December 7, 2006

Footnotes

If my academic career were to continue beyond next Friday, I would require some sort of rehabilitation program for my addiction to footnotes. I suspect this is a common graduate student affliction, but it feels personal to me. I wonder how we ever got along without them. Moreover, I wish I could scatter them throughout my conversations. Not my fiction so much; I think that’s not clever anymore. But yes, if I could find a way to talk with footnotes. I think it would cut down on the number of times I change topic within a single sentence.

December 6, 2006

Difficult

From this article, via Maud Newton.

Marilynne Robinson says “Expect [writing] to be difficult. If you don’t encounter difficulty you’re probably not doing it well enough.”

December 4, 2006

Up there

Up there, she thought, and she patted her hair dry with a towel, the sky must be very cluttered. She remembered back a long time ago, when their house was being built, and her parents had taken her to see it. There was dirt everywhere, instead of a lawn, instead of the street and the house itself still just had its wooden bones, like the houses stopped in time over on the other side of the creek. There was no door yet— only a frame— and they went inside so Carmen could see the room that would be hers, up the wooden steps with muddy footprints. The room wasn’t finished yet, but still Carmen could see its shape and the space where the window would go once there was a wall. Carmen had lay down on the floor in the middle of the room, and looked right up through the roof that wasn’t there yet, and she thought, “So this is what the sky above my bed will look like.” She still thought about that sky sometimes, when she looked at her ceiling in the dark at night. The sky hadn’t looked cluttered then, as evenly blue as the ceiling was white, but then daylight can be tricky. When the night comes along with all its lights, then you can see what’s out there.

November 5, 2006

Listening

I have no set opinions about the teaching of creative writing, but it is a debate that interests me and is worthwhile even without conclusions. Personally, I know it’s worked for me in some ways. I am definitely a better writer than I was a year ago, in terms of what I produce and how efficiently I do it, but I also find myself confused by so much feedback from all sides, and different advice that goes around telling us how it’s done. I think when one is reading about writing, it has to be kept in mind that no advice is surefire and that different things work for different people. It is helpful to read contradictory advice and figure out what works, picking and choosing from the pile. I have managed this pretty well, though it took awhile, but I am getting the hang of who I am as a writing creature.

What I am less sure of, however, is my relationship to my work. I still find myself following prescriptions about what fiction is and what I am permitted to do with it. I realize I am still early on in my apprenticeship, but still it bothers me that I don’t own my work yet. I write what I write, hoping that when I put it out to the world, someone will say “yes, that’s right” more than anything else. Which is crap. And that this is crap never occured to me until today. I realize I am never going to write anything terribly experimental and I think my speciality is stories rather than language, but I want those stories to be mine. I want someone to give me feedback and for me to be able to dismiss it, and not just out of fatigue or insult. I want everything in my work to function because I made it that way, and because it has to function that way. I want my work not to be eager to please, but still to please. I want to remain receptive to feedback, but I also want my work to be my own.

I was listening to that Creative Writing podcast a few weeks back, a writer saying she never showed anyone her work until she was ready to publish it, and I thought how much I could never do that because I don’t know anything, and my instincts are all wrong. This is a big problem with creative writing classes, and something I need to get over. My work suffered in the past, not because my instincts were so wrong but because I was not sufficiently engaged with what I was doing. I need to get inside my work more, take it back and get to know it so well. I need to be engaged with my work on a level I have never been before, on a level that is so demanding it’s nearly painful. Every single bit of my story and its entire container have to be so deliberate and meaningful. But the important thing I realized today is that if I have done these things, I can throw all the writing advice in the world out the window.

This is a revelation. It came upon me today as I was flipping through Francine Prose’s Mrs. Dalloway Reader. An essayist (I can’t remember which) wrote about how in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf turned fiction on its head. She told rather than showed, and the pace was slow, and the story was cluttered etc etc but her book was magnificent. She wasn’t listening to anyone but herself, oh but she was listening to herself so intently. Do this.

This might not sound revelatory on a grand scale, but I suspect anyone who has been mired in the questions surrounding how to write a novel will understand the significance of the line I crossed today.

Note: I find it interesting that searching for “how to write a novel” on amazon comes up with a 1994 book called How to Write a Damn Good Novel by James Frey! James N Frey, that is.

November 2, 2006

Today

When a shite piece of prose grows legs, and Stuart’s eggs show signs of imminent chickenhood. And there’s Japanese curry for dinner. Cheers all around then.

November 2, 2006

Joe saw me first

Joe saw me first, which wasn’t technically true because I’d seen him plenty before that. I knew him, but so did everyone, in that way a whole crowd knows a singer on the stage but no one expects him to know them back. Joe Brighton had been President of the Student Council the year before, when a radical group organized a sit-in at the Chancellor’s Office in protest of the Vietnam War and the university administration’s draconian authoritarianism. Rather unfashionably, Joe had condemned the students’ actions as irresponsible and ill-conceived, and he lent his support to a police raid that saw the protesters jailed. He’d stood up on behalf of mild-mannered, clean-cut boys everywhere, and even when the school paper pasted a headline over his face proclaiming him a fascist, you still had to admire his gumption. Joe’s council impeached him before his term was up, which only heightened his fame really. Felled politician though he was, Joe Brighton was six foot five and gorgeous, star forward of the Varsity Hockey Team, and when I used to take his order at the restaurant where I worked, I could hardly speak without a stammer.

October 29, 2006

Writing Tunes

When I write, I require silence or else music to block unsilenceable outside noise. When I listen to music while writing, I can only listen to one song on repeat, or possibly an extremely seamless album. The top ten most played songs on my itunes are as follows:
Feel Flows: The Beach Boys
Turn Me On: Kevin Lyttle
Helpless: Buffy Saint-Marie
She’s a Rainbow: The Rolling Stones
Crazy English Summer: Faithless
More Than This: Roxy Music
Sweet Thing: Van Morrison
Get Along With You: Kelis
Clocks: Coldplay
Tangled Up in Blue: Bob Dylan

October 25, 2006

A great modifier

I’m sort of in love with the idea of a hyperbolic thesaurus. I don’t know if one exists, or what good it would really be if one did, but I want one all the same. “cold: freezing, burrr-y, 50 below zero, the North Pole, arctic, glacial, polar, Siberian; and if still at a loss, of course “fcking” always makes a great modifier. I think I would be well-qualified to write a hyperbolic thesaurus, if such a position ever became available.

In exciting news (and speaking of cold),Laura has arrived at the South Pole and her first blog entry about it is fascinating. Guardian Podcast: can creative writing be taught (blah blah blah)? I’ll give it a listen tonight o’er my knitting.

Back to work you.

October 25, 2006

Structure

From the Diane Setterfield piece in The Globe yesterday: “Then she began writing the first draft of The Thirteenth Tale over two years. “It was abominably bad when I reread it,” she said. ‘It didn’t make me think, can I write? It did make me think, can I structure a novel?'”

October 20, 2006

the lawn mower that is broken

It is curious that I no longer require the use of an index and can remember that the explanation for “that vs. which” lies on page 59 of my Strunk and White, and yet I never can remember what the explanation is.