Archives for March 2024

Editor’s Notebook: “On Finding & Following Your North Star”

March 2024

The writing god looking out for me is a lesser one, but that’s how I like it, the right god matched to size of ambition. I never wanted to sell a big book or be invited to a studio, so I don’t mind that my writing god needs a haircut and should work out more. She shows up when I really need her, shouting at me through her bullhorn. Right now she’s shouting about North Stars, so you have to hear about that, too.

In the last week, I’ve had three conversations with writers about how to approach their material. These conversations all led to the same place—a place I have been myself a few times. Most recently, ahem, these last couple of months, which is why I know these talks were arranged by my writing god, who clearly looks after my friends, too.

Again I find myself having to talk about being stuck and then how to get unstuck. It’s an evergreen topic for us writers, isn’t it?

Well, the first writer friend wasn’t stuck. She’s older and wiser and (much) tougher than I, and, from what I can tell, doesn’t really believe in “stuck.” Sometimes she writes very quickly, sometimes very slowly. Always she’s feeling her way. Because she’s a gifted poet who translates emotion and psychic energy into vibrant language that takes my breath away, I would be a fool to argue with her methods, so different from my own intensive, analytic, methodical pursuit of meaning. No, she isn’t stuck. She’s just moving very, very slowly right now, in an unfinished chapter of her memoir, and as we talked about why, I said something like, “I see why this piece is taking some time. Because it’s not clear, yet, why your North Star is leading you here.” She wanted to know what I meant by that.

My second writer friend is as stuck as any writer I have ever known. She doesn’t even like to talk about her project because it’s painful to admit how stuck she is, so we tend to talk around it. In this recent conversation we argued about what subgenre her unwritten book falls into; before that, we auditioned titles for it; on several occasions we have scanned the marketplace for anything like what she has proposed to write (there is nothing, her book idea is unique, I beg her (mostly silently) to please, please push past that first, beautiful chapter). As we discussed subgenre, I mentioned that our arguments are moot, really, because her North Star will determine subgenre. “What does that mean?” she asked, in the same tense voice she uses for all of these sideways conversations about the writing she’s not doing.

The third conversation was the one that pushed this notion of the “North Star” so firmly into the front of my mind, relieving the exhausted lesser writing god from duty. This writer friend asked me for feedback on how she should approach the next chapter of her memoir. She was flummoxed both about structure and content. Should she include the material about the thing that happened when she was twelve? If so, should she do it in a stand-alone chapter, or weave in a flashback, or…?

In reply to these questions, I asked her to remind me of what, precisely, her memoir is about, and why she feels compelled to write it. We had been talking for more than thirty minutes by then, our Zoom windows thick with opinions and reassurances and rambling digressions. Now we sat in silence while she looked away and then back at the camera and then away again. “It’s about… hmm. I’m compelled to write this book because… hmm.”

We all know about the elevator pitch. You distill your book down to its essence because no one, least of all an agent, is going to listen to a three-minute monologue about your novel or memoir. Certainly no one can market a book that can’t be described in one or two compelling sentences. But forget marketing, we’re nowhere close to marketing our unfinished books. Can you write your book—can you write it well—if you can’t describe what you believe you’re doing, every time you show up to the page, in one or two compelling sentences?

Those sentences might change. Your North Star might move a bit to the right. But you have to have one to keep you on the path. To know whether the current chapter you’re working on is carrying you off, away from view of it, and maybe it’s time to recalibrate; to put all that good material aside for another day and focus, instead, on that thing your mother said that never made sense but clearly speaks to the question, according to your North Star, this book is answering. Did I say your North Star? I meant mine.

I’m writing my current book, narrative nonfiction with lots of woven-in memoir, to explain why I was so dismayed by something that happened to somebody else. I should have been disgusted, outraged, moved to action, and I was. But I also lost sleep; had to sneak away to the bathroom at work to cry; could hardly think, for weeks, about anything else. This is not normal, I kept telling myself. This makes no sense. Except, of course, it does. The body doesn’t lie, so it has to make some kind of sense. My North Star tells me to make meaning of those strange weeks.

My friend who’s never stuck but sometimes writes very slowly, is figuring out, through the writing, whether this current chapter is taking her away, or just charting a new path toward, her North Star. The friend who can’t get past her first chapter is resisting the North Star that revealed itself in that material; if I or someone else or her own still, small voice can get her to see that, she’ll write a fantastic book. When my friend on Zoom finally found her words again and stumbled through why she thinks she’s compelled to write this memoir, and then realized, no, that’s not it, really… I asked her more questions, she went deeper, and in the end she began to glimpse her North Star, which, of course, revealed the way to take on that next chapter.

I’m no kind of god and I have no bullhorn, just this tiny space in the vast Internet, and, this instant, in your gigantic creative brain. Just pretend it’s no accident you’re reading this and let me ask: What is your North Star?

You’re knee-deep in a project you don’t know how to finish or you do know but lately it isn’t pleasing you. Have you considered the possibility that you have forgotten to take into account your North Star? Or that you haven’t fashioned one, yet? Or that the writing is demanding that you replace the one you’ve been following with a new one?

Maybe you haven’t started the project you keep thinking about. What are you waiting for? The right North Star?

From my co-editor, Cheryl, who puts her own “North Star practice” so beautifully (the poets, they can’t be stopped):

My North Star is the project title and/or an epigraph I have placed at the beginning of the work, often even before the project has taken shape. Even if the title changes, as it did with my current project, it serves as a reference point, a summation, a guiding idea that each individual poem speaks to in some way, however slight. The epigraph, which can also change, serves a similar purpose, providing me with another perspective on my material. And it’s affirming. It says, You have made a decision. You have a vision. You know where you’re going. I know where I’m going, I just don’t know how to get there, yet, and I won’t know I’m there until I reach it. But isn’t that the fun?

And now from our co-editor Suzanne, with a picture for us:

When I finished [her essay collection] Small Off Things and started thinking about my next project, a friend gave me a beautiful stained glass star and called it my North Star. It’s a physical representation on my desk that somehow soothes me as I work on difficult material.

Now, about my own recent struggle….

If you’re writing nonfiction, Truth is always crafted into the lines and light of your North Star, and it’s the part of mine that both keeps me on the path and gets me stuck. Did I not mention that sometimes your North Star, with its insistent shining and blinking, can demand you into a place of stillness? I was made to tell fictional stories, so my current approach to my nonfiction material is both temporary and often feels like fresh hell.

Truth is controlling and rude and ungovernable, and, sometimes, on top of all that, it’s boring. Down with truth, up with what is malleable and flirty and obedient and delightful. I want to remake dialogue, eliminate characters, change endings. But I can’t.

I look at my North Star and shuffle my feet. I fiddle with the tools of fiction even though I know I can’t use them. I get petulant and lazy and refuse to unearth the compelling from the boring. I don’t need to remake anything, I just need to work harder, I know this, how many times do I have to re-learn it?

Eventually, thanks to a small, lesser god, something happens, when I’m weak and stuck, to make me strong. This time it was three conversations with writer friends, all reminding me to re-orient myself to the search for a real-life answer to a real-life question.

Happy writing. If you’re not writing, best wishes as you look up, recalibrate, and get moving.

—Claire Guyton