SansPoint

I am not proud of this, but I am sitting out on NaNoWriMo this year. I sat out last year, too, but with the alleged commitment to writing I made for this year^[1], it stings a bit more that I feel I need to sit this one out. My reasons are twofold:

1. I am working two jobs, and so my free time to write is limited at best. I could, theoretically, write during breaks at my day job, and e-mail the results, but the opportunities would be sporadic at best.

2. November is promising to be a busy month even outside of work: I’m moving, and that entails a whole mess of things, including setting up internet access, settling in, unpacking, and putting my life in order. That is the majority of my thoughts for the time being.

This isn’t to say that I haven’t been writing. There’s an interesting short story shaping up that I need to get back to, and I am still bouncing around the several novel ideas in my head. The trick, as always, is finding the time.

NaNoWriMo has been historically problematic for me. While it is usually easy to keep my motiviation up for a while, around the 10,000 word mark, life creeps in and/or the creative well runs a dry and I don’t have the ability or time to prime the pump any further. I am not proud. Next year, however, I think I will be ready to try my hand again… because I don’t know when I am truely beaten—the sign of a great writer!

1. A commitment that has been rather poorly attented to, and deserves a renewal in 2009. ↩

French Vanilla

One shoe covered in hot wax
when it spilled
splashed on the piano.
One shoe fragrant with the smell
that lingers for days
permeates everything you do.

Apply for a credit card
scrape wax off the sealed floor
so that everything you touch
smells of french vanilla
as it sticks to the surface
of shoes made of canvas or leather.

Reminder of the Season Past

You appeared on a gray day as summer waned
bright as the sun in yellow and red
colors for the season past
and, foolish, I turned the corner
only to turn back in error
to find you had vanished into the ether
a mirage or hallucination
and I know I was too struck to say a word
I just wanted another glimpse of the warm sun
a reminder, bright and warm, of the season past

when the lights fell

when the lights fell
and you took off your shirt
something fell to the floor
and i struggled to find it
lost in the unfamiliar
a room tilting and shaking
conveying a million tactile sensations
with the sole aim of causing confusion

you were nowhere in the dark
you were everywhere in the dark
carefully dancing out of my grip
with artful pirouettes nobody can see
your heels hit the floor behind my head
and when i spin around
i lose my bearing again
but, please, keep dancing

Kurt Vonnegut, in his short story collection Bagombo Snuff Box, provides eight rules for writing fiction. Among the most important and valuable of these is rule 3: “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” In any piece of character-driven fiction, the motivation, the “wants” of the characters are the key force of the plot.^[1] Your character, if the reader is to actually give a damn about them, must have a motivation. It is this motivation that will drive their interactions with other characters (who must have a motivation), and their interactions with the plot. This plot need not be pre-constructed, but it must have a connection with those motivations.

To put it another way, I’m not a fan of the “write down everything about your theoretical character” school of character creation. Unless it is directly relevant to the story at hand, or provide some sort of contrast with what is occurring in the plot, the character’s favorite food or the slogan of his alma mater is probably not something I need to plan out ahead of time. I would rather create a character with some basic attributes, flesh out the personality in my mind, add a memorable quirk, and then let the smaller details come on their own. However, this character requires something to actually make me want to write about them, and something to carry them through to any resolution (or lack) that the plot may take: to wit, their motivation.

Among the most elemental plots is the quest story. In a quest story, the protagonist seeks a thing, not necessarily tangible, Alfred Hitchcock called it the MacGuffin.^[2] The actual identity of the MacGuffin is unimportant. The actions that drive the plot focus around just why our protagonist wants the MacGuffin. The tangible object can be another person (love story), an ideal—the MacGuffin could even be the lack of something.^[3] What is most important in this story is that the wants of the character are what’s driving the plot, and not the plot that’s driving along the character. The distinction is subtle, but simple.

My favorite technique for generating a story idea is to develop a character and put them in a situation that is totally out of their experience, and letting their reaction drive the story. I want to analyze for you “Week Three,” a short story that was part of my Fifty-Two Stories project.^[4] Gregory, the story’s protagonist, is a child. He’s mischievous, aggressive, and unrepentantly childish, as well. What he wants is to resist and to control, hence the behaviors that put him into three weeks of detention. His antagonist, Mrs. Hofflan, wants nothing more than to teach Gregory that he is not the center of the universe. The confrontation between the two that climaxes the story epitomizes how a character can react to a revelation that shocks their worldview. Gregory’s understanding of the impact of his actions forces him to re-evaluate his wants. He loses, and he is no longer the center of his personal universe.

Any story, without the proper motivation to anchor it, and propel the plot, will fall flat. There are a myriad of wants and motivations: fear, love, anger, hunger, escape, sleep, and victory are a few that could, when done well, create interesting and captivating stories. The most important thing, however, is not what the motivation is, but how the writer wields it, and connects it to the story. If a writer’s protagonist is reuniting with a childhood friend, but spends the entire story stoned in the back seat of a car while her friend get into a violent drug deal, they have not fully connected the motivation with the story—as well as committed a grievous error in point-of-view.^[5] A character with motivation, as well, gives the reader something to relate to, a universality that is at the heart of the best fiction.

1. It is worth taking a minor digression here to discuss character-driven fiction versus plot-driven fiction. To put it extremely simply, character-driven fiction has a plot which is driven by the natural behavior and machinations of the characters, while plot-driven fiction has characters that work to serve an overarching story. Personally, I really question if any well written piece of fiction requires this distinction. A story with well written characters and no plot is worthless, and any story with an elaborate plot is worthless if the characters are flat. The trick for any writer is to balance out the natural character with a captivating plot, and the way to do this is to fully understand your characters and their motivation. Hence, this article. ↩
2. I, in my aborted Fifty-Two Stories project, had a little fun with this term in a story titled “Egg McGuffin,” and the reader can probably guess what the MacGuffin was. ↩
3. Think Lord of the Rings here: the MacGuffin is the absence of the Ring, not the Ring itself. ↩
4. Site to be relaunched soon. ↩
5. One of the “benefits” to taking a fiction writing course is reading stories like this. It can be fixed by either making the protagonist active, or moving the central character to someone else. ↩

Once again, the time has come for some technology-fearing literary pundit who has spent far too much time in Academia to complain about the state of the reading habits of the plebeians. Most of these articles feature a techophobic attitude towards the changes in how most people consume the written word mixed with condescension for those not totally in love with the Canon. The conceit around almost all of these articles seems to be a reverence for a past world where high Literature was the read by the masses; a past that never was. John Walsh of The Independent hits the usual clichés. His article reads like the standard series of complaints of how modern readers have short attention spans, and don’t know how to “think” anymore.

In the days of the Enlightenment, when few books were published and people read for amusement in their leisure hours, the speed of thought, as expressed in books, could afford to be slow, proceeding from point to point in Augustanly balanced steps… In this century, 150 years later, it seems that our attention span has shortened alarmingly. The average-length novel is too much of a stretch for the time-challenged, multi-tasking, BlackBerry-prodding “entertainment consumer” to contemplate reading, let alone the 700-page biography of VS Naipaul or Edith Wharton. Not because of the size of books, but because of the thought processes they contain. Via Bookninja

Articles on this nature pop-up with frightening regularity. Certainly, as an avid reader, it never fails to shake me when I talk to someone who doesn’t do any pleasure reading. Having spent much of my formative adult years in a world where books are omnipresent and everyone is reading something—not, perhaps for pleasure, but at least they’re reading—gives one a somewhat distorted world-view. Us book people romanticize literature, and why not? When people find something that connects with them, they automatically tend to place it on a pedestal and revere it. It is not a unique phenomenon: sports fans, Deadheads, political activists, and the devoutly religious do the exact same thing. I suspect a lot of the people who fall into the category of book worshippers would cringe at being lumped in the same group as Deadheads. There is a popular image of the avid reader as an intellectual superior, alone and aloof with their nose perpetually in a book. Book people relish the image, while some others see it as a source of mockery.^[1]

What writers like John Walsh seem to forget is that, until fairly recently, literacy was the mark of a certain social elite. If you had the time to read books for pleasure, that meant you didn’t have to use your time for your survival. The majority of people read very little—mostly the Bible, newspapers, almanacs, and so forth. Only after the Industrial Revolution, and a move towards urbanization, public education, and the rise of a middle class did books and pleasure reading become something for the ordinary person. Pleasure reading by ordinary people is more of a 20th Century ideal. That’s not to say that ordinary people in the Enlightenment didn’t read for pleasure—but what they read was far from the same thing as their social superiors. The pleasure reading was not what we know of as Literature with the requisite capital-L, as taught in colleges and sold in ominous, well-bound tomes. It was pop literature, fluff literature, doggerel poems. To put it another way: while some of us read David Foster Wallace and Michael Chabon today, most people read Debbie Macomber, Patricia Cornwell, and David Baldacci—mass-market paperbacks that sell in massive numbers, but amount to little. One hundred years from now, it’s more likely that people will be studying Chabon than Baldacci.

Walsh makes a big point of the experience of Sven Birkerts trying to teach Henry James to undergraduates.

They tackled Henry James’s story “Brooksmith”, and hated it. Was it, asked Birkerts, the language, the style, the syntax? All of those, said the students. It turned out they were defeated by everything that James was trying to communicate… The subtle moral distinctions between characters, the importance of their choices in the society through which they moved – it wasn’t just that the students found such things old-fashioned; they couldn’t grasp them at all.”

As a student who had to read Henry James on multiple occasions, and hated every second of it, allow me to articulate this from the other point of view. Part of the problem with reading Henry James work in the 21st century^[2] is that we are in a different world, only loosely connected with James’s. The world, the way people speak and interact, almost the entirety of society has changed, and James’s predilection for overwrought language is alien to anyone who grew up on the simpler, more natural language of contemporary literature. It is not a shortcoming of the students, it is simply an inability for James’s writing to maintain relevancy. I’m not adverse to seeing James taught^[3], but anyone teaching it should be prepared to address the issues of relevancy, and connect the themes to the students experience.

Fortunately, there are some voices in the interviews that follow the article that have a much firmer grasp on history, and a saner view of how technology will affect the written word. Sue Thomas, a new media lecturer summarizes it best: “I feel quite cynical about the cloak of preciousness that’s been woven around the novel: it’s such a recent medium – we’ve only had it a few hundred years and yet you often hear people say, ‘We’ve always had novels.’ No we have not!” Literature is an ever-changing thing. As it time continues, it will change form, it will change style, and it will change audience. There will always be the book person, the avid reader looking for the challenge of a 1000 page behemoth novel, whether new or old. There also will always be the ordinary person who picks up a Harlequin Romance novel to read in the waiting room, or on the plane, and there is not a great deal of overlap between the two.^[4]

1. Any chronic reader with a sense of humor should watch “Time Enough at Last”, at least once. It is a classic episode of “The Twilight Zone” starring Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis, a bookworm who catches flack from his wife and his boss for his chronic reading of books, newspapers, magazines, and anything with words on it. It is a habit that ends up saving his life, but the twist ending will make you weep. ↩
2. Or reading it in 1994, when Birkets study was published ↩
3. I’m just adverse to reading it ↩
4. Though there is overlap. A professor in my final semester at Temple University, Dr. Sue Im-Lee, who taught Contemporary American Fiction confided to us that she loves Harlequin Romance novels during a section on Donald Barthelme. ↩

When it comes to blogging, the idea is to write about your passion, the thing(s) that make you happy, your interests, something that you want to share with the world at large, and (with luck) convince people to see it your way. For me, the passion is literature, the passion is writing, and the passion is writing about literature.^[1] The whole point of this enterprise, therefore, is to write about what I passionate about, and it’s a point I seem to have lost somewhere along the way. To make matters worse, I haven’t even been writing much in the past month or more. The creative fountain, or whatever metaphor you want to use, was desperately in need of being primed, or pumped or something.

The biggest downside to having a low-traffic blog is that there is nobody to yell at you if you miss an update, or start slacking with cheap list-based posts and context-free links to other sites.^[2] Fortunately, I have Merlin Mann to yell at me, instead. On top of that, I’ve been reading/listening to On Writing by Stephen King, and it’s been a revelatory experience. I’m not the biggest fan of his fiction^[3], but as a writer and a proponent of the craft, he’s top notch. Merlin’s article and Mr. King’s memoir were the catalyst that the atrophied creative part of my brain needed to wake up from a deep slumber.

It really clicked the other day when I bought a new notebook—something everyone should carry at all times. For reasons I cannot gather, I stopped carrying mine, and now it’s probably in a box in a storage shed. That same day I wrote my first new poem in over four months.^[4] I realize, in retrospect, that plenty of ideas had flitted through my head in the last few months, but I had not written an of them down to work on later—save one.^[5] Also, while searching through a digital junk pile, I found part of a short story written, perhaps semi-consciously, in the vein of Donald Barthelme’s dialectic short fiction. What struck me about this was, unlike most of what I write and put aside, finding this piece again, I felt satisfied to read it. The story certainly needed work—it was only about a page, and nowhere near finished, but what I had was entertaining and readable.

Right now, I feel like I’ve woken out of a lucid dream. There is a lot ahead that I want to do, a lot that I want to say, and a lot that I want to read. I want to finish this post with a promise: I will write three substantial articles for this blog until the end of the year, and step it up in 2009 to four or more. The promise isn’t for my readers,^[6] it is a promise for me. After all, if writing is really what I want to do, maybe I should actually do it.

1. I actually have a few other passions, but the literature thing is what this site is actually about. ↩
2. Those last two happened to hit this site pretty hard before I totally fell off the wagon. It’s like a disease. ↩
3. Horror isn’t my genre. He’s good at what he does, but what he does isn’t really what I go for. ↩
4. The last poem I had written, actually was “ink on paper” back in April or May-ish, but only posted here last week. ↩
5. The story involves early 1980s Japan, and I like the character I came up with very much. ↩
6. When I wrote the original draft of this post, I was bringing in about ten to fifteen views whenever I had an update. However, the essay I wrote on David Foster Wallace’s suicide brought in way more than that. Hopefully, I can convince a few of you folks to stick around. ↩