My story is about a trip to Guinea, West Africa that I went on five years ago. Brad said the second biggest problem (after the fact I was just summarizing) was the story took place entirely in Guinea. I hoped I could get away with giving my life at home minimum exposure and that the summary of events I turned in would inherently have meaning to the reader. The notes on the first draft said that much more of the story needed to take place before leaving and afterward. The criticism/suggestion sounded so straightforward. Actually delving into my own mind to relive moments I was trying to avoid made me realize “straightforward” and “easy” could be mutually exclusive. I spent hours stuck in 2006, the year my story starts in, trying to find what would really matter to the story and to the reader. What I wrote was not acceptable to me as an actual draft.

Brad said during a critique he was giving of another Invictus writer that the parts of our stories that mattered most were the moments we want to skip over. Brad has said this countless times. This time I didn’t merely nod and say “OK” as I had each time before. I thought about the moment I had chosen for my story’s first scene. After walking through the scene in my head,  I realized the moment didn’t show why the trip to Guinea was important for me. I knew, yet I needed to find the moment that encapsulated the “why”. I could find that moment if I examined what I felt before leaving on the trip in 2006.

I didn’t want to squander the chance to leave the U.S. for the first time in my life. After thinking about wasting time and trying to avoid regret, a conversation my father and I had years ago drifted into my mind.

I left Brad’s house and went straight to my apartment. Once inside, I sent my father an email. My entire story would need to be re-rewritten to accommodate this uncomfortable scene; writing this scene would be difficult even after knowing what I was to write about and if I felt apprehensive about including it, I would surely need to consult my father. Even after working up the courage to ask about it, I started with asking a tangential question.

“Hi Dad,” I wrote. “How old is our house? I just need to know a rough estimate.”

“You know I was just about to send you an e-mail,” he wrote back, minutes later. “I looked and I have 524 e-mails and then your’s popped up.”

I smiled, since my birthday is May 24 (5/24) and because the number meant my father still received a lot of spam. I sent another message.

“Is it all right if I write about conversations we’ve had?” I said. Once he asked what conversation I was talking about, then I would tel him, I thought to myself. I wasn’t looking forward to opening up old wounds.

“Yes.”

The message came though right after my previous response. Whatever I wanted to write about was acceptable in my father’s eyes.  My gratefulness was immeasurable and I was overwhelmed to the point I began to tear up. Just knowing (or being reminded) that my father was willing to help me without hesitation meant a lot to me. I tend to suppress my emotions since I become overwhelmed by them, like a Vulcan from “Star Trek”, so this moment made me cry.

My tears were a baptism on the keys; my story began anew. The story is no longer meant to be about the events that transpired in Guinea, nor is it about how different the West African country is from my home. The story’s about the space between the two, be it spatial, temporal or otherwise, and how I attempt to cope with that newly formed space.

When I sent the story to Brad, it was nowhere near where it needs to be and it still isn’t. I still don’t know whether my story will go into the Invictus II book. The story not making it in would be unfortunate, yet a process has taken place which I now realize truly matters above all else. The process is what always mattered: the space between A&B, the first draft and the last, between Guinea and home. If nothing else, the memories and emotions which long sat dormant (but also preserved) in my mind have been given context through being written about. What leaving, going on the trip and coming back meant is clearer to me now. From this modicum of realization, I can better understand why I and anyone else do what we do. Learning this took me five years and there’s still quite a bit I’m unclear about (I still can’t know whether what I took from all this is right).

Figuring the trip out only took  five years. Maybe I’ll truly figure out what this project means five years down the line too.

But then I remembered the promise I made to myself during a trip to the Boundary Waters a couple months earlier. It had to do with the way that I had come to see the world after being trained to be a warrior. When you get out of the military, the world you come back to expects you to flip a switch and go back to the way things were. But any combat veteran will tell you it just doesn’t work that way. In the military I fit in and looked, talked, and moved like everyone else. When I got out, though, I was all alone and didn’t fit in anywhere.

I became the quiet kid in the back of the college classroom. The closer I got to graduating, however, the more I realized that my self-imposed isolation was doing me harm. In almost four years of school, I’d made no friends. Professors tried to reach out to me but I had mostly shunned their attention. But in the summer of 2010, in a remote place called the Boundary Waters, I made a promise to myself that I’d come back and start saying yes when people invited me to participate. I was finally going to see what it was like to be part of the group. To Brad’s invitation that August, with hesitation, I replied, “Yes.”

Over the next year, the original Invictus Writers met and leaned on each other for support while exposing things about themselves that they had never told anyone. It was an amazing transformative process for everyone that participated and I’m proud to say that we are all still friends. Working with that group made me realize what I had missed during the years I’d spent seeing my new world through the eyes of a ex-soldier that didn’t want to try to fit in. In the fall semester of 2011, when Brad and I launched Invictus Volume II, that transformative process is what I wished for the new crop of kids. I wanted them to understand the importance of working in a group–especially as writers–because of what it had done for me.

In December 2011, about six months after we launched the writing project a second time with a new group of kids, I graduated and left the confines of Ball State to move home and save money while I waited to hear from some prestigious graduate schools I had applied to for fiction writing. In the meantime, I drove across the country and got married and returned to anxiously wait to hear something back from the four programs I had mailed applications to. During my travels I watched the Invictus Volume II kids come together through social media. They were sending each other messages, encouraging each other to write and I could tell that the group was coming to life. They were making appointments to write together and finally getting what the Invictus Writers project has always been about.

Things for me, however, were not going so well. Soon after I returned home from my elopement/honeymoon, I got my first rejection letter. Then the second one came and I started wondering what I was going to do if I didn’t get into any writing programs. Then the third rejection letter came and, in addition to the mounting disappointment, I still had a story that I owed the Invictus Volume II writers. When we launched Invictus II, I had decided to write about my trip to the Boundary Waters, but as the deadline  drew closer and the rejection letters piled up, I had trouble starting it. I sat down many times and just couldn’t get the words to flow. And then, on March 25, I received the fourth and final rejection letter and didn’t feel like writing at all.

For the next week, I seriously considered wishing the people I’d befriended this time around good luck and dropping out of the project altogether. They had found that they could rely on each other for support and didn’t need me any longer. They may never know how close I was to walking away from the project.

Not long after I convinced myself that I wasn’t going to be able to complete my story, I got an email from Brad inviting everyone to the last writers meeting for the Volume II kids before they go into production and the school year comes to a close. I prepared myself to let my longtime mentor and friend down. In the same day I got an email from Ambria asking me to look over her story again. Curious, I opened it and saw how much work she had put in since the last draft I had helped her with, and all at once I realized what my Boundary Waters story was all about. It’s about trudging through the muck, bug bites, and sore muscles to get to the other side. It’s about enduring pain to reach something truly beautiful rewarded to those with the gumption to reach the other side. I realized that if I quit, I’d be forgetting everything that place had taught me. So, after reading and editing Ambria’s piece, I finally sat down and began writing my own story. I’m behind the others in the group, but I’m fighting through the pain to find something beautiful.

I left after work last night in Lafayette, Indiana, and drove home to Monticello, and then to Muncie so I could attend the last Invictus Writers meeting for the Volume II kids. Then, after our two hour meeting I turned around and drove my wife back to Monticello so she could be at work before 5 p.m. That’s 242 miles in less than 24 hours just so I could talk about writing with other writer nerds, but it was a meeting I needed to attend. Once again, the power of the group has surprised me.

Yes, we’re finally doing what Brad has asked us all along to do. Write together. As we sat up on the second floor of the journalism building at Ball State University we dove into each story. When passing them around an excitement began to grow in the room after hours of editing together.

Our project began to mean something.

We were able to understand the beginning stages of our first drafts.  Of course, we know by the time Brad goes through them, they all will look completely differently.

This past December I met with Brad to talk about what I would be writing about. I sat in his office, complaining to him that I wasn’t a writer. My mind was wired as a designer and I didn’t understand the process of writing. In my meeting with him, I was hoping I could walk out with a perfect outline for my story.  I wanted him to give me a solution.  I was wrong; as I talked with him I realized that I was the only one that could tell my story.

Three months later, I sat alone in the room that had been full of the other Invictus writers editing. I read through my first draft one more time before I hit the send button to Brad. I was emotionally exhausted by the time I finished as I relived the scenes in my story. I had just spent months trying to make my words mean something.

The words aren’t there yet. I’m slowly learning that this—the drafts, the writing groups and frustration is all part of the writing process.

Katelin

This is The Mayborn Literary Non-fiction Conference, which has a student essay competition.

If you enter and win, we will find a way to get into the conference, there and back again, and all that jazz.

Maybe that why this project is daunting to me. This is the first time I have tried writing about me in a form that I know someone else will actually read. I am attempting to be honest and say “this is what I have struggled with” “This is what happened to me.”

I worry that no matter how much I edit my story it will not say exactly what I want it to say. I worry that I might make others look bad in my story, so I cannot put everything that actually happened in it.

The funny thing about stories is, they don’t end on the last page any more than they began on the first. Its true, I was worried about the shape of stories to come. Including, what will happen after I publish this book? What will people think? Will it seem as if I am just trying to complain about what others have done? Will it make me look mean, or weak, or whiny?

The funny thing about writing a story about your life is that it makes you think about the type of story you are telling the world. The best stories are within with our lives, not our pins. And they are not always neat and pretty.

I hope that, somehow, I will find the words to tell the story that needs to be told.

Of course, none of us have any real wisdom to pass along because the formula for writing is pretty simple. Sit down; Write more.

Still, we can’t help ourselves. We stretch those two sentences and four words into long essays. My favorite, On Writing, was written by a very mediocre write but an amazing storyteller: Stephen King. I think of him oftentimes while I’m doling out my thoughts to young, eager minds who think I can help them. He is a mid-level writer who tapped into the horror zeitgeist and has become part of our cultural landscape.

He is a happy accident, one who capitalized on The Moment because he followed those two simple sentences.

***

This weekend, the Invictus Vol. 2 writers gathered along Muncie’s old train tracks for our group photograph. Afterwards, we met at Starbucks to discuss the final 5 weeks of the project.

These kids have been far more timid than my first group, far less willing to take ownership of their project. They still look towards me for answers. They wait, they sit quietly, and they are still.

I spent two hours discussing their writing with them, helping them think about the problems that writers have and pointing them towards hallways that will lead them out of the darkness.

Afterwards, they filed out. Politely.

As I reached my car, a woman from inside the shop came running out.

“Hey, are you a professor,” she hollered.

“Yes.”

“You teach journalism?”

“I teach writing and storytelling. But I’m a journalism professor.”

“There’s a class on Harry Potter at Miami University, and I’d really — it would be great if you and the professor there could debate about writing. I think that would be great.”

We proceeded to talk for another 30 minutes about my analysis of writing, the application of that framework on Harry Potter, and the reason why people who want to write should never read that book for enjoyment because it illustrates too many things wrong with writing. (Although, I must say, it’s great storytelling.)

My writers were all driving home as this happened.

***

I’m weeks behind on nearly every writing project I have, and there are more looming in the future. There is never enough time. On top of that, I haven’t run in a week, which means my heart is sore and achy in the way that my doctor said it will be in the moments before I die.

This is more comforting than it sounds. I have a built in reminder that life is short, one that I really must remember when others tell me how busy they are or how I don’t understand how much pressure they face.

Everyone’s pressure is important because it is their own. And not everyone has a timer to help remind them of what is important.

I am content to know that even if I finish just a small portion of the projects I’m working on, I’ll be okay with it.

***

Sit down; Write more.

I keep telling myself to do that. Every time I do, I open up my working folders and see tens of thousands of words that need to be edited, honed, crafted, carved, and assembled.

They are not my words. They are the words of my writers. The ones who won’t sit down to write. The ones who sit quietly. The ones who are polite as they leave.The ones who do not burst forth from coffee shops, chasing down strangers who have said things that stirred emotions within them to the point where they can no longer stay keep still.

These Invictus words are not yet stories because my writers haven’t found their voices yet. They are still stumbling around in the dark. They haven’t found the beast within them that compels them to Sit Down; Write More.

They still worry about the shape of stories to come and frameworks of tales not yet told. They haven’t yet grasped how to rip their guts apart and lay them on the page. They worry too much about what the world thinks, and too little about what they want to say.

They have not yet reached the point where the idea of failure is scarier than the idea of never trying.

When they do, they will sit down and they will write more.

This is the story of writers.

]]> http://www.theinvictuswriters.com/2012/03/20/on-writing/feed/ 1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ http://www.theinvictuswriters.com/2012/03/01/second-thoughts/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=second-thoughts http://www.theinvictuswriters.com/2012/03/01/second-thoughts/#comments Thu, 01 Mar 2012 05:28:29 +0000 Valerie http://www.theinvictuswriters.com/?p=590 I take back pretty much 100% of what I wrote in my last blog post, all that soapbox nonsense about what makes a writer. I emailed Brad the first draft of my story tonight. Despite what friends and family and faithful blog readers have told me over the years, I am not a writer. I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. And that is a feeling that I am not used to.

I want to email Brad right now and tell him that actually, I was crazy after all, and there is no way that I am going to be able to be part of the Invictus project. I don’t know how to write and with everything else on my plate right now, the last thing I can focus on is this silly essay.

Is it though? I’m finding that maybe that isn’t the truth. Maybe the thing I care most about is this project. This project that isn’t for a grade and bears no real weight since I’m getting a design degree, not a writing degree. I am looking at design jobs, not writing jobs. This project is outside everything else for me. And that is exactly why it matters so much. And that is exactly why it’s so hard.

I am a control freak. I am a perfectionist. I don’t really take criticism, even when it is absolutely 100% constructive, very easily. It’s something I keep telling myself I should work on but never get around to actually doing. I push myself too hard a lot of the time. I have been taught my whole life that there is failure and there is success and despite all those cliche quotes taped to the walls of my classrooms in elementary school, failure is not a step to success. They are distinctly separate and failure is not a category that I ever want to find myself in.

Except that here I am. My story is weak, disjointed, and not at all what I want it to be. Brad is going to say that I have to get through the first several shitty drafts before I find the story. Dave is going to remind me about the girl from round 1 of Invictus who went through like 87 edits before her essay was done. But I am different. I’m Valerie. I do it all. I want mine to be perfect on the first go-around.

And it’s not, so naturally I want to quit.

Brad, however, just informed me that he is the only person who can kick me out of the project at this point and something tells me he is not letting me off the hook that easily. Which, in a weird way, I’m grateful for. If it were up to me, I’d walk away. I’d keep writing my little bits and pieces on my blog and listening to my friends tell me I’m a “brilliant” writer and believing their lies. They don’t know they’re lying, of course. But that’s the difference between best friends and a writing group. I need both.

I wouldn’t think twice about abandoning the Invictus project, brushing it aside as a distraction from other things I should really be focusing my time on. In short, I would take the easy way out.

But I can’t, so here we are. It’s hard to be vulnerable. I am completely intimidated by this whole thing and despite the fact that I’ve learned more from Brad, both inside the classroom and out, than any other professor I’ve had, I’m kind of terrified of the things he’ll say about my writing.

I want to quit. I want to lie and say that I don’t care about this project, delete my word docs and not look back. Save the writing for the writers.

In reality, it’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I care too much. So I’m not quitting. And maybe eventually, someday, after a LOT of help, I might consider myself a writer. But definitely not yet. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe I don’t have to be everything.

What a concept.

I remember the day I watched it for two reasons:

• Wallace was my contemporary writing hero. A man who wrote words in a way that spoke to me. At the time of his death, I was 4 months and 1 day sober, barely hanging on to sanity; and
• I became unhinged that day. Months later, several students in my class told me they were concerned that I was going to kill myself just as Wallace had done to himself on that fall day.

What sent me racing towards my demons that day wasn’t the interview. I was coming unglued at the seams quite fine by myself. But what has stayed with me 3 1/2 years later was something he said during that interview.

You see, Wallace had recently started teaching college, and like so many writers he wanted to get in the classroom because of the Romantic notion of working with students. We all dream of a class that reads beautiful words, that digs into texts so that they can say insightful things in class, and that produces words in a meaningful way.

This, he was finding out, is not what a college writer looks like.

Wallace said his teaching life was broken into two very distinct phases:

1. The first two years when he was confronted with the very specific task of breaking down his writing process so that he could teach. The students, after all, kept pestering him for answers to their questions. They are insecure; they are painful shy; they are functionally lazy; they are afraid to make mistakes; and they are bristling with this belief that success comes from thinking a lot and then doing something once.
2. The third year when he realized that he’d learned everything he could from teaching — he understood his process better — but the new crop of students still didn’t understand why you should use dependent phrases to start some sentences and not others. (The answer: pacing.)

By year three, he realized if he stayed in teaching much longer he would never write again and he would mostly likely commit suicide. (It’s a chilling interview to watch the day of the news about his suicide even though he left the vocation of teaching, and returned to writing full time.)

For the record, this is my second university teaching gig. Each lasted three years.

I say this as I sit at my desk, the familiar brown Target station where I do my work each night before I head to bed. For all intents and purposes, it’s not very much unlike other nights that I sit here during the school year. With one exception. It’s February 29, and four students owe me work for The Invictus Writers, writing I have not seen.

Earlier tonight, I sent my third angry email about work that hasn’t been done on the project unrelated to this evening’s deadline, a fact that angered me more than the already angry email said.

I am, as you might imagine, not happy at this moment with my life’s decision to teach. I’m even less happy that this project, which doesn’t count at all towards my professional development at the University, is once again sucking my writing time away.

As I wrote tonight’s email, Wallace’s words rang in my head: I’ve already learned everything I need to know about my process at this job, and the only thing I will do now is prepare for the angry deadline emails that I will send each semester to a new crop of students who do not know any better than the last crop.

If it’s Spring Break, it must be time to yell.

The rational human being would quite obviously leave this job once the reality of the semester waves became clear. They would return to the world outside these Towers, and get back to the work at hand.

And yet…here I am, sitting at the Target desk, pouring over thousands of student words written by students who fight me every step of the way so that they can make the most predictable errors while sending me over the edge with rage…just like I’ve done for the last six years.

Of the two groups — them or me — only my actions meet the definition of crazy.

Meanwhile, I have three books in disarray. I haven’t touched them in months. I have two chapters in a book that are due this weekend. I have a pile of research on reading that hasn’t been sorted. My life — my work — is a series of never-ending piles that don’t get done so that I can send emails that scare young writers into action while my time grows ever closer to being up.

This is what the young don’t understand. They do not quite understand the arrow of time. They can’t help themselves in this matter any more than I could help myself when I was there age.

So my books — my writing — sits untouched, unfinished, and unstarted. Instead, i write angry emails that years later the students convince themselves I enjoy sending. (My solace is that they will someday have children themselves, and they will see how much fun it is to put life on hold to correct someone who is fighting with you.)

I am not okay with this life pattern, but I am not unsettled. I am not content that I never get to write anymore, but neither am I restless. This is just the nature of the Writer…Teacher.

While I am not learning anything more about my process (and I wonder how much longer I will be able to call it forth), where Wallace and I diverge is this: The growth I see after the waiting, and the anger, and the yelling still off-sets the piles that never get touched.

However, if you were to tell anyone other than another writer that you have successfully embarked on this endeavor, the reaction you would received would most likely not equal the amount of work you put in. They can never understand the grueling process it takes to put your thoughts on paper. They can never understand the hours you’ll spend on one paragraph and how often hundreds of words are disposable, and can easily be discarded and forgotten for another group.

While a non-writer will never be able to understand the process or the struggle, they can recognize effort when they see it. Sometimes your own writing can get you something more than a pat on the back or an impressed audience.

Sometimes it can get you a foot in the door for a job and sometimes it can get you something even better. Sometimes it can even get you a start on a career.

Six months ago I was a student fresh out of college, gazing worryingly at the onslaught of student loans that I would have to pay in only a few months time. There were other plans that I wanted to accomplish as well, dreams and aspirations of working overseas and making a name for myself as a young writer with an adventuring spirit and a need to find all the stories hidden away from the world.

As much as dreaming is a pleasant thought and the goal of traveling an exciting possibility, there was no getting around the fact that in order to start the ball rolling on these goals, I would need a little cash to fund my way there. Dreams and happy thoughts only go so far. Sooner or later the cold hard reality of income finds everyone.

I began by applying to every part time job in my hometown. The hours were not a factor nor was the detail of each job. If it payed at least minimum and hired for at least part time, I was a willing candidate waiting to happen.

After few weeks of dead ends, an answer came though in the form of Target and their need for backroom workers for the holiday season. When the day came to go for the interview, the room I sat in was filled with other young adults who had the same ideas and need for cash as I did. I remember being a little nervous at the time. For I knew that there were only a few positions open for employment, seven at most. There were over twenty people in the room. It would only be a few hours and phone call that would end up ruining a lot of people’s day. I could not afford for that to happen. If I delayed any longer, I would never get out of here.

When it came my turn to interview I was asked a checklist series of questions regarding my future goals with the company, my strong traits, how well I work with others and how many days I could work. The final question to come up was an expected one, but one that I was surprised that I had a solid answer to.

“So Kyle, what have you done in the past that you consider noteworthy or advantageous to a job?” asked the interviewer in a voice as monotone and sterile as the bright white room I sat in.

“Well, I was the leader of a student organization, I have some experience writing online and oh, I helped to co author a book.”

The interviewer let out a little snort. I could tell that she was more than a little doubtful, but wanted to see how I could recover from this bold statement.

“That’s funny Mr. Hovanec, but there’s not need to joke or lie about this,” she said.

“I’m not,” I said as I reached down to grab a stack of papers next to me. “I actually have it right here.”

I pulled out the first Invictus volume from underneath the papers and handed it to her.

“Mine is the last story,” I told her as I flipped open the book and handed her the paperback version of humble pie.

She was silent as she quickly skimmed and flipped through the pages. After finishing her skimming, she opened the book and skimmed from the beginning. Her look of smugness had disappeared.

She stood up without saying a word. As she walked towards the door she turned around and told me to “wait a minute”.

A few minutes later, a new woman entered the room, with a grin as wide as a chesire’s as she sat down with a stack of papers and folders with the Target logo.

On the top was a book that was titled ‘Job Orientation’.

“Mr. Hovanec,” she said as she stood up and shook my hand. ‘Welcome to the Target family.”

Brad King once told me that having a resume of academic achievement is a good place to start. Extracurricular activities were also a decent thing to have on a resume, but the amount of people you would impress with a creation of your own would be worth more than any 4.0 GPA.

If you still don’t believe me, if you still seem doubtful that a group of students writing about life changing events couldn’t get you anywhere in life, it should be worth nothing that this blog post I am writing is on board a Boeing 777 en route to South Korea. I am now an official employee of EPIK, a program designed to teach English to students in Korean speaking schools. A program that has thousands of applicants apply every month, but only hire around a thousand every year. A program that when I was interviewed, I mentioned the Invictus Project and linked the recruiter to the website.

Go and build. Go and write. Make something cool. Make something unique. Even if its rough around the edges it is something you created. It shows you’re creative. It shows you can think outside the box and it shows that you’re disciplined.

Who knows what it might lead to. A friendly acknowledgment. A part time job. A new career path on the other side of the world.

Go. Build. Conquer.

I was frustrated with myself for spending so much time and investing so much in the draft that I threw out. My writing was stubborn. I was forcing the words and trying to tie things together without any real focus. Important scenes were blurry, and the context was clouded with insignificant details. In the morning I took one last look at the document and then trashed the entire thing.

Once the draft was deleted I felt a surge of relief. I was now free to start again, but with the knowledge of my mistakes. Sentences came to me faster. I reorganized the scenes of my story into a more logical pattern. In twelve hours I was halfway through the newest version of my Invictus essay.

This is my writing process, something like slash and burn. By destroying my original project I made room for the new story, and it sprang out of me with more clarity and sincerity. It’s important to know when you’ve failed, and even more important to receive that failure as a step towards success. I had failed again and I have picked myself up to start over.