I like books

1

Reading came first. It always does.

Reading is the inhale, writing is the exhale.

I once read somewhere that kids who like to read fall into two groups. The first naturally picks up reading from their environment: they see their parents reading, they find books in the house, they go to libraries and bookstores and learn young and easily the books that they enjoy. These kinds of readers are bright, well-rounded kids. They are socially adept. They have lots of friends.

The second kind of reader is a different creature – and a member of a much smaller group. The environment doesn’t seem to make a difference: this kid seems wired to read, and sooner or later she will find her way to books, even if she has to crawl through green slime to do it. These kids read obsessively. They are maybe not so well-rounded, their social skills maybe not so finely honed. They have a strong solitary streak.

I grew up around books. Both my parents read. My mother was constantly bringing home books from the library. My father was an elementary school principal and he would present me with paperbacks asking me to “test them out” before giving them over to his school library.

But I am not a well-rounded type. Not then, not now. I am ‘spiky’. I learned to read when I was 5 – I know this because I found mid-year kindergarten report cards that proclaimed Justine is reading! – and bought my first book for two dollars at the local Coles bookstore. It was Blubber, by Judy Blume, and one of the ‘big kids’ had written a book report in the school newsletter about it. I was with a childhood friend named Andrea who also bought a copy of Blubber, and two days later I went to her house and asked her if she’d finished it yet. I was surprised when she said no. This would have been my first inkling – if I’d been old and mature enough to have such things as inklings – that I was not your typical reader. In grade one I would sit in reading group, bored out of my little-girl skull, while other kids sounded out Dick and Jane. I flipped through the book to the ‘teacher’s instructions’ at the end and read those in a desperate attempt to amuse myself. Then we’d go back to our desks and I’d pull out my copy of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians. Although I didn’t know this at the time – and wouldn’t until I ran into my first-grade teacher over a decade later – the teacher never believed that I was truly reading Christie. She thought I was staring at the pages for show. Just another intellectually pretentious little first-grader.

Reading was my first and earliest drug. I didn’t want to go out on the playground during recess and lunch hour. I would hide somewhere in the school building and read. In junior high I found excellent nesting places among the stacks in the library, at least until my teacher realized where I was (and wasn’t). He would pound angrily on the windows to flush me out. The grown-ups in my life seemed determined that I learn how to socialize like a normal kid, which I was beginning to realize I wasn’t, not quite. I was lonely and craved popularity but could only be with other kids for a certain amount of time. I got bored. I wanted to get back to my book.

Fiction raised me. Although I remember getting the birds-and-the-bees conversation from my parents in a way that didn’t make a whole lot of sense at the time – something about a seed getting planted in the woman’s vagina, how gross, and what did gardening have to do with human babies? – my sexual education came to me, thoroughly and in-depth, from books. I read Judy Blume and learned about menstruation, wet dreams, and erections; I read Richard Peck’s Are You In The House Alone and learned about date rape; I read my way through VC Andrews and learned about forbidden desire. I read so much about HIV – I came of age during the AIDS crisis – that I could lecture adults about how it was and was not transmitted. I knew about the different kinds of birth control years before I had any use for them. I knew that sex seemed simple enough but could get really complicated really quickly and made you emotionally vulnerable and had a seedy underside and a dark side and could ruin your life if you got pregnant, as several girls in my high school proceeded to do. None of the adults in my life taught me this, at least not in a way that made any real impression. Fiction did. Fiction delivered not just a ‘message’ but rich emotional context and power that sent that message resonating through gut, heart and soul. Fiction was like stepping into a whole other life – a succession of lives – and the knowledge I gathered there I could bring back into my so-called real one. It was a strange kind of knowledge, it was the knowledge of life gleaned from books, of hard-won experience when I was an innocent, but it was knowledge nonetheless, and it fueled my hunger for more, more, more. I wanted the world. And no one, absolutely no one, could talk me out of it.

–2—

When someone tells me they want to write, I always like to ask them what they read. It’s not just out of curiosity – although I am always curious about what people are reading, always one to sneak a glance at the title of the hardcover novel my neighbor on the plane is reading, always one to wander over to the bookshelves in any strange room I happen to find myself in – but a little test of sorts. Maybe it’s fair, maybe it’s unfair, but the plain fact is that most people flunk it.

The test is this: Do you read obsessively?

Most people kind of stutter around a bit and look at me blankly. They might name a few bestselling writers, or things that everybody read in high school – Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, Kurt Vonnegut – but more than the actual answer it’s the way they answer, the pauses and squirming discomfort, the sense that I’ve put them on the spot.

People who read a lot can rattle off titles, authors, different genres; it can be highbrow or lowbrow, doesn’t matter: they are fluent in the language of Book. When someone gives me an answer like that, I can feel my writer’s ears perking up, like a dog suddenly hopeful for a treat. Someone could tell me they wrote a novel last week, and as far as I’m concerned that doesn’t prove anything except an impressive ability to face the blank computer screen time after time after time– which is no small thing, but, sadly, not nearly enough on its own.

But tell me you read two or three books last week, and the week before that, and the week before that going all the way back to your teen years or childhood or whatever, and that’s when I think, Ah! You might be the real deal.

Reading obsessively isn’t nearly enough on its own, either. You still need to accumulate all the tools a fiction writer needs in his or her personal kit – plot, theme, character, place, incisive use of detail, evocation of the different senses, etcetera etcetera – and you still need to practice and persevere until you learn to write a novel that, as one writing instructor put it, “hinges together”. And then you need to learn about query letters and how to get an agent and suffer the agonizing near-misses of almost-publication and endure the endless endless waiting and so on. But reading obsessively is, to me, a sign, like a big red X stamped on your forehead that signals you’re one of the tribe. And as a member of that farflung, scattered tribe, I’m excited to find one of my kind.

Because the truth of it is, there aren’t a whole lot of obsessive readers in the world.

Just like there aren’t a whole lot of people who sell their works of fiction (or nonfiction), who are paid to be published, who can walk into a Borders or Barnes & Noble and find their books on the shelves (at least for a brief period of time).

Seems to me these two things are connected.

–3–

This is the part where somebody always tells me just how wrong I am, how full of bullshit, there are no rules when it comes to art, including John D MacDonald’s maxim: If you don’t read three books a week, you don’t have a chance. This is the part where somebody, inevitably a wannabe writer who doesn’t read much, trots out the anecdote of someone they know who doesn’t read much either – after all, who has the time? – and wrote a novel and it became a huge bestseller and won a Pulitzer. Or something to that effect.

To which I say calmly, And so that’s the exception that proves the rule. While inwardly thinking, Show me a successful writer who doesn’t read much and I’ll show you a dog that can foxtrot. Sure, such writers (and dogs) might exist here and there – the whole thing about get enough monkeys together and put them on typewriters and at some point they’ll produce the Bible — and I’m writing way too many animals into this paragraph — but they’re so rare you can bill them as a circus act.

It just doesn’t work that way.

That you need to read a lot in order to be a better writer isn’t a ‘rule’ but a reflection of an underlying principle about the creative life in general. For me, Eric Maisel puts it best in his book Creativity For Life:

‘…the most useful definition of creativity is the following: people are artistically creative when they love what they are doing, know what they are doing, and actively engage in art-making. The three elements of creativity are thus loving, knowing and doing; or heart, mind and hands; or, as Zen Buddhist teaching has it, great faith, great question, and great courage.’

Loving, knowing, doing. The secret behind becoming excellent at anything is loving one thing deep and hard enough to do it for a very long time. To continue to learn and know it.

There are two kinds of knowing: the things that we can consciously articulate and the different, deeper kind that we can’t really explain or, sometimes, are even aware we possess, but guides us anyway – if we are willing to let it.

We call it our inner voice, our intuition.

My best writing comes from what I guess you could call my writer’s intuition – or, as I like to call it, my undermind. The undermind is a mysterious place and I don’t claim to understand how it works, only that I must feed it and keep it healthy and give it enough space and time so that it can work. When I come to the laptop and return to a scene that’s been troubling me and suddenly realize that I don’t even need it, that in fact the book works better if I cut it out entirely…When I express some kind of insight I didn’t even know I had, either through prose or a character’s dialogue…When I go off on what seems a tangent from the main storyline and yet realize that it makes the book richer, deeper to veer in this direction for a bit…Whenever I have the sense that I don’t really know where the writing is coming from, I know that I’m giving my writer’s intuition full force, that I am letting it speak through me. This is also when I know that I’m at – or at least near – the top of my game.

I had my most striking lesson about the undermind when I was writing LORD OF BONES, which became my third published novel (and sequel to my first). I had the entire book mapped out, both in my head and again on paper: I had outlined and revised the outline and revised the outline yet again, believing that the actual writing of the book can affect the outline just as much as the outline affects the book. Both outline and novel-in-progress are, in my mind, living documents: they shift and change, they evolve. No matter how thoroughly you map out a scene beforehand, there’s a kind of magic in the act of actually writing it that never happens in the outline, so that you end up with something different than what you’d intended. The difference might be great, or small and subtle, but it needs to be acknowledged, and looped back into the outline of the novel, which must alter enough to incorporate it…So if the outline dictates the course of the novel, the novel keeps altering the outline.

When I was writing my dark urban fantasy LORD OF BONES I came to a scene where my character Kai Youngblood, a seven-hundred-year-old Summoner (a descendent of angels who can use magic), has a conversation with a demon named Del who has information about the novel’s Big Bad – the Lord of Bones himself – that Kai desperately wants.

And then Del said something that surprised me. He suggested that the Lord of Bones was looking for a new pupil, now that Asha, the villain of my first novel BLOODANGEL, had been eliminated.

A thought flashed through me: what if Jess, my novel’s protagonist (and Kai’s love interest) was that new pupil? What if Bones was seeking her out for that reason?

From the way the idea came out of nowhere and resonated through me, I knew it was my undermind at work. And so I did this:

I ignored it.

I ignored it because in order to accommodate it I wouldn’t have to tweak or alter the outline, but throw out the whole thing and start from scratch. The thought of all that extra work made me groan. Besides, it was a half-second flash. It was a door swinging open just enough to let in some outside air, give a glimpse of a different road. Easy enough to kick that door shut.

Flash forward maybe two hundred pages and many months later. I lost my original editor, who jumped publishing houses, and as we waited to see who would replace her my agent contacted me about the manuscript. She said, nicely and gently, that since the publication date was coming up fast (it was about a year away) we should probably get to work on revising the manuscript – that is, if I was willing to consider her suggestions. Since my agent has proven repeatedly her excellent editorial eye, I said sure. Also, I knew deep in my gut that the book….didn’t work.

My agent confirmed this. She didn’t exactly say “it sucks”, but presented a convincing and thorough argument about why the first sixty pages were good and the rest of the book was not. She said, We should throw out everything after the first sixty pages. She said, There’s a conversation that Kai has with Del where it’s suggested that the Lord of Bones might want to ‘mentor’ Jess, and I think that’s a great idea, and the direction the book should go in…

And of course I knew she was right. The decision I made in order to avoid a painful truth (the book wasn’t working) as well as the extra time and work involved in starting over, ended up costing me….a new, much more painful truth (the completed book was a hideous, horrible failure that should never see the light of day) and considerably more time than if I’d been smart enough to go with my intuition in the first place.

The creative process has always been regarded as mysterious to the point of being otherworldly – the ancient Greeks believed that when you were ‘in the zone’ some literal higher power was working through you. I don’t believe in those kinds of muses – or rather, I believe in what Steven Pressfield in his excellent book The War of Art describes as a ‘workaday muse’. Basically: inspiration strikes only those who prepare for it, and the way you prepare for it is to show up at the work everyday, to overcome all the insidious, brutal forces that keep us procrastinating and rationalizing away that procrastination, to keep slugging through the work until mental skies open and the nubile goddess of Inspiration sweeps down and streaks us away in her white-hot chariot.

My take is that the ‘higher power’ is the deeper, darker power of the undermind, of writer’s intuition. You can’t control it. It will not come when called. It will not be your dog. But you can feed and nourish it and do your best to train it, so that when it does show up it sings out with the full gifted vocal range of a Christina Aguilera, instead of one of those deluded folks trying out for American Idol.

And the way you train it is through reading.

Reading reading reading.

You can take classes and workshops. You can (and probably should) seek out writing mentors who will help you learn the craft of fiction writing and, if you’re very lucky, the kind of mindset necessary to be a professional (ie: someone who loves writing enough to commit to it as something other than “just a hobby”). You can read your way through an ocean of books about how to build plots and create characters.

I’ve done all these things and found them helpful. But this is what I noticed early on, when I was still in my late teens: these books and Writer’s Digest articles that explored the techniques of fiction writing were only putting face and form to things I already ‘knew’. I just knew them on that deeper level of things that are sensed and felt; I already did many of them, knowing that they worked and were somehow ‘right’ but without knowing why or even what, exactly, I was doing. I didn’t need to learn about point of view, for example, from a workshop or an article; I had already absorbed that knowledge through years and years of reading fiction. What I did need was a better sense of how I could improve, and this is where that conscious, deconstructed kind of writer’s knowledge – that upfront face knowledge as opposed to the vague shadowy knowledge of the undermind – came in helpful.

Let me put it this way: I learned to write fiction (to the extent that I know how to do it) through reading fiction. Reading fiction gave me a rough draft of knowledge; novel-writing workshops and all those how-to magazines and books, what I sometimes affectionately refer to as Writer’s Porn, helped me revise all that knowledge to make it sharper, stronger, much more focused.

Reading is the ‘learning’. You can never learn enough. The more I read, the more experienced I become in just what other writers do to achieve a powerful level of storytelling. As a reader, I enjoy myself, and as a writer, I file those examples away deep in my undermind where they join up with other examples and play around and cross-fertilize and wait for the moment when they’re needed. They become the river of knowledge, influence and inspiration that I can draw from and the more I read, the deeper and wider that river gets.

A well-known agent in San Francisco once advised a room filled with eager hopefuls to take their time allotted to writing, slice it in half, and dedicate one half to reading. Reading can never replace the actual ‘doing’ of writing: you still need to put in all that time at the blank page, you still need to get those practice novels under your belt and in that mythical Trunk that every writer seems to possess in some form. But learning and doing are flip sides of the same coin; one doesn’t fully exist without the other.

Reading is the inhale, writing is the exhale.

Aspiring writers will tell me, But I don’t have time to read! I never understood the logic behind this. Whether or not you like it, whether or not you have ‘time’ for it: that doesn’t change the cold objective fact that, if you want to arrive at a certain level of craft, it has to be done.

Which brings us to love.

Loving, learning, doing: if you love fiction enough, you find the time. You give up other things instead. You read around the edges of your life – standing in line, waiting in the doctor’s office, on the train or the bus or the plane. You read during lunch hour. You read instead of doing the dishes or watching TV or shopping for stuff you probably don’t need anyway.

The art of any art is the art of obsession. This is not something that people in general tend to understand. They encourage you to be well-rounded, which bemuses me in a society that tends to reward the specialists – the obsessives – those who decided to excel at one thing instead of becoming good at a hundred or competent at a thousand.

There were people in my life who told me I read too much. One afternoon during the year I was an exchange student in Australia, my host father took me aside and we went for a walk. He told me to make sure I always put away any food I took out of the fridge or cupboard, because in the hot Australian climate crumbs attracted bugs. Lots of bugs. He also told me that maybe I should read a little less. Or maybe a lot less. He believed what a lot of people believe: that reading was a poor substitute for actually living, as if one could only be done in exclusion of the other; and that reading fiction was, by and large, a form of escape and an unproductive use of time. If you’re going to read, at least read non-fiction, because that way you learn something.

It wouldn’t be the last time I encountered this attitude. My ex-husband used to ask me, whenever he saw me reading, “Don’t you think you’ve read enough books?” He was joking without really joking; he thought my time was better spent elsewhere, preferably on the house. To suggest that this was one of the reasons we eventually divorced would not be too far from the truth.

So I would say this:

Reading is living. It is a way of touching minds with some of the most remarkable minds that exist or ever did exist. Reading takes you deeper into the nature of reality, helps you penetrate the human condition itself. It enlarges your consciousness. It provides you with experiences you never could have had in any other way (or just haven’t had yet). And when you put the book down, everything you take away from it helps you live your life with added depth and richness. Fiction may not provide you with the same kind of information as non-fiction, but information is not always knowledge, and knowledge is not always wisdom. Fiction – the best fiction – is wise, and makes you just a little bit wiser, and you can take that wisdom and apply it across all the different parts of your life.

I am, as of this writing, 37 years old. I am an obsessive reader. I’ve also managed to travel the world, get educated, work various jobs (being crappy at many of them and good at a few), develop friendships, have a tumultuous love life, participate in a scandal or two (not telling), have twins, have triplets, sell three novels, see a ton of movies, write a blog, get married, get divorced, etcetera etcetera. Not necessarily in that order. I started out in Peterborough, Canada and ended up south of the border and on the other side of the continent in Los Angeles, California. I don’t say this to brag about my time management skills – which tend to be questionable in any case – but only to underscore the point that, in the most basic and literal sense of the term, I have still managed to have a life.

If I could go back in time and meet up with my younger self, I wouldn’t tell her to read less.

I would tell her to read more.

If you want to be a writer, read.

Read like a maniac.

Give yourself permission to read like a maniac.

Don’t just read because it will make you a better writer – although it will. Read because you love to read, you love stories of all shapes and sizes, you love the flow and rhythms and innovations of language, you love to learn stuff about people, you love to learn stuff about the world, you love to form relationships with individuals who don’t exist. Read because you love to write. Read because you love fiction and nonfiction and their pirate chests of treasures.

Read for love.

Because if you don’t have love, then what do you have?

And why are you reading this in the first place?

– Justine Musk

www.justinemusk.com
my blog The Decadence: Notes from a Novelist’s Life in LA

When I was in university, one of my closest friends asked me if writing fiction couldn’t be a “hobby” instead of something I staked my future and livelihood on.

I was adamant that it could not. I had to create or die, dammit! I was born to be a writer! Anything else would be a death of the soul!

I wonder about that now. It’s good – and necessary – to be passionately dedicated to your art, whichever and whatever the art happens to be. But I’m also reminded of something that Stephen King said in his book On Writing: art is a support system for life, not the other way around.

When I was a kid, I could knock out five or ten pages of fiction with such ease I honestly didn’t understand what it meant to have ‘writer’s block’ or why writers, especially successful writers who made it look easy, would go on about the pain and torment of facing the blank page.

Sure, I was young. But writing was not the center of my existence; school and family occupied most of my time and mental energy.

Writing was the shadow life, running through the real one.

Writing took place at the edges of things.

Only later, when I was an adult, and in a situation where I could put my writing squarely in the center of my days, did I start to understand the pain and torment those writers were talking about.

There is a lot of anxiety involved in the creative process. The choices we know we have to make and the self-doubt we know we have to weather, and then the criticism and rejection we know we will experience when it comes time to show our work to the world (or at least certain corners of it), demand a toughness of spirit that isn’t always easy to manifest.

Then there’s the nature of the work itself: that mysterious wild quality to the creative process that seems beyond our control, so that we often feel ourselves at the mercy of it – that it’s the boss of us rather than vice-versa — and wouldn’t it be nicer and easier to go to the movies instead. There’s something to be said for keeping that kind of work at the edges of your life: like an eclipse that will drive you blind if you stare at it too directly, maybe fiction-writing, or art-making in general, is often possible only if you sneak up on it from a certain angle.

After all, the harder and tighter we try to hold on to anything, the more likely it is to slip through our fingers.

There’s an anecdote I like to tell about a writer I used to know whenever I got into a discussion about MFA programs. I think there’s a lot of value in MFA programs, but I was making a point similar to the point I’m making now: the importance of doing something else, of having a passion other than writing, a passion that you can bring to your writing.

My friend, K, published his first book of short stories when he was 28. He won a prestigious national prize for the title story. I knew him at university – he was bright, and showed talent as a writer, and was devoted to the craft.

He wasn’t unlike many other young aspiring writers who graduate university and go on to do an MFA, or take jobs in coffee shops and write when they can.

K, though, took a different route – he loved sailing and had a passion for the sea. Despite his complete lack of experience, he figured out how to get himself hired as a crew member on a yacht. He sailed round the world, went scuba diving, visited many different countries and took an interest in the people there.

Then he came home and transmuted those experiences into fiction. He found an agent and got a two-book deal with a major publisher. The book came out and, from what I understand, did well, got some good reviews, and K looked poised for the kind of literary career others only dream of.

When I told this anecdote, I was making the point that there are alternatives to the MFA route, and finding a different path that provides equally different material for your fiction can be a deep advantage.

To be sure, K sought out writing teachers and mentors, including a professor at the local university. He read and wrote and got constructive feedback and revised and wrote some more.

That’s what you do.

That’s the job.

He didn’t write a perfect manuscript. But what he did write was something very different than what his peers in their MFA programs were writing, and it made his voice fresh and distinctive, and it gave him a great story of his own to include in the author blurb at the back of the book and in promotional materials. He didn’t just learn how to write; he went out into the world and found something to say.

In everything I’ve read about writing fiction, everything addressed to aspiring writers and especially young aspiring writers, I don’t think there’s enough emphasis on that: find your voice, yes, but also find something to say.

Find the subject matter that is uniquely your own.

Be curious about the world and hungry for experience. Get obsessed, and follow those obsessions wherever they lead you.

And then write about them. Be bold. Take chances. Use your imagination as well as what you know, use your ability to put yourself in someone else’s perspective.

K wrote stories about a young man who works on a yacht, a young man who learns about love and sex, but he also wrote from the perspectives of women, of people from different places, different cultures.

Write what you know, but chances are that you know more than you think you know. Keep learning, keep exploring, so that you know more and more.

But here’s the other part to the story about K, that I didn’t have way back when I used to tell this anecdote. Seven years later, he has yet to come out with the second book in his two-book contract. As far as I know – and I could be mistaken – he hasn’t published again.

The last time I saw K, he was passing through Los Angeles on his way to Mexico where he was going to stay with a friend on the beach and write his novel. Finishing his novel was important, K told me, because he had to do it for him, not his publisher; he had to know that he could do it.

I haven’t seen or talked to him since. I hope he finished it. But I think there’s a good chance he didn’t, because something in his writer-self had shifted since the success of his book. Writing no longer held the same kind of fascination for him; the spark had gone out of it, the way it sometimes does, especially when we invest it with that Create or Die ultimatum. Unlike when he wrote those short stories, people were watching him, now, people were waiting for his work. They had expectations for him. He had expectations for himself.

When we have so much at stake, we get tense. We get anxious. Anxiety reaches deep into the most ancient part of our brains and triggers that fight-or-flight–or-freeze response. All we’re facing is the blank page, but we might as well be facing a snarling sabertooth tiger; that primitive part of our brain can’t tell the difference.

All it registers is: threat.

All it cares about is: survival.

So we freeze up. We back away. And maybe we take flight into some activity or process that is guaranteed to relieve that anxiety, at least temporarily, whether it’s watching television or shopping or doing drugs or alcohol or any other one of a myriad of hard and soft addictions.

Then we berate ourselves for our lack of willpower, we call ourselves idiots; we feel like total failures, we regret the lost time, the lost chances to produce good work. But that part of our brain is older than we are, and it operates in a dark instinctive space that is beyond language or reason. If we back it into a corner, and make it think it’s fighting for its very survival, can we be surprised at how fiercely it drives us away? And that, once again, no writing gets done?

Having it on the sidelines, releasing ourselves from the pressure and burden of expectations, might be, ironically enough, one way of keeping our writing center stage. We do our work in the corner, nourish it and let it grow like a plant that only blooms in the dark. So much of writing seems to happen underground anyway, in the rich mysterious spaces of that parallel life where other lives get lived and life-or-death drama plays out while we run errands, make lunch for the kids, put in the time at the day job.

If you wrote for twenty to thirty minutes a day – every day – you could write a book in a year.

Writing fiction is serious business. It demands nothing less than everything you’ve got to give: your blood, sweat, heart and soul; your time; your ego. You expose yourself in your work and again when you show your work. It deserves to be taken seriously, and yet somehow we have to find a way to treat it lightly, hold it lightly, so it doesn’t slip away from us.

Justine Musk

1

The novel is dead.  Long live the novel.

2

So I got myself a Kindle2.  I resisted the first version, declaiming to all and sundry that I preferred the experience of book-as-object: the feel of the pages, the gloss of the jacket.  But the idea of reducing the weight of the reading load I carry around —  to something as slender as a butter knife — was too seductive to resist.  Still, I remained skeptical.  When the package arrived from Amazon,  I let it sit around the house for a few weeks like a neglected hamster.

But then I got hooked.  In minutes.

The convenience is amazing. Thinner and smaller than a notebook, it takes up so little space in my sack of a handbag I have to make sure it doesn’t get crushed.  Within two days I’d packed the thing with newspapers, magazines, blogs and nonfiction:  not only did I not mind reading them in this new form, I preferred it, happy to be without the clutter of all that print, articles so neatly at my fingertips. 

The coolest thing of all is to read or hear about a book, then be able to order it on my Kindle2, download it, and start reading within minutes.  Because, you know, that two-day wait from Amazon, that fifteen minute drive to the bookstore, is just waaaaay too long a wait.  And reading on a Kindle turns out to be not so very different from reading a book-object: the page looks the same, your eyes move across it the same way.  It just means that instead of getting a strained right wrist from propping up a hardcover, I get a strained thumb from pressing the ‘next page’ button.

Although I’d been following the conversations about the future of book publishing for several years, my attachment to my Kindle2 drove it all home in a way that left me a little awestruck.  I asked myself, Am I holding the death of traditional publishing in my hands? 

And I answered myself: Duh. 

3

Once upon a time, people sat around campfires in smoky caves and told each other stories and painted illustrations on the walls.  Generations handed stories down to each other through poetry and song, using rhythm and rhyme as an excellent memory device.

Enter the book.

 Once upon a time,  a book was this kind of holy relic that monks labored over high in their monasteries, copying page after page while the rest of Europe sloshed through the mulch of the Dark Ages.  Then, you see, this guy invented this thing called the printing press.  Suddenly anything you could think up in your head could be printed and distributed to an audience of unimaginable size.  People got more literate.  Even women.  Novels became the drug of choice, offering flight and fancy — they also allowed the more intrepid (or financially desperate) women writers to create identity, independence and a name for themselves.

Novels – from Edith Wharton to Charles Dickens –were published in serial installments in monthly newspapers.  Short fiction was the real moneymaker: Scott F Fitzgerald churned out lucrative short stories in order to subsidize the “real work” of his novels.  As the decades rolled by, the bulky length of a Victorian novel became more streamlined, due to the natural evolution of the form itself, but perhaps also because of technology.  The advent of word processing makes the cut-and-paste of revision a shockingly different experience than the literal cut-and-paste done under gaslight — or even the liquid paper and carbons and constant retyping I remember doing on the white Olympia typewriter I swiped from my mother when I was a kid.  Form and content have a living, shifting relationship to each other: content dictates form, and form dictates the possibilities of content.

But in the end, do the forms really change that much? 

The more things change, after all, the more they stay the same.  (Or, as Hollywood movie executives like to tell each other, “People want the same, yet different”).   People fret about what the future of fiction will look like, but could be the future is already here.  It looks like this: a Kindle2, popular because it mimics a familiar reading experience, not because it creates any real new one.  Along with books, we have e-books.  Digital fiction opens up a whole new world of interactive narrative, except we’ve already that for years: they’re called computer games, some of them with storylines more sophisticated and compelling than much of the stuff in the movie theatres on any given day.  

We’ll have a kind of hybrid, multimedia storytelling that combines text, music, pictures, video, perhaps even social media but is that really so different from storyworlds like the Star Wars universe, explored through movies, novels, comic books, soundtracks, action figures? (Would Luke Skywalker have a Twitter account?  Would Yoda be on Facebook?)  As traditional magazines shut down and shut out short stories and poetry, literary journals multiply all over the Web .   It’s possible that poetry and short-short fiction will find a whole new audience when distributed on iPhones and iPods.  Narrative-blogs are today’s published journals, living memoirs.  And what is Twitter but a grown-up version of notes passed in class or, for the more adventurous and poetic, a kind of haiku?

Fiction isn’t going anywhere, except digital.  We’re seeing old wine in new bottles.  The challenge is for the publishing industry to learn how to shape and build and package those new bottles. 

And, of course, for the writers.

4

A novel remains a novel:  a singular and well-crafted emotional experience that brings you into intimate contact with another person’s mind and vision.  It is, for me, an experience very different from any kind of interactive storytelling – after all, we’ve already had that too, they’re called Choose Your Own Adventures – because part of the fulfillment of a good novel is seeing what happens next.  And also how, in the end, everything comes together in a way you didn’t expect, and resonates back through the story to give it order and meaning. 

What has changed – the bottle that, in my mind, has been smashed to smithereens – is not the novel, but the position of the novelist. 

In this Internet age of connection, collaboration and communication,  it is harder and harder to view the writer as an isolated figure.  Blogs, forums and social media have transformed the relationship between writer and reader, between writer and other writers, providing feedback and contact when before there would have been only silence — until the trudging footsteps of the mailperson’s walk up the driveway.  Googling a writer can bring on a flood of information that in turn brings a weird kind of intimacy –  a sense of: I don’t know you, but I know you.  The writer’s identity was once a shrouded, mysterious thing in the distance, sometimes revealed, in glimpses, through whatever interviews and public readings the writer decided to give. 

Now, the writer doesn’t just have an identity, but a digital identity that anyone with an Internet connection can access at any time.  I was thinking about this after a conversation with the president of Causecast.org — a nonprofit dot.com company — who observed that “an author’s website no longer supports the books…the books support the website.”  I could see how this might apply to nonfiction, especially if the writer was also a touring public speaker, but fiction?  Fiction isn’t about anything other than the fiction; either a book engages you and does what it’s supposed to, or it doesn’t.

Except…a long time can elapse between books.  The books themselves can span different subjects, different genres.  And if the author’s body of work represents that author’s vision, could be that the author’s website serves as the heart of the vision, a signature digital cord that pulls everything together.  This is also a time when to market your work means to speak with a unique and authentic voice that draws people in, makes them want to connect with you and read your stuff.  Rather than just a promotional or ‘branding’ tool, the website – with its attendant blogs and links and takeaway reading material,  its bio and news and reviews – becomes the author’s persona removed from a distant background to be placed front and center.  It is the author’s way of putting herself out there and allowing herself to be found.  This is why a static website is a failed website; it should have a life of its own, changing and growing as the author’s work — and the author herself — does the same.   The work is the web, and the website – and the connection it enables with the reader — is the warm, fuzzy spider at the center. 

Because another thing that is changing – and not to the writer’s advantage – is the reading experience itself.  When I am reading my Kindle, I have many options to choose from.  One book loses my interest and – boom – I press a couple of buttons and go on to something else.  Or if nothing on my Kindle appeals to me, and I’m in the mood for something new, I just need to switch over to the wireless store and see what catches my fancy enough to download.  This, of course, is on top of everything else in today’s world competing for my time, my attention, and my money.  It’s more difficult than ever for a writer to grab – and hold – the reader’s attention. But, thanks to the multiple dimensions of the Internet, the writer has more ways than ever of doing so. 

As I write this I am sitting at home in Los Angeles while it seems that half the people I know are at Sundance and the other half are at the Inauguration.  I don’t mind this — I could have gone to either, if I’d made enough effort, but here’s the thing:

I am exhausted.

It has been, if I may say so myself, a hell of a year.

When my sons were younger, we once bought a butterfly kit.  We watched caterpillars transform themselves into winged creatures we set loose in our backyard.  But what struck me — kind of horrified me, actually — was the messy, bloody-looking process it turned out to be.  Turns out that that particular metaphor of transformation didn’t prepare me for the dried red stains splashed all around the mesh cage, or the struggle and pain they imply.

To put it bluntly: I got divorced.

The end of my marriage left no doubt whatsoever that it was indeed the end of my marriage, and that to carry it any further would only inflict further emotional damage on all involved.  That door is closed and there is no going back.  So I’ve been an unmarried woman now (in every way except technically, if you want to get picky about it) for about six months. Along with the rise of what seems like every negative thought and emotion that ever got suppressed in the past years — in order to keep the peace as best as it could be kept, in order to just get along — there’s also been the sweeping sense of liberation, release, new possibility. There’s been a growing awareness of the shape I’m changing into once I bust through the final layers of cocoon — and the stained mesh of the cage itself.

It really is a gruesome process.

The high points were high and the low points so low I hope I never descend that far again.  What the year distinctly lacked was any kind of calm that characterizes those points in the middle.  If the poet had it right — that poetry, and by extension fiction-writing in general, is the intensity of experience recollected in tranquility, then I gathered a hell of a lot of material.  I just needed the tranquility to work with it.

I lacked something else too, which is just as important, if not more so.  A friend summed it up in neat if devastating fashion when she said,  ”You need to make choices.  You’re not making choices.”

And she was right.

There’s some cocky little child in me that wants to do and have and be everything….and write about it all.

In other words, there were times when I said yes when I should have said no.  And not because I was afraid to say no; I wanted to write every single thing I was offered, amazed and plumb delighted that I was being offered these things at all.  I wanted it so much that I denied the reality of my increasingly turbulent personal situation and the impact that would have on my work life, especially once my ex and I started wrestling with custody issues.  I also denied the growing chasm between what I’d agreed to write and what I truly want to write, somehow assuming I’d just manage to accomplish it all.

I didn’t want to make the tough choices, so I acted like I didn’t have to make any.

It didn’t work out so well.

Let’s just say that lessons were learned.

So I like that I’m submitting this piece to the site on the same day we get our new President, when a vocabulary of hope and change has galvanized the country, or at least certain parts of it.  It’s not that any of us expect the war to go away, the middle east to suddenly right itself, the economy to return overnight to the insane bubbling froth of the time I first moved to this country a decade ago.  It’s not that we don’t even expect to be disillusioned, perhaps bitterly so, once reality starts to fill up all that lovely empty space of perfect potential that Obama’s presidency still represents.  But there is the hope that maybe we’ve been through the worst, and we’ve now made a different decision, a new decision, that has pointed us in a fresh and bettter direction.

My own life is heading in a fresh direction, including my writing life.  I’ve had to streamline and shift gears.  I’ve also had to learn that the ‘no’ of quitting some things means a bigger, better ‘yes’ to the other things I now have time for.

So I am saying, all over again, a ‘yes’ to Storytellers Unplugged.  I’ve missed so many posts and been late on so many others — including this one — that I’d like to declare, today, a new start and a new sense of commitment.

Thank you, SU, for your patience with me.

So if a woman is to write, she needs a room of her own.

So I’ve heard, anyway.

After years of experimenting with many different kinds of rooms, from my teenage bedroom in Canada to my shoebox apartment in Japan to the back-store café of the Border’s in Century City and friend’s guesthouse in my own Los Angeles neighborhood… I have discovered that in order to write, at this particular moment in my life, I need a whole building.

Or more specifically: a warehouse converted into lofty cutting-edge office space that houses two dot.com companies (Mahalo and Causecast) in a neighborhood of similar converted warehouses…on a street in Santa Monica that doesn’t offer the temptations of bookstore, movie theatre or shopping mall.  It is here that I am writing Soul Matter, the sequel to my book Lord of Bones, which was the sequel to my first novel Bloodangel.   It is also here that I am writing this essay.  In one of the doorless offices to my right I hear low conversation, and behind and off to my left someone moving around the kitchenette, that little place of stainless steel and eco-friendly filtered water, with nary a plastic bottle to be seen  There are long steel tables that serve as desks, cafeteria style, except with massive computer screens instead of  sandwiches and fries.

I can look out the front door, the sunlit parking lot and strip of grass and palms marking it off from the street.  The Causecast CEO, youngish in t-shirt and jeans like he’s about to head off to a rock concert instead of a PR meeting, is talking on his cell and pacing the sidewalk.  Just behind him is his brand-new Tesla Roadster.  Nestled alongside it, in the other prime parking spot, is a yellow Corvette.  The Corvette belongs to the Mahalo CEO, another still-youngish guy who likes to bring his bulldogs to work.  They’re snuffling around my chair right now.

Both men are friends of mine, but it’s the one with the dogs who offered me some of his extra office space to write in.  The offices are built into the walls and for the most part don’t have doors.  I started out in one, got moved to another when the Causecast CEO decided to put his own desk and couch and lava lamp in there, and by the time I found myself moved to a third, I had discovered something:

What I really like to do is write in the open.

I use my office for storage.  I pick up my laptop and roam.  I like the big red chair in the corner of couches, coffee table and fake grass.  But the sun through the windows can make me warm and sleepy.  Also, people have a habit of gathering there to discuss work and eat strong-smelling sandwiches, as if the corner had been specifically designed for such purposes, instead of my own writerly convenience.

To fight off afternoon snoozetime, I like the far end of a wood-topped table that runs along the front part of the main room and puts me close to the espresso maker (this is important).  There are enough walls around to provide a sense of enclosure even as people move through the edges of my vision.  I can take a quick break from my laptop screen, look up and watch two guys wrestling with the antique video game by the entrance.

I like that.

I get to be in my own mental bubble while still feeling involved in the world, or at least a nice little nook of it.

Here’s another thing I’ve learned about why I need open areas:  I like to move.  I need to pace and wander.

I’ve lost count of the number of times something has come to me when just walking or driving along, as if the brain needs the body to move its thinking forward….by quite literally moving it forward.  In the past,  I took this physical restlessness as a sign that the day’s writing was over, life crowding in with so much else to do.  At Mahalo, determined to stay the course for a certain number of hours or pages, whichever comes first, I have no choice but to force myself back to my laptop.  But then the writing would flow again, and I finally realized that, for me, sessions of writing and pacing need to alternate with each other.

Which seems so obvious I wonder why I never figured this out long before.  I am intensely physical;  despite  - or maybe because of – all the time I spend in my head, I come at the world just as fiercely through my body.  I crave exercise, fill my closet with sensuous textures — leather, silk, velvet, suede, high-quality cotton — and have yet to outgrow my fondness for clubs, since dancing, music, lights and crowd act as cathartic ritual for me.

It’s almost as if the body has to take over so the mind can settle down, relax, find its way back into that dreamy, trance like state in which ideas flow and the writing takes over.  It might come in fits and starts, that state of waking dream, but it does come, and then come back.  If I’m willing to hang around long enough.

This need for motion is what makes it a very bad idea to work anywhere near places where I can buy books or clothes.  It’s not just the body that wants to get away from the laptop.

Because if my brain is a creative brain, it is also a restless and fidgety one.

I am – as someone so nicely put it – a highly distractible person.  This makes it tough for me to attend to tedious details or remember where I put things.  I have had to replace way too many passports, green cards, and debit cards; ATM machines that aren’t swipe-through have been a bane of my existence.  I have a troubled relationship with the roof of my car. I will put things there to free up my hands and then drive or walk away.  “This,” the Causecast CEO said the other day, “is why you lose your car keys,” as he took the aforementioned item off the sunbaked roof of my Lexus and handed them over, demonstrating one of the reasons why he runs a company and I do not.

I can, however, write good and publishable fiction.  At university I could crank out essays at the last minute and get one of the highest marks in the class.  I could also skip a great many classes – and did, starting in high school – and still make the dean’s list.  My brain has an excellent ability to find unusual connections and relationships between things, very handy for fiction and essay writing.  But just as the body adapts to trauma and stress by heightening some senses (a sudden eye for detail, adrenaline-fueled strength and increased tolerance for pain) while taking away others  ( bowel control), the brain also seems to operate along a similar exchange.  The kind of steady, accumulative skill- and knowledge-building necessary in subjects like languages, math and science seemed impossible for me as a kid.  I was an intellectually gifted child who nearly flunked fourth grade French, who won county typing championships yet barely – barely! – passed her typing class, who got a 50 in home economics because she never turned in the hooded sweatshirt she was supposedly making.

So when I won a significant four-year scholarship to one of the most prestigious universities in the country,  a lot of kids and adults were shocked as hell — especially when the students who were actually expected to win those prizes didn’t do nearly so well.  Those other students were respectably well-rounded.  I, however, was not.

I am a specialist, or what some psychologists refer to as “spiky”, and that has advantaged me just as much as it has disadvantaged me.

So it’s not surprising that I was recently diagnosed with a form of ADD; what is surprising – even kind of shocking – is that I went so long without that diagnosis. But ADD doesn’t always look like the hyperactive kid cutting up in the classroom and swinging off the lighting fixtures and endearing himself to the teacher (not); it is also  the quiet, well-behaved girl staring dreamily out the window, who has trouble paying consistent attention in class yet can hyper-focus enough to write a novel in six weeks or progress rapidly through tae kwon do.  Who wins prizes and acclaim while also silently concluding that something is deeply, innately wrong with her; that she is, in fact, a total incompetent, especially if other people in her life are only too happy to support this assessment. Adderall, for all its stigma, is a godsend; it’s like LASIK for the brain and has quite literally changed my life.

But a brain of abnormal creativity or intellect or both (although studies indicate that degree of intelligence is not reflective of someone’s degree of creativity)  is also just that -  abnormal.  It fails to work in the so-called normal ways and perhaps because of this overcompensates in others — or maybe vice versa.  The body gives you one thing, but then takes away another. We only have so much material to work with.

What my ADD brain has in common with many highly creative people and also schizophrenics is this: an inability to properly filter outside stimuli.  The world rushes at and in you and gets all jumbled around in your head.  This creates a habitual mental pattern of free-associating words, images, ideas, bits of knowledge; of putting things together in odd ways and finding good reasons.  It also might create a compulsion for narration: for organizing experience into story, finding order and meaning and, thus, a certain kind of calm otherwise denied it.  When these associations and narrations are coherent, you might have an original piece of art, or a major scientific breakthrough.  When incoherent, you might have…a total breakdown in the whole mental process.

There are healthy brains, and unhealthy brains, and somewhere in the middle there might be creative brains.  The brains that are the most creative might also be the closest to the edge.  “Exceptional creatives”, when compared to “normal” people (who do not earn significant income through creative work, at least as defined by this particular study), have an unusually high number of schizophrenic and mood-disordered people  in their family.  Writers especially turn out to have a lot of depression and bipolar disorder riding through their genetics.  Is this, again, a consequence of the brain’s odd functioning, an increasingly troubled way of processing world experience?  Adderall not only clarifies and focuses my thinking in a way that seems miraculous to me – lifting me out of some dusty emotional little corner of my brain all the way up to the sleek CEO suite – it also kills off my low-level depression, as well as the anxiety I used to associate with too much caffeine, even on those days when I hadn’t had any  (again, that lack of attention to detail…).  This is not unusual, a psychiatrist informed me; in fact, depression and anxiety are sometimes not the root cause, but the symptoms thrown off by something else.  Like ADD.

The brain is a tangled affair.

Understanding this helped me realize that I actually don’t require solitude to be creative – if anything, just the opposite.   I need color and action, beauty and ugliness, novelty and stimulation.  I need all that…if just to space out in the middle of it.

I need solitude to recover.  My brain rides high through an endless hailstorm of sensation and information, enjoys the beauty, passion and intensity of it all – then hits a breaking point.  That’s when I get edgy and bitchy and need – in the literal, physiological sense of the word – to get the hell away from the party.

I remember certain school assignments that required you to hand in your brainstorming, note-taking, early drafts, etcetera, so that you could be graded on process as well as final product.  They were a pain in the ass for me.  My first draft back then usually was my final product. I would then have to fake the “process”, sometimes so unconvincingly that the process mark would drag down my “real” mark and make me want to bang my head against my locker.

But so often it felt like that, and not just in school:  like I was coming at life from the wrong angle.

When you’re a square peg who has spent so many years trying to fit yourself into the same round holes that other pegs can do in blindfolds and straightjackets, sooner or later, in order to save yourself, you must admit the sheer stupidity of the whole attempt.  A square peg, no matter how attractive it might look on the outside, or even how round it gets clever and deluded enough to pass itself off as  –  is still a square peg, and will be so forever and always.  Far better to chop out a place that you can live and work and breathe in, than to keep carving away bits and pieces of yourself, especially when there are others in your life who will suffer the consequences alongside you  - and still others who will be so very glad to hand you the scalpel and point out the next part that needs to go.  They might even cut it off for you.

So I had this idea in my head – this nice round hole of an idea – how a writer like me should go about the act of actually writing.  How I should find my room, just as Woolf said, and close the door and lock it for good measure.

And sometimes I need to do that.   I need to soothe and heal my odd little brain.

But maybe if I’d examined my life a little more carefully, I would have realized that some of my favorite and most productive writing and thinking sessions happened in cafes, or other places where, instead of shutting the world out, I could find a way to watch it go by, and let some of it in, and thrive off the energy it gives me.

After all, I’m a writer.  I like to watch.

So if my natural place isn’t at the rounded center of things, it also isn’t removed and sealed away in a room.  Rather, I seem to flourish in the edges between, where there’s enough to look and marvel at, and enough space to wander… and enough brick wall to make sure I drift back to my laptop instead of through Bloomingdale’s.

I am a sucker for dance shows.  Not  Dancing With The Stars kind of thing – I think I was one of the few people actually not watching that – but competitions featuring trained, talented dancers.   And because you don’t exactly need to catch every word of dialogue, they are excellent to watch from the perspective of a rapidly moving treadmill amid the sound of pounding feet (and gasping).

So of course I watched every episode of Step It Up and Dance  and what struck me was the way the show handled the ‘character’ of the eventual winner.  (So please don’t read any further if you don’t want to know who won, but I am assuming, perhaps mistakenly, that most types who read this won’t care.)   There is this kid named Cody, 27, who was the favorite right from the beginning – so much so that at one point early in the season, a fellow dancer/contestant sniffed something like, “Cody could blow his nose onstage and he would win [that particular challenge]. The judges love him.”

Except then things took a turn.  It seemed that Cody might be a little…too good.   The very thing that lifted him above the other dancers – his amazing technique and athleticism (not to mention he’s a tall goodlooking guy who dances, as judge Nigel likes to say on So You Think You Can Dance, “like a man”) began to work against him, at least according to the comments that suddenly started emerging from the judges’ panel.  Cody lacked emotion and personality in his dancing, said they.  When you watched him, marveling at his amazing technique,  the problem was…his amazing technique. You didn’t see the soul pulsing behind it: you didn’t see…Cody…even though you were staring right at him thinking, God, what an incredible dancer and cute guy besides.

The judges started using words like “prim”. Another judge even used the word – repeatedly – “snobbish”.As the dancers were eliminated one by one and the show wound down to the final four, its focus moved among the other three (very talented) dancers and highlighted their strengths while Cody seemed not quite able to break through his perfection and lose himself in the dance the way the judges wanted. I began thinking maybe Michelle would win. Maybe Nick. In his interview segments Cody looked humble and troubled and anything but cocksure.  He mentioned the recent deaths of two women close to him and the fact that his house had burned down.  Then the final challenge, each dancer performing a three-minute solo!  Who would win…?

In an online interview afterwards, one of the judges mentioned how, when Cody walked into the LA audition for the show, he turned to the other judges and predicted that Cody would take the whole thing.  

Which of course he did.  

What lingered with me afterwards about this show – which I very much enjoyed, and when I ran into Elizabeth Berkeley in the elevator at the Brentwood gym where we both work out I wanted to say, “I loved your show!” but of course did not, because that kind of naked enthusiasm is just not what we locals do– was the way the producers and editors, those responsible for taking all this reality footage and carving out a compelling storyline of conflict, uncertainty and drama, handled the problem of:  How do you build suspense around the show’s ultimate outcome when that outcome is kind of obvious from day one?  How do you introduce much more doubt than actually exists?

Maybe, just maybe, you play into this idea that talent and technique fall by the wayside if you don’t have enough heart.  You play into the idea of the teacher’s pet – not a character the audience tends to like, and who often gets some kind of comeuppance in the end (or walks away/steps down) while the prize goes to the underdog who might lack real natural talent but has all the heart in the world.  (Come to think of it, this was the storyline that played out in that wonderful cheesy dance movie Center Stage.)  In a culture – or at least a pop culture – that often equates ‘art’ with ‘self-expression’ – to the point where the one can become synonymous with the other – this kind of story arc plays extremely well, bolstering the American belief that anyone can be anything they want so long as they want it bad enough and put their heart into it.  It’s an idea that’s beautiful in theory but as anyone who has suffered through the audition episodes of American Idol can tell you, doesn’t always translate into practice.  

Talent – excessive talent, true giftedness –is something with which we have an uneasy relationship.  I remember a line from a TV movie I saw about a figure skater, how people “love the gift, but hate the gifted”.   I think of Christina Aguilera at her high school prom: when the DJ put on her first hit single, all the kids she’d gone to school with booed and walked off the floor.  I think of Wayne Gretzky: when, as a child, he engendered hostility and resentment not just from the other kids he played hockey with…but their parents.  Because one thing a gifted child does is point up the lack of giftedness in those around them.  Talent undercuts the dream of a democratic, egalitarian culture:  everything else being equal, genetics simply isn’t.  Some kids are just born with more.   A gifted person is a walking, talking, sometimes brutal reminder that life is innately unfair, so even as people love (or try to make money off) the gift in question, there’s an impulse to tear down the person who bears it.

And I’m reminded of a writing instructor who remarked that after twenty years of teaching the craft of fiction, he’d given up trying to predict who would succeed: so often the most seemingly talented would disappear and never be heard from again. Just as money doesn’t guarantee happiness, talent by itself doesn’t guarantee success. Talent, in fact, is probably overrated, because potential comes to nothing if it’s not backed up by a host of other qualities, like self-knowledge and discipline and the ability to navigate the stress of expectation, the isolation of long hours of practice (and, perhaps, the social stigma that comes with being different in any way), as well as near-constant rejection and criticism. And when success doesn’t happen, for whatever cocktail of reasons – including the fact that success in any artistic or intellectual field is a ruly, unpredictable and difficult thing – the gifted kid now grown into an ‘ordinary’ adult has the rest of his life to ponder all the great potential that never materialized. Which means no matter what else he does he might always, on some level, regard himself and believe that others regard him as a failure.

In a way I was rooting for Cody to win precisely because he was expected to win, and maybe he knew what he was out there to prove – that he was just as good as he was supposed to be.   For me, watching him do his solo – which he did indeed perform with heart and emotion — was a lot like reading an amazing piece of writing, when you don’t just see but feel through body and mind the talent for the art and the discipline for the craft come together.  I’ll never be that good, you think, and who knows, maybe you’re right. Because, in the end, the magic of talent and the heart of the underdog and the circumstances that nurture both need to merge in a way that is rare.  When they do, and we are witness to it, we should maybe take it as a gift, so that we might be inspired to unearth those secret gifts of our own.

– Justine Musk

Or:

I Didn’t Know I Was a Dark Fantasy Series Paperback Writer Until They Told Me
Or:

In The End You Actually Do Have To Write the Damn Thing

By Justine Musk

1

My agent called me up the other day.

“I just got off the phone with Jessica,” she said. Jessica is my editor.

“You know how Roc was waiting for the pre-sale numbers to see whether or not they’d want another book?”

For the folk out there who might not be so hip to such complicated publishing jargon, I give a translation of the above: “…You know how your publisher Roc, which is a subdivision of New American Library, which is a subdivision of Penguin, was waiting to see how many copies the national buyers for the ruling giants of Borders and Barnes & Noble, who can make or break an author’s career depending on how they choose to stock their stores, would order of your new book, LORD OF BONES, which comes out July 1 and is a sequel to your first book BLOODANGEL, which came out three years ago, which is an interminably long time between paperback genre novels and had Roc concerned that you had lost some or most or all your readership, before they decided whether or not they’d even be interested in making an offer for the sequel to the sequel, which is tentatively titled SOULSTICE, or maybe SOULJACKER (which, by the way, is also the title of a really cool album by the Eels), which you were thinking you wanted to write?”

“Yes.”

“The numbers are in, and Roc made an offer.”

She told me the details and I got off the phone a bit amazed. Not at the offer itself – which is humble yet satisfying and, more importantly, keeps me in the game – but just the fact that there was one. I thought first I’d have to submit an outline, a couple of chapters, something. But not even that proved necessary.

They didn’t need a synopsis, or even a title. They just needed some numbers.

2

So this is how it works now. First you have to get published — then you have to stay published — and if the first is just as hard as it ever was, the second is harder. Sales numbers, in this age of immaculate computer memory, determine almost everything. (Unless you’re writing Literary, in which case prizes and reviews sometimes stand in for sales, in the hope that they will lead to sales.) I could bitch and complain about it, or make somewhat intelligent (or not so intelligent) commentary about how unfair the whole thing is – and it is – but a) that kind of thinking doesn’t get me anywhere except curled in a fetal position in the corner and b) since I write popular fiction, and have always wanted to write popular fiction (albeit of a serious, even literary, nature, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms, which I never in my life thought it was), sales actually do serve as a reflection (if distorted and imperfect) of whether I’m reaching people through my storytelling or leaving them scratching their heads saying WTF?… or, worse, totally indifferent.

And the publishing world that I entered when I sold my first book five or so years ago (my! time flies when you’re having fun/banging your head against the computer screen), turns out to be very different from the publishing world I studied from afar when I was a teenager who knew with every nerve-ending of her being that she wanted to be a novelist. First of all, in that publishing world of my lost and dreamy youth, horror and dark fantasy were hardly on the margins. They took front and center in big, fat novels with elaborate shiny cut-out holographic covers.

But then the genre went and died. As in: the publishers drove it into the ground with so many tacky Stephen King rip-offs that people stopped buying them. When I wrote my first published novel, modeled after those Big Fat Books I grew up on – intricate epic plot, subplots, multiple perspectives, distinctive voice, etc. – there didn’t seem to be any place for it on the bookshelves at all. Then Buffy happened, and Laurell K Hamilton, and Kelley Armstrong, and dark fantasy reared its head again, except this time it had a whole different look and tone. There was a wish-fulfillment element to it and an association with female-driven genres that got the books tagged as ‘romance’ or ‘paranormal romance’. This had not exactly happened with THE STAND.

This is neither good nor bad; it just is what it is. The market changes and changes again. And maybe a whole new branch of mainstream dark fantasy will grow or is growing out of what my editor calls the ‘post-Buffy novels’, and more of the excellent writers from the small presses will find their way into the mass-market, maybe even into hardcover, maybe even into major deals.

What can’t be denied, though, is all these series paperbacks.

3

I read series paperbacks when I was a kid, but they were mostly of the Sweet Valley High variety (again, the romance thing). Or , when I was slightly older, they featured detectives chasing down gruesome serial killers (I now give a moment of homage to John Sandford’s awesome Prey series, still going strong after all these years, Lucas Davenport one of the coolest series heroes EVER). They weren’t something I associated with horror or dark fantasy – you got sequels, sometimes, and the occasional trilogy, but not an entire freaking series.

But when you merge the romance element and the mystery/noir element with the whole undead, fey, or fanged-and-furry thing, it seems inevitable that this is what you get.
Not to mention, the bookstore chains love them. They are the bread-and-butter of bookstore sales, those cheap paperbacks with involved series backlists and rabid genre readerships. Which means the publishers are motivated to keep producing them so as long as the chains keep ordering them so long as people keep buying them.

When my agent first offered me representation, she asked, “Can you see this book as a series?” I said “Yes” because I was flattered at the mere possibility that I would be called upon to write such a thing, but that wasn’t entirely true. My first book was meant to be a Big Fat Epic Novel – which it didn’t quite manage to be, since another difference between the publishing worlds of my teen and thirtysomething years is a demand for a much more streamlined length. So when it came time to write book number 2, I wanted to write one, I was eager and committed to write one…I just had no idea what the hell it should be.
If you’re one of the readers somewhat familiar with my blog and previous essays, you know that my other, secret, personal title for LORD OF BONES is “This Damn Book That Kicked My Stupid Ass”. I kept saying (and writing) about how I would never put myself in this position again. Where I had to write against a deadline. Especially a deadline that demanded an entire novel to be written in so short a time. Never again. Or as the line in King Lear goes: Never, never, never, never, never! The wine of my creative genius needed time to mellow and flower into its truest, smoothest, multilayered-est self….which so often seems to happen while going to clubs or shopping for shoes or watching SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE. Who am I to mess with the ways of the muses?

My editor and agent asked, “So do you think you could deliver a manuscript in six months?”

“Sure,” I said cheerily.

So as I set out to write SOULSTICE – or whatever it ends up being called – I like to think this experience will be different because I am older and wiser now. Theoretically.
I have a better place to work (two places, actually). Plus, the end of LORD OF BONES (or, as a certain young friend likes to call it, LORD OF THE BONERS), left me eager to begin SOULSTICE; how the tracks lead so directly from one book into the next. And perhaps, beyond that, into the next.

Because it turns out that my approach to this whole idea of writing a series or being a ‘series author’ – which by no means precludes the other kinds of novels I want and mean to write – is to think of the series itself as one motherfracker of a Big Fat Book, told in serial, each novel rounding off in a satisfying way yet also offering just a touch of cliffhanger, a shadow of question that will need to be urgently answered. And since I’m fascinated with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels, why not give myself the chance to take my characters through the end of one world and the beginning of another?
So that’s why I want to keep telling this story. Because I think it’s cool.

And also for a much more pragmatic reason: to keep myself in print long enough to establish what one might call an actual career at this stuff.

4

Because here’s the thing. In this age of such relentless number-crunching, books don’t get the shelf life they used to get. There’s no time for a slow build-up: either the book performs once it’s out of the gate (in fact, my deal for the sequel to the sequel to BLOODANGEL offers a ‘bonus’ if the book ships above a certain number of copies within the first few months of its release date) or it gets dumped from the stores altogether and the author gets tagged with a stigma that’s hard to overcome. The problem is that the best way to sell a book – the only way, for most books that don’t get the loving PR attention of the publishers – is reader word-of-mouth. And word-of-mouth, if it’s going to happen, takes a while to get up to speed. People not only have to buy the book, they have to actually read the damn thing, and recommend it to people, who also have to read it, and then have to… etc. And by the time enough people have read it to maybe make something start to happen, the book is out of stores and maybe even out of print.

If you begin life as a hardcover that does well enough to transition into paperback, word-of-mouth can have enough time to build into a surprise bestseller (witness the current runaway success of the paperback edition of Elizabeth Gilbert’s EAT, PRAY, LOVE). Which is why the paperback edition can be like a writer’s second chance.

But if you begin life as a mass-market genre paperback, then your second chance can only come in the form of….your next mass-market genre paperback. In the same series. Which might intrigue some people enough to go back to the first novel that they didn’t pick up the first time. (Case in point: although I saw it in the Fantasy section for years, I didn’t pick up George R.R. Martin’s ‘Game of Thrones’ until the fourth book in his excellent epic series hit the bookstores with a surprise placing at the very top of the New York Times bestseller list. The power of word-of-mouth, busily spreading through the reading community while publishers lavished money and attention on other, more ‘obvious’ future bestsellers.) And if they like you enough, they might even go check out some other, completely unrelated novel you wrote and sold to a completely different publisher (coughUNINVITEDcough). In other words, to give your old books a chance at new life, you have to keep on producing new books good enough to win new readers.

5

So I guess my point– assuming, of course, that there has been a point at all, which is kind of a lot to assume when you really think about it — is something about how the only way I can hope to stay in the game as a published writer is by, well…writing. And in this Internet age of one-on-one authenticity and connection, even marketing yourself as a writer becomes another form of writing. And I’m not talking about the Internet equivalent of flyers pinned beneath your windshield wipers – mass-mailed emails or Facebook notes or whatever — flogging your book to complete strangers who are much too jaded and bombarded in this age of overabundance to do anything with your message except ignore it. I’m talking about putting yourself out in the ether and genuinely showing people who you are as a writer, drawing them into your voice, your style, so that they might then seek you out on their own. It’s a long, slow road….but then, so is publishing.

So I marvel at how the mysteries of being a publishing writer always seem, in the end, to boil off to something so simple as just sitting yourself down and, uh, writing. Day in, day out, as the years roll by. If there really is a secret about how to get ahead in this quote-unquote industry, that’s probably the closest thing to it. After all, not even Oprah or Stephen King can blurb your book to millions if it doesn’t even exist in the first place. You have to be in it to win it, as they say. And sometimes just managing to stay in a game so brutal as this one can be a huge win on its own.

1

I started Twittering a few days ago. For those of you who don’t know (or care) what Twitter is – www.twitter.com — it’s basically a way of microblogging from your mobile device. You can draw the attention of your ‘followers’ to a news item on Darfur or pose a Zen riddle or set up an impromptu meeting at the local Starbucks or hype some cool new person or service. You could also announce your arrival at Taco Bell and your intention to choose hot sauce over mild.

It was actually for this last – the Taco Bell kind of thing – that Twitter was purportedly designed. (Or maybe they designed the thing and tried to figure out what it could be used for and how it could be sold and this was the best they could come up with.) You can ‘follow’ – I’m from a generation that still equates this with ‘stalking’, but nevermind – other participants of Twitter and text them about all those little things that you would never bother to blog or email about. The fact that there’s a reason why you would not blog or email such things seems entirely beside the point.

Because it’s something you can do when you’re standing in line. Or stuck in traffic. Or waiting for the dermatologist. Or whatever.

It’s something you can do when you’re bored.

As I became acquainted with Twitter, I came across this idea so many times – you can Twitter people when you’re standing in line and you’re bored – that I started imagining Boredom as something like the First Evil in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer. An ancient menace so great and potentially overwhelming that society as a whole must come together and use everything in their employ – including and especially technology — to fight it off .

Because the gods forbid we be bored.

Or allow our kids to be bored.

People will say, “Oh, I get bored so easily,” as if they’re proud of this, as if it’s evidence of superior intelligence. As if it’s never occurred to them that maybe they could just carry around a good book.

2
I remember a line from a Billy Joel song I heard countless times growing up: “…bored to death on Sunday afternoons.” What suburban kid of that time didn’t know what he was talking about? But this was when home entertainment was limited to twelve channels of television and whatever books happened to be in the house. Entertainment was like information: if we wanted it, we usually had to get off our asses and go out and find it.

Boredom drove us to do that. Boredom forced us, over time, to figure out just what it is we enjoy doing. Boredom might even force us to get good at it.

But now that flow has reversed itself. Instead of us going out to entertainment, information, stimulation — all these things come to us, beamed from a multitude of directions. You don’t have to leave the house. You don’t even have to leave your room. The Internet is redefining what it means to be alone — when entire social networks are just a click away.

And maybe it’s also redefining what it means to be bored. Surfing the Internet on a Sunday afternoon takes you from almost no choices to perhaps way too many.

You’re not competing for entertainment anymore. Entertainment is competing for you.

3

I was born on the young end of the so-called Generation X, and we were pretty good at being bored.

Even as we grew up watching computers and video games and MTV infiltrate our homes, slowly becoming as commonplace as a lamp or a bed, only surprising you when it’s not there – we spent a lot of time being bored. We were the latch key kids who watched old reruns of Gilligan’s Island and Three’s Company and One Day At A Time and The Jeffersons. We got left to our own devices a lot. We graduated into a job market gridlocked by baby boomers who weren’t going anywhere. They made it hard to advance, and then, when the recession hit, it became difficult to get a job at all. We moved back home with our parents. We looked for work. We had time on our hands, little to lose, and very little trust in any future we didn’t create for ourselves.

The term Generation X was coined by Canadian writer Douglas Copeland. Copeland’s inspiration for it came from a lesser-known book by Paul Allen called Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. It’s a witty, scathing, insightful dissection of the various classes and the sensibilities that define them. Class, says Allen, isn’t just income but a state of mind (and taste). This holds true whether you’re lower-lower or lower-upper or somewhere in the middle or lower-upper or upper-upper or so wealthy that you disappear into a parallel land of private schools and personal jets and walls and gates and extensive security systems.

But then there’s the alternative. The X class. The way out. X’ers are those who’ve cut themselves free from the old social hierarchies. “The young flocking to the cities to devote themselves to ‘art’, ‘writing’, ‘creative work’ – anything, virtually, that liberates them from the presence of a boss or superviser – are aspirant X people, and if they succeed in capitalizing on their talents, they may end up as fully fledged X types…Impelled by insolence, intelligence, irony, and spirit, X people have escaped out the back doors of those theatres of class which enclose others,” states Allen.

In other words: Gen X’ers were those well-educated types who hung out in coffee shops a lot. They didn’t necessarily mean to be there, but it’s where the current of their time and place had put them.

You do what you can.

And out of that boredom, all that time to think and dream, a new cultural sensibility began to manifest itself through people like Cobain and Tarantino and Beck. As Richard Linklater put it in a Newsday interview: “Watching three movies a day and reading doesn’t sound productive, but it got me here.” Linklater seized on the word ‘slacker’ and definied it as “someone who’s being responsible to themselves…finding your own path through this maze of programming and pressures.” Linklater’s own path led to a movie called, appropriately enough, Slacker, and suddenly years of doing what appeared to be very little propelled him into a successful movie career.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, a different branch of those quirky X types were doing the kinds of stuff that they thought was cool, like putting together lists of cool web sites on this new thing called the Internet. Some of these lists just kept growing and growing until they became a little company called Yahoo.

4

So what I’m wondering is this: what would have happened if all those Gen X graduates had graduated right into the well-paying jobs they tried so hard and so desperately to find? If they hadn’t had the time and space to dream up alternative worlds and ways of being, until the very word ‘alternative’ became a mainstream kind of genre? It’s all very well to talk about ‘finding your own path’ and ‘escaping out the back doors’ of the established structures of society, but that always comes at a price, especially when you’ve already got a mountain of student debt to pay off. With Gen X, though, that kind of lifestyle – call it class X, bohemian, alternative, counter-cultural, whatever – became the norm, sucking in a lot of very smart, very hard-working young people who didn’t choose ‘slackerness’ but had it thrust upon them. So out of those states of frustration and boredom and stagnancy, people dreamed up new stuff. Some of those dreams got put into motion, by dreamers who were also skilled and hardworking enough to execute it well and make it mean something to others, to have an impact on the culture, to take ideas from the fringes and arrow them into the heart of mainstream thinking.

Creative work is hard work; a successful artist is a disciplined artist. I’m not trying to imply otherwise. It’s way too easy to pose as an artist or writer without doing the near-daily grind of struggle, practice, feedback, rejection, revision necessary to actually become one. But sometimes you have to just detach from everything and sit alone with yourself for a while and let yourself be bored. The mind, after all, needs to move. And if it can’t sit back and be entertained, if it’s forced to come up with its own ways and tricks of entertaining itself…then it will, and in the process you just might discover who it is you really are and what it is you truly want. In the silence and stillness of boredom, you hear yourself think. You have no other choice.

5

Back to Twitter. I like Twitter. It’s the kind of thing that, when someone first explains to you, you think Why would someone want to do this? Why would I possibly want to ‘follow’ someone through the banal boring details of their day? I have enough banal boring details in my own day.

Then I had a conversation with Jason Calacanis, one of these cutting-edge techie types who understands this stuff so well he is now very wealthy (or, as he so delicately likes to put it, “blown out”). Jason talked about how an invention like this is like paper. Give paper to ten different people, they’ll do four or six or ten different things with it: draw on it, make paper airplanes, line the kitty litter, whatever. People will play around until some use for it emerges that seems so brilliant and obvious that not only will everybody start using it that same way, people will wonder how they ever lived without it. Twitter, Jason said, will be like that, is starting to be like that already. People are assigning it new reasons of being. They’’re already bored with the original ones. And soon it will take its place alongside email and Paypal and Amazon and blogs and Google and iPods and TiVo and all those things we can’t believe we ever lived without.

It could also be that Twitter will become the equivalent, in this day of overscheduled teenagers and hectic work lives and the kind of constant motion that keeps us moving away from each other, of slacking off in a coffee shop. Talking about stupid stuff while, underneath it all, bits of ideas go roaming and find other bits of ideas and join up in weird, quirky and wonderful ways. As I scroll down my list of those I’m ‘following,’ I’m exposed to fragments of multiple real-time conversations juxtaposed against each other, often about things I’d never discuss with people I’d never meet in places I’ll never go to. If nothing else, Twitter is yet another way for memes to replicate themselves, to travel in far-reaching, sly, insidious ways.

And one day, when I’ve had enough, I’ll turn it off temporarily – I’ll turn everything off. I’ll lose myself in my own head and listen to what’s going on inside it. And, when the pain of doing nothing – the pain of accumulated boredom — begins to outweigh the pain of actually writing, I’ll start a new novel or story or screenplay.

I’ll put my mind in a space where it is forced to entertain itself, and it will use everything at its disposal, everything it has gathered from the world, to do just that.

Maybe in the end that’s what art is – our collective need to entertain ourselves, to make something out of all the noise in our head, engage in something interesting, beat back the beast of boredom. We remove ourselves to places of solitude and find new ways of reaching out to the world. We go deep into ourselves and our own experience and find nothing less than the human condition. Boredom – with ourselves, our lives, our routine ways of doing and being – creates the very need for creation. And so as society – or at least prominent segments of it – moves more and more toward constant connection and neverending stimulation, we might have to seek out boredom the way we once had to seek out entertainment.

Which would be rather ironic.

But irony itself can be very entertaining.

—Justine Musk

The View from the XX Set

by Justine Musk

1

Writing is seduction, when you think about it. Seduction is to get inside someone else’s view of things and reshape it to your own, to lead them in your chosen direction, to compel them until they are exactly where you want them, whether it’s in your story or in your bed. What writers and seducers have in common is a mindset that is empathetic enough to get into the skin, the head, of another human being and know what they are feeling and how those feelings might be altered…and an eye that is cold and objective enough to know if they’re making progress toward their aim, or if it’s time to revise the course.

Writers and seducers, then, understand human nature. And since human nature comes to us in male and female packages of experience, any real understanding needs to enfold the other sex as well as your own, or else the only people you’ll know how to seduce will be the people just like you.

And maybe not even them.

2

My father likes to tell an anecdote about the time our car broke down along a dark highway during the kind of cold snowy night only a Canadian town – well, maybe a few others — can make. My father told my mother and me to stay within the safe warm confines of the car while he tried to flag down help. Minutes passed. I looked through the windshield and for just a split moment the man I saw wasn’t my father at all, but a hulking, shadowy, six-feet-plus stranger with the hood of a bulky parka pulled over his head.

I got out of the car and slammed the door and hurried to the side of the road, making sure to stand in the full glare of the oncoming traffic. My mother freaked out and yanked at my sleeve, worried that I was about to get hit. Before I could even fend her off, help had arrived.

My father likes to end this anecdote with what is more or less the point of it – how I had put myself out there like a billboard, because I knew that people would stop for me but not for him. This seemed so obvious to me that I was surprised that he was surprised by it. It was not unlike a comment a male friend would make to me at university a year or so later, about how irritated he felt when he walked through campus at night and the girl just ahead of him would cross the street to get away from him. My friend was maybe six-five, with spiked hair and a long dark overcoat. Like my father by the side of the road that night, he seemed completely oblivious to the impact he made on others — especially women — especially a young woman walking alone at night. The comment also made an impression on me because I suddenly realized that I had no idea what it was like to be perceived as the walking, physical threat, the person who, in that moment, gets tagged as a possible rapist or worse. I had never thought to look at it from that perspective.

3

My father was a principal who dealt with mostly women – teachers, secretaries, mothers. He liked to complain about what I now call “pretty girl syndrome”: certain women who monopolized attention and offered up the most banal opinions with authority and confidence. They were used to people listening to them and didn’t think it was just because of their looks.

Soon after I moved to LA, I witnessed a version of this firsthand. My husband lives in a very guy-dominated world – he moves between business, technology, physics, engineering – and his friends had gotten comfortable around me. If I wasn’t quite one of the guys, I definitely wasn’t one of the girls, either, especially since I wasn’t available or under 30 – or under 25 – like the young women our friends brought to restaurants and concerts and parties. These men were highly intelligent and successful. The girls were sweet enough and probably bright enough except academia – or reading material in general – had never been a priority for them. Still, I was struck by how they would break into a conversation with a comment or statement so many light-years off from the informed, sophisticated discourse going on at the table that I would actually think they were joking. They weren’t joking. They held forth with authority and confidence on things they knew almost nothing about. When I took a longer look, I saw what my father had been talking about: these guys, who were generally nice and well-mannered guys to begin with, gave these girls a lot of attention, seemed very interested in what they had to say. It was only when the girl left the room that the nature of her male attention would abruptly change: observations about how inane or boring or annoying or ‘dumb’ she was. When the girl returned, the same guys were back to hanging off her every word. It made me realize – with a touch of what might have been shock – just how insidious the halo effect of beauty actually is and how it determines the tone of how the world treats you, which in turn shapes your perception of yourself (“I must be really interesting”) and others (“People are friendly and nice.”) For all the actresses who find it difficult to be taken seriously because of their beauty, there are, it seems, a lot of girls who think they’re being taken seriously when they’re only being beautiful. And because they never get that look into life on the other side of the great gender divide, many of them don’t realize the trap they’ve fallen into until much later, when they not only realize they don’t have the talent or intellect or skills they maybe thought they did, they no longer have that youthful beauty either. And people are no longer so friendly and nice.

4

So it’s hard to see through the fog of perceptions and projections we all carry around us, especially when we’re looking at the other sex. We’re not only dealing with them, we’re dealing with the shadows we cast onto them as well as their shadows on us. And so in order to truly see them, you have to see how they truly see us.

Before you can get into anybody else’s head, you have to get out of your own.

An opposite-sex-character made from the shadow-stuff of fantasy and projection never rings true. I remember enjoying the movie Knocked Up. I also remember how that movie also never thought to question or explore why a character as gorgeous, brainy and successful as the female love interest would ever be attracted to someone as immature and schlumpy as the male protagonist over his much more impressive rivals. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen – anything can happen. But her choice to be with him, as well as her choice to keep their baby, actually did require more of a look into her inner life, her head, than the movie was willing to give us. The movie just wasn’t interested in the female perspective, and as a result a lot of women have a bit of a problem with it (including the female lead Katherine Heigl, who referred to the movie as ‘sexist’ and then got slammed in the press for biting the hand that feeds her). They might have enjoyed the movie, as I did…but we were never truly seduced by it.

And it seems downright juvenile next to a film like Michael Mann’s Heat – another genre film, meant to entertain, another film made by and about men, but this story makes an honest attempt to position real female characters within that male world. You can sense the histories and psychologies that are uniquely their own, how their lives bleed past the edges of the frame and weren’t just invented to fit inside it. Mann even gives men and women different languages – the women are articulate and tend towards therapy speak – the men are direct, fragmented, and given to macho clichés. Mann seems truly interested in women and how men relate to them, or fail to relate to them, and it shows. It also enlarges his audience. I would crawl through broken glass – okay, maybe I wouldn’t, but I’d seriously consider it – to see a Michael Mann movie, whereas the thought of a Michael Bay only inspires a yawn.

5

I can’t help wondering if it’s slightly – slightly – easier for women to step into the male POV than vice-versa. And not because women on the whole are more sympathetic and relationship-oriented – if anything, that could lead them into the trap of what I think of as soap-opera men: male characters who obsess and ruminate over things like feelings and relationships, while their real-world counterparts go to work and watch sports and wonder why the hell their girlfriend talk their ear off about some problem if she didn’t want him to actually solve the damn thing. Novel-writing has a rich and long history of women taking on male personas and finding through them not only commercial and social acceptability, but a new kind of power and freedom. For a male to step into anything female seems to have a kind of taint to it, a threat of stigma and downgrade, as if the continuing day-to-day invention and maintenance of one’s masculinity will be undone with one stroke of a silky pink pen.

Jonathon Franzen wrote what myself and others consider a genuinely great book with “The Corrections”, but even though he could vividly depict the female characters, he kicked up national controversy when he balked at seeing the Oprah Book Club sticker on his book. He was worried that it ‘feminized’ a hefty and serious novel, even if the novel does chronicle the disintegration of one family and the attempts of its children to correct its flaws and mistakes through the creations of their own families. In other words, even if the novel explored dysfunctional domestic life, god forbid it be tagged a domestic novel, which means a female novel, which means a lesser novel. If male writers like Franzen fret over their literary credibility when they cross over into traditionally female material, no such equivalent seems to exist for female literary writers who move into traditionally ‘male’ subjects of war, like Pat Barker did with her Regeneration Trilogy, or the kind of American violence that Joyce Carol Oates has explored through a lifetime’s body of work. If Franzen got slapped with the indignity of an Oprah sticker, writers like Barker and Oates win awards and acclaim. (Oates, by the way, had no issues with being an Oprah Book Club selection herself.) If Franzen worried that his identity was somehow in danger of being diminished — even as his sales shot through the roof — I doubt Barker and Oates entertained the same concern.

Because this, I’ve come to understand, is one of the central differences between the male and female perspective, and when I cross from female to male it’s something I really have to work to wrap my mind around. It would never occur to me, for example, to open this essay not unlike Richard Steinberg opened his on ‘Part One’ of this same topic:

Let me assure you, dear reader, that I have on me a pair of breasts. They are not huge, but they are not small. They are a large B/small C, which works well on my tall frame because I can wear whatever I want to wear, from a high-necked halter to a low-cut sweater, without looking too boyish or too floozy, and even go braless if need be without any risk of smacking myself, or anybody else, in the face. When I was pregnant, they got the job done with aplomb.

I like my breasts. I have, as you can see, an excellent relationship with them.

But I still like to write from the point of view of the opposite sex.

While female vulnerability is steeped in the physical, male vulnerability seems steeped in the idea of maleness itself. Because you can’t just look like a man — you have to act like one too, and your performance as a man is gets measured and judged day after day after day. And part of being a man is defining yourself against what is ‘female’ – including your own vulnerability. The culture helps you with this. After I had my sons, a man I had known for a long time told me about a disturbing event that happened to him in a city park when he was six. If he had been a girl, he told me, he would never have been allowed to roam free like that, and the incident would never have happened. Female vulnerability is acknowledged and validated and sometimes even celebrated. True male vulnerability is like something swept under the carpet, out of view, so that we actually need to remind ourselves — like my friend was making a point to remind me — that little boys are every bit as vulnerable as little girls. The fact that we instinctively coddle the latter over the former probably does a lot to explain why statistics show that boys are much more often the victims of sexual molestation. Predators – at least in the past — have more access and opportunity to get them.

6

Writing from a character’s viewpoint feels, for me, like slipping into a different kind of mindset, and the more developed that character is – the deeper I am in the writing – the more distinctive that sense of mindset, as if I’m opening the door to a character’s bedroom and stepping inside.

I’ve written two dark-fantasy novels – “Bloodangel” and its sequel, “Lord of Bones” which drops July 1 – and although the protagonist is female, most if not all of the other viewpoints are male. Those mind-rooms marked ‘male’ do seem to share a quality that maybe you could describe as ‘masculine’ — maybe the masculine shadow of the man I would have been if my chromosomes had emerged with one small but vital difference. I’m conscious of my viewpoint toughening up, turning maybe a bit more caustic, the psychic wounds more deeply buried and harder to get at. While my female protag’s angst is easily expressed, my male characters might offer up in place of it the devil-may-care sarcasm Lucas Maddox, or the wary, guarded, careful nature of teenage Ramsey, or the focus and determination of Kai. It’s not that Jess isn’t wary or focused, or that the men in her life aren’t every bit as haunted as she is (this is, after all, dark fantasy). But where Jess might turn inward, using the tools of introspection and emotion, the men turn to action and logic and banter and problem-solving. Likewise, the men are comfortable with power, supernatural and otherwise. They feel comfortable with it. But Jess’s struggle with her own emerging power and the aggressive ways she’s forced to use it – how this darkens her sense of herself and affects her relationships – forms a big part of the story.

Judging from reader email, it’s the male characters in my books that tend to be their favorites. In BLOODANGEL, the best-liked character is Ramsey, which makes me glad he didn’t meet the fate I had originally planned for him. In the sequel LORD OF BONES, the viewpoint I enjoyed writing the most, and found the most comfortable, was actually that of Lucas Maddox, a person whom I would seem to have very little in common with. Although, as a psychologist recently reminded me, all your characters are you, manifestations of you. You can’t write what you don’t understand – at least not convincingly.

So I can’t help thinking that maybe in this space of mental and creative androgyny – where the writer uses all of his or her observations of human nature in order to write from a place that enfolds both genders – some of the strongest characters are made. Instead of creating an opposite-sex character out of flimsy half-baked projections, prejudices, wishful thinking, you can meld the difference of your gender with your understanding of the other gender to make complex, fascinating, emotionally moving characters. You can write about tough men who are vulnerable and vulnerable women who are powerful (just as Joss Whedon did when he created Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a character you might have heard of).

7

When Richard Steinberg suggested we collaborate on a two-part essay about writing from the viewpoint of the opposite gender, I thought of something Zadie Smith said when I went to hear her read and give an interview at UCLA. The interviewer remarked on her ability to write from the viewpoints of characters of different ethnicities. Zadie more or less shrugged off the question, saying that the purpose of fiction is to enlarge human consciousness, not to slice it down into labels and categories, not to act as if people are utterly alien to each other, all trapped as we are in this human condition. In any case, she thought the greatest difference lay not between different races, but the different genders.

Crossing that bridge involves understanding the other gender in a way that also means understanding ourselves. It means developing an eye that is deeply empathic and coldly objective at the same time. It means knowing how to seduce – even as we ourselves are seduced, with all the thrills and pleasure that involves….and also, maybe, the lies. But behind every lie is the truth, and as writers — and observers of the human condition — it’s our job to get at it.

—JM

–Justine Musk

So here’s the thing.

I sat down yesterday to write my essay for this site. I had a topic. I had a sense of where the piece would start, where it would end up, and how it might go in-between. But when it came game-time, I realized:

I got nuthin’.

Could be I’m a bit burned-out – and maybe I could have essayed about that, except Elizabeth Bear already said everything I would want to say about that point in your writing when the writing becomes about not writing. It is time to refuel, wander the poppy fields and watch the comets in the sky. Time to let my mind turn over a few times, shake itself out, do a little yoga. I wouldn’t say I’m blocked, exactly. I’ve got stuff to work on, and I’m excited about all of it. But I also just finished a four hundred pound novel that I’ve been carrying around for a while. My muscles are sore. It’s a good kind of sore. But like I said:

I got nuthin’.

So I give you instead a novel excerpt. This is what happens around page 60 of LORD OF BONES, sequel to my first novel BLOODANGEL. The books are contemporary, urban fantasy shot through with currents of horror. I like to think this chapter is one of them.

Thank you for your time and understanding.

Next month we shall return to our regular programming.

A STRANGER COMES TO TOWN

(excerpt from LORD OF BONES, Roc/Penguin, July ’08)

In truth, the surfer had noticed something earlier that morning, although he put it out of his mind right after.

There had been one wave. One perfect wave. He saw it on the horizon and thought it must be some kind of heavenly gift, because this was one of those times when the sea wasn’t up to anything much; surfers saw you getting out of your truck with your board over your shoulder and greeted you with the dreaded, Hey, mate, should have been here yesterday. He agreed with them – he should have been here yesterday, meant to be here yesterday, except his girlfriend’s mother arrived early and threw his plans to hell.

But then this wave came out of nowhere, and he eyed and measured the moments and paddled out for it and man met wave in perfect salt-spray communion. He became more and less than a man, flowing out of the water and the board beneath his feet. The sea swept him high. He crouched and carved through this world of blue-green streaming wonder, salt on his lips and in his eyes, and he felt his heart roar along with the ocean.

Someone else was in the wave with him.

He registered it in pieces. The shadow rising inside the wall of water. The slithering touch across his shoulders, thick wet whisper in his ear. The sense of presence which had nothing to do with the sea, slipping through the spray and light. Riding the sea. Riding him.

Then it was gone.

So that was the first thing. Perhaps it was a warning. It might have helped him, saved him, if he had heeded it as such: a sign that the world was not quite right today. Better to get off the water, detach himself from his board, spend the day on the sand with his girlfriend in her fetching white bikini, her skin smelling of coconut oil, the icebox packed with beer and roast beef sandwiches and ice cream, part of her strategy to lure him away from the waves for at least a little bit, so she could spend quality time with him instead of her Peter Carey novel.

But he was a water baby grown into an ocean prince. The sea was his home. This presence he had sensed had nothing to do with the ocean. It came from somewhere else entirely. So he dismissed it as some odd, fleeting phenomenon, a trick of the light and the mind. Believing in it would be like believing in a ghost, and, despite what many in his family considered to be his highly flaky, New Age kind of nature, he was much too practical for that.

So he straddled his board, and floated, and meditated on the beauty of the day.

He was thirty-seven, lean and leathered from a lifetime spent outdoors. His long, straight hair had turned grey by the time he was twenty-five, silver ten years later. Around his neck he wore a tiger’s eye for luck and guidance, a shark’s tooth for power and virility.

Sunlight on his shoulders, sunwarmed water sweeping round his dangling legs. In the near-distance, Bondi Beach curved like a thick golden smile into the sea. Music and voices floated over to him – British and German tourists – but it was quieter here, on the south side, where rip currents made life more hazardous. He was a strong swimmer, always had been. He and the sea understood one another. He had survived a near-drowning experience as a child, an encounter with a tiger shark as a teen. The sea demanded his awe. Twice it could have killed him, but it chose to let him go. He loved it for that.

So when the shadow came up beneath him, he noticed it first with a sense of detachment. He thought, Shark?, and drew his legs onto the board, but it didn’t really move like a shark – rising and expanding, a blooming darkness in the water– and that was when he felt coldness along his spine and in his belly, because of the wrongness, because there was nothing in the ocean that should look or move like that.

And then the thing turned over.

Turned over slowly, slowly enough for him to realize there was a shape, a body to it, and he realized he was going to see its face as the water swelled and streamed beneath him and the board rose up, and a whimper escaped him and too late he thought to close his eyes because the face, the deep lipless pit of the mouth and rows on rows of teeth, the small ashy glints of countless eyes and they were all gazing straight at him, and he saw the intelligence in them, and he saw the black streaming limbs floating up towards him, leisurely, as if this thing had all the time in the world, and the surfboard flipped over with that same insolent laziness and he was in the water, thrashing, cold smooth blackness folding over him, hands skating across his body and latching on his calves, and he thrashed at the surface of the water and spat out salty water and screamed, not even screaming words, his mind had gone beyond words, and then he was screaming down through the water, watching the river of bubbles of his life force escaping from his wide frozen mouth as he felt himself pulled down, down, to where the sunlight filtered out completely and all warmth vanished and there was nothing but the cold and the dark.

Absorbed in her novel, Hilary looked up because she thought she heard something: a cry familiar yet odd, which had nothing to do with a sunny Sydney day at the beach.

Johnny? she thought. Except that couldn’t have been him.

And her mind circled back to a recurring nightmare: a great white somehow getting past the shark net and honing straight on Johnny. It was a fear which Johnny himself liked to laugh at. “That’s ‘cause you’re from Canada,” he would tell her. “You know how people here will assume Canadians get attacked by, like, bears and shit? It’s the same thing.”

“Canadians do get attacked by bears,” she said defensively. “I mean, every once in a while.”

“Every once in a while.”

“It does happen.”

“You know someone personally who’s been attacked by a bear? You know even a friend of a friend who got eaten by a bear?”

“There are shark attacks in the news. I read about them.”

“They’re in the news,” he said reasonably, “because they are news. If there was anything ordinary about them, they wouldn’t exactly be news, now would they?”

And he gave her that grin, that broad white grin flashing against his tanned face, deep lines radiating out from his eyes. All that man is, is a child grown older, Hilary’s mother had sniffed, but then Johnny had turned that same smile on her, called her ma’am and held open doors and asked what kind of wine she liked so he could go buy a bottle before putting the chicken and corn on the grill. A child grown older, Hilary’s mother had repeated, before relenting a little. But he’s got nice manners, that one. And he seems to treat you well. You seem happy.

Hilary stood up in the sand, scanning the water, twisting the small diamond ring along her finger.

She saw surfers in the distance, bobbing in the bright blue as they waited for waves that didn’t seem to be coming. They were too far away to see if one might be Johnny. The cry lingered in her mind, uneasily, like a dream you couldn’t remember enough to figure out why it disturbed you.

And then, along the stretch of water directly in front of her, she saw his silver head break the surface.

See, she thought, you were just being silly…but no denying the weakness in her knees, the long sigh escaping her.

Still.

Something odd about the way his face and torso were just…rising from the surface like that. Something odd, too, about the way the little kids acted. Busy with their pails and shovels and castle-building, they saw him coming and broke, scattering up the sand, one of them yelling “Mama! Mama!”

Water streaming off his body, that silver hair he was so proud of slicked along his head and shoulders. She saw he was naked. He had gone into the water in blue-and-white boardshorts and was coming out nude, just the tiger’s-eye necklace circling his throat, and the black leather cord with the shark’s tooth falling between his nipples, as unconcerned about his genitals swinging freely between his carved-out thighs as if emerging from the shower with only herself to witness.

Then his eyes locked on hers, and he came towards her in a way that seemed much too fluid, and he gave her a grin, white jagged teeth inside that tanned skin, and it was not the grin, the teeth, she remembered.

And Hilary felt, in that moment, the first unhinging of her sanity.

He was right in front of her and he smelled of seaweed and something else, something that made her remember her father’s coffin beneath a weight of roses, and he took her wrist in her hand. His grip was too tight and too hot. He brought her gently to the ground and knelt in front of her, the both of them on her oversized red towel, and he said, “What’s my name?”

“What—“

“What’s my name?”

“Johnny.”

He cocked his head. “Maybe we can think of something else. Where do I go?”

She stared at him.

His eyes were like sun-scorched discs of violet. No man had eyes like that. Those were not Johnny’s eyes. Johnny’s eyes were blue, like faded denim. This man’s pupils were like small black pits she could see all the way down into, to where things slithered at the bottom. The hot grip on her wrist, the dripping nakedness, were repulsive to her, and she tried to squirm away but he pulled her closer.

“Where do I go?” he said. “Where is the heart?”

“The heart?”

“The heart of things. The center. I have people waiting and I mustn’t be late.” Again, the grin. “It’s rude.”

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

It was very hard to get the words out.

She said, “What happened to Johnny? My Johnny?”

“Oh.” Casual flick of his head. “That one’s gone.” He lowered his face to hers, breathed in deep, his nostrils quivering. She was aware of her own long body, exposed in the white bikini. She felt very cold. The sun seemed to have gone away. Maybe that’s why she was trembling?

“Ahhhh,” he said, and smacked his lips. She caught again the sharp white teeth. Cannibal teeth, she thought. Didn’t cannibals file their teeth like that? And this person, this thing, who was not Johnny even though he was in Johnny’s body, rocked back his head and rolled it along his shoulders and said, “It’s good to be back. It is.” Then the scorched-out eyes leveled with hers and she tried to look away but he touched her jaw with his other hand and guided her face back to his. Once again she was spiraling into the black void of those pinprick pupils, pinpricks that widened and deepened as if to take her in and swallow her down. For a moment she thought he would kiss her and she felt, again, that odd freewheeling feeling of a mind coming loose, the first bricks tumbling out of a wall. “Look at you, little thing,” said the Johnny-thing, “I guess we could have some fun,” and he was tugging her to her feet, and she wanted to scream but her voice was snuffed out and she wanted to run yet felt herself padding after him, as he hummed and sang, as the beach stretched away on either side and surfers waited for waves and sunbathing tourists went about their day. As if it was any other.