Jonathan Langford's Blog, page 8

Jonathan on Television!

So. I finally bit the bullet (metaphorically speaking) and watched the 45-minute interview I gave for the local River Falls community television station a few weeks ago (available at this link). Looking at it, I like my voice, but there's a lot of verbal hesitation. I also think things went better when I was actually gesturing with my hands rather than having them folded in front of me. Ah, well. Overall, it's not too bad.

It came about in a roundabout way. My oldest son (the one who's currently on a mission) has a best friend who isn't Mormon. Over the years, we've become friends with his parents. When they heard about No Going Back, they insisted on buying a copy. They wound up loaning their copy to several other people, including the mother of one of my son's other friends. That was Gail Upton. She read the book and really liked it. She'd previously done an interview with another local author for the community television station (which is always hard up for programming — you can only get so far with broadcasting city council meetings). And so she contacted me about doing an interview. And I was happy to do so.

Before the actual interview itself, Gail emailed me with a set of questions. Then we got together at a local coffee shop and talked for several hours about the book and other topics. (Gail and I are both pretty talkative and have several common interests, on top of the common history of her child and mine both being part of the same social group throughout high school.) And then we set up a time, and I did my best to choose a shirt that wouldn't make me look too slovenly and chubby (though that's largely a lost cause), and she asked her questions and I talked. And so it happened, and was apparently broadcast on the local station, though I didn't see that because we don't have cable. And now the interview has been posted at the station's website, where anyone can see it who happens to find his or her way to the link, which now will be easier because since I've posted it here on my blog.

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As a writer trying to promote my own book, I've learned to take my opportunities for publicity wherever I get them. It's also a chance to talk about my novel, which as I've mentioned before is something I'm pretty much always happy to do.

One of the positive outcomes of this particular experience has been some additional evidence that No Going Back can appeal to non-Mormon readers and those who lack a Mormon background. My son's best friend's mother (a non-religious person) commented that after reading the book, she felt that she had a much clearer understanding of what was involved in being Mormon — that it wasn't just a Sunday religion. Gail Upton said the book did a good job of showing Mormons as ordinary people and felt that it might give a more fair perspective on what typical Mormons are like, compared (for example) to recent stories and books about Mormon polygamist splinter groups.

I'm hoping for more evidence on that, as some of the non-Mormon bloggers I've recruited will (hopefully) provide reviews of No Going Back. Meanwhile, there's something out on the Internet that people can view to find out what I look and sound like, if that interests them. And I can now say that I've been on TV! Truly, being a published writer has brought many experiences I had never thought to have…

The Writing Rookie Season 2, #1: Floundering Around

This was also posted today at A Motley Vision Mormon Arts and Culture blog.

Back by popular demand*, I now continue my blog series chronicling my adventures into the realm of creative writing. Previous posts recounted experiencies related to the writing of my first (now published) novel, No Going Back. This new "season" focuses on questions such as: What next? Is there life after publication? What's different about attempting to write a second novel? And (for those of you who remember a certain PBS program of my youth): What about Naomi?

* For some particularly dubious values of "popular demand."

For the complete list of columns in this series, click here.

They say that when you wipe out on a bicycle, the thing to do is get right back on and start riding again. At least, I think that's what they say. Personally, it makes more sense to me to put on some bandages and let the scrapes heal first.

Be that as it may…

A couple of months after No Going Back was published last fall, I decided that I wasn't going to try to write a novel in 2010. I've held to that, mostly. Instead, I've focused on my freelance informational writing and editing (which actually pays bills), reading and reviewing work by other people (a matter partly of paying off the karmic debt I feel I incurred by pushing my manuscript on other people for their reviews), working to promote No Going Back — which can be quite time-consuming — and generally catching up with things. More than once, I've congratulated myself on making a decision at once so wise (ahem) and so practical. Indeed, so nice has it been not to be writing a novel that I often doubted, during the first few months, that I should ever want to write another story. Alas, over time I started to feel that certain creative itch again…

During this past summer, I spent an hour one Friday morning in a local swimming pool celebrating the end of my younger son's swimming lessons. (My older son hates swimming with a fiery passion, but the younger son is fortunately proving less hydrophobic.) He, of course, was off playing with his friends. Left to my own devices, I soon found myself observing my fellow swimmers, pondering their interactions, speculating about their internal motivations and mental processes, and generally thinking about them as inspiration for potential characters. That's when I realized that pleasant fantasies aside, the habit of story writing has gotten too firm a grip on my soul to be set so easily aside.

Since then, I've been stumbling back toward writing, trying to figure out how and where to get started again. My hope is to reproduce the conditions, habits, and mindset that resulted in a completed novel, compared to the stalled efforts of years past. So far, the outcome is uncertain.

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Story ideas, for me, often start with the notion of a particular character in a challenging situation. Ideally, there's also some general sense of where the story is headed and how it has to end. Usually, though, it takes work to get to that point. I've generated countless (because I don't particularly want to count them) ideas and possible starting points that haven't gone anywhere — at least, not yet — because they haven't connected with enough other story pieces, of the right shapes and types, to make a decent narrative.

Back before my older son (the non-aquatic one) left on his mission, I sat him down and made him read some of the various fantasy story beginnings and ideas I'd generated over the years. As he did so, his frustration mounted. "They all look okay, Dad! You just need to choose one and finish it!" (Or words to that effect.) And yet most of what I've done in the last few months consists of trying out still more starting-places.

Part of the problem is that I'm simply too aware of the universe of possibilities each new story represents. Without any effort, I can envision myriads of possible directions for any given narrative. However, one of the things I've learned is that charging ahead at random isn't a good strategy for me. Instead, I need to play around and wait for that faint inner click that signals an organic rightness to the direction I'm contemplating. Proceeding without that internal confirmation leads to wasted efforts and a sense of dissatisfaction and doubt in my own writing. Since the enemy (for me) is largely my own internal doubts, that's an experience that's best avoided. I also have to believe (though I have no firm evidence of this) that the story ideas that feel better to me also result in better final products.

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Young adult fantasy novels (which is what I'm hoping to write next, at least in part because I hold out some faint hope that they might result in a positive financial return) are pretty different from a realistic contemporary novel about a gay Mormon teenager. Still, I can't help but hope that some of the lessons of my first novel might help give me a leg up on future efforts. Pondering on my experiences, I've distilled the following mix of declarative observations and imperative guidelines — tentative hypotheses about what works for me in writing fiction:

In trying to write a story, it's good to know where you're going.
Persistence over time can produce a novel, no matter how slow the progress seems to be.
If I can tell I'm writing crap, it's best to go do something else for a while.
It's important to get away from the computer from time to time to refresh my brain.
On a related note, writing in spiral notebooks can be a useful strategy for putting in quality writing time.
I'm more balanced and content when I'm writing regularly on a story, even if it's only a little bit per day.
When I get stuck on one scene, I can jump ahead to work on another scene.
A lot can be figured out by taking the time to think about my characters and their situations in depth.
When the writing's going well, it's best to run with it. Even if it's in the middle of the night.
When all else fails, (a) take a walk, (b) wash some dishes, (c) play with your kids, (d) grumble in your journal, (e) read a good story (by someone else), and/or (f) all of the above.

How all this applies in my current circumstances is a bit of a mystery. At present, I'm surrounded by fragmentary story ideas: characters, voices, setting. So far, nothing has jelled properly. Or maybe it's just that I haven't persisted to the point where one of my ideas starts throwing out roots and branches to become a real story.

In short, I'm floundering around. What I have to keep reminding myself is that I need to flounder. Floundering at least means I'm in the water (so to speak). Horrid and uncomfortable though it feels, to cease doing so means giving up — because all stories, based on my experience to date, lie on the other side of prolonged and profound discomfort. Floundering can ultimately lead to other things, if I gird up my loins (pull on my bathing suit?) and flounder in earnest. At least, that's my hope.

Knowing the End from the Beginning

This was also posted last Friday at A Motley Vision Mormon Arts and Culture blog.

The other day, I was listening to an interview on National Public Radio with Emma Donoghue, the author of Room. It's a novel about a five-year-old whose entire life has been spent with his mother in a small room where his mother —a victim of kidnapping — has been kept since before he was conceived. The book sounds horrifying, fascinating, and tremendously well done.

I don't know how the story ends. The interviewer was very careful not to give away anything about that. The reviews I looked up online after getting home were equally circumspect.

This is all quite admirable for those of you who think a book shouldn't be ruined by knowing the ending beforehand. But I'm here to tell you that unless and until I know how that book ends, I won't buy it. And I won't start reading it.

Most of you will doubtless be horrified by this. To which I respond: Get over it. I'm a longtime reader, with a graduate degree in literature (if that means anything). My reading experience is just as legitimate as yours. I'm not asking you to read this way, but I'm not going to apologize for the way I process texts. Anyone who wants me to read his/her/its story will simply have to deal with that.

The question of just why I read this way has to do, I think, with how strongly I identify with the characters in the fiction I'm reading. I literally feel what they're feeling — or what they ought to be feeling, in cases such as those of stupid teenagers who ought to feel more embarrassed than they do about their own idiotic actions. (This is one reason, by the way, that I shall never watch a Mister Bean movie.) This makes reading a very intense experience for me. It also means I have to be pretty careful about decisions about just what I'm going to read. Knowing what's coming in a story helps me do that.

It's not just a matter of eliminating stories that end badly. Very often when I flip ahead to find out the end of an intense story, even if the news isn't good for the main character, I'll keep on going. Knowing what's coming helps me to get a grip on myself emotionally. It allows me to continue — though there are also times when, knowing where the story is going, I'll decide it's not worth my time. That's my prerogative.

The other thing you have to understand is that for me, knowing the ending in advance doesn't spoil a story. Pretty much any story that I like, I reread. Usually I like it better the second time around. Knowing what's going to happen, I don't have to race through, but can appreciate the journey. It's like a first-time conversation with the person who's going to become your best friend. You may click initially, but things get much better over time. First impressions are lasting impressions only if they're so negative that you don't bother to collect any later impressions further down the road. A good book is much like a good friend in that respect — for me at least.

The one exception I try to make is when I'm reading something to give revision comments to the writer. In those cases, I try to stick to a strictly linear reading, so that the writer will have the benefit of my impressions and misconceptions, uncontaminated by knowledge of what comes later. I'm not honestly sure that's the best idea, though. Wouldn't it be better to accurately reflect the kind of reader I really am, rather than imitate someone I'm not? But I try.

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God, we're told, knows the end from the beginning, whether that's through a kind of mechanical foreknowledge based on his thorough knowledge of the present, or some way of standing outside of time, or something else.

In wanting to know the ending of stories before I get very far in them, it can be supposed that I'm wanting the power of God — something we limited mortals don't possess in real life. Each of us, after all, must live life as it comes to us. Isn't it a form of cheating, of escapism, for me to demand something different in my reading experience?

Except that this isn't the case. God, if you're a Mormon, is someone you believe has indeed revealed the ending of the drama, though not all the intermediate acts. He tells us how things will end up so that we may trust him along the way.

Which, it occurs to me, really is what I want in my reading. When I read a story, I enter a world whose god — the author — is largely unknown to me. Before I venture into that world, I want to know whether it's the work of one of those gods who delights in the pain of his or her creation: a god of vengeance, a god of mercy, a god of suffering, a god of indolence, a god of unjust power and cruel immorality. I want to know what kind of experience awaits me. This, it seems to me, isn't too much to ask.

Extravagant Chocolate Chip Cookies

I should be writing right now. Or at least, you know, writing about writing. Instead, I'm going to write about the batch of chocolate chip cookies that I just put in the oven, basically because I want to. And maybe I'll bring in a writing tie-in later.

I've always loved cooking. I remember back when I was four years old helping my older sister (pregnant at the time) make cookies, which I think may have gone into care packages for soldiers in Vietnam. Later, I graduated to making cookies on my own: chocolate chip cookies without chocolate chips (I had a food sensitivity to chocolate at that time), with which I experimented in various ways: adding an extra egg and a little bit of sage for flavoring, mostly, from what I remember. I never told anyone else that I'd added the sage, and couldn't actually tell any change in the flavor myself, but my mother's told me since that she was quite aware of it. I remain skeptical. (Skepticism about parental knowledge remains a filial prerogative well into maturity.)

I've since gotten over my sensitivity to chocolate (thank goodness), but not over my love of cooking. Indeed, cooking is, of all my creative endeavors, possibly the one I find most simply and uncomplicatedly satisfying. Back when we were dating, my wife and I used to cook together (she also enjoys cooking). In the early days of our marriage, we had to adjust to the notion that even if we weren't up to doing something fancy, one of us had to cook something. There were times when it was well after 10:00 p.m. before one of us would actually bite the bullet and decide on something we would both eat.

Nowadays, cooking — especially for the kids — is more often utilitarian. But I still enjoy making special treats, especially when I'm just done with or taking a break from my writing. This past weekend, it was a batch of particularly extravagant chocolate chip cookie dough.

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My favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe (taken from James Beard's American Cookery and claimed by him to be the original Toll House recipe, though it's different from what I see on the back of Nestle chocolate chip packages) goes like this:

Ingredients

3/4 cup butter
3/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar, packed firmly enough to hold its shape after it is released from the measuring cup
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 tablespoons milk
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
12 ounces chocolate chips (semisweet)
1 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Directions

Cream the butter and sugars together until they are smooth.
Add the egg, vanilla, and milk, and again beat until smooth and consistent.
Add the flour, baking powder, and salt. Stir thoroughly. (The original recipe suggests sifting the flour and mixing with the baking powder and salt before adding to the sugar-egg-etc. mixture. I never bother.)
Stir in the chocolate chips and nuts.
Drop onto greased cookie sheet, 1 inch apart.
Cook in 375-degree oven until cooked, about 8 to 12 minutes. The lighter the better, so long as the dough is not actually still raw. (Note: The dough will still be very soft when you take it out of the oven. It gets much firmer as it cools.)

This yields a soft, rich, cakey cookie that I very much like. It yields either 4 or 5 dozen medium-sized cookies — I can't remember which.

Anyway. A couple of weeks ago, I varied this by substituting some chopped up bulk Amano chocolate (Amano is a business in Orem, Utah, that makes some of the best dark chocolate in the world — really! They've won several international awards) and pecans instead of walnuts. I used less of both than what the recipe calls for: about 6 ounces of chocolate, by my estimate, and 4 ounces of nuts. It worked out really, really well: much (far too much) loved by me, and by my wife, and by my 10-year-old son (though not my 15-year-old daughter, who doesn't care for nuts). It worked so well that I did it again this past weekend, and just popped a dozen into the oven to greet my wife when she gets back from her visit to the dentist.

It is a truly extravant recipe. Based on my rough calculations, the chocolate alone comes to $7.50 per batch. The pecans (based on a price of $10 per pound; they're expensive right now) add another $2.50. I figure the other ingredients are about another dollar's worth. So $11 for a batch of cookie dough — though it doesn't sound quite so bad when you divide it by 48 cookies, giving a price of 23 cents a cookie.

Somewhere, cooks are weeping at the thought that I'm using Amano chocolate for chocolate chip cookies. To which I shrug my shoulders — though I don't plan to do this terribly often. If nothing else, we need to keep the Amano for snacking during the day. (My wife and I figure that intense dark chocolate is better for snacking than other kinds of chocolate, because you eat so much less of it. Of course, turning it into cookies kind of does away with that advantage…)

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And now for the promised literary tie-in. Except that now that I'm here, I'm no longer sure what I was planning to say. Oh, well. I suppose I can always wing it.

Part of the moral of the story is simply this: As a writer, I find that I need a non-writing hobby. Something more tangible, something yielding shorter-term benefits and praise, something where there's less at risk. The fact that I can eat the results is simply another benefit (and downside, considering the condition of my waist).

If I wanted a life of happy and risk-free creativity, I'd probably be better advised to stick with cooking. Indeed, I tried that for many years. The fact that I wound up writing a novel anyway is, I suppose, conclusive proof that I really am a writer at heart. (I postulate that someone for whom cooking was more than a hobby would find it stressful and risky too. By this way of thinking, the fact that I don't have very much of my ego wrapped up in cooking shows that I don't have it in me to be a professional cook.)

One of the things I've learned about cooking is that it's important to go with the flow. The food speaks to you, telling you what it wants. Recipes, I find, are generally no more than inspirations and starting-places (though it's useful to have the right proportions in front of you for getting baked goods to rise properly). You don't really start to cook until you've started to tinker. Adding ingredients, substituting ingredients, cooking something that has no base recipe at all — these are the essence of cooking creativity.

Experimentation is a necessary component of cooking. You can't be too afraid of failure if you're going to develop your cooking skills. One of my early cooking memories is of a casserole I attempted when I was about 10 years old. It included potatoes, apples, green olives, grapes, and much, much more. It was horrible. More recent attempts have included their share of failures as well, such as the infamous pickle soup of a few years back (based on a recipe from Julia Child) and my periodic attempts to find a good way to cook parsnips. For that matter, my wife took about a year of practice before she mastered the deceptively simple cooking of a Yorkshire pudding.

Practice is essential. Watching my children in the kitchen, I'm amazed at how awkward they are at doing things like stirring and chopping ingredients and turning things that are sauteeing in a pan. But then, I reflect on all the practice I've had with that — experience they haven't had. Sooner or later, it occurs to me, I'm going to have to back off and let them (make them) try these things on their own if they're ever going to become decent cooks.

My last lesson from cooking (for this blog entry) is simply that tastes differ. There are things I like that certain other people will not like, no matter how well I dress them up — and vice versa. I will never like cilantro. I will never like acorn squash. I will never like horehound candy, worlds without end. And even though I've had great success in charming people who thought they hated mushrooms with my homemade cream of mushroom soup, some people will never like it, despite my best efforts.

This is important because it says there's no right way to cook. There are useful techniques you can use, ideas you can pick up, but there's no universal pattern that each good cook must follow. Instead, you cook for the people who are at your table. If (like my children) they prefer boxed macaroni and cheese to homemade macaroni and cheese, you hold your nose and fix that. (And then you make some of the good stuff for yourself.) No cooking advice is going to help you if it's geared toward people with different tastes or geared toward something that's not what you're actually trying to cook.

Anyway. The cookies have been out of the oven for several minutes, my wife just walked in the door (though it will be awhile before she can have any, since she got a fluoride treatment at the dentist's), and I should be getting a call anytime now about one of my current writing projects. So it's time for me to get back to my writing and let you get back to yours, or whatever else you do to pay the bills and give scope to your creative juices. Bon appetit!

A Certain Empty Feeling

Below is something I wrote back in March of 2009, right after finishing the first full draft of No Going Back. The mood soon passed, but I think I did not so bad a job of describing what it felt like at the time.

I finished my novel a few weeks ago. It's out there now, gathering critiques and generating comments from reviewers to help Chris Bigelow figure out whether or not he wants to publish it. I'm also hoping to get suggestions for ways to improve my novel. (Well, no, I'm actually hoping ...

Dialogue Review

There's something particularly gratifying about having your work taken seriously enough for someone to discuss it at length. It's all the nicer when someone has positive things to say about your work. I had that pleasure this past week, when a friend pointed out a review that had been published in the latest issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought.

The review, titled "Characters to Care About" — which I have received permission to post in full on my website, since it's not yet...

The Ugly Role of Anonymity in Political Discourse

Following are some thoughts I composed for an email list I belong to (consisting largely of readers and writers of Mormon fiction) where anonymous emails are sometimes forwarded, including a recent one that attacked both President Obama and Snopes.com (the rumor verification site). It's not my standard fare for this blog, but it's something I feel strongly about and think is important to consider, particularly in this political season.

Anonymous political attacks aren't new. The 17th and 18th ...

Book Blogs

Did you know that there are more than 50 book bloggers in Utah alone? No lie. Not to mention who-knows-how-many-more in the English speaking world in general. Which, it turns out, is the answer to the question I posed not so long ago about new things I might to do help promote No Going Back.

Recruiting reviews from book bloggers is not a new idea for me. Even before No Going Back was published, I was contacting various LDS book blogs, seeing who I could interest in an electronic review copy...

Talking with Readers

One of the best parts of having written No Going Back has been the chance to have conversations with readers of the book: Mormons, non-Mormons, ex-Mormons; literary readers, nonliterary readers, occasional readers; those with firsthand experience of homosexuality, those with secondhand knowledge, and those with little direct knowledge. Partly that's because I think the themes of the book are important, and I like talking about them. And partly it's because I find it fascinating — and...

Running Out of Ideas

I had lunch today with Chris Bigelow, my publisher at Zarahemla Books. It was fun, as it always is. We shared gossip and talked about future projects, both joint and individual, and about my recent review of Doug Thayer's book The Tree House (also published by Zarahemla Books) — and about the fact that we seem to be running out of ideas for ways to publicize No Going Back.

Here's a short list of some of the things we've done:

Did a paper on my book at last year's Sunstone...