Narrative 10

Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is a favorite. She was hard-earned to write, and she has hard-earned wisdom and writing that felt sometimes to come from her, from having created the space for her, the language came. I’m not one of these: my characters are real people, but there is certain writing that comes out fast and fully formed that makes you wonder where it does come from. Opal didn’t come out that way. Why I said hard-earned. But certain lines did come out that way from her. The second chapter of hers in There There did come fast, actually. In a week. The one where she is on Alcatraz as a little girl took like four years to get right. I don’t think I have a favorite character in life. I have favorite people. Some of them are my children. And they’re not characters.

“Who has not asked himself, at some time or other, Am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person.” Clarice Lispector wrote this in her perfect novella, The Hour of the Star. It is a book full of quotable lines. But I think about it a lot because it’s so strange to be a human, and it invokes the mythical, to think of us as monsters, of a kind, and I believe we too have saintly qualities, or what is the opposite of a monster in the mythical sense? Hero? That doesn’t seem like enough. Angel? Not a good opposite to monster either. Being human is so singular and strange, and part of why we have fiction and novels is to further explain while also further complicating the mess that we all are.

For novel I would say Song of Solomon, particularly the part where they are hunting, oh, and if I can just pick parts the end of Toni’s novel Love. The beginning of it too. Ocean Vuong’s first poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, or Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf. And now that I’ve exceeded the already open boundaries of the question, Borges’s Complete Fiction.

Depends on the day, but a good writing day would include working early in the morning, and then again mid-morning after (more) coffee, then running in the afternoon while listening to new parts of what I’ve written. I’ve had robots reading to me since like 2013 and continue to do this as part of revision. My ears pick up completely different things than my eyes. You have to get over the horribly wrong robot inflections or lack thereof, but once you do you can find opening up parts of your life you never thought you could be writing/revising, like driving and doing the dishes, etc. Then before I go to bed, for an hour or two more writing/revision. This is on a good day. Writing happening throughout the day. Usually if I’m feeling the pressure of a deadline.

Sometimes playing music helps. To get me out of the verbal headspace entirely. Long runs help. Having someone I know and love and trust and maybe am a little scared read, have them read my writing to me, and have it be someone who is not going to criticize you, understanding you’re just wanting to share and be uplifted a little, to be told it’s not horrible and to find the parts for you that you can’t currently see that are worth going back in for, to save or to improve or to develop.

I use just way too much. And even. And but. In writing. I say literally too much when talking. I say Jesus a lot, I think. As a former Christian this is troubling to me sometimes. I write and say doom a lot. That’s six. I think I say and write think a lot. I do write there a lot, but that one is unavoidable. Probably memory and dream and writing are the other three I both write and say a lot. The words I am unaware of that I use too much are the ones that should concern me.

Speed chess, like one-minute and three-minute games.

My agent has pointed out some weird tics I have. Overuse of because. Redundancies. I think working with my agent and my editor, having things pointed out on the line level, it was invaluable to me just to know how these people think, and what I mean by these people (I love them both) are people who deeply consider the reader and the reading experience, so a lot of the cuts are related to hindering in some way the experience of reading. I can’t give a good specific example, but if I were a writer who hadn’t worked with a professional editor ever I would pay what it costs (I don’t think it’s that much to have someone read your manuscript), but it’s well worth it and you get to keep the tools you learn from their feedback, you get to kind of steal their tools!

Wait, but if I’ve forgotten it then I’ve forgotten it! I think I lost a lot from childhood regarding belief and creating imagined worlds that I’ve tried to reclaim with writing. I wish I would have become a fiction reader and writer much, much sooner.

This is from a forthcoming novel:

She was still getting her bearings straight. There was a joke somewhere that she couldn’t find, about Indians before they were Indians, crossing an ice bridge to get to America before it was America. That bridge eventually both melted and was submerged. What was left of it were islands: Big Diomede and Little Diomede. Indians lived there now. On Big Diomede, they were Russians, twenty-one hours ahead of Little Diomede, where they were Americans, on Alaska time. This place was called Tomorrow and Yesterday Isle. That was where she lived now.