My fourth digest linking to what I’ve recently been reading online. First, the customary now-playing and now-reading: Computer Love by Kraftwerk, and actually, I’m between books at the moment; wifely Kate put Gone with the Wind on a reading list for me, so I think I’ll take up that one next.
There are approximately 230,000 people [in Japan] who almost constantly shut themselves in their rooms except to go to nearby convenience stores, according to a survey conducted by the Cabinet Office. [...] the statistics have raised questions about the future of Japan.
Hikikomori are defined as those who shut themselves in their homes for at least six months but are not involved in child care or housework even though they are not sick.
Problems involving shut-ins have been pointed out over the past 15 years, but only experts and nonprofit organizations have worked on the issue, with little public support.
Requisite rightwing lunacy: former Republican Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, once a Republican presidential candidate who’s now stated his intention to run as the Constitution Party’s Colorado gubernatorial candidate, has advocated the impeachment of President Obama for “wanting to destroy the Constitution,” calling him “a more serious threat to America than al Qaeda” — that’s from his op-ed in the Washington Times, where he says:
[Obama's goals constitute] the utopian, or rather dystopian, reverie of a dedicated Marxist — a dedicated Marxist who lives in the White House.
Because of the power he wields over budgets, the judiciary, national defense and even health care, his regime and his program are not just about changing public policy in the conventional sense. When one considers the combination of his stop-at-nothing attitude, his contempt for limited government, his appointment of judges who want to create law rather than interpret it – all of these make this president today’s single greatest threat to the great experiment in freedom that is our republic.
“On the other side of the aisle,” as the phrase goes, Van Jones, former White House green jobs special advisor, tells the netroots — pretty much the progressive blogosphere — to quit beating up on Obama.
“I can’t stand it. President Obama volunteered to be the captain of the Titanic after it hit the iceberg,” Jones said at Netroots Nation [...]
“This is harder than it looks. Having spent six months in the White House, it’s a totally different experience when you’re sitting there and the missiles are coming over the horizon at you,” he said. [...]
Jones said the netroots need to realize they are up against an “epic” force with the conservative media movement, which is trying to “bury everything you fought for everything you believe in,” and comparing it to the Lord of the Rings.
Much as I wish for more progressive results, I have total sympathy for Van Jones’s view: it’s easy to backseat quarterback and complain when you don’t have the full view of entrenched interests and whatever other enemies Obama faces. On the other hand, acknowledging that can slippery-slope to a “just trust the President you like” position, and since that isn’t viable overall, government should be more transparent. And really, if you aren’t activist-ing in some way (e.g., How to Call Congress, How to Snailmail Congess), your cynicism probably isn’t getting anyone anywhere.
For his part, the President asked Netroots Nation via a video address to seriously credit his Administration for its accomplishments so far:
No? You don’t want to do anything for the mid-term elections because they’re not as dramatic as the Presidential ones? Here, read this CBS piece about Minnesota Republican Representative Michele Bachmann, who “said yesterday that if Republicans [win] the House in November, ‘all we should do’ is subpoena and investigate the Obama administration.” She’s also called for “100 percent repeal of ObamaCare” and the “big mother of all repeal bills.”
A College Board study ranks Texas as one of least educated states, with only 27% of Texans holding university degrees. Actually, that’s a higher figure than I would’ve guessed. No disrespect.
How nervous are liberals about the November election and how angry are they at conservatives? Plenty, to judge from this year’s Netroots Nation gathering of 2,000 liberal bloggers and activists.
General background on the Clarion West Writers Workshop can be found here. Check back with us in September for more information on next year’s instructors and on applying to attend the 2011 session.
An account of a military contractor’s corruption has made many rounds already, but it’s so offensive it bears linkage (NYT) and excerpting:
more than $6 million in personal expenses [were paid out] on behalf of [contractor] Mr. Brooks, covering items as expensive as luxury cars and as prosaic as party invitations, Ms. Schlegel testified.
Also included were university textbooks for his daughter, pornographic videos for his son, plastic surgery for his wife, a burial plot for his mother, prostitutes for his employees, and, for him, a $100,000 American-flag belt buckle encrusted with rubies, sapphires and diamonds.
many other ways to organize time exist in the world’s languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.
In addition to space and time, languages also shape how we understand causality. For example, English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. [...]
if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world. [...] if you take away people’s ability to use language in what should be a simple nonlinguistic task, their performance can change dramatically.
Research published in the British Medical Journal found that patients trained in Alexander technique, which teaches proper posture and everyday movement habits to reduce strain, experienced an average of 18 fewer days of back pain over four weeks
BlackBerry was operating “beyond the jurisdiction of national legislation,” the U.A.E.’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said in a statementi ssued on Sunday.
“As a result of how BlackBerry data is managed and stored, in their current form, Certain BlackBerry applications allow people to misuse the service, causing serious social, judicial and national security repercussions.”
The home ministry, which has time and again shared with DoT its concerns over the security agencies’ inability to de-crypt messages shared over BlackBerry, has now asked DoT to sound out Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian firm that makes the BlackBerry device, that its services in India will face shutdown if its e-mail and other data services do not comply with formats that can be monitored by security and intelligence agencies.
Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother uses phone encryption in its plot a great deal.
The Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, which will be administered either by a state or by the Department of Health and Human Services, will provide a new health coverage option for Americans who have been uninsured for at least six months, have been unable to get health coverage because of a health condition, and are a U.S. citizen or are residing in the United States legally.
Created under the Affordable Care Act, the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan is a transitional program until 2014, when insurers will be banned from discriminating against adults with pre-existing conditions, and individuals and small businesses will have access to more affordable private insurance choices through new competitive Exchanges. [...]
In order to give states the flexibility to best meet their needs, HHS provided states with the option of running the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan themselves or having HHS run the plan. Twenty-one states have elected to have HHS administer the plans, while 29 states and the District of Columbia have chosen to run their own programs.
Starting today, the national Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan will be open to applicants in the 21 states where HHS is operating the program. [...]
The Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan will cover a broad range of health benefits, including primary and specialty care, hospital care, and prescription drugs. The Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan does not base eligibility on income and does not charge a higher premium because of a medical condition. Participants will pay a premium that is not more than the standard individual health insurance premium in their state for insurance that covers major medical and prescription drug expenses with some cost-sharing.
Business Insider discusses the destruction of the American middle class; the article has an anti-global perspective I don’t like (because building walls around yourself isn’t a long-term answer), but the article’s worth the scary read:
no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker ten times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. [...] the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new “global” labor pool. [...]
The truth is that most Americans are absolutely dependent on someone else giving them a job. [...]
36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings. [...]
Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975. [...]
For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together. [...]
More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying. [...]
The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
That’s all I can manage for today; for the news I’m a few days behind, but hopefully this digest will let you catch up on some good items you might have missed. Tschuss for now!
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…
[Illegal immigration apprehension numbers along the Arizona border] are sharply down, according to the Border Patrol — by more than sixty per cent since 2000 [...] Illegal immigration, although hard to measure, has clearly been declining. [...]
The problem of illegal immigration isn’t a matter of violent criminals storming the walls of our peaceful towns and cities. It’s a matter of what to do about the estimated eleven million unauthorized residents who are already here. The mass-deportation fantasies of some restrictionists notwithstanding, the great majority of “illegals” are here to stay. That is a good thing, since they are, for a start, essential to large sectors of the economy, beginning with the food supply — the Department of Labor calculates that more than half the crop pickers in the United States are undocumented. National business leaders have no illusions about these basic facts of economic life.
There are reasons to be uneasy about illegal immigration. In some industries, dirt-poor newcomers lower wages. State and local budgets suffer when workers are paid under the table. The fact that people lack legal status is itself disturbing. [...] Yet anti-immigrant backlashes don’t always track closely with actual immigration. They track with unemployment, popular anxiety, and a fear of displacement by strangers. They depend on woeful narratives of national decline, of which there is lately no shortage. Scaremongering works. [...]
Projections show white Americans becoming a USA demographic minority in the 2040s. Anyone got an idea what, with present voting trends, that’d do to current Republicans? I think that has a lot to do with the rightwing’s anti-illegal immigration position.
At Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow mentions a £1,000-prize fiction-writing contest that insisted, for the alleged betterment of humankind, that contestants handwrite their entries and avoid science fiction. Nobody entered the contest.
INCEPTION is, in microcosm, the state of much current [science fiction]. It is so complex and self-referential that much time is spent figuring out what is happening, rather than inhabiting what is happening. Is this good or bad? I guess that depends why you like stories. [...] If you want them to be reflections of human experience, then INCEPTION is still good but not as good as it could have been [...] judging from the enthusiastic audience reaction last night, puzzles are what is wanted. People applauded at the end.
Kate and I haven’t seen it yet. Despite Roger Ebert and William Gibson complimenting the movie — those two would make a great movie-reviewing duo — we might not get around to seeing this one at all. And, I have to say that right now I’m really enjoying the Kress novel Beggars in Spain.
The Washington Post publishes its two-year project exposing the Top Secret America surveillance and intelligence industry. In case you’ve forgotten about it, here’s the Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I started submitting stories for publication when I was about 15, but it was many years before I sold anything. I don’t make my living writing science fiction so in that sense I’m still not a pro. Writing for publication was always my goal, but making a living writing science fiction wasn’t. [...]
Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know. When philosophers propose thought experiments as a way of analyzing certain questions, their thought experiments often sound a lot like science fiction.
My Clarion West’08 classmate Carlton Mellick III and the rest of the Bizarro writer army make The Guardian and Boing Boing. Carlton was a fun guy, extremely talented, and extremely sincere in a way that was still informed — not dewy-eyed.
A Boing Boing post discusses The Bechdel Test, a few quick questions that help evaluate the representation of women in any movie.
At GalleyCat, novelist Bret Easton Ellis says writers will make more money due to eBooks, not less, in part because of the decreased costs of producton allowing for higher royalties.
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
The second digest in my aggregating/anthologizing experiment. Basically, what I find especially interesting in my day’s Internet reading. Here’s the digests category of my blog. Without further ado — oh, wait. The “What I’m reading and listening to” bit: Today I’ve been reading more of Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress and listening to Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love,” Metallica’s “Fixxxer,” and REM’s “Shiny Happy People.”
At ReaderCon 2010, Eric Rosenfield and JF Quackenbush of Wet Asphalt conducted quick video interviews with several big names mostly asking variations of the same questions: What’s the future of publishing? and What’s the future of genre?. In his interview, Peter Straubsaid: Although “people will continue to write books” — of course! — publishing is becoming “less centralized, more electronic” and publishers are “infinitely less willing to take gambles.” Also: “blogging’s going to become an essential element of a brand” and “that’s just the way things are going, you know? Adapt or die.”
The interviewer asks Straub about publishing his latest novel The Skylark through a small press to preserve an artistic vision not chosen by the major press editors of the book’s incarnation as A Dark Matter (unfortunately I’ve yet to read either, though I own ‘em!); the interviewer specifically asks, “Do you think small presses are going to be much more important in the future in taking up the reins of preserving the artistic vision of writers, and that major presses are just going to advocate anything that — lowest common denominators?” Straub answers — it’s hard to hear given the crowd noise — that he thinks “megabooks are going to antiquate[?] the concept of catering to writers of unproven earning capacity; that means small presses are going to reap an enormous benefit [...] and become more commercial.”
Ted Chiangtakes the studied-neutrality view on publishing’s future: “There will be publishing [...] I expect that there’ll probably be something that no one right now can predict” and says that though genre’s boundaries “aren’t going to go away,” they’re “fading.”
John Kessel, asked about the future of genre (particularly with recognition of his efforts toward pushing the academy into accepting genre fiction), comments: “I think there always will be something that presents[?] as science fiction written. [...] As a separate genre, [science fiction] will probably persist still. [...] But also more and more writers seem to be dealing with [*inaudible*] science fiction concepts without being part of the subculture.”
Writer and editor Scott Edelman captured and/or published footage of a recent panel, also at ReaderCon 2010, that focused on Theodore Sturgeon, perhaps my favorite writer. Scott Edelman’s YouTube page offers Part 1 and Part 2 of the footage, and I hope more parts were recorded and will be published. From the YouTube descriptions:
On Sunday, July 11, 2010, Samuel R. Delany, Paul Di Filippo, Barry Malzberg, Noël Sturgeon, and Diane Weinstein appeared on the panel “From Microcosmic God to Slow Sculpture: The Short Fiction of Theodore Sturgeon.”
In time for this coming Tuesday’s 41st anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, Ryan Brown at Salon.cominterviewsStephen Pyne about his recent book Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery which starts with “the first sputterings of Sputnik and reach[es] all the way to our recent space shuttle disasters.” Although Pyne is inclined away from manned space exploration, he says:
Science fiction actually preceded [space exploration], and many people involved in the program had grown up reading these books and took the ideas within them very seriously. I think that what made the literary side so potent was that it gave space exploration a sense of story. It helped us answer those big-picture questions: What does this all mean? How can we understand what is unfolding?
[...]
[The Voyager spacecrafts] are each equipped with a gold-plated phonograph record and instructions (if anyone is able to decode them) on how to play it. They’re filled with sounds and greetings in most of the earth’s languages.
You can hear the global music recorded on the Golden Record; it includes the best performance of Bach’s 2nd Brandenburg Concerto, 1st Movement — by Karl Richter’s Munich Bach Orchestra — that I’ve ever heard. It’s at a very fast tempo, yay!
With a 9.5 percent unemployment rate reported in June, there aren’t a lot of job opportunities for recent graduates. But the federal government is looking to fill an estimated 50,000 entry-level positions in the next year, according to the Partnership for Public Service, and public sector work is looking better and better to some people as private sector job growth remains anemic.
“President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed what was to have been the world’s toughest crackdown on illegal file-sharing [... yet] not a single warning has been sent out; not a single broadband connection has been cut.”
Like many, my thoughts on digital copyright are mixed and currently not very useful, so here’s some copyleft stuff to read — Cory Doctorow’s nonfiction collection Content — and some far copyright stuff to read — Abjectivist Greg Perkins on intellectual property. Further, there’s the studied, tumultuous-change-is-inevitable neutrality (if I’m not mistaken) of William Gibson and Clay Shirky. Learn more than I have and make up your own mind! I will say, however, that some writers (such as myself) who loudly specify that they don’t write for profit also overly fret about digital copyright, and that seems contradictory to me, unless they’re worrying about publishers/presses affording their costs of production, or about making sure authentic versions of their texts are reliably available to readers as opposed to tampered versions — presumably there’s tech for the latter problem?
This one will probably anger some of my readers especially. The United Farm Workers union has issued a job-offer call to unemployed American citizens as rhetorical defense for immigrants. In response, the NYT opines on immigration:
It is safe to conclude that few if any Americans will take up the [UFW] offer, no matter how hungry they are. The campaign is a sly attempt to draw attention to the push for immigration reform, particularly an effort to legalize undocumented farm workers. With anti-immigrant resentment running hot, many accuse immigrants of stealing American jobs. The union replies: How can immigrants steal jobs nobody else wants?
The [Realms of Fantasy story] also hinted at a parallel with the way western culture often attempts to experience other cultures, stealing bits of the other cultures and incorporating them into their own in a misguided attempt to understand them, perhaps ruining or at least diminishing the original culture as part of the process. “… that was the zombie way. Forever to yearn for new things. Forever to absorb them and turn them into the same old McHuman.”
Of course, this tendency is hardly unique to American, Canadian and modern European culture. I think of the ancient Romans borrowing from Greek culture. Or the Mughal conquerers of northern India (especially Akbar) borrowing from Hindu culture. And I’d also question whether it’s entirely bad.
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!
As mentioned before, Clarion West is stationed in geosynchronous orbit above Seattle, but at the same time it replicates the Earthly city below. I think this Miévillean metaphysic serves in part to shield Clarionites’ dubious deeds from those who might not understand what happens when writing workshops (rightfully) push people to revise their stories: their fictional stories and moreso their personal identity ones. In the space station, as narratology becomes conscious craft, students confront fictional characters who battle through fictional plots, and confront seventeen other writers, plus a vaunted instructor, each of whom are battling through their personal plots — and everyone winds up using the manuscripts as materiel.
Mortal Kombat II: SNES
With their laptops students type out art, trails to their selves; the art becomes in the classroom terrain for proxy wars over personal identities — and over the group’s identity, too. Everyone in the building is at once enemy and comrade. Reality shows would pay to sell some of the behavior that bubbles up. Caught in it, students lean on each other for support. That requires privacy; thus the mystery of the workshop’s location. Again: the experience requires privacy. To have four laptops — writers’ trusted weapons — stolen by aliens breaking in … an invasion!
I’m not clear on the actual details of the heist, none of us were, though we scried far and wide for the aliens, and sent many spaceships chasing after. We were all as one laptop-less ragtags, but within forty-eight hours we were high-fiving each other — because to our quick rescue came an advocate of privacy shielded with a sheen of transparency, in other words, that frenetic pirate known as Cory Doctorow.
Info he finds useful he boomerangs, and so when he learned aliens invaded just prior to his arrival, he donated his instructor’s pay toward laptop replacements and posted the following on Boing Boing:
Clarion West, the famed Seattle science fiction workshop, has suffered a terrible theft: four student laptops were stolen yesterday. Clarion West (like Clarion in San Diego) is a grueling, six-week intensive boot-camp for science fiction writers. Students often quit their jobs and save for years to attend and it goes without saying that they can hardly absorb the cost of a new laptop in the middle of the workshop.
I’m flying to Seattle tomorrow to teach the third week of the workshop and I’m keenly aware of the chaos this will have wrought on the students. The workshop’s organizers are soliciting donations — either hardware or cash — to get the students up and running. The workshop is incorporated as a 501(c)3 charity, so any donations are tax deductible.
I am donating all of my teaching fee to the fund. I hope that some of you will be moved to chip in whatever you can afford, to help fund the instruction of the next generation of great science fiction writers.
Clarion West received enough donations to replace all stolen laptops. I wonder which literary fiction communities could boast the same (I’m actually asking!).
That week, in addition to the invasion, I was shaken “as if with ague,” which is the writerly cliche for describing someone tremoring.
Except there was no as-if subjunctive for me: all week I had a constant fever registering over a hundred, and I had a cough, too. I think the illness was brought on by too much exercise (I ran in the mornings). Thankfully the administrators (Neile Graham and Les Howle) gave me nothing but the kindest help. My memories of Cory’s week, though, remain hazy.
All the same he had a sensitivity about him that I don’t see many mention. For example, he was the only instructor who in the one-on-one sessions made a point of asking how we were doing emotionally, aside from the writing portion of the workshop; that thoughtfulness probably was in part due to his having attended Clarion East as a student in 1992. He definitely understood how stressful and transforming the entire experience is, how it requires the privacy and the care that can come with a good group’s special, monastic space (station).
In one lecture Cory gave us a seven-point formula for plotting: create 1) a character 2) in a place 3) with a problem 4) who intelligently overcomes obstacles, 5) and as things get worse, 6) conflict by necessity comes to a climax, 7) after which there’s a denoument.
If I’m not mistaken, Cory portrayed this formula as universal, which with if so I take issue. The formula doesn’t account for certain types of good stories that go under-represented in science fiction & fantasy: stories with unreliable narrators, trapped protagonists who don’t escape into heroic stature — they’re the kind of characters who remind us, as we watch their ironies, of just how much sway our environment has over our lives, and how unreliable information is, no matter how much we try to route around those bugs/features of reality.
As I mentioned in Part 4, most (all?) my classmates in the space station, along with our Week 2 instructor (Mary Rosenblum), totally loved my Week 2 story (“Glenn of Green Gables“); Cory was among the readers who didn’t. Years later I can count the non-fans on one baffled hand. Cory argued Glenn isn’t like-able since he doesn’t solve his problems intelligently. My rejoinder, however unnecessary it is now (people are entitled to their opinions!), is the one a fellow Clarionite suggested: Glenn is an emotionally intelligent problem-solver because he bravely sticks to his lonely love for ol’ Anne Shirley despite increasingly sinking circumstances…
I've never actually read any Green Gables books -- just Googled 'em for allusions
Maybe I seem bitter, and for a time I did feel a bit (byte?) uselessly resentful. But that’s not the point, not me; the point is to tell you (especially future Clarion students) what I experienced. So: there were three male instructors my year, three female. My father is and has been, uh, conspiciously absent from my life, and so the less mature 2008 version of me unconsciously scrutinized Paul Park, Cory, and Chuck Palahniuk in a way he didn’t the three other instructors (Mary, Connie Willis, Sheree R. Thomas). I regarded the men’s instruction as having a sort of paternal absolutism to it.
And so I’m like…
Now that I’m more of an “active protagonist” in my “real” life (thanks in no small part to Clarion West and Seattle), I’ve intentionally challenged myself to write short stories in different and also more traditional ways, and for that, Cory’s obstacle-tackling pointers have proven handy.
…where am I?
One application: while plotting with point 5 — “as things get worse” — I can ask myself, not “what happens next?” but rather “what would raise the stakes?”
But mostly I just keep piracy and capering as tesserae in my own aesthetic.
You want more? Here’s a list of Cory’s excellent fiction-writing advice:
If you don’t like your story, you get stuck more frequently. If you’re stuck, ask yourself what you need in the story to make yourself like it.
Use a feed reader and consider staying on top of interesting things (including current events) part of your writing job. But be willing to “mark all as read” when you get behind; don’t be perfectionistic about it, or you’ll never keep up with anything.
If you’re really stuck, changing projects can be a good strategy.
Write down little bits of things that interest you, and have a good storage system.
Get away from any ceremonial ritual for writing. You will become dependent on the ritual.
Freewriting about whatever is blocking you works well. The shortest path between thought A and thought B, according to some science article or other, is writing it down.
Subjunctive sentence constructions, dreams sequences, telephone conversations, &tc. generally don’t have as much power as showing situations actually happening to characters face-to-face.
When you’re stuck, look back at what you wrote earlier. You’ll often discover or remember stuff you were thinking earlier that you can use to go forward.
Use descriptive filenames if guidelines for electronic submissions ask for attachments.
The central conceit of a story sometimes doesn’t even show up until a story has gone through multiple drafts. Be willing to revise extensively.
You stop having writer’s block when writing becomes your job.
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.
