For the entire next day, the machine stood silent under its tarp. There was a perfunctory twine fence strung up between makeshift posts in a wide circumference around the machine–the nearest camper was not within a half mile of the shrouded rocket. The ground around the machine was strewn with tools and scraps and other detritus of invention and construction. Acetylene torches like strange alien probes, confetti bits of wire insulation, dully glinting washers and bolts, cans of paint with leftover reservoirs congealed at the bottom, brushes forgotten, their bristles made brittle and useless, scraps of metal with edges burned black and jagged, and a massive black anvil like a fossilized bone from some unimaginable prehistorical animal.

from “Earthly Possessions”

I finally looked through my writing folder tonight for likely candidates to include with my MFA application. The Dark Tower pastiche was out, as were the three secondary world novels starring a character who looks like Satan, as were many of the short stories that, bless them, tried very hard to be good and instead were stepping stones to other, better writing. I love The Roof of the Sky, but it’s not right for a grad school application. There is a little short story about a motorcycle jumper than I like, and a long novella about a man whose toddler becomes Death. Also, the story about the boy finds a crashed space ship in the woods is pretty good, I think, as is the story about the kids who sneak into an old ladies house after her dog won’t stop barking, as well as the one about the widower who builds a rocket ship in his front yard from old Russian rocketry manuals.

And though I may include some of these, I think my best shot lies with the as yet unfinished The Beacon novel. There’s a huge chunk that’s all Silver Age comic book story, and about forty pages of story that extends from that comic. It’s a piece that, right now, isn’t much, but I think it shows the most promise and potential of anything I’ve written. I’ve posted some snatches of it here from time to time. I worked on it a lot earlier this year, but after graduation it languished and sort of went into hibernation. Tonight I added 1,000 words and wrote a scene I’ve known about for months (although, as usual, I didn’t have it quite figured out).

It feels good, and after five months of it sitting there on my hard drive, I’m excited about the project again.

In spite of getting geared up to apply for graduate school, writing as been hard. Neither the writing for the MousEye project (which I’m dreadfully behind on) or my own writing (which has been nonexistent) has been going anywhere. In Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story (which I just finished listening to on audiobook), he talks about the word pool, the language pool, the myth pool, where we all go down to drink and cast our nets. I was looking through some old writing last night, especially my thick manuscript of The Roof of the Sky, and I got to thinking how easy it used to be to find that place where the words and ideas would come. Now, because of any number of factors, I have trouble finding it. And I think it’s probably because, frankly, I thinking about writing more than I’m writing. I mean, even now, this minute, on this windy August night, sitting on my futon with my feet up on my grandfather’s old Navy trunk, I’m writing about writing instead of just writing.

It used to be easy. Now it’s hard. But the pool is out there, through the brambles, over the hedges, somewhere silent in the night, the water at its shores lapping against the finest sand, the soft noise of its existence there to be heard if I could just get my mind silent and still for a moment.

“Are you serious?”

“You don’t know me. I say something, even if it ain’t true, I’m serious. Copacetic?”

-from the new short story

Her mother loved watching all the various crime dramas on television. It seemed to Page that each network had it’s own flavor, it’s own species, all of them derived from some distant and forgotten common ancestor. The characters who populated those shows had their own specific crime dialect, and when her mother tried to employ the lexicon, it was always obvious that she wasn’t a native speaker.

-from a new story

Okay, long post. Buckle up.

I haven’t been posting about writing very much lately because writing’s been hard for the past week or so. I was discouraged today–pulling my old bad habit of wanting to give up on a project just because it’s not immediately easy for me. The past novels I’ve written have all come out rather easily, not always a smooth delivery, but they’ve always gotten written, at least in first draft. It took some talking out with D today to make myself realize, probably again, that I’m an impatient writer. I want my book to be written right now, and often that means barreling ahead when it’s just not there that day, worried more about filling pages, because that’s what writer do, right? They fill pages. If they pages aren’t filling, the book’s not being written, and I get grumpy and want to do something else.

I wrote nine pages this past week, and maybe a page or two felt right. The rest was me telling myself the story. And while that step is important, it really amounts to prewriting. But, dammit, pages were filled and the book was being written. Since the pages were crappy, the book was crappy, and I was in a general crappy mood about the whole business, ready to toss is aside and start something else.

The major problem is, as important as telling yourself the story first is, it does not usually make enjoyable prose for a reader. D, who as usual was a repository for sound writing advice, urged me to trust the gaps in the narrative, and to trust the reader to make connections and observations themselves, without me telling them flat-out in my excessive exposition.

That sort of sparse, economical writing is something I’ve done in short fiction, even longer short fiction like “All Our Imaginary Friends Are Dead.” D explained that, when you write short fiction, you can see all of the machinery, the way the parts work together and click against each other to drive the story. When you write a novel, he said, that machinery is much more vast, often stretching off into the darkness. The exposition-heavy narrative I’d written in the past week was important for throwing some light into that darkness, but it wasn’t the book. The book could only be written after some of the machinery was illuminated.

So this is my long winded way to begin to talk about revision, and the work that I try to do when I revise. So, for the sake of comparision, here’s a scene from that tedious bit of back story I’d written, typos and all (I’ve omitted a few paragraphs that came before this–believe me, they’re not all that important):

As she crossed the street, she remembered proofing some of John Mark’s earliest scripts, the ones that had gotten him noticed. Unlike the troglodytes writing the medical articles, John Mark had a beautiful way with words, had ever since he had been a teenager writing lyrical poetry to his sweethearts, herself of course being the latest.

There was a boy on the stoop, bent over a comic book, reading by the last of the sunlight as it peeked over the roofs.

“Hi there,” Norah said.

The boy looked up and blinked, as if he had just come out of a dark cave. “Oh, hi,” he said, and dropped her head back to the page.

She edged closer to him. “What are you reading.”

“Just some book,” he said. “Why?”

She shrugged. “Just curious.”

The boy closed the cover with his thumb marking his place and presented the cover. His thumb was tucked about halfway through the issue. The cover showed The Beacon, huge in his metal containment suit, regarding a line of young men, all of them lean and muscular. The Beacon’s hand was on what passed for his chin, and big swooping letters below asked the questions WHO WILL BE THE BEACON’S SIDEKICK? THE INCREDIBLE ANSWER IS INSIDE CARETAKERS!

Caretaker was the sobriquet ascribed to fans of the Beacon. She assumed it was some sort of half-baked pun on the lighthouse imagery of the Beacon’s name.

“What do you think of it? Is it any good?”

The boy glanced at the cover and wiped his forehead with his free hand. “It’s pretty good, I guess. I’m not done with it yet.”

“Just pretty good? So do you think I should read it?”

“Yea, I guess. It’s pretty good, but I think I know what’s going to happen.”

“Okay, well, happy reading.”

The boy didn’t answer her—he was reading again.

Norah slipped past him and through the front door of the apartment building. Upstairs, she found her apartment empty. It had been hotter than expected that day, and neither she or John Mark had opened the windows, so the air in the room was dense and heavy. She hadn’t been sweating outside, but now sweat was standing out on her forehead and under her arms. She felt clammy and dirty. She set her purse down on the kitchen table with her keys and the comic she held under her arm. She wanted to read it, but knew that she had time. As much as she loved him, she also relished the evenings to herself, the scant few nights that she would not have to pass listening to the clack of his typewriter, or the scratch of his pencil, or that little chuckle that he made when he thought of something clever. She thought it sounded like a chuckle underwater.

Tonight, at least until late, the apartment would be hers. She turned on the radio they kept in the bedroom and ran the shower until the bathroom was filled with steam. Standing in front of the mirror after, wearing only a towel, her hair hanging in a wet frame around her face, she pressed her finger to the mirror and drew, very carefully, a mask over her face. She drew protruding ears, the horizontal slitted eyeholes and smiled to herself. Before she got into the shower, she wiped the doodle away.

She loved the shower—the steam rose up in waves, making the air thick, making it almost difficult to breath, but she loved the water almost hot enough to scald, so that when she got out, she was red, all of the nerves in her skin firing, so that when she left the bathroom and hit the cooler air of the apartment, the effect was all the more intense and refreshing. She wrapped a towel around herself and stepped into the bedroom and found John Mark seated at the kitchen table. His head was in his hands. Norah had never seen John Mark cry, and the puffiness in his face, the redness of his eyes, informed her that she had missed seeing it this time by less than a half hour.

“John,” she said, pulled the towel tight across her chest, he hair hanging damp and limp.

He looked up at her and sniffled.

There’s not much that’s bad about this, but it’s not very much fun to read because so much of the back story between the characters, and the woman’s inner world, is revealed overtly. We get too much of Norah here through the narrator, and not enough through Norah’s actions herself. It’s a violation of one of the most cliche, but still relevant, adages of writing: show, don’t tell. However, this expository prewriting is crucial for clarifying in the writer’s mind the world (internal and external) that these characters live in. These are things that the writer needs to know, but the trick to prose is parceling out this information to the reader in a way that will be interesting and engaging. Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is an amazing example of this sort of narrative control.

For the rewrite, I moved up the start of the action and concentrated on two things: telling the story of the characters inner world (her personality, habits, etc) without the narrator encroaching on that space, and making the prose more interesting. The scene really still starts and ends in the same place, but is told in half the words. Here is the same scene after a rewrite, typos and all:

She clicked down the sidewalk, a small purse over her shoulder, a pen, forgotten, behind her ear. There was a boy on the stoop, bent over a comic book, the pages held tilted in the last angles of sunlight. The clicking stopped and she stood over him. His contrast between the dark of his skin and the light of his shirt was almost absolute.

“Do you like it?”

The boy looked up and blinked, exposing a flash of tooth, as if he had just come out of a dark cave. “What?”

“The book. That’s The Beacon, right?”

He closed the book over his thumb and looked at the cover, as if he wasn’t sure himself. There was a large man in a metal suit, and four young men in a line under big garish words. “Yea, so?”

“Is it any good?”

The corner of the boy’s mouth and his eyebrow raised in unison. “It’s okay. Why?”

She shrugged, “Just curious.”

The boy turned back to the page, and the woman walked another block, stopped in front of another stoop. She slipped off her clicking shoes. Her nylons whispered against the steps as they went into the building, carrying her legs along inside.

In the summer, the apartment was an oven they paid rent to live in. Even with the sun at the back of the building now, with the blinds closed, it was still heavy and uncomfortable. She set her purse down and stripped her nylons, balling them into a soft fists and tossing them into the trash can beside the refrigerator. They kept a radio in their bedroom, and it played brash and tinny, and crackled when there were storms. A man was talking about the heat.

She slid out of her dress and let it fall crumpled to the carpet where it collected stray hairs and downy lint. When the bathroom had filled with steam, she stood before the fogged mirror with a towel wrapped around her middle. She traced lines of clarity with her finger, enclosing her blurry reflection with a metal helmet—she wiped a square clear around her eyes to see through. She frowned at her reflection and drew the pen from behind her ear, tossing it through the doorway and onto the bed. The bathroom had become so warm that she had begun to sweat into her towel. She deftly removed it, wove it through the rod, and stepped into the steam.

She shivered while she dressed, her skin raised in an archaic Braille of gooseflesh. Her dress was the color of sunflowers, faded by washings, threadbare in places—and it loved her body. A man on the radio was talking about construction in St. Louis. She wrapped the towel around her head in a loose turban and found John at the kitchen table with his head in his hands.

In the rewrite, concentrate on the economy of your language–say what you want to say more clearly, more interestingly, and, usually, in fewer words. Whenever possible, let your characters tell the reader about themselves, rather than trying to do that work for them as a narrator. This last suggestion is of course mutable; this particular section of the book is written or told in the future by a character who can logically have no internal knowledge of this character. In narratological terms, to preserve the mimetic (the logic and believability of the story world) I wanted to have as little intrusion on the story by the narrator as possible.

In my experience, revision seems best when it is done slowly, carefully considering each sentence. The scene I’ve rewritten will likely be rewritten again, but it’s much closer to the scene I wanted.

That’s the basic goal: with each revision, get closer to what you wanted to say in the first place, whether that be by working with what you have or trying a scene in a new way.

If nothing else, it’s a way to force yourself to be patient, and to give the story another chance to tell you what it is.

Presenting the Minnesota Colleges & Universities English and Writing (MnCUEW) conference tomorrow. My presentation is called “Talking Across Our Boundaries: A Case for Creative Nonfiction.” It seems that the conference committe is just as frazzled and disorganized as I feel, so perhaps my nerves are unjustified. Still, nerves aside, I’m going with three good friends, so if nothing else the night day will end with good company and Malaysian food. The presentation is about the importance of the personal essay in the undergraduate English curriculm as an impetus for students to examine their lives as texts in progress that are worthy of interpretation. It’s all very cool, and, weirdly, reading over the paper for the millionth time today got me thinking about Twitter. I just recently started using it. If you like, you can find me here.

I avoided it for awhile, partly because it seemed to me to be a rather arrogant way of telling the world what you’re doing all the time, and I thought that all of twitter was just millions of people speaking their lives into an empty vacuum. But, as usual, I was wrong.

I like to think of Twitter as micro-blogging. It’s not so much a soapbox from which to spew the minutia of your life (although some certainly do use it in that way) but it is also at once an exercise in writing efficiently–posts are limited strictly to 140 characters–and a way to network quickly in a way that more traditional application like facebook can’t accomodate.

Booting up my own page, I see a professor commenting about the jazz concert on campus this evening, a student responding to that professor to ask about homework help, a woman I’ve never met in need of writing encouragement, comic writer Brian Michael Bendis pimping David Mack’s art gallery in Portland, a friend annoucing to the campus that the school newspaper will be printed a little later than normal, and another friend asking for a ride home for easter.

Of course, I haven’t learned all of the various ins and outs of it, but I like the fact that at once I can see news from friends far away, posts about the town I live in, tweets from artists whose work I respect, a geek tour of Jon Favreau’s house, and a link to an article about the two Truman Scholars we have on campus.

On a writerly level, I love the idea of tweets as micro-narratives. Consider this post:

My dad has put me in a bad mood by telling me I’m in a bad mood. Because, shocker, he’s in a bad mood. Stony silence at the Green Mill.

I love that the constraints of the space force writers to construct very precise prose like this. In less than 140 characters, this writer has told us a complete story. We have characters, setting, conflict–all of the ingredients of narrative. It’s this kind of post that I enjoy reading the most–we get a story of what’s going on in the life of that person, told with brevity, subtlty, and force. I love that possibility. Jonathan Carroll uses his page as a miniature version of his fantastic blog to great effect this way.

I don’t mean to suggest that the internet has ruined our appetite for long-form narrative (like, you know, books and stuff), but I think there is something to be said for tight, concise representations of life. Each tweet is a personal essay in miniature, and if we examine them rhetorically, those 140 characters can tell us volumes about the person writing them.

If you’re looking for more micro-narratives, I would recommend fmylife.com and grouphug.us. Both sites functional similarly in that each post attempts to tell a story in as small of a space as possible, but the content on each site is drastically different in terms of rhetorical agenda and craft. Both are worth your time.

The internet is changing the way that we tell our own personal narratives–each new social networking site is a blank slate onto which we can create alternate identities by the ways in which we frame our own narrative.

That gets me really excited.

Happy tweeting! See you in the tubes.

from Jonathan Carroll’s blog this morning:

“I write things on a page I don’t want to have to deal with in life. Writing is a safe vacuum for me because I’m not saying those horrible things to someone’s face. On the page, I can always find the great retort that doesn’t come to me at the right moment in life. I feel I have a kind of bravado in my writing I don’t have in life.”

-Neil LaBute

Good stuff’s happening lately. On Sunday, I got unstuck with The Beacon, and now have a pretty good idea about how all five layers (!) of the novel are going to be working. Now it’s just a matter of getting back to the scribbling, but I’m excited about it again. And after a week of being blocked and disinterested, that’s a good feeling.

Also, found out that an abstract I proposed to the MnCUEW (Minnesota Colleges & Universities English and Writing) conference was accepted, so, in addition to the Undergraduate Research Symposium on campus in late April, I’ll also be presenting “Talking Across Our Boundaries: A Case for Creative Nonfiction” in front of real-live professors and academics next week. Kinda freaky, actually, but I love that paper and the ideas in it. That’s coming up on April 3rd.

My friend, the inimitable NG, has taken up responsibilities for the site MEGATONik, and what was once a site dedicated solely to video game news and reviews has now become an equal-opportunity nerd emporium.  NG, myself, and several other friends are going to be posting regularly about anything that seems important to the world of geek at the time.  Expect a lot of bad jokes, video game rants, movie speculation, comic reviews, snark, poetry, MS Paint drawings,  and all around geekery from the site.  We’ve only been posting for two days, and there is some great stuff up there already.