I’ll write a book where people scavenge and socialize far from home and then, in the later hours, scurry back to their island. 
It’s going to be called Safe on the Island.
Tag Archives: writing fiction
How to Write: The Essential Thing
The mantra for wanna-be writers is always the same: write every day. 
James Bond creator Ian Fleming is said to have written every morning, after which he headed off to the beach followed by an evening of cocktails. 
I tried that once. Didn’t work out so well. 
How-to-author James Altucher offered this: “If you can average 1,000 words a day, seven days a week, you can write four to eight books a year.” 
Uh…what?
Mystery writer Raymond Chandler said that he sat down at his desk each and every day just to concentrate. 
For me, the key to writing is not bullshitting yourself. It doesn’t matter what you tell everyone else. It’s only you that matters. You spend all day, from the moment you wake, and into your dreams, always in your head. 
You need to focus. You need to research. You need characters and action. You need to do all of that. You don’t need bullshit. Just do the work. And never let yourself off the hook.
Okay, maybe once in a while.
Ice Friday: Cormac McCarthy’s World
What is wrong with this story is that it is not a true story. Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. 
The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of. Do you believe that? (From Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plains)
John Barleycorn
And now comes John Barleycorn with the curse he lays upon the imaginative man who is lusty with life and desire to live. John Barleycorn will not let the dreamer dream, the liver live. 
God is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke. From his calm-mad heights, with the certitude of a god, he beholds all life as evil. Wife, children, friends – in the clear white light of his logic, they are exposed as frauds and shams. He sees their frailty, their meagerness, their sordidness, their pitifulness. 
And he knows his one freedom: he may anticipate the day of his death – suicide, quick or slow, a sudden spill or a gradual oozing away through the years, is the price John Barleycorn exacts. 
(From Jack London’s John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs)
The ‘It’ from “Woyzeck” to “Butcher’s Crossing”
I was academically introduced to the concept of the “it” in Georg Buchner’s unfinished play Woyzeck, where a man is terrorized by a vague unnamed force which lays in wait for him in the bushes. 
I had no idea what this “it” was – a ghost, a demon or what – until it dawned on me over the years that it was, as simply as I can put it, a primal force so overwhelming that we must instead coddle ourselves with poor facsimiles such as sports, work and travel.
Rasafa, Syria
In other words, our consciousness is so puny and small-minded that instead of blossoming toward truth, justice and beauty, we drink and have sex. 
John Williams is succinct in his reflections on our futile struggles at the conclusion of Butcher’s Crossing: 
“You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all of your life on lies, and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you — that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else.”
Robert Heinlein’s “Orphans of the Sky”
Robert Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky is a most terrible book. 
The characters are ridiculous and flat, the setting is barren while the prose are plodding, and that’s putting it nicely. On the few occasions when the scientist priests who ruled the ship under Jordan’s Captain met in full assembly they gathered in a great hall directly above the Ship’s offices on the last civilized deck.(93)
The plot elements and unimaginative prose are indeed so bad as to remind me of my own work as 12-year-old when I concocted the Secret Spitballer’s Society series and for which Mr. Bacon regularly gave me grades of “C” and lower. I only wrote two installments before abandoning ship.
To top it off, there isn’t a single woman in Orphans of the Sky, that is until the final ten pages when the heroes escape to a planet and remember the need for procreation. Hugh’s younger wife bore a fresh swelling on her lip as if someone had persuaded her with a heavy hand. (120) 
Keep those damned women out of the way. (122)
Words as weapons: “Eichmann in Jerusalem”
Hannah Arendt offers a devastating portrait of humanity in Eichmann in Jerusalem, an assemblage of five successive articles written in 1963 for The New Yorker. 
It is in this work that Arendt coined the phrase, “the banality of evil”, positing that the mass murder perpetrated by the Nazis was not as much a thing of malevolence as it was of bureaucracy. She explains how words were used as weapons, to indoctrinate and then engineer the mass murders. Death camp architect Heinrich Himmler referred to the Holocaust as follows: “These are battles which future generations will not have to fight again.” Eichmann believed the “battles” to be geflugelte Worte (meaning “winged words” or words from classic literature), when in reality they were only the tools of propaganda.
Wagner’s “Ring Cycle”
In other words, not only does Eichmann not acknowledge the evil of his work, neither does he understand how the evil was disseminated. Arendt goes on to cite a story of a leader speaking to Bavarian peasants in 1944: “The Fuhrer in his goodness has prepared for the whole German people a mild death through gassing in case the war should have an unhappy end.”
Goebbels family – all of whom died of cyanide
Arendt’s text reveals how the people of Germany were indoctrinated as a cult, who were willing to go to the bitter end to satisfy their leader not out of malice but because “honor is loyalty”. Therefore it should not come as a surprise that Eichmann maintained his innocence in the extermination of millions; he and his Nazi brethren were gassed by their own words.
Writing Sex: Search and Destroy Mission
As a teenager, I happened upon a trashy novel called Tidal Wave, the only part of which I remember was a sex scene which went something like this: His fingers explored the tangle of her pubic hair. “Is this a search and destroy mission, captain?” “I don’t have to search for it and I sure don’t want to destroy it.” 
Over the years, I realized that writing about sex was almost always like this. Trite and ridiculous, it just shone a spotlight on the naked stuff – Oh my goodness! Look at that! – destroying the essence of what makes sex rapturous. Whatever the erotic opus – Miller’s Tropic of Cancer or Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being – the writing of the sexual self just fell short. 
The problem is that sex is about another self, a naked self, a self that the clothed self looks at in confusion. What the hell are you doing? Are you really going to do that? You’re completely naked! The clothed self tends to stare and judge, incapable of reflecting on the intimacies of the naked self with any sense or sophistication. 
And yet, it is there, in all of us, the fingers tightening, everything stretching out, the head tilting back, peering into the chasm, ready to fall. Perhaps it is Xaviera Hollander who came closest (haha) to writing of this sexual self in her Penthouse Magazine column only because she wrote about sex and nothing else.
Virginia Adamantine: Prometheus Stripped
My screenplay Sister Prometheus is a reworking of the Promethean myth, utilizing elements of the Oresteia. 
I realize that this is a dangerous and foolhardy pursuit, as any modern work is likely to pale in comparison with the work of Aeschylus, exemplified in the passage below, describing Iphigenia’s death at the hands of the priests of her father Agamemnon:
Rough hands tear at her girdle, cast/ Her saffron silks to earth. Her eyes/
Search for her slaughterers; and each/ Seeing her beauty, that surpassed/
A painter’s vision, yet denies/ The pity her dumb looks beseech/
Struggling for voice; for often in old days,/When brave men feasted in her father’s hall/
With simple skill and pious praise/Linked to the flutes pure tone/
Her virgin voice would melt the hearts of all/
Honoring the third libation near her father’s throne/
The rest I did not see/ Nor do I speak of it.
This sacrifice is said to have appeased the gods and given the Greeks fair winds to Troy and eventual triumph in their bloody quest for Helen. My Prometheus is female. Her name is Virginia Adamantine, and she’s furious with the Agamemnons of the world, ready to fight anyone in her way. And she’s a stripper. 
That’s the part I doubt Aeschylus would have appreciated.
Greenland Reading: Gretel Ehrlich’s “This Cold Heaven”
Gretel Ehrlich’s This Cold Heaven provides a first-person account of life in the cold and dark of Greenland. 
She recounts the Early 20-Century explorations of Arctic ethnographer Knud Rasmussen as well as the painter Rockwell Kent’s year-long sojourn there in the 1930s, but most interesting of all are the details of her own travels, including her journey with hunters in the far north:
Ahead, the ice foot narrowed like a waist, then widened again. Snow turned to sun; we slid from winter into summer. 
A glittering lagoon of open water came into view, packed with seabirds, ice gulls, and eider ducks. We stopped an gaped. The pond was a living sapphire and the birds navigated through blue glint, bumping from one beveled iridescence to another. What were we seeing? (180)
Ehrlich does have a tendency to repeat herself and romanticize the harsh elements, but all is forgiven for her moments of insight and enduring adventurous spirit.