The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Slightly Less Random Stuff About Writing This Time

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Slightly Less Random Stuff About Writing This Time

Between getting over a horrible cold and finishing up finals at the college, I have been away from the computer for a few days. When I sat down to open my email, I found six messages about an article I wrote that just came out in the January Writer magazine.

The jist of the article is that I don't or wouldn't function well with a writers' group. For me, writing is an act best done alone, and in silence -- two conditions that are pretty rare in my day-to-day life. Still, I obviously find time to write since I publish on a regular basis. But I hardly ever watch tv, and I don't go out.
Seriously. I'm not sure how people who work, even part time, and have kids and write go out to parties or have other couples over for dinner. When someone says they are "dropping by" fear strikes my heart because I have to get the laundry baskets off the couch, put the baby gate up for the dog, find a spot to hide the vacuum, and try to act as if we don't live like gypsies with pillows on the floor and books all over the place. I just shut the boys' bedroom door because in there, it's just hopeless. And a little scary.

Anyway, that tangent is done. The point is this: I'm allowed to say that I don't like writers' groups, or critique groups, and that I don't think editors are always right. I guess that's arrogant. At least according to the email I received (so far 4 "against" the ideas expressed in the article; 2 stating they feel exactly as I do about writers' groups). The arrogance is because I don't take criticism of my work to heart. I stuff it away in the desk for a few days, or weeks, then look at it later and decide if the editor was right or not. After all, it is MY writing, and I may have a different vision of it than that editor does. And that probably explains why there are so many editors in the world. It's a little like dating...

I probably should have stopped writing there, but I went on to say how writers' groups are something I just can't stand. "I wouldn't be able to go on without my writers group," one email said. That's good. I wouldn't be able to go on without a fairly steady supply of chocolate, but who cares? Really. I can't imagine showing people my work when it's in the drafting stages because it seems too much like revealing myself too early in the game, or letting people "drop by" before you fix the place up a little.

My reluctance about writing groups can be explained simply. Writing is the only thing I do alone these days. It's the only physical and psychic "space" I have - and I find other people's comments on my writing, before it's in the final stages, to be distracting and, in my crabbier moments, kind of a nuisance. Comments on early writing is like an intrusion into a dream - and I mean the shrill alarm clock kind, not the someone-has-brought-you-coffee-and-bagels-in-bed kind.

But apparently, I am in the minority. Right now, my dog is the only one who is around when I am working (the cats hunker down for naps when the kids aren't home and the house is quiet). I think the only real arrogance here is thinking there is one way to write, and it's yours.

6 comments:

TerriRainer said...: I admire that opinion. I was in a writer's group that turned into social/drinking time, which was a waste of my time, so I quit.

I have since found a group of writers on-line that I LOVE. But that's just me.

I think everybody has to do what works for them.

:) Terri; Friday, 12 December, 2008
Mary Witzl said...: I certainly agree that there is more than one way to write, and that not everyone is made for a writers' group.

For three years, I had no writers' group. I tried going to one, but for many reasons, I could never bring myself to show more than one person my work, and I never really felt comfortable. Oddly enough, I found a good group through my blog, and up until we moved, I was able to meet them on-line every week. I don't always agree with everything they come up with -- and sometimes I disagree entirely -- but their ideas help me to see what I believe in and what I don't, in my work.

I've got a full-time job and teenagers and I'll admit it: we have virtually no social life! Parties? What are they?; Sunday, 14 December, 2008
Bryan B. said...: So, I just read your article in the Writer.

It made me laugh. And I don't know if I was supposed to laugh or not, but having encountered people just like that, well - I laughed regardless of intent.

That said, I think people who go all knee-jerk on you are probably the ones who suffer most from what you wrote about...

Anyway, I enjoyed it.; Monday, 15 December, 2008
Marcia said...: Anne, that photo made me howl! Congrats on the article in the Writer! I'm going to look it up. I belong to a crit group and have for about 12 years, but I don't disagree with you, not by a long shot. A huge disadvantage is that your work gets critiqued too early in the process, and I in fact did sell 5 or 6 books before the group ever formed that had never been critiqued by anyone. I don't want to leave the group (most of us are "founding members," so we have a lot of history), they're good writing buddies in general, I tend to be too isolated anyway, etc. But I'm not bringing my WIP for crit anymore, so I'm not sure how I'll handle this. Like you -- no TV and virtually no social life except with our kids.; Monday, 15 December, 2008
Anne Spollen said...: Right, Terri -I wouldn't mind socializing with other writers, in fact, I would like that, but I would have to call it that and not a writers' group.

On line might be a good way to go if you trust the people's opinions.And on line writers can never ask you to bake anything to bring...

I only work part time, Mary, but my daughter recently turned ten, and she still wants me to play with her, make cookies with her, all that fun stuff. (The teens are more like doing surveillance - where are they going? what are they doing? at this point) I can't imagine how people with kids socialize and keep their kids happy and their writing interesting. I run out of time every single day.

Hi, Bryan B - thanks for stopping by. It wasn't a serious article, and I thought the people at that writing group were just silly, so yeah, you can laugh. There's this idea out there that if you work hard, you deserve publication and I find that ludicrous. I could work really hard on an oil painting, but it would still be junk. I think writing groups encourage those kinds of bizarre
convictions.

I love that picture, too, Marcia. Dogs are so cool - I can't imagine getting a cat to do that - EVER. And I didn't know you had so many books out there -- I only knew about the Anne Bradstreet book. You don't "advertise" too much on your blog!

I guess all I'm saying, and there are still emails coming in about how wrong I am, is that the writing is yours and you shouldn't just blindly follow an editor's advice unless it makes sense to you. And most writing groups people have told me about (I've only been to one) are more social activities than real workshops that shape writing. I think I touched a nerve because so many people are responding to this article - only as time goes on, more folks are agreeing with me.; Tuesday, 16 December, 2008
Anonymous said...: My writing group is my lifeline. You should definately try another writing group because you will find they are the best thing that ever happened to your writing.; Friday, 19 December, 2008

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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