Jay Sennett's Blog, page 11

Writing Exercise: The Reluctant I

The “3 A.M. Epiphany” offers a wealth of writing exercises. Author Brian Kitely writes “This book is a collection of fiction exercise instructions whose main goal is to teach writers how to let their fiction find itself.” 1

The first series of exercises address various Points of View. He makes a compelling case for dropping the omniscient third person P.O.V. While I agree this may make sense for some types of fiction, the big money makers, mysteries and romance, almost always use omniscient third. Rather than dispense with it, I prefer to use it when it is the most effective way to tell the story.

The Reluctant I

I have chosen to share with you my draft for The Reluctant I. “The point of this exercise,” Kitely writes, “is to imagine a narrator who is less interested in himself than what he is observing. You can make your narrator someone who sees an interesting event in which [s]he is not necessarily a participant. Or you can make him self-effacing, yet a major participant in the events related.” 2 Write for 500 words.

Please share you feedback with me. I would love to hear it.

***

The old radio blared out a British sounding voice. Johnny stood up so fast he hit his head on a rafter. The voice continued, muddled as though the man was speaking through the water at the bottom of a toilet bowl.

“There’s no plugs up here!” Johnny almost shouted. He even picked up the radio and found the plug but it still kept talking.

“But what is he saying?”

“I don’t know. It’s not like this piece of junk has a subtitles switch.” Johnny’s parents watched art-house movies and forced Johnny to watch them. “A lot of the times they smoke marijuana and watch the movies and fall asleep half way through. They talk like they watch the whole thing. But they almost never do.”

The British voice said “I find it hard to describe adequately the horrible things I’ve seen and heard.”

“Whoa. The hair on my neck just stood up.”

 

The radio stopped speaking, or maybe the British guy just stopped talking. Just as quickly as it had started it stopped.

It’s not like Johnny unplugged the radio, because it was never plugged in to begin with or even dropped on the floor to stop the voice. Though that would have interrupted everything. The crashing sounds.

No. His voice faded out. Like when a villain falls to their death and their voices get smaller and quieter.

“Have you ever heard this radio before?”

“When Papap was alive, he never played it. He had a different radio then, more modern. Like the 80s kind your Jerry has.”

Johnny rolled his eyes and turned his head away and worked his jaw hard. Jerry was his step-dad, and they didn’t get along. Ever, really. Jerry even tried to have Johnny institutionalized because Johnny wears dresses a lot. Jerry got close to having his way but then he came one night – I saw this for myself – and his face was destroyed. Both eyes starting to swell shut and a torn lip and ripped shirt. “You’re not fucking leaving you little cunt,” he yelled at Johnny while Johnny’s mother – a waste of human being for sure – started crying with “oh baby what happened to you” and Jerry pushed her away and stomped off to his recreation room (said using air quotes for emphasis) to kill his pain with drugs. “Hey, you know what I found out,” Johnny told me at school a week later. “My dad’s father paid some guys to beat the shit out of Jerry and said if he put me in the looney bin they’d cut his balls off and sew them shut in his mouth!” Johnny choked he laughed so hard.

Johnny’s dad had died in a car crash when he was three, and Johnny never spoke about a grandfather before. So I don’t know who Johnny was really talking about. But whoever did what they did, it kept Johnny out of shock treatments.

Show 2 footnotes

Introduction, 1. ↩
Exercise 1. 1. ↩

The Big O is What It’s All About

[image error]“Glasgow Association of Observation and Curiosity” by Michael Gallacher

The use of original detail can be a sign of evolution for a writer. The red car becomes the 1976 cherry red Camero. Ice cream becomes salted caramel with chocolate sprinkles.

An even further evolution arises when an author interpolates those details into a reflection that not only reveals character or setting, but also reveals something about how we are as human beings. Holden Caufield, from The Catcher in the Rye, provides us with a fine example.

Let’s review.

Two sets of suitcases. Two sets of lives. Two sets of class backgrounds, one plastic, another leather. Stated with Holden’s ironic, angry but passive voice make his observation all the more breathtaking because he is so passive. (Shortly after arriving at Penn Station after escaping from yet another prep school from which he has been expelled, Holden sits in the telephone and lists out about twenty people he could call. Yet he calls none of them. This is a theme throughout the novel. Caufield says a lot but does very little.)

Salinger’s exposition on plastic versus leather suitcases carries such weight and suffering.

There is value, I think, in one expertly placed detail rather than gobs of them, which can dull a reader. I’m also reminded that Salinger does what I have not done in one of my current novel drafts. Caulfied’s observation is revelation rather than instruction. In my draft-in-progress, my characters tell each other about their class upbringings. Reading these sentences now I see how I have not dug deeper and let the character(s) reveal something about class. No. I don’t trust myself. So I have to tell you, and in the telling I opted for a passive approach: any old thing will do.

Here is how Salinger sets the scene:

For a while when I was at Elkton Hills, I roomed with this boy, Dick Slagle, that had these very inexpensive suitcases. He used to keep them under the bed, instead of on the rack, so that nobody’d see them standing next to mine. It depressed holy hell out of me, and I kept wanting to throw mine out or something, or even trade with him. Mine came from Mark Cross, and they were genuine cowhide and all that crap, and I guess they cost quite a pretty penny. 1

Then he wraps it up later in the paragraph:

The thing is, it’s really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs – if yours are really good ones and theirs aren’t. You think if they’re intelligent and all, the other person, and have a good sense of humor, that they don’t give a damn whose suitcases are better, but they do. They really do. It’s one of the reasons why I roomed with a stupid bastard like Stradlater. At least his suitcases were as good as mine. 2

Writing well, which I define as writing in ways that give your readers pause, should rely on Observation and not simply observation. To quote from science writer Maria Konnikova (from her book Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes):

Observation with a capital O…does entail more than, well, observation (the lowercase kind). It’s not just about the passive process of letting objects enter into your visual field. It is about knowing what and how to observe and directing your attention accordingly: what details do you focus on? What details do you omit? 3

Konnikova is describing how to have a prodigious memory. But her words just as accurately describe our tasks as writers.

It’s not a matter of any original detail; but the right one at the right time, that reveals character or setting or plot, that shows we have some control over our material. When we are great, and we all are from time to time, our Observations will reveal a thing or two about the human condition.

Show 3 footnotes

  I am quoting from Backbay Books/Little, Brown and Company edition (Chapter/Paragraph) (15.16) ↩
  I am quoting from Backbay Books/Little, Brown and Company edition (Chapter/Paragraph) (15.16) ↩
A much more thorough review of Konnikova’s book. ↩

Are You Creating Easy or Creating Well?

Writing well seems to me to be about all the small choices I make throughout the day.1 I can create something that is hard, that challenges me, or something that is easy.

What is easy, of course, changes over time. (Or that is my hope, anyway.)

She stomped across the room and slammed the door is now easy, and rather pedestrian, for me. She lifted the Colt .45 and obliterated her wife’s face from their wedding picture. It ripped off her face, too. But that was beside the point. The boom from the discharge set off the car alarm and the neighbor’s dog.

This seems more interesting, somewhat more distance, with the potential for irony and humor just at the surface. A little less easy, too.

Creating anything is never simple. Each of us knows in our heart when we write shit and when we’re pulling blood out of finger tips. I can write shit every day and not get better as a writer and not feel too great about myself, either.

Or I can choose to create something that stretches me, makes me nervous, makes think, “what the hell am I doing.”

And so it is with this blog. For ten years I’ve been blogging here. The majority of what I’ve created is forgettable, entirely forgettable. Even to me it is boring. I can’t imagine what it has been like for my readers.

Upgrading My Life

In January 2015 I hand wrote on the back of an old business card, “I want to upgrade my life in 2015.” Here I am in August and upgrading my life has come to mean that I must do something harder and with more effort on this blog, something that I want to learn, something that terrifies me.

So with sweaty palms and no clear vision for the end, I am changing the focus (or pinning down the focus?!?) of this blog. What interests me most now is how to get better as a writer. One way to do that is to write about the practice and craft of writing here. Blog entries will focus on the many tools available to us in English that can make our writing deeper and make the process of writing more rewarding.

I need to do this for me. With no formal plans to attend an MFA program, I must create my own, airy, light, writing workshop and hope that others will join me. Yes, please do!

I vow to post every Monday and Thursday to my email newsletter first. Then I will post that content to the blog. Part of upgrading my life is becoming someone I believe is reliable. So I must act in a reliable way to myself.

Vulnerability

I will also include my own writing in my newsletters. The only way I can encourage others to share with me is to share first, and share often. This may cause you to roll your eyes in disgust. If so, the unsubscribe button is always near at hand.

Vulnerability entails going to the edge and jumping. For me to jump means writing more fiction and sharing it and writing badly and sharing it.

I know I won’t create well every time I create. But I can strive to always create better.

My fervent hope is that you will join me in this new workshop I hope to create. You may sign up here.

 

 

 

Show 1 footnote

See the website of James Clear. His writing and research provides strong evidence that the long term is very much determined by short term choices ↩

How I Got More Out of My Writing Process

Cogitating Is Not Procrastinating

I’ve tried every cure for consistent writing I’ve read about.

The lure of quality has satisfied me enough, at least for this long while. Why bother writing everyday when I can produce decent quality on short notice?

I’m just someone who doesn’t write every day, I said.

The truth is I have always thought myself a writing fraud, though lazy better describes better my self-assessment. Why work hard when writing has never been that difficult for me? I’m not procrastinating, I’m cogitating!

Right. Quiet as kept, the cogitating ate into my self-esteem and played right into my fears of ignominy. You know the one where you dream people will be reading your words 200 years into the future? That was me. But since I was cogitating and not writing,  no one would read what I wrote in the future.

How could they? Statistically I gave myself no chance. My output had been too low. That connection – between output and wider recognition -was lost on me. I was just someone who didn’t write every day.

[Cue baby’s wail here.]

More is More

Recently I began lifting weights. Again. For like the upteenth time. A desire for a  revision of my top surgery motivates me. I want to have as big and lean a chest as I can. This will be my last surgery, and I want to make it a big one.

[Cue forehead hitting the desk.]

Big Ones happen by doing Small Things frequently. That is to say, I achieve a fuller, leaner chest by working out x times per week for x weeks. Each workout is small. But over time the result is the Big One.

More muscles = more weekly work-out sessions.

This time the working out led me to the realization that writing is no different.

More writing = more output.

Regardless of the quality, my productivity goes up.

In the world of goal vs process, the process of little steps every day leads to big goal outcomes. For example, writing 1,000 words 5 days a week (because writing is, after all, a job) for 49 weeks results in 245,000 words per year. That’s a lot of Big Ones. Like a novel or three; mucho blog entries; newsletters, etc.

The Little Becomes the Big

How I failed to grasp this reality is beyond me. Perhaps I just wanted to continue to feel shitty about myself. The old self-fulfilling prophesy thing, etc., etc. The whole thing is now so simple. I can write about 1000 words a day, five days a week. Easily.

I exert no mental pressure as to what I will write about. As a lifelong opinionated blabber mouth means I rarely lack for anything to say. There is still no pressure. I write what I write. Even when I don’t feel like it.

That’s another amazing thing. I finally understand why motivation and will power are terribly shifty friends, ready to flee when I most need them. It’s easier to show up and write than sit around wailing about what a loser I am and why my writing sucks and blah. Blah. Blah.

On the days when I haven’t felt like writing, I’ve told myself to just write one sentence. And it works! The words start to come.

I may not every produce anything of merit. My self-esteem though has begun to solidify. It’s like, “Yeah. I’m a writer. I write like it’s a job. Five days a week.”

Each single, little day strung together is making for some big gains and realizations. I’m getting more out of my writing process because I’m putting more into it, a little each day.

 

 

 

 

A Confederate Flag Flew from a Northern House

On a recent daily morning walk, Ms. H. and I discovered a house around the corner from us flying a two-sided, U.S./Confederate flag. We live in a tiny town in southeast Michigan, a state that outlawed slavery in the 1830s and fought on the Union side during the Civil War.

At this point, I am supposed to point out that the confederate flag is a symbol of racism, particularly Jim Crow. And it is, of course. But as I reflected on how to begin this piece, I realized the double-sized nature of this particular flag speaks to the history of the United States.

The Union Fought to End Slavery?

Michigan sent Union troops to fight in the civil war. What this really means is that my state, and all Union states, fought to keep the Union together, a Union where slavery would be allowed to continue.

At the outset of the war, Lincoln had stated very clearly that he opposed slavery personally but placating the South was more important:

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” [Read: The Best Inaugural Addresses Ever]

Abolitionism grew after Union soldiers interacted with fleeing slaves, who lived not in refugee camps, but in contraband camps. Cogitate on that for a moment. Contraband defines goods that have been imported or exported illegally.

Fleeing slaves lived in contraband camps run by Union soldiers. Like many southerners, northerners also believed that African-Americans were not fully human.

We in the North suffer from the delusion that the Civil War was about ending slavery. It wasn’t.

The war was about forcing the southern states back into the Union. With the inflation-adjusted equivalent of slaves valued at about 3 billion dollars (so I heard Ta-Neihisi Coats claim earlier this year), and many New York banks getting quite rich off the slave trade, and a bone-deep belief that African-Americans really were less than human (let’s not forget the 3/5s clause of our founding document), can we really claim with fully integrity that slavery was a southern problem only?

History Isn’t Ala Carte Menu

The Confederate Flag is inextricably intertwined with our national flag. Every state in the United States that could have legal slavery did so. Michigan, Illinois, Maine, New York. All of them had legalized slavery at some point in its history. We prefer to overlook this fact, I think. Southerners (which I define as anyone, anywhere in the U.S. who explicitly affirms a symbol such as the Confederate Flag) become convenient tropes for our forgetfulness.

We forget that the institutionalizing of slavery was part of our founding document. It is a much a part of our early American history as the Preamble to the Constitution. Yet we continually refuse to acknowledge or confront our past with any semblance of honesty. Because we aren’t Southern, we are somehow not part of the United States history of slavery. But history is rather like karma. We don’t get away with anything.

We don’t get to pick the parts of history we don’t like. If we get teary eyed over the preamble, then with equally open eyes we must embrace the 3/5ths clause, the contraband camps, the institutionalized segregation that existed (and I would argue still exists) in Detroit, New York, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia.

The double-sided U.S./Confederate flag are two sides of the same history. Southern history and southern slavery and southern segregation is Northern history and Northern slavery and Northern segregation. Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not doesn’t make it less so.

Security Style for Creatives – How Websites Work

Understanding how websites work provides the foundation through which we can understand how websites get hacked. My first goal is that you have such understandings, so that when you contract with a designer/developer, you will know what questions to ask about your website’s security. My second goal is right understanding so you don’t pull a Jay Sennett on your website. That’s where you think you know what your doing. But you don’t and get hacked.

What makes website security even more frustrating? Creatives like musicians, writers and photographers turn over website design to designers, many of whom know little about website security, too.

Would you turn over your abode’s security to your interior designer? I didn’t think so.

How a Website Works

Bluehost created this lovely little video below on how websites work. Here are they key points. In parenthesis I describe weaknesses that can allow hackers in.

How Websites Work

Websites are files contained in a series of folders. (Weaknesses are:

The files themselves. WordPress has known vulnerabilities in the files that can, without constant security patches, provide hacker opportunities. Third-party editions in wordpress, called plugins, are a vast treasure trove of hacking opportunities, as are the themes that make WordPress look pretty.
The permission settings of the files and folders. Each file and folder on the server has a read-write-execute “mode.” Some settings are very secure. Others leave your site vulnerable to attack. More in a future post.
The setting a person uses to upload the files to the server. Some settings are extremely secure. Other settings are not. Again I’ll explain more in a future post.
Passwords you use to access your files/folders/software.)

Browsers use a computer language called HTML and CSS to make or render your site on a computer. (Weaknesses are:

Browsers contain security vulnerabilities that have allowed hackers to create malware that you download unknowningly. This malware can then track your keystrokes, for example, and allow hackers to know your passwords, for example.)

Servers are computers used to store and serve the files to anyone’s computer who requests your website url. (Weaknesses are:

Most of us use shared hosting because it is significantly cheaper than private hosting. Shared hosting means your files and folders are stored on a server with scores of other files and folders, each of them an opportunity for hacking.(Weaknesses are:

In a shared hosting environment, your files become vulnerable. Very vulnerable. Your files may be very secure but that security becomes compromised because other files may not be secure. What’s even worse, is that some computer hacks actually target the server, potentially infecting thousands and thousands and thousands of servers. GoDaddy has had servers hacked. My hosting company has had servers hacked. You would think hosting companies would be expert-ninja security experts, deft at thwarting attacks, but they often aren’t. Running servers is actually a full-time job.)

Domain Name Servers (DNS) provide the addresses for your web addresses. Think of DNS as addresses books for all the web urls around the world. (Weaknesses are:

DNSs are under constant threat from hackers.

As you can see, hacking opportunities are baked right into a website’s existence. With good security style, which I’ll be discussing in the upcoming weeks, you can do a darn good job of protecting your website, even a in a shared hosting environment.

I Got Hacked, Part 2

Getting hacked has been a tiring but rewarding experience. Absurd, yes?

Let me explain. I have spent my entire adult life learning how to be more responsible for myself, my stuff, my projects and my people. Responsibility frees me. No longer am I beholden to others. I am also no longer beholden to my own fears.

Responsibility entails knowledge and a willingness to act on that knowledge.

When I got hacked, I realized I had done something very, very, very stupid.

WordPress is a web-based system that runs through a web database system called MySQL. Structured Query Language is relational-database (data in one field can be related to data in another field through a relationship) that is about 45 years old. Without SQL (and php, but that’s another discussion) wordpress would be unable to save posts and pages and comments.

It would be like a car without an engine.

I run WordPress myself (as opposed to wordpress.com). That means I have access to the MySQL databases attached to my wordpress files.

The gold standard for web security with regard to wordpress (and any website running SQL) is to have one username per website per SQL database. That means the database attached to jaysennett.com should have one username (call it user1); the database attached to homofactuspress.com should have a second, different username (called it user2); and so on, for all my domains.

Why should this be the gold standard?

If a hacker gains access to the database information (which is quite easy to do, actually, since that information is contained in the configuration file that runs wordpress), they can only vandalize/hijack one website.

I’m sure you can see where this is going because that is not what I did. Here’s what I did. Each domain/website had the same username for the database running it. So when they hacked the jaysennett configuration file, they gained access to all three database files.

This is a really, really, really STUPID thing to do. And it is very irresponsible. Not even to my readers, however few they are, but to me! I had wasted my own time and money resources.

I was too smart to know how stupid I was. That’s how stupid I was. But I’m learning and quickly. And the reward has come from becoming responsible for my websites. Websites require responsibility. I’m still amazed that I even have to right such a sentence. Everyone knows houses require responsibility. But websites?

Yes, the website will require maintenance. Yes, security is something you will be responsible for. Yes, having a website is a responsibility.

The Impacts of a Hacked Website, Tony Perez, Sucuri Co-Founder/CEO

Are you a responsible website owner? Do you have security style?

I Got Hacked

Do you have security style? I don’t.

Late last week I discovered my personal site here had been hacked. Because I am the dumbest website administrator ever, the hackers were then able to gain access to the site at Homofactus Press and the site at Transgender Cartoon Gallery. Homofactus Press and Transgender Cartoon Gallery were defaced.

Defacing is electronic vandalism. They destroyed image folders and my theme at Homofactus Press, and essentially destroyed every entry at Transgender Cartoon Gallery.

My personal site got hijacked by spammers sending links to bogus Tiffany websites.

I thought I could take care of it myself; clean out the infected files and restore the vandalized sites through backups I had. Which I did. Then the hacks got worse. I lost sleep and time.During one 24-hour-period I slept only 20 minutes.

But I gained a sense of how important website security it is. Without good security, I had treated my websites as if they were homes in which I left all the doors and windows unlocked. Maybe I locked a window or two and an occasional door.  Sure. The net result was the still the same, though. Open windows and doors are still open, even when two others are closed.

I had three websites which were vulnerable in toto. I was not responsible for my websites. In fact, I was completely irresponsible.

As a writer, I care deeply about how I archive my work. Backups ensure there will always be a copy of my work available to me. I care about my money and watch how I spend it. Financial responsibility gives me time freedom, something very important to me as a creative person. Marketing my brand is also important to me.

Website security? Not so much. The sad fact remains I had no security style. None.I simply did not care enough about my websites – and the hours and hours and hours of time and money I invested in them – to do the right thing for myself.

To be continued.

Toni Morrison & Angela Davis – The Purpose of Freedom

[image error]

I am reminded of the tremendous work Morrison accomplished as an editor at Random House. During her tenure she published Toni Cade Bambara and Angela Davis.

“I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.’”

Twenty-Five Cent Words

Reviewing another writer’s work is a great responsibility. One of the greatest ones, I think, is my responsibility as a reviewer to understand what a writer is trying to say and how they are trying to say it. Need I say that whether I like the work or not is irrelevant? I’m not sure I like Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. That it is a work of genius I have no doubt.

Some writers use multisyllabic words (i.e. twenty-five cent words) in their prose. Others do not. But I take it as article of faith that if a writer uses a twenty-five cent word, or, god forbid, a fifty-cent word, they do so for very good reasons. As a reviewer

Thus the responsibility as a reviewer falls to me look the word up in the dictionary. A review comment that goes “you use twenty-five cent words when ten-cent words will do” smacks of a horribly, lazy kind of anti-intellectual arrogance. Words contain both rhythm and meaning. In the case of verbs, our English language contains words with tremendous nuance. A character can gallop, prance, traipse and slink. Each word conveys a different meaning, far richer than walked like a horse, walk with high, springy steps, to walk around aimlessly yet seemingly with purpose and to walk furtively.

As a reader, I take no offense when an author uses a word I don’t know. If I’m feeling ambitious, I’ll look it up while reading. If not, I’ll note it and review the definition at a later time. I never feel that the author has somehow broken some secret covenant with the me that says the author shall never remind me that I don’t know everything. Nor do I feel the author lords his intelligence over me when she uses a word like mendacious.

If a reader refuses to look up a word in the dictionary, as writers that is not our concern. But as reviewers we have an obligation to look up the damn word! When we do, we learn a new word for our own writing; but, more importantly, we come just that much closer to being better reviewers.

A critique that scolds the writer for using words the reviewer doesn’t understand – and is too lazy to look up in the dictionary – says everything about the reviewer and nothing about the writer. Which means the reviewer has not helped the writer at all .I’ve wasted her time because she has had to read my stupid, helpless review.

As writers we are in this big, crazy thing together. Respect should be a given. Part of respect is humility. A writer who refuses to review definitions of unknown words is a writer who has ceased to grow and is now trite.

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