Category Archives: writing

The Mystery We Attend

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In Light in August, Faulkner wrote, “Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing.”

We who attempt to enter the Universe by means of words have a lot of explaining to do. Here we are, suspended in air and light, in grass, in hundreds of billions of galaxies, and in each other’s tears. How do we find the words to describe all that, and also the sound of frogs and the taste of peaches?
 
So often what motivates us is almost impossible to understand or describe, even if we most ardently and earnestly try. Our reasons for acting or failing to act remain obscure, even – perhaps especially – to us.
 
So much of what makes us human defies exegesis. The high and craggy altitudes of faith and the thorny gardens of love come to mind. But so does simply dealing with life’s seeming chaos, one day at a time.

“… because here we were dealing with the pit and prune juice of poor beat life itself in the god awful streets of man.”
– Jack Kerouac

Based on Faulkner’s maxim on motivation, I believe you write, carve, paint, compose – by some means and in some matter you create – because you find yourself attending a mystery that eludes you. There is a thread of music in the night, across the lake or down the block, and you feel a need to find the source. It may take until morning; this I understand.
 

“Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing.”
– Henry Miller

Doesn’t this mean that the creative process is an irrefutably mystic endeavor, that the artist is called into the desert of his/her making for a consultation with their Higher Power? I think so. I believe creativity is an act of faith, not unlike prayer, undertaken by means of solitude and submission to a process we don’t really understand. On a good day, anyway. Other times, it’s clear I’m stuck in my own despicable will. Or, as Anne Lamott puts it, “stuck in the shit again.”

So where do we go from here, from being stuck? Out into the desert, I suppose. Or up to the mountaintop, or – this is my favorite metaphor – down to the bottom of the lake. It’s hard for non-artists to understand, but it’s take a long time – falling deeper and deeper and deeper on down – to reach the creative state of mind. And all it takes (ask Samuel Taylor Coleridge) is one knock on the door to bring me popping back up to the surface, bobbing around in the flotsam, driftwood, and the rubber ducks.
 

“So okay – there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You’ve blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.”
– Stephen King

 

Bonus Advice from Anne Enright

  1. The first 12 years are the worst.
  2. The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
  3. Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
  4. Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
  5. Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn’t matter how “real” your story is, or how “made up”: what matters is its necessity.

Edit This

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This morning I read a conversation on LinkedIn, which begins with a question posed by a fellow professional writer:

“Are editor’s absolutely necessary?”

Oh dear. The “Greengrocer’s Apostrophe” appears among the tomato’s and apple’s.

No, editor’s are not necessary but editors probably are. An editor certainly would have been helpful to that writer.

But hey, I’ve been told I use too many comas. Commas. I meant commas. A coma is what I’m in before I have my coffee, right?

We can all use a little help from our friends, because nobodys’ perfect. I just thought it was ironic, and it made me smile. Smile

Don’t Do It

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Here is Charles Bukowski’s poem, So You Want to Be a Writer.

His advice: don’t do it. Well, that’s not quite true. He qualifies that almost completely. And he’s honest; I have admired his honesty. But to be honest myself, I haven’t admired much more than that about his poetry.

Was he a poet? Sure. A good one? OK, maybe. But I’ve almost always found in poetry a generosity of thought and spirit. Poetry explores Being and attempts to say the unsayable, name the unknown and unknowable. One might hope for occasional feints toward metaphysics.

Read some Bukowski poems and see if you find that in his work. I could be wrong – it’s been quite a while – but what I found named the human condition in terms all too well known, and in ways that I’d call existential but not particularly concerned with gaining altitude.

I just meant to share an interesting poem, and here I am speaking ill of the dead. Mea culpa. I imagine even Mozart had detractors. Bukowski published more than 40 books, which is …um … more than me. He must’ve been getting some wood on the ball. So ignore my rant and see what you think of the poem. 

On Our Way to Somewhere

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…a poem with notes.

 

In her book on writing and life Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott devotes a chapter to the topic of index cards. She quotes Henry James, “A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost,” and explains that she keeps cards and pens around the house, and a folded card in her back pocket when she goes out. If she has an idea, or sees or overhears something memorable, she writes it down on her card.

Lamott wrote her book in 1994, before we all started using computers and carrying cell phones. And today I take a lot of notes with my iPhone. But I valued this lesson from Anne’s book, and it served me so well for so long, that I usually still carry cards with me. I prefer 3×5 inch cards, blank on both sides, but that’s not important.

What matters is that the people around us frequently say things so profound, without even meaning to, that their words ring like bells for a long time afterward.

One day, my Dad said to me, “The mums are blooming,” and it just stuck. I wrote it down. And when I looked at it again, I thought of that scene in the movie Phenomenon, where John Travolta says to the little boy, “Everything is on its way to somewhere. Everything.”

 

Stories About Us

 

Dad says the mums are blooming
as the tulips fade into summer.
Tomato vines work their random course,
they twine and clutch.

We open the door and go in.
There is a breeze from the open windows
but the day is warm.
What do we become after this?

It’s almost time to stand and go,
drive east against the clock,
keeping low to the land
and finally the sun will rise.

Maybe we should weep a while
first, for everything.
A ritual purge, a chrismation
to purify our souls for high deserts.

After this, we are butterflies
silent among the particles of dust,
there where sunlight falls
into the house in slanted shafts.

Lying on the rug, a child reads stories
to herself, and the stories are all
about us. Outside, an engine strains
to rise and lift away.

 

Creative Commons License
Stories About Us by Kyle Kimberlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

 

Here’s the movie scene I mentioned:
http://youtu.be/WYzHuNlSomI

Writing is Re-writing

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I despise editing my own writing sometimes. And by editing I mean re-writing, and we all know that “writing is re-writing.”

I love early draft writing, to see a new thing made of words appear in the world. It has never existed before, but here it is lining up left to right, top to bottom. It’s a beautiful process, this extruding of nebulous Mind into the realm of Matter, and the occasional magic ESP that results. (We write in hopes of finding readers.) But the poor thing is going to have to by edited in due course, and that part is much different.

Sometimes there’s satisfaction in re-writing, in seeing the thing improve and go forth and live on without me. Poems are like that, and flash fiction often is. But not so much this novel that I’ve been working on for far too long.

The novel is basically written, but far from finished. I’ve got about 35 chapters, around 90,000 words. Many of the words are good ones, and in close proximity to other words whose relationships are positive and helpful. But some of the words are the wrong words, or slightly out of order. And after all this time, the effort to rectify this situation has become as dull as painting a house with a horse’s hair.

There are problems with continuity of style, voice, and perspective. I’ve written some parts first person because the protagonist felt so close to me. Other parts, third person omniscient because he is not me, and I doubt either of us would trade what troubles or consoles us.

Let’s just say I love the house, but the subtleties of color often seem insurmountable.

Can you relate?

I Wish

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I wish that back in high school and college, we had been assigned to read more poems like Snow at the Farm by Joyce Sutphen, and a bit less Wordsworth, Shelley, Milton, and the like. I might have found a shorter path to begin finding my own voice. Because I think poetry – modern stuff at least – is best written about the simple, but hard to speak of, ordinary moments of our lives.

 

Wishing

There is a light
beyond the window
and leaves beyond the light
and the clock pretending life
against the wall
and me in the midst of it
wishing for you

 

Hear an audio reading of this poem:

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

Up Too Close

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What kind of writer are you? Do you focus on plot and story or language, color and mood? Do you outline? Do you get the basic story out and come back to refine, or do you work each sentence or line until it’s finely wrought before you move on?

I tend to focus on the language and hope and pray that something of a story – or the message of a poem – will appear in time. I get so close to sentences when I’m writing, that usually couldn’t tell you if there will be anything at all when I step back from the canvas and view it from across the room.

Sometimes I work on a poem for a while, refining it, then I realize it’s about something I didn’t even see or understand until it was ready to share with someone else.

A recent tip from Poets & Writers magazine suggested identifying these characteristics in ourselves, then trying to reverse them as an exercise. http://goo.gl/7VnDn

I don’t know if I can. I have a lot of room to grow in my craft so I’m willing to try. But it’s not going to be easy. When I sit down at the desk, I only have a sentence, if I’m lucky. A thought, a fragment.

He has spent everything he inherited on keeping the rain away. 

After too many years, the dog refused to come into the house.

Though he would never taste it again in this life, he remembered the smell of her soup.

It’s not exactly stuff that lends itself to broad strokes of the brush, if you see what I mean. And though I made up those three sentences extemporaneously within this post, with no intention of using them for anything (but you never know), you can bet I edited each one at least once.

How do we become the kind of artist we are? Well, in my case I wrote poetry exclusively for many years, and poetry is much more a word-by-word process than writing prose. Do you agree?

Also,I take much of my inspiration from fragments of conversations overheard, from songs in my headphones as I write, from photographs. From the little things.

For example, the song Such Great Heights by The Postal Service [http://www.postalservicemusic.net/] was playing on the iPod just now. I was listening to it a year or two ago when I wrote a scene in which the protagonist imagines his life after the departure of his parents.

Here’s a stanza of their song:

They will see us waving from such great
Heights, ‘come down now,’ they’ll say
But everything looks perfect from far away,
‘come down now,’ but we’ll stay…

Here’s what I wrote in response:

I would rather have had them see me waving down from on high, bearing an enigmatic smile born in the lessons taught outside of time and space, of how perfect life is and how much better than life is death. So people die, but they keep watch on what we do and how we spend our fading days, but most don’t choose to stay too close. Everything looks purer in its blues and greens–even the dull brown between the trees and the ruddy drying tack of our blood on the land–from an infinite distance like heaven.

A nice little bit of writing, a good detail. My problem, to reiterate, is that I think the opposite will be true when I “finish” the novel I’m working on. It might look pretty good close up, it small details here and there, but when you step back, just a forest receding into the trees.

Thoughts?

*   *   *

Want to reach that Poets & Writers Magazine link with your smartphone? Here’s a QR code for you.

poets_writers_post_link_20130110a

Final Kindness

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In those increasingly scarce and scattered moments when I can find the time and also muster the clarity to do what I love, and write, I’ve been committing homicide. I mean I’ve been writing the death scene of a principal characters of my novel. You see, the grandfather, whom the protagonist loves deeply, dies in his bed in a nursing home.

It has been extremely difficult to write, and not for the reason you might suppose: that it makes me want to cry, remembering my own grandparents. The hardest part of writing a scene like this isn’t seeing the screen through tear-blurred eyes, it’s simply telling the truth. It’s hard enough to tread such painfully common ground while making the story up, but being emotionally honest about fictitious death is a bitch. Your own experiences must inform, but not overwhelm, the work. You don’t want to be maudlin, because real death rarely is. But letting your prose fall flat, infected by indifference, is even worse.

Here are two little snippets of the current draft.

* * *

Some of the crows lift away, others fly in. They alight and are instantly still. Papa reaches out between the railings of the bed and grabs the sleeve of my jacket. It startles me. He hasn’t touched anyone in quite a while. It’s never been like him to touch, but his eyes are locked on my face, their blue lost in the flat gray light from the window.

“You better call the dogs. I can’t whistle for ‘em anymore.”

“They’re coming, Papa. I can hear them coming back.”

“Martin, you ain’t amounted to the man I hoped you would.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” The bracelet on his tiny wrist is blue plastic with a white tag I can’t read. It might say something important too.

* * *

I felt cheated and deprived. I have always thought the world should change dramatically when someone dies. The sun should rise draped in black bunting, casting the sky in deep purple for a day or two. Or angels lead a band of pipes and drums slowly through the orchard at a mournful march, while the bald canals run backwards, sending dark water back to its high and snowy source.

Death had no right to blithely change the structure of my life, as if a storm had torn the pilings out from beneath a flimsy dock. I was angry because this proved that what we know to be inevitable sometimes really does come true, and that my special family didn’t rate a break from it. We don’t have much, don’t ask for a lot from life or from God. So it just seems right to claim deferment now and then from death’s old harvesting machinery. And it angers me to think that Papa was cheated. He waited all those years for his better life to start and I don’t know if it ever did. Then he waited all that night, cold and alone, in (the) funeral home, to learn what acts of final kindness he had earned for all his work, and all his love for us. That is a kind of loneliness we never learn about in life.

* * *

So, what is the most difficult or daunting experience for you to right about? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

Welcome and Thank You!

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Thank you, everyone, for all of your kind, insightful and encouraging comments and “Likes” for Lying To The Dog. It’s awesome to see one of my little pieces get such a positive response from so many creative people. It makes me want to keep writing!

Thank you, also, to Michelle at WordPress for finding the story and sharing it far and wide.

I’m looking forward to following the links from your comments and Likes, and checking out all of your blogs. So have a great week, let’s keep in touch.