So You Want to Write

by Marge Piercy

  Another example: you loathe violence and are strongly for gun control. You can’t imagine why any sane person would want a gun in the house. Another person in the group writes a cop procedural that has a lot about firearms in it. You would never pick up this book, but here you are listening to descriptions of how to bring down a suspect without deadly force and with it. Nobody is asking you to join the NYPD. But you owe it to your fellow participant in the workshop to listen carefully or read carefully and give that writer the feedback that will enable him to write a better police procedural, not an anti-gun tract.

  We can help each other in small and undramatic, daily, weekly, monthly ways. We can help by being ready to listen. We can help by reading each other’s manuscripts. Often it is easy to get friends to read something in print—everyone wants a copy of a book, not understanding the author is limited to a small number of copies depending on the contract—but very few are really willing to put the time into a manuscript. (They may insist that they are, but just wait and see how long it gathers dust beside their bed.) Yet that is the one important time for input. After a book is printed, criticism is interesting but not useful for improving the object. When a book is in manuscript, it can still be altered. Then is the time that criticism, that the willingness of others to read and to be generous with their time and involvement, is most meaningful.

  We can help when another writer has trouble working. In Vermont, several women I know formed a small group. They worked together in the same house, so that each kept the others working, prevented the giving way to temptations or interruptions. It was a fixed time for work and nothing else. In addition, they read each other what they had written at fixed intervals and gave each other vital feedback.

  In Chicago, when I was completely unknown and quite invisible, I joined other unknown writers, African-American and white, in a small group that met regularly and gave each other criticism and hope. Without that small group, I don’t think I would have stopped writing, but I would have written more slowly.

  Parents can form a playgroup with other writers who have children. This would free up certain days for work at the cost of perhaps one day a week. Where there is a willingness to help each other, a commitment to midwifing each other’s creativity, we will find ways.

  I feel guilty if I don’t write, but I observe that sometimes writers who view writing primarily as self expression may feel that writing itself is an indulgence. A person may even feel guilty about writing. Nobody asks you to do it to begin with—to create something new. You’re solely responsible for the content, which may be revealing and contrary to how you’re told you should feel. But most important, when you sit down to write, you imply that what you are saying, what you choose to take the time and space and resources to say, is more important than anything else you could be doing at the moment in service to others. Tillie Olsen has written eloquently about the long silence of women—about the heartbreaking times of trying to combine mothering, working, and writing and how she lost much of what she wanted desperately to create. Time, time, unbroken chunks of time.

  We may be taught only certain emotions are permissible to express. When we begin to write, we may find those old inhibitions and prohibitions now internalized as a censor, changing the work in revision or else stopping it before it can get out. The inner censor sets limits to what I dare to say of what I feel and know and see and think. Self censorship for all writers has similar roots. You are afraid that people will say, that’s ridiculous. Nobody acts that way (except you). No one else feels that way toward her child/spouse/lover/mother. You have to have a commitment to the truths wrung from yourself as well as the truths already made public by common struggle or history.

  For women, many of our experiences were dumb to us, unnamed, unpossessed because misnamed. I had insights at fifteen that I would seize again at twenty-six and lose because I had no intellectual framework in which they might fit and be retained. As writers we are always asking in public through our work whether our experiences and those of other people with whom we empathize and from whom we create, are experiences common to at least part of the population, or whether the experiences we are working with are singular, bizarre. There are inner censors that make shallow or imitative or tentative or coy the work of a writer, often through fear.

  Voices speak in our heads that tell us we are brazen to admit certain things, that we should be ashamed. We may fear to offend those with power over us or hurt those we wish to love us or those we wish to please. We may fear what those whose politics or religion we share and whose good opinion we rely on may say about work that deals with a contradiction in our mutual politics or religious values, and the contradictions between ideology or belief and action. Yet such contradictions are rich to writers. Often we grasp our characters most firmly in those moist irrational interstices between intention and delivery, between rhetoric and greed, between image and fear.

  Shame can get in creation’s way. We all have notions of what we should be. A writer had better have considerable tolerance for that gap between what we would like to be and what we are in a daily way; at the same time, I think it helps a writer to have experience of how extraordinary people can be in situations that stretch them utterly. Sometimes we are ashamed of what moves us or how much we are moved; at other times we feel we ought to have been moved and we try to pretend. We don’t only fake orgasms; people have faked orgiastic appreciation of many things that bored and even affronted them, from the Grand Canyon to their party’s heroines and rhetoric, to the current literary fad or lion.

  As a poet and as a novelist, I have to believe that when I go into myself honestly to use what I find there, that it is going to speak to you. Some of our experiences are similar and some are different, but the naming of both liberates us. The recreating of the experiences, the use of the feelings that may be different feels more dangerous to me, as if I may stand alone in saying those; yet I think these experiences are important too for us. So much of our lives have been lived in the dark, in ignorance of what others think and feel and experience. Many of our notions about what others’ lives are like are simplified images from the media.

  Exercise:

  Often we ask participants in a workshop to sit in silence and think about their lives and what they have written about, and then to think of something that made them ashamed or afraid, that they have never written about. Something they were reluctant to share with others. You might want to make a list of subjects about which you have never written—not lions and tigers and earthquakes and space travel, but things inside yourself, the hidden or secret side of yourself. After you have finished a short list, read it to yourself and imagine what or how you might write about one of those items on the list. Do you need to employ one of the distancing techniques we spoke of in an earlier chapter? Fictionalizing it? Using third person? Creating an alternate universe? Do you need to seek permission to tackle it from someone you love? From yourself? Do you feel you might need legal advice?

  Suppose that a person writes what she must. That is only the first step in being a writer. The work must survive the moment of its creation. It must get out to an audience. She or he must dare to show the work. She must risk ridicule, misunderstanding, scandal, condemnation, and what’s often worse, none of the above: silence. No attention at all.

  Many people do manage to write, but then hide their writing. This is writing as self-expression, but not as communication. There can be no feedback, no sense of success or failure, no sense of outreach, of impact on the world. This is to act, but to pretend not to have acted and take no consequences for one’s act.

  Occasionally the supermarket tabloids run a story about parents who have a baby and then shut up that child in a room. (I know you would only glance at these papers while standing in the checkout line, of course!) The headline reads: “Diapered 23 Year-old Found in Cleveland Apartment, Chained to Playpen.” I suppose it comes from not cutting the umbilical cord.

  Once the work is done, it
’s ready for its own life. Your art is not you. It exists on its own. Others will take it, use it, abuse it, carry it off. It is their right to do so. There is a necessary letting go in artistic production, a point when you permit what you have made to depart from you and begin its own history. You will hear from it, or more accurately, hear about it from time to time in a fan letter, a hate letter, a review. However, it’s not you but it. There must be some mental discipline to make this distinction, a very important one for preserving sanity.

  Writers who meet together to support and criticize each other’s work can easily spawn readings—anyplace, at bookstores, at coffeehouses, at schools, in nursing homes and hospices, in restaurants, at universities and libraries, in galleries, at festivals. Often groups or cooperatives of writers can get readings that would never be available to any one particular unknown or little known writer. Some groups have also published their own anthologies or started magazines. The number of writers who first published themselves is larger than you might imagine, but it is sometimes more effective to self-publish as a group and often achieves more visibility and better distribution.

  You may get frustrated by the size of a small audience, but believe that even the best selling and most respected writers are sent on tours and into malls where six people show up for a reading, half of whom wandered in by accident. It’s part of the business and you can never predict whether the date you scheduled six months before turns out to be game seven of the World Series or, as one of our writers discovered the day he did the “Fresh Air” show and expected a large crowd at a popular suburban bookstore, the final episode of “Survivor.” However, in a group of five or six, each writer can generally bring (coerce) five or six friends to come and listen. That makes a sufficient audience for beginning readers to practice on.

  If reading to an audience gives you stage fright, practice on each other. Shout, yell, let go, emote, sing your work. Borrow, share a tape recorder and listen to yourself. If you find yourself dull, an audience will wither. Learn to get inside the poem or the story. Think of the work, not of yourself, and make it shape itself on the air. Make people hear it. Practice and practice some more. Readings are one of the best ways for you to reach an audience and to discover for yourself whether the work has merit. If you have published something, readings are one of the best ways to get people to buy it. People will seldom pick up a book by an author whose name does not strike a familiar chord, but after a reading, if people in your audience have enjoyed it, often they want a book as a souvenir of the experience, as a way of revisiting what moved, amused or stimulated them.

  You want to write, but you might be having trouble doing what you want to do; perhaps that’s what drew you to this book. In a workshop, there is a point on the last day when I ask participants to think critically about their situation. How is your time organized? Could you get up early in the morning and write? Could you write late at night when everyone else is asleep? Could you find some block of time on the weekends?

  Do you have a place where you can really write? Is there a door that shuts, or at least a partition setting off that space? Many people get hung up on their equipment. Is the computer functional and the screen easy to read? Do you need a more up-to-date word processing program? It’s easy enough to say that many great writers have had no more equipment than a legal pad, but no publisher we know would accept a submission of three hundred hand-written pages.

  Sometimes the problem is eliminating a time-consuming ritual, or even harder, a small pleasure. Do you need to stop subscribing to the morning newspaper or at least stop reading it with your sharpest mental energy every morning? Should you swear not to turn on the TV certain evenings or during the day on weekends or other days off? Should you disconnect the phone? Can you give up jogging or going to the gym on certain days to have time to write? You cannot do everything, so you must prioritize and, if you really want to write, you have to make time for it. Perhaps you need to give up a social activity or a meeting or two. Perhaps you have to decide, okay, I’m not going to take off that ten pounds, but I will get my book written instead. Which means more to you? That’s what it comes down to. It is always a matter of priorities. Many people ask how much time it really takes to write a book and they’re surprised to hear us say, quite honestly, that one solid hour of concentration everyday may be enough. Think about it. A page a day, 365 days a year, is certainly enough for a first draft. Sometimes the worst thing you can do is allot too much time—time for fussing over individual words, time for rewriting perfectly functional sentences, for dallying on the Internet or in the dictionary, in the bathroom, in the kitchen. One hour with your best energy every day can force you to focus, to get your sentences down on paper because there is no more time. It may be the one most productive hour in your entire day, the one you think about and make notes for. One hour. Before everyone else wakes up; or after they go to bed; or while they’re all out to lunch.

  Ira tells the story in workshops of the woman who came up to him after we had finished presenting and asked him how she could change her life so that she could find time to write. He said, “How about getting up earlier in the morning?”

  She said, “I already get up at five.”

  “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “But I meditate. Then I run for an hour.”

  “Okay, after that.”

  She said, “I have breakfast, shower, get dressed and go to work.”

  “How about on your commute?”

  “I have to drive.”

  “How about on your lunch hour?”

  “I eat at my desk and then I go the gym.”

  “How about when you get home from work?”

  “I have therapy on Monday, my quilting group on Tuesday. ...”

  You get the idea. Her life was blocked out and she was not willing to relinquish any of her activities.

  “Then you’re screwed,” said Ira.

  We’ve all learned long ago that nobody can “have it all.” Nobody. It’s a myth. Writing, like a good relationship, time with your kids, a fashion model’s body, a Ph.D., a vacation in Maui—you name what turns you on—takes sacrifice. What are you willing to give up for that one hour a day?

  What we ask people to do in workshops is to think seriously about how you organize your time and your space and to come up with one change that would enable you to do more of the writing you want to do. Not a vast change, such as I am going to quit my day job. Rather, a small change that you have some hope of carrying out. We ask them, as we’re suggesting to you, to write down this intent on a piece of paper and put it in the corner of a mirror you use every day. In a month, you take it down and replace it with another intent, that can carry you a little further.

  One of the major advantages you can carry away from a writing workshop or a writing course is simply a stock of questions to ask yourself, both before you begin on a piece, and while you are in progress, when things go wrong. Am I beginning in the right place? Does my beginning seduce the reader into wanting to continue? Do I know enough about my main characters? What are their longings? Are they motivated and convincing? The more conscious you are of the possible variables, the more control you have over what you are doing. You can avoid wasting large amounts of time and, more importantly, your writing energy, on false starts that do not produce viable work by learning to do enough preliminary figuring out. You can also learn what to ask when you realize your narrative is not succeeding.

  It is equally important not to begin a long work prematurely as it is not to delay starting it for too long. If you start too soon, you will waste a lot of time and energy writing from the wrong viewpoint or in the wrong person (first when it should be third, for instance), writing stuff that belongs in the dossier but not on the page. You have to allow time before beginning a longer piece, but you do not want to delay your launch until you have talked about it too much and lost interest in what you are doing. We all know people who were going to write a book about some subject dear
to them but never in fact get around to doing it. You can talk out a book or a piece and lose the necessary momentum. Discussing a work you have not written may be necessary if you are seeking funding or an advance, but it is dangerous to do too much of it. Many a writer has had to repay an advance because by the time they got to actually writing the book they had been shopping around, they lost interest in the whole project. You also run the serious risk of being discouraged by other people in the early stages, when you are most vulnerable to criticism or simply a lack of enthusiasm.

  When you have finished—usually not the first draft but what you imagine to be the last, although it may well not be—you need to plan to protect yourself from postpartum depression. It is an extremely real and menacing state which I have witnessed not only in myself but in many others, apprentice writers, those being published for the first time and writers in mid career. I try to have another project on hand at that point—for me usually a book of poetry I am putting together, or some essays I meant to work on. Perhaps reviews I have been promising I will get to. A short article. A short story. My only play was written at such a time. Whatever you select, it is important you have something in the wings.

  I try out manuscripts between third and fourth drafts on my agent for her feedback on whether the novel is ready to try to sell and her estimate of possibilities. Up until this time, no one at all will have seen the book except Ira Wood. I may have sent an excerpt to a magazine or read a chapter to an audience somewhere, but the novel has not been seen by anyone, certainly no one in publishing. This is also the time I seek criticism and feedback from friends, colleagues, other writers whose opinion I trust, experts in something I’m dealing with and also from people I regard as good general readers—people who read a lot and can critique what they have read.