structure

I am doing the Field Workshop on Monday nights. It's a group of artists, seven of us, sculptors, dancers, graphic artists, visual artists and writers, who bring work every week, read, show, or perform it, and then sit there silently and get workshopped by the group. We've had two sessions now, and it's so great to be reading my work to other artists, and hearing their responses. The first night after I read, people talked a lot about my language (although they are not writers so used the words "descriptions," and "words.") To describe my language they used words like : "mesmerizing," "beautiful," and the barfy, "romantic," but they meant it in a nice way. The second night I read a different story, and again I got the feedback that my language was beautiful-- and then Amy Caron, an awesome performance artist, said, "you're such an artist. You know, artists don't want to have to deal with the bills, or keep the electricity going. It's almost as if the plot is secondary, you're so caught up in the rich romantic language, like you really just want to describe the world." Busted.

It reminds me of something Zach said after a class where we'd workshopped one of my essays (the same essay, in fact, that I read last week at the Field.) We were riding the shuttle back to Oakland and he said, "you know, it's like you've got everyone fooled. You hypnotize them with all of these beautiful words and ideas, but you really have no idea what you're doing." I kind of like the way Amy Caron put it better, but in both cases it's great criticism.

Language, I think, is like line quality. Line quality, my first drawing teacher at CCA, Judith Foosaner, said is like DNA. Every mark you make, she said, is written in your genes. I'm not sure, though, if you can pick up a pen and just automatically get to that kind of genetic mark or sentence. At least with writing, I think that to get to the kind of writing that unfurls out of your cells you have to kind of soften your focus and tumble into it. Like one day, that first semester of grad school, I sat on my roof deck in San Francisco and spilled ink onto paper. My goal was to make marks that had no effort in them, no sign of anyone trying to manipulate the mark. George Saunders, in an interview on Bookworm, compares his language with interior decorating. If you took objects out of a house, and put objects into a house that all represent the taste of the owner, that taste repeated becomes style.

But about paying the bills. Larry McClary, the drawing teacher I took for my last two semesters at CCA, was all about structure. One of the first things I learned from him was how to compose a drawing. You divide your page into a big simple shape, and then divide that shape into another simple shape. You then have a primary and secondary composition on top of which you build everything else in the drawing. He said that you can tell a beginning artist because they go to the corner of the page and start putting a lot of detail into one little spot on the page, and then work out from there. Composition in writing, I think, is plot: the big basic arc of what happens in the story. I'm pretty sure this is what Zach was telling me I have not mastered. It seems like it should be so basic but I totally struggle with it! All that talk in grad school about figuring out where the story is taking you-- I don't know.

In high school, once I turned sixteen, my favorite thing to do was get in my car and head for the backroads. I'd get to a T in the road and look left, look right, and pick one. I'd see an interesting little dirt road and take it. I think I've used that model for a lot of my writing, too.

Big basic shapes. Big basic shapes. I'm going to come up with something that is so simple it embarasses me. Structure: this is what I'm about in my writing right now.

Check out that George Saunders interview (and in fact, the whole treasure chest of author interviews on Bookworm. It's a fabulous program out of Santa Monica, on KCRW, and you can find interviews with just about everyone there. This morning, in a half sleep state, I had the idea: download them to your iPod, dummy, and listen to them in your car.)