2010 Booklist?

Man, I haven't been following writing blogs long enough. If I had, I would've known to keep a list of books I've read this year. Everybody seems to have one this week, and they look so impressive.

I've already been frustrated once this year to discover my online public library account doesn't have a history page. How awesome would that be? If I couldn't remember what I read nine months ago, the library would know, wouldn't they? Too bad they don't care to keep that info around, or, if they do, don't want to share it with me. Hmph.

I know I read Outlander because my best friend fell in love with it and lent me a copy. And right now, I've got three books on my nightstand, a James Patterson, and two Regency Romances (one includes time travel, and that almost makes up for the flat protagonist). I purchased Paranormalcy, Firelight and Mockingjay. I purchased Corona by MJ Heiser, but made the mistake of pre-ordering Mockingjay at the same time (won't make that mistake again). I read a handful of books on bird migration and another on bat behavior, but I won't blow you away with the details (and, believe me, they are mind-blowing). Oh, and I remember starting out the year with Ernest Hemingway and Mary Shelley. I'm sure there are two or three dozen more I just can't remember. (In the filing cabinet of my mind, one drawer won't open, two are just crammed with piles of unlabeled papers, and I think the last one holds moldy sandwiches and broken radio parts). 

Know what I haven't read? Harry Potter books two through seven (I know, you're wondering what planet I've been on the past ten years). Or any fiction by Stephen King (and after reading On Writing, I want to...oh, hey, that's another one I read in 2010).

When I do read them, I'll add them to my 2011 list. Along with Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, Eileen Cook's What Would Emma Do, Anderson's Speak, and at least two sequels to Outlander (my best friend is both fanatic and a very good lender). Those are on my to-read pile right now.

Hey Muse, Can't You See I'm Driving?

Sometimes the best and most brilliant ideas have the worst timing.

The best time of course would be when I sit down to write. My muse and I both know ahead of time that I'll be showing up, but I have no clue what she'll be doing. She seems to have no consideration for keeping appointments, or for warning me when she's going to take off on long vacations. I wonder if she even knows herself. "Hey, I think I'll leave this afternoon for Alaska and stay as long as I feel like," she says to herself. She's done it before. She's always been that way.

But just as bad is when she shows up uninvited.

Elizabeth Gilbert interviewed the musician Tom Waits once, and he related to her a story like this. He's driving down the freeway in Los Angeles, and a fragment of a melody comes to him. He doesn't have a piece of paper or pen, and he sees that he's going to lose track of the inspiration before he can write it down. At first, he thinks he'll be haunted by this song that slipped by, gone forever. But then he stops that whole tormenting line of thought, looks up at the sky and shouts, "Can you not see that I'm driving? Go bother somebody else today. Or, if you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune time."

The creative process does not behave rationally. Sometimes I think of my muse like a two-year-old. Unpredictable, irrational, always doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. Your two-year-old sings pitch perfect ABC's for weeks on end, driving you mad, but the second you boast of this skill to a visitor, they clam up and get saucer-eyed. They behave like a mouse at an amusement park but like a hellion at a restaurant. It's like they can sense the pressure to behave a certain way, and then, to test you, do exactly the opposite. It's that age old game, "Will you still love me if..."

My muse played this dirty trick on me, and I wonder if it has something to do with her testing my devotion to her. She refused to show up for months. Thousands and thousands of words that never came together, never worked, never had that special sparkle only a muse can produce. Then, the week of Christmas, when my muse KNEW she should not get priority, when family and cookies and trees and wrapping should first, that's when she decided to appear with her glorious gifts.

Here I am! Throw everything else aside and dote on me. Aren't I wonderful to be lavishing you with my presence and this awesome story idea?

You are not wonderful, muse. I nearly ran over a metaphorical pedestrian trying to scribble your stuff on paper while driving in the holiday lane (the busiest of all traffic lanes, btw). Can you not see that I am driving? If you want to exist, come back later when I have time for you.

Muse got all huffy and left with a pout. She'll probably sulk for several days and not even phone me.

My problem is this is not new for my muse. We have a history of this kind of behavior. When I sit down with a keyboard, nothing comes. The pressure mounts. Ideas scatter. The mental stump reigns. I get frustrated and distracted.

But in the shower, behind the wheel, on a walk, sitting at a dinner with extended family, all the places I either cannot write or don't have the tools to do so, that's when the ideas start pouring out. So I have to wonder. Is it me? Am I scaring off my own creativity with heavy-handed expectation? Is it coming back with a vengeance when the pressure's off precisely because I don't want it at those times?

Passive aggressive muse. What is your problem?

Maybe I shouldn't be shouting to the heavens when my muse shows up while I'm on the freeway. Maybe, instead, I should be mimicking the low pressure mindset of a freeway driver while I'm in front of the keyboard.

No pressure, brain. In fact, we can pretend it's Christmas again next week. I'll pretend I have no time to write, and you come barreling in with supposedly untimely and intrusive yet brilliant ideas, okay? I can tell you again 'if you really want to exist, come back later,' but next time, I won't mean it. I'll just say that to maintain that no pressure atmosphere you love so much while I scramble to my laptop.

Deal?

You're an enigma, muse. A weird and complicated creature. But I'll figure you out yet.

On Worms, Pear Blossoms, and Mortar: Why I Write

Weronika Janczuk posted about George Orwell's and Joan Didion's Why I Write essays. Didion's opened a can of worms for me. Orwell's calmed those worms and sealed the can up again.

I have always wanted to write novels, but really, deep down, I didn't think I had the personality for it. Joan's description of struggling with intellectualism when all she wanted was to observe pear blossoms sounded like standard writerly thinking to me. Writers need to be concrete-minded and observant, they need to recreate the universe in a new way using all that stuff (like pear blossoms) they've stored up in their noggins.

Since I am neither concrete nor particularly observant, I used to fear I was not cut out to be a novelist.

Back in school, while teachers explained to me the finer details of arithmetic, history and vocabulary, I'd drift into a nebulous place of patterns and ideas. When they handed me a thing that just was, say a physics formula, I asked why. Why does the X go here? Why this particular multiplier? My physics tutor told me he was just learning those things himself in the graduate program, and couldn't give me an undergraduate version of the answer. I was supposed to accept that it was as it was, and trust it fit into the bigger picture. I think I got a C in physics just to spite him for withholding the 'why' answers from me.

Now, I could bypass why stuff in order to memorize information. I recited five pages of Romeo and Juliet when the teacher told us anything over twenty lines meant bonus points. I won the Vocabulary Bee sophomore year. I just stuffed it all in that short-term buffer of my brain and used instant recall. I didn't do it for the love of the details. I did it because I was an overachiever who enjoyed showing off.

Why do I write? It's not to capture moments on paper, or because I am fascinated by how sensory details are laced with poignancy or emotion. I am not the Joan Didion kind of writer. Hearing her motives for writing jangled my nerves and opened up that old can of worms because my writing doesn't come from that place. My brain doesn't work that way.

My writing comes from the other end, the end Joan admitted she couldn't wrap her head around. Closer to George Orwell. His thoughts soothed my writerly identity again. George said he wrote his books for four reasons: ego, aesthetics, historical recording, and political agenda.

I have an ego. I want to be noticed for and remembered by what I put on paper. I enjoy the aesthetics of writing, the poetic nature of words and imagery. I don't even mind marking time; fiction is something of a snapshot of the culture and mindset it was created in.

But most of all, I write for the point of it. Orwell's point was politics, and he defined that term broadly: Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.

I don't necessarily care so much about society as I do the individual and the nature of their existence. Questions surrounding philosophy, spirituality and psychology. And not really the traditional ways of viewing these things, but more the existential questions that come from mixing them up in a blender, pouring them in a clear glass and shining a light through the end result. This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.

Orwell said this: What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.

Me, too. What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is make existential writing into an art.  The flowers on the pear tree and how they smell* only strike me as useful if they serve as a sensory handle to the vehicle of an important idea. To this end, I chase after and wrestle sensory details onto the page. For this purpose, I form characters and set up tension in plots. Otherwise ungraspable concepts can become easily accessible to a wider audience when outfitted with concrete examples like pear blossoms, lovable characters and a thrilling climax.

I suppose most writers start with the stuff of the story and let the themes rise from their unconscious to fill in the cracks like mortar for all those sensory detail bricks. I work the other way around. I pick the mortar. Color, consistency, strength over time. Then I grab the most interesting bricks lying around that have the right texture for sticking to that mortar. When I'm done, I'll be looking at the mortar and smiling. Most everybody else will just see the bricks, but since I know it's the mortar that holds them together, I'm more than fine with that.

I know I'm not MFA material, because I tried a semester and nearly gagged on the lack of practicality. The 'why' questions were all being answered, but at the expense of too many 'what for?' versions. So while I wonder about the meaning of life, the universe and everything, I need a reality check to feel complete. Once I've got a nebulous concept, what do I do with it?

I write a story.

I get a character, push them through the gauntlet of a plot, and have them stop to smell the pear blossoms.

That's why I write. Big ideas need places to live, and stories are the easiest and least offensive homes I can build. Thank you, Orwell, for letting my kind of motives be okay in the narrative profession. And thank you, Didion, for not being at all like me. There's room for all kinds, right?

*For the record, I think the pear blossoms in my front yard smell like Desitin, but, since no one else agrees with this assessment, it probably showcases how awful I am at observing sensory details.

P.S. The worm graffiti shown above is a weird image, but the only one I could find with both worms and brick mortar (even though the mortar is black and I far prefer white, and the worms look a little crazy...then again, the worms in that can were pretty crazy when I first opened it). To complete the titled trifecta, and to inspire joy of visual concrete observation, here are some pear blossoms:

Love the Undulations

Life is full of opposites. I imagine the big machine of life to be covered in millions of toggle switches, and some magical space monkey is seated in front of the console flipping them randomly. On, off. Up, down. In, out. High, low. Sometimes he just slaps his palm across several dozen at a time.

Boring or interesting. Depression or elation. Buff or flabby. Global crisis or not. Eating ice cream or wishing I was eating ice cream. Trapped behind a waterfall by an angry bear...or that blissful state of sitting on a couch that is nowhere near a bear or a waterfall.

Normally, for yourself, you'd pick the optimal position for all your switches and then just keep them there, right? No global crisis. Eating the ice cream. A life full of elating and interesting things. No bears.

Right?

Not really. Not all the time. It's not that I want the life full of bears and global crisis while lacking ice cream. I'm not craving drama. I'm just craving variety. And I can't appreciate the good stuff without seeing what the opposite is like. Also, I've got that leaky kind of brain that needs constant reminders. I've never been tied up in dealings with the mafia, but, knowing me, I'd forget the finer details of the experience inside of two weeks.

Stories thrive on undulation. In every chapter of a good story, there is conflict and resolution, excitement and calm, the ordinary and the not so ordinary. Undulation makes a story sing, and in a fascinating melody, not that boring old monotone of same-old-same-old. So flip those story machine toggles, space monkey. Flip them often.

And flip them in my life. Don't let things get stale. Don't let me stagnate. I might temporarily resent the ice cream switch turning off, but I'll thank you later.

And, in case you were wondering, I'm in a weird mood today. Blame it on the monkeys.

The Beauty of Cellar Doors

Every once in a while, dictonary.com's articles catch my eye. Today's is on the most beautiful sound combination in the English language: cellar door.

Meaning aside, I agree. Tolkein was the first to deem it so. He was a master of beauty in phonics. The names he came up with are poetry in a single word each. (like Isildur. Sounds rather phonetically similar to cellar door, doesn't it?).

So why does Cellar Door work so powerfully? I say it to myself, and it does in fact roll off my tongue like a thing of beauty. After mulling it over, I really think it has to do with, get this, plot arcs.

As a writer, I'm hyper-aware of what makes a good story, that is, a beginning, middle, and end, all stitched together with a specific pattern of rising action to a climax that falls after with a denouement. There's Joseph Campbell's monomyth to thank for showing us how the plot arc and story experience are clearly a universal one, deeply embedded in our collective unconscious. It's how we want to see the world and all events in it.

Humanity calls things poetic, like justice, when their idea of what should happen and what actually happens coincide perfectly. A very big part of the shoulds in our mind come from the basic story arc, and any time something mimics it, it feels beautiful to us, poetic, because the ebb and flow of something in the universe matches our idea of an appropriate pattern.

Cellar Door is one of the more perfect plot arcs of phonetic experiences. The S sound at the beginning pulls us into the beginning seamlessly, and since the emphasis is on the first syllable, the second is a momentary respite before the sharp climax of that D. The long o and receding r are the cathartic falling action that drift away into the night.

Every time I say it, I feel like I'm experiencing a miniature story, and tiny capsule of truth that mirrors the way I want reality to work with tension, climax, and resolution. It's a bite sized piece of beauty where ideals and reality actually meet.

Do you think Cellar Door is a beautiful phrase? And what do you think it is about a thing, word or otherwise, that makes it beautiful?

NaNoWriMo: The First Pancake

I didn't really do so hot with the November challenge last year. First off, I cheated by working on an existing project, and even then, only got 43k in. Still, for turtle-paced little me, it was a big deal. If it wasn't for the Thanksgiving holiday, I'm sure I would have hit 50k in my own cheaterly way.

All summer, I've been waist-deep in revisions. I've thrown in a new scene here and there, but I haven't tackled a new project or worked linearly on any fiction since May. I know, bad, bad writer. Should have been writing five hundred words a day, just to keep fresh. But I haven't, so now I'm feeling very rusty.

I can't get the plot I've been mixing in my head to congeal. I can't even pin down the protagonists dominant personality traits or skeletal structure. And, sadly, I think it will continue to evade me until a deadline looms. Thank you, NaNoWriMo for providing a looming deadline just when I need one most.

It's going to be a big month of trial and error, emphasis on the error. It's like those first few pancakes when you haven't found the perfect griddle temperature. My griddle will probably take weeks to adjust, so I'll be wasting a LOT of pancake batter.

Hopefully, I'll win Right Brain back after five months of neglect. Left Brain has had its day with all that exclusive revising, and that day has to come to an end if I'm ever going to write something new.

Here's to the first pancakes of November: I will churn you out, a whole month's worth. Fifty thousand silver dollar attempts, flipped repeatedly and smothered in maple syrup. Please turn from black or pasty white to that beautiful golden brown. Even one beautiful pancake would make the whole month worthwhile.

Killing the distant perspective

One of my big problems in writing is too much distance, the sense that the narrator is a bystander to the action, and not a part of it. I so enjoy taking a step back from life to observe it myself that my aerial, disembodied view sneaks into the prose.

I felt something hitting me.
Something hit me.

Do you know how many 'I felt's I've trimmed out? How any writer revised before computers and the Search feature, I'll never understand.

It was like a bird had sung in my ear.
A bird sang in my ear.

I also have a simile addiction. Metaphors pop, but they intimidate me when I write rough drafts. Thank goodness my revision brain is more open minded to popping.

I saw him cross the room.
He crossed the room.

Really, why do I need to have the narrator point out their perspective, their presence? Sometimes the fact that the narrator is the one seeing it happen is an important aspect to point out, but for every fifty 'I see's in my MS, only one or two deserve to stay.

Death to most Feels and Sees! Forced conversion of similes to metaphors! I am your monarch, oh manuscript, and you will heed my decrees for behavior.