Friday morning I moved my laptop from the coffee table to the dining table and heard an odd sound. My computer rebooted and then couldn't boot up the hard drive.
It sounded a bit like a car in the throws of a breakdown. I prayed, caressed the key riddled dash, and told her she could do it. She can't. She didn't. She needs a hard drive transplant. She is not the little computer that could.
It never fails that some sort of disaster strikes me when I'm getting in my groove. When I'm about - to quote a song from my youth, "put the needle on the record when the drums beats go like this" - thankfully there's a crap Acer backup computer with a wonky backspace key to help me through this latest shit storm.
I took a deep breath, made some chicken & sausage gumbo (delish!), some peanut butter blossoms with out-of-date Hershey Kisses, and tried not see it as yet another sign that my writing is not meant to be.
Neil Gaiman, a hero of mine - writes everything in longhand, I told myself. I know this because (@)Neil himself confirmed it to me on Twitter.
It was near my birthday. I just bought The Graveyard Book. It was like the greatest birthday present ever that Neil Gaiman (who I appreciate more for his non-comic book stuff, though Sandman was pretty fucking cool), directly shared his process with me. It works for Neil and my image of him sitting in front of a massive blank tome by candlelight like the monks in Eco's "The Name of the Rose" except without the killing and what I'll assume is a lot less Sean Connery (connerie meaning bullshit in French btw).
If you wonder why I blog - why I often lay my soul bare on the Internet about writing and all the things I manage to do when I'm not trying to write - well it's because of Neil Gaiman. Discovering his blog basically changed my life. There's a link on the blogroll.
I couldn't get my momentum back Friday or Saturday despite the comfort of a back up computer.
I go through phases. I like notebooks, but until I found my Midori Traveler's Notebook I basically bought every notebook I saw, wrote a few sentences, and the minute I didn't like those sentences I bought and/or started a new notebook. New idea, new notebook used to be my way of thinking. I sort of got around my bad habit by buying myself a notebook I love. If you want to know why, read you can read my rave here.
And that's the thing. I use my notebooks. I collage. I write longhand. I use index cards (à la Nabokov). I use blank sheets of paper; yellow legal pads; post-its galore to draw, write phrases, type phrases with an old manual typewriter. I have a lot of "methods" because I admit I'm falsely obsessed with the Muses, inspiration, blah,blah fuckity blah.
I hate my own conneries and excuses. I hate that I'm unable to discipline myself the way I have in the past to get shit done.
I am filled with this sort of dread that because writing hasn't come easily to me, as many other things have, that I'm never going to get it done. It's why I'm superstitious (i.e. why I talk to my computer like she's Christine when actually she's not a she at all as HAL is genderless). It's why I struggle. It's why I'm constantly looking for answers to how to write although I know that there are no answers. It's like I don't trust myself, so I need to affirm this with the words of real writers, of which I am sad to say despite advice that if I'm simply writing I am a writer, I do not feel I am.
So here is my affirmation for today. Sundays are generally the days I wake up late and then Coco comes for his English lesson. I try to make a lot of coffee and stay in the swing of things after the lesson is over, but it's tough. I have just asked Monsieur Redacteur if he can't go to Coco's house to give the lesson. He gets it. I'm chomping at the bit.
And maybe it's just a bit of Sean Connery, but sometimes things like this help.
"I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.."
Dear Writer:
Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyes and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. This illusion was canceled very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, we were told, is to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, as we were told, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.
The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all - so long as it was effective. As a subhead to this rule, it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three- or six- or ten-thousand words.
So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that, we were set on the desolate, lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades given my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized, the judgments of editors for many years afterward upheld my teacher's side, not mine. The low grades on my college stories were echoed in the rejection slips, in the hundreds of rejection slips.
It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done. Why could I not then do it myself? Well, I couldn't, and maybe it's because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.
It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.
I remember one last piece of advice given me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic '20s, and I was going out into that world to try and to be a writer.
I was told, "It's going to take a long time, and you haven't got any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor."
It wasn't too long afterward that the depression came. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame anymore. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely my teacher was right about one thing. It took a long time - a very long time. And it is still going on, and it has never got easier.
She told me it wouldn't.
1963
That was written by one of my other heroes, the writer John Steinbeck.
I love this newspaper clipping. "America was proud of its front porch until John Steinbeck showed the backyard".
I still remember when I realised that this cartoon was actually referencing Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men":
I still remember the first time I read "The Pearl". I remember struggling through "Grapes of Wrath", feeling pretty bedraggled by the words that seemed to my 14 year old self heavy and covered with baked earth that hid from me some meaning that I somehow understood of hardship and futility like tilling soil that blows away like the wind and isn't even strong enough to hold on to something by its root.
That lonely desolate path that Steinbeck speaks of isn't that lonely or at least it has never seemed that way to me. I've always sort of seen myself as a would-be hero on a quest. I imagine the end will be something akin to the ending of Michael Ende's "Neverending Story". I will find out like Sebastian I am making a book come to life. Then I'll soar around in my fantasyland on my luck dragon, wave to a tortoise, and see Artax again.
Tickity-tock, goes my cat plate clock. I have five minutes to tell you a little story, about this cat plate. It's a plate with different cats in various poses around the lip that the old Chinese man who owns an odd little shop on the Place de Torcy (Paris 18e, Marx Dormoy) turned into a clock. It is now three minutes to a grey tabby or, as other people might call it, eleven-fifty seven.
This clock was originally intended to be a Christmas gift for someone who turned out to be a real bitch. It sat around the house, it's mechanisms threatening to break, and so I finally put it up over the door for safe keeping. She really was/is a bitch and I now consider the cat clock my compensation for bitchiness inflicted.
I am going to, as we say in French, stop des conneries.
In the words of The Thing, one of Stan Lee's genius characters from the Fantastic Four, "it's clobberin' time!"
It sounded a bit like a car in the throws of a breakdown. I prayed, caressed the key riddled dash, and told her she could do it. She can't. She didn't. She needs a hard drive transplant. She is not the little computer that could.
It never fails that some sort of disaster strikes me when I'm getting in my groove. When I'm about - to quote a song from my youth, "put the needle on the record when the drums beats go like this" - thankfully there's a crap Acer backup computer with a wonky backspace key to help me through this latest shit storm.
I took a deep breath, made some chicken & sausage gumbo (delish!), some peanut butter blossoms with out-of-date Hershey Kisses, and tried not see it as yet another sign that my writing is not meant to be.
Neil Gaiman, a hero of mine - writes everything in longhand, I told myself. I know this because (@)Neil himself confirmed it to me on Twitter.
It was near my birthday. I just bought The Graveyard Book. It was like the greatest birthday present ever that Neil Gaiman (who I appreciate more for his non-comic book stuff, though Sandman was pretty fucking cool), directly shared his process with me. It works for Neil and my image of him sitting in front of a massive blank tome by candlelight like the monks in Eco's "The Name of the Rose" except without the killing and what I'll assume is a lot less Sean Connery (connerie meaning bullshit in French btw).
If you wonder why I blog - why I often lay my soul bare on the Internet about writing and all the things I manage to do when I'm not trying to write - well it's because of Neil Gaiman. Discovering his blog basically changed my life. There's a link on the blogroll.
I couldn't get my momentum back Friday or Saturday despite the comfort of a back up computer.
I go through phases. I like notebooks, but until I found my Midori Traveler's Notebook I basically bought every notebook I saw, wrote a few sentences, and the minute I didn't like those sentences I bought and/or started a new notebook. New idea, new notebook used to be my way of thinking. I sort of got around my bad habit by buying myself a notebook I love. If you want to know why, read you can read my rave here.
And that's the thing. I use my notebooks. I collage. I write longhand. I use index cards (à la Nabokov). I use blank sheets of paper; yellow legal pads; post-its galore to draw, write phrases, type phrases with an old manual typewriter. I have a lot of "methods" because I admit I'm falsely obsessed with the Muses, inspiration, blah,blah fuckity blah.
I hate my own conneries and excuses. I hate that I'm unable to discipline myself the way I have in the past to get shit done.
I am filled with this sort of dread that because writing hasn't come easily to me, as many other things have, that I'm never going to get it done. It's why I'm superstitious (i.e. why I talk to my computer like she's Christine when actually she's not a she at all as HAL is genderless). It's why I struggle. It's why I'm constantly looking for answers to how to write although I know that there are no answers. It's like I don't trust myself, so I need to affirm this with the words of real writers, of which I am sad to say despite advice that if I'm simply writing I am a writer, I do not feel I am.
So here is my affirmation for today. Sundays are generally the days I wake up late and then Coco comes for his English lesson. I try to make a lot of coffee and stay in the swing of things after the lesson is over, but it's tough. I have just asked Monsieur Redacteur if he can't go to Coco's house to give the lesson. He gets it. I'm chomping at the bit.
And maybe it's just a bit of Sean Connery, but sometimes things like this help.
"I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.."
Dear Writer:
Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in a class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyes and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories. This illusion was canceled very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, we were told, is to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, as we were told, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.
The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and any technique at all - so long as it was effective. As a subhead to this rule, it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of our story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three- or six- or ten-thousand words.
So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that, we were set on the desolate, lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades given my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized, the judgments of editors for many years afterward upheld my teacher's side, not mine. The low grades on my college stories were echoed in the rejection slips, in the hundreds of rejection slips.
It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done. Why could I not then do it myself? Well, I couldn't, and maybe it's because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.
It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.
I remember one last piece of advice given me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic '20s, and I was going out into that world to try and to be a writer.
I was told, "It's going to take a long time, and you haven't got any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor."
It wasn't too long afterward that the depression came. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame anymore. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely my teacher was right about one thing. It took a long time - a very long time. And it is still going on, and it has never got easier.
She told me it wouldn't.
1963
That was written by one of my other heroes, the writer John Steinbeck.
I love this newspaper clipping. "America was proud of its front porch until John Steinbeck showed the backyard".
I still remember when I realised that this cartoon was actually referencing Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men":
I still remember the first time I read "The Pearl". I remember struggling through "Grapes of Wrath", feeling pretty bedraggled by the words that seemed to my 14 year old self heavy and covered with baked earth that hid from me some meaning that I somehow understood of hardship and futility like tilling soil that blows away like the wind and isn't even strong enough to hold on to something by its root.
That lonely desolate path that Steinbeck speaks of isn't that lonely or at least it has never seemed that way to me. I've always sort of seen myself as a would-be hero on a quest. I imagine the end will be something akin to the ending of Michael Ende's "Neverending Story". I will find out like Sebastian I am making a book come to life. Then I'll soar around in my fantasyland on my luck dragon, wave to a tortoise, and see Artax again.
Tickity-tock, goes my cat plate clock. I have five minutes to tell you a little story, about this cat plate. It's a plate with different cats in various poses around the lip that the old Chinese man who owns an odd little shop on the Place de Torcy (Paris 18e, Marx Dormoy) turned into a clock. It is now three minutes to a grey tabby or, as other people might call it, eleven-fifty seven.
This clock was originally intended to be a Christmas gift for someone who turned out to be a real bitch. It sat around the house, it's mechanisms threatening to break, and so I finally put it up over the door for safe keeping. She really was/is a bitch and I now consider the cat clock my compensation for bitchiness inflicted.
I am going to, as we say in French, stop des conneries.
In the words of The Thing, one of Stan Lee's genius characters from the Fantastic Four, "it's clobberin' time!"
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