JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: Never Too Late, Never Give up

by Gay Degani

My novel, What Came Before, took more than twelve years to write.

I’m not bragging about that. The book is under 300 pages and not a deep philosophical treatise on man’s inhumanity to man. There are no white whales, no Dublin boarding houses, no madeleines, so why did it take me so long?

Well, life got in the way.

Like many others who yearn to put words on paper, my dream of becoming a writer began in childhood. With me on her lap, my mother read aloud the Bobbsey Twins, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Heidi. My dad introduced me to the dauntless detective, Nancy Drew. After devouring Little Women, I knew I had to be a writer, just like Jo. I drew pictures of books, my books, with enticing titles along the spines, my name just below. At twelve, I scribbled a “novel” in purple ink about the Twellington twins and their nine siblings.

I was surprised in high school to find out that Mrs. Hawkins, my Creative Writing teacher, had entered one of my short stories in the Atlantic Monthly High School Writing Contest and was more surprised when I won second place. Wow. “Collision,” I thought, was just the beginning.

After graduating with a B.A. from UCSB in 1970 and getting a Masters’ Degree in 19^th Century English Literature at Long Beach State in 1971, I found myself in need of a career—or at least a job. I had to support myself, but I was certain I could dig up the “spare time” to write. As a kid of the 50s and 60s, I thought time grew like fat plums waiting to be plucked, but as a full-time worker bee, I couldn’t find the tree, let alone the fruit. Still I thought, one day, some day. Now I realize I had to live my life before I could write. When I look back, I can identify those moments of learning that gave me the confidence and know-how to put words on paper.

In a retail executive training program after college, I learned that the Junior Department at the Del Amo Broadway was only a small segment of a huge enterprise. Behind the selling floors, the dressing rooms, and the customers was a complex operation spread over 40+ stores as well as a blocks-long system of offices and warehouses in East LA. In the beginning I vaguely understood the size and shape of the company, but not its intricacies, how it actually functioned. Later, as a writer, this experience of learning the complexities behind the obvious helped me understand that behind a basic storyline, there is structure, a way of doing things, a way of controlling results. Words no more spring spontaneously onto the page than pantsuits and mini-skirts miraculously appeared on shelves, rounders, and mannequins.

As a Gap store manager, my job was about people—customers and employees. I understood something about human nature, but not much. My first lesson came before I was even hired. The company gave all candidates an “honesty” test. It seemed obvious to me that anyone could pass this kind of exam whether they were honest or not, so I asked the man who hired me if anyone ever failed. His answer? Yes, they did. A high percentage. This surprised me and forced me to become more aware of how very different we are from each other.

Later, as a Gap district manager, when I had to figure out how to foster top performances in others, I developed more insights into what motivates and what discourages people. Working toward team goals in a positive atmosphere as well as appreciation for a job well done, helped to create a desire to achieve. Strong characters in good stories have to want something too. They have to strive and overcome disappointment. What pulls the reader along is how characters respond to the obstacles put between them and their desires.

I had kids. I thought becoming a stay-at-home mom would allow me infinite time to sit down at a typewriter and pound out stories. They would nap, wouldn’t they?  Play outside in the backyard? Entertain themselves? As it turned out, I was no Danielle Steele or J.K. Rowling. There were no scribblings of passionate love scenes on the dryer in the middle of night. No sneaking out in spare moments to tea shops to create wizards. My job was all consuming: Room mother, Cub and Girl Scout leader, swim mom, have van will travel.  Here was a lesson I taught myself: whatever I chose to do, I did it full on to the best of my abilities. 

Tupperware came next. Yep, I learned everything there is to know about eradicating mold from my refrigerator, but more importantly, this job forced me to rely on myself to get what I wanted. I had a simple goal: I wanted to buy a computer. What I learned was more valuable. Selling Tupperware taught me to rally to the task, to observe and imitate successful behaviors, to give encouragement as well as to accept it, and to think on my feet. Selling Tupperware made me feel something like a stand-up comedian—the more they laughed, the more I sold—and I became addicted to being “in the zone,” that feeling that comes when everything one does, works. I had forgotten how that felt. I knew it was finally time to write. My first screenplay was called “Plastic Dreams,” about a man who seeks refuge in selling Tupperware.

I wrote screenplays, stories, random poems, and journal entries. I took UCLA extension classes, went to conferences and workshops. Mimicking what I had learned from Tupperware, I surrounded myself with like-minded people, set goals, planned for results. By the time my kids left home to chase their own dreams, I was beginning to understand what made for good writing. I accepted that writing well doesn’t just happen, but that it comes with practice and study.

I am proudest of not giving up, of refusing to abandon my writing dream. I’ve published many stories in print and on line, been nominated for Pushcarts, won contests, short-listed, long-listed, and honorable mentioned here and there.  I published an eight-story collection in 2010 about mothers and daughters, Pomegranate. Pure Slush released my full-length collection, Rattle of Want, in 2015, which includes my novella, “The Old Road.” My suspense novel, What Came Before—that twelve year endeavor—is currently available in its second edition by Truth Serum Press.

I’ll be 68 on the 19^th of this month. Thank goodness, it’s never too late.

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Gay Degani has said almost everything there is to say about herself above, but she'd like to add that since she was born in Louisiana, spent her earliest years in Iowa, and road-tripped every summer to both for each of her summers while growing up in California, that she gained a strong love of place: desert, mountain, plain, swamp, farmland, and beach. She hopes her work reflects that love.  

JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: Straight Lines Are Boring

by Clifford Garstang

Some days I envy the young writers who, right out of college, sit down to write their first novel and never stop writing. How much they could accomplish over a career of forty or fifty years! If only I had been able to do that!

But most days, when I’m being rational, I accept that I’ve taken the journey I had to take. I’m the person I am today—the writer I am—because of the non-writing work I’ve done and because of the places I’ve seen. If my lifetime writing output is smaller as a result, sobeit.

Like many writers, I was first a voracious reader. The Hardy Boys. Chip Hilton. Those are the books I collected and that stand out in my memory, although there must have been others. In high school I discovered books that made me think. I was one of those kids whose mind was blown by Hermann Hesse: Demian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf. Even required reading in school got me excited: The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Heart of Darkness. Another title comes back to me now that was influential at the time: Stranger in a Strange Land.

I was taken by the universal questions these works asked, and I came to admire the writers who had created them. I wanted to be one of them.

In college I majored in Philosophy, not because I knew anything about the subject but because of those questions my favorite writers were asking. If I were going to write like them, I needed to know how to think and also how to ask questions.

It should be noted that I wasn’t doing much writing of my own during this period. I did take a couple of creative writing classes in college, but I didn’t take it seriously. As graduation approached, I realized that majoring in Philosophy had limited my reading in literature, reading that a writer ought to have done, so I applied for graduate school in English. (I hadn’t heard about MFA programs back then; if I had, I might have tried to get into one.) I wasn’t writing, but at least I was preparing to write. It was just what I wanted and I was able to read widely, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Paley, and Cheever.

I was happy with the choice I’d made, but I was in need of a break from school, so I made a decision that turned out to be momentous: I joined the Peace Corps. I served for two years in South Korea, and while the job was difficult and living conditions harsh, the immersion in an unfamiliar environment—culture, food, language—opened my eyes and took me in an unexpected direction. I still wanted to write, but I also wanted an international career.

I returned to grad school, finished that MA in English, and then, because academia didn’t appeal to me as a long-term proposition, I went to law school, aiming to pursue international law, to live and work abroad. And that’s what happened. After graduation I was offered a job with a large, prestigious law firm, and within two years was sent to one of their offices in Asia. Exactly what I wanted, except that writing remained on the backburner.

Time passed. My work was not always exciting, but I traveled all over Asia and saw more of life than I would have if I’d remained in Chicago, which was its own reward. Eventually, though, I grew disenchanted. I had the idea that I wanted to be involved in international development and poverty alleviation, a holdover from my Peace Corps years. My law firm wasn’t going to get into that work, because it didn’t pay enough, so I explored other options. I quit the firm and went to graduate school again, this time to study international development at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, with a goal of working for one of the multilateral development banks. First, though, I took a job as a legal reform consultant in Kazakhstan. No, really!

I lived in Kazakhstan for the better part of a year and found myself with time on my hands, so at long last I began to write. The story I wanted to tell was set against the political landscape of Southeast Asia, a romantic thriller mixed with Eastern Philosophy. I kept working on that project when I came back to the US and eventually finished a massive draft. I even took a class at the Writer’s Center in Washington DC, realizing that I might have a few things to learn about writing.

With no income, though, I began to worry about money. I had not learned the trick of cobbling together teaching and fee-lance work in order to get by, nor was I yet qualified to do any of that. So I began to look for a job, ideally one that would allow me to spend at least some time writing. Finally, I got the job I wanted: Senior Counsel for East Asia at the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (aka The World Bank). It was a demanding job with a lot of Asian travel (I flew over a million miles in five years), and I was unable to do much more than tinker with my novel manuscript, but I loved it. I felt I was making a real contribution to global poverty alleviation, and adding to my store of experiences at the same time.

But then: the new millennium loomed. It seemed like a propitious time to take the leap and finally pursue my writing dream.

I’ve been writing more or less fulltime ever since. I picked up an MFA in Fiction along the way. I’ve attended countless writers’ conferences and workshops. I’ve written and re-written dozens of stories, most of which found homes in literary magazines and two small-press collections. I’ve done some teaching, some editing, a little free-lancing. But mostly I write. In addition to that first novel I wrote long ago and may someday resurrect, I’ve written two as-yet-unpublished novels and am close to finishing another, with ideas for several more. I’ve got lots to say.

 It’s been a circuitous route to Planet Write, but I don’t regret a single step.

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Clifford Garstang is the author of the novel in stories What theZhang Boys Know, winner of the 2013 Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction and the story collection In an Uncharted Country. He is also the editor of the anthology series Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet. He is also the author of the literary blog Perpetual Folly. Visit him at CliffordGarstang.com.

JOURNEY TO PLANET WRITE: No One Has Told Me to Stop

by Rachael Warecki

Last night, I sat down on my floor, opened up the binder that contains approximately 370 pages of my novel-in-progress—all of one draft and the first third of another—and wrote a summary of each scene on color-coded index cards. As I’d learned at a recent writing workshop, indexing your scenes in this manner can be a helpful tool in charting a novel’s progression. Are my scenes in a sensible order? Is the plot of this novel progressing in a logical way? Are my characters developing emotionally?

After I’d laid out my index cards end to end, I was pleased to discover that the answer to all these questions was Yes. I still need to round out some of the emotional beats in the last third of the manuscript, and I need to rewrite the novel’s climax, which my ancient former computer deleted in a last-ditch protest against running Microsoft Word. (You had one job, computer!) But after six years of work and six full drafts, my novel finally feels like a book, like a manuscript that could be sent to a literary agent who would want to see more.

So, to paraphrase David Byrne, I asked myself, How did I get here?

No, seriously—if you’ve not yet had the pleasure of glimpsing the finish line, of measuring the time to a finished, agent-ready draft in weeks and months rather than in years, it’s a unique emotion. For me, it feels most akin to a graduation: the rush of triumph at your achievement, the urge to hug your family and classmates and professors out of gratitude for the time they’ve invested in you, the relief at one stage of your life coming to an end, and the knowledge that the next phase is just beginning.

Compared to other people’s Journeys to Planet Write, I feel mine has been fairly straightforward. In second grade, after learning that a real live species of people called writers had created the books I’d been devouring since I was three, I wrote my first short story. I wrote my first novel when I was in junior high, in a fit of obliviousness toward the potential cruelty of eighth graders, and then told my classmates about it. The novel was a total rip-off of whatever epic fantasy series I was reading at the time (talking animals, people with liberally-sprinkled apostrophes in their magical-sounding names), but most of my nine classmates, to their nerdy credit, asked to read it. That was my first brush with encouragement from people who weren’t my parents, and it powered me forward—although to be honest, I would’ve continued to write even if no one was reading, which was what I did all through high school.

In college, I transitioned into historical novels and literary short stories, the latter of which earned me several school writing awards—the first time that non-parental adults had liked my work. After graduation, I started teaching, wrote a cry-for-help roman à clef that I eventually trunked, took two years’ worth of novel-writing courses through UCLA Extension, attended my first writing conference, and applied to MFA programs. One of the programs was kind enough to let me in, and I worked very hard for two years to graduate with a concentration in fiction.

And now here I am. With a novel manuscript in front of me. Counting down the weeks until I send it out.

In short, I’ve been writing all my life, and I’ve been extremely lucky in that no one has ever told me to stop.

I can’t emphasize how important that last part is, though: no one has ever told me to stop. Aside from my many privileges (being born white and straight and well-off, albeit with a host of severe medical issues), which have allowed me, for the most part, to plan my writing career in methodical stages, the most important factor in my writing career has been my supportive community. When I was seven, writing that first short story about a baby deer, my parents and teachers didn’t tell me to give it up for math and science. In junior high, when it would have been far easier for my classmates to taunt my ambitions, they encouraged me instead. The friends I made through my MFA program have invited me to literary readings and introduced me to people who’ve helped my career. Even the people in my life who don’t write—friends from high school, colleagues, my boyfriend—have always asked after my writing. Let me tell you, there’s no bigger motivation to finish your manuscript revisions than sitting in an airport with a former coworker and hearing him ask, “So, how’s your novel coming along?”

It’s because of this community’s love that I’ve been able to keep writing through illnesses, family upheaval, and personal losses. Thanks to them, it’s not just my novel that feels ready. My writing career itself has proceeded in a sensible order. Despite periods of chaos, my life—if not the world—is progressing in a logical way. And I, as a person, am developing emotionally. I owe it not only to myself to keep putting words on the page, but to the wonderful people around me. If this is my lifelong Journey to Planet Write, then my community is the rocket ship that propels me forward. (And, you know, keeps me from getting sucked into space and going kablooie.)

So I’m not going to stop.

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Rachael Warecki is a native of Los Angeles whose work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Masters Review, Midwestern Gothic, and elsewhere. She holds degrees from Scripps College and Loyola Marymount University, as well as an MFA in Fiction from Antioch University Los Angeles. She is currently at work on a novel, which is an eight-word phrase that describes her entire past, present, and future.