Outlines as an Exercise in Creative Exhaustion

Yesterday's rant addressed in very small measure the exasperation that ensues when I've written myself into a corner and have to figure out what went wrong, what went right but I didn't pay attention, and how to get back on track. I'm reasonably happy with my plan to untangle the mess and even more pleased with the nifty connections and plot twists that emerged from the process. However, I did notice how drained I felt afterwards. Excited, but devoid of what my kids call "spoons" -- mental oomph. (Today I am full of vim and vinegar and excited about diving back into the manuscript itself.) I've noticed the same feeling when outlining a new project or even composing a pitch or product description (as for preparing a book for epublication).

Changing Gears: Downshift to Beginner's Mind

I've been juggling two different writing projects, or perhaps more accurately, two projects that have to be worked on right now. One is the next Darkover novel, The Children of Kings, which I hope to have finished this summer. The thing about stories is that unless you write them, they don't get written, but the thing about novels is that the writing goes on for a long time. This business of "oh, I'll just skip today, it's so beautiful I'd rather be at the beach" starts with a nibble here and a nibble there and maybe I'll just write a blog post and call that a day's writing and before you know it, it's three or five or twelve months later and you've written only a few pages. Maybe a hundred. But you really needed to have written five hundred if you wanted to hit your book-a-year rhythm.

The other thing about novels is that there are so many elements and they're so interdependent that even a short lapse in focus leads to many dropped threads. Maybe some writers can keep all that stuff in their heads for prolonged breaks, or just pick up with the outline where they left off. I, alas, am not one of them. Hence my working style of slow and steady, emphasis on the steady.

Murder at Mansfield Park: A Gem Among Austen Derivatives

I don't like applying the term "mash-up" to Lynn Shepherd's book. To my mind, it does not fit in the category of works of the Sense and Sensibility With Sea Monsters or Pride and Prejudice With Zombies or "[any Austen title] with [any odd or supernatural element that would have appalled a writer of her taste and intelligence]." Nor is it a modern attempt at a sequel, of which there are too many to mention.

Murder at Mansfield Park belongs to an entirely separate group, an homage or pastiche in the most positive sense of the word. Using Austen's novel as the basic structure of her own, Shepherd sets about replacing the personalities of some but not all of the characters, including their relationships and backgrounds. She plays out the results in a manner that feels seamless with Austen's. As a disclaimer, I am not an Austen scholar, so perhaps there are lapses and anachronisms I did not notice, but for me the overall reading experience was as if I had discovered a new Austen novel. Perhaps it is not her best, but it is consistent with her established work and delivers many of the same reading pleasures.

Hands Off My Book!

We've got a Costo membership, a remnant of my husband's bachelor days. He'd make a monthly run to stock up on gigantic sizes of everything; now I go there for what I call targeted shopping. I know exactly what I want, how I'll store/use it, and how much I'm saving over the local 99-Cent store. In addition, we get the Costco magazine. It's got a monthly "Informed Debate" section, often about issues on which I have no strong opinion. This month, however, asks, "Should literary classics be sanitized?"

The case in point was the recent publication of Huckleberry Finn with certain words expunged. The "expert" advancing the "Yes" opinion was Alan Gribben, a professor at Auburn University in Alabama who "helped produce the NewSouth Edition." He not only justifies replacing nigger with slave but goes on to say, "Would Mark Twain approve of making this change? No one can be certain..." and adds that Twain was such a commercial writer that he'd want his work to reach the widest possible audience and that necessitates "sidestepping" "the n-word acrimony."*

I'm outraged by the rewriting of a published work according to someone else's political or social agenda.

Reading As A Subversive Activity

This is not a new idea. We often talk about reading as subversive -- at least, I hope we do, because  encouraging subversive thoughts is practically a job requirement for writers. Mostly what we mean is that what's being read -- books, broadsides, newsletters, blogposts -- contains provocative ideas, notions that challenge the established order and society's comfortable assumptions. But it may be that reading itself is subversive.

Here's a quote from Sven Birkerts in Lapham's Quarterly (Spring 2011): "How familiar is this feeling, this impulse to hide the self away when reading, both because hiding not only intensifies the focus, but keeps the reader out of the the sightlines of those who anoint themselves the guardians and legislators of our moral well-being."