Trills

Do you ever wake up to such a tidal wave of self-loathing you can hardly open your eyes? You lay in the half-light listening to the first plaintive trills of the birds on their drooping twigs and think of every stupid thing you’ve said or done, every hyperbolic joke you took too far, every inappropriate hug you offered, or winsome smile that was not returned. You can taste the hot-watery shock of being tolerated by the one you cared for, being discarded by the one you loved. You remember the saltwater taffy made of salt that you swallowed out of courtesy. The look exchanged between two people you thought were your friends. The time your name was excluded blatantly, aggressively, from a list it should have been on. How you puzzled, thinking, I am here, I am loyal, and snapped to the horror that your loyalty was undesirable, that loving and being loved are not the same thing. You ride the current of bile to a morning when your friend, your casual smiling buddy, screamed, Stay away from me! and you wake to the sound of it twenty years later and think, I will stay away, I want to stay away and stay here and stay buried under the covers where no one has to wish I were not around.

Photograph by Mary Ellen Mark

Inkling

Fuckity fuckity fuck.

I’m all jammed up, halfway between an idea and a story. I’ve got several of the elements in place: mysterious back story, dark, claustrophobic setting, twisted cast of characters all lusting after one another. I have an inkling. Now if I could only find a plot.

This is the agony of the first draft. I am not a natural storyteller. I don’t have a hundred fully hatched stories in my head, just waiting for me to find the time to attend to them. I have to invest a serious amount of energy and research into finding even one workable plot that’s right for my genre, for my readership (if there is one; we can but hope), and for me as a writer. While other writers are turning out story after story from their colorful and blissfully overactive imaginations (I’m looking at you, August), I am grinding my molars to come up with one.

And I desperately want to write. I’ve got time now and energy and the willpower to slam down a draft, and I can’t come up with anything resembling a psycho thriller plot for the present-day timeline. I’ve been at this problem for a month and still . . . nothing. But the back story and characters are too juicy to abandon. There is something here.

* * *

Last night I wrote the lines above and set them aside to finish the post for this morning. And when I woke up, holy mother of god, the light shone down upon me and delivered my story. I almost fell down the stairs trying to get to my notebook so I could write it down. My hands are shaking. It’s possible I will pee my pants.

Now I’m turning the idea this way and that, looking for cracks in the premise. Please dear lord may this work.

What do you do with a hot idea? Outline it? Flesh it out? Or write like hell?

Territory

I’ve been working my way through Writers on Writing, Collected Essays from The New York Times. I hit upon Barbara Kingsolver’s piece, “A Forbidden Territory Familiar to All” and found a kindred spirit:

For decent folk of any gender, the official and legal position of our culture is that sex takes place in private, and that’s surely part of the problem. Private things–newfound love, family disagreements and spiritual faith, to name a few–can quickly become banal or irritating when moved into the public arena. But new love, family squabbles and spirituality are rich ground for literature when they’re handled with care. Writers don’t avoid them on grounds of privacy, but rather take it as duty to draw insights from personal things and render them universal. Nothing could be more secret, after all, than the inside of another person’s mind, and that is just where a novel takes us, usually from page 1. No subject is too private for good fiction if it can be made beautiful and enlightening.

That may be the rub right there. Making it beautiful is no small trick. The language of coition has been stolen, or rather, I think, it has been divvied up like chips in a poker game among pornography, consumerism and the medical profession. None of these players are concerned with aesthetics, so the linguistic chips have become unpretty by association. Vagina is fatally paired with speculum. Any word you can name for the male sex organ or its, um, movement seems to be the property of Larry Flynt. Even a perfectly serviceable word like nut, when uttered by an adult, causes paroxysms in sixth-grade boys.

My word processing program’s thesaurus has washed its hands of the matter: it eschews any word remotely associated with making love. Coitus, for example, claims to be NOT FOUND, and the program coyly suggests as the nearest alternative coincide with? It also pleads ignorant on penis and suggests pen friend. A writer in work-avoidance mode could amuse herself all day.

* * *

To write about sex at all, we must first face down the polite pretense that it doesn’t really matter to us and acknowledge that in the grand scheme of things, nothing could matter more. In the quiet of our writing rooms we have to corral the beast and find a way to tell of its terror and beauty. We must own up to its gravity. We also must accept an uncomfortable intimacy with our readers in the admission that, yes, we’ve both done this. We must warn our mothers before the book comes out. We must accept the economic reality that this one won’t make the core English Lit curriculum.

Still, in spite of everything, I’m determined to write about the biological exigencies of human life, and where can I start the journey except through this mined harbor? It’s a risk I’ll have to take.

* * *

When do you close the door on a sex scene in your work, and what influences that decision?

The Cyclops

Last week I got an email from my agent, asking among other things for a picture of me. Now, I’m elusive as a yeti when it comes to being photographed, even with my family. But me, all alone in front of a camera? It never happens. The whole idea makes me so uncomfortable that I spent the weekend trying to finagle a usable shot on my own (photographer, shoot thyself), with such tragic results that I came at last to a frightening conclusion: I’m going to have to call in the big guns. I’ve booked a session with a professional photographer.

Photograph by Ellen Von Unwerth

Oh the irony. How many times have I pleaded and cajoled and flattered and threatened in order to get a reluctant subject to loosen up in front of the camera. How many times have I inwardly rolled my eyes when she wouldn’t cooperate? How many lies have I told in pursuit of an attractive portrait, how many times have I dismissed the fears of the victim. And now it’s gonna be me grinning at the cyclops, trying to remember not to stiffen my shoulders or squint into the light, silently chanting ‘relax, it’s only a picture’ while someone points that diabolical lens at my face.

Smile, Averil. But not like that.

For confidence, I bought a new sweater and silk scarf. Also, two kinds of powder. Eyeshadow with matching liner. Lipstick with matching gloss! I may even throw down for a hat, and have my author photo reveal one enigmatic and heavily mascaraed eye, peeking out from under the brim.

I’m trying to shop my way through this, what can I tell you.

How are you in front of a camera?

Pinafore

Let me address the elephant in the room. I have been trying for over a decade to move to Portland. I’ve whinged and sniveled and carried on about it until I’m sure you were all ready to stab me in the eye with your fountain pens, and now at last I’m here. So why am I not writing about our new home?

Because it’s so fucking wonderful that every excursion makes me want to race to the top of a mountain and start twirling in my pinafore. It’s nauseating, how much I love it here. If I truly did the place justice, I’d tell you about Silver Falls, where we hiked around and had a picnic next to the creek and laughed at the crow who disdained the chunk of apple we’d offered. I’d describe the farm stands, overflowing with berries. The vintage shops where I’ve bought milk glass and watercolors and barely escaped without the most adorable 70s fondue set (so cute, it still had all its forks!). I’d wax poetic about the arboretum, a cathedral of trees, threaded with quiet footpaths. Our neighborhood market and its mouth-watering ciabatta. The soft cool rain and this lovely house with all its windows open even at midday, my tender potted herb garden in the kitchen. I’d tell you about my fellas, who went bowling together for the first time and came home hooting with laughter. They love it here too.

I’m baking my own bread, for fuck’s sake. I am a cliché of domestic bliss.

But there’s only so much I can share without becoming redundant. You and I have become friends based on our mutual misery: writing, and all its tribulations. And the muse is as bitchy as she ever was.

I have discovered that happiness and misery can coexist quite symbiotically inside me, can in fact swoop in and overtake one another without a break in the action. One minute I’m kneading a ball of dough and watching the squirrels scamper over our back fence, the next I’m pacing around in agony, trying to locate the story. And the sneaky truth is that I’m loving the ride. The shivering apex, the stomach-dropping glide, then up again with my feet against the sky. I don’t want to be steady, I want to swing.

What about you? Feet on the ground, or ass in the swing?

Thread

So, writing. With all the activity of the move and the book sale (!!!) and settling into a radically different and much improved lifestyle, I haven’t been writing much. That makes me nervous. I’ve never spent so much time away from the page as I have in these past few weeks, and though I’ve tried to break back into my work, it’s been difficult. Part of that is due to some of the rejections I’ve received along the way.

I don’t know about you, but I can take any amount of criticism about the story, or a reader’s failure to connect with the characters. Problems with structure, lack of depth, word count. Whatever. But criticism about voice is hard to hear, because it’s the one element of writing that feels unfixable. A writer’s entire sensibility is wrapped up in the way he chooses what to look at and how he describes it, how he experiences the rhythm in language, structures his sentences and paragraphs, how he strings a thought together. Voice is the essence of the writer, the truest representation of the mind behind the work. Dismissal of a writer’s voice is painful. The rejection feels personal.

Lately when I sit down to write, and in spite of the enthusiasm and positive energy that come with a brand-new book deal, I feel self-conscious. I hear myself writing and I’m annoyed.

The solution is to say fuck it, to sit down and write and keep writing and get over it, which is what I intend to do. But I like to work with the criticism I receive, and I’m not sure what to do with this. While every project has a narrative style of its own, the writer’s voice is the thread running through them. How is it possible to change what feels so innate? Do writers reach a point when their voices become fixed, or does voice continue to evolve over the years?

What do you think?

Photograph by Joyce Tennyson

The Call

Our new home town is a book lover’s paradise. We’ve got Powell’s, of course, and Annie Bloom’s. At the Hillsboro farmer’s market I found a used bookstore behind the berry stand, where I scored a crusty Stephen King and two pulp novels. Then there’s the Tigard library, where my son and I received our shiny new cards and made off with such a teetering stack of loot that I could hardly wrestle it into the car. And five minutes from home is a Barnes & Noble, which I investigated last week while Drew was at the other end of the strip mall trying to sort out our new phone numbers.

What’s better than a bookstore. So peaceful, so alluring. All those lovely pages, those uncreased spines lined up on the shelves. Imagine walking into a bookstore and finding your own name, opening a book to see the words you conjured set to print, your whole story laid out between the covers in beautiful font and declarative chapter numbers, filigreed marks at the scene breaks. Wouldn’t it be strange to lurk nearby and see someone pick up your book? Flip it over, read a few pages, carry it to the cash register? What a trip.

As I was nosing through the mystery section, I heard Drew’s voice saying, Hold on a minute, let me find her . . . I zigged through the shelves and he zagged, but eventually we made contact near the cookbooks and he handed me my phone.

It was my agent. It was The Call.

The final offers are in, all decisions made, and my book is SOLD!!! Yes indeed, I kid you not, I was actually in a bookstore when I got the news that Tapestry of Scars will be joining the ranks. It’s been bought in a two-book deal by MIRA, to go out in trade paperback. Do you hear that? My book is sold! So’s the next one! Three cheers for the dark side! Three cheers for the little thriller that could!

And it gets better. I’ve gotten familiar with MIRA during these past few weeks, and I could not be happier to be working with them. Not only because I’ve seen the imprint face-out all over B&N, not only because I like their covers and the range of titles and authors, but because the editors are fired up about my book. My agent said when he called to accept their offer, a squeal of delight could be heard over the phone lines–and if that doesn’t warm a writer’s heart, I don’t know what would. And the folks at Harlequin really know their stuff when it comes to the women’s market. I am in very good hands.

I hung up the phone and wandered back to the fiction aisles, still somewhat dazed by the news. The woman next to me pulled out a book, turned it over, read a couple of pages and walked away with the book in her hand.

Happy, happy day!

Three

Photograph by Ellen Von Unwerth

This morning I got back on the pony and started writing the new book. Oh, beginnings, how I hate them. It’s like learning a foreign language every time I start a new project, it’s like arriving overdressed for a party. I’m painfully, horribly shy at the beginning, as if my characters already exist and are disdainful of my intrusion. I’m the three in the threesome, a kitten amongst the wolves. I’m lost, misguided, a nerdy virgin in the boys’ locker room. I am several other awful metaphors. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

I hate this part.

What part do you hate?

Moat

Yesterday my husband asked if we’d like to go to the beach. I had planned to start my next book, had the day all mapped out in my head, but as soon as he suggested a diversion, I leapt at it. I did take my notebook along, and circled round and round that nagging POV issue by writing out the pros and cons of the various choices, trying to figure whether I can pull off a first-person narrative from a male character, whether I’d miss any crucial scenes by limiting myself that way. I walked up the beach, assessing the possibilities. Then, when I got tired of that problem, I retraced my steps and headed back along the hard-packed sand, thinking of structure. How to control the pace, how to frame the story. Can I tell it with any hope of approaching what I imagine.

Down the beach, back again. I kept passing my guys, who were building a sandcastle with two spades and a bucket. Drew said they’d built it too high up the beach, the moat would never be filled even at high tide. Tragic.

Today I’m tired and irritated with myself for letting a diversion kill my momentum. I need to get in there and start laying down the story. All that shit about POV and structure is a stall tactic; I’m never right about either during the first draft, so puzzling about the details now is unhelpful. I need to start. One paragraph, a page, a scene. I should write a scene and see how it looks. Maybe I’ll write a scene and revise it and try to establish a voice. Maybe I’ve lost my voice. Maybe I never had one! What if people hate the idea and kill it. Or hate the idea and don’t kill it, but let me wallow around for ten months and tell me later that they knew all along it was a crap idea but felt I needed to get it out of my system. What if it hurts, again. What if this latest trip into the darkness is as exhausting and frustrating and lonely as the last?

Do I really want to do this?

What does your fear look like?

Photograph by Russell James

Sprouts

The other day I went to get my hair cut. My new stylist is about thirty, with a loud, infectious laugh and an endearing way of drawing out your shy writer-type with a series of questions that showed she was paying attention to the answers. I was so flattered by the whole conversation that I ended up buying three products I didn’t need and booking my next appointment six weeks out. She’s working one hell of a business model.

Anyway, when she heard I was a writer (yeah, I can’t believe I said it either), and that I’d written a sexy psycho-thriller (I know, I’m telling you the girl is good), she said, as she wrapped my wet head and shuttled me from bowl to chair: Have you read . . . You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?

Ah yes. The Fifty Shades conversation.

She swears, she resisted for a long time, but then her best friend recommended the books, and her sister, and everyone at the salon, and her fourth cousin once removed who dropped like a plum from the family tree just for the privilege of recommending these books, until finally my new friend succumbed.

She asked me what I thought, and I asked her what she thought, and then she grinned and said, You first. I told her I haven’t read the books, only excerpts which were enough to turn me off. I may have moaned something about, The writing! The writing! She seemed puzzled by this. What about the writing? It’s silly, I pleaded, riddled with cliché. The inner goddess? The unsexy sex? The millionaire and the virgin?

She nodded thoughtfully. Yes, she did understand, sort of. It’s as if your girlfriend is telling you a story. Uncomplicated, confiding, and often inadvertently funny.

We talked about it for a while. I was interested to hear what she loved so much about the books. It’s the sex, of course. The campiness of the writing renders the topic safe for public consumption. It’s the cotton-candy ease of the read (stick your tongue out, little girl). It’s the zeitgeist, the groupthink, the weight of one’s peers. The books are right for the times and no amount of dissection can fully explain why.

But for me the most interesting takeaway from this conversation was the way she’d received my judgement on the quality of the writing. It was clearly the first time anyone had said to her, These books are poorly written. In all the conversations she’s had (probably with every female client), the topic of craftsmanship had never come up. It was uninteresting to her, as topics go. I felt like a vegan trying to spread the gospel of sprouts.

I think we’re alone now, writer-friends. We’re writing for each other.

Does craftsmanship even matter?

Going Tribal

It’s that time again. Time to get a job.

Drew’s already been on the hunt and has had a couple of phone interviews. His resume is making the rounds. But I’m not looking for another office job, in which I and my fellow desk jockeys roil around each other like ingredients in a stew, each personality trait reducing down to its most distinctive and aggressive flavor. I want to work with strangers, customers. I want the days to be different.

I’ve been joking about that plant-watering job (vitally necessary in Oregon), but what I’m really hoping for is a job in a bookstore before all the bookstores are gone. Of course it won’t pay much, but then Drew’s always been the one to bring home the big bucks anyway, and we aren’t spending much now that it’s just the three of us. So he’s given me the thumbs-up: do what you wanna do, Averil, and I’ll hold down the fort.

How I love that man.

Tomorrow I’m getting a haircut (the curls are out of control and my straightening iron has been repurposed as a pasta maker), and making some copies of my resume (do they need that for a retail job?), and on Wednesday I’ll hit the road and try to talk someone into taking me on. I feel good about my chances. Surely the management will recognize one of their own. I plan to wear my glasses and my I Heart Franzen tee-shirt, and carry my most well-worn Mary Westmacott novel as though I can’t bear to put it down. I will run my hands through my hair during the interview and speak frenziedly of the dark magic of Joyce Carol Oates. I will be earnest in my defense of the hardback and scathing in my comments about the 50 Shades series. If the talk turns to YA, I’ll profess my love for S.E. Hinton–and Lauren Kate, to show I can be modern.

What more can a bookseller want.

How do you recognize one of the tribe?

Porterhouse

Yesterday I left the boys at home and went exploring on my own. It was a cautious, mapless sort of adventure, in which I simply followed the thread of our main road all the way out of town, past the farms where the day before we’d scored a flat of berries and a jar of black cap jam, past the stables and the cat motel, through the roundabout and up a mountain, the name of which I have not yet learned. Up up up, through a tunnel of pines and out the other side, where a fog-draped view of the farmland opened at my feet.

I stopped the car for a bit and sat on the hood in the rain, taking it in. All those houses below, and I know no one. In this town, and the one tucked into the leafy hillside beyond, I am a stranger. I can go anywhere I like in whatever state of disarray and rest assured that no one gives a shit, least of all me. I can’t remember ever feeling so deliriously invisible.

When my hair and shoulders were too soaked for any more navel-gazing, I retraced my path through town, made one safe turn onto a tentatively familiar road, and found the library. Holy moly, I think I’m in love. If ever I get tired of my little writing nook or the cafe down the road, I’m all set. And there’s a creekside walking path right next to it, for those moments in which the story becomes elusive. Hell, isn’t it always?

Which leads me back to writing. I’m more than ready to dive into the next book, but have stalled out at the moment as I wait for . . . well, let’s say I’m waiting for editorial direction. In the meantime, I’m dabbling. Short story here, prose poem there, obnoxious blog rants and obscure text messages to my family. I badly want to start drafting something substantial. I want a plate-sized porterhouse steak of a story, not this anemic, protein-poor directionless blather I’m producing. My last story was entirely plotless, comprised of two panting individuals attacking each other under a waterfall. I finished it before I realized I’d given neither character a name.

Classy work, Averil.

What do you write while you’re waiting?