Post Thanksgiving Thoughts

Day after Thanksgiving and I'm finally into gratitude.  

Grateful for the satisfaction of wrestling a paragraph onto the page, never mind the two hours I struggled to get it right.

Grateful for rendering a character's emotion believable and honest. Capturing just the right moment to get him on stage, raw and vulnerable.  

Grateful for the joy of having written.  

Sometimes it feels like a great effort just to sit down and turn on the computer.  I look at all the piles on my desk and give myself permission to ignore them.  Just get to the novel. Mornings work for me.  Face the page, reach into the center of myself and don't look back.

Ignore email,  Facebook, Twitter and all the rest. Ignore the cat and the two dogs who have already been fed.

And today I surprise myself.  A breakthrough.  What I believe is the crux of the novel, the emotional truth, the hard story, turns comic at the scene's end.  Not trivial, but funny.

So thankful for not taking myself too seriously.  

Post Election Pessimism

Taking a break from writing to wallow in my role as a curmudgeon.

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
 --H.L. Mencken
A pessimist is  person who has to listen to too many optimists. 
--Don Marquis
My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of other pessimists.
--Jean Rostand
Democracy: The worship of jackals by jackasses.
--H.L. Mencken
If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.
--Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Early to rise and early to bed
Makes a male healthy, wealthy and dead.
--James Thurber
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
--Oscar Wilde
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginable.
--Oscar Wilde
Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.
--Woody Allen
My heart is pure as the driven slush.
--Tallulah Bankhead

Chaos Into Art - The Writer's Responsibility

These two writers (who couldn't be more different) say the same thing:

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.

  --  Katherine Anne Porter

One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. 

-- James Baldwin, Autobiographical Notes

Details, Details Details

 . . . Noticing the details takes conscious effort.  We see only abbreviations of life because it takes times and effort to shed the blinders that prevent us from seeing it full blown. We see people as blond, brunette, tall, short, thin, fat. We don't see how they fit in their clothes, the peculiarities of their movements, the expressions or lack of expressions on their faces, the way a hand gestures, the way an eye moves in its socket, how hair is made to obey or how it is a condition of constant rebellion. We don't see the touch of grime on a coat sleeve, the long scratch on the back of a hand, the worn heel, the empty smile, the combative stiffening of a neck. You need to see your characters with unsparing clarity if you expect your reader to see them at all. -- The Art & Craft of the Short Story by   Rick Demarinis, p. 79.

      

Who are you?

People said:  "Oh, be yourself at all costs." But I found that it was not so easy to know just what one's self was. It was far easier to want what other people seemed to want and then imagine that the choice was one's own. -- Joanna Field

If you were a member of Jesse James' band and people asked you what you were, you wouldn't say, "Well, I'm a desperado." You'd say something like "I work in banks" or "I've done some railroad work." It took me a long time just to say, "I'm a writer."  -- Ray Blount, Jr.

To theorize about how I became a writer, and how writing shapes my life now, requires levels of abstraction and reasoning that are beyond my abilities. But by making brief notes, capturing shards of memory or thought, writing specific scenes, I began to discover what they mean and how they might cohere. -- Floyd Skloot 

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How we see ourselves is a nebulous thing.  Others see us; we do not. Mirrors reveal only our appearance, not who we are. I would guess that most of us feel our identity rather than show it. Who is that person in the mirror? 

Writing helps with the process of knowing ourselves. Sometimes we're surprised at the words we put on the page.  In the act of creating we discover our power inside.  And when that happens, we say, yes, I am a writer.  

Writers Must Persist in Remembering the Sweet and the Sour

Writers remember everything…especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he’ll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.”
— Stephen King, Misery

Your Past is Never Over

"I don’t believe in 'laying to rest' the past. There are wounds we won’t get over. There are things that happen to us that, no matter how hard we try to forget, no matter with what fortitude we face them, what mix of religion and therapy we swallow, what finished and durable forms of art we turn them into, are going to go on happening inside of us for as long as our brains are alive." --Christian Wiman, "The Limit"

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 Yes! In fact I mine my past and go where it hurts. That's where the good stuff is; where I can go deep, where I feel it all the way down in my belly.  Then I know I'm writing.  I've got something worth messing with, putting the real words on paper.  -- Catherine

Setting, Landscape and Atmosphere

Setting - where the story takes place, how characters respond to their surroundings, the sights, sounds and smells that connect the reader to the written word.  This is the building site of the writer's craft.

Setting adds color to the story, affects characters, adds authenticity to the narrative and paints pictures in the imagination of readers.--Nancy Lamb, The Art and Craft of Story Telling.

Settings aren't just backdrops.  Just by where you have the action happening will tell a lot about the action itself and the people involved.--Ansen Dibell, Plot.

Setting grounds your writing in the reality of place and depicts the theme of your story through powerful metaphor. Without setting, characters are simply there, in a vacuum, with no reason to act and most importantly, no reason to care. Without a place there is no story.--Nina Munteanu, scribophile.

Landscape - the broad vista.

On the surface, it would appear that landscape and setting are the same creatures, identical twins given different names just to confuse the beginning writer. This, however, would not be the truth since setting is where a story takes place--including where each scene takes place--while landscape is much broader than that . . .  Landscape in writing implies much the same as that which is implied by the word when it's used to refer to a location in a country: It is the broad vista into which the writer actually places the individual settings of the novel, sort of like the canvas or other medium onto which a painter has decided to daub color.

You need to think about the landscape of your book because if you're able to make the landscape of place real, you can make the land itself real, which gives you a leg up on making the entire novel real for the reader.

Atmosphere - tone and attitude.

Sometimes referring to subject matter, sometimes to technique.  Part of the atmosphere of a scene or story is its setting, which includes the locale, period, weather, and time of day. Part of the atmosphere is its 'tone,' and attitude taken by the narrative voice that can be described, not in terms of time and place, but as a quality--sinister, facetious, formal, solemn, wry, and so on . . . As we need to know a character's gender, race, and age, we need to know in what atmosphere she or he operates to understand the significance of the action.--Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction, a Guide to Narrative Craft.

Setting, landscape, atmosphere are separate entities but connected. The first puts you in the action. The second contains the story's broader vista. The third enables the characters to breathe.

  

  

Great Betrayals

The following is an excerpt from The New York Times' opinion page dated Sunday, October 6, 2013.  I quote from Anna Fels, a psychiatrist and faculty member at Weill Cornell Medical School:

As a psychiatrist, I can tell you that it's often a painstaking process to reconstruct a coherent personal history piece by piece--one that acknowledges the deception while reaffirming the actual life experience. Yet it's work that needs to be done. Moving forward in life is hard or even, at times, impossible, without owning a narrative of one's past. Isak Dinesen has been quoted as saying "all sorrows can be born if you put them in a story or tell a story about them." Perhaps robbing someone of his or her story is the greatest betrayal of all.

Linear Vs Spatial Narrative

Second part of Kim Barnes' handout at the July 2014 Fishtrap writing conference in Oregon:

"There are SO many ways to tell stories, but every story is, in its way, an argument. First, the story must argue for its own validity--its right to exist. That requires recognition on the part of the reader/audience of some melodic engagement--some 'base line' that we recognize as common to our narratival experience. The basic linear narrative is kind of like a number system or syntax or composition: 1-10, subject-verb-object, five-paragraph essay. It's the foundation on which everything is built and/or interpreted.

The next argument is that, in the absence of the linear 'melody,' something else (also recognizable and held in common) must come in to take its place. And that's the challenge for the writer/composer/artist/dancer. What is that 'something'?  Whatever it is, it must also be observable and have progression, movement, and pattern, with an inherent logic that we can follow, or learn to follow--be taught by the story to follow. If you can define/delineate that OTHER SOMETHING that takes the place of the 'melody' of linear narrative, you'll have an argument for a story that is outside of convention. But, no matter what, I believe it's all either STRUCTURE or ANTI-STRUCTURE that we recognize. Outside/between is chaos without chaos theory (because, of course, chaos as defined by theory is, alas, inherently linear and structured and observed and articulated via a rubric that is absolutely defined).

Giving yourself over to the simple narrative, the archetypal progression, is a kind of submission to the laws of the universe, in some ways. To EXIST is to abide by linear laws; to LIVE is to exist inside the spatial, and story must bring those two experiences together in a horizontal/vertical way. In my mind, this is the role of all art. But vertical movement expands, interrupts, deepens, slows, adds texture and space to an otherwise linear narrative. It's in the vertical movement that the 'why'--rather than the 'what'--of the story exists."

Vertical Vs Horizontal Movement in Narrative

The following is an handout excerpt from literary writer and Professor of English at the University of Idaho, Kim Barnes. I met her at the Fishtrap writing conference in July 2014 where she taught:

"Vertical movement is what gives a narrative depth, texture, tension and resonance.  It interrupts the forward, chronological pace of a story or essay (action--what happened) and replaces simple linear movement with spatial complexity (thought--the why of the story). It represents the act of imagination--what propels us into the imaginative leap. There are many ways to achieve vertical movement, including:

1) Backstory (part of plot/action--more of an interruption of horizontal chronology than vertical movement but provides spatial texture)
2) Associative memory (part of thought)
3) Intellectual contemplation and query
4) Detailed, concrete description of characters, objects, setting, landscape
5) Figurative language, including similes (like, as) and metaphors
6) Lyrical "flights" (extended poetic contemplation)
7) Inclusion of outside information and research
8) Appropriate and intentional intrusion of the narrator

As you work toward vertical movement in your writing, read essays and stories by  authors whose work you admire. Pay attention to places where the author is employing vertical movement. You will find that most successful literary prose is made up of a majority of spatial rather than linear telling. Remember that horizontal writing suggests what, vertical writing suggests why. It is this contribution of action and thought that defines our best stories."   

More tomorrow . . .