Category Archives: writing

writing

untitled poem

I keep poem first drafts in one ever-expanding Word document, usually with no titles or line breaks. Stream of poem. I allow myself to write there without any formal consciousness. When I go back and pillage it for material, I usually end up putting the line and stanza breaks in different places, and I add titles in at the very end. This is how I have written 9 out of 10 poems (9 out of 10 dentists) in the last two years.

Today I was trying to write something for a friend’s birthday, and the act of putting “For X” on a line by itself stopped the flow of that document. I have forgotten how to write to order, or I’m not as good at it as I used to be.

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poetry, writing

rather than words

TRYPEWRITER
TRYPE

I was going to make a line from High Windows, by Philip Larkin, the new What Do You Want On Your Tombstone for this site, but have decided, instead, on the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, arranged in the un-ergonomic order of the keyboard. Text, text, text.

High Windows is the first anything I encountered that made me aware that there might be something greater than, or beyond, the artistic mega-vitality of words – something that could not be expressed in words. (And what is that, Philip? Sex! Sex without societal constraints!)

Before I read High Windows, I used to write A WORD IS WORTH A THOUSAND PICTURES on my notebooks, like a radical textualist. After that poem, my notion of textual-artistic dominance was troubled.

My nineteen-year-old response to the poem, which, unfortunately, I remember, reads like this: “Yes. Rather than words. Because WORDS ARE THE DEFAULT FOR WHAT MUST BE THERE. Yes, yes, yes.”

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writing

truly extreme productiveness

“Ultimately, we know that all writers do what they can and what they must. Truly extreme productiveness (like its opposite) is beyond the absolute control of the author. For the rest of us, the respectably rather than the manically productive, there are more practical explanations. Partly it’s the freelancer’s conundrum. Anthony Burgess (75 or so books in some 40 years) used to say he never turned down any reasonable offer of work, and very few unreasonable ones. This will be written on many of our graves.”

– Geoff Nicholson on “matters of literary quantity” – his phrase, I love it – “Can’t. Stop. Writing,” NYT

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quotes, theater, writing

sink to the bottom

“JED: I just gave him a smile colder’n the Cumberland River and watched him sink to the bottom.”

– Robert Schenkkan, “God’s Great Supper,” THE KENTUCKY CYCLE

Schenkkan is a playwright who worked closely with a number of directors I know from my assisting days. I’d heard a lot about this work – nine short plays all set on and around the same contested plot of land in Eastern Kentucky – but never read it, until yesterday. It has enough murders in it for a television show, and so much sad history of the United States that, after reading it, I almost didn’t want to look outside. Smallpox-infested blankets. Civil War debts. Coal mining. Union strikes. Marriages and children and two families killing each other like Mark Twain.

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quotes, writing

some conceit

“You’ve got to feel that it’s not just some conceit. It’s got to be inside you. I’m very cautious about starting anything without letting time go, and feeling it’s got to come out. I’m quite good at not writing. Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I’m a hesitater.”

– Novelist Ian McEwan, on writing, in the 2/23 New Yorker. I can’t find the article online.

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dialogue, writing

“,”

Experimenting with writing quotes on this blog in different formats, play or fiction. Something so intimate about putting the dialogue in quotation marks.

I think what really gets me about the “,”s is the idea of setting the spoken parts apart from the rest of the text, as if everything weren’t just another kind of dialogue. Dressing it up.

“Something so intimate,” she said, “about putting the dialogue in quotation marks.”

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writing

serious times, serious oneacts

Just finished adjudicating (er, reading) the last of the millions of high-school one-acts for the yearly festival, and ranking them. I’ve done this for four or five years now. Nice way to stay in touch with what matters to a subsubsubset of kids in Los Angeles. Although they write about dating every year, this year’s group had a nice sprinkling of electoral politics, stop-lossed soldiers, terrorists, and one very interesting surrealist piece about Facebook taking over their lives. Less pregnancy than last year (the influence of JUNO is fading, I guess) and more missed connections. In general, one of the more outward-looking slates I’ve read.

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chicago, writing

you should have heard the scream she let out, bro

Grantwriting at the Mercury Cafe on Chicago Avenue, distinguished by its large number of electrical outlets and its cavernous space, large enough to perform surgery on a truck.

I ask my tablemate for the wireless password. By answer, he turns to his IPhone, caresses his screen for far too long, and eventually comes up with a photograph of the scribbled piece of paper by the counter where the wireless password is written. It’s so digital it’s analog.

The writer’s group is talking:

A: She’s the kind of person who eats a bird shoved inside of a bird shoved inside of a bird.
B: I am from Michigan…
A: You’re crusty, bro.

There really is no reason to ever feel alone in this city. I have spared the readers of this blog the more graphic discussion to which the group proceeded, about genital piercing, but I had to listen to it. Count yourselves lucky.

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books, criticism, writing

tragical-comical-historical-pastoral

I have often thought but never written on this blog that dating, relationships, and sex are the feminine-thematic literary equivalent of war and fighting.

I was reminded of this in December, while watching FOUR CHRISTMASES with Eileen. Watching Vince Vaughn get beat up by his brothers was juxtaposed with watching Reese Witherspoon get female-relationship-attacked by her sisters. Punching someone in the gut was the same as asking “When are you getting married?” Stereotypes, yes, but more than that. Models. Themes. Some truth.

Sometimes this thought train leads me to think that PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is the feminine version of, I don’t know, THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK. As you moved forward in the history of the novel, you could set up things like THE RADETSKY MARCH alongside THE HOUSE OF MIRTH. You could contrast, historically, the depiction of sex to the depiction of violence. Someone’s probably already done this. What would you put up against THE NAKED AND THE DEAD?

Sometimes the idea leads me to think that there ought to be sex choreographers as well as fight choreographers, for the New Theater.

Mostly I use it to remind myself that I am, as a writer, more of a woman than I sometimes want to admit. I have never written about a fight. I’ve never even been in a fight. I have written, a lot, about relationships, and as I write more, that subject matter keeps coming to the forefront. There may be no avoiding it.

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