I’m very happy to share with you a video and reading from my novel in progress. The video is cross posted on Venom Literati and prepared as part of the yAWP internet reading series.

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“Christ and Machiavelli, while differing in almost every major respect, held in common one precious secret about the nature of reform. Both realized that the individual who is concerned about the vice of a given culture must begin by attacking its apparent virtues.

from Time and the Art of Living

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Before I ever began to think of myself as a writer I had my journals. I first began journaling in high school, somewhere around 1994. Luckily, most of the earliest journals were destroyed or erased. What you see in the image to your left is my stack of journals from 1997 to 2008.

In the beginning I wrote in the journals very deliberately, as though every single word mattered—as though I were laying down every word for the good of posterity. Of course, reading these journals now is a practice in humility. As one teacher once said to me, “if I had one breath left and I knew I was dying I would use it to burn my notebooks.” That’s how I feel about these early journals as well.

As I went on to college I began to write more regularly, freely, and loosely. I accumulated stacks of these journals—thousands of pages. I have mined these journals over the years and certainly every creative piece of work I have completed had a genesis in one of these volumes.

There is something beautiful about these books, even if the quality of words inside their pages is generally less than par. Each book captures the mood of the time, and when I reread these books the person that I am today must confront the person that I was at the time. The self is not fixed in time. We evolve, and with each evolution we both retain and erase previous parts of ourselves.

In working on this book (Yes, I’m working on a book—but more on that soon. I’m not ready to share yet), I am going through all of the journals one last time. I have reread every page of these books, sometimes cringing but often laughing. I am pulling out the last of what they offer, the last they have to give me.

I have considered burning these books because it’s time to move on. After this current book is finished, I no longer need to go back to these journals. The story that I had to tell in these books will be told, and for the sake of my own career and self-interest—it really is time to move on and let this material go.

And yet, I can’t seem to find the will to destroy these books. The husband and I are going to Burning Man next year for my 30th birthday. The festival’s theme is “Evolution” and a ritualistic burning of these books seems appropriate. And yet, I can’t seem to do it.

Each time I go back to the journals some memory is there to greet me, and I am reminded of the rooms, people, smells, colors, jobs, clothes, loves, and flings of my life. All of it is there—a record I will never be able to recreate or proximate.

So, I am boxing up these journals and promising to myself to leave them there for a good long while. If I die before I figure out what to do with the box, then hopefully the fool who inherits them will have the mercy to do what I am incapable of doing, light the match and dance around the fire.

It’s time to move on and to let the past just be the past. But, before I do, I’m spending a few last days with these books, learning what they still have to teach me and looking back on the boy who wrote all those long, lonely, melodramatic, self-absorbed, and hopeful books.

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I began writing as a poet. I even applied, and was accepted to, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s writing program as a poet. But by the time I arrived at the school I already had twenty pages of what I was sure would be my first novel in-hand and I spent the better part of my two years there trying to write that novel.

With time, I came to see the immaturity of the novel that I had tried to write and I recognized that I had allowed all of the well-intentioned “advice” of teachers and peers to move the story so far from where I had intended that in the end the book I nearly wrote looked nothing at all like a story I wanted to put my name on. So, eventually, I gave it up.

Since then, plot and I have had a difficult relationship. There are two inherent impulses at work when I write. The first is what I consider to be the poet’s inclination, to capture fragments of language, distilled moments, the feeling without all of the pomp and circumstance that leads to the expression of the feeling. The other impulse is the novelistic impulse, and it is an impulse distinctly tied to the traditionally structured “narratives” that I enjoy reading most.

Of course there is always the possibility that these two forces are not in conflict and that my notion of what a novel “is” needs to change. This was an idea that I toyed with greatly in graduate school, and as much as I love and appreciate the works of Blanchot, Calvino, Perec, Danielski or any of the other fine novelists who explode traditional notions of narrative in their work, those types of novels are not simply not the types that I wish to write.

Because of these conflicts I have always had trouble with plot. I want to write a novel where plot arises from character, and so I have always set out to write with a strong sense of character and allowed the plot to arise from that.

This time around, I’m trying things a bit differently. Using my trusty recorder I have talked through what I imagine the basic plot of my story to be. I have made an outline and today I am going to put each point of that outline on its own page. Then, over the next few weeks, I will write a scene for each plot point on each page.

Of course, the plot will change as the story changes and the finer subplots and asides to the book have not been considered yet. Still, this time around, I want to lay down the plot in the beginning so that I know where I am going and try to avoid fretting about plot as I trudge along. This doesn’t mean that the plot can’t change on a whim; it can. But if it does, my outline will change along with it.

So I’m off for another day of running and writing, neither of which are getting any easier but they both feel good nonetheless.

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“In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don’t try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.

When you are content to be simply yourself
and don’t compare or compete,
everybody will respect you.

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

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So here we are in day two of my thirty-day respite. Overall the experiment is going very well, though I am beginning to realize just how badly engrained by bad habits are.

Agenda

WRITING (MIND): Yesterday was a day of starts and stops as far as creativity is concerned. I spent most of the morning pouring through my latest journal and typing up the bits of it that I want to work with. After several hours of doing this I realized that what I was getting looked exactly like what I already have, pages and pages of fragments that don’t hold together yet don’t stand alone. I already have more pages like this than I can possibly manage and my desire for this period is to make something cohesive rather than add to the debris that has already accumulated.

So, yesterday, I realized that if I want to make something different I have to try something different. So, I tricked myself out of my holding pattern by finding a new way to write. About a decade ago my sister bought me a micro-cassette recorder for Christmas (birthday?) to record lectures in college. Well, I tried this for a few weeks and the little recorder just wasn’t powerful enough to really capture lectures in a way that I could use for notation. It did prove useful, however, for self-dictation which I did my first year in college.

Going through all of the junk in our Chicago apartment before the move, I came across this recorder and almost threw it into the “junk” pile. But for some reason I didn’t. I remembered that I still had some blank cassettes as well as some notes I had made to myself a decade ago and if I pitched the recorder I would not have a way to listen to those cassettes to see what was on them. Two days ago I came across the cassette recorder again and decided to give it a try. I took it with me on my run yesterday morning and by the time I got back to the house I had several pages worth of notes—story ideas, life ideas, singular lines.

Yesterday I put the recorder to better use. I paced the apartment and recorded notes to myself. I talked through my writer’s block instead of writing all of my resistance down. When I played the tape back I began to see little chunks of narrative that I could use. So, I jotted all of those down in my “compost” file. Then, I went back to some old material and read it aloud to myself with the recorder running. On playback, it’s much easier to tell which fragments still have life and which ones I need to let go of. I even riffed off of a few of them and stories began to emerge.

Yesterday, I added 4,111 words to the compost heap (not counting blog posts) and I hope to match or surpass that number today. I like this method and I hope that it will push me out of my comfort zone and into some fertile new terrain.

BODY: Today was day three for running. I started my jog with clarity and determination and the first lap around Pier Park went pretty well—I even thought I would add another lap to my course. A quarter way through my second lap, however, I just lost the ability to move forward. I couldn’t breathe, could move my legs, and certainly couldn’t run. It’s often difficult at the start of a run routine to tell the difference between the pain that you need to push through and the pain that’s going to screw you up for a week if you don’t listen to it. Today, I believe I experienced the latter so I dialed it back and briskly walked the remaining loop before exiting the park and exploring the neighborhood a bit more on foot.

As for food, we’re continuing to eat healthy though I realize that I am a “bored eater.” When I’m home and procrastinating I eat, and even if it’s health food I just can’t do this for the next thirty days. Brandon’s obsession with all things Ben and Jerry’s also added another indulgence last night that was wonderful, but certainly unnecessary. So, today I’m trying to measure out my food and to not snack between meals. It’s tough but I think I can do it.

Cigarette count yesterday—three. Quitting is for quitters. :)

Peace and much love for now. Over and out.

JHW

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You may notice that yesterday was supposed to be the first day of my 30 day life “reboot.” Well, it was supposed to begin yesterday but the beginning did not meet my expectations. It seems there were still lingering move issues that I had to deal with yesterday and much of the day was spent on final unpacking, picking up essentials from the store, FINDING the store, and developing a working budget. An undertaking like this should be conducted with all seriousness, and so I’m going to delay the start for one more day, a.k.a. “today.”

Today’s Agenda

WRITING: After I finish this post I will write for a solid hour, grab some lunch and read, and then come back to work for several hours this afternoon and tonight. How I’m approaching this downtime is this: write 30 pages without looking at it. These pages can have entries lifted from my journals but I want nothing older than a few weeks to make it into these pages. The purpose of this exercise is generation, without expectation, without direction, just simple generation. When I have 30 pages I will go back, read it all, highlight what seems to work the most, pull those chunks to the front and move forward from there, working in the direction of the chunks I favor. Turn off the brain, just create. Ideas will come later. After this raw generation, my hours tonight will be spent pouring through older material and selecting fragments that seem worth saving. This is evening, editorial work, which should not cross paths with the raw generation that my mornings and mid-days will be devoted to.

FITNESS/FOOD: I’m happy to report that I did make it out for another run in Pier Park today. The run was difficult and had more stops/starts than I would have liked. Still, on my second loop around the park I approached the final hill and wanted to just quit jogging and walk it. However, I saw in that moment that I had a choice and I had to make it immediately or the hill would defeat me. So, I quieted the quivering in my legs and hunkered down. My legs hurt but a zen-like clarity came to my mind and pushed me over the last hill. When I got to the top, I went from a jog to a walk and felt much better about the day knowing that I had concurred at least one small thing before nine.

SMOKING: I had one cigarette last night, so as long as I can stick to this regiment I may be able to evade the “cold turkey” route.

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This past weekend I spent four days in rural Minnesota with my friend Molly. The intention of this trip, aside from some much needed one-on-one time, was to compile a solid first draft of a manuscript I have been working on for years.

In 2001 I worked diligently on a poetry manuscript titled “Stripping the Splintered Stocks.” I spent a semester working with a great poet, Nikki Finney, to compile and hone that work. After graduating college I continued to work on the manuscript but it never materialized in the way I had imagined.

During my tenure as a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago I shelved that manuscript to work on a novel that I tentatively titled “Continental Drift.” Three hundred pages into that manuscript I realized that the story had gotten away from me, that I had allowed the work to be altered by the voices of peers and mentor, and that I had neither the will nor the interest to finish the manuscript. So, I shelved the novel for a year and upon return found that the best thing to do for this work was assisted suicide. Like Kavorkian, I steadied the needle and took aim for the vein.

In November of 2005, feeling utterly defeated as a writer, I was on the verge of surrendering the pursuit. Since childhood I had dreamed of being a writer, but over the years I gained the hard-earned sense to realize that some things are not meant to be. I looked at the enormous pile of unfinished work and felt there was nothing to work from. There were no points of entry, no glimmering nuggets to pull out and polish.

In a last ditch effort to reclaim my craft I embarked on the month long project of National Novel Writing Month. I initially found all of the resistance and doubt that had plagued me since graduating from the SAIC, but mid-month something started to change. I gave up trying to write “a novel,” or “a poem,” or “an essay.” I began to just write, and in releasing all of my notions about how a work should look or how good it should be the words began to come. By the end of the month I felt elated, confident, and renewed.

In the following months I began to process all of the “dead writing” that haunted my bookshelves and hard drive. I began to pull only the best of that work and to combine it with the product of NANOWRIMO. I lost all concern for context, reducing entire paragraphs to mere phrases, sometime less.

Now it is November 2007, two years after my last prolonged writing period, and I still do not have a manuscript. Over the last few weeks I took the pieces that I had, rewrote them all, and printed the manuscript for my trip to Minnesota. I had a mere 87 pages.

I had expected to assemble these pages with Molly’s assistance, using a cut-and-paste method I developed in graduate school. The plan was to use these pages as a frame work for a true first draft of a book.

Last weekend, Molly and I only processed two of those 87 pages, meticulously culling over every line and word. We had an hour’s debate about the difference between “compartmentalize” and “segregate.” Our discussion of my work took us on many fruitful tangents, but I came away with only two pages and a growing sense of dread.

By accident, I picked up Annie Dillard’s “The Writing Life” this week. A short book that I quickly plowed through. Though I do not prescribe to all of Dillard’s isolationist beliefs about what it means to be a writer, her frank discussion of the laboriousness of craft struck a chord.

So now, I look at my 87 pages, my two finished pages and I see a map. I still do not know where the map will lead once I write in all of the missing lines, but I trust that it will take me somewhere interesting. After a decade, I have only 87 pages to show for my work and most of those pages are barely worth saving.

Is this defeat? Some would call it that. Yet, I imagine the eventually satisfaction of seeing the work through to its end and I trust that the journey will have been worth it.

– - –


“Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.

The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write.

There is another way of saying this. Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. aim past the wood, aim through the wood; aim for the chopping block.”

From The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

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