by Patrick Kelly
try getting off your ass
try picking up an axe
things are getting overgrown
and it’s time for ruthless cutting
— ‘Idiom Wind’ by Zammuto
I’m late in writing this blog—really late, actually—because I’ve been putting it off. Both my latest workshops ended weeks ago. I’ve been putting it off because I kept trying to think of something really clever, some way to spice up and weird out my notes about my latest exploits at Lighthouse. My last blog post, you may recall, was a bit over the top: a short pseudo-fantasy piece employing some pretty heavy-handed metaphors for our craft: writing is stitching together a Frankenstein monster, a puzzle of blood and bones. That was the idea. I kept trying to think of some way to get more interesting than that. Something more grandiose. And that obsession paralyzed me.
But then I read a book about writing that turned me around: Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg. I recommend this book. That is an understatement. Several Short Sentences was a kick in the ass for me. The book emphasizes, above all, crafting very good sentences. Simple, short, clean sentences. Klinkenborg also implores you to trust your reader and, perhaps more importantly, trust yourself. These pep talks couldn’t have come at a better time for me.
What I often forget is to keep it simple. Say just what I want to say. Which is strange, because I don’t forget the importance of simplicity in the other corners of my life. Every so often, usually when the leaves start to fall, I’m seized by a need to pare it all down: my material belongings, my schedule, my social commitments, everything. Get back to basics. Inspired now by Klinkenborg’s tough-love guide to the craft, I see no reason why this impulse to cut out the fat should not extend to my writing.
In Jason Heller’s four-week Science Fiction/Fantasy survey, Heller turned us onto managing our strangeness budgets: that is, attending to how far a reader will be willing wade into an unrecognizable world and at what point they’ll feel it’s too much, that they’ve gone too far. This has everything to do with keeping it simple, clear, direct: the reader needs something to hold onto, some guiding light in the darkness (if you want to make the obvious Lighthouse joke here, go ahead, but I’m above that sort of behavior, I tell you). You can push things as far as you like into the realm of the weird as long as you’ve got the strangeness budget for it. And the way you build that budget is by maintaining at least a thread of familiarity for your reader, something to anchor their experience in an exotic locale. You clearly establish the rules for your world, strange as it may be, and you stick to them. Write well and trust your reader and you won’t have to give them tons and tons of clues as to how to live in your alien world. If your sentences are clear enough your reader will follow you anywhere.
In John Cotter’s eight-week Short Story workshop, I discovered the importance of being open to new ideas, and trusting that new ideas will come. After workshopping one story of mine, I felt I was out of fresh ideas and assumed I’d workshop the same story again the next time around. But nearly as soon I resigned myself to that fate, a new idea flashed through my mind. It was actually an old inkling, one I’d been toying with, turning over, holding back. A back-burner kind of idea. The kind of idea I’d mentally outlined to death but never actually put much work into. And then I read this passage from Klinkenborg:
Outlining has at least as much to do with rescuing the writer from himself as it does with planning the shape of the piece. It’s meant to free you from thinking as you write. It provides a catwalk across the open spaces in your mind to keep you from falling into rumination as you write. You’ll never know what you think until you escape your outline.
The purpose of an outline is also to conserve your material, to distribute it evenly so that meaning discloses itself near the end.
Here’s a better approach. Squander your material. Don’t ration it, saving the best for last. You don’t know what the best is. Or the last. Use it up. There’s plenty more where that came from. You won’t make new discoveries until you need them.
What writers fear most is running out of material. The sound of a writer’s fears is the sound of nothing—no typing, no clicking, no scratching of pens. But you can only run out of material if you haven’t been thinking or noticing.
That section got me fired up. I highlighted it, wrote ‘whoa’ and ‘fuck yeah!’ in the margin. Inspired, I picked up that back-burner idea, took a dive into it, and wrote the entire story in one day, two sittings. It’s no masterpiece but I got it done.
Which brings me to my next point: I decided to give National Novel Writing Month another shot. If you’re not familiar, NaNoWriMo is a worldwide challenge to write 50,000 words—roughly the length of a short novel—in the month of November. I successfully finished once, all the way back in 2006, and decided it’s about time I get serious and try it again. With these fresh reminders to keep it simple and to trust myself, NaNoWriMo seems a more important and worthy challenge than ever. It’s all about keeping it simple and just writing. Saving the editing, the re-writing, the nitpicking for later and just cranking out words. In my experience, very little of the writing that comes out of this project is beautiful writing. But it gets done. And you get it out. In writing this novel I constantly hold onto ideas, take notes instead of actually writing, think it’ll be easier to write this or that section at a later date. I store up, I save, I ration.
But no more of that. The lesson I’m learning this year should be an obvious one: give it everything you’ve got, because they’re always more where that came from.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m behind on my word count. Time to bury my head in the sand and write the winter away. Perhaps I’ll see some of you at Lighthouse in the spring with a bunch of new messy work in hand, ready to start chopping it together into something good.
