I’ve been writing since I was in single digits. It started with diaries; hardback books with butterflies or flowers on the cover and a lock that came with a tiny little key providing the illusion of security, the kind of book any intellectually precocious little girl with a mother who valued smarts might have. I still have those diaries, big loopy handwriting (always in blue if you please) replete with bad spelling and half-formed thoughts.
Prose, mostly, came later. Typed away on my second computer (it was an 8088) in a program that was meant for business and not the home user and that ran off two 5 1/4 inch floppy disks, most of my stories from that era were little things to entertain myself or to express longings it wasn’t then possible for me to let out in the world. Many of them, I freely admit, are quite dirty.
In college I continued to scribble away taking the only creative writing class my undergraduate institution offered in the time I was there from a graduate teaching assistant who really wanted to be at Bennington with Brett Easton Ellis but had missed her chance. It was a fertile time for me though, and the writing from then is sprinkled with vivid imagery and sensuality. Speed writing exercises on fruit and snack foods that were really metaphors for desire; short stories full of awkward pauses where not much happened but the characters yearned, and yearned hard, straining against their own frailties and general humanity to try to be more. The spiral bound notebooks sit silently on my shelf, each one bearing scuff marks and bruises from being hauled around with math books and philosophy texts, each one covered at some point with a blur of ink from being well used on an outdoor subway platform during a rainstorm.
It wasn’t until graduate school that I got the most pivotal piece of advice I’ve ever had from a writing teacher. Creative writing seminars can be one of two things: intensely rewarding and productive or an absolute snake pit of loathing, jealousy, and betrayal. Which the seminar is depends as much on the professor as it does on the students in the seminar, and the professor I had for mine managed to take what would have been a marginal group and make it useful.
He got around the big ego on the Stanford grad former Army officer who decided mid-stream that a Master’s in Film wasn’t good enough and he was going to get the MFA in Creative Writing instead. He pulled vivid, interesting stories out of the alumna who was using her benefit to take an evening course for just $50. And he managed to make me realize that despite all of the folding, spindling, and mutilating my screenwriting instructors had done over the previous three semesters to get me to conform to the Hollywood model (9 plot points occurring at specific places in the script serving specific character and plot related purposes), it was really character that drives any narrative.
It is the conflict that comes from thwarted desire, from longing and yearning, from the trying to be more, better, different that makes a story interesting. How he got me to realize this was by making me read. He made me read Raymond Carver who wrote in a minimalist style that Hemingway would have envied.
This professor gave me a book of short stories, and in these stories pretty much nothing happened. I still have it, somewhere, but the only one I remember was about a woman waiting for her child to come home from school on a fall day, sky slate gray and it won’t quite rain; just cold enough that the wind gets down the collar of your coat. All she wants is for the man she’s talking with as she sits at her kitchen table to be out of the house before the kid gets home. Everything else was details: the way the cigarette butts filled up the ashtray; the ring his coffee mug left on the Formica table top; the rushing of the clouds across the sky out the kitchen window hung with curtains that seemed to the woman to be way too colorful for the view they framed.
On asking him why Carver my professor said he wanted to shock me, to make me think about how characters create story and that what I should do is read, widely and anything, anything at all, but to pay attention to how the characters grew and changed and drove the story. And this brings me to the point of this entry: I have not been reading enough this year and I’ve realized, finally, that it’s one of the causes of my general discomfort. For if I am not reading, I can not write; more accurately, I can not listen to the world and can only listen to what is going on in my head, and my head has not been a pleasant place of late.
Over the past couple of months I’ve read Christopher Moore whose work very nearly got me in trouble during Federal jury service and who is recommended for his intimate grasp of exactly how surface public transit in San Francisco functions.
I read just recently a not very well written first novel that is an excellent study of just how character can be misused making what could have been the compelling theme of love and the ways in which we allow ourselves to be deceived by our desire for it seem pedestrian and even boring. Despite being not all that it could, this piece of fiction did contain a little truth in the author writing “For while almost by definition every true lover feels that his or her love is extraordinary, only a very small handful of lucky ones can actually prevail over the extraordinary to achieve a garden-variety domestic happiness.” That little bit of truth, along with some others, made it worth the time.
I am currently learning to love the insanity of Jasper Fforde (well, how else would you describe a man who could conceive of a world in which Richard III is performed once per week with actors chosen from the audience and in the manner in which Americans of a certain age approach a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show?) and I will probably return once more next year to Kelley Eskridge’s Solitaire, the beautiful story of Jackal’s change from privileged golden child to full-fledged adult woman.
My great-grandmother often said that libraries will get you through times with no money better than money will get you through times with no libraries. It had a certain wisdom when there wasn’t a superstore on every corner, and it still carries some weight in that the collecting of books in one place under an orderly system produces by alchemy a certain type of magic that can be found no where else.
So, go read something besides me already, even if it’s only a piece of candy romance novel. As for me, I plan on spending some quality time today on the subway, over lunch, and pretty much any other time I can justify it getting to know new friends in print.