I've been rereading some personal-non-fiction, lately. Henry Rollins' "Black Coffee Blues" trilogy, Michael Palin's "Diaries", and (of course) Warren Ellis' "Shivering Sands". The best way to deal with free-floating depression: look at how you're heroes dealt with it. Rollins' "Intensity is all" point of view - which I still feel is covering a shit load of issues ranging from guilt (best friend shot and killed in front of him in 1992) to lack of connections (he never mentions friends that are just friends, only industry people). Palin's happy-go-lucky nature (which hides a lot of hard mental work - comedy is never easy). Ellis' ...now here's a bit, because "Shivering Sands" is more so a diary about ideas - you're watching Warren Ellis come up with the ideas for his work from 2000-2009, mostly in a drunken haze of futurism and sub-culture.
I touched a little on that - the idea thing - during a conversation with J.C. J.C. came into Kutztown a year after me, and seems like a weirdly displaced little brother (in the same way the N.H. is a weirdly displaced twin), and both of us being theater majors meant that we were exposed to the same teachings, done in the same methods, and ended up having the same views about certain process. Using the Stanislavski Method to get through the day at work (and in forming characters for our different writing projects), the hyper-reality that's trickling into the mainstream world view (him from exposure to MTV, me through the essays of Umberto Eco - which just proves that the only difference between high and low culture is sun-worship). But while J.C.'s work deals more with his (current) struggles with his Catholicism, my own has had more of a "Fuck! We're old!" quality to it.
The ideas - both the things you try to put out into the world and the shit that keeps you up until four a.m. - usually strike because you're not thinking about them. You've just been absorbing the information, letting it run through the processors, and then, boom, the plot-line is there. All of the artistry (if any) can come out of training: method, approach, style, all of that can be taught to varying degrees. But they can't teach you how to focus, because that's always going to be different. I prefer to not plot out a story, and to sit outside and listen to a book on my computer with filtering in the outside world (birds, wind, traffic) and taking some of the different rhythms into my key strokes. Some guys blast heavy metal (Stephen King) others in bars (Warren Ellis - but I've become convinced that Ellis couldn't do anything with out a bar/pub/bag-in-a-bottle).
I suppose all of this came about because of Ellis. In "Shivering Sands" he points out that he's from the tiny English village of Thundersley - originally Thor's Clearing. And all of his work, metaphorically at least, is about lighting - all of the futuretech, the bright flashes of subculture that slowly get subsumed into the monoculture once their spark has been dulled. All of this is mostly done in comic form, although his novel "Crooked Little Vein" has the same blistering effect (see the address bar of this blog to find out if I liked it). Anyway, from the mention of Thurdersley he talks a little bit about his father and stories. His father, it turns out, was an unpublished writer, and loved the fact that he was now a part of Warren's Story (please note capital "S"), while Warren had always felt like a bit player in his father's Story growing up.
That made me pause. All of the things I've written have a gloom to them (in my mind, anyway), and a rather sever awareness of time. I seem more interested in people trying to become adults, and failing miserably.
J.C. called and we talked about his mom going through the same stuff my dad went through, health wise. He talks about how he's doing community theater, trying to keep his acting bug alive.
Another call from N.H. about his sister's wedding, his own (now shockingly) long term relationship with his lady friend. He talks about soccer and the New York fan mentality.
Both phone calls consist of half an hour of the participants complaining about the lack of change.
I talk a little about the new book, and how I want to finish it because I think it's a mind fuck for the reader in it's basic form, a literary dutch angle that I'm hoping will be over shadowed by the more blatantly weird elements (a Puerto Rican named Sven Herbaugh - and that's about as rational as my naming scheme is for this one). I talk about trying to get into my subconscious, trying to think in two different time streams for the book (I wanted to do three, but realized that the word "will" would become impossibly annoying by the fourth paragraph), and hoping that the book acts like a mental bomb for people, leaving the remains of the consensus all over the walls in an easy to clean film or splatter. Both of them are writers, and both of them had exposure to me during the darker parts, so they know that I probably should spend more that five seconds figuring things out. But that's been my life. Sitting on the sidelines, a bit player in the stories of others. Taking in information.
Hell, even the author surrogate is more of an "Also-Staring" role - but then I've only ever written one character: me. Just different portions of me, different percentages mingling outside of my head. Maybe it will work.
Ok, off to a block/triangle party, and then a night spent check tense-agreement. Hiya, Saturday.
I touched a little on that - the idea thing - during a conversation with J.C. J.C. came into Kutztown a year after me, and seems like a weirdly displaced little brother (in the same way the N.H. is a weirdly displaced twin), and both of us being theater majors meant that we were exposed to the same teachings, done in the same methods, and ended up having the same views about certain process. Using the Stanislavski Method to get through the day at work (and in forming characters for our different writing projects), the hyper-reality that's trickling into the mainstream world view (him from exposure to MTV, me through the essays of Umberto Eco - which just proves that the only difference between high and low culture is sun-worship). But while J.C.'s work deals more with his (current) struggles with his Catholicism, my own has had more of a "Fuck! We're old!" quality to it.
The ideas - both the things you try to put out into the world and the shit that keeps you up until four a.m. - usually strike because you're not thinking about them. You've just been absorbing the information, letting it run through the processors, and then, boom, the plot-line is there. All of the artistry (if any) can come out of training: method, approach, style, all of that can be taught to varying degrees. But they can't teach you how to focus, because that's always going to be different. I prefer to not plot out a story, and to sit outside and listen to a book on my computer with filtering in the outside world (birds, wind, traffic) and taking some of the different rhythms into my key strokes. Some guys blast heavy metal (Stephen King) others in bars (Warren Ellis - but I've become convinced that Ellis couldn't do anything with out a bar/pub/bag-in-a-bottle).
I suppose all of this came about because of Ellis. In "Shivering Sands" he points out that he's from the tiny English village of Thundersley - originally Thor's Clearing. And all of his work, metaphorically at least, is about lighting - all of the futuretech, the bright flashes of subculture that slowly get subsumed into the monoculture once their spark has been dulled. All of this is mostly done in comic form, although his novel "Crooked Little Vein" has the same blistering effect (see the address bar of this blog to find out if I liked it). Anyway, from the mention of Thurdersley he talks a little bit about his father and stories. His father, it turns out, was an unpublished writer, and loved the fact that he was now a part of Warren's Story (please note capital "S"), while Warren had always felt like a bit player in his father's Story growing up.
That made me pause. All of the things I've written have a gloom to them (in my mind, anyway), and a rather sever awareness of time. I seem more interested in people trying to become adults, and failing miserably.
J.C. called and we talked about his mom going through the same stuff my dad went through, health wise. He talks about how he's doing community theater, trying to keep his acting bug alive.
Another call from N.H. about his sister's wedding, his own (now shockingly) long term relationship with his lady friend. He talks about soccer and the New York fan mentality.
Both phone calls consist of half an hour of the participants complaining about the lack of change.
I talk a little about the new book, and how I want to finish it because I think it's a mind fuck for the reader in it's basic form, a literary dutch angle that I'm hoping will be over shadowed by the more blatantly weird elements (a Puerto Rican named Sven Herbaugh - and that's about as rational as my naming scheme is for this one). I talk about trying to get into my subconscious, trying to think in two different time streams for the book (I wanted to do three, but realized that the word "will" would become impossibly annoying by the fourth paragraph), and hoping that the book acts like a mental bomb for people, leaving the remains of the consensus all over the walls in an easy to clean film or splatter. Both of them are writers, and both of them had exposure to me during the darker parts, so they know that I probably should spend more that five seconds figuring things out. But that's been my life. Sitting on the sidelines, a bit player in the stories of others. Taking in information.
Hell, even the author surrogate is more of an "Also-Staring" role - but then I've only ever written one character: me. Just different portions of me, different percentages mingling outside of my head. Maybe it will work.
Ok, off to a block/triangle party, and then a night spent check tense-agreement. Hiya, Saturday.
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