Gary Paulson

Writing: The Problem with Digging Deep


Eric Clapton’s autobiography recently came out and it’s been praised widely for, among other things, its frankness. Mr. Clapton’s colorful past manages to be honest without injecting drama that isn’t there. But the chapter dealing with the death of his four year old son has a different tone than the rest of the book. There is a distance to the narrative that alarmed his publishers to the point that they asked him to consider rewriting it. He declined and explained that his child’s tragic accident was not something he could write any other way. That time and those circumstances were not places he could go emotionally anymore. He could talk about them. Sing the song he wrote for his boy. But to write the event from the perspective of the grieving father wasn’t possible. He just couldn’t do it.

In writing my novel I have discovered that while I can fictionalize much of the events surrounding my first husband’s illness and death and that I can write about the year that followed in a fashion, I can’t dive in to those emotions anymore. I am too far removed and just don’t want to. I wondered for a while if this was the denial I have been accused of in the past and decided it wasn’t. I am normal and what I am experiencing is normal. Grief doesn’t go anywhere really but you do reach a point where it is someplace you don’t go much, if at all. And that’s more than okay. It’s a good thing.

So, I am mining my past and my pain for the time being as I go back over the latter half of last year and when the book is finished, I won’t be revisiting that in my fiction again. I have other projects. Two of which I have already started actually. Still, “going there” as Gary Paulson would say, isn’t entirely without its redeeming factors because I think I am writing a pretty darn good book.

Meanderings of Writer’s Block


One of my favorite authors is a man named Gary Paulson. If you are a middle school teacher, you probably are quite familiar with his work. He is a phenomenal talent who writes accessible fiction that promotes thinking without being preachy. I was thinking about him the other day when I read yet another newspaper article about how brave the author of the Harry Potter series was to “out” one of her main characters. I was and still am unimpressed by her after the fact revelation. Had she written the character as a man who happened to be gay in addition to being the head master of a school for wizards that would have been worthy of praise. As it was, she opted for the cheap politically correct option of telling her readers she imagined that the character was gay as she wrote about him……not being gay. Not that it matters. Orientation is not the sole defining characteristic of any person and that should have been the point. It reminded me of Paulson because in his novel The Car, one of the man characters is a gay man. As readers we learn about this through yet another main character as he reveals the fact in passing during a conversation. Paulson never mentions the fact again in the course of the novel because it’s not relevant to the story, but he mentions it upfront and not as an aside in an interview later on. So why do I bring up Paulson at all? Was it to discuss the Rowlings revelation? No, actually I wanted to talk about his theory on writing. I may have mentioned it at some point in my blogging but it bears repeating. He feels that writers have to be willing to “go there” in other words, dig deep into the rubble pile that is the sum of all our bad experiences in life and be willing to put ourselves back in those circumstances and draw on the rawness to fuel artistic endeavors. And no, it’s not much more fun that it sounds. I know because I have been reading back through the first six months of my blogging from July through December of 2006. Not fun times. Although not as dark as times that preceded it in 2005 or 2004 or even earlier. When I truly think about, life has been a struggle since early spring of 2002. That’s when Will first began to be obviously not right in so many ways. That’s a long time to struggle. And sometimes I would like to forget about those times completely. Why not? There is no reason to go back there and agonize, second guess or berate myself. Except that those times made me who I am in the same way that my father’s alcoholism shaped me or my long, lonely single years laid the foundation I built upon when Will was sick and it was just me and Katy, just as examples. How do you integrate and use those lessons, for lack of a better word, and forget the circumstances at the same time. In retrospect, I am a lucky person because I know there are people who lives have been beset with far more tragedy than my own and for whom there never seems to be much, if any respite. Though most of these people are strong, resourceful and able to hang onto those wonders and joys of life that see them through and give them hope; no one is able to hold up the world day in and day out when it seems intent on rolling off their shoulders or becomes to heavy a burden alone. Those times when I felt that life was little more than an endless battle against the bad things; I hung onto the fact that I would be happy again. Even when I wasn’t sure if that was really true, I clung to it stubbornly and it saw me through to where I am now. Today I was reading one of the many widow blogs I peruse. It’s author, Alicia, called to mind the endurance that is necessary to sustain oneself when the forces beyond our control have us tightly boxed and seemingly in their grip. Her poem reminded me of the power within us all to dig within ourselves and express our need for strength and empathy and a glimpse of that elusive and lit tunnel exit sign.

Art


“Art is what you find when the ruins are cleared away” Interesting quote. I wish I knew who to attribute it to, but I first heard it while viewing an interview the children’s author, Gary Paulsen. There’s a guy who had ruins to pick through if anyone did. He said that a writer has to be willing to “go there”. I guess he means the dark places that lurk, mostly unseen, in everyone. I think that is my problem right now. I know what it is I want to write about but I am having trouble “going there”, and I am looking for anything that will distract me from the task. Trouble is a story is like a child. It never lets you alone. And unlike a child, you can’t turn on SpongeBob to get a little peace from it. And even though I have plenty of rubble to pick through, I am not sure that I would call myself an artist. A technician maybe. Writing is skill as much as it is a gift. I remember the first story I ever wrote. It was about pirates. I got the idea from one of those storystarter cards the sisters would give us to keep us occupied during language arts classes. A clever way to teach the mechanics that they surely came to regret as they plowed through dozens of awful flights of nine year old fancy. I was so proud of that story. I had been making up stories in my head from the time I could remember but had never thought to write one down. Sister didn’t think much of it. It was returned without a star and bleeding with red ink. I was an awful speller (never made it past the K list) and had comma addiction. Fortunately, I thought Sister was an idiot. I kept on writing stories. Notebooks and binders full. I still can’t spell but that hasn’t been an issue since the advent of the PC. I still like commas. I stopped writing about ten years ago though. I can’t really say why. Well, okay, maybe I can. I wanted to quit teaching and go back to graduate school at Iowa. Get into the Writer’s Workshop. Got rejected. A real writer wouldn’t have let that stop her, but I didn’t consider myself a real writer. Which is funny because I am nothing but a writer, always have been. I stopped listening to that nine year old inside me and that was a mistake because she had a much clearer grasp on who we were. So, here I am. Back in the ruins, shovel in hand and hesitating. Real writing is work. It is not all manna from heaven, although that does happen sometimes. Mostly though it is sitting and searching for the words that will connect thought with reader. Recently I caught a rerun of a Charlie Rose interview with George Lucas, and Lucas was talking about writing. Something I am sure that some people would argue he shouldn’t do to much of. But, he talked about the difference between his style and that of Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola, he said, just believed that you should write as quickly as possible and get it all down and done. Come back to it and write it again. And again. And eventually you have a finished work. If you didn’t. If you spend too much time worrying about every choice of word or phrase or placement of puncuation, you would never finish. Lucas made a good point, even if he never really did explain how he wrote a story. Summed up my current dilemma nicely. I am worrying too much. I need to just write. The faster. The better. My nine year old self was correct when she came to the egocentric conclusion that critics were stupid. Let he who has picked stones from the ruins be the first to cast them at me.