Category Archives: Writing

Writing and Handedness

Just finished watching this video (public lecture with Leonard Shlain).  There’s an interesting bit about left brain/right brain, handedness and the introduction of the typewriter, and later the personal computer. The idea is that when you handwrite, you only use one hand. And if you’re right-handed, that taps into the left side of your brain (the un-creative “masculine” side). However, with a typewriter and/or computer, you use both hands to write, hence connecting to both sides of your brain.

Aside: My junior high art teacher was obsessed with the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Well, perhaps obsessed is a bit strong, but he went on about it quite a bit. At the time, we found it kind of funny, but lately I’ve been thinking he was ahead of his time.

I’m weakly right-handed (right-leaning ambidextrous?). Some things I have no preference of doing them right- or left-handed. Either way is fine. Like when I was playing sports in school, sometimes I’d play left (things with sticks) and sometimes I’d arbitrarily switch back & forth. I do write right-handed, but I’ve always been able to also write with my left hand. Not as quickly, of course, but that’s mostly due to less practice, I would think. With writing, it makes sense to focus your energies on one hand. (Or does it?! Now I’m wondering…) Anyhow, I have lots of things I do either-handed, and some things I like to do left-handed. I can draw with my left hand.

But whereas with handedness I often wonder if I’m just doing stuff right-handed out of habit rather than actual preference (because if I switch hands it seems fine the other way too), I am strongly left eye dominant. I frame things with my left eye. I take photographs with my left eye.

So anyway, point. It just occurred to me while listening to this lecture that maybe my difficulty with writing pre-computer, i.e. when I was trying to write by hand, is related to mixed-dominance. I used to chalk my lack of production up to laziness or my wrist getting tired. I would think about writing a lot. Work out stories in my head. But when it came time to write them down, not much would come out. Journaling was also a slog for me. But when I started wordprocessing, the words just flowed in a way they never did when I was handwriting. In other words, maybe being able to use both hands at once was really important for me. More significant than just being physically easier. In terms of creativity, and being able to tap into both sides of the brain at once and make connections that just weren’t happening when I was trying to write solely with my right hand.

And! Now I’m thinking about this in terms of blogging / online writing vs. traditional diaries. Maybe there’s an importance to the typing side of it (using both hands, tapping into creative “feminine” side of brain) that’s been overlooked with the focus on public/private and all that jazz.

Hmm… Remember in elementary school, when you were learning to write and they had the letters with arrows showing which direction to form them? Once I mentioned to a teacher that I went the opposite way (and got chastised for doing it “wrong,” of course). I never said anything again, but kept making the letters the way I always had. I always had terrible handwriting anyhow. I’d get put in the remedial section (with the boys) where you had to use those interlined books and write your letters two feet tall. Which resulted in not better, but bigger, handwriting, that I got chastised for by other teachers down the line. OMG. I always chalked up my crappy handwriting to impatience—just wanting to be done already with boring busywork. Maybe that wasn’t it at all.

Anyhow. Possibly this explains why when people rhapsodize about writing longhand, it feels a bit like romanticizing the pen to me. Maybe handwriting is more creative/expressive if you’re strongly handed one way or the other, but not if you’re not so much so?

Thin on story … thick with introspection

The [new Great Gatsby] film won’t come close the power of the novel, but not simply because Gatsby is a book, and, as the cliché insists, the Book is Always Better Than The Movie. Film versions of Fitzgerald’s masterwork inevitably fail because of the kind of novel Gatsby is—frankly thin on story, but incredibly thick with introspection, thoughts unspoken, intricately woven metaphor, and long, dazzling descriptions of otherwise mundane things like sunsets, front lawns and angry wives that are only special because of how the narrator describes them.

Not every book is better than the movie, after all. … [Fight Club and The Godfather] made such good movies because their plots are visual and action-packed. Gatsby‘s plot isn’t. … The novel’s genius is in how Fitzgerald can invest mere tabloid fodder with some sort of epic grandeur. He delves deeply into his character’s thoughts, Nick’s semi-omnipotent narration describing motives and sensations that simply don’t translate well to the screen.

Movies, for all their scope and power, and for all the CGI/3D technological whiz-bangery, have never been any good at expressing human thought.

—Hampton Stevens

This is something I’ve often thought about / discussed before. How I often enjoy movies (or TV series) based on books I didn’t like (or know I wouldn’t like, based on past experience). And of course part of it is that good actors turn stock characters into nuanced ones  and similarly, that good cinematography can turn bland descriptions of place into stunning visuals. But part of it is also this, i.e. that some material is more suited to film than books and some material is more suited to books than film. Anyhow, what I was wondering is if this can be related to ebooks vs. pbooks. As in ebooks are perhaps more suited to plot-based reads, books where the story is more important than the writing (how the story is told). Books where you can be a little distracted and it doesn’t really matter. And correspondingly, pbooks are perhaps more suited to character-based reads, books where how the story is told is more important than the plot. Books that require undivided attention, where all the benefits of ebooks and ereaders would not actually be beneficial. As in, the pbook is better suited for this kind of reading than any ebook (with accompanying distractions) because this kind of book was developed for the pbook. Whereas the plot-based story has been around forever and is easily transferable from one medium to the next—but is perhaps best-suited to media other than the pbook.

Further, while plot-based stories have universal appeal (I don’t mean that everyone likes every story, but that everyone likes some plot-based stories), writing-based stories do not. Writing-based stories have always had a smaller audience. It’s a niche market.

So I think one of the reasons the “death of the book” argument seems to go round and round in circles is that you have two groups of readers and two groups of writers who think they’re discussing the same thing, but really aren’t. When every story was packaged in a pbook, they were all booklovers and it was all good. But now, with choice of medium, the divisions start to create this content/format clash. For example, I think this is why you get people saying stuff like content is what matters; format is irrelevant. By “content” they’re thinking of the story, the plot, which could be told in any medium. But to a writer/reader who leans toward writing-based stories, this makes no sense. To them, of course it’s important where the words appear on the page, what typeface is used, whether Britishisms have been Americanized, etc. Because it’s about the writing… as an art, I guess. As opposed to a craft. Yes, I guess you could think of it like that: art vs. craft.

I tried to start a discussion about this at TC once but it didn’t go so well. I think I was misunderstood. It’s not about one style being better than the other. They’re different. One has a wider appeal; one has a narrower appeal. But there are always going to be plot-driven stories that appeal to those who generally like character-driven ones and vice versa. Just like classical music vs. pop. Or modern art vs. Etsy crafts. Both have their merits and it is totally possible to find both appealing (but probably for different reasons). Both require skill, but different kinds of skills.

If you think about modern art, for example, when people look at a piece, they often say, “I could have done that.” But that’s the key: they didn’t. The execution of the piece may not have required a great deal of skill, but the skill is in the idea, the concept, the meaning of the piece. On the other hand, a craft might not have a “big idea” behind it, but it can nevertheless require a lot of technical skill to execute. The artist needs to continually be coming up with new ideas (i.e. “wow, where did that come from?” ideas). The crafter needs to be able to replicate (or riff off) successful pieces. They’re different, but (done well) neither are easy.

I think you have to start from that point, that both kinds of story can be good (and also: both can be terrible) in order to even have a discussion where people are actually listening to each other and not just shouting that the other is elitist or dumb or covering their ears and going, “lalala I can’t hear you.”

A reminder of the world outside

[In The Things That Needed Doing, Sean] Manning reveals how the small screen acts as a panacea, but more important, as a reminder of the world outside. Death and dying are big moments in life, moments that are near unbearable. It’s comforting to know that the world does and will keep revolving as we go through them. In modernity, sometimes it’s the dulcet tones of bad television that tell us so.

—Jordan Heller

The smoothed fabric of unmentionableness

Funny running across this on the heels of my Reality Hunger post. Coincidence or serendipity?

Prosaic examples illustrate the familiarity of [obstacles to communication]: some people speak more loudly than others; some are never in the conversation to start with; some topics are difficult to raise, or fall out of conversation quickly. Such examples may be encountered much more explicitly in fiction than they are noticed in everyday life, especially if we are ourselves invested, however unconsciously, in keeping something relatively unmentioned. In fiction … we can witness the discomfort that ripples out from rifts in the smoothed fabric of unmentionableness, while in our own conversations, we are often too much of the cultures of discourse, axiomatic beliefs, and de facto assumptions to attend to the parameters of what cannot be said that hedge our choices of explicit verbal exploration.

We are comfortable enough with the elephant in the room, that which will remain unsaid, or is better left unsaid, or a decision to let us never speak of this again that it becomes an interesting challenge to mention the unmentionable.

—Kirsten Valentine Cadieux

Always fiction

What actually interests me now, as I get older, is just narrative writing, telling a story. In a way that is always fiction, even when it’s memoir, or autobiography, or biography, or history; there is what actually happened, which is a total enigma, and then there is the story that people make out of it. It’s never really true. It’s always “made up.”

That having been said, there is a different kind of freedom to just totally making something up, out of nothing, with no reference to what supposedly happened. No other kind of writing is as interesting as writing a novel.

—David Guy

23: Turning Life into Fiction

Turning Life into Fiction by Robin Hemley

One last book for 2010. This was another library book sale find.

I have to admit I was disappointed when I started reading it. I plucked it off the to-read shelf because I was looking for some creative inspiration (a la Natalie Goldberg) but it’s not that kind of book. Rather it’s a book of very practical advice for beginning writers. So while it didn’t give me what I was looking for, I found myself agreeing with his advice. For example, he advises against surprise! endings and “as you know, Bob” dialogue (though shockingly he doesn’t know the term aykb!), encourages writers to think about their audience, and avoid “so what?” stories (ones with no point). There’s really nothing to disagree with here. I think he tends to get a little wordy/repetitive at times, but it’s all good advice. There are also writing exercises at the end of each chapter.

I’d recommend Turning Life into Fiction to many people who submit to Toasted Cheese. This edition was published in 1994 (noticeable due to the complete lack of references to the internet!), but there was a new edition published in 2006, which I assume rectifies that issue 🙂

Ok, and now for the good (coincidental/serendipitious/amusing—take your pick of adjectives) part. Robin Hemley did his MFA at Iowa and, at the time TLiF was published, was teaching at Western Washington University. David Shields did his MFA at Iowa and teaches at the University of Washington. I think they’re buds! I offer, as proof, this:

A lot of writers, including myself and most of my friends, occassionally use the names of their friends  in their novels or stories. These cameo appearances are designed for the mutual amusement of the writer and her friend. … David Shields often includes me in his novels as some off-stage editor or other pesky character. (p. 179)

LOL. Ok, so I started reading TLiF, and was progressing slowly through it, when I ran across this reference to David Shields (and keep in mind, folks, this was written in 1994—this the passage that made me check the date). This is from “Finding Your Form,” a chapter about deciding between memoir and novel:

According to writer David Shields, novels in general tend to be more concerned with story, while memoirs tend to focus more on an exploration of identity. That’s not to say that novels are always more concerned with story, while memoirs are always more concerned with an exploration of identity, just that those are the tendencies.

In Shields’ case, he’s noticed his work steadily creeping away from fiction into the realm of nonfiction. His first novel, Heroes (Viking), about a midwestern basketball player and the reporter obsessed with him, is, more or less, a story he imagined whole cloth. His next novel, Dead Languages (Knopf), a widely praised novel about a boy who stutters, contains many elements of autobiography. As a child, Shields had a serious stuttering problem, but the story is almost entirely fiction. A Handbook for Drowning (Knopf), a story collection, is a step closer to autobiography—a few of the pieces feel, to Shields, almost like essays even if most of the details are imagined. His latest work, Remote, which at this writing he has not submitted to a publisher, is a series of fifty-two interconnected prose meditations. It is unquestionably a work of nonfiction. To Shields, the prose pieces coalesce into a kind of oblique autobiography. In this book, the author “reads his own life as though it were an allegory, an allegory about remoteness.” Despite the autobiographical nature of the book, Shields still thinks the persona that emerges on the page is essentially a fictional character. “The identity I’ve evoked,” he explains, “the voice I’ve used, the tone I’ve maintained, the details I’ve chosen, are highly selective, and in many instances, frankly fictionalized. To me, these definitions get pretty murky. Memory is a dream machine. The moment you put words on paper, the fiction-making begins.”

But the question remains, How do you decide on a novel or a memoir? To a large degree, that’s an individual decision, based on who you are and what your material is. Shields tells his students to ask themselves, “What is it you’re trying to get to? Are you essentially trying to tell a story, and if so, are you interested in setting that story in some kind of place? Then you are probably working on a novel. But if the real impulse is a kind of excavation of a self, a kind of meditation on the self, are you really working on a memoir or autobiography of some kind?” When Shields began working on Remote, he thought it was going to be a novel. “After a while, though, I realized I wasn’t interested in character conflict per se. And I wasn’t interested in a physical place, though I made gestures in those directions. What I was interested in was more autobiographical: the revelation of a psyche’s theme via a sequence of tightly interlocking prose riffs, which became the book.” (p. 40-41)

And then I read Reality Hunger and went back to TLiF and finished it. Which was kind of weird! I mean, Hemley’s sort of exploring a similar theme—the thin line between nonfiction and fiction—but of course Hemley’s book is coming at it in a more practical way than Shields, and at the end of TLiF he gets to the stuff about wanting to avoid hurting people’s feelings (or getting yourself in legal hot water), and yes.

First, life may be chaotic and without plot, but that doesn’t mean people don’t need stories. Maybe they don’t need novels, but they need stories (maybe their stories come in the form of movies or songs or video games). But beyond that, people are human; they’re not robots. Blathering on about a quest for the real without considering that a blind allegiance to nonfiction might embarrass or wound or alienate other people is being deliberately obtuse.

The number one reason to choose fiction, in my opinion, is that it allows one to write with complete honesty about things that would otherwise be difficult/impossible to write about. Which I know sounds contradictory, but it’s not if you consider truth and fact to be different things. You change the facts to get to the truth. If you don’t—if you decide it must be nonfiction, that you must stick to the facts—you’re not going to write completely honestly, because you’re going to worry too much about how the people in the story are going to receive it. Your story may be factual, but it won’t be truthful. And that’s why I think fiction is necessary.

Final Draft

[W]riting is fundamentally about the final draft. … A writer explores, and as he explores, he purposely forgets the way he came. I’m reminded of how the word “essay” derives from the French “essayer,” a verb meaning “to try.” It was coined in the late 16th century by Michel de Montaigne, in many ways the father of the form. Montaigne wrote as a kind of maieutic exercise, a way of drawing his thoughts into the light of day, of discovering what he wanted to say as he said it.

—James Somers

Downtime

Some of our most creative work gets done in downtime–waking from a nap, taking a walk, daydreaming in the shower. (Writers are particularly clean.) Downtime is when breakthrough ideas are delivered to us, unsummoned, when yesterday’s blockages somehow come unblocked. That’s because we treated ourselves to a little boredom and cleared our brains of the sludge of information. Try it.

—William Zinsser