A Quick Note on the Shaver Project

Don’t expect these tiny stories to be any good, not for a while. Instead of writing a collection and editing out the weeds, I’m interested in linear publication of a thought connected to someone else’s (Sage’s) image.

And re. that. Sage isn’t sold on the idea. It seemed interesting at first, but essentially this project asks her to take the same photograph at the same time every day, with the idea that some small and potentially revealing details will change both in the short- and long-terms. I’m looking for those tiny changes and trying to build a personality around the act of noticing. For Sage, though, one wonders where the relevance lies. Perhaps nowhere. Perhaps this project will die very soon. Who knows.

Shaver #2

I watched you drive away, both of you. The evidence is overwhelming. I do not care where you are headed, no. There is only one question: Why here? Nobody lives in the building where you were parked all night. I see those windows, too. Dark for months. Don’t answer. This is a rainy town.

Shaver #1

Truthfully, you are too clean. This is no compliment. Look at your two sentries, your wooden corner posts that reach up and up. They should drop garbage like leaves, but those bills clutch on, no scraps in sight. And this is the morning we’re talking about, the first scene after drunks pull paper down around them and toss flyers into puddles to become pulp. Your upright newspaper carts! Your volvo! Who does your sweeping?

Letters to Shaver

The other day Sage asked whether I’d like to join her in some sort of rapid-fire daily project. Like those people who write a poem a day or make a craft project per day, something in that line.

We decided to try something collaborative, and I’m hoping it turns out like this: Sage takes a photograph of the Mississippi and Shaver Avenues intersection, same time of day, same general area. She sends the photograph to me and I write a very short story about one subject I find in the image. Perhaps it’s a piece of litter, or a dog wandering by himself, or a woman with a coffee. It’s half a rip-off of Joe Wendroth’s excellent “Letters to Wendy’s,” excerpts of which you can read here. The conceit is this: Wendroth has created a persona that writes some profound or disturbing or plainly bizarre piece of wizdom on the little comment cards you find at Wendy’s restaurants. A real picture begins to emergy, within just a few comments, of what a fringe person is behind the writings.

It’s worth picking up, and might be one of my favorite bathroom books of all time. You can simply flip to any page and, even if you’ve read it before, find something interesting to read. About food and sex and violence and just about everything you could want in an American book.

On Divisions

Yesterday I had lunch with my friend Jewel Mlnarik at Fu Jin (where you’ll find not only a stellar hot and sour soup but also the most formal server this side of white linens), and among other things we talked about how to successfully separate the interests that conflict during the course of a day. Since starting my own company last summer, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how work wants to bleed into personal time into writing time into everything, until finally you have some aspect of work on the mind at all times. There’s nothing about it conducive to good writing.

So you silo your work and you protect your spaces (physical and mental) carefully.

For me it’s fairly straightforward: when I’m writing a story or part of a chapter in the novel, I need to push out any lingering distractions. That’s why establishing the writing dungeon was such a high priority, and also why my best writing happens in the morning when I wake up, keep work thoughts at bay, stand over my stove until the hot water is ready to make coffee, and slink downstairs to write for a couple of hours. It’s also why my work computer has and will never cross the threshold of that room. It’s a little silly how vehement I am about that rule, but it’s served me well so far.

Of course, the fact that so many excellent writers never had the desire or the opportunity to protect a physical space for writing makes me wary of my own need, and, to be honest, makes me wonder why exactly I have that need in the first place, but whatever the case my current situation is working out and I’m not rushing to change a functioning setup.

As for Jewel, sounds like she’s looking for a way to have similar divisions online: a space for her personal writing and photography, a place for her professional consulting portfolio, and a place for her professional photography. Sounds like the same practice of division will work well for her, instead of trying to clump all of her public-facing work into a single presence (I predicted yesterday that such a clumped arrangement would lead to a persistent confusion about what projects she was focusing on when).

Anything that improves productivity, right?

New Space

So Sage and I have moved into our new apartment in the Rexall Drugs building at the corner of Shaver and Mississippi. The real story, though, is what lies in the building’s bowels, including a kiln, a man who restores busted hi-fi equipment, records upon records, bikes, invasive vines, and my own dingy office, which is perfect. I like to think of it as an elective sensory deprivation center, where I can lock the door, scrawl on the chalkboards all around me, tack paper to the walls, and disappear for hours to write.

Over the next few months I’ll be training down there, sort of like a runner, with longer and longer periods of writing-exclusive time. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, in the vein of “A Cave of One’s Own.”

Obligatory "It's Been a While" Post

So that’s done with. On to the next one.

Clarifying the Outline

A short post.

Yesterday I wrote about my plan to stop worrying and love the outline. In short, the idea was that, since going through my graduate program in creative writing, I’ve avoided the process of actually sitting down and laying out scenes on paper or in, for example, an application specifically designed for creating outlines (OmniOutliner is a strong candidate at the moment).

I did not mean to imply that writing programs in general or my own specifically encouraged the writer to sit down, head blank, and head in some unknown direction. Instead, the idea was that the writer should have an “idea” of where the story was headed (where this idea existed, other than the memory, is unknown to me) and allow the words to flow. The dreadful things that might happen if you didn’t heed this advice are aluded to in the previous post.

So my only revelation, if it may be called that, is that I actually need to have real, no-kidding outlines. Almost like a storyboard, if you will, complete with scene location, characters, purpose of the scene (gasp!), and notes for the future me who will actually sit down and write the thing out.

Anything to help you out, future me.

On Process: Dirty Outlines

Any post that wants to begin “As every MFA:Fiction graduate I know can agree…” threatens to be drawn out and dull. So here goes.

As every MFA:Fiction graduate I know can agree, going to school to become a better writer burdens you with at least a few bad habits that can take years to shake. Having graduated some three years ago now I feel that my process should be clear of that cruft, but I keep finding new things that slow me down or send me down the wrong path. The fear of overplanning is the latest example.

In school I was taught that to outline was to kill innovation and the ability to jump on new narrative threads as they emerge, as if chapters and characters would jump out from some typo or rambling passage and take over the best threads in the whole story. The idea, as overplayed as it is trite, is that your characters will surprise you. I bought that for a long time, and I still think there’s some truth to the phrase, but what I didn’t consider is what that logic implies (and which I think is incorrect); namely, that to plan out a chapter is necessarily devoid of creativity, surprise, fertile tangents. The other night I came face to face with a chapter that I’ve been working on for months. Yes, months. And part of my inability to move forward is a lack of visualization on how the central scene progresses, ends. In short, I don’t know where I’m going here. So I dusted off some old outline notes and got to work.

Let me go back a step, because I’ve been thinking about this problem of process from a variety of angles, one of which comes from the world of software development. I’ve been spending a lot of my time thinking about how to build process around software development as a service (hourly rates for developers to solve specific problems and produce working code). To project manage such work, one needs to have discrete goals that developers can complete, with every day (hour, fraction of an hour) bringing the whole closer to fruition. So I tried to apply that thinking to my own writing process, given that the results I generally produce in a given hour of writing would be absolutely anathema to the software project manager. Like, I’d get fired. What is my excuse for spending an entire day–a day that I’ve dedicated to my own writing, my own book–at the desk and not moving the book closer to completion? There is no reason. I decided to project manage myself and keep tabs on how the story is progressing.

Hence the plan. How am I supposed to check off goals if I haven’t created them? This evening I was talking to my brother Peter about his process when working on the first issue of his comic. He’s having a similar problem in that he’ll sit down to work on the comic and end up working on something else. His solution, at this point, is to find and mimic the process of a successful artist, and I think that’s a great idea. (That process is to write, ink, and color one page at a time, taking care to finish one page per day. That’s measurable progress.)

So I’ll end this post by declaring my new dedication to and focus on process as a central (critical) means for moving the novel to completion. And if that involves outlines, diagrams of narrative pace, and other analytical tools, so be it. Besides, who said the act of writing an outline can’t be a creative, surprising act in and of itself?

A Break

The day after Halloween this year I began a one-month run of zero alcohol consumption. I’ve never defined a period like this before, and, frankly, the idea of giving myself parameters is uncomfortable. It smacks of “I can’t go without drinking unless I set up rules,” which seems the province of alcoholics. And my family, like every family I know, has alchololics in every stage of admission (still drinking, reducing consumption, increasing consumption, and absolutely dry). So upon further consideration the process of not drinking has become much more complex for me, well beyond my initial desire to take better care of my body after a big weekend and months of watching alcohol creep increasingly into my daily life.

There’s work. It starts with my joining, in April of 2008, the web development company OpenSourcery as their marketing director. I quickly found myself leaving work in the evening and heading to some networking event or another, and inevitably drinking became the lubricant of business connections, partnerships, etc. Everyone had a drink because that’s what you did. Bad logic, no doubt, but true. So I’d go to two or three events on a given weeknight and have a couple of drinks each time. No big deal. Except that you’re looking at 96 oz. of beer without batting an eyelash (and without throwing in the weekend, which is a different story).

Perhaps even more salient is the way alcohol serves as the medium and the reason for inviting a potential client/partner/friend to connect. Since I’m starting a new business, the evening networking events are more important to me than ever, at least as a means for building connections. So the problem arises: what’s my excuse for inviting someone to meet after work hours, if not to drink? In the daytime the expectation is to go for a cup of coffee (a different issue all its own), but in the evening you say, as a reflex, “Want to get a beer after work?” It’s code, but the beer is still important. You’re saying, “We have something to discuss, and since we’re doing it on our own time, after the stress of a full day, we’ll at least get a buzz while talking.” It’s comforting and safe, but at three days a week it’s probably not the best thing for the body and mind. So I wonder what you’re saying if you invite someone for a drink and then go and order a club soda. I’ll almost certainly find myself having to explain my actions, since the internal reaction of my acquaintance could range from thinking I’m a full-blown alcoholic to thinking I’m a stiff.

This post threatens to grow too long if I delve into other considerations (alcohol’s insidious connection to so many events; the fact that there’s always some thing that crops up–a birthday, a holiday–that absolutely requires you to drink; the fact that one glass of wine might actually be good for you; the fact that many foods beg for that same, health-bolstering glass), so I’ll end with this: beyond the social layer I’m ostensibly butting up against, what I’m most interested in is my body’s physiological reaction to going without alcohol for 30 days. After a truly stressful day will I feel something tugging at me to open just one beer or pour one glass of whiskey? Will I find myself standing at an event absolutely dying for a pint of beer while everyone around me mindlessly pours sip after sip down their throats? In short, I’ll be taking stock of just what place alcohol has in my life, from networking to mind to body to sleep to hunger and probably some things I’ve yet to consider.

Now I need another cup of coffee.