There will be days when we don’t feel like coming to blank page or canvas or the meditation cushion. There will be days when life seems to conspire actively against this, and we begin to believe that the creative life just isn’t possible for us or that our lives are too full to cultivate this kind of free expression. This is acedia talking, a kind of dialogue with the inner critic that haunts most artists and sabotages our sincerest efforts. When this happens—and it will happen—our invitation is to gently notice this and begin yet again.
The next time you find yourself resisting time spent with your creative passion, draw on the wisdom of monks and make a commitment to start anew right now. Hold yourself lightly, perhaps even seeing humor in your patterns. Humor is rooted in the word humus, which means earthiness and is also the root of the word humility. Acknowledge that you are human and to be human means to forget sometimes our deeper desires. Embrace your imperfections as the landscape of your journey.
Each morning ask where you need to begin and start there with humility, compassion, and with holy anticipation. Everything else follows this.
Augusto Monterroso is a Guatemalan short story writer best known for his 8-word story titled “El Dinosaurio”:
When I woke up, the dinosaur was still there.
You might imagine a young girl who wakes in the morning to find her pet Dino faithfully at her bedside.
Or you might imagine a lost traveller who’s become a T-Rex lunch, passed out because his legs are torn to shreds, and then wakes up to find the T-Rex picking the meat from his finger bones.
There’s a myth that Hemingway wrote a shorter and more powerful story.
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
But after some research it looks like this story was not written by Hemingway. It was most likely an actual ad in a newspaper, except selling a baby carriage. Go here to learn more about that (also here).
Popular movies take pleasure in portraying wealthy characters.
The movie The Big Year, which I viewed with my wife last night, reminded me of this. Jack Black plays a 36-year-old divorced bird watcher with a full-time job. He relies on his parents to fund his year of breaking a bird watching record. He’s befriended by Steve Martin’s character, who plays a successful businessman desiring to retire with his wife to a Colorado cabin she designed. He spends most of his time bird watching. Although Steve Martin’s character flies coach and sleeps in the cheap hotels, without him and his wealth (he does have a jet), the two character’s would be unable to view some of the rare birds on their list. One such bird they view in the mountains only by flying on a helicopter. Without his money the story faces an insurmountable obstacle and the reality of failure. Money provides more opportunities for success.
Stories (and movies) can do whatever they want. I’m not here to critique them or their characters or the income levels displayed. (The Big Year is a good movie.) But realistic poor people stories don’t offer wormholes with money because there isn’t any money (I’m not talking about rags to riches stories which are success based on materialism).
I wonder what kind of characters Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne become without a garage full of expensive sports cars and superhuman hero suits. I’m comparing realism to a form of wealth-fantasy (an entertaining-sometimes-dramatic-sometimes-comedic form of fantasy that is sometimes super fun to watch) that robs characters of humanity. It’s a subtle robbery, but one which sets us in a garage full of Lamborghinis rather than a meth-addict’s kitchen. Our humanity and immortality are implied in the meth-addict’s kitchen (maybe even amplified), while being softly nudged aside in the warehouse of state-of-the-art weaponry.
The societal status and income level of our characters matter. I’m of course using movie-character’s for the purpose of analyzing our fictional characters. What can we buy with fictional money? What new/exciting experience can be conjured through a thick wallet? Stories steeped in realism will have to ask these questions. What kind of scenes can we create in the absence of wealth? What’s unique when illuminating the poor?
Working with low-income characters might feel like a constraint after viewing so many Hollywood films. But it’s also an opportunity to return the reader to the concreteness of our earthy reality. While the pangs of hunger and unpaid bills feel can be made into a Goodwill-suit-type-cliche, it also offers a rich world of feeling and subtlety and unseen particularity pregnant with tension on the very basis of its poverty.
We fantasize about the luxuries of a billionaire’s jet and avoid the meth-addict’s kitchen. While both provide a glimpse into an unseen world the former is more inclusive than the latter. It’s easier to economically move down than it is to move up. It’s easier to simply walk into a meth addict’s kitchen (not recommended) than it is to wander into a billionaire’s jet (if you do send me pics).
Here’s a scene that requires little money, just some chemicals, a barrel, and some fancy know how. This is unique and easily accessible:
This is unique and exclusive:
The jet scene will serve its purpose, but only with the access of money (unless the jet is stolen). But anyone, rich or poor can walk across an open field and view barrels shooting into the air.
If Cinderella feeds young girls the lie of the prince who sweeps you off your feet and saves you, then the wealth-fantasy lies about the reality of justice. Justice does not come from a microchip-kevlar-caped suit, but rather through interpersonal conflict based and set (and needed) among the least of us, the neediest of us, the most vulnerable of us.
The real example of justice in Batman, The Dark Knight, is of the prisoner who chooses not to detonate the bomb on the other ferry in order to save himself. Batman can’t be Batman without Bruce Wayne’s wealth, but a prisoner can fight for justice with only lint in his pockets and a jumpsuit on his back. The scene, however, was used as a side-note to Bruce Wayne’s belief in the goodness of common people.
This is the allure of the movie Winter’s Bone, where Ree Dolly, a young girl providing for and protecting her poor family in the Ozark Mountain community, is neither glitzed nor glammed nor monetarily able to reach her end goal of finding her father to save the foreclosure of her family’s home.
Her bravery is real, deeper felt, accessible.
Materialism used for good entertains us, but I’ll put stock into the bravery of the poor man or woman fighting for justice. That’s a story needing to be told. Super heroes, not in capes and suits and money-bought protection, but heroes in open fields and meth-addict’s kitchens, penniless and persevering.
A couple of summer’s ago I taught at the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference up on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The conference is held at Fort Warden, a former military installation made famous because the movie An Officer and a Gentleman was filmed there. What is amazing about the place are the huge bunkers that at one time housed sixty-ton guns and all the men necessary to guard the Strait of Juan de Fuca from foreign aggressors. These monstrous stone ruins are overgrown like Mayan temples and imbedded throughout the hilltop like some sort of vast archeological puzzle.
My son Colin was nine at the time, and we tramped back and forth through these haunting structures. For a nine-year-old, it was perfect: the lost city. At one point in the fence bushes, Colin literally found an old door. We explored its chambers and many, many more. Colin led me through dark corridors and across parapets and through tunnels in the brush; he was intoxicated with happiness. At one point two small deer met us head-on as we crawled through the thicket. Later Colin took my hand as we approached another stone battlement, and he said something I will never forget. “Dad,” he said, his voice rich with joy. “Don’t you love it when you don’t know where you’re going?” I mean it sat me down right on the ancient battlements. It was a fine moment in a great day for us that summer, but he seemed to have enunciated my credo as a writer. Those moments when you are beyond your map, past your plan, without instruments, and you continue to venture further and further into the story loving not knowing where you are going.
We live in a society that doesn’t offer any support or approval for ventures that aren’t clearly articulated and aligned for a goal.A writer gets past this. It’s going to be a mess before you’re finished, and you may not have a name for the mess or understand its utilitarian purposes. There aren’t words for everything. For now, we’ll call it the draft of a story.
What exactly is “Y.A.”? What does it mean? Why did it begin in the first place, and when was that? What has it become since? We conferred with librarians, agents, publishing world executives, and the experts of the Internet to put together a primer of sorts. They don’t all agree, either—nor is this current-day definition one that will remain so forever. As author Michael Cart, writing for YALSA, the Young Adult Library Services Association, for which he is a former president, explains, “The term ‘young adult literature’ is inherently amorphous, for its constituent terms ‘young adult’ and ‘literature’ are dynamic, changing as culture and society — which provide their context — change.” [...]
Marcus points to World War II as another impetus in the creation of Y.A. literature. Teens were put through the very grownup experience of war, and came back as veterans old beyond their years, while their younger brothers “felt they’d missed the experience of a lifetime.” This, says Marcus, had a huge impact on society, setting the stage for things like rock-and-roll, and more grown-up literature for “kids.” But there’s also clearly a marketing element at work here: The creation of Y.A. as a category makes “good business sense,” says Marcus. “All along since the beginning of the 20th century, specialized publishing departments were being formed, with the underlying idea to create a parallel world to the world of the institutional book buyers.”
From “What Does Young Adult Mean?” The word and the concept for “adolescent” and consequently “teenager” and “young adult” are fairly new. So the idea of books just for those types of kids/adults/pre-peoples is also a new enterprise. YA fiction is still a young adult.
I see a lot of stories that are well-crafted, especially in one or two particular elements: there’s a strong voice, or the dialogue is extra snappy, or the structure is fresh and startling. So there’s skill, but not always a lot of heart. Writers seem to be writing about the things they feel they ought to be writing about, and not the things that obsess them. That is, a lot of stories are missing that sense of the writer wrestling or contending with something vital to him or her. When we find a story that does have that sense of an author’s struggle, we can usually tell. It’s often the one that gets chosen – it just has that extra layer to it, that tendency to resonate long after it has been read.
There are so many reasons not to write. But few are any better than because you are going to get laid. That is a good reason. Everything else, all these other distractions are meaningless. Friends betray you. There will always be another party. I remember when John Updike blew off some big important New Yorker Party because he was writing. The only thing I ever liked from him was the story about the supermarket, but he lived in the town I lived in and I used to ride my bike past his house and wonder what he was up to, typing away in his house. Adultery stories mostly. But it must have been unbearable for John Updike to show up at parties anyway. Everyone bothering him for something. Everything in the world is trying to distract you from getting something on the page. Our own doubts about everything we do is crushing. Don’t let it crush you. No one has any idea what they’re doing. And even J. K. Rowling once lived in her car and her next book will probably be no good anyway. The Great American Novel is inside you, I just know it. Especially if you’re Canadian. Like the David statue in the stone, it’s up to you to release it. And then leave it on a window sill or the M train so I can steal it and take all the credit for it.
Even the greatest writers died horrible deaths terribly alone. Try to enjoy it.
5. STOP WRITING BOOKS TOLD FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF CHILDREN
I think we can all agree that Jonathan Safran Foer’s magic child in Close and Loud has officially ended the need to ever write a book again told from the point of view of brilliant magical children. The desire of adults who are not YA authors to place themselves inside the lives of kids to make a more-perfect and more beautiful version of themselves in youth: Puking sound. YA authors are actually performing a vital service: Please continue doing that, YA authors! There’s nothing self-conscious and plodding about what you’re up to. Kids in general are rarely magical. They’re kids. Sometimes amusing, sometimes accidentally saying interesting things. When adults write kids they make them unbearable. Like Harry Potter. What a bore. Hermione was the real hero of all those books. They should have all been called HERMIONE GRANGER SAVES HARRY POTTER’S DUMB ASS AGAIN.
In the wine post on Monday, we talked about the story around the wine is what allows for its experience. Sometimes that story is its price. But it can also be it’s history, how and why it’s made, the passion behind it’s creation. Superstar agent @davidrjacobsen tweeted that can be said of so many other things, like beer and sports. Donald Dewey says that’s true even of writers:
Some writers are more stimulating as ideas than as workers at their craft. We can be reluctant to admit this because it opens us to charges that we don’t grasp their art sufficiently, that we have no literary sensibility, or that we have the intellectual patience of the Vandals. Radio talk show hosts aside, nobody likes to be accused of philistinism.
Two writers who come to mind instantly in this regard are Ernest Hemingway and J. D. Salinger. I truly love the notion of a newspaperman forging his fiction while driving ambulances through the battlefields of World War I, ducking under Franco’s bombs in the Spanish Civil War, hunting lions and rhinos in Africa, getting into alcoholic boxing matches with old Brooklyn Dodgers, discovering religion in bullfighting, marrying god-knows-how-many-times, feuding with other famous people over the pettiest of ego matters, calling Marlene Dietrich and Ava Gardner confidantes, earning honors in Castro’s Cuba, and, finally, blowing his brains out rather than submit to some degenerative disease. There’s a magnificent novel in a picaresque, complex character like that; it goads my imagination, moves me beyond a few staid criteria even to contemplate it. But for my (lack of) taste, Hemingway himself didn’t write the novel; in fact, he didn’t write it about a dozen times. The idea of Hemingway was simply bigger, more expansive than his fiction.
For diametrically opposed reasons I feel the same way about Salinger. Unlike the sprawling canvas of the Hemingway idea, the Salinger idea is the tiniest of miniatures: guy writes short stories and novellas about the Central Park West crowd, then turns into a New England hermit. People think he’s faking it, but he isn’t.
This might perturb some writers. They want their work to stand by itself. Philip Roth says, “Just read the books.” But why not embrace the story you write for yourself. The narrative that surrounds you. You can create that writerly aura that makes the book glow with intrigue. Hemingway and Salinger and even Roth did this (probably not intentionally). And another one of my favorite writers Don Miller does this well with his latest book. Publishers probably call this having a platform, but I think it’s more than that.
Vladimir Nabokov percieved numbers as colors. He had synethesia, a mixture of the senses. David Eagleman has his Ph.D in neuroscience and wrote a book about it. In his spare time Eagleman writes fiction. He recently published Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlife, which is 40 vignettes about the afterlife. It’s an amazing book. Imaginative and powerful.
In one story God is a married couple who fight and then make up. In another, people created their consciousness in computers so that they could make their afterlife whatever they wanted it to be. In another, a man chooses to become a horse in his next life and then realizes when he dies again as a horse he won’t be smart enough to change into something other than a horse. In one, those who die wait in a waiting room and don’t move on until their name is completely forgotten and uttered for the last time.
I was so struck by one of the vignettes I reproduced it here. Of course I don’t believe in this version of the afterlife (they aren’t meant to be believed, they’re intended to make us reflect on the life we have now), but the metaphor struck me and I wanted to share it. It’s titled, “Ineffable”.
When soldiers part ways at war’s end, the breakup of the platoon triggers the same emotion as the death of a person–it is the final bloodless death of the war. This same mood haunts actors on the drop of the final curtain: after months of working together, something greater than themselves has just died. After a store closes its doors on its final evening, or a congress wraps its final session, the participants amble away, feeling that they were part of something larger than themselves, something they intuit had a life even though they can’t quite put a finger on it.
In this way, death is not only for humans but for everything that existed.
And it turns out that anything which enjoys life enjoys an afterlife. Platoons and plays and stores and congresses do not end–they simply move on to a different dimension. They are things that were created and existed for a time, and therefore by the cosmic rules they continue to exist in a different realm.
Although it is difficult for us to imagine how these beings interact, they enjoy a delicious afterlife together, exchanging stories of their adventures. They laugh about good times and often, just like humans, lament the brevity of life. The people who constituted them are not included in their stories. In truth, they have as little understanding of you as you have of them; they generally have no idea you existed.
It may seem mysterious to you that these organizations can live on without the people who composed them. but the underlying principle is simple: the afterlife is made of spirits. After all, you do not bring your kidney and liver and heart to the afterlife with you–instead, you gain independence from the pieces that make you up.
A consequence of this cosmic scheme may surprise you: when you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. They hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen. With your death they do not die. Instead, they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves, something that had its own life, something they can hardly put a finger on.
