Aesthetic Absolutes?

What the beginning writer ordinarily wants is a set of rules on what to do and what not to do in writing fiction. As we'll see, some general principles can be set down (Things to Think About When Writing Fiction) and some very general warnings can be offered (Things to Watch Out For); but on the whole the search for aesthetic absolutes is a misapplication of the writer's energy. When one begins to be persuaded that certain things must never be done in fiction and certain other things must always be done, one has entered the first stage of aesthetic arthritis, the disease that ends up in pedantic rigidity and the atrophy of intuition. . . .

Trust worthy aesthetic universals do exist, but they exist at such a high level of abstraction as to offer almost no guidance to the writer. . . . They're laws, but they slip.

Thus saith John Gardner on the first page of The Art of Fiction. Funny way to begin a book on how to write fiction, huh?

Truth be told: for a capstoner, i feel like something of a beginning writer, especially in the way of fiction but also in the creative writing world overall. i get grammar. It makes sense: this is the way we normally talk (in this one standardized dialect of English), and so it will help everyone if we talk this same standardized way when we are talking in this formal dialect. So dot your i's, cross your t's, and put commas between independent clauses when they are joined by a conjunction. Not so for fiction?

Well, not exactly. Gardner opens with this paragraph, and he adds a few more paragraphs too.  His thoughts here reminded me of a conversation i had—recently, i think—with someone i esteemed to be a writer and mentor worth listening to (i think it was Professor Hougen, but maybe someone else said it first?). This person—who will go unnamed due to my suspect memory—told me that it was good for beginning writers to learn the rules of writing well in their beginning years; later, they must learn how they may break, how their art demands to expand beyond these rules.

i liken it to learning a language. It's probably best not to learn how to speak Arabic from street talk or a slang dialect. Learn the idioms, certainly, but also learn the morphological regularities. Learn how words are regularly arranged; then move on how to smear the syntax a little for effect. Learn the rules, and then learn when it's fun/helpful/necessary/socially cool to break them.

One other thought here—Gardner uses a headier diction here. This might be in part his choice for his audience, but it might also be his plain ol' voice. Now i tend toward the denser part of the lexical forest, but as i read this, i just didn't like a few phrases: "pedantic rigidity and the atrophy of intuition." What does this mean? Maybe another good reason to read people, and even people not like us, is to learn by contrast who we aren't, to taste an aesthetic that isn't quite us.

i'd love to hear your thoughts. Do share. Oh, i guess you have to. . .

Noticing Detail

I am reading The Wet Collection by Joni Tevis. I really appreciate her attention to detail. She writes with lots of description. But more than that, she really focuses in on the objects and writes about them close up so the reader can SEE them. I truly feel I am walking where she walks when I read her work.

An example of this is in her prologue on page 5. She is talking about a time when she is was in a museum walking beneath a bunch of stuffed birds hanging from the ceiling. She writes:

The bellies of the birds—phoebe, grackle, redwing blackbird—have been stitched in neat zigzags from crop to throat. Someone’s patient hand pinched the lips of the emptied breast. Someone pushed insecticide-laced batting into the cavity. Someone tied the knot… People bring what they find: sparrows, mourning doves, the common birds of the city. Then someone eviscerates the dead thing, sprinkles cornmeal to soak the blood, glues cabochons of glass for the eyes.

I love this! It forces me to look closely at things—not just in my writing but in my everyday life. I want to really SEE what I am looking at instead of breezing through the day, everything a blur because I didn’t take the time to notice. I often get absorbed in my own thoughts (thoughts are vague and hazy) when I should be focusing on concrete reality. When we talk to people, do we notice the width of their brows, the flecks of color in their eyes, the slight expressions on their faces?

Last night when I was writing my poem, I tried to write more closely about my topic. I zoned in on a leaf and was surprised at the detail I saw which I always take for granted. I want to be able to use strong metaphors and concrete images to explain what I see. I want to draw parallels between things, to use beautiful and unique language that will surprise people.

Last night I was attentive to the real, the detailed, and the concrete. This morning I was walking to work and it took me a few minutes to notice that there was snow on the ground! (Just a couple days ago people were playing volleyball and frisbee outside in their t-shirts.) Shows how quickly we forget. Do you make a habit/discipline of noticing the things around you? Is it hard or easy for you to write about concrete images in a way that you (or the reader) can really see them? Do you ever have to actually look at the thing before you can write about it?

Pick a Favorite

Writing short stories is not my specialty. But then, that’s what the capstone is all about, right? To hone your skills and create something beautiful? I’ve been reading some authors of short stories, but the one that has stood out to me has been Denis Johnson, author of a series of linked short stories in a volume called Jesus’ Son. Because I’m writing about the effects of alcoholism, this series really aided me…considering I’m not the most knowledgeable on the subject of alcohol and drugs.

One thing I really noticed about his style was his ability to take a highly emotional or suspenseful thing and say it in a blunt but beautiful way without making it seem too dramatic or over the top. This passage about a traumatic car crash is an example.

“I was thrown against the back of their seat so hard that it broke. I commenced bouncing back and forth. A liquid which I knew was blood flew around the car and rained down on my head. When it was over I was in the back seat again, just as I had been. I rose up and looked around. Our headlights had gone out. The radiator was hissing steadily. Beyond that, I didn’t hear a thing. As far as I could tell, I was the only one conscious. As my eyes adjusted I saw that the baby was lying on its back beside me as if nothing had happened. Its eyes were open and it was feeling its cheeks with its little hands” (6-7).

This is traumatizing, but he doesn’t make it so, at least to me. This is the way the rest of the stories feel. They are blunt, and they are real. Because it helps to keep the stories shorter and because I struggle with being long-winded, this has been really helpful. I’ve really been able to appreciate the fact that he has complete control over the short story, and I’m doing my best to translate that into my own writing.

But it hasn’t been easy. I’ve invested so much time in my first piece that it seems my emotions and drive to write have run out when it comes to my other two pieces. Maybe I don’t have characters I care about, or maybe I’m not trying hard enough. Maybe it has something to do with all of the classes stacked on top of each other. Sometimes I wish I could just focus on one piece, to baby it and make it as good as it can be. Perhaps it’s possible with all three. Though, is writing more than one thing at a time a good idea?

What do you guys think? Has your writing process been the same from piece to piece? Are you able to pour the same amount of care into each one? If not, why do you think that is, and is there a way to remedy that?

A Reason to Write

The shuttle arrives between 7:30 – 7:31 am on Mondays. Through the winter I am a loyal attendant. When I board, I do what I do best; pull out a good book and connect, like a plug in to a power outlet.  It was on one of these average Mondays that my world was rocked. Joan Didion’s Essays and Conversations placed a kilter on my understanding.  The color of understanding became vivacious, my sense of identity better defined. In a complicated yet crystal clear way, the world tipped. And this is what she said - 

"I knew that I was no legitimate resident in any world of ideas. All I knew then was what I couldn't do. All I knew was what I wasn't, and it took me years to discover what I was. Which was a writer. By which I mean not a 'good' writer or a 'bad' writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would be no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." - Joan Didion 

Snap! The word righted itself. Still wobbling, I traced the ink on the pages, her message resonating into the core of myself.  What it was like to be inaccessible to my mind. Having passion for arranging words until they are just so. Writing to find myself out. Discovering what I wasn’t. Piecing together my fears and wants. I was affected by Didion’s self- awareness and further respected her essays.

Most days I feel like I should join a writing support club, an anonymous society for other special thinkers such as myself.  My introduction would be full of acceptance. Hi, my name is Monica, and I am a writer. I have been diseased since birth, writing fictional stories along with friends’ birthday presents and describing non concrete things by color. If you often hear something insightful and immediately jot it down for further use, you may have been bitten. If you have ever sat next to someone on the airplane or overhear someone’s order in Subway and mentally create a character with their attributes, I invite you to the club. Friends and family do not realize they are cameos in my other universe… (insert evil cackle). My imagination frightens me, disciples me, and delights me.  

Questions plague an author until they process them out on paper. As Didion once said, “Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would have never have needed to write a novel.” At what age to do you remember writing? Do you write with the same ease that you had in elementary school? Is writing as medicinal for you as it is for me? 

- Monica Leair

Meet Oona and Kepick!

Picture two shapes. One is sharp, angular, and smooth. The other is curvy and flowing. Now imagine that you have to tell me the names of each: one is named Kepick, and the other is Oona. Which is which? Now think of how they would act as people. Now think of how they would sound as musical instruments. When you’ve thought about this, write a few lines of free verse describing the two, making up words whenever you want that complement the sounds of the two names.

This exercise was suggested to me by one of the books that I’m reading, Three Genres by Stephen Minot. His sample free-verse segment was interesting: “Surely you think of Oona looking feenly in the shane, but what happens when Kepick kacks his bip and zabops all the lovely leems?” (19).

Most of my poetry deals more with form and image than with sound, but since I read about “Kepick” and “Oona,” I’ve found myself looking for ways to capture the essence of one thing in the terms of another. The other day, I was reading through some poetry by Czeslaw Milosz and suddenly realized how much reading his poetry feels to me like listening to one of my classical piano CD’s. As an experiment, I played one of the CD’s when I was done reading and tried to capture the sound of the piano in words. Obviously it didn’t come out nearly as fine and graceful as either the piano or Milosz’s poetry, but I marvel at how well the two can go together.

I was wondering how you approach the use of the senses. Is there any way you have found that a given sense can be expressed boldly in writing? How do you give the reader the full sensation of what you’re trying to express? Furthermore, is there any picture or kind of music that really spurs on your own writing?

The Art of Physical Description

Physical description in writing is very difficult to do well. For this reason, many teachers tell us to just stay away from it. They’re sick of reading stories in which the first paragraph looks more like a driver’s license than an introduction. Almost worse than this are the contrivances like “she walked past a mirror and observed her long, brown hair, her sideswept bangs dipping past her icy blue eyes.” As a matter of fact, I just used the “character walks past a mirror” trick in my most recent draft because I knew that physical comparison between two characters was important, but I didn’t know how to do it.

As a writer, I have a clear image of my characters that I want to share with my audience. As a reader, nothing bothers me more than having a mental picture of a character only to hear the author describe him/her differently in an interview, or the directors cast someone totally different in the movie.

Even though physical description of characters is hard, I think it’s a very necessary skill to work on developing. I’m currently reading Alice Munro’s most recent collection of short stories, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Munro is good at a lot of different things, but what stands out most to me is her excellent physical descriptions. I was stunned by this excerpt from “Comfort,” in which a woman has just discovered her deceased husband:

“The last couple of months had altered him a great deal -- it was really only now that she saw how much. When his eyes had been open, or even when he had been sleeping, some effort of his had kept up the illusion that the damage was temporary -- that the face of a vigorous, always potentially aggressive sixty-two-year-old man was still there, under the folds of bluish skin, that stony vigilance of illness. It had never been bone structure that gave his face its fierce and lively character -- it was all in the deep-set bright eyes and the twitchy mouth and the facility of expression, the fast-changing display of creases that effected his repertoire of mockery, disbelief, ironic patience, suffering disgust.”

What I notice most about this passage is that Munro does not give the usual hair color/eye color/height description. She tells about his face in a way that describes his personality as well as what he looked like both living and dead. We won’t all see the same man in our minds when we read this, but we all see the same type of man; we know enough about him to see some of his personality traits and how they work their way out in his expressions. Munro managed to give a description that includes emotion, that isn’t boring, and that actually develops his character. If a movie was ever made based on “Comfort,” I don’t think any of us would feel cheated if the actor didn’t look exactly as we pictured just as long as he correctly captured the essence of personality described here.

For my part, I admire Munro for what she’s done here, but I have no idea how to pull off a physical description like this in my own writing. My plan for now is to practice and try to get better. Do you have any strategies for describing your characters without listing off features? Are there any authors you think do this particularly well? Do you agree with me that physical description is important in writing, or do you think it’s helpful but unnecessary?

Core of You and Me.

I’ve been dwelling a lot on the idea of the heart being the center of one’s self. There are variations of this, of course: one’s soul, his or her being, the mind. What is it about the heart that makes your chest ache with fear or pain? Something metaphorical about it being the organ that sustains all life I suppose.

Michelle Kwasny swims around this issue in her poem, “My Heart Like an Upside-Down Flame”:

            One walks, or wants to walk, with the glow

            cupped by two hands. As if light were water.

            As if lemon verbena,

            a blossom around the solid figure of the wick.

            But look what can happen.

            The heart has been looted of its small valuables:

            music, of course, and the dancing couple

            from childhood, secure in their velvet-lined box.

            What is it that so captivates us in the old cliché?

            I am thinking of the light cast from the pines

            or the first green shoots of onion.

            Bird in the palm if only we were patient enough.

            We who lay the fragile thing beating in the yard,

            then trust the stray cat won’t find it.

            Here is the pile of gray feathers and grit.

            Who was it who told us courage was a virtue?

            A candle burns at solstice on a simple yellow plate.

            After work hours, after the bills are paid.

            The safe heart then, burrowed into its winter cave?

            Fish bones and behind them, swimming.

            What is it that I expected the heart to do?

            Follow me? A handmaid, arranging the bouquets?

            Or this tree, then that one, a row of grayer birch

            as the flame steps out from the shadow of its house.

I would say my heart has “small valuables,” and I think all of us can admit that our hearts have been looted here and there by various people and circumstances.

In an Anthropology class I took my sophomore year, we learned in class about this tribe of people who considered the throat to be the center of all life (much like our culture would consider the heart to be). If a person lost their voice or ability to speak, the individual was considered dead. Something in each of us wants a central object to base all feeling and happenstance upon.

When I think about writing, I think of how we are each making collages of words that reflect the planes of our souls. We each have a hundred or a thousand facets to our beings, and its no wonder as we were created with glory and beauty shaping us on all sides. This is something I want to explore more deeply as I write poems this semester - what is the heart, and why is it our center?

Happy endings?

Must a story remain dark to remain anchored to reality? Are the people who enjoy happy endings unrealistic dreamers?

I’m a happy ending sort of person, and not afraid to admit it. Don’t get me wrong—some of my favorite novels and movies are the ones that send my sister running to a happier story and me running to the Kleenex box because of a bittersweet finish—but I couldn’t survive without a healthy dose of safety. I’m not asking for Disney’s Happily Ever After every time, and I don’t even always believe in it, but I need to know that things are going to be okay.

Enter my introduction to reading and writing contemporary short fiction. As I read, story after story left me feeling stressed, headachy, and sick to my stomach. If I read too many, I wound up depressed. As I wrote and watched fellow students work, I saw story after story come back marked as unbelievable. Too pat. Too sentimental. Looking back at my first attempts to tell a story, I understand. To make things easier on ourselves, we often make things too easy on our characters. I get it. But how far does “too happy” reach? Where did we get the idea that only the darkness of death, disaster, or depression is going to be convincing? There must be some other way, some compromise, so I started hunting.

I found Haruki Murakami’s collection After the Quake. It was the first thing I read for capstone, and for the first time, I came away from an immersion in short fiction feeling not sick and depressed, but pleasantly hopeful and connected to the characters.

The characters in these six stories are all realistic, everyday people in tough places, but something felt different as I read their tales. The final story’s final paragraph ended with a character recognizing what I think made the difference:

“I want to write stories that are different from the ones I've written so far, Junpei thought. I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so that they can hold the ones they love. But right now I have to stay here and keep watch over this woman and this girl. I will never let anyone—not anyone—try to put them into that crazy box, not even if the sky should fall or the earth crack open with a roar.” –Haruki Murakami, “Honey Pie”

Stories that are different. Stories about people who hope. Beauty. That’s what Murakami created in this story, though without reading the story you’re missing the context of just how monumental these decisions (to write happier stories and be the hero for the people he loves) are in the growth of the protagonist. It’s how Murakami ended each of these stories, and I wholeheartedly believed them. Reading his words gave me hope—not only for my own writing, and my fear of conforming to the dark picture of life that’s easily found in literary fiction, but also for the world around me.

What about you? Do you believe happy endings? Depressing situations? As a writer, do you feel any obligation to show the world in a hopeful light, or isn’t that how you see the world around you?

On the Intentionally Nonsensical

If you’ve ever read Aimee Bender’s work, then you know that it’s a little off-beat to say the least. However, even when writing something that is intentionally off-kilter, she still manages to keep the reader following what’s going on. I’ve been reading a bit of her collection of short stories The Girl in the Flammable Skirt because I am fascinated by stories that have elements of “the weird” in them. Sometimes it’s a fantastic drawn-out metaphor, like in “The Remember” where the main character’s lover de-evolves from a man into a salamander. Sometimes it’s just unnatural situations and events that break the laws of nature or physics.

What fascinates me is that even though I don’t always understand the rhyme or reason behind what is going on, I am still aware of what is happening in the story. I think this feat is not one easily accomplished, and I’m still trying to figure out just how to do it on my own. How do you write something that makes no sense and yet somehow still creates a cohesive story?

It is ability and technique of showing mania and making the reader feel insanity without completely losing them along the way that I am trying to feel out. I’m not sure yet how Bender does this exactly, nor do I think that there is only one way to do this. Basically all I can do at this point is keep reading, keep trying, and hopefully one day I will be able to turn out a beautifully insane, easily followed piece of fiction.

Do you have any ideas about how to accomplish a rule-breaking, off-beat, or flat out crazy feel without completely losing your reader in the process? Have you read anything else that follows along this same kind of vibe?

Art is Art, Pious or Impious

“Art is art; painting is painting; music is music; a story is a story. If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject."

This is a quote I’ve been wrestling with while reading Walking on Water by Madeleine L’Engle for my Capstone. I’ve been struggling lately with giving my art to God without directly mentioning Him by name. In a section where she talks about “Christian” art, L’Engle brings up that whatever brings glory to God, whether that was the author’s intent at first or not, is Christian, or that at least it is religious, since authors tend to serve and almost worship their works in order to properly compose them. As Leif Enger was also talking about this week in his lectures and breakout chapel, there are times when he is reading great novels where he said that he felt deeply worshipful nearly the entire time he read it, even if the author or the book had nothing explicitly to do with God or religion.

Enger also said that the only way to serve God is to serve the work, and you serve the work by being truthful about whatever it is that you are portraying. That doesn’t mean that you are truthful about only the depressing things in life; I talked with Enger, and he said that far too often, writers are now only being truthful about the things in life that hurt. And while this is a reality we need to write about, he also said to not forget the things that spark, glint, and exhilarate, because life is full of excitement and beauty too. There is ambition, but there is also whimsy. Good writing—and real life—have a balance of both.

So the question is, would I rather write something where everyone knows that it’s about God and run the risk of having the art come out mutated, or do I write something… well, impious? I think L’Engle and Enger (wow, don’t try to read that fast out loud) would say that if reality is impious, then writing about it truthfully is the only way to redeem it. We talk about bringing our art to God; what if, in simply telling a story, we let it run around its course until it ends up finding God? Is that how we should make good art? Has anyone else worked through this already? Maybe I’m just finally catching up.