Insanity

gotta try these out

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Class Assignment, good reading

Everything You Learned in WR 224 (or should have)  What is a story? 

Quite simply, a story is not a

ny one thing done any one way.  One of my first professors defined a story as something that happens in time that matters to someone.  Vague?  Yes.  But an effort to define a story more precisely invariably results in too many exceptions to be of any use. We all tell stories.  It’s second nature to us, really.  Walk through the MU during lunch hour, and you will hear the drone and buzz of a thousand stories being told.  They are about early classes, last night’s adventures, phone calls from Mom, cute boys, hot girls, nice professors, evil instructors, blah, blah, blah.  So I can’t tell you what a story looks like, I can only tell you that it needs to matter somehow, to someone.

Since stories can be so many things, and I can’t possibly imagine that I know all the things they are, let alone teach them comprehensibly, I’m going to teach from the middle of the road.  In this class, you will learn the conventions of fiction that professional writers generally agree to be best practices.  I’m going to give you lots of rules.  I will tell you that stories work when you do X and stories work better when you avoid Y. You will then go out and find wonderful stories that break my rules, and you’ll post this on discussion board and ask, why this writer or that gets to break all the rules.  Trust me, this happens.  I get e-mails in the summer from former students who are doing summer reading who want to know if I hate John Steinbeck because he breaks so many of the ‘rules’ for fiction.  The really bright ones find copies of my work and then race back to class to ask me how I could be breaking the rules, and what kind of hypocrite am I?

Here’s the deal.  If everyone always followed all the rules, our fiction would not be too imaginative.  That’s the difference between what we write and genre fiction, such as mystery or romance.  Those genres have very strong conventions that unify the body of the genre.  The reader knows what to expect, and that’s fine.  In our class we’ll be studying literary fiction, which has very fuzzy rules.  I expect you to learn and practice them, so as to understand them, and to learn the language of fiction writing and the workshop. Breaking rules is only effective when it is deliberate!  You need to be in control of your work first, so that when you eventually do break the “rules,” there will be a well designed purpose behind the moves you make.  If you break the rules for the sake of breaking the rules, well, let’s just say, that’s already been done, and we’re all over Jack Kerouac now. 

Okay, we’re not.  I admire Kerouac.  But in this class, you need to learn to follow the “rules,” so that when you do break them, you do so in the service of art and craft, not because you get the idea, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if…” We’ve all seen that story many times.  We’ve all written that story.  It’s never as cool as it seems it should be.

In this class, we will study and write character driven fiction, rather than genre or idea stories.  We’ll get to that distinction soon.  For now, we’ll spend a little time talking about what a character is, and then we’ll have a brief outline of the kinds of rules for fiction we will work within in this class.  And then someday break.

A character is not a real person.  Even if you start with your mother, ex-boyfriend, or roommate as a model, a character is still not a real person.  There is precisely one difference between a well-written character and a real person: characters live in books.  What does that mean?  It means that I want to see you writing characters who are indistinguishable from people.  That means they do not appear out of thin air when some writer needs a line of dialogue.  They don’t generally carry around samurai swords.  Most of them don’t live on the beach in Orange County.  They are, however, tremendously interesting.

How could these folks possibly interesting if they don’t live in Southern California?  Writing fiction allows us to explore. When we write, we start with what we know, and we write toward what we don’t.  If you can see the end of your story from the beginning, it’s not big enough, good enough, or interesting enough for you.  How do you write a story?  Start with a difficult, complex, or intriguing moment, throw in a character, who is just exactly like a real person except that s/he lives in a book, and follow the character home.  Follow her to the store.  Follow him to work.  Your character has things to do and places to be.  How many real people do you know that have time to go lounge around in a short story.  Things get interesting when there are hard choices – when you character doesn’t have time for the complications that your difficult moment throws at him.  Let the character make the choices.  Don’t force them to do anything – just observe.  Take your time, be detailed, be specific, be patient.

Here’s the recipe for making a character:

Add:

Inventory

Action

History

Desire

We’ll talk about these all quarter long.  But essentially, for us to believe in a character, you need each of these elements.  Inventory denotes things.  Stuff.  Objects.  Everyone has stuff around them, and the things around people identify them as individual and unique.  What do you have in your pockets right now?  Coins? Cell phone? Lint? No two pockets contain the same thing, but what’s in your pockets (or in your trunk or on your nightstand or desk or medicine cabinet) tells all sorts of tales about you.  Maybe you’re working in you pajamas right now, and you have no pockets.  But that inventory (pajamas) tells us something about you.  Maybe you work all day long and that’s why your taking an E-campus version of this class.  Two ways to put that in writing:

“He worked all day, and he was tired when he started doing schoolwork for his online course.”

That’s okay.  It tells us what we need to know.  But we can’t tell this person apart from anyone else.  He is faceless, lacking personality.  I’m not that interested.  Now try it with inventory:

“As he waited for the course homepage to load, he tugged at the collar of his fuzzy yellow flannel pajamas, the pair his mother had sent him on his first birthday in college, and that he’d kept hidden in the bottom drawer of his dresser until he moved out of the dorms.  He couldn’t afford the apartment without working in the pizza shop all day, and he’d taken to daydreaming about yellow flannel as he splattered sauce on pie after pie.”

See the difference?  I don’t know yet if I like this guy, but he’s certainly interesting, and I want to know more.  But, you might say, that’s not because of the pajamas – you added all kinds of other stuff.  Pizza sauce, dorms, dressers, and a money problem.

True, but it’s not easy to put such a strange thing on a young man trying to do classwork.  When I wrote the second blurb, I tried only to put him in his pajamas, but I couldn’t without asking myself why he’s wearing them.  The only thing I could think was that he’s luxuriating in the solitude of his own place outside the dorms.  But that raises other problems.  This guy’s mother didn’t buy him a Beemer for his birthday, she sent him yellow flannel pajamas.  How could he afford it?  I had to give him a job.  Now suddenly I discovered why he’s tired, and why he’s taking online courses.  Understand, when I began writing that paragraph, I had no idea of this.  I only knew that I needed to put pajamas on some character.

In the process of adding an item of inventory, I’ve given him action (tugging – he seems impatient, daydreaming, and making pizza), I’ve hinted at history (dorms), and I’ve given him desire…all day he longs for those fuzzy yellows.

A word about these others:

Action is vital.  Your characters must be doing things.  Small actions that are unique and characteristic are the best.  Give your characters jobs and deadlines.  Give them collars to tug, give them habits they can’t break.  Small characteristic actions.

Do not neglect history.  Every person has a history.  There is the history of today; there is the history of yesterday, last week, and last year.  There is family history.  These things make us who they are.  Knowing what happened yesterday may tell us why a character does the actions she does, and it will tell us why things matter.

The thing about people is that they all want something.  Look out the window, and I guarantee you that every person you see wants something at this moment.  Be it a drink of water, a million dollars, an extra ten minutes, or an umbrella, what is common for everybody is that they want, want, want, want. If you don’t want a boring character, she needs to want things.  And your job is to make it hard for her to get what she wants, and find out how she deals with it.

Beware the undead.  Vampires are bad news.  You’ve seen them going at everything fangs first.  I won’t have any vampires in our class.  Don’t bring them.  While we’re at it, we’ll ban warlocks, dragons, space aliens and anyone resembling too closely a character from Pulp Fiction.  Consider them banned.  Yes, I hear the moans and the anger.  Three of you were planning to workshop bits of the 500 word Science Fiction novel that you’re only about a week from finishing.  Four were going to write a story about the cataclysmic clash between the minions of the dark elf lord Nalbon and the dragon taming Amazon princesses of the Loren Vale.  Now I’ve banned elves, vulcans, undead, and even griffins.  Why?  Can’t Sci-Fi and Fantasy be good, interesting, and lucrative writing?  Of course it can.  The problem is that vampires all go around sucking blood.  What inventory does a vampire have?  Big teeth, a cape, an upturned collar.  What actions does a vampire do?  Sucks blood.  What history does a vampire have?  He’s dead so lately he’s been sucking a lot of blood.  What does a vampire desire?  Do I have to say it?

A well written vampire (and there are well written vampires) are vampires who are too busy to suck blood.  They have jobs, credit card bills, kids to take to soccer practice.  And along comes this unquenchable desire to suck blood.  Now that’s a problem.  Most vampires I’ve read in workshops don’t have enough problems.  When you have a character with a stock set of desires and needs, it becomes very difficult to use the tools of character building to write a well-rounded, interesting character.  The conventions and the cool ideas get in the way.  So I encourage you to, if you desire, write lots of Sci-Fi and Fantasy.  Be sure to send some of the profits to the English department once you’ve graduated.  But don’t go writing them for this class.  Here, we will learn to write characters.  Once you’ve gotten good at that (It’s hard enough to do with fully alive folks) you will be able to write much better vampires than the ones out there on the book shelf, because you will have the tools of literary fiction to apply to your Fantasy tale.

 Did it happen? No.  Is it true? Yes. 

This is, I think, about as good a credo as the fiction writer can have.  There are plenty of people out there who will question the value of fiction.  Is fiction any more than a pleasant pastime and a fun way to get your WR II credit?  One of my professors back in my undergraduate days once said, “Writing fiction is to be involved in the great experiment of figuring out what it means to be human.”  Oddly, no one laughed.  This was probably because he’s published about a zillion books and appears in the New Yorker, Harpers, Playboy (fiction), and every other magazine in the country that publishes stories.  In fact, we have one of his stories coming up in our anthology.  Also, though his statement is a little grand, it does say something about good fiction.  Character-driven fiction is true.  The more firmly you are in your characters and the more carefully you build vivid, specific details and actions, the more true your fiction will be.  That doesn’t mean that it really happened.  It didn’t, or it would be nonfiction, but we start with real situations we’ve seen or heard, and we go from there.  Real characters will act in real ways.  In a sense, you could say that the fiction writer is modeling the real world, and that’s why fiction can be moving and powerful.

You’ll know if what you’re writing is true.  I can not tell you how many stories I’ve read in which characters take big, bold, assertive actions – but I don’t believe they’re true!  The problem is they are not earned.  We don’t do things in the real world without earning them.  No one yells until they’ve already put up with all they can take.  So when  I read a student story in which a man fights with his girlfriend and then walks to the corner market and begins slicing everyone up with a katana blade, I just don’t believe it.  It takes a bit more than that!

Suspension of disbelief is the real point here.  When you write, it is as though you make a contract with the reader.  You will tell a story, and the audience, by reading, agrees to suspend their disbelief and read what they know to be only a story as though it is true.  The problem arises when the writer tries to make a leap that is beyond the parameters of the agreement.  Each story you read requires a different level of suspension of disbelief.  A memoir requires very little; the reader simply must acknowledge that he or she, while reading, will accept the writer’s version of something that happened.  On the other hand, if I wander to a certain aisle in the bookstore and pick up a tome with a colorful paper back and the title Dragon Lord XIV, The Return of the Dark Faerie Queen, I’d better be ready to suspend my disbelief if I want to enjoy the book.

How do we, as writers, stick with what is true, though it didn’t happen?  In other words, how do we prevent our audience from losing their suspension of disbelief?  Two things: 1) never kill people, and 2) apply the 180 degree rule.  Okay, three things, no rain in the end of a story unless it has been raining all along.

Now, I know you’re wondering how I can sit here with a straight face and tell you not to kill anyone when two of the stories I’ve assigned have, it seems, deaths.  Here’s how: in neither of these stories does the death resolve things.  In both cases the death serves as a backdrop to what’s happening.  It sharpens the action we’re following because of the tragedy happening in the background. Very often, when a story gets difficult, a writer’s instinct is to make the grand gesture.  About 97 percent of the deaths I encounter in student fiction are the climax of the story, the big, resounding bell that is meant to end, fulfill, and wrap up the story.  But deaths are not the only interesting things out there.  They are, in fact, a little bit boring because we see so many of them in our media.  The grand gestures – the death, the marriage proposal on the jumbo-tron at the ballpark (yes, I’ve read that story a few times), the screams of the wife who finds her husband in bed with her best friend (and a few of those), are the explosions that Rios is talking about.  The real story is what’s happening, as he says, on the other hand, “behind or above or below or inside us.”

Which brings us to the 180 degree rule.  Often, the higher the tension in a moment, the harder that moment is to write.  How do we do justice to the big, climactic scenes.  We’ve all seen sitcoms and Bennifer films (Okay, happily not all of us have seen them) that never get the moment right.  The romance, the tenderness, the anger, the passion is canned and rings hollow.  It is in these tense moments that the writer most often goes off track and loses credibility.  Anyone can be convincing (and you all have been in exercise 2) following a character down a street.  Let’s say we’ve followed a teenage girl who has snuck out the window with friends to the tattoo parlor.  We’ve got tension, we’ve got danger, our story is moving along, and we’re convincing.  But how do we write the scene when the teenage girl’s mother discovers the new navel ring?  Conflict is tough. How in the world do you find the words and the gestures to express the mother’s outrage?  She can’t even figure out what to say!

And that is the secret.  When you’ve got Mom all set to yell (our teenager got a cheap piercing, and it’s infected so she needs a ride to the doctor), resist the urge.  Apply the 180 degree rule, and have Mom do exactly the opposite of what your first instinct is.  Mom doesn’t yell in this moment; she whispers.  People can surprise you.  They do not, in fact, always act like two dimensional sitcom inhabitants.  The same goes for characters in our stories, which will make them different from characters in most TV programs.  When you allow characters to be complex and surprising it is also amazing the things you discover.  “An edge in the middle,” as Rios put it.  Look away from the explosion, resist the urge to simplify your plot and characters with the grand gesture, and you’ll discover things.  Why does Mom whisper “Let’s get you some antibiotics,” instead of screaming “I can’t believe you!  How could you do this to me?”  Maybe we discover, as we write that whisper, that Mom was a bit of a wild child herself back in the 60s, and she was on antibiotics for… well, you decide.  It’s your story.  The point is, the 180 degree rule is so simple that it feels like cheating.  Characters suddenly say the right things and stories suddenly become interesting when you apply it.  Trust me.  Whenever I’m stuck in my writing I often find that I’ve forgotten to apply it.  I remind myself to look the other way.  See what others might miss in that moment.

Third: when can it rain at the end of a story?  Only when it has been raining since the beginning.  Rain, snow, sunsets, and other natural phenomena are not a soundtrack.  You can’t just turn up the rain as you end the story.  That only happens in bad romantic comedies.  Rain doesn’t just start falling when someone gets depressed.  Mom gets our girl some antibiotics, they sit on the porch swing and read the negative results of the hepatitis test, and a beautiful sunset spreads across the sky as they hug each other and finally understand the sisterhood of mothers and daughters.  ACK!!!  Gag!  Spit!  Please!  Not in this class. No using imagery as a soundtrack.  It won’t stick; it will feel cheap.

On to Dialogue…

Nothing stops a potentially good story like bad dialogue.  Dialogue is tricky, because when a writer is putting dialogue into a story, she or he is most exposed. When we write dialogue, we as writers are fully exposed.  Our ability to use language and to understand and replicate the tone of conversation is on display.  Dialogue can be compared to singing.  You develop an ear for music, and some of us are more nuanced than others when it comes to hearing tone.  Writing good dialogue is also about hearing tone and having a well-developed ear.  It’s a bit like the skill of telling a joke.  We’ve all heard the funniest jokes slaughtered by folks who don’t have the timing and the cadence and the emphasis down, right?  There is nothing as painful as trying to laugh politely at a bad joke teller.  Sometimes I have to tell the joke back to myself the right way so that I can be nice and laugh.

Yes, the bad news is, like with music and jokes, not everyone has an ear for dialogue, but the good news is, it’s not a talent that you are born with or without.  You can develop your ear by doing dialogue and by reading lots of it.  It also doesn’t hurt to read it out loud.  In fact, the ability to reproduce the rhythms of speech is probably the best training for dialogue.  And of course, at the end of this discussion I’ll give you a couple of tricks to help you get by.  Let’s look at “Hills Like White Elephants,” which is one of the most famous dialogue stories in American Literature. Most of you have probably read it. If you haven’t, find a copy. It’s 4 short pages of essential reading for the fiction writer.

This story, like many other great shorts, demonstrates that dialogue should be like the conversation of real people, except these people live in books.  The one difference is that dialogue in a story or novel must be condensed!  There is a fine line between being realistic and being boring. 

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he answered.

“Good day?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“How are you,” she asked.

“Fine,” he said.  “How about yourself?”

“Okay.”

“Good.”

“How was class,” she asked.

“Good,” he said. “How was yours?”

“Not bad,” she said. “Boring.”

Yes!  Boring.  This dialogue is boring!  Why?  Because it’s a little too much like real dialogue.  As a writer, you need to choose what to keep and what to leave out in order to keep the reader’s attention.  The general rule is this: Keep only dialogue that either builds character or advances the plot.  Hi, good, how are you, and all these little lines might actually be a part of our conversations, but they are generic little tags that we say when we’re not really saying anything.  Cut them.  Dialogue should be clean and lean.  Look at “Hills” again.  Even the simple “busy talk” that they engage in tells us things.  She says something fairly meaningless like, “They all taste like licorice,” but that simple little piece tells us volumes about her character.  She’s sick to death of the American expatriate life.  She wants something besides wandering Europe tasting absinthe.  It also drives the plot by showing us that their relationship is headed toward some kind of collision, with or without the baby.  An example of dialogue that purely drives the plot is the man ordering two Anis del Toros.  Now the woman has to go get them, the couple is waiting for them.  Plot moves forward.  Still, good dialogue should do both things whenever possible, and the fact that only the man speaks Spanish and must be the translator also tells us about the characters and their relationship, albeit in a subtle way. 

On a side note, when the man calls the woman from behind the beads, do you notice that her first response is not, “What can I get for you?”  Rather, she says “Four reales.”  She isn’t just there at the beckon call of the writer and the main characters.  She’s in her own story, and in her story, she’s owed money.  That’s her agenda.  She’s stepped out of somewhere to join the scene.  As a result, she’s a little less flat a character, and her dialogue is true.  Sit in all the chairs!

Also, you might notice that we’ve just brought up plot for about the first time, and it’s taken three weeks for it to come up.  Plot is the engine that moves a story forward; it is not the frame on which a story is built.  A story is built around characters.  Plot arises from the inventory and the actions of the characters.  That’s why I tell you that if you can see the end of a story from the beginning, it’s not good enough or big enough for you.  Plot will develop.  Let the characters drive the plot, rather than t he other way around.  Plot stories exist, and are even published on occasion.  Usually though, they are genre stories that are limited and in scope and believability.

Next dialogue tip: what do we talk about when we talk about love?  That’s the title, actually, of a great Ray Carver story, but it sums up the most important rule in writing dialogue.  Dialogue should always be off-topic.  When we talk about love, what do we really say?  We complain about the windows never being washed.  We talk about our day at work, soccer practice, doing the dishes, and the people next door.  Real people rarely say what they really mean.  Look at our narrator in “Araby.”  He says “If I go, I will bring you something.”  What does he mean?  “I love you I love you I love you I love you!”  But he’s certainly not going to say it.

Dialogue needs to be off the topic at hand.  What is it about?  Good dialogue is usually about the inventory at hand, not the topic.  If we were in a classroom and a giant ten-foot iguana were to walk in the door, I as the instructor would not need to turn and point and say, “Oh my god, there is a giant, ten-foot iguana.  Hey guys, there is an iguana in the room.  Do you see the iguana?  It’s green and it’s ten feet long, and it’s walking by the chalk board.”

Instead, we’d let the iguana curl itself under a desk and we’d talk about Araby.  There’s a big iguana sitting there, but we wouldn’t mention it.  We’d talk around it.  We’d talk about anything and everything else in the world, but not that iguana.  That’s how people do with problems, and that’s how characters do, too.  People have bodies, and most of our conversation is about things that we can see, touch, or feel with those bodies.  Stay in the body.  Stay in the body.  Stay in the body.

Does dialogue ever rise to topic?  Sure.  But only rarely, and only when it is earned.  People talk about everything else all day, and then they whisper, “I love you” once, right before they fall asleep. 

The students filed out of the class, each careful to hug the wall until they felt the danger had passed.  Last out, the instructor paused and looked back into the room.  “That,” he said, flipping out the lights, “is the biggest iguana I’ve ever seen.”

Finally, stay in the body.  Oh, did I mention that already?  Well, it also applies to dialogue tags.  Dialogue tags are the verbs that are attached to quotations to identify who says it.  Most common is ‘said,’ as in, “Your navel ring is infected,” the doctor said.  ‘Said’ disappears into the sentence, because we see it so much.  That’s a good thing.  Don’t try to create emotion, tension, or description of your character by attaching fancy dialogue tags.  Use the body and the inventory to create the tension.  ‘Said,’ maybe ‘yelled,’ and perhaps ‘whispered’ are all physical acts that I can see when you write them.  Don’t tell me “Your navel ring is infected,” the doctor prognosticated.  Exactly how does one ‘prognosticate?’  The same goes for intimate, ejaculate (no joke, I’ve seen it in stories to describe speech), explain, propose, suggest, etc.  Those are not physical actions.  When writers rely on dialogue tags to tell the story it is an indication that the dialogue is not doing its job, and that the writer isn’t going slow and staying in the body and allowing the inventory to do its job.

 More About Characters, Plots, and Dialogue 

Always remember that everyone in your story came from somewhere else.  Be willing to go on little digressions, when necessary, to understand all of your characters.  Stop and go on a little riff about someone.  Change point of view if you need to and see where a character has been or wants to go when he or she leaves the current scene.  Remember that all characters have their own stories.  If you’re in a room and you want to know what’s out in the hall, or if you want someone to appear from the hall, you’d better walk over to the door and look out.  There’s no other way to know what’s going on out there.  Don’t miss things.  Be adventurous when you write, and curious.  Try to avoid getting so carried away with the great ideas you have for characters that you forget to let them do their own thing.  They won’t forgive you.  They’ll go flat on you as a sort of revenge.

Do all characters need to be ‘round?’ Let’s say I’m writing a guy who is on his way to a job interview, but he’s early, so he stops to buy an apple at the grocery store.  Do I then have to stop my story and write a whole page of exposition about the girl who is bagging groceries, and whose only line in the story is, “Would you like help out with that,” so as to avoid having a flat character?  I want to move on.  I want to get to this interview.  He’s interviewing for a job as a boom operator at a production studio, and I’ve got this great idea that the studio also produces adult films.  My guy doesn’t know this.  And he’s very religious.  I can’t wait to get to the interview scene.

Obviously you cannot spend pages on every character who wanders by in every story.  There will be flat characters in stories.  The woman who serves beer and Anis del Toro is a flat character.  Hemingway doesn’t take us to her house and examine what she had for breakfast and whose side of the Spanish Civil War she was on.  But he did sit in her chair enough to make her believable in her very limited role.  The greater the role of a character, the more convincingly round that character needs to be.  In the case of the “Elephants” server, Hemingway sits in her chair enough to understand her agenda, her desires, at the moment.  Then he is able to writer her actions as consistent with them.  The inventory is fairly standard. He doesn’t (at least that we can see) do much with her history, which is why she’s flat.  We don’t have insight into her beyond her current role.

So it’s okay to have flat characters, as long as they are not very important characters, and they do not heavily appear in your story.  The less work a character does for you, the less developed the character can be, provided you’ve sat in that character’s chair.

The trick, though, is to be open to discoveries that you might make as you sit in other character’s chairs.  Let’s say that the girl bagging groceries has been required by her boss to say “Can I help you out with that” to every single customer, regardless of gender or purchase (those of you who have been to the Safeway chain of grocery stores know what I mean) and she’s been chewed out by a manager earlier in the day, so she asks our guy, who is young, nervous, and holding an apple, and he says, “What, did you want a bite?”  It’s kind of a funny line.  It shows that my character is quick on his feet, and we’re looking forward to seeing how he handles himself in the interview.  Great.

But if I’ve sat in all the chairs long enough to realize that this girl is absolutely fed up with her job, her manager, and her life, I might realize that she’d take his apple and have a big, crispy bite.  Now that’s a scene I’d like to see!  I have to get in the manager’s chair (and maybe apply the 360 degree rule), I have to get back in my guy and figure out what in the world he’d do if the bag girl called him on it and started eating his apple, and I’d definitely have to think about this girl more.  She’s an interesting character.  What is her history, anyway?

The more consideration you give characters, even minor ones, the more they’ll surprise you.  And the more interesting your stories will become.  Let me tell you, I’ve seen interview stories.  I’ve seen maybe too many of them.  I’m tired of stories with job interviews.  But I’ve never seen a grocery clerk stealing food in front of her manager.  And I wouldn’t, either, if I were so concerned about my big planned interview and my plot twist that I didn’t stop to sit in our girl’s chair.  Plot twists are interesting for about 1.5 seconds, and then the reader figures it out and says, “Oh, that was clever.  I wonder what’s on TV?”  Characters are interesting for a long time.

Earning Our Turns: A Brief Note On Epiphany

An epiphany, is that moment of special knowledge. The moment a character sees the light. Epiphanies are the moments in which characters change. I want to emphasize mechanism for making an epiphany work.  First, we have been building toward it for a long time.  There is nothing surprising.  We can feel it as much as the character does because we’ve been along for the ride.  So the first rule is: earn your turns.  Good writing doesn’t shock us.  The most moving scenes are the ones that the reader can see coming, because the writer is earning them, and yet the reader goes on with awful fascination, dreading and hoping the character might escape the inevitable. Readers have had their own experiences that they connect to the story, so they’ll be along for the ride, emotionally. If we take them, step-by-step, through the life and the experiences that fire change. Earn your turns!

Second rule: change in the body.  Yes, again, and I can’t repeat it enough, stay in the body.  In the very popular story “Araby,” by James Joyce, the epiphany happens in a moment that is grounded in physical details. If you haven’t read Araby, do so. It will change your life, like the Shins. Only for one moment does Joyce leave the simple, physical world with the introduction of “anguish and anger.”  I can’t see anguish and anger.  I’ve never held one.  I can’t measure them.  If I saw one on the street, I might mistake it for a marmot or a porcupine or an iguana.  I don’t know.  So don’t go throwing them around in stories.  Stay in the world you can describe.  Yet, our characters will feel things like anguish and anger.  But just to say that is to evoke something that nobody has ever seen.  There are as many ways to be anguished and angered as there are people, and every time a people feels anguish or anger, let alone both, it will be different than the last time.  I’m not a mathematician, but I’m pretty sure that this adds up to about a zillion different kinds of anguish and anger.  And we haven’t even started on love, joy, sadness, tiredness, excitedness, disillusionment, or psychosis.  So if a character of yours is going to feel one of those things, you’d better not just say the word, because it could mean just about anything.  So do like Joyce does here and stay in the body as you discuss ideas.  Joyce’s guy is experiencing a very specific kind of anguish and anger, the kind you feel at night, past your bedtime, when you turn your eyes up and see only darkness, you feel (with your fingers – part of your body) the pathetic sum of two pennies and a sixpence in your pocket, and it all makes your eyes burn.  I know that kind of anguish and anger.  I’ve even felt a kind that was very similar, only with a credit card.  Stay in the body, even when you talk about ideas.

To relate this, for a moment, to writing dialogue…I told you before to use “said,” “shouted,” and “whispered,” because these are physical actions.  Like anguish, I’m not sure what an “exclaim” looks like.  One fancy little trick is to break up dialogue and insert a little bit of physical presence in the discussion.  This can be accomplished near the dialogue tag, ala, “What,” he said, shoving the apple toward her face, “did you want a bite?”  This might indicate, by the use of ‘shove’ that he’s nervous about his interview, and not quite in control of himself.  Notice how much better it works than saying:  “He was nervous about his interview, so he held the apple out and asked, “What, do you want a bite?’”

Don’t do this every single line!  It gets old if we can’t hear a single line of dialogue with out also getting an action.  And look at the important of the pacing in “Hills.”  No dialogue tags, as long as we can still tell who’s talking, or simple he said/she said, increase the pace of the exchange, and can add an important element to the flow of the story.  Remember, dialogue is all about timing.

Very often, when I read a piece of dialogue that is not working, the bodies, the entire scene, really, has disappeared as the writer tries to rise to topic – that is, to the ideas behind the story.

One last little timing trick: 

He said, “What, do you want a bite?”

“What,” he said, “do you want a bite?”

“What, do you want a bite?” he asked.

Each structure conveys an entirely different feeling.  We understand different intentions and attitudes based only on the timing of the line, as it is altered by a simple scramble of the dialogue tag position.

 The Shape of a Story  

You may have seen, in the past, depictions of stories something like the diagram below.  These are most commonly used in literature classes studying the short story from a critical perspective, and so, they are relatively limited in their use in a fiction writing class.  I don’t want you fretting about whether or not you’ve started writing a denouement, or where exactly the climax of your story is.  I want you to stick with your characters and let them tell you when you’ve reached points in your story.  Still, it is good to be aware of the typical shape of a story, and there are, it turns out, a few things that this model can help us to remember as we write.

  

                                                                                    Climax

                                                           

                                                                                                            Denouement

                        Rising Action

     

Conflict/Origination

  

Very rare is the story that will look just like this diagram in its first draft.  First drafts are often messy, so, again, don’t obsess yourself with models.  But, once we’ve started a story, we do need to be aware of things like tension in the scenes.  Obviously every successive scene cannot be more tense and more driven than the last.  We need to have breaks and deflations, points where our characters and our readers find rest, but in general, the action in a story needs to be rising; it needs to be headed somewhere. If there is no tension in a scene, the reader will lose interest.

What is a denouement?  Few stories end at the climax.  After the character has made a turn, most stories will continue, now with falling actions and depleted tension, until a certain level of resolution has been reached.  Notice the little curl at the end.  Don’t try to tie everything up with a bow!  It can’t be done.  Not if your characters are like people.  The stories of real people are never finished (well, sometimes, but that’s only once).  Instead, we allow the characters to sort things out and let the story go.  Most writers write past the end of their stories!  I often cut the last paragraph, page, or chapter of my work.

Likewise, it is wise to start your story in the middle.  You can’t lay all the possible groundwork.  You have exposition in your story to help with that.  Start In medias res, or in the middle of things.  Start in a tight, interesting moment.  Then stop before the end.

Narrative Distance and Point of View

One choice that we as writers have is what type of point of view we want to use.  First person indicates that the narrator is writing from inside the perspective of a character.  In other words, the narrator is in the story and uses “I.”   An example is “Defender of the Faith.”  Take a look at who tells this story, and the use of the first person.

A second option is third person.  In this case, everyone in the story, including the primary character, is described with the third person – he or she.  “The Ledge” was an example of this POV. 

A writer can, of course, also use the second person, but it is rare, and it can be problematic.  Telling a story with “you” as the main character is tough.  It usually comes off like a gimmick, as though the writer needs help engaging the reader – though there are a few outstanding examples of second person stories that really work.

If you imagine your choice of point of view as a value on an x-axis, narrative distance might be the y-axis.  Narrative distance can change depending on how close to a character or characters you write.  Generally, a first person point of view is very close.  Since we are inside a character, the reader is privy to what the character is thinking. 

Third person can be equally as close. In a close third, we are privy to most of the point-of-view character’s thoughts.  If you know what someone is thinking, and the narrator can tell us outright, it is a very close narrative distance.  A slightly more distant narrator might not be inside anyone’s head. This narrator is overhearing the conversation, and often is referred to as the fly-on-the-wall POV.  This can be very attractive, especially to newer writers, because it has a certain Hemingwayan swagger, and seems easy to do, but it is actually one of the hardest to do well, because the narrator has so little access to the emotional lives of the characters, and must use only the outward, physical clues, and more often than not, all characters come out flat.  With even a little more distance, things change again.  For instance, a slightly more distant narrator might have been able to tell us things that the characters have no idea about. This creates dramatic irony, because the reader and the narrator are now on the same team, and the characters don’t know all that they do. The danger is that the characters become harder to identify with because they often come off as the narrators (and our) pawns. Who cares if a pawn gets into trouble? Any chess player (almost) is willing to sacrifice a pawn now and then.

When you zoom way out, you get to another important narrator, the omniscient.  This is the ‘god’ narrator, who can see anything anywhere, and can move in and outside of anyone’s head.  Early American and British literature, pretty much everything you’ll read in an early survey class, is omniscient.  It is a nice POV, because you have endless choices, but you also are responsible for the whole world.  It’s not as easy as it seems being god (or a wizard or a mutant, or a Spiderman, as our summer blockbusters seem to like to tell us over and over and over again).

Another way to create narrative distance and earn the right to tell things that your character cannot see is to use the passage of time.  For instance, a character telling a story that happened years ago will use the past tense, and might be able to tell things that s/he has learned about the story during the intervening years, whereas the same story, told in the present tense by a narrator experiencing things as they happen (very close narrative distance) won’t be able to give all that information.

Since we’ve brought it up, be sure to stay consistent with your tenses.  If you’re telling in the past tense, keep you verbs in the past (though for exposition, you might use past perfect, i.e. “She had gone,” which indicates the action happened before “he went.”  If you’re using present tense, stay in present.

Usually, it is best to stay with simple past tense, and to stay with either close third person or the first person, especially as a newer writer.  I strongly encourage this for your second story.

I Can’t Think of A Plot

Good. It’s the hardest thing to learn when you’re writing fiction.  This is a common problem, and it usually stems from a fear that your characters will, if there is not strong plan for a plot, not find anything interesting to do.  I’m asking you to do something that you are probably not used to hearing – go write without definite direction.  It takes a leap of faith to trust your characters and trust the fiction to carry you through, but there just is no other way if you don’t want a formulaic story, which is what you will get if you come up with plot first.

So there are two things to do.  First, be sure to start your character with a serious problem and some kind of desire.  The character can be, literally, built around a desire.  In the story I published in the literary magazine Redivider, about a year ago, my character started out with a strong desire to find tranquility.  He pops pills, sits on his couch, etc, to be at peace.  It was kind of fun getting him home and putting him on the couch.  But by the time he was there I had used up all my bullets.  Now what?  Well, because I had a firmly entrenched desire, I was able to start using the inventory to cause problems by making it difficult for him to get, or keep, what he wanted.  I had Craig lose a muffler and park in his yard. His girlfriend Karin and somebeer, a nurse he has a crush on, and a realtor and client from next door who walked into the story as a result of the movers that I’d put in the ride home.  Now my guy has problems, he has to deal with them one at a time, and the story starts to get its own momentum and I am writing downhill. 

The point is, use your silver bullets first to start the ball rolling, and that usually means the desires that define your character.  Then stay in the body and use the inventory to pick your way forward.  Once the story takes on a life of its own, the plot will show itself.

Going Vertical

The great Canadian short story writer Alice Munro once said that for her, a story is like a house.  She can’t write a story unless she has entered all the rooms.  So, rather than seeing a story as an arc that she must follow, a line from here to there upon which she must travel, she sees a story as something to explore.  As one reads her work, the care and patience she uses in exploring all the avenues and possibilities becomes clear.  This can’t be done if a writer is rushing toward a great ending!  Munro discovers her characters and their problems, needs, and humanity as she goes.  As a result, I know no writer whose characters are as well drawn and compelling as hers.  One of my colleagues and former teacher, Marjorie Sandor, who is herself an outstanding writer, uses the expression “going vertical” to describe the kind of movements in the story that Munro makes.

“Going Vertical” is akin to Munro’s expression, “entering all the rooms.”  To go vertical means, as you write, to take the time to fully express each scene, and to literally find the seams between two sentences that are pushing the plot forward (going horizontal, you might say) and pushing them apart.  What do you do in this white space you’ve created?  Add a paragraph that delves vertically into that moment in the story.  It might mean getting closer to your POV character by exploring his/her feelings about the events of the outer story, or exploring the histories that inform that moment.  Again, this exploration should be filtered through the experience of you POV character, whether you are in first or third person.

A related point: be careful never to write a character that is not at least as smart as you are.  Assume that your readers are!  If the dramatic irony of the story is between the reader and the author – that is to say, the character is unaware that s/he is the subject of a little joke, wink, or nod, the reader will not identify with the character or buy into the story.  At most, you might get a chuckle from the audience, but, frankly, that is better done by comedians.  A short story can be funny, but don’t expect a reader to laugh at a character, particularly a POV character, and still take him/her seriously.

The areas where this mistake is made most often are in stories about persons with disabilities (particularly mental) and those about homeless persons.  I suggest that you avoid these stories until you develop a good deal of reach.  Most writers in a workshop have not experienced either of these, and as a result, have a difficult time understanding these characters deeply.  This is not to say that these stories cannot be done well – there are a large number of very good examples out there – but our characters must be written as smarter than we are, and it takes a lot of reach to understand how people unlike us have experiences that that teach them something we may not yet know.

How to Write a Good Sex Scene

So how do you make a good sex scene work?  Raymond Carver is a minimalist. In “Feathers” he writes, “That night, under the sheets, Fran says to me, “Honey, fill me up with your seed.” I heard her all the way down to my toes and let out whoop…”  I’ll let you fill in the R-rated part.  And I know that you know what I’m going to say.  Stay in the body! 

During intimate moments this is particularly important.  It’s easy to get caught trying to write about love and happiness and little glimpses of eternity, but don’t count on the reader buying it.  In real life, the stronger the emotion, the stronger the instinct to euphemize, to talk about something else.  What is Fran thinking when she says “Fill me up?”  We have a pretty good idea, but it would flop if written on- topic. No one is going to buy that she’d say, “Honey, I want to get pregnant and have a baby” at that moment. And Jack hears Fran down in his toes. Again, in the body. When I say stay in the body, I’m assuming you’ll stay away from the cliché.  Long, romantic kisses might make good shots in sit-coms and on the covers of romance novels, but written in fiction, they don’t do a lot.  We’ve seen them all before.  We’re over-kissed as a society.  Turn away, as Rios’ poem urges. Write about what’s happening behind, above, or in the toes.  Find it.

I’m reminded of a make-out scenes in Ron Carlson’s story, “Blazo.” Karen, a lonely widow kisses Burns. But what the reader gets is detail about the coats in the closet they’re in.  When Julie, Burns’ deceased son’s ex-wife, quits putting stitches in his head wound and winds up astride him, we get her breasts and so on, but we also get a needle (a &@*%ing needle for crying out loud!) bouncing around in his ear.  I’m not saying that all sex scenes need to involve your son’s ex-wife, coat closets, or very large birds and ugly babies.  But they need to be fresh.  Generic is always your enemy, but it is especially so when you are dealing with sex, fighting, or happiness.  Any strong emotion.

Writing, cutting, and cutting, and cutting, and cutting

As you write, rather than keeping your cards close to your chest, think constantly about what else the reader might need or like to know.  What else can you include?  When I write a story, my manuscript is generally, on the first draft, between five and six thousand words.  But the fighting weight for a short story is usually closer to the three thousand word range.  I try to include and include, and then, when I revise, I am mostly cutting.  Sure, I’ll find a scene that I’ve skipped, or I’ll see an area that needs to be expanded, or I’ll realize that I need to go vertical in a given scene, but mostly I’m trimming and paring.  Be expansive in your first draft; be generous to your readers.  There will be time to cut your story down later.

 The Last Thing You Need to Know to Become a Great Writer 

Stay in your chair.  When the writing gets tough, when you don’t know what to do, when you can’t think of a way forward and you don’t even like your character any more, stay in your chair.  Writing is just work.  Be a worker.  If you get up and go into the kitchen to make coffee you’re going to find yourself down at Starbucks with all the other failed writers.

So maybe that’s a little extreme.  I get up to get coffee, but I make sure the pot is in the room with me.  Pace if you must.  Swear if there are no children around.  Pound on your desk if you feel like it (but do no harm).  Above all, stay in the room.  Write carefully, put one foot in front of the other, trust that the work will find its way.

My emotional desexualization – So friends it is

I am a single father of 1 amazing child. So I have a responsibility to her on top of my own issues. Here is my theory regarding relationships. If you are really cool, smart, funny and good looking… you’re taken. If you lack these qualities you might still be taken but by someone who is in your same category. When I say category I mean as unequally intelligent or attractive (just accept it… I have). Now unfortunately I have a problem. Although I do fall into this lesser category (although where I don’t know, but lower than let’s say Jessica Biel’s equal) I have eaten at the “best” restaurants (metaphoric but not in the eating out kind of way… although I do enjoy that) and have a taste now for the finer. Now on a side note… irrational and craziness can knock someone off of that top category…. and we had a child together. So back to my problem…. I refuse to lower my goal achieving ways and not go after the perfect woman out there. Perhaps they really are pumped out of a machine in Switzerland 50 a year and handed out evenly across the world … I don’t really know… but I do know I want to wake up every morning and look at my wife and think I am the luckiest man alive (hence never been married… well that and nobody has really ever wanted to). I can’t do that with someone who can’t do long division or has a hairy mole on her head or doesn’t laugh when I talk crass about my masturbation obsessions in Porta-Potties. We are all shallow to a point… (except Pamela Anderson … I mean Kid Rock makes Joe Dirt look like an aristocrat -no this is not a time for the family having sex and pissing on each other excerpt) but that is how we keep social harmony. I hate that… I want to get married to my best friend and I want her to be the hottest smartest funniest woman alive and not have a meth addiction or be bi-polar or HOOKED up with someone else. It will never happen. I am destined to masturbating to Busty magazines and picking up the town hooker at a dive bar once a year and hoping she doesn’t steal my money while I sleep. I’ll never be married… but I have my little girl and we don’t “need no drama” anyways. The crazy thing is… although I adore women and the power of the vag… I kind of have this thought that makes me smile. My little girl and I just doing it alone. That way SHE knows… she’ll always be the number one woman in my life… without a doubt. Daddy doesn’t need anyone but her… well maybe a subscription and a case of lubriderm… but you get it. I’m getting old… and every year a new crop of legals come aboard making the available single population greater (although my chances fade daily) so you think I would have a shot at happiness with an upper category Betty but it’s not happening. I’m tired of random sex to make me stop thinking of love and I am tired of NOT looking (cause they say that works – and no I don’t know who THEY really are) so I have accepted defeat . Which makes me technically a bigger loser than I already feel. I thought I was destined to hook up with a woman who looks like Betty Paige (Suicide girl style) all tatted and thinks I am some god (which I could be but I haven’t proven it scientifically). Where do I go now? Let me tell you… FRIENDS… platonic friendships that provide companionship. I love craigslist and myspace for social networking and so my search continues for some nice real Un-douche (it works for a word) people. Interested then email me…. I’m an average looking guy and have had no problem hooking up with women… just the right one has been a problem (usually very attractive but no brains or morals). I am not looking for sex and if I was I wouldn’t post here on craigslist… I would just go out and get it… sex is easy to find. I want someone to talk to… become good friends… give me advice when I need it and ask for mine. Someone who enjoys stimulating conversation yet can appreciate crass and goofy humor. I guess I spent so much time dating and sex always happened right away and then when it doesn’t work out… you look back and realize… I just fucked someone I will never talk to again (sorry for the language) and they take that trophy of you with them. So you’re left feeling empty, sometimes used, and without a person that you thought was cool before the sex. AND that sucks! Sorry for the book… when I get going I can write for hours (I do it with reading also)

GI Joeeeeeee

THE 101 RULES OF HARDCORE

THE 101 RULES OF HARDCORE
(holy fu*&k this is hilarious!) 1) Be tough at all times.

2) Never cheer after a show…only clap.

3) Be open minded in a “punch people” kind of way

4) Only the good hardcore bands have names that are sentences with bad grammar. Boy Hits Car, Boy Sets Fire, Skycamefalling, Boy Sets Car-fire.

5) Ankles are tough so bring your socks down into your shoes so we can see them.

6) Tattoos are tough especially when they are on your calves. See Rule 5 on how to see said tattoo more clearly.

7) Wear your hoody in the mosh pit because sweating like a wild pig makes you look tough.

Don’t admit you listen to heavy metal.

9) (Exception to rule Only admit you listen to
heavy metal if you think it is ironic and you wear
80’s cheese metal shirts.

10) Be a non-conformist, just like all your friends.

11) Practice hardcore dancing in front of your mirror and then try them out the next time Atreyu comes to town.

12) A hardcore band is only original if you call it
something-core. Example Screamcore, emocore,
Screamocore, mathcore, or Medio-core.

13) Remember, it’s fun to punch and kick kung fu
style.

14) Keep it in the do-jo.

15) Real hardcore fans are called kids.

16) Complain how hardcore bands are playing with metal bands at all costs!

17) Have your own zine, website, production company or be in a band. Claim you are friends with the singer from Shai Halud.

18) Tell people you work in the music industry.

19) More Ankles people!

20) Embrace everybody in the scene except for those people who are not you.

21) Refer to bands as old school or new school then act tough again.

22) Pretend that you get Dillinger Escape plan.

23) Shop at second hand stores and then go buy
expensive shoes.

24) Beat people up and then go to bible study class.

25) Smoking and drinking and having sex before
marriage is too trendy. Real hardcore tough guys
abstain.

26) Whatever you do, don’t let the singer on stage
ever sing in the mic. Make sure you grab it from him and sing in it yourself, after all, you do a better job singing then him. It’s a wonder they didn’t put
you on the album.

27) Start your own hardcore band.

28) Have your logo resemble some random 80’s product for nostalgia.

29) Talk about the scene any chance you get. Say as many obscure hardcore bands from NJ as possible.

30) If you are shy start an emo band so you don’t have to look at the audience.

31) People who know more bands than you are better than you.

32) Add the Letter X before and after important words: XhardcorekidX, XmoshfuckX

33) Never say “Did you hear the new Strung Out?”
Unless you are attempting to be funny in which case stop it because hardcore kids are tough not funny.

34) It’s merch not merchandise.

35) Hardcore girls must wear head bands at all times.

36) Stretch your ears out to look more intimidating.

37) The bigger you stretch you ears out the more
hardcore you are.

38) Your ear should be stretched out enough to
accommodate a block of wood, a hubcap or a penis.

39) People in the front row are best used as a
ladder/staircase to reach your goal…steal the mic
away from the singer.

40) When people ask you if you like a band always say “I only like the old stuff” or “I haven’t really
gotten into the new stuff”.

41) Buy all of that bands merch.

42) Wear your new merch at the next hardcore show.

43) Repeat steps 41 and 42.

44) If you have to wear glasses make sure they are
thick, black framed ones.

45) Don’t tell anybody but make sure you try on your new vintage clothes and stud belt before heading out to see Poison the well.

46) Never admit you don’t like Hatebreed and go see them live 12 times a year.

47) Complain that they are playing with slayer but
don’t admit you actually like Slayer.

48) Complain at all costs.

49) Tag team hardcore dancing is cool.

50) Real hardcore kids are really struggling
photographers.

51) You don’t go to hardcore concerts, you go to
hardcore shows. BIG difference.

52) Name your hardcore dance moves things like “The mother fuck” or “kick that guys ass move” or better yet…stay home and cry.

53) Protect your body from swinging limbs by
sacrificing your two arms.

54) Scream about love.

55) All age venues are important so you are not
tempted to drink.

56) Claim you know a guy who knows a guy whose best friend was standing next to the guy who got his ass kicked during Converge. Bash the hardcore scene and then go see The Get Up Kids.

57) Anytime somebody mentions a band always say you know somebody in the band.

58)Wear your pins with honour! Shai Halud, American Nightmare, Minor Threat and the purple heart of valour.

59) Velcro shoes are cool.

60) Don’t admit that you have a crush on the singer from Walls of Jericho. If somebody asks, say you
respect her as a musician only.

61) Your band name should contain one of the following words: Blood, Murder, Kill, Victim and butterfly.

62) Print your band name as if it was on a bad
printing press. Actual graphics are for posers.

63) Sleep on a portrait painted prettier then
everyone.

64) 100 bands from around the world to play in your city. All of them are the world’s best hardcore bands. Every label represented, every hardcore genre present. The venue is the best all-ages venue in the world. Tickets are $1.00. It is your job to go around saying the festival should be free.

65) Record producers must make sure to pump the mid because mid is tough.

66) Re-issue your demos after every album.

67) When the band starts playing everybody join hands and make a big circle so we can watch the big kids play.

68) Crying on stage makes you a professional.

69) Complain some more.

70) Album covers must be made at home on Photoshop by your good friend.

71) If you are from New York NEVER smile in a promo pic. In fact always try to cross your arms and look into the camera as if you are going to beat up whom ever is looking.72) If you are from New Jersey NEVER smile in a promo pic either. In fact try to look like you just lost your girlfriend to the hardcore band from New York.73) Never admit that Emo is Country music lyrics mixed with pop rock riffs and marketed by 17 year olds trying to make their friend be the next Dashboard Confessional.

74) American Idol is your worst enemy. (But you voted for Ruben)

75) You can get away with glitter on your face as long as your stretched ear plugs are clear.

76) Fuck beer, got breast milk?

77) Bandanas are cool.

78) Bandanas with big X on them are cooler.

79) Bandanas with big X on them were cool last week you poser.

80) Your best friend is a guy named XattackX from Jersey who you chat with on MSN everyday. He is coming to see you one day. Really.81) Chunky breakdowns in your songs are original and you should continue to do them despite every other band doing them which is clearly a rip off of your band.

82) Judge other bands and always compare them to the socio-cultural effects of the band Integrity.

83) Look up Socio-cultural in the dictionary and then get offended.

84) Green Day is the real reason you are still alive.

85) Describe your group of friends as “the scene” and then watch bootlegs of last weeks.

86) Obey the laws of the hardcore scene or forever be banished from the circle.

87) When somebody asks you what is hardcore respond with “I am hardcore” then punch somebody in the face for looking at you wrong.

88) Keep punching

89) Kick a little too

90) Punch

91) Add a threat about their mother for good measure.

92) Pretend you are won the fight then pickup your
dismembered left arm.

93) You are wearing the same thing as the 40-year old gas pump attendant but for some strange mystical reason you are cooler than he is.

94) Tell everybody that Trustkill Records are too
trendy.

95) Did you stop acting tough? I saw you hug that
teddy bear.

96) Pierce your tits and tattoo your body.

97) Straight bangs means straight-edge

98) Being vegan means you can’t swallow sperm.

99) When in doubt mock everything

100) Take everything personally.

101) Assume this list is about you!  

Update from the taco house (Por Que No Taqueria)

What incredible weather!  It’s the temperature that you don’t feel except when a little breeze reminds you that you aren’t just dreaming, you actually do live in one of the most perfect places on the planet in September. It feels especially wonderful because I just returned from the midwest where you can almost play a game of catch with the air there because it is so thick. 

 But the humidity didn’t matter because I  witnessed the Oregon Ducks give a real booty kickin’ to the Michigan Wolverines at the “Big House” in Ann Arbor, Michigan with 12 friends, about 8,000 Oregon fans, and 101,000 Michigan fans  (Yes, I am a sports fanatic, please don’t hold that against me…in fact the trip also included a Cub’s baseball game at Wrigley Field in Chicago and a Tigers game in Detroit & eating about 14 hot dogs in 3 days…but it also included seeing the Lyric Opera of Chicago in Millennium Park, going to a Rick Bayless restaurant and seeing Mikhail Baryshnikov dance when I returned home…so there was a bit of balance). Actually, going on such a wacky trip reminded me that it was time to write an email….

This email has no theme or rhythm, except that it’s all over the place, and may feel like going to 2 baseball games and the opera in two different cities in 85 degree weather and 90% humidity all in 24 hours. Enjoy! 

1.  First off, all of the boutique clothing stores on Mississippi Avenue are having a fashion show called Flourish tomorrow, Thursday the 13th @ 6pm during the 2nd Thursday Mississippi Social.  They are shutting the street down at Mississippi & Beech St. and bringing in the new fashions with DJ MuMu.  Afterwards the clothing stores are all giving 15% off to customers.  So come by and enjoy yourself and support our community because the $2 suggested donation goes to benefit the Albina Youth Opportunity School and the Historic Mississippi Business Association. 

2.  I was turned on to a little coffee cart called Spella Caffe on SW 9th & Alder….Everyone who loves coffee needs to find as many excuses as possible to go downtown.  The proprietor, Andrea Spella is roasting small batches of beans by night, and making killer espresso by day.  He is great to talk to, but don’t talk too long because he has a line he needs to get through.  He roasts in a manner that brings out the subtleties of the beans and doesn’t rip your palette to shreds..It’s more Cameron Vineyards Pinot Noir than California Cabernet….by the way, if you have a strong desire to learn to roast coffee beans & need a career change & would like to eventually help open a cafe on the Amalfi Coast; word has it that Andrea is looking for an apprentice/ employee.   

3.  It was brought to my attention that we were written up in the Gourmet Magazine website as one of the top latino restaurants in 14 cities in the U.S.    http://www.epicurious.com/gourmet/   I don’t know if it will be in the newest issue of the magazine or not, but it made my Mom pretty excited! 

4.  We will be closing on Sept 17 & 18 (Mon & Tue)  to go on our annual end of summer trip to the coast for the employees.  This year they raised about $2,000.00 for the party by taking all the profits from our sales at the Farmer’s Market in Overlook Park.  There is talk of surfing, crabbing and s’more roasting…so don’t come in on Mon & Tue, but call on Wed because if we catch enough crabs we will have to make some crab tacos! 

5.  Lastly, we are helping a great organization called Up with People (http://www.upwithpeople.org/) and they are looking for host families for the youth that will be coming from all over the world to Portland to partake in service projects and performing arts projects to build bridges of understanding as a foundation for world peace.  It is a great organization that partners with Big Brothers Big Sisters and TransActive Education & Advocacy.   If you are interested in hosting a youth, please call or email Emily Gwaltney @ 503.927.7052 or egwaltney@upwithpeople.org All right, thank you for listening….now get off your computer and enjoy this perfect season in Oregon! 

Cheers,

Sam (II) Squared

read a book

My arm is lumpy…

I just created this wordpress blog. It seems do-able but more difficult than, say, blogger. Obviously there is more control, and ulitmately I like that when conveying my voice. Let’s try a picture….

 Ok, seems easy enough. (Attempt #2 put R2 up top for some reason, likely user error)

 What’s weird is that I created (and paid for) a wordpress account through my website.

Then logged and created the same free wordpress acount, just different blogs. I’m confused. It’s happened before and then I wind up having to be samuelpablo1 or something stupid.

Hope not.

There is a lump in my wrist. It’s getting bigger. Doesn’t hurt. Just a fleshy… tumor?

sam paul – author of Why I Committed Suicide

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