John Scalzi, author of Old Man's War and a whole stack of other stuff, has a fat category on his blog titled The Big Idea. What's in it? "Authors discussing what makes their books tick -- and what that meant for the writing process," that's what.

I'm all for picking the brains of writers more accomplished than I am. And stealing things from them. I've just started reading through the various entries, but it didn't seem fair to keep it to myself.

Every so often I get something close to overwhelmed by what seems to be the lightweight and frivolous nature of my life, all the more so when important and meaningful things are happening in the world. It makes it difficult to post my thoughts about the differences between writing that squirts out whole and complete and writing that requires endless revision and reworking. Even though that's what's been on my mind lately, it just doesn't seem to matter all that much. I suppose that in reality the lives of many people are the same way, and they get through each day by ignoring that in one way or another. Usually I do that as well, but some days I'm better at it than others.

Over the past several days I've tried to remedy some of that by working on one of what I call my "serious" pieces. Unlike the two currently on the sidebar, these stories never seem to come out right. Lots of revision, rewriting, and focusing on structure and detail in a way that threatens to suck the life right out of the tale. If one of those ever sees print, I'll be a happy man, because although I like the shorter, lighter pieces just fine, it's these other ones that I really sweat over. They're the ones I work on so long that eventually I have to give up and shove them in a drawer somewhere for a year until I can read them in a fresh way.

It's strange. Sometimes a piece will emerge almost wholly formed, requiring nothing but a little spit and polish. Anchovies and Sumerian Pot were both like that. But for some reason I tend to value those works somewhat less, as though I cheated somehow. At some level I probably believe that it's not really writing unless I've battered my fists against it and invoked the damnation of god during its forging.

Which is nonsense, really, because I continue to maintain that it's the reception of the story by the reader that determines whether it works or not, and much of the difficulty I have with the "serious" pieces stems from my deliberate intention to convey something specific. So instead of thinking about the eventual reader, I'm wrapped up in my own ideas, which, I think, impedes the characters. They get stiff as they try to play the roles I've given them and read the clumsy lines I've written. I'm trying to get them to express my ever-so-interesting ideas about sexuality and identity while they're just waiting for me to leave the room so they can fuck.

So anyway, if anybody was wondering where all the damn content went, that's where. Bit of a funk, you see, and it's not the kind with a tight bass line.

I'll get over it.

I've done it again. I sent a submission that seems to have coincided with a changing of the guard over at Thieves Jargon as Matt DiGangi steps down and hands the pointy dangerous pen over to Dan Scannell.

As before, my first thought was that they just hated it and blocked my address forever and made little dolls and poked rusty pins where my bladder would be. Could be, could be. But then I read Matt's blog post announcing his departure and got a nice note back in response to my status query.

So, my intersection with editorial changeover has happened twice. I don't have a decent data set, though. I don't send out a torrent of submissions, and I know that there's enough staff churn that it happens often enough. If it happens, say, twice more within the next six months I will name myself the Scourge of Editorial Stability, but not before then.

At any rate: good luck, Dan, farewell, Matt.

No, really. I did. I mean...it wasn't a post written by me, so much as a post posted by me, which is to say that it was a post of something I'd found in a book that seemed interesting, like the post below.

Just for a larf I Googled the first sentence of it. Because I had a suspicion, you see: it seemed like one of those things that, while new to me, was in fact scattered all about the lands of the IntraTubes, known to all far and wide.

And I was right.11 pages of results. So, rather than stay here to read it, go here and pick a page and read it there.

This is one of those lazy posts that turned out to be more effort than I originally intended. Bugger.

If an artist does not spring to his work as a soldier to the breach, if once within the crater he does not labor as a miner buried in the earth, if he contemplates his difficulties instead of conquering them one by one, the work remains unachieved, production becomes impossible, and the artist assists the suicide of his own talent...The solution of the problem can be found only through incessant and sustained work...True artists, true poets, generate and give birth today, tomorrow, ever. From this habit of labor results a ceaseless comprehension of difficulties which keep them in communion with the muse and her creative forces.

Honoré de Balzac

Some days, a certain word will clamor for my attention. Sometimes it's a word with a peculiar resonance of meaning. Sometimes it's a word that just reverberates in an especially rich way. For the past few days, that word has been bar.

As in: bars of gold. Bars of silver! Bars of dark chocolate. The word seems imbued with weight and value: the heft of precious metal in the hand, the sensual melt of cacao bean and cocoa butter against the palate. The special way that breath evaporates off the mirrored or satin surfaces of elements found in the more expensive neighborhoods of the periodic table, and the smooth matte sheen of incipient tastiness encased within a velvety envelope of crystalline snap.

Say it with me now: barrrr.

Did it work?

Try it again.

Must just be me, then. Really, though, you're missing out. I've achieved a sort of synesthesia in my imagination. A bar of  gold becomes tasty and flavorful, edible wealth, and a bar of Michel Cluizel gains the mass and inertia of dense metal. The commonality between the two becomes intuitive, a richness that connects the realms of the pecuniary and the sensual.

It will fade soon, I think, but for now I'm enjoying eating bullion in my mind.

I often ask my graduate students on the first day of a creative writing course to write down their cultural influences. I do this because I find that the biggest problem in student writing I see, other than poor mechanics, is self-absorption. Too many of them write about their personal wounds: drug and alcohol abuse, car wrecks, anorexia, dysfunctional and failed families, failed love affairs, depression, anxiety, and rage against feelings of powerlessness. I don't mean to suggest that these are not suitable catalysts for making literature, but my students tend not to see these stories within a social matrix or cultural lineage. They feel locked within themselves and think of artistic expression as a key that will let them into the kingdom of emotional freedom, rather than seeing art as a mindful reframing of experience and emotion through a forming intelligence. They write with too much "I" and no sense of "we." They can tell me what has happened to them - but they cannot tell me the significance, the moral and psychological consequences. They cannot step outside of their anguish to see the cultural context that shapes them. They just know that they, who among the most privileged people who have ever lived on Earth, feel they don't belong anywhere.

Alison Hawthorne Deming
"Culture, Biology, and Emergence"
The Georgia Review, Spring 2009

Over the years (he said, settling back into his worn chair by the fire and picking a stray strand of greasy mutton from his voluminous beard) I've been using the phrase "It's all material" as a kind of mantra, especially when life presents me with one sort of drama or another. It's true. Anything decent I've managed to write, no matter how weird, always has some kernel of reality in it somewhere. That kernel might not be the heart of the story, but it's there. In Sumerian Pot, it was the bit about the martinis.

Other stories, like the one I woke up with in my head a couple of weeks ago and managed to write down before it got away, are firmly grounded in real experience. In that case, it was September 11th. That's a big one.

But it all goes into the meat-grinder. Being in downtown Manhattan during a terrorist attack. Drinking too much on New Year's Eve. Jacaranda blooming outside my window. Every last little bit gets filed away somewhere.

Some people carry notepads around to write these sorts of things down. I'm of the opinion that if I have to write it down to remember it, it's not worthy of remembrance. I have a somewhat freakish memory for that sort of thing, though, so that might not work for everyone.

The trouble is, if something's too close to reality, the story breaks. At least, my stories break; I know there are plenty of folks out there who can put a skim coat of fiction over their lives and don't get yelled at by Oprah for lying. I was all impressed with the story I wrote a couple of weeks ago: it had emotional impact, weird punch, all of that. But the impact and the punch were there because I was too close to the experience I was using as the basis for the story. What seemed to me to be a dense, meaningful conk on the head in 1,400 words fell flat when I asked a writer friend to read it. In fact, she missed the central point of the piece entirely, and it wasn't because she "didn't get it." That which seemed crystalline to me was clear only because I knew it was there. To someone outside my bubble it was obscure to the point of absence.

That's not always a bad thing. If you throw something out there thinking it's about The Meaning Of Eucalyptus and everyone says "This is a fantastic piece, it's like Watership Down for koalas," then maybe take a few steps back and see if you can discover something unintentionally fabulous and work with that. In my case, I was trying to do a specific thing, and failed. So, I need to find out whether I still want to accomplish what I thought I was going to do when I started out, or if what I actually did might turn out to be better than what I intended to do.

We all clear on that? Good.

No, this isn't the third Exciting Thing.

There are will be three exciting things!*

Including this one.


*Edited because Anne pointed out that it didn't make no damn sense. Politely.