Stories without consequences

So like just about everyone else I've been watching Downton Abbey. I've now watched every episode, always a day or more late, since we don't have TV, only the Internet.* I can't say I have Downton-mania, exactly. I don't love it or hate it. Most of the characters leave me cold, and I've conceived an outright loathing for Mr. Bates that I can't explain. Even Maggie Smith's well-delivered witticisms seem forced. When the camera turns to her, I sit up with a chuckle at the ready, and am always a little disappointed with the zinger.

Yet I keep watching, because, I think, of the storytelling itself. More precisely: because of what seems to be very flawed storytelling. I have never seen a show in which huge plot points so often turn out--thus far, anyway--to have such minimal consequences. I guess the rest of what I have to say involves spoilers, so stop reading if you really don't want to know what's been happening. But, just of late: Only one minor character dies in the war, and his widow never loved him anyway. A major character is paralyzed for life, feels a tingle, and is dancing by the next episode. Same character's betrothed dies from the Spanish flu so that he is free to marry the woman he really loves. Headstrong daughter runs off with chauffeur, causing Lord Grantham to withhold his blessing and his money until...he doesn't anymore and everyone hugs. Lord G embarks on an affair with a maid, who then decides she ought to resign for the good of everyone, and leaves. Lady G gets deathly ill and then better within ten minutes.

So: no real freakin consequences. Or, not yet. If everything comes around again in some ingenious interweaving of these previously pallid storylines, I suppose I will have to print out this blog post, spread it with Earth Balance, and eat it. I will be especially delighted if (SPOILER) Mr. Bates really did kill his wife and has to do real jail time for it--even though he would be blameless because his wife was so purely, inexplicably evil. The bottom line is, these episodes feel like first drafts.

I've had the same problems in the first draft of my second novel. Now that I'm revising, I can see how often I wanted to leave my options open as I felt my way along. I could see plot lines heading a particular way, but realized that if they went too far, that character would no longer be around for the rest of the story--and I might still need him or her. So there's this repeated phenomenon of minor consequences for what seem to be major events or threats or screw-ups. The characters, Wile-E-Coyote-like, bounce up after being crushed by anvils, and then wait around to see what else I've got for them to do. At least when writing a novel you can, theoretically, revise once you get to the end, and do so more than once. Perhaps you don't have time for such with series television. You have to get it right the first time, which would be a pretty scary assignment. No wonder Lost went off the cliff.

*Which does not make us more virtuous than those who have TV, at least not anymore. I waste far more time in the Internet than I ever did watching TV.

The Hound of the Baskervilles: Learning to look at faces

This week's reading of Hound is really just a commentary on one phrase. But this little description of Stapleton's physical appearance came pretty close to astounding me. Describing his new acquaintance in a letter to Holmes, Watson writes:

There is a dry glitter in his eyes, and a firm set of his thin lips, which goes with a positive and possibly a harsh nature.

First, the bad news. In searching for the phrase "dry glitter" in the Gutenberg e-text, I discovered that Watson has used it once before, to describe Holmes himself. So points must be deducted for repetition, and for applying what I think is a quite distinctive description to two different characters. Also, the "firm set of his thin lips" doesn't really break new ground imagery-wise. The interpretation of how Stapleton's features might relate to his personality should probably not be attempted except in special circumstances such as these. It's classic showing and then telling, which would normally indicate authorial distrust of the reader--but this is what Watson and Holmes do, of course: observe and then interpret. So Watson gets a pass, although he's probably relying on outdated notions of physiognomy here.

Still--that dry glitter! I like this image immensely, perhaps because it reminds me of a snowy field on a sunny January day. It's also (at least to me) quite unexpected. When eyes glitter, it's usually because they are moist with tears, or sparkling with merriment, or gleaming with malice. The dryness is the surprise, and it intrigues Watson enough to set him speculating. If we want to be really generous--and because I haven't finished the story, I can't be sure this isn't true--we could say that Watson, on some level, recognizes the "dry glitter" in Stapleton's eyes as the same one he's seen in Holmes's, and suspects a similarity in character as well. But right now it feels like a mistake. In any case, Watson--and Conan Doyle--clearly see the image as striking, and worthy of close attention.

Back in 2003, Charles Baxter wrote an article for The Believer about the lack of facial description in contemporary fiction, as opposed to fiction from previous centuries. Reading all these "old" stories for my Borrowed Fire series, I've really come to see how true that is. And it's made me frustrated with what seems like my own limited repertoire for describing characters physically: stocky, short, thin, tall, blue eyes, brown hair, glasses... Dull! Without making the kinds of claims Watson makes about the direct relationship of appearance to inner character, surely we all can do better.

Why not spend an afternoon in a cafe surreptitiously glancing at the people nearby and describing their features in our notebooks? Not just their faces, but bodies, gestures, voices. Pay more attention when walking down the street or across campus or through the airport. I'm already thinking of someone I passed on the way to the bank this morning: slightly pigeon-toed, wearing glasses too wide for her face so that her eyes, rather than the lenses, seemed connected by the glasses' bridge... One could even keep a list of these characteristics, to mix and match later.

How Sherlock Holmes enchants the world

I'm a little behind on my Hound reading, but fortunately I have a great link to keep that Sherlockian tingle going till next time. Via Andrew Sullivan, Michael Saler says that the deep appeal of the Holmes stories is a kind of enchantment--and not the usual kind, either. Holmes goes against the grain by making enchantment an effect of reason:

Unlike many contemporary scientists and logicians who disdained the imagination, Holmes brought reason and the imagination, logic and intuition, together in a new synthesis that he called “the scientific use of the imagination.” He made critical thinking into a romantic adventure. Through his discerning eye, every detail of modern life, from newspaper advertisements to the footsteps of a giant hound, became charged with meaning, possibility, and wonder.

If this is true, and I think it is, then the Holmes stories should be taught in every school in the land. Intellect and reason are the path to enchantment, not its enemies! Understanding, not ignorance, is the source of transcendent delight! Never mind that Conan Doyle himself got pretty woo-woo in his later life, when he fell for some "photos" of fairies that make the guy in the Bigfoot film look like Bigfoot. Perhaps Holmes is the unique product of a mind that craved magic, but couldn't (or wouldn't) yet accept its actual existence. So, like our best realist fiction writers, Holmes makes magic from the everyday.

Books, ebooks, and how everything's always changing

So Jonathan Franzen has gone and said another odd thing in public, this time about ebooks and their apparent threat to civilization. Not surprisingly, I'm ambivalent about these remarks. I do wonder about the relative impermanence and mutability of ebooks (though the corollary is that ebooks won't go out of print, at least not in such a definitive manner). Personally, I have yet to read an ebook, though not for any ideological reason. It's just that I do so much reading on screens, and this reading is mostly of a scattered, nerve-jangling quality. (When I'm online, I picture my brain cells as little bubbles in a pan of simmering water.) I turn to physical books for relief from that kind of reading--for immersive reading experiences. But I doubt I'll be doing this forever. There's too much to like about the convenience of ebooks.

See? Ambivalence.

However, last night I watched this NOVA documentary about attempts to authenticate a drawing thought to be by Leonardo. As Walter Benjamin told us long ago, our definition of "artist" relies on the physical presence of a single work of art--even as technology makes those works more and more reproducible. What will it mean to authenticate written works, once they all go digital? Probably most authors these days compose on a computer, with a minimum of handwritten notes. In theory, we still have Stephen King's Wang to give us some sense of origin (although not in practice, as it turned out). But as books become less and less physical, all sloshing around together in the "cloud"--itself a metaphor for an even less physical entity--will our sense of the term "author" change, too? Will we start to seem less like physical beings who made something, and more like wisps in the cloud ourselves?

And if so, is that all bad?

The Hound of the Baskervilles: Things May Not Be As They Seem

This week's reading of Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles gives me to understand that I am still learning how to read the novel. Last week I confidently asserted that Conan Doyle had shut down a possible path to solving the mystery. I heartily approved of this because, as I noted at length, it's important not to give your story--or your reader--too many options, otherwise the mystery seems too easy to solve. You need to set up plausible obstacles for your detective, to enable a satisfying process of unraveling the mystery.

Well, not so much. That is, the above is still true, as far as it goes, but at least one of the paths has turned out not to be permanently shut off. Having been dispatched on a fact-finding mission to Baskerville Hall--minus Holmes, for the time being--Watson discovers that the telegram he and Holmes sent to Barrymore, in order to determine whether he was at home, was not actually delivered into his hands. This means the mysterious bearded stranger who was following Henry Baskerville in London could plausibly be Barrymore after all. Therefore, contrary to my assertion last week, no path can be considered fully closed down until the book is closed. There still needs to be a mechanism for deferring various threads, for making one seem more important than the other at various times. But the world of Sherlock Holmes, I am learning, is one in which you can never quite be certain that you know what you know. This is why Dostoevsky loved detective stories: they're about epistemology.

This whole approach to reading the book, and the world, gets underscored many times over as Watson begins poking around Baskerville Hall and the surrounding moors. First, in the middle of the night, he wakes to the sound of a woman wailing. In the morning he and Baskerville ask Barrymore about it, who replies: "There are only two women in the house, Sir Henry," he answered. "One is the scullery-maid, who sleeps in the other wing. The other is my wife, and I can answer for it that the sound could not have come from her." However:

And yet he lied as he said it, for it chanced that after breakfast I met Mrs. Barrymore in the long corridor with the sun full upon her face. She was a large, impassive, heavy-featured woman with a stern set expression of mouth. But her tell-tale eyes were red and glanced at me from between swollen lids. It was she, then, who wept in the night, and if she did so her husband must know it. Yet he had taken the obvious risk of discovery in declaring that it was not so. Why had he done this? And why did she weep so bitterly? Already round this pale-faced, handsome, black-bearded man there was gathering an atmosphere of mystery and of gloom.

 
Then, walking back from his trip to the post office, where he discovers the slip-up with the telegram, Watson is accosted by a man introducing himself as Stapleton, who seems to know an amazing amount about the Baskerville case and Sherlock Holmes's involvement therein. Watson deflects Stapleton's questions about Holmes, to which Stapleton responds: "You are perfectly right to be wary and discreet." So are we, Conan Doyle is telling us, as Watson is our representative in the story. Still, Watson accepts Stapleton's invitation to lunch, as Holmes has tasked him with "study[ing] the neighbours upon the moor." But can Watson trust what Stapleton tells him? We don't know.
 
Even the landscape participates in this duplicity, as Stapleton points out:

"...You see, for example, this great plain to the north here with the queer hills breaking out of it. Do you observe anything remarkable about that?"
"It would be a rare place for a gallop."

"You would naturally think so and the thought has cost several their lives before now. You notice those bright green spots scattered thickly over it?"
"Yes, they seem more fertile than the rest."

Stapleton laughed.

"That is the great Grimpen Mire," said he. "A false step yonder means death to man or beast. Only yesterday I saw one of the moor ponies wander into it. He never came out. I saw his head for quite a long time craning out of the bog-hole, but it sucked him down at last. Even in dry seasons it is a danger to cross it, but after these autumn rains it is an awful place. And yet I can find my way to the very heart of it and return alive. By George, there is another of those miserable ponies!"

Sadly, Watson sees the truth of the Mire with his own eyes, and let's not dwell on that any more than we have to. (I recently stopped reading a book I was otherwise mostly enjoying because a character killed a puppy. But I will soldier on here.) The point I wish to make here is that in Holmes-world, you must use your eyes, and all your senses, constantly and intensely. Your antenna are always up. At the same time, you must distrust the signals those antennae give you. You're caught in a constant tug-of-war between discovery and doubt--a sort of mire in itself, in which Conan Doyle hopes to trap you, the reader.
 
I've often wondered how mystery writers contend with the need to dump information on the reader. What are the alternatives to having some witness magically appear and provide, in large chunks of dialog, key information that the reader and detective need to go forward? How do you keep that from just being tedious exposition? Conan Doyle doesn't avoid the large chunks of dialog, as is clear in this section. But so far, all this exposition all coming from people we have at least some reason not to trust. So we are never sure about the status of the information--or of information, period. Maybe it's entirely false, or only partially true, or true, but not in the ways we might think. We're very much off balance and becoming more so, and that's a good thing.

What is vocabulary for?

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

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 report unable to trace cut sheet of Times.—CARTWRIGHT."

"There go two of my threads, Watson. There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you. We must 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 the Official Registry. I should not be surprised if this were an answer to my question."

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

"I got a message from the head office that a gent at this address had been inquiring for 2704," said he. "I've driven my cab this seven years and never a word of complaint. I came here straight from 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

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

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 in connection with that of your friend. You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull."

To which Holmes astutely responds:

"You are an enthusiast in your line of thought, I perceive, sir, as I am in mine," said he. "I observe from your forefinger that you make your 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

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

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 back his chair and lighting a cigarette. "I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt."

He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to think that I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a way which earned his approval. He now took the stick from my hands and examined it for a few minutes with his naked eyes. Then with an expression of interest he laid down his cigarette, and carrying the cane to the window, he looked over it again with a convex lens.

"Interesting, though elementary," said he as he returned to his favourite corner of the settee. "There are certainly one or two indications upon the stick. It gives us the basis for several deductions."

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

"I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth. Not that you are entirely wrong in this instance. The man is certainly a country practitioner. And he walks 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 would suggest, for example, that a presentation to a doctor is more likely to come from a hospital than from a hunt, and that when the 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

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

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

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

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?

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

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?

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

...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

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...

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

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

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

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

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)

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.