If you are a parent, or have ever been around the parent of a new baby, you may be familiar with the term “growth spurt.” It is usually paired with the words, “I don’t know what’s wrong with Little Johnnie – he must be going through a ____” (growth spurt).
Babies get fussy during growth spurts. None of a parents old tricks work – change the diaper, add a blanket, remove the socks, coo, bounce, rock, swing. Things are changing inside Little Johnnie, things we can’t see, and let’s face it: it’s uncomfortable. Scary. Whatever is going on, it’s unfamiliar, maybe even painful, and Johnnie doesn’t like it one bit.
I think that’s what’s happening to me right now. Through kismet or coincidence (or perhaps because it is a basic, necessary skill), both my writing group and the craft book I’m reading are intensely focused on structure. As in, structure your writing instead of pantsing it, build it a skeleton before dressing it with skin, and your work will stand erect. Structure is the foundation and the frame; without it, building a piece is a tenuous process, like trying to build a house out of shingles, but with nothing to nail them to. You must contort yourself to hold the shingles up while you frantically staple them together.
I have never structured my work before. Ever.
At first, I was ravenous for information and experience, like Little Johnnie at the breast, gorging in preparation to grow. I told my group, I get it now! I get why revision evades me – because I’m moving shingles around without knowing what I’m nailing them to. I told them, I can’t wait to tackle this homework, 9 paragraphs on a concrete, a noun, something you can touch and taste and see:
1. Facts
2. Origins
3. Ancient perceptions
4. Facts
5. Anectdotes
6. Personal story
7. Metafacts
8. Historical story
9. Personal return to subject
Writing into a structure. I thought, look, it’s all laid out! I thought, this will be fun! This will be easy! I will write about turquoise. Turquoise is simple, it’s not fraught with personal drama that I’m afraid to get close to on this first attempt at a new way of writing. Look how great this will work! I will have paragraphs. I can move them around to observe the flow of information. I can experiment. I can play.
Three weeks and ten hours of active writing later, I’ve got not nine paragraphs but four. Four paragraphs and they are B-O-R-I-N-G.
Meanwhile, my Andrea Reads America project confronts me with a problem I’ve never had before: because I am reading deliberately, writing my reactions, and comparing works, and because I am simultaneously studying the craft of writing, I have become a critical reader.
I don’t want to be a critical reader!
I don’t want to be that peppery old snoot who doesn’t like anything except the finest, the top shelf, the Hendrick’s gin only, please. I liked it better when I liked everything. There are so many more opportunities for pleasure that way. Sure my appreciation of a finely-crafted novel is more profound now, transcendent almost, as when we ate at a five star restaurant and the food was so good we didn’t want to profane the experience by talking. Diners around us chattered while they absently forked steak that melted like butter, or sipped tomato soup that wrapped around your tongue like having God in your mouth, and my husband and I thought, they are not giving this food the reverence it deserves. They’re not even paying attention.
But not every meal can be a five star fine dining experience, and not every novelist can achieve sublimity. I used to be able to accept that, but now my tolerance for fiction that doesn’t work for me has plummeted. It’s not fair for me to expect perfection, especially because I appreciate how difficult it is to achieve, and because I fail so miserably at achieving it myself, yet I can’t help now but notice flaws and see where things don’t work in my reading life.
So I’m fussy. I’m uncomfortable. My reading and writing worlds are changing, and it’s painful, and I don’t like it one bit. Can’t I just go back to when it was easy? When I pantsed my writing and I liked everything I read? Can’t someone coo at me and make it all better?
I take comfort from our children, our Little Johnnies who fussed and flailed and suffered and screamed their way through too many growth spurts to count. And on the other side of every one of them, after they suffered their torment, our babies smiled, they laughed, they radiated serenity. They came back to their happy selves again. Only they were bigger. Deeper. Less like babies, more like people. They had grown.
The nine paragraph structure my writing group is working with is from Priscilla Long’s The Writer’s Portable Mentor; the craft book is Jon Franklin’s Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction by a Two-Time Pulitzer Prize Winner.
Butterfly Mind 
Well, let’s face it, Hendricks *is* the best gin! I first grappled with this issue when the kids started getting differentiated in public school, that bastion of “everyone has a gift,” right? Except some of us have gifts that are acknowledged by society (reading above your grade level? Great! Able to communicate with animals? We don’t test for that, sorry.) It’s a conundrum, IMO: looking at the world as it is means being honest about the inherent inequality that’s simple biology AND knowing when we *create* inequality through societal policies, biases/prejudices, (lack of) distribution of resources. It’s grey everywhere I look and being with that discomfort is hard. I’m reading Pema Chodron (sp?) and getting some language for that discomfort but: it’s uncomfortable. Period. But thanks for the post 🙂
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Yes, Hendrick’s is the best. If ever I become rich, I will buy it by the case. And the resource issue is key. And I guess I have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Sigh.
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Andrea, I don’t have any great words of wisdom on this. In the novel I have my Jack Moriarty (Kerouac) character ruminate a few times about writing and the creative process. At one point he makes reference to some rules of writing that Henry Miller composed and quotes his favorite: ‘If you can’t create, at least you can work.’ I took this to mean that better writing comes from just plunking your butt down in a seat and working at the craft every day.
Our writing group is populated with very nice folks who month after month say they “want” to be writers, but rarely bring anything worth talking about. I look for the ones who HAVE to be writers because what’s going on inside is bursting to get out somehow.
Kerouac’s “On The Road” is praised because he wrote it out on one long scroll, like a great jazz riff, a novel-length expression of a Zen koan “first thought, best thought.”
Yet, while the book took that form and seemingly just weeks to write, Kerouac spent years gathering the experiences, making notes, starting and stopping, gathering the energy and form to at last give it birth.
So, while Kerouac is praised for seemingly ‘pantsing it’, perhaps his real genius is of someone who worked his ass off to make it look like he didn’t.
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This is what I keep hearing – that the truly great writers are able to make their work seem effortless, as if they pantsed it, when really it took an extraordinary amount of structuring, tweaking, and polishing to create that illusion. In Writing for Story, Franklin called the apprenticeship long and tortuous, which was comforting on the one hand and completely deflating on the other. Either way, I’m counting on decades. Hope I live long enough.
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Hi Andrea, I’ve enjoyed your blog for awhile, and can identify with your Butterfly Mind. I may be wrong but I think it was Edith Wharton who put words on page 1 to a novel with no idea where she was going. It was part of the serendipitous creative journey to see where the blank page would take her. Of course other writers (maybe most) are more disciplined when it comes to structure. And still others have only an idea of the middle and end, and are willing to throw away a ton of pages in between to understand and get to know their characters. Because my mind is so flitting, and I get so wrapped up in the words, they take me to other places that don’t move the story forward (which is what happened in my first manuscript)- so I too am experimenting with style and structure in my 2nd attempt, hoping to find a balance that complements the two. I’d love to come back and see where your thoughts are later on this! Good luck with this growth spurt.
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I’m interested to see where my thoughts go, too. Will I find one method (structuring) too forced and anti-fun, therefore killing all the joy I ever found in writing to begin with? Is mastering the craft worth that? Or will I love the results so much it will be worth the pain? I have no idea. Thank you for the Edith Wharton example; I find encouragement that a writer whose name I recognize might have written with total freedom, and that her words not only resonated, but endured.
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I can totally relate! As a newbie blogger I am discovering that I have to “suffer” through certain processes in order to grow, I have an immense appetite for the resources necessary to become a better writer, and I also have found that I enjoy some unexpected aspects of writing while others (which I assumed would be so super fun) are dreadful! Glad to know that I am not alone, and looking forward to more of your posts.
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I am interested in which aspects you found to be unexpectedly enjoyable and which ones turned out to be dreadful – do tell! And you are not alone, I promise 🙂
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I am happy to share! For me, a big surprise was finding that I particularly enjoy writing about food and how it connects with principal moments in my life. I have discovered that favorite memories are almost always connected with food in some way or another. Writing about these memories, often with a recipe in tow, has been both pleasurable for me and warmly welcomed by my readers. On the dreadful side (for me) is attempting to add to good ideas but then feeling uninspired or unmotivated by the topic, which leaves me asking myself why the reader would want to read the post at all. This doesn’t happen with food, so I created a blog only about food to follow that impulse. I suspect that part of my growth spurt is figuring out what I REALLY want to write about. Thanks for your encouragement!
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The perfection part is on point. I also get a bit fussy when it comes to reading other people’s works and at the same time I myself has not reached the point of perfection.
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Exactly. But to find that perfect poem or essay or novel – isn’t that glorious?
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