Vox Lit Liberation Front’s blog

From the Thinking Writer:

http://thinkingwriter.com/?p=24 (Part I: Text & Subtext)

http://thinkingwriter.com/?p=25 (Part II: Dialogue)

Also Sophocles Beta: http://www.sophocles.net/beta/

 

The rejection letter arrived on Saturday.  That slender envelope could only contain rejection.  Acceptance, like a love letter, involves more sheets of paper.  Take a big red pen and mark out agent #1 on my list.  The good news is, I was ready for it.  This morning, I mailed out a query letter to agent #2 on my list*.  The list goes to 14, so I've got at least a full year of potential rejection/potential acceptance to look forward to.  I'm not going to say that it's a good feeling, but it's a better feeling than not knowing what I'll do when the next rejection comes.  There is relief in activity.

It's always hard not to take rejection personally, even when you get a form letter (which my most recent rejection was).  Like a breakup, you may hear "it's not you, it's me," but deep inside, you suspect it's really you.  Your friends all say, "he didn't deserve you anyway," but deep inside, you know that's sour grapes.  If the envelope had contained acceptance instead of rejection, you wouldn't be thinking, "Is he good enough for me?"  In the face of rejection, you have to ask yourself, why wasn't I good enough?  If you've worked at your writing until you're sure it's good enough, then at last you get to wonder something new.  Why wasn't I right?

The answer, I suspect is contained in both the Bible and the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  To quote Revelation 3:16--"So because you are lukewarm--neither hot nor cold--I am about to spit you out of my mouth."  Goldilocks put it a bit more prosaically: "This porridge is too hot.  This porridge is too cold.  But this porridge is just right."  That's what literary rejection is all about: not being just right for the literary Goldilocks of the moment.  You may be too hot or too cold for the agent you've queried, or it may be that the agent is too hot or too cold for you.

So how does rejection taste?  Not like a bit of porridge, but more like a mouthful of chewed up raw carrot.  It doesn't taste like much of anything, but after a while the texture becomes unpleasantly gummy, and the pulpy mass of it seems to expand until I just can't swallow.  Then I spit it out.  That's why I don't eat raw carrots.

*Remember how unportentous the last submission mailing felt?  This one was equally so.  As I was about to drop the envelope in the mail slot, I noticed that the corner of the letter was folded up awkwardly.  I could see it through the envelope, and knew that the letter would come out of the envelope with an odd crimp in it, but the envelope was already sealed.  Nothing to do; I dropped it in the slot.

~Redzilla

Think of this post as an intellectual salon, open for discussion:

You hear people say, "I recommend that book.  It was really good."  Or leaving the theater, someone mutters, "That movie was so bad, I can't believe we paid money to see it." 

But what do we mean by bad and good, when we're talking about art?  Often, we're only talking about whether we like it.  In fact, that's one of the ways we reserve to insult art we don't like.  We insist it isn't art.  We say, "My 2-year old could do that" or "That's not music" or, as that literary vixen Truman Capote observed of Jack Kerouac's work: "That's not writing; that's just typing."  So, let us first agree that, without regard for our personal tastes, art is any endeavor which requires creative effort. 

If we can also agree, for the duration of this conversation, not to use the words good or bad to define our personal tastes, what then is good or bad art?  What is a good poem?  A bad novel?

In his book, On Moral Fiction, John Gardner wrote:

Moral action is action which affirms life....It was once a quite common assumption that good books incline the reader to--in this wide and slightly optimistic sense--morality.  It seems no longer a common or even defensible assumption, at least in literate circles, no doubt because the moral effect of art can so easily be gotten wrong, as Plato got it wrong in the Republic.  To Plato it seemed that if a poet showed a good man performing a bad act, the poet's effect was corruption of the audience's morals.  Aristotle agreed with Plato's notion that some things are moral and others not; agreed, too, that art should be moral; and went on to correct Plato's error.  It's the total effect of an action that's moral or immoral, Aristotle pointed out.  In other words, it's the energeia--the actualization of the potential which exists in character and situation--that gives us the poet's fix on good and evil; that is, dramatically demonstrates the moral laws, and the possibility of tragic waste, in the universe.

Gardner goes on to discuss the fact that this idea has lost favor; that increasingly people don't believe in a universal morality, but I don't want us to get mired down in that discussion.  Rather, as writers and readers, I'd like us to think about what works we consider moral, which we consider immoral, and which we consign to the heading of moral neutrality, neither good nor bad.  I need look no further to the books I've already added to Vox, to find my first few examples:
The Tombs of Atuan:  Although there is a maelstrom of individually moral, immoral, and amoral acts in this book, the ultimate tally, the actualization of potential, is clearly a moral one.  The main characters are at heart moral characters, seeking to do good.
The Way We Live Now: This is an example of how immorality, sufficiently revealed in its unvarnished baseness, can actually encourage morality in the reader.  After watching the characters scrabbling and scheming to take advantage of people, you can't help but want to rise above that behavior.
An American Dream: A book that rages with immorality, we have a main character who is at heart immoral and is throughout the story engaged in immoral behavior, including murder.  Is the book immoral or merely amoral?  And how does it effect its readers?

Music has taken a lot of heat over the years, been blamed for rapes, murders, and suicides.  How much of that blame is misplaced and how much is earned?  If the song Cop Killer encouraged even a single person to attempt to kill a police officer, how does that reflect on the morality of Ice-T's musical oeuvre?  (And am I the only one who finds it funny that Ice-T now plays a cop on Law & Order?)

What about Seinfeld?  The show was deeply neutral on morality, right up until the final episode, in which the characters are charged with failing to be Good Samaritans.  In short, they're punished for their moral neutrality.  In the end, does that punishment render the totality of the series moral?  Or is the cummulative effect of the preceding nine seasons enough to negate that final moment of morality?

Please join me here, by suggesting some examples of moral/immoral/amoral art, and your observations on its morality.  Let's also discuss this: Do we have an obligation to create moral works?  If the answer is yes, how do we go about defining that morality?  If the answer is no, to what degree are we responsible for the effect of immoral work on our readers? 

~Redzilla

Okay... it was fun, I admit it.

 

http://erasures.wavepoetry.com/poems.php

Administrative things: I just added a ton of people to this administrative blog as neighbors. If you could, please post your mission statements to the group. That would be splendid.

Since I've been hella busy this week, I've been hella shirking, as Redzilla would say. I accept that, and I took up the torch from Amanda.

This is how it works: you get 5 words and with these 5 words you have to write an entry. The words might or might not be related. You decide how to combine them, and how long your entry will be. You tag your entry with 5wordchallenge and whatever other tags you like. Finally, you put the words in bold.

Words: Veranda, remains, cicadas, miracle, righteousness.

The stories came out of the woodwork, like ghosts hunting for something lost.  Last week, one of my dear neighbors suffered a tragedy that chilled my blood and made me cry, actually cry.  Someone stole her laptop bag, which contained the only copies of her novel in progress and a collection of poems.  People who aren't writers may think I'm exaggerating when I say it's something akin to having your house burned down or your child kidnapped.  The loss of writing projects is a violence that is hard to recover from.

In a matter of days, Mathilde's tragedy had unleashed an infestation of ghost stories, as other people began to tell their own tales of woe: writing lost.  Stolen computers, failed hard drives, lost disks, and misplaced manuscripts.  The whole thing piled up into this avalanche of horror that had me double-checking to be sure that I had things backed up.  This morning, I had a realization.  We don't protect what we don't value.  We insure our cars, our homes, our lives.  We lock up our office filing cabinets and keep a tight hand on our purses in crowds.  Why aren't we as careful with our writing?  If we're not protecting our work, that must mean we don't value it. 

I admit, even as recently as two years ago, when working on a novel I had a single document that I edited, and there was only one copy, saved on my computer.  One day I inadvertantly deleted (alright, the cat probably did it on purpose) about twenty pages of a novel.  I had no back up files to go to, and no current hard copy of those twenty pages.  I just had to re-write them.  Twenty pages was painful; I can barely imagine if I'd found myself re-writing the other 280 pages of that novel.  That minor loss helped me realize how much I did value my writing.  It was important and worth protecting.  Since then, I've made sure to keep multiple copies on different media formats.

Loss is always a lesson, but this time, I want you to pretend like you're a youngest child.  We prefer to learn from others' mistakes.  So, please, my friends, if you haven't already, learn from Mathilde's tragedy. 

1.) Keep your edits separate.  When you undertake a major edit of a novel, create a new file.  I usually put the month and year in the name, and that lets me track the changes as I make them (e.g. MyNovel0207.doc would be the draft of your novel that you began working on in February 2007.)  This is particularly helpful if you delete something and want to put it back later.
2.) Back up somewhere other than your computer.  If your hard drive goes tits up, it won't help that you have multiple copies of the file somewhere else on your computer.  There are a lot of cheap USB drives available.  I bought a nice 512 MB USB drive with a water/impact resistent case for $13.  It's more than enough storage.
3.) Burn a CD of all your files and put it in your safety deposit box with your other important things.  If your car title and your kids' savings bonds are important enough to go in the safety deposit box, so is your novel or your collection of poems.  Besides, if your house burns down, all the USB drives and hard copies in the world won't matter.
4.) Another off-site back up option is an internet based storage.  There are a number of companies that offer storage on their servers and you can access your data from all over the world.  More importantly, if something were to happen in your life, your work would still exist in that off-site storage.

Looking back, I can't help but feel that failure or refusal to protect our writing files is only a reflection of our sense of worth.  Stop hating yourselves and start acknowledging the value in your written words.  If it was worth the hours you spent writing it, it's worth the ten minutes it would take to back it up.

~Redzilla

You've got big dreams? You want fame? Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying. With sweat.

The VL2F challenge yesterday and the response (as well as the strenuous work in actually DOING said challenge) got me thinking. Here are a bunch of really talented, smart, interesting people who have great things to say who suddenly freeze when the very notion of touching the work of their favorite authors.

Are you kidding me? Reach down, feel around for your literary balls/ovaries and touch them. These are yours; own that shit. Do you think that V. S. Naipaul commands his pants to him in the morning? No, it's a one-leg at a time affair. Do you think that Billy Faulkner just magically wrote Sound and the Fury in a single draft? I'm willing to bet my first born child that he didn't.

Not only have some of you found the task daunting and looked up at these pedestals and choked like Bill Buckner, some of you actually managed to carve the earth out around these pedestals to make yourselves seem smaller than who you really are. I know many of you. Many of you make me cringe in telling you anything because you're magnificent, diligent, working, living, breathing writers.

In this light, the next week or so will be exercises working with the words of your favorite writers. Remember that list? Well, we're gonna hit all those folks and move their words around a bit. It isn't sacred. They're only words, for chrissake.

This challenge:

Top five first sentences for a novel. Then write five more of your own.

With love (and a swift kick in the ass),

Mathilde

Plagarism is a nasty, nasty thing. However, to think that we spring fully formed as writers without any influence at all is foolhardy. We read the works of others. We think about what they said, how they said it and what it all means. I jumped about with glee at Redzilla's found poetry. It means that she's thinking and all her creative juices are pumping. I was doing my weekly close reading assignment for the week and ran across someone who reminded me of Norman Mailer with two dashes of Henry Miller put in. He emailed me this morning and confirmed that he, too had read American Dream and had his life upended. We are not separate from our influences. G and I were talking the other night and he 'claimed' (this could have been flattery) he couldn't pinpoint my influences from my work. I take great care not to be too much like anyone.

Let's take Sir Thomas Wyatt for a sec:

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

This is a interpretation of a poem by Plutarch (which I have to admit that I can't remember or find on the internets). Does this make it less Wyatt? Hell no. Any less beautiful? Hells no. Imitation is the sincerest manner of flattery.

Assignment:

• Write a list of the top five works that changed how you looked at writing.
• Rewrite a passage or poem in your style from one of these literary heroes. This is MUCH harder than you think it will be, but think of it as swallowing something that is good for you, no matter how intimidated you are by the task.

        

I've spoken at length about how *I* do it:

I sit down around 10pm, find some music to meditate on and listen until I can't hear the words anymore and I get to it. Sometimes, I grab a glass of Sometimes I know where I will start, but most of the time I don't. I keep a list on my Google home page with scraps of themes and articles that inspire me and lines that I can't get out of my head. Sometimes I check that. But mostly, I just write until I'm ready to sleep. Some nights it's sooner than others. . But I try to do it at least 20 minutes a day. Some nights I'm not in bed until 3 am. Sometimes I get up in the middle and pace and talk to myself. I know someone who stands on a chair and she reads it aloud. She also has a little flair for the dramatic, so I won't be using that method any time soon.

Tell me comrades... how do YOU do it?

Writing good dialogue requires an ear for hearing things. I also suspect that those who do it well are lovers of people and mistanthropes (precisely because they love people). I find that working in my open floor plan office acutally HELPS me write better dialogue.

• Listening to the guy behind me talk to his wife on the phone, complaining that she used the wrong kind of cleanser: lemon scent when she knows he likes the rain scent.
• Listening to the guy on the other side of the cube wall declare jihad on UPS.
• Listening to the network guy complaining about this guy who had no IDEA how to use a subnet calculator (He was indignant too. I think he was talking to me, but I'm just a developer done good who hasn't looked at a network topology since token ring networks.)

We have no secrets here, so after I hung up with G the other day, the guy across the cube wall said: You're so cute with your boyfriend.  I almost gave my historic response: Um... isn't boyfriend a strong term? Isn't that a little presumptive? Then I thought about it. What exactly had I said that would give anyone that impression? Did I laugh too loud? Did I whisper something lewd? Did my voice smile? Did my voice have a lilt to it? Did I say something so sweetly that you had to know that the person on the other end of the phone was someone I adored? How could I reproduce that conversation in print to let someone know from hearing only my side of the conversation that I obviously shine when I hear his voice?

For your edification, I will reproduce my side of the conversation to the best I can remember:

This is XXXXX XXXXX, calling from XXXXXX Services.
Of course, it's me. I always sound professional.
Yes, it's my work number and direct line.
Why would you be sad that you can't call the secretary?
(laughter)
You can't call them with your Boyz n' da Hood impression. Have you lost your damn mind?
Riiight.
I don't know what I'm doing tonight. But I just realized that I'm pouting.
Just a little.
I just miss you.
No, just say it. You don't have to censor yourself for me.
OH. You're right. Maybe you shouldn't say that.
(laughter)
Okay, well good luck. I'll catch you later.
I love you. Crap, did I just say that?
(sound of rustling and hanging up quickly)
Shit, shit, shit.

Hell, I can understand where the guy across the cube wall was coming from.

VL2F Assignment: Eavesdrop. You needn't report on it, just go out to some public (or not so public) place and really listen to what people say. Notice what you hear and what you don't hear. Notice how you don't hear the 'ums' and 'like'. Notice HOW people say things and tone. Notice how tone colors what you'd write down. Notice how the tone changes the meaning of things. Think about how you'd bring that to the empty page.