Author Steven Polansky Speaks at the Academy

I teach at an international academy in Northeast Wisconsin. Parents pop in often; we have moms who visit classes, dads who eat lunch with their daughters . . . imagine my surprise and delight learning that the attentive dad who joins his girl so very often in the cafeteria is Steven Polansky, author of Dating Miss Universe

and

The Bradbury Report

(Aw, man, trouble getting the cover to post . . . )

The first book is a collection of short stories that shows the failings of humanity with humor and grace. The second book is a novel that explores what it means to be human in 2071 when cloning is legal and "Copies" are used only for the aid of the "Original." Totally fascinating! And Steven totally needed to speak to our students! How is it possible we had not plundered all of his knowledge already? What riches to mine! :)

He graciously agreed to join us for an hour this week, kicking off our NaNo WriMo with an honest, in-depth discussion of the business of writing.

My hand flew as he spoke because quite literally every sentence he shared was either poignant or hilarious or ridiculously insightful or tremendously useful to us as writers. Ten pages of scrawl have been typed into four pages of notes. Here, I'd like to reproduce the gems I think will help us as we continue living our dreams as writers.

1. The world of publishing will be so changed in three years that in 2015, our students will know more about it than he. The institutions he knows--agents, editors, and printing companies--are being replaced, rendering all his years' experience in publishing obselete. (How fascinating and sobering is that?)

2. Consider the length of your novel. Length is gift we can offer our readers. He compared a small piece of writing to the passing glance of a beautiful face in mass-transit. One can fall in love in a moment like that, but the love doesn't linger. Contrast that passing glance with a deep, devoted marriage, and one will better comprehend the sense of knowing we experience reading a long novel. He said, leaving a world long lived in (he mentioned Harry Potter as a popular example), "The feeling is you are now transported back into your universe, and it is utterly transformed."

3. The life of a writer can be "the best of lives and the worst of lives." He confessed every morning starts the same. He faces his blank screen, and his inner critic tells him, 'Everything you've done before makes no difference. You have no idea how to do this next scene. You can't do it.' And it's awful. But then writes one sentence, and then two, then four, and he eventually forgets he can't do it

4. He gets his ideas for stories by keeping open. He watches and listens. He refuses to play the market research game, sniffing out what sells. Also, he refuses to keep a notebook to jot ideas into because 1) he'd never look at it, and 2) he'd forget what his notes meant if he did look at it. Instead, he just pays attention to those ideas that don't go away. If an idea stays in his head for three or four weeks, then he knows it's worth taking seriously. (Where do you get your ideas from?)

5. It takes him three years to write a novel. He wished those of us trying to do it in a month the best of luck. :) Rather than blasting through a zero draft as most of us have (or are), he methodically focuses on each chapter, perfecting it and then completely leaving it. He sites Dickens as a model for this style of writing: when a chapter of Dickens' Great Expectations was printed in the paper, thousands of readers made the events in that chapter indelible. Dickens couldn't go back and change things. Steven showed us some eighty pages of notes for one chapter of his current novel. (Again, how fascinating is this? I have six pages of notes! For the whole thing!)

6. He left us with two final thoughts:

If you truly want to be a writer, you should write. And there is no substitute for writing.

If you truly want to be a writer, you should read. And there is no substitue for reading.

My heartfelt thanks to Steven Polansky for sharing his wit and wisdom with us. I very much hope he will join us again soon!

So my friends, what do you think of his writing process? In the dawn of NaNos, is it worth reconsidering our methods?