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beggingwolf · 3 years

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hi so I've just eaten too much ice cream, feel vaguely ill, and I'm here to tell you All About How I Failed At Outlining for SGKF this year!

that's partially just a fun tagline, but it's also a bit true. I told my friends I'd be trying to use several different outlining methods to try and knock out a plotty piece for the fest, and things did not go to plan!

important to begin with: I am what is referred to as a "pantser." I tend to just start writing. this is strangely contradictory to my personality, which deeply loves plans. unfortunately, what often happens is plans and outlines ruin my excitement and drive while working on a project (it tricks me into thinking I've done all the work and resolved the plot), leading me to abandon it.

and though I can throw together pretty words and made a decent fic, my fics never turned out as good as they could have been. I kept telling myself that if I planned in advanced and worked out what I was doing BEFORE I did it, I'd be able to craft a fic with such care and attention as to make it really SHINE.

so, uh, kinkfest rolls around, and since I was a mod I could see all the prompts before they even got released to the public, so I basically had a WHOLE EXTRA two-ish weeks to start planning and writing.

did I? NO.

so, despite the fact that I collect writing advice like a magpie , I'm not the greatest at implementing it. if you go into my SGKF google folder, you'll find a few instances of me TRYING to implement writing advice like metawriting:

(and you'll see some fics that didn't get finished/make it into the fest!)

my issue was (and still is) that I think I value every little word too much. this is a bad thing: I'm an overwriter by nature. when I get words down, I want to keep them because I feel like I worked hard for them, even if they're not great or don't actually serve the story in the way they should. that's not to say all my metawriting was bad; it wasn't. I tried it out for A Drowning in California as well [which will henceforth just be referred to as "California").

I had a whole subfolder for California. what kind of amazed me is how different my initial notes for the prompt are from what the story actually ended up being. here, take a look:

literally almost none of this is in california. the WWE and UFC stuff made it in, and so did sid wrestling with horny, but that was it. I was going to start this fic in the locker room, with sid wrestling someone, and it was seriously going to be a story about sex—about sid wanting to hold geno down in bed. that was the premise.

and instead, we got a really emotional story about familial rejection and the isolation it can make people feel. SO! something happened along the way, right?

when I started getting into the plot that would support this supposed sexfest, this is where I went at first:

geno wants the relationship to get serious, sid is like mentally still a 12 year old who just wants to wrestle people and doesn't want to talk about his emotions, and prefers to use physicality to communicate. this doesn't work for geno, who wants ... more

we can start to see the actual emotions come through, the things I was interested in: sid using touch to talk, and geno desperately wanting more

what did the most good for me, in the end, was "doing" the metawriting by talking with my friends.

I told them what i thought this story was about ("I'm thinking about making this a story about relationship-defining, maybe? and the communication needed for a lasting adult relationship? I think I'm going to set it in california/LA, where Sid has invited Geno along for the first time for his California Summer Fun/Training/Escape, whatever, and Geno's going to be emotionally preoccupied with Defining The Relationship—maybe they've been on-again-off-again? maybe they're just new to this, like almost a year deep, and they're not getting younger—and thinking this trip is about that [or hoping this trip is about that, and realizing it isn't, and being disappointed].") and they told me what jumped out at them.

Jes told me what would ramp up the tension would be a deadline of some sort; "Geno’s going to break up with Sid or make some decision or something, or there’s something approaching where they have to make a will they or won’t they decision of some kind related to the core ‘defining the relationship’ issue. Geno’s going back to russia and in previous summers they’ve always slept with other people while apart? or Sid has a wedding coming up and he’s offhandedly mentioned taking someone else as his plus one?"

I liked her thoughts. it made sense to add an external pressure to all this, and that wedding idea stuck out to me the most.

Lis said I should add a jealousy angle, so you can largely credit her for the club scene: "one thing i like to sort of headcanon/imply about sid's california trips is he uses them to hook up anonymously. so you could have, like, sid and geno seeing sid's friends, but also accidentally running into some of sid's friends. and geno's like oh, great, so here i am doing this horrible summertime training that i hate because i don't need to train in the offseason actually, and i'm learning what exactly sid gets up to when we're apart."

My magical solution these days is GOING FOR WALKS. do it if you're able. it clears out your brain. so on my walks I ended up deciding that I wanted a taylor crosby wedding. I like taylor as a character, and as a person with sisters I just like writing her in. best of all, she and sid are close and I like writing "I'd do anything for my family" sid.

and then I was like. oh. what if it's not that sid is afraid/nervous to bring geno, it's that he can't.

I... wasn't as conflicted as I thought I'd be about writing sid's parents as homophobic. I prefer to write them as supportive; I think troy crosby's been eviscerated more than he should have been in older fanworks, and though I respect their right to make fictional!troy whatever they want, I've been a little skeptical of outlandish takes on him ("he doesn't say I love you to his son because a camera caught them mid-interaction once!") ever since I read how the media has found him a convenient narrative villain while he tried to keep his underage son safe from the media as a child and while they needed to cook up Spicy Stories about squeaky-clean sid.

uh, tangent aside, I always thought I'd never write a "parents are the villains" story, but I did here. it felt right. it was easier, too, because they're not PRESENT in the story. I didn't have to write trina actually being horrible to her son. I just had to skirt the edges of the wound.

which works well on two fronts: I don't have to actively write the crosbys being horrible to sid, and I also leave more to the imagination of the reader, and that almost never fails to make the work better. whatever the reader imagines them saying to sid, it's going to be 10x more hurtful than anything I'd write.

I dug really deep on some personal emotions and fears I experience as a gay person for a lot of sid's arc here. sid is deeply imperfect in this story, and he's internalizing his pain and the horrible thing that's happened to him, which is making him pull away from his partner, and sid is not responding how geno wants, nor is he responding well, period, though he's trying in his own wounded, stilted way.

and beloved geno, whose tender heart is so hidden away for fear of someone hurting it. I really like writing geno; he's huffy and emotional and sometimes bitchy and feels things SO deeply.

once I had more of an idea, I was already working on a more detailed outline. this is where I seriously took Jes's advice and WROTE EVERYTHING OUT! it made it so much less daunting, because I didn't have to be figuring out my next steps AND crafting sentences at the same time. also this is where I tell you that the title of this post is mostly a lie, it was metawriting I failed at.

This outline also meant I avoided writing large swaths of things that should've been cut. Another beta told me I should delete three scenes and condense a bunch of emotions into the club scene, and she was SO right. Cutting events out of an outline is WAY easier than cutting out pages of text.

Ironically my outline kind of deteriorated after the club scene, but that's alright: after I wrote the club scene, I actually had a clear vision of what I wanted the end to be. I just had to trust myself. I CAN do this, I CAN still just write intuitively sometimes!

I think California did what I wanted it to do. I'd love to try something out that's longer and has more story arcs in it (jes has a post for that too!) but I think that's best saved for another, longer project, though 18k isn't short.

next up is maggie stief's writing seminar that I bought a month back. I'm going to start working on that this month and see how I like it. I have a few halloween fic ideas, plus spookfest, so these next two months we should be cooking in the kitchen!

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red-will · 5 years

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The Self Is a Fiction: Jenny Xie Interviewed by Mariam Rahmani

The poet on the politics of the gaze, the migratory act of reading, the anxiety of bilingualism, and the universality of shame.

I first met Jenny over a decade ago, when we were both students at Princeton, sweating through a summer of teaching English in China’s Hunan Province. Years later, we met in New York and formed a group with other female friends from college who worked in the humanities, tapping one another’s minds as freely as we sipped each other’s cocktails. Jenny was always reluctant to boast of her then already quickly accumulating successes. Encountering her work for the first time on the stands of my neighborhood bookstore in Brooklyn, I was immediately taken with her writing: the images were stark yet elusive, the lines intimate and yet evocative of so much outside or beyond; the poems seemed so delicately wrought I wondered whether they might shatter right there in my palms. Below, Jenny and I dive into her debut book, Eye Level (Graywolf Press), winner of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. “Clarity is just questioning having eaten its fill,” reads the end of her poem “To Be a Good Buddhist is Ensnarement.” Which is to say: before you know it, you’re hungry with more questions.

Mariam Rahmani: I want to start with the title, and the recurring figure of the eye. As much as readers expect metawriting and words about what it means to deal in words, the salient metaphor in this collection seems to be the act of seeing. The “I” in the poems—and I hesitate to collapse that I/eye with you, the author—is an observer. Does that make writing an act of observing?

Jenny Xie: Much of the collection is about linking the “eye” with an “I”, and thinking through the entanglements of gazes and visual encounters with power, selfhood, and presence. The speaker in these poems, especially those from the first section of the book, engages in the act of observation and renders certain aspects of seeing into language, but observing is never a passive absorption of visual stimuli. The eye amplifies and tames; it heightens and erases.

MR Are the poems “about” you, still, today, now that they’re packaged and clean and in this gorgeous book, or do they take on a life of their own when they’re on the page?

JX My initial impulse is to say that the poems aren’t “about” me, but that response plays into the faulty assumption that poems whose primary aim might be self-disclosure or testimony are somehow less aesthetically rigorous or energizing. I don’t buy that, really. At the same time, the “I” in these poems, while they might share autobiographical details with the person that wrote them, aren’t “about” me insofar as the speakers are fashioned, dramatized, contextually bound. I invoke them and write into them to better serve the poems and their modes, registers, and textures. Many of the poems take up self-interrogation, but I’m not interested in getting the plot details exactly right. The self is a fiction.

The poems in the first and third sections of the book are precisely about the provisional nature of selfhood, how it gets generated and regenerated depending on context. When I’m writing, I’m often interested in stripping away the selves that feel artificial—that I can easily inhabit when I’m moving through the world—to turn inward toward the interior flux. In that sense, the poems are often closer to “me” than the “me.” Perhaps that’s a slippery answer, but the question is also slippery, in a good way.

MR You once told me that your writing process involves reading for hours before sitting down to compose. I was struck by the poetry of this image, the romance of coupling with other people’s words before you can produce your own. How do you prevent a sort of unwilled pastiche?

JX I find that when I sit down to compose, my mind needs ample time to loosen and to unlatch from more linear, familiar lines of thinking. One way to get myself to a more wild, elastic mental space is to read before I compose. It’s always not “reading” in the sense of plowing through a book, or surrendering to the absorption of narrative; it’s more like dipping in and out of different texts, as a way to spur disorientation. I get bored when I draw close to something I’ve written or created recently, so infecting myself with other lines (or films, music, artwork) is a way of working toward self-forgetfulness. I don’t necessarily fear other voices, because my own “voice,” if I have one, is constructed and reinforced from a lifetime of reading and listening. I’m most energized when I don’t quite sound like myself, because that’s when I get curious about what or whom I’m inhabiting, and what can be wielded with a different voice or mode of speaking.

MR You move us from twentieth-century Russia to fifteenth-century Japan, from Tsvetaeva to Ikkyū. There’s a lot about geographic travel here, or rather, tourism; how does that interact with the travel of the mind, and reading as a sort of travel?

JX Reading is migratory, an act of transport, from one life to another, one mind to another. Just like geographic travel, reading involves estrangement that comes with the process of dislocating from a familiar context. I gather energy from this kind of movement, this estranging and unsettling, and I welcome it precisely because it’s conducive to examination, interrogation, reordering. Travel, imaginative or physical, can sharpen perception and force a measuring of distance and difference.

MR But is it travel or tourism? The latter seems more incriminating. I’m thinking, of course, about the rise of modern tourism as a practice of European imperialism, linked so closely to the advent of photography; you also deal in snapshots, in a way, such as in the Phnom Penh diptych, but more frequently to expose their dark underbellies.

JX You’re absolutely right that the latter is more incriminating, though I think most kinds of travel involve negotiating ethical encounters. There’s nothing easy, or easeful, about it. Much of it has to do with the privilege of mobility—of who can enter and leave, who can traverse borders and who can’t, and what is sought out in travel. There’s a lot to think through here, but I would say tourism commodifies difference and encourages a thirst for consuming it from a safe distance. There’s also a good deal of exploitative labor involved, clearly, which is often hidden from view. Taking up residence in a place doesn’t extinguish the possessive tourist drive either. In many cases, being an expat can encourage a false sense of ownership over a place—perhaps partly devised in opposition to the tourist—that can feed into a sense of cultural arrogance.

The Phnom Penh diptych sequence that begins the book doesn’t aim to be polemical, though. I was interested in moral complication rather than moralizing. There, I’m attempting to lay bare some of the tensions inherent in being a foreigner, an expatriate, a tourist, an outsider.

MR Your work really captures the anxiety of bilingualism and how it can leave one feeling estranged from both tongues. Is that how you relate to English and Mandarin?

JX I immigrated to the U.S. from China at age four, and Mandarin was my first language. I spoke it at home, and around family friends, who were exclusively recent Chinese immigrants. I began to learn English when I entered grade school, in classes designated for ESL learners. Similar to many immigrant children, I internalized the hierarchy that placed English first, and felt the accompanying shame of being marked a non-native English speaker. Speaking and writing in English carried with it the anxiety of being betrayed by one’s usage mistakes and lack of fluency; this was no doubt reinforced by the linking of academic success to facility with speech and writing. At the same time that I began learning English, my Mandarin slowed in development, because I wasn’t using it outside of the domestic sphere. To this day, even though I enrolled in a year of intensive Mandarin study in college, my Mandarin is quite stunted. I’ve lost most of the ability to read and write in it, sadly.

You’re right that the poems carry an “estrangement from both tongues,” a sense of not feeling completely settled in either English or Mandarin. At the same time, language is a kind of estrangement in this book. Silence is fertile and full, and language—used conventionally—can feel like a reduction, a narrowing, of what is ample and in flux.

MR The “I” here seems unabashedly feminine, not just in the use of the pronoun “she” in moments of mirroring/seeing but also in the way the gaze itself, observant yet not proprietary, acute yet not cutting (or more precisely, only cutting when directed inward), seems like a feminine gaze—or better, a femininist gaze, as in the opposite of a masculinist vision. That’s not a word, femininist, but I like how it recalls feminist while taking a side step. Are the poems feminist, feminine, maybe even—and now I’m asking you to humor me—femininist?

JX Femininist—yes! I think gender is certainly one category of otherness that infuses the poems in the book, though perhaps not the principal one—at least not consciously so. If the “femininist” gaze is one that is slant and destabilizing, and working against certain kinds of centralizing power, I hope these poems exhibit it. Then again, in “Zuihitzu,” “Visual Orders,” and elsewhere, the speaker occasionally implies the desire to look without being seen, which can be read as a voyeuristic looking that gets coded as “masculine,” though the poems are trying to slip out of that.

MR It can be masculine—but couldn’t one also say that looking without being seen is the plight of many women, even if not their desire?

JX That’s certainly true. I do think a key difference, however, lies in electing not to be seen, of choosing to take refuge from exposure. Really, I’m interested in how many forms of sight can be oppressive. The rapaciousness of vision, which becomes a manner of conquering the visible world and exhausting it.

MR I have been refraining from quoting your lines back to this whole time—they’re breathtaking and they haunt me—but now that the dam’s been broken: “the borderless empire of the interior.” It seems to me that anyone who writes lives there, takes refuge there, in that infinite landless land you call “the empire of the interior.” This is a crazy huge question, but what is the interior? How do we live there, ethically, without abandoning the exterior, or what you call “the outer world”?

JX The dam has been broken from my end, as well. “The infinite landless land”—that’s a good place to start, isn’t it? I’m haunted by that line of yours. In some poems in the book, the interior is equated with the mind, that vast and fluid terrain. I think earlier I referred to it as the internal flux. So much of everyday living involves performance, exposure, and projecting a solidity of self. One way to go about defining the interior is to mark it as the obverse of the public. The interior, cast in that way, is the realm of the private, the inviolable and inalienable. But the concept of interiority is also culturally determined. Poems such as “Rootless,” “Long Nights” and “Borderless” seek to dismantle the false binary of interior/exterior, and of the interior as some sort of gated enclosure. The Buddhist perspective sees the separate self—which oftentimes gets linked to interiority—as illusory. I believe that, too. The mind loves to find ways to draw up barriers that aren’t really there.

MR As someone training in literary scholarship, I always think of the concern with interiority as quintessentially modern. Are these poems modern? Postmodern? And because I’m risking a yawn here, I’ll clarify that this is a political question for me: there’s still so much work to be done in decentering Europe from the plane(s) of modernism, and it strikes me that these poems do some of that work.

JX The poems are definitely invested in states of interiority and kinds of subjectivity, and that inward turn feels, as you say, modern. On the other hand, I hope that the poems don’t feel too narrowly inward, to the point of solipsism. My intention in the book was also to interrogate the stability and authority of the narrating self and to cast an eye on its construction, which would be a postmodern preoccupation. What marks a postmodern poem, though? The evacuation or undermining of a traditional lyric “I”? It’s worth considering who has never had a claim to the authority of a lyric I to begin with. Xiaojing Zhou thinks through this in her book The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian-American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2006), and argues for reconceptualizing the lyric subject as “a site where established notions of the Cartesian I are contested, transformed, and reinvented” by poets of color and writers who inhabit categories of otherness.

MR I was surprised to find the red of shame riddling poems like “Borderless” and “Zazen”. It reminded me of my childhood, and the parts of myself still shaded by that childhood. I shy away from writing about shame because it walks so dangerously close to Orientalism. And yet, for a woman with my upbringing, shame is real. What do you make of all these entanglements?

JX I’m very interested how you speak of shame and its Orientalist leaning—I hadn’t considered that argument, and I want to read about it and sit with it further… For now, I’ll ask: What is shame? Is it the misalignment between who we think ourselves as and what has been exposed of us? Is it how’re we’re being read, and how we read ourselves, against our internal codes of conduct? I recently picked up Gillian White’s excellent Lyric Shame (Harvard University Press, 2014), which underscores, at one point, how shame indicates an awareness of others’ minds, and how we take up residence there. What’s fascinating, too, is the implied shame of expressing shame—perhaps the vulnerability of laying it bare. Certainly shame and vision are intertwined—shame seems to spring from being fixed in another’s gaze or one’s own, and glimpsing a self that chafes against idealized self-evaluation. Being visible, the object in someone’s field of sight, carries with it the risk of scrutiny and reduction. In that sense, so much of existing as a social being can involve shame. Being seen or understood is shameful, precisely because it is so limiting. It feels false to be calcified by another’s presumed understanding. To add another complication, there’s also the shame of being betrayed by need; the shame of being dependent on others who will never know us fully.

MR If I’m understanding you correctly, then, you’d like to gesture toward the universality of shame? Or if not universality, its operativeness in the multiple cultures at hand?

JX Yes, the universality of shame—the shame that comes with being a visible object in the world.

Mariam Rahmani is a writer and student based in Los Angeles. She is currently working on a novel as well as, with the support of a 2018 PEN/Heim Translation Grant, an authorized translation of Mahsa Mohebali’s Don’t Worry (Tehran: 2008) while pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at UCLA. Her essays and reviews have been published in The Rumpus and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

#jenny xie #mariam rahmani #interview #poet #article #political poetry #poetry

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