#7 of The Top 10 Things I Learned This Semester: (Invitation to a Re-shredding)

Jun 192010
 

#7: Letting Go

In my packet-three letter, Doug wrote the following:  “But as a parting shot, I want to re-emphasize the need for you to stop PLANNING quite so much…I’d be even more pleased if I felt you letting go of the reins a little bit, surprising yourself, not seeing the ending before you get there.”

Doug’s words remind me of my golf game.  I played a fair amount of bad golf in my younger days.  I had a long-standing, but modest goal: to break 80 for eighteen holes.  It was a marker for me, a personal goal that lent some credibility to all the hours spent on the links.  Every time I would come close to that score, I’d screw it up.  I shot 82 a bunch of times, but my scorecard was littered with bogies (or worse) on the final four holes.  The better my opening holes were played, the worse my finishing holes.  A demon lived in my head, a demon defying me to break 80.  The closer I got to that score, the louder that demon shrieked.

A few years ago, my wife bought me golf lessons at the course near our house.  My golf instructor, Paul,  recognized right away that I was a head case.  I told him that my goal was to shoot in the 70’s.

Paul asked me a simple question. “What’s the enemy in golf?” he said.

“My putter?” I said.

“The enemy in golf is par,” he said.

Paul told me that the problem was how I approached the game.  Every time I hit a bad shot, it messed with my thoughts because I was doing math, measuring how a few bad shots would kill the chance of breaking 80.  He said to stop counting my score and to start counting my pars.  He said if I focused on par, and not on scores, I would start playing better and that I would break 80 before the summer was over.

I played miserably for weeks and was convinced that my wife wasted her money.  Right before summer ended, I went to the course and played a round by myself.  I enjoyed playing alone.  There was a calm, peaceful feeling being on the course with no one around.  And I began to play well that day, too.  I was striping the ball and putting purely, confidently.  The holes hummed by and I was happily counting my pars.  I racked up fourteen pars before I arrived at the 17th tee box.

The 17th hole was a short, downhill par 3 with a green surrounded by water.  Until I stood on that tee, I had not calculated my score; I had only been counting my pars.  Sure enough, I did some quick math and a knot formed in my stomach.  If I finished with two pars, I would break 80.

The demon woke from his nap and began to laugh.  My legs stiffened, my palms began to sweat.  I switched clubs twice, and checked the calm breeze three times.  I took my stance, a practice swing, addressed the ball and swung.

Now how does any of this relate to writing and Doug’s advice?  That golf demon has a twin brother, and every time I sit down to write, that demonic twin visits. He loves to mock me, to point out how poorly I’m writing, to remind me of better writers, to tell me that I’ll never make it, I’ll never publish.

I fight back by studying the craft.  I’m a craft book addict.  My previous advisor actually told me to knock it off for a while.  She said all the craft book reading was getting in the way of my writing, and she was right.  But I was convinced that the key to unlock my writing potential (and quieting the demon) existed inside those books, and that some piece of the puzzle would fall into place if I just read the right one.  The problem with all this advice, of course, is that it paralyzes at the point of putting pen to paper.  The demon reads the craft books too, sitting over my shoulder, and he loves to expose every flaw in every sentence.  He mocks my attempts to write better, to experiment, to finish a story.

I hit the worst shot of the day on the 17th tee.  I popped up a seven iron and watched it soar toward the water.  The demon raised his arms in victory.  But something happened.  Rather than splashing in the water, the ball bounced on a railroad tie at the edge of the green.  It ricocheted straight up in the air and hovered a moment, out over the water, then touched down on the green.  The demon let out a roar and disappeared in a puff of smoke.  I two putted for par.  On the 18th tee, I smashed a drive straight down the fairway and hit a long three wood to the edge of the next green.  I birdied the hole and shot a 78.

I learned two important things that day: The first was that by giving my demon purchase, by counting my score on the 17th tee, the tension shot straight up.  It ruined my shot.  Only luck saved me.  But the more important lesson happened on the 18th hole.  I felt no tension on 18.  The pressure should have been even greater, because any number of bad shots would have ruined my chances to break 80, but the tension was simply gone.  How I can explain this?  The answer is simple: the previous hole’s meltdown had caused me to stop thinking.  I had let go.

In writing, like in golf, there are so many technical aspects that require study and mastery.  But anyone who’s ever tried to swing a golf club thinking about keeping weight balanced, arms straight, head still, hips turning, grip loose, etc., knows how near impossible it is to make contact with the ball.

I never did learn how to let go this semester, but it remains a goal.  The only solution that worked for me was to write more.  Writing stories that failed seemed to help me get out of my own head.  Experimenting with techniques helped too, even if the results were less than stellar.  In the end, the demon still chides me, but I hope to find a way to quiet him.  Writing a good, complete story remains a whole hell of a lot harder than breaking 80, but the underlying concepts are the same.

Up Next:  #6:  Letting Characters Speak the Truth

See also other entries in this series starting with #10.

#8 of The Top 10 Things I Learned This Semester: (Invitation to a Re-shredding)

Jun 152010
 

Thelma Todd

#8: My Dirty Little Secret: Grammar Issues

I blame Brother Ryan and a number 2 pencil for all of my recurring grammatical errors.  I know the precise moment my writing life suffered its traumatic scar.

It was my first day of ninth grade and I sat in English class under the cassocked tutelage of Brother Thomas Ryan. The slender Xaverian brother cast a six and a half foot shadow across the room.  He wore thick, black framed glasses, kept his dark hair Marine Corps tight, and harbored an odd obsession with the 1920′s actress Thelma Todd . He hung black and white photos of her all around his room.  On my first day at St. John’s, the all-boys, Catholic prep school I attended in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, Brother Ryan stood in front of twenty-eight terrified boys extolling the virtues of grammar and usage.  At some point during his opening remarks, my pencil rolled toward the edge of my desk, dangled a moment, then fell. It barely made a sound when it hit the floor.  As I leaned over from my desk chair to retrieve the fallen pencil, Brother Ryan screamed, “LEAVE IT!”  The echo of those two words rolled out like thunder across the room, shaking the floor, rattling the windows and forever terrifying those of us who had to endure an entire school year under this maniac’s hand.   Needless to say, the pencil remained on the floor.  It might still be there to this day.

Charles Baxter, in his essay “Dysfunctional Narratives or ‘Mistakes Were Made’,” says (critically) that much of contemporary writing has become about reacting to “harms done to them (the characters) in the psychic past.”  Baxter calls this model the ”fiction of the quest for blame.” Perfect.  I’ve found my “unmoved mover.”  I blame Brother Ryan and that pencil for all my subsequent grammatical errors.

From that day forward, Brother Ryan worked us hard.  We diagrammed sentences every day.  He was like a drill sergeant beating grammar into his recruits, training us for battle, forcing us to memorize the rules so they would shield us from bullets or thermonuclear blasts in the war on language raging outside his classroom.  The culminating project of freshman year was to diagram a massive sentence (I wish I remembered where it was from, Poe perhaps), an exercise that required a sheet of butcher paper rolled across our desks, both edges touching the floor.  It took a week for some students to finish.

As it turned out, Brother Ryan was a pretty funny guy and a good teacher. He spent an entire year on grammar, but that damned, falling pencil doomed me.  The psychic scar of being chastised in such a public manner forever blocked access to the lessons I should have learned.  Or maybe I’m just looking for someone to blame.  Maybe the failure is mine and mine alone.  Maybe the laziness in my writing is not a product of some monk trying to scare his students but a result of a broader weakness in society, a weakness that tolerates such lapses.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I still find myself struggling with grammar and usage.  I recognize it as a serious impediment in my ability to construct sentences.  It’s the equivalent of a painter not understanding color.

In Doug’s essay, “The Attack of the Copula Spiders,” the NC moderator charges his students with the following  grammatical war-crimes (among other things):

In the post-literate age, here’s what I have to teach writing students.  Apparently, given the manuscripts I read, at least fifty per cent of my students do not know what a dangling modifier is, let alone a split infinitive, a sentence fragment, a pronoun with an ambiguous or missing antecedent, a run-on sentence, a comma splice, the difference between a comma, a colon and a semicolon.  Often, they do not know how to punctuate dialogue correctly, or, even if they do, they don’t mind being careless about it here and there and letting me make the correction…Student writers like this do not seem to suffer shame at their ignorance.  In the post-literate age, such ignorance is the norm.

I plead guilty to all charges except one: the shame.  It is shameful for me to continuously make grammar mistakes, more so because I’ve had the benefits of teachers like Brother Ryan and many years of formal education.  I cringe when I read that paragraph from Doug’s essay because it so directly accuses me.  I wrote earlier on NC about spending a Friday night reading a grammar book.  I do try, but studying grammar from a text is a bit like learning words by reading the dictionary.  My opportunity to ‘practice’ grammar issues passed with end of freshman English.  It no longer feels like practice.  I was supposed to be prepared, and now I find myself on the front lines and my gun keeps jamming.  (I’m getting carried away with the war metaphors.  Time for a Treaty of Paris (Hilton)) Nowhere (until VCFA) did anyone take this seriously, and it’s become this wart on every story, every essay, and every blog post that I write.  Grammar is hard for me, but difficulty is no excuse.

Just yesterday I received Virginia Tufte’s  Syntax as Style.  This book has already become a welcome weapon in my writing arsenal (meager though my arsenal may be).  She addresses  many elements of style, syntax, grammar and usage.  It’s time to reconcile the trauma of my youth.  It’s time to learn grammar again.  It’s time  to catch the pencil before it hits the ground!  It’s time to let Brother Ryan off the hook. 

Up Next: #7:  Letting Go

See also other entries in this series.

The December Astronauts (or Moonbase Horse Code): Short Story by Mark Anthony Jarman

Jun 152010
 




Mark Anthony Jarman is an old friend dating back to our days at the Iowa Writers’  Workshop. He’s from Alberta, lives next to the Saint John River in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where he teaches at the university. He plays hockey, wrote a hockey novel, has three sons, and was a regular pick when I edited Best Canadian Stories. He is the subject of my essay “How to Read a Mark Jarman Story” which originally appeared in The New Quarterly and can be found in my essay collection Attack of the Copula Spiders. He writes the wildest, most pyrotechnic stories of anyone I know.

This story originally appeared in Darwin’s Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow, edited by Zsuzsi Gartner (Douglas & MacIntyre, 2010).

dg

The December Astronauts (or Moonbase Horse Code)

 

The distance I felt came not from country or people; it came from within me.
I am as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon.

James Welch, Winter in the Blood



I was lost in the stars, but not lost, my tiny craft one of many on a loop proscribed by others, two astronauts far out in a silk road universe of burning gas and red streaks, and one of us dead.

Then the land comes up at us, the speed of the land rushing up like film and our Flight Centre men at serious blinking screens.  Our valves open or don’t open, the hull holds, the centre holds, little I can do.  The dead man is not worried.  I will not worry anymore, I renounce worry (yeah, that will last about three seconds).  The angle of re-entry looks weird to my eye.  I had to haul his corpse back inside for re-entry so he wouldn’t burn up.

In the city below me traffic is backing up into the arterial avenues.  They want to see us return, to fly down like a hawk with the talons out.

“Units require assistance.  All units.”

We are three orbits late because of the clouds and high wind.  They want to be there if there is a memorable crash, our pretty shell splitting on the tarmac into several chemical flash-fires engraved on their home movies.
We were so far up there above the moon’s roads, my capsule’s burnt skin held in rivers and jetstreams that route our long-awaited re-entry.  Up there we drive green channels riven in the clouds, ride stormscud and kerosene colours in the sky, then we ease our wavering selves down, down to this outer borough, down to rumpled family rooms and black yawning garages, down to the spanking new suburb unboxed in the onion fields.

I’m a traveler, an addict.  I descend from the clouds to look for work, I was up there with the long distance snowstorms.  It’s hard to believe I’m here again, hard to believe Ava became so uncaring while I was gone from the colony.


Ava’s messages are still there.  “This message will be deleted in 2 days.”  I press 9 to save it yet again.  I save her messages every ten days, my private archives, my time capsule, a minute of her lovely voice.

“Loved your last transmission,” Ava said in September. “It made me laugh!  And I loved the pictures you sent!  I can’t wait to see you.”

But then the change in October, the October revolution.  We are changelings locked in a kingdom of aftershave ads and good shepherds, lambs and lions and the Longhorn Steakpit’s idea of a salad bar.

Her messages were so very affectionate, and we’d lasted so long, so long, but in the end our messages were not enough.  Our words were not enough.  A week of silence and then a new message.  I knew it.

“Some bad news,” as Ava termed it.  She’d met someone else, she’d had a lot to drink, one thing led to another.  And I was so close.  Only a few days more.  But she couldn’t wait for me.  So long.

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