Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. — James Baldwin

Well, I have no idea why The Guardian should file this series of interviews with authors of novels under "screen-writers." But I do know why it's a good thing to link these videos for other writers who might be reading here: that we may all be lead into deeper reflections on writing's process and its motivations.

While cueing in to what these folk have to say, with my imaginary novel in mind, I noticed that my main character has very large hands, his love interest (did he only know) dances, compulsively but tentatively, at the edge her own private cliff, and the POV character is not a wolf at all. Or, he actually is a wolf pup right from the get-go, but one who has yet to grow into his own pelt.

A Man is Only as Good . . .

 . . . by Pat Boran (link)

I posted this poem and then pulled it for fear of copyright violation. But I both love it and want to alter it. Because it says something I can feel coming from my own mouth, and that, just that, feels like what poetry is for, to find words for other mouths to taste; poetry is best appreciated when voiced because it's meant to be felt by the lips and tongue and throat.

It's only the first three lines I need to change to make it just right for me to say:

A man is only as good
as what he says when he has to
get up out of bed

(etc.)

She said, "Like, I have exactly what to say? That the world wasted me? Who cares? No one I know. Absolutely no one."

(file under character notes, under Why Write, under the bridge, under culture clashing, or under Chick Lit vs. The NYT etc. book reviewers.)

::

I came >this< close to re-establishing email contact with the world just to comment on last Friday's Jon Stewart show. Because why? Because Beck and Palin have bought into the Taliban's honor killing state of mind, and that kind of historical irony puts me in stitches; it screams for humor that cuts at the seams and leaves both politics and religion as naked as the day they were born.

During your latest transposition from there to here and then to now, you only think you kept your eyes open. While you weren't looking, the sun dropped further, countless leaves moved, one bird's note ended and another began — right outside your window. But you in your gazing saw only the constancy of blue.

we are we before i am i.

(which may not be much more than a very simple statement about how we come to understand the use of pronouns. Even so, that's pretty interesting.)

So, I see some friends mixing it up online and I see the crux of the problem being a lack of agreement as to the acceptable level of emotional content in their conversations.

I think they don't understand why they converse. I think few of us understand that conversation can be used as an assist, to clarify one's own thoughts, and such assistance is the summit worth trying for. I think too many of us confuse that with a compulsion to change others' thinking. And that would be good for what? As opposed to an assist, such mental invasion would count as a crutch, methinks.

There's a reason we have different words for Right, Real and True.

What a wonderfully fun trip this could be. Almost as much fun as starting in the south of Europe in early spring and eating my way north as the season progresses. I picture myself bloated and snoring on the floor under dining tables in Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Switzerland, indulged and forgiven, after having tipped very generously.

The hell with elastic waist bands; one need only pack a couple of muumuus.

http://www.fictionaut.com/stories/sara-lippmann/the-dying-tradition

What a hell of a piece of writing this is.

My family, as identity-challenged as it was, would have gathered most appropriately not in a hospital but in a racially mixed gay bar. (In California, of course. Where else?)

There's something going on in my reading of Jewish writers, like Chabon and Ozick for instance. Elements of their religious tradition seem, to me, to sit on the surface. This is surprising. By my reading the purposes of such elements are not religious, not metaphysical, not worshipful. Maybe the intentions or effects fit in the world in some kind of psycho-socio-linguistic way? I dunno.

Gotta figure this out. Gotta wonder about both the arbitrariness and longevity of traditions. Also to wonder about is what to do with provincialism, other than to beat it over the head with a heavy stick.

“the failure of good intentions should not be met with inaction, but with further good intentions, with better intention.”

An author may have spent, let's say, an hour or even a full day crafting an especially important paragraph, a week or more constructing a scene, years writing a novel. To read such a work too quickly would be to wolf down a $50 meal like it was a Twinkie.

I've come to love slow reading, and I think I need to let myself be a slow writer.

Note to self: It's not the writer but the reader who drives through a novel seeing only as far as the headlights reach. The writer's job is to forge a trail on foot with a penlight.

Here's a challenge: write articles and stories and blog posts for the rest of your life without ever once using the phrase "boils down to."

Antagonist: that's fancy literary speak for The Wall.

The Wall: that which tests and limits Self.

Self: file under "yet to be defined."

As much as I regard highly "the fictional mind," I will never go so far as to give some of the political wackos let loose on the airwaves and the internet the intellectual slack they seem to feel they're entitled to.

Nor will I give slack to men who need a woman to pat them on the head and say, "Good boy!" (Man oh man. David Vitter and Ben Quayle: if you can't tell whether you're doing the right thing or just trying to get laid, you need to recuse yourselves from public service.)

I can't figure out politics. With no effort at all, I can think of a half dozen people personally known to me who are capable of working through community problems in a reasonable way. How come the likes of them are not out there mixing it up? How come we get so damn much low hanging fruit being elected? Or even being taken seriously? Could it be simply because it makes for good copy? That it gives us an excuse for outraged bar room conversations and blog posts, and that's a good thing?

Where[as] humans send their young men to war, ants send their old ladies. — E. O. Wilson

"People write letters
to me from heaven, but I'm not listening.
The hermit said: "Because the world is mad,
the only way through the world is to learn
the arts and double the madness. Are you listening?"

- Robert Bly
Listening

Some things I need to copy here since they won't all fit on my forehead for reading later in the mirror. It's so easy to sleep too long and forget where I left off.

How ironic it is that we learn, and even come to relish, patience at an age when we have so much less time for it.

disconcerting, confrontational and beautiful

in the space between
recognition and ambiguity,
figuration and abstraction

awkwardly placed in discreet locations

(I've lost the link this quote came from; I think it has to do with the 2009 Turner Prize. But really I think the quote has to do with a lot more than one event, with much more than one annual selection from all the world's art.)

That deep place where weeping comes from, oh I've been there and I know beyond doubt that at its core, it's all possible joy and all possible grief, inseparable, and all, at last, the profound realization that everything might have been otherwise, but it wasn't, and so this one unique world that spawned me and everything I know came into being.

Bee Wilder

This I understand. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Questions For Dan Ariely

Might it be the case that the more you're paid, the more you feel owned? Might it be the case that earning, via transactions with others, a subsistence level income is a good enough balance? What we subsist on is digested and disappears, not to be encountered next time the sun rises; it's nothing more than the living we need to eat and keep warm or cool and to rest easy.

Excess, however, the baubles and trappings, are there day after day to remind us of our human indebtedness. When too much is too much, might we not feel we have to keep earning it? And why is it that the things I've made feel like things I'm expected to give away?

:: 

Also, see Pictory. The pics are oversized compared to the text (making for an "in your face" experience), but otherwise the design and content are worth it. Surely at least one series will spark ruminations on a scene your characters need to live through.

When the video starts automatically and the ad is almost as long as the interview, it's time to re-assess how the internet is supposed to work. (link - via Author Scoop)

Nonetheless, Byatt's contention that writing is not for blabbing on about one's personal whatevers is a message to be heard in the Quaker tradition. Sit quietly until and unless words move you to speak. Listen when words are spoken.

Whichever your role, as speaker or listener, thinking is right up there, front and center. Else why burden either your ears or your mouth with any words at all?

Writing Advice

If on occasion a sentence erupts as if from a tracheal device, straight from the gut and short of your own mouth, take a deep breath and hope for more such sentences.

Or if you just kind of know what I'm talking about, keep at it, keep banging the keyboard, scritching the pen, pontificating on the soap box. Ink of some kind is in your blood, and you might as well donate before your arteries burst.

Writing Critique

You know that I know what kind of ass needs kicking, what kind of writing it takes to do that, and you know that I'm holding your back boot, always.

Kick it, man. I'll let you know when your foot is bare. We all need someone to let us know when our foot is bare, until that moment when we've learned to feel the ticklish breeze.

And oh man, when we feel the breeze for ourselves? Wow. We're off like rockets, into the stratosphere, fully clad in self-aware craftiness, right down to our toes.

Atwood says, "I could not eliminate the hunger for God without eliminating language." And of Yann Martel's The Life Of Pi, she says she likes the story with the tiger better than the story without the tiger.

Because the stories we form are reflections of self and world, hall-of-mirrors wise, and are commentaries to be shared amongst us, and thereby amplified, on the matter of who we feel ourselves to be. In relation. Always in relation. To each other and to all else.

Because when I say that being naked and covered in butterflies is a moving experience, you and I know that only a sociopath would not be able to share such delight in the artistry of the world.

At one time I was impatient somehow with Atwood's writing. Poor me then; rich me now.

(A coven of scifi lady writers: In addition to Atwood, see also Le Guin and Tepper, and Butler in her genetic engineering phase.)