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