ignorance & expertise
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about my impossible desire for just a lil treat, how when you don't have extra spending money and no foods are off-limits... and you have a toddler... and it's a pandemic... it's real hard to find a reward. It turns out I had one on my calendar for the day after I sent that newsletter, which was Sarah MacLean's How to Write a Romance Novel online seminar.
I don't have any plans to write a romance novel. I've never been good at fiction, even when that was what I wrote (college). I like to get my material from out in the world, and am pretty incapable of things like "plot" and "action." (I did, earlier this year, have designs on doing NaNoWriMo this month, thinking my big book edits would be done already. 30 days of novel sprinting, utter garbage just for me and just for fun. Alas!) But I still signed up for Sarah's talk, and it was probably even better without a month of novel-writing ahead of me. No goals! No usefulness! Just two hours of an incredibly smart person talking smartly about a thing I know and love. All this advice and no pressure on me to take it, so I could just appreciate the wisdom without worry. It was perfect.
There is so much that's ephemeral about writing, all these mysteries inside your silent head, so I really really love concrete discussions of craft. Sometimes it's finding an explanation, or metaphor, that explains the silent mysteries. Sometimes it's solving a problem. Sometimes it's learning what happens in someone else's silent head, whether it's similar to your mysteries or not, but how wonderful to not be alone with it, and to appreciate all the different ways a mind can work.
I'm still in the thick of book edits, but wisely (financially) or not (everything else) I'm ramping back up my freelancing. I'm editing and writing and trying to get some teaching work, and it's good and weird to have ten projects at once again instead of two, to be talking to so many people. The collision, in editing work, of my expertise and my ignorance—I know a lot about writing but start out knowing nothing about this person's project, their goals, their strengths or desires. It's a simultaneous position of competence and humility, which—I'm realizing now that I put it into words—I enjoy very much.
Last week the baby's bedtime routine fell apart, and I found myself, foolishly and desperately, trying to negotiate with a toddler. Now, some bedtimes are calm and some still feature screaming (just his), but I know my job and the screaming is much briefer and I don't get distressed. You never get to have figured out any of it for long.
This week I published an essay in Catapult's Don't Write Alone, about how acting and writing are taught so differently, and shouldn't be. “Acting isn’t 'stand there and produce feelings,' but writing isn’t 'sit there and produce words' either.” What If We Taught Writing the Way We Teach Acting? (I've had to keep reminding my brain that checking twitter for shares or responses is *not* a treat.)
Thank you for reading! Please pardon any typos or sentences that fade out half-way, they're what let me send this out free and weekly. If you enjoyed this newsletter and want to share it, or were forwarded this edition and want to subscribe, the link is tinyletter.com/jaimealyse. You can also follow me on twitter here, and when my book is done and ready to be preordered this is where I will tell you about that.