Library Sessions
This may seem hard to believe, but until last week, I had almost never done any writing in the library. Or reading, for that matter.
This was true even in college; I very rarely studied in the library itself. I just couldn’t get into the proper groove there.
Last week, however, I opted to shake up my routine a bit, and I took my ancient laptop over to the local branch library, about five minutes where I live. How did it go? Somewhat to my surprise it went well, and continues to go well.
Sometimes it got too noisy, what with kids and such, but otherwise, the concept of writing in the library at this point in my history is going better than in previous times I’ve tried it.
Granted, I think on average I write fewer words per session at the library than I do at home, at least so far. That may improve. The key seems to be in the “downtime”. Whereas at home if a paragraph isn’t coming I may wonder around the room, or the whole house, or take a short break and do something else, at the library, all I really do when I am not writing, is sitting there in front of the laptop for a few minutes. I don’t have internet on the laptop when I go to the library, so all I am doing is either writer, or, not writing. And when i am not writing, I am more focused on getting back to it, because it’s the entire reason I left home with all of my equipment in the first place. It would be a bit of a waste to go through all of that only to abandon the writing once I got there. (And I don’t leave my laptop unattended.)
Not that my mind doesn’t wander sometimes at the library. But even the wandering is shorter, and less intense. My very presence at the table in the library narrows my field of thought to the point that letting my mind wonder every few sentences is actually a bit helpful. Though wandering can sometimes be deadly at home, I’ve found that working at the library is actually somewhat enhanced by the frequent, short mental breaks I take. Less gets done, but the quality of what gets done doesn’t really suffer, so it’s a net gain to me.
The library is closed on Friday, so I went to a local coffee shop/cafe on that day to do some writing. That was less productive. It was more noisy there, and though many a written word has been born in places such as that, (more than one person had a laptop open when I was there) my early sense is that I’ll get much more out of a library session than a coffee shop session.
Most of my writing will probably still be done at home, if I had to predict. Still, opening myself up to taking at least a small session of my writing work outside to the nearby library has contributed to my feeling like a writer who invests his time and energy wisely. Walking into a library and knowing what I will be working on gives me a sense of “writerness” that one can’t under estimate. Feeling as though one’s day, or at least a few hours of it revolves around the act of writing reflects back on the writer in a positive way. It says, “I’m here to write. This is what I do.” In my case, I’ve found that a brief drive to the library enhances the effect, for now.
Ten Days Out for Flowers of Dionysus.
Ten days from today, on the 21st, I will launch my first novel, the community theater based story called Flowers of Dionysus.
Writing and editing are of course done, and for all intents and purposes the technical stuff is completed as well. If I pushed a bit, I could probably launch it any day now. But I am sticking with the 21st, because that’s what I’ve been saying all year. Sometimes it’s good to keep with your plan, if there is no pressing need to change it.
What else can be said at this point? I suppose I could share the all important “one sentence” summary of the novel. Experts insist an author must have one, after all:
Before giving up the stage for good, a disillusioned actor joins a friend’s troubled summer production, during which he and some of his cast mates experience odd encounters and supernatural phenomenon that will challenge their views of theatre and of themselves.
I’m still not convinced that if you fail to come up with a single sentence summary, you have failed to write a good novel. I’m not in love with some of the conventional promotion wisdom out there. Nonetheless, I accepted this challenge, and I feel I’ve succeeded in capturing the spirit and purpose of my novel.
Yet what else can I say, ten days out?
I’ve given a more detailed overview of the novel’s purpose here before. I’ve talked about the novel’s setting and explained why I chose such a location for this story. Last year I wrote and published a collection of short stories that took place in the exact same setting, as sort of a build-up. (That collection, Thank You For Ten is still available. On Apple too.)
Plus, I’ve introduced you to each of the five point-of-view characters already: Matt, Marcus, Tanya, Centauri, and LeMay.
You’ve even seen the cover.
I’ve tweeted links to each of those posts, and will to this one. I’ve tweeted thoughts about writing and publishing this novel that weren’t connected to a blog post.
This novel has been a major part of my creative life for more than six years. And now, I’m only ten days out from making it available to all of you. To the world.
You’d think I’d have something poetic to say about all of this, ten days out, but I don’t. I will of course mention it again right before launch, and try to tasteful promote the book on that day and into the future. I’ll do my best to interest new people into buying the book and telling their friends about same. I may or may not succeed to my expectations and aspirations with that. But ten days out, if you follow me on Twitter and your read this blog, and if you are a personal friend of mine, there is not much else to be said. I have either intrigued you by now or I have not.
And of course I hope I have. If so, you’ll be able to find out what all the fuss has been about. You’ll find out about price and links and a few other things regarding my first novel…exactly ten days from now.
I Am Not Freddie Mercury
My singing voice is a bit rusty these days. I used to sing more often, and have even appeared in a few musicals. Plus the occasional karaoke night. I’ve been told that with practice and work, I would have a “very good” singing voice.
When in top form, I can even hit a few high notes. (For a guy, anyway.) I remember once during a break in rehearsing some play or another at a theater, a few actors were goofing off on stage, singing Bohemian Rhapsody. I chimed in, (in appropriate pitch if I may say so) with the part that goes, “…if I’m not back again this time tomorrow, carry on, carry on.” I nailed it, given the informal nature of the sing along. Compliments and laughing followed.
A few minutes later one of the women in the cast came up to me, and of my section of the Rhapsody said, “You’ve got a nice voice.” Before I had a chance to thank her, she added quickly, “It’s not as good ad Freddie Mercury, though.”
Imagine being on say, a third date with someone you are really connecting with. It’s been a great evening, and you both stop and rest on a park bench to take in the warm, orange twilight of a waning summer’s day. A small fountain burbles nearby, birds tweeting here and there. Not the most profound moment of your lives, but quite pleasant. Then a stranger with a dog approaches, greets you with a warm, “Hello. Nice evening, isn’t it?” Before you say, “Why yes, it is,” he lets his dog squat right in front of the bench to take a big shit. Then he and the dog walk off without a word, leaving the steaming gift right in front of you and your date.
That’s pretty much how it felt to be told I had a nice voice, yet also reminded I was not Freddie Mercury all in one breath.
Honestly, why harsh someone’s mellow like this? Why qualify a nice compliment about a fun, informal and impromptu display of musical talent with a reminder that I am not, in fact, one of the most unique, talented, and celebrated vocalists the world has ever known? I mean, Freddie Mercury, think what you want of the man and his music, but by any objective metric he almost single-handedly rewrote the very concept of rock showmanship. And that’s setting aside his stupefying vocal range and clarity. And he did it for years in fronts of crowds of one hundred thousand people or more. And yet you find it necessary to let me know, just in case I was unaware, that my rendition of a few bars of Bohemian Rhapsody in front of seven people in a mostly empty community theater in West Virginia can’t possibly measure up to that?
Thanks, woman who is pretty, but who will never have a body or face like Scarlett Johansson. (I did not really say this, relax.)
No, I am not Freddie Mercury. And I don’t just mean that literally; I also do not have talent equaling that of Freddie Mercury. I have no problem saying this. I don’t feel my entire musical ability should be judged by that goofy sing along that night, and with some time to get back into peak condition, I feel confident that I would be a good singer again. Yet I could practice all day and night and never, ever be Freddie Mercury level in my vocal prowess. Got it.
But I never said that I wanted to be, or that I thought I could be. I was a dude singing with some people one night, and I did it well. I wasn’t trying to blow anybody away, only to have fun and sound good. I think I achieved that.
There’s an old expression, “Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.” In other words, don’t dismiss something of decent quality or effectiveness by concentrating on the fact that it is not the best possible outcome. Forgive the redundancy of this statement but, being good is, well, good. Being great is wonderful when it happens, and each of us probably has some greatness inside that we will bring to fruition in our lifetime. But being good in the meantime is not falling short of greatness; rather greatness is exceeding that which is admirable and well done and appreciated by a few yards or more.
Not a statue of
Ty Unglebower.
I feel this about reading and writing. As readers, we often want a novel to transport us to another state of consciousness, to be so engrossing, so transcendent in nature that we are no longer reading but experiencing a work of fiction. The result not only entertains us, but moves us, and changes our lives. I don’t know about you, but most novels I read do not attain this stature in my life.
Yet I have read some fine novels! I have enjoyed, laughed at, thought about and been inspired by all kinds of fiction over the years. Yes, once in a while, I have had the transcendent feeling, but mostly I experience pleasure. Simple, uncomplicated pleasure, when I find a book I enjoy. That needs to be enough most of the time, because if I go into every novel hoping for and even expecting a life changing absorption into the author’s world, I’m going to spend much of my time as a reader let down.
Yet this expectation of greatness, this “chasing Freddie Mercury” if you will can be even more dangerous for writers. If we write our stories with the ultimate goal of changing society, or being immortalized, we’re not going to get much done, other than perhaps driving ourselves crazy. It’s okay in the back of our minds to hope that something we write will one day touch millions, or be seen as some kind of definitive work, but it mustn’t be our constant driving force. Greatness cannot usually be predicted or manufactured. And even some forms of greatness are temporary, lasting for a few years, and then fading away from collective memory. It takes the greats of the great, (or the luckys of the lucky) to have the greatness live on for decades or more.
By the way, it’s also okay to just write what you think and hope will be a good work. Maybe you don’t set out to alter society with your novel. Maybe “all” you want is to produce a work that will entertain, make people think, laugh or cry for a while. Maybe you just want to write a novel that the reader loves to consume in the moment. Maybe you just want to be thought of as a “good writer.” That’s acceptable, and indeed is probably the wise way to approach our craft. Greatness will come to whom it comes. Just write your story. Sing your song. Play your part. “Consider it a challenge before the whole human race,” that you ain’t gonna lose.
Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar…Even in Fiction
In my last post I mentioned theatre, which got me thinking about something over the last few days.
As an actor, I’ve worked with directors and acting coaches who insist that everything one does on stage must be motivated. Motivated is a huge concept in acting. So huge in fact it’s often misapplied: seen as the philosopher’s stone, by which every moment on stage is justified.
Motivation is certainly important, but as as Freud is alleged to have said once, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” In other words, if you accept the attribution, Freud is saying, “even I sometimes see something that doesn’t represent genitalia, and you know how fond I am genitalia symbolism!”
All right, I oversimplified that, and I also was a bit of a smart ass in doing so. Yet there is an underlying truth in it; some things just happen, some objects just exist, and so on. There doesn’t have to be an intrinsic, hidden meaning behind everything.
Take my acting example. If I am portraying a character giving a speech while sitting at a table, I may at some point gesticulate by wiping my hand across that table at some point. The type of director’s I mentioned at the start of this post would want to know why I decided to do that. Answering that it was simply a random gesture that came forth organically from the character I am creating is not acceptable to such people. If I cannot explain why i glided my hand to the right instead of the left, or what it was about the particular word I was saying at the exact moment I made the gesture, I haven’t justified the movement at all.
In short, I find this approach to be, well, bogus. While theater is not a hyper-realistic recreation of everyday life, we should be able to recognize, both as actor and as audience, a degree of normalcy in most characters and plays. This means that people, going throughout the course of their day, do not always have a direct, discernible motivation for every action they take. Sometimes we rap our fingers on a table, click our teeth, or play with a rubber band while we’re thinking. Each of these actions can of course be motivated by a very specific desire or emotion or characterization, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Life, in other words, is filled with unmotivated actions and moments. People are alive, and their brains generally go a million miles a minutes. Running our fingers along the edge of a table, or leaning back in our chairs while taking is often just a by-product of complex, self-aware, conscious lifeforms going about their day.
I have the same view as an author of fiction.
Like theatre, fiction cannot be expected to be an exact realistic transcription of how humans in any situation behave in life. Events move faster in fiction. Pages of things like , “Um, well, ya know, ahh” are excised from our dialogue in fiction, even though most people will fall back on these semi-conscious verbal crutches many times through a day. When character’s do talk, it might be a highly stylized literary type of speech, depending on what you’re writing.
Fiction, even realistic fiction, is not on the exact same plane as actual life. Yet, in most cases that are not experimental or absurdist in nature, fiction should be a reasonable facsimile of life in the real world. This means that sometimes our characters, just to seem alive, just tap their fingers on tables, kick a piece of trash across the road while walking, and in general do the little, unmotivated things I mentioned before.
“Every single letter, word, phrase and sentence must matter in your fiction,” we’re told. “If your story can be told without even the slightest mention of something, get rid of that something. Kill your darlings!”
Yes, all right, I get your meta-point; don’t waste words or your reader’s time. Fair enough. But I can’t off the top of my head think of any novel that would have collapsed without its mention of someone blowing the steam off of their tea in one moment, or a description a a tiny bird that flies by, never to be seen or mentioned again in the rest of the pages. Yet such moments abound in much fiction. Why? I don’t want to speak for other authors, but my guess is that they don’t exist because the structural integrity of their entire manuscript depends on mentioning that “my father whistled as he painted.” My guess is that such moments exist because they give depth, and make scenes more natural.
People just do…stuff. Yes, kill your darlings to some extent, because you can’t have a whole chapter describing how grandma took her coffee. (Though people write that way, anyway.) But not every little thing that doesn’t reveal character or move the plot forward is extraneous, though that’s often the sage wisdom we find on writer pages. It’s important to me that people view the characters in most of my fiction as people, who do “people things,” and that is the reason they lean against the telephone pole while they explain something, or crumple a soon-to-be-forgotten napkin in such a manner. It’s life. The little things that come about as a result of being what humans are. That to me is enough of a reason to include those small touches, in proportion to the things that do move the plot of reveal character.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Whether Freud really said it, or whether it applied to genitalia doesn’t matter. What matters is that we remember to apply this to our writing, even as we set out to kill all those darlings.
Why a Community Theater?
Someone once asked me why I set my upcoming novel, Flowers of Dionysus in a community theater. I began to tell them several of the things I have mentioned here on the blog and in other venues; I wanted to explore what the arts in general and theater in particular can do for audiences and people in the show alike. I want to share the magic that can descend on a dedicated group of artists, resulting in a presentation that is greater than the sum of its parts. I wanted people to know how heartbreaking it can all be, as well.
I didn’t get that far with this person, though. They clarified their question. They wanted to know why I set the novel in a community or amateur theater. Why not put it on Broadway, or in a fictionalized professional company? Wouldn’t that have been more interesting or exciting?
Not necessarily, I told them.
To begin with, yes, “write what you know,” when taken literally means I have a leg to stand on when it comes to community theater, as I have been in it many times over years. Yet even if I had been in mostly professional theater in my life, I would have set my novel in the Little Dionysus Playhouse, the theater of my creation.
Wonderful things can happen on all levels of theater, from a tiny black box tucked away in a small college, to the Kennedy Center in D.C. When the combination of passion, dedication, talent and audience connection is present, everyone is exhilarated, on, off and behind the stage.
Yet, if I may say so myself, there is a certain element present in volunteer, community or amateur theater that you don’t find in professional or unionized productions with big budgets. It’s the element of personal choice to participate.
Of course professional actors choose their projects much of the time. But if you are a true professional actor, feeding yourself by way of performing regular in shows, you are probably going to be open to taking jobs that in a perfect world you may decline. Maybe you aren’t thrilled with the idea of appearing for two nights only in that experimental piece about gravy going up at the converted subway station. But, like anyone else, you have a job to do, it won’t kill you, and you have a car payment coming up. This will work until the next chance to be in something more in line with your particular tastes comes along.
On the community level, everyone is choose to be there on the day, the week, the eight weeks of your average rehearsal schedule. This doesn’t make them lesser actors or lesser techies by default, but it does mean they have more freedom of movement. They may audition for a role, but they have the luxury of choosing when and for what they wish to try out. Or they can choose not to be in anything at all for two years. By calculating their free time, and considering the other personal desires and requirements their life places on them, volunteer/community actors bring a whole different set of considerations to the table. All actors can be artists, but community actors can afford not to be as needed, and come back to it when their passion is at high tide. If paying your rent depends on your performing in something regularly, that’s not the case.
That free will to mix the creation of art into the other components and priorities of one’s life for the selected period of time provides for some interesting character and plot possibilities in fiction. That scenario provides a cornucopia of potential motivations for a character to be in a community production. The story I wanted to tell in Flowers of Dionysus worked much better with this type of commitment to the arts. How and why does each character come to be a part of the production depicted in the novel? I enjoyed exploring that.
Plus, having it be on the community level gave me, the author, a bit more freedom as well. There are things my characters could get away with as volunteer actors that professional actors could not without being fired. I wanted the freedom to delve into eccentricities and attitudes (not all of them positive) within theatre in a more open manner than setting the story in a professional company would have allowed. The considerations and boundaries are so different.
Also, though I’m reluctant to use the word “suspense,” there is more of it when setting a story in a community theatre. Things are a bit more fragile in an amateur production. On Broadway, if they guy playing Javert comes down with the flu, mechanics are in place to replace him, and the show continues without major incident. In community productions it can be a scramble when the third torchbearer with three lines gets the flu the night before opening. Maybe not the stuff of thrillers, but I like artistry mixed with a little bit of fear and finger crossing at times.
I did not set the novel in a community theatre because I think community actors are lesser artists than professionals. No because I think they are greater by default. The often ignored truth is that you will find terrible professional actors and geniuses in community theatre. You artistry and craft is not determined by how much or if you get paid to do it. Your love for what you do, and a desire to move people when doing it determines such things. I wanted that truth at the center of this particular story, without having to navigate the unique challenges of a professional theater setting.
Ty Unglebower 