Monthly Archives: April 2010

Now & Then, Part 1

A few weeks ago, I was poking around on Google Street View, checking out the (many) places I used to live. I started thinking about posting about them, but I wasn’t sure about all the places (some look very different) and some haven’t been mapped yet, so I thought I’d wait. Then Sallie started posting about the places she used to live! Weird! Coincidence? Or twinny mind-meld? So then I decided I had to do it. Given the aforementioned difficulties, I’ve decided to do it as a series.

So, this is Lillooet, where I lived for grade 1 and part of grade 2. Here’s me, learning to ride my purple banana seat bike, with the house in the background.

Then, Part 1

And, via the magic of Google, this is now. It’s pretty different: there’s some kind of funky addition on the right side, a chain link fence instead of the wooden one we had, a driveway, and that tree is not the same one (ours was a Macintosh apple tree), but this was the easiest house to recognize because it has the Hydro right-of-way beside it and the Fraser River behind it.

Now, Part 1

All In

[A]lmost seven years after I landed in Shanghai, my novel has just been published. I know I’m supposed to celebrate, but the truth is that in letting go of it, I feel lost, even more lost than I felt in those first days in Shanghai. My primary consolation is that I’ve started writing a new novel. I’m still learning my way around, still learning the people who live there, but I’m all in. That, I’ve come to see, is the only way to write. Each story is where we live, unconditionally, as if for good—even knowing that, eventually, we’ll pack up and start again.

—Deanna Fei

The empathy you are going to need

Writers are often motivated by something/someone that angers, irritates, or appalls them. Some people write to get even with a person who has hurt them, or to expose some sort of destructive force in their community. … If your story is going to be any good, you are going to have to get past this.

…

One thing I like to do is to write journal entries in the voices of other people, or even characters in my books. I sometimes do it for people who have hurt me deeply, so I can kind of get a grip on their behavior. The challenge is that you have to discover something new about the person or character. If your exercise reveals only what you came to the page with in the first place, then you have not tapped into the empathy you are going to need to write the story you want to write. The thing is that you are really going to have to want to understand that person, which means you may have to let go of that anger.

—Tayari Jones

You don’t really sound smart

The message: You have to write the same way as others in your field. You must use multisyllabic words, complex phrasing, and sentences that go on for days, because that’s how you show you’re smart. If you’re too clear, if your sentences are too simple, your peers won’t take you seriously.

Many people—publishers of scholarly work, editors at higher-education publications, agents looking for academic authors capable of writing trade books—who think about the general quality of scholarly prose would admit that we’re in a sorry state, and most would say there isn’t much to do about it.

…

By writing prose that is nearly unintelligible not just to the general public, but also to graduate students and fellow academics in your discipline, you are not doing the work of advancing knowledge. And, honestly, you don’t really sound smart. I understand that there are ideas that are so difficult that their expression must be complex and dense. But I can tell you, after years of rejecting manuscripts submitted to university presses, most people’s ideas aren’t that brilliant.

—Rachel Toor

The best editors edit because they want to

To encourage writers to write about big issues is all well and good, but writers in an open society are going to do that regardless. The best writers write because they have to, but the best editors edit because they want to. It’s the editors, not the writers, who need encouraging.

—Jay Baron Nicorvo

True enough. Still… if anyone wants to leave their estate to Toasted Cheese (a la Poetry), please do get in touch.

(P.S. Why is the Poetry Foundation still soliciting donations? They have two. hundred. million. dollars. If you are able to donate to an arts organization, please choose one that’s less well off!)

Reverse the oldest cliché

[H]idden in an article on how “Salt” is oh-so-empowering for female action heroes is this tidbit. The filmmakers believe that it was perfectly OK for the spouse to be rescued from mortal danger if said love interest was a girl, but not if the romantic partner was a man. Apparently, it’s great if the action hero is a girl, as long as she doesn’t have the opportunity to one-up any male counterparts or reverse the oldest cliché in the action-film handbook. Saying that girls can be portrayed as helpless damsels in distress but boys can’t or shouldn’t be is the very opposite of the sort of “progress” that Noyce and Jolie claim to be making.

—Scott Mendelson

This is so, so tiresome. The most insidious part, I think, is that it’s not just supposedly “weak” female characters that need rescuing. Rather, it seems like a rule in film & television that any female character who is depicted as strong or tough (police, military, action hero! etc.) must at some point be saved! by a man! I guess this serves to placate the male viewing audience, allowing them to think: “yeah, she’s tough—for a chick—but I could take her on (or save her!)” Barf.

See also: Woman must die! to give Man motivation to save the world. Hey! Here’s an idea! Why not kill off the man for a change? That would be a twist no one would be expecting. It’d be like that old surgeon joke. Except in this version, the audience would be looking at Woman kneeling sadly over Man’s body and be all like, “So when’s he going to wake up from his dream?”

Slow

I have a blog, but I don’t do it properly. Months go by, years even, without me writing. Then suddenly I write a lot. Other people … other people blog properly.

…

The reason I don’t blog every day is because I am slow. … [U]ntil I’ve figured things out, I’m lost. Life for me is leaves blowing backwards. If I try to blog about it, I’m just snatching from the air. I have to wait until I’m clear of the leaves. Then I can look back and see what pattern they’ve been making, and their colours, and the fineness of their outlines.

Other people are not lost at all. The precision of people who can blog all the time. It startles me, that clarity of leaves.

—Jaclyn Moriarty

So Different

When I was growing up, one of my favourite writers was Madeleine L’Engle. And one of the reasons I loved her books was that they were so different.  It seemed as if every bright idea she had, whether it was a contemporary teen novel or a time-travel sci-fi or a historical fiction or a spiritual memoir or whatever, she just wrote it.

—Trudy Morgan-Cole