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Take Time to Tap!

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

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.

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Seen and Heard

Friday, March 20th, 2009

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.

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Unfashionable Times

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009

A VAGUE REFLECTION ON THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN

Today, FD turns again to the economy. As usual, expect indispensable insight and potentially paradigm shifting information.

First of all, let’s look at our own cost-cutting measures here at Fiction Daily. Because of our own budget shortfalls, we have decided to temporarily reduce entries. This reduction results from the needed reduction in our workforce of 13.4 percent, for a cost savings of at least several pennies.

That benchmarking reduction means I will have to lose about 17 pounds … so, well, we’re doing all we can to reduce expenses, and will have to reduce our workforce by some degree, in any event, because I really should lose about 5 or 10 pounds … but don’t expect me … er, my staff … to post on Mondays for a while until we get out of the woods … er weeds … er dark tunnel … of these challenging economic times.

Next, a word about fashion. Yes, fashion.

Depression-recession fashion has come back with a bang. Or is that a whimper? Looking through my advertising circulars over the weekend, I noticed two things: one, there were fewer of them falling out of my Sunday paper and two, the fashions inside them were more horrible than ever.

Last week, in a moment of weakness and mental abjection, I purchased several so-called “women’s magazines” and the fashions I saw scared me to death. These people look like ghouls! Pale white faces, dark pouts and eyes, feathers, rags and downright unbalanced appearances were a fright.

The trend has spread to mainstream retail, mixed with a strange longing for polyester and unnatural colors, with the exploding patterns, mixed-up skirt lengths and fake-gold chain belts and necklaces from circa early 1970s. (KC and the Sunshine Band, anyone?)

Those were the days of the other “recession,” when we turned off lights and conserved energy as a nation, because of the oil embargo, inflation and other poorly understood economic shudders.

Now we see those days’ fashions showing up again, as if we’re looking for comfort in them … we made it through those days so if we dress in a similar way maybe we’ll make it to shore again this time.

Of course, never, ever look to a writer to understand fashion. Writers dress in pre-Victorian ragware as a rule, and would hardly leave our pajamas at all except society requires it.

So remember, in these uncertain economic times, if you notice fewer posts, remember the FD staff has to trim its budget, too, and we can all make it through these challenges by simply putting off our obligations as much as possible.

Posted in Events, Life in general, Press, Writers | 2 Comments »

Capital Offense

Friday, March 13th, 2009

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 (!)

!!!!!!

: )

Posted in Figuratively Speaking, On writing, Writers | 1 Comment »

Baseball Zen

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

This weekend marks the true start of what’s called March Madness but what is, in fact, a marathon race of college basketball games, one on top of the other for the next few weeks … great games … great coaches … courage, loss and hope. Count me in the startling line up.

My friend Charlie, however, has nothing to do with basketball (I know, he’s from New York). He is generous, as those New Yorkers often are, and left tickets for an East Carolina University baseball game on my porch over the weekend.

Now yesterday was a crush of busy … deadlines and calls, emails and a doctor’s appointment squeezed in there too. The game was at 5 p.m. and I couldn’t have been more in the weeds.

Yet Greg and I agreed that sometimes you just have to make a decision to do something spontaneous and irrational. We packed up and walked out.

From the minute we arrived, we were surrounded by peaceful karma. The parking lot guy ushered us to a beautiful space that looked like it was usually reserved for faculty. The afternoon sun was perfect, the temperature moderate. As the sun set, the temperature went down, too, giving us a wonderful “spring ball” feeling.

Sitting there watching the game, everything slowed for me. Now if you know baseball, you know it’s a patience game … waiting, watching and taking chances on a dime.

I felt the crazy Zen of baseball settle over me and all those worries gradually diminished.

The game was tied until the bottom of the eighth, when two super runs came in and pushed the Pirates over the top. We walked out of the stadium happy, talking and feeling human again.

When I returned to work at 7:30 p.m., I was clear minded. Though I was tired. I managed to finish a feature article I’d been struggling with for several days. More easily than I’d have thought possible.

It showed me, once again, that the human mind and spirit is complex, and so is the human experience. When you have a chance to bathe in that complexity, do it.

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‘The Pale King’

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

A moment to pay tribute to the late writer David Foster Wallace … a deeply perceptive writer … author of Infinite Jest, the 1000+ page opus from the 1990s. He died last September, at his own hand.

He was working on another large novel, The Pale King, which was about one third finished. His long-time publisher will issue this unfinished novel sometime in 2010, the New York Times reports. The novel explores the business of a group of IRS agents somewhere in the Midwest. It will be published by Little, Brown and Company.

Meanwhile, the New Yorker has published an exhaustive portrait of Mr. Wallace in its March 9 issue. (I stopped reading the New Yorker after it published a slanderous article about His Holiness the Dalai Lama by someone interested in taking him down for the pettiest of reasons. The cover cartoon of Mr. Obama sealed the deal for me: No more New Yorker.)

What interests us about David Wallace is his incredible energy, turned inward — into the minutia of our lives and decisions. He has boundless interest in the hidden recesses of the human mind, tosses off the weight of convention and connotation, strips language and humankind to a cleaner, clearer layer.

His stories, essays and novels, therefore, are not for the faint of heart.

I struggled with Infinite Jest because it contains so many identifiable cultural references. My preference is to use vague settings without commercial intrusion. Yet as I understand it, Mr. Wallace wanted to document, in his novel, the effects of these commercial infusions into our lives.

My experience with his writing began in the 1990s with his benchmarking essay, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (”Shipping Out” in 1996 Harper’s Magazine). It deconstructed a cruise “vacation” and revealed it for the infantile experience it was.

Another memorable essay was “Consider the Lobster.”

Mr. Wallace manages to humanize this sea insect … and for me, the connection has always been there … he dissects our fascination with this freshest food, and even, in the pages of Gourmet magazine, asks if it is morally justifiable simply to satisfy our morose culinary whim? (He gives props to PETA, too, pretty darn remarkable in such an august, and decidedly not animal-rights-friendly, publication.)

So I will be anticipating the release of The Pale King, along with the rest of us devoted Wallace fans.

Photo of David Foster Wallace by Marion Ettlinger

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Out of my Depth

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

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.

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FD returns Friday

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

It’s happened again … here it is Tech Thursday and I was all ready to write about the “singularity.”

Then I get busy … dogs, cats deadlines and furballs … threats from all sides … several loads of clothes just sitting there in the middle of the floor … almost out of coffee … I repeat ALMOST OUT OF COFFEE … so focusing in abstract on a concept such as singularity, involving nothing less than the fate of the human race … is entirely beyond my abilities today.

Nevertheless, Fiction Daily will return tomorrow with an all-new superstition-free (or is that full?) Figuratively Speaking, we promise!

And next week, that singularity, at last.

TOMORROW: Where does this Friday-the-Thirteenth business come from, anyway? Figuratively Speaking wants to know.

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Kafka, Realist

Monday, February 9th, 2009

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.

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Watching for ‘Watchmen’

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

Yesterday I saw a New York Times article about the new film of Watchmen.

So a few words about Alan Moore and artists David Lloyd and David Gibbons are certainly in order today.

If you’ve not read Alan Moore, you’re in for a treat. Mr. Moore is a singular writer, whose commitment to his values are such that he refuses to take Hollywood money for the filmed versions of his works. He creates what are called graphic novels … we called them comic books, but Mr. Moore’s works helped define the genre.

What are those works?

Alan Moore, 2006, in England, where he lives

The best known are certainly V for Vendetta and Watchmen. I first became introduced to Mr. Moore’s works when I saw the film version of V. The film version was a great introduction … though purists would object. Indeed, Mr. Moore himself was so irritated he refused to have his name associated with it.

Yet it’s important to remember that many of us need simple elements to introduce us to greater ideas. For me, the gentle love story between V and Evey drew me into the larger idea of the tortured antihero protagonist, V. Otherwise, he may have seemed an antisocial creep.

His caring for Evey allows us to identify with him and trust him, even as he reveals his darker side and the depth of his dedication to free principles and ideals.

The larger context for their relationship is the bleak totalitarian society around them. These kinds of ideas can be too much to stomach without a simple, emotional, thread. (Same with Julia and Winston in Orwell’s 1984.)

V offers so much. Its main idea is that we allow ourselves to become trapped and imprisoned by authorities. We never question their hold on us; we never assert our full selves. These ideas apply not only to futuristic fiction worlds; they apply here and now.

Here’s a passage from the diary of an imprisoned woman named Valerie, written on a toilet paper roll

The other gay women here, Rita, died two weeks ago. I imagine I’ll die quite soon. It’s strange that my life should end in such a terrible place, but for three years I had roses and I apologized to nobody.

I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one.

An inch. It’s small and it’s fragile and it’s the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

(from V for Vendetta by Alan Moore with art by David Lloyd)

So now there’s a film of Watchmen, and many of us are skeptical. Still, though I haven’t been to a movie theater in nearly five years, I may consider a big screen for this one. To see Dr. Manhattan full sized would be a treat.

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