Thinking About Advice

Sometimes when I’m writing a story I start imagining a writing professor teaching the story. The writing professor is very nice to my story. She makes all my failings seem like genius. “See what he’s doing here,” she says. “This whole story is really about destabilizing our sense of narrative. The aunt’s seemingly cliché character traits are deft commentary on the modernist tradition. See?”

I mock the excuse-making writing professor. But at least she’s nice. At least she’s not the mean, flat-topped bully who tells me what I need to do is throw the damn story away and go take a shower. Because, you see, I stink.

There is a debate as to whether writing can be taught. I’ve always found the discussion a bit odd. Sure, a tiny proportion of people in the world can write masterpieces without ever studying narrative structure or learning the principle of show-don’t-tell (and all its caveats). But most of us awaken to this world in, at best, a state of mediocrity. We need to be taught. To be shown. What talent we have needs to be found and shaped. There may be no rules to writing, but there is definitely good advice.

And yet…

The greatest lesson for any writer has little to do with the words on the page. The greatest lesson is to ignore those interior voices. The writing professor. The bully. The tanked-up partygirl who thinks it’d be fun to just go drinking. The bowtied loudmouth who reminds you that there is an argument happening on the Internet and your opinion is needed.

All of these fine folk are fools. Their opinions are worthless. The only way to ever create a decent story/novel/article/etc. is to stay in the chair until it is done and then remain in the chair until it is revised and revised and revised.

Of all the lessons I’ve learned from my mentors, the most consistently valuable is to stay in the chair. And to stay true to myself and not the voices. Failure will still happen. But it won’t be guaranteed. And in this business, that’s actually a pretty big step.

Uncomfortable Weather

It is too cold for late April in South Texas. Gray. The birds are huddled in confusion and my ancient dog is curled into the kind of funk peculiar to dogs who could once sprint after the furthest tennis ball but now struggle to ascend a few stairs. The cold puts an ache in his joints.

I am more like the birds.

Today I will write. Yesterday I wrote. Tomorrow I will write. This is more than mere conjugation. This is philosophy. Or at least credo. I write, therefor—

But there are seasons, of course. Days, indeed. Something unsettled occasionally moving into the air. To which I tilt my head and wonder what machinations of high pressures and winds and deep currents and so forth led to this. There are always forces behind it. Those in the know see it gathering. Although, I never know. And so I am surprised. And I am late to grab a sweater.

I used to run more, too. Not that I am ancient or anything near. But years ago I could run the entirety of Prospect Park. I am winded easily now. I walk instead. And that I can do well. Unless the weather is bad. Then I do this instead.

In Defense of Adverbs (etc.)

I see the admonition frequently. No adverbs. They weaken the bones. This is sometimes expanded into the advice that all extra words should be summarily exorcised. Except, of course, they wouldn’t use the word ‘summarily.’ Or, probably, ‘of course.’ Or ‘probably.’ Probably.

 

And here's where I get to my point. Yes, words weaken our work when those words are unnecessary. But what was unnecessary to, say, Raymond Carver may be vital to Jennifer Egan. Which is to say: all words can serve a purpose. Adverbs are not, I believe, inherently bad. They are easily abused, that’s for sure. They are the gateway drug to purple prose. To prose whose ornamentations blunt its power. But there are times when what might at first glance appear to be ornamentation—those flourishes and the those uses of the linguistically baroque—are, on further review, a powerful part of the prose. Indeed, they can often be an important aspect of what we call voice.

 

When voice was first mentioned to me, I wasn’t sure what the hell it was. I sensed it had something to do with syntactical choices, as if voice was a formula for producing sentences. I was wrong, obviously. But I wasn’t wrong wrong. Because there is an element of voice that enters the syntactical. And that often has something to do with the preponderance of flourishes. Of adverbs. Of asides. Of conversationality (but, of course, you see…). These ‘unnecessary’ words can give a story a certain pop, a unique rhythm that enhances rather than detracts from the artistic/emotional/enjoyment impact.

 

They also give us a sense of the writer’s consciousness. Meaning, it is through the way a writer uses language that we enter their interior world. We see things the way they see things. Even when we’re being led through a story by a character or characters, we are still within the writer’s consciousness. The greatest writers expand our view of the world by forcing us to tilt our heads and see things from a different vantage. And that vantage is, by the nature of the craft, their vantage.

 

I believe the admonition to delete so-called unnecessary words can flatten prose to the point that we no longer have access to a writer’s consciousness. That helps create what is often (erroneously) called MFA-style writing. Those sentences that haven’t been carefully constructed so much as they have been industriously pruned. Those voices that don’t invite us into a consciousness but rather try to impress (or at least avoid offense) with their technical precision. That is the kind of writing I often see and almost never enjoy.

 

I am making a broad claim, I realize. Just as I realize that a wonton use of language can be equally alienating. There is room for a thousand opinions when it comes to craft. But the more I write and (more importantly) the more I read, the more I fall in love with those so-called extra words. Those embellishments. Those much-maligned adverbs.

 

Our language is a vast and roiling pool. I like the idea of diving deep and barely making it up for air.

The Lawn is Dead Again

Once, I overheard a woman complaining about all the packing she had to do for her upcoming cruise¹.

What I complain about is time. Or, rather, the constriction thereof. No time to water the lawn. No time to organize my closet. No time to, well, blog.

This is self-inflicted, of course. There is always some quantifiable amount of time after work is done and the kids' needs/wants/whims are taken care of and my own belly is full. But with what to fill that time? Read a novel and miss my favorite television show? Write a blog post and leave my shirts hanging in an incongruent mess of colors and sleeve lengths?

I jest. I guess. Television is patient for us these days and worrying about the arrangement of shirts is neurotic at best. Particularly for a guy who works at home and wears t-shirts 90% of his life.

But…

Well, there’s more, isn’t there? There are those things that are less important than keeping one’s children alive but more important than keeping one’s lawn alive. And those things need time, too.

Exercise. Sleep. The pursuit of dreams.

How do you finish a novel while working constantly and raising children? How do you do that without pissing off your spouse and your friends? From where do you embezzle the time? Do you let your gym membership fester? Do you sleep so little that your hair falls out? Because we’re not talking about needing 30 minutes here and there. We’re talking about needing hours that will equal days that will equal weeks that will count upwards to full months of minutes.

When I heard that woman talking about her cruise, I thought how much I would love it if my chief complaint was having to pack for a vacation. Privilege has its privileges. Nannies! Gardeners! Maids! Personal frickin’ chefs!!

But…

That’s not really the point, is it? Even the most privileged can find reasons to be frustrated, can permit unhappiness to slither into their days. If we let it, emptiness can consume a thousand free hours. Sure, with time, we might be able to exercise until our bodies are stone-like while blogging/tweeting/status updating every rep and crunch. Our lawns will glow with heavenly green. Our clothes will hang in beautiful coordination.

But that pursuit of dreams thing? We might have the time, but do we have the...

Will. Want. Need.

No one finishes a novel simply because they have free time. Even the worst of novels took more than a few free afternoons. And the best of them? A million years wouldn’t be long enough for most of us to equal the feat.

Time may be a necessity but it is a road; it contains no fuel of its own. As I stumble deep into my 30s, I’m learning that, when I have not the time to write, it’s not the lack of time I should blame. I live a comfortable enough life. Time is there. In pockets. Gasps. Centimeters of space. It’s just a matter of having the will to use it. And the will to let the lawn die.

1. For weeks I’d been in a situation where I could eavesdrop on this woman and her friends. The upper-class overtones of this particular statement are quite representative of this woman’s wealth and, um, separation from the common concerns.^a

            a. This is the only footnote.

That Pulitzer Thing

So, you know the story. Pulitzer didn't pick a fiction winner this year. Literary world burns. Etc.

In responding to Ann Patchett's piece in The New York Times where she contends that Eugenides's The Marriage Plot could have won if Eugenides hadn't previously won, a friend of mine said that if The Marriage Plot is representative of the year's finest fiction, then maybe it's a good thing no one won because, to paraphrase, a no winner might be good for American fiction, given the Pulitzer committee as earned the integrity to tell the writing community that it's falling short of greatness.

So, to that, I say:

Obviously if the Pulitzer committee doesn't think anything is worthy of their esteem then it's their prerogative to withhold the award. However, I find it rather silly that they have done so, regardless of the quality of fiction released last year.

The purpose of awarding the Pulitzer is to recognize the best writing. The purpose is not to serve as some carrot meant to inspire better writing. To make an analogy: while an Oscar for an art film can surely lead to more art films (based on the funding that becomes available due to the prestige/economic gain that comes with doing a film that is/may be Oscar worthy), works of literature, during their lonely process of creation, are removed from the kinds of economics/funding needs of films.

I can't imagine any serious author deciding to write a book "like" one that just won a Pulitzer. And I certainly can't see any serious author thinking "well, damn, I should write better" simply because the Pulitzer committee withheld the award this year. I suppose this might influence authors writing for non-literary reasons, but the Pulitzer doesn't exist to recognize writers of non-artistic motivations.

 
If the Pulitzer committee found none of the books they looked at worthy, perhaps they should reconsider the types of books that make it through the selection process and reach that committee. Perhaps it is that process and not the state of American fiction that is the problem.
 
My point being: I find it extremely hard to believe that NO work of fiction released in 2011 rose to the standards of excellence set by previous winners. Sure, some years the winner will be far superior to other years; but greatness is a fluid thing and exists within a spectrum. To withhold the award is rather pompous and only hurts the writing community that Pulitzer exists to support. Their decision this year takes away not only economic gain but it takes away readers who may have engaged with a work of literature because it held Pulitzer's seal.

I suppose it helps their "integrity" by having the option to withhold the award, but actually withholding the award isn't doing much, if anything, to help American letters. It is, however, giving plenty of writers plenty of reason to get up on their high horses.

And if it appears that I cut-and-paste this from an email, you're right. Consider it time saving since I wanted to write about this anyway.

Of Rainbows and O.J.

Wanted to point to a couple of stories that entered the world in the last week.

"To the End" is over at Used Furniture Review.

"Twenty-Nine Failed Beginnings to 'The Tag Brewster Story'" is over at H_NGM_N.

Thrilled about both of these and I have to personally thank Matthew Dube at H_NGM_N for the time and energy he put into helping me get this story where it needed to be.

It is interesting how these things align. Both of these stories proved super tricky and each took a long time to bring together. "Twenty-Nine Failed Beginnings" definitely holds my personal record for time elapsed between first draft and final publication. "To the End" holds my time-elapsed record for a flash-length story.

Hope you enjoy them.

Chicago Was...

So, I AWPed again. Books, booze and beards. I don’t have a beard. But I made up for it in books and booze.

At some point between Denver (my first and most recent AWP) and Chicago, I became the kind of person who runs into people at the book fair. I ran into a lot of people. And, of course, I sought more than a few others out. It was all a hell of a lot of fun.

Cool moment: discovering that Hayden’s Ferry Review made a button out of my story “Leap.”

Another cool moment: meeting Jarrett Haley at Bull and getting to thank him in person for publishing “What Our Fathers Knew,” the first story of mine to ever really got noticed in the indie publishing world.

Beautiful moment(s): hearing Cheryl Strayed read twice.

Beautiful moment addendum: I got to hang out with Cheryl Strayed for a while in the hotel restaurant. She has been a mentor and a friend and I loved getting to tell her how happy I am for all the attention and success she’s having.

Continuously awesome moment: rolling with my MFA gang (literally rolling, as it seemed we were always in cabs). Seth Fischer, Heather Luby, Yuvi Zalkow, Eric Steineger, LeVan Hawkins, Telaina Ericksen and Robert Egan are all killer writers, cool people, and fine, fine drinkers of adult beverages.

Most awkward moment: in a weekend full of awkwardness, I managed to compliment Michael Czyzniejewski on a story he didn’t read. Or rather, I completely misheard the story he read and told him afterwards how wonderful his story on William Wallace was, when it was a story about William Wells. Which should have been obvious even to my AWP-addled brain. He was reading from his excellent collection Chicago Stories.

Regrettable moment: all those moments I didn’t get to spend with people I’d planned to see. The whole thing goes by so fast and there are a million events at any given moment and my best laid plans were, apparently, not so well laid.

Best moment: The world that flowed chilly and occasionally snowy, so full of words, on pages, from mouths, in minds.

The Rabbit Was Yummy and Other Great Plots

I get blogger’s block. I do. Weeks go by and I have not a thing I want to say here. This is odd. I don’t get writer’s block. Or rather, I’m never short on ideas for stories. I’ve got stories aplenty. So many stories.

Here’s something: I just finished A Dance With Dragons, the most recent installment in George R.R. Martin’s sword-and-sorcery epic. I take those books in with a mindsweep. I unlock my literary jaws and consume them python style. My limbic system gets so juiced that my critical-reading faculties give up and go hang out at the bar until I’m done. Seriously. I cannot comment one way or the other on the series’ literary merit. Ask me to write a review of Martin’s series and you’d get: “ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod.”

One of the first books I remember loving was called Experiment in Terror. It was a YA title, I think. It was about aliens who grow up as humans and don’t know they’re aliens until their bodies start changing. Come to think of it, it must have been a puberty analogy. Experiment in terror, indeed.

Point being: I’ve always had an affinity for what’s usually called genre.

The novel I’m working on now has aspects of sci-fi. But it has far fewer aspects of sci-fi than did my first attempt at this story. I found that all the sci-fi I was including was absorbing too much of the story’s energy, pulling the gravity away from the characters. I have more tolerance for “big plots” in the stuff I read. I have very little tolerance for “big plots” in my own stuff. Everything always ends up feeling forced. A forgery.

Speaking of plots, about time for The Walking Dead to find one. Come on, guys. Can’t spend the entire show sitting around a farm waiting for Shane to kill or be killed. A little momentum is not a bad thing.

A Dance With Dragons has pounds of plot. You could use the plot to calculate the density of the sun.

The plot of the novel I’m writing revolves around the finding or not finding of a mythical city. Kinda. It’s also about love tearing the world in half. Perhaps I should add in something about aliens experiencing puberty. And throw in a few zombies and dragons, too. I bet a teenage alien zombie dragon novel would sell. Thing writes itself.

I guess the plot of this post is plots. Although, when I started, I intended on mentioning my successful preparation of rabbit. On Wednesday of last week, I decided I wanted rabbit for dinner that coming Saturday. I made this happen. The plot was: Alan wants to eat a bunny. It was a very linear story progressing to a happy ending. No genre elements in sight.

This is the First Time I've Ever Mentioned Tao Lin

Apparently there has been a controversy (litroversy?) over a story published at MuuMuu House. “Adrien Brody” by Marie Calloway. I like Rae Bryant’s take. Super intelligent and just the right tone.

MuuMuu House is a Tao Lin production. Tao Lin gets mentioned an awful lot in the indie lit world. This is the first time he’s been mentioned here.

It seems people like to take positions concerning Tao Lin. My official position on Tao Lin is: meh.

My official position on “Adrien Brody” is: I’d have liked to have seen it as a 450 word prose poem.

Full disclosure: I didn’t read the whole 15,000 words. I found it not to my tastes.

This Caitlin Horrocks story in Paris Review is to my tastes.

As is this Robb Todd piece at The Fiddleback.

Both those stories take place in a normal kind of day and are written in clear prose. And yet, the voices are beautiful and the impacts lasting.

I got into a period last year where I moved too far away from direct storytelling. I blame Matt Bell. How They Were Found has some brilliant stories written in structurally innovative ways; I read it early in 2011 and was so impressed I wanted to try some formal experimentation, too. Turns out, I can’t do what Matt does. Or, perhaps, rather, my most true voice cannot accommodate too much fiddling with form.

Last year was mostly a lost year publishing wise. But I think it was a very significant writing year. Even if 98% of what I wrote in 2011 will never leave my file folders.

By all accounts, Marie Calloway is very young. I wonder what she’ll be writing when she’s 40.

I wonder what I’ll be writing when I’m 40.

I’ll be 40 in 2.75 years.

People tell me this makes me young, too.

Remembered Sounds

My neighbor is doing some work on his house and, this morning, someone was using what I assume was a nail gun. The sound was rich and rhythmic, something between a tap and a thud. It was a sound that sent me thirty-or-more years back, leaving me a young boy sitting in a wood-paneled den and listening to my mother type her first novels. Her work came in these tap-thud bursts that I'm sure I didn't quite understand. But the sound of that typewriter--the sound of my mother writing--must have pushed deep into my mind. Lodged there. So that this morning, as I worked on my own writing, a nail gun reminded me of my mother in her literary youth.

And I wonder, in thirty-years to come, if my son or daughter will hear a soft clicking like a keyboard and think of me, still young and believing, sitting with a dark head of hair at the dining room table of their youth and writing books that now sit on their shelves.

Charlie Baxter Dance Party

I was gone for awhile, on the mountain, they say, although those of us on this side of the continent (even those of us in the flat parts) tend to call such soft and rolling land hilly. Not mountainous. So, I was in the hills. Of Vermont.

Everything was very old, except the people. Many of the people were young and filled with what I believe is called verve. Even the old people had young people verve. I’m pretty sure no one was themselves and everyone was exactly who they are.

I’m talking about the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, by the way.

We ate at determined times and we ate what we were fed. I liked a duck dish. The tacos made me laugh. Those deemed to have incredible talent and potential waited on us and I could not help but note how much they all sweated. They were nice people. All of them. But I was jealous. They’d been chosen. I was just allowed to watch them work.

Somewhere between the inn and the Frost cabin, I realized why so few of my stories ever end in any satisfactory way. I was carrying this little green fruit that I’d been told was a crab apple and I was talking and talking, as I do, even when sober, which I was since you couldn’t get a drink until 5:30 or so. It’s about tension, I said. The story ends at the point that particular story cannot contain any more tension, at the point right after it breaks, or right when you know it inevitably will. There is no end until the tension reaches that point. This sounds rudimentary as I write it. There was more to it. There was revelation.

I credit Charles Baxter. He gave a lecture on plot that made people cry. No shit. That happened.

I wore sweaters some days. It was 100+ degrees back home and I was in sweaters and listening to the rain. You want to talk feeling displaced? You want to talk falling out of time? I could feel the thousands who had come before me. Hope. Laughter. In a corner of the barn a piano sat mostly unplayed. They used to jam on it, I was told. They used to fill that barn with their singing.

No one knew where we were. Even those who could find us on a map.

Everyone carried satchels of books. I just spent two-hundred dollars at the bookstore, people would say. And we thought this is how the world should be.

On the last night, there was a dance. There’d been a dance previously but the last dance is always the best dance. And so we drank and flung ourselves around. I smacked into Charles Baxter who laughed. I banged my fists on the floor with the guy who’d began as my roommate but is now a wonderful friend. I consumed a healthy amount of wine and, when the music ended, I was still spinning.

Coming down that hill (that mountain) on the final morning, I thought I might be ill. I blamed it on the wine. But it was probably something else.

I Was Going to be Crass

I dreamed I called an old friend. I was in my kitchen. The conversation was filled with pauses and words used to end those pauses. “Well.” “Anyway.” I had the sense that I needed something resolved but I – the dreamer – didn’t know what this thing needing resolution was. More-or-less, I was observing myself in a private moment. Two degrees to my own left. This is how I feel every time I write a story. I never quite have a grasp as to what the hell is going on.

I want to complain about something but I don’t want to seem like a whiner, or ungracious to a world that has, overall, been very kind to me. Maybe it’s my Texas stoicism. Or Celtic pride.

I was invited to a party and they let me have a beer then asked me to leave. I stood on the street and watched everyone else through the window. It was bright in there. People moved like cattails and swallows. No one looked down to see where I’d gone.

If you type in swallow on Yahoo’s search bar, it will suggest that you’re searching for “swallow birds,” “swallow tattoo,” “swallow my load” ... in that order. I was wondering if swallow like the bird was really spelled the same as swallow like the action of the throat. Apparently, yes, it is.

Part of me wants to title this post: Swallow my load. As you can see, I did not. I’m uncomfortable being crass. Your crassness, however, bothers me not at all.

Short Getting Shorter

I haven't been writing much flash. I've been enjoying taking a little more time with things, leaving room to extend language. Not that I'm writing epics, mind you.

But I wonder what the popularity of flash is doing to our perceptions of things. And by "our," I mean the world of journals and journal readers. Today, I had a story rejected. The reason given: the story is too long to be so reliant on the poetic over the narrative.

The story is 1,500 words.

I'm pretty sure that's quite short.

I assume the journal had issues beyond the poetic-to-narrative balance (not claiming it's the most brilliant thing I've ever done), but I do find the specific concern over the length strange. It's as if flash has trained us to expect a full story in the tiniest possible spaces. Maybe this story needs to be cut in half. But, eight years ago, I would've never imagined a 1,500 word story referred to as "a story of this length." As if it were something bloated and unwieldy.

The Sweet Smell of Failure

That was the title to an original oratory I used in theater/debate competition when I was a senior in high school. It didn't ever win. No one wanted to hear about failure. The people who won talked about patriotism or gun rights (this was Texas) or how important it was that we beat the Japanese (economically, of course ... this was the early 90s). I think my oratory took people too far out of their comfort zone. I also think I could've used a better title.

Anyway, that's the long intro to this video by friend and fellow writer Yuvi Zalkow. It's more-or-less about how to get past writing failures while revising. It's great. I think you'll like it. I've even embedded it below for your convenience.

I Am A Failed Writer. Episode 1: Revisions from Yuvi Zalkow on Vimeo.

This Other Thing

I should be revising a novel; instead I burned a week on one of the worst short stories I’ve ever written. That’s probably not true. I’ve probably written worse, but this one is closer so it feels uglier.

I do this a lot. Write bad stories. Sometimes I even submit them. Sometimes I submit them repeatedly. Then, one day, I read them and I see that they are bad and I feel ashamed about that, although, truly, there shouldn’t be anything shameful about producing bad art. Not giving up your seat on the bus to an old lady – that’s shameful. Failing at art? Hell, least you’re focused on something outside of your own personal comfort, right?

And yet...

I don’t know. I wish I could better identify a bad story early on – like before I even start writing it. Time trickles into this jar beneath me and I can’t get it back and more time just keeps falling and I know this shouldn’t make me all antsy, but it does. I believe I have some great writing within me, but it takes so damn long to extract that I could die before I ever hit the main vein. That’s what this is about, of course. Death being what everything is about. Even love, I think. Although that’s probably one of those simple statements that sounds profound but is really just simple.

I’m a bad reviser. I try to correct every little thing and I obsess on those things too much and just end up making things fake and inaccessible. I can’t seem to shake the belief that all things CAN be corrected with the right effort. I’m not talking writing, although it applies in full to that. I’m talking about my state of being. My mistakes ... well ... I don’t ever believe things are ruined. I believe, if I just work at it, I can fix what I broke. This, I think, seems admirable. Or, at least, that’s what I’d tell someone who told me they don’t give up on fixing what they broke. But sometimes shit is just broke. It’s trashed. And all the tape and glue will never make it anything more than this wad of tape and glue that somewhat resembles an unbroken thing.

I wish I had more time, or started earlier, which is the same thing in a way.

I wrote a story about a rainbow because I dared myself to. It’s pretty good, I think. Then I wrote a story about two women who are married and have no genitalia – because someone suggested I should write such a story. That’s the horrible one referenced above. I would’ve thought the results would’ve been the other way around. Then, again, I thought Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was going to better than 30 Rock. Sometimes premise and potential are nothing. Sometimes it’s just about knowing who you are and not trying to be this other thing.

This other thing. Whatever that is today.

Tournaments and Tragedy and Everything

So I’m sitting with a fellow writer at a chain restaurant bar in a part of town that only has chains and people who want chains and we’re watching the spread of TVs and the NCAA men’s basketball tournament is being covered on most of the TVs except one that is covering the devastation in Japan and I look to my writer friend and I say: isn’t this the kind of thing modern writing should be trying to capture? This shattering of attention, this bizarre alignment of the banal and the horrific, what we consider important being shifted and moved by the programming needs of media as well as our own selfish needs to be insulted from things such as catastrophe and comforted by things such as sports where winners are clear and the pattern is so set that it’s known even before the participants are known, the only unknown being the final way those participants will be organized within the pattern. And here we’ll be, filling out our brackets while Japan bags up its dead and searches for enough capacity in their crematoriums. Although, I imagine, there are plenty of banal distractions in Japan, too. Then again, the thing is, I’m not so sure the NCAA tournament IS a distraction for a lot of people ... I think, for some, Japan is the distraction and that the NCAA tournament is the more important happening, will use up more emotional energy. I don’t place a moral judgment on that; it’s just an observation. There’s too much happening at any given moment and too little energy within any one of us to FEEL something about everything. Libyan rebels are getting murdered, btw. They’ve picked a bad news cycle.

This Thing, Right Now

I finally saw The Social Network. Seeing a highly praised movie well after its “moment” is a good recipe for disappointment. That expected disappointment didn’t disappoint.

The movie was fine. It was well-acted and the dialogue was that fun, nobody-really-talks-like-that-but-wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if-we-did thing with which Aaron Sorkin has been delighting me for many years. But I completely missed how this movie captured anything about the times we live in – or rather how it captured anything more about the times we live in than say, Inception, which, if nothing else, cut right to the way our modern world relies on controlling the opinions of others (leave your “Inception sucks” complaints elsewhere – I’m celebrating its premise more than its execution).

In my mind, The Social Network wasn’t about “this world” but rather “that world,” meaning the world of programmers and hackers that occasionally creates fantastical explosions of humanity-altering change that rockets several odd, probably-on-the-spectrum, geniuses to fame and fortune. This movie, I think, could be about Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Which isn’t to say the movie had nothing to say about the current times, just that what it had to say was submerged beneath a character study of Mark Zuckerberg and those his rise to success affected most. Just because it’s about Facebook doesn’t mean it’s about Facebook.

And, really, I’m not sure any film can adequately capture what things like Facebook are doing to our culture. And that’s because what Facebook is doing is so internal to each person. Our external lives look pretty much as they have for awhile – we take kids to school, we make dinner, we sleep and root for sports franchises. But inside of this, we’re building these new communities that have the power to affect our wellbeing as much or more than our physical world.

This is significant. This is an alteration of the psyche that I’d argue is on par with the kind of shift caused by the great wars of the 20th century. How we perceive and relate to the world is radically changing.

A movie about the founder of a social networking site doesn’t really capture this (in America, young white men have long been able to get filthy rich and screw over their friends by taking control of a valuable product). What I believe can capture this in all its complexities is literature. Because, out of all the arts, literature is most capable of piercing the interior of human thinking and reflecting the way we order thoughts and emotions.

I’m sure a gifted filmmaker can and will prove me horribly wrong in my assessment of film’s ability to capture the social networking revolution; but I’m also sure I will, in the coming years, read far more fiction that captures this than I will see movies that capture this. In fact, I already have. What is Matt Bell’s How They Were Found but a representation of the reordering of thought and the imprecision of truth that comes from a world where our access to information is as likely to complicate as it is to solve anything? And what is Kevin Brockmeier’s new novel The Illumination (which I am reading now) but an examination of what becomes of us when all our inner pain is broadcast for the world to see? (as so many seem intent on broadcasting ever ache and misfortune on Facebook)

We live in a heady time, y’all. This is happening now. And those of us who write, have the opportunity to help make sense of this all ... or at least provide evidence of what it’s like to be alive in this time of incalculable change.

Just the other night I said to my wife that I’m glad I was in college before the proliferation of digital cameras and social media. There weren’t a lot of photos taken in those days and those that were taken are sitting on film, likely forgotten in someone’s closet. That fact right there separates me in profound ways from those who were in college just as few years after me. In fact, my college experience –or, at least, the repercussions thereof, are closer to my parents’ experience than they are to my friends’ who were born half a decade later. If that’s not evidence of something radical happening, I don’t know what is.

How do we capture this? That redefining of privacy? That change interpersonal relationships? That effect on the ways we conduct our daily lives? That alteration in the ways we perceive and present ourselves?

Those, I think, are excellent questions for us writers writing now. Excellent questions.

What Shall Not Be Disliked

Jason Jordan wrote this post about some writers he doesn’t much care for. Indie lit world (is that the proper terminology?) went all flamey. Maybe it still is all flamey. I was away and missed the beginning of this and so I’m not sure where we are on the outrage arc. At least far enough to have passed through immediate attack against Jason and the following stages of various defenses.

(I would link to all this talk but I am lazy and if you read this place you probably read other places and I’m recapping what doesn’t need recap. Which I hear is excellent writing.)

Anyway, this is all interesting. I used to political blog. A lot. And if you are ever inclined to find reasons to dislike me, feel free to Google my political pieces. I wrote from the contrarian center and almost certainly wrote an opinion or fifty you’ll find obnoxious, even ignorant and callous. I’ve been called a supporter of evil – from people on both “sides” of the spectrum (I consider this a feat worth mentioning). I’ve been emailed hate mail so vitriolic, so dismissive of my humanity that I’ve questioned the very stability of our national psyche.

But that’s how it works in the political blog world. Bloggers going after each other with high-tech rhetorical weaponry (and low-tech vulgarity). It’s free speech at its most audacious. Not for the thin skinned.

I mention all this for what is probably an obvious observation: the indie lit world (still don’t know if this is the right word combination) operates under very different “rules”. We praise effusively that which we like and stay mum on that which we don’t. I imagine this is out of some shared sense of fragility, that our community needs protection and encouragement because we’re cultural outliers and already suffer under the weight of constant rejection, not just from journals but from all those who look at us not-famous writers and say “have I heard of anything you’ve written?” as if such a thing is the only conceivable measure of our worth.

That said, I tend to think too much carefulness is stifling. Too much tending of the walls means not enough tending of the sheep. (I don’t know who the sheep are in that metaphor, but go with me here.) If the indie lit world can’t suffer a guy listing some indie-ish writers whom he doesn’t like, how can we expect to survive the metastatic dismissiveness of the greater culture? Who even cares if Jason Jordan gave fleeting rationale for his personal tastes or not? Are we not allowed to dislike something publically? Do we really feel such a thing will topple our walls?

I think the proper reaction to Jason Jordan’s post is to debate his opinions not attack him for having one or hide behind attacks on his chosen style of critique. This is the first and almost certainly the last time I say this, but: we could learn from the world of political bloggers. There’s something to be said for sucking it up and moving on.

Questions, Questions

If I gave you a page of fiction and said “this is the first page of a three-page story,” you’d have certain expectations, right? And if I said “this is the first page of a novel,” you’d have other expectations. But in each case, what would it take for you to want to read more? Is the bar set higher or lower for a novel or a three-page story? I mean, if you know there’s only two more pages to the conclusion, does that make it more likely for you to read more? Or, conversely, if that first page is promising but not, say, “gripping,” is it the novel that would make you read more (because there’s so much space for things to develop)?

Does knowing the length of something impact your judgment of its beginning? Is it even fair to judge a novel on a page or a few pages? Do you expect literature to begin like an episode of Hawaii Five-0 with a lot of action and a clear establishment of stakes? Or do you just want something that displays a compelling voice or sets up something big and potentially grand?

I often make judgments on a piece of short fiction in a journal within the first paragraph. I’ve done that with books in a bookstore, too. There are plenty of times I’ve stopped reading right there. But, clearly, whoever published the piece or the novel had a far different reaction. Chalk that up to variations in taste.

But it makes me think. Is it possible to write something that can’t be dismissed? Or can everything be dismissed by someone? And if everything can be dismissed by someone, what percentage of dismissing is acceptable for you, as a writer? 10%? 45%? 85%? I mean, even if only 5% of people who read what you write think its existence is necessary, that’s a lot of people. And aren’t those people worth writing for?

These Things Will Make You Moody

Last night I checked my email late, just because. There, waiting, was rejection number 3,435 from a certain online journal. Hyperbole, of course. But it feels that way and every time they tell me no, I spend a few moments sulking. This time, since it was late, I headed to bed gripped by this ugly mood, only to find my daughter awake in her room and looking terribly sad. She’d had a bad dream or wasn’t feeling well – her articulation of the problem was poor – but I picked her up and carried her to my bed and let her sleep on my shoulder.

Then I thought of this. An essay at Big Other where Amber Sparks admits to feeling undo anxiety because she’s constantly reading on Facebook (and elsewhere) about other writer’s publications/readings/general success. She feels behind; she feels pressured to keep up and write more and be noticed more and achieve more. And I’m lying there with my daughter on my shoulder and I’m feeling sorry for myself for this latest rejection, except now I’m wondering why. The story is good. Many of the pieces I’ve sent to this particular journal have been good. And, frankly, despite their prestige, I really only enjoy half of what they publish and tend to find the other half perfect presentations of the emperor’s new clothes. Why do I keep submitting to a journal with an aesthetic that I think tends towards the incomprehensible for incomprehensibility’s sake, that holds up a certain kind of obfuscation as something grand when it is, in my opinion, mostly something meaningless.

This isn’t an attack on certain styles of writing; aesthetics vary and I know I don't have the most experimental of tastes. But, seriously, why the hell am I submitting to (and getting disappointed by) a journal that is clearly operating at an angle different from my own?

The answer is: it’d be really cool to appear there. I mean, it seems like everyone else gets published there. Shouldn’t I want to be published there? Isn’t it imperative for me to keep up with the writing joneses? See me, see me, I’m a talented and prolific writer!

This is silly. This is unhealthy. We’re not a factory; we’re not measured on output. And the quality of our work doesn’t change based on where it appears. A good story is a good story is a good story. The goal, I think, should be to write those good stories and let the rest work itself out. If it takes a long time to craft that story, then it takes a long time. If it takes fifty rejections to find a home for that story, then it takes fifty rejections.

At least these are the thoughts that came to me last night. With my daughter on my shoulder. The purpose of things and such. The point of it all.