Believing in the Process

Hi, friends.

I hope you are well and that you’ll bear with me on this long, meandering journey as I try and pull the threads together.

Now that school’s out, I’m back to the writing in earnest. It’s been a series of ups and downs. (Mostly downs, if I’m honest.) If you’ve been writing and revising, I know it’s been a series of ups and downs for you too. Because that’s what writing is. Because that’s what life is.

But sometimes we make this harder on ourselves than is necessary.

If you’ve been here for a while, you know my intentions are so much purer than my follow through. Like Ahab, I board my Pequod every summer declaring my intentions to conquer the white whale. By August, that whale has had it’s way with me. So, at the end of April, I joined an accountability group to help me pursue this whale. I set the hours I’m going to spend writing that week and report back the next week. I’ve been meeting my goals. But it doesn’t feel like I am making much progress. (Though I am. Though it’s never as fast as I want.)

After a string of frustrating days, I finally had an epiphany about why this might be. I’ve put product over process. I’m too focused on The End at the expense of the journey. I’ve squashed my creativity trying to be “productive.” I was bored by my own pages. Once I realized this, my frustration fell away. I started ripping those pages out. Trying to breathe new life into the story.

Story.

This week’s story is BI6FOOT by Jacqueline Vogtman.

Craft tidbits.

I love the opening of this story. The image of the steeple against the landscape. Something concrete, something the narrator can see no matter where she is in town. Its absence, the narrator thinks, explains why life was difficult when she was away at college. (We learn later that trying to find herself at the bottom of a vodka bottle was more to blame. But sure. It’s a nice lie she can tell herself. A way to take herself out of the equation. And this story is about what the things we chose to believe in, real or imagined.)

Far away, the church looked magical, rising from the pages of a fairytale. Up close, though one could see the chips in paint, the cracks in the plaster, the repair that were so desperately needed.

Myths, fairytales, conspiracy theories are inherently more appealing than reality. There’s a comfort to them. It’s why we return to them time and again. Take Genevieve Jump, the spot in the woods where parties are held, where Genevieve jumped after being chased through the woods by a pack of men:

The legend says halfway down she turned into a bird, the truth is she probably just died, dashed on the rocks below.

I also love the juxtapositions that Vogtman makes in the piece. The narrator first encounters the Bigfoot truck while she’s helping her father repair the church steeple.

The truck was empty, parked on the side of the road next to the church. It fascinated me that a person could believe so unwaveringly in what was almost certainly a myth. How could someone have so much faith in Bigfoot when God and even people were so hard to believe in?

Why do we read? Why do we write? What is it we want so much to believe in?

Roy de Maistre A painted picture of the Universe

One of the things that’s been needling me lately is all of this discussion about AI. It’s worked its way into my subconscious telling me that there’s nothing special in what I do, that there’s nothing even human in it. This week one of the tech bros was super excited to let writers know that they’d just launched Story Engine, which they are billing as a “writing partner” for novelists. People were not enthused. (Let’s put aside, the ethics of how they got novelists to submit their manuscripts for the computers to learn in the first place for the moment. As you might suspect, it’s on the shady side.) Let me ask: who wants this? What problem does it solve? If, on my dentistry writing days, I turned to it, “for collaboration,” would my problems be solved? It seems to me AI is built for people to whom writing is a chore. A thing to cross off a list. A comp paper, for instance, that satisfies a requirement but not a curiosity. (We’re back to product vs. process here.) It’s not for readers, that’s for sure. (I clicked through and looked at the samples. They did not light my heart on fire.) Nor is it a substitute for community, the bonds made within writing groups. Writing can be a lonely job, just you and your words. That’s why we seek out writing and accountability groups to begin with. To know we aren’t alone. It’s the same reason the narrator goes out to the woods to begin with.

Always there was someone playing guitar. Always there were faces I half-knew in the firelight … some I knew from high school, some who graduated ten or even twenty years ago. I walked over, wondering how they all ended up here. In high school, everyone talked about wanting to get out, but then somehow they all returned, kept showing up at parties like this one. I guess I was no exception.

I don’t think we can discount curiosity’s role in writing and creativity in general. There’s a reason why the narrator of BI6FOOT is the one who sees bigfoot and not the guys who want to catch it. When she goes to the Sasquatch Society meeting, which is also similar to an AA meeting, she’s the only woman there. In a room of men who look at slides convinced they see

something at the edges, a snatch of fur, a shadow. I began to find the way they were talking about Bigfoot unpleasant, their voices dripping with hunger. Caught, they said. Caught a glimpse. Caught a scent. Caught on camera.

(The way this story uses gender roles to make a larger statement is interesting. I could write an entire thread on it. An idea for another day, perhaps.) Bigfoot is a thing to conquer (a product) and not a curiosity. For the narrator being in the woods, looking for the magic is enough (process).

For the first few days, I stayed on the trails, breathing in pine, listening to birds. By mid-week, I was venturing off-trail, searching for something I wouldn’t yet admit to myself. I was sure there was magic in these woods, even though we were minutes from a highway. By the end of the week, I had photos of trees, birds, leaves, dappled light, mossy rocks, my own shadow—and nothing else.

It seems to me, AI will help you catch words if that’s what you want to do. It’s closer to Erit in the story who sees women as disposable, to use and discard without the messiness of feelings. Asher, on the other hand, the artistic one who she meets in the darkroom, developing pictures in a way that’s not necessary, appreciates the narrator as she is.

Everyone else at college seemed to like me better when I was drunk. Asher, to my great surprise, seemed to like me the way I was.

Ah. The lies we tell ourselves.

Courtney Brown Self-Organization

I don’t think people come to writing because of its efficiency. It’s anything but. And maybe the way we try to measure it—minutes in the chair, words on the page—are just ways of trying to quantify that which can not be quantified. Like finding bigfoot. You just have to believe. It takes a while for the lightbulbs to click on. For the pieces of the story to slide into place. Can a computer see the connects in the same way we can? God, I hope not. Writing is antithetical to click culture. Maybe life is too. At the end of the day, I’m not sure anyone’s happier for it. I don’t think the tech bros are right. I think people are tired of being treated as a product, useful only for their productivity. Burned out from being machines. I think people crave community more than ever, wanting to sit around the campfire and tell stories. [Steve Almond believes that’s why so many people are getting MFAs by the truckload.]

What AI can’t do is know what is to be human. To struggle. To worry about purpose the way writers do. It can’t replace the way I feel about my writing group. The bonds we’ve made. Vogtman’s story ends with the narrator saying:

“I have something to tell you,” I said, “and I hope you’ll believe.”

Isn’t that why we sit down in the first place?

Sparks.

What are some of the local myths that you can use to start a story?

Or. The novel I’m reading right now also uses the woods as a place for teens to gather away from the prying eyes of adults. The woods have long been used as a place of mystery. Start your story there.

Revision. Where can you add more magic? More wonder to your piece? (I do have a bit about bigfoot in one of my chapters. Is it crucial to the story? I don’t know. Was it fun to write? Yes.)

Or. If you need to get really deep into revisions, in the latest edition of Present Tense (a great newsletter. subscribe!) Caitlin Mullen shares her process on using reverse outlining as a revision tool for tension and pacing.

Other tidbits.

Here’s Elizabeth McCracken’s twitter thread on BIG revisions that have been made to some of your favorite books. (Inspiring as it is overwhelming.)

Don’t feed your manuscript to the AI bots, (let them starve) but you may want to link to this digital archival tool.

Open until May 31st: Midway Journal, Split Lip, Gettysburg Review, Mississippi Review. Opening on June 1st: Rose Metal Press (hybrid manuscripts) and Electric Lit (CNF capped at 500 submissions).

I have a writing goal I’m supposed to make today in the name of “productivity” and forward progress. And I will scribble for a while, I suppose. But I’m also going to take the hound for a walk in the woods to see what magic we can find. I hope you’ll do the same for yourself, if only to remind yourself you are not a machine.

Until next time, scribblers~

Marsha