Arts and Letters

Where would you rather be?
Anywhere but here
When will the time be right?
Anytime but now

— “Double Agent” lyrics by Neil Peart

Yesterday, I attended the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley. I believe this is the fourth year of the event — and it’s getting bigger. More participants, more superstar writers, more publishers coming out to the event to hawk their books, talk about various topics, and, of course, celebrate the written word. We’re in an age where it seems the level of interest in reading books is declining while engagement with apps on your phone is at an all-time high. That’s not to say that there was a golden age of reading. It seems there’s always been people who like to read for enjoyment — and many others who find the thought of reading a book a chore. I used to be in the latter camp. Indeed, from my earliest memories to around my sophomore year in high school, reading for me was associated with either homework or trying to peel me away from the TV. Books and magazines became interesting to me around the time I turned 15. I don’t know if it was because we moved that year and I spent a lot of time in the local community college library (or the bookstores at the mall), but I quickly fell under the spell that, well, you could learn interesting things from books and magazines. Not all book or magazines, of course, but I gravitated to those that piqued my interest, were well written, and seemed to teach me something. This was, yes, the pre-Internet age, but that’s not to say that there wasn’t an industry that cranked out crap that vied for the public’s attention — like clickbait and fake news does today. TV used to be called “The Boob Tube” — where “Boob” was a slang for someone stupid, tabloid papers were places were people went to get their fix of fake news, lurid stories of crime, sex, and, more sex, and there was the “trashy novel” for those who like to read empty calorie books.

I certainly wasn’t immune to the pure, time-wasting joy of crap. However, during a brief window at 15, the kind of places where I was getting much of my information was not in a literary desert (self-imposed or by design). Rather, the quality of the material was high at the local community college library, and it was all there without any restrictions — except for the fact that I couldn’t check the books out, so I just read chapters in the library. This was a time in my life when I didn’t have any friends (new school), so books and magazines substituted for human companionship with kids my age for several months.

For some kids who go on (as adults) to pursue graduate degrees, they seem to be the “smart kids.” Me? I hardly considered myself smart — more like curious and eager to learn. Certainly types of knowledge didn’t come easily to me early in life (like basic math), while other types of knowledge did later in life (understanding big concepts — even math related theories — and being able to see connections between them). It’s a weird lacuna that I supposed is just one of those things many of us have — and just live with.

For the longest time, I kind of muddled through school. But after high school, college seemed like a new world where the sheer variety of courses in the humanities and social sciences was really exciting. I’d love to boast and say that my early years in college were ones where I thrived, got good grades, and it all led to an educational trajectory where two M.A.s and a Ph.D. that centered on the Arts and Letters was a logical conclusion. That was not the case. I was a C/B- student who rarely studied for the academic classes. Instead, the world of film was my love. I wanted to write. I wanted to direct –mostly, though I really wanted to write. My problem was that I really didn’t know how to do it with the kind of depth my film influences at the time did (or seemed to). Instead of getting serious and really digging into the process, I winged it — with some good stuff and a lot of bad stuff to show for it.

Once I convinced myself I was an impostor trying to pass as a writer, I ditched that ambition and decided I needed to learn about the world. So, a change in my major and pivot to academia as a career choice. If I wanted to write, academia would allow me to do just that. Research papers, manuscripts, book reviews…it all seemed like a good life of writing that required a lot of specialization, but little to no creativity. And you know what? That’s exactly what it was. The writing was often very technical, the prose was designed to inform rather than entertain, and a research environment that was pedantic, kind of dull, but peppered with the attraction of learning new things.

It was no life of reading novels, writing in a French cafe, and hanging with the creative people at night. Nope. It was a world where even three manuscripts (M.A. theses and one Ph.D. dissertation) was not enough to gain full employment. I was not a superstar in terms of the publish or perish world of academia, but market forces were such that even if you were a real striver, the odds were against you in getting a tenure-track gig.

I’ve long since given up on that career and I’m now working in the media as a news and traffic reporter. The Arts and Letters skills at an academic level aren’t really needed in my current line of work. I sporadically write for Popdose when I want to review something that’s in the pop culture — which, for me, are music, TV, and films. And then there’s this blog where I’m sometimes very active, and other times months will go by with nary a post.

This, alas, is where my writing is kind of stuck and spinning its wheels. I blog sporadically. I post at Popdose sporadically. I post on Facebook sporadically. It all feels like it’s leading to nothing that’s satisfies my creative urges.

So, it was at some point last year, I decided to try something new. Something that would rekindle my interest in writing creatively — and satisfy an ambition I’ve had since I was in my late teens.

I set a challenge for myself: I started working on short stories as part of a collection. I won’t lie and say the words and plots came easily to me. Rather, it was a process of re-writing draft after draft (something that wasn’t foreign to me since most writing is about revisions). After I completed my first story, I hired an editor who did both line editing and developmental editing. She broke the story down into areas that were working well and others I needed to reconsider, revise, or omit.  After considering her suggestions, I proceeded to break down the story into its elemental parts in order to find where the story wasn’t working for me. I found a number of things that needed to be revised, and one Big Thing that needed to be in the story for it to work. I’ve asked three people to be beta readers of the revised story, and so far the feedback is good — and will help me refine it more before sending back to the editor for another round.

This brings me to why I went to the Book Festival in the first place. There were a couple of author events that covered a number of issues that fit with what I’m working on now: keeping motivated to write and exploring evil in fictional characters.

Motivation is the reason I went to see Grant Faulkner speak. Grant is the guy who started National Novel Writing Month (which is in November). The idea (if you don’t know) is to write a draft of a novel in a month — and then spend a year or more revising it. NaNoWriMo has been around for years, but Faulkner has positioned himself as a cheerleader/motivational guy for writers. He says being creative is something we all have inside us, but it takes non-stinkin’ thinkin’ to really overcome barriers to expressing one’s creative urge. He was very articulate and honest about his own struggles as a writer, but also how using advice he often gives other writers has helped him in his own work. You know, it’s very easy to give advice, but sometimes difficult to walk the walk. I bought his book, and we chatted after his talk for a bit. He asked me what I was working on, and I told him that after a long stint in non-fiction/academic writing and pop cultural journalism, I’m now writing fiction. He listened and penned the following inscription in the book I purchased:

Now, this could be a party trick he uses for people to post on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram — which helps him sell more books. However, I thought in this day and age of emoji feelings, it’s refreshing to get something personal written in pen.

The last author event I went to was called “The Nature of Evil: Stories on Darkness.” The three authors there were crime fiction writers. Individually, they came from Finland, Iceland, and Ireland, and seemed to be popular enough that the place was packed.

Note: This picture was snapped before the event started:

The takeaway from this session was that evil is often in the act of the crime (which for them, is murder). For author Liz Nugent, she didn’t think evil exists, but she certainly had a strong opinion of the novel American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Nugent said that she wishes that novel never existed, and if she had her druthers, she would destroy it. For free speech libertarians (many of whom were in the room) there was a collective gasp when she said that — which, to me, meant what she was saying was evil. Later, she kind of clarified her anger at Ellis and his novel by saying that in fiction (and especially crime fiction) sometimes less is more. That is to say, you don’t write in graphic detail about a murder. Doing so, in her opinion, crosses a line from literature to torture porn — which is what she considered American Psycho to be.

So clearly the world of Arts and Letters, like life itself, is fraught with conflict. And in that storm of conflict, there are many writers who suffer from Impostor Syndrome — which makes one susceptible to procrastination or abandoning a project altogether. That’s the kind of paralysis reflected in the lyrics to “Double Agent” when the question is asked: “When will the time be right? Anytime but now.” Well, since we’re always living in the “now,” the time will never be right, and there you are stuck in the proverbial mud. For me, getting out of the mud meant doing things like going to events like the book festival where being around creative people helped to prod, push, and motivate me to keep going with the kind of writing I’m doing. It’s a slow process, but as Grant Faulkner said almost as an aside, “Big things are often built in small increments.”