Protected: Inlet Intensive Blog Winter/Spring 2021: Plotting Your Theme & Your Ending
The S.A.D. of Revision and the Light at the End of the Tunnel
My cat is in energizer-bunny mode when she looks out a window these days—nose, face, back, and tail all atwitch with the thrum of what’s stirring under the melting snow. Then she runs to another window, and another. Something is happening out there she can’t get to but gosh darn it she needs to get there.
I feel that stirring, myself. With the change in light and warming temps, the allure of the spring melt is so energizing I’m still on a sunlight high at midnight.
I get a second wind after getting in bed, and blow through a few chapters in the book I’m reading, or dream up a new workshop for fiction writers who want tips on deep revision. Maybe writing about tunneling through the revision mines will help offset the brightness of the sunlight here above ground, I think to myself, while dark is staring at me from the window. But I keep seeing the sunlight of the day, even when my eyes finally close.
I’m no longer dragged down by winter’s drear but I’m still affected by Seasonal Affective Disorder, it’s just taking on new character. Now I’m supercharged by the early spring’s brightness, buoying me to keep working, working, working. And it’s hard to put down my pen.
Is this what migrating birds feel—that push to keep moving? Or the chipmunks burrowing in thawed ground who can’t stop won’t stop. Well, then, I’m in good company.
This desire to work hard may be a familiar feeling to the revisers reading this. But so, too, might the classic S.A.D. of darkness and despair—that desire to push your project away. You may even experience a S.A.D. of revision season, a period when everything in your work is gloom and doom, and it seems like nothing will ever come together. Until it does.
That’s when the conditions change. When you’ve been writing in what might seem like the dark but the light is imperceptibly brighter. And without realizing the exact moment it happens, you’ve worked your way out of a corner, and turned another, and suddenly you’re moving and making and building and the story’s coming together and the revision’s truly working.
That’s because you’ve worked through the darkness, and didn’t stop. The darkness lifted in part because you broke through blocks and made room for the light at the end of the tunnel. When you persist, when you stay attentive and keep the pen moving, the writing moves forward and you do too. It’s is simple and as hard as that.
Soon, you’ll be done—really done—and ready to start a new draft. And the next phase is upon you. Either another revision pass, or new work. It’s almost spring after all. And you’re a writer. Every ending invites you to begin again.
Protected: “Long Day Sweet” pages
Protected: “Believers in the Year of the Deerman” pages
Protected: “Inland Sea” pages
Protected: “Powhida County 1866” pages
Protected: “Friends With Boys” pages
Protected: “What They Left in the Willow” pages
How To Go With The Ice Flow
My roof is going through a transformation this week: from ice to water. And as icicles shatter on the front stoop, drips patter the porch, and drabs splatter the dining room floors (sigh), I’m cheering on the transformation. Yes, despite dining room dangers, I’m delighting in the thaw.
I’m also listening to a podcast that prompts meditators to visualize a tight place in the body and imagine it shift from ice to water, and water to vapor. My body gets it. I close my eyes, identify that frozen place in my shoulder, and via visualization, slowly unfreeze it, at least a little, sometimes a lot, every time. This metaphor has helped me through the pandemic—and it can help writers through a block, too.
My meditation coach prompts us to notice and become alert to the conditions around the block. Then gently label what we experience—whether tingling, shooting pains, aching or the like. You can do the same for your writing if you get stuck. Identify where the writing isn’t flowing. Where does your pen stop or the editor’s red pen stop you? Then zero in.
Name the experience. Exactly where does the block start. Look closer. The issue may be subtle like an ache—dialogue that drags. A title that doesn’t quite fit. Or you may feel shooting pains and know the problem right away—that character whose goals never go anywhere. So observe and name. Maybe it’s a plot level problem, where a subplot detours, a hole in character development opens up, or inner tension fizzles? If at the level of the sentence, is it a cluster of adverbs, an imprecise verb, a sequence of abstractions? Keep observing the block. Name what you see. Then you’re better able to find the solution.
On our roof, we can reach some places with our roof rake, but not all the tricky corners and steep angles of our 1930s cape cod. Those problem places produce blue-ribbon-winning icicles I would have worshipped as a child. Thick, menacing, harpoon-quality icicles that unhinge themselves and sink into the banked-up snow whale of our yard. That’s where we need to be vigilant. And stay vigilant as the ice melts. Because now we can see gaps in the roof’s flashing where preventative maintenance could have helped. Right above the bucketful of drips in the dining room.
As the literal ice thaws outside, I know that concentrating on the ice dams themselves won’t transform the ice into water vapor before it seeps into the house. But thanks to the frozen places thawing, I not only know the problem and its fix but have a crystal-clear image in my mind of a literal frozen icicle thawing—ice to water—making my meditations even more productive, my shoulders more relaxed, and I’m ready to reach nirvana any day now, I’m sure of it
Protected: Inlet Intensive Blog Winter/Spring 2021: Embodying Theme in Character