Jeannine Atkins

My preferred place to write from is a calm spot with maybe a view of something green, maybe a quiet dog near my feet. Okay, this calm is not just where I most like to write from, it’s where I like to be. I’m lucky to have it enough, but this month I’ve felt kind of robbed, raw, scraped-in-the-belly, prone to wondering why isn’t the world more exactly the way I want? I know I’m much quicker than usual to anger, which I feel as a layer over tears which aren’t far enough down my throat. So when the air conditioner guy didn’t show up at ten this morning, after an earlier cancellation, I took it personally. When he wasn’t here at eleven, I was mad.

Trying to get back to my calm place, I told myself, you’re lucky to have air conditioning. You’re lucky to work at home and have something to do while you wait. And I do have the green view and the dogs, but, wah, I’d put off walking them. By noon, I felt the two hour lateness as the biggest ever act of disrespect. Does my time mean nothing to our heating/cooling guys? Well, yeah. I tried the benefit-of-the-doubt approach. They could be saving dogs in cars. Stamping out fires. Anything.

Benefit of the doubt felt like too much work. I pressed on with my revision, but seeing kind of cross-eyed, I couldn’t tell whether my character getting angry where she shouldn’t. I hadn’t realized how lonely she could feel.

When the new heating guy finally showed up in the driveway, he greeted my dogs and told me about his dogs and how his kids loved the little one. He became just a guy and not the ruiner of my day never mind my life, which was where my anger had been taking me. And I became less the queen of rage and more a normal person, trying to keep the house going, trying to write a book, trying to get a small handle on grief.

So is this the writing process, sometimes? Watching your character get mythic, then shrink back to more someone you might find in your driveway, making chit chat, before cleaning the coils or getting back to the computer and trying to see not through red or blue but a clear clean space?

I’ve been getting back to my novel-with-poems, which has been part of my life for a few years. I like to come and go with various projects. I lean hard for a few months to half a year, then go to something else.

So the book I’ve called all kind of things is drafted, but with holes and repetitions and inconsistencies. And when I say holes, I mean visible gaps between sentences – a jump where I couldn’t decide how to transition – and sometimes, I’m embarrassed to say, holes within sentences, too. Or lumpy or ragged endings.

But, really, the book is kind of all there in its lump-of-clay way. I know the main characters, plot, and patterns, so I’ve spent some of the past few days wrestling scenes into place. Reshaping dialogue so that one person is actually talking to another – not, as in the rough draft, one person going on too long, talking to herself, or one person supplying both halves of the conversation. Oops, who’s she talking to? There’s a lot of pushing stuff around, but sometimes my fingers unclench a bit and almost fly. When I write new rough conversations, which I’ll have to unbend, unscramble, or rake though later.

There’s the joy.

Saturday I went with Peg Davol to the Keene State College Children’s Literature Festival.
http://www.keene.edu/clf/festival.cfm I enjoyed listening to Carolyn Coman talk, especially about her earlier darker work, though I respect the need she expressed to explore and live with a lighter part of herself these days. I got to say hello to Jerry Pinkney and tell him how much I loved the illustration he did for the story I wrote about Woodrow Wilson in Our White House: Looking In, Looking Out. I got to shake his strong hand. Fangirl moment.

And before a talk that didn’t interest me as much, I slipped out to walk to the wonderful Toadstool Bookshop. There I found a book called Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist by Sharman Apt Russell, who appears to be an environmentalist and scientist, too, which intrigued me. I’m not thinking of switching religions, but this is the tradition of the person I’m writing about who lived 3000 years ago. I’d been aware I’d been treating her world view too much on the surface, and I have to attempt to believe with her. If the moon and river is talking to her, for instance, I have to listen.

I brought this book and another to the counter, where the clerk said she’d bought it, and put it on her pile, and we had a brief talk about those piles.

“Oh, what is the book?” asked a woman beside me, winning my heart, as I, too, always want to know what books people are reading, talking about, or even putting in piles.



I showed her and said, “Who can resist reading about someone who believes she’s a bird?”

Apparently this woman could. Her smile turned stiff as she turned away, but not before I noticed she was holding “Badger’s Parting Gift.” It’s interesting how we let, even encourage, children to read about animals with active inner lives, then draw lines that suggest: time to grow up.

I like to peer in and fiddle with the tiny parts of my writing. I can fix the same sentence over and over. I can make small shifts within paragraphs in stolen moments, or edit before or between appointments.

But moving from one major point of a book to another, seeing the big picture, making sure there’s enough action and blocks to it: these are not my strong points, and it’s plot that most baffles me when I revise. For something as massive as planning out a structure, I want a lot of space and silence. I need to keep away from the early drafts so I don’t follow the old lines and just patch things up. I need to make maps with major mistakes and detours in order to find new directions.

Yes, the blank page is scary, but with a little work, hey, it isn’t blank anymore! Within the past few days, I’ve started from nothing and composed a bunch of new words to play with and keep me company. I feel a kind of lightness when starting fresh. I don’t have the heaviness of a pile of old notes to wade through and assess. We have to sometimes be the well rather than just worry about filling it. So I’m heading back to some silence for most of the day.

I’ve often revised manuscripts by letting them sit, then hauling them out, hunkering over, and tackling problems. This time, I’m letting my old manuscript wait a little longer, relying on my memory, and opening a clean notebook. It’s revising by way of the blank page. Perfectly white paper makes me feel eager, sort of young, less like a grown up writer whose job is to push around words on a manuscript that needs to get done. Blank paper lets the bossy author fade so I can feel my way into my thirteen-year-old character. The writer on the hunt for words to shuffle around or scratch out might get in her way now. That author, me, would be busy with sentences, and not let my character bloom. In the back of my mind, I know where E. is, who she will meet, where she’s going and some of the blocks in her way, but I’m offering space within chapters, or how E. spends her hours and days, which, of course, could change the whole.

Once I run out of words, I expect it will be fun to go back to the manila folder that’s kept chapters waiting for almost a year while I tended to other work. I’m not ditching the old draft or dissing it: I hope I open it and find a slew of gifts. I know there are labored-over sentences, paragraphs, maybe occasional whole pages which I can steal from myself. I hold this out as reward and expect to cut and paste and join the two drafts.

Sometimes blankness makes me antsy. It can drive me to the fridge too often. As the boss of my writing, I set rules, but I also offer loopholes. I think I might work my way through a chapter, then open the old folder and peek or help myself to words. We’ll see. Sometimes just telling myself “you don’t have to” is enough to keep me on track, though I doubt I’ll make it through the whole short-ish (150 pages) book this way.

For now my goal is to spend some days close to my character’s feelings and free will. I’m heading back to white paper where it’s just me and my girl. Going into free fall, enjoying the ride.

(Tracy, thanks for asking! Let me know if you have more questions!)

--Beauty, I mutter to myself as I drive the dogs to the vets.
--Beauty, I tell myself as I go to bed.
--More beauty, I remind myself at the computer.

I’m writing about a protagonist with lots of problems, not a bad thing, but I’m afraid she’s too lonely on the page. Even her mother and father and most certainly her brothers seem out to get her. There’s conflict, but is there enough joy? The manuscript feels like a painting with some colors missing.

So I set my one-word direction in my brain and wait for actions and images to cluster around it. What does my girl want? Can’t I give her some taste of it sooner than the end of the book? Yes. I see that she and her mom can have a little more than I let them have before. They’re talking, they’re laughing, and I think that will make the gulf that opens between them soon enough seem even wider.

In my usual step behind fashion, I’m getting around to a fun challenge posted by Becky Levine beckylevine a while back. She took a picture of a stack of books she’d compiled for research on her historical novel, inspired by two even taller stacks of books that Susan Taylor Brown susanwrites had posted. If you want to play, please join us (and no one’s in a rush here.)



I’m writing about ancient Iraq, or what the Greeks called Mesopotamia c. 2400 B.C. and am starting to get pretty comfortable there. (In my mind: no time or space trips planned.) I’ve always loved the Time-Life books for research; I think it was the Web that made these wide photo-packed books stop being produced, which is a shame. The longer essays include more than most web clips and the bigger pictures are more haunting. After checking out a few from the library many times, I decided to buy the three favorites at the bottom from used bookstores, and the musty smell of one only adds to my pleasure. Yes, call me research geek. The pictures of round-eyed statues, votives, and clay tablets printed with cuneiform script are inspirational.

I’ve also read some of the texts of the time – poetry and stories in their first written form. Much of it is not too my taste – I like the moon and everything, but how many ways to praise it? What I like is the thought of characters who do. So here are chants and tales to be reread. And on top of my stack I put a few of my favorite volumes of biographical verse, because I’m working with that as well as prose. I love Marilyn Nelson’s Carver: A Life in Poems, Natasha Tretheway’s Native Guard, and Annie Boutelle's Becoming Bone: Poems on the Life of Celia Thaxter, though, of course, these poems take place in entirely different periods.

My husband liked the photo, but said I should have stacked them in the shape of a temple. A ziggurat, I corrected: the five or seven storied buildings with a temple at the top where priests and priestesses worshipped the sun and moon.

That’s where – sort of – I’m heading now. But if you have a minute, for one of the coolest things ever, you can write your name and see it transcribed to cuneiform. http://www.upennmuseum.com/cuneiform.cgi Please, don’t think I was complaining about the internet when I was raving about Time-Life books! We want it all!