Tossing Word Salad—Again

Doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results defines neither insanity nor genius. It’s the process that curses writers to perpetually search for the right words to convey an idea, describe a sunset, or tell a story.

Sometimes inspiration comes in a dream. Sometimes on the toilet. The perfect words to impart that thought to a hungry reader jump into consciousness. But they don’t usually come out right. Tossed like salad, some appear undressed; others collide with clumsy thumps of repetition. Often in the same sentence.

Scrambled words spinning in a writer’s brain are like charged particles spiraling through a cyclotron. Meaningless and inert, they race around at the speed of light until they collide with a seminal particle beam. For scientists, the result can be diagnostic imagery. For writers, an award-winning novel. Or at least a good sentence.

So we persist. Over and over. Damn. There’s that clumsy thump of repetition. Again. Lulled into choosing genius over insanity, we believe that failure is the road to success.

“I’ve failed over and over and over again,” Michael Jordan said, referencing the 9,000 shots he missed and the 300 games he lost in his career. “That is why I succeed.”

About 20 years ago, a story and its opening popped into my head in the midst of a dream: Of all days for Angus to get loose, why did it have to be today? I knew instinctively what the story was about, but writing it down—by longhand and keyboard—took 15 years.

When I thought I had it right, I joined a writers’ group. Affiliating with such a group can be an abject exercise in vulnerability. Author and researcher Brené Brown defines vulnerability as the emotional risk, exposure, and uncertainty that fuels our lives. If we chose to lean into it, she says, if we allow ourselves to be honestly seen, we develop resilience. And resilience makes us strong.

Well, I leaned into it all right. As I read aloud the first five pages of my novel, it was like standing up naked and turning around very slowly, to paraphrase actress Rosalind Russell’s description of acting.

Instead of hearing thunderous applause from my peers, one of them—Karen—cleared her throat.

“Well, the paragraphs are well-written,” she said.

The paragraphs? I screamed silently. What about the story? The characters? The brilliant setting? Screw vulnerability and resilience. I wanted affirmation.

“Who are these people?” she continued. “Why are they arguing in the kitchen about a dog?” I explained who they were and that I would convey the story through flashbacks. Karen would not budge. She was like Anne Lamott’s agent in the book Bird by Bird. “Write that book you just described to me. You haven’t done it here.” Start at the beginning, Karen said.

So, embracing vulnerability, I did just that. Expecting a different result, I rewrote Chapter One. A month later, Karen said it was better, but I needed to ground the story. Give the reader a sense of time and place. The next month, she said it was better, but…

It went on like this for more than a year. I wrote, rewrote, and rewrote. I got sick of it and put it down. I got inspired and picked it up—again and again. Each time I expected a different result.

In the meantime, I studied, and studied, and studied the craft of writing.

Words are easy, I thought as I yanked one from the cyclotron. They’re like the tiny components of a house. Writing a novel word by word should be easy—the same as building a house brick by brick. Or bird by bird, according to Lamott. Except, says William Strunk, in the ageless Elements of Style, writing should be elegant.

“A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”

That sounds like Coco Chanel, my heroine of elegance. She preached that simplicity is the key. Using her advice, I began to write like I get dressed, starting with good underwear—strong subjects, powerful predicates. My vocabulary began to reflect a wardrobe that runs from business to bohemian. Baubles and scarves are the adjectives and adverbs. Shoes move the look forward. Elegance, however, comes with a caveat—always remove one accessory.

Naked, I dressed and undressed my sentences. Over and over.

A couple of years ago, I learned that I could write a good sentence—at least according to the editors at Writers Digest. I placed fourth in one of their sentence-writing contests. But authors write not in sentences but with sentences. They write paragraphs. If you make each sentence worth reading, something in it will lead the reader into the next one.

I can do that, too. In November 2019, the opening to my middle-grade novel got thumbs up from a panel of judges at the Philadelphia Writing Workshop. It was as easy as stringing six simple sentences into one cohesive paragraph—simply laying one brick upon another. Ha!

My award-winning sentence took about 20 hours to compose; the paragraph, about 20 years. And the book? Well …

Last year, convinced that I finally had a elegant story with a good opening sentence, believable characters, and a well-constructed plot, I donned my vulnerability cloak—again—and began to query agents.

“Good first sentence,” said one. “But it needs a stronger hook.

“I need to know more about the father,” said another.

“You’ve grounded me on a cold train station platform,” said a third. “Then you tell me what will happen in the summer. You’ve got a whole book to do that.”

Humbled, I wrote, rewrote, and rewrote my book, expecting, yet again, a different result.

Last week, after years of doing the same thing over and over again, I got a different result. The Florida Writers Association notified me that I’m a finalist in their annual Royal Palms Literary Awards competition for middle-grade fiction.

I’m sure that when I get the judges’ critiques, I will rewrite again. And maybe yet again. Because the words in my cyclotron often fly around without smacking into a seminal sentence.  Because doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results has made me a writer.