F O U R F O L D

PARTS and WHOLES

2010-09-02T16:11:00.006-04:00

I.
CRAFT: learning how to look at wholes and see parts.

II.
COMPOSITION and REVISION: learning that parts, when put together, makes wholes that are greater than their parts, not wholes that are parts-put-together.

III.
Some craftbooks, especially screenwriting craftbooks, would have you believe that writing is equal to the sum of its parts: "The Six Steps." "The Five Elements." "The Twelve Essential Aspects." Create parts, snap together, produce product. Product = parts. These kinds of craftbooks are no different from rip-offy self-help and weight-loss books-- pay, follow, get results.

IV.
When you think in parts, you need to feel the ghostly shape of the whole; when you think in wholes, you need to feel the ghostly shapes of the parts. (At least I have to, anyway, and it's good hard work.)

Notes From A Discussion on Endings

2010-07-14T16:42:00.009-04:00

I.
The ending as INVITATION. (To the reader.)

II.
The ending as BOMB. (For exploding the work, for exploding the reader's reading.)

III.
The ending as LOGICAL EXHAUSTION. (Of the work's shape, of the work's momentum.

IV.
The ending as BELIEF. (In its surprising structural inevitability, in its surprising contextual inevitability. In the world it has just finished helping to create.)

Form, Myth, and Satire-- Related?

2010-06-23T14:09:00.007-04:00

I.

I have the good fortune to be teaching an Intro to Fiction course this summer.

Last week, we talked about FORMS in fiction, about borrowing the structures of things-that-include-text-but-are-not-often-read-as-texts (grocery lists, baseball tickets, brochures, nutrition information, etc.). How can we use these models to shape a work of fiction?

We read two stories from PANK Magazine-- "______" by Travis Hessman (a Mad-Lib style story with wonderfully specific requests for words-- my favorite is "bouncy verb") and "Letters to My First Love" by Rachel Yoder (dream-like, poetic, and post-scripty love letters). We also read "Happy Endings" by Margaret Atwood (not exactly choose-your-own-adventure, but kind of like a flow chart).

We talked about how the "artifice" of these pieces-- the attention they draw to their forms-- can sometimes, particularly in the Hessman and Atwood pieces, be read as an indictment of fiction that claims to be "realistic"-- how all fiction is illusion and artifice, how the only "authentic ending" is death, and how the immediate acceptance or questioning of form is partially a matter of what fictional conventions are currently accepted by our culture.

Is "realism" arguably an umbrella-form, in and of itself? We discussed this.

II.

Here's my understanding of satire: it so exaggerates the presentation of its subject that you, the reader, laugh; then, nearly simultaneously (though sometimes after), you realize that the exaggeration is not *really* exaggeration-- that the exaggeration accurately reflects actual attitudes towards the subject.

The exaggeration, in other words, is revealed to be no exaggeration.

This shock of recognition allows the reader to (as corny as it sounds) feel the truth.

III.

Satire's non-exaggeration exaggeration initially defamiliarizes the subject-- it takes what is familiar, and, by slightly adjusting its presentation, shows us how strange it actually is.

IV.

A few days ago, my students and I discussed legends, myth, folktales, and parables. We read "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. LeGuin (a folktale structured like a persuasive argument that challenges our culture's notions about happiness and simplicity, among other things), "Before the Law" by Franz Kafka (a mysterious parable that stubbornly resists allegory), and "Mario's Three Lives" by Matt Bell (a myth/legend that artfully resists straight parody and gracefully expresses Mario Mario's existential concerns).

None of these are satires, per se; but it seems to me that they operate how satire operates. That is, they defamiliarize a subject through exaggeration that is not exaggeration.

I'm certainly not saying anything new, here. "Artificial" forms, myth, and satire-- they share techniques. But is there a glue that holds them all together? And if so, what is that glue?

Is it irony?

GUEST POST by the greatly bearded Mario Scapellato: "Reverse Beard Logic"

2010-06-17T08:38:00.003-04:00

I.
Since the warm Chicago weather has rolled in, and since beard is now in full force, strangers and acquaintances alike have started asking me, "Aren't you hot in beard?" I hear this constantly.
I'm not sure why people seem to think that wearing beard suddenly transforms your face into an insane furnace. This is simply not true. I don't notice much of a difference.
There is a chance, however, that my chin is actually sweating incredibly. This sweat might be instantly absorbed by beard. I would never know.
II.
Earlier this year, with the Chicago winter in full force, and since I stupidly decided to shave beard, I experienced phantom beard. This occurred mostly on my chin. Winter winds brushed past my chin and gave me the sensation that my chin was there, but something was amiss. To ponder this I stroked beard. I grasped an inch below my chin and found not-beard. Beard was gone. Who knows where. I took stock in knowing old beard had been spread throughout Chicago. Perhaps farther than Chicago.
Some of beard wound up in the garbage.
Some of beard must still be on my bathroom floor.
Some of beard went down the bathroom sink. Who knows where it went after that.
III.
Before I shaved beard, some of beard must have surely wound up in the CTA trains. Some on the Metra. I imagine when I flew out to New York, I left some beard my airplane seat. Then some beard at that remarkable Korean barbecue restaurant. Then some beard at the Met. Then some beard on that couch I was sleeping on.
Oddly, beard has been lots of places.
IV.
I got to thinking. Beard has been lots of places. Then again, so has arm hair, so has leg hair & so has toe hair (less likely but who knows). Eyebrows, eyelashes, knuckle hairs, belly hairs, shoulder hairs, neck hairs, pit hairs, all hairs.
All hairs have been lots of places.
Beard or no beard, we all leave our mark. No matter how seemingly insignificant it may appear.

Things I Heard At AWP Panels That I Am Still Thinking About, Nearly One Month Later

2010-05-03T12:53:00.007-04:00

I. Short fiction = writing FROM something; long fiction (6 - 8,000 words) = writing TOWARD something.

It's not always as clear as this, of course, but I appreciate the distinction, and sometimes feel it when composing/revising. When writing short fiction, I tend to think about the image or idea that ignited the piece, and, to determine what it's after, try to feel out how the piece is moving AWAY from its first sentence. When writing longer fiction, I tend to think less about what started the piece, and instead try to feel out what far-off thing is moving INTO the work.

II. "Flash fiction is not fast food."

I can't remember who said this, or how they elaborated, but I dig this point. Strong flash fiction is not produced like fast food, nor is it enjoyed and consumed like fast food. Though both, if much-consumed, "stay with you."

III. Mike Young of HTMLGIANT discussing how you shouldn't take a "save your best stuff" approach when submitting to lit mags. He made the great point that avoiding this mentality helps you to be "less precious" about your work.

I've struggled with this myself, feeling like I want to "save" certain work for "better" magazines. The result? Not submitting very much. And you miss out on the larger world of lit mags. You hoard instead of give. Any time a writer can learn to let go-- to be less precious, to have less hang-ups, less ego-- it's probably a good thing. Especially long-term.

IV. Antonya Nelson explaining how it's not as useful for her to think about what characters desire or want, but instead to think of what they "want" in the old sense of the word-- what they lack. She made the point that most people don't know what they desire, anyway; and that overt desire, when injected into characters, can feel too conscious, too predictable.

I love this point, for lots of reasons. One of the reasons is how it defies the old advice to make an overdetermined and lengthy list of your main character's background, and to do this before actually writing: birthday, hometown, siblings, hair color, shoe size, favorite cheese, and deeply-felt but pent-up and unstated and perhaps constrictively reductive overall goals-in-life.

If you discover these "desires" while writing-- and chasing what a character lacks is one way to do this--then maybe there's a greater chance that it will feel like discovery for the reader, too.

Reading-as-discovery-- that's where it's at.

Fertile Indolence

2010-03-28T11:58:00.006-04:00

I. My folks visited this week and stayed with me and the lady. The week before that, I had myself a nice long weekend with two very good friends in DC. So, lately, it's been cities, museums, brewpubs, breakfasts, farmers markets, hikes, drives, guided tours. Making paczki and packing sauerkraut. Playing cards.

And too much not-writing.

II. One of the best things an MFA can do is to help you discover you have a disease. If you find you do not have this disease, and want it, the MFA can attempt to infect you.

There is one steady symptom of this disease: if a day goes by and you have not written, you feel very, very bad. Sometimes like you're sinking into yourself. Sometimes like the inside of your head is itchy, bloated, or gassy. And sometimes like you want to step in front of a semi, off a bridge, or into the christening/continuation of bad habits.

(Arguably, there are many symptoms of this disease; arguably, there are different if not unique strains. But the symptom mentioned above is the only symptom that matters.)

For many, this symptom can be temporarily relieved by reading deeply.

III. In Polish Writers on Writing, edited by Adam Zagajewski-- a killer craft book in a killer series called "The Writer's World" by Trinity Press-- Jozef Czapski, a writer/painter, addresses something he calls "FERTILE INDOLENCE," which is perhaps the best defense for the periods when an artist pours an entire day (or week) into not-arting.

After coming out of a period of extremely hard work-- whether productive or not-- Czapski argues we're often

capable of greater attention, higher temperatures, with deeper
sensibility. At this time observation ceases to be merely an act of will
or the muscles and so a constraint, and it gradually becomes a reflex, later
almost second nature; only then can one speak of fertile indolence...and one
returns to work after one's inactive day enriched, with recharged batteries.

Have you ever felt this way? It makes sense to me. Craft has been worked into our bones so thoroughly that taking a breather is not really taking a breather. It's just shifting the register from "active" to "passive." Or "direct" to "indirect."

This state of fertile indolence is a kind of "passive contemplation," an

inaction [that] is a dream with open eyes, a state only seemingly restful:
the creative instinct is more awake than at any other time, the "faculties en
eveil," the alert faculties, rolled into a ball, are awake, waiting to throw
themselves on the first catch, to leap forward at full speed but also with a
full, cold, calculating consciousness.

Sounds lovely, doesn't it?

But. As we all know, it can be hard to get a stopped train moving again. Czapski cautions us to be "constantly, subconsciously, instinctively vigilant in order not to allow fertile indolence to transform itself into wasteful indolence, which weakens and annuls any project instead of enriching it."

He says it best here, I think: "a person capable of such indolence is threatened by a kind of fall, a peril: an urge to prolong the state, because it is a happy state."

IV. Today I rearranged the study. I added a table, stacked books in piles, and sat (am sitting) at a clean desk. Tomorrow I return to long writing hours. Here's to hoping for the leap from one happy state to another.

"Sons and Other Flammable Objects" by Porochista Khakpour

2010-03-06T16:45:00.006-05:00

[DISCLOSURE: I am friends with the author.]

I. Just finished this novel this morning and, as one of the main characters would say, "Holy big wow," was I moved. And yes, I mean emotionally, but I don't just mean emotionally. To me, from start to finish, Sons and Other Flammable Objects vibrates with its own living brand of organizational logic. There's something wonderfully intuitive about this book's locomotion-- the pages go where the pages go, and I surrender to their dashing in a state of delight because I trust the (third person) narrator's lively energy.

II. Some long gorgeous sentences, here. Sentences that tug you right along. Sentences that make this 396 page novel feel like half its size.

III. To connect #1 and #2: is the winding, intuitive, and energetic arc of this novel a direct product of the winding, intuitive, and energetic arc of the sentences? I mean, well, yes, in the sense that any novel is indeed "made out of" its sentences; but is the essence of a novel as-a-whole something to be found in the nucleus of every sentence?

(Or in most sentences? Or in representative sentences?)

In this case, to me, the answer to these questions is yes. I'm wondering, though, if this is true for most novels. And what about novels that, taken as-a-whole, oppose the arc of their sentences?

Intuitive-feeling sentences and a formally-restricted-feeling arc. Vice versa. Etc. I can't, for the life of me, think of one example. And such examples must exist.

IV. The narrator's charged sentences wind their way deep into the characters and hook them, and when these lines wind back out, the characters come with them-- wild and stubborn, hurting like hell, hilarious and tragic, and real. This is one hell of a book.

GUEST POST by the gracious Stephen Lloyd Webber-- WRITE LIKE AESOP

2010-02-27T12:41:00.005-05:00

WRITE LIKE AESOP
by Stephen Lloyd Webber

I. Set the occasion quickly and without finesse.
Example: “An Eagle and a Fox formed an intimate friendship and decided to live near each other.”

II. Do not feel compelled to write your way into a justifiable end; nonetheless, make a moral out of it.
Example: The Fox and the Grapes

A FAMISHED FOX saw some clusters of ripe black grapes hanging
from a trellised vine. She resorted to all her tricks to get at
them, but wearied herself in vain, for she could not reach them.
At last she turned away, hiding her disappointment and saying:
"The Grapes are sour, and not ripe as I thought."

Another Example: The Image of Mercury and the Carpenter

A VERY POOR MAN, a Carpenter by trade, had a wooden image of
Mercury, before which he made offerings day by day, and begged
the idol to make him rich, but in spite of his entreaties he
became poorer and poorer. At last, being very angry, he took his
image down from its pedestal and dashed it against the wall.
When its head was knocked off, out came a stream of gold, which
the Carpenter quickly picked up and said, "Well, I think thou art
altogether contradictory and unreasonable; for when I paid you
honor, I reaped no benefits: but now that I maltreat you I am
loaded with an abundance of riches."

III. Write in series.
Example: The Hare and the Hound
The Hare and the Tortoise
The Hare and the Tortoise
The Hares and the Frogs
The Hares and the Frogs
The Hares and the Lions
The Hares and the Foxes
The Hare With Many Friends

IV. It’s OK for animals to be wiser. In fact, understand that each animal has their own wisdom. Horses, therefore, have horse-wisdom and lions have lion-wisdom. Men have their wisdom which is by no means superior.
Example: The Horse and Groom
A GROOM used to spend whole days in currycombing and rubbing down
his Horse, but at the same time stole his oats and sold them for
his own profit. "Alas!" said the Horse, "if you really wish me
to be in good condition, you should groom me less, and feed me
more."

Another Example: The Man and the Lion

A MAN and a Lion traveled together through the forest. They soon
began to boast of their respective superiority to each other in
strength and prowess. As they were disputing, they passed a
statue carved in stone, which represented "a Lion strangled by a
Man." The traveler pointed to it and said: "See there! How strong
we are, and how we prevail over even the king of beasts." The
Lion replied: "This statue was made by one of you men. If we
Lions knew how to erect statues, you would see the Man placed
under the paw of the Lion."

One story is good, till another is told.
And with that, I'm off to tell other tales.

Charles D'Ambrosio's Q & A

2010-02-21T17:00:00.003-05:00

1. A few years ago I sold Charles D'Ambrosio a foil-wrapped bean and cheese burrito after his reading. We were at a bar in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He ate the burrito. More interestingly, last week, he came to Susquehanna University, did an outstanding Q & A with the students, and gave a great reading. I was lucky enough to be there, listening.

2. At the beginning of the Q & A, Charles said that the question he continually returns to while writing is, "How do you get feeling into prose?" To me, that right there's the question that counts. The kind of question that has a million murky answers, one for every written effort. A question that can shape your body of work by leading you through the writing of it.

3. Charles said something like, "If there's a problem with the ending, it's probably not the ending." BANG. He also talked about how nice it was when you discover you've written past your story's ending-- "Aha, I'll just cut the last two pages. Done."

4. One student raised his hand and talked about how he was writing a story that needed to have a lot of nature in it, but he himself didn't know much about nature and therefore was unsure how best to approach the story, if at all. Research is one answer, sure, but Charles suggested something even more interesting and useful: if you stumble upon a writerly problem while working on a story, consider giving that problem to the story. In this case, for instance, you could write from the point of view of a character who is lost and overwhelmed in nature, someone who's frustrated and perhaps terrified by the fact that he doesn't know the names or properties of everything around him.

To me, this is high-quality practical advice. Transform your weakness into a revision-engine. Do you have an old story that's slammed into a wall? Give that story a second chance by making your problem the gas pedal, and stepping on it.

LONGHAND

2010-02-08T09:49:00.006-05:00

[a modified reposting from a guest post on Stephen Lloyd Webber's lovely blog]

1. LONGHAND—as though referring to a hand of hands, an entity independent of the writer: sleek and lithe, sly, fit with four lengthy fingers and an elegant thumb. Aloof. Not something you’d find beneath a stone.

2.Many of us work with, on, and through computers. We might feel we could go our entire lives without composing or revising by hand, and I don’t think we’d be wrong. A computer’s gift is speed and ease—in making minor adjustments, shifting sentences and paragraphs, and radically restructuring large sections. Unless you hunt and peck, or are a stenographer, you’re probably able to type faster than you can longhand.

(Two hands versus one.)

And that sound: the soft clickety-clicking, overlapping itself. Sonic progress.

3. In the summer before my last year of graduate school, I needed to make some serious headway on my thesis (a novel). Robert Boswell, who I had the great good fortune to study with, said to me, “If it isn’t coming, change something.” He meant process, not product—if you’re spending hours (or days!) spinning your wheels on the same three sentences, go write in a different room. Write at night instead of in the morning. Have tea instead of coffee. Go to a library instead of a coffeeshop. Write first and check your email second.

Identify your variables, then shift them. Is this the most useful practical advice I’ve ever heard? Yes.

When I’m stuck in the worst way, when I’m working so slowly that I begin to contemplate my mortality, the best way for me to “change something” is to print off pages (the whole thing if it’s a short story, fifty pages for a novel). Then I sit down with a pen and a notebook, and I mark those pages up. I write in the margins, I draw arrows, I slash, I scribble, I spill ink.

And, perhaps most usefully, I’ll rewrite entire passages longhand in my notebook. Writing longhand slows me down. As paradoxical as it sounds, sometimes, when I’m working slowly, that’s exactly what I need. There’s a different kind of logic to what comes out in longhand. Or to how it comes out. (Process.) It’s not that the sentences get more winding, or lengthier, or fancier (though for some reason this is the assumption—maybe because of associations with older times when letter-writing was common, when prose was supposedly flowery?), it’s just that I find myself freed by the constraints of a different medium: the lined page, the pen in one hand. I’m reminded that it’s okay to tear a passage open and rebuild it.

4. Are there pleasures in writing longhand? Ink-smears on the edge of your hand. The tails of g’s and y’s dangling down into lower lines, whacking the foreheads of other words. The sound skin makes against paper when your hand scoots—almost like the breath taken right before you say something that’s just come to you.

Looking at the messy page of what you’ve written. Your style. Thinking: does the way I wrote this say anything about me, about my state, about the work itself?

The Body Artist, by Don DeLillo

2010-01-30T11:22:00.019-05:00

1. I'm not done with The Body Artist. But I will be tonight. I'm finding I have to read this book alone and in utter silence because it haunts me as I read it. This haunting is so fine and lovely that it's banished by any interruption. Although other books have dragged me in so deeply that they've proven to be interruption-proof, I'm thinking that what the The Body Artist is doing to me is in some ways even more viscerally affective. It's the best kind of haunting, maybe, because it's made me so concerned about maintaining its spell. It makes me want to wreath the reading-of-it in ritual.

2. Is this what great haunting does? Make you actively (not passively) ensure that the haunting keeps happening? In a way, that's what's happening to the characters-- (SEMI-SPOILER)-- Lauren, the body artist, is entranced and disturbed by how her dead husband manifests through a stranger. She can't stop herself-- she actively attempts to invoke it.

3. A beautifully close third person, here. Lauren has a thought, interrupts it mid-sentence with another thought, completes Thought Number 2, and then returns to Thought Number 1. Also with Action Number 1 and Action Number 2. Like a ghost, she can't do anything all the way, in-and-of-itself; she floats through this, she floats through that.

4. Why is White Noise the only other DeLillo I've ever read? This book is fantastic.

"Cathedral" and "A Small, Good Thing," Raymond Carver

2010-01-23T09:57:00.000-05:00

I. I've read "Cathedral" so many times, with years between each reading. I've never read "A Small, Good Thing." WOW to reading these back to back. Which I did last night.

II. To me, the engine of these two stories is INTIMACY, an intimacy that has nothing to do with sexuality. More than one character in each story moves into intimacy with another, sliding from a grounding in their own buried aloneness, so buried they may not have fully known they possessed it until presented with the oppportunity (the story's occasion) to encounter the lonely mystery embedded in others: the blind man, the baker.

III. This slide is ennabled by exhaustion-- an exhaustion achieved through drinking, dope, or death.

IV. The collection these stories come from-- "The Art of the Short Story," edited by Dana Gioia and R.S. Gwynn-- includes a brief "craft note" from the author, tacked on after the story/stories. In his note, Carver says, "It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-- with immense, even startling power." He goes on to say a similar thing regarding dialogue.

Is it useful to say that this startling power of precision is, in fact, INTIMACY?

When we write precisely, are we writing intimately?