Theodora Goss's Blog, page 45

The Real Miéville

This happens to you a lot as a writer: you watch a television show, and you can see the clever, intricate way it's going to end, and then it doesn't. The show ends with one fewer plot twist than you had foreseen, and you're disappointed that the writers weren't clever enough to see the final twist that would have made it so much better.

Recently, I read an article by China Miéville called "M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire." When I started the article, I thought, what a clever parody of academic prose! Because of course Miéville is a Ph.D., which means he must have encountered a lot of that prose, but he's also a writer, so he knows what's wrong with it, ridiculous about it. We all do. And I had a great deal of respect for him, because I thought it was a brilliant, and incredibly funny, parody.

As I continued reading, I started wondering – was it a parody, or was he actually just writing like that? Because if he was actually writing like that, in all seriousness, then – I didn't know what to make of it.

Here are the first two paragraphs:

"0. Prologue: the Tentacular Novum

"Taking for granted, as we do, its ubiquitous cultural debris, it is easy to forget just how radical the Weird was at the time of its convulsive birth.(1) Its break with previous fantastics is vividly clear in its teratology, which renounces all folkloric or traditional antecedents. The monsters of high Weird are indescribable and formless as well as being and/or although they are and/or in so far as they are described with an excess of specificity, an accursed share of impossible somatic precision; and their constituent body parts are dispropor­tionately insectile/cephalopodic, without mythic resonance. The spread of the tentacle – a limb-type with no Gothic or traditional precedents (in 'Western' aesthetics) – from a situation of near total absence in Euro-American tera­toculture up to the nineteenth century, to one of being the default monstrous appendage of today, signals the epochal shift to a Weird culture.(2)

"The 'Lovecraft Event', as Ben Noys invaluably understands it,(3) is unquestionably the centre of gravity of this revolutionary moment; its defining text, Lovecraft's 'The Call of Cthulhu', published in 1928 in Weird Tales. However, Lovecraft's is certainly not the only haute Weird. A good case can be made, for example, that William Hope Hodgson, though considerably less influential than Lovecraft, is as, or even more, remarkable a Weird visionary; and that 1928 can be considered the Weird tentacle's coming of age, Cthulhu ('monster [ . . . ] with an octopus-like head') a twenty-first birthday iteration of the giant 'devil-fish' – octopus – first born to our sight squatting malevolently on a wreck in Hodgson's The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig', in 1907.(4)"

What's so funny about this? First, numbering the prologue 0, then calling it "The Tentacular Novum." Classic examples of academic pretentiousness, the 0 and the introduction without definition of the term "novum" (from Darko Suvin), but punctured by calling the novum "tentacular." Then, the inclusion of terms that seem to define a category, but are also somewhat ridiculous: "high Weird," becoming the even fancier French "haute Weird" in the second paragraph. The use of scientific terms applied to the literary: "teratology," "tera­toculture." (Teratology is the study of developmental defects.) The glancing reference, without explanation, to Georges Bataille's The Accursed Share. The paragraphs are dense with academicspeak, and the funniest thing of all is what they describe: the birth of a new genre that has gotten absolutely 0 academic respect because it's about gods with octopus heads. He's writing about the grotesque in a way that is itself grotesque, by which I mean that his writing is continually reaching out like tentacles to incorporate the most ridiculous instances of academicese. Tentacular novum indeed!

I'm going to include a few examples of what I consider particularly funny passages because of the way in which they parody academicspeak.

"In short order, the two key figures in the French pre-Weird tentacular, Jules Verne and Victor Hugo, produced works – Verne in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869) and Hugo in The Toilers of the Sea (1866) – which include extraordinary descriptions of monster cephalopods. These texts, while indispensable to the development of the Weird, remain in important respects pre–Weird not only temporally but thematically, representing contrasting oppositions to the still-unborn tradition, to varying degrees prefigurations of the Weird and attempts pre-emptively to de-Weird it."

Pre-emptively to de-Weird it! All right, he's putting us on. I know he is. This is The Pooh Perplex with tentacles.

"Weird writers were explicit about their anti-Gothic sensibility: Blackwood's camper in 'The Willows' experiences 'no ordinary ghostly fear'; Lovecraft stresses that the 'true weird tale' is characterised by 'unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces' rather than by 'bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule'.(24) The Weird entities have waited in their catacombs, sunken cities and outer circles of space since aeons before humanity. If they remain it is from a pre-ancestral time. In its very unprecedentedness, paradoxically, Cthulhu is less a ghost than the arche-fossil-as-predator. The Weird is if anything ab-, not un-, canny."

All righty. It's ab-canny (refering to Julia Kristeva's notion of the abhuman) rather than un-canny (referring to Freud's notion of the uncanny). Clever clever.

And of course he refers to Freud, Lacan, Kristeva. How could he not? The article contains (or attempts to contain – there you go, now I'm being all academicy myself) an excess of references. It's easiest to read with Wikipedia on standby, although if you haven't read Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, you're not going to get the references anyway.

But then I start to doubt, because it goes on for so long, and it's all like this. So maybe it's not a parody after all? Maybe Miéville is taking himself completely seriously? As he goes on, the academicese drops away to a certain extent and the article sounds more like an actual standard academic article, rather than a parody of one.

(I just have to point out that when he mentions "the proto­plasmic formlessness of the dying vampire Carmilla (1872)," he must be thinking of Helen Vaughan from The Great God Pan, because we do not actually see how Carmilla dies – her protoplasmic formlessness comes earlier in the text.)

Although you still have paragraphs like this:

"There is, in 'Count Magnus', and in James in general, no aufhebung of the Weird and hauntological. The two are, I suggest, in non-dialectical opposition, contrary iterations of a single problematic –  hence in 'Count Magnus' the peculiarly literal and arithmetic addition of Weird to haunto­logical (with the latter privileged, precisely because James is, fundamentally, somewhat ghostlier than he is Weird)."

Aufhebung: a term used by Hegel to explain what happens when a thesis and antithesis interact, meaning something like "abolish," "preserve," or "transcend." (Hunh? Wikipedia, you are not being helpful. Maybe I need to just go ahead and read Hegel.)

And it's shortly followed by this: "If the contradiction between Weird and hauntological was sublatable, then such drives would surely have led to the monstrous embodiment of any putative 'resolved' third term between Weird and haunt." Which I understand, but which is tiring to read. But then Miéville tells us what such a resolved third term would look like, a human skull surrounded by tentacles, and suddenly the article is funny again. There you go, there's your aufhebung! It looks like a biker tattoo.

I don't need to go on, right? You get the point. I don't know whether to read the article as parody or not, but I'd like to read it as parody, because Miéville is wonderful at writing in different genres (as in The City and the City, which was clever beyond clever), and he must be aware that he's doing all the things that academics complain about in academic papers. And doing them to excess.

And Miéville seems aware of that. After all, the article is subtitled "Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?" (seriously? I think not), and he ends the article with his own illustration of the aufhebung: a skulltopus! Also, his blog is a perfect parody of what a blog should be, or what we are all told a blog should be. It's an anti-blog.

In March, I'm going to be at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, where Miéville will be one of the guests of honor. I look forward to hearing what he has to say, and to getting him to sign some books. But I wonder: who is the real China Miéville? Is he the guy who takes himself seriously enough to write an article like that, without seeing the parodic elements? Or is he the guy who wrote the parody I think I'm reading? I hope he's the latter. I hope I'm seeing the right plot twist.

Auction for Terri

I was so tired last night, after teaching all day and then a committee meeting, that I couldn't even write a blog post. So I'm making up for it by writing an extra one today, to tell you some more about the auction I described in my previous post. You can learn about the auction by going to its website:

Magick 4 Terri

And here is some information on why the auction is taking place:

"Beloved editor, artist and writer Terri Windling is in need, and we are asking for your help in a fundraising auction to assist her. This auction will combine donations from professionals and fans in an online sale to help Terri through a serious financial crisis.

"Terri is the creator of groundbreaking fantasy and mythic art and literature over the past several decades, ranging from the influential urban fantasy series Bordertown to the online Journal of Mythic Arts. With co-editor Ellen Datlow, she changed the face of contemporary short fiction with The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and other award-winning anthologies, including Silver Birch, Blood Moon and The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest. Her remarkable Endicott Studio blog continues to bring music, poetry, art and inspiration to people all over the world."

There are many people I need to thank for my writing career, but Terri is at the top of the list. She bought stories and poetry of mine when I was just starting out, and she wrote the introduction to my short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting, which was an enormous privilege for me. And I was deeply influenced by her novel The Wood Wife, which showed me new ways of thinking about fantasy. She's one of my favorite people ever, but I think a lot of people say that about Terri.

I'll tell you about two items I've donated to the auction. Click on the links to get to the items offered.

A Critique by Award Winning Writer/Writing Teacher Theodora Goss

Offered: A critique of your short story or first chapter of your novel (up to 10,000 wds.) by Theodora Goss.

Theodora says: I'm offering to critique up to 10,000 words of a short story or novel. The critique will include a mark-up of your manuscript, a typed critique, and a conversation with me (in person if you live near Boston, by Skype if you live farther away). I am a World Fantasy Award-winning writer, the author of In the Forest of Forgetting, Voices from Fairyland, and the forthcoming The Thorn and the Blossom. I am also the co-editor (with Delia Sherman) of Interfictions. I teach writing at Boston University and have taught novel and short story workshops at Readercon and Boskone. I have also taught at the Odyssey and Alpha writing workshops.

Opening bid: $30

The second is signed copies of my two short story collections, one of which is no longer available, plus a signed manuscript of a story of your choice.

Offered: Anthology and Chapbook by Theodora Goss , Covers by Virginia Lee/Charles Vess

Offered: In the Forest of Forgetting and The Rose in Twelve Petals and Other Stories, plus a bonus story manuscript, all signed by the author.

In the Forest of Forgetting is a hardback with a cover illustration by Virginia Lee.

The Rose in Twelve Petals and Other Stories is a chapbook with a cover illustration by Charles Vess. Only 500 copies were printed, and they sold out in a matter of months. No more will ever be produced.

In addition, you can choose one story from either book and the author will send you a signed manuscript of the story.

Goss's stories and poems are a haunting mix of cobwebby fairy tale elegance and tough-as-concrete contemporary sensibility. – Charlene Brusso, sfsite.com

Opening bid: $50

There are so many amazing items offered in the auction that I'm just going to list some of the ones I covet.

Offered: Be A Character In An Upcoming Animated Film "Xibalba"

Offered: David Wyatt Print, "In the Word Wood With Terri and Tilly"

Offered: Limited Edition Print by Virginia Lee – "Miss Birch"

Offered: Original James A. Owen Illustration

Offered: Die a Gruesome Death! This one is really special:

Offered: Shirley Jackson Award winner Lucius Shepard will Tuckerize you and kill you dead! The author will use your name and general description for a character in an upcoming story and kill you gruesomely. He says that he is currently working on two different sci-fi/horror stories so this is a grand opportunity to be brutally and creepily dispatched by one of the best writers in the field!

Offered: Tuckerization in a Jeffrey Ford Story

Offered: Rare Limited Edition Print, "Gereint" by Alan Lee, #193 of 200

Offer: Handwritten Poetry Manuscript, Patricia McKillip

Offered: Manuscript critique by Author and Writing Teacher Christopher Barzak

Offered: Advance Reader's Copy, Radiant Days by Elizabeth Hand

Offered: Exclusive mp3 of New, Unrecorded S.J. Tucker Song with Handwritten Lyric Sheet

Offered: A Jane Yolen Poem Starring Yourself!

Offered: Lunch or Dinner with Tamora Pierce

Offered: Personalized Copy, Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide

Offered: Character Naming Rights, Catherynne M. Valente Fairyland Novel

Those are just a few of the items being offered. Go to the website to see all of them!

And I have to tell you one more thing, which hasn't been announced yet. I asked Quirk Books if I could donate a signed copy of The Thorn and the Blossom. I just heard that I can. Why is this a big deal? Because whoever won it would get it several weeks before the date it will be offered in stores – he or she would be one of the first people in the world to read the book. I'll let you know once that item is up!

Simplicity

First, let me tell you about the auction to benefit Terri Winding. Terri has been one of the benefactresses of the fantasy community for many years. She is a writer, artist, and editor, and writes one of my favorite blogs, The Drawing Board. She is also one of the loveliest people you are ever like to meet. Because she's been dealing with medical and legal issues, her friends have set up an auction to help her out. The most astonishing things are being auctioned: art by some of the best fantasy artists, plenty of signed books, opportunities to have your manuscripts critiqued, and some truly strange and interesting items. If you'd like to see what the auction has to offer, click here:

Magick 4 Terri

I've donated some items to the auction as well, and when they are listed, I'll let you know!

Today's blog post is inspired by a post written by Damien G. Walter, the Guardian columnist who does such a wonderful job bringing attention to important fantasy works and writers.

Yesterday, he wrote a post called "Why Crap Books Sell Millions." It's a response to an interview with Umberto Eco in The Guardian in which Eco says, "I was always defined as too erudite and philosophical, too difficult. Then I wrote a novel that is not erudite at all, that is written in plain language, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, and among my novels it is the one that has sold the least. So probably I am writing for masochists. It's only publishers and some journalists who believe that people want simple things. People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged."

Walter has a different opinion. He writes,

"I wish I could agree with Umberto Eco (who I LOVE) in The Guardian when he says that 'people are tired of simple things, they want to be challenged.' And by wish, I mean that every fibre of my superior, snobby little soul is vibrating in agreement. But the rational part of my mind that retains a tenuous engagement with reality knows that more people will watch X-Factor this Saturday than will ever read any one of Mr. Eco's sublime novels.

"When it comes to complexity in novels, it is lost on most people. Worse than lost, it will likely make a text incomprehensible to most people. Because most people, whilst literate, just aren't very good at reading. Dense, poetic prose, rich in symbolism and thematic depth, the things us writerly smarty pants all love so much, will just confuse the hell out of most people. That prose passage you're so proud of, the one that switches seamlessly between the internal monologues of the novel's five key protagonists whilst expanding the narratives core philosophical argument? Most people just couldn't make it go in to their head even if they tried. You may as well expect them to read pure binary machine code.

"Bestselling books are, by and large, simple books. Simple stories, simple language, simple ideas. But, simple is as simple does. Perhaps the real art of the novelist is saying the most complex things in the simplest ways, so that even stupid people can understand."

I disagree with Walter's use of the word "stupid" here because I think it's imprecise. I know people who put one of Eco's novels down after a couple of pages. They're not stupid. The ones I know personally tend to be doctors and lawyers, and they're more likely to watch (and love) Downton Abbey than X-Factor. They like to read John Grisham. They pay attention to the latest bestsellers. They've read The Da Vinci Code and Eat, Pray, Love. They like nonfiction, such as Atul Gawande's books on the medical practice or books by political figures.

Bestselling books are generally simpler, I think that's true. Two summers ago, I was staying at Lake Balaton in Hungary. The house had very few English books in it. I ended up reading a John Grisham. After a while I began skipping, because I realized that if I read random pages, I could still follow the plot. And I recently read Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist.

I mostly liked it, although it lost me toward the end, when Santiago turned into the wind. At that point it became too religious and mystical for me. I lost the connection the book had made, all along, between my personal journey and Santiago's allegorical journey. And for some reason, I didn't like that Santiago's journey was to find his treasure, while the journey of the woman he loved was to find him – her love. She should have been on a quest to find her own treasure. I don't think your treasure can be another person. (Imagine the pressure you put on someone, expecting them to be your life's goal!) But I could absolutely see why the book had sold as well as it had.

It's a simple book, in that its meaning is immediately accessible, and I think Walter is absolutely right that simple books, without the sorts of erudite complexities that one sees in Eco, appeal to a much wider audience. So often when we sit down to read, we want simplicity: a clear path into the book, an easy escape from the reality we're leaving behind. If the book contains a lesson, we want it to be evident, not hidden from us.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Simplicity can be done badly, or done well. The Little Prince is a lovely book, and it's simple, accessible. The novelist has to make choices, and one of those choices is prose style: between "dense, poetic prose, rich in symbolism and thematic depth" and something else. I suspect the reason Eco's supposedly simpler book did not sell well is that it wasn't written in his style. When people buy Eco, they want Eco. They are prepared to be challenged. If they weren't, they would buy something else.

So I suppose what I'm doing here is, first, saying that "simple" and "crap" are not the same things – that simplicity is an important tool for the writer, that there is a reason simplicity sells, and that it can be used well. And second, I'm saying that what Eco claims may be true for Eco. Readers may go to him when they are tired of simplicity. What is true for one writer may not be true for another – after all, Eco's best-selling book is The Name of the Rose, and how many readers put it down when they get to the chapter in Latin and just watch the movie? Simplicity and complexity are tools for the writer. You need to know which tool you're using and why, and also know yourself – which tool is appropriate for the writer you are.

(I write this as someone who has been advised in the past, by a kindly relative who no doubt wanted to see me on a bestseller list, to read Dan Brown and write more like that. Just so you know.)

Reading and Writing

Did you know that Goodreads is running a giveaway for 30 free copies of The Thorn and the Blossom? The contest ends in a couple of days, on November 30th. If you'd like to enter, click on the link below:

Goodreads Giveaway

The contest is only for readers in the United States. I'm sorry about that, but I assume the shipping costs are too high for foreign readers. (I'm not the one running the contest, of course. I actually only found out about it by looking at Goodreads.)

Today I thought I would talk about the importance of reading, when you're a writer.

One of the nicest aspects of being a writer is that all sorts of things that are entertainment for other people are work, for you. Watching a movie is work. Watching television is work. And of course reading is work. It's work because when you're a writer, you can't help analyzing whatever it is you're watching or reading. You can't help paying attention to setting, characterization, style. Your brain is always taking those things in, and when you go to write, they come back to you. They help you think about story.

Right now, I'm reading American Gods, by Neil Gaiman – the author's preferred version, which I was given for free at the World Fantasy Convention. (I came back with all sorts of books from the World Fantasy Convention.)

I'm fascinated by several things about the book. First, by how well Gaiman has created an American mythology, has captured a sort of American-ness, considering that he grew up in England. It makes me think that I may be able to capture something English in my book, despite having grown up here. It helps that the England I want to write about isn't the real England, but literary England – the one created for us by Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. Second, by how easy the book is to read, how you sink into it even though parts of it are unpleasant. The places it describes aren't places I want to spend time in, and yet I'm enjoying spending time in the book itself. Third, by how he breaks rules that I know aren't really rules, but that I had nevertheless internalized. For example, his story is digressive – it goes off into other stories. And that's all right, because I always want to come back to the main story. And the digressions are interesting in themselves. That gives me a sense for how I could write my own novel.

Some writers say that since starting to write professionally, they no longer enjoy reading fiction. That hasn't happened to me (and how awful if it did happen!). What has happened instead is that I read differently. It's as though I read with two parts of my brain at the same time: one part is living in the story, and one part is analyzing it. That doesn't lessen my enjoyment of it – but it changes that enjoyment. I'm like a dancer watching a dance, knowing the names of the steps. I'm glad to be in that position, of an insider as it were.

Being an artist means you get to – have to – live fully and consciously. You can't be lazy in your approach to life. Everything around you is to be experienced, so you can keep the experience until later, when you write the story. That requirement changes the way you approach life. It means that rather than simply experiencing, you are always also observing the experience, mentally recording it. But I think it leads to a richer and more interesting way to live. It gives life a particular intensity.

So if you're an artist, say to yourself, I have permission to experience everything, because it's material. And in particular, make time to watch movies or television, to read. Because those are stories, and you need to experience how other people create stories so you can create stories yourself – so you can think about the art of story-making.  But reading is especially important, because you want to know what other writers are doing with words.  That gives you a sense for what you can do – for your own possibilities.

And if people accuse you of wasting time because you're watching a police procedural on television, tell them it's because you're working. (Sometimes I watch those terrible true crime shows, because I want to write murder mysteries. It's very useful, learning about different ways to murder someone. We can be somewhat macabre, we writers.)

(When I tweeted a thought about this yesterday, someone responded that using social media also counted as work, for a writer. And I agree with that. But that's for another post. In the meantime, if you want to follow me on twitter? Click here.)

Being a Heroine

(If you're male and reading this, substitute hero for heroine and vice versa. I'm writing about being a heroine because I'm female, and I'm thinking about this blog post in terms of myself. But really, what I'm going to write about is not particularly gender-specific.)

I don't know where the phrase "Be the heroine of your own story" originated. It's been knocking about the internet for a while, and Nora Ephron has said it, but I don't know if she was the first.

I think it's an important phrase because we understand the world by telling stories about it, and if we want to change our lives, we need to change our stories. And we can – we can change the stories we tell about our lives and ourselves. And those stories can have significant impact, because what you believe about yourself affects your life in many ways. It affects what you focus on, what you strive for. How you allocate your time.

So I want to try to understand it better. What does it actually mean to be the heroine of your own story?

The heroine has a journey.

In a story, the heroine is on a journey from somewhere to somewhere else. It can be an external or internal journey – of course, it is often both. But she is in progress, on the move. There may be periods of stasis, times she needs to spend up a tree or in the underworld. But those periods are part of the journey, not permanent stopping-places. And they are often times when internal progress happens, when she becomes something different than she was internally, and can then change her external circumstances.

And the heroine defines her journey. It is defined by the choices she makes along the way. She decides whether to climb the glass hill in iron shoes. (Yes, there are stories in which the heroine is passive, but we have been tricked into thinking that is the typical storyline by Disney. In the old fairy tales, the true stories, the heroine is almost always active. She decides whether to be nice to the witch in the woods, whether to weave her brothers shirts of thorns. Whether to marry the white bear.

The heroine has adventures.

This is different from having a journey. On that journey, things happen to the heroine that she cannot control. Those are the adventures. She has to respond to them by making choices, but sometimes there are no good choices. Sometimes it's the glass hill in iron shoes. What that means, in practical terms, is that sometimes the heroine's life sucks. Sometimes she has to serve the witch in the woods for seven years. Sometimes she's stuck in the underworld, which is a boring place, let me tell you.

But if she understands that she's the heroine in a story, she knows that the times that suck are her adventures, and she needs to make it through them with a combination of courage, determination, common sense, and whatever magical implements she can find.

Being the heroine of your own story means that when the bad times come, and they will come if you're the heroine (only non-heroines get to live happy, uneventful lives), you get to tell yourself that they're part of the story. And you get to show that courage, determination, common sense, etc. Which is a lot better, I think, than sitting around and saying, wow, life sucks.

The heroine has flaws.

The heroine always has character flaws. She is curious, opinionated. She does not follow the rules. If the hero says, you may never see my face at night, what is she going to do? Find a candle, of course. Those character flaws get her into trouble. But you know what? They are also the reason we love her. If she were genuinely perfect, we wouldn't care about her, because perfect people are not interesting.

That means you get to have character flaws, and your character flaws are loveable. Even, perhaps especially, when they get you into trouble. (Remind yourself of that, when you get into trouble.)

The heroine is at the center of her story.

You get to be at the center of your story. No one else does. There are going to be people who call you selfish because you want to be at the center of your story. Because you want it to be about you, about your choices. That's because they want to be at the center of your story. Parents do this more often than I think they realize – want to be at the center of their childrens' stories. But your story is about you.

The heroine is not dependent on the hero.

The hero is there, for the heroine to fall in love with, form a partnership with. But he is not at the center of her story. He has his own story, his own journey to go on. While she is climbing the iron hill, he is resisting the advances of the ogress. She can't simply wait around for him to show up – he is not her story. He may be a part of it, their stories may intersect. But she has to go on a journey as well. Otherwise, it's not much of a story, is it? (They met, they married, they lived happily ever after. What's the point?)

The heroine gets interesting clothes.

She may wear a cloak made from the fur of a hundred animals. She may wear a dress as bright as the stars. She may wear a suit of armor. But she gets the interesting clothes. She gets to look like a heroine. Unless she's in disguise. (Are you in disguise? When I worked at the law firm, I was in disguise. Sometimes you have to disguise yourself, among people who don't understand how these things work.)

(I mentioned that this was not particularly gender-specific, so I'll just say here that the hero gets some smashing outfits as well, like magical suits of armor. Plus, he often gets to turn into an animal.)

These are all good things to remind yourself of, if you're the heroine. You're on a journey, and parts of it are going to suck because that's just the way journeys are. But you're going to overcome them – you're going to grow as a person, and lop off the ogress' head. And all your faults and flaws and inadequacies are signs of character – don't let anyone convince you otherwise. You're going to make mistakes because of them, but that's part of the journey too. And don't let anyone tell you that the story is not about you, because it is. Finally, and this is an important finally, you get to look the part, whatever you think looking the part is. Are you the sort of heroine with a gamine haircut who knows how to use a sword? Are you the sort of heroine with hair to your waist who charms animals? There are all sorts of heroines, and you get to decide which sort you are. Because (did I say this already?) it's your story.

Style as Story

The title of today's post comes from a line in a blog post by Justine Musk called "How to Be a Genius (Or Just Look Like One)":

"Style is the story you tell about yourself to the world."

In it, she talks about the style of Coco Chanel, and I've written about Chanel before myself. She had extraordinary style. If you are a woman, look into your closet: you will find any number of items influenced by Chanel. As I type this, I am wearing a black knit cardigan over a black knit shirt. Chanel. (Also jeans and Keds, which I'm sure she would never have worn, but she did give us women who dressed like boys – and that's how I'm dressed today, by late nineteenth-century standards. Like a boy ready for sports. A late nineteenth-century woman would never have worn what I'm wearing.  It was Chanel who gave us sportswear for women.)

Why did that line catch my attention so much? I suppose because I like to watch people, and so often I find that how they present themselves tells a story – the story of what they think of themselves. Where they see themselves in the world. People tend to place themselves, and style tells you about that place – where it is, what it's like.

I think of style as having three components. First, there is how you look. Then, there is how your surroundings look. And finally, there is something more complicated – the style of your art.

I was thinking of the second today because I recently met a person who told me that he had installed a flat-screen television in his bedroom so he could watch sports. And in the same conversation he told me that his family used paper napkins at dinner. And I realized that was the opposite of how I had grown up – we had no television, because my mother was convinced that it would ruin us intellectually, but we ate with the family silver. And always had cloth napkins. Those are both choices, and the universe won't end if you choose not to have a television (although if I didn't have one now, I'd miss watching Once Upon a Time, or Being Human on DVDs – the BBC version, of course) or use paper napkins. But your choices do reveal your priorities.

I bought two things recently that I thought were very much in my style. The first is an old bowl, probably late nineteenth or early twentieth century, with red transferware and hand- painted details.

I think it's rather pretty. The second is a set of silver plate with a flower pattern on the handle.

These are both things I saw and fell in love with, in one of the antiques stores in Concord. I think style is like that: it's organic, made up of the things you love, the things that are important to you. But it's also something you can think about and develop. Because style is a story we tell about ourselves to the world, and that story is always changing. In a way, if you change your style, you can change your story. So if you want to change that story, if you want the world to perceive you differently, or you simply want to feel differently about yourself, you can do it by changing the way you look, the way you put together your surroundings.

Style is something fun, individual. Or is should be. (Shouldn't the story you tell about yourself to the world, and to yourself, be fun, individual?) And style is also a process of self-discovery.

What I've been thinking about recently is how I want the three aspects of my style to work together. To express who I am, or think I am. I spent a lot of time being confused about that, trying to be who I thought I should be – who people seemed to want me to be. But at some point in your life you have to discover, or perhaps decide, who you are. And that's when you find your personal style. That's when you realized the story you want to tell the world about yourself.

And I think that's important – thinking about that story, because we do all have our stories, and we're always telling them, whether we're aware of it or not.

As for my personal style, well, you can see it all over this blog, can't you? And strangely enough, you can see it all over my books as well. I'm not quite sure how, because I haven't always had a say in how they looked, but they have that modern pre-Raphaelite look I love.

I know this isn't a particularly coherent post: I'm trying to talk about something I'm just beginning to think about, and that makes for some incoherence. But the idea of style as story is a powerful one – and one I want to explore further, because I'm a storyteller, and because I think stories are how we come to know ourselves.

The Searchers

I found this quotation on Jonathan Carroll's blog:

"I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know – unless it be to share our laughter. We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love."

It comes from James Kavanaugh's There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves, I think perhaps from the introduction? Because the book itself is a book of poetry.

Every once in a while, you come across a quotation that perfectly expresses what you think, who you are. And this quotation does that for me. I feel as though I'm one of the searchers. There have been times this year when I've been deeply unhappy, but for most of my life I've been relatively happy – although not, as Kavanaugh points out, content. Because I've always wanted something more than what I've had. I've always wanted to experience the magic of the world, and I feel as though for most of my life, it's eluded me. I've seen it only in glimpses.

I've seen it sometimes while walking by the ocean, which is magical for me. I've seen it in apple orchards, or on mountains when they are covered with mist. I've seen it walking through cities at night. And I think in the end, that's what I'm ambitious for: life itself. To experience it fully. There is a way of going deeply into life. You can do it by sitting quietly in a garden. You can do it by creating something, a story or a work of art. You can do it by dancing. You can do it by seeing people at night, passing you on city streets. There are all sorts of ways.

And yes, in the end you want someone who can share that with you. Someone whose love will not be a prison, because love can be a prison. It can be the strongest prison, because it can convince you to lock yourself into a life in which you're no longer searching, in which you're not pursuing the life you imagined for yourself. In which you give up your art, your participation in the larger life of the world. If you're one of the searchers, you need a love that is also freedom. (Because love can free you. Loving and being loved is one way to be free.)

I'm not sure why this picture reminds me of the quotation, but it does:

It's called "Abysm of Time," and it's by Edmund Dulac, from his illustrations for The Tempest. I suppose it reminds me of the quotation because Miranda is a searcher herself, wanting to understand life, waiting for love. Sitting by the ocean.  And of course she has red hair, like me, and she's wearing a dress I would love to wear myself.

Today I slept a lot, and I read and read, and then I did some work I needed to do. Dull, not particularly interesting work. But through it all I was thinking, and what I was thinking is that at this point in my life, I am more of a searcher than ever before. I want even more to find the secrets of life (because I believe that life has many secrets), to live as fully as I can.

This past year was for transformation. I emerged from it a different person than I was when it started. This next year is for starting to live as fully as possible, for learning how to do that. For searching.

Writing Poetry Again

I've started writing poetry again.

It's a struggle. I'm not sure why it's such a struggle for me now. I think it's partly because I've been writing so many other things, and somehow I've lost the rhythm. There was a time when I could sit down with a pad of paper and something would come out. Not necessarily something good, but the rhythm of it would be there. But writing a dissertation, and then writing a lot of prose, put you into a different frame of mind. You tend to lose the rhythm. Or perhaps it's just me, perhaps I've lost that sense for it lately.

What I do know is that I haven't written poetry for a long time. And now I'm trying to put together a poetry collection, and thinking about what works and why. And I want to write more poetry, and I'm trying to figure out how.

So there it is.

Earlier this week I started two poems, both of which I finished today. I'm going to include one of them below. I think that what I want to write now is not something finished, polished, perfect. But something broken, almost fragmentary that nevertheless has some power. I don't know if that makes any sense. I have a sort of instinct for where I want to go, but it's difficult to explain.

Anyway, here it is.

Autumn's Song

You are not alone.

If they could, the oaks would bend down to take your hands,

bowing and saying, Lady, come dance with us.

The elder bushes would offer their berries to hang

from your ears or around your neck.

The wild clematis known as Traveler's Joy

would give you its star-shaped blossoms for your crown.

And the maples would offer their leaves,

russet and amber and gold,

for your ball gown.

The wild geese flying south would call to you, Lady,

we will tell your sister, Summer, that you are well.

You would reply, Yes, bring her this news –

the world is old, old, yet we have friends.

The squirrels gathering nuts, the garnet hips

of the wild roses, the birches with their white bark.

You would dress yourself in mist and early frost

to tread the autumn dances – the dance of fire

and fallen leaves, the expectation of snow.

And when your sister Winter pays a visit,

You would give her tea in a ceramic cup,

bread and honey on a wooden plate.

You would nod, as women do, and tell each other,

The world is more magical than we know.

You are not alone.

Listen: the pines are whispering their love,

and the sky herself, gray and low, bends down

to kiss you on both cheeks. Daughter, she says,

I am always with you. Listen: my winds are singing

autumn's song.

It's Thanksgiving day, and I've been spending a lot of time reading and resting, for which I am grateful. And I ate my share and more of turkey, mashed potatoes, candied yams, cranberry relish, bread stuffing, peas, and gravy. I'm thankful for all that, but also for the fact that I'm writing – and going back to some things I haven't done for a long time. I think I'm still in the recovery process from this long, long year. Trying to find myself again. And writing poetry is part of that process.

Anne McCaffrey

I was so sad to hear that Anne McCaffrey had died.

I first read the news on GalleyCat, a blog about the publishing industry. Here is the obituary. The obituary reprints this advice from her blog:

"First – keep reading. Writers are readers. Writers are also people who can't not write. Second, follow Heinlein's rules for getting published: 1. Write it. 2. Finish it. 3. Send it out. 4. Keep sending it out until someone sends you a check. There are variations on that, but that's basically what works."

Which I think is good basic advice for all of us. It's certainly what she did. To tell you why I was so sad, I have to tell you a bit about my childhood. It won't surprise you, I'm sure, to learn that I was an inveterate nerd. In school I always felt like an outsider, partly because I liked to read when other children didn't, and partly because I couldn't for the life of me kick a ball. It would go off in the wrong direction. My family moved around a lot, and so I went to a lot of different schools. In sixth grade, I went to a school where the crucial social skill was playing kickball. I was hopeless.

That year, my best friend was named Amy. She was as much of a nerd as I was. I'm not sure which Anne McCaffrey book I read first. I think it may have been The White Dragon. But I was immediately hooked on Pern. I particularly liked the Harper Hall books, with Menolly. Her heros and heroines, like Jaxom and Menolly and Piemur, were outsiders as well. I could relate to them and to all their troubles. And of course I loved the dragons and fire lizards. What would I have given to have a fire lizard of my own? My soul, probably. Amy and I would swing on the swings near my house and talk about what it would be like if somehow, by accident, a dragon from Pern went between and ended up in a nearby field, and took us to Pern. Where we could be dragonriders, of course, and there was a particular dragonrider we were in love with, but I don't remember his name.

I read a number of her books around that time, when I was twelve or thirteen. I remember The Ship Who Sang in particular, because it was a love story and a story about a woman who discovers her individuality and vocation. McCaffrey had female characters I could relate to. They were strong, flawed, but ultimately heroic. It was quite a change from Middle Earth and Narnia, where adult women are mostly absent or evil. I couldn't imagine growing up to be the White Witch or Galadriel, but I could imagine growing up to be Lessa.

The other fantasy writer who influenced me deeply around this time was Ursula Le Guin, so I was influenced by two important female fantasy writers. Now that I think about it, Le Guin didn't have those sorts of compelling female characters. I ask myself if that can be right, because I generally think of Le Guin as a strong feminist. But the character I remember most from her books is Ged. He's the one who comes most alive for me.

From McCaffrey, I think I got my love of story. From Le Guin, I think I got my love for words and their power. Le Guin was the superior stylist. But McCaffrey had something that I think is important. Many years later, when I was in the middle of my PhD program and inclined to dismiss writers like McCaffrey as inferior to the literary writers I was reading, I decided to reread one of the Harper Hall books. At the time, I lived in an apartment with a claw-foot bathtub, and every night I took a long bubble bath. With a LOT of bubbles and a good book. I made the mistake of starting the book in the bathtub. An hour later, I was sitting in a cold bath, with no bubbles, unable to stop reading. I could see all the problems with her world – the aristocratic system was based on the work of "drudges" (yes, they were called that) who were barely characters at all. Lessa was a drudge, but like Cinderella, she was really the dispossessed heiress, so of course she would eventually regain her proper social role. So there was quite a bit to criticize – and yet, the woman could write a gripping story.

She had courage, too. After her divorce, she moved with her children to Ireland, living off child support payments and what she could earn by writing. I wish she hadn't collaborated so much, and those collaborations aren't novels I would read. But I will never judge another writer for how he or she makes money from writing. It's just too hard of a profession to say, you shouldn't have written that. She supported herself and her children, and that's heroic.

I want to write another time about her novels, about what I think of them now, how they've influenced me. But this post is already long enough, and all I really want to say here is, Ms. McCaffrey, you were such an important part of my childhood, and part of the reason that I'm now a writer. I'm so sorry that you're gone, but so glad that you were here for a while, and that you wrote your books. Thank you.

Reading Coelho

I've been sad today.

Several years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to an aspiring writer. I heard, afterward, that he'd had a play produced. Every once in a while, my friend would tell me that the writer was following my career, glad that it looked as though I was doing well. I never actually knew him, but I heard news of him from my friend. Yesterday, I learned that he had committed suicide. It took a week for people to realized what had happened. (Sometimes, he would stop answering emails and the telephone for a week or two. So people weren't worried that he wasn't getting back to them.)

I didn't really know him, as I said, but somehow I've been thinking about him all day. My friend has organized a tea in his honor, and so far over a hundred people are planning to go. It's funny how you can feel lonely even though over a hundred people want to remember and celebrate your life.

Today, I went into the bookstore and picked up Paul Coelho's The Alchemist. It's part of my ongoing research into being a writer. It's such a popular book, and I want to understand why.

I haven't started the book yet, but I did read the introduction. I'm going to post a few excerpts here.

" . . . we all need to be aware of our personal calling. What is a personal calling? It is God's blessing, it is the path that God chose for you here on Earth. Whenever we do something that fills us with enthusiasm, we are following our legend. However, we don't all have the courage to confront our own dream."

(I should make clear here that to me, God translates as whatever power there is in the universe that directs our ends, that has a purpose for us. I believe there is such a power, and that we can call it whatever we like, and that it's immanent in nature rather than separate from it. I want to make that clear because God is such a loaded term, loaded with two thousand years of history and controversy. And what I'm talking about is completely separate from religious doctrines, which are created by human beings. So when Coelho says God, that's what I mean by the term, which may be completely different from what he means.)

He says there are four obstacles to following our personal calling.

"First: we are told from childhood onward that everything we want to do is impossible." I remember being told that I would never be a great writer because English was not my first language. And I remember having the general sense that being a great writer was impossible – that great writers were geniuses, and of course I wasn't one of those, so why write? I mean, I wasn't going to be Hemingway.

The second obstacle is love: "We know what we want to do, but are afraid of hurting those around us by abandoning everything in order to pursue our dream." Coelho goes on to say that we eventually realize "that those who genuinely wish us well want us to be happy and are prepared to accompany us on that journey." You know what? I think that's overly optimistic. Often it's the people who love us most who sabotage us, because they love us and want use to be safe and comfortable. Following a personal calling is likely to make us unsafe, uncomfortable.

The third obstacle is "fear of the defeats we will meet on the path." Here Coelho says something very useful: "The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times." He also says that we "must be prepared to have patience in difficult times and to know that the Universe is conspiring in our favor, even though we may not understand how."

And he talks about why it's important to follow a personal calling: "Because, once we have overcome the defeats – and we always do – we are filled by a greater sense of euphoria and confidence. In the silence of our hearts, we know that we are proving ourselves worthy of the miracle of life. Each day, every hour, is part of the good fight. We start to live with enthusiasm and pleasure." Which I think is true. He also says, "Intense, unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at our soul, until, one day, we are no longer able to free ourselves from the bitterness and it stays with us for the rest of our lives."

I think what he means by that last statement is that the suffering you endure while trying to follow your personal calling is more bearable than the suffering of not following it, of choosing to be comfortable, doing what other people tell you to do, but knowing that you're not doing what you're supposed to.

He says, "Having disinterred our dream, having used the power of love to nurture it and spent many years living with the scars, we suddenly notice that what we always wanted is there, waiting for us, perhaps the very next day." This is the part that made me think of the writer I mentioned at the beginning of this post. You have to keep waiting for the next day. I understand, very well, how it can become too hard. But that's the key, isn't it? To wait for the next day and see what it will bring. Because it will probably, at least, bring something different.

The fourth obstacle is "the fear of realizing the dream for which we fought all our lives." Because we think we are unworthy of it, because we feel a sense of guilt about our achievement. As though we did not deserve it. He says, "This is the most dangerous of the obstacles because it has a kind of saintly aura about it: renouncing joy and conquest. But if you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here."

I don't think I've made it to the fourth obstacle yet! But I do feel as though I've fought the other three. And the fight is never over, because you encounter those obstacles over and over again. You always return to doubt, guilt, fear. You're always confronted with them.

This has been a rather dramatic blog post, hasn't it? I didn't mean it to be. But it's difficult to talk about a death, particularly that kind of death, without becoming dramatic. Without making a vow that you will overcome the obstacles, follow the dream that seems to keep calling you onward.