A Writer’s Notebook: writers talk writing

Writer/rock star Ryan Werner on writers block and revision panic

[You’ll notice from the subject line that this is a continuation of an e-mail exchange. In fact, this particular discussion went on for weeks, and we each ripped each other’s ideas and ideals to shreds in the course the conversation. It was an exhilarating conversation, but it would fill an entire book chapter, and the footnotes required to explain it would eat up the rest of a book. Way too long for even a multi-page blog post. This was the exhausted finale of that long conversation.]

 

From: Ryan Werner
Sent: Monday, June 01, 2009 9:40 AM
To: Sam Snoek-Brown
Subject: Re: Dude, your article is suite!

I hear about how great DeLillo is from everyone unless they’re someone I meet in real life. The internet seems to be crawling with his nutswingers, but most recently I heard [some friends of ours] talking about how much of a cocksucker he is. I’m going to try to get to White Noise before the end of summer (unless you think I should go for Libra, which I also own). My summer reading list is getting lengthy, but I’ve been kicking the reading engine back into high gear. I’m hoping to clear ten books for the month of June. I’m trying to take suggestions from people, and here’s what I’ve ended up with:

• As I Lay Dying (Faulkner)
• Lord of the Barnyard (Tristan Egolf)
• The Best American Poetry 1996
• Elegy for the Southern Drawl (Rodney Jones)
• Carrie (King)
• The Collected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke
• One Hundred Years of Solitude (Garcia Marquez)
• Airships (Barry Hannah)
• Day of the Locust (Nathaniel West)

That leaves me with a slot to fill, and it’s all you. Pick it and I’m there. If you think DeLillo is pressing, I’ll go for it. Otherwise, name it and I’ll read it.

I’ve been hankering for some new stories by you, but you keep pretending to be busy. Stop it, slacker. Get on the motivation ball! Not that I’m one to talk, as I’m doing that thing again where I’m convinced I’m going to die without writing another thing in my life, let alone anything worthwhile. I read a Rick Bass essay that stressed the daily writing of fiction as to clear a path through the woodland of the psyche (of course) and go deeper every day. The woods will never be completely explored, but that’s the point: to get as far and see as much as you can, and the only way to do that is the daily, depleting grind of fully-embraced fiction writing. I believe him, but jesus it’s hard. To be fair to myself, I’ve been writing a lot of articles for suite101 (finally reviewed that Pancake book), including writing exercises, so I haven’t been completely without writing. However, I’m just afraid the revising will get the better of me, so my fiction has sat dead for over a month and a half now.

I keep reminding myself that lots of writers take a long time to work on stuff, but I imagine them actually working on stuff and not hanging out and reading all day. Carver seemed to have years between collections. How long did Tom Franklin take to do Poachers? Forever, right? Is there a secret to getting myself to take chances on drafts? I get to draft four or five and then freeze up, because I’ve always got a vision that I don’t want to betray. I’m not like this with songwriting, which is why I’m convinced I can beat it in my fiction. With music, I write a song with everything in mind and then do it, tweaking as necessary. Sometimes it turns out great, other times not so much, but I just move on to the next song and keep going. There’s a reason Black Sabbath doesn’t have any demos: they recorded everything and didn’t stop to think about it beyond their base-level vision. The songs took form, existed, and were a thing of the past. I try to do that on my fiction, but I get caught up. I need to take the Bukowski approach and just write a million things every day. Now if only I was a jaded old drunk . . .

Anyways, enough rambling. I’m going to sit down with some poetry and fall asleep watching wrestling (my essay on wrestling needs to be completed, too. Look out for that doozie . . .).

Send your shitty first draft!

-W

---

From: Sam Snoek-Brown
Sent: Monday, June 01, 2009 9:58 AM
To: Ryan Werner
Subject: Re: Dude, your article is suite!

The problem with my story is that it isn’t a shitty first draft—it’s a couple of shitty revisions of earlier stories that I’m gluing together with shitty new material. Which is both shittier and more complicated. So, I have to wait and send it to you when the glue dries.

Looking at this list, I don’t know that you want to get into DeLillo this summer, though if you have to, my vote is for White Noise, just because it’s necessary. But with AILD, Carrie, Airships, and Rilke on your list, I think you have plenty of genius-meets-douchebag to keep you going for a while. (I assume you’ve read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet?) Let me know what you think of that Garcia Marquez—I still haven’t got around to that one.

If I could fill your slot with anything I wanted (… I’ll just wait for you to finish listing jokes…), I’d say you need to pick up David Maizenberg’s Invitations to a Bridge Burning.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned Dave to you before, but his book is nearly impossible to get these days, and I can’t loan you my copy because it’s in a box in Texas. It’s terrific stuff though, and for where you are right now, essential. Dave writes like you and I want to write—loose and brilliant without trying too hard, always knowing when to quit on a draft and leaving what winds up being a bit rough around the edges but all the more fantastic for it. He’s very much about the “quit a draft while the quitting’s good” mode of writing. But he also got burned out really fast and did succumb to that “I’ll never write again” bug you’re talking about, so he serves as a good warning for us, too. I was e-mailing him pretty regularly for a while—and he once sent me some unpublished drafts that are fantastic—but I haven’t heard from him in a long while. Last I heard, he was working in San Francisco or Dallas, or maybe both, or maybe he was just driving around trying to figure out what to do next—I forget. The point is, he got frustrated with never knowing exactly what was going on in his fiction. He just sort of wrote things, and then people published them, and suddenly he was a writer without really knowing how or why. It was cool for a while, but then he got burned [I won’t go into the details here] and he just quit.

Your comment about your process (“I get to draft four or five and then freeze up, because I’ve always got a vision that I don’t want to betray.”) sounds disturbingly familiar, and it’s the kind of thing that I suffer from terribly. Getting over it is like getting over writers block, only backward. With writers block you have to grab on and stick with the writing, no matter how rough it gets or where it leads it. But with this perpetual revision thing, the only solution is to let go and send it out, no matter how rough it is or where it winds up. It’s a hard thing to do, because as much as rejection is frustrates me, I fear bad writing getting accepted even more. Look at my story “The Simple Things,” or “Coffee, Black,” or “Counting Telephone Poles.” Those are pretty silly, or pretty sentimental, or pretty rough and underdeveloped, yet they’re in print, and sometimes I wonder if I’ve “betrayed my vision.”

Then I pick up the 1993 anthology The Gulf Coast Collection of Stories and Poems, a sort of quasi-vanity project run out of U of Southern Alabama. It contains Tom Franklin’s “Rise,” an early draft of “Blue Horses,” and the difference between those drafts is phenomenal. Tommy grew a LOT as a writer in the six years between “Rise” and “Blue Horses.” Yet, there they both were, in print, published. The same thing happened between the version of “Poachers” that appeared in Texas Monthly and the one that appeared in the book. Which got me thinking about the early and later versions of Carver’s work…. And so on. I began to realize that we are almost guaranteed to betray our vision, in some sense, because if we’re worth a damn as writers we’ll keep working on our vision and what we expect out of our work will become more refined and of a higher quality as we progress. Which means anything we publish now is already doomed to fall below our future standards. But that account, then, it doesn’t seem to matter much if it falls even below our standards now. Sure, we want to publish the best we’re capable of, but I think we need to focus on publishing the best we’re capable of publishing, not the best we’re capable of writing and certainly not the best we can dream up in our heads. Which means, if it’s accepted for publication somewhere, then we have to say, good enough for now. But that can’t happen until we let go and send shit out.

It’s an easy lesson to learn, but it’s a hard one to stick to. Believe me.

In the meantime, you’re right: The important thing right now is to keep writing, even if it’s not what you thought you’d be writing or what you think you ought to be writing. And, of course, start sending shit out. Your rejection list isn’t nearly long enough yet.

[Shortly after I sent that message to Ryan, a bizarre coincidence occurred, and I wound up replying again:]

You’re not going to believe this: I just got an e-mail from David Maizenberg. He’s writing again—he sent me a new story to read. If Dave can come up for air and start writing again after something like a decade (not really, but close to it), then there must be some hope for schmucks like you and me.

I’ll keep you posted.

(<– click here to return to the beginning)

(click here to go to the next page –>)