This Is My Original Title That No One Has Ever Done Before, But That is Because It Is Terrible

I recently thought to myself, “You know, the Iliad is to the Odyssey what Batman is to Zorro.” Just take a moment to let the geekiness of that statement kick in.

After half a heartbeat I doubted myself. Is this really a true statement? Who could help me figure this out? And I realized there isn’t anyone that I know of. Even in my small circle of friends with similar interests, I am fairly sure there are none familiar enough with both ancient Western literature and Detective Comics to carry an intelligent conversation about this*. In fact, I am certain that in the entire world there is an extremely small cross section of people that would even be willing to take such a conversation seriously, let alone possess the knowledge to participate and contribute. That makes me special.

I have a specific range and combination of experiences and influences that make my perspective unlike any other person in the world, before or after me. I can speak as a father, a veteran, an aquarium owner, former Warcraft addict and Calvin and Hobbs enthusiast, among thousands of other things. I can link any or all of these together to come up with a story completely my own, a story that no one else could possibly tell. If I don’t do it, that story will be lost forever.

Sounds cheesy, doesn’t it? And not a nice, creamy brie either, this is a full on mass produced stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth American cheese, the “inspirational” posts your sort of friend on Facebook assaults you with cheese. Hang on, I’m not finished yet.

Just because I thought it doesn’t mean it is original. Sure, there are stories only one person can tell, but most people just stick to variations of the same old narrative. Speaking of Batman, how many versions of him do we have? There’s the old “original” version by Bob Kane and Bill Finger that borrowed from Zorro, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Scottish history and Sherlock Holmes, among other things. Then there’s everything from the campy TV version starring Adam West and Burt Ward to Frank Miller’s menacing Dark Knight, and everything in between. Batman has been reinterpreted at least a dozen times since 1939, just different iterations of the same basic characters, plot and setting. This isn’t a new thing, either. How many times has Cinderella been through the wash? Snow White? At least there used to be original storytellers out there, real masters like William Shakespeare, who totally didn’t rip off Ovid**.

Usually original stories are more like Batman’s beginnings, a little of this and a little of that, pieced together to make a “new” story that is really a monstrosity welded together from spare parts in the folklore junkyard. Let’s do Genghis Kahn in a tragicomedy, kind of like Cyrano De Bergerac, but in a futuristic dystopian sci-fi setting like in Bladerunner, with a wisecracking android sidekick fashioned to look like a My Little Pony. You know, to keep it light, for the kids. 

Maybe originality is harder than I thought. Then again, maybe I’m being too picky. Snowflakes have variations of identical structures, but every single one is beautifully unique, right? My stories are beautifully unique?

Well... About that.

Look at a snowflake. It’s gorgeous. There will never be another quite like it, and how do we show our appreciation for these individual awe inspiring beauties? We mash them up together into crude figures that are supposed to look like us, or make cold, wet missiles to lob at one another, and that’s if we are enjoying it. The stuff on the road and sidewalks are deemed a nuisance, so we melt it with salt or shovel it out of the way. Trillions of little flakes, never gazed upon, never appreciated. Just because something is original and even beautiful doesn’t mean that it has value.

The takeaway is clear. Originality is difficult to do, and even if we can come up with something original-ish there is no guarantee people will take notice. Then again, snowflakes are terrible at self promotion. In order to share something the world has never seen, but the world deserves to see, we have to work at making sure the product we put out is worthy, and then we have to work at leading people to the product.

Back to work, then.

*There is perhaps one person I know who could. You know who you are.

**Shakespeare totally did rip off Ovid. Makes you wonder who Ovid was plagiarizing.

The Top Books That Changed Me

            My smart, skilled, and artistically brilliant sister named “the top books that have changed me” in a Facebook post and asked for some other respected reader’s picks. Hers is balanced with a lot of good fiction and non fiction, and shows just what kind of reader she is. They are 

1. The Bible, + everything else

2. The Chronicles of Narnia + This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti 

3. Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend + Psychotic Inertia by Patrick Dodson
4. The Singer by Calvin Miller (yes!!!) + The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard
5. Waking the Dead by John Eldredge + The Hemophiliac's Motorcycle (a poem) by Tom Andrews
6. War and Peace by Tolstoy + lots of Dickens
7. Kim by Rudyard Kipling + The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Spear

             See? How's a guy supposed to follow that?

             My list is a little complicated, because I do not believe I could do these justice without explaining not just what books changed me but why. Given my verbosity, Facebook can’t handle the information dump so here it is in blog form.

            Most important would of course be the Bible, because duh. Philosophy, relationship, reality, the frame on which my perception of the world and my life, beyond fiction, hangs. It's worth noting that my favorite translation is the Complete Jewish Bible, translated by David H. Stern, because of the unique Jewish perspective. This is an interpretive translation and, especially in the New Testament it departs from the Greek manuscripts that we have. However, I believe the translation to be reliable because Jesus most likely spoke the Hebrew dialect of Aramaic, not Greek. I believe that Christianity is a Jewish religion, founded by Jews, for Jews. Anyone can be a Christian, but the Jewish perspective provides a clearer understanding of the words of Jesus and the apostles than the Greek  influence provides. I digress.

First books ever: “Little House in the Big Woods” and the rest of the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, with special notice on “Farmer Boy” because of the male perspective. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and the remainder of “The Chronicles of Narnia” by C.S. Lewis. “The Hobbit” and later, “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien. “Watership Down” by Richard Adams.

These were read aloud to me, largely before I could read myself. In a small part I was deterred from learning to read by these because my Dad could dramatize the stories so well, and when I tried to read I spent so much effort deciphering the words on the page that I couldn’t pay attention to the story. When I read, even in my head, the character’s voices were flat, factual, halting, and uninteresting. Dad made Bilbo and Almanzo and Aslan seem like people with feeling and fire in their souls. Why should I learn to read when I couldn’t make the characters do that? Of course, with enough practice I could, and today people compliment me on my dramatic reading. Dad even says that I do a better Rowsby Woof, a character from “Watership Down,” better than he does, but on the whole I’m still not as good as he is.

First time I noticed a physical/emotional reaction to a book I read to myself: “The Indian in theCupboard” by Lynne Reid Banks.

First time I noticed that I was having a physical reaction (slightly different words, completely different concept) “Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” by EdgarAllen Poe.

Both of these authors got my heart racing. Written words. Symbols on a page, translated to symbols for ideas in my head. Lies. Beautiful lies that I knew were not true, but I loved them so much I wanted them to be true. These are stories my father had not read aloud to me, and the voices they grew in my head were the first that I created with the author, not ones that he had created for me, and they were strong and real. With “Indian” I thought, “I wish I could do that” and with Poe I took it a step further and asked “How did he do that?”

First book I was excited to read, and was disappointed: “The Count of Monte Cristo” unabridged, by Alexander Dumas.

I read the Bantam Classic version of “Count” when I was preteen/young teen, and I thought it was amazing. I still do. When I discovered that this gem was abridged, that there was more “Count” that Bantam had cheated me out of, I was righteously indignant and set out to amend my deficiency right away. It turns out they abridged it for a reason; Dumas tends to wander around on barely relevant bunny trails that do nothing to advance the plot, but do modify the characters in disturbing ways. The image of the Count in the abridged version is that of a hypercompetent angel of vengeance who will stop at nothing until his enemies are as completely destroyed as they intended to destroy him. The unabridged version complicates the heroic, righteous image by adding copious, celebrated drug use and statutory rape to the mix which, according to my values both then and now, makes Dantès unbelievable as an accomplished everything and retroactively deserving of every “injustice” dealt him. Special Hell, remember?

First book I loved for the narrative, then discovered I hated for the message: “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells.

There is a lot of good writing by Wells, and a lot of messages in his work that I wholeheartedly agree with. However, the author and I often have different interpretations of his work, and if you do just a little digging, you may find that Wells held some terrifying beliefs, along with some other literary darlings in the same period. That said, I like the idea of traveling centuries forward in time to discover a completely different, dystopian future. I do not like the analogy of the capitalist working class as cannibals who literally feed on the elite, and while I consider myself quite the cynic when it comes to humanity, I do not support the idea that humans are mere animals.

First book I wanted to emulate: “Jurassic Park” by Michael Crichton.

My instructors would probably wince in frustration if I told them I wanted to be like Crichton. They would mourn my lost potential, because with a lot of work I could probably be a poor man’s David Foster Wallace. My aspiration to be a filthy genre writer (“filthy” as in literary writers consider all genre fiction as suboptimal. I want to be like Crichton, not E.L. James. Geeze) is because of public accessibility. I have not gone into deep research, but in three years “Jurassic Park” sold over 9 million copies. In comparison, Wallace’s magnum opus “Infinite Jest” sold 150,000 in ten years. This means that, even if only one in ten Crichton readers are provoked into thinking beyond “ooh, dinosaurs!” and Wallace has a perfect record for inspiring readers, Crichton still beats out Wallace nearly ten times over. Who is the more effective writer? The one worth emulating?

Plus, Crichton is rich while Wallace killed himself in a drunken fit of depression, so there’s that.

The book that changed my entire perspective on reading: “In the Wake” by Per Petterson.

I had to read this book for a sophomore level English class and I hated it. I loathed it. I despised it. It made me want to stab kittens. What I couldn’t understand was that it was nominated for some huge international literary award with a reward purse up in the tens of thousands of euros. It wasn’t a throwaway nomination, either, because the same author’s next book won that award. Obviously, a lot of other people who know what they are talking about saw more in this book than I did, so I decided to figure out why. The reason is because it is brilliant. It turns out I hate it because it is about being depressed, and the author creates that sense of hopelessness so well that it was instantly familiar and my gut instinct was to get out as quickly as possible. After I figured out “In the Wake,” I knew that I had been reading everything all wrong. I evaluated books and short stories based on whether I liked them or not, and this prejudice impeded my ability to learn from them. It also made required reading as an English major borderline unbearable because, if I stop to think about it, I hate most of the stuff they make me read. I read about an OCD lesbian and her dysfunctional relationship with her gay father who probably committed suicide. I read about divorce and insanity and sexism. I read about rape and drug abuse, and all of the horrible things people say about and to one another in veiled, cutting words. Sometimes it strays into child molestation or incest, but on a good day it will be shrouded in enough literary trappings that, if you try really hard, you can imagine that it’s just about some poor woman in a terrible relationship with her mother. And most of it is incredible writing. The subject matter is appalling but the exposition is sublime, and I can learn from all of it. I have my English 2100 instructor and “In the Wake” to thank for that.

There are lots of other books that should be read. “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams is one; “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins is another. If you haven’t jumped on that bandwagon yet I highly encourage you to do so. There are others that I hear are really good and I look forward to reading. “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green and “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak are at the top of my list, and if fantasy is your gig then anything by Carol Berg is worth a look. I’m also looking forward to “This is How You Die,” a short fiction anthology and sequel to “Machine of Death,” if I can manage to get my hands on it (hint hint). However, these others, from “Narnia” to “In the Wake,” are the books that impacted me most and will always hold a special place in my heart. Maybe a place with theoretical manacles and oubliettes, but a place nonetheless.

Well That Was a Busy Semester

            Hi.

            I’m done with the semester.

            Well, kind of done, you see there’s this online class, early Brit Lit, that I really haven’t been keeping up with and I’m hoping to knock it out here in winter break, but mostly I’m done. I think I may be a better writer now than I was four months ago, but it is difficult to self evaluate. Here are a few things that I have learned.

            If you dig into the craft of writing you may find that there are “rules” to it, things you “have” to do to be successful, unless of course you don’t. Confused yet? One example would be ending a sentence with a preposition. Grammar rules say prepositions are terrible words to end sentences with. But. In creative writing, grammar rules can be violated if you are trying to make a point. The same can be said for every other rule in writing. The rules can be broken, it’s just a case of knowing when and where and how to break them, and it has a lot of writers chasing their tails trying to figure out the system. A lot of us just wind up relying on instincts, but I think I cracked the code.

            The mistake is thinking there are rules at all. The rules are really just cause and effect. A writer only needs to be aware of what effects breaking a particular rule will elicit. Ending a sentence with a preposition will make the sentence look odd, perhaps pull the reader out of the immersion of the narrative, and give the impression of ineducation. A writer may use it if (s)he wants to establish a particular voice for the narrator or a character, or to distance the reader a bit. Good writing has many typical patterns, but when the need to do something unorthodox arises it’s an advantage to know how to break the mold to accomplish what you want. I just need to learn all of the rules and why they are rules. Then I will be able to follow and break them to full effect.

            I also learned that the middle grade/YA novel I have been “working” on for about five years (I haven’t even finished the first act) is pretty darn good for an intermediate creative writing course. I submitted the introduction and first four chapters of the manuscript for grading and peer review, and it was well received. Even better, the critiques helped me solve a few minor problems and one or two huge ones. This is quite encouraging, but I’m not going to start crowing until it sells. It has to be accepted by a publisher first, and before that happens I have to finish it. I can’t finish it until I know exactly what is going to happen in the book, and I don’t, so it looks like I won’t be crowing for a while.

            In the meantime, I’m still plugging away. I have one semester left until graduation, and we’re expecting baby 2.0 in early January. Let’s do this.

Irrepressible Wisdom

Our first assignment in Intermediate Creative Writing was to write the most important things we thought a young writer should know. I realize the purpose and value of the exercise as a "go and do likewise" kind of thing as well as a clever diagnostic for our instructor to see what she has to work with, but it still felt a bit disingenuous to write this. I'm a young writer myself, so it's a case of the inexperienced leading the imaginary inept. Still, here it is, and I do believe that it is good advice. The underlying ideas apply to most creative endeavors.

Five Things Every Young Writer Should Know

1.      Read Other Work Critically

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master.” -William Faulkner

As a writer your choice of mentors is wide: Vonnegut, Rowling, Shakespeare, Collins, Byron, Dostoyevsky, Cisneros, Burgess, Tolkien, Wallace, Hawthorne and on, the limit of authors and what you may learn from them is set only by the time you can afford to read them. Learning how to ape your betters is the first step toward becoming a great writer, but it is by no means the last.

2.      Know the Rules

“Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.”

- H.G. Wells

There are many rules in writing. The aspiring writer first learns to “show don’t tell,” and to “write what you know.” More advanced instruction unveils Aristotelian Structure and Chekov’s Gun among dozens of others, and many young writers begin to resent these restrictions.  The rules, however, were not established by the despotic literary elite who happen to have an arbitrary distaste for sentences ending in prepositions, or by some oppressive Orwellian regime hell bent on stifling creativity and artistic expression by demanding all narratives be confined to three acts. The rules are simply methods that have been proven to work. They are not a fence to confine the genius, they are a path to literary success.

3.      Don’t Be Afraid to Break the Rules

“There are no laws for the novel.  There never have been, nor can there ever be.” - Doris Lessing

Notice we call them “rules,” not “laws.” There are times when breaking the rules is more effective than abiding by them. Unsurprisingly, there is no rule for breaking the rules; a writer must rely on his instincts.

4.      Stay Grounded

“They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.” - Lillian Hellman

            When writers write about writing, they often expound upon their unmitigated sufferings, along with the sublime virtues of their chosen craft. It helps to remember that writers, at least fiction writers, are professional liars. They will rush to remind you that their lies are intended to reveal even greater truths, which should make you all the more suspicious when you see them trying to speak plainly. Don’t allow them to puff you up and get you high on yourself. They are really just patting themselves on the back. Don’t let them discourage you with their moanings, either. They are just disgruntled employees whining about their job, only their job is to be eloquent so they are exceptionally good at it. All of their self-righteous pontifications and lamentations only serve to distract you from the most important step to becoming a great writer, which is to

5.      Write

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

 -Stephen King

People that talk about writing, read about writing, or even formally study writing are not necessarily writers. People that write are writers. Becoming good at it is the same process as becoming good at anything else: practice. Write constantly. Write fiction and nonfiction. Write autobiography and the hero’s journey, write poetry and short stories and novels. Practice plot twists, angst, and true love in addition to clever wording, symbolism and palpable settings, and bite off more than you can chew. Great writers fail and fail often, but they keep writing until they finally succeed.