I just got off the phone with a friend to whom I said, “I have to write everyday or I will kill myself.” That is not a literal truth, but neither is it a huge exaggeration. When I don’t write, when I spend my days avoiding writing, for whatever good reason, and let a string of days go by without stopping to record something, without stopping to reflect on my life I begin to lose faith, to doubt myself. The crisp image I have of myself, the firm identity I draw from writing, from being a writer, a storyteller, a scribbler and a poet, begins to dim, begins to fade from the page, and I am left with very little to believe in. And that is what I need on a daily basis, to believe in something, to believe in myself, to believe that I exist and that what I do matters somehow. I can’t tell you in words why what I write matters more than what I draw or what I design, but it does. On a metaphysical level I need these words to exist.
Posts Tagged ‘writing’
Write to Live
Monday, June 20th, 2011
Bitter Seeds
Sunday, May 30th, 2010I just finished Bitter Seeds, Ian Tregillis’ alternative history of World War II, which pits British warlocks against German X-Men. Reading the concept in Cory Doctorow’s review on BoingBoing I was immediately hooked, especially when Doctorow name-dropped Susanna Clarke, whose Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is one of the best fantasy novels I’ve read. But the comparison is undeserved. Ms. Clarke’s writing is reserved and suffused with mystery and significance, where Mr. Tregillis’ novel is awkward and clumsy. Doctorow’s review claims that “Tregillis writes and plots beautifully. The characters . . . are complex, textured, surprising. The physical descriptions are wonderful. And the plot is relentless, a driving adventure story with intrigue, battle, sacrifice, and betrayal.” None of these things are true. His writing is inconsistent and ungainly. He lacks any sophistication with figurative language or narrative structure, and there are times when he goes so far as to explicitly spell out the significance of the various plot points in case we missed the point the first time around. His characters have little if any arc, and, lacking any but the most rudimentary back story, often feel like puppets making contrived decisions to accommodate a larger structure that the author has decided is the best course of action.
A small example: from the outset it is made clear that the test subjects for the German superhuman program must be healthy, strong children. When we meet the superhumans as adults one of the members is incredibly simple, bordering on mentally retarded. This seems to be a contradiction to the framework that’s been established, one that could simply be addressed with a small anecdotal backstory that might also reveal more about the characters while resolving an apparent contradiction. Tregillis never indulges us with the particulars of how this apparent exception came to be, leaving a small hole in the narrative. If this were the only logical inconsistency in the book it might not matter, but the small gaps continued to pile up throughout the novel, ultimately breaking my faith in the story, the characters and therefore the author.
Given the issues that the author is tackling (WWII, alcoholism, death of both adults and children, human sacrifice) it would have served the story well had Mr. Tregillis taken more time to explore the themes and their consequences and given the book the gravitas that these topics need if they’re to make an impact on the reader. I think with fiercer editing and more time the novel could have been something memorable. Instead the novel glides through its story without ever pausing to absorb the weight of itself. To an extent I understand that that’s much of what the war must have been like: forcing oneself to ignore the disgusting, the horrible and the inhuman in order to survive, but Tregillis’ writing never generates the brittle psychic tension of that situation, either because he didn’t know how to or he didn’t take the time to, neither of which is really excusable given the size of the themes that he’s chosen to depict.
This is not the first time that I’ve been let down by a book, and it certainly won’t be the last, but it’s still disappointing to see such an exciting conceit wither in such a pathetic way. It reminds me of the fate of a lot of science fiction and fantasy; a high quality concept that is poorly executed, usually due to poor plotting, weak grasp of language or both. Sci-fi is guilty of this on a large scale, increasingly leading me to believe that sci-fi as a genre is first a place of perceptual ingenuity, where it’s more important to conjure the concept than it is to paint the picture. The father of contemporary sci-fi, Isaac Asimov, is proof of this over and over again. Asimov was a brilliant man, an amazing futurist and a prolific novelist, but he was not a good writer. I realize that the definition of “good” writing could be debated endlessly, so let me say that here, in this space, a good writer is someone with mastery over the language, who can use words to evoke something that is never said explicitly.
In the simplest terms this is summed up in the 5th grade creative writing chestnut “show don’t tell,” but in the highest form is something much more subtle and powerful than that. Asimov’s books, from the Foundation trilogy to I, Robot to the Lucky Starr series are all rational exercises in futurism; they are “what-ifs…” brought to life. While these cognitive leaps may be important, even exciting, they do not make for great literature. But Asimov is hardly the only giant in the field of sci-fi/fantasy who does it. Neil Gaiman is guilty of the same crime. His book, American Gods conjures a fascinating world of what-ifs without taking the time to really give them their due, leaving readers instead with a jumble of genres that, much like the characters of the book, never achieve the syncretism that the book conceit implies.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Ursula K. LeGuin was an amazing writer whose worlds were bursting with magic and mystery, who won a crap-load of awards and sold a ton of books and whose writing was top notch. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is, I’ll say it again, an incredible work of fantasy and literature that is worth the investment of time, that really explores the intersection of contemporary magic and politics in a way that Mr. Tregillis seems uninterested in doing. Lastly, Michael Chabon, himself a literary fiction author, has written two genre novels of the finest quality. His crime fiction, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and his swords and horses novel Gentlemen of the Road are some of the finest literature I’ve ever read, and they exist completely within the structure of the genres they inhabit. Mr. Tregillis, as is too often the case, allows the unnecessarily lax standards of the popular conception of genre to simplify and trivialize a fascinating concept into so much stereotypical mush.
Waking Up
Sunday, June 28th, 200906.28.09
I want to write. I want to say something. I want to have something to say.
I had something to say once, or at least, I thought I did. I do not know if it came easily, or if I did not mind the difficulty of the coming. I am not the kind of writer who is any good at artifice; my falsity is seen through immediately. It is why I am not an efficient writer (an efficient anything, perhaps) because I have to understand it before it is real. There are people for whom this is not true, I suspect, but I am not one of them. It means, though, that what I do produce is wholly authentic, having been created and remade again and again until each piece of it is understood.
Oh, but it has been so long since something has been created, so long since something has been understood. Standing at the cusp of something inchoate and powerful, I imploded. Wrestling with what it meant to write, to create, to construct I fled myself for the ease of another, abandoning for a long time the set of passions and predilections that I called myself. Five years later I am resurfacing for a handful of breaths to clear the water from my eyes and look back on a dark string of years behind me where the lights flicker and dim, not extinguished, but not exactly shining either.
Now, reading Michael Chabon’s recollections of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (as retold in Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands) I am captured by the passion and fascination, the ambition and the impotence that he talks about, of stepping from one side of a line to the other, being willing to pour out pieces of his soul into a structure he isn’t sure will hold. There is something amazing about the amount of faith and trust it takes to make that happen, a force of will to carry that through, as well as a kind of need I haven’t felt in a long time, and am only beginning to remember as I remember what it’s like to read, read regularly and read deeply.
There is, I think a certain amount of self-destruction in my favorite artists. I think it’s what’s most compelling about the best stories, even if we as readers, viewers or listeners can’t see what it is of the artist that’s being destroyed. I don’t mean just the drama that surrounds larger-than-life figures like Hemingway or Amy Winehouse, but the kind of direct honesty about the things we think and do, about the things that our friends and loved ones think and do that threatens the way that they live their lives. A good and brave writer likely threatens her existence with every word she writes. That is a very dramatic statement, and I don’t mean it as literally as I would like to, but when I imagine the construct of my life and how much my writing threatens to tear it down if I am honest about myself when I do it, then certainly I risk much in even beginning to contemplate what I do and why I do it.
I am, I suspect, starting over. There are things I must relearn, but really, when I am honest, there is no learning involved. It is a rediscovery of passion and self, a rediscovery of purpose and intention. It is a coming home, a waking up. It has not been easy, and I suppose I wouldn’t want it to be, but it is a struggle, using all the tools I have in order to claw my way out of the darkness, the numbness and back into the chariot that will carry me to my ultimate destruction: scattered black fragments against a pale sheet of perfect white paper.
Wrestling with Perfectionism
Saturday, April 19th, 2008It’s hard to be both a writer and a perfectionist. I’m writ(h)ing a story now tentatively titled “The Stone Speaker’s Wife” and it’s about a tribe or town of people that exist in your typical fantasy world. Part medieval Europe, party mythological creation. The trouble that I’m having is that the tribe/town itself doesn’t have a secure context.
You can see in just the description what I’m struggling with. Are these people, the Stone Speaker’s people, the People of the Stones sedentary and agrarian or are they transient hunter gatherers? I don’t know. I don’t know whether I should draw from the medieval township model, in which their subsistence farmers paying tithe to the monarch, the wandering gypsy model of a roving band of rootless people within the blurry confines of the monarchy or scrap the entire monarchy entirely and have a wilder, more primitive land where people haven’t invented long-reaching government yet, and exist more like early Icelanders with bands of families determining the “law” within boundaries that are constantly in argument. (I realize that this discredits a lot of the law giving that the Icelanders did, what with their early adoption of parliament and all, but it wasn’t a monarchy and the towns/families were, for the most part, self-governing and somewhat lawless, the law coming into play when a blood-price had to be paid for someone that was killed, the law not having prevented the killing in the first place.)
What’s hard about this decision is that it is incredibly far reaching and determines a bunch of minute details, from the way they dress, the buildings they live in, the food they eat, the medicines they make, the magic they create, their rites and rituals. All of the minute details that we take for granted in our lives have long before been determined before we “decide” to take them on as daily rituals. Those details are due in large part to our styles of government, food supply, military, monetary system, and a thousand other things.
This is what I’m not good at as a writer, Making the Decision. I do my best to let the story flow out of me, and when I hit a snag like this it makes it very hard to me; so hard, in fact that I often just let the story/idea drop rather than doing the difficult work of hashing it out, because the details are sticky and seemingly endless, and I often feel at the end of the day that I’ve been rolling around in cobwebs and need a good hot shower. That is not what I consider an enjoyable afternoon, but I suppose the lawn doesn’t mow itself and the weeds don’t pull themselves and these details, much as I would prefer them to, won’t work themselves out.
I know at least that the people are rooted to a specific landmark, where the first major scene takes place. It’s a group of standing stones, menhirs, stone henges. Call them what you like. The wedding between the Stone Speaker (essentially the shaman of the People of the Stones) and the 15-year-old girl takes place there. The stones are a sacred site to the people, essentially containing all of the divine power of their ancestry. Now, if they’re a tribal people, they come back to the stones on the solstices and have their festivals there, possibly on the equinoxes as well. If they’re sedentary agrarians then they live nearby and come out for major festivals. I guess what I’m realizing as I write this is that it doesn’t matter which one I choose, but being who I am I feel that there’s a right answer, and that if I don’t choose the right answer the story won’t be perfect, will be fundamentally flawed in some way, visible to everyone, and it will have been a waste of my time. I feel that there’s some secret detail hiding from me, and that if I only think long enough I’ll be able to find it. Once that detail is discovered all of the rest of the pieces will fall neatly into place, and the story will be perfect and obvious to everyone else, and people will stand around scratching their heads wondering why they hadn’t written such an obvious and beautiful story.
That way of feeling about a story, and writing in general, doesn’t give me a lot of power. It puts the power in some secret, mystical ether that I have to grope through (spiderwebs?) in order to attain some divinely ordained perfection. In reality the course that would be most fruitful to take is to layout the likelihoods of both possibilities and see which one most closely matches the vision I have of these people and their story. Then, eventually, I have to decide. I have to choose one option and let the other one fall away. That takes a discipline that I’m not comfortable with. I often fret with decisions that I make, worrying that the decision I’ve made will be the wrong one. It causes me a lot of anxiety in situations where I don’t know either what the right answer is or what my predilection is. I can stand making a “wrong” decision if I know why I’m making it. I can stand choosing Chris Paul over Kobe Bryant for NBA MVP, even though I know the likelihood of Paul being chosen at this point is slim. I know what my definition of valuable is and I know that Paul fits it (though Bill Simmons makes an excellent argument for why Kevin Garnett most fundamentally fits the description, more than even Paul does).
It’s only when I don’t know what I want, nor what the right answer is that things become anxiety-ridden. I don’t know why, don’t know where this comes from, but I’m often more comfortable with potential than I am with actuality. I much prefer savoring the moment when all options are open to me than I do having firmly grasped one to the exclusion of all others. In other words, I have a hard time with commitment. It’s hard for me to say that this is what this all boils down to. It was a lot more noble when I was struggling with mystical variables hovering over me in the ether. It sounded much more high-brow to be cogitating divinely ordained plot points than it does to say that I’m just having a hard time committing to one story line over the other. And maybe that romance is part of it. Maybe I prefer dealing with the romance of wrestling with God rather than clichéd commitment issues. I can buy that. I guess now that I’ve cut that balloon loose there’s only one thing left to do, and that’s write the story.