Word Is Bone

JASONAARON.INFO: 18 Feet of Gut-Crunching, Man-Eating Terror!

2011-06-14T00:23:00.000-07:00

JASONAARON.INFO: 18 Feet of Gut-Crunching, Man-Eating Terror!: "Via"

JASONAARON.INFO: WARHAWK TANZANIA

2011-06-14T00:22:00.000-07:00

JASONAARON.INFO: WARHAWK TANZANIA: "Surely the greatest name anyone has ever had at any point in all the history of the world."

Inception and KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid

2011-06-10T13:11:00.001-07:00

When I was in the Marine Corps the drill instructors were quite fond of acronyms, and ironically enough one of their favorites was KISS. It didn’t stand for anything as pleasant as you might guess. But it’s helpful, nonetheless. KISS: Keep it simple stupid. It meant, don’t make things hard on yourself. In writing, we’re often our own obstacles, and we just need to get out of the way. A great modern master of this kind of story-telling is Christopher Nolan, who seems to make a habit of getting away with murder, or rather cloning and then murder in The Prestige, through the use of quite simple images. No need to explain too much. For instance, after we see the opening sequence of Inception we know how the world works. The water is pouring into the dream world because the guy strapped to the chair is being pushed into the bathtub. It sounds as simple as a college prank, but who can forget that slow motion fall backward into the tub as the water pours in through the windows of DiCaprio’s consciousness? To top it off, that water imagery is re-used in the third act climax, when the van is driven off the bridge into the river… That’s right, Nolan is saying, we can not only enter into another’s consciousness and manipulate it by altering the fabric of their dreamscape… but we can escape on demand with the help of this complex doodad called…well…a wooden chair. Complex stories told simply. KISS. Gotta love it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfMZaLoAsY&feature=related

Woody's Women. "That's what I love about muses...I keep getting older, but they stay the same age."

2011-06-09T11:34:00.000-07:00

In a recent W article Woody Allen talks about his muses through the years.

"My concept of Manhattan is one that I gleaned from Hollywood movies. And it’s the same with the women in my films: I see them all through rose-colored glasses.” And it's those rose-colored glasses that trouble me a bit.

At first it strikes me as immature, that need to "have a crush" on every female star he works with. The casting meetings are a pretense to make sure "they haven't gained 200 pounds" and that he's getting the "same thing I saw on the DVD," almost the way one wants the toy inside the box to look like the one on the packaging.

But Woody Allen also mentions that before his muses, particularly his first muse Diane Keaton, he couldn't write for women. It's hard to write for someone you don't understand, I suppose. But the muse, it's not an understanding. It's a projection.

The muse is a vessel for him and other artist's to put themselves into, pardon any under-age puns. Suddenly, with a muse, Allen says he finds it "easier to write for women" than for men. It's problematic to me that the concept of the muse implies a simplistic sexual excuse to get closer to understanding women, (it's only by seeing them superficially as objects that we could see them as characters that need us to speak through them, rather than characters talking to us) and it makes me wonder where all the female artists' muses are.

Are they, conversely, men? Or are they women too? And if so, do they look just like they did on the DVD?

David Mamet Dishes Out Harsh Advice

2011-06-03T12:06:00.000-07:00

A good friend turned me on to this memo David Mamet sent out to writers of the tv show The Unit. With a voice like Mamet's, always so present on the page, it's hard to put this memo down, even if at times he hits on sore spots. Still, the memo's helpful and fun to read, especially if there are moments when you feel a scene is leading nowhere. As Alec Baldwin's BLAKE says in Glengarry Glen-Ross, "The leads are weak? You're weak." I get the impression Mamet has a little bit of BLAKE inside him. "Always Be Closing." Always be writing well. Always be doing anything well, really. What's the difference?

“TO THE WRITERS OF THE UNIT

GREETINGS.

AS WE LEARN HOW TO WRITE THIS SHOW, A RECURRING PROBLEM BECOMES CLEAR.

THE PROBLEM IS THIS: TO DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN DRAMA AND NON-DRAMA. LET ME BREAK-IT-DOWN-NOW.

EVERYONE IN CREATION IS SCREAMING AT US TO MAKE THE SHOW CLEAR. WE ARE TASKED WITH, IT SEEMS, CRAMMING A SHITLOAD OF INFORMATION INTO A LITTLE BIT OF TIME.

OUR FRIENDS. THE PENGUINS, THINK THAT WE, THEREFORE, ARE EMPLOYED TO COMMUNICATE INFORMATION — AND, SO, AT TIMES, IT SEEMS TO US.

BUT NOTE:THE AUDIENCE WILL NOT TUNE IN TO WATCH INFORMATION. YOU WOULDN’T, I WOULDN’T. NO ONE WOULD OR WILL. THE AUDIENCE WILL ONLY TUNE IN AND STAY TUNED TO WATCH DRAMA.

QUESTION:WHAT IS DRAMA? DRAMA, AGAIN, IS THE QUEST OF THE HERO TO OVERCOME THOSE THINGS WHICH PREVENT HIM FROM ACHIEVING A SPECIFIC, ACUTE GOAL.

SO: WE, THE WRITERS, MUST ASK OURSELVES OF EVERY SCENE THESE THREE QUESTIONS.

1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF HER DON’T GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?

THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS ARE LITMUS PAPER. APPLY THEM, AND THEIR ANSWER WILL TELL YOU IF THE SCENE IS DRAMATIC OR NOT.

IF THE SCENE IS NOT DRAMATICALLY WRITTEN, IT WILL NOT BE DRAMATICALLY ACTED.

THERE IS NO MAGIC FAIRY DUST WHICH WILL MAKE A BORING, USELESS, REDUNDANT, OR MERELY INFORMATIVE SCENE AFTER IT LEAVES YOUR TYPEWRITER. YOU THE WRITERS, ARE IN CHARGE OF MAKING SURE EVERY SCENE IS DRAMATIC.

THIS MEANS ALL THE “LITTLE” EXPOSITIONAL SCENES OF TWO PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD. THIS BUSHWAH (AND WE ALL TEND TO WRITE IT ON THE FIRST DRAFT) IS LESS THAN USELESS, SHOULD IT FINALLY, GOD FORBID, GET FILMED.

IF THE SCENE BORES YOU WHEN YOU READ IT, REST ASSURED IT WILL BORE THE ACTORS, AND WILL, THEN, BORE THE AUDIENCE, AND WE’RE ALL GOING TO BE BACK IN THE BREADLINE.

SOMEONE HAS TO MAKE THE SCENE DRAMATIC. IT IS NOT THE ACTORS JOB (THE ACTORS JOB IS TO BE TRUTHFUL). IT IS NOT THE DIRECTORS JOB. HIS OR HER JOB IS TO FILM IT STRAIGHTFORWARDLY AND REMIND THE ACTORS TO TALK FAST. IT IS YOUR JOB.

EVERY SCENE MUST BE DRAMATIC. THAT MEANS: THE MAIN CHARACTER MUST HAVE A SIMPLE, STRAIGHTFORWARD, PRESSING NEED WHICH IMPELS HIM OR HER TO SHOW UP IN THE SCENE.

THIS NEED IS WHY THEY CAME. IT IS WHAT THE SCENE IS ABOUT. THEIR ATTEMPT TO GET THIS NEED MET WILL LEAD, AT THE END OF THE SCENE,TO FAILURE - THIS IS HOW THE SCENE IS OVER. IT, THIS FAILURE, WILL, THEN, OF NECESSITY, PROPEL US INTO THE NEXT SCENE.

ALL THESE ATTEMPTS, TAKEN TOGETHER, WILL, OVER THE COURSE OF THE EPISODE, CONSTITUTE THE PLOT.

ANY SCENE, THUS, WHICH DOES NOT BOTH ADVANCE THE PLOT, AND STANDALONE (THAT IS, DRAMATICALLY, BY ITSELF, ON ITS OWN MERITS) IS EITHER SUPERFLUOUS, OR INCORRECTLY WRITTEN.

YES BUT YES BUT YES BUT, YOU SAY: WHAT ABOUT THE NECESSITY OF WRITING IN ALL THAT “INFORMATION?”

AND I RESPOND “FIGURE IT OUT” ANY DICKHEAD WITH A BLUESUIT CAN BE (AND IS) TAUGHT TO SAY “MAKE IT CLEARER”, AND “I WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT HIM”.

WHEN YOU’VE MADE IT SO CLEAR THAT EVEN THIS BLUESUITED PENGUIN IS HAPPY, BOTH YOU AND HE OR SHE WILL BE OUT OF A JOB.

THE JOB OF THE DRAMATIST IS TO MAKE THE AUDIENCE WONDER WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. NOT TO EXPLAIN TO THEM WHAT JUST HAPPENED, OR TO*SUGGEST* TO THEM WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

ANY DICKHEAD, AS ABOVE, CAN WRITE, “BUT, JIM, IF WE DON’T ASSASSINATE THE PRIME MINISTER IN THE NEXT SCENE, ALL EUROPE WILL BE ENGULFED IN FLAME”

WE ARE NOT GETTING PAID TO REALIZE THAT THE AUDIENCE NEEDS THIS INFORMATION TO UNDERSTAND THE NEXT SCENE, BUT TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO WRITE THE SCENE BEFORE US SUCH THAT THE AUDIENCE WILL BE INTERESTED IN WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

YES BUT, YES BUT YES BUT YOU REITERATE.

AND I RESPOND FIGURE IT OUT.

HOW DOES ONE STRIKE THE BALANCE BETWEEN WITHHOLDING AND VOUCHSAFING INFORMATION? THAT IS THE ESSENTIAL TASK OF THE DRAMATIST. AND THE ABILITY TO DO THAT IS WHAT SEPARATES YOU FROM THE LESSER SPECIES IN THEIR BLUE SUITS.

FIGURE IT OUT.

START, EVERY TIME, WITH THIS INVIOLABLE RULE: THE SCENE MUST BE DRAMATIC. it must start because the hero HAS A PROBLEM, AND IT MUST CULMINATE WITH THE HERO FINDING HIM OR HERSELF EITHER THWARTED OR EDUCATED THAT ANOTHER WAY EXISTS.

LOOK AT YOUR LOG LINES. ANY LOGLINE READING “BOB AND SUE DISCUSS…” IS NOT DESCRIBING A DRAMATIC SCENE.

PLEASE NOTE THAT OUR OUTLINES ARE, GENERALLY, SPECTACULAR. THE DRAMA FLOWS OUT BETWEEN THE OUTLINE AND THE FIRST DRAFT.

THINK LIKE A FILMMAKER RATHER THAN A FUNCTIONARY, BECAUSE, IN TRUTH, YOU ARE MAKING THE FILM. WHAT YOU WRITE, THEY WILL SHOOT.

HERE ARE THE DANGER SIGNALS. ANY TIME TWO CHARACTERS ARE TALKING ABOUT A THIRD, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.

ANY TIME ANY CHARACTER IS SAYING TO ANOTHER “AS YOU KNOW”, THAT IS, TELLING ANOTHER CHARACTER WHAT YOU, THE WRITER, NEED THE AUDIENCE TO KNOW, THE SCENE IS A CROCK OF SHIT.

DO NOT WRITE A CROCK OF SHIT. WRITE A RIPPING THREE, FOUR, SEVEN MINUTE SCENE WHICH MOVES THE STORY ALONG, AND YOU CAN, VERY SOON, BUY A HOUSE IN BEL AIR AND HIRE SOMEONE TO LIVE THERE FOR YOU.

REMEMBER YOU ARE WRITING FOR A VISUAL MEDIUM. MOST TELEVISION WRITING, OURS INCLUDED, SOUNDS LIKE RADIO. THE CAMERA CAN DO THE EXPLAINING FOR YOU. LET IT. WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERS DOING -*LITERALLY*. WHAT ARE THEY HANDLING, WHAT ARE THEY READING. WHAT ARE THEY WATCHING ON TELEVISION, WHAT ARE THEY SEEING.

IF YOU PRETEND THE CHARACTERS CANT SPEAK, AND WRITE A SILENT MOVIE, YOU WILL BE WRITING GREAT DRAMA.

IF YOU DEPRIVE YOURSELF OF THE CRUTCH OF NARRATION, EXPOSITION,INDEED, OF SPEECH. YOU WILL BE FORGED TO WORK IN A NEW MEDIUM - TELLING THE STORY IN PICTURES (ALSO KNOWN AS SCREENWRITING)

THIS IS A NEW SKILL. NO ONE DOES IT NATURALLY. YOU CAN TRAIN YOURSELVES TO DO IT, BUT YOU NEED TO START.

I CLOSE WITH THE ONE THOUGHT: LOOK AT THE SCENE AND ASK YOURSELF “IS IT DRAMATIC? IS IT ESSENTIAL? DOES IT ADVANCE THE PLOT?

ANSWER TRUTHFULLY.

IF THE ANSWER IS “NO” WRITE IT AGAIN OR THROW IT OUT. IF YOU’VE GOT ANY QUESTIONS, CALL ME UP.

LOVE, DAVE MAMET
SANTA MONICA 19 OCTO 05

(IT IS NOT YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO KNOW THE ANSWERS, BUT IT IS YOUR, AND MY, RESPONSIBILITY TO KNOW AND TO ASK THE RIGHT Questions OVER AND OVER. UNTIL IT BECOMES SECOND NATURE. I BELIEVE THEY ARE LISTED ABOVE.)”

Q&A with Writers, Agents, Enthusiasts

2011-06-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

I thought it would be fun to pose a common question about writing to the writers, agents, and enthusiasts, I'm friends with on Facebook. Here's how it went down:

When discussing decisions of craft, theme, point of view, character, etc, my students want to know whether or not a writer "Just writes". Thoughts?

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Lisa Marie Keene
great question. for me, there's always something that arrives first (voice, setting) that is not a decision but a given. the choices take place in revisions. happy teaching!

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Bryan Gonzalez
When I discover the right character, he does all the work for me.

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Ryan Thies
I loved the question so I asked the only person I know who has a Literature degree, I thought I'd pass on his answer: "Almost all writers I know are essentially executing a vision they had no conscious role in creating. You have an idea fo...r a story or novel, and then in the process of putting it into words begin to find the more "academic" components. Most work with symbolism, motifs, blah blah blah happens in the rewrites. When you're just writing your first draft, that's when you're just writing, trying to create something as close to what you envisioned as possible."

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Serena Chopra
i say that yes, the experience should be of "just writing," but that the process is more heady, clever, and planned. and, they should know, that trying too hard to create meaning only makes big, unwieldy knots.
I like the idea of it all happening in revision, but (and maybe this is bc im mostly of the poetic persuasion) I find that I am constantly revising, even as i am writing.
...And that is why i had to post mythoughts in three separate posting...s.

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Rebecca Jewell Laughton
I guess when I write characters it is kind of like painting. I either make broad gestures at first and then hone in on the details, or I start with a detail and build from there.

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Derrick Mund
I usually write robot's thoughts. Which I guess are thoughts that have already been programmed to derive situationally as reactions.
So ... kinda.

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Andrew Nygaard
i have always just written. just go go go and edit later.

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Stephen Graham Jones
I always like to write my stuff in three consecutive posts. but, when I can't do that, I guess the idea's that all the junkola you learn, that's vital, the craft, the tricks, the sneaks and cheats and not-doing-that-agains, that all that's ...internalized, beat deep into your cerebellum or your cardiac muscle, whichever you write with, so that then you can 'just write,' but with all that other stuff operating under the surface, somewhat. not second-guessing you, but kind of informing your instinct, if that makes the right kind of sense.See More

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Lindsey Clemons
I think that every writer is unique in how they approach storytelling. One may sit down and let the words subconciously flow through his/her fingertips, and another may contemplate a character for days before getting anything down on paper.... Regardless of how a writer writes, there will always be edits and ways to mold the story once it is drafted. There has to be some element that motivates the intial concept of a story and beyond that, writers should write in a way that makes them feel the most comfortable. Having said that, one of my pet peeves when reading is coming across a writer who writes for a theme. Of the elements you've listed above, theme can too easily become the most convoluted and it's more fun when the writer discovers the theme through other literary elements rather than slapping the reader in the face with it.

Symptoms of the Decline in Post-Modern Story, Found in the Works of Pelevin, Sadulaev, and Bekmambetov

2010-12-15T02:48:00.000-08:00

What’s most striking about many post-modern stories is not their immersion in popular culture or their tendency toward meta-narrative technique and stylistic pyro-technics, it’s their recent incorporation of old-world mythological figures. Namely, the scary ones. There’s “a growing number of literary works in Russia featuring vampires as central characters,” and it’s not just Russia (Basinskii 92). Despite it’s being pop fiction, does Twilight ring any bells? But the growing population of monsters makes sense. To argue that there is no inherent significance to anything, as post-modernists tend to do, requires the dismantling of specific ideologies that claim significance: language, religion, the Aristotelian story, to name a few. But by 2010 all of the counter-arguments to these long-standing ideologies seem to have already been made, and to the post-modern artist seeking out new conversations, the old myths with their old monsters seem new again; werewolves might as well start dyeing their greys, they’re featured on book covers galore. Mary McCarthy says, “…to confront the fact that the writing of a novel has become problematic today…I mean real novels […] novels of a high order…” it is not an issue of talent. Post-modernism sabotages story as internal-combustion-machine whenever it tries to function as container-for-external-literary-agenda. But all along, like whispers in the night, there has been a discourse different from the post-modern theorist or writer as preacher, and until now it’s been relegated to genre-fiction. And into the shadows of “literary” fiction, come lurking the werewolves, the vampires, the dragons and ghosts. The post-modern writer, the pop-saturated Van Helsing of our time—not as written by Bram Stoker, not even as played by Laurence Olivier or Sir Anthony Hopkins, but firmly stamped in our minds as Hugh Jackman—has gone after the beasts with a stake. The only problem is, he’s not killed the beasts, the post-modern mish-mash that he is, has killed story. We’ll take a look at three stories, Pelevin’s The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, Sadulaev’s “Why the Sky Doesn’t Fall”, and the films in Bekmambetov’s Watch series, to try to come to some understanding of how not to use mythological creatures, and to come to grips with the idea that, in the end, authors need remember to tell the stories of mankind.

I’ll digress for a moment to say that this is not a statement against the incorporations of “genre” elements—the supernatural, the mysterious or the frightening—into “literary” stories. Far from it. If anything, it’s a statement against the mis-use of “literary” experiment to the detriment of story, and against stealing from the innocent genre-books flying off the shelves like bats from their caves. The modern storyteller is:
“embarrassed by the insignificance (or lack of “significance”) of his finite world. A greater problem is that he cannot quite believe in it […] The souped-up novels that are being written today, with injections of myth and symbols to heighten or ‘deepen’ the material, are simply evasions and forms of self-flattery” (McCarthy).
The post-modern concern with the un-real of mythology is not only a challenge to our pre-conceived notions of the real, it is the post-modern insecurity and desire for a new real, realer than real. “Real” is not a concern for the western writer in exclusivity, it is the interest of all writers. But as we move through post-modernity, Myth, if used poorly, becomes only a symptom of that insecurity. An unfulfilled desire, if history is subjective and nothing is “true”, to root ourselves in something so ancient it may at least be true in spirit. McCarthy says of the definition of the novel: “The novel, to repeat, has or had many of the functions of a newspaper.” An “air of veracity is very important to the novel”(McCarthy). And we can even see this in Bekmambetov’s Watch films’ medieval frame-narrative, in Pelevin’s “Commentary by Experts”, and in Sadulaev’s story’s “book”ness, it’s consistent discussion of being “written”. But this desire to imply veracity is at most a vestigial tail, a bump on the backside of a new beast in the evolution of the novel. This fact-oriented role of the novel has shifted because of the open access to alternate sources of information available to the post-modern reader and the subsequent information-saturation in the post-modern era. This new short-coming in the realm of the real is neither the fault of the novel nor of the novelist, writing on his Ipad, researching on Wikipedia, and sharing the novel with his agent who will read it on her Kindle. While we can’t call this necessary shift in roles a flaw, we can see it clearly in the post-modernist movement, one: from relaying fact to deconstructing it; two: in its meta-narrative approach; and, finally and more to the point: in contemporary story’s current and growing obsession with Myth.

But it’s important to remember that Myth is not static. “Myths are not merely ideas or structures of thought that have survived from past ages, they are a living language that is indispensable to any popular understanding of all the phenomena of society and the world.”

Morch says specifically of Pelevin’s work that it “[…] presents itself as a conscious dialogue with mythology. This means that the author not only addresses well known myths by presenting them in a literary context, he even offers his own versions of them, and develops them further.” And finally, the use of myth not only illuminates the role of myth, it serves as a “juxtaposition of myth and reality in which the nature of both is questioned” (64). In this post-modern era we are doubtful of reality, so doubtful we seeking the super-real, the Ur-real—that which can be true without being fact—and we’ve returned to myth. Literally.

We’ve completed storytelling’s own “were-transformation” into Uroboros with the devolution of post-modern storytelling itself. The perfect example of this is when A Hu Li comments on the Sikh’s resemblance to captain Nemo. He asks for clarification: “From 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?”“No,” she says, “from the American film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” (Pelevin 11). In post-modern society one thing is not simply a referent to another, it is a reference to a reference to itself. Pelevin’s character resembles not only a character from another narrative, but a character from a narrative inspired by another narrative. Story begets story begets story. Or rather, the opposite. The Post-Modern Story eats its own tail.

In this case, Pelevin’s own description of business as theft has perhaps more to say about story even than it does about society. “Just think about the kind of people who have managed to create such a spellbinding formation in the middle of empty space” (85). Or later, “I think it means a snake biting its own tail. When that snake’s head and tail only exist as special effects in an advertising clip, it’s no great comfort to know that the body is alive and fat. That is, maybe it is a comfort, but there’s no one to experience it” (140). And finally, and perhaps most accurately with regards to the external force that re-appropriation of myth places on these modern fictions: “I have already said that foxes use their tails to implant the illusion of this world in their own minds” (330). In this case, the ultimate illusionist, not the werefox but the writer, in the “middle of empty space” or post-modern society, implants the illusion of his world. “Expressed symbolically by the sign of the uroboros, round which my mind has been circling for so many centuries, sensing the great mystery that is concealed within it” (330).

But the great mystery, concealed within it, that ought to be the story’s unseen momentum of plot. Unseen, but sensed by the reader, it’s the unique ability each plot has to resolve itself. Instead, in the post-modern re-appropriation of myth, the only option available to the writer trying to resolve his plot is the external force of the frustrating and superficial deus ex machina. There ought to be “no gods in the novel and no machinery for them; to speak, even metaphorically, of a deus ex machina in a novel—that is, of the entrance of a providential figure from above—is to imply a shortcoming.” These stories demand that their plots not be solved by their own momentum or devices, and all three are united by a deferral to some larger power at the risk and conclusion that they do not entirely satisfy anybody.

Still, one might say that years and years from now, long after post-modernism is dead and we’re on to the next phase, people reading some of the literary greats and experimentalists “may not know how people lived in the nineties. What they breathed, what they heard, what images flitted constantly before their eyes. But they will from [reading Pelevin]. And that, you must agree, is no small achievement” (Basinskii 96).

On the opposite extreme of Pelevin, we reach the films of Timur Bekmambetov. Nightwatch and Daywatch push the myth so hard that culture is virtually absent. They could happen anywhere. While some reviews say that Timur Bekmambetov’s Watch films provide a complex and metaphorical treatment of good and evil, it couldn’t be less true. The metaphor is too obvious to hum with any resonance of its own, much as a poorly written script might as well be a blank page to the skilled actor seeking subtext, seeking meaning. This is largely in part to the films’ overly generalized use of Myth—Light is good and Dark is bad—and its utter lack of any concrete specifics related to Russian culture; either film could take place in Paris with virtually no changes to the script. As Mary McCarthy puts it, “a novel that was only a scenario would not be a novel at all.” This is because meaning in Literature, or any art for that matter, comes from the juxtaposition of two concrete and specific elements.

The tenor and the vehicle are the double-helix that form metaphor’s mutated DNA, that produce the monstrously beautiful, and the beautifully monstrous. By generalizing both tenor and vehicle in an attempt to satisfy mass consumers and genre expectations, Timur Bekmambetov’s films demonstrate the ultimate failure of Post-modern experiment, and the lack of an internal conflict is pushed to its absolute extreme. A mash-up of fast cars and fairy-tales falls flat out of the sky, especially when even the story does not function apart from its external myth and the interference of a god in its resolution.

We see a moderately more successful version of this same symptom in Sadulaev’s “Why the Sky Doesn’t Fall.” Though it also suffers from a similar lack of subtlety—after all:“2000 was both the Chinese Year of the Dragon and the year of Vladimir Putins ascension to Russian presidency” (Basinskii 91). Sadulaev’s story is so much about war—an evil dragon terrorizing Chechnya—that the myth begins to supercede the country’s story. The myth, not unlike a dragon, consumes any hint of cultural context by which to understand specific human experience. The country is only saved when the myth, as embodied by the dragon, wanders “straight for the horizon, to the fairy-tale blue mountains with the shimmering white peaks.” This ending can only occur with some kind of external force upon it, virtually the same as a Deus ex machina, but in this story the external force is hidden by a literary sleight of hand: “And I hear an inner voice […]” The point of view shift from narrator to pilot makes the pilot’s decision slightly more earned by character than if we remained in the narrator’s point of view.¬¬¬ But even the pilot’s decision to change can only exist in the context of a device, a shift in point of view, a change of heart we don’t quite believe, that it’s hardly any less of a Deus ex machina.

Finally, Pelevin’s novel is perhaps the most successful of the three stories at pulling this artificial plot-construction off. The primary choice that Pelevin makes—of structured mirroring—by placing the end at the beginning in the “Commentary by Experts”, is a clever trick. But it’s just that, a trick or device. It’s a way of attempting to provide the kind of narrative momentum and inevitability of plot that we get from the Aristotelian arc. In reality, if we subtract the non-chronological introduction, the explosion of Ahu-li into the super-werewolf is just that: an explosion. It’s too sudden and violent to feel satisfying. Furthermore, it happens off-screen because Pelevin’s story, rooted so heavily in the super-real of Myth, requires all kinds of devices to engage its reader, to convince us that we ought to believe; principally the use of first-person. This manipulative, rather than organic or genuine, us of first-person deprives us of witnessing the transformation into Super-Werewolf as we hope to: in Dramatic Scene. McCarthy says, "It would seem that the device of the narrator, the eye-witness "I" is more often used in novels whose material is more exotic or improbable than in the plain novel of ordinary life. In short, you are back with Defoe and his "true biographies" of great criminals who were hanged, back at the birth of the novel, before it could stand without support." This “I” device means the whole of Pelevin’s story can not stand without support, can only be related after, or before, the fact, through a journal. Subsequently, the immediacy of the story and our investment in it is further removed. But by the finish, Pelevin has no choice, or rather, his determination to engage in the post-modern discourse of the self-aware novel has made his choice for him. Still, this is not to say that Pelevin is guilty of any flaw. He’s simply doing the best he can do with a story that cannot satisfy.

Why can’t it? Because its conflict is one of external source and can only be satisfied by external influence. Where gods and super-beings come down to change the course of a story, we are being told that the world works in the same way. While post-modern man does not believe in any god, isn’t this, after all, what the post-modern man believes, or is taught to? Hiroshima has convinced him that no matter how hard he works, there’s still the chance he and his wallet may get blown up. After death camps, what is there? Those of us moving through post-modernity have no choice but to return to the beginning, to the old sense of awe. It’s society as Uroboros. We see this most vividly in the bleeding of genre and literary boundaries, and the presence of myth in modern story’s attempt to understand modernity’s atrocities, or even it’s day to day existence.

And so these mythic beasts, these were-creatures, run rampant. In Sadulaev’s tale, the narrator tells of a novella he wrote about two werewolves masked as children, attacked by a crusader but who nonetheless escape. The dragon is not only a dragon, it is a military-industrial were-creature. “Perhaps he did have blood, but of another kind: the dark green blood of a dragon, and a cold snake’s heart.” But whereas the Watch films ultimately fail on the level of story because their metaphoric conceit is too general and too familiar (light is good, dark is bad), “Why the Sky Doesn’t Fall” suffers slightly less, but still suffers for a similar problem. Its metaphoric conceit, while well-rendered in shocking and original scenes, the conceit is simply too obvious. The story suffers from its status as a kind of masked (pardon the pun) contes philosophiques. The argument bleeds through the fiction too darkly, and the biased roles (albeit tragically understandable) of the writer as Chechen and the Russian as “Cold Snake” or “Dragon” is too obvious to allow for any resonance, any significance beyond what’s clearly on the page, or, to repeat, the lacking subtext.

Understand, this is not to say that incorporating mythologies is somehow faulty, just that imposing external frameworks, or any external trickery on plot, is. In some way, we’ll have to come to grips with the agency of our characters, even if they move through a world as absurd and seemingly chaotic as our post-modern one, and even if we believe we have no agency of our own. Even so, story can change that belief, and should. After all, the theorists will remind us that God is not just dead, he’s dust. And a growing frustration with meta-narrative and artifice too, preaches that we can’t trust traditional story ad nauseam, and our mistrust has begun a reversal. The time is ripe for storytelling whose very structure, its dependence on character over style, will give the post-modern man some hope. When author Stephen Graham Jones discusses the Zombie in modern fiction, I think it’s safe to substitute the word “monster”: “[monster] stories have always expressed our current cultural concerns and anxieties, and, right now, that anxiety’s an apocalypse...They’re the ultimate economizing device in a story, just accelerate everything…We’re going to know your characters fast.” And what it comes down to is not any theoretical, political, or literary agenda, it comes down to character and consequently to story. Plot and character ought to be inseparable. And if that means that ideologically we must believe that our lives and our own character’s effect on it are likewise inseparable, well, we’ll just have to wait to see how that story ends, but at least we, the characters, will have something to do while we’re waiting. And with so much invested—our identity, the call to action that a character-driven ideology entails, and our own coming to grips with our place in a world we’ve labeled as less than “significant”, void of “meaning”, and nothing but a “construction”—at least we know we’ve got a captive audience, desperately frightened of all the monsters, and in desperate need of our help.

Poetic Action

2010-12-12T15:39:00.000-08:00

I’ve been writing for some time now. Not long, I suppose, in the grand scheme of things, but long enough to know I don’t think writing is one of those things you arrive at. Meaning, I don’t think there will be a point at which I’ll ever feel done, or the best I can be. This is largely because writing is something done with the heart as much as the brain, and we can be sure to be flawed in either one of those places much of the time, and some times, like the angsty teens, the reckless twenties, or the I-don’t-know-I’m-not-there-yet thirties, we can be simultaneously flawed in both.

Also: anytime we are in love, listening to the right music or watching the right films.

Also: anytime we are not in love, listening to the wrong music and watching the wrong films.

This, as I understand it, is not at all a bad thing. It’s simply the truth. And it’s likely where art “comes from”. So we’re flawed, and at times writing might come less quickly, feel more sludgy, less witty or sharp, at times it may be saccharine or cold as yesterday’s chicken in my fridge.
This is okay too.

But, ahem... How does that relate to poetry?

Well, it’s what makes poetry so hard.

In some ways, there’s less of a filter between us, our flawed brains and hearts, and the work on the page. That’s primarily because there’s less story.

Story acts like a costume. It’s that sheet we cut two holes in and use to convince ourselves and others that we are, in fact, for the time being, ghosts. But Poetry apart from story is direct engagement with language, and because of that, with life. Or at least with those synaptic firings that help us translate the everyday happenings and objects and smells into our thoughts about life. (Leap of logic there: our thoughts on life are life. We think therefore we are, etc.) Fiction, relying as it does on narrative thrust, has dramatic momentum to drive us so forcefully through a story that we hardly stop to take a look around at the roadsigns, get a dubious eggsalad sandwhich at the rest stop, see the world's largest popsicle stick. This is why copy editing is such hard work. We miss the typos because we’re blazing down the highway. Linguistic pyro-technics in fiction can sputter into duds and we’ll still be glad we bought the ticket to the show because it’s often not what we come for, at least not entirely. From poetry, though, we’ll accept a fresh image, a unique perspective, on its merit alone.

It’s important to mention Poetic Action, principally because it can be a lovely substitute for plot. A nice example comes from Claudia Rankine’s fragment from The End of the Alphabet. “As if I craved error,” it begins, but there’s no error in the language. Language is as structured as the story-engine of the most finely tuned play, film or novel. But instead of an inciting incident the poem begins with an idea of one’s romantic lover as being a “country”, as “ahistorical” land or geography, and moves through each stanza building on similar language. Counting the number of words pulled from this metaphoric construct of the “natural”, we run into two words in the first stanza, already named, three in the third: “expanse”, “land”, and “turned”, and four in the fourth: “brown”, “field”, “grown” and “green”. The piece’s poetic action is one of language, culminating in a line that builds up from the ground, into God, into June, into the Sun. This kind of linguistic momentum is a keen subtitute for plot, something from which fiction might benefit.

But there is nothing wrong with plot. And there are ways in which poetry must provide plot or at least a substitute as mentioned above. When first approaching poetry, my tendency was to push further away from narrative than was perhaps needed. Further away from the known. I tried to rest my work almost entirely upon image. Of course, the only logical conclusions I could come to regarding appropriate themes for my poetry were related, perhaps unfairly, to preconceived notions about the genre. A biased fiction writer’s notions. These notions include but are not limited to: turtle-neck sweaters, poppyseed scones, copious amounts of red wine in bottles wearing those charming twine outfits I associate only with the most ambiguous of regions in Spain, and pain and death and love and other giant abstract things of that ilk. I suffered from the same sense of inflated importance beginning to write poetry as I had when I first began to write fiction, and I suppose it’s the same as when any of us embark upon some new endeavor—I began to use words like embark and endeavor. I think of the enormity of feeling and gesture when one first falls in love. It’s easy to forget the importance of small things.

A poem is a viewfinder, not a kaleidescope. At least for the purpose of this example. Already I am thinking of other ways that a fair argument could be made on poetry's kalaidoscopicity, if you will, but this is not that story, this is the viewfinder one. Simplicity, clarity, and every-dayness. Choosing themes that are perhaps more day-to-day than grand and abstract is perhaps the most successful choice an artist can make. But maybe a better way of putting that is that the day-to-day is important enough—it is through the day-to-day activities that we come to understand the grand, the abstract.

In other words, I don’t know I love my girlfriend because I know what love is. I know I love her because she smells of clay, and of tea, and she folds her jeans up her calves like wrapping paper.

Reading a poem like Adrian matejka’s “Do the Right Thing” from Mixology, helped shift, or rather, narrow my focus from obscure imagery into the clear and precise.
Matejka has all the familiar elements of any good prose writing in this poem:

Setting and Character are established right away in lines 1-4:

Spike Lee is so small I didn’t even
see him at first, surrounded

by Black Expo goers like a gumdrop
in a fist. When I asked him to sign […]

Conflict comes in by line 5:

my “Free South Africa” t-shirt
he said, You didn’t buy that at this

When Spike Lee, the narrator’s idol, is about to call into question the narrator’s interests and identity, the conflict is at it's peak. Where the poem really takes off, though, is that this profound embarrassment, anger, and emptiness, is not described in any grandiose terms but simply, and beautifully, as, “the missed free throw feeling in my chest.”

It’s day to day language, and not only that, it’s appropriate. It’s urban and it’s associated, in general, with youth, with a sport most of us city-folk have played and remember fondly, dribbling the ball back home, hands stained black from the asphalt, and tired and happy in the cool of the evening. Finally, it smacks of the kind of disappointment we’re perhaps only capable of in that youth, when we still believe a made free throw is not only a point, it is glory, and a missed shot snaps the net, blinks your eyes for the first time at hopelessness.

A great shift has been made in this poem—and that shift is the essence of action, whether narrative or poetic. It's these kinds of shifts we need from both poetry and fiction. A marriage of poetic action and story. But most important of all, is that while story and language are at work, there is also a shift in perspective. It is the grand made petite. It is the huge feeling in our tiny hearts, crafted into something delicate, small enough that we might carry it round, saying, “Look.”

Publications

2010-01-14T19:48:00.000-08:00

Been a while, been a while. And this one's mainly just to promote... for shame. Still, here are my most recent pubs, a new article, called Map Makers, in There and Back Magazine, at
http://issuu.com/thereandbackmagazine/docs/15_january-feburary10

and a new flash fiction piece, called Concrete Punch, in 34th Parallel, at
http://www.34thparallel.net/

Also, there's a story called CHROME in the most recent issue of Palimpsest.

Not sure why my links never work. Sorry about all the cutting and pasting that takes. When the class is in full swing, and my brain is not still mush from a week of edits on my new novel, and from planning the new edits on the less new novel, I will blog something worthwhile. Maybe about writing, even. Maybe about the Princess Bride, though, too. Who knows, maybe both.

New Jobs, New Writing, and Writers Block

2009-12-08T08:39:00.000-08:00

I found out yesterday that I've been hired as a contributing writer to There and Back Magazine, a really cool online outdoor magazine in Colorado. http://www.thereandbackmagazine.com
I've never done any magazine writing, so I'm eager to figure it out. Learn as we go, right? I figure it will be a lot of Top Ten Hikes and Top Ten Things You Need On a Camping Trip and Top Ten Ways Not to Get Violated by a Rutting Moose, but we'll see. Very excited.

The other great thing: I'll HAVE to write. Which brings me to something that inevitably comes up in fiction workshops. Writers Block...

Damn. What was I gonna say?

It seems to happen to all of us. My own particular method of avoidance has been to pretend it does not exist. As Marcus Aurelius said, "Eliminate the sense of injury, and one eliminates the injury." But what if we find ourselves blocked despite even the most monastic feats of athleticism in the game of conscious vs. unconcious personal-jinx?

I imagine myself opening the door to that room in my mind in which I write (there's a glossy imprint of a number 9 where a brass fixture used to be, for some reason) and when I try to step inside I run into a stack of foam bricks, the kind given to children, the kind that when they tumble down on you in a wave, don't really hurt but are endlessly frustrating in their uncanny resemblance to the feeling of a nerf bat striking one's head, repeatedly, teeth clacking.

ON BRAIN FOOD:

Run to the TV. Watch a movie. Read and read and read non-fiction. NON-fiction. Use this time that you cannot write to soak yourself in any and all information, to chew it up raw, gnaw at it. See, you can't write because there's nothing left in you. You left it all on the last pages of the last book like your printer's ink cartridge requires an IV hookup--that is, if you did it right.

ON EXPERIENCE:

Sometimes we're blocked because we fear we aren't the ones to write, we don't deserve it, or we haven't done enough. I once had a wonderfully gruff writing instructor, the kind who smoked a pipe and carried a leather backpack that looked more like a saddle bag. He'd been sick as of late, and we'd all just found out he had cancer. As students, we didn't know how to bring it up, how to acknowledge that strange revelation all students must come to--teacher is human--and so we didn't bring it up at all. We asked him questions about writing. I asked him if writers needed somehow to live more of life in order to gain, well, you know, EXPERIENCE. A distant bell tolled anytime I so much as thought the word.
He lit his pipe, watching the palm trees of Long Beach over his cupped hands, then tossed the match away and said, "Son, life is gonna hand you more than enough experience without you asking for it."

ON RESEARCH:

Not the scientific kind. All the best research comes from observation. Those beautiful moments that make your writing come alive, that make your reader take a deep breath, I guarantee they came from something you caught out of the corner of your eye. So take notes. Write that something down.

Maugham said he felt he'd sacrificed something by living as a writer. He thought that to observe, one had to remove oneself from life momentarily, and I suppose he felt that these many moments of removal from life added up, accumulated, until one found oneself reaching out to touch the world and touching only cold glass. Maybe our fingertips fog it, leave mazey prints, but people on the other side would puzzle over what they were--snowflakes, glaucoma, smudges on the lens of perception?

He was wrong. That glass was already there. It's there from the moment we realize that I am me and you are you. That I have pain, that I have joy, but mine can never be yours and never can yours be mine. And writing: well, it's a ball-peen hammer. It's what we do in case of emergency. Or maybe it's a long lost chunk of gravel popping up off the highway, slowly and steadily spidering the glass. Or maybe it's that hard-candy frozen to the windshield, and when you tug it loose all the glass turns to confetti.

No matter. Suddenly the air is moving again, and you can touch things and people, and they can touch you--from across time, across oceans, or maybe just from the other room. You are an artist, by profession or nature. You know the glass cannot remain. Not if you are to survive, not if you are to be happy. Now or over the course of a lifetime, you will not let that glass go unbroken.

Thought Goes the Way of the Dodo, or How Writing Will Save Your Brain, or A Writer's Manifesto

2009-12-08T08:30:00.000-08:00

Original thoughts are impossible, or so Chuck Klosterman, author of Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, said Wednesday evening at CU. He says that we're all so saturated by images taken from TV and the cinema, it's impossible to have a thought that is not somehow informed by those mediums. It got me thinking, and then thinking: wait, was that thought mine? I stole his idea and took it into my classroom, and then I asked my students to think of a basketball game.

We all did. We saw the court from a distance, shining. We saw the players, the flashbulbs, the fans cheering, or dejected. We saw it all framed by a black border. We saw a basketball game exactly as we'd see it on TV.

But we've all played basketball, haven't we? Why didn't we think of the game-winning free-throw we sank, a Metallica song humming in our heads to block out the near-deafening sound and pressure of our friends and families cheering in the stands? (Kind of specific, that one. Okay, so I wanted to bring up my own rare glimpse at basketball glory.)

When the Great Train Robbery, the world's first film, was shown to audiences, anytime a gun pointed at the camera, or a train charged into the lens, getting larger as it nearly burst into the theater, people ducked. This was because at that time, the only frame of reference anyone had was real life. Now, we have hours and hours of TV and film to flash upon when asked to think of horses, flowers, bars. How many of you just thought of Flicka, Roses in a commercial for 1 800 Flowers, Cheers? Is it possible anymore to have a thought that is truly original, one hundred percent free and clear of the commercial flotsam and jetsam floating in our heads?

(Now, thanks to my many hours of 2 a.m. commercial viewing, I know that I've established a need. Here is where I pitch my product.)

For only four easy installments of 19.99, this library card and notebook--with pen(!)--(ooh-ah), can be yours. That's right. Writing is the answer. In order to write well, in order for us to enjoy a good book, it has to be full of glimmering images, precisely worded and placed, arranged like a mosaic. So, you might say, aren't I just stealing the author's images? Well, yes. But only at first.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, though, that you're the author. You keep a diary. You write stories. Hell, maybe you blog. You have to "dive deep" to find those silver-white pearls that make up our world, those original glimpses, and where do you dive? Not into the kiddie-pool of afternoon sitcoms. You dive into an ocean of human experience called life. You hold your breath as long as possible, sometimes longer than you knew you could, recalling grandma's umbrella, dad's leather jacket, the smell of the sawdust at the fair.
Now, let's say you're the reader. You read a beautiful line about a flower given to a girl. Sure, that's in the story. But then you reflexively flash to the first time you gave a flower, the first time one was given to you. You remember the flowers in the gardens in Austria, the statues standing regally above them. And it's all yours.

What to say? What to say? The Tricks to Good Dialogue

2009-11-02T21:13:00.000-08:00

Most writers I know seem to write dialogue by instinct. We plug away guessing what the best line would be, and growing more and more attached to those lines the less we really understand about process. The key to good dialogue, as with anything, is good character development, but there are a few things we can do to insure that our dialogue is interesting, fresh, and realistic.

Dialogue shouldn't be that hard, right? Readers and audiences want to love dialogue. Also, we all talk, so we've got that going for us. We're already experts, right? Wrong.

Dialogue is not an actual recording of talk. Talk is boring and repetitive. We often echo ourselves and each other; we hem and haw. Sometimes, we even echo ourselves and each other. See what I just did there?

I. Dialogue (I'm stealing from Sol Stein on this one, kind of): A semblance of speech, an invented language of exchanges that build in tempo or content toward climaxes, with a text rooted in the ritual of the world, and an underlying subtext or meaning.

What's the ritual of the world? Depends. But where are your characters when they speak to each other? Are they at Del Casino's Italian Pizzeria? Then they're not gonna talk about how much they hate their boss that they might bump off. They're gonna talk about the pizza they're having, the waitress that's serving them; in other words, everything but they're hatred for the boss. The ritual (eating at the pizza place) is the text, the hatred of the boss is the sub text. So in good dialogue, when one character orders the sausage and artichokes, and the other agrees that's a good choice, but then says,
A:"You know I brought sausage and artichokes to the boss Tuesday night. He didn't like it."
B:"He didn't care for it?"
A:"You believe that guy?"
B:"What did you say to him?"
A:"Never say nothing. Know he said Sally's put on a few too many?"
B:"Sally is the nicest girl this side of the equator."
A:"Been seeing that girl over at the laundry-mat."
B:"Someone really ought to put that man out of his misery."
A:"Shut up already. Pass the parmesan?"
B:"Why are you so serious all of the sudden?"
A:"Maybe I just really like parmesan. Shh. Here she comes."

II. Fiction is made of Description, Narrative Summary, and Immediate scene. The twentieth century reader is so used to television and film, so used to progressions in the writing craft itself, that we prefer immediate scene.

Dialogue interests us so much because it is necessarily in immediate scene. Also, Dialogue must convey characterization and plot simultaneously, which are both things that interest our reader.

III. Principles:

A. Good dialogue is indirect or oblique
Man: You are the most beautiful woman in the world.
Woman: Why, thank you.
Or
Man: You are the most beautiful woman in the world.
Woman: My husband’s the one grazing the hors’ d’oeuvres.

Which is more compelling?

B.But in order to deserve and oblique response, you can’t have your characters asking direct questions.
“Why are you here?” demands some sort of response. But, “You sure spend a lot of Saturdays holding down that chair,” will warrant an oblique response.

C.Dialogue is lean, and every word counts.

D.What matters is not what is said, but the effect of what is meant.
If Joe and Ed are talking, and Joe says, “Ed?”
Or, “Now Ed.”
Or “Ed, Ed, Ed.”
What might each of these lines really mean?

E.To differentiate your characters, give them speech markers. Signals quickly identifiable by the reader.
Throwaway words and phrases, Just sayin, actually, perhaps
Tight or loose speech, windy or terse.
Run-ons
Fragments
Sarcasm
Cynicism
Poor grammar
Omitted words
Polysyllabic vs. monosyllabic words
Professional jargon
Diction

We ought to examine our dialogue and ask:
1. What is the purpose of this exchange? Does it begin or heighten an existing conflict?
2. Does it stimulate the reader’s curiousity?
3. Does the exchange create tension?
4. Does the dialogue build to a climax or a turn of events in the story or a change in relationship of the speakers?
5. Is the line consistent with character background?
6. Are there clichés?
7. Are there echoes?

100 Best Writing Blogs...

2009-11-02T20:43:00.000-08:00

This ain't one of them. But here's a list: http://www.bestcollegesonline.com/blog/2009/02/05/top-100-creative-writing-blogs/

SETTING: If you don't want to read that whole Chekhov post...

2009-10-27T15:41:00.000-07:00

Just read this.

Commonplaces like "The setting sun, sinking into the waves of the darkening sea, cast its purple gold rays, etc," "Swallows, flitting over the surface of the water, twittered gaily" — eliminate such commonplaces. You have to choose small details in describing nature, grouping them in such a way that if you close your eyes after reading it you can picture the whole thing. For example, you'll get a picture of a moonlit night if you write that on the dam of the mill a piece of broken bottle flashed like a bright star and the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled by like a ball, etc. ...

To paraphrase, let the parts imply the whole. Don't speak in generalities, but in specific images that add up to the one thing that matters, your world. Make your world small enough that you truly know it. That were you asked what's on the coffee-table in the living room of character A, you wouldn't have to think twice before you said, "Pop can, harmonica, about twenty sticky notes, and a pencil."

As an exercise notice the choices made in establishing setting in the first few moments of this trailer. Rather than linger on a long shot of wide open space, we see a specific range of hills, then a fence that runs off to nowhere. There's a Texaco sign, but there are no others...

These images make us feel the "nowhereness" of our setting much more powerfully than the statement, "It was the Texas desert fifteen miles from the nearest town." Nothing happens nowhere, and the only choice a writer may not make, is to make no choice at all.

Another Writing Blog

2009-10-26T11:38:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Lisa Marie for the heads up on this:

If the link doesn't work, here's the addy:
http://bridgetasher.blogspot.com/

No Fenders Were Harmed...

2009-10-25T20:00:00.000-07:00

In the Making of this Bender.

So, my good, good friend Chris came out to visit last weekend. I'm sure that those of you who know Chris and I are certain to note the delay between the visit and the blog post. I had a bit of recovery, well, to get done. But this bender was for the good, because in the unlikeliest of places, one stumbles (and I mean stumbles) upon true art.

One of the places we went, big surprise, was the New Belgium Brewery in Ft. Collins, of Fat Tire fame. I've been to a few brewery tours, one in that bicycle filled land called Amsterdam, in the big green Heineken building that the draft horses haul beer from all day long. Another in Ireland; with a view from a glass-walled tower bar, of a grey city where it rains and is still pretty. A little beer called Guinness. Trust me folks, it'll catch on. Of all of them, if I were to strip away the romanticism, New Belgium Brewery was the friendliest, happiest tour you could ask for. (We're not talking Distilleries here, but if we were, then it's got to be Jameson.) The beer is amazing, free and fresh. There's even a slide, which shows that they understand that adults drink beer to feel like kids again. To forge that ever-joyful ever-curious relationship with the world.

They understand community too. New Belgium Brewery brews a beer for one and only one place in the world, and that place is the one hundred years old bar, The Town Pump, Ft. Collins, CO. So, of course, Chris and I had to drink there.

The place had proof of every decade on every wall. From the steer's horns, to the don't blame me I voted Perot poster, to the Yoda doll wearing a christmas hat on the bar. The clever bumper stickers wallpapering the bar-back made for fun reading: Horn broken – watch for finger. And beside us, a bearded man was drawing a bug in a small sketchbook. Turned out, he's a self-supported artist, working full-time at his craft. I asked to see his work, which he casually slid across the bar. When I opened the sketchbook, I couldn't help but smile. It was fantastic.

If any one of us can stumble across a full-time artist in a bar, any one of us can be a full-time artist. The key, he said: Time. And don't be afraid to work for a living. If you think your art can be corrupted by work... well...

Thing is: he was too cool a guy to judge.

Here's a link to his websites (links aren't working lately, cut and paste):
http://www.oscarwoodruff.com
http://www.theispot.com/artist/owoodruff

Men's Fiction

2009-10-25T15:32:00.001-07:00

What does this mean? Well, I suppose it means that someone out there thinks, as do I, that men, notoriously uncommunicative as we are, need a forum for publication, discussion, and encouragement in the writing arts. That place is here

www.bullmensfiction.com/

and

www.bullmensfiction.blogspot.com/

A journal dedicated to fiction about or for men. Who'd a thunk? And on top of that, when they interview their authors, the first question is: If you're drinking, state what?
This is the kind of journal where the answer is never: not drinking. And I like that. I want people out there to read Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison and Cormac McCarthy, and to promote the soon-to-be's as well.

Can't wait to see this

2009-10-21T12:55:00.000-07:00

Based on a story in William Gay's great book of short stories, I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down.

McNamara Grant

2009-10-21T12:53:00.001-07:00

Completely forgot to mention that this summer I found out that I'm the recipient of this year's McNamara Family Creative Arts Grant. Feeling very honored. It's for one of my unpublished novels, The Choice Between Silver and Lead.

A New One Coming Out at 34th Parallel

2009-10-21T12:50:00.000-07:00

So it looks like my short-short "Concrete Punch" is gonna be online and in print with 34th Parallel sometime this Spring. Here's the journal's site.

http://www.34thparallel.net/

Looks like a great, writer friendly journal they've got, in that, they asked for pics and bios and stuff, and they keep everything archived. Also, you get a copy of the journal, cool SWAG, otherwise known as Stuff We All Get. Anyway, can't post the story here until they publish it, but will post later.

Headin' Out Californy Way

2009-05-08T18:14:00.000-07:00

So, I'll be in the L.A. area for about a month. Driving through Vegas on the way out, and gonna meet some friends there for a night before seeing the mama for mama's day. Then I'll be working on a reality television show, that will likely remain nameless so I can chronicle my month long stint in Hollywood here. Then, up north, through San Francisco--hopefully with the high school friends Bryan and Chris--all the way to Oregon, hell, maybe Washington too. Then across, east, because across west might get too wet, yeah? So across, east it is, fishing and camping all the way with no company but my books, my fishing pole, my guitar, and a notebook--oh, and a cell phone--and into Montana (I'll cross through Idaho I'm sure since, you know, there's no bridge to Montana and besides, I read a great book called Five Skies that's set in Idaho and now I want to see it.) Then down through Wyoming and back to Boulder. Then D.C. for a month or so. To be with the loveliest of lovelies and my sister and my nephew. Then maybe back to Cali? Maybe Yosemite? That's where the family's gone just about every year for summer. That's where, my brother promised me, my ashes will be scattered even though that's illegal now in California, but God how I'd love it if my last moments as one consolidated material were used to flip the bird at a dumb dumb law like that. Puns abound. Eat my dust, leave them in the dust, on the dusty trail, partying from dust til dawn, etc, etc.

A Novel Excerpt- Sorry the format ain't pretty

2009-05-01T11:13:00.000-07:00

New Edition Coming Soon

A great parable, and an unintelligible slideshow- how all presentations should be. I swear, I'll try this in a class some day.

2009-04-30T23:04:00.000-07:00

WORD IS BONE - UPDATE

2009-04-28T14:05:00.000-07:00

Going to the Center of the American West's Thompson Awards banquet. The Novel won best, so I get to read for five minutes and eat twice my weight in hors d'ouvres. Here's the link to an excerpt. Sort of an indirect one, but if you click on 2009 winners somewhere in there it should work.
For whatever reason, this program won't let me link you here. Cut and paste, and all that.
www.centerwest.org/academics/write/index.php

Also, as for novelling, trying to finish one now by May 6th, and I've got 100 pages in the bag. Gotta get a move on now. I plan on posting some stories and excerpts here too, one day. But instead of working I've been shopping for fly-fishing gear, yet another hobby. I can't stand not starting something new, but can't stand sucking at things I start, so it's perpetual fun and frustration. Well, here's to the fishes. (Fishes sounds much better than fish, yeah? And sheeps better than sheep?)

Revising Your Fiction

2009-04-28T13:55:00.000-07:00

1. Write regularly so your writing isn't too precious to you.
2. Save what you cut. This way, you can use it later, and if not, it still makes cutting feel easier.
3. Think about cutting the following:
a. Unnecessarily repeated words or phrases.
b. When looking at two scenes that impart the same information or suggest the same idea, choose the best.
c. Do any characters serve the same purpose? Do you have two villains? Two mentors? If so, choose your favorite or combine.
d. Do any of your scenes feel show-offy or boring? Is there a scene that you can't translate into an active sentence, i.e. Jack and Jill go up the hill.
e. Is there a scene that does not address the story's central question or theme?
f. Do you need the first paragraph? Do you need the last one?

As an exercise, circle anything that might fit the above prompts, then delete them and reread your story. Is it tighter?

Viewpoint

2009-04-20T19:03:00.001-07:00

Some helpful quotes, I think, which I found here:http://ulfwolf.com/viewpoint.htm

“The use of point of view is to bring the reader into immediate and continuous contact with the heart of the story and sustain him there.” Tom Jenks

“The artist must be in his work as God’s in creation, invisible, yet all powerful; we must sense him everywhere but never see him.” Gustave Flaubert

“On of the principal techniques is the use of a character whom the reader adopts for his reading experience. In the best fiction and most of the time, the reader is identifying with one or another of the characters in the story. He is vicariously living the fictional life of that character. He is being the Ishmael of Moby Dick. He is being the narrator of Deliverance. He is not, be it noted, being either Herman Melville or James Dickey.” William Sloane

“This is a difficult notion for some writers. No adequate terms exists for this character the reader becomes. In his book The World of Fiction, Bernard DeVoto called this character ‘the means of perception.’ It makes little difference what he is called; whether one uses the term ‘point of view,’ ‘standpoint,’ ‘alter ego,’ or ‘reader identification,’ is not important. What is important is that this is the fiction writer’s most useful device for securing his reader’s participation. Experiencing a work of fiction through one of its characters is the all-absorbing, self-obliterating joy of reading. It is the core of the child’s experience.” William Sloane

“A writer must be aware of, have a reason for, and be in control of all shifts of viewpoint character.” Ursula K. Le Guin

“You can change point of view, of course. It’s your God given right as an American fiction writer. All I’m saying is, you need to know that you’re doing it; some American fiction writers don’t. And you need to know when and how to do it, so that when you shift, you carry the reader effortlessly with you.” Ursula K. Le Guin

“There is more to viewpoint and modifiers, such as adjectives and adverbs, than first apparent. There are two types of modifiers. The mostly objective: such as green, large, shallow, loudly; and the more subjective: such as willful, resentful, demure, wistfully. The objective modifier is the result of observation (he is tall), the subjective modifier is the result of evaluation (he is stubborn). If you are trying to be unobtrusive, shun subjective modifiers, as they interpose—no matter how subtly—an evaluator between the reader and the narrative. Instead, dramatize them objectively. As in show don’t tell.” Ulf Wolf

“Point of View, POV for short and when scribbled in the margins of manuscripts, is the technical term for describing who is telling the story and what their relation to the story is.” Ursula K. Le Guin

“In fiction, the ‘I’ narrator (or the third-person narrator) is not the author.” Ursula K. Le Guin

“First person . . . only what ‘I’ knows, feels, perceives, thinks, guesses, hopes, remembers, etc., can be told.” Ursula K. Le Guin

“First person locks us in one character’s mind, locks us to one kind of diction throughout, locks out possibilities of going deeply into various characters’ minds, and so forth.” John Gardner

“Limited third person . . . only what the viewpoint character knows, feels, perceives, thinks, guesses, hopes, remembers, etc., can be told.” Ursula K. Le Guin

“In ‘limited third’ you’re writing from inside your character. You can tell only what that single character perceives, feels, knows, remembers, guesses.” Ursula K. Le Guin

“Third person limited point of view, or third person subjective, has some of the same drawbacks [as first person] for a long piece of fiction. (This point of view is essentially the same as first person except that ‘I’ is changed to ‘she’ or ‘Helen’).” John Gardner

“Involved author (‘omniscient author’) . . . the story is not told from within any single character. There may be numerous viewpoint characters, and the narrative voice may change at any time from one to another character within the story, or to a view, perception, analysis, or prediction that only the author could make.” Ursula K. Le Guin

“I don’t like the common term ‘omniscient author,’ because I hear a judgmental sneer in it. I think ‘authorial narration’ is the most neutral term, and ‘involved author’ the most exact.” Ursula K. Le Guin

“Involved author is the most openly, obviously manipulative of the points of view.” Ursula K. Le Guin

“The traditional third person omniscient point of view, in which the story is told by an unnamed narrator (a persona of the author) who can dip into the mind and thoughts of any character, though he focuses primarily on no more than two or three, gives the writer the greatest range and freedom.” John Gardner

“A related point of view is that of the essayist narrator, much like the traditional omniscient narrator except that he (or she) has a definite voice and definite opinions.” John Gardner

“Whichever person I start a novel in, I very soon begin feeling its restrictions, and remembering the liberties of the other. I think I’m settling towards the third now. The omnipotent power of gravity in the novel form is realism. I resist it less and less.” John Fowles.

“Detached Author (‘fly on the wall,’ ‘camera eye,’ ‘objective narrator’) . . . The author never enters a character’s mind. People and places may be exactly described but values and judgments can be implied only indirectly . . . it is the most covertly manipulative of the points of view.” Ursula K. Le Guin

“Observer-Narrator, Using the First Person. The narrator is one of the characters, but not the principal character—present, but not a major character in the events. The difference from first-person narration is that the story is not about the narrator. It’s a story the narrator witnessed and wants to tell us.” Ursula K. Le Guin

“Observer-Narrator, Using the Third Person. This point of view is limited to fiction. The tactic is much the same as [using the first person]. The viewpoint character is a limited third-person narrator who witnesses the events.” Ursula K. Le Guin

“The choice of point of view will largely determine all other choices with regard to style—vulgar, colloquial, or formal diction, the length and characteristic speed of sentences, and so on.” John Gardner

“What the writer must consider, obviously, is the extent to which point of view, and all that follows from it, comments on the characters, actions and ideas.” John Gardner

“He must learn to step outside himself, see and feel things from every human—and inhuman—point of view. He must be able to report, with convincing precision, how the world looks to a child, a young woman, an elderly murderer, or the governor of Utah. He must learn, by staring intently into the dream he dreams over his typewriter, to distinguish the subtlest differences between the speech and feeling of his various characters, himself as impartial and detached as God, giving all human beings their due and acknowledging their frailties. Insofar as he pretends not to private vision but to omniscience, he cannot, as a rule, love some of his characters and despise others.” John Gardner

“Once one has recognized that the novelist ought to be able to play advocate for all kinds of human beings, see through their eyes, feel with their nerves, accept their stupidest settled opinions as self-evident facts (for them), one simply begins to do it; and doing it again and again—carefully rereading, reconsidering, revising—one gets good at it.” John Gardner

“What one has to get, one way or another, is insight—not just knowledge—into personalities not visibly like one’s own. What one needs is not the facts but the ‘feel’ of the person not oneself.” John Gardner

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.” Flannery O’Connor

“Point of view runs me crazy when I think about it but I believe that when you are writing well, you don’t think about it. I seldom think about it when I am writing a short story, but in the novel it gets to be a considerable worry.” Flannery O’Connor

“Point of view runs me nuts. If you violate the point of view, you destroy the sense of reality and louse yourself up generally.” Flannery O’Connor

“Yesterday morning I made another start on The Moths, but that won’t be its title; and several problems cry out at once to be solved. Who thinks it? And am I outside the thinker? One wants some device which is not a trick.” Virginia Woolf

“I find the first person more natural. I never think of writing a book in the third person, although The Ebony Tower and The French Lieutenant’s Woman are both third-person books. It usually just turns out that way after having been in the first person originally. I never feel quite at home as the omniscient narrator.” John Fowles

“It is a matter of method. Sometimes the author is talking with is own voice, sometimes he is talking through one of the people in the book.” Percy Lubbock

“The landscape now has the colour that it wears in Emma’s view. . . . And occasionally the point of view is shifted away from her to somebody else, and we get a brief glimpse of what she is in the eyes of her husband, her mother-in-law, her lover.” Percy Lubbock

“The most obvious point of method is no doubt the difficult question of the centre of vision. With which of the characters, if with any of them, is the writer to identify himself, which is he to ‘go behind’? Which of these vessles of thought and feeling is he to reveal from within?” Percy Lubbock

“If the subject can be completely rendered by showing it as it appears to a single one of the figures in the book, then there is no reason to range further. Haphazard and unnecessary plunges into the inner life of the characters only confuse the effect, changing the focus without compensating gain.” Percy Lubbock

“Her [Madam Bovary’s] pair of eyes are not enough; the picture beheld through them is a poor thing in itself, for she can see no more than her mind can grasp.” Percy Lubbock

“A novelist may still do his story an ill turn by leaving too naked a contrast between the subjective picture of what passes through Emma’s mind—Emma’s or Becky’s, as it may be—and the objective rendering of what he sees for himself, between the experience that is mirrored in another thought and that which is shaped in his own. When one has lived into the experience of somebody in the story and received the full sense of it, to be wrenched out of the story and stationed at a distance is a shock that needs to be softened and muffled in some fashion. Otherwise it may weaken whatever was true and valid in the experience; for here is a new view of it, external and detached, and another mind at work, the author’s—and that sense of having shared the life of the person in the story seems suddenly unreal.” Percy Lubbock

“It is a question, I said, of the reader’s relation to the writer; in one case the reader faces towards the story-teller and listens to him, in the other he turns towards the story and watches it.” Percy Lubbock

“To the other people in the book it makes all the difference that the narrator is among them.” Percy Lubbock

“This, then, is the readiest means of dramatically heightening a reported impression, this device of telling the story in the first person, in the person of somebody in the book.” Percy Lubbock

“It is not only the field of vision that is determined by the use of first person, it is also the quality of the tone. When we are shown what Esmond sees, and nothing else, there is first of all the comfortable assurance of the point of view, and then there is the personal colour which he throws over his account, so that it gains another kind of distinction. It does not matter that Esmond’s tone in his story is remarkably like Thackeray’s in the stories that he tells; in Esmond’s case the tone has a meaning in the story, is part of it, whereas in the other case it is related only to Thackeray, and Thackeray is in the void.” Percy Lubbock

“The use of the first person, no doubt, is a source of relief to a novelist in the matter of composition. It composes of its own accord, or so he may feel; for the hero gives the story an indefeasible unity by the mere act of telling it.” Percy Lubbock

“It seems, then, to be a principle of the storyteller’s art that a personal narrator will do very well and may be extremely helpful, so long as the story is only the reflection of life beyond and outside him; but that as soon as the story begins to find its centre of gravity in his own life, as soon as the main weight of attention is claimed for the speaker rather than for the scene, then his report of himself becomes a matter which might be strengthened, and which should accordingly give way to the stronger method. . . . The novelist, therefore, returns to the third person again, but he returns with a marked difference. He by no means resumes his original part, that of Thackeray in Vanity Fair; for his hero’s personal narration he does not substitute his own once more. It is still the man in the book who sees and judges and reflects; all the picture of life is still rendered in the hero’s terms. But the difference is that instead of receiving his report we now see him in the act of judging and reflecting; his consciousness, no longer a matter of hearsay, a matter for which we must take his word, is now before us in its original agitation. Here is a spectacle for the reader, with no obtrusive interpreter, no transmitter of light, no conductor of meaning. This man’s interior life is cast into the world of independent, rounded objects; it is given room to show itself, it appears, it acts.” Percy Lubbock

[In reference to a passage written by Petronius] “Inasmuch as the guest describes a company to which he himself belongs both by inner convictions and outward circumstances, the viewpoint is transferred to a point within the picture, the picture thus gains in depth, and the light which illuminates it seems to come from within it.” Erich Auerbach

“The selection of the narrative approach or means of perception is one of the first things a fiction writer must do if he wants to be read. His selection should be a conscious or accurate one, and it must be made scene by scene, chapter by chapter, or book by book. Thereafter, he must shape his entire narration in terms of that decision. This point cannot be ignored. To ignore it is to forget the reader. The reader must always understand on any page in any sentence at any word—at any single word—the nature of his relationship to the story.” William Sloane

“More fiction fails because the author has not had the discipline and the ingenuity to provide and sustain a means of perception than for any other single reason. That is an editorial opinion, not a statistic.” William Sloane

“Third person is emotionally cooler than first person.” Philip Gerard

“Where’s the camera?” Madison Smartt Bell

“First person—the I narrator, with access only to the narrator’s interior world and the exterior world only as perceived by that narrator.” Philip Gerard

“Third-person omniscient—the godlike ‘all knowing’ narrator, with access to the interior lives of all the principal and supporting characters and the whole universe of time and space.” Philip Gerard

“Third-person limited or assigned—the narrator with access to only one viewpoint character’s thoughts and feelings, externally limited in scope to that character’s world.” Philip Gerard

“But in fact point of view is slipperier than such a technical catalogue indicates—more of a continuum than a series of discrete perspectives. The above list is only a starting point for the maturing writer.” Philip Gerard

“Writers workshops tend to become obsessive about point of view, citing ‘violations’ as if the writer had run a red light or been caught speeding, as if a perfectly maintained point of view somehow carries its own aesthetic value. But it is only a piece of technique, part of the apparatus of storytelling—a means, not an end in itself.” Philip Gerard

“The comprehensive first-person narrator’s insights may seem almost omniscient, may even strain credulity, but credulity never quire breaks, and they remain the narrator’s, not the authors.” Philip Gerard

WORD IS BONE - UPDATE

2009-03-18T15:41:00.000-07:00

So, received the first rejection from those agents actually reading my manuscript. What a bummer. It was a nice rejection at least, and I can't say I expected different as they say rejection is the name of the game when becoming a novelista. Gonna keep sending it out there and there's still hope on that other agent out there in the new york skyscraper looking west out a window and thinking, out in the wild country, that's where I'll find my next writer. In the meantime, got a new novel idea to work on. Got to whip the current one into shape. Gonna write a screenplay in april for script-frenzy (I like punishment, it's true. Actually wrote home when I was in Marine Corps boot camp and told my mom the hikes were nice. Didn't remember it, she had to tell me about it, I was sleep-deprived). Anyway, here's the rejection:

Dear Christopher,

Thank you so much for sharing the novel with me. I was immediately invested
in the story--your opening was brilliant. The romance of Kiddy and June--and
the non-linear way in which it played out--was fascinating and engaging. And
now I am about to say the thing that I hate to say--as much as I enjoyed the
novel I just don't think I could sell it. It feels very quiet and literary
to me and in these dire publishing times unless there is a hook or some sort
of commercial marketability, it is hard to get things to print.

I hope you find another agent who has a different feeling--you are a truly
talented writer and I hope this doesn't dissuade you from keeping on keeping
on.

Good luck,

Well, it's my b-dday tomorrow so for now, not doing anything but reading other people's good stuff, watching flicks, lifting weights and drinking. Spring break is upon me, and I am all up on it.

Anton Chekhov on Writing

2009-03-13T11:19:00.001-07:00

Anton Chekhov
on Writing

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder — that seems to give a kind of background to another's grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold. ... The more objective you are, the stronger will be the impression you make. — To Lydia Avilova, March 19, 1892 & April 29, 1892
I will begin with what in my opinion is your lack of restraint. You are like a spectator in a theatre who expresses his enthusiasm so unrestrainedly that he prevents himself and others from hearing. That lack of restraint is particularly noticeable in the descriptions of nature with which you interrupt dialogues; when one reads them, these descriptions, one wishes they were more compact, shorter, say two or three lines. — To Maxim Gorky, December 3, 1898
Another piece of advice: when you read proof cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. You have so many modifiers that the reader has trouble understanding and gets worn out. It is comprehensible when I write: "The man sat on the grass," because it is clear and does not detain one's attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: "The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully." The brain can't grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously. And then one other thing. You are lyrical by nature, the timber of your soul is soft. If you were a composer you would avoid writing marches. It is unnatural for your talent to curse, shout, taunt, denounce with rage. Therefore, you'll understand if I advise you, in proofreading, to eliminate the "sons of bitches," "curs," and "flea-bitten mutts" that appear here and there on the pages of Life. — To Maxim Gorky, September 3, 1899
Critics are like horse-flies which hinder the horses in their ploughing of the soil. The muscles of the horse are as taut as fiddle-strings, and suddenly a horse-fly alights on its croup, buzzing and stinging. The horse's skin quivers, it waves its tail. What is the fly buzzing about? It probably doesn't know itself. It simply has a restless nature and wants to make itself felt — "I'm alive, too, you know!" it seems to say. "Look, I know how to buzz, there's nothing I can't buzz about!" I've been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can't remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch. — Quoted by Maxim Gorky in "Anton Chekhov," On Literature
If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.
... only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.
But if you had asked him what his work was, he would look candidly and openly at you with his large bright eyes through his gold pincenez, and would answer in a soft, velvety, lisping baritone: "My work is literature." — "Excellent People"
I think descriptions of nature should be very short and always be à propos. Commonplaces like "The setting sun, sinking into the waves of the darkening sea, cast its purple gold rays, etc," "Swallows, flitting over the surface of the water, twittered gaily" — eliminate such commonplaces. You have to choose small details in describing nature, grouping them in such a way that if you close your eyes after reading it you can picture the whole thing. For example, you'll get a picture of a moonlit night if you write that on the dam of the mill a piece of broken bottle flashed like a bright star and the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled by like a ball, etc. ... In the realm of psychology you also need details. God preserve you from commonplaces. Best of all, shun all descriptions of the characters' spiritual state. You must try to have that state emerge clearly from their actions. Don't try for too many characters. The center of gravity should reside in two: he and she. — To AP Chekhov, May 10, 1886
A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer. He is a man who has signed a contract with his conscience and his sense of duty.
I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean — wherever my imagination ranges. — Anton Chekhov
When you fashion a story you necessarily concern yourself with its limits: out of slew of main and secondary characters you choose only one — the wife or the husband — place him against the background and describe him alone and therefore also emphasize him, while you scatter the others in the background like small change, and you get something like the night sky: a single large moon and a slew of very small stars. But the moon doesn't turn out right because you can see it only when the other stars are visible too, but the stars aren't set off. So I turn out a sort of patchwork quilt rather than literature. What can I do? I simply don't know. I will simply depend on all-healing time. — To Alexei Suvorin, October 27, 1888
You are right in demanding that an artist approach his work consciously, but you are confusing two concepts: the solution of a problem and the correct formulation of a problem. Only the second is required of the artist. — To Alexei Suvorin, October 27, 1888
It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees — this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward. — To Alexei Suvorin, May 30, 1888
I write the beginning calmly and don't hold myself back, but by the middle I start feeling uneasy and apprehensive that the story will come out too long. I have to keep in mind that the Northern Herald is low in funds and that I am one of its more expensive contributors. That's why my beginning always seems as promising as if I'd started a novel, the middle is crumpled together and timid, and the end is all fireworks, like the end of a brief sketch. Whether you like it or not, the first thing you have to worry about when you're working up a story is its framework. From your mass of heroes and semi-heroes, you choose one individual, a wife or a husband, place him against the background, and portray only that person and emphasize only him. The others you scatter in the background like so much small change. The result is something like the firmament: one large moon surrounded by a mass of tiny stars. But the moon doesn't work, because it can only be understood once the other stars are understandable, and the stars are not sufficiently delineated. So instead of literature I get a patchwork quilt. What can I do? I don't know. I have no idea. I'll just have to trust to all-healing time. — To Alexei Suvorin, October 22, 1888
One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.
My business is to be talented, that is, to be capable of selecting the important moments from the trivial ones. ... It's about time for writers — particularly those who are genuine artists — to recognize that in this world you cannot figure out everything. Just have a writer who the crowds trust be courageous enough and declare that he does not understand everything, and that lone will represent a major contribution to the way people think, a long leap forward.
I still lack a political, religious and philosophical world view — I change it every month — and so I'll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak. — To Dmitry Grigorovich, October 9, 1888
The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one. — To Alexei Pleshcheyev, October 4, 1888
One has to write what one sees, what one feels, truthfully, sincerely. I am often asked what it was that I was wanting to say in this or that story. To these questions I never have any answer. There is nothing I want to say. My concern is to write, not to teach! And I can write about anything you like. ... Tell me to write about this bottle, and I will give you a story entitled "The Bottle." Living truthful images generate thought, but thought cannot create an image.
In my opinion it is not the writer's job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and what they say; his only job is to be an impartial witness. I heard two Russians in a muddled conversation about pessimism, a conversation that solved nothing; all I am bound to do is reproduce that conversation exactly as I heard it. Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language. — To Alexei Suvorin, May 30, 1888
The suicide of a seventeen-year-old boy is a very promising and tempting theme, but a frightening one to undertake. An issue so painful to us all calls for a painfully forceful response, and do we young writers have the inner resources for it? No. When you guarantee the success of this theme, you are judging by your own standards. But then, in addition to talent, the men of your generation had erudition, schooling, iron and phosphorus, while contemporary talents have nothing of the sort. Frankly speaking, there is reason to rejoice that they keep away from serious problems. Let them have a go at your seventeen-year-old, and I am certain that X, completely unaware of what he is doing, will slander him and pile lie upon blasphemy with the purest of intentions; Y will give him a shot of pallid and petty tendentiousness; while Z will explain away the suicide as a psychosis. Your boy is of a good, pure nature. He seeks after God. He is loving, sensitive and deeply hurt. To handle a figure like that, an author has to be capable of suffering, while all our contemporary authors can do is whine and snivel. — To Dmitry Grigorovich, January 12, 1888
Critical articles, even the unjust, abusive kind, are usually met with a silent bow. Such is literary etiquette. Answering back goes against custom, and anyone who indulges in it is justly accused of excessive vanity. ... The fate of literature (both major and minor) would be a pitiful one if it were at the mercy of personal opinions. Point number one. And number two, there is no police force in existence that can consider itself competent in matters of literature. I agree that we can't do without the muzzle or the stick, because sharpers ooze their way into literature just as anywhere else. But no matter how hard you try, you won't come up with a better police force for literature than criticism and the author's own conscience. People have been at it since the beginning of creation, but they've invented nothing better. — To Maria Kiselyova, January 14, 1887
"Do you know," Ivan Bunin recalls Anton Chekhov saying to him in 1899, near the end of his too-short life, "for how many years I shall be read? Seven." "Why seven?" Bunin asked. "Well," Chekhov answered, "seven and a half then." — quoted by Donald Fanger, New York Times, March 14, 1999
Your statement that the world is "teeming with villains and villainesses" is true. Human nature is imperfect, so it would be odd to perceive none but the righteous. Requiring literature to dig up a "pearl" from the pack of villains is tantamount to negating literature altogether. Literature is accepted as an art because it depicts life as it actually is. Its aim is the truth, unconditional and honest. Limiting its functions to as narrow a field as extracting "pearls" would be as deadly for art as requiring Levitan to draw a tree without any dirty bark or yellowed leaves. A "pearl" is a fine thing, I agree. But the writer is not a pastry chef, he is not a cosmetician and not an entertainer. He is a man bound by contract to his sense of duty and to his conscience. Once he undertakes this task, it is too late for excuses, and no matter how horrified, he must do battle with his squeamishness and sully his imagination with the grime of life. He is just like any ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper reporter as a result of squeamishness or a desire to please his readers were to limit his descriptions to honest city fathers, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railroadmen?
To a chemist there is nothing impure on earth. The writer should be just as objective as the chemist; he should liberate himself from everyday subjectivity and acknowledge that manure piles play a highly respectable role in the landscape and that evil passions are every bit as much a part of life as good ones. — To Maria Kiselyova, January 14, 1887

Quentin Tarantino's Writing Advice

2009-03-12T23:28:00.000-07:00

Quentin Tarantino's Writing Advice

From Ain't It Cool News:

‘Remember when you were nine years old and that favorite TV show of yours and all your friends just began to not be as good as it once was? How it used to be this thing you worshipped, but now the formula has gone a tad tepid and like 3 of your friends are over for a sleepover and you’re all hopped up on too much sugar talking about what the coolest episode ever would be? You’re vibrating from the energy of just unleashed possibilities and your Mom is telling you to get to sleep, but that Nine Year Old creative force is just shaking… running a thousand words a minute, spilling everything you ever dreamt of to your buddies and it feels like the greatest thing any of you have ever heard? Well that’s where you have to write from. You have to write with that energy and that fire. It is all about that magic 9 year old unleashed.’

Vonnegut's Eight Rules for Writing Fiction

2009-03-11T22:32:00.001-07:00

November 15, 2007 – 6:07 pm
Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Rules For Writing Fiction

Eight rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

- Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999), 9-10.

ON WRITING WITH STYLE: VONNEGUT

2009-03-11T22:22:00.000-07:00

August 16, 2008 – 7:27 pm
Vonnegut: How To Write With Style

Kurt Vonnegut This article orginally appeared in Palm Sunday (New York, Dial Press 1999) from pages 65 to 72, 9 years before Vonnegut’s death. I thought I’d share it here.

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.

These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful– ? And on and on.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.
1. Find a subject you care about

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.
2. Do not ramble, though

I won’t ramble on about that.
3. Keep it simple

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
4. Have guts to cut

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.
5. Sound like yourself

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens to not be standard English, and if it shows itself when your write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.
6. Say what you mean

I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable — and therefore understood. And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.

Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.
7. Pity the readers

They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school — twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify — whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.
8. For really detailed advice

For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, in a more technical sense, I recommend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White. E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.
In Sum:

1. Find a subject you care about
2. Do not ramble, though
3. Keep it simple
4. Have guts to cut
5. Sound like yourself
6. Say what you mean
7. Pity the readers

Word Is Bone: The Novel

2009-03-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

As it stands, apart from tweaking here and there, I haven't been looking at it. Reason being: I don't want to. Reason for that: some agents are, and if I look at it I'll see all sorts of things that may or may be wrong and sweat through a pretty good shirt I've only owned for two years so it's still likely got two to four years left, or until I get an advance, whichever comes first; so, no looking at the old (by old I mean not as new as the new one I'm working on now) novel, for all the reasons stated above. So, yeah, agents. Reading it. Kind of a big step, because last month I fired off about 20 queries and 2 wanted to read it. Far as these things go, I think those numbers are actually pretty good. Still, fingers, toes, eyes and all crossables are definitely crossed. Every day I don't hear from them, I say, is another day that my novel has to worm its way into the quietest room of their mind -- in mine it's the bathroom, if minds have those -- and whisper go for it. Sell this book to someone. It will feel good to know you're giving a young man a new shirt.

As for the new novel, it's got no name but I think I just figured out after 35,000 words who my main character is and what all has to happen. Which is great. Enjoying it. It's the story of a family caught in a Los Angeles/Long Beach that's, well: think of the capital of Colombia during the height of Escobar's times, or maybe just imagine it all the way Watts, Compton, South Central can and have be and been. You know? The worst parts. But still, somehow people always find love. At least, I think they do.

Other things I'm going to work on soon:
A tragedy set in a Northern Arizona forest, where a good man's love for a married woman trapped under the thumb of a cruel husband, leads the good man to commit acts of which he'd never thought himself capable.

A western transplanted to the 90's ghettos of Los Angeles. Total genre, this one. Complete with good guys and bad guys and shootouts, even. But not just another western, I hope. This sentence is to remind me that I have to do something new (besides change the setting) for the genre, or why do it at all? Or why not just be on a rack at the supermarket? Not that there's anything (there may be) wrong with that.

Interview with Joe R. Lansdale: Originally featured in The Velvet

2009-03-05T12:53:00.000-08:00

Interview: Joe R. Lansdale
Joerlansdale.com calls Joe R. Lansdale a "Mojo storyteller." He talks about that below, but even that fails to sum things up. Truly, he needs no introduction. He's written stories, novels, comics, screenplays, and more. He discusses genre, in which he's covered most. The only genre he has yet to work in is romance, as far as I know, straight-up or conventional. Then again, whatever the genre, there's nothing conventional in his writing. The only connection, not counting the various continuing series he has, is that they are all Lansdale stories. Really, he should have his own genre, his own section in the bookstore. And all of this, too, is just the tip of the iceberg. Below, there so much more.

THE VELVET: What is Mojo storytelling? Is that a term you coined?

JOE R. LANSDALE: My great webmaster, Lou Bank, came up with that. It caught on and has spread world wide. So I have him to thank for that clever bit of word magic. It means magical storyteller, or it does to me.

VELVET: Is there a difference between literature and storytelling?

JRL: Literature is what endures. Storytelling tends to endure more than anything else, and there are all kinds of storytellers, but I believe there’s a difference in a storyteller and a craftsman. Both are necessary, and if you have the abilities in equal balance, then all the better. Storytelling seems to be inborn, while craft can be learned. Edgar Rice Burroughs was a storyteller, but he was not by literary standards a great writer as his attention was not to style or character. I would argue that his stories are the characters, not the people in them, yet, you remember Tarzan long after you’ve forgotten the name of a character in John Updike’s last novel. Mark Twain was a storyteller, and he was a writer of literature as well. He’s a hero of mine. He wrote what he wanted to write, and yet he welded pragmatism to art. The results were enduring stories, like Huckleberry Finn and on the softer end of his work, Tom Sawyer. Flannery O’Conner’s
work is obviously literature because of style and character, but she’s also a story teller. The stories had a beginning and a middle and an end and a theme. I’m not saying this is necessary to a good story, but it is necessary to good storytelling. John Barth was often an experimental writer, a writer of the head, not the heart, but he was a good writer. But storyteller, not so much. Same with William S. Burroughs. Not a writer I’m nuts for, but I find him interesting. But storyteller, no. Literary, yes, in a back alley kind of way. Verne, Wells, William Goldman, Ray Bradbury, are literary writers because of attention to style or theme or character, or all of the above. And, they are storytellers, and in the long run, I think that endures best. Sometimes a storyteller will endure even if the style is wonky and the characters are thin, though a good storyteller usually has a style of his or her own, and the style itself becomes the character.

VELVET: Have you had any formal training in writing?

JRL: No formal training. I just read and wrote from the beginning.

VELVET: What is your opinion regarding writing programs in colleges and universities? Can writing be taught?

JRL: I haven’t had formal training, and the odd thing is I teach creative writing and screenplay writing, and once, comic book writing. I’m Writer in Residence at Stephen F. Austin State University. I will be teaching at an Italian University this summer. I think you can teach people who already have talent and ambition how to think more clearly about their work, but some folks have all the craft tools but none of the instincts; that can’t be taught. I think the best classes, and maybe the only ones that count in creative writing, or classes taught by writers, someone who writes, and better yet, has been published. Otherwise, the teacher is nearly always talking out of his or her hat.

VELVET: You once said "the story starts to come, and I just follow." What are your thoughts concerning just writing a story versus plotting it out in advance? Some teachers say you can't write a story unless you know the end, but the statement I refer to makes me think you or another writer can find the story as it's being written.

JRL: I think both methods are fine, but usually a writer is one or the other. They either need a map or a compass—I forget who first said that, but it’s the way I see it. I’m a compass writer. I point myself in the direction of true north and go. Some people need a detailed map, others a few lines of direction written on a piece of paper. I do take a few small notes as I go along if an idea flashes ahead in the story, but I mostly just sit down and write. I seldom know where a novel is going, though some have come to me in a complete flash, or a dream. Cold In July was a dream. Sequences in many of my novels, and a large number of my short stories, were dreams. I’m a big believer in the unconscious mind. Sometimes I do know the end and write to it, but seldom. Short stories are more likely to just be there. The whole story is there and I start writing to get it out of my head.

VELVET: You've been called a cult author as well as a genre author. Having written stories in many different genres, do you have a favorite for both reading and writing? Why do you think people look down at genre stories, consider them less literary?

JRL: Genre stories are welding with literature more and more. The idea for me is a good story is well written and well told and sticks with you. I don’t make a lot of distinctions, except maybe in tone. Tone often defines a genre story over a “literary” story. I think most stories are crap. It’s Ted Sturgeons law. Ninety-nine percent of everything is shit. Ninety-nine percent of so called literary stories are shit. Same for genre. I don’t have a favorite, really, but things with a fantastic edge seem to appeal to me a lot, and on the other end of the spectrum, very realistic back street, backwoods stories. I like stories that take place before 1970 as well. But, no hard and fast rules.

VELVET: From the perspective of a writer as well as a reader, can you pin down why literature is so powerful – why narratives, stories, and words in a certain order have the impact on us that they do?

JRL: Nope. I can’t pin it down. Good writers produce images and characters we are involved with, and that’s the best I can do.

VELVET: Your friend Bill Nolan taught you to have a gameplan. Do you plan when you're going to shift genres or plan a certain output per year, both in completed and published works?

JRL: I don’t plan in a concrete way, but when my passion carries me in a direction, I try to go there wisely. I do plan on a certain output. I try to write three to five pages a day five days a week, at least. I try to work in the mornings.

VELVET: Over the years you've done some collaborations. What is the process like for such an endeavor? How do you feel about collaborating on a story versus going at it solo?

JRL: Collaborating on editing anthologies is all right, and some of the collaborations have been fun, but on the whole, I don’t like it. Screenplays, sometimes. Stories and novels, not so much. It’s happened and some have been fun, but the results are seldom as good as they would have been had I or the collaborator been left alone. So, I prefer solo because I see things in my own way. I have my own vision, for better or worse.

VELVET: With that, you have written stories with your wife as well as your children. Not to mention editing anthologies with them. Is the experience of collaborating with your family different than doing so with someone unrelated to you?

JRL: It's harder with the family because they won’t put up with your crap, or you’re afraid the kids will kill one another. The story with my children is I came up with a basic plot, my son did a lot of the prose, and my daughter came up with scenes and ideas. My daughter is a song writer, and my son is a newspaper reporter now, so they have carried on the tradition in their own way. My wife wrote articles on HWA early on for Mystery Scene, and she is the true founder of the organization, based on an idea by Rick McCammon, and made professional by Dean Koontz. But she’s the one who first put it together. She is not a writer by heart or design, but more by accident. It’s not a passion with her and she couldn’t turn out regular stories. My children fiddle with fiction as well, so who knows. My son adapted a comic of mine, and wrote and sold a short film script that never got made. So maybe fiction writing is in his future.

VELVET: Could you discuss the process of editing an anthology? What it entails? How the stories are selected?

JRL: You read the stories, and you accept or reject. I’ve always been a pretty cold-blooded editor, but as I grow older I’m softer because I see more and more what it takes to do anything. Even a story you reject was generally written with love and enthusiasm, and sometimes it’s merely that the story doesn’t fit the anthology, and the story isn’t necessarily bad. Sometimes your co-editor feels different about a story. You may hate it, and they may love it. Sometimes you compromise. Sometimes the publisher hates it and prefers you not buy it. I listen to that if a good case is made. There have been stories I loved the critics hated, and ones I thought were okay or good that they thought were great. Simply, you buy what you like and what gives balance to the anthology as a whole. Balance is important.

VELVET: Many, but not all, authors have a distinctive voice, as do you. I can tell when I'm reading a Lansdale story. How important do you think it is to have that – that consistent, distinct voice?

JRL: I think voice is everything. Mine actually varies a bit, but it has a tone that seems to stay with it through most stories. It was there all along, but it took some time to find it and let it come out. I like authors who have their own voice, and I think of that as style.

VELVET: I've read you have an interest in history. What about history interests you? Does a particular era or period interest you more than others? How about history in terms of the geographical or individual or social?

JRL: I love history. History of the U.S., especially the Old West and the 1930s. I like Ancient History. I love sociology and anthropology and archeology as well, and all of these are connected to history; everything is. I majored for a time in anthropology in college, but I ended up dropping out, going part time, and then the writing began to sell, so I never finished. But I still love all these subjects, and they have informed my writing.

VELVET: When re-writing history, playing with figures and situations in literature, are there any rules? Are there things that should or shouldn't be done, things that need to be considered?

JRL: If you’re going all-out fantasy, alternate universe, you can do what you like. I love Larry McMurtry’s western novels, but in some, he seems to be giving you the straight dope, and then a character will have something happen to him that never happened. I don’t mean could have happened, but where the character dies in the wrong way at the wrong time. It throws me off if everything else seems historically correct. So it really matters on the kind of universe you’re creating. If you’re being realistic, and everything is close to as was, and then suddenly you switch history to suit you, it can be jarring. But if the world you create is populated with demons or whatever, then it’s easy to go with it; it’s an alternative view. On the other hand, there really are no rules. What works, works.

VELVET: Is there a particular story that you haven't written yet but would like to?

JRL: Yep. But I won’t discuss it here. There are two or three. They are more ideas and feelings than they are stories. In this case, the compass points true north and it’s a pretty clear path. Time is the problem.

VELVET: Many of your stories reference East Texas. For those of us not in the know, what constitutes East Texas? Is it truly different from the rest of the state?

JRL: East Texas is very different from the rest of Texas. Rivers and lakes and lots of trees. A lot like Louisiana, but less swampy, though we have some of that too. We’re right next door to Louisiana, so that’s one reason we’re a lot like it in appearance. East Texas is more like the South than the Southwest, though it has the influence of the Southwest a little, Cajun culture, and Hispanic culture. It’s an interesting place.

VELVET: You've written a fair number of horrifying stories. What scares you?

JRL: Concern about my family. About world politics. That’s what scares me.

VELVET: The number of short story collections you've had published is impressive. How much overlap is there between them?

JRL: There is some overlap, but a lot of them contain stories that were first collected in the individual collections. There seems to be more and more interest in the stories as time goes on. Sanctified and Chicken Fried, The Portable Lansdale contains some before collected stories, but in a different arrangement, and a brand new story. I think it, along with High Cotton, is my best collection. Another collection, more of an overview, which will be a different arrangement of stories, is forthcoming from Tachyon, titles Crucified Dreams. After that, two collections with never-before collected stories.

VELVET: Your bibliography list the "Ned the Seal" trilogy. The third book, The Sky Done Ripped, is listed as "unreleased, release date unknown." Was a trilogy always the plan? Is it more that the final installment has been written but no release date planned, or that you know where it's going, know the story, but have not written it yet?

JRL: I’ve started The Sky Done Ripped, but haven’t finished. A trilogy was not the plan. It just happened. Same with the Hap and Leonard series. They just happened.

VELVET: Why was Texas Night Riders initially published under the pseudonym Ray Slater?

JRL: I wrote it for a contest, that I didn’t win, and I was at the time trying to establish different names to work with. I abandoned that plan. Texas Night Riders is not a very good book, but it’s entertaining enough, I suppose. I wrote it in eleven days.

VELVET: Your bibliography also lists you as co-author of a pseudonymous porn novel entitled Molly's Sexual Follies. Not that I'm a huge fan of that genre, but I am intrigued. Other than on joerlansdale.com and Wikipedia, there is no mention of this book anywhere. It's not even listed with the Library of Congress. Could you shed some light on this?

JRL: Molly's Sexual Follies was written in the seventies to sell to make money, but the erotica industry changed. My original novel had fantasy elements beyond the sexual. Later, Brad Foster asked to see it, rewrote it, using only the basic scenes here and there, and sold it for very little money to Beeline Press. It lost the sort of surrealistic tone I was going for, but he knew my approach wouldn’t sell. Mine was more Phil Farmer than Beeline. So, the book isn’t really mine in style, only in a few scenes here and there. He used it as an outline. At the time I had been reading Blown, Image of the Best, and that’s where I was going, though not that obviously. The original no longer exists. Brad destroyed it when he rewrote it. Either way, it’s no loss to literature and I don’t think there were very many original copies. I have often thought about doing the erotica book thing like Farmer did, but as time passes, I doubt I will. I’d have to have some real money to bother, and I doubt for that kind of book it would or could happen.

VELVET: Your first comic-related work was published in 1991. You've spoken before of your love for comic books whilst growing up. Was it always a desire to work in this format?

JRL: Oh yeah. I always wanted to write comics. Always. I was glad when I got the chance. They (DC) had read something of mine, a Batman short story, I think, and asked me to write comics. I jumped at the chance.

VELVET: Another Hap and Leonard novel is slated for release this year, Vanilla Ride. What keeps bringing you back to these characters? Do you see the series continuing after this?

JRL: I love those guys. I got a little worn out with them and I let them rest, and when I started writing about them again, it was like a family reunion. I have Vanilla Ride coming out, and another one next year. All of the Hap and Leonard backlist is being released by Vintage, they are on audio. I’d love to find a graphic novel company that wanted to do them. Also, have had many options to film and have done the screenplay for one of the books, and will soon be doing a screenplay for another one. This time I hope it gets made. Mucho Mojo with a fine script by Ted Talley was almost made, but alas, it died just as it was about to happen.

VELVET: You've had many small press publications, mostly with Subterranean Press. Some are more singular, such as the Lost Lansdale books, and some are published elsewhere in a different version, such as A Fine Dark Line whose limited edition features more material. How do these projects come together? Does a publisher, say Subterranean, ask you for something, or do you approach them with an idea?

JRL: Sometimes I have an idea that I think would do better in the small press than the larger ones. Some books crave a special audience. Sometimes the publisher asks me to put together a collection. It can go either way.

VELVET: 2009 is looking like a big year for you. The first four Hap and Leonard books are being re-issued, a new Hap and Leonard novel will be published, another short story collection, [i]Sanctified and Chicken-Fried[i] is scheduled for release, and another anthology you have edited, along with your son, is coming from Subterranean Press. Can we expect a few surprises? Anything we should be on the look out for?

JRL: There will always be surprises. You named a number of them. Next year, will be even more surprises. I’m going to let them be surprises. Stay tuned.

VELVET: Joe R. Lansdale, thank you.

Interview with Robert Gatewood: Originally Featured on The Velvet

2009-03-05T12:50:00.000-08:00

Interview: Robert Gatewood
Robert Gatewood is the acclaimed author of the best selling novel, The Sound of the Trees and author of the short story, "Down in New Orleans" which appeared in Sonny Brewer's Blue Moon Cafe series. He is currently a creative writing instructor at the University of Colorado. The interview was conducted by Drew "writerswrite" McCoy.

THE VELVET: When did you know you wanted to be a writer? To pursue this as a career?

Robert Gatewood: For me, finally, the best answer abides in an early love for reading. At the same time I want to be careful not to conjure the iconic image of some pale, feverish child tucked away in the vast recesses of his father’s tiered mahogany. And while there is much to admire in those writers who have endured by way of an unusually elaborate relationship with books extreme conditions, I think it’s too often that we hear a writer describe himself as having read “voraciously” in his youth; almost always we learn that this was done so in a weirdly defensive stance that the writer was forced to adopt as a measure against a despotic, “insatiable” appetite for books. It’s possible I myself have mumbled some version of this tale in the past, hopefully long-since destroyed. By now I find these bulletins rather windy, if not patently inaccurate. Why this matters is that they can be cruelly misleading, particularly to young readers and writers. Setting aside the self-congratulatory subtext, they imply an almost physical activeness, a perpetual rapture. Upon hearing such a dispatch an impressionable youth might suddenly feel deflated about their own relationship with books, looking around the stillness, wondering where all the frenzied, confounding romance is. Or worse, wondering, because of its absence, if their own interaction with books is somehow less “true” or “deep.” So while I will not go quite so far, I can say that I sensed, at an early age, that books were filled with excitement, imagination, wisdom and power. And not incidentally, that they by some special, almost osmotic nature, could in turn fortify those qualities in the reader. I suspect all of us sense this to a certain degree in our youth. Then, time passes; the material world beckons, and most of us (wisely, I imagine) race out with relish to meet it. Some of those who withhold in the doorway - the pie-eyed stragglers, the aging children still deeply suspicious of the notion that there could be a yet greater magic beyond the Hundred Acre Wood – start to write.

VELVET: Are there or were there any writers who inspired you?

RG: Yes to both, naturally, though an attempt to create a comprehensive list would be maddening to all and sundry. Moreover, there are books I’ve read and disliked intensely but that have nevertheless contained within them a sentence, an image or idea that has managed to impress me in a large way. But for quick sport, a snapshot would certainly include: Bellow, Borges, Nabakov, Maxwell, McCarthy, Rilke, Cheever, McGuane, O’Hara, Woolf, Baldwin, Penn Warren, Percy.

VELVET: What have you been doing since the publication of "Trees"?

RG: That’s a daunting question to answer when you know it will be available for you to read back on the page; it has the ominous whiff of an onrushing existential storm. But if I can submit for the record that I am now speaking narrowly, the same as always: reading, writing, raising my son, keeping my legs moving and making sure I finish my checks. In the winter I like to chop as many cords of wood as I can get my hands on. It’s a lot less baroque than an analyst’s couch or a confessional stool and it pays important dividends when the cold nights come. As Frost famously wrote, “Only where love and need are one, and the work is play for mortal stakes, is the deed ever really done for Heaven and the future's sakes.” I’m not sure if chopping firewood qualifies as “mortal” stakes when you’re living on the grid, but I like to pretend it might.

VELVET: I read somewhere a few years back that you studied poetry at Holy Cross. Are your prose and rich texture of language influenced by your poetry background?

RG: I had the painful fortune of studying under the poet Robert Cording. While not a part of the religious element at Holy Cross, Cording’s approach to teaching was exclusively Jesuitical. He showed me a thing or two, and not just about poetry. Any sense of election I had in terms of my own intellectual or innate abilities were razed to rubble under the point of Cording’s dispiritingly blue pen. At the same time, he reinforced the notion that the amount of luminosity that a writer throws off is usually directly analogous to the amount of rigor he puts in – intellectual, spiritual and imaginative all three. As to whether or not my studies in poetry have influenced my prose, I would say yes and no. Yes in the sense that I was pushed to cultivate the idea that diction and image are powerful and important aspects of creative writing, No in the sense that when I’m writing prose I’m not transliterating it from a poetical default. At least not that I’m aware of.

VELVET: "The Sound of The Trees" is set in the 30's. Did you do any research for the book?

RG: I spent a lot of time driving around the New Mexican countryside and jotting notes. To what degree those notes came to bear on the book I couldn’t say. I also spent a fair amount of time at the Santa Fe public library, which is a wonderful little place to spend the day (as opposed to certain other libraries, there is almost no sense of death there). My attitude about research for that book was essentially of the learn-and-forget variety. I wanted to adhere to only the most essential of accuracies. I also wanted to avoid becoming too enamored of certain historical facts or events and then running myself aground on their exposition.

VELVET: Would you call "Trees" a Western? Trude refuses the opportunity to use a car, instead riding his horse across the open country, was this choice made intentionally?

RG: Something that continues to be of interest to me is the events and circumstances that surround overlapping eras. That it would be plausible for a car to be passed up in favor of a horse at an hour of great urgency is one aspect of that interest. Personally, I wouldn’t describe the book as a Western. Whether or not someone else would is entirely outside both my power and interest. If it made an impression, brought an idea or emotion into focus, provided 8-10 hours of enjoyment for someone, those are the questions that would be of greater interest to me. At the same time, the compartmentalizing of books in general seems to get more and more frenetic and haphazard as we go. For instance, why are books not germane to the U.S. or Europe sometimes now referred to as “World Literature?” Awfully broad, isn’t it? And should it then follow that Faulkner’s books be filed under “Southern Literature,” as is often the case? Or, more to the point, that they should not be characterized as World Literature? While I know quite well that this rise of categorization is simply a function of marketing in a grueling and imperiled business and not of a malevolent Ubercustodian unleashed by Bertelsmann, at a certain point one does begin to sense that there is some run-of-the-mill corporate lackey behind the curtain, bitching up the gears. Which, in the end, is probably benign. The only problem I can see coming out of this is that it will cut certain writers or books off from one another. And, by extension, readers from certain books. But again, this seems almost beside the point by now. What we’re trying to keep under the rose with all this maneuvering is the steady decline in readers of books - be they Westerns, Easterns or Worlds. Categorization is but one of many attempts to build a modest fire against the falling dark.

VELVET: I'm curious as to your thoughts on the comparisons between "Trees" and Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy. Were you influenced at all by McCarthy?

RG: Comparisons are dicey things. They can be by turns incredibly generous or subversively insulting. It all depends on your perspective. Better to have none, I’ve found. But to answer your question, prior to writing “Trees” I’d read and was a big fan of McCarthy’s Tennessee novels, particularly “Outer Dark,” which I think is a perfect novel in the same way that people talk about “The Great Gatsby” being perfect (I agree with that assessment as well); somehow it seems unalterable, almost as if it had predated its authorship. Later, a friend gave me “The Crossing” while I was working on “Trees,” which made for at least one long night of reading. But one can only linger so long on such things; in the end you’re going to write what you’re going to write and whatever threads people will draw from you to someone else will be drawn regardless. Also, most writers are good readers, so that over time there’s no telling at any given moment which authors might be mugging at the vanity and throwing their dirty towels around your subconscious. Everything comes from somewhere else, it has been many times said. The absence of quotation marks in dialogue in “Trees,” for example, prompted some to draw that thread back to McCarthy. As it happens, I’d first seen that stylistic choice in William Gass’s mesmerizing long story, “The Pederson Kid,” and eventually saw how it might work for “Trees.” So is this a good thing or a bad thing? Shall “Trees” now be dubbed Gassesque? And might this too imply accreditation? Or would it destroy me utterly? You see how elliptical the exercise can get, and tiresome too. I did have a memorable exchange with William Gay about the quotes question, though. I think knowing the man accounts for much of its anecdotal worth, but I’ll tell it anyway. We were talking one night at a bar, and after having gotten onto the subject somehow I asked William - a tremendous writer in his own right who has been oft-compared to McCarthy - if he felt like there was a particular reason he would give for eschewing quotation marks, to which he shrugged and replied, “I just like the way the page looks without ‘em.”

VELVET: The question I'm dying to ask is why only one book? "Trees" was a Book Sense selection and was well received by critics and readers alike. Is it testimony to the publishing industry? Is it just that hard to get another book published?

RG: There are innumerable tiny factors that I could make mention of that might be used to support either of these suggestions, but in the end we would only arrive at an artificial answer. More to the point, I think a larger factor is being missed, which is that not every writer holds quantity as a virtue in his mind. Neither does each one have the facility to make brisk work of his or her ideas. Certainly I’d like to have five, ten, twenty novels published by now, but at what final cost if I can’t stand wholeheartedly behind them, or if I allow myself to get into the unsettling business of “churning them out?” If a writer can tolerate conditions of relative isolation and material paucity (or can find a way to juke these obstacles in order that they can proceed at their leisure), I think these are questions worthy of the asking. I had the benefit of having published fairly young, and though my success was quite modest I was gently – but quickly – led in the direction of the next “Gatewood” book. “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative,” Oscar Wilde once said. I pretty much concur, it turns out. Particularly when that consistency bears a stamp of manufacture. So for me it’s not a question of taking aim because there is nothing to take aim at – I’m bulling my way through to find new ways to say the new things I want to say and, as it happens, it’s taking me some time to do that. I feel a distant kinship with Bellow in this, he who battled his way through at least one or two significant shifts in his own writing (though Bellow proved himself manifestly quicker on the uptake). Our culture – the publishing business included – is intensely interested in rate of turnover, in speed; so while on the one hand I do want to move as swiftly as I can, on the other I do not want to bend slavishly to a trend of expectation. Or to anything else for that matter. One soon, though, would definitely be nice.

VELVET: What's your writing process? And, too, could you describe the process of getting "Trees" published. How it went from a manuscript to a hardcover book from Henry Holt?

RG: The only concrete thing I can say on the process question is that I constantly try to improve upon my level of discipline. There is real worth, I think, in the idea of writing every day. And although my own output of late might make this claim highly suspect, the simple comforts of math will tell us that the accumulation of pages over time will eventually yield results. The publication of “Trees” depended on a similar dynamic. Eventually persistence, along with the intervention of a few remarkable men and women, stacked the deck in my favor.

VELVET: "Trees" has a lot of violent moments. What are your thoughts on violence in fiction? How careful does a writer have to be to not fill their book with violence for the sake of violence?

RG: Yes, I think you imply the correct rule: each thing in its rightful place. Violence is one of the primary activities in life and, as an upshot to writers, comes with built-in drama. But this is not to say either that I have a predilection for violence or that I think it should be used as a preemptive measure to drum up emotion. For my part, I find myself more and more interested in psychological violence these days, though I can still be thrilled by something like McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” for instance, or Gardner’s “Grendel.” I especially like it when our vision of a character’s quality of mind is enlarged by an act of physical violence. A late episode in Tom Franklin’s novel “Hell at the Breech” does this masterfully. At the edge of death, unable to move but still conscious and still able to see and hear, Ardy Grant, a borderline sociopath, is approached by a gang of boys. As he silently watches them hovering above where his body lays splayed in the street, one of the boys begins to stab at him with a knife. Though Grant can’t feel anything, the boy narrates his actions with malicious glee. At a certain point the boy holds a bloody mass above Grant’s face and tells him: “This is your pecker. I sawed it off.” Harrowing and evocative as that is, what’s even better to me is how Franklin then shifts the narrative to Grant’s thoughts, describing his startling observation in the following sentence: “He understood what it was to be a boy for he’d been one himself long ago and wished he were one of these boys here, now, with such a perfect victim as himself.” For me, while this line doesn’t intensify the drama in the same way that the actual violence does, its inclusion pushes the scene to a more significant level of complexity, of poignancy even.

VELVET: I read that you wrote a manuscript right after graduation. What was that ms about?

RG: That was about teaching myself how to impose my will. It was about self-discipline and self-reliance. I had intended to write and see published a novel by the age of 21, so it was also about self-delusion. But I did finish it, and like to think I taught myself a lot about writing in a relatively short amount of time. I’ve never – neither now nor then – been a writing “exercise” man, and have always been suspicious of the theory that standing there dipping your toes in and out of the water has universal merit. Very early on, perhaps, such exercises can help promote an understanding of and comfort with the fundamental components of fiction. In my mind, however, many of the complexities of a story or a novel are only extricable after having written one’s own story or novel to its final stop. To come at it from another angle, I’d pose the following question: Isn’t it hard enough to fight off the innumerable waves of self-doubt and fear every young (and old, I suspect) writer has without perpetuating the agony with what often amounts to a glorified string of procrastinations? In any case, I began it and finished it, a process which I do believe has universal merit. That being said, to encroach any closer upon the actual details of that book would be like peering down a rat hole.

VELVET: What happened to "Into the Afterfall" and "Dawn’s Left Hand"?

RG: Those manuscripts are still very much in play, elusive and sprawling as they’ve become, though somehow “Into the Afterfall” has become the umbrella title for three separate novels. I distinguish them now by the paintings I see myself borrowing to use as their covers.

VELVET: The paperback of "Trees" has a really cool cover, what are your feelings on book cover art, what its purpose is or should be, how it's evolved, and what its current state is?

RG: Well thanks, though of course I can’t claim any credit for that. More than one person has told me they thought the spur on the paperback was a kind of interpretive palm tree, so I’m glad you didn’t see it that way. I always keep an eye out for the old(ish) paperbacks. Signet, the Bantam and Ballantine books from the 60’s and 70’s. I also like those crazy Vintage Contemporary covers that date back to the late 70’s and that pretty much across the board employ surrealistic or antipodal images. Their version of McGuane’s “To Skin A Cat,” which depicts a formal type of eagle perched on a branch in the foreground, a bird dog skulking in the middle distance and what looks to be a prison in the background - its watchtower rising into an unnaturally tempestuous sky - is one such example. Or Hannah’s “Airships,” in which a plane has just taken off from a distant naval ship, only the plane is a saxophone with wings. You get the picture.

VELVET: What are your feelings on character vs plot? "Trees" is very character-driven and at times feels focused solely on Trude Mason and the plot takes a backseat.

RG: My feelings on that question are very primitive: it is no matter to me whether a novel or story is character or plot-driven, so long as it is compelling. I have my own tastes and thoughts about how to go about crafting a story or novel, but they cease to be relevant when I’m reading someone else’s work. There are any number of styles and narrative dispositions that I would never dream of applying myself, but if they work they work. Variety is one of the great treasures of fiction; just because I have my own attitude toward writing doesn’t mean I ought to exclude someone else’s work simply because their approach differs from mine. Who among us would dismiss Borges outright for being too thin on plot? Or Chandler for being too rife with it? When making a decision to this question in my own writing – as with the overarching question of style – I look to the story, in its broadest sense, to figure out the best way it can be conveyed. I suppose it’s safe to say that I believe function ought to dictate form, generally speaking.

VELVET: You have a short story published in Sonny Brewer's "Blue Moon" series titled, "Down in New Orleans." What was that process like? Were you approached by Sonny to write a short or was the short already written?

RG: I met Sonny at a party in Oxford, Mississippi. Barry Hannah was there, guys like Larry Brown and Rick Bragg were there. I’d recently published my novel and was pretty young and was meeting most of those guys for the first time, most of them heroic drinkers and not afraid to prove it. At some point Sonny asked me if I’d be interested in writing a story for the next installment of “Blue Moon” and at some point I said yes, I would write one. Which I did, later. Not that night.

VELVET: Do you prefer writing short stories to novels? I once read that the late great Larry Brown said he quit writing short stories because there was no money in it. Do you agree?

RG: I’m sure he did say that and it’s sad that he can’t be called up to verify. I’d submit that if you wrote the novels “Joe” and “Dirty Work” you don’t need to fool around with other forms if you don’t want to. But in any case, yes, I agree. Some money, maybe, but not much. Though neither is there in novels these days. Money cannot be your helmsman when you push off; it can be in the boat, just not in a position of leadership.

VELVET: Do beginning writers need to write short stories first to find their voice, or can they just jump headfirst into a novel?

RG: I would say they need not start with short stories if they want to write a novel. Not hardly. First of all, I would argue that one does not necessarily lead to the other; the different forms call for different authorial measures and structural elements – oftentimes different sensibilities altogether. Secondly, writing a short story is no walk in the park. I personally find short stories almost impenetrably difficult to write, and have several that I must continue to drag myself by main force back to review, most of them still in-progress. The commonly held notion that success in the short form necessarily precedes success in the long is based on an entirely false logic. Unfortunately, this cadaverous line of thinking can largely be traced along the flanks of the innumerable self-help books out there, as well as the workshop paradigm. Whosoever would be an epic novelist must first write this or that many vignettes of his novel’s characters and themes? On what basis? Each to the leanings of his or her own nature, I say. The reason (and it is a good one, no doubt) that this idea has taken such strong root in our concept of how one advances in their fiction writing in this country is in many ways a result of the fact that the workshop venue cannot by dint of even the purest of ambitions support the reading of twelve to twenty novels in a given semester. Neither is it feasible to make comprehensive and penetrating critiques if you are reading these novels in 15-25 page bi-monthly packets. This is one of the great conundrums of the MFA infrastructure and one that will probably linger for some time, it being in most cases a mathematical issue rather than a philosophical one. But to keep our eye on the ball here, the rationale behind this theory is simply insupportable. It would not be unlike someone suggesting that a young painter must first make a 12”x 8” self-portrait before he attempts to tackle a 48” x 36” one. While the scale – the painter’s brush sizes and the field of white he stands before – may shrink or grow, the portrait’s essential complexity remains constant. Should one have a sense of the form one is leaning toward in terms of fiction writing, it’s my opinion that the only notable consideration to address from that writer’s vantage is time. Though you also might require new shoe soles somewhere down the line if you opt for the novel. So, for the sake of clarity, time and ten bucks.

VELVET: Are you reading anything good? Any books or writers we should be reading?

RG: I’m reading Twain right now, who sometimes gives you the impression that you had begun with a collection of truisms when some rascal pounced upon the pages and presently fell to scribbling various hilarities between the lines. Before Twain I read “The Elementary Particles” by the sometimes-controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq. Because it’s a novel-of-ideas the dialogue can read woodenly, but the cumulative effect is tremendously dramatic and richly provocative. A real gem for any sci-fi lovers out there. Some say it’s an important book, too, and have made strong arguments to support this claim. And then I’ll always promote the underdogs: Barry Hannah deserves your time, as does Joan Didion. Though highly esteemed for her non-fiction, Didion’s novels, to my mind, are terrifically underrated. Some critics have gone so far as to vilify them for being empty shells of style, or for hosting overbred characters whose thoughts and actions appear to have been consciously if not belligerently obfuscated by the author. On the contrary, I’d argue that she’s created some of the most complex heroines in contemporary American fiction. And her dialogue is masterful, filled with subterfuge and scathing humor. “A Book of Common Prayer” is both nightmarish and dreamy; fans of the 80’s novels of petulance and excess such as “Less than Zero” and “Bright Lights, Big City,” will find their far more brutal and exacting forebear in “Play it as it Lays.” Leonard Gardner’s “Fat City,” Fred Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes” and John Williams’ “Stoner” always seem to pass under the radar, as do William Maxwell’s “So Long, See You Tomorrow” and “They Came Like Swallows” and James Welch’s “Winter in the Blood.” In regard to young up-and-coming American writers, I have a very high opinion of Donald Antrim and Tom Bissell, both of who have done and continue to do great things on either side of the fence.

VELVET: Have to ask this one: any advice to beginning writers?

RG: Above all else, read. If you are just becoming and this is somehow beamed out to you in an era of accelerated options, chose parents who will read to you. I think this might be part of the equation; or, at minimum, that it was for me. Reading – and teaching yourself to read as a writer – is in my opinion central to a writer’s development. And in doing so, one can also take hold of one’s entrepreneurial spirit, following a book that excites them to an author to another book and another author and so on. We’ve all been assigned great books at one point or another, but there’s something uniquely invigorating, private and somehow writerly about finding your own great books and authors. And I would go on to say that it is largely through this process of following one’s reading tastes that one develops a sense of their own writing techniques. And then, of course, work hard, try not to take yourself too seriously, be as open as you can in your writing, find one or two thoughtful readers and remain open to their opinions and critiques as well. I think the popular attitude of being rebellious is on the right track, but not quite precise. Somehow, the mantle of the Rebel is susceptible to becoming refashioned into a shield against diligence. Which is to say that a young writer can often delude himself into thinking that obliquity and sloppiness are not in fact these things but rather the substance of his rebellious spirit. A kind of self-application of the Socratic method, while not nearly as romantic, gets to the point more efficiently. Get into the habit of questioning whatever conclusions you might draw from what you’ve been told or read, the litany of my opinions above notwithstanding. I’ve been called a fool before, not a few times by myself, and will surely be again. The point is to allow everything in knowing that you have every right (I’d go so far as to say every obligation) to question those things, and, when necessary, either to reject or be humbled by them. As Theodore Roethke once cryptically but potently said, “Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.”

VELVET: Are you fearful because there is such long span of time between "Trees" and novel two that your original fan base will have moved on? And, talking fan bases, would the fiction you're writing now be in the same vein as "Trees" and even loved by the fans of "Trees"?

RG: All I can do in regard to my fans – and we are now assuming both the existence and plurality of – is presume that they can be called back. The only thing I can afford to fear is forgetting to cross my T’s. As far as the “same vein” question goes, that one seems a little trickier. From what I can tell there are a small handful of writers who, for whatever reason, feel compelled to mine the same vein over and over, and yet are able to continuously gain ground on the Mother Lode, knowing all along that it will remain forever out of their reach. We tend to call these writers “visionaries,” which may be the correct term. Kafka, for instance, was one. Then there’s another small group – again, we cannot know their reasons (though the chances that they’re inauspicious seem higher here), who chose to assay a vein that yields an abundance of sufficiently lustrous iron pyrite, then proceed to dole out bucket after bucket of it. I don’t know what the term for these writers is, but I think it can be found in the vogue idea of creating a “brand.” Which leaves what I assume to be the vast majority of writers who, when confronted by the comedic instabilities of the imagination, go skidding inexorably across the hardpan, often toppling into canyons they hadn’t initially intended to plumb, or hadn’t known were there before their foot wouldn’t quit sailing. The flip side to that coin is that no one is generating out of a vacuum (or at least not multiple vacuums), and so I think we can always find, even if we have to get down on our knees and put our hands into the ashes, the bones of any given writer. A tooth or two, at least. A gold one, maybe, if our enterprise is manifold and our equipment superior. But to wrap up this yawing abstraction, it’s probably to that final outfit I belong. And so I can only hope that when my next book appears what fans of mine who remain will be able to cobble up a decent skeleton, and that they will arrange it in a heroic stance before the pyre.

Interview with Stephen Graham Jones: Originally Featured on The Velvet

2009-03-05T12:49:00.000-08:00

Stephen Graham Jones is a man of many written words, including the novels The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong, The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto, All the Beautiful Sinners, and Demon Theory, plus a collection of short stories, Bleed Into Me. In a literary world where it's not uncommon for an author to release a new book every year, Stephen has given us two within a month's time: Ledfeather and The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti. But then, why stop there? His second short story collection is slated for a Fall 2009 release, and he has also contributed to the forthcoming Native Storiers. Herein, we discuss his works both past and present and the origins of inspiration.

THE VELVET: 2008 has seen two novels of yours published, Ledfeather and The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti. Though no less complex, the latter escapes easy description more quickly. Described as "not quite horror, not quite science fiction," how would you describe the book to someone unfamiliar with your writing?

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES: Yeah, I don't know. Which is terrible. I always say that if you can't tagline your own novel, then you don't really have a good handle on what's going on in it. Too, though, writing it in seventy-two hours, 'handle' is maybe a reach, at least a pretty charitable term. Really I was just running behind it the whole time. Finally happy with where it went, though, and how it finally got there.If you can even say 'finally' when talking about a two-hundred page novel. Anyway, okay, a tagline for Nolan Dugatti: A kid tries to keep separate the two main things in his life, his job as last-ever customer service rep for a defunct video game and his other job, dealing with his suicide father. But of course they bleed over. As to whether it's science fiction, horror, speculative, slipstream, no real clue. As I like all that, though, I'd have to guess it draws from them all.

VELVET: Dugatti was initially conceived for a three-day novel competition. How often have you participated in this? Have any past endeavors gone out for publication, or was there a specific reason why this one went that route?

SGJ: I've done it once before, the year before, actually. That was The Hedonist Chronicles, which was longer, and which was bar-none the best ending I've ever lucked onto a for a thing, but getting to that ending's a pretty wild ride. Not that readable a ride, I suspect. There's a lot of interludes, I mean, where I'm obviously wallowing around, trying to find some direction, some way to get to the end, get off this ride. It didn't even place in the competition. Neither did Nolan Dugatti. With Dugatti, though, I really lucked into a hook-line/structural combo that kind of just generated pages on its own. The novel worked, I mean. Which I'd guess is why it's finally seeing print.

VELVET: The novel involves a creature called the Camopede from a video game of the same name. How did you come up with that? Is it an amalgamation of previously-existing entities, or just pure imagination?

SGJ: Centipede, sure, but -- I don't really know. It's so real in my head somehow, anyway. Not sure exactly from where. Just deeper in my head, maybe.

VELVET: The author notes for Dugatti state it "is by far the most autobiographical." Care to expound on that?

SGJ: Just that I thought Demon Theory was as honest as I could be. But then, trying to do it in three days, there's so little room to lie. A lot of what goes on in Nolan Dugatti's scarily close to what I remember having happened in the non-novel world, I mean. Enough so that I'm even all vague here, yeah.

VELVET: You come up with some of the best character names I have come across. How do you pick the names? Do you make lists of possibilities, or is more of an instantaneous thing?

SGJ: Yeah, just instantaneous, though Doby Saxon, from Ledfeather, that's a name I've had since, I don't know. I'm thinking about thirteen years back, at least. Was digging through an old notebook the other day and came across it scribbled in the margin. Kind of cool.

VELVET: The stories too. Dugatti started as a three-day novel and Ledfeather began with a misheard lyric and a "yellowy snapshot." Maybe not with Dugatti, but is that typical for the forming of your stories?

SGJ: Much as I should probably hate to use an example from the movies to explain novel writing, still, that apple that falls in the street in Stranger Than Fiction, that's how it always is. Some stupid little nothing happens and suddenly time's stopped, you're in some side place, and there's a novel reeling itself out all around you. Takes me by surprise each time. The real trick then's not so much crafting it into a story, but keeping up with it, dictation style.

VELVET: Many authors do book tours. You now have two novels to promote and read from. Any plans for such events?

SGJ: I tend to do more invited university readings than bookstores. But I should hit the bookstores more, I know. It's always fun -- well, to go back to the movies again, 1408 specifically, it always happens anyway.

VELVET: You've mentioned in the past that you like writing to music. The entire Dugatti experience has been documented on your Web site, but how about Ledfeather? What was the soundtrack for that?

SGJ: That was all hair ballads. Some of the same hair ballads as Dugatti, I guess. I know Faster Pussycat was in there anyway. Over at Litblog Co-op, I did a guest-post thing where I pasted the Ledfeather playlists in, I think. I probably should be embarrassed, but, I've never been able to quite get embarrassed over music choice. Probably some genetic lack of shame I was born with, or've contracted.

VELVET: What is the process like for receiving and providing blurbs on novels? Obviously, you have them on yours and you have given one for Gavin Pate's novel. Do authors or publishers have some sort of target market when seeking a blurb?

SGJ: Yeah, you try to get people who are doing the same kind of stuff his book is, say. For Dugatti, as last minute as it was, I just called up some friends -- Zack Wentz, David Goodwillie, Michael Kimball, Kris Saknussemm, Patrick Shabe over at Popmatters -- and asked if they had a few hours to spare over the next forty-eight hours or so. Luckily, they did. So cool to have excellent writers say kind things about your work. But yeah, sometimes the publisher looks people up, sometimes I do. Usually both, I guess.

VELVET: More on covers here, what are your feelings on book cover art, what its purpose is or should be, how it's evolved, and what its current state is?

SGJ: I think it's probably more competitive than it used to be. But that could just be because I'm now, not then. We always think people were stupid twenty years ago, I suspect. As for purpose, it's simple: to get somebody to pluck this book from the shelf, and not all the others. So go for broke with them, I say. Or, I say, not having a graphic design bone in my body. A complete mystery to me, composition of an image, balance, framing, all of that. So I usually leave it to the professionals. Though sometimes, as with Ledfeather -- Dugatti too, now that I think about it -- I'll get to pick from a set of two or three.

VELVET: What are your thoughts on character versus plot? For instance, there are films, both good and bad, that can be seen as a "slice of life"-type of story. They are more like a portrait of a particular point in a character's life, more character driven than plot driven. Have you encountered much of this in fiction? Do you think it works, or does there need to be a more concrete plot: more of a beginning, middle, and end?

SGJ: I'm a big fan of things happening in fiction, yeah. Stories not being boring, please. So yes, give us some plot, give us all the plot, and never ever give us some interesting character in such detail that we know every pore of them, but, all the same, are just watching them move through another boring day. Make the day interesting first, I say, then the character's reaction will nearly have to be interesting. Which, maybe, will make them interesting as well. Somebody I'd maybe want to read for a few hundred pages.

VELVET: You were teaching in Lubbock and have now moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder. Have the courses you teach changed? How do you like your new school and city?

SGJ: Loving Colorado, teaching not that much different, I don't guess. That sentence feels like a telegraph message. STOP.

VELVET: You've been published by five different outfits. How do the experiences compare?

SGJ: I like that, 'outfits.' But yeah, I've been with a New York house who had money to burn, and I've been with indie places that burn their own galleys just to stay warm. And everywhere between. It's been cool, and there'll be more, and more. My dream publisher's one who'll put a book out for me -- a book of mine, I mean, that I wrote -- every four or six months. And not care that they're keeping to no genre, that they're never appealing to the same audience. I want to do what Lansdale's done: create his own genre, "Joe Lansdale." I'll probably call mine something different, though.

VELVET: Also with publishing, you commented once that you wanted to have short stories published in journals and magazines whose names would cover every letter of the alphabet. How close are you on that?

SGJ: Pretty close. Only two to go, I think. Can't remember which two, though. I think H is one of them. Need to finish that. Thanks for the remind.

JL: Are there any particular publications in which you'd like to see your work?

SGJ: Fantasy & Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Analog, Postscripts.

VELVET: You have a piece forthcoming in New Genre. Is the story genre specific?

SGJ: It's a zombie western. Or, really, I guess it's a western with zombies. Yeah. A zombie western's a whole different thing, getting into the hopes and dashed dreams of the undead, and how they might sing about it on the open range. "Lonegan's Luck" isn't that.

VELVET: Also forthcoming, in 2009, from Prime Books, is a collection of short stories. What can you tell us at this point? Do the stories share a common theme?

SGJ: Yeah, horror. It's not all the horror short stories I've written, but it's the one I -- and Sean Wallace, the editor -- think are best. Should be cool.

VELVET: You have also contributed to a book coming from Nebraska University Press, Native Storiers, edited by Gerald Vizenor. What was your involvement, and how did this project come about?

SGJ: I think I have five stories from Bleed Into Me in there. No clue how the project came about, really. just that Vizenor wrote, said it was happening, and that was enough for me.

VELVET: Other than these projects, what's next for you?

SGJ: Not sure. I've got a few novels cued up right now, so maybe one of those'll get picked up. Also have a lot of novels cued up in my head right now too, trying to shoulder each other out of line. However, an alt-tab away here's the one I'm writing now, that I keep trying to quit writing because it scares me. But I'll find a way. I hope.

VELVET: Thank you, Stephen.

____________________________________
Jesse Lawrence is a film-obsessed screenwriter and literature junkie. He currently lives in Minneapolis.

Got five to ten for loving her, from some Oklahoma Governor, who said "everything that doughboy does is wrong."

2009-02-14T02:15:00.000-08:00

A Few of My Favorite Scenes

2009-02-12T11:07:00.000-08:00

Lauren Bacall - To Have Or Have Not - Whistle

Marlon Brando - On the Waterfront - Could of been a contender

Rita Hayworth - Gilda - Put the blame on Mame

Paul Newman - Cool Hand Luke - Plastic Jesus

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - Guns or Knives

Elmore Leonard's Rules of Writing

2009-02-12T11:05:00.000-08:00

WRITERS ON WRITING; Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle

By ELMORE LEONARD
Published: July 16, 2001

These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

1. Never open a book with weather.

If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues.

They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's ''Sweet Thursday,'' but it's O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: ''I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy's thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.''

3. Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ''she asseverated,'' and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ''said'' . . .

. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ''full of rape and adverbs.''

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words ''suddenly'' or ''all hell broke loose.''

This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ''suddenly'' tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories ''Close Range.''

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's ''Hills Like White Elephants'' what do the ''American and the girl with him'' look like? ''She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.'' That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character -- the one whose view best brings the scene to life -- I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight.

What Steinbeck did in ''Sweet Thursday'' was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. ''Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts'' is one, ''Lousy Wednesday'' another. The third chapter is titled ''Hooptedoodle 1'' and the 38th chapter ''Hooptedoodle 2'' as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: ''Here's where you'll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won't get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.''

''Sweet Thursday'' came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I've never forgotten that prologue.

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

Writers on Writing

This article is part of a series in which writers explore literary themes. Previous contributions, including essays by John Updike, E. L. Doctorow, Ed McBain, Annie Proulx, Jamaica Kincaid, Saul Bellow and others, can be found with this article at The New York Times on the Web:
www.nytimes.com/arts

Too Cool For Anyone's Own Good

2009-02-11T15:20:00.000-08:00

I mean, I don't know about you, but this guy makes singers that play the bass somehow even cooler. Man, remember when chicks liked their dudes to look like chicks?(SEE GUITAR PLAYER, either a chick or Norwegian Jesus) Oh, the eighties.

Wolverine

2009-02-11T14:59:00.000-08:00

Man. Looks like they pulled out all the stops for this one. Keep promising myself I'll do homework or something but then I check this trailer out again. Normally, I'm not too into all the razmataz of special effects. Give me Lou Ferigno in make up over cgi hulk any day. (Realize the Lou Ferigno in make up thing could be misconstrued.) But then there's something like this, or the new Transformers, that has me hooked. Besides, the dialogue sounds well written too. How's he gonna kill him. "Chop off your head. See if that works." Come on. That line is pitch perfect.

Word Is Bone means what exactly?

2009-02-11T14:45:00.000-08:00

1.	WELL, I GUESS IT ALL STARTED WITH... Word is bond
	Shortened version of "My word is my bond". You're saying that what you're saying is true and without reproach. Yo man. Did you hit that? Word is bond man....I tore that shit up. Anyway, that's from the urban dictionary. And besides, it says, Word is bond, not Word Is Bone. So what's word is bone mean? Well, I sort of made it up. Word is bond, as you can see above and might hear rappers say in a song here and there, also has a few mutations, word is bon being one, word for short, and I heard a long time ago or (mis)heard or made up Word Is Bone. I like it because one, it's a strange image. Two, it's a mutation of language and mutation is what keeps language alive. Three, it's the title of my novel. And four, it's the title of my novel because the main character is best understood through the gossip in this small urban town called Clearwater, and Word Is Bone expresses the notion that we can, at times, be built out of words, not just in the sense that a fictional character is built out of words, but in the sense that a human being is constructed by their reputation, by the lies and truths they tell, and by the stories told about them after they're gone. Plus, it comes in handy when you agree with something: Hey, ice cream tastes good. WORD IS BONE.