To Believe in Fairies: Chesterton, Tolkien, Kindred Spirits, Disparate Tastes, and Me

Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies.
~G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Running dialogue between Christie and Masha and I on the topic of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, author, b. May 29, 1874, d. June 14, 1936, m. Frances Blogg—on account of her surname I presume he'd approve what we're doing here—running dialogue on this giant among Englishmen, anyway, has resulted in all three of us blogging to explain why we love or can't bear him. Christie knows his work intimately and loves him. Masha has read a few of his books and can't bear him.

I count his Orthodoxy as one of my favorite books, cried tears the size of gumdrops over his biography of St. Francis, have read a few of his other books to interest if less effect, and still occasionally laugh or well up over one of his poems. And I love him. For a lot of reasons: I like happy-go-lucky people, and I like paradox. I like long sentences. I love his enthusiasm for words and his shameless glory in the magical and traditional and childlike and beautiful. I needed his straw-spun-to-gold thoughts as key to unlock the final gate to a splendid, open realm—this bright kingdom in which sacraments work on body and soul, in which fairy tales are taken to heart. I needed him very much for that. I love him very much for that.

And I, like Christie, am often struck by the truth in his statements—some of which, ripped from context and examined at face value, are obviously false. There's no one like Chesterton for gleeful, goofball hyperbole: for instance, the quote at the top of this page. Which of us—including G.K.C. himself—literally believes in fairies? And yet, that statement encapsulates the problem I have with purely rationalistic thinking. Encapsulates it with greater breadth and strength then when he later says, flatly, that "Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind as do materialistic denials."

Christie and Masha have exemplified two very different responses to the same author and the same texts. Masha's response to him was startling and a little overwhelming—it was like hearing one of your friends, in whose goodness you have never had the slightest doubt, suddenly described by another friend as dark-spirited and destructive:

"He is the mocker, the one who seems to write against individuals and for the masses. They are the mocked, the lonely ones whom God nestles close—and I feel Chesterton’s judgment of them; he who calls on the ‘awful authority of the mob’ against my friends who remember that the mob “is nonsense—a sum of negative ones” of people who have given up themselves."

The mocker? All that rambling, high-spirited playfulness came off as mockery? Has my inner Jane Bennet failed to see the evil in a good man, or did his high spirits lead him into speaking hurtfully to a friend of mine, or is all this just some big misunderstanding? Is it just that reading works this way, that a phrase that pulls its weight in good work for one reader will leap from the shadows, teeth and claws bared, at another? I liked "the awful authority of a mob", not because I like mobs in general—quite the opposite, actually; I tend to think mobs are unstable creatures, liable to insanity and brutality—but because the words came as part of the point about "the democracy of the dead", and as something of a traditionalist, I desperately want the people of the past to have a voice in the present.

But Masha's response was real and emotional, not something to be brazenly argued with; in that situation, the best I can think of to say is, Well, I'm confident that he's a well-meaning person, but I am truly sorry he came off that way. I like the guy, but I suppose he can seem brash.

From here I can trust Christie's praise and defense of Chesterton to speak for me. She spoke with exceptional warmth:

"Here was a man who unlocked all the tightly raveled God-knowledge of my nascent soul and presented it to me: not as a bride, like Tolkien, in beauty and mystery; not as a mother, like Lewis had, in comforting familiarity and profound love and awe and devotion; but as my own child, an impish joyful thing, astoundingly complete in itself, innocent yet immortal, infinitely familiar to me, utterly surprising and unpredictable."

I think Chesterton would have loved that. "Impish joyful thing" is a compliment for the ages. I am not likely to top it, so I'll move on to the matter at the core of this dialectic, which is this: how can kindred spirits like Masha, Christie and I have such disparate reactions to the same author, the same words?

How is it that Tolkien's work is all wonder and glory to Masha and Christie, a wide-open path to all things faerie, when for me, it's... okay, he's quotable, and what he did is undeniably impressive, and I do wish I spoke Quenya, and Galadriel is cool and I like Legolas and Aragorn and Sam and all... but The Hobbit bores me silly and I can't read The Lord of the Rings without sadly missing the intimacy of my favorite stories, and I wish with all my heart there were more girl characters...?? It's like I'm missing a gene of comprehension somewhere, which is probably how Masha feels when Christie and I talk about Chesterton. (We haven't yet discovered which author Masha and I love but Christie can't bear.)

How is it that I seem to have to look so far and wide to find people who are, like me, enchanted by the vivid contrasts and thoughtfulness at the heart of the Twilight story? Why do people instead get excited over the Hunger Games trilogy, a set of books so overbearingly dark and violent that I cannot to this day think of them without a visceral shudder, the three-o'clock-in-the-morning horror of waking from the kind of nightmare in which your loved ones die in terrible ways before your eyes? Half of you will think I'm nuts for writing this paragraph, but I feel it.

How is it that G.K.'s style reads as banter to Christie and I, but as mockery to Masha?

It's funny and terrifying and sad and beautiful when like-souled readers respond so divergently to the same work. It's hard to say how much of a reaction is due to the reader and how much to the writer—a fact I feel rather powerfully as both novelist and reviewer. Every reader brings a custom set of sensitivities to whatever they read, and no writer can wholly predict that. But writers are subject to the Book of Proverbs' warning that, "When there are many words, transgression is unavoidable." Chesterton wrote with at least the appearance of blithe effusion, as if no qualms over the possibility of his words' permanence could staunch the exuberance. As someone who has probably spent five or six hours on this post already, I fear and admire that freedom. It is impossible that he wrote all those words without error, but he also wrote so much good.

In the end, of course, disagreements over mere strong tastes matter little. It's just another curious question among friends—friends who can raise a glass together and toast even the great authors that only some of them love. At least, I think so. I'll happily put one up for The Professor. Or even Suzanne Collins. But I'll also tilt up my pint and name G.K. Chesterton, because when I read the cheerful scrawls that make up Orthodoxy, there was a grandfatherly wink in the pages, and the wink came with magic, and the magic was faith.

Though giant rains put out the sun,
Here stand I for a sign.
Though earth be filled with waters dark,
My cup is filled with wine.
Tell to the trembling priests that here
Under the deluge rod,
One nameless, tattered, broken man
Stood up, and drank to God.
~G.K. Chesterton, The Deluge

The Picture-Perfect Blogger... and Me

Easter nail polish!

It's a sunny Holy Saturday as I write, shaping up to be the warmest and prettiest Easter I've experienced in the Pacific Northwest, and I spent most of the day away from my computer. It felt like a good day to pot some of my little seedlings and a pair of avocado trees, paint my fingernails—which happens just twice a year for this gardener/guitarist: on Christmas and Easter—and pound out a Chopin prelude on the piano with intense expression and, unfortunately, coffee jitters.

Lou and I plan to spend the evening at his parents', eat the traditional oyster stew, and then head over to church for Easter Vigil—the most beautiful night of the liturgical year. By the time this post goes live, the Triduum will be over and Easter will have begun. I love the whole Easter season. But there's nothing else in all of life for me like Holy Saturday.

This week, Masha and Christie and I have a three-way blogalectic topic: whether we three artsy Catholic bloggers ought to try in any way to resemble the suddenly popular Mormon mommy bloggers, who were recently examined and praised by a self-described feminist atheist over at Salon.

And as I've sat down to write, I've realized that it's an almost irrelevant question for me. I have all kinds of respect and affection for the LDS church and its members, thanks to my being an Orson Scott Card/Shannon Hale/Stephenie Meyer fangirl and having had a few lovely Mormon friends and acquaintances. But I'm not a Mormon. I'm also not a mommy.

Holy Saturday sunshine and transplanting.

What I am, what I do have in common with these young women, is that I'm a personal blogger with an artistic bent—though I'm bookish and not at all craftsy—and that I belong to a faith tradition that affects every area of my life. The question for me, then, is simply: how open should I be about faith and/or life hardships on my blog? Since both can turn away readers?

The twenty-something LDS mommies are mostly pretty subtle about their religion; it shows up in a link to mormon.org in the sidebar, in references to Utah and the temple. If they talk about faith, it tends to be unspecific but generically Christian in mood and wording. Some of them—again, not all—keep the blogs pretty positive and clean-scrubbed as far as life goes, so that after paging down through a few of them, my own first reaction was sort of like what happens when you watch a commercial and half-believe that drinking Coke will make you sexy. If I were Mormon, says that little niggle, would I be be a pretty 26-year-old wife with a couple of cute toddlers instead of a 35-year-old who had to wait till 30 to get married and still hasn't managed to have a kid, but does have gray hairs coming in? Nope. But I envy those girls their youth, their fashion sense, and their children.

Masha talked about over-share on Catholic mom blogs (gory clinical details of childbirth, anyone?) and finding a balance between posting all happy thoughts and spending too much time working out deep dark issues in public. Christie spoke of feeling never good enough in the presence of the picture-perfect young moms, and of treating a blog as a way to encourage others.

I... could go a million directions, but it seems best to just answer the question.

When the subject of faith wants to come up on my blog—in a book review, in a Friday post's interaction with the liturgical calendar, etc.—I don't hide it, but I do try to keep my readers in mind to some extent. Most of you that I know by name are not Catholic, and some of you aren't Christian at all. The golden rule seems appropriate here; for myself, I'm not generally troubled by people talking about their beliefs as long as there's no apparent attack on my own, so I do my best to make the references organic and honest but non-confrontational.

If this weren't a personal blog—if I were out to meet some public niche interest—I'd just keep faith offscreen, as I nowadays do for politics. But it is a personal blog.



All dressed up for Easter Vigil.

And because it's personal, the matter of how open to be about my imperfect life is a personal decision. For myself, I've learned that on an ordinary day, I'm happier just not thinking about what I don't have or can't do. So I don't talk about childlessness or chronic depression or adrenal exhaustion much. I focus on what I do have and what I can do, and that's what comes out on the blog. And blogging optimistically, in its turn, helps me live a more cheerful daily life.

As for what I have to offer: I try and do for guests at my blog just what I do for guests at my home. If you come here, I hope you find friendly conversation and a place to rest surrounded by books and beauty.

Easter Monday postscript: I feel more like a mommy blogger than usual today, having spent most of the day with my two- and five-year-old nieces. It was a heck of a lot of fun, but I don't know when I'd blog if I had kids that age. Since they went home, I have got the furniture mostly put to rights and the egg off the kitchen floor—the five-year-old helped me make her favorite "doubled eggs" for lunch—but I haven't gotten around to scrubbing the apple juice off the table yet. I'm exhausted. :P

Happy Easter!

Artist and Aesthete

At long last, someone has put time management instruction in terms I can bear contemplating: the secret is to become a Jedi and rescue a princess.

Secondly, if you're at all into gardening, I recommend reading my friend Jana's post "The Secret Garden," wherein she describes this season (in western Washington, at least) briefly and beautifully. And, by referencing Mary Lennox, also in familiar and beloved terms.

Deposition of Christ, Fra Angelico

Thirdly, today is the memorial of Blessed Fra Angelico, patron of artists. And on that note, Masha recently put up a discussion post on the artist's relationship to physical beauty. I spent some time this morning trying to create a full-length essay in response, but I have a couple of princesses to rescue, and anyway it turns out I wasn't saying much. Simple must the answer be, then. From Masha:

Artists tend to obsess over physical beauty. They live in one extreme or the other, setting up physical perfection as a tiny god or rejecting it utterly and filling their lives with ‘meaningful ugliness’ - pushing out the beauty in search of relevance. I lean toward the former.... I do have to work hard to avoid making physical beauty an idol - reminding myself that so many of the Saints were not beautiful people in the physical sense, and some were unpleasant people to be around as well.

The saints seem to preach moderation in all enjoyments—which means that when it comes to beauty, I feel like a decadent, if (hopefully) an innocent one. I don't often hesitate to linger five minutes longer than I should at the piano, feeling my way through a Chopin prelude—or to stand in a parking lot with cold groceries in a warm car, just watching the sunset—or to re-read the splendid last page of a good book again and again and again. I'd stare at people in public without hesitation, making a memory of her eyes or his smile or her juxtaposition of scarlet lipstick and black scarf or his curly-topped toddler features, if it wasn't rude. Despite my chronic scrupulosity, the aesthetic pleasures are one arena in which I have utter, blissful, Edenic freedom.

It is true that under certain circumstances I have to guard against the capital sins, of which vanity at my own fair image in the mirror on a good hair day is far from being the least of the temptations, height and flat chest and dysfunctional sense of style notwithstanding. But overall, it seems to me that moderating my admiration for the beauty of the earth would not mean changing how much of it I took in, but the way I look at it—and not for the better.

Because there's beauty everywhere. I told myself I would learn to love the rain, and in stating so, found the work half done. There's beauty in the soft gray of clouds and the ambiance of wet twilight, in green sprouts pushing up through mud in the garden and in wet hair sticking to flushed faces. There's beauty everywhere in people, too. As Masha says, it's not only in the "young and whole" but "in weathered skin, gnarled hands, and the nobility that well-worn age brings to the body. There is beauty in Rubenesque women and in the darkness long sorrow leaves on the face." I have been thinking so much of this lately, feeling as if I see beauty in every face that I open my eyes long enough to notice.

Lent, in its fasting and prayer and sacrificial giving, is a living recollection of Christ's forty days in the desert—but I've always found beauty in the desert, too. Phoenix and Albuquerque are breathtaking places, all reds and browns and oranges and blues, all particularly striking to a waterlogged Pacific Northwester who drowns every day in grays and greens.

Masha is unlikely to disagree with this, unless she's read something I haven't—but I've yet to read saint or Scripture writer who suggested to me that I ought to take less delight in the arrangements of bare branches around the altar, the dark Phrygian melody of the Pange Lingua, or the picturesque simplicity of broth and bread. As for Easter lilies and Easter tables and full choir with organ and brass quartet on the grand Alleluias, they can wait. Their bright and magnificent loveliness will be all the more striking for the time of being content with humbler beauties.

Homemade Tutus and Too Many Choices

Masha and I are taking the rest of the Advent and Christmas season off of the blogalectic, which should allow us to do things like spend time with family and make Christmas presents. (See below for this week's short post, however.) I celebrated the decision by spending some of my writing time making the first of the tutus for my little nieces.

Craft tip for the tall person: stand chairs on the dining table, string project between them.

In case anyone else wants to try: I combined this how-to with this one and am using ribbon instead of elastic. Also, I used five yards, tops, of tulle for the one pictured. For the littlest of my nieces, I'm using fabric scraps.

Masha's most recent question:

I know that the loss of human contact in our culture is not the fault of the ebook, and I have no problem with it’s existence, I just worry about it’s effect. George, Jenna, does this worry you at all? What do you think, everyone, am I just ridiculous to want a physical thing that can be asked about and then set aside? Is there a way to share ebooks? Do you ever regret having too many choices?

There are so many possible things to say here; this question certainly deserves an essay. Maybe several. But for now:

1. I don't think she's ridiculous at all for wanting "a physical thing that can be asked about and then set aside." Any more than I think I'm ridiculous for wanting chant and hymns at Mass instead of "Anthem" and "The Summons".

2. I don't think ebooks are the problem for most people; it seems likely that Smartphones and social media take countless more heads out of the Real World than books in any form ever do. A determined introvert like myself doesn't often need an ereader to isolate myself from fellow travelers on an airplane.

3. That final question: yes. Oh, heavens, yes. But it's a good problem to have. The overabundance of choices arises in large part from the instant availability of nearly infinite free information, and I love having free information instantly available. I don't know what people did before the internet, but it's a constant source of exhaustion despite its virtues, and I've never learned how to regulate my relationship to it properly. Maybe someday.

Thoughts?

Texture and History: Why We (May) Need Print Books

Masha's turning the discussion to last week's question #5: Why does the world need books? But this week, she says, we're not talking about books in the abstract, but ordinary, old-fashioned, printed and bound books.

That being the case, let me start off with a disclaimer: I have nothing against ebooks. Or rather, nothing except that there's no flipping around in one. I am the sort of reader who constantly turns back and forth through the text, cross-referencing, remembering important quotes, or re-reading sections.

Electronic texts are useful in their own right; I have a Kindle—one of George's old Kindles, actually; thanks, George!—and it's great for getting free classics, finding book club books inexpensively and easily just days before book club meets, fitting more than two books into a purse, and the like. I always miss the flipping around, though.

But the question of the day is the hard-copy printed word, and why we need it, to which I say: We more or less don't. According to Wikipedia, the first known literary texts date to around 2600 B.C., and the world was around for quite some time before that. Which is not to say that books haven't been a necessary part of progress; of course they have. But information is preserved in a lot of ways, and whether that involves printed pages and glued or sewn binding is a matter of practicality, not of morality.

The print book will have its defenders for some time yet, however, on some grounds. For starters, even if all mainstream reading went digital tomorrow, the book as a physical item would be part of history and worth preservation as such. I've got lovely memories of peering into dimly-lit glass boxes and reading Hebraic letters—I couldn't often translate the words—from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Likewise, of trying to chant songs from bright and beautiful hand-illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages. It's from this same instinct that I've one shelf dedicated almost entirely to carefully-bound and especially to old books, some of them almost too fragile to read.

As a matter of everyday reading, the difficulty is that I learned to read on print copies and my comfort lies entirely within that zone. It's in the above-discussed flipping around, in questing for a line by memory of what quadrant of the page it fell upon, in what Masha described as "a sensual connection to the words":

I really like the feeling of holding a book. I like the texture of pages - thick, cream-colored journals or barely there Bible pages. I like the scent of books, old and new.... I don’t have an emotional connection to my laptop like I do to my books, I can’t fold down page corners and write in notes in my margins. I think we need books to continue connecting our minds to our senses and to have something meaningful that lasts when technology fails.

I think you can dog-ear and make margin notes in some electronic formats, if you're less of a Madam Pince than I am. But while I do have an emotional connection to my pretty pink and gray laptop, which holds the books I've written myself, for reading I prefer to get away from screens and buttons and slick plastic and instant searchability. It's nice to feel plain paper in my hands, to re-read parts and keep fingers in various places, to not have to wait that blink for the page to turn, to simply escape the computer and revert to my childhood understanding of the universe.

But that's just me, after all. It says nothing whatsoever about future generations—or even, necessarily, about my own. Not everyone spent as much of their childhood as possible snuggled away somewhere with words printed in black serif font on white paper. Nor does everyone read in such a non-linear fashion. The Kindle fire burns brightest among those who read books once straight through, and it feeds on books designed to be read that way—crime fiction and category romances being among the popular examples. There's something to Kit Steinkellner's question of whether the genre you're reading changes the medium you read in.

Perhaps children born these days will reminisce in their thirties about cuddling down in a fleece throw and brushing their fingers across their ereaders' touch screens. Perhaps technology will have progressed to the point where they can flip around in their electronic books as easily as we do in print copies. Or perhaps no one will care about flipping around the way I do, not having learned to read that way.

If they ditch our print books, though, they'll have to find new ways of decorating their homes. As for me and my house, we preserve the family library. If our heirs decide they don't want the burden of it sitting around their living room someday, I ask only that they treat history with respect.

Blogalectic Holiday: Random Q & A

In honor of the holiday, Masha gave us an easy topic: a list of questions to answer. To veteran bloggers, listing comes almost as naturally as speaking, and I'm thankful for the comparatively light work after a cheery Thanksgiving weekend that was rather too busy for much blog prep.

1. If you could escape into just one story, what would it be?

Escape? I'm usually my own biggest problem. Finding a way directly into a story wouldn't be likely to change that. :P But if I just need a vacation in a fictional world, well—I've already answered that one.

2. What book do you think should be mandatory for writers?

People write and think in an immense variety of ways. Therefore, I say: go find your own mandatory book. For me, it was probably the Harry Potter series, but it'll be different for everyone.*

And no, I don't often read books about writing. For me, they've never proven quite as helpful for writing fiction as has the generally more enjoyable act of reading fiction.

3. What movie do you think should be mandatory viewing for writers?

See above. Only I'm no film connoisseur, and off the top of my head, not one movie of my acquaintance has had a noticeable impact on my writing. Several TV shows, on the other hand, have been influential. The Gilmore Girls is great for dialogue. The Wonder Years is great for narrative. And The Dick Van Dyke Show is great for comical character interplay.

That said, I like artsy but accessible movies like The King's Speech or the Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility. They're beautiful enough to inspire me artward, and might fairly represent the sort of novel I'd like to write: lovely storylines and scenery, thoughtful characters and relationships, happy endings. They're only missing the magic and unicorns.

4. Do you ever take drugs, smoke, or drink to ‘encourage’ your imagination while writing?

Hah. I'm at my most creative when all my faculties are present and accounted for, thank you very much.

If I need wackadoodle inspiration, I can always go to sleep. Of course, I've not got a lot of use for psychedelic Big Birds, tone-deaf people in denim singing in a porch swing at Mass, impossibly large house parties with the drinks table arranged according to the color wheel, and the zombie apocalypse, all of which have figured in my dreams in the last few weeks. But I most definitely do not need any stimulant to provide me with more such dreams.

5. Why does the world need books?

Because so many of us love them. And for other reasons, which are far too many and too complex to bother listing right now. That question could probably inspire its own blogalectic series.

6. What part of the [writing] process do you find most difficult?

Marketing, even to agents and editors. My default emotional position reads as follows: if perchance someone sincerely wants to hear from me, they'll ask. This is not a comfortable way to go about life, let alone marketing.

7. What books have scared you the most?

The single most terrifying book I've ever read, at least in recent years, was Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. Closely following on its heels (creeping silently through the jungle, peering at it with a giant eye) was Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. Horrid books, both of them, as far as I'm concerned.** I might never have forgiven my first boyfriend for making me read them if he hadn't also loaned me all his Harry Potter books and introduced me to Nobuo Uematsu and Orson Scott Card.

* * *

All right, that was fun. What about you? Feel free to answer any or all of the questions in the combox or on your own blog.

* Disclaimer: This presumes, of course, that writers have studied a fair helping of the classic works in the language in which they intend to write.
** Yes, I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek. And Then There Were None was a fantastically structured murder mystery. Jurassic Park was at least an engaging story. I'm still thoroughly sorry I ever read either.

The Four Things that Make You a Better Writer (and a bunch of sub-things that have helped me)

When I saw Christie's recent list of three things that have made her a better writer, I considered hinting to Masha that it might make a good blogalectic topic. I never got around to it, but Masha needed no hinting. She listed her "Three Things that have Made Me a Better Writer", and I was all prepared to do likewise until I started thinking about it.

Because—it seems to me, anyway, after pondering their lists—there are really four basic activities that improve a writer's skills. Between Christie's list and Masha's, all four received mention in some form or another. Both Christie and Masha also credited some activities that were subordinate to the main, which is more the point of the original idea. I like to be excruciatingly thorough, so I'm going to do both.

The four things that help a writer improve in his craft:

1. Reading and studying good literature.
2. Practice.
3. Tutelage and/or critique.
4. Life experience.

For once I'll restrain my hyperexplanatory self and let those stand. Here, however, are a handful of secondary items that have made a difference in my own writing. Oh, and there's no way I'll keep it to three.

"...she only demands from each of you either one thing very clever, be it prose or verse, original or repeated—or two things moderately clever—or three things very dull indeed, and she engages to laugh heartily at them all."

"Oh! very well," exclaimed Miss Bates, "then I need not be uneasy. `Three things very dull indeed.' That will just do for me, you know. I shall be sure to say three dull things as soon as ever I open my mouth, shan't I? (looking round with the most good-humoured dependence on every body's assent)—Do not you all think I shall?"

Emma could not resist.

"Ah! ma'am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me—but you will be limited as to number—only three at once."

Sorry, Emma.

Under the subheading of study:

• Re-reading. Not just once, but absorbing myself in a book until it's practically infused into my bloodstream.
• Reading conscientiously. Getting out of fantasy—and getting further into it. Regularly searching out classics. Looking for the best in any genre or category.
• Writing book reviews. This has forced me to read more widely and more actively. It also makes me more conscious of the books I choose (most of the time; wait till you see Wednesday's review), and allows me to see my own strengths and weaknesses in analyzing another author's.

Under the subheading of practice:

• Private journaling. I have hundreds of pages of journals, most of them quite ridiculous (that's all part of growing up, right? Right?) and still add entries to a private journal when the mood strikes. Journaling allows me to be creative in new ways, or to blow off technique long enough to get some overbearing emotion out of the way. It's also provided countless hours of practice translating thoughts and feelings into words.
• Blogging. It forces me to write to deadline; also, to write to be understood by—and interesting to—others besides myself. Nearly seven years and over 950 posts in, I've probably got three or four thousand hours in this little site alone.
• Finishing those first novels. Not just starting them. It's important to learn how to complete a story arc. When I was nineteen, my mother ordered me to finish that story about M. the teenage ice skater, which I did, and but for that I might have never finished anything to this day. NaNoWriMo 2009 was good for me for similar reasons.
• Remembering I'm a writer, even when doing menial work such as emailing. Working for clarity, for good phrasing, and for interest and humor when appropriate.

Under the subheading of critique:

• Having a wide variety of readers. That NaNoWriMo novel has been read by my mom and sisters multiple times, Lou twice, a round of beta readers, a round of gamma readers, two trained poets, and my in-laws. Of these, some read fantasy and some don't; some read juvenile fiction and some don't; some read novels, and some don't. Every reader has added something to the value of the work.
• Learning how to take criticism. How to pull the real implications out of a tangle of suggestions, which may in themselves be vague, confusing, or emphatically contradictory. How to distinguish between tough truth and dangerous conflict with the story's direction. This is one heck of a deadly fairy dance under the moon, and learning to do it properly is much of what proves your mettle as a writer.

Under the subheading of experience:

• Suffering. Which develops empathy, range, and can also build wisdom. We don't get good at storytelling without persevering through and processing pain of our own, which is why—I'd posit—there are so few truly successful child writers despite there being numerous musical prodigies. For me it's been depression, terror, exhaustion, childlessness, conflicts, heavy internal wrestling over various political and intellectual issues, and just not being the most emotionally stable cookie on the platter.
• Religion. No, I'm not joking, or exaggerating, or claiming that religion inevitably makes better writers than atheism or agnosticism. In fact, my agnostic tendencies have worked positively against some of the artistic stunting caused by early, heavy influence of weak and moralistic Christian fiction. Being Christian, however, supports my sense of wonder, of hope, of love beyond sentiment and goodness beyond plain decency, which every great novel I've ever read, including the ones by atheists, has successfully mirrored somehow. Those things are, I believe, the core of whatever beauty exists in my own work.

Being neither infallible nor necessarily good at big-picture thought, I may have missed something. If so, point it out! And I'd love it if you share what builds and strengthens your own creative powers, in the comments or on your own blog.

Artist and Analyst, Critic and Fan

Analyzing the texts we love is a big part of loving for many of us... So when we analyze how often do we critique? Or is it just all affirmation? How do you analyze your favorites? What aspects do you find most intriguing? How does it develop your relationship to the text?
~Masha

After a cheerful week talking about fandom, Masha took this week's conversation in the direction of textual analysis—an important aspect of both the writer's work and the reader's. Love it or hate it, we don't learn to read or write well without it. I, fortunately, happen to love it. Most of the time.

There are—to get the annoyances out of the way first—forms of literary analysis that frustrate me to no end. The modern tendency to judge older texts (or authors) by the moral or stylistic standards of today is plain chronological snobbery. I've little patience for deconstructionism and none whatsoever for Freudian psychoanalytic attempts to see into the sexual stirrings of the author, though my interest picks back up when we get around to Jungian archetypes and Campbell's hero's journey.

I also wish that current works weren't so heavily subjected to shallow criticism based on use of the passive voice or adverbs. Likewise, that textual studies and conversation everywhere could move away from being quite so issue-centered. And I won't even get into how baffling and frustrating it is to deal with the fact that the default position for literary culture nowadays is flat disrespect for so much of what I've always considered good and true and beautiful.

Set all that aside, however, and textual analysis is good clean fun. Masha's questions are all interesting, so I'll take them one at a time.

When we analyze how often do we critique? Or is it just all affirmation?

I can't speak for everyone, but in most contexts I don't hesitate over a little fair critique. Though I love The Lord of the Rings, I get bored with stretches of it, owing to the overall lack of interesting female characters, Éowyn notwithstanding. I'm also not afraid to chuckle at Victor Hugo's interspersing his beautiful Les Misérables storyline with some of the longest, dullest rants possible, though I'll grant that his topics were probably of some interest to the nineteenth-century French, and will even admit that they should be more interesting to me.

Harry Potter is usually criticized for the wrong reasons, so I tend to speak of him with lots of affirmation and occasionally a touch of defensiveness. It's not often that I bring up the real flaws in the story or even my personal conflicts with it, though both exist. And I find almost no fault whatsoever with Jane Austen's three strongest novels (Pride & Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion, which I believe are her best in terms of narrative wholeness and technical perfection; feel free to challenge me on that, if you like), though certain aspects of modern Austen fandom trouble me.

How do you analyze your favorites? What aspects do you find most intriguing?

That depends on the nature of the book. The first thing I did with Harry Potter was check out the witchcraft accusation. I did happen upon a couple of incredibly sketchy websites trying to use the Potter stories to make witchcraft appealing to kids—and by sketchy, I mean disreputable fonts, absurdly loud color schemes, and in one case a claim that Moses was a Parselmouth, which suggests that the site's writers scored appallingly low on the reading comprehension section of their SAT's. But it became very clear very quickly, on the testimony of pagans and ex-pagans and Rowling herself, that Harry had nothing whatsoever to do with neopaganism or New Ageism.

Sir Frank Dicksee, Romeo and Juliet

Beyond that, I developed a fascination for the source mythologies, including medieval Christianity, the Greco-Roman pantheon, and alchemy. The latter was an entirely new concept to me, and though it's often used in young adult literature nowadays with no more apparent depth than the color changes, I love the way Elizabeth Goudge used it in The Little White Horse and Stephenie Meyer used it in the Twilight saga, and it made an immense difference in my understanding of and appreciation for Romeo and Juliet.

My own analysis nowadays tends to focus on the depth of world and character development, the writer's mastery of prose and storytelling skills, the narrative unity of the work, the philosophies of key characters and—when relevant—the author, and when I know enough about it, the tradition in which the work is written and the work's relation back to that tradition. Those are the critical points that most frequently turn up in my reviews, and those are the points I focus on as a writer.

How does it develop your relationship to the text?

Everything a reader learns about a text can affect the relationship between the two. Most of the time, I find the effect of new understanding to strengthen the bond between me and a story I love, though certain things can occasionally detract from that—well-thought-through critique, say, or someone's reasonable praise on philosophically antagonistic grounds.

Ultimately, I like getting in on a book's secrets and developing a good strong intimacy with my favorites. After all, the ones that teach me the most are the ones which stick around to influence my thought patterns as well as my further reading and writing endeavors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that's much of what analysis is for.

Grownups in Cloaks: A Celebration of Dorky Fandoms

For a discussion topic this week, Masha chose literary fandom. I took her cheery post as license to break from heady theoretical essays—or what passes for them on my blog, anyway—and have some fun.

After all, she introduced the topic with anecdotes of her own:

I can catch [an unkind attitude toward fans] in any review of Tolkien because I'm a fan. Not the dorky kind, the one who names her kids after characters or watches the awful movies Peter Jackson made from The Lord of the Rings over and over. I’m the kind that learned elvish and Old English in College, studies the Appendices and can tell you all about the First Age of Middle Earth. So, the dorkier kind, I guess.

To which I must say: How did I not know you studied Elvish, Masha?! Nai i Valar nauvar as elyë.* (All right, I admit I had to look that up. I didn't study that much Quenya.)

Dork on exhibit at a WWU Yule Ball

Anyone who has read this blog for more than a couple of days knows I take Harry Potter fandom very seriously. It's also true that I've got Jane Austen's books half memorized, have written two songs about Wheel of Time characters, have at various points made it through the first chapter of the Council of Elrond's Quenya workbook and most of The Silmarillion, and am only waiting for MissPhotographerB's next visit to buy a jar of glittery makeup and drive to Forks, but none of that quite compares to what happened when I met Harry. More on that later.

Masha notes that devoted fans are responding, in part at least, to the creation of a myth:

...there is something similar in the way all fans relate to their books. For me the real relationship [to Tolkien's work] was possible because there was a whole mythology, there was depth and meaning and intention, along with a story to follow and characters to love.... I like being able to fall into a world that is real enough to believe in.

Nearly all fantasy and science fiction fandoms, from Tolkien's to Trekkies, arise to some extent from just this sentiment. The Wizarding World is certainly part of Harry's appeal. Given an audience, good immersive worldbuilding usually results in at least a cult following.

Commenter BTanaka suggests, over at Masha's, that fans are made when a story generates personal investment during formative reading years:

...I suspect that most 'hardcore fans' of a particular story or character encountered their story early on in their reading/viewing career and found it to be the most engaging story in their experience to date. From then on, it sort of becomes the 'benchmark' by which they judge other stories, and they retain a nostalgic fondness for it even as they develop into a more mature consumer of fiction.

He's right about some of us, anyway, depending on how you define early on. I read Lewis, Grimm, Austen, Dostoevsky and Hemingway before I came across Rowling, but Harry Potter—and literary analysis thereof—transformed me from a passive reader to an active one. Literature, instead of being either museum or playground, became the Hogwarts castle: a massive school full of talking portraits, magic rooms hidden behind doors pretending to be walls, and staircases that go different places at different times—in other words, a living and mysterious world of infinite secrets and endless corridors to explore.

When something opens up your perspective that dramatically, you love it. So yes, I'm a fan of the dorkier kind: a wizard rocking**, trivia-spouting, occasionally costume-wearing, text-analyzing geek. I sit with the Blogengamot at The Hog's Head—my proudest fan moment was joining that circle. I've even threatened to name my kids after some of the characters (not seriously, though. My relatives would kill me. And a name like Hermione or Luna would be rather hard to live up to.)

Dork being unoriginal at Vancouver
HP club's Yule Ball

It's true, as Masha noted, that outsiders often look askance at fandom or condemn it outright. It looks like obsession to the uninitiate, especially if they've heard a news story or two about someone who took fandom from crazy fun to just plain crazy.

To most of us in the cloak-wearing crowds, however—whether the cloaks come with wands, Darth Vader masks, pointed plastic Elf ears, or glittery makeup—fandom simply celebrates something that changed us. It seems no more likely to be harmful than an annual hard-core session of fantasy football, or a willingness to drive a few hundred miles to see a favorite band, or a lifelong quest for the perfect home brew.

But now I've gotten to my own point: the stories that make us into fans change us, I think, or quicken something in us. Sometimes that's quite subtle, but Harry wasn't. To this day, I lean on that boy for some of my relationship to life and faith and books and what it means to be a decent person. It's not that he taught me something I didn't know; it's that he turned knowledge into emotion and planted it in my soul like the astronauts planted the flag on the moon. This ground has been gained.

Sometimes I show my gratitude by blasting wizard rock while I clean house. If the world doesn't understand that, well—I don't understand their love for MTV. So we're even.

Tell me a tale of magic
Carry me away into a land where anything can happen
Anything at all
Tell me a story
Lay adventure like a road before me
Capture me in glory and the wonder of it all

* "May the Valar be with you."
** wizard rock: music inspired by and/or including lyrics based on the Potter stories.

What, Silent Still and Silent All?: The Artist and His Own Big Fat Mouth

David Roberts, The Great Sphinx and Pyramids of Girzeh

For a long time I’ve largely avoided following anybody whose fiction I read... I want to be able to read and enjoy their fiction untainted by their personal views about anything. I come to them for a story. I don’t care about their politics or their religion or their hobbies or any opinion they have about anything really.... Our culture has a fascination with celebrity and TMI. So we break down all these sane barriers and instead of just wanting a book, we want a book and to know what our favorite author’s favorite color is.
~Zoe Winters

When I've written a post that is fairly opinion-y... I almost always get replies that say something like, "You've lost this reader for good," or "I used to love your books but I'll never buy another one now." Obviously I don't want to run off readers. I think in most of these cases, something I've said has personally hurt that person, and they are trying to hurt me back in some way. That's a natural response, I think, and I can empathize. And they do succeed.
~Shannon Hale

I try not to be harsh about my preferences, but sometimes - like when people claim Dunkin’ Donuts has good coffee, or that The DaVinci Code is a “smart, smart, book,” I do get vocal.
~Masha

This week's question is one I've tangled with extensively offline. It also goes around the blogosphere every so often, as exemplified by the recent posts by Zoe Winters and Shannon Hale, quoted above.

Hold tight, folks. This is not likely to be a short blog post. I'll rein myself in as soon as I can.

Masha opened the discussion with some interesting and sound commentary:

There’s something off-putting about back-cover photos - they always fall short of the image I’d like to have of the author, and if he goes online to discuss his opinions of the election, praise writers I’m convinced are bad, and update me on his daily weight-loss regime, I might lose the ability to see him as anything but a sweaty jogger in obnoxious t-shirts.

She has a fair point about author photos. These usually begin existence as professional photographs, but often appear little better than glare-infested driver's license mugshots by the time they're printed onto glossy dust jackets.

Worse, old-fashioned professional shots with blank backdrops and direct perspective typically make people look less interesting than their stories might suggest. And it's not just the dull pictures that fall short. If the shot makes an author look too young, all fresh-faced and oozing sexiness, it's hard not to respond, as Mr. Harrison did to Anne Shirley, that:

"You're too young to write a story that would be worthwhile. Wait ten years."

It's a little like watching a new acquaintance's child pick up a violin for a family room performance. Sure, maybe they're a prodigy, but so few youngsters possess technical accuracy, let alone emotional resonance.

All that said, I like to get a look into the eyes of the person who wrote a story I'm enjoying. That interest carries to an author's sense of beauty and perspective on life, too. I will be interested in getting acquainted with them as a person, even if only through the author bio and possibly awkward snapshot.

But now we get to the serious part, the matter of alienation through conflict of opinion. In this world of over-share (in which I partake rather too thoroughly) and polarized public discourse, it's not just what you say, it's how you say it. Even writers often don't notice when they're talking past dissenters or insulting them—or worse, insulting the dissenters' friends or family or religion.

In conversations on the blogosphere, writers often recommend not talking about politics or religion at all. I'm not sure I agree. My open Catholicism might turn off a few Protestants, not to mention some atheists, but I try, however imperfectly, to think and speak respectfully of others' positions. Religion has been central to my life since before my memory kicked in, and it's now inextricably linked with my thought processes; removing it from all conversation would be inauthentic, and all I can do is try not to be stupid or offensive with it.

Source.

Antagonistic opinions and proselytizing presentation, however, do seriously threaten reader/author relationships. After all, marketing is everywhere. From television commercials to Google ads, from election debates to politically exuberant Facebook friends, from street protesters to spun media stories, everything and everyone seems to have something to sell us. It begins to feel like an attack after a while.

And sometimes, it is an attack. Artists who share opinions online might do well to remove a few words from their vocabulary: moron, for instance, and all its variants, like nutter and idiot. Even political words like bigot and racist and feminist are dangerous. People use epithets like these because they've learned something in school or church or from their parents or a book, and now they think everyone with common sense and/or education agrees with them. I suspect they don't realize what it sounds like to someone who stands in a politically opposing position and has thought that position through. When those words are used against ideological opponents, they are almost invariably ad hominem treatment and therefore bad form, if not in fact unjust, though they are often quite unjust as well.

There's nothing like the experience of openly revising your own adult-formed opinions to teach you how human nature responds to antagonistic rhetoric and unwanted attempts at persuasion. I'd highly recommend it—especially to artists—as an exercise in humanity, if it weren't so painful for all concerned.

That pain kills off some of the overpowering sense of moral obligation in the face of dissent, the one that demands you correct the wrongheaded thinking of others. It trains you to sigh and shift position when confronted with ignorance, rather than making yourself out to be someone's teacher. You become careful about challenging others' opinions, thanks to firsthand awareness of how easy it is to overlook or rationalize away a few details and come to wrong conclusions. You learn that argument, logical or otherwise, almost universally drives dissenters apart rather than bringing them closer together.

Despite my public openness with much of my life and thought, then, I stand firmly in the camp that claims it's better to be cautious about what you say. And I try to be. For the last couple of years, I've made a point of editing angry opinions out of my blog posts. As cathartic as it is to speak sometimes, comments made out of those burning urges are always made at the risk of someone else's feelings.

It's too easy to forget that the internet is as public as newspapers and television, no matter how small the readership. That when you speak publicly, you don't get to choose your audience.

For help against making angry or snarky responses, especially ones encouraging a narcissistic sense of my own cleverness, I remember Dumbledore. There's a scene in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince where he is faced with a handful of Death Eaters, all intent on killing him and half his students. He greets them by name, with pleasantries of the good evening to you type. One of them sneers something about his "little jokes", and Dumbledore—known for his cleverness—says:

"Jokes? No, no, these are manners."

The point of professionalism is not to be uninteresting or inexpressive. It's about generosity. Manners are about seeing the humanity in the person across from you, no matter what they believe.

It's easy to dehumanize a mob, a demographic opposed to your principles. It's easy to meet a person who embodies the worst of that and find yourself despising them, thinking of them as a monster. And hey, maybe they are low on the scale of beastliness to humanity. But if they're walking and talking and breathing, there's some soul in there left to speak to. One might as well err on the side of kindness.

That's all I ask of an author, regardless of whether I meet them online or in person. And that's the standard I try to hold myself to, with sincere regret for past moments of failure.

Mind over Matter: The Artist and The Choice of Tools

Caravaggio, St. Jerome Writing

Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You should hear every sentence as you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.... Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm[.]
~C.S. Lewis

I think typing everything on the computer leads to a more transitory relationship to the words themselves, they are so easily deleted, they haven’t ‘bled’ on the page the way written words do, but that impermanence gives the writer more freedom while editing to completely transform the piece.
~Masha

This week, the blogalectic has taken up an endlessly-debated question: should writers prefer pen and paper as native to the literary art, or is it all right to upgrade to the typewriter or—heaven forbid—the computer?

The difficulty with this question is that it's impossible to answer with general finality, though Lewis may be right about the typewriter. Alongside the clacking keys, all typewriters I've ever known interrupted the typist at the ends of lines with the bell and mechanical racket of the carriage return. If my choice were between writing by hand or by typewriter, I'd certainly stick with the former.

Thanks to basically holistic ideals, I'd like to believe in a firm, earthy connection between working materials and quality of the art produced thereby. To a certain extent, I do; it's just that the computer works better for my writing than anything else.

C.S. Lewis never used a non-clacking laptop keyboard. Nor did he have access to a backspace key, which turns out to be useful for those of us who rarely finish sentences the way we intended to when we began them. Writers who favor pen complain of losing digitized thoughts to deletion, but I've almost never had to; if a cut phrase or scene becomes necessary, it's usually preserved in a spare file. My deleted-text document for the last few drafts of my NaNoWriMo novel is over 70,000 words, nearly as long as the novel itself.

For better or for worse—possibly for both—the modern computer interferes little with thought, rhythm, or idea. There's no shift or clanging at the end of a line. The writer can absorb himself directly into the text, provided he doesn't have to concentrate on typing. Worlds and characters take form in the mind; digital technology simply removes some of the barriers between creation and the record thereof. Pen-defenders argue that handwriting forces the writer to slow down and think through things, but the pen is not an editor, and the important matter is that the thinking through happens.

Best of all, the computer-written draft stays neat and orderly; there's no scratching out half a page and having to pore over the lines to figure out which words are still part of the work and which aren't. Additions can be inserted without tight scribbles in the margins or attached sheets of paper. Spelling and grammatical errors are easily fixed, and if the writer—like Oscar Wilde—spends all morning taking out a comma and all afternoon putting it back in, he can accomplish the operation without eraser crumbs or Liquid Paper.

All this fails to answer the question generally; it only shows what works for me, though perhaps it may also help explain why so many of us go on using the computer when so many authors argue forcibly for the old-fashioned pen. But Masha offers one further question:

I do wonder, in my more judgmental moments, whether writing solely on the computer has contributed to the huge number of badly written, barely edited books coming out on the market. I know I edit less when I see my writing on a screen instead of a page, and I know that the ability to put so much down, so quickly, with no fear of running out of space has encouraged me to over-write at times. But I don’t know how much of this is due to my own personal weaknesses as a writer and how much is due to the influence of technology.

Through work in a department that revived and digitized old texts, I've seen amusingly dreadful stuff that made it into print ages before the coming of Smashwords, Amazon, or high turnover at publishing houses. Badly written books are too funny to trouble me, or history, very much. Barely edited ones are more irksome; ideally, editors would have the time, numbers, and longevity to stop more authors from using "may" where they mean "might", and to order more rewrites on books that start out strong and fade in the middle. I doubt those troubles are directly due to working on computers, though the many indirect effects of technology upon the pace of life may be involved.

I suggested this topic, but now that I sit down to write about it, the debate over pen versus computer just seems unimportant. The prima materia is in the artist's mind. The influence of mind and body upon each other may naturally work out to a preference for certain tools, but preference comes secondary to proper care and training of the main instrument.

If the artist knows his craft, puts in rigorous hours and years of practice, and becomes so intimate with the work of creation that the practical aspects come as easily as walking or driving a car, it won't matter how he works. And when he has his choice, he'll work the way that works for him.

In a Quiet Room Alone: The Artist and Silence

Johannes Vermeer, The Lacemaker. Source.

"I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it."
~Chaim Potok

"But the article isn’t talking about silence so much as it’s referring to peace. A peace that can actually be had in the midst of barking and birds and whatever other sounds fill your day, but can’t be had on Facebook, or on the phone, or in front of the television. It’s conversation, and the conversation hybrids that slip in through the media that break the silence. Maybe because our minds want to treat them like a real discussion, and who can create art in the middle of a conversation?"
~Masha

The article Masha refers to is a short post by FASO founder Clint Watson, wherein he says to beware the geeks:

If there is indeed a correlation between silence and creativity, then beware of what we, the geeks, have created.  We've built Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and many other services that are designed to tap into the same part of your brain that addicts people to slot machines... The best way to sell art is to produce art that is so good they can't ignore you.  To do that, you need to spend time quietly......the opposite of what the best tech minds of our generation are trying to get you to do.

Artists possess a motherly little instinct for withdrawal and nesting in order to create. Among other things, we look for security, often for small or at least protected spaces, comfort, and—most relevant to today's post—peace and quiet.

As Masha notes, it's not always about silence proper. Some people admit to having difficulty working in actual silence, preferring some sort of cacophonic life or white noise around them. I'm not one of those, but they're out there. Regardless of noise levels, however, I've identified several primary rivals to silence in my own life.

Thanks to social media and notification systems, distracting conversation may be the largest problem. Email sucks attention away from work any time an unread message pops up in the inbox. Twitter requires its faithful users to maintain a near-constant semiconscious state of attempting to be witty. Facebook can be entered and escaped more easily; that is, if one can only avoid arguments.

Competing narrative also causes difficulties. All art works with narrative, but fiction is composed entirely of it and is vulnerable to every attack. And narrative is everywhere. Angry political or religious debates involve the stories we tell ourselves. Everything that comes out of a television appeals to us through story, commercials included. Everything on the internet, likewise. Even music invokes story, especially when there are lyrics.

Without reference to content, the styles used by other writers and even artists of other media can have a subtle intrusive impact on an artist's own style. This is how influence develops, but it can also cause problems. With time and practice, we usually outgrow the tendency to absorb sentence structure and vocabulary usage on contact, but listening to Mozart reputedly helps people perform better on tests; it would shock me if listening to a lot of very simple commercial music or reading mostly weak writing didn't have a negative effect on creativity.

Then there's the simple matter of conflicting rhythms or melodies or simple noise. For instance, trying to write good prose around popular music is a lot like trying to hum a different song than the one currently blasting from the speakers. It takes ten times the concentration to find the melody, and it's next to impossible to keep it, and it doesn't matter how skilled you are—it just makes the work harder than it needs to be.

Those who swear by writing to music usually find it helpful in setting mood, because powerful, immediate concerns of thought or feeling can jerk a text around—if not halt progress entirely. A writer can and should learn to work around moods, but sometimes intervention is necessary. Half the work of being an artist is escaping the world enough to look at it from a distance, to observe and create from a coherent perspective.

For the above reasons, I don't have or desire a television, I rarely listen to music during working hours, and I try—not always successfully—to keep my internet excursions light and short. I don't have a Smartphone, refuse myself the temporary glee of starting various niche blogs, restrict the frequency of events on my calendar, and should probably consider buying Freedom. And I'm learning ways to quiet myself: a walk through the garden, a little piano time, a carefully-created meal or a re-read of a trustworthy book.

Silence, perhaps more than ever before, is a skill which must be learned. The internet and traffic noise and angry politics are unlikely to go away, but their influence can be controlled, and the worst of them avoided. Art depends upon it. And so, I find at times, does sanity.

Peaceful Monday

No discussion post this week; Masha said it wasn't in her. It isn't in me either, since this morning I acted rashly on the idea that my accuracy in both typing and piano-playing might go up if I skipped the coffee for once. Well! Now I'm sleepy, and it's too late for coffee. Especially as I've got to go learn off the soprano line to the Hallelujah Chorus, and ought not hamper my struggling voice with caffeine and cream.

On the other hand, I'm gratified that Masha thought highly of my post, and she's right that we're not in complete disagreement. She says:

"And that, I think, is the natural challenge inherent in beauty, from the fully accessible to the dangerous, it leaves us with the desire for something good just out of reach."

And I couldn't agree more.

Best wishes for a peaceful Monday.

The Arch-Enchanter's Wand: The Artist's Highest Calling

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lilith. Source.

It was a quote that went, roughly, "The highest calling of an artist is to challenge people's views and test the boundaries of society".
~me, loosely quoting someone else

"If [the artist] cannot make a thing of beauty in his art, he will be unable to share truth; if he succeeds in beauty, truth will be a part of the art, with or without his consent."
~Masha

The above quote turned up in my Google Reader recently. I'm not linking back to it, for two reasons: 1) I intend to shred it, and 2) it was only a passing part of an article on a highly controversial issue irrelevant to the question here. My apologies to the author, who seemed good-natured enough, and who did try to present the issue fairly.

But the idea that anyone's highest calling could be to Fix Other People And/Or Society isn't just a wrong notion; it's dangerous. Believing that the artistic gift gives us the right, even the duty, to take a crowbar to the doors on other hearts—that's arrogance. Subtle, well-meaning, insidious arrogance. That idea will destroy art. Left unchecked, it will destroy the soul of the artist as well. Carried into the public square, it's often tyrannical, and George MacDonald spoke truly that:

"The part of philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who would do his neighbour good must first study how not to do him evil, and must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye."—from Lilith

Artists cannot mature in their work without getting beyond this idea that their primary purpose is social change. As Masha says:

"...these ideals and desires are only a tiny part of the artistic calling. They can be an aspect of the whole-hearted pursuit of beauty, or they can be an idol, calling the artist away from his vocation, into certain failure."

We make social change an idol in America, which is part of why young artists lose themselves in this ideal. If it's not curtailed, the next generation of secular art is likely to turn out equal in quality to the last generation of Christian art.

But if our first purpose isn't hacking into the minds of those around us—all right, I'll try and stop ranting now—what is it?

Artists have one first and foremost purpose: to create beauty.

Out of ugliness, beauty. Out of chaos, order. Out of confusion, meaning. Out of despair, hope.

Out of darkness—and here I don't refer so much to the darkness of ignorance as to the darkness of faithlessness, hopelessness, and lovelessness—the lighting of a single candle and the placing of a mirror behind it. The pulling back of dusty curtains to reveal, if nothing else, the light of the stars.

Masha says:

"Beauty and truth are challenging, for sure, to everybody's views in some way. I do believe that art must challenge us, in some way to grow. Art that is completely 'accessible' flounders a little in the shallow end of things, trading in its ability to impact its audience for the comforts of mass appeal. Society's boundaries should always be tested, but only in the pursuit of beauty."

I'm not even sure I go that far. Is there challenge in a beautifully designed stained glass window depicting a Biblical scene or a saint with a few representative props? Yes, but it's much more subtle than the modern Western artist is usually capable of being. We've got to get away from this idea that because "the pen is mightier than the sword", it should be used as one.

The "shallow end of things" is where some people have to begin to learn to swim, so I hold that there's a place for accessible art. Much of children's literature lands here; the best of it is a narrower, safer pool open at one end to the wilder deep.

There's a very, very subtle difference between "testing the boundaries of society" and forcing yourself and your ideals upon innocent dissenters. As Masha pointed out, the idolatrous pursuit of influence will lead the artist into certain failure; likewise, in converse, that "if [the artist] succeeds in beauty, truth will be a part of the art, with or without his consent."

As noted by Cracked, we cannot tell a story without our own ideas coming to bear on the narrative progression. It's simply not possible. If we seek first to offer beauty, though, we might find that truth and its inherent challenges appear of their own accord. If we do our job well enough, that challenge might even turn its point on us.

The Formed Writer and Academia

Me, writing outside St. Peter's Basilica

From Masha, last week:

Jenna~
I realize I didn't really add much to the 'discussion' aspect, so if you have nothing much to add, feel free to boil it all down and just write on [what] you think the benefits or detriments a College writing program would be for you as a writer right now (as a more 'formed' writer). Do you think a program now would be more beneficial or more frustrating for you?

Owing to an immense deck-painting project, along with some time-sensitive editing work, I'm more than happy to keep the blogalectic simple this week. Masha's question is interesting, even though there's next to no chance I'll be enrolling in any kind of school any time soon. If the answers interest you, read on.

The short answer: I don't think I'd get enough out of undergrad to make the cost worthwhile, except in the case of a superb student/teacher relationship. I would probably enjoy grad school, provided that I got along with the professors. But wouldn't you know it—they make you go to undergrad first.

The long answer:

As Masha pointed out, I am a "more 'formed'" writer. That is to say, I've developed voice, direction, and some degree of reasonable confidence in my own work. I'll go on developing, naturally, but the course is set from here.

When 'formed' writing runs up against an academic editor—and I do speak from a certain level of experience—what happens depends a lot upon chemistry between the work and the academic in question, as well as upon style guide loyalties. Regarding the latter, I get marked down a lot for not using the Oxford comma in unambiguous lists; also for believing that if I follow the basic rules, my artistic choices for comma placement are all perfectly defensible. That's all in good, if sometimes annoying, fun.

Regarding the former, the factors are many and the ensuing decisions befittingly complex. I've faced editorial remarks with a list of questions something like this:

• Is this the sort of thing this reader would read for his own enjoyment?
• How thoroughly does the reader seem to grasp what I'm attempting to do?
• What does it mean that this remark seems to come from a different perspective on [insert aspect of writing] from my own?
• What might I learn from this comment/this reader?
• What is the risk to my work if I take this comment at full value?
• Why is everything about writing so damn subjective?

That last one is not quite a joke. One of my readers refers me to a popular novel as an example of technique, and another regularly shreds that same novel as truly pathetic storytelling. My first scene with A.D. delights some readers and baffles others. True, not all of these readers are academics in the creative writing field, but that sends me dangerously close to my old query regarding who has the right idea about how to write a good novel. Is it the dissonant schola of literary professors, or the great inharmonious chorus of readers who read for pleasure and escape and a mile's walk in another's shoes?

Which raises a further question: just who am I trying, ultimately, to please?

My sister had a writing professor whom she loved for his wise instruction and generosity toward his students. I've heard him speak, and I'm a bit envious—I think I'd have loved learning from him, too.

On the other hand, a friend of mine had a writing professor who, as an exercise, had the class create a poem in which the sounds and not the meanings of the words mattered. The professor read my friend's resultant work and said "This is about menstruation." I think my head would've exploded, right there in class.

A creative writing program, for me, would be all about the relationships. I'd learn, one way or another, but I learn anyway, and I will go on learning as long as I have my faculties. A good professor could easily be worth every dime of tuition. An industry connection or two, likewise. But tuition is expensive, and critique partners work on an exchange rate, which is all I can afford right now. For the time being, that settles the question.

The Kindling of a Flame: The Artist and Education

Raphael, The School of Athens. Source.

"The individual is all you ever have and all schools only serve to classify their members as failures."
~Hemingway

Like most people who study writing, I learned that writing can only be taught up to a certain extent. Beyond that, the writer needs something else, something not taught, but given.
~Masha

"We’re very passionate about education in America," Masha says in her recent installment of the blogalectic; "we like the idea of everyone going to college." In the general sense, that's quite true. In the specific sense, meaning me, I'm—despite my fondness and respect for education—not quite comfortable with that last idea. Not everyone is suited to the format and demands of university, and as things stand, the debts generally incurred in the obtaining of a degree are terribly burdensome.

I'm not contradicting Masha, however, as she would seem to agree:

"...while I do think college can be helpful, it can also be in the way of developing as a writer. Flannery O' Connor reminds us that "there's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher." A bad teacher can form a writer in all manner of vices, and the best way to learn writing, through extensive reading, is something we can all do outside of university. I'm not against education, I just prefer not to see it idealized."

I concur. I didn't go to university, not because I didn't want to—part of me has always wanted to—but because the expense far outweighed my expectations of how much it would have ultimately benefited me as a writer. Perhaps I was wrong; perhaps I sensed unfairly that too many writers-in-the-making leave academia with lots of information on the sort of storytelling that pleases deconstruction-happy literature professors, and less concern for what works for the average reader. Some of my own friends have proven that such a judgment hardly covers every graduate.

Even without college, I wanted education. Ergo, I decided—fresh out of high school—to read the classics. Mom pointed me to Austen, and once I got the groove of Regency prose, Dickens was an easy hop and Dostoevsky quite manageable. Hugo's 1200-page Les Miserables was a challenge I couldn't resist. Tolkien happened into my life upon the release of the first movie (I know, I know! At least I had the whole story read before the second, right?)

Apart from the fact that I still haven't read Moby-Dick, then, I've attempted and hopefully gained a respectable independent education in English literature. Let me not, however, discount the value of guidance—provided, of course, that it's good guidance. I certainly feel the lack of some of that, though having a couple of academics as critique partners does help.

Masha questions what education really means, what it is to us as individuals. Narrowing that down to the matter of what education means to an individual writer—for the sake of making this a blog-post, and not a thousand books I'm not qualified to write—well, education begins at birth and doesn't stop with our last formal class.

A writer's faculty is shaped mostly by reading. Good teachers guide reading and interpretation, as well as helping the young writer develop the difficult skill of matching the image he creates on paper with the image already existing in his head. A bad teacher can destroy a budding writer with too forceful methods of shaping, or methods not forceful enough. The faculty for teaching well is a gift at least as rare and valuable as the gift for writing—probably far more so.

Also, different writers need different educations, just as different kinds of surgeon need different wings of the medical school. The set of goals, the nature of the writer's individual gift, the sort of thing he intends to write, his instincts and independence and learning styles, the resources available to him—all of these things require tailored instruction. Maybe he needs grad school; maybe he needs to bypass university altogether and pull all-nighters of studying for no other reason than that he's just that crazy about his work. He'll pull all-nighters regardless. Maybe he needs a good English professor, or maybe he needs a steady critique partner, or both. Maybe he needs to read Hemingway and Austen thirty times apiece, trying to get at the heart of great work; maybe he needs to check out half the library before he can find his own voice.

Among the canon of overused truisms is the statement that there are many paths to success. It's also true that there are many kinds of success, but that's another blog-post. For now, enough to say that education is vital to the writer, but a Bachelor of Arts degree may not be. O would-be student, count the costs either way.