Flannery O'Connor Rules

Flannery O’Connor Rules
This is the name of the list of writing tips that came to me by way of a friend, but also a sentence.

Flanner O’Connor rules.

Yes, she does!

I discovered her collected letters, The Habit of Being, not long after I gathered up my courage to try my hand at writing a novel—a task for which I had no preparation, no training, nothing but the fact that I had been in love with novels from the first one I read when I was, maybe, seven.

I loved the matter-of-fact, suffer-no-fools voice in the letters, the way she wrote what she saw and felt and knew about life in the world and life of the spirit in language that was at the same time plain and complicated and deep. I loved her stories—the drudge and pain and horrors of the human condition rendered with a dark humor I’d never experienced before, except in my own heart.

It’s bad, I know—but when the Misfit shoots the grandmother and says to Bobby Lee, "She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,” I laughed out loud and thought, ohmygod, yes.

Here’s that same voice in these “rules” about writing plucked from her letters.

1. “I’m a full-time believer in writing habits…You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away…Of course you have to make your habits in this conform to what you can do. I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have, but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.”

2. “Try arranging [your novel] backwards and see what you see. I thought this stunt up from my art classes, where we always turn the picture upside down, on its two sides, to see what lines need to be added. A lot of excess stuff will drop off this way.”

3. “I can discover a good many possible sources myself for Wise Blood but I am often embarrassed to find that I read the sources after I had written the book.”

4. “I suppose I am not very severe criticizing other people’s manuscripts for several reasons, but first being that I don’t concern myself overly with meaning. This may be odd as I certainly believe a story has to have meaning, but the meaning in a story can’t be paraphrased and if it’s there it’s there, almost more as a physical than an intellectual fact.”

5. “That is interesting about your reading some Shakespeare to limber up your language before you start; though I think that anything that makes you overly conscious of the language is bad for the story usually.”

6. “It might be dangerous for you to have too much time to write. I mean if you took off a year and had nothing else to do but write and weren’t used to doing it all the time then you might get discouraged.”

7. “This may seem a small matter but the omniscient narrator never speaks colloquially. This is something it has taken me a long time to learn myself. Every time you do it you lower the tone.”

8. “I know that the writer does call up the general and maybe the essential through the particular, but this general and essential is still deeply embedded in mystery. It is not answerable to any of our formulas.”

So offbeat, practical, true.

Fabulous Indiana Writers: Jean Harper

One of the cool things about my job as the Executive Director of the Writers' Center of Indiana is promoting the work of fabulous Indiana writers. I know a lot of them, which is one of my life's great pleasures. But I'm always discovering new ones--and Jean Harper, who lives and writes in Richmond, Indiana, is one of them. Rose City: A Memoir of Work was published by Mid-List Press in 2005.

Harper went to work as a rose cutter when she moved from her East Coast home Richmond, Indiana to be with a former professor whom she had loved since she was a student at Earlham College. She’s married; he’s married. It’s a difficult time. Harper risks everything for love and love is at the center of Rose City, but this memoir is not a love story. It’s the story of a smart, talented, well-educated woman in her thirties, who takes the only job available to her in this small college town, cutting roses, and whose co-workers accept her, teach her, and help her find her way into a new life. It’s about the rose industry, about roses. It’s about a once prosperous Midwestern town dying as new labor policies of the 1990’s lure American companies to countries where workers are unprotected and drastically greater profits can be made.

“All of it was foreign to me,” Harper writes early in the book. “I was an American, living and working in my own country, but it didn’t feel that way. I had crossed a border. I could have used a passport and a visa, entry stamped JUN 27 1992. RICHMOND, INDIANA, THE ROSE CITY.”

Thia world, which Harper so beautifully created on the page didn’t seem foreign to me at all. I grew up in the Calumet Region in the fifties, in a working class family that struggled to make ends meet—a world I left behind as soon as I could, but which, as time goes by, I realize shaped the strongest parts of me. I recognized Lil, Joy, Sammie Jo, Eddie, Bo, and Hank. They lived in my neighborhood in a different place, a different time, and so I know how well Harper captured the poignant mix of grace and resignation which they faced each day, the deep sense of responsibility they felt toward family and friends, the hope that sustained them even as the world seemed determined to drag them down.

I loved everything about Rose City: the story of this group of workers, which read like a novel; the social commentary about company practices with chemicals that put everyone in danger folded into their concerns about pregnant 17 year-old Sammie Jo; lush, lyrical forays into the world of roses; the deft characterization of Richmond, with its assortment of working class people and academics. The raw honesty with which Harper explored the disappointments and failures in her life that she knew she must face to be able to find happiness pretty much blew me away.

“The greenhouse saved me from an ordinary life,” she writes near the end of the book.

Having read Rose City, it’s hard for me to imagine that Jean Harper is a person capable of being ordinary. In any case, I’m glad she found work in the greenhouse and very glad she wrote this book about it.

Jean Harper grew up in Concord, Massachusetts. She earned her B.A. from Earlham College and her M.F.A. from Emerson College. Her short fiction, essays, and memoir have been published in The Iowa Review, Living Forge Journal, and Cimarron Review, among others. She is an assistant professor of English at Indiana University East and lives in Richmond, Indiana.

Kiss? Essay? Essay? Kiss?

Okay. It is probably not a good sign that I sat down to work this first morning of the new year, opened my email to download a file I’d sent from my other computer, and could not resist clicking on “Best 2011 TV Kisses.” I don’t even watch TV, though I got the first season of “Glee” for Christmas last year, watched all the episodes in a couple of days, then rented and obsessively watched all other available season—and the “come-on” picture for the AOL teaser was of Blaine and Kurt. It was a great kiss. Still.


Maybe my first New Year’s resolution should be to start using my Mac e-mail, even though I find the me.com address extremely annoying. Me, me, me. But which is better? An annoying e-mail address or the constant temptation to waste time on stupid shit like “Best 2011 TV Kisses?” Plus, according to my daughter Kate, having an AOL address pegs you as an old person, which of course I am, but, hey, why broadcast it?

Okay. Resolution One.

On the other hand, it seems like a lot of trouble. Can’t I just not click on that stuff? And stop checking my e-mail I hate to think how many times a day? Not to mention Facebook. The New York Times, the Huffington Post. Whatever.

Years ago, leafing through a fashion magazine in some waiting room, this jumped out at me: “Discipline is remembering what you want.”

No doubt, the context was losing weight, buffing up your body, creating your own style. But I was teaching creative writing to high school students at the time, constantly talking (them to death, they probably thought) about the importance of discipline, and I think that’s why the “you” in the sentence hit me so hard.

Especially when you’re a teenager, “discipline” is something parents, teachers, coaches—grown-ups—are constantly saying you need to have. Naturally, then, it feels like being disciplined is something you do to please them, if pleasing them is important to you. If the grown-ups in your life are controlling, not being disciplined is one way you can have some control over your own life. They can ground you, give you a bad grade, kick you off the team—but they can’t make you have the discipline you need to achieve the goals they’ve set for you.

Weirder, and even more destructive, you actually want what they want for you, but there’s no way you’re going to try to achieve it because trying feels like pleasing them and there’s no freaking way you’re going to do that.

I wrote the quote, underlining the “you,” in the journal of a kid I was pretty sure fell into that last category, based on what he wrote about his life. The next time I saw him, he said, “That quote totally blew me away. I wrote it on my bathroom mirror with my mom’s lipstick.”

Not that he immediately became a disciplined person. But it gave him a new way of thinking about what discipline was, which was a start.

In fact, we all carry the residue of the dreams and goals that people had for us when we were young and they get all tangled up in the dreams and goals we have for ourselves. It’s hard to unravel them, though once you understand they’re there you begin to recognize them in the nasty little voice in your head that directs you away from the work you want and need to do. You’re no good, you’re unworthy, you’ll never, ever succeed—so why bother?

You don’t have time. You have to clean the house, rake the leaves, clean the closet, take your sick neighbor a casserole.

The voice can be sugary sweet, too. You deserve a trip to the mall? How about a movie? A nap?

Whatever it's telling you, once you identify it as the residue of what others wanted you to be, you have to remember what you want every day, every hour, every minute to keep it at bay. (Not only New Year's Day)

It’s a constant balancing act.

“Best 2011 TV Kisses?”

Work on the essay you set aside this time to work on?

Seems easy, but it’s not.

For one thing, anyone deeply involved in the creative process knows that sometimes the best stuff comes from an unintended seque. Yielding to temptation can trigger a light bulb moment in your head.

For better or worse, I did get this whole blog post out of yielding to the temptation of TV kisses. And, writing, I found focus for some thoughts I’d been pondering. New ideas floated up—as they always do.

But what if I’d resisted the temptation and spent the better-part-of-an-hour I’ve just spent writing this on the essay I sat down to write?

Can't know. The time is gone.

Seriously, this stuff can drive you crazy.

Still, remembering what you want can be useful in those moments of temptation.

And the old cliché, “Just Do It.”

Just write.

Dear God

Okay, first, full disclosure: I don’t believe You are a You.

Of course, if I’m wrong and You are a You, You already know this—and everything else, for that matter. And if You really are the all powerful You so many people imagine, the one with long white hair sitting on a throne in heaven (wherever that is), maybe You’ve got Your finger raised right now, trying to decide whether to unleash that lightning bolt smite me for being insubordinate.

Or.

Maybe You’re thinking, Right on! Finally. Somebody actually using the brain I gave them.

And/or.

Laughing because, the brain You gave me was faulty. On purpose.

In which case, is this all some kind of cosmic game for You? Which would be pretty crappy on Your part. Still, I can see how You’d need something to counteract the boring, unrelenting goodness of heaven.

To be fair, I should say that, despite my deep reservations about Your existence, I make use of You. I tell my writing students, “Human beings are not only good or only bad. There are no pure heroes or villains. It’s way more messy than that. Creating believable characters is like being God. Imagine Him up there in heaven, creating us one-by-one, setting us in motion. Not controlling us, just rooting for us as we make our way through the world He made. High-fiving St. Peter when we do something good and right.

“Doh!” he says, covering his face with his hands when we blow it. When we’re stupid, mean, arrogant, stingy, unforgiving—or worse. Always hoping we’ll do better next time.

Maybe this next thought is blasphemous, it probably is—and if so, I apologize. Seriously.

But what if You’re just like us—fiction writers, I mean. What if you keep trying and failing to make the world You imagine here on earth?

Like me using the faulty brain You gave me to trick some unanswerable question into a story, hoping against hope that the world I make with words will offer up some small thing that helps me better understand the world You made.

What if each one of us is a story-in-progress?

What if writing a story is a kind of prayer?


Not the kind that asks for favors, but the kind that asks a question—the question always being “Why?”

For example, You may remember that my sister, Jackie, died of brain cancer a while ago. If you are You, all powerful, You decided this would happen to her.

When she called to tell me about the diagnosis, she kept saying in a stunned voice, nothing like her own, “But I’m a good person. A good person.”

And, as You know, she really, truly was.

She was not a religious person. Nor was she an unbeliever. Just one of those live-in-the moment people who didn’t think a lot about such things. In any case, she didn’t have the personal relationship with You that some people describe, the kind in which prayer is like talking to your dad, asking, wheedling, promising to do…whatever if You will just…whatever.

But lots people who claim to know You that way prayed for her.

At first they prayed, “Please make Jackie get better”; then, when it became clear that You’d decided against that, “Please don’t let her suffer any more.”

During her long illness, at her funeral, they said:

God always knows what’s best for us.

(Brain cancer? Please.)

God never gives us more than we can handle.

(But Jackie so could not handle it, God. She lived in terror from the moment of her diagnosis till the hospice nurse gave her enough morphine so that she could finally just slip away. The rest of us didn’t handle it all that well either. We still aren’t.)

God works in mysterious ways.

(Which, I have to say, made me freaking furious every single time and made me want to grab whoever said it and shake the shit out of them, then get right in his or her face and say between clenched teeth, “That is the stupidest, most condescending, thoughtless and annoying thing you could possibly say. Do you actually believe it’s acceptable for God to treat my sister this way—or anyone, for that matter.)

It’s making me freaking furious all over again, writing about it now.

Because, let me tell You, God, it will soon be ten years since I got that awful call from my sister and, as far as I can tell, nothing but heartbreak has come from what You made happen to her.

Just last night I went to the wedding of the daughter of some good friends. We’ve known the bride since she was a little girl, watched her grow into a gawky teenager, and rooted for her as she struggled in those first years after college, trying to find herself, longing for love. Tall, willowy, radiant, she was a picture of happiness in her beautiful gown. After the ceremony, she danced the traditional first dance with her new husband. She danced with her dad. I felt so happy, watching them.

Then the groom danced with his mother.

And it hit me. Jackie won’t be there to dance with her son Sam when he gets married this summer and, God, my heart cracked in a whole new place.

I don’t know. Maybe You feel as bad about this as I do. Maybe when you were writing the story of Jackie, brain cancer just came into it and there was nothing you could do. (That happens with stories, I know.) Maybe you watched it all come down just as I did, hoping for a better, happier ending even knowing how unlikely that would be.

But all this is moot because, as I disclosed earlier, I don’t believe in You.

I believe if there is such a thing as God, He, She, It is nothing like us at all—but so vast and amorphous and truly strange that there are no words, there is nothing in our experience of being human that makes it possible to describe It—and it would be absurd to try.

Here I am talking to You, though—and I have to admit it does feel like I’m talking to Someone. Go figure.

As usual, wrestling with that faulty brain has left me in a muddle, strands of thought tangled hopelessly in my head. As usual, I conclude that all I can do is to keep on writing stories, keep on hoping that each one of them will answer some part of he question, Why?

If you are a You, please receive them as prayers.

If you’re not the kind of God equipped to receive anything from us, personally, or if there’s no God at all, nothing but us, and life is no more than some random quirk in the universe, I’ll keep writing them anyway.

Because I can’t not write and stay even a little bit sane in this crazy world.

Because one of the few things I believe absolutely is that the connections we make telling each other stories about life on this earth really, really matter.


Recently published at On Earth As It Is

www.onearthasitis.net

Is This My Beautiful House?

I’ve written before about house angst, that longing for the perfect house. Who knew I had one? I mean, I love my house (now, after years of a love/hate relationship with it), but I was pretty surprised when someone from the Broad Ripple Historic Home Tour left a note on my door last spring asking if we’d consider opening our house for it. Then, when I didn’t respond, showed up on my doorstep and asked in person.

“Well,” I said. “I guess you can come in and look around to see if you’re really interested.”

They were. I thought it would be fun, so I said, “Yes.

I got two basic responses when I told people about this: “Oh, cool!” and “Are you crazy?”

As for the latter, last week, as the Home Tour loomed, I was beginning to think “crazy” might apply. Not because I was feeling worried about 800 or so people tromping through my house, invading my privacy or, worse, stealing my stuff, but because I actually found myself polishing the leaves of my plants. Seriously. It was the pinnacle of days and days of cleaning and sprucing things up, generally. Not to mention spending an awful lot of money on kitchen and bathroom counters, newly painted rooms, and landscaping improvements.)

“But when it all got going on Saturday morning, I had a blast.

"I love the yellow!" people said, coming in.







"And the blue kitchen!"










“Are you an artist?” one woman asked. “You are very daring with color.”

I think it was a compliment.






People lingered in my nutty little office, which looks alarmingly like the inside of my head.









“Whoa!” they said when they walked out into my nifty little garden.










I was exhausted when it was over. Today, I relished the rainy, gloomy day inside my still-sparkling house, with it bouquets of flowers bought at the Farmers Market for the occasion.

Quantum Physics

In a parallel universe
my sister is waking,
her heart full, thinking
about Sam and Katie,
how nervous they were last night,
at the rehearsal, how sweet
to one another, and all those
grown-up boys—David, so like
our dad when he was young,
and Sam’s buddies, all of them
still children in her mind’s eye,
playing Ghostbusters in the yard.

Which makes her a little weepy
about how quickly the time went,
how quickly it’s going.

But it is a happy day,
she is happy and that is all
she ever wanted. Her memories
are all happy. Holding Sam
for the first time in her arms,
his first words, his first steps
and how fervently he loved lawn mowers
and balloons and dinosaurs.
The year he went to preschool
every morning, a fabric tail pinned to his pants.

She remembers his head bent over a first grade primer,
the sound of his flutey voice, reading aloud,
his floppy white-blond hair and bony arms
and legs and little boy sweat. The smell of chlorine
on his skin after a day in the pool.

And when, suddenly, he was so tall
she had to look up to see him. She remembers him
driving away the first time in the car
and how he looked in his tuxedo on prom night,
the feel of his arm around her, the click
of the shutter, capturing them together
for all time, beaming.

In this universe, there is no memory
of sickness, she can’t even imagine not living
to see his wedding day, which she is rising
to meet on this sunny summer morning.

National Road Yard Sale

Who knew there was an annual 800 mile-long yard sale along Route 40, spanning St. Louis to Baltimore—and running right through Indiana? And where else would you find out about it than a beauty salon? One of the women who works in the shop where I get my hair done had gotten up early to check it out between Indy and Richmond, near the state line, and was talking about the treasures she’d found when I got there Thursday afternoon.

Of course, we had to go! Highway 40 is archetypal Indiana, with its corn and soybean fields, old farmhouses, and little towns. We drove, stopping here and there, when something caught our fancy.

I've got to say, it was mostly a lot of junk. Still you had to appreciate the sheer weirdness of selection—everything used underwear to rubber-banded sets of restaurant swizzle sticks, Sponge Bob lights, cassette tapes, ratty baseball caps, worn combat fatigues, and a waxed, gleaming, cherry red chopper—being sold from yards, tents, barns, churches, parking lots,under beach umbrellas, and the back of pick-up trucks and campers.

I mean, who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to spend all afternoon on a ninety-five degree day for the chance to discover these irresistible ladies-with-fruit-hats salt-and-pepper shakers?