Gretchen Hummel

I received earlier this week a reply from Prospect Agency regarding Black Dreams, Silver Linings.  A rejection like this is enough to keep me going for months.  Particularly note the Editorial Note.

From: Prospect Agency - Submissions <submissions@prospectagency.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:22:41 -0400
To: Gretchen hummel <Gretchhh@aol.com>
Subject: Your submission

To Gretchen Hummel,

Thank you for submitting to Prospect Agency.

We greatly appreciate your submission, and though
Black Dreams, Silver Linings is not a good fit for
us, we think your writing shows promise. We would
be interested in considering future projects from
you should you choose to submit them.

We wish you all the best in your writing career
and thank you for thinking of Prospect Agency.

With best wishes,
Prospect Agency

Editorial Note: Well written and the premise was
intriguing.  Unfortunately, these first chapters
moved too slowly to keep my interest and didn't
quite pull me in enough.  I would be happy to see
more work from this author though!

1. Writers write

2. Writing is a process

3. You don’t know what your writing will be until the end of the process

4. If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is to not write

These are taken from Gail Sher’s Book One Continuous Mistake, another book definitely worth your while.

The author takes a zen approach to writing, one that helped me finally finish a query letter that I swear I had spent no less than 6 weeks on–four friggin paragraphs.  Probably something I shouldn’t admit, but it’s sadly true.  I’m sure there were no less than 25 different versions and all of them “One continuous Mistake” in my eyes.  I simply couldn’t get it right, until I read this quote,

“Before you write and after you write make sure to give it away. . . . the effort, the results, and identification with the results.  Much of the happiness that total absorption in an activity brings is nullified by the belief that it is ours–that we know what we are doing.  But anything we hold onto brings disharmony.”

Sher got this advice from a Tibetan Rinoche (buddhist monk of sorts).  Well, this really struck a chord in me (picture monk sounding the gong, a gong as big as he is.)  I must have had such a murderous tight grip on my query, that it was paralzying me and making everything come off like cardboard.  Wrestling those sentences until I was pulling my hair out.  The next day, I put it all aside, started over, and wrote the thing in twenty minutes.  I was able to allow the flow to flow if you will.   Talk about backed-up, clogged with sludge, and then I was able to let it all go and with a much lighter touch pull it off.

Yes, it could be argued that that’s the way writing should be done anyway, sweat and slave and dig in your heels, draw blood if you must to write the best first draft you can–throw it all away and start over and you might end up with something half-way decent.  Still, there was something about the psychological letting it go, giving it away notion.

Looking at writing as a daily exercise or practice can also get the monkey off your back that’s breathing down your neck with a none too aromatic breath, cracking the whip and expecting instant perfection to trail from the end of your pen.  ”No, I’m not writing, I’m just doing my daily stint”–a way of sneaking up on the work and getting some (imperfect) words down before the spotlight zeros in, if you will, striking you back into paralysis.  Or so can be my process.

She also has some words to say about the fascism of perfectionism.   So many of us try to make our prose beautiful, get the rhythms right, the alliterations resonating, the parallelism repeating, oh, and a little thing called content perfect.  The trouble is perfect is something you’ve already heard.  Trying to attain it in your writing can end up being a suffocating strait jacket.  Strangling your own voice dead in your throat or head or soul or wherever it comes from.  In other words, you’ve lost your unique slant on things.  The color of your own lens gets neutralized and rendered effete.  Back when I was in graduate school getting my MFA, I was at times told my sentences came off “too perfect”.  I didn’t quite understand it at the time, but I’m slowly getting an inkling.

I recently read David Jauss’s “Alone With All That Could Happen:  Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft of Fiction.”  (pauses to catch breath-that’s a long title)  The book is very good on many issues, I especially enjoyed his discussion of the grey areas between choosing a point of view.  Rarely is a book ever written completely in third, or first person.  The reason for the choices are about distance usually, manipulating what, where and how long you want your reader’s attention focused.

The section I enjoyed the most was about opposites and how the best writers reach for a Janussian blend of opposites to create something entirely new.  Some quotes:

Robert Haas:  ”the greatest works of art come very close to saying the opposite of what they mean”

Jane Hirschfield:  ”a good poem is able to both answer uncertainty and contain it”

Robert Venturi:  the aim of art– “the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion”

Oscar Wilde:  ”a truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true”

One of my favorite examples–”and one to me are shame and fame”–Emerson

Plato:  ”Light is the Shadow of God”–love that!

Another section was about using a variety of sentence structures–some beautiful quotes–

Flaubert:  ”The sentences in a book must quiver like the leaves in a forest, all dissimilar in their similarity”

Yeats:  ”As I altered my syntax I altered my intellect”

Robert Haas again:  ”New rhythms are new perceptions”

It’s 4 in the morning.  I can’t sleep.  Too tied up in emotional knots of one sort or another.  Excruciating day of editing today.  I’m reworking the first three chapters to try and implement suggestions made by my tough and invaluable friend/critic, Alison.  I spent 3 hours on a few paragraphs and still came away feeling unsatisfied.  It will come eventually, if I work at it hard enough/long enough.  It does get a little overwhelming, however, thinking about doing this for 400 pages.  It will be the third edit through.  Arghhhh!

I’m reading a wonderful book, the prose is achingly beautiful.  I can’t believe I haven’t read this before, it’s an old book–Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.  I have a nice treat for my reading hours over the holidays.  I eat it up and I’ve had to look up some new words, which I love doing.   I’ll have to put in a few quotes, fabulous analogies–like the sound of thunder–coal falling down a shoot, the savage scribble of lightning in the sky–I drool.   

(more…)

I titled this entry in this way because it’s how I think new writing and editing are related.  Analagous, if you will.  I have been editing away on this book I’m writing for months and months now and honestly not getting much gratification out of it, even to the point of wondering if this is what I want to do at all.  Granted it doesn’t take too much to question myself to this extent where writing is concerened.

Still, the point I’m trying to make is I’ve learned the new writing is what’s fun for me, that’s the part of writing that gives me that zing of energy, that sort of frisson of creative anxiety that starts all kinds of things percolating away in me.  It’s what makes this all worthwhile for me, the joy of the enterprise you could say.  What brought this all to a head recently was finding I needed to add a new half-chapter to increase and remind the reader of my main character’s motivational state of mind–in short I had to write some new stuff.  And I had so much fun with it!

All of which goes to say, I believe I have to find a new way of writing a novel, so that I can enjoy some of the new writing alongside the grueling hours and hours of editing.  Not sure how to put this into practice exactly except by perhaps starting to write a new one while editing the old one?? 

I was invited to a new writing group that I went to last Friday night, here in Charlotte, Concord rather, but it’s much closer than the one I’ve been attending in Augusta.  Nice group–I experienced some warm enveloping vibes from them that I was feeling pretty good about by the time I got home.  And there are some good writers among them.  But they meet every Friday night.  I’m thinking since I’ve already gotten through most of my novel with my writing group in Augusta I’ll stay with them until it’s concluded which I’m thinking will be in October.  And then perhaps I’ll take up full-time residence with the new group.  Until then it will probably be hit and miss, but they were very open to my just showing up when I could and not even bringing material, but just being there to offer comments.  So, I’ll probably do that.  Writing groups are so good for writers.

I read a great book recently I’d recommend–The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Grubar.  Very entertaining, funny, erudite and wonderful character development.  

I’m back from a couple of summer vacations, one to Maine, the other to the mountains of Colorado and it’s time to get back to work on the novel.  We saw some of the most spectacular scenery I’ve ever seen in my life, bar none while in the San Juan Mountains, going over Cinnamon and Engineer’s Passes.  The tetons may rival it–may.

Sometimes it seems I’m so close to being finished with this book I can taste it, others that the editing just goes on and on and on.   It’s going to be a big book, in the 90-100,000 word range, speculative genre.   The first draft is finished and my writing group has seen three-quarters of it at this point.  It is not an easy task, slogging through this editing, and I wish the writing would go a little faster, a little smoother, but all I can do is apply seat of pants to chair as they say and whittle away at it.  Setting weekly goals has helped.  Editing is one of those passtimes that can go on and on–I’ve heard it said that you know you’re done editing when you start changing things back to the way you had them before.  I try to get to that point with each chapter.  I’m having a self-doubt attack this past week, worried about certain parts of the book, which only serves to make the daily work that much more trying.  And why am I doing this again?

I had to include this summer poem below, it’s so beautiful.  The poem was featured in today’s poetnews@poets.org  Our summer nights here in the South resonate with the sentiments expressed–the heartbeat of the cicadas. 

In those days I thought their endless thrum
   was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights.
      In the throats of hibiscus and oleander

I'd see them clustered yellow, blue, their shells
   enamelled hard as the sky before rain.
      All that summer, my second, from city

to city my young father drove the black coupe
   through humid mornings I'd wake to like fever
      parcelled between luggage and sample goods.

Afternoons, showers drummed the roof,
   my parents silent for hours. Even then I knew
      something of love was cruel, was distant.

Mother leaned over the seat to me, the orchid
   Father'd pinned in her hair shrivelled
      to a purple fist. A necklace of shells

coiled her throat, moving a little as she
   murmured of alligators that float the rivers
      able to swallow a child whole, of mosquitoes

whose bite would make you sleep a thousand years.
   And always the trance of blacktop shimmering
      through swamps with names like incantations—

Okeefenokee, where Father held my hand
   and pointed to an egret's flight unfolding
      white above swamp reeds that sang with insects

net over the sea, its lesson
   of desire and repetition. Lizards flashed
      over his shoes, over the rail

until I was lost, until I was part
   of the singing, their thousand wings gauze
      on my body, tattooing my skin.

father rocked me later by the water,
   on the motel balcony, singing calypso
      above the Jamaican radio. The lyrics

here the citronella burned, merging our
   shadows—Father's face floating over mine
      in the black changing sound

night, the enormous Florida night,
   metallic with cicadas, musical
      and dangerous as the human heart.

“Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”–Somerset Maugham

I’m almost finished with a rewrite of my current novel.  The work is going well at the moment.  I’ve been setting weekly goals and finding that working quite well–that is if I break down the weekly goals into doable daily bits.  In other words, I’m so much better off if my to-do list for the day has only two or three items listed, rather than staring down a writing to-do list as long as my arm.  I don’t do well with overwhelm, no question about it.

I’ve also recently recruited a goal’s partner, a writing goal’s partner.  We exchange weekly goals and are then accountable to one another for our success or lack of it in accomplishing them.  This was a suggestion from a course given by Margie Lawson on-line.  MargieLawson.com.  I highly recommend her.

I’m also a member of a writing group, another must, at least for me as a writer.  Writing can be such a lonely pursuit.  It always gives me a lift to see that there actually are other people on this planet that are blessed with/suffer from this writing compulsion.  Enough for tonight.