Monthly Archives: December 2011

on reading your own writing

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Just before bed last night I was looking at what wordpress calls “the dashboard”–your basic blog control panel–when I saw that someone had arrived here yesterday by Google search. The dashboard shows daily “referrers”–links that bring people here–and which pages visitors read each day. For this blog, most people come from Facebook or an e-mail subscription. But for the first time, someone had come because they’d searched for me. Query: “mandy len” Vancouver.

When your online presence is as small and new as mine is, having someone intentionally seek you out sends an electric signal straight to your ego. And having someone stick around and read every post? It’s totally gratifying. Because what writer doesn’t want to be read?

But then it dawned on me that whoever searched for me wasn’t looking for the blog itself. If they know my name and know about this blog, they would’ve just typed in the web address. Or they would’ve searched for “mandy len” “love stories”, not “mandy len” Vancouver. So it was probably someone who had my e-mail address and guessed that Len was my last name, someone who doesn’t really know me. And since I’ve only given my e-mail address to one person in the past few weeks, I think I know who Googled. This realization sent another, more complex signal to my ego which can be translated as a series of questions: What would someone who doesn’t really know me think of me based on what I’ve written here? And would someone who stumbled across this blog want to read the book I’m trying to write? Would I want to read the book I’m writing?

I looked back over what I’ve written and an uncomfortable thought came to me: this blog would probably not motivate me to read my own book. I even suspected that I might sometimes be annoyed by its writer. When she is rushed, she lapses into what Orwell would call “ready-made phrases,” as if she cannot be bothered “to hunt about” for the best combination of words. She is careless and imprecise in a way I often caution my own students against. On a bad day, she and her rhetorical questions might easily be written off as a member of the “Carrie Bradshaw” genre.

I originally pitched the idea of a blog to myself as a workspace, a place to play with ideas, as something that would necessarily be rough and unpolished. I was okay with that. But sometimes reading your own writing is like listening to your voice on the answering machine. Its cadences are familiar, but the tone is warped. You hear as with someone else’s ears, and you become a stranger to yourself. When I was writing with no audience other than my writer’s group, I could be sloppy. I could let things simmer. Or I could polish feverishly. My writers group expected things to be messy, and all anyone else would ever see would be the clean, shining gem that might appear one day in print.

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another kind of love story: sex and writing

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When I was twenty-two I attended a writing workshop with Percival Everett, who asked us to write a sex scene. It would take longer than we thought, he warned, so we were all to head back to our rooms and get started. The next day in workshop we would read them aloud.

I spent that entire afternoon holed up in a white-tiled, airconditioned dorm room in the flattest part of Texas, staring blankly at my computer and willing my fingers to type something. Every sentence I found myself fighting off weird analogies and echoes of bodice-ripping romance novels.

Everett bellowed his deep, echo-y laugh whenever someone’s writing amused him, and I made it my goal to make him laugh. If I could make him laugh, I reasoned, the class might not notice how my face had turned beet red because I was reading a sex scene. That I wrote. Which meant I knew something about sex (which was better, I guessed, than knowing nothing). But I was twenty-two and from a rigorously-puritanical part of the world, where people didn’t talk about sex in private much less in public. I was also the youngest, whitest, most apparently-vanilla person in an otherwise diverse group. If I’d been able to hide how much I felt out of my league before the assignment, I was sure it’d become apparent quite quickly after.

Eventually I realized my problem: I was trying to write a love scene, not a sex scene. Once I took love out of the equation, writing about sex became a lot more do-able, and even fun.

I am thinking about this now because I spent the weekend trying to write a description of a man’s body. Not a sex scene, but a kind of inventory of another person. I wanted to articulate the physical-ness of him, the topography of his skin, the way you can love someone simply for how they exist in space. But it was a disaster. Saccharine and flowery and utterly un-subtle.

I’m a firm believer in attempting to eff the ineffable. After all, that’s why we created metaphor. But some things, like sex and love and the body, will always be kind of elusive. My friend Lee posted this video on facebook. I haven’t seen the entire movie, but I was charmed by this clip–a fairly SFW sex scene–and inspired to keep eff-ing: