Writing elsewhere tonight.
Sorry.
Don't just stand there! Do something else!
Sorry.
Don't just stand there! Do something else!
Ian Wood: May 2008 Archives
As nearly as possible in the spirit of Matthew Salinger, age one, urging a luncheon companion to accept a cool lima bean, I urge my editor, mentor and (heaven help him) closest friend, William Shawn, genius domus of The New Yorker, lover of the long shot, protector of the unprolific, defender of the hopelessly flamboyant, most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors, to accept this pretty skimpy looking book.J.D. Salinger
I can only hope that, when the opportunity comes to write an author's note, I will be as humble and grateful as the famous recluse. That was included in the 1991 LB Books edition of Franny and Zooey. I don't know whether it accompanied the original publications in The New Yorker.
Of course, I will never get such an opportunity if I don't get in the saddle with more regularity. Been a bastard of a holiday weekend, with too much time spent chasing demons and not enough time at the keyboard.
I'd write more about that, but I'm too annoyed with myself right now.
In that long ago somewhere very near this place he'd watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of the mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.(Interesting side note: I was working at the Barnes and Noble in Santa Barbara when Oprah came in and bought her copy of The Road, prompting us to stock up on it in anticipation of the subsequent Book Club influx, which happened two months later.)
So yeah, I've got that word count thing up on the top right there. That's a word count for the novel, not for the blog. And yes, I've written a bit each day for the past three days, just a bit, which, while more than I've added to the manuscript in the past several months, is still a drop in the bucket o' words. It's mainly the "three days in a row" thing I'm happy about.
I'm trying to ignore all the things that are wrong with the manuscript as it stands. Horribly wrong. Fatal flaws of colossal depth and Stygian darkness that will inevitably doom the project and all queries related to it to the fetid, lightless depths of every slush pile known on this planet or any other. Flee! Flee from the wretched prose!
So, you know, I'm like that.
I'll probably get over it.
And don't get all up in my grill about how I'm writing this instead of the book. Fiction draws from a different well.
In other news, I have managed to send out three other bits of fiction...well, one bit of proper fiction and two strange assemblages of words...to three markets over the past week. One of which, I have just been informed, has been accepted for the August edition of Underground Voices.
That is correct. My first fiction acceptance since 1995.
Word.
For someone who's so happy on the web--wait a minute, excuse me.
My first fiction acceptance since 1995. [Insert happy dance here.]
Anyway.
For someone who's so happy on the web, I had a stubborn loyalty to manila envelopes, printed manuscripts, SASEs, and stamps. Truth is, perfectly decent markets accept electronic submissions, and while that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll respond any faster, it's certainly easier (and cheaper) for me.
I highly recommend checking out duotrope's digest, which my lovely and frenetic pal Cicily turned me on to. It contains about 2,200 markets versus the 4,000 contained in the Writer's Market annual, but it's a hell of a lot more convenient, and the occasional "Temporarily Closed" tags on various listings lead me to believe that it's a bit more real-time than the dead tree volume. It's certainly easier to search the markets, and if you sign up (free) you get to use the handy submission tracker. The interface for adding new pieces and tracking their submission could use some work--it's not immediately apparent how to do what you need to do--but it keeps things organized, and having the average response time for the market you've submitted to right next to the length of time they've had your submission is convenient. I used to do the same thing by hand in Excel (if that can be considered "by hand"), but this is much better.
Speaking of being happy on the web, I've got this new gizmo here on the back end that I'm going to try out.
Get your mind out of the gutter.
Here:
(There! Nifty. I don't know whether Zemanta will actually "make blogging fun again," but we'll see whether it's worth keeping around. I'm not exactly sanguine about its tag suggestions...among other, more relevant things, it came up with "Volkswagon" for this post. I have no idea why.)
(Did I mention the bit about my first fiction acceptance since 1995?)
I'm trying to ignore all the things that are wrong with the manuscript as it stands. Horribly wrong. Fatal flaws of colossal depth and Stygian darkness that will inevitably doom the project and all queries related to it to the fetid, lightless depths of every slush pile known on this planet or any other. Flee! Flee from the wretched prose!
So, you know, I'm like that.
I'll probably get over it.
And don't get all up in my grill about how I'm writing this instead of the book. Fiction draws from a different well.
In other news, I have managed to send out three other bits of fiction...well, one bit of proper fiction and two strange assemblages of words...to three markets over the past week. One of which, I have just been informed, has been accepted for the August edition of Underground Voices.
That is correct. My first fiction acceptance since 1995.
Word.
For someone who's so happy on the web--wait a minute, excuse me.
My first fiction acceptance since 1995. [Insert happy dance here.]
Anyway.
For someone who's so happy on the web, I had a stubborn loyalty to manila envelopes, printed manuscripts, SASEs, and stamps. Truth is, perfectly decent markets accept electronic submissions, and while that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll respond any faster, it's certainly easier (and cheaper) for me.
I highly recommend checking out duotrope's digest, which my lovely and frenetic pal Cicily turned me on to. It contains about 2,200 markets versus the 4,000 contained in the Writer's Market annual, but it's a hell of a lot more convenient, and the occasional "Temporarily Closed" tags on various listings lead me to believe that it's a bit more real-time than the dead tree volume. It's certainly easier to search the markets, and if you sign up (free) you get to use the handy submission tracker. The interface for adding new pieces and tracking their submission could use some work--it's not immediately apparent how to do what you need to do--but it keeps things organized, and having the average response time for the market you've submitted to right next to the length of time they've had your submission is convenient. I used to do the same thing by hand in Excel (if that can be considered "by hand"), but this is much better.
Speaking of being happy on the web, I've got this new gizmo here on the back end that I'm going to try out.
Get your mind out of the gutter.
Here:
(There! Nifty. I don't know whether Zemanta will actually "make blogging fun again," but we'll see whether it's worth keeping around. I'm not exactly sanguine about its tag suggestions...among other, more relevant things, it came up with "Volkswagon" for this post. I have no idea why.)
(Did I mention the bit about my first fiction acceptance since 1995?)
Why, yes. Yes I do.In addition to a wardrobe, a six-drawer dresser, the writing desk (yay!) on which my laptop rests and the chair on which my ass sits, I also brought back some sort of nameless affliction from Ikea that required no assembly at all. Sunday was supposed to be a day of character sketches, but I spent most of the it prone on the bed in a Benadryl haze with a sweating fever of 100 degrees while the heat outside sank through the roof tiles and into the room.
I did manage to write a little, capping off the chapter where I stopped writing back in December. It took four sentences. Now, instead of entering the hedonistic circus of a converted Manhattan cathedral, our protagonist will head of to the Ramble for a bit of fun in the woods. He's overdressed for it, but what the hell.
Trouble is...that's what he's doing. Because I have not spelled out his essential nature for myself, the why of it isn't as deep as it needs to be. It's those extra depths of why that turn the tale.
But: the chapter is done. I often find that if I'm hung up on writing a scene when I know its general content, it's generally because the character doesn't want to go where I'm telling him to go, for reasons of his own. So I'll let this guy wander into Central Park and see what happens.
I used to think that sort of thing was a bunch of New Agey hippy-style bullshit. I misinterpreted the idea that characters would "wander off" on their own as a sort of spiritualist automatic writing, with the author watching as his fingers wrote or typed of their own accord. It took me long time to figure out that writers who spoke of that were were describing an attitude and a practice, rather than an objective reality.
It's roughly akin to what I learned about LSD from both experience and from Stephen Gaskin's Haight Ashbury Flashbacks (now called Amazing Dope Tales). It's not that the guy sitting next to you on the couch has actually turned into a giant green lizard, it's just that you've altered your perception enough so that it doesn't matter whether he's a lizard or not, and it's much more interesting if he is, so why not just see that.
Similarly, nobody's saying that your characters are supposed to become little individuals running around in your noggin doing their own thing as objective schizoid beings. But if you've spent enough time with your characters as ideas which represent actual people, and if you've delved deeply enough into the essential nature of those ideas, then eventually you'll reach a point where those ideas, those characters, will come into conflict with what you would do in the situation you've created for them. There is no finer moment than when you realize that one of your main characters is kind of an asshole after they've gone and done something that you would never do, or that he's a better person than you are, for the same reason. It's much more interesting to explore what your characters do than what you would do. Nobody cares about that.
Yes, I recognize the irony of using LSD hallucinations to explain that something is not New Agey hippy-style bullshit. Back off.
Anyway. I've stayed home from work today to recover. I think I'm feeling better, but that might have something to do with pounding shots of generic Nyquil all night and switching over to faux Dayquil once the sun slitted through the blinds. I'm coherent enough to write, which I'll do in a little while.
Tune in for tomorrow's TED video; it's a good one. All about words and the dictionaries we put them in.
Plus, Erin McKean is hot.
Mavis moved behind the bar with a grim, if wobbly, determination, drinking coffee from from a gargoyle-green mug while a Tarryton extra long dangled from her lips, dropping long ashes down the front of her sweater like the smoking turds of tiny ghost poodles.
When I was recently asked to work with an author on her manuscript, the first thing I had her to do for me was provide a written portrait of every character in her tale, from protagonist to walk-on, in forty words or fewer.
I did this for two reasons. First, to give her the idea that every character in her tale needed to exist as a fully functioning person, and not just a device. Second, so I could see whether she understood the essence of each character. I chose forty words rather than fifty because fifty is comfortable. Forty is pared down and creates panic. No room for meandering fat, there. It's all got to be lean meat.
This is a different approach than others might suggest. There's a place for the detailed sort of characterization that you create with a worksheet-style exercise. However, if you've created a squat, heavily-muscled lapsed Catholic former amateur middleweight boxer who was sexually abused by his parish priest when he was nine, works on Wall Street by day, moonlights as an enforcer for the Russian mafia by night, favors Tom Ford suits, continually tries and fails to perfect a chocolate soufflé, and you can't distill him into forty words for me, then you've got a problem.
But my characters are complex! I hear the protests already. Of course they are. Blah blah.
Our aforementioned stock-trading thug? Try this:
All of the window-dressing I described earlier is just that: frills and details. The essential nature of Tracey is defined in forty words. Implicit within them is the conflict of nature versus nurture, the question of whether a man is born or made. Each subsequent detail is an expression of the core facts of his life. Tracey appreciates the finer things in life, and works at a legitimate job which will provide him with an income sufficient to indulge that appreciation. But that's not enough: he didn't manage to work out his rage during his youthful stint in the ring, so now he busts kneecaps and cracks skulls to enforce debt collection among the Eastern European immigrant communities of New York City, as a sort of guilty pleasure. On weekends, he dons an apron, fires up his Dacor stainless steel gas range, and attempts to bake soufflés using imported artisanal single origin bittersweet chocolate. They always collapse.
Anyway, you get the point, right? If you haven't got a firm grasp on the essentials of your characters, they're hollow.
I just finished reading The War of the Flowers, by Tad Williams. It's a big ol' sprawling 816-page fantasy epic, because that's what Tad Williams does. The whole thing is driven by a thirty-year-old singer in a not-terribly successful rock band who's realizing that his potential remains unfulfilled and that life is passing him by. Without the hyphens, that's twenty-five words. And everything in the tale flows from that.
Tomorrow, I journey to Ikea, there to acquire the things that will allow me to bring some order to my living space and, most importantly, give me a dedicated place to write. The first thing I'm going to do at that new desk is a series of character sketches in forty words or fewer. I've got eleven chapters, 22,000 words, a solid first-person narrative voice...and I haven't explicitly distilled any of my characters.
So, I'm going to take my own advice, and do that.
I'll let you know how it goes.
I did this for two reasons. First, to give her the idea that every character in her tale needed to exist as a fully functioning person, and not just a device. Second, so I could see whether she understood the essence of each character. I chose forty words rather than fifty because fifty is comfortable. Forty is pared down and creates panic. No room for meandering fat, there. It's all got to be lean meat.
This is a different approach than others might suggest. There's a place for the detailed sort of characterization that you create with a worksheet-style exercise. However, if you've created a squat, heavily-muscled lapsed Catholic former amateur middleweight boxer who was sexually abused by his parish priest when he was nine, works on Wall Street by day, moonlights as an enforcer for the Russian mafia by night, favors Tom Ford suits, continually tries and fails to perfect a chocolate soufflé, and you can't distill him into forty words for me, then you've got a problem.
But my characters are complex! I hear the protests already. Of course they are. Blah blah.
Our aforementioned stock-trading thug? Try this:
Forty words--thirty-nine if you take the hyphenation into account--and I even got his name in there. That's because I rock the fucking house. Which I built. And defined the nature of "rocking" within. Moving on.
Tracey Caravaggio is sensitive, creative, forty-two years old, and bound with the shackles of violence as a result of childhood abuse. The suppressed demons of his past fuel his sociopathic lifestyle, while his essential nature struggles to break free.
All of the window-dressing I described earlier is just that: frills and details. The essential nature of Tracey is defined in forty words. Implicit within them is the conflict of nature versus nurture, the question of whether a man is born or made. Each subsequent detail is an expression of the core facts of his life. Tracey appreciates the finer things in life, and works at a legitimate job which will provide him with an income sufficient to indulge that appreciation. But that's not enough: he didn't manage to work out his rage during his youthful stint in the ring, so now he busts kneecaps and cracks skulls to enforce debt collection among the Eastern European immigrant communities of New York City, as a sort of guilty pleasure. On weekends, he dons an apron, fires up his Dacor stainless steel gas range, and attempts to bake soufflés using imported artisanal single origin bittersweet chocolate. They always collapse.
Anyway, you get the point, right? If you haven't got a firm grasp on the essentials of your characters, they're hollow.
I just finished reading The War of the Flowers, by Tad Williams. It's a big ol' sprawling 816-page fantasy epic, because that's what Tad Williams does. The whole thing is driven by a thirty-year-old singer in a not-terribly successful rock band who's realizing that his potential remains unfulfilled and that life is passing him by. Without the hyphens, that's twenty-five words. And everything in the tale flows from that.
Tomorrow, I journey to Ikea, there to acquire the things that will allow me to bring some order to my living space and, most importantly, give me a dedicated place to write. The first thing I'm going to do at that new desk is a series of character sketches in forty words or fewer. I've got eleven chapters, 22,000 words, a solid first-person narrative voice...and I haven't explicitly distilled any of my characters.
So, I'm going to take my own advice, and do that.
I'll let you know how it goes.
I write mostly because I can't stop. It's the hinge of my life, and I don't know who I would be without it. It's my identity. I love the potential of it, the possibilities of it. You choose your palette, your subject, your canvas. You can write about anything in the world, or our of it. Fiction is limited only by your own imagination, your abilities. And this is precisely what I hate about it, too. It scares the shit out of me. Any success I've been able to find--and perforce, any failure--is entirely my own.
Also, there's this: you're never entirely sure where it comes from, so you're never sure that it's going to keep coming. Or what to do if it stops. I hate the uncertainty of it--not knowing when I sit down to write if it's going to be any good or not.
It's too bad that the effort you put into it--the daily grind, the research, the struggling, the interior sweat and shake of it--is, if you're doing it right, mostly invisible within the published work. Writers should be the unseen mechanics. As soon as a writer says, "Look at me. Look at how hard this is," the reader is knocked out of the dream, which is the Original Sin of all fiction. This is a particular risk in historical fiction, where there's always the temptation to stuff in a lot of interesting and irrelevant historical detail. With Last Year's Review, I ended up using a very, very small percentage of my research.
To steal John Barth's excellent metaphor, we should all be the secret operators of our funhouses. "Though [we] would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed." And so no one--family, friends, people you see every day--ever realizes how hard it is. Which is maybe why we do interviews, so we can holler it out loud: "Man, this ain't easy!"
I'm still writing about writing instead of, you know...actually writing. I am two weeks into my declared year of writing dangerously and I have yet to write one word on the actual manuscript. Any new words, that is. I've got about 22,000 old words, but I have problems with many of them.It's true that there is a certain amount of manuscript work that doesn't actually involve writing. I'm in the process of reviewing what I wrote last year, and trying to be brutally honest about what's working and what's not. There's also mental work that I can do any time...turning the plot over in my mind, exploring story possibilities, that sort of thing. But I'm well aware than none of that is the important part of the effort, and it's no substitute for adding to the word count.
So: I am "gearing up." This weekend I intended to go to Ikea in Burbank and acquire my writing desk, among other necessary items of furniture, but my Social Security Number puts me in the batch of citizens who will be getting their Economic Stimulus™ on the 16th. I'll be heading south this coming Saturday instead. As I've mentioned, Ikea figures into all this because I'm rearranging my surroundings to support my writing, which means a desk in a room with a door. Yeah, the fact that I haven't got the desk yet is one of those "excuses" I'm trying to identify and quash. I could write on the couch. I just haven't.
It's tough to create new habits out of whole cloth. I'm not whining, that's just a fact, so I'm cutting myself a little slack. I'm engaging in a number of different activities that support writing, including research on craft and technique, ramping up my own fiction intake, that sort of thing. Some of those efforts show up here: videos about the creative process, my own thoughts on craft, and so on. None of this is a substitute for sitting down in front of the computer and stringing words of fiction together. I know this.
I've read a lot of what writers have to say about writing. Without exception, any writer who has had any success whatsoever has said the same thing: writers write, and the ones who succeed do it every day. If they're not powerhouses like James Patterson, David Baldacci, or Stephen King--in other words, if they still have day jobs--they carve out time whenever they can. So my plan is to write every day at my new Swedish writing desk, once I have it. An honest-to-God writing schedule. Merciless. There will be a word count indicator on the right side of this page, and it damn well better go up every day. You have my permission to berate me if it doesn't.
It's important, I think, not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. All my life I've written in fits and starts, when the mood struck me. I've never been much of a believer in "the muse," but I certainly know that there are some times when it's easier to write than others. To meet my stated goals, I'll have to write when I don't feel like writing, when I'm pretty sure that every sentence I write will be unadulterated crap, when I am most assuredly not in the zone.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez said that for all of his life, he was frightened at the moment he sat down to write. Margaret Atwood said that blank pages inspired her with terror. John Steinbeck spoke of his fear of putting down the first line. The fact that you've heard of them is a testament to their courage.
So. Next Saturday, in a frenzy of allen wrenching, I will remove the last practical excuse that I've been hiding behind. I'll put my ass in my new chair, fire up the computer on my new desk...and make my leap.
"I want to write about dialogue today."
"It's your blog. You can write about whatever you choose."
"What, you have a problem with that topic?"
"No, no problem at all."
"You don't have your 'no problem' look on your face."
"I have a 'no problem' look?"
"Well, not at the moment, but yeah, you do."
"I see."
"Well, I don't. So out with it."
"If you insist."
"I do."
"All right, then. You've been writing scenes that are full of snappy dialogue."
"I like to think so."
"And I'd like you to consider the possibility of wit fatigue."
"What?"
"Wit fatigue. That's what happens when all of your characters speak snappy dialogue, all of the time."
"But these are fabulous people. They're witty."
"Real people aren't witty every hour of the day, no matter how fabulous they are. They're not bon mot machines. Even Oscar Wilde wasn't constantly witty."
"But I like witty dialogue."
"Of course you do. I'd like you to consider the possibility that you're writing all of this banter because it makes you feel clever, not because it serves the story or provides characterization."
"Maybe."
"There's something else you should consider..."
"Giving up writing and resigning myself to the salaried life of a cubicle dweller?"
"Hardly."
"See, now you've got your 'Stop being a smartass and listen to what I'm saying' look on your face."
"I'm sure that I do. Can we return to the topic at hand?"
"OK, shoot."
"If everyone in your story is always witty, always ready with a snappy quip, then they all start to sound alike. There's no differentiation."
"Huh. Didn't think about that."
"Try this: edit one of your witty conversational scenes by removing everything but the dialogue. No descriptions, no dialogue tags. Would you be able to tell which character was speaking?"
"Of course."
"This only works if you're honest in your self-assessment."
"OK, fine. Maybe some of my dialogue sounds the same."
"Right, and it shouldn't. Your character's voice is a powerful tool, and you can use it to create a more vivid portrait of that person as an individual. Pay close attention to the rhythms of their phrasing and the words that they choose. Your readers should be able to tell who's speaking based solely on what they're saying and how they're saying it."
"What, like the conversation we're having right now?"
"Precisely. It's a subtle thing, but crafting your dialogue in this fashion will add layers of characterization and complexity to the tale."
"It's your blog. You can write about whatever you choose."
"What, you have a problem with that topic?"
"No, no problem at all."
"You don't have your 'no problem' look on your face."
"I have a 'no problem' look?"
"Well, not at the moment, but yeah, you do."
"I see."
"Well, I don't. So out with it."
"If you insist."
"I do."
"All right, then. You've been writing scenes that are full of snappy dialogue."
"I like to think so."
"And I'd like you to consider the possibility of wit fatigue."
"What?"
"Wit fatigue. That's what happens when all of your characters speak snappy dialogue, all of the time."
"But these are fabulous people. They're witty."
"Real people aren't witty every hour of the day, no matter how fabulous they are. They're not bon mot machines. Even Oscar Wilde wasn't constantly witty."
"But I like witty dialogue."
"Of course you do. I'd like you to consider the possibility that you're writing all of this banter because it makes you feel clever, not because it serves the story or provides characterization."
"Maybe."
"There's something else you should consider..."
"Giving up writing and resigning myself to the salaried life of a cubicle dweller?"
"Hardly."
"See, now you've got your 'Stop being a smartass and listen to what I'm saying' look on your face."
"I'm sure that I do. Can we return to the topic at hand?"
"OK, shoot."
"If everyone in your story is always witty, always ready with a snappy quip, then they all start to sound alike. There's no differentiation."
"Huh. Didn't think about that."
"Try this: edit one of your witty conversational scenes by removing everything but the dialogue. No descriptions, no dialogue tags. Would you be able to tell which character was speaking?"
"Of course."
"This only works if you're honest in your self-assessment."
"OK, fine. Maybe some of my dialogue sounds the same."
"Right, and it shouldn't. Your character's voice is a powerful tool, and you can use it to create a more vivid portrait of that person as an individual. Pay close attention to the rhythms of their phrasing and the words that they choose. Your readers should be able to tell who's speaking based solely on what they're saying and how they're saying it."
"What, like the conversation we're having right now?"
"Precisely. It's a subtle thing, but crafting your dialogue in this fashion will add layers of characterization and complexity to the tale."
The writer who shuts himself up in a room and goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for that is what literature is.
God save me from writing literature on purpose.
I've always thought that the label "literature" is something that is bestowed upon a work by someone other than the author. Orhan Pamuk gets to claim it because the Nobel Committee said so. Tom Clancy...not so much.
I say "foolish" because, although I've heard many neophytes claim that writing in first person is easier, it's not. At all. What they haven't figured out yet is that yes, it's easy to write in the first person, but it sounds just like them. If they're writing a speculative fiction piece, it sounds like a twenty-something protagonist with a quirky modern sensibility caught in the spaces between worlds. If they're writing horror, it sounds like a twenty-something protagonist with a quirky modern sensibility who's discovered a nest of vampires in the basement of his apartment building. If they're writing romance...well, you get the idea. Writing in the first person is easy. Doing it well is another task altogether.
Writing well in first person is inherently more difficult because you're got pull off narrative sleight-of-hand. Unless you've opted for memoir, journal entries, or some other device, you present the reader with a challenge, which they may or may not consciously articulate: how am I able to hear this voice? You've got to be slick enough to get the reader to immediately suspend disbelief. One way to do that is to just dazzle the reader with the big big cleverness. Look at the first two sentences of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange:
"What's it going to be then, eh?"I mean: who cares how we're hearing this, right? Look at that! It's too cool to wonder about the mechanics of it, and Burgess keeps that up through the whole book, addressing us ("O my brothers and only friends") as though we're sitting at the milkbar and hearing the story from Alex's own mouth.
There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.
In Life After God, Doug Coupland takes it even further:
I was driving you up to Prince George to the home of your grandfather, the golf wino.What risk! Coupland's brash assumption shanghais the reader, making you a participant in the story. A certain type of reader would immediately ask, "You were?" But these people are probably unreachable by such narratives, so I don't care about them.
You can use a combination of techniques. In The Children of Men, P.D. James intersperses journal entries with third-person narrative. In The Movie Lover, Richard Friedel adopts the tone of a memoir for the first third of the book, and then pulls off a switch to third person and back again which, by all rights, shouldn't have worked, but did. It worked because he used the third person to give us a tidbit that we didn't know that we were wanting until the very moment he offered it.
In each case, you as a storyteller have to be compelling enough to make the reader overlook the impossibilities of your first person narrative. Some audiences will be more receptive to this sort of trickery than others, but if you can't manage it, you'll fail. And then you'll feel bad and eat too much and get fat and die in obscurity.
Another problem occurs when the first person narrator is an embarrassingly obvious stand-in for the author, turning what is ostensibly fiction into thinly-veiled autobiography. This can go two ways. The first and most common is that you'll run smack into the depressing reality that your life and the conflicts therein aren't nearly as interesting to other people as they are to you, no matter how gut-wrenching you find your own pseudo-prose or how well you think you've disguised yourself. The second and far-less likely path is one of radical embellishment, which will eventually get Oprah mad at you. This requires a certain tweaked genius to actually accomplish.
At the moment, I've got a protagonist who's achieved the academic success I thought I wanted a decade ago, lives a lifestyle that I've fantasized about, has written a bestselling book (non-fiction), with another on the way. He drinks a lot and has access to exotic pharmaceuticals. He lives in a city I used to live in--albeit 25 years from now--and he's smarter and better-looking than I am. Because this fellow is living a sort of fantasy life of mine, I risk creating a narrator who is merely a surrogate for myself and writing a masturbatory monologue that no one cares about.
The trick is mastering that sleight-of-hand. In his story "The '84 Regress," Douglas Lain begins with:
LIFE IN THE 80SLife in the eighties isn't all bad. Television, for instance, is better than you might remember it being: there are fewer stations, fewer commercials, and everything is slower, slowed down. There aren't ATMs or FAX machines; there aren't any e-mail messages.
Driving on the interstate, counting the yellow dashes that zoom by, it all makes sense. The last sixteen years were just a series of bizarre nightmares, everything was just as unreal as it felt, and the year 1984 never ended.
Let me repeat:
The year 1984 never ended.
It's my own unified field theory. Generation X, the Clinton presidency, Jay Leno, my relationships with women--all of it makes sense now.
The man has my attention. I don't much care why I'm in his head. And as the story progresses, I care even less.
I'm not going to be as energetically weird as Lain, or as brash as Coupland, or as clever as Burgess. Which leaves me with two things: story and character. I've got to create a narrator who captivates the reader, and put him through situations that motivate the reader. The first captures his interest, the second keeps him reading. I don't care whether this project ever gets labeled "literature." All I care about is whether I'm skilled enough to keep the reader engaged from the first page to the last.
Oh, that's all? No problem.
Yikes.
Whine, whine, bitch and moan, or something like that. Dig that metaphor over to the left there.
I've discovered that I don't do well with obligation. When I was a kid, knowing I was supposed to say "thank you" for something sometimes created a peculiar pressure in my head, and tied my tongue. I was an impolite child.
Which is inconvenient, because life is full of obligations. Some are chosen, and others are thrust upon us. There's an intricate psychological latticework underpinning my discomfort with this ubiquity, which I can describe in a pithy phrase or two. I won't do that here, because it's rather boring. I consider it a personality flaw, and my strategy until now has been to mostly avoid situations that require obligation.
Which, by way of corollary, means that I've not risked much during my life. I've done risky things, by any objective measure. But nothing that's involved the the same quality of risk as the task that I've set out for myself here.
As I've mentioned, writing is something I'm good at, and that's been true for as along as I can remember. This notion is intrinsic to my identity. And now I'm saying to myself, Really? Let's see what you've got.
That scares the hell out of me.
It's not the time limit I've set. Anybody who knows anything about the publishing business will tell you that the idea of going from manuscript to publishing contract in a year is naïve at best. It's not a question of getting it done in a year. It's not the prospect of perhaps never getting it done at all. It's not even the idea that I might get this manuscript done and fail to arouse anyone's interest with it. It's a simple fear, really: I'll finish this one, and not sell it. I'll finish the next one, and not sell that one. And at some point, I'll have to conclude that this talent, this one thing I'm good at...is illusory.
I know a fair number of aspiring writers who have unpublished novels, or who are in the process of writing unpublished novels, who've told me "It's enough to have finished the manuscript. Publishing it isn't important."
Well...bullshit. I'm not saying that just writing the thing won't have a certain pedagogical benefit, but I'm not going to devalue the goal to soften the potential blow of failing to reach it.
This past weekend was two days' worth of the habitual, leaden inertia that I need to quickly overcome if this project going to be anything other than an exercise in bitching and moaning. I am obligated to myself at this point, a situation which--given the aforementioned latticework--is ripe for all sorts of negative feedback loops. Part of what I'll be describing here on these pages is the process of avoiding that...how I heave my bulk off of the beach, refloat, and set sail.
Assuming, of course, that I manage to do that.
I've discovered that I don't do well with obligation. When I was a kid, knowing I was supposed to say "thank you" for something sometimes created a peculiar pressure in my head, and tied my tongue. I was an impolite child.
Which is inconvenient, because life is full of obligations. Some are chosen, and others are thrust upon us. There's an intricate psychological latticework underpinning my discomfort with this ubiquity, which I can describe in a pithy phrase or two. I won't do that here, because it's rather boring. I consider it a personality flaw, and my strategy until now has been to mostly avoid situations that require obligation.
Which, by way of corollary, means that I've not risked much during my life. I've done risky things, by any objective measure. But nothing that's involved the the same quality of risk as the task that I've set out for myself here.
As I've mentioned, writing is something I'm good at, and that's been true for as along as I can remember. This notion is intrinsic to my identity. And now I'm saying to myself, Really? Let's see what you've got.
That scares the hell out of me.
It's not the time limit I've set. Anybody who knows anything about the publishing business will tell you that the idea of going from manuscript to publishing contract in a year is naïve at best. It's not a question of getting it done in a year. It's not the prospect of perhaps never getting it done at all. It's not even the idea that I might get this manuscript done and fail to arouse anyone's interest with it. It's a simple fear, really: I'll finish this one, and not sell it. I'll finish the next one, and not sell that one. And at some point, I'll have to conclude that this talent, this one thing I'm good at...is illusory.
I know a fair number of aspiring writers who have unpublished novels, or who are in the process of writing unpublished novels, who've told me "It's enough to have finished the manuscript. Publishing it isn't important."
Well...bullshit. I'm not saying that just writing the thing won't have a certain pedagogical benefit, but I'm not going to devalue the goal to soften the potential blow of failing to reach it.
This past weekend was two days' worth of the habitual, leaden inertia that I need to quickly overcome if this project going to be anything other than an exercise in bitching and moaning. I am obligated to myself at this point, a situation which--given the aforementioned latticework--is ripe for all sorts of negative feedback loops. Part of what I'll be describing here on these pages is the process of avoiding that...how I heave my bulk off of the beach, refloat, and set sail.
Assuming, of course, that I manage to do that.
Sometimes momentum sucks.It's all expansive energy and creative outpouring and fulfillment of the innermost need to express yourself by spinning a tale, right up until the moment you realize you've sailed over the edge of the cliff and there's nothing beneath you but 500 yards of desert air.
Every writer has their own ways. Some can't write a linear first draft to save their lives, and write chapters with no regard for where they'll eventually end up in the chronology of the story. Some start at point A and write straight on until point Z with no revision whatsoever, then go on back and rewrite point A so that all the nifty stuff they thought of at point M makes sense and matches up with how it all turned out at point Z. Others move back and forth, revising as they go, so that the last rewrite is mostly about dotting the eyebrows and crossing the teacups.
Whatever works.
Late last year I was writing pell-mell, Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, neat and orderly, thinking I'd just go back after THE END and make everything match up all clever like. Then I ran out of ground, and pancaked into the hardpan far below with an amusing puff of dust.
Now that the momentum's long gone, I've got 22,000 words about characters I've lost touch with, and plot points that are fuzzy in my memory. When I first thought about wrenching myself out of the pit I've been in for awhile and opened up the first chapter in Word, I faced a foe common to most writers: my own suck.
I hated it. I read the first paragraph, closed my laptop, grabbed my wallet, headed around the corner to Hi Times Liquor, and got myself some Absolution. Not because of the chapter per se...more because that's what I was doing for stress relief that week.
The same thing happened with the new stories I wrote during the first three months of last year. I sent them out, and they were all rejected, with good reason. As soon as I re-read each one upon receipt of the rejection letter, I realized that it wasn't finished. I've come to believe that anything I write has to sit in a drawer somewhere for at least a few months before I revise it. I can't get any perspective on the thing, certainly not within days or weeks of "finishing" it.
Unlike certain famous people who do this sort of thing for a living, I don't get to sit down at a desk at nine AM with nothing to do until five PM but focus on the project...although I must confess that I have produced more than one chapter at work when I supposed to be doing other things. But those were special cases. I was manic and out of my mind and couldn't do anything else.
One of the strategies I've learned to adopt over the past couple of years is to identify my excuses. If there was something I wanted to be doing but wasn't--like eating properly, for example--I'd observe myself, to discover what obstacles I was putting in my own way. I was eating crappy food because I had no decent food in the house. But when I put decent food in the house, I'd still get something evil and fatty delivered to my door because the kitchen was a vast pit of chaos and despair. That meant that before I cooked the decent food I'd put in the 'fridge, I needed to do dishes, which made it just complicated enough to sway me towards the ordering of a pre-fab cheese and meat disk. Depression, obviously, contributes to such problems...it becomes difficult to do much of anything in such a state. But I think that simplifying your life so that you remove impediments to taking good and fulfilling actions on a regular basis is a good and wise thing to do, dysthymic tendencies or no.
Things that aren't moving have a sort of momentum, too. It's called inertia.
I've set about identifying what it is that makes it difficult to resume work on Walk of the Night People. When I was really burning up the page, turning out a chapter or two a week, I actually did a fair amount of writing at the office, where my real-world job is. One afternoon in January I cranked out an entire short story there and, remarkably, it didn't suck much. Still, it's very wrong to write fiction on your employer's dime when you're supposed to be manning the SONAR and listening for enemy submarines.
At my office, I've got a desk, an insectoid Aeron chair that isn't nearly as comfortable as the hype would have it, and a properly positioned monitor. At home, I've got my laptop, some pillows, and a rapidly collapsing futon-couch monstrosity. "Home" at the moment, is a one-bedroom apartment. Much of the first room is taken up by a wide assortment of musical equipment. The most obvious place for a writing desk is taken up by a digital audio workstation.
Because this is the kind of problem that's so in your face that the solution dissolves into the carpet, it took serious thought. Eventually I figured out that I could, in fact, place a writing desk in my bedroom. I'll need to move the bed which will, by happy accident, actually improve the feng-shui of the small space. Once I've done that and scooted a bookshelf over, I'll have access to the entirety of the only uninterrupted wall space in the entire apartment. Room enough for a desk, a dresser, and a wardrobe.
The Federal Government has seen fit to stimulate me economically to the tune of $600. Usually when the Fed pulls this kind of fiscal smoke-and-mirrors crap I enjoy thumbing its deficit-ridden eyeball by putting the money into savings, paying off debt, or buying a crack rock the size of my cat's head. But this time? Ikea! $600 will buy me the desk, the dresser, and the wardrobe, maybe with enough left over to get one of those nifty wall-mounted collapsing tables for my kitchen nooklet.
And most importantly: the bedroom has a door. I'll be able to go into the room, close the door, and sit down at a desk that is entirely dedicated to writing. I've noticed that many of the ridiculously prolific writers--folks like Stephen King and my childhood favorite, Piers Anthony--have emphasized the importance of the separate writing space. At the moment, I can't have an office under the eaves of my gated house, or a little miniature house in the woods at the back of my property, but I can at least have a few square feet of desktop with nothing on it but the instruments of my craft. Even when I owned a house with a home office, I didn't have that kind of setup.
Because I don't have the luxury of dedicating an eight-hour workday to fiction, I need to make the most efficient use of the time I can devote to it. For me, all of this furniture purchasing and rearranging represents a deliberate effort to bring more mindfulness into my life. My creation of a separate space kept clear of anything not related to the practice of writing will serve as an external signifier of my intention, in much the same way that an altar in an alcove is a physical expression of inward faith.
Whatever works.
