Tag Archives: publishing

Revising and Rewriting as a Therapeutic Practice

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I wanted to declare something like “most writers pursue their craft as a means of self expression,” but I realized even the phrase “self expression” connotes interiority and poetics to the exclusion of other purposes. So let me establish, before anything else: that’s silly. Journalism, academia, drama, fiction, poetry, and automatic stream of consciousness diaries are all engaging the ideas and experiences of the author/s selves through literary mediums. They use different devices to different ends, but any writer who claims to like writing is relieving a tension which is, to some degree, personal.

I long thought of raw drafting as the only expressive part of the process. Like a lot of fledgling writers, I mistook the act of drafting as essentially the same thing as writing. As a teenager, I regarded my over-sharing, unfiltered LiveJournal (and MySpace, Facebook, and Tumblr) entries as catharsis, and resisted accepting any feedback that might corrupt their pure purpose of making me feel better. Criticism didn’t bruise my ego, it bounced off of it, because anything but immediate enthusiasm for my drafts was just yet another person misunderstanding my efforts.

Ridiculous as it all seems now, I’m glad my adolescent art had such a wide stubborn streak down the middle. A few influential teachers along the way knew to ask me “so what?” and made me explain my impulses and preciousness again and again or let them go altogether. At eighteen I observed a lecture and workshop with a monk who made intricate mandalas in sand and then threw them into a river when they were finished. I made peace with a few crashed hard drives and lost notebooks. I came to see drafting as gathering material, not even assembling it yet, much less polishing. All of this allowed me to shape and mature my process and my voice into something more resilient than stubborn, and more fluid than nebulous. Rejection does not make me feel like a misunderstood art martyr anymore, but it does make me ask where along the way my messages got lost, and to ask “so what?” until they actually do what I meant for them to do.

For the next decade or so, it seemed that revision, rewriting, and publication were about cleaning up nicely. Drafting a piece was the feral self and making it readable and publishable was socializing it, a necessary trade off, so I thought, of taming base antisocial impulses in exchange for more effective communication. But recently I was reading a behavioral therapy essay, “Grieving and Complex PTSD: Fear as Death of Safety,” and a great deal of what the author, Pete Walker, had to say about effective therapy reminded me of tips I’ve seen about creative practice. It also gave me an unexpected insight into what I was still missing in my attitudes.

Walker writes that in treatment for C-PTSD, venting through speech or writing is most useful when it engages both self expression as well as analytical search for the right language. “Verbal ventilation is only effective,” he says, “when it is liberated from the [inner] critic’s control. In early recovery, verbal ventilation can easily shift into verbal self flagellation.” Translated into writing advice, this is more or less “shush your inner critic and keep going,” the very spirit of NaNoWriMo and other tools to overcome the initial perfectionist fear of starting.

But Walker clarifies, “It is important to differentiate verbal ventilation from dissociative flights of fantasy or obsessive bouts of unproductive worrying.” And here I recognized that first, critical lesson that feeling strongly is not the same thing as a good idea, that a frantic and inspired draft is not the same thing as communicating effectively.

For those terrified of critique altogether, who come away from groups and workshops crestfallen and discouraged from ever writing again, Walker acknowledges that “authentic and vulnerable sharing can be extremely triggering, and can easily flash the survivor back to experiences of being attacked, shamed or abandoned.” There’s a ton of great advice out there about how to give criticism constructively, without attacking the writer, but it may be productive as the one getting the day’s critique to reaffirm reality, and know you can’t get grounded or fired or excommunicated from writing just because you didn’t nail the ending or the extended metaphor this time.

Finally, Walker describes the best case scenario. “Verbal ventilation, at its most potent, is the therapeutic process of bringing left brain cognition to intense right brain emotional activation.” Reading this, something clicked for me about how I understood self expression and my writing process. Editing was not in opposition to catharsis; it was necessary to complete the release. Do not view criticism as something you need to suck up and receive like a blow. The cycle of idea, draft, feedback, revision, rewriting, and even publishing was a unified whole; not acts of civilizing self expression, but a process of integrity with that self expression, and more effectively cathartic for it.

-Julian K. Jarboe, 2018 WROB Fellow

Year in Review

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Last December, I was pulling everything together for my application to the Writers’ Room fellowship. It would be difficult to quantify just how different my writing life is now. I have a new job that will make it financially feasible for me to stay on at the Room next year. I have a new place that’s quiet enough to work in. And the manuscript that was one-quarter drafted when I applied for my fellowship– a story I was, and still am, truly excited about– was finished about two weeks ago.

The revision process was nonstop, as it always is, because I absolutely love revising. I can and will work on revisions anywhere: on the train, in a waiting room, in front of the TV while my family watches a contentious football match. But drafting is a much more delicate process for me. It’s something that’s gotten harder, weirdly enough, since I’ve gotten better at writing.

It’s become harder to accept the gap between what I can envision, what I know it will eventually be, and what I write on my first go-around. It’s way too easy to go back and self-edit, to limit what I get done because I won’t let myself just get it down on the page. Every time I’m drafting a new manuscript, there’s at least one moment where I’m convinced that the last book I finished is going to be the last book I ever finish.

Being in the Room has been life-changing in that regard. Not only is it a different head space when I need to turn the world off for a few hours, but my being there at all feels like a vote of confidence that’s been hard to come by in my writing life for a while. It’s encouragement and a fire under me all at once. Every time I took the train into State Street after work, picked up my dinner and took the elevator to the fifth floor, it was to dive into the resources that have been given to me this year with the expectation that I’d use them well. With all that behind you, it’s easy to push past your uncertainties about that last bit of dialogue and just get to work.

To do that, I developed strategies that I’ll probably keep using. I doubled, and often tripled, my usual daily word counts. I know I would have finished this manuscript one way or the other, but being at the Room helped me finish it in a way I could be proud of.

The book is in other people’s hands now, and as I think about what’s next, it’s hard not to reflect on the fact that my fellowship will come to an end early next year. It’s a bittersweet feeling. But it’s fun to think that this time next year, a new crop of writers will be looking at their writing life and marveling at all the ways it’s changed.

Rebecca Mahoney, 2017 WROB Fellow

 

On Seeing the Fruits of Your Labor

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I’ve spent the last six weeks tucked away in a hamlet in the hills of Western Massachusetts, just off a highway that has hosted moose in the past, and very many black bears recently, and which boasts two bars, a library, a hardware store, and a gas station that rents DVDs. This, for a person who has only ever lived in major cities, has been an epic transition.

I came to this tiny village to slow down. The manuscript edits I needed to complete had stalled, and my agent’s check-in emails assuring me she would give me as much time and space as I needed, appeared to have tapered off. The three or so jobs I worked to afford a room in a four-bedroom Somerville apartment had ground me down to a state in which I second guessed whether I was using even the simplest words correctly. I’d burnt out. My brain felt fried.

At just the moment I needed a change, I was awarded a fellowship that provided free room at an artist retreat. In exchange, I would give part-time help running the place. When I arrived, I expected the bulk of my duties to revolve around my experience in program management and arts administration, but was surprised to learn that much of the work would take me away from a computer screen, and would involve power tools and trips to nurseries and lumber mills.

I was nervous. I’ve got a bad back and no evidence of a green thumb, and I was tasked with moving hay bales, hauling mulch, and keeping roses and rhododendrons alive. What I’ve discovered in this work is the satisfaction of interacting with the earth, with seeing the results of my labor manifest in the physical. You plant a rose-bush with ground-up compost and compacted soil, and water it consistently to either see it die in spite of your efforts, or, hopefully, open up in a gorgeous burst of color.

Working in a garden comes with obvious benefits to a writer: Not spending forty hours a week staring at a computer screen, to then have to go home and attempt to create art on that same device; being able to think through characters and themes and plot lines while doing physical labor. But the psychological benefit goes beyond that.

When your day job involves shooting off hundreds of emails per week into the void, or lecturing to blank faces in a classroom, or marking up a client’s manuscript with what you hope are helpful comments, the results of your work can at times feel nebulous.

Completing a full-length manuscript can feel similar. It’s difficult to see the whole of a novel or story collection, and copious rounds of editing can feel like endlessly pushing words around. Yes—I delight in crafting what seems to me a beautiful sentence. But a change in characterization, or setting, or plot a hundred pages earlier in the book may necessitate deleting that sentence, and a second look might illuminate that the sentence wasn’t that great to begin with. The same might go for any proportion of the project.

When your day job and your art both feel like endeavors involving long stretches with intangible results, this can lead you to believe that all of your time is spent getting not a whole lot done, which can be discouraging. With writing, you have to allow time for discovery, which might mean pushing words or ideas around with no end in sight.  Balancing your art with work that provides tangible results can help you to delight in the joys of wading through the unknown. And keep you from drowning in it.

-Jonathan Escoffery, 2017 Ivan Gold Fellow

Emerging Author Dispatches: Five Things I Wish I Knew About the Publishing Process Before Starting Out

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Full disclosure: This blog post should’ve been up two three weeks ago.* Lately I’ve been negligent in my WROB fellowship duties (and many duties, if I’m being real). For the past few months my schedule has gotten more and more crazy as the pub date for my first poetry collection gets nearer. Now that some semblance of sanity is starting to appear on the horizon, I’ve identified five things I wish I’d known about the publishing process before starting out. None of these learnings are novel, but there’s nothing like being humbled by the act of doing something new to make each lesson land sharply.

  1. PUBLISHING TAKES FOREVER

The gears of publishing machinery move v e r y   s l o w l y. So much of the process boils down to an unglamorous, unending waiting. Waiting for it to be “your turn” in your publisher’s roster, waiting for your edits to come back, for galleys, for a more inspired ending of a poem to surface. I tried to create new work during that time but I quickly realized…

  1. IT’S DIFFICULT TO WORK ON NEW CREATIVE PROJECTS WHILE LAUNCHING A BOOK

When TESTIFY’s pub process (re)gained traction I was six months into working on a new book-length project— this close to turning a corner in understanding the story’s structure. I was unprepared for (and, occasionally, resentful of) the onslaught of admin that landed in my lap. The e-mails alone are a part-time job: pitching tie-in essays; planning book launches and readings; being in communication with publicists, editors, and graphic designers… Week after week new work was repeatedly pushed to the bottom of my task list in favor of practical (or paying) responsibilities. When I’m not writing poems or answering e-mails, I’m juggling a full-time job and running a small business. There’s no advance to float authors between books in the poetry world, so carving out time to create new work while launching a book continues to be an ongoing challenge. (If you’ve got tips or suggestions, I’m all ears.)

  1. EVEN IF THE PROCESS SEEMS OPAQUE AND MYSTERIOUS, IT’S ALL JUST PEOPLE

When I was submitting my manuscript the pub process seemed scary and impenetrable, especially as a young poet with a newly minted MFA and no clue what to do next. As everything moves forward I’m regularly reminded that each limb of the publishing apparatus is made up of people. People who know each other and people who don’t. People who are friends in real life and people who have only met on the internet. People who have jobs and lives and responsibilities (so no, their delay in responding to my submission wasn’t personal). Case in point: a colleague I connected with through my publisher asked me to be a contributing editor at a new press he was starting. A year and a half later, I’m plugged into the “people side” of the poetry world in a whole new way. In grad school it felt like the words “publication” and “press” warranted capitalization, faceless institutions built of books and words. Now I know a press is just a group of people, and none of them bite.

  1. YOU REALLY SHOULD BE ON TWITTER.

If this industry is made up of people, most of those people are probably on Twitter. In my non-writing life I’m social media averse. I have a laundry list of reasons why, and I was quick to rattle them off—until a publicist told me in no uncertain words that I needed to be on Twitter. (Verbatim: “You needed to be on Twitter yesterday.”)

At first I was stressed about having to think up witty tweets, as if each post needed to be a pithy 140 character poem. Then I realized I could follow intelligent-sounding people I already like and share their tweets, adding my own comment when necessary.

Since joining I realized that literary/writing Twitter is actually a landscape where opportunities can happen. Editors tweet out topics they’re looking for pitches on, or have their contact info in their bios. Grant opportunities, submission deadlines, contests, and potential collaborators—all on Twitter. Angie Thomas, YA author whose debut novel “The Hate U Give” has been on the New York Times bestseller list for twenty weeks, is an excellent example of how Twitter can help launch a career. In June of 2015 Thomas turned to Twitter to ask literary agent Brooks Sherman if he considered a YA novel inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement acceptable to publishers. One year later, Sherman was representing Thomas in a thirteen house publishing auction that resulted in six figure deal. Sure, it’s a Twitter fairy tale, but it’s also a reminder that social media is more than a way to stay on top of the trends.

  1. YOU WILL FEEL LIKE YOU’RE FAKING IT ALL THE TIME

Writerly imposter syndrome is real. I spent so much time in the early stages of this process second-guessing myself and others who praised my work. It felt like everyone I encountered had access to some rulebook I hadn’t read, or a scorecard I couldn’t see. Even though I’d succeeded at getting picked up for publication, I spent a fair amount of time entertaining self-doubt. Should I have cc’d my publisher on that e-mail? Is that something I should do, or something my publicist should do? Should I run this idea by someone before I send this pitch?

Eventually, I found my way back to a powerful quote from my mother-poet Audre Lorde: “I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.” Thought I might not have been in this exact situation before, I’m generally a diligent person. My instincts led me to write TESTIFY, and they got me this far so they can’t be all wrong. Now I know there’s no rulebook.

If I could go back in time I’d give myself the following advice: do the best you can now, take notes for next time, and know there will be a next time—whether it’s five years from now or fifteen years from now, there will be another book. And whenever that happens, whatever curveballs that experience throws your way, you’ll know more than you did the first time around.

*Thanks to my WROB writer colleagues for their patience and understanding.

–Simone John, 2017 WROB Gish Jen Fellow

 

 

Being with Ending

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This has been a year of writing milestones for me, and I’m rapidly approaching one more. Soon, I’m going to finish a book I started more than two years ago, and that I’ve been working on steadily since.

I didn’t understand that this would actually be a milestone, or what it would feel like, until last week just before my last revisions deadline. There’s no elegant way to frame it: I was a mess. There is, of course, more time– more opportunities to edit, to polish, to rephrase. But this was the last major revision, and I realized that this was the start of a next phase, one I hadn’t anticipated. The letting go.

For almost two and a half years, this book has been a mainstay of my private, inner life. I have turned to it for solace in deeply difficult times, typing alone on my iPad in the dark, in the middle of the night, when worry and anxiety woke me.  I have written on subways, trains, and airplanes. In transit is one of my favorite ways to write, it seems (I’ve just passed South Station, incidentally, as I type a first draft of this blog post).  I can remember where I was when I wrote a pivotal scene. Trite as it may be, I wrote about the elementary school self-portrait that first made me realize that the color of my own skin didn’t match my parents’ as I was sitting on the ledge of the Lincoln memorial on a beautiful and clear D.C. day. I wrote one of my rawest scenes one day in a hotel room in South Carolina, where I was attending a conference, after an angry phone call with a family member. I can still remember the ice bucket on the table next to me, the sleek hotel desk built into the wall, the sounds of people milling outside at an outdoor market, as I banged at my keyboard, spilling my frustration into pages. I remember the warmth of my boyfriend, now ex, who slept beside me as I typed away in or dark bedroom, trying to tilt my iPad screen so I wouldn’t wake him as I wrestled with a hard-to-pin-down exchange. I remember the cold of my drafty old row house in England, as I huddled under a twin comforter for warmth, wrapped in layers of sweatshirts capped off by a fuzzy pink bathrobe, and reread what I’d written the night before, surprising myself into laughter.

All this is wrapped up in my words, enmeshed in a story that is personal and raw and very much still alive.

It will be a while before my book is a book. But someday, in the not too (too) distant future, it will be. I am beside myself with happiness. And I am learning that letting go, that surrendering these stories that are so intimate is hard, even as it’s one of the most exciting things I feel I’ll ever do.

I know that soon, I’ll have a new idea, and I’ll start the next book, and I’ll have a whole new set of challenges and fears to contend with. But for now, I realize that I’m enjoying being with my ending, with all its difficulties and unexpected emotion. I look back at the book I began two-and-a-half years ago, and I can’t believe how far it’s come. I can’t believe what has been teased out, finessed, and developed. I can’t believe the characters and relationships that have emerged.

And as I look at my chapters and remember where I was when they were first set down, I realize too that my book tells another story. I look at it and see the people who have emerged to guide me as I’ve written and revised my first-ever book. I see the writing sample I submitted to the Writers’ Room, and I remember the excitement of my first ever reading, and the encouragement that followed. I see my editor’s nuanced and prescient eye, my agent’s rigorous and right cuts, my sisters’ faces when they came across a joke that was just right, my best friends’ gestures as they helped me to storyboard a new scene and unlocked the energy within it.

In my story, I see so many others. And I realize, frankly, in writing this blog post, that as scary as it is to share them, it is a special kind of terrifying joy to do so.

-Susan Tan, 2015 Gish Jen Fellow for Emerging Writers

Artist Self

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Several years ago I wrote a few short stories, one after another, that each had some kind of artist for a protagonist. They took various guises and encountered various fates, but when I stepped back and looked at them side by side, they were all about characters who gained a sense of agency and belonging through their work. Their art was transformative to their lives. I didn’t plan this, and it took me a long time to make the connection–I don’t think it’s a stretch–that while I was writing these stories, I had been working through the question of whether or not to pursue my MFA. I also didn’t observe, until much later, that I had written each and every one of these artists as male and white.

*

The New York Times recently published a recommended summer reading list, comprised solely of white authors. Some excellent thinkers and writers have already commented on this, more eloquently than I can (for example, see Roxane Gay’s article on NPR’s Code Switch: http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/05/28/410015276/the­worst­groundhog­s­daytime­to­talk­again­about­diversity­in­publishing), so allow me simply to say that it’s only the latest occurrence that necessitates the ongoing conversation about diversity on our bookshelves, in MFA programs, and in the publishing world. You’ve probably read or at least heard of Junot Diaz’s widely­ discussed “MFA vs. POC” article in the New Yorker last year (http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/mfa-vs-poc). You have probably seen the yearly VIDA counts (http://www.vidaweb.org), and heard that this commendable organization is making efforts to expand the count to look specifically at women of color, at LGBTQI writers, and writers with disabilities.

Critics of this conversation often ask why it should matter. Why, if it’s the work that matters, should the writer’s race matter (or: gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion, able- bodiedness, and so on). As though academia and the publishing industry that influence what we read are perfectly merit-­based, neutral systems. As though the work is somehow conjured from a neutral mind, or is about a neutral world that doesn’t exist. As though language is a neutral medium. It is not. Consider the definitions and connotations of the words fair and dark.

IMG_3344There are a couple of strands of discussion here, and while they are intimately entwined, they should be parsed out. There’s the question of representation–of who gets to publish, who is reviewed, who lands teaching positions, and whose books we read. Then there’s the question of our own identities, relative to our writing–what we’re expected to write and why, what topics and voices are “off­-limits” to us (if any), and how, when we choose to cross boundaries, do we do it effectively.

About the former: it’s not an attack on white writers to ask for more parity. No one is saying their books are undeserved accomplishments. Nor is it an attempt to shame any of us as readers and writers and teachers. Instead it’s a plea to the literary community to recognize how much more expansive their reading lives could be, if only they would pay attention. The (predominantly white and male) literary canon is canonical for a reason–it’s brilliant, beautiful work. But think how much more beauty is out there for us to find, if only we would be open to it. Why would we deny ourselves that? The great works by writers of color are out there, and being written, and will be written. You just aren’t seeing them championed in The New York Times. The exceptions to this are sadly just that: exceptions.

As for the latter: I understand, and feel, the desire to write across boundaries. Clearly I had no qualms writing one white male character after another. But the difference between my writer self from a few years ago and the writer self I am today is that I now believe I must first recognize where my own identity sits in this society, relative to my character’s identity. What baggage or preconceptions I bring to my pen. When I write a character, I am trying to bring that character to life in the reader’s mind; I am asking the reader to take a leap of faith with me and to translate a few marks of ink on paper into an understanding of an entire person. What a strange and tremendous act, and, given how powerful narratives are in how we form opinions about the world, what a tremendous responsibility.

We are none of us immune to bias–cultural or otherwise. Was it important to the stories, that all my artist characters were white males? Probably not. So then, what did it say about me, an Asian-­American woman trying to figure out how to write fiction, and what did it say about our cultural landscape, that when I imagined those who produced valuable work, I never imagined someone who looked like me? I’m not claiming that it’s wrong for me to write white male artist characters–it might be appropriate for a particular story. I’m saying that seeing this pattern within my own work made it abundantly clear to me that something was going on, and that I should sit up and pay attention. Because if I didn’t even realize what I was doing, the white bias I was replicating, what other biases am I unwittingly reinforcing on the page? It is my responsibility, as someone who wants my words to be read, to be as aware as I can possibly be of what I’m doing with those words. By the same token, we should all sit up and pay attention if we look at the writers we keep reading and teaching, and they all belong to one particular demographic. Maybe you have some good reason for it, I don’t know. But maybe you’re closing yourself off from books that will knock you over silly, they’re so good.

The Racial ImaginaryIn Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda’s excellent anthology The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, they write in their introduction that “our imaginations are creatures as limited as we ourselves are. They are not some special, uninfiltrated realm that transcends the messy realities of our lives and minds. To think of creativity in terms of transcendence is itself specific and partial–a lovely dream perhaps, but an inhuman one.” This is not a prohibition against writing “the other.” It’s a call to look at ourselves and our work and the work we value with our eyes open.

*

At my MFA program we’ve been having this conversation among the students, faculty, and administration over the past few years. To the great credit of my school, Warren Wilson, and the community it fosters, I have not personally experienced what Diaz describes from his own MFA experience as “an almost lunatical belief that race [is] no longer a major social force.” Instead, I have encountered student after student, of all backgrounds, who have told me that they want to have these conversations, they want to talk about the impact that identity politics have on their work and on our education. We are a community of students trying to figure out how we can process the world through our writing in thoughtful and meaningful ways. Last January, after an overwhelmingly positive response to a student-­led discussion about the intersection of identity and craft, it took some time for me to sort out what felt like an internal ground shift. It was the first time I’d ever explicitly received the message that it can be okay, even welcome, to talk about these issues, and to think that my racialized, gendered self is also an artist self. That my artist self is also a racialized, gendered self. Even if it isn’t racialized as white, or gendered as male. It is a startling thing to understand what you have not been getting from the culture at large. Sometimes you don’t recognize it until you finally hear it.

*

Oftentimes, in these conversations that present hard questions, people want answers. Tell me what to do, so that I can be responsible and respectful. Do I take an affirmative action stance towards my own work? Towards my bookshelf? Do I use certain words and not others? What am I allowed to write? How do I not offend? The maddening thing is, I don’t think there are answers, not really. No singular answers, anyway. If this was an easy thing to address, if there was some checklist we could follow, we wouldn’t keep having the same conversations year after year, reading list after reading list. But I have become increasingly convinced that it is the active asking of questions that is most important, and the willingness to persist in the uneasy and uncomfortable. I have become increasingly convinced that it is only in the belief that this conversation matters at all that we can take small steps in our own work and in ourselves.

-Cynthia Gunadi, Ivan Gold Fiction Fellow