Free Yourself Today

Free Yourself Today

“Humans are born free but everywhere we’re in chains.” – paraphrasing Jean-Jacque Rousseau

“A change would do you good.” - Sheryl Crow

“We need a revolution inside of our own minds.” – Jean Henrik Clarke

Hello and Welcome to Sitting in Silence. I’m your stalwart guide to writing, craft, worry, and joy. Let’s talk about joy and craft. But first…

Ever been to Maine? I have. It’s quite beautiful. And it’s even more beautiful because I’m teaching a class for you called The Joy of Text. We’ll cover everything you need to know to write compelling stories and have them published. Spend your free time seeing the sights and replenishing yourself.

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Today’s Topic: Free Yourself Today

Routines are the foundations of our lives. We get up at a certain time. During the week, we eat a small subset of foods given the countless options available on the planet. Month after month, we carry forth the writing that makes us feel safe, warm, and comfortable.

But sometimes we look at our habits and find they’re not serving us very well. Perhaps, we haven’t published in a way that’s brought us closer to our dreams. We think back on our literary heroes who all seemingly published masterworks by the time they were ten years younger than our current age. We wonder where we stumbled off the path to greatness. Maybe we allow the details of life to pull us away from our tablets, both paper and electronic.

It feels pretty good to wash clothes or have lunch with an old friend or answer some of the 35,839 emails pulsing in our inbox. Almost none of us can cast aside the challenges and requirements of ordinary life just to work on something that may never see the pages of a literary journal or book-length project with our name on it.

Today, I planned to write about the basic elements of craft, but really, in a way, this is a continuation of last week’s post. This is to say, we’re heading into summer, and this is the time to prepare. I often hear that writers don’t know where to start. I’ve done perhaps a dozen panels or classes this year where someone asked me where my ideas come from.

I’m not sure that’s the right question. Maybe a better question is how do ideas come?

Most of us writers have been writing since we were quite young. Over time, we build up a subconscious list of tics, topics, and tells that make the writing our writing. Pick up a book by your favorite author and flip to a random page. You can find this list on any page. By the way, I’m deliberately beating around what most people call this list. It’s voice. Your topic selection, style, and recurring techniques are your voice.

But even a very good voice can stagnate.

The other day, I had the pleasure of going to my MFA alma mater’s graduate reading and awards ceremony. I’m class of ’13 University of New Orleans. Sitting there in silence, in the same room with many of my same professors of a decade ago (Barb Johnson, Joanna Leake, Randy Bates, John Gery, Carolyn Hembree, and the Program Director) brought me back to who I thought I was back then.

I had a very clean voice. Inspired by the canon of the time, which was given to me in college, I wrote in sometimes flat-rhythm sentences about trying to make it in the big city. Because so many of my influences were guys like John Updike and Philip Roth and John Cheever, it’s unsurprising that the city in my head was upstate New York or New Jersey. And the concerns of many of my early protagonists were things like dating and the place of the common (but extremely important everyman) in late-stage capitalism America.

This was all a front. It was unnatural because I didn’t really care about what I was writing. I mean something was in those early attempts at stories and books, but that something was a pale imitation of authors I respected but had no busy following so closely behind. I was like a dolphin chasing goats. Hopeless as a penny with a hole in it.

It wasn’t until I listened to the advice of a classmate and a mentor and a faculty member to just be more naturalistic. Be more me and less them. I did. I started sounding like the place I’m from. And I started writing about the kinds of people and problems that people where I’m from care about.

But I still wasn’t quite free. I had more yet to unlearn.

You see. I saw myself as a very serious writer. If my work didn’t make my reader cry or shake their fist at the heavens, I wasn’t doing my job.

I wrote a lot of pieces in this mode. Many of them were quite good. In a way, I felt it was my job to impress readers, which is the job sometimes. But it’s not the first job of an author.

The first job of a writer is to do the story justice.

But you can’t do the story justice if you’re picking stories from someone else’s universe.

I realize I’m jumping around today. And despite everything I learned in law school and in my old law practice about being concise, I may not be coming through as clearly as I’d like. So let me say this:

When most of us sit down to write a story, we have in our modern heads 1,000s of hours of movies and shows we’ve watched and unnumbered pages of children’s stories, novels, and US Magazine articles and plots from video games and urban legends that you suspect may actually be true.

This is natural. Writers are cultural sponges. We see all so that we can write all. The downside is that we sometimes lose our identities on the page.

We sit and start writing something that sounds like something we wrote a couple of years ago that was itself based on an episode of Law and Order you forgot watched in 2004.

What’s the alternative then? We can’t escape our own minds, true. But we can consciously break our tendencies. This technique is called unsurprisingly enough: tendency breakers. I get the term from football. (I won’t bore you with all the details, but the idea is that if the opposing team thinks you always run right on third down, this time try going left.”

An example of one of my old tendencies that stifled my earlier writing was a habit of starting most of my stories out with a page or so of scene setting a la Charles Dickens (another canonical writer I loved, and still do). My long intro stories rarely go published. But my short-intro/no-intro stories were much more successful.

Other tendencies were things my fellow writers pointed out to me. “Maurice, you know that you often have a scene where your characters are just sitting around talking for a long time,” as a mentor once told me. Well, I started writing shorter dialogue scenes or scenes where the characters were engaged in some important activity or business while having these chats. This allowed the plot to move forward while providing some fun characterization.

My initial reaction in both cases was that I felt trapped. Maybe I couldn’t change if I wanted to. But of course, like all of us, all I had to do was believe that I could change.

And that changed everything.