Photo of the Week
There’s a gorgeous abstract drama to this photo. Hopefully you’ll think of that lit opening at the far end as a bright door into the New Year.
Writing Resolutions for 2012
I don’t fully believe in New Year’s resolutions. The problem is that so many people seem to forget their self-knowledge and insight when making bold new plans for the new year; they forget who they really are and imagine the other people they want to be. Hence the giant leap in gym memberships during the month of January that then go unused. I’m no better; I suffer from the same delusion we all do. The delusion is that we will be better people in the future without effort, or that somehow the future will be easier, brighter, and less complicated than the present.
That said, I’m not a pessimist about the beginning of a new year! I’m as excited as the next guy at a new chance to imagine what I realistically could become. Writers need a chance at regular rejuvenation, and the beginning of a new year is as good a time as any. So how can we avoid gym memberships that will never be used? This year, let’s make a plan for setting creative goals that we can actually accomplish.
The mailbag is back, readers, and we’re blasting ahead with more posts and thoughtful comments from our archives. In the past few months I wrote about the importance of point of view and how to use psychology in writing. You all weighed in, and I’d love to respond. Let’s get to the comments!
On point of view, mary said:
Recently, I’ve been watching many improving science programs about animals in the wild. It’s all the rage to attach cameras to them, then experience “Life–POV Badger!” YOU get to experience small dark burrows behind a little dirty nose, YOU get to be stuck in the maw of a giant cobra, and so on.
These programs have expanded my ideas for POV. Why not tell the story of the politician from his dog’s viewpoint? How many times have we thought the dog was asleep near the fireplace when, in fact, the dog heard EVERY word of the clandestine meeting that was being held? How many badgers have been witness to MURDER in an otherwise empty field?
Thanks, mary, for a lighter take on the possibilities different points of view can give us! It’s true — thanks to a process of democratizing point of view in the last century, we’ve become newly interested in the perspective of the lesser heard, the voice of the voiceless, including the animal voice. It’s often a way to comment on the larger tensions at work and to critique the failings of a society. Consider Black Beauty, which is generally considered responsible for starting the modern animal rights movement thanks to its story from the point of view of a long-suffering horse.
E said:
In a long story (over 50,000 words), is multiple POV ok? I can’t tell the story through one POV because of the various places where the story is happening…
Is there a general rule in this regard?
Sadly, E, there’s no hard and fast rule about this, but I can tell you that far shorter great books have used far more points of view. Faulkner’s classic As I Lay Dying using at least eight or ten perspectives, with each chapter the speaking voice of a different family member. It’s a fascinating take on the death of one southern mother whose sons, husbands, daughter, and neighbors all view the death differently. At one point, we even get to hear from the mother herself — and in that case, different points of view can even act as a source of suspense in the novel, as we eagerly wait for Darl or Dewey Dell’s perspective on new events.
Margaret said:
One thing I’m mulling over is how many points of view I can use in a novel. I’ve got a potential story with two four-way relationships .. I’ve written a YA sci fi about one of them, first person POV. I’m tempted to write about the second — but I’d want it to be third person.
Sounds exciting, Margaret — and a great idea. Often we get to know side characters so well that we wish we could see the story from their perspective. Many novels have played with this burning need of readers, such as Wide Sargasso Sea, which re-tells the story of Jane Eyre from the perspective of the madwoman in the attic. There’s also The Wind Done Gone, which gives us Gone with the Wind from the perspective of the slaves. The possibilities of point of view are endless!
After the jump: responses to psychology in writing.
The End of a Writing Year
I’m back from some much-needed family time during the holidays, writers, and I want to know what you’re thinking now that the year is nearly drawing to a close. What writing goals did you achieve this year? What goals did you never get to? Which goals did you decide weren’t worth achieving?
This year was a big one for my own writing; I graduated with my MFA in Fiction, I finally started work on a novel-length manuscript, and I began seriously considering the next steps (potential agents, publishers, etc). In the past month or so, though, the writing has fallen by the wayside as I wrestled with grades and my teaching career. One of my goals for the new year might be to better juggle my day job with what I think of as my REAL job.
And as family matters intruded and kept me from blogging this week, I hardened my resolve to juggle my various types of writing more capably in the coming months. I’ll continue tackling those thoughtful comments in the weekly mailbag series, and I’ve got a ton of ideas about what’s bubbling in the writing world today and how we writers stay on top of it all.
I hope those of you celebrating Christmas had a wonderful holiday, and whether you celebrate any holiday this time of year or not, I hope you all got the chance to spend some time with family and loved ones. Stay tuned this week for more thoughts on what a writer can do at the end of the year to make sure his or her next creative year gets off to a bangin’ start!
My Favorite Reads of 2011
It’s finally that time again — the time when I get to pore over the books I enjoyed this past year and highlight the ones that really stuck with me. As always, my year-end best-of list is not governed by what came out this year, because I like reading books from all over the timeline, not simply books of the moment. Instead, I hope to use my best-of list as a guide for those of you wanting to plumb the past as well as the present. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the books that inspired me this year!
Aloft, Chang-Rae Lee
Aloft concerns itself with a fairly unremarkable suburban life among the upper-middle class of Long Island, but it’s the writing that makes this book extraordinary. It’s been a long time since I’ve luxuriated in such fluid, graceful, sinuous language. The voice is sophisticated, humorous, and wise; you’ll want to listen to this writer’s voice commenting on anything. The story begins to get complicated when you realize how many different family members are wrapped up in a confused past of tragedy, enmity, and violence; and you begin to feel increasingly engaged with our narrator’s struggle to assert his role in a disintegrating family.
Black Swan Green, David Mitchell
Here’s an excerpt from what I wrote about Black Swan Green this year:
This past week I found myself happily swallowed up in his coming-of-age novel, Black Swan Green. It’s a very British novel, taking place in a small country village and overflowing with British slang and localisms, but that’s one major source of its charm: as a novel from the perspective of a young boy, it does not condescend to its subject, but fully enters its protagonist’s world, giving us the back yards and fenced fields and fairgrounds of a boy’s life. All of these things are presented to us with a young boy’s sense of what’s important, such as being cool in the eyes of the local toughs, wondering about the burgeoning sexuality around him, and anxiously avoiding anything that’s “too gay.” While reading Black Swan Green, I felt like I was getting a lot of insight to the anxieties that shape a child’s growing up, taking me back to that nervous adolescent period when being liked was so, so important, and standing out was the peak of horror. Mitchell stays closely in the voice of a young child, but also allows for a great deal of simple, elegant lyricism, describing the settings and the questions of a child with a great deal of poignancy.
Fun Home: a Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel
I don’t read a ton of graphic novels, but I should probably read more, because each one that I do ends up being tremendously interesting. A favorite American graphic novel for me this year was noted feminist writer Alison Bechdel’s intricate, thoughtful, and haunting memoir. The memoir is concerned with her own coming out, but also her father’s, and the circumstances around his mysterious death, which may or may not have been an accident. Her struggle to understand the way her father policed her gender — and therefore policed himself and the entire family — are a poignant commentary on the secrets we all keep, and the lies we tell ourselves as we grow up and try to figure out who we are.
Photo of the Week
This week’s photo seems charmingly holiday-themed — and besides being with family, the desserts are one of my favorite aspects of the season. Is there something holiday-themed you can write about this week?
The List that’s Dragging You Down
Thanks for your patience, readers; I’ve been dealing with some pressing family matters in the midst of final papers pouring in from my students, and the blog has suffered as a result. But let’s get back on track! While reading my students’ papers, I realized that it was difficult to keep up with my own writing when I had to read and write other writers’ work. And when I finally tried to focus on the writing, I found my mind still pulled in a dozen directions — the grades I still had to figure out, the blog I was neglecting, my family — the list is probably familiar to all of you, because it’s an internal list of issues and dragging thoughts that we keep in all of our heads.
This list can take a variety of forms, but with a little help from technology, it’s not just riding around in our heads anymore; it’s buzzing on our cell phones, popping up in the corners of our computer screens, and ringing off the hook on our desks. The list of nagging, unresolved obligations and problems is now free to follow us wherever we go. Cell phones can tell us everything coming up on our calendars and how many unanswered texts we have, among the many other guilt-inducing functions they have. When it comes time to think creatively, it’s difficult to shed all of the trappings of that list that’s dragging us down, distracting us from focus and attention.
After the jump: cutting the list loose.
Finding Words after Trauma
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously said (in translation), “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” After the unprecedented horror and trauma of the events of the Holocaust, he was reminding us how making sense of things in lyric form seems grossly inadequate, even disrespectful to the senselessness of the violence the victims suffered. While this is an important question to raise about the nature and morality of art in general, it is also relevant to the small struggles we have to write in our daily lives. After small, personal tragedies and traumas occur, we are often left wordless, struggling to make sense of what has occurred. Sometimes we feel that it is disrespectful to turn the events of our or others’ lives into pretty poetry, and we are left only with silence.
The problem with this silence, well-meaning as it might be, is that it is not ultimately the best way to honor life and to go on living, in my opinion. Language and storytelling is the way that we understand events and learn from them; putting those events on paper is a way of taming them, putting them in our power, instead of letting ourselves be in their power. It can sometimes seem barbaric to try to capture grief and trauma, or even to write about other things when grief is still looming in our minds. But we must. It is our duty as writers.
After the jump: finding the words once again
Sunday Review: Kusmi Tea
Now that the bite of real winter air is upon us (at least here in New England), I’m relying even more heavily on my favorite indulgence: Kusmi Tea. I do consider this relevant to our discussion of writing tools because writers need fuel, and that fuel most often takes the form of caffeine in tea or coffee. For a truly resplendent tea experience, you can’t miss this century-old tea manufacturer, which originated with a Russian family operating in Paris (the label is still based in Paris today). Kusmi specializes in exquisite Russian blends of Chinese and Indian teas such as the usual Ceylon, Assam, and Darjeeling. But what makes these teas special is what else goes into them. Without going over the top or becoming too candy-coated, Kusmi uses red fruits, hints of caramel, bergamot, almonds, vanilla, and other subtle flavors to make their tea seem as lovely as a dessert in and of themselves.
There are also sparer, more robust teas for your breakfast, like classic Earl Greys or teas in Irish and English breakfast blends. There are more unusual mixtures, like the tea infused with the taste of buffalo grass. But my personal favorites remain the Russian series, particularly “St. Petersburg”, “Petroushka”, and “Prince Vladimir”, which even has cloves. These teas are spicy and sweet, and I’m usually found drinking a mug while writing. If you’re a devoted tea drinker like I am, Kusmi Tea has just the right richness, spiciness, and subtlety to perk you up but also calm you down.
How to Choose the Right Subject
I’m currently teaching an introductory creative writing class with students who are very new to the writing game. They are definitely picking up on the techniques I’m discussing in class, from vivid adjective choices to strong verbs, but there’s one thing they continue to struggle with. It’s something I find very difficult to teach; in fact, it’s something that might not be teachable at all. It’s the skill (or inborn talent, perhaps) of choosing the right subject.
It’s funny, but no matter how many times I tell my students that stories need conflict and some sort of drama, I still get stories about vacations, trips to the beach, or other perfectly pleasant situations. While the writing in these stories can often be quite sharp, the message doesn’t seem to be getting through that not all subjects and scenes are created equal. Not every premise is equally capable of becoming an engaging story; some are just too trouble-free. The easiest way to get the ball rolling in a story is to present us with some sort of problem, but it continues to be tempting (and not just to my students) to write about safety and normalcy. Why?
The dangerous power of the writer
My theory is that writers, particularly young writers, are very aware of the power of words. They know that words once said or written can do damage; they can break hearts, hurt feelings, start wars. Words and the power of imagination behind them can be very dangerous. When we’re creating something, we don’t want to presume that we’re worthy of describing large, dramatic events; putting a fictional character in danger is almost as bad as putting a real one there. Perhaps our impulse is to apologize for ourselves, and to write small and humbly. We’re left futzing with familiar, tame scenes, attracted by the security of them.
After the jump: how to choose the right subject.
