Jay Sennett's Blog, page 8

Incense

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Follow Your Intuition

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Today I plead with each you to follow your intuition. The voice that wakes you at 1:00 am and urges to write an important character sketch; or the urge to return to a just photographed spot and explore further.

On my bike ride home I had a flash of inspiration about some street art I had just shot. “Oh! I could shoot it from this angle.”

“You can do it another time, add it to your never ending list of things to shoot.”

Then: “What the heck? Why don’t you go back? Ms. H. isn’t waiting for you at home. You have no other obligations. Go! Isn’t this time about pursuing your creative life no matter what?!? Go. Right. Now.”

So I did and found the lovely moment above. It occurred to me after I began my trek home the second time inspiration is like a renewable resource, but with a hitch. If I don’t renew it when it tells me to then it becomes nonrenewable.

Once delayed it becomes harder to access and less inspiring when it does arrive.

Right now I am writing this to you all as I prepare for a trip to Denver. I could have waited until my return, yes. But why wait?

Once this story is out, Inspiration will have another for me. But for that to happen I must renew it every day.

So must you.

Creativity is a Marathon

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One of the challenges of living a creative life arises after the initial thrill of creating disappears.

How do we keep the work interesting to ourselves?

Because I think we can all agree we find ourselves thinking from time to time how lovely a desk job would be, right? Because the glimmer faded awhile back, maybe between shopping, marketing and cleaning. And I’m not strong like J.K. Rowling who apparently could let the housework go while she scribed the Harry Potter series.

With the thrill gone living a creative life becomes living with emotions American’s deny at every turn: frustration, boredom and loss of confidence. We are not, in the end, Americants. We’re Americans.

We deserve peak experiences every minute of the day.

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But a living creatively guarantees we exist in the most un-American of spaces. We find our work uninspired. It isn’t bad, but it isn’t particularly good, either. We find our work uninspiring to ourselves. We’ve been at this creative thing long enough to know that we don’t find inspiration in our work no one else will, either.

I spend most of my creative life thinking why the bonkers am I doing any of it? Trivial things become important: the correct writing instruments; the right attitude (as in I can’t push my pencil across the page unless I’m in the right frame of mind!!!!!); or even perfect weather (I know, right??).

Now I’m learning to game my little infinite feedback loop. Oh, so you can only write on the iPad? Do it on the iPad. You can only shoot with the iPhone 6 or Ricoh or only film? Then do that. You must clean the house first? Just sweep the wooden floors then get started.

Sweeping the floors seems to have become a ritual to help me when my creative discipline fails me. I recall Twyla Tharp discussing the value of rituals in her book The Creative Habit. She exercises quite early in the morning and rightfully acknowledges the difficult of doing this, even for her, a dancer by training. The ritual she devised to get her to the gym was contracting with a particular cab driver to be outside her apartment at a designated time. Once she got in the cab she knew she would work out.

I have less lofty aspirations. So I sweep or straighten up the kitchen. The ritual eases me into the work of creating. It’s like my version of the long-distance runners water break.

If I were to ever run a marathon, I think I could do it only if I could kill all my thoughts about the end. Crossing the finish line; a hot bath after it’s over; how I will feel taking off my shoes; these thoughts and the others like them would need to be gone from my mind.

I could run the marathon if my only thoughts focused on  putting one foot in front of the other, holding my upper body in the correct position and breathing.

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Living the creative life is kind of similar, I realize now. The focus is on this article or that photograph or a new story. One word after another. One more photograph from a different perspective. Right. Left. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Welcome to creative living for the next fifty years.

On Change and Self-Management

 

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On June 30, 2016, after 12.5 years of employment at my local public university, my unit dissolved my position and set me free.

The likelihood I would have left a mind-numbingly boring job on my own seemed about nil. So the boot out the door has proven beneficial.

I had no idea how much time I spent managing the stress of boredom. My mental focus could now be on my self-directed projects, I told myself on July 1.

Except I took a little detour into photography and instagram.

Photography has been a lifelong, though periodic, hobby. Even though it was only six weeks ago or so, I can’t recall what caused me to want to pick up my iPhone and start capturing again.

But I did, and I have, something like 2500 photos, which is nothing on an iPhone. Hit that Burst button and five seconds later you’ve got 35 photos.

The other thing I did, well, I became a social media harlot. Instagram gave me likes and comments and boy did I do a lap dance, several in fact. My old lover Writing got left in the studio, waiting for my return.

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Writing requires extreme mental diligence on my part. It doesn’t have the ease I find in photography. Photography thrills me. Writing, not so much.

Simone Biles’ coach said in an interview she realized soon after beginning their productive time together that Simone needed to have fun to continue feeling motivated. So she gave Simone fun.

I don’t really know how to make writing fun, except to try to not take myself so seriously. Even saying that doesn’t help much.

Words inspire, comfort and kill. Sure, people go ape-shit crazy over images, like Robert Mapplethorpe’s penises or cartoons of the Prophet.

But Donald Trump wouldn’t be the Republicant’s Presidential nominee if he paraded photos depicting “making America great again” (like what would that be? Jim Crow? Concentration camps filled with Muslims?). Nope. Too literal.

Words give us too much wiggle room, too many opportunities for us to interpret a word according to our needs and wants. I despair being misunderstood or, worse, being boring.

All of this is to say I  don’t take much confidence from my writing, not in the way I can, and do, from my photography.

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When I don’t feel confident I put things aside, which results in the worst possible solution: Not writing makes me feel shitty, which in turn deters any interest in writing.

This blahblahblah cycle of write-avoid-write feels ancient and familiar.

Photography, though, has somehow reinvigorated my writing. I imagine my words next to my images and that seems fun.

I’ll try that one for now. Because I must keep creating. You must keep creating. Good day. Bad day. Every day.

Yours in the work,

Jay

This One Trick is at the Heart of Writing

In her book, Imaginative Writing, Janet Burroway states, “There is a simple trick at the heart of imaginative writing.”

Read the following statement, she asks us: “Not everything that appears to be valuable is actually valuable.” We generally understand it. But if the sentence were to be rewritten as “All that glistens is not gold,” then, she writes, “You literally ‘see’ what I ‘mean.'”

If we use words that evoke our senses – things that can be seen, heard, touched, smelled and tasted – then we can create a world our reader can enter. Consider this passage from A Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway:

“They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.”

Would we find an affinity with Hemingway’s statement if it were written in more abstract language? “Within each of lies dormant our future selves, a self that will do better in life if one adopts a healthy sense of humor.” Probably not.

Artists other than writers know they create in the realm of the senses. Musicians create in and with sound, the dancer in movement, the painter in light and color, the sculptor in tactile materials. Writers create with words, which in and of themselves are abstractions.

We must endeavor to remove abstract language from our prose, whether it is fiction or nonfiction (but especially if it is nonfiction). Abstract language works well in legal briefs and business proceedings but not novels or short stories.

For those of us driven to write fiction, we want to thrust out into the world the stories that obsess us, in part because I think we are driven to observe and explain human natures. We best do this through using images. Nonfiction will also become more memorable and appealing through the skillful use of images.

Images are a series of words (or a word) that evokes in us two ore more senses. Again Burroway, “An image appeals to the senses. This is the foundation of all imaginative writing.”

To write images successfully we must use our senses and our mind. We must know when our language becomes bogged down in abstractions. Burroway offers more than several examples.

A thought without an image:

It is best to consider consequences before proceeding.

An image that describes the same thought:

Look before you leap.

A thought without an image:

The situation is being manipulated by peripheral interests.

An image that describes the same thought:

Wag the dog.

This may all seem overly simple. I know, however, I must remain vigilant to creeping abstractions in my writing. And I know even with twenty years and thousands of words written in my past, I never tire of being reminded of the keystone importance of images in writing.

I’ll close with a Toni Morrison quote from her Nobel Prize speech:

“For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.”

Verb Tense and Writing Fiction

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Verb tense is a very important tool in the writer’s toolbox. Will you write in the present simple and continuous? The past simple? Both?

Verb tense offers us the unlikely ability to time travel. This becomes particularly important when we explore shifting mental and emotional states of our characters. How authors depict human consciousness fascinates me. As a student of my own mind, I never tire of writers willing to explore this aspect of humanity.

Describing shifting mental states and movement through past and present can be challenging for writers. We must remain vigilant to the need to direct our reader’s attention to the right place (here) at the right time (now/yesterday/tomorrow).

(We need not worry after these details all the time. Sometimes we tell a story using straight past simple. And that’s okay. Really. Not everything need be intricate. Just as it’s fun to read a straight ahead simple romance, it’s also fun to write one. We need that sometimes, so go for it. But I also think it is invaluable for us to push our own comfort zones and use tools we’ve not used before.)

But what do we do when we the right place is in the past and the right time is the present? Why might we want to pursue this strategy as a writer?

Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight uses verb tenses to signal when Sasha Jensen’s fragile emotional and mental state. Sasha has been rescued by a friend from her room in London where she had been drinking herself to death and sent to Paris.

The City of Light overflows with memories. Indeed the novel begins with her Parisian room querying her:

‘Quite like old times,’ the room says. ‘Yes? No?’

That the street outside the room ends in a flight of stairs, ‘what they call an impasse,” signals to us Sasha’s emotional and spiritual state and also tells us there will be no happy ending here.

Rhys’ hops through past and present tense with precision. Some of Sasha’s experiences of people’s hypocrisy and cruelty happen in the past, even though the framing story is told in the present. An interaction with a woman at a bar shortly after her return to Paris leads Sasha to beginning sobbing, which causes the woman to scold her.

Rhys uses the past tense here, which seems natural. We know that Sasha Rhys’ conveys this by having Sasha describe the crying incident as “That was last night.”

But Rhys wants to blur distinctions between nightmare and reality. How she does this is quite something, I think.

In a brilliant passage, in which Sasha describes a past job, she tells us about this past incident in the present tense. The past is living thing in Sasha, as it is for us. We relive with Sasha the cruel treatment from her manager.

Rhys initially frames the story in the past tense.

…it was a long white-and-gold room with a dark polished floor. Sasha begins her memory/story with a description of the beautiful woman’s dress atelier where she worked for three weeks. Her job was to greet customers and convey them to the next floor. “It was dreary.” Management forbade her from reading. “I would feel as if I were drugged, sitting there, watching those damned dolls, thinking what a success they would have made of their lives if they had been women.”

(An aside: What a brilliant image, class and gender expectations given to us in such an exquisite manner -dolls versus women.)

Sasha continues to describe a particular day at work in which the London-based managing director visited the Paris shop. She relates her thought process, again in the past tense:

“what’s he like? Oh, he’s the real English type. Very nice, very, very chic, the real English type, le businessman….I thought: ‘Oh, my God, I know now what these people mean when they say the real English type,’

and here comes Rhys performing her brilliance as we shift from the past memory to a current action/memory/story that we are all (re)living:

…He arrives. Bowler-hat, majestic trousers, oh-my-God expression, ha-ha eyes – I know him at once. He comes up the steps with Salvation behind him, looking very worried. (Salvatini is the boss of our shop).”

And so we are off. Sasha’s descent is harrowing and Rhys’ writing absolutely brilliant. We as readers become ensnared in Sasha’s teetering madness, in large part because Rhys knows when to use the past and present tenses.

Jean Rhys for my money is a more interesting writer than Virginia Woolf. Rhys hailed from Dominica, and her mother was Creole. Her arrival to London’s high society taught her quickly about upper-crust British racism and classism and sexism. Unlike Woolf, who seemed unable to gain any distance between the world and her class standing, Rhys described upper-class cruelty with a keen, brutal eye.

Her most famous book is Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” told from the perspective of Mrs. Rochester, the madwoman locked in Rochester’s attic so fascinating and frightening to Jane. Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole woman from Jamaica, is betrothed and married to an unnamed English husband. As their marriage progresses the unnamed husband renames her Bertha, declares her mad, confines her to the locked attic room, where she does indeed go mad.

If you haven’t read Wide Sargasso Sea, please add it to your rotation as well as Good Morning, Midnight. Rhys needed, in the words of Diana Athill, her longtime editor at André Deutsch Limited, a nanny. Athill goes on to say in the video below that despite Rhys thorough inability to care for herself, Rhys was someone worth saving. I agree with Ms. Athill. Rhys’ writing was that important.

(This video contains a super BONUS discussion from Ms. Athill about the differences between working with nonfiction and fiction writers.)

DIY MFA: Writing Prompt, No. 2

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Writing notebook time!

A very exciting interview with poet Eileen G’Sell in which she describes her process to fire up her writing. Poetry can provide infinite possibilities for both the fiction and nonfiction writer as poetry teaches us about dynamic word choices.

G’Sell shares that how words sound inspires her to keep writing:

Going back to sound, no matter the type of writing, I love calling attention to the tension or “heat” between words based on what they mean, how they’re spelled, and what they sound like. The sounds and appearance of letters can actually “cue” me to keep on writing.

A recent piece I wrote for Flavorpill, about Lana Del Rey, is one instance where this “sonic heat” presides: “The Reign of Del Rey: Lana, Longing, and Generation Z.” Of course the “Rei” and “Rey” rhyme, but the different spelling calls attention to how “Rey” is also a Spanish word, meaning “king,” such that Lana is “of the king” in terms of surname. “Lana” and “longing” are not only alliterative, but share the same trochaic beat. The third “n” in each creates an exciting tension.

She also shares three prompts she uses when she can’t write. My personal favorite is Hot Words! in which she writes two lists, one contains abstract emotions and the second, concrete objects:

2. Hot Words!

Look at your lists and combine some of the abstract emotional words with the concrete terms. You’ll need to transform some of these nouns into adjectives to pair them up (for instance, “fear” into “fearful”). After matching the abstract with the concrete, which pairs are the most surprising or have the most heat?

The phrase “fearful shoe” appeared in my journal when I wrote out this exercise. As to whether or not the shoe induces fear in others or is afraid, I cannot say. G’Sell shares that if an exercise gets weird that’s a good thing.

She also offers a series of prompts to write about an emotion or sense without using any words that relate to those emotions or senses. If you want to write about anger, you cannot use ire, rage, pissed, for example. I chose the sense of taste, specifically salty, and wrote in my journal, “The fish made me drink a gallon water.” (This exercise reminds me of Borges The Garden of Forking Paths, a parable about time [at least I think it is!] in which time is never mentioned.)

We often become dead to the energy latent in words. I know I do. Email, newsletters, 24-hour newsfeed, often composed and consumed in haste, can lack dynamism. We fall into a rut of parroting what we read.

What someone else writes, however, does not concern us. Our words are our concern and our responsibility. In the end, we can communicate with oft used phrases or make different writing choices.

I want to do more. At the very least I want to thrill myself with the very rare fantastic turn of phrase, even if it’s only once every eternity.

 

One Cool Trick to Shift Points of View

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photo by Will White

Shifting between different points of view requires skill. This is something of a truism in writing. There are many who try and fail. The ones who succeed make it seem like they are writing out a laundry list. Their work appears effortless. Today I want to make a case for adding Chester Himes to that small group of writing who can and do shift successfully from one point of view to another.

Chester Himes wrote a series of noir fiction novels in the 1950s and 60s. Set in Harlem Coffin Ed Jones and Gravedigger Johnson work as detectives for the New York City police department. Mordant and fatalistic Chester Himes described a world shot through with racism and classicism that neither Dashiell Hammett nor Raymond Chandler seemed to notice.

Recently I read Himes’ lesser known, All Shot Up (public library). In it Himes offers us a skillful shift from third-person close to third-person omniscient.

 

Himes creates a kind opening wide shot with a description of the bitter cold and then settles on a medium shot of the man he names “joker” at work, a man stealing tires from a car on Convent Avenue. He needs two tires and has managed to remove one.

“He had the inside wheel jacked up on the slanting street, making the car tilt dangerously. But he was unconcerned. He worked swiftly, without light.”

A passing car halts his efforts, a Cadillac that looks as though it’s made of solid gold. The joker sees the passengers as a result of the illuminated dash panel. What he sees disturbs him.

“The joker’s heart gave a lurch. There was something shockingly familiar about the face. But it was impossible for his own true Sassafras to be riding about in a brand-new Caddy with two strange men at this hour of the night.”

The joker then witnesses the Cadillac hit an old lady crossing the street, or so he thinks. Within moments she is up on all fours, laughing. Just when he and we think she is safe, a black Buick carrying three uniformed police officers hits her square in the bum and sends her to her doom.

Himes continues on with the use of third-person close. The joker becomes disoriented from what he has just observed. The first car wheel he removed brings him back to reality and off he goes, rolling the wheel in front of him.

Now here is where Himes shows us a nifty trick for moving from third-person close to third-person omniscient from within the scene. He doesn’t tell us, he shows us. And he shows us using the motion of the tire.

The Joker flees the scene of the murder with his single tire in front of him. He pushes it away from what has just happened but loses control of the tire as he descends down a hill. The wheel takes a huge bounce in the direction of two police officers. Here our narrator must leave, as he doesn’t want to tangle with the police.

From this point to the end of the chapter, Himes moves to third-person omniscient and uses the wheel as the point of action to weave his descriptions.

“The wheel kept on down the street and knocked the legs out from underneath the two cops, knocked down a lady coming from the supermarket with a bag full of groceries, swerved out into the street, passed through the traffic oaf 125th Street without touching a thing, bounced over the sidewalk and crashed through the street-level door of a tenement facing the start of Convent Avenue. A heavy-set, middle-aged man wearing a felt skull cap, old mended sweater, corduroy pants and felt slippers, was emerging from the back apartment when the wheel crashed into the back wall of the hallway. He gave it a look, then did a double take. He looked about quickly, and, seeing no one, grabbed it, ducked back into his apartment and locked the door. It wasn’t every day manna fell from heaven.”

From this point Himes moves into third-person omniscient. Masterful, simply masterful.

I probably would have just started the next chapter in third-person omniscient because I’m no Chester Himes. Thankfully he is a fantastic teacher, and this opening shift from third-person close to third-person omniscient is now a permanent instrument in my writing tool box.

 

Writing Prompt, No. 1

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“Glasgow Association of Observation and Curiosity” by Michael Gallacher

I use this photo when I write about the importance of concrete, specific details in writing. Whether we write fiction, nonfiction or both, the more tangible the details, the more memorable the story.

These are warm-up prompts, not to be confused with the longer writing exercises I post here. Think about 250-325 words as compared to 700-1000 for the writing exercises.

Describe this scene using your senses. Let us see the building and hear and smell the streetscape, feel the texture of the bricks, taste some of the smells in the air.

To get you started:

Maybe you’re writing a nonfiction article on the rise of magical graffiti after the publication of Harry Potter. Or you’re writing a piece on what happens to signage when a building is shuttered. After all, before it was the Glasgow Association of Observation & Curiosity, it had a different purpose. Or maybe you curate a journal devoted to the ampersand. What a literate graffiti artist, to use both chalk and the ampersand, instead of the written word and.

Or maybe you’re writing a sci-fi mystery and only those with special powers can see the chalked words. Or perhaps your protagonist walks towards a newer, taller building as she contemplates jumping to her death from the roof when she halts in front of the graffiti. Or write something else.

Do your choices create a mood, reveal character or emotion?

For extra credit, try using a few different points-of-view for the same scene. Just remember to keep all that lovely specific detail in the scene.

These 3 Words Will Improve Your Writing Guaranteed

Todd VanDerWeff makes a brilliant case for why most writing fails. We too often use “and then” as the connective tissue in a story.

Riffing off of Tony Zhou’s video essay F for Fake (1973) – How to Structure a Video Essay, VanDerWeff describes the three words that structure all great narrative fiction and nonfiction stories: but, therefore and meanwhile.

Here’s how each of these words works in storytelling.

But: This introduces the idea of opposition. The hero has done something, but the villain has done something to oppose it.

Therefore: This introduces the idea of progression. The hero has done something, and therefore the world adjusts to her actions (usually with some new struggle the hero must overcome).

Meanwhile: This introduces the idea of parallelism, of two things happening at the same time, so we can always cut to something else. The hero is saving the world. Meanwhile, her friend is off dealing with the fallout.

These aren’t just good words for fiction writers; they’re good concepts for all writers to keep in mind.

Zhou learned this from Orson Welles’ F for Fake, which Zhou describes as his bible. Please watch the Zhou’s video above and read the full article here. Fantastic, absolutely fantastic.