Everyone’s phobias tend to look a little flimsy when exposed to reality’s harsh light. Airplanes? Bridges? They don’t really fall down that often. Clowns? Usually aren’t evil serial killers outside of sensational fiction. Meteors? They don’t usually strike just because you’ve stepped foot outside of your house for the first time in three months.
My phobia of car washes, however, is one hundred percent, unshakably, unquestionably genuine and grounded in nothing but fact.
I know, I know. It sounds silly to admit that I’m afraid of car washes, but there it is. It sounds like one of those silly little things one confesses over drinks at a party, hoping to endear oneself as a quirky oddball. But no. I genuinely am afraid of the things. I can’t drive into one to save my life.
What am I afraid of? I’ll tell you. The whole automated car wash is a Rube Goldberg contraption designed solely to reduce my car to a smoking pile of scrap iron. If I don’t align my tires perfectly with the tracks designed to grip them and run the vehicle through the tunnel of suds, if I neglect to put the gear into neutral, if I neglect to wait at the end and shift into drive before the track has let go of the car—well, it’s over, isn’t it? Not only will I induce the wrath of a dozen rag-wiping men, but my car’s wheels will fall off. It’s too much pressure, I tell you. Too much!
I also have an equally well-established phobia of oil change establishments. Frankly put, they scare the heck out of me. I know that when I drive over that pit below, where the men work, that I’m likely to swerve unexpectedly and send three thousand pounds of car crashing down blow, possibly killing someone. But while I really don’t have to wash my car, I do have to get the oil changed on occasion. So while other people rev confidently into their local Jiffylube, I’m the guy who’s creeping forward over the pit, inch by inch, while the fellow trying to guide me in impatiently beckons me forward and looks at his watch, hoping that I’ll make it inside by the time his shift is over.
So basically what I’m saying is that if you’re driving in the metropolitan Detroit area and you see someone with an impossibly dirty car, it’s probably me. But I have reasons.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Author Copies
Yesterday I sent The Buccaneer’s Apprentice off to my editor. Usually by this point in the creative process I’m sick of the book. Not so with the tale of Nic and his friends. That book was a joy to write.
And yesterday, by some kind of weird, fluky chance, I got my author copies of The Glass Maker’s Daughter. It’s a beautiful-looking edition. The cover’s gorgeous. The map is amazing, on the page. It’s a pleasure to hold and to look at.
When I wrote the acknowledgements to The Glass Maker’s Daughter, I dedicated the book to one of my former college professors. I studied playwriting with Dr. Louis Catron at the College of William and Mary for a solid year. His classes were rigidly structured; we wrote a couple of one-act plays per semester, and revised each play three times. Many of the best hours I spent in college were in Dr. Catron’s warm and airless little office, listening to other students read their plays, or reading mine while they closed their eyes and tried to imagine my words on the stage. My belief in the revision process comes almost entirely from the things he taught me. There were times, for example, that the third draft of a play was almost entirely unrecognizable from its original conception—and that can be a good thing. From him I learned that it’s possible and sometimes even desirable to lose entire chunks of text, or even pages and pages, in order to get to the important parts.
Naturally, after my handsome acknowledgements, I wanted to give him a copy of the book. But it’s been twenty-five years, and his website hasn’t been updated in a dog’s age, and I’d known he’d retired a long time ago. I knew I should call and try to find out his current address. In my head, though, I feared doing it. I could’ve made the call months ago, but dragged my feet. What I dreaded, actually, was that I’d ring up the department and have them say, “What kind of former student are you? Didn’t you know he died back in 1993?”
This morning I finally forced myself to call. And luckily, the scenario didn’t play out that way. The fellow who answered the Theatre Department’s phone was very helpful, and offered to forward on the book. Problem solved.
I need to fret less, and do more.
And yesterday, by some kind of weird, fluky chance, I got my author copies of The Glass Maker’s Daughter. It’s a beautiful-looking edition. The cover’s gorgeous. The map is amazing, on the page. It’s a pleasure to hold and to look at.
When I wrote the acknowledgements to The Glass Maker’s Daughter, I dedicated the book to one of my former college professors. I studied playwriting with Dr. Louis Catron at the College of William and Mary for a solid year. His classes were rigidly structured; we wrote a couple of one-act plays per semester, and revised each play three times. Many of the best hours I spent in college were in Dr. Catron’s warm and airless little office, listening to other students read their plays, or reading mine while they closed their eyes and tried to imagine my words on the stage. My belief in the revision process comes almost entirely from the things he taught me. There were times, for example, that the third draft of a play was almost entirely unrecognizable from its original conception—and that can be a good thing. From him I learned that it’s possible and sometimes even desirable to lose entire chunks of text, or even pages and pages, in order to get to the important parts.
Naturally, after my handsome acknowledgements, I wanted to give him a copy of the book. But it’s been twenty-five years, and his website hasn’t been updated in a dog’s age, and I’d known he’d retired a long time ago. I knew I should call and try to find out his current address. In my head, though, I feared doing it. I could’ve made the call months ago, but dragged my feet. What I dreaded, actually, was that I’d ring up the department and have them say, “What kind of former student are you? Didn’t you know he died back in 1993?”
This morning I finally forced myself to call. And luckily, the scenario didn’t play out that way. The fellow who answered the Theatre Department’s phone was very helpful, and offered to forward on the book. Problem solved.
I need to fret less, and do more.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
In the third person
One of the reasons I enjoy writing in the first person is that it allows me to leap into a story feet-first with a clear voice. A first-person narrative seems immediate. It can be as personal as a long letter from an old friend, and as intimate as listening to someone talk about his life late at night, while you lie side by side on a mattress on a hot night. There’s no mistaking what’s to come when one encounters a first-person narrative like this:
All of Holden Caulfield’s disaffection with his life, his jadedness, his education, his precociousness—it’s all there in that lazy conjunction of strung-together phrases that opens the book. Whether or not you like him is a different matter. He’s laying it all out as plainly as possible, in the most intimate narrative manner possible.
What many new writers don’t often realize is that third-person chronicles have their own voices as well. The narrator is usually unnamed. He or she rarely appears as a character in the story. It’s therefore easy to assume that all third-person stories are much the same, dispassionately relating a tale without intruding.
This narrator, from For Whom the Bell Tolls, keeps his distance on the book’s first page.
There’s so much distance, in fact, that the reader doesn’t even learn the name of the ‘he’ until four pages later. What we have is a flat description of place and action. It couldn’t be more different from another famous first line, from Pride & Prejudice:
Both Hemingway and Austen employ the third person. Austen’s narrator is blatantly cheeky, though, forthright about both her own prejudices and those of her era, and as chock-full of personality as Hemingway’s is carefully devoid of it. You might hire Hemingway’s narrator for a reporting job, but Austen’s is the one you want gossiping next to you at a party.
One of the difficulties I originally had when I started The Buccaneer’s Apprentice was that I couldn’t get the narrative to flow. Using the third person seemed to impede my progress, rather than help me make any. After a couple of abortive pages, I had to stop and do a little exercise. I closed my eyes and tried to picture my narrator—to make him an actual person, rather than a simple device. I settled on the image of a crusty old mariner with weathered skin, surrounded by curious listeners. He carried a pipe, plenty of tobacco, and had nothing but time on his hands to share his tale. He would have a tendency to be garrulous, omniscient, and utterly in control of how he spun his story.
Once I abandoned my initial start and let him start talking, the story started to flow. And flow. His voice carried me through the book’s tougher-to-write stretches. I let him dictate the story’s pace. The decisions of what scenes to portray or elide were his. He’s a strong personality, and as a result, the narration is confident and vigorous.
Like any good narrator, my crusty old mariner might not have played an actual role in the novel’s action. He might be invisible to most readers. But he’s as important a character as any of the protagonists.
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
All of Holden Caulfield’s disaffection with his life, his jadedness, his education, his precociousness—it’s all there in that lazy conjunction of strung-together phrases that opens the book. Whether or not you like him is a different matter. He’s laying it all out as plainly as possible, in the most intimate narrative manner possible.
What many new writers don’t often realize is that third-person chronicles have their own voices as well. The narrator is usually unnamed. He or she rarely appears as a character in the story. It’s therefore easy to assume that all third-person stories are much the same, dispassionately relating a tale without intruding.
This narrator, from For Whom the Bell Tolls, keeps his distance on the book’s first page.
“He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.”
There’s so much distance, in fact, that the reader doesn’t even learn the name of the ‘he’ until four pages later. What we have is a flat description of place and action. It couldn’t be more different from another famous first line, from Pride & Prejudice:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Both Hemingway and Austen employ the third person. Austen’s narrator is blatantly cheeky, though, forthright about both her own prejudices and those of her era, and as chock-full of personality as Hemingway’s is carefully devoid of it. You might hire Hemingway’s narrator for a reporting job, but Austen’s is the one you want gossiping next to you at a party.
One of the difficulties I originally had when I started The Buccaneer’s Apprentice was that I couldn’t get the narrative to flow. Using the third person seemed to impede my progress, rather than help me make any. After a couple of abortive pages, I had to stop and do a little exercise. I closed my eyes and tried to picture my narrator—to make him an actual person, rather than a simple device. I settled on the image of a crusty old mariner with weathered skin, surrounded by curious listeners. He carried a pipe, plenty of tobacco, and had nothing but time on his hands to share his tale. He would have a tendency to be garrulous, omniscient, and utterly in control of how he spun his story.
Once I abandoned my initial start and let him start talking, the story started to flow. And flow. His voice carried me through the book’s tougher-to-write stretches. I let him dictate the story’s pace. The decisions of what scenes to portray or elide were his. He’s a strong personality, and as a result, the narration is confident and vigorous.
Like any good narrator, my crusty old mariner might not have played an actual role in the novel’s action. He might be invisible to most readers. But he’s as important a character as any of the protagonists.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)