in the words of a girl who doesn’t exist

Posted on March 23, 2010 | 3 comments

So, I am starting a new novel.  The hardest part at the beginning is finding a good voice, the voice in which the story needs to be told.  There will be starts and stops, lots of frustration.  Probably a good dose of gut-wrenching terror, especially since this book wants to be in the first person which I find incredibly uncomfortable.  But I don’t care if writing this whole damn thing feels like wearing an itchy sweater, as long as it works in the end.

Something else that is likely to be a challenge is that a lot of this book is going to be about scorching sexual chemistry.  There was a bit of that in the last book and there will be more in this one.  When sexy prose works, it is really really good.  When it doesn’t, it is positively disastrous.  Sex is possibly the hardest thing there is to write, one wrong word choice can render a steamy scene totally laughable.  While polishing up the last book I had a whole exchange with my editor about the word “cunt.”  She had concerns that it would be too jarring for some readers.  I wrote back the following:

I kind of avoided naming female genitalia with circumlocutions like “inside her” and stuff like that, but eventually you just have to name the thing you’re talking about.  “Vagina” is not hot, it’s too doctor’s office.  “Pussy” has the disadvantage of being both too cute and too porny.  I decided to go all out and use “cunt,” after all this is not a shy book.  But I didn’t just throw it around willy nilly, I saved it for one or two special occasions.

The argument boiled down to: dude, sorry, but this is just a cunt kind of book.  And the argument worked, because it was.

Now that I am back at square one with a new novel, I have to ask myself: is this one a cunt kind of book?  The narrator is a very stark person, oftentimes unflinching.  But she is also very young, and sex is in many ways her softest spot.  Figuring out what language she would use, what she would say and not say, is going to tax my skills.  Everything has to match up with who she is; the silences have to be just as telling as the graphic detail.  At this point I still don’t know what word she would use to talk about her ladyflower (probably not “ladyflower” though), and if I had to guess I would say she herself would have a devil of a time choosing a word that fits her.  Part of what I may have to portray with the text is her struggle to find words for an experience so powerful and puzzling, one that is both ineffable and thoroughly embodied.  (This is part of the reason why I think first person may kick my ass: having the language still flow while also trying to render its troubles attempting to find a flow…  Christ on a cracker, this is the sort of thing that may make me chicken back out into third person!)

One thing at a time though.  Before I find out what words she would use to talk about making love, I have to find out what words she would use to talk about her morning commute, her cat, the dreams that wake her up in the middle of the night.

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one

Posted on March 18, 2010 | Leave a comment

five

You first came to me one morning long ago, while I was working at the bank.  Your voice simply announced, I am not a child of America, and suddenly I felt your presence in my body like a vaporous specter.  You were standing where I was standing and performing the same mechanical tasks I was performing but you were not me.  You were superimposed over me, like a drawing of a girl overlaying a drawing of a slightly different girl.  When I was granted my lunch break I went upstairs into an empty office where I knew there was an abandoned typewriter and spilled out a paragraph or two of your voice.

That year I was the same age as my students are now.  That year I fell disastrously in love for the first time.  You had a different name then.

four

You liked to let him paint your face.  You liked the feel of the plush brush against your skin; you liked the expectation in his eyes.  You laid out your lipsticks for him in a neat row and asked, “what color do you want my mouth?”  He picked a plum shade which would shortly be smeared all over him.  You didn’t know why it made him hard for you to do this, yet you felt the blood rise to your cheeks to meet the powder blush he was applying there.  Pink on pink, impossible to tell the real arousal apart from the cosmetic mimicking it.

When he lined your eyes, your lids didn’t even quiver.  Not because you trusted him not to hurt you with the pencil–his hand was, after all, trembling slightly–but because a hurt inflicted by his hand was the best hurt of all.

three

You came to me again some years later.  I wrote a whole novel about you that time.  Unfortunately, it was no good.  At least, you met him then, the man who liked to paint your face.  And you gave me your name, Irina.  When I saw how closely it mirrored my own, I laughed, and thought, all right, we’ll go with that then.

two

My last protagonist, Louise, made mischief with the impish glee one might expect.  You are strange; you make mischief with something like grim determination.  It must be some kind of Eastern European thing.  Whenever I ask you why you do anything, you say, why not?  What else is there to do? and I have, of course, nothing to answer.

You are a violinist playing chamber music on the sinking Titanic.  You are a thief who steals even when what he pockets has no value.  You are a man who still neatly parts his hair and cleans his fingernails on the morning he is to be executed.  You are a futile gesture of humanity in the face of oblivion.

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Last class for now…

Posted on March 16, 2010 | 2 comments

So, I taught my last class at UC Davis yesterday.  The students gave me an ovation and I got all misty-eyed.  I will miss this job very much.  Honestly, it was easy to shed the identity of an academic.  I thought it would be trickier, but basically it entailed no longer performing textual analysis for my superiors and no longer writing articles in a language that is completely unnatural to me.  It turns out I can manage that quite well!  So well that I can only understand in the dimmest way that I’m still supposed to take an examination next quarter; it no longer quite seems real.

No longer teaching literature is going to be a lot harder though.  That really worked its way into my heart.  I am a total crackhead for that look of dawning understanding on my students’ faces.  Best thing ever.  Sometimes I wonder if and how they will remember me.  I wrote the following about teaching in a short story once:

The Egyptians had no hell.  The punishment for the wicked was oblivion; there was nothing worse than not existing.

The students absorb this piece of information quietly.  Probably some of them even write it down.  They are very sweet, in many ways still children.  In many ways they do not understand yet what I tell them.  Certainly they will forget everything I say before they are old enough for it to really sink in, but sometimes I wonder if I leave a trace.  Any trace at all.  I wonder if they will recognize something that is happening to them slightly sooner because I told them to expect it.

You cannot really tell someone something they don’t already know.  Teaching is not about filling blank minds.  It is about inducing a flicker of recognition.

The protagonist of that story was an adjunct who couldn’t stomach finishing the PhD (I wrote it over a year ago–prescient, no?).  I will try to get some kind of contract teaching work after I get my MA, maybe with the UC extension.  After the book comes out, maybe I will get a job in a Creative Writing department?  Quizás.  It still seems far away.  For now I have to access the totally feral, slightly unhinged head space I get into while writing a novel.  But I’ll be back in the classroom eventually–if only to have a reason to get dressed in the morning!  Writerly isolation can do unfortunate things to your psyche after too long.

This week, I also had to clear my desk in my office in Sproul Hall (they didn’t waste any time reclaiming my space!).  It was a melancholy endeavor, despite the fact that Sproul is an utter dump no sane person should miss.  My desk was a bleak-looking gray plastic-and-pressboard affair no bigger than a coffee table, lodged in a completely naked train-car-shaped room that gets broiling hot the instant the sun so much as kisses the roof.  One time I tried to open the window in there and the whole pane fell off.  Fell right the fuck off the side of the building, only kept from tumbling nine floors and ending the life of a passerby by the rusty latch, which did not open.  There also has been a weird and unpleasant smell emanating from the wall in the corner of my office where the lone eldtrich computer resides (I swear that machine dates from the Clinton administration) that has not been resolved in all the three years I’ve been there.  And that expiring groan the elevator makes when it grinds to a stop at the ninth floor freaks me the hell out; I always wonder if this is the time the whole contraption is going to let go and and plummet down into the basement, where my mashed flesh will mingle with the poorly-written student papers in my satchel.  Plus Sproul Hall is never, ever cleaned.  I think some of the dust bunnies in my office have evolved sentience, plus there is a green Skittle® on the floor in the staircase that has been there for so long I believe it has tenure by now.  It began its life between the fifth and sixth floors, and when I didn’t see it for a while I surmised that perhaps whatever is making the weird smell in my office wall might have eaten it–but then I was relieved to find it crushed into the second floor landing.  I will miss you, green Skittle®; don’t ever change.

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In Valhalla there are no rejection slips.

Posted on March 9, 2010 | 4 comments

So, a while back my agent sent a pdf of my novel to The New Yorker with selected passages highlighted she thought could be used in the magazine.  Unsurprisingly given my fresh fish status, the NYer editor did not bite, but sent my agent the nicest possible rejection notice.  I will go ahead and include it:

Shapiro is incredibly talented and this is quite a debut, but we didn’t see any way to excerpt from it, unfortunately—the pieces you suggested are strong but fragmentary—and we felt that she wasn’t quite ready for the top-20 list, though she’ll in all likelihood make it there eventually! Thanks, anyway, for sending it over; it was a pleasure to read. Stay in touch if she writes any stories—or if anyone else crosses your mind for this issue (or any other).

This is a stage in a writer’s career: flattering personalized rejections with an invitation to submit again.  This is, in itself, an achievement.  As far as I can tell, a writer’s career looks something like this:

Stage 1: uncontrolled production of thousands of pages of crap.  The afflicted asks herself, “why am I doing this?  I must be some kind of blithering masochistic idiot.”

Stage 2: some small moment of recognition.  The afflicted may be told by a writing instructor that she is good, or get into an MFA program.  The afflicted begins to submit work places, receiving a veritable avalanche of rejection slips that have been xeroxed so many times that the type on them is actually degrading.  The slips are literally slips, as the writer is not yet worth the expense of an entire sheet of paper–that is when the submission is ever acknowledged at all.  Often silence is deemed a sufficient rejection.  The afflicted may sometimes doubt her own existence, and asks herself, “why am I doing this?  I must be some kind of blithering masochistic idiot.”

Stage 3: repeated near-misses.  The afflicted may impress a writing instructor who will ask her to submit a story to his new literary magazine, which he is starting with a big-name editor who will subsequently not like the work in question.  The afflicted may start seeing hand-scrawled notes on rejection slips that read “good work” or “submit again.”  She may get requests from agents to see her full manuscript, which will inevitably get turned down after months of anxious fretting–but sometimes the agents may say something nice about it.  This cycle of crazed hope/crestfallen disappointment may last for years, and the afflicted will ask herself, “why am I doing this?  I must be some kind of blithering masochistic idiot.”

Stage 4: someone says yes.  The sky is ripped open, angels sing; the afflicted is elated that she hasn’t spent the last few years/decades/epochs talking to herself like a ranting homeless person.   At some point she actually said something, and someone heard.  This in no way means the cessation of impersonal rejection slips, which make the one acquiescence seem like some sort of perverse fluke.  The afflicted will then worry endlessly about being unable to make the magic happen again, and will ask herself, “why am I doing this?  I must be some kind of blithering masochistic idiot.”

Stage 5: in Valhalla there are no rejection slips.

Through all these stages, the afflicted keeps writing anyway, though she is too close to her own stories to be able to see that, in their slow way, they are getting better.  Improvement is like erosion: you can’t see anything happen, but if you take a measurement ten years later you have an inkling that, maybe, something did.

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shards of the past week

Posted on March 7, 2010 | 1 comment

My laptop is emitting a rhythmic chirrup that sounds as if it is housing crickets.  I google the problem, and the fix-it suggestion is to hit the bottom of the computer, hard, with a closed fist.  It works.  Sometimes the most complex modern technologies require the most ancient forms of maintenance.

—

On my walk from work to the train station in the gathering dark, I am accosted by a lass who spills forth a frantic story about having just been rendered homeless this very night, about needing money to get back to her mother’s in San Diego.  She bursts into tears, hiccups, “this is so embarrassing.”  I do not know whether the story is true, but her distress is genuine.  Her young face is known to me; there are many such faces in my classroom.  I heave a big sigh and take a twenty out of my wallet.

—

I watch Polanski’s movie version of The Pianist.  It is moving and harrowing, but in some places disconcertingly boring.  Sometimes films cannot do what literature can do.  Watching a man hidden in an apartment starve to death is not nearly as interesting as reading his thoughts about what it felt like.

—

I am missing someone cruelly; his absence is like a pall over my life.  It seems to dim color, dampen taste, restrict breath. 13 rue Thérèse has a French title–never mind that the English title is also a French title!  The title is Pensées de l’absent.  Sometimes I think that would be an apt title for everything I write.

—

My office mate asks me whether I know that the MLA has changed its format for citations.  I consider this news for a moment, then burst into laughter.  “I don’t care!”  I realize this at the same time as I say it.  I am hit with a rush of gleeful freedom.  At the same time I am disoriented and scared.  It’s like being dropped in the middle of the ocean.  Cold and filled with unfathomable life all the way to its lightless depths.

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too old to forget, too young to remember

Posted on February 26, 2010 | 3 comments

As a short-timer, I am out of control with my teaching.  Next week I am teaching my students a Stephen King story (Shawshank Redemption), and this week I showed them a movie based on a graphic novel (Persepolis).  Before you know it, I will be giving them nap time and candy.  Anyway, Persepolis is a lovely movie, a powerful memoir told in a striking visual style.  There was  one aspect of Marjane Satrapi’s experience I related to, and that is being moved across the world as a teenager.  It is a very particular immigrant experience.  An adult who immigrates, as happy as she may become in her new country, will always be a person formed in her native land, and her interpretive filters will always be those of her first culture.  A child who immigrates, as a person still unformed, will adapt to her new home so fast and so fluidly that she will essentially adopt a new country and come to identify with it primarily.  An adolescent, as an in-between person already partially formed by her native culture but still in flux, will be caught in a peculiar bind.  She is too old to forget and too young to remember.  She is started in one place and finished in another, like a book that abruptly switches languages halfway in.  She will be one culture overlaid over an other like a palimpsest.  She will be no one from nowhere, everyone from everywhere.

It’s a strange combination of insider and outsider.  When I moved to the United States at 13 I wasn’t unfamiliar with being an outsider: a hypersensitive brainy kid is almost never popular.  Still, my transplant across the world was a whole new level of alienation–as a highly verbal person I suddenly found myself unable to express my thoughts to the people around me.  It was like being in linguistic prison.  The speed with which I learned English was a survival mechanism: I had to acquire language or fall apart.  There was a delay between my understanding English and my speaking it, however.  For some reason, I did not wish to speak English until I could do so well.

(It’s funny what people will say in front of you when they’re not aware that you understand them.  I related to that aspect of Chief Bromden’s character in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.)

I didn’t get to go back to France until I was in college, when I enrolled in the Overseas Studies program in Paris.  The experience was intensely emotional.  I remember walking around my old neighborhood the day after I landed with my hand over my mouth to keep from bursting into tears.  It seemed miraculous and unfathomable that the place still existed, what’s more almost entirely unchanged.  But it was not a homecoming.  I was, by then, too American.  I knew it even when I was affectionately told by my former neighbor, “don’t be silly, you are French.”  I was twenty years old but it was already too late.  I would always be as foreign to my native land as I was to my adopted one.

While there, I went out a couple of times with a graduate student in literature named Jean-François (he had books about Satan all over his apartment because he was writing his dissertation about representations of the devil).  He told me that I was not at all what he expected of an American, and I laughed.  I think this must have been why he was attracted to me: I was foreign but not really.  I was both home and away.  I was somehow exotic yet safe.  This is what I am: a liminal person.  Both in French and in English I speak with a tiny accent that no one can identify.  Je suis l’Un et l’Autre.

I will always carry in my heart the bewildered pain of a 13 year old girl suddenly torn away from everything she has ever known.  But this uprooting has made me into a more resilient plant that can survive in various climates, different types of soil.  What is more beneficial to the growth of a writer than silent observation of people who do not know they are being understood?

One thing is certain: a teenage immigrant can never, never go home again–but she can sharpen her gaze into the finest of scalpels.

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Fuck the market, and other gems of wisdom.

Posted on February 25, 2010 | 2 comments

Somewhere in the human brain there is a list-making gland.  Something about making lists is primally satisfying.  Like yawning, it is socially contagious.  I cannot read these lists of writing tips from authors without constructing one of my own, just like I cannot watch this cartoon without needing to eat fistfuls of fluffy, salty popcorn.

1. Do not use a big word when a smaller one will do.

2. But, sometimes, a smaller one will not do.  Do not artificially minimize your vocabulary in a mistaken bid to be more “real.”

3. Do not strive to write dialogue “the way people actually talk.”  Dialogue, like narrative, is carefully composed and stylized for a definite purpose.  If you don’t believe me, transcribe the next conversation you hear word for word.

4. Do not be overly alarmed if you are so embarrassed reading a first draft that you wish to be obliterated from existence.  This feeling is normal, and will fuel your subsequent drafts.

5. Write your story the best way you know how.  If it still sucks after all your effort, do not despair.  You will write this story again later, maybe years later, and it will suck a bit less.

6. What kind of arbitrary nitpicky bullshit is “don’t write prologues” and “don’t use the word ‘suddenly'”?  Seriously, if the story demands a prologue or the word ‘suddenly,’ tell that kind of advice to go fuck itself.

7. I do agree that writing accented or dialect dialogue phonetically is pretty annoying, and very seldom necessary.

8. Resist the impulse to show anyone your work for as long as possible.  If you can stand it, do not show a novel to anyone until it is done.

9. Don’t forget that characters have bodies and bodies make demands.  Overly cerebral writing will not connect with a reader.

10. Do not “know the market.”  Fuck the market until the story has been written.  Only when you start submitting it should you consider the market–you do, after all, have to make a pitch.  Then try to emphasize what in the story might interest the market, but do not violate the miraculous act of creation with concerns about The Market.

Okay, now I really have to go and make some popcorn.

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Sophomore novel angst!

Posted on February 19, 2010 | 3 comments

For the record, I’d like to state that Rogert Ebert is an awesome human being, and a great writer.  I still miss him on TV with Siskel (it wasn’t the same with Roeper!).  They had such a fabulous bickering rapport.  Here’s an outtake video of them riffing off each other:

I love the way they seamlessly slide into the announcement at the end.

Today I am going to comment on the subtitle of my blog, which is Sophomore Novel Angst.  This is a new feeling that has manifested with increasing urgency over the past few months.  I have, as a dutiful writer, always been angsty about my work (it’s in the Tortured Artist Handbook, or How to Get Laid if You’re Not Good-Looking*), mostly fretting about it being not good enough.  In past years I have always talked myself down from the ledge by telling myself, “so what if it sucks?  Who gives a shit!  It’s not like it’s going to get published.”  It was a nice double whammy, simultaneously reducing my anxiety level and turning my inability to get published into a comfort.

Now, I am obviously in a different position–a lucky and privileged one, but also one with higher stakes.  As I am struggling to find a strong narrative voice for my next novel, my brain hums with a new brand of crippling terror: “oh shit, what if I can’t do this again?  What if this book completely sucks and my editor turns it down?  Or worse, my agent won’t even consider it good enough to go out on the market?  FUCK!”

There is no seeming end to this sort of self-defeating freakout.  It makes me yearn for a security blanket, a stick to bite down on, a heavy narcotic.  I call this unfortunate condition sophomore novel angst, and it courses through my entire blood stream like an ever-duplicating virus.  I have yet to find an effective coping mechanism; hopefully I will happen upon one before my brain implodes from its self-inflicted pressure.  Hopefully, it will not involve Heminwayesque amounts of alcohol.

* I read some study once that claimed creative people have more sexual partners than the average person.  This may mean that being creative is attractive.  This may also mean that creative people are such a pain in the ass to live with that partners don’t generally stick around for long, and thus angsty artists have to find more bed pets.

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Here is the cover!

Posted on February 11, 2010 | 1 comment

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“So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?”

Posted on February 5, 2010 | 2 comments

This fantastic article truly has its finger on the pulse of the American University.  I feel like I can do little more than froth in ecstatic agreement!  Nevertheless I will try to formulate some kind of response.  I’ll start here:

Throughout much of the 20th century, with the growth of the humanistic ideal in American colleges, students might have encountered the big questions in the classrooms of professors possessed of a strong sense of pedagogic mission. Teachers like that still exist in this country, but the increasingly dire exigencies of academic professionalization have made them all but extinct at elite universities. Professors at top research institutions are valued exclusively for the quality of their scholarly work; time spent on teaching is time lost.

Yes, it’s true.  Time spent on teaching is viewed as time lost, and that’s a shame.  The emphasis is on producing criticism by the ream, which pushes passionate teachers straight out of the academic rat race.  This pains me, because I believe that teaching is the main social function of a humanities professor. I wanted to be a professor to teach college kids to grow up not to be suckers for the advertising industry, but having to spout bullshit to put myself in a position where I could tell kids how not to listen to bullshit ultimately imploded the endeavor.  I always doubted by ability to see myself through the end of a PhD; there was always part of me waiting for academia to shit me back out.  I hung on because I felt I had to; ultimately I let go for the luckiest reason imaginable: I no longer had to.  I’ve been handed the opportunity to write what I always wanted.

I will miss teaching literature at the university.  I might still get a lectureship or an adjunct position one day, perhaps–but in a market saturated with PhDs who can’t get tenure-track positions, I’m not sure that I can.  It is a little giggle-worthy that I am not qualified to teach literature just because I write the stuff.  I’d have to be writing about the stuff.  In my chats with people about my decision to drop out, I’ve heard the opinion that it’s a shame academia doesn’t make room for artists.  It shouldn’t have to: it hardly has room for itself.  It is hemorrhaging qualified PhDs who cannot find a cell within its shrinking honeycomb.

Besides, there already is a place for artists in the academy; most English departments hire a few novelists and poets to teach creative writing classes.  Once my novel comes out, I could conceivably wiggle my way into one of these positions.  Yet the prospect of teaching people to write stories does not fill me with the same sense of urgency as teaching people to read them.  These stakes feel lower, plus making art feels less teachable to me than interpretive and critical thinking skills.

Another aspect of Deresiewicz’s article that resonated with me was his analysis of conformity at top-flight institutions, that to get into one of these places you have to be exceedingly compliant with The Machine and that once you come out the other side you have been equipped to be a fine little machinist indeed.  Having been at both a big-name private school and a mid-list state university, I am sometimes asked if the kids at Stanford are really that much smarter than the kids at UC Davis.  No, they are not; they are not gifted with some ineffable wisdom that cannot be accessed by the Great Unwashed Masses.  They are earnest strivers, usually from privileged backgrounds, who are especially good at doing exactly what they are told, that is all.  That has both its advantages and its drawbacks.  The main advantage being that they are well-tuned devices who know exactly how to channel their considerable gifts into getting the most positive feedback from society at large.  The main drawback being that they are well-tuned devices who know exactly how to channel their considerable gifts into getting the most positive feedback from society at large.  But Deresiewicz says it much better.

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