For my birthday, a friend gave me a book about the Replacements (my all-time favorite band). With the book came a card that read
Happy birthday. Also, rock on!
Now, this has a certain poignancy, because she and I are both getting pretty frigging old by this point. But I mention it here simply because I so love the way she put it. Also, rock on!
P.S. The book is The Replacements, All over But the shouting: an oral history by Jim Walsh.
This might describe me. I hope no one thinks it’s the whole story.
She lived at the corner of Skepticism and Rebellion.
When it comes to a plot, like anybody I want a story that hangs together — and for me it is so satisfying to get to the end of the book and find that all of the subplots were intrinsic and pivotal to the main plotline. However, when it comes to a plot, what I most cherish is surprise. This is a consequence of my many years working as a motion picture story analyst. At the rate of 5 novels or 10 screenplays per week, I read and critiqued materials submitted to movie studios. After several years of this, you’ve seen it all, plot-wise. That was a long time ago, but unfortunately I still anticipate most plot twists. Sometimes I like an otherwise mediocre movie just because it has some story element that I didn’t see coming. I am less charitable with mediocre novels; I suppose that is because my emotional investment in a novel can be so much greater.
One of the (many) things that hooked me on the Potter books was how many surprises J.K. Rowling conjured. I think I was in book 5 before I anticipated a single surprise. Ahhhhhhh.
For the last word in petty revenge,
Not even the dog will miss him.
it is probably not possible to have a serious conversation involving the word clam.
On my optimistic days, the epitaph I favor is
The adventure continues…
Sometimes I read non-fiction but it never grabs me. It’s novels that grab and shake and catapult and expand me. I read novels to get immersed in the lives of people I can care about. I don’t have to like them. I hope they will be complicated, not trivial or easy to understand; nothing better than a character who baffles me – so long as I perceive that the author isn’t B.S.ing me, that the mysteries and the discrepancies are resolvable, and that once I spend more time with the character, I will start to understand.
Authors don’t fully understand the characters they “create”, even when they think they do. There’s a part of me that has the chutzpah to think that I design my characters. There’s another, dazzled part of me that senses them flying in through a door I’ve managed to open, just a crack.
The best characters are like great song lyrics. A few twists of phrase and they change me, profoundly and forever.
Browsing unknown books, I’m less likely to choose a novel written by someone young. That has always been true, even back when I was a youngster myself. Certainly, good writing is good writing and age has little to do with plot, or pacing, or style. But when it comes to characterization, experience matters. A writer needs to have been around life’s block a few times in order to write people and their relationships. I seek novels that teach me something about humans – including me. Now that’s not to say that better understanding is a given with age. Cluelessness can be the most persistent of traits.
Some of the most creative writing I’ve encountered appears in the names of paint colors. There is no Light Gray. Instead there is Pompeii Ruins or Evaporated.
Dark Red? Don’t be pedestrian. Instead expect Romantic Attachment or Can Can. Madder of Fact Red. Go a bit lighter and you come to River Rouge.
I might have called these Gray Blue: Babbling Creek or Wind Blown or the (brilliant!) Atmospheric Pressure.
I’ve got rooms done in Melodious Peach. Turns out that is recommended for pairing with Treaded Grapes or Composed Bloom.
What color would you expect Earthly Pleasure to be? How about Philosophically Speaking?
Paint color names can be evocative, stimulatiing, witty, sly. Perhaps their only limitation is that they stick to the light side of the emotional palette. I guess that makes sense. Hard to imagine someone wanting a room painted in Spiteful Orange or Narcissist’s Pearl.
Why do writers write? Answers to this questions fascinate me and of course they are as varied as their writers. I write to connect – I want people to read my work and I want them to react to it. Emotionally. Intellectually. Fortunately and unfortunately I have never been driven by the desire to make a lot of money from my writing. Fortunately, because a focus on commercial can distort decisions. Unfortunately, because probably one has to focus on making money in order to make money.
Required Writing 