Writing – Page 88

From the Dark Side: 2

May 23, 2011 by John 2 Comments

Last week I posted an excerpt from an unpublished horror story of mine, “In the Ruins on Borphyr Road.” If you read and liked that excerpt, I’ve just posted a second part here. Don’t try to read this second excerpt, though, if you haven’t read the first: I haven’t provided any sort of “as you’ll recall…” recap of the characters, setting, and so on, which might let you take a shortcut. The journey and not the destination, right?

As before, this new page has been password-protected. The password is the same as I explained at the end of last week’s post — with the digit 2 tacked on at the end.

One After Another, After Another, After Another…

May 20, 2011 by John 14 Comments

[Image: scene from Northlandz, the world’s largest model train layout
(Flemington, NJ). Photo by Vlad Bubnov, on Flickr.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

In the Moment

It was a day in June, all lawn and sky,
the kind that gives you no choice
but to unbutton your shirt
and sit outside in a rough wooden chair.

And if a glass of ice tea and a volume
of seventeenth-century poetry
with a dark blue cover are available,
then the picture can hardly be improved.

I remember a fly kept landing on my wrist,
and two black butterflies
with white and red wing-dots
bobbed around my head in the bright air.

I could feel the day offering itself to me,
and I wanted nothing more
than to be in the moment — but which moment?
Not that one, or that one, or that one,

or any of those that were scuttling by
seemed perfectly right for me.
Plus, I was too knotted up with questions
about the past and his tall, evasive sister, the future.

What churchyard held the bones of George Herbert?
Why did John Donne’s wife die so young?
And more pressingly,
what could we serve the vegetarian twins

who were coming to dinner that evening?
Who knew that they would bring their own grapes?
And who was the driver of that pickup
flying down the road toward the lone railroad track?

And so the priceless moments of the day
were squandered one by one—
or more likely several thousand at a time—
with quandary and pointless interrogation.

All I wanted was to be a pea of being
inside the green pod of time,
but that was not going to happen today.
I had to admit to myself

as I closed the blue book on the face
of Thomas Traherne [*] and returned to the house
where I lit a flame under a pot
full of floating brown eggs,

and, while they cooked in their bubbles,
I stared into a small oval mirror near the sink
to see if that crazy glass
had anything special to tell me today.

(Billy Collins, from The Trouble with Poetry, and Other Poems [source])

…and:

Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves how to make room for them, to love them, and to live, really live.

(Anna Quindlen, A Short Guide to a Happy Life)

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From the Dark Side

May 17, 2011 by John 19 Comments

I’ve written before (here and elsewhere) about the writing workshop I participated in, fifteen-some years ago.

An odd cast of characters, maybe: three writers of poetry and literary fiction then seeking their graduate degrees in English, with an emphasis on creative writing; one writer of comic action stories (think Carl Hiaasen, maybe with a touch of Elmore Leonard); one writer of horror and science fiction…

…and I.

I was the only one who’d published a book to that point, my mystery Crossed Wires. But I didn’t think of myself as a “mystery writer.” (Crossed Wires‘s prose and structure, I think, suggests the crooked posture of a writer in a genre he knows he’s not suited for.)

I didn’t know how to classify myself. My reading tastes were all over the map. I’d read a great deal of science fiction while growing up; liked reading mysteries and thrillers; had been bowled over by the caliber of the romances published by friends*; was moved and challenged by fiction I read in The New Yorker and similar magazines.

Horror? Well, I’d read a lot of horror comics when I was a kid. I didn’t mind “scary movies,” but didn’t get many chances to see them (other than classics from the ’30s). When I got older, I read some King and Koontz, and — on the strength of the paperbacks’ striking covers — I read some of Brian Lumley’s Necroscope series. But for the most part, horror fiction didn’t interest me. Beyond what seemed a core of authors with wider aspirations and deeper, more complex psychologies, y’know, It Was All Just Blood.

But the SF/horror writer in our workshop kept bringing to us his inventive little fantasias of things gone frighteningly wrong. And this got me thinking: I wonder what it’s like to write horror? So I tried it. Once.

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The Gravity of the Everyday

May 13, 2011 by John 5 Comments

[Photo, “What’s Important,” by Valerie Everett. Found on Flickr and used under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety —

best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light —
good morning, good morning, good morning.

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

(Mary Oliver)

…and:

Advice to Myself

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic — decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

(Louise Erdrich, from Original Fire: Selected and New Poems)

[Read more…]

“An Echo That Did Not Die Away”

May 6, 2011 by John 10 Comments

[Image: a communications “satelloon.” For more information,
see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you’ve been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw — but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you were transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of — something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it — tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

(C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain [source])

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Fiction and (Overly) Real Life

May 3, 2011 by John 23 Comments

[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, because… um… In order for something else — something absolutely critical — to happen, two characters must exchange their first kiss (or bite) under the light of a full moon, within the first twenty-four hours of the April 21 opening of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, in the restaurant atop the Space Needle.

Now, of course, Seattle is often rainy, and when it’s not rainy it’s often foggy. But suppose you resolve the weather question satisfactorily, and hence resolve the question of visibility from the top of the Space Needle. Was the moon even full that night? If so, what time was moonrise? Could a character in a nearby skyscraper observe the kiss (bite) through binoculars — then lower the binoculars, noticing that the moon is full… without having to turn around?

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You Never Know

April 29, 2011 by John 8 Comments

[Image: “Untitled #153,” by Chris Marker. For more information, see the note at the foot of this page.]

From whiskey river:

Only Once

All which, because it was
flame and song and granted us
joy, we thought we’d do, be, revisit,
turns out to have been what it was
that once, only; every invitation
did not begin
a series, a build-up: the marvelous
did happen in our lives, our stories
are not drab with its absence: but don’t
expect to return for more. Whatever more
there will be will be
unique as those were unique. Try
to acknowledge the next
song in its body — halo of flames as utterly
present, as now or never.

(Denise Levertov [source])

[Read more…]

Book Review: Children of God, by Mary Doria Russell

April 26, 2011 by John 2 Comments

A few weeks ago I reviewed Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow at the Book Book review blog. I just posted a follow-up there, a review of The Sparrow‘s sequel, called Children of God. However, if you have not read The Sparrow, please don’t read my Children of God review: it assumes that you know what happened on the planet Rakhat.

Briefly, I found the later book much harder to like than the earlier (although I continued to appreciate Russell’s skill):

We’re forced to spend much time in the company (and minds) of The Sparrow‘s less pleasant characters.
Much of the fun of The Sparrow came from the kidding, affectionate, and sometimes flirtatious interaction among the humans who made the trip to Rakhat. That original cast of characters is almost completely absent from this book; in their place we have a much more serious bunch. (There are reasons why they’re so serious. That doesn’t magically transform them into a larky gang of back-slappers, however.)

As I mention at the end of the Book Book review, I’d probably rate Children of God something like 85 out of 100, vs. The Sparrow‘s 95. Still worth a read, though — if for no other reason, than that it completes the circle of Emilio Sandoz’s story, while redeeming some of its predecessor’s horror.

Paying Attention to What You Want

April 23, 2011 by John 24 Comments

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 second.” He raised his glass, uttered a single syllable: “Al.”

“Al,” they all repeated, and downed their shots.

The three men downed their shots, that is. Not Bonnie. She didn’t want the shock of the liquor to bring on a second wave of laughter, and she wanted to ensure she could ask the question straightforwardly and without qualifying or explaining it. Bonnie sipped at hers, and put the glass back down on the table.

“Now,” she said. “Now we touch hands — that’s right, almost like a séance, good. And now we close our eyes, all the way Larry, no peeking. That’s right. This is just us, each of us, answering the question for ourselves.”

“So what’s the question?” said Larry.

“Just this: why?” Bonnie said. “Why am I — each of us — why would I do this thing… put so much at risk? Not what’s in it for Al, either. What’s in it for me. For each of us, inside our own heads, that’s the question for each of us: Why would I do this?” A pause to let it sink in. She closed her own eyes. “Okay? All clear? Go.”

—

Why would I do this? thought Pierce.

The question resisted focus. He could not think of a single argument, a single fact that would convince him to pursue such a strange, reckless course of action…

A recent post on one of Nathan Bransford’s forums asked the question directly, with the title “What Do You Write For?” INTERN asked it, customarily obliquely, in her post of a couple weeks ago (“chain of (publishing) fools”) and in one a couple weeks before that (“exhaustion hunting the great spotted WIP-alump”).

And it often percolates between the lines at Marta’s writing in the water blog, sometimes bubbling to the surface — as in an entry of last week (“This is a sign by the side of the road”). A couple days ago she offered this trailer of an award-winning documentary:

Marta asked:

Would you write if every word stayed in the room with you until you died and left them behind?

Which pretty much lays it out there in stark terms, eh?
[Read more…]

Anima

April 22, 2011 by John 5 Comments

[Image: Isle of the Dead (third version), by Arnold Böcklin]

From whiskey river:

Life is a garden,
not a road
we enter and exit
through the same gate
wandering,
where we go matters less
than what we notice

(Bokonon [source: see note below])

…and:

Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and Thinking of
the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of a stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I’m fooled —
I’m wading along

in the sunlight —
and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead —
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week’s trees,
and I plan to be there soon —
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don’t know where
such certainty comes from —
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind —

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage —
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

(Mary Oliver, from What Do We Know [source])

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