January 2009 Archives

The art process itself is the painful thing—the day-to-day struggle to deliver the level of writing I want. In James Lord's A Giacometti Portrait, he quotes the artist's recognition about the burden of trying to work at our highest level: "The very measure of our creative drive is that we longingly dream of one day being free of it." I really understand that. I want to be able to stop when at last I'm satisfied with the work on the page. But the thing is, the art spirit never lets you feel you've done as well as you can do tomorrow.

Maria Flook
Interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson
from The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction: Inspiration and Discipline

No, really. I go in sprints, see...a few weeks solid spent reading anything and everything I can get my hands on, then a collapse into a kind of vegetative state during which my brain absorbs all the phrases and pithiness like a bathmat made of forest moss.

So, yes! Right now I am most properly classified as Bryophyta. I crave dampness and low light. My skull is filled with small hillocks of soft green which lack a vascular system.  But I'm a'fixin' to shoot me out some spiky little sporophytes! Which might only make more hillocks, but at least I will have accomplished something. Oh yes.

Perhaps I will join a mossery, and spend my days being moistened in a British garden.¹

Bonus Material

This post, translated into Japanese and back again via piscine linguistic algorithm, then punctuated and arranged as pseudopoetry:

Calling to obtain, really.
I in the short range running...
the solid matter of several weeks the book-reading
which consumes with what and you.

Look at that:
it can do to all phrases like the bus mat
where all my brains have consisted of the forest moss,
a kind of plant state where pithiness is absorbed by my hand.
The fact that collapse is obtained, it enters.

Therefore, to be!
Now I am classified securely as Bryophyta.
I entreat the humidity and low light level.
My skull is full gently with hillocks,
where the green which to pulse tube system has been lacking is small.
But I'm a'fixin' In order to shoot me,
small sporophytes where ahead is it became pointed!

Perhaps, it makes just more many hillocks,
but either one as for me achieves what, at least.
As for Oh: it is.
Perhaps, I connect mossery,
pass moisture my day with the English garden.²

---

¹For more on this, see my 1987 book, 19th-Century Moss Collecting in Great Britain and America. It's out of print, but the better used book sellers should be able to locate it for you.

²No, I am not bored. Why do you ask?

Writing fiction is inherently godlike.

You build worlds! Populate them! Move the creatures about! And if you want to get all meta you can talk to them as Author, a booming voice from the narrative heavens. It rocks.

Boom! Boom! Boom! Can you dig the sound of creative fury? I can. Sometimes. Other times it's just the hollowness of my head.

Or, to put it another way, if I happen to be feeling somewhat okay about a project I will occasionally indulge myself with such illusions of mastery. Other days the words pop off the screen and come after me. They go for the eyes, like hook-mouthed maggots leaping from casu marzu. They're not happy with me and my ham-fisted attempts to pummel them into something that doesn't suck. Those are bad days.

I've plastered the wall I face when at my desk with nine photos of a certain cathedral, interior and exterior views. Big honking 11x17 color printouts, thankyouverymuch Google Image Search with your ability to filter for the Big Big Photos. Then, I busted out the iPod and put on something REALLY LOUD while I stared into the sanctuary depicted in the photos. In this way, I approximate a key scene in The Book.¹ I would have been better served by visiting the cathedral in question with my iPod, but there was a lot of puking and a certain inability to move that prevented me from doing so. Which is just as well: when I was in the neighborhood I didn't yet have the particular loud music I'm listening to, so the experience would have lacked a necessary tinge of the profane.

At the moment I'm also experiencing a considerable niacin flush. I take the stuff for various superstitious and practical reasons, and its behavior is totally unpredictable. Full stomach, empty stomach, morning, afternoon, there seems to be no pattern to the manifestation of its red-faced side effect. So now I'm in a two-dimensional cathedral with music booming in my skull and feeling the first warming glow of a pill I've popped, which is a nice touch.  

It's an interesting experiment. What happens to the tale if I do this or that, or think in a certain fashion, or write in a particularly unfettered way? Does it progress? Improve? Produce bits worth saving or building upon? Yes! No! Make it stop! Or go go go.

Eventually, if you've committed yourself, the work makes its own mania.

---

¹Should I just start doing that, with the capitalization and the portension? I mean, at this point, it's become clear that that's what this place is all about, right? Sure, I'll throw a link out if I come across something in my perusings that's interesting, but doing that too frequently that would defeat the inherent solipsism of the blog,² wouldn't it?

²I wonder if I should make a habit of footnotes like this. It could be fun.<sup>3

3</sup>Of course I should.  Footnotes rule. Like tacos.

Yes, I know I said that I wouldn't post every time I scratched out another crumb* or two of story. And that's true, I haven't.

But I'm pleased that the crumbs keep coming! No, really. It's utterly fab. If you're in the peculiar business of stringing words together for something other than your daily bread, there is most definitely a certain satisfaction in any level of sustained output. You understand, right? Right, of course you do. So here's a fraction of a crumb, not the whole thing, just a bit, because why the hell not.

     By this point, our phones had been beeping and twitching for some time, as various people in our extended scenes began to hear about the torching of Bethany's and wanted to know if we were there, and Oh My God I love Bethany's is it still standing, and was it true that Darcy had killed a jackboot with a shoe. Rumor mutated and spread through the data-filled air. The only one of us who had bothered to feed the mill was Putnam, adept as he was at sending messages while engaged in other activities. "Geraldine says she's got a squad of booth-chicks together and they're going to get hopped up and head over and add more mayhem," he said. I rolled my eyes.
     "There is nothing that crew won't do to further the cause of trendy violence," I said. "Is she drunk?" Somewhat rhetorical, as Geraldine often woke up that way, ready to slur through the day.
     "Plastered," Putnam said. "Her text wandered off into something about parrots and whether she should bring them along." His thumbs flew over the haptic face of his phone and he used some sort of sonar to avoid bashing into oncoming pedestrians.

Really conveys the Majestic Sweep of my Epic Tale, don't it?

Anyway. I've decided to apply for the Breadloaf Writer's Conference, not because I have much in the way of expectations, but simply because it seems like it's time to do that sort of thing. Although that's something of a small lie. I have imagined in a daydreamy way about how it would be to say to my boss, "I got into Breadloaf and I simply must go!" As though that would demonstrate to all and sundry that: no, this place you see me in Monday through Friday does not constitute the whole of my life; I engage in mysterious and arcane creation in the wee hours of the evening and stress and fret over plot and characters instead of templates and procedural steps; I am Writer! Hear me piss and moan.


*No, I did not know that the conference's session newsletter is called the Crumb when I wrote this post or the post on 12/24. Co-inky-dink, honest.

Research isn't necessary for every novel, but it turns out that it's important for mine, so I spent the weekend in San Francisco having anonymous sex and popping pills. There is no sacrifice I will not make for the integrity of my Art. Not one. If I've got to go all desert tribal and kill a goat and use a big bronze bowl to splash its blood all over the altar, then by God I'll do that, too.

Meanwhile, in the real world I've been furthering my knowledge of a scene that doesn't really exist anymore, because I plan to recreate its analogue in the future setting of my tale. Part of that research involved reading what I consider to be the two definitive novels of the late 1970s New York gay party circuit, Larry Kramer's Faggots and Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance (hence last week's good_words). What's smashing about reading those two back to back is that although they cover the same scene, deal with the same themes, and were published in the same year, their approaches and viewpoints are entirely different. This lends a stereoscopic depth to the world they explore, a world so insular that the books share several of the same anecdotes and some memorable peripheral characters.

Each book is a work of fiction, but they are grounded in a firm reality. So, while I won't be stealing details, characters, or scenes, I will be stealing impressions. By that I mean: there are certain types of details and eyeball kicks which convey verisimilitude and lend an overall sense of realism to a world. Kramer and Holleran wrote fiction that takes place in a real subcultural scene, while I'm writing fiction that takes place in a scene I'm creating. That scene owes much to the past, but it exists in a fictional future, so if I intend to give it the same glossy sheen as the clubs of New York and the house parties of Fire Island I've got to hit some of the same notes and take some cues from those who have gone before.

Not all research is about people, places, and things. Some of it is technical or structural, such as observing how Holleran used first person narrative and framed it with a series of letters exchanged between the narrator and an unnamed correspondent at the beginning and end of the novel. In observing that method, I discover two things: one, I won't do that myself, lest I be accused of aping my betters; and two, there are many ways to tell a tale within first person narrative which break out of the restrictions inherent to that point of view. I knew this already, but in a more theoretical sense. These days I'm finding that everything I read is like fieldwork, observing The Author in the wild as he brings down a wildebeest and fends off hyenas.

I've adopted the same attitude while I'm reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which is a non-fiction memoir with fiction-style tweakings. Dave Eggers does me the favor of deliberately calling attention to his devices, which is instructive because I can then see a clear and well-executed example of a particular kind of trick. This, in turn, gives me ideas about various tweaks I might apply to my fictional account that will make it seem more like non-fiction. Again, there's no direct stealing: just riffs, playing off of melodies.

When I was younger, I was of the OMG I can't read anything while I am Writing because it will contaminate The Work school. I think that was a function of insecurity, and that I was actually attending the OMG I can't read anything while I am Writing because I suspect that my ideas are trite and if I read something that resembles My Work I won't know what to do and then I'll have to drink a lot which I do anyway so whatever community college. That was back when Originality was Everything! It's still important, of course, but when you're dealing primarily with story, you realize that there are really only a handful of great ones to work with and riff on. Much of the overt Originality in Heartbreak consists of characters realizing they are characters in the author's narrative and objecting or consenting to being used as mouthpieces, which the San Francisco Chronicle calls a trenchant way of dealing with the artifice of writing. It is an unquestionably well-defined method. To me, it evokes Monty Python's Flying Circus, with its cast of characters who were aware that they were in sketches and were often quite peeved about it. The true story is parents-die-leaving-a-young-man-to-raise-his-even-younger-sibling. But for me it's the method that's instructive, so even if I was writing a fictional tale about parents-die-leaving-a-young-man-to-raise-his-even-younger-sibling, I'd be able to glean a few nifty things from Heartbreaking without polluting my precious Work.

Sometimes overt similarities between what you're reading and what you're writing are unavoidable. If you're creating a camp character, you're going to evoke Dancer's Sutherland or Bella from Faggots, because that's the nature of camp. If you don't hit the campy notes then it's not a campy tune, darlings! But that doesn't mean you can't put your own stamp on the improvisation you're spinning from that particular theme, because if you've done the necessary work to build the character up into an individual, then he won't be Sutherland or Bella, he'll be his own man, in his own tale. If you're reading a book and come across a character or a scene that sets a black ball of sickly tar roiling in your stomach because it's exactly like someone or something that you've created, it's most likely because you haven't developed the people and places with sufficient depth to differentiate them in your own mind. (Or maybe you have, and another author has perfectly matched that depth in every detail, in which case you've got a telepathic doppelganger and you're screwed.) If you can't tell the difference, you can be sure your readers won't be able to.

Now: I'm off to engage in a weird cat-and-mouse game with shadowy government agencies and mysterious transgendered hackers.

For research, you know.

As Santayana said, dear, artists are unhappy because they are not interested in happiness; they live for beauty. God, was that steaming, loathsome city beautiful!!! And why finally no human lover was possible, because I was in love with all men, with the city itself. And Malone was crazier than I. You could tell from his face how deep the disease had eaten into his system. The life of his flesh dwindled, but his spirit ascended like the angels into a perfect love--and yet he was still stuck with his mortal body and his mortal lusts and mortal loveliness: You can't live on the promise of a casual smile which passes while you sit on the stoop waiting for the breeze from the river--demented queen! You can't love eyes, my dear, you can't love youth, you can't love summer dusks that washed us out of our tenements into the streets like water falling over rocks--no, dear, madness that way lies. You must stick to earth, always, you must love another man or woman, a human lover whose farts occasionally punctuate the silence of your bedroom in the morning and who now and then has bad moods that must be catered to.

What lover could possibly have matched what Malone had stored in his imagination? Or any of us, for that matter. We were lunatics, I'm sorry to say. Our lovers weren't real. Wasn't that finally the strangest thing of all? The way we loved them? We were just queens in the end. We would not even speak to most of them--were we cowards? Shy girls waiting to be serenaded? Or did we suspect that half the beauty and the shimmer of that life was in our own hypnotic hearts and not out there? If that was the case, then we were fools: for being romantics. You know, we queens loathed rain at the beach, small cocks, and reality, I think. In that order. Anyway, that's why I left--the madness of it all offended me, finally, I wanted a real porch, a real front yard with real live oaks and real flowers in real pots--and that is what I have now, dearie, retired faggot that I am, content with the quiet pleasures of life. Even as I put down this pen (my hand is numb) I can hear the mockingbirds in the gardenia bush outside my window, and there is, croyez-moi, no sweeter sound on earth.

Andrew Holleran,
Dancer from the Dance

A new voice was heard: "How are you all, my dearies! Are we having a good time?"

It was the Divine Bella, Bertram Bellberg, tall and stocky, grinning face and expectant eyes, his enormous chest and back Brillo-ed with hair curlicuing out of his workman's overalls and with a huge felt sunflower smiling from his cleavage. "Fred Lemish, are you having a good time?"

"I don't think so, Bella."

"Well, you simply must, you absolutely must. Life is passing us by. Don't go and fall in love. Bella warned you. Everyone warned you. You just won't listen. Bella believes that what we most want out of life is our good times. As Richard Burton said to Deborah Kerr in Night of the Iguana, there are two levels where we live our lives. The real and the fantastic. We have to disco and drug and fuck if we want to live fantastic! Come, my dearies, let's dance!"

Larry Kramer,
Faggots