rebeccakuder

Fear

Gary Perkins survived the 1974 Xenia tornado by hiding under a desk.

In 1974, I lived in Yellow Springs, Ohio, ten miles from Xenia.  One of the worst tornadoes on record hit Xenia that spring.  I remember only a few things about that day: hiding under a heavy blanket in my bathtub; a hail-ball the size of a softball (maybe smaller: I was a kid) that kept for a long time in my freezer; the way Xenia looked like a clearcut forest for years afterwards.  Even as they recreated buildings, they couldn’t rebuilt trees.

I still live about ten miles from Xenia, a town that has traditionally been  plagued by tornadoes.  I’ve been processing my fear of tornadoes ever since 1974.  They haunt my dreams and fiction.  Last summer I wrote a poem (or something that might some day be a poem) about those springs of childhood, memories of many green skies.   So, knowing there’d be “weather” tonight, upon hearing a continuous tornado warning siren, I interrupted bedtime reading to take my daughter, who hadn’t napped, down to the basement.  I took the flashlight and phone, and my laptop, which is the only source of live information (live streaming TV station audio, as we don’t have cable) and explained calmly why we had to go down there, trying not to scare her.  Within a few moments, she said, “I’m afraid!”  She seemed to be trying on the costume of “afraid” more than feeling real fear.  The storm passed (three-inch hail through Xenia, in fact) and we went back upstairs.

I imagine my fear of “weather” is something like what children of the Cold War grew up with: the duck and cover mentality.  (You want to see something interesting, go here.)  I need to work it out, find a way to let go of the freak-out while keeping myself and my family sanely safe.  I don’t want to be alarmist about green skies.  Just because I have a visceral memory of that time, I don’t want to pass it along to my daughter.

But how?

rebeccakuder

“I’ll dance tonight, wear holes in my shoes…”

In the car this morning, listening to my daughter’s “mixed tape” (a CD, actually) that includes Jack Hardy’s song, “Blackberry Pie,” I got sad again about Jack’s passing.  Since he died, I haven’t not been sad about it, but there are moments when there’s an upwelling I can’t ignore or fake my way out of.  I told my daughter that it makes me happy and sad to hear Jack’s songs.  After she informed me that I should not sing the song because, “I’m Jack Hardy and I get to decide who sings my songs,” we had an interesting conversation about how he wrote those songs, and how they are his, but he also gave them to us, so they are also ours.  She agreed.

Here are the lyrics:

Blackberry Pie

i stopped all day to pick wildflowers
down by the banks where the blackberry grows
all in the shadows of the late autumn hours
all in the brambles and the late blooming rose
i picked all of the white ones and picked all the blues
for those are the ones that would go with her dress
and i'll dance tonight, wear holes in my shoes
'til i am the one that she loves the best

(chorus:)
so dally down where the river runs
where the forest bathes the senses clean
dally down where the fiery sun
and the rhythm moon makes a faery dream
and you might think that my heart would lie
that many a girl had caught my eye
but my heart all along belongs to the girl
who baked me a blackberry pie

though i've stayed single all of these years
'tween the twisting rope and the wounding wind
never staying long enough to see the spring
where i had seen the harvest in
and i don't give a tinker's damn for the road
though many they say i'm bound to roam
and i just might be the last one in
though i will be coming home

(repeat chorus)

and many a glass i'll drink tonight
where the wine-red hand is from work or fight
there is no judge more fair than time
for there is no one to change his mind
each time i look in the parting glass
those years that look both ways to know
i'll sing the last song of my youth
but i'll sing it again tomorrow

(repeat chorus)

Today the line, “I’ll dance tonight, wear holes in my shoes/till I am the one that she loves the best,” made me think about writing.  About what I’m willing to do, what I even want to do when I write.  I am willing, I want to wear holes in my shoes so the thing (the novel, the essay, the story) is good, is good enough.  To extend the metaphor, I was thinking an editor might be the “she” in that phrase, but more than that, the “she” is also me.  So I’m the dancer, and I’m also the “she” who the dancer wants to impress, from whom the dancer want to earn love.  Crazy geometry.  An illustration of how Jack’s songs are about so many more things than what appears on the surface.  And how they belong to him, but they also belong to us.

And the sadness comes from my pushing against this: I know that no one lives forever, but I always thought he would “sing it again tomorrow.”

rebeccakuder

Paragraph as fingerprint?

image of egg stolen from http://tinyurl.com/3c7rfzo

In hopes of assessing how many one sentence paragraphs I had in my novel, I changed the magnification on my word processor window, which made the text appear much smaller than usual.  This allowed me to see most of a page on one screen.  As I scrolled through the pages, stopping whenever I saw a one sentence paragraph, I joined what I could with longer paragraphs, and omitted some.  This was prompted by a piece of advice in Francine Prose’s Reading Like A Writer, namely not to overuse the one sentence paragraph.  As I combed through the text, some unexpected things happened:

1) I realized that sometimes one sentence paragraphs are necessary, the best choice.  I want to trust the reader, and not lean too heavily on the structural signal of a one sentence paragraph as alert: “Hey you reader!  Look here! This line is so  important I set it up on its own!  Read carefully!”  And yet sometimes a one sentence paragraph just feels right.  (It was good to interrogate each occurence, however, to be sure.)

2) The decision about where to break paragraphs has its own intuition, and the writer should take time to quiet down enough and follow it.

3) I was doing a lot of changing and then changing back, doing and undoing.  A lot of tinkering, but maybe the act of tinkering confirmed that I’d gotten some bits “right” before questioning, if such a thing as “right” is possible in a thing so subjective as fiction.

4) Another nuance I hadn’t considered, in defense of keeping some one sentence paragraphs in this novel: my protagonist is seven years old.  The child’s close lens on her world and the visual smallness of a one sentence paragraph seem connected.  I don’t think this is overly precious, in this case.

5) The exercise was a great lesson, and proved the point that Prose includes in her book.  On p. 68-9, she quotes Rex Stout’s novel, Plot It Yourself, in which “Nero Wolfe is called upon to determine if three manuscripts that figure into a case involving accusations of plagiarism could have been written by the same person.”:

“A clever man might successfully disguise every element of his style but one–the paragraphing.  Diction and syntax may be determined and controlled by rational processes in full consciousness, but paragraphing–the decision whether to take short hops or long ones, and whether to hop in the middle of a thought or action or finish it first–that comes from instinct, from the depths of personality.  I will concede the possibility that the verbal similarities, and even the punctuation, could be coincidence, though it is highly improbable; but not the paragraphing.  These three stories were paragraphed by the same person.”

So is the paragraph like a fingerprint, individual to each writer?  Maybe.

Another thing happened as I worked through the manuscript, not related to paragraphs, but worth noting.  As the text looked so much smaller to my writing eye, it performed a visual trick on me.  I’ve done this bird’s-eye thing before, but this time I was pulled into some scenes despite (or maybe because of) how hard it was to read the words.  The clusters of words formed different shapes in my brain, pulling me in.  Like those little sugar Easter eggs that you peer into, I had to look closely and see the world that was hiding there.  And thus I did a whole lot of unexpected line editing than I planned to do.  Good.

As always, I hope it’s stronger for the toil.

rebeccakuder

The best lilac ever lives on (and blooms)!

This little light of mine...

A tiny, important thing is happening in my yard.  The little white lilac is blooming.

Here’s the history of my beloved, best ever lilac tree.  When I read that old post from 2006, I marvel at how long ago that was in personal years.  Since then, I had a daughter, the country house is larger, now almost roomy, thanks to an addition.  And the white lilac shoot has been moved to its second country house location (to make room for the addition).

A harsh winter, a rainy spring, and now there’s beautiful popcorn on the small tree.  I breathe in its heady fullness.  I look back and think of how I wanted to kick the ass of the people who cut it down.  I think back to how I considered the word “evil” in the cutting down of that good grandmother lilac tree.  (Now, rather than “evil,” I would call it “unskilled,” and the word would not be a euphemism.)

I savor these blooms.  May the years provide many small but important moments to celebrate flexibility, evolution, and the tender cycle of life.

rebeccakuder

How things need to be said

How do you say "apple"?

This morning, my daughter was talking about how one of her friends says words.  He’s about two, and words are emerging from his little being.  My daughter said, “He says ‘apple’ how it needs to be said!”  Apple, that powerful and delicious word, its expression  with rewarding payoff in fruit.

I love the phrase “how it needs to be said.”  I wish I knew better how things I need to say need to be said.  All I can say is I’m working on it, working toward it, meanwhile watching the delectable round red fruit of finding the right word, often out of reach…

rebeccakuder

Breaking, where to break

An important little symbol.

Oh, where to break the paragraphs, how to expunge some one sentence paragraphs, justify some two sentence paragraphs, avoid too many short paragraphs, how not to be jarring, or coy, and how to trust the reader to know where I mean to place emphasis, how to trust my intuition, the flow of the words, the lightning bolt that tells me to end or begin a paragraph…

Understanding, maybe a little bit, how poets work.

rebeccakuder

Vigor takes work

E.B. White, writing in Maine

I just reread Elements of Style, and several bits of wisdom have taken residence in my mind.  This was the first time I’ve read the fourth edition.  I found the updates to this edition helpful, in particular, some of the tidbits in the final section on style.  If you haven’t read it, do.

I’ve been working through a novel, editing, pruning, and rearranging.  Strunk and White remind me of point 22, on p. 32 of this edition: “Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.”  This can apply to sentences, paragraphs, lines of poetry, and even words: the beginning and end of these units carry the most power, the most weight.  The middle can be incidental, or worse, ignored.  Here’s a clever example (possibly urban legend, but interesting anyway) of how words can work with mixed up middles becoming invisible, and yet the content is still clear.  (Thanks to my friend Lara for digging this up when my human memory failed.):

“Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”

Beginnings and ends of these words are stable, are what we expect, and therefore they guide in reading through the garble.

Another thing that Elements of Style illustrates is more visual than literal.  Writers have to learn the twin arts of making a mess (making a creation, a draft) and then cleaning it up (editing, revising).  If you look at the layout of the examples in Strunk and White, you could consider the left column (before the makeover) as the making of the mess, and the right column (after the makeover) as cleaning it up.  I’m going to use this idea when I talk to students.  I think it helps to put the implicit and explicit judgment of Strunk and White into a context: all writing is a process, a walking through and then away from the muddy, toward the clear.  Start somewhere.  Edit as needed, strive to improve the mess, to communicate better.

Maybe the most important advice is point 17, on p. 23, “Omit needless words.”  An anthem for some people who write, an ideal to strive toward.  I’ve been polishing, weeding the needless, plucking extraneous words from overburdened sentences.  Sometimes it takes years to realize a word is needless.  Omit needless words is a noble mantra and practice.  With time, I could whittle this paragraph down even more than I have, but in the battle between how the blogosphere measures time and my tendency toward perfectionism, I go for speed and risk flaws.  This time, for the first time, I found (or noticed) the sub-mantra of Omit needless words on p. 19, under point 14.  “Note, in the examples above, that when a sentence if made stronger, it usually becomes shorter.  Thus, brevity is a by-product of vigor.”

It’s worth repeating: “…brevity is a by-product of vigor.”

That is such a beautiful fact, and beautifully put.  No wonder I am tired, this revision has been vigorous.  The novel is shorter.  And, I hope, stronger.

rebeccakuder

W-O-M-A-N (Turn that frown upside down!)

Peggy Lee. That lady must have had some darn fine warshing gloves.

One excellent reason to have Peggy Lee’s “Fever & Other Hits” lying around:

Say one morning you find cat barf in your kid’s bin of wooden food (each piece with velcro dots to let the child mimic chopping) because it was left on the floor (lesson: if you leave your toys on the floor, Dante, aka “Big Tiny” the cat might barf on them), you can turn a frown upside down!

Here’s how:

1) Assess which turnips, carrots, and tomatoes need warshed. Remove the big chunks first.  Get a clean bag and stash the unsullied food.

2) Get a used toothbrush (that you won’t reuse for your mouth), some good soap, and the sullied wooden food.

3) Start scrubbing.

4) Realize, through your disgust and crankiness, that this is an opportunity to teach your toddler the word “REPULSIVE.”

5) Realize still further, through this repulsive task, which song has popped into your head.  And laugh.

6) Put down the half-clean wooden carrot top.  Wash and dry your hands.

7) Put on Peggy Lee, risk blasphemy by skipping over the song “Fever,” which always reminds you of the good old college days, and watching Pee Wee Herman lip synching in platform shoes; pine momentarily for the careless 1980s.  (Anyone remember that?)  Skip directly to song number two.

8) Sing along, “‘Cause I’m a woman,” and make sure your daughter hears you spelling that glorious word.

(To the gentlemen: Before you get your boxers in a twist, yes, I know you can clean cat barf too.  Sure can!  And plenty else.  But you’ll need to find your own song, darlings.  This one is ours.)

rebeccakuder

Shut up and sing the song

Jack Hardy’s (magic) green velvet coat

When a songwriter at Jack Hardy’s weekly songwriters group would explain what he or she was about to sing, Jack Hardy would say, “Shut up and sing the song.”  Abrupt, and to some, rude, but a valid procedural point for a workshop, even more notable in its good advice to the writer.

Let the work speak for itself.  If something is  important enough, yet is not on the page, or in the lyrics, put it in there.  Rework or revise it later if you need to, if what you mean is not conveyed through your magic lattice of words, sounds, syllables.

I’ve stolen Jack’s  line when approaching fiction workshops: it applies.  I feel very rude ever telling someone to “shut up,” and usually preface it with context.  As an imperative to action, “Shut up and sing the song” is simple and worth doing.  (I’m talking to myself, too.  For years, I whined about how I wanted to write and yet was not doing it.)  Shut up about what you want to do, wish you could do, mean to do, intend to do.

Shut up and sing the song.