There’s always something inspiring and insightful in the email bulletins from the literary journal Glimmer Train. Each issue features interviews with fiction writers who’ve been published in the magazine. These two articles particularly resonated with me.

I think I’m a reasonably upbeat and entertaining person to be around, but darkness predominates in my writing. My novel protagonist is a gay fashion photographer with a laid-back Southern approach to life–what could be fluffier?–but after four years of working with me, he’s often found lying on the beach in a drunken stupor, crying for his dead boyfriend and worrying about his soul. “Be more funny, Julian!” I berate him, like Homer Simpson talking back to “Prairie Home Companion”.

After all, my so-called logic goes, if my book doesn’t make people happy, I won’t be able to sell my ideology to the masses, and the whole idea that I’m doing Something Important for the World is called into question. Then I start to feel guilty that I’m not using my law degree to bring about social change instead of writing gay erotica. (Or sitting at my computer blogging about my literary self-loathing instead of writing the damn book!) I once wrote in my diary, “I don’t want to sing the blues that no one wants to hear.”

Jenny Zhang, winner of Glimmer Train’s April 2010 Family Matters Competition, understands this fear. When she was a young girl in China, her parents left for America to get an education, and she sent them cassette tapes recounting her adventures in kindergarten. Only problem was, her upbeat tales weren’t actually true. She missed her parents and felt like a misfit in school, but created an alternate storyline for the adults to hear. To protect them? She isn’t so sure. What she does know, as a grown-up storyteller, is this:

…I have come to realize that as fiction writers, the easiest thing we can do is to invent, to lie, to make things up, to imagine, to create fictions. I know this is true because there is nothing more natural and intuitive than the impulse to dream. The difficulty lies in telling the truth. We will always have opportunities to tell stories that are meant to comfort, to delight on dark days when light is needed, but where else and when else, if not in our fiction, are we going to tell the stories that comfort no one, the stories that we often don’t tell out of love or pity or compassion or simply because it is unpleasant? If not in our fiction, then where else can we tell stories that say: I’m lonely. Or: I fear I may matter so little to this world that I can cease to exist and no one and nothing would mourn my disappearance. I know it isn’t much to say: Tell the truth! But it’s the only thing I have, and it’s the only thing I can offer you.

Zhang’s essay reminds me that my approach to writing can become too instrumental. I fall into thinking of my book as a way to change what other people do and feel, when perhaps it would be better understood as a way to name and reflect the experiences that they already have. In other words, my job is to give my readers a way to make sense of who they are, not force a new identity or agenda on them. My excessive need for control springs from the fear that I may not be heard by the people I most want to reach, because they are unwilling to recognize themselves in Julian and his friends, no matter how charming he is or how clever I am.

In the same bulletin, Nic Brown advises writers to “Make It Easy”: use whatever simple tricks you can find to turn your book-length project into a manageable task that you can get your mind around. In his case, it was structuring his story collection like a 12-song musical album with A and B sides. “Make it easy, however you can. It’s not going to cheapen the work. It will improve the writing. It will keep you from hating the process.”

This essay recalled themes from my earlier post on resisting compulsive revision. Writers need to overcome insecurity that we’re not doing real work, because to the untrained eye, we seem to be lying on the couch daydreaming. But being kind to one’s self is the necessary support for telling those hard truths.

Before I entered that zone of Sisyphean torment reserved for writers of novels-in-progress, I used to say I was a poet because I have a short attention span. I can see my way around all sides of a poem at once: it’s like carving a statue, rather than building a house. It takes me about an hour to write, and once it’s done, it’s pretty clear to me whether it sucks or not. If it does, I generally abandon it. When the tone is off, it’s off. None of that “parts of the omelet are excellent” wishful thinking.

If the poem smells OK, I don’t do much to it after that. I’ll tinker with a line or two that might have concerned me the first time around, but I don’t approach my drafts with the presumption that more input will always make them better. By contrast, it’s common for creative writing workshops to silence the author while the other students critique her piece, an approach that troubles me because of the potential for peer pressure to stunt the development of her own internal smell-o-meter.

Even outside a group setting, the self who writes the first draft is not the same person who revises it. You are, in a sense, your own peer pressure. You’ve got to be careful that the anticipation of judging-self’s criticism doesn’t stifle creative-self, because creative-self is the expert and needs to be trusted as such.

A Facebook link posted by the poet Rus Bowden led me to this satisfying screed by Art Durkee , a writer, musician, and visual artist, who goes off on his fellow poet Mary Karr’s advice to students that “every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it”. Durkee thinks, as do I, that bragging about how many reps you did at the revision gym says more about your ego than the quality of the poem. Some choice quotes:

…Rewrite after rewrite after rewrite after rewrite is a completely alien way of working, for me. I literally cannot imagine doing sixty drafts of a poem. I cannot imagine doing endless rewrites without the process itself literally killing every good thing in the poem, including the impulse that originally caused me to want to write it. The spontaneity and freshness and surprise and life will all be killed, each phrase will become so overly-familiar that all the life will be sucked out of it merely by repetition. You can’t bring a poem back to life, after killing it with rewrites: there are no zombie-poems (although one can make a case for there being some living-dead poets, in certain instances). I’d rather shoot the poem and put it out of its misery than subject it to such pointless and endlessly painful surgery.

If I can’t get it in four or five drafts, sixty drafts won’t make any difference: one reaches a point of diminishing returns. Far better to start over, because—in my case at least—endless rewrites will not magically repair what a few drafts cannot. It’s magical thinking—or worse. The definition of insanity is to keep repeating the same behavior again and again, each time hoping for a different outcome than that which the previous hundred repetitions provided. In the case of obsessive rewriting, I’d want to see some evidence that the last twenty drafts made any noticeable improvements to the poem. I remain skeptical until presented with such….

…Poets constantly suffer from an insecurity, inherited perhaps from Romantic stereotypes about tubercular Writers wasting away in starving garrets, that other members of the literary clan won’t respect them if they don’t appear to be working hard enough at their “craft and sullen art.” Certainly every poet wants to appear to the non-poet as hard-working, as if they must work hard, to achieve what they’ve achieved. Poetry is, after all, specialized language, intensified and heightened speech, with more meaning packed into a few words, compared to every other literary artform. Yet poetry is a verbal artform, with no physical component to it, so one might well understand how a poet might feel like a slacker when standing next to a construction worker: although both are building things, only one makes tangible things that one might actually trip over. I myself would argue that poetry at its best is a tangible thing one can trip over, and have one’s life changed thereby—but it’s easy to see how some poets might be insecure about their art’s lack of apparently physical results, especially in a consumer economy wherein the dominant measure of intrinsic value is monetary and physical utility….

…I can conceive of no worse hell than being forced to follow a creative process so alien to one’s own, natural process.

The point here is that there are many different ways of working, even within similar creative processes. We may have fundamentally different working methods. I’m fine with that. I’m not okay when the disbelieving try to impose their values, or their working methods, on others.

Read the whole post here .

The prestigious literary journal Crazyhorse recently asked its readers to submit their favorite quotes about writing. The editors’ choices from this batch were included in their latest email newsletter. Below are some of my favorites:

“If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.”
—Hunter S. Thompson

“I write a little every day, without hope and without despair.”
—Isak Dinesen

“Always pull back—and see how silly we must look to God.”
—Jack Kerouac

“Writing is finally a series of permissions you give yourself to be expressive in certain ways. To leap. To fly. To fail.”
—Susan Sontag

“You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.”
—Richard Hugo

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
—Ray Bradbury

“The process of writing will always be trying to repair something that doesn’t exist with tools you have to invent on the spot.”
—George Saunders

“Any writer who knows what he’s doing isn’t doing very much.”
—Nelson Algren

“Confront the dark parts of yourself…. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.”
—August Wilson

“Truth is not an unveiling which destroys the secret, but a revelation that does it justice.”
—Walter Benjamin

“Writing isn’t about applause. It’s about humiliation.”
—Steve Almond

“Before I start writing I feel affectionate, interested, and frustrated. In that order. Afterwards I feel relieved, disgusted, and confused. Sometimes I don’t think it’s worth it.”
—Joy Williams

“A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”
—James Dickey

“Go forth my book and help to destroy the world as it is.”
— Russell Banks

“I always write from my own experiences whether I’ve had them or not.”
—Ron Carlson

The prestigious literary journal Glimmer Train regularly publishes short essays about the writing process by their fiction contest winners. I appreciated these thoughts from Stephanie Soileau, winner of the December 2009 Fiction Open. Referring to Bruno Bettelheim’s theory that fairy tales give children a safe space to process the darkness and complexity of life, she suggests that all fiction writing can serve a similar function:

The March Fiction Open is accepting entries now through the end of the month, with a top prize of $2,000.
Read more thoughts by winning authors in the Glimmer Train Bulletin.