Almost Spilling Over

As I was sitting in the hospital cafeteria working on my computer, I got a flash of nausea that slowly worked its way up my throat and almost made me spill out all over the table. I held it down but was surprised by the reaction. I had gotten a serving of fried rice from an upscale grocery store on my way to the hospital and it was NOT sitting right with me. I felt like a bloated whale. I couldn't really think and I started to break out in an oily sweat. It was terrible.

I got in my car and drove myself home where I immediately crawled into bed and fell asleep. I got a lot of rest for me and I feel really good today. There has been no evidence of stomach trouble at all today and I wonder if my body wasn't just telling me to take the night off, to leave it alone and to shut down for an evening. Well, I can say that I feel better as a result of a good night's rest and I awoke before my wife woke me (our routine schedule for mornings). I feel like I lost some good time but, in the end, I got what I needed out of the evening, a chance to relax, rest and dream.

Another one down, another one down,

Another one bites the dust? Well, I hope not. I have finished my latest packet entry to my advisor and sent it off in a cascading stream of binary code across the country, irretrievable. I'm excited about the exchange this month. For one, I actually got to include some fiction writing in my packet this time around. Instead of the sole focus being the essay, I turned in a seventeen page story that I think works in this early version of the draft. Don't get me wrong, there is work to be done, but I think the story is revealing itself to me.

I wrote a couple of half-life pages last night after sending off my packet and then I decided that it was time for a nice little break and so I went to the movie store and went home to my wife. Sitting on the couch, I began to have the feeling of accomplishment, of having made it this far, of meeting the challenge I have set out for myself. Not completing it, mind you, but meeting it.

So, as I sat in the living room, feet propped on the ottoman, my dog eyeballing me as if curious as to why I was home so early on a Monday night, and my wife cuddled up under a fleece and down blanket, I began to realize something about this whole process, about the writing life, about myself.

I am a writer. I have to be. I have written for as long as I can remember and I want to write for as long as I can foresee. Nothing makes me happier than feeling like I have tuned a phrase so that it sings, not just for the music of the language, but for its placement, its perfect implication within a greater story, for its inherent truth. In many ways, words are the only way I know how to find truth in this world. I don't think there is a lot of it going around these days but I know it is out there. I know there are things in this life, as a human, as a culture, that are true and some of them are beautiful and some of them are terrible but they are there. I want to dedicate my life to finding and expressing at least one of those truths. I want to dedicate myself to the searching, the asking, the silently necessary task of making sense of this brief time we get to spend here on the physical plane. I believe I'm beginning to live my wish.

Intrusive revision

So I was working last night on a revision of my story that I'm expected to send in the next packet to my advisor when I get the feeling that instead of clarifying the text, I am confusing it, expanding it, diluting it. It's a strange position to be in when the result of your actions is having the exact opposite effect than what you intended.

How much of our intent is made clear on the page? How much of our intent actually is present in the consequences of our actions. I mean, the road to hell is paved in good intentions, right? So, when I'm working on my text and I'm trying to illuminate my characters, give them weight and depth, is my revision really working at counter purposes? Don't get me wrong, revision is absolutely the art in my work. My stories would be nothing without this process but it was interesting to me that when I dutifully sat down with this specific piece that the result was quite the contrary to the intent. Is it because I don't have enough distance from the project to really get down into the heart of it? Was I distracted and therefore making arbitrary and counter-intuitive changes?

The more I delve into the practice of writing, the more I find that I will never know the answer and for every problem that I solve, it will mutate into something new where I will have to struggle through the process all over again with all the accompanying self-doubt and anxiety that I bring to this process.

Just some food for thought.

Circular Living

I live in a circular pattern. Last night, my wife and I went to a birthday party for a friend who is getting separated from his wife. They are still keeping up appearances: hosting the party at their home, both in attendance. But it is quickly obvious that they are on the outs. There are separate activities planned for the guests, each one led by one of the couple - guys on motorcycles, girls wine tasting. Well, I shouldn't say that because I have neither a motorcycle, nor all the equipment, so I am left in the house with all of the women.

I have a terrible habit of getting a couple of cocktails in me and wanting to talk to my wife about the nature of our relationship. Last night was no exception. As we drove home (the party was an hour away from our home), I bring up our methods of communication, a subject that has been well worn, even in the last couple of weeks. It is something I think about...a lot. It is not something that my wife dwells on. She believes me to be too much of a thinker, that I do not allow myself the joys of life because I ask questions about what things mean, their implications.

I think part of this has to do with dedicating myself to the writing life. I have to ask what actions mean. I have to know why characters communicate in the way that they do. It is not a subject that is entirely fascinating to my wife. And that's fair, right? She doesn't have to ask the same questions I do, right? She doesn't need to dwell on the interpersonal relationships of failed couples, happy strangers, or odd looking vagabonds. I need to cut her some slack.

It's hard to put the thinking cap away. It's hard to stop myself from diving into the world of personal motivations and private conflicts. So, yes, I do have a point when I say to her that there is always room for improvement and it is good to talk about how we communicate. But does the conversation ALWAYS have to be about elevating our relationships and our souls to a greater plateau. Sometimes fart jokes are funny.

Playing with Voice

(A sample voice I was thinking about during lunch today)

I'm bored. I'm sitting in my office that barely escapes the classification of a cubicle and I'm watching movie trailers on my computer. I should be doing my work, calling strangers, repeating a script over and over again but I just don't have the energy to be mindless, or I have too much energy to be mindless. Either way, I'm dodging the things I should be doing. There are laminated maps of the country and individual states on the walls but otherwise everything is bland white and Ikea wood. The only place that I can go now is my imagination.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm turning into a junkie, travelling ever inwards inside myself, turning away from the things that sustain my life: my job, my friends, my family. I am distant from my own world right now because I am adrift in my own imagination. I find the landscape there more beautiful and more terrifying than the day to day monotony I am living right now. There is more potential for danger there, thus, more chance for heroism, adventure, and courage.

Here, I am non-threatening, amiable, even cheerful. But there are depths within me that are uncharted by another, even by myself. There are shadowy places within me where I dare not look lest I be tainted by the shadow, brought into its service and inadvertently destroy the beautiful things in my life. I am a killer. No one suspects me because I have not killed but I do exist inside this flaccid form. Behind these eyes, glassed over and reflecting the infinite tedium of my days, there is something dangerous inside of me that wants to break out. I can't promise that I can contain it forever but I do promise to try.

Some thoughts on revision.

As I sat down to work on the revision process for my new story, I felt something different about my writing this time around. It was strange to feel that my writing has changed over the course of my MFA program. It wasn't that I felt the draft was more complete than earlier first drafts but I did have a sense that there was a level of maturity(?) in the draft that hadn't been there before. Each time I come to the page there is something different in each new story but this time it felt significant and it felt good to feel like there was some payoff for all of the hard work I have put into this program.

Now, the revision process itself seemed very difficult this time around. For one, when writing this story I knew there were going to be some significant holes in the text where I would have to do additional writing to fill in the gaps but when I came to those places in the text it seemed a momentous task stood in front of me. RE-submerging into the text proved difficult to me. The initial visualization was difficult but this was something different. When I write first drafts, a lot of times, I can feel a subjugation of my personality and mind take place, it feels like the story comes forward of its own volition in some kind of subconscious process.

One advisor, a couple of terms back, told me that he believed that I used writing as a form of self-hypnosis that the words pouring out of me seemed to take me to place that was different from my conscious mind. The way I read that feedback then made me believe that he felt it was a negative method and that the self-hypnosis was actually cluttering my texts. I'm going to have to find the letter and reread it. Anyway, I'm beginning to think that it isn't such a negative thing at all. First drafts can be born in this fashion but the revision process needs to be the application of the rational and creative minds in order to fashion the story into the desired final draft.

I think this is where I was having problems with the text. The story is new and so there is a faint trace of that subconscious mind present when I come to it again with an eye towards revision. I believe this is where I was having a problem with the re-imagining. When I get distance from my stories I can see the form of them clearly and it is merely a matter of removing the offending blotches of clay that are still stuck to the form, possibly there is an issue of positioning the figure but these problematic elements are clear to my rational mind. I wonder if I will be able to do any significant revision of this story before it is due. Well, I have six days to find the answer.

Quitting

So, today is the first day of my quitting smoking and while I am sure I will reference that endeavor here, I have started a new blog that is dedicated solely to that endeavor. If you are at all interested in this process, you can read my new blog at www.sayinggoodbyetocigarettes.blogspot.com. Wish me luck. Today is a new day.

Completed Draft

For the first time in the last four months, I have seen a story through to an ending. With the critical essay requirement, I have been so focused on its completion, in fact, mandated to do so by my advisor, that I have not seen a story through to completion in a long time.

When that much time passes without the tangible result of beginning-middle-end, one begins to worry that there is some sort of block preventing a story from finding its way through to completion. Or, at least First Draft completion. I feel really good about the story. I'm not saying that it is a glimmering piece of prose but I am proud of the fact that there are some bones here that, with the use of my archaeologist revision tools, will be fleshed out to reveal the structure of a larger organism. I can see a thigh bone and maybe the crest of a skull so I know there is something in there, now I just have to sift through the debris and find it.

It is nice to know that I will have something that is at least passable for my next packet. I no longer have to work on completing a story, I just have to work on revision. There is something satisfying about pouring over your work once it is completed. I find myself agonizing so much at the point of creation, trying to make each word belong to the story and then I wind up getting rid of so many of them. It's a funny little bit of my process now that I think about it. I'm so strict with myself when putting one word after the other, but once I have something that I deem "complete" I can excise any one of those words, try on another one, change around their order and I don't feel the same level of anxiety. Weird. One would think that the closer you get towards a true polished draft, the stronger the need to maintain the text.

I think the main thing that influences this for me is that once I come closer to something being "polished" I can recognize the things that don't belong easier. I can smell a stinking adverb or a false emotion and excise it with a greater degree of clarity than when I am trying to birth something full form onto the page.

It's kind of been a long day and I realize that this blog post is becoming a tad rambling and I apologize, but these are the thoughts that are closing out this first segment of my homework night and I wanted to put them here so I could return to the idea later and reflect. Thanks for your patience.

Wedding Day!

I woke up this morning and realized that I would be ushering two people into their married life at 6:30 tonight. I have written and revised the ceremony numerous times and now have to settle with the fact that it is what it is. Don't get me wrong, I believe it is a thoughtful ceremony but I feel a heavy responsibility when I marry people to give their day special consideration and to channel that consideration through my words. As with writing short stories, I am trying to capture the essence of my subjects, my characters, and to be as open and honest about them as I can. I want to capture the essence of what is important in their lives and their day.

Wish me luck.

A Voice from Across the Ether

I work in relative isolation, as it should be. But every now and again I need to connect with other people engaged in the craft of writing. Today, as I sat down at work and collected my emails, I found one from a friend on the other side of the country. She is disconnected due to phone line and server problems but she took the time to reach me in her spare moments at a local library.

Her email, while short, was a nice touch to remind me that I am not in this alone. I have community. I have friends and they are as entrenched in this process of writing as I am.

Last night, I was driving home from my study session at the hospital where I have taken to writing when I was struck with a single line that felt like the title to something. That single neuron firing sent a cascade of tumbling thoughts through my brain that very quickly began to coalesce into a story. The first line was the second thought, the character was the third, his circumstances came forth and, as the night air blew through the open window of my truck, I knew I had been given a gift.

On my route home there is a Shari's restaurant, a coffee and pie house common to the Pacific Northwest, and I pulled into the parking lot at 10:30. The next hour, sipping decaf coffee, my fingers faced over the keyboard of my laptop and in the end I had four new pages staring back at me. As I wrote, the story moved and changed as it always does, expanding in parts, taking detours in others and I know that it is a living thing, that the "I" of the story is someone who is not me and I am just getting to know him.

I have been writing more over the past two weeks, the blocks I was feeling melting away under the heat of the kinetic movements of my fingers as I type stale prose. But what I am finding is something that an advisor in my program said. To paraphrase, "When you feel you have writer's block, write. Write poorly but write. When we give ourselves permission to write bad prose, poetry, etc we are giving ourselves permission to write and that will eventually unlock us from the blocks we are feeling." In no way is that as eloquently said as the original version but it serves its purpose.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand Unclench.

My back porch is half shaded around the one 0'clock hour and I found myself today with a good book and a cigarette enjoying the shade. My dog, on the other hand, chose the route of full sun. She lay on her side, black as a solar panel, soaking in the afternoon warmth. Bees made themselves busy around me, gathering nectar from a flowering vine in my yard that is supposedly related to bougainvillea. The orange funneled blossoms cascading down the vine as it grows up and falls back towards ground under the force of gravity.

The stories I was reading were touching me in all the right places, places where I believe in the possibility for the human soul, where I believe in the interconnectedness of all things and that there is no such thing as coincidence. It touched me in the place where I can believe.

I believe that life is hard. That it is meant to be. I believe that challenge is the only thing that provides growth and I believe that it is easy to compromise the soul when faced with these challenges.

I took a step back recently, a step back to a place before I reclaimed writing as my own, a place where gripy comments and inaction where the strategies I employed. Today though, today was a different day. So, I am glad that today was a study day. I've written 10 pages of new fiction, an entire wedding ceremony over which I will preside and a new section for my essay. I have been writing for four hours now and I'm just now beginning to feel the pinch in my back, the call of home, and the hope that my daughter will still be awake when I get there.

I'm hoping that I can carry over the feeling into tomorrow and next week and next month but I know now that it will return if I lose sight of it. I must simply remain engaged with the world, even when it seems impossible to do so.

Retail Therapy

Oh dear god it feels good! Last night, after almost falling asleep on myself at the keyboard, I abandoned my normal post at the hospital and made my way downtown to Powell's. My advisor had given me a list of books to read (at my prompting) and I really wanted to get started on them.

On the way downtown, I called my brother and had a positive conversation about an issue that was bugging me and was able to get it off my chest and then have a nice conversation after the fact. I felt bolstered by it. Contented that I had removed an issue from my table, at least until next time. The evening was nice and the Edward P. Jones book on tape was especially scintillating. I found a parking space right next to Powell's, helped a woman with her hand truck full of books to sell and quickly made my way inside to the Blue Room.

The Blue Room, even the room's designation makes me relax. I had the book list in hand and began to peruse the aisles, looking for books. I found about half of the books on the list, the other half will just have to be searched for online, and then I made my way to the sale racks and tables looking for other things that may spark my attention.

I found a short story collection I loved on sale for $3.00 and had to buy another copy. I figure I will send it to my friend, Brandon, who lives near where the stories are set. It was too good a deal. I found some authors I had never heard of but the covers sounded interesting and I couldn't resist as they were priced under $5.00. I walked out of Powell's with a paper grocery sack of books and about $70 poorer than I was when I entered but I felt elated, I gave some loose change to the homeless man on the street and walked down the sidewalk to my car humming a tune to myself simply to hear the tune play in my head.

On the way home, I came across an idea for a story. Actually, I had already had the idea and struggled through two stillborn versions before I decided that I was just going to come out with it. I was going to state what the story was about in the first line. So, I drove myself to a local pie house/coffee shop and asked for a quiet table where I could use my computer in relative quiet.

I was sat at the far end of a sun-room looking corridor of the restaurant. Directly opposing me, on the far wall was a group of teenagers who were discussing their elementary and junior high school pop culture influences. There was a lot of talk about the Spice Girls from the young ladies. The guys mentioned movies like Rocketman (not a bad Sunday morning goof fest, if you ask me).

I was poised, fingers over the keyboard, ready to state my case and I typed the first sentence. It was a piece of dialogue that directly stated what I wanted to write about. The rest began to flow. In an hour I had written four pages and more than anything else I have written lately, it began to feel like a story. I don't know if it is or not but I felt that way and it was nice. I called it a night after filling the fourth page and reading most of a short story from Emperor of the Air.

I packed my things, went home, talked with my wife and her friend for a bit and went to bed where I finished the rest of the story and fell off to sleep. Sleep rose quickly in me, I don't remember Tracy coming to bed, but I slept heavy and long, and, I think, I can't quite remember now because it is afternoon, but I think I slept and dreamt last night partially because I had new writers near me and books to explore once the sun rose again.

God I love retail therapy like this.

The Speed of Life

I linger at my mother's house until I am the last one there, besides my mother. It is late, the day having transitioned to night hours before and it is sultry, without breeze, as I stand in the driveway looking back at the house.

There isn't much left inside. My brother moved most of the stuff this last weekend and I'm playing sweeper, coming in for some last big loads and my mom will be moved. The family home I've known since the second grade will be possessed by strangers. They are a nice family, my mother says, with two kids nine and eleven. I'm saddened by the thought that I will never cross the threshold again, looking for my mother, celebrating Christmas, or having summer barbecues on the back porch.

Time marches on, as it always does and I chalk it up to yet another change in the long list that has occurred in the last year. The monumental force with which my life is changing takes my breath away. I can't seem to find the lull in the action and I'm getting broadsided by events that I thought myself emotionally prepared for.

So I watch the house. The big front bay window looking in on the empty kitchen, the upstairs lights extinguished and the sound of silence coming from the basketball court in the side yard. I've lived so much of my life on that piece of ground. I lost my virginity in that house. I mourned family and friends in that house. I celebrated Christmas Eve for years on end with extended friends and family, a party that gained a reputation for the best of the season. And now its over. There will be no more Christmas in that house. I'm overcome with a flush of sadness as I trace the roof line, imagine the time I actually climbed the steep pitched roof to fetch a frisbee or a whiffle ball. It's unimaginable to me that someone else gets to lay claim to this physical representation of my family, my life.

And then I realize that the house is simply a shell. It isn't the thing itself. It isn't the family, it isn't childhood, it isn't even Christmas. It is a location, a place, and the power of it is encoded in my genes, in my memory, for me to savor for the rest of my life. I will tell its life in story.