I’m never sure whether Mr. Fujimoto’s questions are questions.” .. “Do you know?”

He shrugged.  ”I don’t know the answer, no.  Sometimes I think it’s the only question, and that all other questions ar tributaries that flow into it.”  He ran his hand through his thinning hair.  ”Might the answer be ‘love’?”

I tried to thin, but I kept seeing pictures.  I imagined my father–that man who I had imagined was my father–looking out through the rear window of a car.  I thought of butterfly knives, and a time once three or four years ago when I was alking out of McDonald’s and a businessman slammed down onto the pavement from a ninth floor window of the same building.  He lay three meters away from where I stood.  His mouth was gaping open in astonishment.  A dark stain was trickling from it, over the pavement, between the bits of broken teeth and glasses.

. . . “I’d rather be too young to have that kind of wisdom.”

Mr. Fujimoto’s face turned into a smile that hid his eyes.  ”How wise of you.”

Is that wonderful prose, or what?

From: Prospect Agency - Submissions <submissions@prospectagency.com>
Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:22:41 -0400
To: Gretchen hummel <Gretchhh@aol.com>
Subject: Your submission

To Gretchen Hummel,

Thank you for submitting to Prospect Agency.

We greatly appreciate your submission, and though
Black Dreams, Silver Linings is not a good fit for
us, we think your writing shows promise. We would
be interested in considering future projects from
you should you choose to submit them.

We wish you all the best in your writing career
and thank you for thinking of Prospect Agency.

With best wishes,
Prospect Agency

Editorial Note: Well written and the premise was
intriguing.  Unfortunately, these first chapters
moved too slowly to keep my interest and didn't
quite pull me in enough.  I would be happy to see
more work from this author though!

2. Writing is a process

3. You don’t know what your writing will be until the end of the process

4. If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is to not write

These are taken from Gail Sher’s Book One Continuous Mistake, another book definitely worth your while.

The author takes a zen approach to writing, one that helped me finally finish a query letter that I swear I had spent no less than 6 weeks on–four friggin paragraphs.  Probably something I shouldn’t admit, but it’s sadly true.  I’m sure there were no less than 25 different versions and all of them “One continuous Mistake” in my eyes.  I simply couldn’t get it right, until I read this quote,

“Before you write and after you write make sure to give it away. . . . the effort, the results, and identification with the results.  Much of the happiness that total absorption in an activity brings is nullified by the belief that it is ours–that we know what we are doing.  But anything we hold onto brings disharmony.”

Sher got this advice from a Tibetan Rinoche (buddhist monk of sorts).  Well, this really struck a chord in me (picture monk sounding the gong, a gong as big as he is.)  I must have had such a murderous tight grip on my query, that it was paralzying me and making everything come off like cardboard.  Wrestling those sentences until I was pulling my hair out.  The next day, I put it all aside, started over, and wrote the thing in twenty minutes.  I was able to allow the flow to flow if you will.   Talk about backed-up, clogged with sludge, and then I was able to let it all go and with a much lighter touch pull it off.

Yes, it could be argued that that’s the way writing should be done anyway, sweat and slave and dig in your heels, draw blood if you must to write the best first draft you can–throw it all away and start over and you might end up with something half-way decent.  Still, there was something about the psychological letting it go, giving it away notion.

Looking at writing as a daily exercise or practice can also get the monkey off your back that’s breathing down your neck with a none too aromatic breath, cracking the whip and expecting instant perfection to trail from the end of your pen.  ”No, I’m not writing, I’m just doing my daily stint”–a way of sneaking up on the work and getting some (imperfect) words down before the spotlight zeros in, if you will, striking you back into paralysis.  Or so can be my process.

She also has some words to say about the fascism of perfectionism.   So many of us try to make our prose beautiful, get the rhythms right, the alliterations resonating, the parallelism repeating, oh, and a little thing called content perfect.  The trouble is perfect is something you’ve already heard.  Trying to attain it in your writing can end up being a suffocating strait jacket.  Strangling your own voice dead in your throat or head or soul or wherever it comes from.  In other words, you’ve lost your unique slant on things.  The color of your own lens gets neutralized and rendered effete.  Back when I was in graduate school getting my MFA, I was at times told my sentences came off “too perfect”.  I didn’t quite understand it at the time, but I’m slowly getting an inkling.

The protagonist in my book, Waverly, a tarot card artist as well as hotel concierge sketches the Fool at her desk under the curved overhang of the hotel stairs.

The section I enjoyed the most was about opposites and how the best writers reach for a Janussian blend of opposites to create something entirely new.  Some quotes:

Robert Haas:  ”the greatest works of art come very close to saying the opposite of what they mean”

Jane Hirschfield:  ”a good poem is able to both answer uncertainty and contain it”

Robert Venturi:  the aim of art– “the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion”

Oscar Wilde:  ”a truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true”

One of my favorite examples–”and one to me are shame and fame”–Emerson

Plato:  ”Light is the Shadow of God”–love that!

Another section was about using a variety of sentence structures–some beautiful quotes–

Flaubert:  ”The sentences in a book must quiver like the leaves in a forest, all dissimilar in their similarity”

Yeats:  ”As I altered my syntax I altered my intellect”

Robert Haas again:  ”New rhythms are new perceptions”

I’m reading a wonderful book, the prose is achingly beautiful.  I can’t believe I haven’t read this before, it’s an old book–Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.  I have a nice treat for my reading hours over the holidays.  I eat it up and I’ve had to look up some new words, which I love doing.   I’ll have to put in a few quotes, fabulous analogies–like the sound of thunder–coal falling down a shoot, the savage scribble of lightning in the sky–I drool.   

The book has been finished for about a month. Hurray! I say finished, but with a novel, well, there is always more that can be fixed.  I have it out to a few beta readers at the moment who are reading the thing as a whole.  One in particular I’m anxious to hear from.  Her standards are so high, however, that I don’t dare hope for too much.   Even a nod of approval would be sufficient.  I should prepare myself for that and only that, I know.

I have since heard from the above-mentionned highly valued reader.    She liked it!  With suggestions, of course.  There’s no reason for secrecy here.  Her name is Alison Baker, an O’Henry Award winner and if you haven’t read her work, you should.  How I Came West and Why I Stayed, I thought was especially wonderful.  We’ve been friends now for over 20 years, met in a writing group in SLC led by Francois Camoin, chairman of my thesis committee for my MFA and author of The End of The World is Los Angeles. 

About the I-Can’t -seem-to-write-list.  We’ve all had those days when for whatever reason, fatigue, stress, distractions, we can’t seem to get down to the work.  For those days I’ve starting keeping a list of brainless things that need to get done–researching a particular question, brainstorming for your query letter to the tune of just throwing words down that you may be able to use to compose something later.  Do a find search for all ‘ly’ adverbs, delete.  That same for all those pesky ‘that’s that accumulate–you know the words.  For me, I tend to start a lot of sentences with ‘But’ or ‘And’, so flipping through reworking some of those sentences.

Another tool that has been of help for me is the not-to-do-list.  Instead of keeping a long to-do list, this other list tends to be much shorter.  For me things like playing ‘Wordsplay’ or whatever game I’ve become addicted to.  Another vice lately has been Stumble Upon, a search engine that while constantly keeping me entertained is in the end just a distraction.  Knitting and spinning, other items that go on my list.  A loss of hours exploring itunes, buying more and more music.  When you find yourself doing these sorts of things, you can be guaranteed this is the time to at least pull out the I-can’t-seem-to-write-list.