New York Writers Institute

With a lot of writers I’ve talked to, there’s a certain fear and evasion of writing retreats. It’s a feeling I can completely understand. The beautiful thing about writing is how simple and easy the basic act of it is. Sure, it takes years of practice, but all you really need to get started is a notebook, a pen, and literacy*. At it’s core, I love storytelling for the same reason I love running: even if it takes technique and practice to get good, at its core it’s really more of a basic human instinct than a talent. So wouldn’t time going to readings and workshops (time you could have spent doing actual writing) muck up the purity of the process? Isn’t spending money on some expensive retreat just a way to buy your way out of the hard, simple, long process of writing every day?

Yeah, maybe. But, all the same, the New York Writers Institute at Skidmore was one of the highlights of my life.

On its face, what I loved about it so much really doesn’t have much of anything to do with writing. The people were simply great to hang out with. During the two-week session we’d traded a memoir’s worth of anecdotes and generated a dictionary’s worth of inside-jokes. It was just plain fun to hang out with smart, interesting, funny peers in a beautiful college town. Being writers didn’t really have much to do with it.

Except it did. Even if most of our conversations weren’t about writing, there was a certain literary, observant element in everyone there, along with a knack for storytelling that made for great conversation. I don’t want to make the claim that writers are just plain better than normal people, but maybe really good writers are. And I don’t think I’m bragging by saying the rest of the people there were really good writers, because I was definitely in the back of the pack among them.

It was fascinating to meet the people at the institute as people first and writers second. I might be plagiarizing myself a bit here, but it was like how you need two eyes, two points-of-view a little bit removed from each other, to see anything in all its dimensions. People have parts of themselves they only reveal in writing, and parts of themselves that they edit out of anything they’ve written but that come through in the kind of comfortable conversation you only get after spending two weeks in very close contact with the same few couple people.

The workshop, the readings, but above all the conversation probably put my writing years ahead of where it would be otherwise (which still isn’t great, but it’s still better). Which is strange to say because I don’t think I can list a single rule for good writing that I learned there, or at least not any that I think are applicable in every situation. That’s the thing about writing, there are so many ways to do it that no one philosophy on the subject is going to be entirely satisfying. The best you can hope for is to submerge yourself in a buzz of advice, every seemingly universal rule contradicting about twelve others you’ve heard, and sort it out however you like.

I realize that I’m being very vague about the specifics of what went on there. That’s partly for other people’s privacy, partly because I don’t want to turn this into a parade of inside-jokes. So to give it some human element, I’ll list a few random memories: being body-slammed by a Princeton hammer thrower. A passionate debate about whether or not cross country is even a sport. Smoking a cigarette. Regretting smoking a cigarette. Being laughed at for how bad a job I did of smoking that cigarette. Writing a story about being bad at smoking a cigarette at an impromptu flash-fiction throw down. Too much ukulele music. A byzantine drinking game that I’m pretty sure they made up as they went along. Being surprised to meet people who use words like “byzantine” in normal conversation. Learning about a water tower out in the woods that college students wander towards on summer nights to buy drugs, apparently**.

Around the end of my time at the New York Writers Institute, I compared the experience to doping. The same way that cyclists draw blood at high elevations and inject it when they need to compete, I wished I could extract all the creative energy I felt there and pump it back into myself the next time I needed it. That’s a pretty weird analogy, and it even becomes stranger when you consider that I hardly wrote at all during the two weeks I was there, and for a month after I came home I couldn’t stick to any one project for more than a few days. But I think my time there did energize me in the way that I wanted, in that the advice and inspiration I got from Skidmore powered me through writing two novels (one worth revising, one definitely not), one novella, two scripts, every post on this blog, and more short stories than I can count. 

After that last novel, though, I think my creative energy needs a bit of a recharge, which is why I’m looking forward to my return to the New York Writers Institute later this week.

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* Actually, working with disabled adults at Cow Tipping Press this summer, I’ve learned that even those requirements aren’t real. I copied down some truly excellent writing dictated by people who can’t read.

** If you want more out-of-context memories from an awesome two weeks, check out this video by Miguel Escoto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLhn6SpBtuA

Novel Excerpt

I spent a lot of time on the opening lines of my recently finished novel, but looking back on it, it seems almost certain that I'll scrap it all in the second draft. It just seems so scream "YOU ARE READING THE BEGINNING OF A NOVEL!" without providing any actual introduction to the story and sets up plot points that the reader will only get to at the very end, long after most of them have forgotten the exact wording of the beginning. That said, I'm still proud of it and want it to be available somehow, so I'm posting it here.

Notebook #1

[It is an spiral notebook with “pre-calc notes” on the front cover, more carved than written. Most of the pages are water-stained, so the lines blur to make the bottom half of the page a pale blue color. Despite the title, the content jumps from math to literature to history with little discernible pattern. The notes are meaningless without context, and mostly unintelligibly written anyway. Clearly the notebook has endured a number of boring classes, sometimes half the page is taken up with doodles: stick figures slaughtering one another, tiny mountains, various weapons, or just random dots and squiggles. The artist had great variety in subject and some level of imagination, but no artistic talent. This continues for the first fifty four of the eighty page notebook, and then…]

June 18, 2013

I’m going to try telling the truth for once. 

It’s a novel concept, I know, but my philosophy on this part has always been based on the assumption that no matter how much I lie to other people, somewhere in my mind there’s an unabridged copy of everything I know. That’s not the way it’s going to be for long, though, if the previous example holds. Pretty soon a big chunk of last year will be one huge missing scene, and the scar under my left eye proves that I can’t even forget on my own terms. So I might as well remember while I can, so I don’t fill in the blanks on my own later on. Because no matter how bad the truth is (and it’s pretty damn bad), I trust my imagination will do worse.

On Finishing a Novel

People don’t usually think of writing as a exhausting work. After all, it’s not like you burn many calories typing on a keyboard or moving a pencil across a page. But yesterday, after a five-hour writing session, my bladder nearly bursting and my fingers ached and my eyes were burnt out from staring at a screen all day. I was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted. I was so sick of words of any sort that after I was done I stuck to activities where I could think without language, mostly Minecraft and mindlessly sorting Legos. It felt like I’d just finished a long race or an AP test, where I could waste away the rest of the day recovering because I’d already gotten the most important part of the day over with. It was the exact kind of marathon-level exhaustion that I think the end of a novel deserves.

Yesterday was a numb, patriotically colored blur. This morning, though, all the feelings that come with finishing a writing project that I’ve been working on for three months, that I’ve been trying to write for three years, that I’ve been planning for seven years hit me. I’d sort of lived in the novel the past few weeks, when the rush of being near the end pushed my daily writing quota up to 4,000 words a day. I’ve had vivid and terrifying dreams taken straight from the pages I’ve written. I would’ve answered to my protagonist’s name as readily as my own if someone called me by it. During the Confession of Sin at church I accidentally prayed for forgiveness for something one of my characters had done. And now it’s all over. Before, I always thought that writers were being hyperbolic (something we’re pretty good at) when they said that their characters spoke to them, but during this novel I finally felt it. I thought I’d be glad to be done with this novel, but since it’s a stand-alone story (the ending makes no sense if there’s ever a sequel) I feel like I should mourn them.

Which isn’t to say that my story is perfect. Actually, the other half of what’s been plaguing me since finishing it is that there’s so much wrong with it that I can’t help but want to dive back into it and try to sort it all out right away. When I’d been writing I’d had little trouble moving from one scene to the next without looking back, but now that I’ve capped it off, all the problems that I’d been able to put out of my mind are haunting me. Big things, like unrealized character arcs, as much as small things, like my inaccurate representation of central Texan weather patterns in the summer of 2013. At the same time that I’ve been writing this novel in the evenings, I’ve spent my afternoons literally cutting up the draft of a novella I wrote last summer and taping in new sections where needed. It’s my first major editing project, and I’m shocked by how little of the first draft remains and how much I have to rewrite. With the memories of how much time I put into this draft fresh in my mind, it’s hard to think that when it comes time to edit it, most of it will end up deleted and rewritten.

I’m tempted right now to open the document again, delete the last few paragraphs where I closed the last of the loose ends, and get to work again. It seems like it’d be so nice to let the characters keep on living, to get caught up in writing the next scene so I never have to look back on all the mistakes I’ve made. I might actually do that right now, if it weren't for what my main character has been telling me.

This novel is epistolary, meaning the text of the document exists in the world of the novel. It’s the journal of a high school student over the summer, recounting the very eventful last couple months of his junior year. Near the end, which I wrote when my bladder was just about to burst and the cafe employees were giving me dirty looks for going five hours without buying anything, the protagonist writes, “I’m almost done with this story and the chapter of my life that it represents. I’m anxious to get it over with entirely and get on to the work of forgetting. Not to mention this notebook doesn’t have too many pages left.” If there was ever a case of a character speaking directly to the writer, this is it. I had a sort of Dr. Frankenstein moment when I realized that my creation was begging for its own destruction. 

The novel might not be finished, and it's not anywhere close to publishable yet, but the story is definitely over. It’s hard, but in the end I think I can accept that.

The Edina Horror: My First Publication

My Junior year in high school, the school newspaper put out a call among the staff for a short, not-particularly-scary, Edina-specific horror story for the October issue. I got this down during a particularly slow Biology class. It was accepted by the next period, since my only competition was something about a specific math teacher eating specific students in graphic detail (which was probably some kind of catharsis). Even though this story is somewhat tainted in my memory since I later expanded it into a full-length, absolutely awful novel, I'm still proud of it. It was the first fiction I ever got published, and it got me into the Iowa Young Writers' Studio.

“Any ideas on clubs or people we could feature this issue?”

“Are there any left we haven’t already done?”

“What about that new cultist group that popped up this year?”

“What?” I asked. I had been slumped over in my chair, half asleep while Zephyrus* brainstormed concepts for articles. The word cultists snapped me right awake.

“The Brotherhood of Infinite Hellfire, yeah, weren’t they at the activities fair? A bunch of guys in black robes, murmuring in some arcane language?”

“That would be pretty interesting. Anyone willing to do the article?”

I raised my hand out of some impulse to see if this was some bizarre joke that I wasn’t conscious enough to interpret. But the Editor-in-Chief said, “Okay, John Osler’s down for the cultist article. Next order of business, do we want to publish ‘Top Five Tastiest Water Fountains at EHS’ or ‘Looking Back: Ten Coldest Days of Last Winter’?”

The next day I went down to room 317 to interview the cult leaders. The door was a copy of every flimsy, wooden door at Edina High School, except it didn’t have a window in the top right corner. I reached for the metal handle but it dissolved in my hands, as did the door, melting away like snow in sped-up footage of the first day of spring. In seconds there was no door and no doorway, just gaping dark hole in the side of the dirty white wall. Beyond the hole was a cave, lined with rows of spiked stalactites. The cavern was dimly lit by torches in the wall, despite the fluorescent lighting from the hallway which should have flooded out the darkness. And in the center of it all was a figure, his face masked by a dark hood.

“We’ve been waiting for you.”

He led me down the cavern, which spiraled down deeper and deeper until it was as if we were just walking the same loop on endless repeat. I tried to ask him my pre-written questions from my spiral notebook, but it was a difficult task, both because the torchlight made it hard to read and because the mysterious figure rarely answered with more than one sentence.

“What would you say the purpose of your club is?”

“To raise The Ancient One.”

“Who is your advisor?”

“Some call him The Doombringer, The Shadow King, He Who Consumes Worlds. I call him Locklear**.”

“When do you meet?”

“Only on the midnight of the winter solstice and Collaborative Wednesdays***.”

“Where do you usually meet?”

“Right here,” he said, motioning to the room we’d just come to.

A fire pit burnt in the center of the room, illuminating the other dehumanizing activity in devilish flame. Teens in tattered Spanish Club or YSY or Robotics t-shirts threw issues of Zephyrus, old yearbooks, and set pieces Fiddler on the Roof into the flame, building it higher and higher. They moaned and shrieked as robed figures whipped them, maybe to encourage faster work but probably out of pure cruelty. Other robbed figures read from ancient texts, proclaiming demonic rituals in ancient tongues.

“What is all this?” I asked, my eyes wide with terror.

“We must capture members of inferior clubs. We must burn the fruits of their labor..”

“But why?”

He laughed deeply yet hollowly. “To raise the school spirit, of course!”

Then the fire began to rumble. The inferno shook back and forth more intensely, writhing, growing, as if the fire was something alive, something trying to break free. Robed figures and student slaves alike ran for their lives. In a flash of light the flame burst across the entire cavern. I closed my eyes, yet the fire burnt so bright that it leaked through my eyelids. I could tell when it changed colors from red and yellow to green and white.

When the flame subsided I stood up, somehow still alive even after my notebook had been reduced to ashes. I looked and saw a monstrosity hovering above the carnage, a being of milky white wings, green flesh, and a long tail ending in a razor-sharp stinger. It was The Edina Hornet, no longer a cartoonish logo but a real thing, staring at me with dark, inhuman, intelligent eyes.

“Behold!” cried the robed figure who had led me to this nightmare, “The true entity of our great school! The embodiment of all we are! The Edina Horror!”

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* The Edina High School newspaper.

** The Edina High School Principal.

*** Edina High School’s ill-fated experiment with giving students control of their own time.