Tag Archives: writing process

The Pithy Wisdom of Evelyn Waugh

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Having just read Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, I’m reminded of what excellent writing can be – not only vivid and humorous, but more importantly, deeply cutting.

My wife knew what was wanted. She had neat, hygienic ways for that too, but there were both relief and triumph in her smile of welcome; later we parted and lay in twin beds a yard or two distant, smoking.

Brideshead Revisited, BBC 1981

I was a free man; she had given me my manumission in that brief, sly lapse of hers; my cuckold’s horns made me lord of the forest.

I can understand a man wishing he hadn’t married and trying to get out of it but to get rid of one wife and take up with another immediately is beyond reason.

Finally, while not his words but his actions, it is interesting to note that Waugh, a failed writer at the start, attempted suicide, leaving his clothes and a note on the shore, only to retreat from the sea when he was stung by a jellyfish.

Crime in Mind

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The music was muted, not the way he remembered it. It had been loud not so long ago. He wanted to get off the plane and go nowhere, stay where he was and face whatever he had to face. The consequences, that’s what they were called. He hadn’t done anything wrong. It was in him as much as it was in anyone.

Crime was an interesting word. He had never really thought about it. He had just thought that a crime was a crime, just that. There were necessary laws in civilization. That was how the world was made to work. But the world how? The world why? To propagate what? What system was being kept in place? He was justifying now. He knew that. But there was no crime, not according to the law now or ever. He would be cancelled, maybe that, lose his friends and family. That was the punishment, even if it wasn’t wrong.

Wrong. That was another word he wanted to understand. He felt like he had done something that he shouldn’t have done, something he would regret. Or was that just a thing in his head, convincing himself of that because of what he had been told by his parents and their parents to them? The world was a fucking mess, all of its laws and rights and wrongs being followed, institutions constructed like that, for the greater good, whatever that was supposed to be. He was justifying again.

There was something to all of this, following this path to wherever it was going, on this plane, away, even if that was all inside of him and he was just doing it to himself. He turned the music up until it was distorted. He liked it better like that.

Social Media: Et in Arcadia Ego

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I am averse to contemporary literature. I find it boring. Or trite. Or predictable. Or ridiculous. Or…what’s that word when people put on airs and pretend to be someone they’re not? Affected. No, pretentious. That’s it. I find contemporary work pretentious. And boring.

I tend toward older work, modern as they call it, like Evelyn Waugh, of which I had read some in the past – Scoop, Handful of Dust, The Sword of Honor Trilogy – but skipped the much ballyhooed Brideshead Revisited. I was unsure about reading it now, thinking I might find it predictable. I was wrong.

As irritatingly pompous (indeed affected) as the main players, Sebastian Flyte and Charles Ryder, might be and as predictable the narrative, the prose remains compelling, funny too. Beware of the Anglo-Catholics – they’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents. Or his descriptors for wine: “…shy like a gazelle…a flute by still water…a prophet in a cave.” Or more perhaps to the point, his understanding of the old English world expressed through literary allusions and Latin sayings Et in Arcadia Ego.

Death is found everywhere, even Arcadia, to say nothing of the marvelously sexy and exciting posts on social media. My point, because I always have a point, is that if Sebastian and/or Charles had a social media account, it would be like that, pretentious and dull. But Waugh wrote them in such a way as they were not.

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.

The Thing of Expression

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You go down the pipeline thinking you know something you don’t and it isn’t a bad thing but it’s an obvious thing and that’s still okay but then you remember it really isn’t because that’s sliding to nowhere, not knowing who you are and thinking that’s okay when it isn’t.

Then you’re left asking who are all these people are and how did they get into your living room.

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.