Jeff Berryman : Writing

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 05:07:33 GMT

Writing for Love

"Writing a book is like rearing children--willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, that baby will starve. You do it out of love. Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong. You don't have to scourge yourself with a cat-o'-nine-tails to go to the baby. You go to the baby out of love for that particular baby. That's the same way you go to your desk. There's nothing freakish about it. Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do."

Annie Dillard. "To Fashion a Text." From Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Ed. Willaim Zinsser.

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 02:44:26 GMT

A Major Draft of the Book is Done

A friend of mine accused me of dropping off the planet, wondering when I would be back. I suppose it's true, that I dropped from cyberspace in order to get some work done. And I did get the work done. Hunting Grace is done. Or at least a major draft. It is in the hands of various readers even now, including the publisher, and we will see where we are shortly. Early personal reviews are positive, thought it is still early. Anjie was the first to read it. When I finally finished assembling all the pieces--the blank pages inserted so that copies would run correctly on both sides, Sara's journal entries, the dates, the front matter, etc.--I felt a surge of pure joy that was greater than anything I'd felt in a long, long time. I'm not sure what such a thrill means about the way I've ordered my life, but it was a sweet, sweet drink for a man who's been thirsty for awhile. Her response was gratifying as she rode the emotional roller coaster that is this part of the story. I worry about these characters as they bare their lives to the people who knew them in Ruin, as well as to new readers. The journey is not an easy one. Another thing I discovered was that I think I need to get on to writing the third book while the iron is hot, partially because those readers who have come to care deeply about the Mannings are going to want to know ASAP what happens next in their story. So I'm determined to get started within the next 30 days, and to not take the four and a half years it took me to do Hunting Grace. I'll let you know when the book is going to be published and when it will actually appear. Thank you for all your prayers as I went through the process of writing. May God do what He wants with this new book, and I hope it's that many, many people will take the journey with Cyrus and company. ...thought you'd like to know...

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 17:40:15 GMT

Is anyone there?

Yesterday, I wrote about looking for my own voice (and you looking for yours), and trusting both the voice and the God who gave it. But saying it like that, a question immediately follows, a question that a friend unknowingly placed in front of me this morning. It goes like this:

Trusting the voice and the God who gave it to do what?

faith in what

...You are...thank you...

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 16:42:59 GMT

The Concrete

Last week, I submitted a piece of writing to the Milton Center Writing Group at Seattle Pacific University, a pretty salty bunch of writers working weekly under the leadership of Greg Wolfe, editor of Image Magazine. The writing was a piece of the novel I'm working on concerning the further adventures of Cyrus Manning, the lead character in Leaving Ruin. The piece was one I was curious about, because I had written it in a style that was very removed from Cyrus' normal voice, and was trying to get at a sort of furious violence that often lies underneath the search for God, a violence we see too often expressed these days. What I learned from their strained, decidely cool response to the writing was nothing new really, but something that I needed to hear again. In fact, the concept I walked away from that session with has been forcing its way into my consciousness with the relentlessness of the jackhammers recently tearing up the concrete in my neighbor's back yard. Live in the concrete. Since graduate school, I have been accused of overintellectualizing things, thinking too much. And since I decided to attempt the writing life, I've been struggling over and over to commit to the concept that universals--which in the end, are what interests me--only come through the particulars. That the only real way to talk about abstractions such as love, freedom, sin, and God are through concrete particulars related to the stories of real human beings. And of course, the corollary to that is that it's the only way to live those universals, too. Again, our universals are discovered and revealed through our particular acts. That's just another way of saying "Faith without works is dead." Concrete means sensual, means paying attention to the reality in front of us, means observing without turning away. To see is the crux of the matter. I had the thought this morning that sometimes, in order to think a thought, you have to close your eyes. It's strikes me that the way of abstraction is to do just that...to close our eyes. Open the eyes of my heart, Lord...

Tue, 27 Sep 2005 16:12:30 GMT

Blasting Through the Writing Barriers

Today, I'm going to write. It's 7:55 a.m., it's a late start day with the kids still in bed. They don't have to be at school until 10:00. I woke up about an hour ago, and have been mouthing off to God for most of the time since. I say mouthing off--I mean complaining. Maybe He heard me, maybe He didn't (I think He did), but either way, I feel better. There seems to be a clarity in this moment, a lifting of the fog, and I am determined to get out some things onto the page or the screen that I'm thinking and working on down in my innards. Who knows, maybe 5000 words today. I also have to pay bills, ferry the kids around, communicate with a zillion people about the various projects in my life, hopefully get a few moments with Anjie at some point along the way, and as I go, use certain amounts of leftover energy and attention to make sure I don't eat everything in sight, including the massive amounts of leftover lasagne from Sunday's life group. But see, it's not all the busyness I complain to God about. I've been busy since the day I was born, it seems. The primary thing is that I used to not realize how corrupt the human heart can be on a simple, personal, everyday level. The lofty mountains of living God's love used to be out of sight, out of mind. But ever since I woke up to the fact that the love of God was a reality, needing to be poured out on the world through His people (that would include me), my lack of doing exactlly that (living out that love) is a pebble (more like a boulder) in my shoe. Being prone to self-absorption and navel-gazing anyway, there are stretches of time when I can see nothing but my inability to live the kind of life Jesus lived, and Paul's Romans 7 lament rolls over me with real force: "Who will deliver me from this body of death?" Of course, we know Paul's thrilling answer, but sometimes when I ask the question, there seems to be a huge pause. All that said, today I'm writing, going on with it. Breaking the silence, hoping to draw someone into a conversation about something that will change the face of the day for someone close to me. ...God bless your thinking and feeling today....

Thu, 25 Aug 2005 22:39:05 GMT

The Blank Screen

"Yesterday was a bad day." "Oh, yeah? What happened?" "Nothing." I've had this conversation with several people since yesterday, and it always strikes me as funny and appropriate for someone trying to do some sort of creative work. When something is stirring inside, yet it doesn't come out, it feels like a bad day. Yesterday I sat at my computer, staring at the screen for some six hours, typing a sentence here and there, then erasing it, piddling with a video game for five minutes, but there's no real relief there, then back at the sentence again, delete, delete, delete, and by 4:00 p.m., I was exhausted. Today, I got what I was working on yesterday out in about 2 hours. Ideas were there, coherence didn't seem like a miracle, but normal (assuming I had some, others will judge that), and I'm wondering what that block was yesterday. Probably just normal brooding, gestation, creation at work, etc. The fear of the blank page... Proverbial, and terrifying, just like they say...

Sun, 01 May 2005 16:00:09 GMT

May Day

Ever notice how the phrase "May Day" is both a call to dance and to disaster? There's a dilemma is the land of Cyrus Manning. Cyrus is the protagonist in the novel I'm working on, tentatively titled Hunting Grace. He and I are both trying to make major decisions concerning someone who has entered his life, a character insinuating herself into his deep imaginative life, and between the two of us, we are having trouble making sense of it. There is great delight in watching a world unfold, but frustration, too, when the answers get murky. Funny how that works in fiction just as it does in life. I find the same thing true in the play of mine currently in production at Taproot Theatre here in Seattle. Arthur: The Hunt creates a world in which swordplay is expected, and what you get instead is an attempt at psychology and family relations, which in turn creates questions for both actor and audience, questions I don't always have the answers to. What am I blogging about? I suppose what I'm battling just now is the courage to make certain kinds of artistic decisions, decisions based in risk-taking and breaking new ground (new ground for me, at least), decisions that are, in terms of my own life, high stakes. What can you do if you get it wrong? Tear it apart and start over, I suppose, but after two or three years of working on a thing, that particular labor becomes more and more difficult. Funny that we should pray for writers. But when we pray for them, what we're fighting for is a quality of spirit, of thought-life, that it have integrity, courage, and that wondrous mix of level-headedness and passion. It's so easy to fall off the boat in any number of directions, and in a world where distraction is the intent of millions of dollars of media, spirit-deep concentration--that world of flow where wisdom and character insight reveal themselves--can be hard to cultivate, hard to hang on to. If you know a writer, chances are they are facing imaginative high stakes decisions everyday. Why not pray for them, that they speak creative life just as God does. God help us...

Mon, 25 Apr 2005 17:30:47 GMT

White Oleander

Consilience

White Oleander

Atlantic Monthly

...I'm grateful.

Tue, 21 Dec 2004 20:39:24 GMT

Our River Now

Book of My Nights

Our River Now

Book of My Nights

Wow...

Mon, 20 Dec 2004 15:02:26 GMT

Vows of Stability III

3) I vow to write deeply.

Excellence is not the goal.

Truth is the goal.

Only Truth will last.

Sat, 11 Dec 2004 18:38:37 GMT

Vows of Stability II

SIDE NOTE: One of the more interesting tensions between the creative life and spiritual formation is the notion of "impulse control." Artists nurture, encourage, and protect their ability to respond to impulse in the heat of the creative moment, especially in the moment-to-moment creation of performance - actors, musicians, dancers, etc. To stay alive to the moment, after weeks of careful preparation, is paramount in getting to the riches of spirit artists long for. But the one of the chief notions of character development (read spiritual formation) in the human - wisdom literature from everywhere talks about this - is the notion of impulse control. I haven't seen much writing about this tension, except in the notion of the interplay between the creative and editing functions of the mind in the actual making of art. If someone knows of a writer who deals with this specifically, I'd love to see it.

I vow to cultivate stability.

I will work on the work for today...today...

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 18:28:46 GMT

Vows of Stability

I vow to attend.

I vow to come to the work, to show up, to attend my appointments. The work is my charge, my call, my talent given by the Master, and I will attend to it. This morning, this very morning, I will take up that charge and nurture it, cultivate it, send it into the world with care. I will recognize its nature, its unhurried pace of arrival, and I will wait quietly, diligently, persistently. Whether the work knocks on my door, or I knock at its door, I will hover near a door that opens both ways, and wait.

In waiting, I will apply muscular force. I will put one word, then another, pushing one sentence forward, then another. Unafraid of the inevitable end of writing, cessation, I will press on, emptying my reservoir of words. I will daily drain the well, begging God to fill it again tomorrow. It is on his watch I write, on his nickel, his talent. If he does not fill me here, I will be empty. But then, I will attend the emptiness, ...and write one more word.

Mon, 22 Nov 2004 20:50:51 GMT

Postmodern Poets

God

all

Brian McLaren says modernism creates postmoderns the way childhood eventually creates teenagers. It's a sort of hormonal process: swim long enough in the fluids of modernism, and suddenly, things have changed. Postmodernism is everywhere, and just possibly, (though I didn't want it to happen), my modernist childhood is over, and I'm finding myself in the awkward stage of the budding postmodernist. Here's a great essay by the wonderful poet Scott Cairns, articulating far better than I ever could the stirrings in me I'm struggling to respond to. He is welcoming "the return of the poetic", acknowledging postmodernism's role in bringing it about. Image Unto Likeness: The Body Breathing Again "The next step...is the making of new poems..."

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 20:20:01 GMT

In Passing...

("gloom, despair, and agony on me...")

In Passing

Is blogging about books something of a cybernetic oxymoron?

Sat, 06 Nov 2004 16:55:51 GMT

Tell it slant...

Emily Dickinson

Another time, I'll blog about the Milton Center Writer's Group that I'm taking part in, meeting on Friday afternoons at Seattle Pacific University, which is where I heard this little phrase, Tell it slant. Some describe life as a process of remembering what you didn't know you forgot, and when I heard tell it slant, it was as if a bell rang in my head, alerting me once again to the power of metaphor and storytelling. We were discussing a writer's first chapter of a new novel, wondering if her subject matter might be better served with an indirect approach. And that's when Greg Wolfe mentioned the Dickinson phrase that I've been ruminating on ever since. Tell it slant. I also like the Truth must dazzle gradually. Reminds me of C.S. Lewis' phrase the weight of glory. At Act One: Writing for Hollywood, we were constantly reminded that writing is about telling the truth. Sportswriter Red Smith said "Writing is easy--all you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein." Actors hear the same thing, and I wondered for years what that really meant. If art--writing, acting, singing--is not the equivalent of life, but a reordered something else, then it must by definition approach truth obliquely, circuitously, slant. There is a key here to much Evangelical failure in the arts. We have no faith in the slant of metaphor, suspicious that slant means spin, watering down the gospel, being obtuse, or at worst, flat lying. But here Dickinson is talking about the brilliance of truth, pointing out what Jesus obviously demonstrated as he taught the people of Israel by parable. We are unable to accept glory all at once (Moses hid his face, everybody else just falls to the ground face first), but need to be brought round to it through a journey, a journey most often taken in art through metaphor and story. Perhaps there is a key here to the postmodern mind and its lack of faith in linear thought: it's not so much that truth can't be known, but it's knowing is best served by slant approaches. So instead of "Get over yourself and stop sinning," (sure, we need to do that, true enough), C.S. Lewis calls to us and says, "You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness." As we work, God help us do just that--weave the strongest spells of grace and faith, telling all the truth, but telling it slant...

Fri, 29 Oct 2004 00:40:54 GMT

Deep Joy, Deep Hunger... [Macro error: Can't find a sub-table named "radioResponder".] On days when I'm stumped for words, if I sit quietly, waiting, invariably words arrive--just not the ones I was hoping for. Today, trying to push my little screenplay along, I kept getting sideswiped by thoughts of meaning and purpose, as if someone was at my shoulder prodding me to look again, look again. Here's the Frederick Buechner quote that's been dogging me lately (to say that I'd been brooooding over it wouldn't be true, but it's been pesky, showing up randomly several times a week):

"The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC

Today, the gladness. Tomorrow, the deep hunger. Listen to this, a snatch of sermon from the great 19th century preacher Charles Spurgeon:

of being good;

I write, act, direct, and teach not because they are pleasurable, but because it is there that I first discovered, and continue to touch, the deep joy Buechner is referring to. It is very close to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

This doesn't imply that we creators do so just for the fun of it, for the sheer pleasure of it. Csikszentmihalyi says these are not the moments of ease and fun, but the moments when "a person's body or mind is stretched to the limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." Buechner's notion is that God has supplied us with the psychic energy and inclination to do the very work he is calling us to, revealing our truest nature even as he pour his life through us to accomplish his goals. (That begs the question of denial, but it's the false impulse we must deny, not the true.) Even as God uses us to meet the needs of those he loves and is calling to himself, he is at the same time opening our own hearts to see and live out the essence of being he envisioned when he formed us. Don't ignore the deep joy...

Wed, 27 Oct 2004 20:45:51 GMT

Breaking the Silence... In a conversation this morning with a writer-to-be new friend of mine, he wondered why he should write, why I write, why any of us should "break the silence of the universe." Why does this need to be told, he wondered, introducing me to several of his stories, each full of worthy characters and themes. He was responding in some degree to my oft-quoted Annie Dillard-ism that nobody really cares if you write or not, that the universe will get along nicely with or without the tome you're currently working on. I wish I could report that I gave him a basketful of upbeat reasons to rush home and dash out his narratives, but the truth is I didn't. What are the reasons? It's hard to say. An idea teases us, and we launch into as many wherefores as we can stand, from the idealistic (I'm changing the culture!) to the pragmatic (I'm buying a house!) to the prideful (I'm winning an Oscar!) to the religious (I'm being called!). But in the end, who can say why we stir, why we drag over to the computer, type out a word or two, hoping to get to the end of the sentence, the paragraph--the novel, for heaven's sake? The reasons to tear into the story may be legion, but the only one that really matters is the one that gets our fannies into the chair to actually put the words down. I find that from day to day, that one reason changes. Sometimes it's my family, the needs they have, both current and future. Sometimes it's a note from an obscure reader of Leaving Ruin ("Thank you for investing your heart and soul in your writing. Your labor of love has been a word of grace and hope to me." -- got that one a couple of weeks ago...). Other times it's a looming deadline and the promise of a paycheck. Every once in a while, it's sheer grace, some bit of prose showing up like a perfect fall day, asking no more of me than to simply catch it as it goes by. And then there are those days, like the last couple, when no reason seems quite compelling enough, and I drag my backside to the chair (why do I have trouble joining in the current, constant use of the word "butt"?), and nothing really happens. I click here and there, and hours pass, and I slink away from my job, having done nothing but spit out some bleak words that are far more reflective of my mood that the state of things (as I am fond of saying). But in the end, the silence of the universe is worth breaking. Is there anything as loud as the frank "thereness" of it all? Jesus said if the children of Israel stopped praising him, the rocks would cry out. And if the rocks (not to mention the mountains and seas) can't keep quiet, why should we? Back to the tomes...

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 06:02:56 GMT

...what story would you tell? An agent asked me that question once, hoping it would help focus me toward the one project that would make a difference. Now here's a question: why is it that the story that came to mind in an instant (and it moved me to just think of its completion) is not a story that's anywhere on my list of current projects? Some day... But for now, Arthur: The Hunt is about undergo a dramatic and frenetic transformation. As it stands, both versions of the story as I've written them are predicated on a distortion of almost every telling of the Arthur and his half-sister Morgan/Morgause myth I've come across. (I guess I just thought my way was cool...) That distortion is that in Arthur: The Hunt they meet by chance and fall in love, producing the child that will eventually bring down the kingdom, and the tragedy is that they discover the blood relationship too late. But that approach ignores some of the deeper aspects of human nature that Morgan's eventual enmity with Arthur entails. Sure, it makes for a romantic story, and I'll keep lots of romance, but I've come to the conviction that Morgan must know who Arthur is from the beginning, which of course, changes everything. The trick is to dive deeply into the family triangle that is Emrys (Merlin), Morgan, and Arthur, exploring how seeds are planted in their early decisions concerning each other for the eventual unraveling of Britain. I'll be performing Leaving Ruin at Pacific Theatre in Vancouver, BC this week--Ron Reed's place. It's a small intimate house, and from what I hear, they've done some great work in creating a world for Cyrus Manning. An extended run should be tons of fun, especially since over the last two weeks, Karen Lund has helped me spiff up the show. For those of you who've seen it, we're taking out the epilogue in a way that finally makes sense to me. We'll see... And in the midst of that, a character by the name of Layne Sorenson Friar Wright is collaring me, demanding a hearing. She's the protagonist in my film treatment, due in less than a week at the Act One: Writing for Hollywood headquarters. Okay, okay...somebody tell Layne I'll get her story told...

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 03:38:34 GMT

Climbing Small Hills Posted on www.jberryman.com on June 30, 2004. Trying to write an assignment for ACT ONE for screenwriting... Sitting here, staring at a blank screen, trying to write a two-page visual scene (no dialogue) of the moment in which a young mother realizes she's lost her child in the midst of a huge parade. Why am I resistant to this exercise? It is the final exercise in preparation for the class. I'm getting coffee, working on the web site, blogging here...this is the moment in the writer's process that makes all the difference. Regardless of feeling state, bow the neck and pound it out. Watch the scene in the mind...details...write what you see... Now three hours later, at the end of a first draft. Not too unhappy with it, though I'm sure its rife with cliche. Will rewrite a fair amount before next Monday, I'm sure. But the point is this: felt lousy starting, the mind began to latch onto the imaginative images, and after that, here it comes. Now, there is something rather than nothing, and a small hill has been climbed. Perhaps that's all it means to get stronger...the climbing of small hills daily.

Wed, 25 Aug 2004 18:18:48 GMT

Out of the Box: Indie Film Directors Invade the TV Screen [Village Voice]

At Act One: Writing for Hollywood, Dean Batali (That 70's show) and others said the best writing is happening in television. Here's an article in support of that thesis.