KaBooM Writers

Patience and the Tiger

Weigh, hey, year three is it of this novel? It’s draft number three at any rate. Writing a novel takes endurance and faith and the patience to tolerate so many days that look the same: the screen ahead, the softening hips below, the sun rarely shining, the rain coming too often, the snow a bore. Writing a novel is like rowing toward the horizon. No matter how many times you crank the oars, nor how many months you have been at this labor, the horizon is still far away, and the shore has disappeared. There is nothing to do but keep on going.

Now, as a somewhat creative person, I like to make things. But the course of writing a novel requires so much patience that I find myself turning to other enterprises in order to feed my need for quicker gratification. (note: eating is not advised as a means of instant gratification. A novelist spends entire seasons in a chair, and blooms but not in a flattering way.)

This winter I tried drawing and painting to satisfy this need. As you can see from the photo I posted, I am quite an amateur with  visual composition. However, the delight I got from using color to make forms on a page was exciting and soothing. It quieted the internal, impatient tiger wanting to be finished with this novel right now. It kept my tiger distracted, purring as if my the brush strokes were petting its fur. If you are at sea with a novel, it helps to have a tiger on board, as Yann Martel illustrated so well in Life of Pi.

Today we are roaring across the waves and my little creative self has had some play and is quite happy to be in the boat, and the tiger has begun to eat up all the chocolates and the ladies in the painting are losing it, but that is the way of writing a novel.

As we gathered after a summer hiatus, we discovered each of us had read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love, or seen the movie, or done both. A lively discussion followed. We examined a number of points of view, ours and those of other public commentators.

One writer was disappointed that the movie glossed over the story of Gilbert’s purchase of a home for Wayan, an ostracized divorced mother in Bali.  I agreed that the story was amazing but then I found myself irritated with Gilbert for what I thought was self-aggrandization.  We examined the idea that often what bothers us about another is a problem we have with ourselves.  I chewed on that notion after I left.

For me it seemed a self-congratulatory tale, a do-gooder seeking praise. But it wasn’t really. It was a story of one woman shepherding resources at her disposal to improve another woman’s daily life.  That Gilbert claimed the good work was what irritated me.

Why?  Because I have been taught that modesty is a woman’s way.  Other people may praise you, but you must not toot your own horn.  It felt like Gilbert had gotten away with something that she, as a woman, should not.  The irony is that I often write about the curious tendency of women to censor the behavior of other women–and here I was doing just that.

I appreciate now that Gilbert was showing women how to claim actions.  As women we must. Too many works by women, artistic, social, political, and religious, have gone unnoticed, sometimes due to modesty, sometimes due to malicious intent.   I am glad to have been brought to this understanding and am glad to toss away a fossilized belief.  Let’s allow for self-celebration.  Let’s claim what we do.

This week I attended a bullriding contest and I judged a literary contest. I observed some differences between the competitions. In bullriding, it’s the rider, the clock, and the bull. The rider who stays on the longest wins.   That is the simple method of determining the winner, without consideration for style, or conflicts overcome, or originality in setting or situation. The story is always the same. The bull wins.

In a literary contest, there are many variables, the most crucial being the judge’s sense of what is the most valuable characteristic of a written piece. After years of judging, teaching, and writing, I’ve decided that structure matters very much. Is it a story, first of all? Does it satisfy the requirement that there is a conflict that has been dealt with? I read first, not in an analytical way, but for pleasure. One of the pleasures of reading a good story is the sense of satisfaction and completeness a reader feels when the story ends, as in the stories by Kim Edwards, Michael Knight, Charles Baxter, and Barbara Fisher. This understanding is felt or known, but the reader may not immediately be able to articulate why the story has created such satisfaction. Then, if one is a judge, one can return to the story and see how and why she felt that the story was successful. I start with that response to a story. Then I consider voice, vision, and acumen with language. Once, in the past, I liked the third place story best, because of its language and imagination and voice, but I did not choose it as the “best” because its structure was more flimsy than the winner’s was.

I find that a number of stories show tremendous promise but have been sent out before they are completely finished. That is the most common reason why a story does not win. It needs a few more turns on the spit, for more fat to drip out, more flavor to be tendered in.

Bullriders rarely go into the ring until they are ready. There’s too much at stake. For writers, submitting to subjective judges, it’s harder to know about  a story’s readiness. So I suggest that writers master structure as a necessary skill. If you do so, you will go far in your quest for the prize.