how to write a novel

How to write a novel:

Invent a person you want to spend three years with then spend three years with them in language.

In this scenario of the novel, the invented persona better be interesting. They must hold your attention. They have to have a few things:

1. Memory (history: history is just numerous kinds of memory)
2. A place to move around in, a place to go
3. Friends or what may pass for them
4. Drama
5. Something to want and want bad enough to hurt themselves for
6. Life.

I don’t think the writer has to worry about anything but the fear of invention and time. They should fear those numbers running up and down the long-hand version of the novel–the writer will need about a twelve pack of legal pads for a first draft and lots of pens. The writer shouldn;t write in pencil because the medium will smudge.

The writer should burn the first set of pads because that was just a warm up. The writer should purchase a cheap laptop (about $1,400.00) if they intend on following this last bit of advice.

the rorschach element

This log’s going to be dealing a lot with space of mutiple kinds and a man named Wally Rorschach over the summer months. Wally Rorschach is the protagonist of a novel titled The Man who Fell into the Sky, which I’ve had on the back burner for a couple of years. Mentally speaking, at this point (there’s the spatial element) Wally is standing on the side of a road in Arizona wondering why one of his mates is laying naked on the south going lane, having already been “run over” by a truck and a semi. His name is Vesuvius. But no matter that. See the “subject” link Rorschach to follow along where the log goes on the subject of Wally.

Really, Wally fell into the sky. His son and daughter don’t like that idea at all. Nor do they like that there’s some guy in Ohio/Wyoming on a John Deer considering the notion of driving it cross-country. At this point (there’s that spatial thing again), I have no idea why. This log will attempt an answer in some cogent way.

protuberant space

Many people have talked about the nature of mental images. Concerning mental images, for example, I have one of the Franklin mountains around which the city of El Paso is laid out. Theyre not big mountains, such as those in Alaska. The highest peak rises only about 1,000m. They are, however, a dominant feature of the horizon line to the north of my fathers house, etching a midline gray stone and yellow green break across the sightline.

frankmts3.jpg

The front steps of the house face west approximately. When you leave the house and begin down the five concrete steps you note the sun and the forehead of the mountain to the left of it, at about northwest. Its fair to say that its the first thing you see in the morning. Its an imposing image, an image you watch and watch long, even though the features of the mountain, stone ridging, bandings of sandstone, and just the suggestion of yucca, Spanish Dagger, and desert grass and desert wild flowers, become familiar. The surface changes with the position of the sun. Dark blue and purple in the morning at dawn; then phases of common daylight which dulls the surface, then orange, pink, purple at dusk. Given the cloud cover or the amount of pollution and dust in the air in the evening, all the hues find their way across the creases and folds of mountain. Storms often move in from the southwest, their moisture drawn up from the Gulf of Mexico, thus in evening, the sun will burn sherbet orange on the mountain slopes in its lower course, while the deep gray and blue and black of desert storms wall off the western world.

Storm over west El Paso by Charlotte Rogash.jpg

Above it all you can see the bloated white crowns of the clouds, rising and splitting in the high atmosphere. For the kids, such a sight was familiar and suspenseful and scary, watching a thunderstorm as a total vertical and horizontal phenomenon, for the adults, nostalgic.

Other images of the mind, or in the mind, are more spread out, diffused, or hard to fix, instances of time that we remember, recall, such as sitting on the porch in the cool and sunny air of a spring morning in Connecticut. The image of the mountain is an object. It has physical density. Its image, which no science has been able to explain mechanically, translating the surfacing of certain kinds of memory from electrical signals and stimuli (this is similar to asking what is the nature of consciousness), matches the real object pretty well as light in the mind. The mountain has a ready quality of recognition even as two distinct phenomena. The mountain has objective quantity but the mental image of the mountain, which isnt the mountain, is difficult to describe with conventional descriptive language as an occurrence. The physical mountain takes up space, but what sort of space does the mental image of the mountain take up in my mind? I know that the image takes up time, thus, to accord Einstein his due, it must have some spatial quality. Is the memory or image of the mountain quantifiable in spatial termshaving mass, position, energy, some physics beyond the mechanism of brain–or is it more like an effect of physical fields which the brain translates, such as gravitation or electromagnetism?

Regardless, the power of the image remains, the power of the shadow of what made it lurking just a few seconds away in thought, always.

what are asses for?

In a particularly wonderful moment the phenomenon of sitting and the human ass all of the sudden became profoundly strange to me, this at a meeting of our English Department. This has no bearing on the Tunxis English Department; it was merely coincidence, since most of us were seated. Sure we have chairs. But why do we have asses? Are they for sitting?

I can imagine a human condition in which people never sit and therefore do not envision chairs? In such a case, what is the ass good for? I mention this to my good friend and colleague John Timmons and he reminded me of Bukowski in this regard, which of course got us thinking about this anatomical issue to even greater degrees of absurdity. If the ass were on the head, discos could have lower ceilings and people could leap to no effect but minor bruising.

The question yet persists. It’s either why do we have asses or why do we sit?

identity and the self

I learned something interesting about my good friend Maureen Durkin today. Apparently, Maureen goes around telling people she’s Clarissa. This is very interesting and I can see this. Maureen walks into a room and declares, “I am Clarissa.” I love it.

This is a spatial issue. We can, I believe, inhabit two spaces simultaneously. To myself, in my own thought space, which is all the world at a precise moment, and the circular, bubble-like space of others, who do not know me or may not know me. In other words, I am always known and unknown, and, of course, these “positions” are “real” depending on orientation. The question now is, Who is Clarissa?

IF and New Media

For those considering the leap into Interactive Fiction and New Media 1: Perspectives, it’s time to use those springs.

I’d encourage English majors, teachers, and budding technologists to grapple with these areas, because it is here that the edge can be confronted, and by edge I mean “use” and “analysis” beyond conventions of conventional degrees: i.e., the hyperconventional. We’re talking serious study in coolness and narrative structure with these courses, and the Perspectives course is really coming together with the remediative (the concept of remediation and more: see Bolter, Remediation) elements of media and thought and communication.

The IF course will introduce and consider different modes of thinking about thinking, thinking about presentation, thinking about art, thinking about tools. This course is not a credit course, though it should be. But no matter. It is a course that, if used productively, can get you thinking about edges. Just ask Coonce-Ewing.

Then read this piece of IF (Downtown Tokyo, one of the course’s readings) and draw a map of the “world.”

bats in the dome

Spinning writes:

Mind’s a maze. Mind’s amazing. Buzzing bees and bats in the belfry. belfry: a movable tower used in ancient warfare for attacking walled positions. (Webster’s New World College Dictionary 4th Ed.) Flights of fancy. Back to basics. Bureaucracy at its best when learned and carried on. Now or later? Does it matter? Yes, it does. It really does.

I agree. We are always in the maze, in and out, and amidst.

semester assessment

So all the grades have been submitted and there are a few things to note about this difficult semester, difficult for many reasons.

First semester composition in college teaches people a few things: to articulate ideas to a rational audience in Standard written English (pattern oriented), to evaluate ideas, and to assess their progress given a certain set of objectives. My students learned a lot and made good progress, but the progress was hindered by the “place” from which the students started, what they knew to begin with. It sort of like throwing people into combat without the required bootcamp or having them run a race one hundred yards behind the negociated starting block. The majority are still not ready for the basics at the start of the course and therefore where they end is not necessarily where I want them to be, ready for more content directed courses, such as Comp and Lit or Composition II or Econ.

I see this in later courses, such as Brit Lit. In that course, I require a research paper, but students still struggle with what a research paper actually is, and it’s hard to assess how much time I can actually take to explain basics, since I don’t know what they need to know. The basic reqs of a “research paper” are articulated in comp: it’s not about reporting or listing or articulating someone else’s ideas.

Issues:

1. Students coming into comp are still not familiar and comfortable with texts of multiple kinds, whether text or image-based (some would perhaps claim that our culture is image/visual oriented so students should be more learned in evaluation of images: this is nonsense). Texts are not part of their intellectual life, therefore they have a very difficult time with techniques such as documentation styles, paragraph ordering, and understanding a focus. In a way, a documentation style is an orientation, a way of picturing the phenomenon of writing and reasoning through writing. They are beginning to learn this, though.

2. Students coming into comp have a great deal of difficultly conceptualizing an audience and its needs. They have a difficult time, therefore, understanding where they fit as members of an audience other than one that is simply meant to consume goods (I must have) or survive day to day (I must work). They are learning this, though, or considering the concept.

3. Students coming into comp have a difficult time solving problems that have no predisclosed or disposed answers one or two of which may be correct. Confronted with a problem, such as a lack of data or multiple points of view or some new disclosure, they freeze or retreat into familiar answers. Here analysis is the enemy, because analysis and evaluation call for independent conclusions which could lead to failure, confusion, or ambiguity. But they are beginning to learn.

el paso in hindsight

I learned a lot the past week in El Paso, where my father resides. I learned a lot about poetry. Not about form, lines, and imagery, but about sight. I drove streets I remember driving in a car and on a mountain bike and learned that they were the same roads clarified. I know them perhaps better now.

Seated on the front steps in the early morning I noted a man run by in expensive running shoes. He was followed by a stooped woman in broken sandals, who carried a paper bag. This is the mix on that old road on which my father’s house was built in about 1917, a red brick 1200 sq ft bungalow where my parents raised 5 children. The house is small, squat, raised on a base of stones, the front squares of lawn now just dust and sand with a few spears of grass struggling to live. The sun and sand forbid more.

When I visit, the house always appears smaller than I remember. I wonder how we all got on there. The city is exploding in size, the university building up, and the mix keeps mixing. The way landscaping has changed is interesting, too–multi-colored rock, orange quarter-inch paving sand, red and white brick, very little grass, lots of cactus rearing out of places that had once been watered routinely. Water conservation. The city’s backbone mountain has more and more radio and communications towers so that at night red lights blink like needle punctures heating and cooling, heating, cooling, over the dark houses that climb the rocky slopes, the stars above it all wiped away by the tens of thousands of street lights.

Drivers stopping at the stop signs waved. I remember a Lexus and a beat up Ford. That’s the mix in my “old” neighborhood. But that’s not the way it used to be. Of course, I waved back, because I was seated there, and it’s what you do.

I’ve always been intrigued by patterns, especially with mazes, thus narrative is a means for me of seeing. Urban spaces reveal how we think about idealized space and action, from the smallest plot to the more aggressive boundaries of a city. The space, its shapes, its roads, its architecture, reveals us. Built, controlled space follows a thinking plot. It demonstrates. It reveals collective and individual creativity. It reveals failures that can’t just be put into the trunk of a car and driven to the dump.

The city is another kind of poem and story. It changes when you keep trying to read it.