Monthly Archives: October 2013

October 30, 2013 · 9:47 pm

About that time, eh?

NanoWrimo begins tomorrow at midnight. Technically, the day after tomorrow at midnight. Did I get that right? Whatever – you know what I mean.

The anxiety is weighing heavy on me. You know, that crushing, asphyxiating feeling of what-if-I-can’t-write-1600-words-per-day? What if I have to resort to writing out the phone book, like Strom Thurmond filibustering the Civil Rights Act? What if I have to… cheat? Copy and paste a few thousand words to meet the quota?

So, I’ve been considering all of my little tricks to get myself writing again, which I will share with you because, well, why not? And I’m writing, so it’s good practice.  (By the way, as I write this, I imagine the voice of Norm Sherman narrating it and I’m just transcribing. This is the creepiest, strangest post I’ve ever written. Thanks, Norm.)

Here’s the list:

1.) Stop caring. If you’ve read Anne Lamott‘s Bird by Bird (and if you haven’t, you should) you’ll know that no one writes a perfect first draft.

Except for Tim. He’s an asshole. We don’t like Tim much and we’re pretty sure that he doesn’t have any friends and he cries himself to sleep. Don’t be like Tim. Write bad first drafts and sleep well at night.

2.) Write it like a play. I’m stealing this, again, from Stephen King’s On Writing. I like writing plays, and so it’s more like cheating for me, but there’s a point here. Scripts strip everything down to dialogue and action. If you’re stuck, you can remove yourself from internality, put yourself in the audience’s seat and think “What do I want to happen?” Go wild. It’s drama, after all.

One suggestion, though, is to abbreviate characters to single letters so that you don’t have to write out the names every line.  It gets annoying.

3.) If you’re writing a play, now, and still aren’t getting anywhere, write an impossible stage direction. This is one of my favorite prompts because it forces you to go against instinct. If someone said, “I dare you to write something that no one could do in live-action theatre,” what would you write? This sort of goes along with my whole belief that speculative fiction has more to offer than the Pulitzer Prize committee is willing to admit, but that’s a post of a different color.

4.) Set a timer. No, really. Get out the egg timer and give yourself fifteen minutes and then write for every second of it. There are plenty of websites and widgets out there that will help and I’m too lazy to find them and collect them all here for you. Trust me, they’re out there. Nothing demands inspiration like last-minute inspiration.

5.) Set smaller goals.  Sort of an iteration on the first piece of advice. Instead of trying to write 1600 words, try 50. Or just a sentence. In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway writes that after that first sentence is done everything is easier from there.

He may have been a misogynist asshole, but some of his advice is useful.

6.) Get drunk. Exactly what I said. You should need no more inspiration – just discipline.

7.) Drink a lot of coffee. Sometimes, you just need to mess with your body chemistry. Any dietitian, doctor, or person possessing common sense would argue with the previous two pieces of advice and well they should. It’s bad advice. But the whole list is comprised of bad advice and you wouldn’t be reading this if you weren’t desperate so I won’t judge if you don’t.

8.) Write an outline and follow it. This is my favorite, and the one I follow most often. It doesn’t have to be a formal outline – it could just be a sentence or two saying where you’re going with the story. But it does help. It gives you a map to follow, and any fool who found buried treasure can tell you that’s worth the while.

9.) Walk away. Writing is my profession. Sometimes when I get frustrated by a sentence, or a paragraph, or whatever, I just have to walk around the house, the building, the city, to think it through before I can proceed. There’s no shame in giving up. Temporarily.

10.) Whatever you think you shouldn’t write, you should. More on this later. The gist of it is, if there is something you feel you shouldn’t write, whether it be because you haven’t gotten to that part of the plot or because you are too embarrassed to put it down, write it.

That’s it. Nano’s soon. Godspeed.

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October 28, 2013 · 7:10 pm

Art in Gratitude

In New Orleans I worked for a housing rehabilitation nonprofit where people from all around the country volunteered regularly. Most of them were church or school groups, but occasionally we’d have high end corporate types and celebrities. One of our regulars was a wealthy, charming, attractive actress and everyone was glad to have her on site for one reason or another.

One day, she was working with a friend, J, and asked him how much he was paid. He said that we were technically volunteers, too, and we got a living stipend of $12k annually. A few minutes later, when his back was turned, J felt the actress reach into his front pocket and then walk away. He looked and found that she’d given him a hundred dollar bill.

J told this to our supervisor, M, and I one day during a 24-hour build. M nodded and asked, “And you know what you do when something like that happens, right?” We both shrugged. M said, “You say ‘Thank you,’ and you mean it, and you accept their generosity.”

Giving and taking were and still are difficult concepts for me. I’ve volunteered, and I’ve gone out of my way for others, but I think I’m only just starting to grasp how complex these desires are in the adult world.

For the first time in my life, I have a salaried position and excess cash. I can afford the things I want and have done a lot of purchasing lately. But I’ve also started to donate regularly, both in terms of time and money. I’ve done my best to support my friends in their recent ventures (check out Story Club Minneapolis and OUTspoken), but I’ve also started contributing to the things I like and believe in.

For instance, Pseudopod. If you’re a fan of horror, you should be listening to this podcast, because it’s all that stands between us and the unspeakable horrors we all know exist. And, if you start listening, start donating. Because they and their sister podcasts, Podcastle for fantasy, and Escape Pod for sci fi, are hurting. Moreover, these three podcasts are some of the best venues in speculative fiction today. If you want to support the literary arts, this is as good a cause as any.

I wouldn’t have been able to make that hard ask a couple years ago. Whenever I heard appeals for money from NPR or even Pseudopod before about 2012, I always thought they were talking to someone else, that some rich person would be able to give to the cause and I could ignore the plea. Now that I work in development (a sexy term for fundraising), I suppose I’ve become more callous to hitting people up for money, but my perspective has changed significantly, too.

I work, I play video games, I write, I do a lot of seemingly meaningless things during my day and I’m beginning to understand this desire to be generous, which is more or less what I’ve told people who are trying to raise money for their projects. Somewhere, there are a lot of people who care deeply about the same things you do and want to do something about it.

True, there’s a certain pettiness to this, if you look at it like a cynic (which I am). Philanthropy is vanity, but there’s more to it than that. Most people don’t know that they can make a difference because it isn’t obvious. There’s seven billion of us sharing this planet and in a media-saturated culture we’re constantly reminded of what we don’t have that other people do, like money, talent, prosperity, good fortune, etc. It’s easy to think that Someone Else Can Do It, not because people are lazy, but because people don’t realize that You means Me.

Furthermore, most people never think to Ask. My own partner hates asking me for favors and I feel the same way, because we were brought up to believe that you have to earn everything you get. From that perspective, it’s humiliating to ask for or accept help. Pride is a powerful compulsion. But no one gets anywhere without someone else – it’s part of the reason why marriage and family are cultural universals.

So, here’s a lame way to wrap up this post: be generous and grateful. It’s good for you.

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October 21, 2013 · 7:08 pm

The Survival Rates Need to Improve (Review: You’re Next)

(Yeah, spoilers – you’ve been warned.)

I was surprised when A suggested going to see a horror movie. Usually, she refuses to watch anything that could conceivably be described as “scary,” while I seek out any and everything with a twisted, sinister heart held in the vice grip of some Cthulhu-esque monster. Having grown up terrified of my own shadow, I sometimes find it baffling that I’ve become a horror-addict. If you want to analyze it, I assume that I’m always trying to prove to myself that the monsters aren’t real.

“It’s supposed to be a new take on the Survivor Girl,” A explained. “It’s getting great reviews.”

We went on opening night and there were only a handful of people in the audience. I hadn’t seen the previews or read anything about You’re Next and was going solely on A’s vote of confidence. Within the first ten seconds I knew that everyone in the room was a horror fan because of the laughter and ostentatious, disgusted scoffing.

The film opens with a deeply uncomfortable sex scene followed by a grisly double-homicide as if to remind everyone that, yes, we were watching a horror movie. From there, it follows a formulaic plot of a rich family being hunted and killed by home-invaders for reasons that, if you’re familiar with the genre, are dead obvious from the beginning. I would go into greater detail, but that would require throwing buckets of blood at you because that’s about about all that’s left of the movie.

But I like bad horror movies. In fact, I deeply appreciate and am entertained by them. I prefer psychological over body horror, but I can roll with the occasional foreboding message scrawled across the wall in the victim’s blood if there’s more to it than that. What baffles me is that people seem to think this good horror movie. Reading the reviews, I seriously question whether or not I saw the same movie everyone keeps talking about.

And see that’s the thing – there are merits to You’re Next, but a unique take on the Survivor Girl is not one of them.

Erin, the Survival Girl in question, is unarguably a badass. The final scene between her and Crispian is genuinely funny and I can forgive all the bad acting for that one perfect disbelieving look she gives him as he comments, “But there’s a silver lining to all this,” as she stands there covered in gore from the half-dozen or so people she just dismembered. But, Erin’s resourcefulness is explained away almost immediately when we learn that her parents were obsessed with the societal collapse and subscribed to the John-Conner-prepare-to-take-on-the-robot-apocalypse method of child rearing. In other words, Erin did what any self-respecting commando would do in a situation like You’re Next: mercilessly kill the idiots who thought they could get the best of her.

But there was a moment, before the revelation of her upbringing, that I thought Erin was different. When everyone else is reduced to screaming hysterics, Erin keeps a level head and calmly throws out orders on how to barricade the house and get everyone to safety. That, I thought, was interesting. For once, instead of making herself an easy target, an average young woman in a horror movie is confronted with a crisis and finds it immediately in herself to be a deal with it.

I’ve craved in horror. It’s a depressing genre about atrocious things happening to people and usually, as Stephen King points out in The Danse Macabre, has deeply conservative undertones. The most blatant example would be, “Don’t do something stupid like venture into the dark, spooky forests where there are wolves howling,” (i.e. stay on the straight and narrow) or the more explicitly socially conservative rules laid out first in Scream: don’t have sex, don’t drink, be a good kid and you’ll survive. Horror is usually about punishment or divine retribution, and the scary part is that the reasons are vague but the consequences are painfully real.

In most horror, the protagonists are paralyzed, at least at first, by terror or disbelief. The former appeals to our sense of reason – after all, no one ever believes that they’re in a horror movie at first. The latter plays to that gut feeling, the unconscious, that which we can’t control about ourselves. It makes sense that when faced with horrendous violence most people scream and curl up into a ball, but that gets old fast in movies and literature, and verisimilitude is only entertaining for so long.

It’s Disbelief and Terror that get people killed in Horror. While this is innate to the genre, I find it refreshing when someone does it different, like in Scream. Sydney is an average high schooler who, when confronted by a knife-wielding psychopath, takes him on in a stride. And it’s not just Sydney. Casey and Tatum, the other two female leads, both rise to the occasion. They fight. Neither surrenders or begs, but instead does what she can to survive.

No one knows what he or she would do when thrown into a situation like You’re Next, but that’s sort of the point of the genre: speculation. What happens when worse comes to worst? It’s easy to find examples of failure because it’s predictable and understandable. But it’s far more interesting to see the stories about the people who accept that they’re out of the realm of the Everyday and aren’t afraid to do something about it. That’s when things get interesting. That’s when it’s hard to know what will happen next.

Yeah, horror is a usually a genre about the worst of us, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be optimistic. I’d like to believe that we are all, if not heroes, at least survivors.

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October 16, 2013 · 10:19 pm

A matter of indifference

I haven’t tried to do Nano since I failed to complete a novel in 2005. Even that was a poor attempt since I didn’t actually try to write a novel, but instead a play, which ended up being 17,000 words, or 33,000 shy of the intended goal. Still, I consider that a win, in the end, because that play got me to New York through Young Playwrights Inc. (if you know any young playwrights, refer them – YPI is great) during which I learned: 1.) I hate NYC and 2.) If you feel like you shouldn’t write something, you should.

That’s beside the point. Sort of. You see, I haven’t tried to do Nano in seven years because I’ve had a plenitude of good excuses. For five years it was essays to write for class and after that it was grad school applications. Since neither of those are obstacles now, I’ve run out of excuses, which is as good a reason as any.

There is a seed of triumph in this commitment, though. For the first time in years I am admitting that I’m not too stressed out to try writing a novel in a month. Looking back there’s something very wrong with that sentence, but I’m pursuing a thought now and can’t be held back.

John Barth, though I loathe him, made an observation I agree with, that writers usually fall into two categories: the marathoners and the sprinters (i.e. novel and short story writers). I’ve fallen into the latter category and that probably has something to do with having never been taught or encouraged to do the other. I’m a product of my education, what can I say?

Last year, I tried writing out two ideas for full-length work, but kept struggling with how to weave a plot together over 50k+ words. Nano provides a great incentive: indifference. I like both ideas and, paradoxically, really need to get to the point where I don’t care enough that I can write a lousy first draft.

Will it be any good? Of course not, but at least it won’t be rattling around in my skull any longer.

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October 7, 2013 · 5:40 pm

The Laziest Critic

While we were workshopping his play, my friend K asked, “But, the question I’ve been wondering is, ‘Does this story need to be told?’ I’ve heard of so many writers who hear that question and realize, ‘My god, what have I been doing?’ Does this story need to be told?”

I have only heard that question a handful of times. The person asking typically offers this and nothing more to the conversation and everyone stumbles around trying to answer, eventually arriving at “No,” because there is no way to answer that question. I’ve never bothered trying because the question deserves no response.

In my first workshop, R said that for every story there is some merit to compliment and some deficiency to criticize. I agree with that, but I’ve met too many people that favor the latter over the former.

There are a lot of good questions to ask when you’re critiquing a story. What’s at stake? What do the characters want? Where is this going? Etc. (and insert specificity). If things are unclear and you’re pretty sure they aren’t meant to be, you should ask a question.

“Does this story need to be told?” is the laziest critique I’ve ever heard.

If you can’t come up with a better reason to question the merit of another person’s story, you’re not trying hard enough.  That doesn’t mean there isn’t something wrong with the story (there is always something that could be better), but asking “Does this story needs to be told,” probably means 1.) You don’t like it for aesthetic reasons (which is perfectly fine, but useless to the writer), or 2.) You think it’s unoriginal, which I would argue is not necessarily a bad thing.

As Zero Punctuation pointed out, there was absolutely nothing original about The Last of Us. It was just a typical action-adventure, zombie-post-apocalyptic, survivor-horror video game. If you know the genres, you probably could’ve gone down a checklist of all the tropes and not missed a single one. However, what makes The Last of Us stand above all the others is that it was a Great action-adventure, zombie-post-apocalyptic, survivor-horror game. Yes, there wasn’t anything new, but damn did they do it better than everyone else.

Others have said it more eloquently than me, but if your sole criteria for whether or not something is good is originality, you probably hate a lot of things (like Zero Punctuation, but he’s at least entertaining), which is unfortunate. It’s bad for your heart and quality of life.

But the question of whether or not a story should be told isn’t just ridiculous – it’s offensive. It expresses discomfort or value judgement to subject matter. Good criticism (at least in a workshop) is about craft.

Last Wednesday, I listened to a slam poet friend perform a story at Kieran’s Irish Pub about the first time he masturbated and he turned it into a meaningful commentary on Americans’ discomfort with sexuality. In the same hour, I struggled to pay attention to a man talk about his first-hand experience with rural poverty.

A better anecdote: A teacher of mine told me about how when she was 19 she won the right to go workshop with some Great Writer. When it was her turn, the Great Writer tore her work to pieces and made her cry in front of everyone present. Afterwards he spoke to her privately, “For the next five years, don’t write another word. Go to Rio Grande City in Texas and work there as a waitress for five years. Then you’ll have stories to tell.”

“Bull shit,” my teacher concluded.

Bull shit, I say. An old man tells a young woman that the only worthwhile stories she has to tell are those she gleans from someone else’s tragedy.  No one has the right to tell you your story doesn’t deserve to be told.

We all have worthwhile stories to tell and it’s the telling that matters.

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