One Week Late

I wrote this last Saturday on my Note taker, but I wasn’t able to upload.

I’m debating whether to work on my novella next or go with the more reasonable plan of sticking to one manuscript until I finish it. Lately I’ve been feeling stressed. As I’ve mentioned here, I don’t like some of the things going on at work (especially the part about how we’re getting paid in installments, like that check for $90.00 I just got for September and the half wages I’m still waiting on for November). On top of that, I’m in the process of trying to find a new job, preferably one with benefits and some level of permanence, and because I haven’t found one yet, I’m going through that vulnerable feeling like a pathetic-loser-who’s-begging-to-be-loved-and-accepted phase. The gist is that I sometimes manage the stress better than others.

The last few days have been bad days on the stress management front, and my novella is about a character who … well, let’s just say stress management is not her forte. Part of the reason I’ve avoided working on it much is that I’ve had to do some research about the possible setting and about eating disorders, but mostly I’ve avoided it because I feel I need to go to a negative emotional space to get into my protagonist’s head.

I know there’s a debate about whether the best writing happens inside or outside the character’s skin, and I think that, based on my current revision work, my present opinion is that revision is best outside the skin, but I’m not so sure with this piece because it’s so long and because I’ve decided to change the direction of the action somewhat. I should probably just start reading to decide.

Puntitas reads _The Observations_ by J. Harris.

All About Drama

This morning I finished reading The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, a first novel about a father who gives his retarded daughter away while his wife is still unconscious from the delivery. I admired certain things about it, like the very real and very annoying tendency we all have to hear someone else’s truth and focus on ourselves. The novel’s characters all do that to a fault. One ordinarily self-contained person shares an honest thought or feeling, and the listener automatically says, “What about me? What about my drama?” I also thought The writer did a good job of capturing how we interpret other people’s actions in the framework of our own assumptions about them and about the way the world works. Someone says or does something with one intent. Other characters respond as if something else were meant.

But what was most compelling for me was the father. I was drawn by his motivation and fascinated by his guilt. I was so drawn to him, in fact, that I noticeably lost interest when I realized he would no longer be appearing, and when I became conscious of that loss of interest, I remembered a conversation I had with a friend of mine about how books with happy endings are less satisfying somehow than books that end sadly. I think that’s because happy endings are so much harder to write, happiness so often sounding like platitude, not reality.

For me, this book fell into platitude because I don’t believe that a mother who’s been mourning the death of her perfect daughter for twenty-five years simply accepts the retarded replacement, without wondering what she did wrong or why she was being punished or whichever of the lines from that script that the parents of children with disabilities act out before they learn to love the versions of themselves they never expected to give birth to. I especially don’t believe it from this set of characters—all self-absorbed in the extreme.

The book also gave me the opportunity to reflect on my own writing. The novel has too many little dramatic arcs and small unnecessary complications. For example, the father goes out of town to give a talk. He’s supposed to be gone over night, but instead, he disappears for three days. The family is in a panic and calls the police. When he does come home, he brings an unexpected guest. Later that afternoon, there’s an argument, and the eighteen-year-old son runs away from home, necessitating another call to the police, and the next day, the mother is frantic because she still has the guest in her home, an important business account to maintain, news of her sister’s cancer diagnosis to contend with, an extra marital affair to break off, and her son’s continued absence to worry over. That moment would have been as dramatic (or more) if complicating factors had been trimmed down to one or two problems. The marriage was going badly, so things would have been tense enough if the father had called to say he’d be staying away an extra day or two, then stayed away longer. His coming home with the guest, a character who’s presence doesn’t seem all that necessary to me, is complicating enough. The argument would have happened more or less as it did. And the son (instead of running away, stealing a neighbor’s car, and getting busted for shoplifting) could have just disappeared for a few hours and come home pissed or drunk and made more or less the same scene he had at central booking. The mother could have been just as frantic at the office the next day, stewing over the guest in her home and over the affair she’s breaking off, an important moment in her character’s development. My guess is that this excess of drama comes from an inexperienced writer’s fear that one problem is not serious enough to make the reader understand why a character does one thing or why the action takes a specific turn.

My novel, the literary one, and my novella are retellings of one another. The novella came first. When I wrote it, I didn’t think I’d write anything else, so I felt the need to cram it with every important scene I could think of and to fill it with drama and complications so as to compel the reader. When I wrote the novel, I discovered that some of the scenes in the novella actually belong in the longer work and that the two stories are too similar. At one point, I thought of them as being the same story only one when the protagonist is having a good day and the other when she’s having a bad day. Lately, I’ve discovered that they’re actually two different stories, but I’ll need to do a lot of work on the novella to draw that story out.

Puntitas reads _The Memory Keeper’s Daughter_ by K. Edwards.

Temporarily Out of Commission

I’m sitting in my bedroom with a humidifier, trying not to cough. Illness is such a humbling experience, stripping us of all the airs of grandeur we dress in daily. This morning I got out of bed, smelling of menses and urine from when the cough was so bad I voided. I went straight to the shower, unable to stand myself. After that, it was breakfast, a conversation with my mother, and more cold medicine. I think I’m back to the yearly thing, the one that requires antibiotics and a stronger than usual cough suppressant. My mother says it’s time for the doctor, but since I haven’t had this long enough to obviate the lecture about how colds and viruses need a week to work themselves out of the body, I disagree. I want my $100.00 and my two-hours wasted to result in a prescription, not a follow-up (i.e., no prescription, one condescending lecture, an appointment for another $100.00 and two more hours wasted). By this point in my life, I know my own body and my own ailments well enough to distinguish between a cold and something more serious.

I’m not sure why I’m bringing this up here, in a blog about writing, except that Adrienne Rich has a poem about how coming out of a fever is like a resurrection, how you feel like a survivor afterward, like you left someone else behind. I always think of that poem when I’m sick because she captures exactly what it is to be well again.

I think too that it’s hard to write about the way the mind betrays us when the body doesn’t respond to whatever power we think we have over it. My novella is about a person who is falling apart in mind, body, and spirit. While each collapse has its source, the collapse of the body exacerbates the other two. It affects her judgment and her responses to things. When I had a friend read an early draft, she could not understand why the protagonist couldn’t just do this or that more obvious and normal thing, so I realized that I hadn’t done a good job of reproducing that mindset.

Speaking of mindsets, I started the story I mentioned last time. I got 345 words down. I don’t really know where I’m going with it. Usually I’ve got a good idea. But I’ve decided I’m going to go ahead with it because I’m afraid of talking myself out of it the way I talked myself out of writing the poem with the ball, the swing, and the woman at the foot of the stairs. This story is about extraterrestrials, not at all my cup of tea, so developing the right mindset for the characters and in turn for the reader is important.

Now I’m going to stop. I’m rambling far too much. Between the humidifier and the last of the cough medicine with codeine, I’m having to work less hard at not-coughing, so I may be able to sit here and knit while listening to one of my famous audio books. The one I’ve got on the player now is not very good. It’s called The Lost Diary of Don Juan. Normally, I love retellings, hearing the story from another character’s point of view, etc., but this very obviously made-for-film novel has so little to do with the play that I suspect its writer hasn’t actually read the source of his narrative. The two clearest details in support of that fact are that the galanteador of the retelling is in love with a woman named Ana while the one in the source play is in love with a woman named INEZ and that the Don Luis, best friend of Don Juan and betrothed to Dona Ana (with whom Don Juan has a payback quicky before meeting the saintly Dona INEZ), of the play is no where to be found in the novel. I haven’t read the poem by Byron, so it’s possible that this novel is based on that. Anyway, aside from giving me an excuse to be pedantic, this book is helping me understand that I stop reading altogether when I lose interest in something. I still can’t bring myself to not finish a book, however crappy, so I suppose that finishing it slowly is better than not finishing it at all.

Starting a New One

I’m not sure what the matter is. This week and next are incredibly slow weeks workwise (three appointments in all), so I decided I would turn off my cell phone, my umbilicus to the world of interpreting appointments, and spend the time writing.

So far, I’ve spent the time sleeping, reading email, and researching useless and obscure trivia (like whether “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was once used to help children remember church teachings—an assertion, which Snopes.com tells me is false). Right now, I’m ready for more sleep. I should probably take Claritin or something for the discomfort in my sinuses and occasional drip. But I’m not motivated enough to do even that.

I was expecting to write today. I had an idea for a story last night. It came to me about a year ago after a conversation with my mother, but that mysterious spark that makes some ideas stories and others mere ideas hadn’t happened until I was doing my pointless Googling on urban legends.

Part of me wants to research more, to get the details right. Part of me noticed that there’s enough discrepancy in the details for me to have plenty of license. Part of me wants to put things off till I make a special trip to the locale, but this last is definitely a stalling technique.

Maybe I should stop doing this and do that instead. I can give myself a word goal, right? 500?

Finishing Again

Over the weekend, I read one of my finished stories. As usual, there were little things to touch up, mostly the odd wordy or awkward sentence. But over all, I was happy with it.

The story moves back and forth between present and past. The transitions are clear, and the flashbacks build on each other and on the action of the present effectively, drawing to a strong ending.

One of the concerns I’d always had was that the story sprang from a detail, a datura innoxia plant, but never referred to it. When I wrote and revised the story, I wasn’t able to work the datura in. It didn’t really matter, the story made its own kind of sense. But the plant hints at events that reveal something about one character, which affects others.

This weekend, I was finally able to work the datura in. The story will benefit from one additional reminder in an earlier scene. After that, I will be satisfied. I will probably not read it again once the new detail is added.

I’ve got another story in pretty much the same shape—all complete except for two telling details. I’ll try to work on that next. I’d like to send them out soon.

Speaking of sending out, I haven’t done any this fall. There’s no excuse, except writerly anxiety, and writerly anxiety doesn’t put books in print.

Art As Metaphor for Art

Today is a day of completions. The maestro finished replastering the house and painting the trim, and I finished my seamless slippers. Both events are worthy of record because

• both began weeks ago,
• both evolved over time,
• both required input from others,
• both lapsed into immobility and meditation,
• both concluded satisfactorily after a low point of frustration near the end.

The work on the house began in early October. It started with a simple replastering/repainting (both substances shooting out of a compressor hose at the same time). After a week or so of rest, my mom thought it would be a good time to fix the sagging overhang above the stoop, cover a brick wall with the same paint/plaster mixture as the rest of the house, frame an outdoor shrine, properly finish the eaves below the roofing, and whitewash the trim. The maestro did it all—between real construction jobs and mysterious absences.

As the house progressed, the sound of sawing, filing, scraping, brushing drifted down in short, unobtrusive puffs, and I worked on my swatches, read patterns, thought about drab Amanda, a teacher of what used to be called Home Economics. I imagined her knitting some slippers of her own in a glitzy rayon blend for Hernan’s design gallery. Yes, he is a designer of women’s clothing.

She would do exactly as I was doing: sit over the slippers, her needles idle, reviewing what she knows, brooding—very much the antithesis of Ursula, a short story character who went from poet to knitter during my last bout of revision. Ursula casts on, experiments, frogs, her mind elsewhere.

Amanda is constant, steady. That is her predominant characteristic. She perseveres with her work, perseveres with her secret love of Hernan, perseveres with her theories about her sister, perseveres with her job and her seething obedience at home, perseveres.

I haven’t quite figured out what Ursula’s thang is, what makes her give up her craft, what motivates her very strong, very negative reaction to another character: protectiveness, scorn, pity, satisfaction.

I’m at the low point of frustration with the short story. With Amanda, I’m at immobility and meditation, but I’ve got the maestro to draw inspiration from: plodding, intermittent, and unobtrusive. The slippers are a good symbol to take strength from too.

_The Woman in White_ and Other Controversies

I’m reading Wilkie Collins’ the Woman in White. Wikipedia classifies the genre as sensational. The term rings a bell, but a faint one, so I’ll find out more about it.

I chose this book because it sounded like a ghost story, and though I’m only a few chapters in, it reminds me of Dracula in the same quiet way that running into a person we know superficially brings to mind the cousin or roommate we know better: the layers of narrative, a night walk and the appearance of a mysterious woman wearing ordinary but completely white clothes, the arrival to a seemingly empty house, eccentric characters who smack of the morally corrupt (a perfectly proportioned dwarf [we know Victorians and their thoughts on deformity and disability], a mannish woman, and a womanish male invalid).

I’m reading it because it’s Halloween, a holiday I like for lots of reasons from children and candy to the acknowledgement of the metaphysical, the embodiment of forbidden impulses, and the fearless and even joyous confrontation with inevitable death and with the drives we can’t or won’t suppress.

I’ve always wanted to write a ghost story of my own, the kind Henry James and F. Marion Crawford wrote, silent, under-the-skin tales that get down deep because they’re based on an assumption that there is a soul and that day-to-day choices feed or dampen that soul. Some, the best of them, read like theology, and I think an otherwise resistant reader can be persuaded to consider God inside a ghost story.

For me, this is vital. So much of my work involves God—sometimes frightening, sometimes petty, sometimes indifferent, sometimes intense and protective, sometimes sexual. I don’t think “faith based” fiction has room for this kind of God. I’m not sure that a lot of other readers do.

Last night, I was having dinner with a friend. She’s in the final stages of her dissertation, which is on the sermons of a tenth-century monk. She was summarizing part of a chapter to me and said that, to her monk’s way of thinking, the male should close the gates of his senses and remove himself from women in order to enter into what she terms a dull Heaven that is devoid of sensory experience and burdened by continuous prayer.

My own thought was that concentrated sensory experience leads to small moments of magnified gratification, like the tension and release of orgasm, but the sustained sensory deprivation and focus of my friend’s monk is the instant prior to or immediately following climax. A body knows the anchor of the senses and does everything it can to find out what else is possible; a soul knows there is more and flounders against the lack of limits.

My fiction is about that struggle, and that eternal state of orgasm is what a lot of my characters strive for or work against. I don’t know how much value someone like my friend can find in my writing. I’m not sure how much of a market there is for this either.