Happy Thanksgiving!

My new(ish) apartment, where I can actually get a good night's sleep; my job, where I am valued; my parents' home in Kansas, where the light is just right; Chicago, where friendships of two, five, ten, and seventeen years are still going strong; San Francisco, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Champaign, and Iowa City; the cabin, where I spend time with my family, with friends, and with myself; all the writing I've been doing, because that's where I live.

A year is a long time...

...but it can fly by, too.

Today is the Arlingtonniversary! K and I started writing together a year ago and we haven't stopped.

From the "I am tired of working with idiots" that launched the whole thing to the, "...and I suspect it's you," that brought it all back; from the late night cheering at the arrival of a new, dramatic installment to the resulting insomnia; from the beginning to the not-even-remotely-done-yet juncture where we find ourselves now; and from writing to editing and editing and writing...this has been one of my best years.

This is, verbatim, what I said about how today makes me feel over at Facebook, since there's no reason to try and top myself when this is exactly what I want to say:

A year ago this evening, I came home from a long day of work to find an e-mail waiting for me from [K], and we were off to the races. The writing slump was over and fiction was happening. To say it was a good year is a gross understatement. Life-changing would be better. Vocation-affirming. Freeing. If anyone wants to really know what it's been like writing intensively with another person for a year, I would refer you to Langston Hughes: "I catch the pattern / Of your silence / Before you speak."

No False Steps

I am coming up on one of the most significant anniversaries of my post-college life thus far. In just over a month, it will have been a year since I started writing fiction again, and the confluence of circumstances that got me started and kept me going was just so perfect that it resists easy itemization. Nonetheless, I'm going to try. For the curious, this article is what prompted me to finally write all this down.

1) Audience.

When I was in middle school, I started sending my writing out. Not to literary magazines or contests, but to my relatives and to a handpicked list of teachers and family friends. The feedback I received kept me going. I immersed myself in a series of film noir pastiche stories and taught myself A plots and B plots and episodic vs. serial arcs, knowing that (either out of kindness to me or genuine interest in the story; the distinction didn't bother me that much) someone was waiting to know what happened next. The praise was nice, and continued through high school, because that's what you do when a middle schooler or high schooler demonstrates a commitment to something: you praise them. The praise was nice, but the audience of readers was even nicer. Even after I stopped with the regular mailings in freshman year of high school, I still benefited from a vocal and supportive audience for my writing. My audience that gave feedback, that indulged me as I worked through character developments out loud. I allowed my characters and plots to grow in depth and complexity, not because I was making any conscious effort to grow as a writer, but because those were the types of stories that genuinely interested my audience. The length of time between a conversation's start and an audience member's glazed eyes and lack of attention grew.

A quick word on praise: I almost want to say that it doesn't have to be genuine. Not at first. Not when the first draft could still wither on the vine. I've talked with K a lot about this. She's a teacher, and believes in the necessity of positive reinforcement, especially at the beginning of things. I don't think that need ends with adulthood. If anything, it gets worse, because adults have the tendency to second guess everything.

In sum, tell me my idea sounds interesting, with great characters. Tell me that you can't wait to read the rest. Then, when there is a story, when it's done and there's a beginning, middle, and end, and I'm debating the possibility of sharing it with a broader audience...that's where the audience comes in. Tear it to shreds. We'll call it editing.

Writing is a very solitary pursuit. To a certain extent, at least for me, it has to be. I get distracted easily. Once I get in the groove, it's important to keep going. Nonetheless, it is equally important to pop the bubble occasionally and ask, "Is this working for people?" "Does this interest anyone besides me?"

Writers without readers are diarists, and I was never very good at keeping a diary.

2) Accountability.

This is about more than just an audience. This is about a person (or concept, I guess), who is relying on you to deliver. Playing the Letter Game went like this: K would send me her installment. A day would pass. Two days. Seven. Suddenly, I would start to feel itchy. She was waiting for me to respond. Worse, I wouldn't get to hear what happened to her characters until I let her know what happened to mine. Suddenly, procrastination was not an option. I wrote. The plot threads intertwined. Our separate plot lines united to advance the greater story. Procrastination wasn't even a consideration. The week-long turnaround periods became four days. Then three. Then twenty-four hours.

The Letter Game gave me a person who, more than looking forward to reading my writing, would be disappointed when I wasn't writing. The larger takeaway was that I have to have a reason outside of myself to keep writing. Working toward some large, amorphous I Will Be A Writer goal just doesn't cut it. Not yet, anyway.

3) Interest.

It may seem painfully obvious, but if you're not interested in the story you're telling, you honestly can't be surprised when no one else is. I remember writing only one of the stories I brought to writing workshops at Princeton, and it was one I started writing off-campus the previous summer, out of genuine interest in the subject. As the the other stories I wrote there, if I wrack my brain I can think of a vague plot, one or two characters, or a general hook ("The one with the good sexual tension." The one with the old people."), but not much else. I can't even remember where I was sitting when I wrote these, let alone what I was feeling. That tells me my heart wasn't in it.

I've talked here before about Writing to Solve Problems, which is, in general, what works best for me. The interest has to run on every level: the problem, the resolution (or even, but more rarely, the solution), and the plot and characters who will take you there. Gay seminarians. Long-lost godfathers. What the world will look like deep in the future, how we've moved forward, how we've slid back, and how the people there continue to live with themselves.

4) Feeling.

Every time--and I mean every time--I take the Myers Briggs test, I come out INFJ. Every description ever written speaks to the depths of my soul. It makes sense, therefore, that feeling (that's what the "F" stands for) rather than thinking my way through a story is the best approach. This is as related to interest as accountability was to audience. The problem may be compelling, and I may have a vested interest in its solution, but if I can't fire on all empathy cylinders straight into a feel for the character, then it's not happening. If I'm not driving with the radio on and don't occasionally get punched in the gut by how perfect a certain song is, not from my own perspective, but from the character's perspective, then it's not happening.

The Letter Game was great for this because, for two hours or so every other day, or however long it takes you to respond, you are that character. You may not share their views, or their history, but if you can't put yourself in their shoes and believe what they believe for two hours or so every other day, then your Letter Game won't take off, eat your brain, steal your heart, etc.

If I can't make myself cry, crack myself up, or get myself so tense that I'm moved to administer an awkward self-massage, then it's not happening.

5) No plan? No problem!

This is where the article comes in. For three years in college and one year after graduation, I had this stupid idea that I had to write to an outline. Why? Lord knows. I never had before, and I never had a problem with focus, drive, or creativity. Probably someone told me. Maybe it was an experiment. Either way, I should have stopped immediately and gone back to my old passion-driven scattershot ways. Only I didn't, because I didn't realize my writing process was a process you could wreck, and by the time it was wrecked, it was really wrecked, on multiple fronts (see above; I no longer had access to any of those things).

The Letter Game was tailor-made for a writer like me. You have to start at the beginning and write your way through. (That means no skipping around and writing your favorite parts and giving up before you get to the connective tissue out of some misguided assumption that connective tissue is boring.) You can't outline anything even if you wanted to, because at any moment your co-writer could veer off in an entirely different direction and you have to be ready to roll with it.

For the first time in four years, I finished something, and it happened because, right up until the last sentence, which fell on me fully formed from on high while I was in the shower (go figure), I didn't know where it was going until it got there.

Of course, it's not entirely finished, not really, because writing is never finished and because we're intensively editing now, and probably will be for at least another year. It's not finished, because if it's finished I have to ask myself what the next project is, and although I have several ideas, that's still a question that scares me.

Scares me, but not in a hopeless way. In an excited way. Because now I realize that with an audience, with someone holding me accountable, with genuine interest in the story and a real feel for the characters, and, finally, with absolutely no idea where I'm headed, I can't go wrong.

How I Read (Now)

Over the past year, I've noticed a pretty significant change in how I read. It's not just in the books I choose to read (although I have been choosing slightly differently, it's true) but in the way I read them. Instead of latching onto characters who entertain, I've found myself latching on to characters to emulate. The scenes that I've found most moving are the scenes when a character is facing a situation. A decision. Facts about themselves or others they can no longer ignore. It's never that the character is a role model (or, at least, very rarely is the character a role model), but rather that there are elements of the character I aspire to: flexibility, fortitude, empathy.

Maybe they are role models. No one has ever thought they'd like to replicate every single trait someone else possesses, right?

I started thinking about this after finishing The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which is unquestionably this year's Cloud Atlas, albeit without a movie or a soundtrack to buoy the obsession along. This is a book I put off reading for years, because I had heard it was sad, and because I was at a low ebb in my interest in reading "immigrant stories" and blah blah blah.

I'm glad I waited. Waiting meant that I didn't read this book as a high school student, when I probably would have focused exclusively on Sammy's story, or as a college student, when I would have felt the need to keep a running tally of every cameo by a historical figure. Instead, here I am, in this new phase of my reading life, feeling as if I too could scale the Empire State Building or brave Antarctica, just because these characters did and because in them, in pockets, I could see a little of myself and I would most like to be.

This isn't an entirely new concept. When I moved to Chicago I brought books featuring Dido Twite, Mary Ann Singleton, and George Smiley, thinking these were the characters who would stand me in good stead in my new life. I was right, even though I didn't crack the spine and re-read any of these books until I had already been here for two years and the roughest days were behind me. There were actually days when I asked myself what they would do. Dido walked me through rough neighborhoods. Mary Ann got me out of the house on weeknights. George kept me questioning the status quo.

More frequently, I asked myself what my father would do. But most of the time that was in reference to getting the best parking spot.

1178th Most Happy

I'm back!

In general, as is the case today, it's a good sign when I don't blog for weeks on end. It means I'm writing something else. Fortunately, it doesn't follow that because I'm back I'm no longer writing that other thing. On the contrary.

I was starting to feel guilty, though, neglecting My Kind of Fool for so long. And, of course,  I had this to share with you:

Has anything more accurate ever been written? How did they know I was 66-100 years old?!

In other news, I love my new apartment. I can sleep. I can no longer identify every pair of shoes my neighbors own. I felt so grown up and footloose that I bought a TV. Sure, the internet is not as reliable as it once was, but I can live with that. It gives me more time to read and, more importantly, write.

Moving

 Mom came to visit me over the Mother's Day weekend, and it was a great visit, one of the best of all time. (I would even go as far as to say it surpassed Dad Visits and We Go to a Wedding, Part One and tied Subcontinent and Sir U von L Honorary St. Patty's Day and Architecture Boat Tour Extravaganza.) But it was a long time ago now and I've had a couple more visitors since then. Next weekend, I'll have my last visitor to this apartment. Appropriately, it's going to be CC, college roommate extraordinaire.

Last visitor to this apartment, you say? Why yes. On August 1st, I'm moving on to bigger and better things in the form of a one bedroom a stone's throw from here. In one of the best coincidences so far, it will be on the same street as where my aunt lived when she first lived in Chicago, two blocks down.

This is the seventh summer in a row that I've moved. The first five times (moving to college, and then moving back and forth between home and new dorm rooms) were carried out under my own steam and I got so good at it that by the end I was turning down help and packing up my car with scientific precision as my parents (absent for the three previous departures) looking on, impressed, and held my diploma.

Last summer, I wasn't moving myself, and it was the trickiest move of all. In 108 degree heat, I helped my parents move into their new house in Lawrence, Kansas. It was the hardest move, but it was also the best, because the payoff was the greatest. When we hung the corn painting above their fireplace and it instantly fit, I could tell they'd found a great new home.

So last summer I didn't actually move myself. There was no way I was moving apartments in the same month as I was helping my parents move houses. Nonetheless, I was getting sicker and sicker of living in a studio (especially with visitors, no matter how beloved, and especially in winter).

The move this summer is going to be hectic. (It falls at the end of our yearly trip to Colorado.) It's going to be hot. (See: August 1st. Also it's a third floor walk-up.) But, it's going to be worth it.

"Of course it's all trash..."

Sometimes my friends have more faith in me than I have in myself. Several times since he moved to Chicago, R has introduced me to friends of his as a writer. As "one hell of a writer." As "an amazing playwright." Just as frequently, K has reminded me of stories I wrote in creative writing in high school, quoting them word for word. (I had to dredge up the document to fact-check her and, sure enough, she was right.)

This morning, I was reading Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood (I finished it this afternoon, under a flowering tree), and came across the following excerpt of a letter from his friend Edward Upward:

Olive showed me your letter in which you said something about being silently judged. Of course it's all trash, because--though Marx may not have said it--each of us helps the revolution best by using his own weapons. And your best weapon is obviously writing. It's my misfortune that I have to fight as a fifth-rate teacher.

Those of us who have friends like R and K, and Edward Upward, are the lucky ones. These are the friends who don't believe our nonsense when we say we're headed in a different direction. They insist on continuing to see us as our best selves. It's not that they're inflexible in their conception of our identity, rather they see through all our bluster to the core of what makes us us.

During the Summer of Angst and the following years, I asked myself, "If I'm not a writer, and I've spent my entire life since fifth grade thinking of myself as a writer, then who am I?" I never did come up with a satisfactory answer. Thank goodness. And thank goodness I'm surrounded by people who love me and know better.