My granddaughter Ella, who is a rising fourth-grader with the instincts of an inventor, made a quill pen for me the other day. We’d all been on a family camping trip to a lake, where some Canada geese took up with us. The geese knew easy marks when they saw them and hit us up for a lot of the food supply, but they did leave pretty good tips. Ella came home with a collection of feathers—sleek black tail feathers, exactly the kind you see in paintings of Shakespeare as he writes To be or not to be on a sheet of foolscap.

Turns out you can make a quill pen by taking apart a ballpoint and inserting its innards into the quill. It works. It’s quicker and less messy than the old routine of sharpening the end of the quill and sticking it in the ink pot, although that used to work too. There’s little financial outlay, no carbon footprint, no new systems to learn every year or so, no early obsolescence, no sudden crashes that wipe out a year of work. Many a novel has been written with a quill pen, and in the days when a novel could run seven hundred or so pages. So was much of the world’s poetry. So was the Magna Carta and the U.S Constitution (at least in draft), and I’ve already mentioned Shakespeare.

Which is the context in which I’m saying I’ve just spent upwards of a month on a single chapter of the book I’m working on, because at the same time I’m struggling through a triple learning curve: my new little Netbook that is way more technically sophisticated than I am, Windows 7 (after Vista), and Word 2010 (coming straight from Word 2003 without pausing for breath at 2007.)

For years I wrote on a typewriter—I’m that old. For a long time it wasn’t even a typewriter that plugged in. Those typewriters lasted forever. I think you could throw one off a cliff and still write with it afterward. And they didn’t think. They didn’t even think they could think, much less know way, way more than you did. They just sat there on the desk, and when you wrote something with them, it stayed written. Of course if you wanted to edit anything you had to type the whole page over again, if not the whole piece of work. Or else you could erase the offending lines with one of those little round erasers that scraped away layers of paper and left holes if you weren’t careful. Or you could paint over them—anybody remember Wite-Out?—leaving a manuscript that seemed to suffer from leprosy. Once in a former lifetime I typed an entire doctoral dissertation for someone on a large manual typewriter—eight copies. With carbon paper. And an eraser, used very, very sparingly. No Wite-Out–that was against the rules. Copy machines did, yes, exist, but in that archaic period using one for a dissertation was also against the rules. (If any of the former UNC Epidemiology students I know happen to read this…see what you missed?)

So I guess I wouldn’t turn back time. There’s no such thing as a perfect relationship or a perfect writing tool. But there is an argument to be made for Ella’s quill pen.

When I walk into the ArtsCenter this evening, I expect to meet some more truly interesting people I’ll be glad to have in my life.  Some of them may not have written seriously before—meaning working at a project, revising, polishing, shaping-up—although most will probably have been writers in one way or another for as long as they can remember.  I look forward to knowing them, and to meeting again the ones who have been in past classes.

 And if this term is like most of the past ones, I’ll learn some things I didn’t know before.  It’s surprising what I’ve learned when I thought I was dealing with things like setting up a scene and handling viewpoint and so on.  Here are a few of many, many items I wouldn’t know about yet if I didn’t teach writing classes:

That there are a great many camels in Australia (imported, like the rabbits.)

What it looks like inside a camel’s hump.

What you have to do to exhume a body legally, and what it’s like when you do.

What you got to eat in restaurants in Siberia right after the cold war.

What monkeys are like up close and personal.

That there is a right way and a wrong way to tie a hangman’s noose, and that if you do it wrong, death is slow and agonizing rather than quick and painless (although we have only hearsay evidence for that last bit.)

That there is a whole genre devoted to imitations of books, movies, tv shows, etc. you admire, and it’s been around long enough that I find it embarrassing not to know about it.  So thank you people, for bringing me into the real world!

I can’t write when I’m tired.

I need a free block of time before I can write.

I can’t write when I don’t feel inspired.

Nope.  And nope, nope, nope.  And if I needed to have all that proved to me yet again, it just now was—all this fall, which I spent, in between and around and sometimes instead of most everything else, going through the final smoothing, polishing, concept-tightening and so on for the new book that’s reached the stage of This Is It.  Yes, when it was late at night, yes, when I was tired, yes, when I only had ten minutes.  And inspired?  The Muse, if anyone wants to know, isn’t the darling goddess who murmurs perfect prose into your ear and fires you with the urge to write it.  The true Muse is the Deadline, even when that deadline is partly self-imposed.  She is twelve feet tall, and stands next to your computer glaring and tapping her watch, and saying things like “You’re going to let that chapter out of your hands with that drivel in it?”  And she is, I keep re-learning, the goddess who helps my writing the most.

One of the biggest take-home messages was the necessity of rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.  And rewriting yet again, after you think nothing more can possibly be done to a piece.  That can be as creative and rewarding as the first writing, although in a different way.  You take something that’s on paper and you cut a little here and add a little there, and new ideas come to you, and you see the piece get better and tighter and make more sense as you go, and there are a lot of creative juices flowing.  Then there comes a day, if you’re like me, when you close down the file and tell yourself that it’s “done.”  For most of us, that simple four-letter-word, done, is always, always bracketed by quotes  until or unless we see the story, or novel or whatever it is, in actual print somewhere.  And after we do see it in print and it’s too late, certain other simple four-letter words can come to mind.  Such as “where the _ _ _ _ was my brain when I wrote that?” 

But maybe there’s another step before that, as there almost always has been for me.  It’s the moment when, after some period of time—months perhaps—and for different reasons each time, I decide I’d better do just “one more read-through.”  That’s when I come to the piece almost as if it was written by somebody else.  And that’s when the read-through turns into a complete rewriting which grows to the level of a mental illness for the time I’m doing it.  Everything else in life that doesn’t absolutely have to be done gets brushed away like a cloud of mosquitoes and I discover once again that yes, even though a quiet, uninterrupted morning is my best writing time, desperate times call for desperate measures, and it really is possible to produce something in the twenty minutes between the end of a meeting and the start of a class, also at 11:00 pm and 3:00 am and when I’m tired and hungry and in any other situation I can name.  And that last mental-illness-rewrite can be the one that makes the most difference to the finished work. 

So this is a long way of saying that three days ago I finished a last-ditch rewrite of this kind on the first book of my young adult fantasy trilogy.  This particular rewrite started as “just one last read-through” before I gave it to my wonderful friend Pat for editing.  But then it went on from there and has absorbed my life for the last some weeks. 

This is also a long way of explaining why my Duke Energy bill is ten days overdue, but I’m not sure that’s going to help with Duke Energy.

More and more, these days, people seem to be finding ways to get what they write out to the world…forget about external validation: just put your work out there and see if it floats.  Which brings me back to the question of why we write in the first place. 

One of the things I keep finding, over and over and over in my classes and workshops, is how many good writers there are around.  Writers who start with a good idea, write it well, then take it seriously enough to work it over and revise and polish and make it into a piece that anybody might want to read.  Writers like these are not terribly rare—that’s what keeps hitting me.  In a perfect world, each one would be picked up by a big-time agent who would sell the manuscript to a mega-publisher for a price that would cause the editors of Publisher’s Weekly to gasp; each would get the New York Times review, spend months on the best seller lists, get the movie contract, become ridiculously rich and famous. 

Yes.  But then there are the statistics.  Which you should not think about.

In an earlier post on this blog: “Breathing Out” (October 20, 2009), I said a little about why I think we want to write…or make visual art, or music, or dance.  I believe we have a real human need to make something out of the experience of being alive.  But the making is only half of it.  Arts are communication.  There needs to be a listener, a viewer, a reader, for the circle to be joined.  So if you put your writing out some way, any way you can—via big publisher if you’re lucky, but if not that, then via self-publishing, via blog, via any way you can do it—and if five people read it, there you are.  You can hope that the five people will resonate with what they’ve read, and will each tell five other people, and so on and so on.  You can hope that what you’ve written spreads around the world.  You can hope for anything you want to hope for.  But even if nothing more ever happens, there have been writer and readers and the circle has been joined.

Nothing in my experience shows me life as a straight line, starting here, running in this direction, ending there.  Everywhere I look there are only circles.  A moon orbiting a planet.  A planet orbiting a star.  Spring, summer, fall, winter, and now Hallelujah! Spring again..  Does the same thing apply to an individual life–the life of this specific leaf, for example, or that flower, or me, or the ones I love?  I wish I knew.  I don’t. 

I’ve lived in other places, and I know well that what passes for a long winter in our North Carolina is laughable in other sectors of the planet.  But it has been a long winter, and for here, a cold one, and tomorrow it’s Easter and I don’t care if the thermometer hits ninety, I’ll honor it.  In this year of 2010, spring is here, and I’m celebrating Resurrection.

Ambrosia Farm is a B&B, that also hosts an arts camp for children and teens in the summer and offers weekend workshops in various arts and crafts through the off-season.  I’ve added the website to my list on this blog, if you want to take a look.  It’s about a three hour drive from the Durham/Chapel Hill area, between the Blueridge Parkway and the town of Floyd—which is also worth checking out if you’re into music, art, dancing, etc. etc. etc.  The farmhouse was built in the early 1800’s and is beautifully restored.  Warm wood, crannies and alcoves, and who knows?— a ghost or two?  One of the writers last weekend gave us a ghost horse, trying to return to his home after serving in the civil war.  Sitting in that old parlor as I listened, with branches blowing a little outside the window and the hill sloping up, and creative energy buzzing all around me, I could buy that.

When I write about real people and actual experiences, I keep bumping up against the concrete wall of “what really happened.”  That can be, and often is, not only as inconclusive as life, but completely unbelievable.  So I get all scrambled up in Facts, and a lot of times nothing of much value comes out of it.  With fiction you shape life as you want.  Keeping it believable is part of the job. 

My recent novel Hannah’s House has two viewpoint characters: one a contemporary woman who was not at all an alter ego for me, but whose way of life and whose world I knew well.  The other, a nineteenth century, rural, mixed-race herbalist, could hardly have existed farther outside what was familiar to me.  She and the world she lived in meant I had to do a ton of research—which I thoroughly enjoyed—and she was the one of those two who let me spread my wings as a writer and say a lot of things I wanted to say.

These days I’m writing about as far outside my own life as you can get, with a young adult fantasy about a girl who lives in present-day Durham, North Carolina (well, I do know something about that) but who also happens to be one of the Three Fates the ancient Greeks saw as spinning out the thread of every life.  The story also involves computer hacking, about which I know nearly nothing (but I’m learning—although not doing, I swear.)  When I started on this trilogy I thought it would be pretty light.  But when you create fantasy you create a world, and when you deal with myth, what you find yourself bumping into is not the wall of what really happened, but some of the ancient life questions with which humans have struggled for as long as there have been humans.  It continues to surprise me as I work on this story, how much of the foreign country that is myself it drives me to explore.  Will it turn out to be of value?  I don’t know.  But it already is to me, and that’s what makes it worth doing.