Writers appearing in this text |
The Art of Craft Presented at the It's About Time Writers Reading Series, Seattle, WA., 14 August 2003 In the morning after that long sleepless night in June, he greeted the brilliant blue day with bleary eyes and went to the office as usual. As it always did lunch time finally arrived, and he pampered himself with a drive to his favorite restaurant, Red Lobster in Federal Way. The gangly young host with spiky hair, Zack, greeted him with a smile and led the way to his usual table. Rose, his regular waitress, took a seat opposite him and said, "How are you doing, Len?" He glanced toward the window. "It's a lovely day, isn't it? I feel awful." "How come?" "I wanted to go to a poetry reading in Seattle tonight. Then yesterday I found out that whatsername is going to be at the writers' conference in Port Townsend next month. And I didn't sleep all night." "Hanna?" "That's the one. I knew she would end up going, but I've been in that state of blissful denial. You know how it feels when suddenly you can't be in denial anymore, like somebody ripping a Band Aid off your flesh." "Will this be the first time you've seen her since the divorce?" "Yup." "Oh dear. You won't have to talk to her, will you?" "Nope." "Okay then. She'll see how good you look, and she'll be the one who feels bad." "Right. Say, as long as I came all the way down here, why don't I stay for lunch?" "I was about to suggest that. Salmon?" "Yep. With the usual trimmings." "Okay, let me get that started, and I'll bring your iced tea." A bit later Angie came by. Young, fair-haired, she waited tables in a different section, but she was also an aspiring writer. "Have you been to any readings lately?" she said. "No. Ashamed to say I haven't done much of anything as a writer lately. There is a reading in Seattle tonight. I was thinking of going, but I'm so tired I'm not sure." "I know that feeling. With my baby girl and having to find sitters I hardly ever get out of the house anymore." "I really wanted to go to this one," Len said. "You see, a while ago, Esther, the woman who runs it, asked me to do a lecture on The Writer's Craft that's coming up in just a few weeks. I've never given a lecture in my life. I haven't the slightest idea what I'm going to say. So I thought maybe it would jog my thinking if I heard tonight's lecture. It's such a long drive to Seattle, though." But there was another reason he wanted to attend the reading. In a few weeks he'd be going to that writers' conference - nine days of total immersion in the writers' world. In the year and a half since Hanna had left he'd hardly ventured out his door at all. He'd spent most of his time writing a novel and working out in the gym. He wasn't altogether sure he remembered how to be with people. That writers' conference would have been a test in any case, and now he'd be fretting about how to avoid Hanna while not giving too short a shrift to friends they had in common. It would be a real mess. So even if he wasn't sure he was up to the reading tonight, he knew he needed the practice. But was tonight the night to get that practice? He recalled then that Esther's reading series was called "It's About Time." So when evening came he roused himself from the sofa, drove the twenty-five miles to Third Place Books, hunted down a place to park, and ventured into the store. Over the course of the next three hours, he met several people he hadn't seen in months or even years and found indeed that he hadn't entirely forgotten how to have a conversation. During the open mike he went up and read a poem, and the only awkward part was that he talked right over the applause and was making a beeline for his seat before it ended - he'd quite forgotten that sometimes people applaud at such venues. Len was rusty, all right, but he drove home feeling not beyond hope. Energized, his mind swelled with fine resolutions to take this energy and use it to dash out that craft lecture as soon as possible. Tomorrow at the office would be a fine time to get his ideas in order, read through the notes he'd accumulated over the past six months. This weekend then he could stitch together a decent first draft. Once more that night, however, he was unable to sleep, this time mostly because the reading had left him so jazzed. He woke the next morning feeling twice as bleary as the day before, not ready to even think of going to work. He called in a vacation day and spent the morning in front of his tv set telling himself that when he felt a bit more lively he'd drag himself over to the computer at last and start writing. However, during lunch he found himself watching a long documentary film on director Stanley Kubrick. By the time the film was over Len's thoughts were shamefully far from any remaining notion he'd had of working on a craft lecture. Thus ended his first brilliant burst of ambition and fine intentions. He never seriously returned to the subject of craft again until just about a week before the lecture itself, brushing aside every pang of guilt along the way with the formula: "But I work best against a deadline." Meanwhile, the writers' conference came and went. That first morning in the dining hall at Fort Worden, from a good fifty feet away one withering glare from Hanna, hot enough to reheat his coffee, told all he needed to know about that relationship - what was her problem anyway? It solidified his resolve to give her a wide berth, hope she would do the same, which to his relief she did. After a few fumbling days he remembered again how to make friends, found time to read and critique fifteen manuscripts distributed by his fellow workshoppers, absorbed a close critical reading of his own manuscript, which was a snippet from his novel. He rewrote the snippet entirely, weathered a second critique, attended several faculty lectures and readings each day and an open mike. He accomplished all of this without a solid night's sleep on any of the nine he spent in the dorm, where the sun illuminated his room each day at dawn, pouring right through the flimsy window shade. But that allowed nine blissful walks on the beach in that hour before the rest of the human world awoke, amid seagulls, sandpipers, crows, bald eagles, sand flies, and crashing waves. It made him forget, in that hour at least, that a body needs sleep, for God's sake! Home again, that lesson regarding sleep weighed down on him; but it wasn't for another week that he crashed on a Saturday morning, waking up groggily near noon. Glancing at the bedroom clock, he thought, Oh my goodness the day's almost gone - then trudged dutifully off to the gym. The thought of working on a craft lecture didn't cross his mind on that weekend either. A week before Esther's reading, he still had no idea what to say about craft. After close-reading all those manuscripts in Port Townsend his mind was steeped in the minutiae. For example, driving past a construction site and seeing a pair of orange signs, "Road Work Ahead" and "Flagger Ahead," he'd caught himself thinking, "You know, it would scan better if they deleted the word 'ahead' from one of those signs." But how to work this into a lecture? The sands of the hourglass were ticking away (Oh, he would have to remember to unmix that metaphor!), but all he could think was: what do I know about the craft of writing anyway? For one thing, deep in his heart he didn't really feel that craft had much of anything to do with it. After all these years of trying he still felt like a beginner. And the hell of it was: in his heart of hearts he rather liked it that way. The only times writing had ever worked for him was when he forgot about craft entirely and just wrote the truth the absolute, raw, down-to-the-bone emotional reality of what was living there beneath his skin, what kept him awake at night, what knot of unrealized emotion stirred in his belly whenever he was sad or scared or angry or just plain tired of living. Often he'd tried to put these things into words, and almost always he failed. In the trying, however, if he leaned into it steady and hard enough, just zeroed in with every speck of concentration he had, he might find the weight was moved at least a fraction. Failing or not failing, his writing cleared at least a small space inside where he might exist and breathe a little easier. By then he wouldn't really be thinking of an audience. Were he to look at what he'd written from the point of view of an audience he'd likely decide it was crap, just unfinished, formless, negative-thinking crap. Still, more often than not, the trying at least made him feel better. He understood now that this was no small accomplishment. But was it enough for a craft lecture? After seven months of fretting about it, or not fretting, it was still a big muddle. Those notes he'd made were mostly pedantic rot, an imitation lecture composed by an imitation lecturer spiced with obligatory nuggets of personal background of the usual narcissistic kind, which wandered far off the subject. He'd realized all of this some time ago. Reading through these notes again, however, feeling at last the detachment time brings, he marveled at the emotional distance he'd traveled this year. He felt almost entirely other than who he'd been then. He saw too that even though it was nothing like good narrative writing, had strayed and remained deep in the realm of dreaded exposition which his writing teachers had almost always condemned as stilted and boring he found the sentences themselves often had a certain grace. He liked his own writing, and the way his mind moved. (And if you don't like that, then why write at all?) It carried a certain momentum, and momentum was energy. Len felt his curiosity stirring. Where was this taking him? How might it all come out? Then he thought: what would happen if I just read these notes to the audience? This rough, jumbled cacophony of thinking and avoidance I've accumulated so far? How would they take it? It wasn't a craft lecture, exactly, though it touched on craft. It definitely contained the kernel of everything he was thinking about it. Slowly then it came to him he might just be able to make it work. So Len doubled back to the beginning. He created a new file in his computer and started to paraphrase what he'd written so far. It took about a day to write it all out. He just told it the way it came to mind, hoping the inherent logic of story-telling would provide what form was needed. This time he wasn't flush inside the emotions he'd written about. Now he could maintain that critical distance he'd found. As he wrote, wherever he found a loose end he either wove it in or dropped it. To protect the guilty he changed a few names. To heighten the drama he moved the whole crisis closer in time to the deadline. It wouldn't do to let them in on the fact that he'd really sketched out this story with two months to spare, and by the end of July he'd had little to do but polish it up a bit. Go ahead, he thought, make yourself out to be an even bigger deadbeat than you already are. It can only help the story. Besides, you're a fiction writer: there have to be a few lies in it. Otherwise it's just memoir, and Len was of the firm opinion that writers today are just entirely too confessional for their own good. As he came to the point in the narrative where the protagonist was just beginning to figure out the solution to his problem, a quite passable ending occurred to him. As that ending approached, he realized he was enjoying himself. Believe it or not: sometimes writing is fun! In the days that followed he made a few more passes to shape it further, here and there inserting phrases to aim the beginning and middle more certainly toward that somewhat tacked-on ending. The last revisions were basically cosmetic: cleaning up syntax and so forth. He finished it, put it aside for a day or two, then dragged it one last time into the light of day. Reading it over now, it was still okay. With a day to spare. Rearranging just a few unkempt syllables here and there, he printed it out and stuffed the copy into his shoulder bag. Next day he brought it to Red Lobster. Midway through his lunch, Angie showed up with the pitcher of iced tea and refilled his glass. "So what have you been up to?" she said. "Preparing my craft lecture." "Oh, right! Is that happening soon?" "Tomorrow. It would be great if you could come." "I'd like to." "There's an open mike. You could read something of yours." "Well, if I can find a sitter " "By the way," he said, "this craft lecture isn't a real lecture. It's more a short story with a bit of lecturing embedded. I hope you don't mind, but I put you in as a character." "Cool!" "Would you like to look at it?" "Could I?" She took it, sat at the booth across from him, and flipped through the first few pages. "The host's name isn't Zack," she said. "It's Jeff." "Oh? He looks like a Zack to me. I should change it. Maybe I won't: it's fiction, right?" "'Young and fair-haired,'" she said. "That's nice!" She skimmed a page or two further. "Where's the lecture part?" "Toward the back." Scanning the rest, she handed it back to him and got up from the booth. "Interesting," she said. He said, "I hope there's enough craft in it." "There's still time to put in more." "I don't know any more." "You're funny," she said and went back to work. He took a last look, bit his lip, and put it away. copyright Len Siddhartha 2003 LEN SIDDHARTHA is a Northwest writer and poet whose work has appeared in Bellowing Ark, City Primeval & other literary journals. He has been a featured reader at a number of venues in the Puget Sound area, including It's About Time and is just back from the Port Townsend Writers Conference where he lapped up craft lectures on a daily basis & participated in a thoroughly inspiring workshop with novelist Dorothy Allison. At past conferences Len has studied with Alan Cheuse, Rebecca Seiferle, Linda Bierds, & John Haines. Poet Richard Jones has called Len's work "pretty $@#%$#good!" Read more of Len's stories and poems at his website. |
Len Siddhartha |
It's About Time Writers |
The Art of Craft Presented at the It's About Time Writers Reading Series, Seattle, WA., 14 August 2003 In the morning after that long sleepless night in June, he greeted the brilliant blue day with bleary eyes and went to the office as usual. As it always did lunch time finally arrived, and he pampered himself with a drive to his favorite restaurant, Red Lobster in Federal Way. The gangly young host with spiky hair, Zack, greeted him with a smile and led the way to his usual table. Rose, his regular waitress, took a seat opposite him and said, "How are you doing, Len?" He glanced toward the window. "It's a lovely day, isn't it? I feel awful." "How come?" "I wanted to go to a poetry reading in Seattle tonight. Then yesterday I found out that whatsername is going to be at the writers' conference in Port Townsend next month. And I didn't sleep all night." "Hanna?" "That's the one. I knew she would end up going, but I've been in that state of blissful denial. You know how it feels when suddenly you can't be in denial anymore, like somebody ripping a Band Aid off your flesh." "Will this be the first time you've seen her since the divorce?" "Yup." "Oh dear. You won't have to talk to her, will you?" "Nope." "Okay then. She'll see how good you look, and she'll be the one who feels bad." "Right. Say, as long as I came all the way down here, why don't I stay for lunch?" "I was about to suggest that. Salmon?" "Yep. With the usual trimmings." "Okay, let me get that started, and I'll bring your iced tea." A bit later Angie came by. Young, fair-haired, she waited tables in a different section, but she was also an aspiring writer. "Have you been to any readings lately?" she said. "No. Ashamed to say I haven't done much of anything as a writer lately. There is a reading in Seattle tonight. I was thinking of going, but I'm so tired I'm not sure." "I know that feeling. With my baby girl and having to find sitters I hardly ever get out of the house anymore." "I really wanted to go to this one," Len said. "You see, a while ago, Esther, the woman who runs it, asked me to do a lecture on The Writer's Craft that's coming up in just a few weeks. I've never given a lecture in my life. I haven't the slightest idea what I'm going to say. So I thought maybe it would jog my thinking if I heard tonight's lecture. It's such a long drive to Seattle, though." But there was another reason he wanted to attend the reading. In a few weeks he'd be going to that writers' conference - nine days of total immersion in the writers' world. In the year and a half since Hanna had left he'd hardly ventured out his door at all. He'd spent most of his time writing a novel and working out in the gym. He wasn't altogether sure he remembered how to be with people. That writers' conference would have been a test in any case, and now he'd be fretting about how to avoid Hanna while not giving too short a shrift to friends they had in common. It would be a real mess. So even if he wasn't sure he was up to the reading tonight, he knew he needed the practice. But was tonight the night to get that practice? He recalled then that Esther's reading series was called "It's About Time." So when evening came he roused himself from the sofa, drove the twenty-five miles to Third Place Books, hunted down a place to park, and ventured into the store. Over the course of the next three hours, he met several people he hadn't seen in months or even years and found indeed that he hadn't entirely forgotten how to have a conversation. During the open mike he went up and read a poem, and the only awkward part was that he talked right over the applause and was making a beeline for his seat before it ended - he'd quite forgotten that sometimes people applaud at such venues. Len was rusty, all right, but he drove home feeling not beyond hope. Energized, his mind swelled with fine resolutions to take this energy and use it to dash out that craft lecture as soon as possible. Tomorrow at the office would be a fine time to get his ideas in order, read through the notes he'd accumulated over the past six months. This weekend then he could stitch together a decent first draft. Once more that night, however, he was unable to sleep, this time mostly because the reading had left him so jazzed. He woke the next morning feeling twice as bleary as the day before, not ready to even think of going to work. He called in a vacation day and spent the morning in front of his tv set telling himself that when he felt a bit more lively he'd drag himself over to the computer at last and start writing. However, during lunch he found himself watching a long documentary film on director Stanley Kubrick. By the time the film was over Len's thoughts were shamefully far from any remaining notion he'd had of working on a craft lecture. Thus ended his first brilliant burst of ambition and fine intentions. He never seriously returned to the subject of craft again until just about a week before the lecture itself, brushing aside every pang of guilt along the way with the formula: "But I work best against a deadline." Meanwhile, the writers' conference came and went. That first morning in the dining hall at Fort Worden, from a good fifty feet away one withering glare from Hanna, hot enough to reheat his coffee, told all he needed to know about that relationship - what was her problem anyway? It solidified his resolve to give her a wide berth, hope she would do the same, which to his relief she did. After a few fumbling days he remembered again how to make friends, found time to read and critique fifteen manuscripts distributed by his fellow workshoppers, absorbed a close critical reading of his own manuscript, which was a snippet from his novel. He rewrote the snippet entirely, weathered a second critique, attended several faculty lectures and readings each day and an open mike. He accomplished all of this without a solid night's sleep on any of the nine he spent in the dorm, where the sun illuminated his room each day at dawn, pouring right through the flimsy window shade. But that allowed nine blissful walks on the beach in that hour before the rest of the human world awoke, amid seagulls, sandpipers, crows, bald eagles, sand flies, and crashing waves. It made him forget, in that hour at least, that a body needs sleep, for God's sake! Home again, that lesson regarding sleep weighed down on him; but it wasn't for another week that he crashed on a Saturday morning, waking up groggily near noon. Glancing at the bedroom clock, he thought, Oh my goodness the day's almost gone - then trudged dutifully off to the gym. The thought of working on a craft lecture didn't cross his mind on that weekend either. A week before Esther's reading, he still had no idea what to say about craft. After close-reading all those manuscripts in Port Townsend his mind was steeped in the minutiae. For example, driving past a construction site and seeing a pair of orange signs, "Road Work Ahead" and "Flagger Ahead," he'd caught himself thinking, "You know, it would scan better if they deleted the word 'ahead' from one of those signs." But how to work this into a lecture? The sands of the hourglass were ticking away (Oh, he would have to remember to unmix that metaphor!), but all he could think was: what do I know about the craft of writing anyway? For one thing, deep in his heart he didn't really feel that craft had much of anything to do with it. After all these years of trying he still felt like a beginner. And the hell of it was: in his heart of hearts he rather liked it that way. The only times writing had ever worked for him was when he forgot about craft entirely and just wrote the truth the absolute, raw, down-to-the-bone emotional reality of what was living there beneath his skin, what kept him awake at night, what knot of unrealized emotion stirred in his belly whenever he was sad or scared or angry or just plain tired of living. Often he'd tried to put these things into words, and almost always he failed. In the trying, however, if he leaned into it steady and hard enough, just zeroed in with every speck of concentration he had, he might find the weight was moved at least a fraction. Failing or not failing, his writing cleared at least a small space inside where he might exist and breathe a little easier. By then he wouldn't really be thinking of an audience. Were he to look at what he'd written from the point of view of an audience he'd likely decide it was crap, just unfinished, formless, negative-thinking crap. Still, more often than not, the trying at least made him feel better. He understood now that this was no small accomplishment. But was it enough for a craft lecture? After seven months of fretting about it, or not fretting, it was still a big muddle. Those notes he'd made were mostly pedantic rot, an imitation lecture composed by an imitation lecturer spiced with obligatory nuggets of personal background of the usual narcissistic kind, which wandered far off the subject. He'd realized all of this some time ago. Reading through these notes again, however, feeling at last the detachment time brings, he marveled at the emotional distance he'd traveled this year. He felt almost entirely other than who he'd been then. He saw too that even though it was nothing like good narrative writing, had strayed and remained deep in the realm of dreaded exposition which his writing teachers had almost always condemned as stilted and boring he found the sentences themselves often had a certain grace. He liked his own writing, and the way his mind moved. (And if you don't like that, then why write at all?) It carried a certain momentum, and momentum was energy. Len felt his curiosity stirring. Where was this taking him? How might it all come out? Then he thought: what would happen if I just read these notes to the audience? This rough, jumbled cacophony of thinking and avoidance I've accumulated so far? How would they take it? It wasn't a craft lecture, exactly, though it touched on craft. It definitely contained the kernel of everything he was thinking about it. Slowly then it came to him he might just be able to make it work. So Len doubled back to the beginning. He created a new file in his computer and started to paraphrase what he'd written so far. It took about a day to write it all out. He just told it the way it came to mind, hoping the inherent logic of story-telling would provide what form was needed. This time he wasn't flush inside the emotions he'd written about. Now he could maintain that critical distance he'd found. As he wrote, wherever he found a loose end he either wove it in or dropped it. To protect the guilty he changed a few names. To heighten the drama he moved the whole crisis closer in time to the deadline. It wouldn't do to let them in on the fact that he'd really sketched out this story with two months to spare, and by the end of July he'd had little to do but polish it up a bit. Go ahead, he thought, make yourself out to be an even bigger deadbeat than you already are. It can only help the story. Besides, you're a fiction writer: there have to be a few lies in it. Otherwise it's just memoir, and Len was of the firm opinion that writers today are just entirely too confessional for their own good. As he came to the point in the narrative where the protagonist was just beginning to figure out the solution to his problem, a quite passable ending occurred to him. As that ending approached, he realized he was enjoying himself. Believe it or not: sometimes writing is fun! In the days that followed he made a few more passes to shape it further, here and there inserting phrases to aim the beginning and middle more certainly toward that somewhat tacked-on ending. The last revisions were basically cosmetic: cleaning up syntax and so forth. He finished it, put it aside for a day or two, then dragged it one last time into the light of day. Reading it over now, it was still okay. With a day to spare. Rearranging just a few unkempt syllables here and there, he printed it out and stuffed the copy into his shoulder bag. Next day he brought it to Red Lobster. Midway through his lunch, Angie showed up with the pitcher of iced tea and refilled his glass. "So what have you been up to?" she said. "Preparing my craft lecture." "Oh, right! Is that happening soon?" "Tomorrow. It would be great if you could come." "I'd like to." "There's an open mike. You could read something of yours." "Well, if I can find a sitter " "By the way," he said, "this craft lecture isn't a real lecture. It's more a short story with a bit of lecturing embedded. I hope you don't mind, but I put you in as a character." "Cool!" "Would you like to look at it?" "Could I?" She took it, sat at the booth across from him, and flipped through the first few pages. "The host's name isn't Zack," she said. "It's Jeff." "Oh? He looks like a Zack to me. I should change it. Maybe I won't: it's fiction, right?" "'Young and fair-haired,'" she said. "That's nice!" She skimmed a page or two further. "Where's the lecture part?" "Toward the back." Scanning the rest, she handed it back to him and got up from the booth. "Interesting," she said. He said, "I hope there's enough craft in it." "There's still time to put in more." "I don't know any more." "You're funny," she said and went back to work. He took a last look, bit his lip, and put it away. copyright Len Siddhartha 2003 LEN SIDDHARTHA is a Northwest writer and poet whose work has appeared in Bellowing Ark, City Primeval & other literary journals. He has been a featured reader at a number of venues in the Puget Sound area, including It's About Time and is just back from the Port Townsend Writers Conference where he lapped up craft lectures on a daily basis & participated in a thoroughly inspiring workshop with novelist Dorothy Allison. At past conferences Len has studied with Alan Cheuse, Rebecca Seiferle, Linda Bierds, & John Haines. Poet Richard Jones has called Len's work "pretty $@#%$#good!" Read more of Len's stories and poems at his website. |
Writers appearing in this text |
