That watery squirt
from the mustard bottle
is the saddest yellow.
Weak and dirty-looking,
like day-old dishwater,
it doesn’t even have the
prickly tang of real
mustard.
Yellow must be bold or
else it risks disappearing
into the plate.
Not like the yellow of
sunflowers or marigolds,
or even the pale yellow
of that mustard stain
on my shirt, which
may be sad, but it
speaks to happier picnics
and sustenance
and glorious afternoons
under the sun.
I am reading a lot of books all at once. I don’t know if this is a good thing or bad thing. Here are the books I’m reading currently:
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl
Kothar of the Magic Sword! by Gardner F. Fox (yes, the exclamation point is part of the title)
The Freelancer’s Survival Guide by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay by Andrew Horton (this is a re-read; read this one in college many eons ago)
Unfinished Tales by J.R.R. Tolkien
Heart of Stone by Ben Galley (I figured I needed to read more current fantasy from independent authors, and this one looked good)
…
And now I’m thinking about picking up another book, The Sleeping Dragon by Joel Rosenberg, as part of my research on portal fantasies that use role-playing games as the portal into another world. Also, I want to start reading Oathbringer and get back into Stormlight Archives.
Is this too much? Why am I reading so many different things at once? Is my inability to focus on one book at a time a symptom of my internet-brain, where I can’t get immersed in one text for an extended period of time? Is this a problem, or should I just go with it and not worry?
Today I finished another chapter in Avalon Summer. It’s called “The Clay Mines.”
Not sure about it yet. The novella itself is based a lot on my memories from childhood, and sometimes I’m just writing things as I remember them, not really thinking about plot or structure or conflict or tension or anything, just seeing everything in my mind’s eye and transcribing it on the page. The ending of “The Clay Mines” was like that. I was just remembering things and putting them in there, hoping that somehow my subconscious was making connections.
When I go back and reread my words tomorrow, maybe I’ll see things that don’t fit and I’ll cut, or maybe I’ll see a place to add more, but sometimes it’s hard to judge. Everything is hard to judge when it’s your own work. There’s the version in your head and the version on the page — and they don’t match up — but it’s hard to know if what you put on the page is trash, or if it’s just that artists can’t judge their own work.
I think it’s probably better — as the artist — not to judge at all. Just put it all out there and let the readers decide. This is where enjoying the process — the crafting of the story — is more important than the finished product. Whether the “Clay Mines” chapter works or not is/should be an after-thought. I had fun writing it today. I had fun remembering and trying to picture everything clearly, and to my delight, I remembered a detail about my grandparents’ basement that I hadn’t thought of in years.
That memory alone was worth all the time I spent writing the chapter. Suddenly, with the memory of that detail, an entire vault of other memories opened up and came back to me. That experience is part of the reason I’m writing this book in the first place. I want to remember those forgotten details of the past and put them into some kind of coherent narrative, to lift them out of memory and bring them to the present. Today, I did that.
Listening to: Kokoroko’s debut album Could We Be More
Reading: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Also Reading: 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl
Drinking: Water (for reasons yet unknown)
Listening to: All my R.E.M. albums
Watching: Avatar: The Last Airbender
I’ve been writing a lot of words this week — including finishing Gates to Illvelion — and I’ve been listening to a lot more music lately. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Music has always been — and continues to be — a major source of inspiration for my writing.
When I don’t listen to enough music, my writing well runs dry. When I’m saturated in good music, then my cup overflows. So simple, but sometimes I forget it.
100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl is about theater and writing plays and motherhood, but I’m finding a lot of wisdom in Ruhl’s essays for my own work as a fiction writer.
One of the essays I read today, #37. “Conflict as drama?” proposes that it is actually dialectic — “a need for opposites that undermine each other” — that makes drama, not conflict.
I really like this idea. Ruhl also wonders why improvisation is all about agreeing (“yes and” is the rule of Improv and being a good Game Master), but with drama we say there must be conflict.
This quote on page 82 really made me reevaluate how I write fiction and tell stories:
“What if we borrowed from improvisation a proliferation of assent? A form of storytelling that used surprise as a tool rather than bickering.”
Storytelling as surprise. How can I say “yes and” in my creation of situations and stories? What would that change in my novels?
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