Those who like to believe they have picked themselves up by the bootstraps sometimes forget that they wouldn’t even have boots were it not for the women who came before. Listening to [Sarah] Palin, it’s almost impossible to believe that, as recently as 50 years ago, a woman at Harvard Law School could be asked by Dean Erwin Griswold to justify taking a spot that belonged to a man. In [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg’s lifetime, a woman could be denied a clerkship with Felix Frankfurter just because she was a woman. Only a few decades ago, Ginsburg had to hide her second pregnancy for fear of losing tenure. I don’t have an easy answer to the question of whether real feminists are about prominent lipsticky displays of “girl-power,” but I do know that Ginsburg’s lifetime dedication to achieving quiet, dignified equality made such displays possible.
Monthly Archives: August 2010
Raw Clay
Reading their life story in scattered posts feels exactly like reading Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. The landmark 1957 novel about modern love was told in four books written from different characters’ points of view against the backdrop of inter-war Egypt. Incidents we glimpse in the first novel, Justine, aren’t fully realized until we see the observations of characters in the subsequent stories. Readers are asked to construct the whole picture by collecting puzzle pieces sprinkled throughout four narratives.
Of course Susan and her circle are more of a satire, as their banal posts give us a hilarious glimpse of early 21st century life. But the online confessions offer just the sort of raw clay that fiction writers love to lay hands on. Let me quote from her bio: “I’m madly in love! I’m free!” Many friends click the thumbs-up “Like” button.
Ok, I hadn’t thought about that, but it reminds me that I really should read the whole quartet (re-read Justine and read the others) now that I’ve found all four of them. I can call it research.
A room of one’s own
[My] garret was a bit bleak, actually being the back of my very strange bedroom closet/storage area … but it was a garret, and it had a window, and an outlet, and it was nothing to scoff at, being a room of one’s own. Or at least a corner of an expansive closet of one’s own, which was plenty.
But it turns out that after a day at home alone … spending an evening alone in the back of a closet is bad for the soul. Or so I imagine, having not bothered to try. For the last year, my office has been a chair in the corner of my living room, by the window with my laptop, with my husband busy at his actual desk on the other side of the room. I miss him when he’s at work, and when he’s home I like to be close to him, even if neither of us are talking and both of us are working on various projects.
The ability to keep going
What many talented people lack is the ability to keep going when external rewards are minimal or non-existent.
…
Every writer gets rejected, sometimes over and over. But the ones who only have potential stop submitting (or just stop writing) somewhere along the way. They get discouraged and feel beat down.
And then, before you know it, they’ve become someone who used to be a writer. Or someone who wanted to be a writer.
Death
A good formula, well executed, can be a beautiful (and profitable) thing.
But for literary fiction, the fiction of discovery, formulas are death.
Impossible to Imagine
And it’s impossible to imagine ever returning to a life in which I treat my writing like a frivolous hobby or prioritize writing about other people’s novels over working on my own.
Chaos and unbridled impulsivity
As I’m lying there, crumpled and broken from my most recent attempt at meaningless success, I feel complete bewilderment at the motivation behind what I just did. There was no point. I’m sure that the decision was based on some scrap of reasoning, but in retrospect it seems that chaos and unbridled impulsivity just collided randomly to produce a totally unexplainable action with no benefit and all consequences.
Love Letter
I’ve always thought StoryCorps is about the coolest project ever. Now they’re making videos (sob!):
via Chookooloonks
Not my only guide to happiness
What we mean by “trust your gut” isn’t so much to go against all evidence but to listen to your feelings and your intuition and use their subtle signals to help you decide. Don’t ignore your passion. Honor your passion. But honor your passion by talking to it and saying, Passion, you know I like you a lot, and you’re a lot of fun, but you’ve also gotten me in a lot of trouble over the years, and I’m not always going to just come running every time you call. You’re powerful and you’re fun and attractive but you’re also sometimes inconvenient and dangerous and scary and if I might add, at times, just a mite weird — like some of the ideas you come up with are just against the law. I recognize that without you, Passion, I would probably not be alive, nor would much dance happen. Still, you’re not my only guide to happiness.
Want to understand
I like to write journal entries in the voices of my characters. I sometimes even do it for people who have hurt me deeply in real life. 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. You really to have to want to understand that person, which means you may have to let go of that anger.
The Remainder Table 