Mood, Music

I don’t really understand why the question is so common, but writers are repeatedly asked what (if any) music they listen to while writing. It comes up in the #NaNoWriMo Twitter conversations. It comes up in blog posts (like this one yesterday from Austin local and WordPress/NaNo stalwart Jackie Dana), in author interviews, and almost any occasion a writer fields questions.

Generally, I’m in the “sometimes listen to music before writing, but rarely while writing” camp. I spent most of my adult life studying music, and even the wallpaper Baroque and early classical performances that so many people use as writing or study music can distract me. (Or just annoy me. There’s a reason I specialized in 20th-century avant-garde music.) There are exceptions, though. When working on a scene from Ghosts of the Old City that I’ve since discarded, I put on György Ligeti’s Atmospheres. It’s dissonant atonal stuff, heavy on strings and built around texture. It was the right music for the scene in question.

And that’s my cue to pivot. I’ve spent the first part of Camp NaNoWriMo cleaning up my outline. (I’ve historically been a pantser, but the middle chunk of Ghosts was a horrible soup until I set aside the time to give it structure.) I was surprised to find myself mentally scoring the scenes to help pin down their content. My thoughts about the scenes’ moods were more musical than verbal.

I started grad school as a composer. I started as a composer because I dug music. And largely, I dug non-pop music because of film scores. I spent a lot of my undergraduate years composing pieces with explicit or implicit narratives. I also spent a lot of time thinking about music and text and how they worked differently for telling stories.

The upshot of this is that my ideas of textual structure are thoroughly tangled with my ideas of musical structure. When I think about pacing, I imagine a conductor’s gestures. I think about conflict in terms of crescendoes and cadences and shifts in orchestration. Back when I composed long pieces, I’d get one or two pieces of 11″x17″ paper and sketch out the shape of the piece. Sometimes I’d do that with a carefully-measured timeline across the top of the pages, others I’d just be roughing it out—“trumpet solo here,” “percussion cacophony,” “pianissimo strings…”. I’d draw shapes and small pictures on the page. I don’t do that with my stories, but my longhand outlines sometimes get close as visualization exercises.

Music plays out in time. In a live performance, at least, you can’t flip back to check if the theme you’re hearing now is related to the one you heard two minutes in. (You can do it with recordings, but unless you’re a music student, I think it’s pretty rare.) It’s the composer’s and performer’s job to make those connections clear, to hold the listener’s attention. You get one shot at structure, start to finish. You can use inherited forms, many of which are based on returning material and/or harmonic progressions, or you can make your own structure. Either way, the structure is experienced linearly.

Books don’t have that limitation. You can read them by flipping around. You can read the end first. You can go back and remind yourself what happened in the first chapter. Despite that difference in the medium, structure in fiction works an awful lot like musical structure. Even if you break up your plot, reveal it in out of sequence bits and pieces, it has to be compelling as it unfolds for the reader. You have to bring them with you through the story. The crescendoes have to get them excited. If you change keys for the bridge, you’d better have a good reason (and probably ought to consider bringing some of the bridge material back to prove its relevance).

A novel isn’t a symphony. The concepts and themes to balance are different. The techniques are different. For me, though, it seems more and more like the principles are the same. Whether you’re writing a story or a string quartet, you’re giving shape to chaos. You’re making the inchoate intelligible. Words or notes, you’re paving a path for your audience.

Long story short, there’s a lot of music involved with my writing even when my speakers aren’t making a sound.

Winning Bread, Losing Guilt

“What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?”
“Need of money, dear.”
—Dorothy Parker, in interview

I dreamed about zombies last night. It’s one of the few recurring themes in my dreams. I won’t bore you with the details. The zombies were mere environmental hazard; it was the people who were the danger. The atmosphere, though, was somewhere between “resigned” and “despair,” and it didn’t lift when the alarm went off at 5:30 this morning. That’s the bit I want to seize on, because that’s how postac felt last night. It’ll probably be different by tomorrow, mind.

The catalyst for this latest round of crankiness was notice from Texas Health and Human Services that my household has too much income to qualify for insurance assistance for the kids. The federal government had been certain that the state would cover the kids, and shifted them off our Affordable Care Act application because the state would (theoretically) take care of them. According to the Feds, we’re poor enough to need help. According to the state, we’re not. (Of course, according to the state we weren’t poor enough to need help back in September with income near zero because our 12- and 14-year old cars were worth too much money, so, uh, yeah. Bureaucracy.) Resolving this requires a lot of time on hold. I spent an hour and two minutes on hold with the Feds yesterday without talking to a real person and hung up on their terrible music because it was time to eat dinner.

Anyway. The health insurance stuff is annoying. It’s the kind of problem educated people are not “supposed” to have. I do have it better than many; we’re not reliant on food banks. We can pay our rent. We’re not sure where we’ll scrape together several hundred dollars more for health insurance for the kids every month, but that problem, too, will eventually get solved. Eventually.

While getting to eventually, the mini-crisis kicked up the dust of old anxieties. When we have money trouble, it feels like a personal failure. Societal gender norms say the man is “supposed” to be the bread winner. Never mind the real numbers on who earns more money in a household, especially since the bottom fell out of the economy. Growing up, my dad put in 60-80 hour weeks running a restaurant, but my mom’s consultancy and later full-time employment brought in more money. Intellectually, I understand the reality that the intersection of structural inequities in women’s pay, increases in women’s general level of education relative to men, and broad shifts in the labor market tangle things into an enormous mess that eradicates inherited norms. I understand the ways the numbers tell me that my situation isn’t atypical. That doesn’t change the way I feel about it. I feel like I should be bringing in enough money that the state and federal governments shouldn’t be arguing about whether I count as poor.

As a postac, feelings of financial inadequacy resonate with a chorus of guilt-strings. There’s a monetary level to it—my partner paid the lion’s share of our bills when I was in school. That’s how we avoided loans for living expenses. The money’s only one piece of it, though. She wanted to spend time with the kids when they were young. Because she had to work for our bills to get paid, that wasn’t feasible. I took care of the kids. I had my doctorate drag on and on through shifting tides of funding, research, and an interminable span of writing. For the first 10 years of our marriage, we lived where I was in school. Grad school dominated our lives for a decade. Then, after all the time stewing in that dream, I chucked it.

So yeah. That’s all my fault. My “terrible life choices” (as Marge Simpson would put it) ate up not just a decade of my life, but a decade of my partner’s and the majority of what my kids have known so far. When my personal demons are riled up, life seems as bleak as it did in that zombie dream: what terrible thing will I have to do next to survive? How have I doomed us all?

The problem with this guilt is the one central to so much postac misery: the comparisons that gnaw at me are to a hypothetical and improbable ideal. It’s true that I didn’t achieve the goals I had when I started grad school. I didn’t achieve the goals I had when I quit high school, either, but I don’t feel particularly guilty about that. (Granted, those didn’t involve other people.) Life changes. Grad school did not lead me to happiness. There’s no guarantee that not going on to do a doctorate would have led me to happiness either. I really disliked living in northwest Ohio. Maybe I’d be blogging now about how much I hate flat former swamps and not chasing my ambitious mid-20s dreams.

“Forgiving yourself” starts to sound way too hokey self-helpish for cynical ol’ me, but I think it’s a necessary step in the process. This isn’t just a question of narrative wreckage. This is about blaming ourselves, and stopping blaming ourselves. It’s wasted energy. When we get sucked into guilt, we’re letting our past decisions dominate our present and intrude on our future. The tricky bit is in learning from our mistakes without letting them poison our emotional landscape. (The other tricky bit might be coffee, which is often good for lifting one out of morning bleakness.) My own personal demons don’t stay riled up about grad school like they used to. I’m working on keeping my eyes forward.

They’ll never see a right way forward, only better and worse ways. Regardless, I’m pretty sure that “supposed to” is one of the worst benchmarks with which to gauge those paths.

NaNoWriMo, Camp Style

November was National Novel Writing Month. I was a bit skeptical going in, as I wrote before the month began. I also “won” NaNo—I got my 50,000 words despite presenting at a conference and missing the first weekend. I met some fun people in the Austin area. As the month wound to a close, we were abuzz with the desire to start writing groups and workshop the manuscripts we’d piled up (some more neatly than others). It faded relatively quickly amidst the clamor of the holidays and what passes for winter here in Texas.

Earlier this month, the Austin NaNo Facebook group slowly rumbled back to life. Nanowrimo.org also sponsors “Camp NaNoWriMo,” a more open-ended pair of virtual camps in April and June. (This is exactly what I needed back when my Novembers were full of academics, incidentally.) A good chunk of the Austinite NaNo crowd was signing up. Some of us are still working on our NaNo projects: editing, adding the missing bits, or otherwise trying to turn our word piles into entities with literary architecture.

I signed up. I want to finish.

When I committed to the “proper” NaNoWriMo, post-relocation life was still unsettled. It had been about three months since the move. My partner was only just starting a new job. I was still applying for writing jobs willy-nilly and substitute teaching on occasion, but with my partner working, I went back to being the stay-at-home parent. (Substitute teaching did not pay enough to justify paying for daycare for our pre-K daughter.) That’s changed somewhat. My sister-in-law watches the kids after school when I’m working…and I’m working a steady 40 hours each week at my long-term substitute gig for most of April. This weekend I even had to take some time to do grading and a dash of course prep. I will have considerably less energy and rather less time to throw at my novel than I did in November.

That’s really why I’m doing it—because I don’t have the time. I want a draft. Correction: I want a finished manuscript. I can’t have that without a draft. I can’t complete a draft without doing the writing. NaNo’s a good incentive for that: I take lizard-brain pleasure in watching a bar graph (or in this case, a bullseye graphic) improve. I also get something out of the mild competitiveness of the wordcount race. These nudges will, I hope, be enough to help me cram writing back into my day.

Oh, there’s writing in my day. Blog posts. Still a bit of online game writing (though I’ve dialed that back). I’ve been pecking at my novel intermittently. What has been lacking is sustained pressure. I wrote last week that I’m afraid of quitting my novel, that it would be easy to leave it where it’s at. That’s true. The fear of quitting is also a much more familiar one: the fear of failure. I’m okay with being a “failed” academic, mostly because I happily slap those quotes on it. Being a failed novelist wouldn’t come with the scare quotes. I am in this for serious.

 Not everybody who does NaNo is. I think that’s where many of the anti-NaNoWriMo posts miss the point. Many people do this for fun, and only for fun. They do it because they like hanging out with other writers, virtually or physically. They do it because they enjoy the process. If they crash and burn in November, it’s no skin off their nose. If they write 70,000 words that nobody else will ever read, that’s okay with them. We do NaNo because we love to write.

This seems to be even truer of Camp NaNoWriMo. Its format is open-ended, allowing users to set their targets and describe their projects any way they want. In my virtual cabin, I’ve got two people who are enthusiastically writing fanfic (Harry Potter and Dr. Who, if you’re keeping track). Some people are writing histories. Others are writing poetry. Camp NaNo is an excuse to revisit November’s camaraderie for a while, to borrow a bit of its structure and manic energy without being swamped by it. Or it’s a chance to dip a toe in those waters before diving in in the autumn. The key is this: we bring in the goals we want.

To my fellow campers and fellow writers: best of luck achieving them.

Quitting Not Quitting

“Winners never quit and quitters never win.” —Vince Lombardi

This gentleman has little nice to say about quitters.

This gentleman had nothing nice to say about quitters.

A caveat: What follows is a messier intersection of thoughts on writing and thoughts on postac than I usually feature here. Since making a tacit commitment to be more upfront with my thoughts on #postac a few weeks ago, my posts have generally stuck with writing or postac. This one is both. It might be a miraculous chocolate plus peanut butter moment. It might just be as opaque as the title.

Technically, I didn’t quit. Sometimes I remind myself of that as a bit of self-boosterism: I finished my damn doctorate. I earned that title. Sometimes it’s self-castigation: why didn’t I just quit when I finished my coursework and school stopped being fun? I’d be several years farther down the road to whatever “what’s next” I’m currently fumbling toward. But I didn’t quit. I finished.

I’ve been a quitter twice. In high school, I quit the track team for a few weeks my junior year of high school. Abruptly. I was freaking out about my solo for district solo and ensemble and generally being an overstressed, depressed teenager. (I went back before the season was done after profuse apologies to the coaches.) The second time was a similar whirlpool of overcommitment and depression, and came my freshman year of college. After a ridiculously easy fall semester, spring semester turned out to be, well, college. I was still trying to treat it like high school, where I’d done everything. By February, I had simply run out of time and energy. I quit the school weekly and scaled back my participation in several of the organizations I was part of. That time, I didn’t go back. I had been doing too much. Quitting was the right call.

Even a year out from my decision, I’m not sure whether my departure from the Academy counts as quitting. In some ways, it feels like I just never properly started. I spent one year seriously pursuing the job market. When the time came to fish or cut bait with the secondary market in the spring, I cut bait. That doesn’t negate the adjunct jobs I had while ABD, but the decision to leave is still one I’ll only ever be 95% sure about. Maybe the secondary market would have been the kind of stepping stone it’s marketed as…but that’s a skinny maybe.

I’m pretty sure imaginary Vince Lombardi would call it quitting. It was my dream or a close facsimile thereof, and I stopped chasing it. I stopped chasing it because I woke up, but quitting for a good reason is still quitting.

Quitting has been on my mind because I’m a little terrified of doing it again. I have two thirds of a novel written. I’m a few pieces of plot from being able to write the rest of it. This is an easy place to quit, a point where rationalizations come quickly. I hit a similar point with my dissertation. I hit it with just about every academic paper I ever wrote: “I know how it goes. I could finish it if I want to.”

That “if” works better as the German “wenn,” which has a bit of “if” and a bit of “whenever.” I could finish whenever I wanted to, you know, if I wanted to, and if I had the time. It would be automatic. With academic papers, I resented having to actually write out the remaining parts once I had figured out the line of the argument and structure of the paper. With my dissertation, I felt like most of the work had been done and the only reason there was still stuff left to do was that I’d picked a project that was too big. In both cases, the problem is that the exciting bit is done. What’s left is mostly work. I’d have the feeling that I had proven to myself that I could do what I set out to do and the rest was just window dressing. Window dressing is trivial. Something you take care of “whenever.” If you want to. Like washing the last few dishes.

And this “whenever” is where I am at with my novel, only I have not been able to make the time lately. Part of that is the stickiness of the last two plot bits. More relates to a string of work and family obligations. I’m working five days a week. With responsibility for lesson plans and assessments, I use my planning/conference period for…work. There was a wedding. There was the Baha’i month of fasting. The “whenever” has seemed much more like “if.”

Combine that with the pseudo-accomplishment of being “mostly” done, and quitting starts to look easy. A novel isn’t like an academic paper, either. I don’t get to just hand it off and stop thinking about it. It will need the unflinching eye of an editor. It will need revision. It will need, eventually, publishing and promotion. No matter how mostly done I am, that is still work, and work fraught with chances for rejection. I like my draft a lot. There are problems with it, some of which I recognize. There will be others that I don’t and will happily fix. There will be still others, though, that are in the troublesome category of things-I-think-are-cool-and-how-could-you-possibly-call-that-a-problem.

When I hit this point with my dissertation, I had already turned the corner from “make it awesome” to “get the committee to sign.” (That was a kind of quitting in itself, but I haven’t met many PhDs who haven’t made that capitulation at some point late in the dissertating process.) I also had a quirk of scheduling that gave me the two months before my defense “off,” which allowed me to focus on loose ends.

My hope is that I don’t get similar time off this go-round. There’s no substitute teaching work in the summer, but I expect to have at least a medium-term plan in operation by then. I’d rather have income than open-ended time to write. (Never mind that I’d rather have income from writing, and never mind that the summer will involve full time parenting if I’m not working.) What I am working on instead is carving out the time around my other obligations, trying to push Ghosts of the Old City toward completion.

Quitting would be easy. If nothing else, though, graduate school proved that I’m bad at quitting…or maybe just bad at easy.

Longterm Ersatz

One decision after another. That’s how it goes.

I’ve just taken a (small) step up in the world of substitute teaching. I have a “long-term” job—it runs most of a month. Substitute teaching is a double ersatz: I’m filling in for the teacher, and the job is filling in for…a “real” job. The long term gig is another step along the way, not a destination. Still, it’s a step that comes with some minor perks. Among them:

  • I know where I will be working when I get up in the morning. For a while, I don’t have to refresh the district’s online substitute management page every few minutes starting at 5:15 a.m.
  • I’m teaching at a school that’s on my side of town. It’s still a 25-minute drive in traffic, but it’s short enough that traffic won’t make it too variable unless there are wrecks.
  • I do not have to learn a whole new set of students’ names every day.
  • I get a small bump in pay.

There are other things I appreciate more.

First, and most importantly, I actually get to teach. One of my biggest frustrations with substitute teaching is that my responsibilities are usually limited to handing out worksheets, showing films, or giving tests. Effectively, I’m a babysitter at the “good” schools and a corrections officer at the “bad” schools. (When learning happens at the rougher schools, though, it is incredibly satisfying.) As an aspiring professor, I was in it for the teaching. I like research, but that’s mostly because I like learning. Discovering unknown material and concocting novel theories are cool, but I’m nearly as happy in a quality seminar. Adjuncting was often awful, but there were good moments in the classroom. I still have vivid memories of straining to sing the tenor line in a shape-note unit for non-majors. I like teaching. With the long-term appointment, I get to do that. I have some control over lesson plans. I get to deliver content and respond dynamically to student needs. (And apparently choke on a few buzzwords.)

Second, and related, this becomes a trial run for moving towards certification and full-time secondary teaching. This is closer to doing the job than I usually get, right down to adjusting my teaching plans and schedule for standardized testing. It’s not a perfect simulation: it’s unlikely that I’ll have to deal much with parents, for example. Nobody will be grading me on the grades the students receive on those standardized tests. I have some responsibility for grading, but I’m working within the permanent teacher’s architecture. Same for lesson plans (though he’s encouraged me to adapt the plans he’s left as I see fit). The school I’m at is a “good” one—mildly suburban, mostly middle-income or better. It’s an International Baccalaureate middle school. Basically, it’s a cushy gig that probably wouldn’t resemble my first few years of being a teacher.

If day-to-day subbing is the adjunct situation writ miniature, the long-term sub is more like a visiting assistant position. It’s not precarious, but it’s a long way from stable. At the end of the month, I’ll be back to the grind (or maybe employed outside the school district). Maybe I’ll have made enough of a mark at this school to go on its preferred list for the rest of the year. Who knows? It’s a step, though.

Reconstructing Narrative

My previous post was about a book called Story Engineering. This one is about a more immediate kind of story-crafting, the one that retrieves what I want to keep from the narrative wreckage of my aborted academic career and combines it with my current ambitions to make something compelling. I’m the main audience for that story, but it’s also something that will be useful every time I explain to others (including potential employers) why I took my PhD out the tower’s door.

The seeds for this post came from PastProf’s post “Out of the Wreckage, A New Narrative,” which was in turn inspired by Chris Humphrey’s post about storytelling your way through a transition. Both draw on storyteller Geoff Mead’s concept of “narrative wreckage:” the “point in our lives when we realize that the familiar stories we tell about ourselves don’t make sense anymore.” It is an incredibly apt description of what becoming a post-ac has meant for me. I decided as an undergrad to be a professor. I went to school to become a professor. I worked (with marginal success) to fit myself into the mold of a professor. And then…I turned out not to be a professor. That was mind-numbingly hard.

The part of my new narrative about leaving is pretty well-established. It’s even well-rehearsed at this point. I left because I could not stomach the thought of either being separated from my family or moving them around every year or three chasing visiting assistant positions. I left because the pay was horrible, the workload maddening, and the authority minimal (it is really no fun spending hours developing sample syllabi and then taking an adjunct job and being handed the parent institution’s syllabus two days before you start). If I’m only going to be making $20,000/year, I’d rather do it at 40 hours/week than 75. We relocated to be closer to my partner’s family. Now I’m substitute teaching while working towards something more stable and hopefully more lucrative. I’m out.

It’s the next part that’s hard. What, really, comes next? I’m a writer, but I’ve sort of always been a writer. I had naive expectations that my writing skills would get me a job relatively easily. It turns out that most job openings for writers are aimed at recent college grads or people with at least three years of experience in the specialized field (technical, copy, web, etc.). I remember half-jokingly telling my mom, back when I was settling on doing graduate school in music rather than English, that I’d always have writing to fall back on. Is that my story? That I’m falling back on writing? Aren’t fall-back options supposed to be dependable?

Is the next step teaching? It was something I looked into immediately after the move. Texas has a fairly streamlined alternative certification process that would have had me certified and teaching somewhere within about a year and a half for very little out of pocket. I could not, at the time, stomach the idea of going back to school. It didn’t matter that it would only be some on-line work, a few weekends, and one or two week-long intensives followed by a paid probationary internship. It was more school, and I had had enough of that. My denial is wearing thin these days, though. Even as a sub, I like being in the classroom…at least when I get to teach rather than hand out worksheets or just keep the students “under control.” The problems are in the rest of it: I know how hard teachers work. I know how rules and standards become indiscriminate administrative bludgeons. I know this because I have these conversations with friends who are teachers.

What about my other skills? I’ve done a lot of miscellaneous jobs involving design, document production, and websites. Code doesn’t freak me out. Do I turn myself into a technologist of some sort to take advantage of Austin’s burgeoning tech industry? Could I cobble together a worthy collection of third-party certifications to get my foot in the door at potential employers? Probably. After a year of unemployment, the notion of a stable corporate 40+ has more appeal than it ever has. Monotony might look good on me. At least for a few years while I build an employment history whose last seven years are not occupied completely by teaching assistantships and adjunct positions.

Any of those paths forward require more than just the work. They all require me to tell different stories about myself. More importantly, they all require me to buy into those stories enough that I can make them compelling to others. Boil it down, and there is this: I have to choose. As many stark and depressing moments as the last year has had, this is still a moment of privilege: I get to choose. When I started subbing back in September, that wasn’t a choice. My partner hadn’t found a job yet and we needed income. Period. Now, we can at least keep our rent paid and food in the refrigerator. If we want more than that, though, I can’t keep hanging out in the wreckage of my academic narrative. I have to rebuild.

Inertia and insecurity make that much tougher to do than to say. The household isn’t hemorrhaging savings anymore. There’s no acute crisis to goad me. There’s also the small fact that the last time I set a major goal and chased it, I ended up…here, in the wreckage. Impostor syndrome doesn’t really go away when you get out. It compounds with actual failures (regardless of one’s own culpability in those failures) to make you more skittish. “I wasn’t good enough to get a job at the thing I spent years training for. How am I going to just wing it?” For now, I’m going to have to fake it until I make it, just like I did in my first days in front of classes. Just as it did then, the process will certainly involve making the occasional cringe-worthy mistake.

Some wisdom by analogy from one of my favorite storytellers, Neil Gaiman: “This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it is done. It’s that easy, and that hard.” Building a postac narrative has to work the same way: one decision at a time, one after another, until you’ve reconstructed a story you can live in. Without that next decision, you’re (I’m) stuck in the wreckage.

Bones?

Larry Brooks: Story Engineering

“You’re too cocky.”

Cocky? I said, “Cocky?”

“Yeah. You have all these theories, and that’s fine, and you’re probably right more than you’re wrong. But once you’ve answered something, you stop looking.”

“I don’t understand.”

He sighed. “All right, you know how we say you have to keep developing as an artist? …If you’re going to be a theorist as well, you have to keep developing that way, too. You can’t be content with easy answers any more than you can be content with paintings that are easy to do. Does that make sense?”

I said, “I guess so. But, shit, man. Where am I wrong?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I’m not trying to be a theorist. Besides, I agree with all your theories.”

—Steven Brust, The Sun, The Moon, and the Stars

That’s a long quote, but it’s as close as I can get to a thumbnail of my review of Larry Brooks’ Story Engineering. The man is sold on his theories, which makes him occasionally insufferable no matter how much sympathy I have for his titular concept. Story Engineering is a good place to start if you’re a writer lost in the process of building your cool ideas (whether concepts, characters, or scenes) into a complete novel. Once you get past the bluster, Brooks’ advice is surprisingly practical.

The bluster, though…ye gods. Unless you’re a glutton for punishment, skip the first three chapters. They are 40% extended analogies meant to sell you on the necessity of story engineering. The rest is mostly beating up on Brooks’ favorite target: the strawman pantser. (If you’re not familiar with the term, writers often separate themselves into two camps: plotters and pantsers. The plotters plan every detail of their stories before they begin writing. The pantsers just sit down and write whatever comes.) Brooks repeatedly rails against an imaginary, stereotypical pantser who refuses to outline, refuses to plan, refuses to think beyond the current location of their cursor. This straw man has an ingrained resistance to anything that might make their story “mechanical,” especially any idea that story structures and elements might build on recognizable formulae.

Given that Brooks’ Story Engineering is more or less a formula for producing a novel, one can see how his straw man pantser might not buy in. Brooks would immediately retort that Story Engineering is more about principles than formulae, and he’d be right. That doesn’t stop him from tearing down this straw pantser at every turn.

I get it, though. This book grew out of presentations he’s given and work he’s done with consulting clients. When you’re in a room full of people, you have to punch up your rhetoric. (This is why, incidentally, many academic papers fall flat in a conference setting. Their authors don’t adjust their language for spoken delivery.) When you’re trying to help somebody who refuses to see the flaws in their work, you push and plead and coax and hope they will give. That, I think, is what pushes Brooks to oversell his argument so often. He goes so far as to declare that anybody who successfully sells a story is doing things his way, even if they don’t realize it.

So…what is Brooks’ way? In Story Engineering, Brooks outlines six core competencies. Two of these we usually chalk up to talent, though they’re also a product of long practice: scene execution and writing voice. The other four (the ones he starts with) are concept, character, theme, and story structure. He’s at his best in these sections, approaching writing as a craft rather than as his series of pre- and proscriptions about planning. There is nothing revolutionary in his concepts. Brooks explains them clearly (between bouts of pantser-baiting) and, even better, provides series of questions to help writers develop their own ideas.

Story structure gets the most attention. Although, again, there’s nothing revolutionary here, Brooks draws on lessons from screenwriting and studies of bestsellers (particularly The DaVinci Code) to lucidly explain the foundational elements and shape of a plot. If you’re familiar with Campbell’s Hero’s Journey or similar explanations of story archetypes, there is nothing here to shock you. Brooks, though, approaches the form from a practical standpoint. He doesn’t just tell you which moment comes when, but offers suggestions on how to write those moments. Brooks’ pragmatism is refreshing.

If your collection of writing books is heavy on the “just sit down and write your way forward,” Story Engineering may be a useful counterbalance. If you’ve already immersed yourself in explanations of story structure and are a habitual planner, there might not be as much here for you. As a writer closer to the pantser end of the spectrum, I found much to use in Story Engineering…when I wasn’t grimacing at Brooks’ extended metaphors and posturing.

Larry Brooks’  Storyfix.com offers regular advice about writing and publishing novels. (It is also the virtual storefront for his writing consultancy.) Story Engineering (ISBN 978-1582979984) is available in print and digital editions from Amazon.

The Tangled Webs We Leave: Identity and #Postac

One of my first posts here at Walking Ledges was about the emotional toll of quitting the Academy. That post was responsible for a significant (and wholly unexpected) spike in traffic when it was featured on Minnesota Public Radio’s higher education blog. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. My blog wasn’t even a month old, and it was supposed to be about writing. “Of Carrots…” was an attempt to explain where I’d been rather than where I was. I wrote it mostly for myself, never intending to make it the “face” of my blog. (I was also annoyed that MPR excerpted the most anguished part of the post while ignoring the hopeful notes that came later.)

The thing is, my most popular posts have been, at least tangentially, about life as a post-academic. Even the post that won me my Freshly Pressed badge compared NaNoWriMo to doing a dissertation. More recently, I’ve gotten traffic on posts about the awkward need to go back to school even with a PhD in hand and about the enduring pull (suck?) of university teaching. That’s not what Walking Ledges is “supposed” to be about. Here, I’m not just another post-ac having a rough go of it. I’m a writer.

Except, you know, I’m also just another post-ac having a rough go of it.

That’s part of who I am right now, a story that’s as worth telling as that of my fictional characters running through my made-up city constructed of magic letters. Whether there’s a privilege divide among post-acs or not, there’s clear interest in the stories of making do. We fumble around on our job hunts and wrestle with our expectations. Sometimes we stare listlessly at the walls, others we apply frantically for “reach” jobs and hope that the odds will somehow favor us (just like we did when we were inside!).

So much of being a post-ac hinges on identity. Graduate school is a hermetic world of codes and rituals. Leather elbow pads and pipe-smoking in the faculty lounge might be bygones, but that doesn’t mean that we no longer have ideas about what “professorial” means. Exploitative or not, grad school is an apprenticeship. It is as much turning you into something as training you to do something.

That doesn’t go away…or it hasn’t gone away for me. I haven’t thought of myself as an academic for the better part of a year (even though I presented a paper at AMS back in November). Despite that, I still think about academia more often than I’d like. I tell stories about my substitute teaching in much the same way people complain about traffic or the weather. They’re ephemeral. I’ve only recently incorporated being a writer into my dinner party small talk. Nothing has really eclipsed post-ac as the superstructure of my identity.

Mostly, that’s okay. My recent dive back into the #postac blogosphere has been a reminder of just how messy these transitions are. There are things to be angry about. There are things to be depressed about. There are things to be confused about. The nice bit about being outside? We can dial back our self-censorship about that stuff.  We do not have to maintain our immaculate professional images.

In other words, we can let our identities be a little wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey. Or, more accurately, we can acknowledge that they already are. I’m a writer. I’m a post-ac. I am, at the moment, a substitute teacher spending spring break with his kids. We love the metaphor of the caterpillar turning into the butterfly, but only entomologists talk about the gooey biology that goes on inside the chrysalis. (I have a feeling I might end up more moth than butterfly.) Getting out of academia is gooey. It is “messy” in ways more personal than the situations those of us in humanities threw that word at. Some people might manage a clean break with their academic identity. I haven’t. Maybe you haven’t either.

You’re welcome here regardless.

The Push-Pull of the Un(der)-Employed Ph.D.

Today, for the first time ever, I actually typed, “I hate my Ph.D.” The catalyst, as you might guess, was job search related. The thing is, that came not too long after other thoughts about Ph.D.s staying inside because of the nominal prestige of teaching at a university. (And daydreams about hunting some adjunct jobs myself.) How many of us does that prestige hold in? How satisfying is it to tell somebody we teach college students? How awkward is it do that as a preface to explaining how little money we make?

I have mentioned in passing the occasional conversations I have at the schools where I work, the ones that feature something along the lines of “you have a Ph.D. and you’re subbing?” My explanation is pretty well-practiced these days: as marginal as the pay is for substitute teaching, it’s still better than I’m likely to make adjuncting; also, I work 35-40 hours each week instead of 60-80. I mention that I continue to look for something better and more stable. Teachers tend to be pretty cool people, and nobody has pushed me back on that explanation.

In some ways, they don’t have to, because I have plenty of moments myself where I think “I have a Ph.D. and I’m subbing?” These happen most often when I am trying to cajole a defiant 7th-grader into giving me the paper dart he’s hiding behind his back, or pretending not to hear the students in the back corner talking about their boyfriends in Spanish while I try and teach the handful of people in the room receptive to learning from a sub. I ask myself—only rhetorically, since I know the answer already—how I got to where  am.


(Especially at 0:10)

Entitlement is really hard to let go. We get to grad school because we’re smart (if not always wise). We get there because we believe in education. We stay there because we believe that being smart and getting an education will get us where we want to be…whether or not that destination is practical. It is galling to think that all the years I spent in school are not enough to get me a middle-class job, that they are in fact enough to keep me out of many of those jobs. No matter how much I agree with William Goldings’s line that “Life isn’t fair, it’s just fairer than death, that’s all,” it’s a hard thing to internalize. (Related: I think graduate schools should have the Dread Pirate Roberts’ “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” emblazoned somewhere prominent. Maybe on their application paperwork.) I want what I have earned to mean something, even as I try to get beyond the letters after my name.

There’s not an easy answer for this push-pull. I’m proud I finished my doctorate, no matter how often I wish I’d quit when they first cut my funding. I am proud that my education is diverse and deep enough that I can comfortably cover any secondary class save for upper level hard sciences. I might, these days, prefer somebody to hand me a fiction contract, but that doesn’t mean I’d turn down a stable job at a SLAC if somebody offered.

Ultimately, we deserve what we make of what we have. These days I’m trying for wisdom and detachment, and trying occasionally to make Good Art.

Author Love Letter: Neil Gaiman

Dear Neil,

You’re the first of these authors I feel comfortable addressing by first name. Is that weird? I think it’s because you’re a geek superhero. Anyway. They say opposites attract, but the first time we met, it was like looking into a mirror. Neverwhere was full of sentences written precisely as I’d have written them myself. I thought it was a little creepy, and I was worried that people might think I was aping your style if I ever got any of my own work out into the world. I didn’t really need to worry about that, because I didn’t stay 19 and the more I wrote the more things felt like me. Neverwhere was cool, though. Really cool.

I kept hanging out with you, a bit at a time. I heard you on the radio. I was blown away by American Gods. You manage to touch so many stories with that one, manage to make a story about stories without slipping into self-indulgent metafiction. One of the things I love about spending time with you is that it’s not just spending time with you. You fill your stories with so many interesting characters—and not the euphemistic “interesting” of your adopted Upper Midwest. American Gods is chock full of characters I wouldn’t have minded following after Shadow walked out of their lives. You put your cipher in the central position in the story, and give us just enough of his personality to hold everything together. That’s well into “easier said than done” territory.

Anansi Boys…that one is good, too. It’s light without being fluffy. You also—again—fill the story with interesting characters, but this time you set them around a thoroughly individual protagonist. It’s like in the Odyssey: Fat Charlie proclaims himself and is proclaimed by his world a “nobody.” He might not be a Homeric hero, but Charlie’s cathartic assertion of somebody-ness is awesome (in the undiluted sense of the word). Anansi Boys a great example of how easy you make storytelling look. It’s only when I start to dig in that I see the elegant lines are strings of exquisitely balanced asymmetric nuggets of plot and character.

If Shadow is a cipher, and Fat Charlie is a nobody growing into a somebody, The Sandman’s Dream is a teflon mirror. Reflections slide off him. Utterly himself, Morpheus embodies his estate in ways that seem as incredibly obvious as they are original. Good teachers and good storytellers tell us what we knew all along. That’s what reading your work is like for me.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a brilliant little gem of a book. It devoured me for an afternoon with its mix of wonder and confusion. You capture the bravery of a child (which is half not knowing to be afraid) right along with the muddle of middle age in your bracketing scenes. It’s a gorgeous work that moved me well beyond its slim proportions.

All that, and you’re a Geek Superhero. A Geek Superhero who manages his public life with surprising aplomb and humility. (Batman would not give a talk explaining that you need to get at least two-thirds of the “excellent-timely-nice” triad to get ahead in making Good Art.)

So, um. Thanks. For all of it.

Yours,

J.D.J.

You can start just about anywhere with Mr. Gaiman’s work. His children’s books are pretty wonderful. The Ocean at the End of the Lane, his latest work for grown-ups, might also be his best. American Gods is as close as Gaiman comes to epic in the usual sense; it features a particularly cool Odin. If you have disposable income and for some reason haven’t read Sandman, Vertigo has recently published leather-bound omnibuses that will get you all of the books much more easily than haunting used bookstores hoping somebody has given up their treasured trades.