Catherine Schaff-Stump: The Final Viable Paradise XIII Interview

If you are unfamiliar with Catherine Schaff-Stump, that’s because you didn’t attend the thirteenth session of the Viable Paradise writer’s workshop. She’s a writer, teacher, and academic who’s released the novel Hulk Hercules, Professional Wrestler, and a number of short stories. After Viable Paradise XIII, she took it upon herself to interview every other student. You want to see a fascinating cross-section of fresh writers who are starting to make some waves? Check it out.

So I figured it was about time someone asked her some questions.

To begin with, please, tell us about your current projects and immediate plans and anything else you think we should know that might otherwise go unmentioned.

Right now there are three long term things that I’m working on.

Front and center at the moment is a book called Abigail Rath Versus Blood-Sucking Fiends. The Abby Rath books are YA books about monster hunting kids. Abby keeps trying to be a tough monster hunter, but she keeps running into supernatural critters at school, at the mall, at the roller skating rink, and some of them are nice, so her career path is taking an unexpected turn. The books use a lot of folklore and horror monster knowledge, and is sort of a homage to my husband’s love of cheesy Hammer horror.

Next is the Klarion series, which is about 4 generations of a family of demon binders. The story spans 90 years, from the 1830s to the 1920s. I’m reaching for a Gothic feel. I’ll be working on this for a long time.

Finally, I’m playing with a series that involves Norwegian folklore, mostly trolls. It’s contemporary YA and begins in Decorah, Iowa, which has a reputation of being the Norway of Iowa. There are also disillusioned frost elves, Old Nick, and ice giants, in no particular order.

I have other projects in various stages of writing or development, including a story about wild dogs in the Southern Iowa I grew up in, and a magical retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo.

What led you to attend Viable Paradise? How did you hear about it? How would you compare it to your other educational experiences?

In 2007 I decided I would make time for my writing. It didn’t take me long to realize I needed to ramp up my game, and as a PhD, I realize the intrinsic value of going to school. So, I went looking for a way to educate myself, and the Internet was full of valuable information! Clarion and Odyssey were there, but I have a pretty demanding career that would miss me for six weeks, so I decided against those. Then there was Viable Paradise.

One of my fellow Cats Curious Writers, Christopher Kastensmidt (VP XI), had great things to say about it. So I looked into it, asked the college for a little funding, and off I went. It was a fantastic, intensive experience. Like grad school, it was great to be around people who were as geeky about something, in this case, speculative fiction, as I was. Unlike grad school, the intensive nature of VP resulted in some close bonding. We all worked hard together and survived a week of sleepless critiquing. And we saw glow-in-the-dark jellyfish. Bonds like that stay forged.

I’m fascinated by the connections you’ve established between your vocation and your aspirations as a writer. Was this intentional on your part, or just a matter of following your interests? And are these two streams in your life as mutually supportive as they seem from the outside?

That’s a good question. I wish I’d asked that question when I’d interviewed all of you.

In many ways, although I don’t think I knew it all the time, my life has been one big attempt to get a job that’s flexible enough to allow me to accomplish many of my life goals. I love to travel, and I travel to really interesting places for work. I love to research folklore, so even though my area at Kirkwood Community College is English Language Acquisition, because I work at a community college, the administration encourages us to diversify. And yes, I do like teaching and administrating ELA too.

Kirkwood also supports my creative writing. I have received professional development grants to go to writing workshops, and they even gave me some release time to work on Hulk Hercules. I think that the college expects me to get rich and set up an endowed chair and a couple of scholarships when I retire, though, so I’d best get cracking and gain some wild success soon. Honestly, though, I’m very lucky to work in such a supportive environment, and I appreciate that I can bring all these things together in one spot. It really makes it easy to go to work in the morning, and then come home at night to write.

I’m both gratified and impressed by the job you’ve done on interviewing all of the other people in our session of Viable Paradise. What struck you about your own experience after you’d heard from everyone else? Is there anything you’d like to say Viable Paradise that you think may have been missed?

One of the reasons I wanted to talk to all of the VP attendees is because one week is such a short time to spend with so many interesting people. I could see that there was a lot of talent in that group, and I wanted to know more about its members. One of the things that I felt as I reflect upon the experience was that I felt validated as a writer. Many people dream of being a writer. While I have a long way to go, I felt like I’d leveled up. It was heady that others saw the potential in your work.

I guess the only thing that I want to say that I think has been missed is that not only are the VP faculty great, but Viable Paradise has a great support staff. All of the former VP members who cook, who give you Kleenex when you cry, who talk you down from an anxiety attack before your first pro meeting, these people are the unsung heroes of VP, and I hope they know how many of us appreciate their good work.

(This is true. Everybody wave.)

It seems as if everyone in our circle is comics-literate and familiar with role-playing games, and that this is standard in the fantasy/SF field. Do you think this has had any influence on what’s being written these days?

Yup. In some ways good and in some ways bad. While genre has certain beats and riffs that are essentials, it’s also easy for an author to go on autopilot and write something very similar to what has gone before. I think that the trick is to find that alchemical mix between genre and originality that makes your writing stand out. That’s what the best comics and the most original role playing games do. Come to think of it, that’s what the best film and fiction do too.

What’s your take on the idea that popular fiction is living mythology? To what degree should we regard what we do as representative of forces other than our own creativity and taste?

Wow. That’s a question that could really be answered in a thesis. But I’ll keep this brief.

Could I just talk for a minute about Superman? Because you know Superman was created in 1932. Back then he could leap. Flight didn’t come until later. Superman has been re-imagined by each subsequent decade he has existed. He has been all-American. He has been square. He has been an orphan. He has had hip mid-Western parents. His secret ID Clarke Kent has been a wimp. His secret ID Clark Kent has been a really interesting reporter. Regrettably, he’s now younger than me, which is a good trick for a guy who came on the scene in 1932.

Most people in the First World know who Superman is. They know where Krypton is (was?). They know that Superman came from Kansas. The other things come from our generational preferences and re-envisionment of a hero that we admire and wish to remake in our own image.

Another place to look as we consider this question? Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (many thanks to fellow VP XIIIer George Galuschak for this one). In this book, Booker lays out the stories we keep telling over and over and speculates why we do this. He suggests we tell stories because we want to understand our world and re-create it in our own image, and that stories are ways in which we interpret our life experiences. At a certain level, this ceases to be an individual pursuit, and becomes a cultural one.

Speaking of which, your book Hulk Hercules was a good-natured middle-school romp, and it seemed as if you put a lot of playful thought into publicity and marketing as well as the writing for that one. No need to go into the entire process – unless, of course, you want to – but can you say something about the feeling of seeing something through all the way from concept to product, and the difference in the way you regard a work before it’s finished and later on when you’re deciding on the design for a promotional medallion?

Cats Curious asked me to do a re-telling of the 12 Labors of Hercules. The requirement was that the book be in a modern setting, but otherwise I could do what I wanted with the story. My goal was to make the story accessible to young modern readers, and create a bit of a mystery around the original story. If readers became interested in tracking down the original myths, so much the better. At first, the story was more about Nona’s retelling of the labors, but of course Tony and Bianca took center stage as the book progressed, both as part of the framing device, and because of their own story. Tony, Bianca and Hannah reinforce the idea that knowing about mythology is cool, and their knowledge gives them power when they encounter mythology.

As to the coin, well, you have to know I am blessed with crafty, artistic friends. Sculptor Gerald Dagel designed the medallion, which is actually a replica Morty Moose token. (Morty Moose is the pizza place/arcade that Tony and his friends frequent.) When there were plans to have more than one book, each book was going to get a Morty Moose token. They’re made more meaningful when you’ve read the encounter with Chiron.

While I take my writing seriously, honestly, part of what I am doing is playing. It’s not hard for that to translate across. When we conceived of the medallion, we wanted to bring a piece of the book into the real world, which I think helps the reader hold onto the experience longer. Perhaps that’s one of the philosophies behind merchandising? By the way, Morty Moose tokens are free, especially for kids who buy the book.

And finally, would you care to say a few words about ambition? You’ve written extensively on your blog about your approach to the problem of advancing as a writer. If there were no one around to accuse you of hubris or attempt to hold you responsible for pipe-dreams, what sort of vaulting castles in the sky would you build, with which demi-deities would you rub elbows?

I am an ambitious writer, but in an intrinsic sense. Right now at work, I’m learning a new interview process for a criterion-referenced test to help our ELA students place in their courses. This interview judges the students in relation only to themselves. Their future interviews are examined in light of their past performance. This is me with my writing.

Alas, what I am learning is that the more you know, the more fault you find. I strive toward artistic perfection, but in reality, steps forward are made in a groping, intuitive type of way, which is how learning occurs. There are breakthroughs and setbacks. But the point is that I have a point I’d like to reach and I strive to reach it, in reference to where I have been and where I am going.

However, what would my pinnacle of achievement be? Honestly, what I would like the most is to write a character so memorable and convincing that the character is remembered. Not me so much. I would enjoy having my work read after I’m gone. There’s some hubris for you! And while I don’t expect to support myself with my writing, I guess the bottom line is that I write to the best of my ability and I strive to get better as I work toward my voice and my memorable characters.

So that raises the question: Would you rather write an immensely popular, mediocre book, or a critically acclaimed respected book? The latter, although if I could pull off a critically acclaimed respected best seller, that would be a bit of all right.

A Mean Man Looks At American Fiction

They put you in plastic, Eddie. I'll make them pay for that.

Right now there are terrible things going on in my life and wonderful things going on in my life and I can't talk about them and you know what?

I'm in a bad mood. And when I'm in a bad mood, you know what does me good?

Fucking shit up.

So let us inspect the current state of American letters. To be blunt. Has a genuinely distinguished American writer emerged since, I don't know, let's say, John Irving? (Who would be a second-rate Steinbeck if Steinbeck was as good as his reputation, which he isn't. Fuck them all.) Somewhere in the eighties, American fiction died. It's not that the writing and publishing stopped. It's not that there isn't any work of merit being produced.

But nobody seems to be swinging for the fences any more. The whole scene seems weak, trivial.

Here's what's going on.

First off, the reorganization of the publishing industry as a bona-fide business fucked everything up. The arts are dependent on artists, and the years of effort it takes a writer to develop their true strength are dependent on either extreme good fortune or the knowledgeable patronage of their financial betters.

As a business, publishing has said, "Fuck you," to the notion of nurturing talent. If there were no writers, only best-selling books, they would be perfectly happy.

So as readers? We only get the talent of people who have nurtured it themselves.

And in America, art is not a means of expressing a unified culture. Rather, it is a bitter cup of consolation offered to losers and lunatics such as myself. Which is why there's a paltry, resentful quality to so much of American art and letters.

So. You nurture your talent yourself. Here are the two paths to disaster you can take. Or, as I said to Nick Mamatas (Writer! Editor! Master of mayhem!) the other night, "Incompetence and professionalism both lead to predictability."

You can be classy, and enter a Master of Fine Arts program in literature.

If you do that, you will get four years of free time to write. Doing this when you are young and inexperienced is not a great way to get good writing.

And if the evidence is any indication, you will be taught Jack. And then you will be taught Shit. My recent perusals of current fiction has shown me multiple simple errors in craft on every single page of every single work that wasn't written by someone who's a proven old-school talent, your Joyce Carol Oateses (my favorite new plural) and T. C. Boyles.

They do not know sentence structure, paragraphing, word choice, fucking dialog tags. The technical elements of writing are not there.

What they do have is a willingness to experiment with language. Without skill, that isn't a virtue.

There's a horrible pattern in all recent literary novels I've read. Writer writes cute, chases their tail until they get two-thirds of the way through the book, and then pull in some ridiculous bit of business so there seems to be some kind of story going on. And inevitably, it's a movie or television story, not a literary one.

One afternoon's worth of plotting instruction would put paid to this repetitive nonsense.

Now, if you're as lumpen a prole as I am, you will turn to those writing instruction books, workshops, community college writing courses...

... and you will, with effort and expense, get a decent set of technical skills.

This is where I begin to giggle. Because it's true, it's true, it's really, really true. Literary fiction no longer has better prose than genre fiction. Pull out a copy of a Gardner Dozois Year's Best Science Fiction, and compare the writing, page for page, with The Year's Best American Fiction. Again, with the exceptions of the old warhorses of literature, the prose in the SF will demonstrate clearly superior levels of craft.

Of course, most of the writing will, as most professional writing does, come to feel much the same after a certain point. The problem with the workshop circuit is that the creative pool in genre fiction is a small and incestuous one, where riffing off of a limited number of themes and approaches is part of the game.

And everyone who participates in these workshops can trace their instructional ancestry back to Milford and Clarion. The instruction offered, while tremendously useful and tremendously valid, is so persistent in the field that its influence must be consciously wrestled with in order to produce unique material.

That this highly useful, but extremely specific skill-set is applied to work that's primarily derived from fiction rather than life does not help.

Let me be blunt. I think most American fiction is over-rated. The very best of it tends to be minor, obscure, or otherwise limited. The clearest, strongest American writing has taken place in journalism, memoir, and other areas of non-fiction.

That fiction is no longer at the core of popular culture has an effect as well. Talents that might be drawn into the field wind up diluting themselves in group creative efforts such as television because fiction writing simply is not an attractive career for someone with material aspirations.

So that's why American fiction is shitty and boring.

Wanna fight?

Let Me Harden Myself With Ten Thousand Hours Of Labor

And finally, done! Every issue of Swill must pay obeisance to the Insect God.

And once again, a comment on someone else's blog ran wild, and turned into a post. Catherine Schaff-Stump wrote about that book on expertise that's got everyone all het up, and I figured that if I was going to accuse a pal of serf mentality I shouldn't do it on her turf. I'll do it here, where I'm familiar with the escape routes and can keep a table between us until I get a chance to explain myself.

I should read this book. All I know about it is what I've heard or read in other's discussions. So really, I'm not talking about the book. I'm talking about the reactions to it that I've seen in a number of creators of my acquaintance.

But there are a few things I wonder about. The premise under discussion is that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert in any given skill. I get the impression that what's meant by 'expert' is a world-class, top-grade, unquestionably significant and accomplished talent.

I've seen a common reaction to the ten-thousand hour paradigm. People see it as a sentence. They are crushed, then they nobly lift the burden up and accept it as part of their load.

Because the idea that this is something that must be done also implies that it's something that can be done. It takes a question that seems unfathomable -- how can I achieve greatness? -- and gives a straightforward numerical answer that is just barely on the acceptable side of impossible. Practice for ten thousand hours, and if you still suck, get back to me. We'll work something out.

Don't get me wrong. I am the poster child for compulsive woodshedding, and I think it's paid off. If you want to be good, you need to put the time in. And I think that a cold, sober look at the amount of time that dedicated professionals put in on their work is a damned fine thing.

But there are a few reactions that I've been developing as I've seen the ten-thousand hours join the hundredth fucking monkey and Catch-22 as part of the law of the jungle.

First off, it implies that there is a distinct point at which one says, "Yep. There it is." Ones skill is undeveloped, then ten thousand hours later it's in full bloom.

My favorite band is the Ramones.

By this I do not mean, "Craft counts for nothing." What I mean is, is that lack of expertise is not always a barrier to achievement. I don't think the world would be a better place if Blitzkrieg Bop had an interesting chord progression and some kinda life to the beat. Which is what would have happened if the Ramones had put in their ten thousand hours before they started working.

So that's the first point. Don't think of what you do as practice unless you are doing a deliberate exercise in order to develop some facet of your skill. If you are working on something that means something to you, you are not practicing.

Next is the ten-thousand hour figure itself. Let me tell you something. Practice is not as clear-cut as it seems. Are you doing the same routine every day, or are you challenging yourself? And what counts as practice? Maybe you spend two hours a day writing, but how many hours a day are you spending thinking about your work, or even just consciously using language? When my observational drawing skills are strong, I can draw without drawing -- I look at a branch and count the leaves, that kind of thing.

That gray area in practice, where unavoidable moments in life are turned to the advantage of art, is crucial. Those are the moments when art is not something you make yourself do, or allow yourself to do. Those are the moments when the artistic process is part of your process. When you've fully assimilated your creativity.

When your art is fully part of your life, everything contributes toward it. It becomes impossible to estimate practice time, because it is all practice. It isn't a chore or an effort, because if it is? You won't do it.

When I first heard about the ten thousand hours, it totally rocked my John Henry. I did a little math and felt better about myself.

In other words, I reacted the way Catherine did. Lots of people have reacted this way. One at a time, each is the result of an individual struggling with questions of dedication and achievement. Seen en mass, I find myself reminded of that Maoist-era toe-tapper, Let Me Go To The Mountain, Mother, And Harden Myself With Physical Labor.

I am not criticizing the concept of practice here. But I have noticed not just in myself, but in most of the serious beginning writers I know, a sense of stern duty, of feeling that we must steel ourselves for the rigors to come. Writing these days feels like a polar expedition, where we expect to lose a finger or nose to frostbite in the process of starving to death while surrounded by bears.

This sense of eternally plowing under gray skies (while wearing thick damp pants that chafe) is not an essential element of art. The grim satisfaction of dedication is a useful tool, but I worry that it has grown too important to too many of us.

Here is the secret of the ten thousand hours. You do not get through ten thousand hours of practice through grim dedication. Okay, you can -- but your work will reflect that grim dedication.

If you are one of the people who is actually going to get ten thousand hours of practice in, most of those ten thousand hours will be spent enjoying yourself. Yes, there are tedious practices and chores and so on, but give me a break.

For those of us who like to spend our evenings carving crude pitchforks with which to maintain our dungheaps, this is a bitter pill indeed. When you embrace the labor of art, you embrace the pleasure of that labor -- which is actually play. The moments when you are engaged, when you are loving what you are doing -- those are the moments when you are learning.

Ten thousand hours isn't a sentence or a guarantee. It seems to be an estimate of how much time people have spent doing something they love by the time they get noticed. And a lot of people do good, interesting work long before they clock in those hours. And a lot of people put in more effort than that without advancing. Practice is necessary, but it can only take you as far as you can go.

Bummer, huh? Once again, quantification proves of more apparent than actual use.

Come See Me On December Tenth

That would be my area of specialty -- the menacing faked pastoral. One more of these prints and I'm done.

So, the time has come for me to plead, to beg. Do you live in the SF Bay Area? Are you interested in edgy literature?

Then come see me perform in Lip Service West. This is a literary event dealing with performances of transgressive works drawn from real life. It is very prestigious for those of us who could be described as, 'belletristic dirtbags.' NPR has been known to broadcast from these readings from time to time.

It's taking place on December 10, at 8:00 in the evening, at 5512 at San Pablo in Oakland. There will be wine and hot dogs and such.

Listen, I'm begging here. The more people who show up, the better I look, and the more likely it is that I can participate in the future. This is, oh, brother, a significant career moment for me, and I need y'all to be there if I'm going to pull this off. I'd like to get 'performance' onto my resume, and here's an excellent opportunity.

I'll tell you what, though. It's a good reading. Consistently engaging and interesting. Confessional memoirists are the only folks in the 'literary scene' who still want to entertain the audience. It is a guaranteed good time for those who don't mind peering over the edge!

Bring a friend. Bring two. Did I tell you I heard there would be hot dogs and wine and stuff?

On The Edge Of A Scandal

Note From A Little Later:

I've exchanged emails with the individual involved, have been assured that the situation has been blown out of proportion, and that my work was not at all involved.

So at this point, I suspect it is simply a matter of allowing things to progress until a clearer picture emerges.

Yes, my beloved, the Swillistrations proceed apace.

So. I've become aware of an interesting situation. It seems that the first editor I don't know personally to ask me for fiction has been accused of some fairly ugly behavior.

I'm very bothered by this because our interactions had left me liking him. I'm waiting to see if he has anything to say to me. I don't think he gave me this particular treat -- both pieces of fiction I wrote for him were mentioned on his sites with my name attached to them.

I am a little baffled as to how to react and behave here. So I'm letting y'all know that something is going on, there is no way it is good, and right now I am really, really hoping that David Byron -- the name he gave me -- is going to show himself to be a gentleman. In another time I would be keeping this to myself, but right now I feel a stronger sense of allegiance to the community of writers than to Mr. Byron, and feel that despite the possibility that this is not what it seems to be, it is appropriate that anyone who has had dealings with Mr. Byron know about the situation.

In other words, I'm hoping that what seems evident turns out to be false. And if this turns out to be true, I'm kind of braced for it. I don't feel anger, which surprises me. I just feel puzzled.

When does that kind of behavior seem like a good idea? I don't understand.

While I am holding off on making any kind of serious judgment between now and when I feel as if I actually fucking know something, I am going to celebrate by passing on to y'all one of the stories. If anyone's seen this anywhere, please tell me. This is my story. This was one of a series I wrote and quit after two had been published -- they were basically an attempt at selling outlines instead of writing stories, and it did show up on the New Voices in Fiction website. I was told that it had been published in the magazine and an anthology as well. Here's the special Christmas version, so put on your pointy red...

THINKING CAPS

Next year either I get my shopping done early or I’m blowing Christmas off entirely, I thought to myself. I hate shopping at the best of times and this wasn’t the best of times. It was the holiday season. The bookstore, the music store, even a little boutique to pick up some fancy hair crap for the missus… I needed a drink. I promised myself I’d never go back to that dive just off campus but this was an emergency.

As soon as I stuck my head in the bar I knew I was making a mistake. The last time I’d been in here the place had been nearly empty; now it was packed and noisy and full of happy young people, a breed of human I can do well without. The jukebox was still broken but someone had brought in a boom box. It was playing horrible dance remixes of Christmas carols. The kids were dancing on the rough concrete floor and crowding up against the badly finished plywood of the bar. Someone had stuck up some mistletoe. The bear on the dust-coated Hamm’s Beer waterfall seemed to disapprove.

The short guy with the walrus mustache who had been behind the bar the last time I was here moved neatly back and forth as he dispensed draft beer and well shots, a pointy green elf hat perched awkwardly on his threadbare scalp like it was getting ready to jump. I started to withdraw when he caught my eye and held up his hand and waved me over.

Damnit.

I pushed my way through the crowd and the bartender gestured again, moving me further down the bar. That’s when I saw a big chunk of territory at the end that was completely vacant except for a beefy guy in a Santa suit and a moist white false beard. He had the kind of rugose drinker’s tan that turns skin into a rind the color of a pomegranate. There was an iced tumbler of soda or tonic water, a shot glass, a bottle of hundred-proof vodka and a red plastic bucket sitting next to him on the bar. The college kids who had the nerve to look at him were disgusted or horrified; in turn he regarded them with calm benevolence.

The bartender smiled at me from behind his mustache, a creepy smile that made me think he had something planned for me.

“Come on, hoss,” he said. “You’ve got to meet the latest. Get him while he’s here cause he’s going away fast.”

Hoss? Whatever.

“Mike,” the bartender said to the beefy guy. “You got to tell this guy about the brain stuff, he’ll get a kick out of it.”

Mike smiled benevolently and took a small swallow from the tumbler and licked the moisture off his upper lip. “Sure,” he said. “It’s good for me to talk. It helps with the pacing.” He had the slow, smooth diction of a serious drunk deep into a binge but nowhere near the end.

The bartender turned to me. “The usual?”

I’d only been here once before and I was curious as to what ‘the usual’ was.

“Sure,” I said.

The bartender went to fetch my order and steal change from the frat boys at the other end of the bar.

Mike poured a shot and downed it. “Well, I can’t tell you everything,” he said.

“Top secret stuff, huh?”

“Yes,” Mike said, still smiling. “You got it in one.”

Then he picked up the red bucket and, just as easily as he smiled and drank, he puked in it. Nothing big; more like a macro-spit than a hurl. Clear fluid dribbled into the blue-white fibers of his fake beard.

No wonder the crowd gave him so much elbowroom.

There was a thump on the bar next to me. It a tumbler filled with something red – no ice.

“Eight bucks,” the bartender said and grinned, stubby yellow teeth barely visible behind his mustache. I handed him a ten.

“So this is the usual,” I said. “What is it?”

“Just go on and taste it, okay?”

As I’d feared there was wine in it; there was something else as well. Something varnish-y that swallowed like hard alcohol. It made a couple of return trips before I finally got it down.

“It’s a Brutal Hammer,” the bartender said. “Seven ounces of vodka for the kick, five ounces of red wine for the hangover. I got this cheap Ukrainian vodka I can’t get rid of so I figured I’d cut you a bargain. Chernobyl, baby.” He gave me a thumbs-up.

“Fuck you and everything you stand for,” I said and the bartender laughed and moved down the bar without giving me any change. Jesus, if he was giving me radioactive vodka what kind of wine was in there?

“I used to think that the problem with the world was that people didn’t think straight,” Mike said and took a swallow from his tumbler. “You know, people think they’re rational but they really aren’t.”

“How do you mean?” I took another sip of the Brutal Hammer and it only took two swallows to get it into my stomach. I’d paid for the fucking thing, I was going to drink it.

“You know anything about the brain? I mean, developmentally.”

Now I had to think hard for a moment. At first there was nothing there, and then the file opened up. “Sort of. The way I understand it is that the brain’s like a house where there’s been all kinds of additions put on and nothing torn down; brains started off as sensory processors and then at different stages of evolution additional parts of the brain were added to the basic design and the parts that make us human were the last to come along. It’s not like a human brain is all that different from a fish’s brain; it’s more like it’s a fish brain plus a whole lot of other stuff.”

“Close enough for government work.” Mike smiled gently, as if he’d made a joke. “They’ve done some interesting work with brain scans. When someone makes a decision you see action in the lower parts of the brain first, then in the upper parts. The fish and lizards we carry around in our skulls make the decisions and our human parts just rationalize everything the animals do.”

Mike poured and swallowed a shot.

“Our brains are better at religion and conspiracy theories and fairy tales than they are at rational, logical thought. We can think, we can think well, but it’s like stirring paint with a screwdriver or cooking on an engine manifold. It works but you’d be better off using a tool made for the job.”

Then he puked again and dabbed his lips and false beard with a cocktail napkin.

“So we made the right tool for the job. We made brains for people that let them really think rationally.”

“We?”

“Hoss, you know I can’t tell you that. I will say this; since nine-eleven there’s been an awful lot of money floating around for people who have an interest in…” He took a sip from his tumbler. “Alternative avenues of research. Big money and no controls and if the president says you can do it then it isn’t illegal. And that’s everything you’re going to hear about that.”

I nodded and thought the Tuskegee experiments and those cancer patients they dosed with plutonium and the time they sprayed germs over San Francisco…

“The thinking caps have two parts,” he said. “The first is a sort of EEG that shows which part of your brain is working on a given bit of information. The other’s a processor that allows you to record memories in a limited fashion and also gives you access to calculation, record keeping, all the functions of any computer hooked directly into your brain so you can access them at will. You wind up with your consciousness running on both an electronic digital processor and an organically-grown analog one.”

He took a swallow from his tumbler. I took one from mine; it still took two swallows to keep down.

“Sounds like it would be hard to do any experiments with animals,” I said. “Seems like you’d need to be able to communicate in order to tell whether or not things were…”

Mike nodded. “Terry, which isn’t her name, split off from us and tried to work with parrots that had already been trained to talk; she figured the setup would improve their vocabularies enough to let her work with them. Bird brains are different than human brains; parrots have the equivalent of a cortex but the neurons are organized in a totally different… Well, you’ll hear about those parrots in the news pretty soon. That’s one disaster they won’t be able to keep secret forever. So yeah, we had to experiment on ourselves if we were gonna get any useful results.”

He took a shot and lifted his hat; there was a grubby white plastic box the size of a deck of cards stuck into a shaved patch on top of his head ringed by scabby scar tissue. He put his hat back down.

“Those poor parrots had to be hooked up to their thinking caps with optical cables. Goodbye flight. No wonder they got so pissed.”

This time I didn’t take a swallow; I took a gulp. A quick bad booze shudder and then I said, “So that little box has a processor that can run a simulated human mind?”

Mike waved his hand like he was brushing away an invisible butterfly. “No, no. It’s better than you’ll find in consumer markets but we don’t have anything that good. Yet. It works like this. When you have a thought, you not only have the thought, you also know what part of your brain it originated in. So you find out that your parking is based on territorial instincts rather than time and space functions, or that you picked a particular checkout line because you think the cashier is sexy. It makes it a lot easier to sort things out. Put that together with a digital memory recorder and an internet connection…” He shook his head. “You’d be amazed if you knew how many decisions you made with your dick.”

“Oh, I doubt that.”

“You. Would. Be. Amazed.”

Mike puked in his bucket. The bartender swooped by and emptied it into the little bar sink, wiped the lip with a rag and set it back down.

“Anyway, the end result is that you know what you think and why you think it, you can store important memories in a solid form – the world’s first impartial witness. So if you’re willing to spend the time with your thoughts you can really figure things out. And that’s what fucked us over. We figured out the big question. And then we figured out our answers.”

“The big question?”

“How should I live my life. That’s the only important question and everything else comes from that. And at the end of the day life is a simple minimax situation – minimize suffering, maximize pleasure. Of course there’s no way to eliminate suffering – it’s all a matter of making sure that you get what you pay for.”

He took a sip from his tumbler; by now I was pretty sure it was just a way of padding his stomach for when he hit it with the hard stuff.

Mike held up his hands and started counting off fingers. “Terry, Terry, Terry, Terry, Terry, Terry, and Terry killed themselves inside of the first two months. What we got out of the hard drives in their thinking caps was that they realized their prime motives for existence were based on animal needs they would never be able to effectively gratify – that everything they did was intended to attract potential mates and none of it would ever work and the best way to maximize their happiness was to minimize their lifespans. Thinking with the dick, except for Terry and Terry who used their vaginas.”

Mike puked into his bucket again — splosh.

“Now Terry and Terry, they make a good argument for the success of the experiment. They got together with each other, started getting involved in community services. These days they grow their own food, volunteer at the local grade school, all that kind of thing. Epicureans in the real sense of the word – maximizing life’s pleasure through balance. I mean, they would have wound up like the other Terries if they hadn’t decided that they’d settle for each other.” He held his tumbler out to me. “To Terry and Terry.”

I clicked my glass against his and we both sipped.

“Terry, Terry, and Terry couldn’t make their new minds work. Or maybe we just didn’t wire them right. So now they are locked up in tiny rooms and nasty men such as myself take notes on their various twitches and spasms. Terry runs that program; he likes power and secrets and decided to roll that way. Dick thinking and in his case it works. Terry realized that at the end of the day it was chocolate for her. Diabetes got her after a year and a half, a good two months more than what she thought she’d get. Terry wanted to be pregnant; she’s involved in a fertility research program that’ll come out in the news the same way the parrots will. I promise you nightmares, my friend. And then Terry, Terry, Terry, and Terry have devoted themselves to a sort of masturbatory monasticism. Limited but gratifying, apparently.”

Mike took a shot.

I took another gulp and a deep breath. “So how are you handling it, man?”

Mike smiled, his eyes wide and wet. “Oh, I’m just like Terry with her chocolate but I like to drink.”

The bartender leaned over to me, his mustache almost hiding his grin so I could barely make out his crooked yellow teeth. “Tell you what, Hoss. It’s Christmas. Finish that off in one go and I’ll give you another on the house.”

I looked at the Brutal Hammer, still more than half-full. “Nice of you to offer but I think I’ve got more here than I’m gonna finish.”

Mike smiled benevolently at both of us. “Ho, ho, ho,” he said and reached for his bucket.

Writer's Group Opening -- CLosed

Sigh. The group has temporarily disbanded. The call is off.

Lip Service West

We'll see if Rob is going to be able to print this. If so, we're off to the races.

So there's exciting news. As usual. But this isn't as usual!

As usual.

Anyway. I've got exciting news! I've been asked to participate in Lip Service West. It will be on December 10. I can't tell you how excited I am about this.

If you aren't familiar with Lip Service, it's a fairly high-end program devoted to live readings of autobiographical material by literary writers. It tends toward the gritty and transgressive. Sounds within my range, if a bit ambitious. Which I am.

I was familiar with Lip Service long before I began writing seriously, and remember in detail some readings that were broadcast on NPR. When my writing pal Allison Landa (You have read her piece on Salon, haven't you?) read, I attended and was impressed past what I'd expected. It was a rock solid program.

It gave me that itch. I wanted in. So I threw a few pieces at Joe Clifford, the organizer. And he expressed interest, and I expressed interest, and things have gotten to such a pass as to have me saying, hey.

Show the fuck up on December 10, and you will hear about how I...






Ah. I'll tell you then.

Brand New Oaf

This looks awful on the screen, but in print it is dee-licious. I'll be talking up the Phantasm plug-in for Illustrator big time in the near future, but let me just say it produces the best halftones since those dudes that worked on Dore's stuff. I am not going to color for the large versions of these any more -- the black and white now has all the color the work needs, and more would be detrimental.

The Oaf: I dunno, I've got this horrible streak of competitive Alpha-male in me.

The Missus: I know. That's what keeps me interested. You're not a wimp.

The Oaf: WHAT?! They told me I was supposed to be a wimp! I thought masculine power was inherently loathsome!

The Missus: Well, I'm awfully hard on you, and it wouldn't be any fun if I destroyed you.


So. It's been a while since I posted. I've been focused on Swill and taking care of personal business.

I've also been undergoing a bit of a sea change. The process of growth I've been coping with recently came to a head, and I'm breaking in a new pair of metaphorical boots. I mentioned in my last post that I've recognized the fact that I am a literary rather than a commercial writer, and how that realization was empowering and liberating.

It was reinforced a few days later when -- I ain't giving details til it's set in stone -- but I may be participating in an NPR-level public reading, and I'd be alongside people who's work I've genuinely admired. The stuff the dude running the thing said about my writing? I'm still glowing.

Well, that kinda reinforced things for me, illuminated a few interesting corners of my life. What is true of my writing is also true of other aspects of my creative life. While I still have an infinite amount of learning and study ahead of me, I am now a mature artist and writer capable of operating both in fine art and commercial arenas.

It is time for me to leave school. It is time for me to fully engage the world. I do what I do well, and it is time to find a place for myself.

Part of this means taking care of myself. And part of that means creating an environment and life that is healthy and appropriate for me, rather than awkwardly fail to live the kind of life that 'normal' people live.

Right now I am, and have been, in a uniquely fortunate position for an artist. I have a small amount of cash, and a supportive spouse. I am making the choice to begin living the life of a professional artist, and if I hit the skids before things work out? I'll worry about that then.

Right now? My life, on my terms. Which are extremely flexible, it must be confessed...

So there are two big steps I'm going to take. First, the monetization of my natural, habitual creative acts. Writing is already firmly on the tracks. All I have to do is keep doing the next thing.

The prints from Swill -- sample above -- will be coming out about once a year. I need to find them a gallery, or possibly find an art agent, and this year I'll submit them to the Spectrum competition, and do a POD calender of the images.

Paleo art. A gallery outlet would be nice, but I think the natural place for my work in this area would be either working with paleontologists or doing children's books. And again, submit to Spectrum and do a POD calender.

Swill itself is starting to itch at me. I need to sit down with ol' Rob (You seen his new blog? I think he swiped the title from me -- I once referred to him as 'Rob Pierce, the man with two verbs for a name.'), but I have recently been spending a lot of time moaning about how there aren't any real gatekeepers for self-published fiction, and I want to do book design, and I want to do readings, and Swill has, over the years, developed an eerie credibility that might be of some use in...

Gotta talk to Rob. But I'm dreaming big.

So what this means, is that I'm getting to work on my big projects in a systematic fashion, and at the same time I will be actively seeking work as a copywriter or commercial artist. I will finish my scientific literature class, because it is providing me with a lot of topsoil -- it makes me feel smart and gives me good ideas and teaches me useful stuff. It is adding energy to my life, rather than draining it. But when that's done, classes will be taken in order to achieve specific projects.

Basically, given the response my work has received thus far, it is obviously time to take all the half-finished projects and send them out into the fucking world. This means I will be spending my time doing things I like to do, and do well. This is one reason I've been delaying getting my shit together for so long -- I shun pleasure instinctively, and the life I'm shaping for myself could be sweet if it works out.

Here is the immediate future.

1. Swillistrations. I've got a class in tabletop photography on Saturday, and I've got a work table for my studio on order. I will do fifteen pieces, and seven of them will go into Swill. When finished, I will submit them in a batch to Spectrum, and produce a POD calender based on the best of the old Bonelands series.

I will also do a tutorial based on one of the prints. I will try and make it as complete and professional as possible. When it's done, I'll send out a request for career information to as many different graphic software companies as I can find, and include the tutorial as a portfolio piece.

Then I will put together a portfolio, and look for galleries and art agents. Once I get a sizeable batch of portfolios circulating, I forget about it for a while.

2. Write a resume for my writing, and change my personal site -- seancraven.com, it's primitive but enthusiastic -- to a business site, advertising my services as writer, artist, editor, and designer.

3. Then I write the novel. Straight through, by myself, write it, read it, revise it, then it's line edits and off. No dicking around. I have a fucking plot, I've written it nine times already. It is time to be a pro.

4. Then I put together a round of portfolios to send out to ad agencies and so on.

5. Then I finish the script and get it off to agents, and possibly self-publish it as a book. Because I'm like nine kinds of crazy.

6. Then I find out about doing dinosaur books for children.

At that point, it's vague and fuzzy, which is fine. I'll be changing this as it goes along.

But I need to be focused on effective productivity. Part of that is recognizing that if I get too scattered, too worried, too unhappy, too stressed, etc. I stop functioning. So I need to eliminate sources of stress from my life to a degree that, yes, is not normal. Is not something that would be acceptable in most people.

I have the option of doing that. And I'm taking it. I think that the combination of focusing the bulk of my time on the large, ambitious, self-expressive work, while searching for commercial work in-between bouts, will produce some kind of positive result in the long run, even if it's something I can only keep up for a while.

I will be trying to find the balance between my obsessive need to do one project at a time, and my desire for a more systematic and predictable life, especially the money part. If I'm going to function, I need to respect and work with my obsessions.

I told the missus that I might make some decisions that will be wrong or crazy over the next six months or a year, and that we were going to have to live with that. Because it's time to do something different.

It's time to do it -- not Frank's way, not Sid's way -- my way. Folks, if you haven't tried it? Put yourself in a position to rub your hands together and cackle. It is scary as shit but it's hell of fun.

Affirmed

From this...

... to this, in less than two years. How did I do it? With expert assistance.

I've been trying to figure out what I'm for and how to make me work for a long, long time now, and over the last while I've finally started making some serious headway.

I recently ran into our old vet while yardsaling. After filling me in on his current unpleasant physical state -- he is not an enthusiast of aging -- he asked me what had been going on with my art and writing.

After I laid out a fistful of the ridiculous affirmations the world's given me over the last year or so, he put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me down so our faces were inches apart. He grinned. "So it turns out you're worth a shit after all."

That felt good. Nothing like an affirmation from an elder. I love 'em, and seeking them has brought me good. But while it may take a while for my habits to wear off, I'm done seeking affirmation for my art. I've had enough of the high-end stuff to know that I like it, and it helps, but you know what? It's time to stop asking for it.

I've mentioned that I'm taking a class in commercial fiction that Nick Mamatas is teaching? I signed up for it because I wanted to be told whether or not the novel was ready, and I sincerely hoped it would be very well received. Well, last Tuesday night, we went over the first chapter of the current draft of the novel.

I ain't telling stories out of school, but if you get a chance to take a class with Nick, do so. He's a Rinzai type -- if you're not a Zen buff, Rinzai was the Zen master who founded the hard school of Zen, where enlightenment was frequently inspired by a sharp blow to the head. I just grinned, talked slow, and took it. I know when that's the thing to do.

Essentially, he made me realize that I am not a commercial fiction writer, and that trying to make my work commercial was not helping things. That the characteristics that would make this book appeal to its natural audience are the very ones that I'm stifling in order to make it fit into the genre format.

I feel as though I've been given the book back. More then that, I feel no more real need for outside approval on it. I can see clearly that while the time I've spent with my creative energies focused on pleasing readers has been well-spent, it's time to cut it out and write the book I want to write and fuck everything else. I have been writing down, I have been making decisions I dislike for what are ultimately commercial reasons.

I can't let commercial decisions have any serious role in my work if it is to function properly. The next draft I write straight through, for myself, before I show it to readers, and then I will ask for just line edits and clarifications. That's it. And then it goes out. And I write the next one.

I love genre fiction. I respect its practitioners. I will promote my work in that realm, and I will happily continue to work and associate with my genre writer friends.

But ladies and gents, I am a fucking artiste. I'm done trying to be anything else. I work for me, I probably won't make a living at it, and who cares.

See, figuratively of course, in a moment strongly reminiscent of the ending of the Wizard of Oz, Nick gave me a box. And in that box, formed of letters cast in lead and crusted in sequins, were the words, 'Fuck You.'

And now, if someone says, "the lead character seems sort of lost," or, "this weird stuff goes on for too long," or, "this would be a lot more commercial if the lead character weren't mentally ill," rather than experiencing the sinking feeling that I'm a complete fraud who has no idea what he's doing, I can simply hold out the box and show them the words. Since I'm a literary writer, if my work is easy to read, I'm doing it right. And if my work is hard to read when I know I'm doing it right, then I'm doing righter.

It promises to be very convenient.

Here are the two drives behind all this. The need to achieve, and the desire for affirmation and approval. Now I'm at the point where the more of the former and the less of the latter I have, the better.

Thinking about this over the last few days, I've come to realize that this applies to more than just my writing. Or my visual art, for that matter. This is part of that maturation process I've been trying to get into. Working with confidence. The ability to say, "If you don't get it, it's your problem," and walk away.

Why am I in school rather than hustling to make a buck with my skills? Because I want affirmation. I want to have someone tell me my shit is worthwhile. Well, I've gotten that. It's time for me to stop delaying and just get my shit together.

I feel a sense of balance and strength I've never experienced before, and my manic state is quite mild, thank you. I'm beginning to get a sense of my proper time and place. And in the interests of the hustle, I'm going to go send a few emails in relation to a notion of mine that might bear fruit.

Okay, world, I get it. I'm worth a shit. Message received; over and out.

Punctuation with Van Gundy

So The Other Van Gundy put this up as part of his comments on my post on writing advice.

"What makes a semicolon, em dash, or colon any fancier than a comma or period? They're just different kinds of pauses. Seems like bad advice; I wouldn't want any part of the toolbox off-limits due to perceived fanciness."

I started to reply, when I realized that I was generating a blog post rather than a comment, so here we go. Please note that this isn't a slam. I'm glad Van Gundy brought this up, because I wasn't clear. And yes, I'm going to use Van Gundy's comment as an example of what I'm talking about. I'm not doing it to be a wiseass, Van Gundy. You're obviously a decent writer, and you weren't grossly discourteous or anything.

But you were a little more sure of your position than was warranted.

Here's what I'm getting. First, I get the impression you thought I was advising against the use of anything but periods and commas. Not at all, buddy. I suggested doing an exercise involving strictly avoiding them because I was dealing with a manuscript that had problems with the punctuation, and the problems fell into a pattern I've seen over and over again.

And my use of the term 'fancy' was one that's clearly subject to misinterpretation. Let me explain.

Those forms of punctuation are fancy because they have much more specialized uses than periods or commas. There are specific circumstances under which they are appropriate, and if they are used outside those circumstances they're clumsy and distracting to the reader. Worse; they can reduce a writer's narrative credibility.

When you wrote, "They're just different kinds of pauses," you should have left out the just. They are different kinds of pauses, and they have different effects, and if you use them injudiciously? Your writing will suffer. The colon, the semi-colon, and the dash all set up a sense of anticipation in the reader. They are a message that the phrase that follows will have an immediate and dramatic impact on the phrase just read.

The ellipsis, on the other hand, says that the reader should take a moment to ponder what has just been said...

If you use a high density of these kinds of punctuation, you are in effect giving the reader a series of stage directions, and reading becomes a very different experience. This can be done properly -- may I draw the brilliant works of Avram Davidson to your attention? he does this beautifully -- but it is a feat for a master.

When I say that misuse of these punctuation marks costs you credibility with readers, it's because each of them issues an order, and makes a promise. As an example, a semi-colon primes the reader to expect a close enough relationship so that the phrase following the semi-colon should make the phrase preceding it take on new meaning. Overuse of these variant punctuations makes the manuscript more tiring to read.

So now I'm gonna be a dick, Van. Honestly, what you wrote makes me think that I probably wouldn't bother making that particular note on one of your manuscripts. But the particular sentence in which I think I've located an error is irresistible. Sorry, Van.

"Seems like bad advice; I wouldn't want any part of the toolbox off-limits due to perceived fanciness."

As a reader, that seems flat and anticlimactic to me, specifically because of the use of the semi-colon. The second phrase doesn't add anything to the first. It repeats it. Let's see.

"Seems like bad advice. I wouldn't want any part of the toolbox off-limits due to perceived fanciness."

I think that reads more strongly. The second phrase seems like clarification rather than repetition. This is a very mild example, and is a matter of taste. I can see how someone might think the sense of flow in the first version was nice.

They'd be defensibly wrong, but wrong. If the full meaning, including emotional tone, is the same, simpler phrasing is always to be preferred.

I mean, that was me being picky. But when you find manuscripts where there are more semi-colons than periods, where there are multiple dashes inside of a paragraph, and then you compare them to manuscripts where all variant punctuation is avoided? The simpler punctuation is more readable, more graceful, and carries more meaning. To a stunning degree. If you do the comparison, you will not debate. You may have a personal fondness for convoluted prose -- and I do -- but if you want to communicate, speak as simply as you possibly can while still saying what you mean.

And that goes for punctuation as much as anything else.

Come to the City and Strengthen Your Writing through Intellectual Labor

Well, I was planning on performing at this reading. It was going to be my very first time, and I was so excited. I was asked if I had any preference; I said I'd be able to clear space for this no matter what else I was doing.

I was wrong; something was going on that had slipped my mind. Something I should have posted about a while ago. I'm going to be attending Nick Mamatas's class on writing the popular novel.

Here's the course, and how you can sign up for it.

And here's Nick's own description.

I'll be bringing copies of the first chapter of my novel Ghost Rock to the first class, if that offers you any discouragement. So come on! Anyone who's reading this and is closer to San Francisco than, say, Milwaukee should at least give it some wistful consideration.

Notes to a Fellow Writer

This is the first test I've made of the process I'll be using to generate the half-tones in the series of Swillistrations I've got in the works.

This uses the Phantasm plug-in for Illustrator. This is an incredible tool, and I'll no doubt be doing a more extensive review of it later. But this is so much nicer than the half-tones in Photoshop, and it's resolution independent. I can print this at any size that I want to.

Oh, this is going to be sweet.

So the cat's out of the bag. Ol' Ferrett Steinmetz has fessed up to being my correspondent here in this blog post.

(On the internet, we call that a 'link-like loop.')

Anyway, you can go out and buy a story right now that he wrote and I helped critique. It's called Under the Thumb of the Brain Patrol, and it's in the current Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine.

And for the record. I do not 'eviscerate' prose. I do not 'cut it to fucking ribbons.' For goodness' sake, it's just a little spit on the corner of a napkin and the way some people squirm you'd think it was boiling acid. Honestly.

So dude!

I have dealt out the praise and addressed the specifics of your story in personal correspondence, but as I began to write of more general matters I found myself saying things I've wanted to say to other people, so I wondered if this might not be placed in front of a wider audience. If you don't mind the internet listening in, here's some large-scale advice. Please note that I'm well aware that you're further down the professional path than I am; the arrogance of my stance is tempered by this humbling knowledge. If I over-explain anything, it's for the benefit of those peering over our shoulders.

Here's a big one. Scenes. The basic units of organization of a dramatic story are the sentence, the paragraph, and the scene. A scene is a specific action or interaction, usually but by no means always taking place in a specific location. It has the shape of a story, with a beginning, complete with inciting incident, middle, and end.

You frequently use extended passages of exposition in your stories rather than scenes. "She thought back on those lost years, when she had wandered free..." and you go on for a while. This is a technique of oral storytelling rather than dramatic fiction as it is currently written. And as it stands, those passages stand out as weak spots in your work.

If you want to make them work, you might try framing stories that use this technique as oral stories. Let the voice of the storyteller be present at the beginning to introduce the story, and when it returns later, it will be accepted. Having conventional dramatic scenes inside of a fairy-tale framework works fine.

But I think you'd be better served to learn how to think in scenes more consistently. Conventional fiction is written entirely in scenes -- even when there is exposition, it takes place inside the context of a scene. A lot of the time your exposition leaves me wondering if you're avoiding the hard work of imagining a specific event or interaction that will say what you want to say. You do this perfectly in most places -- I think you should do it everywhere, all the time. Of course, that's me.

If you want to go that way, I would suggest doing at least one draft of one story in script format. Imagine it as a film rather than fiction, and only tell us what happens through dialog and action. You can go back and add the frosting later.

(A quick aside. For years, I avoided doing writing exercises because I was writing my fiction. Big mistake on my part. It turns out that writing exercises can be really, really useful for targeting specific areas of writing that can't otherwise be reached. Kind of like a Nautilus for prose.)

Now I'm going to address a tangle of stylistic issues that I think relate to the above-mentioned issue of oral versus written storytelling. These are things I've had to fight with in my own writing, and I've seen them in a lot of other people's writing. They tend to occur together, and I think I've finally figured out what they're about.

And you will find all the mistakes I'm talking about right here in this post. This is my casual writing. Don't look to it as an example. It's fun, but it kinda sucks.

Anyway.

The use of fancy punctuation -- dashes; semicolons, ellipses... The use of lots of modifiers. The use of meaningless conventional phrases, such as 'and then', 'of course,' and so on. These all seem to go together, and I think I've finally figured out why. They're from oral storytelling. From speech.

The punctuation and conventional phrases act as ways of linking ideas so as to provide a continuous flow. That flow is further enhanced by the use of conventional phrases and modifiers to allow time to think. In addition, there is a music to the spoken word whose tempo and beat can be controlled by such words. These are all functional when spoken.

But on the page, ideas are linked physically, and there's no need to pause for thought. Anything that doesn't contribute is in the way. Grit in the lubrication. Every little flyspeck of a comma or unneeded 'ing' paves the path to Hell.

Try writing a draft of something without colons, semi-colons, dashes, or ellipses. None. At all.

I mean it, dude. Worked for Jersey.

And here's a little mind-blower I got from Nancy Kress. I wouldn't put it out on the blog -- guild secrets, you know -- but she swiped it from Ursula Le Guin and it's got a name and everything so I think it's out there in the public welkin already.

It's called Chastity, and it's dead simple. Write a page without using any adjectives or adverbs.

Dude, stop laughing. I mean it. No, really. None.

Dude?

Dude... Oh, brother. Sorry. Should have been more gentle with that. Here's some Kleenex, buddy. It'll be okay. Just try it once. It's curiously refreshing.

And as for meaningless words and conventional phrases, hard work at revision is your best bet, but this can be aided by the use of search functions in word processing. I know that if you were to do a search on the following words --

and
so
then
but

and the phrase

and then

and then look at each instance and ask, "Does this word bring anything to the party? If I just yank that sucker out would anyone miss it?" you will find your prose hella tighter. Tex mentioned a book called The Ten-Percent Solution on self-editing that looks like it goes into that kind of thing in greater detail and I'm getting me a copy.

Of course, any stock phrases like 'of course' that you run across should get the same treatment.

I'd also suggest that you can save a lot of excess wordage by taking advantage of point of view. This story was written from the close third-person, where you write from inside the character's head. You have a habit of saying, "So-and-so thought..." We're in their POV. Nobody else is thinking. No need to specify who it is.

And for that matter, when you describe a sound? You don't need to say that she heard it, because that's how you perceive sound. If she sees it, tell us. That's interesting. Assume sounds are heard, sights are seen, sensations felt, ad nauseum.

Here's one that I do all the fucking time myself. You're describing something and you try and combine or triangulate descriptions to get greater effect -- "It was thus and such, it was this and that." It do not usually help. One clear description is best. Restatement is a form of hesitation.

And, finally, a word to the wise.

Yours,

Sean

More Pretentionism: On A Critique

This was the prep drawing for a print, and when I ran across it the other day I thought it was worth showing. I adore drawing imaginary animals just for that moment when you look down at the paper and get a faint whiff of life. This wasn't done with a brush, by the way. I used the graphics program Expressions. I get the feeling that the new Illustrator pretty much makes Expressions pointless...

The print was strongly influenced by Japanese brocade prints, and it would have been good if the sleeping Allosaurus hadn't looked dead, and I'd given half a fucking second's effort into drawing some ground cover, a few fucking ferns for chrissakes, how much work is that.

So I got a little het up during my writer's group meeting on Monday, and it provoked some thoughts. I really should get to bed and try and get a couple of hours of drone time in, but I'm thinking too hard for that.

The Monday night group has recently undergone a sea-change. One of our members, Deborah, has had a cough for a while that's kept her away. The result of this has been fascinating, if not to my tastes.

Because all of a sudden the group is a triangle. And triangles are awkward shapes for social groups because it is so easy for it to turn into a two-against-one dynamic. And some of us get a little defensive under such circumstances, and by some of us, I mean me.

Now, before I go into this, I need to state this up-front. I work with these writers for good reasons, and I get good and useful criticisms from them every single week, and have done so for years. But they both have particular biases, they are both quite literally-minded, and neither is artsy-fartsy or responsive to the kinds of fantastic and visionary elements that are at the roots of my creative process.

Deborah gets me in a way the other two don't, so when she's in the room we can kinda acknowledge what's going on when art gets trampled by craft.

They were critiquing the first act 0f the current draft of the novel. It is considerably changed from the last draft, and vastly improved. And I need to get this done. I need to get it out and get on to the next one. So at this stage of the game, I am just asking to have my hand held. I am being honest about this -- right now I am wanting to hear, 'yes, write the next act and send the fucker to an agent.'

You can see where this is going. Honestly, I can't recommend being in a room with me when I'm a little defensive. Ordinary person gets a little defensive, that's maybe three, four pounds of defensive. I dish out ten pounds, twelve pounds easy and that's nothing compared to when I'm really defensive. I've had to do a lot of defense in my life, so I'm good at it.

The first critique came from someone who has only with this draft become aware that the lead character is mentally ill. This is not something I can blame entirely on her. One thing I'm becoming more and more aware of is that my greatest weakness as a writer is that I do not...

Oh, Jesus. This is the kind of thing you're not supposed to talk about. But they brought it up. They used the term, 'too smart.' Repeatedly. In the discussion of more than one issue. But fuck it. I'm dealing with a subject restricted by the bounds placed on ordinary mortals, I speak of the Mighty Oaf. I am too big, too strong, and too smart. My shoulders are wider than an airline seat, I can't use garlic presses because they break in my hands, and the target audience for my fiction is Sherlock fucking Holmes because nine-tenths of what I write is implied. Make that thirty-nine fortieths.

And the result has been that the last draft of the novel was an entirely different experience for everyone who read it. And everyone except for maybe two or three folks I can think of only got a fraction of what was going on.

If they all got the same fraction it would have told me something. They all got a different fraction. Everything I put in, somebody got except for some of the obscure scientific stuff. And Linda got some of that, like the way time shifts affected the frequency of light so the lead character was seeing into the infrared and ultraviolet at times. But until now, she never noticed that Matt was nuts. And she doesn't like it. She thought this was a funny book, and now it's got this whole edgy, disturbing quality to it that gets on her nerves.

See, she had already decided she liked the book. So when this comes up, she's reacting as though I took her book away. So she actually told me that she thinks the book would be more popular if I took that element out.

I think some kind of stinking froth actually shot out of my ears at that point. The origin of the novel came when I wrote what was intended to be a classic ghost story very much in the M.R. James mold about a haunted garage band. I arbitrarily set it in the Santa Cruz around 'eighty-three, 'eighty-four, and used myself as the chatty M.R. James-style narrator.

When I was told the supernatural elements worked, and the realistic elements worked, but they didn't work together, I set about fixing things and the work grew in size. When I realized that my narrator was based on myself during a time when I slept two or three hours a night because my flying saucer experience left me with terrible nightmares, I realized I might have a protagonist rather than a narrator.

My mental illness is the core of the book, one of the primary structural poles. The fantastic elements of the book exist because if I wrote what happened literally, it would be a weak skeptic's version of Communion, and it would suck. But one of the root virtues of this work is that it attempts to deal honestly with mental illness. So that crit was easily deflected.

Then when they asked me what the mechanics of the fantasy element were, what the rules were, that's when they said I needed to dumb it down. The words 'dumb it down' were spoken.

I also disagreed with this criticism. I do understand that people are beguiled by images of a comprehensible world, and that by presenting an only-partially comprehensible story, one that feels as if it makes sense even if you can't figure out how, I'm automatically dismissing a certain portion of my potential audience. But -- here I betray that heralded intellectual snobbery -- I think I like my potential audience better without them.

Then came the criticism that the book just seemed to wander at first. That the protagonist doesn't seem purposeful. Now, this one got to me. Because while I was hearing phrases like, 'he needs to be the hero in every scene,' that immediately set off my hack alert, I also knew that there was something wrong in the work that I hadn't noticed.

That phrase 'hack alert' probably needs comment. I believe that all novels are literary, and that literary fiction is a particular genre rather than a description of what is best in fiction. I also believe that much of the fiction published as literary fiction actually is superior to much other fiction in many ways, and that the critical standards to which it adheres may be effectively applied to most, if not all, other fiction.

I also believe that genre fiction is not only too accepting of lower literary standards, but that its tropes and traditions allow people to 'construct' works (D&D, I blame you for a lot of suck), and that such construction is inferior to genuine acts of creation.

So while I'm not ever going to dismiss fiction on the basis of genre, I'm also conscious of the element of commercialism in most fiction. But that includes what is labeled as noncommercialism.

Here is a key Pretentionist concept.

Truly noncommercial art is made public despite the will of the artist, and the vast majority of it will never be seen. And in most cases, it will be more interesting from the perspective of pathology than aesthetics, and there will be a distasteful exploitative taint to its display.

'Noncommercial' work created with the idea of display in mind is created in the context of a commercial environment that allows support of the artist. And these environments inevitably specify the nature of the 'noncommercial' work they are willing to support.

Even art that manages to avoid interacting with commercial interests still takes place in the marketplace. We live in the marketplace.

That said, there is a very interesting dance that I find myself doing. As I've written before, part of the reason for this blog is that I don't want to be a noncommercial writer. My big aesthetic realization is that what I truly value is the experience that someone has in response to my work.

So there are obvious things I have to do in order to make my work readable. And there are obvious things I have to do in order to make my work worthwhile for me. For instance, while I love a good plot? I read tons of stuff that's basically plotless. If people didn't want plot, I'd write the occasional plot-0riented short story just to prove I could, but a whole novel's worth of plot? No way I'd bother if I didn't have to. Writing insane visionary passages? Sorry, folks. That's why I read, so that's why I write. You'll have to live with them.

But there is a weird zone where things are not clear-cut. I have made specific visual descriptions in the novel because I knew they would be easy to film. Those scenes are easy for the reader to visualize, because they use a familiar visual vocabulary. This is both a commercial and an aesthetic decision, and as an artist I stand by it.

Now. Back to the novel. The issue that came up that really hit a nerve was the idea that the lead character needed to have more of a sense of fate or destiny or purpose to him.

Now, this is something that has been the big problem all along. This has been my big focus on this rewrite. So when I heard this, I felt like I'd gotten a crack from a bat right across the back of my head. Of course, the dude saying it prefaced it with, "This seems ninety-eight per cent there and I would have read through all this just for the writing," but that wasn't important to me. I already had the good news.

The way the criticism was stated made things difficult for me. Al works from a basis in principles, while I'm a 'disagree with principles because they're too much like rules, take them apart with the intention of destroying them, find much virtue and reluctantly incorporate them,' kind of guy. So hearing statements like, "Matt has to be The Hero all the way through," and, "Matt has to be The Fixer in every scene," set me off.

But I knew there was something to what he was saying, and I couldn't see how to deal with it. And if I dealt with it through the application of principles rather than through an organic process of creation, it would damage the work. So I wouldn't do that. But his statements made it clear to me that there was a flaw in the work that I wasn't seeing.

When I learned art, there was no one I could find who taught perspective in a rigorous fashion. So I took a couple of courses in the architecture department. When I wanted to study plot, the only person who was able to actually teach me anything is a writer who's become marooned in SF/Fantasy. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, he's a strong and worthy writer in and out of the field, and it is likely I will succumb to the same fate.) Most of what I know about composition I learned from art I hated and landscape gardening. Here's another Pretentionist nugget.

Current training in the arts ignores many practical aspects of craft. A dedicated artist would do well to design their own course of education, and be willing to go outside the realm of the so-called fine arts to complete it.

And in this case, the solutions Al was presenting me were from the world of writing instruction. Most writing instruction books are intended to enable people to construct potboilers. But they were revealing something wrong with what I've written, and my intuition was that this was important. If Al was right and I had ninety-eight per cent of the novel, well. I was missing the important two per cent.

I could fix the visible problem by applying the rules. But the visible problem, Matt's seeming lack of purposeful movement, was the result of something deeper.

Now, the structure of Matt's story is one of someone who feels completely at a loss in life, who winds up at the end being strong and purposeful. This initial sense of drift is important. It's part of the story. But this is something that has been done before, and I've used other techniques to compensate for it, and goddamn it.

If it was right, it wouldn't feel wrong.

So I've been going nuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuts.

And then it finally hit me. I was reading the first few pages, and I realized that Matt had a tremendously emotional experience that drives the entire fucking plot happen in the second paragraph, and I never say or show how he feels about it. I have him perform extreme acts motivated by that moment, and I never tell the reader how that moment influenced him.

And I realized that while there were passages where I intentionally let the reader in on his thoughts, my technique has been to hide as much as possible. This is partially because of the first issue I mentioned -- one of the symptoms of the mental illness I've shackled my poor protagonist with is self-pity and compulsive internal verbal abuse. I've tried to indicate that stuff without showing it to a degree that becomes unpleasant for the reader. (Which is why Linda's complaints about Matt's mental illness are driving me nuts -- I had literally seventy or so pages of that kind of stuff that she read without issue in the last draft.)

But -- I haven't systematically considered the issue of what the reader knows of the protagonists emotional state. It's purely been a case-by-case issue.

And that's the thing with principles. When Al and Linda were strongly encouraging me to go through the work and make sure that Matt was the hero in each scene he appeared in, I felt as if Satan himself had appeared in my studio and said, "Come to the hack side. We've got all the readers!"

I knew that if I did that, it would throw off the balance of the scenes where Matt's role as the hero of the story simply is not the issue. It would make the work more readable, more appealing, and less worthy. But if I hadn't been made to consider the issue, I would not have recognized a serious flaw in my work, and one that applies to much more than this one instance.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. I've never had a critique that didn't teach me something, and sometimes the real pissers are the ones that do the work.

Mektoub.