“So, Scribble, what is it you think you are DOING, sitting out there in some dusty village writing all morning when you could just as easily move back to the city and get a proper job. 69 is not too old to work. You’re endangering your future. Don’t you want a nice life?”
You again, eh? This time I have a good answer for you. There’s this guy named Malcolm Gladwell who writes books like “The Tipping Point” and “Blink” and now “Outliers.” I’m an outlier.
“What the heck is that?”
It’s someone who is out there on the edge and -- often because of that -- gets an advantage. And that advantage often comes down to having 10,000 hours of practice. Let’s see, four hours of writing every morning, maybe a couple more in the afternoon, so let’s say five to split the difference, seven days a week (that’s 35), 52 weeks a year, for about five years so far. (I moved here ten years ago but didn’t write so steadily at first.) That makes 4320 hours of constant writing in my immediate past. I suppose I’m halfway there. Now that you have a pop label, are you happy?
“So you’re a scribbler/outlier. Give us a little insight into your technique. How do you do it?”
Partly I’m just wired that way and part of it is that I’m habituated. As Robey (also a writer) advised me when I asked him for advice about my piano player character in “Both Sides Now,” after awhile one’s hands want the instrument, whether it is a guitar or a keyboard. Another big part is listening and thinking, reading, remembering, just sort of opening up and waiting. Some of it while waiting to sleep at night. Once in a while during a nap in the afternoon. Ideas arise. An advantage of NOT having a community is that I don't talk them away.
It’s important to roll them around for a while before writing but on the other hand, some ideas are transient and I get out of bed at 3AM to pin them down, which is the great advantage of living alone -- though the cats grumble. But I’m not one to just produce a bunch of words without having at least a thread to follow. I found when teaching that people tend to dive into writing before they’ve really gestated the subject, so they just write knee-jerk stuff they wrote last time. There seems to be a fear that they won’t be ABLE to form new ideas or good questions. Maybe we do too much time-driven writing: reports, exams.
A lot of writers write about their own writing and the reading they have been doing and it all turns back on itself in a knotted and boring way. There have to be times of not-writing. Anyway, brains need spaces for the sorting time, the deep connections that one doesn’t even know are being made unless they show up in dreams.
“Mapping? Webbing? Outlining? Formal research?”
Depends on the subject. I can’t just invent stuff about the limbic system. I need to study. Bless the Internet! But If I’m just joking around about cats, that’s different. Though some times of the day, the jokes come easier. For serious fiction, beautifully written, I need a plan of action, a spine, a plot. It took theological seminary to teach me how to think about plot. “Story theology” was big for a while -- now people don’t talk about it or write about it. Theology, like everything else, is a matter of fads. Esp. in the academic world, the students come in and ape the professors, who are teaching what they learned as students a few decades earlier, and then they go into revolt and invent a new way of thinking. Or, most amazing, the world suddenly shifts and the academic world either makes itself into a bubble or nearly shatters, because most people don’t study enough meta-structure or history of thought to keep from being paralyzed. They think they’re being taught The Truth.
“If the academic world isn’t resourceful enough at thinking, what sort of hubris makes you think you are capable of finding your way through a labyrinth made of revolving doors?”
I don’t. I get lost all the time.
“Then how do we tell when you’re lost and when you’re really gripping the truth?”
Use your own knowledge of the world. Don’t depend on reviewers. Don’t depend on what you see on your neighbor’s coffee table. So much of what people believe was pitched at them by ad campaigns, even ad campaigns in the religious world. I know. I’ve been there. I have better discussions with my UPS man, who is a Salois, a Metis/Blackfeet.
“How it is that you write about outrageous people who are all involved with sex, defiance, guerrilla lingo, taboo stuff?”
They make a world as surely as some religious or ethnic or vocational context makes a world. Because it has bounds, it can be explored as a coherent unit, and these people -- who are often brave as well as traumatized -- are sometimes capable of great intimacy. More than that, as a child I confronted the Forties atrocities in newsreels, then unfolded into a Peace Corps attitude that landed me on the Blackfeet Reservation and then bolted back to Portland, Oregon, at a time of ferment and experiment that I thought would prevail. I thought we’d be able to maintain the theatre, the handcrafts, the gardens, the freedom as mainstream. They still exist, but pushed off to the margins. Maybe the music survived best, but I was least involved in that. I'm not bitter, as my friend Penelope sometimes is.
Anyway, it turns out that this supposedly dangerous taboo world is just all the issues that were pushed out of sight in the Fifties: incest, abuse, alcoholism, commodification.
“So why can’t you write about them in the city?”
Because when I think about this stuff and reflect on my life and other lives, trying to put to use the skills I learned in seminary, I find myself often in a state of grief or rage or terror about something over which I have no control. In this village people go about their business in a dependable way, predictably. When I walk down the street for the mail, it puts me back into the reality of stable families in a community where they’ve lived for generations. I’m sure that’s how people were meant to live. But I’m an outlier.
"So why aren’t you rich, famous or even on the bookshelves."
Dunno. I don’t think about it except when the bills come due.
Showing posts with label Scribble. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scribble. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Monday, September 15, 2008
THE BIRTH OF SCRIBBLE
One of Lawrence Durrell’s endearing but confusing little literary tricks was inventing a character who was a personification of a part of himself and then putting things in his mouth that he, Durrell, could not say straightforwardly -- most strikingly, criticisms of Durrell which no one else could make because they wouldn’t even know about them. You might call them “crimes of consciousness” like knowing better than what one portrays, or being far more ambiguously opinioned about what one pretends to believe, or failing to say something that really OUGHT to be said -- not because of being stupid, but because of being afraid.
So I’m going to try this to see if I can make it work for myself. My character is an old woman named Scribble: overweight, thinning hair, cat-dominated and cat-hairy, living in a small village for her own reasons which may or may not include frank poverty. Seemingly isolated and friendless, she doesn’t hang out in the local cafe. Let’s address her directly.
“Scribble,” I say to her as she sits in an ancient armchair once belonging to her mother and incompletely slip-covered because she loses interest in all sewing projects about ninety-per-cent of the way through. “Scribble, why don’t you go hang around at the local small cafe? You know that would be one way to make friends and maybe even snag a boyfriend! Others have done it. Why not you?”
Scribble looks at me as though I’d gone mad. “I can only quote my mother,” she says. “When I asked her why she didn’t romance some gentleman in the declining years of her widowhood, some cultured man who would escort her to the symphony and buy her lovely meals.”
Of course, I noted privately, there is no symphony here that isn’t two hours’ drive away -- at least in Scribble’s failing old pickup. The meals would be nice were she not Diabetes II and all that.
Scribble went on, “My mother’s reply was that she refused to take care of some old man through his declining years, denying herself to keep the peace.”
I reflected. It seemed to me that our mother claimed quite often than she was “denying herself,” but what exactly was she denying? What was it she wanted and didn’t get?
“Some things are entirely private and secret,” she said. Hmmm. Surely she didn’t mean sex. It must have something to do with her ego. But this is supposed to be about Scribble and me. So what things do we keep entirely private and secret?
Scribble looks sly. “Of course, if I tell, it won’t be entirely private and secret anymore, would it?” I deduce that it MUST have something to do with sex. Or perhaps not. Maybe it was about reading, that most private and secret of pleasures. Maybe her finest moments of intercourse were reading books out loud to her husband when he was nearly blind. Especially the books that had characters with various voices that could be imitated, voices with foreign accents and so on. Maybe some of her finest moments of acting were lying nude flat on her back in bed, reading out loud to her lover from a book about frontier savagery while he laughed and chortled beside her, making the animals also in the bed turn over and sigh. Was it morning with light streaming in the window (which meant it had to be the weekend with no shop help coming for directions) or was it night with that ugly red-shaded wrought iron lamp perched on a TV tray for lack of a proper bedside table? Later she bought an unfinished small chest in the style of a military campaigner of the 19th century, a box with inset handles on the drawers. When she finished it, it was lovely. She should have taken it with her when he divorced her, but by then it seemed to really BELONG there, to be part of the room.
Were the sheets plain white or flowered? In sets or unmatched? Scribble thinks unmatched in flower patterns. I know they must have come from the Browning Mercantile his family -- all but him -- owned because one simply didn’t buy from any other place. I suddenly realize that I never bought ANY sheets in all the time I was there. My own bed was single.
Scribble says, “It was his mother who bought bedding. She bought an electric sheet which the young pet fox chewed straight across, electric wires and all. That was the end of it, of course.” Scribble did buy one thing: a lavendar corduroy bedspread to match the Ace Powell painting of Bob on the buffalo roundup that hung at the foot of the bed where they could look at it before sleeping. Ace was always one to make lovely gestures like that. Scribble notes that as Bob became more important and successful, he moved the painting away and spoke of Ace much less. He was becoming a snob then. Not endearing.
I wonder if that was really it. I wonder whether instead he was grieving, both for Ace and the roundup. He often hid his grief. That was HIS private and secret life that he never shared with anyone else, not even lovers, not even his mother. Because to live in the West in the middle of the Twentieth Century was to see a beloved world eroded and disappearing.
“Scribble, how many REAL Indians did you get to know?”
“You mean, the old people who were born before the buffalo disappeared?”
“Well, of course. What other Indians are there? THOSE are what we care about. Those magnificent weathered faces.”
“Very short-sighted and naive of you, I must say. There are ALL kinds of Indians, an infinite variety. Why can’t you realize that? Is it that you just don’t want to?”
“Maybe so.”
“Well, that’s the way Bob was, too. And even Jimmy Welch.”
“You mean the novelist? Aren’t you speaking of him disrepectfully to call him Jimmy? Doesn’t that diminish his importance? Aren’t you pretending familiarity just because it makes you sound more superior, as though you could order him around?”
Scribble laughs drily. “You and your theories. I’m not even talking about the same James Welch. There were three, you know. You’re talking about number three, who went by James Welch, Jr. I’m talking about his father, technically James Welch, Sr., who was actually James Welch, Jr. himself, because HIS father came from the Carolinas and was largely Cherokee. THIS Jimmy Welch I’m talking about had a Blackfeet mother and was born on the Blackfeet rez, therefore was enrolled in that tribe. The one you’re talking about grew up on his mother’s reservation over by Havre but was enrolled here because of his father.”
“Oh, Scribble, you explain everything far too much. You were just going to tell me what this particular Jimmy said.”
Scribble sighs. “Yes. Some things are untold because I keep them private and some are because no one wants to hear them.” She sips from her mug, which is made by Laurel and has enough gold on it that it can’t be put in a microwave, but which has abstract profiles of Indians on it and therefore pleases Scribble who has a kind of “thing” about buying a new mug and a new bar of special soap when she goes someplace. But now she’s had this mug for a decade, since she moved back here and never leaves. The soap, of course, is long gone. But no one wants to hear all this.
“Jimmy Welch, who was in Bob’s class so was born in 1914, said that in his childhood in winter the old men would put on their capotes and walk down the board sidewalks together. Everyone would draw back and make room for them because they had such respect. And the men walked with enormous dignity.”
“So, Scribble, what year would these men have been born?”
Scribble is not good at math. But she calculates that if these were old men when Jimmy and Bob were maybe eight or ten, which would be 1924, then the old men -- if they were eighty -- would have been born in 1844. The prairie treaties were mostly signed in about 1850, so they really WERE warriors by the time they hit adolescence in 1860. But would eighty-year-old men be able to stride down the sidewalk? If they were tough enough to survive eighty years like those years -- well, the Twenties of this century must have been easy. But unreal.
Scribble laughs bitterly. “Well, of course, the next generation of old men was starved to death by the US Government, who put them on reservations and then failed to feed them.”
I don’t want to hear about it. “More coffee, Scribble?”
"Only if it's fresh and hot. No sugar."
So I’m going to try this to see if I can make it work for myself. My character is an old woman named Scribble: overweight, thinning hair, cat-dominated and cat-hairy, living in a small village for her own reasons which may or may not include frank poverty. Seemingly isolated and friendless, she doesn’t hang out in the local cafe. Let’s address her directly.
“Scribble,” I say to her as she sits in an ancient armchair once belonging to her mother and incompletely slip-covered because she loses interest in all sewing projects about ninety-per-cent of the way through. “Scribble, why don’t you go hang around at the local small cafe? You know that would be one way to make friends and maybe even snag a boyfriend! Others have done it. Why not you?”
Scribble looks at me as though I’d gone mad. “I can only quote my mother,” she says. “When I asked her why she didn’t romance some gentleman in the declining years of her widowhood, some cultured man who would escort her to the symphony and buy her lovely meals.”
Of course, I noted privately, there is no symphony here that isn’t two hours’ drive away -- at least in Scribble’s failing old pickup. The meals would be nice were she not Diabetes II and all that.
Scribble went on, “My mother’s reply was that she refused to take care of some old man through his declining years, denying herself to keep the peace.”
I reflected. It seemed to me that our mother claimed quite often than she was “denying herself,” but what exactly was she denying? What was it she wanted and didn’t get?
“Some things are entirely private and secret,” she said. Hmmm. Surely she didn’t mean sex. It must have something to do with her ego. But this is supposed to be about Scribble and me. So what things do we keep entirely private and secret?
Scribble looks sly. “Of course, if I tell, it won’t be entirely private and secret anymore, would it?” I deduce that it MUST have something to do with sex. Or perhaps not. Maybe it was about reading, that most private and secret of pleasures. Maybe her finest moments of intercourse were reading books out loud to her husband when he was nearly blind. Especially the books that had characters with various voices that could be imitated, voices with foreign accents and so on. Maybe some of her finest moments of acting were lying nude flat on her back in bed, reading out loud to her lover from a book about frontier savagery while he laughed and chortled beside her, making the animals also in the bed turn over and sigh. Was it morning with light streaming in the window (which meant it had to be the weekend with no shop help coming for directions) or was it night with that ugly red-shaded wrought iron lamp perched on a TV tray for lack of a proper bedside table? Later she bought an unfinished small chest in the style of a military campaigner of the 19th century, a box with inset handles on the drawers. When she finished it, it was lovely. She should have taken it with her when he divorced her, but by then it seemed to really BELONG there, to be part of the room.
Were the sheets plain white or flowered? In sets or unmatched? Scribble thinks unmatched in flower patterns. I know they must have come from the Browning Mercantile his family -- all but him -- owned because one simply didn’t buy from any other place. I suddenly realize that I never bought ANY sheets in all the time I was there. My own bed was single.
Scribble says, “It was his mother who bought bedding. She bought an electric sheet which the young pet fox chewed straight across, electric wires and all. That was the end of it, of course.” Scribble did buy one thing: a lavendar corduroy bedspread to match the Ace Powell painting of Bob on the buffalo roundup that hung at the foot of the bed where they could look at it before sleeping. Ace was always one to make lovely gestures like that. Scribble notes that as Bob became more important and successful, he moved the painting away and spoke of Ace much less. He was becoming a snob then. Not endearing.
I wonder if that was really it. I wonder whether instead he was grieving, both for Ace and the roundup. He often hid his grief. That was HIS private and secret life that he never shared with anyone else, not even lovers, not even his mother. Because to live in the West in the middle of the Twentieth Century was to see a beloved world eroded and disappearing.
“Scribble, how many REAL Indians did you get to know?”
“You mean, the old people who were born before the buffalo disappeared?”
“Well, of course. What other Indians are there? THOSE are what we care about. Those magnificent weathered faces.”
“Very short-sighted and naive of you, I must say. There are ALL kinds of Indians, an infinite variety. Why can’t you realize that? Is it that you just don’t want to?”
“Maybe so.”
“Well, that’s the way Bob was, too. And even Jimmy Welch.”
“You mean the novelist? Aren’t you speaking of him disrepectfully to call him Jimmy? Doesn’t that diminish his importance? Aren’t you pretending familiarity just because it makes you sound more superior, as though you could order him around?”
Scribble laughs drily. “You and your theories. I’m not even talking about the same James Welch. There were three, you know. You’re talking about number three, who went by James Welch, Jr. I’m talking about his father, technically James Welch, Sr., who was actually James Welch, Jr. himself, because HIS father came from the Carolinas and was largely Cherokee. THIS Jimmy Welch I’m talking about had a Blackfeet mother and was born on the Blackfeet rez, therefore was enrolled in that tribe. The one you’re talking about grew up on his mother’s reservation over by Havre but was enrolled here because of his father.”
“Oh, Scribble, you explain everything far too much. You were just going to tell me what this particular Jimmy said.”
Scribble sighs. “Yes. Some things are untold because I keep them private and some are because no one wants to hear them.” She sips from her mug, which is made by Laurel and has enough gold on it that it can’t be put in a microwave, but which has abstract profiles of Indians on it and therefore pleases Scribble who has a kind of “thing” about buying a new mug and a new bar of special soap when she goes someplace. But now she’s had this mug for a decade, since she moved back here and never leaves. The soap, of course, is long gone. But no one wants to hear all this.
“Jimmy Welch, who was in Bob’s class so was born in 1914, said that in his childhood in winter the old men would put on their capotes and walk down the board sidewalks together. Everyone would draw back and make room for them because they had such respect. And the men walked with enormous dignity.”
“So, Scribble, what year would these men have been born?”
Scribble is not good at math. But she calculates that if these were old men when Jimmy and Bob were maybe eight or ten, which would be 1924, then the old men -- if they were eighty -- would have been born in 1844. The prairie treaties were mostly signed in about 1850, so they really WERE warriors by the time they hit adolescence in 1860. But would eighty-year-old men be able to stride down the sidewalk? If they were tough enough to survive eighty years like those years -- well, the Twenties of this century must have been easy. But unreal.
Scribble laughs bitterly. “Well, of course, the next generation of old men was starved to death by the US Government, who put them on reservations and then failed to feed them.”
I don’t want to hear about it. “More coffee, Scribble?”
"Only if it's fresh and hot. No sugar."
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