Drafts Y & Z
November 8, 2007 at 1:16 am | In Writing, life | Leave a CommentI have recently divided one novel into two. The first I have handed off to my daughter for now, as raw material for a class she’s taking in screenwriting at the New School in NYC. That story (boy having a psychotic break escapes from his psych ward and ends up on a freeway bridge in downtown L.A. with an important message he is hoping will be captured by TV cameras and broadcast to the world before it is too late) is inherently more cinematic than the second part, involving a different set of characters. That part begins like this:
“She continues to hope that her younger brother, Ted, is still alive. Her best-case scenario has him a cloistered monk in a cliffside cell somewhere. It’s a romantic notion but not inconceivable—Ted in secrecy and solitude, pouring out his life in prayer for the world. He would be happy doing that. As a little boy he’d wanted to be an architect, and maybe he ended up a builder after all, but a different sort: one who has traded rebar and I-beams for the inner geometry of the Kingdom of God. Its own forces and vectors, its many mansions.
“The overwhelming likelihood, however, is that his bones lie somewhere between the western border of Cambodia and Phnom Penh, buried or not. She imagines a team of archaeologists coming upon a pile of skeletons in a mass grave a hundred years from now, five hundred—and Ted’s remains somehow standing out. He had soft tooth enamel and a mouthful of silver, the one thing that might distinguish him from the Cambodians with whom he fell. Or someone, against all odds, might note a truncated left pinky finger and wonder what had happened to make it so.”
Draft Q
October 25, 2007 at 3:23 pm | In Writing | 2 CommentsAdvice to fiction writers: do a freewrite and ask your main character what he or she thinks about what you’ve written about them so far. Do they have any objections, clarifications? Here’s what mine said to me about the psychotic break he experienced at age 18:
“Of this, if nothing else, I am absolutely certain: this was the point that bisected my life into before and after. I struggle to explain. People either understand or they don’t. Mostly they don’t. They have tried to make me believe it was grandiose delusions I was experiencing that day, but the opposite is true. If anything I knew for the first time my smallness in relation to everything else that was out there. Either that or I was in a much bigger place and had to adjust my reckoning of myself accordingly. How could I not? How could any reasonable person not? It was the precise opposite of a hallucination.”
7:15 a.m., domani a Depot
October 22, 2007 at 11:51 pm | In Art, Writing, faith | Leave a Comment
Tomorrow morning several artist friends and I will meet for breakfast at the Depot Diner in north Beverly, a favorite gathering spot. I will order my usual, two over easy with sourdough, hold the bacon, small OJ and a refill on the coffee, please. We will be discussing my crazy idea, a possible anthology of readings about art and vocation, for an audience of young artists brought up evangelical and (some of them) not at all sure about where and how they fit into the subculture. These young artists happen to be their students, so there’s a natural interest. We’ll talk about gathering various things they and their friends have written on the subject over the years and hardly given another thought to. I write, too, (another topic for another post), but in my work life tend to be mostly a hunter-gatherer of other people’s words. Sometimes it’s like reclaiming things thrown away in the trash. Hey, I say. This is a good thing you’ve tossed away. Can I have it?
Jack Gilbert: “A Brief for the Defense”
October 22, 2007 at 7:26 pm | In Writing | 1 CommentA poem passed on to me by my friend Sally, who says: “I had never heard of Jack Gilbert before tonight, when someone sent me this amazing poem. It made me tremble.”
A Brief for the Defense
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
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