Monthly Archives for May 2018

On Writing: Staying focused and maintaining interest in writing projects: advice from Joe Lansdale

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Joe R. Lansdale at the 2013 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, United States. Photo Larry D. Moore. 

I wrote a little about this yesterday, about my mind jumping around from interest to interest of late in my writing, a jump prompted it seems by a re-upping of interest in journalism because of a freelance gig and a waning interest in the second draft of my novel.

This isn’t the first time for me to lose interest in my novel project. As I mentioned yesterday, it was about this time last year my interest in the first draft waned. So, it’s possible I’m at the moment in a sophomore-draft slump.

Last year at this time, writer friends online encouraged me to press on. For awhile this year, in the midst of job and apparently major career changes, I felt the first slump coming on sometime around the Christmas holidays. It seemed to coincide with a major case of holiday blues — these blues hit during that time of year, largely because I find the whole season intolerable; I want it to go away, get sent in a bright red package with a bright red bow to some holiday Gilligan’s Island and get lost and stay lost.

To stay with the fearless-crew-of-the-Minnow theme, perhaps I was lost, overwhelmed by multiple stressors, including the black-dog depression brought on by so many stressors. As you well know from your diet of of pop psychology, major life changes can upset your creative traveler like Gilligan’s storm.

However I got there, I was pulled out by a writer infinitely greater than myself: Joe Lansdale.

Writing tip. Don’t let those who can’t, or won’t do it keep you from doing it. Spend less time explaining the reasons you can’t and more time showing that you can. That sounds like a slogan, but it’s the solid truth. There’s always someone who has an excuse, and sure, there are some that have valid reasons. But most people don’t have valid reasons. They just have reasons they don’t write. I don’t have time is the main one. And hey, that’s a toughie.

But I didn’t start out as a full time writer. I did other jobs, and sometimes two, meaning one was part time on top of whatever else I was doing for a living at the time.

I eventually realized I had a lot of time. Time that I was spending sitting around worrying  about not having the time, or planning a block of time. I decided, what if I wrote from ten thirty at night until midnight. My original goal was one page, and I learned very quickly I could do that.

So, I decided to expand on the idea. I would do three pages of prose. I had to get up at six a.m. to go to work, so I gave myself a carrot, so to speak. I thought, what if  gave myself an out and wrote three pages of good prose, even if I wrote it in thirty minutes. I did that, I could go to bed before midnight. So it was ten thirty to midnight, or three pages. It was usually midnight back then, and sometimes I didn’t get the three, but over time I managed to the majority of the time.

It wasn’t any good, by they way, but I was learning. In time I turned to working mornings, as I had an afternoon to tent-thirty job as a janitor, and weekend jobs as I could grab them. Practicing and teaching martial arts part time. And writing.

On the weekends I would write when I could, even if it was but for thirty minutes. I still made time to be a husband and a father, and my wife and I have managed a great life out of it all. I spent time at my kid’s events, and with them, and still do, even though they are grown.

There is time, if you make it. It’s still hard work, but of a different nature now. I say this merely to say you can do it too, not that I did anything amazing. That’s the point. It wasn’t that amazing. I learned to balance my time without turning it into a chart I had to check off or frustrate over. I relaxed and did it.

This piece of advice spurred me along, and I made time to write and work on the second draft of the novel.

Now, my problem isn’t time. It’s focus. But, I realize, as I’ve just reread and retyped this quote, the shift of focus may be exactly what need to do. Maybe I need to hold off on the novel and use the writing time I’ve set aside for myself for nonfiction writing?

So, does this happen to you? Do your interests flip-flop or jump from project to project? How do you handle it?

— Todd

Current News: Cats, Freelance and Staying Focused/Interested in Writing

I’ve inherited a cat. I’ve never owned a cat and hadn’t really planned on getting one, but Callie the Calico became part of my  life just a little more than a month ago after a friend’s death.20180430_201537

Now, I wonder why I haven’t had a cat before, though I know next to nothing about them, other than they apparently evolved some 6-7 million years ago in the Middle East and were worshiped as gods.

Callie seems to be a good companion so far, and I’m glad I was able to adopt her. It’s probably good for writers to have cats and clearly there are some famous literary cats, like Hemingway’s six-toed feral cats that  roam his Key West estate.

***

Since February I’ve had a regular freelance gig writing advertorials for local newspapers. These have been fun and a nice source of side/supplemental income. At the same time they’ve juiced  my journalism jones again.

I guess I’m like James Bond, never say never, again. I was convinced I was done with journalism last September, at least daily newspaper journalism, and maybe that part of my writing life — at least full time — is done. It’s hard to tell.

The renewed interest in journalism has also led me to reading some great nonfiction again, including Mary Roach’s Grunt, about which I’ll write more in another post.

Reading nonfiction and writing a form of it, though, has put me in the mood to write more of it and that’s why I’ve been blogging more lately. I hope you’ve enjoyed the output.

***

This freelance gig and a renewed interest in journalism and nonfiction, though, has also distracted me from working on the second draft of a novel, a second draft I had fully expected to have finished by now.

Getting distracted by different forms of writing seems a constant for me. At times all I want to write is fiction or a specific genre of fiction such as science fiction or mystery.
Then I get occupied with wanting to write more nonfiction.

Do you experience this as a writer? Does your interest in a form jump around?

But, besides my mind jumping around from fiction to nonfiction, I’ve lost interest in the second draft, lost interest in the novel itself. In one way, this is a bit discouraging. I really wanted to see this thing to the end. But will I? I’m feeling doubtful about this.

Then again, it was about this time last year I was growing tired of the first draft and was ready to chuck in all in the trash bin.

So, maybe, I’ll push through and complete it. Maybe, what I need is some distraction like blog posts to push through the block. To keep writing.

—Todd

Free Fiction Friday: “The Arc of the Cosmos”

Today, I’m starting what I hope to be a regular feature: Free Fiction Friday. On Fridays, I will post either a previously published piece of fiction or something fresh I think you might like. Below is my first ever piece of published published fiction. “The Arc of the Cosmos” began as an exercise in which I followed a  prompt in Josip Novakovich’s invaluable book on writing, Fiction Writer’s Workshop. The prompt suggested writing a story from a dream. So I did. It’s a pretty accurate rendition of the dream, although I’ve never owned a dog named Punchy. “Arc” is also the first story of mine ever accepted for publication, and was published online April 29, 2003 in the webzine Pindeldyboz.

The Arc of the Cosmos

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Swinging his father’s putter, Jack kept whapping the tennis ball, trying to get it up the wheelchair ramp. The ball would roll about a third of the way up before curving and falling over the edge and onto the carpeted step. It was like a miniature golf course. Except he was inside his house.

He tried once more. Of course, he should have tried using a real golf ball but that could break something and his mother would kill him if he broke something. He set the ball at the bottom of the ramp, looked up the length of the ramp to the carpeted hallway and saw the edge of the wall where he wanted to bank the shot so it would roll into his room.

After whacking the ball with more force than the last time, he watched it zoom up the ramp. It made it! It made it! It kept rolling, heading almost precisely where he’d aimed it. Inches from the wall, however, Punchy darted from the shadows of the hallway, her slobbery jaws intercepting the ball before it could make its bank into his room.

“Punchy, no,” he shouted. “Bad dog.” He dashed up the ramp and the dog scrambled away from him, twisting in the hallway until she was bounding down the steps and into the living room where she skittered across the slick tile.

Her haunches gave out from under her and she banged into the fireplace with a yelp.

Jack chased after her and went to all-fours when she fell and crawled over to her to make sure she was all right. There were enough injured animals in this household with his mom all banged up from slipping on the ice last month.

He ruffled Punchy behind the ears and the dog sat up and nosed his face and began to lick him. “Off me! Off me!” He struggled to push away the dog’s heavy forepaws, when suddenly the dog’s weight shifted away from him. In the middle of the living room floor was a glint of yellow. The tennis ball. “No Punchy! Stop it. My ball. My ball!”

But the dog had already snatched the ball in its slobbery jaws.

By the time Jack had scrambled up, Punchy’s snout had jutted into the air, the ball lifting in an arc, and then falling away from the ceiling, dog spit flipping in silvery droplets from it. One of the droplets connected under Jack’s left eye. “Yuck!” He wiped away the spittle. “Stupid dog!”

The ball spattered against the tile, bounced again in an arc, twisted and fell with a dusty thump into the fireplace.

“Shit,” Jack said. Heat rimmed his ears when he realized what he’d said. Cursing was foul. His mother would beat him for sure.

No time to worry, however. The dog had already started for the ball. He leapt and tried to grab her collar, only to crash against the hard tile, sharp stings needling his elbows and the backs of his legs.

Ashy tendrils curled around the fireplace where the dog had landed. She was snuffling in the ash and soot for the tennis ball.

From down the hallway his mother hollered, “What’s going on in there, Jack?”

Jack bellowed, pains knifing his arms and legs.

He had crashed like this once before. On the gravel road behind his house. His bicycle had caught a big rock and slung him over the handle bars and he smacked against the road. Then he had to have stitches for the cut above his eye. He hadn’t ridden his bicycle since, afraid to crash again.

Everyone was afraid to crash. His mother talked about how scared she was lying out on the patch of ice after her crash, unable to move, trying to call for help, but not finding her voice. Her hip didn’t pain her until after they’d gotten her to the hospital. The cold and shock must’ve kept it from hurting, she explained to Jack. Now she was afraid to walk, because that could mean another crash.

Jack had watched when the woman therapist came to help his mother walk again. She would bawl when the woman tried to get her on her feet.

Pain pierced his thoughts and he screamed for help. Punchy stood over him, whimpering. His elbow hurt so much. He thought it might be broken. No one was there to help him. No one had been there to help him or his mother in a long time. When he had fallen from his bike, his father had been there to drive him to the emergency room so he could get sewed up. His father was gone, though, married to someone else by now.

What could he do? He stared up at the ceiling, tried to focus on the fan churning above him. The fan whirled like the cosmos, empty and black, nothing out there, nothing to hear him cry in pain.

Feeling began to come back into his legs. A few minutes later he was able to sit up. He knew then he’d have no one but himself to rely on.

Down the hallway his mother shouted, “Jack, are you all right? Jack?”

“Yes, Momma, I’m okay,” he said. His legs were wobbly, coltish, but he could stand. Punchy nuzzled her ash-dusted snout against him. “I think I’m going to be all right.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Writing: Among the mysteries of writing is moving from abstract to concrete

We live among mysteries. One is the mystery of change. The other is the mystery of identity. Both are realities, but inseparable realities. Rivers constantly change and are never quite the same. The water in them is ever flowing and changing. The river banks and their courses are constantly shifting under the impact of floods and droughts. These are observable and undeniable facts. But in another sense — despite these changes — rivers have an enduring and unmistakable identity. The Amazon, the Mississippi, the Danube, and the Ganges have existed for millennia, in much the same course and place, distinctly recognizable despite constant changes.

“What a marvelous piece of writing,” I wrote in my journal back in April when I first read this passage in I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates. It’s the kind of writing that needs to be copied word for word in a journal. So I did. It’s a passage worth reading aloud to catch its rhythms and absorb its richness. So I did.

For those of you who have read this book, you know Stone is reflecting on Heraclitus’ observation that you never step into the same river twice. “Change, perpetual and inescapable, was his central theme,” Stone writes of the pre-Socratic philosopher.  (If you haven’t read the book, I recommend it; go buy it at a used bookstore, check it out from a library or order it from Amazon, and read it. You’ll be glad you did.) In this passage, Stone is in the process of critiquing Socrates’ insistence on needing to get to an absolute and unchangeable definition of a subject, a quest that borders on the impossible.

I want to note just a few things that make this passage stand out as a piece of writing worth studying. Stone sets a great pace with sentence variation.  He punches us in the beginning with some quick, short jabs to get us into the paragraph. Then his sentences lengthen, interestingly, as he mentions not life’s mysteries, but rivers. And like rivers, the sentences flow, they get broken up — in this case with a parenthetical statement surrounded by em-dashes — then flow together to mark the paradox of rivers, changeable unchangeableness. A mystery, like a river itself.

Moreover, and this is what stood out to me on the first reading, Stone takes a philosophical observation and examines its complexities, not using dry abstract academic jargon, but through an extended metaphor in plain, concrete language.

Stone, as Roy Peter Clark might put it, climbs up and down the ladder of abstraction. In this case, he flows from the mystery of change to rivers to the Amazon, the Mississippi, and the Ganges, all to show that change is constant, yet some things like identity, the “thisness” of a thing can at the same time, endure.

The abstractions, as Clark notes in his Writing Tools, can provoke thinking. The concrete, however, gives us the evidence for the ideas the abstractions provoked. It can work the other way as well, the images can lead us to the idea.

However you work it, this movement, this flow is a great tool for you as a writer. It’s worth trying, if only to lead yourself deeper into the mysteries of life to get a grasp of them before they wash down stream, forever lost.

—Todd

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Losing my religion: Sam Harris and The End of Faith

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On that summer Saturday afternoon when I was about 4 or 5, my grandparents, my parents, and an aunt and uncle were circled in lawn chairs under the shade of a massive sycamore tree in my grandparents’ backyard, all sipping Dr Peppers and telling stories while I played with my toys.

The bearded plastic figure in my hand was, I suppose, a frontiersman wearing fringed leather, kneeling and taking aim with his musket, maybe on the hunt for a squirrel or a deer. But, that wasn’t what I was thinking when I held up the little plastic man to them and said, “Look, God’s shooting a gun.”

They all laughed. I’m sure I smiled. I liked having an audience.

Then, after the laughter died down, my grandmother looked at me, maybe a little sternly, and said, “We shouldn’t talk about God like that.”

Probably like any kid sternly addressed by an adult, I sheepishly looked away from her. I probably glanced down at the neatly manicured St. Augustine grass at my feet, the little ounce of pride I had in making adults laugh sinking faster than the Titanic. Shame probably overtook me. Probably all sorts of questions ran through my head: Had I hurt my grandmother’s feelings? Had I hurt my parents’ feelings? Had I hurt God’s feelings? Had I sinned? Would I go to hell for saying such a thing?

One question, however, was unlikely. At no moment, then, would I have asked myself, “Why?”

Why was it wrong to compare God to a plastic toy? After all, my idea of God was just as simplistic as that toy: the wise, gray-bearded man in a robe, peering down at us from the clouds. What harm was it in saying God looked like a toy? What harm was it to question any sort of faith?

None, of course. But it’s hard for a child to see that, even when the beliefs that faith put forward are childish. As an adult, however, no one should ever limit the questioning of faith, whether it’s your own or other’s because faith, the sacred, isn’t special, no matter what the faithful say.

“[M]ost of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday,” writes Sam Harris in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.

The problem, as Harris notes, is that so many in the world sanctify the sacred to the point that it’s become dangerous not to question it.

The End of Faith sets down an extended argument in general why religion is detrimental to progress in the 21st century and beyond. It specifically addresses the detriment of faith-based religions like those of Judaism, Christianity and in particular Islam to humanity’s progress.

The book reminds me of a well-crafted series of seminars on philosophy, history, science, and relatively current events—we are certainly still reeling from 9/11 in what seems a life with perpetual war on terror in the background, a war by our current president and his churlish followers on our Constitution, and a long, drawn-out war for our hearts and minds from both left and right on science and reason.

At the time of its publication, Harris had graduated with his degree in philosophy from Stanford and was working on a doctorate in neuroscience. He has since received that doctorate and published several books on faith, reason, and science, including Letter to a Christian Nation, Lying, and Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion.

He, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens and others have become spokespeople for doubters, freethinkers and atheists worldwide and have been given the label, the New Atheists. Arguably, there isn’t really anything new about New Atheism — its ideas are as ancient at least as the ancient Greek philosophers — but few, except folks like philosopher Bertrand Russell, have been as vocal about it.

It wouldn’t be until I was in college that I would seriously begin to question the whys and hows and whats and ways of God, in attempt as Milton put it, to “justifie the wayes of God to men,” to justify God and his ways to myself.

Much of my delay in questioning my faith and beliefs came because I was afraid to do so, afraid, first of all, of questioning this alleged being in the sky that was only concerned, it seemed, with my well being as it regarded worship of him through a personal relationship with his alleged son.

In fact, according to his alleged infallible word I am a fool to say in my heart there is no god; I am corrupt, even filthy, and definitely hell bound.

Losing my religion, as REM or a Southerner might say, meant more than going crazy and getting a ride to the asylum. It meant eternal damnation.

Still, question I did. I moved from believer to deist—I was profoundly awakened reading Jefferson, Franklin and Paine—to agnostic and in times of crisis back to believer, until I finally came to understand I didn’t believe, and didn’t have to in order to be happy.

Yet, to this day, being a nonbeliever can cost you friends and family and even risk financial health. In some countries it literally means losing your head. In a world in which even religious moderates will look at you as if you’re the devil incarnate if you question their faith, it takes courage to be a freethinker, a skeptic, an agnostic or an atheist.

But, reading books like Harris’ The End of Faith gives nonbelievers a bit of quiet comfort, while simultaneously offering disquiet that in the 21st century reason and science are often impeded by religion.

Still, you might say, in the book, I found a friend—or rather a likeminded person—not in Jesus, but in Harris. Someone who finally articulated the ideas and thoughts and issues I’ve struggled with, mostly in silence as a closeted atheist.

In his Afterword to the paperback edition, Harris mentions that following the publication of the hardcover edition he “received a continuous correspondence from readers and nonreaders alike, expressing everything from ecstatic support to nearly homicidal condemnation.” Among those lending support were people like me, “embattled freethinkers living in ‘red state’ America.”

I’m not alone in the feeling that as an atheist, especially in the U.S., I’m alone in the world of nonbelief. As science writer Natalie Angier wrote  in the New York Times: “It’s not often that I see my florid strain of atheism expressed in any document this side of the Seine, but The End of Faith articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated, almost personally understood.”

—Todd

X-ray Reading: See Yourself Through to Good Writing

When I read Roy Peter Clark’s The Art of X-ray Reading, I felt like a time-traveler whisked back to the 1990s and my graduate lit classes.

Heady days those were in which little cliques of long-haired twentysomethings gathered in musty classrooms, sat in hard-backed wood desks and talked about books, or texts, as some of the literary theorists we studied called them. We parsed out Faulkner to digest the South’s racism. We dug deep into Lawrence and Woolf to understand gender inequalities.

In X-Ray Reading Clark, too, digs deep into literary classics like The Great Gatsby and Lolita. His purpose isn’t to parse out racism or gender inequality or discover some theory hidden in the words, sentences and paragraphs of classic texts. His purpose is to show—not tell—us where writers “learn their best moves.”

Note the word “where.” Instead of “where,” most books on writing and rhetoric concentrate on the “how” of writing. Thousands of such books line bookstore shelves. Of the making of writing books, there seems no end. You can reach for Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, or Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language;” or you can reach way back to ancient Greece, to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, in part an answer to Plato’s disparaging of the art of public speaking — or writing for that matter — in works like Gorgias and Phaedrus.

Of course, you can open up Plato’s dialogues and see how his spokesman — old barefoot gadfly Socrates — ironically uses elements of rhetoric to dismember rhetoric. You can see, for instance, how Socrates does it: he gins-up plenty of examples (examples, as you well know, make for good evidence in supporting your arguments) he begs for absolute definitions. In turn, too, you can see Socrates placing great value on good writing when he tells his friend Callicles in Phaedrus, “Anyone may see there is no disgrace in the mere fact of writing. The disgrace comes when a man writes not well, but badly.”

Even Clark’s recent Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer is a how-to — one worth plucking from bookshelves to add to your writer’s toolkit. Clark’s no stranger to writing. A journalist and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, Clark’s written five books on writing and reading, including The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English and How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times.

Whichever writing book you reach for, undoubtedly you’ll gather gems of great value like “Show, don’t tell,” or “Use the active voice.” But, where did the writers who dug up such shiny treasures learn them?

Reading, of course.

Not just any sort of reading, as Clark says.

They learn them from a technique I call X-ray reading. They read for information or vicarious experience or pleasure, as we all do. But in their reading, they see something more. It’s as if they had a third eye or a pair of X-ray glasses like the ones advertised years ago in comic books.

This special vision allows them to see beneath the surface of the text. There they observe the machinery of making meaning, invisible to the rest of us. Through a form of reverse engineering, a good phrase used by scholar Steven Pinker, they see the moving parts, the strategies that create the effects we experience from the page — effects such as clarity, suspense, humor, epiphany, and pain. These working parts are then stored in the writer’s toolshed in boxes with names such as grammar, syntax, punctuation, spelling, semantics, etymology, poetics, and that big box — rhetoric.

This kind of textual analysis is not new. In academia, it’s known as the New Criticism, its foundation close reading. Proponents of this critical style, like Cleanth Brooks, argued that only the text mattered. You understood a poem or work of prose only by peeling back every layer of the text, analyzing every word, letter, phrase, with no outside influence like historical context or god forbid the writer’s claimed intention (the intentional fallacy) to corrupt your analysis.

Francine Prose’s book from 2006 Reading Like a Writer is a fine example of this kind of reading, and like Clark, she shows how writers study writing peering closely at words and sentences, paragraphs and narration, character and dialogue, and details and gesture. Her book is primarily aimed at fiction writers.

Clark’s X-ray Reading delves into fiction, poetry and nonfiction, assessing the structure of Gatsby, the play of words on the tongue of Nabokov’s Lolita (“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.” It’s hard not hear that except in James Mason’s exquisite voice.), the meaning of the stopped clock in John Hershey’s classic nonfiction book on the dropping of the atomic bombs Hiroshima and breaking down the “cinematic slow-motion effect” of the opening passages of Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit. It’s nice to see nonfiction included, if only to see that nonfiction’s prose doesn’t have to cross the pedestrian cross walk of AP style or go over the lip of the black holes (is that drill down into?)  of academ-ese or business-ese and vanish in banality.

Clark also analyzes works of writers such as Hemingway, Shakespeare, and Joyce.

But, don’t worry if this all sounds like a boring literature class. Clark’s approach, as Tampa Bay Times reviewer Gregory McNamee notes, is “much more nuts and bolts than all that, and it seems just right: A beginning medical student learns anatomy through dissection down to the capillary level, and a beginning writer learns to conjure phrases such as Fitzgerald’s ‘boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’ by understanding from the ground up how sound and meaning combine.”

It’s a refreshing approach for a book on writing and reading. And, if anything, reading this book proves a great guide to reading in a way that makes books even more alive than usual. Which seems is a secondary purpose of Clark’s:

“One purpose of this book is to nudge you into reading some of the best literature ever written…Read. Enjoy. X-Ray. Write.”

—Todd


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