"The drink takes you:" Contemplations on Alcoholism and the Artistic Temperament

When we offer up our admiration, our praise, even our jealousy to the great American writers of the 20th century, we are largely doing so to a group of alcoholics, drug addicts, and general delinquents.  As Hunter Thompson said, "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me." There is a key point made in that declaration: just because I write about something, just because I convey my life the way it is, does not mean I'm telling you to do the same.  But this point eludes many who admire men like Thompson.  I'd love to argue that we should admire his writing alone, not him for all the shit he got himself into, but I know it is precisely that shit that made Thompson a great man, a different man and therefore a noteworthy man.  What would he have been without all the alcohol and drugs? Those things were integral parts of his life, his philosophy. 

And there we have it.  We so easily move from admiration of a talent to mythologizing a defect on the grounds that the two must be related.  My theory as to why we artist admirers and maybe even artists ourselves take part in this never-ending deluded admiration is that many of us are sufferers too; we all want to believe that our diseases, our defaults, our dysfunctions have some purpose. 

There's really nothing wrong with this desire as long as one does not inadvertently become dependent on their diseases, defaults, and dysfunctions and as long as one does not begin to see them as defining features of who they are.  Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."  I see this as applying to more than just a specific instance of drunkenness; rather, it's the whole process of becoming an addict, of wrapping up our identity so tightly in something, something harmful, that we disappear. 

What does all of this have to do specifically with writing? Well, I recently read Stephen King's On Writing, in which he intimately discusses his severe bout with alcoholism.  What I realized is that it's only natural for writers, people who spend their days inside their heads, to struggle with addiction.  Let's face it, it's downright painful to be quietly with our thoughts that much of the time.  As I've mentioned in previous blogs, it is this very fact that has often prevented me from throwing myself into writing, particularly poetry, as much as I know I am capable.  Hell, it is that fact that holds me back now.  It's not an issue of time or dedication.  It's an issue of being willing or not willing to sacrifice a bit of my mental health for a craft.  I'm sure some will contend with me on the inevitability of that occurrence, and on certain days, I might too, but as for today, I know myself.    

So maybe it is a connection, not just admiration, that many readers and fellow artists feel toward men like Thompson.  But a point that King makes that bears repeating is that the suffering, the addiction, all those dysfunctional things, are not required to be an artist, to be a writer.  He contends that the life of the mind is one that inevitably gets along with the tendencies of alcoholism and drug dependence but that natural attraction is not one we must succumb to, and that to fight it is not to fight against creativity. 

Building Your Writing Toolkit: Part 6.2 – Bits and Characters, the Tool for the Job

Last weekend I was talking to my friend Gene when he made an interesting observation. “By and large,” he said, “Stephen King movies suck – they shouldn’t suck, because they’ve usually got a great story, but I think the problem is that he writes people so well; actors in a two hour movie just can’t live up to the people he makes in a seven hundred page book.”

I agree with Gene’s assessment of the situation (it should be clear by now that my appreciation of Stephen King novels borders on obsessive) for two reasons: one, because King is the king of characterization, and two, because people who decide to make King novels into movies generally wouldn’t know what characterization was if it bit them in the face.

Characterization is, as the word should imply, turning something into a character or adding character to something. This is important because if you don’t work at characterizing your characters nobody gives a shit about them.

There are four categories typically used to define characters: flat, round, static, and dynamic. A flat character is one who is two-dimensional, has little to distinguish him, and who has little depth. A round character is one who is interesting and complicated, who has strengths and weaknesses; she isn’t “just” anything – she’s bright but antisocial, friendly but with an evil streak, cruel but loves her family – she has depth. A static character is one who doesn’t change or develop; she is the same character at the end of the story as she was at the beginning, with no highs or lows and very little learned from her experience. A dynamic character is one who changes (for good or bad) and who learns from the experiences he has in the course of the story.

Characters may be flat and static (the dullest and most remedial part of this spectrum – think Bella Swan from Twilight), round and static (interesting but infrequent, Daniel Day Louis character from There Will be Blood is an example of this, as is John McClain from Die Hard), flat and dynamic (most representations of Tarzan and Superman fit this – the generic action hero/cowboy character who is essentially faceless but who makes an important change at some point), or round and dynamic (generally these are the most fun characters to read or watch – Huckleberry Finn is round and dynamic, as are Dexter from the TV series Dexter, Darth Vader, Elizabeth Bennet, and Bilbo Baggins).

The Harry Potter series has good examples in almost every one of these groupings. Harry himself is round and dynamic: he’s not just a perfect, flat little hero – he can be a whiny little bitch, he lies an awful lot, gets into loads of trouble and makes a few huge mistakes – and he’s dynamic in that he learns from his mistakes, is capable of seeing the bad in himself as well as the good, and is capable of changing roles (to the point that he accepts that he may be more of a sacrifice than he is a hero). Draco is round but static: he’s deliciously nasty and lets everybody know it, he struggles with the task of killing Dumbledore, he loves his family even though he is a spoiled brat, and is scared of Voldemort even though he’s supposed to be a death eater – but for all of that he doesn’t really change or grow in the novels; in the end (even in the epilogue) he’s just a sneering aristocrat who doesn’t like Harry – the same thing he’s been all along. Sirius is a pretty good example but not perfect fit for flat and dynamic: we’re told that he used to be a Marauder and that he was really cool when he was a student, but that’s about all that there is to his character except that we see the transformation he takes from ravening criminal to warm (but childish) guardian. Voldemort is, sadly, both flat and static, which makes him a substantially less interesting villain than he could be; he is and always has been evil (even the childhood scenes Rowling tosses in suggest that he tormented other children simply because he could), there’s no depth to him, he never experiences internal conflict, and he fails to interact meaningfully with any character around him – he’s just a monolithic Bad Guy who you never have a chance to identify with as you read the books.

This is not to say that all of the characters in everything you write need to be round and dynamic – you shouldn’t spend as much time characterizing your main character’s distant cousin who shows up for on scene as you should spend on your character – but it’s good to give some depth to most of the characters who show up on your pages. Dickens was brilliant at this – his characterization was sometimes as simple as coming up with a name that perfectly described a character, for instance the anti-change Barnacle family in Little Dorrit, Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times, who drowns in a well, or Sir Dedlock, a staunch and stupid conservative aristocrat in the legal novel Bleak House.

Where your characters fall in the spectrum of flat/round and static/dynamic is up to you, but you need to be aware of what you’re trying to create – if you’re looking to make a really compelling antagonist you’re going to be better off with a round character than a flat one because that will provide a challenging foil for your protagonist. Do you want to write a goofy, fun story, something along the lines of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? Then static versus dynamic doesn’t matter as much in a main character, but it might be important to have dynamic elements to a supporting character – Ferris doesn’t change in the movie because he’s supposed to be perfect, but Cameron gets to stand up for himself at the end and Jeanne turns into less of a bitch – these supporting character transformations make the main character look better than if Ferris had undergone some profound change because he’s supposed to be a silly, flawless, inspiring hero.

Plotting your story before you start will help you make your decisions about what kinds of characters you want, but we’re not at plotting yet so we’re going to just assume you’ve got something of a story planned already.

Okay, so let’s say you know that you want a round, dynamic female protagonist with a flat, static boyfriend, a round, static female friend, a round, static evil stepfather, and a round, dynamic potential love interest. That’s fantastic. How do you make that happen?

I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again – writers can’t be cloistered. You have to go out into the world. Think about the characteristics of people you like and admire. Your mom is stubborn but gentle, your brother is loyal, your father is kind, your friends are funny, your professors are intelligent, your TAs are zealous – no matter who you’re thinking of you can find something admirable about that person. Now describe it. How would you explain to your friends that your brother is loyal? What things has he done in the past that express his loyalty. Did he protect you from a bully once? Did he stick with a friend through an addiction? Does he get angry when someone makes fun of his friends? What makes it obvious that your brother is loyal? Now think of another admirable person – your zealous TA for this example. Your TA shows up early every damn day. She’s talked about the courseload she’s taking in addition to teaching your class. You heard her talk about the job she works on the side, and about the really long commute she has to get to school then back to work every day. But in spite of that you can tell she really loves teaching biology. A professor wandered in during your lab and while everyone was working she was talking to the professor about her thesis – you didn’t even realize that there was a whole community of people dedicated to studying the movement of water in plants, but this woman is one of them and she talks about stalks like they’re holy fire.

When you really think about the people you know and what you like about them (or what you hate about them) you begin to understand how characterization works. How would you describe your roomate’s sense of humor to your cousin from out of state? You’d tell a story, and you’d start that story with a little background: “you have to understand,” you’d say “Jim grew up on a farm fifty miles east of the middle of nowhere. He had more siblings than their family had cows, and…” and from there you’d tell your cousin something exceptionally funny that Jim had done, adding in some of his more common mannerisms for color, and by the time Jim came home your cousin would be itching to meet this funny guy from the farm who keeps her cousin laughing. The way you describe the people you like (or hate) to the people you want to like (or hate) them is the exact same way you need to write your characters, only more so.

The details that you don’t share person-to-person when you’re describing a friend or nemesis are the kinds of things you do need to include in your story. What does your protagonist walk like? How do they take their coffee? Where were they born? What do they think of hairstylists? (That one may sound stupid, but if you’re writing an independent female lead then telling your audience that “her hair is a usually neglected shoulder-length curtain, combed more often by fingers than a brush and mottled by several dyeings of the do-it-yourself variety to an odd, varied brown” does a lot more to characterize her than just telling them that “her hair is brown and wavy, curling softly to her shoulders.”)

So work on details, write down details, but most of all go out into the world and think about the people around you. When you see someone make an interesting gesture, try to figure out why. If the guy in class next to you has green hair then you should make up a story for how it got that way – what the first color he dyed his hair was and the progression he went through. If the teller at the bank keeps her nails short, question it in your head – does she bite them because of an anxiety disorder, or did she once scratch her eye as a little girl and learn a lesson from the pain? Look at the people around you and see what they say about themselves without saying anything – what comes off as practical in clothing versus what comes off as douchey? What do the colors that someone’s wearing suggest to you about their personality? Once you’ve thought about these things in the real world it will be much easier for you to write your characters with some character.

That’s all for this week because I’ve run long once again. I’ll be back next week with some things NOT to do to your characters, as well as some tips about making your characters speak in their own voice.

Until then, Cheers. Go write something.

- Alli

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

Building your Writing Toolkit: Part Four – Building Material for your Material.

Starting off with a quick recap, so far I’ve covered starting a project (knowing how you start to write), clearing off your toolbench (knowing what environment is best for you to write in), and finding your level (understanding what type of writing makes you happy). Now I’m going to start to talk about the actual mechanics of writing – what you’re working with and how to shape it. This blog is about what you’re working with – the buying two-by-fours part of the toolkit metaphor.

When it comes to the material that you’re writing about, pretty much everyone has heard the words “write what you know.” Yes. Well. I have to agree with that at least a little, because it’s awfully hard to write about something that you know nothing about (i.e. Bio majors writing about Milton’s Lucifer or English majors writing about water transfer in plant cells), however I disagree with the idea of writing only about things that you know all about.

Let’s say that you know all about cats. You know their eating, sleeping, mating and fighting habits. You can name every breed of housecat on sight and can tell anyone willing to listen which big cat is that particular breed of housecat’s closest genetic relative. You scoff at the pedestrian knowledge parceled out in Cat Fancy and are writing your dissertation on the role of cats in folklore from the 7th century. Good for you.

Here’s the problem: no one is going to read your dissertation. Your dissertation committee isn’t even going to read your dissertation. You’re so knowledgeable on this topic that no one can argue or disagree with you – and where’s the fun in that?

However, let’s say you know a little about cats. You know what they’re like around strangers, you know that they’re picky eaters. You know that they tend to be the chosen companions of lonely, introverted people. You’re toying with the idea of writing a story that combines your limited understanding of cats with your somewhat more comprehensive knowledge of people in order to explore the dynamics of loneliness in modern cities.

I’d read it. And I’m sure a lot of people (probably people who like cats or who are lonely or both) would read it too.

Writing what you know is a trap. If you write only what you know well, you’re going to spend the rest of your life trying to become an expert on something so that you can write about it.

Here’s a quote from Robert Heinlein that I like to share whenever someone tells me that I need to focus on a single interest: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

As a writer you don’t want to be a specialist: you’ll only end up trapped in a genre, age group, era or field that you don’t want to be stuck in forever. So what do you do to avoid the trap?

Do everything. This is how you build material to write about.

I’m not talking about going to med school, getting a Ph.D. in Political Science, learning seventeen languages, running for Mayor, working at a coffee shop, starting a law firm and running marathons. I’m talking bout the little things all around you.

Too many writers fall into the habit of cloistering themselves in their chosen writing habitat at around the same time they finish college and never going outside again. You can’t get stuck there – go outside.

Change your oil, ride a bus, go to the zoo, take a train ride, walk down a street you haven’t before, take a different route to work, learn how to fix your sink, browse Wikipedia, go into a new bookstore, take up rollerblading, go to Home Depot, talk to strangers – lots of strangers, go to a dive bar, go to a nice bar, go see a Ska band, go to a symphony, take a metalworking class, sign up for dance lessons, dig a hole, draw a picture. Do something that you don’t normally do. Come up with something new every day.

Sure, it sounds trite as hell, but knowing a little about a lot of things is frequently better than knowing a lot about a few things. At the very least you’ll be able to fill in more details when you’re writing, like what kind of wrench you use to remove an oil filter or what kind of paper a watercolor artist is likely to buy. At the very most you’ll find a hobby that interests you enough that you know it well enough to make it the basis of your next novel.

When you hear the phrase “write what you know” it is important to understand that you don’t have to know everything about an incredibly narrow topic; you do, however, have to realistically know about and understand the world that you’re writing. The only way to effectively know about the world you’re writing is to know about and understand the world you’re living in. And the only way to do that is to go outside and play in it.

Writers are a blessed, cursed, complicated kind of person. They have to be flexible enough to learn from any situation they find themselves in but firm enough to know when they’ve learned enough. If all you know is college kids and drugs, have fun trying to edge in on Brett Easton Ellis’s market. If all you know is falling into fantasy worlds, Neil Gamian’s got you beat. If all you see is the mundane becoming terrifying, Stephen King is sticking his tongue out at you and going “neener, neener, neener,” though Kafka was doing it better and earlier. If all you know is gentle, handsome men mildly coercing strong-willed women into lasting, passionate relationships please stop writing because romance novels are awful, and we already have enough of them in the world.

What I’m trying to tell you – and all writers – to do is to go out somewhere on this great, big, spinning deathsphere into the sunshine and find something to write about. There’s a story everywhere, a poem waiting to be written in every instance of human contact, and a novel in every new thing you encounter. So go find it! If you don’t, someone else is certainly willing to.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back next Sunday, Feb 26th, with part five of your toolkit: Pounding it together – Making Narrative Work. This is going to be a big topic, and might be broken up into a couple of blogs. Until then, I’m going to shamelessly self-advertise: last week I mentioned my silly poem “My Homework Ate My Dog,” this weekend I sat down, made some crappy illustrations online, and organized them into a video of me reading the poem. If this is the kind of thing you are likely to find amusing, you may go and amuse yourself with it here.

Have a great week, and I’ll be ranting at you soon,
Cheers,
-Alli

Comic books, pop music, and validity in all forms

At the coffee shop where I hang out I get fairly constant stream of questions from a bevy of surly twentysomethings about what I’ve read recently, or if any of it was good. These kids (many of whom I happen to adore, though that doesn’t keep them from being irritating little shits sometimes) have spent all their literary lives so far sifting through Keates, Byron, Fitzgerald, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dickinson, and Wolfe searching for depth, meaning, and, above all, Art. So when I return a response of “Have you checked out Watchmen yet?” or “I read a really great Hellboy collection recently,” or “You should borrow my copy of The Crow,” or “Did I tell you about that graphic novel Blankets?” or “Have you read any of Miller’s Dark Knight stuff, or flipped through Sin City?” or “I’ve got this great Eisner winner, Maus, that you should read,” all they have to say back is either “Nah, I’m not a comic book kind of person,” or, worse, “C’mon, Alli, you know I don’t read that kind of crap.” This is pretty much the same response I got from English Lit majors in college when they were confronted with my comic book addiction; when I was excited to see Hellboy assigned as a textbook for a SF class, many of my fellow students were disgusted.

I thought we had moved past that attitude. I was wrong.

Pop art is still totally dismissed as art, whether it’s popular fiction (i.e., Stephen King,) popular poetry (i.e., song lyrics,) popular music (i.e., any music composed for mass consumption, including film scores,) or popular art (take your pick of movies, TV shows or comics), if it starts with “pop” or “popular” before its medium it’s considered below the notice of the discerning classes of society (i.e., anyone who has graduated high school.)

Don’t believe me? Listen to the words of a pop artist who knows the kind of mountain he’s attempting to climb: Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys wrote a poem about being in love, put it to music, and included the line “I poured my aching heart into a pop song, I couldn’t get the hang of poetry.” Personally, I think Turner has the hang of poetry, Stephen King has the hang of fiction, John Williams has the hang of music and Mike Mignola has the hang of both written and illustrated art.

In a recent discussion with the editors of AFLM I ended up putting together a pretty passionate defense of pop art as a whole, and it went along these lines: art is supposed to change the people who encounter it, it doesn’t have to mean something to everyone but it does have to mean something important to someone – so all those kids out there who really give a damn about Twilight validate it as art; every kid who didn’t commit suicide in the late 90’s because of the pop-punk Blink 182 missive “Adam’s Song” places the band on a pedestal that no one can remove them from; every kid from 1985 up until now who came to believe in heroes and in being your own hero because of a Frank Miller Batman comic book is proof that Miller is an artist beyond question.

Now, does that mean that all pop art is good art? Of course not, at least not for everyone, just like the literary cannon isn’t good literature for everyone; for instance I hate stream-of-consciousness and no one will ever be able to convince me that As I Lay Dying is a good novel, no matter how many snooty lit majors try to convince me that it’s brilliant art; just like I’ll never be able to convince them that Maus is a fantastic visual novel that should be taught in high schools throughout the world.

I know that this argument is getting into the sticky realm of subjectivity in art that can only end in either agreeing to disagree about what art is or in putting down a definition that I believe is too limiting to really encompass all of what art is, so I’ll leave you readers with a couple of things to mull over.

First: the vast realm of “Art” is hard to define specifically because it is possible for so many people to define so many different things as art that no one definition can really cover all aspects in depth, which is great because it gives liberal arts something to argue about for the next few centuries.

Second: as a child, Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes had a greater impact on my personality, morality, imagination and values than anything other than my immediate family. Watterson was aware of the pop nature of his art and wrote about it in his comics, making the argument that even though he was just a comic writer he was still an artist. This argument was made as eloquently in four-panel strips full of brilliant, cutting prose as it was in the sprawling detail and watercolors of his half-page Sunday masterpieces. So to the arguing Art fiends in coffee shops and colleges everywhere, I leave you with Calvin’s final words as a talisman to carry in the search to find and define art: “It’s a magical world, Hobbes, Ol’ buddy… Let’s go exploring!”