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ADD Serendipity

I was stuck in the middle of a revision. Yes, when I recognize that something is missing—that I had I glided over some weird canyon in the conversation between two characters—I drop a helpful “ADD” into the text to point out my omission. “Helpful.” If I could, I would paste a gif of someone yelling “Clean up on aisle 5!” into the text. This happens frequently. The excitement of a first draft…

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The Call of Ritual

The end of Lent means that I can eat sweets again. Even though I am years removed from my Catholic upbringing, and I don’t recall my parents ever guiding us through some chosen fast during the six-week run-up to Easter (although we did not eat meat on Fridays, enjoying fish sticks and cheese pizza during that time), I try to give up something I enjoy during Lent. My practice is partly an exercise…

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Paths

As he stared at the land around him, he began to see footprints from an earlier time, but not just earlier on this day, from days and years past. He saw how travelers had crisscrossed the terrain—running after a stray animal, chasing their heart’s desire. No portion of the land was untouched. When he concentrated, he saw how set after set of footprints overlapped and extended back in time. There…

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Distractions (again)

After my last post, my friend, Brian Clements, responded: “Writing is more about limiting the scope of one’s vision, on not-seeing.” This is exactly why I gave up on writing fiction—seeing too many possible directions and being unable to focus on a path. In poetry, leaping around can be more of a virtue. A quick note, you should read Brian Clements’s poetry, especially his Book of Common…

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Figuring things out

My room of my own I started writing poetry in the 10th grade, stopped, then started writing fiction in my final year of college. I got into a writing workshop on the strength of a story about a mine disaster based on fact (there were/are/will be mine collapses) and was inspired by the immediacy and detail of a scene in Conrad’s Lord Jim (a boiler explodes). After college, I tried to write a…

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The Right Way

I’m sure it’s happened to you. Someone has told you the right way to do something. It could be something as simple as folding towels and then hanging them up on a towel rack in your bathroom, folding a t-shirt and putting it in a drawer, or wrapping a birthday present. Maybe you offer such advice, although it’s not really advice. It’s a dictum: THE RIGHT WAY. I wonder where people get these…

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Revision Work

I finished a first draft of a novel in the fall of 2019–a smidge past 88,000 words, huzzah! huzzah! I almost immediately began working on the next one. While at this new work, I managed a copywriter-style edit over the next year that swelled the thing by another 5,000 words, but other than adding connective tissue, it hadn’t substantially changed. I kept at the next book but felt a nagging…

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Drowning. Avatar: The Way of Water

Drowning. Avatar: The Way of Water

Quick hot take: meh. Positives: So much effort was made to get the visuals right, and they are crisp and awe-inspiring. However, I wondered more about the volume of computing power that made such a spectacle possible than I did about the story. Unlike the first film, in which Jake’s amazement stood in for the audience—we watched him watching this world (the scene in which he tapped all the…

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Save Your Darlings

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Soloing in the Red Canoe

Soloing in the Red Canoe

I pulled the paddle into my lap and raised my gaze from the bow of the canoe to the sky. Insects thrummed from both banks of the river. Over my head, the telltale wings of raptors drifted. The smaller sets of wings belonged to hawks, the larger to the few eagles that patrolled the river. One began to circle—head down, eyes scanning the water, wings in a sturdy glide—one loop then another, as it…

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Westworld Season 4: The Worst of 9th Grade English

Westworld Season 4: The Worst of 9th Grade English

Well, it worked for Marvel’s Infinity War, so why not trot out this handy trope? Doctor Strange looks into possible futures (14,000,605 possible future to be exact), and finds ONE in which they defeat Thanos. Long odds indeed. So what does Bernard do in episode three of the current season of Westworld? Exactly. Look, there’s nothing wrong with cribbing from other sources (see Shakespeare, W.),…

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Revision, process, and practice

Revision, process, and practice

Okay, I don’t know if this scene will stay or not, but while drafting (and until someone snatches it out of my hands, it is all drafting), I wrote this: We walked into the sunlight outside. The sidewalk was empty; Willi and Benjamin had already turned at the corner and another corner. Cars crept slowly down the one-way street, pausing at the stop sign and squeezing into city traffic. The waft of…

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Discovering the Power of Reserve

Discovering the Power of Reserve

I have spent hours in Gallery 69 at the National Gallery of Art over the past three years. The conversation between the Sargents, the Whistlers, and the Eakins inspires me. The seminal Whistler Painting Symphony in White, a portrait of Joanna Hiffernan, is currently in London, along with other paintings Whistler made with Hiffernan as a model. It will return along with those other paintings in…

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The Urgency of "I don't know"

The Urgency of “I don’t know”

The centerpiece of the Once Upon a Roof: Vanished Korean Architecture are three chimi—roof ornaments. They look similar enough that one might, at first glance, assume they come from the same site. After all, they are displayed together. However, they come from three sites across Korea: Iksan, Buyeo, and Gyeongju. Two are from Buddhist temples, the other from a palace complex. It’s not the…

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Moving to Write: A writer's journey

Moving to Write: A writer’s journey

When I was in grad school, one of my teachers told me that swimming (I was doing 3000-4000 yards, 3 times a week) benefited my writing. I understood why. Putting one’s head down and churning away for an hour compares well with writing. You pile up the painful laps the same way you pile up the words, and there is no immediate end. You just have to do it every (other) day. Pool at the University…

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Move to Write

I am reminded of a movie I saw ages ago. In The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda castigates Luke about the force. He grabs Luke’s arm with his claw-like hand and insists, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” And that’s the whole point: what’s inside you matters. Of course, this appealed to me when I was a sophomore in college. My belief in an inner self separate from bodily suffering—or…

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The "Hypos"--on the writer venturing into the dark

The “Hypos”–on the writer venturing into the dark

I began the day in a foul mood. That’s not true. I shook the snooze on my phone enough times to drift back in and out of a dream I was having, gathered the cats’ feeding mice (they retrieve their food from a set of “mice” that I secret throughout my apartment twice a day), and poured a small cup of coffee. Traffic was inordinately painless. Then there was a line outside my first Sunday stop, a…