Tag Archives: postaweek2011

A Walk in the Park and Minor White

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The other day, I fired up Google to look at opinions on the appropriate age for protagonists of young adult vs. middle grade fantasy. The reason, as I have said here recently, is that I am reviewing all my ideas and assumptions about the story I’m working on. Everything is on the table.  I was thinking of the greater freedom middle grade fantasy allows; as one blogger put it, “in middle grade, tall ships and laptops can exist in the same universe.”

Opinions on the age divide between the two genres varied, and in particular, no one seemed to know where to put a 14 year old lead character – what I am currently leaning toward for my heroine.  She started out 14, became 16 for a while, and is probably going to get younger again.

At the end of this search I was not only frustrated with the lack of clear answers, but also slightly disgusted with myself.  I have written about not being bound by rules, and these are the most inane sort of rules.  I remembered my very first post on this blog, when I quoted from Neil Gaiman’s editorial notes for the collection of stories called, Stories (William Morrow, 2010).  Gaiman says:  “I realized that I was not alone in finding myself increasingly frustrated with the boundaries of genre:  the idea that categories which existed only to guide people around bookshops now seemed to be dictating the kinds of stories that were being written.”

The next day, Mary and I were walking in the local park and I was relating the results of my search and grousing a bit.  I said, “It would be nice to forget the whole business of getting published.”  She shrugged and said, “Why don’t you?”

Why don’t I indeed?  And we’re not talking here of the old cliche, “I just write for myself,” which implies indifference to quality or being read.  We’re talking of what T.S. Eliot meant when he said, “Take no thought for the harvest but only for the proper sowing.”

Why don’t I?  The reason is simple.  I’m still learning my craft as a writer, still a little hungry for external validation, but I have travelled this arc from apprentice to journeyman before.  I thought of the words and photographs of Minor White who influenced me more than anyone else when, after two years of college, I changed majors and schools to study art and photography.  Minor White’s dedication to photography as a spiritual practice was one of the reasons I went.

White, (1908-1976), began taking photographs in 1938 after spending five years writing poetry.  In 1946, Ansel Adams invited him to join the faculty of the first American fine arts photography department at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco.  White’s work always had an inward focus; he evolved the concept of “equivalents,” a word first coined by the photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, who served as a mentor for White’s and Adams’s entire generation.

Equivalents are photographs, often of mundane subjects, that are seen with an almost visionary regard for form and light.  At their best, “equivalents” evoke powerful and even semi-mystical responses in the viewer, unrelated to the literal meaning of the image.  Later in his working and teaching career, White wrote extensively of Zen and camera work.

Snow Door by Minor White

Zen has always been associated with certain arts, traditionally, painting, poetry, archery, flower arranging, and the tea ceremony. Zen Master Dogen (1200-1253) wrote a manual for cooks.  My friend, Rosi Hollinbeck, has written about the inspiration she gets from Natalie Goldberg who writes about writing from the perspective of a long time Zen practitioner:  http://rosihollinbeckthewritestuff.blogspot.com/2011/03/book-for-writers-and-lovers.html.

For me, it was Minor White who opened a doorway into the practice of art as a spiritual discipline.  At the core of any such discipline are moments of selflessness, where the subject-object split disappears, and mindfulness replaces concern for the “product.”

I hadn’t thought of Minor White in some time, but the memory brought a great sense of relief, because I remembered that once before I had learned a craft well enough that it sometimes became transparent, became a doorway to “the still point in the turning world.”  Sometimes I didn’t realize when it was happening; sometimes I did, as with this image of a crumbling barn in western New York.

"Near Oswego, NY," 1973, by Morgan Mussell

Seen from this perspective, the answer to Mary’s question, “Is it possible to forget about results in writing,” becomes, “It is necessary!”

I was fortunate enough to meet some of the great photographers of White’s generation – Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham.  I never met Minor White himself.  It’s probably just as well.  He was a heros then, and some heroes can loom so large it is hard to let them go when the time comes.

Minor White, 1973. Photo by Robert Haiko

I don’t really have heroes now; heroes are for young men.  What I have is tremendous gratitude and respect for those who, like Minor White, served as mentors and guides.  These are people who found a way to walk their own individual paths, and in doing so, showed us that it remains possible.

First Family by David Baldacci: A Book Review

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Sometimes you luck out and find good reads just by browsing, and so it was with David Baldacci’s First Family, 2009, an action adventure novel featuring private detectives Sean King and Michelle Maxwell.  As ex-Secret Service agents, both know Washingon, and in this case, the first lady, who calls them when her 12 year old niece, Willa, is kidnapped.

At first, we know who the good guys and bad guys are, and the breakdown of that certainty as the story moves forward is the single most telling feature of this tale.  In fact, for me, Sam Quarry, the mastermind of the kidnapping plot is likely to be the most unforgettable character.  He is ruthless, even fanatical, in the pursuit of his brand of justice, but then we see him stop in a nursing home to read Jane Austin to his daughter who has been in a coma for 13 years.  As the story unfolds, we come to appreciate the ingenuity he brings to bear on his personal concepts of right and wrong.  Our gradual understanding of what drives him parallels the fall of our admiration for several other characters who at first appeared virtuous but are revealed as anything but.

This is Baldacci’s fourth novel featuring the team of Sean and Melissa.  If I’d started the series at the beginning I might know why they left the Secret Service under clouded circumstances.  They are a compelling team, and the plot is complicated when Melissa’s mother is murdered in a separate event that parallels the main action when it leads to the exposure of family secrets.

The rhythm of a book, its pacing, is something very mysterious.  James Patterson sets a hook or mini-crisis every four pages, which is the length of his chapters.  Other writers speed things up even more

Baldacci steps away from constant thrills and chills.  Yes, there is the obligatory shootout early on, but the author also keeps us reading as he details the minute preparations Sam Quarry has made on his land in rural Alabama.  The little shack he has planned and constructed by hand is lined with metal and surplus dental x-ray blankets.  Why?  The video camera mounted almost invisibly near the cabin has a hidden feed to a bunker up the hill.  Why?  Quarry spends hours in the basement of his falling-apart family home, with charts and notes, illustrating a web of connections he has spent years uncovering.  We know just enough to keep us reading.  Baldacci knows that mystery and nagging questions can keep us turning the pages as eagerly as drama and shoot-em-up action.

I cannot say much more without giving away the plot.  I can say this – I am definitely going to read the first of the Sean King and Michelle Maxwell mysteries, and if First Family is any indication, I have a whole new series to enjoy.

True North

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In December, 1975, my sister sent me a small wrapped box with a note attached.  Our mother had died suddenly the previous May, but my sister found a small package, wrapped for Christmas the year before, at the back of a closet.

Inside was a compass.  I’m sure my mother intended it as a pragmatic gift – I was spending a lot of time on back roads and camping out in the southwestern deserts where you really want to know where you are and where you are going, but ever since, that particular compass and compasses in general, have carried a lot of symbolic meaning for me.  Finding true north.  Finding one’s way.

The earlier name for a Compass Rose was Wind Rose

My ideas have changed since I got that compass.  I used to imagine “one’s way” as “one way.”  As if our lives were like trains, and we are either on the track or off.  Now I imagine something more like “possible futures,” (a classic sci-fi term).  Not a single track, but an ongoing dance between ourselves and the world, of choices and unfolding events.

***

Recently I posted that I am rethinking the plot of the novel I’m writing because my forward progress had slowed and a step back showed there were flaws and gaps in my core conception.  Later I realized some of the story elements had become so common as to have already become cliches.  I understand how fast that can happen; Thomas Edison used to speak of times when “ideas were in the air,” and I’m sure there were far fewer inventors in his day than young adult writers in ours.

I’ve taken my own advice recently, and done a lot of free-writing, easily filling up single spaced pages with several alternate plots that seems fresher to me, but remain similar in setting and character to the story I was working on before.  One in particular sparked my excitement.  Then I spotted a review of a recently published, YA novel that had features strangely in common with my current conception.

Conventional wisdom urges us not chase popular stories, but these days, my impulse is almost the reverse – it almost seems harder to run away from what other people have done!  Something else we are told often is, “tell the story that only you can tell.”  To me, this sounds a lot like the “true north” idea.  Our thoughts, our emotions, our memories are not stable, so why should our stories be?  That kind of imagined fixity  is something the conscious mind loves, but the unconscious or whatever you wish to call the wellsprings of our creativity, does not share in such linear thinking.

I used to admire an Arizona man named Frederick Sommer, who took hauntingly surreal photographs in the desert.  Once an interviewer asked him why he photographed, seeming, from the tone of the article, to want some kind of deep philosophical rationale.  Instead, Sommer shrugged and said, “You’ve got to do something during the day.”  I’ve always loved the irreverence of his response.  I remember it in moments when I begin to take myself and work too seriously.  As ego involvement grows, I risk mistaking what I do for what I am.

Frederick Sommer

In retrospect, I learned a lot when I was writing software.  I learned that when something isn’t working, you look at it closely, and if necessary, try something else.  I may have missed schedules but I seldom missed sleep.  The years that I spent writing software convinced me that I can solve problems – that if I keep looking long enough, I’ll find a creative solution that was there all along, overlooked.

I write for a lot of reasons.  One of them is that I have to do something during the day.

Water for Elephants: A Movie Review

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There surely has been a drought this spring of movies worth venturing out to see, so I was pleased when Water for Elephants, based on a best selling novel, hit the theaters.

The story is narrated by ninety year old Jacob Janowski after his family forgets to show up at the “home” where he lives to take him to the circus.  He relates how a personal tragedy interrupted his plans in 1931 and sent him out on the rails where he joined the Benzini Brother’s Circus as a vet.  Times were tough and circus life was gritty and often violent.

Jacob falls in love with Marlena, wife of August, the ringmaster, whose brutality sparks the biggest disaster in circus history.  Jacob and Marlena survive, rescue Rosie the elephant and a Jack Russell terrier, and after a successful stint with Ringling Brothers, settle down to raise five sons who forget about Jacob when he is 90.  The circus boss he tells the story to offers him a job, and Jacob feels like he’s coming home.

It’s a decent story, but…

The “but” is that I never really engaged with the characters.  What is the magic that causes us to bond and identify with a character in a movie or a novel?  You can’t say what it is, but you know it when it happens and you know when it doesn’t.  I actually felt worse when Rosie the elephant was beaten that when the goons beat up Jacob.

In contrast to Water for Elephants, my heart was really gripped by another movie about an old man who loses his wife and home but reinvents himself at the end of life.  This was the animated feature, Up (2009).  Up required a surreptitious kleenex in the theater.  Water for Elephants?  Not even close.

I would be curious to hear a response to the movie by someone who read the book first.  In retrospect, I feel like the movie made unsuccessful attempts to manipulate me.  Take August, the villain.  At one point during the movie, Mary leaned over and whispered, “bipolar.”  I said, “alcoholic.”  On the way home we agreed on a dual diagnosis, and now, on Wikipedia, I read that in the book he was pegged as a paranoid schizophrenic – not that circus roustabouts in 1931 knew what that is.  And regardless, if understanding of the villain’s bad behavior depends on a diagnosis, something is missing from the story.

I’m not sorry I went to see this movie, but unfortunately, I have to suggest that others save their money.

Hollowland by Amanda Hocking – A Book Review

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If you are a writer, unless you’ve been living with wolves, chances are you have heard of Amanda Hocking, the twenty-something Minnesota author of young adult fantasies who spun the publishing industry in an unexpected direction.

One year ago this month, after a string of rejections from agents and editors, Hocking uploaded two novels in Kindle format.  She thought $43 for her first two weeks of sales was “pretty good.”  By the start of this year, she was selling half a million eb00ks a month, and in March she signed a reported $2 million dollar contract with St. Martin’s Press.

Amanda Hocking’s story has been told in the New York Times, the Wall Street journal, and on dozens if not hundreds of blogs, but one key question is seldom directly addressed:  are her books any good?  I just finished my first Hocking novel, and the short answer is, yes, it was lively, original, and I liked it a lot.

Hollowland starts with a bang and the action does not let up.  How is this for an opening sentence?

“This is the way the world ends – not with a bang or a whimper, but with zombies breaking down the back door.”

These are not your old-school, reanimated corpse type zombies.  No stiff, slow, shambling, mumbling, B-Grade movie zombies.  A mutation of the rabies virus has infected most of the population, causing them to become really angry, really psychotic, and ravenously hungry.  After her quarantine station near Las Vegas is breached by a coordinated zombie attack, 19 year old, Remy, and her friend, Harlow, set off across the desert, determined to find Remy’s brother.  Their first traveling companion is an African lion – animals are immune to this kind of rabies, and all the big cats from Circus Circus are loose.  That night they meet a rock star whose fame doesn’t mean so much in a post-apocalyptic world.  They pick up an SUV and a couple of refugees from a fundamentalist cult, whose leader has the habit of “cleansing” his female followers in his bedroom.  And so it goes.

It says a lot about Remy that she names the lion, Ripley, after Sigourney Weaver’s character in the Alien movies  That is the mojo you need when the zombies are winning.  Remy also has a charming irreverence, the kind of simple, eyes-open, speak-your-mind nature that you see in Amanda Hocking’s online interviews.

I can really see, though I have not found the words to express it, why the literary establishment would not cut Hocking a break.  There’s a hint of piety about the stories and characters you see in the YA fantasy section of Barnes&Noble.  The word “homogenized,” comes to mind.  And “processed food.”  And “inbred.”

This story was fresh, a little bit raw, a bit unpolished, but shaped by a writer whose imagination has not, and hopefully will not, be poured into the grooves shaped by others.  Hocking reminds me of Stephen King and not for the obvious horror licks that they share.  Both authors seem to gravitate to horror not just for its own sake, but to explore what ordinary people will do in impossible situations.

Hollowland is a available in both self-published text version, and Kindle format for $0.99, and in case anyone does not know, a Kindle device (though I love mine) is not required to read a book in that format.  Amazon has free Kindle apps for pc, mac, iPads and smart-phones.

Enjoy.

Tough Love, Math, Software, and Writing

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One sunday afternoon, when I was in the second grade, I learned a key life lesson because my mother got tired of hearing me whine.  I had some difficult arithmetic homework.  Plus the afternoon was gorgeous, and I could see my friends playing baseball up the hill.  My mother was trying to show me how to work the problems, but I was having none of it.  “I caan’t,” I said.  “It’s too haard.”

My mother finally had enough, and said, in her no-nonsense voice, “Sit here, and do not move, until your homework is done.”

“But….”

“No buts!” I don’t want to hear another word until you’re finished.”

After a quick review of alternatives, such as rafting down the Mississippi, I realized I was trapped – nothing left to do but figure it out.  I remember how delighted I felt when I did, but I didn’t begin to understand how important that lesson would be.  How often I would be faced with similar situations, especially in the world of work – critical problems that no one else knew how to solve – and what a boon it would be to think, “Let’s take a look,” instead of, “I can’t.”

There were times when I was younger when “practice situations” arose, and I remembered and took inspiration from that day in the second grade.  I fought a similar battle to learn formal calculus proofs as a freshman in college.  Another time my van broke down in Bakersfield, and I didn’t have enough to pay someone else to fix it.

I joined the high tech world before the phrase, “cutting edge,” became a cliche – when we really were trying things that hadn’t been done before.  Through luck and interest, I spent some years doing early work in a specialty sort of software.  That made it exciting, made us kind of important, but also meant when we were stuck, we were stuck.

In the second grade, my mother forced me to learn what it meant to do my best – really do my best.  In the world of math and software, it’s rather easy to gauge.  You pretty much know when you have a solution, and the harder you work, the quicker you get there.

It’s not so clear cut in writing.  Sometimes white-knuckle effort pays off, and sometimes it’s counter-productive.  The quality of the my work does not always correlate with “feeling inspired,” and I can’t really judge it until weeks or months go by.  Sometimes it’s best to sit at the table and and hammer away, and sometimes it’s better to go outside and play.  What works one day may not work the next.

I’ve said before, I love the image Joseph Campbell gave for the way the Knights of the Round Table set out to look for the Holy Grail.  Each of them entered a trackless part of the forest, for it would have been “shameful” to follow the trail made by another.  In trying to find my own way, charging ahead is probably not the best way to proceed.  Rather, it’s time to take my time, pay attention, listen especially to the strange hunch and “crazy” idea.  Watch what happens out of the corner of my eye.  Learn to enjoy the forest and let it go, for as T.S. Eliot said, “The rest is not our business.”

A Conference and a Resolution

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“If we had more stories as children, we would need fewer psychiatrists as adults.” – James Hillman

On Saturday, I attended the Spring Spirit Conference of the North/Central region of the SCBWI – Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.  This all day event took place in Rocklin, just 20 minutes from home.  It featured seminars and critiques by writers, editors and agents, aimed at people who write for children and young adults.  I had registered at the end of December, but as the day rolled around, I wasn’t that anxious to go.

Part of it was simple fatigue, the after-effect of this spring’s flu.  Part of it was a kind of burnout.  Earlier this week, as I was reviewing a manuscript for one of my critique groups, I caught myself writing a comment out of habit – a knee jerk response I was not even sure was true.  I’ve found myself doing that several times recently, and as a result, I was feeling an impulse to step away and sort out some ideas that didn’t feel like mine.  I wasn’t sure I needed a professional gathering where I was likely to pick up more.

I was pleasantly surprised by the keynote speaker, author and teacher, Bruce Coville.  “Take everything the presenters say with a grain of salt,” he said.  “Your job is to find your own truth.”  Those words turned my day around.  They set the tone of the day, as did his later seminar on writing fantasy, a genre he notes is snubbed by some literati as less than properly serious.  “Tell that to Homer, to Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare,” Coville said.

“Sometimes I write fairytales because it’s the best way to tell the truth.” – C.S. Lewis

As I went through they day, an ongoing problem that is really mine came into focus.  I’ve been stalling out on my current book because several key plot elements need to be re-imagined.  Slogging away is not going to do it this time.  I’ve known I need to take a break, take a step back, but that isn’t easy for an A-Type, yankee-ingenuity, roll-up-your-sleeves mentality.  I needed some kind of plan to make it okay to take a break.  And I found one.

When in doubt, read, read, read.  That in itself is a great idea, but I find it hard to study really compelling books when the great ones sweep me into the story from the start – I’ll do the objective stuff later, and later never comes.  I happened to flip through the first book I ever bought specifically to help with plot and structure, called (would you believe) “Plot and Structure,” by James Scott Bell.

Toward the back of the book, Bell addresses that whole issue in a section called, “How to Improve Your Plotting Exponentially.”  It involves getting half a dozen novels, ones you have read or new ones.  Read them first for pleasure, then read them again with a stack of 3×5 cards and note the events, characters and purpose of every single scene.  Review them when done (like “forming a movie in your head,” says Bell).  Finally, lay out the cards and see how the scenes fit into the traditional three-act structure.  Where are the key plot points?  Where is “the door of no return?”  Where is the final battle joined?

This will take eight to twelve weeks, Bell estimates, but because of all that I earlier learned from him, I’m willing to test his estimation that during those weeks “you will jump ahead of 99 percent of all the other aspiring writer out there, most of whom try to find out how to plot by trial and error.” Trial and error has always been iffy for me.

So I’m giving myself permission to take a reading break.  I’ve already downloaded three books to my Kindle:

1)  The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, an acclaimed, post-apocolyptic story for young adults.   I started it yesterday and found to my delight, a YA story I can’t put down – I haven’t come upon too many of those recently.

2)  Gone For Good, by Harlan Coben.  This violates Bell’s instructions to stick with the type of book I want to write, but I’ve meant to read this ever since I saw Donald Maass praise the story in his Breakout Novel Workbook.  Besides, I really enjoy action/adventure and believe the genre contains elements that can improve any sort of writing.

3)  Hollowland by Amanda Hocking.  About time I read something by her!

From time to time I will report back on how this goes and probably review at least some of the titles, but right now, I have to get back to  The Hunger Games!

Notes on T.S. Eliot

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Here is what the man I consider the greatest english language poet of the 20th century had to say about his own work:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres-
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. (The Four Quartets)

 

Thomas Stearns Eliot, 1888-1965

Eliot was a modernist who believed that a new poetic language was needed to address the complexities of a new century.  It takes a bit of effort now to understand that he offended the literary establishment of his day the way Picasso offended the art establishment.  The first poem in his first published book, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” (1917) begins:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;

The literary world was still immersed in the 19th century sensibility; to describe the sky with such a simile was as shocking as a cubist landscape.   At the same time, Eliot alienated the bohemian crowd:  he became a devout Anglican, wore three-piece suits, worked in a bank, and spoke in the most precise possible manner.  He went his own way in everything but kept enough humor to describe himself in this way:

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.
…………………………………….
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
(Whether his mouth be open or shut).

I read poems like “Prufrock” and “The Wasteland” in high school.  They were cool enough that as a sophomore in college, I signed up for a class called, “Yeats and Eliot.”  It probably had a more lasting effect than any other college class, since forty years later I still read T.S. Eliot often, usually from “The Four Quartets,” the capstone of his poetic career.  The four sections were written and released separately over six years, and first published together in 1943.  After the Quartets, he wrote, “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” which inspired the musical, “Cats,” and spent the rest of his life writing plays and literary criticism.  Eliot was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1948.

The title of this blog came from an opening line in “The Four Quartets:”  Through the first gate, Into our first world, shall we follow the deception of the thrush?

As I said, I have been reading this poem for forty years, always finding something new in Eliot’s rendering of the human longing for the ineffable (among many other themes).  George Orwell dismissed the poem for it’s “religiosity,” though I find that a shallow reading.  A passage like the following uses religious symbols, not in the service of preachiness, but to invoke an experience that is perhaps as common as it is difficult to name:

I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant –
Among other things-or one way of putting the same thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between the yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.

Here is another such passage which I still see quoted from time to time by spiritual authors:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

No single blog post could be more than an introduction to the life and work of a poet like T.S. Eliot, but if these notes inspire anyone to read “The Four Quartets,”  http://www.ubriaco.com/fq.html I will be more than satisfied.

Let me end with the end of the passage I began with.  After the poet tells us “success” is forever out of reach, he says:

And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate-but there is no competition-
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again:  and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.