disgruntled_owl | Craft on My Commute #3

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett’s book Pen on Fire: A Busy Writer’s Guide to Igniting the Writer Within is less about writing craft then the previous books in this series, but I was drawn in by the words “busy woman” and “ignite” in the title. I’ve been stressed about getting myself to maintain any kind of writing habit and the prospect of keeping the habit going if/when Mr. Owl and I have kids. My hope was that this book would help me get in gear and give me some reassurance that all won't be lost if I become a parent.

DeMarco-Barrett’s thesis is that by taking advantage of 15-minute scraps of time in your day, you have the power to transform your creative life. In 5-7 page chapters, Pen on Fire covers a lot of different aspects of the writing process: finding time, avoiding obstacles and distractions, coming up with content, craft, navigating the publishing process, and dealing with rejection. DeMarco-Barrett has spent years interviewing writers for the radio program Writers on Writing and so her book includes snippets and suggestions from a lot of different writers, as opposed to just her point of view. The bite-size chapters, each of which ends with a 15-minute writing exercise, made for good bus reading. The downside is that the topics all get a light treatment (especially those on craft), but DeMarco-Barrett includes a decent circa-2004 bibliography.

I would be inclined to seek out Pen on Fire for general encouragement and thoughts and suggestions about how to integrate writing into the rest of my life, including a life with kids.

Many chapters are meant to build your faith in your abilities and in the writing you’re doing. Several are devoted to the ideas that it’s never too late to start writing, and to having the confidence that you will eventually come up with material, even if your imagination seems parched. In one, she quotes Alice McDermott about the value fiction writers can provide to others: “I depend on fiction writers to pay attention to the things I can’t pay attention to when I’m in the world. I think fiction is a kind of written meditation that is not singular; it’s shared...If I can offer my readers [who may otherwise be curing disease or driving buses] the fruits of a certain [written] meditation, then we’ve paid each other back.” I found this to be a beautiful sentiment.
In one of the encouragement-oriented sections, she writes that “new writers almost always want to do what they're not great at, perhaps imagining that real writers can do everything. It’s not true. No writer does it all.” She relays similar advice from author Aimee Bender, who says "You go toward what you love about reading and what you love in your own writing. And once you get confident in that, you take on the things that are harder...But if you go for that at the wrong time, you almost spread yourself too thin. You don't want to dilute the natural bent of your work.” This was the kind of thing I needed to hear after my recent ghost-story writing class, which I’ll hopefully get myself to post about in the near future.
DeMarco-Barrett includes a chapter specifically about not talking about your current project in general terms with people, so as not to take the “air or magic” out of your work as you’re producing your first draft. (Having specific discussions to get over blocks or issues is a different matter.) I can see how this might help me keep the energy in my WIPs, though it runs counter to my “obliger” personality, which can need a lot of external accountability when it comes to achieving goals.
She also discusses issues that may crop up for writers with significant others, which is something I haven’t read about for a while. For example: how does your significant other deal with your attentiveness (or lack thereof) when you are working on a writing project? (This has been a minor issue in my household recently). How do you handle it when your significant other reads your work? How do you set mutually agreeable boundaries around when and how you work and what (or who) you write about? How do you deal with this knowing that readers might be inclined to conflate character and author? In each case, she relates experiences she’s heard about from other authors (spoiler: everybody needs to come up with their own workable arrangement). She ends this chapter with an exercise where you write a passage assuming your significant will read it, and then write it a second time assuming that he/she never will. Afterwards, you can compare the two to get a sense of the kind of ground rules you need to come up with for your writing life.
I wish she had written more about balancing writing with parenting. She gives the topic cursory touches, such as by emphasizing taking advantage of scraps of time and using interacting with children as a way to enhance your creativity. (Can you play like a child? What do things look like from their point of view?) However, it would have been great if she talked more about the mental and emotional toll of child rearing, and how you can manage that while retaining the focus you need to write. Even if you can find the 15 minutes to do the work, if you can’t find the energy or the attention, it’s still hard to make progress.

There were also some decent nuggets about craft.

She cites the case of an author who would write individual scenes, put them in a box, and once the box was full, try to organize them into a story that fit together. The author threw away what she couldn't use and wrote in the gaps. I don’t know if I’d attempt this with a novel, but it could be fun to try with a short story.
On titles, she quotes literary agent Sandra Dijkstra, who says a good title is a “gateway to the authors mind, and the first thing an editor knows about how you write.” DeMarco-Barrett suggests an exercise where you consider why writers may have selected certain titles, whether, how, and why you might re-title them.
On dialogue, she quotes author Ron Carlson: “Dialogue is not meant to be on topic. It's meant to be dramatic, personal...so many times when you're writing dialogue, you're really writing the way people don't talk to each other, the way we can't listen to each other, or the words we use to obtrude, to obscure and hide." Good things to think about...
DeMarco-Barrett also suggest a “‘menu” exercise for creating or documenting characters, which involves writing three lists: Psychological, Physical, and Sociological. This struck me as a palatable alternative to lengthy character questionnaires; I usually get turned off by having to come up with their favorite hobby or food. She also suggests writing a letter in the character’s voice, wherein you write about things that only the writer and the letter recipient would know about, which could be a fun experiment.