35 words for magic

I have no time, I'm tired, need to go to bed. . . This process I'm in. This editing, re-editing, is far deeper and more challenging than anything I've experienced, I mean ever. Writing novels isn't for sissies (even if I feel like one), and editing definitely isn't. I'm currently in my third round just of my OWN revisions, never mind the editorial ones I'll be working on all next week. And I'm not through yet.

So what has happened to my passionate, stormy, sometimes-troubled but always compelling relationship to Harold Lloyd?

I'm discovering something shocking. I should have realized this before. The book isn't even about Harold Lloyd. It's about Muriel Ashford, the woman who pursues him obsessively over several decades. Harold is just her projection, her idee fixe, and exists only in her eyes. So how did I get on to this idea that I'd written a Harold Lloyd novel?

I couldn't approach him any other way. I too was "enmagicked" by Harold, got swept up. It's easy to be: the man gave off excitement and fizzing, popping sparks of charm. There was a rude obnoxious edge to him when he was a young knockabout, and I am not sure it ever entirely went away.

In the novel, I have to keep surgically removing certain things that crop up with alarming frequency. One is the word "magic", which, my editor tells me, I used 35 times. Nearly every time I see it now, I chop it off like a stalk of celery, and either come up with a decent synonym or just chuck the sentence out.

Did writing about Harold render me cliche-ridden?  I wonder. I don't remember falling into those things before. But never before did I take the risk of stepping over the boundary into that smudgy midnight phosphorescence, a reality in which everything subtly jerks up and down and runs at the wrong speed.

The things I've been going through just lately have been extremely emotionally draining. I'm shedding yet another skin, but only because I have to. The urgency is coming from within. She not busy being born is busy drowning in her own bile. But there's nothing I can do about that. It's my destiny to peel back my own skin, to persevere.

So the covenant remains, the initial passion now shading into stamina, the need to continue.

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

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Amazon.com

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Chapters/Indigo.ca

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True confessions: is fiction really fiction?

So how much of "me" is in these stories? My three readers want to know (or not). Sometimes, *I* want to know, myself.

It's hard to unwind, unplait the strands of what actually happened (which is sometimes hard enough to decipher) and what was woven and knitted up to fill the gaps and holes. But it's never made up out of whole cloth. How can anyone write except through their own perceptions? These strenuous denials by authors who insist NONE of their real life ever spills over into their work are pure bullshit.

I think it's the rushing groundwater of emotion that always floods through, the rampaging cascades that dominate all our lives, whether we want to admit it or not. My work is emotionally driven, and sometimes I think the fiction I've presented here is nothing but "reaction", a character squirming and writhing and squirting squid ink in distress. (And that's another thing. What is a story? A story is something going wrong. If everything went right in a story it would be a crashing bore, and not even a story because nothing would happen. Is the same true in what we so chucklingly call "real life"?)

I've always had the impulse, even the need to "make story", but it's rare that I can keep my careening emotions and hairtrigger reactions out of it. The first novel I tried to write - it makes me wince now - I guess I thought it was publishable because I sent it to 65 publishers, and nobody would give me the time of day. Most didn't even read the manuscript but hated the outline so much that they immediately fired off a form rejection, with all the force of that cow being fired over the castle wall in Monty Python's Holy Grail. I finally understand why (I read about half a page of it recently and mentally barfed), but what scares me is that at the time I was SURE it was great and was going to get published and make me famous.

It was too much about me, probably, my wretched reactions, though the characters were either totally manufactured or heavily disguised. Each character narrated their part in first person, a technique which is as deadly as a ferret latching on to your jugular. So: failure, but other things came of it. A very wise writer once said to me, "When you're sending out your first novel, make sure you're writing your second one." This was advice that saved my life.

When I wrote Better than Life, I wasn't in it, not really, but so many of my ancestors were: they were given a twist of course, but the essence was there, all these half-cracked Irish people feuding and drinking and generally carrying on. And it worked. Took a while to sell it, but someone wanted it. What happened? Did it improve the novel's chances that I wasn't "in it"? 

I have had the experience of becoming so desperately in thrall to writing a novel that I felt like I was being dragged behind a wild horse. This was exhilarating and frightening, and though there were (I suppose) some good ideas in it, I reread it now and shudder a bit. What was happening to me then? I wasn't eating or sleeping much, and my thoughts sometimes became very peculiar. Strangely enough, I do not believe I am in that one at all, not even remotely. It's all about people living in the Downtown Eastside, and I've never been near those circumstances. Nor did I show up in the next one, The Glass Character, though I think I identify with the main character (who is not, after all, Harold Lloyd, but a woman named Muriel Ashford who is so obsessed with him that nowadays we might say she was stalking him). 

The emotions, the blissful agonies of obsession are things I know too, too well. I have lived over half my life in my imagination. I don't know why this is and it isn't enjoyable and it isn't even "creative", unless we're talking about Dylan Thomas' frightening view of creativity:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
drives my green age
That blasts the roots of trees
is my destroyer

Yes, and other things: reading about the wretched genius Oscar Levant (speaking of obsessions - we WERE speaking of obsessions, weren't we?), I came across a couple of quotes that I've filed away with the good ones: "What makes you, unmakes you," playwright George S. Kaufman stated, and Clifford Odets, victim of an Orson-Wellesian too-early success, added this thought: "Success is the jinni (genie) that kills."

Yes. Gives you three wishes, grants them, then utterly destroys you. Or is it this way? It's granting the wishes that kills you, like someone poor and illiterate winning 6-49. Or is it the wishing itself, the scrambling around for something "better" and never being satisfied with what you have? Is it the human agony of always wanting? Of consuming, of eating and buying and taking in and taking in, hungry, hungry, always hungry? Why can't we rest, why can't we just be? All this meditation crap is just playing at stillness. We'd have to stop breathing to really be still. 

So we are left with the maelstrom, the bucking and heaving, the scrambling and never having, as years pour through our hands and the ground dies under our feet.


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Biggest idiots I’ve ever seen: or, why do we write?

So late at night

I don’t have to listen to the thumping and tumbling of my soul

Why do we we write?

Where was I born? I remember a front porch, and not

Much else. Always there were books around

A whole room of them, a den lined with books,

Most of them in German, seemingly,

Goethe Werke, Schiller Werke

Whatever the fuck that meant

So I tried to make my way
 

 

One day in the buriedness of deeply sucking at

An author I raptly chose

As my favourite of the moment or the day,

I had this thought: you can MAKE these.

Somebody makes them, somebody DOES them.

They don’t come out of nowhere, someone

Sits down and does them.

I began to write. In shaky block capitals at first,

Always in pencil like they told me to in school,

In case I made an error and had to take a pink pearl eraser

And rub it out, leaving disgusting grey crumbs like dead insects

And when I had finished the story

Which was probably about horses

I thought it was good

And I began to write out copies.

 

 

Does this mean I was published? If publishing

Means distributing written material

To a number of different readers, then yeah,

Just don’t count the numbers

As later on,

Having written novel manuscripts, poetry manuscripts, thousands of

Book reviews and gazillions of newspaper pieces,

I did not wish to count the numbers,

As I did have an income

From writing, a steady one,

Just very small,

So I hoped no one would count it up

And see that a paper boy would make more,

Or a counter person at McDonald’s.

 

Oh but you’re in the arts, someone would say,

So why do you even think about making money?

Why do you sully yourself, what’s wrong with you,

Don’t you think you’re lowering yourself by writing for newspapers?

Especially when they line birdcages the next day.

Or start fires, I mean in the fireplace. Good for that.

I didn’t want to tell them about Dickens and guys like that, I don’t want to

Look them up, lots of guys and maybe girls too, who plied their trade

Whatever way they could.

If it's out there at all,

it becomes Game,

Public property that prompts some people

(who always wanted to write but never

had the guts to even get started)

to send you Criticisms

which are For Your Own Good,

and aren't all writers 

interested in "feedback" from readers,

isn't it always a good thing

an educational thing

a thing that will doubtless hugely improve them

if they're "real" writers?

So then I'm a fake writer,

and you can have your fucking gratuitous, sneakily sadistic criticism back

open your mouth and I will return it to you

(or some other orifice, I don't care)

because you don't know what the hell you are

talking about

anyway.
 

But there are bigger problems than this 

I hope I don't live to see it

Grammar is slowly eroding, not the schoolmarm type, not parsing sentences, I mean the matrix below and beneath vocabularly

That helps the whole mess make sense.

 

I wonder how it will be in 100 years, if I came back,

Which I will not,

Even if I could,

Or 300 or 500, if the planet hasn’t blown up by then or is

Taken over by cockroaches, who could probably

Spell better

Than the lamebrain mutants on Twitter.

I wonder if I’d know what they were saying at all,

With the speed with which they were saying it,

The fractured syntax,

Verb never matching subject EVER,

With no one noticing or caring, not even really educated people

Or will there BE such a thing

As everyone spews Orwellian Duckspeak.

 

Maybe just bouncing brain waves off each other.

I would not mind dispensing with words, I mean for-bloody-ever,

Because I honestly wonder

What good they have done me

Except to light in myself

A feverish desire to be “read”

Which has never come about,

Not even in this-here blog

Which probably has an offputting title

That I sincerely thought might ignite some sales.

 

At the same time,

I am unable to wag my ass

Or kneel down

The way I suppose I am meant to

To “get ahead”, to play the game.

There is a randomness about it

So that squealing ambitious pretenders

Say, look, look, there’s 100 Shades of Swill or what-you-call-it

Look, SHE made it work by writing three atrocious books

Full of appalling sadism against women

And these were ebooks

Did you know that

She didn’t even have to send a stamped self-addressed envelope

Or print out 900 pages and parcel them up and mail them

Or put them all on floppy disks.

 

But this is the business part

I suppose I must keep it purely away

From the mad addiction that keeps me sitting in front of this machine

I know I would write anyway because I am an idiot

I am STILL involved with this abusive person, this sadist

Who throws me a crumb once in a while

And kicks me in the face the rest of the time
 

 

And who needs Fifty Shades of Grey

When you serve a Master

Who is so completely

And utterly

Sociopathic

War is hell (but what is writing?)

WRITING IS HELL

If you're a freelance writer and aren't used to being ignored, neglected, and generally given short shrift, you must not have been in the business very long.

Poppy Z. Brite

Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer - and if so, why?

Bennett Cerf

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

Gustave Flaubert

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

Robert A. Heinlein

It's tougher than Himalayan yak jerky in january. 

Richard Krzemien

Writing is not a genteel profession. It's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty.

Rosemary Mahoney

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

Paul Valery

Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

Jessamyn West

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Oscar Wilde

If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do.

William Zinsser

Easy reading is damned hard writing.

Anonymous

Ahhhhhh, JESUS, not one of these blocks of quotes again, all about "the writer's life" and what sheer hell it is to write and about how you must shed your skin and ooze out quarts of blood and etc. etc.

It's not like that. Not like that at all. At least, not for me.

I love to write. Sitting down to work on this blog every morning is more fun than going to the beach. Hell, the circus! I don't worry about the quality of it at all. It's play.

No one wants to hear this, but I have to say, though I've had my share of struggles with the craft and was not really ready to try to publish a novel until well into my 40s, most of it has been pleasurable in a way that borders on the sexual.

I don't know why that is. Many of these quoters, not to mention gazillions of others, would conclude, "That's because you're a lousy writer." It took me a while to disagree with this. Actually, what it took was getting two novels published. It still breaks my heart that they ended up selling so poorly, but out of something like thirty reviews between the two of them, only one was negative.

My publisher at the time said, "It's a miracle, Margaret." I wanted to say: how 'bout twenty years of hard work? Yes, but hard work that still brought a smile to my face.

Writing is hell, supposedly - nearly everyone says so, or wants you to think so - but in my mind, at this stage, right now, what is really hell is trying to get it out there. I think I still have something valuable to share: in fact, I know it. Maybe I am being punished for this, although at the same time we're all supposed to be brimming over with self-esteem (see My Declaration of Self-Esteem, yesterday's post).

It's so weird: writers are supposed to be furtive (as if it's a secretive, even dirty activity). They're supposed to sweat blood: if there's an exhilarating flow to the work day-to-day that results in a work you are immensely proud of, you must be doing it wrong.

You've got to suffer. SUFFER. Big-time. If you don't, it can't be any goddamn good.

I suffer all right, but suffer in the process of trying to get my story into the hands of readers. Here, too, public perception is extremely odd. People react with a kind of embarrassment that you even want such a thing. Shouldn't you just be content to write it and put it away somewhere? What about the process; shouldn't it be its own reward?

I hate to go back to the old saw about the professional cellist or ballet dancer who has trained all her life, is at the very top of her field, and never gets to perform. Shouldn't she be OK with that? Shouldn't she just be content to play her Steinway in an empty hall?

Phhwaaaaaahhh!

Writers who want to share their stories are egotists, and if they actually want to make money, they are mercenaries. Never mind that they have bills to pay like everyone else.

It's odd, but I've noticed over the years/decades that the first thing people ask you when they find out you're a writer (and I never tell them any more because they always look so doubtful) is, "Have you published anything?" When I tell them, they invariably ask, "Did you self-publish?" (or "e-publish", that other free-floating form of the vanity press). When I tell them no, they look at me quizzically and say something like, "However did you manage to do that?"

It's kind of like my freelance work. I've written at least a thousand columns and reviews which have accumulated over 25 years or so. (No one believes this, either. But I wrote weekly pieces, which adds up to 50 or so a year. Do the math.) This is what I heard, all the time, but furtively, as if someone was opening their coat to show me dirty postcards:

"Do they pay you for that?" (in a doubtful tone).

When I say yes, they then ask:

"How much?" (Last time I checked, it was rude to ask someone who works at McDonalds how much they are paid. It just is not done.)

Then comes (incredulous):

(a) "That much?" (or, conversely):

(b) "Is that all?"

Anyway, this is turning into a load of complaining again. I don't complain about the writing process too much any more. Blogging has broken the ice jam and brought back the exhilaration I used to feel before everyone started trying to convince me that Writing Is Hell.

But I'm still on that road. It's called The Glass Character, folks. It's a novel. I think it's the best thing I've ever done. As far as I know, no one has even looked at it: my reviews mean nothing, I guess, because my previous two (PUBLISHED!!) novels didn't sell very well.

And yes, THIS is hell, and always will be. There are a gazillion quotes about how desirable failure is, about how we should all have as many failures as we can possibly manage because we learn so much from them and become Better People.

But in publishing, even one failure (or perceived shortcoming) can sink you forever.

Be warned.

Getting published is hell.

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