Random Thoughts

Puntitas has been wrestling with random writerly thoughts, most of them negative since she’s also at an inauspicious curve in her cycle. She’s already gotten rejections for two batches of poems from her most recent mailings. The letters themselves have been blandly inoffensive, and the quick turn-around has been a pleasant and liberating change. Still, rejections are rejections, objective reminders of the statistical probability that publishing one book, multiple books, is not high.

Another burst of reality along these same lines came when Puntitas was enjoying one of her favorite television shows, knitting needles in hand, of course. Prolific song writer and producer Kara DioGuardi was asked why she didn’t have a career as a performer since she sang well. She said that it just hadn’t worked out. She’d had contracts with recording studios twice, but neither had turned into an actual album. Puntitas’ mind went immediately to her own fledgling writing career (it’s all about Puntitas). If DioGuardi, who possesses singing ability, a successful complementary career, relevant contacts, and inside knowledge about her industry, hasn’t been able to put herself at the mike and on the CD cover, what makes Puntitas think she can go from half-ass writing to the Nobel committee?

Other random thoughts in no particular order:
 In The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault, two of the important characters are writers. One of them, a formula fictionist, thinks about what her characters are doing when she stops writing. X spends the night in a burning shack while the writer sleeps, or Y goes to bed and lies there all weekend long till the writer has time to get back to her manuscript. I think of my characters that way, and those moments of suspended tension help me write more.
 In the afterward to the same book, Renault claims (a little too insistently) that she never censored herself as she wrote. On the subject of explicitly rendered sex, she says that it’s not necessary to describe people making love since the reader will know how a given character makes love if s/he is drawn well. I like this idea—that, without being told outright, the reader knows what a well developed character is likely to do and is capable of doing even in situations that aren’t spelled out on the page. This is not a new idea, to be sure, but put this way, it gives me a more concrete way of thinking about the kinds of details that go into developing the individual.
 In a recent revision session, one of those tinker-before-submitting-rushes, a series of vastly improved poetic lines came to me as did a handful of minor but vital changes. My long poem starts with a short section that is thematically important, but clunky to read. I remember reading and rereading it to smooth out the language, but the line breaks remained pretty hopeless. This time, the fixes were obvious, bluntly so. As I revised, I wondered why they hadn’t been previously. Distance? The powers of mental percolation? Whichever the case, it’s interesting (miraculous).
 In an interview, John le Carre said he didn’t like to spend a lot of time with the literati. He would rather spend the day talking to a wood cutter than a writer because he likes being around the primary sources (i.e., the people he’s likely to write about). I agree with this. I stood under my fig tree three days ago and felt the sparks of a poem, one I’ve tried to write before. The images were clear. So were the details I’ll need. So were the biblical references I spent several hours researching last year. So were surprising new thoughts based on the real experience. I could have written my poem without the real tree, but I needed the tree to write the real poem. This doesn’t mean that a writer must die to write about death or become a drug addict to write about that experience. It means that the writer renders a richer, more significant experience if she or he has had an encounter with death or observed the encounters of others.
 In its mission statement, a literary journal, which is preparing for its inaugural issue, calls for literary work that is lyrical and explores Christian themes without darkness. My initial reaction was typical of someone with a secular education: how limiting. Then when I realized the description applies to some of my work and to some of my favorite reading, I laughed. Joyous does not equate with cliché or platitude. Literary writers and those who aspire to that forget.

Puntitas reads _The Stone Flower Garden_ by D. Smith, _Eve: a Novel of the First Woman_ by E. Elliott, _Constantine: the Man and His Times_, by M. Grant, and _In This House of Brede_ by R. Godden.

Back to the Mail

Puntitas is in the throes of much writerliness and knitting. About the latter, she’s making a long and flowy cape, probably the longest and flowiest of her collection. Currently rows are about 650 stitches long. By the time she finishes, they’ll be at a thousand.

About the former, she has sent out five more batches of poems. She has reread the individual pieces before printing or emailing. In half the cases, she has been satisfied with the poem and sent it out as is. In the rest, she has revised, cutting or reworking an awkward line or word in some instances, moving or adding whole stanzas in others. Rather than frustrating her as it has previously, the process has felt reassuring, proof that she can read her work objectively and that she does generally like it.

When she reread her Miltonian sonnet, the one that responds to “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent,” she decided it needed much work. The images she had been most concerned about were the most effective; the ones she’s been comfortable with needed the most work. The conceit in the first two stanzas wasn’t clear enough on a literal level, so she changed it to one that had seemed trite when she was drafting, but now efficient (more expected by the reader) and apt (appropriately descriptive). Initially, she thought that going with the familiar meant falling into cliché, but now she thinks that clichés can be revived with original details and that they can shortcut readers to a frame of mind that is the first step to the ending of the poem, which will hopefully not be cliché.

Now the greatest amount of work is needed in the sestet. Puntitas read both Milton’s sonnet and the passage in Matthew that it eludes to many times while writing her response, and for other readers to make sense of Puntitas’ sonnet, they would need to read both many times as well. Without that background, the octet and the sestet don’t make sense together and her comeback to his last line sounds like a digression. All in all, she can keep half the lines in the last section, but will probably need to do a lot of reshaping.

Oh, and another rejection arrived last week, an optimistic form letter from the North American Review. . Puntitas thought she had exhausted her supply of pending rejections from the previous mailing.

Puntitas reads _The Friendly Young Ladies_ by M. Renault.

Books and Plots

I spent a little time on the computer yesterday, prowling the Library of Congress website. I went to the Book Festival page and listened to one of this year’s podcasts, an interview with Peter Robinson, of Inspector Banks fame.

The first point of interest is that our good friend Robinson, whose mysteries I like, started life as a poet. Food for thought, to be sure. That it comes as I’m about to launch my manuscripts into the world is … well … not satisfying.

The next is that one piece of advice he gives to fledgling crime writers (or any other kind of writer) is that the back story doesn’t all need to be at the beginning. That’s one of those things I know, but hearing it came as a revelation, probably because it’s easy to forget. Knowing the back story often helps the writer plan and organize, but dropping it all on the reader’s lap, especially at the beginning, is rarely necessary. My favorite example of this is an Anne Rivers Siddons novel I read years ago. The first fourth was all back story introducing a character. I remember thinking that the point had been made and that, if she didn’t actually start going somewhere, I would stop reading at the end of the next chapter. Fortunately, the next chapter included plot, and when I finished the novel, I reflected that most of the first fourth of the book could have been condensed to an early chapter or two plus one really telling scene that appears near the end of that introductory fourth. I think I also noticed the comment because two of my prose pieces suffer from the curse of too much back story at the beginning.

Another piece of advice is that writers don’t need to know the whole story when they start writing. This I know for a fact. Generally, I know key moments in the story, certain aspects of the character, and the central question (conflict) addressed by the narrative. The rest emerges as I go. I was surprised to find out that the same happens in a crime novel because I assumed the crime had to be well understood for a story to be built around it, but that kind of writing involves the same process of discovery and revision as any other, so … Why not?

On the subject of books and their impact on my writing, I just finished the Navarro book. It’s a sci-fi version of James Patterson: lots of action, suspense, archetypes, and cliché, which combine well to keep the reader going. The book does a couple of things that are unusual and worked well for me.

One is that it holds off on physical descriptions of the characters until two thirds of the way through the novel. When the characters are introduced, they’re described in terms of their personalities, habits, and the things in their work areas. Later they’re all described in terms of height, weight, dress, and hair color when characters from a different plot line review dossiers compiled about them. It was interesting both to compare my conception of them with the writer’s and to meet them yet again through the filter of other characters. I also noticed the writer tends to notice people’s hands, which I think are very telling.

Another is that the writer handles distrust realistically. In one of the plot lines, two characters, who don’t know each other, are put in a situation of having to work together. Over time, they learn that they have reason to mistrust the people they work for. What happens in most genre fiction is one of two outcomes: (1) they reveal their mutual mistrust and snipe at each other, each trying to save his own skin, or (2) they form a precarious bond that turns into collaboration as their mistrust of external forces compels them to rely on each other for survival. More often, both scenarios take place, 1 followed by 2. In this novel, however, characters act as they would outside of fiction: each man harbors his own mistrust, conceals it, and acts for his own best interest. That self-containment creates interesting tension and great plot turns.

Finally, the writer brings two plots together in ways that complicate the action. She develops two plot lines, each with its own protagonist. The expectation is that the point of convergence is a meeting of the two protagonists, but it isn’t. The story lines converge when each protagonist encounters a supporting character from the other plot. In fact, the story teeters on the edge of farce at this juncture as the action hinges on sexual union between a man who thinks of sex as something one does when necessary and a frigid woman. The effect of coupling a protagonist with a supporting character is that, instead of one point of convergence, there are two, complicating the action unpredictably for characters in both story lines.

Over all, the novel was an enjoyable read without much lasting value, but I did learn a lot from it, and I did recognize seeds of something that could have been great.

Puntitas reads _Virgins of Paradise_ by B. Wood.

The Submission Blues

In terms of submitting either individual poems or my full manuscripts, I’m going to have to come up with a better plan of attack. I’ve spent my day at my computer, reading submission guidelines and articles on writing contests. So far, I’ve submitted one batch of poems and worked myself down into a pit of publishing despair.

It all started with a short-lived happy moment, wherein I found some fragments of old poems. A couple of them got summarily deleted, but three had interesting images and suggested interesting possibilities, though the actual directions they took were mostly not worth the travel. I also found one very long poem, which is very exciting. In its current prose form, it’s five and a half single-spaced pages, and it’s a lot more polished than I remembered. By the time it’s done, it can turn out to be a chapbook length poem.

The word “chapbook” was where the downward spiral began. The moment I had that thought, one of the Main Street Rag judges comments came into my head, something like “There’s a chapbook in there somewhere.” Suddenly my nicely photocopied manuscripts swam to the forefront of my consciousness, weak poems getting weaker by the minute.

To keep from hyperventilating, I reminded myself that, when I settled down to serious revision, I didn’t use a third of the poems on my hard drive. Half of the poems I did use underwent enough revision for even a casual reader to notice. So while some poems may be weaker, they’re not necessarily weak.

Then I decided to submit one of those weaker poems, and I spent an hour or more revising it yet again. I changed lines, phrases, and words, nothing substantive enough for anyone else to notice. The poem is written in blank verse with a relaxed ABCCAB rhyme scheme. Though I paid attention to the line breaks and feel good about most of them, I stopped editing when I started experiencing the overwhelming compulsion to turn the poem into free verse. Yes, the form is important to me, part of the tribute to the content, so no, I don’t really want to change it.

Anyway, I added the changes to the manuscript file, submitted the revised poem, and called it a day. I’ve got so much work pending that I may take a few days off from this while I figure out how to submit without getting incredibly discouraged.

Closer and Closer

Still on email hiatus, I’m also still working on my books. When I added page length numbers to my list of poems, I realized I’d miscounted somewhere along the way. As of now, I have ninety-four pages of finished work. Yesterday, I still had only ninety-two.

I spent most of my day writing since my appointments either got canceled or no showed. I made my page discovery about halfway through the afternoon and have to admit I got pretty discouraged.

The feeling grew when I received an urgent request for a translation, which has to be done by Tuesday morning. Of course, no one else is available, and of course, it’s really, really important. It’s also long (ten pages), hard to read (faded faxes of poor copies), and full of the sorts of details that need to be checked and double checked as one goes. Why these documents weren’t sent to the translator a week ago is a mystery. The fact that my contract with this particular agency compensates far below the national average and makes no allowances for pay increases when dealing with rush jobs and poor copy is a definite frustration. Yes, I know I could have said no, but official ethics aside, I think that translators and interpreters have a certain obligation to provide their services even when they’re not being paid to do so, like off-duty doctors and nurses. These documents are affidavits needed for court. Their presence or absence can make a material difference in the life of another person, so the mechanism of obligation falls into place for me.

Anyway, when I went down town to pick up the job and actually counted the pages, I had a moment of weepy frustration on the sidewalk especially when I juxtaposed that with the fact that I was still four pages short of finishing my books. I kept myself together by deciding to give myself an extra day on the poetry, putting off the translation for Saturday afternoon. At that point, I had completed one page of the new poem, the one that will include three or four other poems, but I was still no where near finishing and am now exactly where I was then.

I came home to open my iffy folder and think about what could be salvaged. I deleted one poem that is just hopeless, and I pulled up another, which I like but which I know isn’t very good. On rereading it, it was much better than I remembered, so I decided that iffy poem was good after all.

I moved it to the main poetry folder and wondered about my judgment. Had I been too harsh before, or was I too forgiving now? A friend called just then to ask if I wanted to go out. We went to the bookstore to sip coffee, read snippets of books, and find fixes for the economy and the environment in magazines.

At the end of the evening, I returned to the poem and did some tweaking here and there. At first, the poem sounded just fine, save for a couple of awkward sentences and an odd turn of phrase. The more I worked on it, however, the more I found to fix, and the more serious the problems.
Though the need to fix added to the whole day-of-discouragement theme, I did feel vindicated about having judged the poem correctly the day I put it into the iffy folder.

By the time I finished with it last night, I felt fairly satisfied with what I’d done. It’s not a particularly good poem, a series of connected vignettes that build on one another to make a point that is neither original nor surprising, , but I like it because the poem reminds me of my work as a community college tutor, because the events in the poem happened all in one day exactly as described (pretty unusual), and because I’d like to honor the artistic rewards of that work and that student population.

I haven’t read the poem again today. I’m a little afraid I won’t like it. I’m trying to remind myself that books are made up of stronger poems and weaker ones. I’m also debating whether to start on the translation now or this evening, and I’m trying to decide how much time I should devote to that other poem.

Puntitas reads _The River Wife_ by J. Agee.

Having a Story Read

I had a story workshopped today, and the experience was positive. The piece (about a translator who goes blind) is one I like, but I haven’t felt certain about it. it doesn’t follow a tidy chronological order, and it’s approach to meaning is Ondaatjean, gaps that suggest but not explain, blah, blah.

Yes, the Ondaatje connection didn’t come to me till now, and it’s a good thing I didn’t start reading him until recently. My manuscript would have been more chaotic if I had. But I digress.

Ten years ago, when I submitted the story to workshop, I thought the unusual content was what made it hard for my classmates to talk about, but lucky for me, the person who commented on it this afternoon was meticulous about telling me where she had trouble and why.

In typical writer style, I had to work to keep my ego under control. My impulse, at the beginning of the session, was to dismiss her as needling and unimaginative, but I followed the same procedure I used in grad school: I wrote down each comment without saying a word. As we went through the piece, I started noticing a pattern in her remarks, cobbling a sense of how she read the story, how certain elements came across, what techniques I wasn’t handling well, and where the suggestive gaps got in the reader’s way.

From her observations, I realized I gave my reader all of the elements needed to get her to my point, but I didn’t give her enough of a map for traveling there, and I realized (what I secretly knew but was unwilling to admit) that I’m not completely clear about where the story is trying to end up. It’s about translation, changing from one form to another, but in not myself understanding its value for the protagonist, I’ve not only made the story obscure but also perpetuated a motif I’d hoped to explode.

That my reader was so astute is fortunate. Mostly, she did what Peter Elbow calls, “movies in the reader’s mind,” telling me what she thought, felt, or wondered about as she read the piece. She was detailed enough to give me a very specific notion of where (at what points) the confusion lay, and her verbal comments were long enough to help me understand her reading, but not long enough to overwhelm or smother.

I’m supposed to read one of her pieces next. I hope I’m as helpful to her as she was to me.

Puntitas reads _El penacho de Moctezuma_ by Mario Moya Palencia.

Missing Ingredient

My two latest reads were recommended by a friend. She’s a fan of the formula romance. For her, the ending must be happy, and the final chapter must be followed by an epilog, which tells readers that the couple has two children, great sex, and a thriving ranch. That sense of resolution is so important that she doesn’t buy a book without first reading the last few pages to make sure it delivers.

For me, the ending is not a problem, but what I learned over this last long week and a half is that something must happen in addition to two people falling in saccharin love, having the occasional tiff, and settling it quickly to return to an idyll of precious moments and specialness. I need a dose of intrigue, inner conflict, self-awareness, a struggle against society to keep me going, and no, the clichéd soul searching of lovers wondering if they’re moving too fast or stressing because they suspect their beloveds of being unfaithful don’t keep me interested because that kind of turmoil isn’t described in a way that makes it even a little reminiscent of the real.

Yes, yes, I know the real is not always the goal. Some people read to escape, hence the happy ending and the thriving ranch. But the assumption seems to be that a more realistic love isn’t as sweet, fumbling, and fanciful as these tales of attraction, doubt, and commitment suggest. My own observation is that ordinary love stories are fabulous, profound, and lasting. The ones that end in nothing are the ones that sound more like the books. So why not celebrate the ordinary, teach readers to find joy in flaws and minor miracles?

My own formula romance is about an unattractive woman who has feelings for a family friend. Most of the energy of the narrative is spent on her coming to terms with being plain, an important step for a young woman (yes, Puntitas is plain enough to have been mistaken for the campus tranny at an early teaching job) and on making the shift from friend to something other. The typical romance novel misunderstandings do happen, but they’re secondary to this other storyline.

Okay, I hear the alarm bells too: I’ve set out to write a love story, and I’m having trouble focusing on … uh … the love story. This is not good.

Puntitas reads _Smitten_ by J. Evanovich and _At First Sight_ by N. Sparks.

Exploring the Other

Since I just got spammed by Beowulf (good to know diamond replicas can be affordable and glass is still cheap), I figured I’d post.

I’ve been reading lots of creative nonfiction lately. I didn’t choose the books for any particular reason. Some sounded really interesting. Others were interesting enough, but really on-sale. What they all have in common is that they are largely about what literary theorists call the Other.

My stories and poems spend a lot of time in the realm of the Other. Mostly, I think I handle Otherness well (details about the life of other, but rarely at center stage, except for the one that seriously impacts the character’s motivation or the action), but I’m not always sure.

Some of the books (Holy Cow, The Ritual Bath, The Sex Lives of Cannibals) describe difference as if their authors were standing at a display window gazing in. In the first case, the writer stays outside always, marveling at the quaint and exotic clothing, wanting a piece or two, but never forgetting that she would buy it to make a statement, not simply to wear. In the second (a mystery novel), the shop keeper is standing in the doorway pointing to the clothes, saying, “Look. Isn’t it lovely,” but not selling it because it’s significance is too complex for the admiring writer to properly convey. In the third, the writer goes in, tries on the garment, likes it, and considers what items in the wardrobe go well with it. The unfamiliar item (a religion or way of life) is always described in reference to the known. The first two books never really explain their subject because the first doesn’t really leave the norm and the second appears to be unsure or afraid of exploring the Other. The third book does something interesting. It refers to the norm, sometimes from the perspective of one who is Norm and sometimes from the perspective of one who has gone bush and sees the norm as Other. The reason the technique works for me is that the writer is not writing for two characters, which sometimes suggests that one is the “right” one, but that he writes from the perspective of the same character, who changes over time. When he arrives at the South Pacific island country that will be home for the next two years, for example, he notices men wearing skirts. By the time he’s invited to a formal event at the British Office and by the time he has a face-to-face encounter with the Mormon missionaries, he’s spent so much time in a skirt, defending both his manhood and his woman, that Western pants are exotic and out of place.

The other three (A Child Called It, Teacher Man, The Things They Carried) are written from the perspective of one who is Other and very aware of being Other. Though I can’t yet articulate what techniques were used and why they were helpful, these three books, especially the O’Brien, made something in my head click. Well, the O’Brien made my head click for lots of reasons. Emotionally it was a hard book to read. The stories were about people making difficult choices and living through them and with them. Technically it was impressive. In almost every selection, someone dies, gets angry, feels scared, or some combination thereof, yet no two sound alike because they interpret the anger, death, and fear in different ways, and the interpretation shapes the narratives from beginning to end. Beyond the content, it made me think about why I write, and remembering how I used overheard conversations and television and radio show dialogs to make up stories in my head for hours and hours while people at school and in town pretended I didn’t exist kicked off a few nights of insomnia and obsession. Good thing I don’t drink.

I’m now reading another nonfiction (Kabul Beauty School). I haven’t gotten into it far enough to have an opinion, but so far, its writer seems to be more participant than observer, though a little of both.

Puntitas reads _Teacher Man_ by F. McCourt and _Kabul Beauty School_ by D. Rodriguez.

Starting with the Image

I’ve had very little inspiration where writing is concerned. Too many other things are cluttering my head this week, most of them work related, something I’ll probably write about sooner or later. I did have one tiny tremor of an idea one morning, one of those thoughts that flits into the consciousness while I lay in bed waiting for the alarm clock to ring. Three images—a child’s ball suspended in the sky at sundown, the optical illusion of a foot next to a cloud, a woman standing at the foot of some stairs with her spine arched completely back, her hands on the lower steps—came to me, starting with the last and ending with the second. There was another image, a reaching or scooping hand. At first, I thought it was random. Then it helped me gather the other images together, developing the cloud image into a playground swing, the bar overhead and the chains that attach the seat.

Before the fingers enclosed the images into a beginning, the memories just floated around in my head, shuffling like snapshots into different orders, revealing more details, fading, growing again. Each reminded me of having wanted to center a poem around it, but until the hand caught each up and held it against its palm, nothing united them, gave them meaning.

In bed, out of nowhere, I started to feel the peculiar lightness and energy of a piece of writing clamoring to make it to the hard drive, that flaring of experience. If I teach a poetry class, I will probably tell my students that images are pictures or sensory experiences evoked or elaborated to explain what something means for the speaker or why it is important. But images are more mysterious. They’re the nut of a poem, the originating impulse, the supporting detail. They tell narratives in layers, In my case, each image told the same story, but it had something different to say about that story.

As I lay there, the images became more defined. The hand came clearly and fully into focus, and I understood immediately that it was the story all the other images were telling. Part of me knew that I’d need to hang on tight to whatever was developing because I’d have to get up in five minutes to get ready for an early appointment. Part of me wanted to tell the appointment to screw itself so I could let the images play out.

What made the images a moment, rather than the draft of a poem, was that the vast descending hand suddenly seemed cliché, and the narrative, one that I’ve written about before. I know that, as with the Shakespearean sonnet, some narratives are worth telling more than once, but all at once, this one didn’t seem worth retelling at all.

That realization turned all the airiness into flat, dense disappointment. I thought about the seeds of two other poems I’ve been carrying around. They’re images and general thoughts, but something—the right detail, perhaps?—is missing. I wish I knew what would make them bloom. Maybe I can use the ball, the swing, and the arching woman to figure it out.

The Blog Does Its Work: WDG Complete

I think I finished my Shakespearean sonnet—again. Tonight I read it without planning to, and I liked it.

Yes, the blog is doing its work: I pulled up the file only because I was feeling guilty about not having posted anything manuscript related this week.

Like last time, I picked at a word or two, knowing exactly which ones and why and knowing exactly what their substitutes or additions would be. This time, I wasn’t bothered by the movement from unusual to ordinary because the imagery at the start (unusual) evokes a lulling mood that shatters in the last few lines (ordinary). The final couplet is still not the embodiment of originality, but it’s one of those old truths that unsettles us every time we are reminded of it, so like anyone who’s ever written about seizing the day, I can live with the heard-before.

By my third rereading, I was thinking the details that were necessary for the turn to work were “clever devices,” not integral parts of the poem. I was tempted to tinker, but I’ve decided to trust they are fine, and I’ve decided to send the poem out next week in my first mass mailing since March.