Tag Archives: writing

Name Yourself

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Yesterday I started reading a book about writing — James Scott Bell’s Plot & Structure, which is fantastic so far, if anyone else out there needs help sorting out their ability to write plots — and the author talks about some of the ways he’s kept himself motivated over the years to keep sitting down to write. One of his early methods was buying a mug that said “Writer” on it:

I would look at that cup every day to remind myself of my commitment. In fact, on days when the writing drags, I’ll look at it again. It gives me a fresh jolt of enthusiasm.

Of course, if you’re a writer then you’re probably familiar with the sort of intense cognitive dissonance that I imagine every writer, at some point or another, faces over the subject of this sort of naming. I’ve been writing, and rather competently if I do say so myself, for as long as I can remember; yet I’ve always squirmed at the idea of actually calling myself a writer. Surely I wasn’t there yet. I hadn’t sold anything. Then when I had sold something, I hadn’t sold the specific genre of thing that I wanted to sell. Could I call myself a writer if I was self-published? Was I a writer if I’d only published a few articles, and no books? If I’d published only one book? What if I’d written twenty great American novels but was too terrified to let anyone read them? Was I a writer then? If a tree fell in the forest to be turned into paper for me to endlessly crumple and throw into my wastepaper basket, would anyone hear my sobs of helpless self-loathing?

Polling your friends and family won’t help with these sorts of existential questions, by the way. I’m sure my fellow maybe-we’re-writers know exactly what I’m talking about. Your mom might have been calling you “my little bestselling author” since she pinned your first crayon-scribbled essay onto the fridge. Your friends might not think you’re a real writer until you’ve outsold Stephen King.

Logically, if you look at the word “writer,” you might realize that it’s perfectly acceptable to call yourself a writer if you’re somebody who’s writing all the time. Even if you aren’t doing it well. Hell, even if you aren’t doing it frequently. If calling yourself a writer helps you sit your ass in that chair and pound out a few hundred words, who’s to say you’re not a writer? You seem to be involved in the act of writing. Still, your brain can know that logically and still whisper to you at every available opportunity that you’re not really a writer. Not yet. Not until you have fulfilled goals X, Y and Z which have been set entirely arbitrarily by your trolling psyche.

It doesn’t seem fair, because we human beings have very little trouble giving ourselves other titles before we’ve perhaps fully earned them. We have no trouble calling ourselves failures before we’ve truly begun to try; worthless before we’ve even scratched the surface of our ability; hopeless before we’ve even begun to hope. Those titles, it seems, are easy to take to heart.

This weekend I ran my first 5K race. For my $20 registration fee and a slightly greater price extracted in sweat, I got a “Scottish Sprint” t-shirt (I seriously wanted that t-shirt you guys, and I did not care that I had to drive an hour each way just to get to the race), a tag with a number on it, and the fine company of fellow runners through a grueling (well, grueling if you’re me) 3.1 miles in wonderfully overcast weather. I got to sprint across the finish line to the sound of bagpipes in the park across the street as the day’s Scottish festival got going, and I got to feel that in some way I’d just validated all of those months that I’d spent quietly calling myself a runner in my head. A 5K is nothing more than a leisurely warm-up jog to a lot of “runners” I know, but doing your first 5K or 10K or ultramarathon doesn’t make you a runner any more than you already were just by getting out there and running. You know you’re a runner not by how many races you’ve completed or even whether you’ve raced at all. You earn that title by the simple fact that you have run, you are running, you will run.

If holding back from calling yourself a writer helps keep you hungry, then by all means. If calling yourself a writer helps keep you motivated, do that. If you won’t feel you’re a runner until you’ve clobbered that marathon, or you already feel like a runner because you’ve just made it all the way around the block, do whatever it takes to keep on running.

Milestones are important. Goals are important. Dreams are important. But there is no race, no route, no mile marker or timer more important to being a runner than the steady and transcendent rhythm of feet against earth. There is no more important act to being a writer than setting words, one after another, down on paper. There is always hope when your feet are still moving, when your pen is still scrawling, when you have chosen to name yourself instead of letting your doubts name you.

Driving Along the Twisted Road (or, Why Everything Is Better With Fisticuffs)

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“In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.” – from The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

I love conflict. I love messy entanglements, vicious fights both physical and verbal, estrangements and inner struggles, war and strife, murder and mayhem. I love damning secrets, shadowy maneuverings, sibling rivalries, forbidden romances, fistfights and poisonings. There is nothing I love more than a good old fashioned dust-up, either literal or metaphorical.

I also have a book on my shelf called The Coward’s Guide to Conflict, because in my own life I hate every single one of the things I’ve listed above. (I haven’t read that book yet, by the way. It sounds too confrontational for me.) I am completely ill-equipped to handle any sort of squabble. If two random people on the train start having an incredibly mild disagreement, I’m mortified.

Gentleman 1: I say, old fellow! You’ve just bumped my elbow, wot.
Gentleman 2: Oh dear me, I’m dreadfully sorry old chum, but I daresay you needn’t take that tone with me. Perhaps we should discuss the matter over tea.
Me: Oh god please let the train crash and kill us all, I can’t handle this level of animosity.

If people I actually know are having a full-blown argument, forget it; it’s like watching your parents fight, and I’d rather run away to Tibet to become a yak-herder than even have to witness it. I can’t even blame parental drama; mine weren’t together anymore by the time I was born, and as far as I remember nobody else in my family was the type for full-blown fights either (we seemed to have a preference for cold wars, or possibly I just ran away at the first sign of trouble and just never actually witnessed any fighting first-hand). Maybe there just wasn’t enough strife in my household when I was a kid; I never learned how to cope. At the first sign of incipient conflict, I freeze up like a startled rabbit and start singing Soft Kitty to myself.

Maybe my inability to handle that sort of thing in my daily life is why I’m such a junkie for it everywhere else. If there’s one thing that I want from my entertainment, it’s conflict. I want the characters to be struggling with themselves, with each other, with their environments and their societies and possibly with giant radioactive jellyfish from the deep. I want them to be fist-fighting cougars and experiencing all sorts of heart-rending angst and wrestling with their inner demons or their own personal arch-enemies. Conflict is a great way to poke your characters and provoke a response, and of course the response is the satisfying part; that’s where we learn what our characters are made of. We figure out who they are — and become invested in their lives — by seeing them freeze or fight back. If Romeo and Juliet had successfully hidden their relationship and eloped to Las Vegas and been blissfully happen together until they were old and grey, that play would’ve been boring as hell and furthermore, we wouldn’t have really cared about either of them. The meat of the story is in what happens when everybody else finds out about the secret forbidden love affair, and how our heroes react to it all. (In Romeo and Juliet’s case, of course, they reacted by being overdramatic emo teenagers, and look how that turned out.)

Spoiler alert: They totally both die.

This issue of conflict is, I believe, why it’s so impossible these days to find a good romance film. I love romance movies, the sappier the better, so my standards are not unusually high. I have, in fact, watched Chasing Liberty more than once, though mostly that was so I could look at Matthew Goode. That movie at least has a bit of conflict as an obstacle to our heroes’ love, though mostly it’s just Mandy Moore throwing endless hissy fits. But contrast that with Leap Year, another romance movie that I watched just for Matthew Goode (damn you, man), and you begin to see the problem.

See, Leap Year should’ve been a sure thing. It’s got Matthew Goode and Ireland and I’ve liked Amy Adams since she did Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day (Lee Pace for the win!). But mostly Matthew Goode in Ireland, okay? Two gorgeous things that look gorgeous together. Only the trouble with the whole concept is, there really aren’t any obstacles to our characters becoming romantically involved. Sure, she’s got a boyfriend she’s trying to reunite with so she can propose to him, but in these sorts of films the boyfriend is always a bit of a tosser and the relationship is always devoid of human warmth, so you can’t figure out why our girl wouldn’t just go for it with the hot Irishman in the goatee. (Except in those cases when the current partner — who is eventually going to be dumped by our romantic lead — is quite a nice person and overall gets shafted, and then you get distracted by what a couple of dicks the “heroes” of the film are. For an example of this, see Colin Firth in The Accidental Husband. It’s not even remotely a good movie, but it does have Colin Firth and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in it, so. Now if they’d made Jeffrey Dean and Colin the two romantic leads, that would’ve been a whole different and much more interesting film. TAKE NOTE, HOLLYWOOD.) Lacking any substantial reason to keep the movie going for the next hour and a half by keeping our lovers apart, the writers seem to default to artificially creating conflict by making the two romantic leads so obnoxious that even the viewer can’t stand them.

“Hey there, I’m hot and we’re in Ireland, you want to hook up?”
“LOL nah, I haven’t showed you all of my personality defects yet. Before we can get to the snogging at least one of us has to suffer a hilarious concussion and there have to be a few jokes about sex and/or bodily functions.”

(Oh, and lest I give you the mistaken impression that Matthew Goode only does films that are moderately to severely dreadful, I’d like to encourage you to watch A Single Man. His part is rather small on screen but is the center of the whole plot, and it’s just a gorgeous, heart-rending film in general. Also, it made me cry like a tiny little girl. But if that’s not your sort of film either, then surely you liked  him in Watchmen. SURELY. ILU, Matthew Goode. Call me.)

For an even better example of this phenomenon of hard-core lack of anything compelling happening, you could try watching the worst romantic comedy I have ever had the misfortune of viewing, namely The Back-Up Plan. Or, you could stab yourself in the eye with a rusty spoon. The latter would probably be less painful. The thing is, in our modern world, when you take two single and unrealistically attractive people who live relatively normal lives and are not secretly werewolves or engaged in centuries-long familial blood feuds or whatever, there really just aren’t that many reasons for them not to make it work. Sure, relationships fail all the time for a ridiculous variety of reasons, but when it comes to our entertainment we’re generally not interested about a story of boy meets girl where they meet and rather painlessly get together and then discover that ultimately they’re just not compatible because one of them leaves wet towels on the floor. When it comes right down to it, you’re going to need just a touch more drama than that.

(At this point I feel like I should maybe apologize to people who loved Leap Year — I know you’re out there — because god knows we all have those movies that we love even though logically we shouldn’t, but if you really genuinely loved The Back-Up Plan, then I think YOU should apologize to ME.)

Luckily, we have plenty of types of conflict to make our characters’ lives more interesting, even if we don’t necessarily want to introduce any of those forms of conflict into our own existences. (Existensi?) The generally accepted classifications that I learned in school were Man vs. Self, Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Society, Man vs. Man, Man vs. God and Man vs. Machine. The really juicy characterization comes in when these are used richly and in combination. Take The Avengers, for instance. Bruce Banner — perhaps better known as The Hulk — is a classic and quite literal example of Man vs. Self, because the thing he’s most afraid of and struggles with most is himself. But he’s also got some serious Man vs. Man (with the enemy and with his own allies) and Man vs. Machine going, on account of the faceless alien invasion and all that. You could even call some of his struggle Man vs. Nature, even though the wild beast he’s fighting is a part of him. (There’s also an added element of Man vs. God, and I’m pretty sure we all enjoyed how that turned out. Well, everybody except the god in question.) And that’s just one character in an ensemble of other characters who are just as richly drawn. I’m pretty sure when Joss Whedon was making this film his big decisions were which conflicts to cut out because he had too damn many good ones, rather than trying to think of some contrived problem to shoehorn in to liven things up a bit. (I find that, as a general rule, things never need livening up when The Hulk is involved.)

If your story is lacking in conflict, maybe you should outsource the job to The Hulk. Just tell him to smash and watch as he creates a multitude of glorious explosions, plane crashes and other catastrophes for your entertainment.

By sheer random happenstance, just as I was deeply pondering the nature of conflict and how much I hate pretty much any movie with Matthew McConaughey in it these days, I stumbled across a series of writer’s workshops being put on by a local library. The first talk, by local fantasy author Paul Genesse, was all about conflict: why every story needs it, and how to find it without forcing it. (You can find Paul’s presentation notes over here on his blog if you’re interested.) Paul gave a great presentation and we had some terrific insights from the audience as well. I picked up a few great pieces of advice I hadn’t heard before, and was particularly intrigued by the extremely strong opinions some of us had about what qualities in the face of conflict make characters either heroic or utterly intolerable. It seemed we all quite vociferously agreed that characters who let situations push them along, rather than acting to create their own destinies, are pretty much too irritating to be borne. Paul summed it up rather well this way:

Conflict means letting your character make choices. The stronger the character, the more difficult the choices.

The rest of my notes are, I’m afraid, less eloquent. Paul was discussing at one point what sorts of things don’t actually work in creating conflict… like making characters argue for no good reason. (Are you listening, Leap Year? ARE YOU?! I will punch you.) He also brought up my favorite point of writing ever, which is that we can best reveal who our characters are not by giving extensive descriptions of them at every opportunity but by putting them in uncomfortable situations and letting them sort it out. I might have transcribed his thoughts a bit unfaithfully though when I wrote a reminder to myself that read, “When writing lots of exposition, kill yourself.”

See? That’s a great example right there. I could’ve just written a straight-up description of what Paul told us, but instead I added a little Woman vs. Self drama in there. I’m just trying to keep it real. Now if you’ll excuse me, all of this talk of conflict is getting to me, and I think I need to go find a shark so I can punch it in its face.

An Interesting Idiom: “I’ll Be There With Bells On”

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As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m working these days as a carriage driver, and with the holiday season in full swing, I’ve been looking for ways to trick out my horse and carriage. These days I’m feeling like Christmas trees are completely passé and if you’re looking for some true thrills in holiday decorating, you need to look into the art and science of attempting to decorate a live animal. It’s a little complicated when you consider that the thing you’re decorating will likely do its best to eat your decorations, but you also have to contend with the possibility (okay, high probability) of blizzard conditions or just general moisture followed by sub-zero temperatures for hours on end. Your average decorations probably just aren’t going to hold up.

Our carriage company does most of the actual decorating of vehicles — and particularly for us new drivers, we never know which carriage we’re going to end up driving anyway, so it’s best not to get too invested — but drivers can help boost their business with a little bling. The veteran drivers all an incredible assortment of decorating tricks (Scooter’s Santa dummy, mounted over his horse’s back, is a hit with the kids while simultaneously giving me the willies) but for my part I mostly intend to spend my hard-earned cash on endless layers of thermals, snow pants, rain gear and chemical toe-warmers. Still, I’d like to have a little something to dress up the horses I’ll be driving for the occasion, so I have a few strings of battery-operated lights and I’ve been looking into sleigh bells.

My esteemed colleague Jim seems to find my efforts with Christmas lights laughable -- and routinely does his best to fling them off -- but passersby certainly love them. And when it really gets dark, the lights look like little stars against the black of Jim's mane. <3

I bought a few bags of craft-store bells that I’ll be giving a go, though I’d be kind of surprised if they lasted longer than a week. And because I like to live in a land of delusion, I also searched the Internet for real harness bells. I found quite a few places still producing beautiful, high-quality bells of all kinds for use on harnesses (I will take one of each, please), but alas, poverty and other priorities prevent me from actually purchasing any.

My quest did yield a potential origin for an interesting idiom, however. (That’s what I love about the Internet: you might be just shopping for something, but you learn some vocab instead.) You’ve probably heard the phrase “I’ll be there with bells on,” and it’s generally accepted to mean, “I will be attending the aforementioned function in my finest of finery.” Presumably there was a point in time where one might attend a party with literal bells on. (In the UK apparently the equivalent phrase is “with knobs on” instead, but honestly, I don’t want to even know what knobs are. If anyone tells me I will hear it in Graham Norton’s voice and all seriousness will be gone from this conversation.)

One possible origin of the phrase, however, comes from the days of horsedrawn transportation, when bells were often worn on a horse’s harness not just for the holiday festiveness of it but to ensure that other travelers on the road could hear you coming. If a partygoer arrived “with bells on,” it meant that they arrived safely having suffered no collisions or misfortunes. Or, somewhat more mundanely and assuming that everybody back then didn’t travel around with a large cacophony of bells at all times, simply that carriage horses were outfitted with bells for particularly festive occasions, the same way a partygoer would dress themselves to the nines for a special event.

The Phrase Finder offers an even more charming and detailed possible explanation for the idiom:

The settlement of US immigrants in Pennsylvania and other states. Their preferred means of transport were large, sturdy wooden carts, called Conestoga wagons. These were drawn by teams of horses or mules whose collars were fitted with headdresses of bells. George Stumway, in Conestoga Wagon 1750-1850, states that the wagoners personalised the bells to tunings of their liking and took great pride in them. If a wagon became stuck, a teamster who came to the rescue often asked for a set of bells as reward. Arriving at a destination without one’s bells hurt a driver’s professional pride, whereas getting there ‘with bells on’ was a source of satisfaction.

As I’m sure you can imagine, I will forthwith be demanding a set of bells as payment every time I perform a favor for a fellow motorist. Should’ve made the demand of the last person I gave a jumpstart to. “No sir, I shall not furnish forth the jumper cables until you reward me with bells! I demand that they be gleaming, sir! Gleaming!”

Of course, the phrase is pretty antiquated either way, but as a person who drives a horse and carriage, I suppose I can’t really point the finger at anything for being old-fashioned. If you’re more into the modern conveniences and highfalutin technology, perhaps you should take Nathan Bradley’s advice and replace “with bells on” with the much more practical “with sandwich in tow.” I think it could be the next big thing. As for myself, I’m now experiencing an intense urge to research the etymology of the word “highfalutin.” So maybe it’s best to just leave things there.

An Interesting Idiom: “Coming Down the Pike”

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One of my favorite subjects is the origins of words and idioms. I really can’t get enough of it, and the more random the origin, the better. So I was delighted, while reading Beautiful Jim Key (review coming soon), to get an interesting little linguistic insight into the term “coming down the pike.”

It’s still a fairly common phrase (particularly among middle managers who like to say things like, “There are great things coming down the pike if we can keep blue-skying it and thinking outside the box”), and it’s relatively straightforward. Though here in the west you don’t hear much about “turnpikes” and “pike” isn’t really a common word for a roadway any longer, it’s generally understood that “coming down the pike” is pretty much the same thing as “coming down the road.” Though there are some interesting alternate interpretations if you look out there on the web, including “Pike’s Peak, driving down back in the day with only mechanical brakes.” (Uh, what?) My favorite alternate insane explanation is that it might have something to do with the way a decapitated head will slide down the pike upon which it is impaled as the head decays. (Uh, WHAT?)

James Scott's "On the Pike" two-step was inspired by the fair.

The most interesting explanation — but perhaps a flawed one — is the one I first saw in Beautiful Jim Key, though it pops up in other places as well. In 1904, the city of St. Louis held the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, one of the massive World’s Fairs that were so popular at the time. (Between Beautiful Jim Key and The Devil in the White City, I’m learning an awful lot about fairs lately.) Over 19.5 million people attended the exposition and strolled along one of the 1200-acre site’s major features, a massive pedestrian corridor known as “The Pike.” The Pike was a 90 foot wide, mile-long, brick-paved expanse bordered by over 50 extravagant attractions, with water slides, miniature railways, recreations of exotic foreign villages, an aviary, a 40,000-gallon deep-sea-diving tank, a wild west show, a trained animal circus, and much, much more. Because of the costs involved, it was known as “The Ten Million Dollar Pike,” and that was only one part of the exposition. Though the World’s Fairs would eventually die out — due in part to the constant delays and incredible cost overruns that dogged pretty much every fair ever, but also because of the rise of attractions like Disneyland — at the time they were just about the most incredible, mind-blowing thing you could imagine, like a cross between the world’s largest carnival and the world’s most awesome natural history museum. Supposedly visitors were so impressed by the whole affair, and the wide array of attractions on offer, that it was often said that “there is always something new coming down The Pike.”

Visitors on The Pike at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition

True fact? Perhaps not. According to The Word Detective, “coming down the pike” was first used in print in 1901, before the St. Louis World’s Fair.

As I said, “coming down the pike,” meaning in a figurative sense “appearing on the scene now or in the near future,” first appeared in print in 1901. The “pike” is, as you implied, simply short for “turnpike,” a road or highway where a toll is charged for passage. The “pike” in “turnpike” originally referred to the barrier (“pike” being a very old word for “spear”) which was raised or turned aside to allow the traveler to proceed once the fee had been paid. As turnpikes tended to be major roads, it was possible to see the approach of a traveler well in advance, and if someone new arrived in town, it was probable that he or she had “come down the pike” to get there.

(“Down the pike” is also an often-misspoken idiom, as you’ll often hear people say “down the pipe” instead. Tim Kowal has a really interesting blog about how, considering the new landscape of the way information and ideas travel, “down the pipe” may be the more accurate and appropriate expression in these modern times.)

Though The Word Detective and others are pretty insistent about the invention of the St. Louis story by travel agents and fanciful tour guides, at its root the phrase applies to both. The Pike in St. Louis was, after all, a roadway down which visitors traveled, coming down the pike… which may be the reason why The Pike was named The Pike in the first place. It all illustrates one of my favorite things about etymology and idioms (idiomology?): that the paths language takes from point A to point B — and the subjective truths about them — have a way of traveling a very convoluted path (down the pike, if you will) into the present.

Between the Lines

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Most of the writing I do is fiction. And prose. So I don’t really write poetry, by which I mean I’ve never been good at it so I’ve mostly avoided it. But I’ve made many a secret attempt at verse throughout the years (I’m currently wrestling with writing songs, lulz), and when I dug this up from my files and didn’t hate it, I thought I’d stretch myself a little and post it. Every day is a good day to try something new

Between the Lines – Mackenzie Kincaid.

These are my beasts of burden:
these words with their
bent necks and brute strength
and a grace that belies their
consonants –
these words that stand collared
side by side and waiting
keeping company without context
until these conjunctions are laid
as harness across their backs
so that their shoulders may strain
against the hames of my intention.

These are my beasts of burden,
that surge too eager forward
and push on, blinkered,
against the bit;
but pull the weight steady
from wheel, swing, lead
and know their paces.
Set them now to their rows
and let them pull the weight
let them drag their furrows
and do their work between the lines.