Kim: Donna Tartt is My Imaginary Friend

Or, How I Get Unstuck During Revision

When I’m revising a manuscript, I carry a book with me at all times. It bangs around in my bag, its corners wearing soft. It has oily fingerprints from wasabi peas. Friends do not ask to borrow it. I panic when it goes missing. Rumpled and stained, it’s like a beloved teddy bear. 

If you’re inclined to slice a teddy bear down its middle, rip out its stuffing and weigh it. Burrow under its button eyes with a seam ripper and examine the stitch-holes beneath. Measure the diameter of its ears and paws and marvel over its symmetry. 

I abuse these books in the name of revision. They are my touchstone texts, the books I return to when I need a master storyteller to tell me what to do.

In edu-speak, “touchstone texts” are books teachers use for lessons on writing craft (disclaimer: I know nothing, Jon Snow, about being a professional educator). My practice is probably closer to what teachers call using “mentor texts”, where one student uses one book to further their own writing. I like this term very much, because it allows me to fantasize that these authors are my actual mentors (yes, Lev Grossman, I fantasize about you). Even better, that my favorite authors have their own mentors. Imagine the pairings! Dickens traversing death and time to cast his spectral gaze over Donna Tartt’s sharp (I imagine it is sharp) shoulder. His bushy eyebrows rise in delight: of this, I’m sure.

My touchstone texts don’t have to be my favorite books (though they often are). They just have to do one thing extremely well. With the perspective of time, I can generally tell where my manuscript falls short, and where I need to turn.

When my lexicon feels tapped, I pick up Yōko Agawa’s Revenge, which inspires me to keep searching for the fewest, most precise words. When I need to ground the reader with a salient detail, Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides reminds me of the power of the ordinary (“a hot-water bottle the texture of inflamed skin, a midnight-blue jar of Vicks Vapo-rub fingerprinted inside”). If a chapter feels pedestrian, I re-read everything Karen Russell, whose stories about presidential horses and silkworm factory girls challenge me with their ingenuity. If my characters feel loosely drawn, I open Tartt’s The Goldfinch on my Kindle and do a keyword search for every mention of Xandra-with-an-X. If I start to worry that my protagonist is unlikable, I read a few pages of Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, then slap my own hand.

Touchstone texts aren’t books that inspire my novels’ concepts. The Talented Mr. Ripley is the inspiration for my third novel. But I won’t let myself near it while I’m writing. I’ve already got a version in my head, filtered into the elements that fascinate me. Besides, there’s the risk of too much Highsmith making its way onto my page. Or that I’ll judge my work against Highsmith’s, and become paralyzed.

Along these lines, I have some hard/fast rules for my touchstone texts:

1. Touchstone texts have no business near first drafts. For all the reasons mentioned above.
2. If you drift into the voice of the touchstone text author, banish the book from your cache.
3. Mix. It. Up. There’s something to be learned from every great book. Don’t be afraid to study a writer whose style diverges from your own. Lately, I’m learning the rewards of a slow-rising character arc from Amanda Coplin’s The Orchardist.

Revising? Jonesing for a touchstone? I offer the following suggestions:

For Leads: The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier; Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs; Thank you for Smoking by Christopher Buckley; The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

For Endings: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides; The Constant Gardner by John leCarré; Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay (including the last chapter, published 20 years post-release); Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

For Voice: The Woman Upstairs by Clare Messud; Dark Places by Gillian Flynn (for Libby Day); Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer; The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

For Tone: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote; The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz; The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides; The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

For Crafting a Well-Constructed Narrative: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt; Bleak House by Dickens; Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier; The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

For Ingenuity: Antigonick by Ann Carson, Sophocles, and Bianco Stone; We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler; Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell; I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro

For Elegant Prose: Speedboat by Renata Adler; Cathedral by Raymond Carver; Atonement by Ian McEwan; Revenge by Yōko Ogawa

Yes, that’s a lipliner holding open Tartt’s Secret History. I’m not writing with it, though that would be glamorous. And messy. 

A Workhorse Speaks

So, I’ve got this little problem: I’m not writing. It’s not that the watering hole has run dry or that I’ve lost my sense of direction. Neigh. It’s Life, getting in the way.

Summer of 2010 I stepped away from an intense, full-time fifth grade teaching position with the goal of writing part-time and running a business, what would eventually become W.O.R.D. Ink (a tutoring and editorial services company.) My whole life I’ve earned continual paychecks, so the wobbly ups and downs of tutoring threw my husband and I for a loop. Still, we managed to figure out the pattern by the end of the first year in preparation for my second, and I worked through a nine-month program to earn a certificate in digital journalism, so I could expand my business services into print and digital media. All the while, Monday-Wednesday-Friday-Sunday, I was working away on a revised incarnation of a WIP that I was excited to show Sara.

Around August of 2011, my main Life pipeline began to clog up: my husband and I dealt with several complex medical issues, and he hired me (I, being the resident copywriter), on our tight budget to write the content for his new company’s website. Meanwhile, it became clear to me ¾ of the way through my WIP that I needed to return to research and story development once more. I would give myself from November 2011 to February 2012 to sort out the backend of each story component. My certificate degree program now over and the winter lull carving a deep crevice in my tutoring income, I began to write the content and conjure the design for my new business website, having now both time and intense need. The goal was to finish by February (coinciding with the culmination of my WIP research), with the site up and running by April. Then, I thought naively, I can finally get back to Just Writing. My new WIP goal was to finish a polished draft and submit by August.

But, Oh…the unforeseen soul searching that ended up going into the website process, the constant decision-making, tweaks, add-ons, gathering, and revisions! The site was to be a representation of me, and what I stand for, of my business and personal mission, vision, values, and promise. It was, I realized, an encapsulation of the best of me, out there for people to see. So where do you think all my creative energy was redirected? And do you think all that could be achieved by February?

By April, I finally had a website I was proud of, but it had cost me now two months of lost momentum in writing time. All the while, my characters wandered aimlessly around in my head, waiting for me to do something clever with them, but I didn’t have the time or creative energy to make decisions. Then came the miscarriage, after waiting so long. If there’s ever one thing to throw your entire life into a depressing tailspin devoid of motivation, it’s one of those. Add to that, three of my best friends were pregnant and I would be helping to plan their baby showers. *Sigh* -- Life. May through August have been a slog of commitments, compromises, and crazy emotions. I got stuck in the endless loop of the Busy Trap. Kissed my writing time goodbye, and felt like a total failure, bait for bad-luck. Ah, the grieving process.

Eventually, I started acupuncture to find some balance and to reclaim my Chi. After bottling up all my experiences, ashamed, thinking how no one on earth wanted to hear me wail about my woes, I finally started talking. Wow. We all have s*#?t going on in our lives, don’t we? We’ve all been through something. And apparently, we all have something to look forward to, as well. Listening to others, I found myself relieved, and laughing behind the tears. When I broke down on my critique group and admitted I needed some time off, they revealed their own struggles with their novels right now, and we decided to reframe our meetings for the time being, to support where each of us is at, to help each other find our creative spark again.

In another month, I can actually breathe a sigh of relief and sink back into the patterns I created so diligently two years back. My tutoring business is expanding, and I’m in the process of hiring a small team of educators, along with an assistant. I’m excited not only for the expertise that they’ll bring, but for the relentless work they will take off my plate. Soon, I’ll be able to justify “sitting around,” and creating in the middle of the day. I’ll get back to the business of writing, and more than anything, I want to write. But my anticipation wears two faces: one the one side, Joy! Splendid Reward! On the other, Fear. All the usual sorts. Am I deluding myself? Will my best-laid plans continue to get sabotaged by the pressing distractions of Life? Will I, in this workhorse form of myself, be the ironic undoing of my own fairytale vision of balance? What if I can’t gain momentum again, can’t jump back into this fictional world, can only view it from a grimy window in my memory? Am I worthy? Am I good enough? Will I trust myself? Be kind to myself? Remember to have fun?

      A blog post on “Write At Your Own Risk” by the lovely Leda Schubert, faculty member at VCFA, kindly bonks me over the head:

“The work of the writer is to write. The work of the writer has not necessarily been—until recently-- to blog, tweet, post, or travel about the world promoting the work of the writer […] Why is it that we write? […] We write because we can’t not write. We are driven by mysterious forces. […] What I really want as a reader are superb books, and those don’t get written when writers are doing other things. Which brings me in a roundabout way to today’s topic: rules for writers. There are none for how to write a great book. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to check off ingredients one by one and bake at 350 until done?” 

A list of writing rules from famed authors follows. Here is my favorite that Leda quotes from Henry Miller:

1.  Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2.  Start no more new books. [… add no more new material to ‘Black Spring.’]
3.  Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4.  Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5.  When you can’t create you can work.
6.  Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7.  Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8.  Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

Returning over the past month to the very simple revelation Leda laid out, I begin to chant: The less you write, the less you write. The more you write, the more you write.

“Back to work,” Leda reminds me.

I nod, accept my fate in the Chinese horoscope (yes, I’m a born Horse), paw at the ground, and get ready to charge ahead.