Light Under the Floorboards

Rules

Every so often I hear some writing advice that annoys me, and then I want to rant about it.

This time, I’m mad about this idea that you can get away with being weird if you’re a genius. But if you’re still just learning, you have to color inside the lines and play by the rules.

When I think of, “If you’re still just learning, you have to color inside the lines and play by the rules,” I think of things like realistic painting, or classical music. Fields where you’re trying to get close to some specific ideal: what the thing you’re painting actually looks like, the notes that the composer wrote down. But if you’re not trying to paint a bowl of fruit that looks exactly like a bowl of fruit, how are you going to say that a realistic style is better than an impressionistic or abstract style? And, in the same way, how are you going to say that Raymond Carver’s style is better than Cormac McCarthy’s, or that Greer Gilman’s style is better than Hemingway’s? I have personal preferences, sure. But all of these writers are writers who are in control of their craft. They’re not aiming for some single standard of Good Writing; they’re aiming for their own particular visions.

And somehow we have this tendency to say that it’s only the writers who are in control of their craft who are allowed to follow their own particular visions. The rest of us have to follow the Rules, and stop using adverbs.

People tend to point to me as the person who’s the computer expert, but I learned everything I know about computers just by trying different things to see what happened. It’s only by trying this thing and that thing and Googling shell commands and crying that I’ve been able to put together in my head a pretty good model for how a computer works. The people who don’t trust themselves to try different things just to see what happens, the people who don’t trust themselves to make mistakes, are the ones who are always raising their hand for help as soon as something happens that they don’t expect.

I think it’s the same way with writing, or with any kind of art. You can try all you like to follow the Rules, but one of these days your gut will say, this doesn’t work. I don’t know how to do this. And you try building the new tools that you need, and maybe they don’t work perfectly and maybe you build something that’s kind of rickety and weird. But it’s yours. It’s what you needed to make.

A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend has a structure that interweaves two different timelines. I fought against that so hard. I thought that trying to interweave two different timelines was totally pretentious and you shouldn’t try it unless you’re a supergenius. (I think I first encountered the technique in Angela Johnson’s The First Part Last; Angela Johnson is, for the record, a supergenius.) But my gut told me that it was the right thing for the book, and I had to follow my gut.

So I don’t think there’s any such thing as writing with training wheels on. I don’t think that you’re going to gain anything by sticking to the advice that people give you and the techniques they say are safe. You have to have a space for just smearing the paint across the canvas and seeing what happens when you do this and when you do that.

There are a lot of times I’d rather read a bad book than a safe one.

2010 02 13

Endings

I think novel endings are a little like nailing the landing on a gymnastics routine or a figure skating jump. That is, the ending totally depends on the beginning and the middle, and if there are any problems in the beginning and middle, they’re going to turn into an obvious wobble by the end. So you look at the end and you say, “How can I fix that wobble?”–but you can’t fix it by fixing the ending. You have to trace it back to where it started and fix it there.

2009 12 09

writing

Identity and its totems

For a present to myself for finishing a draft of my alt-1920s-Asia fantasy, Sparks & Ashes, I got myself a little order of perfume from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. BPAL has gone mainstream enough now to advertise in Shoujo Beat, but I discovered them a couple of years ago, when it seemed like everyone on Livejournal discovered them at once. They’ve got scents based on gods and demons, characters out of Lewis Carroll and Neil Gaiman and H.P. Lovecraft, plants, cities– in this order I got “The Bow and Crown of Conquest” (that’s from Revelation), “Les Infortunes De La Vertu” (that’s from de Sade–I didn’t pick all of these myself, they give you some freebies at random!), “Season of Ghosts,” “Loup Garou,” “March Hare”…

One of the things that’s alluring about BPAL is that it gives you a way to define your identity. Lots of people glom onto a signature scent, but it takes a special genius to repackage this so that you can wear something inspired by a literary reference you love, or a favorite character from Shakespeare.

I was thinking just now about how I used to be into that sort of thing to, I guess, a much greater extent than I am now. I was interested in making icons for my Livejournal. Figuring out web page designs. Designing avatars to use on forums. Playing dress-up with online paper dolls.

Teenagers get criticized all the time for using material objects to assert their personalities or their identities. And, for sure, I think it’s important to watch out for the ways that marketers use that desire to get you to buy stuff. But it’s not that there’s anything wrong with the desire itself. You want to say, “This is who I am,” but saying “This is who I am” feels very naked and scary. So you gather totems to prop it up. You say who you are by the perfume that you buy, and the way you trick out your MySpace page or your blog. And they provide their own kind of strength.

I think maybe I’m old enough that I’m used to who I am. Maybe that’s why I’m less invested in these external markers of identity than I used to be. Also, I’m probably more alert to the artifice of choosing just one picture or quote to represent oneself. But it can still be fun to experiment.

I smell like sage/lavender/leather, by the way. It’s a weird but somehow alluring combination.

2009 12 02

Kristin Cashore’s Fire

Fire by Kristin Cashore. The cover shows a bow and arrow, and a womans face at the top.

Fire, Kristin Cashore’s recent companion to Graceling, was one of the books I’ve most been looking forward to all year, and what an absolute joy to read.

Cashore’s characters have realistic, complicated emotions that you don’t usually see in fantasy novels for any age. There are any number of girls capable of kicking ass and taking names in recent fantasy novels, but Fire is so much more than that, a young woman who is strong and fearful and determined and sad. And Cashore is as sharp as anybody writing about the intersections of sex, power, desire, and responsibility.

It’s a romance that’s compelling without being gooshy, and matter-of-fact about sex while tastefully fading everything to black. But I love a good side of morality-play along with my action-adventure-fantasy-romances, and I’m most drawn by Fire’s gradual journey towards coming into her power, figuring out how it can be used for good instead of just for evil. Her coming out of her shell, towards relationships with the Love Interest but also his family, and her guards.

She’s asking big questions: how do we use the power that we have responsibly? How do we use the desire that we have responsibly? And Fire is so real and so beautiful, trying to stumble towards answers.

2009 11 29

Plot: it’s hard

I love Stephen King’s On Writing, and I’ll cheerfully endorse about 80% of the advice in it (which is high, for a writing book!), but it does bother me when he says he doesn’t plot, that plot is too artificial, that he just puts his characters in a tough situation and lets them sort it out.

Truth is, I have yet to read a Stephen King novel with a really good ending, so I’m inclined to be skeptical.

The trouble is, as a writer you have control over every aspect of the situation. You have control over the situation itself. You have control over the flow of information. You get to decide where the iceberg is, who knows about the iceberg, and what they do with that information. And without the iceberg, you have only half a plot. The difficulty in plotting is making sure the iceberg is exactly where you need it to be.

Without making your readers feel railroaded.

Because when you have a spectacular coincidence, suddenly people remember that none of this is real. It’s just words that a person thought up and wrote down, and it’s all completely arbitrary. There’s nothing wrong with being postmodern and going for that effect on purpose, but I’m not going to care about this love triangle or that person trying to survive the North Dakota wilderness if I keep thinking that they’re fake people.

So you plant the trap, but you kick leaves over it and make it look real. You build the house that looks, from a distance, like it belongs there in the forest.

Time is the universe’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. So too with plot. What does it change if that discussion happens when your main character is angry and frustrated enough to hear the worst in things? What does it change if that discussion happens after she finds out one crucial piece of information? You can’t abdicate responsibility for these decisions. You try things out one way, and then another, cutting out what doesn’t push your characters far enough and also what pushes them in ways that aren’t subtle enough. You try until you’re sick of trying, sick of considering how one decision ripples out onto another.

And this, I think, is one of the things that beginners have to learn. It’s why books sometimes get harder, instead of easier, to write. It’s easy to glom onto the way it really happened, or the way that you know from TV and movies, or the way that seems most dramatic or surprising, and get wedded to that even if it contradicts common sense, linear causality, and your characters’ personalities. It takes experience to slow down, look around, and back off the first thing that leaps into your head. It’s why I can’t do NaNoWriMo anymore.

It’s not an easy thing. But if it were easy, it wouldn’t be so much fun.

2009 11 25

writing

Amsterdamize, bike culture, and Love Story

Cass in A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend is a cyclist. Me, not so much, especially in high school. Raleigh, North Carolina, has its share of cyclists, and on weekends you can see spandex-clad packs zooming down the sides of highways. But it’s a city that’s built for cars. Big houses on big lots, strip malls, cul-de-sacs. There wasn’t so much as a gas station within two miles from my house, and it was seventeen miles to high school… seventeen miles on the bus, even when I was a senior. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 25.

The freedom that I wanted, when I was in high school, was nothing more than the freedom to go to the mall, the bookstore, the library, without waiting for a parent to be able to shuttle me around.

It wasn’t until I went to grad school in Chapel Hill, NC that I fell in love with cycling. They had a pretty good bus system, and I used it a lot… well, that was the year I broke my arm and then my ankle, so I had to. On my bike, I could get to school! I could get to the grocery store! I could get to the mall, sometimes, though it was five miles away and up a really steep hill!

There’s this new blog I’ve been reading, Amsterdamize. It’s trying to raise these questions of how we can integrate bikes into our daily lives, so that they’re not just a fun weekend toy for people who like to wear spandex, but a valid method of transportation, for running errands, for going to school, for going to work. In a lot of cities, that’s really hard to do because of the sprawl or the bad bike lanes or just the attitudes of drivers towards cyclists. But rolling down a hill with the wind in my face is one of the best things in the world. It’s good for me, it’s good for the environment… so why not try to move towards a world where that’s easier, and safer, and more convenient?

2009 11 11

personal

Finishing a novel

Finishing a novel is kind of like coming back from a long trip overseas. You blink a lot. Your words don’t work right and you find yourself getting up at the wrong time in the morning. The whole world seems a bit foreign and a bit uneasy.

Which is to say, I have finished a draft, and I have spent the last little while so sucked into my draft that i haven’t had much head space for anything else. And I’m very glad to have it finished, since I am moving on Sunday, and having two major projects to deal with at once just seemed utterly overwhelming.

I really hate moving. I have accepted it as an inevitable part of being single and twentysomething and living in New York, but I hate it. I have all these fantasies of finding a really cheap house in rural Japan, but I think I’ll hold out hope for a few more years that I can find myself a semi-permanent residence here in New York.

2009 10 20

Carrying a suitcase

I’ve felt a weird sense of kinship with Haruki Murakami for a long time, maybe because he was the first real writer I ever read in Japanese; even though I have a hard time taking his female characters seriously, and I don’t by any means like everything he’s written, still I feel like I can relate to him.

My sister is a runner, so she picked up his recent book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and I borrowed it from her. I came upon this passage near the end:

What I mean is, I didn’t start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn’t become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run–simply because I wanted to. I’ve always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I’m wrong, but I won’t change.
…
No, all I see is my own nature. My own individual, stubborn, uncooperative, often self-centered nature that still doubts itself–that, when troubles occur, tries to find something funny, or something nearly funny, about the situation. I’ve carried this character around like an old suitcase, down a long, dusty path. I’m not carrying it because I like it. The contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. I’ve carried it with me because there was nothing else I was supposed to carry.

I relate to this. I think that sometimes in American society we put a lot of emphasis on passion, and in particular, there are so many times I’ve been told you shouldn’t be a writer unless you’re completely desperately passionate about it. But I’m not a person who tends to have desperate passions, and when I do it’s usually better if I don’t listen too hard to them. When I feel that things are true it’s a quiet, instinctual kind of feeling. Okay, this is the suitcase I’m supposed to be carrying. It’s the suitcase that’s mine. That’s all, that’s enough.

2009 09 18

Against Optimism

I keep telling people that I wrote six novels before A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend. I’m not sure that’s true. I think I wrote four full novels and, two years I participated in NaNoWriMo, two half-novels that didn’t have enough energy behind them to be really worth finishing. In any case, my computer crashed, I didn’t back up well, and most of what I’ve written has been consigned to the little “trash” folder in the sky. But anyway.

People are a little bit surprised, sometimes, that I was willing to write four-and-two-halves bad novels and keep on going. What did it mean? Dedication, perseverance, optimism?

Not optimism. The people who know me will confirm that I can panic over absolutely anything, that I usually have to be pulled back from the worst-case-scenario running through my head. I stopped believing I would ever be published years before I wrote Love Story.

But I didn’t stop writing.

I mistrust doing anything with my hopes pinned on what’s going to happen in the future, or what other people are going to think of me. I trust what I can see in front of me right now: it’s an idea that’s worth digging up. It’s a story that’s worth telling. It’s sitting in front of the computer and making myself work the problem instead of watching the Daily Show or playing Bejeweled.

I may not always believe in myself. But I believe in the work in front of me.

2009 08 24

personal
writing-life