Process Stories

There are many reasons why I'm not being read by millions. First, I've got a lot to learn before I reach that kind of an audience. I need to learn how to write better (I always need to learn that), how to serve an audience, and how to get the word out. I read a great short piece by Damon Krukowski and was struck by what a fine writer he is, how he does things that I almost understand but can't yet make happen in my writing. I've been reading Dani Shapiro and there's an art and grace to her work that is clearly the result of having put in the work. I need to put in a lot more work before I reach millions.

There are other reasons why I'm not yet a household name (outside my household and that of my mom), but the one I'm thinking of today is how interested I am in process stories. I'm loath to look back and count, but my guess is that I've published at least fifty stories about how I work, tools I use, and even times of day when I'm most productive. It's not that I'm so full of myself (though I am too full of myself more often than not) as much as I love these kinds of stories from other creators and want to tell my own. Austin Kleon often talks about his processes and shares what he has learned of other people's work. Annie Dillard, Anne Lamott, and Natalie Goldberg have written books about process and I've read each of them multiple times. In the words of the great philosophers Depeche Mode, I just can't get enough.

Were I to meet any of these writers I so admire, I would ask them to tell me about their days. When did you get up? Did you make coffee? Do you stay in the house or go out? Do you need to write first thing or does it wait? I'd want to see their writing spaces, ask what word processor they each use, and know what they do about their phones and other distractions. I'd want to know every detail.

There's an entire network on cable (probably more than one) devoted to watching people cook. There should be one on which we watch people write. I want to just see them at work. Ohhhhh, so they keep their back to the window. Interesting.

It's a wonder I'm not a television exec.

Today I'm happy to have heard Chris McDougall, author of Born To Run, Natural Born Heroes, and the forthcoming Running With Sherman describe his process on The Consummate Athlete podcast. McDougall can't write first thing in the morning. Instead, he screws around all day — feeding the chickens, goats, sheep, and donkeys, riding his bike, walking and running with friends, answering email, and calling in for podcasts. Then, at night, having gotten all hyperactivity out of his system, he sits and cranks out work until one in the morning.

This is great!

What excites me is that I could never work that way. I'm a morning person. After dinner my brain turns to sludge even without bourbon. There's just nothing there. (It has been argued that there isn't much there to begin with, but I'll leave that for another time.) In the morning I'm ready to go, can't wait to start. I'm just that way.

As I push on this writing thing, I get nervous that successful writers work so differently than I do. I find myself thinking, maybe I should... There's something to be said for learning from other people's methods — I don't have everything worked out — but the point is to craft my own methods. I'm not going to spend the morning feeding animals (it's not that involved a process to feed two cats and a dog) because I need to start the day with the pen in my hand, the keyboard beneath my fingers, ideas appearing on page and screen as if by magic.

I'm working on the reasons why a million people aren't reading this post. One thing to work on is refining my process. Every time I read or hear of another writer's methods, it inspires but also relieves me of the worry that I'm doing this thing all wrong and should give it up. That's good because because I don't have any kind of future in developing television networks. None whatsoever.

Other Writers & This One

I've been listening to other writers. Listening is something I need to work on anyway and it might as well be to other writers. Not knowing as many writers in person as I would like (not yet anyway), I played an old podcast with David Sax who wrote the wonderful The Revenge Of Analog . He talked about some of the ways in which he works and how he feels about writing.

An illuminating moment came in part two of the episode when he described how some writers just love the act of writing but for him it's much more that he loves gathering the information, doing reporting and research, and then, well, what else is he going to do but write it? Once he gets going with the actual writing the process works for him, but he's not the type who says, oh boy, I'm just going to write for the hell of it!

That's my line and people tire of hearing me say it.

Students at school can't get how I enjoy banging away at a keyboard for twenty minutes, an hour, or the entire morning and into the afternoon. "You don't even have an idea you're working on," they say. I tell them that I'll have an idea once I get writing. Then I turn to the keyboard or pick up my pen and go to work. The writing comes to me through the writing. That's just how I write. Well, it's one way I write.

Lately I've been thinking, okay, so I enjoy the act of writing, but what do I have to say? It's a good question but the answer in my case comes not from deciding too much before I write but is a result instead of hitting the keys, pushing the pen, and seeing what happens. Still, I'm often asked what kind of a writer I want to be. It's a good question and I ought to have an answer.

Mostly, I want to be an essayist in the mold of E.B. White, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, and others who write what they see, hear, and experience in the world. Sure, Berry writes mostly about conservation and the natural world, but his essays range all over the place. Their one unifying quality is that they are all Wendell Berry essays. There's a feel and texture to these people's work that just pulls people along. It sure as hell has worked on me for thirty years even if I can't exactly nail it down. Who needs it nailed down?

I mean, what does David Sedaris write about? Whatever it might be it's great and I can't get enough. I've paid good money almost half a dozen times to hear him read his stuff in person. He's an essayist and I follow him like he's a rock star and I'm a groupie.

My thinking about writing is this: it comes down to finding what each of us has to say and either saying it or turning away from it to watch Entertainment Tonight. Maybe there are shades between those extremes of light and dark. Whatever the case, I'm figuring things out slowly. Pretty much one word at a time. My own words and the words of every good writer I can listen to and whose pages I can turn.

Work Space

“Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. Once wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. When I furnished this study seven years ago, I pushed the long desk against a blank wall, so I could not see from either window. Once, fifteen years ago, I wrote in a cinder-block cell over a parking lot. It overlooked a tar-and-gravel roof. This pine shed under trees is not quite so good as the cinder-block study was, but it will do.”

— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, 26-27

I call my study The Nook. It is a good space for writing. It is very small, warm, and easy to light since my desk is such a small space and I need not worry about lighting the rest of the room. There are good speakers there because I like to write with music, but The Nook is in the basement away from my family so that there are few distractions. But it is in the basement and so the window, a divided pane that I rescued from the curb on garbage night, looks out onto more basement and only a feeble light from the small window across that room.

Annie Dillard wants "a room with no view," and I get where she's going, but given the choice of Nook placement, I would move mine to the attic and have it be windowed on at least two sides. I would push my desk against one of those windows and keep the other to my side so that I could be part of the world I am imagining and remembering.

Billy Collins talks about writing near a window. Just a piece of paper, a pencil, and the window. The poetry is out there and in his head. It filters between and the window is as necessary to the writing as the pencil and paper, almost as much as the poet himself.

I am writing this in a classroom with students who are also writing. One whole wall of this room is windows. The heaters are on and the place is warm. The hallways are mercifully quiet. There are twenty-eight minutes left in the period before another group will come in and probably be less in the mood for writing than this one. Still, I'll find a way to get some words down on the page and screen.

There is no one writing space, not even for one writer. Dillard moved from a cinder-block cell over a parking lot to a pine shed on Cape Cod. While she prefers the cell, I would take the water and move the desk in front of one of the windows. While we have our preferences of work space, materials, and methods, I'm focused on being able to write no matter where, when, or how. Work spaces are good. They are important. Still, the only thing that matters is to be writing. To be making meaning on the page or screen as often and as well as I can. A good work space helps, but wherever I am, there I go, writing across each line and down each page.

---

The more important quote from Dillard comes five pages later:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Where is less important than what and how. I would submit as well that when the writing is done, who and whom become important as well.

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And then there is this:

During that time, I let all the houseplants die. After the book was finished I noticed them; the plants hung completely black dead in their pots in the bay window. For I had not only let them die, I had not moved them. During that time, I told all my out-of-town friends they could not visit for a while.

"I understand you're married," a man said to me at a formal lunch in New York my publisher had arranged. "How do you have time to write a book?"

Sir?

"Well," he said, "you have to have a garden, for instance. You have to entertain." And I thought he was foolish, this man in his seventies, who had no idea what you must do. But the fanaticism of my twenties shocks me now. As I feared it would." (37)

It's not the fanaticism of my twenties that shocks me so much as the fanaticism I still want to feel, that I imagine feeling, and that I assume will be necessary to do real work. I feel the fanaticism of someone on the sidelines knowing that to be out on the field I have to do little more than be living the game with every fiber of my being and to the exclusion of everything else. I know that fanaticism is foolish. I know thinking that way is a crutch to support my broken dreams. And yet I still harbor that fanatic kid within me and keep listening to his voice.