Four or five years ago, Ira Glass, host and producer of the radio and television show This American Life, gave a series of talks about storytelling. David Shiyang Liu made a cool video using part of the original soundtrack two years ago. Janet Reid recently posted the video on her blog.
And I swiped it:
I’m not entirely sure about the quality of my personal taste, but I do feel better about my first two drawer novels.
Like any other art, writing takes practice. This is something that non-writers don’t seem to get.
Everyone knows that dancers and musicians practice for insane amounts of time, and even visual artists are allowed to make models or have sketchbooks or paint practice canvases or run up samples without anyone wondering why.
If a writer’s story or book doesn’t snag an agent’s interest or get accepted for publication, though, then more often than not, the assumption is that the writer simply doesn’t have enough talent and that the time that it took to get all those words down and edit them—and rearrange them and edit them and delete them and edit them and rewrite them and edit them— and polish them and send ’em out five ten twenty fifty multiple times . . . was all wasted.
The worst part, is that we tend to assume this about ourselves.
Why do we do this?
Why aren’t we allowed to practice? Why are shitty first drafts allowed, but not craptastic first or second or even third novels?
What’s the rush?
No words are wasted, even the ones we delete because they are the suckiest words in the suckiest order that words have ever been placed since the dawn of making marks on a flat surface and if anyone ever found out we’d done anything so sucky, our lives would, for want of a better word, suck.
Because even after those words are gone—don’t forget to run the shredder, clear your clipboard, empty your recycle bin and check for keystroke software, just to make sure—we know now that they don’t express what we wanted them to, in they way we needed them to do it.
And that gets us closer to finding the words that do, more than anything else will.
We never go back to square one. Ever. Not even if our desk drawers are so full of sucky novels they’ve overflowed and we have to write at the kitchen table.
We aren’t wasting our time. We aren’t wasting our lives.
We’re practicing.
And, slowly—sometimes really #$%!ing slowly—we’re closing the gap.
“Okay, tell me when you do and put Toby down, please, honey. Cats don’t like to pretend to fly.”
Four hours later:
“But Super Sunny is very strong so it worked just fine. And they all saw that a train was rushing towards a bridge over the river—but the middle of the bridge was gone! And the train couldn’t stop!”
“Right. The End.”
“Is this the Antarctic?”
“And Super Sunny’s super sneeze blew that piece of ice across the water so fast that the little penguin freaked out and flapped its flippers and screamed, Aaaaaaaauuugggghhhh!!!”
“She went potty first.”
“I’ll bet when she woked up in the morning, her bed was full of snot.”
“Good night, both of you.”
“She was playing with a toy giraffe.”
“And her cape was over her head!” (much giggling) “Oh, but the littlest one gets scared”
“Except they were still all crooked and hunched over So Super Sunny was the one who straightened out their necks and legs and rubbed their sore muscles until they could move again.*** And then she flew up and stretched the high wire across the circus tent, too, for the acrobats. Everyone was so happy, the ringmaster gave Super Sunny four free tickets to the circus.
“Mommy . . . cotton candy is too sweet for me.”
Earful of Cider 