So I have a draft, and possibly one eighth of it does not suck. I am going to spend some time this week reading short stories, because I have not done that in a long time, and I think I forgot how they are supposed to work.

I am almost positive that a 5,000-word short story should have fewer characters than a 19th-century Russian novel, however. I have some revising to do.

I have not written in 2006. That sentence does not mean that I have not updated this blog, or either of my other blogs; it means that I haven’t written any fiction, not one word. There is no “writing2006″ folder on my hard drive. I bought a laptop in March that was supposed to make me write, but March was when my life started to fall apart, and I have not written.

Yesterday I wrote a little bit, or rather, I edited. I took three old short stories — and I mean old, from 2004, because I did not write very much in 2005, either, except for some aborted fragments that might have turned into a novel, only I stopped writing — and I cleaned them up and changed some things and I submitted them (or prepared them to mail; most places don’t read until September 1) to journals. I went down the tiers, with the story I think is the best going to a middle tier, and the ones I don’t like so much going to lower tiers. I should have my rejections in six months or so.

And then this morning I sat down and wrote a sentence that I did not think existed in my head, and then I wrote some more, and within about half an hour I had three characters (a cop, a waitress, and the waitress’s creepy bike-stealing brother), a setting, some stuff happening. I don’t know where it’s going or if it will go anywhere but I will try again tomorrow.

Yesterday afternoon I turned in my final papers for the semester — a day early in one case, and three days early in the other. I never hand anything in early so this has me kind of stunned and also very relieved.

The three papers (two short stories, one take-home final essay) totalled just over 40 double-spaced pages. Between Thursday and Friday at work, I wrote a little over 80 double-spaced pages. That is 120 pages in four days, and they were hard pages.

Don’t anyone ever let me say I don’t have time to write a novel, okay? I may not have the brains or the ideas to write a novel, but I don’t get to complain about time. Not if I can write 120 pages in four days.

This de Bernieres book is never going to end. Just slaughter the Christians already so I can listen to something else.

Like Life. A writing professor and a couple of classmates told me to read Lorrie Moore after reading my short stories. I love this collection so much that I can only assume that what they meant by that recommendation was, “Give it up; Lorrie Moore is writing all the short stories we need; you suck.” She takes everything that was good about Tama Janowitz and early Anne Tyler and makes it deeper, better, more lyrical. I have a new favorite writer.

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. I liked this one more than The Newly Born Woman but I am a little embarrassed trying to come up with anything intelligent to say about it. So we are adopting a new rule here at Outside of Dog, which is that any time I have nothing to say about a book, I will just pick out a quote (preferably a quote about dogs) and you can decide for yourselves.

Here is your quote:

We need dogs to understand this strange, ambivalent relation we have to love — hatred. I don’t have a dog. I avoid having a dog. I have always been aware that I have avoided having dogs. A dog is a threat. What is threatening about dogs is their terrible love. You learn this the moment you see a particular dog. Some dogs are like human beings, full of hatred, but most dogs are bundles of love. This infinite, complete, and limitless giving of love is exhausting for a human being. We are a mixture of love and its contrary. Apparently there is no such mixture in a dog’s love. Poe wrote “The Black Cat” about this: a cat’s love that is so infinite the narrator comes to hate the cat.

Meeting a dog you suddenly see the abyss of love. Such limitless love doesn’t fit our economy. We cannot cope with such an open, superhuman relation.

Apologies for the silence around here. I’ve been extra busy at work, and I have finally had some inspiration regarding the short story I’m writing. I hate fiction. When I’m writing a brief, if I don’t know what to write it means I don’t know enough about my case or the relevant law, so I can just go read some more until I know what I’m talking about, and then writer’s block disappears immediately. When I am blocked trying to write fiction, there isn’t a whole lot I can do about it except sit and think for a while, and I really have the wrong personality for sitting and thinking.

Which is why this workshop will probably be my last flirtation with writing fiction. Assuming it doesn’t kill me outright.

Last night while I was looking for reviews of Villa Incognito, I found a link to Carolyn See’s page. I have only read one of See’s books but she was my favorite professor when I was at UCLA in the 80s. I never took a writing class from her, but the 20th-century American lit class I took with her was one of the best English classes I’ve ever taken.

Her page includes several reviews of her book on writing, Making a Literary Life. I think I am never going to have much interest in books about writing, but the San Francisco Chronicle review reprinted on See’s site at least makes it sound like this could be an entertaining read:

See’s intent is expressly political. The literary world, she suggests, is still mostly the province of those “born and raised in an upper-middle- class (or higher) family in New York or New England” whose “grandfather . . . attended college with Norman Mailer” or “grandmother . . . [went] to that Episcopal church where Madeleine L’Engle goes,” of Ivy League alums and master’s of fine arts program grads genetically programmed to understand how the vast New York culture machine functions.

From Maud Newton. This is a very good post. The question she leaves unanswered at the end:

Do we write because we want to synthesize events and move on? Or is writing about childhood a sign that we are stuck, endlessly reliving the bad things that happened, never able to exist apart from them?

Louis Auchincloss has maintained a law practice for years while writing 54 books. And I’m still trying to come up with twelve lousy pages for this stupid fiction class.

Break Every Rule. I am filing this under “reviews” because that’s how I keep track of what I’ve finished, but I didn’t really plan review it. I’m not sure how I feel about the book and I’m not sure that my thoughts are interesting enough to share, although of course that has never stopped me before.

In my seminar discussion last night, most of the class loved the book. I didn’t. I wouldn’t say I hated it; Maso’s language is so beautiful that I couldn’t really hate it. But the book is all language, and it’s all about language, which makes sense because for Maso language is everything. I think that to the extent that this book provides any kind of writing advice, it’s really terrible advice. I cringed a little when the class was so enthusiastic about specific parts of the book, because those were the parts that reminded me most pointedly of the worst writing advice in the world, that bit from Red Smith: “Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.” That advice has produced more crappy writing than divorce has. In a lot of ways Maso’s wisdom here is the same sort of thing, just wrapped up in a chewy French feminist shell. Her focus is still on the writer’s urge to find a language for herself, without much concern about whether that language is ultimately going to engage anyone else.

And I’m not sure that sort of writing really does engage anyone else. Or, if it does engage, it does so not at the level of the body and the bones and the organs as Maso claims; instead, it’s all language wrapped in language and filtered through theory. Maso writes that she wishes to “sing in prose, to somehow get the urgency of bone and blood and hair, entire histories, into prose” (35). This statement itself is expressed with urgency and poetry, but still I wonder if this is all just so much bullshit. Enjambment, fragmentation, open spaces in the text – for the author these may be intended to open up levels of meaning, invite the reader in to the text, avoid authorial “totalitarianism” (I am paraphrasing Maso), but I suspect that more often the end result is an opaque, unreadable text, one that doesn’t open up meaning but instead obscures it, and ultimately represents not the language of the body but the language of language, a pure brain-space construction that communicates little and operates only as an outlet for the writer.

Maso also says this:

Language for me has always been a profoundly sensual experience. Language is emotion, language is feeling, language is body. It is not merely the sign for something, but rather also a thing in itself (116).

And I can buy the first two but I stop short at “language is body.” I think I am going to make my professor cry because every time someone talks about “writing the body,” my body practically explodes on the spot from the need to cry bullshit. I am perhaps not cut out for this.

I guess we’ll call this a mixed review. I didn’t really like the book and the class discussion was a little bit excruciating, plus I wound up discussing stupid Irigaray in my paper even though I took a blood oath to never do that after spring semester last year.

Then again, I also got to say “phallologocentric” and “bullshit” in the same paper, so yay for grad school. But I’m not opening any damn veins and I’m not reading any more Maso right now.

Among other things, she discusses her writing process and her terrible early drafts.

The Usual Suspects book club discussed Barrett’s Ship Fever just about one year ago. I really loved that collection a lot.

Via Maud Newton.

Break Every Rule. Yet another assignment for my fiction-writing class. So far her writing is just gorgeous, lyrical and spare and all of that nice stuff, but I am getting that itchy feeling I get whenever writers talk about their work in spiritual terms. I do like the way she talks about creating spaces for herself with sentences, but too much of that kind of thing makes me itchy, too. At least she isn’t John Gardner.

On Moral Fiction. This book pissed me off. Gardner says a lot of things in this book, a lot of them contradictory, a lot of them reactionary, and some of them just plain mind-boggling. I think perhaps I am not the target audience, but this book also feels like it was really dated at the time that it was written, although Gardner obviously thinks his ideas are timeless.

My main problem with his premise is that I just can’t accept his rigid definition of morality. I have problems with the whole idea of “morality” in the first place, and I understand that he is in part railing against a postmodern rejection of absolutes, but the problem is that some of the specific moral issues that he seems to accept as eternal and absolute – the “Yankee Christian virtues” he laments in the first chapter – seem neither absolute nor even particularly moral to my way of thinking, and I am simply not willing to accept on the basis of Gardner’s impersuasive arguments that my morality is in question based on my personal indifference to love of country and marital fidelity. To take two of his most irritating examples.

So Gardner’s arguments are flawed for me from the outset because I am not persuaded of the need for art to reflect his definition of morality, but, hey, maybe there is something else to glean from this book. That thought kept me from just quitting altogether and going back to The Tin Drum. But Gardner and I have another problem, which is that he thinks that “immoral” fiction presents the world in an uglier light than it deserves, whereas I tend to think that the post-modern novel has not yet been written which is uglier than some of the ugliest corners of reality.

In fact, Gardner’s whole premise here strikes me as one that could only be written by a child of extreme privilege, or by someone who had spent a great deal of time inside the shelter of the academy. Maybe I’m just cynical, but I can’t take seriously his apparent suggestion that ugliness in fiction is bad in part because it is somehow a dishonest portrayal. The worst excesses of Stephen King (I am thinking in particular of The Stand, with its fictional dictatorship in which dissidents are crucified) have nothing on the Khmer Rouge, the desaparecidos of El Salvador, or the Taliban at the peak of its power. (That is not to argue that The Stand is a good book, but my problems with King are aesthetic rather than moral. The book is not bad because the author revels in horror and ugliness; it is a bad book because King is about as subtle as nuclear bomb.)

To the extent that Gardner resonates with me at all, I still have to distill his arguments down from their lofty moral premise and put them into the realm of aesthetics. For instance, I give qualified approval to his disparagement of authors who are not deeply involved in their characters’ lives. But once again, for me this is an aesthetic objection, because books written with only superficial attention – or worse, outright unfairness – to character tend to be books that are facile, uninvolving, or trite.

I think in particular of two current writers who are often classed together, Jonathan Franzen (who I think is a very bad writer, and whom I would probably classify as “immoral” if I were inclined to buy into Gardner’s definitions) and Michael Chabon (whose work I almost invariably respect). Franzen’s The Corrections has been justly criticized for being unfair to its characters; the family at the center of the novel is presented as mostly unredeemable, petty, unloving, and simply mean-spirited. My objection to the novel was not that the characters were unlikeable – I don’t require likeable characters in my fiction – but that they seemed unjustifiably unlikeable; the text provided no rationale for their uniform nastiness, and I found myself inventing alternate stories for the characters in which their horrible behavior made some kind of internal sense. After I finished the novel I read Franzen’s book of essays, How to Be Alone, and one essay in particular solidified my feeling that Franzen had not treated his characters fairly. The essay was a nonfiction account of Franzen’s father’s death from Alzheimer’s, and it mirrored very closely the story in the book. Franzen’s characterization of his mother was likewise nearly as cold and merciless as his characterization of her counterpart in the novel, except that in the essay he reprinted a letter written not by him but by his mother. In her own words, Franzen’s mother comes across as a little pathetic but mostly desperately likeable, and after reading that I was actually angry with Franzen for washing this woman out into bland, one-dimensional unlikeability in his fictional portrayal. This is not to say that her self-portrayal was any more “true” than her son’s version; it simply convinced me that Franzen did not understand his character – or perhaps his mother – well enough to have earned the right to judge her as harshly as his novel seemed to judge her.

Chabon, by contrast, is occasionally too sentimental for my taste, but I never feel that he is unfair to his characters. On the contrary, his novels and in particular his short stories seem to emanate sympathy not only for his central characters but for any human figure who wanders onto the page. I appreciate this feeling of sympathy, because to me it is evidence that the author knows his characters, knows what makes them potentially small and petty and occasionally even bad, but knows them well enough to not take cheap shots and hold back the characterization that would complicate any simple moral judgments. Other writers who I think demonstrate similar sympathetic treatment of their characters include Salman Rushdie and David James Duncan, both of whom, like Chabon, write what I might deem to be “moral” fiction, but what I would prefer to simply call the good stuff. Zadie Smith, a writer whom I don’t quite love but who I think has potential, displays this authorial sympathy intermittently in White Teeth; I think she shows her relative immaturity, however, in losing the sympathetic eye with the upper-middle-class Jewish family that shows up late in the book. And possibly the most sympathetic author I can think of is William Faulkner, who wrote at times about terrible people doing terrible things, and sometimes judged his characters and invariably put them through hell, but never seemed to judge them unfairly or from a position of superiority. Always he seems to pull back with an air of “there but for the grace of God go I” absolution.

In the end, I am just not comfortable with Gardner’s employment of morality when it seems to me that these are aesthetic judgments that reflect the wisdom, the skill, the craftsmanship of the authors, or perhaps (using Franzen’s example) simply their emotional maturity and psychic distance from the stories they tell. I have not quite been brainwashed into postmodernism into believing that all morality is relative (although maybe it is; I haven’t made up my mind on that issue), but I know that Gardner’s sharp line-drawing seems to be based on a rigid sense of good-and-evil that I just can’t buy, and seems to reflect a world view that strikes me as naive and privileged.

In sum: Jen fu, don’t read this if you can avoid it.

If you liked the piece from the other day on mistakes writers don’t see, you might also enjoy this re-examination of the uselessness of adverbs. I like it that he cites Frank O’Connor, who is probably my favorite early twentieth-century short-story writer.

Me, I’m still going to avoid them when I can, because I don’t want my professor to call me “monkey boy.”

Online fan fiction sites help kids improve their writing skills, this article claims. The article examines why (not so much whether; that seems to be taken as a given) kids learn more from “affinity spaces” than they do in formal classroom instruction:

Teachers sometimes complain that popular culture competes for the attention of their students, a claim that starts from the assumption that what kids learn from media is less valuable than what schools teach. Here, however, much of what is being mastered are things that schools try—and too often fail—to teach their students. (It has been said that if schools taught sex education the same way they taught writing, the human race would die out in a generation.)
…
University of Wisconsin-Madison education professor James Gee calls such informal learning cultures “affinity spaces,” asking why kids learn more, participate more actively, and engage more deeply with popular culture than they do with the contents of their textbooks.

I’m not so much a fan of a fan fiction, but I have always been irritated by the assumption that the internet was turning kids into bad writers. It’s not all chat rooms and “U R kewl,” and it strikes me that kids who live online do a lot more writing and reading than kids did twenty years ago, when we all just talked on the phone.