Mind Your Bits

Last week I asked you to give me three parts of yourself.  Your responses blew me away.  If I’ve not answered your email, I’m working my way toward it.  It’s not too late to give me one if you haven’t yet.  It would be lovely to read it.

                                    bistoury56@gmail.com

Now.  If we collect readers as we do friends, then we must acquaint them to us in the same way.  How would you introduce yourself to someone who isn’t you?  A writer must know herself before she can be authentic with others. 

To know yourself better, begin with the obvious bits, as I called them.  While I suggested nationality, region, gender, genre, and topic, don’t confine yourself to those.  Think of aspects that you relegate to tick boxes on application forms, but generally take for granted.  When you have that list, which one would be the first word you use to describe yourself as a writer?  To illustrate, let’s start with nationality. 

Hello.  I am an American writer.

You know your nationality, but what type of nationality is it?  You could always have lived in your country of origin, currently be exiled from it, have returned home after living abroad or have never lived in your own country.  You could be well travelled inside and outside your country or have stayed in a thirty mile radius.  You could be seventh generation or the child of immigrants.  Any of these possibilities affects your relationship with your country and your expression of nationality. 

In the Writing Closet, we consider things outside our door to be equally important.  Staying with nationality, a writer from South America, for instance, faces different challenges in forming a relationship with a European reader than a North American writer does.  To know your specific challenges, investigate how the world looks at your obvious bits.  Don’t ‘imagine’ how the world sees you; research it.  Listen to the misconceptions, biases, negative and positive opinions.  Look into the murky pool dividing who you think you are from what the world considers you to be.  Identify what’s living in there.

Something as simple as nationality turns out to not be so simple after all. 

Add another bit to your first one.  If we use regional attachment or ethnicity, is your subgroup in conflict with your country’s dominant culture or are you part of the hegemony?  When you’re living at home, which outweighs the other in your identity – nationality or region?  When you’re living away, be it inside your country or overseas, which do you present to the other culture?

Now that we have two bits, let’s use myself as an example of what a writer can do with this self information.  Although I’m American, I see myself primarily as Appalachian.  This subculture is not well understood inside the US, even less so in the UK where I now live.  My regional identification is probably why non-Americans see me as atypically American.  Being a minority makes me not-what-they-expect and I should never forget that.

If I go all Appalachian on my reader, there’s an immediate distance between us which creates tone.  The exotic, dark, bizarre, menacing (Deliverance) or farcical, homespun, foolish, naive (Beverly Hillbillies) or traditional, steady, secure, moral (The Waltons).  So same writer, same bits but starkly different tones.

‘Going all Appalachian’ doesn’t mean I only write regional fiction.  In fact, I rarely set my work in Appalachia, yet inevitably Deliverance, the Beverly Hillbillies and The Waltons make an appearance whether I want them there or not.  My rewrites never fully eradicate any of them.  What never shows up in my writing is Sex in the City, no matter how hard I try.  I can write about New York, but it will always be as an Appalachian writer. 

The obvious bits add depth and colour to your writing.  And you’re not just nationality.  Are you sure of your gender or your genre?  How well do they fit you?  Do you want to be confined to either?  Do you express them in traditional, experimental or totally idiosyncratic ways?  Or do you suppress them?  How do they fare in your country of origin? 

As a writer, it’s best to be forewarned about these aspects of your writer’s voice because your reader always hears them.  You can put on any costume you choose, but you cannot become a coloratura soprano when you’re a contralto.  It’s rumoured that all God’s chillen got a place in the choir, so be a goddam contralto and proud.

Write if you have questions.  Next time, archetype and hopefully, the core of your psyche.  Go forth and know your bits, hon.

Pixilization Not Allowed

In my early twenties, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a travel article of mine about Australia.  It wasn’t the first thing I'd published, but it was the first noticed by my social circle.  They phoned me at work, waved congratulations across the Boulevard of the Allies.  I didn’t write for five years after that.  Not – I didn’t submit.  I didn’t write.

Few writers can hope to be anonymous.  Words expose us, even when they’re disguised in fiction.  When we commit words to page, we bare a shoulder, undo a button, slide down a zip without the modesty of a well placed fan or a dob of pixilization.  Not too scary a proposition until the What-Happens-Next.

The What-Happens-Next is the friend of a friend at a party who’s read your story and has an opinion.  The interview, the comment at the end of the blog, the tweet, the email that says you aren’t an invisible voice or an omniscient narrator but a human expressing imperfection. 

I see you.

Jon Walker, the author of Five Wounds and Pistols! Treason! Murder! recently said that we collect readers the way that we do friends.  If you’ve seen a copy of Five Wounds, you could believe Jon had each book individually printed for a friend.  There’s something decadently reader-gifting about his book.

                               Website:  www.jonathanwalkervenice.com

                               Blog:  www.jonathanwalkersblog.com

Although your writing begins expression in a solitary space, it’s ultimately about relationship.  Our readers want to hear our voice and respond, sometimes not kindly, but sometimes with such clarity, they make us better writers.  While it takes courage to toss parts of ourselves out there, do resist the temptation to either micro-manage the trajectory or to turn your back on reader response altogether.  Wait for your words to land; wait to see what comes of them.

Whatever comes next, it isn’t personal.  It isn’t about your worth as a human being.  It’s about your identity as a writer.  Laura Fish, author of Strange Music and Flight of the Black Swans, once said that each writer is a layer in the growing structure of their literary genre.  Without your layer, the genre goes in a different direction.  You’re an important member of the literary tribe.

                                                http://laurafish.wordpress.com/

I say you're on a quest.  It's called being a writer.  Like any good quest, the crucial journey is the internal one.  Who you are seeps into your writing and exposes itself to random scrutiny.  The less you know about your identity, the more it flaunts itself.  Chances are, what you're not seeing is exactly what your reader will hone in on and speak about.

Do three things for me.  First, make a list of what type writer you are.  The obvious bits.  Nationality, region, gender, genre, topic.  Next, look for an archetype that identifies yourself.  Hero, wise old woman, fool, sin eater, monster.  Lastly, sit with your archetype surrounded by the weapons of nationality, region, gender, genre and topic.  Listen to the savage little voice you usually ignore.  Feel that singular emotion you don't want to express.  Discover what object lies at the core of your psyche – a stone, molten lava, ancient oak, wounded deer.

If you get that far, drop me an email and we'll see what happens next.  Come on.  Risk it.

                                          bistoury56@gmail.com
                                          Monster by Diana Afanador

My Dissonant Self

I've lately had some wonderful discussions with my son about the writer's identity.  Flannery O'Connor says that we can't escape our roots from injecting themselves into our writing, even when we're in conflict or out of step with where we've come from.

Like O’Connor, I was raised Catholic in the American Bible Belt.  The things I can tell you about southern American writers are charms on my bracelet – the influence of religion, the sexism, racism, poverty, the music, the good food, the distillation of human nature living that close to the swamp.  But as aware as I thought I was, there was something else wanting my attention.

‘Why do you write about war?’

I couldn’t understand why people asked me that.  IEDs and high velocity weapons aren’t gender specific.  If I were a man, blah, blah, blah, until Rush Limbaugh would burn my bra if only I’d shut up.  I heard the words they said, but not the question. 

                                     A not infrequent scene around my house.

So ask me again.  Why do I write about war?  I was born into a medical military family and after my son was grown, married into another medical military family.  After three years of writing about military doctors, I realise how conflicted I am over that aspect of my life. 

I write about war because those are the vibrant colours on my palette.  At nine years old, a man proudly shows me his stump and tells me that my father cut off his leg.  Several decades later, I grip the phone as my husband, 3600 miles away, can’t get the words to come because there’s too fucking many burned children in the field hospital. 

War to me isn’t patriotism or national security or world domination.  It’s personal.  It’s people I love and their participation in something that makes no sense.  Worse, they participate in something brutal.  War’s a vicarious blackness inside me that demands expression and at the same time, makes me want to vomit.  It’s part of my psyche.  Which is to say it’s part of my identity as a writer. 

                              Sometimes I want to correct the dissonance. 

That would be a mistake.  Holding dissonance as dissonance is genuine, even when it’s not PC.  It leaves the writer vulnerable, invites the nasties in, makes people turn away, raises things in the mirror that a writer doesn’t want to see.  It’s probably why some of us go mad.