5 Books That Made Me a Writer

When I want to learn how to do something, I reach for a book.  This approach did not serve me well when I decided I wanted to learn to knit.  It took one-on-one lessons from my sister for me to perfect a knitting style that many people would call ‘eccentric’.  Books have helped me become a writer, though. The act of reading widely from a very young age has given me some of the skills I need, but there are a few books that have influenced my habits as well.

Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones:Freeing the Writer Within is the first book on writing that I fell for hard and the one that had the most lasting impact on my writing process. Her perspective is that of a Zen Buddhist with a serious practice, but her approach to writing is playful as well. Goldberg is all about making writing a discipline. Her view is that if we sit down and write consistently, we will be writers.  And that is how I feel; I call myself a writer when I am writing every day.  When I am not, I don’t. Maybe at those times I am a writer on hiatus? In remission? When I first read the book about 26 years ago, I filled spiral notebooks with daily writing on everything from wild ideas for novels to how the Kansas hayfields I drove by every evening reminded me of Monet.

Goldberg’s rules for writing practice are the most helpful ones I’ve found for the act of writing a draft, useful enough that I share them with my students when I ask them to write an oratory. In Bones, she lists and explains them:

1. Keep your hand moving. [Don’t pause to reread the line you have just written. That’s stalling and trying to get control of what you’re saying]

2. Don’t cross out. [That is editing as you write. Even if you write something you didn’t mean to write, leave it.)

3.  Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar. [Don’t even are about staying within the margins and lines on the page]

4. Lose control.

5. Don’t think. Don’t get logical.

6. Go for the jugular [If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.]

A blank page is terrifying. Heeding Goldberg’s tutelage, I try to get a lot of stuff down on the page so the fear goes away.

     Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird is full of advice for nervous writers. She advises writers to allow ourselves to write badly in order to write well. Her term for what we churn out when we first being writing a piece is "shitty first drafts". Her advice has heft for me, as a writer and as a teacher. In my own work, I can appreciate that the first words on the page are not going to be the best and I’m better able to face revisions. As a teacher, I see that students have to be willing to be bad at something before they can be good. Band students understand this because they’ve been the sweaty middle school clarinet player whose horn made odd hoots that sounded like their classmates' changing voices. Lamott, who has made a career out of writing about her worst qualities in the best way, is a writer who helps us give ourselves permission to be bad, very bad, so we can get better.

I have been reading Stephen King’s fiction for almost forty years. His reflection on craft, On Writing, gave me new appreciation for his work as well as confirmation that reading is never a waste of time for a writer. Long ago, in an introduction to Harlan Ellison’s Stalking the Nightmare, King wrote about how writers are like milk at times, and they take on the flavor of what’s beside them in the refrigerator.  For writers to find their own voice there has to be a lot of stuff in the refrigerator.  King’s book is more about craft than it is about motivation, and part of honing craft for a writer is reading other writers.

Rosemary Daniell’s The Woman Who Spilled Words All Over Herself has a special place on my shelf, too.  Again, this book had a binary influence on me, as I read it both as a teacher and a writer.  Much of the book concerns her work as a Poet in Residence in schools throughout Georgia, her experience as a writing teacher in prisons, as well as stories of her own writing experience.  This book lit up the part of my brain that is always at a slow percolation, thinking, “How can I teach…” while it also inspired me to write more myself.  One drawback to Daniell’s books is that I feel that a lot of her energy comes from the deep work she’s done on her relationships with her family and the men in her life, and my life just isn’t that dramatic.

Another writer whose genre fiction I have enjoyed is Rita Mae Brown. The mysteries she ‘co-wrote’ with her cat Sneaky Pie are my favorite kind of fiction because they are both entertaining and informative. Brown’s book on writing, Starting From Scratch: A Different Kind of Writer’s Manual, outlines her concept of a conservatory for writers and includes a list of books she thinks every writer should read. Her list is largely classical, but spans genres and would make a good liberal education for anyone, not just a writer.
I have to warn you, though, that READING about writing isn’t writing. It might be tempting to live vicariously through these other writers’ experiences instead of sitting down and writing something yourself.  If you read all of these books and still don't put butt on chair, pen to paper, or fingers to keys, then reading any of them hasn't really mattered at all.

Should It Stay or Should It Go? Get in That Pickup and Drive!

Aside from two fully employed adults, our home houses several thousand books.  Because we don’t practice the “one in, one out” philosophy in acquiring them, the books overfill the shelves and are stacked on flat surfaces around our home. Yet, I often can’t resist picking up another book I haven’t read from the 25 cent table at my favorite book store or a pile at a library sale. Thus this series, “Off My Shelf,” where I take a book from a shelf or a pile, read (or reread it) and decide whether it stays or goes.

It’s irritating to open a book on a weekend afternoon expecting a light, romantic escape to find instead a dour literary novel with a disconcerting habit of bouncing around from one point of view and verb tense to another.

Such a novel is Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch.

From the description of Sarah, the main character, as "one of the funniest and most sympathetic literary heroines in years" and Crouch's wry opening description of Sarah’s Cotillion experience, I thought I was going to read a light novel about a plucky Southern girl who gets the wind knocked out of her up North and goes home to recover. Maybe there would be some romance? Indeed, the blurbs on the book jacket promised a charming book from a writer who was “damn funny”.

I feel punk’d.

Crouch does a fine job in the early chapters as Sarah suffers the indignities of the Cotillion, the training ground where Charleston girls become Charleston women.  She deftly contrasts the two sisters, Sarah and Eloise, who struggle to escape ‘yokel land’.

However, the tone changes about a quarter of the way through the book, the point of view turns from first person to third and the tense from past to present for a chapter. When the author returns to first person past tense, Sarah gets involved in a relationship that leaves her both psychically and physically battered and the whole book takes a shrieking turn into territory I was not ready to travel.

As the novel progresses, the author switches among not only different points of view but point of view characters as well to tell what is primarily Sarah's story. This tactic does illuminate some of Sarah's experience, but at the end of the novel I am still puzzled as to why Sarah made the choices she did and I end up not caring that much about her at all.

If I don't engage with the character, if I don't enjoy the story, if none of the words are notable enough to add to my commonplace book---it's three strikes and this one is out.

Quotations and My Discontents

     A stock photo of a curling piece of notebook paper. Just a corner, torn from a larger sheet.  A note, written in the fat, looping letters of a “tween”-age girl. On the paper, the following quotation: 

     “You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear. ---Oscar Wilde.”

     

     Oscar Wilde?     

     Along with postcards, cookbooks, Crayola themed tchotchkes, and journals, I hoard quotations. Long ago, when memes were “Xerox Lore” and my Pinterest board was an actual corkboard behind my desk, I started.  Now, the Internet has become a crowded bazaar of quotations of all kinds, and I’m glad because I am a fan of a well-turned phrase, but I am also a fan of proper citation. One of the things I appreciate about a good quotation is how the tone of matches the tone of the author. Many times I’ll find a quotation I like, but the attribution is wrong. It’s almost as though Oscar Wilde was responsible for every British ‘bon mot’ and either Mark Twain or Abraham Lincoln in charge of the American equivalent.

     Here are five of the most meaningful quotations I find myself returning over and over. Each of them represent the voice of the author, even though even I am guilty of crediting the wrong person occasionally.

     I’ve pasted Gaiman’s quotation into my journal at the beginning of each new annum for three years running now. Every time I flip by it, the words remind me to make time for the things that matter.

    I’ve tried keeping a gratitude journal and it just doesn’t work for me. What does work is stopping to marvel at some of the random moments that make me happy: seeing the bunnies that have taken up residence in our yard, hearing my favorite Van Morrison song pop up on my iPod mix, smelling the vanilla as it heats up in the pudding I stir on the stove. Vonnegut's words remind us to find small joys and savor them.

     The oldest exhibit in my little museum.  My sister sent this one to me when I was in high school, competing on the Oklahoma high school forensics circuit and discovering that I loved a captive audience. Roosevelt never stood on the sidelines; this is all about taking risks.

    I misattribute this one to Natalie Goldberg even though I know she was quoting Richard Brautigan when she included it in her book.  This quotation is the most important to me as a teacher.  These words remind me that there are only so many minutes in a school year and that I don’t want to be that teacher Brautigan and Golberg describe. Those minutes matter.

     Another quotation that I go back to for inspiration throughout the school year.  I’m not going to make a kid love learning lines or painting flats black, but I can help them discover that once the lines are learned, being someone else onstage is fun, or that hanging out with other people with paintbrushes in their hands is an okay way to spend an afternoon.  I can’t tell them how competing made me feel, but I can get the bus out at 5:30 in the morning and haul them off to another speech tournament so they can discover it themselves.

     Should I be more forgiving of a foible I indulge in myself? Perhaps. Still, I’ve found Garson O’Toole’s engaging reference, Hemingway Didn’t Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations, a swell guide to some of the crimes against authorship the World Wide Web hosts.  His website, The QuoteInvestigator,is a useful and detailed resource for checking out suspect quotations. I like to check things there when I read a quotation that doesn’t sound just right.
     In the end, Shakespeare's words apply: