Just a super-short, super-quick post to say that I loved Sergio Troncoso's recent blog entry, "Why I Write Simply," and think you should read it, too.
Categories:
First of all, Happy Anniversary, Stonewall! Hurray! Now to overturn DOMA, and we'll be making some progress around here.As the insane person I apparently am, I decided some time ago to squeeze in a road trip to meet relatives before I head to Boston to teach in the Pine Manor residency. These are relatives I've never seen before: my biological paternal grandmother, aunts, cousins, y más--relatives of my biological father, Len (The Truth Book, p. 1, for those in the know). They're having a Fourth-of-July family reunion, and they generously invited me to come reune with them.
As those of you who've made the trek to meet unknown relatives or an unknown homeland can appreciate, it's an intense, overwhelming sort of thing to experience. (I'm still absorbing the shockwaves from meeting my biological maternal relatives, and that happened over a decade ago!) Anyway, it should be interesting. I'm packing now.
Recently, Heather Sellers was kind enough to share with us her thoughts about writing by hand, and several of you responded. Chris Westerman asked the great question about whether neurological research had been done to see if different parts of the brain are activated by the two different composition processes, and I'm looking into that. To my happy surprise, I also received an email from one of Heather's former students, who wanted to share his own views about the process.
Of course, let me add the caveat that we all know plenty of people who draft beautifully on their laptops--and more power to them. I just wanted to offer this perspective, in case you want to try it out.
Paul Morin graduated from Hope College in May 2009 and will enter Central Michigan University's M.A. English program this fall. He is currently working on a collection of short stories, Michigan Winter. Here's what he has to say:
I am a writing student of Heather Sellers. She mentioned that you were doing
a piece on writing by hand and that I should email you and share why I write
all of my work by hand. The simplest answer is: because it works. When I
write by hand, I am able to go through the scene more slowly and actually
experience what is going on with my characters. When I write on the computer I tend to go too quickly and leave out important parts of the story: the little details that make a story real. The 'Delete' key is the other main
hindrance for me and my writing. The ability to delete my work effortlessly
makes me feel like I have to correct any mistakes then and there or I will
look like an idiot. That takes me out of the image in my head and also
allows me to delete some of the gold from the story. If, on a snap
judgment, I delete something that I think isn't working, then I may never
have the chance to revisit that detail and discover why my subconscious
thought it was important to include. (Case in point. I have deleted and
re-written three sentences in this email already.)
Another big advantage of writing by hand is revision. When I revise, I copy
over a previous work by hand and add or take away depending on what I see.
When I do this by hand, I am able to see more and spend more time
fleshing out the details. When I write on the computer it is way too easy to
just start typing and end up copying everything over word for word.
Something about the pen allows me to make substantial revisions to the point
where a whole other story emerges from the old one. I have never been able
to do anything more than superficial changes on the computer. It is also too
easy for me to be lazy with a computer. For example, I can use the thesaurus
option in Microsoft Word and change all of my verbs, adjectives, etc. and
feel like I have done actual work. When I write by hand, that option isn't
there, and I am forced to go back into the story and re-see everything which
often brings forward things I never would have seen with something like my
Thesaurus method.
I have also noticed a marked change in the work from writers in various
writing groups when they have switched over to hand writing. The work is
fuller, has more energy and is more enjoyable to read. The whole group could
tell when people had switched. We would be reading a story and say,
"Something's different. You changed your style."
Writing by hand allows me to feel more. It makes my work better sooner,
requires less revision, and adds more depth. And in the end, it is faster
than trying to write a quality piece on the computer. To quote Heather, "The
slowest way is the fastest way."
Categories:
These two recently published profiles of very popular commercial authors intrigued me: "Real Romance" in The New Yorker about Nora Roberts, and "Pulp Princess" in Elle about Miasha. I haven't yet read books by these writers, but their professional stories were interesting--especially in terms of their writing work ethic, determination to succeed, and strenuous, successful efforts to market and promote their work. Their sales are kind of staggering to read about.
Have I mentioned that teaching in the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference was great? The workshop participants were serious, focused, hardworking, and sweet, and they produced like crazy and supported each other. A teacher's dream.
Now I'm back at my desk, revising scholarly articles for submission, planning my fall graduate course in women's transatlantic modernism, and still plugging happily away on my novel.
Here in Lincoln, where the actual temperature of 97 degrees feels, or so weather.com tells me, like 109, and the UV index is 9, it seems like a wise day to be indoors anyway. In our apartment with all of the blinds drawn, I feel like one of the mole-people. Stay cool! Stay hydrated! Slather on the sunscreen, folks.
The graduate course is really exciting for me: Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston, Meridel Le Sueur, Jean Rhys, Margery Latimer, and Virginia Woolf all jostling around in one highly contested little period--and I had to cut so many! (Stevie Smith, I miss you. Djuna Barnes. Dorothy Richardson. Oh, my shame. And this is just prose--we're not even doing poetry.)
My goal is for every graduate student (18 are registered) to get a solid, submittable (is that a word?) journal article out of the experience. We'll see.
Have I mentioned that teaching in the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference was great? The workshop participants were serious, focused, hardworking, and sweet, and they produced like crazy and supported each other. A teacher's dream.
Now I'm back at my desk, revising scholarly articles for submission, planning my fall graduate course in women's transatlantic modernism, and still plugging happily away on my novel.
Here in Lincoln, where the actual temperature of 97 degrees feels, or so weather.com tells me, like 109, and the UV index is 9, it seems like a wise day to be indoors anyway. In our apartment with all of the blinds drawn, I feel like one of the mole-people. Stay cool! Stay hydrated! Slather on the sunscreen, folks.
The graduate course is really exciting for me: Gertrude Stein, Nella Larsen, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston, Meridel Le Sueur, Jean Rhys, Margery Latimer, and Virginia Woolf all jostling around in one highly contested little period--and I had to cut so many! (Stevie Smith, I miss you. Djuna Barnes. Dorothy Richardson. Oh, my shame. And this is just prose--we're not even doing poetry.)
My goal is for every graduate student (18 are registered) to get a solid, submittable (is that a word?) journal article out of the experience. We'll see.
Last week, I received and devoured Sue William Silverman's new Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir (U of Georgia, 2009). And gentle readers, I have to tell you: This is the teaching text I have been waiting for.It's terrific. It's smart, practical, honest, and candid, and it's clearly the product of Silverman's long experience as both writer and editor. (She has two riveting memoirs in print, and she's the associate editor of Fourth Genre, one of the top two journals that publish creative nonfiction exclusively, and my personal favorite.)
Until now, as a teacher of undergraduate and graduate memoir workshops, I have liked and used Vivian Gornick's shrewd and literate The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative with students, but honestly, it makes only a few really important take-away points, and most of them can be found on pages 3-26 and in the last chapter. Most of the rest of the book addresses (at length) texts that my students haven't read, which can be alienating/confusing for them, and I'm not able to devote our whole semester to reading Gornick's references. The Situation and The Story is a good jumping-off point, but then I've had to cobble together numerous other resources to make the pedagogical points I've wanted to make.
Fearless Confessions addresses everything: craft (from plot to sentence-level issues), ethics, the vexed issue of truth and memory, and even marketing. Silverman also addresses the psychological challenges of memoir writing, the fear that such a project can evoke, and the reasons to have courage. "Most memoirists I know are scared to write their stories," she acknowledges, "but the point, I think, is to write anyway--in our own way, in our own time." Throughout, Silverman's voice is warm and open, a voice of guidance, instruction, and encouragement from a been-there perspective.
Politically, as a gender critic, I was pleased to encounter her assessment of the highly gendered reception of memoirs in our culture, an issue that has troubled me since I read all those hostile, slanted reviews of Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss--so brilliant, so maligned--way back when. Silverman tackles the issue head-on:
. . .[W]hy are members of the media and society, broadly speaking, more likely to honor stories written by hostages, prisoners of war, or soldiers who have fought in foreign, faraway places? Aren't stories about domestic civil wars, stories of abused women and children, domestic POWs and homebound hostages--just as acute? Yet when we write about our wars closer to home, or even in the home, we are frequently, and pejoratively, labeled "confessional" writers. Whiny.She talks back clearly and convincingly. A whole section late in the book, "What the Media Doesn't Understand about Confessional Stories," develops the point, and Silverman's book title reclaims the term confessions from its pejorative past. For women and men whose writing focuses on domestic issues, I guess it helps to know the critical terrain in advance, so you can be prepared.
Useful appendices offer seven complete essays--three written just for this book--from contemporary writers such as Michelle Otero and Karen Salyer McElmurray, as well as a bibliography of "Contemporary Creative Nonfiction" that I love. Because it has so many works on it that I already admire and teach, like Alice Sebold's Lucky and Peter Balakian's Black Dog of Fate, as well as classics of the genre like Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican, it feels particularly trustworthy, and I look forward to exploring the works I don't know.
And I'm really excited that another appendix offers Silverman's essay "The Meandering River: An Overview of the Subgenres of Creative Nonfiction," which I liked so much that I assigned to my graduate CNF students when it first appeared in The Writer's Chronicle last year. It provides useful descriptions of immersion writing, the lyric essay, and other CNF forms. Hurray! Now we have it in book form.
I look forward to using Fearless Confessions with students at the graduate and undergraduate levels, because it builds on, reinforces, and amplifies all the things I already try to teach when I teach memoir writing, the things I learned from good teachers and trial-and-error: sticking close to the body and the senses, showing-not-telling when portraying people and events, figuring out how to blend your voice then with your perspective now, which verb tense to choose, differentiating between therapy and memoir-writing, and so on.
This past weekend, I taught a mini-marathon blitzkrieg of a two-day intensive workshop, "Kick-Start Your Memoir," for the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference to a group of fourteen wonderful, serious participants, and I felt very confident, during our last hour together, recommending Fearless Confessions to them. With its guidance, reflections, and several very fruitful-looking writing exercises, it's a book that can keep them going strong on the route they've chosen.
Silverman reminds us why we all keep showing up:
Memoir writing, gathering words onto pieces of paper, helps me shape my life to a manageable size. By discovering plot, arc, theme, and metaphor, I offer my life an organization, a frame, which would be otherwise unseen, unknown. Memoir creates a narrative, a life story.Yes. Lovely, and just so.
Writing my life is a gift I give to myself. To write is to be constantly reborn. On one page I understand this about myself. On the next page, I understand that.
One of the tricky issues Silverman discusses in the book is writing about family. This Wednesday, if you'll be in Lincoln, you'd be very welcome to join Hilda Raz, Glenna Luschei, Aaron Raz Link, Kelly Grey Carlisle and me at NuVibe Juice & Java on 14th Street at 1:30 for the panel discussion "Speaking from Memory: Writing about Family." Come out, sip a smoothie, and share your views.
In response to a recent post on this blog, MFA student Faye Rapoport DesPres asked,
The rhythms of my sentences seem stronger and better when I write longhand, and so does the precision of my word choice. Since my hand is slower on the page than both hands are on the keyboard, my brain has time to try out alternative versions of a line before putting down the one my inner ear likes best and settles on.
I know that people say that writing by hand is too slow--that their pen can't keep up with their thoughts the way that typing can--and this is true for me, too, but I find it to be a good thing, since I can try out and discard weaker possibilities before they even make it to the page. Also, the extra step of typing up the handwritten work builds in an additional opportunity to let the words cool for a while and revise. Lastly, I'm a geek for slow food and organic, handmade stuff; I just generally prefer the intimacy and the sensuous, embodied feeling of writing by hand.
This is just my gut response to Faye's good question; I haven't done any research about it.
But writer Heather Sellers has given this issue a lot of thought for a long time now. A wildly productive, lovely, funny writer in multiple genres, she's the author of the award-winning short story collection Georgia Under Water, two collections and a chapbook of poetry, an illuminating college-level creative writing textbook that I just love (esp. the section about leaps), and two wonderful books about the writing process, Page after Page and Chapter after Chapter. Face First, her memoir about face blindness, is forthcoming from Riverhead, and she's a dedicated and beloved professor of creative writing at Hope College in Michigan. I got to hear her read her hilarious, blistering, sad, knockout essay, "Sails with Good People," in the forthcoming collection An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots, and she blew the room away. Check out Heather's blog about the writing process, Word after Word. She was kind enough to share her thoughts with us about writing by hand.
Me: Can you talk about your own reasons for writing by hand?
Heather: When I write by hand, I have to revise less. The work is more true, more fresh, more strange, more pure. Whenever I write by hand, the work comes out better. Thoughts are so so so useless, I think, when it comes to writing. The brain comes up with all these ideas, these notions and suggestions. They're TERRIBLE. It's the stuff that comes from under the brain, some place where the heart meets the soul in the land of the unconscious--the same place DREAMS come from--that's the place we want to get to when we make art. And, the hand, writing by hand, it lulls me into that place. My pen can't keep up with my thoughts. Perfect! I have a chance to really really write. Not vent. Not pour out words. But when the hand takes over, and the body and the brain are working together—this is always my best work.
Me: Do you see a difference in your students' work when they write by hand?
Heather: I do. It's amazing. They see it too. I can tell, when they bring their final manuscripts (typed up) to workshop who is writing by hand and who isn't. It's like looking at scarves made by machine, and scarves knit by hand by a dear dear friend. Two different beasts.
There's proof. It is wild. I have my advanced students submit a story in advance of the spring workshop, in December. On the first day of class, in January, this past year, I laid the stories out in three piles. One pile was Great Stories. They were so, so, so good. On the next pile, stories that just had a long way to go. They felt pat,
familiar, kind of "phoned in." Earnest writers, trying hard, but they didn't have that....ineffable spark. That thing. In the the third pile I put stories that didn't fit in either category. They were... a mixed bag. Some great parts. Some flat parts. I turned to each of the authors of the stories in pile one. "How do you compose," I said. I really wanted to know. This wasn't set up. Each author said, in turn, "By hand. I write by hand." Each author. I didn't single out the authors of the more beginning-ish stories. I just asked in general, "Do you write on the computer?" They all nodded. OR not. Which I took as a "yes." No shame. No blame. Just learning here. Okay, I said. "What about you three? These stories. I can't tell. Are you hand writers or computer writers?" Each of those students said the same thing. Some of the story was written by hand. Some was on the computer. After class, I sat with two of these writers, and I pointed out the passages I felt were hand, and the ones I suspected were computer. I'm not bragging here, I'm really not. But I got it 100% accurate. I really did. Now, I know these students, and I adore them, so maybe this is too unscientific to be of use or interest. But we were all pretty blown away that day.
I have not yet had a student who writes by hand say, "Yeah, I am really going to try the computer and see how that goes." Once they start (or return) to hand, they never, ever go back.
I remind them of all the great books that were written by hand. For example, all the works of Jane Austen. All the works of Shakespeare. All Sappho. All of the Bible. All done ... by hand.
Me: Are there kinds of writing that you deliberately choose not to do by hand? If so, why?
Heather: Letters to ex-boyfriends. Letters to my lawyer. Anything where I need my critical faculties in hyperdrive. Creative writing is the opposite--it requires that part of the brain to be off, or idling in the distance. Interesting--I'm just thinking of this now--I almost always write my class plans by hand, at breakfast, on printer paper...the work is always more alive, more mutable, more "real" when it's coming from the fingers.
Me: What would you say to an aspiring writer who's worried about the amount of time that writing by hand will take?
Heather: It will be faster if you do it by hand. Remember your mother saying how you should "do it right the first time"? You get better results and have to revise less. It is true. But if you have time to draft and draft and draft, by all means! Use the computer!
Robert Olen Butler is really good at explaining this in his book with Janet Burroway, From Where you Dream. And Lynda Barry, who teaches this method, explains it in One Hundred Demons.
I love this topic and have been happy all day having a chance to think about it. Thank you for letting me weigh in.
You've mentioned in a few blog entries that you write by hand before typing. I'd be very interested in your thoughts on that in a future blog entry...is there an advantage to writing your first drafts long hand, and do you think there is value in that process for any writer? Or is it a personal thing?It's a wonderful question. Thank you, Faye! Alas, I have only the most instinctual response, and here it is.
The rhythms of my sentences seem stronger and better when I write longhand, and so does the precision of my word choice. Since my hand is slower on the page than both hands are on the keyboard, my brain has time to try out alternative versions of a line before putting down the one my inner ear likes best and settles on.
I know that people say that writing by hand is too slow--that their pen can't keep up with their thoughts the way that typing can--and this is true for me, too, but I find it to be a good thing, since I can try out and discard weaker possibilities before they even make it to the page. Also, the extra step of typing up the handwritten work builds in an additional opportunity to let the words cool for a while and revise. Lastly, I'm a geek for slow food and organic, handmade stuff; I just generally prefer the intimacy and the sensuous, embodied feeling of writing by hand.
This is just my gut response to Faye's good question; I haven't done any research about it.
But writer Heather Sellers has given this issue a lot of thought for a long time now. A wildly productive, lovely, funny writer in multiple genres, she's the author of the award-winning short story collection Georgia Under Water, two collections and a chapbook of poetry, an illuminating college-level creative writing textbook that I just love (esp. the section about leaps), and two wonderful books about the writing process, Page after Page and Chapter after Chapter. Face First, her memoir about face blindness, is forthcoming from Riverhead, and she's a dedicated and beloved professor of creative writing at Hope College in Michigan. I got to hear her read her hilarious, blistering, sad, knockout essay, "Sails with Good People," in the forthcoming collection An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on their Poor and Working Class Roots, and she blew the room away. Check out Heather's blog about the writing process, Word after Word. She was kind enough to share her thoughts with us about writing by hand.Me: Can you talk about your own reasons for writing by hand?
Heather: When I write by hand, I have to revise less. The work is more true, more fresh, more strange, more pure. Whenever I write by hand, the work comes out better. Thoughts are so so so useless, I think, when it comes to writing. The brain comes up with all these ideas, these notions and suggestions. They're TERRIBLE. It's the stuff that comes from under the brain, some place where the heart meets the soul in the land of the unconscious--the same place DREAMS come from--that's the place we want to get to when we make art. And, the hand, writing by hand, it lulls me into that place. My pen can't keep up with my thoughts. Perfect! I have a chance to really really write. Not vent. Not pour out words. But when the hand takes over, and the body and the brain are working together—this is always my best work.
Me: Do you see a difference in your students' work when they write by hand?
Heather: I do. It's amazing. They see it too. I can tell, when they bring their final manuscripts (typed up) to workshop who is writing by hand and who isn't. It's like looking at scarves made by machine, and scarves knit by hand by a dear dear friend. Two different beasts.
There's proof. It is wild. I have my advanced students submit a story in advance of the spring workshop, in December. On the first day of class, in January, this past year, I laid the stories out in three piles. One pile was Great Stories. They were so, so, so good. On the next pile, stories that just had a long way to go. They felt pat,
familiar, kind of "phoned in." Earnest writers, trying hard, but they didn't have that....ineffable spark. That thing. In the the third pile I put stories that didn't fit in either category. They were... a mixed bag. Some great parts. Some flat parts. I turned to each of the authors of the stories in pile one. "How do you compose," I said. I really wanted to know. This wasn't set up. Each author said, in turn, "By hand. I write by hand." Each author. I didn't single out the authors of the more beginning-ish stories. I just asked in general, "Do you write on the computer?" They all nodded. OR not. Which I took as a "yes." No shame. No blame. Just learning here. Okay, I said. "What about you three? These stories. I can't tell. Are you hand writers or computer writers?" Each of those students said the same thing. Some of the story was written by hand. Some was on the computer. After class, I sat with two of these writers, and I pointed out the passages I felt were hand, and the ones I suspected were computer. I'm not bragging here, I'm really not. But I got it 100% accurate. I really did. Now, I know these students, and I adore them, so maybe this is too unscientific to be of use or interest. But we were all pretty blown away that day.I have not yet had a student who writes by hand say, "Yeah, I am really going to try the computer and see how that goes." Once they start (or return) to hand, they never, ever go back.
I remind them of all the great books that were written by hand. For example, all the works of Jane Austen. All the works of Shakespeare. All Sappho. All of the Bible. All done ... by hand.
Me: Are there kinds of writing that you deliberately choose not to do by hand? If so, why?
Heather: Letters to ex-boyfriends. Letters to my lawyer. Anything where I need my critical faculties in hyperdrive. Creative writing is the opposite--it requires that part of the brain to be off, or idling in the distance. Interesting--I'm just thinking of this now--I almost always write my class plans by hand, at breakfast, on printer paper...the work is always more alive, more mutable, more "real" when it's coming from the fingers.
Me: What would you say to an aspiring writer who's worried about the amount of time that writing by hand will take?
Heather: It will be faster if you do it by hand. Remember your mother saying how you should "do it right the first time"? You get better results and have to revise less. It is true. But if you have time to draft and draft and draft, by all means! Use the computer!
Robert Olen Butler is really good at explaining this in his book with Janet Burroway, From Where you Dream. And Lynda Barry, who teaches this method, explains it in One Hundred Demons.
I love this topic and have been happy all day having a chance to think about it. Thank you for letting me weigh in.
