September 3rd, 2010
Useful information
Here’s a bunch of random stuff I’ve read on the web lately that might be helpful to you:
10 Mistakes Freelancers Make: I worked freelance for a while and made many of these mistakes, which probably contributed to how miserable I was (but not entirely; some people just have a set number of hours beyond which they NEED to have a conversation with someone). Now I work with/administrate for freelancers, and I see the best ones avoid this stuff. The piece is a bit general, but if you’re just starting out, probably exactly what you need.
Definitions of Different Kinds of Cousins: I’m from a small family and can generally define everybody by pointing and saying their names, but I can see the lure of wanting to know the exact title of your cousin’s daughter or your grandmother’s cousin. The folks from the Emily Post Institute finally set the record straight.
Q&A with Daniel Alarcon: Apparently the New Yorker does these little Q&As with their fiction writers as a web-only feature now. The questions are quite generic, but the writers that the New Yorker pulls are so good that their answers are still worth reading.
The Finding Time to Write piece is part of a writing advice column the Vagabond Trust has been running every Thursday. The best piece of advice in it is this–so true for some of us, but no one ever says it: “Maybe you can have your web browser open and keep an eye on your Facebook news feed while you’re writing. Maybe you can sit on the couch with your laptop and watch TV while the kids are screaming and playing in the room and you can still get your writing done. I don’t know, I’m not you. If you feel that you just can’t stop doing something to write, to to write while you’re doing it. If it doesn’t work, you actually are going to have to stop doing whatever that is for a little while.”
Hope that helps with…something or other. Happy Labour Day, peeps!
August 24th, 2010
Collaborations I Have Loved
With all this talk about the “How to Be Alone” video, I have strangely been thinking about times I’ve worked with others and it’s been wonderful. I am fairly decent at being alone–it would be very hard to write stories and not be–but sometimes the solo, non-social nature of writing bugs me. Sure, it’s nice to have total control over most of what I write, me being a meglomaniac and all, but sometimes it is nice to have someone to talk to about how it’s all working out.
So I’ve always been in writing groups and workshops. It helps to get feedback on my own work, as well as to see what sorts of cool stuff others are getting up to. It helps to keep the conversation about writing going with smart people I respect. Of course, I listen carefully to editors and try to really engage with them on what they think a piece needs. When someone is willing to share some of the heavy lifting of writing, I let them–it’s still mine in the end, but sometimes being drawn out of my hot little skull to a fresh perspective from someone else’s skull is wonderfully liberating.
I’ve also gotten the opportunity to take the process of collaboration farther, to actual shared writing projects. One writing group I was in collaborated on a murder-mystery anthology. I felt this was a pretty brilliant idea, and since it didn’t quite work out, I’m hoping some other group will want to steal it–do you? What we did was, we brainstormed a character and a bit of backstory, and then a scenario in which she is found dead in her apartment building. Then each of us individually wrote a short story for one other tenant in the building, in which each person had motive and opportunity for the crime. Then we were going to collaborate on a final story, revealing the true killer, but the group disbanded before that happened. I’m still rather proud of my piece, though I have to admit that without the context of its sister stories, it doesn’t make complete sense. Still it was a really fun process–everyone went in such different directions that it was really entertaining, as well as instructive to hear the stories presented every meeting.
Somewhere around then, I was also writing a satirical romance round-robin style, with about a dozen other people. A round robin is where each person writes a paragraph adding on to what’s gone before. It’s like improv in the sense that you need to work with, not against, anything you are handed when you enter: if the write of the previous paragraph says that aliens landed, and you undermine it by saying that it was a hallucination brought on by bad ham, the forward momentum and structure of the piece is imperilled–you’ve just wasted 2 paragraphs, basically. But round-robin writing is, also like improv, best suited to silliness! Our love story was hilarious, but not anything anyone could actually print or publish or even read seriously. I also don’t think it had an ending.
An even simpler–and sillier–version of such shared stories is Little Papers (Petites Papiers), a game that I think Fred introduced me to (right, Fred?) in first-year university. This is a blind round robin–you sit in a circle, each writes one part of the story folds it over and passes it on to the next person to write the next bit. We always played with 3-6 people, but I think it would be fun even with 2. Our stories had a standard structure, as follows (how many great novels can you apply this structure to?)
Woman’s name
Man’s name
Where they meet
What she says to him
What he says to her
What happens next
Somehow the results were never not funny. I think you could also play it with less structure, just sentence-sentence-sentence, but that runs the risk of, like our round robin, never ending.
The round robin and little papers exercises are probably best suited to goof-off activities for word nerds, or classroom activities to teach kids of have fun with writing and enjoy working together. As serious fictional enterprises, maybe they won’t work so well (though I’d love to hear an example where 30 people wrote the great Canadian novel in round robin or some such). And also, these are a projects where collaboration is limited: everyone creates singly and contributes, rather than creating collectively. Creating collectively, as we know from marketing campaign brainstorms, focus group film endings and themed bridal showers, often ends in inane results, no results, or hand-to-hand combat.
So the only time I ever wrote something in full collaboration with someone–no “my-part-your-part”–was with someone I have always been comfortable throwing shoes at or biting*, my younger brother. We wrote three episodes of a sitcom together a couple years ago, mainly because we both laugh at the same stuff and have the same strong opinions on how sitcoms should be. Who knows it is actually a good idea to try to write something funny with someone with a similar sense of humour; certainly, not everyone agrees with us and perhaps it would help the universality of our show to have someone on the team who did not collapse in hysterics at our elaborate clowns-at-Starbucks setup.
It wasn’t all hilarity and delicious snack items, though–ok, it was mainly. We wrote it for no particular reason except it’s nice to have an activity sometimes; basically, to entertain ourselves. That certainly worked, though we did nearly come to blows about how to turn off track changes (on Word for Mac, apparently, you just never do). But I do think it was a good exercise in making a single unified work out of two disparate views (even if the disparity is only slight). Maybe next time I’ll work someone who is not a blood relative, even someone I wouldn’t chase with a stick. The sky is the limit.
But actually, I really liked working with my brother.
*What, like you weren’t hard on your siblings?
July 22nd, 2010
More on villains
Just a little while ago, I published an article on villains, about how badly written villains are plot twists and not characters, and well-written ones have humanity and motivations, even if they are loathesome.I have just come across a really great example of the kind of precisely worked, humanly rendered, utterly obnoxious fictional jerk I so admire–too bad I hadn’t read this book when I was writing the article.
The protagonist of Russell Smith’s Girl Crazy is 32-year-old Justin Harrison. He teaches Business English and Online Writing at a suburban vocation school, while taking an interest in neither the material nor his students nor his colleagues, hating his boss, ogling the departmental secretary, and doing as little work as possible. He spends his evenings playing violent video games and having tepid conversations with his ex-girlfriend, whom he seems never to have liked. He has few friends, though he stretches the count by including school acquaintances from 10 years ago who occasionally send him mass-mail invitations to parties. And when he sees a girl crying by the side of the road, his first thoughts are of sleeping with her.
In short, Justin is an utter asshole, who spends the entire book feeling entitled to a lifestyle that he has made no effort to achieve, and being snarky to those he believes aren’t on-side with his pathetic cause, which is pretty much everyone. Luckily, those Justin hurts are pretty much as awful as he is, and for most of the book he is too deluded and inefficient to do terribly much damage to anyone. What’s terrifying at the end is that maybe he’s gotten it together, efficiency-wise without gaining any actual insight–maybe the damage is coming.
And what’s amazing is that *Girl Crazy* is really engaging–I genuinely wanted to know what would happen to Justin at every turn, and was fascinated by the inner workings of his mind. I am very much aware that there are folks in the world–in my world–very similar to this guy. His self-interest and self-regard are utterly resonant with lesser jerks I have known. I liked the book because of Smith’s sharp prose, his funny/mean jokes, the narrative drive, but also because I’d always wanted to know what guys like this are thinking. And now, a little, I feel I do.
Justin feels it’s ok to stare at attractive women as long and obviously as he likes because they’ll never consent to sleep with him, so he deserves to take what he can get, as much of it as possible, whenever he can. Justin is dying to teach literature to his students, though they are training in trades and don’t want to learn it, and the department doesn’t want to offer it. When someone finally asks, “What do you care…about how much English lit our students know about?” Justin thought about this. It was not such an easy question. “I don’t,” he said finally. “I would just find it more interesting.”
I recognize this sort of self-absorbed pathos though I can’t hang out with guys like Justin because my breasts are too small to merit interest and I’d probably try to kill him with a butter knife after twenty minutes, anyway. But it’s great to read Smith’s dead-on evocation of a loser with a theory about everything, and watch how he tries to project himself into the big leagues and the life of a sexy girl.
I am sure no one cares what I think is wrong with fiction today, but for what it’s worth, I think a lot of writers go wrong conflating “protagonist” and “hero.” Of course, there is much great literature to be written about people who overcome adversity, learn from their mistakes, reach out to their loved ones, help the unfortunate, and achieve greatness without ever comprimising their values–but do *all* books have to be about them? I suppose we are the heroes of our own lives, but by any other standard I’d see Justin Harrison as a villain. Reading *Girl Crazy* let me live his life with interest for a week. I even queasily identified with him in places, and that, I think, is a great literary accomplishment for Smith–and certainly a tougher challenge than getting a reader to feel a commonality with the heroes we all feel ourselves to be.
July 16th, 2010
Things to do on a “writing day” that are not writing
Despite the fact that none of the activities listed below are actually writing, they all offerred comfort or encouragement to the heat-besieged writer, and I have no regrets whatsoever about anything that happened yesterday. (I also got a little writing in between all the other stuff.)
–go to the gym where, because of the air-conditioning, you actually sweat less than elsewhere
–pick raspberries
–eat the raspberries immediately. Do not even bring a bowl to put them in–eat’em right off the bush.
–read and read and read Russell Smith’s Girl Crazy. I am only at the halfway point, so I can’t fully tell you whether it is a brilliant novel or not, but I know that I am mad every time I reach my TTC stop and can’t read anymore for a while, so that’s a good sign.
–have lunch at Ackee Tree, where the staff is incredibly nice and everything seems to come with coleslaw.
–go sit on the lawn downtown that no one ever sits on (they sit on benches and stare out at it, as if it were the sea). I will leave out the exact location of the lawn to protect the identity of my partner in crime, but that is one nice lawn–all long and lush, with no worn bits (because no one ever sits on it or even walks on it) and certainly no cigarette butts or dog poo.
–give blood! I am still trying to figure out where to donate money, but at least there’s really only one place to give blood. I asked and the supply is currenly not bad, but they always need more, especially B- and O-, if you happen to have those. (Side story: as part of the usual intake assessment, the nurse asked to examine my inner arms to check for track marks. I had none of those, but I did have a cookie crumb embedded in the sweat of the crook my elbow–sex-ay!)
–watch Nicole Holofcener’s amazing film Please Give starring Catherine Keener and a really talented woman named Rebecca!! (Hall). I am not famous for my interest in complicated, serious, grown-up movies, but I did get blown away by Lovely and Amazing, also by Holofcener and also staring Keener, way back in 2001. I’m actually going to try to review this at some point, so I’ll shut up now.
–scuttle about the city in the heat, and enjoy watching folks in suits and ties eating ice-cream, skateboarders, children pitching fits, tour groups, street charity solitictations, and the nice people from a hair products company, whom I ran into both at Queen and Spadina and later at Yonge and College (I get around) and who gave me a mini bottle of conditioner both times.
–when you get home from all this, pour astringent on a white cotton pad, and then run it over your makeup-free face. If you are disgusting and immature like me, you will be fascinated to see the brownish colour of Toronto smog that has accumulated in your pores. I do this every night in summer! (Is this TMI? I never know.)
What a nice city I live in!
July 14th, 2010
Observation
Maybe so much fiction has been written about male-female dynamics because because then the author can be clear who is speaking/acting/emoting with only pronouns. Every time I write a scene with two or more people of the same gender, I go insane for how many times I have to use everyone’s stupid names–pronouns are all but useless when multiple people are *he* or *she*!
Am I the only one who is still struggling with this sort of mechanical minutiae? At this point on a hot day, I feel like the answer to that is probably yes.
June 21st, 2010
Two nice things
Let’s start with the good stuff:
1) The New Quarterly’s poll to choose a cover image for their “On the Road” issue is now up. The pics are all splendid, so there is no need for me to stump for my favourite, though I very much have one.
2) Ian le Tourneau, whose work I have to admit I’m not familiar with, has started a neat new thing called The Second Book Project. The first one, linked here, is with the always fascinating Zachariah Wells and there is the promise of more to come. As an author knee-deep in the sophmore slog, I am very interested in following these interviews and trying to learn a little something for myself. FYI, the series is poets only, but I find that when it comes to process-and-publication topics like this, I there is still plenty to learn across the forms.
May 29th, 2010
Admission
After yesterday’s “I’m right about everything” rant, I came across this in a story of mine that had unaccountably been rejected by yet another magazine: “undulant wave.” What does undulant mean? Why, wavelike, of course. So, what I meant apparently was “wavelike wave.” The generous editors sent me a bunch of feedback on pacing and dialogue, but I think we all know why this one was really rejected.
Ugh.
May 20th, 2010
On Obscenity
I got an email the other day with a number of obscenities in it. It was a short note and they really stuck out, plus I was a bit bleary eyed and was having trouble grasping the rest of the content (one of the many awesome things about my life is that people very rarely curse me out early in the morning anymore). It took me a few moments to realize the note was from someone who had read a story of mine and was struck by certain language in it that might cause problems publishing it. The note wasn’t even critical, just factual, and all the obscene stuff was in quotation marks–I wrote it.
People say stuff, do stuff and, especially, think stuff, that I never would–and would never want to–but I do want to write about people who aren’t me. So, I have to learn to think (if not say and do) like someone else. Someone with different beliefs, values, standards than me. Someone who likes gefilite fish and ignores lucky pennies, to name two inane examples. Someone racist or disrespectful to women, to name to less inane ones.
So?
No so–I need to do it, because people like that exist. They are even charming and kind on occasion and witty at parties–and I want to write about them. Part of the thrill of writing and reading fiction is breaking out of our own tragically limited points of view and seeing why and how someone might do something completely else.
So if I write seriously, respectfully, and thoughtfully about someone who is is glibly thoughtlessly hateful–what is that? In my mind, that’s not only fine but necessary, but then again, it makes me nervous.
I finally finished reading *Tribal Justice* by Clark Blaise, probably one of the most nuanced, multi-dimensional and utterly agonizing fictional examinations of race and culture as I have ever read. As much as that book challenged and absorbed my every intellectual synapse, I still somehow had the mental space to wonder how my fellow bus riders were interepting the brightly titled cover, or if anyone had glanced over my shoulder to see the range of racial ephithets on many pages.
Those words needed to be there–they reperesented the language people used in the times and places Blaise was writing about. So did the graphic accounts of violence, the weird sexuality, the inflamatory rhetoric–that’s what these characters said, did, believed. These were the stories Blaise wanted to tell, and they needed telling, in the actual lived language. But oh my goodness, I hope no one got the wrong impression based on the cover, etc. (I would recommend this book, but not to everyone: it’s really hard to deal with parts of it).
So, with such openmindedness, RR, why did you note “too close to hateful language” in the margins of a couple of the student stories you were marking just now? Surely those teens have different viewpoints on race/sex/culture/etc, and have a right to represent the world the way they see it–don’t they?
Oh, man, I’m still not sure I did the right thing (don’t worry, I still have the papers, and some white-out). After reading more than 60 stories, I am pretty convinced that a lot of these kids could not distinguish well between their characters and themselves (witness the number of main characters who have perfect wardrobes, expensive cars, and perfect love, all 17). And I want to run up the flag of sensitivity without necessarily making them salute–I can’t make anyone like other races or religions or sexual orientations, I can only make them aware that they are *not* perfectly unbiased in these regards and see what they do with that new self awareness. (I am making this sound really pervasive so I can generalize, lest my students stumble on this blog–actually, it was only a couple kids).
What if I am wrong, and the students are simply writing about characters who believe these things and they don’t themselves? Well, then they’re really talented because it reads so heartfelt. And I owe them an apology.
I wonder, if I ever manage to publish the story mentioned above, if it’ll be something people read and squirm about, ducking the book into their chests on the bus? Or if I could ever be conflated with my characters, assumed to have their blindspots and uglinesses (my own are plenty).
Hmm, this post has a theme but no thesis–I certainly don’t know the answers.
May 11th, 2010
Career Notes: Everybody sad!
I think at my career-talk thingy on Thursday, I am going to be asked about how I balance writing stories and earning a living. My glib answer is “badly,” but my non-glib answer is not too much better–I do what I can, sleep less than I want, miss parties I’d enjoy, I don’t own a car, cellphone, cat, or cable box, and have truly demented tax returns. But judging by the state of the bloggersphere today, everybody is miserable in this situation. So I’m in good company, and at least I’m not injured:
Mark reports on AL Kennedy’s description of the writing life composed of exhaustion, obsession and back pain.
AJ comments on Geoff Pevere’s description of the writing life as composed of networking, being ignored, and self-doubt.
Amy comments on the writing life of trying to find a totally un-writing-related job to support the writing. I like how Amy is positive and puts the pros of the situation before the cons, albeit after the eye-gouging reference.
So what am I really gonna tell the kids on Thursday? That if you want to do a thing that doesn’t pay much (or sometimes anything) you will have to do another thing that pays at least something, to balance it out, at least for a while. And while yes, that can suck the life right out of you and make you just want to lie down and have a little nap at the bus stop or the grocery store, it can also be stimulating and exciting to be in two different worlds. And a workaday job, as opposed to writing, will introduce you to new people, help you learn to work as part of a team, expose you to ideas you did not think of yourself, and more than likely offer at least some cake.
This might be aggressive silver-lining searching from someone writing this blog post as her sole creative outlet this week, as she spends her days editing and her nights marking teenager stories (Bulletin: I have learned about the teens: they like the video games. Also: weird fonts.) But there’s always gonna be tradeoffs, and quite often I get to write for a few hours at a time. At least, that’s what I tell myself.
I think I’m going to do a post on “Jobs for Writers.” I’ve had a lot of different ones, but not nearly all that are out there–please send comments if you’ve had a particularly good, or particularly bad job-writing fit that we can all learn from.
Back to work!
RR
May 5th, 2010
Career Queries
Although it does not come up on Rose-coloured very often, I work as an editor. To do this, I got my publishing certificate. Most of the curriculum was to make us competent enough to do certain jobs in the publishing industry, which was very useful. As well, though, a sizeable chunk of time was devoted to helping us *get* those jobs. You’d think that latter part would have been interesting, and it was, but it was also very odd.
The classes on job-getting inevitably had a guest speaker who had been very successful in publishing–someone who had been at it 20 or so years and had risen to VP status or similar. They were supposed to tell us both about life in the industry and how they got their starts. The former category always a lot fascinating stuff , but the latter… Some weird kind of modesty would overtake our speakers, coupled with spotty memories, and they just could not (or would not) admit they had ever been ambitious or tried hard or even *wanted* to work in publishing. “Just fell into it,” “wasn’t good at anything else,” “friend begged me to take the job,” were a few of the things I heard.
I don’t think these people meant to come across as they did, which was weirdly smug and secretive. I think the industry has genuinely changed in the last 20 years, and it used to be much easier to just “fall” into a successful and exciting career. And, well, I think some of those people *did* fear seeming like they had been ambitious and tried really hard to get promotions and earn money–that’s not something the genuinely bookish are supposed to do.
Well, here’s the truth about me: I have always had a strong–borderline obsessive–desire to feed and clothe myself and to sleep indoors, and I thought it would be best if I could do it working with books. This was hard to do, and continues to be, but I can (usually) manage. Sorta.
So when UofT Career Centre asked me to speak to a bunch of graduating students about my work and path to it (and ongoing), I suddenly had a wash of that bizarro reticence mentioned above–“Oh, I don’t really know, it just worked out, sorta…”
Which is of course crazy–I remember exactly how I got here, and some of those wounds are still quite fresh. I think maybe offering advice feels too much like tempting the fates–“Hey, I am confident in my work; must be time to shoot me down!” And, in truth, no one is an expert except on whatever works for that person…and even then, there’s a fair bit of randomness involved.
But I do think I’ll be able to tell those young graduates a few useful things, and maybe it’ll even be good that I’m low-level enough to remember how hard you have to try to get started. Since I suspect a lot of the Rose-coloured readers might work in publishing, or be interested in it, please feel free to post either queries or advice (or both) that I might use in my talk (May 13). I promise to post whatever notes and answers I come up with here afterwards.
I will of course also be talking about writing stories and stuff, and how I balance the two (poorly). But I have a feeling that students weeks away from summer vacation who are willing to go to a careers seminar are not in the market for a job that you would require another job to support. But…what do I know?
RR