ON VOICES

I also think that the first person is very confining. It was wonderful to work with it in [my novel] Family Pictures where I combined it with the third person, because I got away with a lot, but more typically you only have one person's perspective, and only one person's experience of the story. You don't have the possibility of looking at the way the person she's interacting with felt about the same events. Unless there's a compelling reason for a story to be in the first person, I wouldn't choose it. You can lose a lot more than you gain. It seems easier, and in many ways it is easier, but you slowly become aware of what you cannot do as you work through a first-person novel. You may want to give the history or the feelings of someone else and you can only do it as the first person perceives it or doesn't perceive it. It's a complicated decision, and one I've not always been certain of when I undertook a book at the start. More of my books are in the third person. I love the third person because you can use it in so many ways. You can move in so close to a charachter, and then pull way back and be very God-like and comment on the whole thing. That's great freedom, and I really enjoy that. It can be hard to work well, but I love it." Sue Miller, interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson == Issue No 26, Glimmer Train Press, Inc.


And so, after struggling for way too long with three chapters of Evelyn in third person, I realized it was time to try her in first. I was driving down the road, minding what I considered my own business. Side of the lip curled to one side, thinking how unproductive the morning had been. Why couldn't I hear this woman? Why? And then, out of nowhere at all (or maybe a somewhere I don't have words for), this is what she said:

One thing I have come to know in this life is this: if you don't speak for yourself, you will be spoken for. People will not just leave you be. There is always somebody on the sideline somewhere waiting to have some say. People who got five days a week to mind your business and only two to leave theirs alone. Time has showed me that it's that same somebody that's always getting the story wrong, telling it just like they been there all the time. That's why I feel I am going to speak for myself. I'm the onliest one who knows what happened and I'm the only one fit to tell it.

Now you stand there on your flat feet and say a woman the likes of me should be sent to Bellevue? Say you want to know how any woman in her right can leave such a man as Leroy? How a mother can up and leave her chil'ren behind? Well, I will tell you since that's what you seem to be fishing for. But I am not going to tell you what it is you done already conjured up in your mind. I didn't leave on account of no other man, no broad, and it sure wasn't over no dope, no smack. It was something most ordinary people like you don't know nothing about. So here I am to tell it, once and for all.

Okay, Evelyn. I'm listening.

A.

WHERE DOES THE TIME GO?

An absolutely marvelous day! We've employed a sitter for the children for the very first time and I feel like a new woman. Though the sun has the whole city illuminated and the sweetness of the air has Spring fixed in my mind; though the Springhill catalogue sits on my table begging me to order those fire orange tiger lillies that I absolutely crave in the summer, today I *KNOW* I must write. And so, with Sonny tucked in his bed, tailed curled like a hose and the house perfectly still (not even a ring of the telephone!!) I move into partial editing of what I started on Chapter Nine the other day and light reading of Before The Mayflower by Lerone Bennett, Jr. to be sure that I've got a sense of black life in the late 1930's and early 40's. No word count to give. I'll have to gauge that by week's end once I've made the edits. Oh, and yesterday I did actually get down two pages of a new short story that's been brewing about a woman who abandons sensibility in search (or rather, pursuit) of her dreams. In Spanish, she is La Loba, the Wolf Woman or La Mujer Grande, The Great Woman or even La Huesera; in Navajo, she is Na'ashje'ii Asdzaa The Spider Woman; in Japanese, she is Amaterasu Omikami, The Numina, who brings all light, all consciousness. But for me, she is just Wild Woman and she lives in us all.

Recommended reading: Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD

Angel
(Who is really jiggy right now)

SUNDAY'S CHILD

Sin palabras. No words this weekend. Spending time cleaning out, organizing chapters, throwing away old, old, old shit that I'll never ever need again, especially the "Fiction 101" Writer's Digest magazines. Thankfully, I'm past that I'd like to believe. Two big boxes of out-and-out junk, clogging both mind and soul.

Also time spent on the homefront. Bought shutters to install over the kitchen sink (I'm a sucker for shutters) and blue painter's tape to tape out the childrens' bathroom (we're painting it purple). Weaving again -- bought a beautiful pair of bamboo size 19's and some very thick, very beautiful red yarn with strips of yellow and blue (whoever dyed this should be elevated to saint status). Somehow, I don't feel the least bit guilty about not having put actual words on paper. I know the story is there.

I did stumble on some very delightful old quotes. This one from Toni Morrison:

The progress of Black American writing is marked by five stages. First comes the heat of protest and then the more reflective search for personal identity. This is followed by an exploration of culture, a refinement of craft, and finally a wider vision of the world. But the important thing is not to explain but to bear witness, to record.

Toni Morrison
Time 9/12/1977

--A.

TUESDAY'S CHILD

I so loved Nalo's reasoning for the daily word count that I decided to adopt it as my own. Two days in a row now of feeling good because, as she says, just to see the numbers steadily increase is reaffirming and indicative of progress.

So, for the novel:

Today's word count: 911
Cumulative word count: 43,041

And for the day's work:

Yoga done
Follow up on anthology submission w/editor done
Call Fine Arts Work Centre re: housing list for summer workshop done
Mail registration for Writing the Novel Synopsis workshop done
Print and review next batch of poems (9) for second volume; check for consistency with overall theme done

My, what I can do when I stay off the Internet. Onward soldiers to the second job: dinner, lovely children, Spouse and doggie.

A.

SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A NOVEL ...

A number of years ago I stumbled upon an online conversation on something like a message board. It was an ongoing thread about the joys and perils of love. Just so happened that the initiator of the thread was a young woman in her twenties who was knee deep in an affair with a man in his fifties. This young woman declared serious love for him and he (according to her) declared love in return. What was intriguing to me was the nature of the affair and the man's age: fifty. Knowing this to be a magic button age for many men, I began to toss around in my mind what this man might look like, what his wife might be like, and what the man was actually in search of that led him to having the affair. And because I know that affairs are rarely, if ever, solely about sex, I wanted to know more about this fellow and what kind of life he'd planned for himself and how those plans had or had not panned out. And so I set out writing about this charachter and discovered that, just as I'd thought, the affair was just the tiny little kernel, like an acorn, of a much larger, denser tree. I would discover the many branches of this man's life -- his heartaches, his pains, the unmet things in his childhood, his deepest and darkest fears all coming to a head one the eve of his fiftieth birthday. I became intrigued about mid-life and what it means to know that you have lived more life than you have left to live. I wanted to explore what that feels like; I wanted to get inside that tension of mid-life. I wanted to examine what it means to live fully; what it means to be a full human being. And so over time, after a whole lot of skimming, sketching, cogitating, and reading of course, I discovered that it boils down to having courage. Being a full human being comes with a hefty price and a whole lot of pain.

I've been working on this novel for a number of years, partly because--and this I truly believe--I had to get a little older to understand the passing of time, the meaning of time and what it means to age and look back on one's life. In order to write intelligently and empathetically and artfully and truthfully about a charachter or a place, I as an artist, must know it on the inside at a deeper level than the surface read of a psychology textbook or an atlas describing the local bridge. In order for these charachters to fully show themselves to me, I believe I had to show myself to them. I had to show them that I meant business, that I was serious about my inquiry and, moreover, I was trying to be that full human being that some of them could not be. I had to do a whole lot of reading to learn the mind of man at fifty. Lots has been written about it, beyond the surface joke of the "leather pants and red corvette" kind of crisis. I'm thankful for all of the psychologists who've made it real for me.

Alice Walker once likened her written work as one big garden. The poems like roses, the essays like tulips, but the novels -- oh, the novels -- they are the rutabagas.....tough, hard, thick, unruly. Novels (good ones, that is) take time. Time to establish story, pace, plot, climax, syntax, and most of all, that one key element that leaves us breathless: verisimilitude. Good writing takes time and a whole lot of skill, some of it learned but more of it, I believe, the fruit of being completely open and mindful and the willingness to walk into unchartered territory. Alone. A willingness to live in silence and solitude. A willingness to dig as deep as the shovel will allow. A willingness to spend a whole day on ten pages and come away with only two really useful paragraphs. A willingness to be absolutely honest about what stays and what goes. An understanding of the weaving of threads, much like any kind of sewing or knitting, so that in the end not one thread is left flying in the wind, not one seam is showing. That takes skill.

So, on this page I'll be providing some intermittent notes about the status of my little rutabaga. Maybe a quote or two that pertains to novel writing. Maybe a link to someone else's blog about novels. When will she be done? Well, when she's done.

Without further ado, here's some advice every young writer should tape above her desk:

Writing Advice

Enjoy,

A.

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