There’s been a lot of talk online* recently about craft and voice and when to know if your work is publishable or best kept in a drawer.
Linda Cassidy Lewis posted about the fact that everyone can write a story, but a writer hopes to craft one.
Jennifer Stanley and Donald Maass posted separately on voice. If you stay true to your voice, the work, according to Maass, will read “authentic and passionate.” The story, Stanley believes, will “outshine” all the others.
Rachelle Gardner said that rejection after rejection may imply a writer needs more than just good grammar skills. That writer should sign up for a class on the craft of writing with a good teacher who isn’t afraid to say, “This doesn’t work. At all.”
I wrote a story a while back that was a good story. I remember sitting in a diner watching a scene unfold across the restaurant in a way that I thought, “somebody should write about that. That’s crazy!” So I did. I made up a story that paralleled the scene I witnessed, but I didn’t tell the story well. I wrote it with a particular literary magazine in mind. And, I wrote it in a way I imagined a particular famous author would write it. My voice was lost, along with the passion. The story read flat, no matter how hard I infused it with vivid details or realistic dialogue.
I know better now, but I still have much to learn. I do recognize when a story is becoming my own – when it’s a story that I enjoy reading myself. That sounds narcissistic, but when I read my own story and think, well, I might pick it up, but I hope they will pick it up, then I need to go back, rework it, and find the place where I got lost.
There’s still no guarantee my well-crafted story will get published. But, I can lean on the belief that if it’s authentic to me, it will at least stand out next to another writer’s tale.
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* If you’re on Twitter, consider following Debbie Ridpath Ohi @inkyelbows. She rolls out tweet after tweet of great links, resources, and retweets.
Sometimes I wonder why I first chose Wednesdays for a word of the day writing challenge. Why not bust out on a Monday with a brainteaser right away? Or, better yet, on a Friday, when I don’t need a whole pot of coffee because I’m already skipping into the weekend? To be honest, I only question Wednesday’s when the Wordsmith master stumps me, like today.
from Wikipedia
Today’s word, from Wordsmith.org: buskin. noun. A thick-soled laced boot, reaching to the knee or calf, worn by actors of ancient Greek tragedies.
I posted the picture from Wordsmith’s site, so you too can have an idea of just what kind of boot we’re talking about. I see those boots, and my lips purse. I shake my head. Those boots do nothing for me or my muse.
But, as a writer, I can’t choose the moments when inspiration strikes. Some days, I have to make it happen. The exercise in Wednesday’s word isn’t about writing on a prescribed string of letters I like; it’s an exercise in drawing out the story from any word.
Back in September, I posted a story from the word bowdlerize by playing with its definition. I took apart the letters, rearranged them, and discovered something new. I looked at today’s word the same way. When I broke buskin down, these words fell into line – bun, bin, sun, sin, nub, sub, skin – and fueled the flash fiction below:
***
The reflection of the sun hitting the snow was too bright to look straight ahead while Betsy walked, so she studied her boots instead. Her boots snapped and crunched the snow and left a perfect imprint along the path. Anyone could track her, she thought, if they wanted. But no one had been down this trail in a while.
The real estate agent said little about the back pasture and creek when they first looked at the house. She emphasized “acreage” and “deer,” then leaned in and suggested they not let the dog run wild lest the coyotes get him. So Betsy discovered the trail that ran alongside the creek on accident, late last summer when she went searching for wild mushrooms. Near the creek’s shore, she thought she spotted a morel. It was too late in the season, but still she moved in closer. She squatted and squinted.
“Beefsteak. Too bad.”
She stood up then, and saw the house: small, red, and hidden behind a thick cluster of trees on the other side of the creek. She jumped three stones and risked a mud-landing to reach the little house. Through the window by the door, she could see a miniature chair with faded red upholstery. A wooden crate lay upside down, for a table she guessed.
She didn’t go inside that day, but after her tech-obsessed husband bought his first Kindle and started throwing out her old books – because “all the world should digitize!” – she knew she would go back to the house. The day he ran to the hardware store to buy a bulk-pack of batteries for his Kindle, she grabbed what books she could and made off for the barn. Later, she carried the books from the corner of the barn to the safety of the little house.
This morning, Phil left for a two-day conference. She kissed him goodbye, watched his car leave the driveway, and grabbed her bag. The creek was iced over, so she skated across in her boots. She slipped once, and, as she fell, her leg landed on the tip of a stick frozen in the water. The point was dull, but the impact ripped her pants and would leave a bruise later. She made mental note to concoct a good story. She didn’t want to tell Phil about the little house. She didn’t want him to find the books.
She placed her hand on the doorknob and went inside. The house was lit by the sun streaming in from a window on the back wall. She put her bag down and took out several candles. She lit them and set them in a half circle around the chair. She figured in such a small space, they would keep her warm, or warm enough.
She picked up My Antonia from the small stack of books near the crate. Phil told her he could get it on Kindle. She was horrified at the thought. She bought her hardback copy from a used bookstore when she was in college. She breathed in its scent and her mind rushed back to her apartment on the corner of Lyon and Maine.
She unfolded a blanket and wrapped it around her. Then, she pulled her knees up to her chest and nestled into the small chair. She read Willa Cather’s dedication:
“In memory of affections old and true”
“Phil can have his Kindle,” she said, and she flipped to the first chapter.
“I first heard of Antonia on what seemed to me an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America.”
The level of my patience sometimes follows the phases of the moon. I wax and wane between “my time will come” to “what if I miss it?”
A recent post of mine led to a nice discussion and mention of Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. And, in picking up her book today (during a quiet half hour), I read two quotes from the first chapter that struck a chord with me. Annie Dillard’s words reminded me that a writer must not only be patient with the work, but also indifferent to it.
On the subject of time:
“I takes years to write a book – between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant.”
“Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms” (p. 13-14).
On the writer’s feeling about his or her work:
“There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged” (p. 15).
I struggle with both the panic that a story not published soon will be a story out of date and the anxiety of whether or not what I write is good — or, good enough. I love reading the thoughts of other writers who have gone before me, and finding truth and insight in their words, especially as I enter into a new year with new writing aspirations.
***
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1989), p. 13-15.
