But what I really want to do is direct.
I’d begin with a quote from the Diller Diaries, but I’ve long since lost my fanfold printouts, and nobody, but nobody, has it online anywhere. Shame on us; shame on us all. —I’d begin with an apology for the self-indulgent nature of this post—I’m going to be writing about (my) writing, after all (technical term: whingeing)—but it’s in the nature of blogs to be self-indulgent. If you gaze for long into a navel, the navel gazes also into you, yes yes, but meta-apology’s getting a tad ridiculous, don’t you think?
So all I have left is to, well, begin.
I mean, I was going to work on it last night. Settle in. Made another circuit of the Meier & Frank to fix some details in my head: those canister lights are only on the one particular floor, so the first image I’d had in mind as a conversational break—looking down the escalator at a slice of the chaos of the make-up counters on the first floor—wouldn’t work. The mannequins on the landing were as creepy as I’d remembered, but not in the way I’d remembered, and I’m still not necessarily happy with the creep: I need the opening image, I need the break in the rhythm, but do I need the note this particular image injects right up front, the hollow plastic eyesockets turned half-assedly into eyes with a few translucent strokes of brown watercolor to suggest lids and lashes? —Was pleased to note the specific style of dress I’d had in mind was actually available for sale; we’ll ignore the fact that it’s currently June, the scene in question is set in the middle of September, and I have no idea how seasonally sensitive this sort of designer dress is. For whatever reason, I got fixated on T-shirts: yes, they’re a sort of Dadaist Greek chorus, but I was suddenly hung up on the idea that the mannequins ought to wear a couple of “real,” “actual” T-shirts. Jotted down slogans seen here and there throughout the Misses section: “I’m a Leo! It’s all about me!” “Is it chicken or is it tuna?” “Artificial Respiration Training! (Cute boys only, please!)” “The center of attention.” Made note of a weird hall display in the landing of the closed-off floor: a glass case with a couple of fake topiaried shrubs inside, green flocking crumbling from old brown wicker frames, and lots of plaster? plastic? statues inside, including a nauseating little Cottingley fairy, all white butterfly wings and adorable turn-of-the-last-century Sunday dress, perched atop a plastic-plaster plinth, beneath which: a whole make-way-for-ducklings garden statuary set. Perfect! For what, though? They aren’t going up to housewares. There’s no reason for them to stop and stare at this halfway house. Tuck it away, for later, I suppose, next to the poisonous idea of otherkin, charitable satire thereof.
Home I hie myself, then. The laptop’s set up and plugged in. The notebook’s fished out of my bag and propped up on the corner of the desk. But there’s blogs to check, and the news; a couple of MP3s to download, and there’s that thing about Brokeback Mountain, that line about the sheep is too priceless to let slip, and I’d wanted to do something with the Mayday mystery, right? So sketch the one in quickly, fire up Photoshop for the other, but here’s Jenn, home from work, and then Bill, our current houseguest; time to heat up some dinner, and pour some wine, and we’re working our way through the Northern Exposure DVD, so there’s forty-five minutes or so while we’re eating and cleaning up, and then it’s back to the computer, but I have to finish massaging that 20 January ad and tweak the .gif and after I post it there’s the usual problem that the .blogbody CSS for hyperlinking supercedes the class override written directly into the a tag for no reason at all I can discern, which means the images have the distracting hyperlink line under them, so I see what I can do to fix that, and then we have to water the cat (old, hyperthyroid, kidney troubles, subcutaneous fluids) and feed the both of them and keep the one out of the other’s medicated bowl, and then, well, there’s more blogs to check up on, and news to read, and wow, is that the time?
(The whole time the notebook’s there on the corner of the desk, and I’m not looking at it, not at all, nossir.)
Half-past midnight I finally pack it in. I passed the first bit, there on the escalator. Got to the moment that Orlando kicks the door open and stopped it dead there in the middle of a sentence: “Orlando kicks” —Somebody once said, always leave off in the middle of a sentence. That way, you have somewhere to pick up right away when you get back to it. It doesn’t work any better than any other nostrum, but hey. Any snake-oil in a storm. (Somebody also once said, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns. Not that they have guns. Aheh.) I scrapped the found T-shirt slogans. Went with a Virgo variant on the Leo and a picture of Einstein with his Meyer-Briggs profile scribbled underneath it. Had to spend some time checking which is the most popular profile ascribed to Einstein, though. Of course.
Two-hundred twenty words, and that’s being generous.
(Hey, says the magpie. What about a paralitticism on Northern Exposure and utopia and reality TV? Arcadia, New Jerusalem, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World—)
Every day for years, Trollope reported in his “Autobiography,” he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 AM to 8:30 AM, with his watch in front of him. He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eighty-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next. The writing session was followed, for a long stretch of time, by a day job with the postal service. Plus, he said, he always hunted at least twice a week. Under this regimen, he produced forty-nine novels in thirty-five years.
—Joan Acocella, “Blocked“
Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.
—Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography
The rules are simple: somebody calls you out, or you call somebody out. You pick a referee and a time and you each come up with a list of three words. The referee adds three more. When the appointed time arrives, you receive the total list of nine words. You have three hours to write a story using all nine. Go!
I managed six thousand words in three hours. Five hundred reasonably coherent words every quarter of an hour; as a genre exercise, it didn’t suck. And I was a wreck. Heart-racing, hands-shaking, couldn’t-shut-up bundle of neurotic energy. And even if the words were reasonably coherent and ended up altogether as something not worse than their totted-up sum, they were unmediated: a gormless rush of the me-est me, which usually ends up sounding like a Harlan Ellison huckster, hot under the collar—a sarcastic salesman unreeling the anecdote that’s supposed to help him close. (When I cool it off, it veers into a weird, dim echo of William Vollmann’s jiu-jitsued snark, which I like better, but, and anyway find much harder to hit.) (And maybe that’s why I impose so many rules, my own private Dogme, as if I could oulipo myself into somebody else.)
I can see how Trollope’s rate is possible. I just can’t imagine making a regular daily go of it.
(Besides, didn’t he write highfalutin’ fluff?)
(And? quoth the magpie. Isn’t that all you’re after?)
So three hundred words an hour, nine hundred words a day: this is much more conceivable. Isn’t it? It’s a serial, after all: a net serial. Eminently disposable. The words are there to get you from Point A to Point B and leave you panting for Point C to come; if they shine themselves along the way, that’s all well and good, but no agonizing allowed, bucko! Well-turned phrases be damned! You have a job to do, one you’ve done before, so suck it up and go. Point A: Point B. Begin.
(Those of you familiar with the art/craft dichotomy as, for instance, taken down by Delany in the aforementioned “Politics of Paraliterary Yadda-yadda” should start laughing now. It won’t make me feel any better about not having posted in two months—well, really, six months, and a dead computer’s good for only so much. —But I will grin sheepishly, I suppose, yeah yeah, and that’s better than nothing.)
The problem is that Point A and that Point B. Point A is usually not where you thought it was, and Point B ends up something else entirely, which can mess you up if you were dropping hints about Point C last time and now it isn’t. The words aren’t just the vehicle, after all: they’re journey and destination, too, and even if I see Point B in my head (a lightning flash: a pose, a line of dialogue, an emotional sense I feel in my bones just so—I close my eyes, I can taste it) I don’t have any idea what it really is until I write it down. Any critic approaching any work is one of several blind people trying to describe an elephant; a writer with a work in progress is one blind person, alone, with some blueprints for an elephant lot. They really ought to think twice before opening their yaps. (Violence: violence, and power, in the context of walking up to the groaning boards of fantasy’s eternal wedding feast, still laden with the cold meats from Tolkien’s funeral, and cheekily joining everyone else who’s trying to send the whole thing smashing to the ground just to hear what noise all that crockery will make, with little more than a crappy net serial, ha. Those of you familiar with the politics of genre ghettoization and the attendant shame and self-loathing and projection may now commence to chuckling heartily, ha ha. —But! Also: genderfuck, romance the way we wanted it done back in the day, those moments in pop songs when the bass and all of the drums except maybe a handclap suddenly drop out of the bridge leaving you hanging from a slender aching thread of melody waiting almost dreading the moment when the beat comes back, and the occasional sword fight.)
So I don’t necessarily know what any given Point B is, but I see those flashes of them, off in the distance: having gotten to this Point B, or that, is the entire point of starting off from A, after all. But you write and you write and you stop and you take a look at where you are, and it’s an utterly different Point B; the Point B you wanted is way over there, and here you are over here, except that suggests it’s the plot that’s changed, and it isn’t: those moments that make up the flash all depend on each other, and what went before, and if the words it takes to limn the image end up at odds with the words that need to be said, if what you’ve got onscreen when your hour’s up and the three hundred words have been laid in place don’t conjure what you felt in your bones, what you can still almost feel, not so strong, an echo overlaid by these horribly precise words all a quarter-turn off— I don’t have any idea what it really is until I write it down, but if the words end up betraying what I wanted it to be—? Where do I go? What do I do?
(Rewrite. Revise. —Oh, shut up. You’re missing the point.)
“I don’t like writing, I like having written.” Ha! I don’t like having written, either, most days. I like what I would have written, if. I like what I’m going to write.
Any day now.
Two thousand words! There. See?
Piece of cake.
So all I have left—
Commenting is closed for this article.
>I'd begin with a quote from the Diller Diaries [...] but nobody, has it online anywhere. Shame on us; shame on us all.
Um.
Pretty sure I could put it online. But years ago (you know, back when the Web was largely encompassed by the NSCA Mosaic "what's new" page) I decided it would be rude to do so without the author(s) permission(s).
gd
thanks for this. i was procrastinating, and after i read this, i went back to my drag queen story.
Sara: I'm glad some good has come of it.
Geoff: I am reliably informed your discretion has been, and continues to be, much appreciated.
Discretion ain't the better part of valor: it's pretty much a synonym. After all, somewhere in that batch of stuff there's this thing called Caravan. And something else called Hellions. (There are others... but here endeth the lesson/threat/flashback/eerie sense of vertigo.)
However, if the author(s) personally want copies of these things, I'm happy to oblige: it's gotta be better than those old fan-fold printouts from Houck.
Diller Diaries? I've got the whole thing (excepting the few missing chapters of one of the Pulps) on diskette & disk.
"Earlier, funnier stuff," indeed. "The Diller Diaries" are not only the masterpiece of the lot, they're the funniest as well.