Brain Pickings

I love smart sites, and this is my latest find.  Enjoy!  Brain Pickings, by Maria Popova.

That’s One Tough Mudder

Via

I have a friend who is participating in the Tough Mudder on Saturday in Beaver Creek, Colorado. It advertises itself as “probably the toughest event on the planet.” All you have to do is watch the video on the website and you feel like running with the bulls.

Here’s what the website says:

Tough Mudder events are hardcore 10-12 mile obstacle courses designed by British Special Forces to test your all around strength, stamina, mental grit, and camaraderie. With the most innovative courses, half a million inspiring participants, and more than $3 million raised for the Wounded Warrior Project, Tough Mudder is the premier adventure challenge series in the world.

As I was running my measly 1.5 miles today (working my way back up to 3), the thought crossed my mind that training for and attending events like these are like writers going to the best and most challenging writing conferences.

Bear with me here (and quit rolling your eyes).

I’ve written before about how running is like writing. 

Writing conferences are competitive. You compete to get in, and also you compete for scholarships. You also feel a little competitive while you’re there because there are all these great writers doing all this great stuff. Just like the Tough Mudder.

You train. Oh, how you train. You write every day ~ or feel guity if you’re not. You read like your life depended on it. You obsess. You read your workshop manuscripts. You lose 10 pounds. You practice your presentation reading. You research the other participants. Just like you’d do hardcore training for Tough Mudder competitions.

But more than that, writing conferences are about being with others of your kind, of rubbing antennae with the other strange bugs. About finding your tribe. And what else the Tough Mudder but people coming together to find other people like themselves. Sure, they’re competitive too, but I bet more than anything they think of the others there as their kind and those who don’t compete as the nameless mob. Much like writers do at writing conferences.

So, as I sit here thinking about how crazy this friend of mine must be for wanting to do the Tough Mudder, I have to remember that many people think I’m just as crazy to want to write a novel. But crazy is good, I think. It means you’re passionate about something and you’re throwing your heart and soul into it. It means you’re living your life ~ with emphasis on both the living and on your life.

Intrusions, by Ursula Hegi

Imagine a novel with two parallel storylines.

 The first storyline is an insightful literary tale in third person about a young woman, Megan, trying to figure out how to be a wife and a mother. It follows her from the death of her parents as a kid to her being raised by her aunt and uncle, their divorce due to the uncle’s infidelity, and her finding her own husband and having a child. The story is wonderfully nuanced and non-cliché, with the woman experiencing highs and lows in unexpected ways.

The second storyline is in first person and about a woman who’s a writer working on her first novel. We don’t get nearly as much background information about this woman, and she directly addresses the reader. As she’s trying to write, she gets all these interruptions ~ intrusions ~ into her writing time from her young kids and from life. We all know how it is to try to write a novel ~ it takes a long time and the world wants you to do what it wants you to do. In fact, it’d just as soon you not write at all. As it turns out, this is the woman who is writing the story of Megan above, and she talks a lot about her process as she tries to work out Megan’s story. She gives us interesting background about minor characters and all the other things you try to work out as a writer of a novel.

But it gets even more interesting. The characters start talking to the writer, arguing with her about why she made certain choices and left out huge chunks of their lives. It’s not just Megan who talks with the writer (named Ursula, by the way) but also Megan’s husband Nick. They say they the characters have been talking amongst themselves.

I’m only about halfway done, but as a writer of novels I am fascinated by this book ~ Intrusions, by Ursula Hegi. Don’t you love finding a point of view of someone who is way into what you’re obsessed by, whether it’s writing or engineering or tying flies? You love to hear the gory details of the work, how they used an egg hook instead of a nymph bend and they added a bit of Hungarian partridge feather in with the snowshoe hair.

And this type of metafiction is interesting in its own right. We live in an age of meta where we question everything ~ from the ironies of convention to the way we tie our shoes. Putting this questing into our work is a productive technique that can yield fascinating outcomes, but it also has to be balanced with convention so that the reader isn’t left wondering what the heck is going on ~ or worse, bored to tears.

I’m not drawn to metafiction or experimental fiction generally, but there are some fascinating experiments out there. Intrusions makes me think of Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over, where the characters break the third wall and address the reader directly. Or the movie Stranger Than Fiction, where the writer played by the wonderful Emma Thompson is writing a character played by Will Ferrell, and she’s the type of writer who always kills off her characters ~ will she kill him off? Or the movie Adaptation in which a screenwriter must adapt New Yorker writer Susan Orlean’s work as a film, and there is this wonderful shift when you realize that the screenwriter gave in and turned it into genre. (Any screenplay by Charlie Kaufman is weird and wonderful and meta.)

Have you read or watched any of this wonderful meta self-aware narrative? I would love to hear about it!



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The Great Virginia Woolf

Have I mentioned (a few hundred times) how much I respect and admire Virginia Woolf? She's one of my writer-gods.

Virginia Woolf at Monk's House, Rodmell

"Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works." ~ Virginia Woolf

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Am I Crazy?

Via

I keep reading about writers who write a whole novel ~ blood, sweat, and tears ~ and then query something like 10 or 12 agents and then just throw up their hands and self-publish.  (Not that self-publishing isn’t one of the tools in our toolkits.)  I queried almost 130 agents on my first manuscript and something like 64 on my second before I got an agent. That was eleven years and two novels written and rewritten, not to mention getting published in litmags and going to conferences and setting up a website and so much more.

Query 10 agents and then give up?  What’s up with that?

You're going to need a lot of patience and sticktoitiveness to get anywhere, no matter which route you take.

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A Vegetable Garden, and How It Relates to Unrealistic Expectations

We put in our vegetable garden this weekend, and I’m bit sunburned and a bit sore—but very happy. 

We put in a garden every year, but the last number of years my husband has been doing all the work.  He loves growing things and working in the yard, and all things being equal he would have loved to have been a farmer.  But this year I was struck by a bit of romanticism about it and was ready to pitch right in. We always had a garden when I was growing up on the ranch.

All gardens can be a bit challenging, but we have our own here in Laramie at 7,200 feet above sea level.  You’re not supposed to plant until June 1, and even then it can be iffy.  The growing season is three months at the outside.  You can’t grow melons or okra or sweet potatoes or pumpkins.  Corn’s a bit iffy, though you can get a few ears of the short-season variety.  You might think tomatoes are out of the question, but my husband has had really good luck with cages and walls-o-water.  We always get a good crop of tomatoes.  What we grow particular well are cole crops like lettuce and spinach and things like that.  In fact, there used to be lettuce farms here in the Laramie valley, apparently.

The kids and their grandmother put in some flowers that the kids chose into the planter on the porch.  Next weekend, I think I’ll work on the other flower and herb beds. 

I heard on NPR the other day that whenever a recession hits, people take to growing vegetables.  Makes sense.  But that implies that most of the time people don’t grow vegetables—not enough space, more concerned with flowers, too much effort involved, etc.  In my own case, it’s sometimes not a priority, and plus we’re members of a CSA farm, so we get vegetables every week from June to December. 

But that got me thinking about how that’s just another way we’re disconnected from the natural world.  We can go throughout our whole lives without being exposed to nature more than the walk from our house to our car and then from our car into work or school.

And then I was thinking about the metaphors that we take for granted. The metaphor we use the most nowadays is that of exponential growth.  In the financial arena, we should always get raises and businesses should build and everything goes on an upward trajectory.  In our personal lives, we should be improving ourselves and aiming ever higher.

All this upward seeking, though, creates ever higher expectations—and hence ever higher disappointments.  In the U.S., which arguably has the highest standard of living in the world, we are more frustrated and disappointed than people in less prosperous countries (see there, I almost said, “less advanced” and that in itself shows how the metaphor extends throughout our lives).

But if we all grew vegetable gardens, if we were all closer to the natural cycles of the earth, wouldn’t our basic metaphors change?  Wouldn’t it be the cycle of life and death, not the ever-increasing ledge of expectation?  And wouldn’t we be happier, then?

Potatoes, now there's a goal in life.

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'You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack'

My new favorite comic, You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, by Tom Gauld.

 

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