Writing Advice: John Hildebrand

Easy to change an outline. Hard to write a whole draft.

It’s common sense, really. I’ve always lacked common sense. So naturally, I’ve never thought of this.

I’m not much of an outliner. More of a dive-right-in and then realize what needs to be changed seventy pages in, and so then I return to page 1 and change it. And change it again. Sometimes I write short, quick revision notes under a chapter heading or at the end of a scene. But really, isn’t there just the perfect place for it on an outline?

Also, John Hildebrand makes an amazing shiitake mushroom soup.

Book Review: The Road, Cormac McCarthy

The Sum-Up: Father and son journey across post-apocalyptic America. You know. You’ve seen the movie.

There is beautiful and powerful stuff in this book, all in very concise, unchaptered segments, of course. This is McCarthy, and McCarthy is a genius with minimalist language and un marked dialogue. He knows how to handle the language. The parts I really appreciated, however, were the little unexpected bursts of humor.

Yes, the journey is harrowing. Yes, the characters gripped me and I felt honest relief and comfort when they did. And, yes, it was all very grim and ashy. But yet, there was humor.

One of my beliefs as a writer is in the absurdity of life, even amid the most abysmal circumstances. And I appreciated so much those moments of absurd, unsought humor. It felt very strange to want to laugh.

It seems like a dangerous book for humor. There’s no real place for it. However, as most of it does rise from the little boy, and little boys can be quite funny, there is a good conduit for it. I think, in my bold hypothesis, that the humor simply came out naturally in the effort to write a child’s dialogue. And because of the humor, the child was more authentic and more lovable and all the more cherished.

It’s nice to write a book with a good conduit for humor.

Writing Advice: Leslie Adrienne Miller

“Read what you resist.”

We love to love to books we love, but let’s face it, everyone’s got a book they hate. My particular nightmare book happens to be “The Grapes of Wrath.” And there are many other canonical writers whose material I’ve also struggled with. I won’t list names, to save embarrassment.

At the 2012 Loft Mentor Series’ first mentor seminar, poet Leslie Adrienne Miller (Yesterday Had a Man In It, The Resurrection Trade) advised all of us to go back to those writers we resisted, to those books that we just couldn’t vibe with (my words here.) Her paraphrase: “The most dangerous thing for a writer to do is to pick X and say ‘I like X,’ then carve out a little niche and only read that. That is death to the writer.”

She said that as a teacher, she took care to always a pick a book that she disliked, but critics and other readers did tend to like. “Invariably, my students teach me to like it.”

There are things to learn even from writers we do not immediately feel drawn to, writers whose styles are antithesis to our own. Nevertheless, there is something to study there and something to gain from the reading.

That said, I will be revisiting that old turtle on the side of the dusty road, making the slow, slow journey down Steinbeck’s words.

How very granta of me

My mind is on the short story.

Here are some I read over and over again:
No One’s A Mystery, Elizabeth Tallent
Flowering Judas, Katherine Anne Porter
Aren’t You Happy For Me?, Richard Bausch
Hills Like White Elephants, Ernest Hemingway 
The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Magic Barrel, Bernard Malamud
Heat, Joyce Carol Oates

Lunch: an odd assortment of fruit and yogurt cereal, salsa and chips, and once again, more rice pudding

Wednesday Words

“Anything can happen, captain.”

- Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Lunch: leftover zhook (Chinese porridge) with beef and fish, and a pan-heated pre-made aloo parantha with plain yogurt.  

Dessert and I: Rice Pudding

My roommate and I have been lacking sweets in our fridge as both of us have just separately resisted the urge to buy ice cream. (We are poor. Hagendaz is expensive. And difficult to spell.) So tonight we whipped up some rice pudding based on my roommate’s mother’s recipe. It’s much easier than to make than I thought rice pudding would be, and it’s great served both hot and cold. It’s almost like a textured ice cream when it’s chilled. Almost.

Ingredients:
2 cups jasmine or long grain white rice
4 cups skim milk
1/3 cup condensed milk
2 tablespoons cinnamon
1 tablespoon masala chai mix (optional)
chopped almonds or bits of tangy fruit (optional)

Instructions:
Boil rice in milk at a low heat, stirring occasionally. After the rice has expanded and the milk is beginning to disappear, turn heat even lower and mix in the condensed milk, cinnamon, masala and other optional fixings. Taste test. Add more condensed milk or cinnamon if you want it sweeter, or more milk if you want it less thick. I like it a little more watery with extra milk. Turn heat and serve hot, or put in fridge to be chilled.

Yay simple recipes!

I want a cool blog too

Holy crap it’s 2010. And yet out there in the multi-layered cyber worlds of the Internet still lurk my slightly more coherent and polite first reaction to Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight. So much has happened since then. Stephanie Meyer has appeared in her own book adaptation. Hundreds of blog posts have racked up hundreds of comments. Friends have gotten engaged. Friends have married. Friends have had babies. Friends have had two babies. The world has been productive (and reproductive), but I have not.

And one thing remains the same. I still want a cool blog. While it is late in season for resolutions, here is attempt number 2.

Yesterday on the L

CTA TRAIN DRIVER: Attention, passengers. If you look to the right of the train, you will see a rainbow in the air. Again, rainbow to the right  of the train.

the universe contained inside of you

Volunteered at the Printer’s Row Lit Fest this past weekend. Very fun to be involved but did not catch too many of the cool events like Dave Eggers’ speech or Neil Gaiman’s award ceremony. I did manage to see the beginning of the panel with Elizabeth Strout and Elizabeth Berg, which I got one blurry shot of before my camera died.

Elizabeth Strout (far left) just recently received the Pulitzer in fiction for her amazing book, Olive Kitteridge, which I loved. I was looking at how short stories are linked together in novel form just around the time the book came out, and it was a perfect and beautiful read, thirteen short stories that all revolve around Olive Kitteridge.

Was hoping to find a podcast or video of the panel but so far, no luck. I did find author interivew about the book by Victoria Lautman, which also made me mad because I’d forgotten about the Writers on Record series I could have gone to see many times. I was looking for the Printer’s Row interview because I think she said something about all of us being universes, gliding past each other, and it reminded me of something Junot Diaz said in a Newsweek article last year:

All of us, to misquote Whitman, we all contain multitudes. I think more specifically, we all contain univereses. It doesn’t matter who you are. Your could be some guy who writes code in Mumbai for a major corporation or you could be a truck driver in Cincinnati. But in the end, none of that means that the whole universe isn’t contained inside you.

- Junot Diaz

And interestingly enough, Diaz won the Pulitzer in fiction last year.

If you want another corrollating quote about universes and worlds, here’s another one from Salman Rushdie:

I no longer wanted to be anything except what who I am. Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each ‘I,’ every one of the now six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.

- Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

The Need to Create

“And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.”
-Toni Morrison, Sula

Writers need to create. When they’re not writing, they’re cooking or baking or creating something else, like danger. You hear a lot about writers being tormented when they have no way to express their art, when they are not writing, but falling into depression because of writer’s block. And you hear the affirmative versions, too—writers write because they have to, you’ll know you’re a writer if you never stop writing
I’m not sure if that’s all true, but this winter when I was not doing much writing, I did knit two scarves and half a glove, learn how to make some new dishes*, and pay $150 to paint plates and apples.

But I really did enjoy all of that. Except for the painting class, because painting plates in monochrome, as it turns out, is incredibly boring. But overall, it felt good learning to create other things besides writing.

There are so many ways to create, whether it is cooking, or engineering, or hypothesizing science experiments. I think there is an integral need in all of us to be creative, and an essential joy we derive from our creations. But I wonder where it all comes from.

If we, humans, were created in the image of a Creator, perhaps it is something we have inherited. And all those beautiful, genius ideas of art and music belong to that spiritual realm. And, much as Elizabeth Gilbert explores in this TED talk, on rare occasions, we tap into that genius, we receive a muse, we create something beautiful, and we are briefly touched by a spark of something bigger than ourselves.
Or, going the opposite direction, perhaps we, as a group that is driven to create, are naturally drawn to the mystery of our own creation. And that is why endless creation myths have been passed down from generation to generations, why science seeks to dissect and clone life. Isn’t life, after all, the greatest creation?

What do you think? And anyone have any interesting studies on creativity?

*curry shrimp, chocolate mint cookies, potato and broccoli soup, quinoa chili, grape leaves, Spanish rice, honey walnut shrimp, black sesame soup, quiche, almond tofu, beet salad, tabbouli salad, etc.