The following AWESOME THINGS shall be written in CAPITAL LETTERS.
1. JAM. I totally MADE SOME JAM. And it was REALLY CHEAP because the fruit was FREE from MY YARD. We called it “BLAMBERRY”, i.e. plum and blackerry. I baked some SCONES and we had them with butter and the jam. Delish.
2. REAL CHAI. Then, if my weekend wasn’t awesome enough, my new roomie busted out with some REAL CHAI brewed in a pot with milk, tea, and SPICES. Yum.
3. OTTERS.
Yep. Otters are awesome.
I was out working in my garden yesterday, trying to get it semi-tidy before the autumn rains set in. I know it’s still August, but the chilly wind and low-angle sunlight made it feel like fall. (Fall and spring have always been my favorite seasons. Thus me moving out to the Pacific Northwest rather than Colorado, wherein fall and spring are each one week long.)
Anyway, I did some much needed pruning and brush-clearing in my large and absurd yard. And thoughts bubbled up in my head, like they do when I’m doing repetitive physical activities (Julia Cameron calls them “Artist Brain activities”). I was thinking about how well writing practice and gardening parallel each other. Gardening in the Pacific Northwest is easily a year-round endeavor. (Unconvinced? Check out this, the most awesome PNW veggie gardening book ever!) Writing is a year-round endeavor. Both have seasons of more intense labor. Both require daily maintenance for best results. Both can be kept up surprisingly well if you spend half an hour every day at them*. Noveling is more like upkeeping the whole damn yard: epic, takes a long time to come to fruition. Short stories are like container gardening: attention must be paid to each plant’s exact location. Poetry is like bonsai: every twig matters.
Now, with this beautiful metaphor and all, there comes reality. In reality, my morning pages** are like the stack of unturned compost in the corner of my garden. The chaos that is most of the overgrown herb beds is like my novel draft. The two functioning (ish) vegetable beds are like the chapters I’ve revised. For both my novel and my garden, it’d help if I really did work on them daily and keep the big picture in mind.
So, the nice metaphor is not necessarily ruined by the desiccated wasteland that was my lawn and the undealt-with piles of branches from my pruning efforts…neither my novel nor my yard are particularly well-maintained at the moment. And that’s okay. Because I’m working on both of them. Every damn day.
*Writing advice from my two favorite writers:
"30 minutes every day. Every damn day!" -Terry Pratchett
"And finish things. Then start new things. Then finish them..." -Neil Gaiman
**I write brain drain journaling for half an hour every morning. Julia Cameron calls them “morning pages.” They are important. Now, if I could manage to work on the novel for half an hour every day too, then that’d be closer to Terry Pratchett’s plan.
Or, some thoughts on time management.
I am thinking about times in my life when I’ve worked my ass off. Times when I’ve been pulling ridiculously long days and (mostly) enjoying it. Most of those times involved one or more of the following: 1. college, 2. a theater production, and/or 3. a writing project with an immanent deadline. The last time I’ve worked really hard and gotten a lot done was probably last November, during NaNoWriMo. Before that, it was working to get the dang novel edited and out the door in 2009. In both cases, I had an outside force working to motivate me. Even though they were both my projects, having an outside agency (other WriMos and the NaNoMeter of how many words I’d written, a self-publishing company) was vital to my success.
It rankles me that I work so much harder for other people than for myself. I think of all the times in college when fearing the wrath of a scary professor or the shame of late assignments was all that kept me going. I wasn’t always motivated out of Maslow’s Highest Tier in the Hierarchy of Needs…nah, much of the time I was motivated by fear or guilt…I worked out of “safety” needs rather than “self-actualization.”
Why is that? Why do we need to be motivated by fear to get really important personal stuff done? Why do we give our time so freely to others but struggle in giving it to ourselves? I’m not even talking about a ubiquitous “We”, I’m talking about me as a female in American society. I am programmed to respond to others before myself, which is a noble quality that will not get my novels written. I am programmed to deal quickly with things that are urgent, which is a useful quality that will not get my novels written.
I had a time-management class with the brilliant Wendy Call, who talked about to-do lists. To-do lists, she argued, are more or less crap. If you have a list of items, you will first do what is urgent, not necessarily what’s important. Better to have goals, she said. Better to think about concrete goals that you can do, like upping a word count or sending out a given number of manuscripts. What this said to me was, Best not to make my writing life an option. Make it a requirement. Get it done. And if it takes Write or Die to do it sometimes, well, I’m not sure that matters.
Some people hate this mindset. Some people I’ve talked to can’t stand the thought of forcing writing ever. Writing must be spontaneous to be any good, they say. Writing comes from a higher source, and you are a channel. You must wait to be in the mood, Inspired. Think about the word inspiration. It means breathing. Breathing is something that you do all the time, but becomes a powerful tool when made conscious. Likewise, I think that writing is something that is most powerful when made conscious, but really should be done ALL THE TIME. That spiritual source of writing is a radio station; it’s always on, you’ve just gotta tune in. So it’s not that I am a soulless unspiritual writing-forcer, it’s that I don’t think I want to wait around for inspiration to strike me. I want to keep the pump primed so that on the days when it does come, when I am writing out of a place of self-actualization, I can have a greater outpouring. If I write every day, then the blank page isn’t so scary, and sometimes I go to the mountain of Inspiration instead of waiting for it to come to me.
Here’s an assignment I gave myself this week: Do at least one thing you fear, or makes you nervous.
My successes include:
1. Signing up for classes at the Richard Hugo House. I signed up for a fiction critique class with Nancy Kress (to which I will bring a big ol’ chunk of Novel No. 2), and a master class in poetry (scary!) taught by David Waggoner. Hopefully I get into both classes. In any case, I’m excited.
2. I blew bubbles on my commute home, during the bit where I’m stopped on the 520*. I blew bubbles out of my window, and a few inside my car. No one seemed to notice or showed any noticeable reaction, although that is Seattle for you. If the zombie apocalypse came to Seattle, people would probably feign indifference and attempt to go about their daily routines.
3. I took an Intense Cardio “Martial Arts Bootcamp” class at my gym. It was really intense and I was sore later, but I didn’t totally hate it. This is a major step for me, as I generally avoid all things cardio. Actually, speaking of the zombie apocalypse, my secret motivation for running on the treadmill is imagining zombies chasing me. Not saying it’s healthy, just saying it works.
ANYWAY. I pass the challenge on to you! This week, do or try out one thing you fear.
*Dumbest highway ever. It goes between Seattle and Redmond, Washington. It is a special hell.
Who loves dystopias? Me, clearly, because I wrote one, but still. A good dystopia story is totally cathartic, the ultimate act of schadenfreude.
Holy crap. Too many big words. To review:
Dystopia: a “negative utopia,” i.e. a supposedly perfect world gone horribly wrooooong.
Schadenfreude: A German word meaning “happiness at the misfortune of others.”
…Anyway, dystopias. I’m sure you were forced to read one or two in school, if you went to school in the US…in any case, here’s a few of my favorites, in no particular order (with Amazon links for your convenience):
Utopia by Sir Thomas More
This is worth a read for sure, even if it does mean putting on your Literature Hat and slogging through some archaic language. A traveler is describing this perfect land of Utopia that he’d visited. I was interested in what parts of the society actually seemed like a good idea (women working) and what sounded like utter crap (people will stop caring about gold is we make our toilets out of gold and don’t use gold for money).
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
This is a rebellious book. It was first published in Russia in 1921, and immediately banned. While it was available in other countries, Russia kept it banned until Glasnost in 1988. I think anything worth strict government quashing for 67 years is worth reading! Really, We is a Classic Dystopia, in the vein of 1984 and Brave New World. The society in We is authoritarianism complete with names-as-numbers and lack of emotion. It wrestles with the question “How do you break out of your own mental prisons?”
Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
I admit it: I have never seen the movie. While I intend to, I think I’ve been putting it off because film can never capture the voice of the book. The story is told in first person from Alex’s point of view. For those who aren’t familiar, Alex is an insanely criminal 15-year-old in a dark future England whom the government tries to “fix” with mind control. The entire book is written in dialect, a strange Russian-based language to which you don’t know all the words and have to pick up as you read along. The language removes you a bit from the visceral violence of the plot, and allows you to read with more of a cold, Alex-like mindset. Whether or not you liked the movie, the book is absolutely worth reading.
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Yes, you probably had to read it in middle school. Here’s what I appreciate about The Giver: While most dystopias are a conservative or authoritarian society gone wrong, The Giver is a liberal society gone wrong. When I read it again recently, I was a little embarrassed to admit that I really liked a lot of the things in their society…the lack of cars, the open sharing of emotions, the coherent role for young adults… of course, there’s a lot about it that is Horribly Wrong as well. Lois Lowry actually wrote two sequels, Gathering Blue and The Messenger. They were good, but not as genius as the original. I think the ambiguous ending was one of the great things about The Giver, and its sequels make it a little less ambiguous. Nevertheless, they’re interesting enough to read and draw your own conclusions.
Y: The Last Man (series) by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, et al.
In 2002, a mysterious plague wipes out any animal, embryo, and sperm with a Y chromosome. The only survivors of the plague are a man named Yorick and a male capuchin monkey…and, of course, all of the females in the world. Perhaps this series is a little more “post-apocalyptic” than “dystopian,” but in either case, its vision of what the world would look like if all the men died is pretty damn fascinating.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
I’m about a third of the way through this so far. I am reading it in small doses, because it’s depressing as hell. I think it’ll actually have a redemptive ending, but good lord. I have to be in a masochistic mood to read it; it’s set in a grim and horrible future America where crime and corruption are so rampant that people live in these little walled enclaves, growing their own food and trying not to get robbed/raped/shot.
In another post, I’ll touch on dystopian film, which is a delicious subject too big to be broached here. Lately Mikeatron and I have been doing double feature movie dates, where each of us rents a video that the other one hasn’t seen. So far I’ve managed to pick out weird and disturbing movies (Cube, eXistenZ), and he’s managed to get heartwarming 90s films (Enemy Mine, The Professional). I don’t know what this says about our respective personalities. Perhaps he is a big softy at heart. Perhaps I am not. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence.
Apparently, it’s Things That Bother Me Week. Well, who am I to say no to the opportunity to complain on the Internet. (Complaint is the purpose of the internet, after all. That and porn.)
So. Something that bothers me: Chick Lit.
Chick Lit, to me, literature by women for women that probably has some literary merit, but at the end of day is about Getting A Man. It’s Bridget Jones’ Diary, Sex in the City, modernized versions of Jane Austen that don’t involve zombies* (e.g. Clueless), and other works of literature where sassy spunky heroines decide that their existence is sad and pointless without a man. Chick Lit is the magical lifestyle that Cosmopolitan is trying to sell to you. Chick Lit is close to a lot of feminist ideals that I treasure (sassy spunky heroines, for example), but then falls on its face and undercuts said ideals. Bridget Jones must lose weight to feel worthwhile. Charlotte isn’t allowed by her friends to stop dating just because she has a more fulfilling relationship with her sex toy than she does with men. I love Elizabeth Bennet to death, but she really couldn’t function without eventually finding Mr. Darcy.
The biggest appeal of Chick Lit, to me, is that most of the heroines are Bad Girls. Cameron Tuttle, author of Bad Girl’s Guide series, says, “Bad girls make it happen. A bad girl knows what she wants and how to get it. She makes her own rules, makes her own way, and makes no apologies. [...] A bad girl is you at your best–whoever you are, whatever your style.”
This sounds remarkably like my definition of badass. I’d like to see more Badass Girls. I’m talking girls with a wide range of interests and abilities, for whom romance may be a factor of life, but is not the be-all and end-all of existence. (Who knows, perhaps I’m just sick of stories about marriage.) Now, I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for a woman who’s willing to kick butt and take names, but that’s not the only type of Bad-Ass Girl I can think of. I’m thinking of women who can hold their own, keep to their ideals, and shape their own destinies as much as possible. To name a few:
Anyhow. While making that list, I found that it was way easier to come up with Bad-Ass heroines for whom marriage wasn’t an option: the very young or the very old. Also, a lot of young adult literature is filled with exciting strong women. So then what happens to our girls (and boys!) who grow up reading books filled with strong girl characters? As adults, the literature featuring women that gets any kind of publicity is Getting Married Stories with varying levels of Sex and Plot. I guess it begs the question: How much of modern femininity is still defined by the woman’s societal duty to marry and/or pop out babies? Am I just jaded because so many of my high school and college friends’ Facebook pictures are weddings and pregnancies and babies?
I’m curious. What’s your take on Chick Lit? How do you define it? Do you find it appealing? Worthy? Vile? Subconsciously antifeminist? What say you?
*I have not yet actually read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and I think I should. Perhaps I would like it better?