Soon after I got back from Tin House, I bought myself one of those composition notebooks, and I’ve been jotting in it all the time. The thing is I haven’t been doing much actual writing, and most of the writing I’m doing in the notebook is copying down lines from books I’ve been reading.
A few months ago, I picked up Alice LaPlante’s huge writing book “the making of a story” and I’ve been slowly trudging through it. Trudging probably doesn’t have the right connotations. It’s not tedious and muddy; it’s dense and thourough and it is my pleasure to take my time through it. It’s a good thing to sometimes pretend you don’t know anything about writing, and to go through it, facet by facet, tool by tool, re-learning, re-sharpening. The fact of it is, the only things you know about writing are based on what you’ve written before, and every piece, every story is its own. With every blank page or blinking cursor, the rules change.
I had Alice as a teacher for a class as an undergrad at SFSU and the cool thing about this book, is that it’s a text book. It talks about an aspect of craft and then uses excellent stories to illustrate and question the points raised in the chapter, moving the ideas away from pure theory and chit-chat, and of course the excercises are pretty cool too.
So, in my little notebook, I’ve been writing a lot of gems from that, but I’ve also been reading a lot. First was Benjamin Percy’s The Wilding. Currently I’m making my way through Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy and other stories. And I’ve got a tiny library waiting in the wings: Jim Krusoe’s Toward You, Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America, Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter, Ali Shaw’s The Girl with Glass Feet, Peter Rock’s My Abandonment, and today after a trip to Borders: Hannah Tinti’s The Good Theif, Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love, and then in a whole other direction Jane Eyre, and the book I don’t know why I love, Wuthering Heights. It’s like I just stumbled upon this gigantic net and I’m snatching up books as fast as I can, and trying to pull my way through them, taking what I can out of them, writing down words, sentences, effects down in my book, and closing them in there like pressed butterflies.
It’s wonderful. I know it is. It feels great, satisfying, like stuffing out a hunger, but I know, sooner or later, I have to exhale. I have to write too. I can only hoard these words for so long before they start smelling a little funny.
