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By Thomas Sullivan, on November 15th, 2009
Love that George Jones song. If you have an ounce of passion in you for anything, a single unblemished ideal, or if you feel a poignant stab in the heart for any kind of perfection, then you understand what’s behind that song.
Writers get it. Real writers. Lovers of the Muse. When you want something so badly that it makes your teeth ache and you swallow sand and you know that whatever the obstacles, it’s just right for you – not for someone else maybe, but absolutely for you — and life just won’t move forward unless you are in pursuit of that holy grail, well…that’s when you come alive. And only then. Passion sweats blood.
Only sometimes you bleed out. Bleed white. Your veins constrict, your heart turns into a dried husk, and your mind goes cold. That’s when you THINK you stop loving the Muse. Because passion that intense is draining, and rejection takes its toll. Your commitment may be true, but even a faithful dog backs off when it’s kicked in the teeth enough times. So your fingers slip off the keys; you quit caring. Hope becomes a dull ache, and you walk around in a novocaine stupor. You listen to loud music, you laugh at things that aren’t funny, you get hyper interested in feng shui or the kids next baseball game. The people around you who have patiently endured your impossible dream seem almost relieved. You are back. You are acting the way they act. Life is suddenly clear and simple and balanced.
And predictable.
But then you get a glimpse of color flitting past the window one day or hear a whisper in the leaves alongside an autumn path, and it’s like remembering where you placed your car keys. You vividly recall where you were going! It hits you full passion with a touch of dismay. Because you realize that you are wasting your life, wasting precious time. Like the white rabbit, you are so late! You can’t believe you let yourself become a zombie, that you lost faith with what you started out to be. The stars and the galaxies are still there; you just quit reaching for them.
But giving up on your dream is like letting the best part of you commit suicide. Because that’s where the real you lives. Your dream is where you are honest with yourself. If it dies, what’s left except to live a lie? And, yes, you can live a lie where appearances demand it, but you can’t do it 24/7. You need somewhere, sometime to live your dream, to know that it could really happen, to feel that you are worthy of it. Living a lie might meet the world’s expectations for you on the surface — it might even be noble, depending on your situation — but by definition it cannot be honest.
So you re-visit your dream. Secretly at first. Maybe life interferes with that a little bit. But you find a way, even if at the start it’s only in your mind, your heart. You imagine, plan, fantasize. And then you dare to reach out on a computer screen or a piece of paper. And the words come back. Because that’s who you are. Words and thoughts. That’s all anyone is, only with some people — writers – communication is infinitely more acute. You need words both coming and going. Like breaths. Inhale, exhale. Words are oxygen. You are a willing slave to the Muse. Forever in love.
But you only recognize that when you think you’ve stopped loving your dream. Because your passion is so great that it just exhausts your spirit and you have to take a timeout to let the ground springs refill the reservoir. To let the hurt of rejection subside. And you’ll probably repeat the whole thing again. Until you succeed. Or don’t succeed. It really doesn’t matter which, as far as what you have to do. Life is not a dress rehearsal. One take…action! Or else you go sit with the audience.
“He stopped loving her today… they hung a wreath upon his door.”
Yeah. That’s the only way to murder a Muse, if you’re for real. The only way to kill a true writer. And it says everything I’ve ever tried to say about the journey itself being the destination.
Thanks for reading along with these columns. I get a lot of e-mail from people who gave up on their dreams but think their dreams gave up on them. And speaking of e-mail, I’ve heard from a number of Glenn & Deacon Frey fans that my link to the September column is broken on some of the newsletter mirror sites. I think that column is being confused with earlier mentions of Glenn and Deacon from 14 months or so ago. Here’s the correct link to the most recent column: http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2009/09/16/thomas-sullivan-are-you-ready-for-fame-fortune-%e2%80%94-crosslake-redux-with-glenn-deacon-frey/
Oh, and another thing. If it says Comments closed at the end of this column, IGNORE that. Wordpress has a glitch or two and that’s one of them. Your comments are MOST welcome, and the way to leave them is just to click the title of this column, which will take you to a new page of the column so fast you may not realize it changed. At the bottom of that column is the posting box for your comments. If you got here from my newsletter link, you may already see that.
May I invite you to follow me on Twitter? It’s fun and won’t intrude on your computer. 2 examples of recent Tweets: Nothing is easier to take for granted or quickly forgotten than constant magic…until you suddenly realize it isn’t there. And… Why is everyone telling me I should write a romance novel? Am I wearing chick-socks or something? Hey, I can explain. That was Halloween. Here’s the link: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan . I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net . Past newsletters are archived at the author’s website below under News & Articles. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/
http://twitter.com/thomassullivan
By John Rosenman, on November 14th, 2009
[John is suffering computer woes at the moment. I told him I'd find something appropriate to fill his slot, and found this archived post of his from September of 2006. Enjoy!]
A long time ago, there was this gorilla I knew. I was out of work, and the gorilla was similarly unemployed. At least he appeared to be, for every time I went to the Minneapolis zoo, all 800 pounds of him would be waiting for me at the cage bars like he didn’t have anything else to do. I swear the guy hadn’t moved an inch, and his expression was always direct and unchanging. “You poor jerk,” his brown marble stare seemed to say. “You still haven’t got a job, do you?”
I used to stare into those brown orbs, trying to make Mr. G look away. Never succeeded or even came close. For hours I tried to stare him down, wondering all the time, “What the hell’s going through your head? What are you thinking? What do you think of me? What are you trying to do?” I guess I was a little like Captain Ahab who obsessed about that great white whale, wondering what made it tick and if it had chomped off his leg because it was pissed off or just because it was doing its stupid, meaningless whale thing. Anyway, I’d stare and stare and after a while, I’d try to become that fucking gorilla. I WILL BE YOU! I thought. I WILL GET INTO YOUR FURRY HEAD AND BECOME YOU. I CAN MAKE THE IMAGINATIVE LEAP, I CAN!
Well, I never succeeded. Just as well of course, since I don’t know what I would have done with his 500 pound female companion. But my experience did have one tangible result. I wrote a poem:
GORILLA
Wrapped in a bulging sack of fur
The gorilla stares
Down my winding mind,
Unblinking.
He is grotesque.
In primal maze a memory stirs.
I lift a musty arm
To paw a marble eye.
Words are vines untangling.
The gorilla climbs
Through my combed hair,
Gathers a jungle around my mouth
to swarm in sun,
Suddenly
I am hunger
leaping at hairless flesh
to tear blood wisdom
from its tongue.
Okay, it ain’t great, but my point here has to do with the way I get my ideas. They come straight from Schenectedy. No, forget that. Bad old joke. What I should have said is that most of my ideas tend to just jump out at me, often completely unpremeditated. That’s the way I wrote “Gorilla.” I just sat down and . . . scribbled, let the pen have its way.
George Guthridge has a much more systematic method for generating stories, a brilliant nonfiction idea machine that has resulted in professional sales for both himself and his students. His articles (actually a series) are posted on this site, and I encourage everyone to check them out. I don’t have anything quite as good or elaborate, but I thought it might be interesting to share my “method,” to the extent that I have one. Please note that not all my stories have their genesis in such a spontaneous, unplanned, non-cerebral way, but most of them do.
One place I like to hang out is Barnes & Noble. There’s a huge one in Chesapeake, VA which I haunt. What I do is walk around, sometimes with a cup of java in my hand, and let my eyes roam. Often titles will ignite something inside me. Once I saw a book whose title was The Calm Technique. Bam! At once a similar but significantly different title leapt into my mind: The Death Technique. It’s about a man who’s able to will or cause his own decomposition and liquefaction – in other words, appear to die and rot. Lord knows, how one glance at that title inspired such a ghoulish tale. No wait, I think I do know. My horrific instincts simply “decided” to create the ghoulish opposite of a “Calm” technique. Look for it in HWA’s Dark Arts anthology.
I guess my main point here is that sometimes you should get in touch with your own inner gorilla and learn to love him. Open yourself up to inspiration and take chances. Trust your subconscious and avoid analysis and excessive thinking. Go with the flow and toss your safety net. Forget about outlines, scripts and character thumbnail sketches. Make it up as you go along.
Sometimes I haven’t had to make much up at all. Recently I opened a book of stories – at Barnes & Noble of course – and a story just leapt into my head. It was more or less fully conceived, though I didn’t read even one word in the book. Turned out to be one of my better stories too.
Some stories I’ve written have had bizarre origins.
One day a sentence flashed across my mind: “I’m sitting in hell listening to Barry Manilow records when the call came.” I had no idea in hell what it meant, but I used the sentence to begin a pretty good SF novelette.
Similar to that, I made up a word, “Dreamfarer,” which I used as the title and inspiration for a whole novel. Okay, the novel sucked, but the title itself
was great.
One of my students became a little obsessive. She started to stalk me a bit.
Did I mention she didn’t have good eyesight? One night she pulled up outside my house in her trademark chartreuse van. My wife was upset but I wasn’t. Hell, I had a great story idea about a guy who’s terrorized by a girl who drives a chartreuse van, and I went right upstairs and wrote it.
Back in ’87, I published an article on this subject. I called it “Stories Without Ideas,” and I thought I’d close with some excerpts.
. . . Readers might be interested in a phenomenon that’s happened to me more and more in the past few years: Stories come to me WITHOUT ideas.
What’s my point? Simply that for some writers, beginning stories without (or almost without) ideas may be a viable and productive approach, and it may be folly to wait until something more solid develops. True, you must have SOMETHING, but it may only need to be an interesting phrase or word, a potential title, or a vague question or sentiment. Here are some other examples from my own experience.
I remember reading once, somewhere, that the most frightening and horrifying thing of all is when a rose sings. The quote rattled around in my mental teapot for years till I finally wrote “When A Rose Sings,” which appeared in 2AM Magazine. When I started writing, all I had was the dimly remembered quote, but it metamorphosed into a story about a divinely lovely rose perverted by hard rock music into a flower that mesmerizes its victims by singing. Happens all the time, right?
Recently, another potential title whomped me: “Two Moons East of Tomorrow.” No way I was gonna let that stunner pass. After a false start, the title’s seed burgeoned into a tale about an alien being who can recapture the past by using people who lived it.
One last example: a year ago, I took my seven-year-old son David out on Halloween, and as he ran up a curved path to a house, he disappeared briefly behind a trellis. A question briefly nudged me in a way that scribblers as opposed to normal people train themselves not to ignore: What if that did happen, and the father couldn’t find his son? The result is “Daniel, My Son” [which remains one of my favorites].
“Where do you get your ideas?” I believe the answer to this question is endless because the creative process may be a mystery to the writer itself, submerged in a subconscious realm he can’t fathom. But to me, that’s part of the fun, the fascination, and the glory, for to bring something out of nothing is as godlike as any of us mortals are likely to get. So, fellow writers – pay heed to those unorthodox, sometimes barely perceptible nudges and flashes. It just may be a story knocking!
By James Moore, on November 12th, 2009
Well, it’s November again. Halloween is done Thanksgiving is on the way (Pause here, folks, and contemplate what you have to be thankful for. The odds are there’s a good deal going right, even if there’s some negatives out there.) and a plethora of various religious celebrations are eight around the corner. Some of my fellow writers, well, okay, a LOT of my fellow writers are once again trying to crank out a novel in the month of November for NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month, I believe, is the proper title.
It’s a neat concept, though I’ve never actually formally tried my luck with it. The idea is to write a complete novel length work (I believe it’s supposed to be a minimum of 50,000 words) or a significant portion of a novel starting on the first of the month and ending on the 30th, before Midnight. Neat idea, and I know a few people who are extremely pleased with themselves for finishing at or near that goal. A few even exceed that goal and their own expectations.
I have, for the record, bettered that number on several occasions. Believe me, deadlines are great motivators, especially when there are bills to pay.
Which brings me to my subject du jour. Recently I ran across yet another post that declared the horror genre as a dead beast that simply hasn’t realized it’s dead. I’ve heard the same for damned near every genre out there, to say nothing of the publishing industry.
Garbage, says I. First, I started hearing that horror was dead around the same time I started getting serious about writing. According to the people who seem to know everything—at least according to themselves in many cases—Horror should have been buried, resurrected and buried again half a dozen times by now.
Second, I often find that the people making these proclamations tend to be having trouble selling their own works. Not all of them by any doubt, but a decent number. Seems it must be the industry and not their writing skills that is suffering. Does that sound harsh? Probably, but I’ll stick with it just the same. If even half of the doomsayers were right, there would be no publishing industry.
But Jim, what about how book sales are down?
Yeah. So is real estate, medicine, insurance sales and bloody near everything but the numbers on booze, guns and prostitutes. It’s called a recession and while it is getting better, it hasn’t gone away yet.
What about technology? There’s these Kindle things from Amazon and a few dozen others.
Yep. Technology is wreaking havoc. Sooner or later books will become obsolete as digital readers of all kinds come along to take their place. Not in my lifetime, mind you, but it probably will happen. We can see it occurring already when it comes to the size of print runs and the growing number of digital downloads. Heck, I do half of my research online. Of course, I still write books, too, despite numerous programs. You sort of need to change with the times. If my publishers decided somewhere down the line that they need to publish digital copies I’m just fine with that, so long as I get my piece of the pie.
That mentality is the cause of most literary woes, by the way. The debate got into a little mudslinging and accusations that midlist writers, especially those who demand money for their efforts, are crushing the industry, primarily because they are writing too much stuff that doesn’t appeal to their fans. They are “phoning it in.” For the writers who are making a living as writers, apparently, do not care about the quality of their stories as long as they are published. Making money is destroying the quality of the work.
Sounds as stupid to me now as it did when I read it the first time around. What? Cooks stop knowing how to make soup when they become chefs? Artists stop producing art when they get paid as illustrators? As I said then I will say now, the business of writing should not be confused with writing. They are related, yes, but distantly. The same is true of any creative endeavor and the decision to try to make a living with it. I write a novel and then I sell it. Or, for a twist, I write sample chapters and an outline and then I sell it. Beyond the selling of the manuscript or proposal, the two have little in common.
Which brings me back to NaNoWriMo. If you decide to try your luck with this, more power to you. If you opt to follow the same principle but missed the November first deadline, my answer is the same. The purpose here is not to win a valuable cash prize. To my knowledge none of the prizes offered have anything to do with cash. No, the idea is to challenge yourself and see if you can do it. If you can, in fact, put forth the effort necessary to hammer out 50,000 words in 30 days. That’s almost 2,000 words per day and that’s not a small investment in time. Hell, I’ll do you one better, that’s like working a second job. You’ll work hard if you decide to try this and you’re remotely serious in your efforts.
And I wish you the very best of luck. I’ve managed that sort of rate for most of my career. I know a lot of professional writers who can’t manage that sort of word count per day. Doesn’t mean they aren’t excellent writers, just means they don’t work at the same speed.
But you should try it, just once at least, just to see if you can do it. Why? For the same reason you decide to submit the first time you’re done with a story you like a lot. To see if it can be done.
James A. Moore
By Bill Lindblad, on November 10th, 2009
Perhaps you believe in the soul. Perhaps you don’t, and only view a living being as a series of biological functions acting in concert. Under either philosophy, you will view a dead body as different from a living person. All of the physical components are there, but the core of the individual is gone.
At this point, I could easily segue off into a review of Conjure Wife. Instead, I want to focus on a different book, one that may be one of the most effective learning tools I’ve encountered this year. The title is Horror’s Classic Masters Remastered (volume 1), and it was produced in 2006.
This book, at first glance, is no different from dozens of others. It gathers classic (all conveniently in the public domain) stories from famous authors. You’ve all seen the writers included: Poe, Stoker, M.R. James, Bierce, Hodgson and more. Where this book differs is in its presentation.
According to the editor’s introduction, he “did not set out to rewrite anything.” His “intent was to ‘translate’ these stories for today’s readers.”
I’ll admit, my first instinct was to avoid the book as I would a horrific traffic accident. That impulse was magnified when I realized that the altered stories were being presented under the author’s names alone; not “translated by….,” but merely attributed. Any neophyte reading the book without reading the introduction (a common occurrence, in my experience) might plausibly believe that these stories were being presented accurately.
Upon reflection, however, I had to mitigate my initial reaction. The notion of translating work from archaic languages is neither new nor abhorrent; nor is translation from one living language to another.
What bothered me, instead, was the implication of incompetence from the reader. The stories aren’t reconstructed with a seventh-grade reading level in mind; they’re not intentionally insulting. The stories are structured instead for a high school freshman or sophomore.
The reason is ostensibly due to the archaic style of the writing; I cannot disagree more. The true reason seems to be due to the complexity of the language, which is something entirely different. It is easy to imagine this editor “translating” the works of Thomas Ligotti or Brian McNaughton.
This, however, leads to what I believe is the true value of the book. It is intended to draw the casual reader into an interest in the classics; that is a fool’s errand. If a potential reader isn’t willing to expand his or her vocabulary on the (actually relatively rare) instances when the stories of Poe and Hodgson toss them an unfamiliar word, they’re not going to be able to read any of the author’s “untranslated” works anyway. They’d be served as well… arguably better… to simply watch an old movie or episode of Night Gallery featuring the story in question, with the understanding that they’re not getting the full flavor of the tale.
The true value lies in its aid to writers. This book, combined with the original tales, provides a magnificent illustration in how to make successful stories NOT work. The tales in this collection are dead bodies; the basic storylines still exist, and they are immediately recognizable. The energy which animated the stories, however, has been completely eradicated. “The Mezzotint” is still a horror story, and it is a fairly effective piece, but it is no longer a M.R. James story nor is what remains a classic.
I’ll give some examples; the original first, followed by the “remastered” version:
“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was – but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible.” – The Fall of the House of Usher, by Edgar Allan Poe.
“It was a dull, dark, autumn day. The clouds hung oppressively low. I rode alone, on horseback. At length I found myself, as the evening drew near, within sight of the melancholy House of Usher. I do not know why, but at my first glimpse of the building, I felt a sense of terrible gloom.” – as “remastered”
“In response to Carnacki’s usual card of invitation to have dinner and listen to a story, I arrived promptly at 427, Cheyne Walk, to find the three others who were always invited to these happy little times, there before me. Five minutes later, Carnacki, Arkright, Jessop, Taylor, and I were all engaged in the “pleasant occupation” of dining.
“You‘ve not been long away, this time,” I remarked, as I finished my soup; forgetting momentarily Carnacki‘s dislike of being asked even to skirt the borders of his story until such time as he was ready. Then he would not stint words.”- The Gateway of the Monster, by William Hope Hodgson.
“I arrived at my friend Carnacki’s house, ready to have dinner and listen to his latest story. I had known him for years, and Thomas Carnacki – the famous ghost investigator – never failed to entertain. Three others who were always invited to these happy little times had gotten there before me. Five minutes later, Carnacki, Arkright, Jessop, Taylor and I were all engaged in a pleasant dinner.
“Your latest case didn’t last very long,” I remarked, as I finished my soup.” – as “remastered”
……………….
On occasion, through workshops with colleagues, special editions of classic books, and sometimes even first readers to professional friends, people get the opportunity to see a story grow from a rough draft to a polished work. Much can be learned by observing the process. This takes it further, changing a polished work into another polished, but lesser, work…. Taking a cut of high-grade prime rib and using it as taco meat.
Toward the beginning of the year, Brian Hodge recommended to all authors that they spend some time investigating nonfiction books on writing. In appreciation of his return, I thought I’d focus on this title and the benefit it can provide to anyone trying to wrap their head around the ephemeral definition of “style”.
By Jeanie Franz Ransom, on November 10th, 2009
Last month, when I finally decided to “come out” about owning a Kindle, I learned two things. One, after reading some of the comments about my blog entry, I realized that I have always written about “safe” topics, ones that are least likely to stir up controversy, and heaven forbid, make readers think less of me.
Maybe that’s why I was drawn to children’s picture books. Of course, there are some dark picture books, but the majority of mine are definitely on the sunny side, sprinkled with light humor and less-than-deep situations. Writing the blog entry about the Kindle made me nervous. What would people think? What would people say? It turned out that people had a lot to say, and not all of it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, like my children’s books do.
And you know what? Taking the risk of writing something that may not have endeared me to fellow readers and writers was good for me. And any writing worth its salt SHOULD evoke strong feelings in its readers. Writing outside of my comfort level was just the kick in the butt I needed.
The second thing I learned from blogging about the Kindle was that I wanted to learn more about why many authors – and most booksellers (save those at Barnes & Noble, which is ready to launch its own e-reader, the Nook) – are not big fans of the Kindle.
So this past weekend when I was at a children’s writers’ conference, I took the opportunity to sit down with one of my favorite independent booksellers. I asked her to help me understand just why the Kindle is a “bad guy.” My friend said that it’s not just the Kindle, it’s Amazon’s entire bookselling practices, as well as those of Walmart, Target, and apparently, now Sears. Barnes & Noble’s new Nook is also seen as a threat.
From what I understand, the aforementioned are all involved in “predatory pricing,” offering discounts that other bookstores can’t afford to match. And e-readers like the Kindle make it possible to download a new hardcover bestseller for just $9.99 in less than a minute, and without leaving home.
I continued the conversation with my husband, a former music director and disc jockey, that evening. It’s his opinion that what happened in the record industry is now happening in the book world. With Apple’s iTunes online store, customers could buy a CD that might retail for $17.99 at the local record store for $9.99. They also could purchase a single song – or several songs – without having to buy the whole CD. However, to do so meant they had to have an iPod, which is pretty much the same situation as Amazon and the Kindle, and the other e-readers that are bound to follow. Today, the big chain record stores are largely gone, but some really great independent record stores can be found throughout the country, and they’re still going strong. .
Although I enjoy browsing my local chain bookstores on occasion, in reality they are becoming more generic – kind of like a McDonald’s for the average book buyer, at least in the children’s book department. At the children’s writers’ conference this past weekend, a fellow picture-book author told me that when she recently paid a visit to a local “big box” bookstore, she was appalled to see the explosion of toys in the children’s section. Less space was devoted to books, and of these books, many were the mass-appeal series, and the small picture-book display featured primarily celebrity authors.
It’s obvious that the world of bookselling is changing. Just as Walmart has forced smaller mom-and-pop stores to close, there will be some casualties in the bookstore world. Survival depends on facing the inevitable growth of e-readers and online shopping head-on, and finding creative ways to work around these changes – and eventually, with the changes.
As long as there are people who love the bookstore experience, there will be people to support their local bookseller. There’s nothing quite like immersing yourself in a good independent bookstore. It’s like diving into a box of fine chocolates, and the assortment is often one you won’t find elsewhere.
But there’s also something to be said for having an e-reader, especially for people who travel, or who don’t have a bookstore nearby, or who can’t get out at all. For me, being able to browse my local bookstore – and buy books, as well as to click on my Kindle at any hour of the day or night and download a book, or a magazine, or even a blog, is the best of both worlds.
I think that there is space – and a place– for both brick-and-mortar booksellers and those requiring technology. I hope for a future where they can co-exist, “happily-ever-after” as we children’s writers like to say. I may be fooling myself, but time will tell.
By Brian Hodge, on November 9th, 2009
Looks like it was a sabbatical after all.
Last March, after close to a three-year tenure, I hung up my Storytellers U hat — the one with the Viking horns and a beer funnel — without knowing whether this would be permanent or temporary. Couldn’t help but notice, in the interim, that lords-of-the-manor Dave and Joe never filled that vacated slot for the ninth of each month, or even dropped my name from the active roster, maybe under the belief that, since nature abhors a vacuum, I would eventually slam back into place like an airline passenger into a fuselage crack at 30,000 feet.
Apparently this strategy of inaction worked. That thudding sound you hear…
And hang onto that word, inaction, if you will. It’s key today.
In the grand scheme, this monthly slot is not an especially demanding gig, although that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s immune to something resembling burnout. By last March I was feeling bereft of ideas to bring to the table here. Worse, maybe, I was feeling bereft of much desire to bring them.
And so it felt right to go for a long, meandering walk.
I’ve come to recognize in myself a restlessness that sometimes push-pulls me out one door and toward another, usually a less familiar one. At the same time, there’s a gravitational tug that sometimes pulls my orbit back around to those old, familiar rooms.
Except I come back not quite the same writer, not quite the same person. This is nearly always for the better. Because I’ve been rewired.
Hang onto that word rewired, too.
Nobody ever promised us that life in the creative lane would be a smooth ride. Oh, it has its moments of gliding across the glass-still sea. Days when the words bear you effortlessly up like thermal drafts beneath a falcon’s wings. But then there are the days, the many many days, when it’s all whirlpools, typhoons, and clipped feathers.
And there aren’t just days like that. There are novels like that. Stories like that. Screenplays and essays and poems like that.
There are times when, whatever your project may be, the two of you are just not right for each other.
Sometimes, in the face of a monumental creative incompatibility, be it a blocking wall or a yawning sinkhole, the best course of action really is none at all. Walking the other way. Heading the opposite direction, with an eye toward finding your way back again by some other route whose signposts you won’t know until you see them.
It’s more than just giving yourself time for a few fresh breezes to blow the musty funk and cobwebs from your head. You can accomplish that much in one indulgent afternoon off, and as the beneficiary of many such afternoons I’ll gladly admit they can work small miracles. Sometimes that’s all the honey-laced medicine you need.
But sometimes the challenge runs deeper. Think, in terms of degree, of the difference between a mood and a personality disorder.
Walking the other way — we don’t much like that here in the global West. It’s not the way we were taught. So there’s something shameful about it. While detouring down a path of lesser resistance has always struck me as being a perfectly acceptable strategy in the East, in the West we’re the amped-up spawn of different doctrinal DNA, in particular the hard-assed Calvinist work ethic which holds that if a thing is worth doing, then it’s worth doing with such grim, unrelenting insistence to bend it to your will that you make yourself miserable long before you’re finished and lose sight of why you ever wanted to do it in the first place.
Which is probably a great success formula for cutting down acres of trees or making little rocks out of big ones; but for creative work, personally I’ve always found that approach counterproductive for getting over anything more than a minor hump. Maybe because it doesn’t allow much room for reflection.
But here’s the thing about walking the other way. It really isn’t a path of inaction at all, or shouldn’t be. Not when there are so many other things, new things, to try. A different novel, story, screenplay, essay, poem. A different creative outlet altogether. Or something that may not even be traditionally regarded as “creative” at all.
Do it. Do it with heart, do it with dedication, do it with more commitment than you’d give some simple fleeting diversion, and it will leave its mark on you. Do it, and it will leave you rewired.
This is due to something I’ve found increasingly fascinating lately: neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganize its neurons and their networks in response to new experiences. It’s not a new concept — it was initially theorized in the late 19th century, but had to overcome half a century of being ignored before it made much headway, and even then seemed to take a few more decades to filter into general understanding. Pretty much every biology class I ever had likened the brain to a blob of Jello that reached its developmental apex a few years after it jiggled free of the mold, then spent the next several decades declining into rotting Swiss cheese.
Yeah, and physicians used to bleed out evil humors, too.
Instead, my favorite metaphor for neurons so far is a passage comparing each one to a waving forest whose branches are constantly breaking old connections and making new ones.
Now, what does that have to do with walking away from a challenge and coming back to it later? Only everything. Because if you’re lucky — or intuitively prone to seeking out what you need — then just maybe this tweaked version of you is the one better equipped to meet the challenge you walked away from.
New paths of thought, expanded ways of seeing, deepened understandings … these are a writer’s bags of gold to foot the bill for that next trip into terra incognita.
Or at least bags of fertilizer to grow what you plant once you’re there.
Here are a few things I did since last March, things I’d never done before.
- Received a torn biceps tendon during Krav Maga training.
- Researched and self-rehabbed a torn biceps tendon.
- Planned, planted, and tended a vegetable garden.
- Discovered a love for refinishing furniture.
- Took up soldering so I can make my own audio cables.
- Learned and practiced a few rudiments of parkour.
I’m trying to stick to things that have a physical element of doing about them, where mind and body are both involved, and where they denote some kind of ongoing activity. Then there’s the life of pure mind: the books read, the words written, the subjects explored.
You have your own list. Do tell, please.
How will mine impact my work? In most cases, I can’t concretely say. Not yet. Although there’s one, which I’ll get into next month, because for now this is running long.
But I feel different, changed by them all, and as a starting point — or restarting point — it’s all good.
By mortcastle, on November 8th, 2009
The Chicago Tribune ran “The Great Chicago Ghost Story” contest for Halloween.
The rules: A Chicago site must be mentioned in the story. No more than 750 words.
I wrote a story. Entered.
Lost.
Here’s the loser.
THE GHOSTS OF CHICAGO, I SET THEM FREE
I see the ghosts of Chicago.
I set them free.
This is a mission statement.
Mine.
###
How is it that I see Chicago’s ghosts?
I don’t know.
How is it that you see those Magic Eye images?
I don’t.
You see what you see.
I see what I see.
I see the ghosts of Chicago.
###
No, I do not see Chicago’s ghosts all the time.
A year can go by.
Two years.
Longer.
I’m not sure, really.
But then I see.
Ghosts are inevitable.
###
Ghosts look like …
A free ghost is beautiful.
Shimmering. Translucent. Made of cloud dream.
A liquid going to steam shape.
Imagine an ethereal jellyfish.
No tentacles. No poison.
Late in humid summer night. Free-floating and vaguely luminous. Hovering above the head of one of the Kemeys’s bronze lions at the Art Institute.
Might it be they are here to acknowledge the commonality of beauty?
Sometimes in early morning fog swirl around the legs of the 106 giant headless statues of Grant Park’s Agora. Mockery? You earthbound. You unthinking.
I am a ghost.
I am free.
###
What is a ghost?
Spirit. Soul.
So say some. So believe.
It dwells within.
I know.
###
This cold October night.
This alley.
This darkness.
Clatter-groan of El above.
He sits and begs.
Sees me.
Talks madness.
Nonsense.
I look at his face.
See behind it.
Behind life trenched lines on face.
Behind eyes fierce crazy and hopeless.
Behind mindless brute insistence to go on.
I look at him.
See what lurks behind the flesh.
I see a ghost.
I take my knife.
I set free the ghost.
###
If you want to see the winner, it’s at
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-091027-ghost-story-clark,0,6561998.story
By sarahmonette, on November 7th, 2009
Q: How does it feel to walk away? You’ve just complete a ginormous four book cycle (well, you finished it a while ago). Is it refreshing to turn back to other things, or do you light-headed?
A: The answer, of course, is yes. I am tremendously grateful to be done with the Doctrine of Labyrinths, but I’m also a little bewildered and finding it difficult to settle down to work on anything else. On the third hand, I know, down to the very bottom of my soul, that this story is done. Unlike with the previous three books, there’s nothing leftover, for me, at the end of Corambis. I have no desire, temptation, inclination, or other impulse to keep telling Felix, Mildmay, and Kay’s stories. I love them dearly, don’t get me wrong, and I hope I’ve made it clear that their lives continue past the end of the book, but the story is over–just as, for me, the stories of most of the characters in The Mirador are over at the end of that book, even though many readers seem to feel that there are a lot of loose ends. I don’t want my characters’ lives to end with the end of the story, so I actually go to a good deal of trouble to make it clear that everything isn’t tied up neatly with a big red bow. Their lives go on, and they have more problems to solve and consequences to deal with, but the story I am telling is over. And I am grateful for the chance to move on to different stories in different worlds.
Q: Do you ever find it difficult to accurately and sympathetically portray trauma/PTSD in fiction without getting too dramatic? It’s a pretty delicate balance, and one I think you manage well.
A: Thank you. And, yes, it is difficult. I generally end up writing a very cathartic emo draft and then going back and taking out all the melodrama–letting the characters tell me how they react instead of moving them around like puppets of Angst, Despair, and Woe. The difference is frequently remarkable, so I suppose if I have anything resembling advice on the subject, that would be it. Each character is going to react to trauma differently, based on personality and experience and cultural expectations–and the particulars of the situation. It’s never one-size-fits-all.
Q: How do you turn ideas into short stories?
A: The same way you get to Carnegie Hall.
Okay, now that I’ve got the flip answer out of my system . . . unfortunately, I don’t have anything better to take its place. It depends on the idea and the story. Sometimes it’s very straightforward: my short story “Straw” was a dream. I turned it into a rational narrative mostly by unpacking things the dream compressed and compressing things the dream overelaborated. It took me most of a Sunday morning, and what I had when I’d finished is almost word for word what Strange Horizons published. That is, however, simple and painless and lovely, is not even remotely the norm. The other story of mine that Strange Horizons has published, “Draco campestris,” is a story that accreted, grain by grain, over the course of several years–actually, it must be more than a decade, since the idea of the Centre and the arcs of the Circumference is from Emily Dickinson, and I think it’s from reading Dickinson in high school, rather than in graduate school. Another part of the story, including the title, comes from a necklace made by Elise Matthesen, which I admired for two or three years before I found the story in it–and then it took me another two years to get the story out of it. Which happened by writing all those disconnected fragments and then figuring out which order they belonged in and why. Accretion is much more typical for me, and I’m always, honestly, a little surprised when what emerges from it is recognizably a story.
The other way I write stories is pastiche. The Kyle Murchison Booth stories are all M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft pastiche, with a side of Arthur Conan Doyle and some Edward Gorey as a palate cleanser. In essence, they’re mysteries, which is a little like the prose equivalent of a sonnet, and there it’s just a matter of fitting what I want to say into that mold. (This is not always as easy as I’m making it sound.) The ideas behind those stories tend to be simpler, and thus they’re also simpler in form. No weird chopped up narratives (like “Letter from a Teddy Bear on Veterans’ Day“) or stories like “Draco campestris” where there’s barely any narrative at all. I can also get ideas for Booth stories from dreams; “The Yellow Dressing Gown” was nearly as simple to write as “Straw,” although the two stories could not otherwise be more different.
And sometimes I can’t manage the trick at all. I have half a dozen short stories languishing on my hard drive because I cannot figure out how to turn the idea into a story.
So maybe my most honest answer would be “I don’t have a clue.”
There’s one more question for this month, but as the question itself is a spoiler for Corambis, it and my answer are on my blog, so that everyone can choose whether they want to read it or not.
By Alan Russell, on November 5th, 2009
When people ask me what I do for a living, I am always at a bit of a loss as to how to answer. It sounds a little too highfaluting to announce, “I am an author.” You just can’t say that sentence without sounding like you graduated from Oxford, or that you have something large that needs to be pulled out from your backside. My preference is to say, “I’m a storyteller,” but that involves too long an explanation. Usually I say, “I’m a writer.”
As all of you know, that answer never suffices. You have to explain what kind of a writer you are, and then you are expected to talk about your books. Some writers have business cards listing their books. I am always saying I should have those kinds of calling cards, but that I have never been organized enough to get them speaks volumes.
Other professions don’t require the explanations that ours does. It surprises me when people actually say, “Do you really make a living at that?” To date I have not answered, “Are you really stupid enough to have asked that?”
As writers we need to remember that two percent of the population buys more than 90% of the fiction that is sold. I have yet to figure out why it is that I never seem to get into a conversation with that elusive two percent of the population.
There is a certain danger that comes with others knowing about our profession, and because of that I think the official headgear of writers is the same as that worn by court jesters. I have been approached to read manuscripts by more “friend of a friend of friends” than I care to remember. Need a newsletter written? Need a paper edited? Need a business letter crafted? For some reason because we work with words, others seem to think we would love to be involved with their endeavors. What we want to say is, “Frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn.” What we usually say is, “Okay.”
Invariably, those requests come without an offer of remuneration. “It’s just a page or two,” we are told. I don’t ever remember telling a plumber, “It’s just a leak or two.” I mean, plumbers love to work with pipes, don’t they?
As for speaking engagements, beware those that tell you, “We don’t pay an honorarium, but you can sell as many books as you like.” Those are usually organizations that even Ron Popeil couldn’t sell to.
There is a difference between writing full-time, and writing fool-time. When you are too often side-tracked by writing that is not your own, you are a fool-time writer. Guilty as charged. I am glad that I am in good company, though (Thomas Sullivan, come on down.)
I am proud of being a writer, but November is not a good month to remind others of that fact, especially if they have high school kids. In years past I have been hit up by friends and acquaintances to “take a look” at their children’s college essays. I have been encouraged by those parents to “spruce it up a little.” Talk about trying to make a silk purse out of a cow’s ear.
Now I am getting an education as to why these parents were so desperate. Maybe the thought of their child’s staying at home while attending a J.C. for the next two years drove them to seek out “that writer guy.” Yes, the birds have come home to roost. My 17 year old boy is in the midst of filling out college applications.
You would think by now I would be ready for this, as I have been through the process one time before. Four years ago my oldest boy wrote his college essay and then asked me to look at it. When I finished reading it I asked him, “When you wrote this were you trying to give the admissions people every possible reason to turn you down, or just most of them?” We revised the essay. It is a process where you should not have any sharp instruments nearby.
Now I am going through that process again, but it’s even worse. My middle child has decided he should apply to schools like Swarthmore, Rice, Cornell, the Naval Academy, and Brown. Naturally, all the schools want different essays, and many of them want multiple essays. There are six supplemental essays alone for Brown.
You know Munk’s painting The Scream? This month it bears an amazing resemblance to me.
In another week or so, assuming the two of us survive our collaboration, my son’s college essays will be done. Until that time, though, I really wish I wasn’t a writer.
Pax,
Alan Russell
November 5, 2009
By Gerard Houarner, on November 4th, 2009
The holidays are coming. We’re arriving at an intersection of worlds – the real and the imagined, outer and inner, concrete and symbolic, the past and the now.
What must be done, what needs to be done.
Kids dressed up as monsters expect candy offerings. Blood-bonded friends and enemies gather for the ritual slaughter and consumption of a flightless bird. Parents plot the delivery of gifts under the guise of a night-time visit by a big man in a red suit.
Rev up the planner. Break out the color markers. There are responsibilities and commitments to be met. Shopping to be done, money spent, joy and love packaged and mailed or hidden away from loved ones until the fateful day of deliverance.
Who’s going where, what’s for dinner, which metallic red foil wrapped box is for who, again?
There is fun in playing dress-up, celebrating friends and family, offering gifts, re-connecting with ongoing traditions.
There is also pain in the feeling once more the loss of what once was, empty chairs around the dinner table, phone calls that will never be made, again, doors that can never open to the same smiling faces.
Blood seeps from old wounds. Empty spaces push out from within. Darkness closes in.
These days, broken finances haunt the empty windows of mall stores, office buildings and condos. Work, if you’re lucky enough to have any, is probably insane. The house, well, let’s hope you still have one, never mind the money to keep it up. Writers are living the freelancer’s nightmare of changing and diminishing markets, cranky editors who are themselves crumbling under corporate pressures, vanishing secondary jobs to get through the time between contracts and checks.
Writers belong to the class or workers who don’t get paid personal or sick days, holidays, or vacations. There is very little in the way of a safety net or escape route for writers who don’t have a partner with a job, benefits, and the capacity to step in to take a little pressure off.
Even without the holiday pressure, responsibilities accumulate, along with scars, routines, stuff, and things to do. We’re busy folk, for the most part, with big open pipes full of more things to do flowing fast at us. Health. The job. The kids. The parents.
Change happens, faster and more violently. Even the damn weather is kicking butt. Hang on as the rollercoaster dips and flips. What happened to the safety belts?
The real world is happening, baby.
And if somehow the big stressors have passed you by, and the usual ones are not so tough, there are still the people close by who are hurting, and that still hurts. Distracts.
How do you get anything done? More to the point of SU, how do you keep the imagination alive and kicking when the real world is bearing down from every direction? Can you really afford to trip and fall, in these times, lost in your own private dream world as you try to survive in the real one?
I’m always impressed by the multi-taskers. Envious, really. Efficient, compartmentalized, energetic, eating and exercising right while handling home and business. Great packagers of reality. But so often, there are holes in the product line of that kind of life. Some go missing as priorities take them elsewhere/elsewhen. Things get done in order of importance, in the order of the choices one makes based on the value assigned to them. Their importance, all too often, in the real world.
Sometimes the multitaskers forget you. Or someone/thing else. There’s always a price. Always damage. Maybe to the dreaming.
I may be envious, but I’m not entirely sold on the multi-tasking product pitch.
I suppose I’m nostalgic for the summer days when I could lay down in parents’ backyard and lose myself in some Jack Vance or Ray Bradbury. Or, more recently, just spend a Sunday morning with the Times on the front porch.
I find it harder every day to escape the real world. Forgetting about it too often hurts more than keeping a very close eye on it. Life is not quite what it was when I first started taking on the dream quests.
Sometimes there’s no fun in waking up to an inner or outer Katrina after slipping into that same childhood state of mind that made the world in your head the world’s reality, even if only in the privacy of room or basement or lonely stretches of country road.
That real world pounds on walls of discipline, drains the strength to keep the dream alive day to day so you have something to go back to when the time comes to sit before the keyboard.
If you can dream, no matter what, and deliver that dream to the world every day, then more power to you. If you can handle the price life collects for that focus, go for it.
But if its the dreaming that’s a struggle, and the dream is more than just about being a “writer,” whatever that may mean, but about the heart in the work of stories and characters, then what do you do when the world’s closing in?
Finding space in the day to dream can be part of the problem. Life’s dead zones, like waiting rooms, commuting trips, lunch hours, are vital. Bev Vincent and others create their space by getting up early. Stay-at-home parents mine nap times and school hours. Of course, the lists of other things to be done have to be put away. That’s why being trapped, with no other options for real world engagement, are so valuable.
Here’s a result to read and weep over:
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/brooklyn/2009/04/22/2009-04-22_train_of_thought_bklyn_writer_found_muse__wrote_first_novel_while_commuting_on_t.html
400 words at 8Am and 5PM on the F train, between Manhattan and Brooklyn. On a smartphone. With his thumbs. For two years.
Elizabeth Massie’s entry a while back about doing the things you need to do to be published struck me, because everything she listed required spending time on the quest.
And people don’t want to spend time.
They don’t have enough, or they’d rather do other things. That’s the way it is. But if you’ve managed so far and produced work even with life’s everyday distractions, the message is, there’s still always time. Somewhere. Even the storm. Not necessarily long periods of it. Maybe not for the kind of writing you’re used to doing, or prefer. Perhaps the material needs to change (more on that later). But there’s time to tap the art. To perform. To create.
I personally appreciate early morning writing, especially coming after some sleepy, sloppy late night work. Letting sleep handle some of the work of making connections and opening up the imagination makes slipping back into the writing “dream” easier.
As for popping into a “dream state” in those dead zones, I find the task frankly challenging. Noise, distractions, frustrations over real world issues do seep into the rhythm of coming up with lines, situations, conflict. However, in talking to other writers, it seems a bit of preparation goes a long way – I understand it as making writing one of the “problems” you have to handle during the course of the day. So there’s an outline for a scene, or revision work to be done – in short, a bit of preparatory dreaming has already occurred.
Another strategy is to pour that real world right into the work. If the real world has overwhelmed your dreaming, don’t work so hard at making stuff up. If you’re one of those people who can use writing to escape the real world, or transform the real world into a fantasy world on the fly, then, as with the multi-taskers, more power to you.
For the rest of us, writing often balances personal obsessions, themes, fantasies, types of stories we want or need to tell, with a healthy draw from personal experience. If you’re stuck, if the creative juices just aren’t flowing and the dreaming side of you is walled up, make the wall, the problems, people, issues you’re dealing with more of the story.
There are risks of exposure, of course, mostly to people “in the know” about your life. Normally, you’d have to edit, mix and match personalities, switch up settings, play with atmosphere. Camouflage. But if the world gives you nails and broken glass, and that’s all that fills your imagination, use that raw material. Let it rip. There’s plenty of time later for editing. Censoring. Digging deeper into the personal hell of the life you’re going through and reining in the pain. Building bridges of empathy and compassion to a wider audience than yourself.
Later is the time for making sure you’ve displayed the strength of those who helped you get through tough times and giving them their proper due, and for lingering over the sweet vengeance of using carefully chosen characteristics from the people who made your miserable in your villains or victims.
What I’m trying to say is if the usual routines and tricks don’t seem to work, try to be in the moment.
Being “in the moment” and free associating to whatever is happening around you may not be highly productive to a specific project. But concentrating on the present may help to filter the burden of real world problems. Putting down the experience, letting it roll out of the mind, playing with whatever is happening at the moment may feel almost like dreaming. No past, no future, no lists and shedules, just the problem happening right now. You might come up with some interesting character sketches, dialogue (love overheard conversations), or descriptions to use later.
If you can get a little more focused, rely on whatever strengths you have as a writer (dialogue, atmosphere, etc) and your “dead zone” environment to sketch scenes or notes for a scene. Basically, it’s about trying to stay balanced between real world pressures and skill strengths to be productive on a project.
Or, if you can hold on to an overall vision of a longer work in the middle of the madness, get specific by maneuvering a character from a to b, filling out a description, doing whatever’s needed in a small piece of a story. Like paying a bill, or picking something up from the grocery store, setting up a task for a piece while in one of your stolen moments helps get the imagination focused, even if the task is editing what’s already down.
But if the chaos is just too all-consuming, changing the the kind of writing you’re used to doing may help keep you in the writing game. Pulling back from a novel to work short stories or even flash fiction, poetry, flat out character or setting sketches, journal writing, non-fiction, blogging, tweets, or other outlets can be productive from a marketing perspective, or even produce usable material for later projects.
Finally, if you’re able, a burst of physical activity, from a brisk walk to cleaning the bathroom to dusting those bookshelves, can temporarily clear the mind and leave room for dreaming.
The world is tough on dreaming. Responsibilities bear down hard on our creative lives. These are just some of my thoughts as I struggle my own choices and commitments. I hope some of you out there have your own ideas, techniques, routines to keep working you can offer to the rest of us – I’m sure everyone from working writers to single mothers have a lot of experience in managing stress, crises, and creativity and might have some tips. I know I’m eager to hear them.
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