Fall is beginning to show its colors here in Wyoming. Actually, that is untrue, for this picture was shot in Idaho, just a few miles from my home in Wyoming. My running joke (pardon the pun) is that most days I jog into Idaho--making myself sound impressive and all that. The picture shows off a local sub-species, the Rocky Mountain Maple peeking around the stark white of an Aspen trunk. Fall is my favorite time of year in this neck of the woods.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Monday, September 14, 2009
Ms. Freebush
Okay, I know, how low can I go, posting a blog entry on the dog? Let me attempt all my lame excuses at least. Let's face it, I'm a writer and as such I spend a great deal of time alone working. It's a big house. There are SO many blank sheets of paper. Ms. Gracie Lou Freebush is my primary company a good deal of the time. All three daughters have abandoned me for college. My wife, silly girl, seems to think she is required to go to work five days a week. Need I go on? You have to admit, this face is pretty irresistible.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Learning
Just a quick quotation from the late David Foster Wallace:
"...learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."
"...learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
"Organic" Writing?
Obviously I use the term "organic" a great deal throughout this blog and throughout my discussions of writing process. It is, I must admit, a favorite way of talking about writing (and about life, for that matter), which should come as no surprise as it appears in the subtitle of this blog. But what is it? For me, the application of the term organic comes as an extension of viewing the writing process as natural, of wishing to see the act of creative enterprise as a true element of interacting with the larger world, including the world of ideas, as a natural expression of human nature. It means that one takes one's cues from what the world provides. It comes from a fundamental belief that humans have a need to communicate ideas and have evolved in ways ideally suited to doing so. Much of it has to do with trusting the writing process. I believe in trusting organic forces, whether one sees those forces as harmony or karma or faith or feng shui or chi or any other expression of a belief that there are natural states of harmonic convergence and that when we tap into them we are tapping something universal within human consciousness. It is this view that helps explain the frequent occurrence that accompanies writing in a very focused manner on a project where the facts one needs seem to appear suddenly everywhere--in what you are reading at that moment, on the news, in other people's conversations. Now, lets face it, those facts were probably circulating out there anyway, but now you're paying attention. Still, it can feel as if the world placed them for you to encounter.
Okay, that's all rather mystic and abstract and perhaps sounds a little ridiculous. Let me put it into simpler terms within the confines of writing. While I'm not saying to turn a blind eye to the hard work and the revision that is inherent in producing writing worth reading, I am saying that there are times where you have to trust the process of writing itself. It its most extreme form, sometimes this means getting the editor within you out of the way of the child, for there is something about employing the imagination that we associate with childhood and the editor in you is more likely to be telling you about things you can't do or shouldn't do rather than things you might experiment with. It is about trusting that there will be time to revise later but that you must have text in the first place in order to revise. It means trusting that the act of creation is a natural desire.
Organic can mean, as an example, trusting that writing tends to form a natural structure unique to the task at hand and that part of revision is learning to see such structure and capitalize on it. Take a look at a brilliant story like Tim O'Brien's "They Things They Carried" as an example. One doesn't have to be a brilliantly insightful reader to quickly recognize that the base form of the entire story is essentially a list and that the base rhythm throughout is the cadence of a march. Given that it is a story centered on a platoon in Vietnam, a ground unit "humping" (marching with every conceivable tool and weapon they might need) from checkpoint to checkpoint, isolated in the jungle, connected to comrades outside the platoon only by radio, the cadence and the list both make sense. They are alone. They are powered only by their own legs. They carry the weight of death with them always. They are convinced they will never return to the world they knew before Vietnam. Because O'Brien is the soldier poet that he is, and because he is nearly the definition of the literary crafts person, surely he saw these elements of listing and rhythm within his drafts and openly focused upon employing them fully. But we must also allow that both elements arrive naturally from the very thing being described, from the nature of combat in Vietnam, perhaps even from the nature of the place itself. It can be simpler than that too: isn't it natural that a writer trying to transcribe a languid dream falls into elongated,, serpentine sentences mired with funky syntax? Or that the writer attempting to convey a fist fight suddenly writes staccato? Isn't that what the subjects naturally lead the writer towards?
It is in this view of writing that what I speak about bears relation to Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of organic architecture. From early on, even in his "prairie house" period, Wright studied the lines of the prairie, the rolling hills, the expanse of sky, the way the sky squeezed the light at the horizon, the ways vertical structures like tree lines altered the sense of space, the notions of line and rectangle. These studies then infused his constructions, lowering roof lines, playing with angular light, taking away walls to open living space, using simplicity and minimalism. This was the world he walked within daily, and he began to extend those naturalistic elements as he encountered other sorts of geographies. He took what the world offered. Writers do something similar, for all material has its own set of natural inclinations and its own inherent restrictions, not just from setting but from character sensibilities, actions, historical context, and naturally occurring metaphors.
It can be deeper than this too, yet for me much or my obsession with the application of organics in writing is simply trusting that eventually the story will find its way to getting told. I am a writer who rarely knows the full scope of any story I am writing during the time of the writing. The ending is almost never known to me until I've exposed enough of the story to see it, rather like the archaeologist unearthing an object; not only must much of the object come into view, it must be taken into context with the other objects around it, within the facts of history and theory and other available evidence, all this before one might know the object and conjecture its purpose with any authority. Such blindness scares many but I actually take comfort in it. I believe that I must see scenes in my mind to have any hope of writing them, but if I can only see a scene or perhaps two scenes ahead, I'm perfectly content. Or perhaps I can only see a vague image on the horizon or I have some rather inarticulate sense of where, psychologically, I hope characters might reach, yet that is sufficient, in my experience, to trust that consistent daily writing, close listening, and careful reading will get me to the whole story.
Ultimately, while writing is about ideas and universal experiences and about the conveyance of honest emotions, the vehicle of writing is always language. Words. Words are all we really have as writers. But of course words are organic creations that arise out of experience and natural sound, and vocal recreation of shape and form, out of mythology and recounted history. Together words start to bump and grind. They create rhythm and sound and music. They are as elemental to humans intent upon expressing their experiences as are the other organic elements needed for sustaining life and soul. It is in this context that I employ the roots of the term organic within writing.
Organic suggests to me that there are reasons dominant metaphors exist across languages and cultures and texts. Metaphors like the garden and the river. We don't have to share the same language to recognize the presence of natural cycles in both or to see how those cycles help us to understand the metaphysics of life and death, rebirth and time, sewing and harvesting. Nature gives us the actual and nature gives us the metaphorical too. Creative artists in any medium can recognize the presence of both as well as the applications to their forms and to their ideas that become appropriate extensions of them.
Okay, that's all rather mystic and abstract and perhaps sounds a little ridiculous. Let me put it into simpler terms within the confines of writing. While I'm not saying to turn a blind eye to the hard work and the revision that is inherent in producing writing worth reading, I am saying that there are times where you have to trust the process of writing itself. It its most extreme form, sometimes this means getting the editor within you out of the way of the child, for there is something about employing the imagination that we associate with childhood and the editor in you is more likely to be telling you about things you can't do or shouldn't do rather than things you might experiment with. It is about trusting that there will be time to revise later but that you must have text in the first place in order to revise. It means trusting that the act of creation is a natural desire.
Organic can mean, as an example, trusting that writing tends to form a natural structure unique to the task at hand and that part of revision is learning to see such structure and capitalize on it. Take a look at a brilliant story like Tim O'Brien's "They Things They Carried" as an example. One doesn't have to be a brilliantly insightful reader to quickly recognize that the base form of the entire story is essentially a list and that the base rhythm throughout is the cadence of a march. Given that it is a story centered on a platoon in Vietnam, a ground unit "humping" (marching with every conceivable tool and weapon they might need) from checkpoint to checkpoint, isolated in the jungle, connected to comrades outside the platoon only by radio, the cadence and the list both make sense. They are alone. They are powered only by their own legs. They carry the weight of death with them always. They are convinced they will never return to the world they knew before Vietnam. Because O'Brien is the soldier poet that he is, and because he is nearly the definition of the literary crafts person, surely he saw these elements of listing and rhythm within his drafts and openly focused upon employing them fully. But we must also allow that both elements arrive naturally from the very thing being described, from the nature of combat in Vietnam, perhaps even from the nature of the place itself. It can be simpler than that too: isn't it natural that a writer trying to transcribe a languid dream falls into elongated,, serpentine sentences mired with funky syntax? Or that the writer attempting to convey a fist fight suddenly writes staccato? Isn't that what the subjects naturally lead the writer towards?
It is in this view of writing that what I speak about bears relation to Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of organic architecture. From early on, even in his "prairie house" period, Wright studied the lines of the prairie, the rolling hills, the expanse of sky, the way the sky squeezed the light at the horizon, the ways vertical structures like tree lines altered the sense of space, the notions of line and rectangle. These studies then infused his constructions, lowering roof lines, playing with angular light, taking away walls to open living space, using simplicity and minimalism. This was the world he walked within daily, and he began to extend those naturalistic elements as he encountered other sorts of geographies. He took what the world offered. Writers do something similar, for all material has its own set of natural inclinations and its own inherent restrictions, not just from setting but from character sensibilities, actions, historical context, and naturally occurring metaphors.
It can be deeper than this too, yet for me much or my obsession with the application of organics in writing is simply trusting that eventually the story will find its way to getting told. I am a writer who rarely knows the full scope of any story I am writing during the time of the writing. The ending is almost never known to me until I've exposed enough of the story to see it, rather like the archaeologist unearthing an object; not only must much of the object come into view, it must be taken into context with the other objects around it, within the facts of history and theory and other available evidence, all this before one might know the object and conjecture its purpose with any authority. Such blindness scares many but I actually take comfort in it. I believe that I must see scenes in my mind to have any hope of writing them, but if I can only see a scene or perhaps two scenes ahead, I'm perfectly content. Or perhaps I can only see a vague image on the horizon or I have some rather inarticulate sense of where, psychologically, I hope characters might reach, yet that is sufficient, in my experience, to trust that consistent daily writing, close listening, and careful reading will get me to the whole story.
Ultimately, while writing is about ideas and universal experiences and about the conveyance of honest emotions, the vehicle of writing is always language. Words. Words are all we really have as writers. But of course words are organic creations that arise out of experience and natural sound, and vocal recreation of shape and form, out of mythology and recounted history. Together words start to bump and grind. They create rhythm and sound and music. They are as elemental to humans intent upon expressing their experiences as are the other organic elements needed for sustaining life and soul. It is in this context that I employ the roots of the term organic within writing.
Organic suggests to me that there are reasons dominant metaphors exist across languages and cultures and texts. Metaphors like the garden and the river. We don't have to share the same language to recognize the presence of natural cycles in both or to see how those cycles help us to understand the metaphysics of life and death, rebirth and time, sewing and harvesting. Nature gives us the actual and nature gives us the metaphorical too. Creative artists in any medium can recognize the presence of both as well as the applications to their forms and to their ideas that become appropriate extensions of them.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Guiding lights
My obsession with lighthouses continues, so I've included this photo from Flickr by James Jordon. My last name actually means "lamp lighter," and although I'm reasonably confident that is a reference to lighting street lamps, perhaps I can claim my name has some birthright to this obsession. I love the form of the lighthouse as well as its symbolism. Besides, who couldn't use a little guidence to get them safely through the dark?
Friday, September 4, 2009
Parallelism
I've been thinking a great deal lately about the role of parallelism in literature, the way that in good work it can be as if we've entered a hall of mirrors, a hall of mirrors erected at angles and cantered by varying degrees such that images reflect back on themselves although never in a direct line, never a simple exact duplicate. This is how jazz works differently than pop music where you can hear the recurrent theme but it never repeats precisely, instead the theme gets reborn again and again in new variations. In pop you get simply, overt repetition of the theme--catchy, sing-worthy, but predictable on many levels. Good books work more like jazz. Sometimes they do so at the largest levels of construction and sometimes only in the most nuanced bits of metaphor and image. The best books often do both.
Perhaps I've been thinking about this so much lately because I am nearing the end of the first draft of a new novel. Frequently on a given day I am writing new material in the morning, material that is creeping up on the awareness that it is pushing near the ending, and by late morning or early afternoon I am either typing material or editing material (more often both--well always both as I type) that was originally written months ago. This constant forward backward movement allows me to look at the earliest passages of the book from the distance of some hindsight (and a new awareness of where the story actually goes) and to see in the newest material the moments when it best reflects the language, tone, images, and rhythms of its origins. Of course this allows me to see, and I hope, capitalize more fully on the echoes and parallelisms that are organically present in the text. That's how it is for me: discovering what has occurred organically at the rather subconscious phase of the original writing and then stepping away into the analytical ability to see in it what is natural what works, and then, with luck, enhance that.
The presence of such development was made material for me the other night when my wife and I were watching a commentary from the writers and directors of "The West Wing" about an episode titled "Two Cathedrals." (Okay, I am rarely a fan of TV, and the series is now years removed, but we are rapid fans of this show; one of those rare shows that is powerfully and smartly written, beautifully directed, and brilliantly acted--why aren't there more?) The writer and director spoke at length about the way they began to envision the use of the convergence of two story lines and the employment of the past and the present through the parallelism of events and of settings. Employing parallelism, symbolism, repeated image and gesture and parallelism in dialogue lines, they move the viewer seamlessly in time, going so far as to trust the viewer enough to be intelligent enough to catch more nuanced points of time transition (something TV rarely does--trust the intelligence of its audience). Beyond employing parallelism in time, they also used these patterns to allow the personal life of the President to reflect the political and executive decisions he encountered, which is one of the very things that drew viewers to the series in the first place, the humanization of a fictional equivalent of those in power from whom we are so otherwise removed and yet so dependent upon. Is that not one of the roles of literature after all, to humanize and activate ideas and experiences that otherwise seem removed and too large in scope to comprehend.
About the same time as seeing this commentary I was finishing my reading of an older Stewart O'Nam novel The Names of the Dead. Now O'Nam is consistently an enviable craftsman, someone whose work I not only enjoy but learn from. He uses parallelism in both plot and image to do something similar and move the reader within two time periods--past and present. Given that Larry Markham, his protagonist suffers PTSD from his service as a medic in Vietnam, the creation of the reader's ability to inhabit the two time periods is critical, for of course Larry does, as do all people who have survived horrific and traumatic circumstances. Memory does not leave. Indeed science shows us that without biological manipulation, the memory of absolute fear cannot leave. The reader must experience this in order to begin to formulate and understanding of Larry's present. The fluidity with which O'Nam transitions such movement in time is precisely the sort of thing writers must study if they are to learn the larger elements of craft.
Of course literature can succeed with employing identifiable applications of parallelism in part because life does. We often fail to see the images and symbols and interweaving lines of such parallelism in our lives simply because our lives are to close to see in focus. Literature allows us to examine such structures and to ask why they exist, to examine what they reveal. As always, when we encounter such applications in good books, we examine our lives and our world anew as well.
Perhaps I've been thinking about this so much lately because I am nearing the end of the first draft of a new novel. Frequently on a given day I am writing new material in the morning, material that is creeping up on the awareness that it is pushing near the ending, and by late morning or early afternoon I am either typing material or editing material (more often both--well always both as I type) that was originally written months ago. This constant forward backward movement allows me to look at the earliest passages of the book from the distance of some hindsight (and a new awareness of where the story actually goes) and to see in the newest material the moments when it best reflects the language, tone, images, and rhythms of its origins. Of course this allows me to see, and I hope, capitalize more fully on the echoes and parallelisms that are organically present in the text. That's how it is for me: discovering what has occurred organically at the rather subconscious phase of the original writing and then stepping away into the analytical ability to see in it what is natural what works, and then, with luck, enhance that.
The presence of such development was made material for me the other night when my wife and I were watching a commentary from the writers and directors of "The West Wing" about an episode titled "Two Cathedrals." (Okay, I am rarely a fan of TV, and the series is now years removed, but we are rapid fans of this show; one of those rare shows that is powerfully and smartly written, beautifully directed, and brilliantly acted--why aren't there more?) The writer and director spoke at length about the way they began to envision the use of the convergence of two story lines and the employment of the past and the present through the parallelism of events and of settings. Employing parallelism, symbolism, repeated image and gesture and parallelism in dialogue lines, they move the viewer seamlessly in time, going so far as to trust the viewer enough to be intelligent enough to catch more nuanced points of time transition (something TV rarely does--trust the intelligence of its audience). Beyond employing parallelism in time, they also used these patterns to allow the personal life of the President to reflect the political and executive decisions he encountered, which is one of the very things that drew viewers to the series in the first place, the humanization of a fictional equivalent of those in power from whom we are so otherwise removed and yet so dependent upon. Is that not one of the roles of literature after all, to humanize and activate ideas and experiences that otherwise seem removed and too large in scope to comprehend.
About the same time as seeing this commentary I was finishing my reading of an older Stewart O'Nam novel The Names of the Dead. Now O'Nam is consistently an enviable craftsman, someone whose work I not only enjoy but learn from. He uses parallelism in both plot and image to do something similar and move the reader within two time periods--past and present. Given that Larry Markham, his protagonist suffers PTSD from his service as a medic in Vietnam, the creation of the reader's ability to inhabit the two time periods is critical, for of course Larry does, as do all people who have survived horrific and traumatic circumstances. Memory does not leave. Indeed science shows us that without biological manipulation, the memory of absolute fear cannot leave. The reader must experience this in order to begin to formulate and understanding of Larry's present. The fluidity with which O'Nam transitions such movement in time is precisely the sort of thing writers must study if they are to learn the larger elements of craft.
Of course literature can succeed with employing identifiable applications of parallelism in part because life does. We often fail to see the images and symbols and interweaving lines of such parallelism in our lives simply because our lives are to close to see in focus. Literature allows us to examine such structures and to ask why they exist, to examine what they reveal. As always, when we encounter such applications in good books, we examine our lives and our world anew as well.
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