is a blog by Brendan
Think of somebody you knew briefly, for a week or two, maybe one night, maybe a month: a camp counselor or a host sister, a bad date or that guy who dropped out before midterms. Think of somebody you owe.
You’ve got one afternoon and one present, no larger than a garment box, to give this person. You have a table at a restaurant anywhere (except Paris) in the world.
Where do you eat lunch? What’s in the box?
UJ wrote a fantastic response to my “Christ of the Barricades” challenge, and Will wrote a prequel to Beloit, saved here from the LJ feed:
Tarnished as it is, the dirty chrome armour of the Heliocrashers shines as they blast through the wall: Erythrophobia zaps at a guard, but canon says that sonoluminescence doesn’t cause bubble fusion. So she punches him through a wall.
The other ‘crashers are covering her while she sets a charge against the generator’s critical weak point when canon oozes out of a grate and tears Erythrophobia in half. The charge doesn’t detonate because canon says they use fusion to fly, not fight: instead, her top half flies into a duct and her suit’s failing containment does the job just as well.
And then there’s stuff like Sumana’s MC Masala, which… you know about MC Masala, right? And Leonard is getting the kind of rejection letters most of us would kill for, for a story you will (when you get to see it) kill to have come up with.
There’s no unifying characteristic between the amazing writers with whom I associate, no New School or Movement, even though I keep trying to assign one. I guess I’m just going to have to publish all you guys?
Frances Whitney’s Jabberwocky has been a consistently good read since I found it through her son, my friend Leonard. Frances, who (to my understanding) has been living with HIV for years longer than expected, is getting ready to remove her IV nutrition pump. She isn’t up to writing anymore, but her daughters and sister continue to update for her as they talk to hospice, put Post-its on her belongings and record their conversations together. I wish we’d had something like this during the last months of my dad’s life. Their pragmatism is beautiful.
We came back with all our teeth!
Bee was incredibly gracious in putting us up (and putting up with us) all week, and we owe her a lot, but to repay it in rent she’d have to stay with us for four months. Not that Maria or I would mind, because Bee is awesome. I also finally got to see Graham perform live with the Bathtub Marys–I’d only seen seen him in rehearsal and heard him on mp3. We spent seven hours trying to absorb the Met (art, not opera) with Leonard, then had dinner and games and a subsequent Saturday Day Basketball with him and Sumana.
Louisville seems a lot shorter after nine days in Manhattan, but then it seems a lot sunnier too.
I’d always thought that the route I ran–when I ran–was about three miles: my average plod is about 6mph, and I ran for roughly half an hour. Also it kind of… felt three-milesish.
This morning Leonard delicioused the GMaps Pedometer, which allowed me to discover that my route was… 3.0165352158455165 miles!
At least I know that for a while, I was still in reasonable shape to run a 5k (for which half an hour is a hideous time).
I found Roy Peter Clark’s Fifty Writing Tools via Leonard’s del.icio.us, originally, and had them recommended to me again by Catherine Frostflake. I’ve been reading and digesting a few every day, and today I hit Polish Your Jewels, which reads like a manifesto for microfiction:
“The shorter the story form, the more precious is each word…
My friend Peter Meinke, a brilliant poet, taught me that short writing forms have three peculiar strengths. Their brevity can give them a focused power; it creates opportunity for wit; and it inspires the writer to polish, to reveal the luster of the language.”
All of the essays (so far) are solid, interesting, unpretentious and broadly applicable.
I’ve been thinking for a while of putting together a similar set of microfiction-writing tools, to be released around the time we hit anacrusis #500 (August 16). I’m not a pro like Mr. Clark, so this would involve some significant hubris, which is why I started mocking myself for the idea with Story Hacks. After a while I realized that all the useful word-cutting advice I’ve got could be applied to itself, which leaves me with
Writing transparently is hard–harder, I’ve discovered, than just relaxing copyright or creating collaboratively. Most of the time I still can’t bring myself to do it.
Most writers don’t even consider transparency an option; for that matter, neither do most readers–witness spoiler space. There’s a very strong trend in Western culture toward the idea that a) all good stories must have mysteries revealed within them and b) to reveal such mysteries to someone else when that someone hasn’t read the whole thing is taboo. Mentioning that it’s a sled, for example, is synonymous with “ruining” the relevant work.
But it wasn’t always so, and it isn’t always now.
Go ahead, try to think of the last movie, TV show or novel you watched or read that didn’t feel the need to hand you a Shocking Twist in its third act. Police procedurals and courtroom dramas are desperate for this, as are reality shows. Sitcoms depend on inducing revelation in both audiences and characters within the show. I think it’s impossible to find a modern horror movie that is not also a mystery–to the point where some such movies now add a third pseudoconclusion to fake out the people who were prepared for the second one.
I submit to you that this is weak and unnecessary writing.
By now you probably have thought of a story you know without a big revelation, but I’m willing to bet it wasn’t the first thing that came to mind, or the second. My own exemplar is The Laramie Project, and it was Dr. Tony Haigh’s commentary on my Drama senior statement two years ago that made me understand why it was different. I talked a lot about our production of Laramie in my speech, and Tony came up to me afterwards–only a little drunk–to say “I hope you learn to write with that same transparency.”
I was like “oh, I don’t?” and then “Oh. I don’t.”
So there’s transparency in what you’re writing, which makes it stronger by eliminating the weakness of Shocking Twist gimmickry. And then there’s transparency in creative process, which not even McGrath proposed, but which the concept of open source has made a sudden possibility.
What if you let your readers see the story developing as you come up with it? Anathema. Scandal. They’ll realize it didn’t just burst from your forehead! They’ll see the stupid things you did in drafts. They’ll know about the Shocking Twist. There won’t be any anticipation, any hunger! So let’s print our script on copy-proof red paper and post guards around the soundstage; let’s pollute the rumor mills and drop hints without context in our blogs. As Zed Lopez points out, it’s hard to imagine a writer letting you see his or her process the way some painters do.
I submit to you that these are weak and unnecessary choices.
Which isn’t to say I do it well, or at all. Like I said, it’s hard. But I don’t believe that hiding information makes it more valuable in a positive way, and I’m going to try letting go of that. I’m not going to talk about the process of every story I write here, because it would be boring, but I’m going to try not to be coy about where they’re going.
“By the energy of the alcohol
the virgin Mary was made man.”
The Nicene Creed, babeljacked. Man, I don’t know whether it’s funny or a million stories waiting to happen. Or maybe just a stupid Dan Brown book.
Also, “babel-” totally needs to be a prefix in the Futurologian Congress. PS Dear Leonard: can the Eater of Meaning maybe do this someday?