Youtube Teaches Me Something about Writing: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0TYY7jflz8
This is one of my favorite documentaries. The quality of this Youtube transfer is not great, but it’s worth it for the voice over.
I have trouble writing accurately about the way large groups of people congregate. This means my stories tend to cut away as many characters as I can, leaving singles and duos and trios doing all the work. I depopulate, and sometimes I think maybe I should try to populate and maybe even over populate a story. But I’m hesitant. You, too? Maybe repeatedly watching this will help.
Power quote from about three and a half minutes into part two: “This artifact is a design object the purpose of which is to punctuate architectural photographs. It has some utility as a bench but is usually placed in isolation.”
How often do you, as a writer, favor an object, a character, a fleeting moment’s emotional eruption for it’s aesthetic beauty instead of its utility to a story? Is it wrong to do this? Is it right? Is there a middle ground?
Writing Prompt: Invitation to a bad, bad party.
I wrote a little piece on my blog, and a friend emailed me to say that he found it a bit disturbing because it felt hostile and tribal to him. Much of this feeling seemed to come from the fact that the narrator is first person plural (talks about “we”) and he felt himself identifying with (“Hey, we! I’m a part of we.”) and then being disturbed by the tone of the piece.
Here’s a writing prompt: write in first person plural. Invite the reader in. Invite the reader to be a part of the story’s “we.” And then force the reader out. Repel the reader. Hard.
Open the door and let them into the party, and then make them regret having enjoyed the punch and cake.
But compel them first.
(And don’t go with the easy push back. It’s not hard to punch a person in the kidney or press on someone’s gag reflex. Find a subtler solution.)
translation mania
I’ve been reading a lot of Aeschylus lately, doing research, or something like that. Well, it started out as research, then, I got caught up in reading, as often happens. Then, I got caught up in how different translations can be.
Check this out. Here, I offer five translations of the same passage, each one equally lovely, each one equally amiss:
The five stages of publishing
Hey, writers! Where are you in the publishing process?
Denial: I think maybe I’ll write a novel. I have a really great idea for one. My friends think I’m a pretty good writer. I once got a rejection from The New Yorker that referred to the “obvious merit” of my fiction. Sure. I’ll write a novel and then send it to an agent!
Anger: No one is publishing me because they don’t understand how amazing my work is. They just don’t get it. Philistines. Agents won’t even look at my manuscript. The whole system is corrupt. You have to be one of those New York elites to get a book published. You have to be from money. You have to know people. You have to get an MFA. Publishing is a racket.
Bargaining: What the heck. I’ll go ahead and get an MFA. It might be fun to hang out with a bunch of writers like myself—people just trying to figure out how to get their work out for the world to see. It’ll be fun. I’ll learn some stuff about my craft. Maybe I’ll get into a huge argument in a workshop!
Depression: Even though I have an MFA, Knopf has not yet given me the big, Jonathan Safran Foer-esque, two-book deal. This sucks. Why have I been wasting my time? Publishers are only interested in turning people’s mildly funny conceptual blogs into books. Why the hell didn’t I just take a photo of my cat wearing a monocle, and then ask other people to submit photos of their cats wearing monocles to me? I’d have a book contract right now.
Acceptance: You know, it’s actually surprisingly easy for me to just do this myself. Maybe I’ll just start my own small press.
Do You Research?
I’m working on another ‘weather story’ and found this video of a wind turbine self-destructing. I believe, based on what little I’ve read, this can happen in storm conditions if the brakes in the turbine fail.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3FZtmlHwcA
I can’t remember if we’ve talked about ‘research’ here (so sorry if this is an old topic), but I just wanted to type out a few notes on research and my research habits.
Moves in Contemporary Poetry
Way back in the comments on Danika Stegeman’s poem “Panacea,” a discussion started about “moves” in contemporary poetry, and I mentioned that I’d seen the poet Elisa Gabbert start pretty awesome discussions about “moves” on her own blog and on the Ploughshares blog. Then she posted the following comment: “Hi Mike, I have definitely talked about moves before, moves I like and moves I don’t like and my own signature moves, but haven’t made a real list, certainly not a comprehensive list, certainly not the DEFINITIVE list. Let me know if you want to collaborate on a list of moves for HTMLGiant.”
Well, I thought that sounded like a terrific idea. So here it is, our stab at cataloging 41 popular moves in “contemporary poetry,” an exercise that’s fraught with peril, what with the competing definitions, camps, roles, and processes of “contemporary poetry,” the nebulousness of calling something a “move,” the inevitable non-definitiveness of such a list, and so on, but hey: dancing is fraught with peril too, and no one’s managed to stop me from doing that. So here we go. 41 moves. With mildly related pictures! In no particular order! Please argue and add in the comments. Many thanks to Elisa Gabbert for the bulk of the work on this list.
Thinking about Intervals and Nature
As the new year and decade begin, I’m thinking about intervals. Most instantly, a year seems to be a more natural interval than a decade. Roughly the same things happen each year. There will be a shortest and a longest day and the air will grow warm and then cool again. The arbitrary part of a year is in its stopping/starting point. Nothing is magical so far as I can see about where we choose to end one year and begin the next. If anything, I’d prefer to wait until mid-February or so to conclude all of last year’s business and begin anew.
A decade in the natural world seems to mean not much. But what about in a lifetime? Age 0-10, age 10-20, age 20-30, and so–these seem a bit more adequate as era-markers. Even in the 1800s decades were given sobriquets. There were the Hungry Forties (think potato famine) and the Gay Nineties (aka the Naughty Nineties; aka the Mauve Decade). But not before that; what about modernity made the decade seem like a definable, describable, identifiable interval?
Day is perhaps the truest time-interval. The sun will rise and set. While a year is a real thing, a felt thing, it is usually too drawn out and diffuse to pinpoint or summarize in a word. If you say that 2003 was a good year, I will know that it took the space of time for you to make that judgment. Mid-year, there is no telling. But a day has a character and a shape detectable even as it passes. It is defined by its largest moment. It can be remade no more than once, and the next day may be something else entirely. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning” (Ps. 30:5).
These are time intervals. Modern space intervals mean very little (inch, mile, pint) and exist only for the purpose of standardization, ratio.
Then there are language intervals.
SURFING FOR WRITERS
riding giants
So last night while I was under hypnosis, my hypnotherapist, who is also a friend from school, was trying to return me to the memory of being in a mental & physical place where I could write with intense focus and without distractions. And something fairly strange happened.
READ MORE >
Collaboratively Written Short Stories?
Got an email from Dave Madden — who has an awesome book called The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press, and who also co-edits The Cupboard — requesting some suggestions that I thought y’all might be able to help out with:
I’m thinking of teaching [collaboratively written short stories] in my workshop one week, and am looking for some things to read. Any ideas of any, and feel free to define “short story” loosely. Fiction, though. Prose.
My brain has frozen. Can you think of any examples?
Quotation Marks
Do you use quotation marks when writing dialogue? Why? Why not?
I find myself justifying their use or non-use with some regularity. Sometimes, I use them. Sometimes, I don’t. When I don’t, I don’t for the aesthetic value and/or because I find it disrupts the text. When I do, I do because I feel like it. And for no other reason. Only rarely does it have anything to do with grammar or clarity.