Category: writing

Here’s a wonderful exuberant poem, a throw your head back and howl poem, a laugh so hard with someone that you both can’t breathe and that’s all part of the fun poem, a dance all night and then go out for eggs and bacon and biscuits with gravy poem. This poem smiles at drunk people in the street and flirts just a little bit with everyone in the room because why not? Enough of life is about stopping. And sometimes the opposite of stopping is not going too far; sometimes it’s taking that one more step to the yippee.

Many thanks to Seattle poet Elizabeth Austen for her generous permission to share it with you here. You can also find it at The Writer’s Almanac (and hear it read by Garrison Keillor).

Enjoy

On Punctuation
by Elizabeth Austen

not for me the dogma of the period
preaching order and a sure conclusion
and no not for me the prissy
formality or tight-lipped fence
of the colon and as for the semi-
colon call it what it is
a period slumming
with the commas
a poser at the bar
feigning liberation with one hand
tightening the leash with the other
oh give me the headlong run-on
fragment dangling its feet
over the edge give me the sly
comma with its come-hither
wave teasing all the characters
on either side give me ellipses
not just a gang of periods
a trail of possibilities
or give me the sweet interrupting dash
the running leaping joining dash all the voices
gleeing out over one another
oh if I must
punctuate
give me the YIPPEE
of the exclamation point
give me give me the curling
cupping curve mounting the period
with voluptuous uncertainty

“On Punctuation” by Elizabeth Austen, from The Girl Who Goes Alone. © Floating Bridge Press, 2010. Reprinted with the poet’s permission.

From a reader:

When I ran across Solitaire, I had forgotten where I’d heard your name before (Outer Alliance), but the jacket copy looked interesting, and I was in the mood for something science fiction-y-about-fully-fleshed-people, not better machines.

I’m sure it’s no surprise to you that it’s a good book. I’ve enjoyed books that had plot flaws but compelling characters, or badly written narrative but compelling plot or great ideas not quite fully-realized. Solitaire was none of the above. I think the only thing I found surprising about it was that the corporate drones were sometimes human in good ways as well as bad, and you made me believe that was possible.

In another way, it was all surprising. I love that the book is so strongly grounded in the real; in the smells in the air, the feel of the wind, the movement of water and muscle, the almost-touch, and the taste of things. There’s a density to the writing that I found incredibly compelling.

Now I’m feeling I’ve gotten overblown and pretentious, but I thought you might want to know that I found Solitaire touching, and valuable, and I’m very glad I read it.

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Any author who would find such a lovely response overblown and pretentious ought to be taken out back and hit upside the head with copies of Jonathan Franzen’s new book. Happily, I am not that person. Thank you very much indeed for your kind words, and for taking the time to send them.

I’m particularly pleased that the reality works for you. That’s a harder part of the work for me. I get fascinated by the emotional and psychological reality of the characters and relationships, sometimes to the point where my early drafts can feel like stories about balloons in space. Some writers work hard for the emotional truth; I work hard for the physical truth, to literally ground the story. Because of course all these things are connected, and the beauty of fiction is the chance to intertwine the internal and external experience of characters into something that reverberates through readers on multiple levels.

And I knew that Jackal was destined to spend a lot of time in her own head (smile). I wanted her, and the reader, to have as much physical input as possible.

I have always been a late bloomer in just about every way, and so I do much of my learning at the most awkward times (sigh). I have just recently discovered that I like wearing short skirts and high heels, and am now wrestling with all sorts of what the English would call “mutton dressed as lamb” issues. Why couldn’t I have done all this in my 20’s and 30’s like any sensibly-gendered non-troublemaking woman of my time? Because I am fucking awkward, apparently. And so the older I get, the more I live in my body and in the physical world. I’m sure that I’ll be in a Very Old People’s Gathering one day where everyone else will be busy being all intellectual and wise and Buddhist-ly detached, and I’ll be rolling around in the avocado dip, drinking good wine, and still trying to dance to Pink.

And I will certainly still go on trying to give my characters the same discoveries. Thank you very much for reminding me of it. And thank you for reading Solitaire. I’m glad it connected with you, and I very much appreciate your connecting with me to tell me so.

Write-a-thon running total: 12,032 words out of 12,000.

Well, here we are (big grin). I’m very pleased.

These are first-draft words. Some of them are stinky-bad, but you know, some of them are pretty damn good. And this particular goal wasn’t so much about “finishing” as it was about beginning. I’m glad I have.

Thank you so much to all who have supported me! The fact that you gave money to Clarion West to encourage me to write has made me feel quite humble and, hmm… well, it’s what made me so determined not just to reach a number, but to begin a journey. Going somewhere scary and wonderful, somewhere on the border between familiar and new, that place where we all intersect and story is the line between us. It means a lot to me that people care about a story I might tell. Thanks for helping me begin.

Write-a-thon running total: 11,136 words out of 12,000.

There’s a particular synchronicity that happens for me in writing: as I start to go deeper into my story, the world around me begins to bring small potential story-things to my attention — some bit of behavior that might work for a character, or a phrase that leads me into a new scene, or… well, it could be anything. My brain knows this work is important to me, and so it points me toward things that might be related. This is actually a well-established brain mechanism (the reticular activating system), but it never fails to surprise and delight me even after all these years. I have learned to trust it as a fundamental part of the writing process and to follow these “twitches” of my attention.

Last night I was flipping through an issue of The New Yorker, past the fiction, because I never read the fiction — I find too often their tastes lean toward precious prose coupled with poor storytelling, and life’s too short. But last night I stopped. And flipped back. And read the whole story because of a phrase that caught my eye. I noticed the phrase because my RAS nudged me, and the story (which was actually pretty good, that woman can write) has given me lots of little pieces of setting, and evoked memories of my own that I think will serve me well in my own book.

Being open in this way is a huge part of being a writer, for me. Then comes the challenge of deciding what to keep of all the shiny things the world brings me as presents. That’s another huge part.

And of course, I’m also finding things on the intarweb and in the real world (not that there’s much difference these days) to amuse me. I may be the last person online to see this video — or maybe I’m the second-to-last (grin). I don’t think there will be any Jane Austen in my book (although there is some fighting), but this is just the ticket for today!

Enjoy

 

Today is the birthday of Maxfield Parrish, an artist whom I adore for his ability to tell story in paint, and for his unabashed romanticism that hardly ever feels sentimental to me. It just feels… deep and mysterious and lovely and true. I’ve loved his work since I first discovered it at the age of 13 or 14. I wish I could live in some of his paintings. And my favorite color of sky is Maxfield Parrish blue.

Happy birthday, Maxfield! Thank you for your work that has become such a part of me. Isn’t it amazing, that we can do that for each other?

 

 

Write-a-thon running total: 10,540 words out of 12,000. This is the last week of the Write-a-thon, and my goal is in sight. Thank you to everyone who has sponsored me and all the other writers. And we’re not done yet — if you know anyone who wants to support great writing in the world, please send them to Clarion West to make a donation to encourage any of these fine writers to keep heading towards the finish line. So many amazing novels and stories are being born right now because of your help!

Write-a-thon running total: 4,374 words out of 12,000, so nearly a thousand words since my last update. This is good and bad: good because they are good words, much more “true north” words. I am finding my way. Bad because I must produce more quickly the next three weeks to meet my goal, and this means that if I find out soon that these words aren’t as true north as I think they are, well, then I will have some long days trying to regroup and catch up (grin).

Although I understand the benefits of writing events like NaNoWriMo or Script Frenzy, it is really not my way to blow past sections of story that I know in my bones aren’t working just to meet a wordcount goal. In my experience, glaring wrong turns just lead to dead ends in the story. Wrong turns can be fixed, but not (at least for me) by “writing my way through them.” I actually just have to go back and find the better path. I admire and envy the writers who can simply switch gears from one scene to the next and “act as if” what came before has led them unerringly to the new place. But me, I find that jumping track that way just leads me to make new mistakes rather than rectifying old ones.

I’m enjoying it. And I’m finding it difficult, like all writers with other jobs, to make the brain switch back and forth between writing, editing, board-chairing… One of the essential eternal wrestles of this culture, no? One part of this brain-switching challenge that is hard to explain is that writing brings up all sorts of things from the tunnels within the writer; some of those things are fun to feel/imagine/live, and some of them are not. It might just be “a story,” but parts of it come from deep and sometimes unexpected places, with sometimes unexpected results. And it affects my moods, and sometimes colors my perception of the “real world” (whatever that is). I feel things as true that are not actually true for me right now, even though they may once have been (or will be again). I feel old fears and old losses and old confusions, and sometimes I don’t know where the fuck they come from until I’m on the other side of them and can see, Oh, it’s a writing thing.

Sometimes it’s damned hard to step away from the story world without bringing the story along. In fact, I think it’s mostly impossible. Learning to make the brain-switch anyway, in spite of it all, is a necessary skill, and I have no idea how to ‘teach” it because I’m still learning it myself. But I’m lucky to live with another writer and see this happening to someone else enough that I understand it’s an actual process, an actual feature of being an artist. Otherwise I might just think I was nuts.

Now I will go do something else and see if I can glide back into the rational world. Enjoy your day.

My brain is in some otherspace these days: the new novel, the current screenplay, the new screenplay, the front-burner editing project, Clarion West, the upcoming Lambda Literary Writers Retreat which Nicola is teaching, and where I will be doing a guest lecture one evening. I have read a variety of books and seen an unfortunately large number of bad movies — most recently New Moon, which at least got us through a couple hours of 4th of July noise, and The Book of Eli, which was so bad I couldn’t even finish it. And some good movies too, in particular I’ve Loved You So Long with Kristen Scott Thomas.

I am inside story. It’s nice in here, but it doesn’t really make for brilliant conversational exchanges with anyone except Nicola, who is inside so many of my stories as well as her own.

Isn’t this a very long way of saying Hello, so sorry I have nothing interesting to talk about today?

Maybe tomorrow (grin). Enjoy your day.
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Write-a-thon running total: 3,405 words out of 12,000. I find myself in the inevitable but frustrating phase where ideas are piling in from every which way, and they all seem either equally good (when I have written a particularly nice sentence) or equally terrible (when I realize that falling in love with every single idea means that the book would be an unfocused mess). But this is how it works for me, I know that, so I am soldiering on. By strict mathematical terms, I am behind on my goal by about 900 words, but ya know, I’m not that worried. Words are easy. There are lots of words in here. Finding the ones that belong together is the challenge.