Jane Jeong Trenka: Why She Writes

Over the past few years, since my husband and I began the process to adopt a baby from China, I have been reading about adoption.

One of the writers I discovered is Jane Jeong Trenka. She is a Korean American transracial adoptee, and her memoir is called The Language of Blood. While much of adoption literature has been dominated by the voices of adoptive parents and agencies, adoptees and birth parents are beginning to add their stories to the chorus. Often, these stories tell of pain, loss, and isolation. They are difficult to hear, and no doubt difficult to tell.

Trenka's essay, "Why Write," delves into her experiences of the shadow side of international adoption, and why she is compelled to narrate these experiences for readers.

People always ask me why I write. Here's why: I write because the story I have to tell about my life is not the same story that I have been told. I write because I want to create a small mark on the historical record. I write because the master narrative is a master. I write because I refuse to be deployed to support someone else's agenda. I write to find the truth. I write so you will believe me. I write to remember who I am. I write to remember who my mother was. If my childhood memory is a site of amnesia, then I will make my adult memory a site of resistance. I will remember, I will remember, I will remember. I write, I resist, and I refuse to be erased.

Even as Trenka brings me a challenging perspective about adoption that I struggle to integrate into my own understanding, I am inspired by her courage and tenacity, and the reminder that our words have great power.

Will You Quit?

Don't worry, I'm not quitting writing (although the dearth of posts here may have led you to think otherwise). No, I am merely up to my neck in paid work and haven't been able to spare a thought for recreational writing since early October.

But today I came across a few interesting posts about writers who quit, for one reason or another, and I figured I could take a moment to share them with you.

On Quitting Writing (A Discussion, Not an Announcement)

Quitting

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."

Quitting has only ever fleetingly crossed my mind in my darkest moments. But I'm a stubborn gal. I don't give up easily (can you tell from the name of this site?).

How about you?

Great Books for Everyone

Are you getting discouraged, reading wonderful books and thinking your own paltry effort could never be half as moving? One trick I use is to remind myself that I'm not supposed to compare my first or second book to someone else's fifteenth. Instead, I should look back and see how their early efforts showed the marks of a novice. Warning: this technique does not work for prodigies. When it comes to people who win major awards for their first books, I can't help you. But Michael Allen (aka The Grumpy Old Bookman) and Brenda Coulter may be able to.

Last year, Allen posted an excerpt from his book The Truth About Writing, provocatively titled There Are No Great Books:

According to the professors and opinion-setters of our time, the great novel somehow has a stature all of its own; it remains a great book whether you happen to enjoy it or not. In fact if you, as an individual, happen to consider the great novel excruciatingly dull and boring, then it is you, the moron, who is at fault. The novel in question allegedly remains a great novel, regardless of whether or not you – the individual reader – have the good taste and intellectual equipment to recognise it as such.

Nonsense, is my view. I know of no argument which constitutes grounds for believing these ideas to be true, and I can put forward a strong case for believing the opposite.

Consider what we know so far about the novel.

If the novel is anything at all, it is a machine for creating emotion in the reader. Reading a novel may, conceivably, leave you better informed about hotel management or fetishistic sex, but readers do not, on the whole, buy and borrow novels in order to enhance their stock of general knowledge; consciously or unconsciously, they read novels in order to be made to feel. The main function of a novel, therefore, any novel, may be said to be the generation of emotion in the reader. This is true whether the reader understands what is happening to her or not.

Brenda Coulter is a Christian romance writer. She responds to Allen in her entry Can I Be as Good as Jane Austen? (a repost from last year).

So I've been looking at this all wrong. I thought those effusive compliments were praising my talent and writing skills, and that was why I just couldn't take them seriously; because I know I am a competent but not a great writer. But I'm beginning to understand that when someone gushes about my book being hands-down The Best Novel Ever, she's not talking about my writing, she's telling me something about herself. She's telling me what rings her emotional bell. What makes her laugh and cry and feel good. She's telling me that the story I chose to tell and the way I told it touched her heart in a way no other novel ever has.

I like that a lot.

As I press on through the first draft of my novel, I'm very comforted to know that I don't have to write the best book in the whole world in order to touch readers. I just need to write the best book I'm capable of, and find the readers who will be touched by it. That's a much less daunting task.

If a Book Falls in the Forest

I have been mulling over a comment that Nienke Hinton made some time back. I first wrote about it in a post called "Defining Success":

I think, for the most part, writers write simply because they must. One blogger (unfortunately I can't remember who) recently asked people if they'd still write even if they never had the chance of publishing. I think every commenter said yes.

Yet, I think we all play the fantasy of becoming rich and famous in our heads every once in a while. For example, I love reading "The Call" stories and reading about how writers made it. I'll keep writing even if I never have those stories to tell of my own.

Reflecting on this idea of writing, even without the chance of publication, I came to see a distinction between the work of writing and the purpose of writing.

The work of writing is often a solo task. Getting ideas, doing research, labouring over the creation of a draft, editing and revising--we don't require readers or publishing companies to do these things. It's nice to have a writing group or an editor, but we could manage without. And we can find the work of writing very personally satisfying. It can make a big difference to our own lives, to have done this work.

But the purpose of writing is in connection and communication. Without readers to receive your message, the creation is incomplete, unrealized. If you write a good book and no one reads it, does it truly fulfill its purpose? Somehow I don't think so.* One might point to writers like Emily Dickinson, who received very little attention for her poems during her lifetime, as a contradiction to this argument. But if Dickinson's poems had stayed in a trunk and been lost to the world, that would have been a tragic loss, even though Dickinson's experience of creating the work would have been the same.

That's why I believe it's important for writers to seek ways of sharing their work when the time is right. It doesn't have to be a major book deal for a bestseller. Maybe you're photocopying a chapbook and passing it to friends, or reading at the local open mike, or serially blogging your novel. But don't do your work the dishonour of keeping it hidden when it is meant to be shared.

I was happy to discover that Patry Francis at Simply Wait agrees with me. Her post "On Writers and Ambition" sums it up.

Like most writers, I write because I'm mysteriously impelled to do so and have been since childhood. If I was never published anywhere, I would probably continue--simply because I have no idea how to stop. But writing only for myself has never been my goal. I write to share who I am and what I know, what I've seen and heard and felt; I write to resurrect the lost and to give flesh and voice to the ghosts who often take up residence in my study.

I also write with the hope of earning a living that will prevent me from ever having to hoist another waitress tray. Until the sale of my first novel last November, it looked like I might end up slinging hash until I drop. And really, I couldn't have complained. I was so obsessed with writing that I never consider another career. I tossed everything I had on the table; and if I lost, I could have blamed no one but myself.

I wonder how many Emily Dickinsons or Jane Austens we never read because they had no family to cossett them, no private wealth to nurture their dream, because their hours and days and lives were lost to the exigencies of making a living in factories and mines, in domestic service or on farms. Their stories remain untold, their novels and plays and poetry unwritten. By some accident of history, a few of us are getting a chance that our ancestors could never have imagined. Only base ingratitude could prevent us from making the most of it.

Preach it, sister.

*If you write a bad book, its purpose might be just for practice :-)

Go Into Yourself

Every coin has two sides ...

As a complement for my post on writing community, here's Raine Maria Rilke's advice for a young poet to eschew the opinions of others and instead look within for reassurance of the impulse to write:

You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your while life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

You can read all of Rilke's letters to a young poet here.

Thanks to Cynthia Antoinette for bringing this quotation to the conversation!

Writer on Vacation

Are writers ever really on vacation? I'm in Florida for a week, and amidst the games of shuffleboard and trips to the beach, I can't stop thinking about my novella. I'm itchy to work on it, even when I'm touring the wildlife park or sitting in the hot tub. My husband Shawn and I are staying with his parents in their trailer, so there isn't much space to get away and work, and I'm reluctant to get up early and disturb others. So I'm stealing a few minutes here and there.

Part of me thinks I should just relax and have a good time, not worry about writing. But the thing is, I want to write! I feel better when I do, not so antsy or distracted. Writing doesn't feel like work to me right now. I haven't always been in that space, so now that I am, I want to take advantage of it.

One of my favourite writing anecdotes is about James Thurber and his wife at a party. Seeing a certain look come across his face as he was ladling punch, his wife snapped, "Damnit, Thurber, stop writing!"

A few years ago, Shawn and I took our first trip south, to Costa Rica. One day I stayed back at the resort while Shawn went on a wildlife tour. From my journal:

Four months this story has been sitting, waiting for me to come back to it. But it's stingy now, reluctant to let me in, and I'm rusty, my thoughts come slowly and seem thin. Wouldn't it be easier just to read someone else's story? Instead of write my own? Easier, yes, but sad, that this agility, this facility has slipped out of my grasp. How to bring the words back? How to prime the pump, prove again my devotion to this story?

I have given up a trip to Palo Verde and Santa Rosa -- I will not see the birds and crocodiles and monkeys. Is that enough? At breakfast this morning they asked, why didn't you go? I wanted to stay, I replied, leaving them none the wiser. But we know, si? We know I stayed for you

I did eventually finish that story, and I've never regretted the lost trip to Palo Verde. In fact, I cherish the memory of choosing writing over "vacation."

What Makes Me So Special?

Picking up from my last post about a writer's individuality (It's All Been Done) . . .

Marrije commented: "I have no clue what I see different from everybody else, and even less clue about what would make my views interesting to others. And indeed, what if I'm not interesting?"

I know exactly what she means. When I was doing my master's degree at U of Calgary, I felt like I was surrounded by people who all had something to distinguish themselves: some ethnicity, philosophy, religion, sexual orientation that set them apart. I felt so white-bread middle-class boring. From my journal, September 25, 1997, describing a meeting with my thesis advisor:

Finally I voiced my fear that my manuscript would not be published (premature I know, but also paralyzing for my writing). She looked at me evenly and said that she knew someone would publish it. But I'm not the right kind of writer, I said, I'm not a writer of colour or a feminist . . . . She cut me off and said, don't even go down that road. You can't change who you are. But my subject matter, I said, it's not political, it's not about social issues. Yes it is, she said, and even so, if it's well written people will want to read it no matter what it's about. Bottom line, she said, was that I had to write what I could live with, not for some imaginary audience, and that if I wanted to write I had to put those doubts aside and believe in myself.

I think we are so familiar with ourselves that it's hard to see what makes us unique. So part of the process must therefore be to look at ourselves as others might see us, compare our style and subject matter to that of others, and learn to recognize the distinctions and believe in our value. I liked Rick Moody's quote about this:

[My style is] a more natural albeit slightly more hysterical kind of line length. I just hit it. I just landed the vein in a way. And I suddenly realized that it was okay for me to write these long, torrid sentences and that people would still read the work and many people would be really excited by it.

I have a stylistic tendency that I've subconsciously tried to suppress: I like to use big words. But as a school kid I got my knuckles rapped for "showing off your vocabulary," "using words you don't understand," and "sounding like a thesaurus." Granted, those are things I want to avoid, but since I recognized that I had internalized those critical voices, I'm trying to let the big words come out, and figure out how to incorporate them into a story in a way that works organically. I'm happy to be reclaiming something that makes me special.

It's All Been Done

Do you ever get the feeling that there's no point in writing another word because everything's already been said, and it's nearly impossible to say something fresh in a new way? That was my reaction after reading this article by Sam Sacks, about the sad state of fiction being written by MFA program graduates, called "The Fiction Machine."

... I was reminded of Narayan's machine recently while reading the Best New American Voices 2006, an anthology edited by Jane Smiley. The book gives such a desultory vision of the future of American letters that one can only hope its title is wrong. Without ignoring the occasional flashes of verve, the stories included are so monotonous that they seem to have been written by a single person of middling talent. All but one of them are written in the first person; a similar percentage hinge upon the narrator's difficulties with dysfunctional or deceased members of his or her family, or with ex-lovers. The tone is always confessional and saturated with self-pity. The plot and action are always negligible: one story takes place on a road trip to a presidential birthplace, another while moving apartments, another at a wedding, another while opening presents in front of the Christmas tree. None of this much matters anyway, because the things the characters do are always mundane and largely incidental to their psychological conflicts. From time to time a structural innovation appears to offer an interesting novelty, but under the packaging the same old formula is always to be found.

As a writing program graduate myself, all I can say is "Ouch." The article is well-written and Sacks makes excellent points about the pitfalls of the writing workshop, but I want to know, do I really have to compare my work to Katherine Mansfield, Chekhov, and Eudora Welty? Really? At the end of this article, I am so discouraged by the great classic writers and how I am doomed to follow the Rules of the Workshop, that I almost want to pack it in.

Thank goodness I found this other article today, via Miss Snark. It's by Arthur A. Levine, a children's book publisher, called Plastic Flowers and Channelled Raisins (the January 20 entry). Levine identifies the problem with so much children's fiction: writers' imitating another writer's style. And isn't this exactly what's going on in the MFA workshop fiction that Sacks despises?

Channeling is a common problem to writers of any sort of piece be it poetry, fiction, or journalism, but it’s a particular hazard of the various literary forms that make up the broad category of children’s books: picture books, chapter books, middle grade novels, “Young Adult” novels and nonfiction of all levels.

In most cases, I believe channeling is not done intentionally. A writer simply sits down at his or her computer and sets out to write, let’s say, a picture book story. Suddenly, that person is possessed by the spirit of Dr. Seuss. Everything comes out in rhymed, metered verse, with a plethora of made-up words to help make the lines work.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against rhymed verse – Dr. Seuss did it very well, as did Robert Frost. The problem is, when writers channel Dr. Seuss, he never comes through without a whole lot of static. There’s something phony about it. It’s as if his lines are being spoken by an android. They have the sound of imitation.

The antidote to this type of channelling, says Levine, is to drop down into the one thing each writer has that no one else does: themselves.

Let’s take the question of what to write about. This is the first and the biggest of the big questions every writer faces. How many of you have heard the advice to “write about what you know.” Is that a meaningful phrase? I think it is. But if I were to edit that phrase, I might cut out two of the words. “What” and “know.” So “Write about what you know” would become "write about you.”

Who are you?

Writing about oneself in the way that Levine describes can be frightening. (He doesn't mean "Turn your own experiences into thinly veiled fiction" but rather "Write about the truth as you yourself see it.") What if I can't find anything interesting in there? What if someone doesn't like what I create, does that mean they don't like me? Will something awful happen if I give myself away in my work? It's easier to hide behind someone else's style and content.

Until someone like Sam Sacks finds you out.