Austin Scott Collins's Blog: Upside-down, Inside-out, and Backwards, page 3
December 14, 2015
The Mind of a Novelist
Psychologists who study these kinds of things tell us that politicians and executives have higher-than-average rates of sociopathic tendencies. Lawyers, they say, are statistically more likely to have aggressive, competitive, type A personalities. Veterinary technicians score strongly for empathy and altruism. Extroverts are drawn to careers in marketing and sales.
. . . So what about fiction writers?
As a bunch, they’re tough to categorize — perhaps defined as much by their idiosyncrasies and eccentricities as any detectable common thread. Notoriously weird, fiction writers need to be able to spend long periods of time alone to get their work done, yet must also be keen observers of human behavior. Originality and creativity, obviously, are essential (hence the weirdness), along with enough patience in their disposition to get through a single project that might last years. A fine and fuzzy line separates “peculiar” from “crazy,” of course, and the frontier that divides “dedicated” and “obsessive” is even more treacherous.
On a deeper level, however, what makes a person a novelist? Speculating based on the many novelists I know personally, I venture that a prime element of a novelist’s temperament is cognitive dissonance. F. Scott Fitzgerald expressed it this way: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
One painfully clear signal of inferior prose is a lack of variation in the point of view. Not that a story can’t be told from the perspective of just one character — it certainly can — but that character’s voice should not be the author’s voice (unless it’s an autobiography). Few things scream, “bad writing!” like every single figure having the same outlook, vocabulary, background, etc. Even worse is when a made-up individual embarks on a monologue, and is manifestly acting as a gratuitous mouthpiece for a self-indulgent writer. That’s not a novel; that’s a persuasive propaganda essay poorly disguised as a novel. Likewise, when everyone in the story feels interchangeable with everyone else, it’s a sign of lack of imagination. Good writers populate their worlds with distinct, three-dimensional, conflicted, flawed human beings who disagree with each other, make questionable decisions, and do things their creator would never do. When a novelist has two characters argue passionately with each other and you not only believe the scene, but sort of agree with both of them and have a hard time deciding who to side with or relate to, that’s an indicator of skillful storytelling. Why are some writers good at this? It’s simple: they agree with both of them and relate to both of them. The argument is happening inside the author’s head; the author is arguing passionately — and meaningfully — with herself. She fully embraces both angles. Fitzgerald’s sign of a first-class intelligence is also a sign of a first-rate novelist.
Another trait frequently occurring in novelists is a dark streak. If you met Stephen King or George R. R. Martin at a cocktail party and engaged them in polite conversation, you would probably find them charming and pleasant. (This is assuming you were not there in violation of a restraining order.) Yet they are capable of inventing horrific events and terrifying situations that keep you up at night and make your skin crawl. Hemingway was probably fun to have a beer with, but his stories are filled with death and despair. Dorothy Parker could delight the Algonquin Roundtable with her effervescent wit, yet she churned out verses dealing with suicide and romantic failures. A person who is gloomy all the time is boring; a person who is optimistic and sunny all the time is equally boring. A person who can tell a story about a bunch of seemingly ordinary people sitting in an apartment or standing around in a bucolic little village and infuse it with tension and suspense even as almost nothing happens is Shirley Jackson. Music fills the brain of the novelist, a rich orchestral score with bright melodies alongside menacing themes, deriving power from the contrast, delivering depth through ambiguity.
Interesting fiction plays with oppositional forces. When a character is perfect and everything goes well, it’s not much of a story, is it? Riveting tales revolve around deeply messed-up people in lots of trouble. A good writer has to be able to pull you in, make you care, and then rip your heart out and make you cry. In order to do that, she needs to make it feel tangible and plausible. To put that kind of reality on the page, she has to immerse herself in it. A novelist unwilling to do bad things to her characters is probably going to bore you. “Make-believe in a doll house,” is what my wife calls it when nothing bad ever happens and therefore you never really feel invested in the outcome, you never really feel like there is something at stake.
Misery has fueled restless artistic souls since the dawn of recorded history. Perhaps the fact that the same attributes that make a person a good novelist can also make that person an insufferable human being should be taken as evidence that the novelist gene is optimizing its own implementation: surely no person who suffers from a novel-writing disorder will ever be at a loss for material.
My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
So, What Do You Do?
Crazy People in History #1
A Brief Guide to Writing Terrible Fiction
Answering the Inevitable Questions
. . . So what about fiction writers?
As a bunch, they’re tough to categorize — perhaps defined as much by their idiosyncrasies and eccentricities as any detectable common thread. Notoriously weird, fiction writers need to be able to spend long periods of time alone to get their work done, yet must also be keen observers of human behavior. Originality and creativity, obviously, are essential (hence the weirdness), along with enough patience in their disposition to get through a single project that might last years. A fine and fuzzy line separates “peculiar” from “crazy,” of course, and the frontier that divides “dedicated” and “obsessive” is even more treacherous.
On a deeper level, however, what makes a person a novelist? Speculating based on the many novelists I know personally, I venture that a prime element of a novelist’s temperament is cognitive dissonance. F. Scott Fitzgerald expressed it this way: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
One painfully clear signal of inferior prose is a lack of variation in the point of view. Not that a story can’t be told from the perspective of just one character — it certainly can — but that character’s voice should not be the author’s voice (unless it’s an autobiography). Few things scream, “bad writing!” like every single figure having the same outlook, vocabulary, background, etc. Even worse is when a made-up individual embarks on a monologue, and is manifestly acting as a gratuitous mouthpiece for a self-indulgent writer. That’s not a novel; that’s a persuasive propaganda essay poorly disguised as a novel. Likewise, when everyone in the story feels interchangeable with everyone else, it’s a sign of lack of imagination. Good writers populate their worlds with distinct, three-dimensional, conflicted, flawed human beings who disagree with each other, make questionable decisions, and do things their creator would never do. When a novelist has two characters argue passionately with each other and you not only believe the scene, but sort of agree with both of them and have a hard time deciding who to side with or relate to, that’s an indicator of skillful storytelling. Why are some writers good at this? It’s simple: they agree with both of them and relate to both of them. The argument is happening inside the author’s head; the author is arguing passionately — and meaningfully — with herself. She fully embraces both angles. Fitzgerald’s sign of a first-class intelligence is also a sign of a first-rate novelist.
Another trait frequently occurring in novelists is a dark streak. If you met Stephen King or George R. R. Martin at a cocktail party and engaged them in polite conversation, you would probably find them charming and pleasant. (This is assuming you were not there in violation of a restraining order.) Yet they are capable of inventing horrific events and terrifying situations that keep you up at night and make your skin crawl. Hemingway was probably fun to have a beer with, but his stories are filled with death and despair. Dorothy Parker could delight the Algonquin Roundtable with her effervescent wit, yet she churned out verses dealing with suicide and romantic failures. A person who is gloomy all the time is boring; a person who is optimistic and sunny all the time is equally boring. A person who can tell a story about a bunch of seemingly ordinary people sitting in an apartment or standing around in a bucolic little village and infuse it with tension and suspense even as almost nothing happens is Shirley Jackson. Music fills the brain of the novelist, a rich orchestral score with bright melodies alongside menacing themes, deriving power from the contrast, delivering depth through ambiguity.
Interesting fiction plays with oppositional forces. When a character is perfect and everything goes well, it’s not much of a story, is it? Riveting tales revolve around deeply messed-up people in lots of trouble. A good writer has to be able to pull you in, make you care, and then rip your heart out and make you cry. In order to do that, she needs to make it feel tangible and plausible. To put that kind of reality on the page, she has to immerse herself in it. A novelist unwilling to do bad things to her characters is probably going to bore you. “Make-believe in a doll house,” is what my wife calls it when nothing bad ever happens and therefore you never really feel invested in the outcome, you never really feel like there is something at stake.
Misery has fueled restless artistic souls since the dawn of recorded history. Perhaps the fact that the same attributes that make a person a good novelist can also make that person an insufferable human being should be taken as evidence that the novelist gene is optimizing its own implementation: surely no person who suffers from a novel-writing disorder will ever be at a loss for material.
My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
So, What Do You Do?
Crazy People in History #1
A Brief Guide to Writing Terrible Fiction
Answering the Inevitable Questions
September 19, 2015
As Any She Belied With False Compare
I have a confession to make. I don’t really like writing competitions. You know, where they give everyone one hour to write about a certain prompt and then judge the results. Or where people get up and perform their poetry in front of a live crowd, and the winner is whoever gets the most applause. That kind of thing. I think it creates a flawed — and often slightly ridiculous — construct of supposed worth. In the case of poetry, for example, the victors of the night tend to be angry and aggressive, and often overtly sexual, or sometimes overwrought with pathos. I'm not saying that's bad, but if you put those poems side by side on paper next to pieces by William Carlos Williams or Jorge Luis Borges, they might not necessarily stand out in the same way.
Conversely, if William Carlos Williams or Jorge Luis Borges themselves stood up in front of that same half-drunk crowd and delivered their work quietly and with nuance, it probably wouldn’t hit.
And the idea that being able to write creatively but fast is somehow important strikes me as especially weird the more I think about it. Extemporaneous writing may often be a useful exercise, but some of the greatest works of English literature were rendered over a span of decades. In general, I think it’s safe to say at the very least that books written in a very short amount of time are not always of higher quality than those written on more typical schedules.
The fundamental problem with the premise of writing competitions is that you aren’t comparing apples to apples. You aren’t even comparing apples to oranges. You’re comparing apples to hamsters, or apples to the moons of Saturn, or apples to the concept of free-market capitalism. You’re attempting to artificially rank intrinsically dissimilar things on an equivalent scale. It’s like asking, “what’s better: a pair of shoes, or Robert’s Rules of Order?”
Different people like different things. Moreover, there is a place for everything in this world, whether anyone likes it or not. Some things are important; some things are funny. Some things are entertaining; some things are bracingly disturbing. Some things are sad; some things are insightful. Some things are beautifully crafted; some things are delightfully frivolous. Some things serve a purpose; some things defy definition. None of these characteristics is exclusive to any other. None of these traits is necessarily dependent upon another. Most importantly of all, none of these things is superior to another. It makes no sense to say that Douglas Adams is “better” than Ernest Hemingway (or vice versa). Likewise Kurt Vonnegut and Anne Rice, or William Shakespeare and Chuck Palahniuk or F. Scott Fitzgerald and Homer. These authors strive in their work to achieve very different objectives, and succeed in different ways. If you tell me that Shirley Jackson is “better” than Alan Moore, I am going to roll my eyes. You may as well be saying, “hooba blurfle quomby flerf.”
Contests only really measure anything meaningful when the participants are all attempting to accomplish exactly the same thing in exactly the same way, under otherwise identical conditions – such as a marathon or a poker match. As soon as you introduce a variable, you render the results absurd. When one participant is running and another is swimming or flying a hang glider, you no longer have a real tournament, no matter how hard you pretend. This is particularly true when the runner is going in one direction, the swimmer in a different direction entirely and the hang glider pilot climbing in a slow vertical spiral. And if one person is running and another is painting a landscape mural, it’s not even remotely a race. Someone on the Internet will probably assert that landscape mural painting is better than running and someone else will immediately counter that assertion with the powerful counter-argument that no it isn’t, but these two philosophers of the Web are not advancing human knowledge with this debate.
I love writing workshops and seminars, I love book club meetings and author appearances with question and answer sessions. I love writing courses and open-mic nights. All of these things are inherently non-competitive. Ultimately, even professional writers are not really competing against each other, even if it seems that way. The real opponent is not the other author writing in the same genre and going after the same market segment. The real opponent is far more dangerous: a world that doesn’t value books and reading. Our foremost priority should be to promote and encourage a deep love and respect for these things, not just to ensure healthy sales of novels and biographies, but for the sake of civilization itself. It’s not hyperbolic to draw a direct parallel between an enthusiasm for reading and the greatness of a society. When twelve million authors are going after twenty-four million readers, it’s like African wild animals gathered uncomfortably close around a shrinking water hole. But if you increase the number of readers to two billion, four hundred million, it’s more like gorillas wandering the mountain jungles, in no hurry to collect and hoard food or to put on weight for the harsh winter, because there is always plenty to eat all around them. Visualize that – a world so full of avid readers that no matter how numerous and prolific the authors are, there will always be someone to discover and appreciate your work.
Don't get me wrong; writing contests can be enjoyable social diversions when they are held in the proper spirit of silly, pointless fun. But treating them as serious measurements of authorial ability sends a message most composition instructors would probably disagree with.
From a commercial standpoint, success as a writer means correctly identifying your audience, reaching out to them, and consistently producing work that speaks to them. From an artistic perspective, success is a matter of creating pieces that endure and resonate through the ages, appreciated by critics, academics and peers, consumed by a certain segment of the public for decades or centuries. And as a matter of personal expression, success is simply writing what you want to write. None of these things can be accurately gauged by a game.
No one questions that Finnegan's Wake is a significant achievement and a lasting monument. But it stretches the imagination to try to conceive of a competition that James Joyce could have won with it.
Although the larger-than-life, hard-charging, Type-A personalities out there strenuously differ, not everything needs to be turned into a horse race.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
The Intersection of Grammar and Philosophy
Sleeping With My Editor
The Unique Challenge of Writing Sequels
The Perfect Ending
Conversely, if William Carlos Williams or Jorge Luis Borges themselves stood up in front of that same half-drunk crowd and delivered their work quietly and with nuance, it probably wouldn’t hit.
And the idea that being able to write creatively but fast is somehow important strikes me as especially weird the more I think about it. Extemporaneous writing may often be a useful exercise, but some of the greatest works of English literature were rendered over a span of decades. In general, I think it’s safe to say at the very least that books written in a very short amount of time are not always of higher quality than those written on more typical schedules.
The fundamental problem with the premise of writing competitions is that you aren’t comparing apples to apples. You aren’t even comparing apples to oranges. You’re comparing apples to hamsters, or apples to the moons of Saturn, or apples to the concept of free-market capitalism. You’re attempting to artificially rank intrinsically dissimilar things on an equivalent scale. It’s like asking, “what’s better: a pair of shoes, or Robert’s Rules of Order?”
Different people like different things. Moreover, there is a place for everything in this world, whether anyone likes it or not. Some things are important; some things are funny. Some things are entertaining; some things are bracingly disturbing. Some things are sad; some things are insightful. Some things are beautifully crafted; some things are delightfully frivolous. Some things serve a purpose; some things defy definition. None of these characteristics is exclusive to any other. None of these traits is necessarily dependent upon another. Most importantly of all, none of these things is superior to another. It makes no sense to say that Douglas Adams is “better” than Ernest Hemingway (or vice versa). Likewise Kurt Vonnegut and Anne Rice, or William Shakespeare and Chuck Palahniuk or F. Scott Fitzgerald and Homer. These authors strive in their work to achieve very different objectives, and succeed in different ways. If you tell me that Shirley Jackson is “better” than Alan Moore, I am going to roll my eyes. You may as well be saying, “hooba blurfle quomby flerf.”
Contests only really measure anything meaningful when the participants are all attempting to accomplish exactly the same thing in exactly the same way, under otherwise identical conditions – such as a marathon or a poker match. As soon as you introduce a variable, you render the results absurd. When one participant is running and another is swimming or flying a hang glider, you no longer have a real tournament, no matter how hard you pretend. This is particularly true when the runner is going in one direction, the swimmer in a different direction entirely and the hang glider pilot climbing in a slow vertical spiral. And if one person is running and another is painting a landscape mural, it’s not even remotely a race. Someone on the Internet will probably assert that landscape mural painting is better than running and someone else will immediately counter that assertion with the powerful counter-argument that no it isn’t, but these two philosophers of the Web are not advancing human knowledge with this debate.
I love writing workshops and seminars, I love book club meetings and author appearances with question and answer sessions. I love writing courses and open-mic nights. All of these things are inherently non-competitive. Ultimately, even professional writers are not really competing against each other, even if it seems that way. The real opponent is not the other author writing in the same genre and going after the same market segment. The real opponent is far more dangerous: a world that doesn’t value books and reading. Our foremost priority should be to promote and encourage a deep love and respect for these things, not just to ensure healthy sales of novels and biographies, but for the sake of civilization itself. It’s not hyperbolic to draw a direct parallel between an enthusiasm for reading and the greatness of a society. When twelve million authors are going after twenty-four million readers, it’s like African wild animals gathered uncomfortably close around a shrinking water hole. But if you increase the number of readers to two billion, four hundred million, it’s more like gorillas wandering the mountain jungles, in no hurry to collect and hoard food or to put on weight for the harsh winter, because there is always plenty to eat all around them. Visualize that – a world so full of avid readers that no matter how numerous and prolific the authors are, there will always be someone to discover and appreciate your work.
Don't get me wrong; writing contests can be enjoyable social diversions when they are held in the proper spirit of silly, pointless fun. But treating them as serious measurements of authorial ability sends a message most composition instructors would probably disagree with.
From a commercial standpoint, success as a writer means correctly identifying your audience, reaching out to them, and consistently producing work that speaks to them. From an artistic perspective, success is a matter of creating pieces that endure and resonate through the ages, appreciated by critics, academics and peers, consumed by a certain segment of the public for decades or centuries. And as a matter of personal expression, success is simply writing what you want to write. None of these things can be accurately gauged by a game.
No one questions that Finnegan's Wake is a significant achievement and a lasting monument. But it stretches the imagination to try to conceive of a competition that James Joyce could have won with it.
Although the larger-than-life, hard-charging, Type-A personalities out there strenuously differ, not everything needs to be turned into a horse race.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
The Intersection of Grammar and Philosophy
Sleeping With My Editor
The Unique Challenge of Writing Sequels
The Perfect Ending
September 8, 2015
I've Been Tagged!
H.M. Jones tagged me in the “7-7-7” challenge — to post seven lines starting at the seventh row of the seventh page of your current work in progress.
The manuscript I'm flogging away at right at this particular moment in my life is Hate's Profiting, which is the third and final installment of the Victoria da Vinci trilogy of historical science-fantasy novels.
Parenthetically, Book I is Dicing Time for Gladness and Book II is Crass Casualty . . . and of course this is the obligatory reminder that they are both available now on Amazon in print and Kindle editions as well as finer bookstores everywhere.
And without further ado, my 7-7-7:
Hate's Profiting is about halfway finished at this point, and I hope to complete it before the end of the year.
Keeping the chain going, I hereby tag Lisa L. Kirchner, Von Simeon, Lynn Waddell, and Erika Lance.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
The Intersection of Grammar and Philosophy
Sleeping With My Editor
The Unique Challenge of Writing Sequels
The Perfect Ending
The manuscript I'm flogging away at right at this particular moment in my life is Hate's Profiting, which is the third and final installment of the Victoria da Vinci trilogy of historical science-fantasy novels.
Parenthetically, Book I is Dicing Time for Gladness and Book II is Crass Casualty . . . and of course this is the obligatory reminder that they are both available now on Amazon in print and Kindle editions as well as finer bookstores everywhere.
And without further ado, my 7-7-7:
Soon they reached the railroad crossing, two parallel sets of tracks that divided the city like a scar. On the other side stood warehouses and factories. Electric lights gave them a pale brightness, steady and saturating. Beyond that, starting at Juniper Street, a few blocks of declining but still reasonably habitable neighborhoods clung to the perimeter of the vibrant districts of downtown, from which music could very faintly be heard when the wind blew from the south. In the distance, not visible, hid the homes with clean driveways and manicured yards.
“Careful,” Titania said to Amy as they walked across the twin sets of railroad tracks. The wooden ties were rotten and splintered; dislodged, rusty spikes and broken bottles littered the crushed-stone ballast of the railroad bed.
Hate's Profiting is about halfway finished at this point, and I hope to complete it before the end of the year.
Keeping the chain going, I hereby tag Lisa L. Kirchner, Von Simeon, Lynn Waddell, and Erika Lance.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
The Intersection of Grammar and Philosophy
Sleeping With My Editor
The Unique Challenge of Writing Sequels
The Perfect Ending
August 29, 2015
I Don't Know That Guy
The Germans have a wonderful word, Torschlusspanik, a noun that describes the fear that time is running out to take action, that you're getting too old to achieve a long-sought life goal, that it will soon be too late to seize an opportunity. We've all felt that at one point or another, but this blog is not about that.
This blog is about an inversion of Torschlusspanik — instead of being afraid of not achieving objectives, being depressed about the fact that when success does eventually come, it will not come to you, the person you are today. It will come to someone else, the person you will become, a person who has changed and evolved in ways you cannot predict. That person will probably live in a different place, have a different job, enjoy the company of a different group of friends, wear different clothes, eat different foods. That person will be as unlike the you of today as the you of today is unlike the unrecognizable, incomprehensible person you were a couple of decades ago.
It has been speculated by psychologists that one of the reasons procrastination is so seductive is that we never really identify with our future self. We know that if we take care of this task now, our future selves will derive the benefit. But if we sit around and do nothing, our present selves get to savor the pleasure of leisure. The immediate, tangible joy of being lazy and unproductive is much more compelling than the abstract idea that this person we will be tomorrow or next week will be glad that the job got done. We know that person will be us, but at some primal level we don't feel it.
I don't know what the real word is for this emotion I'm describing, but I call it "Letterman Sadness." As in the sadness you feel when you realize that you will never be interviewed by David Letterman. Not because you will never be a celebrity, but because by the time you become a celebrity, it will be someone else hosting the Late Show. (I came up with this term long before David Letterman announced his retirement, which I guess both helps to make the point and also adds an extra tinge of poignancy.) You can't picture the perks of your future in detail and apply them to the world you currently inhabit. Daydreaming about being a guest on some theoretical future talk show is not as satisfying as daydreaming about being a guest on the talk show you're watching right now.
Consider a young woman who is in her second or third year of college, working her way towards an eventual MBA. Let's say she has fantasies about being a wildly successful businesswoman, a stylish tiger in the boardroom, deft and cunning, smart and well put together, confident and radiant in her billion-dollar success. Maybe she imagines arriving to work in a helicopter, shaking hands with the President, being on the cover of Fortune magazine, having a bestselling biography by a respected journalist, owning half a dozen companies, being surrounded by admiring, envious subordinates. She wants all of her current friends and classmates to be impressed, to see what she has accomplished. But she must acknowledge that by the time all these things happen, she won't know most of these people anymore. With the exception of a few durable long-term relationships, the overwhelming majority of the people she sees every day in the classroom and around the campus will long since have faded into the obscurity of distant, vague memories. Right now she knows the faces and names of every single person in her statistics class; in twenty-five years, she might not recall ever having taken statistics in college. That's Letterman Sadness.
My goal is not to be a celebrity or a tycoon. My goal is to be truly free: free to wander the world, unfettered by budget constraints or time limits, able to seek adventure and fulfillment in whatever form happens to appeal to me at the moment as I drift from place to place, governed only by my whims as I ride the tides of happenstance. There are lots of different ways this could ultimately happen (and it probably won't), but even if it does, as a rational man I am forced to accept that it will be a very different version of myself who gets to relish the outcome. It might turn out to be true that a 54-year-old Austin or a 74-year-old Austin finds himself in the fortunate position of bouncing from one escapade to another, crossing oceans and crawling through caves, flying over mountains and hiking to remote waterfalls, from the luxury of the most vibrant metropolis to the serenity of the most isolated island. He will be parachuting in Patagonia and kayaking in Kenya, sailing in Sicily and diving in Dominica, signing copies of his novels at an event in London on Monday and soaking in a hot spring in New Zealand on Friday. And I'm happy for him, at least in a general way. But I don't know that guy, and I never will.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
So, What Do You Do?
The Three Kinds of Book Clubs
This Is How It's Done, Folks
The Seven Things Challenge
This blog is about an inversion of Torschlusspanik — instead of being afraid of not achieving objectives, being depressed about the fact that when success does eventually come, it will not come to you, the person you are today. It will come to someone else, the person you will become, a person who has changed and evolved in ways you cannot predict. That person will probably live in a different place, have a different job, enjoy the company of a different group of friends, wear different clothes, eat different foods. That person will be as unlike the you of today as the you of today is unlike the unrecognizable, incomprehensible person you were a couple of decades ago.
It has been speculated by psychologists that one of the reasons procrastination is so seductive is that we never really identify with our future self. We know that if we take care of this task now, our future selves will derive the benefit. But if we sit around and do nothing, our present selves get to savor the pleasure of leisure. The immediate, tangible joy of being lazy and unproductive is much more compelling than the abstract idea that this person we will be tomorrow or next week will be glad that the job got done. We know that person will be us, but at some primal level we don't feel it.
I don't know what the real word is for this emotion I'm describing, but I call it "Letterman Sadness." As in the sadness you feel when you realize that you will never be interviewed by David Letterman. Not because you will never be a celebrity, but because by the time you become a celebrity, it will be someone else hosting the Late Show. (I came up with this term long before David Letterman announced his retirement, which I guess both helps to make the point and also adds an extra tinge of poignancy.) You can't picture the perks of your future in detail and apply them to the world you currently inhabit. Daydreaming about being a guest on some theoretical future talk show is not as satisfying as daydreaming about being a guest on the talk show you're watching right now.
Consider a young woman who is in her second or third year of college, working her way towards an eventual MBA. Let's say she has fantasies about being a wildly successful businesswoman, a stylish tiger in the boardroom, deft and cunning, smart and well put together, confident and radiant in her billion-dollar success. Maybe she imagines arriving to work in a helicopter, shaking hands with the President, being on the cover of Fortune magazine, having a bestselling biography by a respected journalist, owning half a dozen companies, being surrounded by admiring, envious subordinates. She wants all of her current friends and classmates to be impressed, to see what she has accomplished. But she must acknowledge that by the time all these things happen, she won't know most of these people anymore. With the exception of a few durable long-term relationships, the overwhelming majority of the people she sees every day in the classroom and around the campus will long since have faded into the obscurity of distant, vague memories. Right now she knows the faces and names of every single person in her statistics class; in twenty-five years, she might not recall ever having taken statistics in college. That's Letterman Sadness.
My goal is not to be a celebrity or a tycoon. My goal is to be truly free: free to wander the world, unfettered by budget constraints or time limits, able to seek adventure and fulfillment in whatever form happens to appeal to me at the moment as I drift from place to place, governed only by my whims as I ride the tides of happenstance. There are lots of different ways this could ultimately happen (and it probably won't), but even if it does, as a rational man I am forced to accept that it will be a very different version of myself who gets to relish the outcome. It might turn out to be true that a 54-year-old Austin or a 74-year-old Austin finds himself in the fortunate position of bouncing from one escapade to another, crossing oceans and crawling through caves, flying over mountains and hiking to remote waterfalls, from the luxury of the most vibrant metropolis to the serenity of the most isolated island. He will be parachuting in Patagonia and kayaking in Kenya, sailing in Sicily and diving in Dominica, signing copies of his novels at an event in London on Monday and soaking in a hot spring in New Zealand on Friday. And I'm happy for him, at least in a general way. But I don't know that guy, and I never will.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
So, What Do You Do?
The Three Kinds of Book Clubs
This Is How It's Done, Folks
The Seven Things Challenge
July 11, 2015
So, What Do You Do?
Despite having already posted
“Art. vs. Income”
and
“On Being a Productive Member of Society,”
in previous blogs, I somehow still feel like I'm not quite done with this topic.
Although I can't say for sure how young I was when I decided I wanted to be a writer, I do know with certainty that it was my stated ambition by the age of ten, because it was in the newspaper.
I had (for some strange reason) sent a letter to the Pentagon explaining my idea for a defensive anti-missile laser. Someone in the public relations division had written me back a very polite letter encouraging me in my future studies and saying that if I applied myself in school I could perhaps someday become an engineer or a physicist and work for the Defense Department. This friendly invitation to join the U.S. military-industrial complex found its way to the local paper, and a reporter was given the plum assignment of coming to my house to interview me. Her name was Goldie Blumenstyk. A short article appeared the next day. It included a picture of me holding a diagram of my “invention” and concluded with the revelation that my goal was not to be a scientist, but to write novels.
After toying around indecisively with various college majors including journalism and philosophy, I finally settled on history. The only jobs available in that area are historian, college professor and museum curator, and I didn't really plan to do any of those things. I just thought history was really cool. But then in my final year, deep budget cuts across the entire humanities department meant that there was not a single senior-level history course available for me to take, so I wouldn't be able to graduate with a history degree after all. (The school's football program, on the other hand, was fully funded. I’m just saying.)
So in irritation and desperation, I switched my major to English for the eminently practical reason that I already had the most credits in that subject. (I had been participating in creative writing workshops for elective credit, mainly just because I enjoyed them, which was closely related to the fact that it was an almost unlimited opportunity for me to be a wise-cracking smart-ass.) I took one class in Milton and a second one in digital rhetoric, and that was it, I was done. I had an English degree. (Side note: I got an A in digital rhetoric, and I'm still not sure what that is.)
So now it was time to get one of those pesky “job” things I had been hearing so much about. I picked the obvious option, and did what anyone with an English degree would do: I became a commercial pilot.
I towed gliders for a while and also worked as a flight instructor. My most interesting and memorable job, though, was “elevator operator” — flying the jump plane at a parachute school. The small operation was owned by man with more than 8,000 skydives. (He later got out of that line of work and became a patent attorney.) The job consisted of climbing up to jump altitude in a big slow spiral with a self-jettisoning human payload on board, lining up on jump run, opening the door, watching as the students and instructors bailed out, and then diving back down to the airport to do it all over again.
The jump plane was an old Cessna 182 — a fixed-gear, high-wing, strut-braced, single-engine machine that was, for a period during the 70s and 80s, the most common jump plane in the world. (Ever see that 1985 movie Fandango? Remember the funky-looking plane from the Pecos Parachute School? It’s one of those.) Like all jump planes, it was butt-ugly, its interior ripped out to save space and weight, leaving bare riveted aluminum. The exterior was stained with grass from the turf runway, smudged and streaky from the oily exhaust. The airstrip was in a rural area with lots of woods, so I was always cleaning bug guts off the windscreen. Without any soundproofing, it was loud. I wore a radio headset, the kind with heavily insulated ear cups. The instructors and more experienced jumpers often wore earplugs to save their hearing. The students had other things on their minds and hardly noticed the noise. There was only one seat, and it was for the pilot. Up to five jumpers, packed in tightly wearing their bulky gear, sat directly on the metal deck. They wore safety belts, but only for the first thousand feet of the climb. (Above that point, it’s preferable to jump out of a disabled aircraft rather than to land with it.) I also wore a parachute of my own, an emergency military rig to be used in the event of a catastrophic failure, such as a jumper accidentally deploying his main while leaning out the door, entangling it with the horizontal stabilizer. Strange things can happen when you’ve got people climbing around on the outside of an airplane while it’s in flight, and at one point or another all of them have. (Run an Internet search for “jump plane accident” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.)
The student would come trudging out to the jump plane, escorted by the instructor and encumbered with a heavy rig. (“Rig” is the conventional term for the entire assembly, including a main parachute, a reserve parachute and the container-harness system.) Students wore floppy jumpsuits in bright colors to make them easy to find in case they missed the target and wound up landing in a field or a forest or a basically anywhere other than the drop zone. The jumpsuits didn’t get washed often, so they bore all the ground-in dirt marks of previous student touchdowns, which ranged from the imperfect to the spectacular. Students were taught to do a “parachute landing fall,” or PLF, similar to the technique actors use to faint or collapse dead on stage without hurting themselves. Learning to land a parachute gracefully takes time to master, to the students always did PLFs for their first few jumps. They also wore comically large helmets and oversized freefall altimeters on their wrists. The altimeters have a yellow “pull” arc and a red “oh, shit!” arc.
I would generally already be strapped in and have the airplane engine running, and I would help to guide the student (accompanied by one or two instructors) as he or she got settled in uncomfortably, either cross-legged or hugging knees to chest, fastened the safety belt and prepared for takeoff. At this point, they were usually pretty calm, although they always looked preoccupied from the hours of training. They were worrying about forgetting something important, or freezing up.
Advancing the throttle, I would steer the plane down the grass runway, gaining airspeed until we lifted off. This was what I really loved: the flying. The ground would drop away, and the landscape would open up around us. Suddenly, the north central Florida scenery, with its lakes and cattle pastures, phosphate mines and orange groves, long straight highways and winding swampy rivers, was spread out before us in every direction. There is no view in the world quite like it. On a clear day, you can see both coasts from up there.
The Cessna 182 is not a fast climber, so it took a while to get up to jump altitude. Experienced jumpers often catnap on the ride to altitude, but of course the students are wide awake and concentrating, reviewing what they’ve been taught and trying to remember it all. The instructor would usually remind them of a few things as we climbed, and most importantly would point out where the drop zone was relative to prominent landmarks.
On a typical AFF (accelerated freefall) training jump, we would climb up to 11 or 12 thousand feet. I would be talking to Air Traffic Control on the way up, letting them know we were there and that we were about to fill the sky with plummeting humans. As we finally turn onto jump run, that’s when we open the door. Opening the door is The Moment of Truth.
Like most jump pilots, I was an experienced jumper myself, so an open airplane door didn’t freak me out. The first-jump students were another story. What I found really interesting from a psychological standpoint was observing people, up close, over and over again, as they confronted what was almost certainly one of the most thrilling and terrifying moments of their lives: their first skydive.
Some people were like me, and had always wanted to learn to skydive. I had first expressed the desire at the age of four, when my mother read me a story from Reader’s Digest titled, “Skydiving: Rapture of the Heights.” I waited impatiently for years and years until I turned 18 and could legally make my first jump. While I waited, I read everything I could get my hands on related to parachutes and airplanes. At last the day came: on the morning of my 18th birthday, I got out of bed, drove straight to the drop zone and made my first jump. But that’s not typical.
Many others come out to do it just once, either to prove something to themselves or to celebrate some major milestone in life, such as a divorce or a birthday with a zero in it. Most of them are nervous but excited, bravely signing the waiver and then going through the training and orientation with the demeanor of someone who is a little scared but mostly eager and enthusiastic. They maintain this attitude as they get manifested for the next load, as they put on their gear, as they board the jump plane, as we take off and as we climb up to jump altitude. They are smiling but fidgety, cheerful but restless.
Until the door comes open. “Door,” I yell, warning the jumpers to protect their handles. I rotate the latch, and the door flies up, held open by the strong, cold wind.
That’s when the reality of the situation hits them. The view is breathtaking. I never got tired of it. Very few non-skydivers ever get to look out an open door and see the landscape from two and a half miles up. And that’s the moment when the student’s face goes blank. This is actually happening. They revert to sensory overload mode. The computer is running, but it’s not saving to the hard disk. The next few seconds are a wild blur that they will not clearly recollect, if at all.
Different exits are used depending upon the student’s training level. For a first jump, the student climbs out on the step along with two instructors, clinging to the wing strut. The instructors are hanging on tightly to the student. The initial climbout can be surprisingly challenging: most students are truly shocked at how powerful the wind blast is, even though I throttle back to idle for this part, and the airplane is actually in a gliding descent. Once in position, the student checks in with the instructors, who signal that they’re ready. The student screams out a count choreographed with an up-and-down body motion: “ready, set, GO!” And then they’re gone, speeding towards the Earth.
As soon as the students and instructors exit, I bank the plane over hard, entering a steep descent, keeping them in view as they drop away. It’s fascinating to watch jumpers in freefall through an open door from the pilot’s seat of an airplane. They recede into specks with amazing swiftness. It’s another one of those remarkable sights that few people ever get to witness, another thing I never got tired of. I close the door by kicking the plane sideways with a stab on the rudder pedal, interrupting the airflow and allowing the modified door to fall. I reach over and latch it, and then continue my descent to the airport.
The students tend to open high, and I generally beat them to the ground. So after landing and shutting down the jump plane, I get to watch them as they come back in, their canopies bundled up like laundry in their arms, their sloppily daisy-chained suspension lines dragging in the grass, grinning from ear to ear, so full of joy and cranked up on adrenaline that they can hardly contain themselves. That was my favorite part of the job: I got to see people having one of the best days of their lives.
Well, maybe not always the best days of their lives. Once in a while things would go awry. We never had a serious accident, thank goodness, but from time to time the jump would not conclude with the usual proud and triumphant march back to the packing area, quivering and high-fiving. I remember one poor young man who either got overloaded or overconfident and did not follow the radio instructions he was being given. (The students wear a receiver attached to the rig’s chest harness, and an instructor on the ground tells them to turn left, turn right etc.) Instead of landing in the nice big friendly green expanse of mowed grass with the huge red X and the handy wind indicator, he wound up high in a pine tree. His canopy was stretched across the branches above him, causing them to bend under his weight and shower him with pine needles. He hung there in his harness, that oversized helmet on his head, those plastic goggles over his eyes, twisting and swinging slowly, his arms and legs limp with helpless despair. Calling down to us, his voice low and cracking, he inquired what to do now. We told him to remain calm. So he just dangled there, 25% scared and 75% embarrassed, waiting for the fire department to arrive with a ladder truck to rescue him. To this day, when I hear the words “forlorn” or “ignominious,” I think of that kid.
As much fun as it was, dropping meat bombs didn’t pay the bills. Eventually I got a job as the manager of pilot training for a cargo carrier. That company had a fleet of about one hundred small airplanes that they used to haul light packages short distances. They followed an on-demand business model rather than having a fixed flight schedule like the airlines do. Their clients were mostly medical labs and banks. The cargo was blood samples and checks being transported to Federal Reserve clearinghouses. (This was back in those quaint days when people still wrote checks.) They had bases all over the United States, north as far as Minnesota, west as far as California and south as far as Miami. I spent thirteen years with that company, and during that time traveled almost constantly. It was a great way to see America. On the down side, it was stressful and dangerous. (Four pilots were killed in crashes during the time I was there.)
Being a freight pilot means spending long periods of time hanging around airports with absolutely nothing to do, so I wrote. It was a fairly prolific period for me. Boredom, while a poor motive, is an effective motivator. I wrote essays and short stories and published half a dozen magazine articles. I wrote several novel manuscripts. Some I wisely set aside. Others I even more wisely threw away.
In my capacity as training manager, I found my niche. This was a job that involved an enormous amount of writing. I wrote standard operating procedures, checklists, manuals, guidebooks, training curricula, classroom handouts, tests, instructional supplements, self-study reference materials and anything else that needed to be written, thousands of pages’ worth, from internal memos to letters to the government. “We need a new training module for this new financial regulation,” management would say, or, “we need a new training module for this new piece of equipment we’re going to start using.” So I’d spend some time with my best friends Google and Wikipedia, do the research, and write a brand-new training module on that topic completely from scratch. I loved it. Although the writing was very technical in nature, it required a surprising amount of creativity and it was satisfying to use my language skills in a meaningful and useful way. Looking back, it’s clear to me now how I was redefining the role to bend my career trajectory back towards what I really wanted to do: be a writer.
When the company was absorbed in a merger with a former competitor, I took it as my cue to leave. I resigned, and my wife and I moved to the west coast of Florida. At this point, I began doing contract corporate technical writing and project management work, which, although inconsistent, was much more lucrative than being a freight pilot. I also published my first novel.
I have a friend who is an artist. That’s what she does; that’s how she defines herself, and rightly so. She has always been artistically inclined. She went to art school. When people ask her what she does, she answers, “I’m an artist.” But instead of asking about her art, she complains, many people ask next who she works for. When she explains that she’s an independent artist, they want to know how she supports herself. Do you sell your art? Or does a gallery pay to exhibit your work? She supports herself by working behind the counter at a coffeehouse, she tells them. And then they nod, with that haughty posture and smug look of condescension, as if they’re thinking, “Oh, so she’s not really an artist. She’s a barista.”
Thus the seemingly simple “so-what-do-you-do” question is fraught with social significance and all the traps and baggage that accompanies it. I can no longer say that I’m a commercial pilot, so now I always struggle with how to answer. I enjoy being able to say, “novelist,” which is technically correct, but then again it’s not my primary source of income, so it doesn’t feel entirely honest. My contract writing assignments provide me with most of my money. So I could answer, “I’m a writer,” which is also technically correct, and is more broadly accurate, since it covers both the books I write and the corporate stuff I generate. But then they want to know, “what do you write?” This is a reasonable question, but one that has exasperated writers since the dawn of written language. If I’ve had more than three beers I’m likely to respond, “Mainly adverbs, sometimes random participles.” If I’m trying not to alienate people too early in the conversation, I can factually report that I write fiction and also do technical and business writing and editing on a temporary and part-time basis, but that sounds so dull that I can hardly even type it without losing interest in what I’m saying. Moreover, it’s not quite right anymore, because on my last project, I ended up working for about three months on something that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with writing at all. People are funny about fishing for details. How many books have you sold? Are you on the New York Times Bestseller List? Is it being made into a movie? It’s like they’re thinking, “Oh, so he’s not really a novelist, he’s an office worker who just happens to have written a novel.” The right to self-identify as a novelist, it seems, is a privilege that must be earned fiscally. I feel like I ought to be carrying around a copy of last year’s tax return to show them. “No, look!”
“So, what do you do?”
“I’m a novelist.”
“Really? Like a published novelist?”
(Sigh.) “Yes.”
“Wow! That sounds legitimate! I’ll let it go for now, but I’m going to ask a few sly questions later in an attempt to figure out how much money you’re making.”
“Fair enough.”
I make a conscious effort to avoid asking people the “so-what-do-you-do?” question. I know that if they’re proud of what they do (or how much money they make), they will find a way to slip it into the conversation. Frankly, I don’t care what you do. If you’re smart and/or funny and/or interesting and/or you have a nice boat, we can hang out and enjoy each other’s company. Our employment doesn’t necessarily need to enter into it, unless (for example) we’re talking about the publishing industry or something else directly work-related. Sometimes I meet people — at the drop zone, for instance, where our common interest in parachuting provides an instant bond — and have hours-long conversations with them without our jobs ever coming up. I like that. I’m always just a little bit disappointed when the other person stops and says, “So, what do you do?” I feel like the authentic, organic part of our interaction has ended at that point and can never be reclaimed.
And while I do relish the confused looks I get when I reply with things like, “armadillo sexer,” “pediatric botanist,” “blimp camouflager,” “administrative taxidermist” or “confetti appraiser,” there are occasional situations where I don’t want to be annoying or evasive. At such times, I find myself wishing that I could make a real living as a novelist, just so I could stake my claim to an easy and accurate one-word answer. My 10-year-old self would like that.
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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
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Recent popular posts:
Crazy People in History #1
A Brief Guide to Writing Terrible Fiction
Martinus or Martino?
Answering the Inevitable Questions
Although I can't say for sure how young I was when I decided I wanted to be a writer, I do know with certainty that it was my stated ambition by the age of ten, because it was in the newspaper.
I had (for some strange reason) sent a letter to the Pentagon explaining my idea for a defensive anti-missile laser. Someone in the public relations division had written me back a very polite letter encouraging me in my future studies and saying that if I applied myself in school I could perhaps someday become an engineer or a physicist and work for the Defense Department. This friendly invitation to join the U.S. military-industrial complex found its way to the local paper, and a reporter was given the plum assignment of coming to my house to interview me. Her name was Goldie Blumenstyk. A short article appeared the next day. It included a picture of me holding a diagram of my “invention” and concluded with the revelation that my goal was not to be a scientist, but to write novels.
After toying around indecisively with various college majors including journalism and philosophy, I finally settled on history. The only jobs available in that area are historian, college professor and museum curator, and I didn't really plan to do any of those things. I just thought history was really cool. But then in my final year, deep budget cuts across the entire humanities department meant that there was not a single senior-level history course available for me to take, so I wouldn't be able to graduate with a history degree after all. (The school's football program, on the other hand, was fully funded. I’m just saying.)
So in irritation and desperation, I switched my major to English for the eminently practical reason that I already had the most credits in that subject. (I had been participating in creative writing workshops for elective credit, mainly just because I enjoyed them, which was closely related to the fact that it was an almost unlimited opportunity for me to be a wise-cracking smart-ass.) I took one class in Milton and a second one in digital rhetoric, and that was it, I was done. I had an English degree. (Side note: I got an A in digital rhetoric, and I'm still not sure what that is.)
So now it was time to get one of those pesky “job” things I had been hearing so much about. I picked the obvious option, and did what anyone with an English degree would do: I became a commercial pilot.
I towed gliders for a while and also worked as a flight instructor. My most interesting and memorable job, though, was “elevator operator” — flying the jump plane at a parachute school. The small operation was owned by man with more than 8,000 skydives. (He later got out of that line of work and became a patent attorney.) The job consisted of climbing up to jump altitude in a big slow spiral with a self-jettisoning human payload on board, lining up on jump run, opening the door, watching as the students and instructors bailed out, and then diving back down to the airport to do it all over again.
The jump plane was an old Cessna 182 — a fixed-gear, high-wing, strut-braced, single-engine machine that was, for a period during the 70s and 80s, the most common jump plane in the world. (Ever see that 1985 movie Fandango? Remember the funky-looking plane from the Pecos Parachute School? It’s one of those.) Like all jump planes, it was butt-ugly, its interior ripped out to save space and weight, leaving bare riveted aluminum. The exterior was stained with grass from the turf runway, smudged and streaky from the oily exhaust. The airstrip was in a rural area with lots of woods, so I was always cleaning bug guts off the windscreen. Without any soundproofing, it was loud. I wore a radio headset, the kind with heavily insulated ear cups. The instructors and more experienced jumpers often wore earplugs to save their hearing. The students had other things on their minds and hardly noticed the noise. There was only one seat, and it was for the pilot. Up to five jumpers, packed in tightly wearing their bulky gear, sat directly on the metal deck. They wore safety belts, but only for the first thousand feet of the climb. (Above that point, it’s preferable to jump out of a disabled aircraft rather than to land with it.) I also wore a parachute of my own, an emergency military rig to be used in the event of a catastrophic failure, such as a jumper accidentally deploying his main while leaning out the door, entangling it with the horizontal stabilizer. Strange things can happen when you’ve got people climbing around on the outside of an airplane while it’s in flight, and at one point or another all of them have. (Run an Internet search for “jump plane accident” and you’ll see what I’m talking about.)
The student would come trudging out to the jump plane, escorted by the instructor and encumbered with a heavy rig. (“Rig” is the conventional term for the entire assembly, including a main parachute, a reserve parachute and the container-harness system.) Students wore floppy jumpsuits in bright colors to make them easy to find in case they missed the target and wound up landing in a field or a forest or a basically anywhere other than the drop zone. The jumpsuits didn’t get washed often, so they bore all the ground-in dirt marks of previous student touchdowns, which ranged from the imperfect to the spectacular. Students were taught to do a “parachute landing fall,” or PLF, similar to the technique actors use to faint or collapse dead on stage without hurting themselves. Learning to land a parachute gracefully takes time to master, to the students always did PLFs for their first few jumps. They also wore comically large helmets and oversized freefall altimeters on their wrists. The altimeters have a yellow “pull” arc and a red “oh, shit!” arc.
I would generally already be strapped in and have the airplane engine running, and I would help to guide the student (accompanied by one or two instructors) as he or she got settled in uncomfortably, either cross-legged or hugging knees to chest, fastened the safety belt and prepared for takeoff. At this point, they were usually pretty calm, although they always looked preoccupied from the hours of training. They were worrying about forgetting something important, or freezing up.
Advancing the throttle, I would steer the plane down the grass runway, gaining airspeed until we lifted off. This was what I really loved: the flying. The ground would drop away, and the landscape would open up around us. Suddenly, the north central Florida scenery, with its lakes and cattle pastures, phosphate mines and orange groves, long straight highways and winding swampy rivers, was spread out before us in every direction. There is no view in the world quite like it. On a clear day, you can see both coasts from up there.
The Cessna 182 is not a fast climber, so it took a while to get up to jump altitude. Experienced jumpers often catnap on the ride to altitude, but of course the students are wide awake and concentrating, reviewing what they’ve been taught and trying to remember it all. The instructor would usually remind them of a few things as we climbed, and most importantly would point out where the drop zone was relative to prominent landmarks.
On a typical AFF (accelerated freefall) training jump, we would climb up to 11 or 12 thousand feet. I would be talking to Air Traffic Control on the way up, letting them know we were there and that we were about to fill the sky with plummeting humans. As we finally turn onto jump run, that’s when we open the door. Opening the door is The Moment of Truth.
Like most jump pilots, I was an experienced jumper myself, so an open airplane door didn’t freak me out. The first-jump students were another story. What I found really interesting from a psychological standpoint was observing people, up close, over and over again, as they confronted what was almost certainly one of the most thrilling and terrifying moments of their lives: their first skydive.
Some people were like me, and had always wanted to learn to skydive. I had first expressed the desire at the age of four, when my mother read me a story from Reader’s Digest titled, “Skydiving: Rapture of the Heights.” I waited impatiently for years and years until I turned 18 and could legally make my first jump. While I waited, I read everything I could get my hands on related to parachutes and airplanes. At last the day came: on the morning of my 18th birthday, I got out of bed, drove straight to the drop zone and made my first jump. But that’s not typical.
Many others come out to do it just once, either to prove something to themselves or to celebrate some major milestone in life, such as a divorce or a birthday with a zero in it. Most of them are nervous but excited, bravely signing the waiver and then going through the training and orientation with the demeanor of someone who is a little scared but mostly eager and enthusiastic. They maintain this attitude as they get manifested for the next load, as they put on their gear, as they board the jump plane, as we take off and as we climb up to jump altitude. They are smiling but fidgety, cheerful but restless.
Until the door comes open. “Door,” I yell, warning the jumpers to protect their handles. I rotate the latch, and the door flies up, held open by the strong, cold wind.
That’s when the reality of the situation hits them. The view is breathtaking. I never got tired of it. Very few non-skydivers ever get to look out an open door and see the landscape from two and a half miles up. And that’s the moment when the student’s face goes blank. This is actually happening. They revert to sensory overload mode. The computer is running, but it’s not saving to the hard disk. The next few seconds are a wild blur that they will not clearly recollect, if at all.
Different exits are used depending upon the student’s training level. For a first jump, the student climbs out on the step along with two instructors, clinging to the wing strut. The instructors are hanging on tightly to the student. The initial climbout can be surprisingly challenging: most students are truly shocked at how powerful the wind blast is, even though I throttle back to idle for this part, and the airplane is actually in a gliding descent. Once in position, the student checks in with the instructors, who signal that they’re ready. The student screams out a count choreographed with an up-and-down body motion: “ready, set, GO!” And then they’re gone, speeding towards the Earth.
As soon as the students and instructors exit, I bank the plane over hard, entering a steep descent, keeping them in view as they drop away. It’s fascinating to watch jumpers in freefall through an open door from the pilot’s seat of an airplane. They recede into specks with amazing swiftness. It’s another one of those remarkable sights that few people ever get to witness, another thing I never got tired of. I close the door by kicking the plane sideways with a stab on the rudder pedal, interrupting the airflow and allowing the modified door to fall. I reach over and latch it, and then continue my descent to the airport.
The students tend to open high, and I generally beat them to the ground. So after landing and shutting down the jump plane, I get to watch them as they come back in, their canopies bundled up like laundry in their arms, their sloppily daisy-chained suspension lines dragging in the grass, grinning from ear to ear, so full of joy and cranked up on adrenaline that they can hardly contain themselves. That was my favorite part of the job: I got to see people having one of the best days of their lives.
Well, maybe not always the best days of their lives. Once in a while things would go awry. We never had a serious accident, thank goodness, but from time to time the jump would not conclude with the usual proud and triumphant march back to the packing area, quivering and high-fiving. I remember one poor young man who either got overloaded or overconfident and did not follow the radio instructions he was being given. (The students wear a receiver attached to the rig’s chest harness, and an instructor on the ground tells them to turn left, turn right etc.) Instead of landing in the nice big friendly green expanse of mowed grass with the huge red X and the handy wind indicator, he wound up high in a pine tree. His canopy was stretched across the branches above him, causing them to bend under his weight and shower him with pine needles. He hung there in his harness, that oversized helmet on his head, those plastic goggles over his eyes, twisting and swinging slowly, his arms and legs limp with helpless despair. Calling down to us, his voice low and cracking, he inquired what to do now. We told him to remain calm. So he just dangled there, 25% scared and 75% embarrassed, waiting for the fire department to arrive with a ladder truck to rescue him. To this day, when I hear the words “forlorn” or “ignominious,” I think of that kid.
As much fun as it was, dropping meat bombs didn’t pay the bills. Eventually I got a job as the manager of pilot training for a cargo carrier. That company had a fleet of about one hundred small airplanes that they used to haul light packages short distances. They followed an on-demand business model rather than having a fixed flight schedule like the airlines do. Their clients were mostly medical labs and banks. The cargo was blood samples and checks being transported to Federal Reserve clearinghouses. (This was back in those quaint days when people still wrote checks.) They had bases all over the United States, north as far as Minnesota, west as far as California and south as far as Miami. I spent thirteen years with that company, and during that time traveled almost constantly. It was a great way to see America. On the down side, it was stressful and dangerous. (Four pilots were killed in crashes during the time I was there.)
Being a freight pilot means spending long periods of time hanging around airports with absolutely nothing to do, so I wrote. It was a fairly prolific period for me. Boredom, while a poor motive, is an effective motivator. I wrote essays and short stories and published half a dozen magazine articles. I wrote several novel manuscripts. Some I wisely set aside. Others I even more wisely threw away.
In my capacity as training manager, I found my niche. This was a job that involved an enormous amount of writing. I wrote standard operating procedures, checklists, manuals, guidebooks, training curricula, classroom handouts, tests, instructional supplements, self-study reference materials and anything else that needed to be written, thousands of pages’ worth, from internal memos to letters to the government. “We need a new training module for this new financial regulation,” management would say, or, “we need a new training module for this new piece of equipment we’re going to start using.” So I’d spend some time with my best friends Google and Wikipedia, do the research, and write a brand-new training module on that topic completely from scratch. I loved it. Although the writing was very technical in nature, it required a surprising amount of creativity and it was satisfying to use my language skills in a meaningful and useful way. Looking back, it’s clear to me now how I was redefining the role to bend my career trajectory back towards what I really wanted to do: be a writer.
When the company was absorbed in a merger with a former competitor, I took it as my cue to leave. I resigned, and my wife and I moved to the west coast of Florida. At this point, I began doing contract corporate technical writing and project management work, which, although inconsistent, was much more lucrative than being a freight pilot. I also published my first novel.
I have a friend who is an artist. That’s what she does; that’s how she defines herself, and rightly so. She has always been artistically inclined. She went to art school. When people ask her what she does, she answers, “I’m an artist.” But instead of asking about her art, she complains, many people ask next who she works for. When she explains that she’s an independent artist, they want to know how she supports herself. Do you sell your art? Or does a gallery pay to exhibit your work? She supports herself by working behind the counter at a coffeehouse, she tells them. And then they nod, with that haughty posture and smug look of condescension, as if they’re thinking, “Oh, so she’s not really an artist. She’s a barista.”
Thus the seemingly simple “so-what-do-you-do” question is fraught with social significance and all the traps and baggage that accompanies it. I can no longer say that I’m a commercial pilot, so now I always struggle with how to answer. I enjoy being able to say, “novelist,” which is technically correct, but then again it’s not my primary source of income, so it doesn’t feel entirely honest. My contract writing assignments provide me with most of my money. So I could answer, “I’m a writer,” which is also technically correct, and is more broadly accurate, since it covers both the books I write and the corporate stuff I generate. But then they want to know, “what do you write?” This is a reasonable question, but one that has exasperated writers since the dawn of written language. If I’ve had more than three beers I’m likely to respond, “Mainly adverbs, sometimes random participles.” If I’m trying not to alienate people too early in the conversation, I can factually report that I write fiction and also do technical and business writing and editing on a temporary and part-time basis, but that sounds so dull that I can hardly even type it without losing interest in what I’m saying. Moreover, it’s not quite right anymore, because on my last project, I ended up working for about three months on something that had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with writing at all. People are funny about fishing for details. How many books have you sold? Are you on the New York Times Bestseller List? Is it being made into a movie? It’s like they’re thinking, “Oh, so he’s not really a novelist, he’s an office worker who just happens to have written a novel.” The right to self-identify as a novelist, it seems, is a privilege that must be earned fiscally. I feel like I ought to be carrying around a copy of last year’s tax return to show them. “No, look!”
“So, what do you do?”
“I’m a novelist.”
“Really? Like a published novelist?”
(Sigh.) “Yes.”
“Wow! That sounds legitimate! I’ll let it go for now, but I’m going to ask a few sly questions later in an attempt to figure out how much money you’re making.”
“Fair enough.”
I make a conscious effort to avoid asking people the “so-what-do-you-do?” question. I know that if they’re proud of what they do (or how much money they make), they will find a way to slip it into the conversation. Frankly, I don’t care what you do. If you’re smart and/or funny and/or interesting and/or you have a nice boat, we can hang out and enjoy each other’s company. Our employment doesn’t necessarily need to enter into it, unless (for example) we’re talking about the publishing industry or something else directly work-related. Sometimes I meet people — at the drop zone, for instance, where our common interest in parachuting provides an instant bond — and have hours-long conversations with them without our jobs ever coming up. I like that. I’m always just a little bit disappointed when the other person stops and says, “So, what do you do?” I feel like the authentic, organic part of our interaction has ended at that point and can never be reclaimed.
And while I do relish the confused looks I get when I reply with things like, “armadillo sexer,” “pediatric botanist,” “blimp camouflager,” “administrative taxidermist” or “confetti appraiser,” there are occasional situations where I don’t want to be annoying or evasive. At such times, I find myself wishing that I could make a real living as a novelist, just so I could stake my claim to an easy and accurate one-word answer. My 10-year-old self would like that.
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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
Crazy People in History #1
A Brief Guide to Writing Terrible Fiction
Martinus or Martino?
Answering the Inevitable Questions
July 2, 2015
The Three Kinds of Book Clubs
Ever walked into a book club and realized almost immediately you had come to the wrong place? Yeah, me too.
The way I see it, there are three basic categories of book clubs, each category serving its own distinct function. While there may be variations and even some small degree of overlap, I don’t consider this a spectrum or a continuum, but more like three completely different things, driving towards unique goals. To be successful, they must take place in very dissimilar kinds of places and be managed in diametrically opposite ways. If a host tries to run a Type I book club like a Type III book club (or vice versa), the result is likely to be an unmitigated flop.
In order to avoid awkward misunderstandings, it’s important for the host to make it perfectly clear in advance what kind of book club this is. It’s embarrassing to show up with five pages of discussion notes and a stack of index cards with major points highlighted in four different colors only to find that half the people there haven’t even read the book and the other half limit their observations to things like, “I thought it was awesome!” or, “I thought it sucked donkey balls.”
It’s equally embarrassing to arrive thinking you’re going to hang out with your writer friends, chat about Frieda’s new manuscript and maybe have a few cocktails, and then discover with some degree of mortification that you were expected to come fully prepared for an intensive workshop.
Finally, it’s embarrassing for an author to be sitting at a table autographing books for a line of fans when one of them wants to get into a 20-minute debate on her use of adverbs.
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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
Crazy People in History #1
Jerks: Some Observations
Martinus or Martino?
Answering the Inevitable Questions
The way I see it, there are three basic categories of book clubs, each category serving its own distinct function. While there may be variations and even some small degree of overlap, I don’t consider this a spectrum or a continuum, but more like three completely different things, driving towards unique goals. To be successful, they must take place in very dissimilar kinds of places and be managed in diametrically opposite ways. If a host tries to run a Type I book club like a Type III book club (or vice versa), the result is likely to be an unmitigated flop.
Type I – The Workshop (Author Present)
The primary function of this type of reading group is to provide detailed, technical, editorial critiques from a wide variety of perspectives. When signing up for this, the author has a right to expect (and demand) honest and useful feedback from fellow writers who have read the manuscript closely and carefully.
In a Type I club, a sense of mission permeates all activity. A suitable venue for a Type I group would be quiet, closed off and distraction-free, such as a classroom or a conference area. Because the group’s purpose is serious, it is better to save the drinks and snacks for later. Everyone who isn’t talking ought to be listening and paying attention, not crunching pretzels or slurping on a soda. Common-sense rules of respectful conduct apply. Although it can certainly be friendly and fun, workshopping is an intense business. A productive group will be limited in size, include only knowledgeable and helpful participants, be tightly organized and moderated, and have a defined timetable as well as a focused agenda. It is often by invitation only.
Type II – The Promotional Book Club (Author Present)
The primary function of this type of reading group is to support a particular writer (or group of writers). To that end, it is usually at least semi-open to the public. For example, The Ladies’ Fiction Appreciation Society of Badger Gizzard, Arkansas Proudly Presents Hometown Novelist Jesse Hoardenschlump. Or, The Stony Mountain County Chapter of the Loyal Order of Mystic Wildebeest, in Conjunction With the Stony Mountain County Literary Festival and the Stony Mountain Pie Shop & Bakery, Brings You “Books-‘n’-Brownies,” a Celebration of Local Writers Featuring Margo Detwiller, Gus Oxencamp, Pamela Lamplighter and Camden J. Zarp.
In a Type II club, the mood is much more sociable and convivial. Beer, wine, and liquor may be served, along with hors d’oeuvres and canapés. It might even take place at a bar. Other good locations include theaters, museums, and art galleries. Readers expect to be able to meet and greet the author, and the author expects to make himself available for questions and comments. Some feedback and opinions are also to be expected, but this a more relaxed and informal event and the book has already been published, so this is not an appropriate time for heavy criticism or deep analysis. Ideally, most of the club members have read the book, but this is not absolutely required. The author will sign books, respond to input, interact with members, and participate in a loosely moderated and generally positive discussion of the work.
Type III – The Social Book Club (Author Not Present)
The primary function of this type of reading group is to gather to share a love of books and reading. Secondarily, it’s an opportunity to introduce members to new books (and maybe even new genres) that they might find they enjoy. But first and foremost, it is a social club.
In a Type III club, a party atmosphere prevails. Conversations will mostly center around the selected book of the month, but they are just as likely to wander onto other unrelated subjects. The discussion of the book will be lively and vigorous, only lightly moderated if at all, and may be brutal. Readers will eat cheese, get drunk, and tell other club members what they thought of the book. Personal reactions and subjective opinions will be shared freely, but this is not the time or place to deconstruct the work at length in a methodical or academic way. (People who do this may find others drifting away from their tedious monologue.) Good locations include someone’s house or a restaurant with group seating.
In order to avoid awkward misunderstandings, it’s important for the host to make it perfectly clear in advance what kind of book club this is. It’s embarrassing to show up with five pages of discussion notes and a stack of index cards with major points highlighted in four different colors only to find that half the people there haven’t even read the book and the other half limit their observations to things like, “I thought it was awesome!” or, “I thought it sucked donkey balls.”
It’s equally embarrassing to arrive thinking you’re going to hang out with your writer friends, chat about Frieda’s new manuscript and maybe have a few cocktails, and then discover with some degree of mortification that you were expected to come fully prepared for an intensive workshop.
Finally, it’s embarrassing for an author to be sitting at a table autographing books for a line of fans when one of them wants to get into a 20-minute debate on her use of adverbs.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
Crazy People in History #1
Jerks: Some Observations
Martinus or Martino?
Answering the Inevitable Questions
June 20, 2015
The Seven Things Challenge
Anyone can say, “this is great!” (or, “this is terrible!”), but it’s not useful.
“I loved it!” makes the writer feel good and “I hated it!” makes the writer feel bad, but as a critique these declarative statements are useless and as a review they are unhelpful.
While it’s easy to express a simplistic personal emotional reaction to a work, it’s much more beneficial to everyone to challenge yourself to unpack what is powerful and effective — and what isn’t — and then take it a step further and deconstruct how the author did it and why it does or doesn’t crackle and resonate.
As writers, we learn as much (or more) from seeing it done badly as we do from seeing done well. But in any case, to get the full benefit, we need to break it down, analyze it, and give the text the passionate attention it deserves.
As an example, I am going to take a story and pick seven things that I think stand out as particularly strong elements. I call this the Seven Things Challenge. It's not enough to spotlight them; you also must discuss the how and the why.
The story is “Jimmy” by Erika Lance and it’s from an anthology called Into the Abyss that contains an assemblage of short pieces from her writing collective, the Ink Slingers Guild.
(Tangent: I love the ISG. Not only is everyone in it extremely cool, not only is it a wonderful case of building a positive, supportive community of friends around a shared interest in creative writing, but also it’s a perfect illustration of the power of the democratization of publishing made possible by the Internet. The World Wide Web and social media, combined with independent printing and binding platforms, now make it possible for people with common tastes in fiction to unite and release their own work in their own way, on their own terms. I raise a toast to them for that.)
But back to the story. Seven things I particularly liked:
This power of this line comes from its simplicity. Mike wakes up and discovers that he is restrained in a strange bed. First he notices the padded cuff on his wrist, strapped to the bed railing. Then it registers (via the narration) that this is clearly not his bed. It’s a terrifying realization, expressed concisely.
This is a nice detail because it helps to establish Mike’s social isolation. It must have come from his family, he assumes, because he doesn’t have any friends.
Jimmy and Mike are talking about attempted suicide, and I love the understated casualness of this line of dialogue, as if they were talking about something inconsequential. It highlights the barrier of awkwardness that exists when we try to talk about things for which we have no comfortable common vernacular.
I talked in this blog post about the importance of finding clever, subtle ways to reveal details to the reader instead of just blurting things out. This sentence serves as a perfect example. Let’s say all you read was this sentence, nothing else. What could you guess? He’s inside, obviously, and near the ground floor. But also, there is a trapped, repressive feeling conveyed here. The window is small. The trees outside represent freedom. He can see them, the author whispers to us, but the implication is that he cannot reach them.
One of the trickiest challenges a writer must navigate is disclosing facts and details through dialogue. This is a fine example of how it should be done. First of all, it’s completely natural. This is something a doctor really would say to a patient. It doesn’t feel forced or stilted. But just as importantly, it simultaneously reveals that Mike has a long history of mental health issues and that his parents have been talking to his doctor about it. The writer doesn’t have to tell us this, because it’s apparent based on the doctor’s remark.
Again — simple (not “the drugs that they were giving him for his various depressive symptoms caused him to feel lethargic and groggy all the time”), active (not “the new drugs were making him tired”) and revelatory (the fact that the drugs are “new” gives us a sense of his prior experience being medicated).
This device is an interesting and effective way to get across that Jimmy’s sense of who he is does not align with reality, and this correlates in a creepy and disconcerting way with Mike’s discoveries as he glances through his own medical files in Doctor Epeton’s desk.
One finishes the story with the vague sense of unease that Lance intended, knowing that something vast and sinister is going on, although the purpose and scope of the experiments remain murky. The reader understands only that the experience of the individual was meaningless in the world that Jimmy and Mike shared, and that the only escape was the annihilation of self, the erasure of identity.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
The Intersection of Grammar and Philosophy
Sleeping With My Editor
The Unique Challenge of Writing Sequels
The Perfect Ending
“I loved it!” makes the writer feel good and “I hated it!” makes the writer feel bad, but as a critique these declarative statements are useless and as a review they are unhelpful.
While it’s easy to express a simplistic personal emotional reaction to a work, it’s much more beneficial to everyone to challenge yourself to unpack what is powerful and effective — and what isn’t — and then take it a step further and deconstruct how the author did it and why it does or doesn’t crackle and resonate.
As writers, we learn as much (or more) from seeing it done badly as we do from seeing done well. But in any case, to get the full benefit, we need to break it down, analyze it, and give the text the passionate attention it deserves.
As an example, I am going to take a story and pick seven things that I think stand out as particularly strong elements. I call this the Seven Things Challenge. It's not enough to spotlight them; you also must discuss the how and the why.
The story is “Jimmy” by Erika Lance and it’s from an anthology called Into the Abyss that contains an assemblage of short pieces from her writing collective, the Ink Slingers Guild.
(Tangent: I love the ISG. Not only is everyone in it extremely cool, not only is it a wonderful case of building a positive, supportive community of friends around a shared interest in creative writing, but also it’s a perfect illustration of the power of the democratization of publishing made possible by the Internet. The World Wide Web and social media, combined with independent printing and binding platforms, now make it possible for people with common tastes in fiction to unite and release their own work in their own way, on their own terms. I raise a toast to them for that.)
But back to the story. Seven things I particularly liked:
1. “His bed didn’t have a railing.” (page 79)
This power of this line comes from its simplicity. Mike wakes up and discovers that he is restrained in a strange bed. First he notices the padded cuff on his wrist, strapped to the bed railing. Then it registers (via the narration) that this is clearly not his bed. It’s a terrifying realization, expressed concisely.
2. The teddy bear. (page 81)
This is a nice detail because it helps to establish Mike’s social isolation. It must have come from his family, he assumes, because he doesn’t have any friends.
3. “’Wondering how I tried to do it?’” Jimmy asked . . .” (page 83)
Jimmy and Mike are talking about attempted suicide, and I love the understated casualness of this line of dialogue, as if they were talking about something inconsequential. It highlights the barrier of awkwardness that exists when we try to talk about things for which we have no comfortable common vernacular.
4. “He could see trees out of the small rectangular window at the end of the hall.” (page 85)
I talked in this blog post about the importance of finding clever, subtle ways to reveal details to the reader instead of just blurting things out. This sentence serves as a perfect example. Let’s say all you read was this sentence, nothing else. What could you guess? He’s inside, obviously, and near the ground floor. But also, there is a trapped, repressive feeling conveyed here. The window is small. The trees outside represent freedom. He can see them, the author whispers to us, but the implication is that he cannot reach them.
5. “’Mike, I know you don’t like therapy. Your parents told me that you didn’t think it helped.’” (page 86)
One of the trickiest challenges a writer must navigate is disclosing facts and details through dialogue. This is a fine example of how it should be done. First of all, it’s completely natural. This is something a doctor really would say to a patient. It doesn’t feel forced or stilted. But just as importantly, it simultaneously reveals that Mike has a long history of mental health issues and that his parents have been talking to his doctor about it. The writer doesn’t have to tell us this, because it’s apparent based on the doctor’s remark.
6. “The new drugs made him tired.” (page 89)
Again — simple (not “the drugs that they were giving him for his various depressive symptoms caused him to feel lethargic and groggy all the time”), active (not “the new drugs were making him tired”) and revelatory (the fact that the drugs are “new” gives us a sense of his prior experience being medicated).
7. The discontinuity in the dates. (page 98)
This device is an interesting and effective way to get across that Jimmy’s sense of who he is does not align with reality, and this correlates in a creepy and disconcerting way with Mike’s discoveries as he glances through his own medical files in Doctor Epeton’s desk.
One finishes the story with the vague sense of unease that Lance intended, knowing that something vast and sinister is going on, although the purpose and scope of the experiments remain murky. The reader understands only that the experience of the individual was meaningless in the world that Jimmy and Mike shared, and that the only escape was the annihilation of self, the erasure of identity.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
The Intersection of Grammar and Philosophy
Sleeping With My Editor
The Unique Challenge of Writing Sequels
The Perfect Ending
May 31, 2015
This Is How It's Done, Folks.
Two weeks ago, with tongue firmly in cheek, I posted
this blog
offering advice on how to write bad fiction. I laid out six guidelines for creating dull, clumsy, awkward prose guaranteed to make you sound like a sixth grader in the process of failing a creative writing class.
I would now like to offer an excellent counter-example — a demonstration of how to do it right.
This is the brilliant opening paragraph of Lori Roy's superb debut novel Bent Road :
Please indulge me for a moment while I break down how Roy fails to follow each of my guidelines for writing bad fiction, with magnificent results.
1. She uses simple, active verbs like squeeze, squint, bounce, kick, rain, gather, meet, and lean. Until the last sentence, Roy doesn't use any passive being verbs (aside from "there is a shuffling in the backseat" and the conditional "were" in the part about Detroit). And when she does use "is," she uses it powerfully with the short, strong line, "Arthur is gone."
2. She discloses an enormous amount of important and interesting character and situation information here. But she does it through the careful deployment of the details she shows us, not by just stating it. This is perhaps the most impressive aspect of this paragraph. A less capable author would have opened with a block of boring explanatory exposition such as, "Celia was driving from her home in Detroit to her new life in Kansas. She was tired, because she had been driving for three days. Two of her children were in the car with her..." etc. You would immediately realize that you're in for a long slog. If you were an agent or publisher, you would probably stop right there.
Consider how much she has conveyed to us in a single paragraph, without saying any of it directly:
(a) Celia is nervous. Roy is establishing that she feels anxiety about relocating with her family, and that sense of discomfort will be a continuing theme throughout the book. Roy doesn't tell us that Celia is nervous, but she shows us how she squeezes the steering wheel, sweats, leans forward, and squints into the darkness searching for Arthur. Which brings us to...
(b) She is following her husband, not just literally in her car right now, but from their former life in Detroit to their new life in Kansas. This is his move. For him it will be a homecoming, a return to his roots. For Celia it will be a jarring and disorienting transition. She struggles to keep up with him, losing sight of him in the darkness, a wonderful little bit of symbolism.
(c) This scene takes place in a remote, rural area. Although Roy has not yet given the location as Kansas, the mention of dirt and gravel immediately convey the setting. Celia's feeling of isolation and loneliness is central to the plot, and Roy wastes no time letting us see the trepidation instilled in Celia by being in a place that feels, to her, like the middle of nowhere.
(d) Celia is a healthy, young and slender woman. Did you catch that? Roy very cleverly tosses in a single, subtle detail: "the flat underbelly" where "her chin meets her neck." By contrast, Roy will later describe how Arthur's mother Reesa (Celia's mother-in-law) has a blubbery dewlap. Reesa is a large woman from years of eating country meals featuring cheesy casseroles, heavy soups, and fried chicken, and concluded with cakes and pies. The rituals of preparing and delivering food form a major current within the story, and become one of the sources of tension between Reesa and Celia.
(e) They are a Catholic family, and going to church is a regular part of their lives (as revealed by the reference to St. Alban's and Sunday mass). This, too will be a critical component of a story that features several important developments that happen at the local church, and Bent Road is a novel that ultimately deals with issues of judgment, condemnation, forgiveness, and redemption.
(f) Celia and Arthur are members of the working class. Although they have the resources to make this move, it entails driving for days, sleeping in the car, and cramming the entire brood into a single motel room for the night. An upper-class couple would fly to their new home, or would at least be able to afford separate rooms for the kids.
That's an amazing amount of information to divulge in what seems, on the surface, to be a description of a woman driving. It pulls you in, makes you care, makes you want to learn more.
3. Her language is plain, unpretentious, and straightforward. Roy avoids platitudes, hyperbole, and trite, overused stock phrases and expressions.
4. She uses very few modifiers. The only adjectives are hardly noticeable words like "flat," and the only adverb is the harmless and unobtrusive "nearly."
Just for comparison, look what happens when you load a sentence down with unnecessary adverbs and adjectives.
Notice how much more effective and evocative that sentence was before we ruined it with all that extraneous verbiage.
5. Her sentences are short and easy to follow. While they are never convoluted, repetitive or strangely constructed, they are varied enough to be interesting.
6. Although she does write in the present tense, which can often be weird and distracting, in this story it works because of three factors:
(a) Lori Roy is a very skilled author, and she knows how to pull it off.
(b) Her unadorned, minimalist style makes her use of the present tense hardly noticeable.
(c) The story is told from multiple perspectives, rotating from one point of view to another within each chapter. This gives the story an urgency and immediacy that helps to sustain interest and suspense. In this context, keeping it in the present makes sense.
It's always a pleasure to read a strong, well-written book. The awards and glowing reviews have already been pouring in for Bent Road, so I won't sputter about how great it is. I'll just say thank you, Ms. Roy, for showing us how it's done.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
The Intersection of Grammar and Philosophy
Sleeping With My Editor
The Unique Challenge of Writing Sequels
The Perfect Ending
I would now like to offer an excellent counter-example — a demonstration of how to do it right.
This is the brilliant opening paragraph of Lori Roy's superb debut novel Bent Road :
Celia squeezes the steering wheel and squints into the darkness. Her tires bounce across the dirt road and kick up gravel that rains down like hail. Sweat gathers where the flat underbelly of her chin meets her neck. She leans forward but can't see Arthur's truck. There is a shuffling in the backseat. If they were still living in Detroit, maybe driving to St. Alban's for Sunday mass, she would check on Evie and Daniel. But not now. For three days she has driven, slept one night in a motel, all five of the family in one room, another in her own car, and now that the trip is nearly over, Arthur is gone.
Please indulge me for a moment while I break down how Roy fails to follow each of my guidelines for writing bad fiction, with magnificent results.
1. She uses simple, active verbs like squeeze, squint, bounce, kick, rain, gather, meet, and lean. Until the last sentence, Roy doesn't use any passive being verbs (aside from "there is a shuffling in the backseat" and the conditional "were" in the part about Detroit). And when she does use "is," she uses it powerfully with the short, strong line, "Arthur is gone."
2. She discloses an enormous amount of important and interesting character and situation information here. But she does it through the careful deployment of the details she shows us, not by just stating it. This is perhaps the most impressive aspect of this paragraph. A less capable author would have opened with a block of boring explanatory exposition such as, "Celia was driving from her home in Detroit to her new life in Kansas. She was tired, because she had been driving for three days. Two of her children were in the car with her..." etc. You would immediately realize that you're in for a long slog. If you were an agent or publisher, you would probably stop right there.
Consider how much she has conveyed to us in a single paragraph, without saying any of it directly:
(a) Celia is nervous. Roy is establishing that she feels anxiety about relocating with her family, and that sense of discomfort will be a continuing theme throughout the book. Roy doesn't tell us that Celia is nervous, but she shows us how she squeezes the steering wheel, sweats, leans forward, and squints into the darkness searching for Arthur. Which brings us to...
(b) She is following her husband, not just literally in her car right now, but from their former life in Detroit to their new life in Kansas. This is his move. For him it will be a homecoming, a return to his roots. For Celia it will be a jarring and disorienting transition. She struggles to keep up with him, losing sight of him in the darkness, a wonderful little bit of symbolism.
(c) This scene takes place in a remote, rural area. Although Roy has not yet given the location as Kansas, the mention of dirt and gravel immediately convey the setting. Celia's feeling of isolation and loneliness is central to the plot, and Roy wastes no time letting us see the trepidation instilled in Celia by being in a place that feels, to her, like the middle of nowhere.
(d) Celia is a healthy, young and slender woman. Did you catch that? Roy very cleverly tosses in a single, subtle detail: "the flat underbelly" where "her chin meets her neck." By contrast, Roy will later describe how Arthur's mother Reesa (Celia's mother-in-law) has a blubbery dewlap. Reesa is a large woman from years of eating country meals featuring cheesy casseroles, heavy soups, and fried chicken, and concluded with cakes and pies. The rituals of preparing and delivering food form a major current within the story, and become one of the sources of tension between Reesa and Celia.
(e) They are a Catholic family, and going to church is a regular part of their lives (as revealed by the reference to St. Alban's and Sunday mass). This, too will be a critical component of a story that features several important developments that happen at the local church, and Bent Road is a novel that ultimately deals with issues of judgment, condemnation, forgiveness, and redemption.
(f) Celia and Arthur are members of the working class. Although they have the resources to make this move, it entails driving for days, sleeping in the car, and cramming the entire brood into a single motel room for the night. An upper-class couple would fly to their new home, or would at least be able to afford separate rooms for the kids.
That's an amazing amount of information to divulge in what seems, on the surface, to be a description of a woman driving. It pulls you in, makes you care, makes you want to learn more.
3. Her language is plain, unpretentious, and straightforward. Roy avoids platitudes, hyperbole, and trite, overused stock phrases and expressions.
4. She uses very few modifiers. The only adjectives are hardly noticeable words like "flat," and the only adverb is the harmless and unobtrusive "nearly."
Just for comparison, look what happens when you load a sentence down with unnecessary adverbs and adjectives.
Celia squeezes the steering wheel tightly and squints worriedly into the gloomy darkness. Her tires bounce wildly across the dusty, rutted, uneven dirt road and kick up coarse gray gravel that rains down thickly like dense, stony hail.
Notice how much more effective and evocative that sentence was before we ruined it with all that extraneous verbiage.
5. Her sentences are short and easy to follow. While they are never convoluted, repetitive or strangely constructed, they are varied enough to be interesting.
6. Although she does write in the present tense, which can often be weird and distracting, in this story it works because of three factors:
(a) Lori Roy is a very skilled author, and she knows how to pull it off.
(b) Her unadorned, minimalist style makes her use of the present tense hardly noticeable.
(c) The story is told from multiple perspectives, rotating from one point of view to another within each chapter. This gives the story an urgency and immediacy that helps to sustain interest and suspense. In this context, keeping it in the present makes sense.
It's always a pleasure to read a strong, well-written book. The awards and glowing reviews have already been pouring in for Bent Road, so I won't sputter about how great it is. I'll just say thank you, Ms. Roy, for showing us how it's done.
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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
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Recent popular posts:
The Intersection of Grammar and Philosophy
Sleeping With My Editor
The Unique Challenge of Writing Sequels
The Perfect Ending
May 17, 2015
A Brief Guide to Writing Terrible Fiction
This post was inspired, in case you were wondering, by a gut-churningly bad self-published and out-of-print true story about a man who hiked across Canada with his teenaged daughter, reconnecting with his lapsed Catholic faith along the way — a perfectly solid premise for a book, sure, but written so badly it almost defies belief.
Here’s a taste:
I will neither name it nor post a review, for this reason as well as for the sake of decency.
The topic warrants an anticipatory rebuttal. Yes, “good writing” and “bad writing” are highly subjective concepts. Yes, different readers like different things. Yes, if you dismiss something as poorly composed you run the risk of sounding like a snob. (See my previous blog post on the subject of obnoxious elitism.) Today’s screed, however, is about how to avoid a few of the worst, most egregious violations of polished prose style — the telltale signs of amateur work. These are the bright red flags that will almost immediately cause a seasoned reader to abandon a story. (Agents and publishers, it is worth pointing out, are seasoned readers.)
Bad fiction is painful to read. Bad fiction causes people to wince, cringe, flinch, moan, grind their teeth, and ultimately toss the book across the room.
Stipulation #1: Granted, some bad fiction is extremely popular and successful. Equivalently, much extremely good fiction does not sell. I am not implying a necessary correlation.
Stipulation #2: Some great writers do violate the guidelines, some of them regularly. But you can get away with it if you’re a great writer. They write great fiction in spite of their transgressions, not as a result of them.
Stipulation #3: I can’t tell you how to be a great writer. I'm not one. But I can tell you a few ways to avoid being a horrible writer.
All right, with that said, let’s embark together on a journey into bad writing.
The Six Keys to Terrible, Terrible Fiction
There are six guidelines to follow if you want to write something really awful. Even if your story concept is fantastic and your characters are compelling, if you write like this your story is guaranteed to be unreadable.
1. Heavily overuse the passive voice.
2. Overexplain everything. Tell your readers what they’re supposed to be thinking and feeling. Reveal facts and disclose background information with long, rambling blocks of exposition, especially right in the beginning.
3. Use lots of clichés. Be sure to drop in some really hackneyed ones. (Bonus points for mixing your metaphors.)
4. Use lots of modifiers. Stack 'em in there. Focus on adverbs. Sprinkle them liberally into dialog.
5. Construct your sentences in clumsy, awkward ways. (Extra credit here for using the same unusual word over and over again.)
6. Do anything weird and distracting. Examples include writing in the present tense or the second person.
I considered adding a seventh guideline to this list, something about using wildly incorrect spelling, grammar, and punctuation. But I decided not to, because that’s not a guideline. It’s a hard rule, an absolute game-ender. No serious reader, not even a generous, gracious, and determined one, will continue more than a sentence or two into a piece of writing that shows a lack of basic competence with the English language.
I’ll start with a snippet of a fake novel. Then, for illustrative purposes, I will destructively reverse-engineer it, applying each of the six guidelines until it becomes an irredeemable, indefensible stink bomb. Ready? Let’s begin.
Permit me to briefly call your attention to four things. First, notice that this entire paragraph uses only active verbs — no being verbs like “were” and “was.” Second, notice that while the sentence structure is varied, there are no run-on sentences or strange, convoluted lines. It’s easy to read. Third, notice the use of specific detail and sensory imagery: sights, sounds, and smells. You feel like you’re there, having this experience alongside Matilda. Fourth, notice that adjectives are used sparingly. And there are no adverbs at all.
OK, let’s consider all the information about Matilda, her personal history and her present situation that I have conveyed here without actually coming right out and saying any of it directly.
1. Matilda has been an enthusiastic sailor since she was a child, and may have learned from her father. (As revealed by the old photograph.)
2. She is now a middle-aged woman. (As revealed by her grayish-blonde hair.)
3. She is currently on a small boat. (As revealed by the fact that the settee berth, nav table and galley are all so close together.)
4. It’s cold outside. (As revealed by the icebergs.)
5. It’s also cold inside. (As revealed by her wool gloves.)
6. She has been out there for a while. (As revealed by her dwindling provisions.)
7. She’s bored. (As revealed by her idle puttering about.)
8. She is an avid reader. (As revealed by the large inventory of books aboard.)
An inexperienced, unskilled or lazy writer doesn’t bother to find clever ways to suggest the essence of a situation. Instead, he just blurts it all out. And since he doesn’t trust his readers to understand what he’s trying to get across, he tends to yell it while waving his arms over his head. Good writers have faith in their readers and allow them the pleasure of figuring things out. Bad writers flog things to death.
The opening line is strong. It’s simple, yet vivid and original. It’s poetic without being pretentious. “The surface of the sea” has a pleasing rhythm as well as alliteration.
Let’s break the first two guidelines at the same time, shall we?
I’m going to break the first guideline by replacing all the active verbs with passive verbs. I’m going to break the second one by explaining everything.
See how boring that is? The repetitive use of passive voice feels inert. We’re basically just sitting here, not particularly interested, while the writer tells and tells and tells. Oh, but wait! We can make it so much worse.
Let’s break guidelines three and four by adding an abundance of modifiers and clichés.
Ouch! That one’s not going to win any literary awards.
But why stop now? Let’s drive this one all the way to the bottom of the swamp. I am going to break guidelines five and six by putting this story in the second person present tense and using tortuously convoluted run-on sentences. Hold your breath and plug your nose.
And there you have it. We took what might have been the beginning of a perfectly nice little story and transformed it into an unreadable piece of pure crap. So if writing terrible fiction is your goal, congratulations. You now have all the tools you need. Soon those one-star reviews will be washing over you like the urine of the angels.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
Crazy People in History #1
Jerks: Some Observations
Martinus or Martino?
Answering the Inevitable Questions
Here’s a taste:
Joyous, through the green, green forest we walked onwards, filled with joy to be in the forest and being together.
I will neither name it nor post a review, for this reason as well as for the sake of decency.
The topic warrants an anticipatory rebuttal. Yes, “good writing” and “bad writing” are highly subjective concepts. Yes, different readers like different things. Yes, if you dismiss something as poorly composed you run the risk of sounding like a snob. (See my previous blog post on the subject of obnoxious elitism.) Today’s screed, however, is about how to avoid a few of the worst, most egregious violations of polished prose style — the telltale signs of amateur work. These are the bright red flags that will almost immediately cause a seasoned reader to abandon a story. (Agents and publishers, it is worth pointing out, are seasoned readers.)
Bad fiction is painful to read. Bad fiction causes people to wince, cringe, flinch, moan, grind their teeth, and ultimately toss the book across the room.
Stipulation #1: Granted, some bad fiction is extremely popular and successful. Equivalently, much extremely good fiction does not sell. I am not implying a necessary correlation.
Stipulation #2: Some great writers do violate the guidelines, some of them regularly. But you can get away with it if you’re a great writer. They write great fiction in spite of their transgressions, not as a result of them.
Stipulation #3: I can’t tell you how to be a great writer. I'm not one. But I can tell you a few ways to avoid being a horrible writer.
All right, with that said, let’s embark together on a journey into bad writing.
The Six Keys to Terrible, Terrible Fiction
There are six guidelines to follow if you want to write something really awful. Even if your story concept is fantastic and your characters are compelling, if you write like this your story is guaranteed to be unreadable.
1. Heavily overuse the passive voice.
2. Overexplain everything. Tell your readers what they’re supposed to be thinking and feeling. Reveal facts and disclose background information with long, rambling blocks of exposition, especially right in the beginning.
3. Use lots of clichés. Be sure to drop in some really hackneyed ones. (Bonus points for mixing your metaphors.)
4. Use lots of modifiers. Stack 'em in there. Focus on adverbs. Sprinkle them liberally into dialog.
5. Construct your sentences in clumsy, awkward ways. (Extra credit here for using the same unusual word over and over again.)
6. Do anything weird and distracting. Examples include writing in the present tense or the second person.
I considered adding a seventh guideline to this list, something about using wildly incorrect spelling, grammar, and punctuation. But I decided not to, because that’s not a guideline. It’s a hard rule, an absolute game-ender. No serious reader, not even a generous, gracious, and determined one, will continue more than a sentence or two into a piece of writing that shows a lack of basic competence with the English language.
I’ll start with a snippet of a fake novel. Then, for illustrative purposes, I will destructively reverse-engineer it, applying each of the six guidelines until it becomes an irredeemable, indefensible stink bomb. Ready? Let’s begin.
Rain hammered the surface of the sea flat. Wiping the porthole glass with a wool glove, Matilda glanced out and saw a few small icebergs floating in the dark water nearby. Beyond that, mist obscured her view and erased the horizon. She brushed a strand of grayish-blonde hair out of her face and turned back to her search for breakfast, checking one half-empty, musty-smelling galley locker after another. She found nothing but tins of tuna and the last of the canned beans. She pulled out a jar of pickles, looked at it for several seconds, frowned, and then put it back. With a sigh, she closed the locker and flopped down on the settee berth. The downpour drummed on the cabin topsides. Above her, the closed companionway hatch sealed out the weather but trapped diesel fumes. She reached for one of the many paperbacks on the shelf above the navigation table. She flipped through it, and a photograph she had once used as a bookmark fell out. She leaned down and picked it up. The snapshot, taken by her father, showed Matilda at the age of about sixteen or seventeen, wearing her favorite blue T-shirt and baggy white shorts, sitting at the tiller of her second sailboat, grinning. She stared at the picture for a while, then slipped it back between the pages and returned the book to the shelf.
Permit me to briefly call your attention to four things. First, notice that this entire paragraph uses only active verbs — no being verbs like “were” and “was.” Second, notice that while the sentence structure is varied, there are no run-on sentences or strange, convoluted lines. It’s easy to read. Third, notice the use of specific detail and sensory imagery: sights, sounds, and smells. You feel like you’re there, having this experience alongside Matilda. Fourth, notice that adjectives are used sparingly. And there are no adverbs at all.
OK, let’s consider all the information about Matilda, her personal history and her present situation that I have conveyed here without actually coming right out and saying any of it directly.
1. Matilda has been an enthusiastic sailor since she was a child, and may have learned from her father. (As revealed by the old photograph.)
2. She is now a middle-aged woman. (As revealed by her grayish-blonde hair.)
3. She is currently on a small boat. (As revealed by the fact that the settee berth, nav table and galley are all so close together.)
4. It’s cold outside. (As revealed by the icebergs.)
5. It’s also cold inside. (As revealed by her wool gloves.)
6. She has been out there for a while. (As revealed by her dwindling provisions.)
7. She’s bored. (As revealed by her idle puttering about.)
8. She is an avid reader. (As revealed by the large inventory of books aboard.)
An inexperienced, unskilled or lazy writer doesn’t bother to find clever ways to suggest the essence of a situation. Instead, he just blurts it all out. And since he doesn’t trust his readers to understand what he’s trying to get across, he tends to yell it while waving his arms over his head. Good writers have faith in their readers and allow them the pleasure of figuring things out. Bad writers flog things to death.
The opening line is strong. It’s simple, yet vivid and original. It’s poetic without being pretentious. “The surface of the sea” has a pleasing rhythm as well as alliteration.
Let’s break the first two guidelines at the same time, shall we?
I’m going to break the first guideline by replacing all the active verbs with passive verbs. I’m going to break the second one by explaining everything.
It was raining. The surface of the sea was hammered flat by the rain, because it was raining so hard. Matilda was wearing wool gloves because it was so cold inside the sailboat she was in. Wiping the porthole glass, which was fogged because of the cold, Maltilda glanced out. A few small icebergs were floating in the dark water nearby, which was normal in the Arctic Ocean. Beyond that, her view was obscured and the horizon was erased by mist. Matilda was middle-aged and all alone in the sailboat. She brushed a strand of grayish-blonde hair out of her face and turned back to her search for breakfast. She was checking one half-empty, musty-smelling galley locker after another, finding nothing but tins of tuna and the last of the canned beans because she had been at sea so long and had already eaten most of her provisions. She was about to give up when finally she located a jar of pickles. She looked at it for several seconds, frowned because who wants to eat pickles for breakfast, and then put it back. With a sad sigh, she closed the locker with disappointment and flopped down on the settee berth unsatisfied and still hungry. The downpour was drumming steadily on the cabin topsides, making a lot of noise that was peaceful in a way but also kind of depressing. The companionway hatch above her was closed, which kept out the cold and rainy weather but also made the inside of the sailboat smelly and claustrophobic. Matilta was an avid reader and had a large collection of books on her boat. She reached for one of the many paperbacks on the shelf above the navigation table. She flipped through it, and there was a photograph in it, a photograph that she had once used as a bookmark. It fell out and she leaned down and picked it up. The snapshot was of Matilda at the age of about sixteen or seventeen, wearing her favorite blue T-shirt and baggy white shorts, sitting at the tiller of her second sailboat, grinning like a maniac. She had been sailing since she was very young. The picture was probably taken by her father, who had taught her how to sail. She stared at the picture for a while, then slipped it back between the pages and returned the book to the shelf, not in the mood to read because she was so sad and lonely right then. She was wishing something would happen, or that she had somebody to talk to.
See how boring that is? The repetitive use of passive voice feels inert. We’re basically just sitting here, not particularly interested, while the writer tells and tells and tells. Oh, but wait! We can make it so much worse.
Let’s break guidelines three and four by adding an abundance of modifiers and clichés.
It was raining cats and dogs. The surface of the great, wide, blue sea was hammered completely flat by the ferocious and unstoppable rain. Matilda was wearing thick, fluffy wool gloves because it was so frigidly cold inside the extremely compact yet cozy sailboat she was in. Wiping the porthole glass, which was totally fogged because of the intense cold, Maltilda glanced out inquisitively yet with determination at the familiar scene, knowing that a sailor’s life is a solitary one. A few small white glittering icebergs were floating languidly in the still, dark, salty water nearby, which was normal here in the frozen emptiness of the wild and dangerous Arctic Ocean. Beyond that, her view was absolutely obscured and the horizon was utterly erased by a dense veil of pale, chilly mist. Matilda was middle-aged and all alone in the sailboat. So hungry she could eat a horse, she brushed a strand of grayish-blonde hair out of her face and turned back to her on-going search for breakfast. She was focused like a laser beam on the task of checking one half-empty, musty-smelling galley locker after another, finding nothing but tins of tuna and the last of the canned beans because she had already been at sea so long at that point and had already eaten most of her provisions. She was about to give up in utter exasperation when finally to her surprise she located a jar of pickles! She looked at it undecidedly for several long seconds, frowned with annoyance because who wants to eat pickles for breakfast, she thought to herself, and then put it back. With a deep, sad, and lingering sigh, she firmly closed the locker with brooding disappointment and flopped down with a heavy thump on the settee berth unsatisfied and still hungry. The cold downpour was drumming steadily and relentlessly on the cabin topsides, making a lot of noise that was strangely peaceful in a way but also kind of morbid and depressing at the same time. The companionway hatch above her was tightly closed, which kept out the cold and rainy weather but also made the inside of the sailboat quite smelly and somewhat claustrophobic. Matilta was an avid reader and had a large and extensive collection of books on her boat. She reached hopefully for one of the many assorted and miscellaneous paperbacks on the shelf above the navigation table. She flipped curiously and optimistically through it, and to her sudden amazement found that there was a photograph in it, a photograph that she had apparently once used as a bookmark, because there it was, plain as day. It abruptly fell out. She quickly leaned down and gently picked it up. The nostalgic snapshot was worth a thousand words, showing Matilda at the age of about sixteen or seventeen, enthusiastically wearing her favorite blue T-shirt and baggy white shorts, sitting with great excitement and confidence at the tiller of her second sailboat, grinning like a maniac because she was obviously having the time of her life. She had been sailing since she was very young. The picture was probably taken by her proud father, who had eagerly taught her how to sail. She stared wistfully at the picture for a while, then slipped it carefully back between the pages and returned the book to the shelf, not in the mood to read because she was so sad and lonely right then. She was desperately wishing something would happen, or that she had somebody to talk to.
Ouch! That one’s not going to win any literary awards.
But why stop now? Let’s drive this one all the way to the bottom of the swamp. I am going to break guidelines five and six by putting this story in the second person present tense and using tortuously convoluted run-on sentences. Hold your breath and plug your nose.
Like cats and dogs, that's how it's raining today. The ferocious and unstoppable rain is hammering completely flat the surface of the great, wide, blue sea. You are wearing thick, fluffy wool gloves because it is so frigidly cold inside the extremely compact yet cozy sailboat you are in, and you use them to wipe the porthole glass, which is totally fogged because of the intense cold, and you glance inquisitively yet with determination at the familiar scene, knowing that a sailor’s life is a solitary one. In the still, dark, salty water nearby, a few small white glittering icebergs are floating languidly, which as you know so well is normal here in the frozen emptiness of the wild and dangerous Arctic Ocean where you currently are. Beyond that, your view is absolutely obscured and the horizon is utterly erased by a dense veil of pale, chilly mist. You are a middle-aged woman and are all alone in the sailboat, so hungry you could eat a horse, and so brushing a strand of grayish-blonde hair out of your face you are turning back to your on-going search for breakfast. You are focused like a laser beam on the task of checking one half-empty, musty-smelling galley locker after another, finding nothing but tins of tuna and the last of the canned beans because you have already been at sea so long at that point and have already eaten most of your provisions. You are just about to give up in utter exasperation when finally to your surprise you locate a jar of pickles! You look at it undecidedly for several long seconds, frown with annoyance because who wants to eat pickles for breakfast, you think to herself, and then you put it back with a deep, sad, and lingering sigh, and firmly close the locker with brooding disappointment and flop down with a heavy thump on the settee berth unsatisfied and still hungry. The cold downpour is drumming steadily and relentlessly on the cabin topsides, making a lot of noise that is strangely peaceful in a way but also kind of morbid and depressing to you at the same time. The companionway hatch above you is tightly closed, which keeps out the cold and rainy weather but also makes the inside of the sailboat quite smelly and somewhat claustrophobic to you. You are an avid reader and, having a large and extensive collection of books on your boat, you reach hopefully for one of the many assorted and miscellaneous paperbacks on the shelf above the navigation table. You flip curiously and optimistically through it, and to your sudden amazement find that there was a photograph in it, a photograph that you had apparently once used as a bookmark, because there it is, plain as day, when it abruptly falls out. Quickly you lean down and gently pick it up. Truly, the nostalgic snapshot is indeed worth a thousand words, showing you at the age of about sixteen or seventeen, enthusiastically wearing your favorite blue T-shirt and baggy white shorts, sitting with great excitement and confidence at the tiller of your second sailboat, grinning like a maniac because having been sailing since you first learned when you were very young, you are obviously having the time of her life there. The picture was probably taken by your proud mother, who had eagerly taught you how to sail. You stare wistfully at the picture for a while, then slip it carefully back between the pages and return the book to the shelf, not being in the mood to read because you are so sad and lonely right then. You are desperately wishing something would happen, or that you had somebody to talk to, for no man is an island, even though you are a woman and are on a boat not an island, you think humorously.
And there you have it. We took what might have been the beginning of a perfectly nice little story and transformed it into an unreadable piece of pure crap. So if writing terrible fiction is your goal, congratulations. You now have all the tools you need. Soon those one-star reviews will be washing over you like the urine of the angels.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
Crazy People in History #1
Jerks: Some Observations
Martinus or Martino?
Answering the Inevitable Questions
May 3, 2015
A Rumination on Artistic Success
Success is inherently unpredictable. I don't mean unpredictable in the sense of wild and erratic; I mean unpredictable in the sense of literally impossible to call, no matter how much information you have. Ultimately, most of us don't get what we deserve. (And thank goodness for that!) We get what we get. It's never fair. It could usually be better. It could always be worse.
If you took ten of today's rock superstars and put them alongside ten talented people who never made it in the business, and entered them all in a contest where nobody knew who any of them were, no one — not the studio audience, not the judges, not the millions of viewers at home — would be able to select winners and losers in any way that corresponded with the reality of their careers. I bet you can name half a dozen pop singers on the Top 40 right now who are not particularly good. And I bet you can name half a dozen people you know personally who are way more musically gifted who don't have record deals, despite years of patient, diligent effort.
Social media experts armed with advanced degrees in marketing and human psychology, despite years of specialized training and access to vast amounts of research data, can't accurately or consistently develop campaigns that go viral.
Stock picks and sports bets made by the world's most highly qualified, experienced, and knowledgeable gurus are no better than random guesses when you look at a large and representative statistical sample.
So whatever your creative occupation happens to be, and whatever your ultimate aspirations, the most important piece of advice is to just keep showing up every day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and doing what you do. Looking at the numbers, you probably won't make it. Neither will I. But that's OK. And speaking as a lazy, undisciplined, self-centered, neurotic, anxiety-riddled whiner of lukewarm intelligence and mediocre abilities, I'm very glad there is no justice in the world.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
What Is Art?
Jerks: Some Observations
Martinus or Martino?
Answering the Inevitable Questions
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
If you took ten of today's rock superstars and put them alongside ten talented people who never made it in the business, and entered them all in a contest where nobody knew who any of them were, no one — not the studio audience, not the judges, not the millions of viewers at home — would be able to select winners and losers in any way that corresponded with the reality of their careers. I bet you can name half a dozen pop singers on the Top 40 right now who are not particularly good. And I bet you can name half a dozen people you know personally who are way more musically gifted who don't have record deals, despite years of patient, diligent effort.
Social media experts armed with advanced degrees in marketing and human psychology, despite years of specialized training and access to vast amounts of research data, can't accurately or consistently develop campaigns that go viral.
Stock picks and sports bets made by the world's most highly qualified, experienced, and knowledgeable gurus are no better than random guesses when you look at a large and representative statistical sample.
So whatever your creative occupation happens to be, and whatever your ultimate aspirations, the most important piece of advice is to just keep showing up every day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and doing what you do. Looking at the numbers, you probably won't make it. Neither will I. But that's OK. And speaking as a lazy, undisciplined, self-centered, neurotic, anxiety-riddled whiner of lukewarm intelligence and mediocre abilities, I'm very glad there is no justice in the world.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Recent popular posts:
What Is Art?
Jerks: Some Observations
Martinus or Martino?
Answering the Inevitable Questions
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com
Upside-down, Inside-out, and Backwards
My blog about books, writing, and the creative process.
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