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Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Writing for Fun

Speaking of writing advice that I’ve found on line – and this is old advice that I’ve given and been given a thousand times, but that has been lost to me for quite a while – writing should be fun.

I know I admire the living hell out of Flaubert’s struggling on his chaise lounge for days at a time, wrestling with a single sentence. I envy his migraines as he scratched out and replaced a single word a dozen times with synonyms and antonyms and, I don’t know, hieroglyphs I imagine.

I have sustained for months at a time with tuna fish and coffee, and thought myself more the artist for it, and maybe I was, but my writing has always been its best when I have enjoyed it. When I’ve surprised myself, taken on something new, or taken on something old in a new way. When I’ve learned from what I’m doing.

So last week, I rewrote a book called What I Know About Boys by Louis Redmond, published in 1952. Each page of text was mirrored by a black-and-white picture of a boy or some boys. Sometimes I rewrote the entire passage. Sometimes I changed a particular phrase. Sometimes I changed just a word. Sometimes I was sarcastic, sometimes parodic, sometimes sentimental, sometimes sincere – and every combination of those things.

I had in mind, initially, that the copyright of the book must, by now, be expired, and I would be able to reprint the book in my own fine way, but, apparently I don’t understand copyright laws, and it might be another half century before this gem hits bookshelves (e-bookshelves or the other kind).

But, still and seriously, that’s not the point. I enjoyed the writing – in process and product.

E-Community

There is some really good writerly advice out there in the electronic world, and I credit said world for part of my recovery as a writer. I have been looking through blogs of all sorts – there are thousands about the act, the art, and / or the craft of writing – many of which offer sweeping encouragements or banal platitudes; others offer writing exercises and experiments; some describe publishing processes or guides to landing an agent: I have found them all very helpful, each for their own specific reasons.

I suppose this blog is the closest I can come to thanking the world for continuing encouragement.

It is also nice to know that there are many many readers out there in the world: literary and genre, pulp and electronic, those who read for pleasure and those who read more like a form of worship – and, the best news of all, many folks who read in many or all or more ways than I listed.

Writing, as I tell every student in every writing class, is a community activity – even the most sacred, secret journal (in that it offers an outlet for feelings or perhaps a source of joy or solace) is a social act, because it affects the way in which we deal with the world.

Writing is a community activity and I am thankful to the internet for providing a limitless community of writers. (I do not mean “limitless” hyperbolicly – I simply do not believe an I could exhaust the online writing community.)

Monday, December 26, 2011

Practice

Writing, I've found, in practice, is not so terribly different from sports.

What an awful feeling, I remember from my high school days, to step onto a basketball court after a two-day break. Even at seventeen, I remember, the creaky joints, the stiff back, throwing the ball up and having it hit the bottom of the rim . . . bounce back and hit me in the nose. A quick cross-over dribble off my foot -- did my feet grow in the past two days? Am I ever going to be able to pass the ball to a teammate again? Should I just get a bag of potato chips and lock myself in a different part of the world where nobody will ever call upon me to run all the way from one key to the other key in a single day?

Holy hell.

But then I'd make a couple jumpshots, do a few king drills, pass the ball off a particular cinder block and catch it in stride en route for a lay up.

Writing turns out to be much the same thing, even as I sit down for the first time in two days, or four months, and clobber the keyboard with mash-potato hands and fingers of cream corn. I feel awful. I want to walk home and play ping pong, but I think over the next five hours, I'll be able to catch some kind of stride, make a useful paragraph or, at least, a strong sentence or a phrase that will become a pleasant refrain.




Tuesday, December 20, 2011

The Writer Who Came in from the Cold; Or Went out to the Cold; I Don't Know Which Yet

I'm taking a quick break from my "Brief History" thread for several reasons. The main reason is that I finished The Day of the Jackal today, and, to be honest, I allowed reading that to cut into part of my writing time.

I haven't read a spy novel since the spring of 2001 when I was finishing my undergrad. I took a course PolySci 197, I think, in which we read five spy novels -- it was very much like a lit course, but also like a history course. The professor was awesome and could range back and forth between narrative theory and Cold War politics in ways that seemed easy and natural. When I tried to do it, I usually ended up sounding like Billy Madison talking about The Little Dog Who Lost His Way (I need a fact checker for that title).

I loved the course, but I never got terribly into reading the spy novels -- I saw them as genre novels, formulaic novels: beneath literary writing in all ways (except they could potentially earn an author an income and sometimes got made into movies). I have been trained to think of junk fiction as somehow lesser than "real" literary fiction, but I've grown to see them more simply as two separate things, and I no longer privilege one over the other.

I should note that all with Gorky Park and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, we also read Going after Cacciato and Our Man in Havana, such that the often arbitrary nature of the distinctions between forms showed its unkempt head from time to time.

Sooooooooooooooooooo what?

Yeah, well, right, I'm writing a spy novel these days. Actually, I'm collaborating on a spy novel with a poet friend. I've never tried my hand at a spy novel before, but it's going quite well, I think. It stems from conversations I've had with my poet friend that always ended at closer to two or three in the morning with us saying to each other, "We should write a spy novel." And slapping high fives, but then sleeping it off and not writing a spy novel. The point is:

I'm writing again. It feels good. One thing I had to do to start writing again, since losing the novel deal, was to move on and try something else. I've tried, over the past four months, to get back into "I'll Tell the Mill" to give it another draft, but I haven't been strong enough yet. Soon, I think, with some more practice, I'll be ready to enter back into that world. For now, though. I'm writing a spy novel.

Wish me luck.

Friday, December 16, 2011

Heaven and Hell

Isaac Asimov said something to this effect: "If there is a heaven, it will be a place where I will having nothing to do but read and write novels."

Personally, I like to get out for a beer with friends from time to time, but when my writing is going well, everything else is just interference. I had a lot of life to take care of for most of my day, so I only had about two hours of productive writing time -- I would prefer eight, but that rarely happens, even on my most secluded of vacations. Once I sat down, I had a hard time getting to work. I opened up the files of my spy novel. I had to pry my way back into it. But writing is like this for me. Like a sport. I have to stretch out, warm up, loosen my subconscious.

When I did, I fell back into it, back into that old feeling of creation. Every day I ask myself, "Why write?" And I have a lot of answers that I cycle through. Some days I can't find an answer at all. But days like today, when I push past the not-wanting-to and the fear of not being able to and enter into the dream space, days like today, the answer is so clear and obvious that it doesn't have words.

Asimov's heaven sounds a little too much like Sartre's "Hell is other people," and I'm not quite willing to forsake the world entirely for the word, but days like today, I don't need much of anything else except for the story.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Part of a Balanced Reading Diet

Still, for me, there is a delicate balance between reading a healthy amount of social media and "wasting time." I'm not really fond of the expression "wasting time," because I think one can do just about anything and not waste time if one is conscious, fully aware of the world. Eeeeeeeehhhhk -- what's that mean?

I don't know, except to say that for my sake, I spent more time than I needed to this morning reading Ricky Gervais Tweets. At first, I was trying to get a sense of what a really funny person would tweet. Then I fell into a trap of redundancy, and before long, I was bored, but somewhat addicted to reading on.

If I am to be honest with myself, my time would have been better spent reading The Jackal or drafting a story.

Not the least of the title from this post comes from watching my kids eat sugary cereal day after day, because one of them, at one point, heard a doctor say that a good breakfast has sugar in it.

Well, yes, my dear, most healthy meals have some sugar in them. Most healthy adults these days do some form of online networking -- that doesn't mean the rest of life can simply disappear.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Besides doing a great deal of writing as an undergrad, the other thing I did -- in my memory, it was constantly -- was read. During one semester, I was taking five lit classes, which obviously entailed a lot of reading, but I was also dedicated to reading at least one novel or story collection each week.

Francine Prose writes:

"Only once did my passion for reading steer me in the wrong direction, and that was when I let it persuade me to go to graduate school. There, I soon realized that my love for books was unshared by many of my classmates and professors. I found it har dto understand what they did love, exactly" (Reading Like a Writer 8).

I thought of this quote again today, and I thought it was important, because this book is one of the major reasons that I simply didn't give up on writing altogether after my novel was shitcanned. This quote helped me feel better -- not okay, not alright, not good, but better -- about the fact that I have largely stopped reading for pleasure during my Ph.D. program, and the texts I did read were often more like chores than learning experiences. Even when I did find time to read, I would feel enormous guilt that I wasn't bettering myself by working on my pedagogy or, at least, reading theory.

But I'm reading again for pleasure, but also for practice. I'm reading The Day of the Jackal, because I am working on a collaborative spy novel. But I'm also reading blogs and articles online. I'm reading lectures and facebook threads. I'm reading several novels right now and each of them, specifically, to learn something as a writer, true, but also for the pleasure of learning something, the way a child enjoys learning.

Maybe that's too kind to myself, to suggest that I'm childlike -- Thoreau said something akin to "I've never been as wise as the day I was first born" -- but I'm being kind to myself right now, and I'm just going to have to deal with that.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Another First Step

In an attempt to find my way back into a sustained and consistent effort, I've picked up two long-stale blogs and dedicated myself to posting more regularly on them. In addition, I've started five new ones and dedicated myself to them as well. A lot of what happens on them (this sentence for instance) is junk, throwaway trash. But that's part of the point, I'm certain.

When I was first writing, it was the writing, the act of writing, the different way of thinking that writing inspires -- it was all of that: the reason I wrote. The world was there only for my words. As time went on, all kinds of things happened. Applying to grad school, submitting for publication, submitting to grad workshops, applying to Ph.D., dabbling in theory, building my cv -- writing became about everything else, everything but writing. The rest of the world was the only thing that mattered about the words.

I am a person of extremes, I know this, so the fact that I am trying to maintain six blogs doesn't surprise me much at all -- I know it's what I need to do right now. When I'm not cranking away at the keyboard, I know it's a huge mistake. The blogs are boring. The writing is pukey. I suck. But when I'm writing, this moment, this sentence, everything is right. I need to be doing this right now.

Plus, I believe in 21st-century literacies. I believe in this project and its medium. I was taught to priviledge Steinbeck and Alexie and Melville and Hempel (and the truth is, I still do), but there are some damn fine bloggers out there, too.

In the meantime, I started writing a spy novel last week. I'm reworking old essays and my steel-mill novel, and maybe, when the time is right, I'll send that business out into the world as well.

Monday, December 12, 2011

Beginning a Sustained, Consistent Writing

I was comparing writing woes with Jaswinder lately -- that we never seem to have enough time to just sit down and write, that we don't seem to get enough recognition, that recognition never seems to be as fulfilling as simply sitting down to write, but still a little recognition would be nice.

This came up during this past quarter while I was teaching a creative writing (fiction introduction) course. The main project for the course was to keep a journal. The idea behind the journal was to perform a sustained, consistent writing. Writers, I believe, should sit down everyday and crank out words, not hellbent on creating a new and equally beautiful Sometimes a Great Notion, but to exercise, much the same as a professional athlete would her body, one's unconscious.

Days after Jaswinder and I spoke about our writing woes, I opened some moving boxes my parents had dropped brought to me recently. I found my college journals, notebooks, and binders for English classes, biology and earth science, Calculus140, Polysci 197, Theatre 203, et al., as well as my personal journals, my drunken notebooks, binders full of laminated papertowels, cigarette packs torn into queer crucifixes and stapled to three-hole-punched cardboard.

It was at that moment that I realized the one thing that I was doing constantly, the thing I backed off during my MFA and the thing I abandoned altogether as a Ph.D. candidate . . . I realized that whatever else I was doing in my life, I was always, also, already writing. I wrote about the subjects for the classes, fictionalized physics, wrote off topic, created worlds in which I was the biology teacher and Dr. M_______ was madly in love with me. I wrote three-line plays and three-page haikus. I started and abandoned novels. I wrote awful things about myself and generous things about exgirlfriends.

At some point, that all fell away. I blame myself, certainly, and at some point, it seemed counterintuitive to begin journaling again. I was a master of fine arts. I was a Ph.D. candidate. I was an adult with children and a mortgage. I had more excuses than I had time to list them.

But I was convinced that I had to start over. I know it was the write decision. So I started running my pen across some pages. Lousy things happened. I wrote about the couch I was sitting on. I wrote about how tall my kids were and how lonely a person might get on a desert island. I wrote about waking up and realizing everything was all a dream. I wrote dreams. I wrote more about the couch, some about the television, a touch about the future of humanity. All boring stuff. All awfully written. All terribly embarrassing. I loved every word.