Theodora Goss's Blog, page 50

Circe Laments

I'm so tired.  I can't write anything today, so I will give you a poem.  It's a love poem, about a woman who could have any man, but longed for one. (The sly Odysseus, of course.) This is "Circe" by H.D.

It was easy enough

to bend them to my wish,

it was easy enough

to alter them with a touch,

but you

adrift on the great sea,

how shall I call you back?

Cedar and white ash,

rock-cedar and sand plants

and tamarisk

red cedar and white cedar

and black cedar from the inmost forest,

fragrance upon fragrance

and all of my sea-magic is for nought.

It was easy enough –

a thought called them

from the sharp edges of the earth;

they prayed for a touch,

they cried for the sight of my face,

they entreated me

till in pity

I turned each to his own self.

Panther and panther,

then a black leopard

follows close –

black panther and red

and a great hound,

a god-like beast,

cut the sand in a clear ring

and shut me from the earth,

and cover the sea-sound

with their throats,

and the sea-roar with their own barks

and bellowing and snarls,

and the sea-stars

and the swirl of the sand,

and the rock-tamarisk

and the wind resonance –

but not your voice.

It is easy enough to call men

from the edges of the earth.

It is easy enough to summon them to my feet

with a thought –

it is beautiful to see the tall panther

and the sleek deer-hounds

circle in the dark.

It is easy enough

to make cedar and white ash fumes

into palaces

and to cover the sea-caves

with ivory and onyx.

But I would give up

rock-fringes of coral

and the inmost chamber

of my island palace

and my own gifts

and the whole region

of my power and magic

for your glance.

And this is my favorite image of Circe, as a sort of alchemist.  A transmuter of things – and people. By John William Waterhouse, of course.

The Quiet Day

No more status reports. There's no more status to report. I'm done.

It's a nice feeling.

That's what I experienced today. For the last few days I'd been rushing around, trying to make sure I knew where to go, what to do and say for the start of the semester. So even after the dissertation was handed in, I was a bit frantic. But today I didn't teach, and I just stayed home planning the semester. Doing work for later. And for the first time in three years, I didn't have a dissertation to write. Oh, I have plenty of work that I'll need to focus on soon. But that one enormous project was not hanging over my head. I felt almost light-headed from the sensation of it.

I'm still in that strange state where I don't quite know what to write, still adjusting to life post-dissertation. So I'm going to give you more quotations from the wonderful Ray Bradbury in Zen in the Art of Writing.

Bradbury lists some of his favorite writers, including Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas. And he writes,

"Think of all these names and you think of big or little, but nonetheless important, zests, appetites, hungers. Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy of creating in large or small forms, on unlimited or restricted canvasses. These are the children of the gods. They knew fun in their work. No matter if creation came hard here and there along the way, or what illnesses and tragedies touched their most private lives. The important things are those passed down to us from their hands and minds and these are full to bursting with animal vigor and intellectual vitality. Their hatreds and despairs were reported with a kind of love."

I love that last line, because I think that is what we do with our experiences, as writers: we take both the good and the bad of our lives and turn them into art, and in doing so we show a kind of love, because you have to love something to write about it, even if it's hunger and cold and despair. Writers are alchemists. They turn the base metal of ordinary life into gold.

What Bradbury is talking about here is writing with a kind of zest and enjoyment for writing and for life, and I agree with that. Writing can be hard, but if it's not something we enjoy doing, something we sit down to eagerly, we wouldn't do it.

He continues:

"What has all this to do with writing the short story in our times?

"Only this: if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don't even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is – excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it'd be better for his health."

I think that's a useful thing for me, in particular, to keep in mind. Because I work in a field where we are told to pay attention to the market, to what's going on commercially, what's popular now. But if I pay too much attention, I won't be paying attention to the stories inside my head, the stories that genuinely come from me or through me (however they come). Vincent Van Gogh paid attention to the images inside his head, and they came out of him, and they were magnificent even if no one recognized them at the time. And no, I don't particularly want to end up like Van Gogh, but I do want to create things that are individual, that are recognizably mine. And that are worth creating for their own sake, even if no one reads them (although of course I want them to).

A final word from Bradbury:

"I have come up with a new simile to describe myself lately. It can be yours.

"Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me.

"After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

"Now, it's your turn. Jump!"

Which seems like an excellent way to end a blog post.

The First Day

Today was the first day of teaching. Since it was cold and raining, I opted for jeans and a twinset. I don't know why, but under the glare of fluorescent lights, I always look as though I'm not a human being but some sort of plastic doll.

I'm still very tired today, so I'm just going to say that Ghosts by Gaslight is finally available. It includes my story "Christopher Raven." Here's the terrific cover:

And here is the table of contents:

"The Iron Shroud" by James Morrow

"Music, When Soft Voices Die" by Peter S. Beagle

"The Shaddowwes Box" by Terry Dowling

"The Curious Case of the Moondawn Daffodils Murder As Experienced by Sir Magnus Holmes and Almost-Doctor Susan Shrike" by Garth Nix

"Why I Was Hanged" by Gene Wolfe

"The Proving of Smollett Standforth" by Margo Lanagan

"The Jade Woman of the Luminous Star" by Sean Williams

"Smithers and the Ghosts of the Thar" by Robert Silverberg

"The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn's Balloons" by John Langan

"Face to Face" by John Harwood

"Bad Thoughts and the Mechanism" by Richard Harland

"The Grave Reflection" by Marly Youmans

"Christopher Raven" by Theodora Goss

"Rose Street Attractors" by Lucius Shepard

"Blackwood's Baby" by Laird Barron

"Mysteries of the Old Quarter" by Paul Park

"The Summer Palace" by Jeffrey Ford

I'm sure I'll recover from dissertation-writing soon. Right? In the meantime, I think I just need plenty of rest, and healthy food, and exercise. Pushups starting tonight! And downward dogs. And downward dogs into pushups. And back.

Two Songs

I'm so tired tonight! I think the last few weeks are finally catching up with me. The adrenaline is going away, and I'm left with just the tiredness. It's time to rest, take care of myself.

But of course, I start teaching tomorrow. What should I wear for the first day of classes? Something to impress upon the students what sort of professor they've gotten this semester. It should say that I'm cool, and interesting, and will ask more of them than they've ever been asked of before in a writing class. Gypsy skirt? Skinny jeans? Something that will alert them to the fact that I sit on tables and pace around the classroom and constantly ask questions. That they won't be able to sleep, actually or intellectually. In other words, something intimidating. But cool. You know? (I'm laughing as I write this. What outfit will say: I can get you from gothic horror to detective fiction by way of Scooby Doo?)

So you won't get much of a blog post from me tonight. I'm mostly ready, but I still have some preparing to do. Instead of writing a blog post, I'm going to give you two videos, an old favorite and a new curiosity.

The old favorite is "Winter Winds" by Mumford and Sons. This song was recommended to me long ago by my friend Nathan, and it's become one of my favorites.

The new curiosity is called "Calamity Song" by The Decembrists. It was inspired by the novel Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. I first heard about it in an article on Salon. I haven't read Infinite Jest (should I? some of you Wallace fans will have to tell me). But I thought the concept was so interesting.

So there you go, I'm afraid that's all I have for you today. I need to make sure I know what I'm going to say tomorrow. Among other things, I'm going to give the students their first writing assignment of the semester, which they'll need to create themselves. Intimidating: that's what I'm going for! And cool.

Making Changes

Status Report: Do you know what happens when you press on a spring, and then you let it go? Yeah? Well that was me today. The girl at the copy shop had told me that it would be closed today, because it's Labor Day, but this morning I received a call: the copy shop was indeed open, and my copies were ready. So I drove them to the university and dropped them off in the English Department. Here I am, ready to go to the copy shop (looking all studious, with hair pulled back, glasses):

And here are the copies in the English Department, before I put them in the appropriate boxes. This angle doesn't give you a sense of how thick the copies are. They're almost 400 pages. I suppose I could have waited until Tuesday to bring them in, but I knew that today it would be much easier to park.

So there you are, the copies of the dissertation have been turned over to the committee members. I'm done, except for preparing for the defense, which will consist of writing down as many questions as I can think of and trying to formulate answers. But I'll have at least a month to do that.

In the meantime, I'm going to be working on changing my life, because I know that I can't have the life I want unless I make changes. There are a lot of things involved in making those changes, but the first things I need to work on are myself and my physical environment. The dissertation took a physical toll, so I need to get back into shape. (I probably still look like I'm in shape. But I can tell that I'm not as strong or as flexible as I should be. I need sleep, healthy food, and exercise. During the dissertation process, I gained four pounds. That may not sound like a lot, but on my frame, I can tell the difference between 124 and 120. So I need to lose that.) And I need to get my hair cut. I mean, seriously:

In terms of my physical environment, I need to start sorting through things, getting rid of anything I no longer use or want. I've done some of that already, but I want to make sure that wherever life takes me next, I'm ready for it. And of course, there are a lot of other more difficult and serious things to do. But I find that getting myself and my environment ready are crucial. It's as though, when you make changes, you have to change first your mind, then your immediate environment, and then the larger world. Change flows outward, I think. This year has been all about making internal changes. Now those changes are starting to flow outward, to change things in the external world. May that happen quickly. For me, at least, that's what the next two months are going to be about.

(I don't know if you're interested? But today I also put together the website for the class I'll be teaching this semester. Just one class, although three sections: this semester, I specifically asked for that. I wanted to make sure I had the time to focus on the dissertation and the defense. So I'm not doing the sorts of things I usually do, creating writing programs for the colleges, serving on committees. This semester is all about creating the life I want for myself. That's the focus.

So here it is, the website for my class:

Fall 2011 WR 100 Fantasy at the Fin-de-Siècle

I'm still working on it, of course. But I rather like it. It has lots of pretty pictures!)

Choosing Roses

Status report: My dissertation is at the copy shop.  On Friday, I finished the last of the revisions.  On Saturday, I proofread.  I managed to proofread most of the manuscript that day (376 pages total).  This morning, I finished the proofreading and entered the changes I had made.  There weren't many. And in the afternoon, I took the manuscript over to the copy shop. It will be copied and put in binders for the committee members. I'll pick the binders up on Tuesday morning, drive into the city, and put them in the committee members' boxes. And that will be it.

After that, all that will be left will be the dissertation defense. But the defense is essentially a discussion about the dissertation. The document itself is the important thing. And that's done, unless the committee members give me any corrections.

So, I've done it. It's taken years, but it's done.

Honestly, I don't feel anything yet. I think over the next few days, the next few weeks, I'll start to feel an enormous sense of relief, a sense of freedom. A sense as though now, I can do anything I want to. My life can begin. The first step will be catching up on email. So if I owe you an email, it will probably come in the next few weeks, as I start catching up. Right now, I'm completely exhausted, still running on adrenaline. I'm going to crash soon, but hopefully a short crash because the semester starts on Wednesday.

Can I even write about anything today? I'm not sure.

Instead, I'm going to plant an imaginary rose garden. I'm going to fill it with my favorite roses. So here they are:

Of course, we need a white rose, and so we should start with the Alba roses. And one of my favorite white roses is Mme. Legras de St. Germain.  My favorite white rose of all is Madame Hardy, but I couldn't find a picture.

There's another Alba we need to have, simply because it has a wonderful name: Cuisse de Nymphe. But also, it's an old pink rose, with the genuine rose blush, the genuine rose scent. In England, it's called Maiden's Blush, which is much more proper than its French name (Nymph's Thigh, for those who have not taken a French class in some time).  I'm afraid this picture doesn't really do it justice.  It's sort of the Marilyn Monroe of roses, all scented and blowsy.

Of the Gallicas, my absolute favorite is Cardinal de Richelieu. I grew it years ago, and it's such a rich, dark rose.  Almost purple.

We have to have some sort of Bourbon rose, don't we? And I think it has to be Souvenir de la Malmaison, because who wouldn't want to remember the Empress Josephine's rose garden?

Of the Centifolias, let's get the beautiful white Blanchefleur.  Once, I started a story about a white cat named Blanchefleur.  (Yes, of course she was an enchanted cat.)  I think I should probably go back and finish it.

And (this is one of my favorites but the picture here doesn't do it justice at all), let's get the wonderfully named Robert le Diable. I've grown that rose as well. I initially chose it because I had a cat named Robert who was indeed un Diable.  It's a small dark rose, charming and wicked.

And finally, let's choose Stanwell Perpetual, an old Spinossissima.  This is close to a wild rose, so it will have wonderful hips in the autumn.  That's another reason to have old roses, for the wonderful hips.  (I might even make rose hip jelly.)

Yes, all these roses were introduced before 1900.  But I like the old roses, even though most of them only bloom once a year.  But when they bloom, what blooms! And what scent!  And the hips, as I said.  Now that my dissertation is done, maybe I'll be able to have an actual rose garden.  It will take a while to find the small house with the large garden I've been writing about, the witch's cottage I've described here.  But at least now I can start working on it.

Imaginary Shopping

Status report: I've finished revising Chapter 2 and the bibliography. All I have left is Chapter 3. I'll revise that tomorrow, and then put the entire dissertation together. I'll read it one more time over the weekend, and then I will hand it in. And that will be it until the defense.

I'm so tired tonight that I have no energy to write a post. So instead, I'm going to play a game. This is a game I used to play when I had absolutely no money, which was not all that long ago. Sometimes, to amuse myself, I would go to Newbury Street and look at all the shops. But since I had no money, I couldn't buy anything. I would just pick out what I would buy if I did have the money. I would go imaginary shopping.

I still like that game. Now I have more than enough clothes, jewelery, paintings, all the things a house and I need. I have almost too much. But I still like picking out the things I would buy if I had the space.

We can't go down to Newbury Street, can we? But we can go on Etsy. Let's visit some of my favorite shops. Here are some items for us to buy (mentally, of course).

The first item is a print called Human Nature from Shirae. The links, by the way, are to the places where you can buy these things, if you do actually want to buy them. I'm cheating a little with this first one, because I own this print. I just need to get it framed.

Next, how about this raku-fired vase from Suzanne's Pottery Farm? I think the colors would compliment the print perfectly.

And then we can buy some linen pillows from Cottage and Cabin. To be honest, I never actually buy pillows, because I can make them so easily. But I like these because they're simple and floppy, which is just about what I think pillows should be.

Now let's make sure we're as magnificent as our furniture. We're going to need an Icelandic Poppy hair ornament from The Faerie Market.

Which I think will go with this summer dress from L. Wang.

We still need something to go with the dress. Maybe a necklace from Parrish Relics.

That's probably all we can afford tonight.  But it's fun going imaginary shopping, isn't it?  I know it used to amuse me, putting things together in my head like that.  It helped me to imagine the life I would want for myself, which would have these sorts of things in it.

What Bradbury Said

Status report: I'm very tired. But I'm doing very good work. As of today, I have the introduction and Chapter 1 revised and in final form. Tomorrow I will work on Chapters 2 and 3, and the bibliography. It might take me until Thursday to finish everything. Then, I will put the entire dissertation together. And then, I will read it one more time, make any final corrections, print out five copies, and give them to my committee members. It's strange, being so close – and feeling so tired. But it's a good feeling too, like being close to a finish line. Which I am, of course.

I've been thinking about that finish line. For along time, it felt like a cliff, as though once I got there I would somehow drop off. But I realized something. When I finish this project, I will have finished the last academic degree I ever want in my life. A JD and PhD are enough, thank you. (Where would I go from here, anyway?) I will have built the platform I need to do anything I want. So when I get to that cliff, I'm not going to drop off. I'm going to fly.

Anything I want to do will be possible. And what's more, I know exactly what I want.  I want to teach literature and writing. I want a little old house with a large garden, with white gauze curtains in the windows, paintings on the walls, comfortable old furniture throughout. Lots and lots of books. I want the people I love around me. I want to surround myself with writers and artists and creative people in general. And I want to write, to tell the stories that are in me. I want one of those lives that are joyful and creative and individual, filled with beautiful things.

I think it's doable.

Today I had to go into the city, which meant the subway, so I brought along Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing. I've only read a couple of chapters, but I love this book. I'm going to tell you some of the things Bradbury says. I think you'll find them as useful as I do. Here's one of my favorite passages:

"And what, you ask, does writing teach us?

"First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded to us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.

"So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

"Second, writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that.

"Not to write, for many of us, is to die."

Bradbury is saying that art is a way for us to manage reality. I think that's true, and I know writing functions in that way for me. Writing is a way to process reality, which quickly becomes overwhelming. I walk around each day with a sense of just how overwhelming it is: all the people, all the things they're thinking and doing. The good and the bad of it – the cruelty, the darkness, the fear, as well as the brightness. Writing helps me sort it all out, figure out what is important. Here's what Bradbury says next:

"We must take arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory. Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audience would know.

"A variation of this is true for writers. Not that your style, whatever that is, would melt out of shape in those few days.

"But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."

I love that last line. And you know, I think there's a lot of truth in what he says, melodramatic though it is. I don't write stories every day, certainly. But I do something related to writing every day, whether it's writing, revising, whatever. I think even writing this blog has saved me, this year.

Work that interests me, a house I want to live in, the people I love. And writing my stories.  Those are the things I want. That's doable, right?

What King Also Said

Status report: I still have to read through the introduction, but once I make any final corrections, it will be done. Today I received the final comments on Chapter 1. I'll start on those tonight and finish them tomorrow. Then I'll start putting the dissertation together. It's going to be so exciting, seeing the chapters go together like puzzle pieces.

There are some things that are difficult to explain to anyone who hasn't done them. Writing a dissertation is one of those things. Anyone who has written one will understand immediately where I am, what it feels like. And what I feel like right now, anxious and unfocused and wanting so much just to be done. This afternoon I sent out a bunch of emails, and discovered later that about six of them had never gone through, and honestly, I felt like throwing my computer across the room. Particularly because the university email system doesn't tell me which emails went through and which didn't, so I think some important ones got lost. (It wouldn't have been adequate to throw my computer across the room, would it? I should have driven into the university and thrown the server across the room.)

After finishing my work for the day, I drove to Concord and went to the bookstore and a couple of antiques stores. (The bookstore: in the local authors section, it has Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott, which I thought was pretty funny.) Then I bought myself some ginger ice cream and wandered around the old graveyard, having all sorts of thoughts about the brevity of life and how we have to hold on to the things we love, that make us feel alive.

Tonight I'm going to finish the introduction and start on Chapter 1. But first, here are some more quotations from King:

"Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading, or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic."

I feel that way about writing. Even if no one were reading this blog, I would try to write as well as I could, because there's a fundamental pleasure in doing it well. And that's more important to me that anything else, than how many people read my writing or how much I get paid for it. One of the problems with real artists is that they don't do it for the money, which means that it can be easy to take advantage of them if they're not as careful as they should be. They do it for the project, to create a particular project. I wrote The Thorn and the Blossom in part because it was one of the most interesting writing challenges I had ever received, and I knew I would probably never be asked to write something like that again.

"The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing; one comes to the country of the writer with one's papers and identification pretty much in order. Constant reading will pull you into a place (a mind-set, if you like the phrase) where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness. It also offers you a constantly-growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn't, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what just lies there dying (or dead) on the page."

I think King is absolutely right to emphasize the importance of reading, and honestly, I wish I could read more. I have such a long list of books I would like to read! Well, as soon as this is over. (Around this part of the book, King has a joke you really need to be an English major to understand. He says that Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? should be titled Can You Possibly Finish It? Which I think is incredibly funny, but then, I'm a literature geek. And I've read Trollope.)

"When I'm asked why I decided to write the sort of things I do write, I always think the question is more revealing than any answer I could possibly give. Wrapped within it, like the chewy stuff in the center of a Tootsie Pop, is the assumption that the writer controls the material instead of the other way around."

I think this is absolutely true as well – that the material comes to you, that it determines what you can do. An idea comes and you have to follow it. I've only ever been able to write for themed anthologies when I've already had an idea in mind that I could relate to the theme.

I've been thinking a lot about my life lately, because it's in such a transitional process right now. There are a lot of different directions I could go from here. But the direction I want to go in is toward writing: toward becoming the sort of writer I want to be and think I can be. There are several components to that. One is making sure I have enough time to write. Another is making sure that I have a writing community, that I have writers I can exchange manuscripts and critiques with. And another is making sure that I create a life for myself in which I can be happy, in which I have the people I love around me, and a place that makes me feel as though I belong, as though I can be at peace.

Sometimes I'm terribly impatient for those things to happen. But I do believe in fate, and I do believe it's taking me in the direction I need to go. And that I'll get there.

What King Said

Status report: Today, I revised the introduction. Well, most of it. I still have the footnotes to revise, but by the time I go to sleep tonight, they will be done. Then, I'll read it over again tomorrow and sent it to my readers. I don't have any more footnotes to write: I finished writing the last of the footnotes today. So as of today, there's nothing, literally nothing, left to write on the dissertation. It's all revisions. And to be honest, at this point I'm revising sentences for clarity. That's it.

It feels very good to be in this position. (Although my back aches and I can't seem to focus on anything. At all. By the end of this process, I will have been reduced to a wretched specimen of homo academicus. But the dissertation will be done.) I haven't yet received comments on the chapters, but those should come early next week. And once I've revised those, well, that will be it. The whole thing will be put together and in my committee's boxes on the 6th. And then I will collapse.

I did take a short break today to go to the bookstore. I bought Jorge Luis Borges' On Writing and Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing. I don't know why all I can focus on now are books on writing. Perhaps it's because I can't actually write, and they keep me going. They give me something without taking effort or a great deal of concentration to read.

But I promised that I would talk about some of the things I liked in Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. I'll just include four quotations here:

"At its most basic we are only discussing a learned skill, but do we not agree that sometimes the most basic skills can create things far beyond our expectations? We are talking about tools and carpentry, about words and style . . . but as we move along, you'll do well to remember that we are also talking about magic."

I like the idea of the toolbox, of my writing tools. That's how I feel approaching a story, as though I'm using my tools to create something. And yet, I know at the same time that what flows through me, what I have been trained to channel, is a sort of magic. Something that is only partly mine, that flows through me but is also from outside me. That I am a sort of highly trained conduit.  And I always hope I have the training, the ability, to get that magic on the page.  (Sometimes I don't.)

"There are no bad dogs, according to the title of a popular training manual, but don't tell that to the parent of a child mauled by a pit bull or a rottweiler; he or she is apt to bust your beak for you. And no matter how much I want to encourage the man or woman trying for the first time to write seriously, I can't lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry, but there are lots of bad writers."

A little later, he says, "Writers form themselves into the pyramid we see in all areas of human talent and human creativity." For King, that pyramid consists of the bad writers, the competent writers, the good writers (which is where I think he places himself). "Above them – above almost all of us – are the Shakespeares, the Faulkners, the Yeatses, Shaws, and Eudora Weltys. They are geniuses, divine accidents, gifted in a way which is beyond our ability to understand, let alone attain."

What do I think of this? After all, I'm a professional teacher of writing, so this is within my area of expertise. I think there are bad writers, but they can be trained to be competent. And competent writers can be trained to be good writers. It's a bit like training a musician: you have to train the musician in technique, but you also have to train the ear, the instinct. I don't think you can train great writers. Greatness is something else, something it's probably better for all of us not to think about too much. It's something we should aim for in a sort of oblique way, never looking at it straight. Realizing it's there, but also realizing that if it comes, in a particular story, it's always a gift. It's a gift you prepare for by training, but not something that training will achieve. The great writers he describes are the ones who were gifted in that way on a regular basis. But they also aimed for it, worked on it, while perhaps focusing primarily on other things, like filling the Globe theater and not angering James I. Writing is not like singing: there are no natural, untrained great writers.

"But if you don't want to work your ass off, you have no business trying to write well – settle back into competency and be grateful you have even that much to fall back on. There is a muse, but he's not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He's a basement guy. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think this is fair? I think it's fair."

First of all, my muse looks very different from King's! (Imagine North Wind from At the Back of the North Wind. That's what she looks like.) But one thing I admire about King, in this book, is his dedication to his craft. Despite the fact that he hasn't been taken all that seriously as a writer – something he's very aware of – he takes himself and his craft seriously. I want to be like that too. I think I am like that, or at least I try to be. Because I believe that creating art is one of the reasons we're here, as human beings. To the extent we're doing it, and trying to do it as well as we can, we're doing something noble and worthwhile.

I have more quotations I want to discuss, but they'll have to wait until tomorrow. This blog post is already long enough.

But it's good to think about writing while I'm not able to do it regularly, while I'm so absorbed in finishing the dissertation. Recently, I've been thinking about the past year. Sometimes it seems to me as though it's been a year of stasis, a year in which things didn't happen. But I think what actually happened was internal: I'm a different person now than I was a year ago. I still feel the same way, still want the same things. But now I have the strength and ability to make them happen. So this is going to be the year in which things happen. Just watch!

Oh, and did you want to see what my muse looks like? Here you go:

(This is an illustration for At the Back of the North Wind by Jessie Wilcox Smith.)