Entries Tagged 'Words' ↓

For the love of god can someone please invent a gender-neutral singular pronoun? I’m trying to write a technical spec, and find myself fleeing again and again to the plural, because I’d otherwise have to fall back on “he” — or, worse, “he or she” — whenever I mention a user. The latter construction is a nasty blight on the English language, and the former excludes half our user base. So that’s not cool.

Yes, I know that “he” is generally supposed to apply to both sexes, and when I’m in my more combative moods I’ll use it with a feigned lack of compunction. But really I always feel bad about it. I read a book once where this race of beings did have such a pronoun, aer, but I think they had elements of both male and female in them, or something, so it doesn’t work for us. Also I object on principal to words that start with two vowels.

Sometimes I wish you could upgrade languages like you upgrade software. And that I was in charge of the process: the cranky Torvalds of the English language. I’d add the new pronoun, but I’d also immediately deprecate such horrors as “incentivize” and “retort”. All of the ugly constructs creeping inexorably into the language — like “step foot” or “could care less” or “irregardless” — would throw runtime exceptions as soon as they’re used, and take down the entire surrounding sentence. Exclamation points would be limited to one per ten thousand words.

I’d probably also introduce a debugger to diagnose writing failures — I have a whole hard drive full of stories that are badly in need of debugging.

English 2.0 — now with gender-neutral pronouns. Upgrade today!

My understanding of symbolism was dealt a near mortal blow in high school, when we were given an edition of The Old Man and the Sea with a symbol index in the back.

A symbol index is pretty much what it sounds like: a list of story artifacts, with accompanying capsule descriptions of what each of them really means. So if, in the course of your reading you come across something that seems a little symboly, you can flip quickly to the back of the book to confirm your suspicions. Oho! you can say to yourself. I knew that scudding bank of clouds was kind of arbitrarily scuddy. And no wonder! It turns out that it symbolizes our hero’s thwarted sexual longing!

There’s only one way to look at a symbol index: as a dictionary of arbitrary obfuscation. Ie: here’s what the writer really meant, but was too much of a pretentious elliptical prick to just come out and say. I remember finding the whole thing pointless and depressing. Why not just come out and tell us? What’s the point of dragging your readers through this kind of arbitrary indirection? Symbolism, framed this way, becomes little more than an exercise in mildly clever transposition.

It’s taken me two decades to get beyond that experience, and in that time I’ve come to some partial understanding of what symbolism really is. But, first, what it isn’t:

1. It’s not a way to get around saying something you don’t want to come out and say because it’s too obvious or silly or embarrassing. You should either say those things, or not say them. Period.
2. It’s not about demonstrating your talents for clever allusion. Nobody cares about your mastery of the minutiae of the book of Revelations, dude. Just get to the goddam point (I’m looking at you, Joyce).
3. It’s not a way to make your stuff seem more profound. Profundity is a feeling, never a technique.

So what is symbolism, then? It’s a last resort. It’s what you do when you’ve got no other choice.

I’ve talked a lot about the limitations of language in this blog. Clearly, language is a beautiful thing, so crucial to our development as a species that it’s pretty much wired into the hardware. But its powers are largely utilitarian. It does a bang-up job of communicating your desire to buy a grapefruit or run a country or marry your true love, but it kind of fails miserably when it comes time to tell someone how much you love them, or describe your zeal for your country, or expound on your abiding and irrational passion for grapefruits. It’s just not built for that.

Granted, all of this is possible, but it takes a special talent. Ian McKellan does it with Atonement, Craig Thompson with Blankets, Kazuo Ishiguro with Never Let Me Go. I came out of those books — not transformed, exactly, but deeply affected in ways that linger on, years and years later. All these guys managed to slip past the literal wall of my mind into that muddy territory where more elemental, unstructured things live: love and hope and faith and all that stuff. And once they’d done that, I was pretty much theirs.

So how do they manage it? By being great wordsmiths, yes, but also by finding images and characters that transcend the page to reach into our collective consciousness, to stimulate us in ways that go beyond verbal. This is the ultimate power of language, as an artform: it can’t reach these things directly, but it can wend its way into the firmament of shared experience, and draw on that to get what it wants.

And that’s what a symbol is, to me. It’s a way to say what can’t be said, and it draws its power from its ability to illuminate, not create. We have a fund of universal feeling that predates our ability to write, and the only real way to hit people where it hurts is to find your way into it and use what’s there. Music and art have more or less direct access to that place, but words have to work harder: they operate in the corner of our eyes, drawing shapes in the penumbral gloom between consciousness and id — and then waiting for our minds to do the rest.

Holy crap. Weird Tales accepted another one of my stories. If there was an emoticon for “capering around room and hooting like a madman”, I’d definitely be using it right now. But there isn’t. I am struck, once again, by the stunted expressive power of emoticons.

The last time I got published was in high school, in the literary magazine. It was called Ladyfair, a sort of heavily-veiled stream-of-consciousness paean to a girl I was infatuated with at the time. I remember that pretty well, but I can’t remember the girl’s name anymore, or what she looked like. My memory routinely betrays me like that — on any given day, I can barely remember what my high school was called, or what color socks I’m wearing, or how many hands I have. But I still remember that story. So my poor leaky brain is capable of holding onto stuff, if it finds it important enough.

The first Weird Tales story, Creature, comes out in March, in the 85th anniversary issue. I think I’m going to remember that, too.

I’ve blogged about Jeff Vandermeer before. His City of Saints and Madmen didn’t just blow me away — it helped me understand that 500 pages of insane twisted effulgence can be beautiful, touching, human.

Anyway, I’ve got a guest post on his blog! My entry is part of a promotion that Ann Vandermeer is doing for Weird Tales, whose helm she’s recently taken. Ann accepted one of my stories for her magazine, proving, once again, that it really isn’t possible to die from happiness, no matter how violently happy you might become.

Jeff and Ann were two of my instructors at Clarion, and the week I had with them was so transcendently amazing that I still haven’t found a way to express it in words. There was one memorable ten minute period where Jeff sat me down and described, in more or less perfect detail, everything I wanted to do and be as a writer, all of my worries, needs, dreams, foibles, thoughts. It was like he was reading my mind, except he found stuff in there that I didn’t even know about. It was one of the most stunning, illuminating moments of my life, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.

ps … Two of my fellow Clarionites, both fantastic writers, have guest posts on Ecstatic Days as well: Peter and Caleb. Check them out.

Sometimes dreams do come true, even dreams you didn’t know you had. Which is to say: they’re making a movie out of Sweeney Todd!

Sweeney Toddy: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is the story of a London barber who, wrongly exiled by a judge who sought to steal away his wife, returns to exact his bloody revenge. It is also, in my humble opinion, the best musical ever written. My certitude in this matter is not in any way compromised by the fact that I’ve never actually seen the play — I’ve listened to the soundtrack about a billion times, enough to wear little digital holes in the mp3s, so I’m pretty sure about this. The music, the lyrics, the story, the twisted, macabre humor: it really doesn’t get much better.

And the movie seems to have a lot going for it. Johnny Depp as Sweeney is an inspired choice, Helena Bonham Carter is a really fantastic, versatile actress who’ll do wonders with Mrs Lovett — and I can’t think of a better director than Tim Burton for this play’s mixture of whimsy and menace.¹

I am, of course, setting myself up for a crushing disappointment. I can only remember three times in the past decade where I’ve been this excited about a movie: (1) The Fellowship of the Ring, (2) The Matrix: Reloaded, and (3) Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace. Fellowship more than lived up to my expectations — but the second Matrix and the fourth Star Wars damaged me in ways from which I will not soon recover.

So I’m keenly aware of the danger here. But, seriously, the previews look great, and Depp’s singing voice — while not the deep baritone I’m used to in a Sweeney — seems more than adequate. I’m hopeful. I’m confident.

But please don’t suck, Sweeney Todd. I beg of you.

I’m in the middle of having my mind blown by Jeff Vandermeer’s City of Saints and Madmen. It’s kind of ridiculous that I’ve gotten this far in life without ever encountering this book — because it’s an amazing accomplishment, creepy and lovely and riveting and beautifully, beautifully written. And right up my alley. This is the kind of novel I want to write, one day.

And there’s even a movie — a short impressionistic deeply disturbing piece about some terrible event in the history of Ambergris, based on the sequel to Saints and Madmen, Shriek. Check it out.

The last thing I wrote in the waning days of Clarion came out in a sort of fever dream, and it shows: it’s a tumbling wordy over-the-top story about an amorphous living city’s relationship with its children.

That’s what I thought it was about, anyway. But a couple of really perceptive people in my writing group just finished pointing out to me that it is, in fact, a giant unadulterated Christ allegory.

This kind of disturbs me, because I kind of thought I was an atheist. I was, in fact, under the impression that I’ve been an atheist for years. What am I doing writing a largely approving story about god’s love for his children?

But it’s worse than that, really: I apparently have no idea what my subconscious is up to. I’ve always known that it’s down there quietly doing its own thing, keeping to itself, occasionally popping inscrutable images into my head or forcing me to engage in annoying bits of introspection or untapping undiscovered wells of feeling for no apparent reason. Mostly I hear from it when I’m writing. A lot of writers call this thing a muse. Stephen King calls it the boys in the basement. At Clarion, we called it Fred.

So, yeah. I don’t know much about Fred. Fred keeps to himself. But I always assumed that he was more or less on board with the rest of me, towing the line, and that all of his odd behavior was nothing more than idiosyncratic elaborations on the theme of me.

Now I don’t know. Is Fred Christian? Is he devout? Is he quietly steering me toward a lifetime of Sunday church and prostration to an invisible deity? Is there a communion in my future? A baptism?

Or is he just fucking with me?

I’m generally not a big fan of novels about book clubs, for a couple of reasons:

1. Things hardly ever explode, and, when they do, it tends to be meaningful.
2. No steely-eyed bounty hunters navigating the wilds of a post-apocalyptic society.
3. No fart jokes.

However — I just finished The Jane Austen Book Club, by Karen Joy Fowler, and I think I pretty clearly need to revise my standards. This book has some of the most beautifully-drawn characters I’ve ever encountered, and it lavishes an amazing amount attention on them without ever becoming florid or dull. In fact, you don’t even really notice how involved you are in their lives until suddenly, about halfway through, you realize that you know these people, inside and out. And more than that — you really care about them.

The real clincher, though, for me, came at the very end of the book. There I was, rolling along the downslope of a pleasant denouement, minding my own business, not bothering anybody, when suddenly I arrived at this sentence that just blew me off my feet — absolutely drilled me with an unexpected, inscrutable upwelling of emotion. And I didn’t know why.

I’ve talked about this phenomenon before — it happens to me every so often. I come across some innocuous phrase or snatch of music that has an effect all out of proportion to the thing itself — a short, sharp punch that leaves me gasping for air.

For a long time, this really mystified me. I couldn’t understand why it was happening. But I think I’m maybe starting to figure it out, sort of. My theory: it’s not the moment itself — it’s everything leading up to it. It’s the unveiling of a secret subconscious framework that the story is building, piece by piece, out of the subtleties of a character, the quiet implications of a conversation, the emotional ramifications of some small plot twist. All of it growing quietly below the surface, burgeoning tectonically, until — quite suddenly — it breaks through. And when it does, all of that stored potential energy blasts out at your dumb-ass insensitive clueless conscious mind with the force of a bullet leaving a gun, and just blows it — and you — away.

I think this is what The Jane Austen Book Club does, in its own gentle way: slowly builds an emotional framework beneath the surface of your understanding, and then, with one line, unleashes it all at once. And maybe this is what all good art does: ferries the bulk of its power down the dark avenues of your subconscious. The best writers know how to navigate these shadowy underroads. They know how to get to you in ways that matter.

Which is why I’m not going to mention the line that got me — because, robbed of its context, it’s just sort of cool. And just sort of cool doesn’t really do it justice. So you’ll have to go read the book. And then, when you’re done, you can go watch Bruce Willis blow something up, if you must. I’ll understand.

I heard an interview with Scott Frank the other day. He’s the guy who wrote the screenplays for Out of Sight, Get Shorty, and Minority Report, clearly a man with a serious handle on how to put stories together. So it was incredibly gratifying to hear him say this:

I find that when I really conscious of thematic things at the beginning, and I try to write from a thematic idea, or even structure … whenever I’m that clear, it’s bad. It just comes out awful, because it feels built — it feels like either the theme was built, or the characters were being plugged in in a way that doesn’t work.

I’m making it sound way more pretentious than it really is. You just don’t want to think about it too much — you want to just kind of do it and think about it afterwards, and kind of shape it and apply your intellect to it, once you have this blob. It’s a very messy process.

This is more or less exactly the same way I write, with almost exactly the same caveats. If I try to start with anything even resembling a theme, or a style, or a structure, the story implodes after a couple of pages. I’m sure other writers are able to build their stuff around thematic scaffolding — but I can’t. It’s too damn hard.

And there’s a reason for that — Frank hints at it when he talks about shaping the blob, and it’s why writers are generally such neurotic insecure people. The source of story, buried inside all of their heads, is a mysterious, flighty, cantankerous cipher. You don’t know what it is, you don’t know where it is, and you don’t know why it does what it does. All you know is that you can sometimes sit down at a desk and fumble around in your mind and open a spigot and wait and coax and hope and finally a couple of drops of raw id spill out and if you’re lucky and patient those drops quicken into a little stream and if you’re even luckier the stream becomes a river.

The important thing to do when fortune smiles on you this way — the crucial thing — is to leave everything the fuck alone. Do not attempt to divert the flow, or shape its contents, or interfere in any way. Just let it happen. It’s a djinn’s gift — real and tangible only as long as you play by its rules. Mess with it, even a little, and it disappears into a puff of cackles and derision.

I’ve taken this maxim entirely to heart over the years. It’s gotten so that I’m even suspicious of plots. They seem like an dangerous imposition on the whole, delicate apparatus. Whenever I try to intervene in a story that’s going in a direction I’m not entirely comfortable with, I feel like some cigar-chomping studio exec: prying himself out from behind my desk, waddling over to the writer, informing him that his screenplay needs more explosions, or tigers, or boobs, or transvestite werewolf hunters. It’s no way to motivate the talent.

So that’s the first part of the job — ride the beast for as long as it lets you, and do everything in your power to make it happy.

I’ve had some minor success with this anti-technique in the last couple of years — not the kind where any actual stories are sold, of course — more the minor, incremental kind that keeps things interesting, and worth doing. More importantly, I’ve had nothing but failure when I try anything else. The mysterious djinn inside my head gets its way, or it melts back into the shadows and disappears for days, or weeks, on end. Period.

But that’s not everything, of course. Once you’ve got all the raw material, you have to step in with your conscious brain — the part that you actually own — and finish it. That’s the second part of your job. Everything you need is there, pretty much, it’s now a question of chiseling it down into something presentable. The chunk of raw id you’ve just dumped onto the page may be sparking with potential, but until you shape it into something palatable, something that someone else might actually want to read, then it’s just that — potential. It’s like sculpture — you may see the statue embedded in that giant hunk of rock, but until you chip away at all the stuff that isn’t the statue, you’ll be the only one who does. The only difference between a sculptor and a writer is where they get their rocks — sculptors coax them out of quarries, writers coax them out of their brains.

So a writer actually has to be two, distinctly different, people: a passive conduit, and an active shaper. Part of the difficulty lies in know when to be which: at what point do you step in and start directing the show? Jump too soon, and you dam the flow, or redirect it into canals of your own making — you tame it, contain it, render it worthless. Jump too late, and the story floods its banks, drowns the countryside, submerges all the machinery that was waiting patiently for a chance to fashion it into something coherent.

There aren’t any answers here. Every story has its own rules, which it doesn’t tell you about. The process of writing is, always and everyday, a journey into the dark parts of the map, where getting lost isn’t just inevitable — it’s the whole point.

So I’ve been blogging for over five years now, and I’m still not entirely sure why. Is this thing an extroverted version of the diary I never managed to keep? Is it an attempt to scratch the writing itch without doing any actual writing? A hopeful shout out into the void? A reason to spend even more time sitting in front of a computer?

The short answer is “I don’t know”. The long answer is “I lack the epistemological basis for any sort of definitive assertions on the subject.” The surrealist answer is “The cheese rises splatterwise in the eye of the molting cow!”

But the good news is I’ve discovered an actual use for this thing: it turns out to be a really good life barometer. Which is to say, I’ve found that the quality and frequency of my posts correlate pretty much exactly with the quality of my mind — when the mind is engaged, stimulated, exposed to new things, the blog is happy. When the mind is plodding, sluggish, or looping through the same basic patterns over and over again, the blog is unhappy. It’s a sort of canary in my mental coal mine.

The canary’s been ailing recently. Not quite dead, but sort of hanging upsidedown on its perch, squawking plaintively, pining for the fjords.

So it’s probably a good thing that I got accepted into Clarion this year. Clarion is a sort of intensive six-week scifi/fantasy writing workshop, taught by established writers in the field, held every year. I’ve been reading about Clarion for a while, and almost-but-not-quite-applying for nearly as long. It’s a big commitment — you basically have to drop the rest of your life and focus on nothing but writing for a month and a half.

But I finally pulled the trigger and applied, at the urging of my wife, who pointed out (nicely) that I’m getting too damn old for the luxury of this kind of feckless vacillation. You either want to be a writer or you don’t. Choose. (It also helps that Cory Doctorow, one of my heroes, will be teaching this year).

So it’s finally happening, and it’ll probably be the most radically different thing I’ve done in a long, long time. If my blog barometer theory is correct, this should jolt the canary upright, maybe even send it spinning crazily around its perch.

I guess we’ll see.