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The Whole Sweet World Is a Garden
[Video: Rowlf and Fozzie collaborate, after a fashion -- and much to their surprise -- on an instrumental version of "In an English Country Garden"] From whiskey river: The thing about Zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose between madness and innocence. And Zen suggests that we [...]
Fiction and (Overly) Real Life
[Photo by Alan Bauer] I want to share with you a little anecdote about one of the wild joys of writing a novel. But let’s put real life aside for a moment; let’s start with a hypothetical. Let’s say you’re writing a novel, as follows: A certain set of events must happen at night, say, [...]
Paying Attention to What You Want
From Seems to Fit: “For this one time,” [Bonnie] said aloud, “I want us each to think about the same question, one question, while we do this. We don’t have to say anything out loud, and we don’t have to spend more than ten minutes doing it, I don’t think—” George: “Wait! Brandy first, question [...]
Unexpectedly Needed, or Not Needed At All
[Video: classic moment from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre] From whiskey river: We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it [...]
Paying Attention to the Click
Nearly every writer, I imagine — maybe we can even dispense with the nearly? — has favorite words. It’s certainly true of me. Some of them are words I just like the sound of. Some of them have meanings just too right: I can’t help reaching for those words whenever I set to writing or [...]
Making the Trip
[Trailer for Adaptation (2002), starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper and featuring a whole lot of other favorite, familiar faces] From whiskey river’s commonplace book (the archives): Human beings can’t live without the illusion of meaning, the apprehension of confluence, the endless debate concerning the fault in the stars or in ourselves. The [...]
Midweek Music Break: “Froggy Bottom”
Almost every chapter in Seems to Fit revolves around a single one of the main characters, even when others are present. It’s a little complicated to move from one character’s head to another’s, in the space of a few days, so I’ve developed some little gimmicks to simplify it for myself. One of these gimmicks: [...]
Paying Attention to, Well, Everything
[Image: photograph, Rock of Ages #15, by Edward Burtynsky: "Active Section, E.L. Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, 1991." Click image for larger view.] This Paying Attention series of posts has recorded, intermittently, one or another aspect of writing (mostly) the novel which I’m now calling Seems to Fit. Every now and then I remember something important [...]
The (Mostly Bogus?) War Between Men and Women
From Seems to Fit, Chapter 23(ish): Bonnie loved her own laugh. Or rather, she loved that George and other men loved it, that spontaneous eruption of trills and musical bubbles which erupted from her throat and open mouth when something struck her as especially funny — especially when the something wasn’t meant to be funny. [...]
Paying Attention to the “Take Her Hand!” Moments
[Video: scene from David Lynch's 1997 film Lost Highway. Soundtrack: Lou Reed's interpretation of "This Magic Moment"] Almost every writer of stories, I bet, has had at least one “Take her hand!” moment. Here’s why I call them that: Over twenty years ago, I was working on a longish short story called “Sing, Sing, Sing.” [...]
