Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:

“Every novelist ought to invent his own technique, that is the fact of the matter. Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet, whether large or small, which has its own laws just as it has its own flora and fauna. Thus, Faulkner’s technique is certainly the best one with which to paint Faulkner’s world, and Kafka’s nightmare has produced its own myths that make it communicable. . . . The work of art itself. . . is the solution to the problem of technique.”

—François Mauriac, La Table Ronde magazine, August 1949



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Key and Peele, Celine Dion, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

 

The lovely and talented mnfaure recently posted these trigger words: read, crusade, kiss, beauty, back, us. They were part of a technique she and her husband use to spur on their creativity. I wrote the words down on a piece of paper and left work for the day. When I came in this morning and saw the words, this tumbled out, I know not from where:

I am on perpetual crusade
to return us to those first moments
when your battlements fell,
the beauty of that first kiss,
the way your eyes read my face,
the way my mouth crumbled
your defenses, our breath
intertwined, our skin’s
burning velvet embrace.
Can we fight our way back
to that fire of long ago
after so many years of comfort
and knowing? Or is it instead
a children’s adventure to try?
The contentment of our lives
is its own crusade, a gentle
battle against the world’s
harsh ways, a bulwark
against its fires of destruction.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“Research indicates that a doctor’s confident attitude assists in the healing process.  Thus for a therapist to be maximally effective, he must believe in his method, but if a technique is objectively worthless, the therapist must fool himself before he can help his patient.  Deception and self-deception are at the heart of the psychotherapeutic process.”

—George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal

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.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Things that made me happy: getting books in the mail


I love getting books under any circumstance, but when I get them in the mail it feels like I'm getting a present! Sometimes literally, but even if I've bought them myself.

Yesterday afternoon I got the last two books in my Christmas gift certificate orgy. People know I like getting book certificates so they tend to give them to me. Which makes me very happy. I got $80 worth this year between Barnes and Noble and Amazon, and the book glut commenced. I tend to spend every last penny, plus some of my own money. Which means I often buy used books as well as expensive or more esoteric books I might not necessarily buy otherwise. I think I did really well for myself this year.

(Ha! Jimmy Durante singing "Make Someone Happy" just followed Coldplay on iTunes.)

( This year's book haul. )

I've been thinking a great deal about mindfulness in recent weeks—and constantly reminding myself to be mindful. And grateful, nonjudgmental, to do the right thing. So it was funny to run across this old write up last week that I did for some friends after attending a lecture by Thich Nhat Hahn.


October 8, 1997

Last night after jury duty I went to listen to Thich Nhat Hahn, Buddhist monk and all-around bon vivant, at the Santa Monica Civic. It was a mellow evening, to say the least. He spoke on the Buddhist concept of mindfulness.

( Read More )

Yes, it's difficult to be mindful, even at a lecture on mindfulness. But there's the other lesson: we strive for the best in ourselves, but we have to accept that we're human and flawed.

The other thing that I've been thinking a lot about lately is not giving too much energy to petty annoyances. Yes, it's difficult not to fall into a cult of irritation when you've had a string of things go wrong: broken garbage disposals, flat tires, wonky furnaces, and the like. But it seems to me, at least lately, that constantly reciting the list of what's going wrong gives these things more importance and energy than they rightfully deserve. They are what they are: what the living do. Every time I find myself listing petty annoyances, I remember that poem of the same name by Marie Howe and use it as my mantra to remind myself that I am still living, grateful to be alive, able to participate in the sacred day to day annoyances, mindful that my story is not over yet, that as long as I'm still alive I have the equally sacred opportunity of turning another page.

When I stopped by the art show to say goodbye to tryslora yesterday, she had such a worried look on her face. "I hope you had fun," she said.

I did, Deb. Thanks for being concerned about me. And it was so nice to meet you!

Even though Worldcon was huge, only my second con ever, and rather overwhelming at first, I met some people, including two of my favorite authors, actually got up enough nerve to have conversations with them, got a card from an editor, and listened to some good panels.

( A long post about a short visit. )

If you haven't already, and get a chance to, I recommend you read the Jeffrey Ford interview in the July 2004 issue of Locus. It'll be posted here:

http://www.locusmag.com/2004/Issues/07Ford.html

Shortly, according to the web site.

Jeffrey Ford is a particular favorite of mine, and what I particularly liked about this interview was how hauntingly familiar some of his process is. I'm light years away from being in Mr. Ford's class—quite possibly will never get there—but it's always a comfort when I can look at someone successful and recognize some, or a lot, of my crazy technique in their way of doing things. I guess it means I'm not totally crazy. Or if I am, there are other crazy people out there who've made a go of it.

Other than the egocentric stuff, I also liked what he had to say about genre vs. literary writing. "Works laboring under either of these artificial labels can be great or lousy. Basically, I don't have time for these arguments and I just have to pay attention to the work...."

I've always thought Jeffrey Ford was one of the more literary guys in the field, one of those pushing the boundaries out beyond the ghetto. He says, and I agree, that this is a liberating time for sff. The boundaries are being expanded. Or, at the very least, smudged so that it's difficult to tell where they lie. This is a good thing. This is a healthy thing.

He also makes the point that in the past, phenomenal experience and scientific projection were regarded as part of human experience, something to be included in serious works of literary art. Ask Mary Shelley, ask Shakespeare, Plato, Milton. Realism is a recent development in the history of writing. And I think, whether we are skeptics or believers, we can't deny that aspect of our humanity which exists in dreams, in the subconscious, in the phenomenal world of pure imagination. All of that messy and contradictory and emotional stuff makes us human. They're part of our animal natures, sure, filtered through the layers of our brain from the reptilian stem to the human-making frontal lobes, but they can't be separated out or denied. We may be technically advanced, but we're techno savages beneath our pinstripes—monkeys with gizmos.

SFF, and the best literary writers, recognize this, I think. We are more than the sum of our mechanistic parts and our gadgets.

Ford quotes his teacher, John Gardner, about writing being "a vivid and continuous dream." Ford goes on to say that unlike dreams, "with writing it's not something that ends in a few minutes; it carries on through the length of a story or book....you see the story in your head and then basically try to record what you see. You don't comment on it, and you almost fall into a trance. If you do it well, it allows you to get in touch with things that make the story work that you're not even conscious of." He tells his writing students that less control will get them in touch with what the story is really about.

Sure, I know so-called "organized" writers (vs. us messy organic types) will probably disagree. But...

Yeah, for people like me it's about haunting the boundaries of reason and pushing through the paper wall that separates us from...the other. That may be me talking, not Jeffrey Ford, but he definitely put me in the zone to think about this stuff.

Writing isn't a mechanical process—just like life isn't. Writing is an experience, a search after meaning, a way of trying to make sense out of things that may be contradictory or beyond our previous experience. It's a process of reconciling irreconcilable differences, of holding more than one truth inside your head at a time, of stretching beyond your level of understanding or emotional maturity. It's about taking risks and pushing the envelope, even if the envelope is only the one inside your own soul. Writing is standing on the edge of a precipice and not being afraid to see if you can fly. It's also about jumping and falling on your face. But hey, it wouldn't be any fun if there wasn't the risk of catastrophic failure, now would it?

Recently I read a story by someone who has revised it about twenty times in the last four months (and if any of my regular critters happen to read this—it ain't none of ya'll, so settle down). I read one of the early drafts of this story and although I thought it needed some tinkering with the narrative flow, it was solid, with a real spark of specialness. So I read it again recently (version 23, I think) and although it's still a competent story, I was sad to see that much of the life, that special spark, had been edited out.

I once did that with an entire novel—my quest fantasy/learning experience. I worked on it constantly for about three years, nothing else, always fiddling and tinkering. I went from writing a flawed novel with juice to a failed novel with all the spark of life snuffed out.

The experience I gained ruining that novel was invaluable. I learned as much about what not to do as what to do—but it was a painful way to do it. Like most people, I don't seem able to learn the easy way. And I suspect that I can use that novel as part of the "million bad words" Jerry Pournelle says you have to write before you start getting the hang of this stuff. (http://www.jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/myjob.html) I rewrote my first novel so many times it must be worth at least a quarter million of those bad words. I've written a hell of a lot more bad stuff since, but that novel will always be a high point in my gallery of low points.

The way I see it, this tinkering-unto-death is always a danger when forcing a high number of revisions through too small a window of time, or of concentrating on one thing to the exclusion of everything else. I think stories benefit greatly from spending time in filing cabinets or trunks: either electronic, mental, or physical ones. These days I always build a little "trunk" time into my revision process and I find it has at least a couple of big advantages:

First, it allows me to gain some perspective on the story. I'm more likely to see things objectively, to change what needs to be changed rather than revise in a panic of "make nice." Second, it allows me to turn my attention to something new. This has the benefit of increasing the number of stories floating around in my creative gene pool at any given time and of me always having something fresh to work on. Even if it's a recycled story, after three or four months in the trunk, it seems fresh.

The disadvantage, of course, is that if you're an instant gratification kind of person or in a fire to publish, this technique probably seems like a big waste of time. Sending work out is an important part of the process and my goal for this year (as it is for every year) is to send out more stuff. I usually make this goal, but I'm still not sending out the great volume that many people do.

Even so, I still don't think constant polishing of a story is the answer any more then I think glacially slow revision is. Writing is a process and I sometimes think that in our rush to Get It Out There we lose track of the fact that editing isn't just about changing stories—it's about making them better.