The Turn That Never Came

Last night I watched the pilot episode of Eastbound & Down and experienced sore disappointment. The premise: hotshot pro baseball player who in love with himself to the Nth degree wrecks his pro career and winds up teaching PE in a public school. Sounds entertaining, doesn't it? I sure thought so.

About half way through the episode, I came to the conclusion that I couldn't stand the protagonist. I mean, couldn't stand him in the way that the sound of his very voice made the muscles in my back tense up. It was a visceral, disgusted response. A good part of it, no doubt, informed by all the times when I was waitressing and got stuck serving some version of this guy. In short, completely obnoxious and I can't stand him.

Yet, I waited it out. I thought I saw potential. The kind where, after almost a whole episode of making the audience hate the guy, the writers, if they were smart, would put in a turn toward the end that would hook me. I mean, it's the pilot, right? It's all about the hook. The final scene, instead of redeeming Kenny Powers, made him even more obnoxious. Ugh.

It was very disappointing. Me, I'm all about rough characters. I love my anti-heroes, reluctant heroes, sympathetic villains, and all the rest. Make them flawed, make them unreliable, make them messy, and I'm there. But, and it's a big "but," they still need to be redeemable. One of my latest favorite examples of a flawed hero is Dennis Leary's character, Tommy Gavin, on Rescue Me. He's all kinds of shady, selfish, and untrustworthy, but he's got enough about him that's admirable that he's redeemable. There's depth there. It's beautiful.

Kenny Powers? Total caricature, and a character who falls completely flat for me. If they had balanced out the over-the-topness just a little more, I could have gotten into the show. Lack of balance wrecks a character far faster than anything else.

It's All Jungian

This week, as the first week of my summer vacation, has been fun. It has also been difficult to keep track of which day is which and I only recently realized it's actually Thursday.

So, I'm currently reading Touch the Dark by Karen Chance. It's an excellent example of why researching your genre is a wonderful thing. I've only just started reading the novel, but it's already making me sad. Chance has two characters within the first couple of chapters that bother me because of a couple of characters I have in Crossroads Promise.

Chance: Female protagonist named Cassandra whose parents were killed by a vampire. Me: Female protagonist named Cass whose parents were killed by a vampire. Chance: Vampire named Rafe. Me: Vampire named Rafe.

It's irksome. I've never read Karen Chance's work, so there's no way I'm subconsciously borrowing from her. Yet, there are the similarities. It's eerie. The Cass/Cassandra thing I get, it's hard not to go with the mythological reference. The orphan thing is even understandable. It's the overlap with the vampire bits that are a tad unsettling. I think I'm going to have to find a new name for my baddie. Dang.

Over-Correction/Brute Force Isn't Working

Tonight I got another round of critiques from the CWC. This go was the whole thesis at once. The critiques didn't go so well. A few of the revisions I made worked, but more were over-corrections and others just made things worse. Not what I wanted to hear.

But, it also became clear that the harder I was pushing to make the thesis to conform to this brilliant idea I had about a family line, and the more I was pushing to unify the stories, the more it just wasn't working. Cool, huh?

What's the solution? Stop pushing so hard and let the thing be what it wants to be. It's unified in other ways, and those ways are enough. Also, I've got to go back to the stories and deal with each on its own for a while again - without worrying about how it's going to fit with the others. It comes down to a Zen type of thing - if I stop trying to force it into place, it'll fall into place easier.

It's funny. I've spent so much time and effort trying to fit it all together that I didn't realize I was jamming the wrong puzzle pieces together.

Time for a change of approach.

And Now, Barring Bits I Missed, It's Done

Switching Cass over to a different tense and POV has proved more of a pain in the rear than I imagined. I never before realized just how many words are pronouns and verbs. Yeesh. The worst part isn't the transcribing from one to the other, but rather the part I just finished - going back over what I had already typed and fixing it on the computer. Every "I" and "says" and a million others had to be replaced with "Cass" and "said" etc.

I am infinitely glad that I'm caught up on the already-typed stuff. A few more pages of handwritten material left to switch over during transcription, and all the tense & POV will be fixed. Words cannot describe how happy I am about that.

Tense

Since I need to be working on my thesis, I've decided to transcribe some of the Cass stuff from my notebooks. Hey, it may be procrastination, but at least it's writing procrastination. Besides, I think it'll help me get into the right mindset to tackle rewrites.

In thinking about the Cass stories/novel, and after reading Dead Until Dark, where I found the narration annoying in spots, I've decided to shift Cass out of 1st person present tense into 3rd person past tense. It makes transcribing difficult. I'm trying to read one tense and type another. Doesn't work too well. I'll get a few sentences down fine, then suddenly realize I've written "says" instead of "said." Ugh. If only there was a Word function that could shift everything for me. That'd be so cool.

P.S. Okay, I've gotten through most of the first chapter, and it's bizarre. After so long of thinking of Cass in one tense, shifting her to the other just sounds wrong and awkward in my head. I keep telling myself it's bound to get better once I finish transcribing and get into writing more from scratch.

The Perfection Problem: Part 2, Responding to It

This morning I pulled out my newly printed & compiled thesis (which has its own dedicated binder) and a purple pen.

One of my new stories, "The Honeymoon of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Roux" was one that just kept getting longer as I wrote it. It's the longest of the collection, coming in at about 25 pages. As I wrote it, I had things I thought I needed to go back to and write more on. There was a moment when I wondered to myself just how long this thing needed to be in order for it to work.

This morning, I started with that story. It took me a while to read through it and make revision notes. However, I tackled this revision differently than I have in the past. For starters, and I have a hard time admitting this for fear of sounding silly, as I read, I imagined how Neil Gaiman would read it. I kept his voice, his pacing, his intonation in my mind. Because, let's face it, a good reader can make just about anything sound good.

As I read through the story with Neil's voice in my head and the mindset that I ought to ease up on myself, a lovely thing happened. This story, which I kept thinking was so sketched and rough, didn't seem so bad. I could see some the machinery behind the story working (i.e. plot points that connect like they ought) and I was able to lean back a little and just like my work. It was cool.

That said, I made notes on every single page about things to edit. When I get my critiques on it from the gang in the CWC and Juan, I'm sure there will be more things that need my attention. So, I'm not saying it's perfect as is. Rather, I'm saying that I'm letting myself like it for its own sake instead of focusing so much on what's wrong with it.

Part way through October, and I find myself applying my "nuts & bolts" fiction study having different results than I expected. Instead of giving me some technical, or stylistic, thing to try, it's giving me a different kind of mindset. The biggest thing I'm getting out of this so far is to trust myself more.

It's refreshing, to say the least.

The Perfection Problem: Part 1, Naming It

I'm about half of the way through The Graveyard Book right now, and I keep thinking about the reading Neil did. I'm also beginning to buckle down on my initial thesis revisions. I like having the two in my mind at the same time.

I'm a huge Neil Gaiman fan, and I've been asking myself why. The thing is, it's not really because of how elegantly he writes. Let's face it, he doesn't write all that elegantly at all. Neil's prose is pretty simple and straight forward. On the way back, Deb and I were talking about how bad he'd get dinged in a critique group for his frequent use of "was." But, that's the thing, sometimes "was" is the right word, passive tense or not.

In a critique group, we're so focused on trying to make things perfect that we sometimes work too hard on finding things to fix. There have been plenty of times when I've talked with someone about something that was not only published, but even acclaimed or award-winning, and we've talked about the fact that said author would have been criticized in a critique group for one thing or another in that piece.

"But, it's a prize winning author!" You say. "They've done it just fine." And you're absolutely right.

The critique group danger is always thinking there's something to fix. Don't get me wrong, there's often plenty to fix and many ways to make something stronger. But, as soon as we work too hard to make something "perfect" we start squeezing out the character of the thing we're writing/revising/critiquing.

Right now I recognize in my own writing this struggle for the perfect. I've wandered away from the land of the happy medium and into the land of "if it isn't perfect, it's not worth it." Time to make a figurative U-turn.

New Thesis Title

After the second push on thesis pages, and my change in direction, I realize that my initial title no longer fits. Thus, I'm faced with finding a new thesis title.

I don't like not having a title for the thesis. I'm in the process of playing around with some, making lists, trying to decide what I want to use as a focal point. I wonder, would it work to call it Falco Sparverius, or would that be all wrong? What about The 250 Year Molt? I almost feel like I'm coming full circle back to my very first ideas about the thesis, like I want the word "totem" to fit in the title somehow.

I'm taking it as a good sign that I've circled back around, maybe it means I was on the right track all along. Maybe I should look all the way back and see what my first thoughts on title were, maybe I've already named the thesis exactly right, but have just forgotten.

Speaking the Same Language

In my Composition classes we've been talking about cultural issues, like language and culture clash. We've been talking about using MLA because writing is a conversation and MLA is the language we use. It's all about being able to speak the same language, only then can we have a conversation.

Today I had a meeting with Juan for my thesis. I feel like we're not speaking the same language yet. His definition of magical realism is a pretty hard-core, Gabriel Garcia Marquez one. Magical realism means "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings." Okay, I can appreciate that.

However, I also find it problematic to use only that definition. Why? Because of the "magic" part. You look cross-culturally and the common denominator of what magic is, is a description of seeming. Things that seem to be magical, are. It is belief in the magic that makes it real. Magic becomes a description of reality. With me so far?

So, then I start thinking of a less literal description of magical realism - manipulation of our accepted perception of reality. A broader umbrella. Beneath that umbrella falls Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried because the whole book is a conversation about what reality is and how reality and truth are not always synonymous. How things seem becomes more important than how things are. Again, we're back to describing reality.

In my mind, it's all inter-connected and magical realism is a first-cousin to metafiction and ways of story-telling. I briefly mentioned Tim O'Brien as a magical realist author to Juan, and got a very skeptical reaction. I couldn't articulate my thoughts at the moment, so I dropped it.

Bottom line: right now we're not quite speaking the same language. I've got to figure out how to articulate it in a way that's clear before I can make progress on my theoretical defense portion. I've got to figure out how I translate Tim O'Brien into Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Messy It Up - The Necessity of Chaos

When I got my CWC critique of the first part of the bar novel, the main common thread in people's comments was to make it messier. Bottom line: it's not complicated enough yet.

The second issue was relating to the protagonist. As anyone knows, if the reader isn't hooked into your main character, you're in trouble.

Now, the cool thing is that if you put the two issues together, they create a solution. Complications build character, and character is how you get complications. They feed off of each other. So, when I solve one problem, it'll lead to the solution to the other. After mulling it over for a while, I've come up with an idea of how to complicate Jess's life. I'm excited about this idea not only for the sake of dealing with the issues I've already mentioned, but also for getting around my stall-out with the sections of the novel when Jess is away from the bar.

It's not even lunch time yet, and I've already come up with ideas on how to tackle the three biggest struggles I'm having with this novel. I'm awesome :)

Yeah, yeah, just let me allow myself a touch of ego, okay? It's the only thing keeping me going right now.

Slippery Days

I don't know what's going on, but the days leading in to fall semester are slipping through my fingers like a squirmy five year old. *Sigh* So much to do before I'm back on campus, sheesh. I'm excited about having 15 pages ready, but not excited about having made no progress this past week.

But, no time to worry about it, I've got a syllabus to revise, a new assignment to create, a key to acquire, rosters to get, reading to do...

Why Demons Are Good

Here I am, almost a week in on the 2 page a day goal. As you may have noticed, my page count on the sidebar hasn't changed.

Only two pages a day. Shouldn't be hard. Shouldn't be hard at all. Is proving otherwise.

My difficulty is deciding what the next arc will be. My first CWC submission pretty much consisted of the starting arc - you know, introduce the people and get Jess started working at the bar. Easy, everything has a logical progression. Then, later, I have other plot arcs already decided on, but it's still too early to start on those, so I've gotta figure out the arc that comes in betwixt.

If I had the pressure of a close deadline, I'd figure it out quick. Without, though, I'm lagging. Crap. Need more pressure.

The Easy Part, the Hard Part

This time last week I was in panic mode. 50 pages, two weeks, how was I ever going to pull it off? Tonight, after averaging out pretty well on my 3.25 pages a day goal, I sit at 33 pages of rough draft.

My many years of English Majoring are paying off. All that paper writing (usually at the last minute) has gotten me pretty practiced at producing quickly. I've had lots of practice getting my thoughts in gear fast and, thanks to typing classes in middle school, my fingers are good at keeping up.

All the time spent working on Oracle is paying off, because through it I finally got a feeling for how to write the pacing and general architecture of a novel.

My many, many blog posts on my bar blog gave me architecture for writing bar scenes, and since I'm so practiced with that kind of tone, the bar scenes are proving easy to write out.

Then, there's the part where my procrastination means I have to write a few pages every day or face sad, sad defeat. The upshot of this is that it's gotten me into a rhythm, it's built momentum.

Of course, those are the easy bits.

There are hard bits too. Thanks to the pace at which I'm writing, my rough draft is pretty sketchy. I already have scenes I know I'll have to go back and flesh out before Monday, which will take more time on top of the pure hit-50-pages time, though it'll also add a few pages to my final count.

The worst, and most unexpected part, is that while I'm having such an easy time writing the bar stuff, I'm having a hard time writing the stuff where the main character is not at the bar. The bar's easy, so many coworkers and/or customers to play Jess off of. Once she's clocked out, I start coming up blank. A little problem, to say the least, and I've got a very limited amount of time to solve it.

Readers Aren't MIND Readers/The Redundancy Wall

Last week Jenny put up this post about struggling as a writer. She puts it well.

During that conversation I whined a bit about feeling tired of hearing myself write. It's something which gets superbly illustrated when one goes from a small to large page count. All of a sudden, I keep thinking "I always write X that way, I'm so redundant." Since everything I'm writing is so immediate and in such quantity, all kinds of patterns pop out. I have certain ways I like to phrase things, certain types of gestures common to my characters, etc.

A couple days earlier, I was working on a piece and had the thought, "I've already written this story. I'm just repeating myself." I don't remember which story I had that thought during, but the thought itself was clear and frustrated.

So, I asked Jenny a little about my thesis (though she's saving the bulk of her input for the CWC meeting tonight) and then I whined. She let me for a moment, then responded to my redundancy whinge with, "You're okay. As a reader, I don't see it."

At the moment I'm juggling three stories. I have a clear idea of how I want two of them to play out, but I'm struggling with actually putting the words on paper. Thinking about the point Jenny made helps, but I still feel like I'm pushing against, rather than through, the wall, (which is made of granite and at least four feet thick).

How do I write them without feeling bored with myself again?

And All I Got Was a Snickers Blizzard

Thursday pages were crap today. I went to Dairy Queen to bribe myself with ice cream, but got nowhere.

I tried poetry, nothing. I tried to think of something fiction-y, nothing.

Not writer's block. I still hold to my principle that "writer's block" is synonymous with "cop out." What happened was a day that got eaten up by other obligations and even when I sat down for my designated writing time, those obligations intruded. I wasn't able to slow down enough to focus on stories becuase I was too busy thinking about everything I had to do to prepare for Comp. 101 tomorrow morning, too busy thinking about getting ready for writers group on Sunday, too busy thinking about...

Most of the time I'm pretty good at shutting that stuff out, but I wasn't able to manage today. This past week or two I've been in a writing slump, too much peripheral stuff going on. Fortunately, things on campus are getting ready to slow down a bit, which will be helpful.

How do you deal with focusing on your writing when there's so much else in your life needing attention? Do you have any proven techniques for shutting the peripheral stuff out? How do you get focused?

The Problem With Computers

I've been making progress on The Tree Story, but once I got past the first bit, my progress slowed right down. I've got the beginning, I've got the ending, I just need to get the middle. Today is one of my "weekend" days, and thus, a day I planned on being productive. I've got my To Do list, and one of the items on it is to forge on through the middle part of the story.

I turned on my computer, pulled up the file, and checked my e-mail, did a round of the blogs, fiddled with Pandora, checked my campus e-mail in case a student wanted to get a hold of me, etc. etc. Time I've been on the computer: 2 hours. Words I've added to the story: 0.

Yes, I'm working on a hard part, but I also know that the way to tackle the problem is just that, to tackle it. I have to write through it, I have to start getting momentum. Or, I could check my e-mail again and see if my friend has replied yet. I've reached the conclusion that it's time for me to print out what I've got so far of The Tree Story, turn off my computer, and go do some coffee shop pages.

Whatever else can be said in the typing vs. handwriting debate, there is one undeniable fact: You can't waste time checking your e-mail (or updating your blog) if all you've got is a paper notebook and pen.

Letter #1

Whew. That was tough.

Looking at my plan for the semester, I can trace a number of instructors I've had who I'm borrowing from. To start off the semester, I'm borrowing from David and getting things going with a letter. The idea is pretty simple: I write a letter to the students and they reply to it. I'm handing out letter one tomorrow, which means it needs to be written and copied out before I even meet the students it's addressed to. A bit strange, I've got to say. Strange, and tough. I've been trying to write the letter all day, wrestling with what to say and how to say it. In two pages, I'm setting a tone for the whole semester. No pressure, now.

All right, now that the letter's done, it's time to get everything else in order. On a side note, one of my favorite things about the beginning of the semester is the obligation to play with office supplies whilst getting all my essential papers and such organized. I harbor a suspicion that one of the reasons people become English majors and/or writers is because we have a great fondness for binders. Now I've just got to find an excuse for using some of those plastic page protectors and I'm set.

Relativity

As I near the end of the month, and especially the end of the workable part of the month since this time next week I'll be in Mexico, I have to admit that I was overly ambitious in my goals. Like I've never done that before. I'm like the person at a buffet who says, "I'm going to try that, and that, and that, and I better get some of that, and that..." I've still got to work on my portion control.

Here's my question for you: Metaphorically speaking, what tends to be the relative size of your eyes in proportion to your stomach?

Scraping the Barrel

Here I am on Sunday night, about to go crazy from the boredom that only incredibly tedious, boring homework (20 source annotated bibliography for the terrible class, 8 sources still to go) can induce and I'm thinking that I may have been overly ambitious with my goals for the month/week. I'm nearly out of week and I haven't even picked up Strong Heart, much less begun revising it.

In the meantime, finals week and the due dates for monstrous final projects rampage ever nearer. I can't help but wonder how much more I've got left in me. It feels like I'm a hair away from running dry. Bad timing, to say the least.

Have you ever completely run out of steam? Have you come close, but perservered? What got you through it?

Retelling Old Stories: Beowulf, Authenticity, and Ownership

Went to see Beowulf last night with Nicole, John, and John's little brother. Had to do dinner first, complete with me getting made fun of for my lack of voice and ending with a conversation on the meaning of "dainty."

As an English major, at one point I read Beowulf. Afterwards, I promptly forgot most of it. Also as an English major, I've had a classmate who was in a few classes with me and who is obsessed with Beowulf. By this point, whatever interest I originally had has been squashed by this classmate's over-healthy zeal. Then, I hear Neil wrote it. Okay, I'm in.

My main beef is that the movie follows the tale too closely. Okay, they take liberties with a few points, but plot-wise it's the same story I had to read in Brit. Lit. 1 *Sigh*

I wish they'd have taken more liberties and followed the saga less precisely. The big time jump, particularly, was where they lost me. First story ends, we jump a few decades, and the second story begins. Everything in between is cut away. Of course, that's the accuracy coming through. But, don't they owe more to the story than to just retell it?

"But they don't!" You argue. "They changed lots!"

True, but the changes weren't enough for me. I wanted a re-imagining of the story, along the lines of Roald Dahl's version of Cinderella, or The Mists of Avalon. I felt like the writers had been too loyal to the original and sacrificed their ownership. I'm frustrated with it because it seems like they got so close to what I was hoping for, but shied away in the end. Speaking of the end, yeesh. Not so good.

Still, this isn't to say that the movie was bad. It's decent. But, as far as versions of Beowulf go, the one with Gerard Butler and Stellan Skarsgard is still my favorite. Sorry Neil.