Display by Label: Writing

I've gotten some good things from writing here. Also, I've gotten some great things. Recently, I got a short story. Before that, I found a voice for my novel. And always there are the friends and conversations.

She's a right good thing, this. And I love her.

But the truth is, she's my mistress. She's a lot of fun to look at naked, but she's not where my heart lies.

So I'm making a promise to myself. And by making it here, I'm making it to the rest of you. I'm not writing here anymore until I'm done with my novel. By "done," I mean completed a working draft. If I break the promise, I'll know. And you all will know. And, worst of all, she'll know.

Here's one thing I know about mistresses: they're fickle. When I'm ready to come back, she may not want me. If that happens, I'll have to find another. And it's okay, because maybe she'll be somebody a little more fond of the kink. And the dirty, filthy talk. Somebody who doesn't wear panties. Unless, of course, they're the only thing she's wearing.

(When you're writing a novel, it helps to dream big.)

I should also mention that I have shaved my head. And it will remain in this hairless state until a final chapter is typed.

And so I will behave henceforth like a monk, but not of the ascetic variety. Because I need a heavy dose of the social in order to carry this thing off. So I hope to be seeing all of you as much as possible. And I will be available for any and all trouble-making that you may (or may not) deem appropriate. And I will do the wearing of hats and the drinking of beers. And I will smoke what is set before me.

Also, my daddy always taught me, if it's just a quickie, it ain't cheating. So I have decreed that the posting of pics and tweets doth not a true blog post make and therefore will continue to be indulged in at more or less regular intervals.

That is all.

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Of course, there's the whole issue of balance. I'm sure part of the problem has to do with that.

Some people go along doing this one thing. Because that's what they've decided they will do. And other things are secondary to the one thing and they're treated like secondary things should be treated. Because they are less important. Or maybe not. Maybe they're important, too. It's just that sometimes you've got to make a sacrifice for the one thing, you know? It's right. And proper. It's one of the things I admire about circus performers.

I tend to treat the secondary things like the one thing. But because the one thing is what it is—the one fucking thing—I never really put it away. I can't put it away. So, the whole time I'm doing the other thing, the one thing is still there. I just carry it around and do tricks with it and flip it like an empty beer bottle. It's all about show. And looking cool. But there's no real substance to it. Not like the man on the wire who juggles the fire batons. That takes talent.

Then I remember—holy shit!—there's this other other thing. You know? Like a second other thing. And I wanted to do that thing, too. And so I put the one thing in my back pocket and the first other thing, well, I stick that through my hair like a pencil. Or a syringe. And with it safely tucked away, I work on the third thing for a while. And there are various clangs and dings and tweets. Then this fourth thing comes along and, wow, that thing looks interesting and it's really something I'd like to do. So I balance the third thing on my forehead and I look down the bridge of my nose at the fourth and, you know, maybe I should save the fourth thing for later. Maybe I'll just stick that right ... and that's when I realize—fuck-it-all!—how long has this thing been in my back pocket? Goddammit! I've been ignoring the one thing again.

And it goes along like this. And it allows me to maintain a dependable feeling of alarm, which I've grown accustomed to. And it also leads to a state in which I'm never quite able to forget and I'm never quite able to remember. I'll call this state, "barely functional."

I know what Moses would say. Something about priorities. Something about doing what you've got to do. So I don't bring it up with him. Because I don't need to hear that shit.

link to this | comments (4) | File:  Writing  TheLine  Chewing 

Right now, I have several pairs of wearable jeans. But not one of them is my favorite. My favorites all have big holes in them. And that leaves me with no old standby to wear to anything that isn't a Poison concert or my monthly Grunge Club social. Even then, it's really just too cold to wear these swathes of denim. So instead, I wear one of The Others.

The Others are okay, but they ain't my favorites. They've survived this long because they're not. Something about them doesn't set quite right with my ass. And my ass objects to this.

There is still one pair, though. A little high in the ankles, but good for the house. Speckled with paint and dried things I can't discern. In these, I do the dishes with headphones on. For some reason, this activity helps me focus. I need more things in my life to help me focus. Because I'm horribly unfocused these days.

Smoking is another activity that used to help me focus. I think because it helped me remember I was going to die. And made now seem more urgent. This was always a double-edged sword for me. I don't smoke anymore. And now never seems very urgent.

My todo list has fifteen items on it. I have to add "read [insert title of current book I'm reading here]" as a todo item. Otherwise, I won't do it.

Writing is not on my todo list, because I will do that whether I put it there or not. But methinks I should add it to the todo list. That way, after I've done it, I'll feel something other than blinding futility.

Blinding Futility would be a good name for a rock band. Much better than Poison.

Last week, I remembered that I could delegate things. And this made me happy. And optimistic.

Optimism has been elusive lately. She hides in shady back alleys. And cavorts with men much tougher than me. Men who probably own several pairs of favorite jeans. All of which probably set right with their asses.

For the most part, I've stopped frequenting shady back alleys. Because I no longer carry a shank. Which is sort of tragic, really. I have been known to carry a flask, though. And I guess that's something.

Before going to bed, Honey will often set her bone on an object of mine—a book on the floor by the bed, or a shoe, or a sock. I'm not sure what it means, but I like to think it's got something to do with love. Last night, she dropped it on a pair of my jeans. She probably didn't know or care that they weren't my favorites.

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The writing workshop I'm taking at NYU is going really well. For the first time, I've shown a section of the novel I'm working on to somebody other than myself. And that's been constructive, because myself tends to nit-pick relentlessly and is, overall, a huge asshole. So I've appreciated getting some perspectives that are more objective and less ... dickish. It's given me a good feel for what's working in the thing and what isn't, and it's really helped me zero in on the important plot bits. My prof is great, too. I have to say, he's very good at being positive while pointing out things that are problematic in your story or with your prose. I've been involved in several workshops over the years and I know that this is a real skill that not every professor has.

Anyway, recently the prof asked us to bring to class a writing sample (somebody else's work) that we find "beautiful" or "dangerous." My first thought was: beautiful OR dangerous? Isn't that redundant? I thought better than to correct him. It's been a while since college, but I seem to recall that correcting the prof never goes over well.

I like the idea that something dangerous can be beautiful and it usually turns out this way in artwork that speaks to me. In writing, for instance, I like authors such as Martin Amis, Hunter S. Thompson and Ernest Hemingway. To me, these are all writers whose prose has a degree of danger to it, but at the same time is beautiful to read. In film, one of my favorite movies is Pulp Fiction, which I think is one of the great examples of danger and beauty for the risks it takes both stylistically and with plot. My favorite painters are the abstract expressionists from the 50s: Rothko, Motherwell, Pollock, artists who, as I think art critic Clement Greenberg used to say, "did battle" with the canvas. The movement was about the artist as hero, somebody who took risks, delving into the sub-conscious, the imagination, the mythic. Somebody who searched for "truths" through their art and in doing so, became a sort of "existential matador." (Again, I think this was Greenberg's phrase, but I can't find the quote). In music, I'm a huge fan of 50s and 60s jazz, which to me is about these same ideas of "artist as hero." The whole idea of improvisation and play in art gets to the root of a beauty that is mixed with a sort of inherent danger as the artist engages in an exploration of the unknown and a sort of "competition" with the other musicians.

Interestingly, I should point out, that the beauty/danger rule doesn't necessarily apply to things that aren't art. For instance, I was lucky enough to receive a tick bite over the weekend. As it turns out, tick bites are dangerous, but there's really not much beauty in them. All I've discovered so far is annoyance, along with a general anxiety about bacteria and Lyme's disease. I don't recommend them. Now, a photo of my tick bite, taken at a certain angle and with the right lighting ... that might be beautiful and dangerous. I'm just not sure if I'm talented enough as a photographer to pull that off.

Anyway, back to the assignment ... after I figured out what my prof meant (translation: bring something to class that is fucking brilliant), I knew exactly what it would be, and it should come as no surprise to anybody reading this blog: the first couple of paragraphs of chapter one of London Fields.

I thought it would be fun to post the passage here, though I do feel a little weird about it. First of all, even though I named this site after one of the main characters from the same book from which the passage is taken, this isn't a "fan site" by any means and I don't want it to be. So maybe posting a long passage from the book would be awkward or a conflict of interest. This could be the case, or I could just be over-thinking it. I decided it was probably the latter. Secondly, it's a long passage, and I don't want to piss off any attorneys out there that might be concerned about copyrights. But you can also read the full passage (and more) here if you want so it's not like this is the only place you can find it online. And I'm not making any financial gain from it, so it's hard to get mad at me over it, right? I finally decided to just just post it and stop thinking about it. Here you go:


I love this passage. It's dark, and funny, and it feels dangerous—and therefore beautiful. Stuff like this is the reason I want to write. Parts of it read like a poem to me. Of course, this is something that's totally subjective, one of those things I think you either feel and love or you don't. When I read this, I catch glimpses of God. When you read it, you might just see words on a page. I accept that. It's why some of you may scroll through this post, bored as shit, while some of you may read it all the way through (still bored, mind you, but perversely interested in exercises of self-torture). It's my taste, and you don't have to agree with me on its quality or correctness. (It's just that if you happen to disagree, you're clearly wrong. And that's okay—it's okay to be wrong.)

So what about you, then? If you made it this far, is there something you find beautiful and dangerous. Or something that is beautiful to you because it's dangerous?

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There are a million and one reasons not to do something. But they all usually amount to one thing: fear. And let me just say that I've got some of the fear and some of the dread when it comes to this thing I've started, Fiction Fridays. I've gotten used to writing certain types of posts in a certain voice. It's gotten comfortable. I write about particular topics. I poke fun at myself. I try to be humorous, when I can. I've begun to whittle down the focus of things here. And so it's become somewhat safe and easy for me. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But I'm never one to ride the wave of "safe and easy" for very long. Safe and easy waves are usually short-lived ones, low and close to the shore. And so last week I decided to throw this Fiction Friday thing in the mix to stir things up and generate some big surf. And, you know, I think I've succeeded because, I have to admit, what I'm looking at here—these waves—they're awfully big, and I'm apt to fall off of these crunchers—and often. It was, in fact, a real challenge to stick to Fiction Friday this week, but not for the reasons I expected. I'll explain ...

I just got through reading Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park. There's some interesting stuff in that book that I want to flesh out in another post, but for now, I just want to cite this one quotation that touches on the heart of what I'm struggling with here. The main character of the book is "Bret Easton Ellis," and this "character self" says early on in the book: "I could never be as honest about myself in a piece of non-fiction as I could in any of my novels."(25)

In the book, there are many levels of irony with that statement, which I love. But what struck me most about the comment is how strangely accurate it is with my writing on this blog. I feel much more vulnerable posting fiction than I do the non-fiction riffs I usually write, even though, as I've written about before, there are definitely elements of fiction in most of my posts, which I call the "exaggeration license." And maybe it's that ability to fictionalize the non-fiction that makes it "safe." Along with the ability to pick and choose what I write about. The stuff that's true, that I don't mind sharing, is just what it claims to be: fact. (At least as much as anything filtered through the psyche—the id, the ego, the super-ego—and written down is "factual.") And the stuff I don't want to share is conveniently left out, glossed over, or otherwise hidden.

But with fiction, the entire thing is open to interpretation. It's not "truth," per se, because none of it actually ever happened, at least not exactly the way it's described. But there is truth in it. And sometimes that truth is more true than anything else I write. Sometimes that truth is the scariest thing to put on paper (or screen) and show to people.

Which brings us back to "the fear." We live in a world of fear. And, I'll tell you, I'm scared. A lot. I'm scared of dying. I'm scared of things like cancer. Of bacteria. Of the crap in our oceans poisoning our bodies. But I'm also scared of living, brother, and I'm sometimes scared of myself. Because with all the standard set of fears that got instilled in me as kid, it really is true that "my mother never warned me about my own destructive appetite" (thanks Jenny).

When it comes to my writing, I'm scared like hell of using cliché, of being trite or boring. But I'm also scared that if I don't indulge in cliché at least a little bit, I won't be understood. And more than anything else, I'm scared that the stuff I'm putting down is just plain bad. That's a big one. I had a short story from college I was going to post this week, but yesterday I got cold feet. Because it's really weird looking back at things you wrote almost 15 years ago, even for me, let alone you guys. It needed a heavy edit.

So, for now, I think what I'm going to do is use Fiction Fridays as a way to post short "writing exercises" that I get from this book called The 3 am Epiphany, which I bought about a year ago, but haven't done much with until now. In my college creative writing classes, my professors always kind of frowned upon writing exercises. Their feeling was just that we should write what we wanted and bring it to class for a very public lashing and embarrassment in front of our peers. Good times. But that approach really leaves things wide open, and tends to fuel a bit of the "writer's block." Because when everything is possible, it's difficult to focus on just one thing. Sometimes the restrictions put on you by an exercise can be oddly "freeing."

For the purposes of my posts, using the exercises will, I think, take some of the pressure off and makes the posts more "casual." I won't have to feel the pressure of "finishing" a story and biting my nails wondering how it's going to be interpreted. Okay maybe, I'll still have some of that, but having the rules of the exercise there (along with a self-imposed length restriction) will put a little more separation between me and it. I also think it'll make for more bite-sized (read: "blog-able") stuff, frankly.

I started this as an "intro" to this week's Fiction Friday post, but quickly realized it was going to have to be it's own post because, like most of my posts, it would be too damn long. So there it is. I've got another post ready, but I really don't like to post twice in one day. Other than the weekends, Friday is always the slowest traffic day. It's pretty much universally that way on every Web site I've ever managed. I can't figure it out, because you would think Friday would be a big Web-surfing day. But I suppose it's also a day for "long lunches" and "leaving early" or catching up on the shit that you put off all week. So chances are most people who stop by my blog won't even read any of this until next week, if at all. So that means I sort of copped out of Fiction Friday this week. But not really. Because I had something ready. (Really, I swear!) I just had to say this other thing first. Anyway, if you have any thoughts, speak up. Leave a comment or send me an email. I'd love to hear them.

Now take an early lunch, already! And have a good weekend.

link to this | comments (6) | File:  Writing  Fiction  Chewing  Blog 

I didn't participate in NaNoWriMo this year, nor have I for any of the years since it began. I'm not sure if I ever will, actually. It just seems like I might wind up horribly maimed in some way or, worst case scenario, dead. I think the underlying idea is a good one though: work like hell on your novel. This is Xtreme Novel Writing, man. It's rad and kewl and stuff. But is novel writing really supposed to be any of those things? I kind of think not. Then again maybe it should be, dammit.

For those of you who don't know, the gist of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000-page novel in the 30-day window also known as "November." And for this marathon of writing it's all about how much you produce, and not how well you produce it. From their Web site: "Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It's all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly."

I have mixed feelings about the approach. There's definitely something to be said for automatic writing. It helps free up the mind and can take you in some interesting directions. But I'm not sure doing it every day for thirty days is a valuable exercise, particularly when it comes to writing a novel. Any long-form writing needs some kind of cohesion and requires a bit of analytical, left-brained thought mixed in with the intuitive, right-brained free-for-all. So if you go into NaNoWriMo with the idea that you'll have "a novel" at the end of it, I think it can only lead to disappointment. But if you approach it with the idea that at the end of it you'll have a huge pile of raw text — some of it good, most of it crap, but all of it a "launching pad" — then I can see how this could be a really great thing, particularly if you're just starting a new project. And I definitely respect those people who put their fears and reservations aside and committed themselves to this grand display of self-torture, like Lara.

My own writing project, which saw some pretty good progress in 2006 and early 2007 has since stalled. There's smoke coming from under the hood. It's making a hissing sound. And now it also has a flat tire. Damn. There are many reasons I could cite as to why. One is that I got completely side-tracked on a really big Web project this summer and that pretty much consumed all of my creative brain cycles. Then there has been the small matter of selling our newly-purchased home and looking for a new place to live — the second time in six months. But these are just excuses. I have to say that, despite my reservations and multiple reasons why I couldn't do it this year, I'm realizing now that NaNoWriMo probably would have been a pretty good exercise for me at this point in my project and might have helped me out of my dry spell, assuming of course that I managed to stay alive during it. Maybe I can begin my own personal writing month after we move, because after reading these two "Pep Talks," one from Neil Gaiman and the other from one of my all-time favorites, Tom Robbins, I'm feeling kind of, well . . . pepped.

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Garrison Keillor came to Baltimore recently to do a live episode of Prairie Home Companion at the Hippodrome. I missed it, which I regret tremendously. If you were to plot my age and my interest in Prairie Home Companion on a grid, the two lines would maintain a steep climb, running parallel to one another. Funny, that. I only hope there's something on-par with PHC that I can indulge in when I'm 82, shoveling spoonfuls of Metamucil into my Guinness each morning, and lining up my heart medications and Viagra on my elbow before drop-catching them in my hand and tossing them back. Something's got to keep old age exciting. And nothing says exciting like regular bowel movements on the pockmarked road to imminent heart attack.

Anyway, while Keillor was in town, he did an interview with Mark Steiner and I did happen to catch that. Keillor's words on life and writing were really inspirational. The guy is pretty amazing and I think I want him to be my best friend. The word 'man-crush' comes to mind. It would be great. We would sit in coffee shops and be witty and sardonic and use lots of plays on words.

Anyway, I wish there was a direct link to the interview, but I can't find one. But if you're interested you can listen by downloading the Mark Steiner show podcast. Also, Keillor wrote a touching piece about his visit on Salon.

link to this | comments (5) | File:  Writing  Ho_Hum 

I've been reading and re-reading Hemingway lately, partly because I'm just enjoying his style, but partly because I'm hoping to learn, through osmosis, the art of writing while pleasantly pissed. Unfortunately, I haven't had much luck in this pursuit. I've tried varying the type of alcohol, speeding up or slowing down the pace of consumption . . . but the result is usually the same: crap. So I guess I'm doomed to be a sober writer. And while I suppose that's a noble thing to be, it's definitely not as fun, and makes it all the more necessary to be profoundly intoxicated while not writing.

Anyway, I'm currently involved in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's personal account of his early years in Paris, struggling to make it as a writer. There are a number of passages where he discusses the craft of writing. This one, I think is particularly good:


I think what Hemingway is mainly referring to here is getting past that point where style begins to stand in the way of content. But I also think he's speaking to how discovering the true content can actually give way to style. Good writing—hell, good anything—involves starting with that one true thing. That spark. A feeling, an emotion: bare-skinned and honest. And when you've found that, the rest falls into place. The style, to a certain degree, is secondary. It will unfold around that initial thrust. People are good at recognizing the non-true. People are good at recognizing bullshit. It'll show.

But writing something true—something that rings true—does not necessarily mean writing the truth. One of Hemingway's biographers (and friends) A.E. Hotchner writes in the 1999 preface to Papa Hemingway, "Part of the mystique about Ernest stems from the manner in which he blurred the demarcation between fiction and fact." He adds that Hemingway once remarked that "Fiction is a magnification of reality." And this is particularly interesting in the context of A Moveable Feast since it is something of a memoir.

So I've been thinking lately about these ideas of truth and fiction and how they relate to blogs. To my blog, in particular of course (because it is, after all, all about me, isn't it?) But also to all "personal blogs." Because people kind of have a different standard for these, don't they? They expect them to be . . . the truth. And people tend to get very upset when this does not turn out to be the case. I sat in on a panel at SXSW last March about fictional blogs. The subject was interesting, though the panel itself was way too short. There was one panelist who had maintained a fictional blog for several years and there was a good discussion revolving around how readers of that blog had felt "duped" when they found out the blog was "not real." Because these readers had related to the narrator and had come to see her as a real person. But my take is this: these people were "duped" because they allowed themselves to be duped. It doesn't change the fact that when these people read the blog it spoke to them on some level. And I think it was that "speaking-to," that conversation, that is what was true. Without it, the blog wouldn't have held their attention. And if they had known that the blog was fiction to begin with, would it have struck them in the same way?

Despite the fact that this blog—my blog—is named after a fictional character, I am not a "fictional blogger." That said, I'll be the first to admit that there are elements of fiction in almost everything I write here. I don't see any other way of doing it really. What I'm always trying to arrive at, though, is something honest and unaffected, and hopefully those are things that come across independent of "fact" or "fiction." Either way, you must get to the one true sentence. And that usually involves baring yourself in ways you don't always feel comfortable doing (regardless of the fact that you might be an exhibitionist at heart.) Because sometimes the fear sets in. A fear of offending, maybe. Or a fear of people not understanding or misinterpreting. And the fear tends to be stifling when you allow it free reign. Of course, this isn't necessarily a problem unique to somebody who blogs. It's a problem with any form of public self-expression or art. And, holy crap, I worry constantly that I don't have the courage necessary to be a writer.

I have toyed with the idea of writing out-right fiction on this blog. Because in some ways, fiction would open up some new possibilities. But it has just always seemed out of place here. And so I've been tossing around some ideas for a different blog, something more fictional that I can do alongside this one, and hopefully one of these days it will become a reality. (Oops. No pun intended.) But if it does come about one of these days, I don't want it to necessarily be defined by the fact that it's fiction. Because even if it is fiction, it's going to be based in some sort of truth. Because, to be honest, I'm just not that imaginative . . .

I read a lot of personal blogs. Some of them are written by people who give their "real" faces and names to the Internets. Some are people who prefer to remain anonymous. Some of them are people I know "in real life" others are people I've never met. Some of them are probably entirely "factual" accounts of "real" life. Others probably contain a good deal of fiction. Either way, it doesn't really matter to me. The way I see it, every "true story" has elements of fiction. And any good fiction is filled with elements of truth. The "true thing" —the one true sentence—is what speaks to people. That's what matters. Without it, there's nothing.

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In hotels, you find yourself reading USA Today. Because it's there. Anyway, from this article: "The sad thing is, it's easier to get behind the wheel of a taxi than it is to write something other people want to read." You can substitute "get behind the wheel of a taxi" with just about anything.

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Articles like this depress me. If you listen to the cynicism, it's pretty hard to plod on. But if you don't read stuff like this, if you aren't at least a little bit cynical yourself, then it makes you out of touch with reality, overly idealistic. Either way, writing about writing is usually pretty useless stuff.

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