Telemachus

I mean to make a habit of writing on here every day again, and with Lent about to start I thought I'd sneak in one last post.

I'm in a math class. We learned about Base 10. And now I look at the finger-spread of my ten fingers, twice, and think about how that's my age.

I got a book off interlibrary loan--they had to get it all the way from Ithaca--that hasn't been checked out since May 25th, 1993. The last set of fingerprints in those pages were made before I had fingerprints of my own. My mom would've just found out she was pregnant with me.

Twenty years.

Odysseus would just be coming home.

She strode in a swarm of fireflies

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today--explode--fly apart--disintegrate!   

- Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

Ahhh, don't let Tumblr distract you, Allie! (But the fandoms!) Focus!

Tonight I finished another short story--the second in as many weeks. It's only because this class has been sitting on my head, putting the pressure on me to do something, but I feel like Ray Bradbury. His book Zen in the Art of Writing (title is kind of misleading--it's the name of one of the essays contained within) has been a constant inspiration to me lately. It lights up that thing in my head that wants to write.

Maybe this blog can be my yellow pad and my Ticonderoga pencil, like Douglas Spaulding's setup in Dandelion Wine, to whittle down the truths found in a summer. I've been picking up truths off the trees like berries lately, new ideas I can set to distill.

At any rate, read poetry every day, he says somewhere in Zen in the Art of Writing. I'm pretty sure I do that anyway, but I nonetheless go to the library and get out a volume of Alexander Pope. He's slow going--he takes digesting, more so than Shakespeare--but the wisdom! The classical structure of the lines! I love him, even if I only have two bites a sitting. And then I flip to the beginning of Zen and read more carefully and I find out one of Bradbury's favorite poets was Alexander Pope. It's things like that that make me feel like Ray Bradbury knighted me in the same way Mr. Electrico knighted him, ignited him--live forever!

And then I went to the library today and found his other favorite poet, also one of my favorites and a key provider of the Bradbury DNA--Dylan Thomas. I had to chose between two volumes that both began I see the boys of summer in their ruin. Well, I don't want to be in my ruin. I write, Bradbury says, to know that I am not dead.

This line from Fahrenheit 451 keeps coming back to me--He strode in a swarm of fireflies. Which is to say, books, words, pages that have caught fire and gone up in tiny sparks.

In Defense of Hate Disguise

"It is worth remarking as an extremely fine touch in the picture of Bottom that his literary taste is almost everywhere concerned with sound rather than sense. He begins the rehearsal with a boisterous readiness, “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete.” “Odours, odours,” says Quince, in remonstrance, and the word is accepted in accordance with the cold and heavy rules which require an element of meaning in a poetical passage. But “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete”, Bottom’s version, is an immeasurably finer and more resonant line. The “i” which he inserts is an inspiration of metricism."
- G.K. Chesterton, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (essay)

I was always going to give my habitual heroine a minimum of two fellow-passengers on the Gua Gua, and to make them coworkers came naturally after that. The two of them have a simple job, to sell stuff, but it's not simple stuff that they're selling--it's the concentrated essence of the seasons, but it looks a lot like ice cream and, when you get right down to it, that's all it probably is.

I made one of the two a poet as an excuse to throw all sorts of little songs and jingles into the text. The other fellow was a bit more difficult, and I didn't have a name for him until he'd been around three chapters or so, with me growing more fond of him every minute. Then, on a whim, I stuck him with the unusual monicker of "Hate Disguise"--a name, as a bemused Renee puts it, which is "part English-dubbed anime villain and part sneeze."

It's a misnomer, of course. Hate, while not bereft of bitterness, is a sort of gruff, warm, mopey fellow. Any anger his soul may possess is turned inward--as Shakespeare worded it in As You Like It, "I will chide no breather in the world but myself, against whom I know most faults." So why go with Hate Disguise? Well, the name occurred to me and it just sounded right, I can't say it any way else. The meaning was entirely wrong for the character, but what if you didn't know the language? Then "Hate Disguise" would sound like a big, warm, generous name, a name for a man who smokes cigars and then feels guilty over it, not on account of his own lungs but because he's afraid that his friends Renee Rant and Donovan Din might get a dose of secondhand smoke. That kind of guy. I read a play by Clifford Bax, The Poetasters of Ispahan, where one of the titular lyricists is looking for a decent rhyme: "What though the sense be thin?" he says. "Sound is the soul of song." (I might add that the word "poetaster", which means nothing more than "bad poet", sounds fantastic; I'd crown myself with that word over a forest full of laurel wreaths.)

So in the story Hate has some kind of a normal name before Donovan Din the poet inflicts the flagrant "Hate Disguise" on him. It's a little comment about poetic thinking and how sometimes poets make the sounds matter more than the meaning. Still, I can't help but wonder uneasily how readers will react to him, since these days the word "hate" carries such a strong connotation that it can't be regarded as simple nonsense. All the time, we hear about "hate speech," "hate crime"--things that are supposed to crush and kill the spirits of our fellow men. And people will have a hard time trusting Hate, and how much you wanna bet that my editors (if I'm ever lucky enough to have such things) force me to change his name? I wouldn't exactly blame them, but I'd have a hard time prying the name from the identity. He just is Hate, and it can't be helped; don't hate on Hate Disguise. He surprised me by turning up in a chapter with the name attached to him, and ever since then, it's just been like that.

To me, that's the thing that fascinates about Hate--the fact that he keeps turning out not like I planned him to. He was going to be a madman. Then he was going to be a smooth talker, absurdly comfortable in his skin. Then he turned out to be a daydreamy, foggy sort with an inferiority complex. But I tried to make his tongue cease to be sharp, in order to better suit this characterization, and it never did. Like many a foggy daydreamer, he's every bit as clever as his friend of the sharp focus. And you know what? I shouldn't jinx the boy by writing all of this out as if it's finality. Because I'm going to bet you that Hate's just gonna keep on evolving. I'll stay the course, and we'll see what happens.

The lesson I take from this is that I shouldn't let Renee be static, either. She's a first-person narrator, and it's easy to obsess about consistency when you're writing from a single point of view, but the truth is that people aren't consistent and there's always new sides of them, and sometimes the sides conflict. I could have one person in a room and try to inform you, over the phone, who was with me, by throwing out only descriptive terms--and you'd think that I had a crowd in there. People can't be described in three words. People are crowds and should be treated as such.

Autem ("however" in Latin, but looks like Autumn in English)

Today I received a suspicion--not a confirmation, but a suspicion--that my character Donovan Din has curly hair. I'd always assumed it was straight, but as a writer you have to keep your antennae up for stuff like that.

So I doodled him with wavy hair, but then he looked not enough like Beethoven and too much like my sister Clair's character Blitzen Coves. And if you were to know Blitzen Coves and Donovan Din, you'd know that they'd work just fine together on a rap collaboration, but on a personal basis not at all.

It being Friday the 13th, we had to read some of Something Wicked This Way Comes, which we began last year and never finished. I wish I was Ray Bradbury. I come close to crying sometimes that I'm not him. And then I thought I'd invented Autumn People when I tried to put them as antagonists in my story, but it turned out that not only had he invented Autumn People, but written them so much scarier than I could ever hope to do that it made me despair. Ye gods, Ray, you dearly-departed writers really rip my skies. And when I think, when we began Something Wicked you were safely on the other side of the grave. Funny how life is.

And with all this happening I have to study for midterms. Cruel world, in it? But with second winds and pumpkin-spice lattes (which are everywhere, Clair says, this time of year) and the shrug of shoulders and the side of Latin that I like (more language and fewer smudges) and the fever of presidential debates in the air and the idea that I might be able to write a little something for NaNoWriMo after all--who knows, maybe turn out some halfway decent Autumn people?--I think I'll make it after all.

Style and Shtick

Sometimes I wonder if my writing's getting too stylistic.

Having a voice is essential, of course, but there's a narcissism in style: saying something, then adjusting it as if you're trying to pick up on your own signal: "Nahh, I wouldn't write that. I'd write it much more cleverly than that."

That was the problem with Pearls Before Swine, which used to be one of my favorite comic strips. Part of its appeal was this rough-and-ready feeling that it had; the drawings were simple, not bad, not inconsistent, but nicely stick-figurey and slapdash. When the zebra ran through the first panel you felt as if the artist had just tossed him off to give him a head start and was drawing the crocodiles real quick to complete the chase scene in the next panel. When the rat, in mid-conversation, pulled out a frying pan and started hitting people with it, it felt almost like an actual impulse instead of the gag he'd been leading up to all along.

Then something terrible happened. The artist developed a style. And now the characters look poised and pretty and stiff as boards. He even applies shading to them, as if they need to be rounded out like plush toys. And when the rat hits people with stuff I wonder if his heart is really in it. It feels as if he's following a script.

I could learn a lesson from that. I'm way too stuck on the internal rhymes and the run-on sentences. Rhymey words are great, but I don't want them to be my shtick, or one day the style might crumble away like so much sugary coating, and I'll find there was nothing underneath it after all.

Congealment

Stories are sort of like sourdough. You aren't making each one from scratch; you're cultivating a bit of the old one, even if you don't know it, and it makes the new story better.

I hope I'm doing that successfully. I'm writing the current novel in scrappy little bits, all of which I need to connect. All these different files, it's like trying to create life by growing all the organs in different boxes. And since it's first-person I've got tricky things to worry about like keeping the voice consistent.

Whenever one of us is in a play and we come home from rehearsal, my dad says--always, no matter what--"Is the show gelling yet?" Really. And he never uses the word "gelling" in any other context, ever.

So I'll say this about this story of mine--I hope it gels.

a blog should not be a place to complain

So I get jealous of other people's characters. Constantly. At the moment I'm sad that I don't own P.G. Wodehouse's Psmith and Mike. A couple months ago it was Jeeves and Wooster. Before that I think it might have been the characters in Krazy Kat or Little Shop of Horrors or something. What is it with this?

Also I envy other people's writing styles. I know perfectly well I'll never write anything as plucky and jaunty and sunny as Wodehouse at his best. Or anything near as hypnotic as Bradbury's stuff, or as idiosyncratic as George Herriman.

I mean my writing's pretty good (I'm only eighteen) and I've got some pretty good folks on my hands. I've got Hate Disguise down to a science, and Donovan Din is starting to listen a little when I whistle for him. Renee is stiff, but serviceable. Why can't I be jealous enough of myself to start writing stuff for myself?

Links of the moment

Finish Your Novel. I'd been searching for a site like this for some time, but they all fell flat and told me things I already knew. This is practical, motivating stuff that gave me more than a few epiphanies. If I ever meet this man I'll thank him personally for my most recent scene, which is, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, undeniably the goods.

Watercolor Moods, the YA book blog of a friend of a friend. I appreciate good YA, but it's hard to find, and I'll definitely be looking at a few of these.

After My Hat, the illustration blog of the friend who showed me the above blog. Hope she won't mind me linking. I wouldn't do it if I didn't love it.

Um...that fantastic Psmith commentary I mentioned in my last post. I suppose I should delete that post, since other than the link it's just me fangirling over how great Psmith is, but a blog is really just life served up hastily as it comes, so I'll keep it as it is.

A Complaint, Punctuated By Optimism

Pity the writers. It's not all pretty paragraphs; it's gasps and groans, it's days spent holding up an antennae trying to get a signal from Mount Olympus. It's thinking you've hit on a way to get the words to come and having it turn out not to work every time you try it. It's that indescribable pang that sends you reeling when you hear about people younger than you getting published.

But here's the good thing about being a writer: you're allowed to talk to yourself as long as you type everything you say. Which means you can provide yourself with a bit of comfort. Which is why I'm sitting here writing a blog post.

All while my sisters beg for the computer to watch a TV show on one end and the characters I'm supposed to be writing about lodge complaints on the other.

Bemused

I love to write, in theory. My problem is lack of motivation. Whenever I'm away from my laptop, I'm practically drooling, dreaming about attacking that keyboard and filling the world with wordy wonder.

Whenever I'm at my laptop, I…go on YouTube for a couple hours. I google-search all the same things I google every day. Then someone boots me off, because when I say "my" laptop I mean "the family laptop, used for everything from legal documents to online paper dolls". And I wail and gnash my teeth, because I was just getting started.

What I need is a permanent muse. Not the kind that gives you an idea, hangs around while you're getting it off the ground, then blips off with a "see you later!" and leaves you to fend for yourself. I need a muse-for-hire. I could pay her wages in word-filled pages and…oh look, I bet there's a poem in that. See, this motivation business is not that hard.

…now where do I begin?