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The
Maplewoods Mirror #17 (August 2007 )
Welcome to my monthly newsletter on life and writing. If you
want to see my website for back issues and other news, please visit www.chrismeeks.com.
In This Issue:
Traveling
Happy end-of-summer to you. It was a busy one. My family
and I have just returned from a trip to Pocatello, Idaho, Butte and
Bozeman, Montana, Yellowstone Park, and Wayzata, Minnesota. I’ll
write something about one of them next time. I’m off to New York this
week. In the meantime, here are a few photos from our travels.
A field in Idaho
Old Faithful
Steam at a Yellowstone
Mudpot
For Those of You in Los Angeles: A
Drawing Class
I’ve always told myself there are two things I can’t do: ride horses
and draw. As a child and teenager, I gave the horse thing plenty of
tries, yet I always seemed to get the horses that spooked easily and ran
off over the horizon with me screaming to stop. My stepdaughter
Ellen, who loves horses, now tells me I should have pulled back on the
reins, but somehow I’d only thought of screaming, despite a number of
lessons. We each take in information in our own way.
When I learned a few years ago that my wife, Ann, could draw well
and brilliantly, I encouraged her to try out one of the open life drawing
sessions at CalArts where I taught. She said she’d only do it if I
went and drew with her. I laughed because I could only draw stick
forms. I was not an artist. Staring at naked people for a few
hours, however, might not be bad, so I went.
That first time, there were two models, and they began with
two-minute poses. My first drawing only had a single nose, and not a
very good one. Because I had to draw so fast, I had to throw out my
misguided notions of how to draw, and I just drew. After a while, my
forms actually looked human.
Over the past few years, I’ve been well-guided by a brilliant
CalArts instructor, Bill Eckert, and this summer I found a great instructor
near Eagle Rock where I live, who I highly recommend. Every Thursday night,
from 7 to 10 p.m., artist Ed Flynn has a model come to his Atwater Village
studio, and you draw. After you draw, he points out what you did well
and, if you’re open to it, other spots where you might “re-see.”
For one session, rather than have us draw, he gave us glossy ads
from magazines, scissors and glue, and he told us that “seeing” is really
about seeing shapes. Hence, he said for us to look at the model and
create her face as a collage of shapes, cutting out text and image parts
from the ads and gluing them down.
What I like about drawing is I see a connection to writing. To
draw is to fool myself into creating. By drawing quickly, my “editor”
is not on.
I am also learning a new way of seeing. Never before had I
noticed how the shoulder inclines into the neck. I hadn’t noticed the
shadow created on face and skin. I didn’t know how people’s ears
lined up with the eyes. I didn’t know that our eyes are really near
the middle of our heads, not near the top. The human form is beautiful—men
and women, old and young.
Ed studied at the Chouinard Art Institute and the Rhode Island
School of Design, and his teaching resume fills a page. As a painter,
he’s had a number of one-man shows, and he presently has an exhibition in
downtown Los Angeles
Ed’s classes are small and very low-cost. You just help pay
for the model. A few who attend are long-time artists and come just to
draw. I leave each evening both drained and energized. I still
have much to learn about drawing, and I’ll keep fitting it in when I
can. Ed offers another class, too, in still life.
To learn about his classes and the cost, give him a call at (323)
663-3417. You can also write his wife, Vivian, an artist, too, at vivianflynn@sbcglobal.net.
To see their webpage, go to http://www.flynnartstudios.com.
POV: Hemingway’s “The Hills Are Like
White Elephants -- Remix”
Point of view is a major choice for a writer of fiction, and it’s an
element not easily taught. The first person point of view, “I,” is
the easiest to control for a writer because we live our lives in the first
person. The reader perceives only from what the narrator senses and
thinks.
“Thinking” is what novels can have that plays and films don’t.
Interior monologue or reflection adds subjectivity to a scene. Not
all written stories employ this, though. Many of Hemingway’s and J.D.
Salinger’s short stories are objective. For instance, in Salinger’s
“A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” we hear the dialogue of Muriel, Sybil, and
Seymour, and we see their actions, but we’re never in their heads. In
this sense, the stories are very much like a play. However, we do
have an unnamed narrator guiding our thinking. One of my favorite
pair of sentences is in the opening of “Bananafish”: “She was a girl who
for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing. She looked as if her
phone had been ringing continually since she had reached puberty.”
If you’re a writer and you want to experiment with POV, take a story
you love and change the point of view. Below, I played with
Hemingway’s “The Hills are Like White Elephants,” which is a very objective
story, though the writer favors the man. I took a chunk of it and
favored the woman, even jumping into one of her direct thoughts. See
if you can sense what I did. This is my chunk of fiction for this
month.
---
The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this
side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines
of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the
warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads,
hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American
woman and the boyfriend with her sat at a table in the shade, outside the
building. It was hot, and the express from Barcelona would come in forty
minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.
"What should we drink?" the woman asked. She had taken off
her hat and put it on the table.
"It's pretty hot," the man said.
She nodded. He couldn't stand anything the least bit hot or
difficult. "Let's drink beer."
"Dos cervezas," the man said into the curtain.
"Big ones?" an older waitress asked from the doorway.
"Yes. Two big ones," he said, grinning, and when the
waitress left, he repeated, "Two big ones," and gestured two
breasts, looking at his companion's chest.
"Give me a break. Don't you think about anything
else?"
"These days, yes, I have other thoughts."
"That's because you didn't think of other things before.
Your obsession got you here, Mister."
The waitress brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads, which
she placed on the table. The woman felt the waitress's stare, so the
woman gazed off at the line of hills. The waitress left, and only now did
the woman truly see how the hills were white in the sun, and the country
was brown and dry.
"They look like white elephants," she said.
"I've never seen one." The man drank his beer.
"No, you wouldn't have."
"I might have," the man said. "Just because you say I
wouldn't have doesn't prove anything."
"I know you better than you think. Like most guys, you
think you know how to fix things. This can't be fixed."
"Oh, cut it out."
"You started it," the woman said.
"Well, let's try and have a fine time."
"I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white
elephants. Wasn't that clever?"
"I don't see how."
"No, you wouldn't."
"I don't like your tone."
The woman gazed again at the hills. "They're lovely
hills," she said. "They don't really look like white
elephants. I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees."
"Should we have another drink?"
"Like that one night? Isn't that how we got the
problem?"
The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table.
"The beer's nice and cool," the man said.
"Happy to hear," she said. Water beaded on the side
of her glass. Things like humid air against a cold glass did what
they had to do.
How to Start a Novel (Part Two)
Last month I wrote how I was stumped. I’d finished my latest
novel, Falling Down Mt. Washington, after two and a half
years. Giving myself a weekend off, I was ready to start on a
new novel. However, I did not have a new novel in mind. Where
do ideas for new novels come from? I was going crazy. If you
want to read or reread how I was stumped, go to http://homepage.smc.edu/meeks_christopher/Maplewoods%20Mirror%20Number%2016.htm.
To continue: Much about writing creatively is finding ways around
your own internal barriers—tricking yourself, as it were. I tell my
students for their in-class writing exercises, “Just write quickly.
It’s okay to write dreck because when you write with speed, sometimes
genius slips in. Don’t edit as you write. You have two sides of
your brain, the editor and the creator. If both are at work at the
same time, then when you’re happily trying something out, the editor is
saying, ‘You call this good writing? It’s not.’ Turn off the
editor. Write your shitty first draft.”
My colleague Aram Soroyan says, “Assume your mind is shapely, so
what you create will be shapely. Your first thought is often your
best thought.”
The problem I now see with coming up with ideas for a novel, though,
is that the creator and editor have to be on at the same time. You
try out an idea: “How about a story about death? Some guy loses his
son and he feels miserable.” Instantly you think, “Terrible.
Some guy? What guy? Was the son murdered, did he have a freak
accident, or was it suicide?”
If I’d been in a better frame of mind, I might have noticed how I
was coming up with possibilities. In slamming an idea, you may be
coming up with specifics that might make it more interesting. It
might lead to a great idea.
On my road to a solution, though, I was hearing the naysayer loud
and clear. None of my ideas seemed good.
I was frozen because I was looking for Great with a capital G.
I couldn’t see. I stressed. Novelist and playwright David Scott
Milton, who I mentioned last time and whose play Bread appeared on
Broadway, wrote me a long e-mail, encouraging me by explaining his
approach.
David
Scott Milton by artist Don Bachardy
Here’s how he began as a writer. At the age of fifteen, he
fell in love with the detective stories of Belgian novelist Georges Simenon
(1903-1989). In his lifetime, Simonen wrote nearly 200 novels, 150
novellas, a number of pulp novels written under more than two-dozen
pseudonyms, and many articles. He was capable of writing sixty to
eighty pages per day. Altogether, about 550 million copies of his works
have been printed.
As David told me, “His novels were about 150 pages, ten chapters,
most of them, and he wrote them in two weeks. He would get an idea, jot
down several points. I have an interview he did with The Paris
Review in which they published a photo of one of his outlines. It was
on the back of an envelope and consisted of the names of three or four
cities, several characters' names, and two or three occupations. That was
it.
“First, he would get a physical examination to see if he was strong
enough to go through the writing of a novel. He would lock himself in a
room for two weeks. He would not talk to or see anyone. He would only work.
The first day he would ouline the book-- that is he would jot down several
ideas for places where the book might take place, characters names and
occupations; that was about it. He would ten write a chapter a day for ten
days, which is why his books were almost always ten chapters long; and then
he would take three days to revise the book. Fourteen days and he had a
complete novel. If for any reason this schedule was
interrupted, he could not pick it up again but had to throw everything
he wrote away. Well, this appealed to me. At age fifteen, I decided
to write my first novel and do it in Simenon style.”
“The book took place in Paris—of course, in the shadow of the
Eiffel Tower. It was a mystery. I tried to write it in two
weeks. I jettisoned the whole project within a month. However, it
pointed to a direction for my work. Ever since then I've made skimpy
outlines, rarely thought consciously about the material, and always felt
that if I could write myself into a frenzy, my unconscious would send
me in the right direction. This wouldn't always hold true, of course, but I
have found over the years that if I can meet up with a character, an
environment, a problem, a set of problems, that excite me, I could go from
there. I'll be all right and the work will be all right.
“I have never thought about my stuff before writing it to any great
degree. For me, as soon as I start to intellectualize the work, it becomes
self-conscious and even pretentious. During the revision stage, I'll often
then try to figure out what it was that I had set out to say. I will
approach the work on a more critical level and try to shade or enhance
certain aspects of the writing. But the most productive stuff usually comes
out of the fire of creation when I'm not examining the work with my mind.
“So, to simplify this: in order for me to write on any level of
accomplishment, the work must be on fire inside me. I treat it, in its
early stages, as, let's say a campfire, where you get a spark going and you
add leaves or paper or twigs to the spark and you carefully fan the spark,
add more stuff to it and more and more until it's blazing. And when the
work is an explosive blaze, then you have to tame it a bit or it'll burn
everything, including the writer.
In short: Go to work, dive in, don't think too much.
Thank you, David.
I ended up doing a couple things. One was to have a title,
which I won't mention now. I still have to sit with it. The second
was to write a few character descriptions of people who might be in my
novel, likable and unlikable. The third was thinking of an opening:
“Patton Burch awoke in his Las Vegas suite to the sharp citrus smell of
grapefruit. Patton’s tall sinewy frame lay naked under the hotel’s
sheets as he stared into the cheese of the ceiling.”
Ultimately, I might change it, but the point is it was enough to get
me writing. Thus, I solved my dilemma of a new novel idea by tricking
myself. I’ll see what comes out of the hopper in about a year
(first draft). I don’t write at Simonen speed. I am assuming something
will pop out. It will be shapely.
As I worked my way though my dilemma, I found a number of other ways
to trick oneself into an idea. Perhaps one of these will help you:
- Think of
a title, which may get you thinking of action to go with it. I
keep a file of titles that for this reason. This is what worked
for me, in part. I won’t tell you the title yet. I have
to see if I get far with my story.
- Read the
newspaper often and in particular, look for the small little
articles, ones that don’t give you a lot of information. For
instance, I’d read one of a bank robber who dashed out to his car
after his stickup, and his car wouldn’t start, so he ran down a side
street, and the police followed. The police lost him, but later
suspected someone in the tanning salon might have helped him.
It’s stories like these, with little information, that can get you
thinking.
- Think of big
moments in your life, and then assign one such moment to someone very
different from you—perhaps of the opposite sex or with a very
different job.
- Think of books
or authors you love. What aspect of them do you like? I
like Nick Hornby, for instance, for his passionate characters who are
often funny. Hence, I’m aiming for a funny book with passionate
characters. My voice is different than his, so my book will be
different.
- Think of
professions that intrigue you and investigate those for your main
character. I’ve written about a scientist whose passion is to
make atoms as cold as possible—near absolute zero. My last novel
is with a female FBI agent specializing in bank robbery. I knew
nothing about either, so I did research, which I found fascinating.
- Use the phone
book and find names that intrigue you or make them up: Traitor Horn,
Blake Rampart, Herbert T. Buttle, Janice Ridge. Now write a one
paragraph description of them, making them likable or unlikable
purely from description. J.K. Rowling, for instance, introduces
Professor Snape as “a teacher with greasy black hair, a hooked nose,
and sallow skin.” Rubeus Hagrid, in contrast, comes off this
way: “He was almost as tall as a normal man and at least five times
as wide. He looked simply too big to be allowed, and so wild—long
tangles of bushy black hair and beard his most of his face. He
had hands the size of trashcan lids, and his feet in their leather
boots were like baby dolphins.” Once you have a character or
two, you might have a start. You might start, in fact, with
your protagonist and antagonist.
- Think of an
opening line that would make you want to read more. Write a few
opening lines and see which one is best. Then start
writing. Only write two pages. You’re not writing a novel
yet, you’re only writing two pages.
- Join a
writer’s group or take a class with a real deadline. Some
people are more creative with a deadline.
- Write about
something that makes you angry. Playwrights Jerome Lawrence and
Robert E. Lee often worked this way. They hated Joseph McCarthy
and the House of UnAmerican Activities Committee for impeding the
freedom to think. They wrote Inherit the Wind. Arthur
Miller, also upset with McCarthyism, wrote The Crucible.
- Think of a
theme, which may, in part, be driven by books you’ve loved because of
themes you loved. Write a story imbedding such a theme. I
often think of Flannery O’Connor whose deep Catholicism guided her,
but she was never didactic. However, she had her themes.
- Think of a
story about morality. Gray areas abound in morality, and the
gray areas are what’s interesting. Playwright Jon Robin Baitz
often focuses here. His play Three Hotels is about a
business executive who sells baby formula in the third world.
People are so poor there, they water down the milk to make it go
farther, and babies are dying. Breast milk would be far better
and free.
There are undoubtedly hundreds more approaches
to starting a novel, some of which you can invent for yourself. The
main thing is to back into your story. You’re allowing yourself to
play. I reminded myself I didn’t need to know my whole novel beforehand,
but, rather, I just needed an interesting start. The rest is process.
Sunset
over Griffith Park
See
you next time,
--Chris
For
reviews or more information on either of my two books below, click on the
cover.
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