Movie Night on the Blog

Writing is Everything

Now, before you admonish me, yes yes, I know, you have to take your vitamins, you have to pay your therapy bills, you have to lay yourself across the railroad tracks in a valiant if fruitless effort to protect your children from onrushing trains.

Other than that.

Not long ago I told a friend in an email I thought she was doing too many book reviews. God put you on Earth to write, I said, not to review books. The silence that followed led me to fear she had dumped me (she hadn't). However, it didn't change my mind or subdue my propensity to meddle. Writing is everything. Book reviewing is nothing.

I was joking with my brother Dan the other day about what jobs we'd like to take, just to be able say we had done or were doing them. He chose ditch digging. I liked his choice, but unfortunately nobody digs ditches by hand anymore, it's all done with a backhoe. I'd love to be a street sweeper, like the prodigy in Ayn Rand's brilliant novel Anthem, but technology has erased that occupation as well.

That leaves washing dishes. The next job I seek is going to be dishwasher. Because if I can't make a living as a writer, no other job, even corporate CEO, would serve as a consolation; I'd rather scrub plates than lose sleep worrying about how to frame the Next Big Lie, even if it meant no personal secretary, no bonus, no Gulfstream.

I think I'd enjoy farming (I enjoy growing vegetables), but I can't get past the notion that whatever I grew would pass through somebody's digestive tract and go kerplop into water only my cat is willing to drink.

Writing speaks to readers long after the author is dead; it documents for all time what the author witnessed, experienced, learned, and discovered. 2300 years after Aristotle's death, we're still reading him, even though he thought fire was an element and women were lower life forms.

Writing engages the mind, forces the reader to conjure her own images, orchestrate her own music. The potential influence of a single parable, in which readers are shown by example what to do, is greater than all the statuary ever carved and erected.

Writing separates us from the beasts; it's the loftiest aspiration and achievement of any civilization. Writing stores human knowledge far more efficiently and comprehensively than oral tradition or the visual arts. Writing is matchless, omnipotent, sacred. Writing is everything.

Ol' What's-Her-Name (who's now an award winning author, so you have to curtsey when you visit her blog) has said A writer isn't something you become, it's something you are.

After watching the stats reported by agents over the past several years, I estimate that about 1 in 500 manuscripts break through. Some of my friends think it's fewer. That's the bad news. The good news is, 450 of those manuscripts are submitted by people who can't write their way out of a wet paper bag. Also, the more manuscripts you write, the better your odds; my fourth novel is the first to be published.

More people are writing books than ever before. Slush piles keep mounting, writers grow increasingly frustrated at having to pitch their work using an ever decreasing number of words. It's like the American Idol casting calls, for which people who have no business singing, even in the shower, show up to compete for superstardom. Some of the worst of them enjoy some of the most encouragement from their friends and families, and that's sad, because the hype only leads to humiliation. If my daughter were Cyclops I wouldn't urge her to model for Maybelline.

Still, if writing is everything, then everyone ought to want to be a writer. I welcome the diversity, the comradery, even the competition. Oh, and what I said earlier about book reviewing: when it's my book being reviewed I'll adopt a softer stance. Depending.


Video swiped from Maya Reynolds.

When to Quit

I was talking to someone yesterday about when to quit, i.e., when to stop advocating on behalf of your novel—to agents, editors, readers . . . The answer I gave was, "How many people are there in the U.S.? When every single one of them owns your book, you can quit."

I lifted the following video from Elizabeth Arnold. It's a shampoo commercial (believe it or not) and maybe a bit corny, but I like it because it offers another perspective on the question.

To Everything There is a Season

There's a scene from the Disney movie "Mulan" I love. Mulan is a young woman struggling to adjust and conform, especially to avoid dishonoring her family. Her father, sitting and chatting with her in the garden, says, "My my, what beautiful blossoms we have this year. And look, this one's late. And I'll bet, that when it blooms, it will be the most beautiful of all."

Mulan then goes on to save China from the Huns and get her fifteen minutes of fame.

Some of us have to wait longer than others for those fifteen minutes. And to my way of thinking, the longer we have to wait, the better.

I would love to cite examples of people I knew in grade school and high school who got their fifteen minutes too early. But some of my classmates read this blog; even if I change the names they'd probably guess who I mean. So no examples. It doesn't matter: we all know the kind of people I'm talking about.

The former beauty queen now operating a cash register at Walgreens. The big man on campus driving a taxi. The class president who crawled inside of a bottle.

Baz Luhrmann, in "Everybody's Free (to Wear Sunscreen)," said, Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don't.

Some of the most interesting 70-year-olds I know are yet pondering the question.

I was late becoming a father—statistically speaking. In my opinion, though, I was right on time, because I wouldn't have enjoyed fatherhood as much, or done as good a job, when I was younger. I'm late publishing my first book as well, but I couldn't have accomplished that any sooner either, I'm sure. I haven't yet hit my stride. I'm perfectly content with where I am, knowing the best is yet to come.

And I bet when I'm in my seventies I'll feel exactly the same way.

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Remember My Name

by my good friend Annie, who blogs as Moannie
(written in 1964, reproduced here with permission)

It occurs to me, as it often does
That life's a funny game.
We're born, we live, and then we die
But life goes on the same.

If I do nothing in my life
To show that I've been here
Like, build a bridge or write a book
Or become a saint or a famous cook
Then, who's to know at the last roll call
That I was ever here at all?

The most I can say is, I'm someone's mother
Somebody's sister and another's lover
Sometimes a nurse, a wife, a preacher
Jury, advocate and teacher.

So, though my name was never meant
To be written in glory, I'm quite content
And I'm sure if I ever came back again
I'd do, and have, and be, the same.

Cover

It's like this: I can stare at my new cover, or I can watch the Lauren Benoit bikini video*.

Sorry, Lauren.

The designer is Kevin R. Brown. I requested him, after seeing his previous work, and my request was granted. Sometimes all ya gotta do is ask.

Publication date is 1 May 2010.

*Oh, all right, it's here.

The Immortality of Fictional Characters

The first "grown-up" novel I ever read was Exodus, by Leon Uris. Like most of you, I graduated early from what we used to call juvenile fiction; I had just turned ten and entered fifth grade when my mother subscribed to Book-of-the-Month Club and began passing leftovers to me. In belated gratitude I have asked St. Peter to assign her a comfortable chair, with reading lamp, in a quiet corner of Heaven.

A principle character dies at the end of Exodus. No surprise there: characters give up the ghost in lots of novels. In fact, the business of dying keeps fictional characters pretty busy. But this particular death was a first for me, and because it happened at the end of the story, after 400 pages of "getting to know you, getting to know all about you," I cried as though I had lost a friend.

In some ways I had. In some ways fictional characters are real for me. Not flesh-and-blood real, but nevertheless three-dimensional. Solid, if a bit spongy. Composed of the nebulous masonry my imagination uses to put them together. And although they die with exasperating gusto—and still sometimes bring tears to my eyes when they do—they continue to live on in the pages preceding their demise.

One of my favorite fictional characters is Howard Roark from the novel The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. When I was a teenager I wanted to be Howard Roark. He was, and to a great degree still is, my idea of a hero. The Fountainhead was published in 1943. As it opens, Howard Roark is a junior in the class of 1922 at the (fictitious) Stanton Institute of Technology. That means he was born in 1901, and would therefore be 108 years old today. And probably dead, too.

But he isn't dead. Nor is he 108. Not whenever I open the novel and read its first line: Howard Roark laughed.

Howard is still designing skyscrapers in New York; still visiting building sites, occasionally operating a torch himself, or catching a rivet; still standing on the roof of the civilized world, the wind blowing in his orange hair. And still laughing. I can visit him anytime I like.

The characters I feel sorry for are the ones killed in the first paragraph of the story. They spend the next 400 pages on comet Hale-Bopp, or wherever fictional characters go when they die. The rest, those who dodge the assassin's keyboard, live forever.


Video glommed from Lisa Bond.

I Used to be Smarter Than My Computer

Because I'm so fucking old, that's why. I started out punching cards in Fortran for the IBM 360, the workhorse mainframe of its day. But even when PCs came along I still had a handle on things. Incredibly, I was the go-to computer guy for my organization. Those were the days; now I have to ask my wife how to plug in all the funny looking cables.

I knew DOS fluently back then (this was before the Windows era, of course); now I'm baffled even when the computer speaks English. If English is what it's speaking.

I could feed the dot matrix printer those accordion stacks of paper like nobody's business. Now I get frustrated trying to install toner cartridges upside down.

My computer taunts me. I swear it. For example it says things like, "A virus is erasing your life's work; would you like me to do something about it?" Are you kidding? Zap it with your super cosmic ray gun!

It likes to fuck with me by wrapping trailing spaces at the end of the line in Word. I keep unchecking the box (please please please don't do that) but my computer keeps checking it again. And without going into detail, let me just say I wish a pit bull would lock its jaws on the genitals of whoever wrote the Auto Correct code.

Ask yourself why you never hear this claim anymore: A computer only does what you tell it to do.

Here's why: Do you ever tell it to freeze up? To shut down in the middle of an unsaved document? To reboot in an infinite loop?

Do you ever tell it to delete your ntldr file?

Do you ever tell it to print your document using 72 point hieroglyphics and give your printer epilepsy?

Do you ever tell it to deny there's anything in the CD drive? To call you a liar? To ask, "Scanner? What scanner?" when it's staring at one—whose cable is plugged into its ass?

"Windows installer is broken," my computer informs me. What does that mean—broken? I understand how a mechanical device breaks; parts wear out. But how does software break? Isn't software just information? I mean, does the word "asshole" become "assole" because the letter H loses its structural integrity and falls apart?

My old 45s from the 1970s still play and play and play (I told you I was old). Why can't my instructions NOT to wrap trailing spaces survive the goddamn night?

Finally, I want to hear from a computer expert: Why are we in a war with viruses? Isn't a virus a command to do something to the machine that its user doesn't want done? Can't a computer figure out that it's not me—not the guy at the keyboard—asking it to corrupt the hard drive? If my computer is so much smarter than me that it can decide, against my wishes, to change word spellings and capitalizations, why can't it decide not to destroy itself when some fuckhead a thousand miles away tells it to?

Next up: stop lights that make me wait, even though there's no one else at the intersection. I'm in a reckless mood.

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Don't go yet! You have got to see this.