Learn to Write for Yourself...And Everyone Else

In honor of paradox, I’d like to consider another bit of possibly contradictory writing advice:

1.       Know what’s going on in the market

2.       Write for yourself

Unlike this paradox, which is OMG

This is essentially saying that we should simultaneously write for ourselves, and for everyone else. Be completely selfish/be completely selfless. Write with your eyes closed/never close your eyes. Read every published work you can find/find your own voice. 

And people talking about absolutes. Anyone who deals
in absolutes is stupid. 

I can kind of make sense of this conundrum when I remember my first exposure to band. My brother was in middle school band, a trombone player. I was a fifth grader, coming with my mother to pick him up after school, and she brought me inside to see the band room and see an experience I might be able to share in, in a few years. After school, the band room was noisy. Students were practicing at random, in small clusters or solo, somehow able to concentrate on their own sheet of music while amongst the tumult bouncing between the sound-cushioned walls.

“How do they do that?” I asked my brother. “How do they hear themselves?”

“They don’t,” he answered. “Well…they do. It’s complicated. While everyone is playing, you have to ignore everyone else and completely concentrate on what you’re doing, otherwise you’ll get distracted and lose your place. But you also have to listen in to be sure you’re matching what the others are playing around you—not too loud, not too fast."

I feel that it's a good illustration of listening--but not too much. If you concentrate too hard on what other people are doing, you'll only succeed in copying them. But if we write in a vacuum, we're sure to produce works that are only appealing to us, that lack an appeal to the other human beings that are sure to make up your audience. 

Unless you have successfully cornered the "reading puppy" market. 

I feel that the "write for yourself" bit of advice most often comes from well-meaning mentors trying to keep their manatees from freaking out too much. 

Reference

For a beginning writer, trying to figure out "what the industry is doing" can be terrifying. And it makes "the industry" sound like an Orwellian force set on blocking our every move towards a successful publishing career. Thus, "write for yourself" is really a way of saying, "Chill out. Stop spending all your time trying to chart the themes in the current best-sellers list, and just write." For we learn by doing, instead of thinking about learning by doing. 

Yes...I see...

Learn How to Create

For anyone who hasn’t read my last two blog entries ("Goodbye my Darlings" and "Learn How to Copy"), it may seem obvious to encourage a writer to create, rather than copy. But in a world so saturated by stories, and a culture so obsessed by the best and worst of them, it is often difficult to separate ourselves both consciously and subconsciously from what we’ve already known. 

A friend of mine wrote a poem in 8th grade that he was incredibly proud of. It had everything a poem should - beautiful imagery, clever wording, a passionate outpouring of emotion. Then his teacher pointed out to him that he had inadvertantly copied much of the content, and sometimes almost the exact wording, from a poem by Wordsworth. 

Feeling discouraged with the fickleness of poetry, my friend grew up and became a doctor. 

But can't you see the poetry still yearning to crawl forth from his hollow smile?

I know I've fallen victim to this myself. I've cursed Orsen Scott Card several times for "stealing" several of my ideas--by writing them decades before I thought of them. 

To create something original, something both in-tune with the stories that a culture is currently consuming, while pressing forward towards something new, is difficult. It means getting uncomfortable. It means taking chances. And that may also mean turning your work into something completely different.

This is hard.

Or at least it's hard for me. You might be brilliant at it. I don't know your life.

The reason it is hard to really create, in my opinion, is because we learn through mimicry. As humans, we learn to speak by listening to others speak. We learn speech patterns and mannerisms by watching our parents communicate. 

Be open to eating warthogs and meerkats, unless they offer a greater supply of food and songs

For this reason, it is hard for us to do things we have never seen, i.e. difficult for men to act as fathers if they had no father figure in their own lives. We live, we learn, by copying.

And then, so that we do not repeat their mistakes or becomes clones of our parents, we adapt what we’ve seen. In a way, we learn history for the same reason. We learn what other people have done, both good and bad, so we can apply those lessons to our own lives. Teaching Monet in art class and Mozart in music class is the exact same as teaching Marx in economics and Stalin in government. We take those lessons and use them.  

Yes, I'm talking about painters again

I had an English teacher tell me that Shakespeare knew all of the rules, so he could break them. There is an extra step, forward movement past successful mimicry and into creation. I think few of us would be satisfied with being able to make “really, really good copies.” We want something original.  

I thought I had done it, with my decade-long novel project. I thought I had created something in a grand tradition, another piece in the puzzle that is the fantasy novel. I had mimicked and drawn something that seems so familiar and yet so very much my own.

But, no—I had very carefully and wonderfully crafted something that the world does not need—a copy.

I see now that though the world didn’t need it, I did. I needed it. To learn. I was just one step behind where I thought I was.   

Degas said—“You have to copy and recopy the masters, and it’s only after having proved oneself as a good copyist that you can reasonably try to do a still life of a radish.”

(Seriously, these painters have all the quotes)

Of course, the HOW is much more difficult. How do we press forward? How do I move past the tropes, the stereotypes?

I start by asking myself this—“Have I seen it before? Is it a character, or a theme, or a setting, or an entire universe ripped from another’s story? Am I rewriting known stories with such minor changes the differences are only superficial?

If I have seen it, if it feels too familiar…then it probably is. Try again.  

Learn How to Copy

In my last post, I wrote about my attempt over the last decade to create a new work of fantasy fiction, while accidentally recreating a list of fantasy tropes in an unoriginal, relatively immemorable fashion.  

The basic idea, however, is not a bad one. 

We should copy. 

I learned the following concept in an elementary school art class:

"Students Copy, Masters Create"

This was my interpretation of Van Gogh's White House at Night,
during the daytime, with pretty birds 

While learning, and, in fact, to learn, students copy those who came before them.

And even though I understood this concept at age seven, somehow I neglected to apply the full concept to one of the most important aspects of my life—writing—for the next twenty years. Go figure.

I assert that it is a mistake to avoid the “copy” phase of artistic instruction. I have seen this phase particularly in poetry exercises:

Write a Sonnet. Now write in Terza Rima.

Now a Shakespearean. Now take the same poem and change it to a Petrarchan,

to learn how your words must adapt.

We play with form, to see how it affects function.

While I have found this to be a staple of my poetry instruction, this same technique was not present in my ‘Creative Writing- Fiction’ classes. I say this not as a critique of those classes or my teachers, because God knows I was taught more than I could possible learn, but simply to say that it is more difficult, and, perhaps, even disagreeable to copy the masters of fiction.

I enjoy using painting as an analogy for writing instruction, simply because I feel there is a very real and immediate grasp of a visual medium. If I come upon a student copying Monet’s Water Lilies, It is obvious that student is simultaneously practicing their own art, honing their own skills, and copying the work of an artist who came before them, to see how it was done.

So...beautiful...

In the writing world, this method of practice is often lost. Are we to open Shakespeare and copy his lines word by word? Perhaps. Surely, after spending so much time writing in a Sixteenth Century voice, one can at least be sure to retain a sense of time and place. If an author were working on a period piece, this may well be a useful technique.

I shall call thee squishy, and thou shalt be my squishy

But for others, this would seem a waste of time, almost more of a punishment than an exercise, like Bart Simpson writing lines on a chalkboard. No, for true instruction, a writing student cannot simply copy a master’s words, but must recreate the same aspects of the master’s work that are copied in poetry classes. Copy form, copy function. Learn how they did it.

For instance, what if a writer were to take the content of Thoreau’s Walden, which I have often and loudly condemned as mind-numbingly dull, and write it as Edgar Allen Poe. This is a dual act, copying the content of one writer and the style of another (though, I am sure some of Poe’s content is sure to slip in. After all, there’s nothing to spice up a lonely few years at the lake like a nice murder and a spiteful ghost).

Can you imagine how many hearts would fit under those floorboards?

I have seen a writing exercise that ‘updates’ old fables—

“Retell ‘The 3 Little Pigs’ in modern day,”

or “from a feminist point of view,”

or “in space, with space-pigs.”

This is right on the threshold of the kind of exercise I am searching for. This fable has a moral and a structure simple enough to be applied to multiple settings (in fact, most of the fables do, which is why we see them redone again and again). As long as the moral and the three-turn structures is maintained (failure, failure, success; brother 1, brother 2, brother 3) the fable is still a success.

I believe it is a young writer’s fear that they won’t be true to “their voice” which keeps them from learning through copying. But why, of all the arts, should writing be so different from painting, or music, for that matter? How ridiculous would it be to have a beginning piano player refuse to play Mozart because he fears that “his own style will not be allowed to grow?”

After all, it is mastering the different voices of our characters, our settings, and our genres that creates incredible literature.

Goodbye My Darlings

This blog is my journey through my own literary mangling. Let me explain. 

"Kill your darlings" is a phrase I have heard again and again. According to this Slate article, the etymology is far more complex than I knew going into this, as I was only familiar with a passing nod to Faulkner and this Stephen King quote:

"kill your darlings, kill your darlings,

 even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, 

kill your darlings.”

I have a book. It has a long history.

At the time I am writing this, I have recently turned 27. The first idea for this book, so different from what it currently is, came when I was a freshman in high school, a dozen years ago. I was age 15, at most. It’s safe to say, I saw the world differently.

I had an idea, with a friend of mine, that moved from a genuinly original idea, to a pseudo-Pokémon rip-off, to a completely different kind of rip-off.

There was a break. Years. I guess, four of them. I was a freshman in college and I read Eragon. Anyone familiar with the fantasy genre, or YA literature, or even anyone who walked into a Books-a-Million in the last decade has heard of his Inheritance Cycle at one point or another. 

Seriously--this cover was everywhere

From those I have spoken to, Christopher Paolini seems to be the kind of writer that people either love or hate (or they loved for years and then learned to hate by talking to other people who already hated him, which, I think, is just terrible. If you’re going to hate a thing, at least be original about it).

My own feelings varied. I loved Eragon, at first read. I ate it up. I showed all my friends, my brother, and then we all read the next books together. I loved the world, the characters, the story. But what I loved most of all was that it seemed doable.

For those trying to be writers, there are authors to be admired, worshiped, and copied. Some authors sit on a pedestal—we don’t know how they did what they did. And there are those we read that, at the end, we say—“that was good. But not so very good. I could do that.”

I wrote a scene, trying to reach into the epic mystery I had felt when I read Eragon, the kind of writing built on Beowulf and Tolkien (but more importantly Tolkien building on Beowulf). It was a nonsense action scene, but I built a mythology on it. Hidden powers, statues becoming people, weaklings becoming warriors.

Like this, except with far less offensive language

I suppose I learned some things in college. But mostly I wrote. I can see it in all my notebooks. The notes were on the pages, but my attention was in the margins. Everything got applied to my story—anthropology, art, western civ, mythology, composition. Four years led to two more, and little changed. Now the stories were stranger, and my comments were too.

By this time I already had full printed copies. I finished the first draft on July 27, 2009. Then there was a second. By the third, I’d realized Office Depot could print double-sided, costing me half the price of paper. Instead of wasting $45 on these ring-bound, black plastic covered manuscripts, I was only wasting $23.

I had friends reading them. Rave reviews, of course. There was a good mix of friendly unawareness and actual helpfulness. My brother read the most. If I died today, he might be able to piece my story together just because of how many times we’ve sat and talking about it. I started querying agents in 2012.

I had some partials, but no dedicated interest. Nothing stuck. I rewrote and rewrote. Every year I created a new, dramatic file folder in my “writing” file. 2012. 2013. 2014. Each time, my book was revisited, redone. This was it, the version that would change it all. But it was still the same. Paolini, and Eragon, were amazing to me, and yet they were still criticized because they were “unoriginal,” a recreation of fantasy tropes. What can I make if I struggle to recreate the recreation?

It’s about perception. What story do I want to tell, and, most importantly, how do I want to tell it? What is my goal? To tell a story that my friends and family will read, over and over again, because they love me, or to create something real, something new?

I have to murder it. This twelve year old, fermenting piece of work. For now, I will set it down, work on other ideas that aren’t so mired in a decade of past words. Someday, I’ll pick it back up, and see what I can make of it. If it’s unrecognizable, that’s because it wasn’t going anywhere as it was.

This hurts, but not as much as failing would.