writing process Archives - Ann Putnam, Writer

Slaying the Dragon

If you attended my presentation during the Writing from the Heart virtual conference on October 21, 2023, you know technical difficulties prevented me from delivering my workshop “Slaying the Dragon.”

I apologize! What follows is what I intended to deliver. I hope it’s of use. And if you’d like to watch the presentation, you can find it on the Story Circle YouTube channel.

First-Aid for Writer’s Block:

You’re writing your heart out because you know you have a story to tell and you’re the only one to tell it. Could be a short story, a novel, a narrative, a memoir, an article, an essay, a letter… and then, suddenly, you stop.

At first, it’s not quite clear you’re in deep trouble. After all, this happens all the time to a writer. Hills and valleys, rushes and pauses, just like always. You’re just taking a breather.

But you slump in your chair.

Then you get out of your chair, your room, your house.

Make another pot of coffee. Let the dog out. Answer the phone.

Maybe read a few e-mails and answer… just one. Or two. That one looks urgent. They all look urgent!

Finally, back to the matter at hand.

You start a sentence, and it suddenly goes off a cliff. You watch it crash and burn.

Or you’re into your first rough draft or your second or third, and suddenly, inexplicably, or perhaps predictably, you’ve just stopped. You get up the next day, determined to rise from the ashes of your own faltering self and begin again.

But… with what?

For the life of you, writer that you are, you cannot figure out how to go forward. You look back and it’s all a mess.

It was never a good idea to begin with.

Despair descends like the proverbial brooding clouds. Your shoulders feel weighted; you find it hard to swallow; your eyes swim with tears. Your heart is thrumming.
Your life is over. Your writing life is over. There will never be another word from you, so why are you just sitting there?

All right, maybe it’s not as dramatic as all that.

Maybe you just don’t show up for your next writing time. There is always something else to do. And then the next time becomes the next and the next and then you can’t imagine you ever lived a writer’s life. You put your head down. You mutter help!

For writers, not writing is like a little death. Nothing feels right.

I’ve been there enough times to know there is a rhythm to this despair. And thus, the expectation you can wait it out and it will pass like a sudden summer storm. Hills and valleys, just like always.

You know all that, but this time you really are stuck. This time it’s all truly falling apart. This time the well is really dry. Not a creative thought in sight.

It feels existential. It is existential.

“Who am I if I’m not writing?”

“The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” ~ Flannery O’Connor, quoting St. Cyril of Jerusalem

The “Father of Souls” is what is in your deepest heart. But it’s dangerous and fraught all along the way, guarded, as it is, by the dragon who would devour you: all those feelings you suspect are true, that say you aren’t good enough, brave enough, or smart enough to write the tale you most need to tell.

How to Heal Your Despairing Writer’s Soul

You start by havening. This is a self-soothing technique that calms the amygdala inside your head and tells you that all is well.

Slide one palm over the other and back again. Shut your eyes. Stroke your arms from shoulder to elbow, then your face. Think of a wonderful thing you wrote.

Then, move. Put on some jazzy music and move your body through the rhythm and beat of it for, oh, maybe five minutes or so. Shake, rattle and roll with it. Release all that trapped energy and make room for a new thing.

Now go from inside, where all those accumulated demons have taken hold, to outside. Focus intensely on what is outside the self by immersing the five senses. It’s really helpful to have a kind of first-aid kit, if you will, so find a nice little box and put these things in it. Or you can just focus on the five senses, one at a time, with things that are at hand. Either way, you want full concentration on the sensations before you.

Here’s what’s inside my writerly first-aid kit:

5 things to hold up to the light:

Amethyst crystal (protection, intuition, spirituality)
Citrine crystal (creative process, happiness, light)
Lepidolite crystal (healing, calming)
Norwegian glacier stone (eternity)
White crystal (enlightenment, guidance)

5 things to touch

1. Irish worry stone
Petosky stone
Shiny blue polished glass. The words: To Life.
Clear, smooth crystal
Smooth Pale opaque blue stone. The word: Imagine

5 things to hear (from soft to loud)

1. Bells on a string
Baby wind chimes
Single bell
Buddha bells
Buddha gong

5 things to smell

1. Jasmine
Lavender
honeysuckle
Frankincense
Bookstore candle. Light it. It really does smell like a bookstore. An old, authentic bookstore!

5 things to taste

1. Chocolate
Chocolate
Chocolate
Chocolate
Chocolate

Once you’ve opened to everything the sensory world has to offer, you are calm. You are not so much waiting, as ready. You can feel anticipation down to your fingertips.

They yearn to touch the keys.

Next, embrace the arbitrary. Then make it inevitable.

Get out of your logical, left-brain mind—it needs to be silent right now—and enter the right-brain: the intuitive, spontaneous side of you, and try these five things: You’re just playing around when no one’s looking. You don’t have to keep any of them.

1 Introduce an event that, on the face of it, has little to do with what you are writing. That is, make something improbable and unexpected happen. If you can’t think of anything, look at the props in the setting of the narrative you’re writing, or your life—your room, your house, your office.

Something falls over, crashes, catches fire, slams shut, turns on, rings, pounds. Somebody screams, sighs, whimpers. Laughs. Why are they doing that? No matter, just describe them doing it. The phone rings. My God.

What is the worst, the best it can be? Describe what can’t possibly happen, what shouldn’t happen, what positively won’t happen. Put these in a list. Surprise yourself with the outrageousness of it all.

Ask yourself, but what if it did?

2 Introduce a new, totally unexpected character. Out of your dreams, back from the dead, out of the newspaper’s front pages.

The mail arrives. It’s a letter you are afraid to open. The doorbell rings. Who is it? Somebody dead? A celebrity?

Who is the last person imaginable to walk on the set of the narrative of your life, your story?

Someone you dread? Love? Fear?

They’re already here. At the lawn, now at the door, the living room, the kitchen, yikes! into the bedroom.

It’s your state senator, the mini-mart owner with buck teeth and a neck rash, Elvis Presley, Donald Trump, Oprah with a Sweepstakes check, the dead uncle with breath like stale radishes.

He’s carrying an envelope. He shoves it at you.

3 Jump: If you can’t get from A to B, then jump to C or maybe V or Z.

Jump in time, jump in space. See where you land. Breathe it in.

There is some reason you’re here and not back there where you were lost and despairing. Try to imagine how this place or point in time is connected to the point in the narrative that had you stopped.

It may be the heart of the story, only you don’t know it yet. It may be something you need to know more about but didn’t recognize until now.

Look down this rabbit hole. Jump. Free-write for a minute or two about what you see.

4 Begin your narrative in a new place. Begin just before the end, then look back. Begin in the middle and flash forward. Begin just before everything falls apart.

5 Read lines from these poems. Underline the words that rise up for you. Write three sentences, each with one of those words in it.

“The only way to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it
Into the body first, like small
wild plums.” ~ Mary Oliver “The Plum Trees”

“Where are you? I called
and hurried out
over the silky
sea of night
. . .down into the garden of fire.” ~ Mary Oliver “The Gardens”

“Listen, whatever you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body.” ~ Mary Oliver “Humpbacks”

“So I walked out one night under the full moon
and agreed with my dead love
that the cold light on the backs of my hands
belonged most to me.” ~ Tess Gallagher “Glow”

“He looks back to the dream—the way
a violin might glance across a room at its bow
about to be used for kindling.” ~ Tess Gallagher “Deaf Poem”

“So love in a room now
can too easily make me lost
like a child having to hurry home
in darkness, afraid the house will be empty.” ~ Tess Gallagher “Infinite Room”

“Only then can I revisit that last surviving
And know with the wild exactness
of a shattered window what he meant
with all time gone when he said, ‘I love you.’” ~ Tess Gallagher “Infinite Room”

Anything will do. Just a single, revelatory word will be all you need.

Take a deep, cleansing breath that travels from head to toe. You’re back!

Say, “Thank you.”

And thank you for staying with this. I utilized all of these techniques, more than once, when I was writing my latest novel, I Will Leave You Never. I hope it all helps when you need a boost.

In the next blog post, I’ll be writing about the progress on my new novel, The World in Woe and Splendor, with all its ups and downs. It has been an interesting process, to be sure. I went places I never knew I’d go.

Finally, if you know of someone who might enjoy reading I Will Leave You Never or my previous work. Cuban Quartermoon, I’d be happy for a recommendation! And if you know of a book club that might read them, I always enjoy showing up for the discussion.

Hope all are well and doing fine.

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Incantation

I began I Will Leave You Never when everyone I loved was still alive.

I finished it after I had lost four of them—loved ones I did not think I could live without.

Yet it’s the way of anyone’s life eventually, this saying goodbye. I Will Leave You Never is the story of such leavetaking, given over to the greater truth of art.

This essay attempts to reckon with how these things took me apart and then put me back together, as my writing grew and deepened. How I came to write and re-write I Will Leave You Never—yet hold it fast through the losses of my life, and other works that too often took its place.

“Zoe’s Bear”

I Will Leave You Never began as a story about a bear in the mountains, called “Zoe’s Bear.” I began it on the drive home from Glacier National Park where we’d taken the children, not knowing a grizzly bear had just killed three people.

The experience of the bear was far more real to me than to my children. They thought it was a grand adventure and loved wearing bear bells tied to their shoes. The terror of that bear has never left me nor the sense that I would never be big enough or brave enough to protect my children from it wherever it was.

But it began my thinking about motherhood and mortality, safety and peril—and thus the urgency of writing a novel about it, which, as it turned out, has no actual bear in it at all.

But then “Zoe’s Bear” became another story, then another yet again, my constant companion over the miles and years, whether on my desk or buried and seemingly forgotten in the bottom of a drawer. But throughout the revisions, it retained the shadow of the bear as metaphor for mortality in various forms both strange and familiar.

I wrote it at my desk at home, on planes, in emergency rooms, doctor’s offices, PTA meetings, gymnastic and track meets, traffic lights. It took days, months, years, and went through many iterations, before it finally became, with much starting and stopping, I Will Leave You Never.

As I was working on the first draft of the book that would at long last become I Will Leave You Never, I began writing a memoir in notes and scribblings here and there about my mother and father and my father’s dashing identical twin and their journey into old age and death, though I didn’t know that’s what I was doing at the time.

Safe as Houses

I toggled between the two as “Zoe’s Bear” became Safe as Houses, and the bear, the threat from without, becomes, not a bear at all, but a serial arsonist setting fires near where my protagonist and her family live next to tinder dry woods in a strange season of Pacific Northwest drought.

A frightening stranger moves into the house at the bottom of their hill. She wonders if he could be the arsonist, and watches over the woods at night, wondering if the arsonist is out there somewhere just beyond her sight.

Then one night, in a dream, she sees a house deep in the woods, bathed in the silvery blue light of moon on snow. And a little boy looking out his upstairs bedroom window. She knows in her dream that this is the arsonist as a child. She wants to take his cold hands in hers, so that he will never grow into the arsonist as a man. And if she can do that, she could protect her family from him and his tormented future.

My beloved uncle has died and soon my father is dying as well, identical to the end. Now I’m writing furiously about the days and months of losing them, and racing against all sorts of things. The memoir is both harder and easier than the fiction I was trying to write about loss and the way we both embrace and run from it.

Safe as Houses is sitting in a drawer because by now, I know there is nowhere safe.

Then my mother dies.

Incantation

But I can wait no more. I go back to the fiction. I write and write until it becomes Incantation, where the threat from without becomes the threat from within, when Jay, my protagonist’s husband, is diagnosed with cancer.

I don’t know why it’s taking this turn, except that it’s the turn my life is taking. My husband also has cancer. They say it’s treatable, even curable. I’m terrified to keep on writing, terrified to stop. The husband in the novel cannot die because my own husband can’t either. So I’ve written hope into an ending which I can control. My heart, my life, my children deserve a happy ending.

I write an ending that is an incantation—words spoken against unspeakable things.

My memoir is going to be published! Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye will be in the world.

While I am giving it a final proofread, my husband dies.

My own true love has died. He promised he would never leave me. And yet he does. My novel goes into the proverbial bottom drawer, possibly forever. I can barely finish proofing my memoir. I write a postscript which is a love letter to him whom I have loved my whole life.

I Will Leave You Never

I write other things, while the most urgent work I have ever done, lies deep in the bottom drawer, waiting for courage I do not have.

Then one day I write this in a notebook: “You can learn to love anything, even terrible things, if you can learn what they are teaching you.”

I try to believe it.

Finally, I take Incantation out of the drawer and lay it across my desk. The pages don’t burn my fingers like I’d thought. There is another, deeper lesson waiting for me, if I can only find it.

I re-title it I Will Leave You Never and re-write it right up to the last chapter. I have written what I didn’t think I could ever write, but it has cost me everything. My writer self is gone for good.

I’m self-dramatizing, of course. Because after some time has passed, and I’ve given myself a good shake, I ask: Who stops just before the end?

But I still don’t know whether Jay lives or dies, or whether the man at the bottom of the hill is really the arsonist or just a strange and troubled man.

And then I do.

The truth of it comes gradually and then the sum of it all at once. The most terrible things are the ones you learn the most from. When death has lain like a stone upon your heart and turned your breath so ragged you feel you might die from want of it, you manage a deep intake of breath that comes so smooth and silvery, you know you will live.

Can you know the depth of love, the very deepest gift of love while you still have it? Maybe life is full of such ordinary light, you can only catch the depth of love out of the corner of your eye.

And then it happens. Saving Grace.

You didn’t earn it. But there it is. An ending so right, so perfect, so full of grief transformed into the purest moment of joy you can say in truth, “I will leave you never,” and in truth he can say it back to you.

And what did I learn?

How pure love becomes when it is distilled through such suffering and loss—a blue flame that flickers and pulses in the deepest heart. Turned to the light just so, the beauty and laughter of the telling transcend the darkness of the tale.

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Memory Care

20150517_105107 I’m here to visit one of my good friends who’s recently been checked into a Memory Care facility. Such a gentle phrase. Care for the Memory. So much kinder than dementia or Alzheimer’s. I’m in a sort of all-purpose room, a Great Room, as they say. About half of the folks in this room are in wheel chairs, the others collapsed into recliners, fast asleep. I count a dozen women, two men. One of them is my friend. “Is the orchestra still playing?” a woman asks me as I walk by. I look around. Of course there is no orchestra anywhere in sight.

“Oh, yes,” I tell her, taking her hand. “The orchestra is still playing. It will always be playing.” I want to run from that room. But I stand still and listen. And there it is. Faure’s “Requiem” inside my head. I see that the room is full of light. I sit down and know I can stay awhile.

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First Post, Seven Years Later

Ed in Sunlight-bw I have never written a blog before. I don’t even know if this is the right name for it. But I hope this is a beginning of something that will heal and bring joy and laughter but also a reverence for the places of sorrow.

I think it was Tolstoi that said, “There are places in the heart that would not exist but that sorrow made them so.” Tonight is the 7^th anniversary of the day my husband died. It seems like a lifetime ago. It seems like yesterday. I am sad all day. I once wrote: “If only I had known that . . . I would do everything I could to save him, knowing all along that he could not be saved, and that my heart would break beyond breaking, then break again. If only I’d seen the sun glinting off those sunslept waters as my love lets down the fishing lines, and off in the distance a salmon leaps—a silver flashing in the sky as if to split the heart of the sun—before it disappears into a soundless splash, in this all too brief and luminous season, to spawn and to die—oh, how I would have sung that song.”

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