I’ve just started using Scrivener, and have a section in my project for my next book that lists the books I want to read and has sections where I can make notes about what I learned from each book and quotes I could pull from. The project is set up in such a way that I can find relationships between books, research articles, my own experience, and the extensive notes I’ve taken all year. I realize that I won’t be reading some of the other things on my TBR pile, because I’ll be reading for my book.
However, some books keep coming up that I think I should read, particularly by W.G. Sebald and Ursula K. LeGuin. Many authors seem to associate with their books. Sebald seems like it’s something North American readers pick up when they’re in Germany on residencies or have moved there for good, a way to parse the literature of their adopted country and understand its culture. As for Ursula K. LeGuin, David Naimon, in his podcast “Between the Covers,” had a series of writers talk about how they were affected by her writing. I felt left out of the conversation, as the only LeGuin book I’ve read is Steering the Craft, a book about writing craft. I thought it was great, and have always been in the lookout for a secondhand copy of it, but the LeGuin books disappear from my used bookstore as fast as they arrive.
Not that I need another book about writing craft. I have so many, and have only read a few of them front to back. I recently re-read John McPhees Draft No. 4 and was reminded of all the structures an essay can take. I also re-read Jane Alison’s Meander Spiral Explode and was intrigued all over again by her analysis of various texts, how they don’t all follow the hero’s journey, which she regards as “a bit masculo-sexual, no?”
I of course have been reading The Writer’s Personal Mentor as my writing buddy and I work through it. We just finished the section on beginnings, and Priscilla Long had some great examples and things to consider. You can start with X is Y: for example, “Solitude is delicious.” Or you can start with a sentence that places the reader in a set place and time “It was February of 1977, and I was turning in my mother’s belly, waiting to be born into the rolling aspen parkland that surrounded my northern Alberta town.”
The next section of the book is on sentence structure, which I dread because this is not something I’ve ever learned properly. We never talked about the parts of speech in school, and when our high school teacher gave us an exercise to identify verbs, nouns, gerunds, adverbs, adjectives, etc., we all failed miserably. I have a copy of The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, which covers all of the types of sentences in the context of vampire lore, but it’s hard sometimes to understand why the author has classified a sentence the way she has. I also have Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, and I get lost in the terminology and breaking down of sentences that assumes I know more than I do.
I’m a bit embarrassed, actually, to be a writer who doesn’t know the parts of speech. I mean, I can identify verb, noun, adjective, adverb, etc. But when we get to prepositional phrases or gerunds I have to look them up to know what they are.
Which begs the question – does an author have to know all of these things? Does it make the writing tighter, more real? Priscilla Long talks about writing that matches the mood of a piece – short and snappy for an action scene, more languorous and flowing for a muted scene. So if I know the parts of speech will I be better able to write the appropriate sentences? Likely yes, which means I have to teach myself about these things.
Thing is, I feel like I have so much to teach myself. That‘s what comes from doing a science PhD and then going into writing – you don’t have the literary background that, say, an English major has. But I do read widely and voraciously which, as many writers have said, is the best form of education a writer can have.
When I was still an academic, and was applying for tenure, my departmental colleagues recommended I submit a 3” thick binder with absolutely everything about my career so far for my tenure package. I thought there must be a better way, and borrowed a colleague in a different department’s tenure package. It was slim, slick, and well-organized. I copied his format to a T, and I think that helped me get tenure. So if I can copy someone’s tenure package, I should be able to copy someone’s writing structure. I can read an essay and see how it’s been put together, I can pull out the threads that make it work. Then I can sit down and try to write my own based on that analysis.
But I always feel like I should be just writing, not goofing around dissecting others’ work and writing to prompts. Maybe I’ve got writing all wrong. Maybe I have to make time for assessing the work of writers I admire and writing to prompts. It’s not all about the product, though it can seem like that when you’re writing book reviews and articles and have deadlines to meet. All you can see is the deadline, there is no time for playing around. I recall Steering the Craft had some excellent writing exercises that I’d like to try. Writing is not just about writing, it’s about our fitness as writers. Writing to prompts, copying another writer’s structure are exercises we do to enhance our literary fitness. So that we have the muscle required to write books.
I need to remember that that’s what we do as writers, we play around. We push words across the page in different configurations: a scene here, an expository section here. A specific word in this part of the sentence that then mirrors a sentence later in the paragraph. Writing to prompts can jiggle loose any number of interesting ideas that can then be worked into essays or chapters. For example, I did a workshop on the personal essay, with Randon Billings Noble. It’s worth mentioning her name here, because she’s the author of Be With Me Always, an essay collection, and A Harp in the Stars, an anthology of lyric essays. She is steeped in essays, and has a lot to say about writing them. We did some writing exercises and I found some interesting ideas cropping up: writing to a prompt helped generate those ideas.
She talked about essays as “thinking work.” Moving beyond story to ask and answer a question, or to use story to argue a point. She said that sometimes she writes an essay and doesn’t know how where it will end up. She talked about writing her book proposal, and summarizing each of her essays in the chapter summary section. But when she sat down to write, those essays became something different, creating their own shape outside of what she had originally envisioned. So I asked if you can outline an essay, and she replied that you can, but sometimes it will get away from your outline and you’ll find out something different than you imagined in the first place.
What I initially planned to write about was my knee injury, and how it has kept me from hiking. I have replaced hiking with walking up and down the street with the dog, testing out my knee on the hills. It’s definitely improving, which is good because I need my hikes to generate ideas. This essay came together last night before I fell asleep, random thoughts swirling in my brain in that liminal space between being awake and almost asleep. I wish now that I’d turned on the light and written my ideas down, as I know I haven’t captured all of them here. Thoughts and ideas also swirl in my brain as I hike, focusing on the trail while also letting my mind wander.
Today on my walk up the street I saw a mossy manhole cover and thought it would make a good picture with a red maple leaf on it. At the next house were red dogwood leaves, and I thought I could pick one up and go back to the manhole cover and take a picture. But for some reason I didn’t. I felt it would be weird. I didn’t want to interrupt my forward momentum. I passed up a creative opportunity just so I could keep moving. Next time I’ll bring my own red maple leaf and place it on the manhole cover and take a picture. Next time.
