Tag Archives: fiction

You Ever Feel Stuck?

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You ever feel stuck?

Sometimes you just do. It’s a good time to eat chocolate ice cream, or go for a walk, or take a bath.

Getting unstuck is usually a combination of mental and physical, which is interesting because feeling stuck is usually entirely a mental thing.

But we’re mammals, so getting unstuck sometimes requires a little physicality. Shaking it off might be literal. Don’t overthink it, just get moving. Enjoy something. Not so much “rest” in the sense of removal from activity, but thoughtful rest in an activity you enjoy.

That was my advice to myself this week when I grew frustrated with my inability to attract a fiction agent. My nonfiction career is going great guns with our seventh edited anthology, thanks, but nobody thinks I have an imagination? I took myself on a long, shady walk in the woods to give myself a pep talk.

Two years now, I’ve been working on a coming-of-age novel set in West Virginia. Two years, the characters have shaped and stammered and grabbed the keyboard from my hands and run amok across it. Now it’s time to edit the opening to make it more of a grabber than an explainer. Something that has never been my forte. But in the personal rejections coming from agents (in a ratio of 1 personal for 3 standard), they pretty much say the same thing: the opening isn’t making me care what happens to the characters.

This is a puzzle to be solved, a craft to be practiced, and I have to remind myself I write because I like writing, because there are things to be said, and because it keeps me from strangling people with my bare hands. So, there’s that. Do what you love because you love it, and remember that’s why you started this journey.

That said, the journey doesn’t have to end down a dead-end alley with the words “your characters are not compelling” written on it. I intend to see that mine does not.

But oh, the energy, oh the strategy, oh the strange masochistic joy of this journey.

If you’re out there writing,too, be encouraged. I’ve published seven books across four lovely publishers, and this is what I have to say about our industry right now: this too shall pass. One way or another, we will unstick. Because, writing.

Get up and try again, kids. That’s my plan.

The Monday Book: BEWILDERMENT by Richard Powers

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Janelle Bailey, teacher, AP exam reader, and former shopsitter for our bookstore, delivers the Monday book this week. It turns out not to be a favorite….

I definitely went into this expecting to be engaged and enthralled and breathing deeply, thinking differently about something–in that case never seeing trees quite the same–as had happened when I read The Overstory. That did not quite happen.

Oh, I will look at stars and space differently and think about some other things newly–grief, death, parenting and most especially through grief and death–as well, but I feel like lots of this book were just over my head or out of my own realms of keen interest and understanding, in parts, for me to fully appreciate it quite like I had expected to.

I DO love that the book is set in Madison, and I considered/wondered whether and if so when Powers had spent enough time there to understand these few Madison things: the farmers’ market and its offerings, the layout of some of the city, etc. And I found Theo and Robin and Aly to be interesting and compelling characters for the most part. I enjoyed spending this time with them.

I am not upset that I read it, I am just less confident that I will be totally “wowed” by every Richard Powers I pick up like I surely was by The Overstory.

Also and maybe a sidebar or irrelevant, but: I became more irritated by all of the things that were over my head scientifically when, in the very first pages the book gets completely wrong something that I just shared again recently is a peeve of mine: the misunderstanding of which year of life one enters on their birthday. This main character is turning 9 and so COMPLETING his ninth year of life (we celebrate a first birthday, the big “ONE,” when a child has completed their first year of life. Right??), not “eighth year” as the book states at least two different times. So I was fairly irritated the more that the book wanted me to get my head around science and even its more “sci-fi” aspects, when it kicks off with understanding age wrong. Argh!