How I Write
By: Felicia C. Sullivan
Tags: Creativity, Storytelling, Books, Writing, Writing Tips

It always starts with a line. The line is my way in, a port of call and entry. I think of the line as a house boarded up and dead-bolted shut. Outside, a pack of hungry thieves hovers. They survey the surroundings, search the terrain, try the windows and doors until they find an opening. A frame of glass, a means to break in. The line could exist anywhere in the story — it doesn’t matter where it falls, only its existence matters. If anything, I prefer to start in the middle because then I’m not daunted by the space I need to fill below.

A line buys me time until I figure out the rest. One line builds upon another until the story takes shape and form. The ending? Your guess is as good as mine. I know the ending when it reaches its conclusion. I’ve no grand plan, no Nabokovian notecards. I only have that hot first line. I’m what Zadie Smith would call a “Micro Manager,”

“Micro Managers like me build a house floor by floor, discreetly and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There’s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all. Because Micro Managers have no grand plan, their novels exist only in their present moment, in a sensibility, in the novel’s tonal frequency line by line.”

Make no mistake, I don’t craft one perfect line to the next. I’m meticulous about the arrangement of sentences, not their movement. After that first line, I need a torrent, velocity. This fucker’s got to move fast to hold my attention. Let me explain.

I played clarinet for thirteen years. I was good at it but never great because I’d rather write to music than play it. But I learned a great deal about writing in the playing.

For example, I loved a run. Playing a long stretch of notes without breathing, ascending or descending chromatically. Especially on the upper register. The elegant slur of your fingers tapping the keys, the breathless nature of it, and the feeling of being carried by the music were exhilarating. Back then, I used to hold my breath underwater so I could take larger gulps of the music. I could swallow half of a page of sheet music before I keeled over.

That’s how I preferred to play — squeezing in every note I could until I could no longer breathe.

It took me years to appreciate tonguing the reed and its abrupt staccato, which felt halting and violent. I hated articulating notes, I wanted to be the drunk at the bar slurring them. Until I realized you needed the staccato to appreciate the run. It was a break in the music, a moment where the player (and the audience) could collect itself and rest. The beauty is in the balance of the two and knowing when to use which.

I think about that in my writing, how the first line has to come out swinging. How it needs enough momentum to carry a paragraph and then I stop. There’s my beat, my rest. I think about that as I’m editing the paragraph. Creating a series of manic lines juxtaposed with a three-word, monosyllabic sentence. Even within the run, I need the illusion of a break. I’m no Faulkner, I don’t engage in a rap battle with the semi-colon, crafting run-on sentences that find their inevitable conclusion at the bottom of the page (bless that man, but it ain’t me). Or two.

After the first paragraph, I read it aloud. I’m 44 and I’ve been writing since I was six, so you do the math. Why I mention this is that I’m practiced. Immediately, I’ll know if I’ve missed the mark on cadence and rhythm. I’ll know which word is the culprit, which “bumped” me (a workshop term I abhor, but it works). Meaning, if the word has too many or too few syllables. Whether the word doesn’t do the job another word can.

I’m meticulous about word choice, as I believe the words you choose and the arrangement in the sentence have to work on at least two levels — one, a pragmatic explanation of what’s going on, and two, what’s really going on under the sheets.

Unless you’re Ben Marcus or that experimental crowd where the art is in the line and the story doesn’t have to be practical (or make sense) to the reader. For that crew, the story is subservient (or at times irrelevant) to the music of the line. I fall somewhere in the middle. I like to fuck with words and their arrangement but I don’t want you wading in the dark without a map, compass, or at the very least, a flashlight.

When I examine the paragraph, I’m a pathologist. I like to look at it on a macro level — did this graph convey what I wanted it to? Does it leave an opening for what comes next? Does the arrangement of the sentences make sense? Do they have a logical order to them? Can the reader move relatively swiftly through them?

Then, I excavate at the line level as mentioned above, but I also consider how I’m using words to evoke an image or mood. I pick my battles with this because I can often veer in the territory where I get too imaginative and fussy at the line level and that just fucks up the story. Instead, I ask myself whether I’ve challenged the words I’m using and how I’m using them.

While I think it’s important to learn all these arbitrary rules, the mark of a writer is how they break them. I’ll transform nouns into verbs. I’ll turn an image or an allusion on its head. For example, I wrote in a story (which I can’t remember), “Watch as I open the door to my heart and all the mothballs flutter out.” In that line, I liken my heart to a locked chest. One that hasn’t been opened in a while, and when it does there’s this massive exhalation of the old and a welcoming of the new.

Then, I look at the adjacent lines. Do I have too many long sentences without a break? Depending on the story, I’ll think about how I can merge exterior interruptions with the interior nature of the narrative.

A perfect example of this is in Delillo’s White Noise, a prescient novel, ironically enough, about a toxic America. Threatened by some airborne event, sickened by consumerism, capitalism, and technology. I remember reading that book when I was 24 and nearly passing out because this fucker had such a way with a paragraph. Delillo could encompass an entire world in and out of your living room in two adjacent sentences.

In the novel, you have a series of white noise interruptions in the story in the form of radio & television announcements, background and ambient sounds, sirens, the hum of personal computers, and microwaves.

All of this to say I often “interrupt” or inject paragraphs with outside information whether it’s a song that relates and amplifies the sentence that preceded it, or a bit of dialogue. I love this because it opens up the story. Makes it larger than what it is on the page. I liken it to surgery where our skin is the shield for a symbiotic network of organs, bone, marrow, blood, etc., it’s a story contained. Neat and functional. Then, you cut the body open and you introduce tools and fingers and the world that exists outside of your body.

It’s an invitation for the exterior to play nice with the interior. To internalize the beauty (or horrors) of the outside world.

I don’t write the kind of stories you settle into, rather you’re always on guard, waiting for the attack. Many people don’t like this. I don’t care. I’m not writing for everyone.

Everyone will tell you that if you want to get better at writing, you have to read. Nothing new to see here, folks, but I read with a scalpel. I will literally cut pages out of a book (not so much anymore — but this was big for me in the 1980s and 90s) or copy sentences from a book to a new sheet of paper and analyze them for days. Why did I like this particular sentence, paragraph, or scene? I’ll zoom and in out until I figure out what the author’s done and how I can make it my own. One of my literary heroes, Jenny Offill, notes in a recent interview,

“But if you’re someone who is trying to move to a more pared-down language, or language that is trying to do things at a couple of different levels at the same time, the workshop environment can be difficult. So I try to teach my students to read at the line level, because I think that’s what’s helpful: to start thinking about what they’re writing line by line, as well as the bigger picture. I’m also always trying to make them read things in different genres: poetry or essays or non-fiction or primary sources from science or anthropology. I want them to get a sense of the strangeness of language. It reminds you that there are all these different ways in which you can create density and give a vital feeling to the words on the page.”

On the line and paragraph level, I look to writers like Jenny Offill, Amy Hempel, Raymond Carver (and that whole Gordon Lish gang). I’ll look at poetry (poets.org is an excellent place to explore) to understand how to be economic with the words I use and how I use them. Poetry is tyrannical in this way and there’s much to be learned on a line level.

But then when the paragraph is over, I keep moving. I build the story paragraph by paragraph. I’ll step back and read each aloud as I build and then read 2–3 together to see if I’ve got the rhythm and pacing right. Is there a logical (at least to me) movement in the story. It doesn’t need to be chronological — for the life of me, I can barely write anything in chronological order because I view time as cyclical rather than linear, but I digress — it just needs to be progressive. Am I taking my reader through a journey or spinning them in circles?

Granted, I want to challenge my readers, but I’m not keen on torturing them. Notice how I said “my” readers because not everyone will come to my work, but for the people who do, I want to make sure their ride is fairly smooth.

While I know every story could feasibly go on forever, I know when to end it. It’s more of a feeling like I’m turning into a rest stop where it may not be completely finished, but it’s finished for right now until I give the page (or screen) some breathing room and I return fresh.

Most of the work I publish here is a first draft and normally takes about an hour or so to write, unless it’s for a publication for which I’ll go through a round or two of edits.

I’m not precious about my work or attach any emotion to it even though much of my work is emotive in nature. I’m a serial killer of the word and I consider editors a gift to the writer. Because once the high from the line is over and you’ve got a story, you have to slash and burn in service of the story.

Most recently, I gut-renovated a piece for Human Parts, and editors are crucial to ensuring your readers aren’t lost, bored, or wanting to murder you. They have the distance and discipline to point out your blind spots. But they don’t reconstruct how you write — instead, they take what you’ve given them and try to make it the best it could be.

My best editors have been guides. We talk about the arrangement of paragraphs and the flow of the narrative at the editorial stage. For a recent OneZero piece I published, the editor invited me to cut half a page from the beginning because it was taking me too long to get where I needed to go. And editors have been ardent negotiators on a line level and you have to pick your battles on what lines you fight for and which to let go in service of the story.

But whether you have an editor or are working on a piece on your own, distance and perspective are key. Once I’ve completed a draft (and my first drafts are normally second or third drafts because I labor and edit as I go), I take a few days off and then I’ll return to it, merciless, invigorated. I’m the kind of writer who loves editing more than the first go on the page because in the editing the story slowly reveals itself. You go deeper. You excise fat. You diagram sentences. You consult sources (inspirational or informative).

In my mind, a piece is never really finished. I’ve published two books traditionally and if I could rewrite them, believe me when I say I WOULD. But that’s the mark of growth. Of writing the first draft of garbage and transforming it into beauty or dive further into the grotesque. That’s the journey. That’s the mark of your progress. Having the ability to step back and learn from all that’s become before, how you’d approach an old story differently. How your ear is trained to know what sounds right or doesn’t — even if you can’t explain it.

Recently, I’ve started revising stories I wrote in my twenties. Most of them make me cringe, but it’s sort of like visiting an old friend who’s in dire need of a makeover. It’s the union between two selves to form a brilliant, beautiful whole.