This Much is True

Sometimes when you are stuck in your writing and don’t know where to go next, maybe music can push you out of that rut. Music is my muse. Always has been. I envision whole scenes in my head according to a song and certain songs represent a scene, a chapter or a whole book when I’m writing. I don’t listen to them when I write, only when I’m thinking about my story and doing my internal writing. Then by the time I write a scene, I can already picture what is going to happen; I just have to write the words. It is the soundtrack of my stories. I have a different playlist for every book (it used to be a different CD for each one and before that a different cassette). The soundtrack for this much is true includes (but is not limited to) the following songs (those of you who have read the book may be able to figure out which ones were used to write certain parts but not all are obvious. Some are just for a certain piece of music or a certain beat.):

Ennis Sisters — No Change in Me
Cowboy Junkies — This Street, That Man, This Life
Jann Arden — To Sir With Love
Jann Arden — Insensitive
Stevie Nicks — Sometimes It’s a Bitch
Queen — Too Much Love Will Kill You
Luba –Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry
The Knack — Good Girls Don’t
Eurythmics — Last Time
Lifehouse — Sick cycle Carousel
Timber — The Whole Way Home
Barstool Prophets — Friend of Mine
Holly Cole — I’ve Just Seen a Face
Toby Keith — We Were in Love
Garth Brooks — Friends in Low Places

I’m getting a pretty good soundtrack for the book I am working on the most right now. I’ll share that on another day.

It doesn’t really matter if you outline your stories, write every day or only when the muse calls to you. What really matters is that you get the clay on the table. A sculptor doesn’t try to place his clay on the table in such a way that it looks great as soon as he has all the clay there. No, he plonks it down without caring much how it looks at that time. Only when the clay is on the table does he start to mold it and shape it, making that ugly lump into something beautiful. A writer should feel the same way.

You can’t edit a blank page so you have to get your words out and then you can fix them up. As Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird, you have to give yourself permission to write shitty first drafts (if you only buy one book about writing, I recommend Bird by Bird be the one). Don’t worry about anything at this stage in the process. Just get it out. Punctuation, spelling, word choice, phrasing, even plot can be changed later. That’s the shaping part. First you have to get the words down on the paper.

When you’re getting that clay out, don’t listen to the editor in your head, don’t wonder what your aunt or your ex-boyfriend will think of this if it gets published. Don’t even think of publication. That stifles you and makes you nervous. Don’t let anything stop the flow of words and ideas onto your page.

My first drafts are usually full of this: [?]. A question mark in brackets follows anything I’m not sure of. Inside the bracket marks I will also put whatever I need to change/research/double-check later. I don’t stop the flow to find out what the name of the character I introduced in the first chapter was, I just put [?that character who hit his mom?] there instead. If I use the same word four times in a paragraph or use a word or phrase I think sounds lame I’ll write or type [?better word?] after it. If you wait to find the perfect word, those other words after it might not come out the same.

Lots of people say they want to write a book. I think many of them probably can. The thing that stops them from doing it is the idea that the writing has to be perfect. It doesn’t. But it does have to be written or typed or recorded or whatever your method of writing is. So turn off the editor in your head, let yourself write a shitty first draft and get the clay on the table. It will work. Of course, that means that you will eventually have to get to the part of writing I hate, the editing part. But don’t worry about that now. Just write and enjoy the freedom of not having to get everything perfect as you create.

I had an interesting question posed to me the other night (at my fun birthday party). My friend asked me how I get time to write with a two-year old in my life. I answered that I can write anything, anytime and what I meant was that I don’t always write but when I do get the time and the urge, I can spew out a lot at a sitting without much trouble. A lot of it may be crap but it does come. I think it is because I have a variety of projects on the go at any one time and the fact that I do a lot of internal writing.

Huh? I can hear you say. Internal writing? Let me explain. I don’t write daily in that I don’t sit down with pen and paper or Alphasmart Neo and produce actual writing that anyone else can read. I do, however, write in my head. On any one day in my head there can be numerous worlds, a bunch of conversations, and various “scenes” that I can see. People live in there so by the time I get a chance to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, they come out and all the conversations they’ve had and situations they’ve been in, just pour onto the page without my having much control over them at all. I become a stenographer for them and I record what they do or say, laughing with them if they are funny and crying with them if they are sad. It is as if I am reading someone else’s writing and reacting to it that way.

The truth is that if I do get the chance to write a lot, I end up creating more and more of those “scenes” in my head to the point that it is hard to live in the real world. I snap at my husband and lose patience with my child because they are interrupting these other worlds of mine. Sounds like a mental illness, I know but it’s true. On the flip side, if I don’t get to write them out of my head from time to time, they pile up and the same thing can happen. Everyone has a different way to write. There are some like me while others need a schedule and a time of day to write every day. Some often have large chunks of time every day like eight hours a day. My husband says that if I wrote eight hours a day, we couldn’t afford the mass of paper I would create. The truth is that I would probably go insane. So, I’ll stick to it this way for now. Maybe those other people have to have their work perfect as they write it and I don’t write that way. My motto is that you have to get the clay on the table. More about that on another day.