The Real World

So I graduated yesterday.

I think it's easy to see certain official moments as an endpoint or a new beginning.  But in some ways, not much will change now that I have my MFA.  Yes, I can apply for teaching jobs.  I now have another diploma to hang on the wall.  But regarding my writing, everything is the same.

Except that it is more stressful to think about dropping the ball.  In a writing program, you have deadlines and expectations to create new work.  Even if it is never sent out for publication, you write yet another story, outline yet another novel.  With that pressure gone, it can be too easy to let it all fade away.

I have heard about some of the alums from my school who have significantly slowed down their writing or stopped altogether.  Maybe a Masters program is just an expensive way to find out you don't want to be a writer, but that seems like a waste.  I don't want to be another alum who drops the ball and never follows through.

So I have the first meeting of a writing group scheduled for tonight.  I have a play that must be finished because it is being produced in February 2010.  And I have my own deadlines for finishing the first draft of my novel.  The more I can do to keep life from getting in the way, the better.  Why take the easy route when that won't lead to the life and career I want?

Minor details

So back to my urge to use details that pack a large punch.  I was grazing through my bookshelves earlier today and came across The Last Town on Earth by Thomas Mullen.  Over a year ago I had joined an ill-fated book club.  When a newer member began a monologue on how he really wanted new friends and all his attempts on Craigslist ended with men soliciting him for sex, I knew it was time to go.  But they brought me to this book, so I suppose it was worth it.

Mullen fictionalizes a lesser known aspect of American history - when towns quarantined themselves during the 1918 flu epidemic.  A mill town in the Pacific Northwest votes to set up a guard to stop visitors from entering the town and infecting its population.  The moral struggles of the characters, both those for and against the quarantine, are beautifully presented.  And Mullen accomplishes this through his strong use of poignant detail.

Consider this example.  At the end of chapter two, the town has voted for a quarantine.  Rebecca, the wife of the town's founder, vehemently opposes the quarantine but cannot vocally go against her husband.  Their adopted son Philip volunteers to be a part of the guard.  Mullen writes:

"Beside her, Philip stood, and as he took his first step toward the line, Rebecca started to raise her hand instinctively to grab his shoulder, to pull him to his seat and tell him he was making a mistake.  He was only sixteen!  He should not stand out there and hold a gun against whoever might happen upon the town.  But before she could grab him, he had stepped beyond her, into that long line, sidling up beside Graham, who nodded at his unofficial brother and patted him twice on the shoulder.

For many year Rebecca would remember that shoulder clasp and the way Philip's back seemed to straighten under the weight of Graham's hand."

When I first read that passage, tears came to my eyes.  Such simple actions and details but set together, a mother's pain is revealed.  And my poor mother!  The Sunday afternoon I came to this page, I wanted to share it with someone.  I followed her around the house reading aloud, explaining why it was such fine writing.  I remember she smiled and said it was nice.

Mullen also has a knack for using detail to grab the reader's attention.  The first sentence of chapter five is "The body only felt light because six of them were lifting it."  Certainly caught my eye.

Coming across The Last Town on Earth gave me hope that I can continue to hone my use of details in my novel.  A longer work can sustain that specificity if it is balanced with plot and characterization.  Granted, I'm in a section of my novel that is heavy with dialogue and is filling in back-story so pretty sentences aren't on my mind at the moment.  But they will be.

Strong start

It’s hard for me to keep my mouth shut when I begin to read something I love. (I’m sorry to all my friends for my repeated Bullet in the Brain proclamations.) There is nothing more exciting than starting a new novel or short story and knowing pretty quickly that you will enjoy the ride.

I began Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré last week because I love action and espionage films and wanted to know if that would translate to novels. I’ve never specifically read a book for of its genre. If the plot sounds half-way decent, I’ll give anything a shot. But I’ve heard a lot of good things about le Carré so off I went.

The first line is fantastic:

“The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn’t dropped dead at Taunton races Jim would never have come to Thursgood’s at all.”

Great details and questions all in one shot. Obviously Major Dover doesn’t matter much – he’s dead. At the Taunton races, no less! I have no idea what that detail means but the specificity draws me in to the as yet unknown narrative voice. Someone – the voice telling the aforementioned truth – is gossiping or confiding in me, making me want to listen.

So now who’s this Jim? And where or what is Thursgood’s? And where would he be if Major Dover hadn’t dropped dead? I’m rubbing my hands with glee over all the questions waiting to be answered. I don’t want all my information upfront; a little mystery can be enjoyable. (I’m talking to you, Larry.)

I was hooked by the bottom on page 2.

So much information is provided in the three long paragraphs that end at the bottom of the second page. Some is scene setting – the teachers at Thursgood’s who debate over opening the trunk of the late piano instructor, Mr. Maltby – and some are prescient – a child observes that Jim’s arrival indicates he knows the layout of the school. The bombardment of information forces the reader to sort through and decide which details are important and will arise later, and which can be enjoyed and immediately discarded. I like the confusion of swirling information that must be sifted through since that is what the various agents in the novel do as they seek out a mole.

In my novel, I tried to create an active beginning that provided enough information to keep the reader interested but raised more questions to force follow-through. So I chose a moment in the story that is an immediate threat and must be handled before moving forward. This seems to be working so far.

I am trying to balance a driving plot with the emotional journeys of the two main characters so maintaining the action and forward motion of the story can be difficult. When I allow my characters to stop and sit and think and talk for a while, I fear they are becoming boring. When I am running them through shooting sprees, I worry that I haven’t conveyed their fears or emotions enough. Hopefully the back and forth between the active and the passive will even the flow.

(And as a side note, so far, le Carré has maintained his pacing while providing excellent inner workings of characters. His omniscient narrator that jumps from focusing on one character to the next was a great choice. Makes me rethink my POV choice. I originally thought my novel would be omniscient instead of third person. Sigh. I can’t go there right now.)

An eye to the future

While everyone else on the train ducks and covers whenever someone coughs, I've been staring out the window thinking about my novel.  I've had a burst of writing lately and I'm in the nebulous center of the story.  When I began my draft, I clearly saw the beginning and the end and shrugged off the blank void of the center.  Now that I am there, it's a little daunting.

It doesn't help that when I dream up scenes and conversations, my mind also considers the intent of the novel.  I want to explore the sometimes conflicting ideas of promises and love.  Which is more important, a promise you have made or your love for someone else, especially when it is a definite choice to be made between the two?

Right now I have been plodding along with the plot.  Lots of things happen, lots of actions and consequences to push the narrative forward.  I still have some things to string together but I bank on figuring it out as I go.  What is distracting is all the bigger concepts I want to weave into the story.  It's not the time to focus on that, I suppose.  The first draft needs to be written and then I can heighten the language and flush out the narrative to present all those Big Important Ideas.  But it's tough to stop myself from turning back.

All I want is to stop and reread, finding ways to explore the implications of Alex's secret and the fears behind Sophia's decisions.  If I do that, I might never get past where I am now though.

So I daydream on the train and see my characters fighting and loving (and some shooting, too) as houses and parks fly by.  The first draft will be the initial dress sewn from my pattern and then I can go back and adjust the hem, reset the sleeve.  Eventually it will be the perfect LBD to show off.  Eventually.

The writer as destroyer and creator

I was reading the Guardian books page today and came across an interview with AS Byatt. The quote under the headline read “In my work, writing is always so dangerous. It’s very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.”

Intrigued, I followed the link and read the entire article. In context, Byatt is discussing characters that she has written who are writers. The full quote is:

“The book [The Children’s Book] touches, too, on what Byatt calls ‘one of the steady themes of my writing that I don't understand - as opposed to several that I do. I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.’”

Interestingly enough, later on in the article Byatt refers to herself as a sort of creator. The writer makes things, constructs things – characters, worlds, dramas. She sees them as three-dimensional.

Writers as creators and destroyers. Two sides of the same coin.

The creator seems obvious. Writers – fiction writers – create every time they sit down to work. World building. Character development. Dialogue and action. They all spring from a glimmer of an idea and bloom on a blank page.

Writers as destroyers is not so pleasant-sounding but ultimately appropriate on several levels. Like a god, we build a world, a character. Like a god, we can run it all down. Characters can die. (And be reborn, if necessary.) Books can end without a satisfactory conclusion. Worlds end tragically. With a strike on the keyboard, the writer rules all.

She might be talking about the artist’s worldview and how that can ultimately ruin her. Many artists, writers and otherwise, become known because of their personal demise. There a link between the artistic temperament and depression, solitude, suicide. It is terrifying to think that you can get that lost in your art.

But maybe it’s because artists can see the end as well as the beginning. Tragedy isn’t surprising. We know that every hero has his flaw. We know nothing is perfect. We know the work that goes into constructing something that needs to appear effortless.

The writer is the magician and sees every trap door, plants the cards up her sleeve. The knowledge of the trick takes away the wonder. It's a little sad - we all need a bit of wonder.

Details, schmetails!

I’ve been told that one of my strengths in my short fiction is my ability to distill a moment down to one important detail. While I am only a so-so judge of my own work, I do know that I purposefully focus on details to illuminate the meaning of a story. Whether it works is a different story. I have also been told that this ability to zoom in on a single image, thought, detail might not carry over to the novel form. Big difference between six pages and three-hundred.

While I writing the first draft of my novel, I haven’t been too concerned about transmitting a technique I use in short stories to the longer form. Until, that is, I began work on my newest chapter. It’s a transition chapter at best; at worst, it will never be included. But the words need to be written because it is all back-story for my protagonist that will directly influence another character’s decision. Somehow this information needs to be given and the best I could come up with for now is a break in my third-person point of view to a first-person account of his childhood and early adulthood. I might eliminate this chapter during revisions if I can find a better way – dialogue, flashbacks, what have you.

As I was working on the chapter this weekend, I began to offend myself with my liberal use of small details. In my defense, I like to think that well-planned, distinct details can really provide a lot of bang for your buck. One ideal detail can demonstrate a character’s entire world view.

But these were by no means ideal details. They were first draft details. The worst kind.

I have to cut myself some slack. Maybe some will stay in the story. Maybe some are just in there as markers for me to remember how I want a character or setting to be imagined. I just need to push through this chapter to get to the next in which the action picks up again. I’ll fix them during revisions.

This concern recalled a book I recently finished, Kate Mosse’s Sepulchre. Overall, a good book. A biographer journeys to France to research Debussy but is actually searching for her family’s past. A parallel story set in 1891 intertwines with the present. History, France, romance – I’ll take it.

One thing irked me about Sepulchre, a small detail relating to details. In the modern day chapters, especially in the first couple of them, the protagonist is described as pulling on Banana Republic jeans or sporting an Abercrombie & Fitch sweater. Now, I have nothing wrong with these two brands (see this lovely dress and pair of jeans here) except that I can’t really afford them.

What I want to know is why these details mattered.

Our heroine, Meredith, is at the end of her Ph.D., most likely not making a ton of money. We actually learn of her financial woes because she keeps checking her bank account online until her book advance is deposited. So does she spend all her money on name-brand items and subsist on Ramen? Does her adoptive mother splurge on expensive clothes to make up for Meredith’s troubled childhood? After I finished reading Sepulchre, it seemed that there was no answer for those stand-out details.

I assume that Mosse wanted to find strong ways to delineate between the heroine of the present – Meredith – and the heroine of 1891 – Léonie. I felt she had already succeeded in that by her shift in narrative tone. Even though all chapters are in the third-person, Leonie’s chapters feel stiffer and Meredith’s read modern. The sentences are longer and more formal for the past and shorter and chattier for the present.

Mosse must have felt that adding details like Banana Republic and Abercrombie & Fitch would ground Meredith in the present. Those details only served to catch my attention and raise questions that I don’t think the author ever intended as important. It doesn’t matter what brands Meredith wears so long as she is comfortable enough to traipse through a cemetery and search the past for clues.

This is unlike chick-lit, or at least chick-lit about women focused on fashion. Name-dropping about labels is required in those books because that is how those characters see the world. And even then sometimes it gets to be a little much. At least those details are appropriate to the tone of the genre.

These label-specific details stand out in the way I fear my clunker images will: bright and atrocious and remembered after the last page is read. For now, I’ll let my terrible first draft details stand. They are by no means name-dropping details but they are my personal brand of details and way too heavy-handed at this point. They’ll last as long as the first draft takes and then it’s the red pen for them! Unless, of course, I really like one and decide to keep it.

Disappearing acts

I went to Tobias Wolff’s reading at Bryn Mawr College earlier this week.  I have a huge crush on Toby (he may not know we’re at such a personal level, but we are) because of a short story of his called “Bullet in the Brain.”  It is a beautiful, very short story about a man’s love of language.  It is about loss and regret and has a sharp sense of humor to boot.  I find this story to be the epitome of craft; it is amazing what he can do in about six pages.

I’ll stop the love fest there.  What I really wanted to write about was something Toby said during the Q&A portion of the event.  To paraphrase it crudely, he said that even when we’re alone, we’re not alone when we’re with a book.  He talked about his memoir This Boy’s Life and how he wished he had read a book when he was a teenager that made him feel like someone understood him.

Some of the best books I’ve read made me feel understood.  They might not have been the best written books but just about anything can be forgiven if a character feels your pain, can name it, describe it and eventually live through it.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle was one such book for me.  (And it’s well-written, so doesn’t need to be forgiven anything.)  I read it in third grade, a little younger than the YA label advised but what are you going to do?  The protagonist Meg is brilliant and misunderstood and trying desperately to find a place in the world.  Obviously, this was my plight as well, even at eight.

Meg’s world was not my own.  I didn’t have a scientist mother who cooked on the Bunsen burner or a younger brother who wouldn’t speak.  I did have a missing father, in a sense, and Meg’s mission to find him - using tesseracts to move through time and space, no less! – made me feel that anything was possible.  Her world was preferable to mine most days.  (Also, I didn’t have a popular boyfriend to tag along and help.)

I disappeared into books during my childhood when I needed to hide from the world around me.  I was notorious for not hearing someone shout my name while I read on the couch, even when they stood just behind me.  I still do that sometimes.  When I need a break from everything and I have some time to disappear, I’ll take to my bed with a book and ignore the world.  And I am alone and not alone.

And again, the book doesn’t need to be a Pulitzer.  In fact, sometimes an easy read, a completely plot-driven book will suffice because no one wants to think when your head already hurts. 

(I will admit the silly Twilight series got me through one particularly bad weekend.  And one weekend is all it took for those four books.  They dissolve on your lap they’re so easy to flip through.  And that’s not necessarily a compliment.  It’s just a fact.)

When I was reading Lauren Groff’s The Monsters of Templeton - and no, I hadn't taken to my bed again; it was on the commuter train - I was reminded of this disappearing act I pull.  She writes:

“When I was small and easily wounded, books were my carapace.  If I were recalled to my hurts in the middle of a book, they somehow mattered less.  My corporeal life was slight; the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered.  Returning to books was coming home.”

Not every book will change the world or even the thoughts of one person.  Some just tell a really good story that people want to read and maybe will distract them from their own pain and fears.  I only hope than anything I write can someday be a prop in someone else’s disappearing act.