Twilight has Johnson Rolling in his Grave

I came across a meme recently that shows just how pathetic Bella (the female protagonist of the Twilight series) is when compared to other contemporary heroines:

(click to enlarge)

Clearly, the meme shares the rather widely accepted view: 'there's not much to be learned from Twilight.' This sentiment can be seen all across the internet, with memes like the "Still a better love story than Twilight" being made as jokes all the time. But, while there is plenty of humorous disapproval for the series online, there are millions of young people in the real world who are actual passionate fans -- for one, I worry about those young girls who have idolized Bella and now think it is justifiable to function in society as over-emotional, depressed messes.

All this got me thinking about the influence that a series like Twilight can have on our society -- especially when its target audience is made up of the easily-influenced -- and I was reminded of Samuel Johnson's ideas of the responsibilities of literature.

During the time of the Neo-classical period, it was Samuel Johnson’s opinion that literature should be crafted with the intent of guiding the impressionable youth. According to Johnson, literature’s shift towards a more realistic depiction of the human interactions of the world made it the responsibility of the writer to be not only well-taught in “that learning which is to be gained in books,” but also in “that experience which can never be attained by solitary diligence,” an accurate understanding of the living, interacting world. An author – especially a novelist – was expected to know how relationships and emotions functioned, to understand how society operated, and to put in writing, almost as a guide, the unwritten rules of the world so that an audience of mostly teens and preteens might be able to grasp at reality and be more prepared for life. Surely, the Twilight series is no guide to real life in this sense.

So then how might Johnson see a novel like Twilight, where the main character, Bella, a character who a young female reader is almost certainly set up to identify with, acts recklessly in order to gain the attention of a boy she likes, even becoming suicidal because of her loss of her romantic lover? Certainly, he'd be on the side of the meme-makers, but I think Johnson would take things a bit more seriously, perhaps labeling the series as dangerous to young girls rather than just poking fun at its pathetic lack of heroism.

What do you think? Would you consider Twilight dangerous literature?

The Value of a College Degree

A college degree has become largely meaningless. The fact that the only real counter to this claim is that a college degree provides a bare minimum for hiring committees only serves to prove the point.

I took over teaching duties for a basic composition course last night; it is halfway through the semester, and the original instructor bailed out for personal reasons. On the first night as their new instructor, I asked the students to pick one aspect of the course thus far that they have not enjoyed or found useful and to make a case for my removing or altering that aspect for the remainder of the semester. Some talked about how the old prof didn't ever write notes on the board; some argued that they should not have to edit each of their papers to perfection through endless revisions (I admit that can get to a point of impracticality); some mentioned that they didn't like many changes to the schedule. All of these are pretty reasonable. But then… one brave little lady put forth this gem: "when Professor X graded our homework, she wouldn't give us credit if we got everything wrong." I blinked, thinking only, "okay?" She continued on: "I think we should get credit for trying."

And there it is, the new mantra of the college student: An A for effort. I don't know if it's something wrong with me (it often is), but I am appalled (yes, appalled) by the manner in which students believe this nonsense without question. What does a college degree mean if it is earned through effort and not proof that you have learned the requisite material? It only means that you can try. Somehow I doubt that hiring managers are looking for good try-ers. No, I think most people in the corporate world still like to believe that when they hire someone with a college degree that college degree guarantees the knowledge of certain skills and concepts. But the average college student today is long past that notion and has arrived apathetically at the "I'm only here to get credits to get a degree, so I can get a job" port.

That attitude (and mind you, I teach community college, so my perspective may be a bit specialized to my particular students, but only a bit) sets college up to be nothing more than a charade. And, I know I've said this before, but that really blows for the people who wanted to teach college so they could teach people who actually want to learn. But the new thing I'll say is this: this charade also blows for everyone else. The more and more that our society collectively undermines the real value of a college education and sees it only as a means to job prospects (the adjective "better" is no longer required here), the more education will diminish and eventually disappear as it becomes fully accepted as commodity.

A college education has become something people believe they can buy and not earn. The concept of earning something in addition to paying for the ability to do so is largely foreign to many students I encounter. I wonder what it is that has given young people this notion. Do you think it's just another unfortunate aspect of the "ME" generation mindset? Or is it something else? I am inclined to wonder if this mindset is a result of the growing necessity of the college degree. Maybe students feel that if they are pushed too hard in college that their wellbeing is being jeopardized. Is that reasonable? I would think only in legitimate cases of unfairness on the part of the instructor. Of course, that is not normally the case.

What are your experiences in the college classroom, either as an instructor or a student? Have you experienced these issues with your students, or have you, as a student, felt resentment toward an instructor for policies or actions you felt were unfair. Please share in the comments below.

Until next time,

Leena

Building your Writing Toolkit: Part 5.4 – Pounding it Together: Making Narrative Work

This is the final blog in my several-weeks-long series on narrative. I hope that, if you’re reading this, you’ve read the other blogs and have taken some time to digest them because for the first time I’m going to offer some suggestions for real practice. It’s all well and good to tell people to “avoid this” or “focus on that” or “think about that” but until you actually sit down and DO something, you’re still just masturbating; you’re thinking about writing, but you’re not actually writing. Narrative is the first subject that I’m giving “homework” for because knowing how you start, how you write best, and going out into the world to experience it all have more to do with knowing yourself than they do with knowing your craft.

Narrative is different – narrative is tangible. If you don’t have a decent understanding of narrative as it functions in a short story or a novel or a poem you’re not going to have an audience for very long because your audience will know that you don’t know what you’re doing, and worse, they’ll get bored.

The written word should not be dull. It should enflame and excite. It should stand out from the page and strike its readers with its wisdom, wit, and wonder. The written word was invented in order to facilitate the sharing of information so vital that men were willing to construct a new manner of communicating to prevent that information from being lost – and one of the earliest things humans started doing with that new medium was marking down stories and poems so that the soul of a race would not die with its elders; we write what we do to give a tongue to history, to give a voice to the past, and to grant immortality to those who understand the magic of the words “once upon a time.” The written word should be anything but dull.

If you understand this concept – that writing should give life to what is being said – then you understand the basis of narrative: tell the story but tell it RIGHT – so that everyone who hears it will remember it and want to share it with others. Good writing is a virus, one that changes everyone it touches, and one that spreads with frightening rapidity and permanence.

I’m going to step off of my soapbox and stop ranting about why the written word affects us, and I’m going to hand out a couple of exercises that will help you to write affectingly.

Tell an old story but tell it new.

Everyone has heard that there are only about ten real stories in the world and they break down into laughably simple terms: love, loss, revenge, greed, pride, rebellion and a couple more of the Big Ideas we’ve been masticating for the last handful of millennia.

I’m not going to try to tell you to write something wholly original – very few things in literature are completely original (though that’s not for lack of trying on the part of many authors) and when you’re starting out (or even when you’ve been doing this for a while) butting your head against the idea of pure, original work is just going to frustrate you. I’m certainly not going to tell you to plagiarize, though. I’m going to tell you to re-forge.

We’ve all had an assignment in some class or another where we had to rewrite something creatively. Usually this happens in elementary school classes when the teachers give kids a chance to flex their creative muscles before binding them into five-paragraph essays for the rest of their K-12 education. Usually the children are asked to rewrite something simple – a fairytale, a joke, or a simple poem. When is the last time you did this?

If it was more than six months ago, it’s been too long.

So here’s the first exercise – it’s more complicated than putting your own spin on Little Red Riding Hood or telling a lightbulb joke with stereotype “x” instead of stereotype “y” or writing a Paul Revere rap: write the story of the moon and the sun. Why are they in the sky? Why are they running away from each other? Write the story and leave out the Greeks and the Romans and the Norse and Ethiopian origin stories. Write something new about something old – write as if you were first asking the question of yourself as a child, and sharing the answer you came up with to all of your friends and detractors on the playground.

Tell a story with an imaginary friend.

This exercise works best if you’re a little crazy and have some kind of recording device handy.

Remember your imaginary friend. If you didn’t have one, imagine one – make her a good one too, if she’s your first, with purple hair and retractable eyelashes or with the best tophat you’ve ever seen, or with all of the things that you hold close and quiet to your heart and are too scared to share with real friends because these things are too wonderful and hideous to expose to an outsider’s eyes. Do you have him in your head – tall or small and frightening or lovely and there to pat your back when you almost break down, but the weight of him in your mind keeps you upright? Good. Hold your imaginary friend there, bright and clear, and trade lines in a story.

Here’s an example:
Me: Once upon a time
Chaplin: There was a basketball
Me: The basketball rolled into the middle of the street, even though there was no one to push it
Chaplin: And no wind to blow it.
Me: The basketball rolled past houses and trailers
Chaplin: It rolled through streets empty of traffic
Me: And finally came to rest in front of an ugly, squat brick building
Chaplin: The town’s junior high school
Me: It rocked before pausing, and only Jack Mason saw it.
Chaplin: Jack had stayed behind that day
Me: After the parade passed by
Chaplin: Because he didn’t like the noise – it scared him
Me: But the basketball, with its beastly show of inertia, scared him more.
Chaplin: Jack was a quiet boy, with glasses and a thin chest
Me: But he was strong in a funny way – the way that stood out to other kids
Chaplin: The way that stood up to teachers
Me: The way that made him a target whenever he made a show of that strength.
Chaplin: Jack had a secret, and the day he saw the basketball roll to a stop in the center of the silent street, he knew his secret wouldn’t stay his for much longer.

One of the best things about this exercise is that, if you get really into it (because maybe you’re really a little crazy) you don’t know where your story is going next. You just know that it’s going, and you want to keep it going. You want to keep playing your game and you want to keep it interesting for you and for your imaginary friend. And if you’re really doing it properly, extemporaneously, with no thought or plan, you’ll get pulled into your own story – you’ll probably never make it to novel length using this tool, but you’ll find an idea for a novel at some point and be able to work yourself out of the sticky places in a longer work if writer’s block starts to settle in.

Thirteen ways of looking at a trash compacter repairman.

I really wish that I could take credit for this one, but I can’t. It’s based on Roger Zelazny’s introduction to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

Zelazny came up with an odd sort of phrase as a wry way of examining the versatility of Dick’s fiction. I’ve appropriated the clever beginning of his introduction as an interesting way to approach storytelling. Here’s what Zelazny has to say:

“(1) Once there was a man who repaired trash compactors because that was what he loved doing more than anything else in the world –

(2) Once there was a man who repaired trash compactors in a society short o n building materials, where properly compacted trash could be used as an architectural base –

(3) Once there was a man who hated trash compactors but repaired them for a living to keep his manic wife in tranquilisers so that he did not have to spend so much time with his mistress, who was less fun now that she had converted to the new religion –

(4) Once there was a man who in purposely misassembling the trash compactors he haded, produced a machine which –

It is no good. I can’t do it. I can play the Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Trash Compactor Repairman Game, but I canot turn it into a story at once puzzling, poignant, grotesque, philosophical, satirical, and fun. There is a very special way of doing this and the first step in its mastery involves being Philip K. Dick.” (4)

Okay, well, none of us can claim to be Philip K. Dick (unless you’re reading this and you’re the missing android version of Dick that someone made in the early eighties – which would be awesome, but if so, please go home: you’ve been scaring people for three decades now.) Putting aside the fact that you’re (likely) not Philip K. Dick, try to play the Trash Compactor Repairman Game. Play it for seven rounds the first time, instead of thirteen. Play it for three rounds. But try to play.

It’s very unlikely that you’ll write a Hugo Award winning story by playing this game (that’s okay too, Dick relied on methamphetamines and a fair dose of batshit insanity to write his stories, not whimsical storytelling exercises) but you’ll write something, and then you’ll write it differently, with more depth, and again but with better characters, and again with more feeling, and again.

This exercise isn’t an attempt to start a novel from scratch (even though that’s eventually what it can turn into) – it’s an attempt to get you to use your imagination. And it’s an attempt to get you to tell a story: not a brave story, not a hero’s story, but just the story of a Trash Compactor Repairman, and maybe one who becomes his own hero.

These exercises may sound silly, you may think they’re stupid, but they’re all getting back to one essential core goal: tell me a fucking story, and while you’re at it, make it a good one. That’s all that narrative is, that all that it should be – individuals passing through the dark places in the world before coming together into the light, with stories to tell about their adventures.

This finishes up my blogs on narrative, but I’ll be back on Saturday the 31st with an extra blog – it’s going to be based on this one. I’m going to do these exercises for homework, for practice, and to see what I can write (though I’m only going to play 5 rounds of the Trash Compactor Repairman Game because it seems that writing fewer than 500 words in a single sitting is a bit of a stretch for me) and to share it with you. I invite you to do the same, to practice, write, and share: choose one or all of these exercises and post them in the comments of my Saturday blog, and let’s use that space to workshop a little.

Thanks for reading, See you Saturday, and have fun. Write something. Play. Make up imaginary friends and visit imaginary worlds. Have adventures. And keep telling stories.

Cheers,
- Alli

Relationships With Poets

Folks,

As I’ve been doing lately, I will be keeping this short. This blog post will serve as a springboard for actual conversation. More often than not, we – the authors – are usually opening up a discussion board to the readers of our blog rather than reporting on our own insights; however, I’ve noticed that – again, more often than not – discussions don’t really happen.  That’s ok, I suppose; after all, I’m assuming the readership of this blog is composed mainly of English majors and literature aficionados – many of which are introverts.  Today is different, though. If you are reading this, I implore you to comment on the question I will pose today.

I read two articles today about the role of the poet and the role of the reader in “witness poetry.” I’m not going to get into what the article had to say, but I am wondering what you all think about the role of the poet and the reader. I know most of you all have read Roland Barthes and the structuralists, (haha, that sounds like an 80s pop band) so I’m sure most of you are familiar with the whole death of the author thing. For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that the author has a purpose aside from writing poetry. Let’s also assume that the reader is not the creator of the meaning behind the poetry. In short, let’s assume there is a sort of symbiosis between the poet and the receiver of the poetry.

So, what is the role of the poet? What is the role of the reader of poetry? What is the nature of the relationship between pet and reader? Does poetry in a historical context change the role of the poet and the receiver of poetry? I’m sure you all have thought about this to some extent, but if not, now’s the time. Please let me know what you think about these sorts of questions. Are they even worth asking? Who knows.

I’m looking forward to your responses.

J

Losing Your Voice

Hey all,

Recently, in class, I had to deal with something that I haven't thought about for ages: the difficulty of academic writing. Now, I don't mean difficult in the way you are probably thinking. I can (as well as many of you, I'm sure) write academically with a fair amount of ease; however, when the rules get really strict, I find that it is difficult to want to write in a strict academic manner.

Upon receiving some of my written work back from the professor, I noticed that I had been docked some points for using contractions. So what? I can easily not use contractions in the future, right? Well, right. But, at what cost? It may seem trivial, and to some people there may be no cost in giving up contractions. However, I feel that they are a stylistic choice that stops the writer from sounding like a complete tool on the page.

But this blog really doesn't need to be about me ranting away, and don't think I don't see the method behind the madness. Contractions were labeled as vernacular language rather than stylistic. The fact is, we have standards that are upheld in academic writing. Really, what's stopping us from using text language in our essays? Well, maybe we see it as a colloquial, casual, or vernacular writing style just like contractions once were.

So, I guess my question is, where is the line drawn? How are changes made acceptable in academic writing? More importantly, do we want to see these changes? I'll be the first to say that I never want to see text language in academic study.

Am I the oppressed or the oppressor here?

Let me know,

-Rainamoinen

A Novel Idea Part 2: The Medium of Drafting

My Fellow Contributors,

I am happy to report back to you that I have been progressing steadily through my first draft and am almost to the half way point. I heard somewhere in high school that Ernest Hemingway would leave his desk and stop writing for the day before he ran out of ideas, that way he could resume the next day and not worry about what he was going to write next.

My system of "Frames" is helping me avoid writer's block in my own way. My goal for the first draft is to amass fifty Frames in a composition notebook. Each frame is anywhere from a page to two pages of handwritten text. It should be noted though that these Frames act more like posted-notes rather than chapters. They are essentially one or two frames out of the movie in my head which is going to be the novel. They are snapshots, meant to spark more writing later during the editing and revising process. Like I have mentioned earlier, at this point in my writing process I am just trying to make the clay; shaping and molding will come later.

But Bermuda, what medium should we writers use to create this clay?

I am glad you asked as I can not stress how important it is to hand write the first draft of any piece you are working on. Handwriting has several advantages over an electronic word processor which I will go over now.

First, handwriting allows you to get the ideas and words you want onto the page with out the restrictions of having to type. Without worrying about spelling errors which pop up underlined in red and steal your attention. When you are handwriting you are less inclined to go back and are able to flow forward quickly.

Second, hand writing a draft allows you to make notes on the margins, over certain sentences, even draw pictures; it allows you to move in unrestricted ease.

Thirdly, a pen, and notebook can go anywhere; they never run out of battery and have no load up time. You can go out into the world and become an observer. Leaving no foot print, only words.

Lastly, if your handwriting is anything like mine (my cursive is a touch unintelligible at times) nobody is going to be able to read it, and sometimes not even yourself. Thus when you go back to type it out on a computer, you are going to have to reshape, recreate and revise your draft, so that what eventually comes out on the computer scene is an entirely new draft. The act of transcription is in fact another stop in the writing process that many authors who simply type into a computer never get an opportunity to go through.

I want to end by saying that I never understood before when authors said their characters wrote themselves; that they had one idea of how the characters should react and instead they did another. I am starting to understand this now as I write my own novel. Characters who I thought would be evil are now starting to do some heroic things and some of my more innocent characters are now getting blood on their hands.

As always

Undoubtedly Yours,

Bermuda

The Safe Harbor and The Terrible Sea

I found it comforting, when stumbling on to the blog this morning, to see the blog that Leena wrote last night, as it tied in nicely with what I wanted to talk about today. But before I go on, if you find yourself wondering at this very moment, what blog is Nick referring to? Then I want you to stop, scroll down, and read Leena's blog before proceeding with this one.

Whenever I visit my parent's home in Northern California I seem to learn something knew. Last time I learned a lesson about revisiting old literature, but this time it was entirely different. It all began one morning with a couple of eggs. I had woken up early to go for a run, and while making some eggs for breakfast was greeted by my eldest brother. We began talking and eventually he (who is studying as a paramedic) told me what one of his teachers had recently told him. His teacher, now 57, had recently attended a funeral for one of the founding paramedic instructors who had just died of cancer. His instructor recalled the sheer number of people at the funeral, most of whom were not direct family. My brother told me that his instructor had told him that the reason so many people were at this funeral was because the women who had died had touched so many people's lives in a profound way. The instructor made one comment that really struck my brother, he said “when you get to be my age and look back on your life, it is as if it all happened in about ten minutes.” When my brother told me this I began to think about my life. Now I have not lived nearly as long as the paramedic instructor who made the comment has, but I can attest that even the times of my life that felt so long and so tiresome, times I never thought would end, actually seem like they passed in the blink of an eye in retrospect. With this in my mind we continued the conversation. The conversation turned and twisted like any other would, and left us at an interesting conclusion; one I feel worthy of sharing with all of you today.

During the conversation, we began talking about all of the dreams we had when we were younger, and how these dreams had been changed into fitting the lives we currently live today, much like Leena said. I had always wished to grow up and become a rock star, yet the career path I am on today has nothing to do with music. However, I do find the time to write and play music almost every day. My brother always desired to become a police officer, and though he is not there yet, he is currently pursuing a career in law enforcement. My overall point is that we all have dreams from when we were younger, or maybe some that we have developed in more recent years. We often settle with the idea that these desires of ours are unattainable, or aspects of our lives that we will put off for future years, but when the future arrives, we still never get around to doing what we postponed. So, with that said, what is important is to take the risk, and explore the frontiers of our lives that we often leave only for dreaming. Whether it be literature, writing, poetry, music, photography, drawing, you name it, what's important is that you go after what you believe will make you happy. Sometimes what seems the harder path at first, ends up being the better decision later on.

With that said, I leave you with a quote from Mark Twain:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Until Next Time,

Nick

This is really self-indulgent. I hope you get something out of it.

How do we know when to give up our childish fantasies? What if we don't know if our fantasies are childish or really meant to be?

I've had this fantasy, off and on for many years, about moving to New York City and getting into publishing. Lately, in the midst of my frustrations with teaching, this fantasy has presented itself yet again. Sometimes I think of the ever-recurrence of this fantasy as a sign that it is an unfulfilled urge that should be satiated. Other times, I think of this fantasy's persistence as a means for mental escape, a way for me to pretend for a little while that I'm not going to continue on the path I'm currently on- a coping mechanism, if you will.

I got caught up in contemplating these things on the way home from teaching tonight. Every time after I teach lately, I am launched into an existential crisis- it doesn't matter if the class goes particularly horribly or particularly wonderfully: existential crisis will follow. And these crises tend to involve deep contemplations on the direction of my life. Usually, I come around to the conclusion that I don't want to teach forever and that I'd like to pursue my true passion: editing. And then I begin to pit teaching against editing (my mom once aptly noted that I have a penchant for pitting not necessarily mutually exclusive ideas against one another). Suddenly, my teaching is the enemy of my editing. You can see how that gets hairy real quickly.

And another issue has been recently brought to my attention: my issues with teaching may not be universally true of all teaching. The main issues I have are as follows: laziness, disinterest, lack of effort, negative attitudes, adults behaving like children, grading shitty papers, etc. A former professor of mine (and an all-around wonderful woman who was, in fact, one of the original inspirations for my decision to become a college instructor) recently told me that she taught freshman English once and that if she had to teach freshman comp for the rest of her life, she wouldn't be teaching. This was something of a revelation for me as I've gotten so heavily entrenched in the notion that if I'm going to teach, I'm going to teach freshman to write.

Her confession trudged up all kinds of buried emotions and convictions, ones that have been lost to years of graduate school and conflicting voices and personal tragedies. At the forefront of such convictions was the one that if I was going to teach, I was going to teach literature to college students. How had I lost that goal? I had lost it so completely. I think it happened in stages. First I was told at the beginning of grad school to declare my primary subject as composition so I would be more likely to get a job teaching at the community college level. This piece of advice was given to me despite the fact that I had said I wanted to teach literature and it was accepted without my having a real understanding of the difference between teaching literature and teaching freshman composition. I think the next step was my beginning to teach composition and discovering that I am good at it. It was just a matter of time before I was saying I wanted to pursue a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition, not literature. What?

Recently, it has all become quite clear to me how much my original desire has become convoluted into something entirely different, and with just a tweak here and a minor adjustment there. You don't even realize you're compromising; you do it in the name of being practical, growing up, being adult.

So what does all this mean? I don't at all regret my time teaching composition and I will continue to do it for a while longer in my life, but now I know that I have not arrived to where I want to be but only where I'd convinced myself I should be. I still don't know if attempting to become an editor in NYC is in the cards for me; but if it is just a childish fantasy, it exists to agitate me into moving my life in a different direction. And that direction, one way or another, is toward a life filled with the thing that has dictated most of the major decisions I've made thus far: literature.

Until next time,

Leena

Building your Writing Toolkit: Part 5.3 – Pounding it Together: Making Narrative Work

As promised, I’m back with more on narrative, and this time I’ll actually be getting into a few specifics. Because I’m getting into specifics, this blog is about three thousand words long, and for that I have two things to say to you: I’m sorry; deal with it.

We’ve covered the fact that we all encounter narrative everywhere, and we’ve discussed that there are many forms that narrative takes, as well as many things you should and shouldn’t do to improve narrative in your writing. This week I’m here to talk about making narrative work in different written media – I’ll be covering narrative in poetry, fiction, academic and creative essays, and drama (briefly and badly – I’m not much of a dramatist.)

I decided to start with narrative in poetry because I have a lot to say about it. We at AFLM get a lot of poetry submissions, and sadly we have to reject a lot of poetry submissions. I want to give you aspiring poets an insight into one of the most common complaints we have about the poetry we reject – it goes something like this: “I liked a lot of images in this piece, and the language was good, but it just doesn’t say anything.”

I have this complaint about a lot of poetry: I’m not just complaining about the submissions we’re seeing, or the poems I hear in workshops, or the poems presented in creative writing classes – I’m bitching about the same thing on the poetry pages of The New Yorker and American Poetry and in poetry collections for the last twenty (at least) years. A prevailing attitude in poetry in the last few years has been that it doesn’t have to actually DO anything so long as it looks good doing nothing. This attitude is bullshit, and is roughly equivalent to cramming a Geo engine into a Maserati. If it’s crap, it’s crap, and no amount of chrome or styling will fix it.

I believe that poetry should always do something, say something, or reexamine something. Let’s look at one of the ballsiest poets we published, Ben Jefferson, who had the sack to submit a 9-word-poem to our magazine, and whom we published based on the sheer chutzpah of that submission. His poem “Eros and Psyche” goes like this:

“When Love gazed on Psyche
He fell into himself.”

What I like about this poem is that on the strength of allusion alone the nine words it’s made up of tell a story – Jefferson gets you to completely reexamine the whole of the Psyche myth (and hopefully the modern concept of psyche, the old concept of love, and by omission Narcissus) with a few words. Even though this poem is more clever than it is deep, it tells a complete story and asks for depth from its readers – and in nine words it does a hell of a lot more than 250 lines of purple verse that describe disconnected images to no purpose.

If you can maintain a similar effect over more than a few lines that's great. There's a reason that dear Uncle Walt is our poster boy - take a look through “Song of Myself” and experience not only a narrative, but an autobiography in poetry that reaches beyond the self and into a national consciousness. In other words, Father Graybeard was a master of narrative in poetry, so you should read more of his work - it can only help.

What makes Whitman fantastic in his use of narrative in poetry is his (mostly) delicate touch. Even though Whitman is a constant presence in “Song of Myself” he doesn’t impose himself on you with his voice, he allows you to get to know him through his vision. By way of contrast, in much of Poe’s poetry his narrative styling is too obvious to want to emulate (see "The Raven" as the most egregious offender) but Poe makes up for that by essentially creating mystery narrative right out of his ass, because he simply fucking felt like it.

Poe’s fiction is a good source to focus on for narrative because it is trying to do one very specific thing (creep you the fuck out) and it succeeds remarkably well. Poe’s characters are sometimes a little thin, his prose is frequently (brilliantly) overwrought, and his narrators are balls-out crazy, but just sane enough to hook you behind them and drag you screaming through his short fiction. Poe’s narration is personal because it’s trying to do one, excruciatingly hard thing (guarantee you have nightmares about mundane objects for the rest of your life) and that works best with a personal relation of the stories.

Twain, on the other hand, plays with his narrative style and voice a little more. Sure, you can hear the sardonic drawl of a semi-sleazy newspaperman bent on claiming all the world’s great one-liners in the background of almost every work, but go pick up The Adventures of Huckeberry Finn for a moment. Look at any passage where Huck is talking about Jim. The masterful blend of clarity and confusion in Huck’s vision of the world around Jim is the exact opposite of the narrative tone in nearly any passage about youthful misadventure that you’ll find in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Now look at something culled from Puddin’head Wilson, bonus points if it’s something about Roxy or her son, and see if you can spot the predominant attitude of the narrator (hint: while Twain manages to be sweet, salty, and sour in this story, it’s pretty clear that there are some things about which he can only be bitter.) If you’re looking for a golden boy in American Literature, you’re not looking for Twain, but if you want to see some adaptability in an author Samuel L. Clemens is certainly your man. Delicacy isn’t exactly his wellspring in most of his fiction, but he manages to be delicate with surprising adroitness when the situation calls for it. Kindness isn’t his bread and butter, but he can ditch the sarcasm to make a telling point when he needs to. I picked Twain here because he’s a pretty damn brilliant example of flexibility in narrative, and he happens to be only a century or so removed from modern readers.

If you want another, less literary, more contemporary, example of someone who can play narrative in novels like a fiddle, check out some Stephen King. In a lot of King’s books the narration follows the same pattern but in some (Gerald’s Game, The Eyes of the Dragon, Everything’s Eventual, It and most especially in The Bachman Books) King reaches into his methodology, strangles it a bit, and comes back with a way of telling a story that you’d never imagine coming from the man who wrote Christine, In a Buick 8, and the story that eventually became the awful movie Trucks, three pieces of fiction about homicidal cars.

Hold on a second. The man wrote three stories about murderous cars. And a story about murderous cell phones. Murderous rats. Murderous fog. Murderous governments. Murderous Gypsy curses. Murderous aliens. Scary-ass murderous clown-spider-alien things. Murderous alter egos. Murderous dead pets. When you really break it down, Stephen King has written the same story (“X” wants to kill you in the worst way imaginable) at least a hundred times. Really think about that. His books have topped bestseller lists for decades, he’s won the O. Henry award for short fiction, he’s written sweeping sagas and fantasy stories and the worst dreams in our collective consciousness (at least since someone put fangs and clown makeup on Tim Curry) and he’s done most of that by writing the Same. Basic. Fucking. Story. Over and over again. Never mind any disparaging comments I might have made earlier – this man has sold the same story to millions of people in dozens of books. He’s the fucking president of “People Who are Better at Long Format Narrative than Anyone You Know.”

Now that I’ve completely overawed myself by marveling at King’s immense body of narrative miracle working, I’m going to completely switch gears and go back to Twain. And I might as well totally turn the discussion in a different direction and start talking about essays. One of the best examples of narrative in critical essay writing that I’ve ever seen is Twain’s “The Literary Crimes of James Fenimore Cooper.” (If you haven’t read it I’ll give you a moment to go to Gutenberg.org, one of the best places on the internet, to download the complete Twain anthology that they have available absolutely free – it’ll only save us time in the end.) The “Literary Crimes” essay is some deliciously nasty literary criticism that also collects some of Twain’s finest opinionated vitriol on what was, essentially, the Twilight of the time. Twain’s narrative style throughout the piece is in-your-face, funny, cruel, and genuine. If you can pull this off in an essay for class then I tip my hat to you, because you’re a stupendous badass, but since I sincerely doubt that anyone reading this is as cool as Mark Twain I’ll expound a bit more on how to manage narrative in critical essays.

A lot of professors these days are lamenting the loss of the “I” in student essays. We’re trained from freshman year of high school that the worst word you can include in an essay is a self-referential personal pronoun, and so we tend to avoid it like the plague. I hate that attitude, and many professors do as well because when you use “I” well in an essay you convey greater conviction to your readers and you come across as someone who’s actually invested in your topic.

If you start an essay with “One has to wonder whether Stephanie Meyers had ever read a book before putting pen to paper,” you sound like a wishy-washy librarian. If you start an essay with “I’ve never encountered an author for whom I hold a greater loathing or more ill wishes than Ibsen,” you sound like a determined jerk (possibly a determined librarian jerk) – but you’ve hooked your reader. You hate Ibsen. You think he’s a jackass. You wish that all of his plays would dissolve into ash, and suddenly your reader wants to know why. Now, you can’t follow this up with “I hate Ibsen because I think he sodomized corgi puppies” and expect to be taken seriously by anyone, but if you follow up convicted “I” statements with numerous examples of sexism, stock characters, strained dialogue, and evidence of an utter lack of understanding of any human relationships, you’re on your way to earning some credit with your reader.

You have to be careful with narrative in academic papers – you’re trying to tell a story (i.e. the story of why Ibsen should die in a fire, the story of why Meyers is really just awful, the story of why summer vacation should be extended for at least a month, the story of Jane Austen as an early feminist) without sounding like you’re telling a story. You need to learn how to move through an academic paper in a natural way, introducing your reader to your topic (either slowly or shockingly) before supplying evidence and arguments (it helps to think of your arguments as characters – give them some personality, make them stand out, and use your evidence as setting to let them shine) and eventually reaching a conclusion that becomes inevitable as the narrative in your essay comes to a climax (inevitability is key here – surprise endings in academic essays are as ill advised as they are in romantic comedies; they’re proof of poor planning and generally a buzzkill.)

So that’s the academic side of essay writing – what about the creative side? Narrative in creative essays is perplexing. A lot of it depends on whether you’re writing about yourself or someone else, and what the purpose of the essay is. If you’re writing a creative essay about yourself then you should go to great lengths to tell your story the way you really would tell your story – seriously, record yourself telling the story, transcribe that recording and clean it up for publication. This will get you that much sought-after tinge of “authenticity” in creative nonfiction. If you’re writing about someone or something else your narrative should be shaped to showcase your subject – you are less important in this sort of essay than your subject is, but your opinion about what your subject says about the world is vital – tell the story the way you see it, but allow yourself to fade into the background (for how to do this, search me – I’m quite bad at this sort of thing – but take some cues from “Song of Myself” because, as mentioned above, Whitman was amazing at telling you how he saw the world by literally telling you about the things he saw in the world.)

Finally, I’m moving on to another topic I don’t know much about – narrative in drama. There are plenty of reasons I’m not the best source of advice on this subject, primarily the fact that I can’t stand live theatre, but I do have at least a couple of suggestions for you hopeful dramatists out there.

Drama is storytelling without the boring business of actually writing out all the crap that goes with a story. You’ve got dialogue and plot, and that’s really about it – even character is, to some extent, out of your hands and in the dubious grasp of the actors. So how do you make storytelling work if you’re not going to write, you know, an actual story?

Number one, for me, is chorus characters. I’m not talking about girls in stockings kicking dangerously high, I’m talking the about masked Greeks who used to stand on the sides of the stage and tell everyone what the hell was going on. Choruses haven’t been popular in the original sense in drama for quite some time now, but my favorite plays (read: the only plays I can really stand to read or watch) incorporate some chorus element. A fantastic example of this is Hamlet. Hamlet doesn’t run around with a bunch of dudes in sheets shouting out his plans over his shoulder – he does it himself. Hamlet’s soliloquies are his chorus – they tell you where the plot is going, why he’s thinking what he’s thinking, and they assure you (time and time again) that he’s not just batshit crazy. Want a different example? Oscar Wilde. In The Importance of Being Ernest Algy and Jack spend a lot of time vocalizing their plans, plots, motivations and ardent desires. This isn’t left up to the actors – you can’t trust the actors with this kind of stuff – Wilde wrote down all the pertinent narrative in what are, basically, superfluous speeches so that the audience could read more into the story than simply the action that was happening on stage. More examples? How about Tennessee Williams – is there any reason to provide all of the rehashings of character history unless it’s to fill in narrative gaps that are created by the lack of a narrator? Try a musical on for size – in Little Shop of Horrors the songs pick up a lot of the narrative duties, but not as much as the bloody she-bopping urchins, who step into the literal (and original) role of a chorus.

Another element that helps drama with narrative is setting – you can do this with words, like Shakespeare, Marlowe and most other Renaissance dramatists did (having your characters tell the audience that they’re on a battlefield, and how they’re shocked at the smoking ruin of war, works in building character as well as moving your story more into a story-telling realm) or you can do this with physical set changes and props (but you still need to tell people what room or forest or well they’ve walked into in order to suspend disbelief and keep your audience firmly ensconced in the story.)

I think I’ve run out of steam here, and said as much as I can reasonably (or unreasonably) expect anyone to read in a single blog. I’m going to leave off with the big question: what doesn’t work in narrative? A lot. You’ll find it, as you practice and grow in your writing. You’ll find that there are a lot of techniques that don’t work for you, and you’ll find many that do. But as you continue to write the field of “doesn’t work” will continually narrow as the field of “does work” continues to expand for you as a writer.

So long as you’re not Ibsen. Seriously. Fuck Ibsen.

Thanks for reading such a bloody long blog, and I’ll be back next week with exercises to improve your narrative technique, which should finish off my weeks-long exploration of narrative.

Until then, Cheers.

- Alli

Cross-Disciplinary Reading

Hey Guys,

I'm going to keep this one short, but I'll start off by saying something I think we all know about good English majors -- key word here being "good". Good English majors can do anything. Yes, anything. English majors are trained to interpret text and draw meaning out of words; thus, to some extent, we are all investigators of everything. This is a good skill set to have because it makes understanding or learning something that much easier.

As of right now, I'm reading a book called The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. TEU is about string theory, Einstein's theory of relativity, and quantum mechanics. This sounds like a crazy read, but for English majors, this shouldn't be a hard read. It is filled with concepts that deal with the vastly macro and the impossibly micro; Greene, however, makes all of these concepts very accessible, especially for someone who is trained to read closely.

I think it is very important for English majors not to trap themselves in a literary bubble. Yes, poetry and fiction is amazing, and they are certainly telling of the importance of humanity, but to limit one's self to literature is perhaps not the best thing to do. Understanding fields outside of literature is an important practice -- one that, I feel, is often overlooked. Because of all the crazy shit I'm learning, I urge you all to go out and pick up a copy of something by Richard Dawkins, Brian Greene, Michiu Kaku, Neil DeGrass Tyson, Thomas Kuhn, or someone else of that caliber. The writing is very interesting, and it may open up some doors for you on an artistic level. So yeah, read outside your bubble, folks.

Best,

J

A Novel Idea Part 1: The Literary Meet and Greet

My Fellow Contributors,

This is going to be the first blog in a series of blogs that will chronicle my attempt at writing a novel. If you haven't already, please check out Alli's blogs on "Building your Writing Toolkit" as this endeavor of mine is somewhat inspired by her series.

What I hope to accomplish with this series is two things:

First, I hope to inspire you, my fellow contributors, to start your own writing project. Something that you will keep coming back to a body of words and shaping and molding it.

Second, I hope by writing about my novel experience, that I will be able to dedicate myself to finishing this novel.

***

When I was trying to figure out where to begin, I found myself actually figuring out the ending. I was in class and was listening to my professor lecture about Milton's Paradise Lost when the Heavenly Muse herself came down and penetrated my consciousness with a brilliant idea. I had the idea of three men, who grow up together, and die relatively soon after each other. What is significant about the ending is that each man chooses to be buried in a specific way that reflects the metaphysical makeup of that particular character.

So now that I had the ending, I needed to figure out how I was going to get them to that point. This seemed like an overwhelming task. I mean, seriously, where was I going to begin. But before I could begin I realized that I had to know who I was writing about and how I was going to write about them.

This is when I performed what I call a literary "meet and greet". I wrote the names of each character and then started to list details about him. I would describe personality traits, people in my own life that I would mold the character after, and little back stories or small events that would come into play later. For the three main characters I chose to mold one of them after myself, two of my friends, and my dad. I am a firm believer that you have to write what you know; granted that you don't have to know everything about something in order to write about it, but it does make coming up with words and realistic reactions easier. I then went on to describe two minor characters, two sons of two of the main characters.

Now that I had some idea of who I was going to be playing with in my figurative world, I now had to decide how I was going to construct the narrative of the story. For this I drew inspiration from two sources. First, Alli's latest blog about crafting your narrative and second from the last book I read And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. The book is written by both Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. In it each author writes from a different narrative perspective and the book alternates chapters between each narrator. So for the purpose of my novel, I will be writing in first person and alternating between each of my three main protagonists as well as a few others.

What has made me feel like I can accomplish writing a novel after mainly writing poetry is that I am going to be writing the chapters as if they were stand alone compartments. Each chapter will be a different perspective and will allow me to give my readers the opportunity to be one-up on characters at points and also one-down at other times. By breaking the novel into pieces it is more manageable and will allow me to write various different narrative sequences with out having to worry about telling the story from A-Z. Having the narrative broken up into pieces will also allow me to move chapters around and interchange them so that I can pick and choose when to reveal important plot information.

So with that said, I am going to be leaving you now. Next time I hope to report back with a few more lines about the progress of this novel idea.

Also if you have any questions about writing your own novel, or want to share your experience please leave a comment. The more of us pushing each other to finish, the better the end product will be.

As Always

Undoubtedly Yours,
Bermuda

Breaking Free From the Chains that Bind You... or at least trying to

Hello again. Lately I've been feeling rather rushed. Now I know that it is finals week, and in light of that I probably should feel rushed. But this feeling of 'rushed-ness' seems to transcend the craziness of finals. In fact, now that I think of it, I have been feeling this way for awhile. It seems the weeks go by without me even really being fully aware. And to make matters worse, the days captured within those weeks go by in what seems the blink of an eye. Because of this, I often forget about all the many facets of life that make me happy. I feel confined to a routine that works with my schedule. However, last night I seemed to have broken my pattern when I found myself caught in a vortex of rap, rhythm, comedy, monologue, music, and poetry.

Now, before I go any further, let me take you back. Fellow editor Ryan called me about a poetry reading that was going on at Half-off Books in downtown Whittier, and asked me if I could go even though he couldn't. Seeing that it might be an opportunity to network the magazine, and needing a break from studying I agreed. Arriving in Whittier I was pleasantly reminded of the town I grew up in, aside from the gravy fry shop, of course. Purposefully parking two blocks away, so I could roam the streets a bit, it took me about ten minutes to walk to the poetry reading, but I finally made it.

Now this is where the vortex begins.

Immediately after walking into the bookstore I was blown away with the amount of laughter coming from the audience. The first act was a comedian who brilliantly intertwined his own poetry into his act making it fit the “open poetry mic night” criteria. Following this act was a concession of poets who were all very talented. The poets at this reading were beat poets, so their performances were very energetic and elaborate as they incorporated music and rhythm into their sets. The most interesting aspect of their poetry was how personal it was, and how much it revealed about their own lives. It was inspiring seeing the expressions on some of these poet's faces as they performed their poetry; these poet's expressions only enhanced their poetry, and captured the audience into listening to what they had to say. The evening wrapped up with a young woman rapping (which still makes me smile), and a young man performing a monologue from Bradstreet.

Now, after writing that paragraph I feel as if I'm writing, terribly, a review of the poetry reading, and that is not what I had intended. I'll cut to the chase. The poetry reading was refreshing, new, and inspiring for me. It opened my eyes to expression in a way that I had never seen it done before. I can't tell you how many times I have written a song and scrapped it because I didn't think I'd be comfortable performing it as the emotions expressed in it were too raw, too real. Yet it was this discomfort, this rawness, this darkness that made some of the poetry read at the Whittier poetry reading so inspiring.

With this said I have but two closing messages:

1. Go out to more poetry readings. In fact, if you haven't been to one, or want to go to another, come join us at the Coffee Klatch in Rancho Cucamonga tomorrow night, the open mic starts at 7:00 PM. The reason I say this is because, like my feelings ,expressed in the beginning, of getting overly caught up in the same routine, artists too can often get stuck in a rut and feel that they have nothing to write about, or that their writing is constantly following the same pattern. Poetry readings, and other events that host artistic expression, can open your eyes, or help break you out of this consistency.

2. Take the risk. It is never comfortable getting up in front of a group of people and performing, but if you never give it a shot then you will never know. So if you have written some poetry, a song, a monologue, anything, and want to share it, then, again, come out to the Coffee Klatch in Rancho Cucamonga tomorrow night at 7:00. A Few Lines Magazine is hosting our third poetry reading, and we would love to have you there.

Until then,

Nick

Living as one mind, knowing nothing and everything at once

Recently, while procrastinating during the onset of finals, I discovered that the Encyclopedia Britannica, that great big set of books that once served as my only research source when doing projects in my elementary school days, will no longer be printed; instead, the entire collection of knowledge, which took 244 years to become what it is today, will be available online (check out this artice). Struggling to stay afloat in a society of people whose views on the dissemination of information seems to be shifting towards a free information society, the encyclopedia's website, http://www.britannica.com/, now offers a short two-week free trial, where users are allowed full access to the 120,000 articles. Users who wish to continue the service must pay $70 a year.

But in today's world, where the answer to any question is a smartphone search away, is it really necessary to pay for outside sources of knowledge? I think it’s time for the Encyclopedia Brittanica to realize the sad truth; they are no longer needed.

So what does this shift from material sources to virtual sources suggest about humanity? And what of the accessibility? The internet and mobile technology have revolutionized the way we behave, changing not only the way that knowledge is distributed to our society, but also how each individual thinks and functions on a day to day basis. With sites like Wikipedia always in our pockets, we never need to remember anything. Gone are the days of the learned scholar who sat and memorized – now nearly anyone can know anything at anytime. In this new technological age, we are moving towards a point where everyone knows nothing -- because they no longer need to remember facts -- and everyone knows everything --because they always have access to the collective mind of the internet.

In an incredibly interesting article (here) about the effect that the internet is having on the human brain, Nicholas Carr points out that the recent boom of the web is just another step on the long journey of innovation that started back when writing was invented (Plato wasn't too happy about that)-- and, just as simple-tech changed the way the brain functioned then, the internet will surely have some affect now. Either we are slowly losing our wits and are destined to be ruled by our own technology, or, as Carr puts it, "Perhaps . . . our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom."

In any case, time will tell. The real question I have is this: If everyone can be assumed to know nothing and everything, how will literature adapt to fit its new readers?

There are no conversations with the dead

I haven’t been reading this year. I know my life is falling apart because I’m not reading. The last book I read? American Psycho and I didn’t even finish it. When I don’t read, I feel like I’m not really thinking. I feel like my head is constantly fuzzy. In fact, it feels somewhat like what I imagine Sylvia Plath meant when she described a “bell jar” descending over one’s head. There’s not much air.

And really it’s the perspective that I lose when I don’t read. The perspective of other human beings. Often everyday communication just feels so banal in comparison to the camaraderie I find within the pages of a book. Characters open themselves up to us in the most intimate ways, and we know that the words they say are true to them; if they lie to anyone, it’s not to us.

These feelings of intimacy and dependence on literature is, in fact, critiqued in the movie Good Will Hunting. There is a scene in which Robin Williams’ character asks Will if he believes in soul mates, and Will responds affirmatively, explaining that Shakespeare is one of his. Williams’ character gently scoffs at this, asserting that the relationship between Will and Shakespeare can’t involve much dialogue.

While I agree that we must cultivate “real” relationships and that relationships with literature are not enough, I contend that they are damn well close to it. And I contend that we do carry on dialogues with literature; to proclaim otherwise is to see literature as static and largely dead. And I like to side with Emily Dickinson on this one and say, "A word is dead/ When it is said,/ Some say./ I say it just/ Begins to live/ That day."

And words begin to live when put to paper too. And words continue to live and be a part of life as they are read again and again. What could be more real for a bibliophile than the words on a page? The ones that cannot be destroyed through proverbial games of telephone? Authors speak forever through their written work and there, on their pages, they are able to elaborate in manners they may never have been able to in their “real” lives.

I’ve always felt that the only way I can truly express myself is through writing, not talking. Because of this conviction, I have come to believe that the written word is much more sacred than the spoken one. When I read, I bring that sensibility to the task; I believe that what I read on the page must be paid attention to because the person who put it there did so with intent. (Side note: this conviction is also why I cannot stand when a person does not put effort into his writing; it wastes the reader’s time.) The writer had something to tell me, the reader, and I have something to gain from paying attention- some insight, some perspective, the specifics of which could be gleaned from no other source. How is that not a dialogue?

And, just like a dialogue, this exchange of ideas can only carry on if we lend our ears (well, our eyes). You take their words into your being, as you allow them to become a part of you and to shape your thinking.

So I started a GoodReads account today, and I’m determined to bring insight and passion back into my life in the form of literature. Not another day should pass without the company of a book. And while we’re on the subject, what have ya’ll been reading lately?

-Leena

Building your Writing Toolkit: Part 5.2 – Pounding it Together: Making Narrative Work

When you’re first learning to use a hammer, you don’t use it well – one of two things tends to happen: either you take mincing, pussyfooting little swings that only serve to waste energy and bend nails, or you whack the shit out of your thumb a couple of times before you get the technique down right. The same approaches are evident when a writer is getting a handle on narrative – either they’ve worked hard to remove all storytelling aspects of a work (you see this a lot with poets who don’t think poems are supposed to tell stories), or they are so aware of the narrative as a narrative that you don’t care about what’s happening on the page. Eventually most writers get this figured out and settle into a narrative style that is comfortable for them (don’t worry, there are more ways to craft narrative than there are to swing a hammer), but it’s a hard rhythm to fall into so here are some dos and don’ts for people who are trying to figure out exactly how narrative works.

Do – Tell jokes. Tell lots of jokes. Tell knock-knock jokes and dead baby jokes and silly kid’s jokes and long-winded story-style jokes. Find friends who are patient with you and just start telling them lots and lots of jokes. Humor is really, really hard to do well, and telling a joke well depends on a lot of factors – timing, delivery, phrasing, pacing, animation and audience are all important to getting a good response. Once you understand this on a personal, verbal level you’ll have an easier time with things like pacing, delivery, phrasing and audience in your writing. And you’ll probably feel better about going out and interacting with real people if you’re decent at telling a joke – which is really, really important if you want to write realistically.

Don’t – Tell us everything all of the time. Have you ever read one of those stories that devotes several pages to the intricate details of a character’s hair, clothing, shoes and mannerisms at a party? Or a story that explains the minute variations in the weapons of a couple characters joined in battle? Or a story with paragraph after paragraph all about how handsomely the main male character pouts? I hate those. Most people hate those. In fact most people have a very specific word for those kinds of stories – boring. There are authors who do this well: Austen could write a lot about party plans, but rarely delved into minutiae; Tolkien spends a whole lot of words describing paths through the woods and swords, but more often focused on his universe’s history (and his descriptions of weapons are totally awesome, so he gets a pass on that); Dickens does spend a lot of time working with tiny details, but he either made them funny or important to make up for their mind-numbing nature. But none of those authors gives us every detail of every outfit that every character wore in every scene. None of them wrote about every emotion that every character was feeling in every dance, battle, or factory revolt (though it seems like Dickens tried to in some books.) The reason you don’t get all the details all of the time is because they’re not important all of the time. Be selective with the details you hand out to your audience, and your audience will learn to value the insight that you give them.

Do – Experiment. One of the reasons that creative writing classes are so useful is because they encourage writers to move beyond their comfort zones. Creative writing professors expect their students to be aware of the possibilities of all kinds of writing – not just the one that a student happens to feel cozy with, and so the students learn – albeit uncomfortably – to write in a broader scope. Give yourself assignments to experiment with – try writing a one act play, try writing in second person (though I strongly recommend that if you’re writing in second person you get VERY good at using it before submitting a second person narrative to anyone – even a creative writing professor), try haiku or sonnets, try any kind of experiment you can think of and see what it does to the structure of your narratives.

Don’t – Force yourself. It is excellent (and vital) to try new things, but if a certain narrative device isn’t working for you don’t force yourself to use that device. You don’t have to be an expert (or even proficient) at everything – if you’re a distant narrator by nature, you’ll have a lot of trouble writing internal monologues but you’ll probably do a great job with creating realistic worlds for your characters to navigate. Play to your strengths and work around your weaknesses. As a personal example, I once had to write a creative nonfiction essay in a stream-of-consciousness style; I was awful at it – I hate reading the style, I hate writing the style, I hate hearing people talk about the style. Stream-of-consciousness and I are not friends. But while I’m bad at writing in that style, I’m pretty good at compartmentalizing ideas, so for the purpose of that particular essay I ended up writing about fifty tiny stream-of-consciousness paragraphs and scrambling them up until they were a coherent (or as least as coherent as stream-of-consciousness gets) essay. It wasn’t pretty, but I was able to get through it – if I had forced myself to sit down and just pound through a long, rambling reflection on the assigned topic in stream-of-consciousness, I never would have gotten past the first hundred words.

Do – Practice. I know, I say that a lot. But I always tell people to practice because it’s the one thing that will always get results. If you’re just starting to get comfortable with something, practice until it feels like home. If you’re already good at something, practice to maintain your proficiency. If you’re utter crap at something, practice until you’re something less than utter crap.

Don’t – Give up. If you want to be a writer but narrative is giving you fits, don’t worry. Telling a story is hard work – especially if you’re trying to tell that story as a poem or in an essay format or in a voice you’re not familiar with. But you need to understand that writing is very hard work – you’re not going to be brilliant right away, your stories will limp and lurch at first, and you will always have a long road ahead of you to perfection because nothing is ever perfect. But the more you work with your writing, the more you re-write, practice, and have patience with yourself, the happier you will be with each project you complete.

Anyway, I’ve said another thousand words without covering all that I want to on this topic. I’ll be back next week with an examination of narrative in different written media (like short fiction, poetry, drama and essays) and the week after that with a few exercises to help you flex your narrative muscles. Thanks for reading.

Cheers,
- Alli

Opportunities for AFL

I'm going to keep this short, seeing as this is the beginning -- or maybe it's the end; I'm not entirely sure at this point -- of finals week. There are some interesting developments I figured I'd share with the lot of you. 

Yesterday afternoon, Rainamoinen and I went to John Brantingham's house. Brantingham is a professor at a local college, Mt. SAC. He is trying to get together an international literary arts festival. As it stands, the festival is scheduled to go on sometime in the beginning of February of 2013. This is an extremely exciting event, and I can't wait for this to happen. So, if anyone here is interested in looking into that, please check out the SGV Literary Arts Festival's Facebook, or visit their website. We'll be present at the festival as representatives of Pomona, so be sure to come out and support us if you can.

Another great opportunity for our magazine is the panel we'll be hosting at Mt. SAC's annual literary arts festival. This is taking place on the third Friday of April during the morning hours. We'll be talking about lit mag stuff, so if you're in the area, come out and feel free to ask us whatever you'd like. We'd be more than happy to have a discussion.

Anyways, I should be going now. Until next time, take care.

J

Letter to the Leaves: There is No Try, Only Do

My Fellow Contributors,

While researching the life of Charles Bukowski for our Facebook profile's "People of Character," I came across a quote that he had etched into his grave stone.

"Don't Try"

I was troubled at first glance, but as I researched more into his life, I found it strangely gratifying.

I mean, think about it. To try is to accept the fact that you might fail. But to do is to resist failure and leave her in the rear view mirror.

This reminded me of a few lines spoken by the famous fictional philosopher, Yoda, in The Empire Strikes Back.

"No. Try not. Do... or do not. There is no try"

I remember hearing these same lines, from my sixth grade Drama and Performing Arts teacher. The point she was trying to convey is that "to try" implies to the receiver of such a phrase that the sender is not fully confident and wants to give a sense of possible failure whether conscious of this intention or not.

The power of language to guide and shape our subconscious is without doubt. When Bukowski says, "Don't Try," he means do not set out to write great poetry or the next classic novel. Let it flow out of you. When we try we put up dams which block the flow of words. But when we let the Muses take over and let them guide our pens we find that we have uncovered something in ourselves that is mystic and cosmic. Something that doesn't even feel like us.

It's as if Milton and Ginsberg and Burroughs and Kerouac and Shakespeare and James and Howells and Twain and Emerson and Whitman and Poe and Hemingway and Sartre and Sedgwick and Dickinson and Austin have met in your mind to form an unctuous orgy in your unconscious, leaving their love children to berth themselves onto your page.

I find it strangely gratify to relieve myself on the page without trying. To relax and release and let go.

Remember as writers we're are a mixture of mediums.

1st is the writer who uses words to create clay.

2nd is the reviser who molds and shapes the clay into a form.

3rd is the editor who bakes and hardens the form into a sculpture.

4th is the publisher who displays the sculpture and shares it with love.

5th is the viewer who looks, reads, and touches. Appreciating art in all its minute nuances which strike with each sight.

Greatness comes not from the writer but from the reviser and editor.

Remember, just do it, think later.

But if you feel like you've hit a wall laced with writer's block, then please:

CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING:

You have to live vicariously in order to write interestingly.

And On the Road was written by Kerouac when he was 29, after he had lived through the lines he let flow onto that long continuous script.


As Always

Undoubtedly Yours,
Bermuda

The Fireside Debate

I don't particularly pride myself on eavesdropping, but the other day at the coffee shop down the street from my house, I just couldn't resist; a man can only take so much. I walked in, ordered my cup of joe, sat down with the homework that I was planning to work on, and immediately caught on to a heated debate between a gentleman and gentlewoman sitting by the fireplace. After listening for only a few minutes, I unraveled the core of this debate from the entanglement of comments it had been covered in.

The core of their argument was: is reader response theory a valid literary theory or not, based on the way most people use it.

Immediately this brought me back to a class I took last year with Jack. He and I enrolled in a 20^th century British Literature course, and one of our assignments was to pick from five literary theories – Stanly Fish's reader response theory being one of them – analyze a text with our chosen theory, and present it to the class. Needless to say, almost every single student enrolled in that class chose reader response theory; it was considered the 'easy way out.' Because of that, the presentations given by our fellow students turned into, what seemed to me as, journal entries expressing why the presenter saw their mom or dad in some of the characters, or why this made them really like certain characters over others, or sympathize with the antagonist rather than the protagonist. It was bad. Jack took no hesitation in expressing his dislike towards these types of presentations as well as, and though it was only the tip of the iceberg for me, the reader response literary theory.

Now let me clarify. Both the debaters in the coffee shop, as well as Jack and I did not have a problem with the theory because of what it proclaimed, but rather with the way that people misunderstand and misuse the theory. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that it seems to be one of the most widely misused literary theories out there, out least from my experience.

So with that said I want to open the floor to the readers. Jack and I's quarter ended, and that coffee shop closed and the two debaters went home, but that doesn't mean that this discussion has to. I want to hear all of your opinions on reader response theory, its shortcomings, its strengths, if it is and should be considered a valid literary theory. And anything else that you see pertinent to this debate. I look forward to reading your responses.

Until next time,

Nick

Did You Know Dr. Seuss Was a Racist?

Our favorite authors aren’t always who we think they are… But what does that really matter?

This last Friday, March 2^nd, was Dr. Seuss’ birthday, and I spent a portion of my afternoon googling all things ‘Seussian’. I’ve always been intrigued by the man who helped millions of children appreciate the craft of language through his simple rhymes, the man who taught me of the Sneetches and their stars, of the Lorax and the trees, and of the simple connection that we all can share as inhabitants of this fantastic world. In my research, I stumbled across this New York Times article and was horrified to learn something that I never knew about my favorite children’s author: Dr. Seuss, the colorful, rhythmic hero of my childhood who taught me to love my fellow man and who is probably responsible for my inherent love of all things rhymy and fun, was a racist.

I was shocked. It turns out that, during WWII, Dr. Seuss didn’t care much for the Japanese citizens who inhabited the West coast of the United States (Please check the article to learn more). His political cartoons played a role in shaping the views of not only the Japanese but also Japanese-Americans in the nation during war time, and some of his most controversial political drawings may have even helped influence public opinion enough to scare the people of America into allowing the implementation of Japanese internment camps in the United States in 1942.

I continued with my research, and I wasn’t surprised at the outcry of the Asian community; many Japanese-Americans are still outraged by Seuss’ fear-mongering and racism and reject him as the father of reading in American culture. Their anger is justified, but some take it too far; I was a little disappointed to find that Koji Steven, a Japanese blogger on 8asian, a collaborative Asian-American/Asian-Canadian blog, goes so far as to say in this article that “Because of these cartoons, I will never read a Dr. Seuss book to my child. I will not even allow one in my house”.

Okay, while I can understand the anger towards the man on account of his prejudice towards Japanese-Americans, I can’t understand the dismissal of his work. I mean, really, is there anything racist about any of his children’s books? Is a child going to be tricked into hating the Japanese by reading The Cat in the Hat? I think it is important to separate the work from the man in this case and understand that, even though he wasn’t the best guy in the world, his books do a damn good job of teaching kids about language.

If we refused to read texts by scumbags like Steven is suggesting, we’d be left with quite a small canon; the amount of racists in literature is ridiculous, and the alcoholics fill the rest of the space. Humanity would lose a lot of its best literature if we read only those works by authors who we might get along with – and there are plenty of authors who aren’t necessarily scumbags, but are just plain weird. As an example, I offer Emily Dickinson, because, while I can’t say she was a hateful or bad person, I don’t think I would enjoy knocking back a few cold ones with the dark-minded recluse. Very few authors are likeable after all.

We must ignore the authors, the assholes and the weirdos – forget about them and let them drift away into the void that their text has travelled across – but embrace the texts that they have left us, because a lot can be learned from the works of even the biggest of douchebags or the oddest of closet-sociopaths when their personality is overlooked.

When it comes to Dr. Seuss, it doesn’t matter to me if he ate babies, his work has made an enormous impact on the culture of humanity, and his work is worth reading. So does that make me a racist too?

You Are What You Drink

As John Cusack's character says in the wonderful High Fidelity, "what really matters is what you like, not what you are like." To some extent, the same can be said of drinks and authors; as much as they are what they drink, they often write like they drink. Let's take a look at some examples:

"After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. After the second you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world. I mean disassociated. Take a top hat. You think you see it as it really is. But you don’t because you associate it with other things and ideas. If you had never heard of one before, and suddenly saw it alone, you’d be frightened, or you’d laugh. That is the effect absinthe has, and that is why it drives men mad" - Oscar Wilde.

Absinthe. If you've had it, you know what it's capable of; if you haven’t, you've probably heard something similar to what Oscar detailed above. Here's the lowdown: the average bottle of absinthe, and there are countless varieties, is 70% alcohol. That's pretty high and with the fun belief that absinthe either does, or once did, contain hallucinogenic components, the wide-spread appeal of absinthe is not difficult to understand. The ethos of absinthe is strongly based in its association with creativity, freedom, and insanity. Many writers and artists at the turn of the 20th century had a strong affinity to the drink as a result of those associations. But everything about absinthe is perfectly suited to Wilde like it is to no other. Just as his writing is an examination of the eccentricities of life and beauty, absinthe entices the consumer to follow the mysterious green fairy on whatever dalliances she fancies. Who knows what you could experience if you just go a little crazy.

Hemingway liked absinthe too; he supposedly drank it everyday while living abroad, and that was even after it was outlawed. The law never stopped old Ernest anyway. But, according to an article on npr.org, Hemingway's perhaps favorite drink was the mojito. This surprises me because I like to think that Hemingway was too much of a man to drink anything with light rum in it. But, alas, this further reveals the sensitive person that seemingly hit beneath the bravado. I like to picture my Hemingway drinking a whiskey neat. But that's because I believe the drink makes the man, and Hemingway was simply not a man made by mojitos. But, what really mattered to Hemingway seemed to be one thing: that he became intoxicated by whatever means necessary, and in that regard he and Jack Kerouac would have gotten along splendidly. "A man does not exist until he is drunk" - Hemingway. Ah. Gotta love that man.

In the literary bar of my mind, Fitzgerald just walked in, took a seat next to his buddy Hemingway, and ordered a gin neat. Supposedly, Fitzgerald preferred this drink because it could be easily concealed with little odor to reveal its presence. It must also be noted that Fitzgerald was a beer drinker if for no other reason than he was Irish. An Irishman is not an Irishman if he doesn't drink beer. Now it may seem a little unfair to in anyway judge Fitzgerald on his drinking habits being that it is widely noted that he was a true lightweight. However, just as Fitzgerald's prose is like a lighter, more easily consumable variation of Hemingway's more harsh and sometimes off-putting constructions, so too can their drinking styles be compared. And Fitzgerald's lightweight nature never stopped him from trying; as determined as he was to be the greatest writer who ever lived, he was equally set on consuming beyond his means. He once said, "In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning." I imagine there's more literal truth to this statement than we may initially recognize. After all, most of Fitzgerald's life was a perpetual 3am party on the verge of becoming a hangover.

Last, but not least, the absolutely insane life of the party just walked in. If no one has gone running through the night breeze with a shotgun in their hands just for the sheer exuberance of it, that will be happening soon. Of course, I'm referring to Hunter Thompson. That stir-his-drink-with-his-bare-finger madman. And that finger was normally being inserted into (please ignore how dirty the first part of this sentence sounds) a glass of rum on the rocks. Thompson was a true outlaw, living outside the bounds of any kind of conventional society, so what else would he choose but the drink of a pirate? For Thompson, the connection between living life and the consumption of large amounts of intoxicants was undeniable: "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."

These drinks, and no doubt the other substances that they were often consumed with, may have very well played major roles in the demise of these men. Oscar Wilde and Scott Fitzgerald both died because their bodies ultimately fell apart in their forties. While, Hemingway and Thompson may have lived to be older men, they eventually chose to take their own lives, a choice that shows a deterioration of mental health if not physical, a process that is no doubt aided along by the over-consumption of alcohol. But, as Thompson seems to allude to in his quotation above, what would these men have been without these substances? This question is not meant to imply that these men were only great because they drank and/or abused drugs; nor is it meant to diminish the signifance of health, happiness, and well-being to any human's life. All of that said, the answer to the above question is undeniably, "they would not have been the same." We would not have A Picture of Dorian Grey, "A Clean Well-Lighted Place," The Great Gatsby, or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas if these men didn't drink. This is not to say that drinking is what fueled their brilliance, but it is to say that it's inseparable. Each of these men were in their own way tortured by what they saw in the world, and that same torture is what led them to drink and to write.

Until next time,

Leena

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6624971