Literary Cryonics: “Freeze” the Work You Can’t Finish

The pseudoscience of cryonics advocates freezing human bodies in the hope of resurrecting them in the future. (Cryonics is sometimes mistakenly called cryogenics, which is actually the science of very low temperatures.) The idea of cryonics is to preserve a person’s body until the condition that caused their death can be cured. While most scientists believe this idea is impractical from a biological standpoint, I think there is some value in this idea for writers, in a purely metaphorical way.

I often work on a literary project for a long time without arriving at a satisfactory draft, no matter how often or how hard I work on it. The project is “dead,” so to speak. That can happen because the ending just doesn’t fulfill or match the build-up that precedes it. Or a work can feel unfinished because I haven’t established a deep enough emotional connection to the subject or the characters. Or maybe I don’t know enough about the actual life situation that I’m trying to write about. The reality is, I more often leave a literary project unfinished than I complete one. Let’s face it—it’s just damn hard to bring a work of writing to a successful conclusion.

So, throw those nasty rejects out, right? Who wants to be reminded of their failures? But not so fast!

I have a folder where I keep all my unfinished projects. They are “frozen” in the sense that I don’t often look at them or bring them to life in my thought process. Every once in a while, however, I go back to something I wrote years ago and see new possibilities that had alluded me when I last looked at it. That might be because I have the advantage of time to see the work with more distance and objectivity. It could also be because I have experienced more in the interim, and I hope, learned a thing or two about writing, about myself, or maybe even about life. For whatever reason, a work that remained an unsolvable puzzle for me sometimes suddenly falls into place. More precisely, I can see that a solution might be in reach if I just spend a little more time digging deeper into that project.

 

So, if a work feels frustratingly inadequate, despite all your best efforts, don’t give up on it. “Freeze” it—keep it somewhere you can go back over it in the fullness of time. Years or even decades later, you might find a cure for what ails it.

_________________________________

Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Rework an Unfinished Project or Start Fresh?

Often as a writer you’re confronted with a choice between reworking a previous project that you set aside before completion, or starting from scratch with a new project. How do you decide which one to work on, particularly if your time is limited?

Part of that choice depends on how much effort you’ve put into the unfinished project. If you’ve devoted years of research into the historical background for a piece, and if you’ve already substantially drafted the work, I can see the rationale for not giving up on that project.

But to me the most important factor is whether the characters are speaking in your thoughts. A writer should be like Joan of Arc, hearing voices. 

Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ultimately, you listen to the conversations and arguments that your characters are having in your thoughts, as odd as that may sound. A piece of writing is alive if you can hear the characters speaking and see them doing things. If that isn’t happening, no amount of research, background, or planning can rescue a piece of creative writing.

I would suggest not getting fixated on securing a return on investment for a previous project, unless that project is alive and talking. In fact, you might complete a new project that is vital and active more quickly than trying to resuscitate a work that you no longer have a feel for, even if it is partially complete or researched.

Not all literary projects get finished, even if you devote years to them. Even if you finish a manuscript, it sometimes doesn’t turn out the way you hoped, and it can’t be sent to an editor or a producer, or it doesn’t get the response you’d wished for. In those cases, the best thing to do is to cut your losses, and start with a new project.

The good news is, ideas for literary projects are not numbered. They’re like waves: there’s always a new one arriving on shore. Not all waves are perfect, but there isn’t a limit on how many occur in your lifetime.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Linda Tillery on How to Clap and What It Means for Writers

A few years ago I took a workshop at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco with singer and arranger Linda Tillery. Linda said many remarkable things in that workshop. She has a profound understanding of the roots of African American music and she interprets traditional music, from children’s rhyming games to spirituals, in a way that makes those sounds extremely contemporary.

Linda Tillery

At one point in the workshop, Linda asked everyone to clap. After a few measures, she waved her hands in a Stop, Stop, Stop gesture. “That’s not how you clap!” she shouted at us. We were trying to make music in that I’m-so-embarrassed-to-be-clapping way where our hands had all the crispness of two overcooked pasta noodles. 

“If you clap, you have to commit to it!” Linda insisted. “You were clapping like this…” And she made us laugh by imitating our half-hearted, self-conscious motions. “No, you cup you hands, and you bring them together like this!” She pounded that left hand so hard against her right one, I couldn’t believe how loud the sound was that just her two hands made. “Now you do it!” And sure enough, when we cupped our hands and brought the strong one together with the still one, using concentrated force, the sound was ten times louder, and so much clearer, and so much more powerful. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” Linda praised.

If you want to see an example of what Linda means by clapping with commitment, watch the video below and pay attention to the woman on the left—that’s Linda. It’s amazing how something so simple, something we all think we know how to do, can be done much better if it’s done with conviction.

So, what does this have to do with writing? I think it’s true of all art, that if you take on a project, if you give yourself a homework assignment, you have to it with all your heart. You can’t do it half-heartedly, or self-consciously, as if you didn’t have the right to do what you’re doing.

That doesn’t mean that if you compose a sonnet it has to be exactly fourteen lines with just the right rhyme scheme and number of syllables and stresses. Writing with commitment is not about following rules. It’s about following through on your idea.

For example, if you write a story or a novel or a persona poem with a certain type of narrator, or if you create a character in a play, that voice has to be true to the person who’s speaking, and true throughout. You can’t just phone it in if your narrator or character is of the opposite sex from you, or has a different way of talking. You’ve got to make every word ring with that voice.

Similarly, if you’re writing about some part of your life or about an issue that’s important to you that you’ve never revealed or confronted before, you can’t just give little hints that hide the story more than tell it. You’ve got to let it rip. If you’re making the rhythm of the words an element in the poetry or prose, those words, those sounds, have got to have the impact of Linda Tillery’s hands when she claps. 

_______________________________________________________________________________

Zack’s memoir about his writer dad, Hugging My Father’s Ghost
Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop, Part 7: What to Do Afterwards

OK, your workshop is over, and you want to revise the piece that you brought to the group. Where do you begin? I think every writer handles this differently, but I can tell you the process I go through after a workshop, in the hope that it might be helpful to you.

First of all, I write down every single comment I get in a workshop that might possibly be of use, and mark it with the name or initials of the person who made the suggestion. That helps me sort through which comments are applicable to the particular work I’m revising. As I mentioned in a previous blog, you have to know the taste, preferences, and biases of your workshop members to absorb their comments most usefully.

Second, I wait one to three months before I look at the comments I’ve written down. Sometimes after a workshop I’m reeling from all the information I’ve assimilated in just a few minutes. I work on a piece for months, maybe years and when I finally show it to my writing group, and I hear all sorts of suggestions in the space of only a few minutes. Many of the ideas I didn’t anticipate at all, and one or two might take this piece of writing in a very different direction.

Even though I usually wait a couple of months to sort out all the information, if there’s something that was pointed out that I know is flat-out wrong, such as a misspelling or a dangling modifier, I usually fix that immediately.

To begin the revisions, I wait for a moment when I have no distractions and a stretch of time with nothing to do in front of me. Revision is a process that requires a lot of concentration. If it involves a poem, I try to allow an hour for the first round of edits after the workshop.

I start by carefully reading every single comment, sometimes recalling the tone of the person making the suggestion, and sometimes I remember my own reaction at the time I received the comment. I include those recollections in gauging how much weight to give to a suggestion. There are also certain comments I may have starred with an asterisk or underlined during the workshop, because the comments felt particularly useful. Those are usually the ones I begin with when I make my edits.

There are sometimes comments that would take my work in a completely different direction. Those are the ones I weigh most deliberately. Often those comments seem to me to be about a different work from the one I brought to the workshop—that wasn’t what I was trying to do, I’m not sure why that person interjected an idea that has nothing to do with the impulse behind this work of mine. Maybe it was a random idea. I discard that suggestion.

But every once in a while, a comment that takes a work of mine in a significantly different direction seems like the best one to me. A member of my workshop has given me a huge gift, a way to rework a problematic piece that otherwise might never gel into a work I’d like to an audience or try to publish. After weighing the alternatives, I rework the whole piece to incorporate that comment.

Just the process of sorting through the comments almost always stimulates other ideas that help me revise the piece in ways that the comments didn’t even suggest. Those fresh thoughts can be really useful in revisions.

One important thing to keep in mind is that a work of literature is a living organism. If you change one thing, you almost always have to change something else to restore the balance. For instance, you might add a line or a sentence that includes a word that you repeat just below the new edit, in which case you might have to find a replacement for that word when you use it for the second time. But this principle can also exist on a larger scale, in the plot of a novel, for instance. You might add a scene at the beginning that then requires adjustments several chapters later, to make the action consistent. Until you get to the very last round of edits, it’s almost impossible to make one change without making another tweak somewhere else. But that's a good thing. It means that your piece of writing is alive, that it is reacting to the work you are doing in revising it.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

How to Get Published
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop, Part 1: Whose Comment Are You Reading?

Many writers attend workshops to get comments on their creations. Workshops can be incredibly helpful, but they can also be confusing. For one thing, people’s reactions are often completely contradictory. “I especially love the ending,” says one person in response to your latest opus. Then the person sitting adjacent comments, “It’s good, but you really lose it at the end. The whole piece falls apart on the last page, where it becomes trite and predictable. That doesn’t feel like the right ending for this piece at all.” So who is right? How can you tell?
You have to pay very close attention to all the comments that people offer about your work. I write down every single comment that anyone makes in the writing group that I show my poems to, no matter how trivial or unfamiliar or wrong a remark may seem at first. But I also write next to the comment the initials of the person who made the remark. When I hand comments to a writer, I always put my name or initials on the copy.

Why? One of the things you need to identify is the aesthetic of the person who is making the comment. Sometimes you know that a person has a certain bias that you may or may not agree with. Let's say you've written a sestina about working in a fast-food joint (I'm thinking of Jan Clausen's wonderful poem, "Sestina: Winchell's Donut Shop"). You bring it to your workshop and someone says, "I love the idea of your poem, but I don't like formal poetry. It's too stiff. Why don't you rewrite it as free verse?" This comment might be accurate, but it might completely miss the point that you wanted to see if the sestina form could be used for such an unlikely subject as fast food donuts, and whether the repetitions of the sestina form could reflect on the monotony of fast-food jobs.

Even if Elizabeth Bishop were to rise from the grave and bring to your writing group a great sestina, you know in advance that workshop member would jump right in and say, “Liz, I have to tell you, I hate formal poetry.” That doesn’t mean that you always have to agree with this member's comments. Put her or his initials next to that advice, and keep in mind that person's artistic preferences. You need to observe and analyze the taste of those who give you comments, and figure out where it does and does not overlap with your own. In fact, that’s not a bad way to figure out you own aesthetic, by measuring it against the comments of others. Listen carefully to everything your peers say, even what they say that has nothing to do with you, or even to do with writing. You’ll find that certain critics you can usually trust on certain questions, and you can rely on others for completely different issues in your writing.

_________________________________

Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry