Building Your Writing Toolkit: Part 7.3 - Voice as Stain

A quick recap before we dig into the meat of this week’s blog: in the last two week I’ve explained that different authors have different voices that allow us to recognize them, that some genre voices are overdone and that new writers need to learn their own voice and use it to distinguish their writing; this week I’m giving some pointers on separating your narrative voice from the voices of the characters you write.

Do you know how to write an asshole? There are lots of ways to go about it. You can make them do horrible things. You can make them lie to the characters around them. You can give your readers another character’s opinion and explain that the asshole is an asshole. But there are problems with all of these approaches – if you want a character to be an asshole with a heart of gold you can’t exactly write them into performing dastardly deeds. If you use another character to tell your audience that the character is an asshole your audience may be disinclined to believe that character, or they may feel like they’re being led too much. If your character lies frequently it’s easy to see them as an asshole but hard to see them as anything else. So once you’ve run through your options you’re kind of stuck: this character (we’ll call him Dick Jones for convenience) isn’t a bad guy, he’s just kind of a prick – someone who is hard to get along with but who is honest and good at what he does. Pretty much your only choice is to make him sound like an asshole: you have to learn to write in an asshole’s voice.

When you’ve pegged down your own voice it can be hard to sink into a character’s voice. Some new writers are a little ham-handed with it – they’ll write Dick like Draco Malfoy (always sneering and insulting people) and Dick will become very one-dimensional. Some new writers will have so carefully cultivated their wise, authorial voice that they’ll be incapable of writing something that blatantly dickish, and Dick will come across as just a normal guy. The trick is to fall somewhere in between these two extremes: Don’t make Dick cruel, don’t make Dick wise – write Dick like you when you’re pissed off at someone. If you’re angry with a co-worker for, let’s say, moving the schedule around so that you have to work fewer hours, you wouldn’t call them a motherfucking waste of space to their face (at least not in front of your boss), but you probably wouldn’t just accept the situation and work your shifts with him peacefully. You’d snark at him. You’d be sarcastic. You’d talk to him less and maybe ignore his requests for help more. You’d probably tell an embarrassing story about him to another co-worker and laugh (somewhat nastily) before going back to work. That’s how you write a Dick – like you, if you were an asshole. That’s how you write anything, really – drawing on your own experience to fill in the blanks of the work you’re crafting.

You can’t rely on yourself for all of the kinds of characters you’re hopefully going to write. You don’t want to use yourself as a basis for someone committing genocide, for example, but you can probably write a happy, depressed, cold, stupid, clever, bubbly, loyal, prickly, or loving character pretty well because you’ve experienced what it is like to feel prickly, depressed, stupid, and loving before. You are a broad-minded, well-rounded human being who has experienced a wide spectrum of human emotions and you’ve lived through situations where you felt like you were the victim, the attacker, the mourner, the lover, the hero, the coward, or the bastard.

You have a lot to draw on when it comes to writing different emotions and emotional states but, for once, I’m going to tell you that you can’t think like a writer. Writers want to control everything, they want to shape every interaction to perfection and make all of their creations shine in the best light possible. To write well in character voices you’re going to have to think like an actor.

Let’s set up a scenario as an exercise. Pretend you’re an actor getting ready for an audition. Pretend that your character is (in this situation we’ll call her Sally, a 17-year-old cheerleader) the part that you’re auditioning for. The director wants you to play the character like “x”. “X” can be anything.

“Alright, Sally,” the director calls out “you’ve just gotten the news that your estranged mother died. You’re talking to your boyfriend about it – you’ve got a one-minute monologue. Go.”

Now say that monologue. Out loud. Right now.

Did you do it? You didn’t. Maybe one or two of you did. But for those of you who didn’t, why not? You know what 17-year-olds sound like. You know what grieving people sound like. You know what confused people sound like. You know what angry people sound like. You know what girls sound like when they’re talking to their boyfriends. You know what Sally sounds like, and more importantly you know what Sally sounds like to YOU. So go – say the monologue.

I’m pretty sure you still didn’t.

Which is too bad – if you say something out loud you know what sounds right. You also know what sounds very, very wrong.

Actors have a couple of advantages over writers (not many, and access to a steady paycheck is not something either group has as an advantage, but at least writers are taken somewhat seriously.) Actors aren’t afraid of talking to themselves. Actors aren’t afraid of lying. Actors don’t give two shits if anyone thinks they’re a genius or if no one remembers them a hundred years from now. But most importantly actors are expected to be many people – it’s the only skill they’re actually expected to demonstrate (other than table service) on a day-to-day basis. Writers are supposed to be writers – they worry that they might do something that doesn’t seem appropriate for a writer, like laughing in public or occasionally experiencing daylight. This crosses over into a writer’s writing and makes the problem of writing character voices all the more difficult because if you’re afraid of being something other than yourself you’ll have a very hard time sounding like someone else, even if it’s just for a few minutes. So pretend you’re an actor. Get into character. Out loud. Speak the lines you think your character should say so that you can hear how they would sound to someone else. You may feel like your character’s lines are cringe-worthy because you would never say them as yourself, but that doesn’t matter when you’re acting – you’re Sally the cheerleader right now so no one would think it odd for you to sob “I hadn’t s-seen her for years bu-buh-but she was st-sti-still mu-muh-my Mommy!” in front of poor, concerned, stupid, imaginary Tommy the quarterback.

So be an actor – you’ll write better for it – but be the director too. When you start to sound too much like yourself, let the director side of your brain yell “Cut! What is this shit? I thought you were supposed to be in character,” then let your actor-side of the brain sooth its ego and get back into character. And when you get tired of the Hollywood in your head take a step back and re-read what’s come of this acting exercise – hopefully you’ll impress yourself because hopefully getting into character will make your characters have their own voices, distinct from your voice as an author but compatible with the story you’re writing.

And if all else fails there’s the old writer’s standby to help – research. Read the books you love and examine how the author builds her voice in contrast to how she builds character voices. Read books that you think are terrible and see what the authors are doing wrong. If you’re trying to build a character with traits and a history outside of your experience read books about that kind of character in history (for example, read about Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoute if you want to write about crazy dictators or read about Hitler if you’re writing about a genocidal maniac.) Reading is never worthless when you’re trying to perfect your writing, as long as you’re reading the right way – with a critical eye and an understanding of what makes works work.

See you next week, then. I’ll be back with one or two brief entries about dialogue (with a possible pit-stop for monologue) and after that we’re moving into the complicated world of tone.

Have fun, and say the fucking monologue already.

Cheers,

     - Alli

Letter to the Leaves: The Nirvana of Flowetry

My Fellow Contributors,

First, thank you to everyone who came out Friday night for the open mic. We had a lot of good readers and even a great harmonica player. But one of the highlights of the night for sure was the piece of Flowetry played by artist Julius Vergara. And it is with his performance that I want to continue my conversation on the art of Flowetry.

Julius, fellow reading editor Danielle Cofer and I were sitting outside the Coffee Klatch waiting for the night to begin when we began to talk about the pieces of poetry we all were going to be playing that night. I brought a few poems I had been practicing and showed them to Danielle and Julius. Julius, after reading a few of my poems grabbed a piece of paper and started to write down a few lines of his own. After finishing a short poem he tells me that his nearly two year relationship to his (now ex) girlfriend just ended. I could see the hurt everyone experiences after something so familiar is suddenly gone, in his eyes and in the wobble of his voice. But then something personal and (more importantly) raw happened. Julius started flowing word after word and phrase after phrase together until he had woven together a beautiful, moving, power-filled, and dynamic flow about his ex and the importance of moving on.

What was powerful about that moment was not the fact that he had just came up with all the words and rhymes off the top of his dome, it was the manner in which he presented them. It was his swagger and charisma; his strength of personality through the pain of heartbreak.

And so the night began and readers read and poems were heard and soon Julius was up at the mic. He took his turn and read his poem and then walked back down to the table. Next various other readers read and then re-read and finally Julius looked at me with a grin. He stood up from his chair and walked silently and briskly to the mic. Once there he gave a short preamble about his ex and his recent break-up.

What happen over the next few minutes is hard to put into words because it is nothing short of the heart and soul of Flowerty. The whole room, myself included, could feel the raw emotion coming from Julius. He was delivering lines off the top of his head and living in the moment; letting the river of inspiration carry him to what I like to call the flow-er's Nirvana (more on that later).

It wasn't even the words he was saying but the manner in which he was saying them. He had taken his body and his soul from a mere means of communication and transformed them into a single medium through which he delivered a striking metaphysical message about love.

His performance transcended the room and touched my heart.

And as he stepped down from that mic, it didn't matter anymore that his girlfriend had broken up with him. It didn't matter that both of us were teary eyed. It didn't matter that he had just made the whole thing up. What mattered was the fact that he had found something pure and magical inside himself and decided to share it with us.

But it wasn't for the sake of just getting up and sharing, but for the sake of growing. That is the purpose of Flowetry; to grow as an artist, poet, person (what have you). Flowetry knows no concept of fame, no concept of value. It is and always will be something which is beyond the here and now. When I talk to many of my fellow flow-ers they tell me that when they are rolling on a flow they feel a sense of ecstasy; emptiness of thought and calmness of nerves. This is what I call the flow-er's Nirvana. A place where you feel as though you are reciting words long since written. As though you are connected to the multitude of other flow-ers speaking this very instant.

One Mind One Love One Peace One Voice

As Always

Undoubtedly Yours,

Bermuda the Man

Is Feminism still the f word?

This blog is a self-righteous and self-indulgent rant and for the record, I am not menstruating. That being said, Webster’s dictionary defines feminism as:

                1: the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes

Now that seems to be a pretty basic concept that most would agree is reasonable. How is it then that the word feminism makes men shudder and dainty women seeking acceptance shy away? I’ve heard men say feminists hate men. Feminists are shrill bitches. But is it that feminists are hatemongers or is it, as I am more inclined to believe, that the few women who boldly proclaim that they are feminists are extremists that had to reach a point where they don’t give a shit about how the ignorant public perceives this mislabeling? I’d even venture to bet that most of the general public is comprised of closet feminists who are merely afraid of the associations tied to the word. By general public I mean both men and women. Even in the year 2012 it is unpopular for a woman to proclaim that she is a feminist. Even highly intelligent women that I know have shied away from donning the title out of fear of appearing radical. But if you strip away all of the negative associations that have been tied to the word, at its most basic the word merely represents equality. So men, relax. Just because I love my vagina doesn’t mean I hate your penis. I think your penis is wonderful, beautiful, and powerful. You should think so too. I don’t want to enslave you or ridicule you, so you can stop saying I am a feminist as if it is an insult or a derogatory term. All that demonstrates is how ignorant you are and your misuse of the word reveals you to be uneducated or afraid.

 And women—please stop saying shit like, “I am not like other women. I am more like one of the guys. I don’t really get along with girls.” Trust me, there are plenty of highly intelligent women who refuse to accept gender stereotypes that kick major ass. Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Bronte, Joan of Arc…hell, have you met the other women who work for this magazine? Far from typical, blazingly intelligent, and even feminine. When you discredit your gender you discredit yourself and that is just stupid. You aren’t an exception. Get over yourself and stop being misogynistic while naively thinking you are some sort of trailblazer.

 If you want to wear makeup and paint your nails—do it! If you don’t want to, don’t. But whatever you chose to do, it should be because you are an individual not because of your genitalia or a societal expectation. So for the record—I am a feminist. I am an advocate for gay rights. Believe it or not, I don’t have to be homosexual to label myself as such. So please, let us all be reasonable and thoughtful and attempt to accept people as individuals. Don’t assume that I hate you because you have a penis and I won’t assume that you hate me because I have a vagina. I mean, I most likely hate you but it is for a multitude of reasons that aren’t associated with our chromosomal differences.  

Building Your Writing Toolkit: Part 7.2 - Voice as Stain

When you hear your professor speaking does it remind you of your father? When you hear your friend speaking do you think of a cousin? When your boss talks to you does it sound like your mom? Probably not – each of the people you know has unique cadences to their speech and a distinct diction that makes them sound unlike most of the other people you know. You have a unique pattern of speech yourself, one which those listening to you can hear and identify you by.

Writers, however, must be able to command a number of different patterns of speech that they can use realistically for their writing. The rhythm of a poet’s poem is different from the rhythm that same poet would use writing an in-class essay; the diction an essayist uses when speaking to his brother is probably very different than the word choices he would make in his writing.

All of us have different voices for different occasions. You don’t speak to a child the same way you speak to a police officer, and you don’t speak to a bartender the same way you speak to your boyfriend. You also have different written voices. You may sound different when you’re writing a poem than you do when you’re writing an essay, and different when you’re writing an essay than when you’re writing a short story. But regardless of what you’re writing you should still sound like you.

Professors often notice (and complain) that students don’t have a voice of their own in their essays. The reason that students abandon their own voice is because they’re striving to sound academic in their writing – they think that there is a single proper tone that they can strike that will instantly make their papers more academic, just as many students believe a five-paragraph structure is required for academic writing – both suppositions are incorrect and both lead to bland, uniform student work.

Similarly many writers strive for a poetic tone in their poetry and fiction, imagining that if they are able to use properly poetic words and sultry enough phrasing that their work will instantly be more artistic – you frequently hear people describing this kind of language as “flowery” and in my mind that’s not a compliment: remember that flowers are a plant’s genitals – I don’t want a bunch of flora-dongs assaulting me either physically or mentally.

Good writing is, always has been, and always will be about good content. Content is the core of good writing and everything else is, to an extent, window-dressing. But it’s up to a writer to decide whether their content is dressed up tastefully or trashily, and much of what makes a piece “trashy” is what makes it trite or cliché. Writers who are afraid to insert their own voice into their writing frequently fall back on “safe” voices – the kinds of voices that have been used in the genre forever – in other words they use cliché and lessen the value of their writing by making it into something that a reader has heard a million times before and is sick of before getting past the first few lines.

Here’s an example from my own writing: I’m currently creating a character called Dr. Denkmann. She is a psychologist in her late thirties. Here are four genre examples of I one could introduce this character if I was aiming for a certain voice.

“The doctor stood before her dark window, watching the rain pound the pavement below. She had curves that wouldn’t quit, legs that went ’til Tuseday, and a look on her face that said trouble was heading my way.”

“A delicate, russet curl had escaped from Dr. Denkmann’s tight bun. It caught the soft light from the window as she looked up at me, gently adding a dusky hue to the blush rising on her cheeks and casting intricate shadows on her slowly heaving breast.”

“The doctor turned sharply away from the window and brought up a new screen on her desk. The smooth, rigid planes of her face relayed to me that bad news was on its way and the glint in her eyes, like cold, distant stars, only confirmed that my day was about to get a lot worse.”

“Alicia pressed her hand to the window and turned her face to me with a trembling lip. I had only just realized that I loved her and I waited, nervous, for her to confirm the worst – cancer, killing our love when it was young enough to be precious and old enough to have completely changed me from an asshole bad boy into a gentle, caring man.”

So were you able to pick up on the tried, true, tired voice in each of those? (I’ll give you the last one – it was the tone of a Nicholas Sparks novel, Sparks being the only living author to have pioneered a voice in his writing alone that is simultaneously addictive to women and repulsive to anyone who doesn’t like reading sappy books about mended men and women with horrible diseases.) Even if you didn’t manage to pin down the voice without more hints, you’ll be able to get it for sure when I ask which of these is romance? Or which of these is Noir? Or Science Fiction? Now it’s obvious. Painfully and depressingly obvious. Why is it obvious? All of these descriptions have the same core elements: the doctor, the window, and an indication that the doctor is upset. Now try to pin down the genre in the description that I actually wrote:

“Dr. Denkmann moved with a jarring, forest animal grace. Her wide hips and narrow shoulders were a startling contrast to her slender legs, capped with narrow black heels that clacked like a deer’s hooves when she walked. I caught her silhouetted against the window’s dim gray light, her absurd frame supported on a dancer’s legs, before she turned and sat, staring at me with a frown so slight that it was almost obscured by her glasses.”

Can you find a clear genre in that? What if I told you that Dr. Denkmann was a character in a horror story? Or a psychological thriller? Or a science fiction, noir, or romance novel? Would it fit with your common conception of any of those things? Probably not, and that is why most genre novels are derided by literature classes – they are genres that so infect the stories within them that most authors lose their voice to the genre. And fuck that bullshit – you can put any voice you want into any kind of writing you want. Dr. Denkmann is a side character in a psychological thriller, by the way, but I hate writing in tingly, questioning voices – nervousness isn’t conducive to character building – so I try to keep my writing MY writing and genre expectations can die in a fire for all I care.

So how do you assert your voice in your writing, whatever it may be? Well, first you have to know what your voice is. I like adding humor and vulgarity to almost everything I write. I know that because I’ve written a lot of shitty, flowery poetry. Flowery isn’t my thing. I had to practice a lot to know what kind of voice sounds right for me when I’m writing. I wrote a lot of stodgy, academic-sounding essays before I figured out that you can work a clever turn of phrase, a dash of hyperbole, and occasional obscenity into an academic paper and still have it turn out well. I’ve tried (you wouldn’t believe how I’ve tried) to write simpering, simmering romances just so I could have something to try to sell to a publisher but I always get twenty pages in and feel like my brain has turned into a milk shake. You assert your voice by writing, writing a lot, and messing up a lot before you figure out what works for you. And once you’ve found it you do your damndest to never write in someone else’s voice again.

Figure out metaphors that are amusing to you, adjectives that you like and aren’t tired of hearing. Here’s an exercise: in 100 words or fewer describe a bathroom. Describe it in every genre that you can think of. Then give yourself a thousand words and set a scene in that bathroom, and use those thousand words describing it the way you want to. Do it over and over and over until you are happy with the result. Then look at the result and really examine it – what makes you happy about it? What sounds like you? Hand your scene to a friend (or a professor – someone who can actually be critical of you but who knows you pretty well) and ask them if it sounds like you. Then the next day try the same exercise with an animal instead of a bathroom. The next day try a car. The next day try a person. When you’ve worked on it long enough (and it does actually take a lot of work) you’ll have found the elements in your writing that add up to your unique voice. Befriend these elements. Cultivate them. Cuddle them and bring them flowers. Then use them as much as possible to distinguish your writing from the writing around you.

Sorry if that’s massively unhelpful, and sorry if you thought there was going to be a quick fix. There’s never a quick fix when it comes to writing well – you should know that by now.

That’s all for now, Folks. I’ve allowed myself to ramble a little too much, but I’ll be back next week with advice on creating voices for your characters. After that I think we’re moving on to dialogue, or perhaps tone. Tell me which of the two you would prefer in the comments and that’s what our next subject will be.

Thanks for reading, and stay Tasteful,

Cheers,

     - Alli

Letter To The Leaves: The Art of the Flow

My Fellow Contributors,


I first want to point out that our fourth issue, and the last of volume one, hit the intangible shelves of the internet today. I want to give a big thanks to everyone on the masthead, our readers and our contributors. Without your dedication, diligence and love, this issue (which I must say is our best yet) would not have ended this chapter of our magazines story on such a high note.

Now with that said, back to the topic at hand.

My goal with this blog is not to give you my "definition" of what Flowetry is. Rather I hope to start a dialogue between us in hopes of exploring this medium together.

At first glance it is easy to see the etymology of the word. There are two parts of the word. The first part of the word is Flow and the second is -etry coming from the word poetry. From this dissection I get two ideas right off the bat.

My first idea points out the fact that the art of Flowing is a dynamic, powerful, and exciting medium through which to enjoy the spoken word. When my friends and I  circle up at a party or even around a camp fire and drop a track to spit on, we are doing the same thing the bards were doing in ancient Greece when they circled up and recited a few lines from the Odyssey. We are creating a story; stringing together words on a beat in such a way that they are pleasing to the ear. It must be noted before I continue that Flowing goes far beyond hip hop or any other musical connotation.

When I flow, it is a largely spontaneous mental exercise. I have no idea what I am going to say or what I am going to flow about next until I begin to speak. One word feeds the next, which feeds the next and so on.

The second idea encompasses the last part of the word, -etry and by extension poetry. In this part of the medium notions such as meter, rhythm, content, rhyme scheme and form come into account. Where flowing is largely spontaneous, poetry is more about revising. It is about working through the inconsistencies of symbolism and theme. It is where the skill of the writer is put to the test and shown off.

But you see, just ranting off a few drunk lines at a party, that just happen to rhyme, doesn't make you a strong poet. Just like writing, preparing, and reading a poem to a crowd doesn't make you an M/C. What you need is bravado, presence, confidence, and dedication. What you need is a medium which can combine these two and create a new way of enjoying the spoken word.

And when we put these two together we get such a medium. A medium which is both dynamic and structured. Chaotic and fluid. This medium resonates with a particular population of poets who are looking for a way of expressing their words in such a way that captures and holds the attention of their audience.


It is a way of weaving words in such a way that whirl in the wind of your audience.

Play music with words and paint pictures with sounds. Share your voice.


And now its time for you to share your thoughts are on the subject.

Please and Thank You.



As Always

Undoubtedly Yours,

Bermuda the Man

p.s.

Be. Do. Share.

A Brief Interruption

UPDATE -
If you're having trouble downloading, pop over to THIS PAGE and you'll find a possible solution as well as a stumbling explanation. 

We will return to your regularly scheduled blog after this brief announcement:

Hey Dudes, we've got a new issue out. Click the link to download -

Volume 1 Issue 4

That is all. Please return to your previous enjoyment of our rantings.

Thanks,
     - Alli

Is it Better to Burn Out?

Is it Better to Burn Out?

In his frequently quoted and often debated song, “Hey Hey, My My,” Neil Young said, “it’s better to burn out than to fade away.” This song speaks to the artistry of gritty music that makes its point in an often assaulting or fiery display and soon disappears. Young pays tribute to the punk scene, grunge music, and all music with the ability to transcend genres through its emphasis of the sudden explosion or burst of imagination in music, making it relevant. I have recently been haunted by Young’s lyrics and I began pondering how Young’s philosophy applies to the writing process.

I have always attributed my success, if you can call it that, to my tenacity. After all, I am not the most intelligent human being. Don’t get me wrong, I have been complimented/insulted with such statements/criticisms as, “You think far too much.” This of course, if you think about it, doesn’t say anything about my level of intelligence. There are far too many of my peers who are better read than me. I am no grammar Nazi. But what I have always prided myself on is my tenacity. Sheer force and willpower has carried me through the majority of my undergrad classes. But what is a writer to do when she is tired, really fucking tired of it all. Maybe this exasperation is coming from the fact that it is week 8 of the last quarter of my undergrad degree. Nevertheless, the question of how to keep a student or writer’s fire stoked is an ongoing concern of mine.

 In the past I would thrive when my back was against the wall. Tell me I can’t do it. Tell me someone else is better than me and I come out rhetorically swinging.  But what do you do when you are all alone and all that you have is a slew of due dates staring you in the face. There is no professor baiting you. There are no intense personal dilemmas weighing you down that you must break free of. It is just you and total silence. In these instances, I suppose, a writer must turn to dedication, but dedication is such an uninteresting word. Dedication doesn’t fire you up or burn your gut. I guess I am just addicted to the rush of always teetering on the edge of running out of gas. Now I am finally running out. Now what? Guts can get you through an undergrad program, but I doubt they’re enough to ensure success in a master’s program, let alone a PhD program.  If you are looking for some big answer that is going to recharge and re-inspire your waning passion or provide you with some insightful life plan, I haven’t got it. All I can offer is my honesty and strange musings. So I turn this over to you, reader. What do you do to keep charged? What inspires your writing or more specifically successful longevity?

Lennon weighed in on Young’s message and harshly criticized it defending the brilliance of an artist with staying power. He basically criticized Young’s glamorization of early tragic death, insisting he valued vitality and artists like Gloria Swanson and Greta Garbo. I suppose both Young and Lennon have valid points, but I can’t help being continually attracted to the destructive flame. Then again, “once you are gone you can never come back."

Where Did All The Culture Go?

Lately, I’ve noticed that modern culture has lost its relationship with its roots. More and more, it seems to me that my society doesn’t cherish the thoughts of the men and women who came before them. In the consumerist, self-centered society that is modern America, is literature being left behind?  

Today, in my “Geography of California” class, my professor played a video from his vault that explained the environmental impact of the channelization of the Los Angeles River. What struck me most about the old video was not the touching shots of native birds nesting under man-made bridges, or the dramatic pull-away camera tricks that caught the LA skyline behind a haze of fog as the sun set behind the edge of the concrete waterway; it was that during one of the many cheesy scenes of a man talking in front of a green screen, the decision to pave the river was described as a “Faustian bargain.”

Now, I hate to sound pretentious, but I’m pretty sure that the other students – mostly freshman – in that general education class had no idea what the speaker meant by “Faustian.” Hell, I didn’t even learn about Faust until my Senior Symposium class that I took this last winter, and that was after already reading many times more than the average engineer. In the case of this old video about the LA River, I’m afraid the reference to literature was lost because our society simply doesn’t care anymore.

Let me jump back a few days. I was standing in line at the Poly Fresh, a convenience store on campus, balancing a book, Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, on my head (it’s just what I do), when an older man in line behind me asked what class I was reading such a great book for. While we waited in line together we talked about the novel and about his position as a music professor who loves literature. At the end of our little talk, as I was approaching the register, he nodded his head and asked, “Muss es sein?” (Must it be?). To which, I responded, “Es muss sein!” (It must be!). It isn’t surprising that we got quite a few confused stares from the eavesdropping customers in line with us.

Again, the apathy towards literature became hauntingly apparent to me. The people in the store looked at us as if we were crazy men, spouting off nonsense – and, in a society that doesn’t embrace literature as a bridge for the emotions of individuals to interact with one another, perhaps we were.

It’s almost sad to compare ourselves to the Greeks. Likely, for a Greek man living at the peak of his civilization’s success, it would have been difficult to go a day without experiencing what we now have come to call the Classics; perhaps in Athens a man couldn’t walk through the center of his city-state without running into a relief of Athena, or Poseidon, or some other deity, and, most likely, he could not go the day without hearing of some reference to great Greek literature. The stories of his people surrounded him, and they connected him to his fellow man. Every man could relate to his neighbor through the myths that they were both raised on, and society built upon itself in this way.

Today, the closest thing I’d say we have to the relationship that the people of Greece had with their art and culture is our relationship with Superhero comics. Our society doesn’t seem to care about literature anymore, and our myths are now our movies.

Tonight’s blog post is a pretty short one. I simply wanted to point out my concerns and tell a few stories from my past week on campus. So, what do you think? Will our society ever fully lose its sense of art and culture? And will “The Avengers” be a great work of art that is regularly referenced a thousand years from now?

Poetry About Cats

A few years ago my husband accidentally ended up at a poetry reading. This was unpleasant for almost everyone involved, since my husband doesn't much care for poetry and poets tend to be scared of large angry men wearing camouflage. Also my husband is something of an asshole. This was a reading that featured poetry of the more deplorable sort, all flow and form and no content - the kind of reading where the audience snaps their fingers and nods, full of insight and benevolent enlightenment and benign sneers, as poets read about their exes and stare at their shoes.

After hearing about the depth of someone's soul for the umpteenth time my husband got up from his work (the reading had appeared around him while he was working on some technical drawings) and approached the microphone. He cleared his throat and this is what he said:

 "My cat peed in the corner.
Poor Kitty.
Poor Me.

My dad told me to clean it up.
I hate you dad.
Bad Kitty.
Poor Me."

He sat down to thunderous silence broken by nervous shuffling and a few half-hearted finger snaps. I was horrified.

"They were just reading their poetry - getting up there and making fun of them was mean," I said.
"But their poetry was awful," he replied.
"They weren't very good poets, but they were talking about things that meant something to them - they were sharing their feelings."
"So was I," he said, "I shared my feelings of annoyance with their bad poems by sharing a bad poem that I had written."
"But you invaded their activity, you broke the mood."
"Good," he said, "when they invaded my coffee shop they interrupted my mood. Why am I the bad guy?"
That did bring me up a little short. I tried one more thing: "but why did you have to make up a poem about cat piss?"
"Maybe cat piss is important to me. Maybe my cat is really important to me. What's wrong with a poem about a subject like cat piss if that subject speaks to the poet?"
"Well there's nothing wrong with it if you MEAN it, but you didn't mean anything there, you just wanted to make fun of them."
"No, I just wanted to let them know that their poetry was cat piss."
"You're an asshole."
"No, I'm a Dadaist and that was performance art. My medium was angry poets."
And I laughed. He may be an asshole, but at least he's a funny asshole.

But I was thinking about the whole episode recently and wondering why it still bothers and amuses me: I came to the realization that it sticks in my memory because poetry about cats is uniformly awful. I've been running into a lot of cat-based poetry recently and I'm sick of it.

We've had submissions of cat poetry for the magazine. My cat-obsessed friend wanted to know what I thought of her poems about her cats, and then wanted to know what I thought about her cats. At work we recovered a file for a client - it ended up being two-hundred pages of a prose-poetry novel about a cat with a Ph.D.

Fuck poetry about cats. Fuck cat people. On the way home from work today I saw a Prius with the license plate "MY2CATS". Hey cat people, let me let you in on a secret: nobody wants to hear about your cats. I'm sure they're adorable, I'm sure you love them, I'm sure they're little ladies an prim little gentlemen with the oh-so-tidy way they clean up after themselves, but no one gives a shit. Want an example? Go to Cracked.Com and look up Christina H. - she's a comedy writer whose column is called "Let Me Tell You About My Cats!", which is funny because she understands that no one ever wants to hear about anyone's cats. Want another example? Wordsworth was a really good poet, and here's a pretty goddamn bad poem he wrote about a cat:

That way look, my infant, lo!
What a pretty baby-show!
See the kitten on the wall,
sporting with the leaves that fall.
Withered leaves - one - two and three
from the lofty elder tree.
Though the calm and frosty air,
of this morning bright and fair.
Eddying round and round they sink,
softly, slowly; one might think.
From the motions that are made,
every little leaf conveyed
Sylph or Faery hither tending,
to this lower world descending.
Each invisible and mute,
in his wavering parachute.

But the Kitten, how she starts,
crouches, stretches, paws, and darts!
First at one, and then its fellow,
just as light and just as yellow.
There are many now - now one,
now they stop and there are none:
What intenseness of desire,
in her upward eye of fire!
With a tiger-leap half-way,
now she meets the coming prey.
Lets it go as fast, and then;
Has it in her power again.
Now she works with three or four,
like an Indian conjuror;
quick as he in feats of art,
far beyond in joy of heart.
Where her antics played in the eye,
of a thousand standers-by,
clapping hands with shout and stare,
what would little Tabby care!
For the plaudits of the crowd?
Over happy to be proud,
over wealthy in the treasure
of her exceeding pleasure!

You can find "The Kitten and the Falling Leaves" in lots of places, but I found that particular version at catquotes.com, which includes pages like "Cat Quotes - Several Hundred Quotes by Famous, anonymous, and other cat lovers" and "Famous Cat Lovers - NEW" and is where the Internet's nightmares come from.

Long story short, cats are like any other subject - if it gives you a noticeable erection you probably shouldn't write a poem in which the reader can sense that erection. Stop drooling over your subjects, it grosses readers out.

As a counter example, subtlety is a frequent component of strong poems.  Here's a Carl Sandburg poem that is not about cats:
The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

 "Fog" is about fog but touches on fog using imagery we all understand as it is associated with cats. Carl Sandburg's cat-boner is not visible here, nor is a fog-boner or any other kind of engorgement. See? Subtle.

 So anyway, shut up about cats, chill out about your subject, and aim for subtlety. Sorry to derail you all from my normal series (we're on to voice right now) but my cat died today and I wasn't feeling up to writing a thoughtful, considered blog. Coincidentally, if you've got a moment to spare you should totally google "I'm sad because my cat died today" and enjoy the unintentional hilarity.

Later dudes. Be excellent to each other.

Cheers,
      - Alli

"There Is Grandeur in this Life" -- Richard Dawkins

I was very excited to read Slick’s latest blog post. Like him, I, too, have been reading a lot of science-based texts – more specifically, I have been reading a lot of Dawkins. I finished the God Delusion – I know, this is more of a philosophically grounded text rather than a scientific one – and I started The Greatest Show on Earth a couple of days ago. The issue I’ll be tackling for the sake of this article, though, will be in regards to an idea Dawkins put forward in the former text.

Near the end of the book, if not the end, Dawkins brings to light the fact that there are four pillars by which people come to trust and follow god. They are as follows: explanation, exhortation, consolation, and inspiration. These four things are the marrow of, I’m assuming, all religions – especially those in which a personal relationship with a supernatural deity is a crucial component. These things, however, need not be grounded in spirituality. I will discuss briefly each of these three concepts. Following this discussion, I would like to see your thoughts on the subject.

Explanation is a big one, which is why, I assume, it is the first to be listed (the order is obviously not alphabetic). Early religions were formulated in order to explain why things happened. We now know – if we truly can, that is – that these religions didn’t explain much. We assume there is no Jove living high above us (or among us, raping human women, no less) or a Loki perpetually fucking the Aesir up. These gods were meant to explain the universe in order to make it less scary. I, however, think there are better, more sufficient ways to explain the universe. As far as we know – and to the fullest extent that we can currently know – the universe is 14-some-odd billion years old. I won’t go into that more than I need to, nor will I go into this discussion more than I need to seeing as this part of my article can go on for thousands of pages. If anyone is interested, though, there is a fantastic book called Just Six Numbers by Reese that sheds some light on the six factors that shape and mold the universe into the elegant thing it is today. Also, anything by Brian Greene would be good – namely The Elegant Universe. I think physics, mixed with chemistry and biology, is more than enough to explain the universe, and by said explanation, it is easy to create meaning for oneself. After all, that is why we have books, folks.   

Moving on to exhortation, Dawkins uses exhortation to discuss issues of morality, specifically doing so by claiming morality does not come from any religious doctrine. According to an article Dawkins cites when lecturing about the matter of religious-based morality, there is no civilization on this earth that does not share one thing in common: the “Golden Rule.” We all know the Golden Rule, and, assuming you aren’t a psychopath or a crazed sycophantic zealot, everyone generally abides by it. The Golden Rule is, essentially, do to others that which you would like them to do to you. This phenomenon has an evolutionary explanation. In the early ascension of man through the homo family, small bands of people formed tribes, and it was advantageous to do good to others. This notion was primarily kept within familial boundaries; however, as more and more humans began to enter the world, it became more and more likely that human “A” would run into human “B” even though they were not immediately related. This notion has been embedded into our psyche and now lies latently in our neurology. Interestingly enough, our propensity to follow the Golden Rule is now a misfire. For example, I am going to Paris in December. If I meet a middle aged Parisian man on the streets, the chances of meeting the same man a second time are remarkably slim. I would, though, certainly abide by the Golden Rule while interacting with this man, and this is because the misfiring of a human’s Golden Rule inclination is still prevalent in the brain.

Consolation. This is something we all need. Though it may sound romantic, a sense of consolation is quite necessary for human beings in order to thrive. We are fragile creatures living in a rather unforgiving, indifferent universe. If you take a minute to look around – I mean really take in the devastating ubiquity of our vast universe – it becomes quite apparent that a majority of it is uninhabitable; in fact, if a human were to suddenly find his or herself in a random part of the universe at a given moment, said human would almost certainly die instantly. This is a harsh reality, but it is the way the universe is. So where do we find consolation on this tiny blue dot (harkening back to Sagan)? Again, looking around we can find a multitude of beauty and elegance, both on our planet and off of it. Having a basic understanding of the universe allows one to fully appreciate the unique beauty that is the cosmos. Not to mention one only has to walk a few blocks down any street in America in order to find a library or museum filled with art and literature. Understanding of all these beautiful things provides me with more than enough consolation and reassurance that life is a miraculous, beautiful thing that I refuse to take for granted.

Finally, we come to inspiration. This, I think, is the most remarkable aspect of Dawkins’ argument. I believe the last chapter of his book is called, “There Is Grandeur in this Life.” This is a beautiful title and it wraps up the whole book so well. There is beyond a shadow of a doubt so much beauty in this world and in this life. Dawkins illustrates a beautiful picture in his book. He says – and I’m, again, paraphrasing here – that if we look at the timeline of the universe, the totality of the existence of everything can be measured on an astronomically large ruler. We, the people alive today, are but a laser point trudging slowly across its surface with everything behind and beyond the point shrouded in darkness. This, again, illustrates the miraculous nature of our lives, and it implores us not to take it for granted. To be alive during this pinprick on the ruler of time is a special thing, and we all ought to “run faster, stretch our arms out farther, [for] one fine morning…*”

So please folks, let me know what you think.

J

*taken from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

  

A Novel Idea Part 5: When to Take a Break

My Fellow Contributors,

This week I am returning to my series about the novel I am writing. I am happy to report that I have completed over 60 frames and have finished my first composition notebook.

What I want to expound upon in this blog, is a part of the writing process that I have come to call, The Break Up. It's that point when you put the piece you are working on in the bottom drawer and live. I remember reading somewhere that Adrian Capote would write in his bed and when he had gotten to a certain point in a story  he would put it in the bottom drawer of his night stand. He would then grab the piece he had previously put in there and would start revising it or would start an entirely new piece. And in a way this is exactly what I am doing. But instead of writing an entire new piece of long fiction, I have started dating my long lost partner poetry.


As a writer it's important to realize when you need to put a piece down. Although you should never let a lack of words stop you from writing, when you find yourself forcing words, creating images that don't synch up or are just completely out of left field, then it is time to put the piece "on the back burner" and let it simmer. Remember that writing a book is not a sprint but a marathon. It is an exercise of mental endurance.

Just like any break up, the prospect of being friends is very slim. There needs to be no contact between you and the other. You will find that when you do come back to it, a few things have changed. First and the biggest change is that you are coming to this piece with new life experiences; new images and words for conversations. New little minute details that will complete a character. Perhaps the character you were going to kill off, you now decide should stick around for a few more chapters. Perhaps instead of cheap grungy hotel, you are going to have your characters meet up at a strip club. Whatever you decide, it is precisely because you took the time to clear your mind of the expectations and the patterns you have already created that now allows you to better present your characters.

Alli has mentioned this several times in her blogs and I am going to repeat it here: You have to live. You have to meet people, get out of your comfort zone. You have to hear all the praise, and all of the shit. You have to fall, and you have to get back up. You've got to make a few friends and spit a few lines.

And on that note, I want to invite you to my next blog next week where I am going to be discussing the ever evolving art of FLOW-try. Its not just about rhyme scheme and its not simply, hip hop.

It's about presentation.

It's about swag.

As Always

Undoubtedly Yours,

Bermuda the Man

A Writer's Return Home

It has been said that you can learn a lot about a person in discovering where they grew up. Recently, I’ve returned to my hometown, El Monte. I’ve found myself enchanted with these tough streets that seemingly attempt to welcome outsiders with the city's sarcastic slogan, "Welcome to Friendly El Monte." I began doing a little research about this sleepy town, hoping that if I understood more about this tumultuous landscape I could possibly learn more about myself. This in turn provoked a series of other questions about writing and more specifically the impact of the writer’s environment. But first, a little background information.

According to Wikipedia, El Monte, translates from Spanish to 'the wooded place.' It has been described as an idyllic plot of fertile land that stood between two rivers. From its earliest days it had a troubled and violent reputation. The Monte rangers were a group of militia men that assembled in the 1850's in reaction to the bandit gangs of Juan Flores and Daniel Pancho. Once they disbanded, the "El Monte boys," a group of vigilante locals, kept the town in order primarily through the use of lynching. Now I don't know, and in fact I doubt, that Wikipedia’s hyper focus on El Monte's violent roots is a historically well-rounded depiction, but I find it fascinating that the author, much like many El Monte natives, conveys a sense of pride about such a troubled past. In addition to the turbulence depicted in the origins of my hometown, Wikipedia references the whimsical aspects of Gay’s lion farm and El Monte’s ties to the musical performers of the 1950’s and 60’s. 

So what does any of this mean? How does a place and time shape or change a writer’s work? And after all, what does it mean to the writer to return home? Thomas Wolfe argued in You Can’t Go Home Again:

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

Certainly there is a loss of idealism throughout Wolfe’s novel that speaks, not only to the troubled landscape of American society in the 1930’s, but also to the adult naively longing for the simplicity of what once was. I used to wholeheartedly embrace Wolfe’s disillusioned interpretation of the tragedy of change that occurs within an individual, distorting their false romanticized recollections of a former home. I am beginning to relate more with Maya Angelou’s experience of home as depicted in Letter to my Daughter, in which Angelou argues, “I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and the dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.”

Perhaps my desire to sentimentalize my hometown lies in the identification of these shadows that have always existed. Accompanying the shadows are always bursts of unexpected light. In the morning I hear a cacophony of birds chirping and people arguing. These invasive and dissonant sounds signal that while El Monte may be steeped in violence, tumultuous, intimidating, and at times crude, nature has never given up on her. With that being said, I welcome the fellow members of my Few Lines family and all of our lovely readers. Welcome to Friendly El Monte.

The Line between Natural Evolution and Human Evolution – Literature as Extragenetic Code

I like to mix things up and jump into new genres every now and then. That’s why I recently began reading Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden, a fascinating look at the evolution of human intelligence and the way the mind has adjusted to the growth of civilization. All the science I’m dealing with has got me thinking a lot about the nature of the written word as a symbol and how it has affected our species. I find it interesting that, while our brains are set up with the same basic structure as most other animals (for the most part), we were the first to put the things that appear inside of our minds into the natural world as symbols.

Books, not necessarily literature, but the things themselves, the bindings, the covers, and the smells, must be pretty strange to a dog – or any other animal for that matter. Isn’t it bizarre to think that, while a dog might look at a book and see an oddly-sliced hunk of wood fiber with dyes smeared throughout, a man will look at that same book and see a great work of art that was carefully put together in a beautiful binding, crafted with the hope that the message it holds might be carried through time to the minds of many men? How is it that we can see something that is beyond our 5 senses – beyond what is truly there?

The difference in what we see and what the dog sees demonstrates the power of perception that is held in the civilized mind…

When I say ‘civilized’, I’m making less of a distinction of intelligence than I am a distinction of evolutionary strategy – for there is no certain way to say that an animal is more intelligent simply because it is more ‘civil’. To be ‘civil’ is simply to have culture, and having a culture simply reflects an evolutionary strategy that is based on extragenetic information – that is information about ones environment that is passed on by active interaction with previous generations. To quote a classic metaphor, ‘civilized’ man is a dwarf standing on the shoulders of giants. We know what we know because someone knew it before us. 

Sagan points out that human offspring are not “prewired” with genetic survival skills like lizards – we can’t survive on our own in childhood and are dependent for a longer time than any other animal species (relative to our lifespan). As a result, we are forced to spend time with our elders as they take care of us, and we learn and pick up our extragenetic information at this point in our lives. Sagan covers this topic quite cleverly in his introduction, when he points out the bargain that man has made with Mother Nature through our process of natural selection:

While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short time scales. We have made a kind of bargain with nature: our children will be difficult to raise, but their capacity for new learning will greatly enhance the chances of survival of the human species.

I think it’s safe to assume that all of my readers grew up in a time after books were already popularized (I’d surely hope so at least); if that’s the case, then all of us here today were born into this world with some kind of framework of what we were to be as ‘civil’ creatures already written out in code in the books that existed at our birth. In other words, if the physical body of a man is formed based on the instructions that are coded in his DNA, then the same can be said about his mental body and the code that exists in written symbols and cultural memories. That is not to say that we are necessarily mentally shaped by books, but rather that we are shaped by our socialization, and books tend to record – or rather codify – the process of our socialization in hindsight, leaving us with a way to trace the evolutionary path of the human mind.

Our survival has been based on our ability to learn from one another, and the use of books to create a new type of inheritance separate from genetic inheritance -- our cultural inheritance -- has allowed us to evolve mentally to a point where we can see even this. I don't know about you, but I find this stuff to be chilling. In essence, the great authors of the world, through understanding and craft, are writing out the inheritance of the future generations just as Mother Nature, through the glory of chaos and natural selection, wrote our genetic inheritance. More so than ever, I feel that writers are gods.

Not a Very Mother's Day Appropriate Blog

I read an article in the Chronicle a couple of days ago about orphans in literature.  Seems like a strange topic, right? Well it kind of is, but, according to Terry Castle, the author of the article ("Don't Pick Up"), orphans are all over the place in literature and the theme of them is an important one to the story of humanity. 

Castle points out that one of the first places we see orphaning in literature is with the exilement of Adam and Eve from Eden. In that tradition, we see the concept of orphanhood as essential to the process of becoming human.  After all, Adam and Eve lose any real claim to their only parent figure in the moment they are exiled; they become orphans. 

The author exemplifies several other works of great literature that involve and center on orphans and the theme, but most interesting in the entire long article (it's over 7,000 words! Which is one of the reasons I'm giving you the Cliff's Notes) is her perspective of her own students. 

While, she believes that the concept of "becoming an orphan," a true individual without ties (of the sort that restrict), is essential to an individual's growth and increased ability to think and reason on their own, she argues that young people today are not necessarily indulging themselves in any sort of self-orphanage.  She says, rather, that they, as products of helicopter parents, are allowing themselves to remain too close and in too constant of contact with their parents even as they go through their college years, years meant to be some of the most invigoratingly independent of them all.

The bewilderment with which she contemplates her students 24-7 attachment to their parents (seven-plus phone calls a day, constant text messaging back and forth, etc) is wonderful and enlightening because a reader cannot help but ask themselves what side of the table they're on: a momma's boy/girl or an "orphan"?    

I do agree with Castle when she argues that we are killing our chances for independent thinking and independent action when we stay in constant contact with parents and when we base our concept of ourselves on them- what they do, what they expect, what will make them proud, etc.  It's freeing to have someone recognize that this is not the way we should live our lives and that to do so is counter to a literary theme of, and a human need for, self-exploration and a certain amount of self-orphaning in order to fully grow up. 

To somewhat more objectively confirm her point beyond just my instant emotional reaction to it, I compared notes with some of my favorite literary characters.  Let's start with Jay Gatsby (where else?)- he has such a desire to free himself from the ties that bind him- to his past, his upbringing, his family- that he even changes his blood name (James Gatz, anyone?).  Let's go to the other end of the spectrum and take a look at Jo March of Little Women.  Admittedly, this is a story that is pretty centered on family; however, it is undeniable that Jo must break away from her family, move to the city and live on her own, before she can become the person she is going to be.  And with that said, this theme becomes a much more commonplace one- people need to venture out on their own in order to evolve- they must seek out new frontiers, they must cast off expectations. 

As far as the real world goes, though I can't speak for generations of yore, it seems that this trope of independent exploration as a right of passage to adulthood is somewhat uncommon.  Today, this can be blamed on a number of things; the economy is not the least of which.  Of people I know in their mid/late twenties more live with their parents (or are highly dependent on their support) than not.  Hell, the guy who lives in the apartment above me gets weekly grocery deliveries from his mom, to which he giddily exclaims, "thank you, Mommy!" every god-damn time.  Isn't that a little gross?

While I do find myself in disgust over grown men using the term "mommy" and being concerned in any way, shape, or form for their parents' sensitivities toward their lifestyle (I find myself often suppressing a "man-the-fuck-up! Do you think Jack Kerouac really cared if he offended his mom? No, he was busy worrying about the world at hand and giving voice to it!" or something equally irrational), I also recognize that I had the good fortune of being raised by some pretty badass, not-easy-to-offend people (though, I admit, to even point this out as a rationalization of my character may reveal my own struggle with parental over-identification).  Either way, I try to pity rather than judge those who've had more of a Little Woman experience.  But, come on, even Jo learned that at some point, you have to worry about you, and you have to become whoever you're going to be. All on your own.          

Thanks for reading. Until next time,

Leena

If you'd like to check out the article mentioned in the blog, you can access it at

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Case-for-Breaking-Up-With/131760/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

Pouring Out Some Brass Monkey -- RIP MCA

One of my childhood idols passed away today. Adam Yauch, ‘MCA’ of the Beastie Boys, died this morning after a three-year-long struggle with cancer. His death marks the end of the Beastie Boys’ 26 year career that began with the release of their first album, License to Ill, in 1986.

           

           The Beastie Boys have held a special place in my heart ever since I turned to hip-hop music as a kid. Growing up in a lower-middle class neighborhood in southern California, I was one of the only white kids who lived on my street. When the African-American dominated hip-hop culture reached what I would call its peak in popularity (around ’99), I was nearly ten years old – and the target of bullying on my block. It was easy for the other kids to pick on the presumably “racist” white kid.

At such a young age, all of this was a lot to handle; I was a little boy, simply trying to fit in, and I had to live with the fact that I was hated because I was labeled as hateful. The constant prejudice from my peers made me feel like it wasn’t okay for me to be white. Trying to cover up my ‘whiteness’, in the years leading up to my teens I constructed an identity that would help me fit in: I turned to hip-hop music as my teacher and became a stereotypical suburban wanna-be, obsessed with gangster rap and clothes two sizes too big.

The act didn’t always work out in my favor. Sometimes, when I was able to play it off well enough, I was accepted, but, other times, when it was clear that I was pretending, it only made the teasing worse. I suppose I had hoped that pretending to be my bully would solve all of my problems; now, I can see it was only a social defense mechanism, but then, at the time when I was talking like Tupac, it was all that I knew – and the Beastie Boys seemed to have the act down perfectly.

I’m not ashamed to admit that the Beastie Boys were something like role models to me in my childhood; I was an impressionable white kid trying to be ghetto-cool, and here were three whiter-than-white jewish boys who were able to pull it off. I followed their lead, and I eventually learned how to be confident in my hip-hop mask. It doesn’t seem to have pointed me in the wrong direction.

 The Beastie Boys made me feel comfortable in my gangster-rap costumes, and I am thankful not only for the confidence that they gave me when I was desperately searching for myself, but also for the passions that they helped me realize I should pursue. I am pretty sure that the quick trip that I took when I went through my hip-hop phase set a love for language deep inside of me. To this day, though I no longer wear that mask and indulge in the hip-hop culture nearly as much as I used to, I still admire the Beastie Boys’ music, which taught me about the craft that it takes to make a simple rhyme and tell a lyrical story.

On that note, I’ll end this blog with a Beastie classic from their first album, one of my all-time favorites, “Paul Revere”:

It's better to be depressed for something than for nothing.

"Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it"- Sylvia Plath

I feel that I've spent a good portion of my life avoiding writing.  You see, I come from a family of writers- my dad's father has made his living writing novels and columns and the like, my dad himself was a wonderful storyteller, and my brother recently published a novel.  I've always known I have it in me.  However, writing is a pursuit I have resisted throwing myself into, despite my awareness of the fact that if I were to win the lotto, I would spend the rest of my life traveling and writing.

So, if I hold writing as the ultimate standard for a fulfilled life, and if I have it in my blood, what has stopped me? Why do I only write a poem or two every few months? Why have I never really tried to publish anything? Why do I avoid creative prose like the plague?

Because I'm scared to death to do it.

I want you, dear reader, to know that the sentence I've just uttered is a grossly confessional one, probably more suited to a shrink's office than to our magazine's blog.  But there you have it, the underlying truth of my life.  What am I scared of? Many things, not the least of which is starvation.  To me, stability has been an attractive life feature, and that is rarely a quality attributed to writers. 

One of my other big fears is depression.  Writing has always seemed to me a gloomy occupation (and I use that word to mean both profession and something that occupies one's time).  The single month in which I wrote more creative prose than I ever have before or since was also one of the most depressed months of my life.  I had just finished writing my first grad school paper and the oversized couch in my apartment was still littered with Sylvia Plath. As if the entire months' long process of writing that paper had been a sort of literary foreplay, my pent-up, frustrated creativity came flowing out of me over the course of that winter break, aided by a snowy Misery-esc setting, a dark living room, and many frequently lit candles.

I've never been more messed up or more satisfied in my life. 

And, so I realized something today: I'm not a stable person.  I am a person who was inclined to write her first grad school paper on Sylvia Plath and feels a real connection to that supremely fucked up woman's poetry.  I am a gloomy person who is moody and frequently irritated and dissatisfied.  If the purpose of not dedicating my life to writing was to avoid pain, to avoid depression, to pursue stability, it's not working.  What am I getting out of not writing?  

As more and more people around me are incorporating writing into their lives, not shying from it or masking it in other pursuits, I find myself wondering why, of all the things I force myself to do on a daily basis, of all the tasks that are miserable to me, I haven't really found time for writing in my daily life.

I could be amazing. I could be shit. If I don't find a way to motivate myself to really try, I'll never know.  It's a lot of pressure, thinking this way.  But at this point, I'm tired of avoiding the pressure, and I'm tired of not focusing my life on the things that actually matter to me. 

Maybe I gave the orderly life a shot. Maybe it's not worth it. Maybe it's time to do everything I'm scared of. Maybe I'll start with writing. 

Building Your Writing Toolkit: Part 7 - Voice as Stain

Many writers don't know literary voice from their asshole. They write plots and poems just trying to get from Point A to Point B without thinking about how their work sounds inbetween inception and completion. This is reqlly quite sad because the authors through history who have been loved (and perhaps more importantly, remembered) have strong, complex, delicate literary voices. Scroll down the page. Look at what Jack has written this week, find Leena’s most recent post, check out Nick and Slick's musings, read Rainamoinen’s writings. Can you hear them? Can you hear the author here? It doesn't matter if you know these people: if you read three of any of their blogs you will start to hear a voice coming through - you'll begin to know who they are by what they say and how they say it. Jack sounds businesslike to me when he's writing a blog (please note that Jack is a man who will open our meetings by saying "Alright Motherfuckers, what are we doing today?"), but he sounds resignedly whimsical in his poems; someone who is tired of wonder but wonders nonetheless. Leena has a delightful wit, almost as sharp as the sadness frequently found in her writing – she is more consistent in different styles than Jack is, maintaining a very precise diction that balances artfully on the edge of juvenile joy and cutting maturity. Nick writes in questions, even when he writes in statements, asking with his poetry and prose “What is this world we’re in? Isn’t it grand? Isn’t it large and lovely? Aren’t you happy to see it?” – Nick’s writing is full of gentle cheer, warming his readers with its comfort and peace. Slick is a card – hard and churlish and jutting in direct, entendre riddled phrases and sly thrusts of jest. He writes like he wants you to think he fucks: each piece is a fun and sometimes-sloppy romp, to the point but never forgetting that reading is for pleasure. Rainamoinen is a budding rhetorician; he guides his readers neatly to the edge of a tall, stark cliff and happily drops them off, letting them land precisely where he intended. There is a charming contempt in his voice – he writes simply and elegantly, as if it doesn’t matter to him whether you read his work or not, but he’s well aware that you read it anyway. And if you’ve been reading this Writing Toolkit series for any length of time you’ve probably noticed that my voice is somewhat schizophrenic – to quote my own poetry (as any good schizophrenic should) “I’m a casual cynic who prays for optimists, but it’s hard for me to be one when I’m talking with my fists.” I want joy and wonder and sadness and comfort in my writing (humor too, if I can get it,) but I also want to make my point brutally, unmissably obvious (sometimes in the bitchiest way imaginable.) Now think of the Big Names – the writers we all know. How do you know you’re hearing Shakespeare? How can you identify Dickens at a glance? What is it about Emily Dickinson that shrieks out of her poems and declares “I AM EMILY!”? Some of it is style – Dickinson poems are pretty easy to visually identify and if you’re looking at Early Modern English iambic pentameter there’s very little chance that you’re reading anyone BUT Shakespeare. Dickens can be spotted by density alone. But what we read in the authors we love is voice – Shakespeare’s lazy attitude about proper word usage and correct grammar created a unique sound that caught the ears of audiences, creating mnemonics for concepts that other authors had explored but never defined. Dickens’ intense descriptions reshaped the way that novels were written. Dickinson’s disregard for accepted forms and heavy use of atypical rhyme sticks, disjointed, in our minds and helps us remember that it can matter when a bird comes down the path. It is the voice in an author’s writing that speaks to us – that’s why it’s called VOICE. We hear authors in our heads and so novels and poems become conversations, we know these writers as friends because we hear their warmth and sorrow and joy and love in the way they speak to us. Voice is the most important part of a writer’s repertoire because it is what makes an impression on readers. So write like you mean it, write like every paragraph and stanza is a speech, or wedding vows, or a eulogy, because everything you write IS a speech, wedding vows, and eulogy to your subject, your readers, and yourself. Good writing becomes permanent eventually, great writing is immediately indelible. I’ll be back in two weeks with more on voice and how to assert your voice in writing. After that we’ll be back with character voice and separating what your characters say from what you mean. Speak well, Cheers, - Alli