Tag Archives: Writing steps

My “Hail Mary” Complex

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I was genuinely excited to read Andy Weir’s highly-acclaimed Project Hail Mary, hoping for inspiration on improving the writing, structure and marketability of my own speculative work, The Cx Trilogy.

My positive outlook waned after a few pages. It wasn’t just the undeveloped writing nor the caricatured characters – much of which seem at first draft level – but more the lack of an engaging narrative. While the premise was compelling – why is the sun getting dimmer and how can this be stopped? – there was little development of the protagonist and his journey beyond a barrage of scientific details.

I’ll cite examples to mitigate your opinon of me as a bitter unpublished author. Below that is the room I woke up in. The one with my dead friends. I sniffle and wipe a tear away. Initially, I thought this was intended as sarcasm, but I soon realized that this was a genuine expression of Ryland Grace’s emotion.

Each of them kind of look like a beetle. Each beetle has a name up top: “John”, “Paul”, “George” and “Ringo”. I’m on a suicide mission. John, Paul, George and Ringo get to go home, but my long and winding road ends here. This sense of humor permeates the book.

My students didn’t swear at me. Their squabbles were usually resolved within a few minutes, either by a teacher-enforced handshake or detention. And somewhat selfish but here it is: They looked up to me. I missed that respect. Mr. Weir has clearly never spent a day as a teacher in his life.

I could go on, but why bury myself even deeper? Mr. Weir has achieved incredible commercial success and knows how to market his work, while I’m an unpublished failure who teaches high school…which is what makes this difficult to process.

I genuinely cannot understand what it is about Mr. Weir’s work that is compelling to such a large audience. And what it is about my own writing that seems destined to never get beyond the literary agent’s automatic reply: Unfortunately, your project does not sound like a fit for me at this time, and so I will have to pass. Boo hoo. Poor me.

Sisyphus: The Hour of Consciousness

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Sisyphus watches the stone rush down toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again. It is during his return, that pause, that hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering; that is the hour of consciousness.

Greenlandic trail

The evidence is in the absurd divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, a nostalgia for unity; those are the contradictions that bind together. If the descent is sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth.

Grecian cave

Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. “I conclude that all is well,” says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred.

(Extracts from Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.)

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.

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.

17 Slices of Cheese

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The deli counter was in the back corner of Gristedes, a New York supermarket I had mistakenly pronounced as Gris-TEA-dees to my sister — and not Gris-TAY-dees. She had mocked me for that. “Ham and cheese sandwich please.”

The woman didn’t look up from her phone.” American, Swiss, Provolone, Cheddar, Swiss, Colby, Pepper Jack?”

“Cheddar, Medium, thanks.”

“Roll or hero?” She continued to scroll.

“Rye please.”

“Rye.” She turned off her phone and placed a block of cheese on the slicer.

“Thank you.” I looked around the great empty space, lit in the horrible bald light and thought about my childhood fears and trauma, being abandoned, alone, all of that amorphous stuff, fanged blobs out from between the walls, bursting out, and then saw the woman wrap the thick sandwich in wax paper. “Oh, I forgot to ask for lettuce and tomato.”

“Anything else? Pickles? Pepper, salt? Mayo?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

She opened the sandwich to reveal a teetering stack of cheese, ten slices, more than that, atop the ham, and added watery slices of tomato and a tough ribbed section of lettuce.

“Maybe not the pickle.”

“No pickle?”

“No pickle,” I reiterated.

“What about the salt, pepper and mayo?”

“Yes.”

She wedged the sandwich back together and gave it to me.

“Thank you.” I opened the sandwich outside and counted the slices, 17 ion all along with three slices of ham. It had to be pulled apart to be eaten. I thought that was just how it was in the city, massive sandwiches that you couldn’t get in your mouth.

Even though I was wrong and came to learn that 2-4 slices of cheese was the standard, I still think of that woman as the gatekeeper of sandwiches. And that Gristedes as the gatekeeper of delis. Gris-TAY-des.

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.

Roadkill in “The Grapes of Wrath”

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Bleakness and death permeate John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, even in the seemingly minor descriptions of going down that barren road. As the truck came near, the driver saw the turtle and swerved to hit it. His front wheel struck the edge of the edge of the shell, flipped the turtle like a tiddlywink, spun it like a coin, and rolled it off the highway. (15)

The rabbit hesitated, faltered and then turned and bolted towards the lesser lights of the Dodge. There was a soft jolt as he went under the wheels “We sure squashed him,” said Casy. (185)

A rattlesnake crawled across the road and Tom hit it and broke it and left it squirming. (230)

Questions On Our Existence

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Do I want to know when and where I will die? Hell no! But…a ‘yes’ means that there’s more to what I think I know. And so…yes?

When you order “Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Chungking Express”, Amazon recommends a spanking video. (Should I put it on my list?)

I’ve got one for whoever is in charge of this mess: Are humans a successful step in evolution? Yes or no. No waffling. (Uh…no.)