That ain't no Moby Dick!

After countless queries of "And what about your first book..." I've grasped the pulls of the metaphorical drawer and let it scrape open.

Adrift on the Dark Sea of Memory is in one reader's hands (a young, nubile reader who is so literate for her age it makes me gasp), and by the end of tomorrow, it will be snuggled in the ample bosom of another--this one experienced, with soft edges, just the way a (book) lover should be.

The question before them is, could this book serve as a lure now that the waters of the publishing world are less murky and deeper?

In the old paradigm, with just one chance at that a catch, I'd never have cast this younger, less seasoned book away from the safety of the drawer. There be monsters out there that eat it alive, and along with it my single chance for a career.

But as the e-publishing splits open the possibilities, a new strategy can emerge. The first book first--a lure to catch the chum that will later call the whale.

I await my fate, while on the horizon I see a mist that may be the geyser of that long anticipated whale. I raise my sail, come hard about and squint, the sun breaking through the liquid plume and casting an arc of color across the sky. ~ Victoria Tirrel

Dream Idea for the Mega-Church

This morning I had a dream of going to a church service where there were reclining chairs instead of pews. Now that's a church!

Amy

Dreams are Strange

Penguins in Brighton.

That's all I have to say.

Amy

Spring into Action

My turn to hand something in to the writer's group is nigh and I have been on my muse's bad side.

I imagine the muse scowling in the corner, eyeing me with suspicion, waiting for me to offer up an interesting locale for a play date. Maybe the greening grass of this early spring will help me think of England's 'green and pleasant land' again. I sure hope so.

Amy

What's the Point?

Check for consistent themes in your writing. Do you have a philosophy that shows through? Does the theme help your writing? Does it shape the learning curve for your characters?

Amy

Tip of the Hat to Ira Glass

Some comments by Ira Glass about the creative process were brought to my attention this week.

His thesis was essentially that artistic people take up a creative project because they have good taste, because they have an appreciation for the skill of the great creators. This leads to a dilemma. The burgeoning creator knows how to distinguish good art from bad art and those initial attempts at any form of creative endeavor are inevitably bad. Years of bad work are required before the good work finally begins to develop.

Musicians see this more clearly than most because there is a physical component as well as an intellectual component. If the fingers do not land on the balance beam of the key or string we hear the mistake in an instant. Only practice can train us to make beautiful music.

And, yes, this is forgotten as one grows older and tries a new type of creative project. To paint or write or tell a story will take hours, weeks, months or years of work. The work must be done. That is the only way.

But the rewards of work will appear over time. Slowly, word by word, sentence by sentence we learn to make sense of our thoughts. Sometimes the words seem to skip onto the page with barely a moment of hesitation. Day by day each sentence becomes a little easier. The seeping spring drains into the creek, then forms the river.

As Ira Glass says, we’re going to be good because we have the sense to know when we are bad.

And, by the way, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice, practice, practice.

Amy

The art of disappearing.

There are very few Radiohead songs that I love more than  “How to Disappear Completely.”  It’s intensely beautiful and eerie.  Disappearing completely—ceasing to be me—is one of the greatest pleasures I know.

As a teenager and a young man, I was—as the French say—mal dans ma peau.  Uncomfortable, or unhappy, in my skin.  Like, if I could just get out of my skin and not be me—maybe get into someone else’s skin and be that person, or maybe just disappear altogether, become invisible—I would be so much happier.   I did what a lot of children, teens, and adults in their early twenties do to get out of their skin: I lived in a world of books and wrote poetry.

When I was a senior in high school, I discovered acting.  Not the acting of every day life, which I already knew, but acting in a theatrical production.  The school’s annual play that year was a particularly hammy melodrama, and I played the hero.  How hammy?  In one scene I swept the heroine off her feet and carried her off stage.  I can’t remember what motivated me to audition for the play.  I suspect it had to do with the extraordinary amount of coaxing and encouragement I was receiving from a number of teachers who feared I was hell-bent on self-destruction and were determined to save me.

There was no way a kid as insecure—as mal dans ma peau—as I could have walked out on that stage, in front of at least two hundred people, and delivered my lines, if I’d felt I was still in my own skin.  Acting gave me the opportunity of discovering the happiness and security of disappearing.  I only acted in one more play—an MFA student’s production of Strindberg’s The Father, at the University of Minnesota, when I was a sophomore.  

For a number of reasons, I chose an academic career, became a professor of French and comparative literature, and experienced a fair amount of success and a huge amount of unhappiness, until I started writing fiction and left academe.  Once again I started disappearing in my work.  I’d like to disappear completely in all of my characters.

I wrote most of this post this morning at my partner’s house, while she was preparing breakfast.  On the way home in the car, I listened to an interview with Anthony Hopkins on NPR.  Hopkins talked about how, when he was a teenager, he loved to disappear in the act of creating art and composing music.  What a coincidence!  Over the next several decades he developed the art of disappearing in his theatrical roles and attained, I suspect, great happiness.  The Birmingham Symphony Orchestra recently recorded the music that he composed in those early years of disappearing and released it on an album entitled Composer.  We need a phrase to describe this kind of accomplishment—perhaps, the return of the disappeared (analogous—but in a positive way—to the return of the repressed). 

When I got home, I listened online to the interview with Hopkins and the excerpts from Composer, and then listened to Radiohead’s “How to disappear completely.”   And I started writing again, disappearing in my novel-in-progress, “Every Tom, Dick and Harry.”

Brian

The Weaver

The trend in novels lately, besides the rise of the multi-volume character-driven series, has been the resurgence of the Dickensian technique of weaving together multiple story lines to form a complex whole in one great tome. Driftless, by David Rhodes, is a stunning example of such a technique.

Rhodes first gives us the landscape to defend his title, then he peoples his small world with characters who have been placed there through various glacial events beyond their control. The hapless residents of the town of Words remain where they are dropped, waiting for other forces to move them.

Through the course of the book the characters begin to find the strength to move themselves. Part of this change is due to July Montgomery, who knows each of the other characters in one way or another. Montgomery merely nudges people and, like Newton’s theory of inertia, the characters keep moving until they bump up against someone else. The remainder of the change simply happens due to the interactions they all have with each other.

Writers often are unable to use slow, creeping tension to its best effect, but Rhodes’ pool table plot played with boulder-sized balls moved by sheets of ice, makes the incremental directions in people’s lives seem gripping. We fret over each new event, sometimes thinking we see the inevitable outcomes and are often surprised by the resolutions.

Throughout, humor mixes with the drama and tragedy. The writing style shows skill with words and an attempt to find humanity in every character. Like sitting down to a rich meal, one finds oneself reading slowly through a phrase to relish its perfection or setting the book down to gaze into space and digest a sentiment.

I won’t spoil the ending, other than to say that I wished it ended a little differently, but I understand why Rhodes chose the path he took. Sometimes the glacier of imagination pushes the author in a direction with no choice for turning aside.

Amy

How a Journey Begins

I started re-reading Master and Commander last night because I wanted to remind myself how the book started. O’Brian did a masterful job of showing the reader sense and sound and personality within the first page, the narrator moving into the principal character like air being breathed in.

We hear the music being played in the room, we see the salon-sized audience sitting on their delicate chairs, feel the weight of a young Royal Navy officer’s blue broadcloth worn with pride and not a little warmth.

There are no names at first, only impressions. We meet the characters as strangers often meet, through proximity and shared interests. Lt. Jack Aubrey is shown to have a larger than life personality and Dr Maturin’s misanthropic tendencies forewarn of an inevitable clash between the young men, but the next day a sudden promotion douses the fire of Jack’s sense of affront and he feels generous to everyone.

A friendship is born, an epic story rises out of the hot Minorcan dirt and spills out into the Mediterranean Sea and, through 20 ½ books, across the very oceans of the world.

Beginnings don't need to fill the reader in on every detail of a character. A hand beating time with the music and a scowl at being shushed show the reader so much more than writing "he liked music and often hummed along."

Writers must swirl through the atmosphere like ghosts. We must remember everything that has moved us in the past and give our characters the opportunity to smell, hear, see and touch the world we have created for them. Our thoughts build flesh. Then we hand out names.

Amy