Back in 2009 I wrote this introduction to an article for the online edition of Foreword Magazine:
With several books published, including a big fat historical novel forthcoming this May, it might seem that I just karate-chop my way through any writer’s block. In fact, for me as well as for many more prolific writers, it’s a daily struggle. Writer’s block can have a multitude of sources, but one that is almost universal is disorganization. It’s difficult to start on chapter 15 when you can’t find your notes— or when you’re facing such a Himalaya of notes that, well, to say the same thing, you’d have to spend an eon sorting it all out before you could sit down to write. I don’t think we need Dr. Freud to analyze this one. It’s a pedestrian problem with pedestrian solutions. Here are mine.
I’d link to that article but it’s gone dark and, in the many years of the meantime, I’ve modified and improved my list of tools. Right now I’m working on a nonfiction book which necessitates a working library and extensive filing system; in this post however I’m spotlighting the subset of tools I also find useful—and recommend— for writing a novel. (And, in case you were wondering, yes, I will be working on another novel soon enough.)
1. The logbook
This is my witness, my “shoulder-to-cry-on,” my champion, and if nothing else, once I’ve finished, an illuminating record.
2. The Kanban
The basic idea of the Kanban is here. My system is very simple. I tape together two file folders so that, when opened, they fold out to one ridiculously large rectangle with three sections. I use Scotch tape to tape it to the window behind my desk. The three sections are: 1— tasks I need to do; 2—tasks I am working on now (2 tasks at most); 3—tasks I have accomplished
Each task has its own Post-It. I move the individual Post-Its from one section of the Kanban to the next in accord with my progress.
3.A small notebook and / or 1/4″ stack of blank index cards
These I always carry with me to jot down ideas, words, overheard dialogue, and sometimes even drafts of paragraphs or outlines of plots. By writing things down, I don’t lose them and also— this is subtle, but crucial— by keeping pen and paper with me at all times, I signal to my “artist self” that I am ready to write.
Yes, one can use a smartphone to capture things when out and about, but think about it for, like, a nanosecond. When you are trying to write a book, should you be picking up your smartphone / aka portal to the world wide web of hyper-palatable distractions? For many well-considered reasons I purposely and rigorously minimize my smartphone use.
4. Plenty of Post-Its
I buy the canary-yellow 1 / 12″ x 2 ” blocks in bulk. I use them for the same purpose as the notebook and blank cards (and I sometimes carry these in my purse as well). Post-Its have the added advantage that I can stick them on drafts, other notes, and inside the covers of the books I’m reading, to note any vocabulary or syntax I’d like to use in my own writing. They also work beautifully for Kanbans.
It’s important to keep these organized and at-hand. I keep mine gathered together on a tray— having them all together makes it easier to find them and easier move.
6.Pens, Colored Pens, and Big Fat Yellow Highlighters
These require their own a special mug.
7. Index Cards Filesaka Recipe Card Holders
This is where the index cards go. Organization ongoing…
8.A Filing Cabinet (or 10)and Hanging Files
The more filing cabinets the better, but if you don’t have the room, filing tubs (plastic boxes with handles) and “banker’s boxes,” inexpensive cardboard boxes for files, work well. It really is astonishing how much paperwork flies around a book. There is the book research itself, but also all that goes into its physical production and marketing. That would be another post. Trust me, make sure you have the filing space, otherwise piles of unfiled papers will bottleneck whatever it is you’re aiming to do.
9.A Labeler Typewriter
The benefits of using tabbed hanging folders I understood, but a labeler? What was wrong with neatly hand lettering a label, for heaven’s sake? But when I finally took David Allen’s advice in Getting Things Done and started using a labeler — mine is a Brother PT-18R— I realized what I had was— I’m not kidding— a mental health tool. Chapter 4? Labeled. Notes on Minor Characters? Labeled. Very Zen.
UPDATE 2021: Forget the labeler, which requires cartridge refills, a battery and/or electricity. A few years ago I bought myself a restored Hermes 3000 typewriter and I use that for making labels. (It’s also handy for typing up letters and manuscripts, among other things, and especially when I want to do so definitively away from the Internet.)
For any files that get too fat and filled with too many Post-Its and index cards. When I’m ready to sort through it all, there it is. Meanwhile, the envelope gets labeled.
11. Some Way to Physically Grok the Whole—or at Least Sizable Chunks of the whole
Originally I had recommended cork boards and tacks. I still think that can be a good idea, however, my current office has no place to nail up cork boards. On the other hand, I have four large windows, so I can just tape up manuscript pages to those. I have also seen some writers string washline from one end of their office to the other, and pin up pages with clothespins. You could also array your pages flat on a dining room table. Whatever works.
12. Manuscript Box
Or were you planning to lose it in a pile? Felted with dust? Blown about in a breeze from the window? Eaten by the dog?
13. Limboland: A Place, Albeit Temporary, for Discarded Pages and Old Drafts
The wastepaper basket is not a good place to stuff your old drafts and cuts, because what if you change your mind? On the other hand, if you hold onto every precious word you’ve written, you’ll never feel confident making the surgical incisions, never mind the blood-spurting amputations that, well, you’ll probably have to make if you want your book to be any good. In other words, don’t toss those pages, don’t keep those pages, park them in Limboland, that is, out of sight, out of mind—but retrievable. I find it helps me as I am writing to know that it’s all still there. I find might dig around in there once, maybe twice. Once the book is published, if I don’t have space for these old drafts, then I make a fire to grill some smores.
Yes, you could leave digital versions on your computer. I don’t. Why? That would be another post, but suffice to say, there are immense benefits to seeing a draft printed out.
For my last book, Limboland was a series of cardboard bankers boxes. For my current work-in-progress, it’s the bottom shelf of a voluminous old cabinet down in the basement. What works for you? Watch out, though, if you stuff the pages under your bed your dreams might get squirrely.
“If I’ve made the audience laugh in some places and cry in others, then I feel I’ve done a good job.” -Barbara Crooker
I do believe that a piece of heaven on earth is the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. That is where, one breezy evening by the grand piano, many years ago, I met Barbara Crooker and heard her read some of her beautiful poems. She goes to the VCCA more often than often, and whether there or elsewhere, she is prolific. Her latest book, Some Glad Morning, is just out from the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Some Glad Morning, Barbara Crooker’s ninth book of poetry, teeters between joy and despair, faith and doubt, the disconnect between lived experience and the written word. Primarily a lyric poet, Crooker is in love with the beauty and mystery of the natural world, even as she recognizes its fragility. But she is also a poet unafraid to write about the consequences of our politics, the great divide. She writes as well about art, with ekphrastic poems on paintings by Hopper, O’Keeffe, Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, and others. Many of the poems are elegaic in tone, an older writer tallying up her losses. Her work embodies Bruce Springsteen’s dictum, “it ain’t no sin to be glad we’re alive,” as she celebrates the explosion of spring peonies, chocolate mousse, a good martini, hummingbirds’ flashy metallics, the pewter light of September, late NBA star Darryl Dawkins, and saltine crackers. While she recognizes it might all be about to slip away, “Remember that nothing is ever lost,” she writes, and somehow, we do.
Here’s her bio:
Barbara Crooker is the author of eight books of poetry, including Les Fauves and The Book of Kells. Her first book, Radiance, won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, her second book, won the 2009 Paterson Award for Excellence in Literature. Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian Americana and has received a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.
C.M. MAYO:Of all the poems in this collection, which is your personal favorite? And why?
BARBARA CROOKER: Well, the book just came out (November 5th), so I don’t have any favorites yet. Plus, that question always feels like someone’s asking which is your favorite child (I have three, so all of them!). Here’s what Garrison Keillor has chosen to read on The Writer’s Almanac: “Tomorrow,” “BLT” (in which I quote Warren Zevon!), “Poem with an Embedded Line by Susan Cohen,” “The New Year,” and “Home Cooking.” I’m doing the first reading from the book this week; I’ll add to that “Regret,” “Big Love,” “Butter” (yes, I have an ode to butter), “Principles of Accounting,” “Drug Store” (based on a painting by Hopper), “Practicing Mindfulness,” and “Mid-November,” which got a lot of good comments when I posted it on my Facebook page. Oh, and I can’t leave out “Big Man,” an elegy to my Zumba buddy and NBA star, Darryl Dawkins. C.M. MAYO: Which is your favorite to read aloud?
BARBARA CROOKER: I’m hoping all of these read aloud well; sometimes, the lyric poems don’t, so when I perform, I tend to pick the narrative ones. I won’t come up with my favorites until I’ve done 5-10 readings—sometimes, the ones you think will read really well don’t, and vice-versa. If I’ve made the audience laugh in some places and cry in others, then I feel I’ve done a good job.
C.M. MAYO: If a reader were to read one poem on this collection, which would you recommend, and why?
PRINCIPLES OF ACCOUNTING by Barbara Crooker
Nearly summer, and the trees are banking on green, calculating their bonuses in numerators of leaves. Outside my window, the crows are ganging up on someone, thugs in their hoodies of night. I’m feeling the number of days begin to feel finite, no longer uncountable as blades of grass. So I’m rounding off clouds to the nearest decade; tabulating interest from the sweetness in the air. I’m going for broke, in the time remaining, like the mockingbird letting loose his vocals, a Fort Knox of sound. I’m going to spend it all. Not like our legislature, who can’t pass a budget, letting one year roll into the next, while schools and social services borrow to pay their providers, leaving even less in the diminishing pot for those who need it the most. Road repair, bridges, pre-K? Not sustainable, say the fat cats, lapping up their cream. For the rest of us, the dice are rigged, the loopholes big enough to drive a camel through. From this distance, the older I get, the closer I see the hand basket coming. So let me lean back in this red Adirondack chair as dusk makes us all equal, happy for the blend of herbs and gin, pure sapphire, the dividend of olive at the end. Here comes the night, nothing we can do to stop it, except tote up the stars on a ledger sheet, and put every last one of them in the plus column. . . .
BARBARA CROOKER: I’m going to pick this one because it hits a number of themes in this book: transience, impermanence, plus my own peculiar hybrid of lyric political poetry. I don’t think you can be a lyric poet in the era of the climate change crisis without letting politics seep into your poetry. C.M. MAYO:Can you talk about which poets have been the most important influences for you?
BARBARA CROOKER: Early on, I’d say Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin. But the one who made me fall in love with poetry, and set me on the writing path was Diane Wakoski. I came across a group of poems of hers plus an interview in a journal put out by Mansfield State Teachers’ College (as it was known then). I thought she was an undergraduate. (I knew nothing, like Jon Snow.) Had I known she was famous, I’d have been intimidated and never started, but I thought, “Hmm, if a college kid can write like that, maybe I can, too,” and dug in. That’s been my method; I was never in a position to get an MFA, so I went to what I call “the MFA of the 3000 books,” reading and studying on my own. Fast forward to recently, and Diane Wakoski put this note under a poem I’d posted on Facebook: “I wish I’d written that.” I couldn’t ask for anything more.
C.M. MAYO:Which poets and writers are you reading now?
BARBARA CROOKER: Christopher Buckley, David Kirby, Barbara Hamby, Linda Pastan, Sharon Olds, Betsy Sholl, Ted Kooser, Wendy Barker, Marjorie Stelmach, Anya Silver, George Bilgere, Ellen Bass, Jeanne Murray Walker, Dorianne Laux, Robert Cording, Gray Jacobik. Plus I read every poem in every journal that I’m in, reading each journal (and each book of poetry) twice and taking notes. Which is why my reading pile is so high, and why I never reach the bottom. . . .
C.M. MAYO:It seems a very important part of your process is VCCA. What brings you back there time and again?
BARBARA CROOKER: I first went to VCCA in 1990, and have been back every 18 months since then (so 19 times). Besides not having an MFA, I’m an outlier in the larger writing world because I’m not an academic (although I have been an adjunct at eight different colleges). Rather, I’ve been a caregiver, taking care of my mother for many years and also my son, who has autism. So the first time I went to VCCA and realized what it was like to reclaim my life, at least for a short period of time (I started out going for 9 day stays; I’m now up to two week ones) would, not to exaggerate, save my life, and so I’ve returned. I’ve also had two residencies at VCCA in France (in Auvillar, near Toulouse) and two at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Co. Monaghan, Ireland.
All of these places have been magical for me; I think it’s because when all you do for an entire day is write, read, talk about writing, take long walks and think about writing, you start drawing from a deeper well. Also, time becomes elastic—those nine days are worth nine months “in the real world.” It’s amazing how many hours there ARE in a day when you are not involved in food prep (planning, shopping, cooking, cleaning up, repeat three times a day). When my son was eight, I discovered that a gluten and dairy-free diet made a world of difference, so I started making parallel meals for him, which was, and is, very time-consuming. So colonies that provide meals are deeply appreciated. Also, when I’m away, I try to write outside as much as possible, let the world around me seep into my poems.
At VCCA, where there are also musicians, artists, other writers, I like to let myself be open to the influences of the other artists—it’s such a rich, fertile community, and everyone whose path has crossed mine has added to my work, perhaps not in obvious ways, but I see the connecting threads. And the grounds and physical location of VCCA is simply gorgeous.
Whenever I enter the gates of Mt. San Angelo, I feel like I’m coming home.
C.M. MAYO: You have been a prolific poet for many years. How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?
BARBARA CROOKER: I’m not sure I am prolific, just old. I have a poem called “Twenty-Five Years of Rejection Slips” in my first book, and that pretty much describes my early years of writing but not getting published. So I had quite a backlog. This has also meant that I’ve never strayed much from my initial writing habits, which are/were to read, write, read, repeat. Initially, email was pretty clunky—remember dial-up? Those of us in the country used it for much, much longer than the rest of the country. So because it was time-consuming (and tied up our one phone line, I tried to limit my time online. Then I resisted using social media for a long time once we got a high speed connection, fearing it would be a time suck (it is!). I do try to answer emails in a timely fashion, but I limit Facebook to half hour sessions, confess that I don’t see the use of Twitter, but do use it to post when poems are online or if I have an event, and haven’t figured out Instagram yet. . . . The good part about all of this (the Digital Revolution) is that I can easily share work, especially work that has appeared in print-only journals, with larger audiences. I maintain my own website (www.barbaracrooker.com), posting a new poem every month, plus links to poems published online. The downside of it is that I’d need to be cloned to really be able to be a big presence on social media. But I feel my real job is just to write poems, so I’m working as hard as I can to keep the rest of the “stuff” to a minimum.
C.M. MAYO:Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?
BARBARA CROOKER: Um, I’m still working on paper! I do multiple drafts on paper, don’t turn to the computer until I feel ready to see how the lines look in type. (I use both my ear and my eye in casting lines.) For me, the connection between head and heart through the hand is important, and I like the physicality of the pen (roller ball, extra fine, .05) moving over the blue lines on the yellow pad. Now, since I have grandchildren, I know that cursive is no longer being taught in school, so I wonder how this will change writing in the future. I’m not saying it will be negative, just that it will be different. Also, I went through both undergraduate and graduate schools using a manual typewriter (only rich people and secretaries had electric ones, and they were big and cumbersome). Here’s a poem from Some Glad Morning about this:
PROMPT by Barbara Crooker after a poem by Alison Joseph
Write me a poem about the manual typewriter, the clip clop of fingers on keys, the sleigh bell that rang when you reached the end of the line. Tell me about the carbon that smudged your fingers when you untangled jangled keys. Remember life before Word Count, when a pencil mark reminded you to end the intro, start paragraph one. The other marks that kept you on the road, true to your outline. The finals streaks of graphite that said, Wrap it up, tie it together, lead it into the barn. Those days when cut and paste involved scissors and Elmer’s glue. When making a copy meant two sheets of paper with a leaf of inky black sandwiched between. No delete key, no white-out, no search and replace. So writing a paper or a novel involved manual labor, fingers dirty at the end of the day. Write me about how your back ached. Tell me about margins and tab sets. The silver levers, the roller bars. Remember how faithful it was, this coal black steed, the places it took you to, far, far into the thicket of words. And how it always brought you safely home again.
C.M. MAYO:What is the most important piece of advice you would offer to another poet who is just starting out? And, if you could travel back in time, to your own thirty year-old self?
BARBARA CROOKER: Read. Read constantly. Read poets you like, and poets you don’t have a kinship with. When you read a poem that knocks your socks off, see if you can figure out why, and then try and do it in your own work. Buy books from that author. Go to readings. Go to museums. Read. And write. To my thirty year-old self, I’d say “Patience.” As I mentioned above, it took me a long time to get a first book, and although I was a finalist many times over (it’s like Chutes & Ladders, if you don’t win, you go back to the beginning), for a while, I was thinking it might be posthumous. Having nine full-length books (I also have twelve chapbooks) was never on my radar. Nor was being solicited for The Pitt Poetry Series (my new book, Some Glad Morning—I’m still pinching myself over that!). Or appearing fifty times on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Or having people pay to fly me all over the country to read. (Am going to FL, OK, TX, WI, and CT this coming year). This writing life is full of a steady stream of rejection (I always say that while it might seem that I’m successful, that’s just the little tip on the surface, and the Giant Iceberg of Rejection is looming far beneath). One of my poems ends with “Something wonderful is just about to happen,” and I still need to remind myself of this on the days when the rejections are flying thicker than snowflakes. And really, my goal is not to earn prestige or win awards; it’s to write a poem that somebody else will want to read, to make that human connection. All the rest is background noise.
C.M. MAYO:What’s next for you?
BARBARA CROOKER: Oh, boy, THAT’S a good question! Up until this point, I’ve had completed manuscripts waiting for a publisher, or part of a project halfway done. But when Pitt came calling, they cleaned out my poetry cupboard, leaving it pretty bare. I’ve been looking at what’s left (and what I’ve done since), and have loosely gathered them in a binder, calling it (for now) Slow Wreckage (the body’s decline, what climate change is doing to the planet, the political situation—cheerful, right?) But I think (or hope) that the political poems will be dated by the time I’m ready to send it to a publisher, so I’m trying to be open to letting air in, changing it completely as new poems come. I’ve been working (slowly) on a series called “Late Painters” (Monet, Renoir, Matisse, so far), on how aging altered their work, and I’d like that to become a series or a section in a book. I’m hoping to apply to the American Academy in Rome, thinking that may bring some new poems, new directions. And I’m equally all right, if I don’t have seventy-five strong poems that hang together, to say that Some Glad Morning will be my last book. But I’m not ready to say never, so really, the answer is, I’m back to square one, where I was when I started, just writing poems.
