Featuring the experiences of a writer struggling to become better at his craft while holding down a day job and supporting his struggling-writer lifestyle to which his family is accustomed. Featuring occasional observations on pop culture. Requests welcome.
How do you write during the busy season? I blogged nine times last December (yep, this blog is over a year old) and I'm not sure how I did it. This year it's all I can do to get to work on time, prepare for the gift-giving holidays and family commitments, and pick up a Christmas tree. Meanwhile I'm working on posts for blogs not my own. One about movies that I started back in late summer. The other will be my first post for a super secret, not-yet-live group blog that I'm helping start (more on that later). Meanwhile, I can't help but check the website of the lit mag for which I have a story coming out in this month (more on that later as well).
My intention with this blog is to come up with informative, entertaining posts, as many as I can a month. My problem with this is that I end up spending hours on a post. Adding links, adding photos, forgetting to edit and censor the writing. Writing to be concise becomes folly. Still, this blog has given me the opportunity to do different types of writing that I would not have otherwise written. Book reviews, posts about buying books, about movies, interviews. I want to do more interviews, I have a list of post topics that I continue to add to, I have a book I just finished reading and want to review.
Question: what do you want to see when you visit a blog? What holds your interest? What do you like about Unreliable Narrator? What would you like to see more of? Remember, requests are welcome.
Have a great busy season. And hopefully we'll see more of each other next year.
Imagine sitting before a blank monitor ready to start writing Chapter 1 in a series of what you hope to be a multi-chaptered novel. You want to start with the weather. Bad idea. Wait, better idea: start with your main character waking to the sound of nature. A bird call. That's the ticket. More specific, although still mysterious. But, what kind of bird?
That opens an entire world of questions. What time of day is it? Where is your character? Small town by the Atlantic? City by the Yangtze River? Is it morning? Is it winter? You need to answer a few of those questions. And when you narrow that down (see, I'm helping you start your novel!), grab the nearest bird guide and start flipping those pages until you find the perfect bird native to your location.
Sure, finding out things about stuff on the Internet is convenient and timely. But nothing compares to owning a few dog-eared guide books to count on for information that doesn't change overnight. Like information about birds. I recommend The Sibley Field Guide to Birds, the classic bird guide by David Allen Sibley. It's a compact guide with thousands of meticulous illustrations of birds, along with maps of the country colored to show what areas they spend quality time. My guide is about the size of a mass market paperback, so you can thumb through it while staring out your back window at some bird you need to identify for your book.
How about trees? Your noisy bird is sitting on a tree branch. What the hell kind of tree is that again? I recommend The Easy Tree Guide, published by Falcon Guides. This full-color book dedicates two pages to each tree, one page a photograph of said tree, the facing page a breakdown of the leaf structure, height, and details of where you can find said tree. The trees are organized by leaf shape. So, it takes some getting used to if you don't know what you're looking for. But what better way to get to know trees than reading a book about them? You have to start someplace.
After your bird gets tired of singing, he flies up to a roof. The roof of the house your main character lives in (or lives next door to). Need some historical and architectural context to describe the house? Do you forget what eaves and dormers are? What if your character lives in the 1800s? What kind of houses were around then? In Virginia?
I highly recommned Gerald Foster's American Houses, a field guide to the architecture of the home. This guide contains photographs and illustrations of houses, including floor plans so you can see what went on inside as well as out. Key elements of all houses are included. It's organized chronologically, so if you know the era of the house you want to write about, you just head to that chapter. You'll find out that the Craftsman style was popular between 1900 and 1930. What's a Center-Passage House (1700-1860)? Just turn to page 94 to find out. Each house type and style is detailed in accompanying text that puts all American houses in the context of the times in which they were built, and describes their influences. It has a complete glossary.
Say you're writing a fantasy, and your bird of choice flies from your house's roof and lands on a seventeenth century cannon (long story). Or a you're writing an adventure and the bird lands on a derrick of an oil production platform. Maybe the bird is attracted to the mouth of a cave, then flies in. You need to know about these disparate objects, but you may not even know what they're called, let along how to describe them.
You need the Macmillan Visual Dictionary. Not a guide per se, this dictionary includes 3,500 color illustrations of everything from, well, oil derricks to caves. Each image has terms defining what the areas of the subject are called. And in the case of a cave, the illustration shows a cross section, so you see the inside and the outside. My copy is from 1995, bought as a remainder at New England Mobile Book Fair years ago. I still keep it on the shelf and thumb through it. Not only do I often find contained what I need to describe, but I get ideas. Subjects range from astronomy and geography, to the human body, to house furniture, gardening tools, heavy machinery, and weapons.
Weapons. For when your bird characters revolt against human-kind, and need something to fight with.
Last week I was contacted by Fiction Magazine. They accepted a story of mine for publication. This is, of course, great news. Fiction magazine is carried by better independent bookstores, such as Brookline Booksmith, has been around since the early 70s, and backs up a wonderful history of supporting "new, emerging voices."
The story behind getting into Fiction is worth telling. I sent them my story almost three years ago, in February 2007. The story was fashioned from an outtake of a novel I was working on at the time. It was a stand-alone chapter that dealt with the second love experience of my teenage protagonist, and it didn't fit, so taking it out didn't upset any balance.
Separate from the framework of the novel, and after some revision, the piece stood on its own. Except for the ending. The original ending trails off. The stand-alone version couldn't trail off, it needed a concrete finish. This is the toughest part of shaping novel excerpts or outtakes; you must rework them so that they still make sense outside of the context of the novel. Because this was an outtake, I wasn't worried about maintaining the original spirit of the novel and could make it into what ever I wanted.
I reworked the ending to summarize the bittersweet end of a summer-long teenage relationship. I wasn't sure it worked, so I kept the ending brief; not overwriting, hoping not to call attention to any shortcomings. I sent the story out to Fiction. I must not have been confident with what I had written because I didn't send it elsewhere, and I never revised it.
When I opened and read the acceptance email, it took a couple minutes to realize what I was looking at. Most magazines/journals today will tell submitting writers that if they are not interested in your submission, you will not hear back. So it's heartening to know that us writers are not sending stuff out into an anonymous event horizon. That time waiting for a response isn't time wasted. And that if you sent a story out last year, the year before, or even the year before that, there's still hope. That somebody is spending late nights and weekends reading submissions from the slush pile in hopes of finding an unsung story, an unsung writer, another emerging voice.
I'm not sure when it started for me. The sudden, very real infatuation, hinting at obsession, for The Criterion Collection. I've always been a film buff. Ever since I studied cinema as an undergrad, I always wanted to own as many great, life-defining films as I could find. Discovering the Criterion Collection has helped me start realizing this goal.
Criterion restores and releases classic and contemporary films for home viewing. They add a few movies to the collection every month, and give each one thoughtful and loving preservation, packaging, and contextual supplements. They champion forgotten or disregarded filmmakers, like Samuel Fuller and Paul Morrissey. And while you expect such reverance for obvious film study mainstays as The 400 Blows, Wild Strawberries, and Breathless, they also make room for popular commercial movies like Spinal Tap, Robocop, John Woo's Hard Boiled, and Michael Bay's Armageddon. Most editions include inserts or booklets with essays and interviews that make a book collector like me not feel guilty for spending money on a DVD.
Sure, these editions are pricey (most run $20 to $40; more if you buy boxed sets), and they sooner run out of stock then sell at discount. But if a film you love finally gets the full-on Criterion Collection treatment, 35 bucks for a 2-disc version that includes a new, restored high-def digital transfer supervised by the now-aged director who came out of seclusion just for this; well, it's is enough to make you forget your soaring credit card interest rate. I only own nine movies from Criterion, but these are movies I expect to watch more than a couple times, and whose special features I enjoy as much as the film itself.
For example, take The Killers. Based on the story by Hemingway about two hit men on the trail of a doomed boxer, this DVD contains two discs and features three very different film adaptations of the story. You get the 1946 Robert Siodmak version, starring Burt Lancaster in his debut, and a young Ava Gardner. Then there's Don Siegel's 1964 version, starring Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, and John Cassavetes. If you just can't get enough, they include a student film version directed by Andrei Tarkovsky from 1956. Tucked away in the case are two essays by Jonathan Lethem and Geoffrey O'Brien, from which you can garner tidbits of context and gossip. Like how Don Siegel's version was originally shot for TV, but deemed too brutal for prime time and got a theatrical release.
Most editions include beautifully bound booklets or inserts. The 2-disc version of My Own Private Idaho comes with a 60-page booklet that is full of color photos and includes essays by Amy Taubin and Lance Loud, and an interview with director Gus Van Sant by the great literary imposter JT LeRoy. There are conversations between Van Sant and River Phoenix and a joint interview with Phoenix and co-star Keanu Reeves, both from 1991 Interview magazines.
My most recent purchase was Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique. This handsome 2-disc set came with a booklet that includes a series of sublime movie stills, many of actress Irene Jacob, essays by Jonathan Romney, Slavoj Zizek, and Peter Cowie, plus an excerpt from Kieslowski on Kieslowski.
Okay, it's not all sunny brilliance. Their version of Fellini's 8 1/2 includes some additional short films that highlight one very over-indulgent filmmaker (beware Fellini: A Filmmaker's Notebook). And it's not like I want to own every movie they release. If I need to see Chasing Amy again, I'll Netflix it. And I can't imagine slogging through Passolini's The 120 Days of Sodom, let alone owning it.
Already a fan of the Criterion Collection? Which of their films are part of your collection? If you're not a fan, check them out. They just might be releasing that long lost classic you've been pining to see again.
Here's a promo of some of their 2009 releases which gives a good overview of the disparate films they offer:
"Beginning with well-known stories by Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, this diverse and colorful collection includes tales by Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Sherwood Anderson, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. From Sarah Orne Jewett’s portraits of rural Maine to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s brilliant tales from the Jazz Age, these stories span the breadth of the American experience."
I write better to music. It helps my concentration, keeps me focused. I listen to music whenever I can during the day. During my commute. At home after work. Hanging around the house on the weekend. I have a job that allows me to use my iPod much of the time, filtering out the noise of cube-city and the nearby printing station. Silence is fraught with random pops, bangs, and clicks. It drives me up the wall if I'm trying to concentrate. That's why I go on the counter attack to create my own noise.
Classical music and jazz don't always work for me, unless the pieces are low-key and consistent. Erratic melody interrupts concentration. Instrumentals work best, or music with the lyrics well buried. Buried under what? A wall of consistent, impenetrable sound. I cannot write, or read for that matter, to any music where the vocal tracks are front and center. This includes most pop and rock songs, all rap, r + b, ballads, and standards.
I've put together a series of mix CDs (which, when I went digital, became playlists) that I listen to when writing. They are top heavy with music by bands and artists like Cocteau Twins, Robin Guthrie, Thievery Corporation, Ulrich Schnauss, Brian Eno, Bethany Curve, Air, Lush, Readymade, Slowdive, Engineers, Ride, Chapterhouse. These bands perform music that contain melodies wrapped in guitars and reverb, or mellow beats and airy, atmospheric vocals that sit way back and watch the show, or walls of guitar distortion and effects that allow me to sink into my writing. Most of my output is due to these and other similar-sounding bands.
Here's a sampling:
Here the Cocteau Twins throw down probably their biggest 'hit' (I remember seeing it featured on MTVs120 Minutes), Carolyn's Fingers, which mixes their dreamy blend of pop sensibility, shimmering guitar, reverb, and Elizabeth Frazier's otherworldly voice singing nonsensical lyrics. This falls right into the category of instrumental music, since I don't know what she's singing about except for an occasional phrase in English.
Robin Guthrie was the guitarist for Cocteau Twins, and he went on to release mostly instrumental music much in the vein of the Cocteau Twins' later output. It's like hearing the Cocteau Twins, minus the instrument that is Elizabeth Frazier's voice:
Thievery Corporation are a bit different, since they use multi-vocalists and meld many different styles, such as salsa, Latin, African, among many others. Not all their stuff is writer friendly, but they are consistent within songs. I know what to expect when a song comes on and can always skip it if it features some inappropriate vocals. Here's a good example of their beat-heavy, but still mellow (chill, if you will) stuff that features delicate female vocals and a dreamy soundscape:
Ulrich Schnauss mixes the best of all worlds; his stuff is mostly instrumental electronica, with harmonies, and perhaps a guitar or two (who can tell?), and the songs that feature vocals have them buried in waves of multi-tracked soundscapes. His music achieves a thoroughly integrated, fugue-like sound. It's especially good to listen to at work; when I have some really dry material to read or write about, I just click on old Ulrich and I'm lost for hours in concentration.
Brian Eno is the father of modern instrumental ambient music (or at least the older brother) and so I find that I can listen to most of his output interchangeably, whether it's his early stuff from the 70s, through to his gorgeous work on Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks in the 80s, or his poppier 90s efforts.
Here's a selection from Atmospheres and Soundtracks:
I discovered Bethany Curve on a website devoted to shoegazer bands. Popularized in the late 80s and early 90s by bands like Jesus and Mary Chain, Slowdive, Ride, and My Bloody Valentine, shoegazer literally refers to some moptop dude or dudette staring at his/her shoes while playing guitar. The music is marked by a wall of guitar distortion and reverb, propulsive drums (sometimes), buried vocals (my favorite kind), and often extended song lengths. Bethany Curve is part of a second or maybe third wave of bands to follow the lead, or continue the cause, since most of the original shoegazer bands are MIA. When I'm feeling less mellow but no less writerish, I'll put on a little shoegazer for the soul.
Slowdive was part of the first wave of dreamy shoegazers, heavy on the echo and thick guitars. Dense but pretty, they never quite got the respect paid to My Bloody Valentine. Or maybe I just made that up. Singer and guitarist Neil Halstead went on to form Mojave 3 and later record solo.
My Bloody Valentine started the whole shoegazery thing. Not always perfect for writing, but occasionally, when I need to go deep, I'll throw on Loveless and the writing time just floats on by and 50 minutes later I'll surface and notice the sunlight and take a breather. Loveless has been influential enough to be beget a book in the 33 1/3 series.
Here's a clip from their recent successful reunion tour:
Do you listen to music when you write? What kind? Or do you need complete silence?
Short notice (especially if you live on another continent), but tomorrow night get yourself over to Porter Square Books to hear novelist and poet E.B. Moore read from her latest book, New Eden. I've taken Grub classes with E.B., and earlier this year enjoyed the benefit of her calming, practical commentary during our writing group discussions. She's a wonderful reader, and she writes in a vivid, evocative, concise style.
Porter Square Books is located at the Porter Square Shopping Center, 25 White Street, Cambridge. Reading starts at 7 PM. Christine Tierney the opens the reading.
I'm a novelist and short story writer. I work as a technical writer at a software company northwest of Boston, and live in a converted mill building in downtown Lowell, MA with my wife, Liz, and tabby, Chester.
