This Modern Writer: Ten Things About Writing and a Preface by Erin Fitzgerald

I could talk about advice not taken, mistakes made, people slighted, opportunities missed, pity parties so elaborate they are weekly street festivals. Someday, I’ll write about those things. But I’ve been so surrounded by distraction lately that I’m thinking about what’s left when distraction falls away. Some of that is what follows here.

1. There are two writing ladders of which I am now aware. There is the craft ladder, on which you improve all of the abilities that get covered in writing manuals and workshops and writer interviews conducted by or for other writers. And there’s the authenticity ladder, on which you find truth. Your truth. At the bottom of that ladder, you have to do it with a low quality plastic spork. Somewhere in the middle, you do it with a jewel-encrusted titanium sword. I suspect that near the top, it’s all about your bare hands. In an ideal world, you’d ascend both ladders simultaneously…but there is no such thing as an ideal world, is there? The craft ladder is shiny and well-maintained and visible for miles, but the truth ladder has chipped paint and is broken in places and behind clouds in others. It’s a little like the Christmas tree in the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Plenty of opportunity for disparagement, plenty of shed needles, and everyone’s secretly a little disappointed when the gang covers it with tinsel and lights toward the end.

2. Using creativity is about setting rules. I like those kinds of rules because they’re not limitations, they’re guideposts. I like setting down guideposts and then going what feels like completely bonkers. I don’t think it’s actually completely bonkers, though. In recent months, looking at something I wrote and thinking “I’m going to be wearing a sandwich board and talking to pigeons soon” has been a fairly good indicator that I’m on the right track.

3. The other day Kyle Minor said this on Facebook about about stories under 1500 words:  If you go shorter, you can ride the lyric train and let the last sentence save you. It was like the floor opened up underneath me, that sentence. I love to read and I’m not much of a musician. But a lot of the time, what I actively try to emulate is a song, or a part of a song…something that is three or four minutes long. Probably related: I dream about trains all the time.

4. I dislike the overuse of the word “fear” in discussions of approaching the act of writing. I spent a lot of time as a student thinking that it spoke to other students, who had legitimately intense and terrifying secrets they wanted to share. I had secrets I wanted to share — what writer doesn’t? — but they were (and still are) smaller and in some ways, mundane. Fear isn’t a good word choice for what stands between me and the page much of the time. There’s no one word that covers all for everyone, but a phrase that is close comes from the Bene Gesserit Litany against Fear. The second line:  Fear is the mind-killer. What the Litany neglects to mention, understandably, is that there are other mind-killers besides fear.  Most of the time, what gets in my way is mind-killing.

5. I’m always in pursuit of myself. If keyboard writing stops working, I switch to longhand. If lines seem limiting, I go to sketch paper. If sitting at my kitchen table makes me jumpy, I go back to my regular desk. No one tactic works for very long. I’ve been wondering if my reptilian brain — the one that really likes by-rote things like Bejeweled or solitaire — has grown to blimp-size, and that’s why I have to keep up the chase. It’s a more pleasant theory than the one in which a side of me continually mocks another side of me.

6. Most of the time, when I sit down to write I have to take out the garbage first. I spend somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes just writing about whatever’s going on in my head. Stuff going on in my life, things I’m obsessing over, grievances, whatever. I have a journal, and this is even separate from that. There is always muck to be skimmed off the surface.  If I have the luxury of substantial time, I’ll push the garbage phase to that full 30 minutes because I know that toward the end I will want to be writing about something else…anything else. If I do that step correctly, there’s a quiet afterwards that is empty and spooky and if I’m lucky, beautiful.

7. There’s an essay in Alice Walker’s book  In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens called “Writing The Color Purple.” In it, she talks about how the characters visited her — almost like imaginary friends. I used to work like that. I’ve been thinking about trying to take it up again, because imaginary friends have the extra perk of comfort. In the meantime, though, I often start with artifacts and go at them with the archaeologist toothbrush. Three for the last three stories on  this page: Christmas trees, Keurig coffee makers, Jack Van Impe.

8. I love the highs I get from having a story that is humming along nicely. What I love more, though, is when it’s obvious that it has been heading in that direction all along. Some random object, idea, emotion I was rolling over mentally five days ago, seemingly unrelated, clicks into place like it always belonged there…because it did. I wonder what I would think of that phenomenon if I was an atheist.

9. I love Margaret Atwood’s novel  Cat’s Eye for many reasons, but a big one has to do with how it depicts artists’ relationships with their work. The main character, Elaine, paints subjects and themes that draw from her life, but aren’t distinguishable to her audience as such — there’s a significant gap between those two experiences, and it has an effect on how she responds to the art community. Her ex-husband, meanwhile, changes media and schools and attitudes with the times — it’s nearly parody, how it’s portrayed. I think most writers who keep with it for any length of time are probably some combination of the two.

10. My standard answer to “why do you write?” is that I write to make sense of things. I don’t think I succeed in that very often, though. Mostly what I do is show you something, and maybe you say “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that too,” and then we both move on. I don’t glance back right away — just like how when I leave a restaurant table, I don’t want to see who sits there next. But sometimes I circle back later, because I’m both obsessive and easily bored, and I see that you’re someplace totally different, and it gives me a little bit of hope.