A Million Words

"They" say that career-ending disaster strikes when someone is promoted up to their level of incompetence.

But I think it’s less a case of rising too far and more a case of just too fast.

Consider this, from Buzz Bissinger’s New York Times profile of Chicago Cubs pitcher Kerry Wood:

"Although the act of pitching a baseball repeatedly is exceedingly stressful, doctors now generally accept that it is not the act itself that causes injury nearly so much as pitching while fatigued. …

"The tried-and-true method of preventing young pitchers from throwing when they are fatigued has been to keep them on strict pitch counts in the minor leagues -- 100 pitches per game has become something of an industry standard. ... [But] pitch counts prevent young pitchers from learning to pitch while tired, to pace themselves during a game, to get out of jams without simply handing the ball to the bullpen. …

"Instead, too many young pitchers, particularly those who have attracted media attention, come up to the majors too soon and feel an obligation to go full bore all the time. They are constantly reaching back for extra velocity, and if they are doing it as fatigue begins to set in, the possibility of their arms breaking down only multiplies."

Similarly, in the New Yorker article Fallen Idols (abstract online), David Denby makes a case for the 20th century’s movie-studio contract system over today’s free-agency:

"Seventy years ago, these actors would have been tested in a variety of small roles or B-movies -- tested to see whether both they could act and whether the audience perked up when they came onscreen. They would have been allowed to grow slowly. Now they are thrown into big roles in expensive movies, and they’re forced to overdraw on themselves before their temperament has found the right shape. They don’t know the camera yet, and the camera doesn’t always find much in their faces."

Reading two such similar cautions should perk up writers to the message for our own work. We learn the craft of writing; then we need to stay buckled down, doing the daily pages -- practicing the techniques one by one and in combination, practicing them when we're fresh and through fatigue, and noticing the effects on readers.

"They" also say that it takes a million notes to make a musician.

And a million words to make a writer.

But It Really Happened, Part 2

I live a generally careful life, unwilling to give too robust a test to the down side of karma. Fine. But then I need to at least give my imagination free rein ... to somewhere near the realm of things that happen, one after another, in real life.

We cynics get a bonus in the last paragraph.

We realists get smacked by the more somber reportage here.

Your Interesting Life

Inspiration from the November 2007 Shambhala Sun’s Q&A with director/writer/actress Miranda July (or treat yourself to her book website ) -- on what holds people back about making art from their lives:

There's not a lot of positive feedback, especially early on. You need people around you saying, “What happened to you today that was interesting?” You have to genuinely believe that there is something interesting and special about daily life and your experience of it. I think people feel this innately [… but …] you’re quickly told it’s self-indulgent or selfish or just so off topic.

Committed Co-worker

Prompted by the release of the film Michael Clayton, Slate.com's Juliet Lapidos writes that most anyone, including a co-worker, can petition a judge to involuntarily commit a person to psychiatric care.

So go on, indulge yourself. Draft the petition letter about some current or former co-worker.

Measuring Stick

This ruler seriously disturbs my brain.

Sci-fi and fantasy novelists could build worlds where its rules make sense.

But in my real world, when people's behavior seems as crazy-making as these markings, it's time to pay attention.

[Ruler is from a print ad for Accenture Technology Consulting.]

She Nodded

Characters tend to nod a lot in the first drafts of my stories. So I was delighted to hear Fred Shafer (scroll down) speak about gestures yesterday at the Off Campus Writers’ Workshop. His premise: gestures are useful not only in showing character and driving plot, but also -- during the story-drafting process -- in aiding a writer’s discovery of character and plot.

Shafer referenced Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer (Chapter 9) and echoed her advice to not use gestures merely to fill space on the page or as beats to alter the pace. But it’s no good to leave them out altogether, either.

Rather, writers must find the right gestures. They need to go beyond the first ones that come to mind -- the stereotypes, the cliches -- and be willing to discover the spontaneous / unusual / uncommon gestures that actually mean something ... that tilt the direction of an interaction (and maybe even the story) one way or another.

He acknowledged that it’s difficult for writers, alone at a keyboard, to think up gestures. So he suggested that writers be like actors, who observe people and then steal their gestures. He told of a director and actors in rehearsal, needing a meaningful gesture but not knowing what it should be. Eventually, the director called over a theater cleaning lady and offered her a sheet of paper. He got exactly the gesture he needed: before she took the paper, she wiped her hands on her uniform.

But what’s a writer to do without a notebook full of previously observed gestures, or someone upon whom to experiment? Use the imagination to experiment, Fred advised. Stay deeply within the scene and watch the characters. More importantly, watch them long enough -- often, what begins as a cliched gesture continues into something more telling. He offered examples from the short stories of Antonya Nelson to illustrate that staying with characters a moment longer leads to discovering unique details:

Abby grabbed Lucia’s hand and Lucia returned the squeeze.

Lucia leaned her head back, her throat moving with her last swallow.

“No,” she said, shaking her head, her hair loosening as she did so.

Edith put her face to his and kissed him, not on the mouth but around it, the way you might kiss an envelope containing a letter to your beloved …

Morning Break

Quarterly Orkin pest-prevention service: $84.80.
Grande whole-milk latte: $3.68.
Side glass of ice-water: free.

An hour's escape to Starbucks to read The New Yorker while the house airs out: priceless.

Preparations

I've been thinking about yesterday's post, which touched on my feelings about the preparatory stages involved in whatever I'm doing ... and my frustration when the preparations cause delays.

It reminds me of a passage from E. L. Konigsburg’s novel, "The View from Saturday", wherein sixth-grader Noah learns calligraphy from Tillie, a friend of his grandparents. But before the calligraphy, comes the intricate, six-step process of filling the old-fashioned pen with ink. Noah narrates: "When I told Tillie that six steps seemed a lot to have to do before you begin, she said, 'You must think of those six steps not as the preparation for the beginning, but as the beginning itself.' "

My frustration with delays leaks into writing, too, where progress is tracked mostly by word-counts or page-counts. It helps me to remember Jerry Weinberg's counsel that "Writing" involves many stages … and the "writing down the words" part is but one of them.

Good advice, both, which I am learning to follow.

Mending Kits

I traveled often in a previous job, and the only hotel freebies I routinely collected were shower caps and mending kits.

Last weekend, when I could no longer close the catch-all drawer of my bedroom dresser, I purged and reorganized its contents, including dozens of remaining mending kits. Those pictured here on the right surprised me in their sameness and now prompt some kind of story reminiscent of Groundhog Day.

But I remember the reverence I felt toward hotels that supplied the kits on the left, with their pre-threaded needles -- a requisite, I’d assumed, for male guests, and pure luxury for women. It’s not difficult to thread a needle (although I haven’t tried lately, with presbyopic eyes); it only requires a molecule of spit to seal the thread's flyaway end, and then a moment’s pause in breathing while the end is aimed to and through the eye of the needle. It’s the delay that frustrates -- the 10-second pause in the midst of getting on with things and out the door.

And now I notice the unique kit here -- with its 10 colors of thread and needle threader; buttons, needles and pearl-topped straight pins; scissors; and a tape measure! The tape measure -- a tailor’s tool, not a mender’s tool -- is what prompts this kit into its own story.

Pick 3

You have three pair of ladies' legs in your life, yes? What's the story?

Better yet, pick a pair from a woman in each of three different stages in your life and put them together on the sofa.

I remember a nun -- {{shudder}} school principal and my teacher in seventh and eighth grade -- whose legs looked like this, newly visible in the shorter-skirted habits that emerged in the late 1960s. I think I'll toss her into the mix.

So Many Writers ...

… so little time. I can’t possibly listen to all of the web’s audio/video about what writers write and how they go about it. But I do check the following sites periodically and choose judiciously:

Amazon’s Amazon Wire

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett’s Writers on Writing

Barnes & Noble’s Meet the Writers

Penguin USA’s The Penguin Podcast

The Tattered Cover Bookstore’s Authors on Tour

and

Live (*note -- not recorded*) audio from Prairie Lights Bookstore’s visiting authors, streamed at WSUI online

Close-up

I'm intrigued by class distinctions, for example the differences in accommodation among the various passengers aboard the Titanic. But comparing differences at the big-picture level of staterooms, or dining rooms, feels abstract and distant ...

... getting down to the details feels personal ... and a story begins.

Cover Story

Are you a writer who can develop the initial burst of inspiration from a visual prompt into a full short story?

Then take a look at this cover-art prompt for Ruins Metropolis, an upcoming anthology of mainstream and genre (science fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance) stories.

See guidelines here. Submission deadline is October 31, 2007.

Archaeology

The thing I’m enjoying most about Jonathan Safran Foer’s ”Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is the 9-year-old protagonist’s mission of talking with every person named Brown in New York City -- and its affirmation that an interesting life exists behind each anonymous face and closed door.

It reminds me of Steve Hartman's “Everybody has a Story” segments on CBS News. Hartman throws a dart at a US map to choose a city, then randomly opens a phone book there and chooses a person to interview. He invariably discovers a fascinating story.

It reminds me of The Oxford Project, wherein Peter Feldstein photographed every resident in the tiny town of Oxford, Iowa. Twenty-one years later, in 2005, he photographed the same residents again, this time accompanied by writer Stephen Bloom, who interviewed them. And hidden behind one ordinary face in this flyover-country town is Jim Hoyt: “… the last living of the first four American soldiers who liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.”

Novelist Orson Scott Card wrote, “If you look at somebody and think he or she is normal, that often means you don't know them well enough yet.” Gustave Flaubert wrote, “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.”

It just takes some excavating around the details.

On the Edge

I'm a believer in method writing. Should you find yourself stuck about what a moment of panic feels like, here's inspiration.

Point of View

If you're not periodically checking out the sites on my Blogroll, you're missing interesting ideas ...

... and alternative views, like this one from Cute Overload.

Truth in Advertising

The quietest solicitor, ever, stood outside the coffee shop this morning.

In his forties, outfitted with a donation canister and an identifying tie-on vest, he held a neutral face mostly toward the cars passing on the street rather than to the people passing next to him on the sidewalk.

Inside, I waited for my latte and watched him pace slowly, a few steps this way, a few steps back that way. I wondered what charity he was (not very effectively) soliciting for, and when he turned, the lettering on the back of his vest answered: "Help Kids With Autism."

Separated at Birth

Which is Archbishop Fulton Sheen (shown circa 1956 from an EWTN program) ...


... and which is vampire Barnabas Collins (shown circa 1967 from Dark Shadows)?

Back to School

Schools in my suburb started a couple weeks ago, but Chicago-proper's first day was today. It influenced the small talk at my coffee shop this morning, and characterized the moms in line.

Barista: "Are your kids back in school?"

Customer #1: (smiles) "Yeah."

Customer #2: (answers via a solemn, silent nod)

Customer #3: (flips hair) "Two weeks already."

TGIF?

On this Labor Day weekend, I'm grateful that my Fridays aren't nights for exhausted celebration.

That the end of each workday isn't the happiest hour.

That Sunday evenings don't build into a feeling of dread.

I'm grateful to be a writer.

A Talking To

I’d been out of touch with news over the past few days, so brought a little radio on my morning latte-walk. But just a couple of blocks into the walk, a noise drowned out my radio as if I’d turned the volume to mute.

I removed an earbud and looked around, finally catching sight of a grey squirrel perched in plain sight on a low tree branch ahead. He (she?) faced me directly and squawked ferociously.

Giving a passing thought to rabies, I kept my eyes on him as I approached. He didn’t scrabble around to hide behind the tree, as squirrels tend to do. Instead, as I passed, he moved around toward me, his body stretched forward like a pointer dog, his head extended tautly. Squared off, he continued to yell at me!

I’ve heard the cautions about human behavior: when you see something unusual going on, it’s likely a staged distraction away from something even more interesting ... like a pickpocket. Did humans steal this strategy from animals? Because, judging by that squirrel’s squawking, there must have been some kind o’ somethin’ he didn’t want me to notice. Maybe babies, out on their own?

I wish I’d thought to look anywhere but at him.

Adaptation

In memory of my dad (who would have turned 90 today), I’m making clam linguine for supper.

I’ve adapted my recipe from his, which he adapted from “Enrico” - a friend, or chef, or restaurant; I don’t know which.

In retirement, Dad would spend an afternoon preparing the ingredients for this recipe -- mincing parsley, oven-drying then crumbling bread, shredding Parmesan -- until the countertop next to the stove was dotted with little measured dishes of each.

All his effort seemed impressive ... which confuses me now, since I mostly guesstimate the quantities, and consider this one of my go-to recipes when in a hurry for something at the last minute. I do use short-cuts -- packaged bread crumbs, pre-shredded Parmesan; sometimes even -- ack! -- dried parsley, though not tonight. And Dad would sip from a glass of bourbon or scotch while he prepared this recipe; I’ll pour chardonnay.

But when I lean over the skillet to breathe in the steam from garlic sauteing in butter, I’ll imagine us agreeing that it’s the best aroma in the world.

2 Tbsp butter
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 can (10oz.) whole baby clams w/liquid
Splash of white wine
1/2 cup frozen peas, thawed
1/4 cup minced fresh parsley
1/2 lb linguine (cooked, hot)
1/3 cup soft fresh bread crumbs
Shredded parmesan cheese, to taste

In large skillet, saute garlic in butter. Add clams (including liquid) and wine; simmer until reduced a bit. Add peas and parsley; heat through.

Remove from heat and toss with hot linguine and bread crumbs. Sprinkle with parmesan to taste.

Servings: 4

[Prepared in photo with penne, served on a luncheon plate, accompanied by a chopped Caprese salad.]

Artist Date

A few times in my life, I’ve bought an issue of Vogue magazine -- the September fashion issue (invariably their “Biggest Issue Ever!”) -- to see what was in, see how far out I was, and gauge how I felt about that. Always, I was 90% out-of-style, and 90% okay with it.

My most contemporaneous brush with high fashion was a time I recognized it on someone else -- on television. Circa 1990, Vogue had filled its September issue with plaids -- and not long after, there was Murphy Brown's Corky Sherwood, costumed in a fitted plaid blazer lifted right off the issue’s pages.

But as I’ve been encouraging my creativity, I’ve found myself seeking out the September issue every year. I bought it at Border’s this week, where a seventysomething checkout lady barely managed the leverage needed to drag its 840 glossy pages across the barcode scanner. “Only $4.99?” she marveled. “It’s all ads,” I said.

At least for the first 300 pages -- editorially, only the table of contents, editor’s letter and masthead appear there. But the creative ads make the issue so much fun! I like the 8- and 12-page spreads that sometimes build into little narratives ... and I like noticing them excerpted in 1- or 2-page Cliffs Notes versions later, in other magazines.

It seems that every writer knows about Morning Pages, from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron -- three pages of handwritten, stream-of-consciousness writing done first thing every morning, intended to clear the mind. But few writers acknowledge Cameron’s twin creative tool, Artist Dates -- solitary playtimes intended to repopulate the mind with pleasing images and energy.

When I reached page 51 of Vogue and saw the ad of a young woman resting on a woodpile in a barn -- dressed in couture! -- and caught myself wondering about her backstory … I realized this issue is going to be a terrific Artist Date.

Mountaintop

If not Moses, who?

And what, where, when?

Why?

From the Classroom

There's no way the text from this page in IKEA's 2008 catalog was written by someone in the USA …

... unless the marketing team included an ex-middle-school social studies teacher, fresh from lessons on imports and exports.

Seriously -- textiles?

Map It

When I was 11, I watched until my neighbors across the street were gone, then crept into their house and drew the floorplan on a page in my writer's notebook.

I look at the diagram now and wish I'd included enough detail to bring the rooms to life this many years later. Yet I also smile, because the major item of interest on their property didn't require a break-and-entering, and doesn't even require a notation for me to remember it. It's off the page at the upper left, at the alley-end of a fence that ran along their driveway. Each week, the trash cans there held (to my mind) an intriguing number of empty beer bottles.

These days, if I feel stalled while writing a story, I'll draw a map of the setting (a room or workplace or city) and make marks in areas that interest me. When I figure out why they're interesting, the story usually gets going again.

Over the Top

When I channel-surfed onto a Food Network segment of Semi-Homemade Cooking, the set decor hijacked my little-girl eyeballs.

I stopped. I stared. I snapped a photo of the TV screen so I could keep looking at the hues and textures.

I used to love peppermint-stick ice cream, too.

Battle at Kruger

With more than 10 million hits, this You Tube video of a South African lion-buffalo interaction is a must-see.

Beyond fascinating and horrifying -- and eventually cheer-inducing! -- it's a terrific real-life illustration of how story tensions rise and resolve toward an ultimate conflict.

Behind the Bridge

When I set fiction or essays in a pharmacy, readers gobble up the behind-the-scenes aspects and ask for more. So when I found myself gobbling up the details in a recent post to a pharmacy listserv I belong to, I paid attention.

Scott Knoer, director of pharmacy at a Minneapolis hospital, gave permission to distribute the following -- excerpts from his personal observations and learnings during the first hours after last week’s collapse of the I-35 bridge.

At approximately 6:30 I received an Orange Alert page and immediately drove to work. By the time I got there, the response from our staff was overwhelming. We never had to initiate a call tree because so many people either called us or just showed up and asked how they could help.

One learning from this is that when a major artery like Interstate 35 is closed, it has a ripple effect on traffic. It took me about an hour to make a 20 minute drive to the hospital. Another learning is that cell phone communications are difficult as the system is overwhelmed by people across the country checking in with loved ones. I had about a 10% success rate when trying to contact staff and the hospital on my way in.

All of the disaster training really pays off. When I pulled up, there were police at the entrances ready to direct and guide traffic. The ED [Emergency Department] was full of physicians, nurses, pharmacists, lab staff, etc. Everyone had their occupation taped to their back so they were easily identified. Signs were on the walls indicating where you could find Pharmacy, Lab results, etc...

At one point we had four pharmacists and three technicians in the ED, running up supplies, drawing up doses, checking allergies and interactions, and handing out morphine, antibiotics, vaccines, etc. The rest of our team manned their stations, keeping supplies moving, entering orders and answering a tremendous number of phone calls.

Another learning is that while we have a stockpile for disasters, it is aimed primarily at bioterrorism. The things we really went through for this trauma event were cefazolin, lactated ringers, and tetanus vaccines. We also quickly overloaded our [pneumatic] tube system's capacity and had to use runners to get things from Pharmacy to the units.

Our Command Center was also not prepared for the huge volume of phone calls from the media and families calling the hospital. We needed more phones and people to answer them in our Hospital Command Center. We were also unprepared for the number of families that showed up at the hospital looking for loved ones. Our plan was directed at patients, not families. We did initiate a lockdown.

You generally think of physicians, nurses, pharmacists and other caregivers in a response like this, but I got to witness every department in the hospital putting their plans to work. Our Food Services staff were wheeling carts of water and sandwiches to the ED personnel. They also set up coffee and food for the families in the lobby. Our facilities people were dealing with tube volume issues and our security people were everywhere. Our volunteers and social workers were here to help patients and families.

Well done, Minneapolis! Thank you, Scott!

As for me ... I've already tucked away the “occupations taped to their backs” detail for a future story.

Family Portrait

True incident:

A house in my friend’s neighborhood was for sale. Curious by nature and interested in housing, he wandered over during a realtor’s open house to take a look inside and see the price.

The entry was unattended but, seeing the front door ajar and hearing voices deeper inside, he opened the storm door and stepped into the tiny foyer. And found himself nearly nose-to-portrait with a large, framed family photograph that hung directly opposite the door.

He recognized the man, woman, and some of the kids in the photo. He admired their casual arrangement into a pleasing composition of figures. And he noticed their dress: everyone in jeans faded to the same hue; everyone barefoot ... and everyone topless.

That’s the set-up. What’s your story?

Dress Code

The smiles and waves say it's unlikely that this group gathered at a funeral.

So -- what other event prompted such consistent dress?

SETI Ears

At a SETI Institute ("Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence") listening post, devices constantly monitor the air for evidence of alien signal transmissions.

To date, they haven't found evidence of aliens ... but what might they have found out about your next-door neighbors?

[Photo from Opentopia.]

Taking Leave

In the sobfest that is "The Way We Were," Hubbell Gardner breaks up with Katie Morosky and leaves her apartment key on the table.

But keys are exchanged in matters other than romantic relationships, and their return doesn't always have to be sad.

Why not twist it -- and imagine a situation where the return marks an all-out celebration.

Emotional Distance

Several people have recently expressed awe over health-care workers’ ability to keep an emotional distance from their patients and their patients’ families.

I don’t remember receiving formal training in that objectivity -- other than via medicine’s many analyses and algorithms, which, I suppose, do help to keep things fairly well up in the intellect and away from the emotions of doctors and others.

It’s similar, I suppose, to the choreography of the uniformed officer who strode to the gravesite last Saturday and retrieved the folded American flag from atop my father-in-law’s casket. He brought it to my mother-in-law and stooped toward her. His voice was clear and even: “On behalf of the President of the United States and a grateful nation, this flag is presented as a token of appreciation for your husband’s honorable and faithful service to his country.” He straightened to full height, took one step backward and raised his hand in a long salute to the flag.

Then he turned left-face and strode away, generating a breeze that made my cheek damp.

Exurban

New Scientist magazine calls this Alex MacLean photo (of approximately 200 houses outside South Jordan, Utah) an "exurban" development, "driven by the American dream of owning a detached house with a large backyard."

Um, that's all? -- a house with a yard? The isolation seems extreme, there's gotta be more to it. What else is going on here??

For more amazing aerial photos by MacLean, check out "Designs on the Land" and "The Playbook".

Urban

Saw this photo of Sao Paolo, Brazil in an issue of New Scientist magazine.

It begs for a writer to choose a couple characters from the wildly different domiciles -- then put them together in a romance ... in a workplace ... in a courtroom.

Running of the Waiters

Tomorrow's running of the bulls ("El Encierro" -- run daily during the July 7-14 Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain) ...

has nothing ... over the procession of cruise waitstaff on Baked Alaska night!

Squirrel Lady

Forget about personifying animals with human qualities -- humans who act like animals are much more interesting!

As I walked home with a latte this morning, a woman came out of her house to get the newspaper from where it had been delivered on her lawn. Too far away to comfortably say hello, I closed my eyes and tipped my latte to take a sip; when I opened my eyes, she'd disappeared!

I glanced at the door to her house but really, there's no way she’d had enough time to hurry back inside. By then, I'd taken some more steps -- and there she was, nearby but behind the trunk of a big elm. I wasn’t sure what she was doing, but in another step or two, I figured she'd be in sight again, and we could exchange niceties. Yet as I took those steps, so did she -- just like a squirrel that moves itself around a tree trunk to keep just out of sight.

I gave up, but when I turned the corner some seconds later, I did glance back. She’d emerged from around the far side of the tree and was walking toward the door to her house.

Happy 231st, USA!

And what better way to celebrate than the deletion of the American Bald Eagle from the Endangered Species List.

I snapped the photo of this snazzy, tuxedoed parent and its three, nine-week-old nestlings from my PC screen.

You can view live streaming video of the now-flying, four-month-old chicks (plus lots of archived photos) at the Norfolk Botanical Garden's Eaglet Nest-cam.

Immediately!

I've seen and heard and used the acronyms ASAP ("as soon as possible") and PDQ ("pretty damn quick"; in fact, my favorite childhood chocolate-milk mix was PDQ granules -- which did dissolve instantly).

And I've heard another phrase that means "right away," but hadn't used it myself -- (whew) -- or even seen it written until a few weeks ago, when an editor copied me on an email in which she asked that something be sent to me "tout de suite."

Ack! -- I hadn't known the phrase was French, and was intensely ashamed at whatever ignorance had led me to imagine it as "toot sweet." But I felt a little better after some research, where I learned that English-speaking soldiers had anglicized it to exactly that during WWI.

I emailed the editor and thanked her for the best thing I'd learned that week. She responded that it was nothing -- it was the writers whose emails and manuscripts included "wa-la!" (um, "voila") that surprised her.

Starboard Center

There are lots of directions to take in developing the bigger story of this picture.

But within that bigger story, what's the little story -- what's going on with the rower in the red shirt … that's gotten him or her out of sync with the other rowers?

Remote

A sizeable compound for such an inaccessible location ... what's going on there?

Psychic Distance

I saw these excerpted recently and, along the lines of show-don’t-tell, thought they did a better job of communicating differences in narrative psychic distance (“the distance the reader feels between himself and the events in the story”) than two pages of exposition would have.

It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.

Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.

Henry hated snowstorms.

God how he hated these damn snowstorms.

Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul.

[From John Gardner’s "The Art of Fiction."]

Atomic Sombrero

The Teaching Company offers terrific college-level, home-study courses for adults -- in areas of art, history, literature, philosophy, science. They're expensive, but every course is available at an affordable sale price at least once per year.

I'm working my way through a physics series on DVD, where the professor talks from a classroom set that includes a podium and the ubiquitous image of an atom with its circulating particles. It's a fine little set, quite non-distracting -- except when the professor stands in a certain spot relative to the atom.

I finally couldn't resist snapping a picture of my TV screen.

For more about distractions, see Jerry Weinberg's post about how writers break the reader's trance.

Thriller

"You were injected with a radioactive substance … it may set off a radiation detection alarm …"

This quote is actually excerpted from a little card that hospitals now give to patients after a test or exam that involves the administration of a nuclear medicine -- for the patients to keep handy in case they accidentally set off an alarm while trying to board certain types of public transportation in the subsequent couple of days.

But taken out of this context, the quote prompts story ideas more along the lines of a thriller ...

Stun Sung

Remember in The Shawshank Redemption, when Andy Dufresne locked the prison guard in the loo and then played The Marriage of Figaro through the prison’s network of loudspeakers? Out in the yard, hundreds of hardened prisoners stood agape, stunned in the pure humanity emanating from the speakers.

That’s me -- a hardened non-fan of shows like “American Idol” -- now sitting agape at the performance of Paul Potts … a cell-phone salesman by day and interpreter of Puccini by night in the current season of Britain’s Got Talent.

Finals are Sunday, June 17.

Sound Effect

A caller to the Mr. Fix-It radio show complained that whenever she was in her extra bedroom, she heard knocking from the other side of the wall -- a common wall between her townhouse and the one next door.

Mr. Fix-It's suggestions were along the lines of mechanical (plumbing or heating lines) and canine (a Golden Retriever's thumpy wagging tail).

What suggestions might a novelist offer?

What Happened Here?

Go beyond the first answers … your mind will wander deeper ... and stumble upon a more unusual story.

In mine, smugglers have cut out interior sections from loaves of bread, creating pockets in which to hide their loot.

Then they scattered the removed bread for the birds and squirrels to eat.

Reading Room

A book-meme blog received so many answers to its question about where readers read, that it then posed an about-face: Ask Not Where But Where Not?

Most of the answers to “Where Not?” involved predictable matters of practicality and individual preference: not at work, not while riding in a car/train/plane, not in direct sunshine. But while some readers don’t read in those places, other readers do. A decade ago (even a year ago), I’d have uttered “Duh!” at someone’s answer of “not while driving.” But I’ve recently seen it happen … and not just at a stop light, but at both full speed and in stop-and-go traffic.

So, practicality and preferences aside, imagine some characters who do read in these other, less-likely places:

At the family dinner table

While grocery shopping

In the dentist’s chair

In the shower

In a movie theater

At a birthday party

While walking the dog

At a funeral/ wedding/ in church

While sleeping (great sci-fi potential here!)

Opening Prompts

A recent segment on the Kathy & Judy radio program asked listeners to imagine the memoirs they’d write, and invited them to call in with the opening sentences.

My favorites were short, punchy lines -- openings that set the stage just enough to intrigue and then set the mind adrift in story possibilities:

Let me apologize in advance.

I’m my own fault.

I lived south of I-80.

These genes don’t fit.

She hit me first.

Later, I looked through the published memoirs on my bookshelf. Most of their opening lines were long and immediately specific to the story at hand. But I found three that are general enough to serve as writing prompts:

The first day I did not think it was funny. (From Nora Ephron’s Heartburn -- reportedly such thinly disguised fiction that I’ll call it memoir.)

Here they come. (From Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man.)

Life changes fast. (From Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.)

Medieval Helpdesk

For everybody who's needed support while upgrading to a new technology.

Two Down

It took me a moment this morning to realize I recognized the sound: the year’s first two 17-year cicadas. High in a 30-foot maple I'd just walked past, one cicada buzzed a 2-second vibrato and another buzzed back in a slightly higher tone. Hooray for them, I thought, and stopped to listen.

Three mornings ago on the same route to get coffee, I’d finally seen some cicada shells scattered on the sidewalks -- a hundred maybe, over the course of a 2-mile round trip. A couple of very warm days followed, and yesterday I'd estimated a thousand shells over the same route. I’d even seen live adults and been fascinated, again, by the shiny metallic green in their coloring -- the purest gold, I’d have guessed, if gold came in green.

But this morning, not much. For all I knew, the shells I did see were leftovers from yesterday. My neighborhood is in transition, its early-20th-century houses being torn down and, along with their yards, replaced by McMansions that fill 90% of each lot. Surely, the construction had disrupted the soil and the dormant cicada nymphs. Certainly, there was less yard space to provide the cicadas with a way out. Maybe this year’s emergence of the periodic bugs would be a bust.

But no! In the tree were two who’d made it out and were home free to spend the next month mating. The noise from just those two was impressive, impossible to ignore. And some black birds didn’t ignore it; perhaps a dozen landed in the tree within moments. The cicadas continued their back-and-forth buzzing and then I heard a quick movement and one of the birds squawked.

And then silence, and the birds flew away.

Run-up to the Cicadas

Every summer, my neighborhood fills with the sound of cicadas.

Annual cicadas, I’d assumed, although now I know that few, if any, species of cicadas undergo an annual metamorphosis from egg to nymph to egg-laying adult. Instead, almost all species are periodic, having life cycles that range from 2-8 years -- most of it spent underground in the nymph stage. Only because each year brings the emergence of a combination of various species, do we hear the "annual" buzz that heralds the dog days of summer. It’s like working with fractions and lowest common denominators to predict which might be the jackpot year -- when the 2- and 3- and 4- and 5- and 6- and 7- and 8-year cicadas will all happen to emerge in the same summer.

I hope it’s not this year, because we’re just days away from the huge, synchronized emergence of a species with an ultra-long life cycle: the 17-year cicadas. I’m not surprised. I knew they were coming. I remember them from 17 years ago.

We’d bought our 80-year-old house in the fall of 1989, in an established suburb full of huge elms and maples. We happily spilled out into our yard the following spring and heard about the impending arrival of the periodic cicadas. We scoffed at neighbors who told us we wouldn't be able to hold a conversation outside amid the droning. I remember it eventually being true.

Cicadas aren’t dangerous, they’re not damaging. They’re just annoying: seriously clumsy fliers that bump straight into you instead of swerving; litterers whose shed exoskeletons form a crunchy carpet on sidewalks and patios. With estimates as high as 1.5 million cicadas per acre, that’s a lot of bumping and crunching.

Scientists predict the cicadas will return this week. I hear some have already been spotted in other suburbs. All I’ve seen so far are the signs: shed earthen casings (exit tunnels?) and emergence holes that can make a patch of bare ground look like it’s been brought to a boil overnight.

Rediscovering Science

I wrote this 15 months ago as an opening to an essay:

“The progress is remarkable,” my friend Greg, a prominent researcher, tells me over lunch at a restaurant. “We’ve … blah blah unintelligible words … the genome of … so many, many more unfamiliar words.”

I stare at him.

How long has it been since I’ve heard a sentence like that?

He spears some romaine and secures it on his fork with a ribbon of chilled sirloin. I blink.

This is Greg, I remind myself—the first person I met on our first day of pharmacy school, nearly thirty years ago.

And now in his whole sentence, I recognize only the one word.

My eyes sting and I look down at my bowl of soup.

I miss science.

Since then, I’ve subscribed to science magazines, devoured fascinating new science books and published half a dozen science articles and shorts.

And yesterday, I reconnected with an amazing source of inspiration: my college organic chem professor—an intelligent, animated man renown for the funnest classes; a creative scientist who applied forensic chemistry decades before CSI. In a 30-minute phone call, we batted so much energy back and forth that I think our cell phones gained charge.

Ain’t life grand?

Losing Science

As a kid, I figured my family could have formed a country. Dad was a college administrator, Mom a paralegal, my sister a teacher. One brother was career military, another was on his way to becoming a doctor, another planned to be a priest.

“And what do you want to be?” people would ask me.

“A researcher,” I’d answer, and they’d screw up their faces: “Why, that’s not even a word!”

Researchist, I wondered?

Forced, finally (and privately), to the family dictionary, I was crushed to find them right. Nothing existed between “research” and “re-seat.”

My New Barista ...

... does things like this.

Empty Nest

I often walk past this house.

And every time, I wonder about the long-ago teenager who lived here and shot hoops.

What's the story now?

Wake Up, Everybody

This is the first place I've admitted it: I've always had a softer spot for geriatrics than for pediatrics.

In high school and early college, I worked as a nurse's aide in a hospital, much of the time on a skilled nursing unit. During that time, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes released "Wake Up, Everybody" -- I liked this stanza best:

Wake up all the doctors, make the old people well.
They're the ones who suffer and who catch all the hell.
They don't have so very long before their judgment day
So won't you make them happy before they pass away?

I'm happy tonight, watching the Zimmers's version of "My Generation."

Rescued From Junk Mail

Woohoo!! to New Scientist ...

for recognizing that some girls like filling their brains ...

more than filling their bodies or closets.

Bad Latte!

Top 10 Ways to Ruin a Caffe Latte:

10. Steam the milk so full of air that the latte feels prepared with helium

9. Use nonfat milk by mistake

8. Use nonfat milk because there’s no whole milk ready

7. Top off with nonfat milk because there isn't enough whole milk ready

6. Top with nonfat-milk foam because there isn’t any whole

5. Top with a cappuccino-quantity of foam (see photo)

4. Top with Styrofoam rather than creamy foam

3. Use lukewarm milk

2. Omit the espresso

1. Argue with the customer about any of the above.

The barista at my new place doesn’t do any of these.

Alternative Medicine

Need a Lunesta?

Try looking at Dixie, instead.

What's in the Bag?

Our "stuff" says much about us, and it's fascinating to get a peek at (and sometimes great ideas from) other people's things: the contents of a house, a car, a drawer, a purse. (For me, a pocket: as often as I can, I leave the house with just keys, my driver's license and a credit card.)

Flickr, a photo-sharing website, gives thousands of these peeks through its cluster of “What’s in Your Bag”-tagged photos. Some people even include descriptions of their bag's individual contents -- click on a photo, then hover over it to see descriptions -- the best ones use specific details that hint at the person's "voice" and open up a backstory.

Form 1040

Sure, they've gotta cut it somewhere.

But as a fifth child, this sucks.

Twisted Dictionary

Comedy takes something expected and twists it to prompt a surprise. For example, Bill Maher's joke in March, when Cheney saw a doctor about leg pain: "Do you stretch?" the doctor asked. "Are you kidding?" Cheney said. "I linked 9/11 with Saddam Hussein!"

Beyond the smile, I love a twist's illumination of character and voice. Consider this, from an e-mailer to Suzanne Beecher's Dear Reader book club, about a time she was baking with her mother: "I asked my mom if I could have a job. She gave me some suggestions, and then I told her, 'I mean an eating job!' "

For me, the hard part is taking a sentence less literally ... learning to recognize a springboard word.

Water Taxi

All aboard for transportation to your new client.

What's the story?

Cinematographer

Take a look at Hawaii's beach cams from Starwood Hotels and Resorts.

Surf-watch or people-watch -- you decide which, because you can control the camera's direction and zoom views for 3 minutes. You can even snap pictures to save to your computer ... inspiration to write the story up later, offline.

O Happy Day

What are the four signs
of aging?

The answer is in the Comments.

[Source: Valerie Monroe in the October 2003 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. Photo source: Hawkin's Bazaar]

Chicago 2016

The Eiffel Tower stood as an engineering marvel at the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris. Colored text in this 2005 photo markets "Paris 2012" … from before the International Olympic Committee awarded the summer games to London instead.

Similarly, the first Ferris Wheel stood as an engineering marvel at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. And, similarly, now Chicago needs international Olympic marketing -- having been selected over the weekend as the U.S.'s applicant city to host the 2016 Summer Games!

Following Paris’s precedent (though hopefully not its outcome), how about erecting signage on Navy Pier’s Ferris Wheel?

Sand Story

I'd seen lots of places of worship but I hadn't seen one with a sand floor until this Caribbean synagogue:

The surprise made space for curiosity, and I learned the sand is likely a profound symbol: a reminder of the ancient desert sands, a reminder of the need to muffle the sounds of secret worship.

One detail opened up a whole backstory.

Pet Cemetery

Argh! -- the consequences of a badly framed snapshot:

Although … not knowing the reality does open the door to imagination.

What DID Eugenie produce??

Book Pride

Turning 180-degrees from yesterday’s acknowledgement of Book Embarrassment, here are two books whose covers I’d wear as a sandwich board:

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. It was the 1960s and I was very young, on a family road trip where all I heard was my mother saying, "Yossarian." All I saw was her laughing so hard she could barely keep reading aloud to my dad as he drove. Decades later, I learned Yossarian is the protagonist in a war novel (anti-war; anti-bureaucracy, really), and more decades later I finally picked up the book. The mess of its incoherent, non-linear presentation tempted me to set it aside, and the only thing that kept me in it was the hilarity.

I’ve talked to more readers who abandoned the book than finished it, so there’s an element of pride in having persisted through a difficult read … and come out loving it. Because, counter-balancing the hilarity, Heller does things like arranging just six discrete words to haunt us about the horrors of war:

"I’m cold," Snowden said. "I’m cold."
"There, there," said Yossarian. "There, there."

If you’ve read the novel, you’ve gone now to get a tissue. We’ll wait.

Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie. I stumbled on this book about creativity (by a former sketch artist at Hallmark) while on a lunch break during a business conference. The title annoyed me and I remember leafing through the book and thinking, "Yech!": the pages were a mess of weird fonts and weird art and scribbles. I put it back.

But then I pushed myself to take another look. It would do me good to stretch toward something eclectic, I decided. And I found the content as different from what I was accustomed to as the design: Creative. Spontaneous. Curious. Encouraging. Supportive. Fun.

Read the first chapter ("Where Have All The Geniuses Gone?") and you’ll be hooked. (Hint: the geniuses are all still here. They're us.)

Book Embarrassment

Prompted by yesterday’s post about hidden things, here are three books that I’d hide:

1. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. I hadn’t read this novel until last year, but was lucky enough then to do so as part of an online book group with a history-professor moderator. A number of readers in the group (including me) confessed to being embarrassed to carry the book in public. We’d absorbed societal messages of outrage against the novel: some of us wrongly assumed it had pro-slavery themes, others had heard anger directed at the portrayal of the title slave as docile rather than militant.

A highly recommended read. But so much controversy remains attached to Uncle Tom that, unless I were in a situation that allowed real conversation, I’d still carry the book with the title hidden.

2. Any of Mary Higgins Clark’s last ten novels. Her breakthrough book, Where Are the Children? is the best suspense story I’ve read. And her next few novels, published in my twenties, are the only books to have kept me reading late into the night -- mostly because I was too scared to pull my arm from under the safety of the covers and reach all the way over to turn off the bedside lamp. But as I grew self-sufficient, Clark’s protagonists grew frustrating. Her women-in-peril stories grew formulaic and sugary-simple. By my thirties, I’d stopped buying her novels. By 40, I’d stopped reading library copies.

Now this year’s novel was just released, and I find myself staring at it in the bookstore … still so doggone sad that it doesn't fit anymore.

3. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. First published in March 2003, Amazon tells me I purchased my copy a month later, in April. I remember not reading it immediately, preferring to savor the anticipation of a story that postulated an ancient (and continuing!) Catholic conspiracy. I’d still read just the first chapter by early June, when I sat on a folding chair in a tent at Chicago’s Printers Row Book Fair, with perhaps 200 people, and listened to Brown talk about it. The man next to me and I agreed: we looked forward to reading this “smart” thriller. Alas, although the premise was smart, Brown’s execution was so-so.

How could that have been only four years ago? Now, with a hundred million readers and film-goers yakking about it, even Dan Brown has to be sick of The Da Vinci Code. It’s gone from smart to pedestrian, and the last thing a youngest-child like me wants to be seen as is a lemming.

Tomorrow: Book Pride

Noticing

From the archives on Jerry Weinberg’s writing blog, a terrific exercise: “Pay attention and see if you can notice five things that were not meant to be noticed.”

I love this! And even stronger than "not meant to be noticed" is "meant to be not noticed." Details like these show character like a cut-away medical illustration shows anatomy.

I should be good at it -- after all, I read Harriet the Spy in fifth grade, then spent the next three or four years recording observations in my own series of spy notebooks. Instead, it turned out to be a difficult exercise. I discovered that I have strong rules against noticing these things -- outing people about what they’re trying to keep private. Heck, it took me a month to collect these five:

The wind blew open a woman’s spring jacket and she quickly pulled it closed again over her midriff bulges.

A friend saw her job -- her current job -- posted on Craigslist.

During the Consecration (the most sacred part of a Catholic Mass), a door opened at the side of the church. No one appeared and the door closed. A few seconds later, it opened again, then closed halfway. The moment the Consecration was finished, the door opened again and the associate pastor came in to assist with the distribution of Communion.

A woman sneezed with the teeniest choo! choo! Then, not having cleared the irritant, her nose proceeded to run, making her sniff! sniff! sniff! for the next 10 minutes.

Everyone renewing their driver’s license at the DMV wore dark, drab overcoats. But one woman removed her coat for her photo -- and underneath, she wore a pretty outfit.

How about you? I’m going to keep noticing, and I’ll report back when I’ve got the next 10.

Peace

These wind farms provoke plenty of tension in some people ... spoiling the landscape and all.

But for me? The horizontals and verticals ... the deep colors ... the rhythm of the blades moving in a breeze ...

Peace.

Secret Prompt

What could be a better prompt of fiction than the tension of a secret?

There are compilations of secrets, such as PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives and its two (so far) sequels. They come from a project whereby people write their secrets on homemade postcards and anonymously mail them in.

But even more accessible are the secrets posted on the project’s website. They simply beg for a backstory and a what-happens-next.

Expansion

Here's another mathematical model of my writing process (like the previous one, this image is supposedly from a student's test paper).

I conceive an idea for an article and outline its basic components (represented here by the equation and its variables). Then it's time to expand the outline by substituting real information (research data, anecdotes, quotes) for those abstract variables. And my first pass is to do essentially what Peter did -- I press the Enter key a bunch of times throughout the outline, introducing white space as a placeholder for the concrete material.

But unlike Peter, I then gradually add the material. The white space disappears and the outline's loose weave tightens. Where it remains loose is a call for attention: maybe more research, maybe a reconsideration of whether the section is necessary.

In the meantime, the smile I get from Peter's response buoys me through the hard work.

Frenemies

Sometimes, fictional antagonists seem more conceptual than real. So I was delighted to find Julianne Dalcanton’s post about nemeses over at Cosmic Variance. And one of the blog’s comments gives a nod to Chuck Klosterman’s accessible and funny 2004 Esquire article about the same.

Considering nemeses and archenemies leads to some of the juiciest musing possible ... it's fascinating to track the lightning bolt that shoots from one person to someone else’s deepest fears and motivations. And it reminds me that the best antagonists are powerful inducers of emotion and action in a protagonist.

Two Oldies (One Goody)

I’ve made my Almond Cream Puff Ring for many parties -- but never in the 20 years that I’ve been married. Until last weekend.

Baking is tricky. It’s chemistry, and while chemistry hasn’t changed in those 20 years, agriculture and eggs and dairy farming certainly have. Would those changes make the ingredients in my present-day kitchen too different from their predecessors in my 1980s recipe? Isn't that why recipes are updated -- because things change over time, and baking can have disastrous results if we ignore the changes?

Admittedly, I was still skittish from a laundry debacle a few days earlier. I’d wanted to use another object from the 1980s -- one of those luxurious Vellux blankets -- on the bed this spring until the weather was warm enough for only the light summer quilt. The blanket just needed a wash to freshen it from years of storage in a sealed bag.

But upon removing it from the bag, I’d ignored my surprise that the blanket looked tan now, instead of pink. I’d ignored having to brush away lint from wherever the blanket touched my shirt and pants. Instead, I filled the washer, added detergent, loaded the blanket and heard the deep whoosh-whoosh of the agitator. To be sure I’d chosen a cycle with enough water to cover the blanket, I lifted the lid and peeked inside. In just ten seconds, the blanket had completely disintegrated into a huge skeleton of mesh and what looked like a tub full of bean soup. I stopped the wash cycle and used a kitchen strainer to hand-empty the material into a trash basket.

So, my eyes narrowed in suspicion, I began to make the pastry. I watched the butter melt in the water and wondered about the changes in dairy farming over the past two decades -- five or ten generations of cows. The butter foamed more than I remembered and I wondered whether to proceed. But the mixture promptly came to a boil and I had no choice but to dump in the flour and hold my breath while I vigorously stirred. And magic! (chemistry!) -- it balled up perfectly. And the rest of the recipe was perfect, too, and the finished dessert -- delicious.

------------
RECIPE:
Almond Cream Puff Ring

Pastry Ring
1 cup water
½ cup butter
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup flour
4 eggs

Heat water, butter and salt until butter melts and mixture boils. Remove from heat and vigorously stir in flour all at once until mixture forms a ball and leaves side of saucepan. Add eggs, beating after each. Cool mixture.

Preheat oven to 400°F. Grease and flour a cookie sheet. Drop mounds of batter in a 7"-diameter circle on cookie sheet. Bake 40 minutes; turn off oven and keep pastry ring in oven 15 minutes more. Cool on wire rack.

Slice pastry ring horizontally. Lift off top half and fill bottom half with Almond Cream Filling (see below). Replace top half and drizzle with Chocolate Glaze (see below). Refrigerate.

Almond Cream Filling
Prepare one 3½-ounce package instant vanilla pudding as label directs but use only 1¼ cup milk. Fold in 1 cup whipping cream (whipped) and 1 teaspoon almond extract.

Chocolate Glaze
Melt ½ cup semisweet chocolate chips with 1 tablespoon butter, 1½ teaspoon milk, and 1½ teaspoon light corn syrup. Stir until smooth.