Patterns in the Noise

The ability to allow sloppy prose to fill the page, ignore MS word’s blood-red squiggles and green-grammar nagging is certainly an act of faith. When I first tried this method, I had strong doubts that I’d understand my early drafts, much less find anything of value in them to make the effort worthwhile. This was not the case. Instead, I found myself able to decode haphazard gibberish days, weeks, even months later. Discovering meaning in messy drafts led me to create them with abandon. Now, I write them with a feeling that’s suspiciously close-kin to confidence; where I once feared drowning in a sea of noise, I now find, on the worst of days, the lack of comprehension only reaches my waist. 

 

Against the repeated warnings of my attorney, I’m going to argue that fiction writers not only listen to but trust the voices in their heads. Of course, for some of us this may not be the best guidance – but let’s imagine Joe Stalin adjusting the garnish of a picture-perfect omelet in the foreground (ignore the charnel house just behind him) and talk some serious shop. After all, writers who aren’t ruthless in the pursuit of crafting better fiction cannot hope to produce work that’s even remotely interesting.  And, frankly – if writing a story doesn’t strain your emotions, if it doesn’t make you feel somewhat vulnerable, you’re probably not doing it right.

But what about the worst of writing sessions? What about the crabbed notes scratched out during some constipated-creative drought? What about fever scrawling, produced in a cold sweat with three bottles of Robitussin down the gullet and a Thrill-Kill Cult track blasting on auto repeat? How can I argue something worthwhile can come from the hot mess generated in such a state?  I don’t know how it happens. It just does. In the majority of my roughest of drafts, I can locate patterns of meaning within the noise. More importantly, these patterns often lead to something raw and genuine: unlikely angles, weird points of entry, or disconcerting descriptions that I’m unlikely to produce otherwise.

Watch this hustle to be clear: I’m not saying the explosive, bottled-up frustration I describe is something universal, normal, or healthy. Nor am I prescribing some insipid activity like free writing or the use of chemicals. How you do what you do is your business. What I’m advocating is the hyper-development of negative capability. I’m advocating a wholehearted embrace of ambiguity and faith that the chaos and clamor of the roughest draft might lead to improvements and innovations that are substantive and worthwhile.

Don’t limit yourself to trusting the drafts that are going well; shit – those are cause for celebration.  Instead, trust there is something worthwhile in those scrawled pages damp with coffee or that word document typed all in caps. What’s worthwhile may end up being the majority of what’s on the page, or it may only be a fragment; but trust that something of value will happen within the noise. Then get loud.

 
AJ Ferguson holds an MFA in fiction from Florida Atlantic University where he teaches writing. Most of his free time is spent working on a novel-in-progress and various other projects. You can keep up with his most recent forays and misadventures at: aj-ferguson.com.

When the Cats Eating Their Food Gets Too Loud, Simplify

Lately I’ve been staring at blank screens, the cursor blinking, unable to write. If there was no computer in front of me, an onlooker might think I was meditating or sleeping. I start sentences, build opening paragraphs, then highlight them all at once and demolish them with the delete button.

I don’t believe in writer’s block in the same way I refuse to acknowledge being sick. I’ll fight it off, with drink, inspiration, pacing, and often all three at once. Starting a story, confronting the blank page, is one of the hardest things a writer has to deal with, and despite my constant starting, deleting, starting, deleting, in the larger scheme of things I believe I’ve actually learned something important. Well maybe two things, but they’re related.

First, some pressure is good in most endeavors because pressure (even self-imposed) produces action, and sustained action leads to improvement. However, too much pressure is usually counter-productive, as I feel it has been for me. Athletes and writers aren’t much different; a tense body, or a tense mind in this case, doesn’t allow for proper functioning, and so you end up missing free throws, or ruthlessly deleting sentences. You over-think, grow frustrated, and maybe start yelling at your cats for eating their dry food too loudly. How to pull back from this kind of mental paralysis is the second thing that I learned.

As I was about to break an empty beer bottle on the edge of my desk and threaten my cats with it for distracting me with their relentless appetites, something simple and seemingly profound occurred to me. I scrambled to write it down on a sticky note; it has been my North Star ever since. In black felt-tip pen it said: “It’s all about themes you choose to explore.” There are many ingredients to consider when you sit down to write: where’s it happening? What are the character’s names? What’s the first line? Etc, etc, etc. These are all important, but in my own experience, the theme of what you’re writing is often overlooked, but maybe it shouldn’t be. Like a bear hit with a tranquilizer I felt myself relaxing, I lowered the bottle slowly, and I was finally able to approach my writing with a renewed sense of purpose.

By thinking more about why I was writing a story, and less about how I should be writing it, I found that deciding where a story takes place, or what point-of-view it should be told from, could be answered more easily by thinking about what I was trying to say by writing the story in the first place. By choosing to focus more on theme, I simplified my approach and was thus able to stop myself from over-thinking, and my mind seemed to exhale as a result. As writers with arduous careers in front of us, it’s easy to let the pressure to produce wear us down, but finding ways to build ourselves back up might be just as important, for us and our loved ones.

Dan Kennard currently teaches at Keiser University in Port St. Lucie, FL and lives with his wife and three cats.

That Great Cathedral Space: My First Year Post-MFA, Part Two

“I don’t know. Emma as you see is the foundation

of my house. Toni is the perfume in the air.”

~ Carl Jung in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method

Everyone believes they’re a writer until they realize the expenditure. It is only then that most (not all, but almost most) recognize that they were only pretending.

            I’ve found myself having to mistressize my writing. I’m forced to hide it away in my office (when the baby is napping and the wife is busy struggling to decide how to properly consume her own little crumb of free time), at work on my breaks, in the “super-secret” notepad app on my IPhone, and various writing journals I’ve covertly deployed throughout our townhouse. I hide it from friends. I hide it from family. Most importantly, I hide it from my wife because—in the event that we do have free time—she (as well as I, because I am the caring husband-type, despite what I’ve written beforehand) usually likes to spend it together, given that we never, ever, ever get any time alone. And there is where the legendary “rub” lies.

            For persons like myself who didn’t grow up with a whole lot, survival becomes a desperate game of shadow boxing against your environment/condition, because poverty behaves like a bully: every day slapping you across the face and kicking you in the solar plexus. You’re left with no choice but to develop an imaginary feud with it—a feud you learn to carry every single day of your life, for the duration—until it carries you out of that margin and into that great cathedral space that you can’t help but only imagine exists above it.

            Now, as it relates to writing and the writing life, this is an approach that the serious writer has to assume in order to survive. I’m not advising writers to approach writing with a combative attitude—save that for Call of Duty marathons online. I’m simply suggesting that an aggressive attitude can and will keep the keyboard, and you, alive. Let’s face it: this lovely game of ours, in its own twisted way, does function similarly to online battle games, save for one major difference: even though failure begets the same sort of figurative death, the aim is survival and not just mindless carnage.

            I’ve managed to lift myself out of that margin and into a better place, however, not without a few spells of knuckling-up. And even while I am more than happy with the situation I find myself in, I’m still not completely satisfied with it—not without the level of writing/professional success that I’ve come to expect out of myself. My wife, my daughter are the foundations of my life. However, writing will always be that lovely “perfume in the air.” It’s another little feud I’ll have to carry-on forever, but one what I’m willing to uphold at any and all costs.

            Why? Because a writer lives the way a shark does: we swim constantly and endlessly or else we float to the surface and die off. 

  

A graduate of Florida Atlantic University's MFA program, Michael J Pagan's work has appeared in The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, The Coachella Review, The Nervous Breakdown, CommuterLit, Gone Lawn other publications. He is a fiction reader for Burnside Review. He lives in Deerfield Beach with his wife and daughter where he continues work on his first poetry manuscript, With a Bullet, Sparrow Voices, along with his first stage play, PING. You can read his blog, The Elevator Room Company, here: thelevatoroomcompany.blogspot.com.

A New Year for new habits (good ones)

Writing is an act of pure discipline.  No one demands I transfer thoughts (hopefully significant) to paper or computer screen.  No one leans over my shoulder or paces around the table encouraging me or yelling at me to get it done. 

Due to the metamorphosis of thought into written language, the solitary process of writing requires an enormous amount of discipline.  We’re taking the already difficult attempt at communication, and then striving to construct a complex piece of literature.  As writers, our task lies in this evolution of communication.  Some people might say, “I write for myself.”  While this is a great starting point (and the only one I know of), the completed work should ideally be accessible to some sort of target audience. 

I’ve strayed from discussing my point about discipline, but I think my purpose behind writing should be revealed in order to provide a reason for developing fierce, and I mean fierce, discipline.  I recently finished Stephen King’s memoir about his life as a writer (thanks, Meg Mary, for lending me the book).  King states that to be a true writer, you must take that shit serious - you can’t tinker with it here and think about it there.  In his early years, every day after work he closed the door of the laundry room in his doublewide and wrote for four hours.  Door shut, alone in a room, balancing a typewriter on his lap, he worked while his wife (who has always supported him and is a published author in her own right) watched the children - he existed in a sphere of solitude and self-discipline (I don’t intend to sound sexist, for the women writers the husband can sit his ass in the other room watching the children and leave you to your work as well).  

During my first semester fiction workshop with Professor Furman, we read a book about Emerson on writing, and an Emerson quote stuck with me: "The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent."  To me, Emerson is stating that writing is an all or nothing endeavor, so to be a serious writer you can’t half-ass it.

I can be extremely undisciplined by nature, so striving for rigorous self-control can be a brick wall sometimes, but once I get that first sentence down, the brick wall begins to fade, thoughts connect, and I make sure to ride that momentum to at least 500 words.  Which to me is not near enough (and I don’t write 500 words a day, but when I can, I sure as hell do).  I think King remarked that he writes 2,000 words a day. 

I’m not saying we all have to be as prolific as Stephen King, but what we do is not what “normal” people do, therefore, we must be abnormal in our work ethic.  In order to become writers, I believe we must go beyond other peoples’ capabilities in terms of perseverance and work ethic. 

A few notable authors’ writing habits:

Maya Angelou - 10–12 pages of material a day, which she edits down to three or four pages in the evening.

Graham Greene - counted each word, and would stop for the day at 500, even if he were in the middle of a sentence.

James Joyce – “In the pantheon of great writers of the last century, Joyce looms large. And while more prolific writers set themselves a word or page limit, Joyce prided himself in taking his time with each sentence. A famous story has a friend asking Joyce in the street if he’d had a good day writing. Yes, Joyce replied happily. How much had he written? Three sentences, Joyce told him” (writetodone.com).  (Personally, I’d suggest writing more, we can’t all be James f-ing Joyce, nor should we be.)

Jack London - between 1,000 and 1,500 words each day.

Joyce Carol Oates – “I try to begin work as early as possible, 8:30 a.m., perhaps, and I try to work until past noon or 1 p.m. I try again to write in the evening. Much of my writing is ‘remembering’—I imagine scenes, entire chapters while running or walking—I am very dependent upon this meditative quiet time.”

Currently, Ben Hill Parham is an MFA - Fiction student and GTA of English composition in the FAU creative writing program.  He grew up in LaGrange, GA drinking beer around big fires.

From Grad Student to Assistant Professor, Episode One: Time Management

            After almost ten years of higher education—of interacting with faculty and observing them on a daily basis—this past semester, it was finally my turn. I love my job even more than I suspected I would, though being an assistant professor is much more than I ever imagined it would be: more fun, more challenging, more exciting, and, yes, more work. I've learned a lot over the past few months, including: most aspects of this career are truly great, departmental meetings are not fun and will take twice as long as they were supposed to, and time management is everything.

            Being a faculty member is a curious mix of freedom and obligation. The biggest thing to change for me this semester is the way that I look at, understand, and manage my time. In some respects, being an assistant professor affords me a tremendous amount of discretion regarding how I spend my time, which I love. The only hours that are truly spoken for are the ones that I spend in the classroom. However, teaching and time spent preparing to be in the classroom is just the tip of the academic iceberg. As a grad student, I never really thought about the job of a professor as being a 30-30-40 time split between teaching, service, and scholarship. As a new professor, however, finding a balance between the three has been essential.

            The way that I looked at my writing, both creative and scholarly, also changed when I started my job. The reality of the academic system is that as soon as you sign a contract, the promotion clock starts and everything you do becomes a quantifiable measure of your professional success. For me, this was actually a good thing because it made me block out time every day devoted to writing and sending out work, establishing a routine that I've struggled with in the past. I've also learned that designating time is a necessity, because  if you don't claim time for each thing that you want to accomplish, that time disappears.

            The service category was somewhat of a mystery to me when I began my job last August, and in hindsight I feel a little silly for worrying that there wouldn't be enough opportunities (ha!) for me to fulfill this requirement. Fear not, future professors—service opportunities abound. Committees and meetings are a fixture of the academic environment, and I had no idea how involved and time-consuming they can be. Though meetings themselves can be tedious, I ultimately really enjoyed the service-related work that I did this past semester, which included being on a job search committee, running an essay contest, and volunteering at events.

            My first semester as faculty was a wonderful experience. I get to teach thoughtful, dedicated students in a fun, dynamic environment, and I also get to pursue my own writing outside of the classroom. While the first semester learning curve was somewhat steep, and I certainly wouldn't mind a few more days of winter break, I'm very excited to have a job that I love and I'm looking forward to getting back to work.

Courtney Watson is an alumna of the FAU MFA program and an Assistant Professor of English at Jefferson College of Health Sciences in Roanoke, Virginia. Her writing has recently been published in 100 Word Story, Into the Willows, The Inquisitive Eater, and more.