Tag Archives: fiction

Writer’s Block and Root Canals

07 Thursday Nov 2013

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Lately I have been somewhat stymied by writer’s block.  Not in all my writing, just with my fiction stuff.  It happens sometimes and I don’t take it too seriously.  I give it a break and work on other things.  And when I’m back, I’m usually better for the time off.

A few days ago, I had a third surgery on the same tooth in three years.  The patient refuses to get better or die quietly.  So the Oral Surgeon is using heroic measures to save it.  He is more tenacious than I would be.  All I can think of is that scene in “Castaway” where Tom Hanks uses an ice-skate for his dental work.  I should be grateful, right?  Swollen cheek and a rack of stitches in my gum is pretty minor compared to that.  But pain tends to focus the mind and good ideas are starting to come out again.  I’m ready to write.  Or more accurately, I am writing again.

Writer’s block is one of those strange events that happens to all writers, and in many forms.  For me, it is not so much not being able to write at all.  I’m always able to put words on paper, but the words that come out are trash and uninspired.  I read back over what I’ve written and cringe.  It just sucks.  I’m not really sure if it is actually that bad.  Maybe it’s just my perception of my own writing that sucks. Or I’m just being ultra-critical of my own work.  Anyway, I don’t like it, and I can’t keep writing, so I stop.  My real problem is that my objectivity is gone, my love of the work is on vacation.

I’ve learned not to push during these times, but also not to wait too long either.  A week is a break, two weeks is an extended vacation with nagging guilt about piled up work, a month is a layoff delivered from an angry boss, and anything over a month is just self-pity.  And nothing is as ugly as self-pity.  Work is always the solution to unemployment.

Ever try meditation?  It works wonders for anything involving self-fill-in-the-blank.  The ideas tend to come when they’re not forced.  Like playful kittens, run after them and you will never catch them, but dangle a string and they’ll grab on like the living Velcro strips that they are.  Meditation is dangling the string.  One’s goal is to stop thinking, to quiet the mind.  Of course the mind hates that and starts laying out all kinds of goodies at the altar.  Well, if you’re going to offer such treats, it would be rude not to taste a few.  So pretty soon I’m writing again and everything is good.

As for the tooth, I’ve almost forgotten it’s there.  Almost.

From Art to Author

01 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by in books, fiction, Sartre, writing

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I grew up with art, was surrounded by it, breathed it.  My father is an art dealer, so our house became an annex for his San Francisco art gallery.  At ten I took a book of Bruegel etchings from his bookshelf and began the laborious task of copying the images.  If you are not familiar with Brueghel, his works are similar to Hieronymus Bosch, lots of strange little characters with animal heads and creepy figures crawling out of eggs.  It is a child’s dream (nightmare) of strange creatures and imagination.  I still love his work.

It was then that I decided to be an artist, to draw great works.  Not painting, drawing, I loved the line and shading.  So I continued copying other artists and kept it up until high school.  By this time in my life I’d probably been to more museums and art galleries than all my classmates combined.  But something inside fizzled.  I didn’t want to be an artist anymore; the fire had burned itself out.

Don’t get me wrong, I still loved art, always will.  It’s like a second blood supply for me.  But the fire to create it had gone out.  During this same period, I had been reading, reading a lot, fiction and science fiction mostly.  There wasn’t really such a thing as young adult fiction at this time.  There were just books that were a little easier for teenagers to read.  I would find a writer that I liked, then consume every book he or she wrote.  Clark, Asimov, Heinlein, H. G. Wells, Bradbury, Maugham, Golding, Salinger, and many more.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but all those words sunk in, shaped my mind and eventually, my desire to create.

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Strangely enough, I studied business in college.  Oh it was tedious and awful as you would expect for an art lover.  To make it bearable, I took lots of literature classes, Shakespeare, poetry – no business students in there.  In my junior year, just as I was ready to drop out, I received a letter inviting me into the foreign exchange program.  I grabbed it like a life-preserver to a drowning student, and spent my final year studying in Copenhagen, Denmark, then traveling around Europe.  Wonderful experience, I recommend it to all students, drowning or not.

What a crazy thing life is, somehow everything comes around to be exactly what it was supposed to be from the beginning.  After college, I followed in my father’s steps, becoming an art dealer and later a gallery owner.  During this time, I wrote lots of things, mostly business related stuff, copy for ads and PR.  Then I tried my hand at essays.  I was invited by the editor of the Aspen Daily News to write a weekly column about art.  I was given plenty of rope with which to hang myself.

I have never studied writing, had only a general idea about journalism.  But why should that stop me.  Unafraid, I just wrote about what I thought would be interesting.  The articles were stupid sometimes, one was about art that had killed people (falling sculptures and poisonous paint), but sometimes it was very deep, a two part article about the Nazi plundering of artwork in Europe.  I got plenty of good feedback, people liked my stories and I kept it up for about two years.  Then the pressures of time and the demands of my art gallery forced me to quit.

But I didn’t stop writing.  Fiction has always been my love.  Sure, I love great science fiction, but my real love is 19th (and early 20th) Century literature, Dickens, Tolstoy, Melville, Falkner, Twain, Hugo, Kafka and dozens of other.  It is difficult sometimes, paragraphs that span pages, descriptions that go into minute detail, but they are always rich with meaning and discovery.  These giants could write.  Great literature is the equivalent of seeing a great painting.  That sigh that is released from your soul when you realize you are witnessing genius.

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So here I am, putting the two things together, art and writing.  Sure, I could write about art, I still do that, but that is not really what I mean.  Art has taught me how to see, how to imagine a scene, the characters, the situation unfolding in my mind.  When I write, I literally see everything happening in the story and just describe it on paper.  Many readers have commented how visual my writing is.  I don’t see how it could be otherwise, that’s where it comes from.

Like I said earlier, life has a way of putting us on the path meant for us.  I guess I should have gotten a degree in literature, studied writing, but it didn’t happen that way.  I learned to write by reading (still do) and how to see by viewing and making art.  Regrets are for the dead.  This is how it is and I’m grateful I get to do what I love.

Even if it took a few extra decades…

Writing Your First Book

26 Saturday Oct 2013

Posted by in books, fiction, Threshold of the Mind, writing

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It took me 12 years to finish my first book, 3 years for the second one, 9 months for my third, 6 months for the fourth, and 3 months for the fifth.  At this rate, I’ll be writing a new book every week, right.  Not quite, but it does get easier and certainly more pleasurable.  My first book, Threshold of the Mind (formerly In the Image of God) is my first book, even though it was published as my third.  The first version was complete in about 8 years, after 3 complete rewrites.  It weighed in at a whopping 200,000 words (approx. 700 paperback pages) and included every idea I had ever had about the future, politics, human relations, and yes, the kitchen sink.  It was dense and rambling, not altogether bad, but not what I had hoped for.

I set the book down for about two years and beat myself up for being a hack.  In the meantime I wrote newspaper and magazine articles, short stories and poetry, things I could complete in a few days.  The opposite of a book.

But in the back of my mind, my book kept whispering to me, “I’m not done, rewrite me.”  No way, not after close to a million words piled in a drawer, backed up on 42 floppy disks (remember those?).  It seemed indulgent, the book that would never be done, just writing and writing, until one day it would be 27 volumes completed the day before my death.  My children would shrug when they saw it, then stuff me and the volumes into a casket.

Finally, I woke up ready to face it.  Enough time had passed.  I promised to be objective and honest about it, throw it away if it was no good.  I would approach it as if someone else had written it and needed my help editing it.  I sat down and read it cover to cover, without a pen, thoroughly subduing the desire to cringe and make notes.  I just read it like a reader would.  Hey, it wasn’t so bad, really good in spots, but there were problems.

I spent the next 3 months outlining the book, one chapter at a time.  Who were the characters, the scenes, the action, the place, the plot developments?  I used a spreadsheet to see the book in a logical way.  It was a good exercise, one I hope never to have to do again.  It was pretty tedious work.

When this was complete, I realized many things about my book.  It had: too many characters; things I loved, but didn’t make any sense to the reader; action that was exciting and well presented, but didn’t advance the plot; and other stuff that didn’t help the story.  I kept the core and began rewriting…again.  It took about nine months this time.  I went through again and cleaned stuff up (another couple of months), but essentially it was done.  It was half the size now, 102,000 words, (310 pages).  And best of all, I loved it, not liked it, loved  it.  That was my first book.

When I finished this time and showed my wife, strutting and proud of myself.  She said, “good for you, now go write another one.”  She had just read The War of Art too.

After that it got easier, much easier.  The whole idea of a book being this enormous project that could take years and millions of words was behind me.  I did it, I finished the first marathon and my feet didn’t break off, I got stronger instead.  One step at a time, as they say.  And that’s exactly what a book is, one word at a time.  Find an idea, a story that you love and start it; don’t worry about how long it will be, or how long it will take.  Don’t worry about doing it the way the experts tell you to, or agonizing if you should have a detailed plot or outline before you start, or if you should know the ending before you begin.  None of that matters.  It only matters that you do it.

Here’s another bit of advice, don’t tell anyone anything about it until you’re done (at least the first full draft).  Maybe don’t even tell them you’re writing a book.  Just pull it out one day and say, “hey you want to read my book?”  Enjoy the jaw-drop effect.  Because if you share it too early, your friends or family, or whomever you show it to, will have all kinds of helpful advice about your plot or characters.  Or they’ll tell you it sounds like someone else they read, or the lead character reminds them of their ex-wife (whom they hate) or some other idea freezing crap.  They can’t help themselves, they mean well, but everyone is a critic.  And you’ll stutter or stop, and your great idea won’t seem so great anymore.  Undeveloped ideas are like snowflakes, very, very fragile.

Do We Over Emphasize the Value of Originality?

24 Thursday Oct 2013

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Artists, writers, all creative persons struggle with the question of originality.  “Am I creating something unique, earth shattering?”  And the chances are, you’re not.  But is that really all that important?  Consider what would happen if everything we did was unique, new, never seen before.  It would likely be incomprehensible.  Concepts are built on a foundation of past ideas.

The visual arts provide the simplest example.  Primitive art eventually led to realism, which led to impressionism, which led to abstraction, which led to minimalism, which led to conceptualism.  Obviously these movements have branched in hundreds of tangential directions too.  But the point is, one needs a reference point to step to the next level.  The abstract movement would have been completely unique in the 19th Century, but would have also been discarded out of hand.  Why, because there was no foundation yet, it was too big a leap, it needed the smaller steps that got us there as a society to appreciate it.

We see this in many other forms, certainly in writing.  How many ways can writers rearrange the several hundred thousand English words and still be unique.  Though the number is large, it is not infinite.  It is math, a finite number of words combine into a finite possible mix.  Yet, experience and intuition tells us this is not true.  We will not run out of new stories, new ideas.  This is because we are continuing to pile slight variations on top of a very broad foundation – a foundation that can grow infinitely.

Not all that long ago, most believed the sun and stars rotated around the earth.  Copernicus and Galileo proved otherwise.  Now, without individual proof or experimentation, we all “know” that the earth rotates around the sun, that the earth is round, that the moon is made of rock and not cheese.  A million little factoids like that.  They are our foundation, our jumping off point of a platform that continues to broaden.

Consider technology.   We take for granted that we can carry around a portable Television studio disguised as a phone in our pocket, that we can use it to speak to almost anyone in the world just by pressing a combination of numbers.  My parents grew up before computers.  They use them, but don’t quite have the easy understanding my generation does.  My children grew up with small portable devices and apps.  They have an ease with them I can’t match.  Their foundation is larger than mine.  They add to this broader base easier, not bogged down in trying to get their heads around what is now commonplace to them, but still new to me.

File:Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The Tower of Babel (Vienna) - Google Art Project - edited.jpgThese incremental additions are tiny bits of originality.  And they are very valuable both culturally and artistically.   Our whole base of knowledge is expanding, because we are a society and not just a mass of individuals, we share information, pass it not only to each other, but forward to our children.  And the larger the base, the more possibility for incremental original additions.   Think of our foundation of knowledge as a city.  Long ago, it was a tiny village, it grew into a town, then a city, now it is a teaming metropolis.  We can add a window, a building, or just paint a wall, but there are increasingly more ways to add to and change it.  And the larger the metropolis, the more possibilities for change, for originality.

Every once in a while, a brilliant man or woman adds something completely unique to the whole, people like Homer, Newton, Joan of Arc, da Vinci, Shakespeare, or Einstein.  But the geniuses stand out, because they are so rare.  Most of the originality we experience is not from these rare geniuses, but from small additions, the ones each of us contribute as microscopic bits of brilliance.