This is my life.

900 words

Note: I was asked to speak about women at Carnegie Mellon’s 2005 Community Collage, our freshman orientation diversity forum. I struggled for months to write a speech that I thought would be appropriate. Then, two days before I was to give the speech, I scrapped it and completely rewrote it. This is the result.

Hi everyone, I’m Kristan. Let me start by saying that I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make this speech interesting and applicable to everyone. Kind of ironic, huh? I’m supposed to speak to a group of 700 people, about diversity, and I want to appeal to all of them? No way. There is no way.

So what I decided to do instead was to talk about something — or rather someone — who is really important to me. My mom.

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I love that I spent all week anticipating Andy’s return from Germany, doing everything possible to make his homecoming pleasant and relaxing — i.e., laundry, vacuuming, dusting, scrubbing, bathing the dog, etc. — and not thirty minutes after he arrives, he gets stung on the toe by a wasp.

>_<

Speaking of unfortunate events, Lemony Snicket was on ABC last night. I enjoyed it even though it was kind of sad the whole way through, I suppose because there was an undertone of comic relief and optimism. Both child actors were excellent — I even think I would have preferred Liam Aiken as Harry Potter — and of course so was Jim Carrey, despite being rather creepy.

Anyway, since I just watched the movie, it seems fitting to post my favorite part of an interview with Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), which I read a few days ago.

I use a quote a lot that Miles Davis supposedly said to John Coltrane when John Coltrane was in his mode where he would get up and he would solo for five hours. And he was playing with Miles Davis, and Miles Davis said, “Um, you really, you have to keep those solos shorter because we’re trying to have an evening.” And John Coltrane said, “I don’t know what to do. I just put it in my mouth and I keep playing and I don’t know how to stop.” And Miles Davis said, “Take the horn out of your mouth.”

And I always think that when I’m too in love with my own work that I feel that I can’t change it. You know, when I think, “This passage is too long, but every sentence seems glorious. What in the world can I do?” And I think, “Just take the horn out of your mouth.” There is in fact a way to change something. And the fact that you feel sad about it is not necessarily an excuse.

Since Andy’s been gone (no Kelly Clarkson pun intended) all this week in Germany on business, I decided to send him a little surprise, similar to what he did for me before.

I can’t even say “Dad” or the poor little guy goes bonkers looking for Andy, sniffing at the door, etc. Thank goodness he can’t spell.

From the movie Miss Potter:

There’s something quite delicious about writing the first words of a story.

“A Writing Woman” by Gail Godwin is a really excellent piece — almost more a story than an essay or an advice column.

(This is the fourth and final of the Atlantic Monthly articles I mentioned, BUT then there is their whole archive of literary interviews, plus a few articles I found elsewhere. It never ends!)

Fact and fiction, fiction and fact. Which stops where, and how much to put in of each? At what point does regurgitated autobiography graduate into memory shaped by art? How do you know when to stop telling it as it is, or was, and make it into what it ought to be—or what would make a better story?

I think that’s something every fiction (or “fiction”) writer wrestles with. I still remember when Catie scratched out “Fiction Workshop” in the header of one of my stories and wrote (lovingly), “LIIIIES!!”

We are told to write what we know, and then told that what really happened is too boring, or unresolved. Dialogue should be lifelike, not peppered with the yeahs and ums and whats that we really hear. But so much fiction doesn’t “ring true.” And so much non-fiction (at least lately) has been exposed as fabrication.

Where is the line? Does it matter (to readers)? Isn’t it all just marketing anyway?

I don’t have any answers. Just my own struggles.

I was badly in need of a miracle. I was twenty‑seven years old and had not yet become what I had wanted to be since the age five: a writer. True, I wrote every evening, long exhaustive entries in my journal, to compensate for boring days. I had stayed for three years in my cushy government job — helping the British plan their holidays in the United States — though I had intended to stay one year. I had begun countless stories and novels but there was something “off” about all of them. Either they had the ring of self‑consciousness about them, or they started too slowly and petered out before I ever got to the interesting material that had inspired me in the first place, or they were so close to the current problems of my own life that I couldn’t gain the proper distance and perspective.

Andy pointed out that “proper distance and perspective” may be what I’m lacking with The Good Daughters, and what’s causing me to struggle so much with the revision. [sigh] I think he’s probably right. So I’m going back to the drawing board, which is somewhat disheartening because I’ve invested so much time, effort, and heart into what I’ve already written, but also somewhat exciting, because I know I can do better.

.

These last two are not writing-related, but I liked them.

“The best means of learning to know oneself is seeking to understand others.”

“Yes, that’s it,” he said, in his cool, professional voice. But I saw the blood come into his face; the blush of exultation; he knew he had freed me. Even if it meant freeing me from him.

Wow, I’ve never read SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE (though I have read a couple other books by Vonnegut) but what a passage:

Billy Pilgrim padded downstairs on his blue and ivory feet. He went into the kitchen, where the moonlight called his attention to a half bottle of champagne on the kitchen table, all that was left from the reception in the tent. Somebody had stoppered it again. “Drink me,” it seemed to say.

So Billy uncorked it with his thumbs. It didn’t make a pop. The champagne was dead. So it goes.

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this :

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn’t in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed.

Thanks to Sarah for linking to it.

From Sarah’s LJ:

we’re part of a generation, a suffering generation, with insufficient outlets, the past can no longer help us, we need to help ourselves. I mean, I guess that goes for every generation — you need to find your own anthems and bibles and whatever.

I keep thinking the same thing. And I keep wanting to give voice to that, through my writing, only it’s such a big task and I don’t know where to start.

Eat Drink Man Woman is a GREAT movie!!

Very Asian, very cute, very real, very unexpected endings.

I should keep it in mind for The Good Daughters revision… Aiya, that stupid revision is going to kill me.

Another day without Andy, another Atlantic Monthly article.

Riley spent most of his day going between the two pillows I laid flat on the couch, taking turns lying on each. Sadly I am not that easily entertained. Instead, I spent most of today tearing up over television (We Are Marshall and Grey’s Anatomy reruns) and cleaning. Much more interesting, right?

Aaaanyway…

Once you get past the intro, “Writing, Typing, and Economics” is pretty good, contrary to what its title might suggest.

All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand — are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced those moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It’s a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments. Such is the horror of having to face the typewriter that you will spend all your time waiting. I am persuaded that most writers, like most shoemakers, are about as good one day as the next (a point which Trollope made), hangovers apart. The difference is the result of euphoria, alcohol, or imagination. The meaning is that one had better go to his or her typewriter every morning and stay there regardless of the seeming result. It will be much the same.

The best place to write is by yourself, because writing becomes an escape from the terrible boredom of your own personality.

And one of particular interest to me, She Who Cannot Be Funny To Save Her Life:

I would urge my young writers to avoid all attempts at humor. … Humor is an intensely personal, largely internal thing. What pleases some, including the source, does not please others. … Also, as Art Buchwald has pointed out, we live in an age when it is hard to invent anything that is as funny as everyday life.

Hmm, should I let Dooce and Jon Stewart know? Oh wait, their humor IS based on everyday life.