Writing, Character Inspiration, and Pinterest

So... I discovered Pinterest...

And now my life is centered on making dinner from recipes I found on Pinterest, emailing my husband funny pics I found on Pinterest while he's at work, pinning people and places and things that remind me of my story ideas on Pinterest... etc, etc, etc.

Now, major time suckage aside, Pinterest is a pretty cool place for writers to be.

I've started following any other writers I can find and they all seem to have at least one Pinboard dedicated to their craft. Maybe it's called "The Writing Life," or "The Creative Life," or "Novel Inspiration."

I have one called IDEA BOX that I am very much in love with.

However, what has become very obvious as I browse these writerly boards and pin more pictures and ideas to my own board is that many writers have ideas of what their main characters look like from people that they have actually seen before.

Maybe it's the lead singer of a band they recently discovered (guilty), that kid that longboards down your street at approximately 3:07 PM every weekday (guilty), or the small forward for your favorite NBA team (guilty). Wherever these people are seen, they can serve as great inspiration as the writer tries to create characters that are well-rounded and interesting.

However, what bothers me about this is that many writerly folks will post a picture of a famous actor or actress, or a beautiful person who is clearly a model, and will write underneath, "This is what Gray looks like," "An older version of Genevieve," etc.

I feel like most writers have done this at some point. Most likely their main characters do not look EXACTLY like the beautiful person from the picture, but the fact that the beautiful person serves as inspiration for most characters is annoying to me.

Because when a reader picks up a book written about a main character they identify with very closely, they imagine themselves in that character's life, as if they were a real-live person. Often, they actually imagine and feel that they ARE that character. This transmutation is such a real feeling and it is one that I love to experience as a reader and that I hope to create as a writer.

However, what if those readers knew that the characters they identify with so easily were created by the writer with an appearance akin to perfection, based on a model found in the pages of Vogue, a character from Vampire Diaries, or another beautiful person who is essentially PAID TO BE BEAUTIFUL?

I feel like this realization would break the spell cast by the writing itself, by the act of reading itself, because the reader finds that they were identifying with a person who, if they were part of this world, would be gracing the pages of fashion magazines and could star in their own reality TV show, if they were so inclined.

Does anyone else see a problem with the way that writer's today portray their characters or love interests? Does anyone else feel that characters should be just as flawed PHYSICALLY as they are personally or emotionally?

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On Zadie Smith and the Disappeared Remainder

During my recent pillage visit to the Orem Public Library, I picked up a work of non-fiction along with my stack of 15 young adult novels: Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith. I had read Zadie Smith's On Beauty and some of her interviews online, so I knew this book would be good for me.

But, because this book is good for me (good to exercise my mind, good to get me out of the habit of reading through books in an almost semi-conscious state) I don't exactly like reading it. This book is so dense, like a giant bowl of lentil soup. I know that eating this soup is good for me, but I also know that it's almost impossible to enjoy the process of eating it when it takes so much effort to get down.

This unpleasant reading experience doesn't have anything to do with the book itself, other than the fact that it is more complex and intelligent than I am and therefore, putting me and this book together forces an ultimate battle of wills, in which I sit and stare at the same paragraph for an hour and the paragraph catches me staring and says, "Really? You still don't get it?"

But I did finally get it, pretentious paragraph, and it only took a few hours on a Saturday when I was too lazy to get up and leave the house to see a movie about superheros.

The essay "Two Directions for the Novel" is a dissection of today's current novel form (lyrical realism) and the novel's future form (constructive deconstruction) in the form of Netherland by Joseph O'Neill and Remainder by Tom McCarthy, respectively.

Netherland, the essay claims, is perhaps the most perfect example of lyrical realism available today: "It is so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait," (73).

The novel, Smith states, is so anxious about its own status in the world of literature that it can't help but show an anxiety of excess and of lyrical overload, where "everything must be made literary. Nothing escapes.... even the mini traumas of a middle-class life are given the high lyrical treatment, in what feels, at its best, like a grim satire on the profound fatuity of twenty-first century bourgeois existence," (80).

To this trend of lyrical realism, Smith poses an important series of questions:

[Netherland] wants to offer us the authentic story of a self. But is this really what having a self feels like? Do selves always seek their good in the end? Are they never perverse? Do they always want meaning? Do they not sometimes want its opposite? And is this how memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent, lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really realism? (82).

If lyrical realism does not actually portray reality, than what is its purpose? Smith claims that "out of a familiar love, like a lapsed High Anglican, Netherland hangs on to the rituals and garments of transcendence, though it well knows they are empty," (82-83).

Then where is literature to turn if meaning cannot be created by a lyrical portrayal of life and, more importantly, the objects that make our lives what they are?

This is where McCarthy's Remainder comes in and where I began to be thoroughly confused. McCarthy belongs to a group of theorists called the Necronauts who are "interested in tracing the history of the disappeared remainder through art and literature," (90).

But what is this disappeared remainder?

It is the gap between a thing and its meaning.

In lyrical realism, a thing is given meaning by assigning it personal significance: "In Netherland, only one's own subjectivity is really authentic, and only the personal offers this possibility of transcendence... Which is why things are so relentlessly aestheticised: this is how their importance is signified, and their depth. The world is covered in language," (79).

But, when this lyricism does not actually do its job (ie. portray reality and provide meaning in that portrait), what are we left with?: "the ghost of the literary burns... away, leaving only its remainder: a nicely constructed sentence, rich in sound and syntax, signifying (almost) nothing," (82).

The disappeared remainder in a deconstructive text like Remainder does not romanticize an object or a place or make it personal, as this does not convey authenticity. Rather, it shows how the thing actually exists in its own reality, in its own space, and it lets it be. It does not assign meaning, but discusses the meaning found by its relation to other objects. The meaning assigned by lyrical realists cannot be authentic, because a thing is, after all, just a thing and should be observed and written as it is shown in space:

One does not seek the secret, authentic heart of things. One believes--as Naipaul put it--that the world is what it is and, moreover, that all our relations with it are necessarily inauthentic. As a consequence, such an attitude is often mistaken for linguistic or philosophical nihilism, but its true strength comes from a rigorous attention to the damaged and the partial, the absent and the unspeakable, (92).

Rather than assign meaning with lyrical language/personal significance, the deconstructive text discusses the thing in its own context. A description of a thing or place can be made a narration by showing how the thing has affected its surroundings. Because "everything must leave a mark.... everything has a material reality," (95) the narrator of Remainder is able to observe a street where a black man has just died, noting its "muddy, pock-marked ridges" and "tarmac, stone, dirt, water, mud" and think "There's too much here, too much process, just too much," (qtd. in Smith 92).

Therefore, this deconstruction is "yet a narration defined by absence, by partial knowledge, for we only know it by the marks it has left" and, most importantly, the disappeared remainder that lyrical realism ignores, but is thoroughly anxious about, is "the void that is not ours, the messy remainder we can't understand or control--the ultimate marker of which is Death itself," (92).

The new direction of literature, supposedly, is language that acknowledges the barrier between language and meaning, the disappeared remainder that exists when we acknowledge this barrier, and the arbitrariness of assigning literary qualities to a thing that cannot be known completely in terms of personal significance or blatant aestheticisation.

The new novel reads this: "'the rinsed taxes, hissing over fresh slush, shone like grapefruits,'" (qtd. in Smith 80) and asks "grapefruits?" Why not "let the orange orange and the flower flower," (91).

The new novel desires to "take the side of things and try to evoke their nocturnal, mineral quality. This is... the essence of poetry... of trying, and failing, to speak about the thing itself and not just ideas about the thing," (91).

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On finding the strength to continue

Lately, I've been having a hard time getting inspired to write.

This is partly because I just started a new job (hooray!) where I write about 4,000 - 6,000 words of online content for other companies (boo!). This does not help my motivations to get home from work and plop in front of the computer to write. Again.

The other part of it is that I've been lazy. I didn't trust when other writers said that writing was real work, meaning you write even when you don't feel like it. For a few days, I rebelled against this, and whenever inspiration left me, I minimized the document and watched an episode of Community. Or five.

When I finally came to myself to realize all that needed to be done (by me) to get my ideas on paper and in print would be terribly difficult and not always the funnest, I sort of lost my motivation all over again. 

Then I did something to come back: I picked up a good book and lost myself in it. 

The book was Fire by Kristin Cashore and it was wonderful. It was exactly what I needed. I can't believe I let it sit on my bookshelf so long, unread.

Reading Fire helped me realize things about myself as I writer that I desperately needed. Things that the advice posted on an author's blog about how to get inspired could not help me with. Things that I didn't even know I needed!

The major thing that I learned with Fire is that no matter how cool the concept of your story is, no matter how interesting the world it is set in, the thing that matters is the story. This goes along hand in hand with character. What happens to your characters and why does it matter? How does their life change, and how do they change to accommodate the difference? Why do people need to read this story?

While those are pretty tough questions, they helped me shift my focus. I was getting too caught up in what kind of world I wanted in my story, and what I wanted to happen when that I forgot why I was wanting to write this piece of crap anyway!

There is my two cents on how to get your mojo back. (PS: I highly recommend Fire to those that haven't read it! If you're a fan of Graceling, be prepared: I liked Fire better.)

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On character: A lesson from author Kate Atkinson

As I briefly mentioned before, I have a weird obsession with author Kate Atkinson. I first read one of her novels (Case Histories, a book that Stephen King called "the best mystery of the decade"), in a Contemporary British Literature class.

I remember being instantly drawn into the novel, sucked in so deeply and so irrevocably that I could not function until I finished the story. After Case Histories, I devoured her other mysteries surrounding the damaged yet lovable Jackson Brodie, One Good Turn and When Will There Be Good News? There is a fourth Jackson Brodie novel out, Rose Early, Took My Dog, but I haven't read it yet. (Gasp!)

Having read three of Atkinson's novels, and a few of them twice, I have come to realize some things about what makes her novels great: character.

The characters in Case Histories and its sequels are rich and real. Their lives are portrayed with such startling intimacy that I am at once terrified and delighted. They are complex humans thrown into amazing circumstances.

As I continue my own creative writing endeavors, I'm trying to learn more about creating rich characters from Atkinson. Below is an excerpt from When Will There Be Good News?, which surrounds the sixteen-year-old Reggie.

What I love about this section of Atkinson's writing is how she manages to create character in such a short amount of time. I could read fifty pages of the average young adult novel and still not have as clear a picture as I get from this short excerpt:
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"Have you had much experience with children, Reggie?" Dr. Hunter had asked at her so-called interview.

"Och, loads. Really. Loads and loads," Reggie replied, smiling and nodding encouragingly at Dr. Hunter, who didn't seem very good at the whole interviewing thing. "Loads, sweartogod."

....

The Hunters had a forty-inch HD television on which she watched Balamory DVDs with the baby, although he always fell asleep as soon as the theme tune began, snuggled into Reggie on the sofa like a little monkey. She was surprised Dr. Hunter let the baby watch television, but Dr. Hunter said, "Oh, heavens, why not? Now and again, what's the harm?" Reggie thought that there was nothing nicer than having a baby fall asleep on you, except perhaps a puppy or a kitten. She'd had a puppy once, but her brother threw it out the window. "I don't think he meant to," Mum said, but it wasn't exactly the kind of thing you did accidentally, and Mum knew that. And Reggie knew that Mum knew that. Mum used to say, "Billy may be trouble, but he's our trouble. Blood's thicker than water." It was a lot stickier too. The day the puppy went flying through the window was the second-worst day of Reggie's life so far. Hearing about Mum was the worst. Obviously.

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From these paragraphs, we learn about the characters by dialogue and anecdote. For example, the way that Reggie says "Sweartogod" is unique, young and probably something she says when she's nervous. We learn from the things that Dr. Hunter and Reggie's Mum say that they are concerned with being good caregivers for their children, even when the situation is not cut-and-dry. We learn from the way that Reggie notices things about her family that she is observant and wise beyond her years.

What do you think about this section? Something I'm wondering about as I write this, is whether or not this particular skill can be adapted in my writing style, or if it is something that is entirely too literary or too character-based to be included in a young adult novel.

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On writing: Lessons from the king

     I'm trying to be a writer, but it's harder than I thought it would be.

     As I started putting my ideas to paper, (I currently have two major ideas for novels), I soon realized that I needed help honing my craft. Whatever that "craft" is. I started shopping for helpful writing advice on the internet and in books. The first writing book I picked up was On Writing by Stephen King, which has been hailed by many a successful author as the go-to guide to writing. The big kahuna.

    I've decided to share what I've learned so far from the King in the form of memorable quotes from the memoir. But believe me, there are far more nuggets in the rest of the book than I'm including here. This thing is chock-full of noteworthy guidance!

from On Writing:

Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. You job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

If you write (or paint or dance of sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all. I'm not editorializing, just trying to give you the facts as I see them.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around.

With the passive voice, the writer usually expresses fear of not being taken seriously... With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid because he/she isn't expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

Rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.

 Description begins with the writer's imagination, bu should finish in the reader's. When it comes to actually pulling this off, the writer is much more fortunate than the filmmaker, who is almost always doomed to show too much... including, in nine cases out of ten, the zipper running up the monster's back.

Some people don't want to hear the truth, of course, but that's not your problem. What would be is wanting to be a writer without wanting to shoot straight.

     This is what I've learned so far from the King. But that's not really the hard part, it is? Now I've got to figure out how to actually use this stuff in my writing, without coming off as a watered-down wannabe. Yikes.

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