My intro post went up this week:

“I’ve always had big plans for the future. Growing up, I’d always be looking impatiently ahead for the better time that I was sure was coming, the time in a year or so when I’d get a different (better) friend group or get a driver’s license or graduate high school or start college. When all of those things happened, though (plus a lot more), and I got older, I started to realize that life isn’t so much about the future, or about big chunks of time. Life is made up of now, of days.”

Read more at RE:NEW

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The frenetic pace and minimalist lifestyle that being a college student seems to engender has forced me to redefine what I see as my relationship to those fictive worlds – how I fit books into both my schedule and my identity. These days, it’s mostly fantasy and chick lit that I read – desperate to escape the mental challenges of the academic life, I turn to books less to reaffirm my love of literature, or to submit myself to an author in order to learn something about life or love or writing, than to simply escape, as wholly as I can, into someone else’s vision. When that urge arises it’s not the complex machinations of Tolstoy’s novels that I want to be faced with but rather the frenzy of finding a proper husband for a marriageable young woman, or the clearly sketched wars between good and evil in fantasy worlds in which magic is a living force. Summers, I engulf myself in Tolstoy and poetry and Jhumpa Lahiri while I can, knowing that my time to spend with them is all too short. Once back, I let impulse dictate what it is I choose to read in the few cornered hours that remain free. Genre is unimportant – all that I need is that sense of fictional worlds seeping over into mine, with all their vivid wonder.

It took college to teach me that as much as I enjoy picking and choosing, rifling through book lists and favorite author bibliographies and Booker-prize winners to find the books which fit my kinks, it is ultimately the mere act of reading that keeps me going. Books are not necessary to sustain human life, or even the human spirit – I’ve never believed that. But there is an intimacy, an ownership to the act of reading that I’ve found almost nowhere else. Opening a book is like sipping a mug of hot tea – there’s a sense of power in the choice to drink, and a sense of submission in the willingness to take in, but above and beyond there’s a profoundly personal nature to it – the feel of the mug in your hands, its warmth on your fingers, the knowledge that no one else will ever drink this particular cup of tea in the same way you do. Books are like this – eloquent, interacting directly with you. Unlike a football game or even a film, books are profoundly individual experiences, rather than audience experiences (both their greatest strength and greatest weakness), which means that no matter how far I stray they’ll be waiting for me when I turn around. Waiting to be opened, tasted, submitted to, engulfed. Books will always be a part of my world – an intrinsic part, which I will return to again and again, and an elusive, necessary warmth at the borders of my life.”

How sudden the world is, how splendid, and how sad. I’m coming, I think, more fully to who I am, but part of this is realizing, as I face my own stripped-bare soul in the harsh light of growing up and facing difficulties, how limited I am – how broken. I do not walk through the world with a burning fire or a palpable strength. Rather I walk slowly through it cherishing the tiny flame of magic that still leaps, stubborn and individual, in my mind and heart. I am more afraid than I would have imagined – more helpless. But I see more clearly now. And part of that seeing is suspecting that there is a space, 3 years from now or 5, when I will be a complete person – when I will have molded and changed and pulled myself painfully out of the structures of enough shells and left them discarded that my being and personality will be, essentially, decided. For better or worse. In the meantime, I keep looking upward. A few more miles to Jericho.

Number One: Two years ago, when I wrote the first of these essays it was about my “egg timer method” of writing. You never saw that essay, but here’s the method: When you don’t want to write, set an egg timer for one hour (or half hour) and sit down to write until the timer rings. If you still hate writing, you’re free in an hour. But usually, by the time that alarm rings, you’ll be so involved in your work, enjoying it so much, you’ll keep going. Instead of an egg timer, you can put a load of clothes in the washer or dryer and use them to time your work. Alternating the thoughtful task of writing with the mindless work of laundry or dish washing will give you the breaks you need for new ideas and insights to occur. If you don’t know what comes next in the story… clean your toilet. Change the bed sheets. For Christ sakes, dust the computer. A better idea will come.

Number Two: Your audience is smarter than you imagine. Don’t be afraid to experiment with story forms and time shifts. My personal theory is that younger readers distain most books – not because those readers are dumber than past readers, but because today’s reader is smarter. Movies have made us very sophisticated about storytelling. And your audience is much harder to shock than you can ever imagine.

Number Three: Before you sit down to write a scene, mull it over in your mind and know the purpose of that scene. What earlier set-ups will this scene pay off? What will it set up for later scenes? How will this scene further your plot? As you work, drive, exercise, hold only this question in your mind. Take a few notes as you have ideas. And only when you’ve decided on the bones of the scene – then, sit and write it. Don’t go to that boring, dusty computer without something in mind. And don’t make your reader slog through a scene in which little or nothing happens.

Number Four: Surprise yourself. If you can bring the story – or let it bring you – to a place that amazes you, then you can surprise your reader. The moment you can see any well-planned surprise, chances are, so will your sophisticated reader.

Number Five: When you get stuck, go back and read your earlier scenes, looking for dropped characters or details that you can resurrect as “buried guns.” At the end of writing Fight Club, I had no idea what to do with the office building. But re-reading the first scene, I found the throw-away comment about mixing nitro with paraffin and how it was an iffy method for making plastic explosives. That silly aside (… paraffin has never worked for me…) made the perfect “buried gun” to resurrect at the end and save my storytelling ass.

Number Six: Use writing as your excuse to throw a party each week – even if you call that party a “workshop.” Any time you can spend time among other people who value and support writing, that will balance those hours you spend alone, writing. Even if someday you sell your work, no amount of money will compensate you for your time spent alone. So, take your “paycheck” up front, make writing an excuse to be around people. When you reach the end of your life – trust me, you won’t look back and savor the moments you spent alone.

Number Seven: Let yourself be with Not Knowing. This bit of advice comes through a hundred famous people, through Tom Spanbauer to me and now, you. The longer you can allow a story to take shape, the better that final shape will be. Don’t rush or force the ending of a story or book. All you have to know is the next scene, or the next few scenes. You don’t have to know every moment up to the end, in fact, if you do it’ll be boring as hell to execute.

Number Eight: If you need more freedom around the story, draft to draft, change the character names. Characters aren’t real, and they aren’t you. By arbitrarily changing their names, you get the distance you need to really torture a character. Or worse, delete a character, if that’s what the story really needs.

Number Nine: There are three types of speech – I don’t know if this is TRUE, but I heard it in a seminar and it made sense. The three types are: Descriptive, Instructive, and Expressive. Descriptive: “The sun rose high…” Instructive: “Walk, don’t run…” Expressive: “Ouch!” Most fiction writers will only use one – at most, two – of these forms. So use all three. Mix them up. It’s how people talk.

Number Ten: Write the book you want to read.

Number Eleven: Get author book jacket photos taken now, while you’re young. And get the negatives and copyright on those photos.

Number Twelve: Write about the issues that really upset you. Those are the only things worth writing about. In his course, called “Dangerous Writing,” Tom Spanbauer stresses that life is too precious to spend it writing tame, conventional stories to which you have no personal attachment. There are so many things that Tom talked about but that I only half remember: the art of “manumission,” which I can’t spell, but I understood to mean the care you use in moving a reader through the moments of a story. And “sous conversation,” which I took to mean the hidden, buried message within the obvious story. Because I’m not comfortable describing topics I only half-understand, Tom’s agreed to write a book about his workshop and the ideas he teaches. The working title is “A Hole In The Heart,” and he plans to have a draft ready by June 2006, with a publishing date set in early 2007.

Number Thirteen: Almost every morning, I eat breakfast in the same diner, and this morning a man was painting the windows with Christmas designs. Snowmen. Snowflakes. Bells. Santa Claus. He stood outside on the sidewalk, painting in the freezing cold, his breath steaming, alternating brushes and rollers with different colors of paint. Inside the diner, the customers and servers watched as he layered red and white and blue paint on the outside of the big windows. Behind him the rain changed to snow, falling sideways in the wind.

The painter’s hair was all different colors of gray, and his face was slack and wrinkled as the empty ass of his jeans. Between colors, he’d stop to drink something out of a paper cup.

Watching him from inside, eating eggs and toast, somebody said it was sad. This customer said the man was probably a failed artist. It was probably whiskey in the cup. He probably had a studio full of failed paintings and now made his living decorating cheesy restaurant and grocery store windows. Just sad, sad, sad.

This painter guy kept putting up the colors. All the white “snow,” first. Then some fields of red and green. Then some black outlines that made the color shapes into Xmas stockings and trees.

A server walked around, pouring coffee for people, and said, “That’s so neat. I wish I could do that…”

And whether we envied or pitied this guy in the cold, he kept painting. Adding details and layers of color. And I’m not sure when it happened, but at some moment he wasn’t there. The pictures themselves were so rich, they filled the windows so well, the colors so bright, that the painter had left. Whether he was a failure or a hero. He’d disappeared, gone off to wherever, and all we were seeing was his work.

This is the essay I wrote for my application to Chungdahm Learning in Korea for a teaching position. There were five or six topics, and I chose this.It’s necessarily short and extremely limited because of word count; a brief look at the issue of euthanasia.

#5 Explain and defend your position on euthanasia

Euthanasia is one of the most difficult and complex moral issues of our 21^st century society. In an age when medical treatment can both sustain a life far beyond the body shutting down, and deliver death with unparalleled speed and painlessness, what we define as life and death, and the rights involved with both, has grown ever more important.

Post-modernist society is all about the so-called “quality of life.” Yet it is not circumstances or even physical functionality which defines life. The brain of a newborn child can process only the most basic things, yet it can kick, scream, move and cry. The brain of a parapalegic is fully functioning, yet his or her body is often fully paralyzed, unable to move or speak. We cannot pick and choose the physical processes which define “life” –– people in different stages and conditions of life will always possess some of those functionalities and characteristics but not others. Are we to term some of them as “living” but not others?

It is not physical characteristics – a heartbeat, blood flowing, motion etc. – that set apart a human organism as “living”. Instead, I would define life as consciousness – the basic existence of an individual awareness. Whether you choose to call it a soul or a mind or something else, it is this spark which makes a particular human being individual and unique – and thus alive. And that individual life is inherently sacred.

“Quality of life” is the idea that some lives are “better” and therefore more valuable, while other lives are “worse,” and therefore less valuable. This leads quickly to moral acceptance of the killing off of those “less valuable” lives, such as infants with mental disabilities and comatose or constantly suffering patients. Yet such reasoning – that the value of a human life is defined or negated by its characteristics – in its most extreme form is what led the Nazis to exterminate millions of Jews. Basing the value of a human life on the mental or physical characteristics of the person in question is a faulty meter that ignores the intrinsic value of human consciousness.

I define euthanasia as a human life being actively ended by someone else. This stands in contrast to natural death from illness or the effects of old age, which includes death which happens after medical treatment is removed or withdrawn at the request of the patient or the patient’s family.  In this case, the treatment is not the cause of the individual’s death – rather the natural course of life is. Moreover, if a person is brain-dead, their body kept alive only by life support, removing that life support cannot be seen as killing – there is no life, no consciousness there. However, if there is any spark of consciousness left, or if they are able to survive without medical technology, then euthanization is simply murder. There is no degree of suffering which makes it less than murder for one human being to deliberately take another’s life.

It is easy to look at circumstances such as suffering, and physical/mental characteristics such as lack of intelligence or mobility, and say that this life is less valuable than others, that death would be better and therefore ending it is alright. But without respect for the fragile spark that is human consciousness, we will gradually become monsters. No individual has a right to die by another’s hand, nor when that happens can it be anything but murder. Life, as I have defined it in this essay, is inherently valuable and must be protected.

The weather acted upon her strangely. She was unfocused and at ease, yet a lucid clarity of vision came to her so that when she spoke, her words came out with the unfiltered honesty of wisdom. The air floated in through the window with a hint of magic and sleepy adventure, and she felt herself instantly back at home. Long lazy vacation days in Madang, where the humidity wrapped everyone in a warm tupor and made one’s physical senses simultaneously more sensitive, so that sleeping and swimming and eating were more refreshing and everything had an indefinable tang like the salt in the air. The whirling of fans would forever take her back to this place, and a particular kind of heat – humid and sly – but never the bright scorching of summer – would make her feel as she had felt in the tropics.

The last time I saw you I was different. You said you wouldn’t love me until I became the person I am now. You said if I loved you, I would make myself into the woman you want. You said you would wait for me to do what needed to be done, that we would be happier if you were happier. I have done things since you last saw me. I know things now. I did not think of you once. I forgot what you look like, how you taste, how your skin feels. When you touch me now, I feel nothing. We both know I won’t stay. You try to make me forgive you and I let you. I like seeing you grasping for the right words to undo what has been done. You couldn’t love me then and I can’t love you now. At the end of a long day, I sit on my balcony with a bottle of wine. It is often cold and windy but I find that peaceful. I wait.”

-Roxanne Gay, from Wigleaf.com

Websites:

Duotrope’s Digest

One Word – fix that writer’s block

Writer’s FM

Byzantine Roads – technical support blog for aspiring writers

Poems about writing:

“Berryman“, W.S. Merwin

Publications:

I recommend The Writer’s Chronicle, put out  by the AWP, the Association of Writers and Writer’s Programs which is probably the largest organization of its kind out there and puts on a huge conference every year. The Chronicle itself is lovely, comes in a nice accessible and non-threatening or demanding format and is chock-full of goodies.

Song of the Day:

“Say It’s All Over”, Paper Moon

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“Educators often justify art courses and creative writing courses on the grounds that self-expression can teach students about themselves. That may be true to some extent, but many creative writers have been quite capable of powerfully emotive writing while lacking insight into the internal conflicts that drive their suffering. While they may not gain insight, they still gain a sense of relief – and a sympathetic audience.”

“Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don’t have to.

“Amateur writers tend to write primarily for self-expression, whereas writers able to become professional can hide or transform their own agenda enough that they are of interest to others.”

– The Midnight Disease by Alice W. Flaherty

-taken from literaryquotes