Feminist Rhetoric and Gender Fluidity and All Those Same Damn Insecurities
Mood:
caffeinated
Now Playing: "Run" by Snow Patrol
Topic: Writing
I started writing again.
Not magazine articles or queries, but something else.
I have been waiting ten months for Carolina Wren Press to reject the memoir manuscript I entered in their Doris Bakwin competition. The website said they'd announce the winner in August, 2006 so I went to the mailbox every day last month in anticipation of the SASE in my handwriting that would enclose the following letter:
Dear "Writer:"
Thank you for your entry in the Doris Bakwin Award competition. This year more than 325 women submitted manuscripts, and all of their manuscripts were better than yours. Of course, we waited ten months to tell you this in an attempt to spare your feelings. After all, having waited nearly a year for a manuscript to be chosen, you can't really hold out any hope that we would choose yours. Therefore, now that we are certain you have already imagined the worst and given up all emotional investment in the outcome of this competition, we are pleased to announce that Sheila Writesbetterthanyou has been chosen as the recipient of this year's award for her manuscript entitled
The View Is Waaaaay Better From Here.We wish you the best with your writing, even though we knew after reading only the first five pages of the crap you sent us that you'll probably never amount to anything. We hope to see more of your work in the future. Far, far in the future.
Sincerely,
The Weary-Yet-Jubilant Staff of Carolina Wren Press
The letter still hasn't come and the website is still announcing that the winning manuscript will be announced last month. I'm not upset about this because I really do understand the realities of being a small press (since I am the sole employee of one) and I can't imagine the stress of 325 book-length manuscripts demanding to be read and ranked and passed up the food chain. It's a miracle that competitions like these are ever finally decided and that one manuscript really is chosen and published and one career quietly launched....
But the fact that after ten months I am still going to the mailbox looking for that letter IS a problem. It means I haven't lost all emotional investment. (I have given up hope that mine will be chosen, but I'm still clinging to some small hope that I might get a nice, handwritten note on the above kiss-off letter saying I was a finalist, or that at least one of the readers really liked the manuscript but, sadly, had to let it go because it was just a little too "___" for this press.) It means I've put all my eggs in one basket. That I don't have enough irons in the fire or enough balls in play. That it is time to start lobbing other pieces of writing out into the world so they, too, can be rejected and returned to me so I can repackage them to some other editor with a form letter just waiting to be shoved into my hopeful SASE.
So I started writing again. It's a tentative writing, but I can honestly call it a writing practice. It has a set begin time and end time and I start by doing a timed writing warm-up in my Natalie Goldbergesque spiralbound notebook. It's all much more ritualized than I've ever worked before, but I needed a routine to get me started.
I think I'm writing the first in a series of short stories for which I have a great title, but I don't want to jinx myself by actually revealing that title. I'm not sure yet, though. It could turn out to be an essay. Since I believe a story finds its own form and wholeheartedly embrace Pam Houston's approach to writing - she says that 90% of her nonfiction is true, and 90% of her fiction is true; it's a matter of which 10% is false that determines whether she calls it fiction or non - I don't think I have to know yet. If it turns out to be a short story, it might actually also turn out to be the fourth story in the series, rather than the first, since I think I may have begun writing this particular collection of stories back in 1989 with a very bad short-short about having to pick out a wedding gift for an ex-boyfriend I was still in love with. (That story, and maybe the second one also, even though the second one has been published, would definitely need an overhaul. In fact, I don't think I still even have a copy of it, unless it's in one of the boxes of stuff I saved from USC....)
To get back in the flow, I began my practice by writing long-hand on looseleaf college-ruled paper with my favorite brand of pen, a blue medium PaperMate. This is how I started writing back in grade school and I wanted that reimmersion this time around. I wrote like this at the dining room table every night this week until tonight, when I decided I had a solid beginning for this story/essay and could step up to writing on the computer. I didn't begin writing on a computer until grad school - and I still refuse to write poetry on a computer. It took some getting used to, but now it's second nature.
Of course, working on a computer brings another layer of distraction, though.
The story is about me taking a questionnaire in college that said I was more gender identified as androgynous than as either female or male. So, I typed up what I had written by hand, went back over it a few times to get the rhythm right, and then decided that 1) I wanted to verify that I was using the word "rhetoric" appropriately (yes, I have a Master's degree and I still worry that I'm using specific terms incorrectly and have to check myself) and 2) that I wanted to see what a Google search on the term "androgynous" brought up.
Suddenly, writing becomes Googling and following links and before you know it, I've lost all the energy I had for the story and now I am all concerned that I have to find a way to specify that my sexual orientation was never in question, just my psychological connection with one gender or the other. (I have always been female, but I like spending time with males much more than I do females. This whole gender thing has become much less of a question as I've gotten older, though, because the more time I spend with men, the more I realize I have a truly feminine brain. I simply see things differently than they do, and I am convinced it's based on brain morphology and chemistry.) I took notes on terms like "androgyne" and "bigender" and "ambigender" and "gender fluid." None of these terms are likely to be useful in the short story I'm writing, and the fact that I suddenly know them makes me want to use them and that makes it more likely that the piece I'm writing will read like an essay, and even though I've said I don't care which I'm writing, I think I really do hope I'm writing a short story. Having the Internet so readily available when I was writing Your Mileage May Vary was awesome because I could easily look up facts about towns I was writing about without having to break focus for very long. If I truly am writing fiction, though, I may have to develop some kind of mechanism to keep myself from hopping over to Google in the middle of a writing session.
And now I've spent more time writing about my writing session than I did actively writing during the writing session.
Thoughts captured by Kristine
at 12:01 AM EDT
Updated: Friday, September 29, 2006 9:57 AM EDT
crushed out
surprised
silly
chillin'
on fire
lyrical
mischievious
flirty