Okay, so Fight Scenes by Greg Bottoms was not my favorite book. I’m not quite sure if I can even explain it, but I think ultimately it comes down to the fact that the writing was too thin for my taste and though the book embraced realism, some things seemed contrived to me. What can I admire about the writing? The use of but not over use of pop-culture reference to ground this story in a particular time and the successful threading of a very important theme, the somewhat intentional repression of the emotional lives of boys in “Big July 4^th Sale—Buy American” American, a phrase that occurs twice in the story, once in the beginning, once near the end.

Pop culture references were not overdone, but they were there as a continual reminder that this was one year—1983—in the lives of two boys. MTV, my little ponies, 7-Eleven, Metallica, “Punk is over…”(23). These two boys, inundated by morally questionable media like when they are listening to the mom’s girlfriend’s stepson’s stepbrother’s satanic music, are at a loss for role models in their lives. They are boys in need, as the writer terms “at risk”. I’ve had writers at writer’s groups scratch out all direct references to pop culture saying that unless you have permission, you can’t put it in, as if it were some kind of copyright infringement. There are some stories that need this context and I’ve always thought that sounded like bologna, but since I haven’t until recently read a lot of contemporary fiction, I wondered if there was some truth to this new “rule” of fiction. It’s nice to see that, as I suspected, there are few “rules, though there are a lot of people out there trying to pin them down.

Bottoms successfully portrayed how the emotional lives of boys are stifled through this story of him and his friend over one summer and shows how that can happen in different ways. The narrator seems to come from a more stable family that values education and yet his father is too busy to get involved in his life in any other capacity than to scold or direct him and Mark’s dad who is crude and permissive: “He was a great dad, I thought for a time: the opposite my own, who was serious and busy, who wondered where I was while he was at work and told me when to be at home, who often asked me what he smelled on my breath” (10). The phrase thought for a time gets at the reality that ultimately the observant, sensitive narrator had to notice how the opposite was just as stifling, how Mark’s dad’s headlocks and urgings to be more manly were not so good after all, left him just as lonely.

His bare, realistic style is mostly successful. I felt like the writer, for the most part, was just trying to write things down as they happened, even when they were things he should be ashamed of, like participating in the exploitation of the slow boy who exposes his penis to the good girl on the playground because of their urging and plotting and insecurity. A couple things I felt were planted. Mark’s sneaking into his mother’s house to write the love poem across the photo on the fridge and the first meeting with Hazel, who behaves like a perfectly damaged, cruel girl whose daddy complex is too obvious, making it less believable. Maybe if she just wanted her dad to find her dead in the flowers, or just show boys his erotic magazines, but there are even more references to daddy than that.

What else? I liked how the dialogue was as crude and unfiltered as the characters, “ That bitch Sissy is a tease” (31). I liked that Hazel and her sister talked crude too. In my own experience as a twelve year old “at risk” kid, there was a whole lot of experimenting with ideas and language that doesn’t often make it onto the page because by then we’ve refined our language, become writers who like subtlety and fresh words. It’s too easy for our writing to become too clean, too perfect.

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Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Kathryn Davis’ A Thin Place was very hard for me to get into at first. I tried starting a few times when I was in places where there were plenty of distractions. Though normally I find it easy to concentrate in such conditions, I experienced something quite different in this case. It took a few quiet hours of solitude for me to finally hook into the rhythm of this novel. The story is about the complexity of human love, the relationships of humans to their physical world, and the beauty, sometimes seeming tragic, in the fact that living things are born and in turn, die. What interests me most about this book as a writer are the–what I’ll call–props that Davis uses to tell her story: the intercalary chapters, the diary entries, the police logs, and the horoscopes.
The occasional police logs give us a sense of the small town of Varenness with its reporting of things like loud music and cat missing and also subtly suggest, as some of the items like car crashes and drug deals are more serious, that perhaps we are leading up to something serious within the novel. The horoscopes reinforce the theme of man versus nature, on which topic, Davis seems to want to impress us with the idea that the divine right of human beings in the world is unlikely, even a dangerous idea that may eventually be our greatest flaw. Horoscopes suggest a kind of fate, that the stars (the natural world) are truly in control. This is reinforced again by the Gardner’s Almanac. But, what about the intercalary chapters? That is where I want to focus my thinking in this paper.
The intercalary chapters did not propel the plot forward. They were more poetic and experimental in style (one from the point of view of dogs, another from beavers). I enjoyed this book and can’t remember reading anything like it and a lot of that feeling comes from how the intercalary chapters added to the story. Those chapters tended to focus on the natural world, to show what was going on simultaneous, but no less important, to human affairs. As Davis concludes her first (erotic!) depiction of glaciers having their way with the world in her first intercalary chapter, “And even then, how beautiful! Rock cased in ice, the sun extracting greens and blues. Though to say everything was more beautiful without people, before people—even to go so far as to imagine after people—is obscene” (12), we know that there is far more to this story than the lives of the people in this small town, that this story has something to say about life and how we should be living it: as if we could die at any moment.
The idea I’ve come up with for National Novel Writing month will also attempt to use intercalary chapters to enhance the stories themes and develop character. This is a technique that I’ve often admired. Tom Robbins, one of my favorite writers, uses intercalary chapters, as does Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, a book I love, love, love. Like Davis, I will experiment and employ a more poetic style in these chapters, but unlike Davis, they will all be centered around my primary character, who will narrate the entire story.

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I have to open—to get it out there—by saying that the protagonist of Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons reminded me, perhaps a little too much, of my own mother. The main character, the character from whose perspective we experience most of the story—Maggie—is the worst kind of optimist. The kind of optimist who can bend and twist reality in her mind like the most talented balloon artist can make flowers, poodles, and pikachu out of deflated rubber pouches. What appeals to me about both my strong reaction to Maggie and the way that Tyler portrays her are the implications for my own writing, because, to be honest, I’ve had great difficulty writing about my mother.

One detail that worked to make Maggie such a delightful character is the fact that Maggie is not, for the most part, self-conscious, but that she is self-conscious enough for us to find her redeeming. The reader sees clearly Maggie’s distorted view of her twenty-something son and how she lies to the people around her to try to bring them together, which, however well-intentioned, is still a lie, a manipulation. She just can’t help herself and we love her for it, because she does it for love. We also admire the easy way she interacts with strangers, how she cares about people, like the old man she ran off the road or the older man who she pretends to be serious for at the nursing home where she works. That image of her flying down the hall in a cart full of dirty laundry laughing symbolizes the way she glides through life. In order to do this, she doesn’t always see things as they are. We notice her flaws, but we love her, because she will don a wig and lurk in alleys to see her estranged granddaughter and it was her dress-up idea that drew Ira’s agoraphobic sister out into public. How does Tyler accomplish this liking of a character who in real life I think would drive me batty?

She dwells mostly on showing without judgment, leaving the reader to conclude what to think of Maggie. She reveals few and only the most redeeming aspects of Maggie’s inner life. We never see her doubt or despair, for instance. She reveals so much through dialogue. Maggie is not “closed-in, isolated” like Ira who regrets his lack of a college education because he is clearly a reflective, intelligent man. Maggie did not want to go to college. Her optimism could easily be mistaken for imbecility if it weren’t for her quick wit as when she picks up on the subtlety of Ira’s singing Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and replies, “Perfectly sane people visit their grandchildren, Ira Moran” (13). Most importantly, Maggie doesn’t appear to even be aware that she might be different from other people, that her view of people and their relationship is greatly influenced by romantic optimism. She is; however, not without reflection on the world and her relationship to it, “Why did popular songs always focus on romantic love?…Then besides the songs their were the magazine stories and the novels and the movies, even the hair spray ads and the panty-hose ads. It struck Maggie as disproportionate. Misleading, in fact” (64). Maggie is capable of reflection, so we must ultimately conclude that her optimism is not an accident, but a choice about how to live her life. This is further emphasized by her criticism of Ira’s pragmatism. Tyler’s commentary free approach to Maggie is what makes her most powerful, the way she gives her body, and voice, and thoughts, but does not judge or comment, leaves her for us to look at and decide. I read in an interview with Tyler that if she actually knew someone like Maggie in her real life, she’d be completely frustrated by her. How interesting! No wonder she wrote her without comment. I think when I next sit down to write about my mother, I’ll have to try to do it something like this.

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Get out of your comfort zone

Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction is a hefty tome, full of close analysis and careful considerations, all leading the reader toward being an intentional, considerate reader and writer of fiction. I’ve chosen just a couple of topics from the book to reflect on here, and they are so intertwined that in the end, they’re the same topic: telling and showing and the use of reliable commentary.
In his chapter on telling and showing, Booth somewhat addresses the fact that for the modern writer this notion has become a sticking point, a dogma that infects individual writers and entire programs. I think he gets at an important truth when in his discussion of Boccaccio he argues that his “artistry lied not in adherence to any one supreme manner of narration but rather in his ability to order various forms of telling in the service of various forms of showing” (16). I was glad to read this section that both acknowledges showing as a superior form of narration and the place of telling in elevating the whole. I’ve grown tired of writers who react in a knee-jerk, non-specific way to lines that “tell”. It was the section on the use of reliable commentary that moved this for me from a notion to a specific idea about just what I love about a certain amount of telling, and why I need to keep working on refining that balance.
Booth suggests that commentary must be intentional and provides some reasons why the writer might choose to comment on her story, such as providing facts, manipulating mood, molding beliefs, and some more. Some questions I came up with for myself after reading this section include: Does the reader have to know it now? If so, what is the best way to get it across? Can you explain why commentary here enhances the work as a whole? The last and most important question seemed to me to be: who decides? My answer for my own work? I do. I’m happy to have this insight as I move into this next revision of my novel, that I know is full of lines that tell when they should show. The task for me will be to keep asking myself those questions. It would be an affront to my own style and vision of the story to simple hack it all away. It’s fascinating to me how this question of good writing doesn’t necessarily translate when the writer moves from short story to novel, as I did.
For many years, I wrote only short stories, always keeping this notion of showing in mind, and for the most part, writing stories that showed more often than they told and told at the right time. There were times even when I was criticized for not telling enough, leaving the story too raw. As I began to write novels, something interesting happened. I wrote good scenes of showing, but was inclined to stitch them together with too much telling of information. This is true in the current draft of my novel. You see, I was so terrified that I wouldn’t get to the end, that I’d get lost somewhere along the way, that I kept checking in with the story. Because of this, what I ended up with is something sketchy, something that I now need to go back to the beginning of and add more detail and color to. After reading these sections, I’m beginning to see this question of telling and showing as something different than before, or maybe just as I’ve always seen it, but was not able to articulate or assert with confidence. Showing is supreme art, but commentary that is intentional is like the perfect mat and frame for the portrait.

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Get out of your comfort zone

Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son impressed me in many ways. Though it’s a collection of stories that mostly stand on their own, it also works as a novella, and is an example of knock-your-socks-off first person narration. The persona Johnson creates in these stories drives the entire work. His careful use of imagery, common language and comparison are three examples of how he creates a complete picture of the man introduced even in the first two words—the title.
So much characterization happens in how the first person persona sees things, in the imagery he provides. “We drove with the windows down. The mild spring evening, after several frozen winter months, was like a foreigner breathing in our faces. We took our passenger to a residential street where the buds were forcing themselves out of the tips of branches and the seeds were moaning in the gardens” (18). This bleak description of spring as a violent intruder, forced and full of pain, says so much about how our protagonist views life, without hope or even desire. He keeps living just because he does, not because he is particularly thrilled about living, as indicated in his response to the overdose that could have been him, but because of circumstance, wasn’t, “He died. I am still alive” (42). He sees death, decay, and fragility all around him, a sign of his own depression, lack of purpose or want of a better life. He sees dead crops “like rows of underthings” (51), how the “cows [stand] around smelling one another’s butts” (49), and eyeballs that look like they came from a joke shop. He may be technically alive, but he is not participating in the things that connect us to each other, like love and compassion and vulnerability. He is an outsider looking in, like he was when he was spying on the Mennonite couple, and that is why what he sees is so dark and desperate.
The words are simple but brooding and they are put together as simply as possible, without dwelling too long before moving on to the next thing, as in “It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere” (11). He packs as much into a sentence as possible without extra words or clauses, an imitation of the resigned attitude of the narrator, “ I saw Jack Hotel in an olive-green three-piece suit, with his blond hair combed back and his face shining and suffering” (35). The economy and simplicity of the language fits a character who both thinks deeply about things and has little faith in the hope of human progress.
A good metaphor will do it for me anytime, but one that is not only good, but perfect, because it serves a larger purpose than just to make the story more vivid is divine. Johnson’s metaphors were perfect, all feeding into what is ultimately story after story of characterization. His comparisons are born from the mind of the unnamed heroin addict / writer who narrates the stories. They reveal the darkness of his mind, how unromantic his view of humanity is, “Back in the O.R., Georgie dropped his mop and bent over in the posture of a child soiling its diapers” (71). Again and again, he sees the filth and desperate longing around him. Johnson becomes the writer/actor in feeding us comparisons that further feed our understanding of the narrator. I imagine him transformed at the keyboard, not Johnson at all, but this other unnamed character, this Jesus’ Son, seeing things as he would see them.
There are all sorts of applications to my own writing in closely analyzing Johnson’s work, perhaps most importantly just the subtle influence that reading good writing has on the mind, how it influences in ways unplanned and often unrecognized. However, it’s Johnson’s master characterization that I’d like to really channel for my own work. I have a tendency to focus more on theme or the big picture, or to try to paint too many characters. I believe that focusing on my protagonist can help strengthen the areas in which the current draft of my novel is weak, such as in point-of-view and sustained elaboration. So, can I get back to it, now? 😉

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Get out of your comfort zone

The Art of the Short Story, edited by Dana Goia and R.S. Gwynn contains one or more stories by fifty-two different authors. Each author’s section is followed by a section called author’s perspective that includes some reflections by the writer on the craft of writing. The back of the book has an extensive glossary, discussion on the elements of fiction and approaches to criticism. This is a book that will scare your reluctant reader because of it’s—even in paperback—massive size. I had started reading this book some time before I chose to finish it for graduate work, so yes, I did read the entire thing. The collection was refreshingly diverse in style and author background. In trying to decide what to write about, knowing that I should only choose a couple of stories to focus on, I first went through and circled all the stories listed in the index that moved me. You know, the kind of story that leaves you awed and inspired, a little tug behind your navel suggesting, this is it, this is it, this is what it’s all about. There were twelve. I’m going to write about two here, because I think that there are some similarities between them that make them a good pair. “The Story of An Hour” by Kate Chopin and “The Swimmer” by John Cheever both use irony and symbolism to invite the reader into the experience of the story and characterize their protagonists.
Cheever’s Neddy outwardly seems uninhibited and happy from the very first scene where he “slid down the banister that morning and [gave] the bronze backside of Aphrodite on the hall table a smack.” And from there we see him inspired with this idea of swimming across the county from backyard pool to backyard pool, and he is delighted with himself for thinking of it. Thus he swims from the Grahams to the Hammers to the Lears, and on and on, a seeming never ending journey from house to house. At first, he slides in easy and is welcomed, seems so at ease wherever he goes, even taking off his trunks and swimming nude in the Hallorans pool, because that’s how they did it. As Neddy swims closer to his house, there are increasing indications that under this surface delight, there is a powerful disorder, and we are not shocked, but not entirely expecting either when at the end of the story we find him standing in front of an empty house to stare at his own delusions. Chopin use this technique as well when she sets us up in the first line for a protagonist about to be crushed by the news of her husbands death, “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the new of her husband’s death.” The story is nearly over before we get her true reaction of “Free! Body and soul free!” The story ends with yet another irony, the surprise of finding out that the fact that her husband is alive, not dead like the first line suggested, is the thing that puts her life in danger and in fact, kills her.
Chopin and Cheever use symbolism throughout to lead us to their ironic endings. Chopin uses the imagery of the sky our of the open window, the window itself, and the flight of the bird, to represent the opening up of Mrs. Mallard’s inner life and her desire for freedom. Cheever uses river symbolism in an interesting way here in that his main character makes his own river, even naming it, in his swim through the county. We know that the river symbolizes life and choice and direction, and are immediately cued into the fact that this protagonist is embarking on a quest. So, we have to ask ourselves, where will it lead? The houses he visits, all families, all named—and there are so many—symbolize the possibilities for family life. When in the end, we find that for him there is no longer any possibility, we are sorry for him, we’ve seen so many varied possibilities. As he gets closer to home, the families he visits seem to know his story, give hints to the reality that his wife left and something is wrong with his daughters, and as this begins to happen, the weather, that has so far been as pleasant as he has been delighted, begins to sour, symbolizing what he must face in the end.
So, how can I take this thing that I noticed in these two stories and apply it to my own work? In cultivating an appreciation for surprise, for playing on reader expectation, on using imagery to compliment larger themes in the story. I’m left with these questions to ask myself about my own writing: Do the images in the scene all contribute to something larger? Are there places where going against expectation would be more effective?

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Get out of your comfort zone

Click here to read it.

This is a very interesting conversation. I personally fall somewhere in between. I think there’s value to the reading kids (and adults!) are doing online. I was disturbed though by the mother who was quoted as saying, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.” This comment is indicative of the throw our hands up kind of approach to parenting that seems so common.
I’d drag my son kicking and screaming to our regular Sundays spent slouched in the comfy chairs at Border’s reading with my little sister, his favorite Aunt. In fact, the first couple of times I kind of did. He wasn’t focused. He kept asking how much longer. I persisted, remained gentle, but firm. My sister and I kept sharing lines we liked and laughing out loud at the parts we thought were funny. (We were all reading Christopher Moore.) We ignored the whining and encouraged the enthusiasm. We, without really planning it out or anything, modeled over and over our enthusiasm for reading. He had nowhere to go to escape the experience. He was stuck. And if you ask him today he’ll tell you, of course–he’s almost 13–that he doesn’t like Sundays spent reading. However, the fact that he can now focus on a book in a crowded room, read for hours at a time, and pose better questions and responses about what he’s reading and that when we’re there he’s smiling, assures me that my inclination that in this instance I’m the parent and I know best is dead on. There’s so much about reading that is a skill that must be learned. It bothers me that as a culture we seem to fear making our kids struggle, do things they perhaps don’t want to do.

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
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Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

I finished A Wrinkle in Time a couple of weeks ago, but am just now getting around to writing about it here. I wrote tons in the margins while I read. (I always do this, do you?) I also wrote out some thoughts freehand about what I wanted to say.
I hadn’t read this book since I was twelve. However, the book is close to my heart because it was the first book I ever loved–James and the Giant Peach followed on its heels. This is the book that changed the experience of reading for me into something not just cerebral, but much more–transformational.
I was delighted to find that the book hadn’t lost it’s influence over me. I enjoyed every last sentence, read it slowly over two days.
What I loved and what I love are still pretty much the same. I love the way that science is used in the book to explore imaginative possibilities of our universe, and how simply that science, such as the idea of tesseracts, are described. (The photo of the ants crawling across a piece of folded fabric, for instance.)
I love Meg’s family. So quirky, but intact!
I love that the thing that helps Meg rescue her father is her faults! There is just so much information out there pushing us to focus on removing our faults, to fix our broken selves. I love that L’Engle acknowledges that it’s not black and white like that, that the very things that get us into trouble, can also save us, that we can embrace our faults and spin them to our benefit.
I love the father-daughter theme and how Meg realizes that she can’t depend on her father to swoop in and save her. I love how she realizes that she is quite capable of saving herself–and everyone else too. Go Meg!

Here are some of my favorite passages:

“Lead on, moron, ” Calvin cried gaily. “I’ve never even seen your house, and I have the funniest feeling that for the first time in my life I’m going home.”

“Meg took a batch of forks from the drawer and turned them over and over, looking at them. / ‘I’m all confused again.’ / ‘Oh, so am I,’ Calvin said gaily. / ‘But now at least I know we’re going somewhere.”

“Yes, it was her faults she turned to to save herself now.”

“Yes. It’s a frightening as well as an exciting thing to discover that matter and energy are the same thing, that size is an illusion, and that time is a material substance.”

“It must be a very limited thing, this seeing.”

“Good helps us, the stars help us, perhaps what you coudl call light helps us. Oh, my child, I cannot explain! This is something you just have to know or not know.”

” ‘You mean you’re comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it?’ / ‘Yes.’ Mrs. Whatsit said. ‘You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.’ “

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Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Light in August by William Faulkner

This was my first Faulkner novel. I’ve read short stories, but never a novel. I chose to read this because a group of fellow teachers formed a book group, which I signed on for.
I am impressed by the craft demonstrated in the novel. For instance, Faulkner’s ability to switch between tenses and points of view amazed me. His way of giving just a little and withholding the rest built suspense and made getting through what was a fairly complex 500 pages seem like a quick read. Usually when I have to go back and reread whole sections I don’t feel like it was a quick read. Somehow this book was though, and I did have to go back and reread a lot.
I was impressed by Faulkner’s what could have been excessive use of pathetic fallacy to build tension, foreshadow, and establish mood. For all the suffering the characters of this book go through, it’s made even greater because the trees—the houses—the air itself suffers too.
There’s lots that I could write about: his use of light/dark imagery to comment on good/evil, his treatment of race, the motif of heritage, and what we inherit as individuals and as whole societies, the collective sins of families, cities, nations—but I’ll choose one thing—his treatment of women.
Womanfilth is a word I’d never seen and, at first, was put off by. When I think about it though, my question about what is Lena doing in the story—she’s barely fleshed out at all—is answered.
Lena is a figure of hope for womankind. She remains uncorrupted to the end. She perseveres, remains sober and dignified. As she says toward the end, “When they [men] up and run away on you, you just pick up whatever they left and go on.” She does not go crazy for the love of a man. She does not burn up in her desire. She does not sacrifice her own integrity to please him. Unlike other women in the novel, she bears new life and remains strong enough to nurture it. Does Faulkner suggest that there is hope for humankind to be found in the strength and leadership of the matriarch?
Why does humankind need redemption? Because evil exists and sin is also our nature, and no matter how hard our fathers try to beat us pure, or how many criminals society jails or executes, the sins just keep compounding. Faulkner was interested in paradox, the inevitability of suffering, and in offering hope in the face of that. Purity is impossible, Faulkner seems to suggests, but one can just “go on” as Lena does, be strong, like Lena is.

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
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It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
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Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

I came across this novel as a teenager, struggling to write. You see, I had this intense desire to write, felt that I had something to communicate, but did not yet have the skills to meet my imagination on the page in a way that worked consistently. So, I sat in cafes and poured over the writers I admired, hoping to inherit their style by diligently underlining phrases—whole sentences—and in general, swooning over their prose. One of these books, read clutching my own spiral notebook and pen in various coffee shops around town was The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing.
“This novel, then, is an attempt to break a form; to break certain forms of consciousness and go beyond them. While writing it, I found I did not believe some of the things I thought I believed: or rather, that I hold in my mind at the same time beliefs and ideas that are apparently contradictory. Why not? We are, after all, living in the middle of a whirlwind.” This description, taken from the jacket cover of one edition of the book, only begins to touch on why I have such a powerful connection to this book.
Unflinching questions about what it means to be human, a woman, and a writer are posed in Lessing’s novel. Anna, the main character writes about different parts of her life in four distinct notebooks and tries to bring them all together in a fifth “golden notebook”. This process drives her to insanity and back. I read this book on the edge of my seat, amazed at the complexity and depth of the characters and the refreshing honesty in Lessing’s treatment of them. The seamless shifts and turns between the notebooks, between action and narration left me mouth agape in awe. I longed to write like that. This book changed my life. It sealed my fate as a writer, pushed me to question my role as a woman in society and in my family, and unraveled for me the nature and necessity of freedom.

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone