Re-reading Stephen King’s account of his long, painful healing process after the infamous hit-and-run accident that nearly killed him really makes the self-pity evaporate (if you want to skip to that part, it’s in the postscript, which is titled “On Living,” but then go back and read the whole thing). His lower leg was broken in nine places; his hip was fractured, and so was his femur; a gash in his scalp required twenty or thirty stitches. Here’s a passage about his recovery after surgery:

“A large steel and carbon-fiber apparatus called an external fixator was clamped to my leg. Eight large steel pegs called Schanz pins run through the fixator and into the bones above and below my knee. Five smaller steel rods radiate out from the knee. These look sort of like a child’s drawing of sunrays. The knee itself was locked in place. Three times a day, nurses would unwrap the smaller pins and the much larger Schanz pins and swab the holes out with hydrogen peroxide. I’ve never had my leg dipped in kerosene and then lit on fire, but if that ever happens, I’m sure it will feel quite a bit like daily pin-care.”

King was still in a wheelchair and recovering from the accident when he wrote the last half of On Writing.

“The first writing session lasted an hour and forty minutes, by far the longest period I’d spent sitting upright since being struck by Smith’s van. When it was over, I was dripping with sweat and almost too exhausted to sit up straight in my wheelchair. The pain in my hip was just short of apocalyptic. And the first five hundred words were uniquely terrifying–it was as if I’d never written anything before them in my life. All my old tricks seemed to have deserted me. I stepped from one word to the next like a very old man finding his way across a stream on a zigzag line of wet stones. There was no inspiration that first afternoon, only a kind of stubborn determination and the hope that things would get better if I kept at it.”

Then a bit later: “There was no sense of exhilaration, no buzz–not that day–but there was a sense of accomplishment that was almost as good. I’d gotten going, there was that much. The scariest moment is always just before you start…. After that, things can only get better.”

If that seems like a naive pronouncement, read the rest of the book. The writing advice is all solid, and some of it is inspired. Even the advice that seems like it ought to be common sense is not commonly practiced. The parts that stay with me, though, are the object lessons King provides from his own history, from the rusty spike under the eaves on which he impaled…wait for it…his early rejection slips (he’s really a pretty mild-mannered guy; what did you think I was going to say?) to his clear-eyed recollections about his alcoholism and recovery (even less self-pity here than in the postscript). Writers have to be uniquely courageous to do what they do, as King illustrates.

This is not just a book for horror writers, or genre writers; it was recommended to me by a successful narrative nonfiction writer with half a dozen respected books to her credit, and has popped up on many others’ bookshelves. (Never mind that the title as it appears on the paperback cover appears to be scrawled in blood on a wall, reminiscent of a certain novel about a haunted resort hotel. Really, it isn’t about how to write horror fiction specifically.)

Find this book at a nearby library or purchase it.

My birthday present to myself this year was a ballroom dancing class, taken with my sweetie. On the first day we arrived at the South Park Rec Building VERY nervous, being the only F/F couple in the group (of maybe a dozen or more couples), but our dance instructors Shirley and Blue (who are in their sixties or seventies, have been teaching for many decades and likely have seen it all and then some) quickly put us all at ease.

On the first night, they gave advice to the gents (and me — yes, I got to lead) about how to lead effectively, which is also really great writing advice:

1. Keep the frame.

In dance, this means keep your arms and shoulders firm and your elbows up. This makes it easier for your partner to follow you (and in fact, hard to do otherwise). I could tell whenever I let my frame slip, because at that point my lovely and talented dance partner would sort of go off in her own direction, doing her own thing, and the dancing-as-a-couple thing quickly disintegrated.

In writing, to me this means you have to build the world with enough convincing detail that your reader is carried along with you. You can always tell in workshops when this isn’t working, because all of a sudden the readers are veering off in all different directions, often reading very odd things into the story that (to you as the writer) aren’t there. You’ve lost them. Keeping the frame is about concrete and specific detail, but even more so it’s about voice. Readers will relax into a book with a solid and compelling voice, and allow themselves to be carried off wherever the author chooses to take them.

2. Dance your body.

In dance, this means concentrating on your own body in space and moving it where you want it to go. If you keep the frame, your partner will come along with you. If you try to direct your partner and “lead” them in that way (steering them around), it doesn’t work.

In writing, this advice translates into adages like, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” (Robert Frost said that.) Writing is not really a manipulative art, although good writing makes readers feel things, sometimes with the full intent and purpose of the author. But I would argue that to be successful, the author has to feel those things first, and even then, it’s cussed hard to bring that level of emotional reality to the page. When an author fails, you get purple prose, melodrama, or transparent attempts to tug at heartstrings.

I’m still thinking about that one.

It seems like there should be a third thing, but those were the only two bits of advice Shirley and Blue gave us! I would add, though…

3. If you are not afraid of looking foolish, being embarrassed, or tripping over your own feet, you can learn a lot in a short amount of time.

The writing and life applications of that one should be obvious. It hearkens back to a hobby horse of mine, permeability as a writerly virtue. Most of the successful writers I’ve met (I’m not talking in terms of book sales necessarily, although that is one measure of success) have this quality. Not only are they curious and interested in others and the world around them, they tend to be more open to their experiences. They are capable of changing their minds, and their hearts.

Another way of looking at this might be John Keats’ negative capability, that is, “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”

At any rate, if you are closed off, the only way you can improve as a writer is under your own steam — it has to be your idea. You become sort of a closed system. If you were a plant, you’d be self-pollinating. Writers who are more permeable are better able to share and swap around ideas and learn from the feedback (and mistakes) of others. Plus, it’s less lonely.

People introduced themselves and chatted a bit, then Jim made a comment to the effect that science fiction is about ideas, but if it doesn’t say something about the human condition it doesn’t succeed, and asked us what we thought about that. The conversation rambled around a bit, and someone (Kelly, maybe?) commented that one definition of the human condition she’d heard was that we are “born in pain, live in fear, and die alone,” and a couple of people seemed willing to take that as a working definition of the human condition, at least for the purposes of that discussion at that time. This idea bothered me, but in an uncharacteristically reticent moment I didn’t say anything at the time.

I mean, I suppose that is the worst case scenario, isn’t it? But it also is a sentiment that seems very localized culturally; it wouldn’t even make sense to other cultures and even subsets of our own that are not so deeply rooted in a sense of individualism.

The counterpoint to “born in pain, live in fear, and die alone” is perhaps “we’re all in this together.” These two philosophies are not mutually exclusive; the one is a consolation for the stark fact of the other.

Luckily, the workshop was much more an illustration of the latter. People think of writing as a solitary activity, and that is partly true, but it doesn’t have to be isolating, and having a community of writers to draw inspiration and energy from is a gift, a necessity if you want to stretch, grow, and learn.

I’m planning on writing a bit more about the workshop and how it went, but I’ll end here for now with this image, which proves that any philosophical point can be illustrated using cute animal pictures from the interwebs. I figure these guys at least partly balance out the Ichneumonidae, right?

“Society is obsessed with the idea of talent and genius and people who are ‘naturals’ with innate ability,” says Ms. Dweck, who is known for research that crosses the boundaries of personal, social and developmental psychology.

“People who believe in the power of talent tend not to fulfill their potential because they’re so concerned with looking smart and not making mistakes. But people who believe that talent can be developed are the ones who really push, stretch, confront their own mistakes and learn from them.” (emphasis added)

The quote is from Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. The article focuses on success in business, but I’ve been reading The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin (and will be reviewing that here soon), and he says something similar about creative pursuits.

It seems to come down to the way people think about learning and developing skills. If they tend to think they are good at things because they are smart and talented, then when they inevitably screw up, it must be because they are stupid hacks. On the other hand, people who think they are good at things because they have worked hard and focused a lot of time, energy, and attention on developing those skills, when they inevitably screw up, they decide it’s because they need to do some more work, try harder, try a different angle, revise their approach, et cetera. (Those are my words; Waitzkin talks about brittleness versus resiliency in the two approaches to performance.)

The NYTimes article puts it this way:

People with a growth mind-set tend to demonstrate the kind of perseverance and resilience required to convert life’s setbacks into future successes. That ability to learn from experience was cited as the No. 1 ingredient for creative achievement in a poll of 143 creativity researchers cited in “Handbook of Creativity” in 1999.

Productive? Is that my primary goal? I mean, what about “daring” or “dangerous” or “exuberant” or any number of other funky adjectives (I’m a writer, I know adjectives).

And if I’m not churning out 1500 words a day (or 500, or 200, or whatever I’ve predefined as “productive”), am I an unproductive writer? My answer: sometimes. But not always.

In short, the name of the blog has been somewhat at odds with the spirit I’ve been bringing to it. Therefore, in the spirit of truth in labeling, I’m looking around at some other ideas: I’m considering the Unstuck Writer, for instance, or just going with my own name on the blog, which will simplify things.

More soon…

Another good friend of mine is primarily working on one novel, but then she has another novel which is her “cheating” project (the Other Novel instead of the Other Woman). When she gets bored with the main project, she switches over to her illicit affair with the Other Novel.

If we were to extend this metaphor any further, I think I would have a harem of active projects. Couple of screenplays. A novel. Two or three short stories. One radio play. That said, sanity dictates that only two or three of those are “hot” at any given day, but I could work on four or five different things in a week, easily.

Clearly, of the lot of us, I’m the juggler. My one-project friend is more of a bloodhound — single-minded with a single purpose. My two-project friend falls somewhere in the middle.

In the past, I’ve worried that I’m not ever going to finish anything if I have too many balls in the air at once, but it seems the minute I buckle down and make myself choose just one (or two), my sense of joy and inspiration dries up, and I wind up working on nothing. So I’m resigned to be a juggler, but the important thing is, I’ve identified my own individual working style (at least concerning my preferred number of concurrent projects).

Are you a bloodhound, tenaciously going after a single project? Or a juggler, needing to have lots of different projects to switch to in order to keep things interesting? What’s your preferred project mode?