“Every human being has, I believe, at times given room to the idea of creating a world himself. The Pope, in a flattering way, encouraged these thoughts in me when I was a young man. I reflected then that I might, had I been given omnipotence and a free hand, have made a fine world. I might have bethought me of the trees and rivers, of the different keys in music, of friendship, and innocence; but upon my word and honor, I should not have dared to arrange these matters of love and marriage as they are, and my world should have lost sadly thereby. What an overwhelming lesson to all artists! Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous, solution. Be brave, be brave!”

—Isak Dinesen, The Deluge at Norderney

There’s not too fine a distinction between humor and tragedy; even tragedy is in a way walking a tightrope between the ridiculous, between the bizarre and the terrible. Possibly the writer uses humor as a tool; he’s still trying to write about people, to write about man, about the human heart in some moving way, and so he uses whatever tool that he thinks will do most to finish the picture which at the moment he is trying to paint, of man. He will use humor, tragedy, just as he uses violence.

—William Faulkner, from his lectures at the University of Virginia

I haven’t written about the workshop much (at least on here—in private correspondence I’ve written extensively) but since I attended last year, in the summer of 2009, I’ve grown as a reader, writer, critic, observer, tactician, &c. My friends there—and I, gloriously, count my instructors among my friends—recommended books to me that have made the last few months a delight; my memory of past conversations, and the letters we write continue to lay fresh avenues of thought; I have an extended family built on shared, self-imposed affliction and composed of the finest people I have had the privilege to live with, cheek-by-jowl. Nothing I’ve done compares.

The instructors this year are excellent. Delia Sherman, George R.R. Martin, Dale Bailey, Samuel R. Delany, Jeff VanderMeer, Ann VanderMeer. And, if I may repeat myself: Samuel R. Delany. Samuel R. Delany is teaching this year. Samuel R. Delany. Yes.

So I say again, with fervency and earnest eyes and overly familiar hand-pressing: If you write short stories, apply to the Clarion workshop. Today is your last day. Midnight according Pacific time, so you slobs on the east coast have until three.

My grade eleven English teacher, Kristopher Koechling, who remains the best teacher I ever had on any subject in my layabout academic career (discounting the Clarion Writer’s Workshop 2009, during which I had 24 teachers of various stripe and twitchy skill, discounted because it’s not fair to compare any classroom teacher to people with whom one lives and works and reads), taught my first ever creative writing class in my final year of high school, and assigned everyone in the class to buy a little notebook to keep on their person and write something, anything at all, in their notebook every day. I filled two small tear-out notebooks over that semester and continued after I left his class, writing in baby composition books with stitched binding. I admit, I stopped writing in them for about a year in college, but I carried a notebook in my back pocket even then. And I just started my fourteenth one.

I was going to copy a day’s entries here, as an example; then I read through the last week or so, and decided not to. But I don’t think the content—my recorded inanity or silliness or obscenity—invalidates the wisdom of a handy recording device. This sort of notebook is useful to me, as an idea-generator, to preserve ideas and patterns of ideas and recurring thoughts, to store output, not to decant brilliance (unless you’ve got it, in which case, knock yourself out). Even when I have writer’s block, I can usually still write in one of these because much of what I write down is what I see, or how what I see seems, or a similarity between what I see and what I’ve seen, or a comparison of what I see and something I heard about once, or an extrapolation, like, “What if what I see were this way but more so?” or “What if what I see were not this way but another?” (All that is one possible answer to the question, “Where do you get your ideas?”)

That was a longwinded way to say: I have a pocket notebook made of paper and I like it very much. As for a full kit, I don’t think my dream kit exists, exactly, or if it does, I certainly can’t afford it.

To write well, I need a device for:

• Reading – Preferably an open reader with a legible display the size of a paperback book that also displays landscape, and that can deal well with double-page pdfs (my own scans), text files (Project Gutenberg), OpenOffice docs (proofreading my own work, critiquing fellow writers), the ebook format du jour (ePub or otherwise), and image archives (comics). Or, instead of a reader, I could stay with hardcopy books. And maybe an rss feed. But regardless of medium, I need to be able to read what’s been done in the past, and what’s happening now.
• Writing stories – What’s not useful: I’ve written a novel longhand, and now it’s sitting in an unsharable lump on my desk (also it’s a terribly written book, which is a different problem). Longhand is good for getting the story out of my head, but it usually arrives unformed and knobbly, and needs a great deal of revision, plus the time to transfer from paper to a malleable digital form. I tried a typewriter and ended up with the same problem as when I wrote longhand: errors take up physical space, and when I’m done typing I have one copy that doesn’t incorporate edits easily. So I need a way to store my manuscripts that is friendly to revision and sharing, which right now means OpenOffice on my laptop.
• Notes – I would be wisest to link my notes with a database, but I’m too lazy to input them all, and I rather like the haptic reality of ink on paper, so an electronic device is out. Rather, the decision is postponed. If the Android or something similarly small and versatile came with a comfortably sized keyboard that felt good to type on, I’d switch in a minute, maybe even use it for writing entirely and ditch the laptop. But until then, paper for notes and recopy the salient bits (poetry, story ideas, character sketches, &c) to my laptop. Mead just put out a series of notebooks with excellent paper that neither feathers nor bleeds. I bought a pocket-size a few weeks ago and have been filling it with embarrassing and inept poetry. (And hm, I need to remember to grab a 6″x9″ notebook the next time I’m out. Because what I need are more empty and quarter-filled notebooks of fine paper. Yes.)
• Talking to people – I have a phone that does nothing but field calls and texts. It is a hunk of stone. A smart phone would be nice, one that would collate my notes to a database and give me chat and GPS, but do I absolutely need this to work? No. Not in the slightest. Warren Ellis does, but he collaborates more often than I do. I prefer face-to-face conversations anyhow, and glean from them an overflowing measure of creative juice. Talking is helpful, if not necessary. Maybe Skype is the answer? Periodical virtual dinner parties full of creative spitballing and noodling? Or, why not, let’s form that grouphouse I’ve been muttering about for years and all live like ferrets in a sock (i.e. in each others’ business).

I can achieve these purposes using separate devices, but I would prefer one. A fold-out, cardstock-thin, hyper-resilient, e-ink tablet with a flexinib stylus (in the shape of my Lamy 2000) that supports handwriting recognition, that also hooks into my mail, that I can keep in my back pocket in a little matte black case that double functions as a phone would work best, please. Science, I’m talking to you.

All this tech aside, the fact of the matter is: as neat and fresh as technology gets, the best, most original part of fiction or any other creative act is the part you contribute, that comes out of your brain, not the tool, and whatever means you use to get it out is your business. As Warren Ellis says, “Obviously [these devices] all serve different purposes, but they are all in fact bent to the same purpose, the essential purpose of writing: getting the idea down before you forget it. Doesn’t matter if the idea’s crap. Doesn’t matter if it’s not immediately useful. Doesn’t matter if it’s half-formed. Get it down.” But don’t waste work; be smart about it.

I’ve been thinking about risk in literature lately—mostly in the context of wanting not to retread smooth ground—but I run into the same wall each time: by what criteria should I measure risk? (For an example of what he means by “creative risk,” Damien cites Bradbury, a writer of whose work I am, on the whole, embarrassingly ignorant, although I’ve read a few of his stories.)

Does risk lie in the writer’s fear of reprisal? Does experimentation lie in simple controversy (talking about what a society has quietly agreed to ignore), or telling stories in untried forms, or telling stories from a new point of view (a person, perhaps, previously ignored in that writer’s culture), or setting a story in a new sort of place? The writer can play with any aspect of fiction; there are no rules if the result works, and no penalty besides wasted time if he fails.

Short stories are an excellent medium for experimentation: they pose comparatively low risk, in terms of time invested. Elizabeth Bear compared the short story to the club scene in music: both are comprised of “bubble and boil;” they’re a conversation, one story to another, and their virtue is immediate feedback. Short stories are where we spy out the new land.

And what are the stakes? Are we risking only readers’ disapproval? I don’t think it’s mostly cowardice that stymies exploration; it’s complacency, or calcified imaginations. (And too, not every writer is by necessity an explorer. Some are homesteaders, and their role is valuable as well.)

What I want, and what is most difficult for me, is to write fresh stories, honest ones, without softening or misdirecting my words. Paul Park apparently suffers from none of this difficulty, if judged by his excellent fiction, yet he said the following in an interview, as he discussed the evolution of his style:

… the hardest thing for me as a writer is to speak without irony, without the protection of being misunderstood. To say, “this is what I think is important,” or “this is what I think is true, or beautiful, or funny, or moving”—that is what is difficult for me.

I strive toward greater honesty in all things. But is this greater personal clarity and vulnerability the sort of uncommon boldness we’re striving for, or is that process of flaying the lying layers from the writer’s heart simply called “writing well?”

At the last, whether all my other questions are answered or not, I want to know: where is the unpeopled frontier? Because I want to spy out the new land.

tiger the color of light, brown deer
on the outskirts of night, girl glimpsed
leaning over green balconies of rain,
adolescent incalculable face,
I’ve forgotten your name, Melusina,
Laura, Isabel, Persephone, Mary,
your face is all the faces and none,
you are all the hours and none…

— Octavio Paz, Piedra de Sol

(I found this snippet while searching through past story notes and realized that I’ve tried to write the same story at least four times. This time maybe I’ll finish it and move on. Or just move on.)

When you undertake to make a work of art—a novel or a clay pot—you’re not competing against anybody, except yourself and God. Can I do it better this time?

– Ursula K Le Guin, from her essay The Stone Ax and the Muskoxen, collected in The Language of the Night.

I’m at work, so I’ll effuse later, but yes, it would be fair to say that I’m excited. And a bit intimidated, given the skill of the other writers going. Not to mention the instructors.

Six weeks of writing and creative community in California. I am looking forward to this so hard.

But soon. O yes, so soon.

Until then, let your joy be as full as mine:

But I can explain all this away: I’ve been writing short stories for the past month. Mostly just one short story, actually.

“But how can that be?” you say. “Shouldn’t you be able to write a short story in one or two sittings? How could it possibly take you a month to write 15-20 pages? That’s less than one page per day. Are you that lazy?”

“Shut up,” I say. “Or I will drown you with tigers.”

I did write some more poems, so it wasn’t all mental thrashing, but still. A month per short story is silly and unprofessional. However: the deadline for that story is tomorrow, so here’s hoping I’ll be able to sort some of these posts out, and maybe respond to what I read more than once a month.

In other news, I’m writing the next story with a pen, in a notebook, where there is no frickity-frackity internet. Because I have all the self-discipline and focus of a chicken pecking rock salt on the freeway.

Also, I will work on my analogies. Because they are terrible. Like a… Never mind.