The 'why' and 'how' of writing

Just a little background as a reference point to you, dear reader. The following essay was part of my graduate work requirements. In it I discuss some of the reasons for writing Who Has Known Heights. We had to explain the "process." I do not believe in a systematic process--for me that will never work. My method consists of three components which I call P³ (P cubed, to the third power). To find out what they are continue reading.

Wheston Grove

10 September 2014

Formal Process Paper

Advisor: Beatrix Gates / G4

P³

This story [Who Has Known Heights] was set in motion long before I ever came to it. The process was not a process in the traditional sense of the term. The process resides in living. I’m going to jump right in—this will be an unorthodox letter.

When I was young my mother read to us. I didn’t particularly enjoy reading myself in younger years. In elementary school we had SSR—Sustained Silent Reading—for ten minutes every day. I was thankful for this time. Some students used it to sleep, some smiled and made jokes in silence, while others used the time for what it was intended. When not reading I would watch our teacher sitting at his or her desk. The windows would be cracked open—it was after lunch and the room smelled of sun, young non-hormonal bodies, and excitement. I was not tired in those days. I was by no means an avid reader. I did not like to spend hours cloistered away on weekends or in my room buried in a novel. When I was young I found plenty to do— I made things, my imagination seemed boundless. I built forts from my Linkin’ Logs with blue cowboys and red Indians. I made an entire bridge out of cardboard cut from a pizza box and strung it together with shoelace so my cars could roll along it. I played shipwreck and rescue games on the stairwell, climbed trees, had mud fights with my sister, dumped everything out of my toy box, crawled under the dining room table and laid long ways on the chairs. In those days my mind was not an asylum. The future was unknown. When I was 10 I realized the freedom in writing. By ‘freedom’ I mean I enjoyed the creative subjectivity. Writing was ‘fun’ in those days. I wrote my first real story at 11.

I loved making diaramas for class projects for our book reports. Mainly when I read I found myself wanting to be the characters in the books. Teachers often assumed I read voraciously since I wrote so well. I told them plainly, ‘no.’ To this day I prefer writing more than I do reading. I don’t like to be influenced. I appreciate originality. Sometimes I’ve said or written something and then later, maybe years later, I come across a fellow author or philosopher who verbalized the same sentiments. What this means is: those ideas were already in me and came about on their own. Discovering that others, at one time, felt and thought the same way makes me realize I am not completely different. Other “Steppenwolves” (reference to Hesse’s character) have lived down the long line of years.

The process is gradual. Let’s compare it to a middle-aged man’s/woman’s receding hairline. It’s always happening, but the change isn’t dramatic when it occurs over many years, then one day he/she wakes up and says, ‘my god, what happened to my full head of hair?’ With writing you might say, ‘My god, where did that come from?’ Or another analogy, one I think is cruel, is the notion of boiling a frog in a pot of water. It does not realize what is occurring because the process is subtle, the temperature gradually increasing so when reality hits, the frog knows (in panic, instinctive alarm) that it’s in deep peril. I’ve never conducted this experiment, nor do I ever wish to—I love frogs. The point is, like writing, sometimes you get so far in, you sacrifice everything, even your life (for some literally, others metaphorically) to get to the other side.

Patience. Sitting on stairwells. Days upon days upon hours and months of no real intimacy, emotional or otherwise. Midnight walks, watching the moon. Patience.

Waiting for this moment to say something. To say nothing but the essential. I walked with myself, sat with myself, rode my bicycle with myself. And when affection came in the middle of this process, it was surreal for a while. Then reality returned. I was alone, in being. This I knew well.

Now, these emotions are the place into which I delve, the pain having nowhere to go. It warped me. I translate the beautiful discontent into language and it finds you here, reading my life or remnants of its passions as a lover. And by lover I use the term in multiple forms. To appreciate true satiation one must know what it is to starve. Contrast is key.

I applied to six other colleges prior to coming across Goddard. I was accepted to all of them, but I had no desire to continue. They were too traditional and/or faceless. I didn’t want to shell out money accumulating student loans for information found in a textbook—a textbook I could easily purchase on my own and read at leisure. I did not want to make routine posts to Blackboard and have no human contact. Amusingly, I did not realize Goddard College was so homosexually saturated. I knew it was a progressive environment, and let’s face it, all artists are progressive and go to their own drum, but it was a surprise to enter an atmosphere where the heterosexual was/is the exception. After the first residency, I decided to go ahead with Goddard if only for the stimulation. I was bored. $40,000 hardly seems commiserate with alleviating boredom, but when your life is on the line you can’t put a price tag on trying something different.

I wanted to make some good friends, even if only one true confidante came out of the program it would be deemed a success. I also had a story that needed to be told. Telling it would lighten the burden, and ease the pain—I hoped. I was wrong on that account. The pain never goes away. It doesn’t get easier. You just become used to it, mildly conditioned, but never resigned.

I have ample verbal support and the confidence/belief of others in me. However, no one has been riding my tail, cracking the whip and saying “You must do this. You must write this, you must, you must continue.” I alone have demanded this of myself. So if anything, above all else, what the Goddard program, the Goddard process has brought forth in me, is proof of my dedication. I am not always disciplined. At times I’d prefer to leave this life, throw in the towel, not because writing is a burden, but because the process is painstakingly lonely. However, it is why I am on this earth. I know it unequivocally, but it makes me tired. I feel responsible for these women’s lives on the page.

Were I to go tomorrow, to die, I would die a happy man just so long as this story was distributed. I lie awake with it, I sleep in a depression with it, I wait for the waiting to subside.

The process: is action. Living. I have no techniques, no formal guidelines other than what I know and have tested, and learned in the course of doing and experiencing. Revision comes with perspective.

Many things—books, movies, individuals have influenced this thesis, but at the core is something untaught, uninfluenced as I stated at the beginning of this letter. A true writer does not think about what to write. He/she feels it. And you know when something is powerful—it frightens you because it comes from someplace else—a trance-like state, everything you always knew. It comes from way back; those places are haunting and lonely, and beautifully tragic all in one.

Who has influenced me? I look at all the people in my life—past and present. The things one does with his/her life. Recently a colleague retired after 45 years of teaching and with nothing to her name. She felt dissatisfied. She told me, “You have something genuine. Do something with it.” I want to leave something enduring in the world. Life passes away, body upon body, but words transcend time. Lest the world is obliterated, a book lives on and that is something amazing. When I am dead who will care about the bills I paid, the job I had, the errands to the grocery store, the shows I watched. All will be swept clean. In writing we leave a part of ourselves for others to discover. How much of ourselves we expose is of our own choice. I believe the greatest tragedy is having been alive and never “known” by anyone. My neighbor has a girlfriend. He is in his thirties. Will they get married, have kids? My other neighbor is in his 50s, never married his entire life, has just his dog. No family or siblings. He works for William & Mary. Bicycles miles upon miles. Is fit. How does he survive, I wonder? All these various lives and unspoken stories. I wish I had the carefree mind to just live blithely, not analyze or suppose, or question why.

The process is something that keeps me alive. I was born to tell this story. That sounds hyperbolic, but it’s not. It is certainty—perhaps the only certainty. It is the most important thing I will ever do with my life because it is timeless.

Prior to seventh grade (the summer before) we had to read Of Mice and Men on our own. And why not?! I am so glad for my education growing up (I attended a private school in California). Public High School in Virginia was a joke. I had to read Of Mice and Men again in 11 grade! I revisited it on my own rather than having the teacher read it to us in class. I sat in my room on warm spring evenings. I had nowhere to go, no friends with whom to socialize, talk about who we wanted to be, and become ready for the years ahead. The characters were my company. The language entered me. “Rabbits that looked like little stone statues,” from the opening scene of Steinbeck’s most memorable story. I did my senior research paper on the works of Steinbeck. I always remember in Of Mice and Men the descriptions of juxtaposition after George and Lennie’s dream is shattered. The men outside are playing horseshoes. Meanwhile a deadly calm, an insulated silence fills the barn. Lennie flees, frantically helpless and the only witness to his accidental crime is perhaps a pigeon in the loft. I remember thinking of the powerful kindness and courage it took for George to euthanize Lennie. But most of all, the current of loneliness running the pages of the novella and the milieu of life so forlorn, transient, spoke to me. I recently read The Alchemist. Never had before. There’s a statement that says: “Having a dream is what makes life interesting.” Yes. Otherwise what is the point? Doing laundry, washing dishes, the endless routine. Something needs to shake the body alive—we are not machines, we should not become creatures of endless toil. Something must be in the future, we must be going towards “something.” Wandering is a tiresome life.

Now to some film and literary characters that have influenced my ideas of women and the women I write about in my thesis: Mrs. Minniver; Francesca Johnson and Robert Kincaid (The Bridges of Madison County); Hannah Schmidt (The Reader). Novel influences: Of Mice and Men; The Well of Loneliness; Lord of the Flies; The Giver; and on and on, and on.

The following items did not influence me per se. Instead they confirmed what I was doing. Long before I read them, the style and language of my manuscript was in place. The two books are:

The Bridges of Madison County and The Reader. In one form another I have lived the themes of both these books.

And three women from my own life brought about my thesis. The women behind the characters of Regn and Bircan. The women whose stories deserved to be told, but which they had not the voice or desire to tell themselves. Seemingly ordinary women who became extraordinary. And my mother.

Additionally, Jackie Moss, my sixth grade teacher. We became friends after I moved away from California. We stayed in contact through my high school and early college years. We’d write letters. Jackie is included in my thesis, but not in the abridged pages I submitted. In sixth grade I received my first literary recognition. The Young Authors Award for a story I’d written titled: Chido, about a boy and his dog stranded on Zanzibar, just off the coast of Africa. I still have that story with its illustrations. The plot may seem contrived, but the implications are present. Why a boy and his dog? Why shipwrecked? Why the adventure of solitude? I was not an avid reader and definitely not a book worm in school. However, I always enjoyed writing. In essence, I was always a writer more than a reader. One is active the other is passive which brings to mind a very poignant statement from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. “How could someone so brave in thought be so timid in life.”

I don’t idolize anyone. I don’t believe in idolatry. However, I do respect certain personages and what they stood/stand for and most importantly, their life’s work. A few who influenced me: Van Gogh. Albert Einstein; Ennio Morricone. These individuals gave/give of themselves. They left something beautiful behind and made the world a better place in passing through.

I was a lover in heart before I knew what it meant, before consciousness of self kicked in and I became tormented.

Are you still with me?

All the days of my life have added up. The process for me has been living and remembering. Remembering the old ways—long before my time—and then holding silent vigil round the feeling of perpetual nostalgia—a nostalgia for the present it’s been termed. Let me paint you a picture. I’m not motivated by money. I’m motivated by love. I don’t mean sex, nor am I referring to any cute sentiment of thronging clichés. I mean a love that runs so deep it impales you upon its stake; anchors you to the past, present, and future all in one; makes the world bearable; makes the world have sense. I’m speaking of an affection that hurts in its pain because it is beautiful in its imperfections and the desire to love in spite of those imperfections. Even I am skeptical to my own motives at times. Everyone has a motive even if he is unawares.

I didn’t always work here—at this location where I find myself typing away at this letter some evenings. I’ve worked many places. But right now as I walk the empty corridors I look out the many windows on a spectacular though mundane view. A field, a freshly mowed field and 80 foot trees across the way, an expanse of unobstructed sky. I consider what it means to die and what I am doing standing at the window and where I am going. Sure I may teach a class, but it doesn’t affect me. What’s important, what I take in, is expressed here and here alone. This is evidence, this is what remains.

In my time I’ve held over 34 different employment positions. This does not suggest instability but discontent and a desire for something more. I know what it is to mop floors and I know what it is to sign mass letters for the president of a company. To wear a shirt and tie, or wipe the sweat from my brow and rub my aching back. None of these positions suited me. I know what I am, but just as a husband or mother, or housewife has a name for the role they satisfy, being a visionary, a writer, means nothing in the working field unless it generates a true, concrete profit. I have jobs. My work is writing and living. Life is damn hard work and don’t let any sweet adage convince you otherwise. “What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger,” “just take one day at a time,” these phrases are a comfort to an old man on his death bed who can sigh with relief and rest. I have become slightly cynical in my young age. It comes from being hurt, from being disappointed in, and by, people.

From the multitudinous reading of Goddard’s Program, my desire to get inside the character’s head reaffirmed itself. There were a couple of books that turned me off because the reader never got to know the protagonists/antagonists and I was bored. I don’t want a book to be straightforward and tell me what the character is always doing. I want to be shown. I want beautiful language. Unusual analysis. For me, getting deep within the motives behind my character was/is paramount. I desire something innovative. Of my 45 annotations, were I to select what I feel is the strongest and tightest analysis from each semester it would be as follows: G1: At Swim to Boys; G2: The Reader; G3: On Chesil Beach; G4: The Bridges of Madison County.

If I had to ascribe my process to any particular formula or method it would boil down to three words: Call it P cubed (P to the 3rd power). Passion. Patience. Perseverance. I allow boredom to accumulate until the necessity to write cannot be staved off. I leave a certain section and return to it weeks and months later. Time. Perspective—these are the key ingredients. I question from many angles, consider my intentions behind the story. Why am I writing it? I know why and are the risks equal to the response it may generate? They say—whoever they are—writers before, critics, academics—that writing is a discovery for the author. The creator is often surprised. He/she doesn’t always go in with a finite conclusion. But somewhere along the line it presents itself. It is an adventure for the writer. The thing about a writer is this: he/she is never at rest, never done working. It’s not a job with set hours. A writer is constantly doing field work, in my case anyway. Even if that “field work” entails lying in bed, contemplating the futility of rising, and wondering about the meaning of his own life. Sometimes it entails watching society at the train station, airport, restaurant, or amusement park and suddenly everything presents itself as absolutely absurd. The things human beings do to occupy their time. It becomes evident in such moments of visual exercise that the only thing we take with us and give back to the world exists in our actions. Everything else is forgotten. It’s what we do that counts for something. And writing is doing something. It’s transcribing active cognitive creativity into a permanent form of media. A person who spends his/her entire life mulling over wonderful ideas, but who keeps them hidden away or never speaks of them neither benefits himself or others. Perhaps ‘benefit’ is not the most apt term. ‘Effects’ is more appropriate. We are on this earth to effect and be affected. Experience through doing, not being passive. Passivity is slow, morose, the demise of the spirit. I am tired of talking to myself.

People always assume they have time. ‘Oh, I’ll write my stories and/or memoirs when I’m old and retired and can look back and reflect.’ Perspective changes over time and so do memories, accuracy. Also, the only time we have is right now. Not tomorrow or yesterday. Urgency is key in writing. The hardest element in writing is keeping passion and desire alive when there is nothing and no one to keep it going but yourself. I often question, why bother? Then I counter, what else have I to do with my time? I look at so many people making a way, earning their living, raising families, putting in “their time.” What does it mean? I was set apart for a reason and throwing that reason away (which I often wish to do), would be a tragedy. I write with the frame of mind that these words are my epitaph. Something printed lives on—and that is a wonderful, comforting fact, but also a complicated one. You take something beautiful and expose it to the light of day, sometimes the shock is so much that the thing itself dies. It reminds me of the statement in To Kill a Mockingbird. Bringing Arthur Boo Radley into the limelight would be like killing a mockingbird. So what do I mean by this? Writing is understanding and knowing one’s self.

Sometimes I avoided turning to this paper at all costs. Any distraction. Doing laundry, vacuuming, going to work. I didn’t want to return to this place, here, where the cursor blinks in expectation. I know the process, I’ve lived it well. It’s sitting at traffic lights, scribbling down notes on receipt paper, napkins, post-its—any corner of free space. It’s hard-earned often and does not pay in monetary value. It’s listening to the atomic wristwatch ticking—no digital watch here. It’s the drip of the faucet at work, the change in wind and temperature—weeks upon weeks, and even years of preparation. Experience is the best teacher. I will make an addendum to that adage. Experience is the only teacher. And sometimes you can’t miss what you don’t know. Sometimes innocence really is bliss. But never ignorance. No sir. We spend our entire lives trying to find out who we are and there are moments, so fleeting when we face ourselves completely and know the answer. It isn’t a word or even a phrase. It’s a feeling, a sensibility and in that passing moment, the mind knows there is nothing to fear, nothing it hasn’t already experienced and then the realization—we’re killing time. When a person dies, he/she is gone forever. The fear and aloneness return full force and life seems cruel, heartless. The “machine” of society continues unabated, indifferent. And these words are all that remain as evidence that someone did live

and how he related to the world.

The process is elastic—it has to be, or nothing will ever be gained. Being resolute in the pursuit of something is not the same as being inflexible. One must try every avenue and not relent.

The process requires blind faith. And when it’s true, when the subject is something that won’t be ignored, then you know it’s the direction in which you must proceed, pleasant or otherwise. Apathy is a side-effect and it is a cycle you must ride out.

For “leisure” I recently read Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle. I was at work and the book was on the shelf. Perfect. A memoir. How appropriate to my own genre. There is a scene early on when the author is describing her tumultuous, nomadic childhood through the deserts of the Midwest. She writes, “While we were in Midland, Mom painted dozens of variations and studies of the Joshua tree. We’d go with her and she’d give us art lessons. One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. “You’d be destroying…it…” she said. “It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty” (38). Contrast is what makes life bearable. And this statement is poignant. It suggests the miraculous possibility of anything or anyone that ever persisted and survived in spite of (fill in the blank). It’s also keenly metaphorical of Jeanette Walls’ situation. She is the sapling who does not want to struggle like her parents. She wishes to transplant herself into an environment that will cultivate growth rather than stunting potential. She suffers unbearable living conditions and finds a way to transform the unpleasant details of her past into something striking, memorable, and yes, beautiful for the mere fact that she escaped and lived to tell about it. BUT, her antagonists are people and environments outside of herself. What if the conflict lies within? What happens when the antagonist “is” yourself? There are stories about drug addictions, alcoholics, suicide. Unlike sex which for some can be a narcotic, love is very different. It is not a high, or a quick fix. It is a necessity. And in whatever terms a person defines it, in the absence of love anything living will perish.

I’ve had to evaluate and reevaluate my motive(s) for writing this story, which is critical to the process. Writing is emotional—regardless of genre. You have to get inside the characters to create the scene and live it or relive it with them. It is much easier when you know the ending going in, as the writer, and are writing to it. But sometimes, and probably more often than authors wish to admit, a surprise comes along, and the ending he/she had in mind is not what stays on the page. Writing is a process of self awareness with endless variables—a mathematician’s nightmare. Some people transform the process into something formulaic, predictable, and for me that’s where the spark dies and the division occurs. The division between stories that are sold for mass marketing and entertainment as opposed to stories that contain enduring qualities, something that speaks of mankind’s inescapable condition. Why a person sits down to write is just as critical, if not more so than what he/she writes. Motive influences every sequence on the page.

I will circle round to where I began, much like the layout in Of Mice and Men. At the heart of my motives is the desire not to be alone. I wrote this story so that the pain wasn’t endured in vain. It is a burden holding a secret. Though life differences abound, I relate keenly to the character of Don Draper in the televisions series Mad Men. I love the era. But here is a man who has everything: looks, financial security, abundant sexual encounters, a family—wife/children, and yet, he is never satisfied completely, never happy because he is haunted by his past and on some level deeply ashamed. He is not perfect; in fact he is a philanderer, forever seeking something “outside” of himself to affirm who he is or divert his attention. But, despite his amorous transgressions and betrayal of his family, he remains an inherently decent man. The one he constantly betrays is himself. He is a closed off man, deeply private, and such silence shows itself as gentlemanly, dignified. I respect this. It is a quality I relate to very well. Someone who weathers pain without turning to others, burdening others. It is a lonely place, not always healthy, but the misgivings of losing what took years to create—the image and identity of who you are in disclosing your true self is a reasonable risk that rears its head in protest to loneliness. Don Draper takes that risk. There comes a point when letting go is easier than holding on. The critical, most important aspect is execution. How and when the truth comes about. Where my thesis is concerned, it must be accomplished in a proper light. And if certain people cannot understand or are upset by it (the affairs more than issues of gender), then they do not grasp its underlying theme: We live for a short while, (sometimes it seems too long), but in the end, we must ask ourselves how and for what we want to be remembered.