Month: February 2014

Unplugged.

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A Facebook friend of mine (our relationship used to be face-to-face but now exists purely through the evil genius of Mark Zuckerberg) is also a hobby writer. He suffers, like I do, from follow-through issues stemming from habitual procrastination and a willingness to be distracted. I figure he’s talented. Years ago he promised that I could read something of his and shortly after our friendship dissolved… perhaps the pressure of my possibly judgemental review of whatever he was planning to let me read contributed to that. But I’m getting off topic. The point is he’s funny and creative and one of the rare people whose Facebook statuses are very frequent and completely personal, but somehow entertaining and engaging.

(To me, the worst Facebook offenders aren’t the vapid daily selfie posters, or the people incapable of spelling any words correctly, or even those glorious few who have uncomfortably personal conversations and arguments out there for the world to see – my dark side finds these last examples a certain kind of wonderful. What I can’t stand on social media is people being BORING: “Just got a grilled cheese. Yum!” “Ugh. More snow.” “Watching hockey with the fam. #blessed #goteam #hashtagsonfacebook.”)

This friend’s ability to post about his unextraordinary life is a friggin’ miracle. I look forward to reading what he has to say in three sentence tidbits, and I’d love to be able to read something longer. Last week he took a break from social media and the internet as a whole. My Facebook feed suffered, but his writing flourished. In his words “An entire week offline. I haven’t thought this clearly and undistractedly (not a word) since the 90s […] this is the key to being able to write. Being unplugged for relatively extended periods.”

I’m trying to decide if I agree with this statement. For the first two weeks of NaNoWriMo, I turned off the internet while I was writing. I had a rule that I could only go online once an hour for fifteen minutes, or every thousand words, whichever came first. It worked wonders, forcing me to put (virtual) words on the (digital) page because there was nothing else to do. However, about halfway through the month, once the daily writing had started to be habit and I didn’t have to be as vigilant about avoiding distractions, the tools that the wondrous internet provided were essential. I became a devotee to the @NaNoWordSprints Twitter account, which had me competing for word counts against myself and others while throwing in optional challenges like using the word sloth or writing a birthday party scene. My personal beast to slay was the #1k30min. If completing NaNoWriMo was my primary goal, completely a #1k30min was a very close second. I managed it with a few days to go while writing a scene about a shark attack. No kidding.

I’ll say that if you’re stuck, uninspired, lazy, or procrastinating – definitely unplug from everything. Go out somewhere. Sit in a quiet space with a pen and paper and watch the world. Then write stuff down. For me, if inspiration comes from the physical world, motivation can come from the digital one. If you must be plugged in, find online outlets that will push you to write – communities, writing challenges, blogging.

(Psst: My Facebook friend doesn’t know I’ve posted about him, but I guess that’s the risk you take when you say anything online).

Self-indulgent crap: Or, how not to be Dawson Leery.

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Netflix has the entire series of Dawson’s Creek available currently, and I’m not ashamed to say that I watched it all. I actually started it during NaNoWriMo on the second day of my flu, when the Dawson-Joey-Pacey love triangle was the most complicated thing my sickly neurons could process.

Aside from reminding me that Joshua Jackson’s Pacey is really the star of the show (sorry James Van Der Beek… Dawson is just incredibly unlikable for the first couple seasons, and by the time he grows up, we viewers can’t ever forget his whiny, wide-eyed childishness), Dawson’s Creek teaches budding creative types that their lives are super interesting – as a primetime soap opera. If you’re unfamiliar with the show, allow me to say *SPOILER ALERT* now, and you can decide to skip ahead a couple of paragraphs if you like.

Dawson Leery, naïve wannabe film director, makes a film in the second season to try to imbue his (first? second?) breakup with Joey with meaning. In the final season, he looks back on this attempt and calls it, if I can paraphrase, a self-indulgent piece of crap and waste of money. Then for some reason (mostly because people keep telling him he used to have “heart”) he does it again, sells it as a T.V. show that is exactly the same as Dawson’s Creek – because meta – and it leads to fame and fortune since teenagers acting out tiresome melodramas and deciding over years whether or not to have sex with one another has the “heart” everyone’s been looking for.

Maybe the average person’s life is interesting enough that others will enjoy experiencing it as second-hand fiction. But personally? If I can’t write an amazing story about my first year of high school, then I won’t be able to write an amazing story about “Jamie”’s first year at my high school either (She’s not me! Really! Look! She’s a red-head!).

I’m not saying that characters, settings, and themes need to be completely original to a writer (as we know, there’s nothing new in storytelling). Of course we’re going to pull from our own experiences, relationships, and personal feelings.

I am saying that if your story is simply your clone acting out the exact situations you went through, but it wouldn’t stand up as literary non-fiction, it’s probably self-indulgent crap. It’s fantasy mixed with nostalgia, and it may very well sell as a primetime soap opera to the CW, but it won’t help you grow as a writer.

A caveat or two to my argument: Maybe your story is interesting enough to stand on its own as literary non-fiction, but you want to frame it as fiction for some reason. That’s cool. More power to you. Maybe your purpose is not to grow as a writer necessarily, but to understand yourself as a person. I’m sure exploring yourself as a fictional character could have some psychological merit.

When I’m tempted to write a protagonist that is a not-too-veiled version of me, instead I write a fringe character who is definitely me. For example, I’m writing a young adult short story right now and I began molding “Aly” into a glorified fourteen year old me. So I introduced her parents. I tried to imagine what I would be like at forty, with a teenage daughter, and in the world of the story. This exercise makes me develop a creative version of myself (instead of a version blurred by wistfulness), and forces me to make my actual protagonist distinct from the “me” in the story. Much more interesting.

Read Recently: Extraordinary

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Title: Extraordinary
Author: David Gilmour
Published in 2013 by Patrick Crean editions, a division of HarperCollinsCanada
Read on January 1, 2014
Recommended by: the Giller Prize award committee (long list)

Synopsis from the publisher:

“Over the course of one Saturday night, a man and his half-sister meet at her request to spend the evening preparing for her assisted death. They drink and reminisce fondly, sadly, amusingly about their lives and especially her children, both of whom have led dramatic and profoundly different lives. Extraordinary is a gentle consideration of assisted suicide, but it is also a story about siblings — about how brothers and sisters turn out so differently; about how little, in fact, turns out the way we expect. In the end, this is a novel about the extraordinary business of being alive.”

Review:

If you read this blog regularly, you’ll notice that I’m a fan of wordiness. I like the taste of lots of adjectives in a row, and I like listing things in multiples, but verbosity is not David Gilmour’s racket.

Sometimes, you read a book of such beautiful simplicity that it makes you understand what being a storyteller truly means. I’m certain one blog or another has made some wordplay witticism about the book living up to its title, so I’ll not put to much time into that endeavour here. Instead, I’ll tell you that Extraordinary is one of the loveliest pieces of literature I’ve read in a long time.

Now, this author got a lot of (deserved) flack recently for stating openly that he only teaches authors who are “serious heterosexual guys” (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/27/author-david-gilmour-female-writers). What a disappointment. However, my new knowledge of his prejudices haven’t erased my enjoyment of this book.

I was a bit surprised that the book didn’t make a more political statement about assisted suicide, but in the end I thought it stood well on the implied – let’s call it “pro-choice” – framing of the issue, without an overt endorsement. The assisted suicide, though the catalyst for the characters’ interactions, felt more like a supplementary story line to the relationship between brother and sister.

As always:

If you’re a friend, I’ll lend it to you. If you’re not, please visit one of your charming, musty, local libraries. If you want to own it for yourself, try your hardest to GO TO A BOOKSTORE instead of an online retailer. (As a former bookseller, I must plead with you to keep those wondrous book havens alive). If at all possible, make it an independent bookstore, but in a pinch, even the giant corporate books/music/housewares/wrapping paper/Starbucks monstrosities will do.

S.E. Lund