Douglas Lucas » Writing

Fiction Filmable … so what?

Douglas Lucas — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 14:25:08 +0000

My good friend Cynthia Shearer said something in a long-ago (long-ago in net years) blog post, a review of Richard Yates’ novel Revolutionary Road, that has puzzled me for a while. Before I get all critical of a single phrase in her post, lemme say some positive stuff to block any negative feelings.

Her blog post’s awesome.
Cynthia’s awesome and her blog’s awesome.
Revolutionary Road and Richard Yates are awesome.
Thanks to Cynthia’s review, Wifely and I both read the novel, and we found it so worthwhile, the book has since become something of a touchstone in some of our conversations.

Now with the kindnesses out of the way, here’s my quarrel, or really, quibble jumping-off point. In the course of otherwise spot-on praise for Yates’ novel, Cynthia gives the following as a thought on the book:

The novel is flawlessly structured, three acts, and eminently filmable.

Confirming what I thought, my OS X dictionary gives the following definition for “eminently”:

used to emphasize the presence of a positive quality

Maybe Cynthia wasn’t using the word so specifically, but regardless of authorial intent…and setting aside commerce, writers upping their audience — i.e., considering aesthetics alone — why is it a positive (or a negative) quality for a book to be filmable? We don’t say: “That’s a great sculpture; after all, it’d make a fantastic piece of photography” or “That’s a great painting; after all, it’d make an excellent symphonic work.”

Connections between artistic content remixed into another art form can be worth pursuing and elaborating and evaluating, but I don’t see any basis for using as a criterion of aesthetic appraisal the ease with which an artistic piece can be remixed to another art form.

By the way, one of my favorite remixes of artistic subjects is Rachmaninoff’s symphonic poem Isle of the Dead Op. 29, composed in the early 20th century and then recorded with Rachmaninoff himself conducting. And yes, it’s “beginner’s classical,” shut up. Arnold Böcklin’s painting Isle of the Dead inspired Rachmaninoff’s piece — apparently the black-and-white version:

Here’s the color version:

And the music, low-fi and split into two parts due to copyright and YouTube limitations:

And here’s an online encyclopedia of Isle of the Dead remixes.

Anyway, the (wrongheaded!) idea of using as a criterion of qualitative judgment an artwork’s capability to be transformed from one art form to another got me to thinking: what can a novel do that no other art form can do? The closest (non-textual) art forms are probably plays (in performance) and movies (“movies,” not “films”; I don’t screen films, I watch movies). What can novels do that those art forms can’t do? I’ll not consider plays, as I haven’t thought much about them. So: movies.

In my tentative answers I’m going to put aside style, too, since sentence-level quality, I think, is a) not obligatory for a novel to be good, and b) not inherently novelistic. So, my first tentative answer: maybe novels can represent time, the workings of memory, changing perspectives, and the inner experience of emotions and thoughts better than any other form. As an example of what I mean (UPDATE: screenhead.com’s list of the hardest novels to film), Theodore Sturgeon’s excellent short story The Man Who Lost the Sea (legal full text at link) — warning, spoiler in the third quoted paragraph:

Say you’re a kid, and one dark night you’re running along the cold sand with this helicopter in your hand, saying very fast witchy-witchy-witchy. You pass the sick man and he wants you to shove off with that thing. Maybe he thinks you’re too old to play with toys. So you squat next to him in the sand and tell him it isn’t a toy, it’s a model. You tell him look here, here’s something most people don’t know about helicopters. You take a blade of the rotor in your fingers and show him how it can move in the hub, up and down a little, back and forth a little, and twist a little, to change pitch. You start to tell him how this flexibility does away with the gyroscopic effect, but he won’t listen. He doesn’t want to think about flying, about helicopters, or about you, and he most especially does not want explanations about anything by anybody. Not now. Now, he wants to think about the sea. So you go away. [...]

His head isn’t working right. But he knows clearly that it isn’t working right, which is a strange thing that happens to people in shock sometimes. Say you were that kid, you could say how it was, because once you woke up lying in the gym office in high school and asked what had happened. They explained how you tried something on the parallel bars and fell on your head. You understood exactly, though you couldn’t remember falling. Then a minute later you asked again what had happened and they told you. You understood it. And a minute later . . . forty-one times they told you, and you understood. It was just that no matter how many times they pushed it into your head, it wouldn’t stick there; but all the while you knew that your head would start working again in time. And in time it did. . . . Of course, if you were that kid, always explaining things to people and to yourself, you wouldn’t want to bother the sick man with it now. [...]

Say you were that kid: say, instead, at last, that you are the sick man, for they are the same; surely then you can understand why of all things, even while shattered, shocked, sick with radiation calculated (leaving) radiation computed (arriving) and radiation past all bearing (lying in the wreckage of Delta) you would want to think of the sea. For no farmer who fingers the soil with love and knowledge, no poet who sings of it, artist, contractor, engineer, even child bursting into tears at the inexpressible beauty of a field of daffodils—none of these is as intimate with Earth as those who live on, live with, breathe and drift in its seas. So of these things you must think; with these you must dwell until you are less sick and more ready to face the truth.

(Oddly for a science fiction story originally published in a straight-up “genre” magazine — The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction — “The Man Who Lost the Sea” was selected for the 1960 edition of The Best American Short Stories.)

I’m not sure a play or a movie could represent the Sturgeon story, its workings of time, memory, changing perspectives, and inner experience as well and as concisely — or even at all. But that’s a huge disjunction: are plays and movies able to represent the Sturgeon story — just not concisely or well — or is there something inherent to the story that cannot be translated to another art form? I think that depends on how inherent an aspect of an artwork has to be for it to be considered inherent. ;-) And, how good does the movie have to be? The movie could voice-over or crawl tons of text to get closer to the original fiction format, but that (probably) would become annoying. You never know, however; artists are always figuring out new techniques. All the same, because representing time, memory, changing perspectives, and inner experience is at least a huge strength of fiction (and especially the novel), more and more I try to emphasize those qualities in my own writing.

I said first tentative answer, so how about this second one, which I can describe best in a metaphorical way? Novels are like multicharacter, revised, organized daydreams — or, imagine being a kid and playing with dolls or figurines, making up stories. That’s basically what novels are, I think, but not so much created daydreams worlds as the daydream-y experience of personal identity as a network of multiple narratives, comprised of images, emotions, etc., and stuck into the context of particular settings and social histories/influences and so forth. Sorta sounds like Bakhtin’s account of polyphony in Dostoevsky. But I haven’t read enough Bakhtin yet to say much; besides, his name sounds like Bactine.

Please don’t DMCA-takedown me, Bayer

This way of looking at what’s unique to novelistic form doesn’t seem to strongly entail the memory rumination or time aspects or changing perspectives I mentioned earlier, but yeah, I think fiction — especially when it avoids too much exposition and abstraction — stages a vehicle for experiencing a daydream related to identity and traveling in a specific historical or social context. Yet in “When Narrative Fails,” an article in May 2004′s Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, J. Melvin Woody makes an interesting case that other forms of art can do this, too:

“Why [...] should we limit our understanding of the constitution of the self to the narrative? Indeed, why limit ourselves to language? Do not music and dance often articulate our passions more eloquently than any literary form?”

Nevertheless I think my second answer is pretty strong, and pertinent to why reading fiction is not just another hobby or preference, but something people who have the ability and resources and time to read it really should do so.

We Don’t Serve Your Kind Here

Douglas Lucas — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 22:00:10 +0000

(taken by ilovememphis)

Within the last few months there have been at least five people who have accused me of intentionally inflating my speech, vocabulary, diction, writing, whatever in an effort, they say, to sound impressive or smart or important &tc. I do a lot of stupid and immature things, but deceiving people with pompous language isn’t one of them. Suggesting someone simplify their sentences for clarity or for aesthetic reasons is one thing; assuming and saying that their complex speech patterns are consciously crafted hypocrisies is quite another.

The way I communicate is in fact pretty much the way I think. Most people are okay with it. An annoying few are not. Well, I’m hardly constructing what I’m typing here right now; I do think in semicolons. This for me is genuine and authentic communication. Because I recognize that many people construe the way I communicate as pretentious, I have tried in little social settings to screen everything I say before I say it in order to render my sentences more informal — to earn a better score on the allegedly important scale of how well you’ve conformed to the conventions of normalcy and tradition and small talk. During those experiments I sounded completely devoid of affect because, guess what, I wasn’t being sincere.

I am not well-informed about the rules of charade which govern much social interaction, rules that apparently tell you how not to rock any boats. So I go about sincerely communicating in the way that’s most natural to me, and people time and again criticize it for not being colloquial enough. I had a professor once tell me that lyrical or odd prose is immoral, whereas plain prose is moral because it supposedly doesn’t talk down to readers. This is the “Style is Morality” crowd. What the hell? You’re an ethicist and you don’t have other problems to worry about?

If you’re like those five people I mentioned earlier, probably you’re thinking: Gee, why did he use the strange word ‘affect’ above? Because I don’t know what it means. That’s why he’s so pretentious! Instead of thinking that, you should try using a dictionary. It’s not that hard. C’mon. You can do it. Really.

This has all been so frustrating to me for a very long time. Look, you get a verbose person when he comes from a background of:

Studying Latin & Greek instead of European languages; my vocabulary became less Anglo-Saxon gutsy and more Latinate baroque. Whoop-tee-do, deal with it, get a dictionary.
Spending enormous quantities of time alone reading instead of socializing. I’m not saying this makes me superior. In fact much of it was probably a gigantic waste of time; I should have sought out more friends.

I could go on, much further, but aside from smacking of LiveJournal whining (stereotype alert), such a bullet-point list would be bad for biz, it might get me in trouble with people, and we all understand just how important biz is, right, because it’s more important to produce goods/services than it is to be honest, sincere?

For me this rant is closely related, emotionally, to my disgust with many science fiction & fantasy readers’ refusal to empathize with protagonists who are anything other than Freytag-problem-solving reliable narrators. I’m not sure what the connection is. But that’s for another post.

With Wikileaks, will there be Forgiveness?

Douglas Lucas — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 07:46:45 +0000

If you aren’t up to speed on Wikileaks news, try here and here and here, and watch this:

Now that you’re up to speed:

There is this goofy card game one of my brothers likes to play~~; to my knowledge, he invented it~~. The dealer (typically my brother!) passes out one face-down card to himself and one to each other player. At his signal, all players raise their cards to their foreheads facing out such that no one can see his or her own card, but everyone can see everybody else’s. The players then place bets as to how valuable they think their own cards are in comparison — a total guess, of course, but by this time everyone’s laughing from holding poker cards against their skin. After betting, the players reveal their cards, and the random results release laughter …

Here’s my version of the game, which so far exists only in my imagination. People find themselves seated at a dinner table, clutching their one card tightly to their chests, looking down at their stated worth — “7″ or “3″ or “10″ — a value that is calculated according to all the good and the bad they have caused in life, according to all the secrets they know, according to all the things they wish they hadn’t said or they wish they knew how to say.

“If you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you” — Herbert McCabe

At this imaginary table of mine the players are making small talk, some of it happy, some of it sad; all are nervous about their value, and what the other players would think if their card were seen. After all, this player Sue’s card reveals that she said to this player Bob that this other, wealthy player Jorge’s a jerk, and now that Bob and Jorge are pretty good friends, does Jorge know what Sue once said about him, and if so, how does that affect who’s gonna pick up the check?

The dealer — a voice from the sky? — suggests the players lay their cards down on the table, face-up, on condition that they all, unanimously, forgive one another and love one another regardless of the cards’ value. The players agree, make their promises, and lay the cards down face-up. Angry yelling (“Jorge has the hots for both Bob and Sue?”) soon turns to laughter (“Jorge has the hots for both Bob and Sue!”) as people discover everyone’s a mess inside …

Except what if the players at the table included polarizing figures such as (take your pick) Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Julian Assange, or heck, even that driver yesterday who cut you off when you really needed to get over a lane? Would we the powers-that-aint agree to forgive they the powers-that-be permanently if they’d lay down their cards and their guns?

I would. I would, to get the cards on the table so everyone could be safe.

There are of course several things my card-game scenario doesn’t address. For instance, it seems radical transparency and privacy can come into conflict, and privacy is I presume often preferable: if you’re surveilled to death, your creativity is chilled (partly because honest creativity requires engaging in thoughtcrime) and also under surveillance you can’t experience as fully the fun premium privacy can add to events (e.g., sweet nothings can be more meaningful when expressed without others around). Further, logically there are possible worlds where security is unjustly threatened by radical transparency, and I am uncertain as to how such situations, when they do arise in this actual world, should be handled, although I am tempted to say, well, let the ~~chips~~ cards fall where they may, because 4000 years of trading our rights away to leaders whose trustworthiness is unproven in return for promises of security hasn’t worked out so well.

Minor edits made 18 August 2010.

The Writer Must Write What He has to Say, Not Speak It

Douglas Lucas — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 17:18:19 +0000

Friends

I’m not going to talk about the photograph above much, and here’s why.

Starting late, late August of this year until — presumably — August 2011, I’m going to write a novel, not just to appease friends who keep suggesting it (as opposed to my continuing to write short stories), but also because by late August 2010 I will have had submitted out in the mail a simultaneous total of ten short stories, four poems, and two nonfiction pieces. Time to do something different.

Already I’ve begun thinking about the book (especially the characters and the setting), but I’m not going to talk much about the actual content of the novel on the blog or anywhere else really. William Gibson, Stephen King, Jeff Guinn, and Hemingway (this post’s title is a quote of Hemingway’s) are four of the many writers who advocate the same policy. Always I’ve wondered why authors encourage silence; Stephen King gives some reasons in his book On Writing, but unfortunately I don’t remember them at the moment. I came up with my own satisfactory reason, though, finally.

Some have told me I’ve shown in-progress work to too many people too often as a way of seeking approval and reassurance. I think that’s partly true, but I don’t think it’s the full story. I think the main reason is my mind frequently works by bouncing ideas off people, and gauging my reaction to their responses — a kind of transference thing. Rarely do I take other people’s advice on artistic stuff anyway! Also, I love to share things I’m passionate about. So what’s my reason I came up with to stop (for the most part) talking about (early drafts of) in-progress work, particularly something as lengthy as a novel?

Because I think sharing with or talking to someone about in-progress work (or at least early-stage in-progress work), can really dampen my (and your?) enthusiasm. It’s like when you go on an awesome vacation, and afterward you tell friends about it. The first five times you tell the story of your trip, your voice is full of excitement and your anecdotes are fresh. By the twentieth time, however, you’re sick of talking about it and you’re recounting boilerplate. You don’t want your work to read like boilerplate, do you?

There are of course exceptions. The research question you ask an expert, the impossible plot boggle you talk out with your friend who skillfully repeats back what you said in a way that gives you another perspective without imposing too much on your artistic turf. The revision stage, too, is not what I’m talking about here; there, you do want some other eyes to read what you write. But again, these are all exceptions that don’t prove the rule.

One overarching solution, though — I’m always looking for compromises, when it seems to me many other people just want to shove their “correct” ways down your throat yesterday — is what I did at Clarion West 2008. There, writing my story Glenn of Green Gables, I periodically wrote enigmatic phrases on the markerboard outside my door. So classmates saw the markerboard say: “A dolphin perhaps”; “Arnold Schwarzenegger”; “Montreal and ultimately Quebec”; “globe-shaped lights brighter than Christmas.” These phrases didn’t really give anything away, and kept it fun — sharing, as some tried to guess what in the heck I was writing about.

With that being said, go look at the photograph again. I put these sixteen pieces of jacket art up partly for inspiration and partly to keep me company as I write the novel (August 2010 – August 2011, inclusive!). So c’mon, guess! What do these books have in common, artistically, story-wise? What’d you expect to come forth from them swirling in a writer’s subconscious? Here’s a list of the books, just in case the photo doesn’t work for you:

Godbody by Theodore Sturgeon
More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
Bless the Beasts & Children by Glendon Swarthout
1984 by George Orwell
Valis by Philip K. Dick
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Air by Geoff Ryman
The Celestial Jukebox by Cynthia Shearer
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Best of H.P. Lovecraft
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Yes, that’s Yoda atop the door. And I will say I enjoy all these books, of course. Fire away!

Take Risks

Douglas Lucas — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 04:54:44 +0000

My Laptop’s New Sticker

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…

Conceptual Feeling Tones in Writing

Douglas Lucas — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 21:53:44 +0000

Gone with the What?

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

Creating Character Emotions is Awesome

Douglas Lucas — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 23:49:15 +0000

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.

Novelist and short story writer Ann Hood (Wikipedia entry; Blog), who teaches at The New School and whose latest novel is The Red Thread, wrote one of the three how-to books I prize. It’s titled Creating Character Emotions.

A Rectangular Read

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!

And buy Ann Hood’s book!

Figure out how

Douglas Lucas — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:44:56 +0000

Henry Helping

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 Donation Drive 2010: Sponsor Me!

Douglas Lucas — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 01:42:10 +0000

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.”

I describe my feelings for Clarion West and my background in terms of the Write-a-thon further on my personal Write-a-thon profile page.

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!

Clarion West 2008 – Part 5 of 10

Douglas Lucas — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 04:09:21 +0000

This post is the fifth in a series of ten about my experiences at Clarion West Writers Workshop (Wikipedia) as a member of the 2008 class. I’ll talk about my third week at the workshop, when Cory Doctorow (Wikipedia, Twitter; freely downloadable recent novels Little Brother and Makers) instructed. Here’re Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of the series. In Part 4 I discussed writing my story “Glenn of Green Gables” and ended with a cliffhanger: aliens had just broken into our space station hull.

Earthly Seattle, via NASA

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!

via vinylville’s Etsy shop

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.

Cory, via quinnums

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.

via House of Sims

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.

Still I can report some of Cory’s instruction. An advocate of privacy, I said; Cory, who’s associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (Twitter), has a number of controversial views not just on privacy but also on piracy, file-sharing, DRM and media industries, more. Some of his afternoon lectures covered his digital ideology. I remember him as a fast-talking firebrand.

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).

Oh, Freytag! (stolen? pirated? from Kathleen King)

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.

I am a sick man…. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. — Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground

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.
Time management: use Getting Things Done.
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.
The main thing is believing in yourself.