Monthly Archives: May 2012

Guard Your Attention

Posted on by

My old friend Mike Elgan gave some great advice to writers in a recent interview. Here’s a sample:

“Writing is nothing more than organized thinking captured in written language. The thinking is what matters most. When you are thinking about what you’ll write, you’re actually engaged in the craft of writing — you’re doing the most important part of writing. So write in the shower. Write while you’re falling asleep. Write all the time, guard your attention and don’t let anyone steal it while you’re writing, even if you’re not typing.”

I agree and suggest that to write well, one’s thinking ought to be more than organized. It must be well informed, perhaps inspired. Transcendent thought is also organized by written language. If you can read great poetry and say the poet really had his/her thinking in order, you’re missing the point. They went on a journey of the mind and heart, then returned and got their thinking in order to tell us about it. But to be fair, I don’t think Mike Elgan was referring to philosophy or literary writing, but writing in general.

Mike is right about the process. I write for hours when I’m not holding a pen or sitting at the desk. In fact, when I sit down and stare at the monitor without having my idea first, I usually fail. This is where the typing happens, but not necessarily the ideation.

This concept does seem to beg a question: If you are writing while you appear to be doing other things, how do you make the people around you aware of that fact?

I know I seem to be doing the dishes but I’m writing. Please do not disturb.

Guarding attention might be the single greatest challenge facing a creative person in modern life. I wish that writers and other artists would be more specific and expansive about whether they can achieve it, and if so, how. It’s difficult for me. Not just because constant connectivity is a basic expectation of our society, and people interrupt my thought process.

Telephones can be turned off, unplugged. So can the Internet and e-mail. But I have neighbors who truly believe they have an inalienable right to make random and sometimes psychotic noise. Then there are the hard-working gardeners with their lawn mowers, leaf blowers, etc.

Sometimes when it gets noisy where I live, I go to write in a coffeehouse. Occasionally you’ll encounter an ignoramus yelling into his cell phone, but it’s rare. And when you’re peering into a laptop in such a place, no one will ever bother you. Coffeehouses, churches, and mortuaries may be the most civilized places on Earth.

It’s not just a problem for creative folks, you know. Everyone goes out into public spaces and is bombarded by demands on their attention. They go home, retreating to the one place where they have the sole right to decide what to give their attention to, only to find that public has followed them. Others believe their happiness depends on performing for the neighborhood, then demanding that everyone leave them alone.

To guard one’s attention means more than making a space for yourself and flipping off the cell phone. It means creating a state of mind free from the anxiety of the expected disturbance which may or may not come. Because it’s as hard to concentrate when you’re afraid that you’re about to be interrupted as when you actually are. The rush to finish typing the sentence before a car goes booming by, or a neighbor bellows at his escaping cat, leads to anxiety and bad writing.

Guarding one’s attention, then, means finding calm beyond the quiet, and in spite of the racket of life. And I would love to learn from others how to live among The Great Unwashed and find that happy and artistic state of mind.

The Theme of Poetry

Posted on by

The theme of poetry is death. I tell people, if you’re majoring in English, you’re majoring in death. The oldest theme in poetry is cape diem, and the reason you would carpe the diem is that you don’t have too many diems left. But poetry always looks at life through this lens of mortality. And looking at it through that lens tends to italicize life and the result provides the second greatest theme in poetry perhaps, and that’s gratitude. Gratitude for being alive.

– Billy Collins

Wasted in Malibu

Posted on by

And now for something completely different …

Do you ever wish you could write for TV? I have imagined it. It seems like it could be fun. I attended a presentation by one of the writers for Everybody Loves Raymond once, and read her book about writing for TV. It’s really a lot of hard work under pressure. But sometimes there’s just no excuse for professional stupidity and bad decisions. Did you watch the season finale of Two And A Half Men on Monday night? I’d like to know your reaction to it.

It made me sad. I laughed some in the first half, but by the end I felt like crying. Jake was a cute kid when the show started in 2003; bright, usually cheerful, and fun. The writers have simply wasted that character. Making him an indolent, wasted, mindless loadie was one of the stupidest decisions I’ve ever seen in entertainment. Packing him off to the Army was the coup de gras.

Jake Harper Angus T Jones

The show was already fumbling along in the dark, out of context.  It became One And A Half Men and a New Guy. And it’s been obvious since well before Charlie Sheen’s implosion that the writers and producers were tired of everything about the vehicle except the revenue. The scripts seethe with resentment. They don’t care for the characters and they damn sure don’t like the audience.

The people Charlie Sheen left behind there have such obvious resentment and animosity toward him is almost hysterical, and not in a funny way. They went far out of their way to give Charlie Harper an ignoble death. They defiled his remains and consigned his soul to hell in the shell of Kathy Bates. Bizarre. All of this without a passing thought for the fact that there might be viewers who’ve built some passing attachment to Uncle Charlie.

Jake should have been the smartest, clearest, and most successful character on the show. Then they would have had something. Turning him into a loser like Charlie Harper was – or they seem to think Charlie Sheen is – was simply asinine.

I’m aware that Angus T. Jones (Jake) might tell me I’m full of s–t if he read this, and that would be great. I wish I was wrong, but I doubt it.

I understand writing for emotional effect. I’m a poet. I’ve written poems meant to give myself and the reader catharsis. When your dog dies, you write a poem, or more than one. Then I’ve stood up at a mic and made people in the audience cry. (And not because the writing sucked; if it sucks I don’t read it in public, usually.) This wasn’t that. This was more like what Douglas Adams said was the secret to flying: aim for the ground and miss.

So when they rolled that memorial montage of Jake as a kid, they killed off another character that we’ve come to relate to for the past nine years. It was much more like a Series Finale than a Season Finale. And that would be for the best. Let us hope that CBS has the good sense for once to let something die with its last shred of dignity, instead of flinging it back and forth over the shark tank until we’re all sick of the pitiful sight of it.

The End Result

Posted on by

Here’s a quote from the prolific writer Gary Paulsen, whose birthday is today (1939).

Paulsen used to run sled dogs, and competed twice in the Iditarod in the 1980s.

“I started to focus on writing the same energies and efforts that I was using with dogs. So we’re talking 18-, 19-, 20-hour days completely committed to work. Totally, viciously, obsessively committed to work, the way I’d run dogs….I still work that way, completely, all the time. I just work. I don’t drink, I don’t fool around, I’m just this way….The end result is there’s a lot of books out there.”

Right, that’s how you do it, by making a commitment. Remember when the writing professor wrote the letters K A C on the whiteboard and said the secret to writing was reading and keeping your ass in the chair? Well, it’s not how I’m doing it. And what does that tell you?

Paulsen’s web site says:

Paulsen is a master storyteller who has written more than 175 books and some 200 articles and short stories for children and adults. He is one of the most important writers of young adult literature today and three of his novels — Hatchet, Dogsong, and The Winter Room — were Newbery Honor Books. His books frequently appear on the best books lists of the American Library Association.

Props: The Writer’s Almanac.

Do You Know a Quiet Place?

Posted on by

I want to share with you a podcast I listened to from Public Radio. The guest was Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, writer, and producer of recorded quiet. Not silence, mind you, but quiet. I suppose collector of sounds would be an apt description of him as well.

Quiet, as Hempton points out, is becoming almost impossible to find on Earth. He defines a quiet place as one in which it’s possible to find natural sound, uninterrupted by noise, for at least 15 minutes.

Hempton’s recordings of natural sound are very nice. I’m listening to one as I write this post, of surf pounding down a secluded beach in Washington State. I found it on Amazon.com, a 99 cent Mp3 download.

I am profoundly impressed with the man’s insights and enjoyed the interview very much.

http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2012/last-quiet-places/

Painting The Barn

Posted on by

Listen:

When he notices the change of light, he puts down his brush and looks up. He spent all afternoon painting, and the sun is setting fast. He is finished finally, just in time. His hand is getting numb and there’s an ache down his back, along the left shoulder blade. So he rinses his brushes in warm water, and watches how the light plans to go on without him.

The sun falls beyond the river, so that shadows move up the side of the gray barn. The last rays hit the eves from which he knocked an empty swallow’s nest with a pole. The building looks angry at his going, sad for his weakness.

The threadbare jacaranda in the field beyond the barn takes the dying light into its inner branches, becomes a skeleton. Before he can start the truck and drive away, it is haunted, beyond all hope.

*   *   *

Some nights, it just takes too long to get home. No matter where you start from, how clear the roads and whether, you just can’t get there fast enough. He stops at the market, buys a frozen chicken pie and creamed corn. He waits in line behind a woman writing a check, like she was transcribing Sanskrit from weathered stones.

He loves the night, when the world is drained of its color. All the heavy gradients, brush strokes, vast pallets of green and blue and brown recede to a diffusion of rippled pen and ink. He keeps the lights dim and settles in to watch old movies, surrounded by his walls of quiet swiss coffee.

At two past midnight, the angry gray barn with blue trim and languid shadows, appears in a dream and demands to be red again. Deep brick red, white trim, hinges and hardware stoveiron black.  It wants to stand on the hill in the sleeping hay all night, then command the sun to rise, compel the threadbare jacaranda to leaf out for full summer, put on purple flowers and clash with the cobalt sky. A barn to make the crows wish for clothes like orioles and cardinals and jays.  A barn to fade with happiness – tomato soup with too much milk – in time to lean against its many rust-red parts, and die on the hill.  Gaps between the sagging boards will give the wind a place to sing.

*   *   *

He leans against the fender of his truck at dawn, drinking black coffee, watching the gray barn and the tree as the sun comes up and washes over them. This is what the customer wanted: a barn to atone with the landscape, make peace with the hill. “I want it to blend in, look smaller, farther away,” the farmer said. “My wife thinks it’s ugly. Paint it gray.”

Now he leans against the truck and thinks this may have been a sin, though not his first and maybe not his alone to bear, this time. An ugly decision, a thing not itself.  But why should a barn get to be what it wants if he can’t?  What he wouldn’t give for a proud brightness, a rich red rightness, and a solid hill, room for animals and a tractor, nails driven in posts for hanging tack and tools.

Dammit, it was four days honest work and money earned. There’s half a gallon left of Driftwood Gray. He leaves the can on the farmer’s yellow porch, along with his bill for the job.

Creative Commons License
Painting The Barn by Kyle Kimberlin is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.