“I see myself staunching wounds. All the pages of all my books going into a great hole in people and slowing the loss of blood.”

Talking with an old friend about art.  Her philosophy came up, and mine, and my place in the world through art.  That’s what I came up with.  I don’t really think about myself in that capacity, because I’m not important in that way.  My words are.

Class has been tough this quarter.  Life has been tough.  The writing, as always, has been good.  I’m coming up on the end of this book and whenever I do that, in my experience, I get a little nervous.  No reason in particular, really.  It’s the same with starting a book.  Anyway.  I’m about 30,ooo words away from the end, maybe a little more.  It’s a treat to hold cards to your chest and finally get to lay them down.  The writing comes fast and somewhat easy, lately.  I should be finished in a few months.

Was laid out for the last week or so, sick.  Had a good and ridiculous time bar-hopping the weekend before that.  The places life takes me, sometimes.  The Antagonist came for a visit, on her way to Australia.  She cooked for me, we drank, we watched movies, we wrote.  She changed the alarm on her phone to a recording of me singing the beginning of Tom Waits’ “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis”. Went to LAX for the 8th(?) time.  I’m now going steady with the 105.  Bought her a promise ring and everything.

May have some good news for you next time.  Meanwhile, I enjoyed the vlog thing, so, requests?

Everyone thinks they can write a book.  They can’t.  Everyone thinks they’ve got a story in ‘em that’s worth telling.  They don’t.  Half of the people who’ve even taken steps to become a writer fall into this category.  Probably more than half.  And I don’t just mean get a book published.  I mean write one.  And not even a good one that goes unnoticed.  I mean just finish one.  A bad one.  Most of you won’t do it.

It’s one way or the other with folks, but often enough I think it’s both.  Writers are, as we’ve covered, mystical figures who ride unicorns and drink the moon’s laughter.  And at the same time, everyone thinks they can be one.  I met Billy Collins a couple years ago, and he had (very roughly) this to say:

I was introduced to an accountant at a party.  We exchanged pleasantries, names.  When he recognized mine the accountant said, ‘why, my nine year old daughter is a poet.  She writes poetry all the time!’ And I said, ‘you know, that’s funny.  My six year old is an accountant.  He was playing with change just the other day.

The truth of the matter is that dabbling in something doesn’t make you a professional.  I’m interested in physics, but I’m not about to call myself a physicist.  Just the same, entertaining the idea, even sitting down to begin a story, does not make you a writer.  There is no hard and fast definition, no certain point at which you can say you are one.  But you ought to know when you’ve crossed it.  And it’s not even necessarily when you’ve finished a book.  I’m comfortable with calling myself a writer after having spent three years at it, getting a few pieces published, and finishing two books while working on a third and going to school for writing.  If you took away any two of those things, I’d probably not call myself a writer.

My thesis is this: I like colons in blog posts.

My thesis is this: while writing is a job, even just a job, it is not something you can claim as a title simply because its definitions are so liquid.  Furthermore, with more accuracy than any weatherman, I can say that you aren’t a writer.  It’s gonna rain, and you aren’t a writer.  Put down your pen and grab an umbrella.  Everyone thinks they can write a book, a lot of people say they will someday, but only writers do.

I have a problem with people calling writing anything other than exactly what it is: a person sitting down (or standing, whatever works) and writing to get an idea out of their head for others to have it.  It is not a prayer, it is not a scream, or howl.  Whatever torture it puts you through comes of your own self in a way that even the idea did not.  The idea came from your life.  The need to bleed for it is all you.  Whatever asceticism you subject yourself to is of your own doing, and if that is necessary for you to write, so be it.  But because you hang yourself on a cross every evening doesn’t mean you and I are saviors.  I pay $2.50 for coffee for every thousand words or so.  What, then, would you call me?  Whether you claw at your hair or pace grooves into your floor or you travel to a mountaintop or you sit quietly in your room, it is your work that makes you what you are.  It is not the action that produced the work.  The word is all.  I have as much respect for Marilynne Robinson as I do for Ernest Hemingway, and I do because they both wrote incredible pieces of literature.  To my knowledge, Robinson never served in any army, never drove an ambulance, never hunted or played at hunting U-boats in the Atlantic.  These are things that increase my esteem for Hemingway’s life separate from his body of work.  I would love The Sun Also Rises whether written by a hero or a coward.

And let’s not inflate what a writer is.  They are simply that.  Storytellers.  A good storyteller is obviously different from a bad storyteller but it’s the story that’s important.  You can blow smoke about writers being priests or prophets but everyone has something they can do well and only artists are given to the notion that they are particularly special.  When you get your car back from the mechanic and it runs you don’t spend time thinking about the  mechanic and what brought him to where he is.  You just drive.  You ought to think about the writer the same way you do the mechanic.  Each performs a service or creates a product and it is the quality of that thing which is important.  The only thing the writer ought to have of you is loyalty if he produces a quality product.  It’s delusional to ask for more and to think that a writer deserves it.  Embrace the work, love the work.  When I say I love McCarthy, I mean that I love McCarthy’s work.  He’s an interesting guy separate from that, but my interest in him arises primarily from my desire for him to write more books.  That’s how it ought to be.  It’s bad for the ego for you to think anything else.  And despite all of our metaphysical trappings, despite that our occupation itself is a unique one, we aren’t special.  We are certainly no more special than nurses or doctors, and certainly less deserving of praise than police officers, firefighters, and soldiers.

What a reader needs to take away from a book does not involve the writer.  I won’t delve any deeper in the Barthesian pool than to say that an ideal reading of any book begins with the first page of the text and ends with the last.  Any thoughts in between occur in the mind of the reader and nowhere else.  Don’t bring a dictionary, a biography, or Wikipedia to the party.  Ultimately no writer is going to quit fellating or cunniling-ing themself because I said they aren’t special.  It’s the truth, but it’s the reader I’m trying to reach, not the writer.  We’re a crazed lot to begin with.  But we’re not mystical, we’re not any more in tune with the universe because we put words on a page than anyone else.  It’s a unique occupation that’s not a little bit mysterious and more than a little attractive.  People like people who live on the edge, and whether it’s the edge of starvation, sanity, or megalomania, the edge is where writers tend to be.  But don’t love the writer.  Love the book.  If it’s good it is the best of the writer; blood, sweat, tears and all other precious bodily fluids distilled whether shed or not, into a story, a message.  Don’t ruin all our good work by wondering how dirty we got in the process.

Tune in next time for part 3, the anticlimax that I will call “In Defense of the Writer”.  Or some such stickuptheass nonsense.  Until then, here’s J. Tillman, telling it like it is.

This post will be one in a two or three parter, provided I feel like following through with it, on the capital letter issues of writing.  Truth and big W writers. Maybe a little Beauty thrown in for good measure.

Being in an MFA program, surrounded by writers, some of us are bound to get a little lofty, a bit high-fallutin’, a tad too big for our britches.  A few days ago one of my profs was trying to inspire us, I think, by telling us that writers are like priests.  We’re ascetics, like no other profession in the world.  Who else locks themselves up in a room for hours on end to make money–and that only if we’re lucky?  We close ourselves off in order to create, spend hours and hours observing, making notes, waiting for inspiration.  When you get on a train of thought like this, you inevitably get a little misty-eyed, a little mystic, and you think of muses.  It’s a subject we dance around, for the most part.  No one wants to out and out say they’re receiving messages from some divine source, right?  Idn’t that a little hokey?

While that’s rhetorical, the answer is yes.  And despite that, people do say they’re tuned into otherworldly channels.  And it’s a channel with a lot of viewers.  I submit to you two stories of disparate success:  The first is Alicia Ostriker, whose book of poetry The Volcano Sequence was channeled to her by a volcano after a period of writer’s block.  Ms. Ostriker is published, many times over, and is, I guess, considered a success.  I got the chance to hear her read.  She wasn’t any good, in my opinion.  I’m backed up by other opinions, but apparently it’s the minority opinion.  Nevertheless, this woman had a book of poems beamed into her head by a volcano.  There’s one end.

On the other is a girl from way back.  I told this story on my old blog, so if you’re an old reader you can skip on down.  Beginning Creative Writing, we’re discussing the muses, the possibility thereof, opinions thereon.  This girl pipes up, says, “yeah, you know, sometimes it’s just like someone is speaking to me, the words just flow”.  You wouldn’t question this if it came from the mouth of Marilynne Robinson.  But this girl’s contribution to world literature is a story about making out with her boyfriend “like a wild hyena”, while Disney’s The Lion King played in the background.  Whatever you’re plugged into, I don’t want to be party to it.

The higher you get in the writer echelons, the less you hear about inspiration, about muses.  People talk more theoretically about what it is that’s fueling them.  My money is on the subconscious/unconscious.  I can tell you exactly when I’m getting inspired, because I can feel it.  You, observing me, can see it.  I zone out, clam up, stare off.  There’s nothing mystic about it.  It’s cool as hell, sure.  But it’s not mystical.

Washing your hands of the muse is a good thing for all of us.  There’s no reason for the occupation of writer to be so mystified, unless by proxy there is reverence for the text.  I’ll never be a guitar god, but that doesn’t mean I think Jimi Hendrix was anything more than highly skilled.  Killing the muse is good for the writer, too.  I doubt you’d ever come across a professional writer who waits to be inspired.  (I could cite sources, if you like.)  With inspiration in and on your head, you do what all the pros do: treat it like work.  It’s a grind like any other.  Some of us hate it, oddly enough.  But they say they have to do it.  Feel bad for them.

So, man.  I wrote a lot and said very little.  I’m sorry you’re exposed to such diarrhea of the mind but at least it’s not getting put down elsewhere.  What I wanted this to do, in part, was attack the notion of the muse as an external force, knock down some stilts writer’s might be standing on, and build a foundation for a post down the line on big W writers.   Notice it was Shelley, not Byron, that said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.  Byron was too busy getting laid and saving Greece to say something as self-serving as that.

I mostly said that to piss off the Shelley fans.  But I’ve got a little point hidden in there, and I’ll write about it later.

I love the hell out of this song.  The voice just barely holding onto its hushed tone.  You can hear Beam biting on the end of every word.  I picture teeth chopping at the microphone.  I think I’m exaggerating a bit, but when I sing it I can’t help but sing it loud.

Anyway.  That song is one of 90 on the “refined” playlist for AAM.  Refined from 221.  I wanted to share the brief story of my good day.  It’s brief because it’s been good only for about 5 hours, since I started writing at the coffee shop.  The fellow at the counter knows me by now and greets me warmly.  I asked for coffee and apparently I’d earned the honor of a house mug, as he took one down and gave me my coffee in it.  I love getting coffee in different ways from drinking other things at a coffee shop.  The first time I drank coffee and liked it was in Valparaiso, Nebraska.  I had it doctored heavily but I still felt strangely adult, accomplished, looking out at the fields around the bed and breakfast.  I’d run away from home, you could say, and came to that town through a series of odd coincidences involving my first book and second heartbreak.  It’s one of my favorite places on Earth.  I ate grilled chicken sandwiches for lunch and dinner and drank beer and got the strangest look when I showed the lady my Ohio ID.  I drove 14 hours to get there.  God, it was worth it.

Right, so, I was talking about this cup of coffee.  In a black and white mug with kitties on it.  Drinking the coffee and sitting at my laptop, man, did I write.  And I looked over earlier passages for reference.  I had myself grinning.  You know that’s a good sign.  Or that you’re delusional.  I chose to believe the former today.  I wrote, and things showed themselves, and the dialogue was sharp and the threads came together.  I finished a scene and started another and I feel good about the openness of it and about what’s coming.

There was an MFA reception today, and I zoned out for a good part of it, sitting in a corner, and for the first time in a while I felt my tanks getting refilled.  I can’t remember if I’ve talked about it on here or not, but my subconscious sometimes puts the rest of me on hold and makes me sit wherever I am and space out while it drinks something in.  It did that today, and I remember getting a few looks, had a fellow come over to me and tell me I was marginalizing myself (nice guy, pretended he was my dad so I could pitch my book to him–I guess as an exercise in clarity).  But lately the only voice that’s been coming to my mind was that of Samuel, the main character’s son, who will eventually take the reins of the book.  It’s great to feel that voice, and it’s great that it’s so insistent.  He’s hounding me.  I know I’m bordering on hokum, here.  Believe me when I say I don’t plug myself into the ether like some writers feel they do.  But there is an element of writing that you can’t pin to the conscious.  And it’s lovely when that element shows itself.

I wrote about 1,500 words today, 500 over the weekend, and I’m set for another easy 500.  Gravy.  Now let’s just hope I can find the time through everything else to keep up this pace.  Might have to start foregoing sleep.  It’s not like I really need 8 hours a day anyway.  Not like I’m working, or anything.  Looking back, this post wasn’t very brief at all.  Guess I lied to you.

I’ve tried writing short stories from personal experience.  I haven’t been able to since I started seriously writing.  Since I graduated from Wittenberg.  My uncle died of cancer very recently and it has had a profound effect on me.  A lot has happened in the past two months and very little of it good.  But try as I might I can’t bring these hands into myself to write out my pain.  Even saying that, “my pain,” sounds silly, false.  I imagine a lot of writers would tell you that these things that have happened to me are fuel, and I should keep them close to my chest to keep them burning.  I agree.  You’ll forgive me if my mind is wandering and my point obscure.  I’ll get to why that is in a moment.  I wrote a story about Lindsay.  The beginnings of one.  If you’ve gathered from below you’ll see things didn’t work out the way we intended– not nearly.  We ran up against a lot of problems immediately and some of them are mine.  Some are hers.  Part of it was this place.  She said it was soulless and I agree with more certainty as I go along.

What I do here is not writing.  It’s pissing out my ass and it always has been and always will be.  I can’t synthesize my thoughts about myself and my experiences into a cohesive whole like I would put into my real writing, and so it goes here.  I can’t I think because, despite writing being a function of my health, it is not a power to be used on myself.  That’s selfish.  I write about people worse off than me, better than me.  Soldiers.  Fathers.  And without that cause I lose interest.  How many self-portraits are considered masterpieces?  How many autobiographies?  I use pieces of my life because my experience informs everything.  But beyond that.

There’s a line in my second book.  The main character is talking to a woman who’s about to leave him.  He says that he’d give her the world.  And she replies, “what am I supposed to do with it?”  That’s from experience.  And laying in those little pieces can be soothing.  I write all of my past into my books, really.  But if you take apart your life and change the pages around, put some in one book and some in another, it’s not the same thing.  You have somebody else’s life.  Spread it across characters, and who’s to tell?

I had these feelings, through the week.  Ones that I want to record.  There are times when I think my life is worth telling– really, you spin it right, I can sound downright fucking dramatic.  One is that brief moment when you wake from a dream, ever so brief, in which everything is fine.  I even dreamed of how awful things were, and waking from that dream it was like a second in heaven.  And then I woke up and she was beside me, back to me, and I remembered.  I’ve rarely crashed so hard to earth.  The other feeling is that no matter how many times I tell you I will never convey to you how special you are, and I fear that you won’t be told that enough in your life.  I’ve said it to you all before but it bears repeating because these are good things, and good things should always be told.  You make me want to be a better man.  A man, period.  I can’t say the same for most people.  But you do.  I fight with myself over this because even you don’t agree– that people should change like that.  I put myself on the line and I think I have stepped over boundaries that I shouldn’t have, compromised parts of myself.  And maybe I should never have done that for you.  You didn’t ask me to, but it was part of trying to make myself better.  And I’ve grown.  So I won’t call it a mistake.  Or regret it.

I’m going to take us down another tangent, quickly, before I go.  I have a tattoo on my left wrist that reminds me that I’m part of humanity, and that I should treat people accordingly.  I feel like I should get at least two more reminders: one that says to shut the hell up, and another that reminds me to keep myself right.  Confucius say: man can’t fix his family without being fixed himself.  I’ve always believed that, sarcasm aside.  After this probably I need some time to fortify myself.  I believe it’s time to walk out into that great desert for a while.

It’s been a topic whirling around the various lit-and-writer’s blogs lately, what with the economy, the Kindle, and, well, technology as a whole: what role does the writer play in this climate? Comma, what role does the writer play beyond his or her own writing?  Comma, what is all this technology doing to us in a broader sense?

So, for those of you unaware, publishers have started selling the writer as much as the book.  The writer has become a product.  It’s a good thing I’m as dashing as I am.  The problem is that I’m a firm believer in the author playing as small a role as possible outside of the creation of the work.  I’ve long known that’s impossible–here I am, blogging– so let’s say I believe in the Coma of the Author, or the Severe Beating of the Author.  Not quite the Death.  As publishers push writers to sell their books in more active ways, as we are driven to blog, tweet, and have a beer with our readers, our work not only becomes minimized but colored.  This is of particular concern, I think, for writers of literary fiction.  You’re here, and you know me already, probably.  But consider a reader who sees my name on the shelf (let’s hope) and picks up the book.  Likes it a lot.  Looks me up and finds that it’s a kid, essentially, who wrote this book about all kinds of things that he’s never experienced–knowledge that can lead the reader in one direction only: away from my book and to me.  To quit theoretically tooting my own horn, pick a literary giant.  Someone really big, you can’t imagine them putting on their pants.  Now sit down and have a meal with them.  Holy shit, Hemingway chews his food like everyone else!  Now he’s got hamburger in his beard.  Now he’s going to the bathroom.  These are human realities that I don’t think the reader needs to face when considering a work of fiction.  I just don’t.  You have to come to terms eventually with the fact that your wife or husband or whoever does, at times, have all manner of rude bodily functions.  You don’t ever need to think of that when reading.  The Sun Also Rises never poops.  Hamlet never farts.  Hell, Hamlet never farted.  Crude humor, I know, but you get my point?

Until I’m established, I am going to fight for exposure.  I’m going to blog.  I’ll make jokes, I’ll talk about what I eat or drink or how I met a smelly Jehovah’s Witness.  I’ll be real world.  It’s necessary.  And it may even be necessary after I’ve got some exposure.  And if that’s true, so be it.  Because what is most important to me above all is that you read my writing.  That’s first.  If I can get that done, then I’ll start worrying about how you read it.  You’re one mouseclick away from an excerpt of my real writing and it is quite different from what you find here.  The space between these two things enriches your knowledge of me.  Not of my writing.

As for things at large, you can make a lot of arguments about all manner of inventions over time, for good or ill.  What if the gun was never invented?  A: We’d still be killing each other with swords.  People make do with what they’ve got and these advances don’t go away.  You can ignore them if you like but the world is going to intrude on you or someone you know.  That being said, I don’t know that it’s true for these advancements.  And, honestly, if I can draw a crude parallel before establishing anything else: What if the gun was never invented?  A: We’d still be killing each other with swords, and we’d be forced to look our opponents in the eye.  I say this to make you wonder about the psychological and moral implications of technology.  The barest, raw result is that someone is dead.  But what has changed in the mind of the victor?  Bear with me.  The first link above goes to Sonya Chung’s latest post.  In it she talks about these coming advances.  I argued in the comments section (go there for the full, I’m not copy-pasting) that the iPhone, Googlemaps, GPS, Twitter, Fmylife.com, textsfromlastnight.com, all these things are reducing our need for interaction in the real world but more importantly, in the case of the latter three, are commodifying what experiences we do have for use on the internet.  Our misadventures (I bring myself up on purpose) become a sort of online currency or hold a point value in a game that goes unscored and unrewarded except through some manner of internet back-pattery.  The ultimate result of all this is that interactions will become a luxury of their own–we’ll simply need the time we save with an iPhone so we can do…whatever.  Tweet.  What we lost by the gun we’re losing by the phone: eye contact.  I could count on my hands the number of people who have addressed me or acknowledged my existence in any way while walking down the street here in Riverside.  What’s worse is that I’m already coming to accept that.

Just like we’re always gonna kill each other, whether by rock or sword or gun, we’re always going to interact in some way.  There are basic interactions that won’t change.  You’ll need to go to the grocery, or get your maid robot repaired, I don’t know.  There’ll always be bars.  But these interactions are being devalued.

To be sure, I’m not innocent.  I’m four days from meeting Lindsay for the first time.  We’ve only spoken online or on the phone.  I’ve gotten postcards from her, my only contact outside of electrical currents.  Obviously I’m blogging this.  It’s all pretty inevitable, I think.  There will be less value put on interaction.  Period.  I will have to sell myself as a writer– which, oddly enough, is going the other way of the technological trend, come to think of it.  But I’m all for fights and hard work.  So let’s make a little ruckus for the passing of “how about this heat?”

I’ve written more here since I’ve gotten the blog together than I wrote in a month at My Heart’s Porch.  May be something you’ll have to get used to.

The above is Modest Mouse, a band I could go on and on about.  They’re great.  We’ll leave it at that.  The first post here, “The Blog That Ate Itself,” is a riff on one of their albums.

I’ve been skipping over an important part of my life here.  It could be that I’m trying to rein myself in a bit, make this place more formal.  But that’s dishonest to the purpose of this blog, if not the site, and I’ll never be able to confuse my writing with my blogging, try as I might to blur the lines on here at times.  So, without further distraction: I’ve got this lady friend.  We’re counting down the days until we get to see each other–we’ve never met, see.  But we’ve talked for what seems like ages.  We have all the inside jokes of a couple and we complete each other’s sentences and we have trouble sleeping or doing pretty much anything without hearing the other’s voice.  It’s not perfect, but I’m finding it’s much closer to than I’ve ever been before.  We both write.  On opposite ends of the spectrum.  She’s masterful at delving into the mind, digging up pieces of heart, laying things bare.  I…write dirt good.  Which isn’t trying to sell myself short, but sometimes I’m in awe of her ability.  I wouldn’t even know where to begin.  That’s the craft.  And that’s her.  I don’t think I can do much better.  And if I can I don’t want anyone to tell me.  Have I mentioned she’s pretty as the stars at evening?

I made good on my vow and got through 2,000+ words.  The count is up to 8,386.  I couldn’t tell you the last time I wrote so much in a day.  What’s more, I finished off with a really decent scene, ended up surprising myself, tying things in where I didn’t know I could.  I love the work–now if I could just get paid for it.

Which brings me, sort’ve, to my last point of the evening.  I fired off a quick thanks to the editor of The Collagist for the encouragement, and he sent a reply right back.  I’ve had some dealings with editors before, and publishers, and agents.  And they do a good job of making me seem little even when they’re apologizing for half-year delays.  But Mr. Matt Bell has proven to be cut from a different cloth.  So, if I seemed halfhearted in my endorsement of the journal before, let me put that to bed.  Not only is The Collagist a tight piece of work, it’s also run by a damn nice fellow.  Can I cram any down home sayings into this paragraph?  No?  Then I guess we’re done.  Go take a look.

While I’ve got you on the horn, have I mentioned Circumlocution to you?  They’re in need of fiction submissions.  And I can vouch for one of the editors as being something like a saint.  I wouldn’t be sitting here today without his help.

Is this what the lotus does to you?  It’s not quite so soothing as I thought it would be.  Maybe I’m too far from the ocean.

The backstory to this is that I sent in my one (1 (single(only))) short story to The Collagist in late July.  To my surprise, I got an email back from the editor after little more than a week, during my first few days here in Riverside.  He asked me to resend the story, as I’d lopped some of it off in the sending.  A good sign, no?  So I resend.  And today–of all days, seriously, Sunday?– I get an email back rejecting it.  The good news is that he said there was good writing in it, and he looked forward to more of my work.  Which is honestly a pretty good silver lining.  But dammit, man.  You just had to wreck my momentum.  So, I blog.  I’m reclined on a couch.  Are you, collectively, putting pens to your lips, saying “hm”?

The wordcount now is 7,658.  In the whole of the text there are 114 commas.  I’m not about to go through 18 pages and see how many of those are contained in dialogue.  But.  That’s not so bad, yeah?  I’m nearly through my designated 2,000 words, and I’m gonna shoot for 3, but we’ll see how well that goes.  I might just sulk and watch The Venture Brothers.   Rejection’s part of this industry, and as far as skin goes mine’s pretty thick.  But the first issue of the journal came out and some decent-sized names are in it.  Would’ve gone a long way for things.  Back on the horse–truck.

That being said, here’s a very short one for you:  For the 3,296 words currently in my third book, I have six commas*.  I’m pretty proud of that.  For you non-writers, take a look at the number of commas in this post, then count the words.  I am a comma wasteland.

In other news, here’s fodder for another day: the role authors must play in selling their own work, and the role they play as a commodity of their own.   That dynamic is and has been changing from the dynamic we’re used to–the one of the writer-as-recluse.  Now we have to be connected.  For now I leave you with more learned and experienced folk’s opinions on the matter.  Nathan Bransford and Sonya Chung each consider this topic.

* comma count only valid for prose, dialogue not included.