A writer’s learning curve
June 25, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 39 Comments
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Across the road from my house sits about 30,000 acres of national forest, which is home to all manner of creepy crawlies. The boundary between civilized and not is clearly marked by a nearly straight line of neatly-kept backyards and a foreboding tree line of towering oaks.
Of course, neither man nor beast keeps to his own side. We all mingle with each other from time to time. Miles of trails leading into the mountains provide all a guy like me needs for feed his inner redneck. And as if to even things out a bit, everything from bear to deer to snakes to coyotes have been seen wandering our streets.
Most of us pay little mind to such intrusions, believing that the animals have just as much right to snoop around our homes as we have theirs. But there is one person in particular who is uneasy about the whole thing.
I speak of the kid down the road. Sixteenish and free for the summer. I remember the summer I turned sixteen, three glorious months of getting into more trouble than I’d ever gotten into in my life. Ask his father, and he’ll say he almost wishes his son would get into that same sort of trouble. Not a lot, mind you. But at least a little. After all, he’s sixteen. Trouble’s supposed to find you at that age.
But it hasn’t found him, mostly because he refuses to go outside. His days are spent staring out his bedroom window and writing about what he sees. He wants to write a book, he told his father. He’s serious about it. And while his father is supportive, he also knows it’s an excuse. His son doesn’t like his new home. Doesn’t like the small town or the big woods. He wants to go home to the city.
The family moved here from the city last year as the result of a job transfer. All this wildness suits mom and dad just fine, but not the boy. He woke up one morning in April to find a bear in the backyard. Found a snake on the deck a few weeks later. Though he refuses to admit it, they think it was all just a little too Wild Kingdom for him. So when school let out and he was free to do what he wanted, he retreated to the safety of the indoors.
He says he’s spending his time wisely. He’s writing. Working. There isn’t any time for much of anything else.
I heard about all of this the other night while out for an evening walk. His father was putting up a new mailbox, I stopped to say hello, and things just sort of went from there.
“He really is a good storyteller,” he told me. “Just wish he wouldn’t stay inside all the time. That can’t be healthy, can it?”
No.
Not for a kid. And especially not for a writer.
There are a lot of would-be authors out there who think it’s fine to stare out of their window and write about the world. They take their journey within themselves because they’re unwilling or afraid to go out.
I can’t blame them for that. I was once the kid down the road, too.
Not afraid of bears and snakes, but afraid to go out the door. To face life in all its glory and pain. Give me a nice desk and some paper instead. Let life leave me alone so I could write about it.
Sounds a little strange, doesn’t it? But that’s what I thought. And that’s what a lot of authors think.
There is a learning curve to writing, of course. First come the simple words and simpler thoughts, which through countless hours of practice becomes better words and greater thoughts. No one denies this.
But there is another learning curve to writing that often goes overlooked, and that is the experience of living. Of plunging headlong into life and daring to swim in both the clear and the murky waters, and then using pen and paper as a towel to dry yourself off.
You have to hurt. And suffer. You have to love and hate and believe and doubt. You have to fail and succeed.
And the only way to do that is to go out and live before you come in to write.
Compassion in the Cold
June 14, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 34 Comments
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I remember standing at an overlook in the mountains on a December night in 2006. I remember it was cold. Very cold. And though it made sense for me just to get back into the truck and turn the heat on, I couldn’t. I had to be outside with the stars and the wind. What I had to do couldn’t be done from inside the truck.
So I went ahead and built the fire. Walked down into the woods, found some rocks, dug a fire pit, and gathered kindling. I got the fire going despite the wind and tossed a few bigger sticks onto the pile. Cedar, I remember. I always liked the smell of burning cedar. And then I leaned back and half smiled and half didn’t, because it was all ready whether I wanted it to be or not.
I reached into my bag and pulled out a thick wad of paper bound by two rubber bands. I turned it over in my hands, watching the firelight dance against it.
Now, I thought…now.
But nothing happened. Whether it was the cold or God or the fabled spirits of the mountain, something had severed the connection between my head and my hands.
Failure seemed too bitter a word, so I decided it was all about letting go. About knowing how to as much as when to. The how was easy. I would burn it. That was the first thought that came to mind a few days before when I got the latest reply. The when, though? Not so easy. I thought for sure it would be that night, but I was having my doubts.
When you spend ten years of your life hanging onto a dream, it takes a lot out of you. You learn to get by on things like faith and hope and tenacity. You try to accustom yourself to blocking out the army of voices both within and without that scream you have no idea what you’re doing and therefore you shouldn’t even bother pretending anymore. It takes strength to endure more than it does talent.
I had the strength. The faith, too. Even had the hope and the tenacity. But something was still missing, and it was a big something. Something that seemed important enough that missing it brought me there in the mountains sitting in front of a fire, ready to incinerate five years of my life.
I was going to burn my manuscript. Release it into the ether once and more all and let its memory float away. I wanted to be done with my dream. I wanted to let go of it so it would let go of me.
I tried once more—
…now—
but I couldn’t, so I simply sat there in the cold and watched the flames dance.
This was not about letting go after all, I decided. No, it really was about failure.
I had pushed myself. Worked and tried and refused to give up, and still after all of that I had nothing to show for my life. It wasn’t that I was too weak to hang on or even too strong to let go. It was that I was stuck in the middle, wavering. A tough place to be. Maybe the toughest. But looking back I think that’s a place we all need to find ourselves at some point, if only so we can find out if our dreams are worthy of the people God calls us to be.
I was thinking about that night one day last week while I was looking over the Fall 2010-Winter 2011 catalog for my publisher, FaithWords. Not only was it pretty darn exciting to see my book on page nine, it was even more so to see they’ve used the cover art for Snow Day as the cover for the catalog. If you’d like, you can see it here.
My point?
My point is that in the end, your dreams are all on you. That means having the faith to see them through.
Having the hope to keep believing.
And it means forgiving yourself when you fail.
The compassion we’re called to show others is the very compassion we’re called to show ourselves. That alone is a source of divine strength.
That alone can move mountains.
I’m proof of that.
This post is part of the blog carnival on Compassion, hosted by Bridget Chumbley. To read more, please visit her site.
Your story
June 11, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 26 Comments
A local high school teacher contacted me recently asking for help with a group of her English students. They had a problem, she said. Could I help? Since she happened to be a longtime friend and I didn’t have much else to do, I said yes. Absolutely.
But it turned out to be more than simply helping out a friend or filling in a lazy summer afternoon. Much more. Because the problem was basic. Simple yet foundational.
They had nothing to write about.
They were your stereotypical teenagers—clumsy and loud, with a strange combination of fear and arrogance. They one thing that set them apart from their peers was a love for writing, whether that love was expressed or bubbling just beneath the surface.
But of course a love for writing isn’t enough, is it? You have to do something with that love. You need material. And they had none. Zero. Nada.
Or so they thought.
I can’t say I managed to convince all of them otherwise in the three or so hours I was there. But I think I convinced some. And I most assuredly convinced a few. Considering the fact it’s darn near impossible to get a teenager to change his or her mind about anything, I’d call that a victory.
But then I started considering the fact that thinking there isn’t anything interesting about one’s life isn’t just for teenagers. Not just for writers, either. We all fool ourselves into thinking there isn’t anything that separates us from everyone else. So I thought I’d give the same little pep talk to you today that I gave those students a couple weeks ago. Just in case.
It’s amazing how the rules to good writing are also the rules to good living. The two go hand in hand, I think. Good writing means cutting out all the excess, whittling down what you want to say until all that’s left is what you need to say. Same with living. Whittle it down. Find the basics. Keep it simple. Makes for not just a better story, but a better life, too.
I wasn’t visiting that class to talk about the basics of a good story, though. I was there to talk about the basics of getting ideas. Not surprisingly, that just so happened to be my own Rule Number One to good writing. And good living.
Rule Number One:
You are extraordinary.
Don’t let anyone fool you by saying otherwise. Some will try, of course. Some will try very hard. They’ll say you’re good or nice or polite or even special, but not extraordinary. And maybe you’ll even tell yourself that. Don’t. That’s a lie, and maybe the biggest lie of all. Fall for it, and nothing will really happen. Don’t fall for it, and everything will.
It’s not just you that’s extraordinary, either. Your life is, too. What you’re feeling, what you’re doing, and what you’re thinking. Your dreams and your fears, your hopes and worries. Extraordinary, and in a very special way. On the one hand, those things are unique to you, and how you approach each of them is determined by everything from you DNA to your experiences and beliefs.
But on the other hand, those dreams and fears and hopes and worries are for the most part shared by every other person who’s ever walked in this world. There is an invisible line that runs through the heart of every person, connecting you not only to your family and friends, but to your neighbor down the road and strangers you’ll never meet. As different as we may seem to be on the outside, we’re all the same on the inside.
You are common in that sense, yes. But only in the way Da Vinci and Einstein and Twain were common. They were extraordinary in what they did with their commonness. You can be the same.
Think of this world as a house with many rooms. Some are big and wide and hold many people. Others are small and cramped and hold just a few. But all of those rooms are dark inside.
When you’re born, God gives you a light and places you in one of those rooms. It might be a big one with many people. Maybe it’s just a smaller one with a few.
But my point is this—it doesn’t matter what kind of room you’re in. Doesn’t matter who’s there and who isn’t.
All that matters is that you do what you’re meant to do.
All that matters is that you shine your light.
Writing Naked
January 28, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 58 Comments
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I took exactly one class in writing. It was about fifteen years ago at the community college and was taught by a real published author whose name I cannot recall. But she was published, and as far as I was concerned that was all the credentials she needed.
The first class turned out to be the most useful. That’s not to say the instruction given in the proceeding eleven weeks of the course wasn’t useful. It was. But that first night alone was worth the money.
The twenty or so people in the class formed a semi-circle around the professor, who stood in behind a wooden podium that was much more intimidating than she. We sat at attention, notebooks ready, eager to have our heads filled with the hidden secrets of literary success.
“Tell me,” she said, “what does one need to write?”
The more outgoing among the class were quick with suggestions:
“Time.”
“Perseverance.”
“Skill.”
“Connections.” (That one was met with a nervous chuckle from the rest of the class.)
“Practice.”
Each was met with an approving nod and so was written down by everyone, myself included. But that really wasn’t what she wanted to hear.
“Those are good suggestions,” she said, “but you’re leaving the most important aspect out. Anyone?”
No one.
“Courage,” she said.
I didn’t really understand that and snickered under my breath. Courage? Soldiers needed courage. Cops needed courage. EMTs and stunt men and bullfighters. But writers? Sitting on your butt and typing on a keyboard did not take courage.
“There are some who might disagree with that,” she said—and to this day I swear she looked at me when she said it—“and I understand. You disagree because you’re writing with your clothes on. By the time you leave here, you’ll be writing naked.”
I’ll admit I almost walked out then. I’d heard about kooky writing classes given by kooky professors who did some pretty strange things in the name of “art.” I was afraid if I stuck around I’d end up dressed in a blue tracksuit with a cup of Kool-Aid in my hand because a comet was passing by to take me to heaven.
I stayed in my seat on the whim she was speaking metaphorically.
“There is no greater fear than to face a blank page,” she said. “It mocks and threatens. It challenges you. Give it power, and it will eat you alive. Face it clothed, and you will fail. The only way to beat the blank page is to attack it naked.”
Twelve of the twenty students raised their hands.
“Wait, wait,” she said, moving her hands in a downward motion. “No, I’m not speaking literally. But I’m not joking, either. Let me ask you something else. Why do people write?”
More hands in the air, which she chose to ignore.
“People write because they must. Because there is a story inside them that is meant to be shared with the world. But having that story inside you doesn’t make you a writer. How you tell that story does. And you tell it through honesty.”
She told us to put our pens down and just listen.
“Writers fail because they come to the page fully clothed. They adorn themselves with fanciful plots and layer themselves with complicated character development. They use flowery prose and words you have to look up in the dictionary. They do this not to impress their readers, but to keep their readers at arm’s length. They’re afraid. Afraid to bare their souls and inject themselves into their work. For that they are cowards.
“Don’t simply tell me that faith saves you, tell me how it almost failed you, too. Don’t tell me about love, speak of your passion. Don’t tell me you’re hurt, let me see your heart breaking. I don’t want to see your talent on the page, I want to see your blood. Dare to be naked before your readers. Because that is writing, and everything else is worthless crap.”
I’ll always remember that. In fact, written on an index card taped to my lamp are these two words—Be Naked. Because she was right, that’s what writing is all about. Fiction or non, poetry or devotional, funny or serious, it doesn’t matter. Our calling is still the same:
To bare ourselves so we may be the mirror the world holds to itself.
A Thousand Words
January 21, 2010 by Billy Coffey · 49 Comments
My office door is closed as I write this, but I can hear the sounds from downstairs as they sneak through the small crack at the bottom—the laughter of two small children, the sound of dinner almost made, laughter from the television. Yet here I sit and peck.
I demand a thousand words a day from myself, which sounds a lot more than it really is. It doesn’t matter what those thousand words happen to be about, nor does it matter what they are for. It could be a blog post or a book chapter or food for the garbage can, and it doesn’t matter. Because it’s still writing, and that’s what matters.
It seems absurd to have to state that a writer is a person who writes, and yet I have to constantly remind myself of that. It’s a concept I can just as easily let go of as grasp. I can delude myself into thinking that if I’m reading a book about writing, I’m writing. I am learning my craft. The same goes for walks outside (“research,” I call it) and trips to Staples (“preparation”). But it doesn’t work that way.
Because a writer writes.
So it’s a thousand words for me. Every day. Regardless. Because I need that discipline. I need the reminder that even if writing is not who I am, it is what I do.
The thing is this:
There are days when those words gush forth from that mysterious place inside me like water from a fire hose. When I have long hours to sink into my desk and ponder. When the sun falls through open windows and warms everything and heaven itself seems to pour upon me buckets of inspiration.
Those days are rare. Exceedingly so.
More often than not those thousand words will be stretched out from around six o’clock in the morning until one o’clock the next. Rather than gushing forth, those words will be cajoled and, in some cases, dragged into the light. Most of them will come in those precious few minutes between one thing at work and another at home, between schleps around a college campus with a hundred pounds of mail and helping with second-grade homework. They will come when I sink myself into my desk not out of comfort, but out of exhaustion. When the moon shines against draped and curtained windows and leaves me cold. When inspiration comes in slow drips like sap from a tree.
That’s the norm sometimes. Tonight especially. But I’m here and here I’ll stay until I have my thousand words.
I always thought I’d be a writer when I reached an audience or when I got published. But the truth is that when the one came along and then the other, I never felt any different than I had before. Every writer wants validation, and often that validation comes in the form of book and agent contracts or an increasing number of visits to a website or blog. Then the words will rush out. Then you’ll be a writer.
Trust me—that’s just not so.
A writer doesn’t become a writer by getting a steady stream of comments or a high-profile agent or a higher-profile publisher.
A writer becomes a writer by writing.
There’s a knock at the door. I look up and see a tiny head peeking.
“Hey, Dad,” says my son.
He doesn’t want anything and doesn’t say more, he just wants to know I’m still here. I say that I’m almost done and then I’ll be down. We can play super hero. He nods and smiles and is gone.
If writing teaches you nothing else, it will teach you this—sometimes you have to be selfish. You have to get your words in. Your family won’t always understand. Neither will your friends. That’s okay. It comes with the territory. At its core writing is a lonely task, and so is my thousand words. Because in order to share myself with the world, there are times when I must remove myself from it.
I take a look at my counter and see that I now have 684 words. Perfect. And I realize it’s time to drag more words out into the light, and that I’d better hurry.
Because there’s a little boy downstairs who wants to play super hero.
The writing life
July 6, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 40 Comments
There has been recent evidence of this, too. Batman shirts and cargo shorts are being replaced by faded jeans and black Ts. Cartoons are giving way to baseball games. His Iron Man hat has been exchanged for a spiffy black cowboy one.
But most telling is the fact that he has begun carrying around a notebook and pen in his back pocket.
I take paper and pen with me wherever I go, mostly because I have the memory of a fruit fly. You never know when something worthy of writing down will happen, and there is no worse hell than witnessing something good that you know you’ll forget.
So when I pulled my own notebook from my back pocket yesterday and proceeded to write something down, my son did the same.
“What’cha doin’ there?” I asked him.
“I need to get this down,” he said.
“Get what down?”
He looked at me, confused. “…I don’t know,” he shrugged.
I nodded. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I have the same problem sometimes.”
I rose from the table to take a look at his work. Squiggly lines mostly, along with a few numbers, three exclamation points, and a smiley face. Standard five-year-old fare.
“Whaddaya think?” he asked.
“I think It’s brilliant,” I said. “Can I copy that down and use it?”
“Yes!”
I rubbed his head, grabbed my own notebook, and began writing.
“Daddy?” he asked, peering at me.
“Yeah, bud?”
“I’m gonna be a writer when I grow up. You know, like you.”
My pen stopped.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. I like to write. Writin’s fun.”
I stared at him, unsure of what to say. I settled on, “Well, you have plenty of time to figure that out.”
The answer was good enough for him to accept. He gathered his notebook and pen and left me to ponder what he’d just said.
My son sat down one day three years ago with a sheet of paper and a blue crayon, and something very special happened. He put the latter on the former and made a blue streak from top left to bottom right. Magic. And when he scurried off and came back to that sheet of paper an hour later, he found more magic—that streak was still there.
And though one important truth was incomprehensible to him at the time, I knew he was creeping ever towards it: if he wrote, he could always leave something behind for others to remember.
That, in a broad sense, is why many writers write. To plant a sign into the hard earth that says I Was Here. To know that to someone somewhere, what you say matters.
I had to admit that what my son said was true. Writing is fun. As frightening as a blank sheet of paper or a computer screen bathed in white was, it was also marvelous—a canvas upon which to paint my story and a map by which to explore my world.
But I knew what he did not—writing was sometimes also not fun. Writing is work. Difficult, exhausting, painful work. It takes courage to look genuinely, whether into life or your own heart, and more courage to share what you find with others. To write is to bare your deepest self, naked of sham and disguise.
It is lonely work, a solitary walk through a land of light and shadow. The writing life is one full of irony in that by exposing yourself to the world you inadvertently construct walls around you to keep the world away. And though you may indeed be surrounded by friends and loved ones, you know that in the end you are utterly and completely alone. You write. They do not. That gulf is not easily bridged.
Because for many of us writing is not a job, but neither is it a hobby. It goes deeper than that, permeating every aspect of our lives. Every conversation, every face, every moment bear is seen through the lens of the page. We ply our trade from the moment we wake until the moment we sleep, and often even our dreams are grist for the mill.
Success is fleeting. Failure is constant. You are turned away by agents and editors, gatekeepers of your aspirations, and deemed unworthy of your dreams. You struggle though doubt and fear. You drown in desperation.
You face the agony of knowing that no matter what you manage to get down on the page, you will never feel as though you’ve gotten it down just right.
And I was left with this one question: was that the life I wanted for my son?
Yes.
Because despite it all, there is to me no greater pursuit in life than the search for meaning, and no other way to chart those undiscovered lands within us than with pen as our compass and paper as our sail.
I’m a writer whose first novel, Snow Day, will be published by FaithWords in 2010.
But don’t let that fool you. I’m just as confused as anyone.
And that is fine with me, because the great thing about wandering around in the fog is that you never know what you might run into.
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