Geil or Write for Joy
“I’d like to write,” came from several people during my 3 author events this week. I ought to have expected the comment and the related discussion. There was one woman at the most recent event I wanted to meet but she seemed just outside the circle of authors and book buyers, but her presence persisted and with each her movements, my eyes followed. She had reddish-orangy hair in tight braids that tumbled down past the completely askew rainbow tulle accent she wore at her waist. I may wish to call it a tutu, but I’d be wrong. And she was too sincere to stretch the concept to clown. Her smile and joy lit up that end of the promenade. I wanted to bathe in that light, but from afar.
During our brief meeting at the end of the day, she asked about writing. I answered plainly and I’ll paraphrase myself: “If you wanna write, then write. And when you write, know that the first works are shit, the next pile are bad. It takes work, practice and time to get to good.”
I said something that compared the first efforts to the drawing done by children. Those crayon dinosaurs and horses are barely recognizable as critters. And so what! Just keep going. Throw them out and keep going.
My father encountered the question often, but I had forgotten that. He said the exact opposite to people who asked him for advice. He was an ass. He described the heart ache, trials, and difficulties writers face. He accepted the duty to discourage writers, and even all artists. Then behind their backs, after they’ve left he’d say two things:
Number one: “They’ll thank me for that.”
Number two: “If they are writers, then they will write even in the face of adversity.”
Still an ass, by the way, even though I see a tiny germ of truth in his statement. 99% wrong is still wrong. Yes, writers write, even in the face of adversity and discouragement.
I’ll divert for a second, I spent most of my time at the event reading poetry falling in love the sparse words and settings I encountered. I’ll write about Leslie Williams’ work soon. What a treat. To my left, a woman wrote a romance book about a mermaid. And I write about small town heroes with a wry wit. My publisher made her mark publishing works from African writers and she is off to South Africa yet-again. While I was sitting at my table, reading, I visited with a lovely couple from Germany and we got to making jokes. Let’s admit that I learned geil from young hip Germans. But when I used to term with Dutch speaking coworkers, they thought I was telling them I was horny. The term changed over a generation from “horny” to “outstanding, excellent, wonderful”, wunderbar as it were.
The lesson from that is every voice is different. And only in those differences do we see the commonality in us all.
My father was a Harvard educated man who graduated with a degree in English in 1958. He promptly wrote books and worked for the Boston Globe as the arts and humanities editor. Like his father, he published a score of books and several movies. That makes me a third-generation novelist in the span of 100+ years. My parents taught me the rigors of narrative structure, essay structure, and encouraged reading (encourage might have equaled required).
Yet, I was a left-handed dyslexic kid who struggled with every word. My father stood sentinel over the realm of writers with his awards and committee positions. And my work could not be understood. Nobody could read my writing or penetrate my creative spelling. I saw my first “A” grade in my senior year of university, and no sooner.
Sure, I benefitted from years of at-home discussion about the written word. I was heavily tutored by both parents on writing. But I could not make myself understood when writing by hand on paper. Just another “C” grade with more red ink than my smudged black ink.
This allows me to tell a tale from both sides of dialectic.
Step 1. Doesn’t matter who you are, you have a story to tell. Tell a story.
Step 2: If you make someone cry, laugh, get horny, or feel anything, you’ve done well.
Step 3: Story telling can fail. People can read or listen then feel confused. People may not feel what you intended. So the-fuck-what! Listen to more stories, read more work by others you enjoy, then return to step 1.
Your first works will be terrible. They will be muddled messes. So what. Delete, and start again. Or keep it, I don’t care. The point is move forward, just keep moving forward as you find your voice and discover the stories within you.
If you can read a story and tell it is great, figure out why you loved it. It took me a while to recognize I don’t love plots. Yeah, yeah, stories need them. But we’re human beings, a social creature. We remember characters and relationships. We remember places. What do you listen for in a story? What makes you return to a story? Discover that and write to that.
One of my favorite contemporary writers is Kate Quinn. After reading her first popular book, I went backwards in her career to read the earlier works. I felt thrilled to explore the growing skills this author developed. She got better and better with each publication. Yes.
Nobody sits at the piano and performs Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto well until they have played it and the piano for thousands and thousands of hours. It takes work to mature from Chopsticks to The Emperor’s Concerto. Knowing that, give yourself license to be a complete and utter failure a hundred times, a thousand times.
It is just work baby. And yes, we all need help. I pay for editors and have done so for nearly 20 years. I impose on nearly every friendship to read my words. The worst feedback is: “Nice, that’s good.” I can’t suss my answer from that phrase: What did you feel? Did the story move? Where the characters real?
Writing can be evaluated with basic terms of success and failure. Failure teaches lessons better than success. Don’t flinch, look. Study. Explore.
One of my greatest joys is writing a scene that makes me cry while I write it. But better than that is making me cry while I read my own words aloud. My writing is only funny if I can also help you find a tear that needs to escape from the corner of your reader’s eye.
So go write until you make yourself laugh or cry or angry or lusty or whatever – all of it. Invest time and effort on your journey to good.
(for Sonja)