Exile on Ninth Street

As I draft fledgling attempts to write science fiction, I’m finding myself worrying about the believability of my understanding of the science part. I come from a liberal arts background, though I love science and loved my required science classes: I took basic zoology and botany and astronomy, as far as the hard sciences go, and anthropology, as far as the soft sciences go. But, much of my understanding of science comes from studying the history of science in history classes, watching the Science Channel and Mythbusters, and reading mainstream science journalism.

One of my current drafts follows an ordinary guy — a liberal arts type — about 50 years in the future who gets his hands on an invisibility suit. The idea for the suit came from a short article in Science News. What I imagine happening to the guy once he gets hold of the suit . . . well, I’m not sure how plausible the idea is, or why or how it could happen, but somehow I want the suit to allow the wearer to fold space time. Oh, and none of you better steal my idea.

Of course, as I’ve begun to write, I also realize that who the character is and what the character wants is also primary to the story. It’s primary to any story. But for SF the plausibility of the science has to count for something.

Hello all! Below are links to PDFs of some recent writing I’ve been doing. They are science fiction story beginnings drawn from writing prompts by Joe Haldeman.  I am asking/begging/pleading/grovelling for any interested readers out there to give these “shitty” first drafts (as Anne Lamott might say) a look-see and give me feedback, especially to which beginnings you think have the greatest potential for a short story. Remember, these are drafts—I haven’t proofread them for errors.

Trial beginning 1

Trial beginning 2

Trial beginnings 3a and 3b

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Through the eyes of protagonist William Mandella, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War gives readers a glimpse of what war in deep space and on distant planets might be like. It’s a theme taken up by countless science fiction writers — Robert Heinlein and Orson Scott Card, to name a few — and no telling how many SF films and tv shows.

Though set in the far future, this novel is comparable to any classic war novel. It’s gritty and unromantic. And given that Haldeman is a Vietnam vet, The Forever War is a novel as much about that war as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

The war Mandella fights against an alien enemy millions of light years from Earth has a spurious beginning — its Gulf of Tonkin incident. The soldiers in Mandella’s unit fight in hostile environments against an often unseen enemy.

Because of the phenomenon of time dilation caused by light speed travel, soldiers age months while Earth ages centuries. When they return home, they find the word vastly changed, an almost completely different culture: one ravaged by overpopulation as well as wars and violence. An experience not unlike that many Vietnam vets had upon their return to the United States. Haldeman in interviews talks about the feeling the went on without him while he was overseas.

The novel, however, is more than a metaphor of Vietnam: Haldeman is prescient about such things as overpopulation, violence and more tolerance of gays.

View all my reviews

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/

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.’

The first how-to write fiction book I ever read was Rita Mae Brown’s Starting From Scratch. That book led to an addiction to how-to write books. I gobbled them up.  John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well (which introduced me to creative nonfiction/literary journalism), Josip Novakich’s Fiction Writer’s Workshop, and on and on and on.

In The Atlantic‘s current fiction issue, writer Richard Bausch critiques writing instruction manuals in an essay “How to Write in 700 Easy Lessons”.

“My quarrel,” he writes, “is with the implication in the how-to books market that one can merely read them to find the magic secret for writing well enough to publish.”

Bausch argues the writer’s manuals promote being a writer without the need to do the work. He tells a story of a student who “with great pride” said “he had ‘over a hundred books’ in his library — I [Bausch] could see that I was meant to be impressed by the number, and that he considered himself a vastly well-read type of guy. He went on to say that many in his collection are how-to books . . . . He did not come to writing from reading books, good or bad. He came to it from deciding it might be cool to walk around in that role.”

The argument is similar to the one John Aldridge makes in Talents and Technicians, a critique of MFA writing programs. Aldridge argued that MFA programs created cookie-cutter writers whose prose was so similar the only difference was the byline. The writing programs, Aldridge said, produced writers for the sake of being writers. These writers didn’t come from reading other writers; it came writing in the writing programs.

Bausch addresses this argument:

I know an assumption exists in certain quarters that writing programs do damage, mostly by causing a so-called cookie-cutter effect, everyone sounding the same. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and you need only look at the work to know it. Allan Gurganus, Jane Smiley, T.C. Boyle, and I were all at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at roughly the same time. Allan and I had classes together. We hung out. I went horseback riding with Jane Smiley . . . and we talked about everything under the sun, including writing

You would have trouble finding four writers who are more different.

If a cookie-cutter effect ever develops, it will come from people keeping to the manuals and how-to books.

And writing that comes from those whose reading is confined to the how-to books is cramped and obvious.

My experience with how-to books has, overall, been decent. I don’t view them as negative, cookie-cutter mills. Bausch says there are classics in the genre such as Gardner’s Art of Fiction. These books, he says, deal with the “aesthetics of the task.” But, I’ve never viewed the manuals as substitutes for reading and learning to write from reading novels, essays, poems or plays.

Bausch says the manuals steer would-be writers away from reading and learning from other writers. Reading the manuals has helped me become a better reader, even better, I think than the reading I did in graduate school. I read deeply and learned to analyze texts in grad school, but  much of that analysis was fueled with theory.

After reading a manual I could go back to the books I loved and pick up on the techniques the manuals had taught. I could see what was bad and what was good. Those books also introduced me to writers such as Bausch and Boyle.

The other thing I learned from were the exercises and prompts. I learned to apply the techniques, and I would practice the techniques, not only at home, but at work when I was writing feature stories. Those exercises were important, too, because they got me to place ass in chair and write.

Of course, the manuals are full of the standards: write what you know; use active voice; show, don’t tell.

But many also go beyond those standards with practical advice like considering journalism as a way to make a living and actively write.

Still, the manuals won’t make you a writer, any more than an MFA program. They can only give you a tiny amount of instruction. Some of it useful, some of it trash.

The truth is this: Writing is a bumper-to-bumper crawl through hell with an occasional jolt to the next level of anguish. To be a writer means hitching one’s self-esteem to the slimy tail of success. Slip loose, and it’s into the wreckage of failed artists.

If there are cheerier routes to the blessed state of authordom, few take them. Like a nation of exiles, millions of tortured souls go forth in search of a byline and a word of approval. Only a three-chain flagellant is assured more misery. Yet being a writer remains the dream of any romantic who ever watched the seasons or fell in love or counted the zeros in some lucky idiot’s book advance.

— Arthur Plotnik, The Elements of Authorship

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 . . .

That’s not writing, that’s typing.

– Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

A long time ago, just out of grad school, I took a job as a substitute teacher (an experience that makes you think of all the good population control would do for the world) and filled in for a computer science teacher. One of the classes that day was keyboarding; the digital age had killed typing class. (What would Mavis Beacon do?)

Back then, when the Interwebs was a toddler, I was a Luddite of sorts. I wrote all my grad papers on a manual typewriter. Lloyd Arnold’s dust jacket photo of Ernest Hemingway working at a manual typewriter was etched into my brain, a definitive image of the writer at work. I never imagined myself composing on  a computer.

Of course I did. And still do. But obsessive questions linger: Does a writer’s writing change when when he or she switches from a typewriter (or longhand for that matter) to a computer? And how does it change?

Earlier today, as I caught up reading favorite blogs, I ran across this post at Bookslut. Apparently, a new biography of Ralph Ellison suggests Ellison’s writing was shakier when he switched to a computer:

Writing on the computer transformed Ellison’s fiction–both its process and its product. It would be going too far to blame the computer for Ellison’s failure to publish his second novel, but its impact on his writing was complicated and certainly not always positive. Writing fiction on the computer is a qualitatively different experience from writing by other means.

I know my writing is different when I compose on a computer rather than a typewriter. I reread sketches I’ve written on the typewriter and they sound better, at least in manuscript. But, when I’ve rewritten those same passages on the keyboard, they don’t sound right. They sound “written” rather than organic, rhythmic sentences. But then I reread published pieces that I thought at the time sounded great, but that read stiff and mechanical months or years later.

Is it the typewriter or computer that’s changed my writing? Or am I a stiff judge of my own writing? Am I getting better? Or am I the same?

I wanted to share this post from Richard at Narrative:

Frank Conroy on mystery & memoir

Conroy’s one of my favorite writers. I read his memoir Stop-Time about a decade ago, after trying to write a short story about my then strained relationship with my dad. While Conroy’s narrative about his relationship with his father is absorbing — it’s not the whole subject of the memoir — what drew me in most were Conroy’s sentences — deceptively simple declarative sentences packed with meaning.

Stop-Time‘s also one of the first creative-nonfiction memoirs I’d ever read. It’s a fine example of the form.

Some of  the interview excerpts from Richard’s post that drew me into Conroy’s mind:

“The power and almost obscene wealth of parts of America resemble nothing so much as the Roman Empire. I don’t understand why people aren’t completely scandalized by the degrading of humanity through films and television over the last twenty years, a degradation of the soul. I’m not religious, but I insist on being able to use some of the concepts generally scorned in a secular society. The soul and spirituality are important parts of life . . . . The spiritual emptiness of society is very deep and unsettling, so people are looking for something better.”

“I don’t believe in the natural writer. I believe in the natural reader who gradually begins to write. You can’t write independent of literature, so you read, you read, you read, you read, you read, and then you begin to write.”