Shakespeare in Love or In Love with Shakespeare

Home-schooled Teen and I have begun our new school year together, and this year is all about Shakespeare. I'm excited since the last time I really looked at Shakespeare I was all of 21. Granted, it was during my study-abroad semester in London and we went to at least one Shakespeare play a week, many of them by the RSC, but I was 21 and not that widely nor deeply read as I am now.

Last year, HST and I read some of the foundational books of the Western canon - Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, the Aeneid and the Inferno. This year, we are reading, more or less in order: Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar (with the addition of reading Plutarch's chapter on Caesar), Richard III, Henry V, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Over the summer, we saw a production of Macbeth and read The Tempest (we were supposed to see a production of Tempest, but that's a whole different kettle of fish). My idea is to circle back to Shakespeare's final play so we can look at how he developed certain themes through his career.

I am excited about this year for a number of reasons. One, I really do love Shakespeare and often forget how much I love him until I pick up or see one of his plays. And then remember all over again how amazing a writer he is. Two, I am going to be teaching a class at Buena Vista University in Iowa this January about appropriation, and the Bard is a master appropriator. Having read the books we read last year, I find myself picking up on his references to the Aeneid in many of his plays. But he also used folktales, popular plays by other writers, gossip, Plutarch, Virgil and almost any other writer with whom the public might be familiar to recontextualize themes and characters who were well-known. Three, I find some of the themes he returns to fascinating. The public versus the private self. The roles people assume and what makes a king a king (I'm not a Shakespearean scholar, but I would almost guarantee that some of the very first seeds of the American Revolution were sown from Henry V and Shakespeare's musing on the idea that a king is just a man with good props). And, four, this time period in European history is incredible. The more I learn, the more fascinated I am with it. We may think our country is in turmoil right now, but it is nothing, NOTHING compared to 16th century Europe with the conflict between the Catholic Church and the Protestants, the rise of the moneyed merchant class, colonization of North America, a woman (WOMAN!) on the throne of England, and the rise of England as the dominant world power. The intrigue, the politics, the social upheaval. How could it not be the stuff of great stories?

So, HST and I have embarked. Our first stop on this voyage is Taming of the Shrew, probably one of the most controversial plays for contemporary audiences. One critic I read as I was preparing my study guide of HST talked about how, though the play is a farce, it can't be forgotten that Shakespeare was a man and how constrained women's roles were during this age. True. But I think it forgets that this is also the man who presents more nuanced roles for women in his other plays. Why would he have other female characters who have great strength and ask us, in this farce, to take Katherine at face value when she talks about the rightful domination of women by men? It's a difficult play for contemporary women to stomach, I agree. I saw a production that went the full nine yards of making Kate a victim of domestic violence. HST and I have just started, so I'll post again about some of the conclusions we come to, and I've paired Shrew up with Romeo and Juliet, so we have two looks at marriage in radically different plays that both, at their heart, turn on the idea of arranged marriage versus marriage for love.

Getting Near the End

I went away to a lovely little house on the Russian River last week so I could get some writing done, and ended up with forty-eight pages and 13,000 words, which means I'm about seventy pages from the end.

For the most part, the next seventy pages will be some of the easiest writing of the entire draft. I've got very few notes from my draft two read-through, which means I'm just typing, adding in some layering, some deeper understandings of the characters and the imagery of the novel that have developed during the writing of the third draft. With the exception of one sequence of scenes (which I've mapped out so thoroughly at this point), I won't be writing large chunks of new text. Although, I've said that before and found myself writing LOTS of new text in this draft. In a strange way, draft three is the same as the previous draft, and in some ways, it's radically different.

On Facebook, I'm inundating my friends with updates about how many pages I've written, and my frustrations with interruptions (I returned to a remodel in one of our neighbor's houses) and just fitting my life in when my mind is perpetually elsewhere. At this point, Altar is officially the longest thing I've ever written and the longest I've ever spent writing something. One of my friends asked me what I'm going to do after it's done, and I jokingly said, "Go to Disneyland." To which she replied, "That's not a bad idea." I know. I feel it starting already. Though there will be editing to do when (fingers crossed) the novel gets taken by an agent and bought by an editor, it will not occupy me in the same way the writing does. I will not live with my characters in the way I do now. For one thing, I will have moved on to the next project by the time that comes about, for another, I won't have to be living so deeply in the story.

So what does it feel like right now? Fluid. Very fluid. I feel a lightness, an ease not only in my mind, but in my body. I am smiling a lot these days. For the most part, small annoyances (like rude drivers) don't stick with me. I get cranky when I can't get to the words (like earlier this week - re-entry was rough with a long list of things that had piled up while I was away. I still haven't worked my way through all of it), I get cranky with my family when they ask to borrow my time for things that were completely avoidable (aka: when the kids call because they've forgotten something at home that they need for school ASAP), and I get cranky when the hammering starts up in the remodel and interrupts my flow of words.

I am posting word totals to Facebook because that is truly what is going on in my life right now. Words. On the page. The story flowing forward in such a beautiful and profound way it's almost like it's not even me writing it at times. It seems to come through me rather than from me. And that is when writing is at its best. There is a tension building as I write ever closer to the final words, as I write towards some of my favorite scenes in the entire book, as I envision myself staring at the computer screen and hearing the printer churn out page after page of the completed manuscript.

I think what surprises me most is how easy it has been to follow this story to this conclusive moment. Over the years, I've heard of writers who spend decades on a single novel and wondered how they could do that, how they could maintain the focus, how they could not drive themselves mad with all the other ideas they weren't getting to. The answer turns out to be that it's surprisingly simple when the idea, the characters, the way the story develops continues to surprise you, to delight you, to reward your attention by getting better and deeper. It hasn't been easy. I have put this story down many times. It started as a 25-page short story in 1999. It grew into a novella a couple of years later. Three years ago, it turned into a full-fledged novel, and here I am, at last, reaching out for the end.

Can You Believe It?

There was a discussion on one of the agent blogs I read several weeks ago (months, probably, knowing how chronologically challenged I am) about whether a teenage protagonist in a YA novel would use a particular word or not. The agent said that no teenager she knew would ever use this word and so it ruined the veracity of the character for her. Many of the blog readers commented that they've heard plenty of teenagers use that word or words of a similar elevated vocabulary level (I forget the exact word, but it was a mult-syllabic, Latinate, SAT-type word).

Similar discussions come up in workshop classrooms all the time. One person says something in a story isn't believable and another says, "Oh no, the same thing happened to me (or my brother, best friend, dog) and it happened exactly like this."

I think the discussions actually miss the point.

The question isn't 'can you believe it?' but 'is it believable for this character?'

To paraphrase Shakespeare (because I'm not going to get the quote right, and I don't want to take the time to go find it): there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

Or, to paraphrase Douglas Adams: In an infinite universe, everything is possible.

These discussions came to mind while I was working on my own novel tonight and wrote the phrase I haven’t made up the reading I’ve missed nor gotten the class notes from anyone and realized it was the wrong language for my character. I've taken a lot of care to make it clear Matt is intelligent and observant. He has to be. He's carrying the observational weight of the entire novel. The reader has to trust his ability to tell the story and give valuable insight into his own character as well as those around him, otherwise the whole conceit of the novel collapses into the diary of a precocious fourteen year old. And that's not what I'm after.

I'm reminded of a friend who wrote a stunning first novel years ago with a very young narrator. She wrote a very smart scene early on where her narrator observed her mother walking through the grocery store, commenting not only on the height of her heels and the tightness of her shirt, but the reactions of the other customers in the store. Instinctively, my friend had done the work of getting the reader to trust this narrator's ability to reveal truth and tell the story even though she was ten years old.

So I don't think the question is one of whether a particular word or observation is believable. If the question of believability comes up, it's usually because the writer hasn't done the work to make the reader believe it.

In Defense of Harry Potter

I had an interesting moment the other day when a new character was introduced in the novel I was reading. Her name was Merope. I knew the name came out of Greek mythology (Merope was the name of one of Atlas' daughters), but I kept getting a flash in my mind of a bedraggled young woman with stringy black hair and a very white face. The image was so vivid, I thought it had to come from a movie.

This happens a lot. I have near-perfect recall for just about any actor I've ever seen in a movie. I've only been stumped a few times, most notably by Hugo Weaving who I saw in Priscilla - Queen of the Desert, The Lord of the Rings movies, and The Matrix and didn't recognize as the same person (largely because Weaving is one of the few actors who can change the cadence and tone of his speech from role to role - Johnny Depp can do it, too, but I've never failed to recognize him since I've loved him since his 21 Jump Street days, and he's usually the star of the movie with his name above the title). It wasn't until a friend called Weaving 'Agent Elf' that I realized I'd been completely fooled.

I usually know the names of the actors, too, not just the roles they played, and have been known to recognize dog and cat actors as well. This ability is like my super power and might lead you to believe I spend lot of time reading the tabloids or memorizing IMDB, but nothing could be further from the truth. The information just sticks. Like Crazy Glue.

This time was different, though. I didn't get the snippet of dialogue that usually helps me figure out who the actor is or the name of the movie he or she was in. Every time I saw the name 'Merope,' I got that flash of the woman's face until it hit me. It wasn't a movie. It was the sixth Harry Potter book I was remembering. Tom Riddle's mother was Merope.

When I realized that, I turned to my husband and told him I want to be able to do exactly that, create an image with words that is so vivid a reader will think they've seen it rather than read it. That's not just good writing, that's amazing writing.

Shouting about Rivers

All this week I’m guest blogging at To Be Shouted, a creative blog started by James Wilson and his family. Each month, they choose a topic and each family member plus one guest blogger gets a week to do whatever they want with the topic. Posts on previous topics (bread, Sundays, home, maps) have included meditations on the topics, essays, paintings, photo essays, stories, just about anything you can think of as a way to conceptualize the topic in a creative way. This month’s topic is ‘river,’ and I’ve been immersed (pardon the pun) in the subject for the past couple of weeks preparing for my To Be Shouted debut.

I’ve been having a good time with the topic, but what’s been really interesting is watching my creative arc as the project developed.

My first step in developing something interesting was to brainstorm. What did I know about rivers? What rivers did I know? What did I think about them? What came to mind when I thought about the word ‘river.’ I wrote down everything I could think of and tacked the list on the cork board over my desk so I could see it each day.

As I got closer to my deadline, I began researching the topic on the Internet. What was a river? What came up on the first page when I Googled the term ‘river?’ That search led me a recording of Joni Mitchell’s “River” on YouTube which got me thinking about the number of river-related songs I knew. So I started searching on YouTube for videos of songs about rivers, which, in turn, led to the post I put up today. But it also started me thinking about the symbolic use of rivers in music, literature and art.

I also thought a lot about mythology and river gods, the words associated with rivers and the effects rivers have on the landscape. I wrote a couple of things about those topics, but I also wanted to do something creative.

The next step in my process was the jump into interpretation of rivers, leaving the physical reality of rivers behind and moving into the metaphysical and symbolic. I’ve written a poem, have a piece of flash fiction/short short in the works, and am working on a couple of visual pieces – all of which will start hitting the blog in the next couple of days.

What’s been nice about this is watching the creative work evolve. So often, when I’m faced with a grant proposal or a residency application, I have a difficult time coming up with what I want to do, a difficult time describing the kind of work I want to create. I now realize, that’s mostly because I’m trying to jump to the last stage of this process without doing any of the previous stages, without any of the brainstorming or processing of information. The work I propose always feels flat. So the guest blogging on To Be Shouted has been a valuable microcosm of my creative process and a really good learning experience for me.

To Be Shouted

I will be guest blogging over at To Be Shouted from today until the end of the month. To Be Shouted is the brain child of my friend, James Wilson, and his family, all of them talented artists. Each month, they choose a theme and write, create art, or post images related to that them. This month, the theme is 'river.' I've got some meditations, a poem, a story, and some art pieces that will be posted over the next ten days. Come check it out.

(the image above is one I took several years ago at the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota. The line of stones the girls are walking across marks the boundary between lake and river, the beginning of a journey that ends some 2,300 miles later in the Gulf of Mexico)

And Now, Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Life

Today is the first day of school for my younger son (the older one went back to school last week), which means the house belongs to myself and the two dogs (who spend most of their time sleeping) for several hours each day.

It would have been tempting to plan to dive right back into work and start zooming away on the novel as soon as the door closed behind the younger child, but, I know myself better than this. I knew I would need some decompression time, time to adjust to the silence of the house (and the increase in environmental noise - like barking dogs and construction - that would become louder because of the vacuum), and I actually planned to give myself some space to do this. I'll pat myself on the back. I got myself right. Finally.

The house is quiet. Too quiet. And feels empty. The dogs are both sacked out - big dog on the couch and puppy by the sliding glass door. It's an overcast day in Baylandia, which makes the day feel even quieter.

So there's decompression from the kids going back to school and no longer being in the house. And there's also decompression from spending the weekend in Reno for Worldcon, which was a whirlwind of panel discussions on topics as diverse as infectious diseases (a catastrophic epidemic will not wipe out the human race, all it will take is a disease that kills 10% of the population to sufficiently disrupt such essentials as distribution of clean water and food and we'll die of water and food-born pathogens), writing fiction with real people as characters (make sure to choose someone who has been dead long enough to have few heirs or someone who does not have a litigious estate), and the nature of consciousness (a "philosophical zombie" is someone who does not know if anyone else has consciousness because, while you know you yourself have consciousness, you can not absolutely know for sure that anyone else you meet does as well). The highlight of my weekend was meeting Guy Consolmagno, or Brother Guy, who is an MIT-educated Jesuit priest and astronomer at the Vatican Observatory, who set us straight about a number of things including that the excommunication of Galileo was not about his science, it was a political move brought about because Galileo's patrons, the de Medicis, had fallen out of favor. Two years after his excommunication, Galileo was back on his estate carrying on just as before. (which, of course, makes me want to research it and write about it - this weekend was great for giving me more stories that I will probably never be able to write)

Another highlight was the panel discussion on linguistics. The academic credentials of the four panelists were incredibly impressive - PhD's all - but what really impressed...the moderator created the Klingon language and one of the panelists created the Dothraki language for the HBO Game of Thrones series. (Also amazing to me...the number of times George RR Martin crossed my path just wandering around the con like all the rest of us mere mortals. Unfortunately, I never had my camera handy when he did so).

Despite Worldcon's focus on SF and fantasy writing (or maybe because of it), I found plenty of interconnection with my own work. A talk about the ways ancient cultures have mapped the heavens gave me lots of information that relates directly to the novel, as did the linguistics discussion. I often went back to my hotel room at the end of the day with my head spinning and so mentally exhausted, I couldn't even contemplate playing Solitaire on the computer.

So, here I am again, just me and my words, and a novel to complete, and a whole bunch of new stories to think about. Which will make my next blog post very timely. Awhile back, I asked several writer and artist friends, how they created a balance between the existing work and the new ideas that inevitably form while you're engaged in a long-term project. My next post will focus on their responses.