I spend my creative hours working on the new story ... the one about the man and the frozen pipes and all that.
A lot of note-taking. Getting to know the main character. It would seem that would be easy to do, given that the entire premise is based on my own experience this past winter, and that therefore, by extension, my main character would be yours truly.
However, I am aware, at least subconsciously, that I really don't want this to be about me, just about what I experienced. And even then, that is not enough for a fascinating story (see: one that doesn't get boring).
So, my notes comprise bits of dialogue, bits of scenes both real and imagined, and bits of character. Well. More than bits.
Writing is a searching-out process for me, where I truly endeavor to get to know the people and learn to fall in love with them.
This main character is a version of me. Someone who, at this point anyway, seems to have some of my psychological features, while being devoid of others.
For example, I grew up going to church. My main character did not. My years attending a fundamentalist Christian organization - through my formative years - shaped my attitudes about God, religion, faith, right down to what I like in food and television and music. I have unflattering views of most aspects of religion, yet I envy those who have a faith in something. That seems like a contradiction but it isn't.
Religion (because of my experience) was and still is about dogma, organization, man's punitive application of Biblical precedents. Faith is in the heart and represents his or her internal application of scriptures as it refers to a direct relationship with a higher power.
My main character?
Doesn't give a shit one way or the other.
Neither atheist, agnostic, or believer. He has not been raised in a house where church-going was practiced, or prayers were said before every meal or Christmas was a religious holiday, not a secular one.
I don't know why these things pan out the way they do. It's part of the joy of writing.
I wish I didn't have the baggage. The internal conflict, the unresolved tension that runs like a current between my father and I whenever we see each other. (It's a low, triple-A battery current most of the time. Wouldn't even light a bulb)
No, this guy I'm discovering doesn't have that in his wiring. He IS similar to me in other areas, though, the frozen pipes and shit-for-a-car notwithstanding.
He's rarely taken seriously, a fault of his own. But a real sticking point for him.
He failed once in a marriage that he should not have entered into, but after he did, managed to fuck it up.
He's unskilled, unmotivated, and unlucky, the three worst things to be if you want to be a successful writer. And each of them is a direct result of the way he was not taken seriously while growing up.
The list is longer than that, but those are the big ones.
I don't know where he's taking me, to be honest. What his 'story' is, if there is one. I don't even know yet if he's a strong enough character to hold the line of a story.
All I have is a broken bathroom pipe in February and a man with a lot of bad luck, no discernible technical skills, but one big dream.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Friday, May 8, 2009
Today's Word: Psaltery
psal-ter-y(sal-ter-ee)
1. An ancient stringed musical instrument played by plucking the strings with a plectrum or the fingers
There once was a girl who craved Big Sam Tuckitt
Whose voice made girls quiver, but was as dumb as a bucket
To get him to sing, she showed him her psaltery
Down upon which he scowled rather dumbly
"Now all you must do is pluck it"
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Sea Change
I sit in my 1850's farmhouse in Buckfield and I feel a little sea sick.
The tide is inexorable, and its tug is felt in my chest. Or better, my ego. I tend to cling to the firm shore along my rocky coastline, for fear of the rip tide of life that I know is waiting to suck me under. It's the mysterious underthing that has kept me from casting out these past 25 years.
I love the shore, the warm, white sands of solid earth, where I can watch the sailboats from a safe distance.
But now, for the first time, I've grown desirous to be out there among them, to see what life is like on the waves.
I'm 41 years old and in a few months I will be a freshman at the University of Maine, Farmington. The place my own father, now 70, earned a teaching degree some 50 years ago.
I therefore enter the ranks of adults across the nation who have decided to go for that college degree after all, and beside whose names are printed “non-traditional,” the moniker given to those of us who (in my narrow, movie-fed, Animal House-distorted view of college) will not be going to keggers on Friday nights or living in co-ed dorms sharing bathrooms with mysteriously tantalizing members of the opposite sex. We are part of a legion of folks who are old enough to be most freshman's mother or father.
I am nothing if not non-traditional.
Married twice. Six children, three of whom are in high school, one a year away from middle school, and two not yet out of diapers. I have worked in two factories, I've been a journalist, and I've slaved within the boxy confines of a nondescript cubicle, within a desert of cubicles so broad and long one could barely see the bank of windows at the distant horizon. My employee number was larger than my picture, the one on my badge, my most important form of identification.
I've seen my four children birthed and have reveled in the accomplishments of two step children.
I've been to the funerals of three of my grandparents, an aunt and two uncles.
I have made colossal errors in judgment; weathered a divorce; spent more money than I earned; maxed out my first and only credit card; flirted with bankruptcy; forestalled foreclosure and been laid off from three different jobs.
I was a teenager when hip-hop was invented, back when they called it “rap” when we all wore parachute pants and the girls had Mall Bangs they aerosoled into frozen tsunamis.
The arc of my character development, you could say, is quite expansive. I would like to think it has yet to hit its zenith. I would like to think – probably naively – that I won't hit my peak for sometime. My life expectancy quotient says otherwise. If you believe life expectancy quotients that is.
I don't. Most of us non-traditionals don't put stock in a lot of things fed to us. That's why my aspiration to be the next great American novelist has stayed with me since Hank Burn's sophomore English class, back in 1985, when I was 17 and Hank was just about everyone's favorite teacher at Oxford Hills High School. I held on to that dream when so many of the kids who did go onto college after graduating saw theirs vaporize into a mist of post-collegiate job interviews and dispiriting 9-to-5's.
Since high school, I've witnessed my sea ebb and flow continuously, coming in and going out, bringing with it – and taking away – the flotsam and jetsam of a life lived. Of debris resulting from wreckage (from failed voyages) or deliberately tossed out there from where I stood. Debris of experiences, of failures and successes. It all becomes debris after all.
I bring this with me to college classrooms where kids my daughter's age will be studying next to me, and I wonder who has the advantage? Me with my lifetime of bumps and bruises, or them with their wide-eyed naiveté? Cynicism versus optimism? They wanting to be me, me wanting to be them?
It doesn't matter. They will have to learn for themselves after all. And they do have one thing going for them: they have, at 18 or 19, taken ship when I am, until now, still ashore. Heels dug into the cooling sands against my fears when they, it would appear, are facing theirs with sails full set.
In the fall, with this new tide, I take up new oars. Perhaps they will propel me further out, away from the shore this time. Someplace where I can see the horizon better. Away from the rip, away from all the detritus of my life, out and out, so that this time when I look back, I will no longer miss the sea for sake of the shore.
The tide is inexorable, and its tug is felt in my chest. Or better, my ego. I tend to cling to the firm shore along my rocky coastline, for fear of the rip tide of life that I know is waiting to suck me under. It's the mysterious underthing that has kept me from casting out these past 25 years.
I love the shore, the warm, white sands of solid earth, where I can watch the sailboats from a safe distance.
But now, for the first time, I've grown desirous to be out there among them, to see what life is like on the waves.
I'm 41 years old and in a few months I will be a freshman at the University of Maine, Farmington. The place my own father, now 70, earned a teaching degree some 50 years ago.
I therefore enter the ranks of adults across the nation who have decided to go for that college degree after all, and beside whose names are printed “non-traditional,” the moniker given to those of us who (in my narrow, movie-fed, Animal House-distorted view of college) will not be going to keggers on Friday nights or living in co-ed dorms sharing bathrooms with mysteriously tantalizing members of the opposite sex. We are part of a legion of folks who are old enough to be most freshman's mother or father.
I am nothing if not non-traditional.
Married twice. Six children, three of whom are in high school, one a year away from middle school, and two not yet out of diapers. I have worked in two factories, I've been a journalist, and I've slaved within the boxy confines of a nondescript cubicle, within a desert of cubicles so broad and long one could barely see the bank of windows at the distant horizon. My employee number was larger than my picture, the one on my badge, my most important form of identification.
I've seen my four children birthed and have reveled in the accomplishments of two step children.
I've been to the funerals of three of my grandparents, an aunt and two uncles.
I have made colossal errors in judgment; weathered a divorce; spent more money than I earned; maxed out my first and only credit card; flirted with bankruptcy; forestalled foreclosure and been laid off from three different jobs.
I was a teenager when hip-hop was invented, back when they called it “rap” when we all wore parachute pants and the girls had Mall Bangs they aerosoled into frozen tsunamis.
The arc of my character development, you could say, is quite expansive. I would like to think it has yet to hit its zenith. I would like to think – probably naively – that I won't hit my peak for sometime. My life expectancy quotient says otherwise. If you believe life expectancy quotients that is.
I don't. Most of us non-traditionals don't put stock in a lot of things fed to us. That's why my aspiration to be the next great American novelist has stayed with me since Hank Burn's sophomore English class, back in 1985, when I was 17 and Hank was just about everyone's favorite teacher at Oxford Hills High School. I held on to that dream when so many of the kids who did go onto college after graduating saw theirs vaporize into a mist of post-collegiate job interviews and dispiriting 9-to-5's.
Since high school, I've witnessed my sea ebb and flow continuously, coming in and going out, bringing with it – and taking away – the flotsam and jetsam of a life lived. Of debris resulting from wreckage (from failed voyages) or deliberately tossed out there from where I stood. Debris of experiences, of failures and successes. It all becomes debris after all.
I bring this with me to college classrooms where kids my daughter's age will be studying next to me, and I wonder who has the advantage? Me with my lifetime of bumps and bruises, or them with their wide-eyed naiveté? Cynicism versus optimism? They wanting to be me, me wanting to be them?
It doesn't matter. They will have to learn for themselves after all. And they do have one thing going for them: they have, at 18 or 19, taken ship when I am, until now, still ashore. Heels dug into the cooling sands against my fears when they, it would appear, are facing theirs with sails full set.
In the fall, with this new tide, I take up new oars. Perhaps they will propel me further out, away from the shore this time. Someplace where I can see the horizon better. Away from the rip, away from all the detritus of my life, out and out, so that this time when I look back, I will no longer miss the sea for sake of the shore.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
In My Queue
We signed up for Netflix last week, in large part because I have a couple of good friends, Sean & Jami, who do something on their blog each week called Netflix Fridays.
They order these movies and watch them, um, on Fridays. And in their blog they discuss the movies they've selected. (They also have something called Margarita Classics in which they describe watching incredibly bad movies while drinking ... um ... margaritas.)
Anyway, they're a fun couple, they have the second-cutest little girl, Ryan, I've ever seen**. And I have been a friend of theirs and Jami's sister, Gianna, since back in the Pajama Game days. (Ask them the reference someday. It's Jami and Sean's favorite community theater story..)
Anyway.
Netflix.
Here's what Corrine and I watched this week:
The Impostors. A comedy with Oliver Platt and Stanley Tucci. And a shitload of other actors.
Why I love This Film: The story revolves around two out-of-work, down-on-their-luck actors before WWII. There's a scene where they sit on the edges of their beds in their one-room NYC apartment doing "exercises": facial expressions based on an emotion their partner gives to them. Like "Ecstatic" and "Fortunate". All you see is a close up of each man's face and I go into hysterics every time I see it. The scene ends with Stanley's character standing and looking straight up into the camera as he does an Oliver Twist sort of impression, cockney accent and all.
Vicky Christina Barcelona. A drama? Comedy? By Woody Allen that takes place in well...somewhere overseas. I don't know. I fell asleep. Then I woke up and realized it was still playing, so I fell back asleep.
I didn't like it, in case you missed the sarcasm just then.
All I could do was hope that Javier Bardem, who plays the male lead, pulled out the cattle gun he used in No Country For Old Men and used it on the females. (You have to admit, that cattle gun was way cool. Wish I kept one in the trunk of my car)
Well, not on ALL the females. Corrine thinks Penelope Cruz is hot, so any woman my wife thinks is "hot" I think is hot too.
Coming Attractions
A Room With A View
I watched this when I was a senior in high school and then had a crush on Helena Bonham Carter for the next 20 years. I'm not sure but I think this was her first feature film.
Why I Love This Movie: Wow. So many reasons. It's Merchant & Ivory; it's got English actors, and I'm a HUGE anglophile; (I used a fake British accent to seduce Corrine.) it takes place in Florence, a place I've never visited but have always wanted to; (After going to the U.K. of course); and it's historical; and it's well-filmed; and...well, I watched it at a time when I went to see every movie that came out.
Howard's End
Another Merchant & Ivory and therefore with English actors, this time taking place in England, and starring Helena, who, in my dreams as an adolescent, gave me shivers with the way she said "How do like your tea, Luv?"
Man.
Anyway, there's a really good story here too. About class distinction, the power of wealth, the weakness of the poor, and all those fancy story-telling techniques they used to have in movies, back when movies had messages.
** But THE cutest in New Hampshire
:-)
They order these movies and watch them, um, on Fridays. And in their blog they discuss the movies they've selected. (They also have something called Margarita Classics in which they describe watching incredibly bad movies while drinking ... um ... margaritas.)
Anyway, they're a fun couple, they have the second-cutest little girl, Ryan, I've ever seen**. And I have been a friend of theirs and Jami's sister, Gianna, since back in the Pajama Game days. (Ask them the reference someday. It's Jami and Sean's favorite community theater story..)
Anyway.
Netflix.
Here's what Corrine and I watched this week:
The Impostors. A comedy with Oliver Platt and Stanley Tucci. And a shitload of other actors.Why I love This Film: The story revolves around two out-of-work, down-on-their-luck actors before WWII. There's a scene where they sit on the edges of their beds in their one-room NYC apartment doing "exercises": facial expressions based on an emotion their partner gives to them. Like "Ecstatic" and "Fortunate". All you see is a close up of each man's face and I go into hysterics every time I see it. The scene ends with Stanley's character standing and looking straight up into the camera as he does an Oliver Twist sort of impression, cockney accent and all.
Vicky Christina Barcelona. A drama? Comedy? By Woody Allen that takes place in well...somewhere overseas. I don't know. I fell asleep. Then I woke up and realized it was still playing, so I fell back asleep.I didn't like it, in case you missed the sarcasm just then.
All I could do was hope that Javier Bardem, who plays the male lead, pulled out the cattle gun he used in No Country For Old Men and used it on the females. (You have to admit, that cattle gun was way cool. Wish I kept one in the trunk of my car)
Well, not on ALL the females. Corrine thinks Penelope Cruz is hot, so any woman my wife thinks is "hot" I think is hot too.
Coming Attractions
A Room With A ViewI watched this when I was a senior in high school and then had a crush on Helena Bonham Carter for the next 20 years. I'm not sure but I think this was her first feature film.
Why I Love This Movie: Wow. So many reasons. It's Merchant & Ivory; it's got English actors, and I'm a HUGE anglophile; (I used a fake British accent to seduce Corrine.) it takes place in Florence, a place I've never visited but have always wanted to; (After going to the U.K. of course); and it's historical; and it's well-filmed; and...well, I watched it at a time when I went to see every movie that came out.
Howard's EndAnother Merchant & Ivory and therefore with English actors, this time taking place in England, and starring Helena, who, in my dreams as an adolescent, gave me shivers with the way she said "How do like your tea, Luv?"
Man.
Anyway, there's a really good story here too. About class distinction, the power of wealth, the weakness of the poor, and all those fancy story-telling techniques they used to have in movies, back when movies had messages.
** But THE cutest in New Hampshire
:-)
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Youth Rant, Old Argument
Did you know that Neil Simon was 30 years old before he wrote his first play? The author of some of the greatest Broadway comedies (see: the Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park, Last of the Red Hot Lovers) didn't get his "start" until he was old.
Older. I meant older.
Like me.
This gives me unimaginable hope.
(Technically Neil Simon wrote for the Golden Age of Television's funniest shows in the 50s, so he was a writer in his 20s, but not a NAME. His name was not on the marquee.)
I live in the same world you do: where "talent" and "success" are prepackaged, televised, and shoved down our throats. Individuality is out the window. In order to be a "great" singer, actor, writer, etc., you must be no older than 26.
I've been seriously worried about this. I'm not kidding. Each year I get eight new gray hairs over my temples and I get one year further away from stardom.
Okay, I don't want to be a star. Writers are not celebrities. I would love to be a success, though, and there's a part of me that keeps wondering if aging is pulling me further away from that?
You laugh. You scoff. You guffaw at my lameness. But I am serious.
I can't pick up the newspaper, go online, or watch television without seeing youth served while my favorite actors are getting older while in fewer movies; my favorite novelists are older and not producing anymore; my favorite musicians...okay, my favorite musicians are all from the 80s. Bad example.
The point is, and I KNOW age has nothing to do with being a writer, I'm still a bit edgy about our culture celebrating a celebrity's YOUTH, not his or her talents per se.
Know what I mean? Is it me or are we enamored with their youthfulness first, their talent second?
Okay. Fine.
You're right.
I'm putting off writing by talking about how afraid I am that my age is hindering my chances of being successful when really the only thing hampering my chances of success is...well...not writing.
Older. I meant older.
Like me.
This gives me unimaginable hope.
(Technically Neil Simon wrote for the Golden Age of Television's funniest shows in the 50s, so he was a writer in his 20s, but not a NAME. His name was not on the marquee.)
I live in the same world you do: where "talent" and "success" are prepackaged, televised, and shoved down our throats. Individuality is out the window. In order to be a "great" singer, actor, writer, etc., you must be no older than 26.
I've been seriously worried about this. I'm not kidding. Each year I get eight new gray hairs over my temples and I get one year further away from stardom.
Okay, I don't want to be a star. Writers are not celebrities. I would love to be a success, though, and there's a part of me that keeps wondering if aging is pulling me further away from that?
You laugh. You scoff. You guffaw at my lameness. But I am serious.
I can't pick up the newspaper, go online, or watch television without seeing youth served while my favorite actors are getting older while in fewer movies; my favorite novelists are older and not producing anymore; my favorite musicians...okay, my favorite musicians are all from the 80s. Bad example.
The point is, and I KNOW age has nothing to do with being a writer, I'm still a bit edgy about our culture celebrating a celebrity's YOUTH, not his or her talents per se.
Know what I mean? Is it me or are we enamored with their youthfulness first, their talent second?
Okay. Fine.
You're right.
I'm putting off writing by talking about how afraid I am that my age is hindering my chances of being successful when really the only thing hampering my chances of success is...well...not writing.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Today's Word: Otiose
O-ti-ose(o-she-os)
1. Lazy: idle
2. Futile: ineffective
A wife said to her man 'Adios!
I can't find a thing in this house'
To which the man yelled
'Margarite, What the hell?!
You would if you weren't so otiose!'
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