Let's Pretend This Never Happened

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened

(A Mostly True Memoir)
By Jenny Lawson

Jenny Lawson is the Bloggess.  She had a somewhat… unusual childhood.  Usually when people hear that her father was a taxidermist they begin to get an inkling of what she means, but it goes beyond that. 

Like the time that Jenny brought her fiancé Victor home to meet her parents and her father snuck into the room and tossed a young bobcat on his lap, saying, “Hellooooo, Victor.”  Now, most people might think that was an extreme way for a father to try to intimidate a suitor but, the truth is, her father would have been just as likely to toss the bobcat on Jenny or her mother. 

Some strange things happen to Jenny but it’s also her take on them and her story telling ability that make her story so fascinating. 

“Did you notice how, like, half of this introduction was a rambling parenthetical?  That shit is going to happen all the time.”  And it does.  In fact, I can’t decide whether this book is more like one, long, run on, stand-up comedienne monologue or more like you’re trapped in a corner at a party with a woman who is hysterically telling you everything insane that has happened in her life in an effort to explain why she is drinking too much.   

In between the mile-a-minute speedball vignettes are some more poignant thoughts -  “When you’re surrounded by other people who are just as poor as you are, life doesn’t seem all that weird… I never really realized we were that poor, because my parents never said we couldn’t afford things, just that we didn’t need them.”

Jenny has been diagnosed with some ailments that she has turned to her advantage, in some ways, including OCD, depression and anxiety disorder.  “It’s like I have a censor in my head, but she works on a seven-second delay… well-meaning, but perpetually about seven seconds too late to actually do anything to stop the horrific avalanche of shit-you-shouldn’t-say-out-loud-but-I-just-did.”

Admittedly, if swearing offends you, this book isn’t for you.  But, everybody else who can follow this ramble will laugh hysterically (or at least chuckle out loud occasionally.)  I enjoyed it a lot!

The Artist's Way ~ Julia Cameron

The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to a Higher Creativity
By Julia Cameron

When I first got this book as a teenager I started to read it, got bored with it (probably because I didn’t have a good frame of reference to connect to it) and put it away.  Over a decade later, I picked it up again and used it as a twelve week course.  I wrote the three longhand, brain dump, morning pages every morning (almost) and I read one chapter every Sunday then picked out a couple exercises I could readily do.  It was a game changer for me.  Along with The Joy Diet by Martha Beck, it turned how I approached life on its head.

The text at the top of the cover says “A Course in Discovering and Recovering Your Creative Self.”  That creativity can be applied to any area of your life.  You do not need to be a writer or a painter.  The writing that she asks you to do is not about creating something for someone else to read, it is merely a pouring out of your thoughts onto paper.  In fact, you are admonished NOT to show them to other people.  This is for your mind alone.

 “As you work with the tools in this book, as you undertake the weekly tasks, many changes will be set in motion.  Chief among those changes will be the triggering of synchronicity: we change and the universe furthers and expands that change.  I have an irreverent shorthand for this that I keep taped to my writing desk: ‘leap, and the net will appear.’ ”

The basic tools are the morning pages and the artist date.  Sometimes referred to as “brain drain,” the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness” to help you get the junk out of your brain.  No one will be reading them, not even you.  “All that angry, whiny, petty stuff that you write down in the morning stands between you and your creativity.”  Let it out and let it go.  Morning pages are, in essence, a type of meditation.  Meditation is learning to let our thoughts pass by without judgment.  Here they are passing out onto our pages. 

If the morning pages are the outpouring of angst, then the artist date is the inflow, the filling of the creative well.  You need both.  Many things can constitute an artist date, from listening to music to gardening to cooking. 

“Remember, art is an artist-brain pursuit.  This brain is reached through rhythm – through rhyme, not reason.  Scraping a carrot, peeling an apple – these actions are quite literally food for thought.”

The weeks proceed through recovering a sense of Safety, of Identity, of Power, of Integrity, of Possibility, of Abundance, of Connection, of Strength, of Compassion, of Self-Protection, of Autonomy and, finally, of Faith. 

As a child you may have been instilled with the ideas that you can’t make a living at what you love doing, that you aren’t an artist or that you’re no good at it.  This book is about inspiration and permission to do what you love, what you may be thinking you can’t do.  You can, and this book can help you figure out how.

Reading through this again has inspired me.  I think it’s time to do this course again from a new perspective.  Mid June seems like the perfect time.  Meet you at the end of summer and we can compare notes.

Writing the Breakout Novel

Writing the Breakout Novel:
Insider advice for taking your fiction to the next level
By Donald Maass

Many people have felt that urge to write a novel, but we all wonder if we have what it takes to write a novel a publisher would be interested in and the public would buy.  Donald Maass is a literary agent who shares his expertise on what makes a novel good and a good novel break out.  He starts with the basics, “Storytelling matters above all other considerations…”

He packs Writing the Breakout Novel with stories we recognize, using them as examples to show what breakout writing looks like, no matter the genre.  From The Bridges of Madison County to Jurassic Park, these books have some things in common.  Maass explains what that is and how we can use those aspects in our own novels.

Maass leads us on a tour through our own bookcases to see what is contained in our favorite novels.  He suggests that they “sweep you away, have characters you cannot forget, and involve dramatic and meaningful events.”

“The key ingredients that I look for in a fully formed breakout premise are (1) plausibility, (2) inherent conflict, (3) originality and (4) gut emotional appeal.”

Maass explains how the novel that readers prefer seems to have changed over time.  “Once essential, the author’s voice gave way to omniscient narration, which in turn gave way to objective narration, which in turn lost ground to first- and third- person narration, which in turn has been eroded away somewhat by what can be called close third-person point of view.”

My mind rebels slightly at this, suggesting that a really good novel could be written and accepted in any of these formats.  But the truth is that Maass is telling us how to write in the most widely accepted format during the current time. 

Maass discusses character development, personal and public stakes, creating tension on every page, multiple viewpoints, subplots, pace voice, and endings.  With so many do’s and do not’s, I start to wonder how to put it all together without the writing sounding stilted.  But that’s what good writers do, they put it all together and make it seem effortless so that the reader never sees the man behind the curtain at the controls. 

Maass has been criticized in the respect that he has written some 17 novels but does not make his living as a writer, so how useful can his advice be?  As someone else pointed out, many great coaches are not superstar athletes themselves.  I think you’ll be able to judge for yourself what rings true as you read the advice here.  For me, it was the vast majority of what he had to say.    

This book is “a guide to writing deeper, stronger and more memorable novels.”  That is really the only path to success, he says.  A big advance and an editor is no guarantee. 

“There is only craft – that and inspiration, sustained effort, luck and timing.  But mostly craft.”