Stuck

These days, I’m blogging here and I’m writing in my Moleskine journal–but I’m not writing my novel. I want to write my novel, but it’s just not happening; I’m either forcing something that doesn’t belong in the novel and/or I am on the brink of a breakthrough. Or I have to just admit that I don’t write well at all in the Summer.

There is a small part of me that says “That’s okay, you’re still writing,” but the rest of me is completely discouraged and self-condemning.

I have friends who write everyday–they write through the blocks and they turn in complete novel manuscripts within a year’s time. That is so not me. There are writers who take ten years to write a novel–that’s more like me. Writers-who-take-years-to-write-a-novel are traumatized by that creative timespan. We are asked “How’s your novel coming along?” way more often for starters.

I think part of the pressure comes from the fact that most writers don’t talk publicly about the dark parts of writing–the blocks, and the days you sit in front of your computer and all you do is revise one damn paragraph. And the days you sit in front of your computer and you can’t think of a single idea. Or the day you sit in front of your computer and you delete every single word you wrote in the last four weeks.

We writers like to, in the public eye, present writing as “magical.” We like to prolong the myth of genius. That the words come out of thin air and shine with brilliance on the page. There are movies that show writers in action–like Katherine Turner in “Romancing the Stone” tearing her hair out while writing (but that typing never stops, does it?) or Nicholas Cage in “Adaptation” (okay at least there, writing block is accurately depicted–for like Charlie, I often negotiate brownies as reward for words written). And I love the depiction of a writer-gone-astray by Michael Douglas in “Wonderboys” (but even then, he’s written an over-long novel, and again, the typing doesn’t stop). But those are stories–stories don’t happen without Something Awful happening–and the Something Awful for a writer equals struggling with a long project. But even in movies, the writing happens, and no one in real life likes to talk about those horrible days and horrible weeks and horrible months where the writing doesn’t happen. Because it makes us seem less than perfect. Because it makes us look stupid. Because it’s tragic.

So in sum, I feel imperfect. I feel stupid. I feel tragic.

So there’s that.

And then I think in my case, my novel is waiting for me to grow up. This novel and its story is bigger than I am. And I wonder if I fail it, every day. Even on my best days, I fear to fail my novel.

In my worse moments, I think that even if I don’t finish this thing a lot of good has come out of it–my novel has made me a better person. It has stretched me. It has been the thing that drove me to recover from my stroke. It has been the thing of so many lessons learned–lessons that I could not have learned any other way than facing a blank page and exploring worlds with the goal of seeking understanding and communicating understanding. It has made me grow up. It has given me comfort. And it has kicked my ass. Everyone needs a good ass-kicking now and then.

But on the worst days, I look at my novel and wonder if I should walk away from it. The only things that keep me from walking away is the incredible encouragement I’ve received from my writing mentors–and my amazing writer mentors are not men or women who give out encouragement lightly. So I keep at it. On my very worst days, my mentors save my novel’s ass.

So for now, I am gestating, in more ways than one. The words and ideas will come. It’s just summertime, I guess, when writing traditionally doesn’t happen for me.

Revision Delays

Everyday. A headache.

Needless to say, my novel revision is not on schedule. It’s hard to write when your head hurts everyday. My doctor says my daily headaches are due to hormones–so all I can do is pop a Tylenol, guzzle some water, and get some rest.

It’s awful not to write. When I’m not in bed, I walk around restless, because I’m always in some level of discomfort. Or I walk around restless, because my novel feels so very far away.

Sometimes, I get to the brink of inspiration, and I open up my novel manuscript in Scrivener. And then, the dull thud in my brain steps on any idea I had. So I have to close my novel. Which leaves me staring at the wall helpless, cursing these daily headaches.

In the interim–I’m reading when my head doesn’t feel too bad. Because if you can’t write, reading is another form of writing.

On Revision

I had the opportunity to share some thoughts on novel revision over at Necessary Fiction where my good friend and excellent writer Matthew Salesses has launched a month-long series on revision as their July 2012 writer in residence.

I talk a little about my process, and my approach to revision–here’s a little bit of an excerpt to get you started:

“Starting over and rewriting is revision, at least for me. Saying I am rewriting gives me more creative freedom, less of an obligation to retain old words, much of which while beautiful, did not work inside the whole. The word revision, for some reason, made me more unwilling to recreate worlds.”

Hope my experience and perspective on rewriting/revision helps you out.

These are the things I do in order to sabotage myself (and because I hate feeling helpless, I propose solutions)

When I write, my aim is to unleash my inhibitions and thus my imagination. On the very very best days, I am able to explore new worlds and write them with courage and truth. On the very very very very very verrrry best days, I write many words with courage and truth. On these days, I am elated. I would take these days over the most delicious cake. That’s saying a lot. Because I love cake.

Unfortunately, when I unleash my inhibitions and imagination, among the many things released include insecurity and fear. If I channel and examine my fear in a positive context, it can help produce the very best writing. Under certain circumstances (and I’m no scientist, but it’s kind of like the optimum conditions for bacteria proliferation), my insecurity and fear rocket. Fear is a very very selfish and abusive state of mind that demands the entire floor. Fear’s best friends are helplessness and insecurity and together, they often plan out acts of self-sabotage.

And sadly, I occasionally enact self-sabotage as a writer. I do so because I am afraid to fail, afraid to (yes) succeed, afraid to confront my feelings, afraid to confront the page, afraid to write the words, afraid my words are not good enough and will never be good enough, afraid to tell the truth–the list goes on.

And these are my acts of self-sabotage (self-sabotage meaning things you do that hamper/damage your writing) as a writer…

1) I don’t do this very often anymore, but when I do, it’s the most destructive thing ever: I compare myself to other writers. It’s a sick act that’s covered in the goo of jealousy. I think it was Craig Ferguson who said that envy is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die. It’s so exactly like that. And I avoid it.

I avoid it by surrounding myself with supportive writer friends, and by supporting my friends. A mentor once told me that a writer who helps other writers will be blessed. The more I support my friends, the less I compare myself to them. Because in a way, I am participating in their success, as opposed to being a bystander.

When I was a kid, I took swimming lessons. I was horrible in swim class, and I was a horrible swimmer. I was horrible because when we swam, I always stopped swimming to look around to see where I was relative to my classmates.

Of course, as soon as I stopped swimming, I would sink. And I’d come in dead last (not that it was a race just like writing isn’t a race, but it sucks to come in dead last). I didn’t learn, because I was comparing myself to others more than I was doing the act of swimming.

I didn’t know I was doing this at the time, but in hindsight and through my mom’s anecdotes (“You keep looking up and sinking. Why aren’t you swimming?”) I was able to synthesize this lesson.

So when I compare myself to other writers, I also think about my swimming lessons. If I’m comparing myself to other writers, I’m not writing. I’m sinking.

2) I psyche myself out and tell myself I’m not good enough. And then I wallow.

This is the thing with which I struggle most. My waning self confidence kills me. It really kills me. It is rarely brought on by others’ achievements, but the lack of my own. Or a feeling of lack of progress.

This is when I often do some low-stakes writing, like blogging. So I keep writing without pressure and without judgment. Or I call a very good writing friend (they are so important). Or I call a very good non-writer friend (they are just as important).

Most important, I just go heads down and write again. Because I’ve gotten to a point in my life where I know that I won’t stop writing. And the act of writing is the ultimate cure.

3) I am not honest about my writerly needs.

In my case, this is one of those “room of her own” situations–where I do not have a proper psychic and physical space for me and my writing. This is when I’m not honest to myself, and I insist on writing at home, even with a houseguest not understanding of my life as a writer–instead of going to a café to write. It’s been difficult to admit, but I’ve learned that I cannot write in my own home on a regular basis. There is too much temptation to be distracted. And if I cannot write–see #2 above: my confidence starts waning.

Instead of writing at home, I write at The Writers Room in NYC, or at the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Both spaces have been very kind for my writing, and I’ve learned what I need from my time at both.

For others–your writerly needs may mean other things, like sleep or a writing residency. Learn what they are, and make it happen.

4) I allow myself to be distracted.

There is a fine line between meeting up with friends for your psychic health and doing necessary chores….and meeting up with friends and doing chores in order to procrastinate on writing. You know what they are. What matters most in a year? What will matter most for me in a year is a finished novel revision. So get on it.

5) I allow myself to become too isolated.

Haha. On the flip side of socializing-as-a-form-of-procrastination, I often allow myself to become isolated. You gotta get out. Meet like minds. Get support. Crack a few jokes.

I’m on twitter–sometimes, I feel like if I didn’t have twitter, I’d be a total writing hermit. And I love my community there, and in real life. It helps to keep a real conversation going with someone other than my characters. It helps me energize. It helps me gain new experiences and new ideas. It helps me realize there is a world outside my novel.

6) I don’t read enough.

I totally self-sabotage by not taking time out to READ. It is the most important thing I can do for my writing (other than write). And I mean read the good stuff. When I do not read, it gets bad.

7) Seek approval from those who will not understand or approve. Or seek approval from those who will never tell you the truth and will too easily give your manuscript their approval.

Know who your audience is. If you’re writing a memoir about being a left wing liberal radical, think twice before showing your manuscript to someone who is staunchly tea party (or vice versa. Giving your manuscript to heavily biased people who will guaranteed-criticize your work is self-sabotage. What are you doing it for? What kind of feedback do you expect, and how will it help your writing?

Also, don’t just show your manuscript to people who so easily approve you will never learn. Again, it’s self-sabotage and over-protection. Will your manuscript improve?

I made these mistakes often in my earlier writing days–and all it did was lead to feedback that rarely helped me.

What things do you do as acts of self-sabotage, and what things do you find helpful to keep yourself in a healthy writing state?

The Ethnic Literature Box

I had an amazing time interviewing Don Lee for Guernica Magazine. We discussed books, writing, Orientalist book covers, his latest novel The Collective, and the trajectory of Asian American literature–all good stuff made even better by Don Lee’s candid and generous responses.

All it takes is a click to go read it. Hope you enjoy!

(And big thanks to Alexander Chee for pointing me in the direction of this opportunity).

Compiling a list of writers of color!

Where do we find writers of color? That’s a question Roxane Gay is answering for the writing and publishing community-at-large.

I didn't realize we writers of color were hiding. Maybe we are camouflaged by the color of our skin. But we are here. We are not invisible. I can't even begin to tell you how many of us are HERE and writing. We are writing hard, hoping to be read and to be heard.

Learning that we are hard to find and that we are in fact, invisible to many, makes me wince. But we have an opportunity in Roxane’s project to send our lists of writers of color.

I submitted my list of writers of color today in the comments (and you might be on that list). Did you? Why not?

And because I’m a bossy oldest sister, I’m going to tell you, “Go submit your list now.” You’re making the world better and smaller and enlightened by doing so.

(hits head on table)

<hits head on table>Looked at my novel-in-progress; it is such a mess and I HATE it today. I know I must soldier on, because I am probably near a breakthrough moment if I hate it this much, but it is agonizing and awful and I feel hopeless. </hits head on table>*

*table on which I am slamming my head is pictured above.

Marching orders

There are a lot of new directives in my life these days, all to a good and healthy end. And so I thought to myself, if everything is on a timeline and I’m to be so disciplined, I’ve got to do the same with my novel manuscript.

Truth be told, I’ve been revising rewriting my novel-in-progress like it’s a day at the spa–with languid leisure. A page here, a page there. An occasional chapter. When I’ve come across a bump in plot or character, I let the mystery wash over me and then when the uncertainty became too uncomfortable, I’d go do something other than write, something other than stick to my chair and computer screen.

Writing has been a daily part of my life, but the great urgency I felt after my stroke (as only a brush with death can achieve) to finish a draft of my novel-in-progress, the very thing that got me to finish a draft, has been languishing for some time.

But I am now once again writing with exigency. Because I have to finish a major rewrite of this novel by the end of 2012. Because if I don’t finish a major rewrite, I’ll have deep regrets, and any discomfort I feel now as I navigate the interstitial spaces of my novel is going to be nowhere near the pain I’ll feel next year when I look at a half-finished novel revision.

I am the slowest writer I know. Writing with urgency for me means muscling through the pain and making a deep commitment to stick with my manuscript even if tomorrow is another day. It means I am still a slow writer. It does not mean writing two thousand words a day, because for me, five hundred words a day is a good writing day. But I know I can and will do it.

So I’m making it public: I’m finishing a major rewrite of this novel by year-end. That gives me about seven months, which I think is completely doable, even at my elephantine writing pace.

Becoming a Writer

When I was a little girl, I wanted to become a writer. Throughout the years, I wanted to be a doctor who wrote, a professor who wrote, and even a forest ranger who wrote, but the desire to make a writing life never ever abandoned me.

The only time I felt any peace or satisfaction as a teenager was when I was putting words down onto the page. And so I wrote. I wrote a lot, because I needed peace and I needed satisfaction and because I could not find it anywhere else. I wrote in the margins of my notebooks, and I wrote notes to my friends, and I wrote in the journal I carried with me at all times. I wrote my dreams, my fears, my complaints, my feelings, and all the things I felt I could not tell anyone.

Twenty years later, when I was recovering from my stroke and healing and reclaiming my memory, I wrote in my journal as therapy. My journal was my short term memory bank. It was my reassurance that I would “come back like Lance Armstrong.” I would write and write, and thus rebuild my neural pathways like muscles doing a particular movement in order to come back a better writer.

Writing has saved my life in so many ways. Writing enabled dreams, it heard my secrets, it gave me comfort, and it healed me.

I’ve thrown away many diaries and journals–at one point during my freshman year of college, I burned them all in a boyfriend’s fireplace, watching my secrets turn into smoke. I regret doing so, even though at the time I felt I absolutely needed to do just that. I felt I had to burn my past to move forward.

But there are a few journals that withstood time. I found my creative writing journals from the third grade. I was eight years old. It was 1981.

The very first entry was the first school writing assignment in which we had to write about our summer vacation. It cracks me up, because the basic imprint of the adult I would become is still there; having not read this in nearly three decades, I discovered that I hated waiting in lines even then.

Also, so much of what’s written is out of emulation–firstly, very apparent is the reasoning of my father, who actually asked us to have a strategy for which rides we rode and when, with the sole purpose of efficiency. If my dad had twelve kids, he’d be the Korean Cheaper By The Dozen Father.

My handwriting is also not my own just yet. It’s emulation of the standard cursive handwriting so many of us were taught back then (do they even teach cursive handwriting in school nowadays?). It’s nice to see the scaffolding of the person I’ve become.

“This summer I went to Disneyland. We went on Small World first because we knew that there was going to be a long line. Then went on the Submarine Voyage. There was a long line. We waited for a long time. And at last it was our turn. We saw lots of mermaids. And then we went on Skyway Fantasyland and the Monorail. The Monorail took us to the Disneyland Hotel and back. Then we went home. At home I put on myplayclothes. I played with my brother. I ate dinner. And then I went to sleep.”

And the next thing may have been my first piece of fiction. Or at least, my first recorded piece of fiction.

“Once there were four friends. Their names were Shorty the snail, Slow Poke the turtle, Fuzzy the duck, and Big Mouth the beaver. They were always helping. It started like this. One day Fuzz was taking a walk. Suddenly he slipped and fell in a pit. He yelled a lot and then at lat there was help. It was Big Mouth. He pulled Fuzzy out of the pit and thats why they helped a lot.”

Apparently, I had not yet been taught any comma rules.

Perseveration and Perseverance and the Novel

I am drowning today. I woke up feeling awful about my novel. Like wondering-why-I’m-even-doing-this awful. And I felt even more hideous knowing that I’d continue to re-write despite my despondence. And yet even more horrific because then of course all this self-doubt was a massive waste of time, keeping me from said novel-rewrite.

On these self-doubting occasions, I feel like my novel is an act of perseveration–of crazy unfulfilling repetition that speaks to the adage, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

That line speaks not to perseverance but to perseveration, which is an actual psychological term describing unhealthy behavior repetition.

There’s a difference between perseveration and perseverance. Perseverance, which is steady persistence (and a novel-writing virtue) towards a goal despite obstacles and discouragement has value in the effort whereas perseveration recreates old, unresolved issues (i.e., like how someone who felt left out in junior high then ends up, in her adult life, trying to connect with people who reject her–or at its simplest, repetition of spoken phrases).

It’s when I fail to see value in the process and effort, that I feel like writing this novel is an act of insanity.

One of the most hurtful things someone has ever said to me (other than the time someone told me, “My husband will not be happy if I get fat–but your husband doesn’t seem to care!”) is “Are you still working on that novel? Finish it already.” That a novel is solely about a finished product is false–that a novel’s value is positioned solely in its finished product is daunting and stomach-turning, at least for someone in the thicket of revision.

And yet, because of this end goal, I push. I push.

And sometimes, it’s the pushing that is the wrong thing to do with my novel-in-progress.

I’ve taken up yoga in the past year or so. After living in yoga-infused-Berkeley for decades and scoffing at the practice, I found a yoga instructor and studio in Tara Stiles and Strala Yoga in NYC that did not make me feel alienated or like I landed on Mars or had me speaking a foreign language in class.

I learned that yoga isn’t about pushing. It’s about being in the moment, and connecting with your breath and going with the ease. That anything is possible. That I can do crow and when I did crow, the moment felt utterly effortless and beautiful and marvelous. That it happened like magic one day. That getting to crow and holding crow meant staying very much in the present moment. That pushing to do crow was the very thing that made me topple.

It is hard to fight self doubt. Maybe it might be better to cave into it and process the feelings that self doubt brings. Either way, I thought that by writing about my self doubt and defining the creature that embodies it in my life today, I’ll know better how to manage it.

That I am pushing to “finish” my novel is what stalls me–that I fail to see value in the process and the present moment of revision is what pushes me to doubt myself.

So I downloaded my yoga class playlist and I’m writing to it this morning, so that what I learn in yoga can infuse me as a writer today. No pushing. Just be. Write the words. Breathe. Listen to my novel. Listen to me. Allow myself to cry. So that I can amaze myself.