Category Archives: Writing

Writing

Rewriting is Writing

Leave a comment

Samhain                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

Once more into the breech. Or, the revision.  Something feels odd, but I’m enjoying the revision.  I didn’t believe it before, but the writing is in the rewriting.

I read somewhere that there are two types of writers, ones who plan, plot, outline and those who discover their story as they write.  I’m of the latter camp once I get going.  I do a good bit of research and I sketch out on a large pad the general flow, big ideas, things I don’t want to forget; but, then I dive in and start writing, see where the process takes me.

This means I produce a first draft that is, in effect, my outline.  Somewhere in there is the story and it may not be the story I thought I was writing.  Or, as in the case of Missing, it is the story I thought I was writing, but a lot of other cool ideas occurred to me as I wrote and I added those.  Discovering them along the way, they just seem worth sticking in.

Revising is, at least in part, identifying those parts and taking them out.  In this instance I will probably be able to use most of them in the next book, Loki’s Children, but it could well be that they would go into a file and never again see a page or screen.

Revision though is additive as well as subtractive.  There’s not only the Michelangelo act of paring away the words that aren’t the story.  There is also the painterly act of filling blank portions of the canvas, balancing the picture, making the colors pop.  Both of these come into play during revision.  Anyhow, I’d better get to it right now.  Later.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Humanities, Latin, Literature, Myth and Story, Photography, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Missing, In the Dark Wood, Lycaon

Leave a comment

Samhain                                                               Thanksgiving Moon

Involved with what is, I believe, technically the fifth revision of Missing.  20,000 words went out today, a whole story line about a goddess and her giantess assistance.  It included, too, a favorite part of the book for me, the Wyrm and the Weregild, a group of expert giant dragon hunters.  But this storyline does not intersect directly with the primary story in Missing and it’s now in the pile for Loki’s Children, which now has over 50,000 plus words available from the drafts and revisions up to now of Missing.

Some key names got changed, transitions made more clear.  I got about half way through a quick review.  Probably will finish with that tomorrow.  Then I’ll go back in and start adding some more description, some character development and I may, probably will, change the ending to give it more punch.  Thanks to Stefan for the idea.

Translated another four verses in the story of Lycaon today, too.  These were hard, either the Latin was thick or I was.  Maybe both.  Still.  Done.  That’s my goal per day.

Also worked on ModPo’s final week.  Two very interesting poets today.  Erica Baum is a conceptual poet who combines photography and found language to create intriguing works.  Here are two images we reviewed in class:

 

The first is from a work called Card Catalogues where Baum photographed certain portions of the New York University Library’s old card catalog.  Each photograph is a poem of juxtaposition created by the strange constraint of alphabetically organizing knowledge.  The second is one of several pieces from a work, Dog Ear.  These are all large photographs, Card Catalog is too, and she hangs them in galleries together, though each photograph stands alone.  This is part of the conceptualist idea that ambient language contains all we need as far as poetry.  We only have to work to find it.  But that work can be difficult.

The next poet is Caroline Bergvall, a French-Norwegian who works in English.  Her work is a ten-minute recitation of 47 different translations of the famous opening lines of Dante’s Inferno:

When I had journeyed half of our life’s way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.  from the Mandelbaum translation

This is a strangely evocative, haunting experience.  You can hear her read it here.

(Frame from a 1911 Italian film version of the Divine Comedy. The director’s name was Giuseppe De Liguoro. from this website.)

Art and Culture, Writing

Missing found.

Leave a comment

Samhain                                                                        Thanksgiving Moon

Missing, the 4th revision, is at home now, having had its beta reading.  That means I’m taking the manuscript up today, seeing what to do, how to hone it one more time. Revision jumps to the front of the line for time, so the Latin will move to 11:00 a.m. and ModPo, this last week, to the afternoon.

There was an interesting perspective on revision I saw last week.  Something like: revision’s not so bad because you know you already have a novel.  True.  And I have few more lying around, too.

Having the ability to arrange my days around the growing season, my writing, the Latin and, now, MOOCs, has made it so I’ve never missed my docent work at the MIA.  Too big a time suck.  How to add art back into my life at that level of intensity, though, still eludes me.  That I miss, the intense immersion in the world of art.  I don’t miss the driving, the tour preparation, the tours.

And now, back to Missing.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature, Memories, MOOCS, Myth and Story, Writing

The Narrative Fallacy

Leave a comment

Samhain                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

Narrative fallacy.  I read about it first last night in a book on Amazon.com called “The Everything Store.”  Jeff Bezos refers to it as a construct he read in the book, “The Black Swan.”  It struck me as very post modern.

Here’s how I understand it.  The narrative fallacy occurs when we use our logical, cause and effect seeking mental habits to place often chaotic events in a series that we can understand.  This means leaving out details, rearranging troublesome sequences, condensing complex interactions.  We make a story out of the data available to us.

I haven’t read the Black Swan but I imagine this is how Black Swans (big problems that seem to come out of nowhere) slip under the perceptions of people trying to evaluate risks.

This squares with an especially nettlesome idea in current neuroscience (the author may have gotten it from that source) that suggests our self is a narrative fallacy.  That is, our self is a story we construct out of certain pieces of our life, knitting this into the fabric and leaving that out.  In this view the self is not solid and unchanging, it’s not even relatively solid but changing slowly over time.  No, the self is fluid from beginning to end, a long long novel with ourselves in a starring role, but the script keeps getting handed to us, marked up with changes.

This partly comes from the plasticity of memory and the proven unreliability of human memory.  We now know eye witnesses, once the gold standard of detective fiction and fact, are the least likely to portray events accurately.  Not because the eye witnesses lie, but because our capacity to remember events as they happened is poor.  Emotions skew them, bias skews them, our senses feed us less than reliable data.  We’re a walking hodge podge of experiences.

(sarah fishburn)

The narrative fallacy neatly explains the role of story.  As Bill Schmidt’s Tom Clancy quote says, “Fiction is not like reality.  Fiction has to make sense.”  A key role of fiction is to reassure us of the intelligibility of the world.  The world is not, in fact, intelligible.  There’s just too much going on.  We have to edit our experience to have any hope of using it to our advantage.

Why is it post modern?  Because post modernism (I’m not convinced this is a very good term.) insists on the unreliability of any narrative. [think about this idea in relation to the photograph below of a Traditional Catholic service in Kitchener, Ontario] As a direct corollary of this, though, there is the role of agency, the role of narrative creator.  That gives all of us a key role in constructing the future we want.  We can claim neither fundamentals from so-called foundational documents or ideas, nor can we rely on history as other than story; but, we can rely on the necessity of our role in creating a new story, one constructed in a way that seems to us true, just and fair.  Even beautiful.  Knowing that none of these categories are more than markers for working or not working.

Writing

Missing, the final chapters

Leave a comment

Samhain                                                      Thanksgiving Moon

On, hopefully, the final lap with Missing. Lonnie and Stefan will pass on their comments this morning.  I’ll incorporate any changes necessary after this conversation and then give the manuscript to Quickproofers.  After Bob Klein finishes with it, I’ll incorporated changes from his work.  At that point it gets sent to agents.  If there are no bites through agents, then publishers.

Writing novels and selling them takes a long time. You have to see into the distance, keep your pace steady.  I’ve not been good at the business side of writing and now I’m going to be.  It’s past time.

Garden, Latin, MOOCS, Our Land and Home, Poetry, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Changes Are Coming

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                     Samhain Moon

With Modern/Post Modern in its last week and Modpo with only three weeks to go, I feel like the end of the quarter or semester is in sight.  Since it will roughly co-ordinate with Samhain, this means a distinct change in my daily life.  The garden is almost put to bed and will be by the end of this week as well.  The bees, too, will get their cardboard outer sleeve, the moisture absorbing top board and corks in the lower two entrances, plus the entrance reducer.

This year part of that outdoor energy will get focused in the garage which can use a major cleaning, rearranging.  It’s gotten cluttered and we could use it for more if we eliminate a few things like the five stall dog crate and feeding platform.

Writing Loki’s Children and keeping up with the Latin will occupy the bulk of the time.  I’ll huddle downstairs with the green gas stove burning, my Zojirushi kicking out tea temperature water and visions of old Rome and Ragnarok.

Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Still At It

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                         Samhain Moon

I’ve picked up the pace in translating.  Not a lot.   But I have.  My intention is to time myself from now on, figure out how I can increase my speed.  That will be important, as I said before, if I’m to translate the whole Metamorphoses.  (Ovid)

You might ask, why?  A few years ago I decided to read classics for a whole year.  I read the Koran, Faust, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the Metamorphoses among others.  As I did this, I also read commentaries and essays on these works to give myself a broader and deeper perspective.  When I got to the material on the Metamorphoses, I realized it stood at a critical juncture between ancient Greek religion (and, I imagine now, the Egyptian influence on the Greek) and Western civilization in the common era.

During the Renaissance it was Ovid’s work that moved Greek mythology into the mainstream of Western intellectual life.  The older sources were either unavailable at the time, as yet undiscovered, or simply missing.  That’s why the versions of the mythological corpus you know are most often Ovid’s version.

(Banquet of the Gods-Frans Floris)

If I could imprint Ovid’s stories into my brain, then I would have a vast resource, one with deep resonance in the entire Western literary tradition.  How to do that?  I had always wanted to learn a language but had told myself I couldn’t.  How about learning Latin, then translating the Metamorphoses? It could vanquish a self doubt, allow a peek behind the curtain of translation and help me absorb these wonderful stories.  All in the same project.

It’s not been, nor is it now, easy.  It is hard part of the time, difficult the rest.  But I’ve learned to enjoy that.  There are new insights often and results that I know are mine.  I’m learning the stories and advancing towards the skill level I need to go the distance.  This is the fourth year of learning and translating.  Many more to go.

BTW:  There is, somewhere in this, the novel I want to write.  A big one, a fantasy, because that’s how I think when it comes to fiction, but one deep in this material.  What it will be like, I don’t know, but I keep looking for fleeting images as I work.  Perhaps behind the story of the golden age?  Philemon and Baucus?  Medea?  Pentheus?  Perhaps in Ovid himself?  First century C.E. Rome?  All of these?  I don’t know.  But it’s the Moby Dick I’ve set sail to find.

Art and Culture, Poetry, Writing

Out There, Man

Leave a comment

Fall                                                               Samhain Moon

The beats.  for beatific.  A generation I have begun to feel more now, reading them in ModPo.  I never read them, ignored them as quaint, anachronistic for the rebellion, my rebellion, our rebellion, the 60’s.  Now looking back at them, imagining them as outriders on the buttoned up, nuclear overcast, post-war suburban build out to conformity culture in which I was young, now I can see.  And hear.  They inhabited a margin unimaginable from the center of Levittown, a world of China and tea with no oriental associations, a rootless, roving busload of wearers of black, makers of poetry, listeners to jazz, respecting no sexual or social conventions.  Out there, man.

(Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Lafcadio Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso in 1956)

Now.  Now I hear the Howl and have listened to Kerouac’s strangely charismatic voice, speaking through digital technology only barely coming to be in his own time.  These are not my people.  I am not of them.  But they are our people, our American outsiders.  Buoys on the shipping lanes of middle class culture warning out beyond here there be monsters.  My people are political.  The beats were not.  We used acid and mescaline and peyote, they turned to heroin.  They found their place in poetry and wandering and improvisation; we found ours in the street, organizing, fighting.  Different.  But the same.

(Carl Solomon, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs at the Gotham Book Mart, New York City, 1977)

American outsider voices.  All amplified in that strange alien language spoken only where the commuters never ride.  Where the matron never serves tea.  Where the only hope is purity and clarity and the archetypal.  Never sullied by bills and jobs and diapers and cars breaking down.  Out there surfing the big breaks of idealism that crest upon the shore of America the Capitalist and America the Conformist.

(Train Station, by Bernice Sims)

I hear them now, speaking in their cadences at night in coffee houses, pounding small drums and shouting into the microphone about pain and angels and doomed love.

Writing

A bit of babble flow after Kerouac

Leave a comment

Fall                                                                     Samhain Moon

listen the quiet surround me buzzing in my ears a bit of hard drive back up whir and shift that oceanic feeling of the yard and teh sky and the north behind me a sense that i Don’t sit here but everywhere, a point, not a line, no particular place though planted here I could also be there where the lift bridge rises and the fog horn sounds or where the Mississippi babbles small brookish out of the old Lake Itasca where Schoolcraft became a student of the head waters which water the head and make us all wet, yet hydrated, not dried out but nourished and ready to grow, growing up in this northern land where the sun rises and sets half way to the north pole where we know we are closer to the north pole than the rest of America below us in particular, for example, Georgia with those peach and pecan orchards and the stars and bars and the sound of NASCAR revving, internal combustion sound music, not annoying sound, but beautiful, wound up and spinning around the track we go up to Washington DC where the white and the marble and the monuments and the documents, the talking and collaborating, the glad-hands and false smiles mean work, work of the people.  Work.

Humanities, Myth and Story, Writing

Expert or Master

1 Comment

Fall                                                                           Samhain Moon

Moving fast this week.  Still working outside, in particular the orchard and broadcast fertilizer.  Two MOOCs presented a lot of reading.  Adorno and Horkheimer, Foucault x2, poems by poets who challenged modernism:  communists, harlem renaissance, Frost and the Formalists.  Finished up Loki in Scandinavian Mythology.  Assessing four essays for ModPo.  11 verses so far in Ovid.  Enough things to do, but not too many.

Been thinking about that learning curve graph I posted a couple of days ago.  It is, I suppose, a graph of mastery, a graph of, according to Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours of work.  Not sure about the time frame in hours.  Seems a bit facile to me.  By that measure I suppose I could say I’m a master reader, a master politician and maybe a master gardener. Probably a master student.  Still seems inadequate, both as a term and as a process.

(Edouard_Manet_-_The_Reader)

I like the graph better.  Steps.  Progress.  That makes sense to me.  Not hours. By that measure I would say I am an expert reader, perhaps an expert student.  So, I’ve become expert, not in a field or a craft, but in the tools of learning.  Worse things to focus on.