From Minds Profound

"Innocent of what?" © Unforgiven (1992)Previous articles on Indies Unlimited have established that writing rules are far from absolute, that they are best interpreted more as guides than anything binding. But far more effective than a plainly stated rule is the aphorism, that memorable quote that both entertains and teaches… something. I keep a running list of quotes in general, but those pertaining to writing have pride of place, and they can alternately act as impetus or inspiration when you’re flagging, as an alarm bell when you’re off track, as a way to stay humble when you become overinflated, or simply as a way to laugh at yourself when you happen to forget how absurd you are. I present to you my Top Twenty Awesome Writing Quotes, mostly written by other writers, but remember: whatever germ of a lesson they contain, it’s not a rule, okay?

20. “I once asked this literary agent what kind of writing paid the best.  He said, ‘Ransom notes.’” Get Shorty (1995) – Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman)

Money? I vaguely remember that stuff. It’s green, I think. I swear, incidentally, that Gene Hackman gets some of the most gleefully brilliant lines in Hollywood. As Sheriff Daggett in Unforgiven, after being told he’d just beat the daylights out of an innocent man, he got to say this: “Innocent? Innocent of what?” To which there is quite simply no conceivable answer.

19. “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” – Richard Bach

He wrote about a seagull. He said this. Succinct is this guy’s middle name. Or wait, isn’t it “Livingston”? No. No, that was the seagull.

18. “It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.” – Sinclair Lewis

It’s not a job, it’s a calling. Like the urge to use the bathroom. If you feel that, Lewis is talking about you. The writing thing, not the bathroom thing.

17. “If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.” – Louis L’Amour

What might have been a fairly ordinary, common sense platitude is rescued—like when the guy with the poncho and the sandblown crowsfeet rides into town—by a startlingly apt metaphor.

16. “I’ve been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can’t remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.” – Anton Chekhov

Um, only take the bad reviews to heart? No, that’s not what Chekhov’s saying here at all. I’m not really sure what he’s saying, but it made me laugh anyway. Odd. I don’t remember him being this funny in Star Trek.

15. “You must write your first draft with your heart.  You rewrite with your head.  The first key to writing is to write, not to think!” Finding Forrester (2000) – William Forrester (Sean Connery)

You won’t go too far wrong if you remember this, while simultaneously forgetting Sean Connery ever starred in this clunky embarrassment of a movie.

14. “I’m all in favour of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

Okay, it’s dated, but it’s too good to exclude on that basis. If you must, substitute “laptops” for the last word.

13. “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” – Isaac Asimov

He means it, too. You can just tell.

12. “There’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.” – Margaret Atwood

Well, that told us. Wait, I didn’t know that about the pension plan…

10. “To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make.” – Truman Capote

Included here because I agree one hundred per cent. You don’t have to, but it’s my list.

9. “If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.” – Kingsley Amis

Put more strongly than I’d put it, but then again, Amis was by all accounts a class one melonfarmer. I’ve always said, however, that you sure can’t worry about offending people when you write. Unless you’re aiming for anodyne, that is.

8. “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning and took out a comma. In the afternoon, I put it back in.” – Oscar Wilde

The sad part is, I get this. I know this. And I’ll bet you do too. I’ll also bet Wilde was tempted to remove that damn comma again by nightfall.

7. “What creates a writer is huge, psychological dysfunction.” – Kathy Lette

Well, we’ve hinted at it here, before. Kathy Lette, however, just comes right out and says it. And it’s kind of a horrible relief. Like when Asimov’s doctor up there delivers the bad news.

6. “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” – Gene Fowler

Easy, you say? Anyone else detect the sarcasm here?

5. “Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.” – Robert Frost

Worth remembering. An antidote to “write what you know”. There’s a reason we have an imagination. But it takes a poet to say it so memorably and so well.

4. “Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett

And you thought Richard Bach was succinct? Also, why isn’t the word “succinct” only one syllable?

3. “The King died and then the Queen died. That is a story. The King died and then the Queen died of grief. That is a plot.” – E M Forster

Brilliant. Since I like this kind of thing so much, I will throw in a bonus 3.b.: “The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.” – John le Carré

2. “Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book.” – Cicero, circa 43 BC

All I know from this is that things don’t change all that much and that Cicero would probably have a catastrophic mental breakdown if he lived today.

1. “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” – Flannery O’Connor

Ha ha. That one’s a stand alone. Flannery sure doesn’t need me to expand on it. Not that any of them do, really. But I had to write a blog post, so I have. Enjoy.

Or, as Dorothy Parker (who clearly didn’t have Text Edit handy) once said: “I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.”

*     *     *     *     *

A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on May 18, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

The Joy Of Oases

So what is it about getting published that so delights us? I've already mentioned how ecstatic I felt when my story "Unquiet Slumbers" was accepted by May December Publications for the third in their series of zombie anthologies, First Time Dead, Volume 3. I mean, self-publishing is also incredibly rewarding, in that you must format correctly, come up with a cover, upload all your data, provide the right information for whichever medium you choose, etc. And that's before all the promotion and marketing. But I do have to say that the acceptance by and of our peers, of fellow authors and publishers within the industry, provides an added gleam to something already pretty shiny.

Well, today, I discovered something that turns that gleam into something blinding in its intensity. Venturing outside (yes, I really did this, no lie) to check the mail, I discovered three packages, two of which I'd been expecting, one which was mysterious. Too large for a CD or DVD. Perhaps someone had gifted me a book from Amazon? Then I saw the word Createspace on the sticky outer label and the penny dropped. Of course! On acceptance of our stories in the above-named anthology, we'd been promised a copy of the actual book and not just the ebook. And here it was.

And I don't mind admitting I got a little excitable. I tore open the cardboard and flipped to the back. Yes! There were the author signatures we'd been asked to provide. A nice touch. Oh, and there was my absurd author photo and bio. And there's my byline and story in the Table of Contents... and at last, flipping to the second story, there's my tale of a zombie soccer mom struggling with the disintegration of everything she loved. And I was overjoyed. Which, in that context, makes me sound like a bad person. But you know what I mean. This was, in other words, a tangible, visceral thing; a body of work I contributed to and have been acknowledged for, within its very pages. I love my Kindle, but nothing quite matches this.

You will forgive me if I plaster this post with the photos I took? I mean, I already bragged across half of Facebook, so I know no shame, but this is pure joy. And hell, since it visits us so infrequently, no one ought to begrudge our occasional extravagance with its expression. At heart, we write for ourselves. We should. But we'd be lying if we didn't admit that the approval of others wasn't almost as important an occasional oasis in the economic desert we find ourselves in as writers.

And this oasis, solid in my hands as I rifled through the pages, was no mirage.

*     *     *     *     *

David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

Hot And Fresh Out The Kitchen

Editing. Not a concept that fills most writers with joy. For many, it’s the unpleasant yet necessary shadow accompanying the act of writing itself, sort of how a painful rash can follow a good… um, hike through poison ivy. And I see why many of us feel that way, I really do. Or I did. Lately, along with extra wrinkles around my eyes and greyer hair at my temples (okay, not just my temples, but we don’t need to get all TMI, do we?), I’ve begun to appreciate editing for what it is. I’m not talking about the editing I do for others, necessarily, although I could be. No, I’m referring more to my own process in that regard. Something dawned on me: I’m starting to enjoy it. Now, either I am growing more masochistic than I ever believed possible, or my new realisation has actual substance. Again, for TMI-avoidance purposes, let’s go with the latter.

Here, I’ll just say it: editing is an integral part of the creative process and isn’t really qualitatively different from writing. What we tend to call “writing” is in fact “initial drafting” and what we often think of as “editing” is just a deeper form of “writing”. Every bit as creative, and potentially just as satisfying. At its best, it’s the layers of paint over the pencil sketch. I realise there may be folks reading this who are kind of looking askance at me and thinking “no, duh, did you just receive your first clue via a Wells Fargo stagecoach?”, and to those people I hold up my hands, guilty as charged: what others have perhaps known for a goodly while genuinely occurred to me, like, yesterday. Look, I’m a slow learner, okay, but at least I’m a learner.

So, what do I mean? Well, the best way to get something across is to demonstrate it, to literally show and not tell (don’t hurt me, Linton). So, I’ll write a quick draft of a fabricated passage from a non-existent fantasy novel, here:

The men rode up the hill, the army of trolls behind them. They paused at the top and looked across a burning landscape, the distant city sending smoke high in the grey sky. Everything seemed hopeless. Ear’o'korn faced his men. “This is the moment. All paths have led to this. We must defeat our enemy or perish. Prepare the last stand of Condomia!” Stirred, the men renewed their faith and turned toward their pursuers, ready for battle again and prepared to fight to the last man for the Good and the Righteous.

Okay, I wrote that literally without pausing or second-guessing, which is how most of us either write or are told to write. In other words, bring on the heavy editing artillery long after the first draft, never during it. So, imagine I’m done my draft and am now returning to the passage in question for the first time. And I’m so not kidding, this part is fun. Either that, or I’m an incorrigible word nerd. Hmmm. Yeah, probably the latter. Oh, I should point out there is no one perfect way to edit such a passage; in fact, the possibilities are probably close to infinite, so don’t attack my somewhat exaggerated style or you’ll be missing the point (he says, covering his butt far too glibly).

Here’s one way:

The men rode to the summit of the hill… I prefer this as it negates the need for “at the top” in the next sentence …the troll army following. Again, it feels more efficient and works better rhythmically. Pausing amid a cloud of dust… This engages the senses, adds verisimilitude …they looked out across a ravaged landscape, at the burned forests and the columns of smoke rising from the distant city. A little more description, just enough to conjure a scene, but allowing the reader to fill in some of the detail of what a ravaged landscape looks like. Dismay and horror crossed their faces like shadows. This isn’t great, but it’s still better visually than “everything seemed hopeless”. You could probably lose one of “dismay” or “horror” if you wanted it tighter. Raising his voice, Ear’o'korn spoke. “Faced his men” is too Hollywood, too inorganic, he’s in the middle of a disorganized, demoralized party of weary soldiers, after all, not giving a fresh battle speech at the outset of a conflict. “Men, this is our moment to defeat despair. We have arrived here together, having traveled many paths. Two choices now remain: vanquish… we used “defeat” far too recently, and it has a nice balance alongside the upcoming “perish” …our enemy or perish in the attempt. In the name of all that’s good, for the sake of all we hold dear, prepare the last stand of Condomia! Fight as the brothers we are!” Sometimes we add words, sometimes we eliminate them. This is an example in which the passage requires more length, his speech needing to fit the “high speech” mold of epic fantasy, and rather than tell the readers his men were moved by it, we allow the words themselves to do the job, bolstered by a simple description afterward. As he spoke, the soldiers grew taller in the saddle, slowly turning their horses to face their pursuers. Jaws set, weapons raised, they roared in unison, each man welcoming the final charge, the possibility of his own death. Now, again, this isn’t perfect or even great, but you get the idea that each time we lay down another layer or another shade of paint, we hope to improve the bigger picture. Of course, this leads to another huge question outside the purview of this post: when do you stop? If you daub too many layers, you end up with a muddy, sloppy mess of words and a ruined picture. Anyway, for comparison purposes, I’ll paste the edited version here.

The men rode to the summit of the hill, the troll army following. Pausing amid a cloud of dust, they looked out across a ravaged landscape, at the burned forests and the columns of smoke rising from the distant city. Dismay and horror crossed their faces like shadows. Raising his voice, Ear’o'korn spoke. “Men, this is our moment to defeat despair. We have arrived here together, having traveled many paths. Two choices now remain: vanquish our enemy or perish in the attempt. In the name of all that’s good, for the sake of all we hold dear, prepare the last stand of Condomia! Fight as the brothers we are!” As he spoke, the soldiers grew taller in the saddle, slowly turning their horses to face their pursuers. Jaws set, weapons raised, they roared in unison, each man welcoming the final charge, the possibility of his own death.

Yeah, okay, still needs work. I kind of cheated, too, as this type of writing is almost built on cliché, so I didn’t have to worry too much about that aspect, at least. But hopefully you get my bigger point, that this is writing every bit as creative and enjoyable as that first rough sketch, perhaps more so. That it’s all part of the larger process. It’s work, but it’s also play.

Once again, an analogy from my other favourite art form—music—rides in like Ear’o'korn to rescue us at the death. Far from being drudgery, what we term editing is really a re-working, is in fact not so much an edit as a remix. And as such, it can be truly radical. If you’re still skeptical, go track down R. Kelly’s original “Ignition”, then listen to “Ignition: Remix”. Clue: one is possibly the greatest song of the new Millennium, and the other… uh, isn’t.

*     *     *     *     *

A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on May 11, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

Pod People

I am now officially a pod person. I've been interviewed before, which is an interesting experience the first few times, but when you notice yourself repeating many of the same answers in slightly different ways, it can be a case of diminishing returns. Which illustrates the importance of fresh questions on the part of the interviewer, but also behooves the interviewee to remember to dig deep and not resort to phoning it in... which is an apt figure of speech for the most recent experience I had of this strange concept in which one person asks questions of another person and they share the result of the conversation in the assumption others will find it interesting. But anyway, what I'm getting at is, on this occasion I did actually phone it in. Almost literally. Well, okay, Skyped it in. And the interviewer, Carolyn Steele, who runs the website Trucking In English, shaped this audio into something very listenable—a podcast, in fact, and the only known recording of my voice on the internet.

Ostensibly a conversation about Dissolute Kinship, it moves surprisingly seamlessly (given my propensity for inexplicable tangents and, um, awkward, ah, speech fillers) between the topics of New York City itself, both then and now, and the wider implications and fallout of the attacks of September 11, 2001. I even talk a little about growing up Catholic in a Protestant country. So, uh, religion and politics. Great. I eagerly await the hate mail.

But somewhere in there, she somehow manages to get me to make a connection between the unifying nature of the world's initial reaction to the horrors that day and the subsequent democratization that's largely been wrought by the internet, offsetting the more rigid and authoritarian reaction in the political sphere. It's an interesting counterpoint to the almost dystopian pessimism into which it's far too easy to lapse. And it takes no small amount of skill to elicit thoughts I probably wouldn't have come up with on my own. I guess that kind of synergy is the point, really, is why interviews can be so illuminating. Greater than the sum, kind of thing.

Anyway, have a listen here and if nothing else, see how mockable my outlandish Anglo-Canadian accent is.

*     *     *     *     *

David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

The Good, The Bad, The Indifferent

"When you have to shoot, shoot. Don't talk." © The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, 1966I’ve discovered a potentially fatal flaw in my personality. I mean, outside the more obvious ones (no need to point them out in the comments section, folks). Put simply, I like genre and I like literary. In musical terms, I like teen pop and modern classical, Spears and Stockhausen, Avril and Arvo. But this post is neither a demonstration of my “amazing” pop cultural eclecticism nor a reflection of my mental health anxieties; we like what we like, after all. No, this post is an attempt to reconcile two apparently opposing impulses in the world of writing; the aforementioned (alleged) impasse between genre and literary fiction.

For anyone who has attended a university-level creative writing course, even a single workshop, this dichotomy might already have raised its slightly distorted head. I majored in English literature and I’ve also attended a one-year certificate course in creative writing at a local university, and I don’t regret either of them. My purpose here is certainly not to trash the rarefied air of academia. Far from it. Because I genuinely learned a great deal about writing—about what works and what doesn’t work, about the inner alchemy and the outer pragmatism of this eccentric world—from those two experiences. Not to mention the confidence boost of sharing your work among motivated and engaged peers as deeply in love with the written word as you, alongside the equally essential practice of reading in front of an audience so you don’t forget that word’s spoken nature either.

But. There’s a prevailing wisdom within such circles that genre is inferior to literary fiction. It’s either implied or stated overtly. That one is entertainment and one is art. One is frivolous and disposable, the other profound and eternal. (Interestingly, we hear the same, equally dodgy “received wisdoms” in music criticism. A received wisdom is usually an unexamined one, after all.)

I’ve thought about this long and hard. Which isn’t especially easy for me. So bear with me. I write in many forms. I’ve written music reviews, poetry, many styles of fiction, nonfiction, journalism, articles and essays. Although I’ve been told my own writing style is “literary”, and believe there is plenty to admire in that category, I don’t ever intentionally set out to write “literary” fiction. I love the writing of Ian McEwan, which is considered predominantly literary by those who define such things, but I also read Stephen King’s predominantly genre material every bit as avidly.

I sometimes wonder whether we’re overly restricting ourselves.

Let’s, for the sake of argument, deny that a firm delineation between the two even exists. Why would one contain more “art” than the other? Fiction itself is a genre, alongside its siblings and cousins poetry, lyric prose, creative nonfiction, journalism, etc. Likewise, writing itself is a kind of genre, alongside music, dance, theatre, film and the visual arts in general.

See where I’m going with this? I hope so, because I don’t.

But seriously, why would we arbitrarily assign less significance to any one particular level or manifestation of “genre”? We don’t tend to ascribe a deeper resonance to writing over, say, dance. Or sculpture over theatre. Nor do we elevate detective fiction above, say, science fiction, other than for admittedly subjective reasons of personal taste. Then why this line drawn between “literary” and “genre”? What does it mean, and what does it say a) about us, and b) about the works we assign to each category.

My experience has been that between the extreme caricatures of navel-fixated ivory towers on the one hand and outright penny-dreadful hackery on the other, most fiction writers fall into some great amorphous blob somewhere in the middle. Who is to say whether Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is genre (horror, western, adventure, western horror adventure) fiction or literary fiction? And in a very real sense, who (aside from literary critic Harold Bloom) the hell cares? We either love it or hate it in the end, which is great, and perhaps the only failure, ultimately, is the work that leaves us indifferent. Similarly, we can take an acknowledged genre writer like Dennis Lehane, and ask why his works would necessarily lack any more of the beauty (or truth, or mythology) of art than those of [insert currently celebrated literary darling here]… And, like I say, I’m not even all that sure we can use “art” as a legitimate criterion or signpost here, anyway.

Indeed, there have been times in the history of English literature when the distinction was as plainly meaningless as I’m arguing here. Stories and storytelling were not politely revered in some airless grand hall, but were populist mass entertainment, gaudy and messy as medieval marketplaces, and this is nothing to be ashamed of. Without such street theatre, the single greatest practitioner of the written and spoken language, William Shakespeare, would probably not have emerged from his decidedly average education and lower middle class roots. Similarly, without the Bardic tradition of songs, poetry may not have evolved. Why would we wish to unravel all that—the music, the words, the rhythms, the art, the entertainment, the colourful cultural detritus both good and bad—so we can score meaningless points over something that ought not be a contest in the first place?

Perhaps language itself is the problem here. As in, we’re using it wrongly. For the sake of argument, let’s take science fiction as an example. There is hack science fiction and there is good science fiction. No one would argue this. Perhaps, therefore, we should be merging our terms and speaking of literary science fiction. In other words, if something is written well, its subject matter and even genre conventions become less important. Good, bad, indifferent. These are the only distinctions that matter. And quite honestly, I reserve more opprobrium for the latter than I do for the first two. I prefer full-on bad to bland and safe. But that’s just me.

Anyway, apologies for getting all philosophical this week—I certainly don’t claim to have had the last word on this and may indeed revisit it in future posts, and welcome further thoughts, or even mass ridicule. Although, be gentle with me, I’m far more fragile than I look. But hey, in the interest of fairness, let’s just say there’s a hint of truth lurking within the distinction. In which case, we may give the last word to Stephen King (whose work has fallen into either category over the course of a long career), who memorably and respectfully summarized the difference between the two in a way that avoids any declaration of war:

“I have no quarrel with literary fiction which usually concerns itself with extraordinary people in ordinary situations, but as a reader and a writer, I’m much more interested in ordinary people in extraordinary situations.” [From the Afterword, Full Dark, No Stars, 2010]

*     *     *     *     *

A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on May 4, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.