I'm a fucking writer.

Don't fucking write what you know

2011-12-11T11:07:00.028-06:00

I know it goes against all the advice on writing you've heard from the time you were a wee bairn, but try this: Don’t fucking write about what you know. What you know, unless you are like an astronaut or a former child soldier, is probably that not interesting to observers. Really. Your kids are cute, but not that interesting. Your husband is dull as shit. Your opinions on politics are better expressed by writers for Politico or the Wall Street Journal (just kidding).

You’ve never done anything. You’ve never saved a kid from a well. You sit around thinking about how you can finagle riches and widespread admiration out of devoting a couple hours a month to your stupid blog (I don’t do that, but I bet you do.) The most wrenching decision you make most days is whether to douse sriracha or sambal oelek on your noodles (that wasn’t intended as a sexual reference, I guess.)

No one gives a shit about any of this. No one wants to hear it. It sucks, because if you’re a writer you probably don’t have an exciting life. There are a few exceptions, like Iceberg Slim and Rue McLanahan. But the rest of us have dull lives because we just sit around and write, and writing about that kind of sedentary lifestyle is limiting. So you’ve got two choices: you can be incredibly funny, witty, and talented and somehow make it interesting to talk about your ball-scratching husband and your kid who thinks cats lay eggs, or you can make interesting shit up.

I discourage you from the former choice. Chances are, you’re not witty and talented. If you actively think you’re witty and talented, chances are even slimmer. Wit and Talent are things you just come across if you're fortunate, like finding USD750 in a shoe at the Goodwill*: they're not attributes you can count on happening, and it's best to plan for a life without them.

So, armed only with your talentlessness and lack of wit, and an inexplicable, perhaps detrimental desire to Be A Writer, your challenge is to create something that people will want to read. “People” doesn’t have to mean “most of the literate public” or “Michiko Kakutani” or “that guy I’ve been trying to fuck for five months now”; you will probably have to be satisfied with a few aspiring writers who only comment on your blog to get you to click on their blog. BUT. Here are your choices: you can describe the inner workings of your own head, which, we’ve already determined, are dull and fairly ordinary. OR you can set to wonderin’. “Hm. What if there’s this couple who are in love but disagree vehemently about the desirability of achieving technological singularity, which the female of the couple is working to bring about?” Or: “Camille Claudel spent the last 30 years of her life in a mental institution; what the hell did she do on a typical day? I’m going to make up a story about it.” Or: “What if there was this superhero with a really benign superpower, like an excellent sense of smell?”**

I find that little exercises like these limit me in a liberating way. You can still write about honest and familiar emotions, but you’re approaching these from a different perspective, an invented one. I’ve met many people who don’t like writing fiction because it is too open, too difficult to set parameters; but it’s fun when you invent your own parameters.

For a long time, I was like Quentin Tarantino in that all my characters were me. They all spoke the same, had the same drives, unless they were the Nemesis, in which case they were way too obvious, like, rapists and capitalists and shit. I had a breakthrough about 5 years ago, when I decided to write a story from the perspective of a small boy. At that point, it was one of the best things I’d written. I wrote a bunch more from a male’s POV. I wrote a couple of historical-ish pieces. I started a historical blog in the voice of an abhorrent upper-class woman. This involved research and some amount of hewing to the confines of actual events. When you know what your limits are, getting to an endpoint becomes like figuring out a puzzle; there may be several ways to solve it, but only one outcome, or at least a finite number of them (this is a good case for outlining one’s work, which I have never done in earnest). Trying to get outside of my own experiences - what I know -- was enormously eye-opening. My characters are all, of course, still me, in some tiny way, but they're disguised as people I've never met.

I don’t know much, so it doesn’t make sense to write what I know. Don't listen to advice. Or, do listen, but try to think about why it's wrong. All platitudes regarding writing are just platitudes anyway, and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

_____

*Happened to my friend.

**All real-life examples of shit I'm writing.

Comment Policy: Keep It Negative

2011-11-07T11:22:00.001-06:00

I know I’ve presented myself as an emotionally fragile human being, and it’s true, I am. I think anyone with a blog/Twitter account is, because people like us need constant attention/feedback/love. It’s a pathetic way to live a life, and I can’t recommend it to anyone.

BUT, I fear that projecting this very accurate portrait of my personality means people politely refrain from leaving negative comments on my blog, and this is the opposite of what I want to happen. I WANT negative comments. I want you to tell me what’s wrong with my blog and me, because 1) I’m a narcissist and thus prefer negative attention to no attention, and 2) I want to be the exact opposite of blogs that have comment policies demanding that commenters must “keep it positive.” Those blogs are boring and suck and are boring.

Anywhoo, I want you to disagree with me. I relish it. If I disagree with your disagreement, I’ll tell you so & probably rant about it for several blog posts. If I agree with your disagreement, I’ll offer retractions. Your negative reaction will push me to be a better person. People who think I’m dumb inspire me to be better. I had a teacher in 4^th grade who thought I was great, gushed over me in conferences, and told me I’d be president someday. Was I inspired by her? Most assuredly not. I’m about as far from president as you can get without being a non-English speaker, and she kind of got my hopes up needlessly. On the other hand, my 5^th-grade teacher hated me, repeatedly told me I’d amount to nothing, destroyed all my stories/artwork, and called my parents in for a special conference to berate me in front of them & tell them what a slacker I was. While painful, I’ve devoted my life since then to proving her wrong, to trying to be a good person & better writer/artist. I haven’t proved her wrong yet, but that’s the thing: she was absolutely right, I am a slacker & a fuck-up, and she called it and I respect her for that. My 4^th grade teacher, on the other hand, the one who told me I’d be the 1^st female president, was full of shit and obviously can’t be trusted. If she hasn’t retired yet, she should be forced to resign.

So please. Honesty reigns here, kind of. I mean, if you just think I’m fat or have a big nose, I don’t really want to hear about it, because I already know & there’s nothing I can do about it short of giving up my nightly bottle of Côtes du Rhône, and that ain’t happening. But, if you think I’m a shitty writer or I’ve said something shitty & untrue or put forth a lazy opinion, consider this my permission to you to call me out, because I can at least try to be a better writer and thinker. I’m emotionally fragile, yes, but frequent public beratings will toughen me up.

Shittily yours,

Kat Vapid

On imitation and originality

2011-10-30T10:38:00.081-05:00

You can’t write anything new.*

You just can’t. Don’t try. Don’t try to be new. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t try to find something out that no one else knows and be thought a hero for sharing this information with the world. Originality is dumb. Originality is impossible. The cult of originality stems from the idea that ideas are important. Ideas aren’t. The important part is the execution. We wouldn’t be so impressed by the pyramids millennia after their creation if they had remained sketches on papyrus.

The cult of originality stems from the idea that art is a moment of inspiration. As any artist knows, it’s not. It’s a process, at times a grueling** one, but hopefully one that is, on balance, fun and rewarding. Non-writers sometimes share their ideas with me and put a dollar amount (typically USD1 million) on their potential. I don’t really like to share my ideas because I know they’re shit. The same 4 or 5 stories are told over and over:

1) Somebody wants something and doesn’t get it and is sad.
2) Somebody wants something and gets it and is happy.
3) Somebody wants something and doesn’t it get but learns something along the way so is better off and they’re happy.
4) Somebody wants something and gets it but it turns out they didn’t really want it after all so they’re sad.
5) Two (or more) people fuck hard and there’s not really a plot but you can masturbate to it (this really could be 2a).***

The really interesting part is not the idea. The interesting part is the fact that the same story can be told over and over and we don’t get bored (unless Nicholas Sparks is telling the story). That either says something about humankind’s propensity to be easily entertained, or about humankind’s capacity to create fascinating shit out of nothing.

Everything is a reworking of something else. Our senses limit what we can comprehend or feel, but we can still comprehend a sight more than a barnacle (say), and we can festoon our ideas with flourishes that a razorback clam (say) is incapable of. The five storylines I summarized above aren't interesting to read, but in agile hands they can be fleshed out to the point of Art. Everything is a variation, no matter how closely the artist tries to hew to the original. The same is true for story and style. Even close copying gets you something different. This is why films get remade, why songs get covered.

Once, at a reading when I was about 16, I asked a writer I admired if he consciously tried to imitate other writers. He gave me a weird look and said, “No. You shouldn’t do that. Only amateurs do that. Find your own voice.”

I tried to follow his advice, for too long perhaps, but eventually found it was ridiculous. I tried to create a new voice, but there is no such thing. I mean, you can invent something totally new but it will be unintelligible, and thus worthless. (Another lesson: don’t listen to the advice of people you admire; what works for them may not work for you.)

In striving for an ideal, we almost always fall short. This is true in writing (ask any writer whether the book they wrote was the one they had in their head) and in language itself, where you have this thing called the phoneme: a group of phones (sounds) that speakers of a language will recognize as a single entity. Every sound we think of as being consistent – such as /p/ or /ä/ or /sh/ -- will be pronounced differently from region to region, from speaker to speaker, from word to word. The /p/ at the beginning of please is actually quite different from the /p/ at the end of top. So: in trying to achieve a single sound, /p/, we arrive at all sorts of nonsense that don’t match the ideal we have in our heads. And that’s just one sound. Aiming for a certain type of story or style can result in infinite variations.

Humans like imitating. (Remember the great pleasure you took in repeating your kid brother's pleas of "STOOOOOP! STOP COPYING ME!" during long car trips?) We take someone else’s actions or words and we expand, we manipulate, we interpret and experiment with it. This is the beauty of creativity, and its foundation. You cannot create something from nothing. You take what you have, and you fuck with it. You copy, and in copying you inevitably vary. In the variations is art, yes, but it is the similarities that make the variations possible. Van Gogh: “Lots of people copy, lots of people don’t copy. I copy. I find it teaches me things and above all it gives me consolation.” Copy, sure. There is no such thing as your own voice. If you’re inventing a completely new voice, you will be inventing your own alphabet and syntax, and no one will understand. Then you get silly things like the films of Andy Warhol and Joyce Wieland.**** And do we not write, above all, to be understood?

____________________

*Every time I make a blanket statement like this, I eventually think of a reason why it's total bullshit. I'll probably write a refutation of this post in the coming weeks. Sorry if I wasted your time.
**'Harder-than-watching-TV grueling,' not 'Donner-party-style-adversity grueling.'

***Kurt Vonnegut has a brilliant, graph-based assessment of the basic reappearing storylines and says that the best stories, like Hamlet, do not fit the above formula; as in life, the morality of the story is ambiguous.
****Please don't kill me for this sentence.

Rejection

2011-10-25T22:38:00.002-05:00

Rejection.

Re-ject. What does ject mean? Re- is a prefix, so ject must mean something.

You look it up, because something has to occupy your time while you wait for all these rejections. Ject is nonsense in English. The word comes from Latin, reicere. To throw back. “Here,” an editor (slushpile reader, whatever) writes in a rejection letter, “I’m throwing this back at you, because it sucked.” Well, they don’t say that. Nobody says what they mean. This has always been a problem for me, because I’m not good at detecting subtexts. The slushpile readers say, instead:

“We enjoyed it, but it’s not quite right for us.”
“Thanks for the look, but I’m afraid we’re going to pass.”
“It’s a nice story, but unfortunately, we don’t have a place for it in upcoming issues.”
“This is without a doubt the most brilliant piece of writing from a contemporary author that I’ve come across in all my days, yet I’m afraid the thick and plebeian reading public is simply not ready for a work of such preëminence (nor are they ready for the English umlaut).” [I made this last one up.—Eds.]

And, always, some variant of:

“We wish you best of luck in placing it elsewhere.”

Thank you. Thank you so much. Luck will be required. You’re basically a gambler. You’re waiting for that hit, that high, that jackpot that comes from acceptance. You’re waiting for money, and meanwhile you make lattes and cry on the inside.

Then rejection arrives as a kind and lengthy form letter: “This is no reflection on you as a writer.” Well, yes, in fact, it is. If you were a good enough writer to be in their magazine, you would be in their magazine.

And that’s just the fiction side. You’ve had better luck with writing little pieces for content mills ("How to Replace a Roll of Toilet Paper"), & you're working your way up to GQ. But big magazines are busy; if they’re not interested, they just ignore you. You go on waiting, month after vacant month, wondering if you are more like Vincent Van Gogh – talented, unrecognized – or more like the shitty poet whose blog you found when you drunkenly googled “interminable sadness,” the poet who rhymes “cleric” with “enteric.”

You should be happy to be rejected, you are told, because it is an inextricable part of the writing process. You write, you get rejected. Everyone. Good and bad. Well, are you good or bad? That’s the thing with writing, you’ll never know.

These lines by W.S. Merwin, in which Merwin recounts a conversation with the poet John Berryman, illustrate the nagging doubt that being a writer entails, but which one must ignore if one is to get anything done:

I asked how can you ever be sure

that what you write is really

any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don't write

I mean, holy fuck, such enviable insouciance about one’s life work! But such insouciance masks, perhaps, a deeper despair about one’s own abilities; as the poet Michael Collier pointed out, “Clearly [Berryman]’s thought long about this issue because he’d like to know how good he is.”

We’d like to know if we’re good because we’d like to know if it’s worth it to eschew social outings, “Breaking Bad,” a day on the beach, a clean house, a purslane-free yard, board games with our kids, the GOP debates….you know, if it’s worth it to avoid the things that the rest of humanity seems to do without complaining. You have little time to indulge in these activities, and when you do, you undertake them with a nervous unenjoyment; because you do some undignified thing that makes you money and then you write (unless you are a good writer, in which case writing is the thing that makes you money), and those two activities pretty much cover your days. We wonder, we receive no answers, we submit, we receive no answers, we keep going, we write, we think about our friends having fun watching “Breaking Bad” or reading a breezy novel on a breezy beach, but we keep going and wondering and submitting and being ignored.

And the rejection letter arrives and we’re pissed off about it, but we also cherish it, just a little bit, because it’s some assurance about the quality of our writing. It’s life, throwing something back. “Here,” says life, “I’m throwing this back at you, because it sucked.” And then, foolishly, we write some more, because even deeper down than the wall of insouciance masking our hurt feelings, and even deeper still, beyond the hurt feelings that we only display to friends who we know will find our vulnerability quaint…deeper than all that, we really don’t give a fuck that life thinks we suck. We just want to be sure one way or the other.

Why the Fuck Do I Write?

2011-10-20T17:46:00.001-05:00

Writing is an effective method of speaking without having to listen. I don’t like to talk to people. I get nervous and have to pee. Sometimes I become so filled with anxiety that I convince myself I am peeing in fright, which makes me more anxious, which increases the sensation that I’m peeing. Then I try to think about cunnilingus to calm me down, and that usually works. But it’s best if I avoid having to listen to people in the first place, and that’s why I write.

Face it, I don’t want to fucking listen to people. I want to imagine that I’m the only person that matters in the whole world. Some jerk (maybe it was my mom) once told me, “You have an amazing personality; you should share it with the world!” (Well, maybe I dreamed it, I don't think even my mom would go that far.) See, that attitude is what's wrong with the world. Look, I don’t write out of altruism. I’m not helping other people when I write, I’m wasting their time. I’m a cold and calculating female. I don’t feel the need to share things with other human beings, because what the fuck have they ever done for me but turned me down for sex when I most needed it?

Humans don’t even really need to write anymore. If you need to express yourself you can just record a rant on YouTube. You don’t even need to be able to sign your name, else why would the e-signature exist? Yet it keeps hanging around, like children even though they, too, are now obsolete. Writing pops up everywhere when there is a perfectly reasonable substitute: texts instead of phone calls, poems instead of songs, Twitter instead of making inappropriate comments to fellow bus passengers. I mean, NO ONE on the planet would rather Skype than e-mail. If a friend asks us to Skype with them, we instantly cut off all contact, because that shit is so far from normal. (We even prefer image-free phone calls to Skype, because we like the option of being able to masturbate through our phone calls, because we’re not listening anyway and we have to keep busy somehow while the other person is talking.)

There you have it: we keep writing because we don’t want to fucking listen. Fran Lebowitz: “The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.” Writers get to avoid all that. I don’t really care about what other assholes have to say, and that is why I write.

Comments are allowed but discouraged.

I like Bill Holm

2011-07-16T20:53:00.001-05:00

Look, if for some reason you want to read about Minnesota, bypass the Garrison Keillor rack at your local Waldenbooks. The poet Bill Holm was a more estimable chronicler of Minnesota life. I was going to write a lengthy post about him, but since I’m shite at criticism and don't really understand literature, I’ll just leave you with this thing he wrote about prairies and the personalities they nurture:

There are two eyes in the human head -- the eye of mystery and the eye of harsh truth -- the hidden and the open -- the woods eye and the prairie eye. The prairie eye looks for distance, clarity, and light; the woods eye for closeness, complexity, and darkness. The prairie eye looks for usefulness and plainness in art and architecture; the woods eye for the baroque and ornamental....Sherwood Anderson wrote his stories with a prairie eye, plain and awkward, told in the voice of a man almost embarrassed to be telling them…; Faulkner, whose endless complications of motive and language take the reader miles behind the simple facts of an event, sees the world with a woods eye. One eye is not superior to the other, but they are different. To some degree, like male and female, darkness and light, they exist in all human heads, but one or the other seems dominant.

...Like a long symphony by Bruckner or Mahler, prairie unfolds gradually, reveals itself a mile at a time, and only when you finish crossing it do you have any idea of what you've seen. Americans don't like prairies as scenery or for national parks and preserves because they require patience and effort. We want instant gratification in scenic splendor as in most things, and simply will not look at them seriously. Prairies are to Rockies what Paradise Lost is to haiku. Milton is cumulative; so are prairies. Bored for days, you are suddenly struck by the magnitude of what has been working on you. It's something like knowing a woman for years before realizing that you are in love with her after all.

--From "Horizontal Grandeur," The Music of Failure.

2011-07-13T20:08:00.000-05:00

I would prefer to have a more appealing job, which would attract people rather than make them run. 

If I could still change careers, I would prefer it. I would have done better to buy beautiful dresses and beautiful hats that would underline my natural qualities rather than devote myself to my passion for doubtful constructions and somewhat forbidding groups.

This unfortunate art is made for long beards and ugly faces rather than for a relatively well-endowed woman.

-Camille Claudel 

Put on some shoes already

2011-07-03T11:53:00.001-05:00

Please stop wearing sandals. I don't want to look at your feet. Feet are like penises: They're gross and utilitarian. Both of them reek, no matter how much airing out they get. I'll accept that they're necessary, and I'll use them both for my own ends, but I don't want to look at them. I'll accept that some people find feet and penises visually appealing, but that falls into the category of weird fetish and it's something you should keep private.

Getting weekly pedis does not change the situation. I don't care how much Sephora nail polish in PeriNeon Pink or AlMons Joy Brown you slather on your toes or penis, they'll still look weird and rather nausea-inducing.

There are some situations in which it's acceptable to wear sandals or bare feet. Like, if it's over 95 degrees, then sandals are kind of necessary. (I still won't stoop that low, I'll just go sockless in my shoes, but whatever.) A beach or a pool is likewise an acceptable place to display your pedal extremities, but it's also an acceptable place to bare your upper thighs, and the fashion mores of these locales do not apply to the real world. And if you're under 5 years old, bare feet are OK, just like bare bums are OK with young children, because their feet and bums have not yet become all lumpy and misshapen. But past that point, they take on a horrific appearance that is best only revealed in limited situations.

NEVER wear sandals in a restaurant. People are trying to eat. ESPECIALLY if you are a man or a laborer or both. Standing on one's feet all day creates edges where soft curves once existed, and renders skin thick and flaky, and it's not a good look. And if you haven't figured out that you shouldn't wear flip-flops into a place where people are trying to enjoy their gomasio-crusted barramundi, you haven't earned the mantle of Human Being.

Look, you want to know where our society's tolerance of bare feet leads*? I'll tell you. I was at this outdoor festival a couple years ago watching some taiko drum performance or something. I was with my children (all under age 7 at the time, a very tender and impressionable age). Some unknown force compelled me to glance around, and I noticed that the man sitting nearest me was clipping his toenails. At an outdoor taiko drum performance. In a crowd. In front of children. This is not cool, guys. We need to take a stand against this kind of behavior. Cover up! If people are gonna get all freaked out at me publicly nursing an infant, then I can get freaked out at your visible toejam.

We live in an advanced civilization. Some things that were commonplace to our naive and maybe even feeble-minded forebears are considered gauche today. Raping your wife, for example. Inviting neighbors over for a dinner of sorghum gruel. Inviting neighbors over at all. Playing Pink Floyd at a party. And, for fuck's sake, displaying your naked ambulating units in all their writhing biological debasement. We don't have to live like our ancestors anymore. We don't have to live in sod houses or die of smallpox. And we DON'T have to wear sandals for lack of available shoe material! Full-foot shoes are cheap. So cheap, sometimes shoe shops will pay you to take a pair home. Well, maybe not quite, but I think that day is not far in the distance.

So, stop the madness. Stop the sandal-wearing. And tuck your penis back into your pants.

__________

*This is called the slippery slope argument. You should read about it, because everyone needs more logic in their lives.

5 Things You Already Knew

2011-06-14T10:06:00.005-05:00

Tired of articles with titles like, "12 things you didn't know about human nostrils" or "7 fascinating serial killers you've never heard of"? They go on to list exactly what their subject heading promises they'd discuss. You think for a moment that maybe you will thwart the author's statement by already being aware of whatever fact they accused you of not knowing, thus proving your smartness; but, alas, the author was correct: you really never had heard of H.H. Holmes. (Well, I hadn't, anyway.)

At any rate, I have crafted a list that is certain to make you feel wise and worldly. There is no way you didn't already know all of the 5 following facts, unless you are Sarah Palin, then maybe.

1. Marijuana gets you high.

Marijuana consists of the dried flowers of the female cannabis plant. A stronger form of the drug is called hashish and is derived from resinous secretions from the same plant. Marijuana is typically smoked (whether in a cigarette form known as a "joint," in a pipe or hookah, or, more rarely, through the barrel of a shotgun), although it can be eaten (usually incorporated into baked goods such as brownies). Lamer still is the preparation of marijuana tea. Within a short while, the user feels effects such as euphoria, mild sedation, a marked slowing of time, an urge to eat an entire bag of Snyder's of Hanover Buffalo-Style Pretzel Pieces, a tendency to discuss guileless philosophical ideas (such as: "How do we know we exist?" "Everything George Orwell said is coming to fruition. And Aldous Huxley, too." and "Dude, are you a narc?"), the valuation of any marijuana-related joke as "funny," the sudden recognition of the shape of one's hands (and the valuation of this recognition as profound), and a desire to listen to the same Bob Marley song over and over and over again.

Note that marijuana is illegal in most states and protect yourself accordingly while smoking or purchasing it. Marijuana in its various guises is also known by the following names: pot, weed, grass, bud, reefer, maryjane, herb, indo, chronic, 420, spliff, fattie, blunt, doobie, ganja, boo, baby bhang, cheeba, muggles, Texas tea, Panama red, Acapulco gold, Zacatecas purple, Kentucky blue, Mexican brown, Manhattan silver, Chicago green, Pakistani black, white-haired lady.

I'm sweating. I need to get high now.

2. You can get food and germs off your dishes by washing them.

This is a surprisingly effective method of not getting sick. Related: cooking chicken kills the salmonella that is present in ~75% of chicken meat.

3. You're probably better off avoiding people whose Twitter/LinkedIn/Wordpress, etc. profile mentions that they are cisgendered.

4. Sex is fun. And sexy.

I offer this statement with a qualifier: Sex is not always fun. Sometimes it's not, like your first time, or when you're super drunk and can't find the insertion point, or when the guy whips out his penis & you can't help but notice that it's small enough to pick locks with (come to think of it, merely mentioning the word "penis" during the act is enough to kill the mood). But for the most part, sexing is fun.

5. "Punctilious" means being all uptight about details and correctness and shit like that.

Actually, I had to look this up because I didn't know what it meant.

Stop lying about wanting to be a writer

2011-06-06T10:37:00.005-05:00

Seriously, stop telling me you want to be a writer.

Stop telling me, “I’m going to publish a book!” before you’ve written a word.

Stop telling me you read a crappy book and thought, “I could do better than that! And I’m going to! As soon as my kids are grown/I have a week off/I finish reading Anna Karenina/I kick this heroin habit.”

Stop telling me, “I wish I could live my dreams and be a writer.”

You may wish you could live your dreams, but your dreams do not include being a writer. How do I know this? If you wanted to be a writer, you would already be doing it. Because, as I’ve mentioned before, writing is a fairly easy (and nearly free) endeavor. I (and you) can still make certain claims about where I want my writing to go: I can say, in all honesty, “I wish my writing didn’t suck” or “I would like to get paid occasionally to write” or “I would like my blog to have better than a 75% bounce rate.” BUT, I’ve never made some fool statement like, “God, if only I could write!” Because I just do it.

I rarely make up shit about what I wish I could do. For instance, I don't say:

“I wish I could play for the Yankees.”
“I wish I could be a doctor.”
“I wish I could be President.”
“I wish I could be a steam locomotive driver.”
“I wish I could be an astronaut.”

Because if I said any of those things, I’d be lying.

But, even supposing the above statements were true, there would be real impediments to me fulfilling those dreams. For instance, they don’t let women play professional baseball (and if someone threw a ball at me, I’d duck instead of trying to catch it). I might get arrested if I tried to practice amateur medicine; I’m not yet 35, and God hasn't yet told me he wants me to run for president; steam locomotives aren’t really around anymore; and they don’t allow people who are afraid of roller coasters to fly into outer space.

But there are a great many achievable ambitions in this world. If it’s your dream to man the Potato Ole fry station at Taco John’s, for instance, that is achievable. So is being a cashier or head of the IMF. And, even more fortuitously, but at a slightly lower income level than a Taco John’s employee: writer. See, you can do it alongside your paying job. You come home from your shit job, you feed the kids, put them to bed, spend a few minutes wondering what your purpose for living is, then remember: oh, yeah, I’m a fucking writer. And then you spend the next few hours writing, and you go to sleep feeling fulfilled.* You might even feel like you can make it through another day. It’s an achievable goal. You don’t even have to write every day; you can wait until your days off.

So why the fuck are you lying about wanting to be a writer?

There are 4 possible things you mean when you say “I want to be a writer.” Let’s examine them.

1. “I want to be a writer as my paid profession.”

Sure, I would like to be a professional writer too. Other things I would like: a 3-bedroom house with central air; a meal at El Bulli in Spain; permanent elimination of my stretch marks; immortality; a make-out session with Jon Hamm.** I mean, sure, we all want things, but some things you just have to file in the Highly Unlikely Category.

But, you, when you say you want to make money from writing, it’s kind of silly, because, seeing as you never write, you must not actually like writing. So, you could have another job that you like as much or as little as writing, and it would probably pay you more.

2. “I want to be important/loved/happy.”

It’s okay to admit it. We all want to be important in our own way. I would love to be important. I try to separate my narcissism from my need to write, even though it's probably futile to do so.

There are many ways to be important. There are small ways to be important. A parent is quite important to his or her kids; Charlie Sheen is of fleeting importance to a great number of people. I think I'd prefer to be very important to a few rather than A Charlie Sheen (I'm assuming his own kids don't like him). Importance is all relative anyway. Natalie Goldberg wrote: “We think writing gives us an excuse for being alive. We forget that being alive is unconditional and that life and writing are two separate entities. Often we use writing a way to receive notice, attention, love….We are good people before we ever write a word.” I’m a tad more pessimistic than Ms. Goldberg, so I’ll allow that maybe you’re a bad person before you write a word; but writing won’t change your inherent qualities.

I think, though, that writers, due to the solitary nature of their work, are especially prone to try to use writing to gain love or friends. Or maybe I'm the only writer who feels this way. I sometimes have this idea that writing will help me compensate for my social deficiencies. No. Hasn’t happened. Whether or not I’m a writer is irrelevant, perhaps even detrimental, to my social life. Writing will not bring you friends, though it may bring you fans, which, I’m guessing, are an unsettling thing to have. Think about it.

As for being happy...good God, man, there are a million better ways to be happy. Try heroin first; if that doesn't work, take up fiction.

3. “I wish I were creative.”

It’s nice, I suppose, to have a visible reminder of the results of your labor, but I don’t know that it’s essential for general well-being or contentedness or whatever it is you seek. I don’t think so-called creative people are any better off than other types of people. I guess I don’t even know what creative means. Let’s use the word talented. Are talented people better off? No, in some cases they’re miserable, addicted, broke, and unable to maintain relationships as a direct result of their genius.

4. “I wish I enjoyed writing.”

You, of course, will accuse me of straw man assembly, but I really think this is what IW2BAW amounts to sometimes. I think you assume that since so many people write simply out of love for the activity itself, with no hope of reward or earnings, that writing is an inherently enjoyable activity. Yes; for some people, it is. But if it’s not something you enjoy, then doing it all the time won’t fill you with joy.

Hey, we all feel this way from time to time. I've thought things like, "Why can't I just get an urge to do something straightforward, like farming? Then I'd be happy!" I wouldn't really, of course. It's not a rational thought, but it's necessary; without striving comes stasis. Woody Allen acknowledged something like this when he said, “What I really like to do best is whatever I’m not doing at the moment.”

But upon examination, the oddity of this sentiment becomes apparent. I like what I like, and there's no point in wishing I derived pleasure from something else.

* * *

I’m a writer because I have to be; I don’t know how to do anything else. And I love writing. It’s a compulsion, but a healthy one.

If you want to be a writer, I encourage you to write, right now.

Otherwise, stop fucking lying about it.
___________

*Sort of, although the realization that you wrote something stupid will probably jolt you awake during the night.
**I would do things with Jon Hamm in addition to making out with him, but I didn’t want to say so because I didn’t want to come across as creepy.

What I Don't Eat: A compilation of customer demands

2011-06-03T08:31:00.001-05:00

Here are my dietary requirements (these are nonnegotiable): I am allergic to peanuts, tree nuts, potatoes, strawberries, white cheese (yellow cheese is fine), and sorghum. I am squeamish about anything with tentacles. And certainly no raw seafood. Meat must be well-done, but not charred. I will not eat birds smaller than chickens or mammals larger than cows.

I do not eat anything I don’t know how to pronounce, which rules out quinoa, flageolets, and Wagyu beef. “Wagyu” just looks like the Japanese word for some sort of esoteric fetish. I do not eat anything I’ve never heard of, like yuzu. Spare me your descriptions. I do not want to learn.

I am gluten-free two days per week and this is one of those days. I’m not certain how I feel about Jerusalem artichokes or kimchi, and until I have an opinion on them, they are out. I do not understand why the same root is referred to variously as cassava, yucca, and manioc; I therefore deem this vegetable suspicious and will not eat it. I do not like seaweed, fruit salsa, kale, raw onions (including green onions), any strongly-flavored or salty cheese (gorgonzola, taleggio, and feta, among others), truffle oil, cold soups, varieties of pears I am unfamiliar with, freshwater fish, offal, nontraditional or European cuts of meat, bivalves, deep-fried foods, unexpected flavor combinations such as sweet/spicy and lavender/pomelo, any food in a semi-solid state (such as ketchup, gelatin, or yogurt), or any dish that contains chilis with more than 30,000 Scoville heat units.

I say all this because it seems that you do not have a single menu item that satisfies all of these requirements. This is unacceptable. Now ordinarily, I have quite an imperturbable personality, but I find myself on the verge of indignation and even, dare I say, outrage. I have never been to this dining establishment before (and I likely will never return), but I am your customer, and you are being flagrantly unaccommodating to my needs. All I really want is a plate of fettuccine. Gluten-free fettuccine. I would prefer fettuccine with lemon and peas, but I would even accept fettuccine Alfredo at this point. I see on the menu here that the chef's surname is Martinelli; I would think that a man of his lineage could handle this reasonable request.

This was to be a very special meal: I am here for a pre-Shrove Tuesday luncheon with my second-favorite coworker. It was supposed to be a time to relax and celebrate, but now it’s ruined. I certainly hope the modern art gallery we plan to visit after our meal does not display the same wanton disregard for the needs of its customers.

Well, I guess I’ll just take the short rib purée with pickled celeriac. Hold the hijiki.

12-point self-improvement plan

2011-05-13T13:41:00.000-05:00

1) Use a manual typewriter for composing writey things. I won't be able to get as much done, but damn, will I be able to ramp up my sanctimonious quotient.

2) Stop making rape jokes. Some people don't find them funny.

3) Always do what I love. Like making rape jokes.

4) Stop giving a fuck whether people like me. And stop liking other people. They don't like me anyway.

5) Stop making self-deprecating comments. It's obvious I was born and/or destined to be ugly, friendless, a professional failure, and in general useless to society & humankind, and repeatedly verbalizing these facts won't change them.

6) Make money. Enough to abandon my family and live a Lohan-esque lifestyle.

7) Have some more children. That way I won't get my period. Menstruation is gross.

8) Get involved in a cause I care about. Possibilities: The plight of me, the lack of money of me, the lack of fame of me, me-awareness.

9) Eat more kale.

10) Fucking Blogger went down and the rest of what I wrote got erased. They were fucking funny, though.

Kat On Kat: Children's Lit

2011-05-11T13:53:00.000-05:00

kat@yahoo.com: Hey, it’s me.

kat@gmail.com: What’s going on?

YK: We had a nice conversation the other day. It was nice catching up. I’m not really in touch with my inner self, so it was just…nice.

GK: Nice, yeah.

YK: I thought we could do it again sometime.

GK: Yeah, maybe someday.

YK: Like, now.

GK: Well, I’m kinda trying to finish –

YK: I thought the topic for today could be –

GK: Wait, we have to have topics? What is this, Tyra?

YK: Here’s the topic. Um, the other day you mentioned how we used to read Sweet Valley High novels?

GK: You’re employing a liberal definition of ‘novel,’ but yes.

YK: I thought we could discuss, like, what you read when you were a kid, and what influenced you.

GK: Where is this interview format coming from?

YK: Well, I was thinking…no one’s ever interviewed us before.

GK: Why should they?

YK: A lot of people get interviewed. Why shouldn’t we?

GK: Because we don’t contribute to society in any appreciable way?

YK: But no one takes us seriously.

GK: I’m kinda fine with that.

YK: …Don’t you want to be taken seriously like James Joyce?

GK: No. That’s not really what I’m going for. I never liked James Joyce.

YK: What?

GK: I don’t know, I opened one of his books and he was talking about moo-cows and tuckoos and it just lost me. He’s one of those people I’m supposed to like. Any time I’m supposed to do anything, I get resentful. It’s a flaw.

YK: Hm. That’s a good way to deflect your responsibility as a reader. In any case, I want to interview you. I want us to interview each other.

GK: Whatevs.

YK: So, you used to read Sweet Valley High.

GK: Oh, yes.

YK: Did you identify with Jessica or Elizabeth?

GK: Liz, obviously. I couldn’t relate to Jessica as well, because she was best friends with Lila Fowler and Lila was such an insufferable bitch. That took Jessica down a few notches in my view. But at the same time, I wanted to be like Jessica. She dyed her hair black and shit.

YK: Yep, in The New Jessica. And you eventually dyed your hair black, too.

GK: Yeah, I became Jessica in a sense. Tried to, anyway. She seemed to have more fun even as she lacked scruples. Meanwhile, Liz had scruples and was kind of an uptight bitch and miserable.

YK: What did you think of Sweet Valley Twins?

GK: You know, I didn’t like it as much. I think because I was closer to that age [Sweet Valley Twins was a prequel that took place when Elizabeth and Jessica were in middle school. -Eds.] it seemed phony to me, whereas high school was so far away that all the nonsense seemed plausible. Like, I just assumed that all teenagers got to drive Fiats and were always falling into comas and having boyfriends die and shit.

YK: And getting kidnapped, don't forget.

GK: That's right, Elizabeth got kidnapped that one time. It all seemed true-to-life.

YK: Yeah, ‘cause we didn’t know any better.

GK: No, why would we? The only teenagers I knew were my babysitters.

YK: Did they drive Fiats?

GK: No, but they smoked and swore and talked on the phone all the time. I assumed they’d be in a coma sooner or later.

YK: Hey, speaking of babysitters, we read a whole lot of Baby-sitters Club.

GK: Oh, yeah. But that, I read with a kind of horror. I mean, it was so bad.

YK: Worse than Sweet Valley High?

GK: Well, SVH was horribly written, I knew that even then. But again, there was a distance, which made it palatable somehow. I knew SVH was horrible, but it had the redeeming feature of all that tragedy. Baby-sitters Club was just weird.

YK: Yet you read it.

GK: I don’t know why. It was something I couldn’t look away from. Part of the reason may have been that I never quite fit in when I was going to Edina schools–

YK: Can’t imagine why.

GK: --so Baby-sitters Club was like a conduit that allowed me to glimpse into other people’s lives. The people who shunned me. Even though I knew my real-life peers weren’t as wholesome as the Baby-sitters.

YK: No?

GK: No, they were racist as shit. And materialistic and generally unpleasant. But the Baby-sitters were sickeningly wholesome. And they, like, loved babysitting. I hated babysitting. I only did it to earn money to buy Chic-o-sticks and Bobby Brown cassingles. I remember in one book, one of the girls – Kristy, maybe – told her charge that she liked him so much she’d babysit for him even if she didn’t get paid, and I’m like, bitch, please. Are there really people like this? Or is this book bullshit and just designed to make me feel like a shitty person?

YK: We wasted a lot of time reading crap.

GK: Yeah. I think it upset my mom.

YK: She tried to get us to read Hermann Hesse and shit.

GK: Yeah, I did read Siddhartha at her behest, but I didn’t really get it. I liked it, but I couldn’t have told you why when I was 13. I ended up really liking Hesse in college. I guess I read crap because it was easy. You know, sometimes you're in the mood to watch a bleak Ingmar Bergman rape scene; others you wanna watch Will Ferrell rub his balls on John C. Reilly's drum set.

YK: Or sometimes you want to eat sous-vide quail egg yolks topped in yuzu foam, while sometimes you just want a corn dog.

GK: Exactly.

YK: So did you read any lit-lit as a child?

GK: My favorite books were the Alice books, hands-down.

YK: You’re speaking of Lewis Carroll?

GK: Of course. Utter magic. I read those two books over and over and over again.

YK: What about them appealed to you?

GK: Well, they weren’t, like, traditional novels. They didn’t have the whole predictable structure. Stasis-conflict-resolution.

YK: Well, they kinda do.

GK: Not so much though. The book never works in service to the plot. It’s a pure reveling in words and language and nonsense. Carroll was a master of playing with language in a way that highlighted its absurdity.

YK: Can you offer any examples to back up that statement?

GK: Um...not off the top of my head, I guess.

YK: Huh...

GK: Are you rolling your eyes?

YK: Sometimes you say stupid things.

GK: So do you.

<pause.>

YK: What else did you read?

GK: Madeleine L’Engle. Loved her. C.S. Lewis, all the Narnia books.

YK: Really? Even with the Jesus stuff?

GK: Hey, I had no idea it was about Jesus. I thought they were clever and fantastical and very well-written.

YK: Did you ever read the Bible?

GK: Never did. I've read parts. Once my babysitter’s mom read to me from a picture Bible and it scared the shit out of me and I knew right then that Christianity was bullshit. She told me God loved me more than my parents, and then said He might send me to roast in eternal hellfire if I, say, masturbated.

YK: She said that?

GK: Well, she didn’t say ‘masturbated,’ I added that part.

YK: I like how you capitalized ‘He.’

GK: Thanks. Oh, and Choose Your Own Adventure, of course, and all the copycat versions. There was even a Narnia version.

YK: Yes, loved all that. So you mentioned a lot of fantasy books, did you read any non-fantasy?

GK: Oh, yeah, Judy Blume, the Little House books, Beverly Cleary, uh…Maud Hart Lovelace…. Nancy Drew. Christ! Sideways Stories from Wayside School. Another without a traditional novel structure. Just delight in nonsense and words. Love it. Oh, how could I leave out Roald Dahl?

YK: Encyclopedia Brown? Two-Minute Mysteries?

GK: Yeah, I loved those. I was horrible at solving them, though.

YK: You just didn’t have the patience. You went and looked at the answer right away.

GK: That’s true, in a sense.

YK: In an absolute sense, yes. Remember how you used to cheat at solitaire?

GK: We don’t need to drag anyone’s name through the mud.

YK: Why would you even do that?

GK: Can we talk about something else?

YK: Can I say one more thing before we wrap up?

GK: Yeah, okay.

YK: I find it interesting that you can’t tolerate usage of ‘moo-cow’ and ‘tuckoo’ but you’re fine with ‘mome wraths’ and ‘O frabjous day.’

GK: Hm. You’ve got a point.

YK: Care to comment?

GK: I’ll think about it.

YK: ‘Till next time, then.

GK: Uh, I’m not going anywhere.

A Conversation With Me.

2011-05-09T23:10:00.001-05:00

kat@gmail.com to kat@yahoo.com*: Hey!

Yahoo Kat: What's up?

Gmail Kat: Nothin'. How 'bout you?

YK: Well, obvs the same thing, since I'm you. We're both doing the same thing. Always, necessarily. Why are you talking to me if I'm you?

GK: Eh, I'm avoiding writing. What're you doing?

YK: Same thing.

GK: Really? That's amazing!

YK: No. No, it's not.

GK: Yeah, I guess not. Where are the kids?

YK: Next door, playing with the neighbor kids.

GK: Nice.

YK: Yeah. I'm glad I live in an open neighborhood where kids play outside all day like in the olden days. Nowadays parents are expected to spend every fucking second with their kids. I'm not a nostalgic type, but there is something nice about kids being a little independent. My kids spontaneously make maps and invent new instruments and shit. Just from boredom! That's the way to do it.

GK: Well, but....

YK: What, you disagree?

GK: I don't know. Were things really better then?

YK: No, no. I'm not saying that. You're confused. But I drive into these suburban neighborhoods and --

GK: You do? When do you ever go into suburban neighborhoods?

YK: I do. Sometimes.

GK: I think you're just pulling shit out of your ass.

YK: There's plenty you don't know about me, okay?

GK: But I'm with you every second and I've never known you to drive into the suburbs.

YK: Kat. H&M, Sephora, Michael's, Jun Bo, these are all in the suburbs. Sometimes I need to patronize them.

GK: You need to?

YK: Yes. I need to. I cannot obtain disposable clothes or artificial kumquats within the St. Paul city limits.

GK: Maybe. I think sometimes you just make shit up, though.

YK: Can I finish?

GK: Yeah, OK.

YK: My point was, I go into these suburban neighborhoods and the streets are empty. Completely bereft of children. The kids like never play outside. They have huge yards and they go unused. The kids are in, like, organized activities.

GK: Lame!

YK: Yeah, or they're on their fucking Wii or DSI. So there are benefits to being poor, too, because I can't afford that shit so my kids teach themselves cartography instead. Well, maybe I could afford it, but I'd rather spend the money on wine.

GK: Why are we not drinking wine now?

YK: Point taken, let's schwill.

GK: Bueno.... Anyway. What did you do when you were a kid? Were you the outdoor type?

YK: No. I mean, I preferred to sit indoors, but when I did venture out I had more freedom than kids typically do now.

GK: Expand on that.

YK: I frequently walked alone to my best friend Laura's house two blocks away, starting when I was like 6.

GK: Oh, yeah, I remember that.

YK: And, when we were 7?

GK: Uh-huh...

Both: Olson's!

GK: Fuck yeah, Olson's drugstore. We went there with no adult chaperons. We bought shitloads of candy and Sweet Valley High books, when we had extra money.

YK: I mean, we had to cross Vernon Avenue.

GK: I know! Four lanes! I live near West 7th [comparable in size and traffic to Vernon Ave. -Eds.] and I can't imagine my kids crossing it until they're like 13.

YK: Really. Is there any more cold beer?

GK: Should be...yeah, grab me one, will you?

YK: Anyway, we went off on a tangent.

GK: Fuck yes, we did. I was gonna ask you, since we're doing this for a writing blog, like, are you working on writing anything?

YK: Well, I was trying to. But you kind of interrupted.

GK: Oh, sorry.

YK: Yeah, well. Shit happens. But it's okay. I have, like, nothing to write about. Nothing.

GK: It's hard to find shit to write about when you don't go anywhere or do anything.

YK: Exactly. Total Catch-22. I used to have tons to talk about back when I earned a wage, but no time to write about it.

GK: Life is unbearable.

YK: It really is.

GK: Well, I'll let you get back to your "work."

YK: Why did you say that sarcastically?

GK: Well. Let's face it.

YK: What do you mean?

GK: Kat. You don't really work.

YK: I don't get paid, but --

GK: No, you don't work.

YK: Fuck it, whatever. I gotta go.

GK: Damn, why'd you have to mention Jun Bo earlier? Now all I can think about is turnip cakes.

YK: I gotta go.

GK: You don't work.

___________________

*Not my real email addresses.

Words/phrases that need to be retired

2011-05-07T16:05:00.004-05:00

I can sympathize with cliché usage. Clichés get used a lot because they’re clever, at first. I mean, a lot of them come from know-it-alls like Billy Shakespeare: “a rose by any other name,” “one fell swoop,” “into thin air,” “foregone conclusion…” These were all, when Shakespeare used them, and mayhap for 300 years thereafter, interesting.

But, their initial cleverness does not make cliché use acceptable. Particularly in our hypertime era, words & expressions move from clever to meme to played-out very quickly and subtly. You might miss the transition. I certainly have once or twice; I’ve caught myself saying annoying shit. Anyway, here are some once-pithy sayings that are now dead in the water (and some that have always been dumb).

1) Meh. I think even the first time I heard this, I experienced a sensation that I imagine was a bit like having an unpleasant voltage applied to my nostrils.

2) FAIL. Never been funny. Never never. Related: Winning.

3) Facepalm/headdesk, etc. Okay, there was a time it was kinda cute.

4) Head explodes/asplodes. To simplify this list, let’s just all agree that cute verbalizations of IRL actions aren’t that cute.

5) Stabby. As in, "Blogger's formatting issues make me stabby." I could get behind this a year or so ago. Let’s change it to “shooty.”

6) <<<THIS! I guess we just get tired of seconding someone’s opinion with things like "hell yeah!", "cool!", "sing it, sister!", etc. Hence, THIS! I'm still fine with "cool" after all these years.

7) Wait for it…. Nah. Don’t think I will.

8) First! This appears in comments sections by people who think it’s an accomplishment to be so un-busy that you read blog posts/articles before everyone else.

9) Really? Really? Just shut up.

10) That’s what she said. See, sometimes there are layers of comedy. So you might laugh at someone laughing at someone who would laugh at someone saying this, but you wouldn’t laugh at the sayer or the laugher at the sayer, just the laugher at the laugher at the laugher at the sayer. Oh, you are laughing at the laugher at the laugher at the sayer? Oh, I guess you’re ahead of me. Maybe it is clever, then.

11) See what I did there? Yes. Yes, I did.

12) Y’all just jealous. No, wait, keep using this. It’s funny that you think I’d be jealous of you.

And, one high-brow cliché that I’ve been begging everyone to stop fucking using for years:

13) In spite of, or perhaps because of… Look, New Yorker staff writers. Make up your mind about whether the thing that happened was in spite of or because of the circumstance you are naming. Then tell us, and leave the other part of the equation out. That is your job as a journalist.

7 Tips for Creating a Superior Blog

2011-04-05T12:54:00.001-05:00

It takes skill to be a blogger, just as it takes skill to make a God's eye or a clothespin man with googly eyes. The good news is, you can probably coax skill out of you. Having blogged for over three years, with little topical focus and a total of 20 posts, I feel eminently qualified to proffer advice on how to turn YOUR blog from ho-hum….to WHOA, YUM!

1) Find your niche audience. If you’re too broad, no one will want to read you. Case in point: the New York Times. I mean, they’re all over the map. It's pathetic. They have news, opinion, lifestyle, sports, science, food…let’s be professional, folks, and make up your mind! Sheesh.

You’ve got to target your corner of the market. Don’t just have a blog about cheese: blog about fluctuating Taleggio cheese prices. Don’t blog about product label design: blog about the social history of Noxeema label design! The more narrowly you can define your audience, the more likely they will want to hear what you have to say.

2) Treat blogging as a job. It is a job, right? Take it seriously. When people ask you what you do for a living, tell them straight up: “I’m a blogger.” To reinforce the point, quit your real job. The main point of doing this is so haters envy you. They’ll say things like, “You sure are lucky” and “I’d give anything to not have to work three janitorial jobs just to send money to my wife and kids in Ecuador” and “Wow, how are you able to monetize when you only get 15 hits a day?” Don’t answer. Just nod and smirk knowingly. Then finish filling out your EBT application.

3) Post regularly. If your audience has to wait 2 weeks, or even, for certain segments of the SAHM population, 2 hours, to read a new post from you, they’ll lose interest. Ideally you should post every 30 minutes. You’ll have time; this is your job, remember. Don't worry about quality; your reader only wants to feel that they are having an intimate conversation with you so they won't feel guilty masturbating to your avatar.

4) Have an opinion. Don’t just report; decide for your reader! The shriller, the better. Make it so readers can't disagree with you without looking like assholes. For instance: "Face it, Geminis are crazy and difficult to get along with, and if you disagree with me you're obviously a pedophile."

4b) If you don’t have an opinion, make benign statements that no one can disagree with, such as: “Face it, the internet is not going away" or “Face it, some women might as well walk around wearing a sign that says ‘rape me.’”

5) Draw your readers in with a hooky title; one that is misleading and probably even false. Something like: Trendy shark’s blood smoothies all the rage in Williamsburg. Don’t worry, internet users have short attention spans, and by the time your readers realize you’re actually writing an article about the evolution of pie charts, they’ll have forgotten all about your catchy headline.

6) Numbers are also effective at drawing in readers. Promising your reader 8 of something, or 12, or even 3, will set off an anticipatory firing of synapses in your reader’s brain that mimics heroin intoxication. See, numbers remind people of the lottery, and who doesn’t love throwing their money and time away gambling? So offer them something you know you can’t deliver. How about, “8 ways to murder your husband and make it look like suicide,” “7 Things You Never Knew About Eddie Money,” or “101 Ways to Tie a Scarf”? (Also, numbers are used in math, and if people think they're going to be reading about math, they'll feel smart.)

7) Write all your blog posts in list form. People don’t have the time or inclination anymore to read full paragraphs, let alone 1000-word polemics. Write in sentences. Sentence fragments are preferable. Like this. See?

Being published is better than not being published.

2011-03-26T14:30:00.003-05:00

You know those people who say "Publication doesn't matter" or some variant thereof? They're fucking liars.

People who say this include:

Everyone who's ever been published.

Writing advice books looooove to reiterate this fact. Substitute "publication" with any form of success in any field, and you have similar results. Successful people like to downplay their success by pretending it's not all that great. They also like to pretend they've worked harder than everyone else, because of this insidious myth we cling to in America that hard work naturally and inevitably produces desirable results.

BULLFUCKINGSHIT.

You may have worked hard. You may be successful. And you may even know people who are lazy and poor, thus strengthening your bizarre insistence that hard work and success are somehow positively correlated. But those are not the only work/success combinations that exist, and I haven't seen much evidence that either style of working leads to a predictable outcome.

I think published people downplay the wondrousness of publication for a few reasons.

Etiquette. It's bad manners in America to pretend you landed in your class because of circumstances as opposed to deservedness. Shit, it's bad manners to acknowledge the existence of class.
False humility. "Sure, I'm published, but it's really not that big a deal. No, no, really, don't fawn over me."
False nostalgia. In this instance, the published have actually fooled themselves into thinking that things were better when they had to work at an $8/hour barista job so they could do their art in their spare time. They're convinced they've eaten from the fucking tree of knowledge and now that they know good and evil, boy, would they choose ignorant bliss, bub. It's kind of understandable. You get locked in patterns of stress and then once you achieve success, it's kind of hard to escape from those patterns, even though you don't have to stress so much anymore. You just channel the stress into weird new things. "Oh, the utter pressure to keep up with my former successes is damaging my complexion!"

BULL.FUCKING.SHIT.

Don't let these people lie to you. Until I have relationships ruined, I will stand by the controversial thesis I've always held:

Being published is preferable to not being published.

Here's why publication is better:

You're published. This is the goal of every writer. If they say otherwise, it's because they forgot how horrible it was to be unpublished, unread, unloved.
You're making money. Maybe. If you're not, you have cause to believe that people might want to pay you in the future.
You're much more likely to get published again. This is incentive to write, and we write because we love writing, right?
People treat you differently. It's a verifiable fact. When I used to tell people I was a cook, they would get this look in their eyes like they were trying to think of something nice to say about my line of work. Then they would inch away in search of people with whom they could discuss their stock portfolio. When I tell people I'm a stay-at-home mom, they get this look of hate in their eyes and make snide comments about anti-feminists and how nice it must be to not have to do anything all day (these people have obviously never spent more than five minutes taking care of 3 kids, but whatever). But when I tell people I'm a writer (something I have only been drunk enough to pull off a few times), they look at me with reverence. They ask me questions. Advice questions. It's not like when I was a cook and people who weren't cooks would pretend to know how to cook better than me, because, you know, cooking is an idiot's profession (there are many idiots in cooking, true, but have you read some of the confessional blogs out there? Any idiot can write.)
I would have broken the above bullet point into 2 paragraphs, but fucking Blogger wouldn't let me.

Point being, once publication occurs, life is all daisies and unicorns and spritely woodland creatures. Try it sometime.

P.S. People with a lot of blog traffic are happier than people without.

Wikipedia-esque synopsis of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice"

2011-03-25T11:45:00.000-05:00

I stole this idea from the many anonymous pop song synopses which once peppered Wikipedia [for instance] but which seem to have been removed in light of their irrelevance. Rehashing the idea means that yes, I'm an unoriginal cunt, and yes, I've been told this before.

The song opens with Snoop Dogg lamenting the sorry state of social affairs in his hometown of Long Beach, California, although he does not specify the nature of the trouble. Dogg affirms his determination to succeed at his musical career in the face of said ails. The song continues in this spirit, with Dogg emphasizing the importance of male friendship and seemingly simple pleasures as a way of coping with life’s tribulations.

Dogg describes a raucous all-night celebration that he is hosting at his mother’s house in her absence. The party includes women engaging in sexual intercourse in the living room (it is unclear if they are having sex with one another while the men watch, or if the men are partaking in the orgy as well), and Dogg states his intention to have sex with one or more of the women. He also mentions that he and his friends are each in possession of an adequate amount (or perhaps even a surplus) of prophylactics to protect against pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. The sex, he stresses, is to be purely casual in nature, as he does not harbor romantic or empathetic feelings towards the women in the room or, it would seem, any woman. Dogg also announces that he plans to smoke a large amount of an unnamed recreational drug (though it is reasonable to assume he is speaking of marijuana).

In the second verse, we learn that in addition to marijuana, Dogg is drinking Seagram’s gin. He expresses annoyance that all of the party’s guests are drinking the alcohol he has provided, yet few, if any, have contributed the fee that social protocol dictates they should pay. Although such a breach of etiquette is somewhat common, Dogg nonetheless explains his philosophy that everyone ought to contribute to the common good. In addition to opening his home to his guests and providing libations, he also offers musical entertainment and goes to great lengths to promote an atmosphere of fun and stress-free living.

As Dogg steps out of the house, perhaps to enjoy the warm evening, he runs into Sadie, the former love interest of a friend. She begins flirting with him. Loyal to his friend, Dogg converses with her for a bit before giving her the full truth: he has no intention of having sex with her. We do not hear Sadie's reaction to Dogg's rejection, but one can infer that this is a great disappointment to her.

Eventually Dogg’s friend Dr. Dre arrives at his house with a large amount of Tanqueray gin and some very potent marijuana. Dogg consumes so much of these two substances that he feels dizzy. Recognizing the profound state of his inebriation, he decides to temporarily cease the self-administration of intoxicating substances. However, his presence of mind is sufficient to allow him to copulate with at least one of the women who have accompanied Dre to the party. Once he has reached orgasm, he leaves the woman and returns to his friends, thus reiterating the theme that has run throughout the song, that of the importance of prioritizing male friends over casual sex partners. Women come and go, but real friends are the ones who matter.

The song's narrative is interspersed with a chronologically unrelated, but thematically relevant, chorus, in which Dogg describes consuming drugs while driving in a car. Although this relaxes him, he can't help but feel preoccupied with financial matters.

Lyrics:

With so much drama in the LBC,

it's kinda hard bein' Snoop D-O-double-G,
but I, somehow, some way

keep comin up with funky-ass shit like every single day.

May I kick a little something for the G's?
And make a few ends

as I breeze through, 2 in the morning

and the party's still jumpin cause my mama ain't home.

I got bitches in the living room gettin' it on,

and they ain't leavin til 6 in the morning.

So what you wanna do? Shit,

I got a pocket full of rubbers and my homeboys do to.

So turn out the lights and close the doors.

But for what? We don't love you, hoes!

Yeah, so we gon smoke an ounce to this

G's up, hoes down, like you motherfuckers bounce to this.

CHORUS:

Rollin' down the street smokin' indo,

sippin' on gin and juice (laid back)

with my mind on my money and my money and my money on my mind. (2x)

Now that I got me some Seagram's gin

Everybody got they cups but they ain't chipped in,

Now this types of shit happens all the time.

You gotta get yours, but fool, I gotta get mine.

Everything is fine when you listen to the D-O-G

I got the cultivatin' music that be captivatin' he

who listens to the words that I speak

as I take me a drink to the middle of the street

and get up mackin' to this bitch named Sadie (Sadie?)

She used to be the homeboy's lady (oh, that bitch?)

80 degrees when I tell that bitch please

raise up of these n-u-t's 'cause you gets none of these, at ease.

As I mob with the dog pound feel the breeze, bi-atch! I'm just -

[CHORUS]

Later on that day, my homie Dr. Dre came through
with a gang of Tanqueray, and a fat-ass J
of some bubonic chronic that made me choke,
shit, this ain't no joke,
I had to back off up of it and set my cup down.
Tanqueray and chronic, yeah, I'm fucked up now.
But it ain't no stoppin', I'm still poppin',
Dre got some bitches from the city of Compton to serve me
not with a cherry on top,
'Cause when I bust my nut, I'm raisin' up off the cot.
Don't get upset, girl, that's just how it goes,
I don't love you hoes! I'm out the door.
And I'll be -

[CHORUS]

Fuck off, I'm shy

2011-02-15T12:42:00.003-06:00

Conceit causes more conversation than wit. 

-François de La Rouchefoucauld

My idea of hell is introductory chitchat. I simply am incapable of it. My friends are all, by necessity, chatty extroverts. (They have to be; as a Quiet Person, when I get together with fellow Quiet People, we just kind of sit there.)

I like listening to these talkers, by and large, though, again by necessity, they have to say a lot of stupid things. The more you talk, the more stupid things you say. It's simple probability. I hate looking stupid. Therefore, I don't talk much. Writing suits me because I can carefully construct what I say, and re-read it before I let anyone else read it to make extra-sure it's not too stupid. Image control, you know.

Contrary to what many seem to think ("you're too quiet," "you need to speak up more,") being gregarious is not a choice; one's social tendencies have as much to do with some moral stance as does body type (i.e., nothing). Growing up, however, I always believed, because everyone told me this was the case, that shyness was a hurdle to overcome, not just an aspect of personality. School and work demand that we be social; in a society that places a premium on individualism, you mark your individuality by being loud. Quiet people melt into the crowd. Suspicious. Creepy, even. We may be lone gunmen, or, worse, stoics.

So parents suggested (or demanded) that I befriend other kids on the playground, even though being the first to say "hello" caused and still causes severe anxiety; teachers reported to my parents that I needed to interact more, as if my personality were in itself a deficit (leading me to a conclusion I still hold today: that school is much more about socializing children than it is about academic learning, and that it socializes children in exactly the wrong ways. But that's another post).

I kind of always thought that outgoing tendencies would manifest themselves as I matured. Shyness was a childhood thing that would end, like stuttering or polio. But you know what? Almost 34 years on, I am no better at chitchat or making friends than I was in nursery school. I don't play well with people. You may have guessed from reading my blog or twitter feed that I'm a bit of a misanthrope. This is not a necessary and sufficient condition of being shy. I was born, for the most part, liking people, but after three decades of being told that liking people meant I had to natter on uselessly about stupid subjects, I began to FUCKING RESENT IT.

Extroverts just don't seem to get it. They don't get why I can't just chat with people, why I can't just have a smooth job interview (and therefore why I remain in a perpetual state of professional failure), why I don't speak up, why making friends does not come easily. Some points:

There is nothing wrong with me. I am just having more interesting conversations in my head than I might be having with you.

Just because I don't say much doesn't mean I don't have a lot to say. I prefer to wait until you're done talking. No, really, go on.

Being shy in itself does not make me miserable. I'm fine with being a Quiet Person (now, though I haven't been for most of my life). What does make me miserable is being expected to be a certain way, and being presumed deficient. That is, my shyness is a problem for you, not for me, but you make it my problem.

Introversion is not inferior. It's a way of interacting with the world; I process my environment by listening and watching. Some people work with their hands. Some people are natural leaders. Some people make jokes as a means of coping. Some people have an intuitive grasp of spelling. And some don't feel the need to compulsively discuss the weather or our boring occupations. Being a Quiet Person may make me less popular than I could be. So what? My outgoing friends have many friendly acquaintances and a handful of close friends. I have no friendly acquaintances and a handful of close friends. The close friends are the important thing, and in this respect I am equal to Loud People.

Introversion is not overcomeable. I am, of course, capable of initiating conversations, but the anxiety it causes is much more agonizing than simply remaining silent and waiting for someone else to talk first. The anxiety is something I'm done trying to get over (and again, the anxiety arose not from being a Quiet Person but from being a Quiet Person in an anti-Quiet Person world). I spent my teenage years and a good part of my 20s immersed in an unhealthy amount of drugs specifically because they made me more social, or they at least helped me to not give a fuck that I wasn't social. For awhile I even packed a thermos of vodka to sip on the school bus at 7 in the morning because I found that vodka gave me the confidence to participate in class discussions. That is where expectations of sociability lead.

Quiet People are not necessarily nice. People sometimes tell me condescendingly, after attempting conversation with me, "You're so nice," then turn to another, more small-talk-friendly peer. Meanwhile, I make mental lists of various torture methods I'd like to use on people who assume my thoughts exclusively involve cupcakes and sprites frolicking in waterfalls.

Being a Quiet Person does not mean I don't enjoy being around other people or that I don't require friendship. I just really really need to be alone most of the time.

If it were not for the internet giving me an outlet, I may well still be the crumbled, substance-abusing mess of a human I was in high school. Either that, or I would have written a novel by now. There's really no way of knowing.

I realize I'm incorrectly conflating introversion & shyness. Outgoing introverts may take offense, but in my case, they are concomitant attributes.

P.S.
Oddly, although I get heart palpitations if I have to, say, ask a supermarket employee where they keep the capers, I don't have a problem being on stage. I did theater a bit in school, I was once a singer in a band, I frequently sing karaoke before a crowd, and I relish all of it. Conversely, a Loud Person friend I have refuses to humiliate herself onstage. Go figure.

How First Drafts Are Like Newborns

2011-02-06T11:29:00.004-06:00

I love writing. Have I ever mentioned that? I love writing so much that it isn’t enough to write; I have to write about writing. Then I write about writing about writing, and how pointless the whole enterprise is, when I should be simply writing, with no recursion involved.

I love the challenge of inventing new characters and implausible situations. I love recreating conversations I've had, ones in which I said all the wrong things or nothing at all, and making myself, this time, say the right things. I love revisiting the past and envisioning the future. I love vocabulary. I love thrilling to carefully chosen Anglo-Saxon words, with a few Latin- or Algonquin-derived words thrown in (fuck what George Orwell says). I love dictionaries; I love looking up words and their etymologies. I love dragging pen across paper, I love my own handwriting, and I love the soft clicks of a keyboard.

I do not love revising.

To revise, you must first read over that first draft you so loved to write, and realize that your loving effort was inconsequential: the draft fucking sucks.

Oh, god, you think. Why am I such an utter loser and hack?

You make some changes. You eliminate this minor character and introduce the main character's mother. You cut out phone conversations. You change all instances of perambulate to walk and notice how reflexively you use the word really.

Okay, it’s getting better, and the third and the fourth drafts are better still; this can only get better!

But then you arrive on the twelfth or so draft and you begin questioning whether you are really improving it. You begin questioning why the fuck you don't have a paying job, or, if you do have a paying job, why you are spending your off hours engaging in toil rather than leisure (yes, it does become toil at a certain point). You begin questioning the purpose of your life. You should've gone to accounting school.

You take it, the twelfth draft, to your critique group, and they tell you there’s still this big thing missing, this gaping hole, this inability to connect with the main character. Why, they wonder, has the heroine of the tale never discussed her line of work with her boyfriend before? And, Oh, yeah, you realize. That's not going to work. But that's integral to the plot.

So much time! So many squandered hours! So much effort! And it’s still so substandard! How many more drafts will it take? Twelve more? Twelve times twelve more? Twelve to the twelfth power more?

What was so promising is fizzling. It’s kind of like the promise of the first beer: the effervescence lightens you, quickens your heart, beckons you into the night and the bar conversations and the mystique of possible unencumbered sex. The second beer does much the same thing, and maybe even the third. By the fourth beer, you’re in way deep; it's too late. You no longer have any idea what you’re doing, and you won’t want to get up in the morning. And after objective parties point out the incompleteness of your twelfth draft, you won't want to get up in the morning either.

Most of the time you spend writing does not have the transcendent, free-flowing quality of the first draft. Most writing is painstaking, annoying, meticulous revision. Sorry. That’s how it is. Unless you are some genius writer (which you're not) you will be revising more than you will be actually writing first drafts. This involves lavishing severe attention on individual sections, paragraphs, sentences, and even words.

There's no manual for revision (well, there are manuals, but you should disregard them, or at least regard them suspiciously; they may or may not contain germane advice) because every writer has different strengths and weaknesses. Some are immaculate dialoguers. Some create vibrant characters effortlessly. Some are spelling and grammar champs.

Some, the foolish ones, think that their first drafts glide out of their pen fully-formed. Nuh-uh. A person tumbles out of its mother's body in baby form, and while a human in baby form is nice, it's not quite ready yet. It requires years of nurturance, experience, education, and emotional buttressing to become a well-rounded adult. Any human that spends its entire life at the intellectual and emotional level of a baby or even a child will probably not be welcome at most social functions. First drafts are much the same way: endlessly fascinating to the person who brought them into the world, kind of annoying and pathetic and shrill to an objective observer. Now, I don't suggest you spend 18 years nurturing your draft, though I suspect it's been done. But you will need to be like a strict orphanage headmistress gazing in contempt upon a wailing foundling. What can you do to whip this hopeless creature into a worthy entity that will inspire love or despair or love-and-despair-related suicide?

Well, I'm going to tell you. Some other time. Once I figure out how to do it myself.

In the meantime, dare to notice your shortcomings. Dare to admit you're wrong. It will demolish your ego, but it's a necessary demolition. Kenny Shopsin, who is chef/proprietor of Shopsin's in New York City, but is more of a chef/philosopher [if philosophers invented menu items like Slutty Pancakes and refused to serve people with food allergies], explains it thusly:

The first duty of everybody in life is to realize that you are a piece of shit....Once you realize you are a piece of shit it's not so hard to take because then you do not have this feeling that you're a good person all the time and let me tell you something: feeling like you are a good person all the time is like having a brand new car with no scratches on it. It's a real responsibility which is almost impossible to live up to. Being a piece of shit and then occasionally doing something that is good and true is a much easier place to be ....There is nothing wrong with not being so terrific. It's what the whole ball game is about : not being so terrific and accepting it.

I spend a good 16 hours* a day obsessing over what is wrong with my writing in an attempt to enhance my relationship with the written word. It's a start.

*exaggeration.

What I need to do vs. what I will do

2011-02-01T15:59:00.001-06:00

Things I need to do today:

Shower. Shampoo hair for like 20 minutes because it’s really fucking oily. Shave.

Do lots of housework. Just imagine everything that could possibly need cleaning/washing/tidying in a house, and that’s the amount of housework there is.

Exercise. Yoga, aerobics, stomach crunches. Cry over my abdomen. Tell kids to stop laughing at me while I'm exercising. Tell kids to stop climbing on me while I'm exercising. Tell them it's their fault I'm fat and that my stomach is stretched out from a twin pregnancy/c-section.

Leave the house.

Scrape ice off the sidewalk so mailman* doesn’t slip & break both elbows & sue us.

Bake bread.

Play with/educate kids without using the television. Get horribly bored. Children are boring. The games they want to play are boring. I don’t like playing with Darth Vader. I hated Star Wars as a kid and I hate it now.

Get in arguments with kids over stupid things. Listen patiently while they tell me things that are total bullshit, then tell them they’re wrong and incur their wrath. “Mama, what if you ate an element? You would die!” “No you wouldn’t. Everything you eat is an element. Everything around us is made up of elements.” “Nuh-uh!” “Nuh-huh.” “No! You’re mean, Mama! I hate you!”

Force Oliver to do his homework. Tell him to stop crying about it. Feel bad for telling him how to feel. But still, he shouldn’t feel that way. Realize I should try to squeeze more hardship into his life so he doesn’t cry over things like homework. Force him to read for 30 minutes, as required by his teacher. Wonder if he’s actually reading/absorbing material or just staring at the pictures. Realize I don’t care. I can’t force him to enjoy reading. I’m not Amy fucking Chua.

Deal with the enormous stack of papers/children’s drawings/bills on my dining room table. Deal with the comic books that my common-law husband strews about the house. Wonder if we’re legally considered a garbage house. I think the legal definition requires fecal matter to appear in places other than the toilet. Recall the time the kids were still in diapers and I found dried poop smeared on the wall of the bathroom. We might qualify.

Figure out how to make money and build a resume while also caring for children & trying to launch a writing career where I write for free.

Send out some magazine queries. Realize the most lucrative writing jobs involve topics I am the least interested in writing about. Realize I have no qualifications to write about any subject. Realize it’s not fair of me to try to earn a living as a writer when there are actual good writers out there with actual things to say. Wonder why my work ethic is so lacking. Fill out some online applications for line cook positions that will get ignored.

Make nutritious dinner for 5.

Things I will do today:

Write a blog post.

Wash my armpits over the sink and put on extra deodorant in lieu of a shower.

Pick up visible debris from floor.

Yell at kids.Tell them to quit making a mess.

Heat up leftover spaghetti. Stretch tomato sauce by adding water.

Have a beer. Have another beer. Have a glass of wine.

Try to cobble together some words after the kids are in bed. Realize I'm too drunk to write. Set the alarm for 5 so I can write in the morning. Look over the blog post I wrote. Consider deleting it. Hope no one's read it. Drift off while making ambitious to-do list for tomorrow.

Have nightmares involving rejection letters and classmates from junior high laughing at my published writing.

_______________________________

*Not being sexist, he’s a man.

Writing: Fun, Easy, Tedious, Impossible

2011-01-26T16:46:00.001-06:00

I encounter a fair number of people who want to be writers, so they say. They think it sounds fun and easy. But they spend very little time doing the thing that writers do, which is writing.

Yeah, I have it easy. I'm both a housewife and a writer. Actually, neither of these are particularly easy (let's face it, kids aren't that stimulating to hang out with 15 hours a day; and writing with kids around is actually physically impossible). But they are enjoyable (at times) and fulfilling activities. And I don't particularly cherish ease in my work. I want to be challenged. I've had easy jobs, like office jobs where I just sat all day, and maybe did some data entry. They were blessedly easy, and horribly boring.

Ease is relative, as is fun. When I went back to work after I had twins, working in a kitchen seemed like a welcome respite from the unending demands of raising children, even though it often meant staying until three in the morning scrubbing the floor with a mixture of an ammonia-based cleaner and bleach. It was kind of fun. And when the work was done, it was done. I went home. (In fact, they forced me to go home.) I read. I watched LOST. And I wrote. I wrote even though it didn't bring any rewards and no one read what I wrote.

I think people (and by "people" I mean "people who think it would be nice to be a writer," which is a category that encompasses most people, so, in other words, "people") totally have the wrong idea about what it means to be a writer. Writers write. A lot. End of story. If you want to be a writer, then do it. Being a writer means you have to write. Having written a poem five years ago doesn't make you a writer. Wishing you could write the next Twilight so you can make lots of money so you never have to write again doesn't make you a writer. Some writers are professional, some aren't, and the only difference is that one category gets paid. That's it.*

Getting paid is nice. But you don't get paid a lot. (By "not a lot," I mean, "about what I got paid for a night of babysitting in the early 90's.") The best thing about getting published/paid is that your family, who up to this point has considered you mildly Asperger's-y and/or delusional about your abilities, begins to think maybe you're not quite headed to a life of mumbling to yourself over morning coffee at Burger King, as they'd always assumed.

There is this idea that writing is easy. And it is; bad writing is incredibly easy. My first drafts pour out of me (sometimes, if I'm the mood, which I'm often not). Yeah, first drafts are easy and fun. But good writing? That is impossible. It's not the difference between easy and hard; it's between easy and impossible. It's like the difference between flying a paper plane (easy) and trying to fly by flapping your arms hard (imp-- you get the idea). But that's not a fair comparison, because there is objective criteria for determining whether you are flying. You're either on the ground or you aren't. Not so with writing; there is only a vague feeling (or less subtle than vague, like a punch in the crotch un-vague) that what you wrote is the worst thing in the world and will probably even lose you some friends. And so you change it. And you change it again. Then you move this paragraph, and cut that sentence, and oh, Christ, now you've fucked it up. That paragraph didn't make any sense in that context, but now that it's gone, the entire tenor of the piece is altered. You should be a cook, not a writer.

I'm pretty sure that when people say they want to write but don't write, they probably don't want to write as much as they think they do. It's kind of like fame: people want to be famous without fully considering the implications. (I don't think fame sounds like much fun at all, unless you could do it without being recognized or ever having to appear in public or having your former friends resent you for your fame or dealing with the inevitable downfall/early drug-related death once the public falls out of love with you.) I think people think they should want to write, because books are prestigious, and feel bad on some level that they don't enjoy it (that's the best hypothesis I can muster to explain this phenomenon).

But if you really do love it, then do it. What's holding you back? Money? It's free, baby. There are no start-up costs. (If you're super-impoverished, go to the Salvation Army and pick up a semi-used spiral notebook for 25¢.) This gives writing a distinct cost advantage over its more expensive artistic brethren, like film or sculpture or painting. Is time holding you back? I know you're busy, but we all have our free moments. Yes, even you. I found time (rather, I made time, which is why my house is so filthy, but we all make sacrifices) even when I had a full-time job and 3 kids ages 4 and under. Now, if you have two full-time jobs and 4+ kids, I'll accept that you truly don't have time to write, but otherwise, shut the fuck up and find an hour a week.

Just be aware that it's not the answer to every problem. Do you really want to write full-time, or even part-time? How about 10 hours a week? Anything becomes tedious if you do it enough. Tying your shoes is exhilarating when you first learn how, but I'm guessing the charm has worn off if you are over six years old. To my kids, riding the bus is a joy on par with a visit to Chuck E. Cheese; but, the bus is considerably less entertaining if it's your only means of getting from your home in Columbia Heights to your job in Apple Valley (note to non-Minnesotans: that's a long bus ride). People think writing is fun because they don't do it enough. Novel things are always fun. But if you, for some reason, had to ride a roller coaster eight hours a day (I don't think there's an actual occupation that requires this, but just pretend so I can make my point), you might have a new perspective on what "fun" means.

Nothing is fun all the time, even the thing you love the most. And if you're doing the thing you love the most, and you're still not happy, you're kind of shit outta luck. Because then you realize your unhappiness is due not to the world oppressing you, but due to your being a whiny cunt. And so your self-hatred grows. Are you prepared to make this discovery about yourself?

I will continue to write, despite having already made the discovery that I hate myself (there's alcohol to deal with that problem). Whether I get paid or not, whether I get published or not, I'll write. And if you want to be a writer, the good news is, all you have to do is write. The bad news is, writing is impossible.** Accept the impossible and you'll do fine.

_____________________

*Okay, I'm leaving out the part where professional writers do have to spend more time at their craft and do have to tailor what they write for the public's/editors' taste. But that's it.
**And you probably won't get paid. But if you love it enough, you'll do it anyway.

Hey kids! Writing exercise time!

2011-01-20T23:05:00.002-06:00

Writing exercise: Write an excerpt from a fictional book review.

"Practical yet lofty, timeless yet ephemeral, lyrical yet phonetically drab: it is no small task to encompass all of these facets of literature in a single work, yet Delbert Zeta-Jones has managed to do exactly that. Walking Around Nkrumah Circle In Circles is what any travel memoirist in the age of the iPad strives to be: a study in contrasts."

"In The Courage to Smell, Beth Obama has spun a stunning yarn – perhaps even a fable, in the Thurberian sense; though in its best moments, it attains a parable-like state, peppered with allegorical elements – of precocity, bullets, and tragedy in the age of the Smartphone. But ultimately, Obama’s parable is, at heart, about the redeeming power of a mother’s perfume."

"Despite – or perhaps because of – its glib humor, The Brigadier General of the Hebrides, by newcomer Winn Winklevoss, fails to live up to the promise implicit in the table of contents (that of inspiring the kind of inner fortitude required to be a haberdasher in the age of the Kindle). It quickly degenerates into a masturbatory ménage-à-trois, a sort of guts-and-glory tale of pacifism, a needlessly prudish exercise in carnal debauchery."

"Were I to give pro bono advice to a bookstore patron contemplating the purchase of Akosua Ray Cyrus’s new novel, E Pluribus Unum, it would be: caveat emptor. The opus reads like the work of a woman who is not in toto compos mentis. Cyrus has said in interviews that she considers this volume to be sui generis, 'a sort of memento mori for the Skype generation.' But far from being a rara avis, the work is little more than a vox nihili; id est, it is not simply ars gratia artis. Cyrus’s modus operandi is to use every cliché from thinly-veiled ad hominem attacks on the alumni from her alma mater, to the cheap deus ex machina she rolls out for the finale. She owes the reading public a mea culpa."

Envy: The Impossibility of the Erotic Dream

2011-01-17T17:03:00.005-06:00

At 22, I was a community college dropout and a waitress in a pizza place downtown. The year 2000 was nearing, and I was not close to any of the goals I'd imagined I would have achieved by that pivotal year. The goal that had persisted throughout my childhood was to be a writer. There were other possibilities I'd considered; at age 4, a doctor/lawyer/actress hybrid; at age 9, an archaeologist; at age 15, a professional revolutionary.

But Writer was the one I returned to. Specifically, a published writer. I imagined I'd have to move to Manhattan, where I'd entertain the bohemian literati on my balcony, which, in my mind, was identical to the one where Annie Hall and Alvy Singer conducted their subtitled conversation.

I did go to New York at age 19, by Greyhound, anticipating my new life for two full days and a night as we rode through Madison, Chicago, Cleveland, the whole green length of Pennsylvania. For a summing-up of that experience, it is illustrative to refer to this story narrated by Mel Brooks, in which a young he, as a young man, meets the legendary Cary Grant and is so excited he can barely speak or function. He is dazzled in the presence of such mighty celebrity. Cary Grant -- Cary Grant! -- even invites him to lunch. And then Cary Grant invites him to lunch a second day. By the end of the week, Mel is actively avoiding Cary Grant: "I had nothing more to say to him!" In a similar vein, I was dazzled when I first disembarked at the Port Authority, but I found that after a month, New York and I had nothing left to say to one another.

So I wrote in Minneapolis instead. It was second-best. Okay. I revised my plans. I worked in obscurity.

I did some other shit too. I was in this stupid band that played to empty coffeeshops and bars. I traveled around the country (by Greyhound, mostly; sometimes by car or plane) to see friends and new places. But mostly, I was a community-college dropout and waitress. And not even one who got the good, Friday-night shifts. I got weekday lunches. (And this was when Clinton was president.)

In June of that year, friends began graduating from college. The four years since high school had sped by, obliterating the past into a flat jumble in my memory. I should have just stayed in college, I thought. I could be a college grad now. I could be checking the 2nd-to-highest box on warranty cards, if I ever bought new appliances. It was about the seventh in a series of panicky, existential crises.

I went to a good friend's graduation from art school. I had witnessed her evolution as an artist since we were high school freshmen together. She drew manga before I had ever heard of manga. I was really happy for her, but I also sat through the ceremony stabbed by feelings of regret and jealousy that I tried unsuccessfully to subdue. She had a solid base for her future plans. I was just being silly with my life.

Later, at her graduation party, we sat on her porch swing and ate cantaloupe and tortilla roll-ups. She told me about her plans to move to L.A. with her new boyfriend. It was a vision that seemed hopelessly beyond my reach, and she was discussing it with enviable insouciance when she interrupted herself and said, "I'm so jealous of you."

I nearly choked on a piece of melon. "What? Why?"

"I've been wasting my time in college for the last four years and you're living your life. You already have an apartment, and you're in this cool band, and you've traveled all over...You're an adult. Like, what have I done? I live with my parents."

"But you're moving to L.A! You have a degree now! You can do anything!"

"Eh. I'll get some crappy job. If I'm really lucky I'll get to assist an animator's assistant or something. That's if I hit it big."

"My job is horribly crappy, trust me."

"But you don't have loans to pay off. And you're in a band! I don't know, I'm just second-guessing all my decisions."

The lessons from this barely need to be stated. But, in case you are dim: 1) Everyone's life is enviable to someone, 2) People who appear to have enviable lives probably don't. These are things that I know, rationally, are true, but have a hard time remembering in day to day life.

What we desire, once we achieve it, rarely has the effect on us that we assume it will. V. S. Naipaul: "We seek sex, and are left with two private bodies on a stained bed. The larger erotic dream, the god, has eluded us. It is so whenever, moving out of ourselves, we look for extensions of ourselves." Our vision never matches the reality. We achieve a goal (maybe), we are momentarily pleased. And then everything is the same again, mostly. No matter what we achieve or change in our lives we can never, in the end, escape ourselves. For most of us, there isn't a magical point at which everything is permanently okay. And who would want that kind of stasis, anyway?

So we see those who have what we think we want, and we are jealous. Jealousy is just misdirected striving. It's understandable, but unproductive. I have to constantly remind myself of this.

Most of us are equally miserable, albeit for different reasons. Not a happy conclusion, but nonetheless. To reference Annie Hall again: "I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable....The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled....And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable."

The best we can do is to find the beauty in "two bodies on a stained bed" after the erotic dream has dissipated. There is beauty in this too.

Lovely morning

2011-01-03T09:53:00.001-06:00

Lovely morning on the block, I guess.

Not my block. I wouldn't tell you where I live.

Not my block either.

Lovely morning for a walk.

Lovely morning for cathedrals.

Lovely morning at the High Bridge. I took a picture of sunrise over the Mississippi but alas, I'm an asshole with a camera. You'll have to use your imagination.

Lovely morning at the ol' coal plant.

Lovely morning along the tracks.

Lovely morning in the sky.

Good morning from the cold, quiet edge of the world.

The Fictive Continuum

2010-12-15T11:08:00.015-06:00

An acquaintance who is writing a memoir is perplexed by the capacity to write fiction, and I in turn am annoyed when I have to (or choose to) write non.

"How do you do it?" she asked me. "I mean, how do you think up story ideas? I really have no ideas. I have to write what I know."

"How do you think of story ideas?" is a question many writers (fiction or non) mock, but it's a perfectly valid question. And I might ask her the same thing: how is it your own reality is enough to write about?

I am a disaster at nonfiction. I've never been adept at writing my own reality or anyone else's. Fiction is a way of interpreting for me, a way of dealing with the world. It's a personality defect more than anything else. I write fiction because I have huge problems with nonfiction. (This is not to say that the two are mutually exclusive, and many writers are capable in both; I just happen to have a predilection for the made-up.)

Here are three and a half reasons I don't like writing nonfiction:

1) I've had a dull life.

I don't know that it's been dull so much as it's followed the most expected trajectory you could think of for a member of my demographic. Born in the 70's, divorced parents, listened to Madonna in the 80's, Nirvana in the 90's, a brief enmeshing in punk rock, MIA in the 00's; I rebelled as expected, experimented with drugs, experimented with non-Western religion, deep depression, Prozac, deferred college, protested, traveled the world, went to college, went vegetarian, read The Corrections, had a baby, started using more asafoetida in my cooking, had more babies, learned to make bread and homemade mozzarella, voted for Obama, house went underwater along with everyone else's, lost job like everyone else, went back to meat-eating, the end. There's my memoir. Ta da. Look up "Gen X Stereotype" and there I am.

There are no new stories, of course, just retellings, so I could conceivably tell my story again, but it seems so whiny. I haven't had the kind of hardship necessary to write engaging nonfiction about myself.*

2) I don't have the insight or empathy to write about other people.

And if I were to write nonfiction about some arena outside of myself? About politics, or music criticism, or the history of fonts? Forget it. I live in my head. I'm blind to all else. As far as writing opinions, criticism and the like...I don't have any opinions. Because of my paucity of knowledge, I am simply too ignorant to form an opinion. I am hopelessly un-well-read. If I have a strong opinion on something, I tend to change it once I research the subject to my satisfaction.

3) Nonfiction is fiction anyway, but more dishonest about it.

To contradict everything I just said, I have written nonfiction. There was college, of course, where I had to write reams of papers that analyzed Freud and Foucault, Balzac and Hitchcock, and it was mostly bullshit. In college I acquired a fair degree of facility in the field of bullshitting, which, it seems, is what nonfiction is about.

And I've written a couple of articles about food. One of them was full of half-memories and perhaps even a fib. I mean, food? How do you write about food? You have to shellac an immediacy of meaning on each dining experience you write about, which tends to not be present at the moment you are dining. It's just food. It doesn't have a moral. Which leads me to:

3B) I find it hard to extract morals from reality.

Again, this leads to some truth-stretching.

Nonfiction involves narrative arcs and denouements just as surely as fiction does; the problem is, reality does not come embedded with narrative arcs and denouements, so imposing these on factual events involves either lying or pathological rearranging.

_____________________

So nonfiction seems dishonest to me; fictitious, in other words.

In a bar once (because that is where all relevant conversations are held) an inebriated gentleman explained to me that what made Hank Williams’ music so great was the fact that his lyrics were autobiographical: the old truth-equals-beauty fallacy. Well, it may have been true that Hank heard a whippoorwill, a mournful train whistle, and a robin weeping at exactly the same moment as leaves died, a moon went behind the clouds, and a star fell in the sky. But of course, they weren’t really weeping along with him and his loneliness: it merely seemed that way. Hank anthropomorphized some natural phenomena and it made a lovely song. Fiction.

Everything is fiction to a greater or lesser extent. I may as well write fiction.

So, how do you write fiction? How do you craft something out of nothing?

While nonfiction is based on true events, fiction is simply based on true events that didn't happen. Fiction is what could have happened, or could still happen. Maybe because of my normal-trajectory life I am fascinated by what isn't. I am aware of the possibilities, and I enjoy exploring them. Fiction is all of that. Fiction is what isn't (but not necessarily what you want to be). Fiction is supposing. Fiction is noticing: noticing all the things that are the same on your 5,000th drive from Minneapolis to St. Paul on I-94, and then noticing what is different, and then wondering what else could be different. Fiction is seams and interstices and the unspokenness they conceal. Fiction is pretending to live forever. Fiction is knowing that you don't have to understand. Fiction is what you wanted to say but didn't. Fiction is who you wanted to love but couldn't.

A marginally illustrative anecdote: before I had ever eaten authentic African food, I got some cookbooks from the library and learned to make West African meals, or what I thought West African meals were. Jollof rice, palava sauce, groundnut soup, gari foto. Of course, every cook imprints her own taste on a dish, and my food assuredly was marked as my own. When I eventually traveled to West Africa, I wasn't terribly surprised to find that the food was miles from my own attempts at replicating this cuisine. It is sort of like learning to read a foreign language before you ever hear it, without learning the phonetics of the language; the spoken reality is removed from the reality you had created in your head.

I still cook West African food every now and then, but there are now two versions of this cuisine in my head: the Pre-Real version and the Real version. Before I plan a meal, I have to decide which type of food I want to create.

Creating the Real version, I've found, is much trickier than the Pre-Real version. Why should this be? Well, you have to follow a formula to craft the Real version. There is a specific way, or a few or many specific ways, but any deviation from those guidelines results in a different product, one that will disappoint those who seek out the Real version. If I were to cook for Ghanaians homesick for the version of groundnut soup they grew up with, I would surely not satiate their homesickness.

With the Pre-Real version, I can do things my way. I guess this makes me a bit of a control freak. But in truth, I tend to prefer the Pre-Real to the Real. I hone it to the tastes that I am used to and that I prefer.

Thus it is with the fictive continuum. When I attempt to replicate reality, I come up short.

There is a Right way to do everything, and there is the way I do things, the Ambiguous Way, the Potentially Wrong Way. I simply don't have the prerequisite knack or inclination to do things the Right Way, and that is why I write fiction.

*I do not mean to imply by this that I accept the myth that artists must suffer to make art.

What We Can Learn From Grizzlies

2010-11-24T10:35:00.001-06:00

Sarah Palin’s got a point about humans being able to learn from the behavior of grizzly bears. Some lessons we can extrapolate from bear culture:

*No talking. Bears do not have language. We should growl, and maybe moan when in pain.

*Fishing should be undertaken using nothing but our formidable paws.

*Our ideal weight is 1200 pounds (about 544 kg).

*Naturally, we must go naked at all times.

*Mating must take place between May and July, after which (serial monogamy being the ideal), we must take leave of our partners until the next mating season. Fathers must, under no circumstances, take any part in child-rearing.

*It is sometimes acceptable for a father to kill and eat his children (if he's super-hungry or they're just annoying him), or to kill his children in order to make his female partner sexually receptive.

*Children should leave their mother’s home between the ages of two and four.

*We should eat a nutritious diet of fish, roots, berries, moths, the occasional deer or moose, and carrion.

Feel free to add any additional moral lessons below.

Jax's Ghost Story

2010-11-22T14:35:00.001-06:00

Note: I swear this isn't going to turn into a blog about my kids. I swear.

Jax: I’m going to tell you a scary story. Once there was a spaceship. And it fell to earth and then a big giant snowstorm started. It got windier and windier and windier and windier and windier and windier and windier and WINDIER and WINDIER….and then it snowed…on a flowerpot! And then a skeleton hand came out of the flowerpot….it was very creepy. [To Harold]: Are you getting too scared?

Harold: Yeah.

Jax: Okay. But I’m going to keep telling the story. So…it got darker and darker and darker and darker and darker and darker….

Harold [close to tears]: Stop! It’s too scary!

Jax: ….and then the hand stopped! On a little sack! Do you want to know what was in the sack?

Harold: Yeah. What was in the sack?

Jax: I can never tell you.

Harold: Was it a little kitten?

Jax: Yes! It was! He unlocked the key to the sack and he scribbled around and he came out with his cat food and he was very cute. The end.

Harold: Was the sack his home?

Jax: Yes!

Harold: But how could he sleep in there when it’s like so small?

Jax: It was a very big sack.

Harold: Oh. Let's play Batman.

Mediocrity

2010-11-11T10:54:00.007-06:00

I tried to be a writer in high school. I joined a student writing group my sophomore year. There were, like, five of us in the group. We met in Mr. Beede's* room. He was the cool English teacher. He never used the overhead fluorescent lights; instead, he set up thrift store lamps, and in place of desks, his room had bean bags and couches, in egalitarian formation (choose your own image; it's probably accurate). He subjected us to the tyranny of discussions rather than lectures. Of course he did; he was the cool one.

He was always happy, which pissed me off. The good students, the ones he liked, called him "Donald," but I couldn't shed my conventional ways. The best I could do was to call him "Beede," though in moments of obeisance I may have added the "mister." I heard rumors after I'd graduated that he got fired for assigning a poem that offended a student, because it mentioned a vulva or something.

I wasn't a student of consequence, to Mr. Beede or any other teacher. I got D's in his classes. I took a Shakespeare class and a poetry class with him. I didn't get Shakespeare, and I didn't get poetry. I loved writing and reading but I couldn't think about books in the way I was supposed to. I got an A in word processing, and in my playwriting class, and in French, always, and I even got an A in economics. I wasn't supposed to be the kind of student who got D's in English.

Beede announced one day a great opportunity for aspiring writers...there was one slot left in a 10-week workshop at the Walker Art Center, taught by a writer from New York whose novel had been optioned for a movie. We could have our work critiqued by a real WRITER from NEW YORK CITY and the workshop would culminate in our writing being PUBLISHED in a MAGAZINE (to be distributed amongst ourselves). I had never heard of the writer, but it sounded like a step up from the student writing group. I approached Beede after class.

"Oh my god, I would love to be in this workshop! I love writing! I bet I would love this writer!"

"Uh....well, no one else has expressed an interest in it yet....So I guess I could sign you up." He seemed annoyed, and I got the impression he was signing me up only because no one else wanted to. "But you know, Katherine, this isn't just something you can not show up for." He was referring to my minuscule stint on the Speech team, of which he was the coach. I had underprepped for the first tournament, then overslept on the Saturday morning I was supposed to be in Eden Prairie competing and missed the whole thing. I made it to the second tournament, only to find myself exactly in last place with my reading of Allen Ginsberg's "America." The judges, it turned out, didn't like the Eff word. They liked my impoverished speaking skills even less. So Speech wasn't my thing. I'd already moved on to Debate, which I dropped a month later.

"No, I promise. This is really important to me."

So, every Monday for ten weeks, I took a bus up Hennepin to the Walker, and rode an elevator up to a mysterious room past the galleries, where I met with the NEW YORK WRITER and other students from around Minneapolis, ones who probably didn't get D's in Shakespeare, to share poetry and stories and critique each other. I developed a little crush on the WRITER. He wasn't an asshole New Yorker; he was from the Bronx, and easy to talk to, and he didn't seem to hold our Midwesternness against us. He smoked a lot of pot, he said. He wrote everything on a manual typewriter, and bragged about how he'd break computer keyboards from banging on them typewriter-style. (I, of course, got myself a typewriter at the earliest opportunity.) He had interesting and fervent ideas about writers I'd never heard of, and about potential designs for our magazine. I remember in particular his disdain for the magazine "Ray Gun," and since I found "Ray Gun" breathlessly cool, I found his disdain for it even breathlessly cooler. His ideas were so fervent that he had a falling-out with the director of the teen writing program over some minor issue or other, and left abruptly before final week of the workshop, whereupon my crush deepened.

He came back to Minneapolis the following month, to do a reading at Hungry Mind bookstore. I was elated that the WRITER treated me like an old friend after the reading, and signed my copy of his book with an exhortation to keep writing forever.

The magazine came out and I was horribly embarrassed to see my poems there, in print, alongside other teenagers' work that was way better than mine. My vocabulary was slight. My D in Shakespeare was evident. My failure on the speech team was a warning I hadn't heeded. Who the fuck was I? Beede was right to be annoyed by me. I was right to know that I hadn't earned the right to call him Donald.

The workshop done, my Debate days over, I tried out for "The Merchant of Venice." I didn't get a role. The following semester, I tried out for "Fiddler on the Roof." I got a part in the chorus. I spent the rehearsals stoned. Quite stoned. Theater, it turned out, wasn't my thing either. Pot was my thing, and writing, even though my heavy Royal typewriter inflicted welts on my fingers.

****

Some years later, I emailed the WRITER. I reminded him who I was and told him how meaningful the workshop had been to me. "I think I remember you...." he wrote back. "Didn't you knit me a hat?"

I wrote back that I had not, in fact, knitted him a hat. I had never knitted in my life. I didn't hear from him after that. I still have the signed copy of his book, but no longer the manual typewriter.

________________

*Given the sensitive nature of being fired over poems about vulvae, I have taken the prudent step of changing the English teacher's name.

How Writing Is Like Cat Shit

2010-11-06T15:30:00.003-05:00

I always sort of believed that writing would take care of itself, that even if I was never published or read, even if I was miserable, writing would somehow improve my lot. That's the lie that well-meaning teachers and authors of writing books like to repeat, and the lie we have to tell ourselves to keep going: the Good will somehow, even if on a transcendently moral level, come out on top (Good=writers, in this instance. Try not to think about that too much.). When I write, my overarching mental state is one of extreme cognitive dissonance: I tell myself I'm doing important work, even if it's not exactly affecting anybody.

But some of the time, the dissonance wears off and reality confronts me: there just doesn't seem to be any point to writing. What has it gotten me, really? Deeper self-awareness? Big fucking deal. Sometimes I’d rather be more aware of the greater world. I write to communicate; I don’t know how to talk to people, so I write. But in that regard, my writing life has been an utter failure, since most of what I've written sits sadly in my hard drive, or (best case scenario) in a literary magazine's slushpile, communicated only to the imaginary friends* I've never fully shed.

What has writing not gotten me? In the time I don't spend writing, I could be making my yard into a not-jungle. I could be exercising, so I wouldn't be so fat. I could have a real job and make actual real legal tender money so I could take my kids to the doctor and shit.** I've wasted many evenings perfecting sentences on the page when I could have been out perfecting conversation and making real friends with real brains. I could be on for my kids, instead of doing my best to tune them out so I can think about what I’m going to write in that rare, weary moment at the end of the day or before the day has begun, when I can steal some alone time.

Don't mistake all this to mean that I don't love writing. I do. I love the blank page, I love the words that roll out initially, when nobody's watching, I love dictionaries and etymologies, I grow to love my characters and find myself engrossed in their conversations.

That's how I feel about the first draft. Then I read it, and it's something I want to destroy, something I wish I'd never brought into existence. Bile. Centipedes. A hangover. It's like when I take my kids to the playground, and there's all this promise, all this fun, and then while we are digging in the sand my hand squishes into a pile of cat shit. Well, that's never actually happened, but if it did, it would kind of ruin my time at the playground, and I'd have to go home and wash up, and my kids would be crying, and they would hate me for making them leave early, and then I'd run into a neighbor as I was walking home, and they'd want to chat, and I'd have to either stand there stinking and trying to hide my catshit-covered hand, or explain that I had to go home and wash the shit off my hand. That's how it is every time I write something. It's a ball of fun, marred by the outcome. Promise, then shit. And people pissed off at/grossed out by me.

Eh. Ignore the shit. It's the best we can do. I guess.

*Yeah, I had two when I was a kid. Creso and Seekos.

**I'm sacrificing my kids' future for a laughable dream.

A few words

2010-10-26T18:22:00.003-05:00

The more acquainted the interwebs and I become, the more I realize that there are, like, millions of fiction writers out there. Maybe. I’m the kind of person who’s never had a secure grasp on numbers. A million, I’ve been told, is a lot. Like, it would take a long time to count to a million, maybe half a million seconds. And half a million, too, is a lot. I think. (How long is half a million seconds? I’m going to guess 4 days.*)

Anyway, the sheer number of fiction writers out there depresses me. Because out of every million, 999,910 of them are crappy. (This is a scientifically derived number.) Or even worse, mediocre (why is mediocre worse than crappy? Because you can’t really make fun of the mediocre). And there is a much, much more depressing and urgent assumption to be extrapolated from that number, which is as follows:

I could be one of those 999,910!

I know, you didn’t want to hear that, but I don’t sugarcoat.

When I was young and idiotic**, it was easy to assume that there were two breeds of writers: the published (good), and me (shitty). Presumably, there were other unpublisheds like me, but not that many; after all, I didn’t really know any writers. Unpublished and semi-published and self-published writers didn’t have blogs where they lamented every step of the process. So, it seemed, if I was good enough I would make the jump to published (and, hopefully, not that breed of published that sat on the dollar shelf at the B. Dalton entrance), and since I wasn’t published, I obviously sucked.

Now, I am aware of the many levels of writers. There are shittier, more successful writers than me, and there are better, less successful writers than me.*** This is helpful because it gives me hope. It is unhelpful because it makes me jealous and I can witness firsthand the competition.

In 1993 my competition was sitting photocopied on a zine rack in an indie record shop, full of typos and sharpie drawings. Now? My competition seems a lot more formidable. I should just give up. What the fuck am I doing? What right have I to make my thoughts known? None, just an inexplicable desire to stand naked in front of humanity and scream my most disturbed thoughts. Which, in the end, is what writing is all about.

Cheerio.

____________________

*I just calculated the actual amount: about 5 3/4 days. I don’t recommend trying to count to a million.

**One should not conclude from this statement that I am no longer idiotic.

***Just kidding. No one’s less successful than me, shitty or not.

Torso Script

2010-10-24T13:14:00.004-05:00

In the absence of time to create any wondrous new blog posts, I am posting the script of a mini-comic I did for an anthology, like a year ago. (No, this is not the most recent thing I wrote. I keep very busy writing new shit.) It was illustrated by the illustrious Ryan Kelly. Anyway, if you like it, see a preview of the art and/or buy the Side B Anthology here. Lots of other good shit in the book too. Enjoy.

_____________________________________________

TORSO

By Kat Vapid

PAGE 1

PANEL 1: Outside of dingy club, à la Fireside Bowl or some shit. We see the sign: INSURRECTION ALLEY, and a brick building, maybe grain elevators or downtown in the distance. It’s snowing hard and the streets are lined with cars and outside are one or two punks smoking.

PANEL 2: close-up of flyer on door:

THIS SATURDAY MOFOS!

Friday, January 18, 2008

At INSURRECTION ALLEY

1225 N.E. PARRANT ST., MINNEAPOLIS

ANARCHO-PUNK MANIA!!!

FEATURING:

FLORIDA MACHINE

With:

DECIMATION (U.K.)

the SCREAMIN’ BITCHES (Chicago)

the TORSOS

BLUNT DAGGER (LaCrosse)

DOORS 8:00

MUSIC 9:00

18+ FUCKERS!!!!!!

$10

smoking preffered

PANEL 3: Inside of club, maybe throw in some panels of the show winding down, people drinking, etc.

PANEL 4 Backstage. The Torsos have just played and are sitting around drinking. There are guitars, ripped flyers, all the usual trappings.

Band members are: Gina (lead), Jason, Max, Saul.

Gina swigs from her giant Newcastle bottle.

PANEL 5

GINA: Fuck! I’m sorry, but we kicked ass!

PANEL 6: Rest of the band sitting around quietly, looking down.

PANEL 7

MAX: You thought so? I fucked up during “Empty 40.”

I mean, the set was all right…

GINA: Waaayy better than 7^th Street. More people, too.

PAGE 2

PANEL 1.

JASON (to Max, quietly): You gonna tell her, Max, or should I?

MAX: Uh….

GINA: Tell me what? You’re pregnant?

TINY PANEL 1.5

GINA:(giggles)

PANEL 2

JASON (looking pissed): You’re out of the band.

PANEL 3

GINA (jokingly): Oh, right. (drinks).

PANEL 4: <Maybe like a horizontal strip across the page?>

We see the three band members from Gina’s perspective; they are all stone-faced.

PANEL 5

Gina’s face is in shock as she realizes they are serious.

PANEL 6

GINA: Oh…you’re fuckin’ serious.

PANEL 7

GINA: Well, who the fuck is gonna sing? I am the Torsos. I am the Torso.

JASON: Julianna, from AK-77.

PAGE 3

PANEL 1

GINA: Julianna? What the fuck, man? If I have an archenemy, it’s her! I mean, she’s talentless. She has no stage presence! Why her?

SAUL: She’s a good worker and she’s really nice.

GINA: Did you just say nice? I’m not sure how that’s relevant. I mean, I add so much to this band. All the reviews of our music, they all said I have a great voice.

PANEL 2:

JASON: Gina, you think you’re a good member of the band? You’re combative. And always drunk.

GINA: Combative? That’s the whole point of punk rock!

JASON: No, it’s about helping each other out and building an alternative community.

PANEL 3

GINA: Did you seriously just say that? All you care about is being featured in Punk Planet, in headlining at 7^th Street. Community, give me a fuckin’ break.

JASON: You see? You don’t get along with anyone. You need to respect people more.

PANEL 4

GINA (pointing to self): Stage. Presence!

PANEL 5

JASON: I mean, you need to go somewhere and get your shit together.

GINA: You don’t make any fuckin’ sense. Do you wanna make kick-ass music, or do you wanna have a fuckin’ hippie love-in? Christ!

PANEL 6

GINA: Max, are you on my side? Or you agree with this bullshit about me being combative?

PANEL 7

MAX (not looking at Gina): Um…you can be – a little on the argumentative side. I mean, it’s not all bad, but…we all gotta work together in a band.

MAX: We all like you, Gina. It’s just – professional. You know.

GINA: All right, man. Fuck this.

PAGE 4

PANEL 1

Gina picks up her bag.

GINA: Enjoy your new fuckin’ lead singer.

PANEL 2 Large panel? Outside, Gina shown from behind and above as she trudges through the snow. As she walks away she mumbles to herself, lights cigarettes, drops shit from her bag, etc.)

PANEL 3

GINA: …alternative community….combative….don’t make me fuckin’ laugh

PANEL 4

GINA: …drunk……respect…get my shit together….fuckin’ bullshit.

PANEL 5 Gina sees exterior of bar that says:

LAST CHANCE BAR

HAP Y HOUR 4-6

THURS BILL WILLARD BLUEGRASS BAND

FRI KARAOKE

PANEL 6

GINA (smiling): Oooh…

PAGE 5:

PANEL 1: Interior of bar; Gina framed in the doorway, wind & snow whipping inside; it’s sort of a record-scratching moment, as the mouth-breathing locals turn to look at her.

PANEL 2: Guy is onstage singing

I got friends in low places, Where the whiskey drowns and the beer chases my blues away.

PANEL 3: GINA sits at table while guy sings in background:

I'm not big on social graces, think I'll slip on down to the oasis….

PANEL 4

UNSMILING WAITRESS: What can I get you?

GINA: Surly Furious, please.

PANEL 5:

WAITRESS: We don’t have that.

GINA: Summit?

WAITRESS: Nope.

GINA: Grain Belt?

WAITRESS: ‘Kay.

PANEL 6: Gina looks at karaoke book.

PANEL 7: Waitress sets beer on table.

PAGE 6

PANEL 1: Gina sips.

PANEL 2

KARAOKE GUY: Okay, folks, we got a newcomer comin’ on up here. Let’s welcome Gina to the stage!

PANEL 3: Onstage. Music is playing.

PANEL 4-5:

GINA (singing): My dream world tumbled to the gro-ho-hound….the one I love has let me down….

GINA: …Oh stop the world and let me oo-oo-ooff!

PANEL 6: Crowd cheering.

PANEL 7: Gina walks to table smiling.

KARAOKE GUY (unseen): Wow, great job by newbie Gina…okay, we got Judy comin’ back up here, Captain Ken is on deck, Mike’s in the hole…

PANEL 8: Gina sits at table and drinks beer contentedly.

So Long, Ari Up

2010-10-21T13:43:00.008-05:00

Oh, man. Ari Up is dead.

The Slits released their first album, "Cut," in 1979, when I was two years old. I didn't become aware of them until I was well into my teenage years, around the time Bikini Kill was busy revamping the Slits' influence. I heard Bikini Kill before I heard the Slits. I was floored when I first heard Kathleen Hanna screaming about issues as big as incest and as little as feeling awkward in a room full of guys. My God, that glorious screaming! You can do that? Sure, I had heard many of the great screams of rock, from James Brown (soul, whatever) to Axl Rose. But to hear girls screaming, and ferociously embracing the femininity of their screams: this, to me, was novel. This was something I could hope to replicate.

[I only mention the Slits and Bikini Kill together because, in my memory, they are nearly inextricable. A listen-to-the-Slits kind of day was always a listen-to-Bikini-Kill kind of day, and vice versa.]

I wasn't aware at first, listening to BK's horror-house shrieks, that they were following in Ari Up's footsteps, but I soon discovered the Slits as well, and fell in love with their sloppy blend of punk and reggae. The Slits were gleeful in their rebellion. Their political stance wasn't informed by hopelessness; they were subverting norms by the simple act of enjoying being anti-norm, of injecting fun into their music. Ari's scream on "Shoplifting" is not so much one of anger or despair but of pure joy at fucking things up in small ways. (A sentiment that Hanna reiterated over a decade later, when she sang about the "radical possibilities of pleasure.") You can improve your own situation in a series of moments; monolithic change is optional.

10 quid for the lot/we paid fuck-all
Babylonian won't lose much/and we'll have dinner tonight

Eventually, I joined a band myself and stood screaming before a crowd (usually, though not always, a sparse one), singing horrible lyrics about the worthlessness of money and religion, rolling around on stage, taunting the audience lovingly, getting taunted back, getting a drink tossed in my face at my last show by a guy who I then chased down the street, in heels, wielding a pool cue. It was never a way of life for me, but it was a way of capturing naked joy and reveling in a moment and loving the sweet scream of it all. Did the Slits make all that possible?

This morning I played the Slits' live album, "In the Beginning," at breakfast. My kids were dancing at the table even as they told me the music was too loud, and marveled over the screams: "This is crazy!" Ari Up continues to amaze even the prematurely jaded youth of the 21st century. So long, Ari Up.

No, I do not have the responsibility to be privy to the same set of facts that you are

2010-10-18T03:28:00.005-05:00

The tweeter who chastised me for being unfunny is proving to be quite humorless himself. His latest tweet, which I'm sure was directed at me (apologies if it wasn't; I am pretty stupid, after all) referred to smart* people who think they "shouldn't have to know better." He also tweeted a link to the Postmodern Generator, presumably to prove that I was being unoriginal.

Seriously? That's all you've got? What is it you feel I should "have to know" about? You think I should be aware of some obscure website that had previously told the same joke I did? Are you actually faulting me for being unaware of a single website's existence?

If that is in fact what you're trying to say (that I should "have to know" the same set of facts that you do), well, that's an awfully hegemonic view of knowledge, and you should know better than to insist that my knowledge align exactly with yours.

If that is not what you're saying, and by saying that I should "know better" you are referring to something else, then tell me. Supposing I am stupid or ignorant (believe me, I do my best to not be willfully ignorant. Any ignorance on my part is due to lack of opportunity or experience, which you should not fault me for). Try to inform me. Try to enlighten me, instead of sitting there in front of your Blackberry and mocking me.

There are a million jokes without punchlines. Here's one, from the "The Rutles"; I think it's funny:

Listen, looking at it very simply musicology and ethnically, the Rutles were essentially Imperical maleonglece of a rhythmically radical yet verbally passé and temporally transcended lyrically content welded with historically innovative melodical material transposed and transmogrified by the ankus of the Rutland ethic experience which elevated them from essentially alpha exponents of in essence merely beta potential harmonic material into the prime cultural exponents of Aloin condensic comic standard form.

There's no punchline there, pal. Comedy can be a literary mode (read Northrop Frye) as well as a funny ha-ha moment.

Yeah, so my joke (or whatever it was, blank-faced satire, say) came 30 years too late. Woody Allen, in "Annie Hall," repeated jokes by both Groucho Marx and Freud, who died nearly 40 years before "Annie Hall" was made. And you know what? The jokes were still funny.**

As for your comment about my "excess hostility," um, dude? You are the one who tweeted a link to my blog and said it was unfunny. You started this shit; you tried to put a woman in her place for attempting comedy; I merely responded. I'm guessing you, too, would be pissed if someone linked to your blog, unprovoked, with a nasty comment next to it, simply over a disagreement about whether something was funny. And I can't help but feel that if a man had made a stupid joke on a little-traversed blog, you would have ignored it, rather than publicly mocked the person and condescendingly told him that he "should have known better."

I will continue to defend the right and the necessity to fuck up occasionally (fucking up includes making substandard jokes), as there is no human on earth who does not fuck up occasionally.

God, this discussion of what is and is not funny is so fucking unfunny. I have to go watch Catherine Tate now.

____________

*So, I am smart? Or am I not? Shall I take an IQ test to determine the matter once and for all? If you first referred to me as not that bright, and then later as smart, then you are guilty of the exact same thing you're accusing me of: making a mistake. This is a blog with a disclaimer at the top (it's for me); this is not a peer-reviewed journal.

**Your original response to my original post said that my joke "stopped being funny in 1997," indicating that it was at one time funny. If it was at one time funny, then whatever, you just happen to not like repetition, which many great comedians would disagree with. If it was never funny, then your quip about it not being funny was your own attempt at being funny/ironic, via a punchlineless joke, and you should have no problem with me attempting the same type of joke.

Fuck What You Think You Know

2010-10-17T13:20:00.001-05:00

I wrote a post a couple weeks ago about how you shouldn’t try to veer too far from what you know when you write. That contradicted an earlier post, in which I admitted I don't always know what the fuck I'm doing when I write (this is probably true most of the time).

Then some jerk on Twitter took umbrage at a completely stupid, humorous post I put up, throwing my own words back at me and implying he was more intelligent than me and I should just shut the fuck up because I’m unfunny and behind the times.

Dude, my posts are not meant to be erudite or enlightening. I see this blog as writing practice, a way of dumping out ideas I have without really thinking about them, before I move on to my real writing for the day. You know what I do when I think a blog is uninspiring, stupid, pompous, or boring? I close the window and find something that does interest me. I don’t waste my time berating people on Twitter who I think are less intelligent than me, unless they are Sarah Palin. That’s an asshole thing to do. And don’t assume that I don’t know anything about critical theory. It was my fucking major in college, though I admit I could never be as intimately knowledgeable about Derrida as you must be. Just because you get a hard-on from deconstructing Pynchon doesn’t mean you have to be all sensitive when I make a joke about theorists. It’s a fucking joke!* Since you’re a brilliant philosopher, I assume you’re acquainted with Henri Bergson, who referred to comedy as the “encrustation of the mechanical on the living.” If the passage I wrote, along with many of the artless academic articles written by some of Derrida’s acolytes, is not an example of mechanical encrustation, then fuck me, I’ll get out of the fucking comedy business, okay?** I admire Foucault and Lacan, but I’m against some of their humorless intellectual heirs who mistake obfuscation for good writing (and I think that the word “to-be-looked-at-ness” should never have been coined). And congratulations on never having made a mistake or said anything stupid in your life, Tesla.

Anyway, overreaction, sorry.

Back to my original point: I enjoy writing what I don’t know about. I get hopelessly bored writing about my own life or people who are like me. For the most part, I’ve led a boring life, except for a brief phase between the ages of 12-25 when I purposely sought out dangerous situations as a way of combating the stasis of my middle-class Midwestern upbringing. So, yeah, I write about things I've probably no right to. I just wrote a story that involves a professor I describe as “brilliant” – a big no-no, according to my own rules, but I hope the result is at least kind of funny. It’s not a story that will go anywhere, but it’s a departure, and thus something of a challenge. It’s play, which is fun and useful.

Children engage in productive play unthinkingly. This is the successor to babble: it seems to have no meaning, but it is incredibly useful. Children can’t learn to talk without babbling nonsense; they can’t learn how to work or interact without imaginative play. But when you watch them playing, it doesn’t always look like play: it doesn’t look like extreme fun. They are concentrating hard, trying to figure things out without even know that they’re trying to figure things out.

A lot of us forget, as we grow up, how to engage in productive play, so we engage in unproductive play like drugs and alcohol. I'm not knocking substance use; I love drinking, I love wine, I love being a little buzzed (but no longer enjoy drunkenness as I once did), and as a committed introvert, I love getting that extra boost in social situations, but I doubt whether this is actually productive. I don’t remember the first time I was bored, but it was probably in school, where you sometimes got in trouble for getting too absorbed in things you enjoyed, like writing or drawing (my fifth grade teacher once dumped the contents of my desk – tons of stories and drawings – in the garbage. But sorry, filling out a worksheet on major explorers is fucking boring. I had better things to do). A lot of people settle into this boredom as a matter of course, and retain it through adulthood. I haven’t experienced boredom in years. This is mostly a function of having children, but also of having a passion. When I do have free moments, I spend them writing. And I alleviate what can sometimes be a tedious process by playing as I write, forgetting what I don’t know and bullshitting my way through it. The end result may not be sexy, but I do learn from the process. Maybe.

When I was learning Spanish, so many of the students were so afraid of making mistakes that they rarely spoke in class. The students who were willing to display their substandard Spanish frequently and brazenly, substituting words when they didn’t know the correct one, were the ones who actually improved. It’s the same with many subjects. You have to fuck up.

So, fuck what you know. Making mistakes is the only way to learn. And go ahead and contradict yourself. Only assholes are paying attention.

____________________

*Edward de Bono says jokes are only funny the first time, so I’m sorry I rehashed a joke whose form you were familiar with; I apologize that your sense of humor is obviously much more sophisticated than mine. I, on the other hand, watch Woody Allen movies and Laurel and Hardy over and over again, and appreciate their comedy every time; I laugh in anticipation of familiar jokes.

**This was a joke.*** I’m not in the comedy business, I’m an unknown nobody who writes a blog that gets 10 or fewer hits a day. Live up to your critical theory tenets and go taunt somebody in power.

***Was my joke an example of what Baudelaire called intersubjective comedy? Paul De Man described this form as being based on the “superiority of one subject over another, with all the implications of will to power, of violence, and possession which come into play when a person is laughing at someone else.” Was I in fact laughing at someone else’s superiority? Or was it an example of comique absolu, the ironic form of comedy, wherein the subject relates not to others on a hierarchical scale, but back to itself? The moment of irony creates a duality within the subject, which invites a momentary self-reflection that makes apparent the faultiness of a subject’s former relationship to and conception of itself.****

****God, I’m an asshole.

Phallogocentric Aesthetics and the Non-Oppressed Status of the Signified in Pre-Post-20th Century Art: A Deconstructionist Non-Propositional Critique

2010-10-16T13:16:00.002-05:00

[Note: This is a sample from a paper I'm working on, to be submitted to an academic journal that addresses Critical Theory and Cultural Studies. In the paper, I discuss a well-known but unnamed work of art, for to name something is to own it, control it, and thereby ultimately destroy it.]

The female subject is here depicted as an inanimate object, albeit with an appendage that is decidedly phallic. In Lacanian terms, this is the semiotic prerequisite for acquiring agency present in the androgynistic globularism of conception, lost the moment this wholeness of structuristic recompensation partakes of phallogocentric sexualistic castrative division while yet residing in the womb. This duplistic lack severs its consciousness from the (in Cixousesque terminology) cathected simulacra of the societalized fissure operating as a real mode of operationalization in the patriarchalized schema of pseudorealist imaginary temptationificationalism, suppressing the biologistically phony, yet ideally “real,” (in Foucaultian terminologification), in order to reintegrate the ambisexual vulva within the electronicated parameters of spiralized ineffectual lesbianism that is the functional equivalent to, or at least repressed rebellionizationisimity for, the acted telephonic unified totalitarian condition of the 20^th-century fullness of lubrification of the secondary fragmentellated, but as yet “un”-recastrated, clitoris. Clearly, this indicates that the body itself is a social construct.

I need more graphics

2010-10-16T11:27:00.000-05:00

I need more graphics on here. No, fuck it. I can't deal with that shit right now.

Without Your Love and Affection: The Untold Story of Nelson

2010-10-15T13:39:00.002-05:00

This is a scene from a film script I'm writing. It's an epic biopic of the legendary band Nelson. This scene comes close to the end, just before they embark on their 5th comeback tour.

SCENE: A basement rec room, ca. 1998. Matthew is sitting in his beanbag chair, playing Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Gunnar descends the stairs, his purple leisure coat swinging as he walks.

MATTHEW: Hey, bro.

GUNNAR: What’s up, man?

MATTHEW (swooping his majestic locks to one side): I made it to Launch Base Zone.

GUNNAR: Sweet.

[They are silent. As he plays, Matthew flips his hair back and forth several more times. Finally, he sighs, and puts down his control. He faces Gunnar.]

MATTHEW: What’s goin’ on, Gunnar? You’ve been weird lately, man.

GUNNAR [sighs heavily]: Nothin’.

MATTHEW: Listen. You’re my identical twin brother. Now, I know when something’s up. You’ve been sitting down here for almost three whole minutes, and you haven’t once flipped, shook, or tossed your hair. Hell, you haven’t even finger-combed it! It’s like you’re not even present in your hair. What’s the deal, man? You can tell me.

GUNNAR: Look, Matthew. I know we have these signature flowing hairdos. But lately…I don’t know, it’s like I’m getting sick of having a yak coat on my head. The hair is losing the magic.

MATTHEW: Gunnar! My God! How could you say such a thing?

GUNNAR: I’m sorry, man. I can’t explain it. It just doesn’t feel like me anymore.

MATTHEW: Gunnar, have you been doing drugs?

GUNNAR [stands, frustrated]: No, of course not!

MATTHEW [sighs; scratches his left knee through his ripped stonewashed jeans, deep in thought]: I'm going to try to be understanding. It’s a phase you’re going through. Everyone goes through existential periods. That’s part of growing up. Hell, that’s part of being human.

GUNNAR: Ah, Mattie, you always were the wise one.

MATTHEW: I think it was Socrates who said: “The unexamined hair is not worth growing.”

GUNNAR: That’s so true.

MATTHEW: It’s only natural to question whether you’re worthy of such breathtaking coifdom. But listen to me, Gunnar. Look me in the eyes. You. Are. Worthy.

[GUNNAR bursts into tears. They embrace.]

MATTHEW: It’s okay, brother. It’s gonna be all right.

[They pull away. Gunnar wipes his eyes.]

GUNNAR: Mattie, I don’t doubt that you’re right. And what you’re saying resonates with me. I’m not making this decision lightly, but –

MATTHEW: Gunnar, no!

GUNNAR: I’ve already made up my mind. I’m cutting the hair.

MATTHEW: NNNOOOOOOOOOO!

How to Write, Part III: 6 big things that annoy the shit out of me

2010-10-08T00:56:00.001-05:00

You, of course, will have already read my earlier post about the Venial (sentence-level) Sins of writing. I now present to you the Mortal (story-level) Sins.

1. Writing only what you know and everything that you know

Poorer writers often explain away their incoherent plot/ending/character with this justification: “It’s a true story!” That may be, but it’s also a true story that I did a crossword on the toilet today and then cleaned hair out of the sink, but that doesn’t make it a story worth telling.

Alfred Hitchcock said: "Drama is real life with the dull parts removed." It really doesn’t matter if something’s true: is it interesting? Does it make sense? Does it evoke an emotion or a feeling or a memory? Are the elements arranged in a chronologically interesting way? Is it at least funny? (Humorous pieces can sometimes get away without really making a big point.) If you are writing nonfiction, think of yourself as a curator, culling the most interesting specimens from your own or someone else’s life. You still have a viewpoint to promote, even if it is a factual account like a presidential biography (wake me when it’s done).

I think of all writing as being part of a fictive continuum. On one end, you have pure nonfiction: a transcript of a conversation, perhaps, or a timeline of Tudor genealogy. Writing is arranging those facts into a narrative. As you move further down the fiction end, you get into realistic fiction: fiction that still references real events, or, if you’re “edgy,” brand names. Then you get into science fiction and fantasy, and so on, until you’re writing in an invented language and no one wants to read it.

Fiction is manipulation, tomfoolery, and regular foolery. Please, wow me with your Machiavellian antics, not the true story of the seat fabric on your 24-hour flight to Sydney.

2. Writing above your intelligence level.

Don’t try to sound smarter than you actually are. Because people smarter than you will see that you are faking. This is sort of the corollary to #1: Don’t write everything you know, but definitely don’t write what you don’t know at all. Write about the amount you know or can research. Tough balance, I know.

Say you got a D in trig, but you want to write an experimental novel where every character is a trigonometric function. Well, you should first question the worth of your own existence. Then you should give up writing. Okay, let’s try another example. If you speak only English, it is best not to attempt a saga entirely in Medieval Faroese. Start with Pig Latin, and work your way up.

3. Withholding pointless information.

Somebody’s name is pointless information. Waiting until the end to reveal it does no one any good. Same for someone’s race, physical abilities, age, even species (yeah, I’ve seen this last one, unfortunately). Unless the withholding of information is integral to the plot in some way (names are incidental to plot), give it to us up front. Inception was an interesting movie because we knew right away that the characters were dreaming. This was part of the plot, not a cop-out.

Now, obviously, if you’re a mystery writer, you may want to withhold, say, the identity of the killer. And matters of why are a little easier to withhold, because they lead the reader to question, which leads them to want to keep reading: Why is the dentist so bitter? Why has the orphanage gymnasium been locked since 1938? Why does the Chicago tap water supply suddenly taste like buckwheat blini? Why is post-structuralist theory still considered worthy of serious inquiry in some universities?

The same can be said for how questions, since the bulk of your story is likely to be dedicated to matters of how. Questions of who, what, when, and where, however, should probably be addressed pretty quickly. It won’t benefit anyone if you’ve been writing in a contemporary style and then tell us in the last paragraph: “Hey, the characters are actually living in 1812! Doesn’t that change everything?” No. It doesn’t. It’s still a dumb story.

Withholding simple matters of fact doesn’t lead the reader to ask interesting questions; it simply leads to confusion.

4. Characters that don’t strive for anything.

Don’t take it from me, take it from Mr. Vonnegut; “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” [I might disagree with the good gentleman just a bit: I don’t think one man’s search for a glass of water would make a compelling novel. A poem, perhaps, in the vein of William Carlos Williams.] In order to identify with a character, we have to identify with their wants. Unless you are a cyborg or a Judd Apatow character, we all strive every moment of our lives. Striving is the basis for conflict, and conflict is the basis for fiction. Without striving, you have postmodernism. Postmodernism is boring. [Note: Striving may include the desire to not strive.]

5. Flawless characters

Flawlessness is dull at best, jealous rage-inducing at worst. I want someone I can relate to, and I am so deep in flaws I may drown in them. Even if you are writing about your beloved great-aunt who was perfect in every way, and who raised you after your parents perished in a tragic cockfighting accident, I don’t really want to know about her. A character must be lacking in some way so that s/he can either improve or fail or, at the very least, have something happen. Fiction, after all, is conflict. Perfection is the absence of conflict.

6. Lack of a consistent voice.

This can take on many forms, from inconsistent usage of slang or dialect,* to mixed metaphors, to a limited POV first-person narrator who suddenly reports on another character’s thoughts. These are not always easy to spot.

Here’s a real-life example:

As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence and meandered through the willow branches that the moose munched on.

This delightfully awful sentence was written by Lynn Vincent, author of Sarah Palin’s autobiography. There are so many conflicting images and weird states of observation that it puts Rod McKuen to shame. Which came first, the meander or the cadence? Pushed past the cottonwood trees? Who pushes past trees? How close together were they? Instead of that weird thing involving shoes and soles, can't you just say, "As I walked..."? We all know what walking entails.

Voice is the hardest to get right. It's very intuitive. The best advice I can give is to shut up, listen to voices around you (preferably the ones uttered by non-imaginary people), pay close attention to what you read.

Which leads me to:

The above 6 Things can all be avoided if you follow two cardinal rules of good writing:

1. Pay attention

2. Pay deeper attention

I could've said that at the outset and avoided all this trouble.

__________________

*Nonstandard dialects can be appropriate if the author is very familiar with the dialect. The dialect should probably be your first language or damn close. For dialog, it’s usually safe, but again, make sure you are using the nonstandard dialect correctly. Please, don’t make a Jamaican character say, “Me a go niam because I’m a trifle famished.”

Why Write What You Know?

2010-10-04T12:52:00.000-05:00

Lookit! It's been over a week since I posted! And here I was sure the blog would last three months.

Here's the thing. I'm a very slow writer. I sabotage myself. Like, now, I'm writing a story about a woman who works in a university lab developing nanotechnology for AI. Trouble is, I know nothing about nanotechnology, or science, or how, say, levers work. I'm not a complete ignoramus: I understand that alleles and chromosomes exist, but I'm not sure what the difference is. And I know that the universe is, like, really fuckin' huge, and that if you have to ask what quantum theory is, you'll never know, and that Pluto has been demoted to a dwarf planet (I'm reminded of this last fact frequently by my 4-year-old son Harold, who is fond of saying, "Pluto's stupid. It isn't even a planet anymore.") My knowledge kind of disintegrates right at that point. My 10-year-old cousin asked me for help with her math homework last week, and to avoid embarrassing myself, I feigned an aneurysm.

Why do I do this to myself? It wasn't supposed to be a sci-fi-y story. I was kind of just sick of writing about characters that were vaguely malaise-ridden artists or maltreated baristas. I find I become more involved with a story if I write about something novel (to me): writing about a male protagonist, or a criminal, or someone who has never left the county they were born in, or a Taylor Swift fan, are all ways to sustain my interest. Also, I am full of self-hatred, so whenever I create a protagonist who is like me, I end up making her horribly unlikable.

So I have days, perhaps weeks, of research ahead of me. I'm learning about some very interesting things. Like the invention of the world's first artificial (rat) hippocampus. How did I not know about this? (Well, it happened right around the time my first son was born, so you can forgive me for not keeping abreast of developments in biomedical engineering.) And about the likelihood of Super Artificial Intelligence. For some time I've been vaguely aware of these people who are convinced that the Singularity is real and coming soon to a planet near you, but now I'm more familiar with them than I might like to be.* Kind of mindblowing. However, "bullshit," says the biologist P. Z. Myers. We have, after all, no idea how the brain works, and no reason to believe we will understand it well enough any time soon to bring about a truly intelligent computer. (For now, I will remain a spectator in the debate.)

Anyway, the truism that The More You Know, The More You Realize How Much You Don't Know, is, uh....well, true. Each element of the story I tweak in accordance with my newfound knowledge means I must tweak some other part, which means I must conduct further research, tweak a different part, etc., etc. It's sort of like when you add too much salt to a dish (let's pretend we're dealing with pasta), so then you add more pasta, then you don't have enough sauce, so you make a bit more sauce, and then it's way too saucy and you're sick of dealing with it anyway.

Oh, well. Serve it with bread to soak up the sauce. Hide the fact that you don't know what you're doing. It's only writing.

Good day.

__________________

*And then there's this insanity. Don't click on the link if you're eating.

What I Can Write About

2010-09-25T12:01:00.002-05:00

I’ve always harbored an unjustified bit of snobbishness about writing fiction. When people [i.e., my mom] would encourage me to go into journalism or grant-writing, I would shudder with boredom. I wanted to be a poet, but the kind of poet who writes prose.

But I’m adapting to the fact that I’m a shitty composer of fiction. I seem to be more effective, lately, at writing articles, or at least selling them. I don’t feel I have the right, because I don’t really know anything, and for me to teach something to people or to impart some opinion seems incredibly brazen and maybe even dishonest. Fiction, though, I could always get behind that: I can make shit up just fine, and if a not-too-well-thought-out idea works its way in, I’ll blame it on the unreliable narrator.

Things I don’t want to write about:

Sports/exercise
Pop culture/celebrity pregnancies
Motherhood
Domestic duties
Crafts
Technology
Fashion
Eco-tourism
Birdwatching
Hipster watching
Senior activities

Things I would like to write about but don’t know enough about:

Politics
Economics
Movies
Books
Science (all)
Architecture
Semiotics
Psychology
Wine
Local history
Linguistics
Philosophy

Wow, that category eliminates most things.

Things I want to and probably could write about:

Cooking/food
Funny people I met on the bus/in the grocery store
The Man (whosoever I perceive Him to be)
The advantages of Failure
Why I can’t stand Caitlin Flanagan
Why school is bad for normal human development
Why religion is dumb
Why the Midwest is the only place I’ll live in the U.S.

An author

2010-09-24T10:45:00.000-05:00

An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man [ahem. –Eds.] in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His overpowering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized countries, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper.

H. L. Mencken

A Joyous Occasion

2010-09-20T19:30:00.000-05:00

What came in the mail today? A check. Someone actually paid me for writing something.

How to Write, Part II: 6 little things that annoy the shit out of me

2010-09-20T10:39:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned in a previous post, rules for fiction tend to be merely an individual writer's preference. Be wary of any rules that start with Always or Never.

I know you're not a fan of long things, but this post is long. It was even longer until I broke it into two pieces. Today, I will be visiting the Venial, or Sentence- and Paragraph-level, Sins. Tomorrow (or next month, more likely) come the Mortal, or Story-level, Sins. The following annoying things might be okay when done by a genius:

1. Using clichés

Clichés aren’t just things obvious things like “eyes as big as saucers.” They can be two words commonly seen together, or even one word in a particular context. Knee deep. Moving on. Small world. Keep an eye out* for things on the verge of becoming clichés. This means you must be alert and conscientious, two qualities that behoove any writer (any human, really). Strive for freshness of expression: any time you string two or more words together, really think, “Will this combination of words seem clichéd in 50 years? In 10? Next month?”

This is especially hard to do because the reason clichés get overused is because they are clever – at first. “That’s what she said”** was hilarious when people started using it. Now it’s annoying. I think it’s stupid when people begin articles with “So” (the asshole Thomas Friedman is frequently guilty of this). But at one point it did seem a novel way to approach a beginning: so conversational, so flowing.

2. The Doing X, He Did Y construction.

Some good writers use this judiciously, but I’ve noticed that bad writers use it with abandon, and often inaccurately.

Example:

Scratching her jaw, the nurse reached for a hypodermic needle.

This isn’t so bad. It’s plausible: a nurse could reach for a needle while she is scratching her jaw. But there are better ways to phrase this. In fact, the jaw-scratching is irrelevant: you should cut that clause.

Often, Doing X makes it impossible or implausible to Do Y. This makes the sentence grammatically incorrect: -ing makes a verb present progressive. It indicates a continual action. So while the character was doing X, they did Y. At the same time. Thus, you could never say,

Taking a sip of water, Fidel shouted, “I don’t give a good god damn what you think! I love you!”

And then there are writers who lay down the mother lode, and use the Doing X He Did Y multiple times in a sentence:

Grabbing the gun from the cabinet, gasping as she stepped forward, and seeing that the ‘burglar’ was just her husband, she let out a sigh of relief and, chuckling, dropped the gun.

Yes, I really have seen sentences constructed this way. Now, there are some temporal issues here. Did she grab the gun and gasp at the same time? The verbs “grabbing” and “gasping” imply that they happened simultaneously with the subsequent actions. Which they didn’t; presumably the chronology is thus: 1, she gasped, 2, grabbed the gun, 3, stepped forward, 4, noticed that there was no burglar, 5, let out a sigh of relief.

This is an extreme example, but in my experience, people who use the Doing X, he Did Y construction use it in about 3 out of 5 sentences. Which leads me to my next Annoying Thing:

3. Repetition, especially of sentence structure

For the love of Mike, vary your sentence structure! Vary everything, really. Don’t repeat. I repeat: do not repeat.

Do not do this:

I sat down on the couch. I looked out the window. Xavier was on the porch. He knocked on the window. I let him in. He sat down on the couch too. He told me he was tired. I said I was too.

Or this:

Sasha wanted to ask him to dance, but she was a little scared. So she hovered near the snack table, but she wasn’t very hungry so she just nibbled. Her friend Tasha was dancing across the room, but she was too tired to go say hi. She felt like dancing by herself, but she didn’t like the song.

Or this:

Stiffly, the candlestick sat on the mantle. Carefully, Jill picked up the brass candlestick. Suddenly, she clobbered Jack over the head!

Sorry, once I start writing bad examples I can’t stop.

You don’t want to read the same word over and over and over and over and over and over and over, and you don’t want to read the same sentence over and over either. Sentences should be of varying length and denseness and cadence. For the same reason, don’t have pages and pages of dialog unless you’re writing a screenplay. And don’t have chapters and chapters that contain no dialog. Pacing matters.

4. Even minor mistakes of spelling, grammar, punctuation.

Quick, what’s the difference between past progressive and past continuous?***

This can be tough. It involves a lot of memorization, and in my experience, a knack for grammar and spelling tends to come naturally: some people just get it, others can't figure out apostrophes. If you don’t know the difference between it’s and its, you’ll have a hard time getting to any sort of professional level. If you don’t have spelling and syntax rules memorized, get a fucking copy of The Elements of fucking Style and check everything if you plan on getting your shit published. Assume that one spelling error will cause your manuscript to be rejected. Sorry. I don’t make the rules, but that’s how it is.

The trickiest rule in English, according to me? Lay/laid vs. lie/lay. Tough. Try to remember it, though. Lay and lay mean different things (really). Not: “I laid down on the bed.” (Correct: “I lay down on the bed.”) Not: “I lay the bills on the table.” (Correct: I laid the bills on the table.) Try to learn them.

Further/farther, raised/reared, fewer/less, affect/effect….so much to learn. Get a fucking book.

5. Telling, not showing.

Now, obviously, there are instances where you'll want to tell: for pacing purposes, you can quickly explain some event or situation that would otherwise plod on needlessly. But often, telling can mean the difference between a summary and a story.

You should have seen me the night of the dance -- I was gorgeous. But my best friend Aricely was jealous of me. That didn't bother me so much, because my other best friend, Agatha, told me I looked gorgeous. We had a great time at the dance. We danced all night to some fun songs. Aricely, on the other hand, didn't. When we left we were all tired. It was raining and the road was slippery. It took us a long time to get home.

There’s a lot of missed opportunities for riveting drama here. Well, no there’s not. It’s a pointless story. But, it would not be quite so tedious if the author (me, channeling other authors) had bothered to emphasize what actually happened and not just offered up a bland retelling of events and emotions.

5. Bending over backwards to not split an infinitive or to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition.

Churchill supposedly said, after an editor did exactly that to his writing, "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put." Supposedly. Even if he didn't say it, it's funny.

Who gives a shit? These are Latin rules. You can end a sentence a preposition with.

6. Not using nearly enough fucks, douchebags, cunts…..

Live a little! Swear! Not strictly necessary, but fun nonetheless. Okay, don't follow this rule. It's my own personal rule. Go establish your own fucking rules.

________________
*This is a cliché. Did you catch it?
** This phrase was possibly first used on a “Wayne’s World” sketch.
*** Nothing.

__________________
Links

Joe Konrath: How Not to Write a Story.

Nathan Bransford: Do You Suffer From One of These Writing Maladies?

Elmore Leonard's Rules for Writing.

Why I Don't Write More

2010-09-18T11:44:00.000-05:00

It's difficult to write with three kids screaming in the background. Even if it's merely an ill-thought-out blog post. I'll try to do better. (Yeah, Yoda, there is a fucking "try.")

On Fucking Titles

2010-09-17T08:20:00.000-05:00

I am bad at titles. I don't like to be so definitive. I have gone through several (embarrassing) nicknames in my life because I wasn't sure my name (Katherine) was the right one. I'm noncommittal like that.

I do not exaggerate when I say it took me all day to come up with a title for this blog. Well, that's not strictly true. I came up with I'm a fucking writer pretty quickly, but someone whose opinion I respect suggested I soften it a bit. "Are you trying to get work?" this person said, "People are going to have to look at the word fuck every time they open your site?"

"What's wrong with the word fuck? It's so all-purpose and funny." And no, I'm not really trying to get work. (Well, I am, but let's be realistic: any work I get will not come via the blog.)

But I considered the matter, through laundry and sweeping up dried Play-Doh and cleaning up throw-up. I wrote down an entire page of possibilities. There were the obvious and simple: Kat Vapid, Kat Writes, Escribir. There were the pretentious and inaccurate: St. Paul Scribe, Bons Mots, Internet Griot. The punny: Katachresis, Katacomb. The stupid: Rule Puncher, Painted Speech, Ballpoint Dreams. The single words: Interpuncted, Deauthorized, Shibboleth.

In the end, they were all inane, and I went back to my original instinct. It's a solid title, and it encompasses everything I value in writing: it's concise, direct, and contains the F-word.

I may yet change it.

Don't break the rules unless you know them

2010-09-15T22:50:00.000-05:00

My previous post was on the universals of writing. I say there are only three real rules in writing because anything else is almost always a) personal preference, tricks, superstitions, etc., or b) a rule that is usually absolute, but one that can be broken in the hands of a capable writer.

Take, for instance, the admonition not to overwrite; it is said that good writers should use simple, clear language, and relatively short sentences that don’t ramble. This is mostly true. But Virginia Woolf was notorious for her rambling, three-page-long sentences. She broke this rule and her writing didn’t suffer; in fact, this was part of what defined her distinctive style.

Now, I’m going to tell you something that may shock you: You are not Virginia Woolf. How do I know this? Well, because she died. Other rule-breakers, such as e.e. cummings and David Foster Wallace, are also dead, so the evidence for you being them is slight.

These people can break rules. Because they’re better than you. I know, this is terribly elitist of me. But it's true. Simone de Beauvoir said: “In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society.” You must have a deep understanding of the basic rules before you can transcend them. Jackson Pollock could break rules because he was better than most ignoramuses who stand in front of his paintings and huff, “I could do that!” Ntozake Shange can eschew capital letters and write “was” as “waz” because she is doing it intentionally, creating an effect that is far different from mere carelessness.

Intention is everything. It is the difference between manslaughter and first-degree murder. Knowing the right way to do something and then not doing it is very different from not doing something because you don’t know the proper way. (Thus, “refudiate” is just stupid.)

So, know the rules. Buy The Elements of Style and study that shit. Read the dictionary cover to cover. Use the rules eight solid hours a day for ten to twelve years, until you're sure you get them. Only then should you attempt to fuck shit up.
____________________
Links

How to use words right.

How to Write Part I: The Commandments

2010-09-15T22:42:00.001-05:00

There are only three basic rules for writing:

1. WRITE.
2. READ.
3. REVISE.

These are the universal rules of writing. The commandments. They are not open to debate. You have to follow them. There are other rules, but they are more individual and flexible. The above are immutable.*

There is not much else that needs to be known, but if you would like elucidation of the above terms, please read on.

1. Write. You have to write. A lot. Like, every day, a lot. Write this moment. Write some more. And yet write. Don’t think about it, don’t talk about it, don’t make excuses, don’t go out for a beer on Friday night (or if you need to go out for a beer, go by yourself and bring a notebook. I’ve done it.) Keep writing. Get off of Wikipedia, you’ve researched enough. Now is the time to coagulate your knowledge. Just write. No, don’t go check to see whether the flan you put in the fridge has set. You need to write.

Unfortunately, writing involves actual writing. I say “unfortunately” because some people have this idea that you can earn a pile of crisp money by dashing off a bestseller. These people don’t want to write; they want to be writers, or what they think writers are.** Well, being a writer doesn’t work that way. Most writers don’t earn a living from writing. If you want to make money, become a Major League baseball player.*** Do NOT become a writer.

That’s not you, though. You don’t care about money or prestige or even publishing. Good. I also say "unfortunately" in the above paragraph because even if you love writing, it isn't always pleasant. Repetitive action quickly grows old, and if you are serious about writing, you will want to do it constantly to maintain momentum. Fortunately, writing begets writing. It might come slowly at first, but the more you write, the more your thoughts will segue into other stories, and once you start, once you've got that momentum, the hardest thing in the world will be not writing. This is the principle of inertia at work (or something. I took one physics class in high school and got a D.) Conversely, the more you don’t write, the more you won’t write.

This obsession with writing means you will only get better. The novelist Barry Lyga wrote a nice post about having to write a million bad words before you write some good ones; Malcolm Gladwell speaks of the 10,000 hour rule. Whether you count your words or your hours, you cannot ignore this: It takes a shitload of writing to get good.****

Yet, as much as we love to write, as much as we want to write, somehow shit gets in the way. Writing demands incredible self-discipline, because there is a lot of other shit to do, most of it more fun than writing. Right now, my kids are at their grandmother's house, I have a few hours free, and I am conscious of the million things I could be doing. My own house is filthy, my garden overgrown, it's a beautiful Saturday, and I feel like biking to the farmer's market. So many things to do!

You have to ignore all those things. Other things you have to ignore: friends, beer, the beach, Inception (at least until the DVD release). You have to write, unfortunately. Welcome to the unglamorous, frequently pointless, writing life.

2. Read. The best way to learn how to write well is by learning how to read well. Read everything; why not? Don’t limit yourself to classics or even Really Good Books. If you only read literary novels, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Sure, Germinal is a nice enough book, but it would be impossible now, or at least silly, to write a novel like Germinal. Read lots of good stuff, yeah, but read crap too. Read Life & Style. Great art is always a fusion of something and something else, and often the dash of Something Else comes from pop culture, folk traditions, or outright vulgarity. Know every tradition. I came from a literate household but somewhere along the line, I picked up a nasty Sweet Valley High-reading habit. My mom bought me Black Beauty and The Old Man and the Sea and Tom Sawyer to try to counteract the pernicious influence of Francine Pascal and her army. To this day, I have never read any of those books. But I did find my way back to literature, somehow. And thanks to the SVH quadricentrilogy and many bad pre-teen fan magazines, I know what distinguishes bad writing from pretty good writing from great writing. It’s important to know what you don’t want to write. And, how do you know what’s good if you’ve never read anything bad?

3. Revise. Any good writer hates his or her own work. This is good news, because if you hate it you will be forced to improve it or, more felicitously, abandon writing. If you like what you write, well, best of luck to you: you won't find a publisher, because you are delusional. What you wrote sucked.

I don’t care if you are the next Shakespeare or David Foster Wallace or even Francine Pascal. The first draft of the first thing you ever write is not going to be good. It is going to fucking suck. Even after you’ve been writing for 10 years, first drafts fucking suck. Fifth drafts suck. I revise everything at least ten times, and my writing still sucks. I'm not trying to discourage you; I want you to write (I guess), but I want you to be honest with yourself. And the honest truth is, nothing is good without revision.

I need to emphasize the suckiness of first drafts to counteract the prevailing attitude among amateur writers that they can sit down and write something brilliant on their first attempt. This attitude doesn't seem to infect other arts the way it does writing. I listen to music all the time, but I am pretty sure if I went and picked up a violin with the intention of becoming a concert violinist, I would not play something listenable this month or even this year. Forget the violin analogy; I couldn't pick up a tambourine today and play with the Monkees tomorrow.

I can hear the objections to this: “But my years of nonstop talking have prepared me for writing! I’m quick and witty! If I can talk, well, by gum, I can write!” But talking has as much to do with writing as listening to music does with being a concert violinist. Really. They are different actions. In fact, if you are gregarious, talkative, a great conversationalist, you may even be a worse writer because you are not listening. Writers must have a great ear, not a gift for extemporaneous speech. That is its own gift, but again, involves separate brain faculties. I am one of the most socially awkward people you’ll ever meet. I stumble over my words, I am silent in groups of two or more, and I generally can’t get a thought across unless I have a pen or a keyboard nearby. That hasn’t hindered my writing. (My writing sucks for other reasons.)

The good news is that bad writing precedes good writing. If you want to create good or even Pascalesque writing, you need to revise that fetid glop of words you just strewed across the page. You must revise not only for grammar and spelling and word count, but for structure, fresh images, character development, believable dialogue, and a host of other factors. The painful thing about revision is that you will have to discard many of the lovely words you have written (because your lovely words are, in fact, stupid). Writers have to be both painters and sculptors: first you put color on a blank page, then you whittle away the excess marble.*****

Revision is the time to correct any errors of spelling or grammar. You can't write (well) without knowing spelling and grammar. Sorry. If you plan on submitting your work for publication, even one typo or forgotten comma will pretty much eliminate you from consideration. If you don't know how to spell, look up every word in the dictionary. If you don't know grammar, get some books and study that shit. Study until you know when to use a dash and when an ellipsis. Know the difference between gerunds and present progressive.

Revision is its own art, and I can't fully address it here, but good writers must also be good editors. This means you must be suspicious of every word. Be like those forensics people on CSI. Ask the words why they're there. Demand to know. Find out what the words were doing yesterday (look up etymologies: it's fascinating). I spend very little time on first drafts. The bulk of my writing time is spent on revision. Like, 25 times more time. It's a bitch, but man, it feels good when I shove that manuscript into that slush pile-bound manila envelope and lick it shut. I know I've earned the rejection letter that will arrive in my box in 4-6 months.

One more rule they don't tell you about:

4. Get used to being alone. If you are a people person, you’re going to have a hard time being a writer. Writing is self-imposed solitary confinement. (There are those books written by two people [usually psychologists or something] where the authors keep breaking the narrative dream by saying things like "We have found in our research that....," but those books are annoying and usually only read for class.)
______________
I guess that’s about it, because any other rule I could devise could have a counterpoint to it. If, for instance, I tell you to avoid beginning a novel with the weather, you will pull out your tattered copy****** of that one Faulkner novel that begins with a lovely exposition of a rainstorm. Okay, there is no Faulkner novel like that, but that’s not the point.

The point is, the above rules are the nonnegotiable rules. I can’t think of anymore absolutes. Can you? Read, write (using correct spelling and grammar), edit, by yourself. Now go.*******
_______________________________________
*I plan on divulging my own personal rules, the ones that are open to contention, in a later post.
**The title of this post, see, is "How to Write," not "How to be a Writer." I don't know how to be a writer; you'll have to find another blog to help you there.
***Or be an expert at something and become a tech writer. They make decent money.
****Maybe you don't want to be good; maybe you write merely to cathart to yourself. Hey, that's cool. This is a nonjudgmental blog. Well, not strictly true. I judge harshly the people who wear flip-flops into fancy restaurants.
*****This sentence is a good example of mixing one's metaphors, which you should never do.
******Also to be avoided are clichés such as "tattered copy." Why must a copy always be tattered? Aren't there ever any "unread copies" or "gently loved copies"?
*******If you're going to use this many footnotes, better to use superscripted numerals rather than asterisks. This is getting ridiculous.********

********See?

Intro

2010-09-15T22:29:00.000-05:00

Hi there. I'm a semi-aspiring fiction and freelance writer. This page will be what I work on when I'm trying to avoid writing. It will deal with all things written. (Typed, actually.) Advice, reminiscences, musings, and other pretentious bullshit. Enjoy.

My personal blog, which I don't really deal with anymore, is:

Nothing from Kat

And my other weird blog is:

The Lamentations of a Lady