New Year's Post (late)

As far as I'm concerned, the grimmest day of any year is the Monday after New Year's. Once again you're up at an ungodly hour when it's not even light yet, eating cereal with your son, neither of you speaking, both of you thinking how quickly vacation ended.
So maybe you can tell I'm not much of a resolution maker. But in keeping with New Year's goal-making, I wanted to share something from a book on Jesuit spirituality which I read a few months ago and which has really helped me. This is from the chapter on "Making Decisions."

1. Beware of getting bogged down in what-ifs and if-onlys when you think about the future or try to make a decision. Deliberately causing yourself anxiety and fear won't help you make a better decision.

2. Never make a decision during a period of desolation. Your motivations will be unhealthy.

3. Ignore I-wants and be aware of your weak points.

4. Learn from the past -- wrong decisions you made before and what the consequences were.

I know that #2 really resonated with me. I've done that a lot -- just fallen into despair and said, "Since I can't...I'm just going to..."

And may all of your New Year's Resolutions come to pass!

Teens and dystopian fiction

There's an discussion article today on the New York Times opinion page about "The Dark Side of Young Adult Fiction." A variety of writers and "experts" weigh in with some fairly vapid remarks, but I thought Steve Westerfeld, author of the Leviathan series, hit the nail on the head with his comment on teenagers today:

"Teenagers are at a stage of life where they must tangle with almost adult responsibilities — school, work, college applications — and yet they haven’t been granted many adult powers or respect. They’re encouraged to work, but generally at menial jobs, and when they show up to spend their money, they’re carefully watched, assumed to be shoplifters and loiterers.

Schools are places where teens are subject to dress codes, have few free speech rights, and are constantly surveilled, where they rise and sit at the sound of a bell. Is it any wonder that dystopian novels speak to them?"

Merry Christmas to all

Well, I did see Voyage of the Dawn Treader and I now know that Eustace is "You-Stace" and the actor playing him was one of the bright spots of the movie. Visually it was close to how I'd always imagined the book, too. As for the rest... hmm.

I did make an interesting observation about characterization watching the movie. The audience's attention focuses on Eustace almost as soon as the adventure portion of the movie begins, in spite of the fact that he's an unlikeable character. Long before he becomes a likeable one, we're identifying with him, even to the exclusion of Edmund and Lucy, who seem rather flat. (This is true in the book, too, but to a lesser extent, as Lewis is able to jump around more easily between the minds of the characters.) The transformation of an unlikeable character to a likeable one, and particularly getting the reader to identify with that character even before the transformation is a nice challenge for a writer.

I guess I'm a bit late for the Be Jolly blogfest so I'm not going to link to it but I'd like to post a picture of my tree. A long time ago I went a little stir-crazy one December and starting making ornaments -- first extremely intricate snowflakes and then posterboard animals. I didn't expect them to last, given the material, but we still put them up every year. For Christmas dinner my husband is going to make the only thing he knows how to make: seafood marinara. It's not really traditional but I don't eat meat anyway so it's been years since I had a Christmas turkey. And if you want a stretch a point, Italians (my husband's heritage) traditionally eat fish on Christmas Eve. (For my in-laws, this is preserved in an annual ritual known as "going to Red Lobster.") So on Christmas Eve day I'll bake cookies and probably take my kid Christmas shopping and we'll eat early and go to the children's Christmas Eve service and I'll try to catch the "The Bishop's Wife" -- one of the more obscure Hollywood Christmas movies -- on TCM.

And it wouldn't be Christmas without music, so I'll share my latest favorite: the Pipettes' version of "In the Bleak Midwinter."

C.S. Lewis hits the wall

Sometime this weekend or over Christmas vacation I'll go with my son to see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. When I was a kid, Dawn Treader was my favorite Narnia book -- perhaps because of the map in front, or that I found Eustace (by the way, I knew no-one, and still know no-one, actually named Eustace and can't fathom how to pronounce it.* I guess I'll learn when I see the movie) a compelling character or just the theme of exploration, going beyond the horizon to the edge of the world. I'm crossing my fingers that some of this will still be in the movie.

The story behind the current movie productions of the Narnia books is this: Disney did The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It made money and got good reviews. I thought it was a pretty good movie and much better than some of the earlier Narnia adaptations. Then Disney did Prince Caspian. They spent a lot of money, and though the movie made money, it didn't make enough, and Disney washed their hands of the whole series and walked away. Prince Caspian struck me as an odd movie, and perhaps this is partly why Disney gave up. The one thing I thought when I left the theatre was, "Wow, that was very...macho." The movie was almost one long battle. Yet most of that stuff was also in the book and here's where the disconnect comes in. For C.S. Lewis, battles were something out of King Arthur. They were about chivalry and honor and Up England! Lewis actually fought in the trenches during World War I and probably knew war wasn't really like that, but when he came to write the books he either figured real war didn't belong in them, or he just fell back on the ideals of his Edwardian childhood. But movie battles usually aren't about chivalry and honor...movie battles tend to be violent. So the movie came off as a lot darker and tougher than the book.

Well, now Fox has taken over the series, and if Dawn Treader does well they will likely make the other books. I think Dawn Treader has the material in it to be a spectacular movie, if made right. About the other books, I'm not so sure. A Horse and His Boy has some politically incorrect aspects to it, though it offers a great female role. The Silver Chair mostly takes place underground and the plot is pretty convoluted and doesn't make a lot of sense until you realize it's Lewis' tribute to The Fairie Queen. The Magician's Nephew, on the other hand, could be a fantastic movie. Great settings -- the dead city of Charn, the Wood between the World, Paradise -- great characters -- bring back Tilda Swinton! A great part for someone like Alan Rickman as Uncle Andrew. Enormous guinea pigs! Unlike the previous two books, there's a strong plot and visual element to it.

As for The Last Battle, well, that's the only Narnia book I never really liked.

So I'm hoping Dawn Treader does well, and if it does, I hope the filmmakers make the logical leap to The Magician's Nephew.

What do you think? What remaining Narnia books are most "filmmable?" Who would you like to see in key roles?

I got a Kindle!

For my birthday I got an unexpected present: a Kindle. Now, let me say that I'm the sort of person who is content with things the way they are, mostly: I check out books from the library, I loan and borrow them from people, occasionally I buy them. I didn't see that I'd use a Kindle much, especially as I use my credit card for large purchases only. However, as the idea began to work in my brain, I could see a couple of advantages to having an e-reader. Magazines, for instance. No more clutter on the coffee table. No more wondering why some weeks the New Yorker comes on Thursdays and other weeks on Mondays. No more missing New Yorkers! (Bah! It turns out I can't switch my current subscription to the Kindle, I have to wait for it to run out and renew it via Amazon.) And there's the space issue, which is one reason why I don't buy a lot of new books. As it happened, my book club had just chosen Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer -- a book about Pat Tillman. Not a book I would ordinarily buy...to make a long story short, oh so sinfully cheap on Kindle and I don't have to feel that I gambled buying a book I don't know much about. (Also, it turned out to be an excellent book which I don't regret buying.)
So I can see that this may, in fact, change some of my reading and buying habits. It will be interesting to see how much...
I still love books and I particularly love the cheapness and portability of them. I love that you can leave a book on a bus...or that you can find a book on a bus. When I was teaching I kept a library in my room and didn't try to keep track of who had what. Some of the books never came back, but I didn't mind -- I figured I was creating new readers. And I don't think Kindles will ever replace that.

I also want to say that I read an amazing book recently. It's written by a scientist called Iain Gilchrist and is called The Master and His Emissary. It's basically about differences in how the right brain and left brain view the world and how in the current era the left brain view (which is often fragmented and disassociated from reality and which views objects as having a fixed value) dominates. It's not exactly an easy read: there's a lot about Heidegger and the paradox of Theseus' Ship and other landmarks of the history of philosophy, as well as an entire section on brain structure. But definitely worth it. Among other things it kind of explains why it's so difficult, when you're revising something, to tell if it's any good or not. (Not that it helps you do anything about it, but at least you know why, after this book.)

...and stopped my mind from wandering

Yesterday I read this article in the Science section of the New York Times about daydreaming. It says, basically, that people who let their thoughts wander aren't very happy. This is the kind of study I'm always a little suspicous of: for one thing, they apparently measured happiness by contacting people every 15 minutes or so and asking them to rate how happy they were at that moment. ("Are you happy now?" How 'bout now?") Then they compiled all the yeses and found people were most happy during physical activity, when they brains were basicially turned off. When they had to think and they let their minds wander, they reported themselves as unhappy.

Maybe they should have talked to more writers.

I do sort of understand where this study is coming from. Thoughts can become repetitive, they can chase you around and around and they make excellent attack dogs, hanging on and never letting go until they've convinced you to do something stupid.

But honestly, some of the best moments of my life have been spent daydreaming. When I get blocked writing, my general procedure is to lie down and let my mind wander while I argue the problem out to myself. I can't imagine life without it.

Some thoughts on Showing and Telling

I'm going to go out on a limb here and admit that "show, don't tell" is one of those writing shibboleths that throws me a little. I'll even admit that I sometimes get the phrase mixed up and can't remember which one is the "bad" one. This may be because I understand "telling" to be as it is defined here -- vague language, lacking in detail and bolstered by cliche, language which doesn't add much to the story and which bores the reader. And yet lots of people seem to think that telling is any form of narration, or any kind of description without drama to it.
I'm hesitant to admit this, however, or even to ask other writers what they think, because so many people treat "show, don't tell" as the 11th commandment. So I'm going to go out a little further on the limb: I don't think it's a commandment at all. I think, like many rules, it gets a little complicated when you take a closer look.

Thought number 1. My son's English teacher recently gave him an assignment of writing "show" paragraphs on various emotions. In these paragraphs he couldn't say why he was angry (or happy, or excited) or what this emotion made him do. He couldn't use any "to be" words, either. She wanted sentences like "Furiously, I rifled through my papers looking for my missing homework." The paragraphs, as they ended up, were loaded with adverbs and over-dramatic language. And yet this was apparently what "showing" is -- at least in the teacher's conception of it. (Note that the article I linked above actually calls use of adverbs a form of telling.)

Thought number 2. People were writing good fiction for years before "show, don't tell," came along. Pick up Dickens or Austen and you get a fair amount of narration and digressive scene building. Try Jane Eyre -- lots of tell there (do we really care about Jane's cousins' religious beliefs?) Read a really bad 19th century novel and you'll get tons of tell. Standard practice in the 19th century was so express a character's thoughts/feelings via background description. The poverty and narrow outlook of a certain character, for instance, would be conveyed by a description of her room and style of clothing.
Then came the modernists, who rebelled against all that. Modernist writers wanted to capture everyday life by showing the interior world of their characters through emotions, memories and passing thoughts. The reader was not to be told anything. Classic modern texts like Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway are nearly all showing -- the events unfold as they happen and the reader has to piece together who the characters are and the relationship(s) between them.*
To me, this puts a different light on "show, don't tell." It evolved at a particular time in a response to a particular kind of writing. Is there a basic truth embodied in it? Yes. Is it helpful to remember as you write? Absolutely. If by "telling" you mean vague descriptions and cliches, I'm all in favor of stamping them out.
But I don't think every single book has to be written the same way by the same rules. I don't think there's anything wrong with narration as long as it is detailed, not digressive, and well-written.

*Readers hate this, by the way. That's why so many people fail to finish Ulysses.