Fragment No. 7

Do not despise the day of small things --
A scribbled page, a brick laid,
The record of a dollar paid.
Plodding steps will always bring

The finish nigh. So let us tell
How tiny deeds composed great feats,
Raising London's bomb-rent streets,
The burnt temple of Ariel¹.

-----

1. Ariel, the city where David dwelt, i.e. Jerusalem. (See Isaiah 29.)

Winter’s Bone Walks the Razor’s Edge

Noir is typically considered an urban genre. Steam drifting across rain-soaked streets, bloody scuffles in back alleys and men muttering threats in tenements streaked with stripes of sodium light -- such images mark its best-known works. But half the fun of genre writing comes in subverting conventions, in turning the expected on its head. So in Winter’s Bone, Daniel Woodrell takes noir out of the city and plunges it deep into the Ozarks, where mountain-cast shadows grow far darker than those beneath any skyscraper.

Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly’s dad has disappeared. It isn’t exactly unusual for him to vanish for long periods of time given that he’s one of the best crank cooks in the Rathlin Valley. Ree’s accustomed to caring for her two young brothers and half-mad mother, so it’s no big deal. That is until Deputy Baskin shows up on Ree’s doorstep. Seems Ree’s old man used the family house to post bond after a recent arrest. The court date’s drawing near, and Baskin wants to give Ree a friendly little warning: If dad doesn’t show up, all four of them are going to get evicted from the only home they’ve ever known. To find her father, Ree will have to work her way through a stratified criminal culture deadly as the Mafia and nearly as old as the hills themselves.

Woodrell is as much in love with the setting of Winter’s Bone as the story itself, teasing beauty from the frozen, wasted hollows and poignancy out of their hard-bitten inhabitants. His prose unfolds with scarcely a missed step or a poor word choice. Beautiful and risky, because lovely diction can only sustain interest so long. Readers need plot, and there are moments there the narrative thread grows thin. Yet it never snaps completely. Ree steadfastly tracks her father though a succession of encounters with characters that rival Flannery O’Connor’s creations in grotesquery. A crank chef who lost half his face in a meth lab explosion. A blonde rogue who likes to persuade with fists and firearms. A trio of matronly sisters who use their steel-toed boots for more than trekking through the hills. If Winter’s Bone wavers, it’s in the old challenging of walking the razor’s edge between genres. Crime fiction fans may yearn for more action, while lovers of literature could find themselves discomfited by a climax involving axes and chainsaws. But Woodrell keeps his balance the whole way through, a feat worthy of witnessing no matter your genre bent.

(Picture: CC 2005 by Eisenvater)

The Thing Frightens With Isolation

It's the boogeymen who frighten us when we're young, the unseen, innumerable creatures that go bump and slump and slither in the night. We imagine them beneath our beds, in our closets, crouching right outside our windows. And it's these creatures, the ones that we quickly outgrow, that most of us believe are the real villains in scary movies. But as any good horror writer knows, monsters are mostly the means by which we explore the frightening parts of humanity and the world, the universal truths that make our skin crawl long after we get rid of our nightlights. So while John Carpenter's 1982 creature feature The Thing features a splattery, shape-shifting denizen from outer space, it's also addresses an equally terrifying theme, that of isolation.

Life is dull and cold in Outpost 31, an American research center smack in the middle of the Antarctic. Dull at least until a lone sled dog trots into camp one day, followed closely by a seemingly crazed pair of rifle-toting Norwegians in a helicopter. One accident with a stray thermite charge later, the Americans are left with two dead madmen, a flaming chopper and a new pet. Oh, and also an extraterrestrial ... parasite or infection or something. The men aren't exactly sure what it is or how it spreads. But they do know it can perfectly mimic any creature with which it comes in contact and messily dispose of those who try to harm it. Fear flashes into full-fledged paranoia as the men understand they're up against a nearly undetectable, indestructible enemy -- and that they themselves may already be infected.

The Thing doesn't scrimp on stomach-churning scenes, a hallmark of those late-seventies and early-eighties genre pieces. And they work pretty darn well despite the dated special effects. Indeed, one particular shock moment that transpires during a defibrillation attempt made me recoil from the screen. But the sense of loneliness and alienation is what really gets the gooseflesh going. With no solid idea of how the creature assimilates its victims, the Americans soon break out into open aggression against one another. Then any hope of outside intervention disappears when a blizzard slams into Outpost 31. That sense of alienation, of constantly having to navigate shifting loyalties and master fears that your friends are about to erupt into eldritch horrors, suffuses the entire film. And when the ending rolls, an ending both sublimely subtle and unsettling, you realize it's just as frightening to be isolated from the certainty of the truth as it is from friends and home.

(Picture: CC 2009 by orvaratli)

Writers on Writing in The Guardian

British newspaper The Guardian asked authors both literary and genre to provide pithy tips for those of us just getting started. Excerpts:

• Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. (Elmore Leonard)

• Cut (perhaps that should be CUT): only by having no inessential words can every essential word be made to count. (Diana Athill)

• Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need. (Helen Dunmore)

• Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire. (Geoff Dyer)

• Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. (Neil Gaiman)

• Have more humility. Remember you don't know the limits of your own abilities. Successful or not, if you keep pushing beyond yourself, you will enrich your own life -- and maybe even please a few strangers. (A.L. Kennedy)

Read the whole thing. Alas, the counsel does vary somewhat in the quality department. Some ranges from mundane ("Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes") to bleakly humorous ("Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide") to completely non sequitur ("Don't have children"). But a great many of the authors return to the same point: If you want to write, you need to write -- steadily, with ruthless commitment and devotion. In the end, that's the only way anything gets done.

(Picture: CC 2006 by athena.; Hat Tip: Neil Gaiman's Journal)

The Truth Will Out

Okay, dear readers, time to put away your polygraphs and see just how well you were able to sound out my deception. Read on to discover the veracity of my "Creative Writer" Blogger Award claims ...

1) I was born at the racetrack because my pregnant mother went into labor as she climbed the stairs into the stands.
• False. I was born in the hospital, not the racetrack. My mother only went into labor there -- ten weeks early.

2) An attempt to headbutt a goat as a child left me unconscious on the front lawn.
• True. Pure gospel, in fact. I was playing on all fours in the front yard with Buttons, my hoofed and horned pet. For some reason, Buttons decided my five-year-old self was a threat and charged. I may be a bit hard-headed, but I was no match for him.

3) Stanley Kubrick (of Dr. Strangelove fame) and I attended the same college, although not at the same time.
• False. Wes Craven attended my alma mater. Interestingly, Elm Street is a few blocks from the college. Methinks it’s no coincidence.

4) I double majored in biology and literature, then went on to Johns Hopkins to get yet another undergraduate degree.
• False. Alas, I am nowhere near as intelligent or accomplished as my wife.

5) I was immediately smitten when I first met my wife and dumped her close friend who I happened to be dating at the time.
• False. I forgot her name three times. Have I mentioned that she’s an incredibly gracious woman?

6) There are no literary novels on The Middle Shelf.
• False. But you’ll have to wait to see the title(s) in question!

7) I am not the least bit perplexed as to why no one has taken me up on a free copy of Genre Wars.
• False. Free books, people! Where were ya? Free books!

Bright Star Brings Lots of Heat

Romance isn’t my favorite genre. I prefer spacemen and spooks, dryads and detectives to heaving bosoms and clandestine love letters. But science fiction or noir or some such similar story wouldn't have really been appropriate for Valentines Day, so my wife and I picked up Bright Star last weekend, Australian director Jane Campion's recounting of poet John Keats' relationship with fashion student Fanny Brawne. The fact that Keats' work (in my humble opinion) beats that of his contemporaries with a stick mollified my genre trepidation, and upon watching I found the film immensely enjoyable. It's a quiet, understated piece whose leads share a potent sexual attraction -- without ever actually having sex.

Not that connubial pleasure is completely off the radar as in those Masterpiece Theater period dramas. Brawne and Keats' mutual attraction is evident to many more than just themselves. "You are already the source of so much gossip," Fanny's mother chides when she suggests a scheme to help the tubercular poet. After Keats falls ill, his friend Charles Brown sarcastically suggests, "Why not bed her? She'd do whatever you wished. It might relieve your condition." (Brown himself has no qualms about impregnating an illiterate Irish maid or suggesting that she should learn to read the Bible because "in the Songs of Solomon there are some bits so juicy they make even a churchman blush.") Brawne privately admits her own willingness to yield right before Keats' trip to Italy that ultimately claims his life. "You know I would do anything," she murmurs. His response? "I have a conscience."

James Bownman, author of Honor: A History, argues that such denial cranks up romance's thermostat. "It was the nearness of human happiness to irrevocable loss and tragedy that made the achievement of love, when it came, so exciting," he writes in The Wall Street Journal. "It is the absence, in our hook-up culture, of the sense that anything very much is at stake in love that makes our romantic comedies so feeble." In other words, sex becomes sexy in our stories when treated seriously, as though it has real import. It certainly works in Bright Star. Lingering close ups of Brawne and Keats' hands twining and untwining, lingering and caressing bring a surprising amount of heat. In fact, in that moment they seem like some of the sexiest things in the world.

(Picture: CC 2009 by ABEE_T)

I Seem Like A Natural Choice, Don't I?

I’ve been tagged for a "Creative Writer" Blogger Award! Which means I get to lie shamelessly to you all and test your truth-detecting skills. The rules are ...

• Thank the person who gave this to you. (Gracias to Patti Abbott of pattinase.)
• Copy the logo and place it on your blog.
• Link to the person who nominated you.
• Tell up to six outrageous lies about yourself, and at least one outrageous truth - or - switch it around and tell six outrageous truths and one outrageous lie.
• Nominate seven "Creative Writers" who might have fun coming up with outrageous lies.
• Post links to the seven blogs you nominate.
• Leave a comment on each of the blogs letting them know you nominated them.

Without further ado:

1) I was born at the racetrack because my pregnant mother went into labor as she climbed the stairs into the stands.
2) An attempt to headbutt a goat as a child left me unconscious on the front lawn.
3) Stanley Kubrick (of Dr. Strangelove fame) and I attended the same college, although not at the same time.
4) I double majored in biology and literature, then went on to Johns Hopkins to get yet another undergraduate degree.
5) I was immediately smitten when I first met my wife and dumped her close friend who I happened to be dating at the time.
6) There are no literary novels on The Middle Shelf.
7) I am not the least bit perplexed as to why no one has taken me up on a free copy of Genre Wars.

In no particular order, my chosen bloggers are ...

• B. Nagel of B. Nagel
• S.D. Smith of SDSmith.net
• Nathaniel Lee of Mirrorshards
• Aerin Bender-Stone of In Search of Giants
• Phil Wade and Lars Walker of Brandywine Books
• Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders
• Ehren von Lehe of Von Lehe Creative
• C.N. Nevets of Nevets.QST
• Any of the fine folks at The Literary Lab

So I broke the rules by nominating ten. Shoot me. Repeatedly. With a large-caliber automatic firearm.

To the guessing!

"Bark"

"He's just a defenseless baby," Marianne tells me. It's the third time she's said it since we left the hospital.

I nod, keeping my eyes on the winding country rod. By any rational estimation, newborns are some of the most helpless things on the planet. But after forty-five minutes in a car with one, forty-five minutes of ceaseless cacophony, every scream and shriek a new expression of infantile anger or need, you could be excused for thinking it's exercising some sort of sonic defense mechanism.

Marianne, though, sees it differently: "It's his way of communicating. If he wants something, he has to call until someone comes."

"At ninety decibels." I crack the window, which both lets some of the late-October air in and some of the screeching out.

"Shut that right now," Marianne snaps. "You'll give him a chill."

I obey. Like always.

When it came to having a baby, I thought the actual labor would be the hardest part, which I (fortuitously) could do little about except hold my wife's hand and tell her she was doing a great job. But I was wrong. While the manuals and birthing classes emphasized methods of delivery and pain-management options, they never prepared us for how to deal with the bone-deep weariness that accompanied our new little bundle of need. Sleep became both a luxury and a necessity as our son cried all hours of the day and night. He cried because he was hungry. He cried because he was dirty. He cried because he wanted his mother's touch or to be endlessly walked or for more inscrutable reasons, like perhaps out of a desire to play Parcheesi in Braille while watching the series finale of Twin Peaks. We couldn't really tell. And despite our best efforts, he usually kept on crying, unleashing a remarkable menagerie of howls, wails, sobs and whines.

Eventually, we started talking about the topic of child abuse, how we'd never really understood why someone would physically harm such a small, defenseless thing. It seemed like such a monstrous evil. But we imagined how if you stripped away the support structures of family and friends, put a mother or father under great external strain, then coupled all of it with the exhaustion and an infant's endless supplications ... Well, it was still monstrous. But we had an inkling about how it might happen.

One night, we awoke to sound of barking. Not of dogs. Human barking. A series of yips, high-pitched and plangent. We flicked on the lights. Our baby was lying flat on his back, looking up at the ceiling. We stared at him, bewildered that such a sound had come out of that tiny body. Then as we watched, he barked one more time and went silent. He almost seemed to be waiting for a reply.

"Bark," supernatural horror in the vein of M.R. James, was born soon after. You can read it in the Literary Lab's Genre Wars anthology.

Or you can win a free copy! Be the first person to email me at ISawLightningFall [at] gmail [dot] com with the approximate distance at which a newborn's eyes can focus, and you'll snag it.

Messinger on Least-Favorite Plots

Meagan Messinger, a production assistant at Tor.com, ticks off her least-favorite plots. Excerpts:

I hate it when I'm reading along, enjoying myself, and I realize that the writer doesn't have a story. They have a set-up, a setting, a single character, or one cool idea, and then they pack it in a bunch of words and hope no one notices that nothing happens in their "story." The major sign of this is that you think "Why was that one minor character so cool?" or "Why was I so interested in the numerology system?" Chances are, the author feels the same way. Sometimes the piece is short enough that it's okay, or the prose style is so beautiful or breezy that I don't notice until I go back and think about it. But a few of the methods for disguising a plotless plot always jump out at me.

Read the whole thing. Messinger blasts big-name authors for relying too much on surprise twists, high-concept characters and the loss-of-innocence motif. (Even the inimitable Neil Gaiman gets rightfully dinged over his narcolepsy-inducing short "How to Talk to Girls at Parties.") She also directs us back to the fundamentals, reminding us that the tinsel and ornaments may be shiny, but we can't forget to purchase the tree. Things must happen. Characters must change. It all has to flow, to be so well integrated you never see the seams. And I'd like to add another supposition, if I may: It needs a modicum of originality. Yes, I know there's nothing new under the sun and narrative arcs tend to fall into recognizable patterns. But we've all read the borrowed story, the one where only the clothing changes. Hollywood goes in big for them, propping up its CGI extravaganzas with the same old rickety framework. We ought to aim for more than pretty lights.

(Picture: CC 2009 by TheOnlyAnla)

Potholes on the Via Negativa

Communicating a theme is no small thing for the narrative writer. The way in which you do it shapes your entire story. Whether it's an epigram uttered in the heat of the moment or repeated symbolic shifts or the example of some sympathetic character, you have to organize the proceedings so that everything falls together to drive your primary principles home. And one of the techniques that most influences a narrative's action also happens to be one of my favorites -- the via negativa.

A preferred mode of classical horror and default for tragedy, the negative way guides us unto truth by marching us in exactly the opposite direction. It lauds contentment by plunging us neck deep in avarice, emphasizes meekness by abandoning us to suicidal ambition, advocates peace by having us hone the knives to razor sharpness. It's Macbeth failing to see how his own lust for power has destroyed him and muttering that life is "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” It's the liver-loving Hannibal Lecter saying, "You've given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling. You've got everybody in moral dignity pants -- nothing is ever anybody's fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I'm evil?”

There is one big pothole in the via negativa, though, namely that it supposes a reader will understand an author is intentionally presenting something unsavory, nasty, negative. But it doesn't always work. You see it most often at the movies when teenagers cheer at all the wrong parts, whooping as Allied forces fall during Saving Private Ryan's attack on Omaha Beach or chortling while Heath Ledger's Joker tortures a poor soul on videotape in The Dark Knight. That's the technique's dark side: It can school audiences in exactly the thing it should be teaching them to hate. The chances of that happening are slim if they're paying attention to the author's intent, but frighteningly high if they disassociate the work from its creator. And once they've gone that far afield, the ride is rough indeed.

(Picture: CC 2005 by indi.ca)

Jacobsen on What Causes Bad Writing

Roy Jacobsen of Writing, Clear and Simple considers just what causes bad writing. Excerpts:

When treating a disease, the key is eliminating the cause, and not just focusing on erasing the symptoms.

The same applies to bad writing. You can drive yourself crazy chasing all of the ways that writing can go wrong if you don't spend some time trying to root out the causes.

So what are the causes? Lack of training? Lack of time? Ignorance? Laziness? Apathy?

How about fear?

Read the whole thing. I started learning how to writing in a professional setting that was a tad harsh. Scheduled meetings with my editor would wake me long before dawn, tying my stomach in half hitches. I finally worried myself into the most chronic case of writer's block I've ever experienced. Stupid and silly, because jobs come and go, but skill of putting down words stays with you -- or at least should. A fear of failure and the dread of opening yet another rejection letter seem to fell more promising writers than any other thing, to send them drifting offer to easier interests. Jacobsen is certainly right when he says that fear leads to insipid, overly ornamented prose. But sometimes its keeps us from writing altogether.

(Picture: CC 2005 by tomswift46)

Friday's Forgotten Books: The Death of Grass by John Christopher

Note: Friday's Forgotten Books is a regular feature at pattinase, the blog of crime writer Patti Abbott. Log on each week to discover old, obscure and unfairly overlooked titles.

By definition, post-apocalyptic novels transpire after some sort of global disaster. This temporal perspective grants authors a bulwark behind which to build an exotic, busted-up setting and provides a buffer for readers against the immediate horrors of societal collapse. But when a writer changes that post into a pre, both barriers disappear, and the genre's shape shifts dramatically. That's exactly what John Christopher did in his first successful book The Death of Grass (published as No Blade of Grass in the United States).

John Custance never envied the mountain-bounded farmland his brother David had inherited from their grandfather. A city dweller by preference and architect by trade, he liked London just fine. Then the Chung-Li virus appeared, a rice blight that decimated Asia, and David unexpectedly offered for John to move his family out to his land where they would be safe. Surely an overreaction, John reasoned. Chung-Li only attacked rice, after all, hardly a staple for Britons. Or it only attacked rice until a mutation give it an appetite for grass -- every single sort of grass. Frightening, yes, but the government was working on a counter-virus, and that would surely set things straight. Yet when that stratagem fails outright and the United Kingdom awakes to the idea of a world without oats, rye, barley or wheat, John finds his thinking has changed. His brother's little farm, freshly planted with potatoes and beets, has begun to look like his only hope.

Christopher has been accused of writing cozy catastrophes, neat and tidy end-of-the-world scenarios with no real bite. But while The Death of Grass may not match Comarc McCarthy's The Road for brutality, it certainly doesn't shy away from nasty subject matter. Starvation, cannibalism, nuclear annihilation, murder and rape all make appearances, but fortunately the worst offenses get handled with a very light touch and the rest are wrapped in dry British wit. "I'm as slack as the rest of you," one of John's friends concludes as news of the mutation spreads. "I should be getting into training by learning unarmed combat and the best way to slice the human body into its constituent joints for roasting. As it is, I just sit around." If the novel stumbles, it's in its depiction of female characters (many of whom are almost interchangeable) and its ducking of big thematic questions. As John journeys toward the farm and his coterie swells into a clan, he begins to change from democratic urbanite into feudal warlord, seizing sustenance by the strength of his arm. The slow stripping away of socialization practically begs for authorial commentary, but Christopher seems satisfied with simply acknowledging the possibilty and moving on. A disappointment in an otherwise excellent novel.

(Picture: CC 2008 by jenny downing (r&r))

Counting the Opportunity Cost

My family hasn't had a proper vacation in years, so earlier this week we packed up the car and drove to Savannah. It's only seven-or-so hours north, but an entire world away in terms of history. South Florida is a place of constant development, where roads are always being repaved and anything circa 1950 is considered ancient. Savannah's a different story. It has guttering, gas-fed streetlamps, row houses built of a brick whose recipe was lost long ago and byways paved with worn cobbles. It's a joy to wander there, and while doing so I've paused every now and again to pull an out-of-print hardcover from my coat and read a paragraph underneath oaks that drip Spanish moss.

The book is cracking good, part adventure, part doomsday scenario, part primer on situation ethics. But I find I'm enjoying the physicality of the volume as much as the narrative it contains. A second printing borrowed through interlibrary loan, it has a much-creased spine proclaiming a faded title. The corners have begun a slow surrender to wear, paper peeling up and away from the thick cardboard beneath. The odor of dust wafts up from ragged-edged, yellowing pages, a scent as old as time.

I am not a romantic. I know that ebooks are the proverbial wave of the future, that they will largely wash away the need for loaning libraries and the very idea of out-of-print titles. We will have everything we want and more with the shuffling of bits and bytes over WiFi, and I cannot pretend that this is not progress. After all, I have an iPod and do not mourn the death of LPs and 8-tracks. Nor do I mind exchanging the jostling of cobbles for asphalt or flickering gas lights for electric. But I walk around this beautiful city where so much of the archaic remains and think of what we give up to gain. It's easy to forget that there's a trade at all.

(Picture: CC 2008 by UGArdener)

Taichert on Dreams, Goals and Getting Published

Pari Noskin Taichert, author of The Socorro Blast and regular contributor to Muderati, blogs about the foolishness of setting a goal of "getting published." Excerpts:

During the recent holidays, I met many people who told me their goal for this year is to "get published."

That ... [makes] me think we should discuss the distinction between dreams and goals here.

To me, dreams are hopes and wishes. They should be grand, marvelous, BIG. They should make you feel good when you think of them, smiling with the giddiness of magnificent possibility. ...

Goals, on the other hand, are the nuts and bolts. They are the steps that help you walk toward your dreams. The key here is that YOU have total control over whether you achieve your goals or not. No one else does.

So . . . I have a real problem with the idea of "Getting published" as a tangible goal.

Read the whole thing. Taichert dissects into three parts the problem with pledging to land your writing in a periodical. First, it's an end over which we have no control. ("Someone else judges your work and decides.") Second, neither acceptance nor rejection are infallible measures of quality. ("We've all read enough really crappy books to know that just about anything has a chance of publication no matter how awful.") And third, those of us who love to think up stories also love to discover doom and gloom in the littlest of slights. ("The problem is that we humans spend a lot of our time inferring. Writers are particularly bad about it.") Her suggestion? Keep on dreaming, but set your aim for something you yourself can hit -- bolstering your writing.

(Picture: CC 2008 by bogdog Dan)