Nancy Springer's Blog: Last Seen Wandering Vaguely, page 4
July 29, 2013
ABOUT ENOLA AND ME
The idea was nothing if not high concept: give Sherlock Holmes a kid sister who can show him a thing or two. The research was vast but exhilarating. The writing was a challenge but a delight. Why, then, when I finished the initial Enola Holmes manuscript, did I tremble like a first-time author as I sent it in to my agent? I was an old hand at this stuff; I knew how to process criticism and shrug off rejection. So why was I feeling so uncharacteristically vulnerable regarding Enola?
That question went unanswered for a while. My agent and my editor greeted Enola with enthusiasm, so I forgot my vapours and got busy writing the second book in the series. But sometime after publication, when readers started asking about the hows and the whenceforths, I realized, with a shock, that Enola was entirely too much like me, Nancy, age awkward, lonely fourteen.
Of course all fiction writers extrapolate from their own lives. But I had exposed way more of my tender underbelly than I realized when I wrote Enola. The Case of the Missing Marquess, in particular, shows a remarkable number of parallels:
Like Enola, I had two older brothers I hardly knew. Both were off to college before I reached puberty.
Like Enola, I was a scrawny, bony, gawky tree-climbing tomboy with hair that needed to be washed.
Like Enola, I was solitary and bookish.
Like Enola, I was raised by Victorians. Actually, my parents were born in 1906 and 1909, but they might as well have been Victorians.
Like Enola, I was a tardy arrival in my parents’ lives. My mother was forty when she had me. Forty was a lot older back then than it is now.
Like Enola’s mother, mine was an artist. Actually, she made a good living doing pet portraits in oils, but what she loved to paint (like Enola’s mother) was delicate watercolor flowers. And when she had painted, say, a rose in bloom, it breathed sunlight and summer breezes from the paper. Her talent was extraordinary.
Also like Enola’s mother, mine was an individualist. I recently realized that in all my life to date – I am now on Medicare – I have never met anyone else even remotely like my mother. That’s how one-of-a-kind she was.
Finally, my mother, like Enola’s mother, “ran away” when I was fourteen. No, not literally, which was why I did not suspect I was writing about myself when I created Enola. My mother’s body remained in residence, but somehow the better part of her seemed to have gone elsewhere. In retrospect, I realize that in all likelihood Mom was having problems with menopause. But of course, in my strait-laced family, no one said so. And there was something else my parents were not telling me: Mom had cancer. I dare say that her health problems preoccupied her a bit and caused her to lose interest in me.
Unlike Enola’s mother, mine did not die. She beat the cancer. But then I went away to college, and then Dad died and Mom moved to Florida, still “gone elsewhere,” and she never did come back. She had Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia for the last decades of her life.
Whew.
So it’s no wonder that Enola Holmes and I formed an instant bond. It’s no wonder that, the moment I needed her, she sprang out of my unconscious mind complete with a name, a physique and a personality. But it is a wonder that I could write about her for so long without realizing that her loneliness was my own and her heartache an expression of the long-forgotten heartache of my teenage years.
No wonder I felt more than a twinge of apprehension when I sent her off to the big city – not London, but New York. Does anybody else out there think that editors and agents take on somewhat of a parental role to authors? If so, I wasn’t aware of it until just now, thinking about Enola and understanding at last why I felt so apprehensive as I packed her off: I was afraid Mummy might not love her = me.
Isn’t it wonderful that Enola’s story has a happy ending? To all of the many readers who love Enola Holmes, let it be known: she loves you, too.
That question went unanswered for a while. My agent and my editor greeted Enola with enthusiasm, so I forgot my vapours and got busy writing the second book in the series. But sometime after publication, when readers started asking about the hows and the whenceforths, I realized, with a shock, that Enola was entirely too much like me, Nancy, age awkward, lonely fourteen.
Of course all fiction writers extrapolate from their own lives. But I had exposed way more of my tender underbelly than I realized when I wrote Enola. The Case of the Missing Marquess, in particular, shows a remarkable number of parallels:
Like Enola, I had two older brothers I hardly knew. Both were off to college before I reached puberty.
Like Enola, I was a scrawny, bony, gawky tree-climbing tomboy with hair that needed to be washed.
Like Enola, I was solitary and bookish.
Like Enola, I was raised by Victorians. Actually, my parents were born in 1906 and 1909, but they might as well have been Victorians.
Like Enola, I was a tardy arrival in my parents’ lives. My mother was forty when she had me. Forty was a lot older back then than it is now.
Like Enola’s mother, mine was an artist. Actually, she made a good living doing pet portraits in oils, but what she loved to paint (like Enola’s mother) was delicate watercolor flowers. And when she had painted, say, a rose in bloom, it breathed sunlight and summer breezes from the paper. Her talent was extraordinary.
Also like Enola’s mother, mine was an individualist. I recently realized that in all my life to date – I am now on Medicare – I have never met anyone else even remotely like my mother. That’s how one-of-a-kind she was.
Finally, my mother, like Enola’s mother, “ran away” when I was fourteen. No, not literally, which was why I did not suspect I was writing about myself when I created Enola. My mother’s body remained in residence, but somehow the better part of her seemed to have gone elsewhere. In retrospect, I realize that in all likelihood Mom was having problems with menopause. But of course, in my strait-laced family, no one said so. And there was something else my parents were not telling me: Mom had cancer. I dare say that her health problems preoccupied her a bit and caused her to lose interest in me.
Unlike Enola’s mother, mine did not die. She beat the cancer. But then I went away to college, and then Dad died and Mom moved to Florida, still “gone elsewhere,” and she never did come back. She had Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia for the last decades of her life.
Whew.
So it’s no wonder that Enola Holmes and I formed an instant bond. It’s no wonder that, the moment I needed her, she sprang out of my unconscious mind complete with a name, a physique and a personality. But it is a wonder that I could write about her for so long without realizing that her loneliness was my own and her heartache an expression of the long-forgotten heartache of my teenage years.
No wonder I felt more than a twinge of apprehension when I sent her off to the big city – not London, but New York. Does anybody else out there think that editors and agents take on somewhat of a parental role to authors? If so, I wasn’t aware of it until just now, thinking about Enola and understanding at last why I felt so apprehensive as I packed her off: I was afraid Mummy might not love her = me.
Isn’t it wonderful that Enola’s story has a happy ending? To all of the many readers who love Enola Holmes, let it be known: she loves you, too.
July 19, 2013
WHEN GOOD IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH
Let’s hope I get this right, because I know my mossy brain tends to blur the plot and bury the details of things I read long ago. But this is what I recall: A young actor sought advice of Sir Laurence Olivier about a difficult role in which he needed to convey the quality of a character’s being not quite good enough. Olivier told him, approximately, “My dear fellow, if I had to be not quite good enough, I’d simply go out there and do my very utmost, as always.”
What a piercing insight from a truly great artist. It penetrated my mind and stayed there, obviously, even though I don’t remember where I read it and at the time I did not understand it. I was still a young writer, and so far everything I’d written had been published, thanks to editors willing to work with me, and had done well. Moreover, thanks to the coaching of my (I now realize) extraordinary editors, I could see my writing improving as if I had put it on steroids, and I truly thought (please forgive me) that once I learned to write well enough, I could by the magic of my mystical prose make any topic, even a visit to the dentist, so fascinating to readers that it would sell.
Although now accumulating rejection slips, I persisted in this notion of my own talent until my literary agent read some work of genius over which I had labored long and hard, then sent it straight back to me.
Owwie.
My agent said my masterpiece was “slight.”
Slight? What did that mean?
Eventually, when I had gotten over my owwie snit, I asked. It turned out that agents and editors have developed a kind of summary jargon regarding common manuscript flaws. “Slight” means the writing is okay but it doesn’t say anything to speak of. It seems that even well-written words ought to say something.
Duh.
Still, it took me several more “slights” before I became willing to admit how important a good idea is, and even then, I learned, sometimes capital-G Good is still not quite Good Enough. I can attest to this. I have about fifty novels published now and I have received some honors and awards, but I still receive rejections too. I can think of at least a dozen novels I have written that were not quite good enough. Most of them were shopped around for a long time before my agent and I gave up on them. But some of them were owwies, rejected by my own literary agent.
But nowadays my misfit manuscripts are usually waaay the opposite of “slight.” My personal pendulum seems to have swung to the opposite extreme. Nowadays I go “over the top.” Even when I base my stories on events that actually took place, “over the top” is a problem, because reality is way more bizarre than acceptable fictional entertainment.
Even worse, I keep wanting to write characters who are “over the top.” Flaws can be too flawed. Good is not good enough if the main character is depressed, needy, bigoted or otherwise “not sympathetic.”
Also, I must face it, the world is not ready for some of the things I’d like to write about, such as alternative angels with butterfly wings, or dyslexic cats in search of Dog, or. . .well, ideas are important, all right, but too often I mistake mere flatulence of the brain for an exciting, new, good idea.
I’m writing about this topic partly to reassure my creative colleagues out there that hey, misbegotten manuscripts happen all the time. Risk and fallibility are intrinsic to the creative process. Good is often not good enough, no matter how good you are. Ask Sir Laurence Olivier.
So what are we to do about it? Why, just try our very utmost, as usual. Nurture the next idea. Write the next book.
What a piercing insight from a truly great artist. It penetrated my mind and stayed there, obviously, even though I don’t remember where I read it and at the time I did not understand it. I was still a young writer, and so far everything I’d written had been published, thanks to editors willing to work with me, and had done well. Moreover, thanks to the coaching of my (I now realize) extraordinary editors, I could see my writing improving as if I had put it on steroids, and I truly thought (please forgive me) that once I learned to write well enough, I could by the magic of my mystical prose make any topic, even a visit to the dentist, so fascinating to readers that it would sell.
Although now accumulating rejection slips, I persisted in this notion of my own talent until my literary agent read some work of genius over which I had labored long and hard, then sent it straight back to me.
Owwie.
My agent said my masterpiece was “slight.”
Slight? What did that mean?
Eventually, when I had gotten over my owwie snit, I asked. It turned out that agents and editors have developed a kind of summary jargon regarding common manuscript flaws. “Slight” means the writing is okay but it doesn’t say anything to speak of. It seems that even well-written words ought to say something.
Duh.
Still, it took me several more “slights” before I became willing to admit how important a good idea is, and even then, I learned, sometimes capital-G Good is still not quite Good Enough. I can attest to this. I have about fifty novels published now and I have received some honors and awards, but I still receive rejections too. I can think of at least a dozen novels I have written that were not quite good enough. Most of them were shopped around for a long time before my agent and I gave up on them. But some of them were owwies, rejected by my own literary agent.
But nowadays my misfit manuscripts are usually waaay the opposite of “slight.” My personal pendulum seems to have swung to the opposite extreme. Nowadays I go “over the top.” Even when I base my stories on events that actually took place, “over the top” is a problem, because reality is way more bizarre than acceptable fictional entertainment.
Even worse, I keep wanting to write characters who are “over the top.” Flaws can be too flawed. Good is not good enough if the main character is depressed, needy, bigoted or otherwise “not sympathetic.”
Also, I must face it, the world is not ready for some of the things I’d like to write about, such as alternative angels with butterfly wings, or dyslexic cats in search of Dog, or. . .well, ideas are important, all right, but too often I mistake mere flatulence of the brain for an exciting, new, good idea.
I’m writing about this topic partly to reassure my creative colleagues out there that hey, misbegotten manuscripts happen all the time. Risk and fallibility are intrinsic to the creative process. Good is often not good enough, no matter how good you are. Ask Sir Laurence Olivier.
So what are we to do about it? Why, just try our very utmost, as usual. Nurture the next idea. Write the next book.
July 8, 2013
BOOKS ET AL THAT MYSTIFIED ME
Books were not the only thing that mystified me when I was a child. My father’s dry Irish sense of humor mystified me greatly. Most mornings at breakfast he would greet me, his voice lilting with his best brogue: “Nahncy, did ye hear the big trrrruck in the middle o’ the night?” I never had, and even in our quiet neighborhood, what was so remarkable about a midnight truck? But my father’s owlish question made me wonder about the big truck in the middle of the night, made me try to stay awake to experience the big truck in the middle of the night, made “the middle o’ the night” a mysterious time in which loomed huge, shadowy trucks of unknown significance. I did not yet know the word “symbol,” but the big truck in the middle of the night became symbolic to me of some immense adult mystery.
It’s no wonder that many of the books I read affected me the same way, because books were an extension of my parents, like gardening tools, cooking pots, and other things that simply came with the house. To this day I have no idea where we got all the books; there were no bookstores. But I wandered vaguely among the bookshelves in our home, reading whatever attracted me, and I continue to reread some of those books even now: the ones that still mystify me with hints and intimations, a sense of wonder, a sense of immense mystery beyond my mundane understanding.
One is THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS by Kenneth Grahame, especially the parts about the Wild Wood and the stoats and weasels. Lo, half a century later, for my forthcoming suspense novel, DRAWN INTO DARKNESS, I have named the villain Stoat. But even more mystifying than the Wild Wood were the River and -above all - the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. He cast a lifelong spell of wonder on me. The very same piper shows up in another favorite, THE CROCK OF GOLD by James Stephens, along with leprechauns and cracked kettles of wisdom exponentially beyond any Irish magic I’ve encountered elsewhere except in the poetry of William Butler Yeats.
Another book that mystified me was MY NAME IS ARAM by William Saroyan, which enthralled me with the uncertainties of the cooking of rice and the inexplicable summer of the beautiful white horse. (Saroyan? In retrospect, I realize my parents must have had a remarkably good library.) And maybe the strongest spell of all was cast by Rudyard Kipling’s THE JUNGLE BOOK – the original, not that awful Disney travesty. That anyone could take such potent, dark prose poetry and turn it into tum-tiddley monkeyshines is literary blasphemy and abomination to me.
Q: Don’t you like baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Disney?
A: I’m diabetic.
Q: Do you like Kipling?
Yes, I kippled a lot. Another of Kipling’s mystifying works was PUCK O’ POOK’S HILL. I had not yet learned about pookas, but my impression at the time was that Puck might be a distant relation of the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Not too far off, for a ten-year-old.
Just because I first encountered them as a child does not mean I consider any of these titles to be children’s books. I recommend them without reserve to readers of all ages, and that endorsement includes BAMBI, by Felix Salton. Even as a kid I recognized the extraordinary quality of Salton’s writing, and I discovered in his storytelling a mystic, shiversome immensity for which I had no words – not back then. Even now I’m not sure whether to call it fate, destiny, doom or transcendence. The Disney version of BAMBI may be appealing in its own way, but it is to the book as a My Pretty Pony is to Pegasus.
*huff, sigh*
I suppose I was a bit of an oddball child. I did not like TV or movies, especially not you-know-whose. And once past kindergarten age, I did not believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, or Santa Claus. But I did believe in the big trrrruck in the middle o’ the night.
And decades later, I saw it. Really, truly. Its roar awoke me at two in the morning. It shook the house; it shook the world. I ran downstairs and out onto my porch to see it impending, taking Main Street, Dallastown, PA by inches, a 72-wheeled monster made of yellow girders, its diamond-shaped trailer possessing the pavement from curb to curb as it advanced at two miles per hour. One bellowing truck-tractor pulled while another pushed, and on the steel platform between them loomed the load, a monolithic concrete cylinder so immense the stoplight wires had to be pulled up to let it through. Men in coveralls drove the pushmipullyu trucks, rode in glass boxes on the corners of the diamond, and strode alongside to guide the behemoth past my house while it rattled the bedrock.
What was it? Where was it going? I still don’t know. Okay, really, all those mornings of my childhood, Dad was just teasing my mother about her snoring. But that doesn’t matter. The big truck in the middle of the night continues to mystify me.
It’s no wonder that many of the books I read affected me the same way, because books were an extension of my parents, like gardening tools, cooking pots, and other things that simply came with the house. To this day I have no idea where we got all the books; there were no bookstores. But I wandered vaguely among the bookshelves in our home, reading whatever attracted me, and I continue to reread some of those books even now: the ones that still mystify me with hints and intimations, a sense of wonder, a sense of immense mystery beyond my mundane understanding.
One is THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS by Kenneth Grahame, especially the parts about the Wild Wood and the stoats and weasels. Lo, half a century later, for my forthcoming suspense novel, DRAWN INTO DARKNESS, I have named the villain Stoat. But even more mystifying than the Wild Wood were the River and -above all - the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. He cast a lifelong spell of wonder on me. The very same piper shows up in another favorite, THE CROCK OF GOLD by James Stephens, along with leprechauns and cracked kettles of wisdom exponentially beyond any Irish magic I’ve encountered elsewhere except in the poetry of William Butler Yeats.
Another book that mystified me was MY NAME IS ARAM by William Saroyan, which enthralled me with the uncertainties of the cooking of rice and the inexplicable summer of the beautiful white horse. (Saroyan? In retrospect, I realize my parents must have had a remarkably good library.) And maybe the strongest spell of all was cast by Rudyard Kipling’s THE JUNGLE BOOK – the original, not that awful Disney travesty. That anyone could take such potent, dark prose poetry and turn it into tum-tiddley monkeyshines is literary blasphemy and abomination to me.
Q: Don’t you like baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Disney?
A: I’m diabetic.
Q: Do you like Kipling?
Yes, I kippled a lot. Another of Kipling’s mystifying works was PUCK O’ POOK’S HILL. I had not yet learned about pookas, but my impression at the time was that Puck might be a distant relation of the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Not too far off, for a ten-year-old.
Just because I first encountered them as a child does not mean I consider any of these titles to be children’s books. I recommend them without reserve to readers of all ages, and that endorsement includes BAMBI, by Felix Salton. Even as a kid I recognized the extraordinary quality of Salton’s writing, and I discovered in his storytelling a mystic, shiversome immensity for which I had no words – not back then. Even now I’m not sure whether to call it fate, destiny, doom or transcendence. The Disney version of BAMBI may be appealing in its own way, but it is to the book as a My Pretty Pony is to Pegasus.
*huff, sigh*
I suppose I was a bit of an oddball child. I did not like TV or movies, especially not you-know-whose. And once past kindergarten age, I did not believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, or Santa Claus. But I did believe in the big trrrruck in the middle o’ the night.
And decades later, I saw it. Really, truly. Its roar awoke me at two in the morning. It shook the house; it shook the world. I ran downstairs and out onto my porch to see it impending, taking Main Street, Dallastown, PA by inches, a 72-wheeled monster made of yellow girders, its diamond-shaped trailer possessing the pavement from curb to curb as it advanced at two miles per hour. One bellowing truck-tractor pulled while another pushed, and on the steel platform between them loomed the load, a monolithic concrete cylinder so immense the stoplight wires had to be pulled up to let it through. Men in coveralls drove the pushmipullyu trucks, rode in glass boxes on the corners of the diamond, and strode alongside to guide the behemoth past my house while it rattled the bedrock.
What was it? Where was it going? I still don’t know. Okay, really, all those mornings of my childhood, Dad was just teasing my mother about her snoring. But that doesn’t matter. The big truck in the middle of the night continues to mystify me.
June 27, 2013
CAT HAIR OF THE MIND
This is about writing, although it starts off being about me. I am definitely the sort of person who will be found “wandering vaguely” with cat hair all over my clothing. It used to be dog hair, when I was a kid and my mom raised Shelties, but now it is cat hair, as I take in strays. But I digress. What I mean to say is, most people don’t appreciate having cat hair slathered all over their sweaters, and they try to avoid it or remove it.
I have no way of knowing for sure, but I think most people probably wouldn’t appreciate cat hair of the mind, either, or brain lint (same thing, minus pet metaphor). What I’m talking about is those loosey-goosey kind of featherweight nuances that the world powders upon us every day. I have a feeling that the average practical-minded, efficient person automatically dusts this stuff away, barely conscious of the ongoing mind cleanup they necessarily perform in order to keep functioning.
But my circumstances are different, so different that personally, I like – no, I love -- the brain dust, the cat hair of my mind. It’s what I need for writing, but also I just plain wallow in it, like a hoarder nesting in garage sale treasures. My consciousness seems to generate a kind of electrostatic charge that attracts tiny random floating manifestations and takes them in. Even more remarkable and alarming, now that I think about it, is the way they come wafting forth for me just when I might need them for something I’m writing.
Well, usually.
Anyway. Examples? I’d love to show off my mental equivalent of house dust thick enough to write in. But first I’d like to mention that my brain’s accumulation of life lint, although random, nevertheless is sure be qualitatively different than that of other authors who have cat hair of the mind, because we’re all as individual as our pets’ noseprints. The conductivity of my mind attracts ethereal particulates differently than anyone else’s.
Now, right now, I am asking my mental lint hoarder for examples and it is offering up Things With Blue Tails: juvenile five-lined skinks, blue-tailed skippers(tiny butterflies), some dragonflies, some peacocks, maybe Smurf primates? That last one is pretty lame, but a writer is entitled not to edit brain fuzz. Anything goes. Things That Bite, in my experience: yellow flies, hamsters, skeeters, boa constrictor, white mice, Lone Star tick, mastiff, scorpions, fire ants, impertinent fish, teething babies. But not all the cat hair of the mind clumps into lists. Floating intimations abound. The giant silk moth is the butterfly of the night. A dandelion is first a yellow sun, then a full white moon, then thousands of stars. A skeletal armadillo looks like a seashell washed up on an inland beach. Women who wear hats with bright, realistic flowers on them are in danger of attracting hummingbirds. The paisley motif resembles nothing identifiable yet paisley-patterned fabric has been around for millennia; it must mean something: fishes, gourds, gravid lizards?
Cat hair of the mind. I guarantee you that the kind my brain snags is different than that of, say, my brother the mechanical engineer with the model train set monopolizing his basement. Mine’s way too organic for him. And his is unknowable to me unless he starts writing.
What “cat hair” has to do with fiction writing is simply everything. A sprinkling of brain dust enriches storytelling in so many ways I find it hard to specify. It adds a whole nother dimension, beyond three, to characters. It takes visual images to the next level, like holograms. It functions kind of like a writer’s Mandelbrot Set, allowing something tiny and random to generate pattern. I admit that in referring to Fractal Theory or Chaos Theory or whatever they call it, I have barely a particulate of a clue what I’m talking about, but I recognize beauty when I see it. And I sense a certain Mandelbrot-style self-similarity in my own creative process, which is maybe just a fancy way to say “theme.”
Fractals aside, maybe not every writer needs mental cat hair, but I do think a somewhat messy mind helps, and I recommend trying for one. My mind has been accumulating the dust of the world since I was a child, but I see no reason why a person shouldn’t start anytime. It’s just a matter of not throwing away the everyday detritus of living. Go ahead and hoard. Upstairs, in your head, it can’t do any harm.
I have no way of knowing for sure, but I think most people probably wouldn’t appreciate cat hair of the mind, either, or brain lint (same thing, minus pet metaphor). What I’m talking about is those loosey-goosey kind of featherweight nuances that the world powders upon us every day. I have a feeling that the average practical-minded, efficient person automatically dusts this stuff away, barely conscious of the ongoing mind cleanup they necessarily perform in order to keep functioning.
But my circumstances are different, so different that personally, I like – no, I love -- the brain dust, the cat hair of my mind. It’s what I need for writing, but also I just plain wallow in it, like a hoarder nesting in garage sale treasures. My consciousness seems to generate a kind of electrostatic charge that attracts tiny random floating manifestations and takes them in. Even more remarkable and alarming, now that I think about it, is the way they come wafting forth for me just when I might need them for something I’m writing.
Well, usually.
Anyway. Examples? I’d love to show off my mental equivalent of house dust thick enough to write in. But first I’d like to mention that my brain’s accumulation of life lint, although random, nevertheless is sure be qualitatively different than that of other authors who have cat hair of the mind, because we’re all as individual as our pets’ noseprints. The conductivity of my mind attracts ethereal particulates differently than anyone else’s.
Now, right now, I am asking my mental lint hoarder for examples and it is offering up Things With Blue Tails: juvenile five-lined skinks, blue-tailed skippers(tiny butterflies), some dragonflies, some peacocks, maybe Smurf primates? That last one is pretty lame, but a writer is entitled not to edit brain fuzz. Anything goes. Things That Bite, in my experience: yellow flies, hamsters, skeeters, boa constrictor, white mice, Lone Star tick, mastiff, scorpions, fire ants, impertinent fish, teething babies. But not all the cat hair of the mind clumps into lists. Floating intimations abound. The giant silk moth is the butterfly of the night. A dandelion is first a yellow sun, then a full white moon, then thousands of stars. A skeletal armadillo looks like a seashell washed up on an inland beach. Women who wear hats with bright, realistic flowers on them are in danger of attracting hummingbirds. The paisley motif resembles nothing identifiable yet paisley-patterned fabric has been around for millennia; it must mean something: fishes, gourds, gravid lizards?
Cat hair of the mind. I guarantee you that the kind my brain snags is different than that of, say, my brother the mechanical engineer with the model train set monopolizing his basement. Mine’s way too organic for him. And his is unknowable to me unless he starts writing.
What “cat hair” has to do with fiction writing is simply everything. A sprinkling of brain dust enriches storytelling in so many ways I find it hard to specify. It adds a whole nother dimension, beyond three, to characters. It takes visual images to the next level, like holograms. It functions kind of like a writer’s Mandelbrot Set, allowing something tiny and random to generate pattern. I admit that in referring to Fractal Theory or Chaos Theory or whatever they call it, I have barely a particulate of a clue what I’m talking about, but I recognize beauty when I see it. And I sense a certain Mandelbrot-style self-similarity in my own creative process, which is maybe just a fancy way to say “theme.”
Fractals aside, maybe not every writer needs mental cat hair, but I do think a somewhat messy mind helps, and I recommend trying for one. My mind has been accumulating the dust of the world since I was a child, but I see no reason why a person shouldn’t start anytime. It’s just a matter of not throwing away the everyday detritus of living. Go ahead and hoard. Upstairs, in your head, it can’t do any harm.
June 17, 2013
QUITE OF HER OWN ACCORD
So I'm going to commit bloggage. Okay. So this is the first time I've done anything like this and I have no idea what I'm doing. Okay again. Such is the story of my life as a fiction writer.
I quite identify with the mother in A.A. Milne's poem about a preposterously named boy, James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree, except that I would never put on a golden gown. I'm more likely to put on a T-shirt, jeans and Chucks, but I remain convinced I can get right down to the end of the town. I envision King John's notice as my epitaph: "LAST SEEN WANDERING VAGUELY: QUITE OF HER OWN ACCORD." In shocked capital letters, of course.
Wandering vaguely? Not just wandering, mind you, but VAGUELY? That's me. I maunder, mystified and bewildered, from new experiences (such as this blog!) to story ideas to weirder story ideas to accidental genres to other genres I haven't tried. "Accidental genre" describes how I started writing novels, lo these forty-two years ago. I felt I had no right or authority to any material except my own daydreams, and I did not even vaguely know that what I produced was called fantasy, and my marketing was as random as it gets. Just as witlessly I later stumbled into magical realism, children's literature, YA and -- mystery? I was not even aware that I wrote mystery until I won my first Edgar! Now I'm fumbling around with psychological suspense. My angelic editor can attest to the extent of my fumbling.
Quite of her own accord? Too true of me. While I don't act out much, in my own mindful way I am contrary to the max and have been so, proudly marching to the beat of a different kettle of fish, since I was a child. Only during my hippie phase did I ever wear what everybody was wearing, and even then I wouldn't do what everybody was doing. Now I won't read what everybody's reading. My family used to say of my mother that if she drowned in the river, one would have to look for the body upstream. I'm the same way. My husband, a mechanically-minded man, says I screw to the left. He's a Chilean, so of course there's sexual innuendo implied. but being a thoroughgoing feminist, I discard that in favor of the larger implications: My mind cycles widdershins.
Since joining Goodreads, I've found that I really want to talk about reading in ways that don't fit the format. In this blog I hope to do that, and maybe give some insight into the "wandering vaguely" aspect of reading, writing, and heck, life. I hope to manage some insights into the cockeyed alchemy of writing, the magical process of turning random nothingness into symbolism and story. I even hope to make some sense of my wayward self.
I'll try to do so once a week or thereabouts. Thanks for reading!
Write on!
Nancy Springer
DARK LIE
Forthcoming: DRAWN INTO DARKNESS
I quite identify with the mother in A.A. Milne's poem about a preposterously named boy, James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree, except that I would never put on a golden gown. I'm more likely to put on a T-shirt, jeans and Chucks, but I remain convinced I can get right down to the end of the town. I envision King John's notice as my epitaph: "LAST SEEN WANDERING VAGUELY: QUITE OF HER OWN ACCORD." In shocked capital letters, of course.
Wandering vaguely? Not just wandering, mind you, but VAGUELY? That's me. I maunder, mystified and bewildered, from new experiences (such as this blog!) to story ideas to weirder story ideas to accidental genres to other genres I haven't tried. "Accidental genre" describes how I started writing novels, lo these forty-two years ago. I felt I had no right or authority to any material except my own daydreams, and I did not even vaguely know that what I produced was called fantasy, and my marketing was as random as it gets. Just as witlessly I later stumbled into magical realism, children's literature, YA and -- mystery? I was not even aware that I wrote mystery until I won my first Edgar! Now I'm fumbling around with psychological suspense. My angelic editor can attest to the extent of my fumbling.
Quite of her own accord? Too true of me. While I don't act out much, in my own mindful way I am contrary to the max and have been so, proudly marching to the beat of a different kettle of fish, since I was a child. Only during my hippie phase did I ever wear what everybody was wearing, and even then I wouldn't do what everybody was doing. Now I won't read what everybody's reading. My family used to say of my mother that if she drowned in the river, one would have to look for the body upstream. I'm the same way. My husband, a mechanically-minded man, says I screw to the left. He's a Chilean, so of course there's sexual innuendo implied. but being a thoroughgoing feminist, I discard that in favor of the larger implications: My mind cycles widdershins.
Since joining Goodreads, I've found that I really want to talk about reading in ways that don't fit the format. In this blog I hope to do that, and maybe give some insight into the "wandering vaguely" aspect of reading, writing, and heck, life. I hope to manage some insights into the cockeyed alchemy of writing, the magical process of turning random nothingness into symbolism and story. I even hope to make some sense of my wayward self.
I'll try to do so once a week or thereabouts. Thanks for reading!
Write on!
Nancy Springer
DARK LIE
Forthcoming: DRAWN INTO DARKNESS
Last Seen Wandering Vaguely
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