Monday, February 18, 2008

dead elk

1. Driving up the mountains on the way home one night on the 80, there was a great bloody smear of elk. It was gorey and horrid looking, with the murdered animal in the median, and it's blood and dark meat chunks spread across the fast lane. I was driving in the middle lane, chatting with Jared, we both saw the elk, he looked at the elk, my head whipped up to see, certain I would see, another animal in the lane in front of me. No. It was not foreshadowing. I was certain that the scene called for a second elk, one that I hit, or a live one in the lane in front of me. It wasn't foreshadowing yet, anyway. For the next week, every time I drove past that spot, I braced myself and waited. It wasn't intellectual-- it was some kind of visceral sense of story. What is the timeframe for the second elk? My writer self knows all too well: my whole life. I have been opened up to the possibility that there could always be the elk to echo that first one.

2. I was wearing my white doublebreasted Italian wool coat and eating tomato basil soup at Carlucci's. I ordered half a goat cheese sandwich with tomato soup and I was checking email and eating red soup in my white coat. I had just finally gotten it back from the dry cleaners. "This is really good tension," I thought. "Why won't the character take off her coat? It's all too obvious." I didn't drip soup on the coat.

3. We were walking down near Moab on a camping trip with Steve. He told us about a video he'd seen of bugs that divebomb your eyeball and in the last dying moment lay their eggs. You think nothing of it until you have a big lump under your eyelid, and when you go to the eyedoctor, he uncovers the teeming eyeball bug larvae. (Fortunately they're not common.) Just after he saw that video, one of his co-workers had an eyeball lump and Steve said, "you'd better go get that checked because it might be bugs," and it freaking was eyeball bugs! "Watch out," I told him, "there will be one more eyeball bug incident in your life." Am I cursing him to a literary life? As if he's in a movie and I'm sitting in the audience all self-satisfied because I know where this is headed?

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Wine Glass

This is just goofing off. Practicing video editing.


Monday, February 11, 2008

Cy + Ann

This blog is about what inspires me, and about the questions I'm rubbing up against, so in the spirit of that, here is an email exchanged with Jacob, and then with Laureen:

Jacob, regarding Ann William's "Cold Fire":

Just finished reading it. Absolutely beautiful. Now I just need to figure out what the hell I'm going to teach from it :)

Me, regarding "Cold Fire":

Do you know the work of Cy Twombly? I was just thinking about form, and what Ann was doing in that story, and I thought of little circles, and then I thought of Cy Twombly. I kind of wonder if the story might have started out as a series of straightforward paragraphs, which originally proceeded in a linear way, but then maybe the paragraphs were disassembled, and then reassembled to proceed in a kind of loopy way.

I doubt, though, that Twombly's painting, here, was ever straightforward.




Jacob's response (still regarding "Cold Fire"):

Dude, Twombly totally stole my ideas!

I think the fragments are about reflection from multiple viewpoints to create a series of destabilized subjects - uncertainties if you will - which are then set up in a metonymic relationship with the dead child, which, because it is only presented once, is presented as stable - just as the finality of Gordon's not-return is. But I think that's the trick: a bunch of images that gain narrative momentum/tension because of the dissonance in their multiple revisitings and that gain interest in their metonymic relationship to the dead boy.

This is all me, now, writing just to you:

Recently Jared and I were over at Jacob's house for dinner, and he argued that the emotional effectiveness in art is 90% craft. When I hear that, at first I think he's' wrong, and then I think it's quite possible I still don't know how to write a story.

Here is my question: do you think that we can ruin ourselves as artists if we have too much information? Is there some kind of innocence we've retained in our craft-based education that might be somehow harmed by a rigorous academic training, or do you think that all information goes into a creative toolbox, and the more we have, the better. I think I'm leaning toward the latter, that more knowledge is better... nevertheless, I'm pretty sure you don't have to know what a metonym is to write a good story.

Laureen's response:

"...do you think that we can ruin ourselves as artists if we have too much information?"

Yes, yes, and yes. But every artist is different. Some thrive in academia (think Nabokov, John L'Heureux, Tobias Wolff...), others thrive without (Hemingway, Hawthorne, many many modern fiction writers). I think that I agree with your friend's statement about the emotional effectiveness of art, with a bit of a caveat. To me, it seems that craft (HOW the art is executed) is absolutely responsible for a work's effectiveness, but the point of any work is also its lasting meaning (not just the instinctual, emotional response), and if meaning is tied up with inspiration (big, general word for a big, general concept), then the real question is where does craft draw its ingredients from? I think this is different for everyone, but that staying true to where your own craft comes from means staying true to your writing. Not sure if that makes absolute sense, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's like one of those logic questions on standardized tests (ie if all boozles are bazzles, and all bazzles are beezles, is every beezle a boozle? kind of a thing): a virtuoso craft-person does not necessarily make a good artist. Does anyone remember Junse Kim? (Katie? Mary?) To me, he is the epitome of an excellent craftsman but a terrible writer. Anyway, craft and "the how" seem to lie on the academic side of things, whereas "inspiration" is obviously organic, ever-changing, often-elusive. Good stories come from a combination of the two.

I think I'll leave it at this: we should all strive to not overthink the process while we're executing it; we should follow our instincts and, dammit all, have fun doing it!

Best,
Laureen

Sunday, February 3, 2008

big shapes and little details, cont.



I love this discussion. Katie's ideas on writing from deep intuitive places resonates deeply, and I'm definitely going to read Ron Carlson's book on writing. I have two new stories that I've started and have been neglecting because I have no idea where they are going, and I think I'm letting that be an excuse. I remember Julie Orringer once saying that the most important thing to do is get through the first draft-- I've got three drafts now moldering while I wait to become a person who can impose structure on her work. That's a big bunch of bullshit.

I wrote to Katie earlier that I'm thinking maybe while structure in drawing is something that you need to have down first, in writing it is not. And maybe is detrimental. Maybe. Some writers... like, when David Mitchel wrote Cloud Atlas, he must have worked out the big trajectory of the novel first-- in fact I think perhaps that's the nature of most science fiction... probably. I would like to think about this more, though: is this one of the divides in literary vs. genre fiction? Plot?

But maybe David Mitchel started with the characters, found out about them, and then let them go. I'm starting to think that maybe structure is a second draft kind of affair. Or maybe structure is something that I might have a loose idea of for my first draft, and it is refined in the subsequent drafts.

There is something that has been bugging me, though: Larry McClary. My first and second semester of drawing, both of my teachers sent me to the library with suggestions to look at specific artists who did composition well. I'd bring a drawing to workshop and they'd say, "you need to work on the composition." And when they couldn't articulate why my composition wasn't working, they'd say, "you need to take a class with Larry McClary." Which I did, my third semester, and Larry broke it down for me. Since taking his class, I know what needs to happen to make a drawing: compose it, lay down a value pattern, choose your media, choose the elements of the craft you're focusing on: gesture, line, perspective, etc. But what was scary is that I don't have that kind of ground-up knowledge of how to write a story. And even though the earlier drawing teachers were amazing, they couldn't articulate composition like Larry could. I want to study plot like I studied composition.

My friend Rolf said that he read this study once about the age of different artists hitting their peak. He told me writers hit their stride much later in life than other artists. Maybe that is because it's really not an art you can break down easily. So again, I love this discussion.

This is what I'm working on in my writing right now:

1. Getting through my first drafts.
2. Being a student of structure
3. Letting my intuition and subconscious rule the first draft
4. Learning my craft