Francisco's Journal an author discusses the art of writing

October 30, 2007

Originality

Filed under: Editing,Journaling,Writing — Francisco Stork @ 7:16 am

A couple of weeks ago I visited my college: Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. I had not been there in thirty-two years and it was a powerful experience to see the old and the new so close together. There was that immense, ancient and embracing oak tree with its curved branches as low as the top of my head. There was the new library with a terminal at every desk. It was good to see certain things endure and it was good to see new things.

In a creative writing class that I visited while I was there, I was asked a very good question by one of the students: What do you do when you are writing and you feel like what you’ve said has been said before – like maybe you read it someplace but you’re not quite sure.” The student then went on to add: “This happens particularly with metaphors.” The problem with people asking me questions at conferences is that the articulate answer that I should give comes to me on the plane ride home or even later. But maybe, as inarticulate as it was, what came out spontaneously and “from the gut” in my answer to that student is probably still the best answer I can give. I told him that he had to push through and keep on writing. He shouldn’t worry about whether it has been said before because it most certainly has. The plots, the type of characters, the style of your writing, it has all been done before. The fact that you are repeating should not stop you because 1) hopefully what you are writing about is something that is worth repeating, a story or an image or a character that brings a little more light into this world; and 2) if you are writing from a deep center in yourself, if you are writing about things that really concern you or move you or have affected you, you are going to be saying something new. The fact that you are different and special from everyone else in this world is where originality comes from. I’m not saying that your writing needs to be autobiographical somehow. What I’m saying is that even if you are, say, writing a teenage vampire story, there should be something in that story that comes from deep inside of you. If you never reach that deep place. If all that worries you as you write the story is getting it published or being read by lots of young people, then I’m afraid that you are not being original. You indeed are repeating what you have read before.

So to the student who asked me the about the feeling of not being original, I say push through with your writing but also dig deep. Find a inside of you a question you can’t answer or a mystery that baffles you, or a place of pain or joy and take it from there. If the metaphor that you wrote is not something that touches you, find another way of saying it. Above all, believe with all your heart that you are special and original, because you are.

September 5, 2007

Some Thoughts on Editing

Filed under: Editing,Uncategorized,Upcoming Work,Writing — Francisco Stork @ 6:54 am

I have been working on the revisions to Marcelo in the Real World with Cheryl Klein, my editor at Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic. Now that I have finished a first round of revisions (there will be a few more, I am sure) and have sent the manuscript to Cheryl for comments, I want to tell you a little about the process of editing. My hope is that the young people visiting this website who want to write, will get a better understanding of the writing process. Today’s lesson is on editing. Editing is a process that can begin at various stages. (Uggh! I sounded like a teacher just then!) It can begin once you have finished a first draft of the work, be it essay or poem or short story or novel. It can also begin when the work has been accepted for publication. The word “editing” is somewhat misleading. It makes one think of making sure that you have spelled all the words correctly and you have fixed all the typos. And it is that. But editing also involves re-writing. It involves tossing out a sentence or a paragraph or a passage or a chapter or two hundred pages and starting over. The big difference between this type of re-writing and just writing is that when you re-write you are doing it pursuant to a plan, a direction, a vision of who your characters are and what they are going to do. The act of writing for the first time, that is, the process of creating that you do as you work through your very first draft is done in a kind of intellectual darkness — you move along not knowing exactly where you are going. Creating requires intuition, editing requires reason. Creating is a movement forward that relies on trusting your gut. Editing requires reaching the end and then traveling backwards to make sure that all the pieces fit together and get you to the desired end. But even within the process of editing there is another type of movement — a kind of narrowing of focus that goes from the large to the small. Editing begins with tossing away what is no longer necessary, filling in new gaps by writing new scenes, and proceeds a narrowing path towards the characters, what they say and what they do, so that they remain true to who they are. Editing ends up with the author focusing laser-like on each sentence and each word so that every part, no matter how small, is part of the whole.

Maybe not all writers put their left side and right side of the brain to work when they write. I am sure that there are writers who manage to stay within the left (logical) hemisphere and there are probably miraculous works out there that are written solely from the right (intuitive hemisphere). (Gabriel García Marquez claims that One Hundred Years of Solitude was written over a frenzied, ecstatic period of two weeks when he didn’t sleep and barely ate.) But I think that if you want to write you should start out by trying to embrace all sides of yourself and by putting to work all that you have. I have found out that editing is hard for a beginning writer but that it gets easier if the beginning writer keeps on writing until he/she becomes an experienced writer. For any writer, the finished first draft usually seems so utterly brilliant that it is difficult to accept that it still needs work. Criticism at this stage, whether from a family member, friend or editor, will seem to totally miss the point and will even seem ignorant or mean-spirited. Suggestions for change will be seen as a violation of our deepest moral principles. Making the work more coherent, more readable, will be ‘selling out’.  But for the older writer (and for the young/wise writer), criticism is always welcome, even if not accepted.  For the older writer, the detail work of editing is also a pleasure, a pleasure different from the thrilling rush of creation, but still a pleasure. And if you persist in writing, there may come to you, as it did to me, the rare joy of collaboration — where you find one or two persons who are so in tune with your work, that their views seem as if they were coming from a part of your soul that you had not listened to before. Finding these persons, in whatever form they come to you,  is a gift to your work and a blessing to you. 

July 19, 2007

Painting Stones

Filed under: Editing,Upcoming Work,Writing — Francisco Stork @ 7:15 pm

A month or so ago, my third novel, Marcelo in the Real World was accepted for publication by Arthur A. Levine Books, an imprint of Scholastic. Cheryl Klein, my editor, was going to be busy during the month of July with the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (also published by Arthur A. Levine and Scholastic) and so we agreed to postpone our initial meeting until early August . (I can’t for the life of me understand why Harry should take precedence over Jasmine, but what do I know!) Jasmine, however, is going to need some revisions and so this interlude between acceptance of the book and figuring out what those revisions will be has been helpful to me. So, besides waiting to see what happens to Harry with just about the rest of humanity, I have been busy (or unbusy) painting stones. On the shores of Singer Island in Florida where I vacation with my family, you find these flat stones the range in diameter from the size of a quarter to that of a small and badly-made pancake. The stones are cool to the touch and gray. They have been smoothed by time and sand and sea. Many of these stones have a hole made God only knows how. (I suspect there is a scientific explanation for the hole but I don’t want to find out. I like my own image of generations of tiny amoeba drilling through eons.) These stones, which I love collecting in my walks, make great gifts. You attach them to a piece of leather or gold chain (depending on the recipient) and there you are. I here confess to being slightly hurt when I see the forced smile on my nieces and nephews as I hand over to them a Christmas-wrapped small box that rattles. Now these stones are perfect just as they have come into the world. I, however, feel compelled to ruin them by making designs on them. I have a shoebox full of paints and indelible magicmarkers with names of colors I have never heard before. The designs I paint on these helpless stones are abstract and can best be described as “Mexican-Mandala.” I start of trying to make a Mandala (like the stone glass windows that you see in the front or back of a cathedral), but I soon make a mistake and then proceed to “redeem” the design painting some a happy fiesta of dotted colors. Why I think that painting stones is the right thing to do during this time of preparation (and anticipation) prior to the revisions to Jasmine is this: I paint stones in silence and my mind slowly attunes itself again and rejoices in the simple act of attention, as if this were the mind’s most natural and happy state. There is in the miniscule and detailed motions of my hands precision enough to require concentration but the object of concentration is playful enough so that it can be carried out with abandon. I care about the process not the results and in this there is, as in all true play, an element of freedom. (I am grateful for the humble stones and the willingness to so sacrifice their beauty for me.) This place inside my mind that I find as I paint my stones is a place where images and dialogues and even thoughts sometimes come to visit (and sometimes stay). They come and visit as if they were coming home – the way aunts and uncles and cousins and neighbors used to come to my grandfather’s house in Tampico when I was a child. They came to sit in the shade of mango and avocado trees and to feel the evening breeze of the gulf of Mexico and they stayed for the pleasure of being with each other. 

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