Nanowrimo Winner

Nanowrimo 2008 Winner

Just reached the 50K mark, pretty close to deadline. I don’t have too much else to say. I haven’t reached the end of the arc of my story, so I’m planning to spend some time in December finishing up. But for now, it’s time to celebrate. And sleep. And get work done for tomorrow.

Congratulations to all the other National Novel Writing Month aficionados out there, whether or not you make goal. And special thanks to my Cafenation Sunday group. Really, I don’t think I’d have made it this time without spending hours with other writers pushing toward the same goal.

As usual after completing a bout of “stunt writing,” I’m not feeling terribly coherent, so I’ll cut this post short, and return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

Woot!

A Thanksgiving Story

My favorite Thanksgiving short story is O. Henry’s “Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen.” Like many other O. Henry stories, it’s an exploration of selflessness and its possible consequences, built around an Old Gentleman’s annual Thanksgiving tradition of buying a good dinner for one particular indigent, Stuffy Pete. This year, Stuffy has already eaten, but the Old Gentleman appears anyway:

“Good morning,” said the Old Gentleman. “I am glad to perceive that
the vicissitudes of another year have spared you to move in health
about the beautiful world. For that blessing alone this day of
thanksgiving is well proclaimed to each of us. If you will come with
me, my man, I will provide you with a dinner that should make your
physical being accord with the mental.”

That is what the old Gentleman said every time. Every Thanksgiving
Day for nine years. The words themselves almost formed an
Institution. Nothing could be compared with them except the
Declaration of Independence. Always before they had been music in
Stuffy’s ears. But now he looked up at the Old Gentleman’s face with
tearful agony in his own. The fine snow almost sizzled when it fell
upon his perspiring brow. But the Old Gentleman shivered a little
and turned his back to the wind.

O. Henry tells the story with plenty of sarcastic jabs:

The Old Gentleman was a staunch American patriot, and
considered himself a pioneer in American tradition. In order to
become picturesque we must keep on doing one thing for a long time
without ever letting it get away from us. Something like collecting
the weekly dimes in industrial insurance. Or cleaning the streets.

But every time I read the story, the melancholy surrounding the Old Gentleman gets to me, just as it gets to Stuffy:

Gorged nearly to the uttermost
when he entered the restaurant, the smell of food had almost caused
him to lose his honor as a gentleman, but he rallied like a
true knight. He saw the look of beneficent happiness on the Old
Gentleman’s face–a happier look than even the fuchsias and the
ornithoptera amphrisius had ever brought to it–and he had not the
heart to see it wane.

Every time I read the story, I get caught up in the sad drama of ironic generosity. I don’t know if this means anything about Thanksgiving, but I do know that this is one of the stories I come back to again and again.

On Looking Around

Matt Bell has a new story, “The Founder of this Town,” up at Twelve Stories. Readers of this blog will know I admire Matt’s work a great deal, and this story is no exception. I read it as a story about how easy it is to know absolutely nothing about the things that surround me on a daily basis. It’s told in a humorous style:

Then this guy came up to me looking like a real character, wearing cargo pants and one of those vests with all the pockets.  He had a camera in his hands, a real pro job, and he says to me, “Are you from this town?”  And I said, “Yes.”  And he said, “Have you always lived here?”  And I said, “Yes.”  And he said, “Do you know the name of this person?” and then he took a picture of the statue, to which I said, “No, I don’t know his name, but he’s the founder of this town,” which was something I had always wanted to tell someone.  Then he took a picture of me, which made me mad because he didn’t warn me first and because I had tuna fish in my moustache.  I could feel it there, cold and sticky, but when I raised my napkin to wipe my face, he took another picture of me, which made me feel stupid.  I didn’t know whether to wipe my face or just leave it.  I wondered about magnification, about lighting.

It’s easy to laugh at the vain buffoon narrating the story, but I wonder how well I’d pass a similar test of knowledge. I try to stay aware, but it’s all too easy to get caught traveling numbly from home to work and back again. I’ve consciously sought some things out around where I live. For example, I found out about a castle about two hours north of here, built by an eccentric inventor. I read about it, and drove there to see it. But how many statues, just within a mile, would puzzle me? Shortly after I moved here, I noticed a sign not two blocks away pointing to Kennedy’s birthplace, and, though I’ve always meant to follow the sign, I never have.

On his blog, Matt says:

I was glad they took this one, as it’s in a voice I hadn’t used in a while, but which I have fun writing– It’s sort of a doomed but well-meaning idiot voice, I think.

I think that sort of voice only comes off honest when the writer approaches it with identification and compassion as much as condescension, and the ending of “The Founder of the Town” certainly made me believe in the sincere questioning of the narrator, and, as a result, the author.

Pulp is Fun

When the going gets hard at the magazine, I consistently turn to the weird in my off time. I’m back to Spacesuits and Sixguns, a fun pulp magazine, looking this time at a flash fiction piece by Rhonda Eudaly called “Immense Dimension of Your Monster.” Inspired by something from the author’s spam folder, the piece is a short, funny take on monster creation:

According to Dr. Frank Stein, founder of this competition, “the hardest part comes when entering the second round. Many of the creations don’t understand the torches and pitchforks are merely diagnostic tools to gage quality of workmanship.”

A Classic Story

Narrative Magazine’s story of the week at the moment is Edith Wharton’s “The Rembrandt” (free registration required. It’s a graceful story with a satisfyingly twisting plot. The initial situation is that a museum curator is being asked to place a value on a (worthless) painting owned by a desperate and proud old woman who needs to sell it:

Reason argued that it was more cruel to deceive Mrs. Fontage than to tell her the truth; but that merely proved the inferiority of reason to instinct in situations involving any concession to the emotions. Along with her faith in the Rembrandt I must destroy not only the whole fabric of Mrs. Fontage’s past, but even that life-long habit of acquiescence in untested formulas that makes the best part of the average feminine strength. I guessed the episode of the picture to be inextricably interwoven with the traditions and convictions which served to veil Mrs. Fontage’s destitution not only from others but from herself. Viewed in that light the Rembrandt had perhaps been worth its purchase-money; and I regretted that works of art do not commonly sell on the merit of the moral support they may have rendered.

It’s quite late as I write this, and I’m not sure how to characterize the particular classic sense I get of this story’s narrative. What I can say is, it’s distinct. It’s in the same category as something like “The Gift of the Magi” — tense and ultimately comforting. It reminds me of my first discoveries of short stories, in old textbooks some adult had shoved onto a bottom shelf of our bookcase. I remember reading these things, and realizing that I enjoyed them, in spite of their textbook shell, but there was always the feeling of age to them, both because of the dust on the books, and because of the diction in the stories and the unfamiliar settings. My usual taste is toward more contemporary work, but it’s lovely and rich to read stories of this era from time to time.

How Many Writers Are You?

For a long time, it’s been clear to me that I want to write whatever is available. I enjoy journalism, enjoy interviewing people, and the constant learning that comes of keeping up with a challenging technology beat. At the same time, I enjoy the freewheeling invention of fiction, and the ability to run thought experiments that come alive. I’ve also experimented with many other forms — poetry, blogging, microblogging, some dabbling in screenplays and graphic novels, and anything else that came to mind. My personal belief is that these types of writing feed each other. I know, for example, that what I’ve learned about revision (which I still hate doing) from nonfiction has helped my fiction writing a great deal.

When I am writing in every form that strikes my fancy, I feel virtuosic, and in love with my craft. But at some point, I came to feel this was a dirty little secret. A book I read in grad school, Elise Hancock’s Ideas Into Words: Mastering the Craft of Science Writing includes a forward from one of my professors that sums up the idea:

Elise is the supreme nonfictionist; you won’t find that word in the dictionary, but I know she would approve. Many writers, unconsciously or not, subscribe to a hierarchy that makes fiction the goal to which any real writer aspires, nonfiction a sad second-best; bitterly they toil in nonfiction vineyards, dreaming of novels and stories they will write some day.

I remember reading this not long after I got to grad school, thinking that I was in trouble. I do dream of novels and short stories — and of articles and biographies — but there have been times that I felt it had to be one or the other. And, for the record, I think the foreword is pointing to a true phenomenon: so many people feel their writing “doesn’t count” because it’s not the right kind. This extends, I think, far beyond the line between fiction and nonfiction. Several months ago, I wrote about a tendency in some readers to feel that writers of science fiction should not “commit fantasy.”

For the most part, I don’t hide that I write all kinds of things. I bring my laptop to work at the magazine sometimes, and use my lunch break to write fiction on the laptop. But, as I like to write so many things, I have moments when I feel awkward. I was uncomfortable, for example, when a person leaving a comment on one of my stories for Technology Review referred to my speculative fiction. And I haven’t gotten up the courage to make all these things public. I have a finished erotica story written that I am quite proud of, but, every time I think about sending it out, I have a vision of some reader at my job’s website making references to it in the comments. I have similar reservations about some personal essays I’ve written about incidents in my life. Granted, I could use a pseudonym, but that gets to the crux of the matter.

Am I writing as one whole person? Do I want readers interested in my work to see that work as a single body, the way that I see it? Or am I writing as many writers? Should I split my writing into categories or genres? I don’t have a good answer to this. The erotica story is still in my drawer. When I started this blog, I deliberately put up links to both my fiction and nonfiction — probably the first time I’ve publicly united the two. I like seeing them beside each other. It’s easy to see that I am writing all the time when I look at the “my writing” page here.

I’d be interested in others’ thoughts on this. How do you handle writing for different purposes, or in different genres?

On Letting Characters Get Away From You

In addition to writing, I run a regular Dungeons and Dragons game (set in Eberron, if you’re curious). Today, as I was planning my game for tonight, I thought about the dungeonmaster’s relationship to characters as compared to the writer’s relationship to characters.

As a dungeonmaster — the person who creates the world and situations that my players will inhabit — I try to keep a loose grip on things. Each character is being run by a player who has his or her own sense of that character’s goals and reactions. One law of gaming is that, if you think the players will do one of two things, they will actually choose to do the third thing that you didn’t plan for. This happens to me all the time, but what I’ve learned to do is roll with it.

For example, one of the most satisfying sessions I’ve run was supposed to be a dungeon crawl. In other words, I’d planned for the players to spend the entire session exploring ruins, finding treasure, and killing monsters. The only problem was that, in the very first battle of the night, I threw them up against a monster that killed one player and one non-player character who was vital to the story. As I was rolling the dice and scoring unexpectedly large hits on each of them, my blood was rushing through my body from the stress. As I called out the numbers, I thought, “I am killing my game right now. It is all going to be over after this.” But I decided to play out the battle and see what the players wanted to do. What happened was that an incredible gravity came over the party as they sought a way to salvage their mission and self-respect. In the game, there are ways to bring dead players back to life — it just costs a great deal. In the course of the players deciding what to do and deciding how to pay the price of regaining what they had lost, we had one of the most powerful story-based sessions over which I’ve had the honor of presiding. That taught me a lesson: Trust the characters. While not as dramatic as this story, I had another session like that tonight, in which I laid out the world and gave the characters free reign to deal with the problems I’d set out for them. It always seems rewarding to let this happen.

Characters get away from me in my writing all the time. Thinking about my experience with D&D gives me a sense of what to do when that happens. I need to go with it. But my D&D experience also tells me that the better I understand the world and the non-player characters in it, and the better sense I have of what the powers that be in the world want, the better a chance I will have of rolling with it when a character does something unexpected. In the end, I want characters (and players) to behave in unexpected ways, because this is a sign of life, and a sign that I’m not maintaining a control-freak stranglehold on the course of events. But I have to be there to match these signs of life with a world that’s just as alive as the characters are.

The Fork in the Road

The first place winner of the most recent On The Premises short story contest, Carole Lanham’s “Maxwell Treat’s Museum of Torture for Young Girls and Boys,” is a heartstopping and original piece of work. Here’s the intro:

“If you turn the lever the wrong way, you’ll hear a click and a pitchfork will swoop down and skewer your big dumb head like a meatball,” Maxwell Treat said, pointing to the La-Z-Boy recliner cordoned off with hot-pink jump ropes in the back of the museum. Lumbar support aside, the machine was pure Spanish Inquisition. “You’ll hear a click if you turn the lever the right way too, only the buckle will snap open and you’ll get to go free.”

“Which way is the right way?” Hayden asked. At the time, Maxwell only smiled. “Hop in and find out.” That was two weeks ago.

Two weeks ago, Hayden Finch had no intention of putting Max’s chair to the test. But sometimes things change. Sometimes a boy can’t help but find himself with a pitch fork aimed at his big dumb head, and no way out but to make a choice.

It maintains a comic tone that I think serves to emphasis serious themes of choice and loss. As often happens, I worry that saying much more will ruin the story, since much of the tension for me depended on not knowing anything about what to expect. I will say that Lanham delivers on every promise she makes in this intro. Well worth reading.

Tip of the Iceberg

Anne Leigh Parrish’s “An Imaginary Life” in the new issue of Storyglossia stands out to me. There’s a lot in this story. Every character is deep with stories, both true stories, and stories of things they wish were true. I read once in some lost piece of writing instruction that a short story should be like an iceberg. The reader should see the tip, but know that there’s a huge mass under the water as well. This story made me think of this advice. Each character peeks out above the surface, but they are tied together beneath it all by the shared tangle of myths people make up in order to survive:

“Can I ask you something?” she says.

“Sure.”

“You ever believe something that isn’t true?”

“You mean a lie?”

“Something made up.”

“Like Santa Claus?”

Nina laughs. Jud is so real, so down to earth. He’s talked a lot about his days with the Arizona Border Patrol chasing “illegals,” staking them out, and waiting, always waiting, for the next one to try his luck.

The beer she sips has warmed in the bottle from being held too long. She sets the bottle on the brick beside her chair and watches a hawk circle above the peak before her. The sun is so intense on the hillside that the saguaro seem to tremble.

“No, something you made up yourself. A fantasy. A dream. Maybe just a tall tale,” says Nina.

The story plays cleverly with this idea, until arriving at a surprisingly hopeful and believable conclusion.

The Value of Community

I had an awesome writing day today. I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month for the third year, but now I think I never truly experienced it before. In November every year, people participating in Nanowrimo (as the event is called) try to write 50,000 words in 30 days. If you make the word count, you win. No one reads and judges the drafts. The whole event is geared toward getting people to write freely, with abandon.

It’s made my life richer the last two years, for sure, but I had no idea how flat I made the experience. In the past, I focused on the word count. I obsessively checked the Nanowrimo website. I didn’t really get in touch with anyone. Then, when the event was over, I would go to the wrapup parties and feel a little sad. I didn’t know the other writers, so it was hard to truly celebrate together.

Last year, I realized that the thing to do was to get involved with the community sooner. I’ve been making an effort to get out to write-ins this year, and it’s made Nanowrimo a totally new event. Take this weekend. Yesterday, because of cold, rainy weather, I skipped a write-in and stayed in, thinking I might even be more productive at home. I slogged away for four hours, endlessly distracted by the Internet, and barely hit my word target for the day. Today, I hooked up with some of my newfound writing friends, hung out in one of the friends’ apartments, and, in the space of a few hours, blew away my word count goal. I wrote about three times what I’d planned for today, and felt more momentum than I have all month.

Some of it was the sound of keyboards, reminding me about my purpose. Some of it was the fact that, when I was stuck, I could have a quick conference about why and how to get out of it. A lot of it was simply the power of being with other writers. I’ve been very committed to my writing for more than half of my life, but I’ve also spent a lot of time frustrated about goals that went unachieved, revisions that didn’t get done, stories that got abandoned. This year, I’ve made a greater effort to join various communities of writers, and it’s making a huge difference for me. I’m looking forward to the end of November, when I can celebrate Nanowrimo with friends with whom I’ve shared the journey.