Invoking The I @invokingthei-blog - Tumblr Blog

So I finally got the story that had me launch this blog published. Thought I should mention that.

Stomach clutching time

Take very personal family stories, write them up, dwell on them for two years, end up feeling totally spent, then package the stories together and ship them off for readers to critique. It's not altogether unlike ripping out your guts and handing them off to your friends to play with. But that's what friends are for.

Milestone #1 done. My first draft is in my friends' hands.

#writing #first draft #critique #Writing process #memoir #nonfiction

The last push

I'm on my final push, editing my way through my final four stories, my weakest links, which I stupidly set aside and saved for last. I did not know this was a terrible idea until I woke up this morning exhausted after keeping my boyfriend company while he combated water damage from Hurricane Irene.

I need a nap.

I seriously need a nap.

Very vaguely, I suspect that wrapping up the first draft of my first memoir manuscript is slightly like giving birth: I don't have much left in me, but I still need to push forward and get it done.

The conditions haven't been great. Sleep deprivation, major weather, dislocation from the bedroom due to leaks, we're half camping.

I'm also full of mixed feelings at my achievement. Having a manuscript means being open to judgment and critique. But that's the point, isn't it? I better get comfortable with the idea.

It's just weird working so hard, so privately, on a project, and then finally going public--Like emerging into the middle of a festival Sunday after spending months alone in a basement. I am blinking in confusion and being asked to socialize.

#editing #revision #Writing process #memoir #nonfiction

Weird

So I've gotten from 38,000 words to 44,000 words in two days. I've written a bucket full of scenes for my various stories with varying success. I need to work on sensory details in each story next. And then... it will be time for my first batch of reader. Scary. Weird.

I'm basically giving myself a week to fix stuff before shipping off my manuscript to trusted friends for reading over the next month. I will stop looking at the language (at least that's the plan) during that month. I'm looking forward to the hiatus. October will be revision month. It's been an intense process. But I'm pretty happy with the outcome. (for now).

#revisions #writing #First draft #Writing process #memoir #nonfiction

jasmined

invokingthei-blog

jasmined:

quiet (Taken with Instagram at Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool)

4000 words in 24 hours

I'm exhausted. I've been writing dialogue nonstop since last night, and I've made great progress, which is gratifying, but the road ahead remains arduous, which makes me tired. It's been fun trying to put words in people's mouths and capture conversations now long gone. I'm not sure I'm doing justice to my familiars, but I'm trying like the dickens.

For some reason, now that I'm exhausted, I just want to write cliche after cliche. They seem quite satisfying and apropos, like a midnight mcdonald's run during a long road trip.

Once the dialogue writing jag subsides, it will be time for descriptive details to rule supreme. That will be fun too.

Good night, good people. May the impending hurricane be kind to all of us.

#dialogue #writing #revisions #Writing process #memoir #nonfiction

Ready... Scene... Action!

Since I'm sick of my all too familiar manuscript, I'm devoting myself to making it unfamiliar once again. Those whom I love enough to let them give me feedback have told me that my core writing problem is that I'm too meta. I like to give the big picture, but forget to provide the little one, the moments that can anchor a narrative, by providing a description of a scene and some characters talking to each other. So that's what I'm doing story by story, I'm going back and adding scenes to amp up the liveliness of my manuscript. Then I will go paragraph by paragraph, adding descriptive sensory details.

Here's a little scene I cooked up last night:

My worst bed experience was moving with my boyfriend into an apartment where we inherited his parents’ bed. He had mentioned to me that his parents had a Murphy bed. I did not know what that meant. He showed it to me on a tour of the apartment when we visited his parents for Sunday brunch.

“This was one of my mom’s great ideas. Isn’t it perfect? This way they can both use this room as an office during the day and a bedroom at night. I think it’s brilliant.” He said as he demonstrated how you could pick up the bed by its feet and shove it skyward into its cup-board like receiving furniture.

“You just close the doors, and voila!” With flourish, pointing at the empty floor space.

“Interesting.” Interesting is what I say when I don’t know what to say, and probably don’t have something nice to say.

But the implications of a Murphy bed did not truly sink in until the bed was in our possession. Not only were we sleeping in his parents’ marital bed, in their marital sheets, but this was a bed that could hide from me.

#Writing #Editing #Developing scenes #Writing dialogue #revisions #Writing process #memoir #nonfiction

Fell in love with highline park in NYC today.

Ruthless Editing

Yesterday, I re-read my latest version of my old lady piece and I decided it was total shite. I concluded that I would have to toss the whole thing and start fresh again. Today I re-read it and thought, well, there are some small bits and pieces that don't suck. I gave myself permission to to save whatever still resonates with me. So I'm spending this rainy sunday ruthlessly cutting any banalities from my story. Whole paragraphs are being sacrificed by this priest to the altar of a better art. I feel like a butcher, stripping away anything that isn't the best meat from the carcass. My hands are bloody.

So I'm slicing, and stripping, and I'm left with little gems for my god. Now comes the terrifying puzzle work, when I try to see what to do with the remaining precious stones of my prior version, and find new ways to string them together, and what new elements must be brought into the whole as I try (again) to make a beautiful coherent piece.

For your reference, here's my opening paragraph, which I like well enough but may not survive to the next iteration:

"My American grandfather insists that the meaning of life is becoming a grandmother. He’s been telling me this since I was about 15, which explains his bitterness about my non-reproductive status as I approach 40. I’m not sure whether I’ll ever be a grandma, but I am looking forward to being an old lady because I’ve decided that I will be young until I reach 69. There will be one year of transition, and then (age, health and vitality being rather subjective,) I'm going to declare myself an old lady at 70. Let’s face it—the future is a mix of the familiar and the uncanny. I can only assume that some of the rituals of the elderly I envy today will remain, and some will fade away."

#editing #Writing process #memoir #nonfiction

Feeling my way in the dark

I massively reorganized my Immigrant and Old Age pieces again this morning. Revising feels like I'm haltingly walking through a strange room in the dark with my hands out, bumping into strange shapes, trying to identify them, trying to decipher the layout of the space, one halting touch into the unknown at a time.

I'm trying to discern what order might lie within the darkness, but it's hard to extrapolate the whole room from my imperfect contact with the component pieces.

Simultaneously, I'm clarifying my thoughts, trying to push myself to acknowledge my unspoken assumptions, the emotions that lie under my comfortable explanations.

Both processes I imagine to be similar to archaeology--you dust a little bit off here, and something new appears, and you dust it again, and it starts to emerge from the dirt, and eventually you can reach in and grab a whole object out of what used to be blank ground. Which is a metaphor I'm pretty sure Stephen King uses in On Writing. Well, he's right.

I'm excavating my little heart out, trying to be optimistic that I'm digging out a valuable dinosaur rather than a 70s toilet.

#excavation #archaeology #revisions #Writing process #memoir #nonfiction

The question really is...

It turns out that in order to start radical rewrites you just need to ask yourself the right question: In my case, "What's my angle? (A corollary of which is: what makes my particular situation/insight specific and interesting?)

Once I started thinking along these lines directly instead of indirectly, rewriting suddenly became a lot easier, as did reorganization.

Sometimes the most basic/obvious realization evades me. But when clarity dawns, fierceness is unleashed! (Optimism abounds, at least temporarily.)

I've radically re-written the openings to my Old Age piece and my Immigrant Identity piece. Here's the new Old Age opener:

"I have one advantage over nearly everyone I know: my four grandparents are still alive and they love life. While most fear old age, I have examples in my family that allow me to relish the prospect. It's not that I don't fear a deteriorating body, I do, but I am fortified by three thoughts: 1) I have good genetics 2) future medicine has to improve and I like doctors 3) I am excellent at having a good time—it really doesn't take much to entertain me. So when I think about the distant future, I tend to be more hopeful than scared. I have a lot to look forward to."

#Old age #editing #clarity #Writing process #memoir #nonfiction

Sunday morning

boyextraordinary-deactivated201

#sky #planes

Saturday night

Boat v2

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