The Gift of Art

The Gift of Art

Last weekend at the New England Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference I heard Laurie Halse Anderson, whose work I greatly admire speak on giving ourselves permission to write. Having been to countless writers conferences over the years, I’m kind of past the point of needing to hear that I have to write everyday, find a good space, ignore the seduction of distraction, etc. I already have figured out how to build consistent writing into my busy life, and I’ve gotten to the point in my own writing process where if the space in my head is clear, it doesn’t matter if I’m sitting in the middle of piles of junk in the living room, “listening” to my husband complaining that I left the laundry room light on, and my son yakking about his school day.

But then she got to point number three. “Give yourself the gift of art,” she said. Play music, paint, dance, sing, write poetry.

Duh!

No wonder, last month, after finally finishing a manuscript that took five years of birth pain, did I feel drained, empty. It was my spring break from my teaching job, and work slave that I am, I wanted to make the most of the extra time, so I immediately started cogitating all the other things I ‘should’ be working on, the snippets of manuscripts I started or made notes for, the dead novels needing to be resuscitated. I couldn’t face any of them.

Instead, I started looking through things I wrote twenty years ago–a bunch of half-finished poetry and journal entries that could be poems. Though I’d published many poems in my 20s and 30s, I don’t think of poetry as my strongest art form—in fact I consider myself an imposter poet. But what did I do for that week? I wrote and revised poems. Lots of poems. They weren’t terribly good, and I didn’t really care about publishing them, but I had fun, I paid attention to language on a different level, and I felt nurtured rather than emptied. I did this for a few weeks before I slowly started going back to work on the next manuscript project, and now I’m continuing to dabble in poems as a sweet coffee break on the long road to polishing the next manuscript.

So thank you, Laurie, for putting to words what I knew in my deepest self was true. It We need to take time to replenish the well through other art forms. This week, I’m looking forward to singing.

Scenes from Dina’s Book Tour in Asheville, NC

What fun it was to visit Asheville, North Carolina. Such a friendly, warm and welcoming place. Here I am signing books at the annual Hard Lox Jewish Food Festival, reading Playing Dad’s Song to fifth graders at Claxton and Glen Arden Elementary Schools, and to the Jewish Community Center After School Program. As a special treat, I got to do a writing workshop with younger kids at the Maccabi Academy, and visit my cousin Karleigh’s preschool, where they fell in love with my writing group colleague, Jeannine Atkins’ book, Aani and the Tree Huggers.

Thanks to all of you who made this possible: Preston, Karla, Amanda, Kevin, and Rick. You sure know how to treat an author well!

On Dumbledore

Significant in the “Dumbledore” story is exactly the way Rowling put it. “I’ve always seen Dumbledore as gay.” While many books about craft talk about “scripting characters” giving them entire bios, resumes, lists of hobbies, etc., I think that we as writers have to let our characters reveal themselves to us. When I start writing, I don’t know everything about my characters, just as I don’t know everything about people I meet, when I first meet them, but as I create stronger relationships, when I dig deep enough, my characters begin to reveal more of themselves to me.

As writers, we need to take those risks–with our characters, and with ourselves. Scripting can be helpful, but only if it allows us to go beyond the surface detail of the group introduction. I personally can’t even develop much of a script until I see my characters in action, and even then the script keeps changing; that’s what keeps my characters alive and human. And readers also help to create characters. They bring themselves and their own experience into our characters, interpreting them or the events in which they participate, in ways that may have been different from how we originally intended, and yet are just as valid as our own interpretations. I know that Rowling is a different type of writer than I am, and might have had Dumbledore’s sexuality figured out from Book 1. But if I had created Dumbledore, I might not have even known his sexual orientation until I’d written my way through Book 7, and even then, it might have been something as vague as a hint that could be interpreted in a number of ways that would satisfy the outcome of the story.

Sometimes people ask me what happens to Halina in Escaping Into the Night. All I can say is that the book stops where it stops. Readers are welcome to take what they know about Halina and create their own musings as to what might have happened to her after World War II. In my mind, she lives and grows from her bravery. But that’s just how I “see” her. It’s only a piece of the experience.

Stuck in the Unsticky Summer

I’ve had writer’s block before, and what helps me is to remind myself that when I get unstuck I discover something exciting that I hadn’t intended to do. But that doesn’t make writer’s block easier. I find myself dreading my writing mornings instead of looking forward to them, but I keep at it–giving myself the goal of at minimum scratching out another two pages of “dreck” (Yiddish word for disgusting garbage).

I’m realizing that in this revision, I’m trying to add in characters that don’t interest me, so that’s why I can’t write scenes with them. So the trick will be to discover something about them that I find compelling. For days I’ve been writing dribs and drabs about them to try to find the key, but so far they are deadly boring.

Today I’m going to try a new tactic–I will go back over what I’ve already done and combine two of these characters into one. Perhaps that will help provide more depth in these paper-thin people. I will probably throw all this away tomorrow, but it could be a way in.

Excavation

So much of writing is like excavation. Digging deeper, deeper and deeper. I don’t get past the surface of things until my 4th or 5th revision–and that’s if I’m lucky. Before that everything is sketchy, skeletal. Likean archaeologist, I spend far too many hours sweltering in the heat and digging up nothing. Like an archaeologist, I’ve had to learn patience, and faith that eventually the story and the characters will emerge. As a New Yorker, patience has never been a virtue I cultivated as part of growing up. Reminding myself not to be satisfied, to look for ways to write something even better is a constant process.

Writers or Puppeteers?

I celebrated my 50th birthday this week, by going alone to the “Peace Pagoda” in Leverett, Massachusetts, a quiet monument on top of a mountain. I knew that what I needed to do most was to spend the day being quiet, away from the demands of my family, my job, and the demands of the novel in progress that I am trying to revise for the umpteenth time.

As I walked up the pathway, I tried to be the Buddhist I’m not and put aside my secret expectations that I’d stumble on the key changes that would make my novel perfect. Instead I tried to listen, really listen. No secret messages other than choruses of birds or rubber-band pinging of frogs. But it did lead me to reaffirm one of the hardest things about writing–that as a writer, I need to be of service to my work, rather than trying to control it

This is why I sometimes find myself prickling when I hear writers saying that they want a certain thing to happen while at the same time admitting that they know such an action is out of character or out of place. Are we writers or puppeteers? I can’t manipulate situations or people to determine how things will unfold. The only thing I can do is listen, and try to understand my characters, their stories, and the situations I’m trying to create on a very deep level.

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