Good writing advice

Writing should be a process of surprising oneself. If I had a plan, down to the last detail, of what my story will be, what would be the point of writing it? I mean, what is in it for me if I know precisely what is going to happen and what my characters are going to think and say and do? It would simply be a matter of typing.

-- Richard Gwyn, in his "Ricardo Blanco" blog

That's how I know I'm writing well: when something happens in my book that I don't expect, as I'm writing it. As in my first novel Make Nice, in which a major character came busting through a door without warning in the 4th chapter, someone whom I had not planned on or dreamed of, and who insisted on insinuating herself deeply not only in the life of the protagonist but in the themes of the book itself.

Speaking of Make Nice, which is set in 1960 and is about the Rat Pack, the local PBS station showed Ocean's 11 last night. As I was watching it I thought of a series of annotations you could make. Like the conversation between Sinatra, Martin and Davis where they joke about going into politics -- a reflection of Sinatra's strong interest in the candidacy of JFK and his poorly hidden hope that JFK would appoint him to an ambassadorship or government post. Or the running joke about the mother of Peter Lawford's character, which is also an inside joke about Peter Lawford's own domineering mother. And so on -- there is inside joke after inside joke, and probably nobody knows them all anymore.

Apropos, here's a cool page on the interiors seen in the film, including the Vegas casino-resorts which have now all been torn down and replaced by more modern ones, along with an explanation that:

Ocean's 11 preserves some important aspects of the place, like the multiple showrooms in each of the hotels. (Frank) Sinatra, Jr. was most impassioned [on the DVD commentary] when discussing how the casinos used to operate, "when they were owned by individuals, not corporations." He explained that these intimate music lounges existed to "feed live music into the casino," and give gamblers a place to eat and revive themselves for some more gambling. ...

The new corporate owners that took over in the late 1960s figured -- according to Sinatra, Jr. -- "that people should only have to walk as far as the elevator to spend their money," which is when the concept of separate buildings was jettisoned in favor of a a gargantuan hotel that could allow you to never set foot outside of it. ... Sinatra, Jr. was also very detailed about the death of quality entertainment in Vegas, explaining that the number of private lounges were reduced by new corporate owners who felt they were wasting their money with duplications of musicians throughout a casino. The disappearance of the small music lounges that were free-of-charge to gamblers did not seem to affect the flow of people coming through the doors, so the rest of the lounges were torn out, replaced by grand concert halls with high-dollar tickets that could lure in even the non-gamblers.

Wayfinding

Just published in The Rumpus is a memoir-ish piece by Elissa Wald, a smut writer whose work I am not familiar with. (Among my many failings and career mistakes as a sex writer was not being very well integrated with the sex-active community, so that as soon as Cris and I stopped publishing Frighten the Horses and people stopped sending us work, I became more or less marooned and isolated as a writer, so that even though Wald's book was published a few years before mine were, I was unhappily unaware of it until this day.) In the piece she commemorates the milestones of her early interest in s-m, including a particularly creative strategy when, at age 16, she phones a recruiter for the Marines in order to have an older man talk to her in a confident, commanding voice.

"You'll learn a lot about yourself in the Marines," he tells me. "Things you never knew. You'll find out what you're made of. Does that scare you?"

"Yes," I say. It's the first true thing I've said.

"Are you willing to let someone break you down in order to build you back up?"

My favorite bit, though, is when she's working as a phone sex operator. The office is short-staffed one day when two phones ring at the same time, and she picks up both receivers and has a simultaneous conversation with both customers, each of whom thinks she's having phone sex with him only. I love the farcical aspect of this, though she says that if she saw a scene like that in a film she'd "hurl a shoe at the screen" -- though she doesn't say why. Because it's so unlikely? That doesn't matter! What matters is whether the actress pulls it off, and she does.

'A Visit from the Goon Squad' and 'Sputnik Sweetheart'

 

This week I finished reading Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart from 2002 and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, last year's Pulitzer Prize winner.

It's not fair to compare them; the Murakami book is shorter and lighter and doesn't attempt nearly as much as Egan's. But I was reading them the same week, so comparisons are inevitable.

I have to say I was disappointed with the Murakami, though I keep thinking that it's somehow unfair of me to feel that way. The book is what it is, and he went on to more ambitious and serious things afterward. While I did find the last 35 pages or so compelling, the first 200 pages were like a warm, light breeze on a hot day, a breeze that doesn't do anything to cool you off.

"A Visit From the Goon Squad," on the other hand, was really exciting -- the chronological scope, the chances she took with characters, the choice to imagine more than 60 years of American history past and future. Very admirable.

Next up: Finishing the serialized chapters of "The Third Reich," then Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, then David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Neither of which are short works. To relax I'm reading Patricia Highsmith, and rereading one of my favorite novels ever, Peter Handke's 1972 novella Short Letter, Long Farewell, which has been reissued by New York Review Books.

Gingrich's Catch-22: The more successful anti-terrorism is, the more secure we feel, so...

This is, by the way, the great -- one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration. The more successful they've been at intercepting and stopping bad guys, the less proof there is that we're in danger, and therefore, the better they've done at making sure there isn't an attack, the easier it is to say "well, there was never gonna be an attack anyway." And it's almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us.

-- Newt Gingrich in 2008, quoted by Mediaite

"One of the great tragedies of the Bush administration" -- that they actually succeeded too much in making people feel safe. That was a missed opportunity, all right! Should have been more fear, more terror alerts, more false alarms, more "condition red" -- because there wasn't enough of that.

Dobson 'stuns' fellow fundies with Gingrich slander

In a meeting of 150 powerful evangelical Christian leaders last week in which the group voted to endorse former Sen. Rick Santorum, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson "stunned" fellow attendees when he attacked another candidate, former Rep. Newt Gingrich. Contrasting Santorum with the former House Speaker, who is infamous (apparently even among right-wing Christians!) for dumping two wives before settling on his present one Callista, Dobson said:

I want to tell you that I've gotten to know Karen [Santorum] and she is just lovely. She set aside two professional careers to raise these seven children. She would make a fabulous first lady role model. And Newt Gingrich's wife, she was a mistress for eight years. ... Who do you want as your first lady?

-- politico.com

A "chill" set in the room, an attendee said, adding that many present were offended. That makes sense, as Gingrich, having converted to Catholicism to marry his present wife, has made the requisite apologies and repentences for dumping his first wife while she was in the hospital for cancer and cheating on his second during the same time he was leading the charge in Congress to impeach President Bill Clinton for like behavior. And in the evangelical world, you can be forgiven for anything. So for an evangelical to bring it up in a gathering of other evangelicals would indeed be shocking.

But all it really shows is Dobson's decreasing influence, even within the evangelical world. Like Pat Robertson, his high profile is about all that's left of his formerly dominant position; these withered eminences may still have their box seats, but they're like Marge Schott at a Reds game: not only do they no longer control the team, but the whole organization is embarrassed by them.

Meanwhile, Twitter is ablaze with rumors that a prominent interview with Gingrich wife no. 2 will be aired tomorrow on a major network. The former Marianne Gingrich spoke with Esquire in 2010 (via @hollybdc)

Yeah no, really

In the first section of The Savage Detectives, García Madero wonders about the Mexican slang term: 'If simón is slang for yes and nel means no, then what does simonel mean?' Four hundred pages later, at the end of the middle section, a former poet named Amadeo Salvatierra ('Like so many hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, I too, when the moment came, stopped writing and reading poetry') recounts the drunken discussion he had one night with Lima and Belano when they had come to seek out any information he might possess about their vanished Cesárea Tinajero:

And I saw two boys, one awake and the other asleep, and the one who was asleep said don't worry, Amadeo, we'll find Cesárea for you even if we have to look under every stone in the north ... And I insisted: don't do it for me. And the one who was asleep ... said: we're not doing it for you, Amadeo, we're doing it for Mexico, for Latin America, for the Third World, for our girlfriends, because we feel like doing it. Were they joking? Weren't they joking?... and then I said: boys, is it worth it? is it worth it? is it really worth it? and the one who was asleep said Simonel.

-- Benjamin Kunkel in The London Review of Books, September 2007.

I was thinking today about the contemporary expression "Yeah no." As far as I can determine, it means "I acknowledge the situation as described as well as the not very helpful suggestion that I take a certain action, but there's no way I am actually going to do that."

Example:

"Look, you could enter this short story contest, you just have to have had some connection to the South, and your story has to be set in the South; you lived in Texas for ten years, why don't you write something funny about it and send it in?"

"Yeah no."

That's just a made-up example. I had reason to use the expression the other day but I can't remember why. Still, it's a useful expression.

The other thought I have about reading and writing is from a Sep. 6, 1959 letter of Flannery O'Connor:

I read about 80 pages of Dr. Pasternak but I am so slow that the book had to go back ere I had fairly begun. There were a lot of wonderful things in those 80 pages but I don't think I could have stood that much formlessness for however many hundred pages there were. A friend of mine reviewed it and said it was like a huge shipwreck with a lot of beautiful things floating in it.

That's already wonderful, but then she immediately follows with these amazing sentences:

You are not supposed to feel at home or at ease in any of the forms you see around you. Create your own form out of what you've got, let it take care of itself.

And then, at the end of the letter:

The thing for you to do is write something with a delayed reaction like those capsules that take an hour to melt in your stomach. In this way, it could be performed on Monday and not make them vomit until Wednesday, by which time they would not be sure who was to blame. This is the principle I operate under and I find it works very well.

-- p. 349, "The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor."