Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween, kids! Tell me, quickly: what's the scariest short story you know?

I'm thinking something by Lovecraft or Poe, but maybe those are more creepily atmospheric than actually scary (though any mention of the Mad Arab makes my skin tingle). Some of the tales in Kate Bernheimer's collection My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me are good and creepy, but not really horrifying, if you know what I mean. Don't try to push any King on me, either; he never really scared me.

Friday Filler! Mountains and Manuscripts!

Last night Mighty Reader and I went to see Ed Viesturs read from his new book and talk about his experiences climbing the 14 highest mountains on Earth. It was pretty swell. Mighty Reader knows a lot about expedition climbing and the history of mountaineering, if you're wondering why we went. Anyway, Viesturs gave an interesting and engaging talk, showed lots of photos and told the story of his three attempts (and eventual success) to climb Annapurna, which he'd dreamed of climbing since he was a boy in Illinois. I will say that my favorite thing about Viesturs is that on his website he calls himself a "high altitude adventurer." I'm putting that on my business cards, I am. See if I don't. Though perhaps mine will say "Low altitude adventurer."

What's going on in my writing life right now is that I'm waiting to hear back from my agent about the manuscript I sent her a few days ago. I admit to some impatient fidgeting. I'm also officially procrastinating on the novel I'm allegedly currently writing. Possibly I've decided to take a break because I know the new one is going to be really hard to write and I just don't feel up to that level of concentrated effort just now. It's dark and cold and I'm sleepy all the time and have a strong urge to hibernate until springtime. Or to wrap myself in a blanket, drink cocoa and watch BTVS on DVD until springtime. In any case, a strong urge not to dive into another long writing project just now. Though I continue to think about the novel and I keep making notes and doing research reading. So who knows what I'm really doing?

What are you really doing?

Happy Friday!

Horton Hears A How

This is the first time this week I've had a chance to post, thanks in part to Michelle and Scott who have had some things to say this week. But I like to wish everyone a Happy Monday, and I haven't done that yet, so Happy Monday, everyone! It's also my brother's birthday today, so happy birthday to him! He's a great brother and I love him. He's one hundred and eleventy seven.

Scott talked about the focal points that he has been concentrating on in his writing and in my comment on Monday's blog post I talked about how my focus lately has been on surprising the reader. Well, that night, the real Monday night, not the faux Monday I'm pretending today is, I was reading a book about writing, and it happened to be a section on surprises, so I thought it was rather appropriate. Here are some quotes from John R. Trimble's Writing with Style:

"There is no deodorant like success," writes Elizabeth Taylor. We read that and stop in our tracks, smiling with amusement, perhaps even chuckling aloud. What captivates us? The answer is clear: the perfect freshness and whimsical aptness of the image.

Each time we write we have opportunities to delight our reader with arresting phrases like that one....Each of these authors instinctively understands one of the chief secrets of artful writing: you have to keep the reader in a state of near-perpetual surprise. Not suspense, but surprise....[Skilled writers are] constantly feeding our appetite for novelty, be it with a fresh idea, a fresh phrase, or a fresh image....I think you might find it instructive to listen to a few professionals talk about their art. The agreement among them is remarkable. Here, first, is master storyteller Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss):

We throw in as many fresh words as we can get away with. Simple, short sentences don't always work. You have to do tricks with pacing, alternate long sentences with short, to keep it alive and vital. Virtually every page is a cliff-hanger--you've got to force them to turn it.

Next, science fiction writer Ray Bradbury:

Creativity is continual surprise.

There's more to this, and I really didn't do Trimble's writing justice with my ellipses, but I hope you get the point.

The idea of surprising the reader like this is really intriguing me because I discovered the technique by accident. I was in Paris at the time, and I was doing a lot of experimental writing--experimental for me anyway. I wrote this story called "Red Man, Blue Man," and only later did I realize that the thing that propelled that story forward was me constantly trying to surprise the reader. As I see that story, every section is my attempt to keep the reader guessing about what the heck will happen next, but in the context of this weird premise that I said up. So, I have lines like:

The furniture also seemed to have grown accustomed to the men, because their painted thighs--bare except for the bands that kept their phallocrypts in place--no longer left colored smudges on the plush leather chairs.

In that sentence I tried to surprise the reader by starting from the POV of the furniture, by having the word "phallocrypts" casually tucked in there, by not explaining what phallocrypts are, and by going back to a fairly boring details with the plush leather chairs. The next paragraph gets intentionally mundane:

That year, March was a particularly busy month. Municipal Services claimed six city blocks for the construction of a water sanitation plant.

I went that direction to sort of force reality back into the story after the oddness of the first paragraph. Again, I was trying to keep my readers surprised. Most of that story works like that. It's odd and then mundane, odd and then mundane, and I think that's the only thing that makes that story hold together. It's strange to me because, in one sense, it doesn't feel as heartfelt as other stories in my collection feel. (Some of the other ones are deeply personal and that makes me like them in a different way.) At the same time, of all the stories in the collection, I've probably had more people tell me that this one is their favorite. And I have a feeling it's because they were surprised by it. Maybe I'm wrong.

I'm using a similar approach with Cyberlama now and I'm really having a good time with it. I get to use a lot of the mundane details of working in a science lab and throw them together with the Dalai Lama and these people who have lived for a few hundred years. It's a perfect space for me to get odd and then normal and then odd and then normal. That's sort of how I am.

Like what Scott and Michelle have been talking about, this idea of surprise is just what I happen to be fixated on at the moment. The fact that Dr. Seuss agrees with me is pretty cool, though, I must say.

And, even though today is Monday, tomorrow can still be Friday. You're welcome.

Why Do You Talk About Writing?

Scott's post yesterday got me thinking about what we talk about as writers, and why. I then started thinking about other aspects of my life and what I talk about with people. Do we as humans feel a certain need to connect to others with our same interests? Would writing a novel and never sharing it be a completely different experience internally than writing the novel, talking about the novel all the time, and then sharing it?

Perhaps these are silly questions, but I like to ask them anyway. Mostly, I see a need within people to gain approval for what they do and how they do it, and what's interesting about this is that while I see this more and more in others' behavior, I see that need diminishing within myself. Thank heavens.

I've grown up needing validation for everything.

Everything.

It's exhausting.

So I've been on this sort of streak to gain more balance and approval within myself rather than seeking it elsewhere. A blog is an interesting thing because we put our thoughts out there and then wait for comments to come in. We want to know we are being heard - or at least I think most of us do. Some people I know just blog without a care whether anyone reads it or not. I have one of those blogs. It's called my journal and nobody can read it but me. I don't seem to write in it very often, and I think that might say something about me that I don't want to reflect too deeply upon at the moment because it probably contradicts everything I'm striving for right now.

So I'm just throwing out some thoughts today about why we talk about what we do and what we expect in return. I know that as I get more books published, the less interested I am in reading the reviews. It's not that I don't care about people caring enough about my work to write a review (even if they hated the book); it's that I'm getting to a place where my writing has less to do with other people and more about refining a craft that's becoming more and more private by the day. That's where I've always striven to be, but getting into the publishing world has really twisted me around and upside down.

So why do you talk about writing? I'm interested to know! Do you talk about it to connect? Compare? Just get it out there? Because people ask and you feel they want to know?

What I'm Not Telling You

There are times when I'm so excited about writing that I can barely contain myself. Now is one of them. I fidget, I am distracted at the office, real life is a strange thing standing between me and the Important Work, et cetera. I can feel my powers as a writer growing, my awareness of new technique growing larger and I can see that my future work will be far superior to the stuff I've already written and so I want to just get on with it and write that superior work. I also--possibly because writers are essentially people who want to communicate--have a strong urge to tell everyone I know about how and why I'm so excited about writing. And then, you know, I don't say anything.

The main reason I keep mum despite my excitement is that I think the breakthroughs I'm having are too personal, too idiosyncratic, to make any sense or have any use to anyone else. Such, frankly, is increasingly the case these days whenever I feel the urge to talk about writing, which results in a weird state where the better I become as a writer, the less I find I can talk meaningfully about it.

As an example, I'll tell you about a post I had planned. One of my long-term goals is to find a way to create prose that's not only very tightly focused but is also relaxed and expansive. It will mean precisely what it says and will speak with great specificity and be full of vivid and memorable images. But at the same time it will imply a large and complete world spinning slowly on its axis and will be welcoming and comfortable for the reader. I've worked on the first half of this--the focus and the specificity and vividness--for several years now and what I've been doing has mostly been cutting extraneous stuff from my novels to leave only the essentials. My prose became pretty lean; even at its most ornate it was very deliberate writing, pointing the reader directly at what I wanted her to see and think about. You could say that I'd fallen solidly into the camp of American Modernists like Hemingway. And I like Hemingway, so that was fine for a while.

The thing is, though, after a while I began to feel that this sort of prose--which is pretty widespread especially among American writers--has a brittle kind of feel to it, a utilitarian way of presenting the world that seems sometimes to leave out most of the actual world. The actual world is vague and fuzzy and mostly only half-observed, and it constantly intrudes in the strangest ways with our plans. A tightly-woven Modernist novel doesn't allow for the hugeness and richness of the real world, and that huge richness is something I want in my books. In the real world, if you are at Grand Central Station, surrounded by pushing, anonymous crowds of people all wrapped up in their own plotlines, you can still decide to stand still and look around and see all of it, observe the color of the brunette's hat, the peeling poster on the lamp post visible through the door, the smells of coffee and less nice things, the way the light filters down from above and the fact that there is a family of pigeons roosting in a weird plaster alcove over the information desk or whatever. Even in the most busy of places, there is--if you want it--an intellectual and imaginative elbow room, an entire expansive world all around you. I wanted some of that in my stories. I didn't know how to do it, though.

I think the main barrier to achieving this expansiveness was that I was working hard on other things. I was working on character, mostly, and the varying emotional distances available through the omniscient point of view. So I was busy for a while. Now that I've learned a few lessons in character and POV, I can look around and see what else needs my attention, like prose density and setting and how density of image relates to pacing within scene. I could always do brief conversations like this, where what's said has multiple meanings and the subtext is clear to the reader:

"I'm asking you about weather but it actually means 'do you like me?'" she asked.

"I say 'the weather is beautiful' but I really mean 'you have gorgeous eyes,'" he said.

"I'll mention that there's a cloud in the shape of a swan," she said, "But it's really a way I have of expressing longing."

And so on. Obvs I won't have them saying what the meanings of their speeches are like this (though I have a story idea about people who know they're fictional characters in a story and that sort of dialogue intrigues me with its possibilities).

Anyway, for a long time I've let the dialogue do all the work but lately I've come to feel that this sort of free-floating Hemingwegian dialogue is too disconnected from the world, and I want to bring the world more into the story. So I'm lingering longer within conversations, adding in action and description. He'll see a flash of reflected light on the distant highway or whatever. I'm trying not to use much of the sort of personal actions that are so common in dialogue beats (he'll rub his cheekbone, she'll look down and find a smudge of dirt on her left shoe and rub it off on her right calf, etc.); I'm trying to enlarge the reader's attention around the central action, to see that the action is part of the larger world. So I don't just say "a light flashed on the distant highway," I have to make it visible to one of the characters. The wide world has to be directly tied to the story action. And so on.

Anyway, things like this are Major Breakthroughs for me but they seem so very minor and insignificant when I attempt to express my fascination and I can't quite believe that anyone else would be as excited as I am to think about them. So it's that sort of stuff I'm not telling you.

Separated, But Not

I'm not sure if anyone will be able to relate to this post, but here it is. My collection, Bonded, is unique for me in the fact that it's three novellas that could easily stand alone, but will be published together. Because of this (and at the request of my publisher for when I submit the final copy to my editor), I recently dumped all three stories into one document. I feel like these books have to connect in more ways than before. They'll be read together, compared to each other, etc. They all take place in the same world although only a few characters cross over the stories and time periods - and only minor ones, at that.

If you've ever read Flannery O'Connor, you might understand how stories can interweave without actually being connected in plot or characters. Although I haven't read any O'Connor for years (I really, really need to pick her up again), I remember she did this connecting so well in her stories and novels that I feel like there's some secret town somewhere with all her characters living together. Way cool.

I want a similar feel for the three novellas in Bonded, but if they are ever published separately, I absolutely want them to stand alone. They are fairy-tale themed, and that connects them. Each of the main characters falls in love with an elf, and that connects them. They each explore vastly different themes, but do contain a few similar layers, and that might connect them. I guess my biggest frustration as I finish the third and last novella is how much do I really want to tie these stories together? How much do I want to go back and add little pieces that connect more dots? Or should I allow them to stand more freely as I originally wrote them?

It's not that I am worried so much about what my readers will want, but what will eventually satisfy my complete vision. The problem is that I don't know exactly what that complete vision is. Some writers seem to know concretely what they want before they even start. Me - I let things grow organically. I've reach a point, however, where I have to make some solid decisions with this book/stories/novellas, whatever this thing is. And, quite frankly, I'm stuck. I've been stuck on this decision for months. I've procrastinated by blaming this block on releasing my other book and having too many other things going on, but those are lame excuses. It all really just boils down to the fact that I can't decide what to do, and I need to decide soon.

I suppose the answer lies in the fact that if I'm a good enough writer, I will connect these stories in some brilliant way outside of what I've already done, but they will also remain completely separate. I wish I knew what I was doing...

Friday Filler! Late in the Day and Mostly Rubbish

This is truly a rubbish post, but it's what I got and Malasarn did not step up and fill in for filler this time.

I'm working on a new novel and I got stuck with chapter four, not having any real energy to work on it. It occurred to me that I was just showing things happen around my protagonist, that my protagonist wasn't emotionally engaged in any of the action. She was mostly just watching other people, and even though those other people were doing interesting things, my protagonist may as well have been asleep during the action. Certainly I was, and certainly my reader would've been. So I asked myself "What does any of this have to do with my protagonist?" And then I sat and made some notes about how everything that happened in the three scenes that make up Chapter 4 reveal my protagonist's character and bits of her history, and now the chapter has come alive and I want to finish writing it. Win! Anyway, this is a gentle reminder that if your main characters are not active, then your story is not active either. If the action doesn't matter to your main character, the action doesn't matter at all.

Also...there was something else, really there was. I can't think of it now. It was important, too. Damn. Damn oh damn, all gone. Was it "Go Cardinals!" No, though I hope they win.

There really was a second item I wanted to post about, but it's well and truly gone now. Huh. That's what happens when you reach my age, kids. Be warned.

Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes' short novel Sense of an Ending has won the 2011 Man Booker Prize. Has anyone read this? Does anyone plan to? The Man Booker has not been good to me lately (with its emphasis on "readability" rather than "high quality" and that's why there's a competing prize now), and I've been hitting about 50% with the Pulitzers (I have still not read A Visit From the Goon Squad though Yat-Yee Chong says it's fine and who am I to argue with Ms Chong so I have to pick up a copy soon).

But, this novel looks interesting in a postmodern unreliable narrator sort of way and Mighty Reader plans to read it so there it will be, sitting innocently in my house, right?

For readers of genre fiction, I wonder: do prize-winning books get your attention much? Does "Edgar Winner" or "Hugo Winner" or whatever make you pause and push you toward parting with some hard-earned cash?

My Rules for Withholding Information

One of the self-imposed rules I set for myself some time ago was that I wouldn't use the withholding of information to build tension. In other words, I wouldn't end a scene like this:

Burgundee Le Blanc waited in the dark chamber as Piotr's footsteps approached. Piotr had been drinking all night, and now he seemed to be stumbling down the hall, occasionally leaning against the walls for support. When he got to his door, Burgundee could see his shadow obscuring the light that streamed in through the narrow crack near his feet. He fumbled with his keys before turning the lock and entering. Burgundee cocked her pistol and aimed.

According to my rule, if I wrote a scene like this, the next sentence would have to describe whether or not Burgundee hit or miss her target.

My selection of the rule--and really the selection of any rule--was sort of arbitrary. For me, the technique felt too manipulative. Whenever someone did it to me I tended to get angry and give up on the story. (Do you hear that season finale directors?!?!) I guess I didn't like it because it felt like a way-too-effective technique that required way-too-little creativity.

But, to some extent, I have changed my mind.

To some extent.

As I write lately, more and more, I find myself withholding information because revealing that information later seems more effective. It has more emotional power behind it. Some reveals work better if I take more time to set them up and really show why they are so meaningful. I think in some ways this is related to earning my emotions, maybe. Having a scene with someone crying doesn't usually have much emotion involved unless you have already taken the reader through the journey to show all the steps that led the person to cry.

So, if I was writing the scene about Burgundee and Piotr now, it might go something like this:

Burgundee Le Blanc waited in the dark chamber as Piotr's footsteps approached. Piotr had been drinking all night, and now he seemed to be stumbling down the hall, occasionally leaning against the walls for support. When he got to his door, Burgundee could see his shadow obscuring the light that streamed in through the narrow crack near his feet. He fumbled with his keys before turning the lock and entering. Burgundee cocked her pistol and aimed. She had never shot a gun before, but she felt this opportunity was worth the risk. After all, what was the worst that could happen? She could miss, and Piotr could wrestle the gun away from her--he had already overpowered her once the night before. Maybe he would even kill her and ensure that she never tell anybody about him coming into her room and fondling her bedroom slippers. Would death be so bad after what he had done? And there was the alternative. She could miss and get caught and sent to a lifetime of prison, probably sharing the same tiny cell with her evil sister Piminy. She imagined the look on Piminy's face, finally getting the satisfaction of knowing that Burgundee was just as corrupt as she was. Piotr flipped on the light. Burgundee pulled the trigger. The bullet went into his stomach and he doubled over in pain.

So, I could withhold the information if I thought I could use the extra time to give more meaningful information. I try to make up for it by not using the technique in a "cliffhanger" sense, and hopefully the way I construct such a scene doesn't keep a reader from wanting to skip the sentences between Burgundee aiming and Burgundy firing. Maybe that's what I'm getting caught up on. I don't ever want to use filler (either pointless information or blank space) to create tension because readers will probably grow impatient due to the junk I'm feeding them. Instead, if I withhold information I want it to be because it helps the reader by getting them set up to better understand the situation and feel the power of what's happening.

Anyway, I do find this to be a different way of working. Often, lately, I'm breaking up scenes and trying to put good material in between so that the reader gets more emotion when the scene's true end finally does occur. And I try to do it in a way that doesn't feel like I'm dangling any sort of carrot. I don't necessarily want the reader to feel the tension as a result of my withholding. The tension should come in other ways.



In other news, I finally solved a problem I've been having in Chapter 3 of Cyberlama. In my revisions, I kept skipping over this section because it was so very boring, and I didn't know what to do about it. But this week, I took the two women involved out of the tea room where the scene used to take place and moved them to the National Aquarium of Baltimore. Then, instead of having them part ways, I have one woman invite the other woman to her apartment where they both kind of get naked. Go me!

Sports Cars, Magickal Whatsises and Cetera

Is it just me, or does anyone else think Cormac McCarthy's novella The Road bears striking similarities to Ernest Hemingway's novella The Old Man and the Sea? Both of them are basically the myth of Sisyphus, though McCarthy tacked on something like a happy ending (to which I cry foul and cowardice, by the way but whatevers).

My point, possibly, is that theme is eternal, or at least some themes are. How many takes on "Romeo and Juliet" (itself a retread of much older material) or the theme people will destroy themselves and their whole world for love have there been? How many more are to come? The theme never dies.

Over on my blog yesterday I was musing about the purposes behind the actions of characters, the hidden motivations. Lately I've been trying to look more deeply into story structure, to see what forces lie far beneath the surface. I have an image of a narrative--what you'd call a novel--as something like the surface of the earth, but it's just a skin stretched over a more primal, possibly molten and unstable core. I want to look at the core, at the center of the earth.

I'm starting small, or trying to, by looking at my characters this way. As I told Anne Gallagher on my blog, a protagonist has to want something, but that something isn't necessarily the swag they're diving for in the story. That swag likely represents something deeper, something never seen by anyone and possibly something within the protagonist that the protagonist never thinks about, at least not directly.

This is not necessarily support for the "psychological novel" where the character's actions in present day are to be explained by some event from their past (some trauma they haven't come to grips with or whatever), but I do think that stories--great stories--tend to be "about" people who are acting to defend their basic humanity in one way or another. Possibly all great stories are in the end the myth of Sisyphus, but in some of the stories the stone finally remains at the top of the hill and Sisyphus builds a house in its shade.

Where am I going with all of this? I don't know. I am rambling on a Tuesday morning. I don't necessarily belief that "there are only X many plots" or that every well-formed story is a Campbellian Transformative Journey of the Hero. What I do believe, at least this week, is that surface elements are the least important part of a story. To my fellow writers I suggest that when you're looking at your character and asking her what she wants, don't listen to her first answer. If she says "a sports car," ask her "why." Keep asking. Don't listen to her facile lies. It might also be instructive to ask yourself, dear writer, why you think your character wants a sports car. What is it about you that makes you think a sports car/money/the magickal whatsis is desirable? Why? No, really. Why? Be creative. Don't accept any answer you've read in another book or seen on TV.

Variations on a Theme Reminder

Happy Monday, everyone!

Don't forget about our Variations on a Theme Contest!

The deadline is December 31, 2011. We're giving $200 to the writer of our favorite story, and $100 to a first runner up. Also, about 20 stories will be published in our 3rd annual Literary Lab Presents...anthology. The contest is also a great warm up for NaNoWriMo!

For more information click here.

I Lied: More From Chekhov

Your statement that the world is "teeming with villains and villainesses" is true. Human nature is imperfect, so it would be odd to perceive none but the righteous. Requiring literature to dig up a "pearl" from the pack of villains is tantamount to negating literature altogether. Literature is accepted as an art because it depicts life as it actually is. Its aim is the truth, unconditional and honest. Limiting its functions to as narrow a field as extracting "pearls" would be as deadly for art as requiring Levitan to draw a tree without any dirty bark or yellowed leaves. A "pearl" is a fine thing, I agree. But the writer is not a pastry chef, he is not a cosmetician and not an entertainer. He is a man bound by contract to his sense of duty and to his conscience. Once he undertakes this task, it is too late for excuses, and no matter how horrified, he must do battle with his squeamishness and sully his imagination with the grime of life. He is just like any ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper reporter as a result of squeamishness or a desire to please his readers were to limit his descriptions to honest city fathers, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railroadmen?

To a chemist there is nothing impure on earth. The writer should be just as objective as the chemist; he should liberate himself from everyday subjectivity and acknowledge that manure piles play a highly respectable role in the landscape and that evil passions are every bit as much a part of life as good ones.

— Letter to Maria Kiselyova, January 14, 1887

Beware The Write Agenda!

A link to Scalzi's article about the Write Agenda, who are not our friends. Writer, beware!

Also, I promise not to post about Chekhov any more. Promise. Davin does not promise not to mention Tolstoy again, though. Michelle will likely remain silent regarding Russian authors, but she might say a word or two about Virginia Woolf if the mood strikes her.

Chekhov and Engines of Imbalance

Here is an excerpt from Chekhov's story "The Party." (Translated by Constance Garnett and edited down by me.)

Olga made up her mind to find her husband at once and tell him all about it: it was disgusting, absolutely disgusting, that he was attractive to other women and sought their admiration as though it were some heavenly manna; it was unjust and dishonourable that he should give to others what belonged by right to his wife, that he should hide his soul and his conscience from his wife to reveal them to the first pretty face he came across. What harm had his wife done him? How was she to blame? Long ago she had been sickened by his lying: he was for ever posing, flirting, saying what he did not think, and trying to seem different from what he was and what he ought to be. Why this falsity? Was it seemly in a decent man? If he lied he was demeaning himself and those to whom he lied, and slighting what he lied about. Could he not understand that if he swaggered and posed at the judicial table, or held forth at dinner on the prerogatives of Government, that he, simply to provoke her uncle, was showing thereby that he had not a ha'p'orth of respect for the Court, or himself, or any of the people who were listening and looking at him?

She found her husband in his study. He was sitting at the table, thinking of something. His face looked stern, thoughtful, and guilty. This was not the same Pyotr Dmitritch who had been arguing at dinner and whom his guests knew, but a different man -- wearied, feeling guilty and dissatisfied with himself, whom nobody knew but his wife. He must have come to the study to get cigarettes. Before him lay an open cigarette-case full of cigarettes, and one of his hands was in the table drawer; he had paused and sunk into thought as he was taking the cigarettes.

Olga Mihalovna felt sorry for him. It was as clear as day that this man was harassed, could find no rest, and was perhaps struggling with himself. Olga Mihalovna went up to the table in silence: wanting to show that she had forgotten the argument at dinner and was not cross, she shut the cigarette-case and put it in her husband's coat pocket.

"What should I say to him;" she wondered; "I shall say that lying is like a forest -- the further one goes into it the more difficult it is to get out of it. I will say to him, 'You have been carried away by the false part you are playing; you have insulted people who were attached to you and have done you no harm. Go and apologize to them, laugh at yourself, and you will feel better. And if you want peace and solitude, let us go away together."'

Meeting his wife's gaze, Pyotr Dmitritch's face immediately assumed the expression it had worn at dinner and in the garden -- indifferent and slightly ironical. He yawned and got up.

"It's past five," he said, looking at his watch. "If our visitors are merciful and leave us at eleven, even then we have another six hours of it. It's a cheerful prospect, there's no denying!"

And whistling something, he walked slowly out of the study with his usual dignified gait.

What happens here? Olga and Pyotr are giving a party, their house is full of guests. Pyotr is worried about an upcoming civil trial where he's the defendant. This trial might have terrible consequences for his career as a magistrate. Pyotr has a public persona he uses that is pompous, loud and totally unlike the person he is with his wife in private. His behavior at the party has been obnoxious and Olga is angry with him. Olga has just watched Pyotr flirt with a pretty seventeen year-old girl. In the excerpt above, Olga follows Pyotr to his study, where she finds him alone and troubled. She stops being angry and moves to reconcile with him. Pyotr, however, is not going to admit that he is in any way troubled, because then he'd have to talk about the upcoming trial and he can't quite face that so he puts on his public persona again and walks out of his study.

The whole story works this way, with unspoken emotion driving people at each other in frustration and away from each other in shame. Neither Pyotr nor Olga ever speak openly about the main crises in their lives (his upcoming trial and his unsure place in the government, her difficult first pregnancy) and they treat each other poorly despite deeply loving each other. The excerpt above briefly displays the way Chekhov accomplishes this, and how he sets up a rhythm of the characters moving towards each other and then pushing away, a rhythm he continues for the entire story. As the tension mounts the movements become more extreme and violent until both Olga and Pyotr lose complete control of their emotions. Because Chekhov understands the power of contrast, this emotional loss of control affects Olga differently than it affects Pyotr. She becomes verbally abusive and he is now the one attempting to reconcile.

So Chekhov, in this story, has created a sort of engine which runs on imbalance, where one character is angry at the other's behavior but who that is keeps changing, and characters revolve from their public to their private faces and not a lot happens in terms of physical action but the emotions are always moving, in larger and larger swings of the pendulum. "The Party" is a very active story in terms of character, and you don't notice that there isn't a great deal of action in the way of plot.

Read the whole thing here if you want.

Quality first

It's raining in downtown L.A., and I'm taking advantage of my ability to work from home as I write another draft of the 10-year institute review I've been entrenched in for the last three weeks. For two of those weeks, my usual boss was out of town. But he came back a few days ago and really slowed my progress. Because? Well, because he didn't let me get away with the bad writing I had been doing while he was away, of course.

I was tasked to help with the review because the office was racing to meet a deadline--a deadline that passed over a month ago. I got caught up in panic mode and was rushing to throw in whatever material I could that might be helpful. I had a ton of questions, and I asked some of them, but no one had any answers for me because we were all in such a big hurry to get it done.

Then my boss comes back and says, "You and I aren't gong to do this unless we do it well."

Me: "But what about the deadline????????"

Boss: "This document is pointless unless we do it well."

We've spent the last few days going sentence by sentence, word by word, through this thing. It's painfully slow. And yet I'm feeling better about it than I ever have. And today, as I sit at home in a tank top and boxers, watching Kiki's Delivery Service, I'm excited to work on this next draft.

What's that thing they say? Haste makes garbage? :)

My new boss has a way of working that I hadn't ever encountered before, but I'm quickly getting addicted to it. He says it's based on his Talmudic studies. Basically, we read a sentence I've written, and we talk and talk about all of the implications that could be made from the words I chose. We talk about whether or not it says everything I intended to say. We go online to check definitions--even if we think we know what they are. It's extremely thorough, and when the product is done it feels really leakproof.

Last night we also had a discussion about the difference between writers and scientists, according to him. (I'm fortunate or unfortunate enough to fall into both camps.) But he said something that was really interesting to me. He said that writers tend to shape ideas in part after the words had been written. In a sense, the words we've used limit the ideas we were originally trying to convey. That was definitely my experience, especially with my novella Bread. When scientists write, on the other hand, they are working to express things they've done. They need to explain experiments and results. So, they can't let the words limit them in the same way. My boss said it's an interesting difference because sometimes it makes the writing clunky, but it's more accurate. There's some truth to that for us creative writers, isn't there? Do we sacrifice our truth, what we originally set out to write, for a close approximation that perhaps flows better? I have for sure.

The day of Mon

Happy Monday, everyone!

I was working on Cyberlama revisions this weekend. When I started this second draft, I had planned to write in new sections with pen and paper, but I'm finding that as I get into more problematic areas all I can really do for now is jot down general notes like "more here," and "expand on this, what is she really feeling?" I feel like the first draft was not as far along as I had hoped it would be, and I need to approach it more conceptually for a bit first. That's not necessarily a problem, but I'm proud of myself for recognizing this now. I can easily see how I could have wasted several weeks fixing the surface of the story only to find out later that the foundation was not yet in place.

I'm also gearing up to apply for a local "manuscript finishing" fellowship, and I'm a little conflicted. The application requires two letters of recommendation, and I thought I would ask two of my writer friends to jump in. But after talking to the organizer I was told that I needed to ask two "experts." My problem is that my view of experts does not jive with the organizer's view of experts. My friends are the people I respect intellectually and writerualectually. I'm friends with them because I respect them. Do I stick to my guns or follow directions?

How are your weeks starting out, y'all?