Longfellow says, in “My Lost Youth”:
A boy’s will is the wind’s will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
Adds Grace Paley:
I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.
Today’s been a day for lack of focus (by necessity, not choice) and wandering around in brief, staccato bursts of Web activity. Among the periwinkles, whelks, and sand dollars scooped up: [Read more…]
In lieu of a longer post still in the works, and with a nod to writing in the water‘s current discussion of knowing when the story is done, and done well and right: I offer this, Folk Tale #6 from Book Two (“Fire”) of The Zen of Programming:
Five novices went into the master’s office, crying “Woe, woe! We have heard that our project may be cancelled.”
The master said, “All things continue until they stop.”
Hearing this, the novices returned to work.
Short version: As an exercise, start a story with one “found” sentence, and end it with another:
First sentence:
I ask your forgiveness.
Last sentence:
I am a mountain tiger.
Note: The italics as presented above don’t have any significance; they aren’t meant to emphasize the text, nor do they indicate that these lines are spoken by someone.
Extra credit: Involve in the story, in some way, the image of the woman at the left. She may be a character in the story (either the “I” in the first and last lines or someone else), perhaps the story will be about the work of art itself.
Report back sometime before Labor Day.
Long version:
Writer’s dilemma: “Show, don’t tell.” “But how do I show somebody who’s uneasy? Isn’t that why we have the adjective ‘uneasy’ in the first place — sort of shorthand for all the… the stuff an uneasy person might do?”
Um, no.
Enter The Emotion Thesaurus, a (weekly?) Thursday feature at The Bookshelf Muse.
You start to type how your [Main Character] is cringing in terror and then stop. You glance back a page and shake your head. Somebody cringed in the last scene — can’t use that one. Hot, shuddering breaths? Nope, breathing’s already come up a million times in this book, so that beat won’t work. You need something different, something unique to show fear. His eyes widened? His face was a frozen mask? Pu-leeze. The POV police are screaming at the thought.
The joy and energy starts to leak out of you. The excitement that brought you here is fading. You can’t seem to find the right way to show the rawness of your character’s fear. Everything action you come up with seems trite or hollow or cliché.
Reality trickles in: the coffee’s even colder now, and the mailman has gone. Your flyers are probably out there on the step, about to blow away. And of course the eerie silence means your dog no longer needs to go outside. You sag in your chair, defeated by a descriptive beat.
As you leave to mop up Mr. Ruffy’s mess, you glance at the computer screen and think, if only I had a thesaurus of emotional beats.
…Now, if you draw a blank on how to show your character’s emotion through a physical action (a beat), we can help. Each Thursday we will introduce new cardinal emotions to our thesaurus, offering you an ‘idea bank’ for the times when you get stuck. You can scroll through our lists, and see if one of our ideas sparks one of your own.
For instance, here’s a selection from yesterday’s post, on “impatience”:
Sometimes using the Web loses all its charm, because you’re too focused on problem-solving.
You need the answer to a question, say, about some damn thing or other that’s locking your computer up, and you don’t know if it’s Linux, or a video driver, or that cheese Danish which inadvertently fell from your mouth (of course it was inadvertent; you wouldn’t do something that stupid on purpose!) — where you’d parked it for a moment while swapping in the RAM upgrade, you just needed two hands for, like, three seconds — fell, as I was saying, into the guts of your computer, and when you went to scoop it up it just sort of schmeared across the surfaces and into the guts of what seems to be a satellite’s-eye view of two hundred silicon-and-plastic-and-steel skyscrapers waaaaay down at the end of a SimCity “game,” the boring part where you know you’re going to have to call down an earthquake or tornado or a major tax hike, inciting SimRevolution, just to keep from falling asleep with your hand on the mouse and dragging an entire suburb across the mountains.
At such moments, it’s easy to be overawed by the fact that Google actually returns close to 9,000 hits when you search on the words linux, video, driver, cheese, and danish (using The Missus’s computer, of course, since your own, at the moment, has as little to do with computing as it does with, say, dishwashing). It’s easy to be flat-out annoyed by that, in fact. Doesn’t Google know this is serious? You need an answer, damn it! An answer. An, as in one. You don’t need random attention-deficit Google-musings.
At such moments, congratulations, jerk: you’ve forgotten what the Web was like in, say, 1996. No Google. No MSN. No Yahoo. Very little, in fact, except the primo contribution of the Web to human communication: hyperlinks.
You’ve forgotten the unexpected pleasures you can get from simply hop-skip-jumping.
About a week ago, I stumbled across the blog known as “Seven Impossible Things to Do Before Breakfast.” (And I’d thought “Running After My Hat” was an ambitious blog name…) It didn’t take me long to add it to the Je Ne Sais Quoi… blogroll category, over there on the right. And one of these days I’ll do a post about it.
This post, though, is about a surprise I got from simply following a link — or rather, a couple of links: from the most recent 7-Imp entry, to a post on another blog by someone named Haven Kimmel. My curiosity was triggered simply by the phrase “The Sopranos.”
Now, I’ve almost lost my sense of surprise that wonderful New York Times bestselling writers have been doing their work for years, quite successfully, with no help at all from my wallet or even my admiration, let alone fanboyishness. Almost, but not quite. And so I can’t help asking the question: Where has Haven Kimmel been, where did she come from, and why haven’t I heard of her before?!?
Okay. I sorta understand. But now I’ve got some catching up to do (and you may, too).
In the meantime, I’ll refer you to an early post on her blog — or rather to its title, “Haven’s First Law: Never Quote A Better Writer Than Yourself.” Because I’m about to quote, very briefly, from her children’s book Orville: A Dog Story
Orville barked and barked against his chain. And right in the middle of a long summer day, when he had barked about how he was really a good dog in a bad mood, and how he missed that one-eyed doll, and how there was something so terrible about the feeling of a chain against a neck, everything changed, because a girl with cotton-candy hair moved into the little house across the road and Orville fell in love.
And then, just because I don’t trust you to follow the above link to her “Sopranos” post, there’s this:
…perhaps things were slightly askew in my psyche, because in an e-mail exchange between three friends I was asked to name off the top of my head (seriously! think fast!) how I would choose to die if I only had twenty-four hours. What would I do, spend my last day hysterical over my motherless children? Try to see the Seven or Ten or Eight Wonders of the World? God, no. I answered as honestly as humanly possible. I said, “I would want to spend 24 hours with Tony Soprano and then I would want him to shoot me in the heart.”
Ha!
A number of things I’ve come across in the last week have reminded me — at a time (yes) when I really should be concerned with ending a story — just how little it takes to start one. In particular, they’ve reminded me of the way in which implied story lines radiate forwards and backwards, starting from a single moment captured in a painting or photograph.
First, there was my post of the other day, about Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus painting and the W.H. Auden poem which sprang from it. What makes this a “story” as opposed to a conventional landscape is the precise instant crystallized in that tiny little area of the bottom right corner. We can imagine what must have led to that moment: the construction of the wings, the warnings from Daedalus, the over-confident youth rising and rising and rising toward the sun. We can see some other things happening during it, of course, and imagine other things which we can’t actually see (such as Daedalus, watching horrified from a shoreline). And we can guess about the moments to follow, from the immediate (the long, panic-stricken but then silent sinking of a feathered figure to the bottom of the sea) to the more remote (the wasteland of Daedalus’s life to come).
Then along came some posts over the last few days on the writing in the water blog. The innkeeper there, marta, recently acquired a scanner; she’s begun to post old family photos, taking off from each to ruminate about the stories it tells, fails to tell, or tells incompletely — and the stories it might have told instead (if the world and the people in it were different).
So while I was thinking about these things, it occurred to me that visual “moments” aren’t the only ones from which stories might branch, forward and back. Musical ones can work that way, too.
I don’t mean obvious story songs — shaggy-dog stories or Broadway show tunes, for instance (the latter of which can be associated with specific points within the show’s plot). No, what I’m getting at is songs, especially short ones, whose lyrics suggest with a quick few brushstrokes more — sometimes much more — than the words themselves say.
Like marta’s (or anyone’s) snapshots, like Fall of Icarus-style paintings, these songs fall into a category we might call “shadows on the wall.” A shadow is not the thing it represents, of course; but our eyes have been trained to see in certain shadowy shapes, or portions of shapes, the corresponding fully-fleshed 3D objects projected, darkly, on the wall. In the same way, shadow-on-the-wall story starters — images and songs — mark the edges of a plotline or a relationship, and let our minds fill in the gaps.
At the time these (not exactly earth-shaking) revelations came to me, I was in the car; in the CD player was Carly Simon’s Torch
No, no, no — not here. On The Book Book.
You will note, in the guidelines for reviewers over on the right side of that site’s various pages, the word-count specs: minimum one word; maximum 60,000 words. I believe these were meant humorously, meaning “Nobody’s gonna go through your review and count the freaking words, you dolt.”
Nevertheless, I suffered a bit of a guilty twinge when I saw how long my review looked relative to the other recent ones.
Dang. Gotta tell you, writing a book review is hard. Especially for an action-y book: you want to describe, kinda sorta, what happens. But you don’t want to give away anything really surprising, either. Tough balance to strike. I admire the other Book Book reviewers (also listed down the site’s right-hand menu) who manage to pull it off, review after review.
[Entry from William Shakespeare’s recently discovered blog, “Honour’d in the Breach”]
Well now I’m not so sure workshopping Shrew was such a great idea.
Like I said the other day, I was really looking forward to the new group. I’d been working with the others for like SO LONG that we were all starting to get on each other’s last nerve, you know? (“Do be or don’t be”? Puh-LEEZE.)
So I’m sitting in the tavern at that table in the back. And every time the door swings open I’m like totally checking out the newcomer, wondering if it would be Bacon, deVere, or Greville (so-called Lord Brooke). Marlowe I knew from the old group of course and wasn’t crazy about bringing him along to this one. (Drunken sod, if I had to lay a shilling I’d say he’ll die in a tavern.) But he was already there. Not with me, of course, at the bar. Chatting up the strumpet of the day, and a right loony Ophelia she was too.
Bacon strode in first. ‘Struth,I knew him by reputation right enough. He had every bit the swagger I expected, and lacked every bit of wordsense you need in a good workshopper. By evening’s end he had us all pretty pissed, except for Marlowe who’s always pissed anyway. On the other hand the boastful cock did come up with “Gremio,” the “Gresio” I’d been using always bugged me. Too much the slur on the Eye Tees, you know? So “Gremio” it is.
I had high hopes for deVere. I’d heard so much good about the man. He certainly knows his words, and he certainly knows (ha ha) his Queen. I did like much of what he had to offer but eventually concluded he had, like, too much to offer. When he told us about the bloke he borrowed the 500 Cs from I seized ‘pon it at once and made him Kate’s da. Then we all had a good beery laugh like old chums about Bertie and deV’s sister and I managed to put some of that in, too, and the stuff about Italy, well, a little local spice never hurts and Christ knows I cannot supply any of that meself. But then deV got greedy. Started on that piggish swill about “A Shakespeare/deVere Production” and he wasn’t jokin’ neither. Who’s the think he is? Pox him, I say. Pox him soundly.
Greville, what can I say. Seems like a right enough chap. But as the saying goes, all the world’s a stage and if you can’t make an appearance till the curtain drops, you sir are no player. Or however it goes. By the time he showed up I’d already tidied me pages. I might show him some o’me other stuff sometime, if he’s lucky hehe.
Which left Marlowe. Lucky for me he had already had one or two or perhaps three too many, or he would have recognized himself in, ha ha, Christopher Sly. That seemed to sail over everybody else’s noggin too, perhaps I should be making the point more sharply. Christopher Toolow, perhaps? Nay. Sly it is.
Anyway, Marlowe was Marlowe. When he slid me his copy of the draft, o’er which he had spewed his draught, I stopped attending to him.
Surprisingly to me, worst of all was my own dear dear Anne.
She had been at me for weeks, she had, and perhaps ’twas the last time I’ll let her peek at my stuff ahead of time: You’ve gotta make Kate do this. Make her do that. Kate would nary say any such thing. All that muck and I went along with it just to shut her up. But when she plunked herself down at the tavern, elbowing deV aside (granted, he’s an arse-licker and I was well rid of him) and trying to keep Marlowe from tossin’ peanuts ‘twixt her bazooms, and THEN in front o’me workshopmates starts saying this and that about men and womenfolk and how the one needs a little more of this and the other less of that… well I have to say I do love the woman dearly dearly after all but am starting to wonder if she really deserves to get my best bed when I am dead and in the ground, you know what I’m saying? Blest be the woman that spares these stories and that woman clearly is not Anne.
But I showed her, indeed I did. This morning before I mailed to the printer the final quarto or folio or whatever the Hades they call it these days, I crossed out that “rights of woman” oration at the end which dear dear Anne had insisted on. Hehe, came up with some good stuff. “My hand is readie, may it do him ease” indeed. Dear dear Anne will crap a pretty brick when she hears that tomorrow night. ‘Course it doesn’t make much sense considering all the rot that came before but at this point I just want to be shut of it. Let the critics sort it all out, I say.
More later!
[Hat tip to Moonrat, of Editorial Ass]
Yesterday I went into a soapbox-lecture rant, shall we say? (yes, let’s — rants seem to be another thing that’s done a lot), about some of the comments to a recent post on Nathan Bransford’s blog.
At the end of every week, Bransford posts a “This Week in Publishing” entry summing up recent industry news and often alluding to the conversation on his own blog. Yesterday’s “This Week,” naturally, referred to the hypothetical questions he’d posed earlier — and to the answers, answers, answers, answers it elicited. And one of the mini-conversations resulting from the “This Week” post caught my eye.
It took place between someone identifying herself as Thomma Lynn, and someone with the moniker “a paperback writer” (evocative, for those of us Of A Certain Age). In the midst of a lot of hard-eyed appraisals of the harsh realities of art, the harsher realities of business, the naivete of writing newcomers, and the thick skins of writing veterans, Thomma Lynn and a paperback writer suddenly found themselves talking about — of all things — love:
…surprise — it’s business!
In a blog post the other day, literary agent Nathan Bransford unleashed a torrent by asking nascent and/or, umm, under-published writers two questions:
Question #1: Let’s say there was a seer who could tell you definitively whether or not you have the talent to be a published writer. Absolute 100% accuracy. But. If the seer person said no, that’s that. Final answer. Would you want to know?
Question #2: If the seer person said no, you don’t have the talent to be a published writer, would you still write?
Now, granted, there are some traps there for the unwary reader. What does “published” mean — does self-publishing count? What’s “talent”?
But there were also a couple traps there for the blogging agent himself. First, of course, maybe 50-60% of commenters began by implicitly re-writing the first question to suit themselves, a la “Nothing is ever 100% certain. Therefore I’m going to assume that the seer may be wrong — certainly in my case!”
(I wanted to say, C’mon, people, make a choice. One shudders to imagine this sort of “decision-making” when facing truly black-and-white life choices — as sometimes, however painfully, life choices are. Re-imagine Sophie’s Choice, say: Sure — take them both! Sheesh.)
The post drew almost 200 comments. But that wasn’t the other trap awaiting Bransford. The other trap was in summing up his responses to all the comments.
