On Hope
Hi, friends.
Happiest of New Years to you. I love New Years. The quiet ones, the loud ones. I love the quiet tail of the year when there is a collective reflection and taking stock and striving to be better humans. For a few days, everything seems possible.
And as muck as I love it, I know it will not last. Our new intentions are met with our old habits and flaws. The desire to be better will fade and the nonsense will creep in. But for a bit, there is the glimmering possibility.
What is writing but an exercise in hope? Every time we pick up the pencil we hope to find the right words. To bring a character, a world, a dilemma to life. To lose ourselves for a few minutes in the possible. To connect with others through an imperfect system of words that can’t fully convey all that we wish. But here, too, we are met with the friction of reality. Some days the words don’t come as easily as we want. Our time gets frittered away on other things. The scene isn’t quite working. We go down the wrong path and find ourselves in the weeds. The rejections mount.
And yet. We pick up the pencil again and again. Because, we know how it feels when it does work. And we need that hope as often as possible.
Story.
Instead of a story today, I’ve pulled some advice and musings from other writers to help set you down the path of good intentions for the New Year.
Craft tidbits.
On Letting Go of Previous Convictions
I thought I wasn’t writerly enough if I wasn’t inventing characters who were markedly different from me, that the process of invention required me to demonstrate I could conjure these distinct selves. Now I have relieved myself of the burden of always having to do that.
—Holly Goddard Jones
Time as a Malleable Material
A story is most interesting to me as I’m writing it if I’m doing something strange with the time signature. I’m the most dead and my writing is the most lifeless when I’m telling a story in a relatively conventional, chronological way. I think that in some ways a novelist’s raw material is time itself. What you do with it, how you compress some events or skip over them or take parts of the past and stretch them out so they touch the future.
—Charles Yu
Getting to Know Your Characters
One of the best writing exercises I did while writing this book is just to write pages of backstory about certain characters, 90% of which never made it into the novel. But it allowed me to get to know a character deeply in a very low-stakes way. I took the pressure off myself by agreeing it wouldn’t go in the actual book.
I had to learn that writing is more than your word count. I had plenty of those frustrating days where you write all morning just to realize it wasn’t working and I needed to delete everything. At first, those felt like wasted days, but I had to learn to realize that invisible work is real work. Learning what story you don’t want to tell is as important as learning which one you want to tell.
—Brit Bennett
On Saving Your Darlings
I’m pretty good at salvaging things even from wrecked drafts (maybe because I’m a slow writer). It also helps to sometimes imagine my entire writing output, thus far and into the future, as a jigsaw I’m making. Sometimes, as with a jigsaw, a piece comes to hand that I try to no avail to fit into the corner I’m working on…but you don’t throw that piece away. You hope it’ll find its rightful home elsewhere in the puzzle.
—Peter Ho Davies
Staying Curious
Research is a big word that encompasses a lot of different activities, all of them based around curiosity. Research is traveling to places, or studying snowflakes with a magnifying glass, or excavating your memories. I very much use writing as an excuse to research, and research as an excuse to procrastinate. The world is so fundamentally interesting and it makes me fall in love with it a dozen times a day. I keep a journal and try to write things down I find interesting and eventually, one hopes, 5% of the things one learns, or the faces one sees, or the skies one observes, eventually get folded into something fictional. The key is to try and stay open…
Anthony Doerr
Have you made some intentions for this year? Set a goal? Picked a word to steer you? (I am going with Determined. And this year, I am writing it down, since I can’t for the life of me remember what 2022’s word was. Look at that. Determination in action!) Some of the best advice I have regarding new intentions (writing or otherwise) comes from Ben Franklin, who kept a fairly steady schedule. Rising at 5 for studying and examining the day’s business, working from 8-noon each day, two hours for lunch and reading, then back to work from 2-6. For dinner and some conversation, music, or other diversion and putting things away before bed at 10. At the beginning of the day, he asked himself: What good shall I do this day? And at the end of it: What good have I done this day? It’s a good way to look outward, beyond ourselves. Instead of resolutions, it might be easier to ask yourself what do you want more of? Less of? What’s a concrete step you can take to make this happen? (I read while I drink my coffee. And last year I wanted to read more, scroll less. So instead of turning the internet on for my second cup of coffee, I extended my reading time to my second cup. Did I succeed every day? No. But I was happier when I did. And I read more books than I did the previous two years. And I’ll continue on this path this year, too, I hope.)
If you want to whisper your intentions in the comments, please do. I find that telling other people what I intend to do, helps me follow through.
(I intend to finish this @#$% book. I am determined about it. As soon as I push send, I am printing it out and reading it all week. I. Am. Going. The. Distance.)
Sparks.
Write about anticipation. Perhaps the setting could be on the eve of something—a new year, a move, a wedding. What goes right? What goes wrong?
Revision. What holidays do your characters like the most? How are holidays treated on the page? I just read a book where the Fourth of July figured heavily, though the book took place in June. For some characters it was something to look forward to. For others it held certain memories.
Other tidbits.
Last year, I used this daily tracker from The New Happy to track my writing sessions. (I do the pomodoro method and assign each number of tomatoes a color. You could track word counts, I suppose, or how you felt. Or drafting days vs revision days. Or the weather. Whatever measurable thing you want.)
If Hustle is your word of the year, this list of ways to increase productivity might be useful.
There are a few places closing for submissions soon: Bennington Review on Jan. 9th, storySouth on Jan. 15th, and Arts & Letters on Jan. 31.
That’s it for today, friends. Here’s hoping for a whole year of beautiful words for you. It’s a great day to start. Pencil’s up~
Marsha