Friday, March 20, 2009

The Wrong Kind of Shy

So I know I promised you more about Butler’s writing theories, but I haven’t had time to type them up. I promised myself a few years ago that I would never let my blog (and my hopes for it, and my dreams of people sitting on the edges of their seats waiting for my next installment—ah, yes) interfere with the actual living of my life. And so, the fact that I haven’t updated often lately is actually a good sign—as sign that my life is busy and full and I am participating in it fully. I’ve been doing AML, Segullah, poetry workshop, my own writing (including the novel—yes, we’re back together again), cubscouting (having a hard time with that one), stake conference, friend-hanging, kid-hanging (off track this month), and reading some darn good books! So . . . sorry (but not really).

Anyway, I went to a poetry reading yesterday and felt pretty awkward. Because I look like a Mormon housewife, which is not the “in” look for a poetry reading, let me tell you. Among the students, the “in” look includes very skinny jeans and floppy knit hats that look like ski hats (what’s with that?). And then there were the poets, who all manage to look world-wise and sophisticated and sort of tired. Very nonchalant. Also, everyone in the room but me was drinking wine. Several of them were classmates of mine from the poetry workshop, so I see them every week. Why not talk to them? But the result of my self-consciousness (feeling very boring and naive) is that I just kept to myself. Why, after all, would any of those people want to know me?

But on the way home I realized the folly of my ways. By being so self-conscious (and insecure) I am being stand-offish and depriving myself (and them!) of a potentially interesting friendship. It’s a kind of shyness that has as it’s root self-centeredness. Maybe all shyness does, but this kind seems more glaring in its selfishness than the kind which renders people simply afraid to talk to others. I’m not afraid to smile, greet people, etc. I just assume they wouldn’t be interested in ME. But so what? Does the world revolve according to levels of interest in MOI?

I’m thirty-eight years old and yet the lessons I continue to learn about myself and how to live brightly and freely continue to astound me. Will I ever be grown-up?

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

People ask me whether I wish I had girls . . .




Nope.

(I'm told the surgeon's cap renders the wearer invisible. Apparently I have a special camera, though.)

(Notice the school rivalry evident on the t-shirts. We are a mixed family.)
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Sunday, March 08, 2009

Writing Seminar

One of my biggest weaknesses as a writer is an overactive sense of control. I guess you could call it the “internal editor,” but it’s not something editing my words so much as something screening my basic ideas. My reception from my subconscious is stilted. So I’m drawn to writing books that talk more about accessing ideas than the actual structuring of a novel or the prose within it.

So several months ago I read From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction by Robert Olen Butler. What follows is a bunch of notes I took as I read this book. Direct quotes are in quote marks, and are from Butler unless stated otherwise. All other notes are paraphrases/notes/thoughts/responses. (The most important part of the book, the process he recommends for “dreaming” a novel, I will save for next week.)

“To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.”—Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa.

“You need courage, and that’s something I can’t teach you.”

“As an artist, like everyone else on this planet, you encounter the world out there primarily in your bodies, moment to moment through your senses.”

“The artist is comfortable only with going back to the way in which the chaos is first encountered—that is, moment to moment through the senses. Then, selecting from that sensual moment-to-moment experience, picking out bits and pieces of it, reshaping it, she recombines it into an object that a reader in turn encounters as if it were experience itself.”

Don’t say you have an idea for a story. Art does not come from the mind. It comes from where you dream, your unconscious, the white-hot center of you.

“Emotions are experienced in the senses and therefore are best expressed in fiction through the senses.”

They are expressed in five ways:
1) Sensual reaction inside your body: temp., heartbeat, muscle reaction, neural change.
2) Outside of body: posture, gesture, facial expressions, tone of voice.
3) flashes of the past—in images.
4) sensual selectivity—the particular messages from our senses that we do and don’t notice. “Landscape is character.”—Henry James.

“Your past is full of stories that have been composed in a certain way; that’s what memories are. But only when they decompose are you able to recompose them into new works of art.”

“Not only is your mind the enemy, not only is your will, your rational thinking, your analytic thinking the enemy, but yoru literal memories are also the enemy.”

Write every day—makes it easier to get into dreamspace. Same place is helpful—cues the subconscious. Good idea to do it first thing in the morning, “only moments away from a literal dreamspace.” Don’t let ANY language get in your mind between waking up and writing. Music helps many. Do not force it. “If you have the itch to write before inspiration has visited you, spend that time meditating in your unconscious.”

Only one kind of journaling is helpful. Recall an event that evoked an emotion. Record the event in your journal ONLY moment-to-moment through the senses. NEVER name an emotion, explain, analyze or interpret it. Render as a scene, with all the external and internal events, concentrating on those five ways of showing emotion through senses.

“But neither are you brainstorming. Your dreamstorming, inviting the images of moment-to-moment experience through your unconscious.”

“Voice is the embodiment in language of the contents of your unconscious.”

Don’t decide ahead of time to “write a novel.” Is it a short story or a novel? “You have a vision of the world and that vision has a natural form; you don’t know what will turn out to be the natural form of your vision [until you write it].”

“Oftentimes I’ve found that my novels come out of the wedding of two separate visions that seemed to be two different novels, two books that really weren’t working and seemed quite different from each other.”

“Be alert to the fact that you must achieve a trance-like state in order to write from your unconscious.”

Revising: go back and read. The words should thrum. When they don’t (twang!), mark those passages. Then go back and re-dream them. “Rewriting is redreaming. Rewriting is redreaming till it all thrums.”

All the things you remember, everything you’ve learned about craft, all the wonderful fiction you’ve read, goes into the compost heap but they “must first be forgotten—at least while you are in your creative trance—before they can be authentically engaged in the creation of a work of art.”

3 fundamentals of fiction: 1) it’s about human beings, 2) it’s about human emotion, 3) it’s about human yearning.

Plot = the dynamics of desire.

“Until a character with yearning has emerged from your unconscious, I don’t encourage you to write.” (It doesn’t require your understanding, just your intuition.)

You can play around, trying narrator’s voice, exploring character’s attitudes and opinions, while waiting for intuition about your MC’s desire. But once it comes, put that preliminary writing away. Then, dream your way into what might upset the equilibrium of his world. This is the inciting incident. Following the inciting incident (death of Hamlet’s father) is the point of attack (ghost appears to Hamlet). This point introduces the conflict (a manifestation of the character’s yearning).

Make sure that something is at stake.

Good fiction should be like film:
PLOT=basic unit, uninterrupted flow of imagery.
CUT=a form of transition
SCENE=unified action occurring in single time and space, usually composed of shots connected.
SEQUENCE=group of scenes that make a dramatic segment of a film.
MONTAGE=placing two things next to each other. Juxtaposing elements. (Ex.: “She looked out the window. A cat crouched under the picnic table.”—we don’t need to say “she saw a cat crouching . . . “)

Narrative voice can place us at a distance or bring us into intimate proximity according to the choice of detail to show.

In music, “rub” is when an expectation is set up (with rhythm, harmonics, color) and then suddenly the music cuts against the grain (spins harmonics, shifts keys, varies rhythm). THAT’S when you get goosebumps. Try it with character. When you’re inside character’s yearnings, going in one direction, showing certain attitudes, open your subconscious to the opposite, cut against the grain, rub the thing that sounds predictable.

Coming next week: Butler’s strategy for “dreaming” a novel.

Monday, March 02, 2009

AML, Schmay-ML

Well, we pulled off (sort of) another one (I’m talking about the AML Annual Meeting). I’m not extremely satisfied but, considering the, well, adversity, we did pretty darn well.

I have some mixed feelings about AML these days. I have always loved it and its mission and still feel it is in the best position to do for LDS literature what needs to be done. (That is, recognize and encourage great things that are not getting recognized in other ways, foster interesting and helpful critical discussions, foster networking among producers of LDS literature and those interested in studying it. Oh, and provide me with some amazingly interesting friends.)

But I’m getting tired.

Every year I tell myself, “This year we’ll get things fixed up. For sure this year we’ll improve. Things are looking up.” But there has been so much blankety-blank adversity! Our presidents keep getting ill! (The degeneration of things began, in fact, when a president-elect died suddenly.) Board members have huge family emergencies and need to drop out. Etc. Etc. Kathleen and I have been the only consistent “board” members (and we are not even board members) for the past four years, and we both feel underqualified to take the leadership. So we scramble around to beg and plead for someone to step in and give us orders. It’s frustrating. It’s tiring. Not physically, but emotionally.

I’m tired of caring so much.

Yet, once again, I feel hopeful. Boyd is taking over this year and he is energetic, wise, connected and, most of all, CARING about AML. We drummed up a few more board members who might actually come to board meeting (James Goldberg! Scott Bronson!). And Eric, in his heroic final act as president managed to finagle Margaret Blair Young into agreeing to be president elect! (And I do have to say that pulling off this meeting was truly heroic for Eric, who has some major health issues going on. I am so grateful to him.)

So, once again, I am full of hope, and will plug on. I do so love AML!

P.S. A very huge thanks to the valiant souls who showed up and presented papers, etc. to the nearly-empty rooms. I enjoyed every session I attended. Terryl Givens was, unsurprisingly, amazing and I’m glad we managed to fill the room for him. And the award for novel went to the most deserving book by far (I’m sure you can guess which that was—if not, check out the AML website at aml-online.org over the next few days to find out). And thanks to Kathleen who keeps on keeping on.