Thoughts on Writing

Trees, Changing Seasons & Writing

looking down at leaves of red, yellow, and green, through a white-framed window

the view from my front room

I’ve already hung jack-o’-lantern lights, and the first good autumn rain is using my walls and roof as its own soft percussion section. Yet from my top-floor flat, I can still see plenty of green leaves. One of these trees, now still mostly green, gave me the first hints that fall was coming back in August when a few of its leaves turned yellow.

In a city that’s home to deciduous trees, it’s the trees that tell you first when the seasons are changing.

Those yellow leaves have since turned gold and then brown and fallen down. Other parts of town have more leaves on the walkways (they don’t survive long on the roads); all month, I’ve taken time, on those rare dry days, to crunch through drifts of leaves on my way to the office or the library. A few times I’ve jumped from pile to pile instead of just stomping through.

Already I’m thinking about how I won’t accept that it’s winter until the last leaves have fallen, leaving behind branches and trunks that grow dark and slick in the rain—no matter how many layers I’m wearing before that happens. Given how slick last year’s snow made the sidewalks, I try not to think about the dark wood taking on a white outline.

None of these changes happen all at once. We choose dates and times to say when one season ends and another begins, when we change our clocks, when we pull out our boxes of scarves and thick sweaters. The trees warn us when these days approach but, more importantly, they show how arbitrary these moments are. Seasonal change, and the turning of the leaves, is a process, not a moment.

And my writing process is a bit like that process. I don’t write in discrete first, second, and third drafts: some paragraphs may have been written and rewritten multiple times before other are made more than an outline. Trees don’t make sure that all their leaves have turned red or yellow before they begin to lose them. Some leaves are still producing plenty of chlorophyll while others have already curled, dried, and fallen.

trees on a lawn with sunlight streaming through gold and yellow leaves, some leaves have fallen onto the grass

Queen's University Belfast Quad, September 2009

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The Long Haul

The Old English epic poem Beowulf is written i...

Image via Wikipedia

I haven’t been posting my writing here or on the various community sites with which I have been associated very often lately. This is partly because of other responsibilities and activities, but a more important reason behind it is a shift in my creative work:

I’ve given up on short forms.

If whatever inner or outer forces are designated by the Muse chose to give me a short piece as a gift, I wouldn’t reject it. This isn’t a philosophical objection to the short lyric poem or to flash fiction but, rather, a recognition that my subjects need more space.

I could list plenty of surface reasons why my life might give rise to the need for longer works: I’ve lived on three continents, climbed a few sacred mountains and seen the sunrise from their peaks, etc. But the truth is that it goes deeper. Some months ago, a story written by a friend served as a catalyst to an artistic crisis: I realized that I was no longer writing the kind of work I wanted to write when I first began.

I just wanted to make pretty poems when I began. I began in second grade, but that’s not really the point. Beauty, and the desire to perpetuate it, brought me into writing, but then I saw too much human ugliness to continue writing as if the world were all rhyming sunsets and lollipops. My first book was, ultimately, about the struggle to cope with horror and how that struggle turns into an obsession with ugliness.

It didn’t take too long for me to realize that to get back to beauty, I had to go through the horror, to hold both together, to weave them at their most extreme. As David Foster Wallace said, “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” I like to think that the same thing can be true of poetry.

The real challenge is how to do it. I tried to do it within short pieces and maybe had some moderate success, but I couldn’t bring in enough of what I know about moving through and surviving the terrible into shorter works. I tried doing it on the level of the collection, and I do think the manuscripts I’ve put together in this manner are valuable, but in the gaps between individual pieces, something of the overall sweep is lost. I’m not doing justice to everything I know.

And the truth is that I’ve been pressed against the limits of the short form for a long time. Even back when I was working on my MFA, the most common criticism of my poetry was that it was too dense. I started using white space as much as I do  in part to counteract that tendency.

Struggling against a restriction can be fertile of course, but part of being an artist is knowing when to let go. And it’s time for me to let go of the limits of the short form. Long poems and novels are my new worlds.

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Poem: Not Our Kind, My Dear

while women are heavy readers, we know they are heavy readers of the kind of fiction that is not likely to be reviewed in the pages of the TLS…The TLS is only interested in getting the best reviews of the most important books. -Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement

     when polished nails touch Ulysses
Marion Bloom appears on the cover
corseted and heaving
                                   over the leather's top

between that and her windblown hair,
No it's not literary No it's not No important enough

 for these pages, my dear

                            be certain to scrape
off all that cherry bomb red
before your fingers hit the keys

if you want your book to be
important enough for us Yes
a quarter are written by the fair sex Yes

                     twenty-five percent is fair

as long as you continue to taste
salt in the wind in your heroine's hair

when our taste is for coffee grounds & tea leaves
the rest is fetish, is popular, is waste

wipe that lipstick off your face
what do you mean that's just your smile?
I know what shallow tastes like
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The Problem with NaNoWriMo

an orange leaf reading "NaNoWriMo Nov. 1" and an orange pen lie on top of a notebook which contains a lot of cursive writing

Image by owlbookdreams via Flickr

There is a problem with NaNoWriMo, but it isn’t what Laura Miller thinks.

I’ve done and won NaNoWriMo before. I can see it benefiting individual writers by helping them establish writing routines or ways of viewing their day with an eye to uncovering moments to write. It can be a way to get a “bad novel” out of the way. For people who might not ever write otherwise let alone publish, it can still serve as therapeutic writing or as a way to gain a new perspective on the work authors do—a bit like the way taking a ballet course for adult beginners helped me gain a new appreciation of exactly how awkward those graceful positions on stage actually feel. (No, I never did wear a tutu or pointe shoes, but I did fall over a few times)

The problem, however, is that [Inter]National Novel Writing Month has gotten big enough that there’s pressure to participate. If you’re a writer and you communicate at all online, someone will ask you about it (multiple people most likely). Among those of us who are not participating, a common response is to explain exactly how busy we are with other writing. Poets even have their own equivalent.

So much for the “creative indolence” Keats talked about.

NaNoWriMo is part of a culture that tells us to do more faster and which tells us that writing more faster is better. Of course, it isn’t just Novel Writing Month that does this: MFA programs require that a certain amount of writing be produced during a limited period, seeing friends’ (and “friends’”) new publications slide by in Facebook status updates and Twitter tweets makes those who produce less feel inadequate, and books on writing commonly advise us to write a lot quickly without listening to the inner critic and then revise from there. Then there are the deeper elements: the Protestant Work Ethic, the traces of industrial thinking which continue to have an impact through education systems built based on factory principles, and the lurking notion that all things should be measurable, that ideas only have value if they can be proven in terms that would be acceptable to science.

By itself, NaNoWriMo would be fairly harmless. After all, writing a lot quickly before revising surely works for some people. But there are all sorts of stories, apocryphal and otherwise, about now-canonical writers who agonised over words even on the first draft, adding less than a hundred per day, taking them out the next. When working on an extended project, I like to revise the writing from the previous day before adding new words.

In the culture that produced NaNoWriMo and which NaNoWriMo in turn produces, however, wordcount rules. Numbers become the primary goal. When hitting 50,000 words in a month stops being just a fun challenge or a way to jump start your writing and actually begins to seem virtuous, art becomes simply production.

As I said at the start, the project itself can be of worth to individual writers. The key is to remember that wordcount isn’t really what counts.

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Magdalene & the Mermaids

Magdalene & the Mermaids

Magdalene & the Mermaids

Available From Reviewed at Sample poems at

Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!

  • Check out Oooooooo by tina negus on Flickr
    http://t.co/0dvmFUte
    2012/02/23 01:03
  • Well, this is disappointing. (Neutrino Not Faster Than Light) https://t.co/1DMaWjwx
    2012/02/23 01:48
  • View 2 new photos on my Flickr
    http://t.co/MoFxF70S
    2012/02/23 01:59
  • Burn All the Liars - The Morning News https://t.co/oFG1eIg1
    2012/02/22 20:46
  • Thanks! RT@Beth_Winter: I gave @EKSwitaj +K about Poetry on @klout ”
    http://t.co/6t3KA8zd
    2012/02/22 11:39
  • @Beth_Winter
    You are most welcome! :)
    2012/02/22 11:25
  • @alexpryce100
    the <pre> tags are your friends
    2012/02/22 11:01
  • …and Standard English, apparently.
    2012/02/22 11:41