Take It All Off

Taking your clothes off might be a daily occurrence. But how often do you do it in front of other people with whom you are not intimate?

I do it all the time.

Yep. I stand in front of groups of people and strip it all off. It's embarrassing, let me tell you. In fact, I blush. I cry. I start with the outer layers and move on to the ones closest to my skin - closer to revealing what I try to hide so often. Each article of clothing drops to the floor. I shiver under the lights that should feel warm, but they don't. Denim. Cotton. Silk. I'm revealing more and more skin. Layer after layer . . .

Until I'm standing with nothing to hide behind.

And that's it. Now how long I decide to stand there letting people gawk and admire and laugh and criticize is up to me. But at least I do it. At least I'm brave. Right?

Oh, come on! You know I'm talking about letting other people read your work. Sometimes it feels just like you're naked, doesn't it? Haven't you sent your work (querying might be a similar experience to some) out to some readers and a few days later you regret it? You think, "I shouldn't have done that. It could be so much better. Maybe I should ask for it back? Tweak here and there and send it out again? Maybe?"

Don't.

I've been getting feedback on my novel, Monarch. It's a second draft. I know that in many respects, it sucks. It needs help. I took off my clothes to show the few extra pounds I'd rather were not there. I'm still standing naked, letting it all show. And it's great. I'm getting used to it, bit by bit.

(I would never really strip in public, I promise. I'd be labeled all sorts of things I'd rather not say here. . . . And I'd be arrested, but that's beside the point.)


Here's a few pointers for those of you who can't "bare" to strip down yet:

(1) If you don't let others read your work you're doing yourself a disservice. Few people can write in a vacuum. Let others who are willing read and critique your work. Often.

(2) Read Scott's excellent post from yesterday and take all that criticism in stride.

(3) Take that criticism and be honest with yourself. Rework. Write. Edit. Layer. Grow!

(4) Then send it out again. And again. Until you feel like it's solid and the critiques you get focus more on nitpicks than huge issues like plot holes and character inconsistencies.


Here's a few pointers for those of you who strip down all the time with no fear:

(1) Make sure you let your viewers - I mean readers - know where your work stands. Let them know if it's polished, a first draft, almost-there-draft, etc. This makes a difference in the kind of feedback you'll receive.

(2) Please tell your readers what kind of feedback you're looking for! You don't want a line edit when you're only looking for overall advice. That's a waste of your time and theirs.

(3) Don't overburden your readers. Seriously rework your piece before you send it to them again. They don't want to read a draft with just a few sentences changed here and there. If all you have done is changed grammar or minor things - and you think it's as polished as possible - your work might not need critiquing anymore. Save the line edits for a close beta reader who doesn't mind reading your work fifty billion times (I'm lucky to have a few of these readers. They're gold and I love them).


If you need help or have questions about where or how to find Beta and Alpha readers, see my post over on my blog, here.

On an ending note, I loved Jessica's advice over on BookEnds a few days ago about knowing when it's time to start/stop querying. She said:

I made the suggestion that authors should never even start querying until they finish their first book and have started on the second. At that point, continue querying until the second book is done and ready to go, if you still have no bites, put the first book under the bed and start querying the second while writing the third.

That's tough advice, she says. I agree. But patience is key in this business. Apparently, it helps to work naked, too. I come up with strange analogies.

Now, if only we could perfect our bodies just sitting in our chairs in front of the computer . . .


~MDA (aka Glam)

Some Thoughts on Criticism

Criticism: The art of estimating the qualities and character of literary or artistic work.

Critical: Involving or exercising careful judgement or observation; exact, accurate, precise.

Lately I've been critiquing the work of a few friends and also having some short pieces of my own critiqued. Which leads me, quite naturally, to thinking about how best to give (and receive) useful criticism. I'll share my thoughts on criticism and see what everyone thinks.

First, general guidelines for giving criticism:

1. Be honest. Say what you think if you've been asked what you think.
2. Be polite and respectful. Don't phrase your criticism in terms you personally would find offensive. I have been known to be blunt, but I hope I'm not rude; I just try to get to the point.
3. Give praise where praise is due. Too often critique is all negative, even if we really like what we've just read.
4. Remember that the point of this is to improve the story. Be helpful.
5. Thank the writer for sharing his work. Did I mention that you should thank the writer? And don't forget to thank the writer.

Next, my list of questions to ask when critiquing a work:

1. Did you like the story?
2. What do you like?
3. Did you not like the story?
4. What do you not like?
5. Were you bored at any point? When?
6. Were you confused by any of it? When?
7. How did you feel about the characters?
8. Did you want to read until the end, or did you do it just because we're bestest friends?
9. Did the story leave you with any questions?
10. Did the dialog ring true?
11. Was the plot believable?
12. Was the ending a good payoff for the buildup?
13. Did you like the prose? Did the writing appeal to you?
14. Was there any point where the writing knocked you "off the page," out of the story and asking yourself, "What is that supposed to mean?"

You can go into greater detail than this, but in general I don't have time for that (because, you know, real life and stuff takes up time) and I'm more a big-picture guy.

Note that I do not talk about misspellings and things like that. I try to focus on top-down issues, all designed to answer the larger question: Does this story work, as written? If the story is broken, the spelling and grammar are not the main issue. If the story and characters and prose are all otherwise fabulous, then go ahead and say, "Dude, you misspelled 'xenotrophicism.' Twice."

How I read for criticism:

1. Read all the way through once, to get a feel for the story and to see if I can read all the way through it.
2. Ask my questions.
3. Give my feedback to the author, using my guidelines and trying to address only what I think are the biggest issues. There is no point in overwhelming someone.
4. Remember to say what's good/workable in the story.
5. Remember to thank the author for sharing his work.

Also make sure you tell the writer if what they've written isn't the type of stuff you usually read or enjoy. If I know I'm not a good audience for something, I don't offer critique if I can help it, because what I'll have to say will likely be beside the point.

Guidelines for receiving criticism:

1. Thank the critic for their time and thoughts. Even if the feedback is useless, because your reviewer put effort into reading your work. Be polite and respectful. That doesn't mean you must agree with them.
2. Be prepared for the feedback to hurt. No matter how well-meaning the speaker, nobody likes to hear that their child is ugly or has behavioral problems.
3. Take everything with a grain of salt. Any time I give criticism, it's done through the lens of whatever problems I'm having with my own stories, so I can be short-sighted when looking at others' work.
4. Be prepared for epiphanies. I dread those, "Oh, you are so right. I never saw that problem before you pointed it out" moments, because it means I have to do more work. But it also means that the story will be better thanks to someone's observation.
5. Take what you can use, and what makes sense. Don't accept as gospel or as necessary any suggestions that feel wrong to you. There is no platonic version of your story, or of anyone's story, and there is no story that will please or resonate with all readers.
6. Don't argue with your critics. It's pointless and won't help your story.

~SGFB

The Literary Lab Gets Revamped

I have some exciting news today. Michelle Davidson Argyle (also known as Lady Glamis) and Scott G. F. Bailey have joined The Literary Lab.

For most of you, these two writers don't need any introduction. They are both more familiar with Shakespeare than I am, and both of them tend to be far more thoughtful than I am before letting their fingers peck away at their keyboards. (Scott even uses a pen.)

We decided to work together because the three of us share a love for literary fiction, an art form that has sadly become associated with stuffy and inaccessible writing. Our hypothesis is that classical literary techniques will make any writing better, and the best popular fiction can also be the best literary fiction.

We're passionate about our art. Our mouths water at the thought of creating that perfect novel. And, we're amazed by how many enthusiastic and intelligent peers we've encountered here in the blogging community. We hope that by working together we can post quality material that's worth your time to read.

So, I hope you'll stick around and see how this lab develops. And remember that both Michelle and Scott will be keeping up their own individual blogs, which I'm sure you won't want to miss!

~D.M.

How Do You Buy Books?

As a new writer, I'm often intimidated by the idea of trying to get my yet-to-be-published novel into the public eye. I want to vomit whenever the host of an agent panel asks an auditorium crowd how many of them are writers and four hundred people raise their eager hands.

But I know I'm not alone. Writers with new novels constantly have to face the public arena and hope that their book will be picked out from the crowd. It's not an easy task when so many superstars (literary and otherwise) are already taking center stage.

I've been trying to help out my fellow writers when I'm at the book stores. First of all, while I still end up going to the library a lot, I'm also buying books more often, at least one book a month. And, I'm making sure it's a new book rather than a used one.

When I go book shopping, I also try to pay attention to more than what's on the most prominent display tables. Even if I end up buying something like Water For Elephants, I at least give several other books a chance first. I peruse the shelves, pick up several books from authors I haven't heard of, in genres I wouldn't normally read, and I look at several random passages before deciding whether or not to buy it.

I also try to give books as gifts whenever I can. When I first started doing this, I made the mistake of giving people--including non-readers--books that I liked. That usually ended up with the book crying on some dusty shelf. Now, I give books that I think the recipient will like, and for non-readers, I choose shorter books with topics I know they are interested in. This has had a much higher success rate and many more thank yous.

How do you all obtain books? Do you buy them? Used or new? What do you do to help your fellow writers?

My Writing Progress

This has been a good week for writing. After feeling stuck and unfocused for about three weeks as I settled into my new home, I am finally making progress on my novel again. I'm trying to flesh out four scenes that a reader in Paris suggested could be emotionally deeper, and this week I've made progress on two of them. One of those is my incredibly troublesome first chapter. This time around, it was youtube that helped me out. I set part of the chapter in a cockfighting arena (my novel's called Rooster), and there was some very illuminating (and very sad) footage on youtube about this subject. I set some videos to play and just wrote while I watched them as if I were simply documenting what I saw. The 500 words or so will probably reduce down to a few sentences, maybe less, but the most important thing is that it helped me move forward again, and I think I have some authentic details.

I also had an exciting lunch on Wednesday. Mary Yukari Waters, the writer I've raved about on multiple occasions here, met with me in a great little restaurant called Hurry Curry. I'm going to interview her for this blog and for, The Los Angeles Review, Upstairs at Duroc SmokeLong Quarterly, and this first conversation was very illuminating. Plus, she offered to give me a blurb on my book if I never need it!

The Los Angeles Review officially accepted "Red Man, Blue Man" and a small literary magazine in Paris called Upstairs at Duroc accepted a piece of flash fiction I wrote called "Enchantment." They actually asked me to do a public reading at the publication party, but alas, I'm here and they're there.

From Inspiration to Story: Where Do You Start?

Most of the writers I admire say that a story has to be inspired by character. You can also start a story from a situation and write something more plot-driven. But what are the things that inspire you? Can you start a story from anything else?

For me, Alice Munro is one of the greatest living authors. Even though her writing isn't about three-headed polar bears, they are strange works. I read one story, "Open Secrets" where I thought to myself: How did she get away with this?

It wasn't a bad story. In fact, it is one of my favorite stories by her. But, it was so unusual that I felt like she had broken some major storytelling rule. (Without ruining the story, "Open Secrets" is a murder mystery, and the in the end, the mystery is solved in a very strange way.)

It seemed like Alice was cheating and still making it work. How did she do it?

I read an essay that she had written where she said something that revealed her technique. She talked about what inspired her to write "Open Secrets." It was something incredibly mundane, something similar to seeing soap bubbles in the kitchen sink. She had written a story inspired by soap bubbles! Then she said something that was truly helpful to me. She said that the longer she writes, the more successful she is as keeping the story focused on that thing that inspires her. And it can be anything. That's what made this story so unusual. It wasn't focused on character or conflict. Instead, somehow, this murder mystery was about soap bubbles. (They weren't actually soap bubbles, but I don't want to give away too much.)

This has really opened up new avenues of storytelling for me. I get inspired by everything. I used to discard a lot of these points of inspiration because I couldn't fathom how a story could be built around it. Now, I'm more open to experiencing the world and writing based on anything that excites me. And, in the end, isn't this the heart of making art? Don't we want to portray what inspires us instead of showing that we are good at following rules? I used to tuck the non-character driven inspirations somewhere in the background of my story. I wanted those things (such as the soap bubbles) in the piece for my own satisfaction, but I also didn't want to write something that wasn't "a story". Now I dare to place my inspiration in the foreground. I write to explore my inspiration rather than to construct a story just to contain it.

What's Your Blurb?

"Davin Malasarn's novel is a disturbing tour de force."

"Malasarn's debut novel positions him as the Britney Spears of the literary world."

Okay, these aren't real, but if you ask my friends, you'll find out that I joke about getting blurbs like this A LOT. And, in all fairness, I'd truly love to get either one of these, with Cormac McCarthy likely being the author of the second one.

What's the blurb you'd want on the back of your book? Who would you want it to come from?

In All Seriousness

On Sunday I went to a beautiful Malibu brunch where I met up with some new friends and a few people whom I had never met before. Many of these folks were in the animation business and, naturally, much of the conversation was focused on that. But, in the middle of dessert, I got the inevitable question that most people ask: What do you do?

"I do scientific research," I replied.

"What sort of scientific research?"

"I study photosynthesis in algae," I said. (Usually the conversation dies here, but on this particular afternoon, it was dragged out for one more step.

"What do you study about photosynthesis?"

"I study the effects of zinc deficiency on the photosynthetic system," I said.

Silence.

Then, thankfully, the conversation returned to animation: art, advertising, characters, story...you know, basically all the stuff that I think about every night when I go home from the lab.

It has occurred to me for a couple of years now that I can actually call myself a writer. And, in a situation such as this, it probably would have been interesting for these people to know that I'm a writer. But, as usual, when the topic came up, I pushed my writing back to "hobby" status. Not only did I avoid talking about it. The thought of talking about it didn't even occur to me.

I have only recently bought into the idea of respecting my own writing. Only recently did I care enough to actually admit that writing is extremely important to me, that I spend a lot of time doing it, and that I actually have an emotional investment in it. I think often times all of us can start to feel like underdogs. We're not Cormac McCarthy or Jhumpa Lahiri or Ursula K. Le Guin. And, because of that, we end up fitting ourselves into a diminished role, one where our success becomes the icing on the cake rather than a dream come true, or where our failure becomes something to be shrugged off rather than a serious hurt.

But what if we took ourselves more seriously? What if we called ourselves writers FIRST? I really think that by respecting our own art more, we will actually improve ourselves as writers. By putting more at stake we will also be willing to invest more of our time and effort.

Writing Mentors

To some extent, all of us are intelligent enough to improve our writing technique on our own. By reading books, exchanging critiques, and simply putting the time in to actually write, we can slowly become better without the help of teachers or other people who have been at this much longer than we have. But at some point, most of us hit our own limit. We've learned what we are able to learn on our own. We don't know what we don't know anymore. We need a mentor.

I've had the good fortune of coming across some great mentors in my life. I had a drawing teacher in college, Dave Hollowell, who spent thirty weeks saying the same thing over and over again. "It's all about intention." It took me about twenty-six weeks to finally hear him. And, for anyone who has been following this blog for awhile, you will hopefully remember that Mary Yukari Waters has been a strong mentor for me. (I actually get a chance to interview her in the next couple of weeks, so I'm totally thrilled about that.)

For me, it's not just a matter of stumbling upon a good teacher. I personally have to be at the right stage of my development to be able to learn from a particular mentor. In Mary's class, there were about fifteen students, and though all of them thought the class was excellent, I was probably the only one whose writing was completely transformed as a result of her teaching. I happened to be at a place where the things I needed to learn (without knowing it) coincided directly with the things that Mary decided to teach.

Lately, I've been trying to take a more active role in finding my mentors. In Mary's first collection of short stories, she thanks a man named Tom Filer for being a big help to her. I'm now trying to contact him in the hopes that he'll invite me to his Goat Alley Workshop, which, from what I hear, is simply a small group of dedicated writers who sit together in his living room and critique each other.

Last year, I also had the very fortunate chance to have dinner with Janet Fitch and Samantha Dunn. I found both of these writers to be truly intelligent, and they both recounted the same funny anecdote. They were friends, and both of them were taking a writing class from a woman named Kate Braverman. One evening, after the group received their critiques, Janet Fitch (author of White Oleander and Paint It Black) ended up crying in her car and was deciding if she should quit being a writer. She happened to look up from where she was parked on the street and she noticed Samantha and another student, ALSO crying in their cars. They all had a good laugh about it and decided to continue on with their careers.

When I heard this story, I decided I must at some point take a class with this Kate Braverman. She has unfortunately moved north to the Bay Area, but hopefully I'll have a chance to learn from her sometime soon.

Have mentors helped you in your writing? What qualities do good mentors have?

My Writing Progress

This week I've been taking a lesson from Scott G. F. Bailey's hand-written notebook. A dear friend of mine got me a fountain pen, and I've been working on my book without the use of my computer. It was a little rocky at first. I wrote things like "test, test, test" and my own name. Then, because I still wasn't ready to write, I decided to draw pictures of the shanty where my characters live and the soccer field where they play ball. I drew a little sketch of my protagonist's gambling father watching a cock-fighting match. The feathers. The spray of blood. His squinting eyes hungry for money--Did I mention I studied studio art in college?

Slowly, my brain constructed more details of this opening scene that I have had so much trouble writing. Some things that I thought I would write no longer seemed all that logical. New, exciting, emotionally-juicy details spat out. I realized my protagonist was being too passive in the scene and suddenly he was active. Suddenly, he was guilty of making the situation worse...maybe even starting this entire mess that is the rest of his life!

The pen came from Little Tokyo here in Los Angeles. I'm not sure how much it cost, but it's no Sheaffer Agio Signature Pen. Still, it did its job very* nicely.

I also got some more nice publishing news. Last week I told you I was a finalist in Opium8's publishing contest. A couple of days ago, editor Todd Zuniga e-mailed me and told me I was a "finalist-finalist." I'm in the top 9 and Opium Magazine is publishing my story in their print magazine. I also got a story acceptance from Noo Journal (which I had mentioned liking before) for a story I wrote a couple of years ago based on my trip to the iron mines in Brazil. It's called "God In Frogs" and will be coming out at the end of the year.

*That's for you, Scott.

Collaborative Writing

Some of you will probably hate this idea. I might even hate it myself...I've yet to decide. But, I have this fantasy of writing a story the same way a director makes a movie. I'd bring together multiple writers based on their strengths (a subjective assessment, of course) and assign a different element of writing to each person in the hopes of making one SPECTACULAR story.

More likely it would be one spectacular disaster.

Do you think this could ever work? Would you want it to ever work? One of the things that I love about writing is that, for the most part, I can have as much control of my story as I want. It's mine. I may not be able to publish it exactly the way I want to, but I am basically in charge of all the decisions in the beginning. Movies with large crews do not have this same quality. On the other hand, I love to collaborate. It's when I'm at my best. I often try harder when I work for someone else than when I work for myself.

If I had control of life and death and time and people, my dream team would look something like this:

Characters: Gunter Grass and Jonathan Safran Foer.

Style: Faulkner

Plot: Dante

Dialog: Shakespeare

Interior thoughts: Virginia Woolf

And the Director? I've managed to avoid talking about him for several postings, but surely you know who my favorite writer is.

Of course almost all of those people are dead. But, I can think of several writer friends I'd love to invite. Would they say "yes" or "shove off"?

Question and Answer Outline

I was finishing up a story for a critique group yesterday. This group doesn't meet very often, so I wanted to turn in something that felt "complete" so that I didn't waste anyone's time.

I had been working on a story about a father who left his wife and eight children for another woman. He goes to live with this other woman, but for some strange reason he wants to maintain a relationship with one of the children, the youngest one, whom they had adopted.

Last night I was panicking because the story wasn't done yet. I had written about 18 pages, but I wasn't feeling any sense of closure. I decided to make an outline for myself. This outline was based on questions and answers. I went along in my story, and whenever the events created a question, I wrote it down.

1. Why does Sam leave his wife and family?

2. How does his wife Sally deal with it?

3. How does the other woman, Vivian, feel about Sally?

4. What does Sam's son think about all the attention he is getting from his father?

...and so on.

When I got to the end, I noticed that very few of these questions had been answered. I had written a lot, but what I wrote was only creating more questions. I realized that I had to answer these questions before I could call the story done.

This directed my writing a little, but when I got to the last paragraph I felt like I had something much more satisfying. I found this new outline format to be pretty helpful, so I'll probably be using it more often.

And?

The word "and" is used to group things together:

My floor is littered with dirty laundry and dishes. I wake up and jump from my bed to the door so I can dodge the debris.

But lately I'm starting to wonder if the word leads to imprecision and inequality in much of my prose. Dictionary.com has over 17 uses for the word, including two idioms. Of these, I think only one use of the word is truly indispensible--"and" used to connect alternatives (you have to choose between this and that). Other uses for the word include connecting objects, phrases, or actions; using "and" to imply continuation; or using "and" in place of "but"...among others.

The times when "and" leads to the weakest writing on my part is when I use it to allow myself to not commit to any one emotion or characteristic. He was tired and hungry. The house was large and dramatic. There's nothing particularly wrong with these sentences but using them allows me to be lazy as a writer. Take the first example. He was tired and hungry. Yes. But wasn't he also a thousand other things like warm or cold, confused or alert? Why can I narrow his state down to two choices but not one? Chances are, given the context, I probably can narrow it down to one. He was hungry, so he headed to the kitchen. -or- He was tired, so he headed to bed.

From a reader's point of view, I think lumping such things together also confuses the information the writer is providing. In the example above, saying he is tired dilutes his hunger, just as saying he is hungry dilutes his tiredness. As a result, the character's state gets blurred, and the reader comes away with a general impression of him, but nothing precise.

When the word is used to connect actions, I think the same sort of blurring often occurs. He got out of the car and slammed the door. He walked to the house and dug out his keys. It's the same idea. "He" actually performs a thousand other actions during this trip that I, as writer, considered to be too insignificant to include, but why can't I narrow down the actions even further?

I think cutting out "and" forces a writer to make more decisions, which in turn makes the prose feel more secure. A reader knows that if we are able to choose the most important details, then we can probably tell a story without wasting too much of their time.

As with all things, this is not a rule that I have set in stone for myself. But, I do think that cutting the word out of my writing more often has made my stories more vivid and entertaining.

My Update On Publishing

At last after a few bland weeks of "I'm not exactly sure what to do with my novel," I have some news to share on a couple of other publishing fronts.

First, my story "Red Man, Blue Man," is currently being discussed at The Los Angeles Review. I submitted it to them a few days ago, and the fiction editor reported back and said "I really dig this story." She suggested a few small revisions and is now asking the other editors if they are willing to accept it. I'm hoping they will, but even if they don't, it's really nice to get approval from the editor.

Second, I found out that my short short story "Sacred Bodies" is a finalist in Opium8's 500-Word Memoir Contest, judged by Tom Perrotta, the author of Election and Little Children. This feels nice for me because Opium Magazine markets itself as a humorous literary publication, and I've always been intimidated by the thought of writing something funny. Thanks to Proust I'm trying to be more funny--mostly by just being honest--and it's actually paying off. They are going to announce a winner of the contest at the end of May, but I'm quite content with knowing that I'm a finalist.

These two bits of news feel especially good because I wrote both of these stories very recently, after I felt like I found my voice. So, hopefully, I'm not just deluding myself, and other people can see my improvement as well.

Permanent Loss

I hoard things. When I set my mind on saving something, I do it well. The Connecticut State Quarter is one example. I have over 400 of them, just because I like the picture of the tree on the back. Maybe because of this, nothing gets my adrenaline going more than when a character in a story permanent loses something of consequence.

Grapes of Wrath. It's been years since I read it, but I remember fretting when the Joads started to eat their salted pork after only a few days on the road. Save the pork for an emergency!

Having a character lose something important to their success really makes for an exciting plot turn. Maybe because it feels so high risk, I rarely do it in my own stories! I make the mistake of playing it safe. But, I've come to realize that I have to push my characters to the edge of failure if I want to entertain myself and others. They have to lose all their money, or all their pride, or all their yummy salted pork.

Take something big away from your protagonist early on if you want their success to be that much more satisfying in the end.

Immanence versus Transcendence

The debate between immanence and transcendence has religious origins. An immanent view of God asserted that He was present all around us, while a transcendent view placed God above us. This debate has since seeped into the literary world, sometimes called presence versus transcendence, and discussed by critics such as Marjorie Perloff, among others.

The literary aspects of this debate concern whether or not a piece of writing should strive to reach divinity (defined in the most secular way possible!) by stretching for transcendence as it approaches the end. Should a story try to have universal themes and symbols? Should a writer consciously attempt to provide worldly insight in their stories?

Maybe not. An immanent or present view would say that by simply writing down the facts of the story and presenting them in a straight forward way, a writer is able to create the divine because the divine is present in all things. Furthermore, it may actually be less insightful to try to make the writing mean more than it does, because any attempt to explain the divine must automatically diminish it.

I've been thinking a lot about this topic lately, since my good friend and poet, Craig Cotter, keeps telling me to stop trying to have that big bang at the end of my stories. He tells me to simply let the story go where it is meant to go without my asserting additional (false) meaning to it.

I experiment with this idea, and I do think it is an interesting one. But it's hard to let go of the idea of having the grand finale.

Note: Tara Maya also has a post on endings today.

Tell Me About Yourselves

As I'm visiting everyone else's blogs, I've been wondering a lot about what everyone writes and how much experience they have.

I've been interested in art for most of my life. As a child I played music, and as a teenager I painted. In college I continued to study painting and sculpture, but I managed to take one creative writing class in the last quarter of my senior year. For whatever reason, I've stuck with the writing. I 've been doing it seriously for about eight years. I try to write literary fiction, almost always with multiple main characters. I love the idea of writing an "epic."

What about all of you? How long have you been writing and what do you mainly writing? What turned you onto writing in the first place?

Nonwritten Influences

A few of us have gone back and forth discussing who our writing influences are. For me, I'm also significantly influenced by other art forms.

Movies are more of a natural influence. I tend to write stories with multiple main characters and multiple story lines, so movies like American Beauty, Closer, and Princess Mononoke have been very influential to me. I watch them over and over again to learn how to pace multi-character stories and how to transition from one character to another.

But, other forms of art also inspire me. I love the music of Radiohead, for example. Whenever I listen to their album, OK Computer, I immediately feel like I want to duplicate what they are doing musically in my writing. Shostakovich also inspires me this way, as do the paintings of Agnes Martin and Paul Gauguin, just to name a few.

An obvious problem arises. How does one translate these different art forms into writing?

Can it be done?

One of the things I love about OK Computer is that the musicians make use of these intricate counterpoint lines to balance the main melodies. When the singer finishes a phrase, and before he starts a new one, another line of music rises up in the gap to keep your attention. These lines often overlap so that as one sound is tapering off, another is just developing. In my writing, though, I've never been able to do anything close to this. I've always felt trapped by the fact that our writing is so linear, that readers can only pick up one word, or one sentence, at a time. Poet John Ashbery has experimented with having poems that are meant to be read simultaneously, but I'm sure that borders on the fringe of what readers are willing to put up with. I know in my own experience of that particular poem (I think it was in The Tennis Court Oath, but I may be wrong) was that I ended up not understanding anything.

So, I often ask myself it is a pointless pursuit to try and translate music or painting into my writing? Perhaps the beauty of these separate art forms are that they are, indeed, separate. But, I realize that part of my motivation to write is so that I can take part in the creation of art that I find to be beautiful, and it saddens me to think that some things are "off limits".

Do you think that other forms of art can ever be more than just an inspiration to your art? Can you steal techniques from other artists the way you can steal from other writers?

My Writing Progress

Well, after 6 months in Paris, I'm back in Los Angeles with my Los Angeles job and my Los Angeles commute. The best and worst part about my Paris stint was that I got a taste of what it would be like to devote more time to my writing. I went from reading a book every three or four months to reading one every week. I finished my novel and several short stories. I started blogging and helping to manage another writing website. In short, I feel like I became a true writer in Paris.

Now, my challenge is to incorporate what I gained in Paris into my LA lifestyle. I've been back for three days, and I feel like it's not going to be easy. But, I have made the decision to live closer to work, which will cut my commute. I'm also working to be more efficient with my time. Things like meeting time management and organization will be more controlled. I'm also making my friends aware that having more time to write is very important to me. And, since most of them are writers too--and since most of them have seen my dramatic progress--they understand that I will have less social time dedicated to them. It's a sad thing, but I do feel like it's temporary. My next goal is to get extremely rich so that I can hire an assistant to clean and submit my work for me. Then, all I need is a driver and an environmentally friendly private jet that can transport me and my winged unicorn.

I've been writing. I'm working on the NEW AND IMPROVED first chapter to my novel, thanks to all of you great blog readers. I'm excited about it, but it's slow going. I think once I settle into a routine, things will be better.

Are Ambiguities Allowed Anymore?

Some of the world's most interesting and influential stories are written with ambiguity. The Bible, the Koran, Shakespeare's plays and sonnets--all of these works are heavy with language that can be interpreted different ways. Was the world created in seven 23-hour, 59-minute, 47-second days, or does the word "day" in Genesis represent a different, longer period of time? What does Iago really mean when he says the line, "Though it be fit that Cassio have his place, for sure he fills it up with great ability?" when talking to Othello about Cassio's possible affair with Desdemona?

The modern publishing world doesn't seem to allow much ambiguity in writing anymore. So often we are told to strive for clarity, but maybe clarity only leads to less memorable stories with shorter lifetimes.

I recently wrote a story called "Red Man, Blue Man," where I tried not to have any point or transcendent ending to the story. If anything, the story is simply a sequential series of events focused on two characters, red man and blue man. I posted this up on an online workshop and got several different reactions to it. The people who admired my work in the past tried hard to find a unified theme of the story. As a result, these readers came up with multiple layers of meaning, pulling in much of their own life experiences. The people who did not admire my past work found a lot of problems with the piece. They suggested dramatic revisions, including breaking the story up into multiple pieces, in which each piece had more of a central focus. Granted, this is a different level of ambiguity that I described above, but it still led to readers finding different meaning in the same piece of prose. Personally, I considered this to be a new kind of success, a new style of writing for me that engaged a reader differently. Whether or not I will continue to pursue this idea is yet to be determined.

Could such amibiguity, either on a language level or a story level, work throughout a novel? Do you think modern readers could appreciate such writing?

Sorry I've been out of touch for a few days. I just flew back to Los Angeles from Paris, and boy are my leathery pterodactyl wings tired.