Author Archives: Kyle Kimberlin

Try Not To Think About Thinking

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In the video linked below (called On Being A Science Fiction Writer, but more widely applicable), Cory Doctorow talks about the writing process, and makes the point that writing is a partly unconscious act. But the conscious mind gets involved and tries to force rationality and structure on the process.

“Every time I’ve actually bowed to that, the story has died. Because I think you can’t be cognitive and metacognitive at the same time. You can’t be thinking about something and thinking about what you’re thinking about at the same time. You can’t revise and create in the same moment. You’ve got to do one and then the other.”

The conundrum of being cognitive and metacognitive strikes a solid chord with me. It reminds me of what Stegner described as being, “infected with consciousness and the consciousness of consciousness, doomed to death and the awareness of death.” That’s existential and makes for all sorts of literary fun. But in creative writing, it’s a real problem. Worse than Facebook. The hardest thing about trying to create anything is overcoming the temptation to criticize it before it has a chance to live.

And it’s only getting worse, I think, with the metastasis of technology. I used to write poems with the idea that I might show them to someone in a couple of months, at a workshop, perhaps, after a few more drafts. Now I’m thinking it’s been a few days or a week since I posted anything on my blog, so I really ought to try to cough something up. Today or tonight, but soon.

I guess that’s always been the way it is for journalists. You’ve got to fill the column inches between the ads with something. And maybe I’ve digressed.

How is it possible to keep the conscious mind from getting in the way and mucking things up? Well, Doctorow seems to say that he faces this challenge by focusing on the tension imperative to driving his plot.

“Plots run on tension, and there are lots of ways to make tension and lots of ways to diffuse it. But the one kind of iron-clad, always works way to make tension is to have a person in a place with a problem. The person tries to solve the problem, the person fails, and things get worse.”

OK, that’s one excellent kind of tension. I have to say it’s not the kind of tension that drives the things I write, unless I take a fairly broad view of what constitutes a problem. My tension tends to be more emotional, more existential than the problem I think Doctorow is talking about.

It seems to me that often it’s not just the problem and the search for a solution that builds the tension, but the greater awareness of the self in the context of the problem.

Here are two paragraphs from my novel in process, in which my central character states his problem:

I hated that the night had gone by so fast and I had to confront my consciousness again, my life and its anxiety, and the fog-soaked dripping valley still sleeping around me. I needed more time to think, to sort things out. I woke up in a vague melancholy, a general discomfort with damn near every facet of my life. Papa was sick and maybe dying, this old house sighed under the weight of the rain and fog. And I didn’t have a clue how to move forward with my life. …”

I laid in my bed and saw that almost thirty years had stood, been glimpsed, and died away since I was eleven years old. I laid here in my lumpy old bed and tried to believe in Papa moving on, maybe soon, in Dad following, and in the whole world going on without me. Can the world really go on spinning when all of us are gone? It seems to have that intention precisely. I thought the world should have something wise to say about all this,  some bland apology to make. But it only rained more ardently, as though it would not stop for days.

OK, so I’m not writing To Kill A Mockingbird. Now there was a plot with tension. I won’t even defile it by restating the problems Atticus Finch faced, and his children. But I think you’ll agree my guy has a problem. He doesn’t particularly care for the way the universe is built. And I suppose under Doctorow’s thesis, my task is to generate tension by making you watch me – I mean my character – try to solve it.

This should be interesting. And more interesting, here’s the video of the interview with Cory Doctorow.

Coming soon: An update on my favorite geeky writing tools for getting stuff written, while staying organized and keeping the bad wolf of premature editing off your tasty bits.

New: G+ Subscription

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On Google+, one’s public posts form a stream which is, in essence, a blog. (See Google+ in the menu above.) In my case, that blog is more active and eclectic than Metaphor, which is reserved for what I hope are thoughtful occasional posts on writing.

Now, thanks to a dubious minor miracle or some serious geekery, you can subscribe to my public posts on Google+, even if you’re not a Google+ user yourself.

This is not a service offered by Google, it’s something I learned to do out of school. It was fun. If you would like to learn to syndicate a feed of your Google+ posts, here’s an article to teach you how: http://www.sybersquad.com/my-daily-links-newsletter-experiment/.

Subscribe to Kyle Kimberlin – Google+ Public Posts by Email

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Ghost Within A Ghost

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Last night I was working on a scene in my novel, inspired in part by a passage from Eugene O’Neill, from his play Long Day’s Journey Into Night. You can find scenes on YouTube.

Here’s my paragraph:

We turned off Main onto Graces Road, toward the orchard, and went on in silence. We drove on under a heavier band of rain, and I turned on the wipers again. We listened to them squeak back and forth. Bo looked out at the endless empty fields of grape stalks and I just drove. I kept both hands on the wheel because life felt terribly fragile. Soon, we had the house in sight. Every winter, Dad had the trees around it pruned strictly back to their bare branches and trunks, so that in summer they’d grow out full and green. When my pickup turned off the road, the shape of the house stood gray on gray against the dripping sky. It looked like the house was drowning in the rain.

And here’s a true master:

The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted — to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned along ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

This version of the scene is a bit abridged. My favorite is the one with Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, et. al. You can watch the play entirely here:

http://youtu.be/6jRYeW05rY4

I have received such gifts

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For Fathers Day, we need a beautiful poem about fatherhood. I considered sending you forth to read Roethke’s My Papa’s Waltz, but it goes without saying, don’t you think?

Instead, The Gift, by Li-Young Lee. And here’s a sip to wet your whistle:

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face

The Matter Before Us

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Here’s a bit of what I’ve been working on lately. I’m writing – mostly editing – a novel. I have 91,500 words, more or less, in various stages of staggering genius and shitty rough draft.

The book tells the story of two brothers on a farm in the early 1970s, their family, a summer of crisis, and the men they grow up to be. This is the prologue.

I would appreciate comments. Do you feel drawn in, invited to read more?

The Mailbox

That rusty old mailbox means something. You see a sad piece of scrap, nailed to a post among the weeds, leaning into the wind. But thirty years ago it was special to me. And maybe I’m scrap myself. I’m standing in the same weeds, leaning into the same wind, out behind the hulking pale gray building we always called the shop. A middle-aged guy in work clothes, alone in the world and staring at cast-off tires and the useless lengths of pipe. But I want that old mailbox, where our uncle would leave gifts for us. I want to remember it as it was when the paint was fresh. Tomorrow I will come with my pickup and claim it. It needs painting. And that much, at least, will not be gone with this land.

There is nothing special about me, and you should know it from the start. I am not rich or talented. James Martin Geister is the brightest light of no one’s life. I love, I have loved, I believe I am loved. And one summer in this orchard I saw something strange, terrible, haunting and perfectly normal. It changed my life. I went on, kept the land with my father and grandfather, and carried within me a faded knot of grief and joy and amazement, as I simply let the time go by.

Time just rolls on down the line, so time is the matter before us, or memory and what it makes of a man and leaves of him as it gathers up the chips of wood and broken glass that time will always make of life.

I turn and walk to the front of the shop, stand and look for a while at the back of my parents’ farmhouse, a hundred feet away on a slight rise, shaded by thick trees. It’s empty and I can imagine seeing their ghosts rising from it toward the first cloud on the road to Paradise. Except that my parents are alive, both fine and I hope to God they’re happy. They drove out from from here an hour ago, following a moving van down the road to their retirement. My heart is just heavy, deep in memory and on the verge of weeping.

I have never been this much alone in my life. I wish that someone was with me, to hear the sound of my shoes scuffing on the packed dirt and gravel, and in my breathing the thin and urgent whisper of my prayer. It’s something about Jesus and mercy but nothing explain my loneliness in this still expanse of space. More will surely be revealed. It all depends on three months I lived through thirty years ago. I was eleven and my brother Bo was eight and the summer was just beginning. Time stretched out ahead of us as long and deep as the Friant-Kern Canal. We had so much summer that it almost seemed too much; too much world in every direction, and countless days stretched through dry haze into September.

I believe all of my life has been the ripples spreading out from that time and I think about that summer every day. I listen in solitude and it comes – vaguely, softly – like a trumpet on the radio, playing in another room. But in all my forty years, there was always family with me here, a dog or more than one to run from tree to tree elated, as though she had not sniffed each trunk a thousand times before. Ranging out, she would keep her people in sight. And if we whistled, she would quickly come along.

I remember that Grandpa’s closet smelled of mothballs and shoe polish. I hid there, waiting for my brother to find me. I tried to keep my breathing shallow in the airless space with its heavy grandfather smells, and strained to hear if Bo might holler Marty! Olly olly oxen free! down in the back yard. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I tumbled out onto the bedroom floor, and lay panting on grandma’s brown and gray hooked rug.

I was bored, but that’s how summer always started. It took days to find something to do, and the cadence of our freedom. How could two kids in the country know what to do with so much sudden liberty? I just kept still a little while and listened to life beating down on the house and land. There had to be something we could do for fun.

Now I cross a plank bridge over the irrigation ditch and turn to face the lowering sun, toward another house where I expect to live a long, long time. The land has been divided, parts sold off, one part left to me on which to live. So I can still call part of this orchard my own, and this hard dirt trail still takes me home. All the land behind me — the shop, my parents’ house, all all the orchard east of this ditch — on that, the escrow will close in two days. The sun is nearly down on everything and everyone I love have packed their things and gone.

And soon I come to the crossing, with rust-brown spikes and crossties running on the mounded ground, and stems of oat grass volunteering at the verge. Two white crosses stand by the right-of-way. Except for the railroad and the gap in the orchards it creates, there is nothing around me but those crosses and acre after acre of fruit trees.

Trees make a good life for people with simple dreams, and my family has made a living here. There is always work to do, and I get up every day and do my share and take care of the trees and the fruit. Once I stood with my little brother – we held hands – and watched men set these two large crosses here. I have walked past these crosses, ridden and driven and run past them, thousands of times in all the intervening years.

 

Download the PDF.

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The Mailbox, a draft scene from a novel in process by Kyle Kimberlin, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Guard Your Attention

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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

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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

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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

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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.