sam ferree | scribbler

On New Year’s Eve, my girlfriend and I went to a comedy performance and party at the Fox Egg Gallery. After the show a handful of us stayed around to help clean up and have a small celebration. Of course, someone started singing “Auld Lang Syne” and one of the performers said, “That song means something very different to me after this godawful year. Fuck old acquaintances.”

The general consensus going around the room was that 2014 was productive and awful. Everyone said that they had accomplished a great deal over the past twelve months, but they had no idea how much they  would have to pay for it. I tend to read (extremely) progressive media and there seems to be tentative optimism that we may see major reforms in social justice and take steps toward addressing climate change. I wonder if it’s not all just wishful thinking at the beginning of the New Year.

For me, 2014 was nothing if not unusual. It’s the first year since I was a freshman in college that I haven’t moved. It’s the first time since graduating that I’ve held the same job for more than a year, and I’m starting to think that I may have found a career. On the other hand, I feel like I haven’t made much personal progress on a lot of fronts, particularly with my writing and community involvement. Sure, I’ve published a few more short stories and now I’m a producer for the Minneapolis Story Club (and, unexpectedly, now a member of some kind of Story Arts), but it’s hard not to feel that I’m running in place. Or maybe this is just a sign that I’m getting older because the jarring life transitions are going to be fewer and farther between.

When I started writing this post, I had this quote stuck in my head from Dorothy Parker, “I hate writing. I love having written.” Consulting Wikipedia for material and to procrastinate, I learned that she was good friends with the great mime Harpo Marx, which felt meaningful to me because I don’t just hate writing, I hate not writing. I enter a vicious circle of uncertainty, because I often want to write about issues that concern me, but I can’t find anything meaningful to say about them. So, I tend to stay quiet, which, for most of issues I care about, is part of the problem.

I often hear people talk about how much they hate the New Year, because it’s just a time for making and breaking promises. I’ve always liked the holiday, even though I have rarely kept my resolutions. Sometimes I think it would be easier just to make a list of all the things I won’t do, because that feels more honest. For instance, I won’t run a marathon, nor will I force myself to do things I loathe “just for the experience.” I will not write what I think other people want to read. I will not be timid. I will not tell myself to play less video games. I will take things less seriously.

That seems reasonable, and a lot better for my mental health.

With every sentence there’s that lingering fear that it will be your last.

Is creativity finite? Is there only so much we can use before it’s gone? Or is it a muscle that strains?

What does it mean when you can’t write?

Of course you can write. Pick up the pen. Start typing. Dictate. Commit it to something like a permanent medium.

Then hate it. Tear it up. Rearrange or edit or destroy it. Rarely love it.

There’s no such thing as writer’s block, just the fear of writing shit. And there is so much of it. Not just in the rough drafts and notebooks lining up your bookshelf and cluttering up your hard drive, but in the libraries and bookstores, too. People like it, you think. There’s hope.

But I’m not going to write crap. I’m going to be remembered as a genius. The Sage of Minneapolis. At least I’ll be remembered for not being a hack.

But what’s wrong with being a hack? A good hack probably eats better than a good Serious Writer. There’s always a chance that someone later will read your piles of shit and interpret it as a gold. It happened to Raymond Chandler. Or at least the cultural studies department will create merit.

Again, what’s wrong with being a hack? People want to consume what makes them happy. Willy Wonka seemed okay with what he did, and his products caused diabetes, whereas what you do can, at worst, cost someone a few hours. John Carpenter, Patricia Highsmith, Barbara Kingsolver, Ernest Hemingway. Sure, I could become them, pandering to my audience. Give them what they want and make a living.

Instead, you write an essay with a confused narrator, sliding between first and second person. Is this even an essay?

It’s something. And it’s a couple hundred words of something. Writer’s block = overcome.

Why does this bother you so much?

Because writing is now part of your identity, and it would be stupid not to treat it as something sacred, or a useful body part. Take care of your kidneys.

Someone once told me that when you’re doing a comedy routine you have to treat your audience with contempt. You have to not care if they laugh or not. Transferring the lesson, you have to not care if your readers like your work as long as they read it. Just like Hemingway.

But you really should be writing. Something else. Because this isn’t enough. There’s a notebook filled with story prompts and half filled ideas and you have another notebook with two aborted rough drafts. This isn’t an essay – it’s an excuse not to write something you care about more. But it’s kind of fun.

This is an ending of sorts.

Gray was probably the first person I knew who took writing poetry seriously. He’s the only person I’ve met with the name “Gray,” and I loved him for that.

Many people who are mourning right now knew him far better than I did, but I still feel compelled to share my thoughts. The greatest tragedy I can think of is that not enough good memories of a person are shared.

Frankly, I have no idea how I met Gray, except that he was friends with all of my older friends, and I was that freshman in high school trying to spend time with the artsy kids. There were a few of us who got together on a semi-regular basis at a coffee shop called Cafe Diem and discussed poetry, art, literature, and music. We called ourselves PALM (get it?). I remember Gray was taking college courses in creative writing and literature and I thought that was so cool.

My most vivid memory of Gray, though, was one time when I went to his house with the same friends from PALM. We were sitting around talking and the house phone rang. Gray picked it up and immediately shouted, “WHAT?!” A moment later he cringed and walked into the other room saying, “I’m so sorry. This is Gray.” It was my mom calling to see when I would be home. She was justifiably insulted, but I was amused then and I still am now.

The last time I saw him was at a Stewart Davis concert in 2006. He looked unwell then, and I worried about him. But in the years after, it seems that he did exactly what I expected of him when I knew him in high school: become a magnificent artist.

Friends and acquaintances aren’t supposed to die in their twenties and thirties. That’s really the only take-away.

Recently, I finished reading Christian Rudder’s Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking), and one of the chapters that really intrigued me was his discussing the differences between the way people write on Twitter and other social media compared to the way the language is used in other literature. He sites the work of linguist Mark Lieberman who found that the average length of a word in a Tweet is longer actually longer than you’d expect: 4.8 characters (as compared to Hamlet with an average word length of 3.99 characters). The most common words used in Twitter also includes a lot more nouns and verbs than the hundred most common words used a survey sample of recently published books.

What does that mean? If you only have 140 characters, you use words that do more work. Does it spell out the death of our language and literature? No. Does it mean that the way we write is changing? Yes. Is that a good or bad thing? Neither.

I loathe alarmist comments about how Twitter is making children unable to understand words of more than two syllables or how kids these days don’t have the attention spans to read Charles Dickens. It’s not just ridiculous and wrong, but it’s distracting from the actual, and much more interesting, situation of how the way we write is changing. And how it’s not.

Just to be clear, we’ve never had long attention spans. Or, at least, not as long as the golden-age-thinkers want everyone to believe so that we can feel ashamed of ourselves and go back to the Good Old Days before social media and television. Charles Dickens work was published in serial, most fairy tales can be recited in ten or twenty minutes, stage plays have basically lasted around 90 minutes since antiquity, and even the Odyssey was probably recited in hour-long, nightly sessions. Today, people are perfectly willing to sit through three-hour long movie adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and we all consume and produce far more text than any generation before us just through email, social media, online articles, and texting (people who text, alone, produce an average of 41 texts per day). Not that the everything posted on Twitter and Facebook is high art, but just because that’s the medium doesn’t mean it necessarily isn’t.

Technology, political climate, cultural trends, and a plenitude of other factors influence art, style, and dominant themes. That writers today don’t write the way they did two hundred years ago is a good thing – it’s what makes our literature unique and interesting. Just as terms like modernist and Victorian conjure up a zeitgeist and particular texture of prose, a few decades from now some academic will come up with a term that sums up whatever it is we’re doing these days.

In the meantime, I intend to enjoy @VeryShortStory and the random witty FB posts of my friends.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me where I get my story ideas. I was thrilled because it seems like this question is some sort of rite of passage. In Stephen King’s On Writing, he talks about how fans ask him (and every other author he knows) all the time. His answer is basically that good ideas just come to you sometimes and you have to remain open to and aware of those sudden flashes of insight. Comic artist Warren Ellis said something to the effect that he fills his mind with a lot of junk and stories sometimes emerge, sort of in a primordial soup kind of way.

My favorite, and the one that resonates most with me, is the observation, I think it was Neil Gaiman, that, “The difference between a writer and other people is that when a normal person brakes their arm they shout, ‘Take me to the hospital,’ but when a writer breaks her arm, she shouts, ‘Get me a pen!'”

Everyone has great story ideas all the time, whether real of fiction, it’s just a matter of writing them down. I’m not saying every time you have a flash of insight you immediately sit down and write out a story, but most of the time you just have to give your intuition the benefit of the doubt.

My story, “Where You End and the World Begins,” has a frankly bizarre genesis, and it didn’t come to me all at once.  It started with a friend of mine mentioning that his mother used to belong to some cult-like church that kept trying to compel the family to come back. One day, when the acquaintance was a little kid, some of these church members apparently came to the house while his mother was in the shower and tried to lure him into a car. His mother’s parent-sense tingled and she ran out of the house naked, grabbed him, and yelled at the parishioners to leave her family alone.

Somehow, that’s where the zealot in the story came from.

The second component, the main character who has a preternatural talent for finding things, was a little more personal and ongoing. I lose things a lot. I’m forgetful and I have a bad habit of setting things down in places the don’t belong. I’ve long wanted to be able to hire a contractor whose job it is to find all the things I’ve misplaced.

That’s it. Two weird bits of information that became a story.

So, if you’ve ever wondered where ideas come from, you already know. It’s just a matter of paying attention and writing them down when you can.

And if you’re doing Nano, get back to it.

When you work with words all day, you start to develop strong opinions and Feelings about them. For instance, I love the words “intransigent,” “autumnal,” “evanesce,” “obtain,” and “logic.”

Likewise, there are words I loathe, and most of them are the kind you run into all the time if your a grant writer, like me, in RFPs, advertisements, and “About” pages. Words like “utilize”, “synergy,” “actionable,” “scalable,” “impactful,” “resourceful” (actually, pretty much any time you turn a pithy noun into a active-sounding adjective), and the list goes on.

For one thing, most of these words are substitutes for perfectly good and more simple words, like writing “utilize” instead of “use.” And those that don’t indicate that the writer is frantically shuffling through a thesaurus for a term that sounds more sexy, these words are typically meaningless. What does “actionable” Mean? Okay, yes, it’s obvious what it’s implying, but that’s the problem: it’s implying, not explaining. These words are deliberately vague. They allow the writer the dodge the messy business of actually giving you a detailed account of what’s going on.

The word I hate most, and I think is used far too often, is “innovate” (or any variation thereof… though that’s just ahead of “unique” in the list of words I think no one uses correctly).

This word is used so often by businesses, nonprofits, foundations, and everyone else that it is meaningless. What’s worse is that the concept itself (“new,” “different,” “pioneering,” etc.) has developed a devoted following and cult of personality.

I have noticed in the past few years that more and more philanthropists, businesses, and activists have made “innovation” their central goal. In other words, people have taken up a Gordon Gekko-esque mantra of “Innovation is Good.”

What bothers me about this is that, particularly in the area of philanthropy, more grant programs and prizes seem to be exclusively focused on “innovation.” Certainly, trying something new is a good idea. But in the growing enthusiasm for originality and uniqueness, it seems like people are sacrificing the ends for the means.

Innovation is neither good nor bad. It’s just different. Because of our insistence that everything be innovative, perfectly good and productive projects and organizations are overlooked in the pursuit of the New.

Take Catholic Charities, for example. Sure, they change their programming every so often and check to make sure what they’re doing is working, but generally they are pretty good at delivering social services to people in need because they have been doing it since forever. Or Good Will. Or Habitat for Humanity. All of these organizations have been operating for decades and are very good at what they do,  but there is a growing pressure from foundations and corporate giving programs that being effective isn’t enough. You have to be innovative. You have to be Different and Cutting Edge.

Is Innovation Good? If it leads to better results, sure. On its own, it’s just a buzzword.

This buzzword, however, is becoming a problem. When the obsession with Innovation overshadows the actual work that needs to be done to help people and solve systemic problems, we have left the realm of reality and entered a weird space of entrepreneurial ideology where the definition of Good is being Different-from-the-other-Guy.

Nonprofit service is about addressing a need and creating benefits for society. Anything that advances those causes is good, but praising the means over the ends is like building a house to make a better hammer.

I’ve been lazy. And thoughtful. Often, those things go hand-in-hand with me.

The trouble is that last sentence. I spent five minutes trying to figure out another way of saying this without using a cliche, but only came up with more.

Instead of writing, I’ve been reading a lot lately. Books and articles, from Moby Dick to Salon. The more I read, the less desire, or the more hesitant I am, to write. I like the stuff I read too much, and what I put down feels hopelessly inadequate.

This isn’t griping. It’s an excuse. And I’m not ashamed of providing excuses. It’s just honesty.

But, I have good news to share! First, I narrated a story for PseudoPod (my favorite horror podcast). It’s “Train Tracks” by WP Johnson and you can find it by clicking here.

Second, I sold a story to my favorite science fiction podcast, Escape Pod! I can’t begin to say how honored and thrilled I am. I’ve been listening to Escape Pod (like PseudoPod) for years. Sometime in the next couple of months, they will post “The Law of Gravity,” originally published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. More details to come.

In other news, I will now be supporting Mimi Nguyen and Jaime Amy Ann is producing Story Club Minneapolis. Since moving to the Twin Cities, I’ve gotten superficially involved in the performance story telling scene and now I will have the chance to do more. If you’re Twin Cities-based, I strongly encourage you to come to the Bryant Lake Bowl on the third Saturday in November to listen to some stories or share one of your own.

That’s enough for now. It’s been a long weekend. I’m going to try to be more dedicated to this blog-thing I’ve got going.

Like most people living in the Twin Cities, an unusual number of my friends and acquaintances work for nonprofits. Not long ago, I was talking with one of said friends who is the policy lead (aka “lobbyist”) with a social justice organization that recently scored a huge victory for their cause, despite ferocious opposition. I asked him how he approached and tried to persuade those opposed to his organization’s cause and he said, “Actually, the people who are really against what we do just don’t meet with me at all. Sometimes they just won’t make the time. Sometimes they’ll let me schedule a meeting, but they always bail out at the last minute, or keep rescheduling until it’s past the point that it matters.”

There are many opinions and causes that I find reprehensible, but I always try to go out of my way to understand where the people who hold those perspectives are coming from. For the past couple of years, I’ve worked with organizations involved with policy-making and so the idea that an elected official would refuse to even discuss matters with the other side was, until my friend told me about his experience, unthinkable to me. Yeah, sure, blustering and heated, intransigent debate I can understand, but flat out refusing to talk to someone about an issue that affects both of you appalls me.

And it offends me for another reason: as a writer, if you’re serious about writing good, believable characters and stories, you have to make the effort to understand things you don’t like. I’m not very good at this, admittedly, but I try.

A few years ago, I was an intern at the Playwright’s Center. During one of the artist talk-back sessions, one of the audience members asked a panel of writers, “Who’s your audience?” The woman was an artistic director at a DC-based theatre and the question sounded innocent enough to me, so I was surprised by the flak she got from the panelists. “I hate that question,” they all agreed. Later, I asked one of the other interns, who had been working in theatre for while, why everyone was so angry. She said, “Do you think anyone ever asks a straight, white, male playwright who his audience is?” Then I realized that maybe, at best, one or two of the people on the panel fell into all three of those categories.

One of the playwrights, Taylor Mac (a magnificent artist), responded to the question, “People should go see things they don’t understand.” The things that make them uncomfortable.

And I do genuinely try to seek out the things that I don’t understand and make me uncomfortable… ish.  It’s the MN Fringe Festival right now and, despite my best efforts, I can’t convince myself to go to musicals (call me prejudiced, because I am).  That’s a terrible example, I know, but I am mildly ashamed of my intolerance of the genre.

The problem is that I’m not very good at writing characters and stories with whom/which I have no personal experience.  In other words, a lot of my characters are white, American, young, irreligious, liberal men.  That’s not just a problem in my maturity as a writer, but as a service to the people who read my stories.  My plots and themes, invariably, come back to privileged existentialism or, worse, solipsism.  Who the hell wants to read about white, American, young, irreligious, liberal men struggling with angsty existentialism all the time?  Even I get sick of it and I like it because it resonates with me.  But, any time I try to stray from that character, I end up writing caricatures, which reinforces my aversion to straying outside what I know.

That’s a problem.  Art isn’t just about entertainment (though I am committed to that goal first and foremost), but about offering new perspectives and encouraging progress.  Really great art is about Change.

The great Bertold Brecht theorized the lehrstueck, the play that teaches.  When I studied abroad in Germany I gave a presentation about how Brecht believed that art could transform people and encourage them to do heroic, necessary things.  Being a natural cynic, I asked my class if they thought Brecht was right and was shocked when everyone raised their hands.  If people believe that a book, movie, play, or song can encourage a person to change their lives for the better, that is magnificent.

That also puts a great burden or responsibility on the artist.  If you’re going to make a point, you’d better do it right and make sure that the comment you’re making isn’t frivolous or destructive.

Now, I’m reading Stephen King’s It.  No matter what you may think of the man (King-hating is awfully popular), he does not shy away from incorporating social justice into his stories.  That’s admirable.  The guy is one of the whitest writers ever, and still a bit of a misogynist, but at least he tries and often succeeds at pointing out that Horror comes from banal, immoral hate and misunderstanding.  The characters who are the most terrifying and awful in It are just some people who have spent way too long in their own worlds refusing to acknowledge that what they’re doing to other people might be wrong.

This is something I’ve become increasingly concerned with in the past few years. How do you write an entertaining story or play that offers something meaningful to the audience? Looking back on my own work, I think the closest I got was either my short story, “The Law of Gravity,” or a play that no one has ever seen called “The News Is Next.”

In the former, I really wanted to tease out the serious moral and emotional dilemmas we’re faced with today in mourning the dead on the internet.  What do you do with someone’s Facebook, Twitter, or Deviant Art accounts after they pass?  It may not sound like a social justice issue, but I think it is.  Grief rituals aren’t about the person who died, but about the living who miss them, and their right to honor their memories.  Funeral practices are a cultural universal, and the inability to reckon with your feelings about losing a loved one can seriously interfere with your working and personal life.  A friend of mine died not long ago, and I remember vividly the anger my friends and I felt when this friend’s parents changed the person’s social media accounts to better fit their idealized version of their child.  Of course, there is no moral high ground you can take against a grieving parent, but for people who have grown up with social media as a part of our identities, changing someone’s Facebook account is like cutting a smile into someone’s face.

“The News Is Next” was supposed to be a comedy, but it isn’t.  It’s about the perverse transformation of news into entertainment and how identifying yourself with your career can corrupt the rest of your life.  Most of my stories and plays are pretty cowardly.  They explore ideas and identities I know too well and express beliefs I assume without question. Art can do better than that and should, if only just one time out of ten.

Okay, getting back to the point, I need to answer the “… So what?” question.  Well, to get there, I need to take a detour.  There’s a story that I listened to on the Moth recently that I adore and only recently began to understand why.  It’s “The Story of Boris” by Dan Barber, and

Exploring the things I don’t understand.