Category Archives: Fiction

Weaving a Blue Horse

01 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by in Attention, creating, Fiction, Guidance, Nancy Peacock, Process, Revision, Story, Working

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This weekend I tried to weave an image of a horse on my small tapestry lap loom. It had been a long time since I’d tried to shape a horse with yarn across tightly stretched warp, and it wasn’t coming easily. I unwove my horse three times.

Unweaving is simply undoing what you’ve done. Instead of going over and under the warp threads to build, you go over and under to take down what’s there. It’s not unpleasant. It’s the same motion as weaving. But no matter what I did, my horse kept looking like a rabbit. I found the rabbit imagery interesting and thought I might try a leaping bunny at some point, but what I wanted was a horse. A blue horse.

Tapestry weaving is simple. Warp and weft, and only two sheds (the space opened between the warps). But it can get frustrating when your image does not progress after having woven and unwoven and woven again so many times. Writing stories can also be frustrating. To use a weaving metaphor, you need to weave a lot of plot and character and setting and what-all-else threads into the story. In weaving this is called the weft. In tapestry weaving it creates what you can see, and the warp, the strings held tight on the loom, become the invisible foundation. In writing warp and weft are the same, both the picture (reader’s experience) you’re building and the foundation of the picture you’re building.

One thing I’ve noticed in both writing and in weaving tapestry is that there is a lot of forgiveness in the medium. You really can fix things that come out wrong. You can unweave, revise, rewrite, patch, or splice in a new warp thread. A lot of beginning artists don’t know this. They look at a finished tapestry or read a published book and feel awed by it, as well they should. It’s important though to realize that things rarely come out perfectly in the beginning.

I could say that the miracle in making art is that sometimes things do come out perfectly the first time around, but I think there are deeper miracles.  Three to be exact, three miraculous gifts every artist is given, a sort of holy trinity of the creative process. This holy trinity is something on which you can build your creative life.

Miracle #1 – We get second, third, fourth, fifth, and endless chances to make it right.

Miracle #2 – What we create will never look like our original vision, and we should rejoice in this.

Miracle #3 –  Often our “mistakes” end up not being mistakes at all. “Mistakes” can be our guides, not guides that tell us what not to do, but guides that show us what we did not know we could do. A “mistake” can send a writer or artist down a path they’d not consciously set out on, but that becomes the backbone of their creation. (A reason for rejoicing in both miracle numbers 1 and 2)

That blue horse I was weaving? After unweaving it for the third time, I set my loom on the couch and went about my day. Each time I walked by I looked at it. I squinted my eyes. I took the long view. I related to it. And I studied the two weavings I’d done previously that had horses in them. I looked closely. How did I do that? I really couldn’t remember exactly, but that night, while watching TV I took my loom back into my lap and I wove a horse. He’s not perfect, but I’ve got some ideas on how to give him a nip and a tuck to make him prettier.

The process for weaving my blue horse was similar to my process for writing. Sometimes I have to back away before I can go forward. Sometimes I need just a nip and a tuck to fix something. Sometimes I need a big overhaul. Sometimes I want a horse but it really should be a bunny. I think if my weaving had come out bunny-like a fourth time I would have accepted it as a bunny, and it would have been fine. As it happened, I did finally end up with a horse.

Every time though, no matter how I feel about it, my art was guiding me. Your art will guide you, too. Trust that.

A Day in the Life of a Writer

18 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by in Fiction, Jealousy, Publication, Working

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It’s no secret that I once cleaned houses for a living. I held this job for 15 years, off and on. I kept quitting, and then, needing money, I pulled my rags and mops and gear out of the closet and started up again. I cleaned a lot of houses. Two story houses, fancy houses, houses with lots of glass, houses with lots of mirrors, houses with furniture that was a nightmare to dust, houses with pots and pans never cooked in – I could go on. While mopping and making beds and folding sheets and cleaning sinks and bathrooms, I thought about my writing, which I had left on my desk in order to come to work, in order to pay my rent and bills. Sometimes, often in fact, while engaged in some physical activity, an insight regarding some sticky point in my novel would come to me, and I’d strip off my yellow rubber gloves and scribble it down on a notepad I kept in the pocket of my jeans.

My clients knew I was a writer. Many of them had copies of my books. I dusted my own books. I was pretty sure this was not how it was supposed to be for a writer who’d been reviewed in the New York Times, but it’s how it was for me, so there was nothing to do but roll with it.

One day, on my knees scrubbing an upstairs toilet (I highly recommend knee pads), my client came bounding up the stairs with a Newsweek in his hand. “Nancy,” he said. “My cousin is publishing a book. Her first novel.”

“That’s great,” I answered.

“She’s in Newsweek,” he said.

“That’s pretty good making it in Newsweek with her first book.”

I silently congratulated myself on my equanimity. I’d been writing for years and here I was cleaning a toilet while being told about a debut novelist featured in Newsweek. There was no need to be jealous. Even though I didn’t know any other writers who were cleaning houses for a living, there was no need to get a funk about it. Sometimes not getting in a funk was seriously hard work, but on this day I was actually doing quite well with it. On this day, I was peaceful and calm as I plunged the toilet brush up and down and scrubbed around the rim.

During my first book tour, I’d been advised by a (probably) well-meaning poet to never tell anyone that I cleaned houses for a living, or that I hadn’t been to college. “But it’s the truth,” I said. He slowed his voice and said, as if speaking to a child, “What I am trying to tell you is that no one is interested.”

That hurt. I also happen to think it’s not true. People are interested. People like to hear about struggle. They like to feel that their dreams are attainable. And after having worked so hard to be known as a writer, was I supposed to live a fictional life? Was I supposed to lie? What would I say when people asked (and they did ask) what university I’d attended, and what university I taught at? I didn’t follow the poet’s advice. I can write fiction, but I can’t live fiction.

Still, there was a wound. It hurt to feel so far on the outside. It hurt that I still scrubbed other people’s toilets for a living, but as I scrubbed this one with my client standing over me, Newsweek in his hand, I gave myself a huge invisible pat on the back for being OK with this scenario.  Big break for my client’s cousin. Good for her. It’s not easy for any of us. I flushed and spritzed cleaner behind the toilet so I could clean that grimy place, intimately known to so few.

“She got a three-million-dollar advance,” my client said.

“What?”

“Yeah. Three million.”

“Three million?” I sputtered. “Geez.” I ran my rag behind the toilet. “You could have picked a better time to tell me this,” I said.

He laughed at that, but seriously, he could have picked a better time to tell me this.

But here’s the thing. No writing life is perfect. No creative life is how we imagine it before we begin. Once we’ve begun we find that out, and some of us still go on, and some don’t, and some rattle around in between doing it and not doing it. And that’s another place we all occupy. We do it and we don’t do it. We thrive and we struggle. We are published and we are not published. We write and we don’t write. It’s all of a whole cloth, or cleaning rag as the case may be.

My life as a housecleaner actually served me well. I didn’t know it at the time. Now I am supremely grateful for it.

 

 

On Getting Lost

04 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by in Attention, Fiction, Process, Writing Advice

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Peacock

 

Not everyone has a natural area to visit in their daily lives. I count myself blessed to be able to step into nature regularly. My studio is located on land that has been in the same family since the 1700s. They work hard to hold on to this land, but who lived here before this family arrived? I’ve never found arrowheads here, although I have found several along the Eno River, close to my home. Those arrowheads were surely made by the Occaneechi Tribe who occupied the area before the British colonized it. I am sure there were native people living and hunting the land my studio occupies too.

On that land there are many trails through the woods. The trails loop and connect to other trails, and backtrack on themselves and spiral within each other, or so it seems to me. When I first started walking these trails I tried to orient myself to the pond and know where I was, but I ended up places without really knowing how I got there. Whenever I am in the woods, I make sure to pay attention to landmarks as I walk. When I got lost, I would finally stumble across something familiar. The big rocks. A familiar fallen tree. Another tree with its bark stripped off. The stream flowing into the pond. A deer stand. I found my way by getting lost. And so it is with fiction.

A story is not a series of disconnected events. A story is a series of events that play off each other. If this happens to this character then what happens because of that? Every scene has a reason for being there, and ends with either conflict or a consequence. That’s a tough row to hoe if you ask me. I know, because I’ve done it.

But doing it, or having done it, doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing when I start out. Often, in the beginning, I have only a glimmer of a character, or an opening line, or a snippet of dialogue. Something that intrigues me that I’m willing to follow, like a path into the forest. I get lost often. Sometimes I thrash my way out and leave a trail of massacred scenes in my wake. Sometimes there’s a guiding hand. Always, I am looking for those landmarks, noticing points in the story that seem similar to other points in the story. For instance, I really don’t want to forget that a character does not eat meat, and then have her date a butcher. If I forget that she’s a vegetarian, then I have forgotten something major. A driving force for her, and a potential conflict or compromise between the two of them.

What I am saying here is pay attention. Get to know your characters the same as you get to know strange paths through the woods. Entering lightly is probably not a good idea, but neither is hanging back and not entering at all. Enter respectfully. Know you can get lost, and probably will. The great thing about writing is you won’t die of hypothermia (unless you can’t pay your heating bill) and you won’t starve (unless – well, you get the picture).

A walk in the woods, in my opinion is always worth it. I don’t always come out of it with an arrowhead, or a story, but I do come out closer to myself, and closer the bone of something deep and primal. And so it is with fiction.

A Poet and a Novelist

17 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by in Fiction, Mimi Herman, Nancy Peacock, Poetry, Writing Advice, Writing Workshops

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Here’s your chance to see two laureates in one post – 2017 Piedmont Laureate Mimi Herman, and 2018 Piedmont Laureate Nancy Peacock– in Mimi’s final post and Nancy’s first.

Welcome Nancy! We’re all wishing you a fabulous year of sharing your gifts with the writers and readers of the Piedmont.

How would describe yourself?

Mimi Herman: I’m a writer who brings out the writer in others, an inventor of ways for people to learn, and someone who can’t resist finding useful solutions to problems.

Nancy Peacock: When I think of how to describe myself, pairs of words come to mind. Reverent and irreverent. Serious and funny. A hard worker and lazy. I don’t see these paired words as opposite of each other. Irreverence is bred of knowing what to be reverent about. Humor is spawned by seriousness. A writer must be a hard worker, and, in order to avoid burnout, enjoy a fair amount of “moodling” time as Brenda Uhland called it in If You Want to Write.

What matters to you in your own writing?

Mimi Herman: I want my writing to be as evocative and engaging as possible – and to be of use to readers. I hope my writing will help see people through difficult times and give them ways to understand the world in which we live. I would love for people to say, “That’s how I’ve always felt, but I’ve never been able to say it.”

Nancy Peacock: Telling a story that wants to be told. Working with a character in a way that honors his or her voice, and his or her needs. This means that with each draft, I, the author, disappear more and more, and give over to the character.

How do you think poetry and fiction are connected?

Mimi Herman: I’ve always thought that poetry and novels – both of which I write – are somehow linked. Maybe poetry is condensed, freeze-dried fiction; maybe novels are what happen when you add the water of extended time to poems. In both, paying attention to how the world works is essential.

Nancy Peacock: When I was younger I wanted to be a poet. Not having any real knowledge of what it means to make a living or pay rent, I imagined what I thought would be a poet’s life: living in a big yellow house with my loving partner and a cat. Not having a job. Spending every day, writing and then taking care of cozy domestic things, like baking bread (which in my imagination was always warm, fresh out of the oven, and the dishes were cleaned), producing wonderful meals (ditto the appearance of food and absence of clean up) shared with a plethora of brilliant friends (never mind that I was very shy and had only a few friends). As I matured, I maintained this fantasy but transferred it to writing novels. And as I matured even more, I recognized that it would never pan out this way (exactly), and that this is okay. Good even.

While my desire to write poetry may have been more driven by fantasy than anything else, I did write poems. I like poetry for its succinctness and punch. I think my early efforts as a writer of poems helped me a great deal in learning to say a lot with only a few words, and in being precise in my use of words when telling a story. It also helped me learn to notice many small things in life that now feed my fiction. Poetry helped me appreciate the world I live in. This is a practice I think is very important to anyone who wants to write anything.

What are some ways you tempt people to become writers?

Mimi Herman: I like to get people thinking about the experiences and ideas that matter to them, and help them find the words to describe these things. We all share our five senses. When these are translated into images through writing, the words come alive on the page.

Sometimes, when people are struggling to write anything at all, I ask them to tell me what they want to say. Then I write it down for them until they’re speaking too quickly for me to write—at which point I hand them the paper and pencil and tell them to keep going. This ends up being pretty much irresistible for even the people who consider themselves complete non-writers.

Nancy Peacock: Writing from prompts in a group is one of my favorite things to do. I offer a free prompts class the second Saturday (10 to 12) of every month at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill. I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, starting at the old Borders Bookshop, and migrating around different meeting places until the group landed such a great home in Flyleaf Books. I witness a lot of magic in this process of writing from prompts in groups. It’s wonderful to sit with a group of people telling stories. How often do we get to create something and immediately share it, without criticism? This temptation I offer is not so much about “becoming a writer” as it is about tapping into the subconscious and finding unknown stories inside, which we all have. It’s a lot of fun. Y’all come and join in.

What do you do when you can’t write?

Mimi Herman: I read. What I really like to do is to read someone else’s poetry until I get interested – then use the energy and fascination evoked by another writer to launch into my own poems.

Nancy Peacock: For me writing is a little dance. I have to make myself walk across the room and ask the partner I think I’m interested in to dance with me. That’s the going forward part, the making myself sit down at the desk even when I don’t know what I’m doing, or have a full plot or character in mind. Once the partner and I get out on the dance floor, I sometimes find that this person didn’t want to dance with me after all, in which case I drop the project. Or sometimes I find that this person isn’t so sure about me, in which case I try to prove my interest in her by showing up every day. Sometimes though the partner and I enter into a difficult relationship where we’re stepping on each other’s toes. When that happens, I back off from that particular material. Maybe it will hold something for me at some future date, and maybe it won’t. I move on. I ask someone else to dance. If this difficulty continues with other characters and projects, I know it’s time to just take a break from writing. I read. I take walks. I weave (I have a small tapestry loom). I clean the house (or plan to). I try to replenish the well by just being. I’m happiest when I have a writing project though, and feel a little bereft during this time of not writing. That’s the hardest part.

How can writing help people through challenges – both internal and external?

Mimi Herman: One of my favorite phrases is E. M. Forster’s “How can I know what I mean until I see what I say?” I think when we’re struggling with something, the process of writing it out helps us understand it – and perhaps even solve it.

Nancy Peacock: Writing in my journal always helps my state of mind, and helps me process what is going on around me. My journal is the place where I get to have an uncensored voice. If I’m grumpy or pressed for time, it helps to just write that I’m feeling grumpy and pressed for time. It allows it to be, and I don’t feel like I’m faced with fighting against it. The page holds my grumpiness and busyness for me, and allows me to move through it. Yet it remains a place that will also hold the spaciousness needed for art. Writing in my journal has been a way for me to learn to trust my own voice, and trust my own thoughts. I know artists in other mediums who also keep journals as a way of working through the daily onslaught of events and energy, and as a way to work out thoughts and insights on particular pieces of art they are producing.

And then there’s reading. Reading is so important. Stories help us become more empathetic to other people. Period. This is the most important life skill you can ever have, and you can hone it by reading fiction.

Why do we need laureates?

Mimi Herman: I think the job of a laureate is to open a door for writing and invite the community we represent to the party. We are ambassadors, helping people not only understand the country of poetry and prose, but inviting them to visit and even become citizens. Citizenship in the country of writing is open to anyone who has something to express. All are welcome.

Nancy Peacock: I think we need laureates now more than ever, to remind people of the written word and of storytelling, and to celebrate the work that has come before us, the work that writers do now, and the work that is not yet written. We need laureates to encourage people to read books other than those on the bestseller lists, and books that are not written by celebrities or about celebrities. Novels and stories reach deep into the human condition, the human experience and human nature that we all share. A laureate’s role is to spread this magic about as widely as possible. We need that.