Career testing

In an uninspired bit of Internet meandering, I happened onto a free online career test. Just answer 100 questions and you'll know what career path is best for you, it boasted. For the past seven or so years I've been pretty dead set on writing, but I figured I may as well give it a shot. Who knows? Maybe I'm really supposed to be testing the stool samples of orangutans.

After the compulsory lying in the registration form (maybe I'm over-protective of my personal ID, or maybe I just enjoy BSing) I started into the questions. Each listed three work scenarios. I had to list my most favorite and least favorite and leave one blank (I suppose that means it's the "meh" answer). Some were no-brainers, like whether I'd rather write articles for a newspaper, work on vehicle transmissions or buy produce for a restaurant. Others were a bit tough, like opting between cleaning dead fish, disciplining employees and managing a bank's finances.

After wading through some offers to go to the University of Phoenix (which apparently only exists in all our heads, sort of like the dollar system), I read my scores. I'd tried to answer very honestly, but the results came through exactly as I might have expected.

I'm more interested in writing than 99 percent of test takers. I'm more interested in teaching than 95 percent. I'm more interested in art than 94 percent. So, I should either write or teach writing, I guess. Well, not every day can bring a revelation.

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Goodbye, Mr. Vonnegut

News comes tonight that Kurt Vonnegut has died. I was first drawn to his books in early high school. In the library, I noticed his book and that distinctive cover, a massive "V" stretching across it. My name being Van, I've always had an attachment to that rare letter. I didn't really expect anything life altering from the writing beneath that cover, though, it was just a chance encounter.

But then I started reading. I can't even recall which of Vonnegut's 15 or so novels it was that I read first. Maybe Cat's Cradle. It was beyond anything I'd read, and expanded my perception of what writing could accomplish. This was during the period that I began to consider writing as a future, and no writer influenced me more than Vonnegut did. I read through everything of his that I could find, and every book seemed to burst out of the conventions of the last, creating something else entirely new.

A couple years ago, a cousin mailed me a birthday card, and inside was a printout. This cousin works as a book editor, and the company she worked for at the time was publishing a new novel with a foreword by Vonnegut. The printout was a copy of the original letter the great writer had composed to promote this younger counterpart. The letter is tucked away somewhere, but I recall it was typically gloomy, referencing the emptiness of the gesture of promoting another writer and complimenting every cynical word this writer had ever strung together. It was funny and sad, more than anything.

I always dreamed that I would break into the writing business and somehow catch Vonnegut's eye and maybe he would write such a letter for one of my books. But, thinking on it tonight, I realized the shortsightedness of such a dream. In my writing, I think Vonnegut would have chafed at the meaning I found in life. Maybe he would've found something worthwhile in my writing ability, but his nihilistic edge would've probably led him to spew venom my way.

Now that Vonnegut has died, I'm sure many who've drawn inspiration from him will deliver an ultimately depressing "so it goes" send off. Those words came into my mind quickly when I heard the news of his passing, but they're not the message I've chosen to settle on. Instead, I just say goodbye to one of my favorites and hope that he's found a peace that evaded him in life.

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The Anarchy of Mark Twain

I just started reading The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain, as published by Bantam Classic. The first story is his most famous, that of the Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. And that, coincidentally, is a story that comes up in my book, because the old man passes through the town of Angels Camp, where this frog jumping supposedly occurred.

The book holds dozens of stories in nearly 700 pages, a dense package but well worth it for sheer content. I read a lot of Twain while growing up, but, as with so many things, it's revealing to revisit his work now, when I can understand better the adult context. What's caught my interest so far, though, is how simple his stories are, both in writing and content. These are little yarns, sung well, yes, but simple all the same. In the Jumping Frog story, he refers to the setting of the story as "the dilapidated tavern in the decayed mining camp."

A good many writers would look at that as something of a throwaway description, such a generalization that it discredits the reader. Hell, some writers could take a whole book to show how the camp is decayed and the tavern dilapidated. Description is so often the tool writers use to strut their stuff, so to speak. In my journalism writing efforts, I'll always search out the smallest details to include (many years ago a reporter taught me this lesson by explaining how she counted all the drops of blood resulting from a bar brawl). It can make for good stories. But, is there a drawback?

I hadn't really considered this thought until I read the truly worthwhile introduction to the Twain book by Charles Neider. He explains quite well the style of Mark Twain, which was essentially that Twain would write out a story straight through, never much editing, never much polishing language, never cramming it full of meaty depictions. The Jumping Frog story, for instance, is surprisingly short when reading it now. Twain tells the tale straight through the way an ol' yarnspinner would. His words focus on the actions, the movements that mark the story's arc. There is very little superfluous material; the descriptions come quickly, such as when the frog returns to the ground after a jump, "solid as a gob of mud."

Neider compares Twain to his contemporary, Henry James, and how they are near opposites.  Another coincidence is that I actually bought James' book The Art of the Novel at the same time as the Twain book, so I'll be able to check the distinction, but from everything I've read, Neider's words ring true. James (who, by the way, is one of the main studies of the excellent book The Metaphysical Club) brings an extremely methodical approach to writing fiction. He treats it, as his book states, as a high art, with all the prerequisite rules to follow. Twain, true to his western experiences, holds storytelling as a purpose to entertain, and that informality and chaoticness are both truer to life and more entertaining. He once said that writing should be like a stream, bouncing around rocks and various pieces of life as it flows. Polished writing, then, is like a canal. Lifeless.

Both have their values, and I wonder why both can't be followed, or balanced, however you choose to see it. I find long-form writing to be much easier when I have things planned out ahead, but I try to maintain a high level of spontaneity in everything I do. And yes, editing is a great aid to any writer, but I have seen the effects of too much editing, which can take away the original essence. As with so many things, creating good fiction is about that balance.

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The new project

This is in the very early stages, so I can't go into too many details, but my next creative writing project (meaning something outside my journalism day job) will be an original graphic novel.

The book will be set in Mexico in the mid-20th Century and features a main character that you'll just have to see to believe. Trust me when I say it'll be one of the strangest comic book protagonists you've ever encountered.

The project already has an artist signed on and starting on the groundwork. We don't have an expected finish date yet, but there will be some promo and preview art coming within a couple months, most likely.

I've been a comics reader for most of my life, so it's very exciting to jump into the medium. With any luck, this will just be the first of many forays.

That's all for now, but make sure to keep checking for updates.

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The van journey: part twenty two

As I headed east through Wyoming, I listened to the radio forecasts of a snow storm likely chasing behind me. In the rear-view mirror, I could see the large-but-soft clouds turning a dark gray above the western horizon, blocking out the setting sun. Though I'd come within short range of my hometown, I'd only rarely come this way, over highway. It had the strange effect of making the landscape appear as if it was the same as that around my parent's home, just that the little details had changed: trees, houses and roads all slightly askew, the Platte River running a bit too far south of the highway, etc. A momentary thought struck me, of how home would appear the same if I returned to it after a century of absence, a modern day Rip Van Winkle.

But, soon enough, I bumped across the always choppy state line (do highway departments conspire to leave a four-inch gap between the roadways of their neighbors?) and rolled into Scottsbluff. Though it's still a nearly two-hour drive from there to home, Scottsbluff is the closest "big city" as we called it. That just means it has a theater and mall. We made hundreds of trips there over the years, any time we had to go shopping for anything beyond the barest necessities. For the first time in weeks, I'd found familiar ground, somewhere comfortable and easy, where I didn't need to be on edge.

Naturally, I decided to stop and buy a hot chocolate for the rest of the drive home, something to keep me awake (I don't drink coffee). I may tend to think of the bleak, but I imagined the story: "Oh, he was so close to home when he fell asleep and swerved into oncoming traffic." I thought I'd be sure to keep myself awake, and safe, and pulled back onto the highway, headed for that last jag home.

The best plans... as they say. A quick turn, a too-short cup holder, a scalding chocolate drink showered across my shin and ankle and foot. I yelled, lonely, frustrated, tired, desperate for an end to the road I'd been following, the road that only seemed to stretch longer the closer I came to home. And then, this damn indignity, this bull shit, this stupid freaking hot chocolate that I only got to keep myself awake in the first place pouring all over every damn thing just as I'm finally about done with this stupid van and sleeping in a stupid sleeping bag and eating crappy food and being completely alone.

And then, I stopped. I pulled over, cleaned off as best I could. And the whole time, I just laughed, a throaty, strong, desperate laugh that couldn't stop, the way siphoned liquid keeps pouring, rising against gravity and flowing out, out till it's all gone. All those miles, and one thing I hadn't done much if at all was laugh. I'd been so caught up in feeling out my book, and discovering myself, and pushing my boundaries, and learning, and thinking, and driving. And too little time had gone to relaxing, to looking at the strangeness of the world around me and laughing. A foolish mistake? I suppose. But then, I'm a fool.

Through the rest of the uneventful drive home, over the familiar roads, past all the little towns I traveled to in my youth for spelling bees and basketball games, past the homes of my former friends, past the Union Pacific coal trains with their three bright headlamps, past the old blind where my dad taught me to hunt ducks and geese, past the line of trees, past the gate, past our metal front door, past that last door, and home. I was home. I was home.

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Now Reading

I happened onto a list of the top 50 books, as chosen by Kevin Brockmeier, a fellow Arkansan who's best known for his novel Brief History of the Dead. I haven't met Kevin, but through mutual acquaintances I've learned that he is one of the most well read individuals you're bound to ever meet. So, when he recommends a book, it's probably a safe bet.

I just read a couple of his choices recently. The first was A Death in the Family, which I really should have read before, but never did. Until now. I picked up a cheap used copy of Amazon and was lucky enough to receive one that had been given as a gift at some point and included a mysterious inscription with talk of some long trip. I love books with old inscriptions. Makes me think I should write something in every new book I buy, but that's a thought for another day.

When I told a friend that I was reading Agee, he groaned, remembering soldiering through Agee's deep prose in school years before. I'll stop short of calling it impenetrable, but it's definitely a chore. His sentences linger much like Robert Penn Warren's, building and twisting and snaking along, so that once they end you're left to try and remember where they began. The book moves along like an eddy within a stream, swirling around this single death (which only arrives a hundred pages in) and moving forward with reluctance, only once each moment is expanded and explored as fully as possible.

That's both blessing and curse, of course, as it takes hip waders to progress, but on the way you can learn an awful lot on filling out a scene. The best part of the book, though, is how completely Agee realizes perspective. In those many little moments, the characters often misinterpret each other and communication moves in fits and starts, as it so often really does. The children, particularly, become so very real through Agee's eyes.

The book's main failing is probably its conclusion, as it doesn't so much end but stop. That could just be my pre-conditioned thinking coming into play, as Agee breaks entirely away from the typical story structure. If the beginning and middle defy expectation, why would the conclusion conform?

A book with a much more satisfying end is one of Brockmeier's top choices, the Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. Set in the 1700s, it tells of the son of a baron who, at the age of 12, moves into the trees to live the remainder of his days. It's one of those rare books that expands the genre of fantasy into a blessedly original direction. The concept is so simple, yet so original. Calvino's playful language (translated from Italian) carries the plot with a boyish energy, moving quickly, just as the young baron swings from branch to branch.

The book succeeds in large part because Calvino uses the idea of a man in the trees not as a flight of fancy, but as a way of reflecting on those who remain grounded (and, in turn, on all people). Most chapters feature one side character or another and how they relate to the main character. Their lives all become richer, and often more tragic, the closer they come to the baron. It is a beautiful marriage of grief and whimsy, one of the best books I've ever read.

And while I found myself wanting at A Death in the Family's final page, I read through the last paragraph of The Baron in the Trees probably four or five times before I could set down the book. The last sentence in particular is among the best I've ever read:

That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit's tread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at times into clear big berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends.

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The van journey: part twenty one

I very clearly remember the blank sky rolling past that summer afternoon as my family's car rolled with perfect smoothness -- no turning, no rises, no dips, no distractions -- as the hours crept into minutes, lost amid the great nothingness of mid-Wyoming. As far as our vacations went, it was epic: west into Colorado, jagging northwest into Wyoming, straight north through the plains, west to Yellowstone, northeast into Montana, southeast into South Dakota and south to Nebraska and home. So you see, I've had substantial practice in the art of sitting in a vehicle, humming along the road, staring blankly at the absence of spectacle, imagining anywhere else.

Every time I visit Wyoming, it always takes on that same feel, that I'll never be anwhere outside of where the moment finds me, that the wheels beneath me spin in vain. I'll fall deep into thought, only to suddenly realize several minutes later that I've gone a dozen miles or more without noticing. And I wonder which part of me was where. Did I slip into my subconscious, occupying the inner recesses while my conscious managed the details of control? Or did my conscious run and hide, loosing my subconscious onto the outside world during a tedious spate? Perhaps neither is true, or maybe both. It seems assured that words will never properly describe the sensation, and so I quit my efforts.

Such was the state of myself -- a morass of boredom -- during the second half of my trek across Wyoming. I stopped at an old fort and slid across a snow and mud-packed driveway. It was closed. Apparently no one vacations to Wyoming in February.

I snapped a couple quick photos outside the locked, lonely buildings...

...and I resumed the road.

Miles later, I pulled off at Hell's Half Acre. It's one of those places that you see on the map and adjust your trip so you can visit, then hope all the way that you didn't just take a serious detour for another tourist trap, a place with a crappy restaurant and a shop where kids can by snakes made of plastic links and headresses and rubber knives and polished stones, in progressively-less-valuable order.

I drove the van off to what looked like either the highway outpost of a very small town or a run-down rest area. Or both. The bad weather that I'd been missing all trip had left some snow here as well, but most had melted, leaving the dirt parking lot a pond surrounded with deep tire tracks that looked as miniature models of great geologic arrangements. A few people stood outside of the crappy restaurant. The shop's closed, they said. I nodded. This Hell's Half Acre? I asked, though I'd seen the sign. Yeah, they answered, but the road to it's all mud. P'ry get stuck. Just have to look from here. I stepped onto a railroad tie used to demarcate the parking and peered to the south. My mouth opened, as did the mouth of something much older.

For no reason whatsoever, the earth fell away to flash a field of spikes, soft red teeth, silent and still, just waiting. I wondered what the sign for visitors might say, what scientific terms it might employ to explain and label the half acre that looked unlike any other. How many thousand years it took for the dirt to wash away (and where did it go?), and before that, how long for the rock to form, or did the wind come through, and water, carving a violent path? Then, the tribes, the braves on their horses, pushing along the startled but unsuspecting buffalo, leading them so carefully, skillfully, toward the trap nature had set. And in a rush, they fell, again and again, to death. Hell's Half Acre? The Indians must have thought it a gift of the gods.

And now? I looked left and right, seeing the full of the land, watching it turn gray as a thin layer of clouds swept overhead. But for that, nothing moved. And nothing will. The hunt has ended. Fenced off, the earth's violence became a zoo display. Perfectly safe, lest you lean too far over the railing and fall inside. Now quick, smile for a picture! I returned to the van, to the last leg before I'd reach home, to the beginning of the end, and my mind trailed off, subconscious, conscious, whatever, and I was no longer driving, no, but somewhere long ago.

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The van journey: part twenty

We're now venturing into the mid part of America, the great flat waistlands, the plains. And, though I didn't know it at the time, we've passed the territory covered in the first book of Manifest Destination (it's separated into thirds) and entered book two, which I've outlined but not begun to write. I'm saving that for after I finish a graphic novel (more word on that later) and a few short stories that I've been meaning to do.

The morning I left Salt Lake City, after getting a jump start on the van and buying a quart of oil at a neighborhood gas station, I wound my way through the surrounding mountains, ever on to the east. But I never saw the beautiful view that spread out all around me. Low clouds had sat atop the city from the moment I entered and now had fallen further into a deep fog that appeared as cotton stuffed into the rocky crevasses, and I and the semi-trucks passing under it, like pills in a bottle.

That was almost exactly two years ago from today. I haven't been back to Wyoming since, and honestly I don't know that I'll ever return. The sky stayed cold and desolate, stifling me further into a cramped loneliness. I started into Wyoming on venerable Interstate 80, but soon tired of the strip mine-marred landscape and veered left, to the north, onto a small highway that stretched like a giant black "I" between perfectly flat fields of light snow. Only to the right, gently, dark hills bumped up, a gate to be crossed, the simplest passage of the Rocky Mountains.

I had ventured off the beaten path before, but in Wyoming I left the map almost entirely untouched. When I saw a highway that had been plowed free of snow, I turned east. Around, still, the only sights were an occasional lane leading to a sudden clutch of trees and a house or two, a barn, a truck... I realized my luck, that once again I'd snuck in behind a storm, so that I could be witness to the consequences while not enduring them myself.

What struck me was not the lack of traffic (I saw one other vehicle over a couple hours), or the lack of utility poles, or the lack of cellular towers. You can find such places in Nebraska even, or the southwest. What struck me was the lack of fences. Everywhere else, ever present were fences of barbed-wire or hog wire or some other wire, running parallel to the road, ever reminding me of the narrow lane life constricted upon me. Don't go there. Here, the land rushed away unimpeded, so empty and blank with its porcelain glaze. I thought of stopping and tromping off, just because I could. But looking across that landscape, I knew my eyes took in all they could and would. For once my legs were free, but only when they had nowhere to go.

The mountains had grown larger and larger as I neared, but they never found enough height to give me pause about trying to cross. My lucky highway snuck through a low spot, I'm sure along a route used for more than 150 years before, by traders and Oregon Trail followers. I imagined a stream of those covered wagons venturing west, their wheels turning aside the snow, and me, headed east, against the grain. A few trees began to spring up. I stopped to walk around an abandoned mine of some kind, a large wood structure that stretched like a caterpillar along a hillside. I stopped again at a valley that runs north and south. So sudden, it seemed as a knife wound into the earth. And the exposed strip of ground within, bearing that theory, held a deep pink hue that pictures can't recreate.

And after that, the road dropped me with no warning back into the plains, leaving me back to the land without distraction, the land of thought, of smothering introspection. I tried to think of the book, of the old man's path and where it would lead, what he would find in Wyoming. But, mostly, all I could think of was my solitude, and how ready I was for it to end.

7:25 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Now reading: Thunderstruck

I've mentioned Erik Larson's writing in previous blogs. He's a literary journalist specializing in historical research and is probably best known for Devil in the White City. His latest is Thunderstruck, like all the others a two-front book that takes two seemingly diverse subjects and gradually weaves them together into a unified narrative. His stuff is always very interesting and his approach is unique, but by attacking every project in the same way it makes his books a little predictable. Still, the research is what really makes it shine and is always worth the price of admission. To be able to write a believable narrative based wholly on hundred-plus-year-old documents, well, that isn't shooting fish in a barrel.

The subjects here are Marconi's effort to create wireless telegraphy and the once-world-famous murder of a woman by her meek husband. I'm not worried about ruining the conclusion by saying that the two interrelate because wireless communication ends up being used to catch the murderer aboard a ship as he flees. Larson gives this away in the first pages and, again, if you've read enough of his work you'd see this a mile away. Those two things speak to the main problems of Thunderstruck, which is an entertaining but ultimately flawed book. It is rather extremely formulaic, and Larson telegraphs his punches so strongly that tension never builds the way it does in his previous books. A third drawback is that the two subjects are much more distinct here than in his previous books, so that it often feels like simultaneously reading two books that just happen to cover a tiny bit of similar territory at the end.

The two subjects are very interesting, though, at least to me. The murder case was the second largely famous (or infamous) case, because it followed shortly the Jack the Ripper slayings and occurred in the same part of London. Larson is at his best when digging into the happenings of the case, but unfortunately the actual murder doesn't take place until about two-thirds of the way through, which leaves an awful lot of less engaging material to work through.

Marconi's story is easily the book's dominant narrative, creating an imbalance. Stories from that era of invention always fascinate me, though, and Marconi is one of the more engaging characters - an Italian with no scientific experience who really just willed his way to accomplishment. Also, we see how reluctant the world was to accept his new technology, first believing it magic, then untrustworthy. That portion of the story does have its problems as well, though. Too much time is spent on the irrelevant first engagement of Marconi to an American woman and too little time is devoted to explaining the way that wireless communication works. I'm sure that might've bored some, but it needed to be included and could've been dealt with fairly quickly.

One little tidbit of great interest to me was that when Marconi wanted to make the first trans-Atlantic wireless communication, he built an enormous set of towers on Cape Cod, not far from Provincetown, where my series is set. I'll have to try to work in a reference to that.

Since MySpace doesn't have illegal music, I'll just note here that I'm listening to Danger Mouse's Grey Album mix. After that, probably some Handsome Boy Modeling School.

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Now Reading: Aristotle's Poetics

While reading Robert McKee's Story, which I referenced in an earlier blog or two, I noticed he made quite a few references to Aristotle's Poetics, the 330 BCE volume that serves as sort of the first defining work on fiction writing. McKee preaches mastering the most basic elements of plot before advancing into a major writing project, which shows obvious Aristotleian influence. Poetics goes back to the earliest recorded days of commercial fiction, and most of its pages go to setting out the very basics.

Aristotle starts with a windy definition of Tragedy and Comedy, then sets right into laying out the ground rules of the art form. It does not say one must comply, just that any artist who doesn't is inferior. In some places, he falls into long passages on what seem the most basic elements of writing, such as breaking down the parts of speech.

But even some of the most simplistic passages are useful. Reading the text feels like hitting "rewind" and erasing all the writing movements -- goodbye modernism and postmodernism, et al -- and returning to an uncluttered state of mind. There is something beautiful in even the most base explanation of what constitutes a "whole":

A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle and an end. A beginning is that which oes not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles.

You can look at those words and laugh and say, "Well, no crap, a story has to begin and end, and something has to happen between the two." But there is more to his words than that. For instance, the use of "causal necessity" in the second sentence speaks deeply about how to begin a story, that the important action must occure "on screen," so to speak, not before the work begins. First, the writer needs to establish, then let the marbles strike against each other. Also, the repeated use of "naturally" declares that the plot must make sense, that the events shouldn't occur randomly, but that each movement within the work is like a gear within a clock, each turning its pattern, part of something greater.

I also took interest in Aristotle's ranking of the importance of the various parts of a story -- plot, character, thought, diction, song and spectacle, in that order. The last one humored me, particularly when he writes that using spectacle to impart an emotion on the audience is a "less artistic method." At first I thought of it as a very prescient note to the Michael Bay's of the world. But, on the other hand, it could simply be another sign of Aristotle's impact that most movie critics dissect action and adventure films with very similar words.

In other ways, our culture of fiction has advanced far beyond Aristotle's musings, such as when he takes on an early air of pretension and dismisses stories with complex plots, which he admitted as being very popular, but only because "of the weakness of the spectators." Also, there's a nice "see how far we've come?" moment when Aristotle writes that women and slaves can be included in fiction, even though they're mostly worthless.

I wouldn't recommend this for everyone. It's dense and very specific in message. But if you want to write and are interested in hearing a very old voice on the subject, give it a shot.

Buy it here.

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