Kate Maloy's Guest Post: Both Sides Now

I live in a small, steep village on the coast of Oregon. There is more light here than in anyplace I’ve ever lived. It courses among clouds or falls unimpeded from the sky; it bounces off the water and the mammoth rocks on the shore; it drips from leaves and rooftops. I walk for miles at a time in this beautiful place, beside the ocean and up into the hills. Walking is my meditation. I am no good at sitting still and focusing on my breath. Movement is my best access to that trance state.

Not long ago, though, I did slip into meditation while sitting still. I was perched beside the water, and this time it was the ceaseless motion of the waves that drew me in, instead of the energies of my own body. I never even noticed; I simply found myself perceiving like a newborn, without language or intentional thought. Everything—light, color, creatures, sound, and motion—formed a fluid oneness, I think because I named not one component of the scene. For a writer to somehow turn off the naming part of the brain, from which follows instantly an organizing, separating, and then reintegrating effort, is a splendid accident, and always an inestimable gift, for I can call upon it even if I can’t reproduce it at will.

Other writers may have no such longing for this boundary-less and occasionally wordless state. It’s one I have drifted into at moments throughout my life, and I always come away with new insights or connections. But it has its costs. I sense that it’s connected to the years of pinballing, in which I impulsively but unconsciously avoided structure of any kind. It might explain why I never took creative writing classes or aimed for an MFA or read books on craft or joined writing groups. Too many words, too much thinking, perhaps, when apparently I was after something else.

I finally did read some books on craft, after Every Last Cuckoo came out. The one I remember most is Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream, because in it he talks about the central necessity of the dream state to the creation of fiction. He says early on, “There is no intellect in this world powerful enough to create a great work of novelistic art. Only the unconscious can fit together the stuff of fiction; the conscious mind cannot.” Later, he says, “Your ambition as an artist is to give voice to the deep, inchoate vision of the world that resides dynamically in your unconscious.”

I love this; it dovetails with my experience by the water, and with other moments when I have found myself in trance or at the receiving end of those lightning flashes. I can only arrive at that state by indirection. I have to come at it sideways, like any other truth, because it does not happen by intention. In that, I agree with Butler completely and am grateful to him for opening my eyes to how much of Cuckoo came from my conscious (and self-conscious) mind, but also how much of it really did arise from the dream state.

Where I part company with Butler is over his insistence that no fiction writing at all should come from “the head,” the conscious, organizing, plotting mind. That part, with its technical concerns, is useful only when the writing is done. It is allowed no ongoing interplay with the act of creation. To be so dictatorial about fluidity and the elusive lightning flashes in the dark—this seems contradictory.

Given my sense that the boundaries within us are illusory, I can only feel that Butler is wrong in setting them up so rigidly. Wrong for me, at least, because I am aware of a free and natural exchange between left and right, fiction and life. Had I trusted this awareness many years ago, I might have been able to write much earlier. Instead, I have done something else worthwhile, which is to form habits of mind and psyche that now I can rely on in my work. I’ve looked for patterns in the accidents of my life and lessons in the pinballing. I’ve listened for messages from my own DNA, teasing out the kinds of ideas and situations that mean something to me, that resonate all the way down my bones to my genes, no doubt passed on my some long-dead ancestor whose name I will never know.

Interviewers and others ask where my ideas come from. The truest answer is that they come from accident and randomness, from my own past and all the generations that gave rise to me, my particular and not well-organized self. They come from living on this planet among all its species and geographies. They come from looking at paradox everywhere and learning to love it, to take pleasure in the mysteries and complexities and the fact that there are no blacks and whites, no opposites, no coincidences, and no reality that is not fiction or fiction that is not real.

I guess that’s why pathways paved by others don’t work for me—not Butler’s, not anyone’s, because my own, regardless of its fissures, bumps, and sidetracks, brings me as close to my “deep, inchoate vision of the world” as I can possibly get. This is where I wish to live.

Kate Maloy's Guest Post: Cleaning Up the Copy

When I showed one of my brothers what I wrote for Monday’s blog post, he said “Gee, I guess girls can have messy lives, too. Who'd a thought!” He also said he liked the ending, about the revising and editing stages. “Time to clean up the copy.” His own copy looks pretty clean to me. I see his editorial work in his dry humor, in the wise kind of father he is, and in the durability of his one and only marriage.

I very much like the notion of cleaning up life’s copy, and the more I think about it, the more I think most of us, writers and nonwriters alike, treat the text of our lives the way novelists treat their fiction—making things up, changing our stories, creating subtexts we’re not even aware of.

To live is to create fictions. In nearly everything we do—meet crises, sustain relationships, take on new challenges—we are forced to rely heavily on memory to inform and instruct us, even though memory is a proven liar, a notorious manipulator of reality for the sake of convenience and self-image. We try to see ourselves in others, too, and they may send back no truer images than a funhouse mirror. Add to that our preferred angles of view on important people and events—views that we frame like camera shots, leaving out the ugly parts. And then there’s everything that never makes it from our subconscious mind to our functioning awareness. No matter how deliberately we search for truth and try to act on it, our subconscious is always there, greedily or needily keeping things from us.

Nevertheless, we can approach truth, by degrees. Some kind of intuitive calculus lets us do this the way a mathematical calculus lets us find the area under a curve. Little by little, by tiny calculations and accumulated experience, we learn to recognize authenticity and develop it in ourselves and our writing.

This could be why I sometimes find myself marking STET where once I’d have written DELE. Though my text will always need work, I begin to reject my assumption that because I didn’t plan well, I didn’t execute anything of importance.

Editing is such a left brain activity, so neatly separated from the writing itself. Right? The left side plans, analyzes, and comprehends; the right creates, intuits, and apprehends. But what about the corpus callosum, the bridge between the two? I think I was stuck on that bridge for a long time, held fast in crossfire from both sides—in a manner of speaking. I don’t really know how the corpus callosum works. If it neither thinks nor creates, then perhaps its role is to generate lightning strikes, brilliant, wordless flashes that illuminate otherwise dark territory. Only connect. Isn’t this how we do it, in flashes?

What I once thought of as mindlessness has actually been full of flashes—connections and insights that come without language or thought. They suddenly just are, where an instant before, they were not. What I’ve tended to see as a lack of discipline and productivity just might have been a necessarily long gestation required by my particular nature, psyche, and circumstances. It’s possible I’ve needed all these decades to be able to write at all—to cross the corpus callosum freely instead of just standing there, tangled in my own ganglia.

All this imagery is important. I use it because the truth is too elusive, and metaphor lets me approach this sly creature a little from the side before it startles and runs off. The thing is, I am falling in love with its skittishness and am very happy in the dappled light that camouflages it. I become a patient stalker and am rewarded now and then with a glimpse of something real and true. If truth were just there, tame and for the taking, there would be no need to search, no thrill of discovery, no flashes.

So there really is no dividing line between life and art—or between left and right. Even in our own brains, there is only the illusion of a boundary separating one function from another. Everything is plastic, fluid, connected. Which is exactly what writing demands from us—or maybe I should just say, from me. We all have our unique approach to writing and truth and our own ideas as to their mysterious source.

Kate Maloy's Guest Post: An Accidental Author--Or Not

Hello, Kepler’s Writing Group! I am delighted to be here this week, among so many authors I admire—and who appear to me more mindful and disciplined than I am. They have posted here about their creative methods and management and the books that have most inspired or motivated them. They have studied and persisted all along and have succeeded where they are most devoted.

I, on the other hand, am a seat-of-the-pants writer, so unsystematic that it all seems accidental to me. Yes, I meant to write, I decided in fifth grade that I wanted to be a writer. I just never settled down to it. Though I made a living writing for hire or editing other people’s prose, the day jobs left me feeling I’d used up exactly the energy I needed for my own work. How could I write all day and then go home and write at night and on the weekends? Other people did it—why couldn’t I?

What I see now, as a sixty-something first-time novelist, is that I was busy making all the mistakes I might have had characters make. I made bad choices in everything from work to love to time management. I didn’t plan, I pinballed. I was on the move, all the time, but without a map or destination. Twice I married by accident, by which I mean that I drifted into relationships that simply presented themselves attractively, and I did it without asking myself the right questions about either party’s needs or intentions. I even became a mother in sort of an accidental way. I had always wanted a child, genuinely and deeply—the way I really did want to write—but fate seemed determined to deny me. Reproductive problems led to medical crises and an agonizing choice, but without them I would never have had a healthy son at age forty. That was almost twenty-four years ago, and nothing in my life has ever made me happier. (The whole story appears in the anthology Choice, edited by Karen Bender and Nina de Gramont. This collection, by the way, covers every kind of real-life reproductive decision, with all its anguish and struggle. It is the perfect book for these fraught days after Dr. George Tiller’s murder).

Just as I was an older, first-time mother then, an “elderly primipara,” I am an older writer now, an “elderly primipublished.” As with pregnancy and childbirth, I failed several times before I succeeded. I wrote a mystery, then I wrote nearly a whole novel about an ugly woman who one day woke up beautiful, and then I quit for a long time, made more mistakes, and began searching more diligently for new directions.

And guess what I finally wrote about, when I found enough peace, time, and confidence to complete a novel I believed in? I wrote about Sarah Lucas, an elderly woman nearing the end of a well-planned life, surrounded by family and a diverse array of friends. Sarah, the main character in Every Last Cuckoo, has spent nearly all of her seventy-five years in one place, the rocky, gorgeous state of Vermont, from which she has derived her great heart and strength. Planning Sarah’s life as I never did plan my own has shown me how I want my old age to be. It is gratifying to see that my best role model is a product of my own imagination. Readers, too, tell me that they want to be like Sarah as they grow old.

Nevertheless, it surprises me that Every Last Cuckoo has done so well. In the writing, it just seemed to unfold, as if I were winging it, like a marriage or a freelance assignment. And yet, though it felt like a seat-of-the-pants effort, I seem to have had intention and craft all along. That’s what showed up sharply in the revising and editing. It’s what continues to show up, and further surprise me, when I talk with interviewers or hear from readers. Other people’s reactions show me aspects of the novel’s shape and pattern that I wasn’t aware of when I was writing it.

This is a grand revelation! It relieves anxiety; it tells me I can trust the processes of my own mind even when I am not conscious of them.

It also suggests that I’ve had intention about my life all along, too. I have, after all, gotten everything I wanted most, a child, a published novel, and even a third chance at a good marriage. This time, marriage works because I’ve learned to be deliberate, every day, about acts and consequences. I’m a little old to be figuring this out, but even though I’m late, I’m not never. I think I’ve simply reached the revising and editing stages, the time when patterns and subtexts reveal themselves, if ever they are going to.