Writing – Page 109

From the Crazy Mixed-Up Files…

October 11, 2009 by John 14 Comments

…of the Be Careful What You Wish For Department:

We’re clearing some stuff out in preparation for a garage sale. Aside from that, we’ve got a lot of stuff in boxes which we’ve never been able to take out of boxes — because of all the stuff on our shelves, stuff which we once imagined might be important than has ultimately come to pass.

So what are we looking at here in this photo?

These are the shredded galleys of my half-dozen tech-reference books. If you think you just can’t imagine ever wanting to shred something like galleys from books you actually wrote and published… well, feel free to re-think that. :)

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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Starting and Restarting

October 9, 2009 by John 3 Comments

[Image above is captioned: “Hoagy Carmichael* pretending to crank start a car.”
From the Hoagy Carmichael Collection at Indiana University.]

From whiskey river, still mining the William Stafford vein (and no complaints from this quarter):

The Gift

Time wants to show you a different country. It’s the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design, the one almost found
over at the edge of the music, after the sermon.

It’s the way life is, and you have it, a few years given.
You get killed now and then, violated
in various ways. (And sometimes it’s turn about.)
You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait
and pray, and maybe good things come — maybe
the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more.
You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness.

It’s a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you’ve been and how people
and weather treated you. It’s a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, “Here, take it, it’s yours.”

(William Stafford [source])

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Building Buildings, Building Books

October 6, 2009 by John 6 Comments

A recent Murderati blog entry by Toni McGee Causey just knocked me out. Her “simple” premise: our designing and constructing the imaginative world of a book resembles an architect’s designing and constructing a real-world building.

Excerpting it here would not do justice to what the piece says about buildings and books. But her conclusion is worth hanging on the wall of anyone’s workspace, whether they’re a writer, an architect, or otherwise:

…take the time to enjoy the people around you. Take the time to look at the things you have done and enjoy them. Dwell. Be. Replenish. The world and the race will still be there when you’re ready to re-join. There is no one final race anyway, but millions of races. If you don’t join this day’s race, you can join tomorrow’s.

(Thanks to Janet Reid for the recommendation.)

Off Balance

October 2, 2009 by John 11 Comments

[Image by Jan Piller at redbubble.com. Click the image for the original/to purchase.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Taking a walk with you

lacking the wit and depth
that inform our dreams’
bright landscapes,
this countryside
through which we walk
is no less beautiful for being only what it seems.
rising from the dyed
pool of its shade,
the tree we lean against
was never made to stand
for something else,
let alone ourselves.
nor were these fields
and gullies planned
with us in mind.
we live unsettled lives
and stay in a place
only long enough to find
we don’t belong.
even the clouds, forming
noiselessly overhead,
are cloudy without
resembling us, and, storming
the vacant air,
don’t take into account
our present loneliness.
and yet, why should we care?
already we are walking off
as if to say,
we are not here,
we’ve always been away.

(Mark Strand [source])

…and:

Anyone whose goal is “something higher” must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

(Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being [source])

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Ultra-Short Story Competition

September 30, 2009 by John 9 Comments

Can you write a ghost story in no more than 124 characters?

Stuart Neville, author of The Twelve (which I reviewed on The Book Book the other day), is running a little contest. The occasion? That book’s publication tomorrow in the US, called here The Ghosts of Belfast. Following is a brief description of the rules/guidelines (for more information see Neville’s Web site):

Compose a ghost story no more than 124 characters in length.
By midnight, October 31, Post it in a Twitter tweet, with the hashtag #GhostsOfBelfast.
Sit back and wait for the adulation and/or prizes to roll in.

All right, it’s not that simple.

For starters, obviously, if you have no Twitter account you are (as the rude abbreviation says) S.O.L. If you’re in that position, you have one, maybe two options:

Enter it as a comment to this post here on RAMH. I’ll tweet it for you. Since I’ve reviewed his book, I hereby disqualify myself from winning. Should your entry be a winner, I’ll put you and Neville in touch with each other. The drawback to this option: anyone on Twitter who’s following the hashtag will think I wrote your ultra-short, although they’ll know better by the time the contest is over.
Neville says in his guidelines (emphasis added): “Each of those [winning] tweets will be re-tweeted by me and the good folks at Soho Press (or linked to a special page on my website if they’re too long).” This implies to me that he’s willing to consider stories which exceed Twitter’s maximum tweet length. The drawback to this option: you’ll have to figure it out on your own and/or wait for Neville to clarify. Or not. :)
Update: On reflection… no, he’s not saying the entries can be longer than a tweet’s allowed to be. He’s saying that when he and Soho Press re-tweet the winning entries, they’ll probably be longer than a tweet may be because of extra text which Twitter adds to a re-tweet. (And no, I can’t believe adults actually talk like this.) So you’re stuck: either use Twitter to get credit for the story, or use me to front for you. It’s gotta be Twitter.

As I said above, I myself am not actually entering the contest. But here’s an example of what an entry might look like:

Old guy at the bar glares at you, at anyone who dares to sit nearby. Don’t take it personally; he’s been there since 1843. #GhostsOfBelfast

[Hat tip to Moonrat.]

Review: Stuart Neville’s The Twelve

September 28, 2009 by John 15 Comments

My review of this new thriller is up, over at The Book Book.

(Technically, it’s only newish; it came out in the UK several months ago. However, it’s slated for publication here in the US on October 1, under the title The Ghosts of Belfast.)

Capsule review: an excellent story, told in what is — for another aspiring new author — an embarrassingly expert manner. I have no idea how much this book resembles the form in which he submitted it, but on its evidence Stuart Neville has a long successful career ahead of him.

The book’s setting: contemporary Northern Ireland. On the surface, the IRA is going through all the motions of becoming a respectable, merely political force. But this innocent exterior is threatened by certain old-line forces which long for the days when an opponent could simply be threatened or dispatched outright.

Into this mix comes one Gerry Fegan, a long-time IRA “hard man” — what we might think of here as a goodfella, of the particularly brutal sort — recently released from prison. He’s not really interested in returning to his old ways, and in fact has twelve very good reasons to put them behind: the ghosts of those he has killed, now demanding payment from Fegan. Blood payment — the blood of those who condemned the twelve to death…

I really liked The Twelve. The supernatural angle isn’t heavy-handed; these ghosts appear to no one but Fegan, and intervene in no way directly. No floating candlesticks, no banging doors. But Neville has made them real to Fegan — oh boy are they real to him.

And as a thriller it’s got everything I’d look for: not mere action (though there’s plenty of that) and not mere suspense (ditto), but plenty of heart as well.

__________________

P.S. Stuart Neville is a blogger and sometime commenter on other popular writerly blogs, like Moonrat’s and Nathan Branford‘s places. Other long-time denizens of those places have known him for years, some even having read and/or critiqued early drafts of his book. I myself don’t “know” him in any way, although I have posted maybe two or three comments to his blog in the year since I encountered him as his online persona named “Conduit.”

On the Page vs. Around the Table

September 28, 2009 by John 16 Comments

From yesterday’s New York Times Book Review, we have an essay on “When Writers Speak“:

Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I’m writing. I don’t claim this merely because there is usually no one around to observe the false starts and groan-inducing sentences that make a mockery of my presumed intelligence, but because when the work is going well, I’m expressing opinions that I’ve never uttered in conversation and that otherwise might never occur to me…

I’m willing to bet that more gray matter starts quivering when I sit down to write than when I stand up to speak. In fact, if you were to do an M.R.I. of my brain right now, you would see regions of it lighting up that barely flicker when I talk. How do I know this? Because I’m writing! In fact, I’m so smart right now that I know my cerebral cortex is employing a host of neurons that are cleverly and charmingly transforming my thoughts and feelings into words. But if I were talking to you about all this, a different set of neurons would be triggered, different connections and associations would be made, and different words and phrases would be generated. In short, I’d be boring the pants off you.

All of which raises a whole lot of questions in my head (while putting a smile on my face).

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So Deep a Sound in Autumn

September 25, 2009 by John 11 Comments

[Image: “Autumn Grasses,” a two-panel folding screen by 19th-century
Japanese artist Shibata Zeshin. Click image for more information.]

From whiskey river (which has been on a William Stafford binge for a few weeks, not that you’ll find me complaining):

Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or in the silence after lightning before it says
its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —
that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.

(William Stafford [source])

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The Ick Factor

September 21, 2009 by John 12 Comments

The Missus and I saw District 9 on Saturday. I’m tempted to review it in full, but fear I’d reveal too much of its plot. So I’ll just say that District 9 is one of the, I don’t know… two or three best movies I’ve seen for the last 10 or 15 years — in any genre. It raises important questions about what it means to be human, and it leaves them dangling in the air, just daring the audience to answer them. And it does so in the context of a science-fiction, summer-blockbuster, mock-documentary-cum-action film which should be a natural draw for audiences across the board.

Which may sound like a recommendation. You need to see it if you haven’t already, right? But, uh, well… No.

Why not? Because of the ick factor: surgical close-ups; exploding bodies; individual and societal violence (and threat of same)… Some people might even be put off just by the, well, icky appearance of the aliens, who look like viscous love children of THE alien from the Aliens films and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu.

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