How to Take Notes in the Shower?

For some reason my mind just races in the shower and I get all kinds of good ideas for blog essays while scrub-a-dub-dubbing in the shower.  However, I forget most of them.  I try to hang onto at least one idea, so that after I get out of the shower, dry off, get partly dressed, exercise, get completely dressed, eat breakfast and back at the computer, I can write it down.  Often even that single idea doesn’t make it to the more permanent memory of  my word processor.  I really should learn to type in the nude while wet.

So I did a couple of Google searches, “writing notes in the shower” and “how to write in the shower?”

As you can see, I’m not the only one with this problem of wanting to take notes in the shower.  It seems showering is well known for stimulating ideas for writers.  Karen Woodward made a homemade scuba writing tablet with materials from Staples in “How To Write In The Shower.”  However, Amazon has a ready made Scuba slate that’s cheaper than Karen’s put together solution.  The problem with both solutions is erasing the board.  But one of the customer reviews at Amazon suggested a Mr Clean Magic Eraser, which my wife has been buying lately, erases the slate well.  Amazon also offers a larger Scuba slate.  I ordered the smaller one for $7.78 with free Prime shipping.

The little scuba slate turned out to be good enough for now.  Capturing my thoughts usually only takes 2-3 lines, and the small slate, about the size of of a trade paperback, can handle 4-5 notes on each side.  I write with water streaming all over me and what I’m writing.  Pretty cool.  Problem solved.

However, I noticed there were other good solutions, include Aqua Notes, a waterproof notepad specifically designed for the shower.  It’s $7.00 plus $3.99 shipping at the site for a 40 page pad, or $10 at Amazon.  I’m going to try this next if the slate doesn’t work out in the long run.  This solution could get expensive.  However it has an advantage over the slate in that you can pull off a page and take it to the computer.

I expect the scuba slate to solve my immediate problem, but I’d like more elaborate permanent solution.  I need a system for taking notes all the time, and from any location.  My iPod touch has a good voice recorder app called Recorder.  I used to own an Olympus digital recorder for dictating notes until I rocked on it with my La-Z-Boy.  Digital recorders are great for in the middle of the night note taking, but I wouldn’t want to take one into the shower, or even a steamy bathroom.

But wouldn’t it be cool to have a smart home that constantly listened to me?  Or even talked to me?  Over the years I’ve seen various science fiction movies where houses had AI butlers built into them.  Now wouldn’t that be cool?  Of course I might go crazy talking to my house all the time.  In the future they might have personal robots that I could chat with and they’d take notes, and be my very own Dr. Watson, but I can’t count on that now.

I created this blog to record my thoughts and called it Auxiliary Memory because I wanted to record my thoughts.  I forget too easily, and I’m forgetting more all the time.   I often reread my older blog posts amazed at forgetting ever writing them.  There is even a movement called lifelogging to record everything a person does in their life, see “Lifelogging 101:  How to record your life digitally.”

Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell wrote a book Total Recall:  How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.  Bell was a researcher for Microsoft that became the subject of MyLifeBits, an early lifelogging project.

Now, I’m not actually interested in recording my whole life.  I want to record ideas.  I often write in my head thinking I’ll get up and write it all down later, but I don’t.  What I’d really like is a brainstorming recorder.  I just searched “brainstorming recording” on Google and got hits.  See, everything I think about has already been thought of before.  It’s nice to know I’m not the only one with these crazy ideas.

Ultimately I’d like a transparent way to record my thoughts, then mind map them with XMind, research and collect additional information and store that research in Evernote, and finally write it all up in an essay.  Sooner or later some savvy young inventor will invent an app that does all those things at once.

JWH – 9/26/12

Full Body Burden: Growing up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats by Kristen Iversen

I’m going to review Full Body Burden by Kristen Iversen in a strange way – by the way the Kristen Iversen taught me to write.  I took her Forms of Creative Nonfiction and Creative Nonfiction Workshop back in 2003, and even then she was telling the class she was working on a book about Rocky Flats, a secret government site near where she grew up, that built nuclear bomb triggers.  I haven’t seen Iversen in all those years but I’ve been waiting for her book.  And it was worth the wait – it’s a disturbing story about seeking the truth – the best kind.

I discovered Full Body Burden was out when my sister-in-law, Natalie Parker-Lawrence, a more recent student of Iversen’s creative nonfiction classes, told me a month ago.  Natalie was so excited about Full Body Burden that she convinced our nonfiction book club to make it our book of the month.  It’s a great book and now I want to convince others to read it, but to review it requires my own personal story.

I had never heard of Creative Nonfiction before taking Iversen’s class.  On our first day of class she had us write 10 minutes about the first memory that came to mind, in a quick in-class writing assignment.  I wrote about fishing on a seawall in Biscayne Bay in Miami when I was 12, while staying with my grandmother.  My grandmother managed an old apartment building populated mostly by retired people and I had found an old fishing tackle box in an apartment I helped clean out.  In the fishing box was a switch-blade knife which I wrote about for my memory exercise.

Now here’s the thing about what I’m writing now.  I can’t accurately remember the exact assignment or words Kristen told us that day.  Nor can I remember exactly what I wrote, nor when I was writing the exercise, was I sure of my memories of that night on the seawall and the knife.  Kristen was using various kinds of writing exercises, memoir, personal essay, travel, etc., to teach us about creative nonfiction.  And there’s a real problem trying to distinguish creative nonfiction from regular nonfiction as a separate genre. 

Creative nonfiction goes beyond reporting the cold facts.  It makes them personal, but it risks the appearance of being subjective about objective reporting.  It pushes the limits of truthful accuracy, to tell the story in such a way, that feels even more true.  I still argue with my sister-in-law Natalie, who got her MFA in Creative Nonfiction about what exactly is creative nonfiction.  I’m a MFA dropout, so I have less authority, but I’m going to give you my take as part of this essay.

I don’t believe a story can be called creative nonfiction unless the story is pushing the boundaries of narrative techniques, otherwise it’s merely nonfiction, the old kind we’ve always been used to.  To understand creative nonfiction, think In Cold Blood by Truman Capote or The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, or more recently The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot or The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.

My hard-to-put-into-words definition of creative nonfiction I acquired from Kristen Iversen is based on how the narrative is told, and I latched onto one particular technique as the defining style of creative nonfiction writing – and that’s when the author puts themselves into the story, and they reveal how they came to write the story as the story is being told.  I’m sure this is an extremely limited definition of creative nonfiction, but it just so happens to be how Full Body Burden is written.

Full Body Burden is a real bargain of a book, because you get two books in one.  First is Kirsten’s memoir of growing up and coming to terms with her alcoholic and distant father, and second, its the history of Rocky Flats, a dirty little skeleton in our government’s closet.  Either story is outstanding on its own.  Each is a compelling read.  Because Kristen grew up next door to Rocky Flats it might seem natural to tell the two stories together, and it totally is.  But in the old days of reporting a story like Rocky Flats, writers worked very hard to be impartial observers.   One of the revealing truths about creative nonfiction is learning that writers aren’t impartial, and letting the reader see our biases is very creative.

I love a category of story writing called meta-fiction.  Meta-fiction is fiction about fiction.  It’s recursive and self-conscious of its own techniques of telling the story.  I consider the best creative nonfiction to be meta-nonfiction.  One of the great themes of Full Body Burden is the impact of plutonium on our environment, and whether or not Rocky Flats is causing a rise of cancer and other strange diseases to the people who live near the plant.  Kristen can’t be impartial, because she and her three siblings all have strange diseases and cancers.

Iversen weaves her own personal biography into the history of Rocky Flats.  She even worked at Rocky Flats.  She interviews people that worked there, or so I would assume.  In every creative nonfiction narrative, how does the author get the information they state in the sentences they write?

This is one aspect of Full Body Burden where I wanted more, and this might be unfair to mention in this book review.  I still need to express it because writing this review explains why.  I wanted the full meta-nonfiction treatment.  Kristen is very open and revealing about her personal life, and she talks about becoming a writing teacher while all the events go on in this book, but she doesn’t tell us how she interviewed the people and how the book was written while the other two stories were unfolding.

We know why she wrote Full Body Burden because Rocky Flats is the biggest story in her life.  We know why she’s in the book, because if she had grown up in New York City or Miami as a different person, Kristen Iversen of Colorado would be a perfect person to interview for the story.  She’s actually a good character to tie the story around.  But I wished Iversen had gone one layer deeper.  She’s a fantastic writing teacher, so I wished she had covered how a writer writes about such a great story.  Of course she might have assumed most people aren’t interested in the mechanics of writing.

We know she worked on the story for 12 years.  That’s got to be fascinating by itself.  Am I asking too much by wishing I had gotten three books in one?   I do have Iverson’s Creative NonFiction textbook, Shadow Boxing: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction.  If you’ve never heard the term “Creative Nonfiction” and read Full Body Burden and fall in love with it, you might want to pick up this book to understand why Full Body Burden is so good.

In class we often discussed how to be factual in nonfiction, how to tell the truth, when our memories, and the memories of the people we interview, are so vague.  Do we really know what we’re writing is true and factual?  How often in recent years have we heard about writers getting into trouble for fudging facts?  Because of Iversen’s lectures, the whole time I was reading Full Body Burden I kept thinking how did she get the quotes she gave.  How did she recall her family memories.  How did she know about what her sister was doing when she was on a date.  Did she remember what her sister told her at the time, or did she interview her sister decades later?  To many readers, this might be too tedious, but because I was Iversen’s student, I wanted to know.  But like I said, this is my own hang-up, but it’s a fascinating aspect of creative nonfiction, where telling the story becomes part of the story.

Iversen brings page after page of startling facts about how our government lied to us.  How it covered up its lies.  Most of the story is about the operation of Rocky Flats and  sinister dangers the Department of Energy (DOE) allowed to be inflicted on the citizens of Colorado.  The other story, and just as gripping to me, is how Iversen reveals a steady stream of deeply personal facts.  Her own coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s was so revealing that if the Rocky Flats story hadn’t been included, I would still consider Full Body Burden a great read.

Now again, I must reveal my own personal connection to justify that appraisal.  Kristen reveals how her father was emotional distant, about his decades of alcoholism and how it affected her mother and herself, how her dad almost killed her and her siblings in a drunk driving accident, how her lawyer father was regularly in trouble with the law for drunk driving and fighting with cops, how he ended up living alone driving a cab.   My parents were alcoholics.  My mother almost killed me and my sister in a drunk driving accident.  My father was distant and hard to know, worked all the time, and never made much contact when he was home.  My father also had run ins with the cops and ended up living alone driving a cab.

Not only do I have personal overlaps with Kristen’s story, I also have some overlaps with the plutonium story.  I was born in 1951 the year Rocky Flats was planned and conceived.  The year the Iversens moved to Colorado to live next to Rocky Flats, my family moved to New Ellenton, South Carolina to live near the Savanna River Site, another nuclear weapons site run by the DOE.  We also were told everything was safe there, but years later I learned that wasn’t true.  Growing up I was very pro-science, but in the mid-1970s I turned anti-nuke, attended lectures, joined No-Nuke groups, and read books on the dangers of living with nuclear power plants and weapon manufacturing.

It will take decades, if not centuries to learn all the consequences of our experiments with nuclear weapons and energy production.  Full Body Burden is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg, but it’s ever so scary.  Growing up I was told plutonium was among the most deadliest substances known, but from Full Body Burden we learn that potentially over a ton of it is missing and maybe spread around the Denver area, with similar radioactive pollution happening to many other sites around the country.  And all these sites still have huge stockpiles of radioactive waste that we just can’t deal with properly.

Full Body Burden is about the U.S. government covering up its mistakes with the justification of national security.  However, how many Americans will die from being nuked by their own government? Rocky Flats was a kind of dirty bomb.  So why isn’t this on national news?  That’s a good and tough question.  The insidiousness of plutonium is very hard to quantify.  I assume if data miners comb the medical records in America and compared them to all the people living near nuclear processing plants, they would eventually find statistical correlations that would show the impact of this poison, but for now the stories are all hearsay.

Full Body Burden is convincing evidence, but its like the legal cases Iversen reports on, not conclusive evidence.  Why aren’t there millions of cases of cancer directly linked to plutonium released around processing plants in America and the rest of the world?  Why isn’t Denver a hot zone?  Why aren’t people living near Rocky Flats all wearing dosimeters?

Well it’s all part of our huge experiment with impacting the environment.  How hot can we make it?  How much radiation can we add?  How many poisons can we add to the fish tank we all live in?  How many species can we push to extinction?  Just how much of the Earth can we trash before it all collapses?

If I didn’t have these overlapping experiences and beliefs would I love Full Body Burden as much as I do?  I don’t know.  It’s all about being creative nonfiction reader.  Not only do we need to know how the writer involved themselves in the story, we need to know what we the reader brings to the story when we read it.  I’m trying to be honest about why I liked this book.  If you’re coming from a different headspace you might not like this book at all.  On the other hand, the reviews have been pretty outstanding, just look at the quotes at Amazon.

Now there’s another aspect of creative nonfiction I should mention that makes it a more appealing read.  One of the techniques of creative nonfiction is to use writing techniques novelists use to write fiction.  This has gotten more pervasive in nonfiction writing as creative nonfiction techniques have spread to general nonfiction writing.  Look at this sample page:

 

It looks and reads like a novel.  For nonfiction, writing like this makes the story more gripping and appealing to read even though it’s presenting a lot of facts.  This is why The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot and The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson are such wonderful books to read – they use the same creative nonfiction techniques.  All three of these women spent over a decade writing their books.  They could have used the same material to write novels, or journalistic, just the facts, nonfiction books.  Do you see what I mean when I say telling the story becomes part of the story?

Rebecca Skloot and Isabel Wilkerson each have websites that tell more about how they wrote their stories and this is very fascinating to me.  Not only can you read and watch videos about how the books were written, but you can follow along with reports of their successes.  Kristen Iversen also has such a web site and I expect it to grow as Full Body Burden becomes a huge success.  These three women have written the best books I’ve read in recent years, and strangely two of them, Skloot and Iversen, worked at the same English Department at the University of Memphis for awhile, teaching creative nonfiction.  Many people do not believe the creative nonfiction is a separate genre, but their success seems to prove otherwise.

JWH – 7/30/12

I Finish NaNoWriMo

Why Write a Novel?

Have you ever dreamed of writing a novel?  I have since high school.  Evidently tens of thousands, if not millions of people, also have that fantasy.  But just what does it mean?  Why write a novel?  For the third time in my life I’m trying to write a novel and it’s been a very revealing experience.  Novel writing is hard.  Oh, it’s easy enough to crank out the words and keep writing until you have a novel length manuscript, practically anyone can do that if they persist.

Is 100,000 words of fiction a novel?  By the least common denominator definition maybe, but a novel is a story with certain elements like characters, plot, conflict, epiphany, etc.  Let’s say we have a gadget that measures the power of each of these aspects in a novel and you can run your draft through it and get a readout, with ratings of 0-100 for each element.  100 represents what the best novels ever written would measure.  Unless you have a lot of talent, or have a lot of practice writing short stories, more than likely your first attempt at writing a novel will barely register 1 or 2 on any scale, and maybe if you have a knack for a certain element, hit a 10 or 20.

I’m working on NaNoWriMo and even though I’m able to crank out chapter after chapter I’m not sure if any of them have value to readers, or would register very high on our novel analyzer.  In my head I fantasize about writing a novel of the future where humans and robots fight over politics, philosophy, science, religion and the environment – but making that real is hard.  Yesterday I saw a movie, Martha Marcy May Marlene, that was so intense and bleak that it made me emotional sick.  Why did they tell that story I asked myself leaving the theater.  That make me ask myself about the story I’m working on:  What am I telling my readers.  Would it entertain, inspire or depress?

I’m not sure most bookworms ask themselves why they are reading a particular novel – they just hear about a book and get it.  I’m sure every reader hopes the next book they buy will be a page turning wonder, but generally they’re not.  Often we have to push ourselves to keep reading, hoping we’ll “get into” the novel.  To get hooked.  That’s what readers want – they want to get hooked – the more addictive the better.  Bookworms love finding books that compel them to read all night long, or even all weekend long.

Then, is the primary reason to write a novel to hook readers?  The movie I watched yesterday hooked me but ultimately it was extremely dissatisfying.  The story was about a mentally ill young woman who had gotten caught up in a Charles Manson like cult.  The review I read said the film was about a young woman readjusting to life after leaving a cult – so I assumed it was a religious cult, and expected  a film about a person coming to grips with reality.  That sounded fascinating to me and I went to the movie with great expectations.  If I had known the cult was of The Family kind I wouldn’t have gone.  In other words I wanted a story that had a positive outcome.  This story was very realistic, leaving viewers with an implied ending that would be horrific and nasty, but very real-world.

I bring this incident up to make another point about why write a novel.  Are you writing escapism or are you saying something about reality?  Martha Marcy May Marlene was saying something about life I didn’t want to experience, but I have to admit that it was deeply perceptive about reality.

If you think about all your favorite books and movies you’ll probably realize you admire the ones most that have lovable characters that you identify closely.  It’s very hard to tell a story about truly unlikable characters.  It takes great talent to create a Hannibal Lector or Dexter Morgan, where the readers learns to like evil people, but people would rather read about a likable serial killers than read a book where all the characters are realistic and depressing.

When most people dream of writing a novel they do so because they imagine fortune and fame.  Few writers get rich, and even fewer gain any kind of fame.  Writing is a lonely business demanding huge amounts of time creating black marks on white screens.  It’s a painful process giving birth to story that people will want to read, and I’m talking about anyone wanting to read.  Few would-be writers produce stories that get read.  Sure they might coerce a few family and friends to read their story, but that’s about all.  Even the successful ones who actual sell a story to a publisher, most of those books never recover their advance and fewer than a thousand people buy them, and its doubtful that even those books get completely read.  It’s just a huge task to compose a story that requires ten, twenty or even thirty hours to be read.  It’s a monumental task to create one that many people will actually read, and its even a winning a Powerball kind of event to write a story that millions love to read.

Why write novel?  Many people believe if they write something they will love to read themselves, others will want to read it too.  That’s the first goal of writing – to please yourself.  I believe this, but I’ve got to ask:  How many people can write something and have the objectivity to know if it’s something they would want to read?  And furthermore, and I think this is even a greater philosophical question:  How many people know what they like to read?  I even wrote about this in “My Kind of Story.”

My guess is few writers ever ask:  Why write a novel?  Just as few readers ask:  Why read a book?  I’m pretty sure Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Stephen King and J. K. Rowling all knew or know what makes a good novel and why people will want to read it.  (I’m a bit doubtful about Rowling since she’s only had a one-hit-wonder.)  Most other writers I believe write something they throw at the wall and hope it sticks.  If understanding how a novel works equals the ability to produce a novel that readers will love, then we should be able to write computer programs that churn out bestsellers.

Now the question I have to ask myself is:  Why do I want to write a novel?  I’m not driven by fame or fortune.  So why torture myself to write one?  Coming home every evening after work to write on the novel for NaNoWriMo takes quit smoking kind of willpower.  It’s worse than dieting, at least when I’m not eating I can go do something fun.  Writing is all consuming.  It eats up time like crazy.  And like the robots in my story, I have to ask where the base programming comes from that provides my motivation.

This now brings me to the nitty-gritty of the question: Why write a novel?  For me it’s because I have two characters I want to bring to life.  What I discovered writing for NaNoWriMo is I have no plot for my two characters to exist in.  Now I could write a literary story that has no plot, like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, or I need to find my inner Steven Spielberg and invent a story for them.

And I think that answers my question, you write a novel to tell a story or create a character, or hopefully both.  I can’t even tell jokes because I never remember the plots much less the punch line, so creating a story for a novel is very hard for me.  Rowling spent years imagining her story and characters.  She saw it in her mind so well she could draw scenes from the story.  Now that’s a vivid imagination.

Well, I need to get back to my NaNoWriMo work – this essay is almost as long as my word quota for the day.  But I took the time off from the novel to think about why I want to write this novel and that is helping me with the plot. October should’ve been NaNoPloMo – National Novel Plotting Month.  Writing a novel is a soul searching endeavor.   Can you imagine a story that takes ten hours to tell and one that people will want to read?  Try doing it sometimes.  It will teach you a lot about reading and watching movies and television shows.

Writers obsess over their opening paragraphs because they know its  the success or failure moment as to whether you can get people committed to reading your work of art.  Why write a novel?  Because it’s a challenge to dazzle readers with a beautiful feat of imagination.

[Aside to myself:  Now that should make you try harder!  Go write!!!  Sorry to everyone else for having to read my pep talk to myself.]

JWH – 11/13/11.

NaNoWriMo

I’m doing NaNoWriMo – November is National Novel Writing Month, where participants join an online communal boot camp and urge each other on to write 50,000 words of fiction in one month.  Yesterday I passed the 10,000 word mark.  This also means I’m writing less for my blog, so I’m taking a bit of time off tonight to explain my absence.

I’ve tried writing novels before and usually crash and burn around the 100 page mark, or about 20,000 words.

Novel writing appeals to the amateur in people – because most people feel they can write their first novel and be a success.  That’s sort of like sitting down at the piano for the first time at Carnegie Hall.   I’ve written 473 posts for this blog, so I consider that my piano practice for writing, but it’s not enough, especially since it’s nonfiction.  I’ve written about 30 short stories for various MFA writing classes and Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in 2002, but that’s not enough practice either.  I’ve read that most writers have to complete several novels before they get one published.

The NaNoWriMo people don’t expect word marathoners to complete a finished and polished novel, they just expect participants to go the distance.  And even at the 10,000 word mark I’ve learned a lot.  I’ve been thinking about the story I’m working on now for years, thinking I was writing it in my head when I was too lazy to write at the keyboard, and what I’ve discovered is that all the thinking I’ve done so far is no where near enough story for a novel.  I discovered that by day 3.

At day 6 I discovered the ending I had planned wasn’t really an ending and I had to blast right on past it.  This morning while in the shower thinking about what to write for day 7 I realized that I needed to blend in another story I was thinking about, so two novel ideas become fuel for one.  I just doubled the characters I have to bring to life and now have two settings to paint, and I’m not sure how far that will get me either.  Novel writing is MUCH harder than it looks.  Just read one page of any great book and count the number ideas the writer had to imagine on that page.  A novel isn’t about one idea, but thousands.

I’m already thinking of converting ideas I had plan to use for blog posts into subthemes for the novel.  This story is becoming a black hole for all my words and ideas.  And I know NaNoWriMo is just the start, because come Dec 1 I’ll have my 50,000 words, but a modern novel is really closer to 100,000.  And those are 100,000 polished words that have gone through many drafts.  And that means I need to think in terms of NaNoWriYears.

I love puttering around after work pursuing all kinds of fun activities that capture my whim.  What I’m realizing now is how much writers have to give up to create their work.  I see that it’s got to be all consuming.  Damn, I wished I smoked cigarettes and took speed.  I need to drive myself on, and now I can see why writers are often so addicted to stimulants.  All I have is loud music.  Tonight I’m listening to my “All Along the Watchtower” playlist that’s contains 117 different versions of the Dylan classic.  I’m playing it loud!

Well, back to the word mines…

JWH – 11/7/11

Blogging and Novel Writing

I’ve always wanted to write a novel but never had the focus or determination to complete one.  November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWrMo.  The goal of NaNoWrMo is to get would-be novelists to complete a first draft of 50,000 words.  Now that’s about the minimal length of fiction to be called a novel, and most editors usually want twice as many words if you submit to them, but the NaNoWrMo consider 50,000 a good writing marathon for one month’s writing.  Their goal is not for people to complete a polished novel, but just go the distance.  They’ve yet to make December National Novel Rewrite Month, but many bloggers have suggested it. 

Essentially this means knocking out 1,667 words a day of fiction.  I have no trouble writing as many words on a blog post, but fiction is different.  I love blogging and don’t expect to give it up for the month of November.  Blogging is therapeutic for me.  Writing about something that requires research exercises my memory.  And I definitely need help with my memory – it’s slipping away more every day. 

But I want to write a novel.  Of course I’ve been wanting to write a novel since I was in high school over forty years ago.  Rationally I’d think if I hadn’t written one by now I never will.  Well, I’m looking at NaNoWrMo as a shit or get of the pot test.  Either I’ve got to finish a novel now or give up thinking about ever writing one.  All my blogging indicates I like writing essays, which suggests I should work harder to polish that skill.  If I fail to produce a first draft in November that’s what I will do – but for now I want to give it one more try.

What I should do is publish my daily NaNoWrMo work here but that might screw up my chances of getting the novel published in the future.  I’ve read that most authors have to write several novels before the get one good enough to publish, so maybe I’m being too protective of my first first draft.  Also, I believe, and this might be naive, that I’ve got a unique science fiction idea and and I don’t want to spoil it by letting people read a first draft.  However, I might be willing to show versions of the opening here as a marketing research to see if anyone responds.

Working on a novel will seem strange though.  My blogging is about watching the world and reacting.  It’s about looking outward.  Novel writing is about looking inward and creating everything from scratch.  That might be why I’ve never been able to write a novel.  I’ve written about 30 short stories and even 5,000-12,000 words are an agony to produce.  I recently put my best effort online and it sank like a stone.  Writing non-fiction is engaging – writing fiction is lonely.

I haven’t signed up with NaNoWrMo yet, and I still might chicken out.  The idea of coming home from work every evening and turning off the world, shunning all my favorite hobbies to focus on one activity is scary.  I love my evening routine.  Writing fiction will be like working two jobs.  So why do it?  I don’t know.  I read a lot of fiction and I’ve always wanted to create a fictional work of art.  It’s like going to a party and always listening to everyone else talk.  Writing a novel would be like having my say.

JWH – 10/18/11

All Agony and No Ecstasy

In 1961 Irving Stone published The Agony and the Ecstasy about Michelangelo’s struggles to produce great art.  I never read the book but saw the 1965 movie.  I think most artists are driven.  I always wanted to be creative as a great artist, but I’ve never wanted to be that driven – it scares me because it seems like possession.  But man, I need to be a bit more driven than my laidback lazy self.  Where does drive come from?  Inside or out?  Can it be self-induced?  Would I take a pill to produce it like in the film Limitless.

Once again I’ve taken a week off from work to write on my novel, and once again it is all agony and no ecstasy.  I have no trouble writing non-fiction, but fiction is painful to produce.  And yet, writing fiction is the one ambition I still have left in life.

This morning Zite brought me a link to “To Who it May Inspire,” a letter at Letters of Note.  It’s a handwritten note from Austin Madison, a Pixar animator, who tells people to persist, and reminds them that only 3% of the time is it fun to be creative, and the other 97% of the creative process is painful, and finally he encourages people to always persist in working through the 97%.

That’s always been my problem, I keep waiting for the 3% mood to hit, and not putting in my 97% of the time actually drudging away.  And that’s the regret of my life I would say.  I don’t know how to persist through drudgery. 

I’ll turn 60 soon and I wonder if I shouldn’t give up on this last dream.  I don’t know if I can though – it might be a permanent fantasy that runs in my head no matter what.  When I was young I dreamed of writing novels as a way of getting out of 9 to 5 work, but over the years I’ve learned that it’s easier to go to work every day than write.  In a couple of years I’ll be able to retire and the incentive to write to avoid work won’t matter any more.  What then?

I don’t think about writing for money anymore, anyway.  I hope this won’t sound silly, but the reason why I still feel guilty about not writing is because I have so many characters that will die unless I create a story for them to live in.  Even though I don’t write regularly, I do fantasize about my characters all the time.  I think my main problem is I don’t have a good plot for them to live out.  I started watching this week Martha Alderson’s 27 part series on YouTube about plotting.  She discusses many examples from classic and current books, so these videos are enlightening even if you don’t want to write.  They would also be good for people who like to review books.

Martha reminded me of something I’ve learned from many writing classes – that is my character must want something.  And my characters are ambitious, but they are like me, they don’t want to work at the drudgery any more than I do.  So now I’m working on two dimensions of persistence – I must persist and making my characters persist.

Another piece of advice from Martha is I need to know where my novel is going.  That’s always been my biggest weakness.  I’ll start writing, and crank out scene after scene, and eventually realize I’m not going anywhere.  I’ll stop for awhile, maybe months.  Then I’ll return to it and start at the beginning again and write all new scenes until I once again peter out.  I’ve finished 30+ stories for writing classes, but only two of them were ever liked by other people, and that was because I created satisfactory plots. 

My best example is “Annaclara’s Heroes” written almost ten years ago.  It’s as closest to Martha’s advice as anything I’ve written.  I went ahead and published it on my blog this morning to see if seeing it inspires me to write more.  Also, I feel bad about not letting Annaclara out of her desk drawer dungeon. 

“Annaclara’s Heroes” is the best I was ever able to do with fiction writing.  It was 12,000 words and I wanted to make it a real novel.  I was only able to complete it because it was the major class assignment for a Historical Fiction course.  Reading it now reminds me of how much work it took to produce.  I had to focus very hard for weeks.  And I think I did because I wanted to impress my classmates and teacher.  I don’t have that incentive when I write stories now. 

That’s the thing about writing fiction, it takes weeks of intense focus.  And for what?  Let’s say I sold a story to F&SF or Asimov’s and got $400.  That’s not a lot of monetary incentive.  I think the real motivation is to create something beautiful, and I do have that kind of motivation.  Just not the drive – but can I reprogram myself to have the drive?  That’s a fancy way of saying, “Can you teach an old dog new tricks?”

I think about writing when I retire, and I take off a week now and then to imagine being retired to see if I can get to work.  But a week is never enough.  I usually have a zillion things to do with my meager week of freedom.  And that might be key to my failure.  Creative people can focus on one ambition with laser-like focus.  My inner light is like a campfire that flickers, jumps, pops, flares, fades, and never stays focused – it creates more heat than light.

I’ve got hundreds of books on my shelf waiting to be read, and hundreds of movies waiting to be watched, and a dozen half-ass hobbies I want to spend more time on – and all of this distracts me from writing.  I keep telling myself I must free myself from all desires but one, but I can’t.

I am reminded of the movie Destination Moon from 1950.  The crew of the first rocket to the moon uses up too much fuel landing and can’t take off unless they can get rid of enough mass.  They end up throwing everything imaginable out onto the surface of the moon to lighten the ship, including their radio and space suits.  If I ever really want to be serious about writing I’ll need to jettison all my other distractions to sharpen my focus.  In the film the astronauts have one great incentive – they’ll die if they don’t.  I don’t have that kind force driving me.

I think I’m not a writer because of lack of drive rather than talent.  I’m not sure talent is critical to the equation, at least I hope not because I’ve never felt talented.  I’d like to believe its how hard you work, and I’m just too lazy.  The fascinating question is whether or not laziness is a quality I can change.  After fifty years of not applying myself diligently I should be able to answer that question without equivocation, but that old adage about hope springing eternal seems to trump it.

I tend to think we all have unfulfilled ambitions we carry around our whole life.  At what point do we give them up.  I have friends who claim they gave up long ago, but I wonder about their secret fantasies they never tell about.  I like to contemplate changing myself.  I don’t know if its possible, but I tend to think I’m not alone.

JWH – 9/9/11

The Metaphors of Magic

 

The concept of magic has been around since the dawn of mankind.  Modern people associate the belief in magic with superstition, so the belief in real magic is waning.  However, the belief in fantasy magic is growing.  People love stories where magic is real.  Fictional magic can take many forms because the rules and intent of magic within a story has literary purpose.

I am listening to A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray, and beautifully read by Josephine Bailey.  It is the first book of a trilogy about four girls in Victorian England that get seduced by the power of magic.  One metaphor for magic used in this book is addiction.   The girls have hangovers after using magic.  They are drawn to magic because of their unhappy lives and magic makes them feel good.  They are warned about the dangers of magic, but they become addicted, knowing that magic killed the two girls that are their spiritual guides.  In A Great and Terrible Beauty magic is seen as a kind of high, or escape of from the real world.

The metaphor for magic in the Harry Potter books is different.  J. K. Rowling treats magic as if it was a science, to be studied in school, with textbooks,  journals, and learned societies.   Magic has rules and limitations, and mastery of it takes work, skill and talent.  This is probably the most popular metaphor for magic.  Readers love everyday stories of practical magic.

Older books, especial from medieval times and earlier, see magic as a metaphor for good and evil, directly related to God and Satan, or gods and goddesses.  There is white magic and black magic, and human users get their magical power through association.  As humans self importance grew, and the power of the gods declined, the nature of magic was moved into hidden aspects of reality.  It was the secret knowledge of adepts.  Stories like The Lord of the Rings comes out of this heritage.

Nowadays magic doesn’t have to have a philosophical justification.  Every writer who creates a new series of books about vampires decides the rules for how they live in their literary creation.   Magic is a tool that shapes fictional form, which can go from sexual magic (True Blood) to comedy magic (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) to satire magic (Saturday Night Live) to alternate history science fiction magic (“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang).

The sad thing is sometimes people really do want to believe in magic.  They want their fictional fun to be reality.  All religions believe in magic of some sorts.  Miracles are the metaphor for religious magic.  But people also want to believe in concepts like luck, Karma and voodoo too.  Thus magic is a metaphor for altering reality.  That’s where it gets really dangerous.  New Age believers are convinced in the power of mind over matter.  That’s an especially dangerous belief.

That’s why you must ask yourself:  Do I believe in real magic or just fictional magic?  Fictional magic is just a plot device to create fun stories, and sometimes its also used as a moral metaphor, like in A Great and Terrible Beauty.  But if you think anything other than the laws of science rule reality then you have something to worry about.  And I don’t mean worrying about being delusional, which you probably are.  No I mean, you have to worry about knowing the rules of your magic. 

For example, if you believe in angels, you have to also believe in devils.  If you believe magic can help you then you also have to believe it can hurt you.  If you can hex someone, they can hex you.  If you believe in ghosts, then you are never alone.  It gets creepier and creepier.  That’s why I love the magic metaphor in Ted Chiang’s gorgeous story “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” where he uses a fantasy time machine to teach the lessons of the Koran.  All magic has laws, even if magic might be real.  All magic has philosophy, even if its untrue.  The best magic is fiction that teaches us lessons about living in the world of reality.

So, whenever you encounter magic ask yourself:  What does this magic imply.

JWH – 11/14/10  

Clarion West 2002

Eight years ago around this time of year I attended the Clarion West writer’s workshop in Seattle.  Seventeen of us all shared the same ambition to become science fiction writers, but so far I’ve failed to succeed.  A few of my classmates haven’t.  We were told only a handful of us would get ahead with our dreams, and it would take years, and it would not always be as planned.  And that’s come true.

Strangely enough, my Clarion West 2002 group had three guys who were 50 that year, seeking new ambitions for the second half of their lives.  Most of the class were in their twenties, with a couple in their thirties.  At 50, I decided to do something new with my life by going back and pursuing one of my teen ambitions, to write science fiction.  In the eight years since I’ve written damn little fiction, but I’ve written a lot about science fiction on this blog and at Classics of Science Fiction.

Dario Ciriello has taken a different tack and started Panverse Publishing, and editing anthologies of original stories, with an emphasis on the novella.  With two titles in print and another due in September, Dario has hit the ground running with a promising new career as an editor.  The books have been getting good reviews and they have stunning covers.

 

You can get Panverse One and Eight Against Reality now at Amazon, or order direct from the Panverse site.  Panverse One is even available as a Kindle book.  Panverse Two will come out in September.  If you are a patron of writers and small presses, you can get copies of the books and make donations at Wonder. Story.  They’re Back! where Dario talks in a short film about his small press and publishing new writers.

The other Clarion West student that was 50 like me back in 2002 is Doug Sharp.  Doug has spent years living out in the wilderness finishing up his wild science fiction novel and is now looking for an agent.  The epic adventure turned out so long after many revisions that it will be two novels, Channel Zilch and Hel’s Bet!  Doug’s blog Walden 3.0 is fascinating account of a modern Thoreau living in a cabin in the Minnesota woods with his dogs while writing science fiction.  Doug takes beautiful photos of the wilderness and wildlife and should write a book his real life, something I envy.

I on the other hand, have written practically no fiction since 2002.  I found a writing outlet with blogging and my website The Classics of Science Fiction.  But the longing to write fiction never stops gnawing at me, and every summer around this time, I remember fondly my weeks at Clarion West and my ambition to write short stories and novels.  Each year I reevaluate the question:  Can an old dog learn new tricks.

I’ve taken off this week to work on a short story as a mental return to Clarion West.  I agonize over my lack of discipline, but the reality of me not writing fiction is probably not about discipline but talent.  Hard work and talent does pay off.  T. L. Morganfield, one of my younger Clarion West classmates has had great success with publishing a string of short stories based on Aztec mythology.  Recent publications include one in the July issue of Realms of Fantasy and another story in Dario’s anthology Eight Against Reality.  What I admire about Traci is her constant work at achieving her goal.  I wish I could be more like her.

Ysabeau S. Wilce, another younger Clarion West 2002 alum, won the 2008 Andre Norton Award for young adults, for her novel Flora’s Dare.  I haven’t heard much about my other classmates except for notices about a story published here and there, and other kinds of artistic success.  I especially wish the young classmates all the luck in the world.  They have the time to make their dreams come true and I hope they succeed.

I hope by next summer when I think of my time at Clarion West that I will have finished the short story I’m working on now, and maybe a few more.  I want to prove that an old dog can learn new tricks.

JWH – 7/6/10

Unique Perspectives

We love people who can think outside of the box.  We love people who can see the world from a unique perspective.  We love people who can spot the trends before anyone else.  Well two of my friends have turned me onto a couple of people that have left me stunned with admiration, so I thought I’d pass them on to you.

The first is from Professor Jesse Schell and his take on where Facebook is leading us.  It’s in three parts:

 

If you watch these videos and don’t have a clue to what he’s talking about, well then I think you need to worry about being out of touch with pop culture, or else accept that the future has rushed past you.  Farmville has over 80 million users worldwide, and if you can’t understand what a weird fraking fact that is, then you might want to study these videos.  I’m not sure rock and roll in its heyday had those kinds of numbers.  Evidently it’s more addictive than meth, crack and heroin combined.  I know from experience since I’m a Farmville widower.

Next up is Christian Lander and his Stuff White People Like, a blog of brilliant social commentary with over 63 million hits.  The way to start reading this site is to visit the Full List of Stuff White People Like and pick a topic dear to your heart and get ready to be undressed.  Even more fun is to get together with a bunch of other white people and read these posts aloud.  Even when Lander isn’t skewering me, I’m learning so much about the people around me that is both hilarious and incredibly insightful.  Damn, I wish I had his people watching skills.

JWH – 3/2/10