Consciousness and the recurring image

Whether they come in the form of ideas you can't get out of your head or nightmares that appear repeatedly in your sleep, recurring images are something we all experience.

I've been working a lot with recurring images in my writing lately. I started paying attention to this technique after reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time and then moving on to Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and Remains of the Day. Both of these writers deal a lot with the idea of unreliable memory. The narrators of these stories recall memories, but they admit that the memories might be inaccurate. Under these circumstances, recurring images are important because they suggest that whatever is recurring is somehow meaningful to the narrator, even if she or he doesn't understand them. A recurring image weighs more heavily in the narrative, even if it's not presented in any emphasized way.

Maybe this is a simple concept, but I think there's a really wonderful nuance to the recurring image relative to a character's experience. That nuance has to do with the idea of passivity.

When we have recurring nightmares or recurring ideas, we are rarely in control of them. They bob up in our minds when we least expect them. They call attention to themselves. "Pay attention to me! Hey, check me out, I'm totally recurring!"

A writer can create an eerily realistic situation by having their character experience recurring images. In a sense, you are creating an unconscious mind for your character...and if that isn't a remedy for a flat character, I don't know what is.

I love the effect a recurring image has on a character. It makes me feel like the character's mind is working constantly. It creates a parallel inner working to the external events. In my current story, Cyberlama, my narrator had a lot of experiences early in her life that she didn't fully understand. As these memories come back to her, she can reflect on them, grow from them, and I think it really enhances the character development I'm trying to create.

Have you played around with recurring images? How did they work for you? What purpose did they serve?

Friday Filler - Notes From Underground Update

My apologies to Scott if I beat him to Friday Filler. Scott, you're welcome to do another post or attach your thoughts to this one.

We've received a few emails from people about what's going on with the Notes From Underground anthology. It's taking a little longer than I personally anticipated, but I only have myself to blame for that since I was the one putting the initial book together and took way too long to do it. Life got a bit crazy!

last year's anthology

Right now Tara Maya, our cover artist, is putting together something super fantastic for the cover. Davin and Scott are doing final copyedits, adding in italics, etc., and writing the front matter of the book. We'll be getting PDFs to all contributors for a final look-over before the book is sent to print. We'll keep you updated!

Thanks, everyone! I can't wait to see this beautiful book up on Amazon for sale! It will be well the worth wait! In the meantime, you can always satiate your reading hunger with a copy of Genre Wars from last year. You can find more info about it on the Anthology Site.

This is When Writing Gets Private

Would you believe me if I said it has taken me 15 years to figure out a problem in one of my novels? Maybe that means I'm really slow, but all it really means is that I had a lot to learn about writing before I could write the story the way it needs to be written.

I've rewritten this particular book probably 20 times now. I don't mean dinky, fluffy little revisions. I mean MAJOR REWRITES, probably half of those starting the document from scratch with a blank slate.

This book makes me feel stupid when I look at the stats.

People who have read a draft of the book at one time or another

estimated 50 people (Can you believe that? Yeah, neither can I, but it's sadly true. Some of those 50 people have read the book multiple times.)

Years I've worked on the book

15 (You'd think it would be really, really, really good, huh? Yeah, it's not. Yet.)

Number of rewrites

20

Number of places I've lived while working on this book

4

Number of times I've queried the book

2 (This was a brief moment of insanity, and then I realized how far off the book was from being ready. These are the only official queries I've ever sent out for anything I've written.)

The book's first word count

37,750 (I first wrote the book by hand because when I started it, I didn't even know what a word processor was.)

These numbers aren't anything private. They are the things I can share and laugh about. People, writers and readers alike understand these facts for the most part. So where does writing get private? As I was working on the book a few days ago, something clicked. I don't mean a small click. It was a huge, monstrous, earth-shattering CLICK!!!!!!!!!!

I almost stopped breathing.

I finally knew how to make the book work. I saw what had been wrong with it for so long. It's something I'd love to share, but honestly, it wouldn't make sense to anyone but me. It's strange. A part of me wants to try and explain what has happened, but it would only come out as a very long, dry, and confusing post. I finally have instincts to guide my way through writing. I've spent a long time building these instincts, and there is no way to share them with anyone. It's sad and depressing and selfish all at the same time, but a part of me doesn't care. That part of me is jumping up and down with excitement that I can finally make this book work.

I think every writer needs privacy surrounding the way they write. It's great to share some of the knowledge we have, but much of the magic which happens during the writing process can't be explained or shared. I think that's how it should be. Sometimes I read posts about rules and processes and I get so overwhelmed with all the noise. It's good to learn these things and understand them, but the only thing that's going to make your writing truly amazing is to find the place where you forget everything else and trust yourself. Nobody can tell you how to do that but you.

Great Expectations

First off, thank you so much to everyone who jumped in on Monday to give me advice. After thinking it over for a couple of days, I feel much more at ease. I realize I had a big fear of ending up homeless. Maybe that sounds extreme, but it was just a fear I had. I don't have that so much at the moment now, thanks to you.

I've been thinking a lot about expectations. I used to think that the best situation was for a reader to pick up one of my stories with no expectations at all. I liked the idea of the person being surprised by the newness of the story. But, last week I started working on a sequel to the book I wrote for my nephew. For those of you who might not be familiar with this, two Christmases ago, I wrote a Harry-Potter-type story starring my nephew. It was meant only for him, but when I gave it to him, it turned out to go terribly wrong. Tears were involved. The good side to the whole situation was that my sister-in-law and her sister both really liked the book. They are big readers, and they thought it was really cool. So, I had decided to write a sequel for them, something that could be darker and scarier and more mature. Some ideas came together for me last week that excited me, and so I started working on it.

But, I had a problem.

I was including a bunch of family stories that the two women would already be familiar with. This wasn't a huge problem, but somehow it wasn't as exciting for me to imagine them reading something they already knew about. Then, it hit me. I figured out a way to present their stories without them really knowing they were their stories. Even though the sisters are the stars of the show, I'm telling the old family stories using other character names. The two readers will be thinking they're reading about other people until the dramatic turning point in the middle of the story when the fake characters names are transformed into the real ones just as we reach the climax of the family stories that everyone will be familiar with.

Instead of the readers not expecting anything, they will approach the book expecting some things. But, now I get to play with those expectations and surprise them even more. I'm so excited!

What sorts of expectations to you set up in your story? How do you play with a reader's expectations?

Sideshadowing and the Battle Against Inevitability

For a very long time in the history of the novel, writers have tended to produce what theorists call "ideal texts," which means that the novels form sort of closed systems where all the events in the stories lead to a distinct end point (the climax) and all the various subplots and strands of the story are wrapped up and concluded by the last page of the book, often in a denouement of whatever length is necessary. The idea is to leave the reader with no unanswered questions or loose ends, with a feeling that everything is over and the reader's mind can rest. This "ideal text" is based on the false premise that life is a neat, closed system wherein every conflict has a resolution. Now, we all know this isn't the case outside of made-up stories, and over time there has been a growing movement to reject this "ideal text" and the imposed closure of this sort of narrative.

Today I'm going to talk about a narrative technique called "sideshadowing." This is similar to "foreshadowing" and "backshadowing." To quickly review, foreshadowing is the technique of putting clues into the narrative early that a particular event will happen later on, a sort of warning that "something's coming." Backshadowing is the technique of putting commentary into the narrative later on that refers to earlier events, a sort of "should've seen that coming." In general, foreshadowing is visible only to the reader, not the characters. Backshadowing is visible to both reader and character.

Sideshadowing, on the other hand, is the technique of pointing outside of the narrative, of deliberately suggesting to the reader that more things might be going on than what's expressed in the narrative, that there are in fact a multiplicity of narrative possibilities, and that the story in not a "closed system" and that everything can't be all wrapped up neatly by the ending, or even at all. I realize that this is a vague definition, and likely that's because sideshadowing isn't a single technique so much as it's a variety of techniques, and because writers are not thinking in terms of "sideshadowing." The term itself is pretty new, the invention of literary theorist Gary Saul Morson. Go look him up.

Sideshadowing suggests not what happened or what will happen, but what else might happen/have happened in a story. Sideshadowing techniques include:

Unanswered questions
Loose ends
Half-told stories
Digressions
Historical backdrops vaguely referenced
Unexposed backstory

Sideshadowing is sort of an argument against inevitability, if you will. Where foreshadowing and linear "ideal" stories close off narratives step-by-step, sideshadowing opens up a narrative moment-by-moment, offering the reader the idea of more than a single possible outcome. Here are the examples of sideshadowed narratives that came to my mind right off:

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevski
The Lady and the Dog by Anton Chekhov (and lots of his other stories)
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Stern
As well as the works of Borges, Beckett, Rushdie, O'Connor, Oates and others.

I think that writers who have resisted the closed nature of "ideal stories" use a variety of techniques all in the pursuit of narratives that more closely reflect the open-ended nature of reality and the many possibilities that exist in each moment of our lives. I think this "now-ness" is what many writers are looking for when they use the present-tense (and that so many writers are using the present-tense because there's an unrecognized but growing sense that "ideal stories" are inadequate vessels for certain types of realist fiction). In other words: modernism has taken a deep hold on current fiction behind everyone's back. For me at least, there is an expansiveness, a feeling that these sorts of stories are not isolated things unto themselves, a hint that these narratives are connected to the larger world and I like that feeling.

This is something that I've been trying to do in my own work. In one of my novels, I refer obliquely to real-world events and mention larger historical movements in passing to give the impression that my characters are part of a complete, forward-moving world. I also leave the essential large-scale conflict unresolved, because it's a large-scale conflict that goes on even to this day. In another novel, I have my main characters' story intersect with the stories of supporting characters and you never learn how those other stories play out. Readers are left, hopefully, with the idea that there is a real world going on outside of my story, that things are in motion and that new stories can come winging into my narrative from any angle and change the course of lives. At least that's one of the intended effects.

Anyway, this is likely very obscure and idiosyncratic but it's what I think about lately when I think about writing: how to open the narrative up and imply not only a larger world than the fictional world of the narrative, but that the narrative is only one possible outcome of the premise, that other endings are possible and may have actually taken place. This technique is still a work in progress for me, and I claim the provisional status of my ideas as an excuse for all the vagueness in this post.

Is All Writing The Same?

Happy Monday, everyone!

I'm asking for your advice today. As you may or may not know, I've been in the throes of job hunting over the last few months as my current job comes to a close (I have an official ending date of June 30, 2011). I work in science, and I considered the possibility of running my own lab as a college professor. In the end, when application season arrived, I only had the nerve to apply to three schools. I got down to the final four candidates with one of those schools, but in the end, I didn't get the job offer. I'm more or less okay with that--though I was depressed for a few days. I figure, if I had really wanted that job I would have applied to 50 schools instead of 3. Now, I'm satisfied with that effort and am open to the possibilities of a more dramatic job switch.

Which brings me to the question at hand. Is all writing the same?

Over the last decade plus, I've been dividing my energy between scientific research and fiction writing. Needless to say, this is often tiring. Both jobs take up as much time as one is willing to give them. I've always wondered what would happen if I focused on one job with 100% of my effort. That could be science, with no fiction writing. Or, that could be fiction writing with no science. (It could also be perfecting the perfect caramel corn recipe, but let's leave that aside for now.)

I'm not the type to just go for broke with fiction writing, though. That feels far too risky for me. I've got three kids to feed. I've got alimony. Okay, I don't, but I still want food and a place to live. I'm not ready to dedicate all of my time to fiction since the payoff will probably be zero dollars and zeroty-zero cents. So, I asked myself if maybe there were other writing-related paths I could take. Things like technical writing, or science journalism, or grant writing. I wonder if these fields are related enough, to fiction writing that I would get some relief. If I were to pursue technical writing, would that really allow me to focus my attention more? Or, is technical writing (or science journalism or grant writing etc.) so different from fiction writing that I would get anymore relief than I have now?

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? And, I know I'm not the only one who deals with this issue. Probably all or at least most of you have jobs and/or kids that suck up take as much time as my current job does. Have you thought of aligning your efforts more? Do you have any good ideas on how to do this? Perhaps--and I'm only thinking out loud--you could raise your child to become a literary agent.

Friday Filligree!

First, an announcement: Erin Anderson has signed with Joanna Volpe of Nancy Coffey Literary and Media! Which means that HOUND IN BLOOD AND BLACK is just that much closer to being published and taking over the world. About damned time, Guppy.

That reminds me that my agent's birthday is next week. More about that next week. Remind me, someone, to send her a card.

Which reminds me to ask if anyone else has any good news. So do ya, punk?

Also: I don't need to be told that my most recent posts have been less than brilliant, and I haven't really been saying much of late that could be construed as, say, useful to someone wanting to read about writing. So I'll work on that.

Which reminds me that next Friday, I will not be around for Friday Filler/Filler Friday because I'll be in glorious California, at a resort on the beach, working very hard for my employers. Work, work, work: that's all it will be. Though one of today's work-related emails read, in part: "Fran mentioned that the hotel lobby has a great bar..." Work, work, work.

One of the things I've been meaning to do lately but haven't actually done (aside from conquer the universe and all that) is to write up a list of books I intend to read this year. So here's something of a list:

James Joyce Finnegans Wake
(I started this back in November but shelved it; it's going to be my 2011 Summer Book)
Sam Beckett The Malloy Trilogy
Something by Nabokov TBD
Something by Virginia Woolf TBD
Beowulf again
Something by Salman Rushdie TBD
Something by David Mitchell TBD
Haruki Murikami The Wind Up Bird Chronicles
Apuleus The Golden Ass
Something by Agatha Christie TBD
More of the Paddington Bear books by Michael Bond because Pads rocks.
More Chekhov stories
More Alice Munroe
Z.Z. Packer Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
Frans Bengtsson The Long Ships
Laurence Sterne Sentimental Journey
Stendahl The Red and the Black or The Charterhouse of Parma
Kristen Hersh Rat Girl (because the Rejectionist recommended it to me)
and, hopefully, a lot of other cool books.

You?

Images or Words?

I find it interesting  how slow I read. Then again, compared to some others, I read fast. Sometimes I wonder if this whole "reading speed" thing is based on how we internalize words. I don't know how anybody else's brain works, but when I read it goes something like this.


I read the line
"It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats - the hobbit was fond of visitors."

my brain thinks

Oh, great description. I like the use of "shiny yellow brass" against the word "green."

I like the colon placement.

The structure in this sentence works well, etc., etc....


then my brain switches to this

Or something like it.

See, I think in words first. Since I'm a writer, I usually analyze word use and structure before I let an image crowd my brain. This all happens boom, boom, boom, really fast. The point is that I first internalize and analyze the words - probably more than I should if I'm trying to casually read. Do all readers do this? Only writers? I'm trying to get past this and just read the dang story, but I'm finding it difficult. I've always read this way, even during my 5-year hiatus from writing.

I know a reader must first read the words, of course, and their brain must translate them into meaning and images, but how many of you analyze the words before finally settling on the image and moving onto the next sentence or paragraph?

Guest Post: Two-Trick Pony

Hi Ladies and Gents and any variation of the two,

Today we have a guest post by the superb Alex MacKenzie!

Alexandra ("Alex") MacKenzie is an author and illustrator from Seattle, WA. She illustrated In My Nature: A Birder's Year at the Montlake Fill (www.constancypress.com), published in November 2009, and she wrote the fantasy novel Immortal Quest: The Trouble with Mages (www.edgewebsite.com), published by Edge SF (Canada) in September 2010. She supports herself as an academic counselor at the University of Washington, where she works down a lengthy hallway from a certain Mr. Scott Bailey.

"Two-Trick Pony"

Many years ago, I wrote a fantasy novel. Many years later, it was published (yay!). That was the culmination of a lifelong dream. But (there is always a “but”), many years ago I also wrote a mystery novel. It has not been published. And herein lies the gist of this post: am I a box of Rice Chex attempting to become a box of Quaker Oats?

My publisher only publishes SF/Fantasy, and has the rights to my next work IF it is SF/F. It’s not. Who do I sell it to? (I don’t have an agent.) Will editors/publishers be put off because I’m switching horses midstream? Will they have no clue how to reach my “market”, such as it is, since the only readers I have so far are all expecting a fantasy novel sequel much the same as the first book?

Now, as a reader, I kind of understand this whole marketing/ branding notion. I have favorite authors who I won’t even jump within genres for – an example is Lindsey Davis, who writes a mystery series set in ancient Rome and who also writes standalone novels. I love the series. I won’t go anywhere near the standalones. Now, I do read quite widely in both fiction and nonfiction, yet when I find an author doing something I enjoy, all I want is for them to keep doing that one thing that I enjoy and not go off experimenting with something different. (Scott, do I hear you groaning down the hallway?)

So, is this more prevalent in mysteries, SF/F et cetera rather than in mainstream/literary fiction? Can the literary fiction folks get away with writing more than one type of novel, or do they, too, lose readers if they vary too much from what the audience has come to expect from them?

One solution often used in mystery and SF/F fiction is for an author to use a pseudonym when trying something new (cite: Megan Lindholm/Robin Hobb), though generally they need to be well-established already for this to fly with a publisher, and often the “secret identity” is not so terribly secret.

Your turn: comment on the above, or for an exercise, imagine you sold a horror novel and it did quite well, and your publisher wants another one, but your next book is a cozy mystery. The publisher will give you a nice advance for a horror novel, but won’t even consider the mystery. What do you do? You can be true to your art, though realistically, you also have bills to pay.

And thank you kindly, Literary Lab, for allowing me to play here today!

-Alexandra (“Alex”) MacKenzie, aka mizmak

Loose Endings

On Saturday evening, Mighty Reader and I saw a play: Cymbeline by William Shakespeare. It was a comedy, which means that it had not only the main dramatic arc but a half dozen other arcs going on. This is certainly an entertaining way to structure a play and it's also how Shakespeare managed to keep the beginnings and ends of his plays away from each other for three or four hours. The plots leapfrog past each other, faster and faster and more ridiculous and violent until the final scene where everything is resolved and all the mysteries and mistaken identities and misunderstandings are resolved.

And about that last scene.

What Shakespeare tends to do is gather together onstage every surviving character in the play and have these characters point at each other before witnesses and make accusations which are refuted; explanations flow nonstop for fifteen minutes or so while every character has one of those "But...I thought you...oh, I get it. Well done indeed. Kiss me, Kate and buy me a drink, Ernesto! All is forgiven!" moments.

About ten minutes from the end of one of these comedies (it doesn't really matter which*) I am always struck by the same realization: these last scenes really aren't necessary. Likely back in the 16th century, when people treated going to the theater as a more social event and drank, ate and chatted their way through the afternoon or evening, a big scene at the end that summarized all the subplots was needed because nobody had really been paying attention to the whole thing. Possibly people only really closely watched the first and fifth acts of these plays; I really don't know and that's not the point.

Here's the point, Mr. Shakespeare: Every character in your story doesn't need to know how everything works out for everybody as long as your reader knows. These final scenes are unnecessary and they slow down the action at the end because, frankly, we've all heard all of this explanation already. Sometimes twice already. So essentially the audience/reader is forced to sit through a summary of the action while all the characters get caught up.

I really hate these denouements, and what's worse is that they are not unique to Mr. Shakespeare's works. I have run across any number of novels that have anywhere from two to two-hundred pages of "wrapping up" and these final sections make me want to blind myself with a sharp object (I'm looking right at you, Mr. Tolkien with your "Scouring of the Shire" and other dull-as-death final chapters). Maybe this is purely a matter of taste, but I'm certain that a well-written ending without all the post-climax exposition would satisfy most readers. In my own books, I work my way to the climax and then I get out of the story as absolutely quickly as I possibly can. My opinion is that you do not have to explain what happens in any sort of detail, nor do you have to show all of the loose ends being tied up. What you need to do--all you need to do--is point the reader at the likely outcomes of the various dramatic arcs. Your readers are bright enough to figure the future histories of your characters out for themselves. Really they are.

*I except of course The Winter's Tale which ends with the stage direction "Exit, pursued by a bear."

Friday Filler! An Announcement and Some Babbling!

Blogger isn’t playing nice for me today, so this will be brief. Sort of an unfilled (or unfulfilled?) Filler Friday. Maybe.

Anyway, we are excited to announce that next week (Tuesday or Wednesday; come back and see!) we’ll have a fabulous Guest Post written by author Alexandra MacKenzie, whose book “Immortal Quest: The Trouble With Mages” has been out for a couple of months and I don’t know why you haven’t bought a copy already. Yes, a Guest Post! It’s fab (I’ve already read it so I know).

Also, Michelle has been writing an excellent series of posts on her personal blog about small publishers, and you should go check it out if you haven’t been reading along. Go! Read!

Also, I have finally revised my way into the third act of my WIP Cocke & Bull and I must say, revisions are where the writing actually happens, and actual writing is actually hard and this week has been exhausting. I can’t wait for the weekend. Tomorrow evening Mighty Reader and I are going to a play (Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline” which isn’t one of his best works, but it hardly ever gets staged so why would we miss it?) and this weekend—aside from taking down Christmas lights at long last—I plan to finish one of the many many books I’m currently reading. I don’t know which one yet.

Hey, this has been all about me except for those short passages that have not. So let’s have something about you: Which dead author would you bring back to life if you could, and why? I would pick Proust, because a year or so ago when Mighty Reader finished volume seven of “Remembrances of Things Past,” she began to suffer an incurable and inconsolable malaise at the realization that there was no more Proust in all the world to be read. I don’t like to see Mighty Reader suffering from a malaise, so I’d chain Marcel to his desk in that cork-lined room of his and get him to write a couple more volumes. I might also bring back Laurence Sterne so he could finish “Tristram Shandy.” You?

Should You Protect Your Bubble?

I've been thinking a lot about bubbles, lately. Protective bubbles. I recently read a post about book reviews and whether or not an author should read them once their book is out. This post doesn't have to do with only published authors, however. I want to talk to everyone today about the bubbles you write in. Do you write in a bubble?

Davin and I have talked about how we both need a bubble in which we write. When I'm working on a rough draft, I'm pretty fragile in the emotion department. I don't want to be poked at by people criticizing my work - even if it's work that's already published. Well, especially if it's work that's already published because, you know, I can't really go and change any of that stuff. It's kind of permanently out there. When I put Cinders out there last year I read EVERY SINGLE REVIEW I could get my hands on. It was like this hunger I couldn't quell. I wanted the validation that my work was good enough since I had self-published it and didn't have the validation of a publisher. I've made it clear that when my novel, Monarch, comes out I won't be reading the reviews unless my publisher sends them to me or they are part of my blog tour or from a friend or family member. That might be all of them at first...but, my point is that I learned from from my Cinders experience that once you read a certain amount of reviews, you pretty much know what everyone else is going to say. You start to see a pattern, and there doesn't seem to be much reason to keep reading the reviews if you know the bad ones are going to start nagging on you. Read 50 5-star reviews and 1 1-star review and the only one you'll remember or care about is that 1-star. I'd rather stay away from that, personally.

For those who aren't published yet, maybe it's not reviews that you wish to avoid - but reader feedback on other work you've put out there on your blog, or beta readers giving you advice, or even blog posts you read every day which might make you start doubting your ability. You might read a post about some rule you're breaking, and lo and behold, you can't think about anything else as you write your draft. All of a sudden you are stunted and your creative energy withers. That happens to me all the time.

So what's best? Do you think you need a bubble where you can write your drafts? I know it's good to be aware of what others say out there, and it's wonderful to grow from feedback, but I think there is a time and a place for those things.

Does Alliteration Ever Help?

Alliteration is a technique that has always been a mystery to me. It's the term used to describe phrases or sentences that repeat particular sounds, mainly in the first syllables of words, such as "The cats crashed on the couch."

We're probably all familiar with this, but I wonder if anyone has ever used it effectively. The technique originated in poetry, which may be cited as the justification for its existence, but I see it often enough in fiction writing. From my experience it gets just as many compliments (I like the alliteration here!) as it does criticisms (You have some awkward alliteration here.)

I have used it on occasion myself in places where I thought it was helpful. For example, if I had a sentence like "Alfred was furious." I might revise it to "Alfred was angry." because to me it pairs the subject of the sentence with his emotion a little more powerfully. Even that explanation feels a little forced to me, though. Sometimes I begin to wonder if the only reason writers use alliteration is just to prove that they know what it is.

Do you use alliteration? When have you found it to be the most effective?

What I Learned at the Picasso Exhibit

Last Friday, Mighty Reader and I spent a couple of hours at the Seattle Art Museum's special Picasso exhibit, 150 (I think) pieces on loan from the Picasso Museum in Paris, dating from 1901 (I think) to maybe 1970. I could look all of these facts up for you, but none of them is really that important. What really matters is that a large cross-section, a longitudinal study if you will, of Pablo Picasso's works were gathered together and displayed more-or-less in chronological order.

If you have a chance to go to an art museum, you really should. Especially if you can look at works of art you only know from books (or worse, from the internets), because seeing them in real life can really change the way you perceive the works. I can't count the number of times I've been at a museum and run into a painting or drawing I know and in real life it's been either much larger or much smaller than I thought it was. Really, size matters in this regard.

Many of the Picasso drawings I knew, for example, turn out to be not much larger than postcards, and so the level of detail seems to be compressed and somehow much greater when you see how tiny the pieces really are. And some of the paintings were very small as well, and the effect is radically different when the three women bathing are all seven inches tall when you thought they'd be three or four feet tall.

But none of that's really what I learned; I already knew those things and had a fabulous reminder last year when there was an Impressionism exhibit and I walked into a room to find myself face to face with a Titian that was six feet tall and ten feet wide and the figures were all literally larger-than-life. That was very cool. But as I say, all of this is not the point.

No, here's the thing. Picasso went through a lot of phases with his art. In the beginning he was more or less a realist, though clearly influenced by Impressionism. His "blue" period was pretty much straight portraiture and you can see Rembrandt, for instance, influencing the paintings. Then around the turn of the century Picasso started to break down the three dimensions and invent Cubism and that developed over the next several decades, but it was alongside a sort of high-graphic illustrative style that bordered on cartoon but owed a clear debt to the Renaissance artists with their interest in movement and weight of solid bodies and the animation of living things. A lot of Pablo's later stuff was just weird; I could see what he was doing but it didn't send me at all.

Mostly, I came away thinking that this was a guy who was always experimenting and looking and pushing at the forms and coming up with new solutions to problems of space and figural representation and color (though not so much as time went on with the color, I don't think) and foreground/background and visual planes and all of that. Immense variety in his output. And yet, through it all, there is Picasso in all of the work. When you see it gathered together it becomes clear what forces connect the weird bicycle seat/handlebar "bull's head" with the big bronze goat (cool!) and the stick figure "bather" sculptures and the "Guernica" painting and the "violin" sheetmetal sculpture and the cubist portraits of Dora and the sketches and paintings of children and the drawings of churches and villages and the realist portraits. You see Picasso's hand in all of it no matter the style or the medium, in a career that spanned 70 or whatever years.

Pablo Picasso (and is it just me who always automatically hears the Burning Sensations' version of Jonathan Richman's "Pablo Picasso" whenever the artist is mentioned?) didn't have a vision, a unifying theme to his art, not if you ask me. But he had a lot of ideas and he pursued them and he never tried to do anything except in a way that pleased him, at least from what I could see. I have no idea if there were market forces at work, controlling his output, but really if you were there in the galleries with the paintings and drawings and sculptures you'd not think it possible that Pablo created anything with the audience in mind. Some of his ideas or visions or whathaveyou were just off-putting (his images of couples having sex were just awful and there was a guy, I kept thinking, who had some serious issues with women and men), but they were still individualistic and brave and seriously intentioned, I think.

I don't care what you think of Picasso's art in an aesthetic sense; this guy was the real deal and showed no fear when he made art. I should look for comments about Picasso from Ezra Pound, because Pound once claimed that "No art ever grew by looking into the eyes of the public" and I believe his claim, and I'm willing to bet that Pound would have supported Picasso even if he didn't particularly like the art.

When I was looking at the Picasso exhibit I thought about people like Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, who were also breaking down the perceptions of their art in the early 20th century (if "Malloy" wasn't influenced by "Ulysses," I'll eat my hat), and then I thought about people like Iris Murdoch and Joyce Carol Oates who also pushed against the bastion of literature to make room for their own particular visions of narrative, and I thought about how brave it is to strike out on one's own and slip into the forest of Unknown to see what's in there, to clear a field and build our own houses and sow what seeds we have newly imagined.

So that's what--to bring this long and rambling post to a conclusion--I learned at the Picasso Exhibit: to be an artist is to be brave. To be an artist is to have an idea or two and to pursue those ideas and to not be frightened by the possibility that people will think you're an idiot. God knows that Picasso, Joyce, Beckett, Murdoch, Oates, Burroughs, Coatzee, Eliot, Lawrence, Naipul, Woolf, Faulkner, Porter, Stein, et alia have all been subject to ridicule but produced what they produced despite the criticism. So be brave, that's all. Look inside for your inspiration, not at the bookshelves. Be brave and mighty enough to be yourself. That's what I learned from Pablo Picasso.

Also! We ran into Ben Thompson, author of the fabulous epic nonfiction book Badass. Ben was at the museum with his lovely wife. He still hasn't signed my copy of Badass. I try not to be bitter.

Do I really need a title on a Monday?

I spent part of my weekend listening to a bunch of Kazuo Ishiguro lectures on YouTube. The author discussed his book, Never Let Me Go, and a collection of his short stories called Nocturnes.

As I was doing this, a part of me was getting antsy to actually write instead of listening to another writer. (I'm working on Cyberlama!) At the same time, I continued to listen with the hope that I might gain some insight into how this author writes what he does.

In the end, I came to the conclusion that I often seem to come to after listening to other authors or reading about other authors. I didn't learn much at all, and yet I found it oddly satisfying.

So, I wonder: What do we get, if anything, out of listening to other writers? Do you read writer biographies or diaries or listen to writer lectures?

Friday Filler! History of a Sentence

First draft of sentence:

"Back in Joppa," Hope whispered, "I saw that look."

and then

"Back in Joppa," Hope whispered, "I saw that look." A snake, a rabid dog, a madman.

and then I

"I saw that look back in Joppa," Hope whispered., "I saw that look." A snake, a rabid dog, a madman.

but

"I saw that look back in Joppa," Hope whispered. The unfeeling eye of a snake, a rabid dog, a madman.

however

"I saw that look back in Joppa," Hope whispered. The unfeeling eye pitiless gaze of a snake, a rabid dog, a madman.

and let's just

"I saw that look back in Joppa," Hope whispered. The pitiless gaze of a snake, a rabid feral dog, a madman.

while we're at it

"I saw that look back in Joppa," Hope whispered. The pitiless gaze of a feral dog, a snake, a feral dog, a madman.

which takes us from our original

"Back in Joppa," Hope whispered, "I saw that look."

to

"I saw that look back in Joppa," Hope whispered. The pitiless gaze of a feral dog, a snake, a madman.

and I think that's much better.

Anyway, happy Friday one and all. Tonight Mighty Reader and I are going to go see the fabulous Picasso exhibit at the SAM (150 works of art shipped all the way from the Paris Picasso Museum just for us)! I hope to make it downtown in time for a cocktail before the viewing. I have no idea what we'll have for dinner afterwards, only that dinner will be had at a very late hour indeed. Elevenish, likely. Pagliacci's might be getting some of my money.

You? Fabulous plans for Friday night?

Getting Defensive Over Your Work Isn't Always Bad

I've been revising my work. I haven't written anything "new" in weeks, and I've noticed my brain switching from one kind of thinking to another. I like this switch because it's a break from drafting. As I've said before, drafting exhausts me. On the other hand, revising, for me, always means I'm dealing with some sort of feedback from others, and feedback always means shifting into defensive mode. I'm sure my betas would tell you I don't actually get defensive with them, but I do get defensive in my head. This can occur even without feedback. That familiar battle:

Oh my gosh, this book sucks. Everything I've ever written sucks. No, it doesn't suck! Have a little self-respect, would you?

How did I miss these plot holes! I'm so stupid. You are not stupid. If you say that one more time I'll break your arm. And both your legs.

I can't possibly revise this beast one more time. It's good enough now. No it's not. No work is ever done until you turn the final edits into your editor. You know this. Duh.

So the battle rages on and I revise page after page after page. This can, sadly, go on for years. Defensive mode can be a comfortable battle, one in which I feel empty without its presence. Being always happy with my work is boring. Being too confident is egotistical. I've got to keep pushing myself down to be a real writer. Right?

Tell Yourself You Suck
As much as I think it's wrong to dog on your work all the time, I do think it's a necessary step to grow. No completely 100% confident person has always been completely 100% confident. Allow the doubt to creep in. Wage a war. Let yourself land into a deep dark pit of doubt and despair and see the light up above.

And Then Get Out Of There
Yep, climb out. Fight your way out. Grow. Learn. And don't beat yourself up for beating yourself up.

Nick made it clear in the comments that there's a difference between beating ourselves up and beating up our work. I agree. What I'm mostly talking about here is being critical of your own work. Mostly, I'm saying give yourself permission to suck and get upset about it. A lot of what I write is never seen by any alpha or beta reader. A lot of it gets deleted into the abyss because I'm learning faster how to recognize what sucks. Still, it's the recognition that counts, and that almost always includes waging a little battle. Celebrate the fight. Let it happen, and march on to victory where there will likely be another battle in a few days. Opposition is, after all, how we grow, and I suppose if you keep losing the battles you probably aren't cut out to be a writer. I'm convinced it's a violent career, no matter what anyone else says.

Contagious Words

I've been aware and annoyed lately by the seemingly contagious word choices used by the general public. It seems like some words get picked up and associated with certain stories, and that association somehow can't be disrupted. Did you hear about the maverick politician? Or the raunchy video made by the Navy captain? As accurate as these words may or may not be, why can't people mix it up a little?

A-choo!

I think maybe there's a sort of shorthand labeling at play here. Reporters perhaps use the same words over and over and over again so that listeners can immediately get in tune with what story is being discussed. But, I wonder if this repeated word usage only serves to take actual meanings away from the words that represent them. Or worse yet, this repeated word usage may be making fact out of opinion.

I think it's one thing to choose a word to describe a situation the first time. It would probably serve me well to describe my own writing as spellbinding or transformative. But, if those words spread through other voices lacking imagination or their own ability to assess my writing for themselves, then suddenly the world would seem to agree with my chosen self-compliments. This wouldn't make them true, but it could give the impression that the words were true, especially by people not willing to look at my writing for themselves.

On a sort-of related topic, did y'all hear that a new version of Huckleberry Finn is being published without the n-word in it? Rather than filing this under censorship, some scholars are claiming that this will allow the book to be read by a younger audience who is currently being prohibited. There's some argument (although I don't quite see the logic in it myself) that replacing the word with "slave" somehow helps to express Samuel Clemens' original intent in contemporary times. My initial reaction was that this is all wrong, but I'm willing to be open-minded temporarily to see if any argument can change my opinion.

What say you?

How Long Does It Take?

I am currently revising the first draft of my novel Cocke & Bull. I finished writing this first draft about ten months ago and until mid-December 2010 I ignored it to work on other projects. I would like to get through revisions pretty quickly so that I can turn to yet another project, because I dream of a future in which I produce a publication-ready novel about once a year.

That might be impossible, though. I've been trying to figure out how long I'll need to write a book, and of course the answer is going to be that "it depends on the book."

My first novel, which we'll call The Unpublishable Mess, took about five years to write. That was just a first draft. My next novel, Killing Hamlet, took about three years to get from "raw idea" to "on submission." I wrote the first draft of Cocke & Bull in about five months and I'd like to think that I can get it properly rewritten and ready for submission in fewer than seven months, which means that--were I not interrupted by other projects--it is theoretically possible for me to write and revise a novel in a year.

Which idea pleases the organized Virgo part of my mind, because the timeline is neat and tidy and possibly could lead to a dependable income stream at some future point in time. But the idea troubles the disorganized Artist part of my mind, especially when I consider that many of my favorite authors take years to write a book, and that many of my favorite books took forever to write. I wonder, you know, if I'm not being careful enough with my stories, if I'm not considering them long enough, not putting enough work into them, not bringing the goods, as it were.

The thing is, I write pretty quickly. Either I have an idea for a novel that I can write or I don't; if I do, I write it down and if I don't, I go watch BTVS on DVD or whatever until I think up a different book to write. While I am certainly in a white-hot fever during the actual writing, I don't feel like I'm rushing the work. It takes as long as it takes, but no longer. I have friends who have labored for years over novels, while over lunch today I wrote a new scene to insert into my WIP, spending no more than 15 minutes on it. Maybe I'll rewrite the scene, and maybe I won't; it feels pretty solid to me.

So where I'm going with all of this is to ask you, Mighty Writers, how long you spend on your novels. I'm looking to see what sort of data point spread there is so I can plot my own progress versus the statistical mean. Or something. Anyway, how long does it take you to write/revise a book? If you've been published (Alex), that's an additional helpful bit of info.

Have you ever...

...liked a book with a bad plot?

...liked a book with boring characters?

...liked a book with mediocre prose?

My answer is yes to all three questions. Kazuo Ishiguro's book Never Let Me Go, although it had a great premise, didn't have an interesting plot to me. One of my favorite writers, Jhumpa Lahiri, hardly ever has a character that interests me. And, I enjoyed Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, although I didn't much care for the prose.

For me, this is a reminder that my job as a writer isn't necessarily to get everything right. Rather, my job is to create a work that has something that excites readers and engages them.

We all have our strengths, and so often I am reminded that writing something successful means showcasing those strengths rather than working to improve our weaknesses.

As we ring in the new year, what are your strengths as a writer?