Echoes in a Hollow Space

It’s taken me a long time to realize there are people who love to read but who don’t give a damn about how a thing is written. Yeah, I know, should have been obvious with one browse of bestseller books—but, somehow, the concrete realization of this fact  managed to elude me. Of course, not all bestsellers are badly written. Many are quite well written, in fact. But now and then someone comes along like Stieg Larsson or Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer or E. L. James who are really atrocious at narrative but still manage to concoct a compelling story and capture that certain something in the zeitgeist that has people flocking to them.

Full disclosure: I am again attempting to read Stieg Larsson’s Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and this time it seems to be sticking, but I have bounced off Larsson and these other writers. I probably won’t try the others again as there seem to be diminishing returns and too many other things I’d rather read. The thing is, as I have been struggling with my own writing, I have also been struggling with my ability to read fiction. I keep bouncing off of books, even well-written ones, even those by old favorites, and I’ve been longing to become immersed in something. I’m far enough past Larsson’s tell-not-show and long infodump opening that the mystery of Tattoo has had a chance to hook me, so I may actually finish this book. No guarantees, though. It’s been the first part of December since I finished anything, even rereads of old favorites. (The last was Deborah Harkness’s Times Convert, the follow-on book to her All Souls Trilogy. It was meh, but I’d loved the other books and wanted to catch up on the characters.)

My writing and my fiction reading have always been connected. One feeds the other, even if what I’m reading has nothing to do with what I’m writing. Being immersed in someone else’s world for a time helps stimulate the mystic place in my brain where my own singing starts. I can’t help thinking that if I cure one symptom it might help cure the other.

I’m still writing almost every day, and it’s still mostly like pulling teeth, but I do plant butt in chair. Most days it isn’t much more than 500 or so words. Some days I’m blessed by 1000 or so. Today, all I managed was 250. But the important part is sitting my butt in the chair, opening the file, and doing something.

So, readers who don’t care how a thing is written. It’s all good. People should like what they like regardless of nerds like me who care about those things. I once had a friend who absolutely refused to read when he was younger, even though it caused him problems in school. He was a bright, imaginative, funny fellow but he just hated reading. Then one day when he was in high school a perceptive teacher shoved a science fiction book into his hands. He was intrigued by the premise and started to read. From that moment on, he became a voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy. He always had a book in his hands. He did confess to me, though, that he often skipped the descriptive parts and dialogue tags and read just the dialogue so he could get through the story faster.

And therein hangs a tale: there are many people like him. Not only do they not care how a thing is written, they want to get through the story as fast as possible to find out what happens. No savoring. They don’t really care about “the art of story,” that immersive feel of a book. It’s a mystery to me why they read at all—but again, that’s not for me to decide. People should be allowed to like what they like and how they like it, and no one—well-meaning nerd, politicizing authors, crusading literati, anyone—has the right to tell them otherwise.

There are no shoulds in reading. Only what gets you through the night. And the book.

 

 

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

In a recent blog, the wonderful and irrepressible Maeve, a character “created” by the novelist Elizabeth Cunningham, is talking about her author. “Who do you think she talks to when she wakes up in the middle of the night?” she asks. “Who do you talk to?”

This made me pause and ask myself that same question. I didn’t have a ready answer. Not that I don’t talk to someone when I wake up in the middle of the night, but it’s not someone I can readily name. That Someone has been there listening for a good long time—maybe most of my life—but it’s not one of my characters, and I don’t think I’ve ever assigned the Listener a name. Or even a sex.

Originally, I was going to call that someone the Silent Listener, but that’s not strictly true. Sometimes that still, deep place answers back. No, I don’t mean I hear voices in the room. I mean that there are times when something bubbles up from the deep well of the Soul Place, a communication from…Well, yes, that’s the question. From the Beyond or from the Deep Within, hard to say which. Maybe both, maybe neither.

All I do know is that I can chat away about anything with the Listener. I can figure things out in our mostly one-way dialogue. When I’m really talking to the Listener, and not some hollow echo of my own reactive mind, there’s no judgment. In fact, there is often the subtle pulse of reminder that what I’m thinking or feeling isn’t so peculiar, that many people have felt or thought that way in the past, that I’m all right, doing the best I can.

Whoever is on the other end of the line, it’s a blessed communication.

Who do you talk to in the middle of the night?

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:


"When you look for the bad in mankind, expecting to find it, you surely will."

—David Swift, screenwriter on the 1960 Pollyanna, who attributed the quote to Abraham Lincoln and didn't admit it was his until the DVD came out





And here's another one, much beloved by peace activists:

“There’s no honorable way to kill, no gentle way to destroy. There is nothing good in war except its ending.”

This quote came from the Star Trek episode, “The Savage Curtain,” featuring a reanimated Abraham Lincoln, who at one point delivers this thought. Trouble is, this bit of dialogue came from the teleplay writers, Gene Roddenberry and Arthur Heinemann. Abraham Lincoln never said—at least, not in this universe.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a beautiful sentiment and should be widely used by peace activists. For me, it loses nothing because Honest Abe didn't originate it. However, if you're someone who likes to Argue from Authority, you might think that the quote loses something without some big gun having spouted it.

(Oh Pam, you ruin everything that's good and fine!)



( Illustrated version. )


Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Me: Min, we have to sleep with the curtains closed.
Min: But I like the curtains open so I can look out.
Me: (closing curtains) No, we have to close them.
Min: (sticking head through curtains to open them) But why? I like to look out.
Me: (firmly reclosing curtains) If someone walks by outside they can look in on us.
Min: So?
Me: Well, they might be blinded by our goddess-like beauty.
Min: That's true. But that's their problem, not ours.
Me: Have pity on your fellow man, sweetheart.
Min: I'm a cat.

I'm happy to report Min didn't win this argument. Score one for the human!

Other quote of the day:

(Actually, the earlier one about simplifying was yesterday's quote.) (Just to be complicated.)





Writingness of the day:

Another significant milestone on Charged with Folly—this morning I wrote the ending to it. Just a couple of paragraphs, but I now have something to aim for.

I'm perfectly capable of beginning a novel without a definitive ending, but I usually won't make the kind of passionate headway I need to finish without that ending. Sometimes it isn't any more than one line, but it's an end spot. Twist as the plot may—going forward, backward, sideways—that endpoint is there reeling it back in. And it's amazing to me how I end up in that very spot. Sometimes I shift the wording, but I always end up in that spot, no matter how much things have changed in the getting there.

I had more than a line for the ending of CWF this morning. Some lines of dialogue with accompanying action. Around 100 words. But the tether that makes all the difference is now in place.

ARRRGGHHH of the day: Actually, the week. It's endless. Fewer and fewer people are here as the week progresses in anticipation of the Fourth of July weekend. I should have taken tomorrow off. The week will never end. And I am only eking out the words, despite the milestones of maps and endpoints. Arrrgghhh.

matociquala has stimulated many conversations with her post on what we're born with and what we learn.

As my post of my early writing shows, I always had a flair for dialogue. (That's a joke, in case you're wondering.)

What I did have early on was an appreciation for words and how to string them together. Reading and writing things down came easy to me. Movies in my head came easy, although it took some time to learn how to convey them to others. I'm still learning that one. I became aware at a certain point that building characters was a mysterious and natural process for me and I like to think I do a decent job with them. Eventually, I think I developed an okay feel for dialogue.

It was a long time before the plot monkey would ride on my shoulders without biting or doing something unspeakable down my back. Every once in a while he still does something unspeakable--but such is the nature of monkeys. The description thing is always going to give me fits--too much, too little, connecting all those bright shiny scenes with something that doesn't read either like pedestrian drivel or throbbing membranes. All that. Pace and rhythm and drama-without-melodrama. Work, work, work. And more work. And continue to work, world without end, amen. Learning to move beyond cliches and comfort zones--a continuing biggie. Learning to stick my neck out and say, "To hell with it, this is what I need to write." The biggest. Work and work and work.

Mood: ranty
Music: "Beyond the Invisible" by Enigma

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," said Franklin D. Roosevelt.

One other thing we should probably fear is complacency. Our own. The nation's. Accepting the will of Our Glorious Leaders that they know better for us.

I was innocently logging on to yahoo this morning when I see the news headline, "U.S. Mulling How to Delay Nov. Vote in Case of Attack." I went on to read the article, detailing how Tom Ridge, Homeland Security Head, is trying to get Congress to pass a bill that will allow the federal government to suspend federal elections any time they feel there is a threat:

[broken link]

I suddenly flashed on all those tin horn dictators in various parts of the world who always make it a habit of declaring martial law and suspending national elections just before declaring themselves President For Life.

After I read this article I read an account from the Houston Chronicle of a writer who'd scribbled a piece of dialogue in the margin of a crossword puzzle he was working on a plane, "I know this must be some kind of bomb":

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/2660471

A panicky passenger reported him to the stewardess and when they landed he was hauled into the local Homeland Security Office and questioned hostilely by several federal and local police. Even when he showed them the novel in question on his laptop he was made to tell them the entire plot of the novel and told he was going to be placed on the Homeland Security watch list.

Excuse me???? Placed on the watch list, guaranteed hasslement at every airport he goes to from now on, because he scribbled a piece of dialogue in the margin of a crossword puzzle, even after he proved it was part of a novel???

Something deeply scary is happening here. And it isn't Al Qaida. The bigger threat to our liberty and way of life are the folks currently in the White House. Ultra-conservatives are always going on and on about how much they love this country and what it stands for. Well, what exactly is it that they love if not the Bill of Rights and the Constitution? Those documents are the corner stones of all those liberties we complacently take for granted, but Mr. Bush and his cronies routinely trample all the hell over those.

Al Qaida wants to destroy America, and this is the surest route to that end: make us so afraid that we destroy ourselves and all the things we stand for. Listen to the voices of people around the world. They will tell you that they didn't always approve of what America did, but they respected our rule of law. They looked to us as an example of what could exist in this world—a country in which no one man was above the law. They were fully cognizant of the injustices that existed here, that the rule of law sometimes ground slowly and inefficiently, and that sometimes horrible miscarriages occurred. But even our enemies had to acknowledge that we got it right a lot of the time, and that even if injustices occurred we had mechanisms in place that allowed us, sometimes, to right those wrongs.

That's what Al Qaida hates. That's what Osama and his crew want to destroy. Because as long as any kind of hope exists that men can do better in this world, it makes it much more difficult for them to become tin horn dictators in their own right. As long as hearts and minds have some kind of counter-example, tin horn dictators have a much harder time of selling their line, "My way is the only way."

But this administration has played right into their hands. Their abuses have crushed hope and erased those counter-examples in the minds of people all around the world. They have played on the fears of the American people and made us small and weak, cowering under the covers in the dark. They have tried to make us believe that their way is the only way.

They want the ability to suspend elections. If that doesn't put the fear in people, I don't know what will. Perhaps the Bush Administration truly believes what they're saying, that if Al Qaida launches an attack during the election it will seriously disrupt our country's democratic process. Or perhaps the Bush Administration believes that a terrorist attack just before or on election day could have the result that it did in Spain, of throwing them out of office in a landslide.

Personally, I think it's just as likely to have the opposite effect, that people will vote with their fear. A terrorist act just before the election could easily swing people to vote for Bush in a landslide. We need to keep our Strong and Glorious Leader at the helm in times of crisis.

We are prone to manipulation whatever way you decide to slice the cake.

But I've come to believe that this administration is as seriously paranoid about Us, their legal opposition, as we are about Them. I think they'll do just about anything to stay in office as long as they can keep at least the illusion of legality. They can't persuade the Supreme Court to put them into office again, that would be too obvious, so what about...

Because George Bush, after all, believes that he received a mandate. Not from the electorate, but from God. He believes he is pope-like in his channel to God, doing God's will, guided by God's hand, damned near infallible. If something whispers in his ear that suspending the elections would be in the best interests of the country because the country is confused and doesn't have as strong a pipeline to God as he does, what's to stop him? If Tom Ridge gets his way, that is, and gets the Republican-controlled Congress to pass that handy little bill which allows the feds to do it.