Chris Orcutt, Writer

The first time I read John Irving's The World According to Garp, I choked on a Big Mac.

It was a cold March day 15 years ago, and I was in a McDonald's in Norwich, New York, eating lunch, when a passage took me by such complete surprise that I started choking.

Reluctant to suffer an ignominious death in a Mickey D’s, I dropped the book and looked around clutching my throat. Thankfully, an old-timer saw what was happening, jumped up from his seat and gave me the Heimlich (he was remarkably spry as I recall). The food dislodged. (Never mind where it went. Gross.)

What I was eating when Irving's book surprised me.

"What the hell happened?" he asked.

"Something surprised me," I said, nodding at the book. "Something I read."

"Well, you probably shouldn't eat while you're reading then."

"Probably not, sir. Thank you."

As I sat down, I glanced at the book that had nearly caused my death. I realized that, while I didn't want to cause readers of my own writing to choke in fast-food restaurants, I did want to emulate Irving's ability to surprise them—the smile-inducing sentence; the word choice that evokes a gentle shake of the head; and best of all, the memorable, unexpected scene.

The hardcover version. I wore out my paperback.

From the first, what grabbed me most about the novel was its delicious unpredictability. Take the first line, for example. I can quote it from memory:

Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater.

This was, and still is as far as I'm concerned, one of the best opening lines of a novel ever. The key word, of course, is "wounding." From time to time, I consider the dozen other words he could have used there, and I realize what a surprising and brilliant choice "wounding" was.  Stabbing? No, too specific, too violent. Injuring? No, too vague. What about "lacerating" or "contusing"? Afraid not. "Wounding" was, and still is, perfect. The questions that "wounding" raises, and doesn't answer, are what entice the reader to continue.

The famous Russian short story writer and playwright, Anton Chekhov, once said the following (I paraphrase): "If a gun hangs above the door in the first act, it must go off in the last act." As a student of Irving who has read Garp and one of his other excellent novels, A Prayer for Owen Meany, at least a dozen times, I'm convinced that Irving must have held Chekhov's view—at least subconsciously—because nothing gets wasted in the story. Every character trait, setting detail and conflict is important, they all build to the climax, and along the way there are hundreds of surprises.

Today, looking out my window and watching the shaking trees, I remember that fateful day in McDonald's when I not only learned to be careful trying to eat and read at the same time, but also the value of surprise in writing. Shortly after that episode, I wrote something on an index card that I've kept on a bulletin board ever since. It's a piece of advice to myself that I've tried to heed in everything I write. Many times I've fallen short, but once in a while I nail it, and here it is:

Put a surprise on every page.

It’s the surprises that keep me reading.

It's the surprises that keep me writing.

It’s the surprises that make life worth living.

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Writing is rewriting." — Ernest Hemingway

It's a good thing Ernie told us this, because I and every other writer never would have figured it out on our own.

"Got tight last night on absinthe. Did knife tricks."
—Hemingway, in a letter to a friend

Yeah, yeah, I know the story about the last chapter of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms—that he allegedly rewrote it 39 times before he was satisfied with it. I say "allegedly" because I've also read accounts in which he rewrote the last page 39 times, and others in which he rewrote the entire book 39 times. More likely he drank 39 cocktails, shot 39 clay pigeons, caught 39 marlins and rewrote the same word 39 times.

Why am I blathering on about Hemingway's editorial habits? Because I'm in the middle (exactly the middle) of the SEVENTH draft of my new novel, and I'm getting a little tired of rewriting. I want to be...oh, I don't know...WRITING something new, otherwise known as CREATING. I've been poring over individual sentences for two weeks, and the resulting effect on my eyes and brain is similar to snow blindness.

A hacked-up page from the novel.

Recently I read a quote by bestseller Michael Crichton about rewriting and his sense of despair about it. I was impressed that he'd gone on the record about this dreaded subject because I've found that a lot of very successful authors like to keep the production of their works a mystery to convey that it really isn't all that hard. This is what I call the "writer as auteur" or the "folks don't want to see how the sausages are made" school of thought.

Anyway, here's what Crichton had to say (which doesn't bode well for me—there will probably be an 8th draft—I'm used to it):

"Books aren't written—they're rewritten....It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it."

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go decide whether to use a loose or periodic sentence in the paragraph I'm working on.

Hopefully I won't have to rewrite the f-cker 39 times.

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 07:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"No mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of the spring." — Henry David Thoreau, Journal, March 17, 1857

"One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring come in." — Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Chapter XVII

I've always been a fan of Thoreau. Until recently, I owned five or six copies of Walden, including a fine hardcover version this terrific guy gave me, but my wife made me donate half of them. My interest in Thoreau began in high school, when every junior in America is required to read "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," and while my classmates were rendered comatose by the 19th century prose, I was entranced. As a kid who had grown up in the countryside (first Maine, then rural New York), I spent ALL of my time in the woods. Finally I was reading about a guy who thoroughly embraced Nature, just like I did, and I was determined to learn more.

My interest in Thoreau was part of the reason why I decided to study philosophy and religion in college. The ideas of spirituality and harmony with nature that Thoreau touches upon in Walden excited my eager young mind. While still in school I started writing a play about him, as well as a biographical sketch for a humor book that was never published.

After college I was a reporter for my hometown newspaper, until one particularly vibrant autumn, when I once again felt the stirrings of Thoreau. I decided to quit my job so I could spend the entire season walking in the woods around Millbrook, learning the names of all the trees.

Sixteen years later, I'm still enamored of Thoreau, and I still enjoy walking in nature as much as I always did. Yesterday was the first non-winter day of the year, so I took a long walk to see what I could see. What I saw was the cusp of spring.

It was cold when I started out, and I was dressed in layers: T-shirt, Oxford shirt, heavy wool sweater and wool topcoat. A mile into my walk, the sun appeared at my back (to the southwest) and heated up my shoulders. I had to remove the coat and carry it, then remove the sweater, put the coat back on and carry the sweater.

The roads were dry—even the dirt ones I walked on—but the shoulder was a squishy mixture of mud and last fall's leaves, which actually made walking easier on the feet.

A waterfall in Glacier National Park.

I passed two waterfalls on my way out of the village, and both gushed as loudly as the ones I saw while hiking through Glacier National Park in March six years ago. Heavy, jagged icicles clung to the shaded corners of the falls, and I wondered how long they would last. The last signs of winter. Would they make it to April?

The snow has all melted, a fact that the squirrels were happy about. I observed a pair of them chasing each other around a fat oak, scolding me and each other, then racing into a knothole. Pheasants, one of the stupidest birds on the planet, strutted in the road at a nasty curve. As I approached, they flapped away and hid in the brush.

There is an alive stillness in the early spring. While crossing a meadow between two roads, I stopped, closed my eyes and listened. In winter you hear nothing but the wind or far-away traffic. But as the air begins to warm, you hear the first signs of life. If you listen really closely, you can almost make out the ground itself stretching, the grass readying itself for another growth spurt. This silence isn't clouded by the buzz of insects, which will be the case in another few weeks. It's a brief interval between the absolute nothingness of winter and the full-blown glory of spring.

I passed an old-timer who was pouring buckets of sap into a steaming vat beneath the trees, and I was carried back 25 years to when I helped my great-uncle Holland make maple syrup. The old man saw me staring and we shared a nod. It takes a hell of a lot of sap to make just a quart of syrup. I remember that well. I walked on.

Some Vermont kid back in my great-uncle's time making syrup.

The thoroughbreds in the fields were still wearing their horse blankets, and when I approached a fence, a couple of the bolder ones walked over, hoping I had a snack for them. I didn't. I patted their nuzzles and kept walking.

In the corner of a field, I spied a collection of beehives. Foolishly, I went over, squatted beside them and listened for any buzzing. It was faint, but it was there. Soon the bees would be zipping in and out of there all day long.

After a couple of hours, I reached one of my favorite spots along a nearby creek. It's a fallen log next to a bridge, where I like to sit down and eat my lunch. I had a corned beef and swiss sandwich, eating very little of the bread, as I looked out at the bare branches and the pristine sky. Spring was coming. It would be here, full-blown, within a couple of weeks. Breathing deeply of the clean, quiet air, I was glad I'd set out on this little walk, and gladder still for leaving the city behind and getting back to my Thoreauvian roots.

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We live in a time of word saturation. Written content of all kinds—blogs, stories, articles, essays, this blog—is freely available for downloading, printing, emailing to friends, or, in the case of some of my former students, copying and passing off as your own work.

For a long time I was resistant to offering any of my writing for free because beginning at 21 years old, I was paid for my words. I was a reporter for a weekly newspaper, and later a daily, and each week I got a paycheck. It wasn't a lot of money, but even now, 17 years later, I can remember the disbelief I experienced when I opened up that first envelope and realized they were actually paying me to write. What I didn't tell the publisher was that I probably would have done the work for nothing. (Or maybe for 3 squares and a cot.)

This morning, I stumbled upon a fairly famous rant by American writer Harlan Ellison. I'd heard about this polemic of Ellison's before, but until I watched it, I didn't realize how much I agreed with it.

His main point: Writers should be paid for their work. What a concept. He's right, of course, and his vociferous defense of this principle is making me reconsider how much, and what type of, writing I offer freely myself. Enjoy.

My favorite line in the video is when he says, "Lady, tell that to someone a little older than you who has just fallen off the turnip truck."

Folks, that's a writer at work. I just hope someone paid him for this because I don't want him burning my house down for showing it.

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)