Category: writing style

Disappearing Act

Like many college kids, I was in a hurry to get my piece of paper. By my last quarter at UC Irvine, I was taking 18 credits, working multiple jobs, and feeling the accelerated decrepitude that comes standard with silly 20-something social timing. I had to hurry up and “start my life.” I don’t blame myself for feeling that way, but it’s funny to remember.

I’m not looking back through time and saying, as a depressed, middle-aged relative once said to me, “After high school, the best times of your life are over.” High school sucked. And college more or less also sucked. But maybe the suction toward the end of my undergraduate years—of intense work, full course loads, worry, and frustration—was a bit less. And maybe in that margin, I brought a lot on myself voluntarily, like taking art classes I didn’t need to graduate.

In a moment of prescience, I thought, after this quarter, I’m never going to have time to take an art class. This is it. I petitioned for the right to take credits past the maximum and got turned down. So I showed up at Dr. Ladaner’s drawing and painting classroom on the first day and said, “They won’t let me take your class for credit. Can I just pretend I’m a student?” He gave me a long look, smiled, and nodded at an empty seat. Ladaner was great.

This is what he taught me. You have to air your work out. You have to let go. You have to be messy. You have to give yourself permission to draw and not erase because the line you draw is the line you draw. You have to accept it. And yourself. It’s the only way to get better.

I still can’t draw. But I took that lesson, which often came wrapped in some pretty harsh language, to heart. It has helped me in everything I’ve written. You have to be willing to make a mess of things. Neatness in the creative process (or really in any process) is, all too often, an expression of counterproductive fear. Ladaner didn’t get upset when we created something that didn’t work. He got upset at pretentiousness and stage fright.

You have to get over yourself, like the nude models we drew around midterms. A few were vampire-exhibitionists, sucking up the attention. But most were highly developed individuals who’d integrated being an artist’s model into their own process. They knew: you have to be willing to let people see you. It’s not about sucking up attention. It’s about exchange. And it’s about knowing how to get out of your own way.

We went outside to draw the cars in the parking lot. Ladaner didn’t tell us anything beyond that. His style: “We’re gonna go out and draw some cars today.”  Someone asked, “How should we do it? What should we use?” He smiled and said, “Let’s go.” 

So we went.  We drew some cars. He did, too. I snuck up behind him and looked. He was using a piece of charcoal, making a wobbly kind of grid. I thought, this doesn’t look like that Toyota over there. It looks like an oversized waffle that dropped down a chimney. But then I realized he wasn’t drawing the cars. He was drawing the negative space between them, the light on the windshields, the shadows of the tires. 

He noticed me and said to take a step back, unfocus, squint a little. I did and it all came together. I was impressed. On the way back to the classroom, he tossed it in the trash. That made me feel even more impressed. And I got it. Ladaner always did the assignments he gave us, but he didn’t dwell on his vastly superior technical ability. He was just hanging out, hanging loose, participating. He said, “Draw every day,” because that’s what he did. But he didn’t get hung up on it. He was more like a drummer doing his rudiments.

Years later, I was a writing instructor at a different university and had the privilege of teaching beginning fiction writing to his very quiet, buttoned-down, organized daughter in order to help her fulfill a gen ed requirement. On the first day, when I saw her name, I asked whether there was any relation (this university was in a different state). She said her father was a professor of art at UCI.

After regaining the power of speech, I said to tell him hi from me, that I once sat in on one of his fantastic drawing and painting workshops. She just gave me a look. I don’t think she ever said anything of the sort to him and I didn’t bring it up again. By the 15th week, she had a solid B in my class, only because she missed two assignments. I treated her like everyone else. She was a good student but largely uninterested in creative writing. Still, part of me really wanted to tell her that a lot of what I’d come to believe about the writing process and about life began with her father’s concepts.

Don’t be afraid to draw a wobbly line or write a wobbly sentence. Maybe you can fix it in the mix. When the time comes, maybe you won’t even want to. And maybe, if you’re really into it, you won’t think about yourself at all. That’s when I know I’m doing it right, when I disappear.

I try to have multiple projects going at once. I try not to get too self-conscious or fixated on whether I’m writing well, even though I sometimes can’t help it. A writing teacher of mine put it like this: “A writer can be shy and afraid of anything in life except writing.” So I try to be brave and let the project move through me instead of getting in the way.

In The Creative Act, Rick Rubin points out that we have to approach it with everything that we are: “We begin with everything: everything seen, everything done, everything thought, everything felt, everything imagined, everything forgotten, and everything that rests unspoken and unthought within us.” But it’s better if we’re not conscious of this inner substance. We don’t think, now I’m going to write a sad scene. We write a scene. And if the scene is sad, it’s sad.

Genre fiction writers call this “pantsing” (writing by the seat of one’s pants). They often despise it because the publishing industry does its best to make them deeply anxious about whether their work is marketable. But it’s a lot like making love. You can’t make love if you’re afraid of letting go. You can’t make art if you’re afraid of letting go. You can’t make friends, either. And you definitely can’t make love to artistic friends. 

I remind myself: you have to confront uncertainty. You have to allow yourself to get lost, step off the path, forget the editorial style sheet, fall off the outline. You have to disappear.

Actors understand this. Francis Ford Coppola described Gene Hackman’s performance in The Conversation as “the first time I saw Gene truly lose himself. He wasn’t performing; he was unraveling.” Hackman was so immersed in the role, he was able to go off script in a way that squared perfectly with the character. Many of the best scenes in that movie were more like channeling than acting. Then again, at the deepest level, is there really much difference?

Writing Through Dead Ends Should Not Feel Like Torture

It’s interesting. I’ve been at a standstill with the novel because I felt I had to write about a certain character but found her boring and didn’t really want to. Today, I simply left her alone and continued the story, which brought the words forth again.

The lesson I take away from this is: write only what pleases you in a first draft—maybe in any draft. That is your story. What you think you should write, in terms of an entire story or part of one, comes from a different place, more from your head than your heart. And you should always write from your heart. Too much thinking is creative death. Too much feeling, while also a problem, can at least be revised into something.

There’s so much pressure on writers (and actually on all artists, maybe on everybody) to be good boys and girls, to write what should be written, to say what should be said. Don’t listen to what you should do. Don’t be good. Be a first-draft hedonist.

Don’t Weep for the Oompa Loompas

I loved Roger Ebert’s wit and lack of pretention.  His movie reviews in The Chicago Sun-Times often struck a delicate balance between honesty and generosity.  He had a great sense of film history and he’d contextualize Hollywood stinkers in ways that made them interesting as artifacts of a silly and unforgiving industry.

Over time, I found his approach to be applicable beyond the movies: first accept that there will be a lot of garbage in a given field or system.  Then understand that garbage can teach you as much, if not more, than quality if you’re willing to pay attention.  That is, if you can continue watching, if you can manage to withstand it and keep your lunch down.

Sometimes, I have a near visceral reaction to pretentious media, especially when it comes to literary fiction and nonfiction.  I can trace it to when I was getting a master’s degree in writing and every other literary novel seemed to be about an attractive young woman on the east coast exploring bisexuality and working in an art gallery.  Most of the stories submitted in my workshops were also about that or something very close to it.  I spent my MFA depressed, alienated from a literary scene steeped in cloying trendiness.

Besides, I didn’t know how to write about that stuff, even if it was required reading in my classes.  My characters, as one of my instructors put it, were rather from the “low end of the service economy.”  And that dog wouldn’t hunt if I wanted a career as a writer.  So she hoped I had plans after graduation.  Maybe sell some insurance or, you know, the Navy.  Half-drunk at a faculty party, I laughed and said something like, “Don’t do me any favors.”  She didn’t.

The formula was ubiquitous in those years and seemed to whip my professors into a lather whenever one of the Big Six offered up another clone—probably because my professors were working writers trying desperately to stay in step with what their agents and editors demanded.  Then Candace Bushnell anthologized her New York Observer columns, which applied the formula to a type of harder-edged, jaded, status-anxious Manhattanite and everybody wanted to be Carrie Bradshaw.

I tried to channel my inner Ebert when writing critiques of the new Bushnellian short stories coming across the table.  I drank my Milk of Magnesia and tried to learn.  And I did learn at least one thing: marketing is rarely about art even when art is being marketed.  But the artists don’t always realize this.  Everyone’s just trying to do their best.  Everyone just wants to be loved in a world that won’t love them back.  So what’s it gonna take?  Go ask Candace.

By the time Sex and the City hit HBO, 9/11 had already seared itself into the national consciousness.  So naturally the usual illicit love triangles, existential crises, career failures and ineffectual husband stories that had been previously set in five-bedroom homes, fancy restaurants, galleries, and uptown lofts—with an odd chapter sometimes taking place at a resort in Vail or, saints preserve us, on a boat off the coast of Mallorca—now featured explosions.

I was advised to rewrite my current novel and make the protagonist a fireman.  A well-known British novelist, who I’d previously considered above all this, published a divorce novel almost identical to his previous divorce novel, save that the new one was set not far from ground zero at the World Trade Center.  My former classmates, now selling insurance, preparing to ship out on aircraft carriers, or working in the low end of the service economy, were suddenly writing stories that read less like quotidian Nobel Prize Alice Munro and more like overheated radio dramas from the 1940s.

Maybe Ebert got his compassionate take from “Sturgeon’s Law,” formulated in 1957 by science fiction writer, Theodore Sturgeon, who declared in a column for Venture Science Fiction that “ninety percent of everything is crap.”  Subsequent writers reformulated this as: ninety percent of everything is garbage meant to hold up the ten percent that isn’t.”  Sometimes, this is referred to as “landfill theory.”  Still, if we’ve learned anything from modern horror movies—a genre that seems densely compacted with trash—one does not take the landfill for granted.

So I tried to embrace the new NPR-coffee-table terrorism fetish like every other young writer planning on attending the next AWP conference, but it was hard.  Hard to keep down.  Hard to contextualize as just another trend.  Reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close helped because I thought it was really good.  Maybe I’d read it differently now, but I remember thinking Foer’s 2005 novel was the only good thing I’d read with 9/11 as a backdrop.  I started to wonder whether the New York publishing industry had the potential to become less squeamish, less trendy, less risk-averse.

Nevertheless, when David Foster Wallace killed himself three years later and Little, Brown, and Company jumped at the chance to publish his unfinished Pale King, it seemed like a new low.  The marketing around the book wasn’t about pushing units anymore or the possibility of an HBO special somewhere down the line.  Maybe no one knew what it was about.  Maybe the reptilian DNA of Little, Brown’s sales reps had finally asserted control and the lizards were running amok in a wild frenzy, fucking and consuming everything in sight.  Then again, maybe I just hadn’t been paying attention.

I had a Skype meeting with an agent around this time who looked very much like the students I used to see coming out of the London School of Economics when I’d get off the Tube at Holborn: impeccably clean, flinty expression, driven, deeply unhappy.  She asked me what the books on either side of my novel would be in the bookstore and didn’t smile when I said, “Well, that depends.  What bookstore are we in?”

I should have said, “On one side we have The Pale King.  On the other, of course, is Emperor’s Children—it culminates on 9/11, don’t you know.”  She knew.  I knew she knew.  And she would have approved. Messud’s Emperor’s Children is the Sex and the City of 9/11 literary opportunism.  For some inexplicable reason, I didn’t say anything like that.  We simply looked at each other for a moment and she wished me good luck.

We’ve come a long way since then; though, it seems like we’re doing the same dance to different music.  Much has been made of the wokification of publishing, whatever that means, and the censorship of Roald Dahl, whose work in its untreated form has now been adjudged dangerous for the youth.  I suspect this has something to do with Millennials and Gen Zs being really, really, really, really sensitive and therefore risk averse.  More than we ever were.  In some ways, I suppose it’s good to be that sensitive.  In others, perhaps not so good.  And Roald Dahl’s estate better watch out.  Because now they’re saying the Oompa Loompas are the “subject of some racial controversy” and I have no doubt they’ll be evaluating the corruptive influence of Switch Bitch and Esio Trot before long.

Still, the cynical insensitive Gen X voice in the back of my head says commerce will undermine equity, safe spaces, and sensitivity readers in the end.  The scaly reptiles of the publishing industry are mostly nocturnal, preferring to stay hidden during the day.  But when they catch the scent of profit, they invariably rise up and stop doing good so they might do well.

Then into the landfill will go yesterday’s social justice homilies along with the newly expurgated Bond books and whatever Dahl stories were rewritten by an administrative assistant at Penguin Random House using ChatGPT.   And there will be a new renaissance of insensitive fiction and non-inclusive speech.  Well, the grave’s a fine and private place.  If Fleming and Dahl are turning in it as a result of all this bad noise, who really wants to know?  Maybe the AI rewrites will improve between now and the next big thing.

I’m reminded of one of Ebert’s funniest reviews: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) which, in the first sentence, he called “a horrible experience of unbearable length.”  Unwilling to pull punches, as this seemed like one of the few movies Ebert really hated and resented having to watch, he wrote that “the movie has been signed by Michael Bay.  This is the same man who directed The Rock in  1996.  Now he has made Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  Faust made a better deal. . . . The two most inexplicable characters are Ron and Judy Witwicky (Kevin Dunn and Julie White), who are the parents of Shia LaBeouf, who Mephistopheles threw in to sweeten the deal.”

That always makes me laugh.  Yet, this was not one of Ebert’s most compassionate reviews.  It was one where the balance shifted conspicuously from generosity to blistering contempt.  Maybe it was his age or the fact that he was definitely of a less sensitive generation, less concerned with being non-offensive, and it was starting to show.  But there’s no denying that his serrated wit could sometimes reach neoclassical dimensions.  And that may be why we read him—not for how much safety and inclusivity his ingenium could provide, but for how dangerous he could be.

The Good Hustle

Today, I was advised to get an editing and proofreading certification from one of the many professional associations available to show potential clients that I am all business and not, as one would otherwise assume, a crank.  Three decades of professional writing, editing-for-hire, and proofreading won’t do it.  The representative who cold-emailed me on social media made it very clear that no matter how good I think I am, no one will take me seriously unless I’m professionally certified.  Luckily, she discovered me in time.

When I asked her if board certification exists for copy editors and proofers, she didn’t respond.  I’m still waiting, but I know the answer.  With a website, a PayPal account, and a fictious business name, you can establish a certification program for anything obscure and unregulated, say, antelope sign language.  You can then offer membership in a professional society based on your courses and the money flows in like sweet milk from heaven when people called to interpret for deaf antelopes feel insecure and go looking for a stamp of approval. 

You’ll pitch your service to the rubes with a great convincer: “Since there are no objective, widely accepted standards for professionalism in antelope sign language, you need our very formal, suitable-for-framing certificate to set you apart from all the dilettante competitors and desperate poseurs trying to steal your business.  You need this.”  I recognized the come-on immediately.  It’s how you sell a diet supplement, a tinfoil orgone collection helmet, a Learn Fluent Inuit in 20 Minutes-a-Day DVD set, or a religion.  You define the subject matter, identify the anxiety it produces, and offer a solution.

New religions always do this, since their subject matter is and must always be vague.  At a science fiction convention in 1948, L. Ron Hubbard is supposed to have said, “Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.”  Like most of Hubbard’s material, it seems to have been cribbed from other sources—in this case from a letter written by George Orwell in his multivolume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters.  But the principle is sound.  Give people something in which they can believe and posit yourself as its source or sole mouthpiece.

Interestingly, the Orwell-Hubbard dates may not match up.  Multiple volumes of Orwell’s collected works were released in the 1960s and, though it’s obvious earlier collections existed, it’s unclear which Orwell resources would have been available to Hubbard in the late 1940s while he was busy doing ceremonial magic in the desert with Jack Parsons and seducing Parsons’ girlfriend.  But we do know that, by 1948, Hubbard had left Parsons and overt occultism behind, well on his way to following through on his million-dollar scheme.

No matter how many conventions Hubbard attended, boats he owned, and storefront e-meter salons he opened, the comment about starting one’s own religion would follow him for the rest of his life and hang over his grave like a feculent mist.  Orwellian cynicism has always seemed perfect for the Church of Scientology.  The organization has appeared, at least since the early ’70s, much more interested in abusive litigation with a side of organized crime than in any sort of enlightenment or spirituality. 

Still, America loves a new religion, the sillier and more coercive the better.  Americans will love it twice as much if the guru requires lavish compensation for his wisdom.  It’s one of the perennial obsessions at the heart of the culture: we’re all looking for Jesus the Businessman, whether he comes as a computer inventor, an online bookseller, or an electric-car spaceship fetishist.  The more he up-sells us and demands to be loved for it, the more we’ll celebrate him.  If he can do this and offer us certificated in-group status, we’ll make him a fixture in our lives.

We want to be saved by someone who shares our values: money, cleverness, exclusivity, salesmanship, and the sado-masochism of the workplace as spiritual praxis.  It’s the reason why, at one point, Oprah commanded the reasoning and libido of 51% of the population, why Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket looks like a giant dildo, and why graffiti near 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, California, used to read “Steve Died for Your Sins.”  He unquestionably did.

But there’s an even deeper reason Hubbard and comparable messiah figures are able to operate until they go out of fashion and either become despised by the crowd that once adored them or go insane: no one has any stable concept of what’s real, including the gurus themselves.  They’re making up the landmarks and mapping the terrain as they go along. 

In fact, the fluidity of unreality, virtual reality, meta-reality, fandom, curated identity, and the floating demimonde of the so-called “knowledge marketplace” underlying these things is so popular and ubiquitous that it has become more convincing than religion ever was.  We’re looking for the next lifehack, supplement, or belief system to stave off our perpetual nervous breakdown because we have no idea what’s going on.  Sign me up.  Get my Level 1 Proofreader’s Certificate and Associate Membership Card.

Black Mirror, Ready Player One, and The Matrix are horrifying mostly due to what they imply about this desperate capacity to turn anything into religion, even down to the most banal and mechanistic corporate sensibilities.  And pandemic lockdown culture has not helped.  When Covid spread across Asia, I was living in Bangkok and noticed a line of herbal supplements being marketed in the malls by a popular Indian guru as protection against the disease.  The layout was very glossy.  There were life-sized cardboard standups of the smiling guru presenting his product at pharmacy endcaps.  People were buying it because they didn’t know what was real.  The guru was defining the problem and offering a solution.  L. Ron Hubbard would have loved Covid-19.

As Mencken put it, “There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.”  But what they offer is certitude and certification in an uncertain, uncertificated world.

What HP Lovecraft Can Teach Us About Programming the Reader

One of the many reasons I love pulp fiction from the early 20th century is that writers like HP Lovecraft can have a line like, “the moon was gleaming vividly over the primeval ruins” (from “The Nameless City“) and actually get away with it. If I wrote something like “gleaming vividly,” my teachers would have beaten me publicly for about an hour. Is it gleaming? Really? Do you have any idea what that is? Vividly? What does “vividly” look like? Do you even know? If you know, how come you’re not showing it in concrete terms? If you don’t know, fuck you, why are you writing it? Oh, the beating would be vast and terrible.

Instead of telling the reader that the moon was gleaming vividly, the harder, more powerful, more evocative and immersive technique, is to show the gleam, show how it’s vivid, show how the ruins might look primeval using descriptive language. That’s the way I was taught. But HPL can get away with lines like this because he’s consistent. And this brings up a deeper lesson about fiction writing: stylistic consistency is more important than any given stylistic choice.

In other words, Lovecraft will write a line like “the moon was gleaming vividly” and we will have to either accept it or shut the book. If we accept it—okay, it’s pulp fiction or it’s HPL or we’re just feeling generous that day—then he hits us with “It poured madly out of the dark door, sighing uncannily as it ruffled the sand and spread about the weird ruins.” Wow. Take it or leave it. Do you want to enjoy the story or not? It’s no fun if you have to complain about the writing. So you take it. And then he’s got you: you’ve decided to let him have as many adverbs and vague adjectives as he wants. You’re going to let him tell you that the sigh was uncanny (what does “uncanny” sound like, eh?) and the ruins were weird (can you think of the last weird ruins you’ve seen?). He has trained you to read and appreciate his fiction rather than trying to meet your expectations.

Some great fiction writers can do both. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, can write idiosyncratic prose and also ground those weird (!) choices in hard-edged concrete description. People think he learned this through his association with Hemingway, but that’s according to Hem in A Moveable Feast—a great book but likely packed with exaggerations and a few outright lies. Hem might have learned it from Gertrude Stein, but the idiosyncratic flourish we’re talking about is less evident in his work probably because he had such a strong background in news writing. He had to make his prose acceptable to the reader (something that also helped him support himself by selling stories to LIFE and The Saturday Evening Post in an era when you could live that way).

Lovecraft is great in other ways. Still, when I read a passage like this, I have to smile: “In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of daemoniac lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus.”

I know HPL sets himself the very difficult task of writing about states of consciousness that have only a tenuous connection to everyday life. So maybe that’s the reason for many of his writerly choices. I do take a certain daemoniac enjoyment of how he disregards certain modern conventions.

Solving climate change one slick magazine at a time.

Read my latest in Splice Today: https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/jonathan-franzen-can-t-solve-climate-change-for-anyone-who-matters

 

Writing out a few sentences by Nakamura to see how they feel.

There was something evil in the glow of the room’s blue lights.  I felt the weight of the man on top of me.  He could no longer move.  His eyes were closed.  I stared long into his face.  I realized that I wanted him.  I wanted the passion he had until a moment ago.  I wanted his shoulders, which were quite muscular for his age, and his naturally tan face.  I got out from under his body, sat in a chair, and lit a cigarette.  I had to wait like this until he fell into a deep sleep.

It was raining outside.

— The Kingdom, Fuminori Nakamura (trans. Kalau Almony)