Describing Reality is a Spiritual Thing

Taking a break from reading and responding to fellow classmates’ poems. This is more of a personal post today, and might not make a lot of sense, but I’ve begun to read Mark Doty‘s The Art of Description, a deceptively tiny book of richly concentrated insights into the craft of translating world into word. It begins…

It sounds like a simple thing, to say what you see. But try to find words for the shades of a mottled sassafras leaf, or the reflectivity of a bay on an August morning, or the very beginnings of desire stirring in the gaze of someone looking straight into your eyes, and it immediately becomes clear that all we see is slippery, nuanced, elusive. As Susan Mitchell says, “The world is wily, and doesn’t want to be caught.”

Yes. Exactly. But as I read Doty I remember why I must write. I remember that fiction and poetry are my lifeblood, my spirituality. I’ve dabbled on many spiritual/lifestyle paths in my life–different Christian flavors, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, gothic (!), satanic, hippie, anarchist, I Love Lucy–but I can’t explain why I tried any of them. Looking back, the one truth to which I always return and which has never left me since I was five and began reading Little Golden Books, Alice and Wonderland, Winnie the Poo, Wind in the Willows, A Child’s Garden of Verse, The Jungle Book, Oscar Wilde stories, Swiss Family Robinson, and on and on is literature & poetry.

Reading is one thing, but writing is a completely different experience. Capturing reality on the page is as slippery as Elizabeth Bishop‘s famous fish. At the same time, reading Doty helps to clarify and solidify why they have always been my ethical and spiritual guides. Because they begin and end in the essence of my existence, the thing inside that never changes and which the rest of my life revolves around: for lack of a better word, psyche or soul. I have no idea if there’s such a thing as transcendence after death. All I know is what my senses write on the tablet of water called consciousness. I need the physical to lead me into the non-physical both in my reading and my writing, but also in my life. Tattoos and trinkets, for example, to remind me of my Quest. An Egyptian hieroglyph of the Principle of Consciousness tattooed on my left hand and a cord of three symbols around my neck, symbols for poetry, literature, and the rightness we call “love.”

If you have read to the end of this and are lost about what I’m talking about, it doesn’t matter. In order to touch the sublime sometimes I have to leave my rational mind at the door, knowing that, whether or not I’ve succeeded here, ultimately as a writer I’m in the business of connecting.

My Never-Ending Poetry and Used-Book Adventure

The poetry part of today’s post:

It’s snowing again, second day in a row. And I’m procrastinating again. I’m supposed to be reading like fifty pages of really technical stuff on meter for my poetry class. So far it’s been a swell day trying to figure out how to upload my poem on a learning site do-oh, why am I so thick sometimes? I also have to read some famous dead-guy poems and compare their moods and the way they sound, and give written feedback to the other poets in my class on their work.

The used book part of today’s post:

If you love used books and if you don’t know about them already, get your ass on over to Abebooks and check them out. I  don’t have any affiliation them in case you’re wondering, and I do believe it’s important to support your local booksellers and thrift shops whenever you can.

BUT if you’re short on cash like I am and your local bookseller doesn’t have used titles you need/want, then you go to plan B. Say, Abebooks. Last week I found two books there among Graywolf Press’s outstanding series “The Art Of”  (The Art of Subtext and The Art of Description) from the UK with free shipping for less than I could find them from booksellers in the states.

You can find many books on Abe with free shipping without the minimum total that Amazon requires. The service is excellent and you can track your purchases easily once you set up an account. I’ve found most (not all) titles I’ve sought there for (usually) the best price. You can filter your searches and do other fun stuff there without a lot of clutter. So, that’s my recommend for today.

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The First Three Words

A stream-of-consciousness post. Pretentious. Indulgent. But oh well. My poetry writing class started last night. I have to write a poem about an object or a place. I’m having difficulty because I’m too critical of myself because I suffer from memory stains from my fiction writing workshops. I know I have it in me, I just need to begin. I’m brainstorming places I’ve been and what the consequences were, what they might mean in a larger context of my life. Of life in general. So far I’m too distracted. I’m trying not to get back on coffee, but it’s getting harder. I need it to help me knock on my muse’s door.

At any rate, just for fun, I thought I’d post this little game I found on Tumblr. Try it if you’re inclined. I think it ties in with my state of mind right now. The first three words of a poem; the first three words of a story; the first three words that rise to my mouth in the morning; first thought best thought (I don’t agree with that), and so forth.

I got NOIR, MEME, AND MEN. I didn’t understand “MEN,” so I cheated and did it a fourth time and got…MAN. Hmmm. Don’t know what that means, but it’s all grist for my poems. I do tend to be a NOIR-ish person, where for years I wore nothing except black and wrote grave-side stories. And MEME…well, that might refer to my penchant for literature, for English classes, etc. But MEN/MAN? I think it could mean that my protagonists have usually been male. I’ve gone through phases of my life where I have wondered about my sexuality, which has mostly been a-sexual. The most erotic organ is the brain, and that’s what I use to read fiction, so. There you go.

If you like, leave the three words you found that describe you in the comment section. Have fun.

Burning Down My Short Story House

Last night I was re-reading Charles Baxter‘s brilliant book Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. The first time I read it last year I raced through it and moved on to something else. Last night I chose a random chapter and read it again. Slowly. Digesting its content. How could I have missed such important stuff the first time?

Cover via Amazon

Here’s one small example. I’m a genius for stating the obvious in my story drafts. I’m also clueless when it comes to writing emotion–afraid of it, perhaps, or not observant enough of it in my own skin. Baxter directs me away from all that.

Miss Lonelyhearts has nothing to do with the pleasures of recognition. Its impatience with realism is quite feverish. The book has instead a peculiarly pure interest in the derangements of meaning. Recognition is forced to yield to a sort of comic-grotesque literary cartoon of the unnameable. Shock has something to do with the experience. So does the perception that profound emotions, at least in America, often feel cheap.

It’s the kind of reading that pulls you into your own glaring flaws and allows you to simmer in them as you peer outside the soup pot at the bowl, i.e., the container where your soup will be served. And you want it to be as tasty nourishing as possible. So, this morning I splurged and helped to stimulate the economy by buying three used books: Nathanael West‘s Miss Lonelyhearts, Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext and Mark Doty‘s The Art of Description (I’m painfully learning that place always matters. It is character and vice versa).

As a writer I’m always castigating myself for my a-social habit of looking like I’m not doing anything, when in fact I’m engaged in what I think is the most difficult process of work in existence: crafting a compressed and efficient story with characters that lift off the page and stay with you for days, months, years. Pondering the marrow of Baxter’s essays is just what I need at this point in my process.

As a side note, I’m curious what side of the fence readers are on about the viability of the short story. Is it dead?

 

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Sticky Notes for Fiction Writers Part 2

<Part 1 here>

Yesterday I posted 10 possibly useful points from my notes taken from an informal discussion with Tom Grimes. Here are the rest of them.

1. Sentences are fiction’s bedrock. Write sentences that show aesthetic integrity as opposed to careless, sloppy, cliched, or imprecise sentences.
2. Characters’ actions have to be understood on a purely functional level. Motivation has to be irrefutable.
3. Use your five senses. What does a place–any place–look, sound, smell, taste, and feel like? transform these into words.
4. The world is chaos. Artful fiction satisfied our human desire for order, and excavates meaning from the rubble of incomprehension.
5. Listen. Watch. Observe the minutest details.
6. Revise endlessly until you find your narrator’s voice.
7. Make yourself inconspicuous and pay close attention at the same time.
8. Develop a sense of form and structure. Develop sentence precision. Landscapes sharply drawn, sensual imagery and appropriate metaphor.
9. Dramatic action always. Dramatic action always has consequences.
10. Develop a distinctive voice.
11. Literature exists inside you, not outside you. It’s dynamic, not static.

I will leave you to interpret some of the more enigmatic of these points.

Sticky Notes for Fiction Writers Part 1

If you have stopped by here before, you have found lists. There will be one today as well. I sometimes discover helpful insights into the writing process and occasionally share them here with you. You’ve probably encountered many of them elsewhere. They aren’t ground-breaking. But I like to post them 1) so I can revisit them later and 2) because I think the more I read something, the more it filters into my subconscious.

Last year Tom Grimes came to speak to MFA students in my writing program. He has been friends with Charlie D’Ambrosio, one of my writing workshop instructors, since they attended the Iowa Workshop together when Frank Conroy directed it. Grimes was on tour promoting his memoir Mentor, which I read afterward. This post isn’t going to be a review of his book. It’s going to highlight a few points I scribbled in my notebook as I listened to him speak. As a student in fiction writing, I found many of them self-evident, yet helpful for my own process. I’ll be posting these stickies in two parts, paraphrased.

1. Someone out there will eventually like your stuff.
2. Put in the work. Nothing stays the same, so if you’re true and tenacious, something will eventually break through.
3. It’s always what’s on the page, not any detail about the writer. Text on the page is everything.
4. Don’t be vague. Give the reader concrete details using all five senses–those sharp and particular little details ground the story like nothing else.
5. Cut out all the superfluous, redundant, stupid, unnecessary underbrush (words, sentences, paragraphs).
6. Third person distances the writer from the main character, so the writer doesn’t risk self-indulgence.
7. Above all avoid melodrama. Understate the narrator’s emotional reaction. What the author withholds, the reader supplies. Establish and maintain the story’s co-creation. Don’t dwell on key emotional moments.
8. Use only those details that advance the story. If a detail is essential, keep it. If it isn’t, cut it.
9. If a writer gives the reader too much information, the reader feels forced to accept whatever the writer says and eventually stops reading.
10. If a writer gives the reader too little information, the reader feels compelled to search for whatever the writer says and eventually stops reading…so you want to meet the reader half-way.

<Part 2 here>

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Eight Intelligences

As a writer I have to make a concerted effort to observe things with my eyes and ears, what’s going on around me, what people are there, what they are doing and saying, and what’s in the room or on the street. Observation is the lifeblood of inspiration and depth in one’s work.

But as a poet, I don’t have to try to feel things deeply. I’ve always done it effortlessly on a level that can’t always be articulated.

At the risk of sounding spoogey, I can only describe it as though an invisible, permeable membrane surrounds my body. I’m not psychic or anything like that, but I do feel things deeply–empathic, perhaps. I think most of us have this ability. But we’re also taught to ignore our feelings, to push them down as a sign of weakness. They are, after all, irrational and they don’t serve commerce.

We are, most of us, hyper-aware on some level that something is going very wrong on our planet–unprecedented climate patterns, mass extinctions, irrational human behavior, and so forth. Often we can point to what it is, but just as often we cannot.

I watch nature for signs, for meaning, for warnings. I didn’t read a book to do this. No one taught me. I feel it. For example, I know if it’s going to be a wet winter if a lot of orb spiders spin webs around our house. I know something is really off when our evergreen Portuguese bay tree leaves begin to turn yellow and it produces massive amounts of purple berries–something it’s never done before. I know something is weird when spring birds have already begun arriving in early January.

My reason for writing this blog is that as a writer, although I know I must write every day no matter what’s going on no matter how I feel, sometimes the silent wail of the planet and its creatures is too alarming as it pushes against me like a fist. It crushes my heart. It all seems just too overwhelming, you know what I mean? Sometimes I just sit, frozen in a theater of images that make no sense.

Apparently we have not one but eight intelligences. Yet we use only two of these in our current education system. This is unfortunate, to put it mildly. They are silent because they’ve been shut out for so long. But we carry all of them within us. If we were to tap into more than two of them, perhaps we could regain our rightful gifts as a species. We have only to sit very still among the trees, under a night sky, in a quiet room, or other environment outside the blinding and deafening human world and listen.  For me that’s usually around three or four in the morning, staring up at the dark ceiling when I wake feeling very, very alone.

The Eight Intelligences

Notebook as Time Machine

While I’m on the subject of re-reading old notebooks, another thing I found in the one I wrote about yesterday was a list I’d made of all the people I’ve known since I was ten. I lay in bed last night until after midnight adding to it. It was an odd rush of memories all muddled together in the present. A distinct feeling that time is an illusion, since most of the names weren’t listed in any particular order. My third grade teacher just above my neighbor from a few years ago just above my first (and only) high school crush. Each  name brought with it a flood of memories frozen in time, scraps, really–places, relationships, emotions, objects, regrets, dreams arrangements, failures.  All stuff of fiction. The list was a goldmine of characters who could be sorted, mixed, and re-invented into countless stories.

A commenter on yesterday’s post mentioned my sentence about shame and suffering. I don’t remember why I wrote those two words in my notebook a few years ago, but I think they must be at the heart of human experience.  I don’t remember if it was my idea or someone else’s.

an occasional striking [notebook] passage, which, lacking the quotation marks, [the writer] is not sure whether to attribute to himself or to someone far cleverer, funnier and more articulate, whom he happened to be reading at the time. (from the blog I mention below)

Shame and suffering. Maybe one causes the other. Shame implies judgment, that we don’t measure up somehow. Who is judging us? At first it’s authority figures, but then we begin to judge ourselves by their standards, which amounts to suffering. I used to think I had no shame, but if I didn’t, I’d be okay running around without clothes and being honest every time I said something. But I’m prevented. I do not want to suffer. I came across the following words in a blog on notebooks by Charles Simic in The New York Review of Books. They seemed relevant to my pursuit of paying attention to shame and suffering:

I opened a book in the [library] stacks and found a passage on1830s France by Charles Fourier, the utopian French philosopher, in which he talks about the dishonesty of business transactions, the tedium and deceit of family life, the hardship of small farmers, the miseries of the poor and near-destitute in great cities, the evils of naked greed, the neglect of genius, the sufferings of children and old people, the stupidity of war, the coercive mechanisms of society disguised as law, morality and the benefits of civilization. Can you believe this? I thought to myself. Everything this man said one-hundred-and-eighty years ago is true about us today. I had no choice but to write it down, so I could prove to my friends that nothing ever changes.

Proust must have understood that memories captured in a notebook can be like a time machine. But do any of us really learn anything? Like most people I know, I follow the path of least resistance. I avoid suffering and pain, when maybe they can teach me lessons I need to learn. Maybe that’s the definition of a hero: someone who steps outside the boundaries of time and shame and suffering. There are many stories tucked away in all this material. All the private moments where I realize I can’t sit still in a room by myself yet.

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Paying Attention to Detail

I was reading through one of my old notebooks. It was an amazing experience. Amazing because I’d forgotten about so much of it. Life is very much a white rabbit, always vanishing down its hole, carrying a pocket watch as it goes.

I re-discovered an experiment I did once, suggested by Jack Heffron in his Writer’s Idea Book. One night I left my notebook at my bedside and as soon as I woke the next morning wrote down as much as I could remember about my dreams.  I carried the notebook around with me all day and wrote down everything I did, things I saw, people I met, places I went in as much detail as I could (capturing detail is a real challenge for me).

I ended my walk at a local coffee shop and had an herbal tea, writing more in the notebook, sketching the people inside. I continued to write in the notebook until I went to sleep that night. The next day I re-read what I’d written. It was quite a volume of material. A single day in the life. What amazed me, though, is that some of what happened in the dream I recorded also took place during the day.  I don’t know what that means and I won’t speculate. But because, like everyone else, I’m caught up in all my distractions during the day, I never would have caught this had I not written it all down. The most valuable results from the exercise were the amount of details I managed to capture. It doesn’t matter if I use them in a project. What matters is that I paid enough attention.

As a side note, I’m trying to observe how shame and suffering work in our lives. I’m trying to pay close attention to unseen gesture and emotion (what people repress out of fear, shame, shyness, whatever). It’s always very subtle.

The most difficult of all is paying extraordinarily close attention to what is on my mind.

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