Hello, I am Traci Chee & this is my blog.

Truly Delighted!

2012-03-06T20:34:00.000-08:00

Having finished ten TPA questions, which took me about three hours total, I felt like I earned myself a little break tonight. In that break I’m rewatching Midnight in Paris. I blogged about the movie when I first saw it last year, and now that I’m watching it again, I’ve just got to say something.

Delightful.

Just… delightful.

In the midst of all this… in all the TPAing, the lesson planning, the grading, the doing homework and the assigning homework, the arranging of meetings and the meetings themselves, in short, in the midst of all this mundane life stuff, I’m reminded that life stuff is not just made up of the tedious, the troublesome, and the difficult-to-bear. Life stuff can be delightful.

I had a hard time getting to sleep the other night, and the way I ultimately calmed down was by listening to this song:

1B from the album Appalachian Journey. I feel like if there was a song that was also my soul, it would be this one. It reminds me of mountains. It makes me think of streams and wet rocks and dusty pine air. And stones sliding under your feet as you hike uphill, and quartz veins, and rough granite biting into your hands, and white sky, and your dog running wild through the manzanita, and silence.

I get so caught up in the doing, in the constant shuffle of my daily life, that I forget to think about the parts of life that are truly delightful. You know, the ones that nourish your soul. If nothing else, Midnight in Paris reminds me that I can be delighted. Truly delighted!

Now here are some things that make me happy:

Blackberry Lemonade

Mountains Sliding into Water

Ancient Trees Growing Out of Ancient Stones

Art and Innovation

Mountains and Cold Stars

The Future of the Book Part II (Choose Your Own Adventure Edition)

2012-02-28T20:34:00.001-08:00

For the past few months I’ve been reading, with agonizing slowness, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr. (In all honesty, I’m a terrible reader of nonfiction. There are few books of nonfiction that I’ve finished. In my defense, however, I’ve been reading, writing, planning, and grading so many other things that my brain is often shot by the end of the day, and I can’t even devote mental energy to sustained reading, much less sustained interactive reading. Ergo, the excruciatingly long time it’s taken me to read this book.) I’m about 75-80% through, and so far, it’s been like this: The first half of the book traces the development of the communicative technologies—writing, printing, the newspaper, the internet—while interspersing this information with research into the inner workings of the brain: how it learns, how it processes, how it can be trained, etc. All in all, it’s been very, very interesting, because I feel like the subjects in this book are directly linked to the subjects that captivate me: how what we read influences how we think, how what we write is intertwined with what we write in (or on), yadda yadda yadda.

If our modes of communication are all headed towards the digital and the networked—in other words, towards the internet—and I’m fairly sure they are, then it’s worth considering the future of the book in relation to that medium. However, reading The Shallows is making me wonder if there is a future for the book. Is the digitization of literature, like the digitization of information, necessarily fracturing it… in a way that may possibly destroy the beauty or integrity or human truth that so many of us consider essential to the art form? When I drafted this blog entry in my pen-and-paper journal, I had my doubts. But while I think it would be easy for the art of literature to disintegrate into the internet, I don’t think it’s inevitable. Just difficult to overcome, because it requires writers (and readers) to think in a different—nonlinear—way.

On an obvious level, the easiest way to translate (or upgrade?) the print book to electronic book is to use the technique of hyperlinking to create a more advanced version of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story. In Wikipedia terms: a hyperlink is “a reference to data that the reader [or user] can directly follow.” To those of us with computer and internet access, hyperlinks have become ubiquitous: We link to websites, streaming video and music, PDF documents, email addresses, you name it. In a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, the plot progresses in a tree-form, with each “choice” branching the narrative into a number of directions, some of which intersect with alternate plot lines, some of which dead end or circle back. So if you incorporated links into an electronic novel, the novel might become something like an advanced version of one of those plot-driven stories, written in second-person, where, after reading two or three pages, you, the reader, is faced with a choice:

You open the door. Turn to page 45.

You knock on the door. Turn to page 76.

You turn around and leave. Turn to page 23.

When you turn to page 45 (or 76, or 23), you either read another two or three pages or you get something like this:

You decide that you must open the door. Turn to page 22.

Page 22, of course, leads you directly to the same choice you had just tried to make. A choice that was, apparently, wrong.

I encountered “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories when I was in elementary school, during a brief stint in which I read R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series. Stine also penned a series called Give Yourself Goosebumps, a version of the “Choose Your Own Adventure.” I read a few, but I remember being constantly disappointed because although the books gave you the illusion of making choices, there always seemed to be a “real” or “set” storyline that you were supposed to follow, a series of choices that you were supposed to make, and if you didn’t choose correctly, “you” died or were, like on page 22, circled back to the choice to try and make it again.

This type of storytelling ultimately begins to resemble a text-based video game, in which you, the player, read descriptions of areas (rooms, dungeons, etc.) and the objects and characters in it. You type in basic commands and these commands open up other descriptions or commands.

It would take, I believe a spectacularly nonlinear mind, to create a “Choose Your Own Adventure” electronic book with a plot that doesn’t merely branch out or have one “good” or “goal” ending. It would be easy, I think, to create a plot-driven mystery, or adventure, with very little character development, in which all of the reader’s interest depends on the action of the plot. But the great possibility of an electronic “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel (and I’m talking only of narratives here) is the possibility of a character-driven story, in which the reader makes choices that alter the way character develops, so that discovering Information A changes the images you get when you encounter Description B, or the choices you have when you get to Action C. This type of “Choose Your Own Adventure” would not necessarily progress in tree-form, with branches that only loop back on themselves to service the forward motion of the plot, but the main events, information, or description could be encountered in a multitude of ways, and each time, depending on what you have already read or encountered or chosen, they would seem necessarily different, by juxtaposition, or by the order of what has come before. This type of electronic book would not simply be a more efficient form of the clunky, cliché “Choose Your Own Adventure,” but a more nuanced and complex form of reading, in which the act of navigating the book influences the content of the book itself, and the resonances that content has for the reader.

Hello 2012

2012-01-18T21:35:00.000-08:00

Hello, blog world! At long last I’m back and blogging with a vengeance. Sort of. Among my new year’s resolutions, there’s one that seems particularly relevant here: to write in my journal three times each week. If you remember, I tried to do such a thing last semester—tried and failed horribly. Why is it that even though I know writing nourishes my soul in a way that only mountains and Lord of the Rings can, when the going gets tough, it’s the first thing to go? (Honestly, the answer is simple: writing is hard. Collapsing exhausted in front of the TV with frozen pizza is easy.) This time around, however, things are different, and here’s why:

Three weeks ago I began my student teaching semester at Dominican University. Rather than sitting in the back of a classroom taking notes and occasionally picking up the odd lesson here or there, as I did last semester, for the next five months I’m developing curriculum, running classrooms, grading papers, and in general being awesome. And learning. Oh there has been so much learning. (More on this later.)

To the point: my eighth graders have a journaling requirement of three page-long entries per week. these journals are worth a full ten percent of their grade. Now, I’ve caught more than a few of them on more than one occasion writing not three in a week but eight to ten in a single night, in the twenty-four hours before a month’s worth of journals are due. I’ve also read more than one entry complaining that it’s too much. Being the reflective teacher that I am, I started thinking… Is it too much? Now, I’m pretty sure that I’m just as busy—if not more so—than my thirteen-year-old students, so I decided to take this as a challenge—or, rather, as an opportunity: If I expect my class of extraordinarily busy middle schoolers to write three journal entries per week, then I better damned well expect the same of myself. Because I’m a writer.

So here we are. I can’t devote every entry to the fiction writing I’ve been neglecting (Novel, I miss you!), but I can certainly use the time to draft my blog entries and get back to some serious, regularly scheduled blogging. I began writing this longhand on Monday night, which means I’m at least a day late in posting.

Now, the holiday season has come and gone, much to my disappointment, since the month between Thanksgiving and New Years is my favorite time of the year, but here are the highlights:

I decorated the apartment (with significant assistance from boyfriend, who is, fortunately, tall enough to reach the high ceilings). While I was growing up, my family used to go out and get our Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving. It was a huge deal—my aunts and uncles and cousins, and my grandpa, would all get together and we’d go Christmas tree hunting in what seemed like these far-off country locations.

Then, when we got back, we’d put up the tree, and my mom would start decking the halls. There were lights and garlands and ornaments and nutcrackers and little stuffed bears wearing Christmas sweaters and a sparkly reindeer that I loved and, oh yes, upside-down Christmas trees suspended from the ceiling!

Having a decorated house puts me in the Christmas spirit. It makes me believe that the holiday season is a time where people go out of their way to be nicer to each other, to reach out, and to celebrate.

I was big into decorating the house I lived in in college and now that I have a place of my own, I had to do it here too.

Because of my busy schedule last semester, it took me a while, but I finally got everything up. The garland arrangements, the tiny tree on the bedroom dresser, the lights in the hallway and the dozens of snowflakes we cut by hand!

And it was totally worth it.

Then, of course, there was Christmas in Angels, with an amazing brunch prepared by one of my best friends in the entire world…

And, after nearly three years, my dog finally learned how to open presents!

To her dismay, one of her presents was this wonderfully tiny tiny hat by Goorin Bros. She hated it. I loved it.

All of the other dogs hated it too.

Following Christmas, boyfriend, dog, and I took a quick trip to Tahoe, where there was no snow, but totally ice. Yes, totally ice.

Entire lakes were frozen over, thick enough to walk on!

All things considered, it was a good trip. Also, I got to make this for my sixth graders. They're writing short stories, and I wanted to make an example setting for them. It just so happened to be one of the settings in the Navigator:

Happy 2012. I got tons of stuff to do this year and I'ma gonna do it!

There's Nothing Quite Like a Real Book

2012-01-10T08:39:00.000-08:00

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

2011-12-29T08:45:00.000-08:00

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Wallace Stevens

Renegade Book Art

2011-12-02T08:12:00.000-08:00

story at npr

and

full story here

This One's Called 'Monster Eats the Pilot'

2011-11-29T08:47:00.000-08:00

When I was an undergraduate I was obsessed with the TV show “LOST.” My house mate Rosie borrowed the first season DVDs from her brother, and she started watching them. Then my house mate Vinh joined in. Then RUby, my roommate. And finally me. We probably watched the first few episodes three or four times before everyone was caught up, but we were so hooked. SO. HOOKED. We’d watch episode after episode, sometimes four in a row. And when we were done with the DVDs, we started watching “LOST” on Wednesday nights. It was a big deal. Dinner, friends, and TV. I have such good memories of Wednesday night dinner parties and “LOST” watching.

Now, finally, I’m rewatching it on Netflix. I just saw the first episode yesterday, and it’s interesting to think that the actions of the characters in the first episode are somehow indicative of where they end up when it all goes down in the final season. That’s good character plotting. Or really, just the excellent and awesome kind of inevitable ending that us writers are always striving for.

Heads up, there are spoilers. Like major ending spoilers, so if you don’t watch “LOST” or want to watch “LOST,” you might want to stop reading now and check back next week.

But here’s how I see it.

It all comes down to three main people in the end, right? Jack, Locke, and Hurley. Locke “becomes” the black smoke monster/the man in black, the noxious evil thing trying to destroy everything by leaving the island. Locke becomes the “bad guy,” and even though you don’t see anything like it in the beginning, think about what Locke does in the first episode. One, he helps Jack lift the guy with the injured leg out from underneath a huge piece of plane. As Jack runs off to help Claire, Locke and some other survivors carry off injured-leg-guy and while they do so, a dude runs in front of the spinning engine. Locke yells at him to get away from there, but the very act of him yelling stops the dude in his tracks and he gets sucked up into the engine. Bang, Locke is, at least in part, the cause of someone’s death, right there in the very first episode.

Two, and this is a small thing, but when Kate is taking the boots off of a corpse so she can use them, Locke smiles at her. He has a big slice of orange in his mouth. And the first time I saw it, I thought it was kind of a sweet moment. But this time around I realize he’s smiling at her while she’s looting a corpse. Which makes it kind of creepy.

Then there’s Jack, who could have been the protector of the island, right? Who was, for a very short time. And that makes sense, because he spends the first ten minutes of the episode rescuing people and caring for them and making sure they’re all right. He shows that he’s a natural leader; he’s got those instincts, which is why the survivors end up following him for a time. (But then, as we all know, he gets way stupid in the middle and every time there’s a Jack episode you go, “Stupid Jack…”) The point is that in this episode his first reaction is to take care of people.

But let’s look at Hurley. He helps Claire out, under Jack’s direction, sure, but the one thing he does on his own in the first episode is feed people.

The night of the plane crash, he goes to get those nasty airline meals and he distributes them among the survivors. He even gives Claire two. The essential difference between Jack and Hurley is that while they both try to help people, Jack’s main mode of doing so can only occur after they’ve been hurt. He can’t fix or heal people unless they’re broken or sick first. Hurley’s main way of helping people is to feed them, to nourish them, to build them up. His is, at its core, proactive. Jack’s is necessarily reactive. And if someone is going to be the caretaker of all the light in the world, it should be the one that doesn’t need things to go to hell before he can do his job. It should have always been Hurley.

The first episode, then, drops hints about the ending. Elusive, have-to-dig-for-them hints, but hints nonetheless. If you're paying attention, you know who it has to be. And you know who it cannot be. And the ending--at least a part of it--becomes inevitable.

My First Experience with an eBook, Plus Doodles from the Past Month

2011-11-22T19:03:00.000-08:00

I started reading my first-ever e-book yesterday night. My good friend Vinh lent me his Kindle so that I could speed through A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens during the Thanksgiving break, because the sixth grade class I’m working with is reading it as soon as we get back, and do you know how hard it is to teach a book you haven’t read?

Really hard.

So thank you, Kindle (and Vinh), for providing me with free access to a classic holiday story. As I suspected, reading an e-book is a completely different experience from reading a real, honest-to-goodness physical book, and I’m wondering how this new medium, if it takes, which it probably will, will change what we read, the way we read, the way we think about reading, and the way we think. So far I’ve noticed two important differences: One, you don’t turn a page—you press a button. I think what this means is that you don’t see the change, the way the page curls, the recto/verso (front/back) of a sheet of paper. The new text just appears in front of you, magically, as if from nowhere. Unlike a physical book, the “page” of an e-book only exists (observably) when you’re viewing it. All the other “pages,” all that text in the chapters before and after this one, aren’t there, so the page exists in isolation.

Two—and this is related to one, I think—you can’t see how far you have until the end of the chapter, and you can’t see how far you’ve gotten since you started reading. I found this the most frustrating part of reading, because I really wanted to get to the end of the first section of A Christmas Carol but even as my eyes started closing on me, I had no idea how close or far I was. I ended up shutting the book (off) because I was so annoyed. What this means is that when you’re reading an e-book, there’s no measure of your progress. You miss that feeling of looking at your bookmark or dog-eared page and going, “Hey, look at that! I’m already halfway through the book!” or “Wow, only twenty pages left…!” There’s nothing to tell you how well you’re doing or how far you’ve gone, so reading an e-book is missing that feeling of accomplishment, or that feeling of hopelessness, depending on how much you still have to go. (On the other hand, because there’s no way to measure your progress, if you have the time, you can “get lost” in a book without feeling guilty for reading one hundred pages in a single setting.)

I’m not sure what all of this means yet, but I figured since I finally have the time to write a blog, I’d better keep track of my thoughts. The sad fact of the matter is that I haven’t had the time to write, or think about writing, or think about reading, or do much of anything, really. Just student teaching during the day, attending classes at night, and squeezing in homework, lesson planning, and grading in the time that’s left over.

Here is the past month of my life in pictures that I’ve drawn in my notebook while I’m supposed to be paying attention in class.

This is the progression of my enthusiasm for course work. If you remember, I started out pretty excited! And then I realized I hated half of my classes. And then I realized I had to keep going to them.

This is how I felt every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday night when I walked into the classroom.

I am learning things, however, and this is one of them. Sharing! Doodle courtesy of my new friend Jake.

Jamie and I are thumbs-up buddies!

I have also learned the meaning of teamwork! It is this.

Also included in this picture are the games of "Six Degrees of Separation" that I played during lecture.

However, most of the time, while in class, I feel like this.

And when I’m not in class, I’m like this.

Or this.

That’s what I should be doing now, actually. Because I’ve got a TPA (Teaching Performance Assessment) to complete! For those of you who don’t know about TPAs, lemme tell you: They’re awful. They make me want to pull out my hair. And my eyes. And my brain. They’re a series of four at-home exams with about 50 short-answer/essay questions per exam. That isn’t the terrible part. The terrible part is that they’re so repetitive that completing them feels like standing on a factory line assembling bits of pedagogical jargon over and over and over and over and over again. This is what I drew when they were presented to me:

None of my instructors look like this, FYI.

Yes. Only two more weeks of classes this semester. Thank goodness.

Famous Last Words

2011-10-06T09:08:00.000-07:00

L. Frank Baum

from buzzfeed

The Library

2011-09-29T17:05:00.000-07:00

This has always been one of those stories that just blows my mind every single time I read it.

Oh, Joy

2011-09-25T16:14:00.000-07:00

I feel like I’m working two jobs. Last week, I put in sixteen hours of observation time at my placement school, not counting the three lunch periods I threw in for free. I also attended fifteen hours of classes, spent five hours commuting, and put nineteen into homework and grading. I suspect that that’s a little shy of sixty (but I also thought that a nine-to-one Saturday class meant five hours), and maybe that’s peanuts to some of you, but it’s a peanut mountain to me. I feel like I barely have enough time to feed, bathe, and clothe myself, much less to put gas in my car, to go grocery shopping, and to walk my poor little dog.

This also means that I don’t have time to do the things I love. The things that make me happy, relax me, and bring me back to myself. I haven’t been able to go hiking, or on a different, more materialistic note, shopping. I haven’t been able to partake in the slew of prime time network TV shows that sprung up last week! I haven’t been able to bake, which normally restores my equilibrium when I’m stressed out. And I haven’t been able to read. Or write.

Normally, even when I’m busy with other things, I’ll be able to at least go to sleep thinking about and dreaming up ideas for stories that I’m working on. Stuff doesn’t get written down, but at least I’m able to dwell on it for those precious few moments before I fall asleep.

This hasn’t been happening lately. For the past few nights, I’ve lain in bed trying to get back to the Navigator, trying to get back to anything, the stories I’ve been wanting to write for years, the images or motifs or metaphors that I want to expand into narratives, and… well… I’ve gotten nothing. My brain feels empty. Or, rather, my brain feels sapped of all its creative energy, and by the time I have a few minutes to spare, it’s depleted and deflated and there’s nothing there.

Ironically, one of my reading assignments for today was from a book called Conscious Classroom Management, in a chapter devoted to stress. It includes the subheading “Taking Care of Ourselves,” which nearly made me laugh out loud. Do I have time to take care of myself? Hell. No. I feel like I’m forcibly holding myself together with duct tape and paper clips, and at the slightest breath of wind I’ll get ripped apart.

The thing is, I used to like breaths of wind. I used to find the breeze enchanting. Cold, yes, but enchanting nonetheless. Wind meant change, and things moving, and stuff being swept clean. Now wind means inconvenience and things falling apart and me dropping the proverbial ball. These past few nights before falling asleep I haven’t been thinking about my novel, or story ideas, or anything, really, except the amount of work I’ll have the next day/week/month/semester and the fact that I haven’t been really, excruciatingly delighted by something lately.

I think I’m missing joy.

Or, honestly, I haven’t allowed myself the time for joy. I haven’t exposed myself to the kinds of experiences that give me joy. I haven’t read any poetry lately. I haven’t considered the beauty of the word. I haven’t gone on a good long walk, and I haven’t given myself the time to stop thinking about all the things I need to do and to consider things like the sculpture of the ocean or the crest of a mountain. Hell, I don’t remember the last time I saw a mountain.

Except for that peanut mountain I'm buried under, I guess.

I have a new plan for next week, and it goes thus:

1) I'm required to put in 8-12 observation hours at my placement school. Last week I did sixteen. This is definitely not happening again, which should free up some spare time.

2) I've finished a significant number of next week's homework assignments, which means I should be able to sneak time to do things to recharge my batteries... like nap.

3) I'm going to include teeny tiny leisure activities into my schedule. They will be quick, but they'll be something. Reading poetry, for one. Writing in my journal, for two.

4) The Hardly Strickly Bluegrass Festival is next weekend and no way am I going to miss out on the free concert and the good music!

Writing and Freedom

2011-09-19T21:38:00.000-07:00

As all of you now know, I’ve been busy. Out-of-my-mind busy. Off-the-deep-end busy. Explosively busy. End-of-the-world-as-you-know-it busy. At the beginning of this month, I not only moved into a new apartment in the city, I also started college for the third time. This go-round, I’m earning a single subject teaching credential so that I can teach English in public schools. (Yes, that’s right. Being a master is not enough. I also have to be… credentialed.) A bunch of teaching credential programs are two years, and I can see why. I’m cramming all of my coursework, observation, and student teaching into one year (that’s two semesters), and honestly the whole thing is not only exhausting, it’s also making me a little crazy.

Crazier?

Crazier.

I have five three-hour classes on weeknights, observations at a school site to do during the day, commuting to get to both places, and homework to do all the times in between. I’m barely managing to squeeze in things like “grocery shopping” and “clean and organize the house” and “take care of my dog.” And I really mean barely.

That said, some of this is probably my own fault. I’m a chronic over-achiever. So while I’m required to do 8-12 hours of classroom observations per week, last week I did 13, and I’m well on my way to 15 for this week.

I don’t know why I do this to myself.

Or, really, I do. I like learning. And I like being good at things. And I like teaching.

So this week I only have questions for you. Just questions I'm hoping to answer someday. I’ve been re-reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie with the 8th grade class I’ve been observing most frequently, and that’s gotten me thinking about the relationship between writing and freedom.

Without giving too much away, the novel is about a young Native American teenager who decides to leave his high school on the reservation in order to attend the affluent white rival high school. He faces discrimination and violence in various forms, and navigates his heavily segregated world with help from his art—the diary he writes and the cartoons that he draws.

Reading and writing keep cropping up in this book, and that’s gotten me thinking. See, in this book, there are readers and there are writers. There are people who consume art—by reading—and there are people who create art—by writing, or drawing. The consumers, the ones who read, are trapped. They’re stuck. They can’t get out of their situations. The creators, the writers and artists, are the ones who leave. The ones who go out and get what they want. The ones who are set free.

Bear in mind I’m only about two thirds of the way through, and maybe things will change by the end, but this is the way things seem to stand right now. And I’m wondering: How does writing set you free?

What is it about the act of creation that saves you? What is it about getting your thoughts and feelings and imaginings outside of yourself that’s so important? Is it something about relating yourself to the rest of the world? Getting a tiny part of yourself out there? Why do we need to express, or share, or communicate in order to set ourselves free?

Busy

2011-09-12T20:26:00.000-07:00

I've been so busy! I haven't had time to blog or write and I've barely had the time to stay sane through all of this! I promise to write a blog about this eventually, but for now, it's all I've got in me to keep on top of all the other stuff I have to do.

You Are What You Eat

2011-09-01T08:19:00.000-07:00

Read all about it.

Im(prompt)u

2011-08-29T15:35:00.000-07:00

Hello writers and readers and family and friends!

On this busy Monday, while I'm overwhelmed with school and student teaching observation scheduling and moving into a new apartment, I am very, very pleased to announce that my wonderful and talented friends Laura Edgar and Renee Nelson have just revved up a new literary magazine, Im(prompt)u Review!

Their idea is to discover, uncover, and celebrate the writing process, and I had the privilege of contributing to their debut issue, dedicated to the evolution of that process. I was lucky enough to share webspace with writers harold terezón and Kristi Moos, and I totally recommend checking out their essays as well.

If you are a writer, check out their prompts page and maybe you can contribute to the next issue! Have a good week everybody!

ebook

2011-08-25T09:25:00.000-07:00

Book or not book?

New Chapters

2011-08-22T15:21:00.000-07:00

On the evening of December 31, 2010, I was celebrating the new year with my friend Rachel in a donut shop on 10th and Clement. I remember it being chilly. The door wouldn’t stay shut, and it remained half-cracked the whole time we were there, despite all my attempts to close it. I had bought a chocolate old-fashioned and a carton of milk, which I used to toast the new year, declaring, with full gravity, that 2011 would be the Year of Moving On.

Despite having the best summer of my life in 2010, the year as a whole was full of half-successes, abandoned plans, and unfulfilled goals. 2011, I decided, was going to be different. I set myself three major life goals, all of them lofty and if I had been practical maybe I would have aimed a little lower, but was I ever practical?

1. Get into college (again). After two years in Angels Camp, volunteering and substitute teaching at my childhood schools, among teachers that had become my peers, I realized that I wanted to teach… for reals. And to do so, I needed a teaching credential—and another year (or two!) of college.

2. Move back to San Francisco. This goal was to coincide with Goal #1. If I was going to attend school in the Bay Area, I better damned well live close enough to do it. I fled to blissfully slow country life immediately after graduating from State in 2009, and it was time to leave home (again) and move on—to getting my credential, to getting my own place, to starting life as an independent adult, complete with money, bills, errands, cooking, money, job, insurance, money, etc. It was just time.

3. Get my book published. I had left San Francisco with a nearly complete (but not quite) short story collection that I worked and reworked and reworked during my time in the country, finally finishing it in late 2009, when I started sending query letters and manuscripts out to independent publishers and small presses. This was probably the longest shot in my series of goals, but it wasn’t he last one to come through.

By spring of this year, despite often feeling like the doors I proverbially tried to open kept proverbially getting shut in my face, I had already accomplished two of my goals: I was accepted into Dominican University of California (not to mention the two other schools to which I applied, thus maintaining my 10/10 unblemished college acceptance record). And my collection, Consonant Sounds for Fish Songs, had been accepted for publication by Aqueous Books.

Two out of three ain’t bad, but I’m happy to announce that I’ve finally—finally—landed an apartment in San Francisco. I signed the lease yesterday, got renters insurance today, and move-in is next Sunday. It’s all going a little fast for me, but I guess when it rains it pours, right?

You see, school is also starting. Tonight I attend my first class at Dominican, and I’m not sure what to expect. It’s been a couple years since I’ve been a student, and although I can reasonably assume the classroom routine will all come back to me once I get started, I feel like I’ve forgotten how to be a student. To have your life revolve around classes, papers, exams, and regularly scheduled holidays. I bought a notebook—not a laptop notebook, a spiral-bound college-ruled notebook notebook—and that’s all the preparation I’ve done so far. Am I missing something?

These next couple weeks will be full of new things on two fronts: At school, new campus to explore, instructors and colleagues to meet, books to buy and read and highlight, homework to do, classes to attend, student teaching observations to make… and at home, new apartment, new furniture, new neighborhood, new daily routines, a new space to make my own. Don’t get me wrong—I like new things, but that’s a helluva lot of new at once. As someone who’s prone to worrying (an affliction I like to call “planning”), I’m beginning to feel overwhelmed and underprepared.

It’s become clear to me today that I am starting—in the most clearly delineated way— a new chapter of my life. For the past two years, I’ve been in a transitional state. My graduation from SF State in June 2009 and my father’s death a month later marked the end of an entire book of my life—the one where life could still be simple and I could still believe that there was a rhyme and a reason to the way things happened and what we had to go through; and the past two years have been a stuttering introduction to a new way of thinking about the world and being in it. I needed to be home in Angels Camp, for a while, just to get my bearings again, to figure out what I thought and wanted, and I needed that magnificent summer in South Lake Tahoe to remind me that the world can be absolutely spectacular if you’re in the right place with the right people doing the right things. I spent what feels like the majority of 2010 waiting for things to happen and then having them not happen at all.

But 2011, I told you, was going to be the year of moving on.

If my life had page breaks, there’d be one here. Good-bye transitional period. Good-bye vague sense of aimlessness and doubt. For the first time in a couple years, I’ve got a real sense of direction. I’m going to school again. I’m earning a teaching credential. I’m living in San Francisco and I plan to be teaching here for the next few years. I have a place to live. I have friends and family. I have a dog! Who is awesome!

New chapters are all about finding out what comes next. (That’s what makes the ends of chapters page-turners, the burning unquenchable desire to find out what happens!) Sometimes the characters have just discovered some sort of plot-changing information. Sometimes they’ve just stumbled into a quagmire or labyrinth or trap. Sometimes things in the previous chapter have simply come to a close; all the important plot events have occurred and the characters have done all the developing they can do there.

That’s me, here, right now. Starting today, things are going to be different. A private university? An hour-and-a-half commute five days a week? An apartment of my very own? This is new, vast, unexplored territory! These are new, vast, unexplored pages. Hello, new chapter. Let’s get crackin’.

ebook

2011-08-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

Read all about it.

What is a book?

2011-08-16T10:17:00.000-07:00

I’ve been planning a post called “The Future of the Book Part II” (electronic books edition) as a follow-up to, well, “The Future of the Book Part I”, in which I addressed some of the possibilities for the physical book. But while I’ve been scheming about this, I’ve realized that I never talked about what a book is before I went on and on about what a book could be.

Here is a book that’s recognizable as a book. It is a sheaf of papers of uniform size and shape slapped between two covers (like a page-sandwich!) and bound along one edge. This type of book is called a codex. These days codices have pages made of paper (made of wood) and thick cardboard covers and there’s usually glue/thread holding the whole shebang together. Back in the day they had pages made of vellum, which is very very very thin animal skin, and covers of metal and jewels.

Inside the book are words. Sometimes those words are accompanied by pictures:

Sometimes, however, there are no words and no pictures:

But these books have the potential for words and/or pictures, and their physical form matches the codex form. They’d still be considered books.

But what about this creature?

This is called a “fold book.” The pages are folded, rather than bound with glue or thread, but they’re printed with words and/or pictures, and there’s even a front and back “cover” enclosing the whole thing when it’s folded up. Book or not-book?

Here’s another:

This type of book is called a “dos a dos.” It features pages bound along one edge and two covers, but the back cover serves two codices, so that you can read first one side, then flip it over and read the other side. Book or not-book?

This is a fan with writing on it. We’ve all made fans before, by folding a sheet of paper back and forth and pinching one end together. It has “pages” of a sort, and they’re bound along one edge. Book or not-book?

Codices, fold books, dos a dos, fans could all be "books" in the sense that they're constructed like books and have the possibility of transmitting information through words and/or pictures. You could tell the story of "The Three Little Pigs" in any of these forms. You could write a poem in any of these forms. That makes them books... right?

Still, there are other things that look like books--like codices, specifically--but I don't know that we'd consider them books. We might call them "art books" or "book art."

It's a book! It's a sculpture! It's book art! This one looks like a codex, but some of its pages have been turned into an octopus and a three-masted ship.

What about this one? It has pages and it's bound and there are words inside it, but does it count as a book? Can you "read" it the way you'd "read" The Very Hungry Caterpillar?

This one? There are no pages and no words, but it's recognizable as a codex.

Or this one? Pages, covers, bound along one edge, but it's made of metal and there are no words. Is it still a book?

I bring all of this up not to give answers but to ask questions. What is a book? What characteristics make it a book? It is the form? The content? Can something be a book if it doesn't have all of these characteristics? Can we tell a different kind of story depending on the form the "book" takes? Does a different book form open up different possibilities for the things we can say?

The Monstrous

2011-08-11T16:35:00.000-07:00

One of the turning points in my writing-life was in grad school, when I took a class called "Experimental Fiction" with Dodie Bellamy. We were reading Incubation by Bhanu Kapil, and our writing prompt was this:

Write about the monstrous.

Consider monstrous form as well as content.

For the first time in my life, someone asked me to go crazy with the formatting. I didn't have to defend the way I used italics or different font colors or wrote in the margins or turned the page upside down. It was asked of me.

I wrote about love. But I didn't stop there. This class--in particular, this prompt--showed me that the things I wanted to write weren't wrong. They were glorious and messy and full of potential, and it was totally okay to embrace them. To be glorious and messy and full of potential.

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

2011-08-08T15:24:00.000-07:00

The list of movies I’ve seen this summer isn’t very impressive: The Green Lantern, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, and Captain America. Okay, maybe their budgets were impressive. Maybe they spent inconceivably enormous amounts of money. (They did.) Or maybe their special effects were impressive. Maybe it was super-duper neat to watch the siege of Hogwarts in 3D. (It wasn’t.) But I wasn’t very impressed. Summer blockbusters, in general, aren’t supposed to be great art. According to my good friend Wikipedia, blockbusters are recognizable by their emphasis on spectacle, gargantuan budgets, and the saturation of advertisements and merchandising in the weeks leading up to the film’s release. No one expects them to take home any Academy Awards—except maybe for the ones having to do with special effects and sound design. Everyone, however, expects them to be entertaining.

en•ter•tain•ment
[en-ter-teyn-muh nt]
noun
1. the act of entertaining; agreeable occupation for the mind; diversion; amusement.
2. something affording pleasure, diversion, or amusement, especially a performance of some kind
3. hospitable provision for the needs and wants of guests.
4. a divertingly adventurous, comic, or picaresque novel.
5. Obsolete . maintenance in service.

Please notice in the first entry: “agreeable,” “diversion,” and “amusement.” A thing is entertaining if it agrees with, diverts, and amuses you. There is nothing essentially wrong with this. I know there are days when all I want to do is not think. My feet hurt, my mind is weary, and sometimes I just want to sit back and be taken in. Sometimes I get tired of analyzing the whys and wherefores, and it’s simpler and easier to just watch (or read) something fast and mindless and fun.

However, there is something wrong if you put the word “just” in front of these words: “just agreeable,” “just diverting,” “just amusing,” or “just entertaining.”

Something that is “just amusing” is good for laughs and thrills, but the thrill only lasts as long as it does, and it doesn’t help you laugh longer or louder when it’s over. Something that is “just diverting” is only a momentary vacation from your real life, with your real problems, your real worries, and your real loves. Something that is “just entertaining” doesn’t challenge you. Rather, it agrees with you. It makes you feel comfortable—which is part of the appeal, I admit—with yourself, your beliefs, and your way of life. But people who feel comfortable don’t grow as people. They are okay the way they are, so they don’t change. They stagnate. When I cooked up a working definition of art, I said that art should challenge you. Entertainment doesn’t.

If this sounds like a false dichotomy, it is. Art and entertainment are not, in fact, polarities on either end of a spectrum. But consider that art is thoughtful and nudges you towards transcendence and self-actualization. In other words, art makes you face the world and face yourself. Consider that entertainment is escapist; it takes you away from the world and yourself. Entertainment doesn’t encourage thinking. I abducted lyrics from Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the title of this entry. Here’s how they go:

Here we are now, entertain us.

I feel stupid and contagious.

Entertainment, in all its agreeable, diversionary glory, is most often associated with mindlessness. And mass mindlessness, at that. This is what bothers me about most media these days. Many movies, books, TV shows, and video games don’t require that you think—in fact, many of them prefer that you don’t—but that creates a huge number of people who don’t think about what they’re watching, reading, or playing, and who, by extension, often don’t think about what they’re saying or doing either.

Take, for example, Avatar, released in December 2009. It had a huge budget, a huge following, and a huge number of ideological problems. It’s impossible to deny that Avatar is beautiful to look at. The special effects are downright stunning. James Cameron, the director, shows you a world you want to sink into and roll around and fly dragons in. When I’ve discussed this movie with people who loved it—the kinds of people who saw it four times in theatres or more—almost all of them have said it was “fun” and “entertaining.” But none of them addressed the facts:

First, the film is basically Disney’s Pocahontas.

Second, the moral of the story is that might makes right. In the end, both the humans and the Na’vi abandon diplomacy in favor of violence. They don’t talk to each other. They don’t compromise. They fight and kill and destroy, and winner drives out the loser.

That’s a problem. This isn’t something we teach our kids. This isn’t something we claim to believe in. But this movie, in which you’re supposed to cheer for the “good guys” (the noble, savage Na’vi) and be glad when they use violence to win their cause, clearly shows if you’ve got the power, you can throw it around to do whatever you want.

A political sidebar: Has anyone noticed certain legislative and/or executive branches also not talking or compromising lately?

Whether we like it or not, the creative products we consume (movies, books, TV, video games) impress upon us a worldview, an opinion, an idea of how life is and should be. And if that worldview, opinion, or life outlook is nothing more than fun, experiential, or entertaining, then we’re in danger of becoming people who don’t think, engage, or question—people who think that life is merely fun, experiential, and entertaining. Moreover, people who don’t think about the things they watch, read, and play, are unaware that they’re being confronted with these worldviews, and if they aren’t aware of it, they can’t question, challenge, or come up with alternatives to it. Rather, under the guise of being “amusing” and “diverting,” something that is entertaining can in fact be terribly convincing. People believe what they see, right?

When I said that I wasn’t creating a false dichotomy between “art” and “entertainment,” I meant it. I think it’s entirely possible for something to be both art and entertainment. A movie can be fun to watch while also making you think. A book can be an easy read but still challenge you. And yes, a video game can be entertaining and smart at the same time. But to be just entertaining? That's not good enough.

Crazy Heads

2011-08-04T18:22:00.000-07:00

for other fun and neat things go here

Why Vacations Are Not Really Vacations

2011-08-01T11:49:00.000-07:00

Last Friday was the final day of summer school. The kids had finished their in-class essays, grammar finals, and cumulative spelling tests. Their evaluations were written and neatly stapled to their exams. In class we solved Two-Minute Mysteries and played rousing games of classroom Boggle and Taboo (online version here). Then I passed back their exams and evaluations, they filed out of the classroom, and although a few lingered, they were all gone in minutes.

Some of the kids asked if I’d be back next summer, and I told them honestly that I didn’t know. I might not see them again, and in a way that’s a relief because, well, some students are frustrating. But I really liked some of the others—they’re such smart and funny and hardworking kids—and I’m going to miss a bunch of them. A couple students even ended their self-evaluations with thank you letters to me, which I, of course, photocopied and kept.

All in all, I think teaching summer school English was a success. There were students I couldn’t stand, students who made going to work awesome, difficult frustrating days, and terribly wonderful days in which it felt like they were actually learning something. I saw shoddy, lazy work, fantastic over-the-top apple-shining work, and no work at all. But I think some of them learned something, and that’s what’s important, isn’t it? Some of them worked hard and earned it. They acquired vocabulary; they learned how sentences are constructed; they picked up study skills; and they began to think more deeply about the texts they read and the ideas they’re presented with. Of course, some of them were slackers, and yet despite themselves their writing actually began to improve. As a teacher, I don’t expect to inspire all of my students. There’s a halfway point, and they have to meet me there if anything is going to change. But if there are some, even a handful in a class, that learn something about language or literature or thinking? That’s important. That’s worth it.

Now that summer school is over, I have three leisurely weeks of freedom before my own classes start, and I have to head back to the expensive grind of college courses. Wait, did I say “leisurely” and “freedom”? Because I meant “jam-packed” and “filled with things I need to get done.”

In the next week I have to gear up for this weekend’s backpacking trip in Lake Tahoe, one for which I am totally unprepared physically and, well, physically. I need to take my dog on longer walks and load my backpack with bricks or many, many bottles of water. I need to do the chores—like vacuuming and cleaning the bathroom—that I’ve been neglecting for the past week. I need to write this blog entry, write my novel, and work on an essay for Im(prompt)u Review, a fabulous new literary publication dedicated to the exploration of the wild and wondrous writing process. I’ve also promised time to my favorite cousin and my best friends. Then, after the backpacking trip, next week is museums, more writing, other friends, more chores, and family who is visiting from out-of-town.

I’m not complaining. Not by any means. But I’ve been thinking about how when I say, “I’m going to have three weeks of sweet, sweet freedom,” I really mean, “I’m going to have to cram in all of these things I want and need to do before I have to start neglecting them all again because I’ll be back in school.” What happened to vacations that are really vacations? The ones where you actually get to relax? You know? The ones where you don’t feel like you’re running around trying to get to all the fun things before they’re taken away from you again, which makes it no less fun but maybe also a little stressful?

Before I started thinking about this, I had been daydreaming about being able to devote hours and hours to reading the books and working on The Navigator, but now I realize that I won’t have hours and hours. I’ll have just as little time as before, except I can’t complain because the time that I won’t spend writing will be taken up by awesome life experience things that I hope will one day ooze over into the writing. Complain? Can’t.

Still, I also can’t shake the feeling that I’ve somehow lost something. Maybe it’s the growing up. Because, well, the achingly long summer days that I used to spend sitting on the couch and playing video games or running around outside with the neighborhood kids? The nights where the stars were so bright I couldn’t have fallen asleep if I wanted and I didn’t want to anyway because there were campfires and long talks and music and singing on the shores of alpine lakes? Gone. Gone. All gone. Summer days now seem too short, and I couldn’t possibly fit in all that I need to fit in. Summer nights are now just for sleep, because I’m so exhausted from checking off items on the day’s to-do list.

Now I have things to do. I have responsibilities. And they’re not necessarily bad responsibilities like payments and housework, I have great responsibilities, like my responsibility to my dog or my writing or my friends, but they’re responsibilities nonetheless, responsibilities that children don’t have or don’t think about. My former students are going to be spending their days playing Halo 3 and sitting around being bored. I don’t even have the luxury of being bored!

But it’s also about complexity. Childhood is simple. That’s part of what makes it so beautiful. Adulthood is complex. As we grow up, there are more and more things for us to handle: In high school, it’s class schedules and politics and dating and peer pressure and thinking about college and forming an identity (and more). Then there’s college, and new self-directed class schedules and new friends and new opportunities and politics and jobs and paying rent and learning to cook and dating and peer pressure and thinking about after-college and forming an identity (and more). Then there’s after-college, and there’s new friends and new opportunities and politics and jobs and paying rent and budgeting and dating and peer pressure and thinking about decades of a future/stability and forming an identity (and more). It gets more complicated from there, what with interpersonal relationships and maybe buying a house and maybe kids and maybe travelling the world and maybe something crazy with the stock market or whatever I don’t even want to think about it because it feels like my life is complex enough. And this complexity is part of what makes adulthood so beautiful. A hassle, sure, but at times beautiful. Like how my next three weeks will be a hassle, but awesome—or is it awesome, but a hassle? Both?

Freedom now, the way summer break was freedom when I was a kid, isn’t really freedom. It’s another opportunity to juggle the work, obligations, responsibilities, hobbies, chores, friend-time, family-time, boyfriend-time, and dog-time that I always seem to be adding to. It’s another opportunity to forge connections with people, to do things I haven’t done before, to absorb experiences, and to do things I’ve done for years but haven’t stopped loving. Vacation? Sure. Leisurely? Hell no.

How Do You Feel Emotions in Your Body?

2011-07-28T20:07:00.000-07:00

Click here. The whole experiment is neat.

Verse and Prose

2011-07-25T19:50:00.000-07:00

Last week I posted an entry about the necessary cohesion of form and content, saying, in essence, that how the work is presented has to match what it is about. In last week’s comments, an anonymous poster brought up the question of what constitutes a novel—and by extension, what constitutes prose.

(I’d like to mention here that although I welcome thoughtful comments, I prefer that you also leave a name or a handle. I suspect that the anonymity of the internet can at times be problematic; the lack of an identity can also create a lack of responsibility for the things people say. To avoid a few of those issues, I think it would be a good practice to steer clear of anonymous posting in the future. It’ll be as simple as attaching a consistent name or nickname to your comments.)

Thus far, I’ve avoided discussing my thoughts on prose, particularly how it relates to verse, but I suppose that, given my recent discussion of form and content, it’s a worthwhile pursuit now. During my last semester as a graduate student at San Francisco State, I took a class called “Experimental Books” with a fantastic instructor, Dr. Meg Schoerke. Initially I thought that the course would be about the sorts of books I mentioned in my last post—oddly shaped books, art books, book objects—but it turns out that one of the primary aims of the class was to delve into the fundamental question:

What is the difference between verse and prose?

We studied books like Jean Toomer’s Cane, Susan Howe’s The Midnight, and my personal favorite of the course, W.H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror. All of these books included selections of what most people would call “poetry” and selections of what most people would call “prose.” The Midnight included photographs and The Sea and the Mirror is a self-styled commentary on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. According to our anonymous commenter, who mentioned that s/he believes the content of the words (and not the way they are arranged graphically), these books would not qualify as novels. However, Cane is listed on Wikipedia as a novel, even though it includes a number of poems like this one:

Her Lips are Copper Wire

whisper of yellow globes
gleaming on lamp-posts that sway
like bootleg licker drinkers in the fog

and let your breath be moist against me
like bright beads on yellow globes

telephone the power-house
that the main wires are insulate

(her words play softly up and down
dewy corridors of billboards)

then with your tongue remove the tape
and press your lips to mine
till they are incandescent

In class we discussed the possible differences between prose and poetry, and we came up with a number of ideas: Prose was “straightforward.” Poetry “paid attention to the beauty and rhythm of language” or “rhymed” or “had meter.” But these definitions are too limited to function well. There are too many exceptions. Take, for example, this:

With that,
he toppled over, sprawled full-length, flat on his back
and lay there, his massive neck slumping to one side,
and sleep that conquers all overwhelmed him now
as wine came spurting, flooding up from his gullet
with chunks of human flesh—he vomited, blind drunk.
from Book Nine of the Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles, 223

Or this:

burn burn burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “awww!”
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 6

The language in the Odyssey seems straightforward enough. It’s a description of an intoxicated Cyclops, just moments before Odysseus so famously outwits him. Then, the language in On the Road certainly “pays attention” to imagery and rhythm, even going so far as to repeat the word “burn” three times in order to emphasize the urgency of it. There are innumerable poems that sound straightforward and blocks of prose that sound poetic, and if you read them aloud, it’s honestly hard to tell the difference.

In Experimental Books, all of our attempts to define prose and poetry (or more accurately, verse) by content ended the same way: inconclusively. About halfway through the semester I got fed up with the whole question. I decided, and this is a definition I stick with, that the only difference between verse and prose is the way that the words are laid out on the page.

If something is text-wrapped—that is, if the words go to the margin and then jump to the next line out of necessity—then it’s prose. It might include paragraph breaks, which would be the exception to the text-wrapping rule—but it doesn’t have to, as in Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile, an entire book of one big fat paragraph.

If something is line-broken—that is, if the words jump from one line to another without having to hit the margin—then it’s verse. It might include rhyme and meter, but as free verse shows us, it doesn’t have to.

Verse = line-broken
Prose = text-wrapped

Simple. Effective. If The Sea and the Mirror includes a section of poems, then it includes a section of poems, but that doesn’t make it a book of poetry. If it includes a section in which Caliban addresses the audience, it may be text-wrapped, but that doesn’t make it a novel or a collection of critical essays either. Verse and prose, to me, are essentially formal issues, and have little or nothing to do with content.

Novels, short story collections, collections of flash fiction, books of poetry, children’s picture books, collections of critical essays… I would say that these categories fall somewhere between form and content, and are somehow mixed up in genre. But let’s hash out the basics today and get to the even more complicated stuff another time. Thanks to the readers for their thought-provoking comments—keep ‘em coming.

"Idiom" by Matej Krén

2011-07-21T07:32:00.000-07:00

from a library in Prague

Form and Content

2011-07-18T15:10:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, while celebrating the recent book release and slew of excellent reviews for one of my amazing writing instructors, Alice LaPlante, my friend Diane of Confessions of a Word Slut and I were discussing the necessary cohesion of form and content in writing, and I realized that although this quandary plagues my work, I haven’t devoted a blog entry to it yet, and it got me thinking about how to articulate my thoughts about it.

Many of you have heard me talk about the necessary cohesion of form and content in writing (hereafter called the “quandary”), but for those who haven’t, please allow me to explicate: Form and content are two aspects to any piece of art—in this case, fiction. Content is, well, the content—the guts of the story, what it’s about, who’s in it, the themes and recurring metaphors, the setting, the story arc, the plot developments, etc. Wikipedia calls content the “work’s essence.” For example, no matter how you told it, any story of “The Three Little Pigs” would include a big bad wolf, three little pigs, and some shoddy construction and poor building materials. These things are content.

Form, however, is how the work of art is presented. In writing, form involves font choices, line spacing, the size of margins, and line breaks, to name a few. (It might also involve structure, point-of-view, and narrative tense.) If you studied Shakespeare in high school, you’re probably familiar with the sonnet form: fourteen lines, distinct rhyme scheme, iambic pentameter, etc. You’re probably also familiar with the novel form, the hour-long TV drama form, and newspaper form. To take our earlier example, even though the content of “The Three Little Pigs” wouldn’t change, you could put that story into a variety of forms: You could put it into speech, write it in a kids’ book, make it into a poem, turn it into a movie, etc. You’ve still got your big bad wolf, three little pigs, and the shoddy construction that make it “The Three Little Pigs,” but the story’s form has changed.

What I mean, then, by “the necessary cohesion of form and content” is that how the story is told must match what the story is about. Here’s a clear example, “Il Pleut” (“It’s Raining”) by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire:

Translation:
It’s raining women’s voices as if they had died even in memory
And it’s raining you as well marvellous encounters of my life O little drops
Those rearing clouds begin to neigh a whole universe of auricular cities
Listen if it rains while regret and disdain weep to an ancient music
Listen to the bonds fall off which hold you above and below

Notice how the lines of poetry trickle down the page the way droplets of water would trickle down a window? That’s an example of how form fits content; what the poem is about matches the way it’s presented.

The movie Memento is a good example of form and content in film. The main character, Leonard, is completely unable to create new memories. His short-term memory only lasts a few minutes at a time, and he writes notes, takes Polaroids, and tattoos himself in order to remember important information. That’s the content. The movie’s form goes backwards, from the last chronological event to the first, and viewers must piece together Leonard’s life the same way he does.

But why does this particular quandary plague me? I think it’s because of my views on the future of the book. I’m convinced that reading a book shouldn’t be limited to reading it front-to-back. (When I was a kid, I had a book based on the Ghostwriter TV series called Steer Clear of Haunted Hill that had the same story from two different perspectives. First you read it right-side up from one perspective, then you flipped the book over and read it upside down from another perspective. It was silly, really, but oh, the possibilities!) A book might be read back-to-front, or through the center of the page, or in circles. A book might be made of transparent pages laid one on top of the other, so that as you turned the pages, the layers themselves would change the very things you could see and read clearly. How cool is that?

The quandary, of course, is this: What kind of story needs to be read backwards? What kind of story goes through the center of a page? What kind of story is a circle? What kind of story is both totally clear, totally unclear, and totally layered? In other words, what kinds of content are required for these forms?

The other reason I’m plagued by the form/content quandary is, as I’ve noticed recently, video games. Writing video games, as I mentioned, is that one true dream I’ve always had and can never quite escape. While I think that the medium has potential to produce art, I think most if not all of the games I’ve ever heard about or encountered fail to live up to the term. Much of this is due to the fact that I don’t think that video games have quite grasped the idea that form must fit content.

Halo 3

Why, for example, is it important that a first-person shooter be told from a first-person perspective? What does it mean to be able to see nothing but your hands or your weapons?

Braid

Or: Why does a two-dimensional platformer have to be two-dimensional? Why does the character have to jump or land on enemies heads in order to defeat them?

Shadow of the Colossus

Or: Does a game with a massive explorable three-dimensional world address what it means to explore? Shouldn’t it?

In order to be really good, really thought-provoking, or really art, interesting forms like these necessarily have to have stories (content) that match. The stories that we tell each other necessarily have to be told in such a way that their forms not only amplify but add to their content. That makes them good. That makes them interesting. That makes them art.

Weird Writing Habits on Flavorwire

2011-07-14T13:15:00.001-07:00

Check it.

Naming

2011-07-11T14:02:00.000-07:00

I’ve been making good progress on The Navigator lately. I’m writing in my journal almost every night, so even though I don’t have the page- or word-count, I know there are a slew of scenes lined up and ready to be typed. Last Friday, however, I encountered a bump in the road.

It’s shaped like this:

This is a sea monster that has been asleep at the bottom of the ocean for the past couple million years. It is very old and very grumpy, and it has been down there for so long it has gone blind and begun to turn to stone. It’s going to be awoken by the Bad Guy, who will use it to destroy enemy ships like so:

Sounds deliciously evil, right? Right! The holdup, however, is that I have no idea what to name this creature. I got some suggestions from my fourth and fifth grade students on Friday—front runners among them “Exgana” and “Graxor”—but none of them seemed to fit such an enormous and ancient and stone-like monster. Honestly, I want to call it “Ichthyon,” but I’m pretty sure 1) that’s a name I’ve stolen from somewhere else, and 2) that it has the Greek root word for “fish,” and this is a fantasy world where there are and never were any Greeks.

You would think that I could just begin writing, and put in a _____ wherever the creature’s name is supposed to be, but somehow that isn’t the case. I can’t even bring myself to write in either Exgana or Graxor because I know for sure that neither of them is this monster’s name. Names, I think, are terribly important to fiction writing. If a character’s name isn’t exactly right, everyone is going to know it. As in life, names express so much about who a character is and what they’re all about. Take, for example, the name “Lord Voldemort,” from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.

What an evil sounding name! Not only do you know this guy is powerful—because he’s a lord—you also know from the “V” sound (as in “vampire” and “vicious” and “eVil”), the syllable “mort” (as in the French word for “death”), and the juxtaposition of “old” and the “m” (“mold”) that the dude practically reeks of nefarious deeds and doings.

Names can come easily. As many of you know, I name many of my possessions: my computer Henry (formerly Henrietta), my printer Hank, my piano Carmichael, my phone Pete, my car Calcifer, the place we went hiking off-trail in Tahoe called "the Gorgamont," the list goes on and on. Normally, I can look at a thing for a moment, somehow pick out its essence, and say with all the confidence in the world: “This is Sam” (my guitar) or, “Henceforth you shall be called Jazzman” (my keyboard). My main character, Sefia, got her name this way. The name of the Bad Guy organization, the Guard, did as well.

But I have agonized over names as well. The kids at an after-school program helped me come up with the names of some of my kingdoms, like Deliene, and ships, like The Current of Faith. I plan on using Exgana at some point, since it sounds so powerful and fast, but not for a huge terrible sea monster. For my non-fantasy work, I have a book of baby names and an encyclopedia of gods, and even that doesn’t always help.

So to any fiction writers out there, how do you name your characters? Your worlds? Your cities? Your gigantic sea creatures that have been slumbering in the deeps for millennia? And what should I call this guy?

Article in the Huffington Post

2011-07-07T07:24:00.000-07:00

About the quiet.

Staying Under the Top

2011-07-04T17:42:00.000-07:00

Robox

2011-06-30T18:33:00.000-07:00

Yes.

If You're Bored, You're Boring

2011-06-27T20:59:00.000-07:00

As some of you know, I’m teaching a set of English classes this summer. I have three groups of kids: fourth and fifth graders, sixth and seventh graders, and eighth through tenth graders. As some of you also know, we are four weeks into an eight-week course and my 8-10 class has caused me nothing but grief. From the very first day, getting them to say anything in class has been like pulling teeth. My teeth. They don’t ask questions. They don’t have opinions. All they do is sit there and occasionally make fun of each other. It drives me to distraction. I’m tempted to give up and make them do the assignments silently for an hour and ten minutes each day, but my better judgment knows that won’t do them any good. I’ve talked to them about why English is important. We’ve had (painful) discussions about how they can be more interested in class. I’ve split them into teams and pitted them against each other. Nothing works!

This weekend their assignment was to write three journal entries: one paragraph each for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. They were to include what they did that day, what they thought and felt about it, and what that said about who they were. I understand that self-reflection takes practice and that most kids—hell, most adults—don’t know how to do it or why it’s important to their growth as human beings, but what I got were a slew of papers that went, basically:

I woke up, ate breakfast, and watched TV. Then I ate lunch. Then I went to so-and-so’s house. We played video games. I went home. I ate dinner. I watched TV with my family. I went to sleep.

Imagine that with fewer capitals and proper punctuation marks. Maybe I can understand the scant few attempts at self-reflection. All right. Examining who you are is tough. Sure. But more than half of the papers didn’t mention what these kids thought or how they felt. Is it true that a day for them, however exciting or uneventful, is nothing but a series of actions? Is it true that a day is comprised only of what they did, and not the thoughts they had, the emotions they felt, or the conversations they had? It’s hard for me to believe, but so many of these students seemed like they were performing a day’s activities without really ever engaging with them. Maybe this is because they don’t know how to write about how they engage with their own lives and the people in them, but when I specifically ask for thoughts and feelings, couldn’t they have at least tried?

(Given the number of “watched TV”s and “played games”es I saw, I’m beginning to suspect that boiling a day into a list of actions may have something to do with modern technology and its ability to flatten consciousness so that all we do is take in a stream of information without taking the time or using the energy to process it. Are young people being trained not to think? Are they being taught that for something to be interesting it has to be easy? And that if the rewards aren’t tangible (like candy, money, or toys), they aren’t worth having? And perhaps more troubling: Am I already old and outdated?)

A few students wrote about how their days were boring. One wrote that he was bored in English class, and I immediately stopped caring about the stupid, clearly half-assed paper he’d turned in. You’re bored? I thought. You’re bored. Hell, I already know this stuff. Don’t talk to me about bored. I’m the one who's bored. After that initial belligerent reaction, however, I immediately thought of my friend Raicheal, who told me the smartest and most insightful thing I have ever heard about boredom:

If you’re bored, you’re boring.

In other words: If you’re not interested in anything, no one’s going to be interested in you. I don’t know why not caring ever came to be considered cool, but that’s one of the stupidest outlooks I’ve ever heard. There’s nothing duller than someone who’s bored. They sit back, uninterested and unengaged, and have absolutely nothing to offer the world, not even a way out of their own boredom. People like this are boring to be around.

On the other hand, if you’re interested, you’re interesting. My favorite instructors have always shown enthusiasm for their subjects or for teaching. My favorite people have interests and hobbies and thought-provoking things to say about them. My favorite students—particularly my group of sixth and seventh graders—are the ones who are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, the ones who sit up and ask questions and make comments because they want to know. They’re intrigued, and that makes them not only good students but interesting people.

In this respect, I understand that if students are bored, there’s only so much I can do. I can try to think up new ways to approach the material. I can come up with new gimmicks. I can muster as much energy and enthusiasm for literature as humanly possible. But being or not being bored is ultimately their problem. Which means that my boredom is also my own problem. Sure, these students are boring the hell out of me, but I’m the one who’s letting myself be bored. And maybe that’s what I’ve got to change this week.

If you have any approaches or gimmicks to share, please let me know. I’m looking for new methods and new things to bring to the classroom. But my personal work goal for this week is to stop allowing myself to be bored by a bunch of kids.

Book Club July

2011-06-23T17:16:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to announce that there will be another book club meeting in mid-July at Javaholics (449 Balboa Street) in San Francisco. (Time and day are dependent on who's coming.) This time around we're reading another trilogy: The Gryphon Trilogy by Andre Norton. It consists of the following:

The Crystal Gryphon (1972)
Gryphon in Glory (1981)
Gryphon's Eyrie (1984)

I've read the first installment and the other two just arrived in the mail today. Norton's roving first-person perspective switches between two characters: Kerovan, a half-breed human lord deposed from his own country, and Joisan, who must lead a band of refugees from her country when they are violently ousted by invaders. Though they have been betrothed since they were children, Kerovan and Joisan have not yet met, and The Crystal Gryphon is in part the story of how they find each other as well as the story of how they find themselves. So far, I've found Norton's writing to have a beautiful cadence and her characters to be dynamic, and I can't wait to begin the next book.

If you are in the area, I invite you to read the trilogy and join us at Javaholics in mid-July. The time and date will be determined by who can make it. Contact me if you're in!

Skydiving

2011-06-20T13:46:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday I jumped out of an airplane with a man named Tony strapped to my back. Fortunately, Tony had a parachute strapped to his back, and even more fortunately, he had been skydiving for three years and he knew how to use it.

I have been wanting to try skydiving for years. I came close, once: While visiting my family in Arizona, we took a trip to Eloy, a flat middle-of-nowhere town boasting some of the best skydiving in the country and an enormous wind tunnel to boot, and there I spent a full two minutes in free fall. It was an amazing experience, but let me tell you now that it's but a shadow of what skydiving is really like.

The Parachute Center, in Acampo, CA, offers the cheapest tandem skydiving package ($100) in Northern California, so that's where I went. Tony harnessed me up, Zak introduced himself as my photographer, and I got a few instructions about how to jump out. Then, after another few minutes, we headed to the plane and went up into the air. Now, I've been on an airplane before, but being crammed front-to-back (literally) in this little plane was nothing like riding in the spacious (yes, spacious) luxury of a commercial aircraft. Those of you who have flown before will remember the port-hole type windows you have to crane your neck to see anything through. Last Tuesday Tony and I were sitting up in front, by a clear plastic door that slid upward into the wall of the cockpit. And, for the most part, that window was open. It was amazing. I could actually see the ground drop out from below us. I felt like if I leaned just a little too far, or if the plane banked a little too quickly, I could topple out. (Two people did topple out, in fact. They jumped at a much lower altitude than we did, and to my untrained eyes it looked like they just balled themselves up in the doorway for a moment before tumbling outward into the rushing air.)

But flying up there was nothing, as I soon learned. At 13,000 feet, it was time for Tony and me to jump. Put one leg over the bench. Crouch. Waddle towards the open door. (I honestly don't even remember what it looked like perched there on the threshold between plane and sky, because I was trying to remember what to do. Look at Zak, the photographer. Smile. Don't grab the door frame. Hold on to your harness. Arch your back. Tip forward...) And then--nothing but falling.

The minute of freefall is so loud that even if I screamed, which I think I did, I couldn't hear it. It's like all the sound was ripped violently out of my throat and flung into the atmosphere. Like it maybe never even existed at all. The wind is so fast that it whips everything out of your mouth. Sound, moisture, even air itself. I swear I didn't even know whether I was breathing or not and I actually had to think to myself, Are you breathing? Take a breath. Did you do it? Are you exhaling? Take another. Were my lungs working? I hoped so.

But then I looked around. The whole of California spread out below me like a vast immovable fast-approaching map. The rivers, the farmlands, the stitches of roads. The land bending beneath the sky and god, did you know that the Earth was so huge? Did you know that we are so small we are dust motes whirling across the curvature of the globe? I saw things in a way that only birds and angels do. I felt like I was in a roaring torrent of noise and when things are that loud your sight gets very, very quiet. The world seemed enormous and small at the same time. The trees like moss. The rivers like veins. The jigsaw puzzle of furrowed farmlands. But can you imagine--this is the view that gods and angels get.

How could you look down at all this, all the hills and lowlands and silver rivers, and not feel absolutely galactic? How could you look at this, the mess and measurement, the man-made and the untamed, how could you not feel miniscule? I think I fell in love with the world up there. It is so beautiful. How could you look down on it and feel anything but inspired and alive and absolutely head-over-heels for life?

Then Tony pulled the parachute and freefall was over. I watched the planet slow down beneath me. Like freefall was life in fast-forward eating me up making me small and bullet-like and then the world took one huge gulp (like the whale swallowing Jonah... or Pinocchio) and everything slowed down again. As we floated down, watching other skydivers plummet or pull their chutes, I got a good look at the ground. What a difference speed makes. Where before it had been huge and terrifying and beautiful, now Earth looked calm, welcoming, and yes, still huge. Tony guided us towards the lawn where we'd land, and I saw the trees come into focus again, the vineyards regain their definition, I saw telephone poles take shape, and cars appear like small shining beetles on the highway. I could hear, and speak, and breathe again. I felt myself returning to my normal size, and my normal perspective. (I also felt a little motion sick, but that's not Tony's fault, because I get motion sick everywhere except for on my own two feet and really, every time we adjusted our course a little the entire world seemed to swerve beneath me.)

Then the landing. I had learned earlier that "to femur" (verb) is to break your thigh bones on landing. This, thanks to Tony's expertise, didn't happen to me. I simply put my legs out straight as we floated towards the lawn and soon enough I just put them down again and stood up. I felt disheveled. I felt grounded. I felt awesome. I watched the others come in to land as well and already I wanted to be back up in the sky, looking down, falling in love again with the planet.

Very many thanks to Tony, Zak, and all the people at the Parachute Center in Acampo, CA. I had the most amazing time, and I encourage everyone to get out there, get up there, and hurl yourself into the air.

Maps

2011-06-16T19:18:00.000-07:00

I could take a sheet of paper and draw the outline of North Dakota and then draw a point for each McDonald's in the state and even post this on the Internet, but for me, this would not really be a map--these would only be markings on a page. A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected. To do this right is very difficult.

- Reif Larsen, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet 138

The 1/3 Mark

2011-06-13T18:43:00.000-07:00

On Friday night I met my friend Diane, of Confessions of a Word Slut, at the Elbo Room for Literary Death Match. The Death Match itself is hilarious, and I recommend going if there’s one in your corner of the world—there are ones in London on June 15 and Dublin on June 24—but the highlight of the night was reconnecting with a writing colleague I hadn’t seen in three years and getting to talk to her for nearly three solid hours about books, the craft, and our literary experiences.

Diane is working on the final revision of her novel, The Altar of Dead Pets, and when I told her that I was struggling with my own work, somewhere near the beginning of the middle of The Navigator, she had something very interesting, and insightful, to say.

She told me—and unfortunately I can’t remember clearly enough to quote her accurately—that there are two milestones that all artists encounter when they’re working on a long-term project: the 1/3 mark and the 2/3-to-3/4 mark.

Why there?

Well, with novels, the 1/3 mark denotes a major shift from the beginning to the middle—exactly where I am, in fact—in which you lose all of the excitement and forward motion of setting up your world, introducing your characters, and running wild with the energy of exposition. It disappears. By the 1/3 mark, your readers already know your characters; they understand the rules of the world; and they’ve got enough plot laid out for them that they’re ready for the really interesting stuff. But for a writer, the really interesting stuff—the middle—can be difficult to write. Sometimes it seems impossible. Because by the time you hit the 1/3 mark, your characters have already started to take on a life of their own, and the story, whether you like it or not, has already become something different than what you had envisioned when you started. And it’s likely—if not inevitable—that the really interesting stuff you might have envisioned from the beginning no longer fits the 1/3 of story you’ve already written.

The characters are discovering their own quests. They have vendettas. Their ulterior motives are complex and elusive. The themes you thought you were setting up have in fact been replaced by motifs that mean something entirely different. Often, at the 1/3 mark, it feels as if the novel you began writing however-many-months-ago is no longer the novel you actually have.

This is almost exactly what I’m going through, and it happens to me every time I work on a novel. I get to the middle—that damned middle!—and forget what story I was supposed to be telling in the first place. Where was I going with this again? What was my point? I try, like I’m trying now, to jam the pieces together to make them fit. This character is going on a treasure hunt, dammit! Yes! This character is going to find the ghosts of her parents! Yes, now! I said, now!

What Diane suggested to me, and what I’m going to try next, is to just let it go. Let the characters do what they want. They’ve got personalities now. Let them do something crazy and unexpected. So what if it doesn’t fit with your plans? Your plans are flawed and unfinished! The story has been turning into something else the entire time you were writing it. Let it be this new thing. Let it be uncontrollable. So what? You can smooth it out in revisions.

I’m beginning to suspect that the book at the 1/3 mark is a teenager. Half-grown, still figuring out who it is, awkward and overrun. And no matter how hard I try, no matter how much I scold, no matter how many rules I set, the thing is still going to defy me. It’s still going to do something I didn’t expect, and disappoint me in ways I didn’t think I could be disappointed… and surprise me in more delightful ways that I could have ever been surprised. The thing is, it’s going to do it on its own, whether I like it or not, so I might as well let it grow up.

(Honestly I’m glad I’m not a for-real parent because this child-raising thing sounds like hard work. It’s difficult enough for me to let my novel do its own thing—I can’t imagine letting a high schooler do the same.)

So there I am. Anxious parent of a strange and uncontrollable book-child. Hoping I’ve given it enough to know where to go next and what to do with itself. Wondering if when it becomes what it’s going to become, I’ll ever recognize it again. But I’m letting go. I’m letting the novel be itself, whatever that may be. I’ve got to let it get past the 1/3 mark. And grow up.

Story Arcs

2011-06-09T16:14:00.000-07:00

Genius.

Midnight in Paris

2011-06-06T20:55:00.000-07:00

Today was my first day of teaching summer school English—and boy oh boy did it go fast—but I was so wrapped up in crafting syllabi and making lesson plans this weekend that I’m a little tired of thinking about it all and honestly after this whirlwind first day I’d rather think about something else.

After work, Cole took me to see Midnight in Paris at the Sundance Kabuki, where we learned, after arriving half an hour early to get good seats, that you can not only order the damn things online, but you can also pick exactly which seats you want and later claim them, no matter how far into the previews you arrive. Lesson learned!

From top to bottom:
Hemmingway,
Fitzgerald,
Stein,
and Dali

Midnight in Paris is about a writer visiting Paris in the 21st century and slipping back through time to the 1920s, where he rubs elbows with writers of the Lost Generation—like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, and Gertrude Stein—and a number of artists also living in Paris at the time—like Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Henri Matisse.

While I heard some people complaining that Gil, the main character played by Owen Wilson, had adopted too many of Woody Allen’s mannerisms—a critique I’ve heard leveled at many Woody Allen films before—I honestly could care less. Listen, okay? A writer goes back in time and not only talks to but gets advice from some of the greatest American literary figures of all time! Hemmingway asks if he’s ever made love to a truly great woman! He gets into a car with T.S. Eliot! Gertrude Stein reads his novel and says it’s good! That’s nothing less than delightful!

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never been the biggest fan of American literature. Sure, I read The Great Gatsby in high school, and I’m head-over-heels for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but I’ve never read Hemmingway, and my Gertrude Stein collection is limited to a copy of Tender Buttons. But watching this movie made me want to read more. Having heard Corey Stoll deliver Hemmingway’s lines in a deep and sonorous and slightly scratchy voice dripping with gravity and just enough pause to make it count, I want to read The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Moveable Feast. Yes!

Not only that, but after watching this film, I want to be exposed to more art. Go to more museums. Walk into more galleries. Read up on art history. I want to paint. I want to think about color. And composition. And texture. I walked out of that movie theatre wanting not to see more movies but to go to the library, or the bookstore, or the DeYoung where there will soon be an exhibit on Picasso premiering on June 11th. And that’s amazing.

I’ve read book series—like The Hunger Games trilogy or even Harry Potter—that hook you in and make you crave the next installment. I’ve been addicted to TV shows like LOST that drive you crazy with waiting for the next week’s episode. But I’ve never left a theatre, or closed a book, and been so inspired to go out and discover more art. More authors. More books. More paintings. I’m not looking forward to a sequel; I’m looking for the diverse array of beautiful and wonderful things that have already been created and whose discoveries are totally within my reach.

And that’s really something.

The Surprise Hunt

2011-06-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I caught my second dinosaur. It was an unexpected find: When the first clue to the dino’s whereabouts was posted on Tuesday, May 31, I was out of town, three hours east back home in Angels Camp. In fact, I’m at my friend Barbara’s bon voyage party when my mother, who has recently become as fascinated by dinosaur hunting as I am, calls and in an excited voice tells me, “I know you’re here, but there’s another clue posted and I figured it out! It’s at 333 Fremont Street! It’s an empty lot; there was supposed to be a big building project there a few years ago but it was abandoned! 333 Fremont Street!”

I text my friends in the Bay Area, hoping that one of them would capitalize on my mother’s genius, but both of them say they’re busy that day, and I give up hope of finding a second dinosaur. Instead, I play Settlers of Catan, eat, drink, be merry, and let all thoughts of dinosaur hunting go.

Yesterday, however, I come back to San Francisco, and I’m supposed to meet Cole for a movie at the Landmark Theatre Embarcadero Center. I’m in a skirt and heels. I have none of the proper attire or equipment for dinosaur hunting except for my wits, my phone, and whatever pens or scraps of paper I can dig out of my purse. Still, I hike from the Embarcadero BART station down Fremont Street hoping to find that vacant lot.

I call my mom: “Where’s this thing supposed to be? There are like three different construction projects going on on Fremont Street!”

She repeats the address to me and I hike another block down Fremont to Harrison Street, where, as she had said, there’s an enormous vacant lot, and attached to the chain link fence, a clue:

There are three sheets of laminated hot-pink paper: One with a grid of letters, one with what seems like a key to a code, and one with the date of the day that the first clue had been posted, 5/31/2011. I snap photos with my camera phone and scribble down the grid and the key on the back of a crossword and a stray bookmark, and while I send them to Cole and my mother, I head back down Fremont to a café where I can sit and puzzle the thing out while waiting for Cole.

I call my mom, who’s at work, and because she can’t receive images through text messages, proceed to recite everything to her: “The fourth row is jester, dog, see-saw, dog, yodel, dog, Peter Pan!” But she’s at work and after half an hour of Googling can’t help me figure it out.

Let’s fast-forward a few hours: I wrack my brains for an hour and a half trying to figure out how to decode the grid. Cole is late to the movies so we miss the showing. We dejectedly head back home, where we look up all sorts of ciphers and codes on the internet, where we find information that should be helpful, but isn’t. The ten alphabets on the key seem to shift one letter every time, making it seem like a Caesar cipher, and the whole array like a tabula recta. But why the numbers? Were we supposed to turn the grid into a series of numbers, which we could also have to decode?

Fast forward again: We’ve eaten dinner. We’ve eaten dessert. We’ve watched the Giants play ten innings against the Cardinals. We’ve seen them come from behind twice. And then Cole asks me what was written on the third piece of paper.

“Just the date,” I say. “5/31/2011. That’s the day the first clue was posted.”

“Maybe the top row is five,” he says, pointing, “and then the second row is three…”

“Maybe…” I say. But while he decodes in rows, I begin decoding in columns. There are, after all, seven columns, and seven numbers in that date. The first column, which I suspect corresponds to the alphabet on row five of the key, doesn’t give me any Xs or Qs, so I have hope. The second, which corresponds to row three, doesn’t either. A Z shows up in the third, row one, and I start to feel like maybe we’re never going to figure this clue out, but I persevere, because if this isn’t it then I’m going to make damn sure it isn’t. By the fourth column, row two on the key, I’ve spelled “HOPE” across the top line and I know I’m on to something. “It’s in columns!” I tell Cole. “Do the last two! They’re both on row one!”

While I finish the fourth column and the fifth, Cole quickly decodes the last letters and reads them off to me, and here’s what we get:

HOPEFULLY YOU ARE STILL NEARBY COLLECT YOUR PRIZE AT ZENO PLACE

Nearby? We’re in the Outer Sunset, as close to the beach as you can get, and Zeno Place, we discover, is around the corner from Fremont and Folsom, all the way back across the city, near the bay. But we’ve spent hours trying to figure out this puzzle. And at ten o’clock, as the Giants head into the top of the 11th inning against St. Louis, we grab the dog and the camera, hop in the car, and head out in search of that elusive dinosaur.

We get to Zeno Place half an hour later there it is. The dino sticker and the plastic-wrapped package we were sure someone would get before us.

Everyone, meet Hutch the Heavy Dinosaur. He's a triceratops!

We have to thank my mother, who gave us the location of the second clue, the internet, and AdamD for doing such an amazing job arranging the dino hunt. We’re making a concession, however: Although we love dinosaur hunting and solving puzzles, we’ve got to bow out for the next ten rounds. There are only 70 dinosaurs left now and we want other people to share the thrill of dinosaur hunting! (Please don’t leave one un-hunted for a week, though, because then we might not be able to help ourselves!) Go get 'em, world! There's dinos to be hunted!

I Hunt Dinosaurs

2011-05-28T20:14:00.000-07:00

Today I write not about writing, nor reading, nor teaching, nor life. I have no quotes or insights or witticisms to share, and there are no stick figures. For today, my friends, I write about the thrills and frustrations and victories of dinosaur hunting.

For those of you who don’t know, the sport of dinosaur hunting is alive and well. In fact, dinosaurs have been spotted, stalked, and captured by dinosaur hunting enthusiasts all over the Bay Area. AdamD has been painting and hiding dinosaurs since March of this year, and he won’t stop until he’s painted and hidden one hundred of them. This, my friends, is the 100 Dinosaur Scavenger Hunt, which I heard about when my friend Roman of French Press Films posted it on Facebook. I’ve only recently moved to San Francisco, but I’ve been following the project diligently and greatly anticipating the opportunity to hunt my first dinosaur, and when I saw my chance Friday morning, I took it!

AdamD had warned us on Thursday evening that not one but five dinosaurs had been seen lurking in San Francisco, and that their last-known whereabouts would be released the following morning at 8:00 am, so I woke up bright and early, ate a hearty breakfast, and put together my dinosaur hunting attire and equipment, which, as we all know, includes but can by no means be limited to the following:

* layered clothing, because you never know what kind of weather you’ll run into

* hiking boots, because sometimes you can track a dinosaur for miles before you catch it

* a second pair of shoes, because sometimes your hiking boots start to hurt your feet

* an umbrella, because the forecast called for light precipitation

* a water bottle, because dinosaur hunting is thirsty work

* a notebook and a pen, because you might need to record the clues

* a digital camera, because that’s way more efficient for recording clues

* a phone, because as long as you have friends and family, you have human lifelines to help you figure out clues

* a phone with internet access, because sometimes no one understands a clue and internet knows everything

* a laptop, because if you don’t have a smart phone you’re probably going to need a Starbucks and free wi-fi

* cash, because if you’re in Starbucks you’re probably going to want caffeine

* a car with GPS, because if you’ve only just moved to the Bay Area and you don’t know it that well you’re probably going to get lost

It was my first dinosaur hunting expedition, and I was determined to catch one. Thus prepared, I checked the Dinosaur Scavenger Hunt website and found the first clue. It was a picture of a sidewalk and some newspaper dispensers that looked to be somewhere in the downtown area. My heart sank. I didn’t know the city well enough to know where that was! But I didn’t give up hope. I clicked on the image and it linked me to a Google Maps location at California and Sansome—two San Francisco streets that intersected, as I had suspected, downtown. Yes! Cole, my dinosaur hunting partner, and I jumped into my car, input the intersection into my GPS, and we were off!

It took us a while to get downtown from the Outer Sunset where I live, but with the help of Calcifer’s (my car’s GPS), and despite its insistence that we could make left turns from Mission Street even though several signs prohibited it, we finally made it to California and Sansome. I hopped out of the car at a stop light and quickly made my way to the nearest set of newspaper dispensers while Cole found a parking space. (Little did we know that we would come to repeat this exact same set of actions [we stop at a light / I jump out of the car to find the next clue / Cole finds a parking space] innumerable times in the next three hours.) I stared at the bright metal boxes. Was I supposed to insert quarters to open them?

Nay! I spotted a sticker with the telltale dinosaur-bullseye logo affixed to one of the dispensers.

Sutter and Sansome! Now, a word to the wise: If you are unfamiliar with the city, I have already suggested that you have a car equipped with GPS. At this point, I would like to add the following: a map. A basic, run-of-the-mill, impossibly-folded paper map. Because when I saw the word “Sutter,” I immediately thought, “North!” and after snapping a quick photo I began walking up Sansome towards Broadway, texting Cole the clue and my direction as I went.

Folly. I will never again make this mistake, because as most of you probably already know, the intersection of Sutter and Sansome is not north towards Broadway, but three blocks south, towards Market. I hiked half a mile north before realizing that I was going in the wrong direction, and while Cole, who had parked the car by then and even started in my direction, quickly made it to the correct intersection, I hightailed it back down the hill feeling rather abashed. Tricksy dinosaurs!

At Sutter and Sansome, I found Cole searching poles, walls, and newspaper dispensers for the third clue. We meandered around the intersection, crossing and re-crossing the street many times before I had the wits to show him the picture I had taken of the second clue. He recognized the format of the sticker and ran to the nearest newspaper dispenser, where three tiny dino logos indicated our next destination:

Halleck? I’d never heard of the place before, and with slightly bewildered looks, Cole and I headed back to the car to check the GPS and to get the umbrella because, as forecasted, it had begun to rain, but when we arrived at the parking space on California and Battery, we soon saw the street sign just one block north. “Halleck!” I shouted. Cole took the camera and made for the intersection while I stopped at the Starbucks at California and Battery to sneak into their bathroom. It requires a code to enter, but luckily there was a line and I slipped inside, even slightly sopping wet, without triggering the notice of the staff. When I came out, Cole beckoned me towards the intersection of Halleck and Battery and pointed to the base of a metal pole, where there was a large T-Rex sticker and the fourth clue!

Five spears and some faint writing in the corner: MRRT? MART? We puzzled over the clue as we headed back to the car in the drizzle. Were we supposed to go to a museum? Was there a set of spear heads on display somewhere? As I used my phone’s limited internet access to search for websites with such terms as “san Francisco” and “mrrt,” Cole and I stopped in the Starbucks to get out of the rain and to take advantage of their free wi-fi. (Please, if you are in the area, go ahead and patronize the Starbucks at the corner of California and Battery. They were very kind in letting us use their facilities without buying a single thing.) After my searches for “mrrt” and “mart” came up empty, I finally did the obvious and searched for “spear” and “san francisco.” “There’s a Spear Street!” I said. Cole checked its location and lo and behold, Spear Street was only four blocks away!

The rain had stopped by then, but because we didn’t know where the hunt would take us, we popped back in the car and made for Spear Street. The five spear heads, we suspected, stood for the number of the building we were searching for, but when we arrived at the intersection of Spear and Market (where we again did the stop/jump out to look for clues/find a parking space routine), where 5 Spear Street should have been, we found, thanks to the help of a man behind the counter at 11 Spear Street, that such an address did not exist. Wildly, we checked the newspaper dispensers and poles and any stickers we could find at Spear and Market, and Lady Luck smiled upon us: We found the fifth clue slapped on a raised Muni stop!

150 Drumm was our next destination, and it was our good fortune that the clue was not only easy to understand but also that we actually knew were Drumm Street was! A block down, in front of the Drumm Liquor and Deli, we quickly located the sixth clue:

At least the address, 000 Jessie, was straightforward, but, as with Halleck, we had no idea where Jessie Street was. A friendly policeman informed us that it wasn’t very far, just south of Market a ways, but we still headed to the car and its time-saving GPS, which confirmed the policeman’s directions. I popped out of the car at the corner of Mission and Ecker, which as we now know is an alley closed to vehicular traffic, and made for the narrow, one-way Jessie Street. There, while Cole searched for parking, at the intersection of Jessie and 1st, I found our seventh, final, and by far most frustrating clue:

Despite Cole’s protestations that the second part of the clue could be “MACN” or “MATCH,” it was always very clear to me: “MAIN.” We knew there was a Main Street a few blocks east because it is one of the few streets that allows left turns from Mission, so it only made sense that we were going to Main Street next. But it was the first part of the clue that caused us as much, if not more, aggravation than all of the other six clues combined.

We headed over to Main Street, and, as usual, Cole dropped me off on the corner so I could look for another clue while he parked the car. I had a few ideas in mind. To all appearances, it looked like a drawing of a slightly twisted version of Donald Duck. I headed south on Main looking for a business that had something to do with ducks, or smoking, or Walt Disney. I passed a bank, Mission Street, a burger place, Howard Street, the temporary Transbay Terminal, and I had arrived at the corner of Main and Folsom when I finally decided that, as with Sansome, I had gone in the wrong direction and the trail was getting colder and colder the further I got. I called Cole, who, as with Sansome, had parked the car and was heading in my direction, to tell him that I think we had missed something, and while I slowly made my way back, Cole checked the intersection of Main and Market for clues.

By the time we met up again, I was getting tired, so Cole took the camera, which had the picture of the smoking duck, and headed back down Main while I peered in the window of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco at the display of toys, which contained a Minnie Mouse and some other unrecognizable cartoon characters, but no Donald Duck—and certainly no smoking Donald Duck. I consulted the phone internet, which told me two things: First, that there were tours going around San Francisco in amphibious land-water vehicles colloquially known as “ducks,” and second, that there was an accountant with the last name of Duck working at 221 Main Street. Cole had entered a few businesses asking for help with the clue, and although 221 Main Street turned out to be a bust, he suggested I look around Market for some duck tours.

There are no duck tours at Main and Market. Believe me, I looked. There were a number of banks, some lamp posts strangely bereft of stickers or graffiti, some homeless people going through the garbage, and a veteran asking for donations and passing out flowers and pamphlets. Standing at the corner watching him, I briefly suspected that his name was Donald and that he was somehow affiliated with the dinosaur hunting adventure, but by then the fatigue and lack of food had probably gotten to me.

Cole came back with nothing. I had nothing. We went back to the car, where Cole began searching for streets starting with “MACH” and where I called everyone I knew who might know something about San Francisco and smoking ducks. It was getting late, and we were getting hungry and tired, and we were supposed to get some pie and go play Settlers of Catan in the afternoon. But we had figured out six clues already, and we felt we had to be close, and we couldn’t give up when there was so much to gain (the thrill of catching our first dinosaur, the illustrious reputation that would follow, etc.). So we drove to the other end of Main Street, which, as it turns out, was only two blocks from Folsom. At Harrison Street, Cole went into Gabby Café to ask if they knew anything about a cigar smoking duck in the vicinity. The man behind the counter thought he recognized the cartoon from a cigar shop on Drumm Street, across from the Hilton. We thanked him and headed out, and as we left he laughed and told us that if we found it we’d owe him a cigar.

We headed back to Drumm in the car and I yet again jumped out at a stop light while Cole went to find parking. We had been there before, for the sixth clue, which had led us to Jessie Street. I looked. There was no smoke shop. There was no Hilton. There was a Hyatt, but no Hilton. Despairing, I checked the poles and the newspaper dispensers, but to no avail. When Cole arrived, he asked a panhandler if he knew anything about a cigar shop or duck tour on Drumm, and the man said that there weren’t any duck tours in the area, but there was a cigar shop next to the Walgreens on Market. So I headed back to Market to look for a Walgreens, while Cole went back to get the car and drive even farther down Market looking for Walgreenses and smoke shops.

I didn’t find a smoke shop or a Walgreens on Market near Main, but while Cole went back to Jessie Street to take another look at the clue to see if we’d missed anything, I did talk to the veteran whose name I suspected to be Donald. I showed him the picture of the clue and told him we were looking for anything that had to do with smoking or ducks, and he seemed perplexed. He suggested we look for restaurants that served smoked duck. Smoked duck! I hadn’t even thought of that. I thanked him and headed back down Main to look for restaurants, and he gave me one of his flowers, which, at the time, was a wonderful gesture because I was beginning to think we’d never figure out this clue.

Heading back down Main, I entered the burger place looking for a menu item with duck as an ingredient, but no dice. Cole called me from Jessie Street saying that we hadn’t missed anything, and we decided to meet up at the Starbucks on Mission and Main where we got an Arnold Palmer for our flagging energy and a banana for our weakened muscles. Oh yeah, and we got free wi-fi.

It was nearly noon by this time, and after almost three hours of dinosaur hunting, our spirits were getting low. Cole began searching for “smoke and match” on Google, but I wanted to be in charge of the computer, and, once there, and sipping my deliciously cool drink, Cole suggested I do an image search for “smoking duck” to see if anything came up. To do him one better, I typed in “cigar smoking duck,” and there it was. A duck in a suit and tie. Despite his appearance, he isn’t Donald. Oh no. A quick mouse-over told me that this duck’s name was Howard.

Howard and Main. A block away! I stayed with the laptop and the Arnold Palmer while Cole took the camera and went in search of the next clue, but when he came back, what did he have?

A deliciously sparkly, dino-bullseye-logoed present! “Such a slap in the face,” he said. “We both walked past it before!” The dinosaur and his four brethren had been hiding in, of course, a bright orange newspaper dispenser marked with huge T-Rex stickers:

And inside:

The last dinosaur! The one of the five that had eluded capture the longest and who was therefore the best, most wily dinosaur in the herd! Cole snagged it right away and after he had collected me from Starbucks we went back to the scene of the capture to see what kind of dinosaur was now ours…

A pterodactyl! (My Auntie Lisa later asked if what we had caught was in fact not a pterodactyl but a pteranodon, but after much deliberation and a little Wikipediaing, we decided that our dinosaur’s rounded crest more closely resembled the crest of a pterodactyl, or pterosaur, than the pointy crest of a pteranodon.) After a three-hour hunt, we had captured a dinosaur! And a wonderful, happy dinosaur at that. I named him Hugo the Happy Dinosaur, and Hugo became my first capture. (We have to thank all the random people we asked for help on this hunt: the man at 11 Spear, the policeman on Drumm, the cashier at the liquor store, the security guard in front of Bank of America, a veteran, "Donald" the veteran, the panhandler across from the Hyatt, the man and woman in Gabby Cafe, the businessman on Main, the student on Main, the bus driver on Main, and the cashier and his friend at Starbucks on Main.)

And then we got pie.

If you think you might have what it takes to be a dinosaur hunter, if you think you have the guts and the grit and the GPS (or the Bay Area know-how), if you want to join the ranks of other legendary dinosaur hunters such as myself, join the 100 Dinosaur Scavenger Hunt. The rules are simple (like: leave clues where they are). The quarry is elusive. The rewards are priceless. And you too can become a dinosaur hunter like me.

Blood & Magic

2011-05-26T18:40:00.000-07:00

writing as an act of violence and conjuration
- Jerome Rothenberg, "The Poets and Ethnopoetics of the Book"
from A Book of the Book, pg. 14

The Wishing Fish

2011-05-23T14:07:00.000-07:00

It has been a wonderful week. With my cousin visiting from Arizona on her whirlwind tour of my favorite places in Northern California, we've been accumulating a tally of Awesome Things, including but not limited to: hiking to High Meadow in South Lake Tahoe to the place where my grandparents' ashes are buried; eating Steak Diane at the Sage Room, one of my all-time favorite restaurants that my grandfather used to take us to, before giving us a roll of quarters and setting us loose in the arcade at Harvey's Casino; waking up to find the world dusted in mid-May snowfall; playing a board game called Settlers of Catan, which is agonizingly slow but so much fun to both win and lose; visiting Yosemite National Park; being surrounded by glacier-carved mountains and streams of water running down their sides; climbing the Mist Trail to Vernal Falls and then another 1.6 miles of stone stairs to the top of Nevada Falls; seeing more rainbows in three days than I've seen in the past year; going through all the cards in three nights of playing Taboo; watching my friend Tawnie marry the exact right man for her; and going to the Calaveras County Fair and Jumping Frog Jubilee, where I ate the following: corn dog, lemonade, nachos, indian fry bread, funnel cake, kettle corn, cotton candy, and roasted corn on the cob.

The best part about all of this is that I got to do these things with my family and friends, who are all so amazing that at times I'm overwhelmed by how lucky I am to be surrounded by such fantastic people.

To top it all off, I have some more great things to look forward to: My birthday is this Saturday! I have absolutely nothing planned yet, but regardless of what I do or who I see or what I get, I think birthdays are days to feel special, and even if I do nothing more than bake my own cake and walk my dog, it's going to be a good day because it'll be my day.

Finally, here's the best writing-news: My short story, "The Wishing Fish," is in the Summer 2011 issue of Able Muse! It's a set of three interlocking stories about a mother and her daughters, a fish who collects stars, and being so young and so in love that you don't even know it. You can find it online, but this is the first time ever you'll be able to purchase my work in print, so I encourage you to grab a copy of the issue or even subscribe to the magazine!

For Real

2011-05-19T09:08:00.000-07:00

Yosemite National Park

When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.

Adrienne Rich, "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning"

The Real

2011-05-16T12:50:00.000-07:00

Yours truly.
Photo by Kats

My cousin Stacy is visiting from Phoenix, Arizona, and since this is only her second time here, we've been on a whirlwind tour of northern California: We've been in San Francisco on the west side of the state and South Lake Tahoe on the east side; we've hiked in beautiful sunny spring weather and seen six inches of snowfall. We've raked pine needles, made dinner, found a rope swing, played board games, and eaten amazing desserts. We've been so busy I haven't read a thing, much less written. And you know what? That's totally fine.

Caples Lake

I've gone on and on about the amount of time and dedication it takes to be a writer, and I feel like I've described the necessity of alone time, but I want to also talk about the importance of life. I spend so much time in fantasy worlds--some of them truly fantastic and some of them only slightly strange--that it's easy to forget the importance of the real. Some writers can't write about themselves, and their ideas and inspirations come from articles they've read or topics they've researched, but I'm not one of them. I write about issues that are deeply personal, ones that I can't work through without writing, ones that get to the core of who I am and what I think is meaningful. No, I haven't transformed into a fish, but I know about loneliness and the fear that you will never be able to truly connect with anything. I haven't taken a road trip up the center of California, but I know what it feels like to be bewildered and lost and looking for direction because someone you love has died. I know what the mountains smell like. I know how to make stuffed pork loin and how the sauteed apples, cranberries, and walnuts feel in my hands. I know about the worst things people can say to each other, the things that stick and never come out. I know how it feels to meet your long-lost family.

We found this hut on top of a rock next to a ski resort.

For me to write fiction, I have to experience the real. So even though I'm momentarily taken away from my journal or my computer, I love this stuff. On the drive back from Tahoe yesterday I was watching the newly fallen powder being blown off the trees and I was thinking of how if I were going to write about ghosts that's what they'd look like. Streams coalescing into curtains and being whipped away again in the breeze. Have you noticed that when you watch the special features on DVDs, the special effects team usually says they prefer to go for actual physical pyrotechnics rather than computer-generated explosions? That's because of the curls of smoke and the particles of dust and the bits of debris. You just can't make this stuff up.

Mid-May dusting of snow.

Stacy is in San Francisco for the next couple days, while I'm spending some time in Angels Camp, but we're going to reconvene on Wednesday for a trip to Yosemite National Park. I have a wedding to attend on Saturday, and Sunday I'm getting some funnel cake at the county fair. Then a week or two of preparation for my summer job as an English teacher in which I'll have time to sift through all of the things I've just experienced. To quote from William Wordsworth: "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." You need the real, the spontaneity, the powerful feelings, in order to have something to think about and mull over in those precious moments of alone time. You need the real in order to produce the fiction.

A Change in Perspective

2011-05-09T15:07:00.000-07:00

Main character of
The Hunger Games being awesome.

As you know, I spent my reading time last week blowing through The Hunger Games trilogy (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay) for the book club meeting yesterday. (The meeting, incidentally, was awesome. Really, just give me an excuse to read and talk about it and I’m there. Expect more book club open invitations in the future!) These books, though completely lacking in what my friend Rachel and I termed “sophistication of language” are a fun and fast read, and the plot and characters are compelling enough for anyone to overlook the absence of style. The storytelling is straightforward; there are no sentences that leave you breathless, no paragraphs you want to submerge in, no complex interplay of word associations or development of linguistic motifs. I suspect that the lack of style is in part due to the series’ genre; it’s at the core a young-adult adventure story, and while the content is enough to keep you thinking for weeks and weeks, perhaps the way the content is presented—the language—is so, well, bland because we often think that young adults can’t handle complex texts. This may be true for some people, but it’s one of my grand ambitions to collapse the false dichotomy between “entertaining” and “artsy” and “smart,” particularly for young people.

Those are supposed to be eyes...

I think The Hunger Games trilogy hits the mark with “entertaining” and “smart.” It’s a page-turner. I read half of the first book one night, finished it the next day, tackled the second in two days, and finished the third in twenty-four hours. And it got me thinking about my own novel-in-progress, The Navigator, which is most definitely not a page-turner, not even for me, the person who’s writing it. So I got to thinking about the differences between the way The Hunger Games are presented and the way I’m trying to do The Navigator and I immediately came up with one glaringly obvious difference: The Hunger Games is in first-person present tense (I go to the kitchen); The Navigator is in third-person past (she went to the kitchen). There’s something very immediate and unfiltered about first-person present; it gives the reader direct access to the narrator’s thoughts and emotions and like stream-of-consciousness, it carries you forward not knowing where you’ll end up (whether that be in the sentence or in the story). In The Hunger Games, you stay with the main character, Katniss, the whole time. Not once do you leave her side, and you get access to all of her thoughts, emotions, confusions, and failures. You know at all times what’s at stake for her and how desperately she tries to protect it.

I’ll be the first to admit that working on The Navigator has been lackluster lately, and after finishing The Hunger Games I’ve realized that it’s because the heart has gone out of it. I’ve lost touch with my characters; they’re pawns I’m moving around in order to maneuver the ending into position, but I’ve forgotten that they’re people—they have feelings and complex motivations—and in order to get back to them, I’ve decided to switch into first-person present tense. I want the same kind of reading urgency that The Hunger Games provokes, and I think it comes from intimacy. By its very nature, The Navigator can’t remain in first-person, but maybe I can write it with the same closeness and adapt it back into third-person later.

A diverse selection of footwear.

As I’ve been writing, however, I’ve realized that the insight I can gain as a writer from changing perspectives is the same insight a reader gains from reading. Reading offers us a new opportunity to envision the world as someone else does. For all I criticized it, A Fine Balance let me see into the lives of 1970s Indian citizens and experience a worldview that wasn’t my own, a worldview in which, to quote my friend Rachel, “Shit happens.” Period. The end. No hope for something better. This is just the way it is. Was I utterly uncomfortable by this worldview? You bet. Have I learned something from it? Absolutely. Reading allows us to strap on someone else’s boots, sandals, slippers, snowshoes, (etc.) and walk that long mile. It helps us to imagine being someone else, and shows us how easy, difficult, and complicated that really is. Reading can make us a better-informed, more compassionate people and, as Chimamanda Adichie mentioned in the speech I posted last Thursday, show us that others are not one-dimensional, are not stereotypes, are just as intricate and knotted up as ourselves.

Trouty Mouth

Looking at things with new eyes, or at least a new brain or a new heart, can at times mean everything. To take a simple and mundane example, on last week’s episode of Glee, a bunch of characters suspected that seeing their friends parting ways outside a motel meant that there were some sexual shenanigans going on, but later, when one of them confessed that he had in fact been living in the motel because his family had gone through some recent harrowing financial pitfalls and the two people seen outside with him had been donating clothes and helping him babysit, everyone’s perspective changed, and so did their attitude and actions. They came to his aid.

A party to remember?

Or, to take a more controversial example, last week I watched CNN broadcast the news that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. There were some bits of information as the newscasters and the White House correspondents tried to piece together what happened, but much of what they showed was the celebration gathering on the street in front of the White House: people chanting “USA” and sitting on each other’s shoulders, whooping and hollering and in general expressing joy. And yes, I’ll admit that I felt this grim sense of relief that the man was no longer in a position to hurt anyone, but it didn’t seem okay to celebrate. To exult. To be so ecstatic about death. And I thought that maybe a little perspective would have helped here—not just thinking of how it felt when there were people celebrating the destruction on 9/11, not just walking a mile in the enemy’s shoes. I mean a little perspective about the differences between killing a criminal in a firefight and executing him after a trial. About the differences between relief and celebration or justice and revenge. About how suddenly people, ordinary people, were overjoyed about violence and death. The issue is complicated, as well it should be, but that’s all the more reason to stop and think and discuss it.

The book as mirror.

I find that the most beneficial aspect of changing perspectives, however, is not the social, cultural, or historical one. It isn’t the big stuff, and it doesn’t have to do with other people. Rather, I’ve always found that reading gives me more insight into me. Who I am. What I think. How I operate. What’s important to me and why. And I think this kind of personal refinement is one of the most compelling reasons to pick up a book. Being confronted with questions. Imagining the answers. Figuring out who you are and who you want to be and what you’re going to do.

Fiction and Perspective

2011-05-05T18:08:00.000-07:00

Great talk about fiction and perspective by Chimamanda Adichie on TED.com:

Getting the Yes

2011-05-02T12:51:00.000-07:00

In March I wrote an entry called Getting the No, which was about the practice of receiving rejection letters and persisting in the valiant quest to be published nonetheless. Today, at long last (sort of), I’m going to tackle the other, much more elusive, acceptance letter.

You all know how easy it is to be rejected, how difficult it is to find the right publication for you, and how tough the market is (because everyone and their brother thinks they can write, because there are a zillion niche publications tailored especially for your apocalyptic sci-fi mystery romance, etc.). But everyone hopes, prays, and diligently works for that shining moment, that uncommon much-lusted-after acceptance letter. It arrives inconspicuously in the mail, or in your inbox, like any other correspondence, junk, or spam. But inside, you know it’s different right away:

It is a pleasure to inform you...

Congratulations!

Wow...

For those of you who aren’t writers, you’ll recognize the feeling of opening one of these babies up, because the elation is similar to getting a college acceptance letter or a job offer. It feels like fulfillment. Like, Man, all that hard work really did pay off, and, I really am something after all. And like relief, because, I did it! and, Thank god I’m done with that now. It’s validating, and not just because I achieved a goal—like getting into college or getting a job—but because there’s something about writing that needs proof.

I know in my heart that writing is a legitimate—though not lucrative—practice, but sometimes I can’t help feeling like there’s some sort of social disapproval when it comes to spending isolated hours at the computer playing make-believe and tinkering with words. Like it isn’t worthwhile. Like it isn’t the hard work I know it to be. Like it makes me lazy or selfish or reclusive. Before my first publication, the best I could do to justify my writing was print a Microsoft Word document and hand it to someone—and however good that story was, however clever or poignant or inventive those words were, to all appearances it was just a printout of a word processing document, something that anyone with access to a computer and a printer could produce.

I often contrast this result with those of other artists: A painter can produce a canvas brushed with color, and you can tell immediately that it’s special by the mixture of paint, by the way it’s been applied, by the visible (or invisible) strokes of the brush. Not everyone can do this. A musician can produce a song, and you can tell immediately that it’s special by the skill it takes to play an instrument or use the voice, by the melody, by the structure and complexity of the chords. Not everyone can do this. But type something out and print it? Nearly everyone can do that.

So acceptance letters, and the subsequent publications, are validating to me because they allow me to show other people that what I’m doing—writing—is actually doing something, getting out there into the world, being read by other people, maybe even changing things. Because not everyone can do that. And now, when I tell people I’m a writer, and they say, “Where can I read your writing?” I don’t have to go pigeon-toed and sheepishly say, “Oh, I’m working on a novel,” I can say, “You can google me.” Which makes it all the less awkward in the long run, because if they’re not really interested, they won’t be blindsided one day when I send them an email with an attached *.doc file or when I come up to them in randomly in the street with a sheaf of papers bright-eyed and bushy-tailed saying, “Oh hey remember me you said you wanted to read my writing here it is I printed it just for you look at my font choices!”, and they can (but don’t have to) follow up on their own.

"It's only thirty pages!"

More than any other acceptances I’ve ever gotten, acceptance letters from publications make me feel like the craft I’ve devoted myself to is actually getting me somewhere, and despite all the hardships I’m actually hacking it, and maybe my childhood dreams aren’t actually unattainable after all.

All of this is a roundabout way of directing your attention to the right: I’ve been accepted again! My short story “The Wishing Fish” is set to appear in Able Muse this summer, both online and in print! Excepting a fine edition of the UC Santa Cruz campus publication, Chinquapin, this will be the first time one of my stories has appeared in a print edition of a literary magazine! I am beyond excited, and hope that you take a look when the time comes.

You may have also noticed that my bio no longer says that my short story collection is seeking a home, and that’s because it’s found a home at Aqueous Books, a fantastic independent publisher based in Florida, with a growing catalog of innovative literary fiction. I heard about this possibility back in March, but I’ve been waiting for it to be official to announce it to everyone. My book is going to be published! The whole process takes a while, and I’ll keep you updated, but I’m over the moon about it and can’t wait to get the wheels greased and the ball rolling and all that jazz.

Acceptance? Yes. Validation? Yes. Ready to tackle whatever comes next? Hell yes.

Book Club

2011-04-27T14:18:00.000-07:00

This one's coming to you early, since tomorrow I'll be busy packing my car and moving my dog and myself to San Francisco and won't have time for even a tidbit. I did, however, want to extend an invitation to you. My friend Rachel and I will be holding a book club meeting somewhere in the city on the afternoon of Sunday, May 8th, and I'd like you to join us. We'll be discussing The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins (find it online or at your local bookstore). The Hunger Games is a young-adult adventure novel set in a post-apocalyptic world. I read the first installment for a young adult literature class while I was at SF State. To give you an idea of what I liked about it, here's the synopsis I wrote:

When her younger sister is chosen for the sadistic Hunger Games—staged by an oppressive government, in which adolescents must hunt and kill each other on national television—sixteen-year-old Katniss volunteers to go instead, though it means she will have to use her hunting skills, formerly used to feed her family, against fellow humans. During the Games, Katniss must appease the blood-thirsty audience, whose favor she requires to win, even if it means treading the lines between frivolity, fatal consequences, friendship, competition, and love. At every turn, Katniss is threatened with the loss of her life, the loss of her identity, and her ability to face the ones she loves and trusts once the Games are over.

Collins riffs on William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, except that this situation is no accident; it is an intentional, political move—a cruel reminder that the people, subject to a tyrannical government, are not free. This text is simultaneously an action story, a meditation on what humans—even children—will do if their lives depend on it, and, because the Hunger Games are nationally broadcasted, it also comments on reality television. Survival and entertainment are conflated, causing Katniss, who must alternately fight for her life and pretend to fall in love with a fellow competitor, to lose track of her identity as well as her humanity.

I know this is short notice, but I promise you the reading goes quickly--like can't-put-it-down-for-a-second quickly--and if you start the first book, you'll be finished in time. Again, we'll be meeting the afternoon of Sunday, May 8th (location TBD). If you're interested, please let me know in the comments and leave your email, and I'll let you know the exact time and place. I hope to see you there.

Why I Write About Death

2011-04-25T18:02:00.000-07:00

In general I consider myself a fairly happy person. Maybe less so in the couple years since my father’s death, but even then, in the day-to-day I’m still pluckier, more excited, and quicker to smile than a lot of people I know. A few years ago my friend RUby and I decided that every person has one natural talent—a skill at which they excel without even trying—and one natural gift—something harder to define, but a quality of being that makes him or her unique. For example, I suspect that my natural talent has to do with understanding the theory behind things—physics, literature, philosophy, what-have-you—which is helpful for being a teacher, but more on that some other time. I think my natural gift, though, is emotional resiliency. I get sad sometimes, yeah, but I bounce back. It’s difficult for me to stay depressed or be pessimistic. In high school, someone once called me “annoyingly happy.” Kind of a backhanded compliment, but whatever, I guess I can be overzealous with my joy sometimes.


This really happened. Except it was in the dairy aisle.

But however happy I am or act, I don’t think anyone could deny that my writing is dark. I write a lot about death, and not always in an ambiguous way that makes it seem like maybe someone didn’t die and maybe there’s hope after all. Sometimes when I write about death it’s just plain old sad. Yesterday I read an interview with Alec Bryan, author of Night on the Invisible Sun, which is on my reading list, and he talked about his fascination with death, and how someone once said, “Death is the mother of beauty.”

Death is the mother of beauty?

I don’t think I believe that. I don’t think that the reason things are beautiful is because they are fleeting, or because I am fleeting. For example, while I was at SF State, I was walking back from class one day, and there was this little purple flower growing by the side of the road, and I saw it, and I stopped, and I thought of how perfect and small and beautiful it was. And then I thought of how it must be so simple to be a flower, to just grow and be small and beautiful, and not to be concerned with courses, or walking, or anything, really, because flowers aren’t sentient. And then I thought of how that flower was going to die sometime soon—relatively, anyway—and I didn’t think of the flower as more beautiful when I thought of its death. It just made me sad.

I think death makes me sad because I don’t know what happens after we die. I want to believe in heaven, or reincarnation, or hell, or something, because that would be less terrifying than everything going dark, and there being nothing, no light, no world, no consciousness or soul to remain in existence. If I could believe in ghosts, even that would be something, because it would mean that when you die you aren’t just gone. Believe me. I want to believe. I just can’t.

I suppose in a way this perspective makes the living world seem more precious and, yes, beautiful, because one day it’s all going to disappear, but unlike Mr. Bryan, I’m not fascinated with death because of its impact on life. Rather, I’m fascinated with death because I can't understand it. When I write about death, I’m trying to imagine what death is like. How it works. What it means. What, if anything, comes after. I’m trying to come up with a way to deal with it. As if by using words to define and surround it, I could somehow make it less awful. For me, writing about death means prodding the darkness, illuminating nothing, but inquiring all the same.

I write about death because I need to tell stories in order to cope with a world that is too big for me, a world so enormous and complex that, for all my talent with theory, I couldn’t begin to understand it even if I had a million lifetimes to experience and study it. I think in a way telling stories is a coping method for all of us, as if by rationalizing something and putting it in order makes it somehow smaller, and easier to grapple with, or to assimilate. I think this makes us all, in some way or another, myth-makers.

Joseph Campbell, a guy who studied myths, said that myths—which are, in the end, stories—have four basic functions, among them experiencing awe of the universe and explaining the shape of it. Awe and explanation. According to Merriam-Webster, awe isn’t happiness and wonder—it’s dread and veneration and wonder, and happiness has nothing to do with it, in the face of something way bigger and more powerful than you. Telling stories is a way of working through that feeling of being insignificant or crushable. Or of figuring out what to do when you feel that way and how to come to grips with it and keep going despite everything.

This is why I write about death. Not because I think it’s beautiful. Not because I’m depressed. But because this is the only way I can even begin to cope with it. Like putting it into words and giving it a shape makes it less scary, and more manageable. But I think we do this for everything that seems overwhelming to us. Tell stories, I mean. We tell stories about our relationships, and our car accidents, and the bad days when everything seems to go wrong, and the strange confluences of events that put us in exactly the right spot at exactly the right time. I tell stories about death. What do you tell stories about? What myths do you make?

Organizing the Bookcase

2011-04-22T07:57:00.000-07:00

the guy's YouTube channel / the guy's website

Getting Back on the Horse

2011-04-18T19:13:00.000-07:00

A collection of past journals.
Except the spiral-bound notebook, all of these were gifts!

I wrote today.

After more than a month of struggling with writer’s blah—and with life, as it happens—I opened my journal, flipped through the pages, and settled the nib of my pen on the paper. It took a paragraph to slip back into the floating, half-there-but-totally-here, alert and absent mindset that writing fiction requires. But it only took a paragraph!

It has just been too long since I’ve written. I’ve fallen out of the habit of it. I should be working on the scene where Sefia and Nin are reunited. What is each one thinking? Feeling?

My friend Tucker gave me
a journal made from elephant poo.
Get yours here.

And then I was in. By the seventh line I had sunk back into the sharp cold morning, the grandeur of my fictional citadel, and the uncertainty of my main character. I wrote three small pages before my mind was skipping along so fast, and the scene was unfolding so swiftly, that longhand simply couldn’t keep pace any longer and I had to switch to the computer, where my fingers can go almost as quickly as the words come.

Interior of the poo journal. Used for
sketching and keeping track of quotes
as well as for writing.

I’ve been thinking about this scene for weeks, in the middle times between applying for jobs and looking for apartments and attending classes and penning essays on child and adolescent development, before sleep, after reading, but honestly the middle times haven’t amounted to much. Maybe fifteen minutes altogether, and most of that was, like, What scene am I working on again? Oh yeah, Sefia and Nin reunited. So I was surprised when I got halfway through the scene before I had to stop. I hadn’t expected it to be so easy. I hadn’t expected to get back into the groove so suddenly, or to stay in it as long as I did—for one-and-a-half pages single spaced!

I also journal dreams. I heard it helps you remember them.
This one includes a map and a diagram of a catapult battle.

I also cut out and tape into my journals other miscellaneous
pieces of paper. This one is of a game that my friend Steve
and I played during boring lectures at UC Santa Cruz.
There are no rules to this game. It's like free association,
but more awesome.

This one was a gift from one of my bosses.

I could say this small streak came from years of training, and maybe it did to some extent, but I’m going to attribute it instead to my journal. I spent some time thinking about my novel this past month, half-daydreaming about the scene and the characters in it, but it took me more than thirty days to write one-and-a-half pages, and that just isn’t enough. I’m reading this book Orality and Literacy, and I found out today that “by taking conservative functions on itself, the text frees the mind of conservative tasks, that is, of its memory work, and thus enables the mind to turn itself to new speculation” (Walter J. Ong 41). In other words, when you don’t write things down, your brain has to spend most of its thinking capacity on trying to remember things and it doesn’t have enough left over to think of new things. When you do write things down, however, all that space your brain would have been using for memory is freed up for all the new things you could be thinking about.

Another example of a drawing and cut-out.
This is pretty much the most logical thing you will ever see.

This is why thinking about the novel during the middle times is not enough. It’s a lot of time spent remembering where I’m supposed to be in the scene and not enough time spent focusing on new material. I actually need to be writing this stuff down. And I know that seems obvious, for a writer, but you’d be surprised at how easy it is to forget and how often I do it. But when I boot up my computer, there are just so many other things to do. Check email. Check my other three email accounts. Check Facebook, respond to messages, read interesting articles posted by my interesting friends, like things. Check Craigslist. Check the blogs I follow. Check for sales on clothes. Check Facebook again. This, as we all know, is the problem with the computer. This is why the way to make sure I keep on track is not to turn on the computer and type every day but to open my journal and uncap my pen and write longhand. About anything, I think. Anything that will grease the wheels until I can start jotting down ideas about conflicts and clever wordings and what’s at stake. Because whatever I write, it means I’m spending less time going over what I already know and more time pressing forward. Oh journal, will you be my friend again?

My current journal, a gift from my Auntie Kats.
Yes, that's a totoro on the cover, and there's a catbus on the back.
Yes, a catbus.

Nanook's Gift

2011-04-14T18:39:00.000-07:00

Someday we shall meet in
This world of ice.
And when that happens it
does not matter
whether it is I who shall
die, or you.
- Michio Hoshino, "Nanook's Gift" (1996)

The Benefit of Time and Space

2011-04-10T20:49:00.000-07:00

I’ve been having dreams about floods: flooded red hallways and men with knives, flooded apocalyptic worlds with lightning sounding beneath the surface, oceans flooding beaches, flooded floors and microwaved cats. Among other things, dreaming about floods indicates that my emotions are surging up from my unconscious and threatening to overwhelm me. I’ve always been a big believer in dreams; partly because I have madcap adventure dreams that inspire me creatively, and partly because I love the idea that in dreams we can tell ourselves things we don’t even know we know. But even if I didn’t believe in dream interpretation, it would be difficult to deny the fact that lately I’ve felt swamped by even the smallest things. I’ve been crying a lot. Because I didn’t have groceries. Because I had a long day. Because I felt tired. And if that wasn’t enough, my wonderful dog Yumi has been acting funny lately too. You know how your pet will reflect your own moods? She’s been anxious: shaky, whiny, tail-between-her-legs nervous. All this leads me to believe that I am beyond stressed. Like, so stressed I can’t deal with it mentally, emotionally, or physically and it’s gone underground.

I usually deal with anxiety by tackling or avoiding its source. In the child and adolescent development course I’ve been taking, I learned that avoidance can actually be a healthy way of dealing with stress, but only so long as it doesn’t become the only way you know how to cope. That’s why I have confrontation. In the past, if I was worried about an upcoming exam, I’d study the shit out of that sucker. If it was a deadline, I’d write the shit out of that essay or story or whatever. If it was clutter, I’d clean the shit out of the kitchen/my bedroom/the closet/the bathroom/my car. Confrontation works.

But, like avoidance, it has limitations. The older I get, the more I encounter that I just can’t tackle. I spent a significant chunk of my eight-hour Saturday class trying to think of what I could possibly be so stressed out about. Here’s what I came up with, from the very small to the insurmountably huge:

Money, finding an apartment, paying for an apartment, buying food, incapacitating allergies, Child and Adolescent Development assignments, sitting through eight hours of Child and Adolescent Development class, writing this blog, socializing my dog, paying bills, money, shopping, finding a part-time job, making an anniversary card for my boyfriend, moving to San Francisco, my brother, my mother, finding an anniversary gift for my boyfriend, writing The Navigator, the business of writing, money, the death of my father, walking my dog, playing with my dog, money, work, my students, money.

I guess most of these lean towards the insurmountably huge. I mean, I can knock some of these out in the next couple days—like writing this blog or making a card, for instance—but the way I understand it, things like MONEY TROUBLE or INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS don’t just go away with time. In fact, if anything, they get more intense.

To take a page from my textbook: Good attachment figures like parents, caregivers, or teachers will help a child develop something called distress tolerance. That is, rather than immediately eliminating the child’s stress—whether because another child took his/her toy or because s/he wants a cookie—the adult will wait a bit before alleviating the child’s discomfort. The benefit of meting out little doses of stress is that it shows children that they can, really, deal with uncomfortable situations and develop alternate coping strategies. Not having this toy or that cookie is not the end of the world. In fact, it’s not so bad.

I suspect that I am having a problem with distress tolerance, and that this “growing up” thing is far from over. I’m not anxious because I can’t have a toy (although yeah, that skirt would be nice, or maybe that pair of shoes), but because I haven’t developed the distress tolerance for the tidal wave of adult concerns (job, career, security, caregiving) that seems to have suddenly struck. I can’t even imagine what it’s like for homeowners, entrepreneurs, or parents, but it’s got to be real intense.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I haven’t been writing—and not writing is probably contributing to my level of stress as well, since it’s so bound up with how I process my interactions with the world. What I need is time and space. Honestly, I think most of us could use a little of this, and it’s important to remember to allow ourselves to have it. My friend Diane wrote a fantastic blog entry about how everything sucks for the first thirty minutes, and I think she’s got it down. If something’s worth doing, it’s probably going to suck for the first thirty minutes, because it’s difficult and requires effort. It takes that half hour to get into the groove, so to speak, to stifle your other concerns (the adult ones, maybe) and get yourself to focus. It takes that half hour to get to anything good, particularly with writing. Often times, I spend those thirty minutes battling the blank page: typing a line, deleting it, trying a paragraph, retyping it, deleting most of it, and so on. I need at least an hour to allow myself to let go of money/dog/housing/school and sink into the writing—and that’s an uninterrupted hour, none of this people calling, walking in, asking me to run errands tomfoolery. Give me an hour to myself. Give me sixty minutes to center myself in my own life, to make sure that I am standing at the still point of my turning world, to find my footholds so I can face my responsibilities from a mentally and emotionally secure position. Give me time to articulate what’s going on in my own head, time to sift through it and sort it out and put it in order. Just give me time. I think we all need this. Not time to watch TV, or even do the crossword. Time to take a walk. Time to think. Time to settle down. Time to feel what we’re really feeling. Time to be ourselves and figure out what that means.

Fun fact: I learned as an undergrad that universities scaffold their system of higher education in such a way that the more education you get, the more leisure time you have to process it. When I was at UCSC, full-time students had an average of fifteen quarter units—or three classes per week. And the rest of your considerable leisure time was for a part-time job, maybe, but also for thinking and reflection and the self-actualization that I mentioned last Monday.

But, having lived with my parents for the past year or more, I’m also coming into the realization that we also require space. Like our own personal niche. It isn’t enough to have an uninterrupted hour; we also need uninterrupted space. To hollow out a piece of the universe for a while and be there. For some people, this is an office space. A place to do the thinking and working out of things. Other people find space on walks; they get space through being mobile and anonymous, so the space moves with them and remains their own because they’re among strangers or among no one at all. In a bind, space can be imitated—say, in a crowded coffee shop with headphones and the music turned up. You’ve got a table and a chair and auditory isolation, and that’s good enough. It’s about having a place where you won’t be harassed, heckled, harried, hurried, or hung-up by other people—because however friendly, caring, or well-meaning they are, they’re still using their own gravity to pull you off your center. I think space is important because it reorients you to your own body, and you can feel safe there. Again, it’s about centering. It’s about focus. It’s about coming back to yourself and feeling good about it. It’s about having the breathing room to do all the things you can do with that sweet hour of time to yourself.

I think if I can find time and space in the next week I’ll be okay. I’ll figure out how to deal with all of my adult concerns. I’ll work through some of the things I need to do. With any luck, I’ll get some writing done. I’ll re-center and re-focus and re-orient myself. I’ll learn that I really can deal with the storm and stress of being an adult. And maybe some of that emotional turmoil will abate, and maybe I’ll stop dreaming of floods, at least for now.

Endings and Inevitability

2011-04-07T16:53:00.000-07:00

Now is the time, she would say to herself at a certain moment, when without doing anything violent I can show the meaning of all this. And she would begin--how unmistakable that quickening is!--beckoning and summoning, and there would rise up in memory, half forgotten, perhaps quite trivial things in other chapters dropped by the way. And she would make their presence felt while some one sewed or smoked a pipe as naturally as possible, and one would feel, as she went on writing, as if one had gone to the top of the world and seen it laid out, very majestically, beneath. (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, pg. 93)

I saved this quote in my journal when I reread A Room of One's Own last year. Woolf is writing about writing endings. The good ones come not without effort but without force (violence); it's as if all the small bits and pieces from previous pages come trickling back to you, and you take them all and use their various meanings to weave together the conclusion, so it seems perfect, like all those little snippets and character moments from before have been placed there so carefully, and it couldn't have ended any other way than it did. Because all of those teeny-tiny things led here. To this moment (with the sewing and the pipe-smoking). And they make this ending make sense, just as the ending makes them make sense.

I wanted to mention this now because I think this is related to the cohesion I mentioned in last Monday's entry. All the disparate elements being woven together towards one--inevitable--end.

A Working Definition of Art

2011-04-04T12:29:00.000-07:00

When it comes to lifelong dreams, I believe there are two kinds: your one true dream and the dream you learn to love. Those of you who have it will recognize your one true dream because it was the first dream you ever had, before anyone ever told you no, and it still haunts you years later, even though you have long since chosen other paths for yourself. For the ones who believe in this sort of thing, the one true dream is the thing you were born to do. The dream you learn to love, by contrast, is the one that grew on you, over time, and after years of hard work you incorporated it into yourself.

My second dream, and I say this with only the slightest twinge of betrayal, is writing. I don’t love it any less, but it took me a decade of study and devotion to make it a part of myself. Now, after all that time and hard work, it is a part of me and I am a part of it and there’s no going back, even if I wanted to.

All the same, there are these occasional weeks—kind of terrible aching weeks—when I remember my one true dream, and it’s all I can think about. It’s difficult to describe, but I long for it in a way I’ve never longed for anything else, not romance, not a pony, and not writing. It’s like the person I never got to become is calling to me, from wherever she is in that world of old abandoned possibilities, and begging for us to become one in the same. That is, my one true dream is just as alive and burning as it was when I was a kid. This dream, as most of you now know, is designing video games.

The past couple weeks have been like that, and they, like they always do, have made it difficult for me to focus. It’s like I have to live two lives: the for-real life where I’m subbing and going to class and eating and walking my dog and writing, and the dream life where all I do is think up the most exquisite games in the world. The medium itself is famous for catchy and engrossing enterprises such as Super Mario, Halo, and Starcraft, but no video game has been acclaimed the same way that music, drama, film, writing, sculpture, (etc.) have been. I’ve been doing some sparse reading on the subject—here and here and here—and most of the articles I’ve read are concerned with “elevating” the video game from entertainment to art. Still, I don’t believe that any of these articles succeed. Although many of them make compelling arguments about the possibilities for video games, none of them can figure out what art is. And if they can’t figure out what art is, they can’t figure out what games are aspiring to. And if they can’t figure that out, they can’t do it.

There are some folks who recommend that we “ignore the ‘is-it-art?’ debate altogether” because, in America, at least, our “current artistic landscape […] is so widely varied that the ‘is-it-art?’ debate is almost meaningless.” I disagree. The “is-it-art”—or, rather, the “what-is-art”—debate is about what’s worth looking at, worth talking about, worth considering, worth our time and energy. And looking at, talking about, considering for what purpose? To what end? That question is part of the debate too. Because in an environment suffused with media—with a variety of competing opinions, ideologies, hierarchies, (etc.)—it’s easy to stop thinking about what’s good and what’s bad, what’s art and what’s trash, what’s right and what’s wrong. It would be easy to go belly-up and float along the current of commercials, pop songs, TV shows, blogs, movies, novels, street art, (etc.), but that would mean we’ve ceased to have an impact on the world and forfeited our totally awesome right to act and to change the way things are going in our lives, communities, and cultures. And if we forfeit that right, then we might as well give up our other rights as well, and be mindless and boring and inert. So do we keep talking about what’s art and what’s not? Of course we do.

My thoughts have been leading me to this point all week and I’ve finally mustered the articulation and the hubris to do it, but I’m going to try to define art—or at least create a working definition for it. In my thinking, there are five elements to art: skill and craft, cohesion, intention and personal affirmation, social and cultural affirmation, and affect. In the following paragraphs I will try to explain these terms and hopefully they’ll lead to a way of thinking about art that is not only understandable but applicable, so that people who work in burgeoning media like video games or hypertext will have a practical way to conceive of and work with their materials and—yeah—make art.

To begin, I’m going to start with skill. Here, skills are going to be defined as learned and practiced abilities used to execute desired results. They aren’t innate talents; they require study and exercise in order to even begin mastering them. Some people may be born with talents that help them cultivate their skills, but on the whole, the defining factor of a skill is that it’s learned. With few exceptions, anyone can have them, given enough time, effort, study, and practice. The skills of a painter, for example, include mixing paint and applying it to the canvas. A pianist’s skills include finger dexterity (so you can play the notes that are required of you), sight-reading, working the pedals, and keeping time. For a writer, the skills are primarily intellectual: putting together a coherent, compelling, aesthetic sentence; weaving a plot; and developing a fully-fleshed and riveting character. You could also call this craft. What determines skill and craft is more difficult to define, but I’m going to say that prodigies—people whose talents exceed the skills of even the most practiced artisans—exist, they are rare enough to be discounted here. I think the mitigating factor is time and work. In order to be an expert, you need to devote time and work to the craft, not just in isolated practice, where it’s possible for your skills to plateau and stagnate, but in a culture of fellow (aspiring) artists. This means, among other things, taking classes, attending workshops, and/or submitting work to other people like skilled peers or publishers. Skill is one of the elements that distinguishes something like City of Bones, a young-adult fantasy novel riddled with cliché, stereotype, and abstraction, from A Wrinkle in Time, one of the best books I have ever read. Skill is why your children’s scribbles do not compare to Jackson Pollock and your home videos will never be Citizen Kane. It simply takes time and practice to develop the skills necessary to make art.

The next element is perhaps an extension of skill, as it takes skill to do pull this off, but I want to make cohesion separate. When I talk about cohesion, I mean all the disparate elements of a piece of art working together, towards one end—towards affect, but I have to get to that part later. In writing, those elements may be theme, metaphor, character, and plot, among other things. In film, sound and music, editing, and cinematography. These discrete elements take skill in and of themselves: You can have a deft hand with metaphor but be unable to create anything but stock characters. You can have an amazing soundtrack but sloppy editing. It takes all of these pieces at their best and working in concert to make art. If they aren’t, you end up with something that can be artful, but not art. This is, I think, where many video games fail to live up to their potential. Many of them have beautiful visuals or innovative game play, for example, but lack an artful story. Two of my latest and greatest disappointments, Shadow of the Colossus and Braid come to mind here. Both of these video games were amazing to play and stunning to look at, but their stories were abysmal (and I say this with years of studying the story behind me), lacking the depth, complexity, nuance, and finesse of good storytelling. Like I said, work where only some of the elements demonstrate skill can be artful, but it isn’t art.

It takes intention to make art. A person has to say to him or herself, “I’m going to make art.” (This could also be a set of persons, of course, like the cast and crew of a film or the musicians of an orchestra.) I know it’s tricky talking about authorial intention because you can never really be sure what the author intends, even if you ask, and I’m sure there are exceptions, but even if the genesis of a work of art is accidental, it’s often (or always?) honed by skill. I’m also going to call this personal affirmation, which can occur after the fact, when someone looks back at the product and the process and says, “I made art. This is art.”

The counterpart to personal affirmation is social and cultural affirmation, where other people say that something is art. Because Duchamp’s urinal is so often cited as an example of why our current definition of art is so cockeyed and hard to pin down, I’m going to use it as well. Basically, he put a pee-pot into contexts in which art was normally displayed, and because he wanted it there (intention) and because people let it be there (social affirmation), it came to be one of the most famous and influential works of art in the 20th century (cultural affirmation). If you see something in a museum or a gallery, you think it’s art because other people think it’s art. If someone takes something (an old sign, a piece of petrified wood, etc.) and mounts it on a wall or displays it on a pedestal—two common household contexts for art—it’s coming closer to being art because someone has said so. Social and cultural affirmation is probably the trickiest defining factor of art because society and culture are so tricky themselves. They’re changeable. They change all the time. But that’s why I never said art had to be eternal.

What it does have to be is affective. Or maybe effective. (I never bothered to learn the differences between the two because distinguishing them never seemed important enough.) What I mean is that art has got to do something, in the end. I don’t believe, for example, in “art for art’s sake.” But do what? That’s the question. Should art make us feel emotion? Should it make us think? There are a number of things that make us feel emotion—like fear or disgust—but I don’t think that makes them art. There are also a number of things that make us think—or calculate, or reason—but those can be pre-algebra word problems, which aren’t art either. In this article, Mr. Brian Moriarty suggests that art provokes “contemplation” and “frees us from the agony of consistency and causality, and gives us a brief, precious glimpse of what we really are, one thing, already complete, and perfectly ambiguous.” What I get from this statement is that in order for something to be art, it must elicit reflection—the seeing ourselves for what we really are—and transcendence. Transcendence? Tricky.

I’m going to turn here to Mr. Abraham Maslow, who in the 1940s wrote a paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation,” about a now-famous pyramid called the hierarchy of needs. According to Mr. Maslow, humans have got to fulfill a certain set of needs, in a certain order, not because they have to, but, as the term implies, because they need to, because it’s built into us to strive for more than what we’ve got.

On the most basic levels, people need to fulfill biological needs (like food, water, air) and safety needs (like shelter). Then there are social needs (like family and friendship), followed by what Mr. Maslow calls “esteem needs” and “self-actualization.” People need to be respected by others, then respected by themselves, after which they can start in on the really good stuff: meaning, aesthetics, and self-awareness and self-fulfillment. Parsing these is a little difficult, but I’m going to try. I think the arty needs are the ones where people begin to explain to themselves who they are (their personalities, temperaments, etc.). This is where they think about beauty: what it is, what it does, how it interacts with the world. And this is where people start figuring out how they fit into the world, on all the levels, from the global to the interpersonal.

This is what I think Mr. Moriarty means when he talks about being set free. I think he means that we can “transcend” the grind of the lower-level needs (going to work, getting paid, paying bills, buying groceries, meeting friends, reuniting with family, etc.) and take a brief trip up into the higher needs to think about who we are and what we mean. I can get on board with this. I love the idea that art can help us figure out ourselves and our world, not in any practical sense, but in the awesomely useless sense that can make you a better person because you’ve been jolted or challenged in some way.

Art should do this. It should jolt or challenge you, and by being jolted or challenged, you should be closer to fulfilling your self-actualization needs. This is I think the most important element of art, and it’s also the most personal and the most difficult to define. But this is what makes art’s presence in the world so impactful. It doesn’t alter people with law or policy, but it alters them nonetheless, and nudges them towards the best possibilities of who they are and can be.

I know that there are aching gaps in my definition, but that’s why it’s a working definition, something to refine and build on, but something concrete and laid-out anyway, because in order to keep talking about art, we’ve got to have something to work with—and maybe something to work towards.

Compelling Tidbits

2011-03-31T07:15:00.000-07:00

Although I am endeavoring to make this a weekly blog, with posts every Monday, I encounter so many interesting things/ideas/images/quotes/conversations/film clips/fragments/bits of art and trash that inform my thinking and feeling that I want to begin sharing them as well. And so, the first Thursday entry:

came across this at bookshelf porn

how literature comes pouring from the seams of every day life, how the very rooms that surround us are filled with words, how the wall is a page, how to turn such a page, how poetry is hidden and must come tumbling out

The Future of the Book Part I

2011-03-28T07:33:00.000-07:00

This week I’ve been thinking about the book. My mother came home from work a few days ago and told me two people had come into the office with Kindles. One of my best friends has a Kindle and finds it more convenient to hold than even a paperback edition of something like 2666, a nearly 900-page novel by Roberto Bolaño. Convenient, sure. But personally, I’m trying to stay away from electronic readers like the Kindle, for a number of reasons.

First, and perhaps most immediately, I like to write in my books. I only read with a pen nearby. I go through so many pages each year, and so many of them have beautiful, thought-provoking, take-your-breath-away passages that the only possible way I can keep track of them all is to underline, and dog-ear, so that when I go back looking for that line about men and mountains (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, pg. 113), I can spend less time looking for it and more time thinking about it or using it.


That ain't my handwriting! (This selection from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, from the Stevenson College Self and Society Reader 2003, pg. 392)

Second, like many of my colleagues, I’m in love with the physicality of the book. It has heft. It has movement—you don’t forget the sound or feel of fluttering pages, like feathers, evoking flight. Books take up space, and despite their fragility—broken spines come to mind—and susceptibility to fire, they have a sense of permanence. If you keep your books, like I do, they fill shelves, sometimes entire walls, or rooms, with weight and words. They’re solid. They’re here. And they have histories. My used textbooks have been marked with a stranger’s highlights, underlines, notes. I can see what they thought was important and worth remembering. Some of my books were once in public libraries, and they still have their dust jackets and date stamps. When I lend books to friends I tell them I don’t mind markings. Putting a heart next to your favorite paragraph gives me insight into you. It connects us in a very physical way; both our hands and eyes have been on this exact page.

I’ll admit that I’m being sentimental. After all, the book is reproducible. It’s historically linked to the printing press, to mass production, to making things replicatable and replacable and therefore less special. Mass market paperbacks aren’t handset or hand-bound anymore, but they are handled. By readers. By people. I like picking up a book knowing that someone else has touched it, read it, maybe even been changed by it. These are things you don’t get from an electronic book, which makes the content of the book that much more impersonal. Touch is so tied up with intimate human contact, and in being untouchable, in lacking a physical history, I think the e-book loses that sense of interpersonal connection.

Love and sentimentality aside, there are still a number of reasons to resist the e-book, at least in its current incarnation, because I suspect that e-readers are suitable for stories that are only stories, for easy reading and no thinking, for emphasis on content and not form. There is a future for the electronic book, I full believe that, but it isn’t in reproducing 19th, 20th, or even early 21st century literature. The physical book, the touchable turnable upside-downable book, still has so many untapped possibilities. The book isn’t done yet.

Last year, as part of the research I’m doing for The Navigator, I read an anthology called A Book of the Book, a collection of essays (and poems and poetry fragments) about what the book is, what it does, and what it could be. I had dabbled in parts of A Book for a course at UCSC, but last year I tackled it cover-to-cover. And although some of the articles were difficult to digest, on the whole it gave me so many ideas about what the book could be that I haven’t even really begun to think about them all.

For today, though, I want to talk about the structure of the page and of the book. I think poets understand this better than us fiction writers, but the word, the phrase, the sentence, are all possibilities for structure, for layout, and the page, an empty field where anything can go anywhere. On the most basic level, breaking the line
thus
makes you pay attention to the white space, to the way the words are stacked or set in rows. Poetry takes advantage of the word and the page as structural elements. As readers (and writers) of prose, however, we’ve been trained to think of the words as going one-way, forward, towards the end of the story—and the end of the book. An essay called “The Book as Machine” discusses how the book and the act of reading actually function. Of particular importance is the idea that “[p]rose as print encourages inattention to the right-hand margin as a terminal point. The tendency is […] to read continually as though the book were one extended line” (McCaffery and Nichol, A Book of the Book 18). As prose readers, we follow the logic of the sentence and not the page, so even though the line stops at the right-hand margin, we keep going until the final punctuation. In other words, we ignore the structure of the page, and because we continue this kind of thinking over the course of many many pages and even chapters, believing in the linearity (the going-forwardness) of the story, we also ignore the structure of the book.

pages from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda, pg. 46-47

Now, I need to explain what I mean by “structure of the book.” According to McCaffery and Nichol, “In its most obvious working the book organizes content along three modules: the lateral flow of the line, the vertical or columnar build-up of the lines on the page, and thirdly a linear movement organized through depth (the sequential arrangement of pages upon pages)” (18). In order words, books have three simultaneous structures: First, they are organized along the line, that is, the words going from left to right on the page. Second, they’re organized in columns—that’s the number of lines on any given page. Finally, they’re organized by depth, or the way the pages are stacked one on top of another. Although some people, like poets, manipulate the possibilities for structure on the level of the line and the column, hardly any explore the dimension of depth.

A notable exception is Mark Z. Danielewski, author of House of Leaves. (Two of my friends recommended House of Leaves to me, within weeks of each other, and they both said the book turned them crazy. House of Leaves has the uncanny ability to make commonplace events eerily meaningful—in particular, anything to do with cats. One of my friends adopted a cat while reading House of Leaves; another’s cat died; and my house mate had a cat follow her home when she read it.) To today’s point, however, House of Leaves explodes the structural possibilities of the book. There are columns, footnotes, footnotes to the footnotes, backwards blocks of text, and passages that can only be read in one section of the page. For example, the left-hand column in the picture below is continued from a left-hand column on the previous page spread, in the exact same position with the exact height and width, and the text in it continues in another left-hand column on the following page, in the exact same position with the exact height and width. In this way, because these sections of text are stacked on top of each other depth-wise, the reader can read through the page.

photo from wikipedia

Even though I don’t think all of Danielewski’s structural experiments are successful, he definitely opened up for the average reader a world of possibilities for what the book can do and what reading can be. There is a section of House of Leaves in which the main character gets lost in the house, and at the same time, the text itself turns sideways, inside out, and splits into chunks, creating a narrative maze that the reader must navigate just as the character must navigate the labyrinth in the story. Part of the beauty of this section is how physical the reading becomes. I turned backwards and forwards through the pages so that I could read first this column, then that one. I found a hand mirror so I could read the backwards sections. There is, I think, a point where I had to turn the book sideways. Even though some readers might be put off by such intensive reading practices, the fact remains that the textual labyrinth Danielewski created physically involved me in the story of the character lost in the house, and the act of reading became synonymous with the act of navigating a maze.

I learned today that the term for this type of work is "ergodic literature," or literature that requires more work from the readers than moving their eyes or turning the pages. Ergodic literature doesn't necessarily have to be physical or electronic; most physical books are nonergodic, and I think I can safely say that books available on electronic readers are also nonergodic. The screen of an e-reader has only two dimensions (line and column), and although you might be able to say that “turning” the “page” has the same properties of doing so with a physical book, the fact is that once the “page” is “turned,” the previous page is gone. Stored in memory, maybe, where it can be recalled, but it’s no longer there, so there is no depth. I’m not even convinced that the e-book has columns, because I’m not sure that the number of words or lines per page is fixed—and if they aren’t fixed, then they don’t matter, because then they’re accidental and not purposeful or meaningful. As I mentioned, there are so many possibilities for electronic books, but having heft, movement, and depth aren’t among them.

pages 138-139 from Figuring the Word by Johanna Drucker

What I mean to say, in the end, is that I’m going to keep resisting the e-book as long as it remains in its current form. Aside from its convenience, I can’t see any advantages to its storytelling possibility that I can’t get with a physical book. Electronic books as they are don’t seem to be pushing for art or meaning that can only come out of the form of the electronic book. Instead, they’re only stories. Stories only, with no power of structure or organization to contribute to their effect or their affect on their readers. They don’t say anything beyond what a physical book could say, and if anything, they say it less intimately, because they aren’t as physically connected to their readers.

I, for one, want to push the physical book as far as it will go before I turn to electronic books. There are so many possibilities for how books can involve you, change you, and change the way you read or think, and those possibilities have to do with the how a book is structured, what it’s made of, the margins it has, the font sizes it uses, the amount of white space you see, and the layout of the page. I’m trying to explore some of these possibilities in The Navigator, and I’m trying to do it in a way that’s accessible to the average reader and stimulating for the demanding one. The book can’t be dead. It hasn’t begun to live yet.

Getting the No

2011-03-21T08:03:00.000-07:00

I’ve been actively trying to get my writing into the marketplace since June 2007, when I graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a Bachelor’s in Literature with a Concentration in Creative Writing. That’s about four years of submission experience. I know this because I’ve kept a log of all my submissions ever. I have a grand total of 53 submissions, and a respectable six acceptances out of those. That’s right, six. Six acceptances in four years. Six acceptances in 1,461 days. It might sound dismal to non-writers, but honestly, that ain’t half bad.

Still, that’s 47 rejections, giving me an 89% rejection rate. Writing is a tough business, and not everyone gets that, which is why I’ve dedicated this entry to the art of rejection.

Rejections are par for the course. I’ve heard of authors papering their bathroom walls with them. Because we live in the digital age, most of my rejections have appeared in my inbox, and I unfortunately cannot juxtapose them with the toilet, but I keep them all. I have a folder just for rejections. Except for today, I haven’t revisited them, but somehow it seems important to know where I’ve been. I also keep track of them in my log:

As you can see, there are two main types of rejections: form rejections and personalized rejections. Here’s an example of the former:

Dear Writer:

Thanks for submitting your work to [name of publication]. We’re sorry this submission wasn’t right for us. We appreciate your interest in our magazine, and wish you the best of luck placing your work elsewhere.

Sincerely,
The Editors

It tells you your work was rejected; it gets the job done. This is the kind of rejection that I simply file into the folder and forget about. It tells me that my work didn’t even come close to what they were looking for, and that I should move on. Please note in the above example, the thirteen form rejections in a row. “To Keep Me Awake and Alive,” which I loved from the moment I started writing it, was rejected seven times before being accepted by ABJECTIVE. “The Fisherman,” “Not the Same,” and “No Place” still haven’t been published.

All the same, there are, on wonderful occasions, personalized rejections. These are the ones where the editor actually takes the time to not only address you by name but also to write something to you, however brief. They let you know you’re on the right track. These are also the kinds of rejections worth remembering, because they often ask to see more of your work. Personalized rejections are rare, however; I have fewer personalized rejections than acceptances. Still, they give you hope that someone is actually reading and thinking about your work.

Then again, they can stick with you, in the way that harsh workshop criticism sticks with you. Here’s one I got for “The Flying Fish and the Frying Fish”: It looks like you’ve sent a few micro fiction stories rather than one story, and none of them are strong enough to be published individually. Compared to some of the criticism I’ve heard from my peers, this isn’t that bad, but the context makes all the difference. When I first read this rejection, all I could see was, “This story isn’t good enough to be published.” Getting the no, and getting it as often as writers do, requires thick skin and confidence in your work. For example, I saw this rejection and thought, “Editor, you obviously just don’t get it. And if you don’t get it, you’re not worth it.” I know, I know. It’s a belligerent attitude, and I would never advocate that kind of thinking in workshop, where you’re dealing with works-in-progress, but you have got to believe in your own writing. You’ve got to believe that it’s finished, and it’s right as it is, and it will belong somewhere, and that all it takes is finding that place.

The no is difficult to take. As any writer will tell you, writing is hard work. It requires thought and time and effort and craft and skill and persistence and deep inquiry into the things it’d be easier to ignore. And having someone reject you is tough. It makes it seem like all your work didn’t pay off. It makes it seem like maybe you can’t hack it after all. But if you really do put in all that thought and time and effort and craft and skill and persistence and deep inquiry into the things it’d be easier to ignore, you know that your work is good. You know that it’s done, and it doesn’t need revising, it needs the right home. And if you know this, and you believe in your work, then getting the no is, in a way, helpful, because you’ve eliminated one of the thousands of possible publications, and you’re one step closer to finding the right place, the right editors, and the right audience for your writing.

Writer's Blah

2011-03-13T21:15:00.000-07:00

This past month I’ve had a number of health afflictions, and they’ve come at me one right after another: First, I caught a head cold from one of the ~~germ factories~~ students I teach when I’m subbing. Then, after two weeks of battling it off, I caught a terrible head cold that completely incapacitated me for a week. And, while moving from the sneezing/blowing nose stage to the hacking my lungs out stage, I messed up my back while coughing in the middle of the night. It turns out I had a subluxation of one of my lower ribs, meaning I coughed so hard one of my ribs popped out of place and was rubbing very painfully against a nerve. Thank goodness for chiropractors, right?

Normally, minor health problems like this are a minor annoyance, particularly when there’s work to be had, walks to be taken, and writing to be done, but when I get them one after another like this, my irritation escalates into total frustration. And although I think I’m over the worst of my physical problems, that’s only emphasized my mental one—namely, writer’s blah.

Writer’s blah should not be confused with writer’s block, the most common of writing afflictions. The primary symptom of writer’s block is the inability to produce work, and it can be caused by a number of physical, mental, or emotional difficulties. Although those who suffer from writer’s blah, like myself, are also unable to write, our incapacitation is of a slightly different nature.

My current case of writer’s blah may have begun as writer’s block, since writer’s block can be caused by physical illness. In fact, I’ve been stuck on my novel for about as long as I’ve been sick! I’m trying to work in a genre that I’m calling literary young adult fantasy. In other words, I’m attempting to write an intellectual character-centered adventure story for adolescents and adults alike. It’s called The Navigator. It’s been tough to write because in some respects my ambition for the story outstrips my knowledge-base, and I’ve done more research for this project than any I’ve yet undertaken. But honestly, that difficulty isn’t the problem now.

At 45,000 words, I’m in the beginning of the middle of the middle of the novel, and while middles are a recurrent problem for me, with the help of some of my writing colleagues, I’ve made a working map that’s been keeping me on the right track. As I said, the problem isn’t writer’s block. I am not stumped by the blank screen, the internal editor, or lack of inspiration. I know what’s supposed to come next. I can count on both hands the number of ways the scene is supposed to function. I just don’t want to write it! Someone help me. I have writer’s blah!

The upcoming scene involves a king’s reaction to another kingdom’s recent and unprecedented military move. At the same time, it foreshadows the king’s imminent downfall, as he’s betrayed by his best friend and most trusted advisor, who will take control of his kingdom in the last section of the book. My reluctance to write this scene is due to the fact that I can’t stand political scenes in fantasy novels. I hated them even when I was a kid, and I’d skim any chapter that involved characters sitting around talking about this or that or whatever having to do with the intricacies of power, politics, or strategy. I mean, get to the good stuff, fantasy novel! Get back to the characters I actually care about!

The problem is that I’m working in a genre in which political scenes are not only commonplace, but necessary. You can’t have a global war brew, ensue, and end without at least mentioning how it came about. But that doesn’t mean I like it. This scene has given me writer’s blah, an insipid lethargy or apathy regarding the writing. I know I have to, but I don’t want to, and I’ve been dragging my feet for a month. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t even open the Word document anymore. I don’t even want to think about fantasy politics. Trying to imagine another way into the scene—some new angle, some compelling character point—is tiring; it makes me sleepy. It’s like this scene is a soporific.

That’s writer’s blah. Lethargy. Indifference. Inertia. It’s been a month and, as with my physical afflictions, I’m moving into total frustration. I need to kick this, fast, because there’s Newton’s first law of motion to consider: An object at rest remains at rest (or an object in motion remains in motion) until it’s acted on by an external force.

Have you noticed that this law doesn’t just apply to physical objects, but to states of mind as well? A few months ago, I was reading and reviewing a novel-in-progress and a short story nearing completion, entering a flash fiction contest, and exchanging work with a colleague. It was the most writing work I’d had since graduating, and it was also the most prolific I’d been. I got pages and pages of my novel done. I think the more you have to do, the more you actually get done, allowing you more time for other activities. I think that’s the key to those impossible people you know—the ones who juggle work and family and friends and hobbies and travel with what seems like the greatest of ease. They take on so much, and it allows them to do so much more.

The opposite is true as well. Laziness is a tough habit to break. I’ve seen people without jobs or volunteer work get stuck. They’ll spend hours and hours of their day playing video games (and not always quality ones either). They’ll browse the internet, watch TV, and be generally unproductive. I say this without judgment because come on, we’ve all been there. (Both TV and the internet are specifically designed to hook you, reel you in, and keep you on the line—or plugged in.) This is just how inertia works. The more you get accustomed to staying still, the harder it is to get going again.

This is the true danger of both writer’s block and writer’s blah. You stop writing for long enough and you’ll stop writing altogether. So, to anyone who’s struggling with inertia, I encourage you to kick your own butt hard enough to snap yourself out of it (and that might be pretty hard, depending on how stuck you are). But from experience, I can tell you that once you get going, it’s easy to keep going. The first kick is the hardest part.

Now for the novel.

The Responsibilities of Fiction

2011-03-07T07:50:00.000-08:00

I recently finished reading A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, and my deep dissatisfaction with the last third of the book has gotten me thinking about the responsibilities of fiction. I don’t believe that an author can write whatever and however they want simply because it’s all made up anyway. Fiction is an art; it enters the world and is viewed/discussed/ingested/digested/incorporated into people’s thought processes/etc., and because it makes contact with individuals, who make up society, it has certain obligations.

I admit that I have a somewhat antiquated opinion about art—I don’t believe in art for art’s sake, for example—but at the moment I’m okay with that. I was never very hip to begin with. But art is a cultural object and it has an impact on what people think and who they become. And I can’t bring myself to believe that something that powerful doesn’t have responsibilities that come along with it.

Because it’s been on my mind, I’m going to be using A Fine Balance as an example. It’s set in India during the mid-seventies, when the government instituted a state of emergency and denied a vast majority of people their civil liberties while simultaneously giving free rein to corrupt and self-serving government officials and other political thugs. I’m no expert on Indian history, but this is the situation according to the book. The story centers around four people of varying ages and backgrounds who are forced to live together because of financial need, and by the end all of them are in a worse situation than the one they started off in. For the first two thirds of the book, the novel develops in this organic way, tracing the characters’ histories, showing the complexities of their situation and relationships, but in the last third it just seemed like one bad thing after another happened to them, with no rhyme or reason except for the whim of the author. These events occurred in such a way that they didn’t seem inevitable, the way they do in well-crafted fiction, but intentionally manipulative, as if the author was deliberately putting them in certain situations or making them do certain things just so that bad things could happen to them. I don’t want every story to have a happy ending, but instead of allowing his characters to develop on their own, Mistry forcefully used his authorial power to stomp them down over and over again until they couldn’t recover.

In this way, A Fine Balance reminded me of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. I read it in high school, and even then it was clear to me that Sinclair’s primary intention wasn’t to write good fiction but to get his message across. He wanted to show everyone how horrible it was for the working class American at the turn of the 20th century, and sure, reading The Jungle made me go, “Whoa, it was horrible for the working class at the turn of the 20th century!” But that doesn’t mean it was good fiction. As with The Jungle, A Fine Balance seemed so intent on describing a historical period that it sacrificed some of its literary quality in order to get a message across. I don’t mean that the language suffered; on a sentence level the diction, syntax, and rhythm of the prose was beautiful right through the frustrating epilogue. But in literature, although there may be some extraneous circumstances that force characters to do one thing or another, on the whole, the stories are supposed to be driven forward by the emotions, motivations, and actions of the characters themselves. So even though the atrocities in A Fine Balance probably, or even certainly, happened to Indian citizens during 1975, it seems too controlled, too manipulative, for an author to have so many of them happen to so few characters in such a short time span. Having them constantly bombarded by external forces made it very difficult to have them develop as complex people with complex relationships. Here’s the crux of the problem: It was so clear that the author was manipulating the circumstances and characters that I had to wonder: What is the point of reading if the characters end up in a worse place than where they started? It’s as if the very act of reading helps to destroy them.

In fiction, I’m okay with depressing endings, or even numerous atrocities. But it has to be good fiction. And here the author was so intent on his message that he twisted events to suit that message, thereby sacrificing the needs of his novel-as-literature. And because there was no sense of inevitability to these events, they didn’t actually have to happen at all. They were there to make the ending devastating, but nothing more.

Perhaps A Fine Balance demonstrates the abysmal conditions of the working class in India circa 1975. But I’m not convinced that it’s enough for fiction to merely depict historical truth. Let history be history. I think fiction might have some obligation—especially when it’s so obviously fabricated, as the ending of Mistry’s novel is—to say something else.

These ideas come from Sir Philip Sidney, a poet from the 16th century best known for a sonnet series called Astrophil and Stella and an essay called “The Defence of Poesy.” In this essay, he says that fiction has not only an artistic purpose—to be good literature, for example—but a social one: “to teach and delight” (The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition Volume B 959). Fiction, he claims, is poised not only to educate, like history and philosophy, but to do so in such a way that people will actually listen and be interested. It even “excelleth history, not only in furnishing the mind with knowledge, but in setting it forward to that which deserveth to be called and accounted good” (962). Historical truth, like the one depicted in A Fine Balance, may be informational, but the problem with history is that it has no moral compass. Whatever happened happened, and examples from history aren’t necessarily artistic (literary) or right (morally). Fiction, however, can show people something more—something good. It shows people “what may be and should be” (959 italics mine). Unlike history, fiction can imagine the possibility of a better world, with better people in it, and therefore has a responsibility to show what that world and those people look like.

The last part of A Fine Balance frustrates me because of how it seems like the author exploits his own characters and his own novel in order to depict a snapshot from history. I think at this point it fails to be good fiction, and, like The Jungle, becomes more of a medium for a message than literature. Instead of using its imaginative freedom to say something about its characters, their relationships, or the way individuals can rise above even the caste system when they’re forced to really see each other, in the end it seems to say only, Nothing good happened to anybody who might have deserved it, and the only person who prospers in the end is a murderer and a fraud. Not only does “the moral of the story” overtake the literary quality of the book, it’s also a stupid moral. And even though I’ve been complaining about how trying to be more like history than like fiction makes for bad fiction, I think I’m even more frustrated about what A Fine Balance ends up saying. Nothing good happens? That isn’t good enough. Quality aside, I think it’s important for fiction to show people what’s possible. What could be. What should be.

Drudgery

2011-02-28T13:34:00.000-08:00

My friend Diane keeps a writing blog called Confessions of a Word Slut, where she recently wrote an entry called “This is What it Means to Be Writing,” in which she detailed the daily minutiae of writing: the distractions, the backtracking, and the hard-earned paragraphs that mean you’re making progress. Although she left out my own personal distractions—alternately checking the refrigerator and Facebook—her list of disruptions reminded me that writing is not easy. Writing is hard. Writing, as experienced on a day-to-day, even minute-to-minute, basis, is drudgery.

To drudge, according to The Free Dictionary, is “to do tedious, menial, or unpleasant work.” To toil. It comes from the Middle English word for “labor,” which comes from the Old English word for “work” and “suffer.” For me, and for many other writers, I’m sure, that sounds about right.

When I chose to become a writer, I had the quaint notion that the more I studied, the more I refined my craft, the easier it would get. I would be fast, inspired, and prolific! Words—nay—pure unadulterated poetry would flow from my hands as sweet undiminished springs from fertile mountainsides! I would spend hours furiously typing, my fingers a blur across the keyboard, and come to, dizzy and invigorated, having written pages upon pages of beautiful, finely wrought prose!

Ancient Greek authors used to invoke the Muses—daughters of Zeus and goddesses of artistic and literary inspiration—before beginning to compose, asking for divine assistance, asking to be conduits for some kind of otherworldly poetry, which would surge through them and into the world as epics or hymns. The following are examples from The Homeric Hymns, translated by Susan C. Shelmerdine:

Sing, Muse, of Artemis, sister of the far-shooter,
the virgin pourer of arrows, raised together with Apollo. (146)

Sing to me, Muse, clear-voiced daughter of great Zeus,
about the Mother of all gods and of all men, (149)

Begin to sing again, O Muse Kalliope, daughter of Zeus,
about Helios the radiant god… (163)

Muses skilled in song, sweet-voiced daughters of Zeus,
son of Kronos, sing next of long-winged Moon. (164)

Homer called upon the Muses to sing to and through him, so the perfectly placed lines of verse would pour from them into him and thus out into the world: pillars of Western literature like the Iliad and the Odyssey. I want to say it’s myths like this—the myth of divine inspiration—that made me think that writing would come easily, in a flash of genius. “Hey Muses, help me out here,” and bang—an exquisite work of fiction.

This, sadly, isn’t the case. I haven’t met a single writer whose best work comes so effortlessly. For me, and for many, writing is drudgery. It’s work and suffering. I’ve devoted almost all seven years of my academic life to the word—I’ve taken literature classes, creative writing workshops, even a linguistics course, in addition to having been a writing tutor and a teacher—and it still doesn’t come easy. I’m struggling through the middle of writing the first draft of a novel at the moment, and it’s hard enough to write, much less write well.

Don’t let those crazy old Greeks fool you. If it was simply a matter of invoking a Muse or two and letting the magic happen, everyone would be a literary genius. But it isn’t that simple. Let’s go back to the word drudge. To work and to suffer. It even sounds sluggish and painstaking. Like sludge. I can’t just sit down at my computer and knock out a perfect paragraph, or even a perfect sentence. I spend hours agonizing over a scene—imagining it, sketching it out, filling it in—and that’s just the content. Getting the language right is another type of drudgery, one in which you phrase and rephrase over and over again, trying to get the exact right words in the exact right order. At the end of her list, Diane wrote, “84 words! Whoot! I think I’m back in the story.” Eighty-four words. That’s less than the length of this paragraph. And it’s still something to celebrate. For writers, even getting a mere eighty-four words right can be a victory.

You see, writing is making yourself sit down at the computer, or pick up the pen, and put down one word after another. It doesn't all appear at once, in a flood, but in drops. Word by word. It can take hours to get your words right. It can take days, or months. Some of my short stories have taken years to write. Because the words take time. They take careful consideration. They require shuffling, discarding, and redrawing. And all the while life beckons. It clamors for your attention: errands, work, bills, family, work, friends, food, work. It's difficult to sit down and do something as time consuming as writing when you really need to attend to all these other matters, or when you'd rather do something easy and mindless, like checking Facebook or watching TV. And even getting eighty-four words down is something. Even that is progress.

Writing, for me, is chipping away at the ol’ block. Michelangelo is supposed to have said, “In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.” The statue is there, somewhere, beneath all that extra rock; he just has to find it. Oddly enough, even though I’m building up words rather than carving it away, I think of writing like that. The novel, or story, or paragraph, or sentence, or word, is out there somewhere; I just have to find it. I just have to keep working at it. I just have to toil and sweat and labor over it, but with hard work, patience, and yes, of course, with skill, I’ll get there. It just won’t be easy.

Reading and Writing

2011-02-18T08:27:00.000-08:00

There are so many things that I want to say about reading and writing and there is only one introductory post in which to begin saying them. I want to tell you about how difficult it is, how frustrating, how everyone thinks they can do it and how very wrong they are. I want to tell you about my dreams for the future of the novel and what that has to do with poetry, visual art, and the internet. I want to leave you with quotes. I want to talk about books I’m reading or have read or want to read again. There is so much to say, and only one place to begin.

I found out this past week that I’ve been accepted into a Single-Subject Teaching Credential program. I want to be a high school English teacher. I’m currently substituting, and although teaching itself couldn’t be better suited to my skills, experience, and personality, it’s important that I’ll be teaching literature—the great love of my life. Because all of this has been on my mind lately, I thought I might share with you, in revised and abbreviated form, some of what I wrote in my application essays. After all, it wasn’t until I was writing them that I even fully understood what writing means to me.

I never had my heart set on teaching. When I was an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, I’d tell people I was majoring in Literature and they’d say, “What are you going to do with that? Teach?”—as if teaching was the only practical option available to me. It seems obvious and silly now, but I spent years railing assumptions like that one. I’d always considered practicality to be for the unimaginative, for those without vision, and I prided myself on being a dreamer.

Maybe at one time in my childhood I wanted to be a veterinarian—or a princess—but my first dream career was designing video games. I was eleven when I first laid hands on a video game controller, and I was hooked. I had always been an avid reader, but these stories were alive! They had a depth and tangibility that were inspiring. I wanted to do that: build worlds, create interactive experiences, inspire people in turn. It was, however, never about the technology, the graphics, or the programming, and when in my last two years of high school I had to make the choice between the practical technical fields and the impossible artistic ones, I chose art. When I went to college I charged headfirst into the Creative Writing department and I didn’t look back.

I studied reading and writing because I loved it. I wanted to be involved in it. I wanted to produce it. When asked what I was going to do with a degree in Literature, I said I wanted to be a writer—and a writer is what I have become. I don’t believe you’re a writer because you’ve been published. I believe you’re a writer because writing is an essential part of you. Without writing, for example, I can’t think. My thought process has become so intertwined with the act of putting words together that I can’t articulate and order my thoughts or emotions without doing it. If I’m annoyed, frustrated, angry, sad, depressed, or anything else and I don’t know why, I pull out my journal, and I put that pen to paper, and I write. I lay down word after word hoping that they’ll lead me somewhere that makes sense, a place where I understand what I’m feeling and why I’m feeling it. I used to tackle academic essays in this way, and after all these years of study, writing has become the practice I use to understand myself and to navigate the world. It’s an indispensible part of who I am.

For reasons that I suspect will reveal themselves in time, over the past two years I’ve lost so much of my confidence in the world that I am only now beginning to piece it back together again. It’s been difficult for me to believe in anything—people, institutions, God—but what I do know for sure, maybe one of the only things I know for sure, is that I still believe in the written word. I still maintain the impossible hope that literature can change things—the small things, yes, but maybe even the big things, one day—for the better. Language can transform you. Reading a book can inspire you. And all my aspirations, from the game designing to the writing to the teaching, come down to this. It has always been about engaging people, getting them involved, and inspiring them to think. It has always been about the possibility of change.

Reading and writing are more than what most people assume them to be. People read more than books, magazines, and websites. They read television programs. They read other people. They read society itself. Learning to read literature is the practice of listening for what’s important. It’s paying attention to what someone is saying, really saying, processing it, and measuring it up against what you already know. Writing, likewise, is more than filling out a resume or putting together a cover letter. Writing is articulation. It’s figuring out what you believe and putting it into words, so that other people can engage with you. Reading and writing are the interpretive and analytic skills that form the foundation of being an involved, decisive, fully-conscious citizen of the world. They’re human skills.

Of course, I didn’t understand that I thought this until I began writing my application essays, but the more I wrote, and wrote, and revised, the clearer it became to me: Literature, for me, is about opening up to new ways of thinking, new ways of approaching the world. Reading and writing, therefore, are acts towards the possibility of change. Simple change. When I was eleven, I wanted to engage and inspire people with video games. When I become a teacher, it’ll be about engaging and inspiring students in a classroom. As a writer, I do it with fiction. I’ll pile sentences, paragraphs, pages one on top of the other because I still hope that at the end of the day, someone—me, or you, or anybody—will read it, and something in the world will change… however small.