Monthly Archives: April 2011

How is Popcorn like Writing?

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One late Friday night not long ago, when I was preparing a manuscript for a group, or prepping a presentation for a workshop, or meeting some kind of a deadline that loomed like a tsunami on Saturday morning’s horizon, a friend called to check in on me.

“What’d you have for dinner?” he asked. He’s a man who knows about such things as cooking salmon in parchment and layering seared scallops atop little houses of shaved carrots, sprinkling the whole thing with 10-year-old Balsamic vinegar.

box of popcorn“Popcorn,” I said.

He laughed. It sounded derisive, like a snort. “That’s like filling up on air.”

I was glad I hadn’t mentioned the M&Ms.

But his point was taken. Eating popcorn for dinner is a lot like reading a book or story or article that has no depth. It may fill my stomach (or my time), but not with anything of substance or anything that will nourish my life.

How can writing be like popcorn? (Warning: Mixed metaphors ahead.)

Sometimes a writer skates on top of a subject. Or tap-dances around the edges. The writing is glib and clever and absolutely without a trace of depth. After you’ve read it, you feel like you’ve just eaten a bag of popcorn—filled with air. You didn’t get to know the characters, so you didn’t care about them. You didn’t get lost in the story or caught up in any drama. You didn’t get taken to your own depths. So what? you might say when you finish . . .  if you finish. Disappointment is what you’re left with. Like the old song, Is that all there is?

What can get in the way of “going deeper” in your writing?

For starters:

  • Being in a hurry to finish
  • Knowing the end or what happens next, so there are no surprises (You know what they say, No surprises for the writer, no surprises for the reader.)
  • Afraid of boring the reader (who cares about all that?)
  • Or the writer herself is bored (I don’t care about all that.)
  • Afraid of opening a whole can of worms  (if I go there, then I might have to go there. If I write this, it means I have to change that.)

Then there are the fears:

  • Fear of exposure
  • Fear of what might be discovered or revealed
  • Fear of discovering there’s nothing there. That you don’t have a deep place. (Oh, but you do. you do.)
  • Fear of being lost
  • Fear of being vulnerable
  • Fear of losing control
  • Fear of taking risks
  • Fear of telling secrets
  • Fear of “falling in” and not being able to get out
  • Fear of feeling the feelings
  • Fear of surrendering to the page
  • Fear of the stillness

popcorn piecesAnd all the “nots”

  • Not trusting your intuition
  • Not trusting the process
  • Not trusting your own writer’s voice
  • Not trusting the reader
  • Not focused
  • Not paying attention
  • Not listening (to the story or the characters)
  • Not able to be still

There may be some characteristics that show up in life as well as writing:

  • Lack of curiosity
  • Dishonesty, intentional or otherwise
  • “Settling” (that’s good enough)
  • Lack of passion
  • Lack of commitment

Cynthia Ozick said, “If we had to say what writing is, we would define it essentially as an act of courage.”

Besides courage, it takes time and patience and caring to go deeper in your writing. Be a courageous writer.

P.S. My favorite way of eating popcorn is mixing in a handful of M&Ms when the popcorn is still warm. Yum yum. More popcorn recipes

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh! for a Room of My Own

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… a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.  –Virginia Woolf

My messy room

Lately, like an old dog looking for the perfect place to nap, I’ve been setting myself up to write at various locations around the house. Clearly, my office is no place for a writer. My day job’s constant muttering for attention is too distracting. A few times last week I slid out the little table on the roll-top desk in a corner of the dining room. It’s neat and orderly and the light is beautiful and I was glad for the work that got done there. A corner of my bedroom with its comfy chair and wobbly portable desk works fine for morning coffee and journal writing, and I’ve extended a few of those mornings to include working on the novel there, too. But for some reason, of late I can’t seem to “rise above the setting, with its comforts and distractions” as John Updike told us we must do.

That Updike quote is from the introduction to one of my favorite books about writers and how they work—Jill Krementz’s The Writer’s Desk, which features photographs of 57 writers in their rooms, among them Tennessee Williams, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Eudora Welty, Joyce Carol Oates. The pictures are dramatic black-and-whites that intensify the glamour of the writers and the place they do their work.

Montaigne's Solitarium

And of course, the monks of old had their scriptoriums, holy places where they would go to create their illuminated texts and Montaigne had his Solitarium, with its truths carved into the beams above his head.

I don’t know about you, but I fantasize that if I had the perfect writing place, the writing would come easier. If I had that book-lined room with its view through the trees and the rippling song of the little creek that passed below . . . if I had that wooden deck with its dappled light and napping couch . . . if I had a beautiful writing desk like Virginia Woolf’s with fat peonies in a glass bowl  . . . not only would my writing be better, I’d be a better person, too.

Virginia Woolf's Desk

(insert sigh here)

In workshops I sometimes invite writers to describe their ideal writing space, then compare this dreamed-of niche with their current space. What’s the same? What’s missing? What can you change to bring the real more in line with the wished-for? Writing about this, we can discover what we need to inspire and support us and what makes us feel comfortable and safe. We need to feel safe both psychically and physically to endure the free-fall that writing can be.

This is a good exercise for a writing practice session. Shall we give it 17 minutes?