Write like a kid

The crazy, word-hoarding pace of Nanowrimo does something to rewire the psychology of writing, and after churning out 50,000 words I didn’t really have time for because there wasn’t time to agonize over each one, I am getting a whiff of something I remember from a long time ago. I remember what it was like to write as a kid.

My first novel was a sprawling venture involving a parallel fairy universe/continent called “Toonvia.” A regular girl was falling asleep in her room (a small white bedroom with the cardboard rainbow from Spenser’s on the wall over the bookshelf) when a fairy came alive in a poster on the wall, and begged the girl to step through the poster into the other world. The fairy’s name, at least in early drafts, was a memorable hybrid I invented myself, and when I gave birth to my first child in 2002, my oldest friend was shocked to learn that her name was not Lilyamelody.

I wrote that novel like crazy, all the time. I carried a notebook around with me everywhere in fifth grade, and there was some kind of dire warning on the inside front cover written in all caps – something like “IF LOST, PLEASE RETURN TO THE FOLLOWING ADDRESS. IT’S A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.” My afore-mentioned friend told me then that this was a bit much, and for the first time I understood that being too earnest was not an asset. Even in elementary school.

Tragically, every single draft of that novel is now lost. I hope when I die I am offered a chance to view a movie of all the unremarked moments in life when things were lost – the exact moment when my mother accidentally put that notebook into the trash, or when I ripped out the pages and put them in a folder which was never seen again. There are plenty of moments like that to review – what happened to the pair of opals someone gave my dad and I used to keep in my jewelry box? Where did the burglar who stole my rings in graduate school put them? What was I doing when my necklace of jet beads fell off and was lost? And where is it now?

I have only the soft-focus memory of the pages in my first novel notebook to remember what was in it. I know there was a war going on in Toonvia between the good fairy folk and a host of witches and monsters who lived on the other side of the continent. The human girl (and what was her name? Probably Melanie.) was welcomed into fairyland with a full makeover and a feast, a la The Wizard of Oz. I remember that scene well because when I gave it to a girl to read at summer camp, she ended up only reading one side of each page in my double-sided manuscript. I figured out the mistake when she became very upset that there was a father pixie being served up at the welcome feast, but when I pointed out what she had done, she declined to go back and re-read the whole thing. Imagine!

I wrote and re-wrote that novel all the way through junior high. It evolved into a conventional fantasy adventure novel inspired by Anne McCaffrey (who has recently died, I was sad to learn). There was some kind of stone that had to be obtained. There were two kids sent on a quest. The boy could make things appear by magic when he played his flute. I wrote all summer in little coded notebooks and on my mother’s typewriter. I wrote while we were up in Pulaski, declining to go down to the river to swim so I could get some work in on my character sketches and chapter outlines. I made maps and kept lists of names. I also had separate sections in my notebook for other pursuits, like the “Philosophy” section in which I was building a taxonomy of every possible kind of conflict known to humanity. Don’t ask me! Those synapses have long since been pruned.

At some point the novel fizzled out, and what I remember was that I became more interested in physical descriptions of the winsome hero with dark curly hair than I was in plotting – he was a dreamboat, and (wouldn’t you know it) he exactly resembled the teenage TV star I was in love with at the time. So out went the era of literary intensity and in came that other era, the one in which Ophelia needs to be revived.

For fifteen years I wrote hardly any fiction. I signed up for poetry in college, thinking that I only had a prayer of finishing something if it was short. Poems are exquisitely short. I could write and rewrite them ten times in an afternoon and still have time for a two-foot high stack of Russian homework.

Academia is a pretty good party killer when it comes to unbridled creativity. My critical faculties increased to the point that I knew it was embarrassing to write. Still, I never quite made it to the other camp. During my last gasp of graduate school, at a conference on Russian women writers I organized, I gave a paper on the poet Karolina Pavlova. Afterward, a kind professor from another campus said, “You know, that was a writer’s paper, not an academic’s paper.” Secretly, I took it as a compliment.

It takes an exercise like Nanowrimo to force the imagination back into the mindset of writing like a kid – writing all the time, every minute, wool gathering, making leaps, forging ahead constantly. I didn’t waste time doing laundry and dishes when I was a kid, either. In January I can begin the process of agonizing over the fifty thousand new words, one at a time. Meanwhile I am going to devise a process of hypnotizing myself so that when I sit down to write, mentally, I’m ten.

Paranormal Investigations

Who are these winsome frontier lassies?

I did a lot of digging around in old things when I was in Pulaski at the end of the summer, and there are a number of unsolved mysteries I have yet to unravel. One particularly fertile place for excavations is in Great Great Uncle Richard's trunk, which serves most of the time as a tablecloth draping stand in the back room at the Brick House. It's full of all the special things he saved from his time out in Leadville, Colorado designing mining works and making friends.



I realized, as I was sneezing through the mildew and the dust and the remains of century-old weevils, that what I really wanted were not the facts. I want to get past the facts to the juicy stories, the ones that don't make it into family bibles and the letters home. Who, for instance, is this person, whose woolen long-john clad likeness shows up in the photo archive in the top tray of the trunk (just inches away, I might add, from all the photos of his dear old sis back home in Pulaski)?


Those fancy ladies out in Leadville, Colorado were a frisky lot, posing in their underwear -- but you have to admit, it is cold out there. A lady can't be too careful of her health.

I am also hot on the trail of this raven-haired beauty:

Her face shows up on several warped pieces of cardstock in the collection, and her signature appears on the bottom of a heartsick letter, written after a weekend rendez-vous that had to come to an end.

Is this the same person, in a later photo?

The interesting part of the story is the part that gets erased (as when Great Grandma Mahaffy burned the half-literate letters that went with the photos at the top of this post "Deer Hart, Wen yew gonna come and see mee?"), or the part that was never committed to writing in the first place. Communicating with the other side takes a little imagination.

Migraine Interlude

Good nighty night, ladies and jets -- I mean, gents. I am so good happy to speak to you this day on the change purse of the Headache People. In Washington. From the tingly part to the shame labyrinth -- I can make it a migraine for you. That is to say, I can help you get migraine too.

Remember that book about the guy who was really really smart, so smart he could see the cells in the flowers? And then he got really dumb again, so dumb he forgot his name was Algernon? No wait -- Charles. Algie was the mouse, right? Anyway, it's like that.

Or like have you ever tried to sleep over at your cousin's or aunt's or roommate's place on one of those blow-up thingies down low on the ground close to a big spiderweb, and then in the morning you are on the hardness in a sinking sinkhole with covers choking you? That's it too.

Maybe you are going up in a log ride and your tummy is already boiling from the cotton candy you shouldn't have eaten for breakfast, but up you go, chunkity chunk chunk -- and you know you aren't going to die, but it seems like you might, only the chunkers under you chunk out and you slide down the back side of the flume, not going the right way, so maybe you do die. That's what happens to your thinking parts. Not just your thinking parts, but the whole bowling ball up there, and your jugular vessel is the chunking machine.

Does that make sense? I had some powderpoint slides but I can't get this thing to work, so you'll have to follow me through the frabjous part.

Good! Now is the question asking time. Hello there! Hmm. Mmm hmmm. I'm nodding. Yow, that smarts. Excuse me -- see that long green thingy over there, off stage, the one with the pillows and the hard bits on the end? Is that clean enough to lie down on or what?

By Request

Comments have been streaming in (Can't see them? Make sure you have your preferences set to "View Invisible Comments.") about how William Blake's picture of Cronos eating his children is not a very nice "summer vacation" picture for the blog. Cronos seemed like a good idea at the time, and it isn't always the crazed daddy I identify with. But onto other seasons! This season I've been digging up new material. Cemeteries in the North Country, it turns out, are treasure troves of Victorian names, and some of them are real howlers.


Apparently some families had a real poetic gift for choosing evocative names, and I'm sure they knew very well the provenance of the names they chose, internet or no internet. Even in temperance-friendly northern New York, you just have to let your kids be their own people.

Modern-day children with funky names are a great help in spotting the real treasures.


But some of the stones in these tiny rural cemeteries are so old, the names have long been obscured by lichens and mosses, as if the dead are so fashionably ensconced in the afterlife they no longer need the living to care for them.


Whoops! On closer inspection, this gravestone belongs to my Grandma Guthrie, who is alive and well and always did believe in planning ahead. You wouldn't want your children messing around with your final resting place. In their grief, they might get uppity ideas.

The Muse?

Literary inspiration does exist, only it isn't the divine gift you read about. The muse isn't a comely nymph with classical features, nor even an immortal roller skating babe (before the Classics, there was Xanadu).

Here are some of the things I did yesterday to work myself into a literary state of mind: sort a stack of mail two feet high, pay bills, write a letter about property taxes, pick up groceries, organize tools, throw away garden seeds "Packed for 2005", wash dishes, help with a report on "America the Beautiful" and change three filthy HEPA prefilters. Sound inspiring? Once the kids were in bed I did some light stretching while dipping into an excellent book about health by Andrew Weil.

And then, KABOOM, the clouds parted and I had a genuine Literary Thought. It was a thought in the shape of a poem, something to do with what Andrew Weil was saying about Venus and Saturn, about the balance between the generative, feminine Aphrodite and the destructive, masculine Cronos (devourer of his own children).
I couldn't remember the last time I'd been able to see an idea for a poem, but there was no time to stop, as I was galloping ahead. My novel was on the horizon -- the chapter I've been working on in fits and starts, the scene that still needs some strong glue to hold it together, and the deadline looming next month. I had two good ideas about things to add -- no, make that three ideas! -- and in a moment I had blasted right past making notes and was writing actual dialog. Not just dialog, but funny dialog! I could not be stopped.

It was in the middle of the hilarious, scene-clinching conversation that I realized the left side of my head was cracking open like a volcanic fissure and that I mildly wanted to throw up. I leaped off the page where I was writing and started scribbling down observations on the back of another sheet. Migraine was dawning. How did it happen? Did I think so hard I tweaked my brain? Did the neural pathways required for literary thought happen to be the same ones prone to swelling? Did writing increase circulation in the grey matter so rapidly it caused a short circuit?

I dragged myself to the medicine cabinet and then got back into bed with my notebook. Before I collapsed on the pillow I had finished the dialog, outlined the next book review I have to do, and made two pages of notes on important plot questions for the second half of my novel -- which surprisingly had a lot to do with the book for the review. What an amazing coincidence.

My husband turned out to be the only person thinking clearly. When he came in to bed, he listened patiently to my chatter for ten minutes before observing, in his calm way, that literary thoughts are not the cause of the migraine, they are one of the symptoms. "It's just part of the manic lead-up," he said, before turning off the light.

My delusions of grandeur went hissing off into the darkness like a leaky balloon. This was not inspiration -- this was prodrome. The lack of blood to the brain was producing literary thoughts, not the reverse. Were they real ideas? Would they still be there, on the page, when I recovered from the migraine (and the side effects of the medication)?

Eric put in his two cents. "You have to take what you can get," he said, and was asleep in thirty seconds.

Marietta Holley: The Song

Do you know the low feeling, about a third of the way through a big project (a novel, say -- or a wallpapering job, or a knitted sweater), when the pile of glittering good intentions with which you began your effort seems to be sifting down into nothing and your stamina is at a low ebb? I've been trying to unstick myself from such a moment. I've been reading Marietta Holley's own words, and getting up my enthusiasm to know more about the suffrage movement and what exactly Susan B. Anthony said and when. Today, in my noodling, I found "The Ballad of Marietta Holley", courtesy of the students at South Jefferson Central High, in Adams:

"Oh Marietta, I need to know you.
Oh Marietta, why don't I know you?
I would have thought they would have told me of you in school.
Oh Marietta, I need to find you."

Can you believe it? They read my mind. Click here to see the affecting video, complete with photographs from the Watertown Historical Society. You may not need your hankie, but I sure did.

Relics, Archives, Memorabilia & Souvenirs

BEFORE

When the clutter is knee deep on the ground, when the books are in laundry baskets because there is no room for them in the bookcase, when the file drawers are so jammed with relics from the pre-digital age they bend and warp and can't be closed, it's time for a purge.

At first glance it would seem that a mess is a problem related to space, but upon closer inspection it turns out that the real issue is time. The books are straightforward -- even books read in the past are timeless -- but scratch the surface and there are time bombs and worm holes of every description lurking in the piles. The high-school yearbooks are expected, and the photo albums, and the baby books (Poppy's, Effie's, and mine). The college papers have been filed neatly away, at least, and the decades of journals line up in an aesthetically pleasing manner, but what about the rest of the stuff -- the old letters, the notebooks full of miscellany, the postcards from every museum in Europe? Then it gets tough -- what about the unfinished poems, the dead novels, the aborted dissertation in its own accordion file, the fan I slept with every night as a child, the carousel of slides from my mother's teenage years, the Victorian coin purse my great-grandmother gave me, her note still inside? The only proof that my past really happened is here in this house. Without the memorabilia, even I might forget I was ever a roller-skating preteen in Austin, Texas, or a California hippie graduate student. My eyes might glaze over and I might begin to believe I have never been anything but a mother of two in a big house, watching the clock and wondering where the little one's ballet clothes are.

WHERE ARE THE PURPLE SOCKS?

When the past begins to infiltrate the present, though, it's dangerous-- there is more past than present, and more every minute. Tidbits from the past filter to the surface and impede the flow of time in a forward direction. Today when I wanted to put on earrings I first had to tug a filmy piece of purple rayon off the pair I wanted, and I had to waste time thinking, "This is a purple sock belonging to the toy incarnation of Donny Osmond, circa 1976. Yes, I remember watching 'The Donny and Marie Show' and doing somersaults around the living room with my brother, and those were good times, and I'm sort of glad I saved the Donny and Marie playset, and I'm sort of glad I let the kids play with it, although I wish I could use this brain power to reflect on the Elizabeth Gaskell biography I'm reading -- not to mention to get myself dressed on time -- instead of worrying that I'm forgetting the past or failing to find the interesting kernel in it by not making hay out of the whole Donny and Marie thing."

What kind of archive would set the mind at rest? Wouldn't it be great to have a closet full of industrial-strength storage boxes, stacked and labeled in bland, unemotional codes like the materials in a library vault? Reminiscing would require white cotton gloves and a blank table, and could only go on until dinner time, when the box would be have to be repacked and returned to a high shelf.

My own TV and Russian literature-inflected past -- indeed, my whole family's past (the distant daguerreotype past, and the recent baby-photo past) -- is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. There is history to be reckoned with. There is an infinite wealth of times past I don't even know about yet -- my memory can't be jogged, but must be stocked. If I'm not tripping over my old toe shoes on the stairs, I can be watching time pass on a bigger scale, welcoming past time into the memory banks, which are airy and full of room.

Did I mention that I'm writing a historical novel?

AFTER