D is for Denouement

The Posterchild for:

2010-11-21T16:21:00.006-05:00

Relationship ADD.

I remember the complete and irrevocable infatuation I had with my first viable "love interest" evaporated around the same time I was anesthetized for my wisdom teeth procedure. I went to sleep snug with affection, and woke up cold.

Another time, I built a charade from smokey bars, sneaking past locked gates, and a kiss in the rain. A world of perfection that had no hold on me once it became fully realized.

I have had shared moments of heart on a barroom receipt, on a cramped couch, in an apartment power outage, outside a packing van on a beach boardwalk, singing commercial jingles at 5 am wearing sunglasses while the sun came up; and I have called for chauffeuring at a price that I never admitted to aloud. I have been held by a man with trembling, strength, need.

All these things, once started, no longer held any sway. I had peaked, I had achieved. There was nothing left to win. The poetry had existed, had breathed life alongside me, and had gone.

I look at those women with diamonds, with a man, with the new life. I see their contentment, fresh like changed paint. And I search in vain for the poetry.

Where are the eyes that will meet mine downtown as the rain pours? Where are the hands that will find mine in the darkness of an open sky? Where is the laughter that will hold me captive? Who is the human enigma that will draw me in with a perpetual devotion to uncovering the mystery?

Am I doomed by my own inability to focus, to stay engaged? Am I committing myself to solitude by my need to keep turning the wheels once I've witnessed your sliver of poetry?

And is this why I have flitting ideas, which always run through my fingers like mercury?

Caught in the crossfire

2010-10-31T14:35:00.005-04:00

I find more and more lately I am caught in the same conversation that I wish I had never started:

Person: "So what do you do?"
Me: "You mean as a job?"
"Yeah."
"I'm an accountant."
"Do you like your job?"
"It has its moments. But there are other things I would rather do."
"Like?"
"If I had my way? I'd be a writer."
"What would you write?"
"Fiction."
"Really? What kind do you write?"
"...I haven't..."
"Oh, no time?"
"...There's no money in writing, so... here I am. An accountant."

By the end of the conversation, I feel broken, cheap, fraudulent. A money-grubbing twenty-something with no soul, a liar with an icy smile and a frost-bitten heart.

But I can't help telling the truth. I gloss over the part where I have lost faith in my ability to channel the written word. With no practice, there is no learning. Stagnation results in stale confidence as well... or none at all. The advice that you should write every day is by far the most true thing I have witnessed. And probably should start listening to as well, if I want to continue hawking myself as a would-be writer.

Justification on the Run

2010-10-17T07:03:00.004-04:00

One thing I am challenging myself to do these days is not make excuses. If anyone has ever tried it, you know how extremely difficult it is. I still can't delineate between explaining how something occurred and avoiding saying "so you see, it's not my fault". Here's an attempt.

Statistics, in my opinion, tend to explain circumstances without overly excusing or rationalizing behavior. The extent that is done occurs within the listener or reader. For example:
I traveled over 7,000 miles in the month of August.
I worked about 300 hours in the month of September.
In October, my class has been invited to 3 lunch/dinners to ensure we will not quit, given the unprecedented mass exodus of employees at our rank.
I have 3 bonuses in the form of gift cards I am challenged to spend, with another on the way.

Aside from statistics, I've found another way to explain without excusing is stating facts. For example:
I was finally able to exhaust a gift card with a purchase of a Hemingway anthology. At night I drink a gin and tonic or a glass of heavy red wine, depending on the tone of the day. I have started standing in the shower for a half hour, minimum, to let the hot water unknot my shoulder. How much I read from the anthology directly relates to how unable I am to fall asleep, how much I am thinking about the next day at work. I sit in front of the television on weekends staring at football players run headfirst into each other, and I am fascinated by this entertainment.

All that to say: things have been spiraling out of control. I have not written a word, and I have not blogged. I have been one-dimensional. I have burned-out. I am production-less.

There are no excuses.

The Shadow on the Wall

2010-08-08T07:48:00.002-04:00

So August is a hectic month, full of many travels. That includes this weekend, and several more upcoming. A lot of responsibilities, a lot of routine breaking, and a lot of unknowns.

Anticipation is very fascinating for me. In anticipation of guests, we clean the house, we iron our shirt, we style our hair. In anticipation of a long car ride, we pack extra water, snacks and music. Those are the good ways we plan ahead. But we also fall victim to knowing things in advance. We anticipate how terrible a project will be when we have heard how long it took others. We anticipate an intolerable evening when we hear that the in-laws are coming for dinner.

A symptom of the anxiety-ridden anticipation is procrastination. Most of us aren't masochists, and we avoid pain if we see it coming. I believe this is totally human, and there usually isn't much we can do to keep ourselves from falling for that routine once or twice.

But with self-motivating projects, like writing, how do you keep yourself moving along, writing that one scene that you really don't want to do, but know you have to for your character to get from A to B? Or those revisions, that you really don't want to do because there is nothing worse than going through with a fine tooth comb and realizing what you thought was brilliant and flawless is in fact crooked and broken? What about the "delete-a-scene" moment, where you realize you just wrote yourself and your protagonist into a corner and it's time to cut the witty dialogue and luscious descriptions?

We all put things off. In work, in our personal lives, in our ambitions. "If we just give it time, maybe something will work out." But honestly, how often does that happen?

My dad was renovating the master bath when he realized the base of the shower he put in was not angled inward - that is, instead of funneling the water down to the drain, the ledge was tilted toward the outside where the glass walls were supposed to be. Which meant standing water or worse, leaks. The manufacturer of the shower parts had arranged to ship him new goods once they fixed the production problem. Still, my dad had to tear down the walls and the base to get back to where he could begin installation of the new parts.

He spent hours agonizing over how to pull down the walls (glued in with silicone) how to pull out the base (cemented in), whether or not he would be able to salvage anything. For over a week, he wondered if it would ruin the tile, tear the drywall paper off.

This weekend, I had enough. I asked what he was waiting for, and he had no answer. I asked why he wanted the new items to come in, when clearly he had already made the decision to switch out the base. I asked why he planned to start demolition when the new pieces arrived. "Don't you want to be prepared to begin installing once they are here?"

I know my dad - when he saw his decisions were not based on anything but his own procrastination, he was embarrassed. With a defeated agreement of "you're right", he put on his work clothes, squared his shoulders, and pried the new shower walls down.

First one, then the other. He cut the damaged drywall out, which was much less than he had originally expected. On a whim, he tried lifting the base, only to realize the stone did have a chemical on it to self-release once the cement hardened, as the head engineer had promised. He took a chisel to the foundational cement, to see it come up from the plywood in smooth, even blocks. In five hours, he undid the work and worry of five days.

Sometimes, the hurdle we see is just an over-sized shadow reflected on the wall.

Promises of the West

2010-08-01T09:33:00.005-04:00

On the agenda for the month of August? Trips to 3 different locales. Deep South, West Coast, and Southwest. The end of summer means work travel, and that also introduces the possibility of new places.

Unintentionally, I have covered two of those locations in the past two books I read. I mentioned Pat Conroy and South of Broad previously, and then I embarked on reading Karen Fisher's A Sudden Country. Oregon Trail was one of my favorite games as a kid, and I've never quite gotten over the idea of embarking into the unknown wilderness. Little House On the Prairie was one of my favorite books, even after I realized most of the harshness life offered had been weeded out of those pages.

No author has to work terribly hard to sell me on the West, is my point. Add in poetic license, varied sentence structure and those words that just fit what you are trying to say, and I'm sold. Easy customer.

So maybe I let my hopes get a little too high, and I tried to rush through the book toward the end. Without spoiling anything, I just was not sold on the denouement and the resolution. The poetic words did not flow as smoothly as they did before. The realizations the characters came to did not seem organic, but more in the voice of the author imposed on them. The choices that they made and their ultimate fates did not seem logical to me within the context of their development. I did not buy into their internal resolutions, their discoveries. Not to mention that all characters made the same decision, which struck me as odd.

I read the acknowledgments to learn that it was actually based on historical accounts. Perhaps it was the attempt of mapping the world of fiction to the real world that broke the spell for me. Forcing the characters to end up in the situations reality dictated, regardless of whether it fit the story that had been told the majority of the book. For all the beauty in the language and characters for the first 75% of the book, I was disappointed in the last 25%. Did I get the message the author intended? Yes. I got the message - I just don't feel as if I unearthed it on my own the way the ending was structured. My takeaways were muted.

While I am skeptical of my own opinion of the book, as it seems I am harder and harder to please when it comes to reading these days, I do think this is still a good read. The first 75% of the book are more than enthralling enough to make up for any deficiencies I might have perceived in the last section. And while my mother agreed with my assessment of the ending, she still said she enjoyed reading it. The first chapter was absolutely astonishing, I just wish the ending could have kept pace.

Two parking tickets in under a month

2010-07-25T11:02:00.009-04:00

This coming from someone who, as a small child, was scared to death of turning in a library book late. What would they think, I used to ask myself. I've always been the child who struggled to do everything right, to be above reproach, to heed all the warnings and make no mistakes.

My mother tells me I scared her when I was seven or so, and I cried because I got a B in gym class. I didn't tell her back then, and I certainly see no point now in telling her the reason I was so upset was that I was afraid I would disappoint her. Not long after, there was the "repainting of my room" which resulted in a heinous pastel pink. All I wanted was purple, and I felt impotent and unable to stick up for myself because I thought I wanted something that was "not right". Granted, I was SEVEN, but you see how this was apparently ingrained in my overall psychology.

I was still a firm believer in right and wrong when I left high school, giving those who liberally made mistakes no quarter. Attending college in the South did some things to dispel that mentality, by seeing others who were even more stringent than me (like when I was told very matter-of-factly by a friend I was going to hell because I was a Catholic), and I learned tolerance. I no longer judged those who made mistakes, even though sometimes I saw the misstep coming from miles away.

But I never learned to be tolerant of my own mistakes. I took a creative writing workshop or three, and I was never able to take the criticism from others well at all. I was Queen of The Misunderstood, Professor of The Highly Conceptual You-Just-Don't-Understand-My-Vision School. And as a result, I suffered. I didn't learn. I just wasn't ready to admit that I was fallible.

By the end of graduate school, I started to care a lot less. When I started working, I reverted back, afraid of losing my job amidst a terrible economy and shark tank competition. So yesterday, when I got my second parking ticket and realized my indifference, I was actually happy. I had done something stupid, and I didn't care. I had made a mistake that I should know better than to make. But I did not hate myself for it.

I survived high school, college (although not without incident), and I kept my job. Despite the mistakes I invariably made and continue to make. All the time I spent chastising myself - wasted hours. That it took me so long to figure this out easily could be my biggest mistake in my life. But I'm not going to waste my time being angry at myself, or regretting the time already spent.

I'm going to take my new parking ticket violation insight and see if it isn't time for me to accept my own inadequacies as a writer and maybe learn from my beta readers and critiquing sidekicks for once.

Educational vs. Emotional

2010-07-18T10:54:00.004-04:00

Entering bookstores is always a struggle for me between the inherent cheapness instilled by my father and the love of the written word gifted by my mother. I stare at thin novellas and fat tomes, torn between the "New" fiction and the classics that I really should read in order to fully educate myself. Part of me hates going into the store because I know the conflict and indecision that awaits, while another part of me is secretly thrilled that I can purchase a whole world with just eleven dollars and fifty cents.

I went into the store this past week on a mission: dystopian fiction. I had recently spoken with a friend of mine who was reading Brave New World, and the conversation reminded me of the sheer awe I experienced after finishing that book for a high school Lit class. I did some research, looked for other novels in the same vein and settled on the whim to read something thoroughly Russian. I waltzed into the store with my list, feeling like such an intellectual.

As I combed the shelves, I found myself disappointed. They didn't have one author; they had another, but not the title I was hoping to find. The third had an absolutely atrocious cover, which the more I looked at, the creepier I felt - it was as though Big Brother was staring at me through the jacket.

I was set adrift among the volumes, no longer feeling superior and educated, but very lost and indecisive. My options were now overwhelming, and I had no foundation to ensure I would be purchasing a book that I was in the mood to read. What made it worse: my subconscious cheapness kept shouting "If you buy a book and you are disappointed, YOU HAVE WASTED."

To superimpose order on my sudden turmoil, I started in the A's and began to work my way through the alphabet. I considered the names I knew and those I didn't, finding one reason or another to reject them until I came across Pat Conroy.

During my freshman year of college, I took my first and only Literature class. I had neither the patience nor the mental fortitude to evaluate themes and character development in American fiction. I pulled an all-nighter to complete my final paper for that class during which I was typing words in my sleep like airplanes and knives (I received a resounding "congratulations, you are only marginally above average" grade of a B on said paper. Apparently I succeeded in sleep editing as well, as Uncle Tom's Cabin had neither airplanes nor knives and I probably would not have received a B if those words remained in there).

But just because I was inadequate in understanding the books I read didn't mean I didn't want to BE one of those people who could expound for hours on the pickle dish in Ethan Frome. I wanted to be smart and have important things to say about Literature. I had always been good at science and mathematics, but I didn't want to just understand computations. I wanted to understand the human experience and explain it.

So when the professor mentioned a reading and lecture by Pat Conroy, a "Southern Writer", I worked against my own insecurities about being in the Lit arena and attended. I don't remember the book he was promoting; I don't remember one word he said. I may have gotten extra credit for writing something about his lecture, but I don't remember that either. All I do remember is sitting in the back of an auditorium, looking about the room that watched his every move. And I remember him standing behind a podium, thinking he was infused with the belief that what he had written was worth reading. That there was genuine gratitude he exuded at our presence - the hope that we would share his sentiment.

I left with my notebook for the twenty minute trek across campus, feeling as though I would never be in that league. I would never have that confidence, nor the admiration of English professors, nor the rapt attention of an audience. But for once, instead of letting myself feel inferior and jealous, I promised myself that someday when I had a full-time job and disposable income, I would purchase the book he had talked about.

Standing in the bookstore, I had no idea which book it was, and I realized I did not care. I picked up a copy of South of Broad, and brought it home. I am biased - I lived in the South for about 5 years, feeling like an ex-pat in a foreign country. I soaked in the biscuits and gravy, the twang, and the indescribable influence of religion, hospitality, and facades. But it was never something I could own. Therefore, whenever I see a book about the South, I am instantly drawn to it as if there is a magnetic pull. And so while I have heard this isn't his best book, I would be lying if I said it would have changed my decision.

I've abandoned dystopian fiction for the time being. I want to immerse myself in the South, in the gentility of the humid air and Spanish moss. The awe of Brave New World and all the dystopian promises of hopelessness are no match for my own nostalgia of the South, and the need to understand the secrets hidden in old patrician homes. To read that voice I will never own. And because of that day, in the auditorium, where I saw the truth of what makes an author.

Before I go into the store again, I am going to find out what book he was promoting that time in the auditorium and buy it. And maybe I will throw some Faulkner on the list after that, in an effort to disguise my unnerving need for Southern Literature as an interest in self-education.

The window you choose changes the view

2010-07-04T08:25:00.004-04:00

Sometimes real life offers perfect examples without meaning to do it. Case in point - my younger brother and I tend to like the same kinds of storylines. Similar topics and characters interest us, and whether that is because we were shaped by similar experiences or genetics, I don't know. We are also both interested in stories through a host of media outlets - books, music, video games, theater, or movies are equally acceptable.

So at one point, he mentioned a specific video game he enjoyed, and described it as near flawless in both the integration of gameplay and cinematics. The innovation and the storytelling were superb. I don't take his recommendations lightly, so I watched him navigate through the opening sequence, and when he left for a stint in the city, I decided to sit myself down in front of the console.

Quickly, I found myself enraptured despite several years of not playing video games. The story was well-developed, suspenseful, and full of unexpected twists. While the so-called "love" scenes were amusingly cheesy, the graphic torture scenes were gut-wrenching. And the whole time, I bought the story, I bought the characters - I was in it.

After I finished the game and witnessed the closing sequence of betrayals, naturally I had to talk to my brother. We debated who was the hero and who was the villain, who we felt sympathy for, and who we loved to hate. And I found myself shocked that my brother didn't share any of my opinions, especially when we usually were so similar. "Wait until you see him in the other games," my brother said. "Then you will get it."

That's when it hit me. The game itself was the third in a series - and this story was meant to explain the backstory of one of the enemies in the first and second installment. As I progressed through the story, I threw my chips in with the main character. I rooted for him, I viewed all other characters through his perspective and based my judgments on that.

My brother, on the other hand, had been through the first and second installment. His lens was through the perspective of another character, one I had not even met. And the main character of the third? Well, it wasn't 100% clear at the beginning of the third piece, but he was eventually revealed to be one of the antagonists from the first two games. What my brother gained from the third was a sympathy, an understanding, of the motivations of the nemesis. The storyline served to show him the reasons behind the actions and made a prior character beautifully more complex. The villain could no longer be strictly hated.

Now, as I progress through the other two storylines, I am watching the character I previously adored begin his downward spiral. His descent into the category of antagonist, while fully developed and understandable based on the backstory, does not strike me as fulfilling, but makes me very sad. I had hope for this character, I had invested my time and emotions into rooting for him and wanting him to succeed. I won't say the outcome is disappointing, but it is not what I wanted.

Ultimately, the matter of perspective changed everything. Where I entered the storyline impacted my outlook and where my sympathies lay as opposed to my brother's. My experience of the remainder of the story will be vastly different from his, because of my frame of reference.

The question of where to start and who to start with is so important. Agents, publishers, editors and authors always talk about the revision process as having the potential to change a story so utterly and completely that is is almost unrecognizable from its original shape. Altering where a story begins or who is telling it can have a profound impact on the takeaways and sympathies of the reader. Don't underestimate it.

Oil Leaks in Fiction?

2010-06-27T09:02:00.001-04:00

I am not going to comment on the BP oil spill - there are plenty of political, environmental, and business blogs that can do a much better job of discussing the ramifications. What I find interesting about the whole thing has to do with books, naturally. The more I hear about the BP story, and the more opinion columns I read and researchers I listen to, the more I tried to think of books that had environmental "stakes", for lack of a better descriptor. Specifically, ones that had involvement by corporations - which rules out the apocalyptic/dystopian genre, not to mention tornadoes and earthquakes as plot twists.

I've never read Grisham's The Pelican Brief, just watched the movie. Maybe I am just not well-versed in environmental themes occurring in fiction, but I am seriously struggling to come up with other well-received storylines that had this facet within the plot. Granted, the presentation was the thriller genre, with people being killed for the sake of the cover up, but the threat of environmental destruction by a corporation was crucial to the entire plot. I know nonfiction had a few big hits, with A Civil Action and "Erin Brockovich" among them. That's not getting into documentaries, either.

It does seem odd to me that the concept of environmental preservation or destruction doesn't show up more in fiction considering the prevalence in today's world. Isn't this something that has clearly defined stakes? Or maybe it is harder to depict in fiction than I give credit? Is it strange that something discussed so much has only been dealt with on what seems like a primarily nonfiction basis?

I spent a little bit of time trying to brainstorm a way to work the environmental aspect into a fiction plot without going straight to a legal thriller, and I didn't have much success. I am somewhat operating on the assumption that manuscripts of this nature have been rejected by agents or editors, which is why they haven't made it to the marketplace. Maybe it's my own education of what is available in the marketplace that is skewed?

The bottom line? I probably wouldn't buy a book simply because it had environmental considerations in its plot, and so maybe that's why I have a hard time tracking any down. That's not what drew me to any of the above referenced books and movies. What mattered was the human development that was precipitated by the conflict - which happened to be environmental. But with climate change/man-made disasters being in the news for some time now, I am curious why we don't see that connection happening more often in fiction.

I have a confession to make...

2010-06-20T12:32:00.001-04:00

I want to write a novel. I have always had somewhat of an addiction to reading, even as a small child, and like any Generation Y individual, I blame my mother. She loved to read and sat my brothers and me down for bedtime stories and snacks on a daily basis. So I suppose it shouldn't have been surprising that I learned to read early and often associated that ritual with the end of my day.

Bedtime stories were a phase I never wholly left behind - when I was in grade school, the hour of storytime was replaced with chapter books on my nightstand. After numerous lectures of "stop reading and go to bed; you will be tired tomorrow" I cultivated the skill of turning off the light at the first sound of my parents walking up the stairs. Twenty minutes to a half hour later, the light was back on, and I was immersed again in the land of fiction.

In retrospect, that lack of sleep turned me into a temperamental, surly daughter. The days became less about the hours of school in front of me, and more about the need to find the next heartbreaking tragedy, the next spine tingling thriller, the next mind numbingly intelligent mystery. With my surliness and the constant devouring of the written word, at some point I stopped accepting the plots as they were presented to me and decided that there were infinitely better ways the author could have addressed the protagonist's plight or the downfall of the antagonist.

In the teenage years, my hours of consumption morphed into hours of production. Countless days spent experimenting with writing and visual designs at night while going through the motions of Algebra and Chemistry by day. Like a true Gen Y child, I found online communities of others who had the same repetitious pattern to their days, and we all encouraged each other to continue the creative streak. We all wanted to make something that other people could understand and relate to, something important enough to leave a mark.

The ability to invest that much time evaporated as people began to shape their own lives, full of different priorities. College, marriage, children. Less time was spent creating, and more time was spent doing. I was no exception - outside of the elective creative writing class I took, I hardly wrote.

For a long time, I felt that I had lost my inspiration. College introduced alcohol, coffee, and my inability to meet my personal expectations. In my childhood, everyone who read my writing complimented me on how well I did, how creative I was, how elegantly I strung words on a page. My writing class was full of people who could do exactly the same thing, and I was not prepared to no longer be "the best" at what I had invested so much time in building within me.

While I didn't notice it at the time, the realization was all the more debilitating because I am actually a distant and reserved person. When I went to my five year high school reunion, only a handful of people remembered me as a classmate. Writing words on a page, bringing characters to life, gave me a chance to let out all the pieces of myself that I kept bottled inside. To have hard evidence that I was not unique, that I was not the epitome of self-expression, destroyed me more than I wanted to admit. I took it as proof that the person I had kept quiet and subdued was not going to emerge from the cocoon as a butterfly. Instead, it would be better to keep her suffocated; let her rot.

So began the next chapter of my life that I am not so proud of: as a self-loathing, mindless automaton. I gave up on writing, I submitted to a day job (which unbeknownst to me, had the potential of sucking up all free time in EVERY day), and I tried to forget that I ever had aspirations of being anything other than a white picket fencer. I told myself I was happy. I told myself I liked my job, I could make this work. I took to watching shows like Top Chef, or Project Runway, where when the compost hits the wind turbine, people just force their way through. I told myself, "it's not like you would have made any money being a full-time writer anyway."

For two years, I thought this was a good idea. Could I really pretend to be shocked by my epiphany a couple months ago about how miserable I was? No, I think I saw the downward slope, and I was just too apathetic to stop it. Too mired in my disappointment in myself to even think the giant gaping abyss was anything short of what I deserved for my ineptitude. Without my crutch of writing, I didn't even know where to turn.

When I reached the bottom, I pulled out the last trick in my Gen Y bag of resourcefulness. I surfed the internet. I started reading agent blogs, editor blogs, publishing blogs. I learned about the industry, the dos and don'ts, and the grammar tidbits I had long ago forgotten. Articles expounded on authors dealing with writer's block, how to provide motivation for characters, how to overcome the feeling that all this time spent would result in nothing. I found myself jealous.

I missed writing a story that made me feel like I had crafted a new being. I missed the feel of my fingers typing words at the beckoning of my subconscious, totally bypassing conscious thought. I missed feeling that my perspective was worth sharing. Because isn't that what writing is about? Dreaming of characters and settings and plots during my drive home from work, while I'm doing my hair in the mornings? Much like how I used to imagine on the school bus on the way to class?

Let me revisit the first line of this post. It's not that I just want to write a novel. I think I need to write one. And I'm hoping to have this blog with me every step of the way.