Historologues

There is a subgenre of travel/history books that I’ve been enjoying quite a lot of lately. It’s a sort of travel through history, a historologue, if you will.

Since I write historical fiction, I end up reading a lot of history books, and many of them are, I hate to say it, total snoozes. They are academic for the most part, and their goal is to present the information, the whos and the whats, and they don’t really put a narrative into it. Sometimes they make an academic argument, refuting another academic argument, but often I’m not that interested in those either.

What I love, for the pure pleasure of reading them, are books like Germania by Simon Winder or Russia: A 1000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East by Martin Sixsmith. These books take the reader on a journey to the relics of the past and their histories, while grounding the story in how that history and travel affected the writer, and how it formed the national consciousness. In many ways, they are romances between a person and a place. (Similar, but more travelogue oriented is Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier.) It’s not a coincidence that all of these books are by men who are obsessed with their subject. Their endless fascination with the place and its history carries through to the reader, and they are always more interested in telling a good story than in writing a definitive history.

Another thing these books have in common is grappling with a place that has a mixed legacy, and confronting that legacy. Simon Winder is specifically interested in how the German view of history shaped the tragedy of the 20th century, but also in presenting a more holistic view of the German project, one that does not begin and end with Hitler.

In many ways these books seem more honest than a straight history book, which marshal facts to make a point, or to try to talk about “how it was back then”. These books realize that the past is entirely lost to us, except in glimpses, and it’s what we make of those glimpses, the uses we put to history going forward that make the difference.

One of the reasons I like to write historical fiction is the same reason that other people write fantasy or science fiction, or set their fiction in a fundamentalist Mormon compound: to show that humans are humans, grappling with the same issues, and at the same time, use the heightened reality of an alien culture to display those issues into a different light.

Eugene O’Neill said: “There is no present or future-only the past, happening over and over again–now.” And he was restating the stupidity of history, how we are doomed to repeated it, how no one ever seems to learn enough not to.

But it would be as accurate to say that there is no past and no future, only the present, happening over and over again. These historical travelogues show history in the only way we can ever really view it: personally, and inescapably through the lens of the present.

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THE BEST BOOK ON STORYTELLING

THE LIN WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE BEST BOOK ON STORYTELLING SHE READ IN YEARS, POSSIBLY EVER.

Ahem, sorry. Once you read a lot of Film Crit Hulk, it’s hard to talk any other way for a while. Regardless of Film Crit Hulk’s stylistic choice to WRITE LIKE HULK ALL THE TIME, WHICH MAKES SENSE BECAUSE HE IS HULK, he is one of the best thinkers on storytelling that I’ve ever read.

I’ve been a fan of his blog and his posts on Badass Digest for a long time. There is simply no one writing about storytelling the way he does, in a way that both opens my eyes and resonates with my beliefs about storytelling. This post, for instance, on the importance of dramatizing characters, told through the lens if criticizing the recent Man of Steel, is a must-read if you’re interested in any kind of storytelling, even  if you haven’t seen the movie and never plan to. (I have never seen the movie and never plan to. Superman is not my jam.)

His archive is a treasure trove of meditations on writing and film-making, and now he’s written a book: Screenwriting 101. Disregard the pedestrian title. The first 2/3s of this book are a meditation on the purposes and paths of storytelling. After a wonderful exegesis on why humans tell stories at all, he goes through traditional, often reductive, ways to look at storytelling, like the 3 act structure, or the hero’s journey. He talks about why they became prevalent, and why they are flawed ways to look at telling a story. One of his big points is that the ways we analyze stories as academics, breaking them down into component parts or repeatable beats, is not very helpful for learning how to build stories, because these maps mistake form for function. It is not important that the hero refuses the call, per se, it is important who the hero is and why he refuses the call, if he refuses the call.

The Hulk talks about viewing stories through a lens of character and theme, which is something that works very well for me. He talks about economy, doing the most with the least words or screen time, and the importance of empathetic characters. Every scene should dramatize character and theme, ever character should dramatize the theme and other characters, the theme should show us things about the characters…

And most importantly, he talks about the how: approaches to constructing (“breaking”) stories, to figure out their beats. His character trees are fairly standard, but the idea of looking at the arc of each relationship between two people, making each person represent a different way of looking at the theme, is something that I find very helpful.

I’ve often felt when wrestling with a novel that it’s like punching a pillow, or trying to put together (or take apart) a very complicated knot. Each piece connects to every other piece, and pulling one throws the whole thing off. Film Crit Hulk does not deny or try to minimize the difficulty and complexity of telling a story. Instead he outlines various tools for thinking about it, and then he talks about how knowing these things is good, but practice is more important, that the writing itself teaches you–something I’ve always believed.

Looking too much at theme can sound like it leads to preachy stories, but I would argue that it actually makes a story feel more cohesive. The challenges that a character needs to go through to grow should reflect the theme of the story, and so, in a well constructed story, every scene will dramatize both character and theme. I’m breaking down a story right now where the theme is the importance of finding one’s own moral compass, and of the danger of all-or-nothing moral thinking. A theme like that can lend itself to an infinity of events and choices to dramatize it, so grounding it in a particular set of characters, time and place (in this case 12th century Europe, involving the key players in the church controversies of the time), narrows in the set of possible choices.

I have a love-hate relationship with writing manuals. Often they feel too prescriptive, or they make the endeavor seem easy, which it is not. Even to write a trite, flat novel takes a lot of time and work. Film Crit Hulk’s book acknowledges the difficulty, and explores the ways that we can think about stories not to make them easier, but to get deeper into them, to understand how they work.

Film Crit Hulk always comes back to our human reasons for needing stories, and that resonates with me. Many of the books I read at NYU this past semester with Zadie Smith were writers wrestling with the question of whether it’s even moral to tell other people’s stories. Nabokov in Pnin, and David Foster Wallace in everything he wrote. Richard Yates, in Easter Parade. Those books are interesting to me, but not for that question, but because they also wrestle with the question of how to tell stories morally, not just if. Film Crit Hulk has done his wrestling with that (HE VERY STRONG) and come up with some helpful ideas and ways of thinking about story, and he writes about them in a funny and passionate way. 

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Sometimes It’s Hard

This weekend I finished a read through of my viking novel and got it back to my agent. For those of you wondering about the submission and getting sold process, for me it’s gone like this, after the get-an-agent-interested-in-my-writing part of the process:

1. She reads it. Her assistants read it. They all create 4-page single spaced notes on what works and what doesn’t. We brainstorm ideas together. Certain plot things need big overhauls.

2. I come up with potential fixes for the big plot things in an outline form. We have several back-and-forths about those. The changes are approved.

3. Major rewrite. Cut 70,000 words, write 60,000 new ones. Resubmit.

4. She reads it. Her assistants read it. More plot notes, these ones more minor, but still not small.  It takes 3 meetings to get through all of them, but they’re more granular now.

5. Make plot changes. Cut 175,000 words down to 140,000 words. Re-read again for typos and whether these plot changes make sense. Tear hair out. Realize that this is probably the 20th time I’ve read this novel, and that is a lot, and as much as I love these characters and this story, I am tired of them right now.

6. Send it back to my agent.

Those 6 steps have taken 20 months, because the manuscript of an unknown writer is not the highest priority for an agent. This is all before even trying to sell it. My impression is that these days editors want a novel that is as close to perfect as possible when it comes across their desks. Agents do a lot of editing. There may be another round.

People ask me “when is your novel coming out?” The answer is: not for a long time, and maybe never. No one wants to hear that and I don’t want to say it, but there’s a reason why people say “writing is hard”. And it’s not just because making something up from nothing is hard, and all the research is hard, and just typing those first 180,000 words took a long time. Not just because I can’t count the number of dinners and social events and other things I’ve turned down so I can get some writing time in after work.

It’s because I’ve done all that, off and on for 10 years, more on than off for the past 5, and this book may not get published, at least not on the mainstream market. The next book may not get published. Even if they do, the monetary rewards are often tiny. The extrinsic rewards for writing don’t balance the sacrifices. The intrinsic rewards have to.

Even if this book doesn’t sell, and I have to make the tough choice of keeping it on the shelf, seeing if I can sell the next book I write, and making a market for this one, or going the self-publishing route, even if the book after that doesn’t sell, I know I’m going to keep writing. I know because I’ve tried not to, and it doesn’t work. Oh, sure, I can go a month or two or three where all I write is blog posts and grocery lists and emails, but then I will need to start writing stories again. It always sounded like bullshit to me when people said that, and for years I tried to get my creative fulfillment in other places: work, knitting, cooking. But I always came back.

Now it’s a little comforting. No matter what happens, no matter if no one ever wants to read what I write, I’m going to keep doing it. What that means is that the time I’ve taken hasn’t been wasted. Whatever extrinsic rewards do or do not come, it’s what I’m going to do. (Right now I’m trying to go the traditional publishing route, because that’s what I want, but I am lucky to live in a time when there are many different ways to get readers.) This not a resolution, this is not me buckling down or finding motivation, it is just knowing myself: this is what I do. It is what I have always done, and what I will continue to do. I can protest and make it harder for myself, or I can accept that.

The rewards or lack thereof don’t actually matter in the day-to-day of my life. Of course they would be nice. They would be wonderful.  I could stop answering the “when is your book coming out?” question in a way that makes people uncomfortable. But in terms of making decisions about how to spend my time, whether to “waste” it writing things, that decision has already been made.

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Little Yellow Boxes: Why Deadpool Is Awesome

After She-Hulkmy next favorite discovery in Marvel Unlimited is Deadpool, specifically, at least so far, the Deadpool of Cable and Deadpool, which title teams him up with a mutant from the future named Cable, who has a messiah complex. Cable wants to make the world a better place by any means necessary, and he has the power to do it.

So the plot conspires to throw them together, and I get to meet Deadpool, one of Marvel’s weirdest creations. He’s an expert mercenary, a gifted fighter with any weapon who came out of the Weapon-X program, the same one that grafted all that adamantium to Wolverine’s bones. Deadpool got Wolverine’s healing factor, which coexists with a cancer that is trying to kill him, leaving his skin incredibly scarred. Like many Marvel characters, he’s the victim of torture at the hands of evil scientists. (The ratio of evil scientists to good scientists in the Marvel Multiverse is, like, 100:1. Sorry, Mom.) His healing factor means his brain is constantly rebuilding himself, which makes him crazy. Bonkers. Also immune to telepathy.

He never shuts up, which is one of his superpowers, because he annoys the hell out of his opponents. And like my beloved She-Hulk, he breaks the 4th wall. He knows he’s a character in a comic book. His 4th wall breaking is of a different flavor than She-Hulk’s. While the entire She-Hulk comic has in-canon references to comics and comics tropes, and She-Hulk complains about her portrayal in comics written about her, Deadpool seems to know that he is a character in a comic, not that there is a comic about him that coexists with him in canon, but that he himself is a character. Or he’s just bonkers. But like many jesters, he sometimes speaks the truth.

It seems like most of the characters in Marvel’s stable have some sort of tragic back story. Some turn it into heroism, some turn it into villainy, but Deadpool’s reaction to it, to be crazy, is one of my favorite. His life sucks. Without his mask on, he’s pretty physically unattractive to most people, and even with his mask on, he’s annoying and unhinged. He wants to do good, but often he can’t get his brain together enough to figure out what that is. His banter is  hilarious, and he makes fun of everyone, but in the hands of his best writers, that comedy is the funny icing on a rather tragic cake.

He’s one of the most interesting characters because the thing that stands in the way of him getting what he wants: mayhem, doing the right thing, friends, is usually himself. His healing factor means he can’t die, which means gross things happen to him. His personality makes him difficult to get along with. He and Cable were an interesting partnership because Deadpool, in his weird way, believed in what Cable was doing, and Cable liked to be believed in. Cable was a king in need of a hyper-violent court jester, and Deadpool was that jester. Cable, perhaps, saw Deadpool as someone that, if Cable could win Deadpool over, and make him better, make him use his powers for good, then Cable could do that for the whole human race.

Because Deadpool is extremely human, for a super-powered Marvel character. He does terrible things for the right reasons, and good things for the wrong reasons, and blunders around, not knowing what he’s doing, with inconsistent logic, going on flawed instinct more than reason, and annoying everyone while he does it. Doesn’t get much more human than that.

And Cable and Deadpool is funny as hell. I may have undersold that by talking about how much I like the pathos inherent in Deadpool’s story, but it has hilarious juvenile humor, offbeat humor, and intelligent brilliance.

But the character walks a difficult line. He is crazy. He does awful things. He’s cruel to people. He doesn’t always see people as people rather than entertainment. He’s violent and nearly immortal, and when super heroes do have to deal with him, they try to contain him, or point him in a helpful direction. When villains have to deal with him, they usually find that using him is more trouble than it’s worth. Because of that, I think he’s hard to write well. Or, the version that I really liked, the specific balance weirdness and whimsy and humor and violence and pathos and gross-out moments that Fabian Nicieza wrote for Cable and Deadpool is not the balance I find in other titles, and so I don’t enjoy them quite as much. They’re still funny, but missing the underlying reason for the humor that made Nicieza’s series work so well for me.

Comics fandom is challenging that way. Since characters are nearly immortal, the world is so sprawling, and the writers so varied, it can be exciting to see a new writer take on your favorite characters and bring them somewhere unexpected. Or it can be challenging to watch someone take characters in a direction that doesn’t work as well.

Oh well, Deadpool. We’ll always have the little yellow boxes.

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The Post-MFA Life

It’s a cool and sunny day in Manhattan. I went for a run this morning along the Hudson, then read some stuff on the internet while I ate breakfast. Subway to work, where I have a combination of interesting tasks. Tonight I will drink a glass of ice herb tea while doing a little pleasure reading (1Q84 by Haruki Murakami), eat dinner, then get back to editing my novel.Post-MFA life is pretty good so far.

I’m working on a second, and hopefully almost final round of edits with my agent. I’m cutting the book down from 175,000 words to 140,000 words, combining some plot points, and generally making it a better book. I’ve really been enjoying the process, because her ideas are making the book tighter and better, and the things she wants to keep are the things I love the best. I feel like I’m learning a lot about how to plot and write from her, which is good because I never want to stop learning and stop becoming a better writer.

So far, working 30 hours a week is a good amount. I’m lucky to have found a place where I can do interesting work that is not full time. I wouldn’t mind a little more leisure time, but a busy schedule tends to make me productive.

Some of my classmates in NYU’s MFA program would talk about writing for 8+ hours at a stretch. Except at the end of a novel, or a serious, major revision, I’ve never written that much. If I write too much, I burn myself out for the next day. When I’m writing new material, I’m best if I average no more than 2000 words a day, no more than 6 days a week, which usually takes me 1-2.5 hours.

With editing, I can put in a little more time, 2-5 hours a day. The smaller the changes, the more time I can spend. Sentence-level tweaks don’t burn me out the way giant revisions do.

I’m glad I figured most of this out before doing the MFA program. There is a vibrant writing community online, involving NaNoWriMo, writing bloggers, and other forums and meeting places, where people can get good advice about writing without having to figure it out in the higher pressure world of grad school.

It’s amazing how little time it takes for things that drove me a little bonkers about the MFA program to feel silly and pointless. If people want dismiss whole genres of literature, let ’em, as long as I’m not taking classes with them anymore. My agent suggested I take a Screen Writing class to learn more about tight plotting, and I may do that, once I feel the need to be in a class situation again. Right now, I’m just enjoying the freedom.

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Thoughts upon graduation

NYUToday is pretty much my official graduation from NYU’s Creative Writing MFA program. There’s a reading and a party to celebrate tonight, and some various other parties. I have one more class after graduation because of scheduling conflicts. I need to track down some signatures for my thesis. But basically, this is it. I’m done. I’m not doing any of the official NYU graduation events. Been there, did that from undergrad. Found them mildly tedious then, am glad of the opportunity not to do them this time.

I’m glad I’m done, so I will get my reading and writing time back, but a Creative Writing MFA is much more about the process, than the outcome. It’s not a degree that leads to jobs and prestige.

When I was in the process of applying to MFA programs (and I applied to 12, I think), I dreamed that I got into NYU and woke up thinking, “Nah, that will never happen. It is my first choice.” But I did get in, and went, and I’m glad I did. My reasons for doing an MFA were:

1. To make a commitment to writing. As Jonathan Safran Foer said in one of our classes, “Writing is the only job where you wake up every day and wonder if you’re going to do it today.” Doing an MFA is a good way to make that commitment serious.

2. To meet other committed writers. I took several classes in NYC, which has a lot of more casual programs for adult students, but I wanted to be with people who were maybe grappling with bigger writing challenges than those in some of my classes, who had mastered the basics.

3. To expand my reading. I read a lot, and fairly broadly, but I knew there were whole areas I’d neglected. NYU exposed me to the Creative Writing canon, which overlaps with the English Lit canon, but not a ton.

4. To teach Creative Writing. Which I did, and which was highly enjoyable. I’d love to do it again someday.

5. To take classes with giants in the literary world, and I did. I will be thinking about what I read with Rick Moody and Zadie Smith for the rest of my life.

6. To write things I might not otherwise try writing, and I did that as well, especially in my first year, when I wrote short stories, and in Rick Moody’s class, where we had weekly writing assignments based on our readings.

I also discovered some things I did not expect, but probably should have:

1. More or less, an MFA is about ART. I’ve always viewed writing more as a craft, and art, if it exists, comes by grace, which cannot be taught, but many professors made attempts to look at the books we read and our fellow students’ work as art. I’m still not sure how good I am at looking at writing like this, or whether I think art can be taught, but it was an interesting way of looking at writing.

2. In pop culture, it may be the age of the SFF nerd, but whether non-literary genre is acceptable or not is still very much a debate in the MFA world. One of the reasons I wanted to go to NYU is I knew they were interested in students who wrote in all kinds of genres, and I did find that, but people who do not write contemporary literary fiction are still outliers in MFA programs. Even historical fiction is a bit outre.

3. I’m wasn’t very qualified to read certain kinds of experimental fiction, but I could be taught. I love stories, with plots and characters. A traditional plot arc with hooks and stakes, with pages I love to turn, is my favorite kind of story. But I was exposed to W. G. Sebald, Jenny Erpenbeck, Thomas Bernardt, Teju Cole and many others, who expanded my idea of what a novel can be and what it can do.

4. The thing that teaches you the most about writing is writing. The next thing is reading. Far down the line after that are other teachers you may have. Not that they weren’t great, but I’ve learned more simply by writing, throwing things away, and trying again, over the last ten years, than I did from any teacher. I think writing teaching is a lot like athletic coaching. You say the right things, the platitudes, the shop-worn wisdom. You give specific suggestions when you think of them. But they only sink in and make a difference when the student has worked herself to a place where she’s ready to hear it. The reason we have so many platitudes, and repeat them so many times is that you never know when will be the right time for someone to hear them, or which combination of words, which mean almost the exact same thing as another combination of words, will be the thing that clicks with someone.

So. I’m glad I did it. I’m glad I’m done. Nothing is going to change very much in my day to day life, except fewer classes, and choosing what I want to read more. And that’s as it should be. It was my 2 year launch into prioritizing the writing life above all other commitments.

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She-Hulk is the Best and I Will Tell You How

SheHulk_COVER_IN_LIVIN_COLOR_by_BroHawkI’m graduating from NYU’s Creative Writing MFA program in a few days, and as a present for myself, I bought a subscription to Marvel Unlimited with the plan to read Marvel comics and nothing else until my eyes fall out. I’ve been reading great and wonderful literature for two years, and it’s time to have some fun.

So I was reading all the comics I’ve always meant to read, the famous Captain America arcs, Joss Whedon on The Astonishing X-men and I decided I needed fewer dudes, and more lady action (though Joss’s X-men had a nice selection of ladies and I will write about how I love Emma Frost later). Enter She-Hulk. (2004-2009)

All I really knew about her was that she existed, but what I discovered was my favorite super-hero to date. Of course, part of why I love her is that I am a tall muscle-y lady, and she is a tall muscle-y lady, but there’s so much more than that. Jen Walters, She-Hulk…I will just have to list all the things I love about the comic (minor spoilers):

  • Look at that picture! Look how she’s drawn! She and all the other women in the comic are usually drawn in power poses, not sexy, ass and boobs poses.
  • She is strong and loves to kick ass, and she is also gorgeous and feminine. Not that a big strong woman has to be, but it’s nice that she can be both, that her strength and ass-kicking are never shown as something that makes her less than a woman.
  • She’s not a rage monster like Bruce Banner. As She-Hulk, she is less inhibited than in her human form, but she’s not out of control.
  • She has sex with a lot of the hot dudes of the Marvel-verse, while being taller than all of them, and complains about the double standard, but it’s never shown to be a bad choice. For a little while she decides not to hop into quite so many beds while she figures out why she’s doing it, but then she bones Hercules, because they like each other and she wants to.
  • AND THEN HERCULES CALLS ALL HIS FRIENDS AND WONDERS IF SHE’S GOING TO CALL HIM AND IF HE SHOULD FEEL USED. *FLAIL*
  • It’s playfully feminist and wonderfully 4th wall breaking. There’s a whole subplot about the comic-book archive at her law firm. People complain that things are so crazy, “It’s like every time I come in I overhear someone saying, ‘Weren’t you supposed to be dead?'”
  • And when She-Hulk is briefly a member of S.H.I.E.L.D., she’s on a team with a Life Model Decoy (lifelike robot), the scantily clad Agent Cheesecake, trained for combat and seduction. Then when She-Hulk leaves the team, she’s replaced by the virile LMD Agent Beefcake, also trained for combat and seduction, who makes the dude leader of the team veddy uncomfortable. Heh heh heh.
  • Romance is important in the early arc, and there’s an interesting storyline about how much people should change for the people they love. Then women friendships become very important in the later arcs, which is also wonderful. Both types of relationships can and should be important.
  • Jen, She-Hulk, begins as a lawyer, which she loves, and has spent all of the comics grappling with how to be a super hero and a lawyer (or some other things), and what kind of super hero she wants to be. She’s not tortured, she’s frustrated, by the world’s injustice, and by the limitations of what she can do, even as a super strong fighting machine.
  • The comics don’t neglect potential real-world conflicts of being a super hero who causes a lot of destruction. There’s a moment when Jen’s in jail and talking to her cellmate, who has had a far worse life than her, and they commiserate, and it’s poignant and wry and wonderful. And then the (female) cellmate grabs her ass as their both leaving, because when is she going to get the chance again? To which Jen says, “Okay, but the next one’s gonna cost you.”

I could go on and on. I love comics. I love the brooding and the world-ending consequences and the bottomless tragedy, but I love even more She-Hulk’s lighter touch. Everything doesn’t have to be doom and gloom all the time. Jen is an optimistic, wonderful, ass-kicking lady, who makes mistakes and grapples with her place in the world, and we should all try to be more like her.

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The hard-hard thing

mountain-01[I abandoned this blog for a while because a WordPress update killed some of the old posts, and also, school was taking up a lot of time, but I’m getting back to it now.]

This is a post I wasn’t sure whether I should make it at my fitness blog or here, because it’s about fitness and life and how we choose to spend our time.

There was a training blog I used to read that had a great post about hard-hard things vs. easy-hard things. Yes, running a marathon or deadlifting 500 pounds is hard, but that sort of training can also be used as an escape from the actual hard parts of life. He would train people who were going through nasty divorces, or who had failing businesses, who put all of their energy into some huge physical goal, and used those as an escape from the hard things in their lives.

There’s nothing wrong with staying fit or having big ambitious fitness goals. But his point was that if you use the easy-hard thing (running a marathon) to escape the hard-hard thing (doing the soul searching it takes to figure out why a marriage is failing), then that is a problem for your growth as a person.

I remembered this again when I was listening to a podcast interview with Joe De Sena, the founder of Spartan Races and writer of Spartan Up!. He had some great stories on the podcast, and I definitely want to read his book, but something about the interview made me uncomfortable. He describes himself as being someone who always wants to work 20-hour days, and always wants to find other people to work for him who are willing to put in that amount of time. He particularly liked hiring Eastern Europeans, because they would work that hard. (Questionable ethnic stereotypes? Check!)

He runs these Spartan Death Races, which are obstacle races where his intent “is to break you”, which last up to 72 hours, and they keep on going until all but 15% of the participants have dropped out. He sets the competitors all kinds of grueling, dangerous and pointless tasks until he’s broken most of their spirits and they quit. The people who win, he says, are the people he wants to know.

Eh.

I have no doubt I could be broken quickly by something like that, and want to quit. And sure, too many people quit too many things.

It’s definitely good for me to challenge myself in all kinds of arenas, but I don’t think that hard work is positive simply because it is hard work. After all, digging a ditch is hard work, but very few parents want their kid to grow up to be a ditch digger.

But as an over-achiever, a big challenge is balance, and putting my energy in the right place. I don’t want to be someone who does hard things just because they’re hard. I believe that all of the things that are really worth doing are hard, but not everything hard is worth doing.

That is the hard-hard thing. Not to quit something because it’s hard, but because it’s not right for me. And not to keep doing something because it’s hard (or easy) but because it is right. It’s a lot more useful and conducive to a happy life than this harden-the-fuck-up attitude.

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Dark, Cynical, Satirical or Otherwise Weird

One of the fun things about teaching has been sharing with students a wide variety of writing. My interests often tend toward the fantastical, the weird, the violent, the darkly humorous, and happily, several of my students shared my interests.

Early on, we read “The School” by Donald Barthelme. A good litmus test for how twisted your sense of humor is: “Where does this story stop being funny and start being tragic?”

If you haven’t read it, give it a look, it’s less than 1000 words.

For some of the students in my class, it stopped being funny with the Korean Orphan, but for me, that was the funniest part of the whole story. I = terrible.

So one of my students was asking me to recommend reading to him, especially short stories, that are “dark, cynical, satirical, or otherwise weird”. And here’s what I recommended. but I’d love more recommendations from my readers. This student’s taste does not tend toward to fantasy or horror, so I’ve tried to keep those recommendations to a minimum. Most of my favorite stories and novels that fit the bill are dark fantasy. Here is what I came up with from my own reading:

  • Edward Gorey, for demented poetry and illustrations
  • Other stories by Donald Barthelme
  • Jesus’s Son by Denis Johnson
  • George Saunders, especially “Sea Oak”
  • The short stories of Stephen King (often better than his novels, IMO, with a satirical aspect to the horror), Neil Gaiman, Aimee Bender, Kelly Link, Vladimir Nabokov, and Franz Kafka.
  • Jane Austen, Thackeray (Vanity Fair), W. Somerset Maugham, and Edith Wharton are all writing biting social satire in their novels, but their subjects may not be to his taste.
  • The novel Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett is a dark satire about the apocalypse.
  • The Maltese Falcon is an excellent example of noir detective writing, and reads almost exactly like the a screenplay for the movie. I have never read a novel that is so close to the movie, but works in both mediums.
  • P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories are not so dark, but they are funny and satirical.
  • Lynda Barry’s stories and novels, especially Cruddy, are hideously dark. Cruddy reminds me of the TV show Justified, but if it focused more on the sad peripheral characters and was a lot more gruesome, but also compelling and impossible to put down
  • Generation Kill, about the Iraq war is non-fiction, but the characters are so darkly funny that I think this student might really enjoy it. And the HBO miniseries is just as good if not better.
  • T.C. Boyle’s short stories–are less dark, more realist, but still somewhat satirical. My favorite of his is his novel Drop City, about a bunch of hippies who try homesteading over a winter in Alaska, and their ideals come up against the reality of a long cold winter.
  • Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is an autobiographical graphic novel about her growing up in a funeral parlor, with her gay, closeted father.
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A Day In the Life

It has come to my attention that my grandmother thinks that all I do is lift weights, because that’s what I post about most on Facebook. And I do think lifting weights is a great hobby to keep my mind off the frustrations of writing. Lifting weights has clear, concrete goals and payoff. I lift weights, and I get stronger. I feed the monkey on my back that wants constant achievement.

Writing and teaching have far less instant, obvious payoffs, and I like to post positive things on Facebook, for the most part. I’ve had days of teaching where I think

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