Quote: Reality & Fiction

“The difference between reality and fiction?
Fiction has to make sense.”

Tom Clancy

The Top 5 things I attribute to (or blame on) my creative side

5. I lie.

Gibbs’ Rule #7: Always be specific when you lie.

And I am. I lie without missing a beat. About stupid things! I mean, why tell the truth when the lie is so much more interesting, right? When I was a sophomore in college, I forgot that I had a meeting with a professor until 15 minutes after it was supposed to start. Without thinking I told him that the battery in my car had died, and explained that while yes, I did live only a five minute walk from campus, I had been downtown that morning and couldn’t leave my car where it’d been parked. This led to advice about what the problem could be and what I should ask my mechanic. As a freshman I received an A on a biology paper in which I explained that the reason I had chosen to read and summarize that article on skin cancer was because a friend of the family was recovering from stage III melanoma. The real reason? That article was the only one in the New England Journal of Medicine that I could understand. (I’m still proud of that one.) Several men who have asked for my number are under the impression that my first name is Lilah, including a semi-elderly man in Madrid. Who I gave my fake number to. In Spanish.

At the beginning of the semester, my professor ended an anecdote with, “…which is why I’m a fiction writer–can’t stop lying.”

So it’s all good.

4. I’m passionate and dramatic.

I also attribute this to being a Leo. Enough said.

3. I over-think everything.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I worry myself to the point of indecision. Even now, a semester and a half into my MFA–which I love–a huge “What if?” hangs over me. When I was making my decision, I had several pro/con lists. I did research into financial aid, classes offered. I ran down the cost of 2 and 3 years at each of the schools I got into. I weighed the commute to NH during the day against the commute into Boston at night. I would wake up in the middle of the night with another factor to consider.

A similar thing happens to me when I’m writing a story and a character faces a crossroads. My brain leaps into the possible outcomes–a hindrance, more so than anything else. But it’s something that I can’t shut off. Whether I’m deciding which graduate school I want to go to, the meaning of something someone has said to me, or the kind of maki I want to eat, I will over-think a situation until I am mentally exhausted. Or at least not hungry anymore.

2. My expectations of people and situations are greatly out of proportion with reality.

This is a direct effect of #1 and #3.

In Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote: “In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.”

I think that’s true, and I’m sure–in fact, I know–that I’ve done just that. But I go further. I invent–no, write–scenarios for every aspect of my life and am heartbroken when they don’t happen, or when they do if they aren’t to my satisfaction. For example, when I was quite young, I convinced myself that my parents were going to get me this puppy we’d seen in a pet store while visiting my cousins. Even though my mum had been very firm and told me no, we would not be getting the dog, I decided that this was because they were going to surprise me. For a week I thought about all of the things that I would do with Moe, named for Moe the Dog in Tropical Paradise, not for the Stooge. When my dad went back to Littleton to help my uncle with something, I knew it was really because he was picking up my puppy. They thought they were so smart, waiting a week to surprise me. But I knew. And then when my dad came home without Moe, I cried.

I’ve done it since I was a kid, and I’m still doing it today. And for the record, being aware of the fact that I do it? Doesn’t help.

1. I talk to people who are not there.

I’m serious: I have conversations with people who are not there. I mean that. I imagine that a friend, relative, love interest, what have you is sitting with me in the car, or on the couch, or on the back of my snowmobile (that only happened once), and I hear our conversation. These are people that I know, and I can hear their voices clear as though they were really next to me. Often, their responses are my own desired reaction, not at all characteristic of whoever it is I’m conversing with, but satisfactory for a fake tête à tête. More often, these fake interactions get me into trouble, because I come to expect that the actual incarnation of this person will be as sympathetic or kind or flirty as I imagine them to be, when the reality is quite the opposite.

Until I read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, in which she describes undergoing similar imagined conversations and likens them to that of any writer who hears voices, I thought that I was simply showing early signs of what would eventually develop into some sort of mental instability. Schizophrenia, multiple personalities, etc. You know, the biggies. But Lamott comforted me with the realization that I’m suffering from a very different mental instability: that of a writer.

Classes are as much about the setting as they are about the discussion.

There’s one particular room in which the majority of UNH’s fiction courses are held. I hate this room. I like intimate, cozy classrooms. This one is huge and sterile looking, with high ceilings that rain down harsh lighting, and three walls that are stark white—two are broken up by chalk boards, the third by two huge windows. The fourth wall is covered by a horrible (used in the most loving way) mural painted in 1940 by George Lloyd. At the time, UNH’s library was located in Hamilton Smith Hall. Lloyd and two other artists–Gladys Brannigan and Arthur Esner–were hired as part of the  Works Projects Administration (WPA) under Franklin D. Roosevelt to paint a series of murals throughout the library. When the library moved and the rooms were converted into classrooms, most of the murals were removed or covered up. This one by Lloyd–subject “farming in New Hampshire”–is the last remaining mural, although my professor last semester said that supposedly there’s a part of another mural still visible in an inaccessible area of the top floor. (I looked all of that up specifically for this post. I now know too much.)

I try to sit facing the wall with the windows, because there is something about that room—the lighting is the current theory amongst myself and peers—that just drains the energy right out of me. I mean that. I sit down, and within ten minutes I have a headache and lose focus. Facing the windows helps. Unfortunately, facing the windows also means that the mural is to my right, and because it stretches the entire wall it is impossible not to look at it.

And let me tell you: that mural is the most distracting, creepy painting. It’s become a game now to create stories about the various things going on in the mural. As viewers, we’re looking out on farmlands progressing through the four seasons. Some of the scenes are folks working in the fields, some are views into buildings–a barn, a schoolhouse, a farmhouse, and what I think is a meetinghouse. The glances inside the buildings are probably the most disturbing; the buildings are overpopulated, and all of the people within them are too big for the structures, looking as though four walls were just built around them to create tightly confined spaces of punishment. A classmate took it upon himself to count the number of people living within this mural and has kindly informed me that there are eighty-nine men, women, and children: twenty-nine work or stand outside, and sixty are packed into the four buildings. All of the visible faces are distorted, ugly–more alien or zombie than human.

Portion of UNH mural by George Lloyd, 1940

To give you some idea of what is going on in this mural, it begins and ends with two men in some kind of trade. While we joke that there are a couple of drug deals going down, these exchanges are more likely meant to represent the economic value of farming–the money put into it and the necessary goods that come from it. In everything that lies in between these deals, there’s a man standing on a horse-drawn hay wagon with his pitchfork (that appears to be) aimed for the throat of another man standing beside it; a preacher–who last semester I nicknamed Jim Jones–with his arms stretched out of the uppermost window of a barn, while a man holds up a baby to him; a man sitting at some sort of large dinner, his fork half-raised to his mouth as he stares out of the painting at the viewer, maybe perplexed by all of us as we are by him; a judge or official with his over-sized hand in a vice-grip on his lectern, glaring at people during a meeting; zombie-like children sitting in an over-crowded schoolhouse; a man on his horse, spreading seeds from what we’ve guessed must be a bag reading “potato seeds,” but the way his leg falls it reads “pot seeds,” and so forth…

Portion of UNH mural by George Lloyd, 1940

As I stated on my first day of the semester, when I was reunited not only with my friends but with this horrific and magnificent piece of art: It is my favorite and least favorite thing about that room.

Special blog thanks to L, my classmate and friend, who has many times sat with me during a class break to analyze and gawk at this mural; to P, who counted the persons appearing in the mural; and to J, who showed us the never before noticed door in the back corner of the classroom that he claims leads to Narnia, Hogwarts, and the adjacent classroom.

The Story of Kara, the Ketchup Queen

A “bedtime story” I wrote a couple of years ago for and about my best friend, who loves ketchup. Please don’t steal it and become famous.

—–

Once upon a dream, Kara wandered into the land of the Ketchup King. There she did wander the Ketchup-colored road to his Ketchup-colored Castle in the hopes of fulfilling her life-long goal of succeeding him to the throne and hoarding all of his beloved Ketchup packets. Along the way she met the Ketchup Army, armed with Hunt’s Ketchup Bottles. Though she was fake-wounded, with ketchup staining her skin red, Kara fought back with her own bottle of Heinz and managed to belay the attack. She trekked onward and thence came upon the dreaded Green Tomato Monster. The Monster, twice her size, made to attack, but our heroine was quick. With a flick of her pocket knife she cut him down, julienne style. As a trophy she cut the Monster’s vine and took it with her. Kara then came at last to the Ketchup-colored Castle of the Ketchup King. Sure of her approaching triumph, she entered the King’s great hall and called to him where he sat on his throne choking down a goblet of a 1956 French Catsup. “Be gone, Ketchup King!” she called to him, brandishing her knife in one hand and displaying the cut vine in the other. “Abdicate thy throne!” The Ketchup King, tired anyway of his ketchup-filled life, had no desire to fight the brave Kara. He threw down his goblet and bowed down his head. Red splattered across the floor and onto his robes. And so it was that Kara became the Ketchup Queen.

What’s that, Nicholas? You think it’s time for some conflict resolution?

So much of what I hear or read from writer’s about their process has something to do with their characters talking to them and leading them through their stories. Listen to your characters’ voice. Don’t try to control the plot. Allow your characters to take the lead and the plot will follow.

It’s all very romantic.

But my characters don’t talk to me. Sure, I can hear them. I know what they sound like. Sometimes they even argue with one another or with themselves. But at no point have they ever addressed me directly or indicated in any way that they had any better idea of where my story was going than I did. We are, most times, separate entities. They are my kids, roughhousing in their play pen, and I am still at the keyboard trying to figure out what the hell I am going to do with them before they drive me crazy.

Coming from a family of creative minds, I’ve heard of and can believe in the embodiment of the character by the author thing, and I’m glad for those authors that their characters talk to them and embark with them on this great journey of telling a story. In fact, while I’m sure that being addressed by one’s characters surely comes with its own set of troubles, I bitterly imagine it as just that: a great journey on which these authors and their characters, hand-in-hand, are skipping down the sparkling Plot Road.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my concerns for my current workshop—how differently it’s framed from other workshops, how much my professor seems to believe in letting the story take you where it wants to take you, and how scared I was of the idea of starting a story and letting it do just that. But man, I tried. I came up with an idea, and instead of following my usual pattern, I sat down and I started with a sentence, and followed it with another, and just wrote, in order, ideas as they came to me.

But it’s just not working.

Rather than ending up with a draft of a story that I was comfortable with, with scenes and characters that made sense and just needed to be expanded, I now have the first half of a story that is 90+% exposition, no distinct scenes, and my characters are just sort of—there. Flat. During my workshop, this is what I heard from my professor:  My character’s voice is not there. I’m trying too hard to navigate the plot and not allowing for the character’s voice to shine through. If I can’t hear the character’s voice, then maybe I’m writing the wrong story and need to write from a different POV.

BAH! Now I’ve got to start over and do it my way.

I’ve said this before: Most of the time, when I come up with an idea for a short story, I immediately need to know what the ending will be—or at least something close to what it will be, though I accept that this may change—and I work from there. I draft the ending scene. Then I begin to draft other scenes, not necessarily in any order, but key scenes that I know will factor into getting my characters to where they need to be. If I’m lucky, the beginning will become obvious to me without my needing to harp on it, and I can begin to piece together the scenes, adding information as necessary, until they come together in a way that makes sense. From there, I can figure out the holes and fill them in.

I liken it to a puzzle: We all know what the puzzle needs to look like when it’s finished—the picture is right there on the box. That picture is my ending. But we have to find the right pieces and fit them together before that ending makes sense. If I don’t have an ending, I get into trouble. Instead of enjoying each piece and taking my time putting them together, I start rushing to see what the final result is going to be and everything important is lost.

OKOKOK–I’m weird. I work backwards. For me writing is not a romantic or spiritual experience, it’s a game that I have to solve. I’m Mario, the ending is Princess Peach, and I’m just fighting my way through the castle to get to her.

…Yeah, that just happened. What a geek.

from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

Quote: Prose Writers

“Prose writers [...] are unreliable friends. They are always studying you to see if there’s anything in your personality or appearance that they can steal for their next narrative.”

-Charles Baxter, “Rhyming Action”

Running, and veggies, and vitamins–oh boy.

So, up until a few years ago, I cared very little about my health. I ate terribly and rarely exercised, I didn’t go to the doctor or the dentist as often as I probably should have, etc. I was not a sporty kid growing up, I was a video game kid. I still am, actually. And because I was never well-grounded in a healthy lifestyle (not that my mother didn’t try, mind you, but YOU try putting up with a stubborn Leo who hated all things vegetable), I allowed my health to become the very least of my priorities. I mean that: bottom of the list.

But my weight got to such a point that I was the heaviest I’d ever been, miserable, and hated to go shopping. (And I LOVE to buy myself things, so this was very devastating indeed.) At the beginning of my final semester of undergrad, in January 2008, I made the decision to get the ball rolling. I altered my diet, I started working out. It took a long time—I’d fall off the wagon, hop back on. Last summer, for the first time since I can remember, I reached a healthy weight and BMI for someone my height.

And then I started graduate school, and, like I always do, I allowed my studies to take priority over my health.

I haven’t been overwhelmingly terrible—not like I used to be. I don’t drink soda, I don’t stock my cabinets with sweets, I don’t eat chicken alfredo calzones. I actually eat breakfast and take a multivitamin every day—well, almost. But I haven’t been good, either. I’ve been eating out more than I should, I didn’t exercise once during my entire fall semester, and then when I finally got myself a new gym membership for Christmas, I immediately got sick, busted my ankle, and haven’t been back. The consequence? I’ve gained back eleven pounds, my immune system is down, and I have no energy. Ever.

Life’s just given me a kick in the ass, and so I found myself this morning running over all that I need to do to revamp my lifestyle—back to the gym, clean out whatever unhealthy things are in my cabinets and fridge, buy vitamin supplements, and track calories like it’s my job. I’m not looking forward to it. Whoever says that living healthy is easy has never had to deal with weight problems—over or under—or an emotional tie to food.  I have actual junk food menus that I can identify with each of the big emotional moments of my life. I’m also not looking forward to dealing with all of the friends who just don’t get it when I say, “No, I can’t eat that” or “No, I can’t share dessert with you.”

But I have to start making myself a priority again, step by step.

Today, I drank green tea and I turned down a brownie.

1,000 all-time views!

A small number to some of you, but exciting to me!

Zine

A few years ago a couple friends and I started our own “zine”—a self-published, small circulation magazine. We had all just graduated from college, were barely working (if at all), and were so, so in dire need of a creative outlet. We focused primarily on writing, usually accepting one prose piece and 3-5 poems per issue. We accepted artwork, though we could only publish in black and white, and were usually able to feature an artist in each issue. We also tried to include a short interview with someone with a creative presence in the North Shore area—a writer, musician, artist, what have you.

It was quite well done, actually, given our limitations when it came to funding. Nothing fancy. Designed in Adobe InDesign, printed at home and copied wherever we could make copies. But it wasn’t just thrown together, either–it looked cute!

I loved doing it, too. Funnily enough, it wasn’t the submissions that I loved that much, it was the design and seeing the magazine come together and improve with each new issue. I never took a design course, but I know enough about the Adobe Creative Suite that I played a heavy hand in the layout and design. For a time, before I’d applied to MFA programs, I considered applying instead to a MA in Publication and Design program. (It’s something I would still like to do, although I realize that I can’t actually stay in school forever. Oh, but to dream…!)

Anyway, we only lasted a year, four issues. Unfortunately, while we all needed real jobs, and two of us wanted and needed to go to graduate school, the time those other things took combined with the lack of money one actually generates with a new, small magazine, meant we didn’t have the time or funds to keep it going. One of us left after the first issue and while another friend took her place, eventually we all had excuses not to keep going.

But I miss it! I found a few copies of our second issue while I was cleaning out a shelf a couple of weeks ago, and I’d forgotten how much potential we had with that thing. Sure, there were kinks, but I think we could have ironed them out eventually. It’s been suggested that in lieu of the money for a printed magazine, there’s always the option of publishing online, but I’ll be honest: I’m not a huge fan of online publications. I know everyone says that print is on its way out, but I hate sitting at a computer all the time–it makes my eyes hurt, it makes my head hurt. I’d much rather have something tangible. There’s something about seeing my words in print that makes my heart go all aflutter, and I imagine that a lot of writers still feel that way.

Maybe when this program is over, I’ll see if anyone is interested in kicking off something new. And maybe by then I’ll realize how much easier it would be to just do it online, too. (But probably not.)

Bucket List

Perusing other writerly blogs, I saw that at least one person had dedicated a page to their bucket list. For those of you who don’t know what a bucket list is (and how could you not after the adorably freckled Morgan Freeman’s so-named film?!), it is simply a list of things to do before you die, or “kick the bucket.”

One day, at least six or seven years ago, I sat down and wrote out a quick bucket list. I’m guessing that since the movie wasn’t out yet that the idea came from the episode of Friends in which Phoebe is trying to do all of the things she wanted to do before her thirtieth birthday and finds out she is actually turning thirty-one–”The One Where They All Turn Thirty.” My list wasn’t very long, and I held back a lot of things because I was still in this weird phase in which I wore a lot of dark, over-sized hoodies and thought it was uncool to want normal things like a house and a family. But I kept it, somehow, through all of the computer disasters, and updated it a couple of years ago to include anything I could think of that I want to do before I die. Looking at it, there are probably some things I would add on, and probably some things that I should have added on back then and have since done anyway. And there are some things that I’ve even removed because they were the eighteen- or nineteen-year-old me’s desires, and really we are two different people.

Anyway, I liked the idea of having my bucket list as a page on the blog–then it’s in my face and I can’t forget about it for a couple of years at a time. So voila–my bucket list.