Writing Lessons From a Fellow Outlier: Dad’s Maybe Book by Tim O’Brien

Of all the books I read in 2019 (105 and counting, as of this writing), perhaps the one that surprised me the most was Dad’s Maybe Book by Tim O'Brien.

Don’t get me wrong: I wasn’t surprised by the quality of writing to be found in the pages of the man who gave us The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato; nor was I startled to find a memoir about fatherhood from the man who has so beautifully described the horrors of war because ten years ago I heard Tim read from an early draft of Dad’s Maybe Book (a sweetly hilarious scene involving his son peeing into a bathroom wastebasket); nor was I shocked to find this new memoir loaded with pathos and tenderness and sentimentality that occasionally walks up to the line of overdoing it, then spits in Treacle’s face, because any reader who makes it through The Things They Carried without weeping surely carries a stone in their chest in place of a heart.

No, what really struck me afresh in Dad’s Maybe Book was how Tim O’Brien reveals himself to be a first-class writing instructor, one at whose elbow I would gladly sit with pen and notebook at the ready. I nearly wore out the highlighting feature on my Kindle marking all the paragraphs dedicated to writing advice and then jotting them down in my ongoing Commonplace Book.

At first, this new book feels like a bit of a departure for the man who wrote, in The Things They Carried, of a soldier who ties a puppy to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezes the firing device. There are some of those gruesome echoes of war here, yes, but O’Brien leaves most of the grim stuff off the page and concentrates on the messages of love he wants to leave his two sons. Tim came to fatherhood late in life: he was 56 in 2003 when his first son, Timmy, was born; his second son, Tad, came two years later. And so, facing the ticking clock of mortality, he set out to write a book not for us but for his sons. Maybe it will be a book, maybe it won’t, he muses. His wife Meredith assures him, “You don’t have to commit to an actual book. Just a maybe book.”

And here’s our first lesson: write a book for your readers, not for publishing glory (or vainglory, as is often the case). Even if it’s just two readers—a little boy named Timmy and his brother Tad—speak directly to them from the page, not the faceless thousands who might grab your book from a display at a Hudson Booksellers in an airport terminal between flights. Write for your Tad, your Timmy, or perhaps your dead mother who needs to hear what you could never say while she was alive.

That’s Lesson Number One, class. Are you paying attention?

Here are many more nuggets of wisdom gleaned from Dad’s Maybe Book, randomly plucked from my Commonplace Book which I am sharing with you [insert your name here], my dear friend.

I write so slowly—how can I tell my kids all I want to tell them? Each of the scraps of paper on my desk seems to whisper, “Tell me, put me in, don’t forget me,” and yet this is only a maybe book, and I am only a maybe-writer, just as every writer was once a maybe-writer and just as every book was once a maybe book.


All of us, writers more than most, are left with the cruel and taunting illusion of memory. What we call memory is failed memory. What we call memory is forgetfulness. And if memory has failed—failed so colossally, failed so apocalyptically—how can we pretend to tell the truth? Is one small fraction of the truth the truth? Memory speaks, yes. But it stutters. It speaks in ellipses.


We lose our lives as we live them. Memory is a problem. Even more of a problem, much more, is that I am also at the mercy of my abilities as a writer, and at the mercy of recalcitrant, never-quite-right nouns and verbs. I am at the mercy of the bullying word “nonfiction,” which prohibits make-believe. I am at the mercy of my endurance, and at the mercy of the demagogic rhythm of a sentence, and at the mercy of a spectacular image just off the tip of my imagination.


Among the strange and bitter ironies that have visited me over these seven decades is the certainty that I will be remembered, if I am remembered at all, as a war writer, despite my hatred for war, despite my ineptitude at war, despite my abiding shame at having participated in war, and despite the fact that I am in no way a spokesman or a “voice” for the 2.6 million American military personnel who served in Vietnam from August 1964 to May 1975. In the eyes of many Vietnam veterans—probably a majority—I’m an outlier. I don’t fit in and never did. As far as I can tell, the bulk of those who fought in Vietnam are proud of their service. I am not. They generally believe their cause was just. I do not. Many profess nostalgia about their days in uniform. I do not. Many would do it all again. I would not.


To read as a writer is to read not only with attention to artistry. It is also to read with jealousy, with ambition, with disputation, with rivalry, with fellowship, with fear, with hostility, with celebration, with humility, with proprietorial vigilance, with embarrassment, with longing, with despair, with anger, with defensiveness, with pity, and with a wolf’s steady contemplation of its next meal.


The essential object of fiction is not to explain. Explanation narrows. Explanation fixes. Explanation dissolves mystery. Explanation imposes artificial, arrogant order on human contradictions between fact and fact. The essential object of fiction is to embrace and widen and deepen all that is unknown and unknowable—who we are, why we are—and to offer us late-night company as we lie awake pondering our universal journey down the birth canal, and out into the light, and then toward the grave. In a story, explanation is like joining a magician backstage. The mysterious becomes mechanical. The miracle becomes banal. Delight vanishes. Wonder vanishes. What was once surprising, even beautiful, devolves into tired causality. One might as well be washing dishes.


Bad and mediocre stories explain too much: how the wicked witch became so completely and irreparably wicked—abused as a child, no doubt. Bad and mediocre stories tidy up the world, sorting out the human messes of serendipity and tangled motive. Who among us truly understands the plot of his own life? Do you, Tad? Do you, Timmy? Do you truly understand your own swirling, half-formed, and contradictory motives? Who recalls more than a tiny fraction of his own life—last Tuesday, for example? And if we cannot recall our lives, how can we pretend to explain our lives? It is guesswork. Scantily informed guesswork at that.


To trust a story is to trust one’s own story, not someone else’s. To trust a story is to avoid the predictable, the familiar, the wholly logical, the already written, the movie you saw last week, the bestseller you read last month, and even that classic you nearly finished back in college. To trust a story is to trust your own imagination, not the imagination of some literary predecessor.


Do not impose symbols on your work. Let symbols grow in and from your work. If you write a sentence that contains a symbol merely to insert symbolism, hit the delete key and dip your computer in Clorox.

Take Nothing For Granted: Kate Barnes on “The Knife’s Edge”

              When I woke up this morning
          I found I was writing a poem in my dream
          and the only line I could hold on to
          was: take nothing for granted.

          So I will write down that one line
          and go looking for the rest;
          I will take nothing for granted.

from “The Knife’s Edge” by Kate Barnes

For the past week, since the midpoint of our current National Poetry Month, I have been discovering, with joy, the stanzas of the late Kate Barnes, who served as Maine’s first official Poet Laureate from 1996 to 2000. I started reading Where the Deer Were, from which “The Knife’s Edge” is taken, and will go to Kneeling Orion later this year. I come to Barnes because of my newfound fondness for Maine (after visiting there too briefly a couple of years ago), but I stay for the crystal-clear imagery and plain-spoken language of her poetry.

This morning, “The Knife’s Edge” sings to me, calls to me. I, too, have had poems (and stories, and entire chapters of books) vanish from my head before I could commit their words to paper. I try to hold them in place, preserve their syllables and consonants, promise myself I’ll get to them later, only to find that Distraction and Interruption have burned them away like morning mist meeting the sunrise. Thought turns to vapor, vapor evaporates into nothing.

Only an hour after waking, I already feel the tug-and-shove of the encroaching day. The distracted busy-ness of phone calls, emails, and report-filing will greet me with open arms at work in an hour, but they can wait. For now, they can wait. I hold up my hands, on either side of my body, palms out like a traffic cop halting the flow of cars, like a modern Moses parting the sea of paperwork. For now, I am trying to be still in this moment, this short, warm moment where I can live inside a poem and listen to its refrain: take nothing for granted, take nothing for granted.

Living in the Flux: The Glimmer Train interview with Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly

I’ve been enjoying the latest issue of Glimmer Train Stories, reading it in small doses each day so I can stretch out the experience. (Full disclosure: one of my stories, “A Little Bit of Everything,” can also be found in these pages.) While many of the stories are outstanding, for me the real centerpiece of the Spring/Summer 2016 issue (#96) is Kevin Rabalais’ interview with Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly, the husband-and-wife team behind The Tilted World. Tom is also the author of the short story collection Poachers and the novels Crooked Letter Crooked Letter, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk; Beth Ann, a poet, is the author of Tender Hooks, Unmentionables, and Open House.

I thought I’d share some of my favorite portions of the interview because they have a lot to say about the writing process—especially doing research for historical novels (The Tilted World, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk are all set in times past). I’m at the very beginning of a writing project which is set here in my adopted hometown of Butte, Montana in the early 20th century, so Tom’s comments really resonated with me.

Here he talks about writing Hell at the Breech, which is set in Alabama in 1897:

When I read the newspapers of those times, I would get both high and low language. Whenever someone wrote an article for the paper, he was generally trying to show off. If they wrote for the paper, they were educated. So instead of writing that the passengers were “spitting” in the rail cars, the writer used the word “expectorating” just to show off a bit.

I think that a certain kind of research would only give you that surface quality. You have to go deeper into it and try to find diaries or letters. That’s where people talk the way they really talk. There, you’re catching people when they’re naked. You can look at old photographs and see the way people are stiff. Compare that with the way they sit on their own front porch. As a novelist, you need to write about your characters not as though they’re posing for that photograph but relaxing on their front porch.

*     *     *

Here’s Tom discussing Smonk, which he says is “my favorite of all my books and the one that sold by far the worst,” and how it compares with the composition of his earlier novel:

With Hell at the Breech, I started in the middle and wrote toward the end and then came back to the beginning. I did a first draft of Smonk in ten days, two hundred pages in ten days, and then it took me a year and a half to fix it. I’ve now learned that’s how to write a novel. Start and don’t look back until you get to the end, even if you know it’s all wrong. You can always fix it later, but you have to follow the momentum. You need to be able to judge the whole animal, which you can see and weigh as opposed to just having pieces of it. If you’ve got a whole big quilt, even if it’s missing pieces, you can still see how to fix the corners.

*     *     *

I’ll let Beth Ann have the last word. When Kevin Rabalais asked the couple “What keeps you both excited about writing and about literature?” she replied:

It’s the narrative impulse—simple, yet essential. That’s why we’re on earth. The world is this flux of events and noise. The writer’s job is to live in the flux but to perceive a shape in it, to find the story and to trace the arc of the human experience. Narrative gives shape and meaning to life.

Ditch-Digging and Bricklaying: Sinclair Lewis on Main Street

Last night, as part of my five-year plan to read the Essentials, I started Main Street, Sinclair Lewis’ 1920 satire of small-town life in the Midwest. I didn’t get too far before I bonded with the author’s irascibility.

In 1937, his publisher asked him to write a new introduction to the book and Lewis reluctantly complied:

I must, says the publisher of this edition of Main Street, write an introduction; and what, he suggests, with the blandness characteristic of all publishers urging slothful writers to their task, would I like to say about the opus? What would I like to say? Nothing whatever! To me (and I think to most writers) there is no conceivable subject so uninteresting as one’s own book, after you have finished the year of ditch-digging and bricklaying, read the proofs with the incessant irritation of realizing how much better you might have said this or that if you had had another year, then fretted over the reviews—equally over those in which you are hoisted to the elevation of world master, and those in which you are disclosed as a hypocritical illiterate.

So true, so true. We write our books, we wish them well, but then we give them only occasional glances in the rear-view mirror as they shrink to the size of dots in the terrain behind us. We press our foot to the accelerator, speeding toward the next thing, hoping to outrun the books behind us.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Advice: That’ll Be 5 Cents, Please

Opinions: just like certain anatomical parts, we all have ’em. I was recently invited by the good folks at Bloom to dispense a few. Specifically, I was asked to share the best writing advice I ever received. I don’t know if this is the best advice I’ve ever packed in my toolkit (which is full of hammers, screwdrivers and pliers from Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Stephen King, Dani Shapiro and others), but it’s certainly something which has stuck with me over the years:

       I attended grad school in Fairbanks, Alaska—a cold, winterdark place to hone one’s craft. Because I worked during the day as an active-duty soldier stationed at Fort Wainwright, most of my classes were at night. Though it’s been 25 years, I can still remember stumbling out of the bitter, below-zero air into those classrooms where other workshop students waited to tear apart my stories (which, in hindsight, deserved to be shredded to pieces). Once my fingers thawed and uncurled from tiny wooden claws and I was able to hold a pen upright, I started taking notes with the earnest sincerity of a young writer who knows he’s an empty vessel. Our instructor was Frank Soos (author of Unified Field Theory), a tall, thin Virginian whose soft, gentle voice could take the sting off the very worst criticisms. Frank chose his words carefully, so when he did dispense advice it came like slow drips of honey. I bent over my notebook and took down as much as I could with my half-numb writing hand. I remember one night in particular when Frank was on a roll, he gave us three things to think about that have stuck with me over the past two decades:

       1. Don’t let characters off the hook in uncomfortable situations. Stay with the scene until the resolution. Keep the characters in the situation.

       2. What does each character want? To what degree will he or she go to get it?

       3. Each sentence should reward the reader. If nothing is happening in the sentence, if it’s just spinning its wheels, then it needs to be cut.

I was joined at Bloom by four other talented writers (including Marian Palaia, author of The Given World). I think my favorite of all the nuggets of wisdom comes from Robert Gipe (Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel) who offers this writing tip (a variation on something movie director Billy Wilder once said):

Come up with a character people care about.  Put that character up a tree.  Set the tree on fire.

Anyone got a match?

Charles Dickens: "Ready made to the point of the pen"

While this Monday space is normally reserved for words of wisdom from present-day writers, I thought I'd take a week's break from the My First Time series and go farther into the past for some inspirational quotes from Mr. Charles Dickens.  I maintain a document on my computer hard drive full of snippets like this--aphorisms on the writing life, stanzas from poems, crystal-beautiful passages from novels and short stories, and so forth.  As anyone who knows about my obsessions with All Things Dickens can probably guess, a good percentage of that "quotes" document is taken up with words by and about "the Inimitable Boz."  Here are a few related to writing...

      He corresponded with the young and aspiring George Henry Lewes, telling him that “I suppose like most authors I look over what I write with exceeding pleasure,” that he felt each passage strongly while he wrote it, but that he had no idea how his ideas came to him—they came “ready made to the point of the pen.”

from Charles Dickens: a Life by Claire Tomalin

      Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up.

from a Feb. 19, 1856 letter

to Angela Burdett Coutts while working on Little Dorrit

      I didn’t stir out yesterday, but sat and thought all day; not writing a line; not so much as the cross of a t or the dot of an i. I imaged forth a good deal of Barnaby by keeping my mind steadily upon him; and am happy to say I have gone to work this morning in good twig, strong hope and cheerful spirits. Last night I was unutterably and impossible-to-form-an-idea-of-ably miserable.

from a Jan. 29, 1841 letter

to John Forster, lamenting writer’s block on Barnaby Rudge

      I need not tell you who are so well acquainted with “Art” in all its forms, that in the description of such scenes, a broad, bold, hurried effect must be produced, or the reader instead of being forced and driven along by imaginary crowds will find himself dawdling very uncomfortably through the town, and greatly wondering what may be the matter. In this kind of work the object is—not to tell everything, but to select the striking points and beat them into the page with a sledgehammer.

from a Nov. 5, 1841 letter

to John Landseer

No artist is pleased

Today's inspiring quote comes from legendary choreographer Agnes de Mille by way of Dani Shapiro's equally inspiring book about the writing habit, Still Writing, which will be published in October (I'm lucky to have an advance copy).  On the bulletin board above her writing desk, Shapiro has tacked part of the following quote, words of wisdom from dancer-choreographer Martha Graham to de Mille while the two were having lunch and discussing the famous "dream sequence ballet" de Mille designed for the musical Oklahoma!:

The greatest thing [Martha] ever said to me was in 1943 after the opening of Oklahoma!, when I suddenly had unexpected, flamboyant success for a work I thought was only fairly good, after years of neglect for work I thought was fine. I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy. I talked to Martha. I remember the conversation well. It was in a Schrafft's restaurant over a soda. I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be. Martha said to me, very quietly: "There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open....No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."

No artist is pleased.  Boy, ain't that the truth!  I don't know about the rest of you creative types out there, but I'm filled with that "blessed unrest" every time I sit down at the keyboard or the open notebook, my pen queerly, divinely dissatisfied.  Every so often, a sentence of words will come together--syllables locking into place with a sharp snap!--and I'll be happy with the music I hear....but then the next day I'll wake up, read those same words, and think the whole thing is utter shit.  I call this voice of dissatisfaction my Grouchy Editor.  I picture him as this older, world-weary guy--maybe a little overweight, hair rumpled, food-stained shirt in a constant state of un-tuck--who's always frowning around the cigar he clenches in one corner of his mouth.  My GE is never happy with what I write--which is a good thing for me, actually.  He prods, provokes and encourages by way of insult.  "You call that good writing?  My grandmother could do better than that--and she was blind in one eye, only had eight fingers after that accident down at the tool-and-die factory, and dropped out of school in the fifth grade....plus, she's DEAD!"  He jabs his cigar-fingers into my chest and drop of his spittle lands on my cheek.  I look down at my page and sigh, "You're right."  Then I delete, revise, rebuild.  I am never pleased, I can only hope to reach a level of lesser displeasure.  And so I march forward, the lash of GE's words at my back.

Even now, he's grumbling, "And what the hell are 'cigar-fingers' anyway?"

Tim O'Brien on our 26 letters

I had the pee-my-pants pleasure of meeting Tim O'Brien at the Texas Book Festival this past weekend.  I'm here to tell you he's every bit as gracious, humble, and smart as you'd think the author of The Things They Carried would be.  Just before I met him for drinks at a bar along Congress Avenue in Austin, I attended a ceremony at the State Capitol where he received the Texas Writer Award for 2012.  After he'd shaken the presenter's hand and acknowledged the pounding waves of applause in the House Chamber, he sat down for a conversation with novelist Elizabeth McCracken (another of my literary idols I met this weekend).  They talked about magic (little-known fact: O'Brien is a professional-grade magician), how his children have influenced his writing, and then he pulled out this gem of a quote:

“There are twenty-six letters in our alphabet. And there are some punctuation marks, and that’s it. All we’ve got. Nothing else. And out of those 26 letters you can make Ulysses, or The Iliad, in translation – or you can make Hustler magazine or some piece of junk. The same twenty-six letters!  And it’s the responsibility of the writer to pay attention to those letters, putting them in order so that they’re graceful, lucid, clear, all the things that matter to you as a writer. ”

Words of Wisdom: Sailing the Ocean in a Bathtub With Stephen King

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub.  There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.  If I write rapidly, putting down my story exactly as it comes into my mind, only looking back to check the names of my characters and the relevant parts of their back stories, I find that I can keep up with my original enthusiasm and at the same time outrun the self-doubt that's always waiting to settle in.

--Stephen King, from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft


Photo by Jill Krementz

Baiting the Hook with George Singleton

       When fishing in a large lake, it's okay to troll for long periods of time.  If you don't get a bite, though, it might be a good time to reel in your line and see if you still have bait on the hook.  Likewise, in writing a first-person narrative, it's okay to get sidetracked, to go on rants, to have the narrator offer a slew of asides--as long as these diatribes and anecdotes are funny, awe-inspiring, or relevant.
      Think of how your grandmother tells a story:  You can ask how she's feeling, and she'll go about sixty years backward telling about all the times she's felt better or worse.  Finally, she'll get to the point.  Do you get frustrated with her?  Do you start to space out?  So does your reader, unless Grandma's stories are incredibly interesting.  It's okay for her to ramble on and on without a point in sight, as long as her voice--the way she tells the stories--remains irresistible.  Otherwise, she needs to hurry up and say that she's suffering from gastritis, seeing as that's where she means to be ending up.
      After a while, as a writer, you need to remind the reader that the bait's still on the hook, and what the bait's supposed to be attracting.
            --George Singleton
            Pep Talks, Warnings, And Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom And Cautionary Advice For Writers


Wise words from a funny guy.

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Singleton at the Jackson Hole Writers Conference two weeks ago and as anyone who attended his craft class, cornered him in conversation at the barbecue dinner, or sat down to read The Half-Mammals of Dixie, Why Dogs Chase Cars, or These People Are Us can tell you: the man knows how to spin a story.  Oh, he'll appear to get sidetracked with rants and asides at times, but he always knows there's a worm or hunk of stinky cheese threaded on the end of his hook.

His "how-to" book on writing, Pep Talks, Warnings & Screeds, is full of aphorisms of this nature.  If you are at all serious about the business of writing, it would behoove you to pick up a copy.  And by "behoove," I mean "do it without delay."

Words of Wisdom: Burying Your Books

"I wrote six unpublished novels, and too many unwanted short stories to count, before All About Lulu was published.  I physically dug holes and buried three of my novels in the ground—salted the earth so nothing would ever grow there again.  And I loved every minute of it!  I never bothered doubting the occupation, because nothing was going to deter me from doing the thing I loved more than anything else in this world (besides drink beer).  Throughout my 20-year apprenticeship, I did virtually every conceivable menial job you can think of, from roadkill hacker-upper to “hot talk” radio jock (the former being infinitely more rewarding).  And I’m still drawing from all of these experiences, which is more than I can say about the time I spent sitting in classrooms.  Having my work rejected time and again was a minor annoyance, at most.  I had the work.  I just kept licking envelopes and collecting form rejections as a form of due diligence. If nobody ever published any of my work, and I died in complete obscurity, surrounded by feral cats, I’d be writing novels up until the end."
          --Jonathan Evison in an interview with The Rumpus


Thanks to All About Lulu and West of Here, Evison should sleep soundly at night--even if he's surrounded by feral cats--because he won't slip into obscurity.  He has the "right stuff" and he'll be gracing our bookshelves for years to come.

I don't know about you, but there's something damned intriguing about the thought of going to the backyard, digging a hole and burying your failed novels in the soil.  It takes a certain kind of fearlessness (and a couple of stiff drinks) to turn your back on your writing with such finality.

I speak from experience, having once taken a match to one of my own misguided manuscripts.  As I dropped the flaming paper into the woodburning stove in our kitchen, I felt both relief (sort of like a colonic cleansing the bowels) and regret (since this was my only copy of the novel, I could never undo this incendiary action).  That was many years and several convictions* ago--back when I painstakingly typed reams of paper hunched over my Smith-Corona in the low-ceilinged upper floor of our first house in rural Oregon.  I was an impetuous young writer and saw the world in black-and-white terms.  Like Evison, I licked a lot of envelopes in the face of rejection.  Sometimes, rejection started with me holding a match in one hand and typewritten pages in the other.  Like a Buddhist monk with a can of gasoline, I was prepared to make a statement (if only to myself).

These days, it would just be too painful to take a sledgehammer to my laptop computer.  Though that would certainly make a statement.

*Spiritual convictions, not criminal ones.

Niagara roaring through the head of a pin

From one of the many tomes I had read on the “art of fiction,” I had got the idea that, like Athena, the goddess of wisdom who sprouted full-breasted from the head of a man, the majestic sweep of my novel would roar out once I could “see” my first sentence—roar out like Niagara through the head of a pin.

          --Frederick Exley

          A Fan's Notes

Frederick Exley has been on my mind a lot lately, having just read his blistering landmark 1968 novel, A Fan's Notes, in preparation for reading and reviewing Brock Clarke's less-blistering (but no less potent) 2010 novel Exley.

It's hard to read A Fan's Notes in large doses.  It would be like chugging a quart of vodka.  There are so many moments when he comes right off the page, kicks you in the baby-making nether-regions, spits on you when you're down, then snuffs out a cigarette on the back of your hand.  Those of you who think I exaggerate Exley's brutality to the reader have obviously never picked up A Fan's Notes.  As Walter Kirn once wrote, "His prose is moist with lyrical revulsion."  There's a lot of self-loathing and cynicism soaking the pages of that autobiography thinly disguised as a novel.  I loved every minute of it; even while the poison was going down, I was smiling in recognition.

Amid the brutal scenes of alcoholic vomit, mental hospitals, electroshock therapy, and an extended "depression on the davenport" interlude, there are some excellent moments of metaphorical language, such as the above quote.  When I read A Fan's Notes, I was galloping down the homestretch of polishing off the latest revision of my Iraq War novel, Fobbit.  It was a laborious process: tinkering with words, slashing away whole sentences, adding more flesh to skeletal characters.  I was worn down by the effort, yet flush with hope for what the novel might one day become.  Despite the days and days of revision, some of the best sentences of Fobbit are probably still unwritten, padlocked inside my head.  I can strain and grunt all I want, but they won't come any easier.  All I can do is show up for work on time every day, crack my knuckles, splay them above the keyboard and keep vigil for the words which may or may not show up.

When I read that sentence about Exley's idea of his novel roaring to life, "like Niagara through the head of a pin," I felt the burn of recognition.  Yes, I too had been waiting for the floodgates to open on the novel, waiting for the tumble of words that will make Fobbit the best it can be.   Like Exley, I'll still sit here and stare at the head of that pin, waiting for that first welling bead of water to appear.

God, I hope the electroshock doesn't hurt.

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.
          --Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

This morning, I was sitting in the Hardback Cafe of the Hastings in Helena enjoying a tall Red Eye (a shot of espresso topped with brewed coffee).  As the java jolted into my veins, I looked at the disposable cup and found the above quote printed on the side.

I've previously written about taking out my own notebook and pen and working on character sketches for Fobbit and this quote immediately took me back to that umbrella-topped table at Starbucks (also in Helena--why is it I seem to get so much public writing done in Montana's capitol city?).

I like the direct simplicity of Hemingway's style--always have--and this paragraph from A Moveable Feast shows how he gets right down to business after coming in off a "wild, cold, blowing day" on the streets of Paris.  Hemingway enters the cafe, fingers stiff with cold (perhaps he's blowing on them), he wraps his hands around a cup of coffee, then he prepares to do what he does best.  One word, then another, then another.  The tip of the pencil pulling across the page is the only thing he sees; the lead against the fibers of the paper is the only thing he hears.  We should all be so earnest in the single-minded pursuit of what we love.


Image: photo of Cafe de Flore comes from the website Paris Nights.

Driving around with John Reimringer

“Place is important to my writing, and one of my best practices is to get in the car and drive. Images from those drives—a janitor in a lighted skyway at night, two cop cars in an empty parking lot, a woman dressed for the office waiting at a bus stop in Frogtown—inspire scenes and form the whole tactile underpinning of a piece. When I wanted to set part of my novel in small-town Minnesota, I got out a map, picked an area that looked like it had interesting landscape, and spent a day driving around that particular county, taking notes on what was being farmed, the kinds of trees, church architecture, area businesses, how long it took to drive from one town to another. A whole section of the book grew out of that day’s drive.”*
—John Reimringer, author of Vestments (Milkweed Editions, 2010)

Good advice from a writer who, from what I've read, carefully crafts his descriptions of landscape in his debut novel.  I've only dipped in and out of Vestments, but I hope to take the full plunge later this winter.

While some might argue that to truly inject a sense of place in your fiction you need to spend more time than a drive-by allows.  But I believe if, like Reimringer did, you take careful notes and drink as deeply as you can from the geography, then at least a small amount of authenticity will leak out into your words.  I needn't have lived in Antarctica my whole life to convince you of my polar residency (as Kevin Brockmeier so skillfully did in The Brief History of the Dead).  My words should be enough to assure you I know what frostbite feels like.


*Courtesy of Poets & Writers website

Michael Cunningham and Jodi Picoult kick me in the ass

This might be the only time you see Michael Cunningham and Jodi Picoult together in the same blog post here at The Quivering Pen, but I'm using them today to help kick-start what has been the writing equivalent of running a pickup truck into a muddy ditch and attempting to climb out with bald tires.  In short, the Dreaded Doldrums have come to pay me a visit again.  It's been about a week since I did any serious writing on Fobbit (typing a period in a sentence lacking one, and changing a character's hair color from blonde to brunette does not count as "revision").  I've lost focus and have succumbed to distraction.  My office has never been cleaner, I've refolded the unused Kleenex in the box on my desk, and I waste incredible epochs of time on the Internet (I knew I was in trouble when I requested a Facebook friendship with the Raisin Growers Union of California.  I don't even LIKE raisins!  In fact, I downright HATE the lame-ass wrinkly snacks!).  So, in another one of those woe-is-me cycles, I find it's time to pull myself up by the bootstraps and get back to the work at hand (note: I do not now, nor have I ever, owned a pair of bootstraps, nor would I know which way to pull them; I just like the giddy-up sound of the word).

For inspiration, I turn to the Quotes file on my computer's hard drive.  There, I find a couple of choice nuggets by Mr. Cunningham and Ms. Picoult.  I've yet to read anything by either of them, but I've got Cunningham's upcoming novel By Nightfall sitting in my long-range to-read pile; and I've often wanted to find out whether all the fuss about Picoult is justified (The Tenth Circle was a Christmas gift to myself a few years ago, but remains unread).  Nonetheless, I like what each of them had to say about the kind of wiffle-waffle, bluesy state in which I currently find myself.

I can’t distinguish the parts I wrote on the good days from the parts I wrote on the bad.  I’ve come to believe that the inspiration is always there, like an electrical current, and what varies is our access to it.  And I’ve found that the best way to cope with that is with diligence, is with a kind of daily determination.
--Michael Cunningham, from an interview in
Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings and Everything in Between

 
 

Writing is total grunt work.  A lot of people think it's all about sitting and waiting for the muse.  I don't buy that.  It's a job.  There are days when I really want to write, days when I don't.  Every day I sit down and write.  You can always edit something bad.  You can't edit something blank.  That has always been my mantra.
--Jodi Picoult, from an interview in The Guardian

So, here's to not editing blank pages.  Onward, to the finish line!

Conviction and Confidence: David Foster Wallace's Boundless Brain

(Infinite Jest) pretty much reconfigured my sense of what's possible in a novel, which is to say it made clear there's very little you can't do if you're writing with conviction and confidence. And it taught me that it's possible to be funny and playful and earnest and intensely cerebral all at the same time.

 --Ron Currie Jr. on the influence of David Foster Wallace's masterpiece

That's from a Q&A with Currie, the author of Everything Matters!, over at the L.A. Times' Jacket Copy blog.  Currie talks about the summer he spent reading Infinite Jest in bite-sized chunks while working with his father on landscaping jobs in Waterville, Maine ("By the time I'd finished, my copy was a mess of grass clippings, sweat drips, and smears of axle grease and 50:1 gas/oil mix").

What struck me most about Currie's response, however, were those two words: conviction and confidence.  Armed with just those two qualities, a writer can wrestle any beast to the ground, even one as big and thick as Wallace's 1,100 novel about tennis, hallucinogens, and corporate-sponsored years.  Sure, I have conviction and confidence, but I lack a full dose of either.  I sit at my computer every morning, prodding myself to go farther, surge over the top, let loose the hounds of imagination.  It doesn't always work: I envision wide horizons, but get roadblocked by the words already written on the screen.  I try to focus on one word, "boundless," picturing my novel shooting out tentacles of wild vines in all directions; and then another part of my brain comes along with gardening shears: snip snip snip.  In theory, my novel dances around the cocktail party with a lampshade on its head, but I can't always get there in practice.  I want to write about the Iraq War in a way that's funny and playful and earnest and intensely cerebral, but I'm smothered beneath the weight of all that's not on the page.  I want more, I want the infinite; instead, I get the 215,000 words already corralled in the manuscript.  They bellow and grunt and shoulder-shove each other like restless cattle.  It's hard to know which ones need a sledgehammer between the eyes and which ones should be allowed through the open gate to go frolic and mate in the green pastures beyond.

Sometimes (most of the time), I'm my own worst enemy sitting at the keyboard.

That's why when I look at cirque d'imagination displays like Infinite Jest I get all short of breath and just a little bit depressed, knowing my brain could never open that wide.  Wallace had conviction and confidence; so do I....just in smaller doses.

It's been years since I read Infinite Jest, so I'm not going to attempt a review of it here (I could never do it full justice anyway), but if you're still hanging around the Jacket Copy blog, why not click over to the post which reprints David Kipen's excellent take on the novel?  As Kipen notes, "What keeps it fresh is Wallace's prose style, a compulsively footnoted amalgam of stupendously high-toned vocabulary and gleeful low-comedy diction, coupled with a sense of syntax so elongated that he can seem to go for days without surfacing."

Swimming with Caroline Leavitt

Over at Wordswimmer, Caroline Leavitt talks about the writing process and how to keep on going during dry patches, muscling through self-doubt, eating chili-infused chocolate to jump-start the brain, et cetera.  The interview has a few too many water/swimming metaphors for my taste, but given the name and nature of the blog, I guess that's to be expected.  Overall, though, I thought Leavitt had some good practical advice to dispense.  For example:

Wordswimmer: What's the hardest part of swimming?

Leavitt: The self-doubt that comes on like muscle cramps.  The realizing that there are better swimmers who are further out there, and that no matter what I do, they’ll always be further out (which leads to the realization that it’s not a competition and that’s a mighty big ocean out there).  When I can’t get something right, self-loathing sometimes rears its ugly head.  Sometimes I forget that I know how to write, that I’ve had story problems before and solved them, and I sink into deeper despair.

What’s hardest for me is the length of time it takes to finish a novel.  I know it takes me a year to figure out what I really am writing about.  It takes me another year to realize my wrong turns.  Last year, after two years of work, I threw out 100 pages of my novel and started all over again, but this time I feel as though I finally got it right.  When I first start a novel, it’s always filled with false starts, way too much back-story (do we really need to know the character’s life as a baby?) and characters who wander in from another novel I haven’t written yet.  I don’t know if there’s an easier way to do this, but this seems to be my process.

I really liked Leavitt's earlier novel, Girls in Trouble and am looking forward to her next novel, Pictures of You, due from Algonquin next January.

Josh Weil Gets Cracking

The stories get me writing–the other ones that I have in a notebook full of ideas: I want to get to them, and do them well, and bring them to life, before I die.  And if I’m going to get near most of them, I’m going to have to get cracking.  What keeps me going?  The story I’m working on right then.  The fact that something I wrote the day before feels good enough I can’t let it die.  That if I don’t write something today that matches it, I may as well be killing it.  And I owe my characters, the story itself, more than that.
      --Josh Weil in an interview at JMWW

Josh Weil is the exceptionally-talented author of the exceptionally-beautiful The New Valley, a triad of exceptionally-poignant novellas.  Now that I've used up my daily quota of the word "exceptional," I can only say that you must, YOU MUST read this book before all others on your to-read list.  You will thank me later.

The New Valley is populated with unforgettable characters from what the jacket copy calls "the hardscrabble hill country between West Virginia and Virginia."  The novellas are filtered to us through three lonely men who live on the outskirts of the fringe of society: a middle-aged farmer who has just lost his father and must pick up the pieces of his life and the family business; a health-nut who desperately wants to save (and control) the life of his obese daughter; and a mildly-retarded man (he refers to himself as "diminished") who gets involved with an unhappy wife, a decision that sets the narrator, the woman, and the woman's husband on a collision course toward violence.  Of the three, I liked the center story ("Stillman Wing") the least...which is to say I really liked it, as opposed to loving it in that turning-cartwheels way I felt reading the other two stories.

Weil's characters are lonely and alienated from those around them--which is pretty lonely when you consider we're talking about rural Virginia here.  In the first novella, "Ridge Weather," Osby Caudill, flounders through life in the wake of his father's death.  Abandoned hay bales frighten him, flirty convenience-store clerks fluster him, and he's perplexed by how best to raise his father's cattle.  Osby wishes "there was some way other than talking to say things.  It was like he wasn't even meant to be a person.  He would have been better off an animal, comunicate by raising the hairs on his head or putting off some kind of smell."

Here's another passage which illustrates Weil's attention to detail--a flashback to when Osby's mother died:

His father hadn't let anyone help them take the body to the funeral home.  They had wrapped her in the sheets and carried her downstairs, his father holding her under her arms, Osby clutching her cold ankles.  She had smelled like old cabbage.  Her body sagged, heavy as wet sand.  His thin twelve-year-old forearms strained and he struggled to keep his fingers locked around her legs.  Halfway down the stairs, he dropped her.  Her heels thwacked the hard wood step, and he had thought how much that would hurt if she was alive.

The third novella, "Sarverville Remains," might just be a modern-day masterpiece--the writing is tight, complex and original.  The story is told by Geoffrey Sarver, the "diminished" thirty-year-old who finds himself falling for Linda Podawalski, a small-town femme fatale.  "Sarverville Remains" is a series of letters Geoffrey writes to Linda's husband who is serving time in jail after catching Geoffrey with his wife and then savagely beating him.  From the very first paragraph when we encounter Geoffrey's distinct voice, we know we're entering a story unlike most others:

I want to say right here what I am sorry.  I am sorry for where you is at and how you got there and I am sorry for calling you to the scene of the crime, as they say, and for the crime, and for if I hurt you something what's took too long to heal.  Most off I am sorry about your wife.

"Sarverville Remains" demands that the reader's eyes slow down and patiently absorb Geoffrey's simple-yet-complicated style.  It's as if William Faulkner's Benjy was narrating a film noir set in hillbilly country.  I found myself in that odd position of wanting to read the entire story in one fell swoop while constantly applying the brakes so I'd slow down and savor Geoffrey's voice.  In the end, I spent nearly a week on "Sarverville Remains"--that's how good it is.

I'm very impressed by Weil's talent for getting so deep inside his characters that everything else falls away.  While I wouldn't call his stories plot-less, there is less going on here action-wise than your average novel.  But that doesn't matter because the writing is so rich with detail and deliberately-paced syntax that you find yourself immersed in the people on the page.

In another interview--this time with The New York Times' Paper Cuts blog--Weil talks about his writing process and it's a good indicator of why The New Valley works so well.  It's also identical to the way I work in my basement--or would work if I was "lucky enough to have a month or two or six to yank loose from the rest of my life":

      When I think of my writing life, I think of life at the cabin in Virginia where I wrote all of the novellas in The New Valley.  It’s where I do the bulk of my work, and if I’m lucky enough to have a month or two or six to yank loose from the rest of my life, this is how a day there goes by:  I wake while it’s still dark, reach for a flashlight (I don’t like to turn the lights on), climb down the ladder from the attic, put a slice of toast in the toaster, put the coffee on, put a kettle of hot water on, too.  I watch the burner’s blue flame.  I stretch.  The toaster pops.  Out on the porch, the breeze blows up the valley.  I watch the view beginning to take shape in the first blue light of dawn.  Then I finish my toast and go inside and put my earplugs in, and pour coffee into the thick, white diner mug my brother gave me long ago.  I sit at the small side table I use as a desk.  I get to work.

      If work goes well, I’ll write for six or seven hours straight.

      Maybe I’ll get up to have a second slice of toast, maybe to stoke the wood stove, maybe to pace on the stone path between the apple tree and the grape arbor, maybe just to lie down on the floor beneath my wool blanket and shut my eyes.  If it doesn’t go well, I get up a lot more often, and nap a lot longer, and pace a lot faster, and talk to myself more loudly and with more hand gestures while I do it, and probably look increasingly like a half-crazed madman.  Either way, by early afternoon I’m tapped out.  I make what I call breakfast, deal with real life for a while — anything from splitting wood to sending emails — before the late afternoon when I head up the mountain.  I hike fast, and think on whatever I’m writing, and by the time I’ve reached the ridge top I’ve most likely figured it out.  Then I run down, strip, shower, sit back at the desk and try to get down a little of what I’d discovered.

      Of course, that’s the writing life when the writing life is good.

      The tough part comes at times like now:  I’ve just moved to an apartment in Baltimore where my upstairs neighbor’s TV wakes me, its babble leaking through the floor; my desk is surrounded by half-unpacked boxes; I spend more time mulling over the class I’m teaching than the book I’m writing; I spend more weekends driving to bookstore readings than reading books.

      How one manages to bring together both — a focus on the work without withdrawing entirely from the demands of daily life — is something I’m still struggling to figure out.

Making Every Word Tell

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subject only in outline, but that every word tell.
               --Strunk and White
               The Elements of Style

As I plunge into this new stage of writing with all ten fingers--the grinding, exhilarating light-footed slog of revision--I try to keep quotes like this from Mr. Strunk and Mr. White close at hand.  Even as I work past my impatience to be done with this novel and move on to the next (and the next and the next), I must control myself, narrow my focus down to the page, and make every word tell.

As Hemingway once said in a letter to Max Perkins:  "I never use a word if I can avoid it, but if I must have it I know it."

And so I write, scalpel in hand.

Stamina and Self-Mastery

On my computer, I have a file called "quotes," something I've maintained for years. Kibbles and bits from books, magazines, and movies. Every so often, I'll dip into this well of words and come up with a bucketful of inspiration.

Today's quote comes from Tobias Wolff's In Pharaoh's Army:

In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was the pleasure of having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it could mean something. Mostly I was glad to find out that I could write at all. In writing you work toward a result you won’t see for years, and can’t be sure you’ll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it.