Quotidian. Why use quotidian when mundane works just as well? Don't try citing some subtle shade of connotation, because there isn't one; they mean the same damn thing, except ninety-five percent of the English-speaking world could tell you what mundane means. Barring mundane, why not give everyday, commonplace, or ordinary a day in court? Too quotidian?
Using quotidian, you're not trying to tell us what the office is like, or describe Chester's workaday habits, or what materials an artist used for his pieces - unless you're Lionel Shriver, you're being deliberately obscure to add mystery to your piece, to make the reader work a little harder and invest more of herself.
I see the word all the time.
"Look out! The Quotidians are behind you!"
That, and words like it. Elegiac ("expressing sorrow") is one. Anodyne ("uncontentious or inoffensive") is another. To me, it's all grandiloquent ("Pompous or extravagant in language, style, or manner, esp. in a way that is intended to impress").
I think my vocabulary is better than the average bear's. If you're not David Foster Wallace, it ain't right to have me running for the dictionary (well, for Google). It's also no comment on my lack of education (I hope) because it's the same words over and over.
I remember a poster in my sixth grade English class, back in the days when it was called Language. Flying in the face of the Mighty Elmore Leonard (see Rule #3), this poster declared, "Said is Dead; Use These Instead." An alphabetical list of words which wouldn't make it past an AP writing class followed- Argued, Berated, Chided, Declared, etc. Seeing elegiac in four different books I've read in the last two months makes me imagine a spreadsheet handed out at creative writing programs across the country; Simplicity is Dead; Use These Instead.
Leonard says, "if it sounds like writing, re-write it." John D. MacDonald says, "Author intrusion is, 'Gee, Mama, look how nice I'm writing!'" John Dufresne says, "thou shalt not be obscure."
Look, I'm all for high fallutin language if it serves the voice of a piece. I like learning new words, particularly from a Shriver or a Wallace who knows how to use them. But most of the time these words just seem underlined. If you tell me your book is a "bildungsroman" rather than "a coming-of-age novel," you're proffering the secret MFA handshake.
McWriterface, listen closely: shake off all those fancy words you discovered pursuing your degree. They are weighty words and you need to build up your muscles before you can lift them properly. I see intransigent ("unyielding") and suddenly you're not trying to tell me a story, you're waving your MFA in my face. You can't expect editors to stop these words because they all have their MFAs, too. So it's up to you, Authorton.
Only you can prevent grandiloquence, Authorton... only you.
You never know when banana bread is going to be part of your life. It's out there, waiting for you to leave your bananas out too long, then you notice there's a little too much black on the peel. A few more days they'll be completely unappetizing but a few degrees shy of disgusting, and it'll be banana bread time.
I'd forgotten that the perfect banana bread recipe requires three bananas rather than the two I had. We have more bananas for smoothies but they're entirely too yellow. Because you can't will a banana to rot (what an awesome super-power - ripening), I immediately switched gears into muffin land.
I don't want to think about how much seeing the video above played into this decision. Do I make my own decisions, or do I just react to stimuli? Let's just admit that Adaptation is one of the most brilliant movies of all time and move on.
This is a rare real-time post. I can smell the muffins as I type. I woke up at five am, thought about my writing-work-dinner-wedding prep agenda for the day, and looked at the bananas in their now-or-never ripeness. My upbringing won over my longing to write. Wasting minutes I could've spent writing is intangible; throwing two perfectly usable bananas into the trash is real waste.
My posts have thinned out lately, and I expect them to get thinner. If you look over the proceeding, you can imagine why. I'm a bookseller. Unless you're Cory, there's not a lot of drama in the day-to-day. Well, maybe for those of us in the business. But Indie vs. A-Word, paper vs. ebook, dying industry vs. renaissance of the story - those posts can only go so far. I want to write about anything and everything.
The downside is that I sometimes end up writing about nothing.
I flatter myself that my thoughts on books, movies, parenting, relationships, food, and life are worth sharing. Still, I like to polish these thoughts up a bit before I share them. More importantly, especially for things I've started to write for reasons I'm not aware of, I want these posts to have some meaning. This sometimes means opening the same file dozens of times, revising, rearranging, looking for a point. Since Sweet with Fall and Fish doesn't have a unifying theme (apart from being the Official Blog of Aaron John Curtis), it's important to me that the individual posts try to have a point.
I have thoughts about Borders closing, and Amy Winehouse dying, and mass killings in Norway, but by the time I decide how I really feel and the best way to express it, those feelings are years out of date. Witness the post I've been working on about The Dark Knight and Tropic Thunder, movies which came out in 2008. Not because I just got them on Netflix, but because I wasn't sure how to express my feelings about Heath Ledger's death. After all that microscopic consideration, the challenge becomes making someone care. But I suppose that's always the challenge.
Did you know I saw Patti Smith at the Miami Book Fair International days afterJust Kids won the National Book Award? As part of letting the standing room only crowd know about the upcoming (at the time) OMiami! poetry festival, I was one of dozens who helped P. Scott Cunningham perform Arthur Rimbuad's Vowels, a random act of culture about which Smith said, "I've never seen anything like that."
I've mentioned Hilldawg from time to time? That's her holding the sign.
Did you know Patti Smith performed three songs during the reading, and that the last one became a sing-along? Did you know I loved Just Kids? Did you know I met Patti Smith? Of course you didn't. I worried too much about capturing the magic on the page, I procrastinated starting, then so many months had passed that it seemed silly to try and remember how I'd felt at all. There have been many nights like this I've passed over, but I offer this as an extreme example.
There's a lot of pressure in my life right now.
I'm getting married in 32 days. The marriage doesn't stress me at all, but there's a lot of prep involved in the event which marks the beginning, especially since this is DIY wedding.
Also, I know in this economy I should be pleased to have a job, but the work load I'm saddled with lately is ridiculous. Our week's run Thursday to Wednesday, and I'm over 32 hours for the week. These thoughts occurred while I was baking and I wanted to share, so I'm pushing back biking in to get this posted. I'll probably take Wednesday off to be with Dylan - Becky and I are taking turns watching him this summer since we can't afford camp or daycare - but I can't be sure. I could live in my office and work there every waking minute and it would take half a year to get on top of things, and even then I probably wouldn't be on top of things because they'd find even more for me to do. Grawr.
Finally, I've had a setback in my writing life. The mighty Carl Lennertz has left Harper Collins to become CEO of the North American branch of World Book Night. This is excellent news for the world of books which is semi-devestating to me personally.
As I've written my stories and taken time polishing my novels, it's always been in the back of my mind that my first published essay was a given (I've had pieces published online and in print, so I guess I mean published by the Big 6). I know I acted like it wasn't, but I was fooling myself. I'm glad I chose not to shout State by State from the roof tops, but I no longer have that foot in the door, that significant set of eyes which has looked at my work and deemed it worthy and which invites prospective agents and magazine editors to do the same. I'm back to square one.
In some ways, it's good. It gives my morning writing time more focus. With the help of my writers group, I am polishing four or five of my best stories until they will knock a magazine editor on her ass, so that she'll share the story with her readers, and I'll have a nugget of something to put in my cover letter to an agent, something more substantial than hopes and dreams. I need a credit. As Laura Munson writes in This is Not the Story You Think it Is, "You can't put good rejection letters on a resume."
What this doesn't bode well for is Sweet.
Of course this comes as my gradually-increasing readership reached its zenith in July. I should be writing more to keep you guys coming back, but something's got to give. I'll try to take a day to myself (if I can find it) and automatically schedule a bunch of stuff I've been tinkering with so it looks like I'm active while I take a break (or maybe it will be like today's post: write it, look for glaring errors and hope I didn't miss any, then publish post). Just because I don't see the point doesn't mean you won't, right? Reading is a relationship, and finding a piece's moral and sharpening it to a point is just me trying to bully your reaction. Of course, you might just get nothing but this for a while. We'll see.
Meanwhile, WLRN's Under the Sun released a CD of the last Lip Service event.
"What's this? A CD of a live Lip Service event recorded for broadcast by Under the Sun?"
"And who is that at #5? Why, it's me. Remember when I freaked out over the edits...
Wait, I never blogged about this, either? Fuck me."
As I sat in Books & Books cafe, reeling from the realization that Carl Lennertz left Harper Collins before he could publish me, a favorite customer approached and told me he enjoyed hearing me on NPR. Co-workers told me they'd heard and enjoyed me on the way in to work. It's the only thing that kept me from a meltdown that day.
Since then, strangers have come to the bookstore looking for me. One asked, "Which one of you is Aaron?" while I happened to be there. She didn't shop, but just stopped off on her drive home to tell me how much she enjoyed the piece (thankfully, I wasn't in the buying office at the time). Customers have congratulated Becky on her upcoming nuptials (which I mentioned in the Q&A after the reading). Apparently, I also "sound cute" on the radio. I feel like my writing career is foundering, but more people are aware of me than ever. It's fairly surreal.
So take heart. Even if you don't see much of me here in the coming weeks as I prepare for my nuptials, you may hear me on the radio.
And the muffins? They smelled better than they taste, but they are solid, moist, and they put two rotten bananas to good use. Here's to a morning well spent.
I’ve gotten into a habit which is sure to give me an ulcer - reading bad reviews of books I love.
First, there’s Amazon. When I first heard that top reviewers were getting paid to write good reviews for books before they came out, I was angry but not surprised. Damn, I thought those reviews were legit! Followed by, It’s Amazon, what low business practice won’tthey do?
That’s what you get for trusting the internet. Turns out these top reviewers are “paid” in free books. Advanced Readers Copies, Uncorrected Proofs, Advanced Readers Editions, these are the pennies, nickels, and dimes with which top-rated Amazon reviewers are compensated. And me, frankly.
This is bribery! went the internet cry. Publishers are trading free books for 5-star reviews!
Actually, they aren’t. Free books are a publisher’s cheapest form of advertising, but they run the risk of the reader hating it, and putting that hatred online for all to see.
The comments which really irked me said the only way publishers could get 5-star reviews for crappy books was by giving away copies.
No one knows what makes a bestselling book. Sometimes authors become favorites and you know they’ll always do well, but the breakout bestsellers vary so much in tone and content that there’s no way to predict what will be next. But one thing which always helps a good book build sales is word of mouth. When you have a product you believe in, be it an album, movie, or book, you want it in as many hands as possible. You especially want reviewers, taste-makers, and buzz-generators to have copies.
Just because you’re jealous that you don’t get free books, don’t take shots at the practice.
Then, there’s Goodreads, a site I vastly prefer for obvious reasons. When I got around to adding Darin Strauss’ Half a Lifeto my profile, I decided to take a stroll through other people's thoughts on the book.Apparently I’m not the only one reading bad reviews of books close to my heart.
I don't know Strauss personally and I'm not a rabid fan, I just thought his book was excellent. I have no idea why I've felt compelled to answer critics for a book I didn't write. Probably because I can't take the lesson that there are different perspectives in life, and sometimes they are both 100% accurate even though they are different.
But that's no fun, so I’ve decided to review the review.
I was really surprised this book received any good reviews. It is really about a guy, who on a bad luck day, hit a girl on her bike when she swerved into his lane. He was told it was not his fault, and he went off to college, got married and had two kids.
Losing the first really is really up to you, but the second really is really unnecessary. Really.
PS, is “bad luck day” a thing, or are you just too lazy to be coherent?
Strauss' neuroticism about this "event" is dull, without a sparkling bit of prose, and not well done in the circle around an event mentally technique that Lydia Davis does so well.
Why is event in quotes? Does striking and killing someone with a car not qualify? Perhaps you meant to put the quotes around “circle around an event mentally technique” to clarify that part of the sentence.
You might also try: “...and not well done in the circle-around-an-event-mentally technique that Lydia Davis does so well."Or: “...and not well done in the circle around an event mentally technique that Lydia Davis does so well.”Better yet, take your time, make this two sentences, and ensure that your point is clear. Or slap yourself in the face.
By the way, Lydia Davis writes fiction. Fiction is the place for sparkling prose (or sparkly bits), as opposed to a memoir about coming to grips with taking a life.
I am deeply saddened that someone who is a creating writing teacher wrote a book without any sort of drama or dramatic arc. The narrator dates around, doesn't want to tell people, feels guilty...its like duh...you hit a girl and it is a tragedy, but the real tragedy is your inablility to provide a shred of insight, prose, or humanity to the entire situation.
It saddens me that you teach a memoir class. I worry your students will never find their own voices because you’ll teach them to sound like Lydia Davis. Maybe you should teach "creating writing" instead?
Again, fiction is the place for a dramatic arc. There’s plenty of drama involved in killing a classmate. In visiting her parents. In walking the hallways and streets of the community afterward. In trying to live your life and connect with people while something so life-altering has happened to you at such an early age. Strauss' humanity and insight is there, presented in simple, straightforward lines. He doesn't need purple prose to express his anguish. If anything, the stark language underlines his struggle to cope.
There are plenty of places to look for beauty in the written language. Half a Life is a beautiful exercise in self-examination.
I read this light book in a night and was left feeling grossed out by the total solipsism of this book.
(Which book? This book? Okay, got it.)
When you say “light book" I think you mean “slight.” Or was it physically light? Or a poor examination of the subject matter (which is pretty heavy)? Did it give off beams of light? Be more constructive with your feedback, please.
FYI, criticizing a memoir for solipsism is like complaining that a detective novel is too mysterious.
Nice use of “grossed out,” though. I don’t see that enough in book reviews.
At some point, an editor or a publishing house should say no, this is not a valid book to publish and spare the audience something that should have stayed in a journal, a therapist's office, a conversation with your wife.
At some point, you should have realized you can’t look at the book objectively. You should have spared readers looking for genuine guidance on whether to purchase a book something that should have stayed in your diary, or a text to your BFF, or an overly-loud cell phone conversation on a subway train.
Sorry, this book just really pissed me off.
I think I’ll follow your reviews just to read everything you hate.
You wrote a book, but what do you know about writing a book? You set a deadline, and four-hundred single-spaced pages later, you met it. You proved to yourself you could chase an idea for longer than a short story, that a couple-few hours in the morning were enough to eventually have a mountain of words.
Why oh why did you have to show it to people? Friends and family, maybe, maybe, but people in publishing? If you want a part in Clint Eastwood’s next movie, you don’t send him a tape of the play your high school drama club did.
Two megabytes spent on the same story, .97 megabytes after your deadline, you finally began a draft you can be proud of... couldn’t you have waited a couple of years?
Oh, well. Screw ‘em if they can’t suffer an amateur misstep.
You paid a print-on-demand house to publish your book, but what do you know about writing? Paying to have your book printed means you have money to spare, not that you’re an author.
You claim it’s not about rejection by traditional publishers or the strength of your work, it’s about having creative control and a bigger share of the profits. Right, then; what would you do if your P-O-D sales impressed the big boys so much, they offered to publish your book? If autonomy is so important to you, wouldn’t you tell them to stuff their contract in a pipe and smoke it? Think of the joy, being able to reject the ones who rejected you.
When you write, you’re pulling thoughts which are beautiful and perfect in your mind and putting them on paper. You need another set of eyes to tell you how close or how far you’ve gotten from capturing that perfect idea. It helps if those eyes aren’t on your payroll.
Money can buy pages, but it can’t buy talent.
Very Sincerely,
Your Grammatical Choices Hurt My Brain in the Buying Office
In my short story “Happy Halloween,” the narrator starts off hungry from not having eaten for a week. Immediately, his narrative is suspect. As he slides into a drunken state, the narrative degenerates. By the time he spins a fellow party-goer around to ask where the bathroom is, our narrator is pretty drunk.
The party-goer is dressed as a mime, with a bullet-hole in his forehead. Our narrator gets a kick out of this and forgets what he was going to ask. It’s first person, present-tense.
I meant to write, I spin him around and I laugh and I forget what I was going to say.
Editing later, I found I’d written, I spin him around and I laugh and I forget what he was going to say. Oh, perfect – that’s how far gone the narrator is.
I wish I’d thought of it instead of mis-typing it, but I’ll take it.
Miami blog collective The Heat Lightning has decided I'm worthy of inclusion. I will have more to say about the mighty David Mitchell in future posts, but for now, check out this link.
Challenge every exclamation point. Like adverbs, they are intrusive. You get, let's say, three exclamation points in your life. Use them wisely. Using an exclamation point is rather like laughing at your own joke.
Upon editing, The Heat Lightning used two of my three. Other than that, I'm pysched.
I just re-read a scrap of diary I titled Dark Night of the Soul, a perfect piece for putting my current misery into perspective. I’m frustrated over how long losing the defining relationship of my life has hurt. Understandable. But think about Tuesday, October 6th, 2009, when I came closer to suicide than any point in my life since 1980 [Yes, I tried to kill myself when I was eight years old, but the difficulty I’ve had editing this proves it’s more than I can explore here. In the end I removed that experience from this post. Suffice to say it was a genuine attempt, and it caused my parents to finally look at what alcoholism was doing to our family]. It’s a common experience for the third-born Child Of an Alcoholic, called the Lost Child, to attempt suicide without knowing why. Last fall, I knew exactly why I wanted to end my life.
A David Foster Wallace character said you kill yourself for the same reason people jump from a burning high-rise. He’d know, of course. I might not be able to describe the exact mix of emotions which leads to the point of desiring oblivion, but the Wallace quote does a decent job.
Although I’ve contemplated suicide often enough over the years, I’ve never forgotten how God spared me as a child (to clarify, I use God and Satan metaphorically, as shorthand to express myself, not to imply a biblical faith or a religious belief; human thoughts can not measure or define God). Even on my worst Dark Night of the Soul, I still believed that God never tests us with more than we can handle. You promise yourself the burden will become easier to bear, so you’ll carry it another day.
Then it gets better.
You’re humble enough to ask for companionship, and your friends surround you like campers nurturing a lick of flame into a fire, and it gets better.
Your family listens to you ramble, and it gets better.
You find a group of amazing women, ostensibly to discuss books, and it gets better.
You see a soul-fueling concert, and it gets better.
Your cat comes home, and it gets better.
The frangipani blossoms fall, Coldstone Creamery serves a Milk and Cookies shake, you write, you drink, you bike, you work, you think, you breathe in and out, and it gets better.
You meet someone special, a Queen of the Nile who feels like finding shelter after months wandering a storm, and it gets better.
I’m editing, deciding if I want to replace the file last saved on February 9th 2009 with this morning’s file. Have I been out of the game so long? Blogging and journaling have kept my writing skills limber, but being pulled along by my imagination is a the feeling I started writing to pursue. Has it really been over a year since I got off on making stuff up?
Ah, a fresh reason to be angry with my ex. I was worried for a moment there.
In all seriousness, lately I find myself almost constantly on the verge of tears. Any time I have a moment to myself, when I stop reading, writing, working, or watching TV on DVD (pabulum I love such as Friends, Seinfeld, and South Park), the lining of my throat gets thick and the back of my eyes sting.
How long does it take for the misery to end?
Longer, I suppose, when you’ve buried the hurt in new love. I was too cowardly to face my pain all at once, so I’ve decided to dole it out over a period of…who knows how long…and compound it with the guilt of making Becky feel like she’s not enough to keep me happy.
Of course, no one is enough to keep another person happy; ask a suicide. The only person responsible for one’s emotional state is one’s self. Yet if I allow myself to be miserable, it’s tough for Becky not to take it personally. And I don’t want to hurt her, so I keep it inside.
I’d like to be over my marriage, over Andi, over the hurt, over the anger. I’m not. Knowing when I will be would be nice, but the heart is not a wind-up toy.
Crying doesn’t help. Drinking doesn’t help. Writing my stories, much as it pains me to admit it, doesn’t help. It’s been divine losing myself behind fiction lately, remembering there’s more to pushing the cursor than hashing and rehashing the past, or worrying about the future, or decrying the present, but it’s no different than watching a Sex and the City marathon. It’s doing so I don’t have to think.
My not wanting to be in pain has no bearing on whether or not I am. The only thing that helps me feel better is writing about my feelings. For a Child Of an Alcoholic – and this is psychology talking, not just me – it’s tough to even know what I’m feeling, let alone articulate those feelings or explore their origins.
As frustrating as it is to have lost so much time being miserable, and writing about being miserable, these weeks of getting back on schedule have taught me I’m not ready. The number of stories I had running all at once before my life changed, it’s overwhelming. I can’t work like I did. In some ways, this is good. I was being pulled in so many different directions at once that I never moved. Focusing on just one story, I have the chance to move forward and finish something new.
In the meantime, there’s still some crying to be done.
Now I remember what it felt like to be in the grip of a story.
To find my way back to writing fiction, I needed to give up the project I had on the front burner before my marriage fell apart - the third draft of Scratch the Dead Places, the final draft, which is really fucking good, if I say so myself. Unfortunately, parts of Scratch are a little too close to reality.
My second-burner, part two of the Ming trilogy, is in the safe terrain of almost pure imagination. It also hasn’t compelled me in the slightest. Even if they use different processes and have different views, most authors agree that when the story stops, it’s because you’ve taken a wrong turn. I know exactly what parts two and three entail. I have whole scenes just ready to type like dictation, but the main character – Levi – just isn’t speaking loudly enough.
Instead of either of these big projects, or beginning yet another short story (in keeping with the writing queue as kitchen metaphor), I dug way back in the freezer.
How long has The Block been there? I know sixty-four pages of a WordPerfect second draft were written in October 2006, that the original was written on a floppy disc then transferred to a hard disc, before CD-ROM, before jump drives.
Re-reading the eighty-seven pages of the third-draft in MS-Word (although since none of these versions were completed, calling them “drafts” pushes kindness into the realm of fabrication; let’s call the hundreds of pages devoted to The Block on floppy, hard disc, and CD-ROM false starts), I was surprised by how good it is. I never finished it because it felt too easy. It’s basically one story of hundreds I used to tell myself as a child to pass the lonely hours. When you live with a story for that long, you stop thinking it could have value for anyone except yourself.
The Block has been the perfect medicine because it is easy. I know exactly where it’s going and who the characters are (if not necessarily how they get there), and it’s all made up.
It’s also unpublishable. Even though books can get away with a lot of things movies and TV shows can’t because of the audience’s smaller scale, I can’t imagine a publisher tackling the legal hassles associated with having Barbie as the main character.
Supposedly one writes with an ideal first reader in mind. With this story, I’ve rediscovered myself as my first reader and it feels just fine. Whether anyone else ever reads it…
But the feeling I refer to in my opening sentence is not the joy of using imagination instead of reality to push the cursor, but the frustration involved in having a job. Short stories are one thing, but tackling a novel in the space between sleep and work is tough. If writing was sex, it’s interrupting foreplay to pay bills. If writing was food, it’s knowing how delicious the main course will be but trying to fill your stomach by nibbling appetizers because you’ll never be served. If writing was art, it’s penciling an outline, mixing the paints, dabbling a few colors, then cleaning your brushes because you know everything will dry before you find time to finish.
I wish there was a grant for authors who’ve written a Young Adult fantasy Bildungsroman with an adopted Chinese girl as the protagonist, which is the first of three, who need a few months off to hammer out the rest of the trilogy.
This morning I made an edit which changed “My girlfriend thinks a psychiatrist cured [my nightmares], so I can’t reach out for comfort.” to “My girlfriend thinks the psychiatrist she recommended cured [my nightmares], so I can’t reach out for comfort.”
Both sentences involve the conflict of keeping secrets from a significant other, but the second sentence gives the girlfriend more weight. She’s been with the narrator long enough to notice a problem, recommend a psychiatrist, and see the treatments (she believes) work. I had been struggling to impart the seriousness of the relationship without resorting to a clunky “live-in girlfriend” or “long-time girlfriend.”
Point one: I knew Laura had recommended Tom’s psychiatrist, but it wasn’t on the page. I’ve got to be careful about re-reading things with fresh eyes. Or get back in a writing group.
Point two: I communicated the conflict and the seriousness of the relationship simply, in a way that’s invisible to the reader.
I may remain unpublished but I’m getting better at this shit.
I was first published in Junior High. My family was going through counseling for problems associated with alcohol abuse – my parents in Alcoholics Anonymous and Adult Children of Alcoholics, my siblings in Ala-Teen, myself in Children of Alcoholics. Families rarely undergo real change; this period as much as any explains my adaptability.
The poetry I wrote at this time was a few degrees removed from stream-of-consciousness emotive rants, but one or two of them inspired others in the program. COA’s empathized. Their parents understood what they were putting their children through, sometimes for the first time.
The lead counselor was Paul Curtin. The new Phaidon rep I met this week, I couldn’t remember his name for love or money, but Paul? I haven’t seen him for twenty years, and I didn’t even have to think.
I wonder when I became so anti-therapy.
Paul wrote a book and used two of my poems, crediting me as an anonymous child of an alcoholic. As part of the publishing business, I now understand that no one would mistake Paul for John Gray, but I still think of this as my first published work.
All the attention felt good, but I couldn’t see what the fuss was about. I just wrote what I felt and prettied it up a little.
My second publishing experience was an opinion piece on racism that I wrote for the Herald-Journal in High School. This was also my first experience with the editing process outside of a classroom. The man who ran the teen section of the paper, I can’t remember his name but his fingerprints are on Sweet with Fall and Fish. To this day, part of my editing process involves taking out all of the “I thinks” and “to mes” and “I feels” to strengthen my voice and streamline my message.
I was proud of all the work I put in, proud that a photographer came to my house to take a byline photo, proud of having an entire third of the front page of the section.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get a pass before the column was published.
My final paragraph began, “When people look scared passing me on the street, I try to believe it’s my age group or because I’m so tall rather than my features.” As part of strengthening my voice, the Herald Journal removed “I try to believe.” Give that line another read without “I try to believe” and you’ll see the whole meaning is changed. It made the struggle to ignore racism that I’d outlined in the preceding paragraphs into childish puling.
Take a look at my photo. I have no idea how you perceive my race, but as a man moving from central New York to Miami I’m qualified to tell you that you’re only as ethnic as the people around you. I may seamlessly blend into the cultural mash that is Miami, but in East Syracuse I was once mistaken for black.
But my point is not whether or not I was subjected to racism as a child, or that you should have final approval on everything you publish; I wrote this blog because the Herald reporter told me that if I ever had something else close to my heart which I felt like writing about, I should give him a call. I thought contacts and opportunities like this would be available my whole life. I figured any time I wanted to express myself, someone would be there to bring my words to a larger audience. Charmingly naïve, or just naïve?
Beyond these two early brushes with writing success, there were awards and recognition for my art and backstage work, IQ tests, my SAT and ACT scores, a scholarship to a school I didn’t want to attend. Daily, I heard that I would do amazing things with my life. What I want to know is, when does an individual’s promise become promise unfulfilled?
Cassandra Wilson didn’t put her first album out until she was forty-two.
When do people stop encouraging you to follow your dreams and tell you to be realistic?
When does limitless potential become limited choices?
Ben Fountain was forty-eight when his first book Brief Encounters with Che Geuvara stormed the literary world, the mighty Charles Bukowski's first book wasn’t published until he was forty-nine, Alfred Hitchcock didn’t change cinematic history until an amazing string of films beginning at age fifty-four, pieces Cezanne painted in his mid-sixties are worth five times the art he painted in his twenties.
Artists who don’t have children are judged less harshly. If I decide to live in a Treehouse with few amenities and a fiscally tenuous position in the hope that I’ll someday work at something better, it affects no one but me. Meanwhile, parents are admonished to think about how their decisions affect their children. This is valid, but only part of the story.
I’d rather teach my child to work for his or her dreams than for a paycheck.
My seventh grade advanced English class studied the descriptive paragraph. We read one aloud, then picked one to memorize and perform in front of the class, and finally we had to write one of our own.
The example we read aloud was of a t-rex coming through the trees in the most re-published short story of all time, Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder. We underlined adverbs and circled adjectives, then looked up definitions and synonyms. We learned about the Butterfly Effect.
I was reading Frank Herbert's Dune, so I pulled a paragraph from there which starts, “A pre-dawn hush had fallen over the desert basin.” I don’t remember the rest.
The last part of the assignment is trickier to recall. I wrote a paragraph about a guy who visits his dead wife’s grave. Our teacher, Mrs. Temple, ripped it to pieces. When I applied her notes, the man became much older. He needed help getting out of his car. Before placing flowers on his dead wife’s grave, he he’d wrapped them in a wedding vale that had yellowed with age (“swathed in a yellowing wedding vale” was the line, God help us; what do you want, I was thirteen), and he leaned heavily on a cane for support.
Mrs. Temple read both drafts in front of the class, one after the other, and critiqued both. I remember getting odds looks from people after she read the second draft. They weighed me with their eyes, discovering me for the first time.
I think there was a paragraph we had to edit to make descriptive. The elements were there; the man, the car, the grave, the cane. Actually, all I remember for certain was the cane. In my first draft, the cane “kept rhythm with his spry step” as the man walked away, which doesn’t sound much like visiting a grave (unless you’re glad this person died, an entirely different kind of descriptive paragraph). In the second draft the man “leaned heavily on his cane” as he shuffled away. Did the cane bow with the weight of his aged body, with the weight of grief in his heart? I’m sure it would if I wrote it now...and I'll probably look back on that with disdain in years to come, too.
I remember how much I liked the image of the cane, tapping rhythm with the man’s shiny black shoes. Maybe that was one of the problems Mrs. Temple addressed in her notes, how out of place it seemed at a gravesite. Maybe there was no grave at all, and the only image I had was of the cane so I changed the destination. Who knows?
Memory is a strange thing. I’m wise enough now to know that my memory and facts are not the same things. However it happened, seventh grade English was my first lesson in the importance of the editing process, of taking work I’d done to entertain myself and changing it to communicate something with a reader. There is nothing a like a fresh, objective, keen set of eyes on a piece to make it sing.
I’ve been in Lip Service twice now. My favorite part of the process both times has been those rehearsals at Andrea's house the Wednesday before, a bunch of writers fueled by wine and snacks, eager to view each-other’s work and make it better.
It’s what brought me back. Reading in front of a crowd was mostly an afterthought.
“You asking me,” Catlett said, “do I know how to write down words on a piece of paper? That’s what you do, man, you put down one word after the other as it comes in your head. It isn’t like having to learn how to play the piano, like you have to learn notes. You already learned in school how to write, didn’t you? I hope so. You have the idea and you put down what you want to say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas and shit where they belong, if you aren’t positive yourself. Maybe fix up the spelling where you have some tricky words. There people do that for you. Some, I’ve even seen scripts where I know words weren’t spelled right and there was hardly any commas in it. So I don’t think it’s too important. You come to the last page you write in 'Fade out' and that’s the end, and you’re done.” - Elmore Leonard, Get Shorty
My preferred method of recommendation is quoting an author’s work. As you can see from the paragraph above, Elmore Leonard is funny, real, and spare. He’ll never come up with a line so poetic that hipsters want it tattooed across their shoulders, but if there’s another writer as masterful at revealing character through dialog, I’m taking nominations. Whoever you want to bring forward, it would still be called the Elmore Leonard Dialog Award.
He’s created some of pop culture’s most memorable characters, folks who populate his fiction and film. Chili Palmer. Karen Sisco. Ordell Robbie. Of course, for every Out of Sight and Jackie Brown, there’s a Big Bounce or a Stick.
More than providing hours of page-turning entertainment, I have Elmore Leonard to thank (or blame) for buckling down as a writer.
When Andi and I first moved to Miami, I was a mess. Looking for the job with the least amount of responsibility long before Lester Burnham, I’d gotten a job as a dishwasher at Bennigan’s some years before. Why go to school to teach yourself to be an artist? What did it matter what you did to keep food in your mouth and roof over your head? The work mattered, not the job.
Of course, this was before I knew what the work would be. That fundamental weakness in my pursuit of art led to a lot of late nights, LSD, and – most shamefully – to my spinelessness when presented with a dollar raise. I forgot my job was a necessary evil and not a calling
Airbrushing supplies gathered dust. T-squares collected cobwebs in corners. Paints dried up. The writing was dump and flush, amateur hour, the drivel of a dabbling dilettante (yes, I know that “dabbling dilettante” is redundant, but who can resist the alliterative pull? Say it five times fast, drivel of a dabbling dilettante, drivel of a dabbling dilettante… might make a better blog tagline than that if I care how others perceive my passions stuff. I’ll change it after I change the About Me section of my profile to “twat with a Tank Girl tattoo.”).
When Elmore Leonard pushed me into the writing life, I had the day off from my management job at Borders. I was watching a DVD of Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, which is based on Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch. I’d seen it so many times, just watching the movie wasn’t enough of a distraction. I decided to watch it with the text commentary.
1) Never open a book with weather. 2) Avoid Prologues. 3) Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue. 4) Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.” 5) Keep your exclamation points under control. 6) Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.” 7) Use regional dialect sparingly. 8) Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. 9) Don’t go into great detail describing places and things. 10) Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
All these rules have exceptions but the most important thing is- if it sounds like writing, rewrite it.
I hit the pause button on the DVD remote, sat up on the couch. The first draft of my first book opened with a prologue in which a person with a thick northeastern / reservation dialect talks about the weather (and how I heartily wish that was a joke). Clearly I had a lot of work to do. I ejected Jackie Brown from the DVD player and got to it.
I printed Elmore Leonard’s Rules for Remaining Invisible above my desk, imagining them posted above typewriters and computers across America. I started a program called “Mind Pissings” with the words what to write when you have no idea? Mind Pissings became my journal, my drawing board, the place where I wrote every morning at five am before my judgment bone woke up and stopped the circulation of my imagination.
At a Books & Books appearance some years later, Augusten Burroughs told aspiring writers to write every day, and on the days when they had nothing to write about and no ideas, they should write about having nothing to write about and no ideas.
It’s the habit. Like pushups and sit ups before bed. Switching fried food for salads. Thinking before speaking. The tiny, healthy steps which, in the fullness of time, will get you where you see yourself. It takes build up to make big leaps.
Thanks, Mr. Leonard. I build my room in the Tower of Babble by your grace.
A few years back, I was having difficulty with a volleyball scene in Ming. I introduced a lot of characters in a short period of time, many of them players who would only be used in the two gym class scenes. My writing group had a tough time telling the girls apart, except for Michelle Vale:
“Michelle probably brushed six feet. She was all knees and elbows, a praying mantis with braces on her teeth and sad, down-turned eyes. The dark roots of her blonde hair broadcast that it wasn’t her natural color. She’d applied her makeup with a less practiced hand than her friends, looking like a young girl playing dress up. She must have money, Ming decided. Popular girls could do sports but sport girls without money rarely did popular, even if she was a star.”
It’s not surprising my cohorts got a handle on Michelle. She was the only new character in the scene who mattered to me, the only one I saw clearly.
Eventually, re-writes made volleyball back into basketball, as it was in the original draft (switching computers, I’d somehow lost one hundred pages; changing the sport made me feel slightly better about having to rewrite what was my favorite scene). Michelle Vale became Michelle Polaski. I also introduced Michelle at the same time as Ming’s three other antagonists, much earlier in the story. I started with broad strokes, adding details as the scene continued.
It just occurred to me- I could further help the reader distinguish the girls by clarifying Ming’s different emotional reactions to them. Sometimes, I wonder how many years of learning on my own I could skip by taking a writing course.
Anyway, since giving new characters immediate distinction was something I struggled with, I’ve often noticed how folks I’m reading manage the trick.
“You suspect that his sexual orientation is largely theoretical. He’d take a hot piece of gossip over a warm piece of ass any day of the week.”
Dennis Lehane's short story “Running Out of Dog” features a Vietnam vet whose only outlet for his demons is shooting strays. Lehane immediately presents the character’s emotional identity:
“Blue was the kind of guy you never knew if he was quiet because he didn’t have anything to say or, because what he had to say was so horrible, he knew enough not to send it out into the atmosphere.”
Mystic River was one of my favorite reads of 2009, a modern tragedy with pathos to rival Shakespeare’s best. Mystic River offered some of the best character introductions I’ve read.
“It was a strong face, never pretty probably, but always striking. She was not unused to being stared at, Sean guessed, but was probably oblivious as to why she was worth the trouble. She reminded Sean a bit of Jimmy’s mother but without the air of resignation and defeat, and she reminded Sean of his own mother in her complete and effortless self-possession, reminded him of Jimmy, actually, in that way, as well. He could see Annabeth Marcus as being a fun woman, but never a frivolous one.”
Not quick sketches but mental Polaroids. You understand where she’s coming from immediately; everything after these snapshots is gravy.
Unfortunately, these paragraphs didn’t blend as seamlessly as the rest of the story. Because Lehane has the luxury of page time with his main characters, they’re allowed to unfold like petals in the morning sun. He needed to present secondary characters quickly so they can make their contribution to the story. I noticed every time.
I’d like to point out, this is criticism so gentle it qualifies as a subjective opinion. More of an observation, really.
Also, it could just be a side effect of writing. One of the things I hated most about majoring in musical theater was being unable to enjoy movies without picking them apart. After I stopped being involved with acting and theater, it took years to dissolve that critical eye and let a story sweep me away.
In the mighty Ben Fountain’s short story “Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera” (one of ten gems collected in Brief Encounters with Che Guevara), he offers this:
“Hernan [was] a slight mestizo youth with catlike looks and a manner as blank and flaky as cooled ashes.”
The language fits right in with his descriptions of the “gelatinous drizzle” of the rainy Colombian jungle. In less than two dozen words, Fountain introduces a new character, gives that character a sense of place, and shows us how untrusting the protagonist is of him. Functional, simple, and poetic, a masterstroke of character description.
Thinking about how I stack up in all of this gives me a headache.
It would be much easier to use the method Christopher Moore employs in the upcoming Bite Me: A Love Story to describe his vampire-fighting detective duo, Cavuto and Rivera. Moore already described them in 1995’s Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story and 2007’s You Suck: A Love Story. He probably assumed readers were already familiar with the cops, so why not squeeze in another joke?
Moore writes “Cavuto, if he’d been a flavor of ice cream, would have been Gay Linebacker Crunch.”
Meanwhile, “Rivera’s flavor was Low-Fat Spanish Cynic in an Armani Cone.”
It might not have the poetry of “blank and flaky as cooled ashes” but it gets you to the same place. I don’t think we, as readers and writers, should dismiss this as a joke. I’m sure the first time movies featured people in France speaking French-inflected English among themselves it was a bit jarring, but now we just suspend our disbelief when the lights go dark. We accept that there are no foreign languages, just English with different accents. We accept when friends espouse exposition at the main characters instead of just chatting. We accept black best friends without depth and people too good-looking for their lot in life and men dating women half their age.
Using ice cream flavors as characterizations would save pages of reading and tons of ink.
“If Walter Mitty had been an ice cream flavor, he would have been Diffident Nut.”
“If Dr. Jekyll had been an ice cream flavor, he would have been Obsessive Guilt and Violent Desire Swirl.”
“If Sancho Panza had been an ice cream flavor, he would have been Sweet Loyal Chunk.”
Writing hasn’t been going so well. The holidays always play hell with my schedule; I’ll lug my laptop on Thanksgiving vacation but the only times I know for certain I’ll use it are at the airport on the way up and at the airport on the way down. I’ll probably do some editing and I might, might, get an idea worth a few fresh pages, but usually if I’m not chatting with family, I’m reading. Then Christmas parties play hell with my bedtime, which plays hell with my early-morning writing sessions.
In the past, I haven’t judged my muse for needing a break as badly as I do.
This feels different. I’ve had this problem since I moved to the Treehouse, and it goes deeper than non-fiction taking over fiction. Stephen King says the secret of his fecundity is stability. Interviewers point to his horrific accident and his struggles with addiction; he points to his wife, Tabitha.
I mentioned some good ideas I had a few weeks back. New ideas usually spring from stepping away from the daily cursor push and giving my subconscious time to shift things about. I’ll find a new way of looking at an old story, the realization of what it’s lacking or where it went off the rails, or I’ll discover an entirely new story. I credit this latest batch to Becky. I didn’t feel particularly desperate before we started dating. I felt sad and lonely, but not desperate.
I fooled myself, but not my muse. Like any good woman, she smelled my desperation and stayed away. As Becky’s presence has allowed me to look back on my marriage with more honesty, being with her also brought the sense of play back to my writing. Playing is what I enjoy most about fiction. The examination of reality is necessary for my mental health, but it can be exhausting when that’s all there is.
I’ve allowed my self-discipline to slide. What the hell, my life fell apart, right? Who would expect me to stay one hundred percent grounded? Now, I’m in the glow of new love. What the hell, I’ve been miserable for months, right? Who would demand I pull my head out of the clouds and do the work than needs doing on me? Emotional growth, self-examination, reflection, re-examination, yada-yada-yada. Not fun, but vital. And there’s work to be done on my stories, new characters to introduce to the world. Not vital, but fun.
For the most part, my family legacy is not steeped in success, it’s one of setbacks, lowered expectations, and bitterness. My goals this year should be loftier than getting my love life back in order.
Of course, it took getting love back in my life in order for me to see that. Life is odd.
I’ve often told people I’ve written past the point where it matters whether I’m published. True, but only part of the story. John Dufresne, in the excellent Lie That Tells a Truth, has an entire chapter on the profound indifference with which you can expect the world to greet both your decision to be a writer and the work itself. Basically, Dufresne says if you want to change the world, stop writing now. If you want to change yourself, have at it.
In that sense, I have written past the point where being published matters. I need it like sleep. I’ll have some restless nights, or stay out late reveling a few evenings in a row. I can still push through my days, but I’ll be irritable, on edge. Sooner or later, I need to make up for that deficit with a deep, coma-like sleep.
A friend of mine uses coma to describe any activity so powerful that it shuts out the rest of the world. Book coma. Food coma. I’ve been skipping days of writing and then settling at the keyboard for hours, but I’m missing a good writing coma. The one that pulls me out of bed the second the five am alarm goes off because it was the last thing I thought of before I slept, the one speaking so vividly it nearly writes itself.
The project which had been giving me that feeling – the third, final, and correct re-imagining of my first book, Scratch the Dead Places – died when my marriage died. I’m not sure why. I look back at things I’ve written before the accident and see how I’ve evolved (some have commented that the first and second drafts of Scratch could have been written by two different people). Writing starts with knowing where it put your commas and shit, but the process itself is about finding your voice, being able to communicate exactly what you want. But it you want more than your friends and family to read it, there better be truth, and depth. I was working toward those things, but the accident saved me many years of cursor pushing, putting me more in touch with my emotions and therefore the emotional lives of my characters.
The end of my marriage is more than a broken heart. It’s a broken world view. Love conquers all, until the end of time, etc. etc. I believed in all of that. Now, I don’t. To some people, that’s maturity. It’s left this former hopeless romantic floundering.
I don’t think I woke from my Scratch the Dead Places coma for the usual reasons. I don’t think the story went off the rails, that I need to step away so I can realize where I took the wrong turn. I don’t see a lack of depth or truth which makes it the unsalvageable effort of a fledgling writer. It might be a measure of guilt. It involves the murder of five children, the sort of lurid thriller I judge harshly. Really, Aaron? This is how you want to introduce yourself to the world? Isn’t there enough ugliness out there?
One of my favorite books in the thriller genre is Stephen Dobyn's The Church of Dead Girls. It’s disturbing, and grotesque, but not bloody or puerile, a literate study of small-town paranoia about as far removed from Chelsea Cain or Jeff Lindsay as you can get. I don’t think I can judge myself too harshly for following my muse down this path; my story is about consequences, not dead children.
If I push that safe reason aside, I’m left with the relationship between the protagonist, Thomas Walters, and the woman to whom he is telling his story, Laura Moya. Thomas Walters is not me. Laura Moya is not Andi. But they are only a couple turns of the kaleidoscope from reality.
