Grant Faulkner

Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo

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Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” How can we be creative every day? That’s the question Pep Talks for Writers sets out to answer. And it’s an important one, right? I know you feel story ideas beckoning you to give them voice. You’ve felt the wondrous, magical rushes of creativity. You know how being creative can change the way you wake up, how you approach your work, how you connect with other people. Approaching the world with a creative mindset is wildly transforming—because suddenly you’re not accepting the world as it’s delivered to you, but living through your vision of life.

That’s the gift I see each November during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I witness thousands of people break down the barricades that prevent them from writing the novel of their dreams and take on the Herculean task of writing a novel of 50,000 words in just 30 days. Writing suddenly leaps up from the cluttered basement of their daily tasks to stand tall on the pedestal of life for an entire month. An audacious goal and deadline serve as creative midwives (and an occasional bullwhip), and writers are propelled by the scintillating rushes of their imagination and the galvanizing force of the huzzahs coming from what can seem like the entire world writing with them.

It seems like such a rollicking novel-writing party is never going to end, but then on December 1, the roars of rapacious novelists start to quiet. Suddenly, people are doing things like shopping for Christmas presents, studying for finals, or cleaning the mayhem their house has become. (Creativity gives the world many things, but it rarely provides a tidy house.)

The thing I hear most often after National Novel Writing Month is “I loved writing during NaNoWriMo, but I have trouble writing the rest of the year.”

It’s challenging to muster such energy each day. The galloping pace of NaNoWriMo is over, and it can be difficult to get up on the proverbial writing horse again. Urgent items on your to-do lists clamor for attention, and tackling those items is important, necessary work—buying groceries, washing dishes, fixing that squeaky door that has bugged you the last three years—so, really, how could you keep doing something so trivial as write? Suddenly, you start to feel creativity falling down on your to-do list. You know the joy it gives you, the life meaning, yet those slithering, pernicious beasts called “the demands of life” loudly yell what you should be doing (and I won’t even mention the siren calls of social media).

No one assigns us to be creative. And, what’s more, society usually doesn’t reward creativity, at least not unless your work makes it to the shelves of a bookstore, the walls of a gallery, or the stage of a theater. You might not think you’re a creative type, but to be human is to be a creative type, so one of the shoulds in your life should be to make sure creativity is not only at the top of your to-do list, but that you put your creativity into action every day. If you put off your dreams today, you create the momentum to put them off all the way to your deathbed.

We yearn to touch life’s mysteries, to step out into the world looking for new solutions to old problems, if not new worlds altogether. We need to tap into our vulnerabilities, seek to understand our fears, look at life through others’ eyes, ask questions, and open up our awareness of the wonders of the universe.

Each story is a gift, a door that opens a new way to see and relate with others in this crazy, crazy world. Stories are the oxygen our souls breathe, a way to bring the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable to life. Our creative lives shouldn’t be a hall pass from the stiff and forbidding demands of our lives. Writing our stories takes us beyond the grueling grind that life can unfortunately become, beyond the constraints of the roles we find ourselves in each day, to make the world a bigger place.

Stories remind us that we’re alive, and what being alive means. “Only art penetrates . . . the seeming realities of this world,” said Saul Bellow in his Nobel Prize speech. Leslie Marmon Silko says that stories are “all we have to fight off illness and death.” Jacqueline Woodson says writers are “the ones who are bearing witness to what’s going on in the world.”

For a writer, life hasn’t really been lived until one’s stories find their way onto the page. We exist in the flickers of a rift with the world, searching for words that will sew the fissure, heal it. A rupture, a wound, finds the salve of a story. If you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. If you don’t create, you hurt yourself. The signature of your self is formed by the work you put into your story. Making art tells you who you are. Making art in turn makes you.

So it’s your duty as a writer, as a person, to build a world through your words and believe in your story as a beautiful work of incarnation, to see it as a gift to yourself and others, as something that elevates life with new meaning—your meaning. Writing a story is many things: a quest, a prayer, a hunger, a tantrum, a flight of the imagination, a revolt, a daring escape that ironically leads you back to yourself. As long as we’re creating, we’re cultivating meaning. Our stories are the candles that light up the darkness that life can become, so we must live in the warm hues of our imaginative life.

It’s not easy, though. The efforts of creativity carry angst and psychological obstacles that must be overcome. In this book, we’ll explore 52 different approaches to being creative every day. Each pep talk will include ways for you to explore your creative notions and angles, because life and writing are really ongoing creative experiments. Some pep talks may sing out to where you are now, while others might become relevant later in your writing process. The important thing is to keep your creative life at the forefront of your thoughts and actions.

We become the things we do, and I can promise you, if you excavate your life to make room for your imagination, if you open up time to keep writing, you won’t just finish your novel, pen the poem in your head, or submit a short story you’ve worked so hard on, you’ll change, because once you realize yourself as a creator, you create worlds on and off the page.

If you hear the whispers of a novel coming from the other room, or ideas for other stories caterwauling for their day in the sun, dive in. “The days are long, but the years are short,” some wise person once said. Your story can’t wait. It needs you.

Buy Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo.

Inspiration is a rare sighting (like Bigfoot)

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Inspiration is a funny thing. It’s powerful enough to move mountains. When it strikes, it carries an author forward like the rushing torrents of a flooded river. And yet, if you wait for it, nothing happens.

The irony is that so much is actually created—mountains moved, sagas written, grand murals painted—by those who might not even describe themselves as particularly inspired. Instead, they show up every day and put their hands on the keyboard, their pen to paper, and they move their stories forward, bit by bit, word by word, perhaps not even recognizing that inspiration is striking in hundreds of tiny, microscopic ways as they push through another sentence, another page, another chapter, of their novel.

This is the principle way writers finish 50,000 words of a novel each year during National Novel Writing Month, and it applies to being creative the rest of the year as well.

Inspiration is often characterized as a thunderbolt—a brilliant flash that strikes from the heavens—and that metaphor certainly holds truth because inspiration can be a sudden igniting force, random and illuminating and otherworldly (and even a bit dangerous). Yet I sometimes think of inspiration, at least the big, gobsmacking moments of inspiration, as more like Bigfoot. Sightings of Bigfoot are rare, and he’s so elusive that he can’t be captured, physically or even truly on film, so his very existence is in question. It’s wonderful to believe he exists, because it’s nice to think of the world as strange and beautiful enough to spawn such a creature, but if you go out into the woods and look for Bigfoot, you’re not likely to find him, just as you can’t force sweeping gusts of inspiration to appear on any given day.

“And the muse? I have no idea who has one, but if anyone does, I’d like to know so I can stage a kidnapping,” said author Kami Garcia in a NaNoWriMo pep talk.

The fantastical “muse” Garcia speaks of is the source of inspiration in Greek and Roman mythology. Ancient authors invoked muses near the beginning of their work, asking the muse to sing directly through them. As Homer puts it in Book I of the Odyssey:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns

driven time and again off course, once he had plundered

the hallowed heights of Troy.

This mythological muse was often illustrated as a creature in a beautiful flowing gown, playing a harp and singing a song from the heavens, but I’d like to recast this muse because maybe, just maybe, the “kidnapping” Garcia mentions is possible (or at least a type of kidnapping). I see the muse as invisible sprights that sleep in the whispery spaces between each word. This sprights are enlivened only by the breaths of a churning imagination, by the stirrings of a story moving forward. Such a muse is ineffable, so miniature that she often goes unnoticed, yet an author must trust that the responsibility for bringing those story sprights to life resides in the spool of words spinning onto the page. The muse doesn’t sing the words of a story; the muse is conjured in the telling.

“No one looks forward to those lulls in the writing process, but they are natural, and they can be overcome,” Marisa Meyer wrote in a NaNoWriMo pep talk. “These are the times when we must proceed on willpower and caffeine and the unflappable confidence that each word we write is one word closer to a finished novel.”

When willpower isn’t enough

True words, but such tough moments can certainly feel like they’re killing inspiration more than they’re nurturing it. Your thoughts dull. All of the synapses that used to fire with such eager alacrity have either gone into a deep hibernation or abandoned you all together. Perhaps your initial bolt of inspiration carried you through the first hour, the first day, the first week, or even the first month of your novel, but it’s becoming a faint memory, a cruel con, because without its strong winds, you feel adrift, your journey stalled.

This is a dangerous moment because when inspiration stops carrying you, the doldrums of self-doubt creep into your thoughts (perhaps in between sips of your favorite caffeinated beverage and your diligent intentions). You tell yourself no one wants to read your story. You tell yourself your characters are clichés, your plot unremarkable. And you—you!—are not a writer. You are a person with silly dreams who should know better, and you should just return to a life where you sit and simply be entertained by other people’s imaginative creations. A life of binge watching Netflix isn’t all bad, is it?

Here’s what you must know: Every single creator throughout history has experienced such moments. The question is how to deal with such deadening humdrummery.

“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time,” said Leonard Bernstein.

The unromantic and unheralded “rest of the time” is actually a yeasty opportunity. It’s an invitation to fertilize your imagination. If a dulling lull is smothering your willpower and caffeine’s power to propel you through another paragraph has dissipated, then pull away from the page for a spell: Pick up your favorite book to be reminded of the fantastic places words can take you, take a walk and marvel at butterflies twirling about in dapples of sun, or go to a museum and stare at paintings and people—anything that it takes to stir and heighten your senses, to let your mind dash back onto the playground of the imagination and caper with your new ideas.

Every writer needs a strategy to deal with those dulling lulls. Joan Didion describes her method of retrieving her imaginative oomph in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook”: “When the world seems drained of wonder … when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write … I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest … dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavilion (one middle-aged man shows his hat check to another and says, ‘That’s my old football number’).”

“It all comes back,” Didion writes.

Yes, it all comes back. If you revere and remember the natural, irrepressible gambols of your imagination, writing won’t be all about a ponderous and painful plodding forward. And it’s necessary to make sure you don’t write with too much of the “no pain, no gain” approach (those tiny story sprights can only handle so much discomfort). “If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun,” Ray Bradbury posits in Zen in the Art of Writing, “you are only half a writer.”

So step away from your writing if need be and find a source of inspiration that will put air beneath your wings. But don’t step away for too long. Many a writer has made a lifestyle out of stepping away. You must return after an hour or an afternoon and concoct inspiration on the blank page. Let the blank page be a spigot for all of the dramatic, ornery, lyrical, and shocking thoughts in your head that are eager to come out.

“The blank page is yours,” wrote Chuck Wendig in a NaNoWriMo pep talk. “Cast aside worries over art and criticism. Imagine a land without rules. Imagine that nobody has ever told you that you cannot or should not do this thing. Those people were wrong. Forget those voices. Because, for real?

It’s an empty field and you’ve got the keys to a freaking Ferrari.

It’s a white tablecloth and you’ve got ketchup, mustard, and relish.

It’s a blank page and you’ve got all the letters and words you need.

Rev the engine and take the ride. Paint with all the colors the condiments at your table allow. Create whatever robot-human monstrosities your mind cares to conjure. Crack open your chest and plop your heart onto the page.”

When you plop your heart onto the page, you’ll realized that the words you create every day are each fruit-bearing kernels of inspiration. Each word wants more and more words to follow. And you are the God that sends those words—those story-igniting lightning bolts—into a world that’s coming to life before your own eyes. You are your own muse.

Here’s an inspiration exercise to fuel your inspiration engine:

Exercise

Write a page or two about what inspires you to write—whether it’s the desire to create lyrical prose, escape this world, or explore your inner world. After you’ve written this short piece, focus on the things that inspire you as your guide to sit down and write on even the worst days. Your big “I” inspiration can open a pathway back to writing.

Serialization as Writing Process

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One of the biggest challenges a writer faces is moving forward. Sounds simple, but it’s all too easy to get caught in a condition I’ll call “the endless loop of perfection.”

I have suffered from such a malady. The part of writing I like best is the shaping, shaving, and sculpting involved in revision. I can tweak a sentence or a first chapter endlessly, looping back, and then looping back again, caught in a state of near aesthetic paralysis until I have everything just right. I tend to get so ensnared (and outright dizzy) in the loop that I endanger “the next”—the second chapter, not to mention the rest of the book.

Now there’s a place for such perfectionist tendencies, and I don’t want to belittle them because obsessive fine-tuning is necessary to write subtle subtext, riveting dialogue, and surprising character development. But there’s also a lot to be said for moving a story forward with an urgent, fevered pace, and even showing it to readers chapter-by-chapter. That’s why I’m intrigued by the comeback of serialized fiction.

Comeback? Yes, there was a time when serialized novels actually dominated the publication of novels. A serial is a work that the author writes in progress—sometimes without a preconceived middle and ending—and publishes on a regular schedule, much like TV shows. In the Victorian era, a rise in literacy, technological advances in printing, and improved economics of distribution ushered in the serialization of novels in magazines and newspapers, not dissimilar from the growth of mobile- and tablet-based reading that is sparking serialization today. In the Victorian era, serialization wasn’t just a way to publish, it was the primary mode for novel publication. Think Charles Dickens, who published most of his novels in monthly or weekly installments. Think The Count of Monte Cristo, which included 139 installments. Among American writers, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote and published Uncle Tom’s Cabin over a 40-week period, and Henry James published several novels in serial form, including The Americans, The Turn of the Screw, and The Bostonians, which he then revised for publication as books.

Like most writers, I like to reflect on my writing process and enjoy experimenting with it (hence my love of NaNoWriMo’s “writing with abandon” approach and all of the creative moxie it spawns), so I’m intrigued by how serialization might enhance writers’ creative processes. One benefit is the built-in reader expectation of more, which puts the writer to a test that involves improvisation, derring-go, and stamina. In Victorian days, many writers made writing an extreme sport of sorts. Alexandre Dumas wrote twelve to fourteen hours a day, working on several novels for serialized publication at once. The main point was to keep the story moving forward—to tease out the plot in titillating episodes to meet reader demand. As Ray Bradbury said, “First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him [or her]!” Serialization is all about that wild pursuit—the writer existing in a state of creative incipience.

The chase, though, doesn’t occur in a lonely writer’s office, but with readers practically looking over the writer’s shoulder. Because regular installments of stories created a nearly real-time environment of writing and reading, serial authors in the Victorian era heard immediate reader feedback and altered their tales to more deeply engage their audience. Dickens was especially known to keenly listen to reader reactions and then modify his story based on the feedback he heard. Writers and readers became collaborators, in effect.

The Internet obviously provides tools to amplify that sort of writer/reader “discussion” is many ways, making it the kind of give and take an author might hear from a writing group, or even an editor. Such reader input and demand can prod an author onward. Consider Hugh Howey, who on the eve of National Novel Writing Month in 2009, heard so much demand for his 12,000-word story Wool that he decided to add more segments to it over the next months. It became an informal serialized novel, with each installment building an avid discussion among a growing audience of readers clamoring for more. That “more” turned into a self-publishing phenomenon.

With an engaged audience and such immediate feedback, I think serialization can be an amazing tool to overcome writers’ no. 1 enemy: self-doubt. As Erica Jong said, “I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged. I had pieces that were re-written so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.”

I wonder how many writers get trapped in the finishing instead of the giving of one’s story to the world? Deciding when a work is done will always be a tough decision, but serialization offers a pathway out of “the endless loop of perfection”—and perhaps toward a better novel, sparked by regular deadlines and constant reader feedback that can be used in not only story creation, but revision.

We write to move readers, but the story must move forward to do so.

This is a repost of an essay I wrote for JukePop a while back on serialization and how it can affect one’s writing process.

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto that Invites Manifestos

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It’s odd to say, but I have a soft spot in my heart for manifestos.

Despite what some might see as a fuming belligerence that characterizes our age (tea partiers, Rush Limbaugh, Charlie Sheen, etc.), I think we’re hampered by a cultural tendency to be overly polite, especially when it comes to the arts.

Go to France and England and you’ll find people practically dueling over an aesthetic or intellectual dispute—and then inviting each other to dinner the following week for round two. But in the U.S., I’ve seen friendships break up over an artistic difference voiced only the slightest bit ardently—as if to talk passionately and argumentatively is bad manners. Kumbaya.

We’re a country of book clubs whose main purpose is to drink wine and chitchat about novels that go half-read and half-thought-about.

For God’s sake, let’s take our reading seriously and argue the hell out of it. Our books aim to represent life after all, metaphysically and phenomenologically. So…do you agree with an author’s take on reality or not?

That’s why I love the often pugilistic tone David Shields takes as he essentially puts up his dukes to the literary establishment in Reality Hunger. At the heart of Reality Hunger is Shields’s critique of the literary world’s rather stodgy proclivity to privilege the traditional realist novel as the mirror of reality—a representation of reality that has held firm since the 19th century despite all of the world’s changes.

What if Impressionism had continued as the dominant art form for the last 100-plus years, but just with different subject matter? What if Cubism still dominated the art world for that matter? Think of all of the exciting, compelling, challenging, wondrously disturbing (or disgustingly disturbing) art we would have been deprived of.

So Shields takes on this intractable monolith of realism, the novel, and exposes the form for its calcifications, limitations, and, well, its sometimes God awful boringness (Shields says he’d rather die than read Jonathon Franzen—oh, if there were a literary death match on TV, I’d love to see Shields vs. Franzen).

It’s all about a definition of reality in the end. “Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art,” Shields writes (or does he write, because the book is an assemblage of short, aphoristic entries, many of which are plagiarized—with plagiarism operating as a premise of reality, so is it really plagiarism?).

There’s a disturbing complacency in how the majority of the reading public has come to unquestioningly accept the standards of literary fiction—usually written in the third person, adhering to Flauberts style indirect libre, removed from the heartbeat of reality that’s so immediate in a first person narrative of an essay or memoir that doesn’t adhere but explores, ventures, jaunts, and perhaps even fails.

Yes, fails.

Shields appreciates a text’s rawness—a messiness that is absent from much contemporary fiction and much of the real-life fiction foisted upon us in our lives, whether it takes the form of a politician, a newscaster, or an advertisement.

He prefers the essay—the attempt—to the polish of the three act plots that guide most novels. “My medium is prose, not the novel,” Shields writes.

By emphasizing prose, Shields neuters plot. To read in pursuit of the end, or at least the next, is one way to read, but Shields asserts the meaning of the moment, a narrative of pauses and drifts of dramatic tension (yes, dramatic tension that can occur without plot).

“The lyric essay doesn’t expound, is suggestive rather than exhaustive, depends on gaps, may merely mention,” he writes (quoting John D’Agata and Deborah Tall).

On the other hand, novels tend to be written toward conclusions instead of questions.

“The novel goes hand in hand with a straitjacketing of the material’s expressive potential,” Shields says. “You can always feel the wheels grinding.”

What fun is it to read such a grind of authorial construction? Somewhere within that grind, you can almost feel an agent or editor looking over the author’s shoulder. The click of a stopwatch that says it’s now time for the reversal, now time for the denouement.

Think simply of most characters in realist novels, who generally operate around one or two contradictions or counterpoints—life represented as relatively neat and tidy in comparison to the many personas and doubling backs and strivings that form most of us.

Shields is after something without so much artifice, which is why he says that memoir and creative nonfiction are the most compelling genres of our age. Life not as it’s represented via authorial filtering, but as it’s lived.

“Not only is life mostly failure, but in one’s failures or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self,” says Shields.

But here’s where I stub my toe with Shields. I don’t buy that the best “fiction” is being written as nonfiction, although I appreciate how he emphasizes the fictionality of nonfiction.

If anything, I feel that we’re living in an age where memoir has become bloated. As Neil Genzlinger put it so perfectly in the “The Problem with Memoirs,” “There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occur­rences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.”

I think what Shields is actually getting at is Camus’s thought that writing should be confession. “A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.”

To use Franzen as an example again (just because I love picking on him), his novels read with the wheels grinding, the studious craft of storytelling guiding every sentence. But his novels don’t read as anything close to confession. And that’s the problem. To write with a sense of confession brings writer and reader closer to a hungered for reality.

To strive for authenticity is different than striving for what is real—and this is the crux that dooms much realistic fiction. The literal truths (which Franzen aspires to capture in his socioeconomic approach to characterizaiton) aren’t as important as the poetic truths (which, say, Bolano or Kundera aspire to).

“You adulterate the truth as you write,” says Shields.

Forms must change.

“If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.”

And write manifestos. And break forms. And then write manifestos again. Here here.

Ian McEwan and the Art of Suspense

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I’ve always thought of Ian McEwan as a sort of modern day Graham Greene. It’s not about their subject matter or their style, but the discipline, the concise and unwasteful approach they take to their narratives.

All of Greene’s novels seem to be more or less the same length, as do McEwan’s. Likewise, Greene and McEwan share an appreciation for a straightforward story, carefully plotted, with a keen sense of suspense.

Suspense. It’s an enviable narrative skill, no matter if you’re writing genre fiction or experimental fiction. McEwan, like Greene, is able to write challenging, thought-provoking novels while keeping you on the edge of your seat—just enough so.

The February 23, 2009 New Yorker published a nice profile of McEwan, focusing largely on his evolution as a novelist of scientific reasoning, but also capturing his thoughts on craft. One of his goals is to “incite a naked hunger in readers,” he said. To create this hunger, he gives a great definition of suspense: “Narrative tension is primarily about withholding information.”

This approach stands in contrast to the more expositional “background” approach to characterization that is so often proselytized. Know your characters’ eye color. Know the way they soap themselves in the shower. Know if they had pets as children, etc., etc.

But this sort of background knowledge can not only bog down the story, but weigh heavily on the writer, killing the notion of suspense.

The profile calls McEwan a “connoisseur of dread.” “At moments of peak intensity, McEwan slows time down—a form of torture that readers enjoy despite themselves.”
McEwan can slow down and create tension in such a way because he’s Nabokovian in his ability to “fondle details.”

McEwan explained, “Writing is a bottom-up process, to borrow a term from the cognitive world. One thing that’s missing from the discussion of literature in the academy is the pleasure principle. Not only the pleasure of the reader but also of the writer. Writing is a self-pleasuring act.”

Gosh, how interesting. In other words, don’t think of your reader in Peoria, think of yourself.

I envy McEwan for his ability to strike this chord of narrative leisure while attenuating the action to such a degree. “McEwan believes that something stirring should happen in a novel. Though he is animated by ideas, he would never plop two characters on a sofa and have them expound rival philosophies.”

In fact, he keeps a plot book full of scenarios two or three sentences long. “Here’s one,” he said. “’A comedy of beliefs set in a laboratory. Into this realm comes a young Islamic scientist who is technically brilliant. The head of the laboratory is a secular humanist, and the two become entangled. Something short and vicious, like Nathanael West.”

I can’t say that I’d want to read that novel, but then perhaps McEwan could make it interesting.

For more on McEwan, read

King Dork vs. Catcher in the Rye

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Beware high school English teachers: If Catcher in the Rye is a standby of yours, King Dork challenges what’s become the sacred text of teen angst in the past—let’s say it—60 years (ouch!).

Part social satire, part mystery, and part tribute to ye olde Catcher, King Dork starts like any good adolescent taunt—or outright defacement, rather—sporting a dust jacket with the cover of Catcher scratched up and chiseled with a ball point pen.

It’s as if a bored high school kid had nothing else to do in class and resented the crazy adult teachers who assign teen angst literature from their youth for him to read.

That bored kid would be Tom, who stands in as our modern-day Holden. Not quite as eloquent or dark, and maybe not as insightful, but he’s game to tear down the world around him with similar snarls of wit set to a drum beat of dweebish desires.

”I don’t command a nerd army, or preside over a realm of the socially ill-equipped,” Tom, aka King Dork, says. ”I’m small for my age, young for my grade, uncomfortable in most situations, nearsighted, skinny, awkward, and nervous. And no good at sports. So Dork is accurate. The King part is pure sarcasm, though: there’s nothing special or ultimate about me. I’m generic.”

Alienation and its kissing cousin humiliation are the themes here—surprise!—all wrapped up in scratchy blankets of cynicism. And there’s superiority, of course—because how to survive teen alienation and its depredations unless you believe you’re kick-ass superior (the King moniker isn’t pure sarcasm; it never is). High school is the one bonafide time in life when arrogance comes in handy.

Above all, though, King Dork is a pleasant read, a bit like an extended sit-com (say, a two-hour episode of Freaks and Geeks). In fact, the first 80 pages are essentially repeated four times and could easily spin through a few more times, like a rerun, except not quite.

The novel so conspicuously lacks a narrative arc or any true character change that Tom, who tells the story with a banter similar to Holden’s, even comments on the story’s lapses toward the end of the book—a sort of last-minute metafictional recompense that lets us know that the author’s editor and agent had qualms about the story’s loose episodic tendrils.

But the story is otherwise conventional, traveling through the usual high school pranks and pitfalls in a playful and nostalgically pleasant way for those of us who survived the unpleasantness of those glory years (or think we survived). Fast Times at Ridgemont High meets Juno meets Superbad.

Among the scariest pranks are “Make-out/Fake-outs,” in which a cute girl decides ”it would be fun to put her arm around you and pretend to be hitting on you to see what you would do, with everyone laughing at you the whole time.”

Sound familiar? (If not, you’re blessed.)

Tom’s technique is to deflect bullies by flashing guns-and-ammo magazines—an effective strategy for a while, kind of like screaming while walking through a shopping mall. People keep their distance.

Although the booby traps of the high school are inherently predictable, the episodes of Tom and his one friend Sam make the novel memorable, even special. Tom and Sam spend most of their time making up imaginary rock bands—“Margaret? It’s God. Please Shut Up”—and devising accompanying logos and album titles.

The duo cycles through 25 different names in the course of the book—all of them delightfully silly and grandiose (similar to your favorite rock n’ roll bands, in other words—such as author Frank Portman’s successful Bay Area punk band “The Mr. T Experience”).

It’s a nervous tic that’s actually a survival mechanism. A nerdy kid’s counterpoint to low status—flippin’ the bird to the popular kids in day dreams, a “just you wait until I’m playing arena shows.”

While Tom’s tone and language aren’t as erudite as Catcher, he strives for the same ironic, humble truth: find a way to cut through these crazy layers of phoniness that life serves up like cafeteria food and come out on top.

Like Holden, Tom finds himself dodging and despairing of the adults around him. His mother is a distant self-medicator (Sam is friends with Tom in part to steal her valium), and his stepfather is a well meaning but annoyingly goofy, aging hippie, who’s kind of sweet, but tries too hard to connect, so he doesn’t. But at least he tries.

His teachers are frequently negligent or misguided or downright weird (and all too often cultishly obsessed with Catcher). How could they be otherwise? The climax of the novel has Tom and Sam bringing down the evil vice principal at the school assembly when their band Balls Deep….

Well, you’ll have to read the book. Or see the film, which is due out in 2010.

The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud

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My, what a lot of fanfare this novel received. After I read the reviews, I expected a stunning classic. A daring style. Wisdom. Maybe more.

The Emperor’s Children didn’t meet my expectations, which isn’t to say that it isn’t a good read (navigating a double negative might sum it up). It’s competent and well constructed—in the way an aristocrat ties his cravat—and surprisingly fun at times. In fact, it’s the kind of book I can feel smart reading, yet it’s no more demanding than watching TV—the perfect book to take on vacation.

Above all, it’s a writer’s novel, chock full of all sorts of descriptions, piquant and promiscuous and sometimes gorgeous, as if writing descriptions were the point of it all. Yes, Claire Messud is an active, perhaps hyperactive, describer. The narrative moves at times as if each dust mote in the air might just cry out for an adjective or two of investigation.

In fact, Emperor’s made me wonder if description is the new narrative these days, the new beginning, middle, and end. It seems to have usurped characterization, bulldozed metaphor off to the side of the road, slapped dialogue into a whimper. I read so many reviewers gush over authors who write sentences that spill over with description.

Every one of Messud’s sentences lets us know that a writer has written it, as if she’s in a writerly competition, obsessively injecting adverbs and adjectives and the odd odd word in a sentence. I came to peculiarly enjoy the way she might construct a scene—say a restaurant scene—and end up describing the salt and pepper shakers, the ice cubes in the water glass, the crinkles of the white table cloth, the part of the waiter’s hair, the fabric of the carpet, the smell of the wine, the shape of the potatoes in the soup….and then touch base with the characters and their drama. She catalogues the world, and she does it gorgeously, masterfully, even enviably, but somehow she misses the telling detail, neglecting the guts of her story in service of the wordy words in her head.

The critic James Wood wrote that “Nabokov and Updike at times freeze detail into a cult of itself.” Messud is likewise cultish with detail (interestingly, she’s married to James Wood.)

The Times calls Messud an “unnerving talent” in its review of the novel, “a crafter of artful books praised more for their ‘literary intelligence’ and ‘near-miraculous perfection’ than for their sweeping social relevance” until The Emperor’s Children, which is “a comedy of manners — an astute and poignant evocation of hobnobbing glitterati in the months before and immediately following Sept. 11.”

The novel is a comedy of manners, promising hefty themes in the milieu of New York intellectuals and sophisticates, but each character is somewhat hackneyed, a cardboard cutout, the construct of an author adept at writing and researching the backgrounds of her characters, but unable to put the necessary flesh on the bones.

Marina is the typical spoiled rich girl—smart but flip and undisciplined, searching for meaning and a purposeful life, if not a husband, as she approaches 30. We’re told that she’s exquisitely beautiful and charming, but we have to take the author’s word for it. She tends to seem simply spoiled and inert on the page.

Julius is the typical gay cultural critic, caustic and callow and capricious and coked-out, exhausted by his decadent escapades and looking to settle down while also fighting the urge to skylark about town just a bit more (and you just know he’s going to be punished for his skylarking ways—the scene of his punishment is one of the most crazy, riveting scenes of the novel).

Danielle is the smart hard-working gal who can’t land a guy. She is a television producer who longs to create stories on weighty topics but instead covers liposuction—career situations like this are the definitions of tragedies in this novel; everyone deserves to be important and famous, it seems, and a story on liposuction doesn’t cut it.

Danielle has an affair with Marina’s dad, Murray, the emperor of all these children, who’s the stereotypical ‘60s activist, a truth teller who lost the truth somewhere in the ‘70s but still attempts to spout it between scotches and lurching leers. He’s writing a book about how to live, although he and we know he’s lost the necessary vision or self-respect to be able to tell that tale.

Ludovic Seely steps in as one of the two characters who aim to shake things up, especially when he begins to court Marina; he’s smarmy and arrogant, supposedly brilliant, and ready to usurp Murray’s regal role with his post-ironic sensibility, but on the novel’s pages he has about as much insight, wit, or intellect as a drunken, self-satisfied bore at a cocktail party. That’s fine except that all of the characters revere him, or at least reckon with him in ways that he doesn’t earn for the reader.

The counterpoint to all of these characters is Bootie, Murray’s lost, fervid nephew, who hews to an uncompromising truth to which even he doesn’t measure up, if only because no one can measure up to an uncompromising truth, right?

Bootie’s the character who most truly comes to life and challenges and threatens the reader, just as a young, avid thinker does to us all. Bootie might be Messud’s best character, or the only one who can carry a novel by himself; we’re never quite sure what he’s capable of, which makes him dangerous. And he is dangerous. He aims to bring down the Emperor’s house by exposing Murray’s derelict intellect, strangely thinking that he’s performing a service and naively carrying a torch for Marina at the same time.

The novel is oddly a September 11 novel, although I strain to figure why Messud literally dropped this bomb on the novel. Everything was much more interesting before September 11, and the novel didn’t do much with the event. When things were supposed to be serious, the gravity felt forced and unfulfilled; when the characters turned back into their selfish selves, the story felt diverted, neglected, hurried.

Still, despite these misgivings, Messud is a florid, adept writer. Her sentences flow, despite her infatuation with the comma. And she crafts a pretty good story—perhaps short of the “near-miraculous perfection” the Times credits her with, but one that kept me turning the pages.

I talked to several people who read this book, and they all liked it kinda, sorta, but none of them could remember much about it. One friend was able to name nearly all of the characters from a movie he saw in the ‘70s (the “Bad News Bears”), but couldn’t remember one of the character’s names from Emperor’s.

I suppose this is the risk an author takes when description is placed on such a pillar. Many readers forget the words that describe the characters they’re supposed to remember.

Perhaps that’s the telling detail.

Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse: Adolescent Reading, Adult Reading

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I reread Steppenwolf as part of a little project to revisit some of the novels that swept me away when I was in high school.

The danger of a project like this is that the stories won’t measure up to my estimations of the time and ruin my beloved memories of yore—Steppenwolf certainly didn’t. That said, it’s interesting to view such books through a different lens and think about why a book like this meant so much to me.

In many ways it’s obvious. Harry, the Steppenwolf, feels different. Not only does he feel different, but he feels superior to his surroundings, and doesn’t understand why he isn’t recognized for his purity and intellect. He’s full of anger, revulsion, self-contempt….and deep thinking and integrity. Sounds exactly like a teenager, or at least me as a teenager. The novel is a natural accompaniment to early ‘80s punk rock.

Harry’s further complicated by the dual self he feels warring within himself. He’s trapped in the middle, drawn to a life of intensity, the life of a wolf who yearns to live unconventionally and in the wild, but he’s unwilling to give up the comfortable and orderly life of the bourgeoisie, even though he holds it in contempt.

A teenager’s life is often similarly fraught with such drama, with the crux of defining oneself against the materialistic or middle-class wishes of parents while struggling to discover one’s true self in all of the wild madness of being a teenager. No matter who you want to be, you’ll likely have to transgress against your parents’ wishes—or more dramatically, what feels like all of society, gosh—to figure it out.

Harry has retreated from the world, cordoning himself off in a room he rents in a bourgeoisie woman’s house (he rhapsodizes about the cleanliness and order of her entryway as a way to show his addiction to a life well provided for). He takes lonely, aimless walks through town, tends to mope, indulges in his intellectualism—which is more pure and uncompromised than a poor well-meaning professor he has an encounter with—and enjoys forays out to listen to music (Mozart, not jazz, God forbid) and drink wine.

He’s living the life of a potential suicide, in short, and dwells on the thought of suicide, even making a pact with himself to kill himself when he’s 50.

Harry’s dilemmas are made all the more compelling for the adolescent mind when a mystical component is introduced. He encounters a person carrying an advertisement for a magic theater who gives him a small book, Treatise on the Steppenwolf. The pamphlet addresses Harry by name and strikes him as describing himself uncannily.

Later Harry enters the magic theater, which holds the keys and transformations of his fate.

One thing that struck me during my adult reading of the book is that for a smart man, Harry is very petulant and self-limiting. He disdains most things that are modern, in particular the phonograph, which mechanizes the beautiful orchestrations of Mozart. The purity of the world seems to be categorically sullied by all things of progress.

I suppose I found this part of him appealing in high school—and maybe I still do, never quite trusting what’s presented as technological advances—interpreting his hatred of progress as a revulsion toward capitalism. It’s that, but something else as well—an inability to adapt that’s not particularly commendable.

Being a kid is all about expecting the world to form itself to your brilliant, superior thoughts. Being an adult is all about adapting, so Harry seems particularly rigid and immature. I’d find him interesting if I met him in life, sympathetic, but a little to sour and self-righteous to want to spend much time with. And that shouldn’t condemn me as one of illegitimate sellouts who are such because they aren’t him.

He’s also reluctant to dance, as if such enjoyment is base and lowly, although dance and an immersion in other “instinctual” pleasures will deliver him as much as anything in the end. He even starts to like jazz. I suppose I was so entranced by Harry’s spiritual dilemma in high school that I overlooked what a curmudgeon he was.

The more striking thing I overlooked was Hesse’s exploration of individuation—the necessity of thinking of a self not as a single ego or unit, and not even a dual self split between saint and sinner, but as an inherent multitude of possibilities. The best example of this is when Harry laughs at himself in the mirror at the Magic Theatre, and his self cracks into hundreds of pieces.

Hesse wrote this in the mid-20s, so I don’t know if he’d encountered Jung yet, but Jung’s thoughts on self and individuation permeate this novel. In fact, it’s a great book to do a school project of Jungian analysis with.

Hesse felt that readers misunderstood the book, focusing only on the suffering and despair that are depicted in Harry life and missing the possibility of transcendence and healing. My high school self did misunderstand the book, but I was one who was more interested in despair than transcendence.

Hesse is masterful at blurring the lines between the fantasy and realistic elements of the book, which is one reason the story has haunted me over the years. Hermine’s death is particularly riveting, especially since it’s essentially carried out in a funhouse mirror.

While I wouldn’t say it’s a great book, and I would have certainly been frustrated with it if I’d read it for the first time as an adult, it was the perfect book for an angst ridden teenager like me. I wish I could go back 25 years and read it again and be swept away.

If you want a good summary of the book without reading it, this short movie pretty much captures it.

Writing–Or Not Writing–About Work

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We’re in the midst of a slew of novels about the place we spend the most time: work.

Is it a trend? A new genre? A conspiracy?

Not quite. First there was Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to an End, and now there is Ed Park’s well-reviewed Personal Days. The list essentially stops there.

The New York Time’s review of Personal Days notes a subject I’ve occasionally chewed on: why isn’t the workplace a more prevalent subject for novels? As the sit-com The Office has shown, it’s a natural place to situate comedy. Beyond the absurd aspects of office life, however–which is where Ferris and Park seem to find their best material–office environments are perhaps too mundane to set a novel in.

Perhaps readers just don’t want to dig into a setting that typically causes the Sunday night blues. It’s enough to just wake up and go to work, after all. Sure there might be butt loads of existential meaning in our cube farms, but it’s tough enough to make it to quitting time, let alone come home to read about meetings and corporate jargon–or write about it–unless we’re laughing at the idiots in management or the cube next to us.

Here’s an idea for a party game–or a road trip game–or a game for any time you’re bored and want to kill time….hey, the perfect game for the workplace! Name novels that center the workplace in the novel’s dominant trajectory. The Times names titles such as Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine and Upton Sinclair’s Jungle, purposely focusing on literary novels.

Just looking at those titles, however, I begin to think of other possibilites: The Confederacy of Dunces, much of Kafka (perhaps the stories don’t take place at work, but they’re often about work in some way), Henry Green’s novels, The Grapes of Wrath. There must be more.

The question, of course, in terms of novels like Park’s and Ferris’s, is whether the novels are really about work or whether work is a secondary thread of the novel, present only in relief to another larger and more meaningful theme.

Perhaps not many novels focus on work because work, despite the quantity of time it swallows from our lives, is still marginal in terms of who we really are. That’s the way I prefer to think of it.

How depressing it would be, after all, if Descartes had said, “I work, therefore I am”?

Henry Green: Loving

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It’s always fascinating to read a book and be completely at odds with other major critics. The questions span from “Am I simply the wrong reader for this book?” to “Do I have too many kids and soccer games going on to thoughtfully assess this book?” to “Did this critic have too many damn kids and activities to decently evaluate the book?”

The problem with the last question is that the answer is frequently, if not always, “no,” because critics tend to be selfish sods who expect others to take care of their kids so that they have the presence of mind for high-falutin’ thoughts.

At least I take care of my kids. Or fail trying. Or at least that’s what I think.

But…to cut to the chase, here’s the critical rub on Henry Green, who I’ve been reading praise about since I first put on Winnie the Pooh flannel jammies, or soon afterward (to be truthful, perhaps soon after I bought my first—and only—Styx t-shirt).

Elizabeth Bowen* said that Henry Green’s novels “reproduce, as few English novels do, the actual sensations of living.”

W.H. Auden once called him the finest living English novelist.

Francine Prose put Loving on her list of “Books to Be Read Immediately.”

John Updike praises Green for “this surrender of self, this submersion of opinions and personality in the intensity of witnessing ‘life itself.’”

It’s this consistent emphasis on “reproduction” and “objectivity” that troubles me. Green is too frequently a stenographer when I want him to be an author (please, what’s wrong with just a little personality?).

Sure the dialogue is, well, realistic, true to life, etc., but it doesn’t hold nearly the same subtext as, say, Hemingway, who also privileged the author as an objective witness. In fact, the reason Hemingway reads better than Green, and is more illuminating, is because he never truly dared to actually surrender himself (thank God!), but only claimed to.

Henry Green said that he aimed to “create ‘life’ which does not eat, procreate, or drink, but which can live in people who are alive.”

I could have used a bit more procreating (there was a fair amount of eating)….

Updike’s praises Green as a “saint of the mundane,” which is entirely accurate: Green bathes in the mundane, breathes the mundane, eats the mundane—and, hell, procreates in the mundane. In fact, my reading experience was so mundane that I kept getting distracted by the dishes, the laundry, and the bills, but not by any of the big life questions and thoughts I like to read for.

Updike writes that Green’s “observations of the world appear as devoid of prejudice and preconception as a child’s.” I only wish he could have presented a scene from a child’s point of view, with the jarring perspective that children so often provide simply because they are not “saints of mundane,” but steeped in the kind of authorial personality that continually demands interpretation and reinterpretation.

I do agree with one of Updike’s comments. He calls Green’s novels “photographs of a vanished England,” which is my overwhelming response to Loving. I felt as if I were walking through an odd sort of literary museum, observing some of the interesting details of class differences in England, eavesdropping, but never quite experiencing the high points of dramatic intrigue, a story that is shaped with a point of view—the fundamental characteristics of a meaningful narrative.

I’m sure that Green’s novels served a more forceful and urgent purpose in the era he wrote them (from approximately 1920 to 1950), and he’s a capable author in certain ways. He does create a polyphony of voices in the novel, so that life sounds like a hammering dialogue of competing needs. He’s just not the stylist I desire—or more accurately, he doesn’t convey the necessary transmutation that defines art. I don’t want novelists to just be witnesses, after all—the idea of aspiring to pure and faithful mimesis in a literal sense was essentially exhausted by Zola. Novelists need personality because they need a point of view.

But then again, perhaps I am simply the wrong reader for Henry Green. Or I was too distracted by things like school auctions to give him his proper due.

*The great thing I discovered about Elizabeth Bowen is that she’s on MySpace, despite being dead, and that she’s “in my extended network,” which means that I’m not too far removed from her good friends Proust and Vita Sackville-West. Jeepers, I feel special—and so early 20th century, my favorite era.