My day starts off by wrangling my three kids out of bed, into clothes and breakfast, and out the door. I drive my fifteen-year old son to school, while my wife takes our two daughters to their schools. Then the day is mine. Back home, I grab some tea and head out to my office, which is parked in my side-driveway—I work in a 1967 Roadrunner travel trailer that was once an Idaho state police surveillance vehicle, but is now my writing studio (a.k.a. the VOLT-mobile).

Being a writer has ruined me to reading. I don’t really mind. I’m ruined because I always hold a yellow crayon while reading, and as I read I highlight any passage I think has value. I might highlight a great line of dialog, a great image, a great noun or verb, an interesting mannerism, whatever. I start off my writing day by going through what I read the day before and hand-writing out every newly highlighted passage into a composition notebook. The idea is that I’m training my brain and eyes and hand to write at the same high quality as the highlighted passages. On this day, I enter passages from Robert Musil’s novel, Young Torless.

Next, I decide my task for the day. I don’t believe in demanding a word count for myself, and instead try and choose a reasonable task, usually one scene or moment in the story. Today I task myself to write a scene where my protagonist is driving headlong into a hurricane with her little sister and brother (a war vet gone A.W.O.L.), in an attempt to find their father, who’s holed up in a huge coal barge down in the shipyard.

The way I write has a closer kinship to acting than to journalism, though I use techniques from both disciplines. From my training as a journalist, I use research. On this day, I need to get my head around how being in a hurricane might look/feel/sound. I turn to videos online, watching home videos of from North Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. I take notes. I make sketches. From this, eventually the hurricane becomes realized in my imagination.

Next, I have to figure out the content of the scene. I try to think of any books I’ve read, any plays or films or TV shows I’ve seen, that might help. On this day, I read a bit of “Upon the Sweeping Flood” by Joyce Carol Oates, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and Far North by Marcel Theroux. Then, I watch scenes from the film Winter’s Bone and a documentary Hell and Back Again. After all of this, I come away with the mechanics of the scene.

I’m what I call an “empathetic writer,” as I try to place myself wholly inside the character, which in this case is a seventeen year old woman, a high school drop-out who is now, with her mother dead, her father gone, her sister too young, and her brother ill, in charge of the well-being of her family. I take the setting and events I’ve imagined, and now must figure out how she might feel, think, and imagine, in this situation. I read a book on the Stanislavski Method of acting and find it very useful to take the emotional content of my own past and place those feelings into the character. I recall driving through a tremendously frightening storm back in Illinois, and draw my imagination back into the intensity of that trip. I work all this out, playing the scene in my mind over and over until I’m feeling it as real 

Then I open the computer and do my best to find the words to capture the empathetic experience of my character, as it’s vividly alive in my imagination. Today’s an intense day and I work myself into crying, wiping my eyes just to see the computer. I don’t pause when I’m done, and immediately revise, scrutinizing every word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph, until I’ve delivered the scene into absolute truth and clarity.

Finally, to disconnect from the trauma of my character before my wife and kids get home, I return to the house, where I take a long hot shower, then hit the kitchen, turn on some tunes, and play a game of Scrabble on my iPad. Then I begin working on dinner, trying my hand at a new curry recipe.

At last, my wife and kids get home and I kiss them each and ask about their days. When they ask about mine I say only that I had a good day of writing.

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AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• Ladies and Gentlemen by Adam Ross. I loved his novel Mr. Peanut, and was curious how he’d do with stories. Great, great, stuff.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• Do not look beyond yourself for validation. Be brave enough to take yourself seriously. The moment you decide to look fearlessly inward, to take yourself seriously, you will stop imitating others and will become original.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• In my trailer I have a counter and wall that I’ve covered with pages from books that contain amazing writing. So, if I’m reading something and come across a passage that completely blows my mind, I tear it out and glue it to the wall.

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By Alan Heathcock:

When I was four years old my father lost his job. We were living in Trenton, New Jersey at the time, where he had lived most of his life. With no college education, he had worked his way up to the position of controller at a Transamerica-owned manufacturing company called Delavalve. The company restructured itself and dismissed him. My parents decided to use his sudden unemployment as an opportunity to take a vacation, to drive whatever Buick convertible we had at the time from New Jersey to California. My parents loved the sun and the beach more than they loved anything except vodka martinis. They promised to take me to Disneyland. We stopped at Las Vegas on the way.

To read more of Corn Maze…

“The Staying Freight”–I love the title–was first published in the Harvard Review. At 36 pages, it’s a long story. And it’s divided into 20 sections. But I really want to slow things down. I think I’ll just look at the first section.

The first section is 4 paragraphs. The first sentence is 17 words:

Dusk burned the ridgeline and dust churned from the tiller discs set a fog over the field.

The first sentence sets the scene in a lyrical, poetic way–dust and dusk, burned and churned, fog and field. The camera angle is wide–looking at the ridgeline and the field.

Followed by:

He blinked, could not stop blinking. There was not a clean part on him with which to wipe his eyes. Tomorrow he’d reserved for the sowing of winter wheat and so much was yet to be done.

With the second sentence, character and a very small action (blinking) enter the picture. Why “he” instead of a name? I think because of the two sentences that end this first paragraph:

Thirty-eight and well respected, always brought dry grain to store, as sure a thing as a farmer could be. This was Winslow Nettles.

The writing creates a picture for us–the field, the man in the field, a good man, and then the final flourish, his name. Instead of simply giving us the man, Heathcock is drawing our attention to the man.

Here’s the second paragraph all in one go because, even as I didn’t want to read the next word that I was afraid would be there, I just couldn’t lift my eyes from the words:

Winslow simply didn’t see his boy running across the field. He didn’t see Rodney climb onto the back of the tractor, hands filled with meatloaf and sweet corn wrapped in foil. Didn’t see Rodney’s boot slide off the hitch.

Note the repetition: didn’t see, didn’t see, didn’t see. There were so many chances. Note the details that grab at your heart: the meatloaf and sweet corn wrapped in foil. Note the simply: I imagine the sentence without it, and it’s harsher. The simply tells me it was just one of those things, just bad luck. The simply tells me Winslow wasn’t doing anything wrong. And the simply tells me the narrator is kind.

The third paragraph:

Winslow dabbed his eyes with a filthy handkerchief. The tiller discs hopped. He whirled to see what he’d plowed, and back there lay a boy like something fallen from the sky.

Second by second. Dabbed, hopped, whirled. That’s how fast it happened.  A boy like something fallen from the sky. That’s how to create emotion. Verbs + a simile.

The fourth and final paragraph of the first section:

Winslow leapt from the tractor, ran to his son. With his belt, he cinched a gash in the boy’s leg. He pressed his palm to Rodney’s neck. Blood purled between his fingers. Winslow cradled his son in his lap and watched the tractor roll on, tilling a fading arc of dust toward the freight rail tracks that marked the northern end of all that was his.

No time for conjunctions. Short sentences and details. Leapt, cinched, pressed, purled. Until the final long sentence that contains the beginning but with everything now changed. 34 words that create a picture. A man crouched in a field, cradling his son, with the tractor rolling on.

34 words that slow us down.

*For more on Volt, read Jodi Paloni’s review in Contrary Magazine
**Cross-posted at Contrary Blog

a shop window in Montpelier

ice!

snow!

graduation

graduated!

the sun going down on graduation evening

with the moon already rising

On my way home from Montpelier, Vermont and the successful completion of  a two-year low-residency MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. This last residency went by so fast–it’s hard to believe it’s over.

Both my lecture and reading were on January 1st. And graduation was yesterday.

This morning, breakfast at the Skinny Pancake. Then a drive to Burlington and a flight to JFK. Now waiting to board a flight to Atlanta. Then I’ll have an hour and a half drive to Columbus.

As many of you know, I love traveling and airports. Today, especially, it’s nice to have all these hours in transit to mark the transition.

There are some things I miss even before they’re gone. The sound of my children’s feet against the wood floor as they run from their bedroom at one end of the hallway to the bedroom I share with their father at the other end of the hallway is one of them. It might be six-fifteen in the morning; it might be seven. No matter the hour, that pitter pat of two pairs of childfeet is the way I begin most days.

On this day, like all school days, the four of us rise and scramble through the dress-eat-brush teeth-locate books, backpacks, snacks, and coats routine in various states of calm and agitation, rancor and love. By 8:25, I’m walking my children to school. It takes about ten minutes to reach the big brick building where my son attends first grade and my daughter kindergarten. I hug them one by one in their separate classrooms, and then I walk solo down the hallway and out the side doors into the cool December air and I’m free.

It’s 8:45. Time to work.

Sometimes it seems as if there’s a giant kitchen timer installed permanently in my momhead that begins ticking the moment I push through those school doors. I know precisely how many hours and minutes I have before the bell will ding.

I pull out my iPhone. I want to be the sort of woman who walks down a sunny morning sidewalk without checking her email, but I’m not currently that woman. I scroll, I skim, I almost break my ankle tripping over uneven chunks of sidewalk while I read the tiny text on my screen. By the time I get home I know who I have to answer first and I do that while drinking the coffee my husband Brian has kindly made for me, even though he doesn’t drink it himself. He’s an artist too—a filmmaker—and we chat briefly before he departs for his office a block away from our house.

I don’t have an office. I’ve tried in the past, but an office hasn’t ever been terribly productive for me. I’m not a desk person. So instead I currently work in my bedroom while sitting on a blue velvet chair I bought in a thrift store when I was pregnant with my first child and revising my first novel. My cat Gulla sleeps on the bed nearby. Every couple of hours she rises and comes to sit on the wide arm of the chair and lick me before stretching and returning to the bed.

I answer email. I tool around on Facebook for no good reason. I open the calendar on my computer and see today is the day by which I’m meant to send my publicists the answers to a Q & A they plan to use in promoting my forthcoming memoir, Wild.

I open the document and begin. It’s more challenging than I thought it would be. I wrote the book. I know the answers, and yet I have to craft each one carefully. I try to be entertaining and intelligent without repeating myself. Soon, I understand that this thing I thought would take half an hour will take most of the day.

Carlo Saraceni's “Saint Sebastian”

In one question my publicists write “…there’s an almost Homeric feel to your journey…” and I have to Google “Homeric” so I can answer the question, but when I type the word into the search field my overly helpful computer changes it to “homoerotic” and so I end up spending a good twenty minutes reading about a long-dead Italian painter named Carlo Saraceni who made a painting called “Saint Sebastian,” which depicts a young naked man with an arrow shot into his lower abdomen/upper groin. Eventually I realize I really do know what my publicists mean by Homeric, so I return to my document and answer the question.

After a while, my iPhone makes a little sound: a text from Brian. Do I want to have lunch and then take a walk with him? he inquires.

I do. I’m too busy to do this because the great kitchen timer in my head is ticking ever so loudly and I’ve gotten distracted by an early-Baroque Italian painter, but I say yes.

He comes home and warms a pot of soup and makes kale salad and slices an apple while I shout to him from the blue chair in our bedroom that I’ll be right down. We eat. We walk. I don’t ask him what Homeric means. He goes back to his office and I go back to my blue chair.

Can you introduce us to Monster? my publicists want to know when I return to the document open on my computer screen. Monster is the name I gave my backpack on the long hike I wrote about in Wild. It’s basically a character in the book. I begin to describe it, but then I decide it would be better if I had Monster sitting right beside me as I wrote my reply, so I go down to the basement to get it and instead I see a mountain of laundry near the washing machine, so I sort and start a load, and return to my blue chair empty-handed, remembering only when I reach it why I left it.

I email my publicists to ask if they really, truly need this Q & A by today. Within minutes I’m given an extension until after the holidays.

I answer more emails. I make comments about people’s status updates and photographs on Facebook. I text Lidia. I text Sarah. I text the other Sarah. I text Brian. In an hour and a half he’ll get the kids from their afterschool class.

I open a folder titled Novel and then a Word document titled Emily and I read what I wrote the last time I wrote anything in this particular document and I feel sort of excited about it and I feel sort of sad too because it’s a new novel that I’ve begun ever so slowly to write knowing I don’t have any business starting a novel right now because I’ve got other writing commitments on the burner and my soon-to-be-out book to promote, but I start messing around with a paragraph anyway and pretty soon an hour and a half has passed and I hear loud footsteps on the porch below me—Brian and the kids—and though the day isn’t over and there is what-are-we-going-to-have-for-dinner and having dinner and play time and bath time and out loud reading time and zapping off quick emails and texts on my iPhone in between all those times—there is a way in which the day is done and the front door opens and my kids yell, “Mommy! We’re home!” and the great kitchen timer in my head goes ding.
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AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• Pam Houston’s new novel Contents May Have Shifted, which will be out from W.W. Norton next month. She’s so perceptive, so intimate and intelligent on the page. I felt known by this book, like I do by all of her books. I got an advanced reading copy when Pam and I were interviewed on stage together at an event at the Mountains and Plains Independent Bookseller’s Association Trade Show in Denver a few months ago. I gobbled it up immediately and have been waiting impatiently to share it with the world ever since.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• My first bit of advice is to take only the advice that works for you. Writers have different processes, different approaches. There aren’t rules. Having said that, I’ve found it helpful to read every word I write out loud at least twice, but more like three or four times. There’s something I can’t seem to know about my sentences and scenes until I’ve heard myself say them.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I take walks by myself when I’m deep in my writing. The walks aren’t breaks, but rather an important part of the writing process. Something I can’t get in a chair always clicks into place when I’m walking alone. I don’t think it’s strange, really. A better way to put it is that a strange thing I’ve learned about writing is sometimes you have to not be writing in order to get where you need to go.

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By Cheryl Strayed:

I’m ready to go!

If you can find twenty minutes, you can listen to Dylan Thomas’ story ”A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” read by the author–courtesy of NPR.  The written story is also available online.

Thomas grounds the story of this long-ago Christmas in real details–snow and fire brigades and uncles–and yet he tells it as if it were a fairy tale.

The ending:  “I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”

Still, some of Toibin’s passages took my breath away, like this one from the title story, with its building of emotion by the use of repetition and the cadence of the words:

And all I have in the meantime is this house, this light, this freedom, and I will, if I have the courage, spend my time watching the sea, noting its changes and the sounds it makes, studying the horizon, listening to the wind or relishing the calm when there is no wind.

And from the same story:

It came to me then that the sea is not a pattern, it is a struggle.

I’ve come back to this line several times–the ocean as a struggle.

***Actually, if anyone would like me to send the copy (a hardback with my marginalia in pencil) his or her way, just leave word in the comments before I head to the post office on Monday, and I’ll email for your address.

A week ago, I was so struck, as I came up over a hill, to actually be able to see the end of the storm–see it in the sky. At its source. Rather than notice the rain had stopped or it was getting lighter outside.

Sometimes it’s easy to see the endings of things. But sometimes you don’t know it’s the end until you look up to see the next thing has started.

One morning recently, I woke to find bare branches. And I thought, so fall is over just like that.

We’re nearing the end of another year, and I’m looking around trying to see it happening.

…
I’m writing from the road, I had to see,
and not just know, to see clearly
the sights and fires of a single world…
~from “To See” by Adam Zagajewski
Without End