Joseph Grammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"

Cocoon Kids

Errors. I feel like I made millions of them in my book. My fingernails are still raw from chomping, and my eyes have suffered in hours of sapping laptop light. My mistakes are out there in the world ("the world" meaning the dozen or so humans who know my book exists) and I have to live with them. Which is cool.

I love failure. It's like coffee for me, although I also like coffee. Lattes, which I can get in my apartment for free (well, the cost of my rent, which is high). Failure makes me smile and reflect for a second or two on my long train to a shabby gravestone, whose last stop I can only hope is sometime past 2060.

My book is called "Cocoon Kids" (should I italicize this? who knows) and was totally unexpected to me. I've been writing a book set in Okinawa for the last 6 months, and then these short stories came to me out of nowhere. Or, more truthfully, I'd been whittling them in my spare time over the course of years, and then finally got around to clumping them together one day. Mostly due to the prodding of my girlfriend.

I was obsessed with making the stories perfect. Literary and worthy and memorable and all that jazz. But at some point I had to accept that I am an error-ful young human with a scatterbrained disposition. It will be many years before I am memorable, if I ever become so lucky.

So errors. I'm thankful for them, because they teach my brain useful stuff. Mistakes in plot, pacing, tone, character development, or (gasp) grammar abound in my collection, but that's part of what makes it sort of valuable to me. I'd much rather make a million mistakes in this collection than be writing a PhD dissertation right now (no disrespect to grad students, that is one hell of a hard job).

Anyway, I enjoy making mistakes, and you can too! Slogan.

P.S. Let me know how many mistakes are in this article.

Joe Grammer

I'm atrocious when it comes to running. I'm no fan of pacing, consistency, or doing the same thing twice in one week. It's not part of my hardware. But when it comes to writing a book, all that stuff is necessary (unless you're into the avant-garde, but even then you need some patience).

Six months ago I wasn't even writing every day. I was working in an office and only wrote fiction for fun, when I felt like it, to feel creative and inventive and all that jazz. Then my girlfriend Anna (www.2lch.com) created a word-tracking web app called Twords (www.twords.2lch.com) to help spur my writing career when I confessed I wanted to do it professionally (or at least attempt to).

I am not an app person, and I am technologically stunted even though I am 24 years old. Anna frequently giggles at the way I interact with 21st-century devices. But Twords got me writing every day, which made me feel less like a hobbyist and more like a person who actually values writing fiction for dollars.

Sure, I did NANOWRIMO (National Novel Writing Month) a few times, but Twords helped build my habit of writing because I could log in every day. This process felt like slamming my head against a cabinet for a few weeks, and then slowly got easier. Now I get antsy if there's the possibility of me not having Internet access to log my word count. Odd how swiftly you can depend on things that used to enrage you.

I always marveled at people who ran marathons; they were like insane superheroes with tighter clothing. But now I see the appeal, even if my own version has nothing to do with leg muscles or fanny packs of GU Energy Gel.

Every day I push my book forward. Some days suck, and other days fill me with the kind of joy new episodes of Invader Zim used to instill in me. Most days are just OK, which is fine with me. At least I'm stumbling in a single direction.

P.S. It's sad how I felt weird about writing "one direction" because of the band. Did they really have to ruin that phrase for me? Oh well, get over it, Joe. Go eat some GU.

I tell people I'm a writer now.

In the past I never did; it was embarrassing. It was like this weird shameful tumor in my belly, and I thought if anyone found out they'd rig me up to a tree or something.

When people ask what I do, I fight the urge to lie and tell them I still work at my old office. I try not to change the subject or point out a mutual friend walking somewhere very far in the distance. I attempt to look the questioner in the eyes and say, "I write for a living now." Then nausea happens.

Why all this unpleasantness? I guess I never thought of writing as a legitimate profession I could perform. In the back of my mind there was always this narrative that people had to work a regular 9 to 5, no exceptions, end of uninteresting story. (Although my old job wasn't even really 9 to 5.)

I'm not an exceptionally innovative human, and it took a long time for me to acknowledge, and even longer to accept, that I was a writer of some kind.

When I read Dr. Zhivago I was like, "Yes, of course, I get it," because he wanted to write poetry but entered the medical profession to earn a respectable living. I'm not as talented as Yuri, so I refrained from medical school and went straight for the words. We'll see how that works out.

In the meantime, my name is Joe and I've been writing for 18 years.

I like increasing the amount of good stuff in the world in my own lame, first-world, probably hypocritical way. It's only what millions of people around the globe do every millisecond: hold open doors, ask others about their lives and actually listen to the answers, clean up my own clumsy messes, etc. I have no illusions that I am an entirely average and unexceptional human, and that I constantly irritate or hurt people in my attempts to stay in line with my values.

At my core, I feel a sucking emptiness that never goes away. It's like a foot or an earlobe: an integral part of me (yes, I think earlobes are integral; just pull on them — so nice!). Everyone has this weird sense of loss (so I'm led to believe), which is cool to reflect on when I'm not freaking out about the potentially disastrous trajectory of my life.

The best method for coping with the empty tunnel in my belly seems to be peaceful actions towards other people. No surprises there, but I always have to remind myself of this because it's pathetically easy to be swayed by shiny distractions. Like the laptop I'm typing on, or tons of other junk you already know about.

Sometimes I feel like tossing my life away and starting over from scratch. I'm sure everyone contemplates that at one point or another. But usually some tiny kindness from a loved one or stranger intervenes and reminds me that my life is not an endless trench of unpleasantness, but a mostly neutral path filled with joyful and painful bumps.

Being peaceful is cool. Earlobes for life.

My book is getting out of hand. I love the thing, but I wanted to end it months ago. I already wrote one version of the novel over the summer of 2013, finishing on my birthday (Sept 24). I racked up 75,000 words, then scrapped the entire project and redid it from scratch, with new characters and a new plot. Sounds like some fear of completion stuff if you ask me (Moby Dick: "God keep me from ever completing anything.").

Both versions are about Okinawa, but the first one was a lot more personal. It was also more magical realist in nature, since it involved things like ghosts and mythical demons (specifically, the tengu). The core of the novel dealt with suicide.

Then, after my latest birthday, I decided this story was crap and rehashed everything after watching Fargo for the first time. It's a cool movie.

I changed from first person to third-person omniscient, expanded my cast of characters, and took out anything supernatural. I also wrote an outline, which for me is like running eight consecutive marathons in uphill terrain, without any GU energy gel (they don't pay me to say this, I swear, it's just a funny name to me).

I love my new characters. They're broken, and weird, and groping for dumb slivers of knowledge. I love my old characters too, but they seem to belong to a different Joe. I'm worried about fucking up both books, although I only want to publish one.

In my new novel I'm up to 78,000 words. I'm afraid of finishing the story, but I'm more afraid of procrastinating forever. Writing a book for me has been like hugging a dog really, really tightly for a year straight--sometimes it's the absolute definition of joy, and sometimes you just want to take a shower and wash off all the drool and, well, talk to humans.

At some point I was terrified that I had wasted months of my life by investing in this new story, and that the old one was far superior. Reading over the early pages, I found passages I actually liked. At the time, I was sick of working on the new plot, and sure that I had bitten off more than I could chew. Should I go back to the first draft? I wondered.

In some ways the old novel is better than my current one. That was hard to understand and harder to accept. But too bad. I'm working on 2.0, and that's the way it's going to stay.

Of course, I could freak out at the very end and flip a coin to determine which version I should present to the world: magical realist roman a clef, or planned, post-modern adventure. But at this point I just have to keep going. Write, edit, drink coffee. Coins aren't going to do shit for me.

I hate outlines. I always have. For most of my life I’ve behaved erratically, on impulse, letting my emotions dictate my actions. So often, when I am overcome with intense desire, or anger, the feeling seems to obliterate all logic and trust. The feeling forces me into a claustrophobic space that deprives me of my value system. In other words, I appear to be “not myself.”

For my in-progress book, though, I’ve been working on planning my plotline and character development. This is, for me, a complete 180 of behavior. In many ways, the content of my novel also deals with a shift towards living according to systems. This shift feels like ripping out your insides and rearranging them into a more appealing shape, but it is better than being a slave to your own shitty habits.

Writing on a basis of impulse feels good. It makes me feel creative and free, but it is stressfully uneven. I can’t foreshadow properly or flesh out a consistent character. My writing suffers. In my head, there is this stereotype of the Jack Kerouac novelist typing on a scroll for three weeks on a cocktail of coffee and adrenaline. Over the past several years, as I have moved from “wanting to write” to “writing,” I realize how harmful this stereotype is for my wellbeing—for a number of reasons.

First (and most obvious): Stimulants are a poor long-term strategy for getting any work done. In World War II, pretty much every country jacked its soldiers up on amphetamine salts to keep them awake in chronically under-rested conditions. This is true, I expect, of every subsequent war. Air Force pilots (especially in combat conditions) use Dexedrine (“go-pills”) to continue long past the point at which their bodies would normally fail. While this may be useful for short-term goals, the long-term effects, in my opinion, are inevitably damaging. Not that war without amphetamines isn’t damaging.

My point in saying this is not to critique the military’s policy on legal speed, but to critique the mindset of doing everything right now. It’s not fun or sustainable to be Jack Kerouac, furiously writing “On The Road” in an intoxicant haze. He died in his mid-forties, by the way, of internal hemorrhage brought on by cirrhosis (which you get by drinking a fuck-ton of alcohol for years).

Second (less obvious): The Jack Kerouac in my mind is a lie. The real Jack planned “On The Road” for years, in various journals, before his three-week spree of the first draft. His book was not spontaneous—obviously. Any lasting creative endeavor requires some set of rules in order to make sense (even if your rule is “nothing matters except right now”). What's more, Kerouac's lifestyle masked a slew of childhood traumas and debilitating struggles with alcohol.

In “The Cloud in Trousers,” the Russian poet Mayakovsky says,

Formerly I believed
books were made like this:
a poet came,
lightly opened his lips,
and the inspired fool burst into song—
if you please!
But it seems,
Before they can launch a song,
Poets must tramp for days with callused feet,
And the sluggish fish of the imagination
Flounders softly in the slush of the heart.
And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth
Of loves and nightingales,
The tongueless street merely writhes
For lack of something to shout or say.

To me, writing on impulse and writing according to a plan are needed in tandem. The spontaneous kind helps push the story in ways you might not expect, and can prevent your writing from sounding stilted. But planning is pretty damn important, too. It keeps you, hopefully, from dying in your mid-forties.

In Antarctica, there is a mountain named for that feeling you get when you just know somebody is a scumbag, even if you can't put your finger on why. Your judgment of this dude is influenced by your past experiences with scummy-looking guys, to the point where your brain makes a conclusion without considering other options. Maybe you see him on a street corner where you've seen other scumbags standing, hollering at ladies, making vaguely threatening remarks to passersby. This guy is a scumbag, then, because he's doing the same thing.

Can this heuristic be wrong? Sure, why not. It sounds like a pretty reliable way to stereotype, and as a result I propose to challenge intuition whenever I can.

In a dangerous situation, I won't have time to decide the best course of action. I just react. But with a less damaging problem, I look at my gut feeling and skeptically tilt my glasses at it.

Post angry comment on Facebook? My belly says yes, but a host of pathways in my brain remind me how I value courtesy in my exchanges with others. Maybe saying "You're a dumb asshole" won't bring me the satisfaction I initially think it will.

Now, plenty of people never do this. Someone snipes at them, they snipe back. It's human nature, you might say, and to a degree it is. But reason is as equally human in my book.

Having said this, I'm not an exceptionally logical guy. I'm crappy at math and engineering, and I've been heavily right-brained my entire life. I prefer parallel links and feelings to hierarchies of logic; it's what helps me write fiction. To sense a random impulse and follow it along in a story is an immensely rewarding activity.

But I've written myself into some holes this way, too. At the time it might seem like an awesome idea to add an action-style firefight, but then I realize the repercussions of such an event in a realistic book. Characters' injuries would severely slow them down; the police would arrive, and would give chase; fingerprints would be everywhere.

What are the odds, then, that my narrator will actually escape to Denmark like I want?

Now, it's cool to stretch credibility in a story. You can make a guy super-smart and superhuman, so that he makes it onto the departing ship with three bullet wounds in his torso and nine squad cars in pursuit. But it's not always what you want.

Intuition is supposed to save you time by shoving the right choice in your face. This is a fantastic brain invention, even if it fails sometimes. The way to minimize failure is to gain a great deal of experience with whatever it is you're making decisions about. Which means learning.

In many stories and films, there's some elderly character who believes his intuition is infallible, and an opposing young character who spends the tale proving the old person wrong. "The world has changed, old man. You can't judge things by your outdated standards and expect to come out on top."

Intuition Peak is so named to honor the contribution of "gut instincts" to science and research. Some people view it as being "in tune" with yourself, tapping into a spiritual "oneness," or seeing things "as they really are." Whatever. It's just a way to save brain space.

Intuition led me to write this tangent and keep myself moving so I don't feel like crap about my career, which felt much better than sitting and weighing the merits of a possible blogpost would have. Maybe I should've used my time to do my taxes or dead-lift 100 pounds, but I didn't.

Sometimes my gut tells me to make astoundingly shitty choices. It's difficult, then, to parse out when instincts are helpful and harmful, and when reason is helpful and harmful. Everything turns into this gray, nebulous mass. How do I decide anything?

By accepting most decisions won't be perfect, I guess. Relinquishing some control and trusting your body and mind, while not abandoning all choice to fate. Here lie the boundaries of human action.

If intuition is a mountain, don't bother climbing to the top: you'll only dig yourself into a hole. But it's cool to have a mountain in the background.

My body is full of germs. Usually I push through and ignore it, but in this weird netherworld called 2014 I am implementing new habits. Taking care of self: no, no, no.

I loaded up on vitamins and Nyquil, then added some coffee for good measure. A strange combination (it's making me listen to Arctic Monkeys, whom I've never listened to before in any conscious way...the song Mad Sounds reminds me of Lou Reed). I've been reading and editing and planning for a moderately lucrative future, although I really have no idea how to plan so I mostly just worry and watch Samurai Champloo.

I took an Amtrak home on March 27 for my dad's birthday, which is when the cold probably wormed its way into my cells. I gave my dad the only extant copy of my book Cocoon Kids, as well as some electronic stuff that is a lot more practical and cool. We ate enchiladas. At night I jammed with some Jersey friends, lifted with my brother (new gym, really purple, open round-the-clock), wrote with my friend Dan, and saw an old friend I hadn't seen since high school. Anthony, the said friend, became a convert to the Tullamore Dew school of whiskey, which I highly approve of -- because I made it happen.

On March 31 I NJ Transit-ed it up to NYC to see my friend David and eat vast quantities of food. At the KGB Bar on E 4th St I taught the Japanese bartender some Russian and discussed Putin's foreign policy, which we both disapproved of in our various languages. Hand gestures and eye movements usually get the point across just as well as a clear phrase.

David and I met up with Eldis, our human friend who can do anything and everything, and then with my brother Jim and his girlfriend. We got hammered and played darts; I hurt my foot. We yelled in Scottish accents about cyberbullying and confused most of the other bar patrons.

On April 2 I took another Amtrak up to Boston, then a commuter rail over to Worcester to see my buddy Phil, who just received a fellowship for an exercise physiology Ph.D at the University of Florida. Meals included: filet mignon and kielbasa. That's it. It's everything I need. Thanks to Carl's in Oxford and Phil's parents.

I flew home for free from Boston on April 3, using up some air miles that were about to expire, and ended my journey with a smile in my head and a vague, fuzzy feeling of fatigue in every other organ.

Then I got sick. It's all good, because seeing my family and friends was absolutely worth it, but now I have to cough up the consequences. At least I edited my book and sent it out to some people to read. And I can watch more Samurai Champloo.

Being alive feels like constantly tripping on acid, except fewer objects squiggle around in your field of vision. I often find myself a dumb slave to my emotions, forever changing my worldview in accordance with how hungry I am, or how many hours I've holed up in my room with a sweater and a messed-up copy of Doctor Zhiavgo. Hence the feeling of LSD.

I'm sick right now, again, since I've just traveled to the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and I always contract a fun virus whenever I step beyond the threshold of my fuzzy apartment. So, in bed, my brain fizzles and pops with angry, aching, joyful thoughts that will not leave me the fuck alone.

Are you happy? How do you get happy? Is happiness a byproduct of living a baller, good, hardworking life? Should I be attached to everything? Nothing? Should I live underwater in a research sub with no outside contact beyond the translucent shrimp whose mating habits I study? Things like that.

I have zero answers for these queries. Having said that, I know millions of people cherish their own opinions and worldviews with regard to happiness, industriousness, sociability, and achievement. Maybe your answers are cool; keep them to yourself.

I say this not to be a dick (for the most part), but to preserve my own weird unknowing for as long as possible. This is unhealthy.

Oh, wait, but I'm sick! Now it makes sense. When the germs leave my bloodstream, I know I'll feel a surging rush of hope, and the sunrise will appear all the more radiant and precious because I can breathe without my nose funneling mucus onto my chin.

What? External environment significantly impacts internal human conditions? How scintillating.

In other news, the Writers' Workshop was great, and all the humans I met were inspiring and talented. These include: jaded lawyers, a high-schooler, a former rock star, an engineer, a displaced urbanite, and a really smart guy who quoted old works of literature. I am none of those people, but I hung in there and let strangers peer into my book and churn it up like slush and show me beautiful things about it I didn't know before, plus useful ways of improving. Talking to writers is a good thing, I am learning (take note, brain).

So my girlfriend Anna challenged me to look at the last year of my life and see how I have evolved in my "business," which, for better or worse, is writing. At first my amygdala freaked out and electrified me with stress, but sitting at my desk now, with a bunch of baby saguaro cactus beside me (they never complain), I feel grateful for the opportunity.

A year ago today was October 7, 2013. During that time I was frantically writing Cocoon Kids, my self-published book of short stories, and assuming my life depended on its objective quality. I was an idiot. I am an idiot now, but back then, I am happy to say, I was a much feebler one.

Every word on the page terrified me, because it was a word someone else would read (ha) and judge to be lacking in some major category. My plots would be predictable, my characters flat, my dialogue the worst kind of daytime-TV cliche ("Pass the ham, Sally," Grant Shadow said. "Oh never mind, I love you like a farmer loves mowing hay in the crisp fall."). In short, I was a prisoner of stupid, meaningless fear: great job!

I could look back at that younger Joe (nice biceps) and scorn him for his naivete, but I won't, too much. He had his good points. He cared a lot about his stories, and he did his best to bring out the love and pain and inherent human grossness in each person. Most of the time he failed, but once in a while a sentence came through and achieved something moderately engaging.

My favorite story, and what seems to be readers' (thank you for existing, you few worthy humans) favorite story, is "A Squid for Mr. Calaway," which concerns the eponymous hero as he leaves his therapist's office in downtown Manhattan and proceeds to buy a package of squid for dinner. Only he loves the squid. In fact, it is the only thing he truly cares about. When he meets his acquaintance Barry on the street, the two trade insults and random hypotheticals until Calaway gets embarrassed and leaves. The ending is the strangest part, and I give infinite thanks to Anna for helping me tone it down from its original, more unpleasant tone.

My favorite sentence from this story (wow I am a self-indulgent bastard): "Into the dusk with my mollusks."

There we are. Now I can properly trash myself. The rest of the book is a hit-or-miss collection that is vaguely linked by the themes of isolation and connection. A common response from people who read it was, "It was hard to tell who was speaking." Another: "I had to read it two or three times to understand what happened" (thank you for even reading it once, you fucking rad cherubim). I agree with these concerns, especially when I revisit the stories and puzzle over the dense conversations. What was I trying to accomplish?

Nothing special, really; I was just bad at writing.

And now?

Now, I can safely say, I am better, but so far away from "good" it is not yet taking my calls.

However, in the space between 10/7/13 and now, I have befriended other writers, attended an Iowa Summer Festival Writing Conference, finished my novel, sent it to agents (to be rejected), and, most importantly, I have written a ton of shitty stories. Most of them are dead in a folder somewhere, but a few hang around, waiting for me to hurl them at magazines or people (magazines are people, too, I'm not judging). I have also read up on publishing contracts, practiced and failed at marketing campaigns, and sold a few books online. I no longer feel terrible about calling my writing a "business"; it just happens to be a failing one right now.

So. The two things I have done well, in my opinion, are these: 1.) writing every day and 2.) showing my work to other people for critique.

Of the things I have not done well, I present only a small selection: 1.) watching movies all day, 2.) stressing out over query letters so much I don't send them for months, 3.) over-editing my book because I'm afraid of letting it go, 4.) getting angry when people ask me what my book is "about" because I haven't done the work to distill a good pitch for it, 5.) not telling people I'm a "writer" when they ask what I do, 6.) avoiding human interaction entirely.

Well, if you've made it this far, thank you. I hope my self-review was marginally entertaining; but if not, I leave you with the inimitable and uplifting Sly and the Family Stone.