January 28, 2007

Glimpses

There had to be something more than this, Gail knew. All around her, she was permitted glimpses of the most marvelous things— the tops of blooming gardens behind tall walls, a sudden pagoda in the midst of a residential block, orange fish swimming far below a layer of ice in the castle moat. A tall blue building the next street over, windowless and featureless, except for its shimmering neon sign. It was a pachinko parlour, Joe said, which was a gambling game, and if Gail ever walked by when someone was going in or out, she got a sense of the overwhelming light and sound inside until the doors shut again and that whole universe disappeared.

January 9, 2007

Shift

I’m about midway through the second draft of my long project, and I’ve decided to shift from first person to third. I’m not convinced it’s the right decision, but I have to try it out and see. And so I am going through my story carefully, changing all the ‘I’s to ‘she’, and no doubt missing quite a few. It’s good though, because at this point in my work, it’s effective to go through the entire story carefully and see how its functioning as a whole. Changing the narration forces me to go through it carefully. I also have a feeling that it will make my narrator more likeable.

January 3, 2007

Short

I’ve taken a one-week break from my long project to write short stories– two or hopefully three. Concurrently, I’m reading Cathedral and listening to my new Badly Drawn Boy CD for inspiration.

January 2, 2007

A tricky business

Now, chewing gum is a tricky business, and so ultimately disposable and therefore dispensable that in a troubled economy it’s usually one of the first sectors to suffer. I worked in Product Development under Great Mind Peter Davenport who, with his knack for innovation, had been charged with maintaining the vitality of the Gollingham Gum brand throughout the economic down-turn. In addition to typing, my work with Peter involved the chewing of prototypical varieties of gum throughout the day and subsequently completing thorough surveys regarding their tastes, textures and flavours— long lasting or otherwise. I grew awfully fond of the new peppermint, and I credit Peter for saving what was left of the Gollingham economy with it.

December 15, 2006

The Ledbetter Serial Arsonist

Before we left Toronto, I had promised postcards home— to Caroline, my friends and even to my mother. But there were no postcards of Ledbetter in existence. You could buy postcards in Ledbetter, at the old train depot museum, but they were actually postcards of the Grantville Town Hall and the Grantville Floral Clock. They used to sell Ledbetter postcards some years ago, I learned from the woman in the conductor’s cap who staffed the museum. But then the postcards ran out and they never restocked, and so many buildings had burnt down by then anyway.
“Have you heard about our arsonist?” the woman asked me.
She led me over to the display in the corner which told the story of serial arsonist Randall Hicks who had destroyed over fifty buildings in Ledbetter over a more than twenty-year spree— from garages and sheds to the Town Hall and Public Library. Hicks was an accountant and a careful arsonist. Only one person was ever injured in one of his fires; a clear case of wrong place at the wrong time, he had been robbing a store Hicks had targeted. And no one had ever managed to catch Randall Hicks either. He’d turned himself in in 1966, one day after his father died, saying he would have done this years ago if it weren’t for the shame it would have brought his dad.
“And that’s why we don’t have postcards anymore,” the woman told me, so I picked up five of the Grantville Floral Clock.

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.