Michelle's Daily Dose for Writers

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 15:45:53 GMT

keep your eyes on the flag and your head in the sand

So John Kerry went to war. He served honorably. He came home disgusted with the horrific and unnecessary loss of life on both sides of the battle. He voiced his anger. He had reason to be angry. After all, 58,219 American soldiers lost their lives in that war. Another 153,356 were wounded. It cost America 111 billion dollars--only a fraction of what we will spend in Iraq, but a staggering sum nonetheless. Surely, history has proven his anger to be justified. Most folks who know anything at all about the Vietnam war will agree that it was a disaster marked by poor conception, worse planning, and a degree of hubris among our military leaders that left many thousands of American and Vietnamese homes ravaged by grief and death. We lost that war. It is not the soldiers' fault either that we fought it or that we lost it. They were merely serving a country that demanded their service. Many believed they were doing the right thing, many questioned their orders, but America gave them no choice: fight and die in Vietnam, or suffer disgrace and jail time at home.

Kerry was one of those soldiers. Because he was and is a thinking man, not a robot, because he is a man who saw how horribly wrong the war was on so many different levels and in so many different ways, he came home and voiced his concern. He did not mince words. He knew that there were tens of thousands of American soldiers who served as well and as ethically as they could under tragic circumstances, and he knew there were some who committed atrocities. No nation, no matter how adamantly it cloaks itself in the veil of God's will, is immune from producing men and women who will are willing to commit evil deeds. One need not look too far into history to see this: have we already forgotten Abu Ghraib?

It seems, however, that many Americans on the eve of this election are condemning Kerry for being a thinking man. Never mind that his opponent never served in Vietnam and refuses to release the records of his own shadowy National Guard service. Never mind that his opponent never saw a moment of combat or saved another soldier's life. Somehow, Bush seems to be getting away with attacking Kerry for serving honorably in a war and then coming home to tell America how terrible war really is. Maybe if Bush had seen war, he would admire John Kerry's courage. Maybe if Bush had lost a leg in Vietnam or a daughter in Iraq, he would understand the terrible price that members of the American military are paying at this very moment. Maybe if he were ever put in the position of attending the funeral of a brother who died in combat, he would think twice about sending tens of thousands of young people into a war zone in which many are sure to die and be maimed.

Those who allow themselves the luxury of not thinking often find comfort in condemning those who do think.

the exercise

The writer is not exempt from civic duty. In some ways, all writing is political in the sense that we cannot entirely extract ourselves from the context of our times. That is not to say that every story or poem has a political slant. Clearly and fortunately, this isn't the case. But we humans are political beings. We cannot help but notice the injustices around us. Writers observe, and then interpret what we see. Some of the most riveting fiction comes from writers engaged in a political struggle: witness Milan Kundera, Chinua Achebe, Gao Xingjian.

Write a story or poem in which there is a clear political context. Politics need not be the driving force behind the piece, and it should not dilute the complexity of the characters or the fullness of the language. It should be there, though, in the background, a presence which leaves its mark, if subtly, on the larger world of the story or poem.

Fri, 20 Aug 2004 15:27:02 GMT

friday reading tip:

Check out the new anthology, Alumni Grill, featuring stories by a number of Southern writers, including yours truly. Other authors in the mix are Brad Watson (author of the excellent story collection Last Days of the Dog Men and the novel Heaven of Mercury), Silas House, Rick Bragg, Suzanne Hudson, and Tom Franklin, to name a few. Alumni Grill and Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe III are the latest in a series of Southern fiction anthologies published by MacAdam/Cage.

A couple of weeks ago, MacAdam/Cage joined Lemuria Books to throw a huge party in Mississippi to celebrate the publication.Contributors to both anthologies were on hand to sign books, give readings, and drink lots and lots of beer. I was there last year but missed it this year, on account of being, in Biblical terms, "great with child."

As you may know by now, I live in San Francisco. But I grew up in Alabama, on the Gulf Coast, which is where my story collection, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, is set. Despite the fact that I haven't lived in Alabama in eleven years, I find myself coming back to the South in my writing again and again.As writers, we are so often shaped by place, by the climates and voices of our childhood, by the earliest language we pick up from parents and family and community. We may relocate, lose our accents, change our religious and political affiliations--in essence, grow up--but something of the place of our childhoods always remains with us.

the exercise:

fiction: Write a story set in the city/neighborhood/region of your childhood. In the story, setting should be more than a mere backdrop. It should be vivid and alive, integral to the plot and movement of the story.

memoir: Write about a place that has shaped you.

Wed, 18 Aug 2004 18:12:18 GMT

the tennis players

I’ve just finished reading The Tennis Players by Lars Gustafsson. It’s a very short novel, just 92 pages, so it only took me one morning to read, but I imagine I’ll be thinking about this book for a while. I’ve yet to meet a Lars Gustafsson novel I didn’t like. His work is characterized by quiet, contemplative narrators who bring to their observations a depth of thought and breadth of knowledge that is often missing in contemporary fiction. If you haven’t yet read Gustafsson, I suggest you begin with Death of a Beekeeper, then move on to A Tiler’s Afternoon, The Tale of a Dog, Sigismund, and The Tennis Players. We all know someone to whom we are grateful for introducing us to an author's work at just the right moment in our lives. I owe my early love of Gustafsson to Joanne Meschery, who was my professor for a class in form and theory of fiction at the University of Arkansas in 1995. One of the books she had us read was Gustafsson's story collection, Stories of Happy People.

The Tennis Players was first published in Sweden in 1977, and the English translation was released in 1983. It takes place in Austin, Texas, in 1974. The narrator, a professor named Lars Gustafsson, “is teaching a seminar in nineteenth-century European thought and quietly perfecting his game of tennis” (from the book jacket). The story takes place on the tennis court, on campus, and, briefly, in an underground desert bunker where a rather unstable amateur tennis player named Chris spends three days a week monitoring the Southern Air Defense District’s operations computer for Strategic Air Command, a powerful division of the Defense Department.

I won’t summarize the book—you simply must read it. But there is one passage I wanted to point out, on page 63. The professor is playing tennis with Abel, a former pro who has played at Forest Hills, won the Australian Open, and come in second at Wimbledon twice, but who “prefers to play here with people who come by.”

Abel gives the faltering professor a bit of tennis advice. “Never think about the ball that’s gone. It’s gone, whether it’s good or bad it’s gone just the same. There’s never any ball except the one you’ve got in front of you.”

The same can be said for an author’s books, or for your own stories. There comes a time when a book is sold and published and has made the rounds of the reviewers, for good or bad. A time when a story has been revised three dozen times and has been sent out to various literary magazines, where it has been accepted or rejected. A time when a book or story is part of a writer’s past, as irrelevant to one’s forward motion as ex-boyfriends, senior prom, and one’s first job.

Remember this: there’s never any story except the one you’ve got in front of you.

the exercise:

Choose two to three stories that are truly past. They may be past because you’re revised them to the best of your ability, or they may be past because you’ve simply outgrown them as a writer. We writers do that, you know. We outgrow books and stories the same way we outgrow the little black dress we bought to celebrate our 21^st birthday. If we are writing dutifully, and reading thoughtfully, and living a life both of the mind and of the world, our writing matures and deepens. It may be a sad discovery that a story you wrote two years ago, which at the time seemed brilliant, is no longer something that you feel particularly proud of; but any serious writer will experience this over and over again. Don’t despair: it’s a sign that you’re getting better.

Now, today, begin a brand new story.

Tue, 17 Aug 2004 15:03:23 GMT

danger

This just in from my sister Misty, who's been backpacking around South America for the last three months. She just emerged from a two-week stint deep in the Amazon, among the Cofan.

"Soon after we got there we heard that an 11 year old girl had been bitten by a snake and almost died. And a couple of dogs had been bitten by snake too. The longer we stayed, the more dangerous it seemed. One night a moth flew into the house and everyone came around to see it. After getting a closer look, Bolivar said something in Cofan and a dozen people immediately stepped back. Once Bolivar had killed the moth, he explained that if it stings you, you die, and then he laughed.

There are also fish here that stick you with their spines, electric eels, spiders, alligators, bats (carnivores), jaguars, sting rays, ect. And we were bathing in the river that whole time. By the end, walking through deep puddles didn't seem so fun anymore. And the 20 roaches crawling on our things when we came into our cabin at night didn't seem so grand either, or the mouse that ate my bra and kept us awake at night in the thatch roof. But, I'm glad I went."

Misty's a pretty intrepid traveler. About a month before this happened, she was bitten by a strange dog in a rural area and had to spend two weeks in Quito getting rabies shots. She was also mugged at knifepoint, had her passport and money stolen, lost her luggage. And she kept going. But I think the killer moth marked the end of this trip for her.

the exercise:

Living the middle class life in America, many of us tend to get complacent about physical danger. That complancency is occasionally shaken by some unanticipated event: a mugging, the violent death of someone we know, a natural disaster such as an earthquake or hurricane. 9/11 reminded us all just how imminent and unannounced death can be.

memoir: Write about a time when you or someone you know was in grave physical danger.

fiction: Write a story about a character whose confrontation with physical danger changes him or her in some fundamental way.

Fri, 23 Jul 2004 15:10:12 GMT

chance meetings

I'm currently reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. The novel is filled with seemingly chance meetings that all turn out to be part of a grand design. The unlikely hero meets a mysterious woman in a red vinyl hat, a damaged stranger who dresses like Jackie O, an elderly man ravaged by war memories, a teenaged girl who is responsible for her boyfriend's death by motorcycle, and a wealthy benefactress who inexplicably dresses our hero up in fine clothes and gives him large sums of money. Throughout it all, there is a feeling of something sinister going on, something that neither the hero nor the reader can quite grasp. I'm guessing that, in the end, this grand design all works itself out and becomes quite clear, but I still have about 130 pages to go.

The Exercise

Write about a chance meeting.

Thu, 22 Jul 2004 16:04:13 GMT

a night to remember

Was it in a car, a bar, on a plane, on a train? Was it last night, last year, sometime in the last three decades? Was it so long ago you might burst a blood vessel in your brain just trying to remember it? Did it involve sports, desserts, great music, bad lighting? Was it over in a flash, or did it just keep going? Was it rowdy, religious. funny, furious? Were there unforseen consequences--of the disastrous, delicious, or just unpredictable variety?

The Exercise:

Write about your most memorable sex. It doesn't have to be kinky, although it can be, and it need not have taken place in a strange location, although that's okay too. The only requirement: this sex blew your mind. If you need inspiration, check out my newest sex piece, Knocked Up, on Salon.com.

And hi Susan! Thanks for your note.

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 16:20:51 GMT

she's back...

Bet you thought I got lost on the highway somewhere between Bowling Green and San Francisco. Not so. I've just been awfully busy, what with the news of our December arrival. Yes, it's official, it's a boy and he's one serious kicker! Thanks to all of you who have written to ask whatever became of me. What with shopping for maternity clothes, teaching a couple of writing classes, and trying to figure out how to switch this blog from one computer to another (I never did figure that out), I've been one busy girl.

We went to Cabo san Lucas last week. It was about five billion degrees, but a dry heat. As long as we were in the ocean or the pool, it was blissful. We spent a lot of time underneath our umbrella on the sand, drinking smoothies and marveling at the roundness of my previously flat belly. We brought some plastic floaties from home--you know, the kind that take half an hour of hard huffing to blow up, with the funny little pillow at the top--and rode the waves in style. It reminded me of being a kid on the Gulf Coast, spending summer days at the beach with my seahorse floatie. Next to my Howdy Doody wooden puppet, the seahorse floatie was my absolute favorite toy.

The Exercise:

Write about your favorite toy from childhood. Or, make a fiction exercise out of this, and further explore a character in one of your stories by writing about his/her childhood vacations.