AARGH

Crappy weather, still. And I killed all of yesterday going to see a horse who ended up being TOTALLY not right for me (I miss Nelson more every single day -- I was truly lucky to find such a sweet, athletic, smart, and correctly built horse, and even though we only had a few months together, it was life-changing, and I'm beginning to feel I will never replace him). This horse situation is starting to be a real problem -- I tell myself each morning "Don't think about horses until your work is done!" so of course, all I can do is think of horses. It's getting to be a total obsession, like I'm a 13 yo girl. And as if I didn't have enough keeping me from wanting to work, a dear friend has his 6-month CAT scan today and his freaked-outedness about it has me pretty worked up, too.

I know the only answer is to work through it, go to the page. But I don't want to go to the page. I just want to cry and eat chocolate.

I'm going to lunch. Maybe I'll feel more like working after I eat something.

I hate myself when I don't work. Really, really hate myself. And I've been on such a roll this month -- 13 days of a possible 16, and several of those days I managed 2000+ words! And then, of course, this morning, on the way to the office, I started to wonder if everything I've written on the novel has been wrong ... if in fact our hero isn't engaged at book's open, but rather still trying to get the ring from the man of her dreams, so that actually she's just gotten the ring in Chapter 9, and Chapter 10 starts the wedding madness ...

And I'm pretty sure that all this stuff happening in Chapter 10 needs to happen by Chapter 5 or so, and that this book is MUCH SHORTER than I think it is.

And this thought, of course, leads to my worry that I've spent too much time worrying about plot and not enough luxuriating in my characters.

Who scare the pants off me, of course. Playing with their lives worries me that I'm playing with fire too close to mine.

But what other choice do I have?

Aargh. Really that's all I can say about that.

Finally, I'm Live!

Ten hours later, here it is folks:

www.sklevy.com

CREATIVE CRISES MANIFESTO AND EMERGENCY ACTION PLAN

We accept that creative crises are a fact of life for any thinking person who wants to create anything. Crises are crippling, paralyzing things, and happen to anyone with half a brain who knows how to use it. Crises can make you doubt everything you believed about your own talents—they can make you think you haven’t an original, unique, funny, nor insightful cell in your DNA. But though creative crises come to all of us, they can be held at bay by certain actions, and even when they can’t, there are methods for weathering these crises, and even working through them.

CHECK IN WITH YOURSELF FIRST THING – ON THE PAGE!

I find that when I’m particularly stricken with creative panic, the first thing I stop doing is facing myself. I fill myself with other people’s words, other people’s music, and I avoid my notebook as if it were infected with the plague. Journaling and miscellaneous scribbled coffee-shop observations and little plot and character ideas I jot down while stuck in traffic cease completely. THIS IS AN ENORMOUS MISTAKE. Even when you feel you haven’t got a thing on earth to say that would be of interest to anyone else, even when you think everything you’ve created or attempted to create is crap, IT IS VITALLY IMPORTANT YOU KEEP CHECKING IN WITH YOU. You feel an overwhelming desire to stop “working” on your current project? Okay. Indulge it if you have to. But at all costs, keep talking to yourself in your notebook. Julia Cameron recommends daily “Morning Pages,” three pages of longhand journaling to clear your head. Dorothea Brande recommended this decades before Cameron, suggesting you write first thing, before even getting out of bed. I’ve been keeping a journal since I was eight or nine and first read Anne Frank, but in the last decade or so I’ve realized daily morning pages are indispensable to me. Even when I can’t write another thing, I can go about the rest of the day, post-morning pages, knowing I’ve exercised the writing arm for at least three pages … and usually more, since I’ve taken on Brande’s advice that you write these pages until the steam runs out.

REPETITIVE PHYSICAL ACTION IS KEY TO KEEPING THE GEARS OILED

I am not the first person to think a daily walk is key to keeping myself open and aware enough to let inspiration strike. This is not to say that on every walk I find myself fixing a problem in my narrative, or figuring out what it is I want to write next. Most days, really, I’m mostly thinking “Damn, it’s hot, and I really, really, don’t want to walk up that hill right now, but hell, I’m out here and the only way home is up it, so up it I go.” That said, after every walk I’m more focused, more dropped down to myself, and even if I don’t go straight to the page, I clean the house with real verve and precision. But with practice, when I manage to keep my daily walks actually daily for any extended period of time, I do find that more often than not, inspiration does strike, or better, the repetitive physical act of putting one step in front of the other quiets my worries enough to allow me to get back to work. Also, walking from here to there shows me I can get from start to finish with all my projects—if I want to get to THE END, then I just have to remember, I do have it in me walk up that hill. I do it everyday, after all. (Biking, riding, kayaking, surfing—these probably are equally good activities to attempt. As long as you can’t read the newspaper doing it, it’s a good repetitive physical action to try. This is why I don’t think the treadmill at the gym is a substitute for a good old-fashioned walk—watching Dr. Phil on the monitor, or skimming a magazine, blocks out every “I’m open, I’m open” impulse the activity I recommend is geared towards nurturing.)

SHOW UP

Don’t bring a stack of magazines. Don’t carry “other work.” Go somewhere where it’s just you and your notebook, or you and your computer, and be there. You can’t do the work if you’re not at the table. Period. You’re much smarter when you’re writing then when you’re thinking about it. Prove me wrong, why don’t you?

NO IMPULSE IS THE WRONG IMPULSE ON THE PAGE

That’s not to say that every impulse is right, but how are you to know the difference between right or wrong until you get to the end of your story and figure out what’s there? So don’t ever let not knowing what comes next stop you. Write down whatever comes to you, or skip to your next certain beat. You can always erase a misstep, or fill in the blanks to the next beat that’s calling to you—even better, often times, you’ll realize you don’t need to fill in that missing moment, it’s assumed just by getting to that next, vital, breathing beat.

DON’T EVER WALK AWAY FROM A PROJECT WITHOUT KNOWING WHEN YOU’RE COMING BACK

As I’ve said before, I generally get the impulse to walk away from whatever I’m working on somewhere in the middle, just as the first energies of the new voice I’ve discovered is no longer able to do all the work of supporting the story without something else to back it up. This, for me, is where my “I’m a talentless hack” song starts to scream at me so loud I can only silence it with an entire Entemann’s coffee cake. You’ve got a few options at this point. You can, if you’re a better, stronger person than I, skip the coffee cake and write through the internal screams, following the “NO IMPULSE IS THE WRONG IMPULSE” rule I’ve stated above. Or you can move to another project on your docket, and work on whatever is calling your passions more strongly for a little while. This is not exactly the wrong move, because at least you’re moving forward on something you love. That said, if you find yourself getting to a point halfway through that second piece where you stall out, thinking you’d give your left arm to be working on something else, you’ve got a problem. If this second roadblock sends you back to the first thing you’d walked away with, you may have a workable system, moving back and forth, back and forth, until completion of both, but if you’re anything like me, I’m assuming it’s not quite that easy. So here’s what I do:

1. WHEN BEGINNING A PIECE, I WRITE TO THE FINISH BEFORE STARTING SOMETHING ELSE.

This rule is easiest to accomplish with stories, essays, poems, articles—things in which you can actually envision the end of a first draft coming to you in under three months. Any longer, and it gets harder to sustain, so I no longer force myself to adhere to this rule with novel-length projects. Instead, I consider chapters of my novel discreet pieces of work for this project. That way, I can say, “I AM FINISHING CHAPTER EIGHT BEFORE GOING ON TO SOMETHING ELSE” as opposed to “I AM FINISHING THIS 400-PAGE NOVEL BEFORE GOING ON TO SOMETHING ELSE.” Much easier to swallow. And it may be, that after Chapter Eight, I decide Chapter Nine has my most passionate attentions, so Chapter Nine comes next. Or I decide to go on to a story or essay I’ve been thinking about for awhile—and I write that TO THE END before going on to something else.

2. SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO INTERRUPT YOURSELF.

Of course, sometimes life intervenes in your start-to-finish plan. Deadlines on other projects, or sheer panic, can lift you from what you’re attempting to write straight through. So promise yourself that once you’ve FINISHED this other, interrupting-piece, you will return to what you’d previously started, until you finish that, too.

These rules are why my writing docket looks like this right now:

a) COMPLETE DRAFT 2.0 OF TRAVEL ESSAY: My first priority, only because it has a deadline attached—I have to bring it to my Writing Group next week.

b) COMPLETE DRAFT 1.0 OF CHAPTER EIGHT: I had to interrupt work on Chapter Eight in order to complete TRAVEL ESSAY for Group, so once I’m done with Travel Essay, it’s back to Chapter Eight I go..

c) COMPLETE DRAFT 1.0 OF CHAPTER NINE or COMPLETE DRAFT 2.0 OF TRAPEZE NOVELLA or COMPLETE DRAFT 2.0 OF DOCTOR/NURSE STORY: What I do following Chapter Eight’s completion will depend where my head is when I get there.

d) IF I COMPLETE A NON-NOVEL PROJECT FOLLOWING CHAPTER EIGHT, I MUST RETURN TO THE NOVEL NEXT—I MUST NEVER MOVE AWAY FROM THE NOVEL FOR MORE THAN ONE PROJECT-CYCLE AT A TIME.

Finally, for endless inspiration:

SEE NEW MOVIES, READ NEW BOOKS, HEAR NEW MUSIC.

Enjoy what’s out there. That’s what you want to be a part of, right?

BUT ALSO, JUST AS IMPORTANTLY, SEE THE MOVIES YOU LOVED AS A KID, READ THOSE BOOKS, LISTEN TO THAT EMBARRASSING MUSIC.

Remember who you were if you want to really know who you are when it’s just you and your keyboard. That person who considered Skid Row deeply profound wouldn’t have for a second thought she wasn’t good enough to lay it all out for everybody on her own damn page.

August Check-in

I finally found my summer groove! This month, I wrote a 13,000 word long story concerning a trapeze family and their middle daughter's struggle to fly free -- and I actually LIKE the first draft, and believe I can make something lovely from it.

Here's how I broke through the summer doldrums. As I've said earlier, my life was pretty upended by circumstances out of my control--my wonderful 5 year-old quarter horse Nelson, who came to live with me in May, became violently ill and had to be hospitalized in July. He very nearly died during his 4 1/2 week hospital stay, and I spent a lot of time on the road, traveling back and forth to see him. With Nelson in the hospital, I found myself waking up later and later, because I no longer had to rush to the barn at the dawn to ride. So between bed and the freeway, writing hours got shorter and shorter ...

With the result that I became more and more depressed.

Finally, the first week of this month, I reminded myself of what I know to be true about my writing habits, and yet so often let myself forget:

1) I write best first thing in the morning, preferably before I speak or see anyone, and much as I hate leaving our warm bed in the mornings, I work better if I get to the page while Husband is still asleep.
2) Writing 1000 words is ECSTACY. Pure and simple. Writing 1000 words is as good as anything anything anything gets. Writing 1000 words sends me off towards my other chores and responsibilities happy and care-free and high. Giddy with joy, even. Funny how, when I'm not writing, this is the thing I most quickly forget.

So I started getting up in the mornings again--up at 7, out the door by 7:15. First stop: Starbucks, where before my coffee I wrote a minimum of 5 pages in the journal, then ordered a non-fat latte and read until 9. At 9, I kept a date with my story, and wrote until 11 each morning, aiming for a minimum of 1000 words and hitting way past the mark several times.

The high that followed allowed me to cope with the stress of my horse's illness--recently, horrible as it is to say, he's taken a turn for the worse. It also helped me be sweet and kind and good to Husband, who in return did anything and everything to get me out the door mornings, even agreeing to go to sleep earlier than usual and not bitching about my alarm going off hours earlier than he likes to wake up. He even insisted I go to work in the mornings despite our having house guests (the amazing man sent me to the office every morning and took on hosting responsibilities entirely by himself).

So now, as we prepare to leave for our 10-day excursion to Maine, I'm feeling good about my work because I FINISHED SOMETHING!!!! I moved through the middle-of-the-draft problem, and shot straight through to the other side!!!

And even better, as I wrote the story, the synapses kept firing towards other projects: I figured out exactly how my story collection functions, came up with a new story for it that takes its inspiration from the Nelson tragedy (writers are vultures), and figured out how three other stories for the collection that I'd been percolating for awhile actually get from a to b to c--how I should approach and move through them, how they start and end and even, how the middle parts work.

Anyway, I can go on vacation breathing easier because of all this. But also, I can go on vacation knowing that I won't stop writing just because we're traveling--that I'll actually enjoy it MORE if I escape for a few hours every day and hit the page. So that's the plan, and that's the gauntlet I'm throwing for myself over the trip's duration:

I WILL RETURN TO LA WITH A FIRST DRAFT OF A NEW STORY.

Because only if I keep writing can I truly relax.

Takes One to Know One

The best description I have ever, ever seen of writer-paralysis (and the very reason I have vowed to NEVER LOOK BACK, NEVER START OVER until a draft is done from start to end) is found in the story "Sunlight," by Matthew Kneale, which is collected in a volume called Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance (a collection I can best describe as Roald Dahl grows up, ditches his mysogyny and dependance on magic to drive plot, and travels the Global Village behaving badly -- wonderful stories that made me so uncomfortable I had to stop reading them before bed because thinking about them afterward made it impossible for me to sleep). Anyway, see here:

All his dignity would be restored once he finished his novel.

Unfortunately, he never did. Years went by, and the book continued to slip and slide from his grasp. The maddening thing was he could never quite see what was wrong. Everything felt fine when he was deeply absorbed, but as soon as he stood back, distracted by a few day's break, or even an absorbing program on television, it all seemed to fall to nothing: characters he had thought intriguing and complex became somehow indistinguishable from one another (changing their names, which he did repeatedly, never seemed to help). Likewise, plot lines that had felt ingenious suddenly appeared lacking in any sense of surprise, as if the whole story might be the background to something else more eventful. A number of times he tried to abandon the whole project, only to be pulled back, like a cart dragged into the same muddy ruts it has got stuck in ten dozen times before. How could he give it up whne he had already invested so much time? [...] So he worked on, accumulating first chapters--he never quite got started on a second--of wide variety, one opening with Lucinda dancing passionately in a 1932 Berlin nightclub, another beginning with poor Hermann breathing his penniless last breath in the chill wind of 1979 New York, a third starting with Leonora (previously Lucinda) weeping tight-lipped in her Stepney home at the news the Gerhardy (Hermann) has been reported missing in action from the Afrika Korps. The novel did not grow so much as spread, as pages of handwritten notes and printed openings piled up in his study, on shelves, in drawers, on the floor at his feet.

Story of my first novel, with the slight exception that I managed several awful complete drafts in addition to the dozens and dozens and dozens of first chapters that are archived in stacks of plastic file boxes in our garage.

Another Lesson Learned

This morning I attended a bridal shower brunch for a very dear friend. She's a TV writer, very successful, and no one is more deservedly so -- she began as a receptionist and wrote her way up, and it's been a thrilling rise for everyone who loves her. Not surprisingly, many of the women at her shower were also TV writers, and that would have been just fine with me (I've never ever wanted to be a TV writer, I hate collaborative writing and I hate writing to deadline) had one of them not mentioned she'd just left her job to write a novel. That would probably have been okay, too, if she hadn't said it with such JOY, as in "I'm writing a book, and it's going great, I'm so happy, I've been at it a month and I'm hoping to find an agent by the end of the year" yadda yadda yadda.

And something about that just knocked me flat. Maybe it was her supreme confidence (which I wanted to believe was naivete) -- god knows this has not been the summer of Supreme Confidence for me. The combination of sun and kids running around and also the fact that my regular writing schedule has been sort of fucked up due to uncontrollable extenuating circumstances has made my sense of committment but more so my belief in my own abilities shrivel up and bake like a raisin. Add to that the "middle of the manuscript" problem, and it makes for a fine summer mess.

What, you ask, is the "middle of the manuscript" problem? Well, I have found over a long career that I tend to start strong -- disciplined, positive, productive, creative until, well, I hit the middle of the manuscript. Somewhere in the middle, I stall. I always stall. I know what comes AFTER the middle -- but for some reason, the connection between the START and the END goes blank. I begin to wonder if the beginning is any good, and if the end actually makes sense, and if maybe the whole project isn't completely empty or wrongheaded in the first place.

Then I dry up. I stop writing, but I keep showing up at my desk, and I beat myself up for the nothing that goes on there. Mostly nothing happens there because, though I'm at the desk, I find it impossible to actually open the appropriate document, so not surprisingly, I don't write a word.

So this summer, after much tsuris of the type described above, I eventually fixed on another tactic: I decided to work on stories for awhile, at least until I was ready to go back to the novel (in my head, ready = Labor Day, for some reason). Stories seemed manageable -- theoretically, they're easier to start and finish in shorter periods of time.

So I started a new story (now nearing 10,000 words, way past story length) and told myself I couldn't get back to the novel until I had COMPLETED a draft of the story. No more "stopping in the middles," I told myself, following a browsing of my files that revealed several half-drafts of various projects, "completing this story will give me a sense of accomplishment that will send me back to the novel feeling more confident -- finishing something will remind me I know how to do this, after all."

It's been tough. I constantly second-guess this choice, and wonder, on those days when I think "I should be working on the novel today," that maybe, indeed, I should go work on the novel. But then I wonder, "isn't going back to the novel while my story is middle of the manuscript just another act of procrastination against finishing the story?"

It's been a whole summer like that.

For the moment, I've decided to let process trump everything else, so I've made myself stick to the new story, and will do so until I reach THE END (hopefully this week). Then I will return to the novel -- and for now on, any time I want to stop work on the novel, I have to be AT THE END of a chapter, and I have to turn to another STORY and write TO THE END.

It's all about getting to the end, practicing completion.

Slow and steady, does, eventually, someday, over time, win the race.

As for my horribly depressing brunch experience, here's what I did next:

I went home, made a cup of coffee, and opened up THE STORY. I drank coffee and I wrote 527 words and followed them up with notes for the scenes I think follow next.

And what would you know -- that fixed everything. I did my work, and it felt great.

They Can Let Me Down Easy Any Time

At the bottom of the form "no thanks" from Esquire, this lovely note:

Dear Sarah Kate Levy,

What a wildly entertaining read "Dirty Darlene" is! I hope you continue to submit to us. I'm sorry I can't place this piece.

-- MRM

Wish I knew who MRM was ... I'd send flowers. Really. I can hardly imagine a nicer thing to hear about "Darlene" short of someone wanting it. Made my whole weekend.

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Faith?

Hmm. I'm the girl who went around my synagogue hanging "Is there a god?" signs on all the sliding walls. But that said, this is still a vaguely encouraging story.