in (virtual) print
Well this is an honor.
I found out, rather last minute, that an excerpt from my novel The Bee Whisperer (the one I’m hard at work finishing), has been published over at the website Intellectual Refuge.
Well this is an honor.
I found out, rather last minute, that an excerpt from my novel The Bee Whisperer (the one I’m hard at work finishing), has been published over at the website Intellectual Refuge.
Chances are, if you read this blog with any regularity, you know that I attended the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference last week.
You may have also encouraged the telling of tales from the week, or the showing of photographs, the conveying of information—you want me to share, dang it!
Well, alright.
Confession: I didn’t take one single photograph while in Napa Valley. That’s a shame, isn’t it? I intended to. I took along two cameras, even, but there was just no time for it. Maybe there was physical time to snap a photo, alright that’s true, but I lacked the space in my brain to try and cram one more thing, one more responsibility in, to be able to take any photos.
Besides, that’s what words are for. Put simply, the vines were green, and multitudinous in number. Often, they stretched from the roadside all way to the edge of the gently rolling brown hills, row after sentinel row of curling branches and purple-red fruit. The sky in the morning was gray and heavy, socking in all that green until the latter part of the morning, when the sun would burn through and the sky turned blue and then it got hot in the high noon of the day until the sun went behind the hills again, where its light would linger long into the evening, mellowing out the sky to a nice yellow and then back to black as the moon would rise against the other horizon and illuminate those vines long into the night.
So, it was beautiful, for sure. The conference itself was a lot of fun, and very useful, as well as exhausting and intense and other things as well. There were a lot of writers talking about writerly things, like craft and structure and empathy and “staying in the room” and other things, like potatoes and vodka and really, trust me, you don’t want me to get into it. You’ll be bored, possibly, and confused, certainly. Just know that it was a long week focused on one sole purpose: writing.
Funny then, that I didn’t do any writing while I was there. I journaled, actually, so I guess that’s a lie—I did write, but more succinctly, I didn’t do any work on my “fiction manuscript” or any of my plays, not any creative writing. From day one, our fearless workshop leader voiced his concern that conferences of this nature have a shelf life of four days and that if we have any hope at all of making it as writers out there in the real world, that we needed to commit to writing every day.
So he challenged us. He challenged us to write at least one sentence, everyday, for one hundred days. “You’re not allowed to stop writing until Guy Fawkes Day,” he said, even though technically Guy Fawkes Day is November 5th, and to reach a hundred days, we have to write until November 7th … but I won’t quibble.
Anyway, so a sentence a day for one hundred days. I thought about this last Wednesday as I took the afternoon to myself and hiked around the Napa/Bothe State Park, and realized that my 14-week half-marathon training regiment last 98 days. Surely, if I can run for (approximately) 98 days, I can write for 100. And so far so good: I got over that four-day hump this morning and am trying to write about 1,000 words a day, which only takes a half-an-hour, surprisingly. I probably won’t end up using half of what I’m writing, but I’m getting it all down on the page, which is the main thing.
I know, too, that it won’t always be so easy and that there will be days where I will not feel like looking at that manuscript again or put my fingers to my keyboard at all. But Ron told us that there are days when even he needs to get back up out of bed to write his sentence before he can successfully end his day. Get back up out of bed—as in, already probably sleeping, or close to it. That’s dedication. “Those are the days you’re a writer,” he said, “any other day, just forget it.”
It’s February 8th. Three months and seven days remain until I am officially done with school. Naturally, it is at this point that two things start to happen: I start to wonder what comes next, and many well-meaning but ultimately clueless and misguided people pose the question, “so, what’s next?”
And even though it is not much of an answer at all, the best one I have so far is simply, “I don’t know.”
It’s true that something will happen after graduation. For one, I will need to start paying back my student loans, and in that way school has had a very definite value, to the tune of 100,000-plus dollars—well, 100-grand and a masters degree—that’s the tangible, actual value of these last two years, a culmination of classes and writing, workshops, professors, concentration changes, grades, theses, GREs, permits to register, student i.d.s and writers’ conferences.
See, a writing degree is not like a medical degree or a law degree, which are pathways to a very definitive end—you finish school and become a doctor or a lawyer and you go on to make a gazillion dollars. But graduate with a professional writing degree and do … what exactly? Go back to temping? Join a squatter community? Get another MFA? Who knows? There’s no certainty, and that’s the hardest part about writing, at least creative writing anyway, because so few place any tangible value on it.
Even writers question writing. Find one, any one of them, and ask them—they’ll tell you of the exquisite torture that comes with writing: long hours alone in a room, the constant distraction of the Internet, the nagging feeling that it’s all so futile, that words don’t mean anything, that there are worthier pursuits in the world, that they should have gone to medical school, that it’s so hard why am I trying anyway?
So what is the real value of school? That’s a question I’ve been asking since the day I set foot on USC’s campus and it’s only been within the last week or so that I’ve begun to figure it out. To be honest, I’m surprised it took so long, and if you know me at all you know where this is headed: to relationships.
This past weekend was Lindsey’s birthday party. We dressed in ’60s-inspired clothes and drank ’60s-inspired cocktails; there was much merriment. The next day, Superbowl Sunday, I was tired and a little hungover, and spent the day with many of the same people I’d partied with the night before. Together we suffered from the same malaise as we lazed around, barely speaking to one another half the time. It was comfortable—no pretense, no feeling the need to be “on,” just a roomful of tired writers (and their significant others), all quietly questioning their chosen paths, and watching football, of course.
So it’s community. Ha, I almost laughed out loud when it dawned on me. Isn’t it always community, always relationships that are of utmost import? Yes, indeed. A group of us are headed to the Association of Writers and Poets (AWP) annual conference in Chicago this week. At a recent informational meeting, Brighde encouraged us to be bold in our networking, to not be afraid to walk up to writers we admire and to tell them so, because she also said that the way we meet and interact with writers and publishers and editors now will lay the groundwork for our future careers. I think she’s right and that’s already been happening over the last two years.
Do you do this? Oftentimes I will make note of a movie or book or writer that a professor mentions in class—you know, to check it out later. But then I don’t actually follow up on it. The information just sits there, useless, in my composition book, with the rest of my notes.
Well, no more. I felt more energetic than usual after class tonight and went through and compiled a list of things I want to check out for further enrichement …
Far Away, by Caryl Churchill
The Palm Beach Story, directed by Preston Sturges
Second Serve, directed by Anthony Page
Landscape of the Body, by John Guare
The Goat: or, Who is Sylvia?, by Edward Albee
Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters, directed by Paul Schrader
Plan B, by Chester Himes
London Fields, by Martin Amis
White Noise, by Don Delillo
Aunt Dan and Lemon, by Wallace Shawn
Fidelity, by Susan Glaspell
Machinal, by Sophie Treadwell
Punch Drunk Love, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
The Dying Animal: Elegy, by Philip Roth
Pennies From Heaven, and The Singing Detective, directed by Dennis Potter
Bamboozled, directed by Spike Lee
Wish me luck, I’m gonna be busy for a while …
Have you noticed that most good movies, or even most movies in general involve stories of people who make bad decisions? Tonight, like most good nights, started out as one thing and then warped steadily into another. It started off as my old roommate Clee taking me to a screening of the new Coen Brother’s film, Burn After Reading (which, now that I’m thinking about it, never made a reference to its title), and then turned into a double feature when we bought tickets to see Woody Allen’s latest, Vicky Christina Barcelona. It was on the car ride on the way home that we lamented Allen’s decision to show two limited views of love to be the only options in life: the main characters can hope only to be stuck in a predictable, loveless-yet-committed marriage, or to chase down impossibly exciting and passionately lustful trysts—all to end up dissapointed in the end. The main characters, Vicky and Christina, natch, were women who both seemed incapable of making good decisions, and when they did make good decisions, they were unhappy with them. At first I wondered why perhaps Allen decided to only write characters who made poor choice, but then a thought came to me, that most movies or books, or anything that had a narrative arc in general, tend to showcase people making bad decisions. ‘Cause that’s where the drama is. If Vicky and Christina decided to rebuff the gorgeous and seductive Juan Antonio (which they didn’t, obviously), there’d be no movie, or at least no movie that anyone would want to see. Same too, for a film like Knocked Up, which some have called an “pro-life” film, because its main female character chooses to go through with an unexpected pregnancy instead of have an abortion. When asked to comment, writer/director Judd Apatow said that in no uncertain terms was it meant to have a pro-life message, but that there just wouldn’t be a flim if she chose to have an abortion.
Anyway, why did I write all this down? More than anything to remind myself what dramatic action actually consists of, and that when I get stuck on some plot point in my own writing that when in doubt, make my characters make bad decisions.
**UPDATE**
Now that I have eight-plus hours of sleep under my belt, I remember another instance of bad decision-making propelling a narrative forward. I guess you could call it the original bad decision—the fall of man, which you can find in Genesis, chapter three. Many horrible consequences came out of that one bad decision—side note: roommate Sharon and I were talking the other night and we pondered the fact that one bad choice, which could take only moments to make, could also take years to unravel—and we’re still trying, as a human race, to right that choice and are going about it in all sorts of misguided ways. So, God is the ultimate lover of dramatic action, ’cause yes if Eve and Adam hadn’t decided to turn away from him, a lot of pain and suffering would have been avoided, but then the story might have been well, a little boring, don’t you think?
