Madeleine Robins

Some days I swear that, writing-wise, I’m like Bart Simpson* muttering “can’t sleep clowns will eat me.”  Except, of course, I substitute write for sleep.  Why will the clowns eat me?  The temptation to be really really glib here is almost overpowering, but I’m going to try to play this one straight.

I’m trying to finish three short stories and start a new book.  I know what all four works are about; what I don’t exactly have a handle on is some of the events in those stories. This is what happens when you write by discovery rather than plan.  The metaphor I usually use to describe the process is that I have a topographical map of the story’s terrain, but I don’t have the road map.  I know who the characters are, I know where they’ll wind up (emotionally, if not physically), but I don’t know whether they’re taking the train or walking 600 miles through rough country.  Sometimes I know something about rest stops they’ll be making (to pull this poor, weary metaphor out to its last thread) or people they’ll encounter on the way.  Sometimes I find myself fetched up somewhere, blinking and wondering where the Hell my character’s got to, only to find that it is, indeed, somewhere useful, probably necessary, to the story.

This can be disconcerting.  For a life-imitates art metaphor: I went to a friend’s birthday party on Friday last, held at a restaurant somewhere in the East Bay.  I had printed out directions, got under way, and it was only when I scanned the directions as I was crossing the Bay Bridge that I realized that my computer had, for some reason, not printed the instructions after “cross the Bay Bridge.”  I called my daughter, asked her to look up the restaurant, get directions on MapQuest and text them to me (I love living in the Future).  She did.  Unfortunately, shortly after she texted the directions to me but just before I pulled over to look at them my cell phone battery died.  So there I was, wandering in a place that might have been anywhere, looking for a very specific somewhere, with directions I could not access, no way of calling for specifics, and with a birthday cake sitting in the front seat.  I finally found the place by following the BART tracks (because I knew where the place was relative to the BART station).  Once I got there it all made sense.  Also, it was a lovely party.

But while I was wandering in the wilderness of San Leandro I felt something very much like the way I’ve been feeling lately when I sit down to write.  I can try this turn here, I think it’s in the right direc–oh, Hell, it’s a dead end.  Okay, U-turn, back on that road.  I’m going east, but don’t I need to go north?  Except that I see something over there that’s what I’m looking for and…  Yes, that works.  Okay, let’s go on in this direction for a little while longer and see…yes.  Okay.  Good.  Feeling a little better about this now…

I’ve been doing this long enough to have a reasonable certainty that I will find my way to where each of these stories needs to go.  I’m pretty sure that the clowns won’t eat me–but it may be a close thing sometimes.

*thanks to Deb G for setting me straight on who was saying this.

My friend Janni Simner wrote a great piece last week on finding the writing process that works for you.  Go read it.  No, really.  It’s terrific.  I’ll just wait here.

I am one of those neurotic folks who thinks that everyone else was issued a full set of instructions at birth. For everything–friendship, clothes, housekeeping, parenting, business.   Mostly I’ve learned to background that assumption, or even forget it for long periods of time.  (I am always convinced that people I think are cool must have homes that are tidier and cleaner and better organized than mine.  In fact, not so much.)  There are situations–job hunting, class reunions, etc.–that revive that anxiety, but mostly I know better.

Except about writing.  It’s not that I think everyone else’s writing is better than mine–I have seen enough to know that that’s not true.  There are some kinds of things I will never be able to write, and some writers I outstrip, and that’s just the way it is.  But process, ah, that’s where the neurotic certainty that I didn’t get the memo really kicks in.

There are a zillion books out there that will tell you how to write.  My mother used to give me the more high-flown, literary ones (she wanted to write literary short stories in the Updike/O’Hara style; failing that, she wanted me to write literary short stories etc.).  I never bought any for myself (and I’m sorry to say I never read any of the books Mom bought me).  Why?  Am I too good for advice?  Not hardly.  When a friend says “Oh, I have that problem too; you know what works for me?” I listen.  I’ve learned a lot in just that way.  I might learn excellent things in all the writing books out there, if I read them.  But I have a superstitious, deeply irrational fear of messing with my process, which means I don’t actually look too closely at how I power myself through writing, lest it somehow evaporate.

See, I’m still convinced that everyone else got the memo.  Memo-less, I’ve been making it up as I go along for decades.  You know what? It works for me.

When I was at Clarion, Kate Wilhelm described the way she put a book together, and her husband Damon Knight sat right next to her, pleased but mystified by the process she described.  ”I tried it that way once,” he said later.  ”It was interesting.”  I guess the burden of this particular song is: whether you got the memo or not, if what you’re doing works, it works.  If you’re writing, and your work is progressing, Ur Doing it Rite.

Sometimes, when the writing is being uncooperative, you need to do something else. It’s a nice thing when someone asks you to do that something else, so you can pretend that this isn’t a tactic to outrun your inability to figure out what comes next. This is where the cake making comes in. I don’t wake up and decide “hey, I’m going to make a Green Man cake!” or “gee, wouldn’t it be fun to make a Wedgewood Regency cake,” but if someone says (as someone did) “My birthday is coming up and I really want a Regency-themed cake, go wild!” well,  what am I to do?

The cake on the left was made for the band room for Words & Music2, a benefit concert, and was my attempt to replicate the art from the gorgeous poster.  It may be the most photographed cake I’ve ever made–people in the bands, the staff photographers, everyone was taking shots of the cake.  Fortunately the cake also had the most desirable trait of cakes: It tasted good.  So everyone was happy.

Except, just a little bit, me. Because I had this image in my head of what it was going to look like, and it fell short. This is what I call the Sistine Chapel Effect: when my older daughter was small she would draw something and I would admire it, not only because I was her mother and that was part of my job, but also because her eye for color and line was pleasing, and the finished work was admire-able. But Older Daughter, otherwise known as Sarcasm Girl, would crumple it up because in her head she was sketching the Sistine Chapel, but what she produced was somewhat less evolved.  Later, she had something of the same problem with homework: the essay she was writing in her head was sooo much better than the one she produced on the page.  We have had many conversations about this, boiling down to: Perfect is the Enemy of Good.

You want to do your best work, not just because you want your work to be admirable but because doing your best work feels good.  But “best work” is a constantly evolving goal.  If you’re constantly worrying that your best work isn’t measuring up to The Best Work Ever, you’re not going to progress, no matter whether it’s cake-decorating, writing, or science.*

So my Green Man cake doesn’t match up to the celestial perfection I was hoping for.  But it’s a far better cake than any I made three years ago when I started learning cake decoration.  Onward and upward.

* In this regard I refer you to the ever fabulous xkcd.com and the comments of Zombie Marie Curie.