Exile on Ninth Street

Can you tell by my headline which writer I’ve become obsessed with lately? Besides reading his novel The Forever War, I became interested in the fact he writes his science fiction novels, generally set in the far future, in longhand.

In this podcast below, he talks about his process and about writing in longhand:

http://copperrobot.com/2010/09/science-fiction-writer-joe-haldeman-discusses-unplugging-to-create/

Neuromancer by William Gibson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Now a classic of science fiction, Neuromancer by William Gibson launched the cyberpunk genre, and gave readers a look into a future that to some extent has become real.

Like most science fiction, some of Gibson’s technological inventions are now outdated, but I can imagine in the near future the possibility of humans being able visit virtual worlds while linked physically to computers, and enhance ourselves cybernetically.

The novel follows computer hacker Case and cybernetically enhanced mercenary Molly as they delve into the virtual worlds of an AI, Wintermute. They eventually learn Wintermute is trying to merge with its twin, Neuromancer to create a super AI.

At times it’s a trippy read, especially when Gibson sends his characters into the virtual world; it becomes as hard for the reader to tell what is real and what is virtual, as it does for the Gibson’s characters to make such a distinction.

Which leads to an interesting question in our current world: Where does reality end and virtual reality begin, especially at a time when people ”live” in virtual worlds such as Second Life? 

The novel also has one of the best opening lines in literature: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

View all my reviews

Most of Walter Mosley’s advice in This Year You Write Your Novel is standard to almost every book on writing or writing class, explaining point of view, going over dialogue and description, and expounding the merits of showing versus telling.

The bulk of the book covers these elements of fiction in brief but useful segments, perfect for reference and reminders. Though brief, they are insightful.

His segment on showing versus telling, for instance, is one of the better ones that I’ve read. Mosley concisely explains why showing is preferable, in most instances, to telling.

I know that there are the sticklers out there among you who will say that everything expressed in words is told, not shown. After all telling is a function of speaking, and writing is nothing but an extension of speech. This is true. But there’s a difference between explanation and verbal action.

For instance, “Call me Ishmael” is the well-known first line of the American classic Moby Dick. Contrast this sentence with “His name was Ishmael.”

. . . .

“His name was Ishmael” is a flat statement that does not, on its own, draw us in. It is merely a piece of information.

The first example shows something to the reader, or, more accurately, it attempts to include the reader by engaging the reader on a personal level.

Besides drawing the reader into the novel’s world, Mosley explains, narrative that shows adds a “human aspect to its repertoire and, in doing so, includes the reader either emotionally or physically.”

Mosley’s book is also one of the first I’ve read that encourages fiction writers — or any prose writer for that matter — to study poetry seriously. Poetry teaches the writer, Mosley says, to appreciate the subtleties of language.

“Of all writing,” he says, “poetry is the most demanding . . . .In poetry you have to see language as both music and content.”

I was also impressed by Mosley’s differentiating between intuitive writers — those who basically plunge in and discover the story as they write —-and structure writers, who know the whole story from beginning to end, and don’t plunge in until they know it.

Some writing books, as Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream, favor one method over the other. Butler suggests to some extent that the intuitive approach is the only approach that will allow a writer to tap into the creative zone necessary to write without restraint and create art.

“The intuitive and structured methods are equally valid,” Mosley says.

Truthfully, Mosley says, there are probably few writers who are strictly intuitive or structured.

One of my favorite sections of the book is a digression on genre. Mosley doesn’t stash any genre into the literary suburbs. It’s a refreshing outlook—in a refreshing book on writing — not always present in other books on writing, which seem to encourage writers to aspire only to literary writing, whatever that is.

“A novel is a novel is a novel,” he writes. “A crime story is a novel. A romance is a novel. . . .No one who is serious about literature would dismiss One Hundred Years of Solitude for being a fantasy. No one would write off The Stranger because of its courtroom or crime details.”

I’m not a big fan of Jonathan Franzen, but it’s nice to see a good writer make the cover of the Aug. 23 issue of Time in our post-literate age. His latest novel Freedom is out this month, nine years after The Corrections.

The Time piece is a nice profile of the writer and a preview of the book. Here’s a passage I liked on the significance of the novel, on reading in general in a multi-media saturated culture driven to constant distraction:

There are any number of reasons to want novels to survive. The way Franzen thinks about it is that books can do things, socially useful things, that other media can’t. He cites . . . the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and his idea of busyness: that state of constant distraction that allows people to avoid difficult realities and maintain self-deceptions. With the help of cell phones, e-mail and handheld games, it’s easier to stay busy, in the Kierkegaardian sense, than it’s ever been.

Reading, in its quietness and sustained concentration, is the opposite of busyness. ‘We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we’ve created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful,’ Franzen says. ‘The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.’

I’ve felt like Joshua Braff in this NPR piece, loving such guilty pleasures science fiction, but disdaining the genre all through grad school as if it didn’t exist.  But, I’ve also pretentiously fawned over Joyce and DeLillo, and I have read them, Ulysses and Underworld, though not Finnegan’s Wake or whatever DeLillo’s recently released.

But, I’ve also read John Irving and Stephen King. They are master storytellers, and storytelling sometimes seems lacking in the language experiments of the DeLillos and Joyces of the lit world.

Enjoy the link:

Proud and Unpretentious: Lessons from John Irving

Here’s my latest book review:

Here is this week’s Booking Through Thursday:

Which do you prefer? Short stories? Or full-length novels?

To be diplomatic, I have to say I like both forms. That said, I like novels best. I like the depth of character in novels. I like subplots and side stories. I like digressions. I like getting involved in the writer’s world — most of the time: sometimes, of course, you can’t wait to get out!

At the same time, a good short story can be as involved as any novel. The characters can be well-developed. There can be subplots — though brief — and side stories. I am also fond of story collections and like hybrids such as the novel-in-stories.

A favorite form is the novella that lingers on the edge of genre.

Last night was a movie night at home, and the late show was The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei. The film garnered Rourke a best actor Oscar nomination and Tomei a best supporting actress Oscar nomination, and has been hailed as Rourke’s comeback role, and Rourke’s performance certainly deserves the acclaim it received.

I had wanted to see it since seeing clips of it during the Oscars a year ago. From the clips I recognized the film’s literary roots: it has a Raymond Carver-esque tone and theme. It concerns Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a professional wrestler resembling some cross between Hulk Hogan and Dog the Bounty Hunter, who saw his heyday in the eighties, and now only wrestles on the weekends. His slide from fame has taken him from celebrity to working as a stocker and at the deli counter of a grocery store.

The movie has all the elements of a Carver short story. A bleak wintry setting. (I was never quite sure where the movie takes place, although apparently it’s Elizabeth, New Jersey.) Trailer parks. A working class bleakness as Randy struggles to get by with the money he makes at his job and weekend wrestling gigs. Familial estrangement. In this case between father and daughter. Randy tries to redeem his relationship with his estranged daughter after a heart attack ends, or should end, his wrestling career.

The movie’s most noticeable literary element, though, is the “dying fall” that ends the movie. As the narrative moves along in the film it seems to be moving toward a Rocky-for-pro-wrasslin’ resolution, the sports hero/entertainer making a comeback when Randy quits his grocery store job and goes back into the ring for a triumphant bout. Tomei’s character even follows the wrestler to the ring. Tension builds. Will he go through with it though it may kill him? Or will he throw in the towel? Randy enters the ring. He battles his nemesis. He begins to clutch at his chest. He climbs the ropes. He leaps to finish off his opponent. Fade to black.

The dying fall, I understand, comes from music — it’s an abrupt fade out of sound. And it has been adapted to literary forms, including film.

My favorite fade to black is from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which the wounded hero Robert Jordan awaits his fate:

“Robert Jordan lay behind the tree, holding onto himself very carefully and delicately to keep his steady. He was waiting until the officer reached the sunlit place where the first trees of the pine forest joined the green slope of the meadow. He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.”

The novel ends. Just like this blog post . . .

A little over a week ago, I wrote a post about my recent bout with self doubt (maybe bad poetry is my real calling?), and since then have received some great encouragement from commenters.

One commenter, Richard Gilbert, sent me a link to Junot Diaz’s essay “Becoming a Writer” in O, The Oprah magazine, in which Diaz talks about the doubt and despair he went through when composing his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2008.

I had heard about Diaz’s essay in passing and had seen one quote frequently pop up:

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

A very powerful statement. (I have to recommend this essay to any writer, whether you’re struggling with self doubt or not. It’s one of the most evocative essays about self doubt and the writing process I’ve ever read.) But the image that struck me most was this:

While I waited for September to come around, I spent long hours in my writing room, sprawled on the floor, with the list [of other professions Diaz might be qualified for]on my chest, waiting for the promise of those words to leak through the paper into me.

Diaz had gotten to the point of wondering whether or not he really was a writer after working on his novel for five years without success. He was planning to go back to school. He had made a list of professions he was qualified for or might be qualified for. Nothing suited him. And yet his future as a writer was in doubt. What else was there to do but to lie on the floor and look to the void for answers?

While my circumstances are different Diaz’s, I can picture myself with a list of options on my chest (I keep an unsatisfying list in my head) and I can see myself sprawled on the floor looking up to the void to waiting for an answer.

If not this, what?

Part of my anxiety is the dread of doing anything other than writing or editing. I’ve worked in such worlds as retail (a nightmarish experience that awakened me fully to Sartre’s “Hell — is other people”). And while ideally “a writer is a writer . . . when there is no hope,” I sink at the prospect of not writing professionally in a day job (no one seems to want me); I sink at the prospect of having to work outside of  professional writing.

And yet that Sartrean nightmare Reality demands I have an income. In my mind I lay on the floor, looking up, wondering, If not writing, what?

As far as my novel goes, I’ve set it aside, though an inkling of inspiration came to me Saturday after hearing a talk by Elizabeth Berg, who at one point addressed the conflict between the writing life and “real” life, one of the larger conflicts in my life at the moment. I may tinker with parts of the book. There may be some potential in it, yet.

But I’m still fumbling with self doubt. My writing has been sporadic — blog posts, journal entries — as I sprawl on the floor asking, What do I write? and If not writing, what?

When I avoid something that I know I must do, I end up feeling guilty.  So every year as summer approached and I had ten weeks of free time, my anxiety level would begin to climb. I knew I had two and a half months in which to write if I wished, and I was terrified to begin because I had a number of fears that I just did not want to face.

— Elizabeth George, Write Away

This morning I picked up and read for a few minutes in George’s book on writing novels to jump start myself into working on my novel, and came upon the above passage, coincidentally after I had been thinking about the necessity of anxiety to the writing life.

If you’ve followed this blog, you know that I’ve gone through periods in which I’ve felt detached from my old self, a faltering sense of self as a writer. A routine appendectomy almost a year and a half ago left me in such a state. Or rather the aftereffects of the surgery heightened a lost sense of self, a lost sense of purpose that had been creeping up on me after a 360-degree career change — launching from newspaper feature writer to adjunct writing instructor to textbook editor to no career at all.

From my recent studies of Buddhism I’ve gathered that a detachment from the Self is just what a body needs. I’m not sure how this is a good thing. It seems to strip you of purpose.

Which is what I feel — stripped of purpose. I should be revising my novel today. But I came to a point in the revision yesterday when I lost interest. I lost interest in the characters. I lost interest in the story. I lost interest, worst of all, in the process. I began wondering, Why am I writing this novel anyway? and Why am I writing at all?

When I first set out to write the novel, I knew why I wanted to write the novel.

First, I wanted to tell a story. A particular story. A fictionalized version of a romance. Though not a romance novel. Something along the lines of A Farewell to Arms or James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime (a grammatical aside: Why does “pastime” have one “t”?). A serious look at love and the relationships between men and women.

Second, I wanted to involve myself in the process of writing a book again. I had immersed myself into writing books before, completing two manuscripts, neither of which went beyond first drafts. This time I set out to immerse myself in the process, determined to stick it out draft after draft until I had something perfect enough to submit.

After a false start or two, I finished the first draft in about a year. Within another year I had teased out a second draft.

I set the book aside for various reasons after I finished the second draft. For the most part, I needed a break from the book, although a career change, then a period of unemployment, another career change, several moves, a marriage, and further unemployment, along with an extended bout with detachment from my writerly self also contributed to the manuscript gathering dust.

As I think about it, I set the book aside because I felt detached from my writerly self. For some reason, my desire to write had grown stale. The energy I got from writing had flattened. I tried to galvanize my desire: blogging more, writing a long piece on my first experience under the knife, writing and submitting a short piece about my struggles with religion, writing a couple of freelance pieces.

These things briefly electrified my system. Still, something was missing. Time? No, I had plenty of time, especially because I wasn’t working.

When I first set out to write, I always felt anxious about finding time to write. I chipped out times to write, scheduling around work schedules and family. Once I set a schedule to write, like Elizabeth George, I would feel guilty if I missed a set time to write. Anxiety would build up. The anxiety would get to me. It drove me to the desk, to the keyboard. I had to write. Otherwise I would feel guilty, and overcome by the anxiety that I had failed myself as a writer.

Now I have time to write (and yet that free time creates another form of anxiety—the stresses of not having a job). For several months now, I’ve been writing, a set schedule, working around time spent looking for a job.

Up until a few weeks ago, I worked enthusiastically on revising my novel. A renewed sense of purpose came after receiving a critique of my manuscript and some encouragement from debut novelists Karen Harrington and Joe O’Connell.

That renewed sense of purpose spurred a whole new vision of the novel. I still had a vision of a serious novel about romantic relationships, but one that was funny, and not morose and bordering on the nihilistic. Now I have a vision of something closer to Nick Hornby’s How to be Good.

Over the past few weeks, however, several things have overwhelmed my psyche.

Like the band Styx, I think I have too much time on my hands. Paradoxically, all the years I that I worked full time and scheduled in time for writing, I craved working independently as a writer: I wanted writing to be my full time job. At the moment, I don’t have anything to schedule around. I’ve been losing the feeling that if I don’t write I have failed myself as a writer. I miss and crave the anxiety of making time to write.

Also, not working has conjured up a whole new state of being, a whole new state of anxiety, one that’s not good for the writing life. Or for the self at all. Almost daily I experience a free floating purposelessness, as if I’m living in a nihilistic vacuum. There are moments when I really have no idea what I want. In this state, I’m numb to writing.

Over the summer, one event numbed my psyche against writing more than anything since: the hope of returning to work, to my old newspaper job, got crushed by an absurd rehire policy. Rejection by my former employer — a place where I developed my writing more than anywhere else — was a kick in the sternum. Besides easing the stress of not having a job, this rejection cast more doubt than anything else on my ability to write.

A new anxiety cropped up. Each time I’ve sat down to write since the rejection, doubt has cropped up.

Yesterday it surfaced again as I started working on my novel. My imagination seemed to fail. I lost interest in the process. Suddenly I’m facing a fear I’ve neglected to face: The question of whether or not I’m a writer at all.