This is Part 1 of a talk I gave last week (November 20, 2013), to the Annapolis Chapter of the Maryland Writer’s Association. What a delightful evening I had with this group!
November 28, 2013 Leave a Comment
June 24, 2013 Leave a Comment
Why Fight the Wifi
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Here’s your problem, my compadre. You need long blocks of silence in order to do your creative work. But your Wifi connection poses a constant threat to that silence. In fact, you’ve got a minor addiction to constantly checking, or playing on, email, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, whatever.
You need a good soul-shake. You need a total re-think of your creative connection to the Internet. On this edition of The Comic Muse Podcast, my task is to do just that.
April 15, 2013 Leave a Comment
April 11, 2013 Leave a Comment
“Don’t Call an Ambulance. It’s Only an Artistic Coma!”
I love reading biographies of authors. I love reading most about the period of their early struggle (and, frankly, I often lose interest after the author achieves success). Just last night I dipped back into the early chapters of Robert McCrum’s magnificent Wodehouse: A Life.
“The quality of [Wodehouse’s] life as a freelancer was solitary and unremitting. He hardly ever went out. He was working too hard. After the Globe in the morning, he would walk back to his lodgings and start work right away. Occasionally, he would break off to play cricket, but he was too keen on his work to leave his desk for long.” McCrum, p. 57
Wodehouse, author of over one hundred books, was clearly a writer who knew how to induce what Dorothea Brande calls the “artistic coma.”
Artistic coma? Sounds dangerous. What is it?
The artistic coma is more commonly referred to today as the “zone,” or “flow,” or being “in the groove.” It’s that state of being lost in the imagination but in such a way that one doesn’t just stare at the wall, but rather, almost without effort, writes.
Inducing the artistic coma, as Brande teaches in Becoming a Writer, is really a simple process. Almost silly it’s so simple. First we have to learn to quiet the mind. Which is why constant checking of email and social networks during a writing stint is a terrible habit. Believe me, I know. To quiet the mind means to still the “chattering monkey” of our thoughts, and for that the even louder chattering monkey of the Internet needs to be, for a time, locked in its cage.
But the artistic coma is not just a matter of quieting the mind. Once a habit of quiet has been cultivated, then a story idea or character can be brought in. In the womb of relaxed silence the idea gestates.
And then?
“Presently you will see the almost incredible results. Ideas which you held rather academically and unconvincingly will take on color and form; a character that was a puppet will move and breathe. Consciously or unconsciously every successful writer who ever lived calls on this faculty to put the breath of life into his creations.” Brande, p. 166
All that pencil sharpening that writers do? All those games of Internet solitaire? All that leisurely strolling and paper clip sculpting? It’s all done, wittingly or no, to put the mind in a state of languidly alert stasis, a “coma” not unlike the moment before falling asleep, or upon waking up from a Sunday nap. Brande even encourages a stroll and a hot shower before inducing the coma in preparation for writing.
I suppose for Wodehouse, the walk home from the Globe offices was inducement enough.
What’s your strategy for inducing the artistic coma? What more than anything puts you in the “zone” for work?
April 9, 2013 Leave a Comment
Failure to Launch
So you check the email one more time, or consult your planner or glance at the newspaper. Anything but confront the page in the notebook or the document on the laptop where you will actually have to go to work.
Why don’t you plunge in?
Why do you hesitate?
You say you want to write something–something wonderful you have in mind–and yet you put the launch on hold. Why?
Fear, typically.
Fear creates a chasm between wish and reality, between the daydreamy wannabe and the lunch-pail writer busy putting sentences together like a bricklayer making a wall.
Fear of failing to execute as you dream of executing.
Fear of not measuring up to someone else’s expectations.
Fear of being alone with all your half-formed and unconvincing thoughts.
Fear of not making it (whatever “it” is).
Fear of difficult work.
Fear of being thought a fool.
Fear of silence.
Fear of the feeling of fear itself.
There’s only one thing to do with the monster under the bed. And no, it’s not looking underneath to prove that it’s not really there.
The only thing to do about the monster is to ignore it.
In other words, to plunge right in. To walk straight across the chasm, through the open space, looking straight ahead and not down.
In brief: to write.
One sentence at a time.
Just one sentence.
Write it.
Now.
And feel the courage and inspiration surge through you…
So what’s your fear?
April 3, 2013 Leave a Comment
The Problem of the Next Line
Back to the question of planning versus plunging. Here is a YouTube clip from an interview with playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard in which he discusses his play, Arcadia. Watch the clip from the beginning to 2:04, where Stoppard discusses the genesis of the play. Then pay attention again from 2:58 and following, where he discusses his method of composition. Stoppard is definitely a plunger, not a planner. When writing, he keeps his attention focused on the “problem of the next line.”
The following point Stoppard makes I found especially interesting:
“…if you actually start by slicing and dicing what you think you’re going to write, making it very logical, and you know where you’re going and you know where the corners are and you’ve got this roadmap, I think the result would be actually quite brittle, because unconsciously you’re forcing people to say and do things so that they stick with your map.”
Today I picked up again a book I’ve had on my shelf for years, and which may well be the best book on writing there is, Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer. It’s not a book about the techniques of storytelling, but rather about the habits required to become a successful writer. Brande is fascinating on the role of the unconscious (not subconscious) in writing and on strategies of giving it free play–the kind of free play Stoppard describes in this interview.
Brande writes:
“The unconscious should not be thought of as a limbo where vague, cloudy, and amorphous notions swim hazily about. There is every reason to believe, on the contrary, that it is the great home of form; that it is quicker to see types, patterns, purposes, than our intellect can ever be. Always, it is true, you must keep a watch lest a too heady exuberance sweep you away from a straight course; always you must direct and control the excess of material which the unconscious will offer. But if you are to write well you must come to terms with the enormous and powerful part of your nature which lies behind the threshold of immediate knowledge.”
When we come to terms with the unconscious, as Brande relates, we will then be able to “follow our nerve endings,” as Stoppard so descriptively puts it, and thereby solve the problem of the next line.
So that we can go on to the next.
So what do you think? How does all this comport with your method of composition? Do what Stoppard and Brande say resonate with your experience? Or does anyone want to give two cheers for plotting?
April 1, 2013 1 Comment
This Immortal Instinct for the Beautiful
“it is this immortal instinct for the beautiful which makes us consider the earth and its various spectacles as a sketch of, as a correspondence with, Heaven….”
Baudelaire, L’art romantique
The beautiful.
This has been the goal of writers and poets and all other artists for most of human history.
Yes, the concept of the beautiful has been put to the question by artists and critics in the last one hundred years or more, but even so it remains a concept worth trying to understand, if not commit to. After all, it was the quest for the beautiful that motivated Greek tragedy and Dante’s Commedia, the Annunciation of Fra Angelico and Michelangelo’s Pietà, as well as Shakespeare’s plays. If only out of respect for these great artists and works, shouldn’t we at least give a few moments’ thought to the nature of beauty?
Maybe in doing so we will find something to motivate our own work…
As a prompt to get you started, I have written a little e-ssay entitled “Freshening the World: A Very Brief Introduction to the Concept of Beauty.” I am a philosopher by training, but this e-ssay is not meant to be a full-blown scholarly treatise on beauty. It is, as the title says, a very brief introduction. But hopefully it will get you started thinking about beauty if it’s a concept you’ve never given much thought to before.
Oh–and my e-ssay is yours, absolutely free.
All you have to do is join The Comic Muse email newsletter by using the simple sign-up form at the top of the Blog page here at The Comic Muse.
After you receive and click on your email confirmation, “Freshening the World” will be sent to your email box in .pdf format.
You’ll also then receive, every week, The Comic Muse email newsletter, with craft tips, news and notes on the business of writing, and more.
I hope you’ll sign up today and that you’ll enjoy “Freshening the World.” If it prompts some thoughts, comments or questions on your part, I hope you’ll contribute them via one of the com boxes (see above the title of this post), or by emailing me, Daniel McInerny, at [email protected].
March 28, 2013 Leave a Comment
250 Words Every Fifteen Minutes
It’s interesting. When I put the thoughts from my last post in front of the folks in the Writer’s Café at Kindle Boards, I received, from more than one writer, a very strong reaction I had not expected.
One said that people who focus on their artistic temperament are really only playing at being writers. They don’t realize that unless they actually write something they’ll never be a writer.
Another apparently pretty successful writer–having mentioned in her reply an agent and film producer–simply said that she didn’t have the luxury of having an artistic temperament. She was too busy working.
Other replies to the post gave no quarter to the thought that being an artist is an excuse for boorish behavior. One said that “artistic temperament” sounds like someone missing a vital part of their upbringing, someone who had never learned self-control.
To these writers, the phrase “artistic temperament” immediately suggested a prima donna, a self-absorbed aesthete more interested in the thought of being a genius-creative than actually sticking the bum in the chair and putting words on paper.
I suppose that’s one pitfall of the artistic temperament. We can let it grow wild such that the need for approval, to be thought special, drains the life out of both the work and our relationships with other people.
But I was glad to hear these reactions. They showed that one of the key ways of bringing the artistic temperament to maturity is to focus on the work and not on one’s self. The writers on Kindle Boards pride themselves on being hard-knuckle devotees of their craft, not white wine and brie literateurs.
Perhaps you’ve hard about the work habits of the great 19th-century English novelist, Anthony Trollope. Trollope’s day job, through much of his writing career, was as a postal inspector. So when did he find time to write? Every morning from 5:30 to 8:30. Pushing himself in those three hours to write 250 words every fifteen minutes. And if he finished a novel before 8:30? No big breakfast celebration with kippers. No, he took a fresh sheet of paper and started another one.
How did it go for him?
49 novels in 35 years.
March 26, 2013 Leave a Comment
Your Artistic Temperament, Or, How Is It Possible You Still Have Friends?
Imagine the following:
A writer deep into the second act of his magnum opus who realizes that he hasn’t brushed his teeth in a week. Or talked to his children. Or stepped outside long enough to check the mail. Or eaten anything not made with high fructose corn syrup.
Or a writer who spends months fighting brave battles in the land of her imagination, but who immediately gets sulky and petulant when her beta-reader doesn’t get her allusion to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida on page one of her sci-fi epic.
Remind you of anyone?
Ah, the artistic temperament! So tedious to be around–and so tedious to be around. Not that there aren’t upsides to it. I mean, without a bunch of us super-sensitive, high-strung types, the world would never have been graced with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer, Snakes on a Plane, or the Twilight series.
But seriously. The artistic temperament is indeed a beautiful thing, but it can also be a right pain in the easel. And not just for friends and family members. The same temperament that sees God in a grain of sand can also undermine one’s work in any number of ways: through discouragement, procrastination, even vanity.
The good news is that temperament of any kind is susceptible of being formed. Just as someone who by nature is melancholic can learn how to work with what is best in that temperament and reject what is destructive, so too the artistic temperament (which is often melancholic, too) can be shaped and guided and formed.
This work of formation is part of what Flannery O’Connor means when she talks about the habit of art.
So now we have to talk about how to form the artistic temperament–that’s the agenda for this week on The Daily Muse. What strategies help to capitalize on what is best in the temperament and reject the stuff that makes our best friend want to run screaming from the room?
Your help is vital in collecting and clarifying these strategies. How have you handled the difficulties and promises of your artistic temperament? What’s worked and what hasn’t?
March 22, 2013 Leave a Comment
Muriel Spark and the Uses of Omniscience
In talking about free indirect speech in the last couple of days, I didn’t situate it within its wider historical context. Free indirect speech is a technique that was exploited, if not invented, by modernist writers such as Joyce. David Lodge observes that free indirect speech (or style) was also a feature of some of the best-known British social realist novels of the 1950s, such as Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. Lodge notes that these novels “were narrated in the first person or in free indirect style, articulating the consciousness of a single character, usually a young man, whose rather ordinary but well observed life revealed new tensions and fault-lines in postwar British society.”
Lodge makes these observations in the context of a revisiting of Muriel Spark’s very different novel from the 1950s, Memento Mori (1959). In this black comic send-up of the effects of looming death on a collection of senior citizens, Spark eschews the exploration of a single consciousness through a heavy use of free indirect speech. Rather, Spark embraces an intrusive omniscient narrator of the kind that Lodge associates with 19th-century novels. And her narrative strategy is to move rapidly in and out of the minds of her large cast of characters, a rapidity that is intensified by the brevity of the novel itself. In proceeding in this fashion, according to Lodge, Spark “violated the aesthetic rules not only of the neorealist novel, but also of the modernist novel from Henry James to Virginia Woolf.”
The plot elements of Memento Mori are also throwbacks. Lodge indicates how Spark weds her “new, speeded-up, throwaway style to a complex plot of a kind excluded from modern literary fiction–in this case involving blackmail and intrigues over wills, multiple deaths and discoveries of secret scandals, almost a parodic update of a Victorian sensation novel.”
So I’m wondering if the media here are not part of a message. That is, I’m wondering if the modernist exploitation of free indirect speech isn’t a manifestation of the greater cultural weight given to interiority at the dawn of the twentieth century. And whether in eschewing its effects in Memento Mori, in favor of an omniscient narrator and Victorian plot elements, Spark isn’t calling us back to an older cultural understanding where the individual consciousness was always under the watchful eye of a Consciousness not his own–a Consciousness always reminding the individual of Death, “the first of the Four Last Things to be ever remembered.”
