The Triumphant Return

I survived the conference, mostly, and came out with pages of notes, a pile of new friends, massive sleep deprivation, ideas exploding out of my head, and more confidence in my writing than I’ve ever had. My exhaustion was so pervasive that even after lots of sleep, naps, and more sleep THE NEXT DAY, I’m still tired. All that is a good thing in my book.

There’s no way I can cram everything I learned into one post, nor would I want to, so I’ll probably have to split it up into multiple successive posts. 

I’ll start with this though : not to sound like a magical crystal hippie or anything, but there is something to being around hundreds of creative types in an enclosed area for a few days. With all that artistic energy arcing through the room, you can’t help but pick up stray bits of it. If for no other reason, that made going to the conference worth it. Even some of my friends who didn’t have great responses from agents came out with that “I HAVE TO WRITE ALL THIS DOWN OR IT’S GONNA BLOW UP MY HEAD” look in their eyes. One of my fellow crit group members woke up at 4 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep because of all the plots running through her head.

It’s a fountain, maybe a geyser, and if you go with the right mindset… well, all I can say is hold on tight!

The (not actually) dreaded conference

Gotten a couple of questions about this and I felt stupid that I never gave actual details on it : The DFW Writers’ Conference - http://dfwcon.org/ Check it out.

Last year I was like “why do I need to rub elbows with other writers, agents, etc.? That just seems sleazy. Shouldn’t writing be about WRITING? I can use that time to actually WRITE instead of TALKING ABOUT writing.” Plus it was expensive and blah blah blah excuses.

Then I talked to my buddy Jennifer, who’s a published author (plug to Jennifer August – http://jenniferaugust.com/ ) who told me that DFW is a good one to get my feet wet, and that it’s probably one of the best for the money. So, not being poor, I signed up and decided to go.

That was possibly the best decision I’ve ever made in my writing career.

Yeah, I still feel sleazy hobnobbing with agents and such, because I STILL believe that writing should be about writing, not who you know, but what’s important is that I saw the playing field with more clarity than I ever have. I met other writers, some from different parts of the country. I met people who only aspire to write. I took classes and came out feeling really good knowing that I was already doing 90% of the things they told me to do. Most importantly, I met my crit group there.

And seriously, if it all was a setup for this year’s con, it was worth it. I’m going in FEELING more prepared, more confident, and with my head more in the game now that I’ve caught a glimpse of it. Not that I was lacking confidence before, but now it’s like I’ve stacked another mountain on Everest. And if I get knocked down, I have a year to build yet another mountain on top of that one.

I won’t say “all serious writers should go to a conference,” ( I will say “all serious writers should find a crit group and take it seriously” ) but I highly recommend it. Maybe not DFW, but SOME conference.

And if you’re coming to DFW, ping me and I’ll hook you into the gang I know from last year, and my crit group, not because I’m into networking, but because they’re seriously fucking cool people. Oh, and they’re writers too.

Query letters and the space time continuum

With the DFW Writing Convention a couple weeks away, I thought I’d start working on my pitch / query letter. This would require me to stop re-writing one of my older novels, Dreaming Vicariously, which is the writing I really WANT to be doing now because, you know, it’s actual writing and storytelling, not some boringass summary.

So I bit the bullet and took 2 days to write a query letter. I thought I put some serious effort into it, because with the conference a couple weeks away, it’s time to get my shit together or wait another year. Out of those two days I got 2 solid paragraphs that I thought I’d take to my critique group for input, with the caveat that I don’t know shit about writing query letters.

They were pissed. “How the fuck do you take a story as exciting as yours and write a query letter this boring?” “Your voice is completely absent from this query letter.”

 

Well, shit.

Ok, maybe I didn’t put serious effort into it. At the coffee shop yesterday, I sat down and told myself I’d work on it, and I did. half an hour later I had a solid paragraph that I felt was a million times better than both the previous ones, and after I chew on it a little longer I’m sure I can come up with another couple to match. Granted, I had some really good insight that got me headed in the right direction, but the first time around I didn’t have my head in the game. That or I was eager to get a crit group smackdown, which I did. 

In either case, the moral of the story is that there isn’t a fucking shortcut. If you’re gonna do the work, jump in, and if you’re only ankle-deep, that ain’t enough. #19 of My Own Personal Kerouac is “Throw yourself at the story or don’t tell it,” and I should’ve taken my own advice.

We’re all fools

Today I made an April Fool’s facebook post about calling it quits when it comes to publication and writing. While most of the people who know me figured it out pretty fast, I always say that at least some small fraction of a joke is true.

The part that’s true here is that I do get a shit ton of rejections, possibly because my writing sucks, possibly because it’s just not right for wherever I’m submitting, or a combination of both. Whatever the reason, it happens a lot and can sometimes be a blow to the ego, and to some I look like a fool because I keep chasing that roadrunner.

In spite of that, I keep trying, not because that’s what writers do, or because it’s what artists do, because it’s what HUMANS do.

In the back of our minds where we don’t like to look, we all know we’re gonna die, and all our money, fame, power, etc. will go away when that happens. Depressing, ain’t it? Yet we create art and language, study science, manufacture magnificent buildings and cities, and in general pursue the elusive “happiness.” Sure, maybe we’ll leave a legacy and influence other people, or have kids as a sort of genetic and cultural record that we were here, but that starts to beg questions like, “why are we here?”

But I digress. The point is that we press onward in the face of defeat. It may be elitist to say “the people who aren’t serious drop-out,” but it’s true. The process sucks, but it’s a crucible that purifies those who survive.

That or we’re all fools for not lying down and accepting defeat. If those are my choices, I’ll take standing up and looking like an idiot.

Perception part 2 : Too close

I know I praise the merits of a crit group often, but I think this last week was a real clear reminder of it for me.

We’ve got a few really really really talented writers, really. As in “they’re so bad ass I feel like a complete newbie when I read their stuff.” There were times when I couldn’t give anything in the way of critique because their first drafts were so solid. (fuck you, Dan)

While they’re total badasses, they still bring in their work, and with good reason. This last week a couple of them were writing furiously while we were giving them our thoughts. They walked away with some really solid critique and I thought, “why the hell are they taking advice from n00bs like me??”

Perspective. We has it. 

I fell into this category too – I brought in a section I was ok with, but it turns out that in some places I’m too close to the text, so I don’t have perspective on it. They pointed out some rather large, glaring structure problems, and I’m not talking about bad sentences. I’m talking about “hey you already had the climax, why are we still doing X and Y?” Whoa. 

See, an artist SHOULD be pretty damn involved in their work, at least if they’re interested in making it good. The problem with that is this : we’re human, and we tend to (not always, but most of the time) lose perspective on something we’re really close to. 

Perception, Part 1 : The Phuckin’ Phone

So this weekend I both switched phone companies and downgraded my phone. Yep, you read that right – I downgraded.

Here’s a story : I was walking through San Francisco one fine summer day, listening to music on the headphones. Queen was playing when one of my earphones got out of whack, so I stopped to fix it. When I looked around I found that I was in front of a Buddhist temple with a giant statue of Manjusri in the back. Holy shit.

So of course I went inside and talked to one of the attendants for a while. When I tried to take a picture of Manjusri, they very politely told me that wasn’t allowed. Holy shit. “Why? I mean, not that I’m attacking your traditions, I’m interested in what the taboo against photographing bodhisattvas is? This actually interests me more than the photograph.” She didn’t know, but more importantly, I didn’t get my photograph.

So I return to my walk across The Shining City, only this time without music. I decided if I’m gonna walk with a destination or walk for exercise, maybe music is ok, but when I’m trying to EXPERIENCE the city, it’s important to have as few distractions as possible so that I could perceive as much as I could in my short time there. As Kerouac said, “#2 : Submissive to everything, open, listening.” Bustling streets, sleeping bums, beautiful women, the hardness of the sidewalks and the coolness of the air – it became a journey about ripping-off those filters we use to “deal with” the thickness of everyday perception.

This brings me back to my phone. So many people wander around looking down at their little glowing screens, being distracted from the world around them by computer magic. It’s fucking pathetic. Be in the world – if you’re gonna step outside into the world, BE there. I’ve never owned a “smart” phone for this reason. When I need to do computer shit, I use a goddamn computer and put myself in that context. Any other time I’m out in the world experiencing it. Acrid exhaust fumes, brilliant food with magnificent women, the amazing tactile sensation of turning the pages of A FUCKING BOOK! Drink that shit with your senses.

“But Ben,” people ask, “what do you do when you’re lost and can’t look at online maps?” Uh, stop and communicate with someone? Honestly I have some cherished memories of getting lost alongside effulgent people. #23 of My Own Personal Kerouac is “With good enough company, all else is irrelevant.”

The epilogue to this is that my new phone doesn’t even have a camera. No pictures of Manjusri or anything else. What would I have done with a picture of Manjusri anyway? Say “hey, I was here once”? The picture would sit in some archive on my hard drive and be looked at maybe once a year, if that. Instead, I have a story about NOT taking a picture that means a whole fucking lot more to me.

The “lost” art

A couple months ago my mentor up in New England sent me a hand written letter and I about shit myself at the fact that it was 6 pages, single spaced, double sided. That’s twelve pages of bad handwriting that she took the time to sit and pound out in one sitting (she commented on how her handwriting degraded over the course of writing it).

I’ve heard that letter writing is a “lost” art, but fuck that, it never went anywhere, we never lost sight of it, it’s just easier and faster to whip out your fucking iPhone and send an email while you’re eating dinner, or worse ON A FUCKING DATE. This is actually reason #459,838 why I still have a shitty flip phone that barely sends texts, but I digress.

I responded in kind – I sat at a deli and wrote a letter by hand, and that shit takes focus and time. I got marinara on the paper and was done eating LONG before I finished the letter, and when it was over I’d killed a pen and my hand hurt like a bitch.

It was a slightly different kind of writing – with no easy way to correct mistakes, I was forced to make shit tight on the first go or scratch it out. I had to kick the self-edit-as-you-go mentality and deal with whatever I put on the page. “I could make that sentence better if I cut this word and moved the verb and…” no, fuck you. It’s a letter, not a story with tight prose. It may be an artistic endeavor, but it’s got a different flavor to it than the art you’re used to. I’ve long said that all writers should dabble in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, etc. – now include handwritten letters in that pile. Study everything. STUDY. FUCKING. EVERYTHING.

So here’s my awesome offer / proclamation / statement : if you hand write me a letter, I’ll do one for you. I can’t guarantee the response will be the same length or that it’ll be timely, but it’ll happen. I don’t give a shit what you talk about, but generally if you don’t wanna sound like a dumbass, don’t ramble on about TV shows for 20 pages and then expect me to do the same – I don’t have TV. If you want a conversation, you usually get out of it what you put in, so if all you have to say is bullshit, expect a short “fuck you” and nothing more.

If you’re honestly interested, send me a message asking for my address, because I ain’t posting that shit publicly.