Never Let a Novelist Guest-blog

            not by Laura Numeroff

I should have written it down. Which is strange for me, because I write everything down. I burn through notebooks, always copying down odd wordings on hand-written signs or trying to get right the way the girl at Taco Bell just asked what kind of drink I wanted. But this I've let slip. I remember the gist, though: Writers are never not working. Even if they spend just ten minutes a day at the keyboard, still, those other twenty-three hours and fifty minutes of the day, they're writing. And, yeah, now I remember why I didn't write it down: because after this, the thing I'm probably not even paraphrasing -- Steven T. Seagle's It's a Bird graphic novel, about a comics writer maybe and maybe not writing some Superman stuff -- it kind of ramped down into something like "the unconscious is always cycling through the story." But then too I just read that somewhere else -- in a Richard Ford article or interview, maybe? And I didn't write it down then either, probably because I'm very resistant to romanticizing the act of writing, hesitant to ever attach psychoanalytic jargon to it it, all that. When, I mean, writing, plain and simple, it's just work, it's getting to the end of one row, dinging that carriage return, and leaning back into the next row, knowing full well there's acres and acres of rows left to go. Not saying there's not magic moments or that it's not worth the product, just that -- it could even be that, by handing responsibility over to this 'unconscious,' over which I guess I have no real control, it would mean getting all Calvanistic, saying I'm just the vessel through which this 'divine' story flows. Which in turn would make my name on that cover pretty damn moot. At which point, yeah, we're talking about the ego now, when I was trying so hard to stay off the couch. So let me begin again, if you will.

(this is how everything I ever write goes, too)

I should have written down what Seagle was saying. Because it's true. Case in point: right now -- or, since two days after Carolyn interviewed me for that podcast -- I'm writing a new novel. Tentative title, and this kind of just jinxes me in every way, but what fun are sueprstitions if you can't dare them, is Ledfeather. It's the novel I'd always planned would be third, after Fast Red Road and Bird is Gone. Except then sometime after Bird I got kind of, I don't know, disenchanted with writing that was consciously experimental, or trying to be innovative. And not at all saying that that's what an FC2 book is [Bird and Fast Red Road = FC2 books], just that Fast Red Road and Bird seemed to always get lumped 'experimental.' And, I mean, they're strange looking for sure, and that's not a bad pigeonhole to stuff them in, and, if 'experimental' is supposed to refer to FC2 books, then that's some excellent company to be keeping. What I AM trying to say, and burning all this space to say it, is that I began to question my own motives for writing such non-normal stuff: was I showing off? trying to hide behind all the diffraction and pyrotechnics? could I even write a 'straight' story, do, say, what Lynch did with The Straight Story, what Tony Earley did with Jim the Boy, or was I (consciously) spinning off into some literary sideshow, where we all appreciate each other's narrative eccentricities or something, but are pretty well insulated from the real world? All of which is itself lights and mirrors, I suspect: truth was, 'experimental' or 'innovative' had (has) become such a loaded term to me that I didn't trust myself to tease apart whether I was grafting it onto a piece or whether it was the only way that piece could express itself, or get expressed, however you understand it. Whether the shape my stories and novel took and take were some kind of valid reflection of whatever twisted, melodramatic pathways in my head or whether my own flawed act of writing was in fact the thing twisting them.

None of which has even started to get at what I meant to be saying here, about how writers are always working, I know. There's a reason I write fiction: without the mediation of characters and scenes, I just have no focus whatsoever. But to dig my way out of this hole I'm suddenly standing in: just like with pushing superstition or whatever, I finally decided to just do it and see what happened, to try my hand/pen at that third FC2 book (which they've yet to accept, even, or even see, so, really, it's a still an anyplace book, like all of them. but it's in keeping with Fast Red Road and Bird, anyway). Because you don't figure out what, say, a detective novel is just by reading them and talking about them. The only way to really grok them, to know them through and through, is to write one yourself. Same with engines: read all the manuals you want, but until you're stuck in the middle of nowhere and have to get your hands greasy if you want to keep on living, you don't know the first thing. Or -- and I think I say this in Bleed Into Me somewhere -- you don't learn not to kill things by not killing things. And, what I was, and am, trying to kill here was the so-called experimental novel. Or what that is and was for me, anyway. And no, this Ledfeather, it's not even remotely the novel I planned a few years ago. That one was supposed to take a minor character from Bird (Slugpusher), set him back in the comical Old West, and then mount some of kind of Robert Cooverish/Ghost Town assault on the whole of western myth, which is kind of the underpinning of America, I think. And I could still write that novel, I know; it's all in my head, swirling around that chrome drain that leads to my fingers. But it would just be exercise, I think (and, believe me, please, if I'm insulting anybody here, it's myself, not Coover: his Ghost Town is maybe the novel of the 20th c, for me). No, instead how this Ledfeather thing started happening was completely by accident. Like all good novels.

I was up on the reservation shooting elk and managed to find myself in the bookstore of the community college there, dropping twenty dollars I didn't have on this big thick government report thing --  a history of the Blackfeet Reservation type affair. Boring reading, of course, unless, say, that's your people. It'd be a few days before I could read it, though; there were a lot of elk to get through first, so that the next time I saw that report (it's hundreds of pages), the front was all coated in dried blood. Mine, not the elks', because the skinning knives were uselessly sharp at first, my hands just so fun to cut into (evidently). But the blood flaked off, and I just inhaled that report, every word, every boring little thing. And about halfway through, just stuck between two words that didn't even matter to each other, there was Ledfeather. The whole freaking novel. And it made perfect sense in my head. But then, a few days later, when I started thumbnailing it out onto the backs of napkins because it wouldn't stay in my head any longer, I realized that the only way to push the magic of this particular story was to do a thing to the narrative which I really don't think's been done before. Or not like this anyway.

So now, yeah, I'm in it neckdeep, trying hard just to keep it sane, to make it manageable -- to only use the straightestforward sentences I can, because that's maybe the best way to tell a story as torused as this one. It's like -- you've heard about that Russian dude who solved Poincare's big impossible math problem thing? It's way past me, though I'm sure it somehow includes or accounts for me, and all of us, but, just reading the dumbed-down explanations for it, trying to visualize the contours of space his numbers evidently describe. That's how Ledfeather is to me. If you think about it all at once, your head melts a little, so that you can kind of hear a bit of cerebellum calving off, splashing down to never be seen again. And I didn't think, after what Bird did to me, that I had any brain like that left.

Which is about where Seagle comes back into things. Or Ford. Whoever.

That first week after Carolyn interviewed me, I slammed through fifty pages, no problem, and -- I hope I'm not just saying this, either, but am probably the last person to trust on/with it, too -- really, I think it's the best stuff I've ever written. Certain pieces of Fast Red Road aside. And one particular chapter of Bird. And Demon Theory, yeah. Con looking up at what's coming for him. Nona going out to meet them. Jenny touching her brother on the arm. But I'm in love with them all, so, again, can't be trusted. Anyway, it was rolling, Ledfeather, it was happening, it was real and I was dreaming it, and by the end of the next week I was up to eighty pages, I think.

At which point a thing happened to me which, jacking around with as many novels as I've jacked around with, I've come to recognize: I hit a wall. Not of not knowing what was coming next, that's never the problem, and not of how to say it, that's always findable, if you flay enough of yourself away. No, midway through that next stretch of pages (I was promising myself not to let this particular part push past p.100, just in order to keep Ledfeather around 160/180 pages, if not less), I stopped right in the middle of a scene that was just singing, just humming along perfectly. And that was two weeks ago. Not a word on Ledfeather since then. And I'm not talking anything romantic like "writer's block" here -- writer's block's crap, plain and simple -- but a certainty that something was wrong, that I'd screwed up, and to go any farther would just compound the problem. So, for that first week of nothing, trying to figure out what was wrong, I reread those last ten pages countless times, just because, when I stop like I'd stopped, it's nearly always from a mistake I've just made, that's going to pretty seriously perturb things downstream. An oversight, an indulgence, a mis-spent not-at-all matter-less line, something like that. And then that second week, like Seagle was saying, I didn't even read Ledfeather at all. Actually, that was the week I read Seagle, and about twenty-five other graphic novels, about twenty of which I'd already read, and a few of which were pure stupid (some of those six were the twenty, too). And I also got back into the swing of teaching, of having a schedule again like the rest of the working world, and then blew my knee out on the court, and there were all kinds of other excuses not to be writing as well, but, like with writer's block, I don't accept excuses not to be writing, because that's a slippery slope you can't ever climb back up. You either write or you don't. It's not complicated. Too, I mean, I'll hardly ever take a two week break from a novel. Especially one like this, which I'm supposed to have done by March (though it may very well end up being in March). But I wasn't just going to fake my through it, either; it's too important to me, too real. It was either going to be authentic and as good as I could do if not better, or it wasn't going to be at all. And yeah, some writers will just fudge over a part they know's a little fried, because they can fix it next draft, but in my stuff, everything's always so interlocked that if you allow some wrong thing to remain, it kind of worms its way into the rest of the story until you (okay, "I") can no longer recognize it for the fake thing it is, and wind up throwing just the whole piece away, because it's thoroughly contaminated, and likely to infect the rest of your writing. And I was willing to throw Ledfeather away, even though I'd already told people I was writing it, all that useless fun.

But then I ran out of graphic novels I was interested in, so picked up a book wholly at random, just a blind stab into a jumbled thirty-two-degree sided pile I really need to be stacking -- Gene Wolf's The Devil in a Forest. And it's so so good, and not at all related to anything to do with Ledfeather, except that it too is a story, I guess. And, wholly on accident, I even sketched out this beautiful little OTHER novel, which I'm all hot and bothered to start writing NOW, please, and was about to this morning, screw everything else. Except, just out of loyalty, or maybe whatever nostalgia can accumulate over fourteen days, I thought I'd give those last ten pages of Ledfeather one last look-over, as goodbye, and there it was after I'd given up, that obvious thing I'd missed, the thing which informed and shaped not just the next chapter, but the whole rest of the book. The key which locked everything together. THAT's the thing some part of me had seen and been seeing. And now that it's there, I've got my winamp open again, my Ledfeather playlist cued up (see '*' below), and the book's cooking again, just clawing at the inside of my head, trying to bleed out my eyes, my fingertips shaking on the wallowed-out letters, all that. Which is what writing's about, I think. No, I mean, it is what writing's about. And, yeah, who knows, will I finish this thing, this Ledfeather? No clue. But then Demon Theory, and Bird, and Fast Red Road, and ATBS and (lo) the many unpublished ones, it was the same way with all of them too. I think if I knew I was going to finish any of them, knew I was going to be able to make them work, then I probably wouldn't even play anymore. Either that or I've just read way too much Conan, and have never gotten over the way he knows, each fight he goes into, that the odds are impossible this time, that there's no chance. But then he mumbles something about Crom and just wades the hell in anyway, to see what'll happen. And that's where I am right now, pretty much: this big hard-to-manage thing rearing up over me, blotting out the sun. And somehow I've got to get it down on the page. So yeah, I was lying earlier, when I said I don't like to romanticize writing. Truth is, instead of framing it in Freudian terms, I prefer to make it look more like a Frank Frazetta poster:

[ and yeah, that's a Molly Hatchet cover. Flirtin' with Disaster; Frazetta rules ]

________________________________________________________________

*

01. Cinderella - Don't Know What You Got (Till It's Gone) (5:55)
02. Warrant - Heaven (3:58)
03. Skid Row - I Remember You (5:16)
04. Poison - Every Rose Has Its Thorn (4:20)
05. Motley Crue - Home Sweet Home (4:01)
06. Guns N' Roses - Patience (5:56)
07. Kix - Don't Close Your Eyes (4:17)
08. L.A. Guns - The Ballad of Jayne (4:32)
09. Skid Row - 18 and Life (3:51)
10. Bon Jovi - Livin' On A Prayer (4:10)
11. Poison - Something To Beleive In (5:27)
12. Slaughter - Fly To The Angels (5:10)
13. Cinderella - Nobody's Fool (4:50)
14. Tesla - Love Song (5:24)
15. Def Leppard - Love Bites (5:46)
16. Jackyl - Down On Me (4:05)

Yeah, I still wish I could wear bandannas tight around my wrist, all over my jeans. But, too, that's in the minimized winamp right now, as I'm not writing Ledfeather, but this post. What's in the front winamp, I'm proud to say, is my playlist I call just 'second grade' :

01. Terri Gibbs - Somebody's Knocking (2:58)
02. Juice Newton - Queen of Hearts (3:26)
03. Barry Manilow - I Write The Songs (3:55)
04. Johnny Lee - Looking for Love (3:31)
05. Carly Simon - You're So Vain (4:18)
06. Blondie - Heart Of Glass (5:48)
07. Nick Lowe - Cruel To Be Kind1 (3:28)
08. Neil Diamond - Heartlight (4:28)
09. Waylon Jennings - Luckenbach Texas (3:18)
10. Bee Gees - How Deep Is Your Love (3:58)
11. Stevie Wonder - Ebony and Ivory (3:42)
12. John Lennon - Watching the Wheels (3:33)
13. Barry Manilow - Copacabana (At the Copa) (5:45)
14. Glen Campbell - Rhinestone Cowboy (3:18)
15. Neil Diamond - America2 (4:19)
16. Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers - All The Gold In California (2:37)
17. Juice Newton - Angel of the Morning (4:11)
18. The Moody Blues - The Voice (5:16)
19. The Romantics - Talking in Your Sleep (3:58)
20. The Who - You Better You Bet (5:38)

( I've got a sixth grade one as well, but I'm guessing I'm not to be trusted anymore, either )

Also, for Ledfeather, I'm doing a new thing: every time the winamp cycles down to Jackyl for the second time, I stop writing for the day. Or that session, anyway. Because, without these kind of external governors, I'll just go all day, not eat, not do anything of the moneymaking or 'life' variety. And, as for this post, it's only taken me down to Glen Campbell on that second grade list. So now I have a cool six songs to just coast around the net or whatever. Except of course I'm about to switch to other winamp, steal some Ledfeather time before the chicken pot pies of lunch start dinging that bell that pulls me into the kitchen . . .

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

¹I do however, always skip over this one. I mean, I have to have some self-respect, yeah? I leave it in that list mostly to remind myself that I've become more mature since second grade. And yeah, not liking that song, it's about the only way I can tell (used to, KISS's "Shock Me" was on that list -- growing up, all my money went to blood tablets -- but that just really and seriously makes all those other songs sound just a lot more 'adult contemporary' than I'm completely comfortable with).

² I always feel like such a traitor listening to this song. Like watching (and kind of liking) Outkast dressing up in green tribal gear for those music awards whenever. But maybe that's part of the attraction, too.

===================================================

( and no, I'm not all that interested in what framing writing fiction as a Conan-ish campaign might say about me. but I will admit that my biggest concern when I was twelve was where I was going to carry my sword when I grew up. because that I was going to have one, I mean -- foregone conclusion, man.  unavoidable, really.)

                                                             +++++++++++++++++++++++++

[ this Death Dealer series was so cool, really, that it inspired a series of novels, and comics -- much
as Nighthawks and Diner (81 & 82) were were not based on the 1942
Hopper painting. rather, together, they reverse-
portend, ie, 'echo,' Tom Waits' 1975
Nighthawks at the Diner ]


                                                     stephen graham jones

Comments

[Dan Wickett]

And now that you're at least closer to being grown up - have you figured out where you're going to carry that sword?

[Dan Wickett]

I'm a little surprised at no "Girlschool" by Britny Fox on 2nd Grade.

Interesting to note how you completely shut down seemingly instinctively during these novels, when you think you've done something to set yourself on a wrong path.

In the past has it not taken so much effort to find what it was that that one part of you was noticing? Have you been this close before to scrapping a whole novel, not because you decided it wasn't going to work, but because a part of you knew it had a problem, but you didn't know what the problem was?

[StephenGrahamJones]

man, and there's no excuse for this, but I never got into Britny Fox. Samantha Fox, yeah, I mean, c'mon, and FOX & THE HOUND, of course, even some Red Foxx, but I don't think I've ever owned a Britney Fox album. a big gaping hole smack dab in the middle of my musical education. or, no that'd be 'music' education, I guess. wouldn't 'musical education' involve teachers who sang algebra?

as for hitting that wall and having to lay low and cycle for a week or two, yeah, happens all the time. trick is, finally, now, I'm getting to where I can live with not writing on the thing for a week or two. and I know too that there'll always be other novels, so scrapping this one wouldn't be the end of the world, no matter how much I might think it matters. used to, though, sure, I'd cue in that I'd just made some mistake, but then I'd always force the issue, just keep writing, and writing, and would end up writing the same 10,000 word stretch over and over and over, until I fell in love with the wording or something, at which point I'm rationalizing it's non-deletion from the novel and it becomes that much harder to excise, even when it's for the good of all.

and, yeah, my everyday sword now's that Spyderco, I suppose. feel just naked without it. longest I've ever kept a carry-knife, too. I mean, going on four years, maybe five. and, sure, I've had to file the serrations off and shorten the tip, but I've yet to snap the blade. speaks better for Spyderco than for me, too, as I've become no less careless with cutting, no less shy about offering my knife for whatever. just because, like books, they were made to be used, not to sit and be pretty.

[Dan Wickett]

I don't know that I'd call it a gaping hole - being probably 17 or so at the time it was running, the video for "Girlschool" is about the only Britny Fox experience I recall having myself. It was a tough one to turn away from.

Back to your writing though - so, in the past you'd have been more likely to try to write through this section, even knowing it wasn't working all that well, vs. now, stewing over it and re-reading until you determined what was causing you the pain behind the eyes?

[StephenGrahamJones]

yeah, days gone by I'd just power through, damn the torpedoes, all that (and I have no real idea what that means, 'damning' the torpoedoes -- shouldn't it really be usefull verb of some kind? or what's that saying even from? it's got have some cultural [ie, movie] import that I've never cued into, I'g guess).

but, to get unparenthetical for a moment, unless stacked clauses are also a type of parenthesis, say, with Fast Red Road: that was a novel where I went back through and had to kill all these big wandering 20K word sections, I think. just because there'd be a mistake right at the front of that section, that was frying everything after it. but, as for killing big parts of in-process novels, Seven Spanish Angels ranks top there, for sure: at my then-editor's request, I've torn that novel down to nothing just so many times. I think maybe I go into page numbers over at the Cult interview or somewhere. I'd guess I've written at least 2000 pages just to get a solid 300 there, though. but I guess that's kind of different, too, as it wasn't so much that I was seeing somethign wrong as that my then-editor was, and he held my strings, pretty much. which, don't get me wrong, that's kind of the way it should be, I think. most editor's don't do violence to your novel unless it's for that novel's good, where 'good' is of course measured in sales. which is something, just writing the piece, it's easy to forget about. but, I mean, sure, you're messing with art, mabye even 'Art,' but you can't forget either that you're going to be plunking that Art down into the marketplace, which is the real arbiter of whether what you've written's any good or not. a lot of writers complain about the sales pressure, about the flighty audience, all that, but, the way I see it, the marketplace is the only thing that really keeps us, novelists, in line. I mean, without that pressure to have to appeal, to need to connect, all that, we'd just tell these big wannabe epic stories about this time we rode the ferris wheel when were two and spilled all our Milk Duds, and expect everybody to be interested (my prejudice: I like stories in which things happen, stories which aren't boring, that aren't all in the head, that have a plot, that don't need to be told pretty in order to be effective [not that I don't appreciate the hell out of beautiful, clean writing, I do. I just don't think that should be the final goal. rather, the writing kind of's what allows the story to percolate up into the reader's head]). but I meant not to get all nested like this. just kind of how my brain crumbles, I suppose. and now I've kind of forgot what I was saying anyway. something about torpedoes, which makes me think of Captain Nemo, which leads me to Namor, the submariner, who of course is Spock before Spock was Spock, and now I'm just going to hit that post-button, maybe hint at an apology for my lack of focus (alt-tabbing over from Ledfeather here, so the winamp's on pause but my brain's still spinning in its case, whirling out everything at once).

[Carolyn]

I wish I could say that after talking to Stephen, I'd plopped into my chair and written 50 pages of a brand new novel!

It seems to me that SGJ has a very unintrusive internal editor. One that shuts the hell up until there is something really important, then wakes up and throws all the alarms. I wish I could train mine to behave that way. Could it have anything to do with listening to Skid Row and Cinderella?

[Dan Wickett]

Maybe next weekend, Carolyln, wake up and at 10 a.m. (well, maybe it's different in Pittsburgh than here in Detroit) find your local hard(est) rock station and listen to Dee Snyder's House of Hair. 2 solid (and I'll say it, glorious) hours of 80's hair metal bands. See what it does for your writing!

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I'm not a very focused writer either. I can write about 30 things at time and not finish any of them. I keep them all works-in-progress.
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