A Rock To Tie A String Around

I have a love/hate relationship with Dr. Phil. I feel like he’s lost something since we first saw him on Oprah so many years ago. His version of keeping it real seems watered down now. Although maybe that’s less about Dr. Phil and more symptomatic of everyone trying to ‘keep it real’ and thus I’ve become desensitized in the face of so much in-my-face reality. Keeping it real seems to be a catch phrase for ‘Hold on, I have no tact, and I’m about to be an asshole.’ It doesn’t have to be that way, I appreciate honesty, pretty sure most of us do, but ‘brutal-keeping-it-real-honesty’ is a bit like when I was a kid and my brother used to take my own hand, smack me in the face with it and then start chanting ‘Stop hitting yourself!’ Technically he was right, it was my hand – but it also hurt like hell and was nothing I would have done of my own volition.
I get suspicious of people who practice brutal honesty. Usually, not always, they tend to be much more comfortable dishing it out than hearing it, even in small doses.
In any case, Dr. Phil had a woman named Maria Housden on his show this week. Housden wrote a book called ‘Hannah’s Gift – Lessons From A Life Fully Lived’. I fully admit I have not read it, so I can’t speak to the quality or content. But Housden wasn’t on the show to promote her book so to speak. She was defending the creation of it. Evidently, Housden gave up custody of her children in her divorce to her ex and took off to travel and write. She did what many men do in the case of divorce, she became a part-time mom, traveling back and forth, spending weekends and Christmas Break, but the full time – in the trenches parenting was left to her ex-husband.
As a parent, I can’t imagine anyone willingly relinquishing custody of a child. But I’m also not sure she should be getting the ‘keeping it real’ smack down by Dr. Phil either. After all, if he devoted show time to questioning fathers as to why they were able to walk away from kids in a divorce, that’s all he’d ever have time to do. It’s considered normal to men to be weekend dads, summer break dads, or in a lot of cases, disappear almost completely.
The part about this show that really irked me was that Housden kept defending her decision because she said she had to express herself and be a writer and follow her dream. This is where I think the smack down should have been inserted. The idea that you need to be completely abandon personal responsibility in order to be creative is a flaming pile of bullshit. Lots of writers, artists, singers, musicians, and actors have somehow found a way to balance creativity with wiping up mac and cheese off the floor.
I think Housden’s real motivation was the urge to chuck it all, destroy her Lego castle. There’s a great monologue in Donald Margulies’ brilliant play ‘Dinner With Friends’ where he explores this urge we all have to destroy all the happiness we’ve built up in our lives. Margulies compares this to kids building Lego castles and then delighting in smashing them to the ground. We can’t handle the uncertainty and impermanence of life so we smash our castle to the ground before it can start to crumble. We break up with our lives before they can dump us.
The problem of course is that this theory only works in our heads and when given practical application, doesn’t solve anything. Dumping someone just because you’re pretty sure they might dump you doesn’t mean you were any happier then or now. It just means you were too chickenshit to take the chance.
Easy for me to say, I suppose – I have a pretty good Lego castle going. Maybe in a few years I’ll get twitchy and start picking at the edges, tearing down the towers and remodeling the drawbridge. But right now I’m so overprotective that if anyone comes within twenty feet, I start hucking boiling oil at them.
Maybe I’m the one who needs Dr. Phil……

In a recent interview I was asked if I map out my character and plot arches. I stumbled a little bit, not because I’m not aware of what they are, or not capable of doing it, but because I can’t imagine knowing the end of the arch at the beginning of the story.
I think all writers are vastly different in terms of how they develop their characters and storylines. Some pull from their own lives and experiences, some rely on their dreams, some of us watch the oddities of daily life unfold and apply a ‘what if’ element.
Chuck Palahniuk, in an interview for this book Haunted, stated that he wrote the book largely because he had a collection of true stories in his head that people on airplanes, in waiting rooms, and various other places had told him over the years. He obviously fictionalized them a bit (at least I’m hoping he did – if you‘ve read that book you know what I mean) but the core that truth is stranger than fiction guides his creative process.
I’m a voyeur. Big time. I don’t sneak ladders up to my neighbor’s windows and watch them eat supper, but I’m definitely tempted sometimes. If I could have a day in the life of any creature (and retain the memory of it) I would be a spider in the corner of someone else’s house. A small spider, not the kind that anyone wants to kill. I would watch and listen while they went on with their day, ate breakfast, argued about the bills, negotiated who got to borrow the car, decided what to make for dinner. I would watch all the everyday, unseen habits that we collect over the years and record it in my spider memory.
It’s this reason that I love hanging out in hotel lobbies and airport terminals. People in transit who have abandoned most of their social niceties, stressed out and stretched by the monotony of waiting are the most fascinating characters in my creative universe. I like to take all the nervous ticks, rude gestures and actions, and stress-induced social blunders and apply the idea of ‘what if they acted like that all the time’.
On a recent flight to Denver I sat next to a nun. An actual real-life nun in full-out Sound of Music nun-gear. It’s not like I haven’t seen nuns before, but they’ve always been modern day nuns, dressed pretty much like everyone else but with a tiny, indiscreet headband that signaled their nun-hood.
The nun, by herself, was pretty fascinating. I had to bite my tongue to not ask a whole legion of dumb nun questions. I know for the Catholics out there this sounds incredibly ignorant. But I’ve never really been around anyone of religious authority. My pastor growing up played the drums and the electric guitar. He hosted barbeques and had the congregation pitch in for the keg. Reverence is a word I know only from books.
For example, I bit my tongue before asking if she could carry on more than three ounces of holy water. Or if and when she ever went swimming, was there a Catholic version of the Burkini that she was required to wear?
But back to my point, what was more fascinating than the nun herself was people’s reaction to the nun. In the crowded terminal, people sat on the ground rather than ask her to move her bag off the empty seat next to her. If that had been me, someone would have sat on my bag and then chewed me out for leaving it there. When she first arrived, she sat next to a young man in his late teens who was reading ‘Breaking Dawn’ by Stephenie Meyer. When nun sat down, he looked at her sheepishly, put his book away and took out a copy of National Geographic.
Is reading vampire books considered a social faux pas around clergy?
The young man reading the book is a perfect character for a future project. But I could never try to plot out what he was going to be doing by the end of the book. I have no idea. In my current book, The Tree Museum, I had no idea just how crazy Nate was until he started having a mental breakdown. I was disturbed by his downward spiral in the same way I would be if a family member or a friend were losing their grip on reality. I never saw it coming.
I think that if we too carefully map out our character’s paths, we will give it away. It’s like watching a poorly done horror movie and knowing the sorority girl will run upstairs instead of out the back door. If I know she’s going to get whacked in chapter five, the intelligent reader will have guessed it by chapter two. I think we need to trust our characters to make their own decisions, like our kids. They fall down, do the wrong thing sometimes, and every once in awhile take too long to get where they’re going. But I tend to think our role as writer is much akin to our responsibilities as parents. We hurry them up when needs be and patch up their skinned knees. But if we hover, we suck all the fun and excitement out of our character’s journey.

I’m not much of an art critic, nor am I particularly knowledgeable about art, so I try to swallow my doubts and stay out of the debate when it comes to exacting the value of a piece of art, especially modern art. I read recently that British Artist Damien Hirst has his panties in a wad over a recent theft at his ‘Pharmacy’ Installation. The culprit was a teenager who lifted pencils from a jar in the fake, artsy pharmacy that is designed to look just like a normal pharmacy, complete with pencils.

The installation is nothing more than a set, be it a movie set or a stage – but it’s a fake pharmacy, where the art connoisseur can ooh and ah at the shelves stocked with seemingly mundane, pharmacyesque items. Am I missing something here? Seriously? I didn’t find in my research what Hirst is charging people to see this ‘art’ but I have a cheaper option for the tough economic times – go to a real pharmacy, it has the same stuff and comes with half the pretention. Here’s another picture:

http://www.artificialgallery.co.uk/shared/assets/ART001/5564/Pharmacy.jpg

Now, for normal folk like myself, there’s nothing artistic or quaint about going to a pharmacy. In fact, I can see how it’d be damn annoying, if I go to a pharmacy, I usually need something, in this place it’s all for show. However, I have to remember that Hirst is a famous, rich artist, so someone likes this stuff. Maybe it’s the rich, botoxy delicious ladies live off the service of nannies and housekeepers that would enjoy this slice of reality. Maybe it’s the Warhol fans that have come creeping out of the woodwork that consider the Pharmacy a flag of modern art.

I see this phenomenon with books all the time. I wonder who in the world would buy such a thing and before you know it, it’s on the New York Times Bestseller’s List. “I Do” by Jessica Simpson made it there. Yep, Jessica Simpson was a bestseller. In fact, back in 2004 there were rumors that Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey submitted a proposal to a New York publisher to write a marriage advice book. The proposal was picked up but for a measly one million dollars, so they kept on shopping. Evidently the shopping trip lasted longer than their marriage.

My point is this, there’s a market for this crap. I’m sure that if Simpson and Lachey had accepted the one million dollar offer for their project, it would have been a bestseller as well. No matter that they had only been married for two years when they proposed telling the rest of the world the secret to their happiness. Tori Spelling’s ‘Mommywood’ spent some time on the New York Time’s Bestseller’s List. It’s currently rated 34,000 on Amazon. Considering the average book by a mainstream press is somewhere in the 100,000 range – that’s pretty damn good. It’s a book about parenting, life in Hollywood and celebrity and she has lines out the door whenever Tori Spelling holds a book signing.

Great except….it reeks a little of Pharmacy. If I’m going to read a book about surviving marriage in Hollywood – I want to read about a couple that has actually done it. I want to read about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward or Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson – someone that’s been married for a significant length of time. If I’m going to read a book about parenting, I want to hear from someone that isn’t just writing about her experience with her (then) one kid.

I don’t mean to sound bitter. I don’t have anything against Tori Spelling, I mean who didn’t love Donna Martin? I do have a small, irrational grudge against her husband who dumped his wife and other kids to run off with Donna Martin and film a reality series about what a great dad he is. But that’s neither here or there in terms of ‘Mommywood’. I remember right after ‘Titanic’ there was a Leonardo DiCaprio biography on the bookshelves of every major bookseller. I’m not begrudging DiCaprio and I would bet money that he had nothing to do with this biography. But it irks me when crap products make money. It’s like Sham-wow- that towel they sell on TV that claims to be able to absorb an entire can of soda from your carpet…uh yeah…not so much.

I just don’t think that what sells is necessarily what is actually good and sadly what is good, often doesn’t sell.

I’m very picky about my literary sex scenes. I tend to read a lot of horror, speculative fiction and drama type books and the best kind of these genres are the ones who manage to intertwine relationships and yes, sex, into the story.

It’s a fine balance, however, between writing a sex scene that comes off as romance novel cheese-fest, and the alternative, which is hospital-sterile utilitarian. Some writers opt for the overly graphic, bordering on violent – yeah, I’m talking to you Chuck Palahniuk. Others, go out of their way to make sex skeevy and unpleasant – ahem, John Irving.

A while back I wrote a blog about the balance of not spending too much time on mundane details while also not skipping important components of your character’s everyday life. Sex scenes also face this danger. In a general kind of way I have observed that it seems to depend largely on the gender of the author as to what details end up being overwrought.

For instance men tend to only focus on the physical, especially when they’re attempting to write from a woman’s point of view. The woman is overly concerned with her large, luscious breasts and is utterly fascinated by her partner’s throbbing, pulsating….anatomy.

Women tend to ignore the physical almost entirely and try to delve into their character’s brains. The woman is constantly flooded with metaphorical images of Georgia O’Keefesque flowers and the man is murmuring sweet nothings such as darling, sweetheart, babydoll….

Of course there are some authors that drive me batty by going the route of the absurd. Anne Rice does this when she writes sex scenes. In The Witching Hour she actually describes her protagonist, Michael, as “walking sex.” I bet you could poll 10,000 women and you wouldn’t find a one who had ever actually described a man as looking like ‘walking sex.’ Her erotica is even more absurd, although I’m not sure that it’s not supposed to be. All the women and men in her Sleeping Beauty Erotica novels are so driven mad by their sex drive that the worst punishment in the world is to deprive them of wild, semi-violent sex with strangers.

Uh huh. Maybe that’s what erotica is and I’m out of the loop but it left me feeling icky and confused.

The sex scenes that really make me crazy (and not in a good way) are the John Irving type inappropriate ones. I love Hotel New Hampshire but the ten-page romp between sister and brother left me with cold chills and an overpowering urge to call the literary social services. Into the Forest by Jean Hegland is a fairly decent speculative novel about an illness that wipes out most of humanity and a father and two sisters that are left in house in the woods. I looked past a the moments of fleeting silliness in this book until one sister is raped and the only way she can move past the violence of the act is to have lesbian sex with her own sister. Her own sister?!? Ew.

This follows the Anne Rice theory that women are so controlled by their own sex drives that they will literally explode if they don’t expend their energy in any way possible. If the only willing participant happens to be their own brother or sister, oh well. Again, ew.

Sometimes sex scenes are just arbitrarily placed, which is enough to make them seem silly. I used to read a lot of Dean Koontz. It seemed like in every Koontz horror novel, the female protagonist, who was being stalked, terrorized and hunted by the lurking menace had time away from her predicament to fantasize about the impossibly hot detective, police officer or free range male protector. Usually this culminated in an actual, mediocre sex scene. Sometimes, it just stayed a fantasy.

Maybe it’s just me, but if my life were in danger from anything – human, monster, natural disaster, you name it – sex would be the last thing on my mind, no matter how good the handsome detective looked in his suit. I guess there’s really no way to be sure of this. If I’m ever being chased by a supernatural menace or hermaphrodite serial killer – I’ll let you know what I think of the detective in charge.

There are a few that do it right, or at least come close. I’ve raved about her a lot lately but Charlaine Harris has some pretty spectacular sex scenes in her Sookie Stackhouse mysteries. For the most part I think she’s successful because she sticks to the female perspective and manages to incorporate and address the extremely female trait of being flooded with perfectly mundane thoughts at inopportune times. Ladies, you know what I mean – admit it – there’s been at least one time when you’ve been jolted from the throws of passion by the sudden realization that the front door is unlocked or that you left the ice cream carton on the counter and it’s going to melt and thus create a giant, sticky chocolate flavored ant attractant.

My husband tells me that this isn’t a problem for men.

I’m trying to think of other authors, male or female that have successfully walked the thin line between erotic and absurd. Help me out – in your opinion who’s written a sex scene that didn’t make you want to either gag or laugh?

I fully admit it, I laughed pretty hard when I read this article:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/20/annoying.facebook.updaters/index.html

“The Twelve Most Annoying Kinds of Facebookers” on CNN. Mostly, I laughed because I fit about eleven out of the twelve types of annoying facebooker listed. I do, however, take some issue with Brandon Griggs’ assertions, not because they’re not true, they are, but because truly, when I see these qualities in my Facebook friends – they don’t bother me. I bet I’m not the only one not bothered or annoyed by these qualities

I’ll be more specific.

1. “The Let-Me-Tell-You-Every-Detail-of-My-Day Bore”, “The TMIer” and “The Sympathy-Baiter”: Griggs asserts that we are a little show and tell happy on Facebook and blather on about boring, mundane details until our Facebook friends are in a boredom induced coma. I’m not sure that’s true. Plus, the update format really only allows us to blather on for 300 words or less, so really, how bored can our readers get? It’s a bit like my high school students who swear that they are going to die of boredom if I over-explain an assignment or inject a relevant story. C’mon Mr. Griggs, I know we are in an ADHD world, but take a Ritalin and focus…focus….

2. “The Self-Promoter”, “The Friend-Padder”, “The Paparazzo” and “The Town Crier”: Essentially, Griggs’ problem with these categories is that they’re too loud (in a virtual kinda way), too obnoxious and far too proud of themselves. I’m 100% guilty of all of these categories incidentally. I have a lot of friends, however, by way of growing up in a small town and working in the theatre world – I know a lot of people. Granted, without Facebook, I would probably not have ever found most of them again, but I seriously do know a large number of my Facebook friends. The others weren’t exactly randomly chosen, mostly they are fellow writers and publishers. I love having a large circle of virtual friends, not only do I get to live vicariously through their adventures, but also whenever I’ve had some kind of random writing survey – I get tons of varied answers. You can’t pay for that kind of research.

3. “The Bad Grammarian”, “The Lurker”, “The Crank”, “The Obscurist” and “The Chronic Inviter”: The opposite of Griggs’ other pet peeve, these people aren’t loud enough, not proud enough and lack the proper social skills necessary for proper virtual socializing. Given that a good number of us update our Facebook status from iphones, blackberries, etc…I’m pretty forgiving of weird grammar. After all, I have big fat fingers, and those are itty, bitty letters. As far as the others go, the lurker – they’re quiet, so quiet in fact you don’t know they’re there. Does it creep Griggs out that someone is actually reading his Facebook page, did he expect no one to pay attention? I’m a total Obscurist on days, and laugh pretty hard at the Obscurist comments my Facebook friends make, so we’ll have to agree to disagree there. And finally, The Chronic Inviter – I currently have like 75 invites for quizzes and games pending. I just don’t read them, therefore they don’t annoy me.

What Griggs’ really seems to be complaining about is twelve different types of people. We all have these friends, or work with one of these types. In the ladies room at any given time one is assaulted with TMI’ers and Let-Me-Tell-You-Everything’ers. I have learned to be very careful when asking ‘How’s it going?” If you don’t want an answer, don’t ask the question. And even though you might think that because my day job is teaching and I’m surrounded by educated, intelligent adults – the Bad Grammarians wouldn’t exist in my world. You would be so very wrong. Email is the forgotten written medium. Every once in awhile I print up some of the faculty emails and show my students so I can impress upon them the importance of spell-check.

In short, I guess one man’s annoyance is another woman’s entertainment. I like my self-promoting, paparazzo, obscure posting friends. I don’t mind when someone lurks around the fringes of the virtual world and only pops up once in awhile, and I actually, honest to Shiva like hearing mundane details of other people’s days. But I’m a writer, and that stuff is fascinating to me. If they read closely enough, my Facebook friends will find bits and pieces of themselves in my next book.