A lot of writers over think everything.

Sometimes it seems as though they are paralyzed to use a word, as if in order to use a word they have to look it up in the dictionary first and examine all its meanings, then run the closest meaning against the meanings of all the other words in the sentence, and then finally use the word, but then they have to add a disclaimer explaining how the word didn’t exactly, perfectly, precisely convey what they meant (as if words do that all that often, anyway) before finally moving on to the next word, which is put through the same anxiety-laced system. It’s like a neurotic computer program that has been designed to second guess itself.

This is why I am not a poet.

I love Jennifer Egan, so of course I have already purchased her newest book A Visit from the Goon Squad. From what I read, saying that Egan plays with narrative structure in this book is a bit of an understatement. As the New York Times review puts it:

What’s actually kind of fun for once, however, is attempting to summarize the action of a narrative that feels as freely flung as a bag of trash down a country gully. That’s because to do so captures Egan’s essential challenge to herself: How wide a circumference can she achieve in “A Visit From the Goon Squad” while still maintaining any sort of coherence and momentum? How loosely can she braid the skein of connections and still have something that hangs together? There is a madness to her method. She hands off the narrative from one protagonist to another in a wild relay race that will end with the same characters with which it begins while dispensing with them for years at a time.

In this interview with NPR, Egan talks about the book, which she says she doesn’t think of as experimental because “when I hear that something is experimental, I tend to think that means the experiment will drown out the story.” She goes on to say, “If you don’t have people that the reader cares about and stories that are gripping, you’ve got nothing.”

That is why I was crazy about The Keep, Egan’s last novel. When you summarize the plot for people–a prison inmate tells a story set in a gothic castle–it sounds like it wouldn’t work, but it does.

At the last Word Pirates meeting, we were complaining that some experimental novels come off as self-indulgent or boring because storytelling and characters get lost. When a book is experimental AND has a story, I tend to find it really exciting. But when there is experiment with no purpose behind it other than to “do something new” or to show off how clever the writer is, it usually leaves me cold. The best way to experiment is to pick a structure that best serves the story you are trying to tell, not the other way around. Which, as Egan points out, is nothing new.

“If you read novels of the 19th century, they’re pretty experimental,” Egan says. “They take lots of chances; they seem to break a lot of rules. You’ve got omniscient narrators lecturing at times to the reader in first person. If you go back to the earliest novels, this is happening to a wild extent, like Tristram Shandy or Don Quixote — these are crazy books.”

Some writers love the first draft. It’s where they get to play, be creative, be swept away by the story in their heads. Other writers like the editing process. They love the meticulous ordering of words, the smoothing out and cleaning up of paragraphs, the plotting and filling in of holes.

Of the two types, I am definitely the former. When writing is going well for me, the first draft can feel like I am seeing a movie in my mind. I become completely immersed in the world I am making. This makes sense–I am very visual. I think in a combination of pictures and words and I have very vivid dreams. So the first draft is my playground.

I don’t hate editing, but it can be boring. Sometimes, when I am checking every punctuation mark or analyzing every word, editing feels more like data entry than a part of writing. That doesn’t mean that I’m not good at it, but I don’t particularly enjoy it. I have never liked crossword puzzles or Scrabble or other games like that, either. I have a feeling that writers who like those games also like editing.

I say this because this is a summer of editing for me. I have a novel to finish and at least 10 short stories to edit. I am also judging a book contest, which is a bit like editing too, since you have to use the same analytical skills. So far, I am finding all the editing a little soul crushing, but it has to be done.

It’s true that writing is editing. I spend much more time editing what I’ve written than actually writing it. So I am a bit envious of writers who actually like editing. They probably get more overall enjoyment from writing than I do, just because writing the first draft takes so much less time than editing it does.

Which part of the process do you prefer, the first draft or the editing? Or are you one of those lucky people who like both?

“I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it absolutely perfect; or if not that then wonderful; Then you write for who you love whether she can read or write or not and whether she is alive or dead.” — Hemingway.

As good as any other reason to write. Maybe better than most.

HTMLGIANT has a long, nerdy craft post about popular moves in “contemporary poetry,” meaning they have written a list of common things poets do when writing poetry.

I like articles that demystify writing and turn it into an artistic process with a definite strategy. Like learning how to play chess, it makes the game easier and more exciting. Of course, there’s always a danger of over-defining and boxing in with a list like this, but that doesn’t bother me in this case because Mike Young, who wrote the post, isn’t saying there’s anything wrong with using these moves. However, we may be looking at cliches of the future here.

Here are some examples from the post:

4) The “blank of blank” construction
Examples:

From “Marriage Proposal” by Sarah Messer: “I want to be trapped by the cage of your ribs”
From “Synchronized Swimming” by Angela Sorby: “How did decay work its way into the theater of water”
From “I want you to see me” by Kate Greenstreet: “Red and blue and the white of my transparency”

16) Use of casual hedges like “sort of” and “kind of/kinda”
Example: From “Kasmir” by Jon Leon: “I’m sort of in a dunebuggy”

21) Verbs as reasons for linebreaks

Examples:

From “Homecoming” by Dorianne Laux: “At the high school football game, the boys / stroke their new muscles”
From “Vehicle” by Heather Christle: “… Man / in the dining car, stop eavesdropping / on children talking about balloons.”

31) Ending a poem with a question
Example: From “Evelyn’s Kitchen” by Shafer Hall (last stanza):

What roiling ritual is this?
What does this dance mean?
What are the shapes that I know?

And so on. Read the rest here.

On the heels of the Guardian’s great list of rules for writers, which offered well-known authors’ advice on writing, Salon offers its own advice on writing. However, this time the advice is coming from the reader’s point of view.

An example:

2. Make your main character do something. … [M]any writers gravitate toward characters to whom things happen, as opposed to characters who cause things to happen. It’s not impossible to write a compelling novel or story in which the main character is entirely the victim of circumstances and events, but it’s really, really hard, and chances are that readers will still find the character irritatingly passive. When you hear someone complain that “nothing happens” in a work of fiction, it’s often because the central character doesn’t drive the action.

Making your work interesting and readable isn’t the same as playing a trendy guessing game to figure out what will be popular.

This article from the Guardian is well worth reading. “Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don’ts.” I cherry-picked my favorite rules below:

Anne Enright:

1 The first 12 years are the worst.

[Only 2 more to go…]

Richard Ford:

6 Don’t drink and write at the same time.

9 Try to think of others’ good luck as encouragement to yourself.

Neil Gaiman:

3 Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

PD James:

5 Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

Al Kennedy:

4 Defend your work. Organisations, institutions and individuals will often think they know best about your work – especially if they are paying you. When you genuinely believe their decisions would damage your work – walk away. Run away. The money doesn’t matter that much.

Margaret Atwood:

7. … Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.

William Faulkner got a good deal of the inspiration for Go Down, Moses from a plantation diary that has just been discovered. It was written in the mid-1800s by Mississippi plantation owner Francis Terry Leak, whose great-grandson, Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr., was a childhood friend of Faulkner.

The New York Times has a fascinating article on how much the diary influenced Faulkner.

Names of slaves owned by Leak — Caruthers, Moses, Isaac, Sam, Toney, Mollie, Edmund and Worsham — all appear in some form in “Go Down, Moses.” Other recorded names, like Candis (Candace in the book) and Ben, show up in “The Sound and The Fury” (1929) while Old Rose, Henry, Ellen and Milly are characters in “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936). Charles Bonner, a well-known Civil War physician mentioned in the diary, would also seem to be the namesake of Charles Bon in “Absalom.”

The article also looks into Faulkner’s relationship with the material–which seemed to enrage him:

Dr. Francisco, speaking by telephone from his home in Atlanta, remembered hearing Faulkner rant as he read Leak’s pro-slavery and pro-Confederacy views: “Faulkner became very angry. He would curse the man and take notes and curse the man and take more notes.”

More here.

There’s that old stereotype that women only write about small domestic issues–sewing, pregnancy, raising kids–and men write about big “important” issues–war, the fate of mankind, etc. I asked the Word Pirates the other night if they think this still goes on. Are there still women’s subjects and men’s subjects in writing?

My guess is yes, these stereotypes still linger, although not officially. Women aren’t confined to writing about society and family like they used to be, but they still do it. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we need both genders writing about all subjects. And frankly, men tend to dip into the women’s subjects more than the other way around–you are more likely to find a male writer writing about family than you are to find a female writer writing about war.

Anyway, we came up with a list of stereotypical Male subjects and Female subjects, and it rather amused me. Here is it:

Subjects Regularly Covered By Female Writers:

Family
Children/Pregnancy
Emotional strife
Romance
Jane Austen
Vampires being romantic
Fashion/shopping
Death from cancer/car accidents
The emotional ramifications of sex

Subjects Regularly Covered By Male Writers:

The condition of mankind
The end of the world
Sports
War
Physical strife
Science
Vampire being violent
Death from terrorism
Politics
The sex act itself and the ramifications of women having emotional reactions to it
Cowboys

This is, of course, tongue-in-cheek. Still, I think there’s some truth to it.

I’m reading The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates right now. After a bad review for one of her books, she wrote the following:

If younger writers could anticipate what lies ahead after their years of arduous labor and their hopes and fantasies and sacrifices (if anyone still “sacrifices” anything for their art) … would they believe the effort was worth it? If it weren’t for the satisfaction of writing as an end in itself, apart even from the money involved, I wouldn’t advise anyone to write. Not at all. Therefore I’m at a loss about advising writers who are modestly gifted but who find writing very hard work, not really enjoyable. I really don’t know what to say. I look at them and think, But why do you want to writer if, in fact, you suffer so …? The rewards won’t compensate for the suffering. The “rewards” are so mixed, so ironic. Why do you want to write if you really don’t want to write?

This strikes me as true. Publishing is hard. Always has been, always will be. So the act of writing has to be important and enjoyable to the writer to make it worth it. I have seen other writers struggle like she is describing and I often wonder why they are forcing it. Why write if it is such a struggle? There are a lot of easier pursuits out there, that’s for sure.