Category Archives: Writing

And the answer… none of the above

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I’ve got my NaNoWriMo story. All those other ideas, including a couple I forgot to mention in that previous episode, are back on the back burner. There’s a new story in town, and it’s a goodie.

An american is assigned to live in a tiny nation that no one has ever heard of – in fact, no one is even sure if it’s actually a country or perhaps a territory of one of its only-slightly-less obscure neighbors. He is met with great suspicion until he admits he is a spy, at which point he becomes a minor celebrity. People are beating down his door to tell him “state secrets”, most of which are repackaged jokes involving goats. Eventually our main man, under pressure to report something meaningful, starts including these stories in his reports, developing his own code. The spooks in Washington, being paranoid, read an entirely different message into his code. Hijinks ensue. When the Russians learn of the Americans’ interest in a part of the former Soviet Union, things get really crazy – and, of course, the chinese can’t ignore all these goings-on.

The mayor of the capital city of “Stan”, as the country comes to be known at the CIA, turns out to be quite a wily fellow beneath his naive bumpkin exterior.

Thanks!

November approacheth.

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I’m pretty sure I don’t want to read that last episode. Bars with Internet are dangerous things, to say the least. Moving on…

I was going to write something lighter this year for NaNoWriMo. I was going to get a little bit silly and maybe even include the Epic Weasel, the Universe’s first convertible spaceship. Pink planets with wine-cooler oceans, and the revolutionaries who brought them beer. That kind of thing. You know, an autobiography.

Then there was the story with the all-female, all-babealicious NASCAR pit crew, Pit Kittens. A friend came up with the title. I already know the cast – the sinuous, dangerous motorcycle rider, the hot-tempered buxom redhead machinist, the mechanical genius who wears lace beneath her lab coat, and, of course, the twins. Oh, the shenanigans!

But then I got another idea, for a psychological thriller kind of thing, where the man in the middle is just as messed up as the people he is tracking down. That seemed like a pretty good idea, but it’s not growing in my head the way a healthy story does. Two good scenes, a few decent situations, one good character, but it’s stagnating in my head.

So then I got another idea. It’s perfect for NaNoWriMo – it plays out over a set period of time (why not thirty days?) and so in the thirty chapters things can move and change, but continuity won’t be a problem with this one. I’ve gone so far as to outline the thirty chapters. I have some good phrases in my head, and I hope I can remember them when it’s time to pick up the pencil and start the examination.

Except that more than half the time I hate the idea. It’s got lots of great potential for themes touching on the nature of who we are, but it’s dark. Dark done well can make the rare glimpses of light that much brighter, but dark done poorly is just a non-stop bummer. (Speaking of which, last week I had the cover over at Piker Press. It’s a story I particularly like for reasons I can’t put my finger on, but ultimately it lacked the glimpse of light. It was more of a episode than a story, I guess.) But there is light in this dark, dark, story, and it ends on a strong note, with a new voice filled with life and hope. When I’m in a particular mood I love the idea.

I don’t think I can maintain that mood for thirty straight days.

I think it’s time for a new poll…

Thanks!

Nursing a Blue

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We’ve all had the blues. Its a special sort of sadness, a reflective melancholy that does not particularly want to be consoled. From the blues comes a deeper understanding of the world and of who we are. The blues are a window to truth, the time when your brain is naked, when the darkness presses in, asking questions you don’t want to answer.

I have been nursing a blue for about a week now. Just a singular blue, not enough to be crippling or debilitating, just enough to imbue my characters with the pathos that allows a reader to like them. Just enough sadness to make joy feel tenuous, and life an act of courage. The best characters are wounded, birds with broken wings that cannot be healed, but if they can’t fly, they still walk, and perhaps in the end they learn that flight is not about wings at all. Those are my favorite stories.

So for the last few days I’ve been riding this blue, keeping it alive (though I suspect I have no control over it at all), and writing every waking moment. Soup Boy reminded me to eat yesterday. Before that, I think there were days when I lost some weight. I have been consumed by this blue, and I have eaten it alive and sucked every last morsel of sadness from it.

The blue is fading now; I write this from a reverberation, the last echo of the bell over the graveyard.

Thanks!

I wrote a story once

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It was an odd tale; it started as sleep-deprived ravings but grew on me. It was an odd world, an agrarian culture, but without horses. Giraffes were the beast of burden.

There was a man in the village who no one liked. He had a bad temper, and sprayed saliva when he talked. No one mentioned that to him. He was out working his fields one day when his giraffe had a heart attack. That must be common among the swift ones; the heart has to maintain enormous pressure to keep the head nourished, perched way up there.

The man’s giraffe died and he sat there, out in his field, next to his dead animal, for three days. Then he packed what he could carry and left the village forever. The story was not about him.

In this world of odd mammals and random blinding rainstorms, metaphors had a disquieting concreteness. Promises were trees, and lies were death. I was big on the truth back then. Wombats would pursue their victims relentlessly across the grassland, but neither hunter nor hunted would voluntarily enter the forest. I think they were wombats. They sound more dangerous than platypuses. The plainsmen raised them to be particularly nasty.

I’m thinking of that story now, wistfully hoping to recapture its unfettered randomness and heavy symbolism. Fifteen years later, I seem to recall some good prose as well. Tonight I have been sitting, groping for some of that silliness, my prose prosaic. There are only so many hours you can spend editing your own work before you turn into a pile of dependent clauses and dangling participles, with nary an idea in sight.

It’s time for action! It’s time to recapture that old-school mild schizophrenia. All nighter! Yeah! Rock on!

Thanks!

Back to the Central Ave. Grill

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There aren’t many places to go in Los Alamos when one wants to sit and write, but the Central Avenue Grill is one of those places. Jojo wanted to join us for a writing session, and we agreed to meet there.

The place has big garage doors that open onto Central Avenue (the name of the place, while not terribly creative, is certainly descriptive), and they were wide open to let in the fresh mountain air and a handful of flies. I chose a table right by the windows, we ordered pricey beers, and quickly we set to work, fuego and I on laptops while Jojo had some sort of tool that applied ink to flat sheets of some material based on wood pulp. Very interesting technology – it doesn’t even require electricity.

I was working on revisions to a longer short story based on some excellent feedback Jojo had provided on a previous draft. I needed some pretty big changes to take advantage of the opportunities I had missed in the first draft. fuego was working on the new, bigger Pirates screenplay.

Outside, it began to rain. At first it was just a few big, fat stray drops, but eventually it grew into a real storm complete with thunder and lightning. We sat and enjoyed felt the mood of the entire town lift (or maybe it was just me). You know you’re in the desert when rain is cause of great celebration. Perhaps the overdue cycle of afternoon thunderstorms was finally revving up.

Jojo had other things to do and left, but fuego and I persevered. We had to vacate our first table because it was reserved, then we were chased from the next by the sound man. Yes, a band was beginning to set up. We found another table, this one near an outlet, so we could continue to work. I think things were going better for me than for fuego that day, but that’s how it goes, sometimes.

In the end we listend to a band with an enormous amount of new equipment do passable covers of Dave Matthews and people like that, and an occasional song by bands I liked. The singer had a sweet voice and played piano well, but she was not angry enough on some of the songs. She was also very, very, attractive. I wrote through much of the gig, finally finishing another draft of Old Town. I probably should have read it over the next morning before sending it to Jojo, but it’s too late now. I’m thinking now I may have succumbed to three-beer sappiness in a couple of spots.

All in all, a good day in the Atomic City, with beer, friends, music, writing, and even a little bit of dancing.

Thanks!

Built to last

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Many of you have read me talk about my laptop before. It’s definitely got that “Road Warrior” look to it – dented, bent, scratched, paint peeling off the titanium. It’s in a sweet spot where the processor is fast enough for me but it doesn’t eat up batteries. It is slender and lightweight.

I added a character count feature to Jer’s Novel Writer recently (my faithful Swedish users were pinin’ for it), and one of the documents I have done a character count on was a slimmed down (and still fat) version of The Test. Almost a million characters. Combine that with all the other stuff I have typed, and it’s no stretch to imagine that there are individual keys on this keyboard I have pressed well over a million times. Space bar, slam dunk. Backspace, probably approaching a billion by now.

Sure, sure, there are plenty of people who have pressed their keys far more than that, but still it’s mind-boggling to consider. How can anything (fingers included) continue to work so well after that much use? What happened to all those e’s? Where are they now?

Thanks!

Should be writing now, but…

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Sat down for what might be an unusual opportunity to get some writing done. fuego will be getting off work in a bit, and then we’ll have an emergency summit to come up with some sort of plan for how we’re going to get from here to the first day of shooting. Gotta cut down the shot list a bit, work up a shooting schedule, find a cafe with a good layout and parking lot that doesn’t mind having business disrupted for a few days. We need to figure out when I need to get over to New Mexico to drive around testing green chile cheeseburgers, scrounging props, and taking pictures of long, straight stretches of road.

And props (anyone have a goldn figurine with ruby eyes lying around? I’ll be careful, I promise). And costumes (good thing there are bikers handy). And a thousand other things I don’t even know I need to worry about.

And the car. Holy Moley, we need to chop the top off that baby pronto. And get it running. And get “Crusader” painted on the back. And…

Meanwhile, the movie fuego is currently working on, Return to Frog Mountain (or something like that), is in full swing. I think they start shooting on Sunday, and end the day before the shootout begins. So the guy who actually knows how to do this stuff is already doing long, long hours. The good news is that if my IMDB search was accurate, the guy who is assigned to us as mentor looks like he’s been around the block, having directed a couple of pretty major films, but not afraid to do things for art’s sake. It should be really interesting to work with a guy like that. The people running the festival assume, I think, that the winners are writers, not experienced film people, so they are prepared to do a lot of the preproduction work. That’s a good thing, but I still want to participate – I don’t want to lose parts of the script simply because there’s no one available to do the leg work to set it up.

I don’t know much, but I do know it’s going to be a blast. A serious non-stop sleep-optional romp where all that really matters is getting maximum energy from the cast, getting it on – uh, whatever the medium is – and just having a good time doing it.

It sounds like we have a couple of bands writing original music for us – that should be a hoot, and Tom Waits is one of the judges that will pick the best of the short films. It’s too bad he can’t be a pirate.

I’m thinking that when the dust settles I’d like to have a couple of parties, one in New Mexico and one in San Diego, to show off whatever it is we end up with. You’re invited!

Thanks!

JerNoWriMo canceled due to Pirate activity

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Don’t quite know what to say here except HOLY CRAP!

Pirates of the White Sand won the Fellini Award at the Duke City Shootout. Shooting starts July 22. There’s a lot to do before the shooting starts. Casting is supposed to be done next week, and I want to be there for at least part of that, to make sure our pirates have that completely over-the-top energy we need.

We’re making a movie! Our movie! That we wrote! Dang, that’s cool.

Thanks!

I feel so… dirty

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I am a whore.

Doing some more work for Zepter – they still owe me for the vacuum cleaner stuff, but somehow I’m back at it. “It’s all for the second camera for Pirates,” fuego reminds me. Sure. If we gat paid. And if we get paid for that previous work I’ll take this back:

Zepter is a bunch of cheap-ass sons of bitches.

For the benefit of anyone searching on Google for info about this company, let me say that again:

Zepter is a bunch of cheap-ass sons of bitches.

Although they did come up with tickets to the world Hockey championship game. I gave up my spot (you’re welcome, Mito, if you ever say thank you), but that was a nice gesture on their part. Maybe they’re just waiting for an invoice.

So tonight fuego and I were working on the copy for the Zepter Bioptron, which probably represents the state of the art for light therapy. I spent the evening writing copy that fell into two categories: “Not provably false” and “They’ve already said it once so it won’t make things any worse to say it again.” And honestly, it’s probably not complete bullshit. This is the technological answer to “You should get out more,” without the dangerous UV. So I’m OK with that.

Still, I wrote things tonight that… well, let’s just say I wrote some things. Let there be Light — 50W, polarized, in a narrow band of the visible spectrum, with a timer, on a flexible stand.

I met the manager of Zepter’s health products today. It was an early morning meeting in a fancy hotel that luckily was near my pad. It was a beautiful morning walk, and the rays of the sun lifted my already doing-alright spirits. This is the very feeling Zepter is marketing. Whether they deliver it or not I have no idea. I met up with fuego and the client was a little late but this is Eastern Europe and that’s the way it works.

Let’s call her Sofia. It’s as good a name as any. She’s a doctor, living in Zurich, spending time in Milan, and she is distractingly attractive. The period when the button of her shirt finally gave up the good fight and when she pulled things back together is but a vague and hazy mam – uh, sorry – memory. Mmmm… Kryptonite. But Dammit Jim, she’s a doctor! She was part of the team that developed this little marvel. She was smart, no doubt, and enthusiastic, and (according to fuego) far more together on what she needed going in than the average Zepter product manager. It was a good meeting.

Except for the part where we said we’d have a draft in two days. That was nuts. But by then all I could think about was the button holding on for dear life. I tried to use my Jedi Master Force Stuff: Just let go, little button. You’ve been working harder than any little button ever should; no one would blame you if you relaxed for just one second.”

I am no Jedi, but it’s better to try to use the Force when you don’t have it that to completely forget you are a Jedi Master when your life is in peril. But I’ve gone on about that before.

The button held, resolute, against great pressure. Some of the greatest pressure I’ve seen in some time. But she had much more going on than that, and I’ve already done her a disservice emphasizing her beautiful, freckled, gravity-defying bosom over her other qualities.

Dang. I can’t resist irony even when it turns me into an ass.

(Turns me into?) But seriously, she was way more that. It was the smile that reached all the way up to her brown eyes. It was the way she was confident without being overbearing. It was the way that, on some fundamental level, for her life is still fun. I am not going to smooth on her. I am what they call “not boyfriend material,” and I don’t see that changing. “Insensitive, lazy, self-centered, unemployed workaholic” is not how one gets “ideal date” status, and I’m enjoying being that way.

And now I’m writing copy. In fairness to all, it was a done deal we were writing this copy before the meeting. This morning was about what copy to write, not whether to write copy. fuego had already thrown us into the tar pit; it was just nice to see a pretty, intelligent, witty face there while we sank beneath the surface.

Thanks!

Slow going on JerNoWriMo

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This style of writing sure requires a lot of thinking. The chapters are short, and after each one I have to go back over parts of the story to see which part of the narrative should come next. To a certain extent I can and do write bits and then shuffle them around (insert plug for Jer’s Novel Writer here), but I feel that while the story is extremely nonlinear in time there is still a structure to it, connecting the bits thematically, and revealing the right bits at the right time. And that takes thinking, no two ways about it.

In that way JerNoWriMo is quite different than NaNoWriMo. I am not giving myself license to suck, which is what November is all about. I’m looking forward to November. JerNoWriMo is not even about word count, really, although I am keeping track of that. It’s about finishing this dang story in a month, in a form I can call a real draft. I still have some tough questions to answer, as well, and as I answer them I invalidate some of the things I’ve already written.

The good news is that by containing my rambling style in small units, this will be by far the smallest large thing I’ve written. I estimated 70K, but now I don’t think it will be even that much. We’ll see. I’ve been working on it 7 days now, and at the rate I’m going I will only have about 50K at the end of 30 days. That might be enough, and there will be some parts that are easier to write. I hope.

As soon as I figure out how to get George and the Feds on the same side in a shootout I’m home free, baby — until I have to explain what Dragon Lady’s angle is in the next chapter. Sure, sure, it’s wealth, but how much does she know, really? Ai-ai-ai. My head’s exploding.

Thanks!

JerNoWriMo

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Well, the only way I’m going to get that dang Day of Atonement out of my head is to write the dang thing. However, I can’t just go dropping everything else every time I become infatuated with a new idea. The only way I can justify writing this is to get it finished quickly.The good news is it will be more novella-sized — about 70K words I’m guessing — which is possible in a month without too much trouble.

So I’m declaring June to be JerNoWriMo in the grand tradition of National Novel Writing Month.

What does this mean to you, the blog-reading public? Will my media empire languish for the rest of the month? Probably not. I spend several hours a day writing anyway, so what I’m writing probably wont affect you much. In fact, I’ve got a couple episodes saved up for a rainy day. I have added a JerNoWriMo counter to the main page, however, so those who care can follow my progress.

Wish me luck!

Thanks!

Arrr!

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Things are going well for me here. I’m getting a lot of work done, which was the big test of whether coming here was a Good Idea. Unexpected was my output of short stories. Unexpected, but welcome, and a lot of fun. So I’ve got progress on the novels (required), progress on the software (hoped for) and a few shorts I like (bonus). I also got something else, something I didn’t expect at all. Something really cool.

No, not a girlfriend. Haven’t you been paying attention?

A few weeks ago I learned that Piker Press would be doing a special issue to commemorate Talk Like a Pirate Day. It’s way out there in September. That same day I had been thinking, “I’ve gotta lighten up a little.” A pirate story seemed just the thing. Pirates. Arrr! Hilarity ensues. I had a couple of really great images in my head but nothing written when fuego sat down to join me at the Cheap Beer Place. I said the word ‘pirate’, mentioned a couple of my ideas, and he was all over it. We laughed and chuckled our way through some ideas and the core of the story took shape. The next day I wrote up a sketch of the story and away we went.

Flashback to another bar, sitting with fuego as we worked on other projects. There were students at the table next to ours, working on a project for film school. They were torturing themselves over the tiniest details — should she be holding half a cigarette or a whole cigarette? It was distracting for me and maddening for fuego. I wanted to go over to them, grab them by their collective collar and say, “Just tell a story. Maybe when you’re done and looking at it on the screen you’ll see things you put in there without knowing it, but if you don’t tell a good story, the rest doesn’t mean crap.”

fuego, who works in the film biz, just wanted to slap them. To some of their dilemmas he wanted to say, “That’s what you have actors for.” For the cigarette, it was “however long the damn thing is when you get a good take.” But for all his more knowledgeable criticism, it boiled down to the same thing I felt. Tell a good story and the rest of the crap will work.

So, pirates, then. Using the ideas we had come up with, I knocked out a few pages, defining a couple of compelling characters, drafting some good moments and building a few great images. It was nowhere near a complete thing, but I could see its strength, its story, shining up from the depths. fuego and I began the process of adapting it for the screen. (Not relevant to this story but exciting: we may be filming Pirates of the White Sand in New Mexico this summer. It’s a long shot, but within range of a good high-powered rifle.)

As we worked ideas were conceived, hatched, and clubbed to death. Nuances were added, relationships defined. Shots were laid out. The tides came and went. The pirates came to life. Tonight we finished a draft, and the result, while not final, is fun on a biscuit. We toasted its completion with an Arrr!

Which brings me back to the other thing I have found here in Prague. We had been working on part of the story and as usual fuego had to go to the bathroom. When he got back I said in a gravelly pirate voice, “Nay, Ruthie, twenty-six minutes.” fuego laughed and we shared for a moment what that said about the pirate captain. We squabbled for a bit about something else, then fuego came up with some dialog that helped connect Ruthie with the captain. Through it all we were having a blast.

We brought different things to the table as we collaborated, but the two, um, three… wait, four! most important things we had in common: ideas, respect, humor, and something else. And that’s what I’ve found here in Prague – a collaborator. A kindred spirit who loves a good story and has the drive to see it done. Of course we have our own things going as well, but what a blast it’s been working with him. Pirates wasn’t our first project together, and it won’t be our last. It’s just working.

Thanks!

Maybe Tin Can didn’t suck so bad

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OK, I never thought Tin Can sucked — the title of this entry is theme-based — I just didn’t rank it with some of my other bits. I’ve only been a Piker contributor for a few months now, so I didn’t think I’d show up in the anniversary issue. It’s a huge issue, a lot to go through, but there’s some great stuff there this week. This is your chance to appreciate the talent at that rag.

So I was pleased to have one if my scribbles recognized by my piker peers, but I’m left asking myself ‘why that one?’

Perhaps my other stories are not accessible. Zelazny, in a comment between stories in an anthology of his early work said, “explain everything.” I’m having a hard time with that. But shit, he’s been camping for years while I’m still looking for the trail head. I should listen to his advice, but I like leaving things unsaid. I want there to be a question mark hanging over the reader when the last sentence is over and nothing is left but but the unknown. I imagine you, faithful reader, setting the story aside with a frustrated “dammit” and then building the unknown yourself. All I’ve done is give your imagination a Scooby Snack.

Pardon my pompous-ass declarations, the pseudo-intellectual trappings of a storyteller striving to be important, but the things I have written that I like the most have been about questions, not answers. There is a Giant Unsaid, a current of thought that we all know but try to ignore. It is the work of artists to speak of the Giant Unsaid, and it is why we are afraid of true artists. Or, at least, I’m afraid of them.

The implication of the above is that in some sense I am an artist. Craftsman I have no doubt. Artist, well, that’s not for me to decide. Giant Unsaid, well, crap, we’re human.

Tin Can is getting better the more I think about it,

Thanks!

Monster News

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Recently I went through the exercise of distilling a 500+ page novel down into an entertaining 20 double-spaced pages. Dang. It’s not a place for my ramblin’ style; it’s all about being to the point, moving along, yet still creating sympathy for at least one character and providing a good read. At the heart of it is the question, “If I could have written it in twenty pages, don’t you think I would have?”

But it has been a rewarding exercise. That came home tonight as I worked through the comments from people who provided feedback for the synopsis. The most magical moments were when I read comments that forced me to distill into a few words the key moments in the book. With that understanding I can look back on the big fat pile of prose and see where I missed opportunities, or simply didn’t articulate what I meant to say. There are now parts of the synopsis that serve as criticism of the larger work. When I am sure the distilled ideas of the synopsis are sharply represented in the novel, I’ll feel much better about the whole work.

I have read long, disjointed, incoherent works from established writers, and I wonder if the novel would have been different if the writer had been forced to write a synopsis. It’s a hell of a chore, and when I’m big-time and I don’t have to do it any more I’m sure I won’t. So please, when the third novel comes out with my name bigger than the title on the cover, but you read it and it kind of sucks, drop me an email and say, “maybe you should write a synopsis of the next one, and pass it around.”

Seeing the holes in the story I feel better about it than ever. I am filled with an arrogant self-deception, an optimism that says if I fix all the problems all that’s left is art. It’s a silly conceit when put that way, but the business is 90% perspiration, right?

One thing I’d like to ask the real writers is, “How do you keep the art through endless revisions?”

All right, I rambling now, in a muddled way, and it’s time to stop.

Thanks!

Thoughts about Writing

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I’m sitting here in Crazy Daisy, and it’s a fine Prague day. The sun is shining, the birds are singing (I didn’t miss them until they came back) and the world is generally a cheery place. A pretty girl went by in a miniskirt and naturally I thought about the art of writing essays.

It goes back to a comment my august sister left for another episode celebrating spring. Some pundit somewhere compared the essay to the miniskirt, saying it should cover the subject but nothing more, or something like that. It’s a nice quote, so you should go back through the comments and find it. Carol Anne had added to the famous quote by drawing a parallel to my comparison between miniskirts and bikinis. To which I simply added “It’s gotta have swish.” I think I just misquoted myself. Can you do that?

I didn’t state it so then, but while a bikini reveals, a miniskirt enhances. Women can probably make a similar analogy involving speedos and board shorts. In any case, it’s gotta have swish.

So what would I say if I was in front of a bunch of kids who are required to take a course in essay writing? I think first I would ask them the last time they wrote an essay, and I would point out that every email they send is an essay, every note they write is an essay, every message they leave on an answering machine is an essay. We will all agree that some people just have a knack for great messages, great emails, great signals across a room that you don’t forget. I have friends that can raise the most mundane thing to a cause of laughter or sorrow. I have a special note that my email program plays when I get a message from one of those people.

So what sets them apart? How much of that can be taught to a class of people who see writing essays as a chore?

In my not-so-humble opinion, there are two things that make a great essayist: they find their subject interesting and they write without fear. It’s important to differentiate between their subject is interesting and they find their subject interesting. I’ve read emails lately about things I care not one whit about, but the way they were written made me read the message more than once. Really I don’t care about baby poop, but when described passionately, with magical language, it resounds, and I’m thankful to hear about baby poop.

The only way to be passionate is to write without fear. So really the two things that make a great essay boil down to one. Write without fear. Talk about things that matter to you and put your balls on the anvil.

I don’t know how many times on my travels I was sitting listening to the person on the next stool spin a great yarn. Usually autobiographical. Holy cow, the stories I’ve heard. Then I would tell them I’m a writer (I love saying that). My co-drinker’s eyes would get wide. Why? They had just run out a better essay without thinking than I could do with blood. They were telling a story to a guy in a bar. There was no fear.

We are taught somewhere along the line that there are three (I think it was three) sorts of essays. Those Essay Nazis are really into numbers. Fives and threes. Three reasons to write an essay, my ass. I bet if you asked the author of an essay you really liked, “Why did you write that?” they might at first cite some social or political reasons but in the end they would just say “I needed to say it.” They’re not writing for a defined purpose, they’re writing to write. Certainly they will hope that the articulate expression of their experience will affect the world, but fundamentally they’re stringing words together to make concrete something that before was only in their head, and they’re doing it for themselves.

I suppose that’s the corollary to writing without fear. Write for yourself. Be yourself in everything. When my faithful laptop makes the plunk-choing sound I know I have something worth reading that will be an intimate reflection of the sender. I will be reading a great essay about baby poop, or Little League, or it will be a long unpunctuated ramble with almost frightening enthusiasm. If you’ve ever been to a poetry slam you’ll know that it is really an essay contest.

Which brings me to the karaoke semi-simile (kind of like) I used in the title. On karaoke night you will remember two singers, the best and the worst, the two most fearless of all the participants. Attitude the same, results different, both remembered, both walking off the stage with head held high. If I were to grade essays, there would be points for all the technical stuff, because you always want their courage to be as effective as possible. There would be style points, asking whether the writer is finding their own voice, their own way of expressing things. But there would also be a courage score. There’s gotta be points for laying it on the line. There’s gotta room to acknowledge art when you see it, whether it’s dismantling the modern power structure or discussing toilet water splashing back up onto your butthole.

It’s my only advice to anyone who wants to write. Write without fear. If you’re in school, screw the grade. There’s nothing wrong with technical ability, in fact, you’ll find that all that grammar and crap ultimately gives you a much faster car to drive into the brick wall. To really be great you need the technical skill, but all the skill in the world will never replace passion. And everyone has the passion. Everyone. You just gotta let it show.

Thanks!