disaster as muse

I'm beginning to rely on narrative entropy to get The Secret to Love bouncing along the trail toward completion. As I ponder the verticality of my main character and her merry band of screwed up relatives, my natural tendency is to have her in that, as Steve Almond calls it, "man alone in a room," conundrum. I love delving into her motivations and ruminations as she bumbles along. Unpacking her deep scars with backstory.

But, alas, I'm having to trade some of that in. It's sort of like when I helped my ex-husband fix up and resell houses. I got into painting "effects". Sponge, rag, glaze. Stencils, sometimes. Sometimes checkerboard. Once, I painted with milk. The process of "treatment painting" fulfilled some sort of need for imposing design-graffiti on these houses that were so briefly mine. Okay, maybe with the stinky milk paint it was more akin to pissing on the fence posts.

At some point I realized that simply rolling out a room with whatever mistint was on sale at Miller was the more efficient way to go about preparing a house for the fast sell. And then, I lost the taste for ragged and sponged walls entirely. After that, each time I stepped into a room festooned with "treatment paint," the complexities and patterning and nuanced shapes embedded in the look became altogether too tedious to ponder.

And so it is with narrative.

Now, don't get me wrong, I will always be a fan of vertical characterization, to an extent. But, I've grown eager to see characters behave and react. Thus the onslaught of disaster in Secret to Love.

In part two of the book, there's an icy night on the eve of a major development. The next chapter (day), I was just going to get on with the forecasted event itself, when I realized I had set up an opportunity for a big messy situation—a tree cracking from ice and falling into the character's house. A lovely disaster, actually, near enough to Christmas and a big family gathering to set up more texture and torment and bad behavior amongst the characters.

I've left my day's writing mid-disaster, hoping that my puerile interest in messes re-ignites the muse tomorrow.

Farewell, Peter Christopher

"From the darkness, a bird's whistle rouses him."

That's the opening sentence of Flight, a lovely story by Peter Christopher, who died last Tuesday of cancer. I only met Pete on two occasions. Once, he was my teacher—the revered friend of my mentor, Tom Spanbauer. He and Tom team-taught a writing workshop at Haystack back in 1992 I think it was. Us Dangerous Writing disciples had heard all about Peter from Tom. He'd share letters from him at the Thursday night workshop nights, and all of us not-yet-published students were tickled, in a sort of star-fucker way, that we got to hear personal correspondence from the desks of these famous guys. Two real writers who had books in bookstores and inside jokes about Gordon Lish and Columbia and all sorts of literati scuttle-butt. So when Peter came out to teach a week with Tom, it was like the Stones and the Grateful Dead and we all had front row seats.

The second time I met Peter, he had just married one of the Dangerous Writing devotees, Carolyn Altman. There' some love triangle dish about Tom and Peter and Carolyn that I don't know the details about, but what I do know is, Carolyn and Peter took off for the East Coast, and stopped speaking with Tom and that there was a sadness whenever Peter's name came up.

I heard that Peter Christopher died when I attended Tom's 20th Anniversary of Faraway Places reading last week. It was, what Tom (and the French) would call, the sous-conversation of the evening. A whisper through the crowd. Tom addressed his friend's death at the reading, fresh as it was. He dedicated the reading to Peter, and sort of choked up, and it was a bit like those Thursday nights and the letters, but without the laughs and the starry-eyed envy.

Peter told me that first time I met him that he kept spitting out stories, writing at a fast and frenzied pace, because he suspected that he would die before he could get it all out on paper.

And, as if via objective correlative, the last line of Peter's story, Flight goes, "From that height, he sees the woman and the child walking together under the far trees, their slipping away from him as his own life has--and that is the moment he lets go, throwing himself higher, farther, into the light that will burn him clean."

God bless you, Peter Christopher.

prodigal daughter

Just completed a whirlwind trip home for my father's 70^th bday. I get back there (Warwick, NY—a smallish upstate town) every year or so, and with each passing visit I feel a diminished claim. There is, of course, the idyll. Warwick is beautiful in that pastoral, rolling hills way. But I feel no kindred connection to the populous. Aside from my family and an ever decreasing pool of friends there, the townsfolk seem displaced to me. As if they were newly minted plastic figures set out on my father's boyhood train set. The Brooklyn accents, the suburban mannerisms and pushiness—it all feels odd and wrong and not how I remember it.

I fielded the usual queries: will you always live in oray-GHAN? Do you think your kids will ever move back East? Don't you miss Warwick???

Steeped in the nostalgia brought on from a father's significant birthday, we rolled up to the high edge of the cemetery, where my grandfather is buried and where his wife's name and birthdate awaits the final inscription (she's nearly 96 and in a nursing home). I had not been to "the grave" in years, though I think of my Opa often. Much to my surprise, I noticed a flaw in the epitaph punctuation. Apparently nobody ever proofed the tombstone. I felt snotty and mean bringing up the mistake (an apostrophe in the possessive its), but I couldn't help myself. It sort of sealed the deal for me, this little thing. As if something like this could never happen in the much-hipper city in which I reside.

Warwick is a lovely town. Though provincial and quaint and full now of transplants, I couldn't have picked a better place to wander through adolescence. It's just that I realize now my ruby red slippers are appointed with moss, fern bits and mud instead of oak leaves and lightning bugs. I'm in the Newark airport Marriott at the moment, decompressing and about to suck down a vodka and cranberry from the bar. I'll toast to the East Coast, but I can't wait to see my snow-capped peaks, lie in my native Oregonian boyfriend's embrace, and wake up to the sound of rain plinking my gutters.

clearing the clutter of things and pages

This weekend I cleared a path. In feng shui terms, I invited my chi back in. I'm not exactly finished. If my chi were arriving via jet, it is somewhere between the Portland airport and here. For me, very few tasks invite this level of navel-gazing quite as enthusiastically as sorting through my terrestrial stock. I rifle, examine, sigh, move boxes around, lie on my bed, sometimes weep, sometimes laugh, sometimes entertain road-not-taken scenarios. It's emotional tedium that knows no parallel.

I started with my closet. I held a tattered vintage silk blouse in my grip for something like 18 minutes, imagining the possible blazers I could still wear it under without the rust stains or rips showing. I once took this blouse to a drycleaners hoping they could mend and de-filth it, and the normally poker-faced Asian woman bowled over in mirth. Eventually I gathered half my clothes and jettisoned them to the storage area. Another third got crammed into plastic Goodwill sacks. (Much to my delight, Turbo Tax has an index that allows you to write off thousands of dollars worth of donated clothing).

The Spring Cleaning dominoed itself throughout. My closet, Carson's closet, my "office," the front porch, Carson's room, etc… Before I knew it, my boyfriend was helping me move my crappy plywood desk into Carson's room and, voila, gone is my former "writing space." The little appendix of a room that bulges out from the main part of my bedroom is now all but vacant. I wrote my MFA manuscript in that space. I jammed all my stories and half-finished projects into files and boxes and folders and hard drives in that space. There is so much psychic detritus in that little rectangle I should cut down a sage brush and set it aflame like the Olympic Torch.

Truth is, I haven't written in that space in years. The combination of wi-fi and Carson not needing to be closely supervised from a window has placed me and my work downstairs, at the edge of the dining room table that David Millstone left in my care when he high-tailed it to Houston.

Kirk and I are going to turn my former writing space into a haven. A place to stretch, nap, gaze, breathe, and, you know, whatever. I'm divesting my bedroom of the paper clutter and relieving it of its duty as repository for inert objects. But first, I have to revisit each and every piece of writing—which makes the tedium of sorting clothes look like unfettered frolic. In figuring what to keep, what to recycle, what to sequester, what to burn I spent a good part of today loading boxes, taking the boxes elsewhere to sort, then deciding to reorganize and reapportion said boxes, and then getting so frustrated I just gave up and lay back down on my bed. It's hard to admit that I'm like this. I have no respect for this type of unearned sentimentality. After all, if I really gave a shit about the bronze toad letter holder, why has it been in the bottom of the Turkish tin for six years? And what's up with holding onto every higher education id card I've had since 1979? And do I really need another wind chime? A cracked vase? The broken oval photo frame adorned in the motif of fox hunting? My freakin' dressage helmet? When's the last time I mounted a horse, anyway?

The analysis that goes into painstakingly deciding what to banish forever is halting. It takes time I don't have. But somehow, it feels necessary and luxurious. Like a gathering up of haunches before a big leap.

poetry month

Today I had the pleasure of receiving this e-mailed poem from a colleague (who is also the Director of Wordstock). Enjoy, and READ MORE POETRY this month.

DANCING WITH POETS

"The accident" is what he calls the time

he threw himself from a window four floors up,

breaking his back and both ankles, so that walking

became the direst labor for this man

who takes my hand, invites me to the empty strip of floor

that fronts the instruments, a length of polished wood

the shape of a grave. /Unsuited for this world/ --

his body bears the marks of it, his hand

is tense with effort and with shame, and I shy away

from any audience, but I love to dance, and soon

we find a way to move, drifting apart as each

effects a different ripple across the floor,

a plaid and a stripe to match the solid navy of the band.

And suddenly the band is getting better, so pleased

to have this pair of dancers, since we make evident

the music in the noise -- and the dull pulse

leaps with unexpected riffs and turns, we can hear

how good the keyboard really is, the bright cresting

of another major key as others join us: a strict

block of a man, a formidable cliff of mind, dancing

as if melted, as if unhinged; his partner a gift of brave

elegance to those who watch her dance; and at her elbow,

Berryman back from the bridge, and Frost, relieved

of grievances, Dickinson waltzing there with lavish Keats,

who coughs into a borrowed handkerchief -- all the poets of exile

and despair, unfit for this life, all those who cannot speak

but only sing, all those who cannot walk

who strut and spin until the waiting citizens at the bar,

aloof, judgmental, begin to sway or drum their straws

or hum, leave their seats to crowd the narrow floor

and now we are one body, sweating and foolish,

one body with its clear pathetic grace, not

lifted out of grief but dancing it, transforming

for one night this local bar, before we're turned back out

to our separate selves, to the dangerous streets and houses,

to the overwhelming drone of the living world.

-- Ellen Bryant Voigt

myers-briggs for character development

Whenever I share pages of The Secret to Love, typical feedback about my narrator is that she's removed—somewhat cynical. Ironic. This isn't the first time I've come across this sort of critique of my characters. I like writing from the POV of the ice queen. My mother is an ice queen. At times, I too can be one. It's my alter-ego.

In Myers-Briggs, though, I'm an INFP. That's a healer/idealist if you buy the Keirsey spin on it. Introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceiving. Romantic doormats. Women who love too much. Blah, blah, blah. But that's not who I write about. Who I write about are INTJs, it turns out. At least that's what this online test indicated.

Frances is the quintessential scientist. Rational, scientific, judgmental. And she's married to another INTJ. Why so many INTJs? What's the appeal?

Well, if the process of writing a novel involves following a depth of inquiry, then I must confess that the enigma behind INTJ looms large for me. I have often flirted with the idea of becoming a pragmatist (or as a college roommate once put it, having an interest in having an interest). And at various times of my life I've sought structure to the point of self-alienation—again, it was play-acting.

Following Frances down the garden path, trying to get inside of her, pry her open—it's intriguing. But, here I run into the danger of that old saw, imitative fallacy. Risking writing a "boring story about a boring man." My prose, through this POV, has a tendency to be pedantic and snarky if I'm not careful. It's a rhythm that gets going. Ponderous. Laborious. Sometimes I just want to slap.

The best thing about being an INFP though? We're the goddesses of the Myers-Briggs sectors. And as such, we can shape our characters however we see fit.

here’s a list

Open-heartedness

Clarity

Grace

Adventurousness

Passion

Integrity

Self-awareness

Perseverance

Intuition

Light-heartedness

 

on plot points

One of the ways in which we divvy up styles is by designating a given fiction either plot-driven or character-driven. The plot-driven piece follows a series of specific action points—places in which particular things happen to drive the story forward. The degree to which this aligns with an actual formula—say, rom-com, thriller, or heroic journey—varies.

When it comes to writing my own fiction, I've always taken my cues from the characters themselves. Though I've tried outlining plot, it pretty much falls by the wayside once the folks in my story start doing stuff. Events follow the interactions of my characters rather than the plot informing what the characters do.

What a writer gives up by writing a character-driven novel is the cruise control expectation many readers have grown accustomed to. Not all readers want to be drawn in to the ruminations, wrong turns and epiphanies experienced by characters—they'd rather see things happen to them without having to invest in the big voice—the unresolved issues—the pain. When literature explores the big questions, readers cannot blithely turn from their own knock-about concerns—instead, they have to stare them in the face. Not everyone wants to feel when they read. Mostly, they want to escape.

That's not to say that the character-driven novel shouldn't work towards climax, or have tension or include lots of action. The best novels I've read lately do both. Take Tom Perrotta's Little Children for instance. I can't think of a novel that handles multiple points of view, culmination of event and eerie tension better than that book. When the shit hits the fan the reader is absorbed, but also led to question his stance on morality, humanity and wrath.

I guess what I want from my own book is what I look for in the work of others: things that happen to characters I'm invested in, as well as an invitation to ponder the larger story, one that connects me to realities I would otherwise not embrace.

vacation

Here we are on yet another ski trip. Life is tough.

Rachel and her son Alex are actually the leap off characters of "The Secret," in that it was their Rhode Island summer home we visited when the kernel for the novel took form. I'm sitting here the day after the glorious day of skiing, in the woodsy vacation home Rachel rented, and it's snowing out the window. It's the type of day where everyone is curled up with an activity, and the occasional blanket fort gets built. A pan of brownies is cooling on the stove. The little terrier is lying under the coffee table. Kirk is helping the boys write backwards and every few minutes they leap up to check their efforts in the mirror.

I'm trying to gear up to write the next scene in my novel, which will be the opposite of this comfy idyll. Instead of hunkered down and phlegmatic, the scene needs to be energized and contentious. I'm almost loath to introduce the psychic energy of a family in maximum entropy. Couldn't I write a sex scene instead? There hasn't been a lot of sex in the book thus far, and if I ever want it to sell, that needs to be corrected. Certainly introducing THAT energy into the book wouldn't mess with the "chi" of my vacation…

asking for help

I've started the second act of The Secret of Love!

Aside from the excitement of that, I must report that I just had a brain-storming session with my wonderful boyfriend. Who, it turns out, is a great collaborator. What every writer should have in a partner is someone who asks questions, offers solutions, and doesn't get mad if you completely blow off their wonderful suggestions.

Here we are in this lodge up on Mt. Hood. It's the Mazama Lodge--shrine to mountain climbing expeditions and all things rugged and green. NOBODY IS HERE!!! It's sort of creepy, like The Shining--120 feet of snow, caretakers, and us: Kirk, Carson and me. And that goat with the scrotum growing under its chin. But I digress.

Nothing evokes failure of spirit like having to come up with yet another beginning. Act one is over, and I have to traipse across the country, introduce new characters, and evolve the plot line enough to get readers engaged, not lost, and intrigued. So I asked Kirk to help me set this all up. He sat with me on one of the seventeen couches in this expansive venue, and rapid fired several potential scenarios. One or two sounded plausibly, so I dug in while he took the 8-yr old down for a robust game of foosball (is there anything better than a boyfriend who will actually play with your kid while you write?)

Meanwhile, I plunked myself down with some general direction, and usurped some details from a feng shui gathering I recently attended, co-opted a possible scenario from the boyfriend chat, and plunged into part two.

Okay, all you novelists and first-timers: I'm here to invite you to seek assistance. Call on your significant other to get the wheels turning. Bend your boyfriend's ear. Get the conversation started and forge ahead.

The night is young.

show and tell

Last night before workshop I was giving the elevator speech on why I ended the first act with a denouement scene instead of an oh-my-god scene and the conversation ended up the way so many conversations about writing do—character development vs action. Being a chick, and given my predilection towards relationships, I'm drawn to scenes that offer glimpses into "THE BROKEN HEART."

I realize not everyone has that preference though.

"Give your character a piece of physical business." That's quite often the prime directive. If you want to engage, say my workshop cronies, don't just have a bunch of folks in the room sitting around the table navel-gazing and lamenting.

Interestingly enough, there's been a shift around OUR table lately. Several workshopees have been exploring graphic novels. One is writing/drawing one, one is using elements of cartoon in his work and another has been asked to write an introduction to a comic book. While the invitation in a graphic novel is to show stuff happening, more often than not characters are alone with their thought bubbles. But because of the visual medium, the audience is "shown" instead of "told" the state of a character. Facial expressions, physical business, activity—these are all implicit in the form. The image is supplied, and therefore does not have to be described.

In lieu of providing a sketch, writers need to impart physical activity without interrupting the tone of the story. It's one of those horizontal/vertical balance conundrums. You describe the activity and advance the plot (e.g. moving characters from a to b, setting up the scene), while deepening the character by moving her into (emotional) danger and creating, in the reader, a desire to give a shit.

The last scene of my first act is all about making a case for the reader to care about Fifi, at the expense, I suppose, of drawing the reader into a cliffhanging situation. I'm not sure it works, but I truly won't know until I get to the end of the first draft.

first act in the can

I finally finished a first draft on the first third of my novel. I think. 82 pages of set-up, drama and cliff-hanging.

My new solution to the problem of word count generation is to get up with Kirk. (insert a smacking palm to the forehead.) That's the guaranteed hour: 5:30 - 6:30. Before client e-mails and Carson's needs and even before the dog and cat have the right to demand to be fed.

Of course I'm going to be derailed immediately as next week is spring break and the occasion for slothful mornings and recreation-filled afternoons and over-indulging evenings full of whiskey and hot tubs. Oh yeah, and I'll still have to work. Why did God invent wi-fi, anyway?

Onward!

back in love with the secret to love

After a hiatus from The Secret to Love, in which I wrote three drafts of a short story for a local anthology, I'm back to Fifi and the gang. The respite freed me up, but also confounded me, in that I forgot some of the reasons why I'd started to love my narrator. Absence, when it comes to narrative development, does NOT make the heart grow fonder. It makes the heart indifferent. Sigh.

Anyway, at workshop I read a rewrite I'd rewritten over a month ago. Actually, two months ago. The good news is, I was distant enough from its creation that I was taking the pages in like a reader as I shared them. I was reading as one of the others at the table—and therefore much more available to the critique. In fact, the misgivings I felt upon reading the piece were similar to those voiced—but, since I still had the relationship of creator, I was able to see how something that didn't work COULD, in fact, work if I wove some stuff in earlier.

I'm peppering the broth with a new layer of "secret" and I'm hoping that will add some dimension to the girls' (Fifi and Ursula) relationship.

I'm committed to full reengagement with the project now. Which means daily attention. Watch the word count. It's gonna go up!

objective correlative

I've paused work on my novel in order to write a short story. (Does this sound like cheating? Interspersing marriage with an affair?) Whenever I indulge the need to dive into the snake pit of the idea-driven, differently-scoped world of short fiction, I am reminded of how challenging the form is. How one must be both ruthless and discriminating in the selection process. Words have to be fitter in the short story, more muscular, flexible and chiseled. The elements of plot, while not as front-and-center, exist in the backdrop as supporting perspective to the small turns in consciousness of the story's main character.

I am writing with objective correlative. I want to tell a certain story, so I'm telling a different story in order to reveal what I want to say. Place is a character. The history of a certain place. The tendencies of a culture in defining that place. So, in order to tell that story, I'm telling a love story. A dark love story, of course.

One of my favorite short stories is "Demonology" by Rick Moody. He is attempting to tell the story of the death of his sister, but he has to tell a different story to particularize the heartbreak of the event. He writes about his niece and nephew trick-or-treating the night his sister dies. Through chronicling some of the specifics of a childhood event, he sets up the emotional landscape of his love for his sister. There is event next to event. Back-story, scene, a bit of seemingly unrelated internal monologue, scene…like that. He builds up to an event through tiny moments set side-by-each. Momentum builds this way—sneakily.

This technique works so well in short fiction, but might overwhelm in a novel, where the striding of plot gives the reader a break from the density of poetics. It's the sprint versus marathon, to invoke yet another metaphor. So. Off to the races!

Imitative fallacy

The summer before last I went to Salt Lake City for the Writers at Work conference. In workshop with Steve Almond, I was introduced to the term "imitative fallacy." Until then, I'd always called the concept, "A boring story about a boring man." It was a Dangerous Writing caution: you must avoid falling into the trap of adopting the narrative tools of your narrator when telling a story—unless your narrator is a gifted story teller. It's up to the writer to craft a compelling story, even if your main character is an idiot. Or, in the case of The Secret to Love's Fifi, an emotionally disconnected scientist.

Part of the challenge I'm facing is because, like Fifi, I'm sort of a geek. I'm not as smart or as educated as Fifi, but I think I share with her the tendency to cause glazed eyes when I go off on one of my conceptual epiphanies. In workshop a few weeks ago, I shared a first draft of a critical scene at the end of the novel's first act. There's a lot going on in the scene, four people all doing something different, and the anticipation of an important family gathering. But something goes amiss, and in trying to unpack the tension leading up to that something, I'm trying to shine the light on an activity that serves as a metaphor for the whole first act. The activity is boiling live lobsters. But, remember, this is a laboratory scientist boiling these lobsters, so it's fitting to engage in some of the character's unique sensibilities while she's boiling these creatures alive.

Even though she's cool as a cucumber while reporting the killing of the lobsters, I need to show how her body betrays the coolness. I need to demonstrate that she's not heartless lest the reader be too turned off to care about her. I have to mitigate imitative fallacy by revealing, somehow, Fifi's broken heart—or at least her discomfort:

It's show time. Grandmother always set the egg timer, plunked the lobsters into the pot, placed the lid atop, and then promptly left the room until the ding sounded—not wanting to offend her genteel sensibilities with the futile scratching and scraping from inside the pot as the aquatic arthropods protested their being boiled alive.

There was a time that we children questioned this practice. During our fleeting vegetarianisms and outrage at various injustices. None of us had the nerve, of course, to confront the matriarch on her barbarism, but we complained loudly to our mothers. Loudly enough so that Grandmother interrupted the shooshing and sighing with her knowledge of the life sciences.

"My dears," she assured us, "They don't feel pain. They have no cerebral cortex, you see. Only an instinct to scuttle off to a certain density of liquid."

We never challenged this. Never looked it up officially. Grandmother was notoriously and perfectly final in her proclamations.

Eventually, in a marine science class, I discovered that Grandmother's guilt-alleviating speech was typical, but inaccurate. While it's true that lobsters don't have cerebral cortexes, that piece of neuro-anatomy is merely responsible for translating pain as an emotional experience, not registering pain in and of itself. A lobster, I found out, can indeed receive stimuli—it can feel things through its carapace. Lobsters have nociceptors and prostaglandins and neurotransmitters—rudimentary versions of our own equipment. They have all the hardware needed to register pain, in other words, but maybe not to experience pain.

These lobsters will take fifteen minutes in the boiling water before their antennae pull out with ease—the old Watch Hill litmus test. But they remain alive in that boiling pot for the first of those minutes. And that's why I do what I do.

In the lab, we call this the Kevorkian Rapid Unconsciousness Method. K-Rum. Disable the frontal ganglion. Ice pick to the forehead.

I reach into the rubbery pail and grasp the first victim. A slimy handful, this big boy. His eyestalks wag like Egon's tail. I look away as I set him on the cutting board and reach for the large brass nail and hammer. I am horrible. A monster. But. My dying cousin wants a lobster dinner tonight, so that's what she shall have. Lou-the-Lobster is wriggling his ten little legs. His experience of the air must be like being drowned. A person's horror at being held underwater against her will. A maneuver like this requires a little anesthetic. The Beefeaters bottle—a Watch Hill kitchen counter staple—glistens in the spill of sun through the transom. A half dozen highball glasses still remain in the cupboard and offer themselves up, I like to think, eagerly.

the latest news from chuck and choke

Chuck Palahniuk just came back from Sundance with great news. His book Choke, adapted to screen by Clark Gregg, has just been picked up by Fox Searchlight ($5 million, if you haven't heard). Unlike many authors whose books get made into films that miss the mark or otherwise piss off the originator, Chuck has only praise and respect for Gregg and the entire cast and crew responsible for Choke--the movie. Myself, I'm fascinated by the whole odyssey. Having been lucky enough to see the entire process of Choke's genesis--from draft to revision to final edited manuscript, the dessert will be its ultimate form after Fox Searchlight puts it into post-post-production. I'm not alone in my awe at "Once" and "Juno." Hm... Chuck's not the only artist sticking to one-name titles!

planet of the apes?

This weekend I attended a science teacher's conference with Kirk. The purpose of this confab was to provide a venue for high school science teachers to reveal the findings and results of research they'd conducted the previous summer, to practice sharing this research with other science professionals, and to gain some insight and mastery at getting kids fired up about engaging in science—not just teaching it, but doing it. There was lots of food, booze and swag, too.

Aside from getting treated to a wonderful winter interlude in San Diego's warm and sunny climate, and spending uninterrupted time with the man I love, I had an unexpected windfall—a happy accident, you might say. Turns out there's a primate research center in these parts, and I made a few contacts over the weekend, including the Director of a lot of the research. Someone who might just serve as a model, work-wise, for Frances.

Spending more time around the monkey people, I started getting that excited feeling—the way you do when you think the stars are aligning to help you write your book. It's always wonderful when your life and writing collude to make you think what you do is a real thing, and can borrow from the real world. The danger, I suppose, is in forgetting that you are weaving a fiction, and don't have to stay true to every detail the world presents. Remembering to be judicious and discerning when it comes to what you're going to take can be hard—because writers sometimes feel they owe the truth a story, instead of the other way round.

mouth of babes

There was a dry spell at work today, so I did a rain dance. Went to a matinee and saw Juno. It worked, came back to the office and hydroplaned through client emails. Luckily, I’d already done my writing for the day, so all those word chunks dislodged while in the darkened theater will have to compost overnight.

The movie was very good, but I must admit, it took me a while to suspend disbelief and go with the farcical dialogue. No sixteen year old sounds like that, has that sort of dry wit and acid-tongued machine-gun-fire retortability. At first, I thought the script too pleased with itself. Too clever. But the girl (played by the very talented Ellen Page) won me over in the end. Once the story got to climax the character showed, at last, the sort of vulnerability I was hoping for—not sentimentality, vulnerability.

I was once a child, and I’m 70% done raising my brood of three. Look, there’s my littlest. He’s 8 and still innocently goofy, but getting hipper by the day. The hat. The skater hair. The drum sticks.

In art, I’m a fan of the adultified, precocious kid ala Peanuts, but as a real parent, I’m decidedly not. My two older kids I tossed into the Waldorf School to assuage the effects of premature sophistication, the media-inspired onslaught and the tendency of public education to thwart critical thinking. Turned out the Steiner disciples my children got were not exactly free-thinkers who encouraged questioning minds. True, my kids were spared the uninterrupted barrage of commercialized drivel during the Waldorf years, but they were subjected to a different shade of fascism: cultish adherence to the tenets of a man who was born a century before neuro-scientists got a really good peek at the brain. Dyslexia, for instance, was explained as a stage afflicted children would transcend once the long bones matured. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that simplistic, but the shrugged shoulders and head nodding still irks me when I remember the way parents with learning disabled kids were dismissed.

So, when it comes to romanticizing childhood, I guess I’m selectively cynical. I don’t buy that childhood is only pure if a kid is dressed in woolens and brings a hand woven basket of homemade bread to school each day—aesthetically it’s a nice thought, but, some days I’m really glad that God invented juice boxes and Ziploc storage bags.

On the other hand, if teenagers really were sophisticated enough to expound, convincingly, on the nuances of punk rock that was produced a decade before their birth, I’d be scared.

on being codependent in behalf of one's character

So today I wrote a chapter in which a beloved character kills herself. I was going to hold off on it for awhile, play out a few more "getting to know you" scenes, but as I tried to weave those together, I realized that the tempo was right for this to happen now--not three chapters from now.

A curious side effect of this was that I decided to hang on to my protagonist's inability to face the impending death of the suicide character (who was slated to die of cancer) by letting her play out the scene she (I) would have rather experienced. One in which all family wounds are healed over a big family dinner. A ridiculously sentimental conceit that not only would not have worked in and of itself, but would have pulled the whole manuscript into flatness.

In my "solution," I allow my narrator to envision an over-the-top, lovely dinner party, providing, I hope, respite from the dark, painful actual event, as well as an overlay of sympathy for this rube of a woman, who must then go on and continue on her heroic journey through the nether-regions. Here's a snippet of the stalling tactic she employs as she ascends the staircase where tragedy awaits:

The trickling water through the wall suddenly stops. It is quiet with the loudness of dread. No stomp, stomp, stomp. Just the beat of the engine under my apronned chest. My legs, suddenly without muscle or bone, begin to bend and move and then climb up the back stairway. Ghost legs. Phantom limbs. Somebody’s voice, not mine, but somebody’s, asks if everything’s okay. It has a slightly British sound, this voice of inquiry. Grandmother, but not Grandmother. Maybe someone screams out. Maybe it’s Annika. Maybe it’s Cherry. Maybe it’s the UPS guy slipping a disc picking up the box with the andirons. Boiling lobster smells compete with burning endive. My hand is wrapped around a high ball glass of mostly ice and tonic. How many times have the women of Watch Hill ascended this staircase accompanied by a glass of gin?

Ah, where would we be, us novelists, without booze and prodigality.

modern brokenness

In yesterday’s recast of Terry Gross interviewing Mark Ruffalo she got to that inevitable question, “What does acting mean to you now?” I love his simple, truthful answer: “It’s…my way to be fully realized as a human being. It’s my relationship to the world…”

When artists succumb to whatever medium invites their relationship to the world—be it acting, painting, playing music, writing—they often slip into the place where they feel the human experience in a way they can’t otherwise. It’s instantaneously cohering and alienating, which adds to a sense of the delicious complexity that makes us feel alive.

Take this morning, for instance. I’ve got my son’s skis and ski poles in one arm, and a plastic bag in the other. I’m following the pug around in the sodden side yard as he looks for that all-important dumping ground. A very human situation—one to which most multi-tasking suburbanites can relate. But the particular clumsiness that followed—the capturing of the steamy logs in a glove-sized plastic bag while the skis and poles tip and tumble, the inevitable buzzing of the cell phone in the zippered pocket, the complete lack of grace as the shit squeezes back out the bag and onto a shoe and the ski pole spears the blind dog—redemption only comes from imagining a scene in which a character finds herself in such a predicament, only then can the artist transcend the defect of her own humanity and forgive herself her unique brand of compromise and clutziness.

The ways in which we find ourselves abjectly human are small ways indeed. Small, clumsy and full of, what Ruffalo referred to as, modern brokenness.