Deciding on a sticker or a wall hanging or even a T-shirt takes me a long time. I have to intuit whether the motif-y object will influence me the way I want. When I saw this red sticker, though, I decided in only a few minutes that it belonged on my laptop (my constant companion!) as a reminder for how to live life. You have to take risks, but first — some backstory.
Recently I’ve been cleaning out a closet, partly so wifely Kate can put her work clothes there. Cleaning out this closet entails dealing with old CDs, always a weird nostalgia trip. I ran across in one box the Japanese release of Megadeth’s 1999 album Risk, and the sticker was inside the case, waiting probably a half-decade for me to find this use for it. Glad I hadn’t throw it out. When I look at the laptop now, I really don’t view the sticker as connected with Megadeth — just as an independent artwork.
Risk album cover
About that album, however: with it Megadeth tried to get away from their same-ol’ same-ol’ bellocisty and incorporate some fresh ideas from techno and other musical territory. Aging, they’d realized life wasn’t all about aggression, and further atempts to bring forth art that spoke only of hostility rang false to them; but, on the other hand, they (and, I presume, their biz overlords) wanted to still please the angry-teenager fan base. Trying to please everyone made the new elements sound unsure, just poor compromise. Not a brave enough risk.
A 1999 live version of Risk’s opening track, “Insomnia,” which is quite good, I think:
Alternate music for the frailly eared: the best recording, to my taste, of a particular Bach piece that made it onto the Voyager Golden Record.
Megadeth’s demeanor in the live performance above suits the angry young adults they once were, but in 1999 they were nearing their forties, and by that age I think it’s definitely time to have sequestered anger for release only when absolutely necessary. See as contrast artists such as Sting, whose long career has evolved through many styles, attitudes. Artists can’t force themselves to create once-agains of their past art; they’re no longer the same people. Unfortunately for 2010, Megadeth, currently out of tune with themselves, sound like such parodies of their youthful selves that I won’t embed a representative video. I must clarify, however, that I really enjoy most of their music, including Risk, and I wish that love to be noted.
Judith Butler has a passage about the necessity of taking risks, written in the context of ethical theory (emphasis mine):
… we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human.
Generally I interpret — maybe wrongly — that Butler quote in terms of small and difficult interpersonal interactions. You’re having a longstanding quarrel with a friend, for instance, and you’re not sure what you should say the next time you see them. The real trick is, in the actual moment of interaction — when what [has formed you] diverges from what lies before [you] — simply to risk yourself despite the context of uncertainty (what will happen?) — at moments of unknowingness — to risk making yourself vulnerable — to become undone in relation to others — and try to do whatever the right thing seems to be, fear be damned, consequences subordinate to honesty.
Sometimes I feel I’m not living up to the need to take risks with my own creative writing. Probably that’s just my self-criticism module out of whack, but who knows, maybe it’s trying to tell me something. Here’s perhaps my best story ready to go out in the mail (as multiple simultaneous submissions) once some certain literary magazines open up their fall reading periods:
“Flares” ready for snail-mailing
When I wrote this story, I wasn’t at all concerned with grand ethical notions of risk. In fact I just wrote, wrote, wrote, laying down words like so many bricks on a path across a few months(!). Now I write faster, in more mature ways, even, but few other works of mine quite affect readers as intensely as this one, I don’t think. So maybe, likely, it was just good luck: every so often as a fiction writer you create a 10-out-of-10 story, not an 8-out-of-10. Goes with the work, maybe. But I wonder how I can push myself harder to take risks, to say vulnerable things well…
In the first paragraph of Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner writes (in the midst of an infinitely long sentence):
and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege
I think that multi-adjective noun phrase — “grim haggard amazed voice” — and his millions like it are not supposed to convey an auditory percept to readers; they’re not supposed to convey sound data to readers’ perceptual faculties. After all, try to vocalize “William Faulkner” in all of the following configurations:
a grim, haggard, amazed voice
a grim, haggard, and not amazed voice
a grim, amazed, and not haggard voice
an amazed and haggard, but not grim voice
William venn Faulkner
I can’t do it, and if you can, you should post audio clips of the four on your blog. Until you do that, take my point as proven: the noun phrase “grim haggard amazed voice” isn’t supposed to convey an auditory percept. You’re not supposed to hear a specifically grim haggard amazed voice in your head (as opposed to a …). So, what is the phrase supposed to convey?
I think it’s intended to create for the cerebral mind the equivalent of a perceptual feeling-tone.
So far as I know, “feeling-tone” is a vague term out of physiology used to indicate a mood allegedly bundled up with a percept. On the feeling-tone view, you see a snake and you experience a feeling-tone of fright because there’s some fright tied up in the snake percept (perhaps even before it impinges on your awareness).
When you read “grim haggard amazed voice” there isn’t any resulting auditory percept, but there’s a feeling-tone you experience, right, a certain bleak mood? The interesting part is: the noun phrase is not plucking your emotions through your perceptual faculty, as the phrase “a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens” does. Rather, the noun phrase is plucking your emotions through your conceptual one — yeah, percepts and concepts can’t be demarcated cleanly and all that, okay fine, anyway — which in one sense isn’t surprising because of course we have emotional reactions to very abstract words (“freedom” for example), but in another sense is definitely surprising to me as a reader because “grim haggard amazed voice” is so abstract that it feels as though Faulkner is doing a card trick with a tall deck, each wheeling card an emotion-causing abstraction in my left brain … and not many books work that way.
This explication is totally lacking something, and surely some Modernist poetics somewhere explains it in a lot of boring detail, probably written by a poet who needed funding. If you have a better explication than I, leave it in the comments.
P.S. I think William Gibson‘s Neuromancer (written, significantly, as far back as 1984) works similarly in many spots, and some readers who walk away from the book are expecting too many of the noun phrases to be translatable back into percepts. But they’re not; for instance:
He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix
Most how-to fiction-writing books I’ve read — and I’ve read a bunch — are bad, worse, or useless. A few have helped me tremendously, however, and they don’t fall in either the pathetic HOW TO WRITE A BESTSELLING NOVEL category (an actual title!) or in the John Gardner “Does anyone actually read this?” category. The three I’m thinking of lie in the Woah, this is useful! category that makes it worthwhile to occasionally visit that slightly embarrassing WRITING REFERENCE section of the bookstore.
After opening with an essay on writing about emotion, the book gives 36 short chapters, each focusing on a separate emotion — Anger; Anxiety; Apathy; Confusion; etc. — in a specific pattern: a short essay discussing the particular feeling, bad examples of its description in fiction (with discussion), good examples (with discussion), and exercises. (Myself, I always ignore exercises; I have enough writing projects of my own! So I can’t speak for or against her exercises.)
Here’s ANXIETY.
Excerpt of the first part, the mini-essay:
Anxiety comes from matters large and small. Anxiety is worrying to an extreme.
Excerpt of the second part, the bad examples:
“Would that doctor ever come out? Jon wondered. He bit his nails and tapped his foot nervously.” [...] Nail biting, foot tapping, fingers drumming, sweaty palms, butterflies in the stomach, a trickle of sweat, and pacing are all tired ways to show anxiety.
Third excerpt, one of the good examples (from Thom Jones‘s short story “I Want to Live!”:
“But those people in the hospital rooms, gray and dying, that was her. Could such a thing be possible? To die? Really? Yes, at some point she guessed you did die. But her? Now? So soon? With so little time to get used to the idea?”
Fourth, one of the exercises:
Choose a seemingly minor reason to produce anxiety, such as an invitation to a party, running out of hot water, a rainy day, and write a one-page scene in which a character obsesses on that concern. Be sure the character’s anxiety level rises as the scene progresses. Objective: To tap into the heart of anxiety. Even a small thing can cause great panic.
Too often I see in fiction the “He bit his nails”-type shortcut to expressing emotion — in fact, I don’t think these shortcuts express emotion at all, except for inexperienced readers or for characters with really important nails (what about biting the kind of nails you put into walls?). I think those shortcuts — “He bit his nails” — are, unless the writer’s really trying to speed a paragraph along or some such, simply announcements to readers’ left brains (so to speak) that amount to “Oh, the story is informing me that this character is anxious.” The shortcuts become mere info to process, sort of like a bus route chart: no emotion there.
Whereas a description of anxiety that startles or wounds or points uniquely will force readers out of complacency and keep them engaged in reading which is an active process of creating an experience in the mind. The Thom Jones example above makes readers (me at least) worry about suddenly learning of their own impending deaths. The bad example is just data, better suited to a computer than a person. CAVEAT SCRIPTOR: Don’t ditch all physiological ways of showing emotion, of course, unless you want your characters to represent disembodiment.
By the way, some writers/critiquers subsume the above advice under the precept “Don’t tell readers what to think.” That precept, I think, is imprecise. If a writer says “He wandered the hours away by the bank of a brook, watching the sun on the face of the chuckling water. A bird came to circle him, flew unafraid through the aura of gladness about him. The delicate tip of a wing brushed his wrist with the touch of the first secret kiss from the hands of Bianca” he should first win an award, but anyway, he is, in fact, telling readers what to think — at least to some degree — he’s commanding THINK OF A BIRD; and THINK OF A TIP OF A WING, etc. So drop the precept, people!
If you’re a writer and reading this, already you know that writing can get your brain in a tangle. Writing isn’t hard at all in the way, say, manual labor is. But it can sure give you, or at least give me, guilt. I’ll work six hours straight trying to figure out some plot boggle, then lie awake worrying over it, too — my head will feel like it has a knot inside that won’t shut up. I’ll be moody a whole day =( because I can’t figure something out. The next day, answers come to me, and all’s swell =). Obviously I need to chill on the workaholic thing, but I haven’t yet figured out how.
Read This
Apparently, a lot of life is like this: you know that you should, or people suggest that you should, do or not do a certain thing — visualize better in your mind’s eye, interrupt less, read faster … not allow the day-to-day success or failure of your work to swing your mood around. The thing is, people rarely tell you specific steps to take in pursuit of oddball goals. Or if they do it’s at $zillion per self-help package. Some books are exceptions, of course, and relatively inexpensive, such as Sparks of Genius. (Caveat: I’ve only read parts of it.) Mostly I think we’re left to figure things out ourselves, mostly on our own. Maybe not.
Because good teachers are so helpful — life-changing. As I read through my teaching textbooks I’m pleasantly surprised at how little is taken for granted. For example, a specific sequential formula for writing critique, which one of my textbooks credits to Nina Zaragoza: “TAG”:
Tell what you like.
Ask questions.
Give suggestions.
People aren’t just born knowing a good way to critique, and the first procedure that pops into their minds isn’t necessarily the best one. So when someone wise gives you a specific way to go about something, you at least can get started well, you can start developing a better way, too. Modeling after someone else sounds really simple and elementary but the cool thing is, you can apply it to anything. Especially if you find people curious enough to reflect on how their mind operates while they’re succeeding at a task — often the most skilled people don’t know, they just take their standard operating procedure for granted, but if you formulate the questions well, you can get great answers out of them about how they do what they do …
Especially if we take seriously the diversity of our personalities, our ways of processing experience, I’m convinced we can chart out specific steps to change the most nebulous things about ourselves.
Clarion West, the six-week writer’s workshop I attended in 2008 on a space station in geosynchronous orbit above Seattle, hosts an online donation drive called the Write-a-thon each summer concurrent with the in-person workshop (June 20 – July 30). This year I’m participating in the drive along with many other former students and instructors. Here’s the deal: participating writers pledge to complete a certain amount of work individually; their friends, family, and fans donate whatever amount they choose to Clarion West as a show of support for both the writers and the organization. My goal: “Each of the six weeks I’ll either write a complete, good first draft of a new short story, or finish revising an older, in-progress one.”
The donation drive works on an honor system — but, if you want proof I actually meet my Write-a-thon goals, I’m happy to accommodate you privately pretty much however you see fit. And, no promises, but if you do donate and want a character named after you in one of the stories, let me know that, too, as long as your name isn’t Forrest Gump or Darth Vader; if your name is euphonious I’ll ask the Muse to see if It can work anything out.
Clarion West is a nonprofit organization, and in the United States donations there are tax-deductible, as described on the main Write-a-thon webpage. Remember the organization has to fly the space station, pay the instructors, and so on — a lot goes into making this wonderful workshop happen. Rest assured that it is totally, totally, totally acceptable to donate a mere $5 if you want; $5 times a lot of donors times a lot of writers equals a whole lot of money.
To donate, you can either 1) click the PayPal “Donate” button on my personal Write-a-thon profile page, or 2) send with a note mentioning my name a snail-mail check to:
Clarion West
P.O. Box 31264
Seattle, WA 98103-1264
Thanks everyone, and I really appreciate even a single $5 donation to Clarion West. Let me know if you donate: it’ll make me work harder! Feel free to badger me about my progress towards my Write-a-thon goals, too!
To write by computer or by hand — or by typewriter? Writers love to talk about their choices, but at the same time they tend to remain uncomfortable with each alternative, regardless of brainy stuff phenomenologists say. Ultimately, whatever works best for you is what works best for you; I’m not here to insist on anything. But if you write, you might benefit from trying my method.
Writers who use computers sometimes talk about their nostalgia for, and fantasies about, typewriters’ plentiful white space — or the white space of any blank sheet of paper. As in a purely empty page: as in the opposite of Microsoft Word’s space-eating toolbars, dancing paperclips, and squiggly red lines underneath your artsy grammar and underneath words your software simply doesn’t recognize. True, you can turn off many of these word processor impositions (surprising as it may be to geeks, lots of writers aren’t aware of those settings). But some impositions — whether in MS Word or other word processors — stay put, cluttering up your screen and distracting you. Ah, but you say you’re invincible against clutter’s powers of distraction? I suggest you actually try a text-editor’s blank screen for a while before you assume clutter doesn’t mess with your story headspace.
Text-editors are software programs designed specifically for composing text — not for producing images and tables and bullet points and dancing paperclips alongside words. If you don’t want to abandon the way computers allow you to move text around quicker than longhand, or the way computers allow you to get your thoughts down faster than a cramping hand, use a text-editor (I use TextPad). Word processors are at root text-editors combined (often poorly!) with elements of graphic design programs. But text-editors combine the advantages of a computer without the disadvantages of word processors; you can think of text-editors as high-tech typewriters.
Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, “correcting” your spelling, criticizing your sentence structure, and so on. The programmers who wrote your word processor type all day long, every day, and they have the power to buy or acquire any tool they can imagine for entering text into a computer. They don’t write their software with Word. They use a text-editor, like vi, Emacs, TextPad, BBEdit, Gedit, or any of a host of editors. These are some of the most venerable, reliable, powerful tools in the history of software (since they’re at the core of all other software) and they have almost no distracting features — but they do have powerful search-and-replace functions. Best of all, the humble .txt file can be read by practically every application on your computer, can be pasted directly into an email, and can’t transmit a virus.
Below, compare a screenshot of a typical MS Word configuration with a screenshot of TextPad, both using text from the beginning of my (free!) short story “Glenn of Green Gables.”
As you can see, TextPad shows merely one thin menu bar at the top; the rest is empty space for you to dive into. MS Word surrounds your screen, and thus your headspace, with distractions.
My text-editor gives me an additional benefit: when I set TextPad to full-screen, I feel as if associations between my computer and non-creative work and recreation drop away. Let me explain. Robert Olen Butler advises taking advantage of a phenomenon psychologists call “functional fixedness.” From his how-to fiction-writing book From Where You Dream:
That is, if you have a certain place and certain objects that you associate only with a certain task, eventually the associational values build up in such a way that when you go to that place and engage those objects, you are instantly completely focused on that task.
Partly I regard my computer and desk as a place where I check email, stare at Twitter, what have you; partly, it isn’t a place to get ‘in the zone’ for creative writing. For a while I thought that maybe I could use two computers and two locatons — one for creative work and the other for non-creative work and recreation — but that wasn’t practical. However, everytime I work creatively in a text-editor, I feel as if I’m in a different world, far away from a tempting taskbar or, god forbid, a dancing paperclip.
EPILOGUE: Minor tech notes for new users of TextPad and other text-editors:
Text-editors save documents as .txt files in either UNIX-based or PC-based format (your choice); many programs on whatever platform read either format sufficiently well (so the formats are largely interchangable); but, if you run into a problem with something somewhere (such as with tagcloud.pl), try saving your .txt file in the other format. Microsoft stuff uses the PC-based format; Macintosh and UNIX-based programs (including operating systems such as Linux) prefer the UNIX-based .txt format.
In TextPad, pressing Alt+V followed by an “F” keystroke will give you a full-screen view, but you might have to adjust your Windows taskbar first (by right-clicking it and changing options on the Properties menu) in order for it to disappear beneath Textpad’s blessed blank screen.
In TextPad, an F11 keystroke will give you a sidebar where you can select between multiple files. I find this useful when I write sections of a creative work out of order.
In TextPad, pressing Alt+C followed by a “W” keystroke will force the program to word-wrap your text automatically, which is what you want.
You can and should change many of TextPad’s default settings, such as for font size, to your liking.
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