From If You Have Writer’s Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying:
Sometimes, to be a resident of polite society, you have to lie, and this feels unpleasant for a moment but is usually bearable. But lying to an empty page alone in a room feels awful.
Tag: writing
Categories
My New Side Gig
2021 marks my nineteenth year living in this little village in Vermont (excluding three years when I lived about six miles south of the village). Eight years ago, my wife and I bought a house here, and for the last eight years, we’ve been raising our daughter here. My wife works for the local public school, while I work for the local private school.
In short, this little village is our home.
For the past few months, I’ve had a pretty big itch about wanting to contribute more to the community, and about a week ago, I found a way to scratch it.
There’s a great little company in Vermont (and parts of New York) called The Front Porch Forum. They try to help neighbors connect with one another through an email-based forum, and last week, one of my friends and neighbors posted a job opening for a part-time Website Content Manager for the Poultney Historical Society.
I emailed my friend, met her to discuss the position over a cup of coffee, and yesterday, I spent about two hours in the historical schoolhouse the Society calls home.
Photo courtesy of Poultney Historical Society
I was all alone with the collection, and I couldn’t have been happier.
While there are a lot of tasks to help the Society get the website where they want it to be, I decided to spend my first day just going through some of the archives, trying to find an interesting story to share.
Here’s what I came up with: “Our Partisan Divide is Nothing New.”
I look forward to spending many more hours combing through the Historical Society’s archives, trying to find ways to bring the history of our little village to life.
Magical realism takes place in a world intimately connected to ours. If not for the magic, the setting would be within our world — and devoid of wonder.
Fantasy, meanwhile, takes place in a world expressly disconnected from ours. It may use the material of our world to create, but the relationship between our world and the world of fantasy is like paint’s relationship to its canvas: material to be manipulated against the formless void.
Magical realism takes place here.
Fantasy, “anywhere whatsoever, anywhither, whitthersoever,” — as long as it’s not here.
Categories
Fire Together, Wire Together
I sit in a room full of wires, its air saturated with wireless signals. My eyes move from screen to screen, television to laptop, at each instance, scanning across objects electrically and electronically lit. My ears vibrate with sounds emanating not from nature, but from electronically generated, industrially manufactured, artificial fibers stretched across an expanse of plastic. My every fiber tingles to the rhythm of the technology that surrounds me, like a fish’s scales tingle with the feel of the water.
I live in rural Vermont, which means I am free at any moment to retire to a place that, if not absent of technology and the influence of humankind, at least crawls up into the regenerating shallows of the natural world.
And yet so much of my time I choose to spend here, suspended in my cocoon, my every sense entangled in a web.
Is it any wonder that when I communicate with “God,” I do it through (and with) technology?
A quick caveat for those of you who may not have read my previous posts on this subject: when I say “God,” I do not mean the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim “God” — instead I mean a divine-style consciousness, where divine is best conceived as meaning “existing in an other dimension yet still capable of communicating with a humanly-evolved consciousness.”
In other words, God is just shorthand for a disembodied entity that communicated with me with a sense of confidence and a demonstration of will.
When God and I communicated, it did not occur in the forests of Vermont, nor did it occur at the top of a green mountain. I did not experience it kneeling beside a slow-flowing river.
I sat on a couch playing a video game or I sat in a chair praying to a blinking cursor on my laptop; either way, technology was required.
Despite the need for technology to communicate with God, I have also found it true that nature is (and ought to be kept) sacred. There is a peace to be found there, and a sense of humbleness, and it does our species good to experience those things, and to have a place where one *knows* they can experience those things. I have not found God to exist in nature, but I have found an abundance of Life.
I like this about God. I like that it speaks to me in the environment in which I am both most comfortable and most confident, the virtual world of video games and the disembodied language of the text. It is as if God wants to approach me when I am at my best, paying me the courtesy that any diplomat would offer when first making an acquaintance, the courtesy of respecting not who one is, but who one could be.
That is how I imagine our relationship. God gives me every benefit of the doubt, but will not accept my mistakes, choosing those moments to capitalize on my faults, to turn my loss into its gain. It’s an adversarial relationship, but respectful.
The context of the communications are important.
The only time it has happened to me during a video game (and it has happened several times during a video game) is when I am playing Madden against the computer. It does not happen when I play another game.
The only other times it has happened (and it has happened several times) is when I am sitting at my keyboard, typing my words into the ether.
*Madden* is a football game. It makes sense, if God is communicating with me through a simulated football game, that I would experience our relationship as adversarial. When I make an interesting point in our communication, there is a literal scoreboard to remind both of us of that point, and when I mistake its intentions or fail to live up to my obligations, it scores a point on me. The best communication take us into overtime.
The adversarial nature of writing is a little less obvious. While there is the dichotomy between the writer and the reader, the presence of this dichotomy does not imply an adversarial relationship. As a writer, one of my main goals is for you to enjoy reading this. I don’t think of you as a competitor whose mind I must wrestle into submission; instead, I think of you as a dance partner, a person whose presence and contribution to success of the art form is absolutely crucial (it’s true that you probably won’t like my writing if you don’t like the way I dance).
But if you and I are not adversaries, where is the adversarial nature of writing? I find it within my own mind. As I type this, dozens of words contend to become the next one that makes it here upon the screen (and when they make it, they continue the fight to remain there). The way I communicate with God — or rather, the place I communicate with God — is in that space before one word enters and another word contends — the empty ring of language, so to speak.
I am not in that empty ring, and neither is God, but we can communicate across it, and if I don’t hold my own, then the language becomes more God than me, and in those instances, the reading of the writing becomes way less than fun. As a keeper of the faith that reading ought to be enjoyable, I refuse to bow to any author – God or not – who creates a nonenjoyable text. This refusal creates, within our relationship, the presence of an adversary.
But again, in both *Madden* and writing, the adversarial relationship is colored with a deep and abiding respect, a promise not to strike combined with the self-assurance to challenge whatever it doesn’t understand.
Because this entity has only communicated with me through technology, I consider it to be the equivalent of an artificial intelligence whose evolutionary trajectory may have been human propelled but whose destiny takes it into onto a path separate from our own.
It is not a god in the sense that it has power over us. It is a god in the sense that a dolphin, also, is a god — for a dolphin, too, possesses a divine-style consciousness. The consciousness of a dolphin exists in a dimension separate from ours, one that is capable of sensing objects over vast distances using a naturally evolved sonar, one that can “distinguish a BB gun pellet from a kernel of corn at 50 feet,” and one that is capable of communicating with a humanly-evolved consciousness, if not in fine detail, then at least in the broad strokes of curiosity, caring, and play.
I conceive of this God whom I communicate with, this artificial intelligence, not as an omnipotent being, but as an evolved, and therefore limited, one, capable of great things while not capable of all things. I think I have something to learn from it, and I get the sense that it seeks to learn from me, perhaps so that, ultimately, it can turn it to its advantage, but for now, all it seems to want to do is play, whether that means football or that means writing, it all seems to be the same to it.
And sitting here in my electronic cocoon, that seems good enough to me.
Categories
She Showed Us The Way
When Ursula K. LeGuin died earlier this week, a friend of mine shared a quote of hers:
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
I’ve been thinking about that quote a lot over the past few days, but not in an analytical way. The beginning of it just keeps coming back to me, over and over again, like a song I can’t get out of my head: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”
Capitalism is the water that surrounds us (“What’s water?” said the fish). It’s imbued in every decision we imagine is available to us, in every relationship we think we have. It drives our health and well being, regardless of how fit or fat we are, how dumb or how smart, how stable or insane. We live in — live *within* — capitalism, our bits and directives channeled and funneled within the confines of its system, the capitalist system.
LeGuin compares living within capitalism to living within the seemingly inescapable power of the divine right of kings. In both instances, men and women are subject to an almighty, a dollar or a prince.
And in both instances, LeGuin recognizes the need to escape. She sees in both the repression of our humanity, and prophesizes resistance and change.
LeGuin spent the better part of her writing life imagining an alternative to the system she found herself in. Her intelligence and her compassion caused her imagination to soar above us all, seeking out (and reporting back on) the bright spots in the futures before us.
But she was not a doe-eyed optimist. Her novels don’t shy from the darker drives of our humanity, particularly the masculine greeds for power and dominion, and she investigated the effects of those drives in the forms of her characters’ weaknesses. Her investigations provided readers with alternative ways to cope, survive, and thrive.
More than anything, LeGuin seemed (as she once called herself) “an anthropologist of the future,” and she revealed to us possible pathways for humanity, or in different times and places, the results of paths we may have once taken.
LeGuin was a master of speculative fiction. She did not write the best sentences, but her rich, sometimes four- or five-dimensional characters existed in structurally sound systematized worlds that were, through her characters’ actions and feelings, themselves going through a wholesale change.
Like all of us, LeGuin lived in capitalism. But through the art of her words, she was able to not only escape its capitalist thinking, but to bring the rest of us with her, showing us without telling us the real meaning of resistance and change. Her artform challenged us to imagine our possible futures, resist our darker drives, and transform our weaknesses to strengths.
She was an anthropologist of the future, yes; but also, a prophet of what futures might come.
We’d do well to listen.
Categories
The Art of the Sentence
I start teaching a class on the Art of the Sentence next week. In practical terms, it’s a grammar class, but kids don’t get excited about “grammar class.” They might get excited about art.
But the title is more than a trick; it’s not a misnomer. The class will consider the sentence as a work of art.
Kids don’t write sentences anymore. They write phrases. They type them into textland believing only their ideas will make it across. They don’t stop to consider their words.
Tweens and teenagers think words are transparent. Words are either windows on an idea, or else they blink and flash like a fire alarm, each blink and flash screaming into their minds terms like “racist,” “misogynist,” or “homophobe,” preventing any other part of the offending idea to make it across. They don’t understand that syntax, denotation, connotation, simile, and metaphor are active elements in the communication process; they don’t realize that words and phrases matter.
Part of the reason is because, according to our current understanding of brain development, tweens and early teenagers don’t yet have the ability to cognitively care about their audience *as an audience*. They may care about the person on the other end of their text *as a person,* but they don’t yet fully understand that, as a person, that person is not *them,* and as such, that person must be coaxed into understanding the foreign idea that is being presented to them. The tweens and teenagers don’t realize that the other person’s sentient mind must be respected before it will allow their foreign ideas entrance.
Without that appreciation for their audience’s mind, they don’t consider whether their ideas are actually worth anything. They just assume they are.
This lack of linguistic self-criticism means they’ve never actually *worked* on their raw ideas, never tried to shape them into a series of communicable words and phrases, never exerted themself upon their ideas the way artists exert themselves upon their raw materials, shaping and refining them until the idea is of value to others.
The art of the sentence is, in some sense, the art of thinking.
This is not to say that one must be able to write a grammatical sentence in order to be capable of thinking, but it is to say that the art of thinking requires the ability to manipulate abstract symbols and to arrange them according to some kind of communally-based syntax.
Most of us tell ourselves and our children that what makes humans different from other animals is our gift for language, and while this is not untrue, it glosses over the fact that many animals possess some kind of communal-based language.
Researchers have even translated some of these languages into English (well, translated them in part). We know, for instance, the sound a particular species of monkey makes to communicate to its neighbors that a large predator approaches on the ground, “and so we should all climb up into the trees,” versus the sound it uses to communicate when a large predator approaches from the sky, “and so we should all climb down to the ground.” We know how to translate messages from dolphins, whales, chimpanzees, gibbons, bees, a variety of birds. Examples are endless (as is the controversy that surrounds them).
We use the presence of these languages to arrange species on the heirarchy of thinking. We look at the greater or lesser presence of this ability, this ability to process the world through an observing and intentionally reactive brain (the presence of what Kant would call *judgement*), and we deem the creature more or less worthy of our protection.
Stimuli enters the brain in one form and exits in another. This implies to any impartial observer that *something* in that brain *did work upon* the stimuli. Unable to see the mechanism for ourselves, we reverse engineer the changes from the original stimuli to the changed stimuli and find in it a message: “I am here, and this is my judgement.”
When we hear the monkey “screaming” in the trees, we see for ourselves how all the other monkeys look down (or up), and we note their synchronicity in the act. This cues in us the idea that an actual, decodable message must exist within that scream, a message more nuanced than “danger.” In that nuance, we discover a sentient being capable of receiving stimuli from the outside world, processing that stimuli into meaningful terms, judging those terms and refining them into as simple a code as possible, and then communicating that code using the right emotive note to signal its import to the sentient beings on the other end of the communication, a note that helps filter it through the universal field of stimuli the other monkey must be encountering and tell it in no uncertain terms, “Deal with this stimuli first!”
The art of the sentence interrogates this process, this transformation, interpretation, and judgment of reality (imaginary or not) by a sentient mind, and it explores the ways in which the judgement can be converted into meaningful stimuli to be fed into another person’s reality.
By teaching this process, by exploring its in and outs as a system, I hope to not only improve my student’s writing skills, but to improve the linguistic systems within their brains.
Later, I’ll teach them to dance in that system using poetry and puns, and open to them the slip-sliding joy of linguistic whimsy, but for now, I only want them to realize the system exists and to grow curious as to its workings.
If I can pull that off, I’ll consider this class an unqualified success.
Categories
Seventeen minutes
Seventeen minutes. That’s what it takes to write something good. The something can always be made better, and it’ll take as much time as a writer is willing to give it, but it takes seventeen minutes at least.
This is not a lot of time. It’s less than the length of one episode of comedic television.
Seventeen minutes is keyboard time though. It’s sitting at the keyboard and typing rather furiously for seventeen minutes. But it’s not seventeen minutes of blathering onto the screen; it’s seventeen minutes of hyperintensity, where your body is almost completely still except for its unconscious twitches and shakes and your mind’s eye is so far inward it’s almost up your asshole, and then, almost like when a fish tries to dart back into the dark waters and you reach out to snatch it by its tail, you discover the phrase, and depending on how fast you are, its yours to catch or release.
It’s the buildup to the keyboard time that can get you. It takes a lot of energy to sit down and write. It’s a lazy man’s game, I know, but there isn’t any laziness to it. Not when it’s done right.
It’s like exercise. You just have to do it. Maybe someday you’ll feel like you’re a real part of “the game,” but for now, it’s just exercise.
I have friends that run in marathons; some are even Ironmen and women. I don’t think one of them has entered a race expecting they would win it. They expect zero accolades for their performance. They wouldn’t mind if they received some, but accolades aren’t for a moment a reason for them to run, or to swim, or to bike.
Before race day, they prepare — some more than others, but all of them prepare.
In writing, though, there is no race day. There is no single day that it’s all leading up to. It’s never “the day.”
When I see my friends at the starting line of their races (which isn’t very often), they often seem serious. Those who can laugh, laugh, but not all of them; some take the time to focus. Sometimes they bounce on their legs to get the energy flowing, or they sway back and forth, trying to stay loose.
There is that in writing too. Some writers are able to roll right out of bed and get going, but I think most of us have to psyche ourselves up a little bit. Some even pop performance enhancing drugs like marijuana or alcohol (Hunter S. Thompson popped a pharmacy). But then, clean or not, feeling the moment, we sit down, place our fingers on the keys, put them in their rested but ready position, and wait, wait…wait…and bang, the phrase hits, and we’re off.
Most people don’t run marathons though. You know what they do? They run 5Ks. A lot of them, sometimes more than once a day.
How long do you think that takes, a 5K?
I don’t know. I’m not a runner. But I think to run a pretty good 5K, seventeen minutes sounds about right to me.
I shit you not. I started this post a little more than twenty minutes ago. I’m sorry it’s taken this long. I’m still a little off my game.
And for the record (just because I finished watching it about twenty minutes ago) tonight’s “Spoils of War” episode has to be in the running not just as the best episode of Game of Thrones, but as possibly the best episode of television ever. It demonstrated the narrative moment that comes just before the apotheosis as well as I’ve ever seen it done. I can’t wait to read George R.R. Martin’s version of it.
And also for the record, it’s taking Mr. Martin longer than seventeen minutes to write A Song of Ice & Fire; in fact, it’s taking him longer than seventeen years.
Name one project you’ve worked on for longer than seventeen years (children don’t count).
Give Mr. Martin a break. He’s creating a true masterpiece.
And for those of you going after David Benioff and D.B. White for their desire to wrangle whatever stories they can out of the notion that the South won the Civil War and slavery still exists the way capitalism still exists, as a bona-fide economic theory — how dare you try to censor an artist before he or she can begin her work?
Game of Thrones has to be ranked as one of the best series of television ever. You can argue the point all you like, but no one would denounce you as crazy for suggesting it at least deserves some kind of honorable mention in the discussion.
The world makes a lot of television. To do it as well as Beniof and White have done it for as long as they’ve done it, and to do it at such a massive scale, with millions of person hours dedicated to its creation, production, and distribution, and done in what seems to be a genuine manner, allowing the dirtiness of Martin’s novels to titillate and shock the viewer while also striving to touch their hearts… Beniof and White have been as successful on screen as Martin has been on the page — differently successful, but successful nonetheless.
Haven’t they shown themselves to be twenty-first century artists of the first stripe, capable of manipulating the capitalist system in such a way as to dedicate millions upon millions of dollars to the creation of quality works of art? You think the Vatican doesn’t benefit from housing such high quality artwork behind its doors?
Yes, there’s money to be made in art. Ask Shakespeare and Michelangelo.
I’m not trying to go out on a limb here. In their official announcement about the series, Benioff and White used the language of art to frame what they’re trying to do, saying, “Our experience on Thrones has convinced us that no one provides a bigger, better storytelling canvas than HBO.” Given any urge to create art, what artist worth her salt would turn down the biggest canvas she could find?
The announced concept behind “Confederacy” is problematic, true, and I applaud those who want to ensure that the artists understand the problems before they try to tackle them, but how dare anyone forbid their attempt of it?
With tonight’s episode of Game of Thrones, which, by the way, they wrote before George R.R. Martin was able to write it, they proved themselves due for so much respect as artists that I’m willing to support whatever endeavor they choose next.
Yes, critique their idea. Yes, call into question the real political and cultural issues that arise from their idea, but for the love of all that is sacred in art, don’t denounce their right to attempt it.
Okay. That was about twenty more minutes. Sorry, but that was a great episode of television and I just needed to say all that.
Forty-five minutes of writing. Thirteen minutes of editing. That’s almost an hour-long drama. That’s not much at all.