August 12th, 2009

Writing Exercise: Questions Game: RR’s response

(This answers an earlier post.)

Facing Kate, Sarah felt the same déjà vu she always feels. The two girls were the exact same height, and their shoulders are the same width across.

“What are you doing, Sarah?”

Sarah struggled for a long moment with that, before lying back down on the floor again, so that it would be obvious. She put her head a bit farther from the toilet this time, but she could still feel damp creeping through her hairnet and hair. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

Kate inhaled as if she were about to blow up a balloon. “And this is supposed to accomplish what, exactly?”

From the floor, Kate looked enormously tall. Sarah thought this was more appropriate, really; Kate’s personality was much taller than hers. “Why would I want to accomplish anything?”

“Yeah, why would you?” Kate plummeted abruptly down, her legs accordianing under her until she was crossed-legged beside Sarah’s wet head. “Why try to keep your job, or your dignity, or even your clothes clean? Why not just give up on anything that’s fucking adult, and go cry like a little kid?”

Sarah slurped snot up her nose and tried to breathe evenly. She stared at the domed light fixture on the ceiling—clean, but with dozens of dead-fly bodies in the nipple of it. When she turned to look at Kate, Kate’s small watery blue eyes were trained right on Sarah’s forehead, like gun sights.

“Is it my turn to talk now?” Sarah said weakly.

“Do you want it to be? Do you have anything to say?”

“Why don’t you just speak for me, say whatever you think I should say? What would say right now, Kate, if you’d just lost it in front of a customer and were lying here in a puddle of maybe pee, and the only reason you hadn’t been fired yet is that Darin is scared to come in the ladies room?”

Kate flinched and peered more deeply at Sarah’s face, before flattening down onto her stomach beside her, so their elbows touched. “Do you really think he’ll fire you?”

“Why wouldn’t he? How much of an asset to the team am I, really?” Sarah had meant to say it with all the grim bravado Kate would have brought to such a damning self-assessment, but the truth of her own uselessness hit her hard in the stomach midway through asset, and the rest of the words were watery with tears. “What use am I at all?”

Kate’s eyes narrowed even more, pale slits with the light of the fluorescent tube reflecting in them. “Can’t you just…just…get it together?”

Sarah tried for another deep breath but there was the weight of a sob resting on her lungs and she didn’t get much. “No.”

***

RR thinks: this is *way* easier when you’ve got some narrative to play with, not just the questions themselves to build the whole scene. And I hand-picked a part of the story I was working on where evading the question makes sense. And ended with a statement. But I still used the *spirit* of the exercise, I’d say, plus I think I’ll actually be able to keep most of this in the piece as it stands, which is useful.

Anybody else?

RR

August 11th, 2009

Writing Exercise: Tom Stoppard’s Questions Game

Sunday evening I rewatched the film version of Tom Stoppard‘s brilliant play Rosencrantz and Guidenstern Are Dead. Since the author directed the film, it is just as wondrous as the play.

If you’ve never read or viewed this one, it’s the left-out lives of Hamlet‘s two retainers, who die off-stage and without tears or explanation towards the end of that play. It’s also about the act of writing and the definition of character, the concept of performance, and a variety of physical principals and simple machines, which are explored by one of the characters in a series of subtle and hilarious protracted gags.

This is one of the funniest movies you’re likely to see, but to get all the jokes, it helps to see it multiple times (I think this was my forth, and I saw a lot that was new!) One scene I did remember distinctly and with joy from childhood viewing was the great Questions game, that the protagonists play on Hamlet’s indoor tennis court.

The game is what it sounds like, to keep a (semi-)logical fast-paced conversation going using only questions. The characters have rules against not only statements but repetition, non-sequiteurs, rhetoric, synonyms and hesitation. This keeps the conversation fast, intense, somewhat surreal, and very tight–people are trying to win, after all.

Stoppard’s style of dialogue in general like that; the Questions game comes up almost as a kind of parody of R&G’s usual quick, confused/confusing banter. This style also reminds me of Sanford Meisner‘s repetition exercise for actors–another way of creating fast, tight dialogue.

As a lover of fine dialogue of both real and artificial forms, needless to say, a) I love this stuff and b) it’s very hard to do well, or even at all. As I said, I watched this movie as a kid, with my bro, and the first time we encountered a tennis court, we did try to play it–so frustrating! Even when you leave out some of the secondary rules about hesitation, non-sequiteurs, etc.

So, obviously, this is a great writing exercise. Obviously, you won’t end up with anything quite *realistic* in the usual sense, and if realistic is what your project is, you’ll have to redraft to use the exercise. But in addition to pace and rhythm, the all-questions-no-answers style brings a great deal of tension to dialogue–nothing says recalcitrant witness like answering a question with a question.

Ok, the exercise is: write a scene with two (or more, if you really want to push yourself) characters, in which all dialogue is in the form of question. Use the other rules at your discretion, or not at all. I’ll post mine when I’ve written it. If you write one, I’d love to see it if you send me a link, post it as a comment, or send it some other way.

I’m glad I came up with this after my actual teaching term finished–I think it’s gonna be really hard.

I’m a wrecking ball in a summer dress

RR

August 6th, 2009

An Apology for Crudity, by Sherwood Anderson

[RR: I don’t agree with everything here, natch, and it was written close to 100 years ago, but try substituting Canada for all the American references and see what you make of this.]

For a long time I have believed that crudity is an inevitable quality in the production of a really significant present-day American literature….

If you are in doubt as to the crudity of thought in America, try an experiment. Come out of your offices, where you sit writing and thinking, and try living with us. Get on a train at Pittsburg and go west to the mountains of Colorado. Stop for a time in our towns and cities. Stay a week in some Iowa corn-shipping town and for another week in one of the Chicago clubs. As you loiter about read our newspapers and listen to our conversations, remembering, if you will, that as you see us in the towns and cities, so we are. We are not subtle enough to conceal ourselves and he who runs with open eyes through the Mississippi Valley may read the story of the Mississippi Valley.

It is a marvelous story and we have not yet begun to tell the half of it….

As I walk alone, an old truth comes home to me and I know that we shall never have an American literature until we return to faith in ourselves and to the facing of our own limitations. We must, in some way, become in ourselves more like our fellows, more simple and more real. [RR: does he seem to change POVs here? Wasn’t it “us” and “we” a moment ago?]

To me it seems that as writers we shall have to throw ourselves with greater daring into the life here. [RR: I think this is gorgeous] We shall to begin to write out of the people and not for the people. We shall have to find within ourselves a little of that courage. To continue along the road we are travelling is unthinkable. To draw ourselves apart, to live in little groups and console ourselves with the thought that we are achieving intellectuality, is to get nowhere. By such a road we can hope only to go on producing a literature that has nothing to do with life as it is lived in these United States….

The road is rough and the times are pitiless. Who, knowing our America and understanding the life in our towns and cities, can close his eyes to the fact that life here is for the most part an ugly affair? [RR: I disagree, but…not entirely] As a people we have given ourselves to industrialism, and industrialism is not lovely. If anyone can find beauty in an American factory town, I wish he would show me the way. For myself, I cannot find it. To me, and I am living in industrial life, the whole things is as ugly as modern war. I have to accept that fact and I believe a great step forward will have been taken when it is more generally accepted….

It is, I believe, self-evident that the work of the novelist must always lie somewhat outside the field of philosophic thought [RR: Yup. Short story writers too.] Your true novelist is a man gone a little mad with the life of his times. As he goes through life he lives, not in himself, but in many people. Through his brain march figures and groups of figures. Out of the many figures, one emerges. If he be at all sensitive to the life about him and that life be crude, the figure that emerges will be crude and will crudely express itself.

I do not know how far a man may go on the road of subjective writing. The matter, I admit, puzzles me. There is something approaching insanity in the very idea of sinking yourself too deeply into modern American industrial life.

But it is my contention that there is no other road. If one would avoid neat, slick writing, he must at least attempt to be brother to his brothers and live as the men of his time live.He must share with them the crude expression of their lives. To our grandchildren the privilege of attempting to produce a school of American writing that has delicacy and colour may come as a matter of course. One hopes that will be true, but it is not true now. And that is why, with so many of the younger Americans, I put my faith in the modern literary adventurers. We shall, I am sure, have much crude, blundering American writing before the gift of beauty and subtlety in prose shall honestly belong to us.

***

I want to be a modern literary adventurer!!!!

RR

August 4th, 2009

Submit, all ye who enter

I started thinking about story (and poem) submissions to literary journals when a friend said she was going to start sending some out. I’ve been doing that for a few years now, and our conversation made me realize how much I’ve learned since then. I thought maybe I could help someone out a little with that learning curve, if in fact anyone in need of help is reading this.

1. Where to submit?

Journals you like–if you like what they do, the odds are higher that they’ll like what you do. Don’t know any journals well enough to make that assessment? Go read some. This needn’t be all that expensive or time-consuming; you don’t need to subscribe, but one issue from the newsstand or library, or a serious peruse of the mag’s online archive (if it has one) would really help you decide if it’s worth your time to submit–and worth the editors’ time to read your work.

Ok, ok: If you are extremely talented and extremely patient, you can get published without reading the journals you submit to–you’re just going to wind up sending a lot of inappropriate places and getting a lot of nos first. Some journals only take a certain genre, or style of writing… Also, every journal I can think of wants new, fresh voices (show me the journal that is after “staid and tired” writing) but exactly how edgy they want writing to be, how fractured, how weird or funny or linear is various. Those are style issues that could cause perfectly good writing to get rejected because it doesn’t fit the journal’s aesthetic.

A great list of litmags, as well as contests and calls for submissions, is available from the generous folks at [places for writers] (no, I don’t know what what the brackets are about, but it’s still a great site). The Canadian list there is a little weak on genre magazines; there’s a few science fiction ones, but I don’t see any for mystery or horror. I think those are perhaps more common in the states, but genre and American publications are two areas I know little about. Sorry.

2. Paid or unpaid?

Doesn’t matter in the slightest. Many perfectly good journals don’t pay, or pay in copies, or in beer, or in love. If you would like to do this writing thing long term, it would help to become comfortable with that. Here’s why: If you should ever keep track of all the hours spent writing and rewriting a given piece of creative work, and then divide that into whatever you end up getting paid when it’s published (and I would strongly discourage you from doing this), nothing any journal could ever offer you is likely to approach minimum wage. And since any amount of money isn’t really going to be right, maybe $0 is only just as incorrect as any other amount.

The one thing writer payments guarantee is that the journal has the respect of subscribers, advertisers and/or granters to some substantial degree. Money doesn’t promise that it’s a good journal, but it does indicate someone thinks it is. So it can be harder, if doubt your own judgement, when you find a non-paying journal that you like the look of, to know what anyone else thinks of it. Ask around, maybe read a couple issues (so you know it’s not a fly-by-night)–good work is usually known. Submit to journals you respect, that you’d be proud to appear in, and that oughta be that.

The one exception to the money-doesn’t-matter rule is when you are working towards applying for grants. Both Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council require writers to have a certain number of publications paid in cash (no copies, beer, or love) in order to be eligible for grants. If you plan on seeking grants, this is something to be aware of.

3. What about this simultaneous submission thing?

I’d get more rejections if I could send the same stories to multiple journals at the same time (that’s what a simultaneous submission is, der). But many journals don’t allow that, which is I think a rather author-unfriendly policy, but it’s not my ball; I can’t play by my own rules. Several journals I admire and would love to be published in have that rule, so I suck it up and let them hold my story for 9 months before they reject it and I am free to send it elsewhere.

Not an ideal situation, but better than a) not submitting to journals I admire or b) lying. I have to admit, the tales of simultaneous-submission renegades getting blacklisted/scorned/never published again/shunned at parties are vague and apocryphal, but I still think honesty is the way to go, if only for it’s own sake, and the sake of keeping your submission tracking chart (mine’s in Excel) clean.

If you should screw up and, despite the Excel chart, send something to two places by accident (I’ve done this; Excel is confusing), just write and withdraw one; no need to admit the gaffe and say why, as long as you do it promptly.

4. Are you ready for rejection?

I was terrified to submit to professional publications–and didn’t–for 10 years. There were several reasons for this, but basically it boiled down to the fact that I wasn’t ready to have my work read by strangers, whether by hundreds of subscribers to a journal, or by a single editor flipping idly through her in-box. I didn’t think my work was good enough to stand up to criticism, but also my own little ego wasn’t tough enough to accept rejection and use criticism effectively.

Rejection stings. It makes you doubt your work, your ability to select the correct forum for your work, your ability to judge, and is also just sad and annoying. I used to lose a couple days’ writing time every time I got a “no”, but now it’s down to only a couple hours. The time away from the story actually often gives some distance and insight, and by the time I get the no I might have already figured out what’s wrong with it, and other times I haven’t at all but the kindly feedback in the rejection helps me do so. And yet other times I’ve felt that it was the editor’s loss and I immediately sent the story elsewhere. In all events, the story is exactly what it was before it got rejected, and if it’s not good yet, I generally have faith in myself that I’m capable of making it that way.

Don’t submit until you feel that way. I have been alarmed recently to get several form rejection letters that said, “This rejection does not mean you’re not a good writer,” and in one case (jokingly???) “…a good person.” What kind of rejection responses are those journals getting if they feel they need to include this? Writing is very personal and very important if you do it right, but to keep doing it, one needs at least a little distance. If everyone who ever wrote anything dumb and/or was misunderstood by others let it crush them, there would be no writers left. I get more than 20 rejections a year (not counting grant applications, contest entries or dating)–I can’t afford the time to be blown apart by them.

5. What if I hear nothing?

Most journals have an ETA on responses published in their submissions guidelines, and though it’s hard, it’s pretty much good manners to wait until that time has well and truly passed before emailing to ask what they’ve done with your beautiful story (ie., if they say they’ll get back to you in 6 months, try to get more than a day past that before you email…if possible).

Most editors or assistants or interns will actually go figure it out and tell you if your work has passed to some higher level of editorial deliberation, or if the rejection is in the mail, or what. Occasionally the work is lost, and they have no record of receiving it, which makes that 6-month wait really sting. Even more occasionally, I get no response at all to my query. In that case, I wait a week and then send another note withdrawing the submission, which usually goes unacknowledged, too. Strangely, when this happens, I have twice gotten a rejection letter for the story about two months later. Quel bizarre.

Sidenote: do as I say, not as I do: write down how long you are supposed to wait (three months, six months, whatevs) before querying, and then query after that long. Don’t be like me who carefully logs story submissions, then forgets about them for months and feels like a giant loser writing to a journal to admit I lost track of a story I love for an entire year. Yes, this happens to me.

6. How should I format my work?

I’m not touching this; almost every journal has a very similar set of formating guidelines with one little wonky thing, often to do with headers/footers. Do whatever they say; seriously, it’s respectful and proves you’re not outsmarted by MS Word. If there’s actually nothing given, ok, fine: use the default settings and font on your computer, double-space for prose and single for poetry, your name and the page number on the tope right of every page. Use white paper and envelopes; resist the lure of stickers.

Oh, and be really respectful about maximum word counts. You don’t get far in the editorial community without being able to eyeball a wordcount in 15 seconds, no matter what spacing is used.

I hope that helps…I actually have no idea if it does or not. If I’ve left out something crucial, or am actually doing everything all wrong, please let me know!! It’s fun and exciting and crushing and thrilling to have work in the world and although this post somehow got monsterously long, it’s really not that stressful. Highly recommended, really!

Then begin again
RR

July 20th, 2009

An honour and a privilege

I have ever maintained that the short story is thriving, as challenging, fantastic, funny, depressing, thrilling, shocking, entertaining and inspiring stories continue to be produced in this country at a fantastic rate. I read frequently and vigorously–journals and collections and online stuff–and still there’s a million things about this tricksy form that I’m trying to understand.

This spring and summer have afforded me some marvelous opportunities to try to learn this craft. The first was teaching grades 10 and 11 to write short stories. Anytime you want to call everything you think you know into question, just try telling it teenagers. Even before the kids started their questions, the act of putting together my thoughts and beliefs about how something ought to work in a story showed me a lot of my limitations, and opened up doors I never knew existed. Of course I want to think that my teaching served the cause of the short story by showing kids how fun it is to try to write them, and how much can be gained by reading them. In addition to that, though, I do think that my own contributions to the genre will be shaped by what I learned from teaching.

The other thing I’ve been up to lately is acting as a judge for the Journey Prize 21. Obviously, it was a huge honour to be asked to take on this role, but also a huge privilege to get to immerse myself in some of the best work done in the form this year in Canada, and to then to discuss that work deeply with my inspiring fellow judges, Lee Henderson and Camilla Gibb. This was, once again, an opportunity to interrogate what I think of as a “good short story,” why I think that, and how that might be limiting.

I plan to write more about this process around the book’s release (October 6; the winner will be announced at the Writers’ Trust Awards in November). This little post is just to say that I hope you are as excited about the upcoming anthology as I am–it’s full of wonderful, challenging, weird, etc. stories that inspired us, and might inspire you, too. And also to say that I think I’m a lot smarter than I was six months ago.

Our still lives posed / like a bowl of oranges
RR

June 30th, 2009

Life is unfair

Another line I love but had to kill:

“…his mother with her stiff vegetarian hair, worrying about her chickens back in Austin tended by a neighbour child with a lisp and a nosering.”

RR

June 26th, 2009

What the last 10 years have taught me

What I mainly did on that dock, as I said, was read *The New Yorker* fiction issue, which I had been waiting for with avid enthusiasm (because I can’t read magazines out of order, natch). Obviously, I was rabid for the stories, but I had also been forwarned by Facebook friends that there was an article on teaching creative writing that I would want to see.

The piece turned out to be a review by one of my favourite critics, Louis Menand, of a book called The Program Era by Mark McGurl. I haven’t heard more about McGurl than what Menand wrote, and I have little intention of reading the book (beyond the vague miasma of “oh, yeah, I should probably read that” that I feel about most books). So on the one hand, it’s pretty presumptuous and glib for me to respond to the article. On the other hand, Menand’s piece is one of *The New Yorker*’s rambling “Critic at Large” pieces, which encompasses a lot of general thoughts on the issue. So maybe I’m responding to those general comments. Or, on yet another hand, this is a blog, and maybe presumptuousness/glibness is the least of the worries of the blogosphere.

So!

The book, and to some extent the article, deal with the rise of the university creative writing class and degree, and simply the increasing presence of the “certified” writer on the lit scene. It was indeed edifying and maybe mildly shocking to see how many names got listed here (nice to see Bharati Mukherjee’s name in *The New Yorker*, whatever the reason). An interesting thesis of the book, and one that Menand deals scantly with, is how creative writing programs shaped the evolotion of later-20th-century prose–in fact, the subtitle of the book is “Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing.”

Menand has concentrated much more on the ever-scandalous question, also inherent in McGurl’s work, “Can creative writing be taught?” Both offer lots of fascinating “well, maybe” answers, well worth reading at least in the short review form. I’ve written about this here before, and so I’ll add only my usual quotation of the immortal Judith Viorst–help helps–plus: Creative writing classes, and eventually an MA in the subject, helped me so much with my writing. The classes gave me the discipline, focus, friends, inspiration, connections, snack foods, mentors, party tricks, informal workshop groups, cold terror, and cheerful ambition to take the writing I was already doing to the next level. If that’s not learning, I don’t know what is.

But I also know there are other kinds of learning, and this is something Menand leaves to the very last paragraph. This is moving, but I think it elides something else:

“I stopped writing poetry after I graduated, and I never published a poem—which places me with the majority of people who have taken a creative-writing class. But I’m sure that the experience of being caught up in this small and fragile enterprise, contemporary poetry, among other people who were caught up in it, too, affected choices I made in life long after I left college. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

The majority of people who take a creative-writing class in undergrad don’t continue to write after graduation, he says. Well, I don’t have the stats, but judging by the folks I know, that sounds about write (ahaha. I actually wrote that accidentally.)

So, maaaybe, if impermanent writers–elective takers, dabblers, interested experimenteers– is who is in the classes, Menand and McGurl are missing the boat. Maybe what creative writing classes in universities do is not (only) shape the national fiction style or create silken prose out of sow’s ears, but *teach 20-year-olds to think creatively and write coherently*. Transferable skills if ever there were.

I think this issue is actually larger than creative writing; it stems from a larger misunderstanding of liberal arts education, although I don’t know that one is mine or society’s. When I was wee, but after I figured out that being intelligent was not a profession, I asked my liberal-arts-professing father what he taught people to do–like, medical school taught people how to cut open bodies and fix them, and police school taught people to shoot guns. My father’s response was that his sort of teaching wasn’t about learning to *do* a thing; he taught people how to *think* about things in a certain way, and then they could apply that way of thinking how they liked.

Revalatory, when you’re ten and trying very hard to learn to do a lay-up and spell “persimmon.” (And the author will allow that she may recollect her childhood as slightly more Socratic than it actually was.)

I have a BA Hon. in English Literature and an MA in English and Creative Writing, and I swear to you, I use what they taught me every day of my life. No, no one has asked me about Grendel, Tess, or semiotics today. And yet, the skills of close and careful reading, of contextualizing what I read with as much related material as possible, of reasoned and elegant essay arguementation, and of clear and relentless questioning of whatever I think I know–well, thank you, liberal-arts education.

Of course, as you can see by my Facebook friends above, conversations about the nun’s priest or Samson Agonistes are likelier to happen to me than perhaps to most. But I really do believe that folks in advertising and marketing, in law and government and even medicine are able to use reading and writing skills they picked up in liberal arts classes. Not to mention the endless insights into the human condition we are given in reading about humans, in fiction or in non-fiction. And the ability to not only answer questions but ask them intelligently. And to empathize with people so foreign to us they actually don’t exist.

Most people know that learning to think in different ways is always to the good. But I worry they don’t prioritize that good. Having TA’d a little, and generally being around academic life, I do worry about the vocationalization of university education. I worried that my Effective Writing students wanted only to work on resume cover letters and mission statements that would translate directly into career skills, rather than work on the whole craft of writing and then make the cognitive connections in the work world for themselves.

I did actually go to vocational school too, so please know I don’t knock that course at all. It was interesting and stimulating and my publishing certificate leads more or less directly to me being able to eat food and sleep indoors in a relatively entertaining fashion. But those skills I learned there are rigid, specific, and date-able. Every time I switch software platforms, style guides or subject matter, I start over…not from square one perhaps, but certainly from a square nearby. Vocational skills are generally like this: welders certified to do stick welding have a fundamentally different skill than those who do pipe welding. The skills may have much in common, but you can’t just extrapolate one to the other; you have to go back and learn again.

Which is, as I said, a fine way to learn, but fundamental different than the fluid (or, admittedly, amorhphous) skills of the liberal arts education.

What a very long way of saying I think that evaluating university creative-writing programs by the famous writers they’ve produced does many students a disservice. I spent this spring trying to teach 90 teenagers how to write a short story, and although I can see perhaps a dozen of them pursuing the craft, I truly truly believe many of those kids were a least a little smarter for having tried it. I think creating strong introductory creative writing classes, as well as Intro Psych, Philosophy and Film, can help a lot of people think a little bit different, and better.

But then, I would think that.

The eventual downfall / is just the bill from the restaurant
RR

June 19th, 2009

Incommunicado

Until my late teens, almost everyone I knew had not only the same area code but the same first three digits in their phone numbers. It was a very small town, but as far as I was concerned it contained everyone it needed to. Sure my extended family and parents’ old friends lived in the faraway U.S., but so they always had, and it was hard to miss people whom one rarely saw in two consecutive years.

Nevertheless, I delighted in post from such farflung correspondants, and a few made an effort to write to my young self on a regular basis. I was a far more ardent correspondant than any one recipient could handle, however, so whenever the elementary school penpal program circulated, I signed up again, winding up with a worldwide network of fascinating penpals, all of whom I would exhaust into silence within a year or two. I also wrote a family newspaper for distribution within my household, with articles on such topics as whose birthday it was that week, and what we needed from the hardware store (oh, this blog was so clearly presaged). I was also likely the only kid in the world who didn’t have to be nagged to write thank you notes for gifts.

I went away for the summer I was 17, made no friends, and used up half a dozen books of stamps. I went away the summer I was 18, wrote only slightly fewer letters but did finally actually make genuine friends who didn’t live in my township. They were older than I, already in university and conversant in the ways of university email addresses. I had no idea about any of this, but when I returned home, I tried to figure it out.

We’d had a computer in the house since the end of the eighties, which my brother and I used to play endless video games of steadily evolving complexity, and occasionally to do schoolwork. I had no idea what my folks were doing with it, or with the shrieky dialup “internet”; work of some sort, it seemed.

So the fall of my last year of high school, my dad taught me about email. I don’t know if freemail accounts hadn’t appeared on the scene yet or I just didn’t know about them, but my father generously shared his work email account with me, leading to a whole new form of household nagging (“Did you email Amanda back yet? That note’s been in my inbox all week? You really should…”) Everyone was sad when I moved away for university, but at least I got my own damn email account. By then I was hooked.

Far away from my area code and all the relevant people it contained, I started emailing my friends and family constantly–minutia about school and new friends and food and weather and clothes and health…and people *emailed back*. Letters had become old-school and boring: you had to buy stamps and envelopes and remember to walk past a mailbox, so I very rarely got post, but email still had the gloss of novelty to it, and I was thrilled to get email every day.

More than a decade and several technological revolutions later, I’m still pretty excited to see that Inbox (1) bar pop up! Letters have largely gone dormant for most people, though I can’t resist that heart-leap hope when I unlock my mailbox that today will be a day that one of the six people on earth who still use post will have sent me something.

In truth, I think the bloom is off the rose a bit with email, too. Most people’s jobs require them to send and receive dozens per day, and most of those are of the “Please reconfigure the pages completely and within the hour” variety that rarely causes heart-leaping, even in me. I’m sure I know a lot of people who, off the clock, would like their computers firmly silent and email-less.

Not me. I’ve never gotten over my childhood desire to hear from those distant, and much as I love to talk, I still feel my best self-expression–most coherent, most thoughtful, most amusing–is in writing. I like to think over a letter/email/story, rewrite a line or two, delete (some of the) extraneous stuff. I think I have a career as a writer that I could never have had as an “extemporizer,” and I think you’ll agree if you’ve ever gotten voicemail from me.

So I’m an email junkie. I send and receive dozens a day in a professional context, and although fewer in personal context, I’m still ever-emailing. I do get that not everyone wants to write long discussions of life, the universe and everything in their off-hours. Actually, I’m sort of amazed that some people (other than myself) do, and that I can be the recipient if only I continue to respond in kind.

All this email-relection has been brought on by the fact that I’m headed out of town this weekend to a cottage, on an island…with no internet. This has never happened to me before, really–not since that critical turning point back in the late nineties. I think it’ll be good for me, although challenging. I think the lake water, sunshine, friends, tofudogs, boardgames, actual dog, boat, bonfire, and coleslaw will help.

But I’ll still miss you, interent, and all my lovely far-flung friends that live inside you!

You just can’t do that again
RR

June 17th, 2009

Introducing Samantha

I’m pleased to say that my future work in the world will now be represented by the very book-savvy Samantha Haywood at Transatlantic Literary Agency, Inc. Here we are at Samantha’s author party last week, her looking like the charming individual she is, me looking mildly deranged for wearing an enormous winter coat in June (you can’t even tell in the picture, but it’s actually buttoned wrong, too!)

June 11th, 2009

The work in the work

The estimable Steven W. Beattie has a great post up on writing about work that’s worth reading if you care about such things.

I found SWB’s comments, along with those from the Alain de Botton column he was responding to, very interesting and somewhat encouraging. Because I do care about such things, which makes me write about them, and I want to do it well. It’s comforting to know that others see a void in a lot of fiction where I do–the workaday world–and think it worth filling.

The flagship “office novel” in recent years, which both de Botton and Beattie reference is Joshua Ferris’s *Then We Came to the End*, and for the laugh/cry/aspire to be a better writer experience that I am always hoping for when I crack a new spine, this book is pretty outstanding. It was actually one of the first reviews posted here on Rose-coloured, although I can’t for the life of me find it now because I used to name posts clever things and not actually what the post is about. Anyway, I love that book, but I am sometimes I am concerned about how it is regarded, the genre-izing. Somehow “office-novel” implies the work isn’t strong enough to be regarded as simply a novel.

Indeed, I loved Ferris’s book because it offered that office setting that I relate to, write about, and laugh at. Ferris knew his terrain well and treated it with subtle satire and insightful criticism, and I definitely enjoyed that flare and humour. But more than a relevant setting, some good jokes and well-crafted set pieces, this “office novel” is a *good* novel. And to me, it’s good for the same reason so much of my favourite fiction is: because the author has created characters that seem like real people in our world, and he shows them to such effect that we react to them and with them, recoil at their cruelties and smile at their small victories and desire them to grow beyond their failures. At least, I did.

I understood Ferris’s topic not to be “office culture” or work or layoffs, much less snark and gossip and all the unattractive parts of the field. Call me crazy, but I thought he was writing about that eternal topic of literature: *how people are*. This book concentrated mainly on how they are during their working hours, but in any frame the Mona Lisa is still herself, as in any context so are we all. These characters were varying degrees of hurt and suffering, cocky and vulnerable, funny and mocked, but they were all recognizable as human human human, and they recognized their own foibles, too. They especially knew when they were making good jokes.

A lot of writing set in offices is funny, which is something that I love about it, but also something that puts those “office” books in danger as being dismissed as *merely comic* or *merely satirical*. And although I would also like to take on the difference between comedy and satire, one thing at a time: let’s talk about diagetic and non-diagetic comedy first. I just googled those terms and it seems maybe I made them up. But I think they work, even if they don’t technically exist.

If diagetic music in a film is music that the characters in the film can hear and that comes from some source within the scene (a radio is playing, someone sits down at the piano, etc.), and non-diagetic music is a part of the soundtrack but not the scene, so the characters don’t hear it then…does it make sense to say that diagetic humour is a joke the character(s) make(s), or a situational irony that they appreciate and comment on? And non-diagetic humour is a joke *on* the characters, or at least one that they miss but the reader is supposed to get?

Still with me? Like, M*A*S*H was a revelation in diagetic humour in TV shows–Hawkeye made jokes and the other characters laughed or at least rolled their eyes knowingly; everybody was in on the jokes that the audience was laughing at, in a way that simply wasn’t true on *All in the Family*–Archie Bunker had no idea he was funny.

Ok, so what’s interesting to me to write about is to write about characters who get the joke, Because they’re smart, and they’re funny a work environment is a fertile field for such people. A high concentration of reasonably intelligent folk, stuck together in tight proximity over long periods of time, under mild duress, trying to kill the boredom, create the bonds, defend their territory in order to get through the day, and life, without losing their jobs, their dignity, or their sanity.

It’s funny. Workplaces are funny places, and writing, tv shows and films about them *can* be satirical in the sense that the jokes are on the characters (who on *The Office* is laughing?) or they can simply be mimetic, showing a reasonable facsimile as life as it is lived for a lot of the gainfully employed, reasonably amusing world.

And of course “a reasonable facsimile of life as it is lived” is not the only right answer to the question, what is fiction? but it is certainly one of them. Writing about work is important because it’s relevant and true, just like writing about war and babies and sex and taxes are important and relevant and true. I would hate to see that importance be diminished by gags involving photocopiers, rubber chickens and Outlook Calendar. Because those are facts of life, too.

You look so good in the shoes of a poseur
RR