Tag Archives: writing

My Process: States of Being

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  • Potentially Awesome. A flash of inspiration. The possible forms it might take are endless—a decalogy, a movie franchise, an epic poem. Laughter, tears, bitter insight into How The World Really Works. It’s all there, and it’s mine to plunder.
  • Awesome. First draft done. From nothing to something. Gold has been mined but not refined. Is it rough? Sure it’s rough, but its beauty shall blind anyone who dares read it! Let it sit briefly, before the world beholds its wonder!
  • Decidedly Not Awesome aka damn, this needs a lot of work. Three weeks after the first draft, doubts have arisen only to be confirmed when the drawer is opened. What was exciting has been muddled and lost. It’s going to take a lot of buffing to polish this turd…
  • Okay. One month later. Re-written, shown around, re-written again. It can no longer be denied that it is a story. Maybe it’s better. After all the work, perhaps it is better than originally hoped, a submission ought to give me the answer…
  • Crap. Absence may make the heart grow fonder but two months in slush limbo only bring its glaring faults to the forefront of my mind. I can’t bear to open the file and confirm the spelling errors, logical inconsistencies and derivative prose. Yet to know that I can neither correct its faults nor protect myself from a reader’s umbrage…shameful.
  • Confirmed Crap. Rejected thrice!!! It doesn’t work. They can’t use it. They may want to see other things, but never again this vile piece of shite! Away it goes, banished to corners of the hard drive saved for tax receipts and college one-acts. Never again will it see the light of day.

Until…Two years later. I click on a document folder whose title I don’t recognize. The story within, well, it’s got a certain whiff of inspiration. Sure, it’s buried by tonal issues and the pacing is flabby, but with a little work…

Repeat.

Psycholinguistix

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There is a bias in modern mental health toward pharmacology. A diagnostic term is a lifejacket on the Titanic. Bipolar Disorder is salvation. Schizophrenia? Thank the Lord! Post-traumatic Stress Disorder!?! Hallelujah!

Label implies treatment, implies excision, implies happiness.

Unfortunately, diagnoses portray a level of remission that mental health treatment rarely achieves. Hope turns to disappointment. Disappointment turns to anger…Yoda would have more to say.

When the DSM took over nomenclature and reduced psychiatric diagnoses to an Internet Chinese menu (for better and for worse), human experience and psychiatric labels were placed in conflict.

Examples:

“I have Anger Management issues.”

“I’m totally ADD. Like, totally.”

“My boyfriend tells me I’m Bipolar.”

The language of emotion has been subsumed by the vernacular of diagnosis or treatment as if it’s only pathology. One can’t be angry or inattentive or reactive or vengeful or ambitious without a label, or the popular acceptance of a term.

Anger can be appropriate. Inattention, too. 

Most of my day is spent as a translator; I am Fezzik in The Princess Bride.

Personality is the general term for stable traits. Those that are recurrent, predictable. It is not a derogatory term, it might be everything.

Fiction often captures more about personality than the DSM. Reading a novel, you will learn more about the trajectory of personality, of sadness, of anger than a psychiatric diagnosis.

Inherent in psychiatry are the concepts of. baseline and change. Inherent in fiction are the concepts of flaw and motivation. The goal of psychotherapy is to make the inherent articulated, the inchoate communicated. Fiction celebrates “flaws” as interesting.

Don’t tell me a diagnosis. Tell me what pisses ya off.

Typewriting

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We had a typewriter in the basement. It had its own suitcase. It was heavy and I always jammed up the keys. It was worth jamming them in order to pick through and un-jam them.

Everything I ever typed had the holes on the wrong side, and the top margin at the bottom. I seemed to like custom paper sizes, trimming the paper…just ‘cuz.

It made a noise. Not a thwack not a thump but a combination of the two. Then the letter appeared. It didn’t have the fancy corrective paper, I just re-typed the letter over and over and over again until the mistake (and its replacement) were a smudgy hole.

I wrote stories about currency, The Misadventures of Big Bully Dollar. I wrote about my pet Pegasus and the airplane I intended to build. I wrote about my friend Chris(topher) but abbreviated his name to “Christ”. Christ and I went on a lot of adventures; my teachers must’ve thought my parents were evangelicals.

On the Scriptnotes podcast, John August uses the phrase “something that exists in the world” to mark the definitive transition from idea or intention to physical presence.

A typewritten page, however wrinkled, however corrected is something that exists in this world. I have them.

Is a .pdf something that exists?

I don’t have a typewriter anymore. What will my daughters look back on? Their first e-book?

Scalzi’s Redshirts

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Expected the laughs, but not the tears. Damn, I love Existential Fiction, science-based or otherwise.

Speaking of which, just finished Death Sentences by Kawamata Chiaki. Also very much at the intersection of artistic creation and meaning of life. How can you not like a book that has both Marcel Duchamp and a Martian mercenary as characters?

I’ve read a lot of criticism lately of modern writing being “downbeat” with “passive” characters, mostly from editors with rallying cries for optimism! and action! Both of these works capture the bewildering complexity of living, while avoiding maudlin answers, hopelessness, and passivity.

Now to steal everything I can from them…

Futures

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There’s a pretty cool website called futureme.org.  I can’t remember how I came across it, but it allows you to time-delay an email to yourself.  A little time capsule shows up on your doorstep just when you’d forgotten it existed.

In 2006, I wrote a note to myself for 2009. Last week I received the note that I wrote to myself in 2009.  It reads:

Wassup? Don’t know if you’ll remember this one. You didn’t the last.

It’s June 2009. You’re about to move into your new home. You’re at 19 w 1 d. Don’t know the sex yet. Fatherhood, a home, they’re all just slightly more than an idea…

Writing, writing, writing. What to do? How to do it? I hope you’ve figured that out by now. Still struggling, to get motivated, figure out how to overcome the demons.

Hang in there.

“Wassup” aside, what’s remarkable about the message is that it captures a psychic state three years ago, that is unchanged today: anxiety about being a father, fear of adult responsibilities, tackling the obstacles of writing, and an underlying hope that these are obstacles that can be “overcome.”

I wonder if that’s the case. One thing that’s a struggle as a psychiatrist is the illusion of change, the Holy Grail of change, for that matter. To deny its possibility is to give up hope, and hope is a very powerful therapeutic tool. On the other hand, to pretend that we don’t have some inherent human nature is to ignore the obvious.

There’s a great video that captures transient global amnesia. It’s heartbreaking to watch (remember it’s transient!) but it also reveals something about our baseline personality, beneath all the mishmash of the day, the person we are underneath it all. I’m left wondering if this email, which seems so close to what I might write today (and am tempted to), will resonate again with me in 2015.

I guess what I’m saying is this: for each of us, life is a type of struggle. And while at various times the rhythm changes, overall the melody remains the same.

Image

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Last year I had the distinct honor to have my first fiction published by Catherynne M. Valente at Apex Magazine. Cat had an amazing year individually and Apex was Hugo-nominated.

I am deeply proud to have been a tiny part of a great year for the zine and a part of this great volume.  Pre-order now available with free shipping.

Baby is healthy. Move is (mostly) complete. Job is (barely) settled. Many new works in the pipeline. So here’s to looking forward, and celebrating great company.