on writing

Some times we can't find ourselves in our words

I love to read writers when they write about writing; I usually feel like a peeping Tom, and sometimes they are willing abettors in the act, especially Eudora Welty, Pat Conroy, Stephen King, or Amy Tan (in Opposite of Fate, which I would recommend to anyone who wants to know what being a writer really means).  They often expose themselves, even  when they take the tack of writing a textbook, as do  Annie LaMott in Bird by Bird, or John Ciardi in How Does a Poem Mean--that I was introduced by my creative writing teacher Evans Harrington.

While I got a little bit of that sense of peeking through the blinds in reading Julie Smith’s  “how to” book on novel writing,  in Writing Your Way: The Great American Novel Track, the author manages to seem modestly wrapped in a bathrobe. Her choice of a second person voice in the title throughout most of the book was probably the key. She seemed as it were, to be looking back out of the slats at the reader.  That was part of her technique, to focus on the prospective writer.

One of the strengths of the book, was leaning on Samuel L. Clemens/Mark Twain’s exemplar Huckleberry Finn as a template of what makes a novel great. Clemens is undeniably among the greatest American writers.  Plus his critique of James Fennimore Cooper is perhaps one of the finest warnings to writers that the find authenticity in their fiction.  After reading Smith’s book one of the things I would dearly love to do is visit her in a literary salon setting where we could discuss the marvels of Mark Twain., and of course I would like to tell her why she, and Hemingway, are wrong about the close of Huckleberry Finn, that indeed it was some of Clemens bitterest writing, and he could be bitter as milk after eating grapefruit.

The strength of Smith’s book is that of a good teacher urging students to just do it. Her three rules of writings: “Start it. Put your heart in it. Part with it.”  are worth the whole book.  She says that many a writer finds themselves asking, “What would Shakespeare do?” That brought to my mind that speech by Hamlet to actors that could just as easily fit Smith’s instructions, “let your own discretions be your tutor: suit the action to the word and the word to the action.”  While Writing Your Way is very pedagogical, it is also intuitive and helpful. My main complain is that it is an e-book, which makes all those joys of making a paper book one’s own with marginalia and underlining are missing. The most valuable section is on marketing: or in other words, doing what all writers write for, finding a readership.

How to Terrorize a Reader

Reading horror is an act of cooperation

One of the wonders of reading for me is that it can be as much an act of creativity as writing. A good writer invites the reader to share imaginations with him or her. One of the reasons no one who is reasonably literate thinks of the movie as better than most novels is, despite the magic in good actors who can give more life to a story than the writing of the script deserves, is that the most important part of a good book is missing: is the contribution that the imagination of the reader. Ever wonder why a book reviewer or another friend seems to have read a different book than the one of the same title and author that you read? Could it be that their imagination or lack there of has created an entirely different book?

                Take for instance Kait Nolan’s Forsaken by Shadow, published pseudonymously as an e-book. I don’t know what other people may think of the book, but I can give you the view of it from an imagination tempered by an affection for Mark Twain, whose sci-fi/fantasy books and short stories, not the least of which is several versions of The Mysterious Stranger, rival Ovid’s Metamorphosis and the Odyssey as explorations of what the author Nolan calls a paranormal romance.  When I saw that descriptor, my mind flipped to Margaret Atwood’s somewhat disappointing but occasionally brilliant Penelopiad.  And my look at the book is informed by several other books, including a Roger Zelzany’s Jack of Shadows, Interviews with a Vampire by Anne Rice, the writings of Lewis Thomas, and  Goedel Escher Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglass Hoffstadter. But most importantly in her book I see an exploration of several cultural creation mythologies, including a sex scene that is straight out of John Milton’s Paradise Lost when the first parents sought consolation in each other after understanding the passion they had unleashed. And if there is any question that Nolan is delving in Psycho-mythology, one of the pivotal characters is named Adan, which in many languages including Spanish and Hebrew is a variation of Adam. I also saw in the mating of fiery Embry (no coincidence of its closeness to Ember) and the male protagonist, a reference to the Gilgamesh epic, and Embry’s fear that her love (as Ishtar’s) would be destructive to her uber-hero Gage. The only thing missing was Gilgamesh’s side-kick, the “wild man” Enkidu; but no, even that is part of her mythos in the dual person of Gage, who was a wild man, Ultimate Fighter Cade, during a ten-year span of amnesia.

                So I see in the book a part of that modern compulsive recreation of a mythos in a world where all myth has been put on a shelf in the name of science, Science itself is threatening to become a modern mythology. Where else does that rebellion come from in literature where who see a slavish love for and imitation of J.R.R. Tolkein, and an adoration of the phantasmagorical in the Twilight Series and is the Harry Potter Series. We have a need for our heroes and anti-heroes who live outside the realm of the everyday, outside of the plausible, and Piers Anthony to the contrary, outside of the Mundane.

                And this is the stonework that was built around the cottage of imagination that I entered while reading Forsaken by Shadows. There are dangers in reading a book in a cottage like that. Because, such a lair of imagination carries with it great expectations of the author. Sometime the sheer force of the imagination and the places that a story takes us too are so strong that even really bad writing, like that of Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Tarzan series, overcome the writer’s shortcomings. Another Example is Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, whose story is so captivating that a reader can forget it is the barest shell of a narrative. For me, a prime example of a failure to bring me into the writer’s world is Twilight.  Sixty pages of bad writing failed to bring me into that world.

                But I found Nolan was not lacking in the storyteller’s ability to become her characters.

                So now I invite you into my cottage, with lined with many books including those mentioned above, as I let my imagination wander through Forsaken by Shadow. Shadow is a word of several meanings here, not the least of which is a totem name for Gage/Cade.  Oh, speaking of Shadows, I am now reading a book on Carl Jung’s view of how we have to make our peace with our shadow self, In Nolan’s book, she does an masterful job of treating that Jungian concept as a place of escape and exploration. While in the traditional Christian sense, we allow ourselves to see our shadow self as a dark side, a shade of sin. Nolan takes the Jungian idea that it is a place where we can allow our imaginations to grow. I have a friend who has a ministry with prisoners, who addressed this more imaginatively than I did. Before noting that when we face the light the shadow is hidden behind us and when we turn our backs on the light all we see is our shadow, he reminded his convicts that we are in a way like Peter Pan. Pan discovered that without his shadow he was incomplete. Nolan’s Gage/Cade did find himself without his shadows, and trapped in the light, trapped without imagination, as it were. This carried the story through its climax.

                And while finding herself perhaps more and more caught in the limitations and conventions of the paranormal genres where Nolan says “even the paranormal use Robert’s Rules of Order,” Nolan escapes by using a sense of humor, sensuality, and a darkness in an effective job of story telling. But she doesn’t address the one question that I have found running in these genres; why do the paranormal forces, especially ones with the strength they show in Nolan’s story insist in keeping hidden; from being generally known among human, with whom they for such a large part seem to share a gene pool that makes them of the same species? Perhaps that will be the stuff of future writings.  Of course the answer could lie in how boring and average the paranormal would be it if didn’t exist in shadows. Maybe it would be treated in the same sterile way disease is handled in a hospital, when the human body is treated as though it were a dented fender in a body shop.