Monthly Archives: December 2015
THE WEATHER OUSIDE IS FRIGHTFUL
. . .but it could be a lot worse.
Inside, it’s delightful. There are plenty of Christmas leftovers, mostly the dessert variety, and numerous books to read.
My daughter was given a book for Christmas (which I wrestled away from her), called, Quack This Way. It’s an interview of David Foster Wallace by Bryan A. Garner. It’s a fun, but short read. Its fast pace makes it seem even shorter as the two men take a romping, lolloping, constitutional through discussions of writing, language, and usage. The interview was conducted in Los Angeles in 2006, two years before DFW committed suicide.
Who could resist a chapter called, ‘Crummy, turgid, verbose, abstruse, abstract, solecism-ridden prose’, or one simply called, ‘You need to quack this way’.
Our writing group read a short story by Wallace last winter entitled Mr. Squishy. I loved it. I’m loving Quack This Way, and decided to go whole hog (duck?) and downloaded Wallace’s Infinite Jest to put the icing on the holiday-reading cake.
I’ve only just begun this almost 1,000 page tome. It’s a North American dystopian novel taking place in the giant corporation subsidized years of ‘The Depend Adult Undergarment’, and ‘The Trial-Sized Dove Bar’, where our cold (weather outside is frightful) New England States have become Canada’s waste dump.
Yes, it’s a humorous novel, but only as it is written. Underneath it could become melancholic, but I haven’t gotten there yet.
One critic for the New York Times called Infinite Jest a vast encyclopedic compendium of whatever crossed Wallace’s mind’. That may not be so bad. Years later that same critic backpedaled and hailed it for having enriched today’s literary landscape.
Wallace himself said that his heavy use of end notes in Infinite Jest were a method of disrupting the linearity of the text while maintaining some narrative cohesion. There are plenty of them.
Well, I’m off to a lolloping romp through Infinite Jest this Year of the ‘Whisper Quiet Maytag Dishwasher’, or maybe it’s the ‘Year of Glad’. I’m not sure yet, but I imagine that I’ll enjoy the outing.
Stockings filled with coal
When you get to be my age, it’s amazing what an almost fourteen hour trip to Virginia, in steady rain, in a rental car with tires in need of replacement, with GPS directions that you find out are not taking you the way you think you are going until it’s too late to change direction, can do to you the next day. And I was only the passenger. The driver started the trip at six a.m. getting thrown to the ground after being hit in the head by the garage door on its downward trajectory. I think you may get the picture why this post will be short and disjointed!
The good news is we made it to Virginia safe and sound, our suitcases already unpacked and clothes hung in the closets with care, the driver still lively and quick. The last leg of our journey to Arizona will be by sleigh, er, airplane, that is.
I survived, and won, NaNoWriMo, with time to spare but not a creative thought lurking anywhere. I’ve printed my 2014 and 2015 winning submissions and lugged them with my original printed book (“Anne”) with a plan to ignore the Arizona sunshine this winter and return home with a completed draft comprised of an amalgamation of all three novels. We shall see…
Over a year ago I wrote a short story that
Christmas at the Omni Mount Washington Resort
partially is set in my daughter’s house in Virginia. (You may recall the experiment with the weed whacker string.) Another unfinished work. As I walked into her garage last night, after the exhausting trip from New Hampshire, the story engulfed me, reminding me of characters and story lines left hanging, like stockings hung on the mantle filled with coal. They deserve better than that. I just may finish that story this trip.
And Santa just may bring me everything on my list.
A Writer’s Twelve Days of Christmas
On the first day of Christmas, my karma brought to me:
A manuscript in a mad tangle
I’m grateful to have a complete first draft. Really. But the tangle starts on page 2.
Two hackneyed plots
It’s not that I’m a plagiarist. It’s just that my memory gland is too strong for my imaginary gland.
Three foreign phrases
I don’t use them myself. So where are my characters getting them?
Four dimpled darlings
Such adorable turns of phrase! Why do my readers get that gag-me-with-a-Smurf expression?
Five false starts
Once, you got a litter of crumpled paper on the floor, signifying writerly despair. Now it’s just delete…delete…delete….
Six friends kibitzing
I rely on their advice. And there’s so much of it! But I like to share my toys.
Seven cocktails calling
My protagonist knocks back Scotch. F. Scott Fitzgerald was drunk more than he was sober. Why do I have to stick to coffee?
Eight deadlines looming
I should be so lucky.
Nine unanswered queries
See above.
Ten howlers howling
Last week I left the same corpse in two places at once.
Eleven critics carping
See Eight and Nine above.
Twelve distractions dithering
E.g., Christmas. Happy holidays, all!
GET OUT OF THE HOUSE
GET OUT OF THE HOUSE
It’s not so much exercise that we need in the winter to keep us going, but light. Natural light.
Studies show (and I won’t belabor you with links and names of studies here, those you can easily Google yourself) that sleep improves with natural light. Thinking improves with light. Creative abilities improve with light. Your health improves with light. Everything improves. It’s a win-win situation getting natural/sun light every day.
I go through a definitive slump in the winter. Poor sleep, less writing oomph, less able to think through a problem. The works.
However, El Nino, the rainy weather blessing for California and the benign winter weather blessing for us here in the Northeast, is passing through. There is dim sunlight evanescing beyond the cloud cover this morning, and I am fighting an almost sleepless night’s inertia to hie myself out into the great outdoors and get some of it. Will it work? I don’t know, but I’m going to try. The outdoors here is great, and in the absence of the usual cold and snow this couch potato should take advantage of it, at least in the name of scientific experimentation.
After walking a couple miles I had definitely worked up an appetite but, I wondered, had the sunlight, trapped as it was behind that lone cloud, been strong enough to permeate into the melatonin producing area of my brain? That’s a good question. I’ll let you know if I sleep any better tonight.
In addition to the fresh air, sunshine, and exercise, I noticed that my brain was twinkling awake. It was telling me about things that should go into my stories. About a contest I was interested in entering, about a change I needed to make in my novel. I took deep breaths of mid-December air that had been mollified by the El Nino winds that perchance blew everyone some good, and thought, wow, this is heady stuff.
This nina is going to take advantage of El Nino’s sojourn in the cold climate of New England and get out of the house more. There’s too much to lose not to.
Baby’s First Rewrite
I think I passed a milestone this week.
It wasn’t literally my first rewrite of a scene. My writing group would never let me get away with that. All kinds of changes have rippled through my manuscript, usually to remedy total howlers in the plot, but also to remove unlikely remarks by a character or make my subplots more like a braid and less like railroad tracks.
This week is the first time I forced myself to abandon a scene totally and write another to do the same work in the book, better. Be warned: it hurts.
If only my red pencil were as sharp as the Geisha’s blade!
(Geisha’s Blade Philippines Samurai Sword Shop)
Two criticisms forced me to it. Our group’s homicide detective told me that interviews of witnesses would never be conducted with other witnesses present. You isolate them and get each one to tell her own story. Even weightier, there was a sad consensus that ‘it all went on too long.’
Even I could feel the latter problem. While I never used the dread locution, ‘and then,’ I might as well have. On plodded the scene, until slept the mind. I resolved on surgery.
I work in the Scrivener writing program. It’s hugely useful, letting you switch from any scene to any other with a single click, showing links to notes, outlines and subplots on the main page. Unhappily, that makes it so easy to tick back into your original draft, to tinker with it instead of starting fresh, to cheat by leaving your new text to lift just one or two sentences – such clever prose! – from the old.
Somehow, this time, I realized that I had to resist. I stayed with the blank white screen of the new version. When I needed to analyze the old scene for necessary information, I did it in longhand on a yellow pad. I changed the location of the scene, narrowed the point of view, pushed beloved characters into the background.
Lo and behold, it worked. When I checked back with my yellow pad, I found that the new scene did all that the old did, more briskly, with more conflict in the present and more tension about what is to come. The new scene is 25% shorter.
The exercise wasn’t without losses. On my yellow pad, I had drawn two columns: Needed and Good. The latter listed five brief passages in the original scene, a few words or a sentence or two at most, which I liked very much. Four of them showed characters acting characteristically. When I had forced my way through the new scene, these vignettes were gone. The course of action just didn’t allow them to happen.
Were they darlings? I still don’t think so. I’ve stored them in a file called ‘fragments’ for possible reinsertion in a final smoothing. Deep in my heart, though, I don’t expect to see them again.
Eleanor Ingbretson
Karen Whalen
llandrigan
Heidi Wilson
Mike M
Thursday Night Writes 