Category Archives: writing

writing

me, a name I call myself

Just got back from the second to last session of Dialogue Workshop @ Chicago Dramatists. Again, characters taken from life become or unrecognizable in the mouths of others. This is a relief and a regret. I realize that I am, or have been, writing poetry because I am, or have been, feeling very self-centered, and to write plays requires you to hear other people’s voices besides your own. The plays, the fiction, the all of everything I’ve been writing is all about the third note of the scale. The comments I get on the scene are, not surprisingly, about wanting to hear more points of view.

R&C have returned from the Convergence, bearing photographs and stories. R refuses to believe that I am taking a break from theater. I refuse to believe it, too, but it’s happening anyway. We watch, to great success, CARS projected on an enormous white curtain. God, I love cars. Especially when I don’t have to drive them. Little red cars named Lightning. Cars with big blinking windshield-eyelashes. So cute. So LA right now.

For the first time in years of inactivity, the Random Rhyme Generator in my head turns on, and I hear this: “official / prejudicial.” Later on, “interstitial,” but the first one’s the important one. I only really like them between words of different syllable counts…I used to get these things the way I now get sinus infections. I haven’t had one since this blog was founded. It’s been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely lonely lonely lonely ti-ime. Is this because my mother asked me about the location of a lost volume of Lear?

– I don’t have a category for myself on this blog. (I guess the blog is the category for myself.)

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writing

stranger than

I once wrote a short story in a college fiction class where the characters, but not the events, were all based on real people – myself and two of my friends.

I worried for a long time about the ethics of doing this, but decided I had disguised everyone enough that it wouldn’t matter. I felt very guilty about “using” my friends in this way, but not at all so about myself. I was, I thought, fair game for my own writing.

When I turned in the story to my classmates, the character whom they all found the most morally repugnant was the one based on me. This taught me that I contained, or sympathized with, a person who was highly dislikeable.

It also taught me that in the process of transferring “truth” to “fiction,” enough is always changed so that you don’t have to worry about “using” anyone. I remind myself of this now, because you have to keep learning it over and over and over again.

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quotes, writing

heroism

“I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.”

– More David Foster “I Have Dara’s Initials” Wallace, quoted in this article, which is so good. I have never before posted 3 quotes from an article before reading the whole thing. Who is this “D.T. Max” person? Only one of the best article writers ever, obviously. He has also, beside having written this amazing DFW article, written a book on fatal familial insomnia. (D.T., not DFW.) So, so, good.

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writing

academia would give him a more stable life, with health insurance

“Wallace had decided that writing was not worth the risk to his mental health. He applied and was accepted as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard. Philosophy was the only thing that had meant as much to him as writing. It, too, could trigger epiphanies. Harvard had offered him a scholarship, and academia would give him a more stable life, with health insurance.”

More of the same. Oh, DFW…DFW…

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chicago, writing

this morning

I am editing the narratives of two artists into those “artist’s statement” items for a grant. I got to talk on the phone to each of them, which was nice. One, rehearsing in Minneapolis, had just returned from getting lost on a morning jog in ten-degree weather.

It would be inaccurate to say that snow is “falling” today, because from my second-story window, it looks more like it’s rising. Or, knocking at the door.

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quotes, writing

an abyss of loneliness

“…just as often the entries record a kind of spiritual desolation and profound isolation. The actress Hope Lange, with whom Cheever had an on-and-off affair, once said that he was the horniest man she had ever known, and sexual avidity is certainly omnipresent in the journals. They include graphic descriptions of sexual encounters, real and imagined, with members of both sexes, as well as anguished attempts to hide or rationalize or excuse his attraction to men. But what comes through most strongly is not so much lust as all-purpose yearning: for a gentle touch, a moment of closeness — for love. The journals are often so thrillingly well written that you can’t put them down, and yet there are pages where you feel you ought to look away. Reading them is like peering over someone’s shoulder into an abyss of loneliness.”

– Charles McGrath on John Cheever in the NYT Sunday magazine

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writing

take that, feds!

Despite Ear Infection 2009, I managed to get some good work done today on a grant for the NEA, in between shooting steroids into my ears. (Mmm…steroids…)

I wrote almost the identical grant for a different project back in August. That time, it was my first federal government arts grant, and I think it took me about three times as long. This time was much less painful.

In a year which has often been about thwartedness and frustrationdom, and a vague sense of declining capabilities with incipient age – no more all-nighters – no more excessive consumption of alcohol without hangovers – no more life without consequences – it is so nice to feel like I have gotten better at doing something.

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poetry, writing

cathy & heathcliff avant la lettre

“She was never beautiful. Her extreme thinness, weathered skin, the effect of a lifetime of weekly, sometimes daily, migraines and the gradual loss of her teeth meant that she aged prematurely, looking 20 years older than she was. It was her energy rather than her appearance that appealed, and in particular her responsiveness that was valued and praised.”

– Frances Wilson on Dorothy Wordsworth, poet William Wordsworth’s devoted sister, who lived with William all her life as something of a second wife-figure, in the Times Online. Taken from her new book THE BALLAD OF DOROTHY WORDSWORTH, reviewed here by Miranda Seymour, which comes out March 6th. Seymour writes:

“Such was their closeness that Wilson suggests Dorothy and William may have been the inspiration for Emily Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. Although this may seem a little farfetched – particularly the Heathcliff element – Dorothy in her youth certainly embodied all the wildness of the heroine of Wuthering Heights. As described by de Quincey, she was a pagan goddess with “a gipsy tan”, and “an impassioned intellect”.

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grants & fundraising, writing

time: relative

If you spend eight hours avoiding writing a grant and two hours writing it, how many hours have you worked? The mistake I always make is by starting with a blank document, as if I were composing something. Grants are not composition. It’s a pastiche of other people’s work. Once I remember to open up all the old grants and cut-and-paste, the work flies by. I suspect that at least some of the eight hours that I feel like I wasted was spent thinking out the grant, which is why I wrote it so quickly.

I don’t want to EVER ever ever spend another hour staring at a blank Microsoft Word document, and then reading Mary Beard’s blog, and staring at the document.

When I do this, I always have this conversation with myself:

Me: If it was only going to take you two hours, you could have done that at 10 am, and then –
Self: I wasn’t ready to write it at 10 am.
Me: How am I supposed to know when you’re ready to write it?
Self: I told you I didn’t feel like writing the grant at 10.
Me: This isn’t the kind of writing where you get to “feel like” anything. This is the kind of writing where you’re being PAID, like with MONEY, and so you have to do it on time, and regularly.
Self: I got it done, didn’t I?
Me: I’m getting too old for this.

Contract is contract. Two hours is two hours. My timesheet for the day says TIME IN: 7:45 PM, TIME OUT: 9:45 PM. But I’ve been at a desk since this morning.

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