On Balance
Hi, friends.
We’ve come to that part of the semester where papers have begun pouring in, encroaching like kudzu into my writing time. I put them off, pretend they aren’t there, because once I start grading, it will be a steady stream until the end of the semester. Does that mean I’m frantically scribbling trying to catch those words before tending the papers? I mean. Surely you know better. Their existent looms. My desire to ignore them becomes its own task. It’s silly. Isn’t it easier to just grade them? Absolutely. Yesterday, I looked at a few. It’s never as terrible as I think it is. I can do four or five at a time, it doesn’t have to consume my whole day. There’s still time for writing. And yet. And yet.
Story.
This week’s story is Kudzu by Jac Jemc.
Craft tidbits.
Yesterday, after I graded a few papers, I read over a few chapters I’d written and revised a few weeks ago. They don’t work. I felt some despair about it. But I also know what’s wrong with them, and how to fix them. All summer I’ve been paring the novel toward a more manageable word count. In doing so, I made these chapters too thin. No description. No internal conflict. They read as plot points and nothing more. They are, in short, out of balance with the rest of the novel. I over-corrected.
When I was a child, my mother (the school teacher) would patiently read whatever book I wanted. But if my father (the engineer) was in charge of bedtime, I often got the tale of Lazy Jack. No book. Just memory. In the story, Jack is so simple he can never solve the problem at hand but relies on a lesson he’s learned in the past. As a child, I found him silly. Why couldn’t he learn? And here I am carrying butter around in my pockets.
Jemc’s story is a good metaphor about how we, like Lazy Jack, are prone to over correct a problem.
Just after I pushed my daughter out into the world for the first time, I decided it would be best if we retreated. I would keep her safe from all of the outside harms.
But living in this house of kudzu presents its own problems. They need goats to chew the kudzu back. It is an exile of their own making. What keeps them safe, also becomes a thing to fear.
On days when I felt frustrated and afraid that even I could not keep my daughter safe, I feared the kudzu.
It seems to me stories or books (and yes, even student papers) often don’t work because they are out of balance. There’s too much description and not enough action; too much past and not enough present; not enough detail, etc. But here, Jemc finds a balance between the internal and the external, dialogue and description, the wants of the daughter, the needs of the mother.
We are always seeking balance on the page, within our writing lives, trying to make time to get the words down on paper, but also in giving our brains enough room to ponder and imagine what our characters need to do, how we might shape a scene, what we might cut in order to get to the conflict sooner. Sometimes there is too much time. Sometimes too little. There is nothing about writing life that’s not also true of life writ large.
We see reminders of change all around us, as the seasons change, as light gives way to dark, as children grow into adults, as contentment wrestles with anxiety. Things do not stay one way forever. Each change is toward a balance of the whole.
Like the narrator of Kudzu, we seek a balance between our private writerly lives tucked behind the kudzu vines of our making and being in the world, sending work out, applying for residencies and jobs. Sometimes this feels uncomfortable. We grow tired of rejection. But it’s also a way to stretch ourselves, a way to add some change to our process when things grow too comfortable, too stale. Is it easier to retreat, to hide away, to take the safest routes? Yes. But that leaves us wanting something too.
I knew it couldn’t last. I knew my daughter would eventually want out of this little world we’d created.
Sparks.
Everyone is strange to someone. Write about someone who is a local curiosity. Perhaps they have absented themselves from life. Perhaps they have been the subject of gossip. Perhaps they do something that’s just too odd for everyone else.
Or. On Friday, poet Jerecho Brown asked twitter “Was there a moment you realized your father was a man? Do you remember it? Did he see you see it?” Write about that moment when a child realizes that their parent is flawed.
Revision. Where have you over corrected your manuscript? Perhaps it’s in scope or in length. Perhaps it’s in distance or description. Where is it accidentally off balance?
Other tidbits.
Fancy a writing residency? In March? Apply to The Mount’s Writers in Residency program (Edith Wharton’s home in MA) by Oct. 1.
Maybe you are also a long writer? Massachusetts Review is open to stories from 7k-25k. But you’ve got to put it in the snail mail by Oct. 1. (And they pay.)
Nimrod is open to general submissions, and one themed around body language, closes Oct. 1. Witness is seeking poetry and CNF on the theme of second chances by Oct. 5th. Camas, a journal of the American West, seeks work on the theme of lore by Oct. 16.
That’s it from here scribblers. It’s a great day for writing. Those papers, dishes, laundry can wait. Pencils up~
Marsha