[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 writer is just the messenger, the moving target. Inside culture, the writer is the talking self. Through history, the writing that lasts is the whisper of conscience. The guild of writers is essentially a medieval guild existing in a continual Dark Age, shaman, monks, witches, nuns, working in isolation, playing with fire.
When the first illuminated manuscripts were created, few people could read. Now that people are bombarded with image and information and the World Wide Web is an open vein, few people can read. Reading with sustained attention, reading for understanding, reading to cut through random meaninglessness — such reading becomes a subversive act. The writer’s first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language. Ego enters in, but writing is far too hard and solitary to be sustained by ego. The writer is compelled to write. The writer writes for love. The writer lives in spiritual debt to language, the gold key in the palm of meaning. Awake, asleep, in every moment of being, the writer stands at the gate.
The gate may open.
The gate may not.
Regardless, the writer can see straight through it.
(Jayne Anne Phillips)
Writing is one of the most easy, pain-free, and happy ways to pass the time in all the arts. For example, right now I am sitting in my rose garden and typing on my new computer. Each rose represents a story, so I’m never at a loss for what to write. I just look deep into the heart of the rose and read its story and write it down through typing, which I enjoy anyway. I could be typing kjfiu joew. mv jiw and would enjoy it as much as typing words that actually make sense. I simply relish the movement of my fingers on the keys. Sometimes, it is true, agony visits the head of a writer. At these moments, I stop writing and relax with a coffee at my favorite restaurant, knowing that words can be changed, rethought, fiddled with, and, of course, ultimately denied. Painters don’t have that luxury. If they go to a coffee shop, their paint dries into a hard mass.
(Steve Martin, “Writing Is Easy!” [source])
Not from whiskey river:
His writing did not go “gonzo” until 1970, when he found himself up against a deadline for a story on the Kentucky Derby…
“I’d blown my mind, couldn’t work,” Hunter S. Thompson recalled later in a Playboy interview.
“So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer.
“I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody.”
The article… was heralded as a breakthrough in journalism, and it brought the author a lasting epiphany.
“If I can write like this and get away with it, why should I keep trying to write like the New York Times? It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.”
(“New Journalism’s Dark Prince,” by Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times, Feb 22, 2005)
…and:
E.L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.
(Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)
It’s been a crowded week here: words — and thoughts about them, and stories built with them — filling my head, and everything but words and writing and stories jammed into waking life (outside the early-morning and all too brief writing periods). It hasn’t been dull, I’ll say that — in fact it’s been downright entertaining. It’s resembled the stereotypical circus act in which a miniature car with opaque windows (some sort of shrunken Mini Cooper) drives into the center ring. It rolls to a stop. The door opens, and out unfolds a fat clown… followed by a skinny one… followed by a little guy… and his pony… a guy on stilts… a twisted contortionist, somehow walking on her hands… and… and…
That car. Yeah. That’s been my week.
Yours?
John says
P.S. Just read a relevant quotation in today’s edition of the Writer’s Almanac e-newsletter:
(Joy Williams [source])
Froog says
That car sounds like it could become a nightmare, John. I hope it’s just been hectic-but-fun, challenging-but-energising.
Whatever it’s been, it seems to have provoked a particularly marvellous selection.
Who on earth is Jayne Anne Phillips, and is she is still of an age to have babies with me?
The Querulous Squirrel says
For someone who hasn’t written a short story in a long time, and is longing to write one again, this was a very inspiring post. Adaptation is one of my favorite movies. The writing being like driving with headlights in the country applies to the way I once rode/wrote stories, and want to get back to doing again.
Ashleigh Burroughs says
Ah, welcome to my world, JES. Every day is a new adventure, filled with sensations and emotions and visitors and therapists and sunshine and strangers bringing food and staying to talk and redefine my experience in their own terms.
Headlights? I can barely find the ignition.
Months ago you said something similar to the Doctorow/LaMott piece to me when I was flailing about, wondering how to write more than 500 words at a time. Since Annie and I lived in Marin at the same time, since she is Little Cuter’s muse, her words resonate with me more than you knew when you typed it on the screen…. and I hope you, too, enjoyed the feel of the keys under your fingertips.
Hope your little car is filled with premium gasoline, has a clean windshield and a road map folded neatly in the glove box. Remember, we here in the blogosphere are ready to offer direction and encouragement should the road take a detour to a strange and unfriendly neighborhood.
a/b
John says
Froog: Jayne Anne Phillips published several collections of short stories 30 years or so ago. Her first novel, Machine Dreams, really caught my attention. (It was very highly praised and hard to miss at the time.) I read and liked Fast Lanes, her next collection, as well… but then sort of drifted away. (Almost certainly a matter of things going on in real life at the time, rather than a problem with her writing.)
The quote from whiskey river’s commonplace book comes from an essay, “Why She Writes.” The whole thing appears at her own Web site.
As for the car… That circus trick does an interesting bit of misdirection. As the clowns pile out, and continue to pile out, and pile out some more, and are still piling out, the audience stops thinking about the car (which never changes) and concentrates on its contents (which are always different). The initial joke — “My gosh, there’s another one… and another one…!” — gets pushed aside, in favor of a follow-up joke: “Wow, did you see how funny THAT one was?!?”
But I always wondered about the car.
John says
Squirrel: So good to see you!
If the only thing I accomplish all year is to flip a switch which gets you writing the sort of fiction you want to write, this will so much NOT be a wasted year for me…
And yes, the follow-the-headlights/forget-the-map advice works for me, too. :)
John says
a/b: Given what seems (even to me) like an unimaginably crowded daily schedule of my own, I have not a single slight intimation of an idea how I’d shoehorn into it any of what you have to deal with!
Now I wonder what I said to you, though. How come all that advice is spilling out all over when I’m advising someone else, but not when I need to remind myself about it?!?
LaMott is one of those writers’-advice sources which I have mysteriously never read any of on my own but which keeps cropping up in the recommendations of others — especially Bird by Bird. Guess it’s time to at least consider correcting that, hmm? :)
fg says
@ JES, what a week. Seems I must watch Adaptation.
My mother had a Mini when we were small – all be it a Mini estate. (one where if you fiddled with the sliding windows they fell out.)
I told you I am one of three right…
@ a/b “…staying to talk and redefine my experience in their own terms.”
That rings a bell. And, it is so hard to put the breaks on it because, 1, these people are being kind. And 2, the more you listen the more you realise that they need to ‘work’ on your experience to relieve their own.
@Jayne Anne Phillips
No, oil paint was the preferred medium and still is for most and it stays wet for weeks. Thus has the most wonderful mailable quality. I used to ‘sculpt’ the occasional oil painting for days as a teen.
John says
fg: Watching your mother and the three of you exit that car all at once must have seemed to an observer like a, um, a miniaturization of the clown stunt.
That’s a first — the first time a commenter here replied to someone (Phillips) we were just talking about, obviously replying to a question which no one has asked. Interesting answer, though — ah, the inscrutable mind of the artist! :)
When my kid brother and I were in our teens, we painted our bedroom in a sort of royal-blue color — an unusual, a little disturbing, and some said weird color choice. After the blue paint dried, we — maybe just I? — intended to paint a single diagonal red stripe on each wall.
But ah, that was the thing: “after the blue paint dried.” The only sort of paint we could find in a color close to what we wanted was oil-based. Which, as you say, and as we had not figured, takes a loooooong time to dry. We couldn’t just leave our furniture where we’d moved it, not for that long. So before nightfall we had to move it all very carefully up close to the walls, so the fabrics etc. wouldn’t streak the paint… forgetting that sleeping teenage boys are sometimes known to thrash about in their sleep. The next morning, well, let’s say the bedclothes matched the walls in ways we hadn’t anticipated.
We never did get to do the red stripe, either. Damn.
fg says
“Painters don’t have that luxury. If they go to a coffee shop, their paint dries into a hard mass.”
I thought I’d reply to Jayne as assertively as she writes to us. I understand she is not hear/here but having just googled her I believe she is still alive, so you never know…
PS good on your parents for letting you “decorate” your room and from the sounds of it trash it and all the bed linens in the process. haha
John says
fg: Oh. Duh. Now I’m embarrassed. Experience shows that on average, in about 50% of the cases in which I accuse someone else of confusion, I’ve got it backwards: I myself, in fact, am the confused one. This is obviously one of those cases on the wrong side of the 50% line. :)
As for your PS… I seem to remember a certain amount of knitting of adult eyebrows at the time the plan was announced. But it was sort of a no-risk proposition for them: we ourselves bought the paint, we moved the furniture, we did the painting, we replaced the furniture, and we did the laundry. If I’d been in their shoes, I’d have knit my eyebrows, too (and laughed, once the boys were out of earshot).
marta says
A Mini Cooper is my dream car. I’ve never cared two figs for cars until I caught a glimpse of one on the Tracy Ullman show years ago. I had never seen on in the States at that time, but oh, red with a white top… sigh.
Anyway, the first hour of Adaptation I loved. Maybe about 40 minutes in I went to get a snack and told my husband–this movie is GREAT. But, by the ending I hated it. I’ve never turned on a movie like that, but really, the alligator. Seriously?
Someone I used to know thought it showed a lack of depth on my part to not “get” the ending of Adaptation. Maybe so. But I do happen to know something about gators.