Tag Archives: writing fiction

Negative Capability

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At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and what Shakespeare possessed enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason. (John Keats, 1817)

Only recently did I learn of the term “negative capability” in Mathew Zapruder’s Why Poetry, where he writes “What is important is not the cause of the feeling (of engaging with the arts) but the feeling itself, those moments of deep inexplicable feeling, of sadness or melancholy or joy that we cannot place, a feeling that is maybe only possible when one is truly alone.”

This term is a revelation for me, akin to emotional intelligence, an idea to which I have a great affinity, but didn’t know was a thing and will now use as a moment for Davis n my script, Wave That Flag, where he leaves school and to explore his negative capability through a journey on tour with The Grateful Dead.

The Sacred Whore, Version 3,5

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Shockingly, I met my goal for yesterday of completing a draft of The Sacred Whore. I had two major problems in completing this latest draft. First and foremost, I had to move the primary point of view away from a male perspective, which meant not only minimizing the pimp Jefferson’s role and switching the king-pin to a queen-pin, but also expanding the voice of a number of the sex workers.

The other challenge was updating the work to present day. And since I wrote the first draft in 1988, the inclusion of phones and other technologies was paramount. Once I figured out that Dorothy could be a vlogger, everything seemed to fall into place. I also edited out much of the speech at the end. Pontification is a not an effective device.

I’m going to take a swing at Wave That Flag today and try to give Davis a little more clarity in his arc. We’ll see. Today’s writing prompt: “My favorite teacher…”

Scared of Writing

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I waited outside of Mr. Carver’s class, thinking of how I could get an extension. The assignment – a 2,000-word creative self-reflection – was due that afternoon, and I hadn’t even started. I didn’t understand why I had to do it, because I had graduated long ago and was in fact now teaching at the school.

I gave up and beetled off to my classroom, the Dean of Students behind me, a row of exiting buses ahead. As I sprinted up the hill, I opened my eyes to find it was late into morning, another cloudy day. I was scared of getting back into my writing. That’s all it was.

There is a sprawl of projects to address. I have to fine tune three scripts: Ave and Dorothy need to be established as live-bloggers from the outset of The Sacred Whore. Davis’ motivation for going on tour with The Grateful Dead needs more focus in Wave That Flag. And the background stories need to be more relevant to Davis’ isolation in Just Weird.

The Vanishing Pill is a mess. Two years in, and this book remains cluttered with notes all over. I haven’t figured out the starting point or the crisis nor where or how it ends. And then there’s my teacher’s guidebook, Fuck Pedagogy. No idea how I’m going to focus that into anything relevant at all.

To paraphrase Matthew Zapruder in Why Poetry, I’m afraid of being exposed, of being seen as banal, derivative, uninteresting and stupid. That’s all it is. And so, “To bed!” I will arise at dawn and begin this battle anew! Or now. I’ll do it now. And start with my first prompt: “My favorite childhood vacation…” That was in Anna Maria Key in Florida where everything was magic, especially the gift shops.

To Kiss Others

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“I’m going to kiss others.” And then her lips were on mine, and I was closing the blinds, people trying to peek in, her naked body there, all of it over too quickly.

I didn’t remember much, but she was pregnant and we were married. And then the accident, she paralyzed from the waist down. We didn’t make it.

I was back in her neighborhood years later, at a fundraiser. I stayed at the periphery, thinking I might glimpse her but only saw her friends, and went back down the hallway, and she was there, her hair lighter now, elegant as ever. I whispered her name. She began to cry. “You came.”

I wanted to hold her but knew that would make it worse and kept a respectful distance, leaving later, talking with her assistant about what arrangements might be made for later.

Life is Work and Work is Life

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I’m coming back from two weeks in New Orleans where I was tired and uninspired and did very little writing. Instead, I read and drank and walked around. “It’s good for you,” I was told time and time again. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like life was pointless. I felt desperate.

My father always said that if you don’t like work, you’re not going to like life. Jim Henson concurred: “I love to work. It’s the thing that I get the most satisfaction out of – and probably what I do best. I think much of the world has the wrong idea of working. It’s one of the good things in life. The feeling of accomplishment is more real and satisfying that finishing a good meal or looking at one’s accumulated wealth.”

The idea of being idle, either enjoying the company of family and friends or, worse, in retirement, are presented as goals in our society, a tendency toward inertness that has been furthered by our self-destructive attraction to our screens and just be generally stupid.

My dream is to be like Henson and my father, to be working until the end, projects on the go, one close to completion, others in production, another one or two in development, and then getting up from a table, moving onto another thing, I just don’t make and am no more.

Over-rated Mothers

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His drug addled brain wouldn’t let him sleep but he remembered being trapped in an MRI machine, his arms pinned to his side, and looking back above his head at the sterile room, trying to call, but nothing was coming out of his mouth. The machine caught on fire and he woke up. He left the hotel and met Delia, a former student, sitting by the river.

She told Davis the story about when she worked at a high-end bottle service club and a patron had reached up her dress. “My mother told me I was asking for it.”

“You get along with your mother?” Davis asked.

“Mothers are overrated.” Delia eyed him. “All that self-sacrifice stuff, I get sick of that.”

He watched the clouds over the building tops and thought about going to look at the Viking ships in Roskilde in the morning. “They like to be martyrs and they hate it when they can’t sacrifice themselves.”

“I mean, my mother’s fine.” Delia looked at herself in her phone. “It’s not that I resent her for anything. She’s just my mother.”

“I forgive my mother for whatever she was supposed to have done to me.” Davis downed half of his beer. “I had this dream, more of a vision really because I think I was still awake. I was with my mother and she was in a smart button-down dress, and she looked beautiful, conservative and smart. She was younger than me and we were on the classic propeller plane going somewhere. But she was at the front of the plane with her friends.”

“That’s it?”

“I was sitting there, thinking that she would come back to me. And she didn’t.”

My Bad Chance

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A number of years back, an influential agent took interest in novel, My Bad Side. He had his reader review the opening 50 pages and gave me advice on changes to make, which I did. I received a follow-up on moving the back story to a later stage. I questioned this idea, explaining the benefit of where it was. That was it. I was out.

A year or so later, I pitched him my new book, Anori. “Not for me.” The one time an agent had taken an interest in my work, a one-night stand as it was, I hadn’t done as I was told and was cancelled. I’ve thought back to this moment often and wondered what might have happened if I had complied. What success would I have reaped? If only, if only…

Today, hundreds of indifferent rejection emails later, I feel something coming, some long-awaited breakthrough, not with them as much as me. I’ve made it somewhere, not a revelation as much as a state of mind, I suppose. Probably the booze but more of a clean sure hike up, getting to where I can see where I am. Which is here. Nowhere else but that.

My latest opus, The Vanishing Pill, will be ready in the spring.

Every Day You’re Dying

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Why are you here? Ask yourself that. What is the purpose? Where do you belong? I try to write like that. And then I don’t like how I feel when I go too long, my head thick, nothing working, done and lost. It seems like life isn’t worth it at that moment.

It’s not complicated to get my energy back, my brain back on its stem, even if it doesn’t feel like that. I walk and eat. And then I am new again, that clarity of purpose back inside, thinking I just came here to find the answer.

And this is it: We go fast on the roads we know and slow on the ones we don’t.

And that’s it.

Writing In Spite of Everything

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I gleaned a couple of basics from Anne Lamont’s book of writing advice, Bird for Bird. First and foremost, writing “is a matter of persistence and faith and hard work.” (7)

She also goes on to state that many readers “buy into the simplistic concepts of character and plot because it is much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality, as reality is unforgivingly complex.” (104)

These two essential ideas aside, she does miss how the nucleus of the process is in the marvel of entering another realm, knowing something there and chittering at the edge of that, loving the moment for as long as it might last.

In other words, it’s essentially about having the etching tools and a place to set up.