Monthly Archives: May 2024

A Meeting of the Mind

Fiction, Humor, Ink Spatterings, Writing, Writing process, , , , , , ,

An Answer to the Question “How Is Writing the Novel Going?”

ME: Good morning, Every Part Of My Brain. Welcome to what I think we can all agree is a much-needed gathering of the committee. I appreciate you and every contribution you’ve made. Last month’s failures are this month’s stepping stones, right?

(THE CRITIC snorts)

ME: You know what, let’s skip the ice breakers; we’re all intimately familiar with each other’s quirks.

(Cheers erupt.)

ME: How about some treats!

(The group goes wild, followed by ten minutes of enthusiastic snacking.)

ME: Let’s get this rolling. I called this meeting of, uh, me…us…you BRAIN PARTS. I thought instead of you all coming at me higgledy-piggledy –

MONKEY BRAIN: Higgledy-piggledy! Higgledy-piggledy!

ME: — and in a disruptive way, we could all air our thoughts in an orderly fashion and I can get back to work on the new book. We’re nine days in and you’re all very…loud.

DREAMER: What if our protagonist could see emotions as colors swirling around people? It could add a whole layer of depth and magic!

ME: Huh. Interesting, but that doesn’t really align with the the plot, genre, or characters we’re writing. But otherwise, very creative!

CRITIC: Magic colors? Are we writing a book or doing a kiddie craft project? We need substance, people! Proper substance!

ARCHIVIST: Speaking of proper, let’s ensure our details are accurate. We don’t want another incident like the Doctor Who situation.

(The group gasps.)

ME: All right, that’s a little unnecessary. We all remember the what happened when I had a piece published and it said “Dr. Who” instead of “Doctor Who.”

SELF-DOUBTER: Oh, no. Now I’m compelled to list every public failure we’ve ever had. Shall I go in alphabetical order, chronological, or in level of humiliation?

HYPE MAN: Whoa there, buddy! Let’s not dive into the doom pool today. (Ornately gestures for the meeting continue)

MARKETER: I just saw a great Insta about a dog diving into a pool. Adorable. Talk about a launch! Speaking of which, we need to start thinking about that, and about all the marketing. Platforming. Audience building. Make sure everything you post online and also everything you say in every conversation is geared towards sales, acquiring an agent, getting a book deal, and of course, your legacy. That includes the book’s first line. Maybe we should put the first line online and see what people think?

SELF-DOUBTER: Yeah, no. I don’t need data confirming if people hate my first line.

ME: We’re only on the first dra –

HYPE MAN: Dude, fear not! Every great book had its doubters. We’re going to rock this so hard, they’ll feel it on Mars. (Performs enthusiastic air guitar solo.)

DREAMER: Let’s write a story where children’s shadows whisper their secrets.

ARCHIVIST: That may have been done already. I’ll check. But, you should know that shadows were often seen as spiritual, a bridge to the unseen world.

HYPE MAN: That’s what I’m talking about! We’re gonna bridge worlds, baby!

ME: Love the energy, buddy, but maybe turn it down a notch.

HYPE MAN: You got it, Chief! Dialing it back to a solid eleven. (Jumps on table) We’re gonna grab this book by the horns and ride it to glory town! Who’s with me?

CRITIC: I’d settle for making it out of the driveway without backing over the mailbox.

SELF-DOUBTER: Are we really going for the haunted hipster vibe now? Is that our brand?

MARKETING: I’m glad someone is thinking about branding. Speaking of which, we should write a series of blog posts. Build some buzz.

WORRIER: Let’s not get carried away. We have a reputation to not utterly destroy.

CRITIC: She’s not wrong. For once.

MONKEY BRAIN: Palm Frond. Frond. What kind of word is that?

CRITIC: Look, I have to say, this talking to yourself thing is not as charming as you think.

DREAMER: I find myself quite charming thank you.

CRITIC: And shadows that talk? Let’s focus on something adults might actually read.

MARKETER: Excellent point. We need to think about our target audience. Who are we writing this for, and what will grab their attention?

ME: Thank you, everyone, great input.

DREAMER: What if laws were divined from armpit stains on white shirts? Could we write that?

ME: Let’s hold that thought — actually, let’s not.

CRITIC: Your writing is as appealing as a pit stain. And as common.

ARCHIVIST: I’d like to revisit some unresolved topics from the last brainstorm. For instance, the Victorian ghost we abandoned last month?

ME: I considered writing a ghost story for, like, a second.

MARKETER: With significant tweaking and rewriting everything you’ve done for six months, we could hit a niche market that’s currently underserved.

HYPE MAN: Boom! Who’s ready to rock those ghosts back to life? Legendary!

SELF-DOUBTER: More like legendarily bad. I mean ghosts? We’re digging that up out of deep storage.

MARKETER: Speaking of digging, we should consider digging into new markets. How about a vlog series?

ME: I have to write the book first.

WORRIER: But what if no one likes it? What if we’re just shouting into the void? What if — 

MONKEY BRAIN: 🎶Tea with jam and bread. Tea with jam and bread.🎶

ME: Worrier, maybe you and Self-Critic can go into a breakout session and work together?

WORRIER: Oh, GOD are you kicking me out of the group?

DREAMER: Imagine a character so vivid that readers think they can reach out and touch them. Oooh, maybe they can literally step out of the book?

CRITIC: Wow. That’s awful.

ARCHIVIST: You mentioned in your notes here that a famous burger chain uses 80/20 beef. You need to quadruple-check that.

ME: I’m really only powering through the first draft now. That’s more of a later draft kind of –

ARCHIVIST: Fact-checking is not optional.

MARKETER: Add a viral element to the story. And do a reel, especially since you stopped the daily updates on (pointedly) DAY FOUR of writing. But, like, get a haircut first.

ME: Let’s focus. I called this meeting to streamline our thoughts, not scatter them further.

SELF-DOUBTER: Can I just say something, please? What if this whole idea is too ambitious? Or too dumb? Or we’re too dumb? Have we forgotten how mean people are? Or, worse, how pitying they can be? What if we fail?

HYPE MAN: What if we don’t? Like, what if we blow everyone’s minds?

MARKETER: We need to maybe find some people to share this with… talk through the ideas, maybe give them the first chapter or two.

EVERYONE: NO!

DREAMER: Not yet, friend. Not yet.

CRITIC: As long as we’re talking failures, do you need to update that list of writing rejections?

(Everyone grows quiet )

HYPE MAN: Come on. COME ON. Remember who we are. All that? Just the pre-show. This time we’re headlining the main stage. Let’s make this draft so hot, it’ll burn holes in their eyeballs! Goo everywhere!

ME: Well. There you go. This book isn’t going to write itself. Let’s get back to work.

MONKEY BRAIN: BEES.

The Folio: What I Read Mid-April Through Mid-May

Book Review, Books, The Folio, , , , ,

Legacy, Raised Pinkies, and Cookie Crisp

This month’s reads were about legacy and our role in crafting it. What we spend our time on and how much intention we put behind it. 

NOT THE SNOOZEFEST YOU MIGHT THINK.

These are the books that I enjoyed enough to finish in the last month:

Writers at Work 08: The Paris Review Interviews

This 8th in a gazillion-volume collection from The Paris Review is an invaluable, delightful, and infuriating look into the process, philosophy, and weirdness of various writers. It’s a fantastic reminder to consider the whys and how-fors of craft, examining writing in social, authorial, political, and moral contexts.

From the profound to the gentle, the hilarious to the maddening — boy, what a mess we writers can be. Most interviewees were generous with their self-reflection, some were cloying or downright insufferable, all brilliant. I did have to remind myself these interviews are polished and edited, because there were moments I was like “ARE WRITERS SUPPOSED TO BE THIS GOOD ON THE FLY?”

Undergirding most of their thoughts is awareness of permanence in the work. While perhaps not intentional during the creative process most expressed an consideration of the afterlife of their words. Some eschewed it, some hugged it tight

Standouts:

  • E.B. White (“A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter”)
  • Robert Fitzgerald (“I don’t think it comes on that way…wanting to be a writer. You find yourself at a certain point making something in writing, and this seems to be great fun.”),
  • Elie Wiesel (“I am myself only when I work” and “Writing is so personal, so profoundly and terribly personal.”)
  • John Irving (“I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way…the more you know about a book, the freer you can be to fool around.”

King Lear by William Shakespeare

You may have heard of this one. Lear descends into madness after handing over his kingdom to two rotten daughters while pushing away the good one. Cue the descent into madness, a cocktail of chaos, tragedy, bad spouses, fools, and some seriously bad-hair weather. It’s all about power, betrayal, redemption — Willie Shake’s big hits.

Do I need to provide quotes or explanations, because this one’s been chewed over for centuries? But, hey, it’s still kicking, repackaged as everything from Succession to Ran to A Thousand Acres to Cookie Crisp. (Kidding. Although I saw some Cookie Crisp hawked on an endcap at two stores the other day. WHO ASKED FOR THIS?)

T.G.I.Family Size

Shakespeare is meant to be watched, yet modern audiences (Hi! Me, even, with all my fancy learnin’) still struggle with the language. Somehow, Lear was never in my studies. Not even the college Shakespeare class. Not sure how that happened. Maybe I had a choice and picked something else, or I just don’t remember because I was focused on BEING IN MY VERY COOL COLLEGE A CAPPELLA GROUP.

Anyway, I’d watch a scene and then read it to soak up the wordplay. 

Not here to brag or claim I only skim the cream of literature, but yeah, my pinky is raised as I type this.

About Alice by Calvin Trillin 

This gem of a memoir by Calvin Trillin is a heart-stuffed tribute to his wife, spilling over with tales of their life and her impact on his work. Love as the ultimate legacy? You bet your sweet typewriter it is.

I crave this and would never, ever use it.

I picked About Alice up as a palate cleanser after Lear: short, digestible, and focused on love. It turned out to be both gorgeous and devastating.

Humorous and heartbreaking, it’s a love letter for the ages. There is something intimate in sharing mostly unremarkable moments of a life together. It’s absolutely uncynical, offering respite for a weary soul. Trillin’s love is overwhelming, and we breathe along with him.

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

Are we coding ourselves into oblivion? Can we resist as a form of legacy? Or do we need to surf the beastly waves of tech change to leave our mark? Should we examine these questions through the lenses of technology, identity, and purpose? 

MAYBE!

Picking up this book feels like grabbing a live wire, thanks to the AI anxiety zapping through the creative world right now. Vonnegut serves uncomfortable truth: as technology grows, we and our humanity risk being downsized. Before you hand over your creative keys to some cold, calculating circuits (Would Lear? Doubt it.), think twice.

Yet, despite the gloom, Vonnegut’s just-so, wry humor stops you from walking too far into the existential sea (and hey, if you do, maybe a friendly AI lifeguard will save your ass — what do I know?)

Show Your Work by Austin Kleon

Encouraging creatives to share their process openly. It’s about peeling back the studio curtains and shouting, “Check this out!” to build a tribe that gets you. Kleon’s all about transparency and collaboration, pounding the drum for a legacy that’s more than your final masterpiece — it’s also about the blood, sweat, and tears that got you there.

I’m actually trying to do this with my book — small snippets (“Daily Dispatches”) on my socials, and then dropping a chonkier update here each month. It’s a solid way to summarize the process without blasting everyone with full-frontal, nuclear emotion.

(Hey, you keeping tabs on me? Are you scrolling with me on Threads? How about Substack Notes? And oh, Instagram — where you can witness my gloriously pathetic attempts at photography?)

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Good gosh damn, Donna Tartt can write. This one had me staying up late and getting up early.

The novel follows a group of elite college students tangled up in a murder. I could crack wise about the different kinds of marks we can leave, but let’s keep this highbrow. The main characters shine in their intellectual pursuits and cloud everything else with a cascade of dark actions. They seek extraordinary legacy, struggling with their ethical compromises and the consequences. The book reflects on how the stories we tell about ourselves — and the secrets we keep — shape our legacy in complex ways.

As with her other works, Tartt writes with needle-sharp detail, creates insanely deep characters, and does so with near-celestial language. Her plots unfurl with deliberate grace.

I mean, holy cow.

___

Last month was a whirlwind romance with The Secret History, and I had a writerly crush on Show Your Work. The long and the short of it, quite literally.

What did you read this month?

Sushi, Queen Elizabeth’s Spine, and Becoming One with My Car

Creative non-fiction, Humor, Inspiration, Life and Other Existential Problems, Month in Review, Parenting, Poetry, Recommendations, Under 750, Writing, Writing process

A Scrawl of April Delights and Wonders

April, that slippery trickster, played peekaboo with my sanity and my word count, yet here I am, wrestling it all into a monthly wrap-up blog post.

The dungeon of delights I toss stuff into (i.e. a crummy little computer file called “Cool Stuff!”) is ever-burgeoning. 

I also have a file called “Can You Believe This Shit?”, a cavernous pit of my more epic fails — those are usually what I serve up here once I’ve pulled my face out of the mud of life, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of my own clumsiness. But let’s sidestep the slapstick for a moment, shall we? 

Here are some splashes of the marvelous from April 2024 :

  • I got to hear author Julie Otsuka (of When the Emperor Was Divine, among other gems) speak at an event. She talked about the musicality of her prose as a guiding force. It was revelatory to me as a writer, who gets so worried about writing well that sometimes I forget about writing with beauty and whimsy and lyricism. The Swimmers is next on my list to read.
  • How lovely is this piece about the creative seasons by Austin Kleon? (peek here).
  • Ever feel like you’re in someone else’s movie (picture of definition of “idiot plot”) and it was a movie written by a coked-up background muppet whose Mahna Mahna has slipped off its cracker? I mean…
  • I’d absolutely demolish Le Crookie, a sinfully delightful pastry mishmash taking Paris by storm. (Feast your eyes on this madness).
  • It was my daughter’s birthday on April 8. We told her we moved heaven and earth for her, and that’s cool and all, but don’t expect that every year, kid.
  • Having kids has completely reshaped my understanding of time, especially when there are milestones. It’s like living in a real-world example of relativity: they’re at once newborns, teens, young adults, and everything in between, while I just steadily decay.
  • And then the routine chaos: proms, concerts, sporting our way through life. The husband and I morphed into glorified chauffeurs, hauling our offspring hither and yon.
  • Our sports pilgrimage included track meets in Arctic temps and baseball games called by some marvelously colorful umpires — can you say, “turkey, chicken, duck”? Because one umpire sure could every time there was a foul. Games and meets are long, is what I’m saying, and I have a lot of time to enjoy things like that. Except for the Arctic temps.
  • My bookshelves are screaming under the weight of an ever-expanding TBR pile. So many books, so little time (and this doesn’t help).
  • While I’m shedding no tears — except for the workers affected — over Oberweiss flirting with bankruptcy, I’m totally drooling over Jeni’s ice cream (I mean, have you tried it?). If I indulged as often as I’d like, I’d be experiencing regular cardiac events while living in a cardboard box — but what a sweet, sweet home it would be.
  • Discovered joy with my husband at a new sushi joint that actually knows what spicy means. It’s our new “our place,” because let’s face it, my usual place is inside my own head. It’s cluttered in there and there’s no sushi.
  • Kudos to The Crown for reminding me why posture matters (thanks, scoliosis). Also I AM WELL AWARE OF HOW BEHIND I AM. I DO NOT OFTEN HEAR THE ZEITGEIST OVER THE SOUNDS OF LOCAL LEAF BLOWERS.
  • Hat tip to Redditor thewelfarestate who, in a thread about not (over)using adverbs in writing, said, “Adverbs killed my father… meanly.” 
  • This is also good writing advice:
  • Dove into k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving” and “Hallelujah” on repeat because her voice cools the burn of a world that can get too loud and cruel.
  • And not to bury this or anything, but this happened a couple of days ago. More next month.

(and also, I love this flavor, in case you’re wondering. And this one. And this one. And this one. Also this. And I cannot forget this.)

May we all come into the peace of wild things.

And may we wild things bring peace to you.