Storytellersunplugged

MY BIRTHDAY GIFT FOR YOU

2009-07-08T00:17:07Z

MY BIRTHDAY GIFT FOR YOU

The day this column appears, July 8, is my birthday. I am 63. I do not feel a day over 62.

And truly, I am upbeat about the whole aging thing. I mean, we have the optimistic words of Cicero, who sagely said:

As I give thought to the matter, I find four causes for the apparent misery of old age; first, it withdraws us from active accomplishments; second, it renders the body less powerful; third, it deprives us of almost all forms of enjoyment; fourth, it stands not far from death.

Cheery guy, huh? You know … If life hands you a lemon, say, “What in the hell do I want with a goddamn lemon? And besides, I’m allergic.”

Not that I’m feeling old … But my thumbs hurt. I mean, arthritic thumbs: Where the hell’s the telethon for that? You contribute to the March of Thumbs lately? And you know, I’m a guitar player, and the thumb thing is not doing my Travis picking any good.

You see, the syncopated style of thumb and forefinger playing was pretty much developed by Merle Travis (who wrote “Sixteen Tons”)–and right up until the end of his life, he was known for the limberness of his thumbs. He died at age 66 … Goddamn.

Here’s another Power of Positive Thinking quote:

There was no respect for youth when I was young, and now that I am old, there is no respect for age–I missed it coming and going. –J.B. Priestly

You mean Rodney Dangerfield “I don’t get no respect” nailed it?

Anyway, as a writer at this stage of my life, I’ve started to clear away that which I no longer need and / or will never use. I got rid of the four Citizen ribbons for the dot matrix printer that spouted first noise, then smoke, then flame back in 1987. I donated to the library my issues of Writer’s Digest from 1973-1978, including that so helpful issue in which Richard Bach, author of Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah offered his “10 Point Checklist for Writing Popular Philosophy.” I pitched that letter from Vantrash Publishing that assured me they were indeed seeking new authors and that subsidy publishing had been the route that led to Edgar Alan Poe’s success and lifelong happiness.

But I came across a number of story openings from years gone by. Just openings. The stories didn’t get written. And I decided I was as likely to write the stories sometime soon as I am to take up ballet.

So, here is my … Happy Birthday Gift to you!

More than a few writers have declared launching the story is the most difficult task in the entire storymaking process, so …

Take any one of the story prompts below.

(I still like ‘em. Really.)

Write the story.

Keep it under 1,500 words.

Send it to me before August 8 (of 2009–this year in which I am 63 years old!) as an attachment to onlywrite@aol.com. Slap Storytellers Prompt in the subject line.

The three I like the best will win … What else? I’ll send you a Mort Castle book of some sort, a rarity that will be signed to you (or to Ebay upon request).

Now howzat for a birthday gift …–from the birthday guy who, truly, is not feeling all that old, in part because of his good and artistic wife, his jolly friends and talented students who do not allow fossilizing, and those wonderful people who’ve gratified me by giving a chunk of their lives to reading what I’ve had to offer.

Cherish all your happy moments: they make a fine cushion for old age. –Booth Tarkington

I. It was Saturday night. Harlinville’s graveyard. The full moon was lovely, Lee Anna thought. It was silver and it was gold. The night was beautiful, warm but not muggy, with a breeze so gentle sometimes it surprised you, because, suddenly, when you weren’t noticing anything else, there, there it was.

Lee Anna Covington was 15. Her father was A) _______, B) _______, C)_________ or D) Who the hell knows or gives a double-dutch goddamn. Her mother was a drunk and a doper and a whore.

###

II. Last Saturday, I asked Phyllis why it is that no one warns you: Middle-age is hard. There are times it seems you are either coping with loss or preparing to cope with loss.

Phyllis said she could have told me that a while ago.

But I would not have been ready to listen.

###

III. “Nobody ever dies there,” he said.

“Fathers don’t go away there,” she said.

“No.”

“No one goes away. They don’t go away and leave their little girls alone.”

“They don’t go away.”

“–don’t go away and leave you alone.”

“…alone you got no chance, no chance.”

She called herself Chance, EZ Chance and that’s the way it was for her. The aloneness.

When Last We Left Our Heroes . . .

2009-07-07T17:38:12Z

The thing about writing a post every month (or every couple months–mea culpa) is that you-the-reader tend to get hit with whatever I’ve been thinking about more or less in the background of my day to day life. This time, it’s series novels.

There are two different kinds of series in genre fiction. One, on the Tolkien model, is a single story split up over multiple volumes.* George R. R. Martin is doing fabulously well with that kind of series right now. (Please note: Martin’s success is the exception, not the rule.) The other, which I think of as the mystery model, is a set of stories, all with the same protagonist(s), but with little or no continuity from novel to novel. Ngaio Marsh wrote that kind of series. So did Emma Lathen and Ellery Queen and Edmund Crispin and a whole host of other Golden Age detective story writers. At the far end of that spectrum is someone like John Dickson Carr, whose continuing character, Gideon Fell, is actually almost always a secondary character. Carr wrote standalone mysteries which happened to feature the same detective.

The advantage to the mystery model, from the publishing point of view, is that it caters to the vast yearning for same-but-different that drives a lot of people’s reading habits. You can pick up any book in the series–first, fourth, fourteenth, thirty-seventh–and have roughly the same reading experience. It doesn’t matter if two, five, and nineteen are out of print, because only the completists will care–or even be able to tell. Each book benefits from the sales record and reputation of the other books, but no book is dependent on the other books. This is very much not the case with the Tolkien model, where if you can’t find volume three, reading volume four is an exercise in frustration. And if you’ve read volume four, your incentive to find volume three is sharply diminished, because you already know what’s going to happen. In the mystery model, what happens in volume three has little or no bearing on volume four, and vice versa, so reading one has no impact on your desire for the other–except for feeding the same-but-different demon.

I completely understand why people like the mystery model. I like it myself when I find an author who’s good enough at it. And I equally completely understand why publishing likes the mystery model. It’s as close as you’re going to get to a sure thing in an industry ruled by caprice and intangibles.

My problem is, a mystery model series is the last thing on earth I want to write. They’re popcorn reading, and their indeterminate nature–you have to have enough closure that the story stands on its own but either (a.) leave enough minor threads loose that the next book can tie on or (b.) have frictionless characters who don’t change from book to book–means that even very excellent mystery model series aren’t much more than popcorn reading. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy Emma Lathen and John Dickson Carr and Ngaio Marsh and their ilk, and I respect their craft. But they’re not what I want to write. You have to live with a book you’re writing for a lot longer than a book you’re reading, even if you write fast (which I don’t), and, while I enjoy visiting, I couldn’t live in such a self-limiting form.

I’m ambitious. I aspire to art. I want to write great novels, not just excellently crafted entertainment. This may be a case of “aim for the stars, get to the roof” but it’s still better than aiming for the roof and only getting halfway up the stairs. The four books of the Doctrine of Labyrinths are all deeply dependent on each other, and I have always thought of that as a feature, rather than a bug. (It was in fact my puzzlement over reviews describing it as a bug that led me to understand, finally, that my definition of a series was only one of two possible definitions, and not the preferred definition at that.)

I’m going to be writing standalone novels for a while, I think. Aside from the publishing drawbacks, writing a Tolkien model series is exhausting. But when and if I do write another series, at least I’ll know what I’m getting into.

—
*This is very literally the Tolkien model, since–As You Know Bob–Tolkien conceived of The Lord of the Rings as a single novel. Most post-Tolkien series have at least some closure at the end of each individual volume: each installment is more or less a novel on its own.

Boohoo: My Life as a Ghost

2009-07-03T18:55:35Z

A recent column by Wayne Allen Sallee used the G word – ghostwriting.

It took me many years of writing before I figured out how to make a living from our craft – all you need do is write the words of people that can afford to employ you as a hired gun (writer). Oh, there’s also the little matter of selling a piece of your soul to the devil.

My most monetarily successful year of writing occurred when I ghost-wrote four books. You notice my twitch? Yes, the money was good but it came with a price. Before I started ghosting books I decided to work only on non-fiction. Somehow I had it in mind that since I wasn’t writing fiction I would be able to keep producing my own words. Well, that didn’t happen, because in most of these projects it seemed as if I had to be a therapist in addition to being a writer. I signed a non-disclosure clause for most of my clients. Be aware that if your clients have the money to hire you as a writer, then it’s likely they also have a lawyer on retainer. That’s why no names or books are mentioned here. Since I am not officially a medical health professional I cannot say with a certainty that most of my clients suffered from psychiatric disorders, but I sure as hell have my suspicions.

If my appraisal seems a tad biased, it’s possible that my feelings color the reality. It is true that when I write the words of someone else I don’t have a proprietary feeling over what I created. Even though some of the books I ghosted won awards, I never felt invested in the work. The jobs were a means to an end. I guess my sentiments are best revealed by MY titles to those books, titles that are considerably different than what’s written on their covers.

The memoir book I refer to as BATHROOM REMODEL. As for the historical, it is HARDWOOD FLOORS. The financial book I call FRONT AND BACK LANDSCAPING. My title for the psychological self-help tome is MY SON’S FANCY LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE. The rags to riches Horatio Alger story is INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR HOUSE PAINTING. The animal care book is MY SON’S FANCY LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE, PART II.

Because those books paid the bills, that’s how I view them. That’s not how I look at my own novels (but maybe it would be healthier if I did).

Instead of whining, though, I should probably be grateful that I was able to ply a trade that was akin to my vocation. Still, it’s not something I want to do again, as it seemed to sap my creative energy even more than other jobs I have worked. Maybe you can only look at a computer screen so many hours a day. Maybe my muse went on strike when I dipped my pen into another’s ink.

All of this actually does lead into one of my writing rules: Work a job that allows you to write. That might sound a little self-indulgent, especially with the current high rate of unemployment, but it should be the goal of any writer. When I graduated from college I decided to be a night auditor (a clerk that works the graveyard shift) in a hotel. It seemed like a good choice to me, as I imagined that I would have ample time to read and write (which proved true). Like any job, though, it had its pros and cons. When you work the graveyard shift you become a zombie, and lead a life that goes against the circadian rhythms of most of the world. And there was also the matter of my neither making much money, nor seemingly much headway into my professed career, while at the same time my peer group was going on to become doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs. Writing is a tough mistress. Deal with it.

Still, there are jobs, and there are jobs. Some work is all consuming, and doesn’t allow the hours to even dream about being a writer, let alone practice the craft. That’s not the kind of job a writer should be working. If you can’t carve out a respectable amount of hours every week to write, you will never have a chance of succeeding. My night auditor job allowed me to work and write full time.

My first literary agent once told me, “Alan, instant success in the writing field is a ten year wait.” She emphasized the word instant. It’s a carrot I have stuck in front of my nose for a long time. It’s another one of my writing dictums. You have to approach writing like you would a marathon. You train, train, and train just to be able to go those 26 miles. You learn how to persevere and grind it out. If you’re lucky, along the way you might get some insights as to how it’s the journey and not the destination, and along the way you get the chance to type The End a handful of times, but the carrot keeps you going towards another finish line, and another.

The End, The End, The End . . .

Pax,

Alan Russell (7-5-2009)

Whether Workshops

2009-07-03T02:29:05Z

It’s a crazy world, writing workshops. An industry of hope. Not without precedence - nobody thinks twice about music school. Dance school. Art studios. So why shouldn’t there be writing workshops?

I’ve mentioned some of my workshop experiences in past entries - ranging from academic classes in college to evening adult-type classes at the New School to private workshops funded by members of a writing group.

What brought all of this back to me was an article in the New Yorker discussing the phenomenon, through a lengthy discussion/review of The Program Era by Mark McGurl, an examination of American fiction and creative-writing programs.

You can check it out yourselves: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/06/08/090608crat_atlarge_menand

Of course, the discussion is focused on literary “genre” and the academic base of creative writing programs, rather than the broader industry of off-campus commercial, often genre-based writing workshops ranging from Clarion to events at Romance Writers of America conferences. But the issues raised are relevant all around.

The eternal, universal question is asked: can writing be taught? More on that one at the end.

There’s also a key, at least for me, observation: “Writers are products of educational systems, but stories are products of magazine editorial practices and novels are products of publishing houses.”

Teachers expand horizons. They demonstrate, lead the practice of and correct components of skill sets. They serve culture, society, community. Editors also teach. Less so now, of course, than in the past. But if you’re good enough to “get in,” then sometimes through the editorial process and revisions, they do teach. But that’s not their business. Yes, they shape the literature that comes out of their magazines and publishing houses with their taste and educational awareness, but they’re invested in a different way from a teacher in the outcome of the process. They teach with an eye on an audience, whose members grade performance with cash.

There’s a practical reality about tying the work of writing to a business process, rather than an educational/academic system, that I find appealing. The lessons taught by editors and the publishing house process are still about serving culture, society, community. There’s certainly the sad influence of the “lowest common denominator” to be taken into account. And I’m certainly not saying that the commercial “judgement” of what literature is should be accepted over the critical findings of our cultural “guardians.”

I’m just saying, historically, there’s good reason to be suspicious of both ends of the spectrum, and a little healthy attention to both sides might achieve a more balanced, and real, determination of artistic merit.

Anyway, I find the distinction between writing and storytelling (in terms of what is studied, and what is “produced” in a business kind of way) interesting.

A point is also made that, even in the rarefied halls of academia, there are wildly different approaches and reactions to teaching “creative writing” workshops. There is no set curriculum for teaching writing, even if the structure of a writing workshop is more or less standardized (you hand in work, and most of the time students give feedback, as well as the leader/teacher).

My experience in “academic” creative writing workshops, I suspect, was not a traditional one. The City College of New York in the early 70’s was a free, open-admissions college, part of the City University of New York, known as an engineering school. There weren’t many other options for me. And, the big draw for that school was its writing department, supposedly one of the top ten in the country at the time.

Certainly my teachers were world class - a Black Mountain poet and Greenwich Village/Lions Head Pub fixture, the author of one of the great American novels (so it’s been said, and I agree) who found financial support, if not satisfaction, in Hollywood (through things like McHale’s Navy and Casino Royale), and genuine academic writer who’d had a story in Best American Short Stories. There was also the junkie/killer/Ginsberg-bud, but his class was filled in minutes during registration so I just crashed it.

This was not the academic creative writing workshop world depicted in the New Yorker article. And it didn’t last long, either. If I remember correctly, most of the action was gone by ‘75 or ‘76.

Still, I was challenged, warned about the business, and I also proved to be a puzzle to most of my instructors. The snarky among ye, no doubt, would say my writing/career is proof writing can’t be taught. So it goes…

But the experience was entertaining, and encouraging.

In the early 90’s, I re-entered the world of workshops, having reached a commercial and inspirational dead end, and again sought out seasoned, experienced teachers, this time in “our” genre, at the New School in NYC. And I can say the experience kick-started a new phase of writing for me. I met other writers, some with experience, others beginners, and we formed our own writing workshop which continues to this day (though I’m no longer an active participant). We took more New School writing workshops together, even hired one famous science fiction writer to give us a mini-Clarion weekend workshop, and of course met regularly to critique each others’ work, following the structure and guidelines we’d learned in our class together.

I sold a lot more work after those 1990’s workshops. My editorial “ear” became much sharper (again, I hear you saying, not quite sharp enough, bucko - whatever). I “learned” through the experience of having others read my work, and reacting to it as readers, editors, fellow-writers. The experience included finding out where the gaps occurred between my intention and the consensus reaction of my mini-audience (oh, so you didn’t get that metaphor of the squirrel representing my lead’s libido, did you…), and the discovery that style did not necessarily mean laying down thick, complicated sentences that somehow lacked the “charm” of a Lucius Shepard, much less Faulkner.

Some lessons apparently take longer to learn than others…

That question about whether or not can writing be taught? New Yorker staple Louis Menand thinks so, saying that despite all the reasons they shouldn’t, they do work. He says that though he never published a poem after his workshop experiences, the value he received was in his awareness of “the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.”

An informed and engaged reader, or critic, is not a writer. People entering the arena of death hoping to emerge as the next Faulkner, or King, might not find such comfort in their failure. Hopefully, they’re not the ones turning their writing “talent” to producing hideous reviews on Amazon.com, or endless snarky blogs and message board comments, about books they secretly know are far inferior to the ones sitting in their hard drives.

I really wish people could rise above the petty, but I’m too cynical. But on the other hand, these programs and workshops, the whole, far-flung industry from high-falutin’ academia to down-and-dirty get-togethers in hotel rooms, not to mention magazines/books (I’m reluctant to include SU in this company because we’re volunteers, and industry is business, and business is about the cash) do produce actual, real, working writers. Ask the writing teachers who contribute to this blog.

Hell, those workshops produced me, and even if I don’t make a living writing, I make money from it, have books and magazines to wave in people’s faces, reviews, even (he said, with a pathetic whine in his voice).

Drama aside, I’ve found concrete, editorial advice that helped me get rid of bad practices, focus on educating myself in terms of my weaknesses - I’ve also learned to ignore bullshit. My writing has improved, even if I’ve hit a critical acceptance ceiling and very little commercial success. There are things some of us just don’t want to learn. Or can’t.

Workshops also provide hope, which I suppose is akin to faith in the necessary process for some of getting from one day to the next.

And the company of other folks who share a dream, a need, a frustration.

And, if we’re all lucky, creative writing workshop graduates who have learned to respect and honor the work entailed in writing, and moved on with their lives carrying that respect, and a trained eye for good writing and storytelling, now visit bookstores with cash in hand and a burning desire to buy a good book.

One of our books, I hope…

Steve & Melanie Tem: HOW MUCH DO YOU NEED TO START?

2009-07-02T06:40:42Z

Steve:

So how much do you need to have in place before you start a piece of fiction? I’m mostly talking about short stories here, since I presume that before you begin a novel you’re going to want to have a pretty clear idea of what it’s about, who the characters are, and in general where it’s going. Maybe you’ll even want to have some, or all, of your research done before you put that first word down on paper.

Melanie:

True in most cases, I think, but I’ve been known to start what I know will be a novel without knowing much about it, on the basis of only a single scene (”this would be a great ending for a novel!”) or maybe just a feeling profound sorrow I can’t quite name and so I have to write its story, or a
certain kind of restlessness, or a moment of excited curiosity about nothing in particular). So I’d say that even long projects can start with a small thing. Then you find the actual story and the means to tell it.

Steve:

Now I admit that sometimes I start with a subject, and some research, before I start writing a short story, especially if it’s something I want to place in a theme anthology. If it’s a theme I don’t know that much about, I’m hoping that the research will spark an idea. It’s a gamble that sometimes pays off, sometimes not. I don’t have that much to lose–after all, the worse that could happen is that I’ll have learned some things I didn’t know before. Never a bad thing. And maybe I’ll find a way to use that research later. It’s not that unusual for me to read a book, a handful of articles, watch a few movies, visit a location or two, all as research for something I decide not to write. I suppose that’s wasteful, but I don’t worry too much about it. I assume (perhaps too optimistically) that it will all be useful in the end.

Melanie:

Theme anthologies often work like writing prompts for me. Sometimes I find I just have nothing to say about a theme. Usually I know that right away. Not infrequently, though, an announced theme–or an overheard phrase, or a word that all of a sudden strikes me as laughable–will turn out to be exactly the impetus for a story I already had in mind to write, or to inspire me to write one I hadn’t thought about yet.

Steve:

So what’s the minimum that you need to begin a story? I’m sure the answers vary widely. On my disks, in my notebooks, tugged away in my funky little flashdrives, I have lists of titles, and underneath these titles are oftentimes the beginnings of stories, sometimes even one or more scenes. These titles simply came to me, floated out of the air, and I recognized (perhaps too optimistically) that they were the titles of stories I would one day write, or had written, in some alternate universe. Titles like: Chasing Sleep, Coldwater Hospital, On the Eno Estate, Disappointment, Rock Scissors Paper, Return to Earth. I wrote them down because I knew immediately they were the titles of my stories.

The peculiar thing is, when I wrote these titles down, I was already feeling what I knew would be the central emotional thrust of these stories. And I was hearing some of the characters’ voices. These last two bits of data are even more important, I think, than the titles themselves, which are most likely to change. So I wrote down as much of these conversations as I could capture, even though I didn’t know who these characters were. It was like overhearing conversations that haven’t yet occurred.

Melanie:

The danger in beginning a story with something small, without having thought it through, is that you’ll come to a screeching halt somewhere about page 10 or, worse, page 32), and you won’t be able to finish. That first flash-in-the-pan turns out to be nothing more than that. That’s frustrating
and discouraging, unless you can remember that it’s not wasted, you might use that material in another project, or you might have just worked out something necessary before you can actually write a different story.

Steve:

Yeah—that would be a killer. For me, my process seems to work in a way that failure never happens that way. Page 8 seems to be the litmus test for me—if I reach page 8 in a short story I can be pretty sure I’m going to finish it, no matter the eventual length (and of course some of my pieces are much shorter than 8 pages). I stop novels for different reasons, which often simply have to do with the energy required by the enterprise.

As for the stories that don’t make it to page 8–some of these stories I’ll get back to, some of these I won’t. I try not to worry too much about it. But some days I wake up, and these unspoken conversations start up again, and the unseen participants gradually reveal themselves and tell me their story.

Melanie:

And the potential benefit of starting a story without much thought out is that you go in places you had no idea you were going. That’s really fun, if you can stay with it and hang on for the ride.

Steve:

It’s a kind of fishing expedition. If you’re really serious about storytelling, all your life you’ve been collecting people and conversations and situations, and all that collects in this great unconscious pool. You go fishing with one of these little pieces—this color or this phrase—and you snag a complex of things which, when landed, grow into this dynamic story-making machine.

So how much do you need to start? For you maybe it isn’t even a word, but a smell, a taste, a barely articulated sound.

Melanie:

Or a word you’ve heard all your life–chair, alabaster, swimming, albeit–that suddenly pulls a little loose from its moorings and invites you to go somewhere else.

Collecting Characters on the Road

2009-07-01T11:13:03Z

My son and I are in Baltimore as I write this. I set up a new office for my company here a while back, and since we just managed to get it connected to the corporate network, I’m here to iron out the kinks and get things running smoothly. Bill is in training to do this sort of work, and he’s a great helper.

On the drive up, I caught myself in an old habit that I thought I’d share. I call it character collecting. I think we all do this to a degree, writers, artists, anyone with creative tendencies. You see a guy with greasy hair and five kids in a beat up pickup truck, or five teenage girls dancing and whooping it up in a Mercedes with the sunroof open, and you take a mental snapshot.

I was doing this yesterday, particularly in traffic. We pulled up to a stoplight in DC on the way through, and across the concrete median from us, a semi trailer got pulled over by a pair of police SUV’s, lights flashing and sirens blaring, and I couldn’t help checking out the oddly balanced cargo, which was some sort of white bales. I was already writing stories about it in my head before the light turned green.

At food stops along the way I gathered more people. A young mother with several children went crashing through McDonald’s, and I tried to picture why they were there. Were they local? Did they come in from the road like we did? There was a truck there with a flat-bed trailer behind it and what appeared to be a very ornate gold-leafed coffin as the only cargo. Behind the trailer, another trailer (a small green one that might have been tools, or a generator?) was dragging, and the guy was having a hell of a time backing it up to get out of the parking lot.

In the bushes, with kids and workers all around, a snake slid along out in plain sight. The only one who seemed to notice was Bill, and by the time I turned, it was gone - as if it had never been there.

I remember a trip I took long ago to a convention. I drove there with Storytellers’ own John Rosenman, and we stopped at one of the most bizarre hotels ever. The toilet made space sounds, and when we went out to get take-out we determined that the Chinese restaurant was actually staffed by aliens. What they gave me as “soup” was hot water with vegetables in it. No broth, not soup at all. The vegetable chunks, broccoli and Cauliflower along with a few other things, were HUGE. There wasn’t a bite-sized bit in the entire meal. Combined with the oddness of the hotel room, stories were born. Later that trip we ate at a diner that prompted John to write his story “Nighthawks at the Diner,” for an issue of the now defunct magazine AFTER HOURS. In that issue, every story was titled “Nighthawks at the Diner,” which was interesting. I wrote a story too, but didn’t make it into the issue. I still have it.

I keep it in my people collection. Today we’re going to the new office, then out into Glen Burnie, an outlying part of Baltimore, where will undoubtedly add a few more unique faces to the coffers.

It’s what I do. Then I sift them, re-arrange them, build them into something new and bring them back to life in my stories, screenplays, and novels.

Wish me good hunting.

—On the Road — David Niall Wilson

I AM NOT LOOKING FOR ME

2009-06-22T21:19:26Z

Why do people treat books as mirrors?

I recently came across a post by Elizabeth Bluemle at the Publisher’s Weekly site entitled “The New Literal Mind” (link to the full post, and comments that follow, given at the foot of this essay). Elizabeth writes, amongst other things:

“I’ve noticed a strange trend among grandparents these days, and sometimes among parents: the tendency to reject a book for not being specifically, literally, representative of their child’s world.”

Parents or grandparents apparently look at a book – its cover, to be more precise – and come up with reasons why their child or grandchild won’t want to read it. The kid’s a country kid, and the book is set in the city – or vice versa. The kid has a brother, and not a sister (like the character in the book) – or vice versa. Most damningly at all, the “Oh, I don’t think he’ll really be interested in THAT” comment when the skin colour of the child depicted on the book cover doesn’t happen to match the precise hue of the potential reader of said book.

That neatly connects with another trend that has seen a lot of Internet exposure recently – the blog posts of a whole bunch of people, particularly people of colour, about how they could never “find themselves” in the books that they were given to read as children..

And that brings me to the brink of something that I do comprehend as a concept but which I completely fail to understand on a visceral level.

Why are all these people so bent on treating books as mirrors? Why is the value of a book measured by how much of oneself – in an absolutely literal sense – one can “find” in it? I have never picked up a single book with the purpose of looking for multiple incarnations of me – but, instead, I’ve sought new things, new experiences, new ideas, landscapes I might never see in real life, people I might never meet, and people I might be fascinated with but would not remotely want to actually BE. I have never picked up a fantasy book with a dragon on the cover and expected to find a clone of me riding the dragon by page five.

When I read a book, I’m not looking for me.

Look at (a random selection of) books which have touched my life.

“Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott: at the time I first read that, I was still a young kid living in Europe. American history was not remotely familiar as such, not in detail, and the context of the March family’s lives might as well have been on a different planet. But with the one possible exception of going “Oh! She writes too!” when I met Jo March, I have never identified with any of the sisters. Meg is entirely too holier-than-thou (which I never was), Amy annoyed the snot out of me, Beth made me cry but I am not sure that she would not have been too precious to live with if I ever had to do it in real life, and even fellow-writer Jo often went off the rails and did things I did not approve of. I did not wade into the book desperately seeking a reflection of myself, and I was not put out when I did not find one. Did that stop me from enjoying the book and from loving my early copy of it literally to pieces? No, it did not. And if the cover on it had been anything to do with choosing it I would never have had it at all – because oh, these were AMERICAN characters who ran around wearing long dresses and white gloves none of which was remotely familiar to me so in other words these were the equivalent of “city” characters being thrown at a “country” child.

Any book of China, by Pearl Buck: my mother had a set of these and I read them, in translation, when I was pretty young. The books were old-fashioned hardcovers with slipcovers on them – the slipcovers are long since gone but as I recall a lot of collected-edition type books of that era basically had the title and the author’s name on the cover and very little else so relying on the cover art to determine whether I would “find myself” in these books never arose – but even if there was a Chinese girl on every cover that would not have prevented me from picking up such a book because, well, it had a Chinese character on the cover and I was not Chinese. I was not seeking myself in those books – I was getting thoroughly and enchantingly lost in a world not my own, where characters did not think or behave as I would have thought or behaved, where the rules were different and everything was rich and strange.

“Through Desert and Jungle”, by Henryk Sienkiewicz: Yes, I am a European child and I read European authors. Sienkiewicz was a Polish writer – of adult historical novels – who happens to be a Nobel Prize winner; he wrote a book for what would these days be considered a YA audience, which was a cornerstone of my mother’s growing up, and then mine, and then I gave the book as a present to my young nieces when THAT generation came up to the point of demanding things to read. I loved that book. I love it today, still. It concerns the adventures of a young English girl and a young Polish boy, children of Suez engineers in Egypt, who are snatched as hostages to be exchanged for persons being held by the colonial government during the Mahdi rising. The kids ride on camels across the desert in the moonlight; they are thrown into the chaos of conquered Khartoum; they are tossed out again in search of someone who would know what to do with them; they escape, and in their travels they cross from the Sahara into the near-equatorial jungles and savannahs, meeting lions, and elephants, and warring black tribespeople into whose path they blunder, and dying explorers, and malaria, and they live in hollowed out baobab trees, and oh GOD it is wonderful stuff. I first read this book years before I, too, stepped onto African soil – and even after I had done this my own experience of Africa was far, far different than those of the two protags of this book (thank Heaven…) To this day I have never been in Northern Africa, the Arabian part of Africa, Egypt or Algeria or Libya or Morocco; I have never seen the pyramids, the dunes of the Sahara, the Nile, or the Suez canal. I may or may not get to do this in the future. There was NOTHING of me in that book when I read it – I was not English, I was not Polish, I had never been to Cairo or seen the desert or experienced the humidity of equatorial jungle or set eyes on a living elephant. But I plunged into the story which has now held three generations of my family’s girls, and I had one hell of a ride.

But all of those are more or less “real” contexts, in the sense that although they were unfamiliar at least they were possible, they existed somewhere out there on this planet which turned with me upon it. What of true fantasy? If it is true that you need to find yourself in a book of fiction in order to enjoy it or even accept it, how did true fantasy ever even get a toe in the water?

The Hobbit, by J R R Tolkien: There are no such things as dragons. Or trolls. Or dwarven kings under the mountain. Or hobbits, for that matter. And there are no characters in that list which I could identify with, even remotely. Oh, I have always aspired to be an Elf, but I can no more be Tolkien’s Luthien than I can be Cinderella – both are creatures of the imagination.

Yes, before people point out the obvious, I am aware of archetypes, and people possibly identifying with an ARCHETYPE of a character rather than the character themselves. But I ask, again – where does Imagination come into this? Curiosity? An itch to discover things that are outside one’s own purview, things that one might never see or smell or touch in reality but which become all the more real because they take such firm and potent root inside the potent imaginary scenery of our own minds and hearts? Isn’t this what books are FOR – the chance to imagine something that had been unimaginable, to look out onto the world through a pair of eyes which might perceive it differently from our own?

Do people seeking to find themselves and only themselves in a story – people who dismiss the story as inadequate, for whatever reason, if they cannot – really believe that a child is incapable of imagining the things that are not spelled out for it? If that is the case I despair for the human race because it is wonder and imagination, the kind nurtured in very young children, which has taken us this far – and which may still be the only thing that will carry us forward.

Elizabeth Bluemle writes:

“As a child growing up in the sand-colored deserts of Arizona, I loved reading about kids in New York City, or the swamps of the south. I did enjoy the odd book about my own landscape, in part because there were so few of them, but if I’d limited myself to books about kids like me in a setting like mine, I’d have likely been bored, for one thing, and grown up with a very narrow world view, for another. I was living my life; the magic of books lay in getting to live someone else’s.”

A commenter by the name of Gail Gauthier then comes in from a completely different direction:

“I think one of our reasons for reading is to connect with someone–the author or characters we believe to be like ourselves. Even when we’re reading to try out different lives, I think there’s usually something about the book that we connect to. We think a character is like ourselves or like someone we’d like to be. Or something is happening in the book that has some significance for us.”
As a reader – then (as a child) and now (as an adult) – I am not sure that Gail Gauthier’s comment speaks for me. I did NOT enter a book seeking a character I believed to be like myself, or even particularly want one. The “something about the book that [we] connect to” that Gail speaks of has always, for me, been the STORY. A story lived by characters whom I could believe were living it. It did not matter in the least whether or not the character was “like me” or not – and preferably it would be someone not like me at all, someone whose own take on life and their own particular worldview would be sufficiently UNLIKE me to teach me something which I had until that moment not known or been capable of knowing.

Elizabeth Bluemle continues:

“We have many missions as booksellers, but it’s a strange world when one of them is the need to defend children’s curiosity and imagination against the instincts of some of their most loving and well-intentioned guardians. “

To which I can only give a resounding AMEN. Let’s keep the books as portals, as gateways into the unknown, as a magic carpet which can take us to lands unknown and perils unnumbered, where we can go wearing someone else’s skin – learning what it means to be HUMAN, as opposed to just being ourselves. There are enough mirrors surrounding us all our lives in which we can peer short-sightedly and see only our own faces – there are more and more every day, and often life does seem, in an eerie and tragic way, to be lived inside a carnival fun-house where there’s nothing BUT mirrors to surround us. A book, a good story, is a doorway out into the green meadows of summer, into the dunes of a yellow desert, out into the stars. Leave the mirrors behind. Let’s stop trying to find ourselves in other people. Let us, instead, try to find other people in ourselves.

Full text of the Bluemle blog post, complete with commentary:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/blog/660000266/post/770045677.html

Yearn For A Dream

2009-06-28T06:21:41Z

Yearn For A Dream
Wayne Allen Sallee
June 28th 2009

We finally got our mid-90s here, so I’m listening to Cannonball Adderley and Charlie Parker. In the
stinking summer subways of Chicago, the best thing you can hear is someone playing a saxophone with a pile of coins inside the case on the floor. One summer I heard a guy playing “I Can See Clearly Now,” and I can still see the moment, maybe fifteen years later, stopped in time. This temperature is great for me, health-wise, though I’m still one fingered, I can type for longer stretches, and this late at night I feel less tormented, as I sweat on the keyboard. Never at peace, just less tormented. Maybe that’s why men play the sax in the bowels of the city.

I am almost finished with a novel I’ve been ghostwriting, 91K out of 94K. I am actually excited, the original manuscript was turned on its head, but the author and I have worked closely so that the book is still his own. I’m sure with all of you novelists on board here, you know that feeling, being able to sit down and immediately be in the moment, know who does what next as the last five or ten minutes of the book’s life ticks down. I could say that I know that feeling from my short fiction, but not in the same way, as I always have the last line and title written before I start something.

I write my best in the evenings, and so I’ve taken advantage of summer, not wanting it to slip away so fast. I hurt from typing, but not everything is fine motor motion. This past week, I went kayaking for eight miles on the Chicago River, with the rains causing the river to be three feet higher and loaded with dead rats. As a kid, I saw a syndicated b&w cliffhanger-type thing on Garfield Goose, “Journey To The Beginning of Time,” which ran about 60 chapters. These guys go canoeing in Lincoln Park after being at the Museum of Science and Industry here in Chicago, go under a bridge and end up in prehistoric time and there’s some really cool stop action filming. I can only remember two guys’ names, Tony and JoJo, and it was kind of a rip to find out at the end that all 60 chapters turned out to be a dream of JoJo’s after falling asleep on a bench by the T. Rex exhibit. Well, a gyp, as we said back in the day. Also went to Taste of Chicago and had lunch with a few people in the Loop, came up with street talk and story titles as I rode the el. This last mostly comes from people being on their cell phones. I always wonder why the hell people are on the phone all the time, what did they do before cell phones?

What is the deal with the current trends in publishing? Some dude got a five figure advance from HarperCollins for a book that consists of, well, funny “tweets” on Twitter. Thing is, he has an email set up for people to send him these examples, which then leads me to believe that people will just make up funny entries. Now, there are some odd things I come across, the few times I’m on Twitter nowadays, my favorite being my writer friend Maurice Broaddus writing “I can’t believe I’m up this late trying to buy a pool for my son’s frog.” Mind you, no one would get this unless they have nieces who have Webkins. But I contacted my agent about this Twitter event, and suggested he market @joymotel, the Twitter novel I wrote with John Kewley (our hook being the review in the Boston Phoenix and the fact that John and I have never met or spoken on the phone.) You look at, say, Project Gutenberg, and you have bookshelf to ubernet. The new trend seems to be the reverse. Its no longer “What happens on Twitter stays on Twitter.” Another example is HARRY POTTER SHOULD HAVE DIED, which is entirely filled with speculations that had been posted on message boards on said ubernet. So I again contacted my agent, and working with a fellow in Los Angeles, have started writing LOST’S LONG CON, which intersperses a blog about the television show LOST that has been five years running with new material consisting of the two of us doing a Siskel & Ebert routine. The pitches can’t hurt, and for once in my life I’m looking at what’s on the shelves and knowing I have the time to write something that might slip through the window before the next trend hits, presumably “anecdotes involving iPhones,” and yes, you heard it here first, folks.

I suppose that if there is a topic to be discussed here beyond my usual ramblings, it is the net-to-shelf thing going on. I suppose it is a good thing, encouraging people to go out and buy a damn book, yet there is something vaguely insidious about it. If PK Dick were alive today, he’d find a way to write a great novel about it, likely involving corporate mind-control. He would certainly have invented the word UbikNet.

I’ve been taking a mess of photos, I always used to as references, and I have a Flickr account. Always use a disposable camera. Sometimes a multiple shot, but usually I want it to be a karma-like thing. In the last issue of WIRED, Hideki Ohmori talks about disposable cameras. A lot of what he says is right on target with my general feelings towards social networking, and I do have my toes in the water, but don’t really plan on dog-paddling daily on Twitter and Typepad and LinkedIn and Plaxo. Also, though no one asked, Facebook might as well be the Chicago River, in my opinion. I get more emails from FB than I do regular mail, and when I politely reply on FB, I then find myself replying to five or six other friends who have replied to my original reply, even though no one asked. Do I sound like Andy Rooney now, or what? I’m glad I don’t have his eyebrows. Imagine Rooney’s eyebrows on Larry King’s face. Yeah, good luck getting that image out of your head now.

Anyhow, Ohmori closes his interview by saying this. “We do not always want a faithful representation of reality. Sometimes we yearn for a dream.” Hopefully my photo will post; I took the picture while the bus I was on passed 91st and Cicero.

Enjoy July, my unseen friends. Call or hug a veteran next weekend, after you watch YouTubes of what’s going on in the streets of Tehran.

The Secret To Good Writing. Seriously.

2009-06-27T03:46:28Z

If you are reading this, you are most likely someone who reads extensively about writing. You have no doubt read or heard a great many bits of advice, suggestions and recommendations as to how to make your writing better. You have almost certainly been told multiple times what the secret/key/Maguffin to good writing is, often in ways that contradict each other with jagged and relentless ferocity. You have been told to do everything except dip yourself in lemon herb butter and conjure the spirits of the ancient lobster gods of Lemuria before sitting down at the writing desk and taking quill in hand.

And I am here today to tell you that the secret is none of the above.

At this point, having spent the better part of twenty years writing novels, roleplaying games, book reviews, nonfiction, video games, academic papers, blog posts, book reviews, and internet humor columns under the pen name “Elfpants”, I can say that I have found precisely one factor that correlates 100% with writing well. Everything else has its ups and downs, its pluses and minuses, but there’s one element that, time and again, matches up with when I’ve done my best, my fastest, my cleanest work.

Get enough sleep.

That’s it.

Look, I know some of you were hoping for something earthshattering. Sacrifice a spotless purple goat on the new moon, maybe, and get the magical power of adverbs. Do a specific exercise and in just 3 sessions per week of 30 minutes each, your writing abs will be rock-hard and cut like a Belgian diamond. Keep yourself on a strict diet of no prepositions. Whatever. The gimmicks don’t have it. The gimmicks are often precisely that: gimmicks. What matters is putting yourself in the best position to do your best work, and that starts with getting enough sleep.

Get enough sleep, and your brain functions better. Your brain functions better, and you think more clearly. You think more clearly, and your ability to do silly little things - like utilize language constructively - is improved. In short, you write better. If, on the other hand, you don’t get enough sleep, pretty soon your brain starts running like Atlanta public transportation during a snowstorm. Surprise, buttercup: If you’re not thinking well in general, the parts of your brain that are thinking about writing well aren’t going to be magically exempt, even if you have a deadline.

This is not to say that getting up an hour early to get some writing in before work is a bad thing. On the contrary, a scheduled, structured approach that includes a solid sleep schedule is a great thing for writing. It means forgoing sleep excessively, for whatever reason, will ultimately negatively impact your writing.

Don’t believe me? Consider this possibility: You stay up late writing because you’re on a really good roll and don’t get to bed until the wee hours. In the morning, you get up at your usual time, still exhausted, and don’t get a lot done at work. Because you’re not getting stuff done and you have a deadline, you stay at work a little later, just to make sure everything gets done. That, in turn, means you get home a little later. Which means by the time you sit down to write in the evening, it’s already getting late. Plus, you’re still tired, which means it takes longer for you to get the amount of work you want in, which keeps you up even later to make your word count, and…

You get the idea. As romantic as the idea of the magically inspired writer pounding heedlessly away into the wee hours, fueled by the sheer glistening fires of artistic creation might be, it’s not a sustainable model. Sleep debt is the sort of thing that racks up interest in a hurry, and it takes payments right out of the middle of your brain. I know for a fact that on days when I’ve gotten enough sleep, I write better. I have more ideas, and better ones. I work faster, and cleaner, and just plain better. And on days when I’ve pushed too hard or too far the night before, I lose the good ideas before I can write them down. I work slower. I get distracted more easily. I need more breaks, and I’m a helluva lot worse at Facebook Scrabble.

Anecdotal evidence? Sure. But ask a lot of writers, and I’ll bet you get a lot of similar anecdotes.

So read all the other stuff. Pay attention to it. Learn it. Try it. Do it, if it makes sense to you. Find what works for you – exercises or word counts or schedules or writing groups or whatever – and go for it. But if you want it to have the best shot at succeeding, if you want to give yourself the best chance to do good work, do this one thing.

Get enough sleep.

Whistle While You Work

2009-06-21T03:04:59Z

I’m still finishing up the novel I mentioned last month—almost there!—so I’m going to keep this short and sweet.

I love to listen to music. Back when I was a kid, I’d pull out my parents LP albums and 45s (that’s a single-song vinyl record, kid, not a pistol) and listen to them over and over again. I’d learn the lyrics, sing along, and then sing them to myself when I wasn’t anywhere near a record player or radio. (This was back before MP3s and things that play them.)

Today, I still love listening to music, and fortunately I work at a computer that gives me access to countless tunes of all stripes. The trouble is that when I’m working I don’t want to listen to most of them. Writing uses the verbal centers of your brain, the ones they always check to see if they’re shutting off accidentally when they do brain surgery, which is why they keep you awake through it and treat you as if you’re drilling words for the national spelling bee.

Songs with lyrics, of course, also worm their way into that part of the brain—unless I’m familiar enough with them to ignore them and treat them like background chatter. Unfortunately, I need every bit of that center that I can draw on when I’m writing a novel. There’s just not enough of it to spare, and if my brain starts latching on to lyrics and singing along—even just in my head—it’s not letting me use what I need to write. In other words, there’s only so much mindwidth getting pumped out of my verbal centers, and I need to give my writing full access to it.

Because of this, I like listening to wordless music when I write: soundtracks, techno, trance, house, things with a beat but nothing to say—at least literally. In fact, I’ll often pick up or adopt a certain album for a new book and then listen to it over and over while I write. When I’m done with the book, I’m often done (at least for a while) with that piece of music too.

The music also helps drown out the other strange noises in my house—I have lots of kids—and lets me focus on the writing instead. Things like screams still manage to poke through, which is likely good for my family’s long-term survival though.

When I’m not writing, though, I really go for great music with solid lyrics that mean something to me. For instance, the ringtone on my cell phone is the opening bars to “Taking Care of Business” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. As the song says, “If you ever get annoyed, look at me. I’m self-employed. I love to work at nothing all day.”