Tayari's Blog: The Wallet and The Roadtrip-- Explained
Posted by TayariJones on November 7, 2007 07:15 AM
Filed under
Writing
Here is the explanation for the pop quiz posted on Monday.
My mentor Ron Carlsonturned me on to this idea back in 1996 or so when I was working on Leaving Atlanta. I think I have blogged in the past about my two-steps-forward and one-step-back writing process: I can get a good 100 pages into a project and realize that I am going about it all wrong and I have to start over. (My second novel, The Untelling, underwent THREE do-overs!) These set-backs used to devastate me. I couldn't understand why I couldn't get it right the first time. That's when Ron told me about the wallet.
Being a writer is about making mistakes. Big mistakes. Being bold it about trying new things that probably won't work. The key to success is how you feel about these missteps.
The people (24% of us who took the poll) who get happy just because they realized that the wallet was missing are in the best position. These are folks who just love being on the road. These folks are really into the process for its own sake.
I am in the middle (along with another 24%) who feels disappointed but am able to regain my rhythm once I have corrected the mistake. I'm the driver who will curse all the way home, but pop in a new CD and set out singing.
The rest (52%) will be mad until they have written enough pages to make up for the "bad" pages. These folks will look at the page count on their computer and think "I would have been finished by now if I hadn't spent all that time writing from the wrong point of view..."
The lesson, get happier earlier. We do this thing because we love it, right. Learn to love the whole thing. You'll have more fun and do better work.
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There are 3 comments on "The Wallet and The Roadtrip-- Explained". If you'd like to leave a comment, click here to jump down to the comments entry form.
Comment #1, by jamey ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.tayarijones.com/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
as a writer starting the 99th draft of her novel who also just lost several chapters of said novel in a computer crash (no, i was not properly backed up), i needed this little quiz. i was somewhere between a and b in my answer. i've thrown out hundreds of pages so far. thanks!!
November 7, 2007 11:21 AM
Comment #2, by Tayari Jones
This is from Ed.
Ah-ha. This is helpful. And, it raises (I think, maybe I'm wrong?) an issue that's vexed me off and on for years. Here's the situation.
What if my reaction to the dilemma in the car puts me in category 1 and my response to the today-unveiled situation in the writing process puts me in category 2 or 3? Am I alone in this?
That is, what if I react to impediments in life (at least in cars) in one way and to those in my writing in another? There it is: the life/writing dilemma. I think there's a danger among writers to (mis)place
feelings (like frustration, pain, even delusional hope) about their writing into their lives. As if it's easier to deal with pain and chaos in our lived lives than in our imagined ones. At times I wonder
if we don't often act as if we're safer from physical threats (in this
case wasted gas, tire rubber, miles) than we are from the silent sweat
of what we writers call work.
In response to a symptom of this dilemma, a good friend of mine once told me that, at some point, she realized that she'd have to learn to be easier on herself and harder on her writing. I took her to mean
that she'd decided that she'd need to be tough enough to confront the
dangers and dilemmas in her writing head on and no longer wait until they'd bubbled into her life in hopes that they'd somehow magically evaporate from the page if they appeared as (physical or psychological) bruises in experience. Tougher on writing, alas, like possibly shortening that last sentence? See what I mean?
Anyway, I think about her decision often--my respect for its clarity and basic sanity and also for its subtle difficulty--when the confusing confluence between life and writing appears as it does in the deceptively simple structure of this quiz.
Sincerely, Ed
November 7, 2007 04:01 PM
November 8, 2007 11:13 AM