The Boston Book Fair: A Pile of Books, People, and Awesomeness

The Boston Book Fair was a lot like trick-or-treating: I went to each booth, smiled awkwardly, then picked a free button or bought a lit mag. I ended up with seven lit mags, two regular mags, ten buttons and a book. But that wasn’t the most awesome part. The most awesome part was talking to the people at The Common’s booth. One woman said her favorite thing they had ever published was The Idea of Marcel, by Marie-Helene Bertino, in issue four. I bought issue four. The Idea of Marcel was a wonderful story. Basically, a woman goes on a date with the idea of her ex-boyfriend, then finds him dating his ideal her. It ends happily. It made me get all melty.

The other best part was going to the Drum's booth. I listened to the first story in Books, Actually through the headphones they had on an iPad. The author of the story was standing right next to me. The story made me grin (My favorite line: “She thought being at the festival would be more exciting given the way mom and dad had argued about whether she should go.”), but sometimes when I grin I look like a spooky clown so I hope Catherine Elcik didn’t look at me and think, my story is making this girl make spooky clown faces. I listened to the rest of Books, Actually at home. It made me laugh a lot and my mom informs me she had to tell me to come to lunch seven times before I heard her.

Me and my Dad picked our literary fortunes (buttons) at the Grub Street booth. Mine said Unrecognized Genius. His said Starving Artist. He said he didn’t want to be a starving artist, so he gave me his button. By that point my shirt had turned into a suit of armor made out of buttons. Thanks, Dad!

Also, we went to the Ploughshares booth where I bought five back issues (on sale for a dollar each), spooky-clown grinned at the person there and said something coherent, like, “Lit mags are good.” or possibly, “Lit mags are yummy.” (All the awesomeness made it hard to think straight.) The back issues have been good for reading, and they are just the right size for the domino chain I am trying to build out of lit mags.

The Philosopher's Notebook

A couple days ago I went to Staples to get a new notebook, and, standing there in front of all those rows and rows and rows of notebooks, it occurred to me that maybe there was a notebook that would make my writing come out better than normal. Maybe if I had a notebook with small lines I would concentrate better, or maybe if I had a notebook with fainter lines they would distract me less, or maybe if I had a notebook with a red cover the red would energize me and make me write better… For a while, I flipped through notebooks made of faux leather and notebooks with built in folders and notebooks with inspirational quotes on the binder. Then I gave up and got the kind I normally get.
Thus I learned that I am irrational and also that someone misleadingly quoted Emily Dickinson on a notebook cover.

How long have I been working on this thing? (Don't answer that.)

I always wanted to write a novel, so, maybe a year or two ago I took a novella-­length short story I’d written a while before and made it longer.
That is, I edited it with the sole goal of making it longer. (Dear Past Self, think next time.) My story already had a nonsensical plot and a protagonist who was out of character so much of the time she didn’t even have a character, but the editing made it much more rambling and undigestible. When I realized how bad it was, I thought maybe I could fix it by touching up a few of the main scenes.
Um... Nope.
I cut it down to from 33,000 to 17,000 words. I took out tons: for example, the gratuitous identical twins I had put in because, hey, identical twins are cool! It was a lot of work. I was proud of myself.
It still didn’t make any sense.
I did a complete rewrite that forced the story into an actual plot.
The actual plot was driven by a cliched bully with no motives.
I put the darn thing away for a few months. Then, a couple weeks ago, I cut it up and put it back together. It seemed to work.
Last week at an (awesome) writing class, we discussed cliches. I went back home and realized that the story has lots of cliches: The Successful Nerd. The Bully Who Always Gets Away With It. The Ethnic Token Character! Errgh.
I’m putting it in the dumpster... for something like the fifth time.
But, I’ve learned from my mistakes. For one thing, the longest thing you’ve written is not necessarily the most important, and for another, some stories have no future to look forward to, but you have to write them, anyway.
(I’m still proud of myself for cutting all that verbiage.) 

#AmWriting

Today I cut up a fifteen page story scene by scene... and found out it had about sixty scenes. Today I killed off six characters, including the two-dimensional antagonist with no motives. Today Ipositioned the spotlight over a girl the protagonist doesn't like who wants to be the protagonist's friend. Today I talked to myself so much I could have been reading aloud a book about a crazy person. Today my family went to church while I highlighted passages. Alone, I cursed aloud and used the whole main room floor to spread out pages. Today I threw a ball of paper into the dog's dish by mistake. Today I used up all the paper in the printer. Today I cut a brilliant passage about rock dust that I had no room for, and it stung. A lot. Today I opened a new document to resurrect that kind of dead darling in. Today I used four different kinds of highlighters. Today my mom could not convince me to eat lunch until 3:00. Today, I wrote.

(Actually, I wrote this yesterday. I was too busy writing to post it until today.)

Lit mags count as independent reading!

Recently I found myself in the position of saying,

“I did the assignment but I can't really turn it in because, um, there's stuff written on the back of it.”

That's what you get when you try to combine your English assignments, planner, and writer's notebook.

Thus I have spent some time miscommunicating with the photocopier.

Here's something awesome about English: Lit mags count as independent reading! So my independent reading book is the Peter Ho Davies issue of Ploughshares! Yay!

And... we read The Secret Life of Walter Mitty!

It's by James Thurber. I love Thurber. The story was great, as expected. It is a slice of life (which can be really good!) about a man who does everything wrong and has fantastical daydreams. I think I'm sort of like him. Ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa!

At the end of the story, we were asked what we thought Walter Mitty was like. A lot of the class thought he was on drugs, alcoholic, schizophrenic, or had dementia, someone confused him with Breaking Bad's Walter White, one girl thought he was lonely and his wife picked on him. I agree with her. I also think he's writer-ish. I don't know what it says about me that I think a man is writer-ish who most of the class agreed is on drugs.

The teacher (who is not the teacher who went to Emerson, but is pretty cool, proven by the fact that he kept calm when one of the boys drew on his head) also showed us one of those story maps: rising action, climax, falling action. Conflict, resolution. He asked us to fill in the blanks with the events of a story we'd read recently. I went blank. I could think of lots of stories, but some of them were not in any sort of chronological order, in some the conflict was never resolved, some ended with the climax, some seemed to have more than one climax, some had a conflict I couldn't articulate- I could just remember images and characters. I mean, try to graph out one of the stories in 100 Word Story or Beecher's! Eventually I looked around the classroom, saw a poster for The Wizard of Oz (the school is full of theater sets and posters. Also, it has a grandfather clock and three pianos.) and graphed out the Wizard of Oz- the theme is Home. The problem is that Dorothy is stuck in Oz. The solution is that she comes home again. I think I did passably. Phew.

We got a preview- we are going to use a lot of different outlines, including, at some point, a Venn Diagram. Interesting.

I can't believe they made an hour and a half long movie out of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty*, and are making another. Like I can't believe they made an hour and a half long RomCom full of bathroom humor out of Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs. They really did do that! Not that I recommend watching it.

*I've heard the Walter Mitty movie's good, but I haven't watched it.

Happy Mediums and Idea-Driven Stories

I used to think I didn't like science fiction.

Now I've figured out that a. I have a weak stomach in some ways and b. I strongly prefer character-driven stories, so there is a good deal of science fiction I don't like, along with stuff I really love (A Wrinkle In Time, anyone?).

An interesting phenomenon that makes up some of the science fiction I like less is stories that are not really either plot or character-driven. An author comes up with an idea- what if aliens came to Earth or what if computers were implanted in our brains or what if people started growing snakes for hair- and builds a plot completely to serve it, then pulls in characters just to serve the plot. Thus the idea is stretched to create a whole novel much the same way you stretch the Clean Teeth pamphlets when the dentist keeps you forty minutes in his waiting room. These books seem to be becoming more common in many genres- books that have a good idea, and often good/decent craft and structure, but don't really seem to mean all of the story. A person who is interested enough in the idea may read and enjoy the story anyway. When I became interested in the life of Anne Sullivan (after watching The Miracle Worker, which is just so good! It made me cry so much I felt like my face was melting!) I read many, many books on her and Helen Keller, some of them near identical twins, or triplets of each other.

This is something I do when I have a good idea that might not fill many pages: write flash fiction! And, one of the most important things I've learned: Don't be afraid of wasting ideas. I used to ration out ideas, one per story, and as a result, my stories went dry. Now I often use five or six ideas-for-a-story in one story- if they (seem to) fit, of course. Not that I don't occasionally end up with a story in which a shy, anxious character randomly decides to juggle oranges in the playground (real example) or a story where the whole point is that you should be nice to your little brother (or if you aren't nice to him, you should be really nice to your parents), but I think writing is a lot about finding a happy medium, something between “Stuff happened.” and “Hannah J. Brown, who still had coffee brown eyes, and blond hair down to her shoulders, moved the big toe on her right foot that still had a cut slightly to the side of her shoe to scratch an itch (the cut toe was itchy, not the shoe).” Or maybe writing is a happy medium. (Medium of expression. Pun intended.) Writing this was certainly fun, especially the Hannah J. Brown (who still has brown eyes, blond hair, a cut on her toe, and strawberry yogurt on her nose) part.

Inverses, Identities, Geekiness, Oh My!

This is pretty geeky and not related to writing, except that I'm writing about it now. But...

In math class we learned about identities. X (operation) (identity) = (identity) (operation) X = X. That means 1 is the identity for multiplication: X x 1 = 1 x X = X. (Sorry for the capital variable; I can't get the computer to write a times dot and I didn't want it to get confused with the multiplication symbol.) 5 x 1 = 1 x 5 = 5. 8 x 1 = 1 x 8 = 8. 0 is the identity of addition: X + 0 = 0 + X = X. 3 + 0 = 0 + 3 = 3. But...

Subtraction and division can't have identities! 0 – X is not the same as X – 0! X divided by 1 is not the same as 1 divided by X!

To have an inverse, if I've got it right, you need to have an identity, because X (operation) (inverse of X) = (identity of operation). The multiplicative (if that's the right word) inverse of 5 is 1/5... It's like flipping the fraction upside down: 5/1 1/5 The additive (if that's the right word. I think additives have something to do with food coloring) inverse of 5 is -5. Awesome!

And algebra is all about inverses. If you want to figure out what X is in X + 5 = 40 you add -5... which is the same as subtracting 5... but we're making all the subtraction addition and all the division multiplication, because it's so much simpler to multiply 25 by 1/7 (25/1 x 1/7, 25 x 1 = 25, 1 x 7 = 7, voila!) which is 25/7 than to divide 25 by 7. When I try to do that in my head, I make my head gooey.

Another lovely thing... distributive property! That simply means that a(b + c) (that's a times bplusc) is the same as (ab) + (ac). (ab is a times b, or a b's.) Simple enough rule. But...

(X + y)(a + b)(m + n)

That's... xam + xan + xbm + xbn + yam + yan + ybm + ybn! PATTERNS! I used to do something like that when I was younger, and bored, go through my fingers tapping and not tapping, figuring out the combinations on a hand: taptaptaptaptap, taptaptaptapdon't, taptaptapdon'ttap, taptaptapdon'tsdon't, taptapdon'ttaptap, taptapdon'ttapdon't, taptapdon'tdon'ttap, taptapdon'tdon'tdon't... and on and on to don'tdon'tdon'tdon'tdon't! I never thought it was anymore useful than thumb twiddling (which, for some odd reason, gives me thumbaches), but maybe it will be!

Math is rhythm.

Back to school leaves me as excited as it does exhausted.

Okay, geekfest over.

Back To School... And Lit Mags!

My seven-year-old brother has been rocking his chair in iambic pentameter, but instead of “Duh DUH Duh DUH”, it sounds like, “BAM! BAM! BAM!” We discovered that the sentence “Do not forget to write” was three iambic feet, and thus the sentence “Do not forget to write at night my dear” was a line of a sonnet. We think. This was the whole of our dinner table conversation. Well, except for the bit where I got in trouble for sneezing on the potatoes.

I have a cold, and sometimes when I try to say things I sneeze, like Wednesday, the first day of school, when my name was roll-called.

I'm starting at a new school and the thing I've been wanting to know, of course, is whether anyone likes lit mags.

Hallelujah! They do!

At lunch, while I was writing, a teacher came up to me and asked if I was writing. I said yes. She asked me whether I was writing creatively or taking notes.

“Sort of both.” I said. “I, um, I'm writing a funny story about... here?”

She laughed. Really, my new school is a funny place. The dialogue I collected included such gems as,

“X had back surgery, and if you hold a metal detector up to him, it beeps!”

I asked her if she liked to write. She does. I asked her who her favorite author was, even though this question always has an equal and opposite reaction (and I can never decide!). She said David Foster Wallace. She was pleased that I'd heard of him. I said I'd read one or two of his essays. This is true. I have read one of his essays. I read The Depressed Person, because Becky Tuch uses it on her Grub Street students and I figured if I read the same essay as Grub Street students I would become a Real Author. It took me three sittings. It was fun when I stopped trying to make it make sense.

Sometime in the conversation I mentioned lit mags. She likes lit mags. I took the issue of Gulf Coast I had been rubbing and praying to out of my backpack and said, “This is a lit mag?” because I'm better at writing than I am at talking. Then I read part of a poem out loud, except I skipped some words and I got mixed up pronouncing “fete”. I thought it was “feh-tay”, like feta and pate.

She wants to see some of my writing! And she'll show me some of her writing! And she went to college at Emerson, home of Ploughshares!

I am currently crossing all of my body parts up to and including my arteries that she will be my English teacher. (I'm not exactly sure what the schedules are yet. We seem to be feeling it out.) I am hoping this even though I hear she gives a lot of homework, because I also hear her homework involves writing. In my old school there was just spelling, and the teachers really didn't appreciate my points about the merits of reading as homework.

And there is another teacher who likes lit mags! She came to talk to me as soon as this teacher had finished talking to me and I had started writing again! I said, “Do you like lit mags?”

She said, “Do they have words in them?”

I handed her Gulf Coast. She said, “You should talk to (name of teacher I had been talking to before her).”

She was the science teacher, actually. One of the rules they made really clear at the beginning of school assembly is that she's the only one who's allowed to drink out of beakers, probably because she's the only one who can tell which beakers have chemicals in them.

I think I'm going to like this place.

P.S. Gulf Coast is awesome. Odd. Arty. Gripping. Stock up on back issues! It's what I'm doing!