low door

This past Monday evening, we drove to Roanoke. Tuesday morning, we went out house shopping. We saw about 6 houses, and then broke for lunch. Over lunch, we decided that the second house we had seen was the one. Initially, I had been holding out for more of a city location, with sidewalks and shops you could walk to. Screw that…that’s why god invented cars. After we saw the second house that morning, we realized we could live in the mountains on 1.6 acres. I think it will be a good place to write.

Dianne asks for clarification regarding my last post. (Hey, Dianne, quit reading blogs and get back to work! )

First, a definition of what I mean by the “precious pretentiousness” of contemporary fiction. I’m actually not opposed to “best-seller-type stuff,” since mostly I think it’s sincere and appropriate for the genre and makes people (including me, sometimes) happy. I’m talking more about the kinds of books you read so that you can tell other people at parties that you’ve read them, or so that you’ll look hip on the metro. (That sounds petty and mean, and it is. I’m really just jealous that they’re published and I’m not.) By “precious,” I mean “trying too hard to be cute and clever and self-referential”–in other words, “affectedly refined in conduct, manners, language, etc.” (Ok, can’t put “The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary” on my list of books to get rid of.) It’s the kind of “pretentious” stuff that sounds like it came out of a creative writing workshop (and probably did). It’s affected and uses common tropes in order to sound “literary.” It’s the kind of fiction that the New York Times Book Review section and Oprah love. (Well, until she started liking good books.)

So, to summarize, I like good, mainstream, genre fiction too. As long as it’s not completely meaningless or pandering.

Second, Dianne asks some pointed questions:

I’m curious why you want to write a novel.

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money” (Samuel Johnson).

Do you…
1) have a story everyone should hear?

Well, that would be kind of pretentious of me if I thought that, wouldn’t it? The answer is yes. More seriously, though, it’s more that I have a story I want to hear.

2) have a story that has to get outside of you, no matter who else reads it? (you previously mentioned “the story idea that’s been bothering me for a while”)

I do have voices in my head that won’t leave me alone. I think I’m actually one of those people who say they “must” write, but I really haven’t written for a long time, and I continue to put it off. So I guess I’m also a masochist.

3) want to get your name on the NYT best sellers list? (unlikely)

After my snarky comment above, it’s unlikely they’ll give me a good review anyway.

4) want to see how far you can go as a writer? (now that you’ve written many many other styles)

As an undergrad, I chose journalism as a major because you could make money as a journalist. So, for the last 10 years, I’ve been seeking writing jobs that make money. (See Dr. Johnson’s quote, above.) So it’s not that I’m out to conquer each different kind of writing, so much as it is that I guess I see writing as my profession. It’s just hard to get someone to hire you to be a novelist.

5) want to hand out business cards that say (truthfully) that you’re a novelist?

Good idea! I’m going to spend the rest of the day designing my business card. (Don’t tell my boss.)

I guess I’d have to say that it’s a combination of several of the above. I want my first book to be on the NYT bestseller list and to be optioned for a movie so that I can afford to write full time. Then, I want to write about things that actually matter to me (and hopefully to other people). I want to write fiction because I see it as more “truthful” (as opposed to “factual”) than non-fiction. And I think it’s got a lot to do with my personality (INFP).

I don’t know–it’s a good question. Sometimes I forget that not everyone wants to be a writer, and so I don’t think much about it. Actually, John Gardner describes me pretty exactly. I’ll have to look back through his book and list the personality traits of writers as he describes them. Look for that in a future post…

I’ve decided to be a novelist. It might take a year, or it might take 10 (more). Either way, for me, it involves a continual rearrangement of priorities.

For a number of years (seven, but who’s counting?), my priority was to become a literature professor. To that end, I accumulated quite a number of books, always telling myself they would someday be useful (and some have been). It was pretty easy to justify. And I’ve always taken a perverse pride in my overfull shelves, stacked two-deep and overflowing onto the surrounding floor.

But now, as I look at my shelves, I notice a glaring problem: easily half of my books are specifically not novels. They’re books of criticism, mostly dealing with nineteenth-century topics, or books of theology, much of which I’ve outgrown and won’t return to. The criticism is no doubt valuable, but much of it probably not valuable for a novelist. The theology is probably more valuable (for the kinds of novels I want to write). Many I haven’t read and, I must finally admit, probably never will (or probably never should).

The presence of these books isn’t what bothers me–I’m happy to cart them around and arrange them on my shelves and pretend I’ll one day read them for the next 10 years. But the lack of novels says something about my priorities. Most of the novels I own weren’t even written in the last 50 years. Shouldn’t a novelist immerse himself in the literature of his time? Mostly, I can’t stand the precious pretentiousness of contemporary fiction, but no doubt there’s something out there that I haven’t found. (This is where the comments feature comes in handy–too bad only two or three people read this blog…)

So I’m close to making a decision to sort through my books and sell or give away those that I know I’ll never need–or that are weighing me down like a millstone. (I have to word it that way. Otherwise, my wife will read this and immediately come upstairs with empty boxes, and my shelves will be bare in 10 minutes.) It might be a good, cathartic process. And just thinking about shelves full of novels–rather than this–makes me want to write.

Greg has been discussing the same topics that we’ve been talking about with our 5-year-old daughter. First, read this. Then this. This this and this.

Or just skip it all and read this:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.

Today, after church, my 5-year-old daughter Audrey asked (over lunch), “What does Jesus dying on the cross save us from?” Suddenly, all of the angst, indecision, rethinking, and growth I’ve undergone over the past 5+ years had been reduced to a single question. Sooner that I had expected, my child was asking what I believe–a possibility that has occurred to me as I’ve been working out my beliefs, but one that I thought I could postpone a while longer.

The first problem with answering this question is that Audrey has a pronounced anxiety about death. She occasionally cries about the grandfather who died long before she was born, and she clearly sees death as a separation from the people you love. She has a vivid imagination, but it doesn’t yet extend to the supernatural and transcendent. No amount of reassurance about the bliss of heaven will satisfy her.

So clearly she’s been learning about Easter in Sunday school. I guess there’s no getting around the torture and death of Jesus during this time of year. And really, why should this season be any different, since the Bible in all its brutality is paraded before them at all other times of the year. Here, kids, color this!

My answer to her question, I quickly decided, couldn’t have anything to do with the idea I’d grown up with. I simply don’t believe that God sent Jesus to die in order to satisfy some sort of blood debt. And today, over lunch, I just came right out and said it–”Jesus’ death doesn’t save us from anything. It was a consequence of the life he lived. He died because he said things that challenged people with authority, and they didn’t like it. He wasn’t the only one to have done so. Instead, the life he lived is what saves us. His example saves us from a life of meanness, selfishness, and insignificance. Following his example is what ’saves’ us.”

Then, naturally, the topic of heaven came up. Audrey’s clever enough to know that if loving God gets you to heaven, there must be a place for people who don’t love God. So, what the hell–I told her that that place doesn’t exist. It’s something that was made up by people to scare kids into believing what they want them to, like telling her that I’m going to smack her bottom if she doesn’t listen–only forever, in the dark, and on fire. Why would God do that, even if she decided she doesn’t love him? I wouldn’t drop her at the side of the road if she woke up every morning and told me she hates me–I’d still love her, feed her, and take care of her. So screw it–everyone gets in.

I don’t know whether she bought my explanations. I’m trying to decide if I do myself. But I know that I don’t want fear and death to be the primary motivators for her beliefs. And anyway, if trying to live like Christ doesn’t get you “saved,” then there’s really no point in believing the rest of it.

Just watched this movie tonight. I totally thought it was going to be a goofball comedy, but it turned out to be a serious commentary on contemporary narrative theory. Leaving aside the obvious stereotype of Maggie G. as the sexy-tattooed-anarchist-baker (wait, is that really a stereotype?), it made a lot of poignant comments about the outdated (but still popular in academia) notion of the “death of the author“–and probably a lot else, which I would be able to speak intelligently about if I had ever really paid attention to literary theory in my seven years of graduate school. Suffice it to say, it nicely deconstructs the separation between creator/creation/audience/text/stuff. So “meta”–sort of like The Matrix…but with Will Ferrell.

Anyway, all of which is to say that it actually taught me some things about writing. And those things are actually important for the story idea that’s been bothering me for a while. My story ideas invariably seem to involve people in situations they don’t want to be in who learn outrageous and improbable things about themselves–and then kick the shit out of each other with kung fu. (Just kidding…see The Matrix reference, above.) Ok, so that describes a lot of storylines. I guess I should start writing in order to figure out exactly what I mean…

I’ve been writing lately, but not online. I started a journal–one of those Moleskine things. The first entry is March 10, 2006, then there’s a big gap between April and July 2006, then one entry each for August, September, and December 2006.

Since Feb. 28, 2007, though, I have 13 entries. It must be a personal record. And I find that I really feel the lack of it when I miss a day, so that must be a good sign.

My goal is to reawaken my writing self. For years, I’ve only written academic stuff. Then, for the past two years, it’s been technical stuff. I keep telling myself I’m a creative writer, based mostly on my creative bursts in middle school, high school, and briefly in college as an undergraduate. I think I’m almost at the place where I really can write with creative freedom again, this time more informed by my experiences with literature in graduate school–and I think I’ve distanced myself enough from that debilitating, soul-withering experience. (It has taken some time for me to be able to read as anything other than a would-be scholar.)  To be sure, I’ve gained quite a lot as a reader, but it remains to be seen how those skills will transfer to writing.

Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.

That’s the message that appears when I don’t have any posts on my blog. I like it, and I’m thinking of adopting it as my life motto. Maybe I’ll have it tattooed to my palm, so I can read it whenever I open up my balled-up fist to let go of whatever the hell it is I think I’m holding on to.

Incidentally, the message no longer appears.