If

Thinking of how poets love words has got me thinking about words.  I remembered this book I bought ages ago called One Word. It's a series of essays by a bunch of different authors, each about their favorite word, or at least a word they think is interesting.  For some it's a memory that goes along with the word, for some it's just the word, for some it's all the different connotations that go with a word.   I haven't read all of it, but have read some of it and think the idea of a whole essay--some really long essays--on a single word is intriguing. 

Lately I've been thinking about the word, If.  It's so small, with one pretty letter and one ugly letter (In my opinion), but it can do so many things.  If opens up so many possibilities for fiction.  If you start with If, it opens more questions than answers.  Ondaatje opens his novel, In the Skin of a Lion, with, "If he is awake early enough..."  And the entire chapter, I kept thinking, What if he didn't wake early enough?  What if he slept in?  Would we even have the rest of the novel? 

Is a story ever finished, if you start it with If?  If you start with If, the rest is just one possiblity.  You could have an entire beautiful story with the perfect ending, but in the end, the entire thing is based on the that first word.  If this story happens, it's beautiful;  If it doesn't... what is it?  The possibilities are endless. 
 
If is a promise: 'If you do your chores...'
If is a threat: 'If you don't...'
Slap an Only on its back, and If is tragic:  'If only...'
Make it chase a What, and If is the door to the imagination: 'What if...'

In the end, this question is what the writer answers.  'If a girl wakes up fat, what would happen?  If a man explodes? If someone cheats?  If a lover dies?  If love is forbidden?  If there were magic?'

Writing, at least for me, begins with an If, and ends with finding the answer to it.
 
Or at least an answer to it.

Of Poetry

I cheated in a poetry contest in 10th grade.  I went to a private school that competed every year in a regional convention.  Other private schools got together with our schools and we competed—in our uniforms—in everything from Ping-pong, to basketball, to speech writing and giving, to poetry and other forms of writing, to chess, to cross-stitching....  Yeah, we were very cool. 

The principle's wife, who was a long-ago English teacher, came in to do a little poetry workshop.  Then she made us all write a poem for homework.  She was going to pick the best poems and enter them into this regional convention.  

In 10th grade, I didn't write poetry.  I was just getting into writing of any sort, and even that was few and far between (average of one cliché per blog).  So, like any assignment in high school, I put it off until the night before, and instead of rhyming a few words together and calling it a night, I decided to copy the words of one of the songs from this obscure band I had been listening to.  Then I spent a couple hours switching some of the words around so I at least could say I didn't totally cheat (Though now, in my wiser state, I know very well that I was cheating).  


Anyway, she loved my poem.  She put it in regionals, where it won 3rd prize and went on to a national convention where it got 10th or something.  I felt horrible about it.  I thought of running on stage and saying, "I didn't write it.  Please, please give my 10th place ribbon the 11th place winner.  He deserves it."  But I didn't.  What self-respecting 10th grader would have?


My family was elated.  My mom was bragging all over the place, telling aunts and uncles and everyone. They announced my success in Church (the school was run out of the church).  My grandma bought me a notebook.  She said I could fill it up with all of my poetry.  

So I was lying in my bed, trying to figure out how I could make up for all of it.  I couldn't just tell people.  Right?  I didn't think so.  So I did the only thing I could do: I wrote a poem, a real one, that wasn't copied out of anything.  


I can't remember what it was, but I remember feeling proud of myself.  And I filled up that little notebook, and, well, I haven't stopped writing since.  


I read Life of Pi, years later, in the 5th year of my first degree (I squeezed 4 years into 5).  I mentioned in an earlier post that it was the first book that made me think about what the writer was doing and not just what the writer was saying.  And I think it was after this when I started writing fiction, and not poetry.  


By the time I got to UofR, I was very into writing—I was a novelist!—but never read or wrote poetry.  But I took English 252 with Dr Wall, and the first day of class she told us we had to read a poem from The Writer's Almanac, online, every day of the semester.  It was the first time I had really read any poetry that wasn't all rhyming and Romantic, like Wordsworth or whoever.  And I actually enjoyed it.  I was even trying my hand at poetry before we were even required to (though the first poem I submitted was much more than a bomb).


By the end of the class, I had submitted a couple decent poems, nothing spectacular; it didn't change my mind into becoming a poet, but it was fun, and I thought I might keep it up afterward.


I didn't.


What I did keep up, was reading the poems on The Writer's Almanac.  They are awesome.  Some days, the poems are just kind of nice, but don't really speak to me.  But other days, the poems just punch me in the gut and make want to grab my notebook and get down to friggen writing.  When a poem hits you in the right spot, it's like some kind of beautiful slap in the face and you just can't help being moved.  


I can't speak for all fiction writers, but for me, I'm in love with the sentence.  A sentence, with the commas and hyphens and dashes and semi-colons or whatever,  can be pure magic.  It can jab.  It can sing lullabies.  A single good sentence can be more of a character development than a full three pages.  It can prick the hairs on your neck, give you goosebumps.  


I think, for poets, it's even more simple; poets are in love with words.  I think poets should teach kids how to read.  They could just stand in front of the class and read a word out loud and say, "Isn't this exciting kids? We're learning to read words."  and the kids would cheer and say, "Yeah!" and they'd grow up reading books and buying books of poetry and short fiction and they'd start some revolution that says, 'Shut off that damn TV and read a book.'


When I'm stuck, when I feel the need to write, but nothing's falling onto the page, I read poetry.  I listen to music. I drive around. And I read poetry.  One of these three things, sometimes more than one at a time, will get me writing.  


But lately, the poetry has been enough.  I read a poem a day on The Writer's Almanac, and I spend the day wishing I didn't have homework, or reading assignments, or any responsibilities at all...


So I could get down to some freakin' writing.

Nothing New

I used to judge every book by it's cover.  I would wade through the shelves of books at Chapters or wherever else, and I'd pick up books that looked cool.  I thought I was being edgy or something, and thought it was funny to tell people, "Always judge a book by its cover."  I did find a lot of really good books this way—A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby; Arthur & George - Julian Barnes;  His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman; Others—but I'm sure I missed out on hundreds of good books along the way.

Case in point, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.  The cover is beige, and has 6 pictures on it, each a different likeness of a cloud: drawings, photographs, satellite images.  The spine is beige, with Cloud Atlas written in white, in an orange box.  It looks Boring (capital intentional).  I would never have picked it up (and if I did pick it up I probably would have tossed it right back down, out of order even), if it wasn't assigned for Dr Trussler's fiction class during last Spring's semester.  Even in the UofR bookstore I was groaning to myself, thinking this book was going to bore me into dropping the class, but—no surprise I'm sure—I loved it.

20 pages in, I was enthralled. And the farther I got, the more I was completely captivated.  It's different than any novel I've ever read.  Each chapter is separated from the last by dozens of years, following only reincarnations of characters rather than actual characters.  It starts in the distant past and works to the near apocalypse of a post-apocalypse community, then works its way back to the start (Crazy right?  Read it.  It's not as confusing, and just as awesome, as it sounds).

In one of the later chapters, one of the characters is an editor for a publishing firm and is reading a potential best seller, and thinks he may have something:  "I concluded the young-hack-versus-corporate-corruption thriller had potential. (The Ghost of Sir Felix Finch whines, 'But it's been done a hundred times before!' —as if there could be anything not done a hundred thousand times between Aristophanes and Andrew Void-Webber! As if Art is the What, not the How!)"

Mitchell's story, without the structure of the book, doesn't seem like anything new.  Good vs. Evil. Bad guys ruining the earth's environment for the sake of money.  Good guys dying when they try to uncover the Bad Guys' plans.  Servant clones end up having real personalities and souls.  The world ends and people have to revert to earlier ways of hunting and gathering and scavenging and living of the land.

Nothing new, but like I said, the novel is nothing like I've ever read before.  It was completely new to me.

The Art was in the how.  Not the What.

I'm working on a short story for my creative writing course, and I've nearly finished the first draft, so I was moving it from my notebook, to my computer.  But as I was reading and typing, I kept thinking, This whole thing is one big cliche.  I was beating myself up, and running through a scroll of different stories in my brain.  I'll admit, There is a time in the middle of every story I write in which I start to think the story sucks.  There is almost never a story I get through without this little blip; I think all of my talent or creativity or whatever has run out, and I wonder if I should just give up.  I look for this blip now, and smile when it gets here, and push through it, and get to the end.  But this time, I couldn't get over it.  I read it over about 5 times and was positive it was exactly the same story any old Joe at a coffee shop could have come up with.

And then, out of nowhere, I remembered this passage.

So then I thought, Of course it's an old story.  There is nothing new under the sun, after all (Ecclesiastes, I think).  The task of a writer who wants to be noticed or to be thought of as special in the 21st century has to work on the how as much as the what.  There isn't a lot out there that hasn't been said, or thought of.  Even Solomon (he wrote Ecclesiastes) thought there was nothing new, like 10,000 years ago.

That's not to say we should just grab some worn out cliche and twist it around and make it weird, but then maybe it is.  Maybe we have to twist our brains to think of things in an entirely different way in order to be 'new.'

I had this idea for the story.  A decent idea, but I wrote it in a way that I almost always write stories. And I guess instead of just writing a whole new piece, I've decided to rework my first one.  I'm not claiming I'll find some brilliant new way of writing stories, but I'm trying to picture this story in a way different than what I first imagined, than how I first wrote it.  I hope it will turn out OK.

No doubt it will be my masterpiece.

So Words Are What You Feel

Confession:  I didn't do a photowalk.  

I walked around the Mackenzie Art Gallery.

I had shown one of my stories—one I had worked very hard on over the summer—to a trusted critiquer, who subsequently ripped it apart.  While he was positive about it, he didn't get what I most wanted to get across. He felt like he didn't believe either of the main characters would act in the way I have them acting. I was proud of the story—am proud of it—and half thought he would be jumping up and down and saying something like, "I know a guy who knows a guy who wants to publish this."  But instead was reminded that a first draft is a first draft, no matter how good you think it is.

So then I was absent in all of my classes.  I was there, yes, but I was rewriting my story in my mind.  I was replaying everything my critiquer had said and was deciding my story was crap, and was about ready to pull out my notebook and start it all over.  I wrote out the first line of the story in the middle of my art history notes, then started thinking, "Is this even a good first line? It's actually kind of cliche. It's lame. It's amateur. It's freakin lousy."  I scratched it out and sulked through the rest of the class.  I walked around campus trying to find someone, anyone from any of my creative writing classes who I could sit down with and say, "Isn't the writer's life tuff?" as if it was thrust on me, as if it's some supernatural thing that has me trapped in it's talons, as if I'm being forced, as if I don't actually love it.

I couldn't find anybody. So I hopped on the bus and went over all of the little things that I use to try to pump myself up for revising: Peter Carey rewrites a novel from top to bottom 13 or 14 times before anyone else sees it; Stephen King just slips his first drafts away for 6 weeks, or until he can read them as a reader and rip his own stuff apart;  James Joyce spent a day writing 7 words and was still upset, and when his friend said that's actually a lot for you in one day, James said, Yeah but I'm still not sure if they're in the right order;  there's that guy whose friends talked about him spending the morning putting in a comma, then spent the afternoon deciding if he should take it out again;  rewarding work is hard work; if it was easy everyone could do it;  "For the serious writer, writing is revising.... for, however good the work, it isn't so good as it might have been" - Joyce Carol Oates.

By the time I got off at my stop at the corner of Albert and 23rd, I was feeling better.  And as the main character in my story is a painter, I thought I'd check out the gallery.  I often go to the Mackenzie and try to immerse myself in the artwork.  It took me a long time—through all the years of skateboarding, and playing and watching sports obsessively, and chasing the beautiful woman who is now my wife—to consider myself an artist. It's only been in the last two years where I've actually embraced it.  But still, when I walk into an art gallery and stand, solemn in front of an abstract work of beauty, I inevitably feel like a fraud.  I have no idea what the artists are trying to do, or even what makes one piece 'better' than another, or what it is people are looking at when they stand forever in front of a single piece.  Still, I like going.  I like imagining the process they went through of imagining it, and working on it, and getting it just right.

This time, there was a woman standing in front of a long canvas.  The canvas was white, with thin white lines running horizontally from one end to the other.  But for two lines in the middle which sort of bowed, making a sideways parenthesis, the lines were straight.  I watched the woman in my peripheral as I went to 5 or 6 paintings and moved on.  The entire time, she stood standing in front of the white lines on white canvas, and I wondered, "What the hell could she be looking at, all this time."

So I asked her.

"Are you an artist? " I said.

"No," she said. "Are you?"

I told her I wasn't.  I know I just said I've embraced it, but then there I was in an actual art gallery, wondering what I was supposed to be doing, so I said I wasn't.  I told her I'm a writer, and one of my characters is a painter, so I was just wondering what it was artists look for when they're looking at a painting.

"I just look for the feeling I get when I'm looking it," she said.

It may be elementary—of course you look for the feeling it evokes—but it was eye-opening for me (are we allowed cliches in our blogs?).  I walked around the gallery and stopped looking at strokes and colors and technique, and just looked for the feeling.

And isn't this what we do with our writing?  Haven't we all started writing because at some point in our lives we decided we like the feeling we get when we encounter good writing, and have decided we want to evoke those feelings in others?  I read the Narnia series when I was young, and felt desperate to find a new, magical world.  I would search through cupboards and closets and whatever else, trying to find talking beasts.  I read Harry Potter later and felt jealous of them for getting to go to Hogwarts.  I read Life of Pi, and felt awed by Martel's ability to write an entire book length story, and then tell me in the end that the story wasn't at all what he said it was—the first time I actually thought about what the writer was doing, rather than just immersing myself in the story.  I read Mr. Pip and felt like crying, a feeling I don't have entirely too often.  I read The Road and felt like hugging my son, kissing him (and I felt like recycling).

And I've read countless books in between these, each of which gave me some sort of feeling, a feeling I don't get from anywhere else, the feeling I've taken part in someone else's creative process.  For what would a book be if it weren't ever read by someone other than its author?  Would we write and revise and strive to create this art, if we knew we were the only ones to read it?

I don't think I would.