But the result is that the work isn’t grounded in experience so much as in other work, like painting a picture of a picture. You’ve seen it: mix in some elves, some swords, some magic and (lately) some brooding anti-hero. Carnage, blood, killing your babies has produced a new gritty world of f&sf that is even more retarded than the old one. There’s garbage in other kinds of fiction, too, but it seems to stink more when it’s genre, I suppose because the readers are more forgiving. There’s something to be said for departure from reality, whatever else its flaws, so the bar stays low.

Anyway, setting that aside, the problem with the ‘write what you know’ bit is that it can be misleading. I’ve been working on something for the last few days, for the first time since August, really, and it’s really struck me that I’m writing the same story over and over. Or rather, some depressingly large subset of what I do is the same story with altered particulars. And the story isn’t even very good. It’s authentic, yeah, but you know what else is authentic? Sitting on the couch and watching TV for four hours, every night of your life. Lots of people do that, but we have little need for their stories.

So then I started thinking about the stuff I’ve done that I’m actually proud of; and its defining quality seems to be that its written with my head not stuck up my own ass. In other words, a departure from the solipsistic universe I know better than anyone.

So now I think the canard should be: fuck what you know. Write what you aspire to. We’ll see how that goes.

Burn Notice has been obsessing me lately because the show is fun to watch, at least at first, without providing any benefit whatever to the viewer aside from simply passing time in a more engaging way than sitting quietly and staring at the ceiling. If you stuck an electrode into a person’s hypothalamus and allowed him to self-stimulate, the result would closely resemble the action that unfolded on the couch last night.

This has got me to thinking about what I want, and don’t want, from my fiction. What could BN have done to keep me from complaining, and to keep me watching? I’m trying to sort this out, but it takes a surprising amount of analysis to come up with an answer.

I’ll unwrap this little by little, but here’s a final thought for now: you know how they talk about stuff being a guilty pleasure? A James Patterson novel on the beach, for instance; or a show like BN. Music, sometimes. But what does that mean? What is it, exactly, that we’re feeling guilty about?

For a long time I had diagnosed my change in attitude this way: Harry Potter works from a model of the world where the hero doesn’t exist. What I wanted, on the other hand, was for Harry to become super bad-ass and lay waste to people at the end. If Harry Potter were a basketball story, I’d want to see him working on his game, then showing up in the climax having all these wicked moves and kicking ass on the player who’d humiliated him. That never happens. Harry manages to do what he does with luck, trinkets he’s given, and help from his friends. He is decidedly underwhelming as a Chosen One.

For years I thought this was the big failing in the books, and the reason I’d lost my taste for the movies. I’m all about the grand heroics, the levelling up, the showdown. I want magical Michael Jordan, or something of the kind. But in the last few days I’ve been re-evaluating the HP franchise, and I get now that Harry’s flavor of heroism isn’t a failing, but a particular design choice, a choice that is actually braver and more profound than the version that I would have liked better.

Harry is basically just a guy — an admirable guy, a guy who you wouldn’t mind if he were dating your sister — but pretty normal, really. Not a real standout at anything, kind of where he is by accident, a magical trust fund baby with a hard luck story, yeah, and sure, a pedigree, although really his parents being awesome is no accomplishment of his. But he lives up to it as best he can, in an uncertain world, with bad odds, with help from his friends. It’s very un-Beowulf or Achilles. It’s also a lot closer to the stories most of us know from real life, and closer to most of the situations in which we’ll find ourselves, one way or another: we’re born, we’ve had some good opportunities, we don’t live in Somalia or Palestine, we’ve got health care (or at least the possibility of health care) and a free education.

Few people have the tools necessary to be Michael Jordan, in basketball or in any aspect of life. Hard work made him, but that’ll only get you so far without superhuman ability. But greatness in the way Harry is great is something you could really aspire to, and the mythology of the HP franchise is one much more proximate to reality than most of the hero stories we’re told. Nevermind that there’s wizards and shit: do what you can; be worthy of friendship; keep your friends close; and hope for the best. That’s a way guttier answer than almost anything else fiction will serve you up, especially in this genre.

I’m not saying that Simon is dreamy, BUT, flowers actually turn their blooms to face him whenever he walks by. I have seen this happen. It is fact.

Women appreciate his unwavering confidence and rugged good looks.

Men look forward to, and treasure for days after, his heartfelt handshakes.

Flora prefer his ambiance to the life-giving rays of the sun.

There is, quite simply, no finer specimen of humanity in the web hosting industry – perhaps the world.

Dialogue is only for conflict.

It’s like a racehorse, it can’t just carry any old thing, the pots and pans and old tires. You can’t heap all your expository business on it, the meet and greet, all that yack. It’s just for the conflict between one character and another. That’s it.

So if characters agree, you don’t need dialogue! If someone’s just buying a donut, nobody needs to say anything. That’s what narrative is for.

Also, great dialogue in fiction isn’t screenplay. In fiction you can just tell us what people are thinking, they don’t need to say the obvious. In fact, the most interesting fictional dialogue has people thinking one thing and saying another. That’s what gives your scene dimension, and it’s super fun to do.

The question in dialogue is always, who wins and who loses. Who is putting pressure on who, and how.

Dialogue works best in short bursts, three or five lines, then go back into the other tools of writing–landscape, internal thought, memory, observation, gesture and so on.

Keep it short. People don’t generally speak in full sentences. And nobody gets to make a speech, unless it increases the tension of the scene–where I’m waiting to see if you’re going to get me on that plane and don’t dare interrupt your long story about your grandmother’s prize apple pie.

I’m not sure how I feel about the ‘only for conflict’ thing — for me to agree we’d have to broaden the definition of ‘conflict’ so far that it would wind up being useless — but the last bit, about keeping it short, addresses one of my principle irritations in literature. Especially old literature. I _hate_ speechifying, where characters who hate each other stand around and give two page speeches about how much they hate each other, or deliver ten minute orations, or whatever. Nobody does that; nobody has ever done that. If you want to do that, write something else. Write an essay. I don’t want that shit in my fiction any more than I want raisins in my chocolate chip cookies. Which doesn’t mean that it’s A Rule that you can’t do it; only that if you do it, it will suck, in the same way that if you try to write in a vernacular you don’t really know, that will suck.

I want to think about the “think one thing, say another” bit, though.

Contemporaneity, in the sense of being “up with the times,” is of no value. A competent wakefulness to experience — as well as to instruction and example — is another matter. But what we call the modern world is not necessarily, and not often, the real world, and there is no virtue in being up to date in it. It is a false world, based upon economies and values and desires that are fantastical — a world in which millions of people have lost any idea of the resources, the disciplines, the restraints, and the labor necessary to support human life, and who have thus become dangerous to their own lives and to the possibility of life. The job now is to get back to that other perennial and substantial world in which we really do live, in which the foundations of our life will be visible to us, and in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions of necessity and mystery. In that world all competently wakeful and responsible people, dead, living, and unborn, are contemporaries. And that is the only contemporaneity worth having.

– Wendell Berry

What’s remarkable, though, is that I don’t regret spending all that time, not even a little bit. Watching Lost was a thoroughly worthwhile pursuit, which raises the question about what a ‘worthwhile pursuit’ actually means. What about the other stuff that I do? I spend at least ten hours a week in cafes, thinking about stuff; maybe five hours a week at the gym. A lot of working, some time cooking and cleaning, going to meetings, reading papers, seeing friends, reading the Economist, watching basketball …

What do I have to show for all of that? What does anyone have to show for anything, ever? When’s the time well spent? You could spend forever trying to systematize the answer to that question, and I don’t have forever. So I’ll just give my preliminary results:

I think that any undertaking that makes you understand the world better is worth doing. From watching Lost I understand more about certain kinds of storytelling; what works, what doesn’t. It was, in many ways, a groundbreaking display of serial narrative. If you’re interested in the craft of narrative, then it’s like taking a class. It’s like watching a master carpentar building a bigger, more glorious house than any you’d seen before. (Nevermind that he fucked it up in the end.)

In a fuzzier way, though, Lost gave me what good stories always give you: a peephole into another reality, into other peoples’ lives. And it doesn’t matter that the ‘people’ were fictional and their ‘lives’ implausible and fantastic. Good drama turns all the knobs turned to 11, and as such throws aspects of the human condition into stark relief, where details that might otherwise have been hidden jump out at you. The best drama, the best writing, the best art is sufficiently rich that the pretend reality maps onto the real reality in some profound way. This is why Lost is worthwhile; this is why Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” has something to say to us, even though nobody in the real world ever turns into a giant bug. And so on.

You know what isn’t worthwhile, though? Most of the time I spend screwing around on the internet. Arguing with people, to no purpose. Researching trivialities. I’ve spent more time, by far, preparing to do things, or trying to figure out the optimal way to do them, than actually doing anything. More time writing about writing than writing. Etc. That’s wasted time, and I want to do better.

Also, I’ve forgotten to update on this lately, but the tally stands at 11 total submissions of six different stories, which have resulted in four rejections.

What should I do when I get accepted? Maybe I should start planning. Thailand + whores? Fly to Sydney to see Swanky? Buy a second house? Suggestions welcome.

10 Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

From here, via Caren. I wonder if anyone who’s not trying to write would find anything of interest in this collection of shop talk. You tell me.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to find a good market for “Mutter” which is one of my favorites, a real dark horse from the contest. Nobody has ever said anything about it to me, which either means nobody’s read it or else nobody liked it. At this point I don’t want to know which it is.

Point is, Mutter is sort of a tough sell — speculative fiction about Minnesota white trash, based on a couple guys I know. It’s about a lot of things, but one of them’s class, so when I discovered that Tin House is doing their Fall 2010 issue on “Class In America” I just about pissed my pants with delight, not just because the market fits but because Aimee Bender sometimes teaches at a workshop Tin House runs in the summer. If you don’t remember, Aimee is one of a small number of People Who Changed My Life. It goes like this:

Aimee -> Clarion -> Writing

Meaning: no Aimee, no Clarion, no Writing. I dunno if I’ll “make it” in any significant sense, but I do know, without doubt, that I absolutely wouldn’t be in a position to make it without Aimee.

So cross your fingers, please.