Grant Faulkner

For the Love of a Good Cover Design

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Grant Faulkner FissuresI’ve now been a part of two book cover designs, and I adhere to one overwhelming principle. You’re going to live with your book for a lifetime. It’s a little like getting married. It’s a little like buying a house. Make sure that every time you look at it, you love it.

You’ve worked so hard on your story, after all. It’s a gift you’re giving yourself and the world. So make sure your story is dressed to the nines, that you’re proud to be seen in public with it. Don’t take a short cut; don’t be too frugal.

Your cover design needs to accomplish two things:

  1. Catch a potential book buyer’s eye
  2. Capture the book inside in some fundamental and perhaps unforeseen way.

Peter Mendelsund, a designer at Knopf who is reputed to be one of the best in the industry, describes his job as “finding that unique textual detail that … can support the metaphoric weight of the entire book.”

Ideally, you want a designer who will read your book and look for relevant details to work with—not just mindlessly follow the conventions. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to a designer, Patti Capaldi, who did both. I admired her aesthetic, but beyond that, I most appreciated the way she worked with me. We worked as partners, creative collaborators.

Here’s how the process worked. For my most recent cover, the collection of 100-word stories, Fissures, I filled out a questionnaire that included listing such things as the adjectives that described my stories and the adjectives that didn’t describe them. Then I sent on images of my favorite covers from other books.

Patti followed up with a phone conversation to talk through everything. The conversation was important because it was critical to make sure we were on the same page and had a trusting relationship. As a result, when Patti later sent me comps to look at, it was easier to give feedback and weigh different options because we had a common point of reference and a shared vision.

I offered to help Patti research images (to cut down costs for my publisher). I learned one thing: it’s really difficult to find the perfect image. I sent on a handful of possibilities, but none of them were quite right (and thank God Patti offered her guidance on why they weren’t right). We ended up going with an image Patti chose.

There are amazing image resources online, though, so I want to pass on the ones Patti sent to me.

Big agencies, huge collections

http://www.gettyimages.com ($700+)

http://www.corbisimages.com ($700+)

More specialized agencies with consistently arty, sophisticated stuff

http://www.arcangel-images.com ($600+)

http://www.panoptika.net/index.html ($500+)

http://www.gallerystock.com  ($600+)

http://www.wildcardimages.com  ($500+)

http://www.milim.com  ($600+)

http://www.trevillion.com  ($700+)

http://www.magnumphotos.com  ($700+)

http://www.glasshouseimages.com  ($500+)

Insanely cheap, huge collections with lots of junk and a surprising amount of good stuff too!

http://www.dreamstime.com (practically free!)

http://www.istockphoto.com (practically free!)

Historical photos/fine art

http://www.loc.gov/pictures (Library of Congress, great free stuff but make sure image information says “no known copyright restrictions” or take note of information provided)

http://www.akg-images.co.uk  ($300+)

http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary (wonderful collection of papers, letters, archive materials, photos, often very high resolution and free)

http://www.bridgemanart.com ($300+)

http://www.npg.org.uk

http://photofestnyc.com/contactus.html

http://www.everettcollection.com (entertainment, $300+)

http://www.theimageworks.com ($300+)

http://www.vandaimages.com/collections.asp

http://www.maryevans.com ($300+)

http://www.picture-desk.com ($400+)

http://www.artres.com

http://www.granger.com ($300+)

News photos

http://pictures.reuters.com ($300+)

https://www.apimages.com ($500+)

Travel/nature

http://www.lonelyplanetimages.com ($500+

http://www.nationalgeographicstock.com

Illustration/cheeky art

http://www.theispot.com

http://www.csaimages.com

http://stockart.com

Random photographers

http://store.shehitpausestudios.com

http://www.photographymuseum.com (a photo collector’s site—great old civil war and other historical photos)

http://www.jamesrobinsonpictures.com

http://marcyankus.com/site

http://www.charleskleinphotography.com

http://www.juliablaukopf.com

http://www.joannedugan.com

 

On Goal Setting: Lapsing and Not Lapsing and Monthly Resolutions

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It’s a good time to take stock of things.

I say that because it’s February, the month when many people sink into a pre-New Year’s Resolution state, content with not doing yoga or meditating or writing—whatever big life-changing goals they bravely asserted at the beginning of the year.

I recently read that 88% of people fail their New Year’s Resolutions, a statistic that jives with my overall success rate. They fail largely because they experience a lapse, and then they don’t come back from the lapse. I wrote about this in a post on the NaNoWriMo blog, I’m Going to Finish My NaNo Novel No Matter What.

The key is to make a plan to recover from the lapses you’ll inevitably experience. For example, I notice that people tend to beat themselves up when they teeter from a goal. It’s difficult to start again if you’re too busy chastising yourself for failures. So you have to give yourself a bit of self-compassion. As in … tomorrow is a great day to start _______ again.

Another reason might be that instead of setting big yearly goals, people do better with smaller monthly goals. I got this idea from Dave Beck, NaNoWriMo’s IT director, who sets monthly resolutions instead of yearly ones. He aimed to run 100 miles in January (his “Janulution”), and made it admirably to 80 miles. The idea of conquering goals in a month’s burst of activity sounds familiar, but I can’t remember where I heard about it.

I figured I’d take a crack at a few writing Februlutions this month:

  • I’m digging into the second draft of a screenplay, so I’m going to dare myself to finish it in the next 23 days (that’s a stretch goal, but what’s life without awkward stretching fueled by coffee).
  • I’m writing a piece for Writer’s Digest’s creativity issue on vulnerability. It’s due on February 18, so this Februlution comes with a built-in crack of the whip.
  • I’d say that’s enough, but I want to write more blog posts this year (as part of a book on creativity). Let’s see if I can write three more this month. Short ones, perhaps.

Okay, it’s all documented now. I’ll tweet this post, and then it will formally reside in the public record of accountability where people can chide and cajole me, and maybe even celebrate my goal victories at some point.

I’ll report back in March. And I’ll have my Marchlutions figured out by then.

Boredom: the Secret Passageway to Creativity

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Haring_computermanI’m increasingly disturbed by my behavior.

I have a tic, an affliction, a virus. Like many, when a moment of emptiness descends upon me, I reach for my phone, tap it madly, and hope to find stimulation. I do this in line at the grocery store, during one of my kids’ soccer games, or even at a red light.

I’m searching for the dopamine spritzer I’ve become addicted to, but I don’t think anything productive comes of my impulsive neediness. I scroll through photos, read some random updates, and then when the red light changes to green, I go on my way (if I see the light).

I’ve become the “computer man” Keith Haring presciently depicted in his art in the 80s, with a computer monitor for a head and a phone for a hand. I’ve merged with my gadget, and lost myself in the process.

I view these spaces of boredom as unwanted instead of the gifts that they are. Our minds need these little pockets of rest to create, after all. Moments of boredom resemble sleep; when the mind finds itself in an interlude of rest, synapses connect in different ways, new thoughts form.

Also, this supposed boredom is an invitation to actually pause and experience the world. Before I had a smart phone, boredom was an occasion of observation, a wonderful juncture of daydreaming. I could conjure a new story idea while standing in line for a burrito. I could observe the way a person’s face moved through thoughts while riding the bus home from work.

As the poet Mary Oliver wrote, “To see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer.” Oliver tried to see through “the heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles,” something that requires absorption in those stray, lingering moments of life.

Just as we’ve forgotten how to make butter or build chairs, like our ancestors of yore, I think we’re increasingly losing the art of being bored. On family vacations as a kid, my parents drove hundreds of miles each day. I had to read a book, stare out the window, play a game with my brother and sister, or squabble—and usually all of the above. Nowadays, we stick a screen with a movie on it in a kid’s hand.

We’ve forgotten that on the other side of boredom is the most exciting experience one can have as a creator—the state of discovering new possibilities. The mind doesn’t seek boredom—it seeks stimulation, creation—so these moments of stasis are actually a breeding ground for ideas.

There are even psychological studies on the merits of boredom. Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman, psychology researchers at the University of Central Lancashire, found that boredom felt during passive activities heightens the “daydreaming effect” on creativity. The more passive the boredom, the more likely the daydreaming and the more creative a person is afterward.

Being bored actually signals to the mind that you’re in need of fresh ideas and spurs creative thinking.

One of my resolutions this year is to not only slap my hand every time I mindlessly reach for my smart phone, but to revere boredom for the sacred, creative moment it is. I’m going to surrender to boredom, drink it in, taste it, let its waves wash over me and … see what happens.

“Boredom is time’s invasion of your world system,” wrote Josephy Brodsky in “In Praise of Boredom”. “It puts your life into perspective, and the net result is precisely insight and humility. The former gives rise to the latter, not a bene. The more you learn about your own format, the humbler and more sympathetic you become to your fellow-beings, to this dust that swirls in the sun’s ray or that already lies motionless on your table top.”

To ponder dust motes, to ponder other worlds.

On Hallowed Ground at Granddaddy Faulkner’s House

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I’ve been asked whether I’m related to William Faulkner thousands of times in my life. It’s safe to say I have a strange and abiding kinship with the man, one that will indeed last an eternity, so it was only fitting that I stopped by his house, Rowan Oak, when I crossed into Mississippi for the first time in my life.

The word that first came to mind as I stepped onto the hushed grounds of Rowan Oak was “hallowed.” Hallowed because there was none of the expected tourist fanfare surrounding the place (in fact, we got lost trying to find it). Hallowed because everything was just as William Faulkner left it. It was as if the writer hadn’t left the house.

Impressions …

When Faulkner’s daughter Jill wanted a radio in her teen years, Faulkner and his wife argued about it. Faulkner didn’t want any technology in the house (he also forbade air conditioning, believe it or not). I wonder if he wanted to preserve the dramatic tension of his story world, the South trapped between the past and a questionable future. The South living in the past.

He guarded his privacy, which was quite evident. The house felt like a writer’s sanctuary. It was difficult to imagine it full of the noise of life. He was famous for the ghost stories he told children who stayed in the house, and his ghost seemed present in every room. “All Faulkners believe in ghosts,” his niece, Dean Faulkner Wells, said.

As Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” If we’d come in the summer, I imagine the sun might have shone on dust motes hanging in the air, as they did in the opening pages of Absalom, Absalom (my favorite Faulkner novel).

In his writing room, he’d gotten frustrated with the wind blowing the papers of the outline of what would be his last novel, so he wrote the novel’s structure out on the wall (photo below). Yes, William Faulkner actually structured his novels in his mind before writing them, as much as they appeared to be wild and chaotic creations. I’ve always wanted to do something similar with my office walls, to immerse myself in the story.

His quotes in the house paid such deep reverence to the sacredness of creativity, the importance of storytelling. I left as if receiving wisdom from my grandfather.

Here’s a favorite quote that speaks to everything about a writer’s purpose:

I decline to accept the end of man… I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among the creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Here are some favorite photos:

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The Author as Hero

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This is a brief summary of my speech at this year’s Night of Writing Dangerously (also known as the best writing party on the planet).

I spoke at the Frankfurt Book Fair earlier this year. The theme of the event was “The Heroes of Storytelling.” Naturally my heroes of storytelling are authors, but I began to think about how authors are portrayed in books and films, and, well, they don’t fare too well. They certainly aren’t heroic, or at least not in the terms of the transcendent heroism of characters in many stories.

Here are some images I collected of different writer stereotypes from films.

Barton Fink

The joy of creativity glimmers in this author’s eyes, right? This image of John Turturro from Barton Fink is a portrait of the three “A’s” of a writer’s life: alienation, anxiousness, and awkwardness. I’d like to invite this man to NaNoWriMo write-in and give him a big hug. I’d like to tell him, “There’s no need to be afraid. You are a creator.”

Emma Thompson

No, this is not a NaNo writer anguishing in the swampland of week two. It’s Emma Thompson in Stranger than Fiction, demonstrating ye olde writer’s block. I want to tell Emma to practice a little “writing with abandon.” Empty your ashtray, change out of your pajamas, and have some fun.

Nicholas Cage

This is Nicholas Cage from the film Adaptation. What I like about this scene is how it looks like he’s been in a wrestling match with the book Story—a how-to write book—and the book won. It pinned him. Many a how-to-write book has pinned me. I recommend a good dose of “exuberant imperfection” to this writer.

Ray Milland

And then, oh my, there’s Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. The alcoholic writer staring into the darkest of dark nights. The bottle as forgotten inspiration, found desperation. Portrait of an author as a drunk.

It’s not that these images are inaccurate. Authors themselves wrote these characters, after all. Writing holds struggle, persistence against the forces of critics, internal and external. If you come over to my house on any weekend, you’ll probably see a variation of these authorial states (although hopefully not the one from The Lost Weekend, or if so, at least with more moderation).

But I think of the author as a heroic figure–a figure of verve, moxie, derring-do. So I sought a different image of the author, and here’s what I came up with.

Philip Petit

This is Philip Petit, who walked on a high wire across the Twin Towers in 1974. The documentary about him, Man on a Wire, won an Oscar a while back, and he just wrote Creativity: The Perfect Crime.

So why is this my image of the writer as hero? I’ve got ten, but I’ll give you three:

No. 1: This was an act he had to do. He was sitting in a waiting room at the dentist’s in 1968 and read about the Twin Towers being built, and he obsessed about walking on a high wire between the towers. The urge was so overpowering that if he didn’t do this, he would have felt a hole in his life forever. When asked why he did it, Petit said, “There is no why. Isn’t the joy, the beauty, the sheer magnificence enough of a reason?” I feel the same urgent need to write. There is no why other than my life would suffer tremendously without writing, and I know many NaNo writers feel the same.

No. 2: He didn’t do this alone. It looks like he’s on the wire alone, but he actually had a whole support team. They helped him plan this for years, mulling over blueprints and even taking field trips to New York City. They helped him practice. When he walked on the tight rope strung up in a French prairie, they’d yank it back and forth to replicate gusty conditions at that height. And then they helped him sneak in all of this heavy equipment and actually string the wire between the towers (not an easy thing to do). But most of all they were there when he took that first step, 1,350 feet above the ground. That’s the third reason he’s a hero.

No. 3: He embraced vulnerability. He said, “If I die, what a beautiful death!–To die in the exercise of your passion.” To be a writer doesn’t risk death in quite the same way, but to decide to be a writer is a clinch with vulnerability. To tell the world you’re a writer magnifies that vulnerability because you invite naysayers in. And then to do something crazy like write a novel in a month, you’re testing your grit, your time management, your resilience, your resolve to do something big. You might fail, but that’s the definition of vulnerability, risking failure.

To be vulnerable is important. Only by embracing vulnerability do we connect with others. Being vulnerable makes life meaningful because by being vulnerable, we’re giving our souls, our challenges, our imperfections to others. We’re giving the truth of who we are. That’s what we need to aspire to as writers. Being vulnerable in our prose helps forge connections with readers; being vulnerable opens up new worlds.

I used to make New Year’s resolutions, but I could stand seeing “Do yoga” on my list only for so many years. I decided to change my approach. For the last three years, I’ve just focused on an invitation: “Invite more opportunities for embarrassment into my life.” In other words, I decided to risk vulnerability.

I’ve always wanted to tap dance. But I’ve never taken a lesson, never watched a how-to video. I thought it would be transformative to tap dance in front of 250 people at the Night of Writing Dangerously. I couldn’t do it alone, though, so I invited volunteers up on stage. People filled the stage–with gusto! And we tap danced, very appropriately, to Fatboy Slim’s “Because We Can” from Moulin Rouge.

“You are untying yourself from the tangible and becoming half a bird,” Petit said of his venture on the tight rope. I felt the same way when I became a tap dancer last Sunday night.

I now want the world to tap dance with me over and over again. I want to tap dance for infinity.

 

The Power of Getting More Ideas Faster

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speedFor years, my writing process formed itself around the notion of ponderous preciousness. I distrusted the idea that anything of quality could be written quickly. A story, a novel, a script had to be as finely aged as a good bottle of wine in order for all of the nuanced tannins and rich aromas to fully develop.

I’d conceive of an idea for a story and then burrow into it. I’d write one draft, usually in a somewhat plodding fashion, and then I refined and refined, and then refined some more, sometimes over the course of years. It was as if I held a very tiny chisel and carefully maneuvered it again and again through the practically microscopic contours of my story world.

Steeping a story in deep and obsessive ruminations has a place, but I’m becoming more interested in the benefits of hastening my creative process after reading an interesting study that counters my “a fine wine takes time” approach.

The book Art & Fear recounts the story of a ceramics instructor who did an experiment in his classroom. He divided the class into two groups. The first group was graded on quality, represented by a single ceramic piece due at the end of the class. The second group was graded on quantity, literally the amount of work they produced.

Who produced the highest quality work? Not the group that practiced my refine, refine, refine approach. Those who threw pots “with abandon” (as we might put it at NaNoWriMo) created the highest quality pots.

Why? Because they tried more ideas. Instead of creating one overwrought pot, they produced pots that held more verve because of the creative pressure put on them and the loose structure of banishing the restricting limitations of “quality.” They might have encountered more botched pots, but they were astute enough to learn from those failures and build on them.

As Thomas Edison said, “The real measure of success is the number of experiments that can be crowded into twenty-four hours.”

Yesterday, I spoke to the Sacramento Writers Club. As part of my presentation, I had everyone do a five-minute automatic writing exercise, to just choose a subject and write as fast and loosely as possible.

Honestly, even though I’ve done this several times with groups, I never know how it will turn out. I always expect to be challenged by a naysayer from the “ponderous precious” camp. I was so gratified to feel the risk-taking energy in the room and see the deep immersion in writers’ eyes. Afterward, people told stories of newly found character insights, wild plot discoveries—and in just five minutes of writing like a dervish.

I felt the same. I jumped in and wrote to this prompt: “When I was five, I ____ .” “When I was nine, I _____ .” And so on. I somehow struck upon a recurring vision that a character in a my novel has, a vision that guides, taunts, and troubles him throughout life.

The dangers of such free-flowing expansion is that you’ll encounter too many “plot bunnies”—that a story can bound out of control when you get too many ideas, because one idea breeds with another like rabbits.

I think that’s a good problem to have, though. In fact, I’ll take that problem any time because I can slow down in revision and choose the bunnies I like.

So here’s to writing more—and doing so with alacrity.

Paul Bowles by His Friends

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Paul-Bowles-001I page through Paul Bowles by His Friends. In some ways it’s an insignificant book. It’s one those books only a true fan would read for the most fetishistic of biographical pleasure. I bought it at the Harvard Book Store on a recent vacation, just to have a souvenir, and also because I knew it would fill those haphazard spaces of life when I needed to touch something reassuring.

A favorite author reassures when nothing else can. I love reading about Bowles ensconced in his strange little apartment in Tangiers, his isolation paradoxically full of social life. He turned into an artistic magnet, even as he sought the solitude of a desert monk, with visits from many of the notable artists of the second half of the 20th century, including William Burroughs, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and John Cage. They dropped by to experience the allure of “the invisible spectator” and breathe in the wafts of his kief.

Bowles is interesting in so many respects, but one thing that fascinates me is that he never seemed to doubt his life much. Not his chaotic marriage to Jane Bowles, not his decision to live in Tangiers. He’s always at ease, smoking a cigarette, elegantly dressed. As Gregory Corso put it, “he carried lightly the whole Romantic age in his graceful stroll.”

Or, as Charles Henri Ford said:

Surprising himself
Is half the satisfaction
He derives from art

For reasons which he
Cannot fathom he opens
Poetry’s locked door

Bowles practiced viewing his life as an observer rather than participating in it as a child. He was always a bit absent, even sexually. Neither his homosexual loves nor his marriage to Jane Bowles were driven by any overwhelming carnal desire. He preferred to watch the chaos of others’ lives.

Philip Ramey described Bowles as a passive spectator, watching Morocco’s “continuous peep show of the chaotic.” On his initial visit to Morocco, Bowles wrote of his love for its theatricality, “the impression of confusion of insanity.” “I knew I would never tire of watching Moroccans play their parts,” Bowles concludes.

When the streets of Tangiers flooded, the frogs became vocal under his window, so he recorded them. He seems very much like John Cage in this respect. He recorded 60 children in Tangiers praying for rain. He recorded people’s stories, the music of Morocco. Sounds led him throughout life

I tend to like artists who value the irrational over the rational. The outsider can never truly trust logic. I envy the reckless disregard of Bowles’s friends, one who aimed to start a literary journal whose contributors would be limited to dipsomaniacs, dope fiends, schizophrenics, and Hindu mystics.

Bowles lived as a transient, an expat, a traveler, all of which was determined by chance. When he was a student at the University of Virginia, he flipped a coin to decide whether he should commit suicide or leave for Europe. Such travel isn’t an affirmation of life, but in leaving home, he found his home in the vast elsewhere of other somewheres.

There will never be such an outsider to American literature as Paul Bowles. Theodore Soltafoff described his work with the apt phrase, “the algebra of nihilism.” He was always in pursuit of the furies of the abyss.

Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Absence as Presence

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roland-barthes-camera-lucidaI have a love affair with books on photography. Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Mind’s Eye, and now Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida.

I suppose I’m drawn to commentary of photography because photographs provide such a moment for existential reflection—such an everlasting moment (a paradoxical phrase that in itself defines photography’s poignancy). Each photograph resides in a prism: the intent of a pose, the person caught unawares, the gaze trapped in time. Each photograph tells the smallest part of a much bigger story.

And then I love Barthes, who writes more like a poet than a philosopher. It seems as if he touches each word with his fingertips. He’s a sensualist, a memoirist, in the best of ways; his thought, as complex as it is in all of its theorizing and decodings, always traipses through life, the drifts of memory.

Barthes wrote Camera Lucida in homage to Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Imaginaire, in which Sartre discusses what the existence of imagination shows about the nature of human consciousness. His conclusion is that because the imaginary process relies on intentionality, the world is constituted not from the outside into our consciousness, but rather we constitute the world based on our intentions toward it.

The interplay between exterior and interior forms our relationship with photography as well—which “divides the history of the world,” says Barthes. Photography forces us to believe in the past in all of its incongruities. How differently would we view history, after all, not to mention our own lives, without photography?

Consider the photos of oneself over a lifetime. Barthes says we want our photographs to correspond with our “self,” even in our various poses over time, which show a transient notion of self more than a solid core. Each time we pose for a photograph, we assert a self to the future viewer: “I am happy,” or “I am beautiful,” or “I am intelligent” (or “I am a pissed-off teen who doesn’t want to be in this photo,” which marked many of my early photos). A photograph can never correspond to our self, though. Barthes says, “…’myself’ never coincides with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn (which is why society sustains it), and ‘myself’ which is light, divided, dispersed.”

The most interesting part of the book is Barthes’ framework for viewing photos through studium and punctum. Studium denotes the cultural, linguistic, and political interpretation of a photograph; punctum denotes the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within a photograph.

“A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me),” Barthes posits.

Most photos don’t prick, though. They provoke only polite interest because they are invested with studium. “The studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste: I like / I don’t like.” Think of the photos in advertisements, in hotel lobbies, or the posed family photos that do little to reveal the people in them (so they are themselves advertisements in the end).

“What I can name cannot really prick me,” he says of studium.

It is the ineffable that makes art arresting; its meaning resides in its ability to disturb. The wound provides its own particular, strange salve. When I survey the books I love, the photos and paintings I return to again and again, they all stare at me from an abyss I can’t quite fathom. They tell, and they don’t tell. They’re beguiling, elusive, yet demanding.

Barthes applies that concept to erotic photographs. Truly erotic photographs (or stories for that matter, I’d also argue) don’t make sexual organs the central object of viewing; instead the erotic takes the spectator outside its frame. The punctum is a subtle beyond, in other words, the desire that is imagined.

Despite being a prick, punctum isn’t about shock value, though. “Ultimately, photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.”

Thinking, shaping, as opposed to recording, as people often think of photography. Photography has always struggled for a place in the arts because it can seem as simple as pushing a button to open and close the shutter. But as anyone who has ever tried to take a compelling portrait knows, it’s more than a quick snap. “The great portrait photographers are the great mythologists,” Barthes says.

Written after his mother’s death, Camera Lucida is as much a reflection on death as it is on photography. Death and photography co-mingle in a way no other art does. “The Photograph does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph),” writes Barthes. “The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed.”

Therein lies its haunting, disturbing quality: photography attests to our mortality. “The photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object, but on time. From a phenomenological viewpoint, in the Photograph, the power of authentication exceeds the power of representation.”

Whereas film presents the flow of continuous time—the absence of the past, in effect—a photograph breaks our notions of continuity. So the punctum “is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (“that-has-been”), its pure representation.”

The photos that reveal such a punctum of time for me are the photos that cause me to pause in my stream of Facebook photos. Friends sometimes post photos of their dead parents, parents I grew up with, and I look at them at once like the little boy who stood beside them, yet also like the adult who knows the circumstances of their aging and death. It’s an incongruity I can’t quite reconcile, an incongruity that always wounds. Photography allows us to look into a dead person’s eyes while they’re alive (or vice versa).

As Sontag says in On Photography, “Photography is the inventory of mortality. …Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.”

Barthes searches through photos of his mother for what he calls “the air”: “that exorbitant thing which induces from body to soul—animula, little individual soul, good in one person, bad in another.” He finds photos that only give him her crudest identity, her “legal status,” until he finds one that he calls the “Winter Garden Photograph,” in which he cries, “There she is!” It’s a likeness he compares to the Buddhist notion of satori, in which words fail—“a kind of intractable supplement of identity, what is given as an act of grace, stripped of any importance.”

Such a moment defines the “new form of hallucination” photography provides: it’s false on the level of perception because “it is not here,” but true on the level of time because “it has indeed been.”

And so we look for ourselves and the death of ourselves when we look at photographs. Absence, forever present.

Resilience More Important Than Any Writing Tip

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Writers are always looking for the next great writing tip, the secret to plot, the key to subtext, the way to write compelling dialogue. But perhaps what’s most important to every single work—and especially the long-term life of a writer—is something beyond the craft of writing: resilience.

We’re going to experience a heckuva lot of rejection, after all, whether it’s from agents, editors, readers—or, unfortunately, ourselves. What’s most important is not how you write, but if you show up to write—and that you write in the bravura fashion that gives a story meaning.

I’ve been thinking of this recently in light of Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED Talk, Success, failure and the drive to keep creating.

Gilbert, the author of the blockbuster Eat, Pray, Love, has the enviable problem of trying to write a book that will please anybody after such a wild success.

“I knew well in advance that all of those people who had adored Eat, Pray, Love were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it wasn’t going to be Eat, Pray, Love, and all of those people who had hated Eat, Pray, Love were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it would provide evidence that I still lived,” she says.

I’ll gladly take Gilbert’s problem of riches any time, of course, but I also sympathize. In the end, Gilbert is just another writer waking up in the morning trying to tell her story, and one’s demons don’t necessarily go away after success. They might even get magnified. We’re all susceptible to criticism and expectations. We all can project negative outcomes no matter what past successes we’ve had. Success is nothing more than a temporary, flimsy blanket or shield.

“I had to find some way to gin up the inspiration to write the next book regardless of its inevitable negative outcome,” Gilbert says.

But how does she do this?

She remembers her “home” as a writer, a metaphor I love. She remembers when she was beginning to write as an unpublished waitress who came home to rejections for six years. I was such a waiter myself, and even though I haven’t written Eat, Pray, Love or anything close to it, I remember those early days of writing, and what a strange and blessed sort of home they were, when I received no recognition, yet found the warmth and glow of being alive when my pen touched the page.

I know now that six years of rejection isn’t much for most writers, but then rejection is rejection. Sometimes a single rejection will kill a writer. Sometimes the anticipation of a single rejection will kill a writer. The only way to create in such circumstances is to feel a reckless and unquestioned urgency to create.

Gilbert says, “Writing was my home, because I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing, which is to say that I loved writing more than I loved my own ego, which is ultimately to say that I loved writing more than I loved myself. And that’s how I pushed through it.”

Who knows how to explain why or how such a creative act can take on such importance, but when it does, it’s a transcendent moment. Like Gilbert, I believe I can tolerate setbacks and even tragedies that go beyond writing simply because I have that home of creativity. When I write in the morning before work, the day beams with a nurturing vibrancy. I can lose my house, my car, my job, all of my money, but I can’t lose writing. It’s so much more important than any of those things. It’s my soul.

As Gilbert says, “I will always be safe from the random hurricanes of outcome as long as I never forget where I rightfully live.”

We all need to ask ourselves each day, “What is my home?” It doesn’t have to be writing—it can be parenting or teaching or baking muffins or selling flowers—but whatever it is, it’s sacred. What is your home?

Watch Gilbert’s video:

Dancing the Tango. Writing the Novel.

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tangoThere’s the famous quote, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” which has always struck me as indisputable. It’s just so difficult for one art form to truly comment on another. That said, I just stumbled on quotes about dancing the tango that perfectly describe the process of writing a novel for me.

Consider this quote:

Imagine telling a beginner man he has to learn to find the rhythm of the music, watch out for navigational hazards on the dance floor, develop a strategy on the spot for dealing with them choosing from a repertoire of movements he has learned, then lead the woman to move in the intended direction with the intended speed while maintaining the connection, and then… He has to follow the woman’s response to his lead to determine the next move (within a millisecond, after all, this is not chess), and take responsibility for whatever goes wrong.

Somebody named Jay Rabe said this. I feel exactly the same about my novel at the moment—that success relies on doing five paradoxical things at once. I’m trying to find the rhythm of the music (that lyrical flow of the storyline) while also  navigating a few steps ahead—i.e., making all of the key plot connections—and thinking maybe I’ll move this way, or maybe I’ll move that way, and I’m leading, yet following, pivoting, yet tripping. I’m all dressed up in other words, trying to look like I’m the real thing, but I’m sweating under my collar. And my partner, the woman in this quote, is my main character, who I have to lead and respond to and feel.

The novel is a game of chess. Except it’s dancing the tango while playing chess.

And then there’s this one on that ever beguiling notion of achieving perfection (italics mine):

Tango is a dance in which it is easy to become obsessed with perfection. The taste of heaven that is found within tango may encourage some to seek perfection. Others may bring their own perfectionism to tango. But we should never confuse heaven and perfection. They are very different. The path of perfectionism often leads away from heaven—as we find ourselves accompanied and driven forward by demons that become all too familiar. If we pursue perfection in our practice, we are likely developing the demons that seek to keep us from effective dancing. In tango, heaven is found through the simple gift of grace. That comes from getting out on the dance floor with the person that happens to be right for the moment, opening one’s heart and falling in love again.

Somebody named Stephen Brown said this. I love the way he articulates the dangers of perfectionism, which can constrict a good story or stifle a good dance. A good novelist and a good dancer have to find that mysterious zone of serving the story like a child—to dance with one’s partner rather than with an aspiration. This is where our quest as creators resides. Not in the striving, but in the release, in the openness—in the falling in love. To dance with the notion of perfection is a dance of separation, isolation, ego. There’s no grace in that.

I’ll posit that learning to tango holds lessons for learning to write a novel. It’s a dance that is rife with narrative tension and drama. Tango steps vary in timing, speed, and character, and follow no single specific rhythm, allowing dancers to vary the dance from moment to moment to match the elements of the music and their mood. Movements are sometimes slow and slithery, and other times sharp, a quick foot flick or a sharp head snap to promenade position. You might say the dance if full of plot points.

The next time I sit down to write, I’ll think of the tango, and try to listen to the music of my story, my various partners, and chant to myself to not confuse heaven with perfection.