Fact: These use numbers. Real numbers.

Are facts influenced by language?

If you’re John D’Agata they are, according to the Lifespan of a Fact, a book which contains correspondances between D’Agata and his fact checker, Jim Fingal, for the essay “What Happens There.” For example, thirty-four sounds better than thirty-one when counting strip clubs in Las Vegas.  So D’Agata wrote thirty-four rather than thirty-one; it’s just a number that happens to sound precise and has a good ring to it.

Numbers are so important to the essay—at least the first free chunk online—that the reader is overwhelmed with fear of a pending arithmetic problem. It’s 113 degrees outside. Water is five bucks a bottle. Someone plays one 35-minute game of tic-tac-toe. Meanwhile, there’s a sixteen year-old boy and a 1,149-foot-high building and it’s a certain time and if you don’t practice mathematics, and if force, gravitational constant, mass and distance are all considered, your heart is pounding already.

You should probably have a cardiovascular response when you read about a suicide, so maybe the writer should work to create one. Remember, the argument in question is: it’s the mood, not the numbers, that matters.

When asked, “What about that fact that this [game of tic-tac-toe] didn’t occur on the day Presley died? It’s not accurate to say that it did.”

D’Agata says, “No, because being more precise would be less dramatic. I don’t think readers will care whether the events that I’m discussing happened on the same day, a few days apart, or a few months apart. What most readers will care about, I think, is the meaning that’s suggested in the confluence of these events—no matter how far apart they occurred. The facts that are being employed here aren’t meant to function baldly as “facts.” Nobody is going to read this, in other words, in order to get a survey of the demographics of Las Vegas or what’s scheduled on the community calendar. Readers can get that kind of information elsewhere.”

D’Agata says repeatedly that it’s the rhythm, the language that matters. Depending on whom you read, language is either a duvet for thoughts or a discrete controller on all of our actions. It’s either something that routinely fails to describe our inner life or the very thing that influences our thoughts, by distorting physical evidence to fit it within our understanding. We get a lot of this latter idea from Benjamin Lee Whorf, a linguist and such a proponent of “linguistic relativity” that it is known as the “Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.” Whorf maintains:

“[...] the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way [...]“

Whorf was responsible for the snowclone, the myth that the Inuit language has more words for snow than we fair-weather folk will ever comprehend—such as, but not limited to the dry snow that scatters your tracks, wet snow that slakes your mukluks, thunder snow, margarita slush snow, etc.

The snowclone has become a type of telephone game. One might say to a friend that the Mayans had more words for processing corn than the Inuit do for snow. Or the hippies had more words for marijuana…you get the picture. Usually, there’s a number involved and it sounds concrete, documented–50 words for x, 100 words for x, or 500 words for x. The number is fake; it’s the meaning that counts, and when someone evokes the snowclone, they’re trying to say “this thing is very important to these people.”

So do the numbers matter, even though they are just acting as a linguistic vehicle to reinforce rhythm, to evoke an idea, an emotion, a physical response?

Heck yeah. A number is a fact; there’s credibility in it. The reader assumes someone spent a long time trying to wrestle that data into into an exact number. It seems like D’Agata spent a lot of time compiling those digits; they lend him a journalist’s air of credibility, even if the essay is meant to be lyric. You don’t need the numbers, the fuzzy math, the lazy journalism. For a good example of the same mood evoked in the essay, without numbers, check out Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.”

The Plymouth Duster had been patched together for years.  Literally.   Once I found myself  epoxying chicken wire over a dent in the right passenger door and painting it with Rustoleum.  Then I lost myself again, and for years she took me to and from class, climbed the Allegheny mountains and transported kegs of beer to mythic realms where Bon Jovi and Madonna still reign as King and Queen (no one can convince them otherwise).

Anyway, it was a sad day when the tail pipe fell off and careened along the median strip, causing mayhem for the traffic coming in my rear-view mirror.  But the day that I’m recalling — that time of the infamous stalling in the midst of rush hour — is not that day…

During that particular turn of the Earth’s axis I called my father, an automobile mechanic for over forty years, and asked him for help.  I called him from the counter of the fitness center where I belonged and where the body-building guru had once taken a look at my torso and asked me if I’d left “my chest at home.”   My dear ol’ Dad could be just as calloused when it came to my feelings, but as I described for him the car’s diagonal position in the road and how we were about to make the evening news, he seemed downright cheerful and calm.  ”I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said at 5:35 in the afternoon, and with the Fidelity Bank sign blinking the digits of 5:45 he appeared in his greasy overalls and got to work.

First on the agenda involved a problem I failed to mention over the phone.  That is, in my haste to exit the vehicle and run across the parking lot, I had locked the keys in the car.   (Don’t ask me how.)   And so, with the trusty bent-clothes-hanger technique, Mr. Fix-It opened the door.   He then popped the hood and stuck his head into the guts of the engine.  He yanked, twisted, tightened and told me to get in the driver’s seat and try to start her up.

I did and nothing happened.  Nothing…

Just a few clicks.   And the rain continued to pour.   The gutters along the curbs began to swell.  And the commuters maneuvering around us, in what now constituted a small lake, made their presence felt.

At this juncture, my father’s even-keel disposition took a hit from the side, which is to say, a guy passing by honked his horn and displaced a wave of water than crashed upon his head.  His blue Esso baseball cap had now been drenched.   And without much warning, he let fling a heap of expletives and pleasing consonant-combinations that I’d rarely heard him utter in my life…  Not long after that venting, the skies cleared and the spark plugs sparked and the timing belts squealed and the other Plymouth Duster gizmo’s began to sound like normal.  ”Thanks a lot, Dad,” I said, driving away.

But one thing about our circumstance had not been normal.   One thing in the midst of the chaos I could not leave behind, and neither could the mechanic who came to my rescue.  The spiritual core of that incident happened during the interval between my Dad’s tirade and the car’s repairs when some unknown pedestrian approached us and said, “Excuse me…  I noticed you cursing and I just wanted to tell you… ah… I mean… this doesn’t matter.”

This doesn’t matter.

This doesn’t matter?

Well, in the moment, it sure as hell mattered.

It mattered a great deal.

But now that I’ve had years and even decades to contemplate the words of this mysterious Buddha, I consider that multi-layed episode to be the paradigm of my existence — and it DID matter, but only in this sense — in the sense that Gary Snyder suggests that nothing matters, or that “emptiness” matters:

I first saw it in the sixties,

driving a Volkswagen camper

with a fierce gay poet and a

lovely but dangerous girl with a husky voice,

we came down from Canada

on the dry east side of the ranges. Grand Coulee, Blue

Mountains, lava flow caves,

the Alvord desert—pronghorn ranges—

and the glittering obsidian-paved

dirt track toward Vya,

seldom-seen roads late September and

thick frost at dawn; then

follow a canyon and suddenly open to

          silvery flats that curved over the edge

O, ah! The

awareness of emptiness         

brings forth a heart of compassion![--from Finding The Space In The Heart]

– Spellcheck is a frenemy

– The post you spent three hours on will have less mass appeal than the post you wrote in 45 minutes, after six pina colada  flavored wine coolers.

– Drink heavily and write. Edit with strong black coffee in the morning.

– You will still miss mistakes. Don’t worry. Sam Ligon will edit them and say they were “minor”.

– Write about what you know.

– Be okay with having what you know completely shitted on.

–If you share a blogging home, read the other bloggers’ posts. Comment, if you have things to say. Compliment them in a loud voice in public and repeat the name of the blog.

–If you can’t stand the silence, phone The Network. Your mother, grandmother, brother, mentor and best friends will gladly comment on your posts.

–The shame of calling The Network diminishes over time.

– Build off better, well-written posts. Link them in your post, to give yourself credibility.

–Take a week off. Take two if you feel like you might whine. If you feel guilty about not writing something, post a Youtube video and write a witty sentence about it. Don’t be pissed when you get more comments on that post.

– It’s okay to envy the people who post consistently solid posts. They will die young.

–Be proud of your progress. It will be undefinable but you will feel something in the shining moment that you write exactly what you want to write and sober too.

–Take your writing seriously but not too seriously.

–Losing sleep on a 500-word post is not uncommon.

–Don’t stop.

–Never surrender.

–When complimented on your writing/perspective/argument, act surprised.

It'll Make Sense in Time

It’s beautiful. You wake at 8 A.M. on a Sunday morning. You’re healthy, 24 years old, and you have no other obligation today other than you have to write.

You stay in that meandering, foggy limbo between sleep and dreams for a bit knowing that you should get up and write. You think about your work. How the end goal is to become a super writer. Something like the Six Million Dollar Man, where your writing is the cleanliness of  Hemingway’s prose (without the deeply entrenched misogyny) combined with the energies of Kerouac, the metaphor and dream state of  Murakami, paradox of Kafka, sense of place and lyricism of Dybek. You’re going to write the next great American novel, start a literary movement where even the people you’re loosely associated with become famous. They’re going to coin a new term after your style and you’re going to spearhead the next cannon of American writing, just so long as you wake up. But your bed feels so lovely, almost like it’s made out of cotton swabs and billowy wisps of clouds that drift by on a sunny day. You’re going to accomplish so much, you just need a little more sleep.

12 P.M. You wake up feeling that drugged, heady feeling that comes with having overslept. You certainly can’t write in this state. You put coffee on and take a warm shower during which you wonder why you don’t grind your own beans and really is there much of a benefit to doing so. Doesn’t that decision mark the turning point where you become a coffee snob. The type of hipster we all love, who, when ordering coffee at a cafe winces after their first sip and says, “the stuff I brew is a million times better,” yet they go to the same cafe everyday.

12:30 P.M. You need to relax before writing. You need to calm yourself and just breathe for a moment. You shouldn’t view writing as a job. When you resist the process at every step the work reflects this hesitance and lack of enthusiasm. So you watch episodes of Community on Hulu. You watch the entire first season, in fact. You don’t understand why more people don’t like this show. It’s one of the few examples of something that’s meta and doesn’t feel likes it’s completely up its own ass. It manages to be meta in its disdain for all things meta. On top of that it subverts genre and satirizes popular movies in a way that doesn’t seem cheap. In the first season’s paintball episode cinematography and content from 28 Days Later, Terminator 2 and Die Hard is used.

4:00 P.M. You realize both of your legs have fallen asleep and the only food you’ve eaten all day was warmed in a microwave. Moving past discarded hot pockets boxes and stained coffee mugs you find workout clothing. You haven’t exercised nearly enough this winter and as a cause you’ve gained weight and lost muscle mass. As a red head you don’t want to be Louis CK, maybe something more akin to Sean White but without the fro. You definitely don’t want to be as emaciated as Thom Yorke but as of right now you have the body type of Conan O’ Brian.

4:30 P.M. Instead of running you make a line graph representing the body types of famous red heads and where you fall into this. This makes you realize you need to work out more. And that you need to learn to make visual representation. In the future, that is.

5:00 P.M. More television. This time two British programs, Coupling and Peep Show. You’ve finally given in, even though you’re so fucking sick of people telling you that British sitcoms are so much better. That the writing is witty and true to life, not desperate and meant for the lowest common denominator like American shows. This is bullshit though. You can see the appeal, it’s clever and all, but you don’t really care much for the dry wit. You can appreciate how a chain of misunderstandings lead to catastrophe, but it doesn’t make you laugh. You savor and digest but you don’t enjoy what you see and it doesn’t elicit even a titter. So many of the scenes make you uncomfortable, even cause you to close your eyes. Is new humor just sustained awkwardness, and unsympathetic character types who don’t understand how to function in society?

8:00 P.M. You take a bubble bath and think about the purpose of the 2nd person narrator. So often it distracts from content, making the reader hyper aware of form. It’s meant to unify, to instruct and find universality in observation but more often it just estranges others. They can’t empathize with the way you live and reject it as something too radically different from their own experiences.

9:00 P.M. You read novels. The best way to write is to read other people and in this sense you’ve already finished your writing for the day. You’re finishing up 1Q84, and after a couple of weeks of working away at it you can’t help but feel disappointed. Structure of the piece is cool in the sense that it reflects content, material dealing with parallel worlds is compelling, but overall the novel meanders. By page 500 the author becomes complacent and the narrative stagnates. You can’t help but insert your own imaginary cuts into the work, something that feels like blasphemy when dealing with Murakami.

12:00 A.M. Your cough has come back so you take nyquil. The game becomes how long can you combat the drug before sleep takes you. The ends of your vision blur as you sit in a dark room watching bad zombie movies. Your girlfriend wonders why you’re so fascinated with the end. Don’t you know that if it was the zombie apocalypse she would more than likely be devoured, that you’d be lonely haled up on an island, in a mall, a frozen wasteland waiting for death to come. Masses of undead shuffle across your screen and for some reason their movements, their predictability, the reliability of the form soothes you. You drift off, thinking that it’s best that you get some sleep. You have writing to get done tomorrow.

“What I am particularly interested in exploring is the border zone between consciousness and unconsciousness, between then and now, between self and other and self as other.  The border is not a fixed site but a movable one where exchanges occur, where encounters happen (between people, between imagination and language), where some material doesn’t get through and what does get through flows out in the odd dream logic of condensation and ongoing deferral.”      –Thomas Heise, The Missouri Review (Vol. 34:111).

Gabrielle Giffords, the Congresswoman from Arizona, is thankfully recovering from the point-blank gun-shot wound that she sustained to her head.  Forensic analysis showed how the bullet entered her skull and exited after passing through the area of the brain associated with speech, and if it hadn’t passed through, the energy from the trauma would have been too much.  The victim would not have survived.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As of last week, of course, we see that Giffords has done considerably more than survive and suffer the comatose or vegetative conditions associated with the aftermath of such horrific events.   She has cast votes in Congress.   She has done interviews.   And most recently she has resigned from her post in the House of Representative and will now be devoting herself full-time to recovery, which may involve a trip to the African continent with her astronaut husband, Mark Kelly.   It may also involve a sojourn to the “border zone” that Heise describes above.

I find myself irresistibly drawn to this story for a variety of reasons:  the relationship between Giffords and her spouse is simply beautiful to behold and I can only imagine the way their private conversations also manifest all that’s good about marriage and the way it’s supposed to work.   I also might point out how Giffords actually stood for very controversial things, gun control among them, and that in Arizona, where the wild, wild west is a point of nostalgic pride, that’s a courageous stand to take.   But most of all, what strikes me about this amazing person’s progress involves the tears associated with her overwhelming drive to communicate, and to communicate in ways that may prove instructive for those interested in semiotics and how language becomes tethered to the rawest right-hemisphere processing of the brain.

Giffords weeps and weeps most often as she attempts to retrieve words and form sentences, things that are now much more difficult than they used to be.  Regarding the violent act which precipitated her injuries as well as the death of others — including a federal judge who appeared with her in the Safeway parking lot … including a nine-year-old girl who idolized her — she is now painfully aware.   That is, she grasps the tragic loss of life, and that she miraculously survived.   She comprehends the psycho-path’s premeditated act, perhaps his warped world-view.  But the visual imagery associated with the actual firing of the weapon is blissfully blacked out… cryptically erased… redacted by the powers of the soul (or the hard-wiring of the brain, which may be inextricably intertwined)…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now, on that note, I’d like to make a turn and suggest an aspect of creative writing that, I think, is often overlooked.   Does the phenomena have a specific designation?  I can’t be sure.  It has something to do with a writer’s inability to articulate with precision the “event” itself, that the experience of things in and of themselves yield no direct access and that ironically the raw regurgitation of causal relationships will not translate to others as well as the carefully-considered reflections which come well after the supposedly brute fact.  If pressed, however, I might refer to this “border zone” speech as the Sacajewea Affect after the famed translator for the Lewis & Clark expedition [More On This Below].

Giffords, even at her best, at the height of her powers, prior to the incident, would have to capitulate as much.   After rehearsing her speech on immigration policy, for example, she would have to admit that the truest existential moment — the thing that drives her to speak out — cannot be articulated as fully as she might like.  The very sympathy or empathy that she might exude for refugees along the southwest border — that emotional  response might be articulated in words and coherent phrases.   But the actual feeling of the human condition, that tripped breaker in the hard-wiring of her soul, is better left untouched.  Unsaid.  And, of course, if it is said, if such a statement should escape any politician’s lips, we immediately doubt its authenticity.

Moreover, we are justified in our doubting primarily because no one should presume to step out of existence and to imitate an objective view.   All that we are capable of doing is what the slain and now recovering Gabrielle Giffords does for the world to see.   She weeps.  She allows tears to fall from her frail face and with all the strength she has Giffords absorbs anyone who’s willing to hug her quivering frame.

***

I’ve recently had the chance to read through the Journals of Lewis and Clark, in which the auspicious explorers ventured from St. Louis, picked up the trail along the Columbia river and arrived at the Pacific coast, from which they led their corp of 35 men and one woman and one infant back again.   The entire journey took years and upon completion the pair had a compilation of words — subjects, objects and verbs connecting them with events that drenched them like the winter rains that made them miserable at Fort Clatsop.   Anyway, no matter what adjectives, adverbs and prepositions we peruse, clinging like mildew to tarps or moss to trees, it’s obvious that neither Meriwether Lewis nor William Clark can fully express the urgency of the present moment through which they pass.   Lewis is notoriously moody and depressive.  Clark is succinct and even detached.   But when these military ambassadors invite Sacajewea into the mix we have the possibility of a break-through.

To cut to the chase, the sixteen year old indian guide sobs.   She comes to the end of every language at her disposal, her French-trapping husband’s, her American-employers, her Minnetaree captors, her Mandan benefactors and even her own band of Shoshone, to whom she makes this thrilling return:

Sacajewea was sent for; she came into the tent, sat down, and was beginning to interpret, when in the person of Cameahwait she recognized her brother:  She instantly jummped up, and ran and embraced him, throwing over him her blanket and weeping profusely… After some conversation between them she resumed her seat, and attempted to interpret for us, but her new situation seemed to overpower her, and she was frequently interrupted by her tears… (Saturday, August 17, 1805).

You see, the issues which surround the emotional intelligence of the writer are not irrelevant to any genre of literature, whether its a non-fiction chronicle that will rock recorded history, a fantasy-prone trilogy of novels that tap into the mythic consciousness of the western world or a poem which implies that human imagination has been woven into the very fabric of the corporeal world.

The other things I would just touch upon briefly involve the contributions of women and where writing will go in the next few decades and centuries with women asserting themselves and incorporating their gifts for emotivity into their writing.   U2, in one of the rock group’s most recent songs, offers this lyric:  “Women are the future of all the big revelations.”   And, looking around at all the proteges of Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov, I have to applaud and affirm every feminine archetype, and more importantly, every female act of courage that I can absorb into my Low-T bloodstream.

As the lights brighten, as the sky darkens,
a woman with crooked heels says to another woman
while they step along at a fair pace,
‘You know, I’m telling you, what I love best
is life. I love life! Even if I ever get
to be old and wheezy—or limp! You know?
Limping along?—I’d still … ‘ Out of hearing.

–Denise Levertov, from A February Evening In New York

Click here to view the embedded video.

The woman is too heavy for the poem, she is a swollenness, a foot, an arm, gone asleep, grown absurd and out of bounds.

Rooted to memory like a wedge in a block of wood; she takes the pressure of her thought but cannot resist it.

You call this a poetry of false problems, the shotgun wedding of the mind, the subversion of choice by language…

–Adrienne Rich, from The Will to Change, Section 8

 

Could it be that Gabrielle Giffords’ recovery is the future of politics as we know it?   Or could it be that her story-telling struggles — what to leave in and what to leave out — will help Thomas Heise and others in their explorations of the “border zone”?   Is there a writer out there who will trust the emotional intelligence at work in the random tear?   Yes, I believe there is and will always be!

Peace–

Because seven is a cooler number than eight.

Some people would have you believe there are no new stories to tell. Christopher Booker would have you believe there are only seven plots in all of existence (though he does allow for subplots under his comedy and tragedy headings, because (I can only assume) most people with a brain could tell you that “tragedy” is not, in and of itself, a plot). I admit I’ve never read his book, and I know better than to let TV Tropes suck me in while I’m trying to get anything done, so I’ll take a stab at those seven plots and say they’re something like this: Lord of the Rings, Oedipus (marrying your mom—is that comedy or tragedy?), Cinderella, Twilight (though I’ve never read it), Star Wars, Inception, and To the Lighthouse, though I still can’t tell you what happened in Inception, and something tells me Booker hasn’t read much Woolf if he thinks her plots would fall under a heading such as “The Monster.”

In grad school, we sometimes talked about someone (and, forgive me, I forget who, because I was almost completely uninterested in simplifying plot this far) who had said there were two: someone comes to town, someone leaves town (or, perhaps I’m mis-remembering because I just looked at Cory Doctorow’s page on Wikipedia; have you tried the random article feature? It’s as much of a time sink as TV Tropes).

Myself, I’m not sold on either of these ideas, though I do suppose that, if you want to paint with large brushstrokes, you could go so far as to say there’s only one plot: some things (or one thing) happen to some people (or one person). But that’s not really true either, because I recommend rejection regularly in the slush reading I do, and often on the grounds that there’s no plot.

This piece is anecdotal, I sometimes say, and after typing that yesterday in my notes, I wondered what I actually meant by it. What is an anecdote versus a story? Like pornography, I assume I know, but perhaps there’s taste involved, too. Like—I’m uninterested in reading fifteen pages of description of painting a mural, and so I will contend that nothing actually happened in your story; or—your character lost a limb in this story and I’m still not moved to any sort of emotional response, not even at the basest level of “well that was gross.” (Don’t even get me started on the turkey baster story.)

Perhaps plot is, as a term, ineffective. Plot good, anecdote bad. Plot interesting, no plot boring. This morning, I went to the doctor and they wanted to stick me with a needle. I said no. My car door wouldn’t shut in the parking lot, but then it did. I didn’t crash on the way home. Which of the seven plots is that? Is that someone comes to town or someone leaves town, considering I did both?

There’s a discussion begging to be had here in terms of the writer. There are certain writers about whom I could honestly say that I wouldn’t mind reading fifteen pages of painting description, because the description would really be a lightweight veil over something deeper and possibly sinister. But I’m feeling lazy this morning; I’d rather giggle as I struggle to fit all my books into one of those seven containers. And when it gets hard, I’ll just take the easy way out. I’ll say “things happen to people in this book.” Then I’ll go eat lunch.

Fact: There are ___ days until your thesis is due.
Truth: Don’t count. Don’t even think about counting. Make sure everyone understands that if they continually announce the countdown until their/your defense date, you’ll punch them in the throat.

Fact: When you’re planning fifty events, every person thinks their event is at the top of your priority list.
Truth: Most of them aren’t. Sorry.

Fact: Everyone around you will assume that their level of stress about thesis is greater than yours.
Truth: Everyone will be stressed, to some degree. It’s not a competition. Be kind to each other.

Fact: Two interns worked extra hours last week to keep us on schedule.
Fact: Two other interns have reminded me about mealtimes to make sure I eat, while another brought me coffee.
Truth: Those are the kinds of things you do for your boss when you fear for his/her sanity.

Fact: The number of people who have said some variation of, “Hey, really coming down to it now, eh?” is too many.
Truth: Those people are good people but I still want to punch them when they say that.

Fact: People will say things like that to you regarding your thesis.
Truth: You will resent them for it.

Fact: No less than three people have pointed out small mistakes or missteps I’ve made the past week.
Truth: Every time, I had the disproportionate reaction of wanting to die on the spot.

Fact: Later, you’ll find a typo or other mistake in your official, bound thesis, or you’ll hate the font or how you did the layout.
Truth: Doesn’t matter.

Fact: This is not my first time at the rodeo. I am not unused to jobs that require a lot of work.
Fact: Things are on schedule, and going okay thus far.
Truth: Knock on wood. And it feels like I’m behind.

Fact: Things are most likely on schedule for your thesis, and going fine thus far.
Truth: You don’t need to knock on wood. You’re not behind.

Fact: My expectations for the festival are similar to the expectations I had for my thesis.
Fact: Those expectations are/were unreasonable, and as a result, were not met.
Fact: You should make sure that your expectations for your thesis are not unreasonable. Push as hard as you possibly can, but don’t break yourself.

Fact: It will be fine.
Truth: Fine isn’t good enough.

Truth: I just watched Lost in Translation instead of continuing to work on a Saturday night, and justified it to myself as “research” for my novel. It wrecks me when he tells her she’s not hopeless.
Fact: Everything about the above is ridiculous. So much so that I’m tempted to give myself s**t for it. Be a dear and do it for me, okay?

Fact: Unsolicited advice is generally annoying.
Truth: *shrug*

Fact: In the time that it’s taken me to write this post, I could have accomplished at least a few emails or finished a project. You know, been productive.
Truth: I like this better.

On occasion, I’m struck by the similarity of something in the real world to something in a story I wrote.  Am I special person, like Tengo?  (I’m aware Tengo is a fictional character) Or did my sub-conscious give me the idea, which I used in the story, and then noticed in the real world?  I lean toward the latter.

I tried NaNoWriMo this year.  I failed.  I wrote about 1,500 words my first day, but decided they were so bad, and I mean really bad, that I couldn’t bear the thought of pounding out 48,500 more terrible words.  (NaNoWriMo seems to work for some people and that’s great)  I share this because in those first few pages, my main character hits a little girl with his car on his way to work.  It’s not his fault.  The girl darted out in front of him, but he feels guilty, and wonders if he could have prevented it had he been paying more attention.  

Like many of my story ideas, I stole this one from real life.  Maybe six or seven years ago, on my way to work, I saw a mother and her small child walking on the side of the road.  I was stopped at a traffic light, and made a mental note to go well below the 35 mph speed limit until I’d passed them.  Inexplicably, the girl ran into the street.  Luckily I was still a good twenty yards away and hit the brakes.  The mother grabbed her daughter, yelled at her, and I think mouthed an apology to me.  My heart pounded the remaining five minutes of the drive to work.  How easily my life could have changed if I’d been even a little distracted that day.

Like many things that are terrible in real life, but great for a short story or novel, the idea stuck with me, and I decided to try it.  A few weeks after I wrote those 1,500 words, a little girl was hit and killed by a car in my hometown.  And I feel guilty even mentioning this tragedy in a blog post. I know there is no connection between my writing a scene and a very similar scene happening in the real world, but it was still surreal and jarring to read the account in the local newspaper.

I recently attempted meta-fiction in a short story.  The first few pages are ostensibly in third-person, though there are hints that suggest otherwise.  About a thousand words in, one of the characters directly addresses the narrator.  The story continues in first person, with the narrator occasionally commenting on how he will turn the conversation between the two characters and him into a short story.  Then, in a previous draft, I shifted again, and revealed an autobiographical first person voice behind the narrator:

I wrote to explore Eryn and Harold, two fascinating people, two fascinating characters, and I inserted myself for triangulation, to put something more at stake, adding the element of self-aware story-telling.

I decided to do away with this second shift because it felt too blunt, too jarring.  But I realized, in writing this fiction, that I’d ended up, at least partially, explaining why I write.

I took these great moments and added and changed and emphasized and cut and rewrote and made a story.  I gave some of my lines to Harold.  I pretended to see Eryn as perfect, despite being keenly aware of her flaws.  I made a story because the reality failed to live up to expectations.  The actual ending was even less satisfying, even more anti-climatic.

…much like the ending of this blog post.

For the next few months, I hounded my fellow poets. At parties, I got drunk and asked each one to “Describe to me your writing aesthetic.” I wanted to know what contemporary writers they would compare their work to. I wanted to know about their opinions on rhetorical questions in poems and how they viewed titles that had no seeming relation to their poems. I wanted to know about dashes. I wanted all these answers because I couldn’t answer them for myself.

Some writers don’t like to be asked what they write about but I don’t have a problem with that question. I write about sex and men, intimacy and my body – all together and separately but how I write about them is still a mystery to me. I think I could give a better response on how fellow poets (and barkers) Cathie and Kristina write than how I, myself,  write.

When I was researching for a paper for my professor, JJ, on Major Jackson, I found an audio interview Jackson gave in which he talked about his latest book, Holding Company. He spoke about his intentionality of driving the poems forward with images instead of a narrative arc, which blew the cover off how I’d been reading (or misreading) the poems. When I looked at the poems again, this time knowing each was scaffolded by imagery, I was dumbfounded by how much easier the poems became to understand.

How do we, as writers, choose our delivery? How would you describe your writing? *puts the mic in your face* I need to know.

Now that I’m a more experienced writer and committed to a novel that is 100% fictional, I understand what those writers mean. My characters will sit quietly in my brain for hours, even days, until something triggers them and they start talking to me. For long stretches they won’t say a thing, but I often think of them when passing a shop window or listening to the radio: Molly would look good in that, James would hate this song. When we do get together, we can spend hours in each other’s company, and it’s fun. It’s like rooming with good friends: I might not spend every waking hour with them, but I see them most every day and I enjoy our time together.

But I have some visitors in my brain of late: Mickey and Cecily, my characters for the two versions of The Odd Couple. They’ll only be staying with us until mid to late February, which puts me on company behavior until they leave. They get first dibs on my time and attention. I try not to neglect my novel characters, but I feel the pressure of our limited time and I can’t ignore my visitors for long. And the two groups don’t play well together. I don’t want to banish my novel characters, even for a few weeks, but I only have so much creative attention to give–it runs out long before time does. When I’m feeling particularly torn between them, I find myself retreating all together, ducking out, hoping the characters will figure it out for me.

In an ideal world, I would have enough energy for everyone. I could spend the mornings in my novel and the afternoons in the plays. There would be no blank stares, no uncomfortable silences. But they’re both fighting for one portion of my brain, and I can’t seem to expand it. I can’t cannibalize the part that calculates my daily expenditures, or the part reserved for guitar practice, or even the section designated for reading. It’s as if my brain doesn’t want me to spend my whole life in fictional worlds, talking to and developing people who don’t technically exist. It demands that I create things with my hands, that I do math from time to time, that I look at the world in front of my eyes.

When I have company in the real world, I set my regular life aside so I can focus on them. I reconfigure my schedule to spend maximum time with my guests. I talk to them more than I talk to my husband, but I do still talk to him. What’s most often sacrificed during a visit is my alone time, but I often find a way to have some, whether it’s going to bed early or taking a solo trip to the grocery store. If I don’t take these breathers, I start to become a useless hostess–quiet, distracted, surly–and by the time the guest leave, I’m ready to collapse.

I keep feeling guilty when I take time away from my characters (lately, I’ve taken solace in the serene repetition of my crochet hook) but I’m starting to think it’s okay if it prevents total burnout. I can’t neglect my novel characters entirely, but I have to know when to rest. It was my tendency to push myself too hard that made my first “novel” stiff, dry, and unimaginative–at least in part. I just have to trust that my novel characters will be faithful, and that when Mickey and Cecily leave, they will be waiting.