Category Archives: craft

A TRIP TO IRELAND AND WHAT CAME HOME WITH ME…

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The Liffey at evening.

The Liffey at evening.

I returned a week ago from my fourth trip to Ireland, spent mostly in Dublin, this trip, at World Con (a science fiction/fantasy convention). I’m not sure how much I got out of the convention itself, but I went with a writer friend and met many of her friends–very open and friendly people. And that was worth a lot.

Dublin is much changed since I was there last, in 1997. With membership in the EU, it has become a much more international city. On my first morning there, I was astonished by how fast everything–pedestrians and traffic–moved, rushing off to work. It felt more like New York than DC does. I’m very happy for Dublin. But I miss Bewley’s counters and pots of tea made without tea bags. There seem to be a zillion coffee shops, and Grafton street seems to have an awful lot of the same stores we can find in any Mall here in the United States.

But I revisited Dublin haunts I remembered from past trips–the goldsmith, Declan Killen, on Fade Street, where I had bought my Irish knot necklace back in 1986. (I lost it some years later, but managed to trace a photo of it and sent it to him, and he made me a replacement.) This trip, I came to his red door on Fade street. One had to push a button, and he answered and buzzed me in. I went up a long flight of stairs covered with a red carpet, and was greeted at the top of the stairs. He ushered me into his small shop. His jewelry, necklaces, pendants, pins, and a few earrings, are lovely, though mostly beyond my means.  It seems that every twenty years or so, I visit his shop, admire his beautiful work without managing to buy any of it, and nevertheless, on each visit, he offers to–and takes–my silver necklace, and cleans and polishes it for me.

I also accidentally came upon the International Bar on a corner of Wicklow street, where I had had a humorous adventure on that 1986 trip (a story for another time). Lots of nostalgia.  20190814_160402_Film1This trip, I was staying in the Temple Bar area along Wellington Quay for some of my time, and on St. Augustine street the rest. I loved waking to the cries of sea gulls in the mornings, and the cool, fresh air. I also loved the Leprechaun Museum which, despite its name, is neither a museum nor a tourist attraction devoted to what Americans would expect Leprechauns to be. Rather, it is a place of Shanachies–storytellers of old Irish myths. We were treated to wonderful tales more performed than merely recited by a terrific, theatrical storyteller named Emily.

There was a guided day-trip to the Cliffs of Moher and Galway town that, due to circumstances beyond our control–weather and some other things–was rather a bust. But we did get to see the Aillwee Cave–which was fascinating: a series of caverns created by underwater rivers cutting through rock over centuries.

But the main piece of Ireland I brought home with me this trip, was the experience of seeing a small exhibit of Martyn Turner’s political cartoons at the entrance to Trinity’s Berkeley Library. I simply had to get a book of them. I tried Easons–they said the books were out of print, and suggested Chapters, which has a used book section. So off I went to Chapters, and found a number of them. I bought two. Turner’s themes mostly relate to Irish politics. But he also addresses world politics. Something clicked in my brain, and I came back with (a) a sudden enthusiasm to write and draw political cartoons; and (b) a zillion ideas pulsing through my brain at once. I had recently signed up to have a Daily Kos Diary, and have now decided to start posting political cartoons there. We’ll see  whether ideas will keep coming to me, how well I can draw them (I do have a style of my own, but I’m not sure how compatible it is with political import), how adeptly I can combine text and pictures to satiric effect, and whether or not I can develop an audience for them. (So far, I have posted two, and have received five recommendations for each.  It is not a lot, but at least someone has SEEN them and, apparently, liked them.) I am excited about this new endeavor. As I grow and develop, I hope to post here what I may learn about the craft and about developing an audience.

New York City: On Polaris North

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In my first week in NYC, I went, with my friend Camille, to The Liar’s Show, down on the Lower East Side. Four storytellers told stories and the audience voted on who was lying.  Afterwards we went to dinner with some of the organizers and I ended up in conversation with one of the storytellers and his mother who, it turns out, is an actress. She told me of Polaris North, a group of playwrights and actors.  She told me that the public could attend readings there (the audience is asked for feedback to help the playwright improve the play), and that one could also audit their workshops a couple of times before joining.

Not living in New York, it did not make sense for me to join. But, when I returned for my second two weeks in the city I attended a public reading at Polaris North, and was invited to approach the workshop leaders to audit while I was in town. I did. The workshop leaders and the members were extremely welcoming.

On a Saturday, I audited a playwrights’ bootcamp, a workshop lasting for about four hours. This was very much like a regular fiction workshop, except that the roles were read aloud by the various members attending before the group and leader critiqued the work.

On the following Monday, I audited an actor’s workshop. I’m sure that, for actors, it probably would have been commonplace. But, unlike the playwrights workshop, this was, for me, a new experience, and I found it fascinating. An actor would perform a prepared monologue. The leader and the group would critique the performance. The leader might say, “no–too much. Do less.” Or, “no, not strong enough. Give it more.” And the actor would immediately redo the monologue with a slightly different take, often subtly but identifiably different. One actor redid her monologue several times, and each time there were subtle but varied interpretations that gave distinctly different nuances to the character.

In the book Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights, edited by Barry Paris, Adler says of the actor, “Your job is not to ‘act.’ Your job is to interpret.” She notes, “That histrionic side of the actor is what he is and what he adds to the play. The play is dead. It lies there. The other side is the side that people fool around with.” I’m not sure I’d call a completed play “dead.” But (except for out-of-town try-outs and resulting rewrites), it is complete. Done. Something that the director and actors will now make their own. It is a matter that writers of novels, short stories or other sorts of literature do not need to consider. Observing the way in which the actors at Polaris North “fooled around with” their monologues was instructive to me–indeed to anyone who is not already in theater–who may decide to write plays. One must recognize that they need to leave space for the actor to interpret.

Gore Vidal on “write what you know”

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From time to time, I have had mixed feelings about Gore Vidal.  The man was, on occasion brilliant (Julian; his essays), but also had a streak of cynical elitism that sometimes put me off.  That said, I want to shout “HIP HOORAY for his statement at the end of his essay, “Thomas Love Peacock:  The Novel of Ideas,” published in the New York Review of Books, December 4, 1980.  Vidal wrote:

…write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all.  Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect:  that is the only way out of the dead end of the Serious Novel which so many ambitious people want to write and no one on earth–or even on campus–wants to read.

Vidal began this essay finding fault with the American idea of the “Serious Novel,” stating, “…for Americans, sincerity if not authenticity is all-important; and requires a minimum of invention,” and “During the last fifty years [fifty years before 1980, when he wrote this–but also largely true today, I think], the main line of the Serious American Novel has been almost exclusively concerned with the doings and feelings, often erotic, of white middle-class Americans, often schoolteachers, as they confront what they take to be life.  It should be noted that these problems seldom have much or anything to do with politics, with theories of education, with the nature of the good. … Irony and wit are unknown while the preferred view of the human estate is standard American…For some reason, dialogue tends to be minimal and flat.”

Vidal suggests that to salvage the novel form, a tactic that might work is to infiltrate the genre forms.  “To fill them up, stealthily, with ideas, wit, subversive notions… .”  To some degree, in the years since Vidal wrote those words, so-called genre novels have done so. (eg. Walter Moseley’s work; much of Stephen King’s work–the metaphor of IT, for example; and most certainly, the short stories of Connie Willis which I have recently been reading).

For Vidal’s term, “Serious American Novel,” I might substitute the term “Literary Novel.”  I’m not sure when that latter term was coined, but I suspect it was after 1980.  In any event, there is a difference between a literary novel and true literature.  I believe it is that difference to which Vidal was speaking.

 

Uses of Setting; Example: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men

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Like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Robert Pen Warren’s All the King’s Men begins with several pages of description.  Penn Warren’s pages are not quite as directly metaphoric for the theme of his story as are Steinbeck’s opening pages of The Grapes of Wrath. (See September’s post.)  Rather, Penn Warren carries one along using run-on sentences to create a sense of speed and a strong first person voice–that of Jack Burden, a reporter working for Louisiana governor Willie Stark. He is in a car with the governor and his entourage, driving to Stark’s home town, Mason City.  It begins:

“… You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and if you don’t quit staring at that line and don’t take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you’ll hypnotize yourself and you’ll come to just at the moment when the right from wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab, and you’ll try to jerk her back on but you can’t because the slab is high like a curb, and maybe you’ll try to reach to turn off the ignition just as she starts the dive.  But you won’t make it, of course…
“…But if you wake up in time and don’t hook your wheel off the slab, you’ll go whipping on into the dazzle and now and then a car will come at you steady out of the dazzle and will pass you with a snatching sound as though God-Almighty had ripped a tin roof loose with his bare hands…”

From there, Penn Warren goes into descriptions of what one passes on the ride, using that to show the changes over time of the society:

“There were pine forests here a long time ago but they are gone.  The bastards got in here and set up the mills and laid the narrow-gauge tracks and  knocked together the company commissaries and paid a dollar a day and folks swarmed out of the brush for the dollar and folks came from God knows where, riding in wagons with a chest of drawers and a bedstead canted together in the wagon bed, and five kids huddled down together and the old woman hunched on the wagon seat with a poke bonnet on her head and snuff on her gums and a young one hanging on her tit…Till, all of a sudden, there weren’t any more pine trees.  They stripped the mills.  The narrow-gauge tracks got covered with grass.  Folks tore down the commissaries for kindling wood.  There wasn’t any more dollar a day. The big boys were gone, with diamond rings on their fingers and broadcloth on their backs.  But a good many of the folks stayed right on, and watched the gullies eat deeper into the red clay.  And a good handful of those folks and their heirs and assigns stayed in Mason City.”

…”That was the way it was the last time I saw Mason City, nearly three years ago, back in the summer of 1936.”  The narrator then goes on to describe the different characters riding in the governor’s entourage.

After one has read the entire novel, the descriptions of going off the road or waking up in time to stay on it can be seen as foreshadowing Jack Burden’s journey throughout the story–and, on some level, Willie Stark’s as well.  Penn Warren’s description of changes in the landscape, of who came and made a profit on it, and who was left behind, tells us much about Willie Stark’s roots, the kind of man he is and, perhaps, what in his background made him that way.

The point:  setting rarely just describes scenery or sets a scene or mood to prepare us for the entrance of characters onto a stage.  At its best, it is integrally connected to the development of character and theme.  (Note:  this is not to say that it is done consciously, or in a calculated fashion, which could make such description feel forced.  But if the setting fits the story well, it may quite naturally supply these other connections.)

Uses of Setting–Example: Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath

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When it comes to long descriptions of setting, I tend to react like Alice:  what’s the use of a book without pictures or conversation?

That said, I’ve been examining chapter one of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which contains two and a half pages (seven long paragraphs) of description of the landscape and the weather before any humans come into it–and he keeps my interest throughout.

  How does he do it?

The language has a poetic beauty.  But that is not the key.  Rather, it is his use of verbs and adverbs to give weather, plants, and tools life–some examples (emphasis added):

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.  The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks…The sun flared down on the growing corn…The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try anymore…the wind cried and whimpered over the fallen corn.

And a little further in:

During a night the wind raced faster over the land, dug cunningly among the rootlets of the corn, and the corn fought the wind with its weakened leaves until the roots were freed by the prying wind and each stalk settled wearily sideways toward the earth and pointed the direction of the wind.

Here, the vagaries of weather and nature are not used merely to set a scene or mood but presented as characters that act.  Phrases like the wind “dug cunningly” or the stalks “settled wearily” suggest intention–a struggle between elements.  In presenting his Oklahoma setting this way, Steinbeck sets us up to feel the emotional connection of the tenant farmers to the land–for them, it is a living, but also something more than just land, or just a living–and therefore to understand the largeness of their catastrophe when the land does not produce and they are thrown off of it.

 

WRITING GENDER–HUMANITY SUPERSEDES

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Not long ago, I was listening to  Krista Tippet’s National Public Radio show, On Being.  Tippet was interviewing Joy Ladin, a transgender individual, about her journey between genders.  Ms. Ladin discussed her acute observations of the outward ways in which gender is expressed–of her need, before coming to terms with her inner self, to model the observed masculine and avoid what she thought was feminine and then, when she made the change from male to female, the need consciously to observe and model the outward ways  in which women move and express themselves. (As an example, she noted her observation that women tend to use their hands when speaking and men tend not to.)

I know very little about transgender issues (other than the threat to transgender people by those who hate).  I would never be so presumptuous as to write about the matters they must deal with emotionally, psychologically, physically, or societally, and I have not raised the Joy Ladin interview here in order to do so.  (I do recommend that people listen to the interview, linked above, to gain some insight.)  But, while it makes perfect sense that, in Ms. Ladin’s circumstances, she looked to outward cues to determine how to pass or function as one gender or the other in society, it troubles me that society creates such narrow strictures of what constitutes masculinity and femininity.  And, as I listened to Ms. Ladin speak, it reminded me of how these strictures tend to affect even the ways in which writers deal with characters in fiction.

Some writers express insecurity about writing from the point of view of the opposite sex.  I am reminded of one male author’s delighted amazement at my ability to embody male as well as female characters in my novel, Tinker’s Damn.

I am also reminded of a prospective agent’s reaction to another novel of mine in which the female protagonist was an IRA bombmaker trying to get a former cohort to observe a truce with the British.  That agent asked:  Does she ever wear a dress?  Does she ever think about marriage or wish she had children? –As if, in the middle of an encounter that will affect world events, the character should stop and ruminate on wearing dresses and having kids?  Indeed, one of the reasons I wrote the novel was to create a female counterpart to the male anti-heroes of the genre–someone of tough mind and integrity, and an ability to handle hairy situations.  Why, in an international thriller, should such a female protagonist, any more than her male counterparts, spend time considering  her personal domestic issues?

When, in irritation, I mentioned the agent’s questions to a writer-friend who happens to be a Lesbian, she replied, “well, you could just go all the way and make her a Lesbian.”  I’m sure this was an off-hand reply, meant either with a bit of humor or without giving great thought to it.  But, I have wondered since whether my friend realized that her statement was feeding into a stereotype of what it is to be gay or straight, as well as male or female.

There are all these exasperating myths out there of what it is to be manly or womanly:  men like to fight, women like to talk; women are the nurturers, men are the aggressors; men want to solve problems, women want someone to just listen; men are logical, women are intuitive.

I believe that our common humanity comes FIRST.  The rest are just trappings and societal constructions.  Fiction can reflect and reinforce these trappings and constructions, or it can be a tool to change them.  And not only by writing stories about characters fighting the strictures society places upon them, but by creating characters that, by their mere existence, defy those societal definitions.  (To paraphrase the film Field of Dreams, if you write them, they will come?)

I believe that human motivations are universal.  You can create any kind of man and any kind of woman and still have them be believable so long as you capture the essential humanity that will govern their response to their given circumstances.

Humanity comes before gender.