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.

From the Files

Found this yesterday while going through my grad school folders. It was created by those of us in Michelle Carter's Teaching Creative Writing class in fall of 2007 (so I'm not solely responsible for this, just contributed to it). If you've ever been in a workshop or critique group, you'll appreciate this.



Roles and Dynamics Found in Workshop Hell:

The Justifier - a) recognizes the writer's intentions and insists that the writer has accomplished them; b) reflexively defends the work as it is.

The Placater - "I just LOVE the writing!" Everything is wonderful, wants everyone to feel good.

The Alpha-Dog - "As my agent remarked over martinis last night..."

The Slash & Burner - thinks he or she is demonstrating critical acumen by crapping all over everything.

The Psychoanalyzer - "Clearly, the writer is the child of an alcoholic, probably two..."

The Digressor - "This reminds me of that time..."

The Fixer - "Start on page 10, move the scene on page 3 to page 7, and end the story on page 12, and make your main character a man."

The POV-changer - "Try changing this to first person..."

The Cosmic-Nitpicker - insists on focusing on irrelevant trivialities such as word choice in first drafts, titles, the color of a character's clothing or hair.

The Politicizer - "As a Marxist feminist, I find it offensive that..."

The Lit Crit Student/ Aesthetic Advocate - "The signifier fails to decenter the sign..."

The Formalist/Traditionalist/Classicist - "This is not a story..."

The Flame Warrior - insists on having personal battles and butting heads with everyone over everything.

The Teacher/Group Leader-Pleaser - arse-kisser

The Automatic Contrarian - habitually challenges the teacher because he or she knows more than the teacher.

The Personalizer - "I've never been to China, but I did have Chinese food for dinner last night and..."

The Perpetually Clueless - "I've got no idea what this story is about, actually."

The Cliche-Lover - praises what is trite/familiar and fears surprise and originality.

The Defender - responds to all comments with "But my writing group/husband/dog really loves this story."

The Explainer - "I know it's really slow up to page 50, but that's necessary because..."

The Validation-Hungry Genius - just wants to be told how brilliant he/she is.

The Dismisser - "I don't really care what you think about my work, it's being published next month just as it is."

The Apologizer - "You're right, I suck. I should just stop writing now."

The Excuse-Maker - "I haven't slept in a week, I'm moving, my cat died..."

The Psychotherapy Patient/ The Tender Plant - "I haven't felt this violated since my parents' divorce destroyed my life."

The Realist - "But that's how it really happened."

The Unintelligible Theorizer - "This piece is a deconstruction of Heidegger's praxis in its problemization of Paul de Man..."

Notes from the Life

Couple of things today:

I'm going through my file cabinet right now, becoming reacquainted with various piece of paper I have collected and held on to, sometimes for several years. I've found some story starts from more than a decade ago (probably more like two decades - it is astounding how recent they seem and yet, when I do the chronology thing, I realize how long ago I actually put those words on that piece of paper - have I really been at this writing thing that long?)and been pleasantly surprised at how good they are (which, of course, begs the question of why it is so easy for me to doubt the quality of my writing. Believe me, I do. And often).

I also reacquainted myself with my "success" folder - it contains acceptance letters (and also "good" rejection letters - my favorites are rejections of the short story "Choice" which has become the novel I'm working on: "Although there is much to admire here, sorry to disappoint you on 'Choice.'" and "This story is hovering on the edge of being a great story..."). There are also comments from editors and people I interviewed during my freelancing days - my favorite, after adding a concluding paragraph to a run-of-the-mill round-up article about the top ten innovative tech businesses in Nevada, my editor e-mailed back, "Perfect. Good fluff is an art form." Love it!) Looking at the success folder was a great shot-in-the-arm and I'm grateful the younger version of myself thought to create the folder and keep it in the very front of the filing cabinet where it's visible every time I open that drawer. Good job, younger self!

I'm also going through the vast multitude of folders full of stuff from grad school. It's too early to start doing a thorough culling, and there's sooooo much good stuff in these folders, that I'm not doing a lot of thinning here. But what is interesting is coming across things I wrote for exercises and not recognizing them as my own writing nor remembering their creation at all. This has happened quite a few times. It's completely understandable. The pace of grad school was tremendous - I did my MFA in three years. It was three years of constant pressure to create and write and get work out there on a deadline (maybe that's why the work has been moving at such a slow pace during my first post-grad school year). Looking at these snippets of stories or novels (I mined previous novels and novels that were still in development mercilessly in an effort to short cut the creation process when a professor asked for scenes - a totally legitimate way to create what I needed to for the class), I'm amazed at what I produced, and how much of it there is, and how GOOD a lot of it is. I've thought I hadn't really written anything during my time in grad school. Um, hello? It makes me very glad I'm doing this culling and pruning thing right now. (though I truly wish I didn't have to keep reminding myself that 1) I'm good, and 2) I'm productive, almost prolific.)

The other thing is that I saw George RR Martin last night in Redwood City courtesy of the super in dependant book store Kepler's. What I did not know until last night was that Kepler's promoted George's first book in the series, Game of Thrones, and sold more copies of that book than any other bookstore in the country.

It's an odd thing to see an author in person, especially an author who has achieved the kind of super-star status that packs out a 1,000 seat theater or, as happened at ComicCon, has 7,000 people lined up for hours to get seats in an auditorium that only seats 4,000. There is never enough time for all the questions to be asked let alone answered (in this case, George talked a bit about why this latest book took so long and about the HBO series, then there were a few questions from the audience and then George sat at a table and signed books for the 1,000 people (several of whom had brought the full limit of three books for signing) - the event started at 7, my friend and I got out of there at 10 with our signed copy) and it always seems like the author can't quite answer the question the audience wants answered the most: what is it like in your head?

Having been to a number of author readings and signings, etc, I truly think that is the one question the audience really wants answered, but neither the audience nor the author knows how to get to it.

Anyway, back to the files and the ever rising pile of paper in the recycling bin.

(There will be a picture of George attached to this blog post as soon as I can get it from my friend. Promise)