Write About Now

Are Artists Special?

"Once the artistic element has been separated out from any area of human activity, whatever remains risks being devalued as mechanical and even contemptible. Once religious paintings were made into works of art, then any church decoration that did not bear the mark of a master was of little interest; any building not designed by a known architect was 'vernacular'; any anonymous folk song might be charming but could only become real art when arranged by a serious composer. Low art disappeared below the horizon of history until its rediscovery by social (but not art) historians.

"This legacy has not simply divided 'low art' from 'high art', but has decreased the possibility of artistic achievement in everyday life. Once the decoration of churches or the painting of icons on the design of cathedrals and guild-halls was taken out of the hands of wood-carvers and masons and journeymen and given to artists, then the role of the artisan was decisively degraded. Artisans may take pride in their work but they must know that it is always somehow second-rate. When the artist is removed from society and made into a special person, then the artist within each of us begins to die."

ROGER OSBORNE

Civilization: A New History of the Western World, p. 212

Thanks to Myron Glaser for pointing me to the passage.

Letting Voices Be Heard

My Orr Street Studio reading from February has made the news -- or at least, a photo of it has. Vox Magazine did a profile on Orr Street's "Hearing Voices" reading series, which was started by my friend Anthony Connolly (quoted in the piece) with another friend, Allison Smythe. It's interesting to see that our little group in Houston, now split by diaspora, has had such a wonderful afterlife. If you're ever in Columbia, MO, Orr Street should be on your agenda. Here's the article:

Letting voices be heard: reading series offers local literary hub

My wife was particularly charmed by the juxtaposition of the opening line -- "Drawings of muscular, nude figures ... " -- with my lamentably unmuscular and gratefully unnude photo.

The Policeman's Tortured Psyche

Now that I'm writing crime fiction, I keep running across things like this:

"I'm not the cop-hater I'm reputed to be, and in fact police fascinate me. But this is because I think their natures are very complex, not simple at all, and what I would object to in your speech if we were debating is that you made a one-for-one correspondence between the need to maintain law and order and the nature of the men who would maintain it. The policeman has I think an extraordinarily tortured psyche. He is perhaps more tortured than the criminal...."

NORMAN MAILER
in a letter to William F. Buckley, Jr., quoted in The New Yorker, October 6, 2008, p. 59.

There's a Story All Right

We stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, a scary sort of place with an inch of grime on the surfaces and locals who watched our every move. Not the sort of place I'd choose for a pit stop, but needs must. Laurie went in while I pumped gas, and when she didn't return I went in after. The place was dark inside, a warren of interconnected rooms, the log cabin walls exposed. She was just paying our tab when I entered, and booked out to the car once I arrived. I couldn't leave, though. I had a stop to make.

Through a doorway and down an unlit corridor, I found myself in a greasy spoon diner. A single occupant sat at the counter, watching me through a tangled beard. The walls were covered in clippings from half a century ago. Then I went inside the bathroom. I almost jumped.

Here's what I found:

The Perks

It's not all suffering, this writing gig. Like when the nice folks at Bethany House took their authors at ACFW to a privately catered fine dining affair. Here the chefs engage in some confectionary blowtorching. If a future novel of mine features one of these mini flamethrowers as a weapon, don't be surprised.

Trouble I Don't Need

Writing might not require too many precision instruments, but your tools need to work. Mine are having problems on that score, much to my frustration. First, there's the baseline irritant to cope with. The MacBook is a flawed design. Who puts a sharp edge around a keyboard? And a fault-line in the plastic so that while your wrists are being sliced, the weight of your hands is progressively disassembling the laptop's case. I miss my aluminum PowerBook more and more. Here's hoping the rumored aluminum MacBooks materialize.

In the meantime, I've been using a wireless keyboard to keep my hands from being severed.

But the MacBook has another problem -- or maybe it's my Airport Extreme hub. Every so often, I lose my wireless signal. I can see the network, but I can't log in. At first, I tried to see this as a positive -- less internet means less distraction while writing -- only you'd be surprised how many look-ups a manuscript draft might require. Without a connection, I'm constantly flagging things for fact-checking. What's this type of car called, where do these two streets intersect, how did that quote go again? The time I spend trouble-shooting the problem is time I don't spend getting work done.

The irritus maximus, however, is the HP LaserJet P2015. You can print all you like on an inkjet, but for me, nothing compares to seeing page after finished page spitting out of a laser printer. Only nothing's spitting out of the HP anymore, because it's suffered a fatal error of some sort. The paper jam light is permanently illuminated in spite of there being no jam, and from what I could piece together via the extremely unhelpful customer service resources online, this means some kind of internal widget needs replacing. So when I do make progress, I can't render it physical any longer. Looks like a new printer is on my agenda.

Aching like a sore tooth, providing a constant background jab, is the fact that my Maxtor backup drive stopped working, too. Again, after much consulting of taciturn support materials, it seems this is a common and catastrophic failure. My e-mail to customer service has of course gone unanswered. So I have to figure out a substitute back-up plan, for one thing, and I also have to discover a way of rescuing the information still housed on the perpetually non-mounting drive (including a lot of the music that might otherwise be inspiring my productivity).

This is trouble I don't need. Pen and paper have never looked so good.

ACFW

Another day, another conference!

If you take on a genre...

"If you take on a genre, you should know something about the form, but you shouldn't let the form gain greater importance than the novel itself. All novels are about characters and their transitions based on the story being revealed through a precise plot."

-- WALTER MOSLEY
in This Year You Write Your Novel, p. 98.

Kiss the Rules Goodbye

The problem with the rules of fiction-writing is that they come from rule books, not great books. This is why, when reading both bestsellers and classics, you always hear the literal-minded complaining: "Hey, she can't do that! She's breaking the rules." But she can do it, as witnessed by the fact that she has. You might try arguing that the book succeeds in spite of breaking some rule or other, but in fact, success in fiction has nothing to do with keeping or breaking rules.

All the author has to do is create and sustain an illusion, and anything that accomplishes the job is just fine.

Which is a relief for people trying to learn the craft, because it gives them one thing to focus on instead of a hundred. But for those who teach, it sucks. Because it's easier to teach a set of rules than it is to teach illusion-making. That's why so many "how to write" courses, whether offered by those who can write or those who can't, consist not so much of revelation but of rehash. "You can never hear these basic truths too often," we're told. And we'd better believe it. The day we stop, a lot of these classes are going to fold.

We don't want to be lied to. (Unless we do.)

"I'm not just preaching," a former pastor of mine would say. "This really happened." As shocking as the implication was -- that there was no guarantee when he was preaching that lilies weren't being gilded or the size of prize fish greatly exaggerated -- no one seemed to mind. They accepted, as we all do, that for rhetorical purposes the truth might have to be adapted to get at the truth. Or to be more specific, the truth of a narrative might have to be sacrificed to get at the truth of a proposition. The other way around, the congregation would have had a problem. Telling true stories to back up a false premise? No, sir. But if a true premise required for full emotional expression the invention of an articulate handicapped boy, a series of improbable coincidences, and a gripping climax ... well, it's just preaching.

When we talk about fiction as "the lie that tells the truth," that's the sort of lying we have in mind. An author conjures up a vision of the world, and that vision speaks to us about the truth of things. We accept the fact that, to get at these truths, the author just made up a story. Verisimilitude is nothing more than an exotic way of saying, "something like this might really have happened, if the world works the way we think it might. Or should." Viewed in this light, lying is not really lying, any more than self-defense is murder. What it has in common with real lying is making things up, but the motive's different.