Lethargy, Languor, Lassitude, Listlessness

I don’t know what to write about today. I have plenty of subjects lined up, but something about it being the Friday of a long week of up-ups and low-downs makes my mind wander. So maybe just a shout out to everyone pressing in their traces, creative or otherwise. You can do it! I believe in you. If not today, a good night’s sleep and we’ll get it done tomorrow.

What I’m Reading Today: I read James Joyce’s short story ~ novella really ~ “The Dead” for the first time. It’s one of those things I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. What a lovely story. The contrast between the liveliness of the party, with its good humor and little frictions, and the image at the end of “the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” Hear, hear, for the epiphanic ending, even though many people say its time has passed.

PS My friend Jenny Shank’s first novel is being published! The Ringer is about an accidental police shooting and the way it affects the families of both the shooter and the victim, who confront each other when their sons unknowingly find themselves first as rivals, then as teammates in a Denver youth baseball league. When it comes out in May 2011, I’ll be the first one in line!

PPS Got a very nice rejection from a very important literary magazine today, and it made me feel so good. Writers, you know what I’m talking about.

Philip Gourevitch, You Are Definitely a Cool Person

Oh, my. Philip Gourevitch. What a fabulous reading. His eyes are intense ~ you can tell his mind has leapt out far ahead of what he’s saying ~ yet here and there his face relaxes with humor at a question or as he mimics the old-school NYC accent, with its “oi” for “r” and “oh” for “ah.” When asked a question, he gives a full answer, teasing it round and round to present it from all sides.

I’ve done a little freelance journalism ~ a few profiles and historical pieces ~ and what bothered me about writing them is that you have to tell coherent unified story. You have only maybe 800 words, if you’re lucky, to tell what happened. You have to tell the truth, of course, but not the whole truth, and that’s why I am drawn to literary fiction. One of the aims of literary fiction, in my mind, is to get at the nuances and complexities of life, not to simplify it.

And that’s what I love about Philip Gourevitch’s work. He’s writing nonfiction, yet he’s trying to understand what happened from the ground up, in the hearts and minds of the people who were there and how they view it after it happened. He doesn’t simplify it; he complexifies it.

He read from his book We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, which explores the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He talked about how reporters called the genocide “unseeable, unimaginable, and unspeakable.” The person who was supposed to be the European expert on Rwanda said, instead of there being good guys and bad guys, “they’re all bad guys.” How dismissive, Gourevitch said. Isn’t that the job of journalists to see, imagine, and speak?

That’s exactly what I’m trying to do in fiction. Everyone has a reason why they do something, emotional or otherwise, and to call them crazy is to dismiss them and their realities. It’s laziness or timidity and lack of imagination on your part. It’s the Why that always fascinates me. People fascinate me.

And that’s what Gourevitch said he’s trying to do too. He’s interested in the criminal mind and in aftermaths. He’s fascinated that a murderer would justify his actions by talking about all the people he could have killed but didn’t. He talked about Rwandans and how they make gallows-humor jokes about the killers and the trials. He’s interested in our common humanity and how ~ in theory, around the dinner table ~ we believe that everyone on the planet has a common humanity. Yet, in practice, we act locally, and that becomes a problem when we set policy in theory yet act locally once we get there.

Gourevitch wrote about the Rwandan genocide (We Wish to Inform You …), about an unsolved (until recently) NYC murder case (A Cold Case), and about Abu Ghraib (Standard Operating Procedure, or The Ballad of Abu Ghraib). What I’m left wondering is: What does that do to your beliefs about human nature? Are we base creatures or essentially good or somewhere in between? How can you witness all that, imagine and cogitate for months about all the horrible and wonderful human acts in order to write about them, and not be affected?

What I’m Reading Today: Still reading Best European Fiction 2010. Each story is just a gem.

Thrilled!

I am thrilled to be able to hear the amazing Philip Gourevitch speak tonight! Very inspiring.

Blog Hate

I think I’ve been reading too many blogs lately.

A number of blogs are posting lists of things not to write about. Some of these lists are created out of frustration ~ slush readers seeing too much of the same thing. I understand this. These are good people who have to do something that is unnatural, something that can make a person feel bad. They have to tell another person that their offering ~ their heart on a stick ~ isn’t good enough. This begets pain, which begets anger, which begets humorous lists. I do understand the impulse behind this.

But other lists are just plain snarky. They stem from the same place ~ the pain of rejection. However, they can get downright mean. They basically say, everybody out there, you suck. They say, these rules are written in stone, you can’t write about, say, middle-age angst. But we all know that a) there are lots of people out there doing it very well and b) you have to write about what you have to write about ~ at least if you want to a) remain sane and b) write with your pen on fire.

What I don’t like about these lists is that they stem from the same place snarky criticism stems from. Yes, I know they’re supposed to be funny. But they’re also mean. It disregards others’ feelings in order to vent your own pain and frustration. It disregards the number one rule of writing, which is empathy.

Furthermore, this attitude is detrimental to creativity. Creating something takes a sense of play, of joy, of enthusiasm. Yes, and a sense of childlike naivete. It’s hard to be world-weary and creative at the same time.

So please, for the sake of your art, use your anger and frustration as drive to build up your art, not tear down other peoples’.

What I’m Reading Today: I finished my friend Pembroke’s kick-ass zombie manuscript! Also more European Anthology.

In Honor of Dr. King

I’ve been reading some interesting posts about writing race recently. Great stuff on the Rejectionist’s "Homework for White Folks" post, which has wonderful links, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s great TED talk about the dangers of the single story.

I couldn’t agree more. So many great points. Writing is an act of empathy, and we should try to populate our stories with characters from all backgrounds. Sure, it takes courage to write someone of a different race, and there is a huge responsibility that goes along with it. No stereotypes! Check out the posts ~ they say it so much better than I can.

Which brings me to what I was thinking: Do your best for that character, no matter what his or her background. A white character is not white. Her mother’s mother immigrated from Quebec to northern Montana and got pregnant when she was fifteen and had to give her daughter up. Her father is from very proper British stock who immigrated to New York when it was still a colony, who then over the generations migrated west, first to Tennessee, then to Colorado, then to Santa Fe.

All these things work together to help create this individual you’re creating. All this contributes to who she is, and you should know this about your character. The fact that your character’s mother was abandoned when she was little made her cling tightly to those she loved, so your character felt crushed as a child. Or, conversely, her mother was afraid to count on anyone and, though she didn’t abandon her physically, emotionally she wasn’t there for her daughter.

Even if your character is yourself, you should have some metacognition about your own background and how it contributes to who you are.

Same way with jobs: you should know what your character does for a living and how closely that affects them. Maybe he is a doctor and sees the whole world as a disease to be cured. Maybe he refuses to hold down a job because he has a thing about authority that informs his whole life.

The same with race. You should know that your character’s father’s family came from Japan and her grandfather fought for his country while his loved ones were in relocation camps. Or that her great great great great grandmother was brought from what is now Nigeria to be a slave but ended up working in saloons in California when her owner, the great great great great grandfather, went broke, fell in love with her, and moved West.

And none of this necessarily shows up on the page. But it bubbles up in the fiction and makes for richer writing. It creates nuance and depth, as well as suggests metaphors.

A final note: Watch your own tics. Don’t make all your white characters good and all your French characters bad. Conversely, don’t make all you multiracial characters noble and your white characters evil. Flesh ‘em out, Dr. Frankenstein. Make ‘em both good and bad.

I say this all as a reminder to myself.

What I’m Reading Today: Getting caught up on some blog reading and also some New York Times.

PS It’s been a banner week. Another request for a partial on the novel! Thank you, universe!

What’s Cooking?

I think it’s useful to remember the metaphor of cooking when thinking about writing. Sometimes, no matter how much you prepare, no matter how fresh and/or seasoned your ingredients, no matter how hard you try, what you cook turns out only so so. Or even downright bad. Other times, you can just throw things together and something will turn out grand. But, overall, the more you cook, the better you get.

What I’m Reading Today: More great European Anthology.

PS, I got a request for a full today!

If Only

(Since I posted the below yesterday, I've been thinking about it. I meant to be funny, but I wonder if I didn't cross a line? In summary, I meant to express the tension between writing and publishing. Seriously, I believe that the urge to write comes from the need to be heard, so of course publishing is important. Being such an avid reader myself, I am grateful for any readers who enjoy my work and for those intrepid souls who publish. Carry on!)

Oh, wouldn’t it be nice to say that it doesn’t matter? To say, who gives a hoot if the outside world ever sees a pen-stroke, a key-punch? I write because it inspires me, thrills me, for its own gratification, because I have to. I am a pure artist, I live for the art itself. My muse lives in the glass castle and eats nothing but dew gathered from the early morning cup of a calla lily, unsullied by the eye lashings of those beings called readers and the grubby fingertips of commerce.

But it does matter.

All this to say: I got a request for a partial on the novel today, and I’ve been in an irrepressibly good mood ever since.

What I’m Reading Today: Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Aleksander Hemon. I was prepared for it to be challenge because Hemon’s introduction seemed to say that a lot of the fiction was experimental. On one hand, I know it’s good for me to read fiction that is experimental ~ since I tend to be a traditionalist ~ but on the other hand the term “experimental” is sometimes used by writers who ignore their readers’ needs, a cardinal sin in my book. Not to say I don’t think readers shouldn’t be challenged, but they shouldn’t be ignored either. But, so far, I’ve found the fiction to be thoroughly delightful and not “experimental” in the sense of “go ahead, try to figure out what I was doing,” but more in the sense of deadly serious playfulness. Not innovation for innovation’s sake but to serve the story and the reader.