Lowell Mick White - Ordinary Horrors: A Blog

This Has Got to Stop

10/30/2020

So four years ago I was interviewed by a wonderful former student, Raikhan Serikova, who was then a grad student in International Journalism at Newcastle University in the UK. She was doing a piece on the US election and wanted to know if I had any thoughts.

I had thoughts.

I wasn’t right about everything! I thought HRC would win, though it would be close. I thought that Trump, if elected, would not seek reelection because he’d be too fucking old.

But I was right about a few things. I said:

His normalization of lying, racism, and misogyny has strengthened anti-democratic forces in our country.
People will die that should not die [if Trump is elected]. Lives will be derailed. The institutions of government will be damaged, perhaps permanently.
A big percentage of the American population—25% to 30%–is deeply ignorant, racist, and angry. Trump has energized these people and has given them a political focus. They will be a threat to our democracy (and maybe to the world) for a long time. Traditionally, for the past 150 years (in other words, since the end of our civil war) American electoral politics have been volatile, while the government itself has been quite stable. This is changing. If Republicans control the House and the Senate after this election, don’t be surprised to see the US government…just stop functioning.

So. This shit has got to stop. If you haven’t yet voted—get out there and vote right now. Stand in line if you have to. Risk covid if you have to.

Pandemic Status XII

10/30/2020

All indices up. Election-driven Terror up the most! Will Terror take the lead by election day?

I really fucking hope not.

I Answer Some Questions About Writing V

10/23/2020

All of the answers, none of the questions....

I think an occasional ALL CAPS might work. Italics are the usual way of emphasizing.
Be careful—readability is very important....
Guilt won't get your book written—it just makes you feel bad.
Find something that makes you feel good—knitting, fly fishing, basketball, old movies, video games....
The process of learning something is for me the best part of any activity....
Playlists for books are a great idea….
Do it.
The "real" person will be transformed by the magic of imagination and the exigencies of the story into a "fictional" person.
My response was pretty basic—don't base your characters on people who will be hurt.
Your life as you live it is your most precious writing resource. Don't be afraid to use it.
What does your focal character see? There's your description—maybe, if it's needed
I actually think Tolkien was doing this….
The best novel? Oh—War & Peace, by my boy Tolstoy.
You'd don't want your best writing buried where no one will notice it!
Setting is always important, unless your characters are floating around shapeless in a formless void. They are some place.
Remember—the BODY is also a setting....
Probably The Great Gatsby, for the punctuation.
Yes—I am inspired by em-dashes and commas!
I may have talked about this before....

Shelby Hearon, my first creative writing teacher: "It's never the book in your head."

Larry Heinemann, my last creative writing teacher: "Revision is where the money is."

You can tag the dialogue through action or setting, too.
What are your characters doing while talking? What are they seeing?
Read it backwards, aloud.
This removes the context of the paragraph, and you can see (hear) each sentence in all its glory/ignominy.
Fifty-one years, ha!
You have to be persistent.
I think foreshadowing is best accomplished as an aspect of revision.
In your first draft, going forward, it's more important to just get to the end.
They disappear into the background—which is what we want.
Obvious isn't always bad, and what's obvious to you—the author—isn't necessarily going to be obvious to the reader....
Are they talking on the phone or face to face?
They could be walking, shooting zombies, fishing, watching tv, washing dishes, sitting on the can, shopping, driving, in church, in a meeting, fighting—they could be doing whatever it is people do....
Also—it's important to think: are they actually listening to each other?
I mean, really—how many times do people actually fully pay attention to one another?
Good question! I'm trying to figure this out myself!
Try going for empathy.
No one is really frightened.
I would keep moving forward and get the story written and then look critically at what you have.
Do you really need a backstory with past relationships? Maybe—but maybe not.
You take something you've written that has a lot of problems (all texts are flawed) and then you fix the problems.
It takes time and attention and is really rewarding.
I think the aging process has left me more easily distracted than I once was.
The problem with writing is that life gets in the way.
How much time can you afford to spend on writing? For most of us—not enough.
Having a roof over your head and food in your belly is probably more important than writing!
A lot of writers do practice writing….
It's great to treat yourself when you accomplish something! Everyone needs to do this!
For me—champagne and turkey legs!
Many years ago in a class like ours I wrote a story I thought was pretty good. But I know now it was a good student story....
I know for a fact that at the time I wrote it, I didn't know what the heck I was doing….
There are any number of writers who have gone down the road of pomposity.
The best writers—the best revolutionaries, the best eye doctors, whatever—are informed by a sense of humor.
My advice--always be aware of the absurdities and ridiculosities. And embrace them.
My whole life up to the point I finished...?
The difference is—LIFE.
A LOT OF TIME.
Just keep going down one path or another until you find the right path....
DO NOT DELETE ANYTHING! Keep all your variations. Trust me—you have room on your hard drive.
Each round of revision I focus something else—dialogue, setting, transitions, colors, textures, whatever....
Write a story with a strong beginning.
From looking out the window, from the things I see in life. From dreams. From snippets of people talking that I overhear. From things I learn....
I look at a situation and ask, "What if...."
There are often big big BIG differences between "Truth" and "Fact."
The highly personal voice is always very engaging. You can do a lot with a memoir
Do you have a citation for that?
(I could also be stupid!)
Borders are interesting—they are where things come together, and where things come apart....
Life gets in the way. You just have to do the best you can with the time you have....

Pandemic Status XI

10/23/2020

All indices up. Rage still leads the way, but Terror up the most.

Because this is a terrifying world.

Odd Job: Wolfe Nursery

10/16/2020

#wolfe

Wolfe ad, 03/13/1982

Several years ago I was on an AWP panel chaired by the late great Larry Heinemann. The theme of the panel was work and jobs, and how these basic human endeavors affects and influences us as writers. Larry thought it was a good idea to introduce the panel by listing each job the panelist had had in their lives. The panel was at 800am (insane!) and I remember sitting there hungover and tired and feeling more and more depressed as Larry introduced me and read through the list of 17 jobs I had given him. I sat there thinking I have made some bad fucking life decisions….

(Then I got up and gave the worst presentation I’ve ever given, but that’s another story…).

(And of course bad life decisions make for good literature, maybe).

So, anyway—this is one of those bad life decisions. Wolfe Nursery. I worked at the south location for about four months in 1982. I sold shade trees, unloaded trucks, did whatever the stupid bosses told me to do—I even mopped the floor once (a fiasco).

I sold a magnolia tree once—got a $30 commission. Yay! Real money for broke-ass me.

Much of my time was wasted unloading trucks of fertilizer and peat moss. There was a competing nursery just on the other side of Ben White and we used to denigrate their manhood because they used forklifts to unload their trucks. We used our backs! We used brute strength!

A semi would back into the soil additive section, and three guys would get to work—one up on the flat bed of the truck, one in the middle, and a stacker on the end. The truck guy would peel the 40-pound bags of sheep or cow shit off the pallet (peel because the plastic bags would stick together) and toss the bag to the guy in the middle, who would spin and toss it to the stacker, who would arrange the bags into an orderly, stable stack. The middle job was the best, I thought—you could sort of catch the bag in mid-air and flip it to the stacker without too much effort. The truck position was the worst—you had to pull those bag up and throw them.

Three of us on a job like that on a fully-loaded semi? Five or six hours.

And at the end of a shift—yeah, you smelled like you’d been working in the soil additive section.

Selling shade trees was better. Or selling roses! Or just about anything else.

I see in this ad the little box for “spring bulbs.” Yeah, I remember those fucking things. There were crates and crates of bulbs, and each bulb was in a little cellophane packet closed off with a tiny tight rubber band. It was my task, one rainy afternoon, to remove those rubber bands. Hundreds of them. For four hours or so. I was cross-eyed by the time I finished.

After work I stopped by the Deep Eddy for a beer or ten, and I was complaining about my day. Peter Nye said, “You realize that on the other end there was some guy putting those rubber bands on, right?”

And I did realize that! I had actually spent the cross-eyed afternoon thinking that we were all victims of the vast capitalist conspiracy! That this work was meaningless, that my labor would never be adequately compensated….

I was happy when they laid me off in May.

Yeah, look at it.

Pandemic Status X

10/16/2020

Here's a pandemic life note: I look better in a mask than I look without a mask.

I wonder why?

All indices up this week because of course they are.

I Answer Some Questions About Writing IV

10/9/2020

As usual, all answers, no questions....

I'm a huge procrastinator, too.
This works.
You'll have to experiment around and find the best time for you. Me, I write at night….
The easiest thing in the world is to not write—this is true for everyone
I hate getting started. But once I start, I'm fine.
Most of the time we'll never know the autobiographical relationship of poet and poem.
Poems tend to be more personal than stories—there are fewer places to hide in a poem.
I would always prefer that students analyze a text rather than talk about their feelings about the text—analysis over autobiography.
A university class is not a book club.
As writers we might strive to be perceptive, rather than judgmental.
It’s (mostly, probably) perfectly okay to find the behavior of a fictional character repellent!
The super-badass character is also aspirational for many readers….
The discomfort perhaps comes as we recognize the limits of our empathy and the difficulty of truly imagining the experience of another human.
Factual aspects of a story can always be researched, and research is always important to a creative writer.
Take your knowledge of these emotions and give them to your characters.
It means reading for HOW a text means, not what a text means. It's reading as perception, not judgement.
It's maybe like when dreams fade once you wake up.
When you're bored with what you're doing.
All writers have an internal editor. I sure do! As writers we have to find a way to shut up that voice, dodge around it, suppress it.
When you've accomplished one thing and want another challenge.
When your vision of the world changes.
When you learn something new.....
Keeping notes is a really good idea! Most writers I know have overflowing notebooks with will all sorts of ideas and inspirations....
I think this would all have to depend on the writer and where they are at that moment in their lives....
Said is NOT dead. I would strongly advise you to stick with SAID and ASKED (almost) all the time.
They are inoffensive little words that become invisible.
When they are invisible, readers can actually focus on your character's brilliant talk.
Maybe try skipping the things you're having trouble with.
Add those things later as part of the revision process...?
Is this writer's block or is it the voice of your internal editor?
Not necessarily.
In a short story, you can get by with only one "round" character. You can distinguish between secondary characters by giving them distinguishing physical characteristics.
(I learned this from my man Tolstoy, in War & Peace).
For a long work like a novel, you want to keep character notes just so you don't suddenly change their educational background or eye color or whatever.
You can improvise as much as you like, but keep notes on your improvisation.
I feel pretty confident starting when I know more or less how I want the book to end, and I have an outline that will get me at least 40 pages or so into the first draft. But even better is a BIG outline.
I use both. I love my little notebooks, and I love my phone.
An advantage of the notebooks: when you're at a meeting (in pre-pandemic times) it's considered impolite to mess with your phone while someone is speaking. But you can write in your notebook and say whatever you feel like saying, even if you're slagging the speaker! It's fun.
Getting any book out is a big deal. After that, you can't control how many people read it, and you really can't control who likes it.
So much of what is considered success is luck. But—you have to work hard to put yourself in a position to have luck.
Research! Creative writers do research!
Show their character through action. Just like every day real people show who they are by how they act....
Yes, I think all of us should be writing in response to the pandemic.
This historical crisis we're going through right now is complicated and exhausting—it calls for writers to pay attention to it.

Pandemic Status IX

10/9/2020

Of course all indices are way way way way up again. This is America 2020.

Let's look back at my pandemic status for late April. Such an innocent and stress-free time!

Terror was actually trending down. (I didn't know Terror).

Almost Five Things That Are Good

10/2/2020

Everything is a mess right now and poor America is sadly trending negative. Here are five things that are good:

Deven Green—her Friday couch concerts are the capstone of my week. Deven Green makes the world a better place!
The new Elizabeth Hand novel, The Book of Lamps and Banners. I just started it and it’s wonderful and Cass Neary is one of my all-time fave fictional characters.
Beer—always. Plus pandemic beer deliveries!
Turkey—always. Plus turkey probably has at least as many anti-viral benefits as hydroxy, and tastes better.

Well. Four things are all I can come up with right now. Maybe the world is worse off than I thought.

Better for you than hydroxychloroquine!

Pandemic Status VIII

10/2/2020

Well, of course all indices are way way way up this week. We’re in pandemic chaos around this here sea to shining sea.

Thank god for beer deliveries.