Paying Attention

Paying Attention to Unpleasantness

October 10, 2009 by John 17 Comments

[Image: “Marshmallow Gun” (excerpt) — click for full original at xkcd.]

I realized a couple days ago — during this criminally busy week — that I hadn’t posted any writing samples in a long time.

Many of the (non-blogging) pieces I’ve posted on RAMH are grouped together under the category called “Paying Attention.” But I don’t post a given bit of my work with a “I thought you’d be interested in reading this” preface, followed by the thing itself. (Yes, smart aleck: that would be too simple.) Instead, I’ve prefaced each piece with a full blog post about an component of writing to which I try to (yes) pay attention when I myself am writing: setting, character, action, and so on. At the foot of each such full post is a link to some writing of mine which illustrates (if I’m lucky!) whatever point the post was ostensibly making.

The topic of today’s post, obviously, is something no one really wants to think of — and maybe not a lot of people are willing even to read. But I’m not talking about a specific something, mind you, because everyone has different thresholds for different sorts of unpleasantness.

What things or experiences does the word “unpleasantness” call to your mind? Do you expect to encounter them in fiction? If you know you’ll encounter them in a given book, will you not read it?

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Paying Attention to Your Sense of Play

May 23, 2009 by John Leave a Comment

I’d already written this post’s title. And I almost began the body of it with these words: “Sometimes, you just have to”—

But, nah. I don’t think everyone, not even every writer, “just has to” do almost anything, much less experience the sort of off-the-wall moment I did one afternoon, years ago. And even less than that, to actually follow up on it.

This was back in the days when I was living on my savings and trying to Be a Fulltime Writer. (If you notice the contradiction in terms there, on either side of the and, you’re not the only one.) I was reading the paper one day after lunch. It had been a productive morning writing session, and I was feeling a bit burnt-out but still not quite ready to toss away the afternoon on something other than writing. Just, y’know, not necessarily that writing — what I was working on every day.

So I was reading the paper, as I said, and my attention was caught by the Ann Landers advice column on the page opposite the comics. “Dear Ann Landers,” it began (they all began that way). “I was a closet smoker who went through a pack a day for 20 years and tried to quit dozens of times. I failed because I felt as if I was depriving myself of a great deal of pleasure even though I knew in my heart that cigarettes were killing me…”

To this point, a fairly conventional letter. Yet even as you read of this guy’s struggle with the Tobacco Demon, you could sense, lurking in the wings, a but. You could sense he wasn’t writing to seek advice. He was writing to offer it.

And so he did.

Something about the solution he came up with just suddenly struck me as bizarre. Flat-out hilarious, even. I’d been a smoker myself, and the thought that I might actually employ this solution back then, on the occasions when I’d most wanted a cigarette, just, well, it just unhinged me.

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Paying Attention to I-Don’t-Know-What

February 24, 2009 by John 4 Comments

When telling people about my flipping back and forth from technical writing to fiction, I usually say I went for five years without writing anything at all.

That’s not exactly true. Truth is, after about four years I’d had enough. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t have anything specific I meant to write, but just sitting around — I wasn’t, really, but you know what I mean — was starting to make me a little crazy.

So I told The Missus I meant to get up early the next morning and I did. Staggered to the computer, bleary-eyed, with a cup of tea in hand. Opened the word processor. Let my hands hover over the keyboard and typed:

It’s 1927, late on a mid-June morning.

A few things about this very brief sentence:

I just about never write in the present tense. From the first word, I was already surprising myself.
What the hell did — do — I know about 1927? My only connection to that year remains tenuous: my dad had been three years old then. But I had no stories about his life as a little kid that I was preparing to channel. (Really, I had no such stories at all.)
The morning on which I wrote those words was not in mid-June, and the time was certainly earlier than later. But we’d been wallowing in one of those weeks of high heat and humidity which periodically drag their lazy way through North Florida regardless of season. And that environmental influence, in retrospect, certainly had something to do with that first sentence and what followed.

The story which came out of that brief fling with an early-morning routine — it lasted maybe a week, maybe two — is called “The Running Boy.” I never finished it; got a little over 6,000 words into it and just ran out of steam. Not abandoned by the Muse, not tired of the story itself. Just plain tired. (I hadn’t adjusted my bedtime to allow for the early morning schedule, instead counting on the adrenaline rush of writing again to carry me through a day on four hours’ sleep. Say it with me: Duh.)

But “The Running Boy” continued to interest me for a number of reasons (some of them hinted at in that opening sentence).

The plot itself — or rather, the thing-which-the-plot-seemed-to-be-about, what Hitchcock used to call the MacGuffin — caught me completely unawares. I wish I knew how it turned out.

I experimented (again, no idea why) with writing dialect. While I often give my characters characteristic rhythms of speech and other little verbal tics of their own, what I’ve got of “The Running Boy” represents my only attempt to give characters what you might call accents. And I don’t think it’s too heavy-handed. (We’re not talking Joel Chandler Harris here.)

The story has three main characters — probably two too many for a short story. But while it lasted, I had great fun working out their relationships. (In the back of my mind, they’re continuing their adventures with one another somewhere.)

Finally, the genre is one which I’d never seriously attempted. At that, the genre itself was a sort of MacGuffin; “The Running Boy” — at least its first 6K words — has even less to do with the genre than it does with, say, computers and the Internet. The story more or less announces its genre within the first few paragraphs and then more or less forgets it; the point, as it happens, seems to have been the characters after all.

Anyway, for what it’s worth — and for the sake of whatever my mind thought itself to be achieving — here are the first 1700+ words of “The Running Boy.” (I haven’t edited this at all, just copied-‘n’-pasted it from the document, so it doesn’t take long to make me cringe at stuff I wish I’d rewritten.)

Enjoy!

Paying Attention to Bits of Everyday Life

January 31, 2009 by John 6 Comments

When writing-related blogs ask their writing audience when, exactly, they “knew” they were writers, the answer most commonly offered is: I’ve always wanted to write.

Not so, in my case. Up until seventh grade, I had no such ambition, although teachers and family members had often complimented me on my writing. (I remember one grandmother — this was probably when I was around ten years old — chuckling in her grandmotherly way at something I’d said. Then she stopped for a moment, looked at me, and said, It’s not so much what you say, Johnny. It’s how you say it. Obviously, I never forgot that moment.)

In high school, one of the teachers I became friends with was Mr. Hanlon, who taught trig, physics, and calculus. He kept telling me I needed to consider a career in engineering.

No, I’d say, engineering didn’t interest me. I wanted to be a writer.

A look of almost-mock horror would flash across his face. “A writer?” he’d exclaim. “What about engineering?!?”

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Paying Attention to Meaning

January 14, 2009 by John Leave a Comment

I wanted to try something… something different for our writing workshop back then.

Not something funny (or was it?). Not something in the psychological horror line. Not a genre piece, not an obviously literary piece. For that matter, none of the things that would pop into workshoppers’ heads when they sat down to read it and started to answer the question, What sort of story has John written?

I wanted to overturn expectations. They knew what sort of story I wrote, after all, or so they thought: a story with some quirky protagonist at center stage, acting out some strange mental drama in a world which stubbornly resisted his or her preconceived ideas of the way the world should work. A story with a lot of… of… thwarting going on.

They’d expect a story, furthermore, that went on for thousands of words.

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Paying Attention to Action — or Is It Character?

December 30, 2008 by John 4 Comments

I’ve written here before (here and here) about the terrors of newly-published-authordom — particularly, when the bad reviews land in your mailbox.

But sometimes, even a bad review contains a nugget you cling to when the whole damned thing threatens to come unraveled, when your spirit sags and you wonder why you’re even bothering to continue.

In my case, that nugget for Crossed Wires appeared in a review which on the whole was not particularly flattering. (This was the review referring to “occasional patches of arty prose.” Which was true — which was why it rankled so much!) Specifically — I’m going on memory here but think it’s pretty close to the real wording — it said: “The action scenes are winners, some of them quite funny.”

The reason this comment stuck with me wasn’t the “quite funny” part. That’s something people had been telling me for years about (much of) my writing; while it was nice to know that a stranger concurred, I more or less just nodded to myself at that point — because I was still savoring the first half of the sentence.

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Paying Attention to History

November 9, 2008 by John 1 Comment

If you’ve been visiting Running After My Hat for more than a few days, you already know about what you might politely call my serial attentiveness. Theoretically, this is a blog about writing. But then, oh, yeah — there’s stuff about music. And true, I rattle on sometimes about reading, too, but isn’t that sorta kinda like about writing? Oh, well, all right, yes I do post — but less often! — about tech stuff, and politics, and art and photography and poetry…

When working on a large-scale project like a book, similarly, I sometimes wander off the main road, suddenly absorbed in distractions of landscape and weather and architecture.

Oddly, this sometimes works to the advantage of the book in question (although, all right all right fine, it sometimes does not — and probably just as oddly).

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Paying Attention to Setting

September 27, 2008 by John 6 Comments

Taino, Dominican Republic (photo by Dr. Lynne Guitar)

A few weeks ago, I read a blog entry somewhere about the claim (phrased variously) that the setting in a given work “becomes like [or even is] a character itself.” It drove the blogger crazy, because setting and character (in his/her opinion) have so little in common. Whatever my other reactions to the rant, it got me thinking about setting. About whether I’d ever really paid much attention (due or otherwise) to place in my fiction.

I didn’t think I’d ignored setting; in fact I’d mentioned in a comment somewhere else, shortly before, that I knew of a brief passage in Merry-Go-Round in which I’d described an old hotel in a way which — yes — almost made it seem, in retrospect, like a character. But I couldn’t think of any examples where I’d done much more than (say) list the geographical features of a town, the layout of a room.

Eventually I filed the question away, and forgot about it.

I’ve mentioned before, here on RAMH, that I’ve been spending several weeks going back to look at the book which (as the cliche goes) I think I may be meant to write. The working title, which I’m not completely satisfied with but use because I’ve got to refer to it somehow for chrissake, is Grail. (Don’t be misled by that title, though. This isn’t a medieval romance or historical novel. Events for the most part occur in the mid-1980s.)

I’ve taken it through 2½ drafts so far (the first in 1991). In this pass, I’m just recording in a word-processing document certain key events and character traits from the drafted version(s), so I can look at Grail‘s whole structure with fresh eyes, away from the words in which it’s cast. This is based at least in part on the theory that I’ve learned a lot about writing in the last 17 years (more or less), and therefore will probably want not just to edit a fresh draft of the book but honest-to-God rewrite the thing, from scratch.

So anyway, I’m going through the text earlier today, transcribing information, and I came to a chapter whose events are described in flashback.

It’s a memory of a character named Albert (Al) Castle who is — to the extent anyone is — the central figure in the book. The time is May, 1945. Corporal Castle, Seventh Army, USA, is in Germany. And he goes out for a walk– a walk that will change his life.

And that’s when I came across the specific passage to which I link below. I don’t make any claims to this as an example of setting-as-character; but I’ve gotta say, I was surprised by how much attention I’d paid to setting here.

(By the way, the photos on that page are just meant to be illustrative. They don’t depict exactly where this action takes place — in one case, not even roughly the same time.)

[Link to Grail: Excerpt]