Category: talk to me

Like a Song: Elevation

This is an essay I wrote for @U2, where I am a staff writer. It’s part of an @U2 series called Like a Song, in which staff members offer personal reflections on U2 songs.

Let’s talk about joy.

I am standing in front of the stage with a heart like a jackhammer and a soul ready to take off, a kite that only wants a strong wind. The power of music: to make us fly. I’ve sat on a cold Seattle sidewalk for 12 hours and stood crammed in this crowd for another three, waiting, waiting, wanting to soar. The power of music: to make us feel. And now the crowd is roaring: we are a hurricane of noise, and the eye of our storm is U2, taking the stage, taking a scan of the arena, and then taking us all to the places we all want to go. The power of music: to show me myself in a song. To remind me tonight that I am large inside, so much bigger than the tiny boxes that everyday life sometimes tries to squeeze me into. Tonight I am a creature of hope and love and joy, and there is no better song than “Elevation.”

High
Higher than the sun
You shoot me from a gun
I need you to elevate me here

I listen to U2’s music at different times for different reasons – to feel the fierce abandon of “The Fly,” the anger of “Mofo,” the yearning of “Streets.” Because a song describes a desire so private that I can’t, or won’t, seek it anywhere except inside the music. Or because I need to put a name to some specific pain so I can cry over it, and begin to be healed. The power of music: a stranger sings our innermost self. I put U2 in my headphones to hear myself, and the songs I like best are the ones that are most about me.

But I come to the concerts to see four men make the music happen right in front of me, and here the songs I like best are the ones that are most about them. Forget about being pulled up to dance, or getting the autograph outside the stage door. That’s not where the real juice is. If you want to meet the band, then watch them make their music, because in the instant when they give themselves over to it you will see their souls. You will know all about them in those moments. I have seen their fierceness and their anger and their yearning. And I have seen “Elevation” live, and know that whatever else they may be, Adam, Larry, Edge and Bono are people of joy.

See for yourself.

This is the 2001 Slane performance of “Elevation,” full of joy. The power of love to bring us out of the dark of ourselves into the sun. The jazz of the four-way relationship, the heightened awareness of each other that comes from 25 years of playing together: you can feel it when they share a look, when they lean toward each other for a note.

And above all, there is the sheer joy of making music. Bono can’t wait: he howls it out as the audience quivers in the moment, and then Larry counts them in tap tap tap tap, brings his sticks down BLAM and the lights come up and Bono leaps into the song. Watch it fill him so completely that it propels him around the stage and makes his body move, move, move. Watch Adam lean into the music and smile that private smile. Watch Edge dance with his guitar as Bono sings about jubilation. Watch for that twirl of Larry’s drumsticks at the end. And look at Bono smile as he walks back toward his band. That, my friends, is the joy of U2.

You make me feel like I can fly
So high
Elevation

The power of music: our worlds collide and I am sharing soul with my Irish brothers, whom I never love so much as in these moments when they sing themselves and take me with them. Not let’s get naked love or some kind of worship, but the electric connection of shared humanity: they are full of joy, and so I am too. It’s such a human thing to do, to show our souls and make joy for each other. And that’s why I come. That’s why I wait in line and stand until my back is frozen and offer up my heart. I come to see U2 be human and make music. I come for the joy of it.

Naked truth

Question for you.

Do you have secrets? I ask that because as a writer, I imagine many of your personal theories and philosophies and fantasies and the like get written down on the page, in one way or another, disguised or not. You’ve also down your share of interviews (although I’ve only read two) where you answer personal questions. And you’re very candid, very refreshing.

I guess I wonder if you have boundaries that you don’t cross in interviews, or even on the page. Things that you keep close and keep closed, if you would.

Writers always say that if you can’t tell the truth about yourself then you can’t tell the truth about others, and that in order to write — really write — you have to be willing to be excruciatingly honest with yourself, no holding back. You write and by doing so you look at yourself in the mirror (so to speak) and write from what you find. When that happens, when you write a novel, when you do an interview, do you feel hollowed out afterwards? Are there things you hide from the general public (which I realize would include me)?

I truly apologize if these questions are intrusive. I am just curious, but sometimes my curiosity can get the best of me. I’m just very intrigued.

Luey

Hi, Luey.

I think healthy people have boundaries, and I certainly have them.

I have secrets, too. But “secret” is one of those words that means enormously different things to different people. And it’s meant different things to me at different points in my life. I’ve kept secrets at times in my life because I thought I would break if anyone knew them, that my life would be over…. I don’t have those kind of secrets now. They are not worth it.

But I am in many ways a private person, interview candor notwithstanding. I think it’s possible to be both candid and private, it’s just a question of where those boundaries are. I can tell the truth about myself: I just don’t always choose to. Not that I lie about myself routinely, that would be exhausting, but just that my personal boundaries are more rigorous in interviews, in conversation, in the world of human interaction. There are things that I don’t share because they will hurt other people too much. There are things I don’t share because they will hurt me too much. That’s life.

But the boundaries between me and my work are much more permeable. I use myself in my work all the time, all of me, even the parts that would hurt me or someone else in the real world. Some of those things are obvious to people who know me. Some of them, no one but me will ever recognize. Sometimes I don’t even know until they are on the page — but at some point I always do know. That is what comes from expertise — knowing when a piece of writing is true, and knowing (often only later) what it is true of.

I had an extended conversation with Robin on Virtual Pint (the “let’s sit down and talk” area of my old website before I discovered the Beauty That Is WordPress) about this notion of when/how the writer finds herself on the page. The VP archives are a total mess right now, but I plan to move them all over here at some point, so I’ve decided to start with that conversation. Here it is, in chronological order:

Meaning and vulnerability (April 2006)
Naked (July 2006)
More naked (November 2006)

As you’ll see, I’ve been through some changes on this. And that’s the thing about being honest, you know? We can only be honest (or not) about what we know… but I don’t know all there is to me yet. When I was younger, I thought that I was supposed to know all about myself, that self-awareness was a zero-sum game. And that if I didn’t have it, I wasn’t a real adult, I was only pretending — or worse, trying my ass off and failing, failing, and that any second now the real grownups around me would realize it.

I don’t think that anymore. Now I see it as a process, a becoming… much the same way I currently see writing. The more I see it this way, the more closely bound my self and my writing become for me.

But I don’t look in a metaphorical mirror when I write — I look at the characters. I don’t write “about myself.” I don’t use consciously use fiction to explore my own issues or my own psyche, although every story has some of me in it. Characters turn up with hopes or fears or dreams or joys or grief that feel just like mine…. and when those moments are real on the page, that’s when a story starts being true.

Interviews do not hollow me out. They are work, sometimes enjoyable, sometimes a chore. Writing fiction and screenplay makes me temporarily insane in ways that I very much enjoy, but I suspect are sometimes a trial to the people around me. If you want to know more about that, you can find it in a story called “Dangerous Space” — the relationship Duncan Black has with music is a very extreme version of my relationship with writing. And the way Mars feels about music is exactly how I feel about it.

Was that conscious? No. I wasn’t planning to write about my stuff. But it was right for those characters, for that story, so I used it without hesitation. I will put myself on the page anytime I need to if it’s in service of the characters, of the story, of making it true. If it’s just to roll around in my own stuff, well, I hope I am enough of a real writer to know that wouldn’t be real writing.

And no apology necessary. The nice thing about being a grownup is I don’t have to answer people’s questions if I find them intrusive (grin).

Short stories

Kelley:

Recently I have been reading a short story book by Jeffrey Deaver called “Twisted Stories.” Reading the book, and comparing it to similar books I have read by Stephen King and Dean Koontz, leads me to one question I have about short stories.

I like to think I am good at reading character, in people in general. So my question is can a good writer, reverse that type of process, and give a reader a good solid character in a short story?

It’s especially obvious in Deaver’s book that characters take a back seat to get a good shock by the ending. Surely you can manage a short story while still giving your character some depth if movies can do it, it’s a very similar format in pacing and length. Thoughts?

I absolutely believe that three-dimensional, emotionally true characters are possible in short fiction. I would have to put a fork through my forehead if I didn’t (grin), since those are the kinds of stories I try to write.

I agree with you about Deaver and many, many other writers of short fiction, particularly in crime/thriller genres. I’ve read very few short stories in those genres that paid much attention to character. In those stories, the point is the twist at the end, the shock (the big reveal, they call it in screenwriting). Some science fiction is like that too, although much more SF these days tries to focus the “cool idea” through the lens of character. Some people are more successful than others.

And some writers just don’t do short stories very well.

And some writers believe short stories are not to be taken as seriously as longer ones, which makes me exceedingly grumpy. There’s a school of thought that says novels are “better” than short stories because they are longer, more complex, require more carefully blended layers. Et cetera. I think it is certainly true that novels are more work than short stories; they take longer to conceive and longer to write. What pisses me off is the assumption that doing more work automatically makes a work more worthy, and therefore short fiction is automatically lightweight not just in word count, but in intrinsic value. Stories certainly can be lightweight, sure — you’re reading some right now. But they can also be luscious and dense and have as much layering, pound for pound, as a novel; and to create compelling character in 5,000 or 15,000 or 25,000 words is neither an easy nor a less worthy thing to do.

Not sure I agree with you about Stephen King. I think he’s a master of character. There’s no one who does a particular American voice and manner like he does, and with such obvious love for his characters, even the real shitheels. I love his work. If you’re not finding enough character in the shorter stories to interest you, then I highly recommend any of his novella collections (writing as either Stephen King or Richard Bachman): Different Seasons (amazing stuff, including Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and The Body), Four Past Midnight, and The Bachman Books, which are actually short novels but rip along so fast they feel like novellas.

I’d love to hear anyone’s recommendations for short fiction with great characters. Let’s talk.

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And if anyone wants to start a different conversation, just use this link (or the Talk to me here link on the sidebar). It may take me a little time, but I will respond — I love these conversations.

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Edited to add: Jocelyn just turned me on to the short review “where short story collections step into the spotlight.” A brief wander through the site already tells me that there are plenty of collections out there dealing with character-based fiction…. so let’s all go find something good to read.

Also check out their blog.

More hope

Hi Kelley —

Found my way into some of the comments in your Virtual Pint and felt inclined to comment. First that article on Joshua Bell’™s experience was fascinating. I was thinking that if they had tried it at the end of the day instead of at the beginning when people had more time — it would be different, but then there were the people standing in line for the lottery tickets with time to spare. What that says about our society is kind of frightening really. On the flip side, I found the lack of the public’™s appreciation for him mitigated by the $40/hr he took in. Not so bad really. I wonder what percentage of the number of people who passed through appreciated him vs the percentage of the number of people in our general population who would appreciate him if placed in context for them. That is to ask is that percentage any different than how many people in our culture appreciate classical music? than how many people can see through their own crap and appreciate beauty for beauty’™s sake? Reading that article did not make me feel hopeful.

Then one post led me to another and I read the discussions on hope, that lead me here and here. My first reaction when reading about the Goss book you mentioned was to vehemently disagree, but on reflection, I’™ve about decided that I’™m going to order a copy. (I already checked and my local library doesn’™t have it) I really think the reason I (we) continue on is because of hope. Otherwise, at some point or another it just wouldn’™t be worth it anymore.

While I do agree with what she says about acceptance and about life not turning out the way it ‘˜should’™, I think that’™s more a matter of accepting that life is not ‘˜fair,’™ and not a matter of giving up our hopes, dreams, plans, and/or goals. The idea being acceptance rather than resistance; resistance gives a thing more power and takes the energy away from the solution. Maybe my issue is just that I would probably define hope differently than she does.

As for the question of what is hope? I think it what helps us conquer fear. I don’™t believe we can expel fear from our lives. I think it will always be there, but what I can do is continue on despite the fear. Hope helps me to do that. I wouldn’™t call it the opposite of fear, but I would say it’™s the conqueror of fear (along with action). One could say that actions conquer fear, but how can one act without hope? Call it hope or faith (in myself, my loved ones, the universe), belief, vision, or even goals. It is what keeps the human race going isn’™t it? I understand the argument that accepting failure would negate the fear of it, but I’™m not buying it. Where does the motivation come from? It sounds like she’™s saying that failure is a foregone conclusion. Well, ok, I accept that there will be (have to be) failures along the way, but not that the ultimate outcome will be failure. Maybe we have to change our concept of what that ultimate goal is because of the things we learn from our failures, but if the path has heart, so will the end and so will we. Maybe hope is part of having heart.

That doesn’™t mean that I believe in false hope. I think I understand what you mean about not hoping for a cure for MS. I have faced the loss of hope of a cure for ovarian cancer a loved one facing a recurrence of that. There is a difference between facts and possibilities. It’™s a hard line to draw. Doctors these days are reluctant to give out statistics and predictions for terminally ill patients. The reason for that is they have seen what the results of doing that are; patients who are told they have 2 months to live are more likely to die in two months than those who aren’™t told that. I have seen this happen for myself. Holding out hope (hoping against hope) for a miracle could prevent one from making the most of what is in this moment. I’™ve faced that choice and had to let my lover know that I faced it with her. Maybe if I’™d faced it sooner, I could’™ve supported her better. Or… maybe when she saw that I had given up hope, she deteriorated more rapidly than necessary. It’™s something I still wonder about these 9 years later. I watched another close relative experience a very similar path with the same disease with a different attitude; one of denial. She was much older, yet lived longer. Who can say why, but it makes me wonder.

Belief/attitude/hope is a powerful force.

Can’™t say I have any answers. This is something that’™s definitely been weighing on my mind lately. Forced into thinking about it as I try to decide if I need to re-work my Plan B or come up with a Plan C…..

I realize this discussion is several months old now; I’™d be interested to hear if you’™re still in the same place with it.

I too loved that quote you had from M L King.

Then this quote from you is why I’™ll read/watch anything you ever write:

“I don’t just want to show you things: I want to put them so far inside you that you have to dig them out with a spoon.”

Blah, blah, blah. Way too much out of me. Feel free to edit this if you put it up.

Best —

Jennifer

No editing necessary. I don’t think I can respond to every point right now, because there are baked potatoes in the oven and a beer in the fridge with my name on it (and I don’t mean that to be flip, just that I’ve been thinking about your comments a long time and could think about them longer, but then you would never have a response). I appreciate the conversation and that you’re willing to take so much time to continue it.

It’s been a wee while since you sent me this (my bad, very sorry) so I’m curious — did you get the Goss book? As much as I’ve talked about it here in the virtual pub, I’m pretty sure I haven’t yet found the right way to encapsulate her point (oh ho, maybe that’s why she wrote a whole book about it, laughing now). Or perhaps it’s that I find my understanding of “hope” is changing as I try to integrate her perspective into my view of things.

Am I in the same place with this? Hmm. Yes and no. I don’t feel hopeless, but I no longer rely so much on hope. I think that what you said above — Holding out hope (hoping against hope) for a miracle could prevent one from making the most of what is in this moment — is perhaps a good parsing of her point. If we rely on magical thinking, if we decide okay, I will get this thing or person or result I want if I don’t step on a crack, or if I don’t call her first, or if I pray hard enough, then maybe we miss the opportunity to just give a rebel yell and do the thing to the fullest in the moment when it needs to be done. And if we do the thing, and it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t mean we did it wrong. It doesn’t mean we were wrong to reach for it, to throw ourselves out there (to, as they say, dance like no one’s watching). It just means that it didn’t work out. And that’s how it goes sometimes. Right now, I think that’s what she means, and right now I can mostly be okay with that. Would I be okay if it were the death of a lover I was talking about, if it were Nicola’s death? Probably fucking not. So I’m not sure where I am.

Except that I know I’m in a doing place, a place of action without as much expectation as before. I do think that it’s possible to act without hope, by which perhaps I mean this expectation that things will work out the way I want them to. I still want them to work out, on some level I still hope they will — I just don’t necessarily pin my self-esteem or lifetime happiness or sense of worth on it the way I used to. And in some weird way this has freed me to, among other things, be braver about what I write and love my writing more. Why? I don’t know, it’s a mystery.

And since I’m in quote mode at the moment, here are a couple more:

We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are. ‘” Anais Nin

We are not what we know, but what we are willing to learn.
‘” Mary Catherine Bateson

I know this is in no way a complete answer to your very thoughtful comments. Thank you for them. And thank you also for your kind words about digging and spoons. It’s true, that’s what I want in almost every respect right now. Life’s short. Let’s just reach right in.

It’s a party!

Nicola has recently published her new novel, Always, and it rocks. Find out more here. Get it at your local bookstore or on amazon.

Next on her horizon: And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life. This is a fabulous thing: a memoir of Nicola’s childhood and early adult life with emphasis on how she became a writer –” the events, people, feelings, challenges, fears and joys that led her to the work.

It’s more than a book (although there are over 45,000 words of text): it’s a beautifully designed object, a box of Nicola that includes several small volumes, photographs, juvenilia (Christmas lists, an early poem, her first crayon-drawn book), reproduced diary entries, a CD of songs with her band… and more.

I’ve never seen anything like it. Imagine that someone hands you a small box, perhaps like the cigar boxes of my youth in which kids saved their most precious objects. And in the box is a story in many dimensions, multiple media, so many different ways to experience the memories and feelings and thoughts of the person herself… I think it’s seriously cool, and I think it may well set a new paradigm for memoir. [Edited in 2009 to add: And I’m apparently not the only folks who think so. ANWAGTHAP won the 2008 Lambda Literary Award for memoir.]

See for yourself.

But hurry: it’s a limited edition of 450 signed and numbered copies, and that’s all there will ever be.

Art and commerce

For your Strad.

Sarah

Thanks very much for sending this. I don’t know whether to laugh or pound my head against the wall: it’s the perfect demonstration of how hard it can be to make people hear (literally, metaphorically…). Of course I hope I’d be one of the people who stopped, but maybe not –” it’s so easy to hurry by beauty and skill when it’s offered in passing, when it’s not ritualized by setting. When art is offered out of context, it makes a lot of people nervous and grumpy. It’s weird that our culture is so monetized that we regard freely-offered public performance with suspicion: after all, no one’s making anyone listen, and no one’s making anyone pay.

I wish the economics of art were different, both for artist and audience. And I think those economics are changing. Anyone keeping up with the music industry (a giant rollercoaster ride these days) knows that MySpace and P2P and recent developments about payola and royalty payments are changing the ways that people make a living with music (artists, distributors, broadcasters, promoters, labels… everyone’s world is different today). In February 2009 Someday, there will be no more analog television. Nineteen screenwriters are changing how writers play in the Hollywood sandbox. And what will happen in publishing? I don’t know, it’s a mystery, but I’m confident it won’t be business as usual.

As long as we don’t all end up like Strad… for those of you not familiar with my short fiction, she is the protagonist of Strings, the lead story in Dangerous Space, which I’m delighted to say is now available from Aqueduct Press at a reduced price through June 15 (the official release date). If you’d like a personalized copy, you can order one now from University Books.

[Edited in 2009 to add: I don’t have the personalized arrangement with U Books right now, but if you want a book personalized you can arrange to send it to my PO box. Contact me at info at kelleyeskridge dot com.]

I hope people will enjoy the collection, and that some of you will want to talk about it over a virtual pint. There’s always room at the table.

Cheers.

Words in my head all the time

[Kelley’s note: This post refers to an unpublished story that used to be available on the old website. It isn’t here right now. Maybe one of these days I’ll get it posted… it’s interesting now to me to look at it in light of “Dangerous Space.”]

I read “Shine” earlier this morning and it has stuck with me throughout the day. In trying to determine why, I found myself going back to the story, trying to find those pointed barbs that usually catch my mental attention when I’ve read something good that stays with me. However, this story doesn’t seem to have “points” that are meant to catch the reader (me) as much as it seems like an emotional road that travels from point A to B with a lot of fractional stops in between. There is an emotional movement to the story, starting in the realm of emotional panic (?) of realization towards an ending of acceptance…but then I continue to question myself, could it be an ending that is focused on searching? I loved the movement in the story but am wondering what she would be doing in the next week or the next month. Will she find something in her searching and singing or will she even recognize it should it come her way? (Is she capable of realizing it?) I suppose my question is, if you took this story any further, in what direction do you see it going? Or do you see any direction at all?

I liked it and thanks for posting it.

Christine

I’m glad you liked it. Thanks for letting me know.

“Shine” is the first fiction I wrote after Solitaire, and it reflects my search for the next thing — in writing, in life, in myself. Joanne’s older than Jackal; she’s wrestling not with the complexities of assuming an adult identity, but with the damage to our dreams and sense of self that seems inevitable as we live adult lives. In the two years after “Shine,” I wrote 16,000 words of one novel and more than 20,000 words of another… still looking for that next thing. I talked a little over a pint or two about wrestling with these books; and ultimately I had to step away from them because I couldn’t find my way past the pretty writing into something that was both risky and real for me the way that Solitaire was, and “Eye of the Storm” (the most recent story prior to “Shine,” written while I was working on Solitaire).

Walking away from 36,000 finished words (plus many, many more in draft) was not a happy experience. I wondered in public (somewhat indirectly) a year ago if I was even meant to be a novelist, and what I was really thinking was that perhaps I wasn’t meant to be a writer. There was a difference between doing (even doing well) and being that I could see but not touch, much the way Joanne came up against her own reflection in the rain.

And then came screenplays — and I fell in love with the form and thought, Okay, I’m a writer after all, but maybe not a fiction writer. And then I threw myself headfirst into “Dangerous Space,” the new novella for the collection, and it was…amazing. 25,000 finished words in six weeks and the only reason I stopped was my deadline. Unlike “Shine,” unlike the aborted novels, “Dangerous Space” is a story that makes me excited and nervous and itchy to have people read it. I think some people will find it eyebrow raising. I think some people will hate it a lot. I hope some people will find all the layers in it that I think are there, underneath the in-your-face surface.

When Matt Ruff talks about a writer walking the line of not embarrassing herself (in his blurb for the collection), I think he’s talking at least in part about this story — and no doubt some people will think I have embarrassed myself. And you know what? That’s fine. Because it’s the first fiction I’ve written in years that puts me right out there on the edge of myself as a writer, not because it’s so beautifully stylized, but because it is as transparent, as lacking in ‘style,’ as I could make it. And that, brothers and sisters, is where I want to be right now. I want to be writing pretty words that don’t show. I want you to mainline the story, to feel yourself inside the characters, have the experience of living with them jack right into your system and run away with your brain without you needing to appreciate how clever and articulate and wordcrafty I’ve been.

And now I’m just so in love with writing again that I can’t see straight. Words in my head all the time. It’s just astonishing.

Which means you may not see a story quite like “Shine” from me again, at least not anytime soon. It’s a good story, and there’s a lot of truth in it — it rings clear to me (see my essay with Nicola about writing if you want to know more about what that means) — but it’s a chronicle of a journey, not the journey itself. And right now as a writer I want a more direct experience when I write and when you read. I don’t just want to show you things: I want to put them so far inside you that you have to dig them out with a spoon (and there’s a little taste of “Dangerous Space” for you).

I hope that the sense of ’emotional movement’ you’ve described will always be a part of what I do. And as for your question about Joanne — well, if you have come away from the story wondering what she’ll do, caring about what choice she makes, then it’s your story now to continue as you see fit. I’ve talked before about my belief that once the story is out of my head and in yours, that I as the writer don’t have any particular authority over how you should read it. But if you’d like to know what I think, then here it is: yes to all of it. Yes, it’s acceptance. Yes, it’s searching. It’s Joanne acknowledging that this may be all she ever has of her dreams, so she’d better have it with all the gusto she can. And it’s also Joanne continuing to want the rest. Does the knowledge that she will never be a rock star keep her from being the best rock star she can be? I don’t think so.

Screen and short stuff

Long time, no pint.

Congratulations on finishing your FIRST screenplay! This is very exciting stuff! What’s the title? What is it about? I’m working on a family drama called A Simple Kind of Man. Did you happen to catch the Screenwriting Expo in October?

Out of left field and rambling (grin)… Perhaps I should stop by more often and hoist back a few with everyone else?

Cheers!

Lindsey

It’s feeling like old home week in the virtual pub (grin). Glad to see you again, Lindsey.

I’m excited about the screenplay, and wish I could talk more about it right now –” but it’s Out In The World as we speak, and I think it’s best to let that process play out before I start slinging details. Although right now it seems that everyone has left Hollywood for the holidays so the process is that the screenwriter sits and waits.

Not that I’m bored. I’m working on a new short story for a collection that I hope will be out next spring –” I’ll post details as soon as the publisher and I have a contract. For those who follow my short fiction, the new story is about Mars (a character about whom I have written before, not the planet). I love the Mars stories and am delighted to be living inside one again for a while.

I’m also working on new screenplays. Regardless of what happens with the one that’s under submission right now, I’m serious about walking through this door that’s been opened for me –” and that means plunging right into the next thing. I’ve got some ideas. Now I have to swim. Robert Frost said in a poem that “work is play for mortal stakes,” and that has never been more true for me than now. I’m having serious fun, fierce fun, and the personal stakes are very high for me.

So, now that I’ve been so annoying uninformative (laughing), can I ask about A Simple Kind of Man? What’s it about, and are you enjoying working on it? What’s it like for you?

I didn’t go to Screenwriting Expo, although I scoured the panel descriptions with longing and would love to be there sometime in the next couple of years, god willing and the creek don’t rise. I’m also dying to attend one of the three-week courses of TheFilmSchool here in Seattle –” intensive learning experiences work pretty well for me as a rule. The last six months have certainly been intense. I’ll look forward to talking more about it when I can.

How’s Bonnie? I remember her quote, “Love and work are both four-letter words” every time I feel like throwing something I’ve written against the wall–¦.

Back to serious fun. Happy Holidays to all.

Hope and happiness

I had been vacillating on whether to come on board and say hey ever since before last week’s Election Night. Reading this decided me.

Your more than gracious response to my own rant after the 2004 election came back to me unexpectedly in the days running up to this year’s election. I found a printout I had made of my rant and your response while cleaning the house and carried it with me as a talisman against the crippling fear of a repeat disappointment. I was terrified before the election, but only vaguely cognizant of what exactly I was afraid. Corruption, stolen elections, a continuation of the triumph of the politics of fear and hatred and lies. What you wrote about hope had to serve as a placeholder for my foundering hope for a few days until the election, which turned out much better than I had been hoping. So thank you again!

But this post has given me more food for words, as follows:

— First, I haven’t read Tracy Goss’ book, but based on your description, I think I’ve had a similar first reaction to yours. It just doesn’t read for me. If I’m following you, Goss’ point is that acceptance of hopelessness leads to freedom from fear and, as you quoted “…the opportunity, instead of giving up, to play with full engagement…” But without hope, what motivation does one have to show up in the first place? Why be fully engaged with no hope? In other words, if one does not have a ‘hope’ for a certain outcome in a given endeavor, why bother engaging in the endeavor at all? What is hope if not inherent motivation, a reason to go on? Maybe I’m splitting semantic hairs here, but acceptance of life as it is does not require for me letting go of hope. To let go of hope is, in a strong sense, letting go of life itself.

— Second, but relatedly, you ask “are hope and fear two sides of the same coin?” The metaphor implies that they are opposites, but I don’t think that’s true — I don’t feel that fear is the opposite or absence of hope, or vice versa. They co-exist, in some cases very closely, but I don’t see it as a 1-1 correlation. While they are sometimes connected, I don’t feel that the amount of hope one has directly determines the amount of fear one has (as if one could quantify emotion!) And I certainly don’t believe one must lose hope to conquer fear. I’ve seen too many folks conquer fear as a direct result of having hope to believe that.

— Finally, you ended with a wonderful Castaneda quote, which reminded me that I often use quotes as a source of solace, or joy, or hope. And one of the more hopeful new quotes I’ve encountered in the past year, one, in fact, I’ve often repeated to friends, family, co-workers, goes like this:

“I still believe in plans, but more and more, I think it’s a Plan B world.”
— Kelley Eskridge

Keep passing the open windows (—John Irving)

Adam D.

Hey Adam,

Lovely to hear from you. I was thinking about you at the elections, as a matter of fact. There was a certain amount of anxiety in our house too…. and at the same time, I believed it would turn out the way it did. Very gratifying, and in some sense so predictable. The wheel turns.

I can recommend the Goss book, if your definition of “recommend” includes wanting to throw a book at the wall but then being compelled to read it again just because…. And I don’t think I’ve represented it accurately (maybe not even coherently). But there is something about it that speaks to me lately.

I don’t think it’s so much that she is asking people to not bring hope to the party. Or maybe she is asking that — and maybe the real issue is what does each of us mean by hope, anyway? I think she’s saying that many people having a notion of hope as a kind of crutch, almost as a blueprint for “here’s how my life should be, and I’m going to hold my breath until I turn blue or until my life turns out this way.” I think what she’s trying to say is that kind of hope can hold us back, because instead of desire without expectation, we tie ourselves to a particular vision of how things should be, and then regard any variance from that as “failure.” And then our hope is “lost.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations lately. It’s been said that all anger is the result of failed expectations. I know that most personal conflict I’ve experienced comes down to disappointed expectations — I “expect” that strangers will honor the social compact and not cut me off on the highway, or be rude to me at Starbucks. I expect that my closest people will always be wise, kind, and respectful of my little personal quirks (along with being able to read my mind). Et cetera. I know that my greatest mistakes with other people happen when I write scripts in my head for how things should go in any particular interaction — and then discover, much to my surprise, that everyone else has failed to learn their lines, and in fact aren’t acting in my little play at all.

I have not let go of hope — in a big way, I’m all about hope and always will be. But I’ve been astonished by some of the things I’ve been able to do in the last year by releasing hope and instead just doing the thing I yearn to do, or the thing that needs to be done (which are sometimes the same and sometimes not). I don’t hope for the thing to work out in any particular way. I just do it and see what happens. I don’t assume that it’s “good” only if it works out the way I want it to. I don’t know how to explain it better right now, but it sure is making me think (grin).

I agree that hope and fear are not opposites. And I don’t think hope is in any way a bad thing. But I believe that hope gives fear a doorway into our lives. We fear the loss of what we hope for. Is it better sometimes to live without hope? Is it possible to live without hope and at the same time to not be “hopeless”? I dunno (scratches head).

Although, actually, that’s not true. I do know, in some ways. I no longer hope for a cure for MS, for example. I look at Nicola and give great thanks for my life with her. I don’t look at Nicola and think that if we only do the right thing, make the right choices, if only we are good, that she’ll be without MS someday. I no longer regard MS as something that might go away. It never will. Is that hopeless? Or is that simply moving hope out of the way so we can get on with our lives?

This doesn’t mean I never hope. I just don’t want hope for a particular thing to define my happiness.

I think I’m starting to climb down my own navel here. Apologies. And these are real questions, not rhetorical ones. Comments welcome.

I’m glad you like the Plan B quote. I still stand by it (grin). Here’s another one I like:

— Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
— How?
— I don’t know. It’s a mystery.
— Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love

The conversation

Hi, I saw the reply about you and Nic separating and was wondering, what makes your relationship work? It’s very rare to hear about couples succeeding in the long term — and you two still seem very happy, passionate, and seem to genuinely like each other. 🙂

Also, (if it’s not too personal) I was wondering why you chose not to have children? By the way, I love both yours and Nicola’s work and can’t wait until “Always” comes out next April and the “Solitaire” movie is out! Thanks for everything!

Candace

I’m not the goddess of all relationship wisdom (that would be Carolyn Hax). I don’t know that I have anything profound to say about it except that we love each other and we make it work. And that I think most of the credit belongs to Nicola.

There’s a story in a book called Fierce Conversations about a “typical marriage” (Is there such a thing? Who knew?) in which a husband wonders why his wife keeps wanting to talk about their relationship all the time. Couldn’t they just have one giant conversation about it every once in a while and move on? And then it finally occurs to him that the conversation isn’t about the relationship: the conversation is the relationship.

Nicola and I have a lot of conversations. Some are more fun than others. Some are very, very hard, but I know down to my toes it is better to have them than to keep silent. Knowing this has changed my criteria for important relationships. I don’t offer intimacy of any kind to people who aren’t willing to have the conversation.

We don’t have children because Nicola has multiple sclerosis, and because we decided that we would rather focus on taking care of each other than taking care of a child. I believe if we had a child, I wouldn’t have much of a life right now beyond service to the needs of others, and that’s not enough for me. Nicola and I would maybe not have had time for all those conversations (and beer, and writing, and exploring, and adventures…). I don’t regret any of that. I do occasionally mourn the lack of relationship with a teenage and adult child –- I think I’d have enjoyed that very much, found it very rewarding. No choice without loss.

We’re looking forward to Always (a fun, fine, fierce book, wonderful stuff). And wouldn’t it be fun to have the lights go down and Solitaire come up? I get a lot of pleasure imagining it….