tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66867004488907463342024-03-12T21:20:11.393-04:00Write from ScratchI've called myself a writer for over twelve years now. Recently, I had a novel accepted for publication. More recently, my press folded, and the novel became just another file on my laptop. That was four months ago. I've hardly written a word since. It's time now, but it seems I've forgotten how. I'm going to reteach myself how to write. Though I have some background in writing, I've lost faith in what I know. I'm starting over. I'm learning to write from scratch.Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-61764373039408391982012-04-14T14:21:00.000-04:002012-04-14T14:21:25.185-04:00On Place and Space: The Vacuum<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
"As if the world were not what we make it, pulled by dogs down streets so dark, the sound of a river is almost a kind of light." I lifted this line from George Looney's <i>Animals Housed in the Pleasures of the Flesh</i>. And I wish I had written it before him. Let me be clear about two things: one, that's how I remember the line, and I'm pretty sure it's close, but it might be a paraphrase; two, I lifted this line eleven years ago, and I've been carrying it around with me ever since.<br />
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The sentiments in the line form currents, of course, in <i>Scrap</i>. Most notably: Nathan Daniels follows the rivers this way, at night, in his memory, the sound guiding him, such that he can see the world, see the trickle of water over pebbles, the splash of water against rock, the suck and silence of eddies, the gulp of a quick undertow.<br />
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He knows the river by smell, too, that spring-time shitty muck -- that new life that smells just this side of recent death -- which hangs in the thick night air. He could tell you in the darkest darkness how high French Creek is on a particular limestone boulder, how many paces of river rock are exposed between the tall grass and the water, by the smell and the sound of it all.<br />
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That is how we know the world, I'm certain of it, sensuously. That is why when Descartes tried to get at some kind of primary truth, he had to first deny access to his senses. He couldn't do it. We can't do it. We exist entirely in how we know the world, and, I'll say it again, we know the world in how we see it, taste it, touch it, smell it, and hear it.<br />
<br />
* * *<br />
<br />
Nature abhors a vacuum -- what a fun thing to say! Say it in front of a class and your students will think your intelligence has no limits -- <i>Wow!</i>, they'll think, <i>this guy's deep</i>. Say it at just the right moment during a cocktail party, and your spouse will drag you home and smother you in enduring caresses. "Nature abhors a vacuum," truly, a notion that is both a pleasure to think and a joy to say. The coupling of the long a and the long u. The soft rs. The simple cadence -- here is the kind of sentence I wish could be the title of my autobiography.<br />
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But it's not true, right? Part of the pleasure in saying it is the same pleasure in telling a small, meaningless lie, like when we, for no apparent reason, blurt out that we're allergic to cheese. "Oh," someone will surely say with raised eyebrows, and then we shrug, "Yep, can't eat cheese, though as a child it was my favorite thing . . . just the smell of it brings me such joy and revulsion . . ." well, it goes on from there.<br />
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Nature, in truth, is indifferent to a vacuum. If nature has a consciousness it is in the knowledge of its own cellular make-up, its quantum entanglements, its utter relationship to all things. Nature, that is, at a cellular level exists just the same in a vacuum or in a Cuisanart. Society, on the other hand, culture, that is, abhors a vacuum. The collective consciousness of humanity fears, hates, and dreads the absolute lack of all things.<br />
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Nothing is more terrifying to a small child than the notion of a black hole. Can you remember learning of a black hole for the first time? I can. An awful place whose gravity is so great even light can't escape, the end of heaven and humanity, for sure -- this awful emptiness that will someday consume us all, the utter lack of detail where one's notions of the world and a relevant afterlife no longer apply. What would that be like? We have no words to describe it. The most terrifying notion of all, the absolute lack of description.<br />
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So, yes, while nature is indifferent to such things, humans abhor a vacuum.<br />
<br />
<br />
Mies Van Der Rohe was right, the modernist architect, of course, that "God is in the details." Great writers, as well as great builder -- artists of any ilk -- know this. And we hear it again and again from Flannery O'Connor to Anne Lamott to Stephen King. Some of whom I'm sure to come back to, but first the two things at play: the details and the utter lack of details.<br />
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I'm thinking here of <i>The Neverending Story</i>, and why it resonates so powerfully with children: the resonance, of course, begins with the unique details -- the playful and tender giant flying poodle, the racing snail and its rider's elegant burgundy riding suit, the dripping nostrils of the mountainous allergic turtle -- these details are grand and precise, scaly, caked with mud and dead sticks, but their beauty, their truth, is in how they are set up against the void. The Nothing.<br />
<br />
The worst thing imaginable is not to be dead, but to have never existed, to be sucked into the nothingness of a black hole. God is in the details. The black hole is the place where no details exist, where no god exists -- it is The necessary Nothing, which threatens the imagination. As a child, imagining the end of all things is far worse than imagining our own inevitable death. Consciousness, language, we abhor a vacuum.<br />
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Meanwhile, we've all heard it said that a story that seems to take place nowhere, seems not to take place at all -- the floating head story of our intro to creative writing classes. And, even as we point out that a porch is not a place until we feel the dry sharp paint chips digging into our palms, until we see in the light of a globeless bulb the fluttering of spring's first moth, until we toe the cigarette butts across the cracked gravelly concrete with our sticky bare feet -- even as we mention this, our students say, "No, I'm not going to change that; the story's not about the porch; it's about vampires." Such young writers, who resist the sensuous, do not know their own world. They don't know the world they're writing, because they don't know the world in which they live. They see at what they're looking, as Gertrude Stein said of every artist except Picasso.<br />
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I said I've been reading Yi-Fu Tuan, and here he is (though he gets quickly enveloped by Niels Bohr): "What is place? What gives a place its identity, its aura? These questions occurred to the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg when they visited Kronberg Castle in Denmark. Bohr said to Heisenberg:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Isn't it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines that Hamlet lived here? As scientists we believe that a castle consists only of stones, and admire the way the architect put them together. The stones, the green roof with its patina, the wood carvings in the church, constitute the whole castle. None of this should be changed by the fact that Hamlet lived here, and yet it is changed completely. Suddenly the walls and the ramparts speak a quite different language. The courtyard becomes an entire world, a dark corner reminds us of the darkness in the human soul, we hear hamlet's "To be or not to be." Yet all we really know about Hamlet is that his name appears in a thirteenth-century chronicle. No one can prove that he really lived, let alone that he lived here. But everyone knows the questions Shakespeare had him ask, the human depth he was made to reveal, and so he, too, had to be found a place on earth, here in Kronberg. And once we know that, Kronberg becomes quite a different castle for us. (Tuan)</blockquote>
</blockquote>
Tuan's perspective of experience is rooted, entirely, in place -- this passage occurs early in his text (page 4), and the idea continues throughout the text.. So it is with Bohr. So it is with our writing. Flannery O'Connor said something like "There are no things from ideas, only ideas from things." And that's what this is all about. How many times have we heard or read or thought the line, "To be or not to be?" And in hearing, how many of those times have we seen "The stones, the green roof with its patina, the wood carvings in the church"? Probably never, right, or we see the director's interpretation if we're watching the line performed. But go to the place, go to Kronberg, look into the dark corners, listen to the walls and ramparts, and try not to hear "To be or not to be?" Only ideas from things. It cannot be the other way around.<br />
<br />
So the young writer wants to write a story <i>about</i> sorority girls who are actually vampires, she doesn't want to describe the porch, because it's just a porch. Meanwhile, those vampires seem to exist nowhere and therefor seem not to exist. Nobody built a castle in Transylvania, <i>because </i>something terrifying existed there. Dracula exists because of the castle, because of the landscape, because of the rocks and the woods and the rivers that make up that world, and so writers must go on, "pulled by dogs down streets so dark . . ."</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-67200437962284066492012-04-13T16:48:00.003-04:002012-04-13T16:48:22.811-04:00On Research-Based Creative Writing: The Bib<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
(As usual, I don't mean for any of this to sound instructive: this is not a <i>how-to</i> manual. Any advice I give, at this point, can be taken with an ocean.)<br />
<br />
I have, by now, written closer to 200,000 words that have had at their heart the early days of the oil industry in Western Pennsylvania. The current incarnation of the project is called <i>Pithole: The Wickedest City</i> -- a novel about the five hundred days of an oil boom town of the same name. In early 1865, a couple fellas struck oil along an uninhabited stretch of Pit Hole Creek. A couple more fellas came there and started building a town. Over the next eight months, more than 20,000 people moved there: by September 1865, that is, the Pithole post office handled more mail than every other post office in the state, except for Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. By June 1866, Pithole was a ghost town. Warped gray wood covered in a thick blanket of oil, scarred here and there by the dozens of fires that had burnt swaths of the town to the ground.<br />
<br />
A newspaper writer of the time called Pithole "The Wickedest City East of the Mississippi." My annotated bibliography at this point is over 40 pages, single spaced -- including information from dozens of oil books, <i>Walden</i>, Emerson's journals, <i>The Bible</i>, <i>The Origin of the Species</i>, and an ancient manual about knots and related devices called "Tackle it Safely: Rigging Hand Book" -- and that phrase, specifically, "The wickedest city," has stuck with me more than any other. For all those phrases that have not stuck with me, I have my dear pal, annotated bib.<br />
<br />
I can't remember who said, "All good novelists have bad memories."<br />
<br />
That's a lie. It was Graham Greene, though, in my own defense, I have forgotten a great many other things: many of which are far more important than Greene's notions about memory.<br />
<br />
Which is why I keep an annotated bibliography. I'll admit it: it's not in MLA format, but it does house hundreds of passages, biographical moments, contemporary philosophical inquiries, and other snippets that I return to from time to time to check myself against the past. And most of the citation information is accurate.<br />
<br />
The bib, it turns out, has a life of its own. It is a project similar to, but independent from the historical novel: <i>Pithole</i>. The bibliography has been a place for me to keep a great deal of information, without, necessarily, committing it all to memory. Facts, dates, folk song lyrics -- I even have an attached glossary.<br />
<br />
Still, liberating though the bibliography has been, I have at times also found it limiting. Let me turn to a pro -- in fact, the place where I first found the above Greene quote -- to help me explain. In <i>From Where You Dream</i>, Robert Olen Butler claims:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
What you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination. . . . Greene's compost of the imagination is the same as the dreamspace, the white-hot center of the unconscious. The point he's making is that not only is your mind the enemy, not only is your will, your rational thinking, your analytic thinking the enemy, but your literal memories are also the enemy. </blockquote>
When used appropriately, the annotated bibliography has allowed me to gather all of my research and compost it in a very real, visible, tangible form. When used poorly, the bibliography has been stifling, instructive, telling me, "No, no. That's not what <i>really</i> happened." When this occurs, when I become too reliant on the bibliography, the story that I'm writing, the fiction, the narrative, becomes entirely untrue. I lose the voice of the novel. I lose the narrative that has been roiling over and over inside me. I lose that great unconscious drive that creates.<br />
<br />
I solidly believe that good literary writing comes from an undefinable place in the imagination, a place that an artist can access -- through the practice of a sustained, consistent effort -- but never truly know. This is why writers can be so frustrating to talk to when you ask them the very simple question: "Where did you get the idea for this story?" The idea for a story, for any kind of creative endeavor is something that comes to the piece in its own creation. Stories, that is, are not ideas in and of themselves. They are things. They are things made of things. Literary fiction arises out of the senses -- out of what we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell -- ideas, morals, motifs: they are the result of the details, not the source. The question -- <i>Where did you get the idea for a story? -- </i>can be most easily answered spiritually: the narrative is the world speaking through me, nature speaking through me, god speaking through me, society speaking through me. A creative narrative is the process of creating -- it is not fact gathering, journalism, reproduction.<br />
<br />
My annotated bibliography works when I enter the information, dwell on it, ruminate over it, read it, reread it, and forget it. Set it aside. It works best when I copy a line from an existing text onto a blank computer screen and let that language carry me for hours at a time. Sometimes it takes two or three pages just to bury that line, to let it decompose into my own language and bring a new, different kind of life and language to the surface. This new life is voice. It is narrative. It is at the white-hot center (Butler's words) of literary fiction.<br />
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And, then, there's the one other thing, brought to us by Walt Whitman: "<b>Walt, you know enough, why not let it out then?</b>" I have too often, in the process of my research, denied myself access to my writing. I have, that is, privileged the research, and that has lead me, occasionally, to shame. If writing is the end game, sometimes we must allow our annotated bibliographies to suffer*.<br />
<br />
So, long story short, Step 1 for a research-based creative writing project: track your research.<br />
<br />
*No actual harm was done to an annotated bibliography in the writing of this post.</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-36661635942426516782012-04-12T10:19:00.001-04:002012-04-12T10:28:07.075-04:00Out of the Forest<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
In many early fables, the troubled or desperate youth wanders or flees into the forest. The forest is usually a dark place, mysterious, threatening -- often magical, or deemed magical for lack of understanding. The forest is haunted, not often by mindless specters, hellbent on giving one the willies, but usually by a primordial knowledge of the past, or the deeply frustrating notion that the youth is not living up to her potential. When she emerges from the forest, <i>she</i> is changed. Though she might look around at the world and see it differently, the real, knowable difference is her application of what she learned in the forest. She is now magic, because she now understands what was so recently beyond comprehension.<br />
<br />
Our contemporary versions of those stories has a fella falling into a uranium pit. Or getting infected with gene-altering chemicals. And rising out of that experience with some new knowledge, be it wisdom or some sort of physical know-how.<br />
<br />
At any rate, I guess I'm hoping that I arise at this moment as some sort of writing Spiderman . . .<br />
<br />
But, first, let me tell you about my forest. I applied for this post-doctoral fellowship, which I currently inhabit, about a year ago with the promise to speculate about research-based creative writing. I'd been working on a novel about the early days of the oil industry for over a year -- I'd even had a short historical story about Ida Tarbell published in a literary magazine.<br />
<br />
I was awarded the fellowship about a week after receiving news that my novel deal had fallen through, and, well, best-laid plans go to shit. Still, while it's taken some time to recover, I have had research on my mind, and I have had Petrolia on my mind. As a result, I spent two weeks in March back in Western Pennsylvania, wandering through the libraries in Oil City and Franklin, digging through old manuscripts, scrolling through reams of microfilm.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, I have been still hung up on some of the ideas from my most recent post -- from holy moly over a month ago -- about landscape and fiction. I found the lesson in a book about oil, but went on to read <i>Place and Space: The Perspective of Experience by Yi-Fu Tuan</i>. What a book! It really got my literary spidey-senses tingling.<br />
<br />
The rub: I have split my attention over the past month between a contemplation of landscape in fiction and the practice of research. Over the next couple of weeks, this blog is going to be a place where I can explore those ideas a bit, see if I've learned anything. In the meantime, I'll continue working daily on <i>Pithole</i>, which should inform both the narrative of landscape and of research, while informing both things.</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-4875339586551351202012-02-29T14:10:00.000-05:002012-02-29T14:10:12.077-05:00Found Lessons<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
There's no bad place to (re)learn a lesson about writing. The best thing I've learned today about writing came to me from a book about the early days of the oil industry. <i>Petrolia</i>, published by Brian Black in 2000, is a ruminative, often poetic, examination of 19th Northwest Pennsylvania. I thought I was reading the book to research historical events which are the basis for my own historical novel: <i>Pithole: The Wickedest City</i>. Turns out, today, I'm reading the book for a lesson on setting in fiction.<br />
<br />
Two weeks ago, my introduction to fiction writing class discussed Janet Burroway's chapter on setting in her book <i>Writing Fiction</i>: "Far, Far Away." Great chapter. As always Burroway brings together the voices of many writers' fictions and many writers' notions about fiction writing. The element that my class struck on, perhaps the most important notion in the chapter (or even the whole book), is the simple statement: "Like dialogue, setting must do more than one thing at once" (173). A statement no less poignant for its simplicity. I would take it a step further even to say, "Every element of fiction must do more than one thing at once," but we'll take that up another time.<br />
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Today, I found this passage:<br />
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<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
A landscape is constructed of geology, hydrology, and
biology; yet it also includes the creations of the humans or other beings that
inhabit and change the environment. Where nature and culture meet, they
construct a landscape. This construction is most obvious in its physical
manifestations, yet humans also determine its spiritual, social, and cultural
meanings. Therefore, such a meeting between nature and culture may not always
result in a physical creation. A vision of a place can also form within the
mind, as humans reshape attitudes and values—thereby adding a mythic component
to the meaning of an envisioned locale. In this fashion, a definition of place
can be constructed externally by a larger culture. Occupants may still form
their own ideas of a place, but an external construct based in ideals of the
larger culture also encroaches on a place’s meaning. (Black 61)</div>
</blockquote>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Two weeks too late for the conversation about fictional place, proper, there is no bad time to learn a lesson about writing. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Setting or place or landscape, I've found as a teacher of inexperienced writers, is often confused with background, and background in writing (as opposed to visual arts) is often confused with the blank white piece of paper on which one puts words describing a plot. This is problematic, of course, as Jerome Stern points out, because a story that seems to take place nowhere doesn't really take place [paraphrase]. I have, in fact, heard many experienced writers speak of setting in sad and general terms, almost as though creating any sort of place is a burden that a writer must deal with in order to get to the sexier things like characters and turmoil.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
I was lucky enough to work with Ann Pancake as an undergrad. She taught me to see setting, not as something to be slogged through but as an integral experience that carries a weight equal to the greatest characters, the most poignant themes, the most descriptive detail. How did she teach me that? I would like to say, "She told me, and I listened, and I learned." But I'm not so easily convinced. Rather, she told me, and I shrugged and scrunched my face a bit, and said something like, "I don't think so." Such were my undergraduate retorts. So she told me again, and I shrugged and smoked cigarettes and stared off into the middle distance humming Lag Wagon lyrics -- I was a force! And then she let me read her short story "Jolo" which begins:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Moving through air as sticky as the blood that moves inside her, same heat as the blood, the spit inside her, that moves inside, so that here in the dark she forgets where she ends, forgets where her skin stops, her skin does not stop, she is continuous. Moving through the weed smells, all the different green smells, single, then symphonic, single, then symphonic, the river low and mucky, a fertile rotty smell, low low dog days August smell. Not a bad smell, even though it is a just short of shit smell, but the river is not unloved for it, no, actually loved by Connie more tender for it, for its spoiledness, its helplessness, for how people have done it. Moving through the frog and bug burr, the chung, chung, chung, the tiny creature roar, layers of ankles and throats and wings, a sobbing mesh, the sound, too, an extension of her, the sex noise that shirrs the rind of her head, the kernel of her chest, again, Connie not knowing where her body ends, her not knowing again, and <i>say it. Jolo</i>. The name carries a kind of wet heat, a back of the mouth under the tongue, a you-know-what-I'm-saying-heat. <i>You do.</i> Carried in the syllables themselves. <i>No</i>, she wants to say to the cop, <i>it's not like that</i>, she tries to say. <i>Fires are a dry heat</i>, she says, and <i>Jolo's wet, just say his name. Jolo.</i></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: left;">
More than one thing? How about a West Virginia dialect so thick the passage is hard to read out loud without a drawl? The language rises out of the landscape, pushes up through the mud and the muck; Connie's consciousness is the world around her -- this is not background; this is not burden; this is how we know we're human. How about a character who sees herself in terms of her environment:"the rind of her head, the kernel of her chest"? She sees herself (rind, kernel) as the product of her environment. Connie doesn't know where she ends and where the world begins . . . but none of us do. We are the union of the world we create and the world that is created for us. We are socially constructed as we socially construct each other. We rise out of the landscape and fall back into it, and, in the meantime, we are the rhythms of the world around us; for Connie, read it out loud, "Moving through the frog and bug burr, the chung, chung, chung, the tiny creature roar." Read the whole passage out loud if you have a moment, and you might just feel the river creeping between your toes.</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
Setting is not background. It is not generic. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
I'm no musician. A dear friend asked me to stop whistling one day because I was so far out of tune the noise was making her sad. Far far from a musician. And, yet, I try to imagine a world of music in which composers, song writers, or singers simply thought of the noise from the instruments as a generic blank backdrop, something that must be borne in order to rejoice in the lyrics. Now, I love lyrics, but without the noise from the instruments, mighten we just as well be talking? Of course, there are those six or seven singers throughout history whose voices are instrument enough (in similar fashion one could easily find oneself in the middle of a Donald Barthleme story with no desire to understand where it takes place), but most of us prefer accompaniment.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Well, shit, my hour's almost up, and I haven't even mentioned the passage I set out to discuss. Which is probably for the best. The passage struck me, it strikes me now, as something terribly important to the world, to my first-year composition classes, to my own writing, but I've had no time to compost it yet. I've had no time to let it live and breathe in me, such that I can practically apply it. Still, speaking of a pleasure to read out loud: "A landscape is constructed of geology, hydrology, and biology" -- a joy, in part, because of the internal rhyme, but also, let's face it, because most of us have never said the word "hydrology" out loud, and few of us (scientists aside) think hydrology when we think landscape. That is, the line is lovely, in part, because learning is fun.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Final writerly lesson from a book about early oildom? "A landscape is constructed" -- the invisible hand of god at play in the field of language. What we know about landscapes, this union of culture and nature, we know because we have consciousness, because we are thinking creatures. As writers, our words are our landscape. Writing, of course, is an artifice. Language is a construction, but it is a construction that rises organically out of the characters, the consciousnesses, the landscapes, even as it creates them.</div>
</div>
</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-889152543874701202012-02-20T14:25:00.000-05:002012-02-20T14:26:14.003-05:00There's No Good Way to Say This . . .<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
So I'm thinking about writing a book, which would share the title of this post, about the art of the query letter. The book would rise from my absolute inability to craft such a letter. Can it really be as hard as I'm making it? Shouldn't I just be able to reproduce my novel in one or two beautifully crafted sentences? Am I over thinking this whole mess?<br />
<br />
I don't know. And I don't know if I want to be good at writing a query letter.<br />
<br />
The book would be based also on watching my spouse go through the process of writing a query letter. I watched her spend a painstaking eight months crafting a beautiful literary page-turning novel about 1950s burlesque in New Orleans. Each day, she would read me her thousand words, and each night I would go to sleep wondering what might happen next. As she wrote the last few pages of the novel, I felt that familiar feeling -- as though I were saying goodbye to a good friend, knowing that it would be some time before I might see her again -- that I feel at the end of a great book.<br />
<br />
I say familiar, but I mean the closing pages of <i>Moby Dick</i>, <i>Nobody's Fool</i>, <i>The Things They Carried</i>, <i>The Sound and the Fury</i>, maybe twenty or thirty other books whose voice I know I'll miss, even as I'm enjoying each ending. Like I say, I watched her research, live, and write this book for eight months, then I watched her research, design, and craft a query letter for the next two months. I've seen and listened to twenty or more drafts of her cover letter, and I think she's nailed it now. From her hook, to her synopsis, to her closing salutation, she's written a compelling, exciting argument about why someone should publish her book. I think she'll earn an agent very soon, certainly, I think, a book deal.<br />
<br />
My spouse is way smarter than me, I think we've all come to terms with that.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, I've been trying to write my own query. Here's what I have for a hook so far: "Stuff happens in a steel mill and somebody probably dies." It's awful. It's an awful thing to write. I believe in the book. I believe in the writing. But how in the hell do I write <i>about</i> the book? No, I think anybody who followed the epic whining of "The History of My First Failed Novel . . ." should know I have no problem writing about the book. More to the point, how do I write concisely about it?<br />
<br />
Three more famous stories:<br />
<br />
When Rimaud's mother asked him what a poem was about, he replied, "I have said what I have wanted to say, literally and in every other way."<br />
<br />
Flannery O'Connor said of her short stories, "If I could have written them any shorter, I would have."<br />
<br />
Jeanette Winterson, apparently likes to say, "It's about what it's about."<br />
<br />
I'm paraphrasing off the top of my head, not quoting: I just want to be clear.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I'm including those quotes for two reasons. First off, because I love them; they speak so deeply to the creative process and many of the things that I believe about art, that I celebrate them in papers and at cocktail parties and around campfires, often to very serious head nodding. Secondly, because I love them and use them as a constant excuse to not push myself harder to do the necessary writerly things that might not be as pleasurable as writing literature.<br />
<br />
Ouch. It hurts to admit that.<br />
<br />
But it's true. I don't wanna write a query letter. I don't wanna read the submission guidelines. I don't wanna buy a manila envelope to mail a manuscript to 10000ish zip code where, I'm almost certain, my manuscripts are insulating some of the tallest buildings in the city.<br />
<br />
The only things I ever want to do, as far as writing is concerned, are read and write. But that's never enough. I think this might be a true story for a bunch of us out there in the world. For instance, by a show of hands, how many folks out there, like me, somehow expect an agent to happen across a manuscript and give you a call? (I'm typing with just the one hand right now, by the way.) Or it might be something else -- shouldn't a particular press be seeking out your very own work this minute, because you'd be a perfect fit for them?<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, in my writing classes, one practice I insist my students engage is honesty -- not with the world, though I find that important to, but with themselves. Find the places you're being lazy, I tell them, and acknowledge that laziness. Often those lazinesses are easy to see. Some writers use a half dozen semicolons to build a monster sentence that goes nowhere, because they don't know how to advance their plot, their argument, their assertion. Others attempt to fit all 64 common prepositions into a single paragraph, because they've written something off topic and can't figure out how to get back to their text.<br />
<br />
You can't lie to yourself and be a good writer.<br />
<br />
No, scratch that again, one can be completely misguided in how one reads the world -- that might be how one creates such a compelling narrator.<br />
<br />
But you can't lie to yourself about your writing and be a good writer. I'm working on a chapter right now in my epic oil narrative history clusterfuck, and in this chapter, I know, I absolutely know that the perspective is off. I've chosen, in fact, the completely wrong character to narrate this chapter. I've known that intuitively for a long time, but just last week, I admitted it. I said it out loud: "This chapter belongs to a different character." So after months of working and reworking a particular 5,000 words, I have to let it all go, redream it, see it from another angle.<br />
<br />
That I'd been employing the wrong narrator all this time was hard to accept, though I knew it to be the truth. But, if I had recognized it earlier, I could have saved myself many headaches, countless frustrating hours, a full ream of paper . . . I might have completed the book manuscript by now, had I been honest with myself sooner.<br />
<br />
So, okay, here I go: while what I want to be doing this afternoon is researching oil and writing awesome epic asskicking adventures about the early days of the industry, I'm going to sit down with <i>Scrap</i> and try to write two or three good sentences about it.<br />
<br />
Such work is not glorious, not artful, but, if I must be truthful, necessary work.</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-88865076313088993822012-02-09T12:00:00.000-05:002012-02-09T12:00:02.521-05:00Nothing in Isolation<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
"Nothing exists in isolation in the forest."<br />
<br />
I was famously sitting in my family's cabin by the Allegheny River for the coldest six-month stretch of my life. Late fall, I watched the ice gather on the river in small patches and form fields, which themselves impinged on the shore like hour-long car wrecks, until the water was frozen solid. I was a college dropout and a college grad. For an entire month, the high temperature did not rise above freezing. I was a steel-mill worker and a hoddie. I was also an ex-all those things and, though I couldn't know it at the time, a soon-to-be grad student. Mostly, I spent that winter reading and writing. I had visits from friends and family on the weekend, but spent four or five days each week, not hearing a human voice or seeing a human face (unless you count the folks on the other side of the river or the characters on the VCR tapes).<br />
<br />
One of my favorite programs to watch at the time was a Nature Channel or Discovery Channel or National Geographic Channel series about the world. I forget which channel, clearly, but I do know that the series explored the tundra, the polar caps, and South American rain forests, specifically, as well as a few other sweeping geographical generalizations. I learned a lot about the planet. My favorite detail came when a flock of toucans, who had apparently eaten some sour berries, ate mud from a cliff. The mud had no nutritional value, but provided a base to counter the negative effects of the acidic berries. Ha! Not a pharmacist or an M.D. among them. <i>Parrot</i>, I thought, <i>heal thyself</i>! I knew they weren't parrots, though, so it was a moot point.<br />
<br />
Later in the same episode, the announcer in a conversation about one of the most complex ecosystems in the known universe says, "Nothing exists in isolation in the forest." I paused and rewound and played that line at least a dozen time. "Nothing exists in isolation in the forest." "Nothing," the announcer says, "exists in isolation in the forest."<br />
<br />
I had payed money for these tapes. That line was scripted. It's not as though the announcer were commentating a live broadcast of the forest. He had been payed to say, very specifically, "Nothing exists in isolation in the forest."<br />
<br />
I felt duped.<br />
<br />* * *<br />
<br />
On the other hand, I love Francine Prose's book <i>Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them</i>. She insists that we all slow down and read and recall what it's like to savor what we read and to learn from what we read such that when we read again or when we read something else or when we write, we can enjoy again what we have read in other great works. More than insist, she gives us permission to read thus.<br />
<br />
She begins her book by insisting on close reading in her chapter 1 titled "Close Reading." She goes on to focus on how a story might hinge or develop or change entirely as the result of a single word in her chapter 2 titled "Words." Chapters 3, 4, and 5 -- "Sentences," "Paragraphs," and "Narration," respectively -- grow larger in scope, but focus on language with the same kind of intensity as her previous discussion of close reading and words. "Character," "Dialogue," "Details," and "Gesture" -- chapters 6-9 -- encourage us to consider carefully the myriad ways in which an author develops a piece of fiction through such such devices.<br />
<br />
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My students are to come to class today, ready to discuss "Character." In the chapter, Prose discusses <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Marquise of O—</i> by Heinrich Von Kleist, <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sense and Sensibility</i> by Jane Austen, <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pride and Prejudice</i> by Jane Austen, <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Middlemarch</i> by George Eliot<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sentimental Education</i> by Gustave Flaubert. Yet another beautiful conversation by Prose in which she block quotes huge swaths of the texts and discusses how they variously develop character through dialogue, thought, dress, narration, perception, and other methods.</div>
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Something that struck me about twenty pages into her chapter, the impetus for this post, in fact, is that, for a moment, I forgot the title of the chapter. During her discussion, I lost sight of whether this was a chapter on narration or gesture, details or dialogue. I've read the book before, enough to recall lessons from each of the various chapters. In reading the long passages she had quoted from the text, I found myself applying Prose's lessons on several of the writerly things* her text addresses. <i>What a pleasure</i>, I thought, <i>to apply so much of what I've learned to just this one passage</i>! Then, of course, the terror set in that I would not be able to talk to my students this afternoon intelligently about character, and would end up, again, tangentially describing the glories of free indirect discourse in narration. <i>The horror</i>, it was as if something buried deep in my literary subconscious had uttered, <i>the horror</i>.</div>
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* * *</div>
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The summer after my longest, coldest Pennsylvania winter became the hottest, driest of my life. I started working for a temp agency in April and ended up cleaning the scrap pits at a machine shop for three weeks in June. There was a stretch of thirteen days where the high temperature each day was above a hundred. On my lunch breaks, I sat on a bucket chewing tobacco and watched The Wasatch Mountains burn. I didn't have much invested in saving the world, so I thought, <i>Burn, baby, burn</i>, at times, and at others, thought, <i>Shouldn't someone put that out?</i></div>
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At one point, in the machine shop, my boss got frantic and put me in charge of making rabble arms -- pieces for a ten-story industrial** furnace used to heat and slowly cool giant hunks of metal used in the construction of submarines. The furnace was in Brazil. I was in Salt Lake City. The submarines would end up in the ocean. The rabble arms were made of some strange sort of concrete I'd never seen before or sense, the powder a finer consistency than even sifted flour. I mixed the mortar and poured buckets full of a million tiny metal needles into the mixture. I have no idea why. For all I know, I might have been making those car-wide curbs that keep cars from wondering off in parking lots. I was famous in the machine shop for chewing tobacco and not knowing shit, so I continued to not ask questions.</div>
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Still that announcer haunted me, even then, even 1957 miles away from where I'd first heard his narration, even months later and a hundred degrees hotter. "Nothing exists in isolation in the forest." The awfulness. The sweeping generalization. The vagueness. The obviousness. The statement made more sense to me at that moment -- in the desert building a product of steel and stone that will build a product that will build a product that will swim through the deepest oceans -- it made more sense and sounded more astute than any other statement I had ever heard.</div>
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And, today, here I am in Southeastern Ohio, reading Prose, thinking of a machine shop in Northern Utah, wondering about a text: is it character? is it narration? is it dialogue? And this, traditionally, has been the hardest part of teaching writing -- creative, composition, literary -- for me: you can't separate out the parts. You have to learn and grow and write very intensely, applying all of what you've learned and grown into and written, into every document as it comes out before you. Nothing exists in isolation in literature. Good dialogue is good character development. Good setting is good plot. Good generalization is good detail. Nothing exists in isolation in literature. We separate it out to talk about its pieces. We look at the toucans and we look at the sloths. We live in the desert or we live in the hills. But nothing exists in isolation in literature. </div>
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*Prose doesn't define or describe how she separates the chapters, so I don't know what she'd want to call these things -- they're not themes or devices or techniques, necessarily, nor are they not not those things either.
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** For the record, I realize that if the furnace is ten stories tall, I probably don't have to mention that it's industrial. I'm in too much of a hurry to bother with redundancies.</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-10801562133345298572012-02-06T19:40:00.001-05:002012-02-06T19:40:22.924-05:00On Teaching Creative Writing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I once (three days ago) famously (well, seven people responded, and only three of them were me) tweeted, "I don't mean to sound preachy, but why would one take a creative writing class if one hates to read and write?"<br />
<br />
The question, I admit, sounds preachy. It looks facile. It seems as though I'm pissing and moaning about a lack of effort on the part of some of my students. And that's all probably true, but something more important than that is at stake for me. I, ultimately, don't have time to worry about how much effort my students put into their studies, their careers, or their lives. On the other hand, the general lack of commitment shown by many students who take creative writing courses, ultimately, devalues the entire process of teaching creative writing. <br />
<br />
But, here, let me tell you the story.<br />
<br />
The catalyst for this post was my collecting student reading and writing journals last week for a midterm update. The reading and writing journals, I believe, are the most important processes in the course. I have written the following on this blog before; I have said it again and again in the company of many writers; I make the same claims about practicing writing that I make about practicing running and practicing math:<b> if you want to improve your creative writing, you have to develop a sustained, consistent effort.</b> I've said it so often, I have, at times, believed I made up the phrase "sustained, consistent effort." It's in my syllabus. It's on the assignment sheet for both journals. 50% of your grade, my syllabus tells us, will be "the sustained, consistent effort you put into your reading and writing journals."<br />
<br />
So I collected both sets of journals last week and found that a full half of the class was not only <i>not</i> halfway through the completion of their journals, but some had only written two or three writing-journal entries out of a possible thirty. Some had less than ten percent of the minimum reading-journal requirement completed.<br />
<br />
Some students included apologetic notes, "I'm
sorry. I know this journal isn't where it needs to be. I'll work
harder." To whom, I always wonder, are they apologizing? Certainly not
me. They have not hurt my feelings. They have not let me down. I have
four kids, a spouse, two parents, some pets, several friends, and my own thousand words a day to put on paper -- I have better things to do than be let down by students. For me, grading is strictly business, nothing personal. I tell them, "I'm the Michael Corleone of grading." I will help any student with any problem, academic or personal, to whatever extent that I can. "Come to my office hours," I tell them, "if I can't help you, I'll find someone who can." But I am not going to be sad about a student's lack of interest, intensity, or commitment.<br />
<br />
Well, then, this seems like a non-issue, Jackson. If you don't care, and they don't care, then . . . what?<br />
<br />
Just this: there seems to be a great sweeping belief that just signing up for creative writing classes, and just showing up from time to time, and just talking about what one likes or does not like about a piece of writing is enough to pass the course.<br />
<br />
But such students are not going to pass my course. I tell them on the first day of class: "If you think you can just show up and talk about what you like or don't like about a story and pass this class, you're wrong." It's in my syllabus: "We are not here to talk about what you like or don't like about stories." Your reading journals are a place to experiment with what you are learning through your reading -- through imitation, celebration, and engagement. Your writing journals are the place where you will sit down every day and give the muse access to your pen. Students who don't do the work in my course, fail my course. I tell them this, and, each term, some of them are surprised by low grades. They then say awful things about me, and that's too bad, I think, for everybody concerned, because it's hard to get a letter of recommendation from a worthless piece of shit, but it's their prerogative. <br />
<br />
The question has larger ramifications.<br />
<br />
The best creative writing instructors* in the country, I believe are under constant scrutiny: "Can you actually <i>teach</i> creative writing?" They are asked by students, administration, parents of students, colleagues, other writers, each other, themselves: "Is it even possible to teach creative writing?" The easy answer is: "Of course." And, for me, that's the truest answer. But, again, I point to an ancient Greek whose name I can never remember, who once said, "Every question possesses a power that does not lie in the answer."<br />
<br />
*Let me take a moment to point out that I am not suggesting that I'm in this crowd of great cw instructors. I have my moments, but, ultimately, have a lot to learn about teaching. I will, however, remind you that I just compared myself to Michael Corleone.<br />
<br />
Anis Shivani is the most recent writer I know of to garner a great deal of press for
writing a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/creative-writing-teaching_b_1178279.html">scathing** piece</a> about teaching creative writing. He writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Creative writing is a subset of therapy, with the same essential
modalities -- except, like everything else in our culture, it comes in a
stripped, dumbed down version that partakes little of the rigors of
psychotherapy. More appropriately, we might call it the Oprahfied
mindset that penetrates workshop. Life lessons and living a more
authentic life are always just beneath the surface of any workshop
discussion. </blockquote>
** I think Shivani would agree his piece is scathing. I think he means for it to be scathing. But I am not writing this in an attempt to refute the creative writing naysayers, only to point out that they get a lot of attention (some of it earned), and that attention (often unwarranted) hurts creative writing instructors. It hurts the whole field.<br />
<br />
That said: I have heard of this kind of creative writing course, where writing is synonymous with therapy. I have imagined
this kind of creative writing course. I have feared this kind of
creative writing course. But it has never been my experience. I have rather been <i>taught</i> by great teachers and writers to create a space for myself to access the muse. I have been taught to learn from what I read and to practice craft and to consider perspective and to weigh options and to think about the ways in which my own writing might fit into writing throughout history. I have been taught to value, above all else as a creative writer, reading and writing. It is not easy. Learning creative writing, I believe, is a constant lesson. It takes constant practice. I don't imagine Melville saying, "Well, I guess that's all I need. I'll write <i>Moby Dick</i> now." But writing is not therapy. I have never written about my feelings. I have never been psychoanalyzed by a peer or an instructor. I am not sure, exactly, what Shivani means by "the Oprahfied mindset that penetrates workshop," but I'm pretty sure that's never happened to me.<br />
<br />
Rather, I believe, we can teach creative writing. It was taught to me. I have seen it taught to others. I will teach it to anybody who wants to learn. Still, the power of this question lies in the asking, rather than the answering. I can't recall hearing or reading anybody ever ask: "Yeah, but, can anybody really <i>teach</i> history?" or physics or astronomy -- three subjects that seem infinitely less teachable to me. I mean, can anybody seriously imagine <i>teaching</i> history? What the hell would that look like? I can imagine encouraging somebody to read a book. I can imagine grading somebody on how many dates and places and events she remembers. I can even imagine suggesting to somebody that history books are always written by the winners. But teaching somebody to weigh conflicting reports of a factual event; teaching somebody to search through artifacts and determine which one is most accurate, most true (who would say that? most true? what's that); teaching somebody to understand the ramifications of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta"><i>The Magna Carta</i>*** </a>on contemporary American civil liberties . . . forget about it: can anybody really do that?<br />
<br />
*** Turns out, it's not, in fact, spelled Magna Carter. Thank you, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia">wikipedia</a>.<br />
<br />
For two years, as an undergraduate I studied secondary math education. I
meant to be a middle school math teacher. I wanted to teach math
because I was awesome at it, and I wanted to teach sixth, seventh,
eighth grade, because I wanted to help kids through some rough years.
But can one really <i>teach</i> math? In my experience, it's no easier
than teaching creative writing. I can draw numbers and symbols and
apples and arrows on the chalkboard for forty minutes a day; I can encourage students to practice at home; I can
collect and grade homeworks and quizzes; I can test students on their retention. But getting them to understand math. Not a chance.<br />
<br />
I think, in fact, we need to change the question. I think, when we say, "Can you even teach creative writing?", maybe what we mean is, "Can you evaluate creative writing?"**** I think that's a much less insulting question with a much more meaningful, if infinitely more complicated, answer. For the purposes of the University system, of MFAs and Ph.D.s in creative writing, I think the notion of evaluation is much more important, even if the individual answer is only relevant to a particular program, a particular school, or a particular instructor.<br />
<br />
For me, for the Introduction to Creative Writing Course that I'm teaching, I am not evaluating the quality of students' creative work. I grade the quality of their self-analysis and the thoroughness of their peer responses, but the 50% of their grade that is their creative practice, I only grade their sustained, consistent effort.<br />
<br />
I also make professional comments on a single work of fiction each quarter, and offer to them on a daily basis that if they would like to meet with me in my office to discuss any aspect of writing (theirs or somebody else's), I would be happy to do so.<br />
<br />
**** In fact, the even better question might be, "Should we evaluate creative writing? And by whose standards? And what kind of magical criteria?" But those questions, I think, have much more to do with whether or not we're getting into Heaven than whether or not we're getting tenure.<br />
<br />
[Meanwhile, I just thought I should note, given my belief in the power of questions, that I have changed my initial (perhaps rhetorical) question to: "<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]--><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Why would
anybody who refuses to read and/or write take a creative writing course?"
The hating is optional.]</span></div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-80137603423162223332012-01-30T19:32:00.003-05:002012-01-30T19:32:42.064-05:00ReScrap<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I'm revising <i>Scrap</i>. I'm going to start sending it back out. What an awful prospect.<br />
<br />
Revising is an exaggeration. I'm editing it as per my editor's (from Pugilist) suggestion.<br />
<br />
I started this edit shortly after I got the comments from her in July -- or, at least, I read them through, and opened up my computer -- then the press shut down; we all know this.<br />
<br />
I had a look at them in September and again in October, twice in November, and I vowed not to leave the house in December until the draft was complete -- that didn't work at all. But now I've completed the draft and I'm sending it out.<br />
<br />
Sending out damaged goods.<br />
<br />
When I sent out the ms. in 2009 and 2010, I felt fucking fantastic about the work. I was dumbstruck each time a press declined, each time I did not win a contest. Unbelievable . . . who wouldn't want to publish this work?<br />
<br />
Today, I'm dubious. I've lost confidence. I've never faced this crisis as a writer before. As a high school athlete, sure. As an engineering major, of course. As a lover, bet your ass. As a grad student, every day for five-and-a-half years. As a writer, rejection always saddened me, but made me want to write more, and, more to the point, to write better.<br />
<br />
But there's something about losing a book after eight months of feeling pretty sure I had a book that has really wrecked me psychically.<br />
<br />
I doubt myself. I doubt my work.<br />
<br />
But I'm sending it out. I guess a really good way to get over this for-shit feeling would be to get a book published. So, of course, that's floating around in the front of my mind -- it was good enough already for what looked to be a really great press, it will happen again -- as long as rumor hasn't gotten around London yet that <i>Scrap </i>isn't virtuous.<br />
<br />
Bad place for a <i>Downton Abbey</i> reference? I suppose so. Even as my metaphors gather in strength, my allusions huddle in the basement of some other master's servants. Crud, it sounded good, but it doesn't mean anything.<br />
<br />
Hell.<br />
<br />
I'm sending it out, and would like for it to get published, but would like, also, to be rid of it. Even in early August, I had 80,000 words of an historical novel written. 80,000 words which were, in fact, the basis of my post-doctoral fellowship application. I tried to enter into that text after the bad news from Pugilist, but it was futile. Not just the novel, but the pursuit, the writing. I had my most serious doubts of walking away from creative writing entirely. I'm pretty good at teaching lit classes, and I love comp. Who needs to bother with writing fiction, impossible, after all, as it is?<br />
<br />
But I'm healing. I've spent this past week revising and preparing submissions. I'm ready to jump back into my <i>Pithole</i> with my pen blazing. I don't have a timeline, but I am going to reread what I have, dive into my research, and finish this book.<br />
<br />
I'll keep us all updated on my progress.</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-8339474497122554692012-01-26T07:54:00.000-05:002012-01-27T12:37:18.292-05:00Why Writing Is Impossible: A Quiet Diatribe Concerning the Craft Delivered in the Form of an Innocuous Series of Blog Posts<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It's hard to learn to write again for all the reasons I've mentioned -- fear, shame, humiliation -- but the emotional difficulties also help to bring into clear relief the technical difficulties. I've been thinking about some of them, some of the reasons writing is so impossible. This is not the first reason or the most important; it's just the first reason I wrote down. <br />
<br />
Consider the paragraph, for instance. Francine Prose writes a twenty-two page lyrical, informative, passionate, impassioned, telling, showing, fun, descriptive discussion of the paragraph in her book <i>Reading Like a Writer</i>. In the chapter, title "Paragraphs" (Oh! I love this book), we learn or relearn everything we've ever known about paragraphs but never thought to ask. The writing is a delight. The passages are a delight.<br />
<br />
I'm rereading the chapter right now, thinking about how I will begin a conversation about paragraphs with my creative writing class this afternoon, thinking about how I break my own paragraphs, thinking about my favorite paragraph writers (Rick Bass, Richard Ford, Johnathan Kozol, bell hooks) -- yes, I'm just dorky enough to have favorite paragraph writers -- thinking about what makes their paragraphs great.<br />
<br />
Prose delivers great advice from great writers, all guided, of course, by her own love of paragraphs, specifically, of writing at large. At certain points, as with the previous two chapters "Words" and "Sentences," we realize that the key to any good paragraph (or word or sentence) is magic. Or, as I like to call it, God. Or, as I like to call it so that atheists and religious folks don't get offended and agnostics don't have something new to ponder, society speaking through us. Or the muse or the Aeolian Harp. Or great writers of the past. I was right at first: all good writing moves are magic.<br />
<br />
And then Prose inserts a passage from Strunk and White's <i>The Elements of Style</i> -- certainly, every creative writer's favorite grammar book, despite its many flaws. The passage ends, "Moderation and a sense of order should be the main consideration in paragraphing." Thank you, Strunk and White, for creating this tiny book of writerly advice. It has served me, it has served my students, it has served us all in more ways than we'll ever know.<br />
<br />
But "Moderation and a sense of order" . . . ? What the hell are those? This passage marks the closest I've ever come to feeling like Ralphie in <i>A Christmas Story</i> after he waits patiently for weeks and finally receives his Little Orphan Annie decoder ring and deciphers the secret message "DON'T FORGET TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE." "Moderation and a sense of order" . . . ?<br />
<br />
I feel like I should apologize to my creative writers in class today for sharing this drivel. "Strunk and White," I'll tell them, "aren't always like this. They're really good guys when you get them alone." Writing, all writing, but specifically creative writing, more specifically fiction, should be human, right?, should be flawed and well-intentioned and beautiful, and, above all, compelling. Paragraphs should be tiny novels or winding narrations with, yes, of course, topical sentences, even though none of us knows what those are, really. And, yes, they should vary in length and intensity. And, yes, like any element of craft -- from dialogue to setting to gesture to title -- they should do more than one thing. Paragraphs should be voice driven as determined by the narrator. Their look, size, density should be dictated by the story, rather than the other way around. How they look when set beside other paragraphs is key -- e.g. a short paragraph in between several long ones can be striking and lovely and carry as much weight as the big ones. Paragraphs, like stanzas, must focus us intensely on a single moment, must control the pacing of a story, must describe huge sweeping changes in time and space -- the paragraph must be able to navigate the present moment as well as guide a reader into the future or past. And because of all the demands on paragraphs, a writer absolutely must have an overarching sense of order -- not necessarily as an impetus for the story, but it must be present as the drafts develop narration. Order, for sure, and a writer must balance lyricism with scientific presentation, the past with the future, long paragraphs with short paragraphs -- a writer must moderate her passions and flare with the rules of language and a knowledge of literary history. In short, the two key elements of a paragraph are moderation and a sense of order.<br />
<br />
I hope that clears this up for everybody, and, again, give Strunk and White a chance. They mean well, even when they're making sweeping generalizations about what you <i>need</i> to be a writer.<br />
<br />
Francine Prose says all this much better than I, and I have learned more than I can ever convey from her book, but perhaps the most important writerly tidbit I can take away from her book: "Though once again, as with sentences, merely <i>thinking</i> about 'the paragraph' puts us ahead of the game, just as being conscious of the sentence as an entity worthy of our attention represents a major step in the right direction." Some ancient Greek wrote, though he was probably not the first to think or say, "To know that we know what we know and that we do not know what we do not know -- that is true knowledge."<br />
<br />
See what I mean?<br />
<br />
Smoke and mirrors, slight of hand, misdirection: all within a grounding sense of reality. Magic. </div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-41641699337382418502012-01-18T11:01:00.001-05:002012-01-18T11:01:39.058-05:00Unsolicited Advice from Jackson Connor to Jackson Connor<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Interviewer: Leslie McGrath. Interviewee: Sabina Murray. From <a href="http://www.awpwriter.org/magazine/"><i>The Writer's Chronicle</i> </a>February 2012:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b>McGrath:</b> Your first novel, <a href="http://www.sabinamurray.com/index.htm"><i>Slow Burn</i></a>, was published when you were twenty-one. How did that come to pass? Are the [sic] any similarities between being a young author and a child star?<br />
<br />
<b>Murray:</b> Well, I didn't become a drug addict or a prostitute, but I'm not exactly Liz Taylor. When you publish that early, your peers are not rooting for you. That's one thing. And there are two treacherous holes one can fall into: first, there's the flash-in-the-pan, where you buy everyone drinks until the money dries up (let's say two weeks) and never publish again, and, second, there's the stuck-in-a-hole, where, although your first book was published when you were twenty years old, your subject matter and writing style remain remarkably unchanged deep into middle age. Or there's me, where your book is sent out, reviewed in a few places, you get your picture in <i>Vanity Fair</i>, but are still selling balloons on the sidewalk in order to make ends meet. Then ten years later, when your next book comes out, you find yourself telling people over the rims of pints that it's actually your second book. And this gets met with a "Really?" so frequently that you wonder if you're not making it up.<br />
I was a young college senior, I graduated at twenty, and the book was my senior thesis. I had the shocking good luck to have Valerie martin as my teacher and she sent the book on to her agent, who sold it. Nothing has ever been quite so easy since. What might have been an auspicious beginning turned out to be character building. But a I said before, no drugs and no prostitution, so I count myself rather blessed.</blockquote>
In <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Stephen-King/dp/0743455967"><i>On Writing</i></a>, Stephen King discusses his early writing career, beginning, I believe, in his case, in the womb. After college, he taught writing, and he wrote like hell, and he published a couple things here and there, then he sold a manuscript for $200,000, and, well, you know the rest of the story. Or if you don't, this is it: he still writes like hell and publishes the hell out of his writing, and, if the story I made up is true, paid more than $200,000 for dinner with friends one time.<br />
<br />
Anne Lammott in the chapter "False Starts" in <a href="http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=bird+by+bird&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=3024657074512081180&sa=X&ei=JekWT6rbLLTr0QGTr6HUAg&ved=0CD0Q8wIwAQ"><i>Bird by Bird</i></a> receives a letter from her editor beginning, "This is perhaps the hardest letter I've ever had to write" (86). Now, if she's anything like me, she's immediately thinking the letter is hard to write, because her editor doesn't know how to spell Pulitzer Prize. Come to find out, this book she'd been struggling with for two years just doesn't quite <i>do it</i> for the editor. So she struggles with it for another eight or nine months amid feelings of grief, fear, and humiliation. She fell in love with the book and this new draft and resubmitted it to her editor and flew out to talk to him about it. "But my editor said, 'I'm sorry.' I looked at him quizzically. 'I am so so sorry," he said. 'But it still doesn't work.'" That evening, as she describes it, sounds rough. But she immersed herself in the novel for a month, wrote, and wrote like hell, set a brand-new treatment off to her editor . . . "The book came out the following autumn and has been the most successful of my novels.<br />
<br />
(I am not doing either of these authors justice. Lammott discusses this process in a lovely, hilarious, and brutal eight-page essay. The first 94 pages of King's memoir cover this epic and honest writer's early writing life.)<br />
<br />
Norman Mailer high-fived himself when he got drafted and published<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Dead-50th-Anniversary/dp/0312265050"> <i>The Naked and the Dead</i></a> at age 25 -- I think it's his best work and one of the best war novels of all time.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Picasso-Dover-Fine-Art-History/dp/0486247155">Gertrude Stein</a> got a famous rejection early in her career, suggesting, if I recall, that she learn the rules of our language before she attempt any further fictions in it.<br />
<br />
Nick Flynn's dad failed at his attempts at the Great American novel, and this failure, in part, is at the heart of Nick Flynn's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Another-Bullshit-Night-Suck-City/dp/0393051390"><i>Another Bullshit Night in Suck City</i> </a>-- which creates, for me, complicated notions of the contemporary American novel.<br />
<br />
How old was Henry Miller when he published <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tropic-Cancer-Henry-Miller/dp/0802131786">Tropic of Cance</a>r</i>?<br />
<br />
Some craft books, some collections of essays, some anthologies of writerly advice, offer writers eight, ten, thirty-three, fifty, or a hundred and one varying perspectives on how to get into the writing world, how and when to write, how to publish, how to respond to publication, how to keep one's head up despite set backs, but not so far up that one might think oneself above oneself. In short, it's a clusterfuck of advice.<br />
<br />
And it's all good. Every ounce of it: from Hunter S. Thompson's<a href="http://www.tentimesone.com/how-to-get-a-job-by-hunter-s-thompson/"> job application<span id="goog_50770172"></span><span id="goog_50770173"></span></a>s to Natalie Goldberg's<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Down-Bones-Freeing-Writer/dp/1590302613"> <i>Writing down the Bones</i></a> to<i> <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_50770183">They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing</a></i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/They-Say-Matter-Academic-Writing/dp/039393361X"> </a>by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein.<br />
<br />
There is no template for the writerly life, I believe. In fact, when we've read these books by writers about how to write, my spouse and I have often reflected that these writers are not telling <i>us</i> how to write, so much as telling themselves; more to the point, they're telling us <i>How I Wrote</i> -- whether it's how I wrote this story or this novel or this sentence or my complete oeuvre, the only thing they're telling us is: this worked for me . . . good luck. There is no one way to advance in this field. There is no way to know when you've made it. There is no end game, except to write. The only thing to do, the only thing that's real for a writer, is to write. And if that means losing your first novel because Borders shuts down, sit down and write. And write like hell.</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-41997663777805472212012-01-13T18:34:00.000-05:002012-01-13T18:34:36.498-05:00My Toolbox, How I'm Like Michael Jordan, Nothing Groundbreaking<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Stephen King begins his chapter "Toolbox" with a long description of a moment from his childhood when his uncle carries a hundred pound toolbox from the workshop to the window where he's replacing a window screen. Quite an effort. He uses a screwdriver, replaces the screen. Job over. I almost said out loud, "Why the hell did he carry that great big thing all the way out there when all he needed was a screwdriver to replace some loopscrews?"<br />
<br />
Then eight-year old Steven King: "I asked him why he'd lugged Fazza's toolbox all the way around the house, if all he'd needed was that one screwdriver.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Yeah, but Stevie," he said, bending to grasp the handles, "I didn't know what else I might find to do once I got out here, did I? It's best to have your tools with you. If you don't, you're apt to find something you didn't expect and get discouraged."</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities, it behooves you to construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscle so you can carry it with you. (<i>On Writing</i> 106)</blockquote>
There's nothing more, really, I can add to that, especially considering the fact that King spends another 28 pages describing a writerly toolbox. What can I add?<br />
<br />
Except to say that I am (re)building my own toolbox in my own way. I've talked about Burroway and Prose and here a touch about King, and there is no limit to how much these writers are helping me build it and fill it up.<br />
<br />
But I'm not relying on fiction writers alone for help. I'm also teaching a junior-level composition class, using Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein<i>'s They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing."</i> A book that sings the praises of, provides examples of, and teaches students to use . . . templates. Hazah! But I don't mean to be sarcastic. Nor do I mean to belabor an introduction of the book.<br />
<br />
Consider the opening paragraph of the introduction "Entering the Conversation":<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Think about an activity that you do particularly well: cooking, playing the piano, shooting a basketball, even something as basic as driving a car. If you reflect on this activity, you'll realize that once you mastered it you no longer had to give much conscious thought to the various moves that go into doing it. Performing this activity, in other words, depends on your having learned a series of complicated moves--moves that may seem mysterious or difficult to those who haven't yet learned them. (1) </blockquote>
This notion -- that writing is a complicated set of simple procedures -- is something that I could not acknowledge over the past few months. I have, rather, been trying to sit down and finish a novel about the early days of the oil industry. In the midst of my desperation resulting from <i>Scrap</i>, each time I sat down, I became overwhelmed by the 80,000 words staring at me and the notion that there might be 20,000-40,000 more that I needed to get down before I could even begin a revision, and then, and then, and then, oh my hell. It's little wonder the words fell to pieces when I looked at them. The language became shrouded in mystery, because all those moves had ceased to exist.<br />
<br />
In similar fashion, I have a hard time imagining Michael Jordon returning to basketball after five months away from the court and leaping from the foul line after his first dribble.<br />
<br />
Now, though, I'm working again on those small simple steps. I'm reconsidering what I know about showing vs. telling. I'm thinking about character, setting, dialogue. I'm reading like a writer again. It's all part and parcel, though, right? I'm simply repeating myself with every entry, with everything I read. Oooh, did I mention the inspiration for Anne Lamott's <i>Bird by Bird</i>? If you've read the book, you'll recall:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."</blockquote>
So, yes, I am repeating myself. No these lessons are nothing new, <i>really</i>. Nothing groundbreaking in any given thought, but the repetition itself speaks to the practice at the heart of this regenerative process: the sustained, consistent effort.</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-67116561151707725012012-01-10T21:42:00.001-05:002012-01-10T21:42:17.246-05:00Fiction, the Healing Process Continues<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Part of the process of learning to write again is studying craft again. Or is it studying craft for the first time? I'm not sure how to qualify this, so I'll just tell the story. Because I'm teaching creative writing this quarter, and because I taught it last quarter, I've been reading books about writing fiction. The two text books for the class are <i>Writing Fiction</i> (7th ed) by Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey French and <i>Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them</i> by Francine Prose. Both wonderful books from which I am learning more than I can express, more than I can teach, more than I'll ever know I'm learning.<br />
<br />
But here's what I mean by "studying craft for the first time": I never read Burroway's book before. Nor had I read Prose's. I've never read <i>Writing down the Bones</i>, <i>Bird by Bird</i>, Stephen King's <i>On Writing</i>, <i>The Art of Fiction </i>by John Gardner . . . the list goes on. I read most of <i>Making Shapely Fiction</i> by Jerome Stern as an undergrad, and I've done a great job of forgetting a large portion of that text (I, of course, mean that in a good way), and I read an occasional craft essay by Carlos Fuentes, Andrea Barret, Rick Bass, Lord Byron, but by and large my ideas about craft came to me through reading <i>Moby Dick</i>, <i>Satanic Verses</i>, <i>Darconville's Cat</i>. I learned to write, largely, the same way I learned to play soccer . . . except I learned to play soccer by watching it on television, but you get the point.<br />
<br />
Which might be part of what I love about <i>Reading Like a Writer</i> . . . Prose suggests that we attempt to unlearn what we know about reading, and, in a sense, learn to love reading again, learn to savor it. I've never been a fan of speed reading, never been a fan of skimming, never been a fan of reading the first and last paragraphs of a short story or just the last act. I have never read a Cliff's Notes or a Sparknotes: I've always wanted to, I've just never found the time for it. I've always read, as far as I can remember, every word. It's a slow process, and I'm a slow reader. My students always think I'm kidding when I describe how many minutes per page a book takes me. (For instance, <i>Writing Fiction</i> is a five-minute per page kind of book. <i>Infinite Jest</i> for another instance took close to 6000 minutes to read.) Francine Prose celebrates this kind of reading . . . in fact, more intensely: she suggests reading classic texts in a language you barely know. Now that's slow, savory, something I hope to do . . . someday.<br />
<br />
I have often wished I could read faster. But never while I'm immersed in a great book. I never once, while reading <i>Sometimes a Great Notion</i> thought, "I can't wait til I'm done with this monster."<br />
<br />
As for <i>Writing Fiction</i>, Burroway has gathered a best-of writers talking about writing. She continually quotes Dorothy Allison, Flannery O'Connor, Anton Chekhov, and maybe a hundred other disparate and talented writers. And this is what I mean about "studying the craft again:" This text reinforces a lot of the ideas about writing that I've learned from my amazing cast of mentors, my shockingly talented groups of peers, and from my own autodidactic pursuit of craft lessons.<br />
<br />
Burroway quotes Octavia Butler: "Forget Inspiration. habit is more dependable. habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice." The most important element of any writing life, I believe, is a sustained, consistent effort. I like talking to folks who say that they're always writing, no matter what they're doing, even if they're sitting around smoking a joint or bad-mouthing Republicans or playing golf. I think that's fantastic, and I think it's largely true (that writers are always writing), but if a writer doesn't get on her ass every day and slap some keys, she isn't going to produce anything -- she'll lead the paradoxical life of a writer not writing. Let me preface this (after the fact) by saying I'm definitely wrong about this. Some folks can smoke a can of opium, sit in a bathtub for an hour, and write "Kubla Khan" any day of the week. Some folks can write in their sleep or while they're driving or while they're watching the Superbowl. I can't. I think most folks can't. And, even if they can, I think we're all better served by the sustained, consistent effort, by persistence in practice, by sitting on our asses and cranking out words.<br />
<br />
Another hugely exciting experience I'm having in reading <i>Writing Fiction</i> is the writerly dialogue the work is opening up in my head. Burroway quotes John Gardner:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
. . . the needless filtering of the image through some observing consciousness. The amateur writes: "Turning, she noticed two snakes fighting in among the rocks." Compare: "She turned. In among the rocks, two snakes were fighting . . ." Generally speaking--though no laws are absolute in fiction---vividness urges that almost every occurrence of such phrases as "she noticed" and "she saw" be suppressed in favor of direct presentation of the thing seen.</blockquote>
Is this what it all comes down to? The distinction between "she noticed two snakes fighting" and "two snakes were fighting" feels like the least of details, like noticing a dusty shelf in a condemned building (while I approve of the metaphor, when I'm completely healed, I'll create an analogy with a positive connotation, rather than suggesting that good writing is like a condemned building . . . though, when I say it that way, I like it all the more). I mean is it <i>that</i> big of an issue? I actually asked myself that question as though I were asking John Gardner himself. And, as if John Gardner were speaking through me*, I thought, "It is not only <i>that </i>big of an issue. It's the only issue. A good story, a good piece of fiction <i>is </i>consciousness -- we are accessing another's consciousness. We are seeing through another's eyes (we are, in fact, using all of her senses, which is why sensuous detail is so stinking important), and registering another's thoughts." I for one have never looked at two snakes fighting and thought, "I turn, only to notice two snakes fighting among the rocks." No, I have never thought that at all. I might say that, but I'll be damned if I'm going to narrate the action in my head, I think to myself as I continue typing and consider what I have learned today.<br />
<br />
Also, I say I haven't read Anne Lamott's <i>Bird by Bird </i>or Stephen King's <i>On Writing</i>, but that's only half true. I started both books recently and both are helping me to rebuild my writing self. Thank you, fiction writers who have paved this road to recovery. I always imagined that I would read the books someday to help me improve my writing, to help me improve my teaching, to help me pass an exam or land a job, but I never would have guessed I'd be reading these texts as a way to help my psyche heal.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
*Yep. I'm suggesting that I'm channeling, not only one of the best fiction writing books of all time, but also, a book I just acknowledged I've never read. It might make you feel better that earlier today on a different blog, I very clearly compared myself to Cool Hand Luke.</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-72821246098818034882012-01-05T07:14:00.001-05:002012-01-13T13:34:23.422-05:00Reading Like a Writer<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Okay, so, clearly, the last five months have been rough on this writer. I'm not ashamed to admit, I've had my first bout with "writer's block," whatever that is. Whatever that stems from. Down the road, certainly, when asked about writer's block, I have to imagine myself saying, "Yes, I had that once, it was caused by the loss of my first novel," and that might be true, or it might be a cop out, or, most likely, it will be like this: I doubted writing for a while, the way some folks doubt their religion, but I worked and I prayed and I read and I sat down and pounded the keyboard and pounded the keyboard . . . and here I am today.<br />
<br />
Perhaps it will be part of my acceptance speech for the Pulitzer Prize . . .<br />
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Certainly, by then, I will have got over my need to use so many elipses.<br />
<br />
At any rate, I am becoming a writer again. That is, in large part, what this blog is about. The recurring narrative, of course, is about loss, but the bigger idea, the one that will carry on after the sad-sac recounting of the early life and times of <i>Scrap</i>, is that I am learning how to write again.<br />
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And, and I have to stress this, it's not <i>just </i>happening for me. I am not just waking up in the morning feeling a little more like a writer each day. No doubt Michael Jordan never stepped back onto the court after a month or two of hardly touching a ball and leap from the foul line (did I just compare my writing to MJ's basketballing? Oh, my. I'm getting out of control). It isn't <i>just </i>happening. I'm reading; I'm writing; I'm seeking out my writerly spirituality (again, very similar, I imagine, to folks who follow other religious practices).<br />
<br />
Will I please be more concrete and specific, please?<br />
<br />
"Afraid of running out of books," Francine Prose writes in <i>Reading Like a Writer</i>, "I decided to slow myself down by reading Proust in French." I've been reading books about reading and writing is one thing I'm doing. I have no fear of running out of books, but I love Prose's notion here. I love that she gives herself permission to slow down her reading: <b>clearly, </b>she is not suggesting to read less or to read sloppily, lazily, half-assedly -- she is suggesting we look more closely at every word, to make connections, to love the work. Again, I'm thinking of sports: in all my time around sports, I have never heard a coach say, "Get your ass out there and shoot 10,000 foul shots as fast as you possibly can!" Rather, we ask an athlete to slow down, to perfect a particular motion, to focus on Feet Elbows Eyes Followthrough (FEEF? That doesn't sound right).<br />
<br />
I taught this book in the fall and am teaching it again and am taking this advice to slow down. The easy thing for me, at this point, might be to skim through the text, focus on a few notions that I underlined, checked, starred or circled last quarter and summarize the rest. But I don't think that would be as good for my writing.<br />
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At the same time, I don't think I have it in me to write a 500 word blog post every time I find a sentence I like. Or do I . . . ?<br />
<br />
No. I don't.</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-51018315917863012932011-12-27T15:46:00.001-05:002011-12-27T15:46:20.592-05:00Writing for Fun<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #2a2a2a;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #2a2a2a;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #2a2a2a;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #2a2a2a;">So last week, I rewrote a book called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What I Know About Boys</i> 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.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #2a2a2a;">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).</span></div>
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<span style="color: #2a2a2a;">But, still and seriously, that’s not the point. I enjoyed the writing – in process and product.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #2a2a2a;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #2a2a2a;">I suppose this blog is the closest I can come to thanking the world for continuing encouragement.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #2a2a2a;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #2a2a2a;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #2a2a2a;">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.)</span></div>
</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-8553087848426498142011-12-26T11:54:00.001-05:002011-12-26T11:54:49.343-05:00Practice<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Writing, I've found, in practice, is not so terribly different from sports.<br />
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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?<br />
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Holy hell.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-24861990195080951242011-12-20T16:13:00.000-05:002011-12-20T16:13:15.024-05:00The Writer Who Came in from the Cold; Or Went out to the Cold; I Don't Know Which Yet<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I'm taking a quick break from my "Brief History" thread for several reasons. The main reason is that I finished <em>The Day of the Jackal</em> today, and, to be honest, I allowed reading that to cut into part of my writing time.<br />
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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 <em>The Little Dog Who Lost His Way</em> (I need a fact checker for that title).<br />
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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. <br />
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I should note that all with <em>Gorky Park</em> and <em>The Spy Who Came in from the Cold</em>, we also read <em>Going after Cacciato</em> and <em>Our Man in Havana</em>, such that the often arbitrary nature of the distinctions between forms showed its unkempt head from time to time.<br />
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Sooooooooooooooooooo what?<br />
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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: <br />
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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.<br />
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Wish me luck.</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-36392380467395566722011-12-16T17:33:00.003-05:002011-12-16T17:33:56.898-05:00Heaven and Hell<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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."<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-9751921995580472282011-12-15T13:38:00.002-05:002011-12-15T13:38:50.051-05:00Part of a Balanced Reading Diet<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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?<br />
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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.<br />
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If I am to be honest with myself, my time would have been better spent reading <em>The Jackal </em>or drafting a story.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-20206652531711649672011-12-14T15:48:00.001-05:002011-12-14T15:48:50.588-05:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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.<br />
<br />
Francine Prose writes:<br />
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"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 <em>did</em> love, exactly" (<em>Reading Like a Writer</em> 8).<br />
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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 <em>bettering </em>myself by working on my pedagogy or, at least, reading theory.<br />
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But I'm reading again for pleasure, but also for practice. I'm reading <em>The Day of the Jackal</em>, 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-23186991092040095462011-12-13T19:55:00.000-05:002011-12-13T19:55:58.933-05:00Another First Step<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6686700448890746334.post-8047041118296134172011-12-12T14:41:00.000-05:002011-12-12T14:41:14.584-05:00Beginning a Sustained, Consistent Writing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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.<br />
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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 <em>Sometimes a Great Notion</em>, but to exercise, much the same as a professional athlete would her body, one's unconscious.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.</div>Jackson Connorhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01336091187419706497noreply@blogger.com0