Category: Process

The Writing Process Blog Tour

Jeanne Obbard

Thanks to K.T. Landon for tagging me in the Writing Process Blog Tour! Here we go.

 

What are you working on?  

1. The first draft of this post. It was lengthy and pretentious, so I deleted it.

2. a. Unpacking.

2. b. My current journal is an all-white Moleskine, to inspire me to be a minimalist. (So far I’m not inspired to declutter, but I’m very inspired to complain about decluttering.)

2. c. Praying to Hermes, god of communication, that Verizon fixes my internet before Poetry Grind #2 starts on Monday.

3. I was in a boring day-long meeting, so I wrote a poem about spiders and whether or not to kill them.

 

How does your work differ from others of its genre?  

I don’t really want to answer this question. Does anyone really want to answer this question? Don’t we all think we’re in a category all our own?

My thing is, I loved studying the arts in college, but my experience of the academy was that it was a lot easier to take something apart than it was to put it together, and that the two practices – both worthy – required utterly different mindsets. So I try not to let “comparison sickness” creep into my thinking about writing. If I read a lot of Milosz, I start to sound like Milosz. But eventually I just write like me again. I’m inescapable. And the only way I can define myself better is to keep evolving.

 

Why do you write what you do?  

I have such nifty, clever ideas about what to write poems about… and instead I write about what I keep stumbling over.

I keep stumbling over approximately 40 boxes of packed books, so I’m thinking a lot about their relation to life as a writer. The carefully packed boxes from ten years ago, labeled with their exact locations on the shelves – “upper right,” “lower left,” “poetry.” (It’s kind of cute how organized I was.) The new boxes I packed more haphazardly – the books signed by my dad; the book with an ancestor’s inscription and a crumbling spine; that weird little book about wabi-sabi that I keep re-reading the first half of.  

I was a better packer in my 30s, but a worse writer. I wanted everything to be finished, to be polished off. I’d labor over one poem crankily, obsessively – open with a good idea but manage to strip away every spontaneous thought, every strange locution, until it became a hollowed-out version of what a poem should be: all the parts, no heart.

And I think about how I could easily fill up my bookcases with the books I already have. But how I need my bookshelves to not be full. They can’t just be proof of where I’ve been. The poet can’t ever think she is finished. She has to keep some open space. I try not to become too rigid, too aligned, and too full of my own history and my own certainties.

I didn’t answer the question… I think the point is, I’ll probably throw away the poem about the spiders and find it was just a way for me to get to my real topic.

 

How does your writing process work?

I keep a journal, full of unrestrained self-pity. I cherish it as proof that I got through each day. And sometimes it also functions as a first draft.

Sometimes I decide I’ll write one poem each night, which is a great way to be productive, but not as good as…

…I’ve done one month-long poetry grind, which is an incredible way to be productive.

I used to think I could only compose on paper, but the grind taught me that I can also write first drafts on a laptop, and that I can let go of things, and be looser. You never know when you’ll get to the good stuff, so the key is to just keep writing.

I like it when other people participate in the same project because it alleviates my existential suffering.

 

So that’s all there is to say about me… My nominees for The Writing Creative Process Blog Tour:

Sarah Hand is a paper mache & mixed media artist and teacher. Exploring and spreading wonder and making stuff keeps her going. She lives with her husband and unruly cats in Richmond, Virginia.

Julia L. Mayer has been a Philadelphia area psychologist, specializing in women’s identity and relationship issues for over twenty years. She’s worked with numerous young women struggling with bad boyfriend issues.

 

Poetry Grind update

Jeanne Obbard

So, I’m on Day 20 of the 30-day Poetry Grind exercise. I haven’t had time to post about it because I’m writing every day and I’m worn out! Woo!

There are ten people in my group. We’ve only lost one person along the way. That means nine people have been consistently sending out a draft a day, to all the others. This is completely amazing to me. These people are serious about poetry.

Some observations, in no particular order:

1. The generosity of the medium.

You can write a poem about absolutely anything. I can’t talk about what other people have written (wish I could!), but some of my topics included:

migraines

hearing aids

cosmetology school

death

my day job

12-step programs

the Poetry Grind itself

 

2. Community.

It is really, indescribably great to get to read other people’s poems every day. This will make you look forward to your inbox. Getting to see “invisible” work: the daily work of exploring a form or a theme, the daily work of hammering away at something. I get familiar with other people’s preferred forms, and I start paying more attention to my own. I see that somebody else is willing to write about x thing, and I feel like I have permission to write about x thing.

Thinking about this experience versus the classroom/workshop experience, there’s just no comparison at all. There is real value to reading someone else’s work over the long haul, in an intensive way, especially seeing the false starts and the different angles we all try in order to get inside an idea. It opens your ears to ways of thinking and approaching the work that I haven’t gotten anyplace else.

3. Conservation of energy.

You are not allowed to respond at all. GENIUS. I find it exhausting sometimes, in a workshop, to give feedback. This way, I get all the intellectual engagement but I get to reserve my energy for my own writing.

4. Discipline.

I am forced not only to generate, but I also feel motivated to get things to a respectable place. Having an audience, even if they aren’t reading what you send, pushes me to write better things. I put a lot more effort into these drafts than I would without that impetus. I don’t give up as easily. Because I feel like, if I’m asking someone to even glance over this thing, I can make it a little better. Not perfect, just a little better than I would have otherwise left it.

A friend of mine recently quoted somebody as saying that overcoming writer’s block is about the patience to keep writing even when you’re writing terrible stuff. I’ve become willing to start over and over until I get something that starts to click.

5. Cutting your losses.

Because I’m on a deadline (midnight each night) I’ve started abandoning things that don’t work, very quickly.

Having to do it every day encourages me to let go of the previous day’s effort and move on. I know I’ll come back to a lot of these pieces, but right now, I don’t have to. This is writing as a process, not a product.

6. Poetry First!*

I love my real-world writing group, but it’s a mixed group of poetry/prose, and I often write prose in it. There is nothing like having a group of just poets.

7. Conservation of momentum.

There is no slacking. Some days, you write a three-page rant. Some days, you write a three-line blurb that you wring out of your brain at the last minute. It doesn’t matter. You keep your hand in.

 

* This reminds me of Portlandia’s Women and Women First.

women and women first

Welcome

Jeanne Obbard

So I’ve been giving some thought to the function and structure of this blog. My original vision was of a communal excercise… but shockingly, all the peeps I’d like to have writing with me here are crazy busy, and also busy putting their writey goodness, rightfully, to better purposes.

Where does that leave me? Well, I still like the idea of this space as an outlet, a place to think aloud. Because I have other writing outlets, this one sometimes gets neglected for long stretches of time. I’d kind of like that to change? But I’m not sure it’s gonna? Wow, way to commit.

I’d also like this to be more personal, and more interesting, and less pedantic, because pedantic is a huge problem of mine and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

So here are the proposed changes around here.

Change the First. Blah blah blah, less precious.

Change the Second. I’m biting the bullet and migrating the blog over to my own name. Because a) Me me me. And b) I could never, ever remember the exact web address to save my life. Going forward, if you wanna look me up, all you have to do is spell my name right. We’ll work on pronunciation later.

I started The Poetic License as an outlet for writery thoughts, from which it… occasionally… drifted… off topic. Uh, oops? I still can’t promise that all my posts will be 100% germane to the writing life and its discontents. WHATEVER. Just roll with it.

A special note on the weird photos: These are most definitely not going to change. Because there is almost nothing I like better than weird photos, taken with a totally inadequate camera. There’s a metaphor here. Give me some time and I’ll write a poem about it.

There’s probably gonna be more cursing. Sorry about that.

In poetry news, there’s so much great stuff going on; mainly – that a poet friend talked me into this craziness. (It’s awesome! It’s insane! I’m losing my mind! In a good way!) Stick around to hear all about it.

Revision

Jeanne Obbard

awesome accordion

Process of poetry revision:

Day 1. Write draft.
Day 2. Change the word “black” to “ebony.”
Day 3. Add comma.
Day 4. “Ebony” is too pretentious. Change the word “ebony” to “obsidian.”
Day 5. Change the word “obsidian” to “black.”
Day 6. Remove comma.

Repeat until insane.

Beginner’s mind

Jeanne Obbard

Overheard at the “faces” fountain:

Girl (about four years old): “What are they?”

Nana: “Faces. What happened to them?”

Girl: “They’re old.”

face in water

Natalie Goldberg talks in Writing Down the Bones about “beginner’s mind.” What is beginner’s mind exactly? That brief conversation I overheard was an unfiltered moment that, like poetry, held a lot of condensed meaning. What happened to the faces? The girl’s assessment was, “They’re old.” Old happened to them. Not old like Nana, as she clarified a moment later, but a different kind of old that she reacted to viscerally. I have many times sat by the faces fountain and thought about their peacefulness, their aura of kindness-in-death. There is something soothing about them, and also something final. I think that both the four-year-old and I were reacting to that quality. Her interpretation was rather more concise though.

arc

It reminded me of when a co-worker of mine said, “My kid says the weirdest things. He calls Center City ‘the New City.’ ” I thought, well, yeah, it is the new city. Layers of shiny skyscrapers hide the older brick and stone buildings like City Hall. “The New City” sounds hopeful and superficial both, spangled with lights and the reflections of all those mirrors. My co-worker’s son was conveying his impression very concisely. He wasn’t asking, “Does anyone else call it ‘the New City?’ ” He wasn’t filtering or censoring. He was saying what he saw. It can be very instructive to listen to the ways that children assess the world, because theirs is the “beginner’s mind” that all artists need.

house

We must unlearn the way we see things as adults. We must peel back the layers of assumption and cynicism. We must hold off on the moment of judgment. Judgment closes things down, it shuts down perception. We make judgments and assumptions as a kind of shortcut, to cope with the complexity of life, but the downside is that we then see only what we expect to see.

shadows

To get at those “first thoughts” we must become enthusiastic, vulnerable, open to our senses and to our reactions. This can be disconcerting. We may potentially be embarrassed. We may be thought eccentric or labeled “weird.” But as we practice this quality of attention, we find we can hold our senses open for longer. That “first thought” leads to another first thought. Something original sneaks though the cliches we’ve learned to apply to everything. Opening up our perception is how we begin to create original art.

clouds

Adrienne Rich, political poetry, and a confession

Jeanne Obbard

shadow

A debate on the qualities of Adrienne Rich’s poetry, and an even bigger debate on the nature of political poetry.

Ange Mlinko’s review of Adrienne Rich’s Later Poems is here.

And Carol Muske-Duke’s spirited defense of Rich is here.

I don’t totally disagree with Mlinko’s assessment of Rich’s poetry: it is cool, careful, intellectual. But it also cares intensely about women’s experience of the world. I was lucky to read Rich in college, and while I didn’t fall in love with her writing, I took away something perhaps more valuable: a sense of respect for women’s intellects. Rich was serious: she took her thoughts seriously and she opened up the possibility that I could take my thoughts seriously as well. I can’t overstate how important this was for me as a twenty-something-year-old woman.

Did I think Mlinko was trashing Rich? Not as much as Carol Muske-Dukes did. But Muske-Dukes gestures towards perhaps a bigger issue: what she sees as a particular style of writing poetry – “indeterminacy” or “playfulness,” manifesting as apolitical poetry.

It’s a debate that certainly resonates for me. Even as my admiration for women poets was cemented by Adrienne Rich and the anthology No More Masks, I was aware that my own poetry was hardly ever explicitly feminist in either subject or theme. As a college student, I wrote about rejected love, and depression, and family drama. My own assessment of my work was that it was all too inward, too minor. Those women poets who wrote to all women were my heroes; I felt I didn’t measure up.

Twenty years later, I think it’s time for me to stop feeling like a failure.* I mean, I’ve been a feminist for as long as I’ve had a coherent thought in my head; everything I write comes out of that viewpoint. Feminism means I get to take my thoughts seriously; but it also means I get to take my sensitivity and my ambivalence seriously.

I am thinking of two poems that found a home in a small literary magazine** this past year. Both were about the experience of being a teenage girl. Yes, I did the emotional work of writing about difficult memories. But I also did the intellectual work of making those fragments into poems – bringing to bear whatever skill I have to make them accessible, well-shaped, and true. These two kinds of work are both necessary to the creative endeavor; each is pointless without the other. And sometimes, finding ways to talk about the political turns out to be the same as finding ways to talk about the intensely personal.

*About this, anyway.

**Shameless promotion of a very nice journal.

How to revise a poem in 18 uneasy steps

Jeanne Obbard

Hand_sun

You approach the poem with a sense of dread and disappointment. The poem hates you, rightly, for underestimating it. You get a snack. Come back. The poem makes you tired. You try to take a nap. But you can’t really sleep. You read the first couple of lines again. You realize that it starts much too blandly; it needs to start where the action is. You look up a single interesting line in another failed poem and type it at the bottom of the page. You go back to the middle and type, “something about this friendship dynamic. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Stop trying to describe everything. Please change this title, it’s awful.”

You go back to the first line. Phrase it differently. You must continually crush the desire to write a book report or convince the reader of your point. You must give up the idea that you even know what the point is. You pick out the two or three most vivid images or feelings. They make you think of something else… something you’ve thought for a long time, something you’ve been afraid to say. Fear! The fear feels good. You can’t lecture your reader when you’re afraid. You follow the fear. Now a whole cascade of things is happening. Time kind of collapses.

Now the poem has a completely different shape; you’ve said some things that you really like. The danger is that now you’re kind of in love with the poem, but it’s infatuation rather than true love. So you have to resist looking at it for a while. When you finally have some distance, the cliches stand out like plastic bouquets in a field of blown grasses. Oh! I hate that I wrote those cliches! You delete them with a feeling of righteous, destructive glee.

It goes on like that: keep reading the poem over and over; skim over the good lines and keep fiddling with the weak parts. Sometimes you realize that what you thought were good lines were actually clever lines masquerading as good lines, so now you have something else to fix.

At some point, the poem is at its peak. Unfortunately, this is also a very fragile moment. Because now you have to stop working on it. If you keep re-writing it, it will start the return trip to banality. Also known as “work-shopping” a poem.

So that’s revising – which is another word for “writing,” which is another word for “re-creating.” It’s an adversarial process, but adversarial in the sense of Jacob wrestling with the angel.

A short list of the best books for creative writers

Jeanne Obbard1 Comment

Well, it's a very specific list -  books that help the creative writer understand their creative practice better.

I know there are people who just do it, and don't do things like stop writing for months at a time, or have to examine why they stop writing for months at a time. Ahem. But for those of us who do benefit from insight into how we work and why we create at all, these can be amazing resources.

The Artist's Way – Julia Cameron

Cameron has written a lot of books about creativity since, but this one is still the gold standard for creative recovery.

Fearless Creating – Eric Maisel

After you've been gently coaxed by Julia Cameron's warmth, Maisel is a nice brisk kick-in-the-pants. He's particularly insightful about how to successfully manage the anxiety of the creative process.

Writing Down the Bones – Natalie Goldberg

The best for turning off your inner editor and getting first drafts down on paper.

If You Want to Write – Brenda Ueland

“I learned…that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.”

Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft."

 

Any that I missed? Please share in the comments! 

The practice of imperfect

Jeanne Obbard

So I re-started a practice I used to do: write a poem every night, before sleep. It’s the time when I’m most relaxed, and least coherent. I have no to-do list. I have no expectations. Most nights it’s hard going. I have a habit of trying to explain everything, describe it to death. I’m pedantic, dry, scholarly. I keep banging away at an idea, but there’s no magic. The results are deadly.

But some nights, I’m lucky. Some nights a good line will just arrive. As Mark Doty puts it in The Art of Description:

It’s a familiar experience to poets, that arrival of a phrase laden with more sense than we can immediately discern, a cluster of words that seems to know, as it were, more than we do.

More and more, I’m looking forward to this exercise, maybe forty minutes in all, when I write down, “Write a poem. What poem?” and then just begin. What am I going to write about? I might come with an idea – write about camellias, how they bloom in December; or write about the ragged ear of a friend’s tomcat – but I almost never get anything out of these mental notes. No. It’s the thing I don’t want to write about that owns all the energy in the room. While discoursing on the cool and scentless camellia blossoms, some complaint will come up, a statement of longing or loathing. If I’m smart, I’ll willingly go off on that tangent.

I suffer occasionally from a whole night’s worth of insomnia – it was on one of those nights, in a state of exhaustion and gloom, that I wrote – “the blue soak of dawnlight” – and in that phrase was a strangeness and an energy. Something melancholy and synesthetic. The draft took on momentum from there.