It feels like forever since I was up early and actually productive. I should NOT be blogging at this hour, sapping the magic flow I have at this time of day--the reason for getting up this early--flow that should only be used for fiction writing, but I wanted to mark the occasion.

My grandmother died December 17th, and this on top of an incredibly busy year end made any sort of creative work impossible, almost anything impossible really. So now that I am back at it, wish me luck, this book if due NOW!

For the first time ever I will be on a panel! As an editor! I will be appearing with two other wonderful editors from the NW Independent Editor's Guild on Sunday November 20th at 2pm at University Bookstore in Seattle. Come check us out, wish me luck, and admire my blue hair and stack of old Nanowrimo manuscripts.

The Golden Theme

By Brian McDonald

Libertary Editions 2010

The author has an impressive set of Hollywood credentials. From the back cover of the book:

“Brian McDonald has taught his story seminar at PIXAR, DISNEY FEATURE ANIMATION and George Lucas’s ILM. His award-winning short film WHITE FACE has run on HBO and Cinemax and is used in corporations nation-wide as a diversity-training tool.”

Also, impressive was the fact that Charles Johnson, a National Book Award winner wrote a glowing forward for The Golden Theme.

Think of this as a seminar as opposed to a writing text. The main purpose of the book is to highlight and give examples of ways to find our common humanity. If you take nothing else from the book, it will be the theme that “we are all the same.” Even the bad guys.

If you are having trouble creating realistic characters your readers can identify with, McDonald includes powerful examples of ways to imagine yourself in someone else’s skin. He also points out ways we are more alike than we might think. Villains still need a dose of humanity to make them believable and our heroes cannot be too perfect, or the audience will have trouble identifying with them.

One especially effective example the author gives is of having to imagine the character of a slave holder. After explaining the historical circumstances that created a climate where slaveholders may have lived in fear for their lives, he asks us to imagine a motivation for being especially harsh.

    “Find the thing that would make you behave as the cruelest of slaveholders and you will have found his humanity and your own.”

McDonald explains that the purpose of stories since the beginning of time is to give us valuable survival information, and to soothe our souls through the magic of story, letting us know we are not alone.  The Golden Theme is a less a “how to” and more of a reminder of a higher artistic purpose.

    “Your job is to let people know that everyone shares their feelings—and that these feelings bind us. Your job is a healing art, and like all healers, you have a responsibility. Let people know that they are not alone.”

John Daniel who I already blogged about once, has generously shared a link to his speech so anyone who was unable to attend the conference will be able to read it.
 
http://www.johndaniel-author.net/oddsandends.php#wots

This was an excellent conference. No agents or editors so the focus was just craft and networking. They capped the attendees to 200 so there was also a feeling of intimacy and friendliness.

John Daniel was the featured speaker on Saturday afternoon. Wonderful talk, I've already told three of my other writer friends about how great the talk was. I took his poetry class. Poetry for me... what a concept, and I learned a lot and have so much more to do now on my own. I may even have a new opening page for my novel.

What I loved the most about his talk and the message in his class was finding that by evoking particular images, you can evoke a specific emotion in your writing. This was something I thought I understood, moved on from and then somehow over the weekend, the real power of that concept hit home. I am inspired to learn more and start my own practice of harvesting images and trying to place them together to make something that might effect someone else.

If anyone else is curious about this author, click here for a link to his site: John Daniel-author.net. 

Among many other things, Robert Olen Butler won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his collection of short stories, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain and is the Francis Eppes Professor in English at Florida State University. In 2001 he recorded seventeen webcasts where he let the world watch him create a short story from beginning to end. This is an important resource for any emerging writer, and it can be found at www.fsu.edu/butler.

As of Friday I will be away from internet connection....that's the plan anyway.  No twitter, no facebook, no email. Just me, other writers,  my books and my words. I'm almost ready, doing my last minute conference prep, only this time I will be gone over a week and the prospect of missing the family is very real.

Conferences, though busy, are usually times to reconnect with the writer inside and remember what my goals are. She is also tired of continually having to collect her thoughts and start again. I hope I don't spend the whole time missing my interruptions. This is the first conference I will attend where writing and reading are the focus so I hope I'll have enough distraction. This conference will be my church. I hope I am up to the task. As a young Argentine once said, "I must Fukus."
 
My manuscript has been edited by a very wise professional who made excellent revision suggestions, and I will have a whole week with Priscilla Long to polish sentences. After that I will spend two days contemplating my memoir(s). It seemed like a good idea when I signed up, but now that my ulcer is back i'm not so sure.

I said in my last post that the test of this book would be if it stuck. It has, and how. When I was rewriting a short story to send in to an anthology, I kept thinking about how I was using color in the room descriptions and even in the dialogue. The imagery in general, the pacing of the story and the way the author left out bits of information or manipulated them to make the reader uncomfortable, also came back when I was rethinking the way I presented information for my own readers. Especially in a short space, the techniques RPW used are especially effective-- something a poet I discussed the book with mentioned as well. I feel like it is all coming together: my study, my discussion, my writing.

What this says to me is that this book, or maybe just the action of reading closely and focusing on technique, has come back to serve me already. If anyone was put off reading Wilderness by my blog post, I would say I am much more ready to recommend it to other readers, and especially other writers, than I was before.

The true test of this book I think will be if it sticks with me. I won’t know that until a few months from now. At this point I am laying myself open a bit to those who better understand the mechanics of the art of writing.* Please be gentle with me. I hope this post can serve as a way to pull in feedback and more for me to chew on so I can grow as a writer and a reader.

This book is triggering some sort of artistic attack. I read this because I wanted to understand the work of another writer I admire who cited this book as an influence.

As an aside: Robert Penn Warren’s  poetry works for me. That says quite a lot since I only have about three poets I can say I enjoy at all. This I found to be a relief! I have always been drawn to vivid imagery (Henry Miller being another example). It is maybe easier to focus on the words and images when I am not trying to keep track of a story--something I had a hard time doing in Wilderness.  

What interests me about the book are the poetic tricks my writer friend talked about. I LOVE the idea of laying down a code that only people who are really paying attention will tune into, or even better to maybe paint a picture they themselves aren’t aware they are looking at. Yet one more reason to get back on the poetry study I was working through a while back.

The author uses basic color in a vivid way, repeating words like white over and over, or green, or going on and on mixing the way he repeats the word stone with other descriptions of words like gray, slate, and other things that call to mind a certain solidity and coolness. (I am starting to sound like an English professor wannabe on meth.) 

What bugs me about myself here is that I am giving the author my patient attention and thoughtful consideration because I know he is someone to pay attention to. Would I have caught this if I was reading the words of one Stanley Kotex or Philbert H. Schlong from the PNWA conference last year? I doubt it. This scares and bothers me.

One thing I can rave about: the characters in the story are not black and white, they are all in the middle of moral and ethical difficulties. They are real. This renews my faith in the human mind’s ability to see the various shades of gray in our experiences and characters (ourselves). So I am thrilled to say I didn’t miss everything!

One example from Wilderness:  A character who studied the bible all his life, wanted to be left in peace and found he had to kill the “’scripters” who came to collect him to avoid going off to war and  killing any more people. After this he had to live in the wild to avoid being found.  One night he wakes his wife up laughing (the giggling and laughter throughout the book make me think half of the cast is insane) and says:

“…the Lawd God said thou shalt not kill and then put a fellow in a tight whar he had to kill to keep from killen.”

What would the writer’s digest book on dialogue say about that one? Here is probably an example of knowing the rules and then bashing them to smithereens.

Back to the character’s dilemma:  when you read what this guy turns into, it does make you think the entire fucking world must have been then, and still is, totally off it’s rocker and there is no such thing as sanity, morality, or right and wrong. I compare this to the way things work today and feel not a little silly for believing anything different.  

Earlier in the book one character explains the necessity of conscription.

“…when the heroes are dead, you have to fill the ranks some way.
Even with ordinary mortals. Who much prefer to stay at home and make money and sleep with their wives.”

None of that sounds familiar right? All war books seem to end up being relevant at least in this way.

Again, what bothers and humbles me, is how I will read and consider a writer’s work when I know the author is important (this author won three Pulitzer Prizes for God’s sake!)  but if I just read this as a manuscript submission I would not have given it more than ten minutes, if that. Too hard to follow.  Great details I would say, but if you lose your reader by the second page what good is the rest of it? I would have made suggestions that would have been detrimental to the vision of the book. As an editor, and as a reader, I wouldn’t have finished the book to draw the conclusions about madness, because I wouldn’t have seen the way he pulled it all together later on. The reason I would miss all this is because it wasn’t obvious by the first two pages eh? To sink in, to be effected takes time. Something almost nobody gets anymore in an age of kindle samples where the first few pages are critical, the same with trying to grab the attention of overworked agents and editors. **

If Robert Penn Warren changes the way he refers to characters--changing from a name, to a description, to a pronoun-- and it confuses me and I can’t tell what is going on, or I am annoyed because I have to go back and reread, what does that say about me? I have no generosity or open mind apparently when it comes to my reading material. I want it to be safe, comfortable and easy to move through.

I have been fighting this--the most depressing thought imaginable: maybe Jonathan Franzen is right that I am losing my ability to concentrate and focus! I always want him to be wrong, but continue to come across some stinky slimy nugget of truth to what he says when I least expect to.

Here are a few of the more random lines that make me feel like I am missing something because they don’t sit right:

“Adam uttered a grunt, or moan.”

Or how about this one:

“He found himself against a little door. The door gave under his pressure and he slipped in, into total darkness. At least it was totally dark as soon as he pushed the door closed behind him. Then he fell.”

Really?

“At least it was totally dark as soon as he pushed the door closed behind him.”

That line had me shaking my head, scratching my scalp and wondering what was wrong with me because I wanted to laugh. It was like Twilight all over again.

Here’s another that begins a chapter:

“The eight maniacal scarecrows burst into the glade.”

Is this a place where a great author made a boo boo? I doubt it. I have to believe someone of this caliber means what he says and says what he means. So where does that leave me if I just don’t like it? Don’t appreciate it and read it as downright bad writing?

As a faithful reader I have to believe that RP Warren  knew what he was doing. I have to. He slips into passive voice at random times and you see the word “had” over and over and then it disappears. At times you almost can feel the silence and stillness in the room by the way he shortens the lines, repeats words, etc. The author slips a few times into addressing the audience as “you” and I can’t see any reason for doing this.

Again, is there some technique I am woefully unaware of?  All of these together made this a difficult read, though strangely it went fast if that makes sense, even with all the rereading I did to backtrack and figure out what I missed when something happened that didn’t make sense.

About the content, I think anyone looking for time period details would find lots of good ones in here: the sutlers, the way people talk, the funky facial hair, the games people played outside their tents, the awful things people did to each other, and what people on the ground really thought about the whole business. I really appreciate when people don’t fall into pat moral categories and just want to get on with their lives. This resonates and feels honest. We are not all heroes in the face of injustice, racism, apathy, greed, bullying, lust and all the rest of it. Some people overcome and some just try to get by.

In the interest of further understanding this author I will also read All the King’s Men. That may be a different read.

Any insight would be appreciated. In the end I felt I got out of this book more than I put in but the experience of reading in general has me feeling again like I have to buckle down, study harder, read more and figure out why I didn’t get most of what the author was trying to do here. I have also been reminded why I may need to be a more generous reader. OR, do I need to knuckle up as it were and be more confident in my opinions? I know what I like and what I don’t. Somehow blowing this particular author off as I would Suzanne Collins doesn’t sit right with me. Something tells me there is an opportunity for growth here. I call on my friends who like to discuss books and exchange ideas to give me feedback and insight.

Thanks for reading.

*I can imagine that MFA or PHD who needs to believe that 100K in school loans is worth it can now be secure in the knowledge that you do know something valuable and indeed, at least in this tiny corner of the world, life altering! 

** Except that I did it and continue to do it. Several of us are reading Infinite Jest over the summer. MUCH more accessible, humorous, and still wordy as all get out. Maybe the difference there is the voice? It speaks to the part of me that loves all things McSweeney’s, the part of me that can’t give up the run on sentence or going off on tangents that may only seem relevant or humorous to me. It is a spiritual thing, I think.

Really good, important books are still being read and talked about and even with technoplogy and tiny attention spans. I am just one example of how literature is still working even at this level.

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

In short this is an excellent book, especially for writers: vivid, visual, voice out the wazoo, layers of details and artistry and all the rest of it.

He does like to call women cunts. He does like to bitch and whine.

See the latest edition of Line Zero and order a copy if you want to read the two page review I got to do on this book.