The Rooted Narrator: Negotiating Time and Narrative Distance in Nonfiction (AWP)

(Panelists: Jill Christman, Debra Gwartney, Sonya Huber, Dan Raeburn, Bonnie J. Rough)

I didn’t know what to expect from this panel as I’m not writing a memoir. What I learned (does this sound like a 7th grade essay?) was that what they had to say applied just as fully to fiction. Being that my novel has skips around in time, rooting is key. I just didn’t have a name for it until I heard these wonderful writers speak. I think they should have called it “Tips for Kickass Storytelling”.

I take full responsibility for any lapses in logic and will plead that it is so brilliant, I refuse to explain its brilliance.

• You should always be asking yourself why does your story start here? Why does your story start now? Throughout the book if you don’t know the answer to that, go back and figure it out. You may be lost.
• Rooting is the place your narrator stands to tell the story, the pivot point. You must give your reader a place to stand as well.
• The narrator’s telling of the story must be urgent and necessary. What is at stake.
• For essays, the site of the essay is where the narrator is located.
• The story must start at a moment of instability, when the body and mind are in conflict.
• In Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, the memoir starts by her opening a word document, not by her discussing her husband’s death despite that being the sun the book circles around. The reader feels the immediate impact of the text (the word document). It is tangible and grounding. This gives a foothold and yet a launching pad as the reader is intrigued and searches for explanation.
• Memoirs are not about “me”. They are about the former “me”. You have two selves, the experiencing self and the remembering self; the character and the narrator.
• The distance between the character and the narrator is the story.
• When this is done well you are reading someone’s thoughts. When it is done unbelievably, you are reading someone’s mind.
• Why are you telling this story?
• Why does it need to be told now?

 

Still 40 Pages

I’ve so far typed 40 pages of my WIP. I had a modest goal this weekend and that was to hit page 70.

I’m still at 40.

My youngest woke up Saturday morning at 3 a.m. with the stomach flu. He threw up once an hour on the hour until 8:30 a.m. I got an hour of sleep before it began and then in the early morning hours changed his clothes and sheets three times, spot cleaned the carpet twice and had drifted off at 6 a.m. when his big brother awoke. I got him set up with cartoons and went back to bed for 15 minutes before the youngest woke up happy as could be. By 7 a.m. the three of us were on the couch cuddled up until he got sick twice more.

The great news? No one else caught it (and yes, I’m knocking on wood as I type this). The bad news, his older brother was to have a friend over to play and we had to cancel. I had to break the news to him when he woke up at six, the first thing he said to me after “Can I go watch cartoons?” was “I can’t believe it’s already Saturday! What time does A. get here?”

When I told him his friend couldn’t come because I didn’t want him to get sick, the tears flowed. He sobbed on the couch, poor guy. With a working mom, he doesn’t get to see his friends as much as most kids. It can only be on weekends when we don’t have anything going on.

We always have something going on.

My master plan was to have his friend come over and while the three boys played, I’d get some writing done. It gave me a three-hour window.

Nuts.

Disinfecting countertops, doorknobs, washing all sheets and towels, watching movies and playing video games filled an entire day. Sunday rolled around and all of the Saturday duties had to be done. More laundry, grocery shopping, Target shopping, all so my husband could take care of the yard, a disaster after the recent heat spurt. I don’t think we’ve ever had to mow in March. Crazy.

All of this time spent doing nothing I wanted to, got me thinking about my life. It gave me some time to see things in a new light, or rather an old light that I forget about until I get it sledgehammered into my head.

I’m a mom first, a wife second, a writer third. When one of my kids is sick, I truly could care less about writing. I don’t resent not doing it. I don’t begrudge them. Their health is everything.

I thought about my luck. I don’t believe in luck with events. You make choices and each one leads or doesn’t lead to the next. It isn’t destiny, it’s a willingness to work hard and keep going.

But when it comes to my kids, my husband, my writing, I am lucky. I know that my kids will get over the flu. They’re healthy. With the way I take care of myself, I should get sick more often than I do. If my husband wasn’t willing to be a primary caregiver, I wouldn’t have that time on the train to write, and I wouldn’t have written a book, no less if I had to cook we’d all be sick from eating McDonald’s every night.

I need to work on remembering all of that. I need to be kinder and gentler when I’m at work, be the me I am in the world and not twelve different people depending on the situation. I need to let the chips land where they may.

The book is not the be all end all. It’s a small part of a great big life. My life. My only one. I need to remember that and be thankful for it.

So tomorrow, I start trying to be me and not a version of me to fit a situation. I’m going to try to be kinder and do what I tell my children. If people are unkind, stay away from them but don’t meet their aggressiveness with your own. That only reflects on you and you are better than that.

I am better than that.

 

 

Sometimes

Sometimes.

Sometimes you decide that life is short and it’s about time you were the person you keep telling yourself you want to become.

Sometimes you lie in bed waiting for your three-year old to fall asleep and awaken to him planting little kisses on your nose.

Sometimes you are worse than you ever think you could be.

Sometimes you work for days on a way to tell your kids that their uncle is getting divorced and realize there is no good way.

Sometimes you decide that because you don’t want your daughter to go to a school play alone, her little brother will be her date. You have never let them go anywhere together without you before and are frightened.

Sometimes a light rain late at night will keep you awake as you plan how quickly you can carry your children to the basement if the tornado sirens go off.

Sometimes you reach out to an old friend and realize no one ever really changes. And you are grateful.

Sometimes you wonder when the shoe will drop because you love your partner too much.

Sometimes you wonder where your voice went when you’re reading words you’ve written over three years ago.

Sometimes you are thankful to have a job.

Sometimes you wonder when you got lost.

Sometimes you wonder what it will take to be found.

Sometimes you play football in March because it’s 80 degrees and your kids laugh harder than you can remember.

Sometimes your son plays piano and you know you hear magic.

Sometimes you wish you could be better.

Sometimes you wish you could be more.

Sometimes you’re a wife, a mother, a lover, a confidante, a career woman, a writer…but only one of these you would deny.

Sometimes a day comes when you know that you are the only one who could write your story. And you do.

Sometimes you slay your demons and win.

Sometimes the people in your cheering section are people you never expected.

Sometimes the grass isn’t greener, and others lives aren’t easier. It just seems that way.

Sometimes we see through the fog that all of our decisions, all of our bad choices led us to today.

Today is the day that counts.

You are amazing because if you weren’t where you were, you wouldn’t be where you are now.

Write, read, sing, dance, draw, paint, teach, live, love, listen, nurture.

Do whatever it takes. Just be you about it.

Love.

Over My Head-Narrative Structure at AWP

Otherwise known as The Geometry of the Novel: Making “Shaplier” Fiction. (Panelists: Peter Grandbois, Debra Di Blasi, Michael Martone, Lance Olsen)

This panel made my brain explode multiple times. Let the record show that I was completely over my head in these concepts which I loved. It’s intimidating, but thrilling at the same time. I could feel the muscle that is my brain getting a workout. That being said, my notes are complicated and one thought did not directly correlate to the next. It was like sitting in a room with philosophy instructors who were really cool, who I wanted to understand, and did while they were speaking, but it dissipated when I tried to explain it. I tried to target the things I loved, that I semi-got.

So dear friends, what follows is the best I could do.

• We’re used to the Freytag shape of novels.

1. Manifest destiny
2. Pull up by the bootstraps
3. Climax
4. Epiphany

• Story should dictate shape. Maybe it’s not linear, but rather a circle, an infinity sign.

1. The circle narrative begins where it ends.
2. The infinity sign has us endlessly playing out our parts (i.e. an endless cycle of guilt)

• In real life our dreams or worries loop endlessly back (infinity). It is within our natural obsessions that we ourselves are revealed.
• Obsession has no clear beginning.
• In these structures, form is function.
• Don’t follow conventions but constantly undo them.
• The satisfaction of a complete plot is not a matter of thinking but a matter of being (author’s note: this was a criticism of traditional narrative). Balzacian mode-Does that capture NOW?
• If you don’t use your own imagination someone will use it for you.
• Extreme multiplicity is the human condition. It is not point A to point B, linear from launch to landing. It is sculptural, and like a sculpture made to be entered from many different jumping off points.
• Make up stories until you find one you can live with (Chronology of Water), but rather make up stories until you find one your story can live within.
• Stories remind us of something we have yet to remember.
• To the caged animal the cage is just a cage. To the caged writer, we accept the constraints. We see no other way to see.

1. Identify the cage, that we’re in the cage.
2. Work out what we mean. Are we artists or craftspersons?

• The commodification of art, a product not a process. What is the essence? What is the point for a human being. It is now about marketing. Google “Marketing in Fiction” and you’ll get five million hits.
• Human beings make art and we’ve gotten away from that.
• The moment you open your eyes in the morning you begin to theorize your world. The distinction between theory and art need to be forgotten to innovate. Back to form is function.
• Assume the cage. You are in the cage.

That is History

I just found out that one of my dearest friends is engaged. I found out on Facebook.

She is one of my oldest friends. We have known each other since we were four. We had joint birthday parties up until our sweet 16. We used to see how long our mothers would let us sleep over each other’s houses in the summers, moving from my house, to her house, to her grandmother’s house, day after day, night after night inseparable until we spent too much time together and had an inevitable blow up. We’d forget. Our mother’s would hold grudges. Inevitably, we’d be back together.

She’s a Scorpio. I’m a Sagittarius. I don’t know about you, but I fully believe in the profiles. I can usually guess what your sign is without having any clue as to your birthday. And she is really, really a Scorpio, one of only two I’ve ever gotten along with. The other is my husband.

I tread carefully with Scorpios. They seem agreeable, and listen much more than they talk. But once angered, they hold a grudge or mentally write you off completely. There is no gray, there is no in-between. They are loyal, and the person you want as your best friend. But if you happen to be someone who figures out what she’s saying as she goes, ahem, and works out problems aloud, you sometimes come into conflict with a person who works it all out in their head. By the time a Scorpio speaks something, albeit using terms such as “maybe” or “I think possibly”, don’t be fooled. They know exactly what they think, but have better manners than to say so.

E. and I grew distant our junior and senior year of high school. There are many reasons for this, but none of which it is my place to share. We were a fiery friendship, and I am an all in friend. We shared everything: all of it, good, bad and hideous. Years went by and she dropped out of college, pregnant. She got married when her daughter was a little over a year. Of course I stood up in the wedding. There was no question. Our friendship isn’t based on events. It’s based on history.

Do you ever sit down and think about how many friends you truly share a history with? Do it. What you’ll find is that as you age, you find people to befriend that are more like you, less work. You start using phrases like, “Life is too short for this,” when someone is a pain in the ass, or lets you down. You write them off, because there isn’t time, but what there isn’t time for is the effort.

Effort is what is missing in a Twittery world, a place where you see condolences for deaths on a Facebook wall, a place that a man walks through a door that you hold open expecting him to grab. He walks through without so much as a “Thank You” because he’s preoccupied with his cell phone, his 4G, his online persona, his updates, his texting.

So my friend is engaged, and I see us walking down the aisle on her wedding day. I see her the day after an ectopic pregnancy long after her divorce, curled up on my couch after flying  800 miles because there is no way she would miss my wedding. I see her watching me, bowled over in pain, bleeding with a smile on her face as she sees how madly in love I am, and knowing the man who impregnated her was thrilled that she lost the baby, that his bipolar ass, stood over her bed after breaking into her house, telling her that he hated her.

That is history.

She could love me and hate me simultaneously. That she and I may not have spoken in years and when I hear the story about the man, her three kids tucked, sleeping in their beds, my only question is “Where does he live?”

She cried. I did not. I repeated the question. She couldn’t tell me. She knows me.

That is history.

When her mother died six years after her daughter was born, I drove immediately back home. I hadn’t spoken to her in years, I parked in her driveway, walked into her mother’s house and her aunt said to me, “What took you so long?”

That is history.

I went to the wake and sat in the back as the line wrapped around the block. Her young daughter was there. She brought her daughter to me and went back to the front saying nothing. Her daughter crawled up on my lap. We stayed seated for the next four hours and every time someone hugged my friend, she would search me out through the crowd, hundreds of people yet the two of us always had a clear sight line.

Her eyes said, “I can’t do this.” Mine said, “You can. You have to.” I did not cry as I held the girl curled up on my lap. I wondered how a young girl who didn’t know me, had just lost her grandma and saw her mother crying would sit with me. But I wondered only out of a falsity. She sat with me because she saw that her mother was surrounded by people and when she looked at me, she stopped crying. She saw over the next couple of days that I didn’t try to make her feel better. We just were.

That is history.

So time has passed again, and the Big Brother Marketing Machine that is Facebook tells me that she has a status change. She is engaged. The date listed for the wedding on a wall post, my grandmother’s birthday. She wouldn’t remember that, but she’ll be pleased. My grandmother was a strong woman too.

And it got me to thinking how I don’t think I’m cut out for technology. I like long conversations with friends over coffee or beer. I don’t want to know your likes and dislikes until you share them with me. I like to laugh until I cry and I like to be the person who knows you peed your pants because we laughed too hard, terrified on that one amusement park ride. You know that my idea of sitting in the fountain so we were both wet, hid the truth. I like that you know I am capable of extreme cruelty and extreme love, and you would never use either against me. You don’t know that I write, but it wouldn’t surprise you. The time I threw a table across a pop-up camper in eighth grade? It was the first of two times that I have thrown something in anger. That would surprise you.

I love that we have missed everything in each others lives and nothing. Life moves at the speed of an internet connection, but you and I don’t connect that way. We can’t. It is too course, too simple for such a grand history.

And that is history.

Things On My Mind

I’m having trouble formulating a connected thought. Work has been tougher as of late, and I’m torn between gratitude at having a job, and how normal it is that I would have to leave in tears numerous times this last week. I should preface; I am not a cryer. It doesn’t come easily to me and I am most likely to cry when I get frustrated and angry. It’s like when they were handing out the life skills at birth, my hands were empty when it came to anger management.

I can’t go into what I do for a living, but it’s not a job where you want to burst into tears when you’re frustrated. Come to think of it, no job really is, but let’s just say that when you are dealing with mainly men, it makes you look weak and unstable. Wrong field for that, sweetheart. Get a grip.

The good thing about crying is that you don’t get that burning sensation in the back of your throat. You know the one. You go to swallow and it’s like there’s a vice smashing your windpipe. Good stuff there.

I feel like I’m at a breaking point, only I don’t have the breaking luxury. I have to work. If I didn’t, I would have finished this book already. At least I’d like to think so. Who am I kidding? If I wasn’t working, I’d be so freaked about not being able to pay the mortgage I would be barely functional. We did that once. Never again if we can help it.

Right. So things on my mind are as follows:

• I am getting so much reading in now that I have my train time for reading and not writing. I have read Living Arrangements by Laura Maylene Walter (Alice Munro watch out), A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (I was holding out because of the hype. I loved this book) and Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (my daughter talked me into it, and I devoured this book in a day and a half. I get the hype and have to get my hands on books two and three. Now.). I am reading every second and loving it.
• Do I enjoy writing as much as reading? This question keeps circling my brain and I think I like reading more. Okay, I know I do. So why write a book? There seems to be no logic because even knowing that, I still want to write. Huh.
• Between us, I read the book so that I could take my daughter to see the movie as it comes out on our weekend. After further research I found out that her mom made plans to take her and a friend and a friend’s mom the following weekend. I begged off because it’s the right thing to do. I wish that it didn’t bother me, but sometimes it sucks being…well, it just sucks.
• My son’s parent-teacher conference tonight went great. She said that he wanted to be a teacher. “You must have made quite an impression,” I said to her. As I was putting my son to bed I said, “I didn’t know you wanted to be a teacher. That’s great!” “Yeah, Mommy. A Kung Fu teacher.” Mystery solved.
• When I moved to Chicago I got into graduate school at Loyola and DePaul. I didn’t want to be saddled with debt so I didn’t go. AWP was hard for me because I was surrounded by many people who went and saw what that path looked like. I wanted to teach high school English and eventually get a nice cushy job as a university professor. Reading and writing all day long. Sigh.
• There is nothing more draining and dull than talking about weight. I either do something or I don’t, but the obsessing has to stop. I need to get off of the wheel and just be.
• I’m either doing an amazing editing job on my book or I’m cutting out everything that has any color. I truly have no idea which is the case. But of 7 journals, I’m halfway through number two and at 37 typed pages. Cut, cut, cut.
• I asked my husband to write me a novel. Why? Because I want to hear what he has to say. He restarted a blog that he had awhile back and I’m so happy to see him writing.
• I got the China Glaze Hunger Games nail polish in Agro. I love it. My daughter is bringing me her Smoke and Ashes so that my youngest son and I can go sparkly black nails this weekend. What’s that word for a woman is behaving like a teenager? Ridiculous?
• I’ve been late to work 2-3 times a week since AWP. I blame the time change but really, it’s more a mind change. I’m actively trying to get myself to care.
• My oldest son told me for the first time, “Mommy, you’re embarrassing me!” Hehehe. Finally all of this work has paid off. Seems Mama just found another tool in her toolbox.

Have a good day tomorrow, dear friends. May you live in the moment, and not be bogged down by things out of your control. And if nothing else, may you write one good, clear, raw sentence.

Literature and Evil: Marilynne Robinson, Ha Jin, Paul Harding

(Notes are frantic for this panel. As opposed to the other panels, theirs was a feeling of uncertainty, we write to find out. I trusted it more. These writers write in the space between.  We all know evil, yet it isn’t that simple. When possible, I’ve listed whose thoughts are represented to the best of my ability. They came too fast and furious for accuracy.)

• The greatest peril is thinking you know what evil is and dismissing others on that basis. Evil as something that is “other” people. There is a complexity of choice from moment to moment.
• Evil is something within us. The Grapes of Wrath deals with social evil. The oppressors were evil but the oppressed could be evil within. It is harder to acknowledge the evil within the oppressed.
• There is a perception of evil. How can we manage evil. The temptation is to assign evil to something else leading us to believe it can be managed.
• HJ-Guilt cannot be divided. The way to manage evil is personally.
• MR- Historic evil comes from a cultural sickness, the addiction to fear. Who is it that is undermining the group? Fear is a stimulant, a marketing product gotten from bad movies and bad television. Humanity is brilliant, forgivable. Courage conquers evil.
• PH-So much of the time you don’t know the larger context of so many things. In the climate of fear currently, there is an absence of the benefit of the doubt. Using that is like using a muscle. They atrophy. You have a series of choices. You can choose kindness, mildness.
• HJ- Fear is a human condition. Very few can attain a state without fear. We can be paralyzed by fear.
• PH-Evil has to be as well as goodness. Both can be sentimental.
• MR-Seeing evil as enriching depends on the complexity of the question. The slyness of the devil is too easily arrived at. The definitions of good and evil do the work of the devil. Some people have accurate moral compasses and some don’t. It doesn’t make the latter less lovable. Ask their mother.

Moderator: What is the responsibility of what John Gardner called “moral” fiction?

• PH-Literature aspiring to be art can’t help but swim in morality.
• MR-If a subject is taken up seriously, it’s moral. Some writing ends up with cheap effects, gratuitous. That’s immoral. The same subject taken seriously is moral.
• HJ-Private life, social life, political life. Students in other countries are very good at their political life. Students here are very good at private and social lives. It needs to be more expansive.
• PH-Your art is a description of your values so be aware and shape accordingly (despite what you may thing).
• MR-The purpose of literature is to teach compassion.
• PH- Whose lives do you show readers? That is the question.
• MR-The cure for any human problem is mutual respect.

The purpose of literature is to teach compassion. Now, go ahead. tell me what you do isn’t important. These people above think you’re wrong.

And so do I.

Write on, dear friends.

People Watching- AWP

It’s disorienting to go from five days of writers to the rest of your life with non-writers. What I mean by that is I spend my life (husband excluded) surrounded by corporate America whose concerns are far different that mine.

I was perhaps the only person on Wall Street cheering on the Occupy Wall Street folks.

When you put someone like me into a situation where I’m submerged in books and writing, surround me with people who could talk about authors and concepts for days on end, people who would argue (this happened) with their editor about the fact that “I came into the room” is vastly different from “I entered the room”, you can imagine the thud I felt when I went back to work. It was less of a thud and more the baby being squeezed out of the warm, floaty womb, sliding down and out of the birth canal to land unceremoniously on a cold, hard floor.

Yes, the dire problems of the first world. I know.

Men in peacoats and facial hair, thick, black-framed glasses, somewhere between 25 and 30 years of age, scraggly enough to avoid being a type (in their own mind) ran late into panels with such utter confidence and nonchalance as to plop down in the front row seats that most people were too intimidated to take. Funny, I probably work with these boys’ parents. Those coats cost money, as did the brand of glasses, and their nonchalance from years of being encouraged, of being called “artsy” and a “writer”, not “lazy” and a “bum”. A certain studied confidence is built upon money. The rest of us? Our time is expensive. We know we may only have one of these we can go to. We aren’t late and we don’t miss sessions. Despite being early, we sit back a couple of rows. Sometimes.

Oh, the arrogance of monied youth.

Then the hipster crowd, waifish girls in thrift store dresses, but wait, those are too nice, too clever. Those are the dresses made to appear thrift store, that aren’t. These girls hide behind the same glasses, thick and prominent, like mine, but the lenses are glorious free of concentric glass circles that most of us myopians have. No coke bottle bottoms for this chic set. Those girls drank martinis. My money says that they nursed one.

The hipster boys wore carefully designed careless attire. Their flannel shirts flew the Hollister eagle proud and prominent over their right breast. They were untucked and wore beaten up, good shoes. It took much effort to achieve such carelessness.

These pretty young things weren’t from New York or Massachusetts, but rather Minnesota and Wisconsin, hiding the dizziness brought on by the martini they could barely get down their gullet.

A panel on Vampire poetry I regretfully missed. I wanted to people watch. I saw these people outside the hotels, chain-smoking in fingerless gloves with “Death” appliqued to the backs. Charcoal-rimmed eyes, and a disgust in anyone who would look their way as they wrote feverishly in their small journals, fingers close to the tip of the pen, white at the first digit from the pressure. Dyed-black hair fell in their eyes, only on one side. Eyebrows pierced, maybe a nose, a few lips, all of it showing to the outside, the dystopian view they held within.

Last I noticed the professor set. Aging men and women either gray and natural and proud (both sexes) or aging and fighting it every step of the way. The gray-haired earth mothers versus the raw and edgy, hair-dyed and possibly cropped edition. The men still wore blazers and turtlenecks. The women wore either floor length, hippy-esque skirts, or tight black shirts, with just the right jeans, baggy and perfect, the black boots peeking out, well-worn.

I wanted to be that woman. The jeans, the tight, black shirt, the boots, the focus, the cropped hair. Serious. Determined.

I wanted to sit next to the earth mothers.

Today my husband and I went to the Art Institute because the day before AWP, Teri and I met there and my head exploded. I saw two paintings and a window installation that I had to go back and photograph.

It’s my next book.

How do I know? Because the synapses in my brain were audible. Ding, ding, ding, crackle, ding. Connections between disparate things firing up and traveling faster than the hand and the eye combined.

The speed of sound.

All of us from the naive optimist to the jaded dystopian connect because the most important thing is the books. We wouldn’t have been there if we didn’t care. We wouldn’t have been there if the writing, the reading, the hero worship (okay, maybe just me, but passing Marilynne Robinson in the lobby, a foot between us and making eye contact??), wasn’t so important that when politicians start running on about cutting art and humanities budgets we audibly gasp. And grab a pen knife.

Every last one of these people, from Len who I met sitting at the bar to my posse,

Amy and Laura

Teri and Suzy

every last one of them is a bit of me, and every one of them is so important to the world.

For all of our outer appearances, we are more the same than we ever could be different. Art matters. Books matter.

Yes. Yes it does.

So to fight off the depression I encountered when I was back to work, not surrounded by these people, I held on to what Teri and I saw. I held on to the feeling those paintings left me with and the knowledge that I just tasted my new book although I don’t know what it is.

I held on to the fact that there were 9000 people at this conference, and I could tell most of them that I saw some paintings and found a new book, and they wouldn’t blink. They would get it. Because writers get it. And writers are amazing.

But not as amazing as my husband who couldn’t wait to get to the Art Institute and start off his visit by following me around as I snapped photographs of paintings that make a new book. Because he is all sorts of amazing. And helped me find more.

Go write something amazing.

Go read something amazing.

It’s what we do.

 

 

Villains and Killers and Criminals, Oh My: Representing Evildoers in Literary Fiction

Panelists: Reese Okyong Kwon, Matt Bell, Eugene Cross, Brian Evenson, and Lauren Groff

(I have no idea who said what here. Just to be clear, these are not my thoughts but rather the thoughts of people writing about the bad guys. We all know, I’m not writing about things that will not allow me to sleep at night…)

• Psychological backstory is too simple. There are complexities that manifest when you take out the typical abuse scenarios (tortured by father) and deal with predestination.
• Occlusion adds interest. It’s the reason you like movies you don’t fully understand (Reservoir Dogs). Look to Shakespeare. He doesn’t explain villains. People still talk about Hamlet today not because of what they do understand but rather because of what they don’t understand.
• The Joker in The Dark Knight-When he initially is explaining his face, he says his father did it. We feel relief in knowing that he is bad because of his father. We are thrown off-kilter by the second explanation of his scarring. By his third we feel the horror of a villain who we cannot make sense of, a bad guy with no reason for his badness. This is far worse than knowing the evil, far more creepy.

My thoughts: I loved The Dark Knight and when he mentioned the Joker, I felt my mind spread open. I remember exactly how I felt when the Joker gave his first explanation. I remember the moment I heard the second story, I felt unnerved and by the third I was terrified. Although he was a sociopath any way you look at it, somehow I felt relief knowing there was a reason for it. Then to think, oh, okay he’s a liar, duh. But by the last story to understand that he is just evil…gah!

Although I don’t write anything like that (nightmares, anyone?), I thought it crazy that a writer was explaining to me exactly how I felt and why I felt that way. The fear was in the emptiness, the relief was in the reason. There was no relief.

Second, I thought the occlusion comment was another great observation. The thing that makes me flip pages is when I have a question that I’m trying to answer. I want to know why even if it isn’t in there. My brain frantically tries to put the pieces I have together and I become more interested when I can’t figure it out.

 

 

 

Fiction Writers and History: Joyce Hinnefeld, Eugenia Kim, Dolen Perkins-Valdez and Nalini Jones

I arrived on Thursday after making the kids breakfast, a couple of lunch sacks packed and scurrying out before any theatrics started. I arrived downtown in time to get to the 9:00 a.m. panels but my head wasn’t in it yet. I was still in mom-mode. Fortunately I ran into Teri in the lobby and proceeded to collapse onto the sofa. I blew off the first panel I had listed, and headed off for coffee with Teri while we waited for Amy. For those who haven’t met these two, they are possibly two of the warmest individuals you will ever meet. If you need to get your head together, there are no better people to surround yourself.

And that turned out to be the perfect way to start what would be a whirlwind of thought and busyness that would last until we left to drive back Sunday morning.

“Thinking with Your Own Apparatus: Fiction Writers and History” (Joyce Hinnefeld, Eugenia Kim, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Nalini Jones)

(What follows is a mishmash of the thoughts of the four writers present, Henry James quotes, and my own thoughts stirred into a soup. Unfortunately many of my notes read as if I myself had Henry James’s thoughts. The best I can tell you is that if it looks familiar, it isn’t mine, but I couldn’t write quickly or accurately enough to get it all down. Mea culpa.)

The title of the panel came from a Henry James quote (not that we didn’t agree that the phallic nature of the title was a bit…) about how each of us has to think with our own apparatus, our body, our mind, the culmination of our experiences.

• Historical fiction should not be science fiction facing backwards.

• There are details that work too hard. You know them when you see them. Cut them.
• Experience is never complete. Experience is the very atmosphere of the mind.- Henry James
• Fiction can be a way to discover the “other” of yourself. For example, you write about India although you aren’t from there.
• Fiction is unlimited. One of the novelists told about how they read a novel based on Anne Frank surviving and it blew her mind. The idea that you could change history through the writing of historical fiction was life-changing for her. You could recreate what happened.
• You have to understand the character through the time and place, where it meets. Although you can save Anne Frank, you cannot save her family. She is still crushed. There has to be an emotional truth to historical fiction for it to work.
• The only way to access emotional truth through fiction because you haven’t lived through it is by leaving the back door open. The idea is not to recreate the past, but to be emotionally true and therefore honor the past with a new fictive past.
• Be cautious about word choice. (Indy, this one’s for you.) The word “lifestyle” wasn’t used in the vernacular until 1950. Moreso than in other forms of fiction, it is a detail like this that is the key to the authenticity. If you aren’t sure, always, always look it up.
• Only by embodying the truth of the characters does the emotional truth come alive.
• It is always a presumption to jump into character. Sensory detail is key. Embrace it all even if you don’t use it. You need to know what route they take to work.
• How much historical info do you use? This should be the last think you’re thinking about. We’re back to the emotional core. The reader has got to care otherwise whether the historical data is boring or interesting, it isn’t enough to carry a novel.
• Immerse yourself in primary sources: Letters, photos, etc. You can capture more in seeing the look on someone’s face, or reading their words to a loved one, than all of the historical data combined.
• Capture the feeling of the era. It isn’t just about the nightgowns and stoves.
• The failure is almost always a lack of imagination- James?
• It is a mistake of the writer to divest emotion. Passion is what makes the best books great. The trick is to make it seamless with narrative.
• If you are faithful to the passion tat brought you to the material, you can’t go too far wrong.
• Certain historical things, the Japanese occupation, the Chicago fire, WWII have to be included. Other than that, leave it out unless it adds to the big story. Too many detailed facts weigh down your story.
• It’s always about the story.
• Sensory details are the way to access character, not to drop facts randomly into the fiction, but to get to the character. This is your point of entry.
• There has to be fearlessness. It’s not about publishing. Rage has its place. Your purpose is to write real reactions to the scenes you set before the characters. Fearless.

These four women were amazing and open in their assessments of what worked for them, and what failed. I was thrilled to have this as my first panel, one of the only ones I attended on crafting, and custom-made for me.

Thank you ladies.