Dear Everyone in Fiction Dailyland … This week is just looking terrible for deadlines and other obligations … not to mention the cats are out of food, Dewey needs to return to the vet and I haven’t gotten my taxes ready … in these uncertain financial times it’s a struggle to contemplate abstract topics and easy to get in the weeds about things … begging your indulgence as Fiction Daily pauses for a few days.
FICTION DAILY RESUMES IN APRIL!
Today, just a few words about an often neglected fiction form.
Science fiction.
Most of the time this form is relegated to the back of bookstores, the bargain bins, or dusty boxes where these humble paperbacks languish. Rejected by mainstream literature, marginalized as “fantasy” or “role playing,” these story lines are nevertheless quite rigorous when done right.
Why is this so? Maybe it’s because of our national character, which emphasizes hard work, practicality and productivity. What could be less Protestant WASP-y than fantastic characters with strange habits on far away places that don’t even have gravity?
Yet, who can deny the power of science fiction? Star Trek has been with us for more than 40 years now. Let’s not forget 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Andromeda Strain and other movies of those days, even A Clockwork Orange.
Can any writer, anywhere, top The Martian Chronicles? I place it among mankind’s greatest fiction, ever.
So for the next few posts, FD will take a look at this humble form, pluck out a few titles and open the floor for suggestions.
I finally made it to tap dancing class last night after a three-week absence. It’s hard to imagine a writer being so busy it makes the head spin … so when it happens I wonder just how busy those people must be who have real jobs … people who have constant demands, bosses asking for things, having to attend meetings all day, please the manager, arrange birthdays and sick days, deal with their co-workers who may be sitting beside them, meet deadlines for complicated reports, issue important memos and emails … make sure they checked the correct box on their income tax declaration form (I never knew, is it 1, 2 or 0?)
A writer must have uncluttered time … days and frankly weeks of it … to work. We must clear the appointments from our days … rid the hours of meetings or phone calls … lunches, office visits, even friends. That’s the only way we can work. Probably no one but another writer can understand this fact. And for those who don’t it can seem odd and even unnatural.
When my schedule is busy, that may mean one appointment. That’s busy. How else can a person put together 5,000-word articles unless they have lots of time. To. Sit. And. Figure. Things. Out.
With all this thinking, the writer would rather not talk for hours and days at a time, which is difficult when you’re part of human society. Unless you’d like to develop a reputation as a CRANK. Which I don’t. Though it may be true.
So on a day when I’ve had three meetings and other deadlines … emails … phone calls … and family situations … I couldn’t imagine making it to tap dancing. All that noise and effort. What I really wanted was to cover up in a blanket and go away.
Nevertheless, something inside drove me to do a single meaningful thing … and as absurd as it may sound … that was tap dancing.
So I turned up last night and there was Anna, my teacher, and classmate Catherine, and everyone was glad to see me … fearing I’d dropped out or something … I’ve been at it for 10 months now and I’m just getting somewhere, so I’m not going anywhere now!!
It was delightful and restoring to falap shuffle ball change my way through an hour and I was happy to see that I’d not really lost any of my ability. Of course it’s a pretty low baseline … but still I don’t want to regress!
Happy to report that today, no meetings … just my beloved words words words all day long … with a few dog walks and cat feedings in there. And a tap class next week.
FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING
Yesterday, I wrote a sentence that kept me awake last night. Now I’m a writer, but not so conceited as to imagine my words are worth losing a night’s sleep over. (Over which to lose a night’s sleep? Oh well … another post.)
What you ask did I write that rippled throughout my sleep? I wrote a simple closing thought in an email, one of those silly throwaway lines you create as you’re desperately trying to get out of that d* message and onto something else. I’m often writing people I’ve never met, and making fairly personal and complicated requests of them (How old was your daughter when you gave her part of your liver to save her life?) So in my emails I always aim for the stratified politeness level that’s generally required to write a proper email, since normal language comes off as rude or brusque.
Here’s the line:
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
As soon as I wrote it, I shivered. How the mighty fall! Penning (or tapping) a line like that one nearly knocked me out of my rattletrap desk chair.
Just look at it — it’s a fright!!
Look forward to … a phrase that relies on a visual metaphor. Implies you are literally peering into the future and searching for something, as if you could spy a response, like a ship, on the horizon.
Hearing … an auditory metaphor. Implies the writer is a sounding board, waiting for anything that comes along. This phrase by the way is especially useful for writers who must constantly submit their work for review. It offers no promise of commitment to rewrite or revise. As in, Here’s the new brochure on Irritable Bowel Syndrome. I will wait until hearing from you before sending to the designer, and really appreciate your suggestions.
(Writers secret: If you want to make a writer’s skin crawl, tell us you are sending “corrections” or “changes.” There is a special place in Dantes Inferno for people who subject writers to such things. You may, however, send your suggestions, recommendations or ideas. If you’re very very nice about it.)
And last in that phrase, we have … thoughts.
As something that is shared.
I know full well that thoughts are in the mind, known only by one person, the thinker, and then, only remotely. Thoughts are abstract, shapeless, vague things that can’t be pinned down.
Much less heard.
So we have a ridiculous proposition. A writer sitting at her desk, eyeballs at the window looking not to the side or back, but forward. With her ear cocked, on alert, to hear something that may or may not yet be there … something that may not make a sound … to hear … thoughts.
Obviously, working every weekend for the past five weeks has done something to my brain.
So this weekend I will not work, unless you consider a family trip work, which it may be in the end. But not work of the verbal variety. It seems to rattle the brain. See what I mean?
FICTION DAILY RETURNS TUESDAY.
TECH THURSDAY
Today, big — very big — news in the ‘Net — it’s a showdown of sorts between so many camps it’s hard to tease apart the battles. Yet it seems somehow the future of the entire human race rests on the outcomes.
First up: Twitter.
OK, I admit it. I investigated Twitter for a simple reason — I wanted to find out WHAT ALL THE FUSS WAS ABOUT.
Once signed on, I felt was much ado about nothing … then again, quite often technology appears insignificant, irrelevant and unneeded at first … then we get hooked … then WE CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT IT.
So I check my Twitter feed and even Tweet from time to time. I have a few friends I follow. I also read Stephen Fry’s frequent (and frequently funny) Tweets. He was among the first and healthiest Tweeters. Or is that Twits?
Next up: New Facebook
What is it with software developers and IT people? Sometimes they are just so … ON. Other times, it seems they’re hosting a wee fascist streak. Software and the ‘Net thrive when they’re open, lawless and flexible. Organic. People powered.
The new Facebook design is more intrusive and noisy. It pours everyone’s activity and status updates into a single feed, meaning that the interesting bits are buried under junk.
The status update — that one-line show of genius and minimalist poetry — is now reduced to so much static among too many boring items about what quiz someone took, which 80s movie they are, which rock song defines them, etc.
Just give me status updates, please! If I want to know which color defines their personality, I’ll visit their wall, thank you.
Last: Battle of the social networks.
If you haven’t noticed, here’s how the teams line up. MySpace seems to work for music and bands. Facebook has exploded among, well, us grown-ups. Twitter seems to be fashionable among movie stars and journalists.
I have integrated Twitter onto my Facebook page. You may have noticed Twitter is also on my Web site. Facebook is a major form of communication between my husband and myself during work hours. I have given more Facebook gifts than real gifts this year.
It’s interesting to wonder who will end up on top of the heap when the dust settles.
In the meantime, I’m just out here looking for a meaningful status update. One that will justify my very existence. Or at least all those hours on Facebook.
FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING
It’s Friday again and time to take a look at language. Or something.
These days, I am a “friend” on Facebook. Not only am I friendly with FB, but I am downright hooked.
Now many people will say, Just what the world needs. Another way to goof off. And I agree.
Sure there are many ways to justify it. Such as
– I work alone and it’s only fair that I have a sense of camaraderie with others during the work day
– FB allows me to express my creativity
– We all need breaks from work
– I don’t really spend that much time on FB
– It’s great keeping up with my friends
This is rot.
I rarely need a break, since I’m quite good at taking time off during the day. Usually to snack.
As for keeping up with friends, well, I’m actually a hermit.
No, Facebook is just like any other diversion. Unnecessary distraction from something difficult. Mea culpa.
(Marion, you ask, why are you going on about Facebook so today … wouldn’t it have been a more fitting topic for yesterday’s Tech Thursday? Which, by the way, you failed to post ….)
Back to Facebook and language, then.
I am finding myself somehow tossing aside some language guidelines that I’ve always embraced, clung to, even relied on for sanity. Such as capital letters.
Lately, I’m finding myself writing email messages without them … just saying what i have to say and not worrying about dressing up my words in their formal attire. not worried about being judged. free
This trend has sometimes given me shivers, as I look at my words. I am reminded of an elementary school note, written hurriedly and passed in secret.
YEAH! THAT’S IT!
There’s something subversive about going without capital letters. A feeling that I’m part of an underground movement. We have our language and rules, signs and codes.
I run into an internal conflict, however, when I’m writing someone a message, or making a post on Facebook, using only lower-case letters and the time comes to end the sentence. i want to close it with an exclamation point!
But as we all know, to get that exclamation point, we MUST use the shift key.
Hypocrisy? Perhaps.
or maybe i’m enjoying playing a game with rules i have a part in creating (!)
!!!!!!
: )
FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING
There’s no doubt about it … if we followed rules issued by the U.S. Postal Service 100 years ago today, many of us would never open another letter. Maybe not even a bill …
The U.S. Postal Service declared that
Every obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character … is hereby declared to be nonmailable matter.
These days, that covers just about anything worth sending — or receiving. My Rolling Stone magazines violate just about every provision above, and I’m a pretty conservative gal. Who knows what other folks are reading.
Of course these mail standards at some time would have also included Madame Bovary, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lolita and Grapes of Wrath.
Which brings me to the observation that in some ways prompted today’s entry — at the grocery store a couple of days ago, I ran into my former mail carrier, whose name is Bob. He has a remarkable memory … and is a genuinely nice guy.
He works in the university community here and has walked the same route for decades (he was also my postal carrier in the early 1990s).
As we were talking, he mentioned that though he’s in the same area, his routes and those of others he works with are experiencing considerable shifting and reworking because the mail volume is off so sharply. Advertisers aren’t sending us so much junk mail (a good thing for us) … but for the Postal Service, that junk mail decrease translates into lost business.
Folks just don’t send letters anymore, and we even pay our bills online.
It reminded me of when I was a little girl, growing up deep in the countryside of Edgecombe County … with corn fields in front of me … tobacco fields behind me … and mom’s daylilies farm everywhere else.
Each week in the summer, my days were unstructured and dreamy as I read novel after novel, discovered Edgar Poe and Jane Eyre; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; biographies and dinosaurs.
In those days we had only one or two TV channels and magazines and other junk culture were not pervasive, at least not in Edgecombe County.
The highlight of those summer days … the clearest joyful moment in those sun-washed hours … came when I made the trip across the street to the mailbox. For inside would possibly be a letter from a pen-pal; a rare ordered item; or, best of all, My Weekly Reader.
That four-page newsprint reader brought me such happiness and opened so many doors of my imagination. It had simple stories about far-off places, games and puzzles and suggestions for activities. I was always a little sad when I had finished reading every word … and the hopeful waiting began for the next issue.
And it came in a mailbox.
BE SURE TO LISTEN today at noon to the Down East Journal on Public Radio East for a Figuratively Speaking commentary!
Thanks today to Jeffrey Kacirk for his calendar, Forgotten English, which gives FD such food for thought each day.
It’s back to work today … Monday arrives with a vengeance … and with it, a familiar lament that often, for weeks (years) at a time, work obligations keep me from the novel. So much energy goes in to getting back in the soup of writing that once I’m out of it, I just stay out. There are writers who say they plug away at their work an hour each day … I find that in an hour, I’m able to remember my characters and roughly what they were doing when we last spoke … then it’s time to get back to the professional work.
There’s also the energy that goes into writing. It’s widely known that some people have nearly boundless energy … these folks took 18 and 21 hours in undergraduate school, while I kept with 12 and 15. That relates to my approach to any topic … I will dig in and root my way back to the surface, from the inside out, until I know everything about the topic. My grades were generally high, which reflects my thinking about knowledge at the time: Quality over quantity.
These days, I’ve learned to skim through some things. I’ve learned to clean the house quickly. I’ve learned to tear through some books at a clip, as well. It’s because these days, I have more of a base of knowledge to start from.
At the same time, other books take weeks to read. Anything by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, for instance will take a long time. His ideas are complex, and generally require time away from the book to absorb them and work them into my views and habits.
At the same time, many books I can pick up and get the gist of. Some books aren’t worth picking up (sorry, dear authors, but you know it’s true).
So today as the week opens, I’m likely to be pacing myself through many writing tasks, some of them with depth and passion, other, leaner assignments, with a view to getting them completed. In neither case do I spare quality. It’s an approach, a manner of competence, I certainly didn’t have 30 years ago.
LANDSCAPE OF THE HOME
It’s not unusual for me to open the week with a description of some kind of clearing out and cleaning up. Getting rid of clutter is one of the hardest things for me to do — clearing the home requires making decisions, many of them very emotional.
But my sister gave me this sweater … I say to myself … my Mom gave me this ceramic bunny … this wooden panel has been in my family for three generations … you get the picture.
We get busy … things enter our homes … dust settles on them … we’re too busy to take things down, clean them off and decide if they should stay.
Yet when I take time to remove everything from a shelf … a drawer … a closet … it allows me not only to clean away the dust, but also to clear away old emotions, and even old parts of myself. It allows me to return to who and what I am today — today’s projects, and not yesterday’s burdens.
Two expressions guide me. First: The landscape of the home is the landscape of the mind. In so many ways, this one is true. When I’m very busy, working on many projects, no time for peaceful thought, my home tends to reflect this state. Sometimes when I’m really busy, the house becomes nearly unrecognizable — dishes on the counters, clothes on the floor, disarray everywhere.
Yet these are times when I’m often getting a lot done. So there’s no need to focus on cleaning the house. There’s a flurry of ideas, so there’s a flurry of, well, stuff.
Nevertheless, this junk in the long term is very burdensome. Whether we’re aware of it or not, all the dust, all those objects that we really don’t want or need, weigh on our thoughts and minds, tangle us in them, literally and figuratively weigh us down.
The second expression that guides me goes: Only keep items you believe to be beautiful or know to be useful. That expression recognizes that we can appreciate and enjoy things because of how they appear — we don’t have to always use them.
I have a shelf with items most people might consider ordinary. I have two plastic tops, a couple of rocks, feathers and a plastic salamander. As I dusted this bookshelf yesterday, I looked at each item and felt something. The plastic salamander was a gift from the children next door when they were 6 or 7 years old. The pyrite belonged to my Mother when she was a little girl, and it reminds me of Medoc, the state park I used to visit as a little girl.
On the other hand, there was a bit of shell I once thought beautiful, but think it should be sent into the world. Likewise, favorite books that deserve to be read by other people, instead of sitting on my shelf. Books I accept I will not ever read. (Sometimes these books decisions are the hardest, as they bring me face to face with my own mortality.)
What is useful, what is beautiful? When we can make these decisions, we can better understand ourselves and what we value.
At the same time, these are decisions that we sometimes would rather put off, as we may not know the answers. And so, our homes become cluttered while we figure them out.
Kafka anyone?
Every once a century or so, a writer comes along who clearly captures a great truth about what it is to be human. Victor Hugo gave us Quasimodo … a twisted, ugly man on the outside, whose heart held unmatched love, devotion and beauty. Quasimodo gives us a sublime being whose story is our story. Physical appearance trumps morals in human society, yet in the end, heart, compassion and love keep us alive.
So Kafka.
Kafka gives us worlds of absurdity and threat. Where innocent people find themselves charged, convicted and condemned … through no crime of their own. In Metamorphosis, a man wakes up a giant beetle. Like the rest of us who find ourselves under siege from within or without, he makes do. He finds himself a beetle and he does the best he can. He adjusts. He mourns the loss of his ability to work, to communicate, to go about his day. But he persists.
So the first time I ever heard about this word by Kafka, I must have been a teenager, or younger, a child. I heard someone talk about the story plot, and it terrified me. How could someone survive being turned into a roach? No escape, no chance at life again, no walking, no being held by your mother?
For a child, it was unimaginable horror. It was unsurvivable.
Yet today as an adult, I understand what that beetle assault really means. It is the constant hostility of the world, and people driven by greed, who will attack and destroy. It is those people driven to have more, to take at the expense of others, who turn the rest of us into beetles and leave us bedridden.
Or, we face the person in power … such as the “officer” in In the Penal Colony. This character, one of literature’s most unsettling, uses a giant metal point to write lessons in prisoners’ backs, until they expire.
Likewise, for transgressions and sometimes without them, we find ourselves severely punished and facing sentences unbearably harsh, inhumane even for a criminal. Even a criminal deserves humane treatment. Otherwise, what are we?
We like truth, or verisimilitude, in writing. We expect a logical progression of events, and characters who act consistently.
Yet at the same time, brave writers can break from so-called reality and give us grotesque situations that better capture the human experience than a so-called real portrayal.
