Swerve and Vanish

What is vocabulary for?

2012-01-27T09:22:00.000-08:00

Back in the day, when there were no iPads and we did our homework on the backs of shovels using lumps of coal (boy, did teachers hate grading papers then), we once had to do the following assignment: Write a story about something you did yesterday. Then rewrite it, replacing as many "little" words as possible with "bigger" words. This was an exercise in stretching our vocabularies. I can't remember what grade this was, possibly third, or maybe fifth (it couldn't have been fourth, as I had a particularly memorable and colorful--OK, frightening--teacher that year, so I would remember that). Anyway, I distinctly recall hearing another kid reading one of her improved sentences, which came out: "My friend and I purchased each other Christmas gifts." I have remembered this sentence all these years, because of how it grated on my pedantic little ears. What, I silently wondered, was wrong with "bought"? Swapping it out for "purchased" made no useful difference in meaning, and it wrecked the grammar of the sentence besides. But the kid had done the assignment correctly, and so was praised.

Now, I'm not saying this exercise was a terrible idea--it was just an exercise, and even a rather inventive one. But it did convey the idea that the purpose of using "big" words (two syllables are better than one!) was simply to sound more impressive, more educated. I honestly think that this is still what most students believe when they are made to study "vocabulary" for various tests. I once worked on a vocabulary CD-ROM whose selling point was that it spat words randomly at the user, and he or she racked up points by selecting the correct meaning for each one before time ran out. Now, it isn't news that context makes it a whole lot easier to learn new words, and that a richer vocabulary develops most efficiently, and least painfully, through extensive reading. But the question still remains: Apart from getting through all those damned tests, is the point of improving one's vocabulary really just to sound educated? To impress potential employers and mates with your great big verbal display?

A much better reason--which only occurred to me rather recently--is that language is a set of tools. The more words you have at your disposal, the greater the precision of those tools. If you know only the word "buy," you have a hammer, and you have to use it on everything from a rock to a Ming vase. If you know "buy," "purchase," "acquire," "obtain," etc.--and understand the subtle differences they make in different contexts--you have a scalpel, or a laser beam, or a pair of tweezers, or a brush. Words are for finding and expressing meaning in the most accurate way possible. They're for refinement. A large vocabulary gives you not only options, but a sense that there are options. Maybe you can't even think of the right word immediately--but knowing that it, or at least something close to it, exists will make you pause and work on that particular thought or sentence, until it says what you need it to say. The thought, the sentence, and civilization itself are all better for that effort.

The Hound of the Baskervilles: Closing Off Possibilities

2012-01-25T08:58:00.000-08:00

In this week's reading of Hound, I'd like to look at a technique that is probably especially important to mystery writers. Then again, aren't all works of fiction mysteries in some way? The questions, in the end, are the same: What happened in the past? What is going to happen? How will the characters understand what happened, and how will we?

Also, I'll wager that all fiction writers, especially novelists, have run into the problem of having seemingly too many options to choose from. At a certain point in the writing process, you start to realize that the story could go, well, a thousand different ways. How do you know which one is right? Having experienced this a ton of times myself, I'll say that the only solution is just to plunge ahead through the weeds until you crash into a brick wall, then backtrack to the fork in the road and try another branch. (How's that for an overgrown thicket of cliches?) Otherwise, your fate may be paralysis.

Having eventually chosen a path, however, you will still have to go back and clear it for your readers in the revision process. That is, you have to make sure your reader--while possibly seeing all the different forks in the road that you could have taken--understands why the path you took is the right one. You can't leave a bunch of loopholes open in the plot, or in your characters' motivations, which would immediately allow your protagonist to solve the problem easily--and bring the story to a dead halt. It's the old "why doesn't someone just kill Ahab?" question, which you have to resolve in some convincing way.

In the early going of Hound, Conan Doyle shows us one way to block off possible avenues for solving the mystery too early. Sir Henry Baskerville, heir to the Baskerville estate and possibly to its giant, slavering devil-dog, has just arrived in London, where he receives this immortal message: "As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor." All but one of the words, "moor," were clipped from a newspaper and pasted onto a piece of paper. Holmes, through his obsessive knowledge of fonts, determines that the newspaper was yesterday's Times. He also determines that the letter was created in a hotel room, because the word "moor" (the only one that did not appear in the paper, so had to be written by hand), is in the kind of dried-out ink you'd only find in a hotel room. (Don't you hate that?)

So, to find out who sent the note, Holmes pays a kid to go to every hotel in the area and ask to see yesterday's trash--looking for a Times with words cut out of it. Meanwhile, he and Watson have also spotted a mysterious bearded man following Baskerville in a cab, and Sir Henry suggests it might be Barrymore, the butler of Baskerville Hall. Holmes sends a telegram addressed to Barrymore there, to see if he's home. Soon:

Just before dinner two telegrams were handed in. The first ran:—

"Have just heard that Barrymore is at the Hall.—BASKERVILLE."The second:—

"Visited twenty-three hotels as directed, but sorry, to reportunable to trace cut sheet of Times.—CARTWRIGHT."

"There go two of my threads, Watson. There is nothing morestimulating than a case where everything goes against you. Wemust cast round for another scent."

Holmes is right; there is nothing more stimulating than a case (or a story) where everything goes against you. Obstacles are mounting, increasing the challenge to Holmes, and thus allowing the story to move onward and upward. The key point is that the obstacles mount plausibly: without slowing the story down too much, Conan Doyle shows Holmes addressing two clear paths to solving the case, and being convincingly thwarted by each one. Then, literally in the next line, a third path opens up:

"We have still the cabman who drove the spy."

"Exactly. I have wired to get his name and address from theOfficial Registry. I should not be surprised if this were ananswer to my question."

The ring at the bell proved to be something even moresatisfactory than an answer, however, for the door opened and arough-looking fellow entered who was evidently the man himself.

"I got a message from the head office that a gent at this addresshad been inquiring for 2704," said he. "I've driven my cab thisseven years and never a word of complaint. I came here straightfrom the Yard to ask you to your face what you had against me."

The relative ease of contacting the cabman would have been really annoying, if Conan Doyle had not preceded it with the failed efforts at locating the newspaper and identifying Barrymore. The cabman's appearance still seems a little convenient, but now we suspect whatever information he tells us will not be as helpful or as straightforward as it might otherwise seem. The chapter is called "Three Broken Threads," after all, and Holmes has just said that everything is going against him in this case. The author has trained us to read his story as Holmes would: with enthusiastic suspicion.

We shall see...

Parsnip, black-eyed pea, kale, and barley stew

2012-01-19T11:42:00.000-08:00

So this blog is "mostly about fiction and writing," but it is sometimes about food and cooking. Especially vegan food and cooking. And cooking is like writing, right? It definitely is the way I go about it: 1) Open vegetable drawer (analogous to brain and/or journal). 2) Say: Jeez, I gotta use up these things before they rot (analogous to ideas/fading youth/ambition). 3) Wonder/worry/chew nails/pace. 4) Put stuff together and see what happens.

The best guidebook ever for the above approach to cooking is Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. I recommend ordering yourself a copy and then spending an afternoon just paging through it. The only downside to this otherwise delightful and enlightening experience is that the book weighs about 50 pounds, which precludes my favorite reading style of lying on my back and resting the book on my stomach. It will crush you. Anyway, for those not familiar with Bittman's deal, this is less a cookbook in the ordinary sense (although there are recipes), and more a giant permission slip to try new ingredients, or use common ingredients in new ways. He's not big on precision; instructions tend toward "throw in some more x if it looks like there isn't enough," and the repeated injunction "don't worry."

My own recent stroll through the book brought two neglected items to my attention, barley and parsnips. The former is a great way to add starch/bulk to soup or stew, without it getting all huge and slimy, as pasta does. The latter add a rather exotic, sweet taste to the proceedings--a nice alternative to carrots.

With those ingredients, a bunch of rapidly expiring dino kale, and a bag of black-eyed peas on hand, I concocted the following, and it is really damn good. Especially on a cold evening...

Parsnip, black-eyed pea, kale, and barley stew

A couple tbsp of olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
4 medium parsnips, peeled and diced (remove woody core if necessary)
1 cup dried black-eyed peas or 1 can cooked
1 bunch dino kale or other green, chopped and tough ribs removed
1/3 cup pearled barley
1 28-oz can crushed or diced tomatoes
4 cups water or vegetable stock
Salt and pepper to taste

Saute chopped onion in olive oil till transparent. Add parsnips, and cook until both onion and parsnips begin to brown. Add everything else (note: if you are using canned black-eyed peas, don't add until about 15 minutes before the stew is done). Bring to boil, reduce heat, and partially cover. Simmer for about an hour, till beans and barley are soft.

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The Hound of the Baskervilles: Establishing Character through Dialog II

2012-01-17T11:59:00.000-08:00

Moving slowly through Hound, I am discovering, Holmes-like, that there is much to discover. Last time I wrote about how the early dialog between Holmes and Watson quickly established the nuances of their relationship, and thus their characters. Now let's take a look at the spoken language of the first guest-star, one James Mortimer:

"Glad to meet you, sir. I have heard your name mentioned inconnection with that of your friend. You interest me very much,Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull orsuch well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have anyobjection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? Acast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, wouldbe an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not myintention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull."

To which Holmes astutely responds:

"You arean enthusiast in your line of thought, I perceive, sir, as I amin mine," said he. "I observe from your forefinger that you makeyour own cigarettes. Have no hesitation in lighting one."

Holmes helps the reader feel like a smartie here, by stating the obvious: Mortimer is an "enthusiast" (Watson prefers the term "strange")--an obsessive, in other words.

This leads me to the point of this week's reading. On a web site I recently visited, one agent said she particularly looks for stories in which the dialog is vivid and distinctive: that is, all the characters should not sound the same. I think this aspect of dialog-writing often gets overlooked; we get hung up on what the characters are saying, and making sure they say it in the least boring way possible. But, although all these guys all come from a single source--the author's brain--they must appear to reflect their own separate and distinctive development as human beings. For example, Mortimer is a phrenology nut--which means his language is peppered with the language of his profession, and also reflects the rhythms of obsession: his stated attempt not to be "fulsome" suggests he's been criticized for ranting on and on about skulls before, but his preemptive apologies only reveal his interest more strongly.

In other words, to be convincing and distinctive, characters need to use language in ways that reflect their particular physical and emotional circumstances. A doctor is going to use precise anatomical language, which means that if we are creating a doctor character, we have to become familiar with such language and the ways in which that particular doctor would deploy it. She might speak in a notably detached way about, say, the progress of cancer in a lung. Or, for a different effect, she might speak in peculiarly loving detail about it, unsettling her interlocutors and readers. Or she might convey an unusual capacity for empathy by constantly checking to see if her patient understands her terms. The point is, because the doctor is this particular doctor, she isn't going to sound like that other doctor over there. Mortimer and Watson are both men of science (Mortimer says he's a mere "dabbler,") but they don't talk the same way. On the other hand, neither Mortimer nor Watson is going to use a term like "that lumpy thingie on your head"; their scientific backgrounds enable them to know the contemporary, technical language for it.

See what I mean? This is not to say you should lard up your characters' dialog with "distinctive" (i.e. distracting) verbal tics and professional jargon. But it is worth thinking about different people you know in real life, and how they all express themselves a little differently, even if they're in the same profession. And if they're from different professions and backgrounds, their speech should differ accordingly, if still subtly. Finally, speech reflects temperament. If someone's impatient, don't just tell us that: have him speak impatiently.

Writing as meditation

2012-01-10T12:43:00.000-08:00

At one time I had something like a real meditation practice. That has not been the case for awhile now, largely because I can't figure out how to meditate with cats either a) climbing on me or b) hurling themselves at the closed door. No, really: this is a good excuse.

At any rate, I am now applying meditation techniques to my writing. For the last several weeks I have just not felt good about anything I've written, which has led me to put whatever creative energy I have into thinking up excuses for why I don't have to write today. The bottom line is, I don't want to write if it's going to suck, and there seems to be a better than even chance these days that it will.

So what I've decided to do is institute my own personal NaNoWriMo, except without, necessarily, the "No(vel)" part. From now till the end of January, I am going to write 1,000 words per day which are nominally related to the story idea I am currently least repelled by. I am not going to craft my sentences or delete sections that seem irrelevant, and above all I am not going to pounce on the thing and strangle the life out of it by declaring: Aha! I know what this is about! This is definitely a novel/novella/short story, from the point of view of the alien baby, and there's a big shoot-em-up at the end! There is to be no, repeat, NO anticipation.

This is related to the technique in Insight Meditation in which you don't try to stop yourself from thinking, but rather notice the fact that you are thinking, without pursuing any particular thought. You notice, and then return to the breath, as they say. So I notice the anticipation (This is a novel! I know it! Ooh, I can really build on that scene!) but make no commitments to it. I just go back to churning out words.The words are the breath.

Like meditation, this process sometimes really feels like crap. But I have become aware of how little tolerance I have both for writing poorly, and for not knowing what I am doing--that is, not being able to anticipate the outcome. In the past, it seems like I have been able to work around this and get stuff done anyway, but now, for whatever reason, this is not so. Therefore I am resorting to the kinds of writing advice one always gets in beginning writing classes, and which I have generally scorned.

I really don't know what will happen, but at least I'm writing.

The Hound of the Baskervilles: Establishing Character through Dialog

2012-01-05T11:21:00.000-08:00

So it's the new year, and I resolve to be less lame. Which means that, among other endeavors, I am going to resume the Borrowed Fire series on this blog. In this series, I read works of classic literature, all available on Project Gutenberg, in order to see what contemporary writers like me can learn from them. So far it's been all dead white guys--a consequence, though not a necessity, of the whole public-domain thing, but they still have one or two things they might teach us. And since we've had our vampire (a super-dead white guy), we must now turn to werewolves, or potential werewolves, or at least large dogs, and so let us dive into The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!

Before we begin, I should mention that I had never read a word of Conan Doyle before about an hour ago. However, I have recently become obsessed with detective stories, spy stories, and stories of deduction in general, and have spent spent many hours watching both Jeremy Brett and Benedict Cumberbatch portray Sherlock Holmes. I also just saw the first Robert Downey, Jr. version on a plane, and it was better than I expected, but there was little attempt to make the character Holmes-like, at least as I have come to understand him. Jude Law's Watson is another matter, as today's rumination will, I think, bring out. Anyway, what I wish to stress here is that I'm coming to this novel with a bunch of pre-set expectations and at least some general knowledge about the characters--as is likely true of just about everyone who's had any contact with Western culture. Sherlock is an icon, on a par with, I dunno, Santa Claus, and Watson is his humble sidekick and sounding board.

But what is that genius-sidekick relationship actually like? Well, it's quite nuanced. Hound starts off with Holmes challenging Watson to use his "system" to deduce as much as possible about the owner of a walking stick, which has been left behind in their apartment. Watson gamely offers that it likely belongs to a country doctor, and deduces from the inscription on the stick that it was given to the doctor by a hunting club. Holmes then bathes Watson in backhanded compliments:

"Really, Watson, you excel yourself," said Holmes, pushing backhis chair and lighting a cigarette. "I am bound to say that inall the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my ownsmall achievements you have habitually underrated your ownabilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but youare a conductor of light. Some people without possessing geniushave a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dearfellow, that I am very much in your debt."

He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his wordsgave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by hisindifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I hadmade to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to thinkthat I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a waywhich earned his approval. He now took the stick from my handsand examined it for a few minutes with his naked eyes. Then withan expression of interest he laid down his cigarette, andcarrying the cane to the window, he looked over it again with aconvex lens.

"Interesting, though elementary," said he as he returned to hisfavourite corner of the settee. "There are certainly one or twoindications upon the stick. It gives us the basis for severaldeductions."

"Has anything escaped me?" I asked with some self-importance. "Itrust that there is nothing of consequence which I haveoverlooked?"

"I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions wereerroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to befrank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guidedtowards the truth. Not that you are entirely wrong in thisinstance. The man is certainly a country practitioner. And hewalks a good deal."

In this exchange, Conan Doyle conveys the light S/M dynamic that has clearly been going on between these two for some time. Watson, habitually humble, is embarrassed to admit to us, his readers, that Holmes's words give him "keen pleasure," especially in light of his usual "indifference to my admiration." He strongly desires Holmes's approval, and seems further driven to seek it the more Holmes dismisses him. Of course this means that he can't, or won't, listen to closely to what Holmes is actually saying to him, which is more along the lines of "thank you for being such an idiot; if you were smarter, I couldn't use you." In fact, I myself was a little caught up in rooting for Watson to receive some genuine praise from his hero; it wasn't until Holmes announced that most of Watson's conclusions were "erroneous" that I went back and marveled at the blithe condescension of Holmes's compliments. Watson is a little stung, and seeks reassurance, which Holmes rather patronizingly gives him:

"Then I was right."

"To that extent."

"But that was all."

"No, no, my dear Watson, not all—by no means all. I wouldsuggest, for example, that a presentation to a doctor is morelikely to come from a hospital than from a hunt, and that whenthe initials 'C.C.' are placed before that hospital the words'Charing Cross' very naturally suggest themselves."

So Watson, his head duly patted, is back in line, ready to be slapped down again. We've got some serious co-dependence issues here. But this is precisely what makes these characters more than just a smart guy and the admirer of the smart guy. Watson makes an especially poignant stand-in for us readers. We see that the admirer's admiration, while genuine, also costs him emotionally; in this, we feel for him, because admiration is rarely pure, or purely rewarding, in real life. Watson is the unrequited lover, hurt by Holmes repeatedly but unable to quit him. This is an interesting analogy for readers of fiction generally. Like Watson, perhaps we, too, want something from literary characters--love, or at least acknowledgment--that they are utterly incapable of giving us. We are so close to them, yet they elude us in the end.

Through this early dialog, Conan Doyle has given us an emotional investment in the mystery that we'd otherwise be lacking. Why should we care, right from the beginning, about the provenance of this walking stick? Because of Watson's--and Holmes's--own personal investments in knowing, around which their whole relationship is structured. This relationship raises and complicates the emotional stakes of deduction, which would otherwise be a purely intellectual exercise.

Oh, about Jude Law as Watson. Partly because he's just too gorgeous to play it otherwise, Law eschews the fond, slightly doddering exasperation of other Watsons. He's sharp, witty, and gets seriously pissed at Holmes--rightly raising the question of why he sticks with him.

What art is for: yet another explanation

2012-01-03T16:48:00.000-08:00

Reading Adam Hochschild's review of Laurent Dubois's new book, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, in the NYT Book Review, I was drawn to these lines: "American officials declared, accurately enough, that the Haitian government was in bad shape and needed reform. But as the troops on the ground discovered, like their counterparts in Iraq and Afghanistan, no one likes to be reformed at the point of a foreigner’s gun."

We've all read sentences like that last one hundreds of times in the past, oh, ten years, right? The point seems simple enough, and yet, as stark as that reality is, the failure of huge numbers of policy makers to understand it is more so. This problem goes beyond the well-known failures to become familiar with the invadee's language, history, culture, religion, etc., though these are encompassed by the overall problem: the failure of imagination itself. In Haiti as in other misadventures, invading powers could not--or would not--imagine what they might do if some other country tried to impose its values on them by force, even if they agreed with some or most of those values.

In literature classes I've taught over the years, we've often discussed the role of fiction in fostering empathy. In fiction, we are given direct insight into the minds of other people, albeit fictional people, a position we are absolutely denied in real life. (In fact, even in nonfiction works in which the author tries to reconstruct the thoughts of, say, George Washington, that Washington is necessarily fictional, because we cannot know the real thoughts of the real Washington.) Martha Nussbaum, for one, has argued that this experience of putting oneself in the place of another (or another in the place of oneself, maybe) transfers to real life: for Nussbaum reading fiction, at least certain realistic kinds of fiction like Dickens's, makes us more empathic, i.e. better.

Personally I would not go that far. In my experience, it is possible to voraciously read the most refined literary fiction while remaining an asshole. And I don't think reading Hard Times would have done anything for all those who jittered with anticipation to invade Iraq; it would have fallen on blind eyes, as it were. Something else is involved in making that leap, in having both the ability and the desire to make that leap. But this thought did occur to me: if nothing else, the existence of fiction and other forms of art remind us of the importance of the leap--that is, of imagination. Where imagination is valued--widely praised, engaged in, and made available in the richest possible variety of forms--the leap is valued. Trying to picture what it is like to be someone else, even someone not obviously similar to oneself, will come easier. Will seem like a more obvious thing to do. Will not seem silly or beside the point in deciding what to do and how to live.

So bring on the art--art we hate, art we love, art we aren't sure about. The more the better.

The author as enforcer

2011-12-16T10:45:00.000-08:00

How about another Franzen Friday? Well, why not? I mean, the poor guy hardly gets any attention anymore. Having finished Freedom, and mostly* enjoyed it immensely, I moseyed over to the Paris Review to read the interview with Franzen from last winter.

What I find comforting about this interview is that Franzen's concerns about fiction seem closely aligned to my own, which means that I, too, will someday reach the same pinnacle of fame and success on which he is now ambivalently ensconced! OK, probably not. But I can learn from his trajectory. For instance, like my own, a lot of Franzen's early works grew out of his engagement with science fiction. And this fondness for big ideas, or "systems," to use his term, meant that his characters were created to serve the system. Now, he says, it's the other way around: any "system" that's apparent in the novel is there to serve the characters. However, he still has to remind himself every time to start with character; his tendency, even now, is to start with the system, and he has to learn "the hard way" not to do that.

Yet. I myself am not ready entirely to jettison "systems," and one reason is this nagging suspicion I have of realism as a genre. Helpfully, Franzen addresses that in a way I hadn't thought of before:

You know, enchantment has a positive connotation, but even in fairy tales it’s not a good thing, usually. When you’re under enchantment, you’re lost to the world. And the realist writer can play a useful and entertaining role in violently breaking the spell. But something about the position this puts the writer in, as a possessor of truth, as an epistemological enforcer, has come to make me uncomfortable. I’ve become more interested in joining the characters in their dream, and experiencing it with them, and less interested in the mere fact that it’s a dream.

This "enforcer" role--the author as stripper-away-of-enchantment--is, I think, part of my problem with realism. I like a sense of enchantment in novels, even if there's no actual magic or flying cars or mind-reading; that is, even as I'm absorbed in the story, I like dimly realizing the whole time that I am elsewhere--emphatically not in the real world. Authors who are obviously striving to make that sense impossible (*ahem* Carver) tend to irritate me. You don't have to be some po-mo riff artist, gleefully calling attention to the constructedness of all texts, and to the fact that all is text, to create a pleasant sense of artifice within your work. I don't like the concept of art as spell-breaking; I prefer spell-creating, which is not the same thing as bewitching or misleading. In this view, the author can be a guide to this slightly different reality, not an enforcer.

*I still think it's a little too sadistic to certain characters, and--like The Corrections--features a lengthy, detailed investigation of human feces. I dunno, is that supposed to be a sign of fearless confrontation with life's realities? I guess it's meant as that stark blend of comedy and horror that can work sublimely in fiction...but to me it just seems juvenile.

On finally finding Franzen's Freedom

2011-12-09T08:28:00.001-08:00

So there's this book out? It's called Freedom? Jonathan Franzen wrote it and it's all the rage! Oh, wait, this isn't 2010. Heck, it's hardly even 2011 anymore. However, never let it be said that I don't follow literary trends. I just don't follow them at the same time as everyone else.

All this is to say that I am finally reading Freedom, an activity I'd actually been dreading. Having read the excerpt in the New Yorker, and then the zillions of sugar-and-or-bile-coated reviews, I had formed certain expectations, the most notable being that Franzen would be condescending to his characters, especially his female characters. As much as I loved The Corrections, I sensed this condescension, even contempt, and the New Yorker excerpt of Freedom seemed to have the same whiff about it, only in spades.

Well, this does turn out to be true in Freedom. With the caveat that I have not finished the book, I would say that the portrayal of Patty does seem to come from an on-high, nose-wrinkled perch. Her "autobiography" in particular is puzzling in its language. It's supposedly her own work, and seems to show an intentional lack of familiarity with the finer cultural attainments , but it also contains numerous Franzenian displays of wit and acuity that a character like this would, by the author's own definition, not be capable of.

And yet the damn thing is riveting. I cannot wait to sit down with the book at the end of the day, and as soon as I open it, I am absorbed. Why? How? First off, although the author seems unable to directly overcome his condescension, it also seems he has found a way to work with it, so that it becomes an integral part of the story rather than working against it. The novel so far is starting to look like the author's battle with his own schadenfreude toward bourgeois mediocrity. And I think that's a battle more of us are fighting than we might like to admit. Everyone, truly, knows about jealousy and the joy of discovering that one's seemingly perfect neighbors or coworkers or whomever don't have it all, after all.

But what are we to do with this embarrassing recognition of our own failings to be sympathetic and good and decent? A lesser author might revel in it, but Franzen does not. He seems to use this discomfort with his authorial stance to drive himself to find deeper compassion for his characters. Whatever schadenfreude he and we are experiencing does not reduce the characters to cartoons: quite the opposite. Patty and the other characters are portrayed with such careful detail, such nuance, such understandable ambivalence and contradiction, that I, at least, have ended up rooting for them more than I might have in a less overdetermined portrait.

Also, let's face it, the book is something of a soap opera. Neighborhood spats, filial dynamics gone terribly wrong, guilt-ridden yet passionate love affairs...Plus it's quite funny.

So, hey, check out this new book by this budding young talent. Remember, you heard it here last.

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Burying the verb in a noun

2011-12-01T08:59:00.001-08:00

I've been coming across a certain stylistic problem, both in the nonfiction I've been editing, and also in, ahem, some fiction. Here's an example:

A flood of relief came over me.

Let us not dwell on where this sentence came from; that is not important. Nor, for our purposes, is the fact that it's a cliche. The problem is that there are actually two verbs in the sentence: a strong, vivid one, which is disguised as a noun ("flood"), and the weak, bland, actual verb ("came"). The overall effect is a wordy and mushy sentence. The fix:

Relief flooded over me.

OK, there is still the problem of the cliche. But now that we have one specific verb, "flooded," we can start tweaking it: Relief poured over me. Relief trickled through my veins. Relief poured over my shoulders like a hot shower. Or maybe we should just leave well enough alone for now...

The point is, I've suddenly become very aware of this problem, so it seems to be everywhere. There may even be a fancy rhetorical name for it. What's nice is that it's easy to fix: just look for weak, flabby verbs like "came" and then search the rest of the sentence for the real verb, which is likely present, but disguised as a noun.

What is writer's block?

2011-11-29T13:35:00.001-08:00

I've told people that I never get writer's block. I always seem to be able to write *something,* if not something interesting or good or important. This is what blogs are for, writing *something.* And now that I am in revision mode with novel 2, getting *something* done is even easier. All that is required is staring at the printed (not blank!) page and making some sort of change. Or not! Because maybe I'll just keep what's already there, and keeping counts as revision! I am thinking! I am deciding! This is real work!

However. I am beginning to get a hint of what classic, cigarettes-bathrobe-wild-haired-baggy-eyed-cocaine-haunted-hotel-ax-murder-type writer's block is like. I have been trying to come up with "ideas" for some new short stories, which I hope to start on when this next round of revision is over. I have done about three pages on two different stories, and finished a full draft of another. But all of them just seem hollow. That's the best word I can use to describe them. They are words wrapped around a nonexistent core. I don't enjoy reading them or thinking about them. They feel like imitations of stories.

Well, Robert Olen Butler would say that having "ideas" for stories is my first problem. It means I'm coming at the problem intellectually rather than "from where I dream." And I suspect that is an issue. I'm writing about things I don't really care about. That is, I'm working from "concepts" that I think are "interesting" rather than from emotions that I don't fully understand (or accept). Even though some of my more successful stories have always seemed to me rather aloof, even arch, I'm starting to realize that there's some strangled cry of personal anguish within them. You can't fake that shit. You can't borrow someone else's personal anguish or conjure it up out of abstractions. In other words, at some point, you have to--metaphorically!--open a vein. Find an untapped agony mine, and then, maybe, make it funny.

The holiday season will probably help with this.

The new issue of Crazyhorse is out--with my novel excerpt

2011-11-18T15:00:00.001-08:00

Just in time for the holidays! The new Crazyhorse is out, including "Origin," an excerpt from my novel Christmastown Lost. Hey, the e-book is only $5.00...

Would you self-publish?

2011-11-17T13:39:00.001-08:00

Busy with work today, so I'll hand this post off to these guys, who have a lot to say in favor of self-publishing. Personally I can't let go of the traditionalist dream...not yet, anyway.
(Via Nathan Bransford, as it so often is.)

On being a rereading chicken

2011-11-15T12:38:00.001-08:00

Lisa Levy's post on The Millions about rereading reminds me of a class I taught at Stanford called "Does Literature Matter?" One of the assignments was to reread a story, book, or poem that meant something to you in the past, and write about how you and the story had both changed. This assignment always seemed to produce the best papers. As Levy suggests, I think that's because rereading generated multiple layers of reflection: yourself then, yourself now, yourself now seeing yourself then. And somewhere in the middle, the "text itself," which is always changing as its readers change. To reread is to consciously experience the fluidity of yourself, and all the things that surround and bolster your "self."

That all sounds great and important. And yet I, myself, am not that much for rereading. I suspect I'm afraid of being sucked into the past, and/or former selves, many aspects of which I would rather not dwell on or in. When I do reread, I tend to do it for some purpose other than pure pleasure: for the Borrowed Fire experiment, or to study techniques of a writer I admire (which is really the point of BF anyway). Those are partly the hazards of being a semi-professional reader.

What do I reread purely for pleasure? Popular science books mostly. Maybe that's because my own emotional history isn't bound up in them. There aren't a lot of places in them to deposit one's hopes, fears, and dreams for later--possibly blindsiding--retrieval.

On responding to reviewers

2011-11-10T12:19:00.001-08:00

I'm intrigued by Jonathan Lethem's essay, "My Disappointment Critic," which responds to James Wood's negative review of The Fortress of Solitude. For those not closely following Lethem's career (why not?), Fortress and the review were published eight years ago. But, Lethem admits, he couldn't stop thinking about Wood's misrepresentations of his work:

I’d have taken a much worse evaluation from Wood than I got, if it had seemed precise and upstanding. I wanted to learn something about my work. Instead I learned about Wood. The letdown startled me. I hadn’t realized until Wood was off my pedestal that I’d built one. That I’d sunk stock in the myth of a great critic. Was this how Rushdie or DeLillo felt — not savaged, in fact, but harassed, by a knight only they could tell was armorless?

Lethem's points are interesting, subtle, and also humorous, so it would be better for you to read the piece rather than for me to try to summarize his objections. The upshot is that Wood, in Lethem's view, simply wanted to read a different book than Fortress turned out to be: he did not evaluate it on its own terms. Moreover, Wood's terms are unnecessarily snobbish.

Now, I'm quite fond of the work of both Lethem and Wood, so I feel a little sad that they apparently don't see eye to eye. As far as I know, I am also yet to have the experience of a critic reviewing my own work. My general sense, though, is that one must resist the urge to respond to either good or bad reviews, to avoid looking overly needy ("Thank you for that great review! It made my day!") or bitter and pompous ("You are obviously too dumb to discern the subtleties of my prose."). But clearly writers violate this tenet all the time: witness the Letters section of the NYT Book Review. It does seem that, especially when hemmed in by tight deadlines and multiple obligations, critics can miss key points; or they can start out with fixed expectations and then, in the interests of time and simplicity, judge the book according to those. And writers can fail to get their intended points across. This is a slipperier business in fiction, though; I think readers should be free to see what they see in a story, even if the author didn't consciously put it there. Otherwise, what are book clubs and lit discussion sections for?*

Lethem makes a careful and convincing argument on his own behalf; I have no doubt Wood, if he so chooses, could do the same. What I like most about this piece, though, is how it reveals the humanity of both author and critic. Both are flawed, as writers and as people, even though their positions in this dynamic require that both pretend not to be. ("Here is my perfect book." "Here is my meticulous, objective judgment of that book." "Your judgment affects me not at all." "Your judgment of my judgment means nothing.") These formal rituals are built up to conceal very basic human questions: Do you like me? Am I good? Do I know anything for certain? It's worth remembering that both reviewer and reviewee have these questions.

In writing this piece, Lethem took the risk of seeming whiny, petty, needy, etc. But in bringing out the subtle, human dynamics of the writer's life, I think he did the right thing.

*This reminds me of another post I ought to do sometime, on the depiction of English/literature classes in film and TV. Unlike the vast majority of my experience, as a student and a teacher, classes in these shows invariably have a Socratic-style professor dragging the "correct" meaning of a passage out of the students: What does Romeo mean when he says...? Right you are, Billy! Or: Nnooo, that's not quite what he's saying; how about a hint? The students are occasionally inspired, if the teacher is passionate and/or colorful, but more often they are bored, and rightly so. This is bad publicity for the literary profession, and something really should be done about it!

Too much light!

2011-11-08T08:47:00.000-08:00

Maybe it's the time change and the whole darkness-at-five-thirty-p.m. thing. Maybe it was our recent trip to Tahoe, when I woke up in the middle of the night enveloped in darkness--I couldn't tell whether my eyelids were open or closed--and felt utterly calm. Maybe I've developed some modern-day proto-vampiric ailment, exacerbated by staring at glowing screens for the majority of my waking hours. (God, that's insane.)

At any rate, I seem to have become deeply averse to artificial light, especially the uniform lighting one finds in office buildings and to some extent on our living-room ceiling. (My husband is very fond of this light and thinks it's sun-like, whereas I find it sickening. Light must be a personal thing to some extent.) I posted this TED talk awhile ago about uniform lighting in offices. We're not wired, so to speak, to handle it. We need shadows in the sea of light, and office design should take that into account.

Also there's a street light outside our bedroom window that nothing short of blackout curtains can snuff out. I suppose I could wear one of those masks that you used to see on neurasthenic starlets in the 50s, except that is a recipe for getting my face clawed by a cat in the middle of the night. On a larger scale, light pollution is a huge problem for astronomers, nocturnal animals, crime fighting (really bright lights create darker shadows that are easier to hide in), and, I would argue, life in general. The International Dark Sky Association is doing something about that--and homeowners can, too.

Now, if I can just get through the next four months of standard time...

Peter Cook

2011-11-04T09:20:00.000-07:00

For some reason, for the past few weeks I've been oddly obsessed with the late British comedian Peter Cook. Maybe it has something to do with the holidays, which make me think of my parents, which brings to mind their senses of humor, which derived in part from their record of Beyond the Fringe, which we listened to often when I was little. ("Then, unavoidably, came peace.")

Anyhow, watching Cook in Not Only...But Also recently, I was struck by his presence--the combination of his rather delicate features with a total, fearless comic spirit. This is not to say he was an over-the-top performer. On the contrary, there's a quietness about him that you don't see much in contemporary comedy. I think Stephen Fry put it well in his statement about Cook a few days after his death in 1995: "He had funniness in the same way that beautiful people have beauty."

Here is that commentary by Fry, who was objecting to the media's laments about Cook's "unrealized potential" and "flawed" personal life. It includes some useful thoughts on the meanings of ambition and success.

What you need to start writing a novel: a voice

2011-11-01T13:12:00.000-07:00

Just in time for NaNoWriMo, Nathan Bransford offers this very helpful post on how to start writing a novel. Yes, I know: just start. Today of all days, just start. That's probably the best advice of all. But Bransford points out the two elements you need in order for the novel to take shape: voice and plot.

In particular, I can't overemphasize the importance of finding the voice--which, as Bransford says, is the novel's sensibility. (Be sure to read his post on the elements of a successful voice.) Here's my two bitcoins on the matter: Voice is close to tone and is reflected in tone, but it's more the stance toward the story. The stance is personified as some form of narrator or narrative presence, and is evident in the narrator's word choice, pace, tone--the whole stylistic kit and kaboodle. Now, you may not think there's an actual narrator in your novel, at least not akin to Thackeray's or even Austen's convivial, sardonic "I." But it's worth deciding there is always a narrator, even if he or she stays far behind the scenes, pretending she doesn't actually exist. Thinking this way allows you to distance yourself at least a tiny bit from the voice that is telling your story, which then allows you to make conscious decisions about what the narrator--again, not necessarily you--thinks and feels about what's going on. In fact, it's been my experience that a certain productive tension can result when I decide that the narrator of a particular story is going to feel somewhat different about its events than I, personally, would feel. This curtails the temptation to turn the story into a self-pity wallow or a soapbox, and it allows for unexpected experiences of empathy--which are the best kind.

Plot, for me, is even tougher to tease out--but I think that, too, has a relationship to voice. What your narrator chooses to tell, how she chooses to tell it, and why she tells it all are all aspects of plot. You have a sensibility that's picking and choosing, so understanding that sensibility is key to making those choices.

Of course, like everything else in novel writing, your voice for the novel will probably not spring fully formed from your head. It will come out in the writing itself. It may gradually assert itself more and more as the draft moves forward, or it may pop out in odd little asides, where you least expect it. The point is to realize you need it, and to keep an eye and ear out for it, as you work through your early drafts.

The growth mindset

2011-10-27T08:39:00.000-07:00

I heard this interview with Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck last weekend on To the Best of Our Knowledge. The 10-minute recording is well worth a listen. She's talking about her new book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, which describes her research on factors leading to resilience and self-esteem in children.

The upshot is that parents seeking to raise resilient* kids should praise process, rather than end results or innate qualities. For example, "That's a really interesting mistake. What should we do now?" Or: "You chose a really difficult problem; you're going to learn a lot from that." The kinds of praise kids hear more often--"Good job!" or "You're so smart/talented!"--are actually detrimental, because they suggest an either/or situation. Either you did a good job or you didn't; either you're smart and talented, or you're not. This leads to a "fixed mindset," in which the child believes every problem is a test of his or her innate abilities, and becomes terrified to fail. He or she starts to avoid challenges, and has a harder time learning and growing.

With the alternative, the "growth mindset," kids see intelligence, athletic ability, etc. as things that can be developed over time. Not only do they not fear challenges, they enjoy them and seek them out, and their abilities improve accordingly.

The really good news, according to Dweck, is that this mindset can be learned at any age.

*The term the interviewer and Dweck both use here is "successful," but I am having trouble tossing that word around without extensive qualification. "Success" in this culture so often just means wealth and/or prominence. I would almost prefer the term "happy" here, or "fulfilled." Of course, the same mindset is necessary for any definition of "success."

Is art too tiring?

2011-10-25T13:37:00.000-07:00

So we got the first disk of Beckett on Film from Netflix (hooray, not Qwikster!) about two weeks ago. Today I sent it back unwatched. Instead of Waiting for Godot, we spent the last two weeks on a steady diet of Friday Night Lights alternating with Arrested Development.

Now, as middlebrow entertainments go, these two shows are near the top, critical-acclaim-wise. No Celebrity Liposuction for us!* And yet, compared to Beckett, neither can be called challenging. FNL has plenty of emotional drama, and often crosses the line into melodrama; I care about the characters and events, and am even strongly moved on occasion. So there's an emotional challenge, I guess--but I can't say the show makes me think or wonder, beyond "What's Tim Riggins going to do now?" And AD...well, it's just funny.

The thing is, I've always loved Beckett, or thought I did, so why didn't I want to watch the DVD? The answer seems to be that after a full day of writing and/or editing, I just didn't have the energy. I knew the Beckett was going to require something from me--even Godot would, and it's the least challenging of all his work. I want to be done working in the evening. Not that I want to turn my brain off, or have it bludgeoned into irredeemable stupidity by some reality show. I want to be engaged, but not asked to do too much; I'll row, but I don't want to be the one in front (or back, or whichever one does the most work).

But this is a worrisome realization. I think of myself as an advocate for high art--you know, literature and its ilk, the stuff you're supposed to need some sort of college-level training to enjoy. If I can't bring myself to pop in that Beckett DVD after a work day, what hope is there for people who have no stake in supporting the arts? What if most people just have too much going on mentally to devote any extra brainpower to the finer creations of humanity? Can we blame our overworked, overstressed populace if they pick their mental and emotional battles, and they don't pick art?

Maybe watching the Beckett would have refreshed and invigorated me with its greatness, whereas FNL and AD mostly soothed me. But at a certain point, soothing is what I want.

*I don't think this show actually exists.

Hope for writers

2011-10-21T09:08:00.000-07:00

Via Nathan Bransford, a very thoughtful piece by author Natalie Whipple on the struggle to stay hopeful when your writing dreams don't seem to be coming true.

I would add that I think it's perfectly fine to feel like crap about your writing once in awhile. Even more than once in awhile. After all, we writers generally get a lot more bad news about our work than good news--and more often than that, we get no news. I am not a big fan of accelerated cheering up. If you need to sulk, sulk. Just be aware that's what you're doing, and be open to the good things, even little good things, that can crop up while you're in the midst of sulking. Maybe a solution to a plot problem that comes to you while you're muttering "fuck" to yourself in the car.

In short, here's another way to think about not giving up: you can still write when you feel like crap about writing. You still go to your job when you feel like crap about it, don't you? So you can write.

Revising in bits and pieces

2011-10-18T15:56:00.000-07:00

After getting some *great* notes on the first chapter of my new novel (thanks, KS!), it occurs to me that perhaps a better way to revise a novel draft is by breaking the whole thing into separate, chapter-size files and treating each like a short story. This idea also comes after my husband's remark last night, to wit: "Isn't a novel just like a bunch of short stories strung together?" To which I replied, "No, Jesus Christ, it's nothing like a bunch of short stories strung together."

But the advantage of working with separate, story-sized files seems to be that it prevents one (or me, at least) from racing through the revision process, skimming along the surface of the whole giant thing in order to get to the end (second draft: done!). With these 25-page files, I'm more likely to come to the end of each, and then go back to the beginning of that same file again, polishing and shaping each section on a sentence level--as I would when revising a story.

I'm a little leery of dealing with all these separate files, but I can already see that it slows me down and forces much closer and deeper attention.

Have I once again stated the obvious with a sense of great discovery?

Teens and adult fiction

2011-10-13T15:03:00.000-07:00

So I basically agree with Brian McGreevy's article on Salon today, for reasons I'll blather on about in a moment. First, though, there's the article's subheading, or the first part of it, which just, well...here, read it:

Parents push young-adult fiction because it's safe. But protecting kids from sex, death and adult themes is wrong

Can I just say: what is this safe young-adult fiction? OK, I don't have kids, and haven't paid much attention to the YA fiction of today. But back in my day, when YA fiction was chiseled onto blocks and hauled into the agora by mules, a hell of a lot of it was not "safe" at all. In fact it was downright lurid in comparison to adult fiction. For example, I remember a book called Run [Drat, what was the protagonist's name? I can picture the book cover--a teen with long blond hair, wearing a black turtleneck and looking warily over her shoulder for reasons which became only too apparent], Run. That book was pure pornography. My mother evidently agreed, belatedly, as the book disappeared from my shelf at some point and was never seen or mentioned again. And that wasn't the only example. By comparison, the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates, or even Stephen King, is redemptive.

Though I was a rather sheltered child, I managed to read--either surreptitiously or in the amber light of my mother's weary approval--Jaws, The Exorcist, and Carrie, not to mention the subversive Judy Bloom, and a lot of other quite questionable stuff. Oh, and Dracula. I was, for the most part, not allowed to watch movies of the same ilk (I got to read Jaws in exchange for not seeing the movie), and I pretty much agree with that decision now. There's something about the visual assault of violent movies that doesn't occur when you're reading, although imagination can sometimes make things worse, generating images and sensations that linger creepily in your system.

But I do take McGreevy's point: "perverse and puritanical an instinct as there is in this culture to prolong childhood, there is a far stronger counter-instinct in children to analyze, simulate, and as soon as humanly possible participate in the challenges of adulthood." And: "They are entitled to learn about it at exactly the rate it is appropriate to their individual moral development to do so." I think my own dark, semi-taboo reading experiences were somehow validating at a time when I needed validation. I was not the chirpiest, chipperest kid (unlike now!), and these books told me I was not alone in sensing something was seriously wrong out there. The books were scary, but oddly reassuring.

Strangeness in fiction

2011-10-11T11:59:00.000-07:00

From John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist:

There can be no great art, according to the poet Coleridge, without a certain strangeness. Most readers will recognize at once that he's right. There come moments in every great novel when we are startled by some development that is at once perfectly fitting and completely unexpected [...], or those moments we experience in many novels when the ordinary and the extraordinary briefly interpenetrate, or things common suddenly show, if only for an instant, a different face. One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One has to be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one's being to take over the work from time to time. Or be capable of cracking the door now and then to the deep craziness of life itself [...].

I've been thinking about this in the context of realistic vs. non-realistic fiction. From time to time I've implied a bias against "realist" fiction in favor of fabulist or magical realist fiction. But I'm not sure that's the right way to explain my preference. A novel like Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, not to mention The Brothers Karamazov, is perfectly realistic--the events depicted could literally happen on this earth. (BK does contain "The Grand Inquisitor," a story in which Jesus returns to earth during the Inquisition, but it's a story told by a character who's beginning to lose his mind.) Yet both of those books seem magical to me, and I think it has to do with Gardner's concept of strangeness.

Gardner doesn't do the best job here of explaining strangeness, but that's the point. It is one of those know-it-when-you-see-it things. He gets closest, I think, with the ordinary and the extraordinary briefly interpenetrating. The briefness is important. If you create a world in which the ordinary is always extraordinary, then you have a sort of bizarro world as your starting point, and have to do even more to generate some kind of informative strangeness. (I'm sure this can be done, and encourage all attempts.) But brief glimpses of deep craziness can suggest the power of that craziness more strongly. We spend most of our time on land, but 71% of the earth's surface is ocean, and every now and then we hear its roar, or we fall in.

So I guess what I object to is not realist fiction as such, but fiction that takes the representation of ordinary reality as its endpoint. That sort of work surely takes skill and dedication. However, like Gardner, I think art ought to aim higher, and deeper.

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Elegance and the everyday

2011-10-06T09:33:00.000-07:00

I'm an Apple apostate. My first computer was a Macintosh 512K Enhanced. I worked that baby all the way through college *and* grad school, feeding it floppy disks like so many potato chips which I failed to properly label and lost. Then I went to work in the corporate world and everyone--except the graphic designers, those hippies--used PCs. There wasn't much of a choice back then, if you wanted to, you know, run software.

Over time one device intertwined with another, and I've been fully PC for over a decade. And it's been fine. Really. PCs work. It's only occasionally that I feel a twinge of envy as some Apple person breezes by in their architect eyeglasses, carrying some irresistible device that I really don't need. I console myself that my PC was cheaper and works just as well, and...

But PCs are the strip malls of personal computers. They are function without form. We need inexpensive groceries, quickly, and an easy place to park the car to get said groceries. Hence the giant parking lot in the center of town, ringed by bunker-like chain stores and anchored by the gigundous Safeway. You know, fine. It works. No one set out to build a temple here. But, Christ, it's ugly. And somehow a little disrespectful, as if consumers--which is all we are, in this mindset--really care about nothing besides saving money. We don't really care what our cities and towns and thoroughfares look like, just so they get us where we're going (which is where, exactly?).

I know, I know: meeting our basic needs as inexpensively as possible is important, especially in these times. You can't feed elegance to your kids. Also, it's not like Apple is a great roar of protest against the degradations of consumer culture. It is one of that culture's most potent sources of fuel, and waste--the lovely, pretty much unnecessary gizmo that causes you to toss your previous gizmo into the landfill.

Still. Steve Jobs and Apple insisted that the most utilitarian possible object, the computer, should be elegant. Using it should not just satisfy us, but please us. It seems like a small thing. After all, we can find beauty at the art museum, or on the mountaintop, or in the concert hall, if we need it, right? Why should everyday, functional objects also be beautiful? Well, because they pull us one step back from the abyss of what Russians call "poshlost'"--the depressing mix of banality and vulgarity for which there is no equivalent English word. Every ugly, purely functional, hastily slapped-together thing that catches our eye is another little poke in the eye: we don't need anything better; we don't deserve better; we aren't better. Not settling for everyday ugliness is a little rebellion.

So here's to Steve Jobs and the elegance of the everyday. I really do not need an iPad. But I really want one.

Would you read hypertext fiction?

2011-10-04T12:41:00.000-07:00

Paul Lafarge has a very interesting piece in Salon today about hypertext fiction. Like Lafarge, I remember that moment in the 1990s when it seemed like hyptertext fiction was really the next big thing--as important an invention as the novel itself. But then, as Lafarge puts it, nothing happened. To his credit, Lafarge still thinks it's a form worth pursuing, and to his even greater credit, he is writing a hypertext story himself, Luminous Airplanes.

I took a look at the story. It's very well designed, and the craft, so far, looks lovely. But I have to admit that my overall feeling, as soon as I began clicking through, was anxiety. I followed a link, hit "back," and did not know where I was going back to. Was it the same "back" as if I had not followed the link? It didn't seem so. I stopped reading, becoming completely concerned with the question of "where I was." I wanted a flow chart.*

Now, presumably, the more experienced reader of hypertext is not only accustomed to the loss of a single main thread--the handrail of linearity, if you will--but embraces that loss. Non-linearity is the point. So maybe it is just a matter of experience, and of being willing to let myself be lost, not unlike the way one is "lost" in a good, absorbing novel. Perhaps I am like those audience members who ran screaming from the oncoming locomotive in an early example of another new art form, film.

After all, I have spent the past few months trying to read Pynchon's Against the Day (75% done!) and have been lost, as in disoriented, plenty of times. I go leafing back through the heap of pages I thought I had already read, trying to find out who the hell Cyprian is, because apparently I have been introduced to him, but danged if I remember. Lafarge makes the further point that many proto-hypertext novels already exist, such as Hopscotch, Pale Fire, etc., in which flipping back and forth and all over the place is a necessary part of the reading experience.

So what is the difference? Maybe the still-unpleasant aesthetic experience of reading on a computer, which is already being fixed by e-readers and the iPad. After reading Lafarge's article, I do feel I ought to give hypertext another try, as a reader if not as a writer (probably, definitely not as a writer). But it does feel like a lot of work.

*I should point out that there is one, and also a fair amount of help/orientation text, which I was too unsettled to poke around in on my first visit.

Sing to a lizard

2011-09-30T08:57:00.000-07:00

...because apparently lizards like to be sung to. From David Rains Wallace's Chuckwalla Land: The Riddle of California's Desert:

Lester Rountree, a prominent California botanist, was singing to herself while collecting plants one day when a lizard emerged from under a boulder, climbed on her knee, and "showed an enormous capacity for large doses of song, closing his eyes in absurd abandon and opening them whenever I shut up, his eyelids sliding back to reveal pleading orbs. This went on for some time till I finally...placed him, limp with emotion, on the boulder."

Couldn't hurt to try it.

Tips on tightening dialog

2011-09-27T18:34:00.000-07:00

I've recently received notes from two editors on two different pieces. And the gist of both was: tighten your dialog.

I've always thought my dialog was particularly scintillating. Also, lately, I've gotten it into my head that if a character (other than the POV character) has a big idea to present, it's best to do it as an extended dialog so that the character can use his or her own voice. Turns out that's not true. In literature as in life, lots of talking can be boring. In order to make the talk sound realistic, the writer might also start throwing in lots of "wells" and "you knows" and "really?s"--which go unnoticed in speech but really clutter up the written page.

What's the solution? Paraphrase. As a former academic, I still shudder at the word. You want the unfiltered voice whenever possible, right? But in this case, you paraphrase through the perception of either the interlocutor, or the overall narrator, if the later has a distinctive voice. You don't just paraphrase neutrally, relaying what the speaker is saying like some objective reporter. You say what the other person actually hears, and thinks about what he or she's hearing, which will be colored by their personality and prejudices. The filter doesn't fuzz things up, but adds information and nuance. You can then spice up the dialog with brief, actual quotes from both speakers, just to give the flavor their individual voices.

Obviously this isn't an issue for short dialogs, or for fiction in which dialog plays an unusually important structural role. But I myself have been annoyed by page after page of dialog in fiction--especially if I sense that the dialog is actually just exposition that the author can't think of another way to bring out. And I especially don't like it when the speaker pauses just so the other character can say "really?"--which is a lame way to break up long paragraphs. I am looking through my own work now for those "really?s" and "tell me mores," so I can replace them with something revealing about the character saying them. If the character truly has nothing more to say than "really?" then he should remain silent. The presence of "really?," more often than not, means the speaker is going on too long, and it's probably time for another paraphrase.

Here be dragons, or something like dragons...

2011-09-22T13:52:00.000-07:00

I never watch Jeopardy!, but I became a fan of Ken Jennings after that whole Watson thingie. Turns out Jennings has now written a book about maps, called Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks.

I hate maps, personally. That is, I hate them as functional objects, because I can't read them. I'm the one in the Honda Fit, parked cockeyed and three feet from the curb, holding the map upside down and bordering on tears. However, as aesthetic objects, I like maps very much.

I particularly like map monsters, and Jennings has put together a delightful slide show thereof. Also, a fun fact (what else would you expect from the Jeopardy! champ?): the phrase "Here be dragons" is not common at all on old maps, and in fact seems to have only one recorded appearance. And that is probably a translation error.

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A non-fiction sentence I happen to like

2011-09-20T10:03:00.000-07:00

Since we've been on the subject of sentences lately, I thought I'd say a few words about one I just came across. It's the first sentence in the opening chapter of David Rains Wallace's Chuckwalla Land: The Riddle of California's Desert:

The desert's stark reticence challenges comfortable notions that we humans occupy the apex of benign, reasonable processes that have unfolded especially to produce us.

At first glance, this is not an especially stunning sentence. It doesn't really start the book off with a bang (though there is a prologue that begins with a shorter, zippier line). It also contains some fairly abstract, generic terms like "challenges" and "notions" and "processes" that in other hands could have made the sentence deadly dry.

So why do I like it? First, the striking phrase "stark reticence" at the beginning creates a lot of goodwill for proceeding through the rest. The phrase personifies the desert, and it's always nice to have an active presence for the reader to attach to right off the bat. Moreover, it brings together two terms that I, at least, am not used to seeing together. It makes me think the writer is precise and inventive, without being overly showy about it. The vividness of that phrase spreads over the relatively dull words in the rest of the sentence, and the dull words, in turn, end up setting the phrase off more. The dull words keep the prose from becoming purple, an especial risk in nature writing.

Second, although it's a somewhat long sentence, there is only one comma. As a sort of Johnny Appleseed of commas myself, I appreciate this particularly. But it's not just a matter of leaving commas out. The sentence is constructed in such a way as to not need them. It's a sentence about qualification--in fact, the whole thing is one big qualification of humanity's sense of itself at the end of the evolutionary chain. Qualifications usually beget commas. However, Wallace has obviated this problem by correctly identifying the subject of the sentence as the desert, not humanity. In other words, the sentence mirrors its point: we're not at the apex after all--not in this book, anyway.

With the true subject properly named and situated, the rest of the sentence can unfold according to the book's overall argument. And it really does seem to unfold. As we move forward through its smooth, nearly comma-free terrain, complex ideas peel away and bring us--at last and ironically--to "us." Here we are, except we don't know where we are anymore. Now we are in position for a guided tour through the "enigma" of the California desert.

(No, I haven't finished the Pynchon cinder block yet; thanks for asking.)

Plot is thought turned into action

2011-09-15T12:12:00.001-07:00

Five years ago, I attended the Tin House Writers Workshop, where I worked with Aimee Bender. The rumors are true--she is an awesome teacher. One thing in particular that she told us has become so embedded in my thinking that it has never before occurred to me to comment on it. But I caught myself using it again today, so I thought I'd pass it along.

In a lecture on plot, Bender told us to try having our characters do what they are only thinking about doing.

Consider: I find my characters thinking about doing stuff all the time, only to brush aside the thoughts and continue on their (probably more boring) paths. He wanted to kiss her, but turned away and pretended to look at the dunes. Which is the kind of thing we do all the time in real life--turn away. But real life is not fiction. Fiction is precisely where we explore the paths we didn't take in life, where those discounted thoughts can and should become action. It's the road not taken. Perhaps we don't take it out of fear, and that might be a good enough reason in real life not to do something.

But in fiction, fear is no excuse. If anything fiction allows us to confront what we fear in relative safety, which means that succumbing to fear in fiction is a doubly missed opportunity. Not only will you never know what the road not taken might have been like, but your character won't know either. His life will be just like yours. Is that what you really want?

I don't. That means my characters have to do stuff I probably wouldn't. It also means that if I'm stuck for plot, or character, I could think of something I wouldn't do, and then create a character who's quite capable of doing it.

Of dorm-room philosophizing

2011-09-13T12:26:00.000-07:00

There's this scene in my new novel where some characters--adults well over 40--are discussing whether the color blue that you see is the same as the one I see. And then I come across this very same question (same color even) on some blog or other, and it's being mocked as a "dorm-room" conversation.*

So, wait...did that question get answered, and I missed it? Was I out getting coffee or something? Is it the same color? Or is this just too dumb of a question to bother with, now that we're out of the dorm? I get the impression that there are those who believe that asking these kinds of (so far) unanswerable questions is a sign of immaturity. College is the place where they are explored, and contained; they have no place in the real world.

Why not? Is it because after college, one is (and is supposed to be) preoccupied solely with practical concerns? Is ordinary life so fast and furious that contemplating unanswerable questions is really a waste of one's limited time? Maybe so. And maybe the "blue" question is not particularly interesting, although I kind of think it is. What concerns me is this brusque dismissal of an act of wondering. This notion that certain questions aren't appropriate for adults--and not because we have the answers now. It's just time to stop wondering and get on with it, whatever "it" is.

Personally I'd rather be in a dorm room than a cube.

*I can't find that blog, but here's this, about the "dorm-room" conversations in Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City. In his book they may be meant as satire, and in my book, they aren't. Or at least I don't think so.

Forgetting about writing so you can write

2011-09-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

Over at the Tin House blog, they're doing an occasional series called "The Art of the Sentence." In the current installment, Jaime Quatro sings the praises of a sentence by Denis Johnson. I won't reprint the sentence here, but, as Quatro points out, "Read the sentence aloud and you’ll hear the rhythm and pulse of the elevated tracks—structure informing content, music suited to subject matter."

Indeed. The sentence really does make you feel like you are right there in the train car, watching squalid snatches of other people's lives flicker by. And this makes me realize that Johnson, at some or possibly many times in his life, really paid attention while he was riding in such a car. That is to say, he wasn't sitting there thinking: I've got to pay attention to all this so I can write about it later. All right, maybe he thought that at some point during the experience. But in order to register this much sensory detail (sights, sounds, the physical sensations of rhythm), he had to be, as we say in California, fully present in the moment. He was not thinking (yet) about what he was going to write and how he was going to write it. He knew those answers would come later. He is a writer, after all; there should be no need to remind oneself of this fact constantly, if one is a real writer. In the train car, he was where he was, and experienced the experience. That's the only way this sentence could have happened.

So: while we are out and about, away from our machines and the actual physical process of writing, we need to be exactly where we are. We will do our writing a great favor by forgetting about it when we aren't doing it. If we are truly present where we are, we will absorb--and remember--the kinds of experiential detail that make sentences like Johnson's truly stand out.

Experience is craft.

Through amber-colored glasses (from the gas station)

2011-09-01T08:10:00.000-07:00

The other day I bought an iced tea that came in a reusable drinking glass. Seemed like a pretty good idea. Except maybe in order to make the whole proposition affordable, perhaps the glass was made somewhere way overseas, by poorly paid workers, and then shipped thousands of miles over here. Who knows? The glass is quite nice, though.

The experience pleased me particularly because I am old enough to remember when gas stations gave away glassware. *Nice* glassware. I think you got one glass with every fill-up or something. My mom still uses the extensive set of distinctively 70s-style amber drinking glasses as part of her regular dinner setting. I am not sure what happened to the Cleveland Browns glasses, which were also nice, particularly once the Browns logo wore off. These came in two sizes, were vaguely ball-shaped and heavy-bottomed. I recall they were especially nice for serving eggnog, a staple beverage of Browns fans. We had a ton of those, too. Perhaps they vanished, along with the "real" Cleveland Browns, in 1995.

Anyway. What an odd thing, it now seems, to be getting your dinner glasses from Shell or wherever. But a wondrous thing, too! Why not bring back those days? And why stop at glasses? Why not china, silverware, pots and pans... Engaged couples could register at Chevron.

Mysteries of mystery writing

2011-08-30T08:19:00.000-07:00

All right, real mystery writers: how do you do it?

By "it," I mean figuring out the plot--all the details of who did it, why, who knows what, and who believes what. Most of all, I'm wondering when you figure all that out. Do you map it all out at the beginning or do you figure it out in the course of the writing? Or does it vary from writer to writer (as do pretty much all aspects of writing)?

I ask because I think the culprit in my literary murder mystery is about to change for the third time. In this case it really seems like the story itself is pointing to this person, whom I, like my protagonist, had dismissed out of hand. It's been an interesting experience to observe this happening, as I had certain characters arguing for this person's guilt, and it's as if they finally convinced me. The change, should I choose to implement it, also allows my protagonist to be productively wrong, rather than just sadly misunderstood (fortunately he's not a heroic detective, just a sort of hapless bystander who decides to get involved).

However, questions remain: If the story itself is insisting on this particular culprit, maybe the culprit is too obvious. Maybe the reader will grow fed up with the protagonist's seemingly willful blindness early on. OR will the case the protagonist is building against someone else be enough to raise doubts in the reader's mind? Also, does the culprit always have to be a mystery until the end, or, in the manner of the old Columbo mysteries, can the interest lie less in who the person is than in how he or she is discovered? (The fact that Columbo is my touchstone for such questions should tell you that I know relatively little about the mystery genre, which is part of my problem.) And, also, in a novel that aims for literary interest, is the whodunnit aspect even that important?

I find that even in my "purely" literary writing I suffer from plot anxiety. I worry that the story is simply too boring, that nothing is happening, and so if anything I over-plot. In an actual mystery story, a convoluted plot can, I think, be satisfying, as long as it doesn't seem contrived. But there's a fine line between convoluted and contrived. And then there's the kind of story, which I'm ultimately working toward, in which we don't get a final answer. In the end, different characters are still going to believe different things, and there won't be enough evidence to convict the apparent killer. However, I still think I need to have a firm notion of the culprit in my mind in order to write this kind of story, and then think of ways he could be overlooked by others.

In a way, I suppose, all fiction writing is mystery writing of a sort: What's going to happen? What will be revealed? Who is this character, really?

So I guess the answer, as always, is to keep writing and then get someone honest to read it and tear it apart. Still, I would love to know how people who think up mystery stories for a living really do it.

In praise of unlikable characters: Pete Campbell

2011-08-18T12:20:00.000-07:00

So I blew through the fourth season of Mad Men on Netflix, and made a surprising discovery: Pete Campbell is my favorite character.

This discovery interests me because I have been harping off and on about the issue of likable characters in fiction. In fact I created a class around the topic at Stanford a few years ago. To recap, it always bugged me in fiction workshops when people would say something to the effect of, "I just don't like this character," meaning...well, I wasn't sure, exactly. The story wasn't working for these people, but was it because they felt the character was immoral? Or they couldn't "relate" to the character, meaning he/she didn't evoke sympathy in the reader? Do all characters have to be someone we would want to be friends with in real life? I thought not. But characters to have to engage us, and I have been at pains over the years to figure out how.

In the first few seasons of Mad Men, Pete was the character I loved to hate. I hated his pinched expression, his sense of entitlement, and his peevishness when that sense ran up against some real-world obstacle. (Also he was a jerk to Peggy, and his wife, and all women, but that of course doesn't make him anything special in the MM world.) He was like a little boy entering the grown-up world a little too soon, and finding out that it was not at all what he'd expected.

But who can't relate to that? Who hasn't felt, after a long day at some office, that "I was led to believe there would be cake" feeling, and wanting to whine about it? Where is the damn cake? And the freedom, and the knowledge, and the power that all adults were supposed to have, all of which I was supposed to have, too, once I grew up? It's all a big ruse, this adult thing? Now what am I supposed to do?

Also in this past season, I've noticed another quality in Pete that I admire: his commitment. Even as he sees (and complains about) the Don Drapers of the world trampling on the less handsome and less lucky and (so far) getting away with it, he still puts on his suit and shows up at work and does his god-damnedest to haul in new clients. We may not think much of the value of the work he does, but he does it extremely well. Despite all the problems he sees, Pete is not yet ready to give up on his dream. He signed up to be an ad man, and that's what he's going to do.

Lots of credit, of course, must go to the actor, Vincent Kartheiser, who plays Pete without a trace of vanity. He never winks at the audience, inviting us to mock Pete or to remind us that he isn't "really" this guy. The commitment we sense in Pete is the actor's commitment.

So what does this all mean for writers trying to create interesting characters? By which I mean, characters who are complex and engaging and challenging--not simply mirrors held up to flatter readers' (and our own) moral vanity? Well, the creator of characters must understand them. I may not like or admire Pete's peevishness, but I know where it comes from; I've felt it, too. In other words, Pete feels like a creation from within. He's not a cartoon, observed and imitated from outside, but grown out of common, if embarrassing, emotions.

All of which suggests that a great character might start out as some complex twinge in the heart, rather than as an image, or a type, or a role you need played in your story. And you need to commit to that twinge, not wish it away, or wink at it.

Is Pynchon overrated?

2011-08-16T10:08:00.000-07:00

So here's that much-read Slate piece about famous books that are overrated. Or at least that these particular authors never liked. Gravity's Rainbow comes up a couple of times, and that's a book I actually love. I think I love it, that is.

I agree with Elif Batuman on this issue: a particular book has to reach you at a particular time. I read GR when my father and I were driving cross country from Ohio to Berkeley, where I was about to start grad school. I read the book in strange motels in Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming, while during the day we covered vast stretches of stark landscape and listened to Paul Simon's Graceland. I was on my way to immersing myself in an acid bath of literary theory, which at the the time I was looking forward to, in the same way I looked forward to living in a place with palm trees. Nothing seemed quite real, except being with my dad, and somehow the book brought all that real unreality together. This goes back to a thought I had awhile ago, that the context of reading really is important in making literature part of your life. Reading in a class, or a library cubicle, does not always allow for that kind of rich reading experience.

But I don't know if I'd enjoy reading GR now. And I am bogging down a bit in Against the Day, after my initial enthusiasm. It's just...very...long.

On being decisive (in fiction)

2011-08-11T14:29:00.001-07:00

So I'm not the world's most decisive person. (Maybe I shouldn't have said that.)

I recently received some comments from an editor on a short story, and I realized its biggest problem was my refusal to commit to...a story. I myself like stories with ambiguous endings, the did-it-really-happen or what-exactly-happened endings. Which is not to say I like endings the writer *messed up.* These things have to be done very carefully, so that the implications can be taken in two (or more) ways--but the reader has to be able to figure out what those ways are in the first place.

The mistake I made in this story was trying to keep all options open, when what I needed to do was commit myself, through my narrator, to one path. In reality, other options can and will remain open, but that openness is accomplished through the limitations of the characters, and through language. In other words, literature is a bit loose because language and characters are a bit loose. In fact literature creates a productive ambiguity if you're doing it right. But if you force ambiguity by refusing to commit, you create confusion, not art.

Review of Francisco Goldman's Say Her Name

2011-08-09T14:50:00.001-07:00

I got assigned to write this review a few months ago, but due to a timing issue, the publication ended up not being able to use it. This is not a timely review, except that grief is in the air for me these days. And I liked the book, so here's what I had to say about it.

---

I am starting to believe that the greatest terror life has in store for us is not death, but grief. Death has an ending, after all; it is the ending. Grief, on the other hand, may subside, but will never truly end. And one of its most awful aspects (it’s a complicated, writhing thing) is helplessness. This is the condition of both the survivor, and—if she is aware of her circumstances—the dying. The loved one pulls away, like the tide withdrawing from the shore, and all anyone can really do is watch. Though sometimes, later, the survivor can also tell the story.

In 2007, Aura Estrada, a young writer and scholar, broke her neck while bodysurfing in Oaxaca and died the next day. Her husband, novelist and journalist Francisco Goldman, wrote Say Her Name in the aftermath of that personal disaster, which was also a loss for the world of letters. The book includes excerpts from Aura’s stories and diaries, which are funny, brightly inventive, and increasingly experimental in their language. In fact, Aura’s promise as a fiction writer is one reason Goldman wrote Say Her Name as a novel: to honor her imagination.

At first, I didn’t realize it was a novel. I found out only after finishing the book and skimming the dust jacket for a hint of how to start talking about it. This was the most brutal portrait of grief I had ever read, and to “review” it—as if there were anything more to say on the subject, especially in the form of critical judgment—seemed absurd. But instead of giving me the handhold I was looking for, the synopsis, puzzlingly, called Say Her Name “the novel of Aura.” Sure enough, the bookstore sticker on the back said it belonged in the fiction section, and so did the Grove/Atlantic Web site. The question should probably not have mattered to me, but it did. What was this terrifying, exhilarating place I’d just emerged from, shaking and desperate to call my husband?

I turned to the New Yorker’s interview with Goldman, in which he discusses the genre issue in some detail. Of course, he says, the extended sections describing Aura’s childhood are fictionalized; since he wasn’t there, how could they not be? More intriguingly, he says the account of his actions as the grieving widower are not (or not all) true. The “narrator” of Say Her Name does things in his anguish that the real Goldman did not. I was relieved to hear that, since much of the narrator’s behavior is reckless and at times cruel. And yet those sections, for me, raised the story far above the finely crafted, moderately touching expression of loss that I might have expected from a grief memoir.

In the novel the bereaved Goldman gets drunk night after night and frequents strip clubs. He hallucinates. He torments himself with accusations that he caused or even desired his wife’s death. He has affairs with Aura’s friends, including a young woman named Ana Eva, at whom he unleashes this twisted, blackly funny tirade:

So take that you fucking Sméagol, you and your Latino straw man marvelous quirkiness of love, go sodomize yourself with your fucking sock puppet, you idiot pendejo!

Ana Eva gaped at me. What had set this off? [….]

She was frightened. She’d drawn back into a corner of the bed. What’s the matter? Was it her? Why was I screaming at her about some Sméagol?

Oh Ana Eva, no, no, it has nothing to do with you. I’m sorry. Something Sméagol, a book critic wrote. He gave us the evil eye on the subway. He fucking killed Aura, not me.

Grief undoes the narrator from inside out, and watching this happen made me fully trust the experience as portrayed. Goldman rejects any redemptive, golden-light-infused “process” to lay bare the reality of his emotion: It’s monstrous. Now he tells me a good portion of the story isn’t true?

Then again, how does the griever himself know what is real? “No happy memory,” Goldman jarringly writes, having already recounted many of them, “that isn’t infected. A virus strain that has jumped from death to life, moving voraciously backward through all memories, obligating me to wish none of it, my own past, had ever happened.” Aura’s death has rewritten his life, making him wish his past—all that has made him who he is—were fiction. What can happiness mean now? What even happened? What’s one more revision of his life story, if grief is the ultimate fabulist?

In the New Yorker interview, Goldman explains how the fictionalized self-portrait reveals a different kind of truth. The man most people saw, in the months and years after Aura’s death, seemed to be doing pretty well. As he mourned he wrote; he taught; he established the Aura Estrada Prize. But all that felt like a lie, he says. In the book, the narrator’s actions reveal the raw, hidden, even shameful experience of grief. He gives it a face. Maybe Goldman also wanted, by writing the fiction, to separate the griever from the person walking the earth under the name “Francisco Goldman.” But it’s equally likely that others, and even he himself, will conflate them. The point is, it really doesn’t matter. The book is very much about Goldman, but also not.

When you get down to it, Say Her Name is about everything, where everything takes the form of Aura. We come to observe life through the lenses of her talent, ambition, astute critiques of academia, humor, Hello Kitty toaster, dresses, travels and culture shocks, and her deep and bracing loves: literature, her troubled mother, her husband. Lost in thought, she misses her subway stops. She loudly recites George Herbert, of all possible poets, when drunk. She wants to have children. She worries that her much older husband will leave her a widow too soon. She adores the beaches of Oaxaca. She wants to learn to bodysurf, but is afraid, so Goldman, who’s been doing it since childhood, shows her how.

Like everyone, and not like anyone, she’s ordinary and extraordinary. She changes Goldman, as he does her, both during her life and after; in the end, her power to transform is just as strong as grief’s. Say Her Name proves how wonderful it is to love someone so much that losing her is so completely devastating. As Goldman puts it:

One of the most common tropes and complaints in the grief books I’ve read is about the loneliness of the deep griever, because people and society seem unable, for the various reasons always listed in those books, to accommodate such pain. But what could anybody possibly do or say to help? Inconsolable does not mean that you are sometimes consolable. The way things are has seemed right to me; it’s all been as it should be, or as if it could not be any other way.

So the helplessness of grief cannot be helped. That makes sense, even if Aura’s strange and awful death does not. The rightness is a kind of consolation.

Still, we wouldn’t want to trade places with Goldman (or Aura) for even one second. Or would we?

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Vacant lots in Cleveland

2011-08-04T08:00:00.000-07:00

There's a very interesting piece in today's New York Times about the vacant lots in Cleveland, my hometown. (OK, my hometown was actually a suburb, but I still identify, for better or worse, with the "metropolis.") Anyway, there are enough of these lots now to constitute an actual ecosystem, and naturalists are studying it.

The article and the photographs convey the sadness of the city's long, probably permanent decay. But you can also see the charm: the brick buildings, the old broad-leaf trees, the mugginess--not always awful--of the summer air.

Werner Herzog (again)

2011-08-03T10:27:00.000-07:00

Missed my Tuesday blog post. Swamped. Fortunately The Millions has a great post up about Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and that wild, wacky, Herzogian method of magic. Enjoy...

How to fix the humanities (again)

2011-07-28T08:21:00.000-07:00

Articles about how to reform humanities education have been coming out for probably thirty years now. This one from Slate is particularly scathing. But it does at least offer some concrete suggestions. The following struck me particularly: "They [humanities programs] should cultivate new ways for people with humanities sensibilities to build entrepreneurial projects outside of traditional academe, and make these alternative paths the norm, without shame."

When I first decided to leave academia, I attended an alternative career seminar on campus, the focus of which turned out to be entrepreneurship. "Just think of a need that's out there!" the seminar leader chirped. "Go on, you! What's a need you could fulfill?" I said something about looking for parking spaces for people, for which I was praised. I was in fact being sarcastic at a deep level that I rarely descend to. Suffice it to say I thought the seminar was beyond useless. People were talking about opening bakeries, for God's sake. What was that ten years' worth of critical theory for, again? Now I'm supposed to learn how to bake, and run a business besides?

But more than a decade has passed, and "entrepreneurship" seems to mean something different to me now. After all, I've become a freelancer. I do have my own business, and I like it a lot. I found a need and started filling it.

The thing is, lots of us humanists are square pegs to begin with. That's why we read and mope and moon about, and end up in grad school because we just can't see ourselves hammered into a cubicle for the rest of our lives. (Maybe I should have said we are round pegs, because cubicles are square...well, never mind. We are blobs, really: wherever we try to fit in, something squiggles out.) Anyway: for people like this, learning how to make a space for yourself really does seem valuable. What could a large, loose network of independent humanities "businesses" do for the nation?

The part about getting rid of the "shame" would also be key.

The 2011 Bulwer-Lytton Prize

2011-07-26T15:55:00.000-07:00

If you haven't heard of it, the Bulwer-Lytton prize is given annually for *intentionally* bad writing--specifically for the "opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels."

This year's winner is Sue Fondrie, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. The judges note that at 26 words, hers is the shortest winner in the history of the contest, "proving that bad writing need not be prolix, or even very wordy."

What we write when we write reviews

2011-07-21T13:17:00.000-07:00

By way of reviewing the worst book review(er) ever, Robert Pinsky says that when he first started writing reviews, one newspaper gave him the following set of guidelines:

1. The review must tell what the book is about.
2. The review must tell what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.
3. The review must tell what the reviewer thinks about what the book's author says about that thing the book is about.

Pinsky then goes on to point out that hardly any reviews these days do all three things. At most they do one or two of them. Also, those who prefer Rule 1 tend to avoid Rule 3, and vice versa.

Which raises, for me, larger questions: What are book reviews for, anyway? Are they a "Consumer Reports"-style report, as Pinsky puts it? (To buy or not to buy?) Are they criticism, and if so, what does that mean?

I like to read book reviews and have written a few in my day...but I honestly don't know the answers to these questions.

Self-promotion for introverts

2011-07-19T13:51:00.000-07:00

Nathan Bransford pretty much says it all on the subject: Yes, it sucks. Yes, you have to do it.

But if you suck at it? Won't that make things worse? Isn't it better not to have self-promoted at all, than to have, for example, broken out in hives and blurted an obscenity at a prominent editor while attempting to introduce yourself at the washroom sink?

It appears there is no answer to this question. However, Shrinking Violet Productions can offer assistance, for instance in yesterday's post. Here's a particularly good excerpt:

Make it worth their while. I feel more comfortable putting myself out there if I’m giving the people listening to me something for their time. And what I can give is information, so that’s what I do give...

If only there were a way to self-promote while being convinced I was being completely taken advantage of...that would work for me.

The showing never stops, nor does the telling

2011-07-14T15:49:00.000-07:00

In the endless quest to make sense of the "show, don't tell" dictum--which I would actually love to bury, except that, once under the earth, its bones begin to glow mysteriously, and the earth above them to rumble, until the monster bursts forth, more powerful and threatening and unhelpful than ever--

Start again. Recently, Alan Rinzler made an excellent point about "show, don't tell." Although he doesn't actually use that phrase, which is probably all to the good. The point is, writers have to consider the reader's experience:

Have you ever been to a movie where there’s an annoying voiceover narration that keeps commenting without adding anything to what you’re seeing on the screen?
That’s equivalent to an excessive explanation that an author inserts unnecessarily.

Yeah, that unnecessary voiceover narration. Hello, Blade Runner Not-the-Director's-Cut. The voiceover blatantly tells the audience that the filmmaker does not trust it. Either we are too dumb to figure out what's happening on our own, or someone thought the film itself was too dumb to get the points across. Neither generates good vibes.

Even worse, this kind of explaining shuts down any nuance or variety in interpretation, which is part of the pleasure of viewing or reading art. This is the meaning, the voiceover tells us, nothing else, so stop thinking that other thing you were thinking, you're just wrong. So why are we reading this novel anyway? Why not read a diatribe on The Topic at Hand? Because the diatribe would probably be boring. We're making fiction because we want nuance and ambiguity (which is not, however, the same as obscurity and confusion). We want the reader to participate in an imaginative dialog, not be bludgeoned into submission. That's what I want as a reader, anyway.

I find I do a lot of over-explaining in first drafts, because I myself am trying to figure out what's going on. How does this character feel about his father at this moment? What conflicting emotions are going on inside him? How does he--according to his personality--express or conceal those feelings? And so forth. But after I've finished the draft, presumably I know the answers, and if I don't, I have to find them. So during revisions, I can take the over-explanation out.

Of course, it is exceptionally hard for an author to determine on her own if any aspect of her intention is coming across--or, conversely, if her writing is sufficiently nuanced to allow an interesting range of responses. That's why we all need our good, critical readers.

The early reviews are in

2011-07-12T17:13:00.000-07:00

There is now cat vomit on my revision notes for novel #2. I suppose that's better than having it on the completed manuscript. I will tell the archivists it's coffee.

In related news, Zee appears to be on the mend at last. But the process has not been without...hiccups. And four visits to the vet.

Against the Day: Where the hell am I?

2011-07-07T17:38:00.000-07:00

So I wanted to write about a brief sentence I read just last night in Pynchon's Against the Day. It was a little thing he did with dialog, which I was going to blow up into a larger thing we could all learn from.

But, leafing through the book, I can't find the line anywhere. It should, shouldn't it, be somewhere just to the left of the bookmark? Apparently, a few nights ago I put the bookmark in the wrong place, and so last night I resumed reading about 100 pages ahead of where I had actually stopped. Here's the thing: I did not notice. I am used, with Pynchon, to not remembering who each character is, and not knowing exactly where I am, setting-wise, in any given section. I had given myself over to the gestalt of the thing, and was reading along quite happily.

This is not so much a criticism of Pynchon (or me) as an aspect of the experience of reading him, which I think is mostly a fine one: sort of riding the whirlwind rather than trying to parse it. Parse away if you want, but I don't think it's strictly necessary to enjoy or even "get" the work.

On the other hand, after visit #2 in three days to Kitty ER, I was not at my sharpest last night. Keep a good thought for Zee. She is tired but feeling better--for much longer, this time, I hope.

Inspirational words about writing to compensate for incipient crazy cat-lady behavior

2011-07-05T08:18:00.000-07:00

Our cat Zee spent yesterday in Kitty ER. She is OK now--this was apparently a flare-up of a chronic intestinal condition, if by "flare" you mean...well, you can get the picture. That picture includes, at least for the moment, a special diet, which means I am spending this morning keeping Bella away from Zee's food and Zee away from Bella's (formerly Zee's as well). Obviously the simple solution is to only feed them at certain times and then *put the food away,* but they are so plaintive and manipulative that it seems easier just to get up every 10 minutes and chase somebody into another room. Did I mention that the special diet smells?

So for today's post about writing, I will simply refer you to this nice piece on procrastination by A.L. Kennedy:

I have, in my professional life, met numberless writers who seemed paralysed by their own desire to write, who had intelligent and reasonable excuses for not starting, not committing, not getting on with it, who could trump any arguments or suggestions I might make towards putting anything on paper. It is nice to win arguments, but not if it means you deny yourself the chance to do something beautiful and intensely alive.

Revising from something rather than nothing

2011-06-30T16:16:00.000-07:00

So I've been revising novel #2 for a week. Maybe two weeks. I've lost track. This thing is a mind-sucker. Keeping track of all the details of the murder mystery, like who knew what, and when, and who believed what, and why, and how the investigation got all screwed up but plausibly so...and I'm not even into the string theory section. Yes, really. I DON'T KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT.

Still, it's going well. And once again I must attribute it to my new practice of (relatively) rapid prototyping, i.e. getting *something* down and moving on and not worrying too much about anything until the whole draft is done. Because, here's what I keep discovering, to my eternal astonishment: You just need something to work with. That something need not be good; it need not even have that much to do with what you now understand your story to be.

Years ago, when I thought I was a visual artist, I used to go through the process of gessoing canvas. Gesso is that white stuff you put down first, to keep the paint from soaking into the canvas; I understood that the tedium of stretching the canvas and gessoing it was supposed to be meditative or something, but I was usually really impatient to just get started, and I turned to writing because I thought there would be less laborious prep and you could just, you know, do the thing. Joke's on me! Turns out the first draft is the gesso. You still have to do it, but the good news is that the second draft almost entirely covers it up. The first draft is really not much more than a layer to put the revisions on.

You just need something, rather than nothing. That's all.*

*Speaking of something rather than nothing, Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance posted a very interesting discussion of that question--Why is there something rather than nothing?--a few years ago. It's worth reading the whole post to follow the reasoning, but the overall point is that it's actually not a good question. Our "experience" tells us that the presence of "something" is somehow significant, and less "natural" or "simple" than the state of nothingness. In other words, we assume that the presence of "something" has to be explained (i.e. by the existence of a god or similar). But according to Carroll, there's no reason why nature itself should "prefer" nothingness. It's not necessarily a simpler state, so the presence of "something" does not necessarily demand a special explanation.

Why we need models

2011-06-28T12:36:00.000-07:00

Writing models, that is. Not supermodels. Well, I suppose we need them, too. They make us feel fat and old, which causes us to buy lots of clothes from China, which stimulates the economy and allows us keep on existing in the state of anxious pseudo-prosperity we have come to know and love. Or something.

Still with me? On the Ploughshares blog, Angela Pneuman takes up the age-old question of whether creative writing can--and needs to be--formally taught. On the matter of whether MFA programs are helpful to writers, and to contemporary literature in general, she says, "I am--helpfully--100% ambivalent." But she is certain about the importance of models as part of teaching.

It is impossible to teach without, on some level, invoking guidelines, and it is impossible to invoke guidelines without invoking the culture’s dominant aesthetic, which is most likely as familiar to us--and often as unexamined--as the air we breathe. We are either teaching to this aesthetic or calling it out and teaching against it, but there is no getting out from under the umbrella of (some) ideology--contrary as we may be, far as our meaning-making systems may be flung.

It's true that you need to know the rules in order to break them. And it's not enough to recognize those rules in some abstract way: You have to have engaged them, gotten inside and driven them around as if they were a car. Only then do you begin to realize that total, flagrant, mindless imitation of said rules is much harder than using them to go your own way.

Case in point: In one of the most fun classes I've ever taught, I had students rewrite a scene from the movie Ghost World in the style of Jane Austen. Now, assigning students to write in Austen's style wasn't a new idea, though the Ghost World angle might have been. One point of the exercise, of course, was to see what Austen's style "did" to the Ghost World story, to understand that style and story cannot be separated. At the same time we discovered that Ghost World is not as different from Pride and Prejudice as we had thought: The propriety in Austen's voice brought out the rule-bound nature of Ghost World's 1990s suburbia. Enid, the movie's heroine, struggles against these rules, as does Elizabeth Bennet; Elizabeth finds a way to thrive within that setting, while Enid finds another, more ambiguous solution.

But what was really exciting about this exercise was that each student's piece was quite different. It wasn't that some had failed to fully grasp Austen's style (or Ghost World). Rather, because each writer was different, they were drawn to different aspects of that style, and chose different scenes to translate into that style, which further destabilized it. A's Jane Austen was not B's; just as Elizabeth's choice wasn't (really wasn't) Enid's.* The sincere attempt to imitate actually brought out originality.

Having had this and countless similar experiences, though, it's still hard to keep this need for models in mind. There's probably never a point where you can fully dispense with them; conversely, they can always help you, especially if you're struggling with some writing problem. Yet my instinct still says: I want to be original. I want to do this on my own, not copy someone. The thing to remember is that the best models (Pneuman celebrates Virginia Woolf in this instance) show us what's possible, not what's impossible. They show us possibility in general. When we start rejecting models or guidelines entirely, that's when we start to reach for cliches--because that's what comes most readily to hand for everyone.

The other key is to know when you have a good model, one that opens up possibilities rather than shutting them down. Formal education helps with that.

*In fact Enid's departure on the empty bus at the end suggests suicide, which I hasten to say I'm not advocating for writers who find "the rules" or the so-called MFA style oppressive. Please don't off yourself, literally or as a writer, because you find Raymond Carver boring. Let's say instead that you need to take the bus farther out. Look at 18th century literature or international literature or...

Return to Pynchon

2011-06-23T12:43:00.000-07:00

It has been years, nay even a decade or more, since I last read Thomas Pynchon. Now I'm starting Against the Day (thanks, KS!).

So far it's about a team of balloonists/adventurers on their way to the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. How I have missed this sort of thing:

At one end of the gondola, largely oblivious to the coming and going on deck, with his tail thumping expressively now and then against the planking, and his nose among the pages of a volume by Mr. Henry James, lay a dog of no particular breed, to all appearances absorbed by the text before him. Ever since the Chums, during a confidential assignment in Our Nation's Capital (see The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit), had rescued Pugnax, then but a pup, from a furious encounter between rival packs of the District's wild dogs, it had been his habit to investigate the pages of whatever printed material should find its way on board Inconvenience, from theoretical treatments of the aeronautical arts to often less appropriate matter, such as the "dime novels"--though his preference seemed more for sentimental tales about his own species than those exhibiting extremes of human behavior, which he appeared to find a bit lurid. He had learned with the readiness peculiar to dogs how with the utmost delicacy to turn pages using nose or paws, and anyone observing him thus engaged could not help noticing the changing expressions of his face, in particular the uncommonly articulate eyebrows, which contributed to an overall effect of interest, sympathy, and--the conclusion could scarce be avoided--comprehension.

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Plot and plotless

2011-06-21T11:58:00.000-07:00

Two excellent essays were recently posted on The Millions, arguing somewhat opposite points. Michael Rowe's piece on Philip K. Dick exhorts us to stop getting hung up on Dick's "occasionally terrible" prose style. For whatever reason, Dick was never concerned about style, Rowe explains:

Dick isn’t out to crystallize a particular sentiment. He does not aim to be quotable—to be, in a word, reducible. Instead, his novels feel like labor, as though they are tabulating the results of some desperate experiment. So, it isn’t the prose style, but the plot assembly that gases up the moving parts of Dick’s fiction.

Meanwhile, another essay by Mark OConnell celebrates "plotless novels" like Oblomov, the hilarious-sounding Voyage Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre, and Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker. In Baker's novel,

[p]retty much literally nothing happens; the closest we get to action is when the narrator exhales forcefully in the direction of a paper mobile hanging from the ceiling of the baby’s room, and the paper flutters around for a while. And here’s the thing: there’s not a dull moment in the book. Baker’s brilliance as a writer lies in his ability to make the (apparently) utterly trivial utterly compelling.

So: plot or style? PKD or XdM? It's an old question, of course, and ultimately a matter of personal taste.

Re: PKD. I suspect this is why I have always really enjoyed having the plots of Dick's books told to me; yet I have never made it through a single Dick novel. (One exception was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and that possibly was only due to post-Blade-Runner-viewing momentum.) I should mention, before going any further, that Dick is occasionally quite a brilliant stylist. Especially at the beginnings of his novels, before he's racing toward his deadline, or realizing he has to make a novel out of what was in fact only a short story, or whatever happens to cause the book to collapse like a circus-tent disaster, he zaps off some of the most hilarious, spot-on condemnations of consumer culture I've ever read. Also, I haven't read many of the books people consider to be his best, so I should probably reserve judgment overall. Anyway, Rowe's essay makes me want to give old PKD another shot, and maybe, to be fair, start with the Modern Library anthology edited by Jonathan Lethem.

Still, those collapses are so disappointing--in Clans of the Alphane Moon, for example, when this brilliant premise about a bunch of mental patients governing themselves on a distant moon turns into long passages about a guy loathing his ex-wife. I guess I'm saying that confronted with a whole bookfull of Dick's prose, I'd probably gravitate instead toward a plotless novel, and cop to whatever upper-middle-class anxiety Rowe says that reveals. Style is important to me. However--and this is still something I'm trying to learn as a writer--self-conscious style is wretched. Style for the sake of showing off one's writing ability never works, and is even more off-putting than Dick's desperate scrabbling.

So how would you write a story in which nothing happens, without overwriting to make up for the lack of plot? This seems like a terrific challenge to take up. Especially for those of us whose new short story has just driven itself into a corner.

What's a mystery?

2011-06-16T13:13:00.000-07:00

While I'm on the subject of mystery, which I have been a lot lately, even though it may not technically be a "subject" as such because we don't, by definition, know what it is...here's a perspective from Leonard Susskind:

[I]n the past few years the science sections of newspapers have been reporting that cosmologists are mystified by two astonishing "dark" discoveries. The first is that 90 percent of the matter in the universe is made of some shadowy, mysterious substance called dark matter. The other is that 70 percent of the energy in the universe is composed of an even more ghostly mysterious stuff called dark energy. The words mystery, mysterious, and mystified get a very thorough workout in these articles.

I have to admit I find neither discovery all that mysterious. To me, the word mystery conveys something that completely eludes rational explanation. The discoveries of dark matter and energy were surprises but not mysteries. Elementary-particle physicists (I am one of them) have always known that their theories were incomplete and that many particles remain to be discovered. The tradition of postulating new, hard-to-detect particles began when Wolfgang Pauli correctly guessed that one form of radioactivity involved an almost invisible particle called the neutrino. Dark matter is not made of neutrinos, but by now physicists have postulated plenty of particles that could easily form the invisible stuff. There is no mystery there--only the difficulties of identifying and detecting those particles.

Susskind goes on: "The real mystery raised by modern cosmology concerns a silent 'elephant in the room,' an elephant, I might add, that has been a huge embarrassment to physicists: why is it that the universe has all of the appearances of having been specially designed so that life forms like us can exist?"

As Susskind's book is called The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, we can be sure that for him (as for me), the answer "[A] god did it" is neither helpful nor interesting. The book, which I am just now starting to read, promises to untangle the seemingly simple (and seemingly wrong) "anthropic principle." I thought I had finally understood this thing awhile ago, but now guess I don't.

Anyway, it does seem worth considering what we really mean when we use the term "mystery." By this definition, a murder mystery really isn't one. It's a...oh, hell, Rumsfeld is a prophet after all..."known unknown."

Now, once more into the cosmological breach.

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Popular Crime

2011-06-14T11:47:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence, by Bill James. So far it's lighter on the reflections and heavier on the celebration--or at least the giddy interest in piecing together clues and debating theories, which some of us share.

James at least does give cover to readers like me, who hope our interest in certain mega-famous crimes is not *primarily* lurid fascination. He says it's largely driven by a desire to see justice done. I'd add a closely related need for things to make sense. Life's a mystery, like that guy in Shine said. We're surrounded by walls we can't see past all the time: what our parents were really like before we were born; where the universe came from; why that agent who was perfect for my book never even wrote back. Surely, surely one self-contained event--this murder, which left so much "evidence" behind--can be understood, the answer known. But often, it just can't. As I've said before, information does not always add up to knowledge.

For my own problem, I choose to blame The Brothers Karamazov. It tells us that life is not just a mystery, but a murder mystery, and God is the prime suspect.

Anyway, as someone who's dug a little too deep into the Sam Sheppard case, I found James's take on the matter...interesting. At first it seems far-fetched, but then again, the more I thought about it...it does explain a lot. (No, I won't spoil it, but the NYT review did, if you're curious.)

On the other hand, an explanation is not an answer, either.

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Permanent Vacation

2011-06-09T11:02:00.001-07:00

No, not a description of my career aspirations, but a fabulous new book from Bona Fide Books: Permanent Vacation: Twenty Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks.

Have you ordered your copy yet? Why the heck not? Don't you love the outdoors? Haven't you ever wondered about those people making the beds in the lodge, or repairing the trail after a rainstorm?

What's that? You are/were one of those people? Well, good news for you, too. Bona Fide is taking submissions for a second volume.

First and third

2011-06-07T13:23:00.000-07:00

A writing teacher of mine once said that beginning fiction writers tend to write in the first person. As they grow, they "graduate" to writing in third.

Like the honor student I used to be, I took this as a task to be fulfilled. I was writing in first person in those days, for god's sake, which meant I was not a mature writer. How embarrassing to be revealed in this manner, when I'd thought my narrators were ever so sophisticated! When I did start using third, and managing not to screw it up completely, I felt I had made it to a new level of respectability. Writing in third meant I was in control, surveying the whole story from a height of my choosing. At least in theory, I was able to incorporate the sweep and scope of the great 19th century novels, the likes of which I didn't particularly aspire to write, but could have. Maybe. The point is, the third-person writer has authority. The first-person writer not only acknowledges her subjectivity but flaunts it, or worse, hides behind it, afraid to deliver any bigger truths than one individual's epiphanies.

However, I have since regressed. My second novel and the new short story I'm attempting to write are both in first. What has happened? All of a sudden I'm finding third person far more limiting. True, you can justify traveling among places and times and consciousnesses in ways you can't do in first--in a realistic first, I might add. But I can't let go of the notion that someone is always telling the story. She may be all but effaced behind the opaque screen of minimalism, or you may have the chatty, confidential "I" of much 19th century fiction, who does not sense his perspective as limited at all. In any case, there is a narrating consciousness. Some may simply decide that's the author's consciousness, with no intervening figure between it and the reader, but I somehow can't see that. To me, the narrating voice is always created, through the act of writing itself; it's artificial, which I don't mean in a negative way. So I feel like I have to understand that voice, and who it's coming from. In other words, third keeps blending into first for me anyway, so why not save a step and just do first?

It may be that first limits you in terms of saying what other characters are really thinking, and keeps you from being in two or more places or times at once. On the other hand, first gives you a tremendous amount of internal latitude. It seems to me it's much easier to justify flashbacks, for instance, in first. We suddenly remember stuff all the time, and having the memory can be part of the story, rather than (god forbid) a sort of pat psychological underpinning for some character. You can also just stop the story and muse (engagingly, of course) on the narrator's pet obsessions: Why does my father insist on wearing those glasses? How can my best friend believe in ghosts? Did the world really exist before I came into it? (Try thinking about that through the mind of a fictional character!)

Anyway, I'm finding there's lots of terrain to explore in the first-person point of view. But I wouldn't rule out authorial immaturity, either.

Consciousness and character

2011-06-02T08:10:00.001-07:00

It seems the whole consciousness thing is as tough a nut to crack as the whole what-is-the-universe-made-of thing. Over at 13.7, Alva Noë suggests a different way of approaching consciousness:

For a while now I've been arguing that we shouldn't look for consciousness in the brain. We haven't found it there, and we won't. Not because consciousness happens somewhere else, in the soul, say, or in the environment, or in the collective. But because consciousness isn't something that happens; it is something we do or make. And like everything else that we do, it depends both on the way we are constituted — on our brains and bodies — but also on the world around us.

Sidestepping the actual question of what consciousness is, I think this discussion has implications for fiction writers. (Well, everything has implications for fiction writers.)

Literature and literary characters give us more direct access to other minds than we have in everyday life. At least we seem to have access, in the form of other people's interior thoughts. On the other hand, this access is limited to what can be expressed in verbal language; and the other people are, at least to some extent, fictional.

I won't wade into the morass of how much language itself creates or forms consciousness. But we do experience a sort of merging of consciousnesses when we read. The author's words steer our minds in directions they might not otherwise go. Her language, for a time, becomes ours, though what we see and feel through that language can't be exactly what the author saw and felt when she was writing. We're drawn in by generalities, a shared language and similar broad-strokes experiences (love, loss, fear, ecstasy). But it's the edges, where the differences are negotiated, that give art life.

About character specifically: It seems to me we could think of characters as consciousnesses, by which I mean ways of seeing and being in the world, which overlap in general ways but not in specifics. I think I've too often pictured my own characters as different, atomized mixtures of my own consciousness (which I'm sloppily eliding here with personality): That one has more of my prickliness and less of my confidence; this one embodies my secret desire to become a hairdresser. But I haven't thought enough about how these guys relate to each other as consciousnesses.

In other words, just like us real people, characters should be aware that others have minds, and be equally aware that they can't quite reach them. They are as alone, and as connected, in their world as we are in ours. And moments when consciousnesses seem to touch and interact--as when an author suddenly shows us an entirely new way of seeing--should be as amazing for characters within the novel as they are for us on the "outside."

Jumping up and down on the fantasy bandwagon

2011-05-31T09:39:00.001-07:00

In the Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Alter says that literary authors are "jump[ing] on the fantasy bandwagon" this summer. All manner of highbrows are now writing about werewolves, zombies, ghosts, and robots, and evidently raking in the cash. Some of us have in fact been riding this very bandwagon for years, hopping up and down and waving our arms; but if this "new" trend means that novels about domed cities, crackpot marketing schemes, the Apocalypse, Bigfoot, and kind-of-magical babies are now hip--and lucrative--then I am all for it. Have I mentioned that my novel is about a domed city, a crackpot marketing scheme, the Apocalypse, Bigfoot, and a kind-of-magical baby? And celebrities? OK, just checking.

Apart from yapping after the accelerating Audi of mainstream success, I suspect these literary authors are also taking post-post modernism in another, logical direction. Those who are congenitally suspicious of "realism" may be getting tired of self-consciously playing around with figurative language--with clouding the lens, as it were. (Though not me, God knows.) Entering the imagined worlds normally reserved for science fiction and fantasy is another way of saying, "What do you mean, 'represent reality'? No, really, what do you mean?" Probably more readers will enjoy this second way of asking the question.

Where the real resides

2011-05-26T07:49:00.000-07:00

From the Paris Review's interview with Ann Beattie:

The interplay between character and external world is something that realist writers always dealt with conscientiously, and it started to drop out with minimalism. Hemingway dropped it out, too, but even in his stories there tends to be a volley going on between the environment and the character. Carver won’t say what the volley is. None of us will.

I guess you might say that minimalism resides in certain omissions, in trusting, à la Beckett, that if you give the sparest sort of context—two people in a trash can, a road at night—it will be like a dreamscape for people’s projections.

This is very well said, and something I've been wondering about for quite awhile. What makes literary characters seem real to us? What forms the boundaries around character? What delineates it; what processes build it up? I've always thought the "volley" was an important component, and that squares with my being somewhat averse to minimalism. But Beattie's right; minimalists like Beckett (whom I love) trust the reader to supply the "dreamscape." To put it another way, the characters' interior depictions are strong and suggestive enough to inspire that dreamscape.

So who's to say which is a more realistic depiction of character or "the world"? We don't come across people in trash cans calmly discussing life every day, but for many readers and playgoers, that psychological reality is fully recognizable. Perhaps it's more so, because they're creating their own context to a larger degree.

Jess Row is getting at this same issue in his recent Boston Review piece. His point, well worth remembering, is that our sense of "realism" is culturally determined. In part, anyway. (There's quite a dust-up going on in the comments to this article. By God, people do care about literature.)

The way we live now

2011-05-24T07:40:00.001-07:00

Back, I hope, to the regular blogging schedule of Tuesdays and Thursdays.

On this Tuesday, I think it's worth contemplating the words of Cathy Davidson on the HASTAC blog, in response to Bill Keller's fears about Twitter and the human soul:

We are fifteen years into the commercialization of the Internet. We have all made tremendous adjustments to these new forms of technology and social media. I don't know about you but I do not need a new "study" to tell me my life has been changed by email, texting, blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon.com, my iPad, my Blackberry, and on and on and on. It's NOT the Technology , Stupid! I hear James Carville shouting. It's about all of the ways life is changing and how technology facilitates, reshapes, redistributes the everyday patterns, facts, and habits of life. And it is about us figuring out the best ways to live given these rapid and continuing changes.

I agree that it's time to dispense with laments for the Before Time. This technology stuff is here to stay, and many of us--the relatively privileged, anyway--are now living a good chunk of our lives in the cloud. If that's an expression of a collective soul, we have the opportunity, and obligation, to discover its proper care and feeding. If the soul--the Internet--is dumb, we can make it less so by reading and writing better stuff. If the soul is vicious, we can make it kinder. And so forth. The message is the medium.

Space colony art from the 1970s

2011-05-11T13:49:00.000-07:00

Commissioned by NASA.

I love these for the same reason I love the NASA logo itself, the one known as "The Meatball." It's the goofy more-is-more graphic optimism of the early space age. (I don't love the alternative logo, known as "The Worm," which has fortunately been retired.)

Of course I'm biased, since my dad worked for NASA. He was at the research center now known as Glenn, formerly Lewis. They used to have "For the Benefit of All Mankind" spelled out in begonias in front of the building.

Light needs darkness

2011-05-04T04:21:00.000-07:00

I really enjoyed this TED talk on the relationships between darkness and light. It also confirmed my suspicion that institutional lighting can truly make people crazy.

(Link here.)

The new novel is napping

2011-04-28T08:06:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday I finished the first draft of my second novel. In contrast to the first one, which took six-plus years, this one took less than a year.

One reason is that I had the voice for the new novel in my head right away. It's first person, alternating between past and present. Knowing this meant that a lot of point-of-view problems, as well as tone and mood problems, never arose. First person is quite limiting in other ways, and it didn't work for my first novel; but it seems that if you at least know who's talking and why, you can go a long way.

Another reason this one went relatively quickly is that I've learned to tolerate some remarkably egregious flaws in a first draft. These include:

A character who, Schrodinger's cat-like, is both alive and dead throughout the first half of the story. I couldn't decide which had to be the case, so I just kept writing till it became clear.
Another character who becomes three different people during the course of the story. When she first appeared I had one idea of the role she would play, but she evolved out of that. By the end became both the motive for the storytelling (the "narrative occasion," always an issue), and a fully worthy love interest for the narrator.
Not knowing who the killer was until the last paragraph. Maybe still not knowing.
The usual instances of overwriting, underwriting, and especially substituting summary for scene. God, why must there be scenes? Why can't everything be summary interspersed with occasional dialog?
Massive doubts as to whether the story even begins to make sense on any level.

What all this means, of course, is that revising is going to be a lot of work. But before that is the required cooling-off/baking/resting period, in which I ignore the novel for approximately two months so that I can tackle revisions with a new perspective. I'm shooting for July 1.

PROGRAMMING NOTE: During the next two weeks blogging may be lighter than usual, and/or unpredictable, due to work, travel, and family issues.

Of chicks and literature

2011-04-26T08:30:00.000-07:00

I missed the initial dust-up in which Jennifer Egan, fresh off her Pulitzer win, described certain works of "chick lit" as "very derivative, banal stuff," prompting Jennifer Weiner, a noted author in that genre, to tweet, "And there goes my chance to be happy that a lady won the big prize." Floodgates have opened; Egan has been widely accused of attacking fellow women authors and setting the cause back 50 years.

Jeez.

Anyway, it's all spelled out in this Millions article by Deena Drewis, who pretty much has the same take on the fracas as I do. I've talked about this issue--expectations for women writers--in a slightly different context before. Bottom line, I think it's great that Egan advised "young female writers" to "shoot high and not cower." Although she may have steered them toward a life of relative poverty. Not, again, that there is anything wrong with chick-lit or women's lit (which I understand are not quite the same thing, inasmuch as I understand what either of these things really is). What's wrong is being shocked when some women say they don't want to write or read it.

In a related development, last Sunday, the "Riff" piece in the New York Times Magazine by Carina Chocano compared two movies that came out 20 (!) years ago, Thelma and Louise and Pretty Woman. Chocano points out that while the former was truly groundbreaking, the latter now seems more prescient and contemporary. Unfortunately.

I will just conclude with an update on my plea for complex portrayals of intellectuals in American fiction. How about complex portrayals of women intellectuals specifically? Of women for whom philosophical, artistic, and/or scientific concerns are central to life, not a misguided distraction or displacement of maternal energies?

Lyrical realism vs. the avant-garde

2011-04-21T08:16:00.000-07:00

A recent piece by Garth Risk Hallberg revisits a 2008 Zadie Smith essay, in which she compares Joseph O'Neill's Netherland to Tom McCarthy's Remainder.* I was surprised to learn that Smith came out strongly against Netherland as the type of novel she'd like to see--and write--more of. But that's a testament to how unprepared I am to wade into this debate. Not only have I not read Smith's essay, I also have not read Remainder or any of McCarthy's work. This will not, of course, stop me from commenting.

Like Smith, I've grown tired of "lyrical Realism" in contemporary fiction, and suspect that it's holding fiction back from addressing Big Questions. I don't, however, have a strong argument at hand to prove this. It's more a feeling that all the time spent "showing" the raised, doily-like pattern on the china our heroine is setting on the rough-hewn dining room table leaves less time for "telling," or asking, what all this is for. Why are we here? What is our place in the universe? What are our obligations to it? Yes, I know: these questions are all there. They are embedded in the showing of the china, and a more subtle mind than mine would appreciate them that way. I just prefer it when characters and authors wrestle with big questions explicitly, at least from time to time. And some of that wrestling could well spill over into the novel's form, making it what is loosely called "avant-garde."

On the other hand, I really liked Netherland, and I believe it's because, as Hallberg puts it, "the potentially meaningless gets redeemed by fine writing." That's no minor distinction. When the writing is that fine, that important to the story, it becomes its own meta, its own avant-garde. Of course it's extremely hard to do this well; the attempt often results in too much milky light glinting off the aforementioned china, and/or tiresome nosedives into the past. Back to "lyrical Realism" of the most lamentable kind.

Anyway, Hallberg deftly undermines both the lyrical Realist and avant-garde categories, reminding us that the point, for both writers and readers, is not to choose a side. Instead, it's up to authors to rethink and revise form *every time* they sit down to write--not for the sake of form itself, but to properly accommodate the writer's "burning."

*We have now reached the third level of meta, criticizing criticism of criticism. There's probably a point at which this must stop.

True stories about people's lives, and fiction

2011-04-19T08:45:00.000-07:00

Still (for some reason) on the subject of David Foster Wallace, self-help, and literature, I very much enjoyed Jonathan Franzen's "Farther Away: 'Robinson Crusoe,' David Foster Wallace, and the island of solitude" in the recent New Yorker.

It strikes me yet again that this is a very different kind of literary criticism than I was trained to produce as a grad student. Back in my day, literary study was an utterly sterile environment, an ICU where we hooked books up to large, wheezing theory machines and then watched them slowly die. (I'm sorry. I guess I'm still a little sad about the whole business.) There was literally no place to discuss the work in the context of lived experience. You could, by way of disclosing the position from which you spoke (i.e. your implied authority and/or biases on the subject), mention your race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, but only in the manner in which you would check these off on a form: permission to speak, plus plausible deniability. Check.

Actual personal narratives, however, had no place; and there could certainly be no discussion of the role the work in question played in your own life. Why should there be? In fact, it played no role. It was an object of study. Study was not life. As to how one was supposed to navigate one's non-studying hours--well, those hours or minutes were so brief anyway, why even wonder? One thing was clear: you would never turn to the poems or novels or treatises you were working on for solace or advice or reflection. That would be misuse, and stupid besides.

But now I'm noticing, both inside the academy and outside, a real turn toward lived experience as a central aspect of criticism. Critics are not necessarily exposing their innermost secrets with every piece (and thank god), but there's a sense of literature as part of life, as a pattern of rich threads woven throughout life's fabric. Elif Batuman's The Possessed is one example. Franzen's article is another. What we see in this kind of writing is the process of literature and life enhancing each other. We look through one at the other, and then back again, gaining new insights with every turn. We take literature with us on our journeys, not to pass the time, but to make it.

Franzen does this literally in "Farther Away," traveling to remote Masafuera Island with a copy of Robinson Crusoe and a small box of Wallace's ashes. The resulting article touches on ecology (especially birdwatching), technology, the perils of hiking in fog and rain, the history of the novel, the resonance of Robinson Crusoe today, and Wallace's complex life and cruel death. This last entails the cruelty he showed to others in killing himself, especially at home, where those he loved most would find him. The suicide is not just the delicate artist bidding adieu to the harsh world he can't handle. He added to that harshness in a big way, and his survivors have to deal with that. No wonder the pull of isolation is as strong for those left behind as it was for Wallace.

Franzen's grief expands the meaning of Robinson Crusoe, instead of reducing it, as the hermetically trained critic might fear. And vice versa: Crusoe enhances (which does not mean "worsens") the grief. Pieces like this show the most illuminating way to read cannot be in a library cubicle, surrounded by white walls and buzzing lights and the unrelenting fear of failure. Instead, we could try reading a little, walking a little, nearly falling off a rock, building a campfire, reading some more, crying, sleeping, reading, scattering ashes. Now what does the book have to say to us--and vice versa?

DFW's self-help library

2011-04-14T09:29:00.000-07:00

Via Kate S., a really wonderful article by Maria Bustillos on David Foster Wallace's collection of self-help books, and his deep, furious engagement with them. Bustillos does us an enormous service by not just revealing Wallace's marginalia in books like Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child--although she does that extensively. She also takes on Wallace's thoughts about the books, offering her own deep engagement with his fraught self-image. I suspect he would have approved.

Bustillos, through Wallace, situates the powerful self-help streak in U.S. culture within the context of artistic creativity, by showing us the double-edged sword of individuality. The imperative to know and love and help oneself easily gives over to obsessing over and hating same. This makes creativity virtually impossible. As Bustillos puts it (referring to The Pale King),

The book Wallace was too stuck in himself to complete is one in which he was observing how we all ought to become unstuck, sadly. The realization that you have something of value to contribute to the greater world necessarily involves prying your mind off yourself for a minute. [....]

And yet our culture is obsessed with finding the causes, with talking things through, and with getting to the bottom of our problems by thinking and talking about them a lot. With solving the problem of depression. The book The Drama of the Gifted Child, suffers very much from that "self-help", inward-turned weakness. It is a good but flawed book that tells just a small part of the story of how to do family life. There is no blame to pin anywhere; there is a balance to try to achieve.

Anyway, I really recommend you read the whole article. This is one of those pieces of criticism that does full justice to a complex subject, while finding its larger implications for our cultural moment.

True stories about people's lives

2011-04-12T08:59:00.000-07:00

So I was in a bookstore this past weekend. While picking out a large, lavishly illustrated book on forensic science (something I never thought I'd own in my life, but the new novel requires it), I overheard a woman say to the clerk: "Can you recommend any autobiographies? I don't want fiction. I only read true stories about people's lives."

I felt like throwing down my lavishly illustrated forensic science book and pouncing on her. But as I rounded a row of shelves, I observed that she was about six feet tall, resplendent in animal skins and platform boots. So I reconfigured my imagined pounce as a verbal one:

Her: I only read true stories about people's lives.
Me: Obviously you don't realize that fiction, although it is not "true" in the "factual" sense, puts us in touch with larger "truths" that strictly "factual" narratives can't provide. Jeez.

In reality, I said nothing. Having received some recommendations, she clomped off happily, and I plunked down my forensic science book, along with an impulse buy: Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett, a true story about people's lives.

Specifically, it's about Patchett's friendship with the poet Lucy Grealy, who is best known for her nonfiction book, Autobiography of a Face. Grealy was hugely talented but hugely troubled, mostly by the aftereffects of the cancer she'd had as a child, which left her face disfigured. She'd since had dozens of reconstructive surgeries, all of which eventually failed, and which ravaged the rest of her body through tissue and bone grafts. While successful by any measure as a writer, and possessed of many friends as devoted as Patchett, she felt unloved. Despite her friends' heroic efforts to save her, Grealy died of a drug overdose in 2002.

As you can see, I have already finished the book. I inhaled it over the last two days. This total absorption is largely due to Patchett's writing. It's simply perfect, not an ill-chosen word or clumsy sentence in the entire book. To be able to write with such grace about traumatic experience is probably what defines the true artist.

However, I'm also convinced that knowing the story was true was part of the reason I could not put it down. I think it's because I was looking for answers in a way I don't look for them in fiction. In other words, I had a non-artistic purpose in reading, which was learning how Patchett got through this difficult experience. I don't like to think of art, which this book is, as self-help, and yet--isn't it always, on some level? Aren't we always seeking something better, new, different, in ourselves through the experience of art? Still, my goals were more practical: How did Patchett manage to love, and stick with, this very needy person right up to the end? How did she come away from it loving Grealy all the more, apparently without bitterness, only with gratitude? (It's true that bitterness can be edited out of a book, if not one's life, but I think Patchett is an honest enough writer that she would have allowed it to show if it were a significant part of her feelings toward Grealy.)

Did the ability to make art from the experience have something to do with the gratitude she now feels? I suspect so. Not that Patchett was thinking to herself the whole time: Well, this is hard as hell, but at least it's material. In the book, she explains it this way:

We were a pairing out of an Aesop's fable, the grasshopper and the ant, the tortoise and the hare. And sure, maybe the ant was warmer in the winter and the tortoise won the race, but everyone knows that the grasshopper and the hare were infinitely more appealing animals in all their leggy beauty, their music and interesting side trips. What the story didn't tell you is that the ant relented at the eleventh hour and took in the grasshopper when the weather was hard, fed him on his tenderest store of grass all winter. The tortoise, being uninterested in such things, gave over his medal to the hare. Grasshoppers and hares find the ants and tortoises. They need us to survive, but we need them as well. They were the ones who brought the truth and beauty to the party, which Lucy could tell you as she recited Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day.

So how did Patchett arrive at this understanding? Through art? Or is she just a more generous ant, by nature, than I? I will try to assume it's the former, and see what I can do.

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Review of The Hidden Reality on The Millions

2011-04-08T08:25:00.001-07:00

My review of Brian Greene's new book is now up at The Millions.

Wind

2011-04-07T08:35:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was windy.

Years ago I read a wonderful book called Wind: How the Flow of Air Has Shaped Life, Myth, and the Land by Jan DeBlieu. Naturally I can't find my copy now, but from the Amazon review: "Jan DeBlieu lives on North Carolina's Outer Banks, where 'wind is culture and heritage... Wind toughens us, moves mountains of sand as we watch, makes it difficult to sleepwalk through life.'" At one point, I remember, she says that she feels strange in places that aren't windy like the Outer Banks--not just breezy, but what many would probably call blustery.

I thought of this yesterday, watching the giant redwood at the top of a hill in our neighborhood swirling its branches like some multi-fronded sea creature. My life is largely a still affair, with lots of sitting at desks and staring at words, which may create imagined movements in my head but don't engage in a whole lot of activity on their own. I sit in cars or planes and watch the world pass alongside or beneath me. I am not buffeted, except by psychological currents. In other words, I tend to think of wind as something wrong--as in, it was a beautiful day, but windy.

Wind is strange to me. The air, which normally I just walk through and don't notice, is coming after me, insisting I feel and respond to its presence, affecting the way I move. But why should this be bad? Sure, no one wants to get hit with a trash can lid or a falling tree limb while out on one's daily stroll, but apart from certain hazards, wind's strangeness--for the suburban knowledge-worker, anyway--is psychological. It's a reminder that things are changing all the time. And not just changing all around us, but within us and through us. We're one of those things the wind blows around.

Since I've been immersed in cosmology books lately, the wind also reminds me that we are always in motion, whether we feel it or not. The earth is turning and revolving around the sun; we (the earth, the sun, our solar system) are riding roller-coaster like around the galaxy; we (now expanded to include our galaxy and its compatriots) are shooting along to who-knows-where on the constantly expanding fabric of space-time. That's relativity for you.

I'm not as anchored as I think. Or, rather, I must think of being anchored differently.

The Killing, Twin Peaks, and how much we may or may not enjoy them

2011-04-05T09:30:00.000-07:00

"The Killing," AMC's new limited-run series (too long to be a mini-, I guess) is getting rave reviews. This one from Matt Zoller Seitz delves into the new show's debt to "Twin Peaks," David Lynch's 1990-91 TV series, often referred to as "groundbreaking." It was also a "limited run," though in this case the limits were imposed by the network, which demanded that the central mystery be solved midway through the second season. Shortly thereafter, and rightly, viewers abandoned the show in droves.

By coincidence, I recently re-watched "Twin Peaks" on Hulu, up to the point where everyone stopped watching--when Laura Palmer's killer was revealed, and the series immediately disintegrated into full-on buffoonery. The show is actually a great study in characterization, presenting us with a collection of oddballs with exaggerated quirks; they don't seem quite like real people, but then again, maybe our definition of "real" in this case comes from other detective shows. What does make us think of characters on TV as real or not real? Aren't the heroic, daring detectives of TV and film mostly projections of our wishes? And don't we know some very strange people in our own lives, when we step back and think about them?

At any rate, the characters of "Twin Peaks" all fit quite naturally into the eerie Pacific Northwest setting; they are appropriate inhabitants of this place. Intriguingly, the main character, Special Agent Dale Cooper, played by Kyle MacLachlan, is from elsewhere--yet he is perfectly suited to the town of Twin Peaks. He fits in by not fitting. I would add that some of the minor characters, included apparently for comic relief, are cartoons, not convincing either as Twin Peaks inhabitants or as people. They exist to slip on banana peels, be hit in the face with rakes, get accidentally pregnant, and have other hilarious mishaps.

This gets at the heart of what I have to say about "Twin Peaks," which is that for all its inventiveness, it contains a cruel streak that seems to go beyond the needs of the story. This is especially true in its treatment of women, who are time and again victims of sadistic violence. Now, this is also true, in many cases, in the real world. I don't believe fiction has to go out of its way to show women as always powerful and free--as moral examples, in other words. Nor should it browbeat us with the plight of victims. Instead, tell us something new, unfamiliar, intriguing, disturbing about violence and its sources.

"Twin Peaks" doesn't do that. Instead, it revels in women's victimization, serving it up as aesthetic entertainment that makes no demands on the viewers' conscience. Again, the aestheticization of violence--and its conversion into entertainment--is part of real life. I'm not saying we should excise this issue from our stories. Instead, the story can ask interesting, uncomfortable questions that do implicate the viewer or reader: Why does this interest you? What are you seeking here? How does the search for justice bleed over into prurient curiosity? What purpose does this curiosity serve? These questions seem even more pertinent when real crimes (like JonBenet Ramsay's murder and many, many others) rather quickly turn into fun for the rest of us. Good fiction could help us understand how this happens, in a relatively safe practice zone. But on such points, "Twin Peaks" has nothing to say, other than check this out, man.

I'm hoping that "The Killing," with its unconventional female detective, will surpass "Twin Peaks" in asking, not exploiting, these hard questions.

Another good idea (or two) from Ta-Nehisi Coates

2011-04-01T09:09:00.000-07:00

In this post, Ta-Nehisi Coates does two great things.

First, he once again demonstrates unbridled enthusiasm for great writing--in this case, King Lear. Let's all do more of this. Let's shove great writing under our friends' (or blog readers') noses, or read it to them aloud, without any comment other than our own obvious joy.

How often do we come upon a passage that just knocks us back on our heels? That makes us just want to sit there and let the words flicker around our heads like fireflies? Nabokov called this the "telltale tingle between the shoulder blades." That's a central aspect of the experience of art; and I think it actually happens pretty frequently. Unfortunately, too often, those of us who write or talk about art (semi-)professionally tend to brush that experience aside, so we can get down to the business of criticism. The feeling is hard to articulate, which makes it seem, I don't know, less than worthwhile, possibly even silly. Yet critics who adopt a purely sober, droning voice when discussing even works they love do a disservice to potential readers, not to mention students. If these guys who are supposed to love literature can't muster anything more than formal statements of approval, why should I bother? What am I going to get out of it? Dude, you can be ecstatic! Look! Listen!

Second, Coates makes this passing suggestion: "I think it might have been better for me to enroll in college at 35, instead of 17." Agreed. Or, rather than "instead of," why not "in addition to"? I bet they do this in countries like Sweden all the time! Every (say) fifteen years, the government pays you to leave your job and get a degree in anything that interests you at the time. Or you take a bunch of different classes, if you have lots of interests, but real, college-level classes, full-time. Then, after three or four years, you go back to your job, or to a different job, refreshed, enlightened, ready to innovate.

My own little fantasy is to go back and get an undergraduate math degree. You're laughing! I am the person with the recurring nightmare that I've signed up for some high-level college calculus class, but somehow forget to go all term, only to realize that I must now take the final. But that's the point. I want to learn math outside the stakes of high school and college, when you're under pressure to figure out the thing you're good at, asap, so you can major in that thing and be that thing for the rest of your life, climbing relentlessly higher on that thing's ladder of success till you die at the very tippy top, whence you are vacuumed into heaven--and yet your math scores are telling you that at age 18, it's already too late for any of this to happen to you. Your peers will climb that ladder, growing ever smaller in your tear-blurred vision, as you watch from your refrigerator box on Skid Row or your parents' treelawn. Now I just think math is cool and I want to learn it.

Still, I doubt I will really do this. At least not until I am rich and insane, and right now I am only one of those.

Blog note: With this post, I am going to end my brief experiment of posting every day, minus weekends, federal holidays, and travel days. I am going to aim for a more manageable schedule of twice a week, say, Tuesdays and Thursdays.

What is narrative?

2011-03-31T11:57:00.000-07:00

I don't know if this was intentional,* but Google's coffee-pot-and-test-tube graphic today reminded me of The Way Things Go. This is a 1987 short film by Peter Fischli and David Weiss, and Wikipedia describes it better than I can: "It documents a long causal chain assembled of everyday objects, resembling a Rube Goldberg machine."

It begins with a heavy bag hanging by a rope from the ceiling. The rope slowly unwinds, eventually lowering the bag sufficiently to start a tire rolling, which then upends a plank resting on a fulcrum, which flips to propel the tire further forward, causing a weighted ladder to inch down a ramp... You get the idea. The film contains no words. Yet it is amazingly suspenseful. Will the tire stay upright long enough to reach its destination? It has rhythm: some of the events are slow, to the point where you nearly give up on them, and others lightning fast. And although no human beings (or anything sentient) appears in the film, it has characters: the objects that are set in motion one by one, play their brief part in the "story," and then fall to the wayside (or burn).

It's remarkable to think that narrative can exist without human, or at least anthropomorphic, figures to drive it--not to mention without words themselves. There seems to be a deep, underlying flow to storytelling, into which characters and words are woven, and/or to which they contribute. You may have great characters and lovely words, but without this flow, you may not have a story--at least not the traditional page-turning, leaning-forward-to-hear-what-comes-next variety. Is this flow the same as plot? Maybe, but I think it's deeper. It's the conviction that all things in the story are connected, even if you can't exactly articulate how; that the things are there because they have to be. This might actually be a better, or at least a less intimidating way, to think of plot.

You can watch all three parts of the film on YouTube, apparently; too bad it's in separate sections. There are also edits in the film itself, as a commenter on YouTube points out, which suggests the machine's motion may not have been continuous for the full half hour, or that some of the events took too much time for viewers to sit through (like watching something dissolve in acid, for example). If your main concern is whether the machine really worked as shown, this is a problem.

*Oh. The graphic is to commemorate Robert Bunsen's 200th birthday. Guess if you click on the graphic it tells you that, too.

Another thing I've learned about writing (which people tried to tell me for years)

2011-03-30T12:54:00.000-07:00

The thing is this: read your drafts aloud. I'm not talking about learning to perform your work, which I also wholeheartedly recommend. I'm saying that in the privacy of your little workspace, to your own little self, you should read your work aloud. Fiction, nonfiction, whatever. It is astonishingly helpful.

For years I resisted this advice, because it would, you know, make me feel like a dork. It is odd to worry about feeling like a dork even though--or in this case because--no one can see or hear me being a dork. Apparently if a dork falls in the forest, etc., he or she is even more of a dork.

Anyway. My other objection to reading aloud was that it wasn't really necessary. I can *pretend* to read aloud using the little voice that's always yammering on in my head, which is very similar to my actual voice. But that's not true. For one thing, you can't skim when you're reading aloud. You have to say (and therefore read) every word. And boy, do you catch mistakes that way.

But reading aloud is not only important for copyediting purposes. Whatever type of writing you're doing, hearing the sound and rhythm of your words will make a big difference. I read a draft out loud just this morning, and there was this one sentence at the beginning of the last paragraph that went "clunk." When I wrote it, I thought it was audacious and charming. But then it went "clunk." So I thought about it, and realized that in fact it didn't fit. It clunked because it made no sense, and when I took it out, harmony and rhythm and sense were restored.

This is not to say your rhythm should always be smooth. Sometimes you want a word or line to be jarring. But there's good jarring and bad jarring, and bad doesn't just mean the sound is off. Likely as not, the sense is off, too.

I just read this post aloud. I made several changes.

Do's and don't's for writers

2011-03-29T15:19:00.000-07:00

Short on brain power again today. But that's why we have the Internet. Behold, some valuable do's and don't's. You're welcome, writers.

Don't respond viciously to lukewarm reviews of your poorly copyedited self-published book on Amazon. Or maybe, do.
Do submit your work for BonaFide Books' Tahoe Blues Anthology. Don't miss the May 1 deadline.
If you live in or near LA, do attend the New Short Fiction Series on April 10. This is a spoken-word performance and book launch of Stacey Levine's new collection, The Girl with Brown Fur. Don't miss it and end up kicking yourself.

The importance of writing badly (and with cats)

2011-03-28T08:41:00.000-07:00

Via Kim W., Jennifer Egan talks about her writing process.

I haven't read A Visit from the Goon Squad yet, but The Keep was fantastic--in both senses. And a little Turn-of-the-Screw-like.

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The most important thing I've learned so far (about novel writing)

2011-03-25T14:17:00.000-07:00

The Guide to Literary Agents blog has a recurring feature called Seven Things I've Learned So Far. Last week, novelist Alexander Yates posted a great list. His #1 is also mine:

1. Revision is important, but finishing your draft is more important. I learned this the hard way. It took me five years to finish writing my novel, but in retrospect two of those years were wasted (or at least used very ineffectively) on obsessive over-revision.

Oh, how I can relate. I would estimate five of the six years I took to finish my first novel were spent on the first 50 pages. And I tossed almost all of that work in the end.

Here's the thing. People did tell me this. I read and heard countless admonishments to first novelists not to fall into this trap. But my excuse was, I had to "understand what I was doing before I could proceed."

Now, there is a point to that. You do need *some* idea of what you're doing before you get too far along; otherwise you could drive your clattering jalopy of a novel right off a cliff. Early on, you will need to do a certain amount of rewriting and redirecting and just plain noodling around. At the same time, it's important to accept that your first several chapters will always be far from perfect. In fact, they will be the farthest from perfect of all your chapters. As Yates says, "first chapters are supposed to stink."

But what do you do, as you're cruising into page 100, and you suddenly realize several events back in the beginning no longer make any sense? Well, in the past, I would have gone back and revised *everything up to page 100*--to the level of line editing. Oh, God, the years! Lament! Howl!

Anyway, the solution in this situation is to *make a note.* Write your notes in a separate file, or by hand in a notebook (I prefer this method). You might say something like: "Necklace cannot be discovered until *after* body is found." If the matter feels particularly urgent, add exclamation points or highlighting or draw a box around the note. Then go back to page 100 and *keep going.*

Because--get this--when you've finished the entire draft, you may realize you were right the first time: the necklace shows up *before* the corpse does, just as you originally suspected. Or you might have come up with a different scenario all together. There was no necklace in the first place! You can delete that entire paragraph! Imagine how painful that would be if you had spent six months rewriting that damn paragraph. As I did.

Anyway, read Yates's whole post. It's good. And I hope we've saved at least one of you out there some time.

PS on Henry James

2011-03-24T10:25:00.000-07:00

Here's a great piece from The Millions on learning to love James. It's kind of an immersion thing. It's also true that reading Colm Tóibín's The Master really helps.

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Collusion in the literary ghost story

2011-03-23T10:14:00.000-07:00

The Turn of the Screw? Done! Completed! All behind us! Ah, how much we've learned about writing scary stories! Except...

Did we understand the ending?

To recap: One child, Flora, has become so traumatized by the governess's suspicions about her and the visitants that she has become physically ill. She has been whisked off to London by Mrs. Grose. That leaves the governess alone with Miles (not counting the anonymous, apparently non-interactive household staff)--and she takes the opportunity to try to pry some answers out of him at last. Specifically, she wants to know what he got him expelled from school. In the last portion of the novella, she's gone from thinking the children wholly innocent, to believing they are decidedly not. However she still loves Miles, clearly her favorite now, and her last remaining hope for understanding what has been happening. As she questions him, the specter of Peter Quint appears behind Miles in the window, and then drifts away again. And then...

My sternness was all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him avert himself again, and that movement made ME, with a single bound and an irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him. For there again, against the glass, as if to blight his confession and stay his answer, was the hideous author of our woe—the white face of damnation. I felt a sick swim at the drop of my victory and all the return of my battle, so that the wildness of my veritable leap only served as a great betrayal. I saw him, from the midst of my act, meet it with a divination, and on the perception that even now he only guessed, and that the window was still to his own eyes free, I let the impulse flame up to convert the climax of his dismay into the very proof of his liberation. "No more, no more, no more!" I shrieked, as I tried to press him against me, to my visitant.

"Is she HERE?" Miles panted as he caught with his sealed eyes the direction of my words. Then as his strange "she" staggered me and, with a gasp, I echoed it, "Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!" he with a sudden fury gave me back.

I seized, stupefied, his supposition—some sequel to what we had done to Flora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better still than that. "It's not Miss Jessel! But it's at the window—straight before us. It's THERE—the coward horror, there for the last time!"

At this, after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled dog's on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light, he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and missing wholly, though it now, to my sense, filled the room like the taste of poison, the wide, overwhelming presence. "It's HE?"

I was so determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to challenge him. "Whom do you mean by 'he'?"

"Peter Quint—you devil!" His face gave again, round the room, its convulsed supplication. "WHERE?"

They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his tribute to my devotion. "What does he matter now, my own?—what will he EVER matter? I have you," I launched at the beast, "but he has lost you forever!" Then, for the demonstration of my work, "There, THERE!" I said to Miles.

But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.

Wow. I didn't remember that ending at all from my previous reading, whenever it was. I really had no idea what was going to happen, but Miles's death was a surprise even so. This time through, I think I'd come to believe (with the governess) that the children were nearly as sinister as the visitants themselves. I've possibly seen too many devil-child movies, and the sudden "ugliness" of Flora's language, when she tells Mrs. Grose how much she hates the governess, gives her a certain Linda Blair aspect. Plus, there's the word "dispossessed," in the very last line, significantly set off by commas. Google tells me "dispossessed" can mean both "exorcised" (as of a demon) and "homeless." Very interesting. As if Quint is a kind of parasite (cf Alien, Aliens, Alien3, etc.) that kills its host when removed. And it seems as if the actual parasite is love, in a perhaps unspeakable form.

But it isn't exactly clear. So when I finished the story I did something I'm not proud of. I consulted the introduction to the Signet collection of James's stories I happen to have. Even in my high school days, that felt like cheating. And may I say, just in passing: Why give away the ending of the story in the introduction? Does this not announce flat-out that anyone reading this stories cannot possibly be doing so for pleasure? Why not just title the Introduction "Helpful Hints to Get You Through Another School Assignment"? Perhaps an Afterword, or notes section, would provide assistance if needed, while maintaining that old books can still be read for the same reasons we read new ones?

Anyway. R. W. B. Lewis, writing in 1983, tells us that *nobody* really understands the ending (although that was nearly 30 years ago; perhaps experiments at CERN have since settled the matter). Are the ghosts real, and responsible for Miles's death, or are they just figments of the governess's deranged imagination? Lewis writes:

Henry James's histrionic genius would never settle for an either-or account of experience, especially of the kind established by many critics of "The Turn of the Screw": it is all the ghosts' wicked responsibility, or all the governess's doing. Peter Quint and the governess collaborate, by a dreadful collision of psychic energy, in the death of young Miles.

That sounds fine to me. James is a great writer, and a great ghost story would not give us pure victimization as a spectacle. Nor would it be a mere "trick" in which the narrator wakes up at the end--possibly inside a mental ward.

So here's the lesson for fiction writers today: in the literary ghost story, the events should come about through collaboration between human and ghost. That's not to say our human hero should "really" be "bad" in some way, or even directly responsible for the bad stuff. But something about their psychology, their reactions to events and/or certain secret desires should combine with the occult to drive the outcomes. This is the way to make your story truly surprising and disturbing. The hero must invite the vampire in, and get more than he or she bargained for. One thing is clear from this ending: the governess's pride in her own strength in the face of terror have backfired. When she stands up to Quint directly, shielding Miles from him, that's when Miles dies.

But was this pride the cause? Not really, or not only. We think we know what we're doing, and we don't. That is scary.

No Day Without a Line (and at least one day without a screen)

2011-03-22T08:58:00.001-07:00

While I was casting around for something to write about today, my eyes landed on a book that I've been using, completely fortuitously, to prop up my monitor: No Day Without a Line by Yuri Olesha.

As some of my former students know, Olesha is really my favorite author of all time. I may have raved on this blog about others who are far better known, like Dostoevsky and Melville, but Olesha really is the guy.* This Soviet-era author, born in 1899, was "young with the century," as he put it. He is best known for his 1927 novella Envy, a magical-realist encomium to, and take-down of, early Soviet-style materialist culture. You see the influence of H. G. Wells and Dostoevsky in the story, but at the same time, there's really nothing else quite like it. It's a Freudian/political fairy tale that employs some of the most vivid and memorable images I have ever come across.

Here's just one passage (from the NYRB edition, translated by Marian Schwartz):

I entertain myself with observations. Have you ever noticed that salt falls off the end of a knife without leaving a trace--the knife shines as if untouched; that pince-nez traverse the bridge of a nose like a bicycle; that man is surrounded by tiny inscriptions, a sprawling anthill of inscriptions: on forks, spoons, saucers, his pince-nez frames, his buttons, and his pencils?

No Day Without a Line is a fragmentary memoir written, according to translator Judson Rosengrant, primarily during the six years before Olesha's death in 1960. In it, we see Olesha entertaining himself with observations--a pleasure which is also a serious discipline. Many of these observations are not direct, but in the form of childhood memories which Olesha observes meticulously. In fact it's childhood in the form of memory that makes these images so striking. They are not dry recollections of "what things were like back then," but brief, poetic addresses to sights Olesha saw and loved and knows he will never see again in this same way:

In Odessa we sailed on the sea in punts. These were large, heavy boats with a flat bottom and no keel--something on the order of a cart thrown into the sea without its wheels. They were crudely painted in red and blue and moved by means of huge, heavy oars secured to the oarlocks with a strength sufficient at least for tethering oxen. In the bottom of these boats there was always water--puddles in which rags, pieces of shrimp, or a bottle swam. The punt skimmed over the waves. There was something of the Greek myths about the appearance of these boats. Even now I remember, as if I'd only seen it yesterday, the brown pear-like calves of the fishermen as they ran behind a boat they were launching, in order to leap into it once it was afloat.

Those "pear-like calves" are pure Olesha: that unexpected comparison, often between food and a body part, which makes the comparison both memorable and slightly forbidden. There's a visceral, yet innocent attraction to the fishermen's calves that an "adult" mind would probably chase away--especially one in Olesha's place and time. (Envy is often read as a story of unrequited gay love.) But if we can learn not to banish such images, we can light up our own fiction with startling beauty. It sounds like a cliche, but this passage really makes me feel like I'm right there in Odessa in the early 20th century. That's an amazing feat of teleportation, and it works because we're traveling through a particular consciousness, rather than generic reportage.

All of this makes me worry more than ever that I--and possibly many of my fellow writers--are spending way, way too much time in front of screens. We are no longer entertaining ourselves with unmediated observations. We are not going down to the sea and watching fishermen get into boats; or if we do, we are too distracted, or cynical, or something, to just take it in. Maybe we are not taking the time to really remember--and color with memory--what we saw in childhood. There are too many layers between writing and experience. I certainly sense this in my own work; the screen is always there somehow, humming, inserting itself ever so subtly. Writing today may be more "knowing," but a lot of it doesn't seem nearly as fresh as Olesha's much older work.

Fortunately that problem is fixable, entirely free of charge. If I can just tear myself away from this computer.

*I did have the opportunity, some years ago, to rave about Olesha in Tin House. That obviously didn't get the raving out of my system.

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Me and my Shadow

2011-03-21T09:34:00.000-07:00

I read Dana Goodyear's article in the New Yorker about Barry Michels, therapist to Hollywood screenwriters, expecting a good dose of woo-woo and hoo-ha. I mean, would any self-respecting, largely successful movie-industry "creative" would pay $360 per hour for anything less? There ought to be trances, silly names for common conditions, bullying in the name of tough love, and invocations of obscure gods--at the very least.

OK, Michels does deliver some of that. It's his job. Still, I was surprised at how...helpful his approach seemed. I especially took note of his use of the Jungian concept of the Shadow,

the occult aspect of the personality that Jung defined as “the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious.” In “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” Jung describes a dream in which he was out on a windy night, cupping a tiny candle in his hand. “I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me,” he writes. “When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was a ‘specter of the Brocken,’ my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying.”

That image of the Shadow coming into being because of that little light is really lovely. It illustrates the dilemma of creative work, which is at the heart of Michel's practice. That is: your creativity arises directly from those parts of yourself you would most like to hide. The more successful your work, the more of this creature will become visible--to you, and (you imagine) to your audience. It feels a lot better to suppress the shadow, but then your work suffers, or doesn't happen at all. So Michels gives clients various methods (some woo-woo, some just funny) to welcome the Shadow into your life and work.

I don't suppose the Shadow's existence will come as news to most people. By other names it's the subconscious, the wounded inner child, or high school. But a lot of therapy seems bent on exorcising the Shadow in order to allow it to dissipate. You may learn to treat it with compassion, rather than ignoring or raging at it, but ultimately you want it to go away. In this view you keep the Shadow close by, recognizing you can't do your work without it.

Random tidbits about books and writing

2011-03-18T11:23:00.001-07:00

It's Friday and I have no hope of sustaining a coherent stream of thought for more than a few sentences. Here, then, are some short and random tidbits, a. k. a. stuff I found on the Internet, about books and writing. You may hear my friend synapses sizzling in the background.

Via Dee S., Kirkus Reviews has a book blog. In retrospect that is not surprising, but it was news to me.
Via Nathan Bransford, Bill Morris at The Millions tells us that for new authors, bad reviews increase sales by as much as 45%. For us unknowns, that is GREAT NEWS. Instead of fretting about Michiko Kakutani shredding our babies, we can now *hope* she does.
Also via Nathan B., Brad Phillips at Pimp My Novel offers us Nine Ways to Give a Better Reading. This backs up my encomium to a certain spoken-word performance earlier this week. If you can't take an acting class just now, Phillips suggests listening to good actors read books on CD.
My So-Called Freelance Life by Michelle Goodman is a really, really, really good book on becoming a freelancer. I got it at a really, really, really good bookstore in the Los Feliz neighborhood in LA called Skylight Books.
Apparently Los Feliz is pronounced "Los Feelies." Color me surprised!

That's all I got. See you Monday.

Are we happy yet?

2011-03-17T13:03:00.000-07:00

Like many Americans with a little too much time on their hands, I am a sucker for any article with "happiness" in the title. Perhaps, I say to myself as I click eagerly on the link, this one will be the answer. Finally, I will know the truth: am I happy or not? This WSJ article got me thinking...well, dang, maybe I am.

I hesitate even to say this, given that in addition to being (possibly) happy, I am also deeply superstitious about admitting any form of good fortune. So let me protect myself by saying I remain on constant high alert for bad stuff to get upset about. Bad stuff is always happening, and will happen, to me and to others, whom I know and don't know. I mean, jeez, all you need to do is look out the window, or, god help you, at the Internet, and you will see that there is an infinite amount of stuff to be unhappy about, even if you personally are not at this very moment unhappy. In fact, there must be some reason why the Internet is so full of awful, aggravating, horrible information--if we didn't seek out awfulness, content providers would rush to deluge us with some other kind of content. Like...what? What would we rather have?

That question gets us back to the article, whose main point is that what many of us think of as "happiness" is not really worth pursuing after all.

The pleasure that comes with, say, a good meal, an entertaining movie or an important win for one's sports team—a feeling called "hedonic well-being"—tends to be short-term and fleeting. Raising children, volunteering or going to medical school may be less pleasurable day to day. But these pursuits give a sense of fulfillment, of being the best one can be, particularly in the long run.

Until recently, I guess I thought of "happiness" as either this "hedonic" business, or else the absence of any kind of bad feelings...which, on reflection, translates to a sort of blankness that seems scary. No wonder the pursuit of this is so unsatisfying.

The article suggests that engagement, a sense of purpose, and above all *not ruminating on your happiness or lack thereof* are the keys to a different type of happiness. This is "eudaimonia," which is more akin to fulfilling one's potential. People who feel eudaimonic happiness "are good at reappraising situations and using the brain more actively to see the positives... They may think, 'This event is difficult but I can do it[.]'"

Since completing my novel, I've experienced a lot more of this type of happiness. MIND YOU there are still plenty of things I strongly believe that I can't do (self-marketing, cutting the cats' toenails). But being able to focus on my writing and finish a large project have given me a certain confidence that I didn't have before. On any given day I feel despair, frustration, even self-loathing, but the difference is that I expect these feelings to go away at some point. Back when I was seriously depressed, I figured the despair was permanent, which contributed to the depression all the more. I've somehow--for now--concluded I can handle these experiences.

Based on this article, I might suggest swapping the word "confidence" for "happiness" when thinking about what we want to pursue. I'm not talking about bravado, the false confidence that requires an audience to exist--and usually attracts one. I mean a confidence you feel whether or not anyone is looking.

That's what I'm going to try for, anyway, because I no longer think the other is possible. (I say this with hope, not despair.)

Calling West Coast short fiction writers

2011-03-16T08:10:00.000-07:00

So last weekend the New Short Fiction Series performed a selection of my short stories at the Barnsdall Art Park in LA. They chose four stories (two of which were excerpted) and a different actor performed each one. The actors were Buckley Sampson, Jesse Holcomb, Kate Heller, and Sally Shore (the series director), and all were terrific.

If the words I wrote are a score, then those performances were music. As the writer, I've never been more aware of what good actors can do with the printed word. Even with minimal costuming and gesture--in this series the actors stay seated and read the story from pages, rather than memorizing--they bring the story into a different dimension altogether. Their tools are voice, with all its varied tones and dynamics; rhythm--speeding up, slowing down, pausing; facial expression; gesture; and the ability to engage an audience. This last is a process I don't fully understand. But rather than simply accepting the audience's presence, as a sort of worrisome fuzz in one's field of vision, they bring the audience into the space of the story. You are not being talked at. You are with the characters in a shared fictional world.

The actors found and expressed nuances of emotion in my stories that I wasn't fully aware of. The stories were mostly comic, and they knew how to bring out the laughs, but they also guided the audience into sudden, but fully earned, moments of sadness. It was a great honor to have my stories given such careful attention.

It was also brought home to me, in no uncertain terms, that performance is crucial in literary readings. I am seriously considering hiring actors for those (still rare) occasions when I am invited to read in public. (I could hide under the table, and...oh, that's been done?) If that isn't feasible, I am really going to have to work on my acting skills. I know, I became a writer so I could *hide* behind words. Full-on acting isn't in me. But I have now seen the difference between a droning "reading" of a story and a performance. The former is something the audience politely sits through. The second is entertainment in the best sense.

All of this is by way of mentioning that the New Short Fiction Series is looking for more material by West Coast short fiction writers. If you fit that definition, write to submissions@newshortfictionseries.com for submission guidelines. That's how I got the gig. You won't regret it, I promise.

Another California

2011-03-15T08:37:00.000-07:00

Eric Puchner, my former teacher and author of the great novel Model Home, tells a personal story of California dreams gone wrong.

Ohio spring

2011-03-11T08:23:00.000-08:00

I do miss some things about living in the Midwest. One is the approach of spring. Here in Northern California spring begins in, oh, December--as soon as it starts raining and the hills turn green. While we've had our bouts of cold rain, and the great Almost But Not Actual Snow of 2011, the flowers have been out for weeks. As a transplanted Midwesterner, I never feel I've earned these flowers.

Whereas in the Midwest, you do earn them. You savor spring's arrival. It comes on slowly at first. The air becomes gentler, less brittle. You see a crocus or two along the myrtle bed. Later some blue-eyed grass will appear between the bricks on the patio. You start skipping the down jacket in favor of a sweater and windbreaker; you find don't have to shovel the driveway or scrape off the car this morning. The days get just a little easier, and you know that the really lovely weather is still to come.

That said, I understand it has been snowing in Ohio.

Two poems for Thursday

2011-03-10T08:19:00.000-08:00

THIS IS JUST TO SAY

I cut in front of you
in the parking garage
and took the spot
you thought would be yours

Forgive me
I am usually not quite such an asshole
but I was hungry and late for my haircut
and your giant black Expedition filled me with self-righteousness

-----

YOWL

I saw the best chairs of my condominium destroyed by cats.

$125 well spent

2011-03-09T08:11:00.000-08:00

Last year, we bought a California State Parks Frequent Visitor pass from the State Parks Foundation. From a direct-mail solicitation, no less. For $125, we got a hang-tag for the car, a subscription to Sunset Magazine, a detailed map, and a remarkably well-written guidebook to all the parks.

I know what you're thinking. Trev and Ann in matching visors and fanny packs, squeezing their Winnebago past bicyclists on Highway One. Or maybe tearing up once-pristine deserts with their OHVs. Not so! Now, I might like to get a smallish RV one day, truth be told. I believe our days of curling up on the hard, lumpy ground while re-breathing our own carbon dioxide inside a tiny tent are behind us. But visors, fanny packs, and OHVs are right out!

My larger point here is that I have become a huge fan of the state parks. Until last year, they were invisible to us. We did not want to pay $10 to check out what was perhaps just a port-a-potty and a dusty trail--so we always drove by. Now we go in. And we have discovered wonders.

For example, the unassuming-looking Sugarloaf Ridge State Park in Sonoma offers some lovely hikes, and contains the Robert Ferguson Observatory, which is open to the public for day- and night-time observing programs. There are three pretty day-use areas tucked inside Point Reyes National Seashore. Your hang-tag gets you into Point Lobos and any number of beaches all along the California coast. There are literally hundreds more options. And not to put too fine a point on it, a whole new world of accessible bathrooms on Highway One has been opened to us.

For us, the hang-tag paid for itself in a couple of months. So, Californians--please consider supporting your embattled but wonderful state parks. We are definitely renewing.

Pop culture in fiction: a ticket to obscurity?

2011-03-08T09:43:00.000-08:00

Matt Zoller Seitz has an interesting post up on Salon today about pop-cultural references in TV shows. Recently he noticed that a classic episode of The Simpsons from the early 90s relied on cultural references (to Arnold Schwarzenegger's action-film persona and the Hollywood Squares) that his kids completely missed. He wonders if popular TV shows today, which rely heavily on current references, are sentencing themselves to obscurity in the near future.

I've often wondered the same thing when writing fiction. Should I refer to, say, Justin Bieber or Twitter, if, by the time this piece is published, those phenomena will have gone the way of flip phones? I use the phone example because, in editing some stories for upcoming publications, I noticed a definite lag in their depictions of cell-phone technologies. The stories were originally written a couple of years ago, when human beings other than I still used flip phones and thought they were pretty neat. Of course, this update will only hold for another six months or so. After that, those phone references will likely slide into the worst possible crack of datedness: recent enough to be recognizable, but with that whiff of mustiness that tells us the story (and writer) are just a tad behind the curve.

But back to Bieber and Twitter. If you're writing a story set in present day America (or any number of other countries, really), and it involves kids and/or parents of a certain socio-economic set, you're going to have a heck of a time steering around these things. By consciously trying to avoid topical references, you might tie your story into such knots--or make it so implausible--that it's better just to go through the Bieber, not around it. Still, when Justin embarks on his inevitable decline--not that I wish this upon him or his fans by any means; I'm sure the prospect is still many months off--will he take your story or novel down with him?

One consoling thought is that if your story or novel is around in twenty years (and I'm sure it will be!), those references to Justin Bieber may no longer seem musty. They may actually help root your piece in place and time. That's assuming a) Bieber has reached a sufficient critical mass of fame now that his name will evoke an "oh, yeah, I've heard that name" response in your as-yet-unborn-college-student reader, and b) without making your current readers scream out "Duh!," you've provided enough description and context for Bieber that future readers will at least gather he was a young, cute singer whose haircut sent shockwaves around the world.

In other words, if you're using Bieber in a winking, we-all-know-who-this-is kind of shorthand--as The Simpsons used Schwarzenegger--it will likely be a problem in the future. But if he's not just shorthand, if his presence makes a substantive contribution to the story, you'll be forced to spell that out at least somewhat. That should cut down on the "huh?" factor. Presuming shared knowledge, or shared "knowingness," between writer and reader (or viewer) may be the real ticket to obscurity--as Matt Zoller Seitz suggests.

Here are a few other ways I've thought of to use pop culture references in fiction while ensuring your story doesn't seem dated:

Set the story in the past. This can be the very, very recent past. I remember talking to a guy in a writing class who said he was writing a "historical novel" set in 2007. It was 2008 at the time. Folks, 2010 is now a setting for historical fiction. Heck, so is March 7, 2011. So is the last minute. My point is, I think this mindset will just slightly shift the way you talk about "current" cultural phenomena--enough that you'll feel compelled to put it in a context.
Create a realistic but alternative world, in which Justin Bieber is, say, Jason Beebler. You then can--and must--explain who he is and why he is loved by zillions. Most future readers will probably get the echo, but if they don't, it's no big deal. You've created your own character, who may prove more useful to you anyway, and more interesting.

The anatomy of fear

2011-03-07T13:40:00.000-08:00

Sorry, couldn't resist that title. In fact this is another overdue post about The Turn of the Screw. But it's exciting! Both anatomical and fearsome, in a good way!

All right, for those of you who haven't clicked away...

Continuing my thought from Friday, about trying to learn the craft of fiction on the sentence level. I've written before about the advantages (which may not be readily apparent) of writing what appears to be a ghost story in a highly complex, nuanced style. Obviously this style isn't for everybody, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to suit James's purpose. I believe that purpose is not only to tell a damn scary story, but to understand fear as profoundly as possible.

Contrary to what we might assume, James shows us that fear is not a simple emotion. Unless the werewolf is literally leaping at your throat at this very moment (and even then, I might suggest), fear is a layered and contradictory experience. Especially when the nature of the menace is not yet clear, the experience of growing fear is a nuanced one. It is not just a series of bigger and bigger jolts. Fear waxes and wanes; at times you might try to go through your ordinary routines, aware as you are that they have been knocked off kilter. You clutch with overwrought relief at false hopes. You get irritated. You might even laugh at yourself as you step back and watch yourself scurrying through those musty corridors with your guttering flashlight. How did I let it come to this?, you say to yourself.

Anyway, let's take a look at one of those finely-wrought Jamesian sentences. This one refers to the governess's attempts at conversations with the children in her charge, now that all are aware of the spectral "visitants" who have come to the children on several occasions. The governess has just described the "small ironic consciousness" of the children--their awareness that she knows something is going on, but is unable to ask them about it directly. The children, she tells us, are not so "vulgar" as to taunt her with this knowledge. Rather,

It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other—for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended—the doors we had indiscreetly opened.

First off, the sentence mirrors the physical events in the story. The governess has been "perpetually coming into sight of subjects" that stop her short--the apparitions. She turns out of alleys and peers through doors, and gets caught looking. The sentence is a kind of mini suspense tale, giving us the "little bang" that disrupts the sentence's flow, somewhat violently, with dashes, before finally revealing what caused the bang--the doors. The events and the fear they cause seep into the very language--the words and the syntax--the governess uses to try to understand the events. Even in retrospect, she can't think outside of the fear.

But what's also touching here is the repetition of "we," and "us," the implication that she and the children are on the same side in this predicament. Together, they encounter subjects and stop short; together they "indiscreetly" open doors and startle when they slam. They have the same motives, and share the same surprise and disappointment when their adventures go awry. Glossed over is the fact that the children are hiding something from the governess. She loves them and fiercely wants to protect them. She can't quite bring herself to think that they may have an agenda quite different from hers.

The "we" also conveys something else. The children are--at least--the governess's equals in this game. She cannot out-think them, any more than she can get them to obey her in any but the most trivial matters.

The sentence contains a kernel of simple, unthinking fear: the jolt when the door bangs louder than expected. But rippling out from that are all the shadings that make fear so difficult to understand and overcome: There's love and the desire to be loved back (the fear of not being loved back, perhaps). There's propriety in social relations, especially with children for whom one is responsible. There's denial--this isn't really happening, not really--pitted against the equally strong will to understand. All these emotions are happening at once, and all are part of the supposedly simple experience of "being afraid."

So as we write our own scary stories, we might spend some time unraveling all the emotional threads that make up fear...the kind of fear worthy of literature. Give fear its due by placing the shaded, qualified sentence alongside the gut-wrenching shriek.

Possibly such complications are also worth considering as we face fear in our daily lives--or accuse others of being fearful.

Can creative writing be taught on the sentence level?

2011-03-04T13:47:00.000-08:00

After reading about (not actually reading) Stanley Fish's new book on sentences, as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates's lovely discussions of Jane Austen's sentences, I am wondering: Can creative writing be taught on the sentence level? Could there be a class (or, say, a series on an obscure blog) that dissects literature sentence by sentence, in order to improve students' (or fellow writers') own writing?

I've never taken a creative writing class that dove that deep, except on occasion. It seems one ends up talking mostly about "flow," believability, characterization, plot, and structure on a higher level. But can writers be taught, through example, to craft better sentences, word by painstaking word?

I'm rushed today, but intend to think about this more...

On not wanting to write

2011-03-03T09:25:00.000-08:00

It's crazy. Writing is supposed to be what I love to do most in this world. I have time. I have solitude. I have emotional and financial support. I am very, very lucky in these regards. Yet when it comes to pouring out my required 1,000 words for the day on my novel, more often than not, I just don't want to.*

I know I share this problem with millions of writers; there's a whole industry dedicated to producing prompts, encouragement, and inspiring threats for writers, all for a low, low subscription fee. But what I still don't get is why I don't want to write whenever my self-appointed time rolls around each day. You'd think I'd be champing at the bit to write. You'd think I'd do it all day long, that I'd have to be pulled kicking and screaming from the computer. So again, I ask, why?

Here are a couple of answers I've thought of, none of which are fully satisfying:

It's tiring. The intense concentration that kicks in, once I finally do get going, really does take something out of me. I don't like being tired. But what exactly am I saving myself for?
There is no immediate (or possibly even distant) concrete payoff. If I cook a meal, I get to eat it. If I do a job for money, I get paid. I know one is supposed to write for oneself, ultimately--that publication, acclaim, any kind of payment, etc. are just icing on the much larger, more nutritious cake that is doing what you truly love. And yet. After a writing session, I may feel pleased with what I've written, but I may also feel that I've just spent two hours shouting into a great, dark canyon that does not even echo.
When writing a novel especially, one tends to feel lost a good part of the time. Yes, I have a sort of overall outline, a general sense of where I'm going, but most days I feel I'm hiking through some vast wheat field, with only an iffy compass telling me I'm going in the right direction. I do not like feeling lost.
I feel guilty. Most people never get the chance to do something they truly love. Who am I to be given that opportunity? Do I deserve it, when so many others can't even imagine having it? This is self-indulgence of the worst kind--and to top it off, I'm still procrastinating! I don't even appreciate what I have! Self indulgence and ingratitude!
I don't like what I'm writing. Actually, this one does not feel so true at the moment. To be honest, I'm rather fond of what I'm writing these days. But perhaps I think that fondness is delusional. Because it really is terrible, what I'm writing. Yes, that's probably it! If I don't like my writing, I shouldn't be doing it at all. And if I do like it, it means I'm out of my mind!

I don't know. It's probably best not to think about this stuff at all. Just get over yourself and do it already, right?

Or I could clean the kitchen...

*Obviously writing about not wanting to write is no problem at all. This is because it is, at its heart, complaining. This is perhaps the easiest form of discourse, spoken or written, to generate. Maybe this is because complaining shuts off expectations of any sort--it's a substitute for doing something. And it's fun.

Should writers cut back on scenery?

2011-03-02T08:44:00.000-08:00

Laura Miller's Salon column yesterday got me thinking, again, about the relationship of setting to character. This is a particular concern of mine, because I've often worried that my own fiction lacks a sufficient sense of place. But how do you work a detailed sense of place into the narrative without bringing it to a grinding halt while you describe every highway, byway, lake, lawn, and tree?

Miller argues that one of the biggest problems in literary fiction today is, in fact, the overuse of description. Using Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife as her primary example, she quotes a paragraph of scenic description, and then says,

Zdrevkov is godforsaken, but this fact is amply conveyed in the following four paragraphs describing the town itself -- most of that bit is quite good, although still a shade exhaustive. Obreht has said in an interview that she wants to write about "the influences of place on characters," but the passage above is too flatly reportorial to suggest that this woman feels anything but overheated.

By way of contrast, Miller approvingly quotes Alias Grace:

Margaret Atwood writes of a suffocating Victorian parlor, "all possible surfaces of it are upholstered; the colors are those of the inside of the body -- the maroon of kidneys, the reddish purple of hearts, the opaque blue of veins, the ivory of teeth and bones."

The distinction I believe Miller is getting at is that Atwood's description reveals both the parlor, and the state of mind of the character viewing the parlor. Grace (who will later be accused of murdering the parlor's owner and committed to an asylum) is clearly, shall we say, unsettled in this setting. The "influence of place" on this character is indeed stifling--though Atwood, I would point out, leaves open the possibility that someone else (the rich owner of the house, for instance), would see these same items very differently.

In other words, places definitely influence characters, but the reverse is also true: characters influence settings, at least in terms of how the reader sees and interprets them through their eyes. Atwood's description is singular enough that we come to see both the parlor and Grace as singular. And throughout the novel, Grace and her setting will continue to interact and shape each other in surprising (and specific) ways. It seems to me this notion is crucial--the setting doesn't just "contain" the characters, but is continuous, and contiguous, with character. Setting and character are all part of the same fabric, the space-time of the novel (to rip off both Bakhtin and Brian Greene at the same time).

Still, this is much easier to realize if you are writing in the close third-person point of view. I haven't read The Tiger's Wife, and so don't know what point of view Oberht uses overall. Miller says her style is "subtle" and her main character mostly "opaque," which suggests a more external, even omniscient point of view. If you believe in or at least want to explore the possibility of omniscience (even a sort of blocked omniscience, which can't see inside people very well), some descriptive passages would have to originate from this point of view. This would seem to preclude the red-in-tooth-and-claw type of description we get from Atwood. But does that mean that such description would always end up being "flat" and "reportorial"?

Or maybe this really means that in literature (if not in life) no setting can exist outside of perception. That perception might be a character's, or it might even be the author's--more specifically, that of the author's persona, which we might call the voice. The author may or may not create a specific narrator for the story, but there is always a presence that the voice embodies. And it would behoove us writers to always be aware of that presence, what it is doing, and what its agenda is at any given moment in the narrative. Perhaps it's even in a tug-of-war with a character, vying (quietly or not) over whose description of reality is more true. You would then see layers (or striations) of perception in the landscape, which could make the scene very rich indeed--even if those layers are subtle.

Anyway, I can't decide whether I think Miller's right in telling authors to cut back on description. Elmore Leonard's advice to take out the boring parts is, of course, always correct--whether they are descriptions of setting, or dialog, or anything else. I suspect that boredom often ensues when the reader's sense of a human presence flags.

New story up at Slush Pile Magazine

2011-03-01T08:05:00.001-08:00

My story, "The Inheritor," is now up at Slush Pile.

Bringing storytelling into the digital age

2011-02-28T11:05:00.000-08:00

So this is cool. Broadcastr.com is "a social media platform for audio and storytelling, shared on an interactive map." You can listen to stories from around the world and upload your own.

Intellectuals in American fiction: a plea

2011-02-25T09:55:00.000-08:00

It's very rare that a single book review convinces me to buy a book immediately. A favorable review usually gets tossed in the "I'll have to read that someday" bin in the back of my brain, and repeated reminders are necessary for the thought to ever be retrieved and acted on.

Not so with Teju Cole's debut novel, Open City. James Wood's review in The New Yorker has convinced me that it is necessary for me to read this book as soon as possible. Some of the credit for this has to go to Wood, who is one of the most thoughtful and original reviewers out there. He does not use the book as a launching pad for rants on his own pet artistic concerns; nor does he dutifully plod through the upsides and downsides of plot, theme, character development, etc. Instead, he seeks to fully engage the work on its own terms, and he draws out the book's unique perceptions and contributions--without reducing the book to its own uniqueness. If that makes any sense.

Anyway, the reason I must read this book is its portrayal of the lives of young intellectuals in America. Describing a monologue by one of the characters, a student of literary and cultural theory, Wood says, "This is one of the very few scenes I have encountered in contemporary fiction in which critical and literary theory is not satirized, or flourished to exhibit the author’s credentials, but is simply and naturally part of the whole context of a person." This statement brought me up short, as I have certainly been guilty, in my own fiction, of satirizing. (Maybe of flourishing too, though, God, I hope not.)

Overtly intellectual characters tend to get short shrift in contemporary American fiction. Why? There's a logistical problem, first of all, of thoroughly explaining what their theories actually are--as well as the intellectual bases for the theories--without turning the novel into a theoretical treatise in itself. More important, though, is good ol' American anti-intellectualism, both real and assumed. Nobody wants to read about thinkers, right? Thinkers are not doers; they do not take action, which is both a moral failing and a liability for plot purposes. It's bad enough to be sitting and reading oneself, but to read about readers? What's the outcome of all this thinking going to be, anyway--someone finishes their dissertation?

Well, if your character is Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, or any number of Dostoevsky characters, he or she will try to live out his ideas (sometimes with disastrous consequences). In Dostoevsky, ideas are made flesh. They are not games; they are characters in themselves, in a sense--they are as real and as important to human life as food, the landscape, and one's family and friends. As Wood says, they are part of a person's "whole context."

This is true of Cole's character, Farouq, who's viewed sympathetically but ambivalently by the narrator. As Cole (and Wood and Dostoevsky) remind us, characters can legitimately care as much about ideas as they do about their children and lovers, about understanding their own pasts, or conquering mighty Everest. Intellectuals in fiction need not be *merely* bloodless, hypocritical, or ineffectual--though they can still be funny, strange, immoral, and/or difficult. In other words, ideas are the legitimate stuff of passion in literature; not distractions to be overcome or set aside in the pursuit of "true" experience. The key is to show why the characters care about their ideas so much, so that the reader will care about them too. Don't allow readers to feel simple contempt for the characters, and thus dismiss the ideas.

In fact, those of us who care about intellectual life in this country could do a lot worse than support--and write--good fiction about people who think.

A big hooray for small presses

2011-02-24T10:00:00.000-08:00

You like indie films, right? Sure, they're not as glamorous, or brightly colored, or loud as major studio pictures. But they're often more compelling, more human, funnier, and take more artistic chances. They're made by people who like movies at least a little better than money, and they--usually--don't make you feel all icky after watching them.* Why, here's one I stumbled across on Netflix just the other day, and can honestly say I adored.

My point is that those of us who support indie films should offer up some of our hipster love for small/independent presses. If the big publishers are becoming more skittish and dependent upon formulaic blockbusters, plenty of small presses still really want to publish good--and original--writing. Their marketing budgets may be tiny, but they spend the money wisely. Just look at what Starcherone Books did for Zachary Mason.

Here, then, are a few starting points to help you find some great new books to read--and maybe a publisher for your cutting-edge book.

Fifteen Feisty Small Presses from Huffpo
The Poets and Writers database of small presses
The New Pages list of independent publishers (including university presses)
Dzanc Books and their imprints (Black Lawrence Press, Starcherone, Other Voices Books, Keyhole Press, Monkeybicycle, and Absinthe)
Bona Fide Books (a personal favorite)

I need to do some research on university presses that publish fiction--many do. What else have I left out?

*For an important discussion of ickiness in mainstream movies, see this review of Just Go With It.

People-shopping on Facebook

2011-02-23T09:47:00.000-08:00

Like most people, my relationship with Facebook is love/hate (or maybe love-hate or love: hate). I love to hate it, and I hate to love it. It's a waste of time and somehow absolutely necessary. It's the American Dream made high-tech, where you can reinvent yourself in real time and get instant feedback on the changes you've made. It's you, crowd-sourced, continuously improving.

Every day, several times a day, I visit my page with a mixture of anticipation and self-reproach that I believe is unique in all of my personal experiences. By nature I am a furtive soul, who both resents and welcomes the challenge of pretending to think of myself as a celebrity. Aren't we all stars, anyway? Or just stardust? I wish I could just decide how I feel about this damn tool once and for all, but I suspect the ambivalence is actually part of its appeal. If I simply loved it, I could probably leave it alone.

Lately one aspect of Facebook has proven especially irresistible, and that is scrolling through the seemingly endless page of "people I may know." In about 90% of the cases I don't know them, which is where the fun begins. There's a whole life behind that little square, revealing maybe half a smiling face, a cat, a sunset, a book cover, a drawing, or (in more than one instance) a gun. I like the partial human faces the best; it seems like the most honest depiction of what you're really getting--a sliver, a crafted distortion. The names are slivers, too, in verbal form.

I will never know the first thing about these other person's lives, and yet they're being offered to me as an array of possibilities to choose from, like cereal boxes or paperweights on a store shelf. I can pick one up, turn it over, check the price and say "My God, they want that much?" All of which seems very crass, until I remember that I have given my permission for countless others to do the same to me.

Except it's not me. Is it? Can I, the author of my profile, send it out into the world and let it fend for itself, as writers are supposed to do with their books? Or must I constantly protect and shape and update and explain it? And what does it mean if doing that work becomes a significant portion of my daily life? Is constantly making an artificial version of my real life still a real life? Are we always doing that in some other form anyway?

But back to "people you may know." Perhaps a more positive way to view this is that it's nothing more than people-watching, minus the park bench and the embarrassment of being caught staring. It feels harmless enough, maybe too harmless. It does suck up vast amounts of time, watching the faces appear on my screen and then vanish as the scroll rolls upward. Elsewhere (a fair exchange?) my own profile is doing likewise, evanescent as a bubble.

Should we try to write like Henry James?

2011-02-22T12:31:00.000-08:00

For the last year or so, I've been doing a series on my blog called "Borrowed Fire,"* in which I read works of classic literature and try to draw out lessons for contemporary fiction writers. All the books are available on Project Gutenberg. For the past few months I've been working my way through Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.

Now seems as good a time as any to talk about James's language, and whether writers today can learn from a style that seems particularly outdated.

I probably first read Turn in high school. I have a vague memory of my English teacher, who was blessed with an ominous, quavering voice, intoning about the sexual nature of the threat. I have a stronger memory of being bored and frustrated by the story, because it was supposed to be so incredibly scary--but I could not get through the prose. If the story was supposed to keep me on the edge of my seat, why did it take the narrator *forever* to get the simplest point across? If she was terrified by her experience, how did she have the mental capacity to even construct such long, involved sentences? Yes, the story is told in retrospect, but wouldn't it have been better to make it more immediate, so that the narrator's reactions could be more visceral and (therefore) believable? The whole thing seemed pointless. You know, maybe back then people managed to get scared while wading through giant blocks of baroque language, but James just puts us to sleep.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that lots of readers have a similar response to Turn, at least the first time through. The whole literary endeavor seems to run counter to horror, at least to what we now think of as horror. Thanks especially to movies, horror is a sensory experience, not a verbal one. Lots of screaming, lots of gruesome visuals and crunching, but light on talking and reflecting. If you are writing for an audience seeking this type of experience, you'll get nowhere borrowing from James. Just go with "Oh, God...Oh...God," and lots of one-sentence paragraphs.

But I've come to believe that retrospect is a great place to tell a scary story from. For one thing, there's the problem posed by memory itself. What do I really remember? What have I forgotten due to the trauma of the experience? Maybe I've gone crazy, and none of this really happened. Or maybe it's going to happen again, even though I've been free of those awful apparitions--I think--for all these years. A story like Turn, you see, is never over. So the process of writing it, instead of being a clumsy device ("The vampire is coming through my door right now, his foul breath is upon me, but I must keep writing...must...aaaggghhh...") becomes a necessary part of the story.

The narrator of Turn is trying to make sense of her memory, to recollect the experience in as much detail as possible, while constantly questioning the accuracy of those details. What if she hasn't got them right? What if she has? Either way, the implications are terrible. Writing itself becomes a type of horror, a compulsion the writer can't resist but also can't bear to face. It's not just the shock of the experience that frightens the writer, but realizing all the aspects of what it's done to her, and what it is still doing to her. She is, to this day, bewildered.

It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first and that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment of vision of which, after these years, there is no living view that I can hope to give.

James's kind of horror isn't simple. It's a complicated experience, which is confusing even in recollection. But the confusion is rendered with precision--the kind of precision only an acute loss can bestow. The above passage is the moment that "bewilderment of vision" sets in. The narrator has lived at least long enough to write the story--but from this point on, she is lost (in the wilderness), and she knows it. That's the horror--watching herself become lost.

So should we try to write like Henry James? Or to put it another way, could anyone in our time write a story like this, in this manner? I think it would be well worth trying, even using James's style, giving shadings to shadings. Possibly the memoir format could work here, only it's a fictional memoir...and instead of redemption at the end, portray the growing recognition that there is no way out of one's own memory--real or not.

*"Stolen Fire," as in stealing fire from the gods, was--appropriately--taken. Also the idea of writers "borrowing" from others, especially from those to whom we are supposed to feel inferior, appeals to me. It puts us on a more equal footing--Fyodor, can I borrow a cup of sugar / method for creating suspense? Henry, that's a great tone on you--could I try it on sometime, and maybe wear it out to dinner?