I just came back from the wrap party for Gracie Rose, the newest film from Films on Consignment (no links in text tonight, go check the sidebar - besides, I don't know if there's a link yet to the preview I saw tonight anyway). These people have done something amazing, something that looks and feels professional, legitimate, serious, and potentially career launching for them. I think this is the moment they will all point to as the "beginning" once they become successful.
It made me realize something. Well, not so much realize as feel the need to confess it to all of my 43 (on average) readers. I posture. I rant. I rave. I play at being "full of piss and vinegar" - as the saying goes - but the truth is this: I'm always afraid that I'm never taken seriously. I'm afraid that everything I do, no matter how humble, how grand, how outrageous, or foolish, or irrational is pathetically un-serious. Trivial. Inconsequential. Stupid. The cold, form rejection letter is, in my eyes, nothing more than someone feeling sorry for me and not having the balls to tell me that I am wishing to be the "King of the Sky," as John Bruce might say. Even this post, bald, naked, confession of my insecurities, will seem, with time, nothing more than trivial, humiliating shit. If I'm not better than the self-published $20 book on how-to-write-a-novel crowd, please, someone tell me. Just be honest so that I can either decide to give it all up and become a plumber or press on foolishly carving out my tiny pond where I'm the only fish that matters.
As an undergrad, Steve Heller told me that my one strength as a writer was that I was stubborn. No one was going to get me to change the vision I had for my story. In grad school, Bobbie Louise Hawkins said I had "the goods." A fellow student once commented on a strange, confessional piece I wrote about girls accidentally flashing their panties at me, with the idea that I had taken a seemingly base topic and made it somehow compelling. I hold on to these things like they're pieces of drift wood and I'm lost at sea.
So, I'm stubborn, I'm honest, and I'm mostly without a censor. What in the hell does all of that mean?
Thursday, July 27
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3 Notes to the Editor:
It's an important decision, and not something you make just once or on the spur of the moment. For much of my life, I decided I didn't have what it takes, although now and then someone would disagree (my reaction was to want to ask them if they'd pay my rent while I wrote the Great American Novel). But I never quite stopped writing, and not just for my own amusement -- I figured if I had some talent, I could put it to use for club newsletters, historical societies, and that sort of thing. It kept me up to the idea of writing for an audience, which I think is important.
Whether you think you have ability or not, I think it's also important to get some real experience of life, the kind you get from straight jobs, for instance. Charles Bukowski decided it wasn't going to work out for him to be a poet in his early 20s, so he took up drinking as an art form (by his own account). Twenty years later he went back to writing.
I had a look at the samples from your novels, and my thinking based on that is that you need to develop beyond MFA program style writing. I get a sense of too many characters doing too many unfocused things, and I don't know where the novel is going. But this is not an answer to the ultimate question of whether you should be a writer.
John Bruce
John - I don't want to sound like I'm taking great offense at your comments - although they did cause a bit of a WTF moment - they are things I've pondered and continue to dwell on. So, any further comments would be appreciated.
At 35, how much more straight job experience should I go for? I've done food service, retail, manual labor, call centers, and corporate cubical farm jobs.
I'm not sure I can completely agree or disagree with your comment that my writing is still "MFA program style writing" without a better understanding of what you mean by that. My understanding of MFA style program writing is such that, if following the "style" then my novel should have been a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman told in a linear fashion, perferably in first-person so as to maximize my "voice."
What, specifically, gives you that feeling of too many characters doing too many unfocused things?
I'm not rushing to defend myself here - I hope that's apparent - I'm only looking for a little more detail.
It's worth what you're paying for it -- but in just a few paragraphs in part 1 of "Shadows", I find Lian, Emil, Jack, and Gray all doing things I can't quite figure out. We meet Lian reminiscing about playing a corpse to keep the ghosts away, but I'm not sure what that has to do with anything else in what I've read. We meet Lian and Gray lying down, not sure why -- if we met either of them doing something rather than sacking out, we might learn more. Emil is prowling, not sure why -- unfocused. Toward the end, we find they must be in ex-Yugo, but again, no reason why. We have to go back to Sarajevo to get Jack, no reason given.
The assumption seems to be that the reader will want to hang on long enough to find out what's going on, but it's dangerous to assume.
My inclination, for what it's worth, is to give the reader specific questions to be asking right at the start, not hoping the reader will sympathize with someone because they once were afraid of ghosts, for instance. Also, I find the present tense frenzied and nervous. But take it for what it's worth.
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