Wet Ink

We're All Vulnerable Monsters

And in addition to the post below, here's a quick little plug (which is another plus-point of keeping a blog!):

"Vulnerable Monsters" Seminar on June 16th at Grub Street :

From fairy-tale wolves to modern-day vampires, monsters have often stood for the violent in us; but many authors stress another side: how vulnerable it can feel to be different.  Drawing inspiration from literary examples and classic types, you'll create a monster or human hybrid who exists in a world of people.  Through our writing, we'll challenge readers to ask deeper questions, such as, "What is it like to feel monstrous, and how do we cope when we do?"  This seminar will be a great way to build a new story or to better understand the character(s) in an existing story or novel.

To read my instructor bio, click here.

To find more details about location and cost, click here.

Blog is a Blog is a Blog

Thinking, "Woah, I've been blogging for ages," I tried to make this blog into a book.  It was an idle kind of project -- to see if it could be done.  What would go first? I asked myself.  How would the "essays" be grouped?  Did the pieces need extending?  Who was my target audience?  "To make your blog into a book," the experts say, "you need to have a massive following."  But I don't want a "massive following".  I just want you... else I'll stop confiding.  And why should a blog not be small?  A kid with big boots.

One of the most wonderful things about blogging is this:  The content truly belongs to both reader and writer.  No big publishers, no marketing -- just you and me.  It's direct.  And, for the most part, it's all about the work.

Last night, at Art2Art, a performer stood up and, before he shared his music, talked about what these evenings mean to him.  I won't name him because I suspect he wouldn't want me to -- it was an intimate moment between fifty people at the end of a relaxed night.  What he said, more or less, was that what we're doing isn't about fame.  The quality of the performances is increasingly impressive, but that's far from the bottom line.  Art2Art is about the work and the people.  The process, the sharing.  And, ya know... being passionate.

Just as story isn't about publishing, so a blog is not about money or fame.  What we do here is different to printing a one-time volume.  It shifts, grows, muses.  And it's here for the screen.  

So the identity crisis is over.  

This isn't a book.  It's a blog.

Dancing Alone

It's a habit.  When I'm drying dishes, making the bed, taking a break from my writing, I play a few tracks and swing these hips, and hell, I'm not ashamed.  I don't seem to know anyone these days who truly likes to dance -- it's been years since I hit a dance floor, but what the heck?  So there I am in the kitchen, with the curtains wide, wiggling to Nina Simone and singing like a kid; similar to the moments when a piece of flash hits me and I'm scribbling away on the back of an envelope...

Of course, I'm not the first to liken writing to dancing.  In his essay entitled "Losers", (Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter '07) Charles Baxter uses dance to argue art is valid whether or not it receives public recognition.  "Two people dancing are not losers when they are not dancing for an audience, or for money, or for a prize.  They may be demonstrating their skill as dancers, or their love for each other.  They may be cutting open a wound or healing it."  So true.  And yet, why choose dancing as a metaphor here?  Perhaps because, in our society, writing is stereotyped as being all about publication; yet unless the dancer's a professional, it's widely accepted that most people boogie simply to express.  

On another note, finding your voice can be a little like finding your rhythm.  I remember, many years ago, writing a short piece that seemed so musical that I had to adopt a beat.  For the first time in my life, I saw I could write with rhythm and all the work I'd done when penning poems gushed through my fingers and I felt.

In fact, when I'm dancing alone in the kitchen, it isn't so different to when I'm sitting writing.  Which brings me to another take: our creative pursuits may change in our lives -- teaching may shift towards writing perhaps, or a painter becomes a singer -- but the beautiful, hard, blazing thing that rises behind our ribs (or whatever yours feels like and wherever it's located!) is a part of us that may transform, but can't just disappear.  As long as we're living and healthy, we're likely to always express it.  

The only choice is how.

What They Said About Letting Go

All writers have to let go of a dream at some point, or, if not that, then a dependency or longing.  Whether it's in the shape of rejection slips, gaining approval from loved ones, or something more profound, we all have to pick ourselves up now and then. 

So here are a few quotes that help me get through it.  Maybe you'll find some of them of use!

"Feeling austere, lonely, bitter, defeated.  Life failed to materialize, to be what I want, so the book grows."  From Fire, by Anais Nin (p. 160).  

"It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us."  Viktor Frankyl in Man's Search for Meaning .  

"I used to be Snow White, but I drifted."  Mae West.  (It's okay to drift -- makes us less gorily perfect).

"You must wish to consume yourself in your own flame: how could you wish to become new unless you had first become ashes!" From Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. by Walter Kaufmann). 

The WHOLE of Rudyard Kipling's If, which I read at my father's funeral.  There.  That's a confession!  

Sweet dreams.

GUYS, I WON'T BE BLOGGING FOR A WHILE.  WILL PROBABLY BE BACK BY NEXT WEEK.  HOPE YOU HAVE A GOOD FEW DAYS.  

Breathe - A Note on Pressure

When I first moved to America, my doctor sent me for a pulmonary function test in order to explore the extent of my asthma.  I got crabby about it.  Did I really have to go?  I've been asthmatic since the age of thirteen, and have been caring for myself quite capably ever since.  But the doc insisted, so off I went to a small room in a hospital where they stuck me in a box.

Seriously.  It was a small glass box, the size of a shower cubicle with lots of pipes inside.  The nurse stuck a clip on my nose, inserted a tube in my mouth, then closed the door on me and told me breathe.  Was I comfortable?  Was I heck.

What proceeded was the strangest process in which she shouted instructions through a speaker.  Sometimes I was told to pant; at other times, to breathe normally.  At one point, I had to hold my breath, then blow out superfast.  Finally, she told me she was going to pump air in and I'd have to resist by blowing through.  "Force your own air out," she said, "fight the incoming pressure."

Snort.

Now, with me, the only sign that I suffer from asthma (apart from cold-symptoms which tend to be harsh) is that a strong wind stops me from breathing.  I actually have to cup my hands across my mouth to ensure I don't get stifled.  So you can understand how horrid this was.  She forced air into me and I couldn't resist.

"Is that all you can do?" she asked, as I tried to recover.  "You've performed so well on the other tests."  So she told me to do it again and again, but to no avail.  Come the fifth time, I looked her in the eye (through the glass you understand) and told her no.  

"But I'm sure you can," she told me.  "You just have to try harder."

I told her I disagreed. 

Then I yanked the pipe from my mouth, removed my nose-clip, opened the cubicle door and walked from the room.

As writers, there will be times in our lives when people say, "You should write about that big trauma you experienced as a kid," or "Go to that dark place" or "Face your inner fears."  Sometimes, it'll be great advice and sometimes it won't be.  The test of someone who cares for us?  They'll trust our own reaction.  If we do want to unearth our traumas, we'll do it when we're ready.  

You don't have to own the lungs of a god to know you breathe just fine.

A Writer's Thoughts on Vegas

Got back from Vegas on Sunday night.  Here are a few musings:

• Like those huge, zany flowers made of plastic inside the Vegas hotels, we writers can create illusions that are more vivid than reality -- but a thought: unless we're aiming for satire or exaggeration, ours can often do with being smaller, less intense. 
• I think money can be the opposite of words.  Cash is helpful for the material world, but language can help us touch the spiritual as well.  Also, everything's relative. In Vegas, as a friend of mine warned me, a hundred-dollar bill can seem like a tenner. What is it like for those of us who feel a tenner is like a hundred? One of the reasons Vegas can feel so dirty, at times?
• "Flush" has a whole new meaning for me since I learnt just a touch of poker.  Every new meaning is a pun in the making - a new chance for complexity, I guess.
• Wherever there are great highs there are also great lows.
• When the sun sets over such strange, new buildings, surrounded by desert, studded with trees, though it's the same sun that the rest of us experience, it also isn't in a way.

At a party, I noticed two of our mates kept looking at each other.  There was something in their eyes -- a mutual pleasure.  Later, in the car on the way home, I told R. I thought they were in love.  He laughed.  "No way," he said.  "Those two are barely friends."

Two months later, I received an email saying these folks were moving in together.  When I told R. he had to look at the message before he believed what I said! 

Many of us, as writers, are good at reading intention.  It comes, I think, from our natural interest in people.  To write about motivation, emotion, communication, you have to be tuned into these aspects in real life.  It's why many of us are people-watchers, perhaps.  Folks interest us.  We read stories in their eyes.  And once we create a character in imagination, we can often see their face.

When I was studying Psychology, I learnt about prosopagnosia, the condition whereby certain folks can't recognise faces.  They recognise other objects that are placed in front of them, but faces are a different matter.  So useful is the ability to know a face when we see one that experts claim a part of the brain is entirely devoted to the process.  Lincoln Holmes, interviewed here for the BBC, says, "When I am asked by people 'do all faces look the same?' the answer to that question is 'no -- they don't all look the same, but none of them look like anyone.'"

Of course, prosopagnosia is not about reading emotion, it's about recognition, pure and simple; but it does make me think about my connection to faces.  We're fortunate if we're able to create, in our mind's eye, the faces of our characters.  And those of us who enjoy people-watching -- maybe we're fortunate too.

Your Face is a Book

At a party, I noticed two of our mates kept looking at each other.  There was something in their eyes -- a mutual pleasure.  Later, in the car on the way home, I told R. I thought they were in love.  He laughed.  "No way," he said.  "Those two are barely friends."

Two months later, I received an email saying these folks were moving in together.  When I told R. he had to look at the message before he believed what I said! 

Many of us, as writers, are good at reading intention.  It comes, I think, from our natural interest in people.  To write about motivation, emotion, communication, you have to be tuned into these aspects in real life.  It's why many of us are people-watchers, perhaps.  Folks interest us.  We read stories in their eyes.  And once we create a character in imagination, we can often see their face.

When I was studying Psychology, I learnt about prosopagnosia, the condition whereby certain folks can't recognise faces.  They recognise other objects that are placed in front of them, but faces are a different matter.  So useful is the ability to know a face when we see one that experts claim a part of the brain is entirely devoted to the process.  Lincoln Holmes, interviewed here for the BBC, says, "When I am asked by people 'do all faces look the same?' the answer to that question is 'no -- they don't all look the same, but none of them look like anyone.'"

Of course, prosopagnosia is not about reading emotion, it's about recognition, pure and simple; but it does make me think about my connection to faces.  We're fortunate if we're able to create, in our mind's eye, the faces of our characters.  And those of us who enjoy people-watching -- maybe we're fortunate too.