Category Archives: writing

author! author!

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I was checking out the creative profile site impnow.com, and came across a little video by editor H. Christine Lindblom. In it, Ms. Lindblom characterizes the difference between writers and authors: She says that “authors share,” and that not all writers are willing to make the committment to get themselves and their work out there.

“An author has chosen to have a career. They’ve chosen to be on the the road. They’ve chosen to have a Web site….”

I don’t mean to flame this author of this nice little video. It’s otherwise well thought out and informative. But the writer – author conundrum is a pet peeve of mine.

The implication is that Author is a job title. It’s not. A writer is always a writer, even after many books have been published. An author of a book is always still a writer by career.

A writer is someone who writes. If he writes something and shares it, he is the author of it. Same person, two perspectives.

An author is the writer, or group of writers, or an entity such as a company, who has responsibility for the creation of a particular work. For example, William Faulkner was a writer and the author of The Sound and the Fury. Robert Frost – Poet – author of North of Boston.

I am – in addition to being a creative writer and poet – a technical writer. I have collaborated with other writers to produce sets of manuals and documents for a product, the ultimate author of which is the company for which we worked while writing.

I have written industrial books which are published, and delivered to customers, of which I was not the author. I wrote the whole thing, but the author was the company.

If a farmer writes a beautiful diary and hides it under the bed, and dies, and his great grandson gets it published, who is the author? The grandson? Even if he never writes so much as a query letter, or publishes another page? See, it’s not so simple as “the author has chosen to have a career.” Neither of these people did. But the farmer is now the posthumous author of a memoir, even though he never meant to share a thing, or made a commitment to writing as a career at all.

If you go behind the scenes of a TV show, happily you’ll now find a staff of writers. Who is the author of the show? The creator? Producer? Director? Only the lead writer? The actors? By Ms. Lindblom’s logic, all those staff writers – not being authors – toiled away with no intention of getting themselves and their work out there. I say they are all writers, and co-authors of the show. But you would introduce such a writer as a writer, not an author.

So “Author” is never a job title in itself. It’s always “author of …” If I am the author of a thousand books and poems, I am still a writer and a poet.

Writers write. There are amatuers and professionals, and all manner of failure and success. When a writer manages to communicate, it is his/her relationship to the product of creation that creates authorship.

open note to the wrtiers and producers

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Hey guys, as you know The Los Angeles Times has this recap on how private overtures led to a breakthrough in the writers’ strike:

“Poor communications, they all agreed, had helped trigger a strike that had shut down TV production, thrown thousands of people out of work and threatened to turn next fall’s TV season into chaos.”

Pretty ironic, don’t you think? You guys communicate for a living.

Hey, here’s an idea: before the SAG contract expires, script the negotiations. I mean get some good writers working on the screenplay now. Throw in a couple of plot twists, a little drama, a few jokes, but make sure the denouement is: everybody gets rich.

I’m available for such a project. E-mail me.

marginalia

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  • I have removed from my TV’s preset channels the one for CNN Headline News. It is lost to the vortex of the trivial and tawdry, and I can’t be bothered to keep clicking past it. Nancy Grace and Glen Beck simply suck. And what happened to the premise of Headlines? Talking heads are not the same thing.
  • I find I write best and with most alacrity with music playing. Lately, my best and favorite music is the soundtrack from the movie Garden State. Wonderful. I recommend it for the ills that ail the writer and poet.

    And if you took to me like
    A gull takes to the wind,
    Well I’d a’ jumped
    From my trees and,
    I’d a’ danced like the king of the eyesores
    And the rest of our lives would a’ fare well.

    …

    I’m looking in on the good life
    I might be doomed never to find
    Without a trust, or flaming fields
    Am I too dumb to refine?

    — When You Notice The Stripes, The Shins

  • I hear dead people. I have their voices in my dreams.

going down by the bow

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It’s an old seafaring term, meaning a ship sinking front end first. I just thought of it and laughed, remembering that it came to me as I sat listening to poets at last Summer’s SB Book and Author Festival. Most of them were great, but one poet was obviously – to me – uncomfortable with being on stage, at a microphone, in front of a group of people. I watched and listened and thought, “That poor woman is going down by the bow.” It struck me funny then too, and I’m only glad I didn’t blurt it out.

(You know that little switch in your head, that keeps you from yawping out thoughts best kept private? Do you think it can really be trusted? I’m never completely sure.)

Reading in public isn’t easy. We poets tend to be solitary when it comes to spelunking the caverns of our creative underworld. So to take one’s little offerings from the printer, carry them to a lecture hall or coffee house, and offer them up is an art or artifice in itself.

I consider myself well practiced in it, but I’ve taken on water and sailed off listing to starboard a few times myself.

All of which is prefatory to sending you off to mystic-lit, to read poet Joseph Gallo’s thoughts on readings. And you can read three of his fine poems too. … Aloud, if you please, if only to the cat or the living room wall. It’s all good practice.

feeling slushy

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“The speed with which a literary magazine responds to submissions is a frequent topic of conversation among those who, as editors take their sweet time wading through the slush pile, are necessarily biding theirs. As the weeks and months pass, it can become a bit of an obsession, and with the preponderance of online journals (not to mention print magazines accepting e-mail submissions), the wait—no longer a matter of eager anticipation of the friendly postal carrier’s daily visit, but an all-day in-box vigil—can be too much. Pity the writer who wonders what happened to not only her submission but also to her e-mail inquiring about her submission. Official response times vary widely.”

Poets&Writers, Inc., from the Jan/Feb 2008 issue.

I think the longest I’ve ever waited for a response was around 10 weeks. But I can relate to both the anxiety of waiting and the overwhelming pressure of a pile of slush.

peaches

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… But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. …

That’s from the poem “Why I Am Not A Painter,” by Frank O’Hara. One of those brilliant little poems that keeps making itself useful as metaphor in my life.

So I sat down and ate my peaches and watched the closing disc of bonus features in the Deadwood series. I ate my peaches without weeping, but I have not escaped the gnawing sensation of having been denied closure. (Incidentally, if you Google Deadwood Peaches, you’ll find that I didn’t make that up; canned peaches are indeed served on the show. In fact, one episode is titled “Unauthorized Cinnamon,” concerning someone’s ill-considered idea to add cinnamon to the peaches.)

In comments by Deadwood creator and lead writer David Milch I heard this:

“Any good poem, any good human being, and any good story spins against the way it drives.”

Huzzah! That’s absolutely right, Mr. Milch. We are dissonance seeking harmony, just as we are estrangement seeking atonement. And the ultimate fruition of life is death. Well, maybe I just went a little too far; it’s what we do while we’re alive that matters.

Speaking of things that matter and things that don’t, is anyone reading this blog? I’ve not had a comment since 12/22. My stats say 6 hits a day this week, but somehow the tracker has been counting my own visits when I proof posts, so maybe it’s zero. If you’re out there, could you Please Leave A Comment? Can I get just a smidgen of external validation? Sheesh.

chewin’ on my usual bone …

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I’m interested in the small details of everyday life, the little intangible, tragic, joyous, sanctified or profane habits that make us who were are. In fact, such are the fine focus of poetry and good writing; the intangible motes that make the shaft of light we writers throw on an otherwise mundane universe.

I almost always put my left sock on first, sitting on the edge of the bed, and then the right. The shoes later, on the way out. I keep them by the front door, kick them off when I come in.

In my story Winter Angel, it was very important to me that the man, when asking his wife to bring him more tea, does not pick up his cup from the table. It leaves it resting, and tilts it toward him, looking in. It was essential, somehow, to his reality, so it’s vital to mine.

Now I am drinking tea; Constant Comment, as they were out of my favorite Decaf Vanilla Chai at the store. This time of year, I like a spicy tea at night. Something to put me in mind of mulled wine. With my vitals well warmed, I can tell you, because it matters, that my old canine friend Tasha would come from any distance at the sound of a kiss, as well as a whistle.

The little things matter, because they are what we remember, and we are made of memory.

But I digress. I started off on this post because I wondered this thing, apropos of the socks and such:

Let’s say you’re working in your study, late of an evening as am I, and you decide to make a cup of tea. It doesn’t have to be this effeminate stuff I’m slurping; imagine anything you like. Do you boil the water, return to your desk, go back and pour the tea, and then let it steep beside you as you work? Or do you leave it to steep in the kitchen, and make another trip to fetch it, maybe adding sugar or lemon, when it’s ready?

Me, I do the latter, about 80% of the time. I don’t like to put the sweetener in with the tea bag, and I like to let it steep with a saucer over the cup. I imagine, despite the lack of evidence, it gets stronger that way. So it’s easier just to leave it, and set the timer on the microwave for 5 minutes or 10, and go back. Otherwise, I forget it, and it’s sitting there cold in the morning. A sad thing to wake up to.

Don’t tell me it just doesn’t matter, because, as we’ve seen, the dog is in the details.

the zeitgeist of aging in america

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“And then there’s Helen Knightly, the 49-year-old narrator of Alice Sebold’s new novel ‘The Almost Moon,’ who has been caring for her difficult, 88-year-old mother seemingly forever. Then she stops. Abruptly.

‘When all is said and done,’ the novel begins, ‘killing my mother came easily. Dementia, as it descends, has a way of revealing the core of the person affected by it. My mother’s core was rotten like the brackish water at the bottom of a weeks-old vase of flowers.'”

Here’s an article in the Times about how American writers, and their audience, are aging. And the characters and themes of fiction are aging with them. And the size of typeface as well. I picked that section of it to quote, just because it stood out. I mean, don’t you wish you’d written that? Siebold, you may remember, is the author of The Lovely Bones. [Link.]

It’s interesting. I’ve had older characters and themes in my stuff for years. For example, my vignette Winter Angel is about an older couple. The novel I’m writing is framed by the decline and death of the progtagonists’ grandfather. And the vignette I’m writing now is about the end of life as well. But it’s not necessarily because of my age. I’m 46.

It’s not because of the age of my possible eventual readers that I write about these things. Though I suppose such themes presuppose a sensitivity to the long terms of human life and the big picture; a sensitivity that informs my need to write such stuff in the first place.

Aging and dying are the common ground and denominator that we all share, if we don’t die young. We are all, if we are self-aware, spelunkers of the same dark, dank cave; thus, writers and poets have a duty to envision it, in an effort to light the way. That, in my opinion, is the real job of a creative writer – of any artist: to try to make sense of and express universal experience.

I disagree with Siebold’s premise that “dementia, as it descends, has a way of revealing the core of the person affected by it.” I have some sad experience here, and I would say that dementia unmasks only pain. It creates a new mask of suffering, bearing little resemblance to the wearer. No one is at fault.

Maybe life is a circus parade, mon ami. As it moves through town, we take turns as jugglers, acrobats, soothsayers, lion tamers, and the guys with the push brooms that follow behind. Some people just insist on playing the ringmaster most of the time. I am frequently the indolent pachyderm of prodigious memory, sometimes the trainer of the dog and pony show. Occasionally, the yapping terrier with harness and bells.

Regardless of the part you play, the parade is heading to the same place for everyone: A dusty plot of hard ground, trampled weeds and blown dust, on the edge of town. And it’s the poet and writer’s job to scramble to the top of the tallest wagon and try to scout the road ahead.