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.

__________________________

* 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!”

__________________________________

* 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.

Why I'm a Fan of Admiral Holdo

Yeah, so I’m covering The Last Jedi six months after its release, when even the people who want Rian Johnson tarred and feathered are getting a little bored of talking about it. Sorry, but this is honestly how long it takes me to process things sometimes. When I walked out of the theater with my friends and the inevitable, “so, what’d you think?” question came up, I answered with a series of faux-intellectual analysis so similar to The Onion’s thoughts on the matter that if they’d shown up on the street outside the Grinnell Theater with a lawsuit, I would have settled right then and there.

I went into the movie with high hopes for a very particular kind of Star Wars movie, one where the decades-old sci fi tropes were reimagined in a new light. If we’re going to get another one of these things in theaters from now on into infinity, after all, then we might as well get slight variations on the formula. And if there was anyone who was up to the job, it was director Rian Johnson, who did some great trope-work when he reimagined the style and speech of Dashiell Hammett’s 1930’s criminal underworld within a 2000’s high school in his first movie (and one of my all time favorites) Brick. 

For this essay I want to focus just on the sub-plot surrounding Admiral Holdo, one of the most maligned parts of the film. For those who need a refresher (also: spoilers ahead): Holdo is put in charge of the last starship of resistance fighters after Leia is heavily injured. Pursued by the First Order with resources running low, Holdo’s plan is to abandon ship and send escape pods to a nearby planet. Poe Dameron, a resistance pilot and something like the fourth-tier protagonist of this movie, thinks it’s cowardly move that will doom the whole resistance to be picked off one-by-one. 

We don’t really see any reason to doubt him, which is the main complaint that most people bring up when nit-picking this movie, since Holdo could easily have explained how the plan would work. Anyway, Poe and fellow rebels Finn and Rose form a rebellion against the rebellion to pursue a daring escape that ends up killing almost everyone, whereas Holdo’s plan would’ve worked out without a hitch if the double-rebels had just followed orders.

I’m as disappointed as anyone that the answer to “Why didn’t Holdo tell them what she’d do?” ends up being essentially “Don’t think about it,” since in every other respect this is a smartly crafted element of the film that rewards careful examination.

Like I said before, I was looking forward to seeing how Rian Johnson played with genre tropes, and in this sub-plot he didn’t disappoint. There’s this character-type I’ve noticed floating around that writers use whenever they need a secondary conflict without complicating the plot too much. It’s a non-villian, usually a member of the government or some other authority figure, who presents an obstacle to the heroes not out of malicious intent, but because they’re too incompetent or cowardly to trust the heroes’ skill and genius. The best example I can think of is the EPA guy in Ghostbusters or Cornelius Fudge in Harry Potter (though he gets a more complex characterization as the series goes on). The audience is usually signaled to hate this person before they’re even properly introduced, with some sinister line of text or a shift in the musical score. This trope suggests that you can legitimately judge a person based on your gut feeling, a dangerous idea in itself. When the conflict between this weak-willed or stupid person and the heroes start, the story paints conflict between people, even people who have the same goal, as a simple question of who knows their stuff and who doesn’t. This approach actively discourages compromise and, since everyone is the hero of their own story, encourages going out on your own despite what everyone else says.

This character-type bugs me because, in stories of fights between good and evil, any interesting character dynamics or moral insights have to come from the people in the middle. I’ve always been drawn to the people in the middle: when I was a kid I adored Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender and combed the Bible looking for redemption-arcs for Ponticus Pilot and Judas (which I assume are two allusions of equal literary merit). So all of these simply drawn characters feels like a missed opportunity.

That’s what’s so great about Holdo. She’s introduced with every hint that she’s one of these wimps and idiots we’re taught to expect in fiction, especially genre fiction with clear-cut heroes and villains. We have every reason to believe that she’ll doom them all unless this trio of plucky rebels saves the day. But she ends up saving the day on her own, first with her genius plan and next with her self-sacrifice. If she’d been another Neville Chamberlain-type, Poe would’ve stayed the same cocky firebrand as before, but instead he grows as a character through the experience and guilt.

I heard that Holdo’s role was originally supposed to be filled by Admiral Ackbar, and that they only changed it when they realized that someone named Ackbar committing suicide by smashing a flying machine into a base filled with people might hit some raw nerves. I don’t doubt that, but I also suspect that the 2016 election played a role in that decision, specifically in the choice to use a female character. Too many people (myself among them to some extent, back when Bernie was in the running) voted against Hillary Clinton, not because of any well-informed research on her policy, but because she struck them as corrupt, weak, dumb, or cold. Faint knowledge of various scandals reinforced these notions among many. Stories color how we see the world, and I think this trope informed how many people saw the election. Trump was loud, confident, and unapologetic. That’s a trait you see in most cinematic villains, sure, but most heroes too, and that’s never how you’d describe the weak sap in the middle of the two. 

I’m not suggesting that better movies or books are going to permanently our political woes. Only informed discussion and smart voting can do that. But we’re always going understand our politics through stories. Maybe introducing a strong-willed, competent woman who people don’t trust at first but ultimately saves everyone isn’t a bad trope to add to the mix.

Well, that’s that. Hope it’s better than my past coverage of the franchise!

Yeah, So I've Sort of Been Wasting My Summer...

So it turns out that my summer was far less busy than I anticipated. I've been able to spend between six to eight hours a day reading and writing, but even with that I have more time than I know what to do with. Unfortunately, I rediscovered my old Lego collection a few weeks ago and have been sinking my time into that ever since. Because I'm out of ideas for what to do for these Monday from-the-vault posts, I figured I might as well do something in-between a shameful confession and proud display what I've spent all my time building.

As I've said in earlier posts, most of my building has been using Bionicle pieces so far, and I wanted to try out making similar models but with more standard bricks.

I wanted to make two models who contrasted with each other in interesting ways, so I ended with with a segmented, very articulable flying robot and a ground-based machine that's basically just one big chunk.

 I wanted this one to have a strange, unnerving quality to it, so I chose an accent color of lime green (which, fun fact, makes people so uncomfortable that many directors choose to light interrogation and torture scenes with it). And I guess this thing probably would be pretty scary if you were looking at it from minifigure-height.

From normal-human-height, though, it actually comes off as sort of cute, at least in my opinion. The wheel-and-arm build, which I meant to be unsettling since it's unclear if it is organic or mechanical, actually made it seem like an old fashioned wind-up toy. The enormous eyes were supposed to be like  roving spotlights (they can even move independently, though I didn't photograph it like that because, instead of being scary, it just looks like the thing has gone cross-eyed) but ends up making it look childish.

This mechanical dragon thing came much closer to my original vision than the other one, though I'm not entirely happy with it. Even with all the articulation, you can't pose it very well without it tipping over because it's much heavier on one side than the other.

Gotta say, I'm pretty happy with those wings, though. The canon on its back doesn't make very much sense since it would probably shoot things below, not above. Plus I didn't plan to make this thing some kind of war machine in the first place, but now that the canon is in the model looks sort of wonky without it. I guess years of making warrior-robots left me with some bad habits.

Family Separation, Atticus Finch, and Uneasy Morality

With a damaged achilles tendon keeping me homebound, I’ve spent the past few days reading Go Set a Watchman, trying and failing not to get re-addicted to Minecraft, and wondering how I can celebrate the founding of my country in two weeks when that same country is currently ripping children from their parents and holding them in cages. All three of those things disturbed in a variety of ways, but while there isn’t much insightful to say about how it’s surprisingly easy to get a sucked into a manual-labor simulator, I found an interesting connection between the first and third. Or, actually, my mom did.

Like any red-blooded American English major, I love To Kill a Mockingbird. My appreciation for it was actually determined before me prenatally. Before I was born, my parents decided they would nickname me Scout if I was a girl. I honestly sort of wish they’d kept with that plan even when I came out a boy, because Scout Finch might be my favorite protagonist in any story. She’s got a naivety and innocence that seems so authentic to the way that kids really think and act. The fragment of her growing up we see in the story, along with the longer one we see hinted at with the adult narrator, feels so real and personal. But despite all that, she’s not even my favorite character in the book. That title goes to Atticus, of course. His empathy towards anyone, and justice informed by that empathy, makes him the embodiment of everything that Americans should try to live up to. His philosophy helped me make sense of how I could love my hometown of Waco, even as I realized the racist and cruel elements of its past and present. 

Of course, gushing about To Kill a Mockingbird isn’t anything original (there’s a reason it’s taught in nearly every high school English class, after all). And saying that I was deeply disturbed by Atticus’s portrayal in Harper Lee’s posthumously published first draft, Go Set a Watchman, isn’t either. I held off on reading it until now because I’d heard so many complaints about how it recasts one of my favorite characters of all time as a racist. But finally I figured that I needed to read every word of the story I loved, so I picked up a copy.

It was worse than I’d thought. Before reading I’d imagined the Atticus of Go Set a Watchman as a totally new character who just happened to share the name with the final version’s moral center. But Go Set a Watchman doesn’t just change Atticus’s character, it recontextualizes his most noble actions in To Kill a Mockingbird. Go Set a Watchman’s Atticus doesn’t defend poor black men out of empathy, he does it so that black lawyers don’t get the news and come into Maycomb to enact lasting change. Of course, these novels don’t exist in the same fictional universe, but all the same it may hint at a dark hidden meaning for Atticus’s character in To Kill a Mockingbird. He had the resources and the knowledge to get more radical lawyers involved in Tom Robinson’s trial, so why did he go into the trial alone, noble but ultimately doomed?

I read this disturbing revelation at the same time, almost down to the minute, that Trump signed an executive order stopping the separation of undocumented immigrant children from their families. The two moments almost harmonized with their uncomfortable ambiguity. On its face, this was the American system of democracy working. Journalists had uncovered an inhumane practice, the public had raged against it, and the government had stopped it. All the same, it didn’t punish the man who’d decided to break up families on such a massive scale. It didn’t do anything for the 2,000 children who were detained before the policy shift who will remain separated from their families. And it didn’t do a damn thing to stop the countless other atrocities that don’t photograph quite as well but involve just as much human suffering.

One of the great things about living in a family of professors and students is that there’s always someone to talk to about distressing questions in literature and politics. Another is that everyone always has summer break off. So my mom had nothing better to do when I told her about how much the new Atticus disturbed me. She was actually the one who brought the recent executive order into the conversation, and tied the two together with the T. S. Elliot quote, “The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.” 

After a long talk with her, I ended up coming down less hard on Atticus Finch and the American public (Trump doesn’t get off so easy, though). Atticus may have lost his way in his later years and traded harmony in Maycomb’s white community over radical but potentially lasting change even in his prime. We as Americans (me as much as anyone) might have the memory of a goldfish when it comes to atrocities and only really use our democratic power when it comes to the most extreme circumstances. But we all draw the moral line somewhere, whether it’s splitting up families out of spite for immigrants or letting a man die for a crime he didn’t commit. We need to push that line further, and God willing we will, but at least there’s hope.