Boogeymen, weirdos and freaks

Warning: This blog entry has several stops in Freakyville. Hope you all stay on board.

As a grad student, my first attempt at a thesis was fiction based on a trial I’d covered as a reporter when I lived in Georgia. It had been an interesting case, one that had drawn a degree of international attention, and I felt I should (a mistake I’ll discuss in a later blog entry — never write what you should write; write what you want to write) write about it, because I had been there. I spent my first semester working on this novel, compiled about 80 pages or so and gave it to my mentor, Kaylie Jones.

Kaylie is a pull-no-punches teacher, and when you’ve written crap, she’ll tell you (she is the most passionate, inspiring and brilliant instructor on any topic I’ve ever known). “You need to seriously think about why you want to be a writer,” she told me.

Then she said someting which at the time freaked me out. “You should try meditating,” she said.

Sounds new agey and ridiculous, doesn’t it? It did to me at the time. Meditation always seemed like something for robe-wearing sandle-wearers. I always thought, appologies to Samuel Coelridge and his opium, writing was sitting there, staring at a page and figuring out a story that exists somewhere in your head, and the freakos who talk of subconscious were all kidding themselves.

But Kaylie’s recommendation was where I began to realize something about what Norman Mailer calls “The Spooky Art.” For the most part, nobody gives a shit what your conscious mind has to say.

Here’s an Adams County, Pa., description of  the human mind. Ya got two brains bangin round in that skull o’ yers. Some’s got more, but youse got at least two in thar. The first is your conscious self, the person who makes fun of people who meditate, who recognizes reality. Often, this brain is the one that tells you the lies you need to get through your day, to make you socially acceptable, to guard you, to bring you success in business, etc., etc. It has limits and is fairly uninteresting — he’s the person you meet at a party who spends the evening talking about mushroom soil. He fits in, he doesn’t stand out. He’s boring.

The other brain is your subconscious. This is where you dream. It has no limits. When your boring conscious mind takes a nap, this guy takes over. This is the place that gives you the nightmares about the vampire shoes and vest-wearing snakes, yes. But it’s more than that. This is the mind that has a deep-rooted connection to your soul (some would go even further and talk about the collective subconscious). This is who you really are. This is where you reach the brass ring that all writers are searching for — truth. Even if you’re like Buffy, a children’s writer colleague of mine, who writes, among other things, funny stories for children, she’s trying to write something that’s true, that touches her reader in some way (even if it’s just something to make them laugh). All creativity comes from here, even if your conscious self is in control, it’s your subconscious pushing its way past the boring guy and showing off.

So if you think you can sit down and type out a story the same way you make out a grocery list, success may elude you. You have to let your subconscious tell the story. Nobody cares about your conscious mind. Your conscious mind is all about your daily responsibilities and social acceptance. Even if you’re writing a novel about daily responsibilities and social acceptance, if you let your conscious mind tell the story, you’ll tell it in trite ways everyone has heard before. Let your subconscious take over, and you’ll reach deeper chords all of us have within us. You’ll be speaking to people on a deeper level.

I don’t mean you should fall asleep and hire Edgar Casey’s stenographer to write down what you say. I mean you should do your best to quiet your conscious mind. Some recommend a simple meditation. In a quiet room, sit down in a comfortable position. Close your eyes. Now, breathe in and out and count your breaths. Each time you breath in think “And” and when you breathe out think “one.” Count up to four and start over again. Do this for 20 minutes. Now here’s the hard part — DON’T THINK ABOUT ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE NUMBERS YOU’RE COUNTING. Think of your brain as a child you’re trying to keep on a path. When the child wanders into the grass or to something else, gently tell the child to return to the path. It’s hard! I think it was Plato who compared the human mind to a ship adrift on an ocean. You’ll think about sports, celebrities, what you have to do, your finances, you’ll see pictures, lavalamp-like lumps — but you gently tell yourself to stop and return to your counting. It’s hard to steady it, but that’s what you’re attempting to do. You’re attempting to focus on nothing but this set of numbers. And, with practice, you learn to focus deeply and you can quiet your mind.

Others swear by transcendental meditation, which involves a mantra — something you repeat over and over. There are classes for this.

But the point is, you have to try to let your subconscious tell the story. This is one of the great challenges in writing. But have you ever written something and felt like what you’re writing is taking over? That’s your subconscious telling the story. The key is to harness it and make that kind of thing happen all the time.

Anybody have any luck with this? Anybody have any suggestions? I’ve heard writing first thing in the morning is helpful for the subconscious as well. You keep a pad and pen by your bed. You wake up and you write before you do anything else (when I try this, all I write is crap, but I’ve heard it works for some people).

Anybody have any advice to give? And by a show of hands, how many of you now think I’m a hippy weirdo?

Revision help

Note: Only two more shopping days until I stop taking questions for author Marlon James. This is a guy who knows the industry, everyone. It’s your chance to talk with him about anything you want. Also, I posted a new writing exercise. Show us your work!

So four years ago, I finished the first draft of a manuscript for a novel. I liked it. My writing instructor and mentor liked it. My family and friends who I asked to read it all claimed they liked it (But what are they going to say? That’s like saying “Mom thinks I’m good looking, so I must be.”).

Everybody else, however, gave it a thumbs down.

I’ve been given various reasons for the disapproval. But the common theme seems to be “your characters need more development.”

OK. I get the need for characters to be organic creations (see earlier posts). They have to come from the subconscious and really they should drive the narrative, not vice versa. But here’s what I don’t get.

Help!!!

How do you add character development in a revision? Your characters personalities and decisions were supposed to have been driving the story? Once the story has been written, how do you go back and add character development, since their development is supposed to be what’s driving the whole narrative to begin with?

Some say go back and talk about their upbringing, their relationship with family and friends. OK, but isn’t that really just adding backstory? Backstory and character development aren’t necessarily the same thing, because character development is how your character (assuming it’s a round character — a dynamic one that changes and not a flat character) changes throughout your story.

So essentially does this mean you should throw away everything and start from scratch? That doesn’t sound like a revision to me. That sounds more like throwing away your work and starting over.

For four years, I’ve been doing revision after revision of this manuscript and I feel like I keep working around the  problem.

So I’m throwing this question out there. How do you develop characters in a revision of a story already written? Not looking for philosophy here. Looking for a nuts and bolts how do ya do it kind of answer. Help!!!

Exercise 2: A call for submissions

This goes hand in hand with the last post on showing instead of telling. Think of a situation. Make it as basic as possible. Someone has cancer. Someone just won the lottery. A man beat his wife. Now, write a story about that situation in 500 words or less. And here’s the challenge — NEVER DIRECTLY MENTION THE SITUATION. If someone has cancer, never use the word cancer. If the man beat his wife and they’re living in the aftermath of that, never mention the beating. Make the situation as clear as possible to your readers without ever once mentioning it. (Don’t cheat and do something like say “hare” if you’re writing about “rabbits.”

Where economy ends

Rush had it right. Show, don't tell.

On Friday, I’m going to submit our questions to author Marlon James. Also, don’t forget to participate in the online excercise.

 

In The Sun Also Rises, Barnes is impotent. Infinite Jest takes place in the not-to-distant future. In The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family is poor.

None of this is told to us. Using his narrator, Hemingway doesn’t say “I am impotent.” David Foster Wallace never says “this all takes place a few years from now.” Steinbeck rarely uses the word poor. And yet we know each of these things more deeply than if they’d been told to us point blank. We have an empathy for Barnes — we feel the humor and sorrow of his “situation.” Infinite Jest’s allegorical, post modernist future is felt more keenly. And Steinbeck tells us more about how it feels to be a dustbowl refugee more accurately than any encyclopedia.

Are these writers being coy? Why don’t they just come out and say what they mean? Seems like it would save an awful lot of trees if writers would just get to the point, doesn’t it?

I think it boils down to what resonates most with the reader. What will evoke the strongest emotional response? This is where description comes into place. You must “show.” Don’t tell (some writers say never tell — but I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule). If you tell somebody something, it doesn’t have the same strength. You’re not making your reader feel something.

This is always a struggle — at least for me. I want my fiction to be simple and clear. Many of my beginnings for novels are nothing but sentence after sentence of telling. I should have been showing my readers something.

Don’t think of it as sacrificing clarity for the sake of artfulness. If you show something correctly, you should be enhancing the clarity. If you make your reader feel something, they have a far better understanding and are moved by something much more than if you come out and say something.

A great way to practice this and challenge yourself is to try to write about a topic without ever using the word you’re writing about. (Hemingway alert — what is it with this guy?) Read Hills Like White Elephants. It’s a simple story about abortion, and abortion is never once mentioned. Everything is subtext, everything is tone.

Watch the way people talk and relate to one another. How often do people say precisely what’s on their minds? And yet often we still understand anyway.

Anybody else struggle with this?

Who are you?

I’ve gotten a few questions for author Marlon James. Post more below. Also, don’t forget to participate in the writing exercise. I’ve gotten a good response to that so far and would like to see more.

The storyteller in A Clockwork Orange

It’s the night of Lord Darlington’s important dinner meeting. His butler, Stevens, is making sure everything goes off without a hitch and nothing will prevent the evening’s perfection — even the fact that his father is dying upstairs. In the end, when his father dies, Stevens speaks with great pride how me must now be a legend among butlers having sacrificed so much to do his duty.

Stevens is telling the story in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. No, more than that — we (the reader) get a glimpse inside Stevens’ head. And what’s most thrilling about this novel, we learn that Stevens is fallible. He’s an unreliable narrator. The real story presents itself in the details he can’t put together or process — but we can. We learn the man Stevens is so devoted to (Darlington) is actually a fascist and that Stevens has sacrificed so much of his life, including a chance to connect with his father and a romance, to perform duties like tidying things up and keeping the pantry stocked. And that’s the real story.

The story is all in the voice. Voice in fiction — not just point of view (first person, second person, third person, third person limited, etc.) — is perspective. It’s complex and it requires a lot of thought. Who is telling your story? When are they telling it? Why are the telling it? Why are they telling it the way they are? Selecting the right lense through which to view your story makes all the difference. And the voice provides a wealth of opportunities for you as a writer.

Believe me, I know. I used to think POV was all that mattered. My first manuscript  was written in first person. But I never really went deeply into my narrator’s mind or thought about when he was telling this story or why. In later drafts, I tried for something far more complex. I went for a third-person-limited narrator, but tried to shift the focus between three characters. The shifts have to be very apparent when you’re writing like this, the voice have to be totally unique, otherwise you’re left with something muddled. I tinkered and tinkered. Seven years passed. I threw my mangled manuscript in a drawer where it remains today.

A fellow writing student who was adept at voice and POV once told me he was so good at it because he’d been an actor. That’s it, essentially. You have to inhabit your characters. You have to inhabit your narrator. Read Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. It’s a murder mystery told from the point of view of an autistic savant — a man who can perform complex mathematical equations but can’t understand basic human emotions. Christopher is telling the story, and better yet, we the narrator know things he does not — we recognize things he can’t say, and in those moments, in the subtext and in the details unspoken, lies the story. It makes for a much more emotional and realistic experience than if Haddon had gone the route of the Victorians and chosen his narrator to be God.

There are an infinite number of options when choosing a voice and a POV. I think it’s where all the possibilities lie in fiction. Is a story better told from high over head with the perspective of centuries separating its telling and it’s happening? Or is it better told in the present tense, in the moment, from the perspective of a character whose views are obscured? Should it be told by a teenager addicted to ultraviolence like in A Clockwork Orange? Should different characters with varying degrees of mental capacity and self absorbtion tell it like in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury? Four third-person limited narrators, including a dog — like in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle? A middle-aged pedophile like in Lolita?

This is always difficult for me — I’m on draft No. 4 of my newest manuscript. I’ve gone from a third-person limited POV to that of a 12-year-old boy, but now I’m struggling with degree of distance. Why is he telling the story and when? Is he an adult looking back? Is he writing in a diary during the events? Are we simply in his head as the story unfolds?

Take a look at two of your favorite books. Who is telling the story in those books? Why are they telling the story? Where are they and when are they telling the story in relation to its happening? Why do you think the author chose this perspective?

And how do you choose your voice and POV when writing a story?

Staying power

Note: We’ve gotten a couple questions for author Marlon James. I’d like more. Please, scroll down and ask him anything on your mind — the guy has a wealth of knowledge to share. Just post your question in the comment section. Also, we’ve gotten a couple of really good responses to the exercise I posted. Let’s keep em coming.

How do you maintain focus to be a writer? It takes a lot of self-discipline, people assume. You have to force yourself to do it every day. My mind wanders too much — I have too much going on, they think.

I’m exactly the same way. Right now, the Phillies are in the penant race, football season is upon us and my favorite team just acquired a dog killer, I’m trying to learn how to be a page designer at a newspaper, maintain a relationship with someone who lives two hours away, my mother’s sister is fighting a losing battle with cancer, I’m obsessed with Life of Pi, I’m trying to jog, exercise, eat better, I love movies and now I’ve got a blog to maintain. Every few days I’m obsessed with something else, now it’s Life of Pi, a few weeks ago it was blues music, before that the films of Akira Kurosawa …

I’m a mess. A lot, both useless and crucial, competes for my attention. I’m interested in everything and an afficinado of nothing. But I’ve been writing every day for a while now. And I think I’ve discovered the secret to maintaining focus.

Program yourself. You have to completely imerse yourself. You can’t come to writing casually. If you think you’re going to do this in your spare time and have any success at it, you’re mistaken. You become a writer. You have to take everything else around you and look at it as a writer. How can this help me acheive my mission? Next thing you know, you won’t be forcing yourself to write. You’ll be writing because it’s what you do. Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast talks about how he belongs to his pen and his notebook. That should be you.

Once you come up with a project, develop a list of books to read that will help you stay focused. Writing about a boat? Read Moby Dick. Read Life of Pi. Read Huck Finn (hey, a raft is a boat). Read Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum (one of the greatest true-life adventure books ever written). Your family? The Brothers K, Everything is Illuminated, Kaylie Jones’ A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries even Infinite Jest (though you’ll have to wade through the late, great David Foster Wallace’s thousand-plus pages of disperate POVs and hundreds of footnotes on addiction, it’s a great book — if you like PoMo). This helps in two ways. One, you can check out what’s already been done and maybe get some ideas for what to do or, better yet, what not to do. And two it keeps you focused. It keeps your head in the game. 

Here’s something I discovered, recently, that will make me either sound like a nerd or an old person — audiobooks. Listen to them in your car. I find I have very little time to read any more, I spend so much time on the road. I used to listen to a lot of music and talk radio. Now I listen to books I download, books on CD, free podcast readings of books that have long been on my reading list. It’s not the same as reading, exactly (unless you have Tim Robbins voice in your head when you read The Great Gatsby), but it gives you a different perspective on a work. And again, it keeps you focused on this marvelous language of ours, the beauty of it.

So how else can we stay focused on our work? Anybody have any suggestions about maintaining focus?

Chicken or egg?

Note: I’m still taking questions for author Marlon James. In addition to being a brilliant writer, he had to struggle with lots of rejection before achieving his growing success and he knows the publishing industry. Also, check out the writing exercise below.

In Stephen King’s On Writing (A great book. I know some people have snobbish notions about Stephen King, but try to find a more eloquent, readable and practical book on craft. John Gardner puts me to sleep and as much as I love Norman Mailer, saying he tends to be wordy is an understatment), King talks about how he wrote a novel called The Dead Zone from an outline. The idea for the narrative came first, and he laid out a map of where the story was going to go before writing it. He did this one other time with Rose Red.

Then he advises against writing that way.

Most writers don’t start with narrative. When they begin, the narrative is still just a general idea, a germ, a destination maybe they’d  like to visit someday. What comes first for a lot of  modern American writers is character. Then the narrative is guided by your characters’ decisions. You create a person, give him or her likes, dislikes, a personality, and then you put the character into a situation. The character acts or makes decisions and the narrative is born out of that.

Maybe this is why snobby literary types moan about how narrative has been dead for years in American fiction (although most of these monacle-wearers are implying that we Americans are self-involved mirror-gazers who care nothing for the world around us). I don’t necessarily agree with that. Read The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, for instance. But I do agree that story and plot should evolve out of character. Otherwise your narrative is guiding your characters and it loses plausibility.

Think about it. If you come up with your story first, you’re telling your characters what to do. Then they become stock characters, little cardboard puppets who shuffle around from plot point to plot point. If you have your character’s decisions drive the story it becomes real. It’s driven by real emotion. It becomes more meaningful.

But hey, I could be wrong. Where you you start a story? With character or narrative? Why?

Call for submissions (exercise one)

Note: Don’t forget to participate by sending me a question to ask author Marlon James. We’ve got two so far. Keep em coming.

OK, one of the things I was hoping to accomplish with this blog was to provide a venue where we could share our work.  In a weird way, some of you will actually be PUBLISHING YOUR WORK, because you’ll be posting it for everyone to see. Probably the easiest way to do this at first is for us to complete some simple writing exercises. Some of these might seem kind of dumb, but they can be fun and they can help prime the pump for some other projects — you never know where ideas might come from.

EXERCISE 1: Pick two random nouns that have no relation to one another whatsoever and then relate them to one another in a story of 500 words or less. I did this in a writing class once and I wrote a story about the terms “linebacker” and “white zinfandel” and turned it into a short short story about a linebacker who beats up a kicker for comparing him to white zinfandel. See what you can come up with. Post them at any time and I invite everyone to comment on the submissions. If we get any. Cough.

When do you pull the trigger?

What my house would look like

Note: Scroll down and participate in landauerfiction’s interview with author Marlon James. I’m taking questions from anybody interested and will be passing them along (provided they’re not too creepy).

It took seven years to write my first manuscript. F. Scott Fitzgerald conceived, wrote and published The Great Gatsby, arguably the best American novel of the 20th century, in three years time. Hemingway wrote the first draft of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in six weeks of his mid-20s.

So my first novel must be a labyrinthine, Pynchon-esque epic in comparison, right? Suuuurre. I still believe the idea was a good one, but it became a yawner populated by hideous characters — and not the cool grotesques of Winesburg, Ohio. More like 200-plus pages of waiting in line at the DMV.

I tell people my first manuscript was a classroom. I was learning how to write a novel. Never mind that in seven years I could have learned to be a doctor or a lawyer.

Let’s face it, it wasn’t exactly seven solid years. I wrote it piecemeal (see the post about being a constant, everyday writer). But I used to tell myself by sticking with this one idea, I was tenacious.

Maybe I was something else. Maybe I was … oh, whats the proper lit-crit moniker … yes, a moron. I didn’t know when to give it up. I spun my wheels and spun my wheels. Other ideas came and went, but because I was married to idea I stayed faithful and let the ideas disappear.

Now, here we go again withmanuscript No. 2. I’m going on 4 years with it now. It’s in its fourth draft (not to mention numerous false starts). I feel better about this than the first time out, but it’s still lacking in ways I can’t quite put my finger on. And when I think I’ve found the answer, I write a new draft, only to find out that it was more flawed than the previous draft.  Thank God for a big harddrive, otherwise my house would begin to look like the warehouse at the end of Citizen Kane, stacked with failures in boxes.

I can complete a first draft easily. Rewrites are what kill me. I’m not averse to writing multiple drafts. Marlon James (still plenty of space for your questions folks — see below). I keep reaching and reaching, I think if I tweak this or that it’ll be perfect. But then it’s not.

Some tell me to just send the book out as is (I’ve already gotten some negative feedback from an agent and a Viking Prss rep). Others tell me to trash it and move on. I have a new manuscript which is flowing better than anything has in months, and I almost hate to abandon it.

So here’s my question: When do you say die? How do you know when to give it up and move onto the next one?

The truth about modifiers

Note: Don’t forget! Scroll down and check out our upcoming interview with author Marlon James. I’m sending Marlon questions from everyone who submits them (provided they’re not too crazy), so don’t miss out on the chance to chat with this up-and-coming literary figure.

One of the worst things I can do when I’m working on a project is to read Fitzgerald. His prose is so beautiful. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be able to write something like “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.” The problem is I always try to imitate that style even when I don’t mean to. And when a person who is unsure about themselves tries to write this way, it turns into overwritten dreck, and nine times out of ten the writer goes crazy with modifiers.

I’m talking about adjectives and adverbs here. We love em. They’re the added emphasis, the colors in our little paint-by-numbers drawing. John didn’t just say something, he said something INTENTLY. It’s not just a car it’s a blue, sporty car.

Here’s the truth about modifiers: Modifiers are the failures of nouns and verbs.

I’m not saying adjectives and adverbs aren’t necessary — sometimes they are. But if you’re anything like me, you reach for them far too often (notice I used the unecessary words “anything” and “far” in that sentence). You don’t trust your nouns and verbs to make your point. You’re reaching for something, and usually what’s lowest on the shelf are words to quantify and qualify what you’ve already said.

Arthur Quiller-Couch’s famous advice for writers is “Murder your darlings.” Often your darlings are these words, these little safety nets you pad your stories with. When you want to get to the bare essence of your story, strip all this stuff out of there. It should be the first to go. Go through and axe the adjectives — even if you love them. Unless the fact that the couch is brown is some integral part of the work, who cares what color it is?

Hate to keep going back to the Hemingway well, but here’s a guy who had it right. His prose is lean to the nth degree. Before you do any rewrites, read The Sun Also Rises. Or read his short story “The Killers.”

Working for a newspaper can help you with economy. That’s my day job — has been for 13 years now — and I’ve learned that my prose has to be devoid of fluff. You have to pick the clearest, most bullshit-free way of saying what you want to say. You have a limited space. Often headlines have be two words or one word. That can help in fiction (the stuff you have to unlearn from being a journalist when writing fiction or creative non-fiction? That’s a different story).

So what are some other rules of thumb when it comes to economy and breaking the adjective adverb addiction?