David Donavel's Blog, page 2
October 27, 2013
Mexico
When it comes to real life events, I have shabby memory. My wife tells me it’s selective, which is her way of being kind. I have friends who seem to recall every day of their lives and when they are recounting stories in which I played a part I cannot remember, I feel a little like a ghost. A neuroscientist might be able to explain this deficiency, but I’d probably forget what she said.
Oddly, I do recall learning to read. The memories come to me as snapshots, but they do come. I recall reading groups from the tiny grades; sitting with my mother and a neighborhood playmate discovering that I could read words in the book that she could not; learning in an embarrassing way that the p in pneumonia is silent. One memory that is especially vivid comes from fifth grade. Miss Knope, our teacher, set aside time for individual silent reading and on the day in question, I had gotten my hands on a particularly compelling book. I got lost in it entirely, so lost, in fact, that I never heard her call an end to the reading period. There I sat in the corner of the room as far from PS #49 School as a fifth grader can get. I think I was in Mexico. She had to walk to my desk and shake my shoulder to bring me back. Looking up at her, seeing the other students and the classroom was something akin to waking from a dream. I don’t recall if that was the beginning of my career as a reader. It might be. Around that time I discovered the Black Stallion series by Walter Farley and I read as many of those as I could find, getting as lost in each one as I did in that class. By comparison, Black Beauty was thin and flat.
In the many years since fifth grade my tastes have changed and changed again, but I still love that business of entering the fictive world. That part of reading has remained constant. It’s travel without traffic or jet lag and if the book is especially rich, I never want it to end. I want to stay inside it just as I wanted to stay in Mexico when I was unintentionally ignoring Miss Knope. This pleasure is what people mean when they look forward to curling up with a good book. For non-readers the phrase must seem strange, about as enticing as cuddling with a porcupine.
It will come as no surprise, I suspect, to learn that with respect to entering imagined worlds, there is little difference between reading a book and writing one. Of course, coming upon the finished item as a reader is usually smooth sailing whereas writing the story often means a lot of backtracking, deleting, revisiting and shuffling to get the thing in proper working order. But in both cases there is that other world, a city or small town, people going about their business finding trouble or love, playing out their destinies. And best of all that other world, the imagined space, has something like a flavor or tint, its own particular emotional tone which is as vivid as any character or scene if much more difficult to define. The “flavor” of, say, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is distinctly different from anything else, even distinctly different from anything else by Faulkner. And when you return to a book, either as reader or writer, it’s as if you can taste it and it’s delicious. This literacy business is pretty special.
But what of the question of a book being good or bad? I was and still am an English teacher and for many years I walked around with the notion that I was encouraging not only reading, but the reading of good books. Some people call these “the classics.” I think I see now that I had for many years forgotten Miss Knope and my travels to Mexico. Do you see how poor my memory can be? Sometimes, apparently, even when you remember something it’s as good as forgotten. Memories ought to be useful and it occurs to me that I’ve found the use, at last, for my fifth grade travels. Whatever book I was reading then, whatever book it was that took me so far from that classroom, was a good book. And the Walter Farley books that followed were as good as were many, many more.
In the last twenty years or so I’ve become quite fond of most of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s very funny, spiritually and intellectually challenging. Ishmael and Queequeg are boon companions and sailing around on the Pequod turns out to be conducive to engaging meditation. Yet, I know other English teachers who cannot abide the novel. Moreover, when it first appeared, the critics had little use for it and it was not until much later that readers began to see its value. So, is it a good book? It seems to me the question has stopped making sense. Is it a good book? What are we asking? Is it a good book now but not when it was first published? Is it a good book for me, but not for you? Dare I say that it’s a good book if it carries you off, not to Mexico in this case, but rather to shimmering Asian seas? I think so. I think if it does that, if when you pick it up you can taste it and it’s delicious, then it’s a good book.
I have already said that when I make my own stories I enter into that seductive, compelling fictive world. It’s the best I can do. It’s the only thing I can do. I have no formula for making novels, nor do I attend to that army of agents and publishers, writers and teachers who are full of advice (for a fee of course) on how to make your book a screaming best seller. Some of my readers—there are a few—report that some of the books are “page turners.” For me, the good news is that these reports vary in such a way that each book is a page turner for at least some readers. Page turners. How excellent. At least some of the time I’m taking my readers to Mexico.
You can find them on Amazon as Kindle books at: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&f...
Oddly, I do recall learning to read. The memories come to me as snapshots, but they do come. I recall reading groups from the tiny grades; sitting with my mother and a neighborhood playmate discovering that I could read words in the book that she could not; learning in an embarrassing way that the p in pneumonia is silent. One memory that is especially vivid comes from fifth grade. Miss Knope, our teacher, set aside time for individual silent reading and on the day in question, I had gotten my hands on a particularly compelling book. I got lost in it entirely, so lost, in fact, that I never heard her call an end to the reading period. There I sat in the corner of the room as far from PS #49 School as a fifth grader can get. I think I was in Mexico. She had to walk to my desk and shake my shoulder to bring me back. Looking up at her, seeing the other students and the classroom was something akin to waking from a dream. I don’t recall if that was the beginning of my career as a reader. It might be. Around that time I discovered the Black Stallion series by Walter Farley and I read as many of those as I could find, getting as lost in each one as I did in that class. By comparison, Black Beauty was thin and flat.
In the many years since fifth grade my tastes have changed and changed again, but I still love that business of entering the fictive world. That part of reading has remained constant. It’s travel without traffic or jet lag and if the book is especially rich, I never want it to end. I want to stay inside it just as I wanted to stay in Mexico when I was unintentionally ignoring Miss Knope. This pleasure is what people mean when they look forward to curling up with a good book. For non-readers the phrase must seem strange, about as enticing as cuddling with a porcupine.
It will come as no surprise, I suspect, to learn that with respect to entering imagined worlds, there is little difference between reading a book and writing one. Of course, coming upon the finished item as a reader is usually smooth sailing whereas writing the story often means a lot of backtracking, deleting, revisiting and shuffling to get the thing in proper working order. But in both cases there is that other world, a city or small town, people going about their business finding trouble or love, playing out their destinies. And best of all that other world, the imagined space, has something like a flavor or tint, its own particular emotional tone which is as vivid as any character or scene if much more difficult to define. The “flavor” of, say, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is distinctly different from anything else, even distinctly different from anything else by Faulkner. And when you return to a book, either as reader or writer, it’s as if you can taste it and it’s delicious. This literacy business is pretty special.
But what of the question of a book being good or bad? I was and still am an English teacher and for many years I walked around with the notion that I was encouraging not only reading, but the reading of good books. Some people call these “the classics.” I think I see now that I had for many years forgotten Miss Knope and my travels to Mexico. Do you see how poor my memory can be? Sometimes, apparently, even when you remember something it’s as good as forgotten. Memories ought to be useful and it occurs to me that I’ve found the use, at last, for my fifth grade travels. Whatever book I was reading then, whatever book it was that took me so far from that classroom, was a good book. And the Walter Farley books that followed were as good as were many, many more.
In the last twenty years or so I’ve become quite fond of most of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s very funny, spiritually and intellectually challenging. Ishmael and Queequeg are boon companions and sailing around on the Pequod turns out to be conducive to engaging meditation. Yet, I know other English teachers who cannot abide the novel. Moreover, when it first appeared, the critics had little use for it and it was not until much later that readers began to see its value. So, is it a good book? It seems to me the question has stopped making sense. Is it a good book? What are we asking? Is it a good book now but not when it was first published? Is it a good book for me, but not for you? Dare I say that it’s a good book if it carries you off, not to Mexico in this case, but rather to shimmering Asian seas? I think so. I think if it does that, if when you pick it up you can taste it and it’s delicious, then it’s a good book.
I have already said that when I make my own stories I enter into that seductive, compelling fictive world. It’s the best I can do. It’s the only thing I can do. I have no formula for making novels, nor do I attend to that army of agents and publishers, writers and teachers who are full of advice (for a fee of course) on how to make your book a screaming best seller. Some of my readers—there are a few—report that some of the books are “page turners.” For me, the good news is that these reports vary in such a way that each book is a page turner for at least some readers. Page turners. How excellent. At least some of the time I’m taking my readers to Mexico.
You can find them on Amazon as Kindle books at: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&f...
October 9, 2013
Writer's Block
Years ago at the high school where I used to teach we had the chance to invite a working writer to visit and speak with some of our students. So long ago was this that I don’t recall what sort of things he wrote or where they were published. He was trim and fair and came to the occasion in fashionably conservative costume. He struck me as a no-nonsense kind of fellow. I remember being just a little intimidated by him partly because he was accomplished (i.e. published) in a way to which I aspired and partly because of his personal demeanor. At one point in our conversation, a student asked him what to do about writer’s block. Without hesitation, the writer replied, “Lower your standards.”
And there it is: diagnosis and treatment in three words.
In my retirement I teach one course a semester at one of the local community colleges. Because many of my students are learning English as they work toward their degrees, I ask them to write every week. I base this approach on the not very sophisticated idea that they’re likely to get better as writers with, and only with, a good deal of practice. Many of the students diligently grind out the papers and over the short time I’m with them, they make some small gains. The gains are small because learning to write, like learning to play French horn, takes time. At the beginning of the course, as a way to forestall the writer’s block to which beginners are especially vulnerable, I offer an instructional set piece. I draw a demon on the board and name him Ed, which is short for Editor. I go on to make the point that this demon resides within all of us and that his job is to veto any composition at all. Sit down before a computer screen or a blank piece of paper and before you’ve written a complete sentence, Ed is sneering at you, insisting that you’re a total moron and that it makes much more sense to go have a sandwich. And he doesn’t quit. He’s always there, always mocking, always sneering, belittling every word you write. He wins when your deadline arrives and you’ve got nothing. My advice to my students is the same as that offered by the visitor in my classroom: Kill the Editor. That’s the same as lowering standards. Get rid of that internal voice that demands perfection.
But it’s not easy. The Editor is like one of those terrible villains in horror stories. You plug him; he drops. You think he’s dead, but before you know it, he’s baaack. It’s a constant struggle, one that wastes time and energy.
It’s helpful, when you’re struggling with Ed, to remember that there is no penalty for crappy writing. None. Your fingers don’t fall off. You don’t lose money. Your family still puts up with you. It’s okay to write poorly. It really is okay. You don’t have to show your work to anyone and if you do and they don’t like it, most of the time they don’t say anything because they don’t want to damage your ego. So you don’t even get insulted.
Annie Lamott puts it this way (I paraphrase): Five hundred words and a shitty first draft. Which is another way of saying lower your standards. Lamott’s advice carries the notion that you can fix whatever mess you make, which is true. You can revise and revise and this is especially easy now when most of us write on computers where changes are easily made and do not require tedious hours of typing and retyping as they did in the old days.
My own version of writer’s block strikes most often when I’m maybe ten thousand words into a novel. By then, I’ve got characters and setting fairly well staked out and often the seeds of conflict. The block comes with plot. Something has to happen. I know that, but everything that comes to mind seems “really stupid.” That’s Ed talking. “Dave, this is really stupid. Go have a beer.” Ed can be persuasive. Ed’s idea is that I can the project entirely and start something new—which he can later sabotage. I try not to listen. Instead I muck around with this and that until I lose patience with both Ed and myself and finally one of my characters does something alarming or dangerous: a boy beans a companion in a sandlot baseball game; a husband becomes obsessed with another woman. When I say my “character does something” I mean that I don’t know what’s going to happen as a consequence or where the behavior might lead. I mean that I didn’t make him or her do whatever got done. It happened; they did it. I tagged along. I get myself into uncharted water. I simply push the story forward without a planned idea of where “forward “might take me. That is, I’ve lowered my standards.
Sometimes this works well, other times not so well. But in any case, I’m up and running and I’ve banished Ed to the nether world, at least for a while. Thus far keeping standards low has allowed me to produce eleven books. Whether they are any good is not for me to determine. Some of them can be found here:
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&f...
And there it is: diagnosis and treatment in three words.
In my retirement I teach one course a semester at one of the local community colleges. Because many of my students are learning English as they work toward their degrees, I ask them to write every week. I base this approach on the not very sophisticated idea that they’re likely to get better as writers with, and only with, a good deal of practice. Many of the students diligently grind out the papers and over the short time I’m with them, they make some small gains. The gains are small because learning to write, like learning to play French horn, takes time. At the beginning of the course, as a way to forestall the writer’s block to which beginners are especially vulnerable, I offer an instructional set piece. I draw a demon on the board and name him Ed, which is short for Editor. I go on to make the point that this demon resides within all of us and that his job is to veto any composition at all. Sit down before a computer screen or a blank piece of paper and before you’ve written a complete sentence, Ed is sneering at you, insisting that you’re a total moron and that it makes much more sense to go have a sandwich. And he doesn’t quit. He’s always there, always mocking, always sneering, belittling every word you write. He wins when your deadline arrives and you’ve got nothing. My advice to my students is the same as that offered by the visitor in my classroom: Kill the Editor. That’s the same as lowering standards. Get rid of that internal voice that demands perfection.
But it’s not easy. The Editor is like one of those terrible villains in horror stories. You plug him; he drops. You think he’s dead, but before you know it, he’s baaack. It’s a constant struggle, one that wastes time and energy.
It’s helpful, when you’re struggling with Ed, to remember that there is no penalty for crappy writing. None. Your fingers don’t fall off. You don’t lose money. Your family still puts up with you. It’s okay to write poorly. It really is okay. You don’t have to show your work to anyone and if you do and they don’t like it, most of the time they don’t say anything because they don’t want to damage your ego. So you don’t even get insulted.
Annie Lamott puts it this way (I paraphrase): Five hundred words and a shitty first draft. Which is another way of saying lower your standards. Lamott’s advice carries the notion that you can fix whatever mess you make, which is true. You can revise and revise and this is especially easy now when most of us write on computers where changes are easily made and do not require tedious hours of typing and retyping as they did in the old days.
My own version of writer’s block strikes most often when I’m maybe ten thousand words into a novel. By then, I’ve got characters and setting fairly well staked out and often the seeds of conflict. The block comes with plot. Something has to happen. I know that, but everything that comes to mind seems “really stupid.” That’s Ed talking. “Dave, this is really stupid. Go have a beer.” Ed can be persuasive. Ed’s idea is that I can the project entirely and start something new—which he can later sabotage. I try not to listen. Instead I muck around with this and that until I lose patience with both Ed and myself and finally one of my characters does something alarming or dangerous: a boy beans a companion in a sandlot baseball game; a husband becomes obsessed with another woman. When I say my “character does something” I mean that I don’t know what’s going to happen as a consequence or where the behavior might lead. I mean that I didn’t make him or her do whatever got done. It happened; they did it. I tagged along. I get myself into uncharted water. I simply push the story forward without a planned idea of where “forward “might take me. That is, I’ve lowered my standards.
Sometimes this works well, other times not so well. But in any case, I’m up and running and I’ve banished Ed to the nether world, at least for a while. Thus far keeping standards low has allowed me to produce eleven books. Whether they are any good is not for me to determine. Some of them can be found here:
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&f...
September 23, 2013
Marketing
The other day I was whining to a close friend about how disagreeable I find the whole business of self promotion that is regarded as necessary to selling one’s books, be they printed or e-books. In the middle of my rant, he interrupted and reminded me of the politician who disdained the grubby work of campaigning, and consequently lost. His point was that if you want to hold office, you’ve got to stand in the rain and shake hands, whether you like it or not. Lady Macbeth chides her husband in a similar way when he expresses hesitation about killing Duncan. Here she is at her humiliating best:
Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour,
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thy own esteem;
Letting "I dare not" wait upon "I would,"
Like the poor cat i' the adage.
For those of you who, like me until recently, do not know about the cat, the story concerns a feline who would like to eat a fish, but doesn’t want to get her feet wet.
Well, neither promoting one’s self in the land of politics nor pushing one’s own books in the hot competition for those few people who still read is as dire as regicide, certainly, but they all feel—at least to me—as if they participate in the same bad form: unseemly ambition, I suppose you could call it.
Nevertheless, I have to confess that I would like more readers, more sales even though my main motive in writing novels is the pleasure writing brings me (see Musings), not wealth and fame. It’s a small dilemma, one that I feel most acutely when, in conversation, people ask me if I am pursing publication, by which they mean Random House, not Kindle. The attitude seems to be that there is little point in doing all that work, all that writing, if you’re not going to make a buck. There is some sense in that idea which is why I have offered the books electronically. Even to me, a fellow who drifts toward ridiculous “artistic purity,” piling the books up on a hard drive or leaving them in a drawer feels empty. No. The novels ought to get out there and do their part, make something of themselves.
Not many years ago at the high school where I used to teach, we invited a writer of mystery novels targeted at young teenaged girls to come speak to the English Department. Prior to her visit, we read one of the many novels she had published. The book itself was entertaining, but not something most people would read more than once. During her visit, the writer spoke about her writing habits (as writers love to do) and mostly about the marketing effort she puts in to keep her work in the eye of her targeted public. It seemed formidable. It was a job. She worked hard at it and appeared to be making a reasonable living, although nothing like that living earned by figures like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. I admired her for it, admired her drive, her willingness to stand in the rain and shake hands. In the wake of her talk, by the way, we all received regular email notifications of her publications and readings. The woman did not miss a trick and there’s nothing wrong with that.
The logic of the situation impels a person to get out there in the rain; peddle the books and the self as vigorously as possible. You’ll get nowhere if you don’t. Hmmmm….. Well, where is “somewhere?” What do I mean by “more readers, more sales?” I guess I need to answer that and I haven’t yet.
Walk through a bookstore. All those books—and those are only the ones that are published and happened to have been purchased by that particular store. All those writers marketing themselves and their work. Often in the entryway to such stores you’ll find a clearance table. Imagine finding your work there! It always seemed to me the store wouldn’t mind if you stole the stuff, cleared the table. Books as litter.
Look through any copy of Poets and Writers Magazine and what you’ll find are endless advertisements for MFA programs, expensive workshops on publishing, pricey retreats and so on. The market for this kind of stuff seems without limit, as if everyone in the United States is an aspiring John Grisham. And all of them are out there in the rain shaking hands, I guess.
This makes me feel dizzy and faint.
I’ve got to stop this now. I’ve a book work on and another to finish revising so that I can post it on Kindle, along with the others. In a week or so it will appear here:
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&f...
Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour,
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thy own esteem;
Letting "I dare not" wait upon "I would,"
Like the poor cat i' the adage.
For those of you who, like me until recently, do not know about the cat, the story concerns a feline who would like to eat a fish, but doesn’t want to get her feet wet.
Well, neither promoting one’s self in the land of politics nor pushing one’s own books in the hot competition for those few people who still read is as dire as regicide, certainly, but they all feel—at least to me—as if they participate in the same bad form: unseemly ambition, I suppose you could call it.
Nevertheless, I have to confess that I would like more readers, more sales even though my main motive in writing novels is the pleasure writing brings me (see Musings), not wealth and fame. It’s a small dilemma, one that I feel most acutely when, in conversation, people ask me if I am pursing publication, by which they mean Random House, not Kindle. The attitude seems to be that there is little point in doing all that work, all that writing, if you’re not going to make a buck. There is some sense in that idea which is why I have offered the books electronically. Even to me, a fellow who drifts toward ridiculous “artistic purity,” piling the books up on a hard drive or leaving them in a drawer feels empty. No. The novels ought to get out there and do their part, make something of themselves.
Not many years ago at the high school where I used to teach, we invited a writer of mystery novels targeted at young teenaged girls to come speak to the English Department. Prior to her visit, we read one of the many novels she had published. The book itself was entertaining, but not something most people would read more than once. During her visit, the writer spoke about her writing habits (as writers love to do) and mostly about the marketing effort she puts in to keep her work in the eye of her targeted public. It seemed formidable. It was a job. She worked hard at it and appeared to be making a reasonable living, although nothing like that living earned by figures like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. I admired her for it, admired her drive, her willingness to stand in the rain and shake hands. In the wake of her talk, by the way, we all received regular email notifications of her publications and readings. The woman did not miss a trick and there’s nothing wrong with that.
The logic of the situation impels a person to get out there in the rain; peddle the books and the self as vigorously as possible. You’ll get nowhere if you don’t. Hmmmm….. Well, where is “somewhere?” What do I mean by “more readers, more sales?” I guess I need to answer that and I haven’t yet.
Walk through a bookstore. All those books—and those are only the ones that are published and happened to have been purchased by that particular store. All those writers marketing themselves and their work. Often in the entryway to such stores you’ll find a clearance table. Imagine finding your work there! It always seemed to me the store wouldn’t mind if you stole the stuff, cleared the table. Books as litter.
Look through any copy of Poets and Writers Magazine and what you’ll find are endless advertisements for MFA programs, expensive workshops on publishing, pricey retreats and so on. The market for this kind of stuff seems without limit, as if everyone in the United States is an aspiring John Grisham. And all of them are out there in the rain shaking hands, I guess.
This makes me feel dizzy and faint.
I’ve got to stop this now. I’ve a book work on and another to finish revising so that I can post it on Kindle, along with the others. In a week or so it will appear here:
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&f...
September 14, 2013
Getting Started
Getting Started
When I was in high school, my best friend, who is also named David, played the tenor sax. He played in the school’s jazz band and probably in the orchestra, but I may remember that incorrectly. Dave also played in what might be now called a garage band and that group was good enough to get hired for local dances and I went to as many of those as I could. I admired his talent and did what I could to associate myself with the band and thereby bask in the glow of his their fame, but what I wanted was an outlet of my own and while most of those adolescent yearnings might have been hormonal, some at least were artistic, or so it seems now.
I knew I had no musical talent and no aptitude for visual arts, but I did have the sense that I might be able to write. Consequently, like so many young people, I fooled around with poetry in college and created the usual overstated verse on the usual weary themes: love, injustice, loss (I never did descend to puppies). Later, I had better luck with poetry and during the 1970’s and 1980’s published poems with some frequency and later still, in partnership with the photographer Andrew Martinez, met with some success as a freelancer for a number of magazines.
However, it was always novels that interested me, but the more I read them, the more certain I was that I lacked the kind of organizing vision that novel writing demanded. Even books I and others regarded as mediocre were skillfully constructed, filled with foreshadowing, intricate and overlapping imagery, clever ironies, and consistent characterization. I could not imagine how a person could possibly plan all of that and then execute the design so as to create something that felt full and organic, that carried the reader all the way through to the final finishing page. And so I never tried.
When I was about fifty, the breakthrough came in an unexpected way. I belonged to a reading group comprised mostly of teachers of literature and one of the members knew a local writer who told her he’d visit the group on the condition that we read one of his mysteries. We did. The book was, by the standards of the group, poor. Not only did it pander to the sexist fantasies of older men (the author himself?), but it was clumsily written and peopled by characters who lacked depth. When the writer arrived, no one had anything kind to say about the book and so we instead discussed his writing habits. (This is a wonderful fallback, of course, because writers are vain people who never tire of reporting on their working habits or their literary history and in these days some of them are foolish enough to maintain blogs). I’ve forgotten everything he said save his answer to one of my questions. His mystery, like most mysteries, contained clues to “who done it” early on, but, like most mysteries, they were invisible until you looked back on the initial chapters after you’d finished the book. Only then would you say, “Ah ha, I should have known!” I asked about this. I asked him how difficult it had been to plan this out, to sow the seeds, as it were, in the first few chapters that he would reap later on. He looked at me as if my question didn’t quite make sense, and then said, it wasn’t difficult at all; he simply followed his nose. As for the foreshadowing that had so intimidated me, he explained that it was the opposite: he remembered when he got to the end of the story what he’d written at the beginning and simply picked it up. What a revelation this was for me. You didn’t have to be a genius of organization to write a book; you could be just as foolish and floundering as I felt myself to be and, with a little luck and persistence, carry it off. I went home thinking that I could write a book at least as bad as the one we had read for our meeting and shortly thereafter got started on the first of what has proven to be an even dozen, an apprentice novel entitled Michael. This one is not published and probably will not be. Others are. You can find them at the following link:
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&f...
When I was in high school, my best friend, who is also named David, played the tenor sax. He played in the school’s jazz band and probably in the orchestra, but I may remember that incorrectly. Dave also played in what might be now called a garage band and that group was good enough to get hired for local dances and I went to as many of those as I could. I admired his talent and did what I could to associate myself with the band and thereby bask in the glow of his their fame, but what I wanted was an outlet of my own and while most of those adolescent yearnings might have been hormonal, some at least were artistic, or so it seems now.
I knew I had no musical talent and no aptitude for visual arts, but I did have the sense that I might be able to write. Consequently, like so many young people, I fooled around with poetry in college and created the usual overstated verse on the usual weary themes: love, injustice, loss (I never did descend to puppies). Later, I had better luck with poetry and during the 1970’s and 1980’s published poems with some frequency and later still, in partnership with the photographer Andrew Martinez, met with some success as a freelancer for a number of magazines.
However, it was always novels that interested me, but the more I read them, the more certain I was that I lacked the kind of organizing vision that novel writing demanded. Even books I and others regarded as mediocre were skillfully constructed, filled with foreshadowing, intricate and overlapping imagery, clever ironies, and consistent characterization. I could not imagine how a person could possibly plan all of that and then execute the design so as to create something that felt full and organic, that carried the reader all the way through to the final finishing page. And so I never tried.
When I was about fifty, the breakthrough came in an unexpected way. I belonged to a reading group comprised mostly of teachers of literature and one of the members knew a local writer who told her he’d visit the group on the condition that we read one of his mysteries. We did. The book was, by the standards of the group, poor. Not only did it pander to the sexist fantasies of older men (the author himself?), but it was clumsily written and peopled by characters who lacked depth. When the writer arrived, no one had anything kind to say about the book and so we instead discussed his writing habits. (This is a wonderful fallback, of course, because writers are vain people who never tire of reporting on their working habits or their literary history and in these days some of them are foolish enough to maintain blogs). I’ve forgotten everything he said save his answer to one of my questions. His mystery, like most mysteries, contained clues to “who done it” early on, but, like most mysteries, they were invisible until you looked back on the initial chapters after you’d finished the book. Only then would you say, “Ah ha, I should have known!” I asked about this. I asked him how difficult it had been to plan this out, to sow the seeds, as it were, in the first few chapters that he would reap later on. He looked at me as if my question didn’t quite make sense, and then said, it wasn’t difficult at all; he simply followed his nose. As for the foreshadowing that had so intimidated me, he explained that it was the opposite: he remembered when he got to the end of the story what he’d written at the beginning and simply picked it up. What a revelation this was for me. You didn’t have to be a genius of organization to write a book; you could be just as foolish and floundering as I felt myself to be and, with a little luck and persistence, carry it off. I went home thinking that I could write a book at least as bad as the one we had read for our meeting and shortly thereafter got started on the first of what has proven to be an even dozen, an apprentice novel entitled Michael. This one is not published and probably will not be. Others are. You can find them at the following link:
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&f...
September 11, 2013
Musings
In both The Odyssey and The Iliad, Homer invokes the muse to help him tell his tale. Virgil does the same in The Aeneid and so does Milton in the first book of Paradise Lost. My guess—for I am not a scholar—is that other epic poets follow this pattern. As I recall, when I first took up Paradise Lost as a sophomore at college, the instruction was that the invocation of the muse was a poetic convention. I guess it is. At the time, I took that to mean that it was a mere formality, something you had to do if you were going to make one of those long poems. I took it as a nod to the poets who had come before, most notably Homer as well as a declaration of modesty: I can’t do this on my own; I’ll need divine help. Maybe false modesty, I thought, since after that first invocation I saw no further reliance upon muses; the poets were at the business of telling the story and seemed to be doing fine without heavenly help. Then, later on I ran into Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” which seems to be nothing if not an invocation of the muse, but this time it doesn’t feel like mere convention. Shelley’s serious. He’s feeling punky, worn out, full of dreary autumnal tones and wants the wind, destroyer and creator both, to blow though him in order to perk him up. Here’s the final stanza:
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own?
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, 60
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse, 65
Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? 70
Fiery stuff. Way too fiery to be dull convention, a mere nod to Homer. Nope. Shelley’s asking for something real here. He’s on to something about writing. In her amusing book on writing, bird by bird, Annie Lamott claims that she doesn’t do the writing at all. It’s really composed by little men in the attic of her house; she’s just the stenographer. Well, that’s a paraphrase. As I said, I’m not a scholar and I did not chase down the quote, but you get the idea. She’s talking like Shelley, only without the flamboyance.
Discovering the muse, or the west wind, or those little men in my own attic was one of the finest and happiest surprises about writing. There have been moments—many of them—in the composition of every one of the dozen novels when I go on autopilot. Oh, I’m present, in a way. I’m concentrated and focused but it’s as if I am a mere conduit, the means by which the words appear on the screen. The fingers fly and for some time I am sustained in a kind of happy trance. And when I return to my right mind and look back on what I’ve done, it’s usually pretty good. (Which is not to say that it doesn’t need patching. The writing always needs patching. The patching is endless—and a little boring—compared to singing with the muses, or the wind, or those odd little men.) The trance times come usually once a story is established, which occurs somewhere near the middle. It varies; it’s unpredictable. As I am not a scholar, I am also not an athlete, but I suspect that my “musings,” let’s call them, share much of the quality of mind experienced by athletes in the midst of play or dancers given over to movement, or perhaps musicians lost in sound. I think James Baldwin is talking about this experience at the end of his fine story “Sonny’s Blues.” At any rate, these musings, while not the only reasons I write, are surely a large part of what keeps me at it.
Some of the novels are available as Kindle books. The link is:
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&f...
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own?
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, 60
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse, 65
Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? 70
Fiery stuff. Way too fiery to be dull convention, a mere nod to Homer. Nope. Shelley’s asking for something real here. He’s on to something about writing. In her amusing book on writing, bird by bird, Annie Lamott claims that she doesn’t do the writing at all. It’s really composed by little men in the attic of her house; she’s just the stenographer. Well, that’s a paraphrase. As I said, I’m not a scholar and I did not chase down the quote, but you get the idea. She’s talking like Shelley, only without the flamboyance.
Discovering the muse, or the west wind, or those little men in my own attic was one of the finest and happiest surprises about writing. There have been moments—many of them—in the composition of every one of the dozen novels when I go on autopilot. Oh, I’m present, in a way. I’m concentrated and focused but it’s as if I am a mere conduit, the means by which the words appear on the screen. The fingers fly and for some time I am sustained in a kind of happy trance. And when I return to my right mind and look back on what I’ve done, it’s usually pretty good. (Which is not to say that it doesn’t need patching. The writing always needs patching. The patching is endless—and a little boring—compared to singing with the muses, or the wind, or those odd little men.) The trance times come usually once a story is established, which occurs somewhere near the middle. It varies; it’s unpredictable. As I am not a scholar, I am also not an athlete, but I suspect that my “musings,” let’s call them, share much of the quality of mind experienced by athletes in the midst of play or dancers given over to movement, or perhaps musicians lost in sound. I think James Baldwin is talking about this experience at the end of his fine story “Sonny’s Blues.” At any rate, these musings, while not the only reasons I write, are surely a large part of what keeps me at it.
Some of the novels are available as Kindle books. The link is:
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&f...
