Looking Back at My Oeuvre
Without having every work I have written since high school in front of my to prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt, I am going to contend the title of this post as only the second time I have made use of the word “oeuvre” lifetime. Certainly feels that way.
It just means “body of work.” Technically speaking, it probably only applies to such a body of work in its entirety, as opposed to a deliberate look at each given piece. I am announcing the former on this site coming up in May, wherein I will be looking back on each of my books and describing what I hoped to achieve, how it came about, general writerly stuff with the benefit of some distance in many cases.
So, the title may not be English professor-approved, but I just wanted to use “oeuvre” again.
Jokes aside now, I will in fact use May, possibly parts of June to look back on my various books. I am not renowned at this point, nor am I done with writing, so perhaps there is a “who gives a shit” element to this project, in which case, keep moving I suppose. Yet this year I have dedicated my time on this site to explore the nature of both writing, and my personal opinion on same. Best way to do that is to revisit my previous stuff in a bit more detail.
I would love you to purchase and read any of my previous works, but promotion (REpromotion?) is not the driving force behind this upcoming look back. Educations on process and presentation of my tastes as an author are the primary purposes of this little journey. Even if you do not (or have already!) choose to read any of these works, I hope you will get something out of my style and technique discussion as framed in these pieces.
As always, respectful comments and questions are welcome.
We will start next week with the first book I ever published, my short story collection, Thank You For Ten.
Heart-Probability: What I Look For in Fiction
I don’t know what the hell to read next.
Only once I skim either the shelves of the library, or the descriptions online can I come to a conclusion about what book I want to try next. (Word to other indie-publishers, that jacket blurb is damned important!)
About 50% of the time, I am right. The other half of the time, it feels like I chewed a sour grape as a result of the let down of my expectations. Especially when I rarely even read a jacket blurb’s summary of a book that blows me away. Usually when I decide on a book to read, it’s because I said to myself something akin to, “not bad. Let’s see.”
Might be a current bestseller. Might be a second-tier thriller from 40 years ago. I will start to read it, if I get the sense I will find the story something I call “heart-probable.” By that I mean you can put characters in space, in purgatory, in traction, but if it feels like in the end a human experience is unfolding in a manner that I could sympathize with, (or long for) I am more likely to give it a try.
There are plenty caveats, to be fair.
For example, even though I give off the occasional “snooty English professor” vibe, I will prioritize this heart-probability over intricate writing and illustrious prose 85% of the time or more. If I want straight, eloquence, or word magic at its finest, I generally turn to poetry over fiction.
The other side of that coin shines just as brightly though; I don’t want vapid, pedestrian writing if it serves only to push cookie cutter, Hallmark Channel level characters around on a map, either. Suspense and adventure stories are among my favorite reads, when done well. Glorified travelogues propped up by guns and sex are not. That’s because even the least appealing person in real life generally has more to say, to think, to aspire to than the heroes of such books.
Heart-probable.
Even when I attempt a full escape into a story not known for the depth of character, I usually cannot finish it. I struggle with most sci-fi, (concept-over-heart) and Tolkien-style fantasy, (lost in a sea of words) for this reason.
Yes, that is subjective to some degree, but so is every other metric by which a given reader judges what works and does not work for them. We’re talking about effective fiction, not particle physics.
There are other caveats to my preferences as stated here. A story can be heart-probable, and yet removed too far from my personal experience in life to hit the nail fully on the head. Heart-probable but without hope puts me off as a reader, even if beautiful. I study and perform Shakespeare, I know tragedy-as-art. in fact perhaps because I am involved in Shakespeare, I have less tolerance for tragic stories from other places/ in modern settings? I’ll have to ponder that.
Anyway, I work overtime not to succumb to the notion this real-world has no hope, so I am not at all drawn to fictional world that offer none of it.
Maybe I should call this whole concept “My-Heart-Probable,” instead given how subjective this is, and how many stories I hated could nonetheless by “heart-probable” to someone. I concede that much of what makes a story worth reading all the way through for me is this intangible, nebulous notion of wanting to be along for a ride that is at least adjacent to the human threads that shape me as an individual, even when the setting and plot is outlandish.
Characters in the stories that mean the most to me are also tethered to the everyday to some extent. They may, and often do find themselves in the middle of something out of the ordinary, even otherworldly. Yet they remained tethered on some level to their status quo. If I am to care about how they confront the proverbial inciting incident, I have recognize a bit of where they came from before hand as human, and adjacent in some degree to my own humanity. Characters placed in entirely foreign circumstances have to remind me of something that is not, or was not foreign to me in the first place.
The idea that I could see myself next to a character as they live the story is an important one, even if I would not choose to be in the middle of their life.
A protagonist either makes a better world, or becomes a better them as a result of the stories that appeal to me most.
And when I cannot find enough of these stories to read, I do my best to write them.
Heart-probable.
National Poetry (sometimes) Month
We are well into April, which is, as the title mentioned, National Poetry Month. (It is also National Autism Awareness Month, which was probably a coincidence, but I like to pretend the two are connected in some unseen, life-affirming way. That’s another post.)
Poetry peaks and valleys over the course of my writer’s life in terms of priority. Years ago I was always writing it. There have been spans of years during which I write none. Currently, poetry is near the valley for me, though climbing slowly over the last two years.
I meant to release a large volume of found poetry this year during April. It is my second, and by far the more ambitious work of “blackout” or “found” poetry, wherein a pre-existing work is used as a template, and all words that are not the poem are “blacked out.” My Lodestone Crossing is my first foray into this, which you can find on this site under, “My Books.” That was my first experience with the method, and I used multiple sources. This second attempt altered one very large single source of words into a quasi-epic that took my six months to compose, and is taking me much longer to merely transpose into typed words than I planned.
Plan priorities and schedules being what they are, this project has fallen somewhat by the wayside. It will still happen, but nowhere near the end of this month.
I’m at ease about that, as I am with most of my poetry. As bad as I am at marketing my work, I market the poetry even less. Lodestone Crossing is the first book of poetry I have ever offered to the public, and even that is not standard poetry.
Poetry is the one writing world in which I feel totally free to do what I damn well please, no restrictions, expectations, or in most cases, promotion.
Forms are long out of style–I use them. So called “free verse” despite its name apparently still has certain expectations, especially for performance; I ignore them.
Self-consciousness is virtually zero when it comes to my poems.
Of course all of my writing would benefit from a touch of this carefree approach, and I am doing better in that regard. That notwithstanding, poetry is there, as has always been, unless I’m entering a contest with specific rules. (Exceedingly rare for me to do with poetry.)
Not every writer composes poetry. Then there are poets who meticulously build their entire writing world around same. I make no proclamation about poetry’s place in your life.
I will say that every writer should have for them what poetry is for me. If you write, there should be some genre, some format or style of writing you engage without consideration of expectations or appreciation. If you can do this for all media, great, but make sure there is at least one that you can go into 100% guilt-free and rule-ignorant. That embrace of freedom and rejection of convention is bound to help your imagination and vocabulary, and make you more intimate with language on the whole, and thus improve the rest of your writing.
Poet and did not know it? More like a poet, and did not feed the overriding scholarly or cultural expectation of it.
(See, I broke obvious poetry norms there. Ask me how much it bothers me.)
Writing as “Rotisserie” Fantasy Baseball
Baseball season is upon us here in the United States. With it, (often) is my jump into fantasy baseball.
For those unfamiliar with fantasy sports, (into which I never sink any money), the concept is simple enough. You join a league, usually online these days. You draft real Major League players onto your team as does everyone else in your league. You score fantasy points based on what your players do in real life, vs what the players “owned” by your opponents do.
That, in essence, is all there is to it.
How does one win?
That depends on the format you’ve selected. There is no need to get into detail about that here. In the broadest of terms, some formats emphasize what happens week-to-week against a single opponent. Others, like the format I am trying for the first time this year, emphasis an entire season’s performance of your players. Whoever accumulates the most points by the end of the real-life season is the winner. “Rotisserie” they call it, having nothing at all to do with seasoned chicken.
It is early yet, but I think I may already enjoy this marathon approach as opposed to the sprint approach.
Most writing is like this rotisserie style fantasy baseball. Accumulative. Slow. Deliberate. Plenty of time to make course corrections if things start to go South.
True, not everything we write gives us the luxury of such a distant deadline. But even shorter works, outside of daily journalism which is indeed a sprint, can benefit from this marathon approach.
We set a goal, brainstorm how to obtain it. Some of us outline at some of us don’t, but then we move into first drafts. Round of revisions. Edits. Next draft, and so on. Perhaps a beta reader or two for some of us that offers thoughts. More revisions. Your milage will vary but that’s the gist of it.
You can have a bad day or even a bad week or two in “roto” fantasy baseball and still end up on top by October. You just have to be willing to look at who/what is not working, and adjust accordingly. No need to rush or panic. Like a manager look at the big picture and do what you think it best to fix things.
Writers have the advantage over the fantasy baseball manager in one key aspect at least; there is no time table by which to perfect the work. Again, there are deadline-based exceptions, naturally. Yet writers, especially indie-authors such as myself have the luxury of moving the “season” into November, December, the following January, however long it takes to pace the marathon of our writing to get it to its best possible outcome.
Fantasy football is almost always a week to week battle with little room for error. I hate it and love it for that. As far as writing analogy goes though, roto fantasy baseball is most applicable.
There is plenty of time for you to write the best version of what you want written. Use all of it.
Writing and “Respiration”
People are built to breathe. Literally.
You’ve heard the old warning; a person can go two weeks without food if they have to. Two days without water at best. But two minutes without air. (Broad estimate, but it sounds better with all the twos.)
Nothing works without breathing. Allow me to be morbid for a moment when I mention that even if a person is dying from suffocation, their unconscious body will still go through the motions of breathing in its final moments, even if there is nothing to inhale.
In other words, people will attempt respirate reflexively even when hope is lost.
We can however hold our breath. People can make the conscious decision to pause their respiration, even if only for a very limited amount of time. And of someone fights off the urge to go back to breathing long enough to pass out? They start to breath the moment their lose consciousness. (One reason that wise parents never did/do fall for tantrums involving breath-holding; it literally cannot cause permanent damage to the brat in question. The body and brain will not allow it.)
Enough with the macabre extremes, though.
People can hold their breath for safe controlled periods of time as well, most often for the purposes of swimming.
Adept swimming is basically founded on knowing the best times to breathe, and to choose to stop breathing, with minimal pain and maximum effect. Swimming well is about knowing the need to breath will always be there, but having the intelligence, the bodily awareness to manipulate the unavoidable need for respiration to one’s advantage.
Only a deranged person would attempt to swim with the assumption they can dismiss altogether the need to breathe.
It makes a solid analogy for writing.
Writers must swim. Some will merely bob around in the family pool. On the other side, there are the elite: the Micheal Phelps types. Most fall in between. Except the writer’s unavoidable reflex is not breathing in this case, but validation.
I opine that virtually every writer that produces more than a private diary at some point at least wants some validation that their work is appreciated. More than 99% of writers likely want to impact and/or influence a readership of some size. The desire is not going to go away anymore than the need for breath.
Yet it’s vital that we acknowledge this, and train ourselves to “swim.” That is to say, habituate the conscious choice to create written work while suspending our natural desire for validation for as long as we can before admitting in, immersing ourselves in it a while, and then drawing another breath to continue the swim.
The problem is that validation for any given writer is far less abundant than the air we all breathe. The good news is unlike the air we breathe, we can suspend this reflex for extended periods of time under many more circumstances.
Gills, as it were, would be wondrous. To swim under the water for as long as we wanted without coming to the surface for air. Just as writing would take on a whole new meaning for most of us if we never once had to face to innate desire to have people enjoy our work. That too would be a powerful paradigm shift in the world. A handful reach this magnanimous relationship with the reading world, no doubt.
Also no doubt? I am not one of those elites. I do have to acknowledge my desire for people to enjoy and appreciate what I create. I do have to accept that thus far very few people choose to do so.
Yet I remain a pretty decent swimmer for the time being.
Ty Unglebower 