Routine

One of the things I've found is effective for me as a writer, and just in life in general, is having a routine. The most productive I've ever been was a couple years ago, shortly after grad school before I started teaching as an adjunct. Two major things I had going on at that time were getting into shape and writing. And I was able to develop a routine for both, exercising regularly, reading, and writing each day. I think my ideal day would go something like this: get up around eight or nine, drink coffee and read for two to four hours, eat, read some more, exercise, write, eat again, and then write or read or maybe watch a movie later in the evening, and in bed by midnight or so. What a life that would be. And I pretty much had that for a few months, and in that time I lost about thirty-five pounds of extra fat, did substantial rewrites on a novel, worked on some stories, worked a bit on a screenplay, and wrote an entire rough draft of a children's novel. It was a fantastic life. But, of course, the need to actually pay rent, to buy food, and to pay back the debt I acquired while in grad school required that I get a job.

For the past year and a half, I've had a much different life. I've been working two jobs, teaching and retail. Some days I would work both jobs back to back, leaving at seven in the morning and getting home at ten at night. Other days I would grade papers at home before going to the store in the evening. And while my classes were on the same schedule for a semester at a time, my retail job required me to work a variety of hours each week. I still somehow found some writing time, but not nearly as much as I'd like, and I could never develop a solid routine. If I wanted to make Friday a writing day, that might work one week, but then the next week I'd be at the store all day. Often I worked seven days a week and then when I'd get a day off I just wanted to completely zone out in front of the TV. The lack of a consistent routine really makes finding time to write a challenge.

But I'm beginning a new stage right now. The bookstore is closing down. Tuesday is the last day it will be open, and by Thursday, it will be completely empty. Although I'm sad for the people who are losing their jobs, this works out perfectly for me. I had been considering quitting for a while since I started teaching more classes and making more money from the college. This semester I got a raise and will now make about as much just from teaching as I made last semester from the two jobs combined. And the thing I'm most looking forward to about only having the one job is that I can now develop a steady routine.

I will only be teaching two days a week this semester, Mondays and Wednesdays. I have four classes back to back and then office hours as well as my hour-plus commute to campus, so they will be long days. Then, of course, I'll have to prep for classes and grade papers at home during the rest of the week. But I can now schedule my time much more accurately since there won't be an unpredictable variable anymore. So I plan on devoting the extra time each week when I had been working at the bookstore to writing. I can schedule my time myself and set aside the same regular hours. I can develop my own routine. Of course, it takes a while to get into a groove with a routine. The store is only now closing, and I plan on visiting family soon before I'm too bogged down in the semester to take a weekend off. But starting in a couple of weeks, I plan on instituting a new routine, setting specific goals for my time, and using this semester to full advantage.

One final thought on this subject: I found out recently that I'm going to get to go to the Advanced Placement English Reading this summer to evaluate AP English exams. It's one week in June and pays an honorarium equivalent to one of my regular teaching paychecks. That extra money, on top of what I intend to save throughout the semester, should be plenty to get me through the summer and up to the point where I'm paid again in September even if I have no other source of summer income. So that means that if I don't teach a summer class or get another part time summer job, I could devote about three months this summer to writing. I could have the ideal life once again, get a solid routine in place, and be incredibly productive. What a lovely thought that is.

Saying Something

Once again, I'm contemplating the purpose of writing fiction. I think fiction should primarily entertain. I don't remember which book it was (Stein On Writing by Sol Stein or one of John Gardner's books?) that made the observation that reading a piece of fiction should provide an experience more interesting than not reading it. Or something like that. And I agree. I think there's nothing wrong with simply entertaining. In fact, if a book isn't entertaining, then no matter how much it plays with form or touches on important subjects, it fails. For me, one of the great examples of this problem is Toni Morrison. Of course she's a best-selling writer and a Nobel laureate, and Beloved was voted by a group of publishing professionals to be the greatest American novel of the end of the twentieth century/beginning of the twenty-first. I have read two or three Morrison novels, and although I can analyze them for a literature course or admire the innovative way she tells a story, I simply don't enjoy reading her work. It's an entirely intellectual exercise for me with no emotional connection; the work doesn't resonate and excite me the way reading Hemingway or Roth or Salinger or Carver or so many others does. Of course, this is where the largely subjective nature of the whole thing comes in, and I recognize that regarding Morrison, my opinion is in the minority.

Anyway. The first objective is to engage, to entertain, to provide a dream that is superior to sitting around not reading. But that isn't necessarily enough, unless one is writing genre fiction. Simply being entertaining is fine for a mystery or an adventure story, and even in those cases, I think the best works have some additional resonance, some thematic elements that raise them above merely being a diverting way to spend several hours in another world. For example, The Shining is about the effects of alcoholism and abuse on a family; The Silence of the Lambs is largely about feminist ideals. But if one is writing something that is realistic, that isn't driven by high conflict or enormous events, if one is dealing with the small, the mundane, then I think by necessity the work must offer more than the experience of reading; it must have a lasting impact, leave the reader contemplating ideas. Right?

Here's part of my thinking. I wrote a story years ago about a lonely man who encounters a girl in a coffee shop and the experience affects his life; I brought it in to a grad school workshop, and my professor was able to succinctly express why it wasn't a great story: "Salinger did it first and did it better." Within the past year or so I received a rejection from a literary journal for a story about a young man contemplating having an affair; the rejection itself was a personal note rather than a form rejection slip. The editors informed me that although they wouldn't be publishing the story, they liked my writing and would happily consider more work from me. The problem with the piece I submitted is that it didn't "contribute anything new to a familiar situation." And, like my professor, these editors were exactly right. My story was well written, but it's nothing unique.

I'm not especially interested in experimenting with form and doing anything wildly different. So how do I make my work significant? How do I add something worth paying attention to? If offered a choice between my story and Salinger's, I would recommend that a reader pass over mine in favor of the master's. I'm also not interested in writing plot-driven genre fiction. So, if my work isn't gripping because of the high tension and it isn't reinventing what a story does, why should a reader bother with it? I think the answer might lie in having something worth writing about, some observations about the world that make a reader feel like perhaps they've experienced what it's like to be somebody else or to reconsider experience from another perspective. I think I have to have some sort of intellectual angle or theme that elevates my fiction.

And that is the challenge.

I've recently been working on a short story that I began last summer. When I started it, I had no idea what it was "about." I just had an image of a character in my head and then something happened, and then something else happened; another character came into the scene, and eventually I had a rough draft. I've reconsidered and reevaluated and reconfigured the plot and characters, and I'm at the point now of rewriting the story so that it will likely have little resemblance to the initial version I wrote a few months ago. But the issue I'm struggling with is this: what the hell is the thing is about? I think I've got some interesting plot details and some reasonably engaging characters, but I'm still not sure that the story has anything to say. I have some rough themes that the story touches on--death, loneliness, attempting to make connections with others, the unceasing progress of life--but I'm not sure that I'm actually saying anything about anything. Touching on a theme is not the same as actually having a position. Is it? I remember Stephen King commenting in his On Writing that theme is overrated and tends to come on its own without the writer having to stress over it too much. I suspect he's right, but he also had the advantage of writing plot-driven high tension pieces where theme can elevate the piece but isn't necessarily required to give it its purpose.

So what I wonder, what I've been wondering about more and more for the past year or two, is whether I have anything worth saying to the world. Maybe the best I can hope for is that I'll write stories that others before me have written better. Maybe I'll have one decent story that's basically a Salinger ripoff and another that is a pale version of a Carver story. Is that enough? Can one ever truly hope to add anything new? Is that a completely unrealistic goal that is best abandoned sooner rather than later? I used to shake my head at fellow students who talked about being original because I long felt it was an unattainable objective. I also felt, and still do, that having the goal of making a difference, of changing the world or changing people's minds through one's art is ludicrous to the point of nearly being delusional. Yet somehow, despite knowing that for a long time, I'm still struck by the difficulty of facing that reality. If I truly accept that I can't contribute anything new, then what am I actually trying to do? Is it enough to do something old and do it well? I hope so, but I don't know.

Reading Habits

As everybody knows, it's essential as a writer to read in order to gain a greater understanding of how language works, how novels are constructed, how characters are created, what works and what doesn't. Sometimes it's kind of annoying though. Not that reading is annoying. I love reading. But sometimes I wish I could completely submerge into a book and not analyze it at all. Not think like I'm a writer trying to deconstruct. Okay, so it would an exaggeration to imply that my mind is always working like that. Sometimes I do get sucked in and forget about analyzing craft at all. But usually, at some point in a book I have this commentary going on in my brain that is about how it's written rather than what's going to happen next in the story. But the advantage of that is obvious. I feel like I'm always gaining new appreciation for writing that I hope I can then apply to my own work.

When I was a kid I never understood how my dad could read more than one book at a time. He always had a handful of books with bookmarks sticking out of the top. They sat next to his bed in piles. He read often, but what was the point? How could he "get into" a book reading that way? And now I've become him. I haven't counted up the number of books I'm in the middle of right now, but it's probably in the double digits. Some of that is due to the variety of things I read. For instance, I've read some stories from a collection, marked how far I am, but then not returned for a bit. Does that count as being "in the middle" of a book? Or how about a collection of essays? Then there are science books about theories on the brain or addressing big questions of nature versus nurture. Dipping in and out of that over time isn't the same as setting down a novel in the middle, right?

But, alas, I also have several novels I'm in the middle of. Part of the issue is that I don't feel the same obligation to read a book to its conclusion that I felt when I was younger. For the first twenty years or so of my life, I almost never put a book down unfinished without returning to it. If it was boring, well, I had to plod through. If it was interesting but I wasn't quite in the mood for it, too bad. I had to finish that one before I could start another. Now, however, if a book fails to hold my attention, I feel little guilt about setting it down and picking up something else. The problem, however, is that I often am interested in a book, want to finish it, but it's not absolutely compelling me to read, so I set it down with every intention of picking it up only to start another book. So at the moment I'm probably in the middle of a few novels that I plan on finishing, but for whatever reason they weren't holding my interest every second.

So, back to the issue of learning from writing. I've been thinking that it's a good idea to read more widely than I've always done in the past few years. In grad school, they tell you to read widely, but then that's not really what they encourage you to read in classes and for the comps exams. You pretty much stick to "classics" and "literary" stuff. I like a lot of that, sure, but what about the majority of what people actually read. I work at a bookstore, and not only do we only carry a handful of the type of book I studied in grad school, but what we do have, we rarely sell. In fact, the store has probably sold more of that since I started working there than in the previous year because I keep recommending stuff to customers or buying stuff for myself. So when professors tell us to read widely, do they actually mean to read as widely as possible, or do they merely mean we should read both James Joyce and Italo Calvino?

One problem with only studying classics or literary stuff is that it's often difficult to get much from those as far as learning what those writers do. I was reading a Philip Roth book last fall, and rather than thinking, "Ah, here's how he puts this stuff together; I need to try that myself," I kept simply being stunned by how good it was, yet completely unsure why it was so good since he seemed to be breaking a whole slew of the craft rules I learned in workshops. I'm actually not sure how much can be gained by studying the masters. They might simply be so far above the rest of us that they're untouchable.

However, I think we can learn a lot from writers whose work actually sells to normal people. For one thing, there's the major question of why does this appeal to the average reader? That's an issue that is pretty much never addressed in grad school. All the discussion of craft and character and language, and we never really think about what the average paperback buyer is looking for when they choose something to read on the plane. And sometimes, I fully admit, it's easy to dismiss what is popular as "bad" writing. I've picked up a few bestsellers and read a few pages only to shake my head and wonder how anybody can get through this junk. And yet more people are interested in that, so there must be something there, right? I wish my grad school experience had devoted some time to looking carefully at popular genres to deconstruct what is so appealing to so many. About the only time a class touched on those issues was the screenwriting class, and I still feel that class may have been the most useful course I took in grad school. One of the main things we discussed was the need to not bore the audience, which didn't seem to be much of a concern in the workshop courses. Or there was the class on "Forms of Fiction." Rather than thinking of different genres as taking on different forms, our only concern was literary fiction, often classic stuff that (in my view anyway) bears little relevance to twenty-first century writing. I mean the techniques that were cool and innovative two hundred years ago are simply clichéd now, and you can't get away with that.

This post is probably going on too long, but I've got something specific I want to mention. I was working at the bookstore the other day, and it was slow, so I grabbed the nearest book off a display by the register and started reading. As you might guess, the prominently displayed book was a big bestseller, and in this case the cover featured an image from the movie that was just coming out based on the book. All right, I figured, I'll see what the big deal is with this book, why we sell so many, why they made a movie of it, why this writer is rich now. The book was Confessions of a Shopoholic by Sophie Kinsella. So while the store was nearly empty, I read the first few pages. And you know what? I wound up buying the book that day. It is hysterical. And there's a lot to be learned about craft from it. Not only does it present a clear lesson on the value of humor, how that can compel a reader to keep going (I laugh out loud probably every couple of pages and even more often I smile laugh on the inside), but it's also a fine example of irony. A writer studying the use of the deluded protagonist-narrator who doesn't see the world as it is and is constantly at odds with that world in an effort to protect herself from its challenges could do much worse than studying this book. I'm sure Confessions of a Shopoholic would be dismissed in a graduate "forms of fiction" course. In fact, I once spent a whole class listening to my professor try and fail to explain why Jane Austen is not chick lit because Austen is so great and wonderful while chick lit is stupid fluff (apparently Austen is funny and uses irony well to comment on society, which as I've now seen is exactly what Kinsella does, only more successfully in my opinion).

Anyway, I'd say I've gotten off track a bit, but I'm not sure I was ever on a track to begin with. So here's the thing: Not only am I fully engaged with Kinsella, but I also feel like I can learn something about how to write effectively, how to appeal to a reader. Roth, on the other hand, engages me, but also leaves me completely awed nearly to the point of paralysis because I can never do what he does, or if I can I haven't figured it out yet. Not to suggest that I'm on the level of Kinsella at this point, either, but she seems attainable.

I realize that some of my thoughts here seem to be in direct contradiction to my previous post about high concepts. After all, Kinsella's book is about a financial journalist who is completely out of control with her personal finances. It's utterly high concept. And that's the case with so many genre works. But maybe there's something valuable to learn from them still.