The Patina of Culture

Oh, that's SO Jungian.

Of course in CountryName social norms are just completely different.

Well the [Post-Modernists/Medieval ruling classes/Oneida Community Members/Basically any other movement-era-group-schoolofthought] were generally much likelier to [pick your blanket statement] than we are today.

I'm not the only one who bullshits this way, am I?

"So Have You Published Anything?"

You've heard this one before, right?

You tell someone you're a writer, and almost the first words out of his mouth are "oh, so do you have a book published, then?"

And yet...no, it's not in there.

Unless, of course, it's "I have some really interesting things that have happened to me--I should write a book," as though the two are even REMOTELY related to one another (okay, they're a little related, but not much, certainly not as much as, or in the way that, people seem to think).

Where's the Line Between "Work" and "Just Work?"

As you likely know by now (follow the very-cleverly-concealed clues, Sherlocks), in my spare time, I like to write.

I'll admit it: I just wanted to throw some Cumberbatch on this post.

That's not true, in my spare time I write. "Liking" it doesn't really seem like accurate terminology. Maybe  "I feel compelled, as in OCD compelled, like if I don't do this, the inside of my skin will itch, to write" is closer to the mark.

And of course even that only makes me churn out so many words a day. Unless it's a really NICE day and a friend wants to wander. That's important too.

Unlike many of my other addict friends, though, writing is also my day job. Some of it is mildly creative, some of it is deathly boring (that's day jobs, right?), but upwards of 90% of what I do relates pretty directly to the written word.

As I mentioned recently, it's pretty much the only skill I have.

But there's writing and there's writing.

New Talents

I've always claimed that I wound up a writer because I'm frankly no good at anything else.

That was true.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, at my company's summer outing to an apple orchard, I discovered my true calling in life: apple bobbing, a pursuit at which I DOMINATE.

It's always good to have a backup plan, right?

What if YA Were More Like Literary Fiction?

I'll admit it. Lately, I've been losing patience. I've become intolerant. Things that used to seem charming are crawling around under my skin like a bad case of verbal bed bugs.

I speak, of course, of the "look at my verbal backflips" tendency in literary fiction.

What if YA were like that? By which I mean, what if YA were so impressed with the smell of its own farts (or just the sound of its own voice, you pick) that it spent hundreds and thousands of words talking about...nothing?

Even during the not-as-brief-as-it-should-have-been, Jilly-know-yourself-better-dammit period when I was trying to write semi-literary fiction myself, I found the long-winded description tedious at best.

I don't really care about all 73 shades of pink and coral and mother-of-pearl and Orange Julius tinting a sky, causing a character to reflect, boringly, on his own mortality and also his childhood. It doesn't change my understanding of the character, or the story, or the writer's ability, to slog through an entire page of an elaborately-constructed metaphor comparing two women's church hats to multi-colored, feathered Parthenons, marching bravely through time and the line at the post office atop their some-also-overly-clever-metaphor-for-hairs. And there's just never that much worth saying about how that one tree looked.

I don't want to read about those things, even when they're done well; why would I want to write them?

Oh god, I'm gonna have to read about SO MANY NATURE MOMENTS.

Shame? Have Any?

When I was younger I was embarrassed pretty much all the time. I was embarrassed of my too-big feet, of my having parents, of the 75,203 things I was afraid of, a list that included speed boats and water parks, and of my own embarrassment, and the way it kept me from being one of those awesome kids who were just cool with everything.

None of you would have liked me. I didn't either. 

Seriously, it was awful in there.

But while most people shed some of the cringing awkwardness of being a teenager as they grow up, I feel like most also retain SOME boundary lines. 

WARNING: Writing Ruins Reading

Apologies for the click-bait title; it's not QUITE as dire as all that.

It's just mostly dire.

Now don't get me wrong--I'm still the kind of person who falls in love with books. Pushes them on every friend I talk to while the afterglow is still strong. Stacks new ones around the house, in tottering towers, all of them "ohmygod I have to read this right now," and none of them capable of preventing me from buying yet ANOTHER title the next time I pass a book store. Thinks about the characters, sometimes months later, as though they're real people who are real-life friends with me, capable of thinking about me back. All of that is me.

But the longer I write, the more I find myself incapable of turning off my "writer's brain" when I'm reading. I'll come across a sentence that's very expository and an alarm starts blaring internally, "INFO DUUUuuuuUUUUUMMP!" Or I'll catch a character looking in a mirror early on, just so the author has a chance to describe the length and texture of her hair, and the deep wells, or velvet pools, or piercing steel of her eyes. Cliche. Easy. Or I'll read a lovely description of something tangential to the story, like a sunset or a puppy's sorrow or abdominal muscles, and I find myself thinking "So? Who cares?" EVEN THOUGH I LIKED THAT PART.

So...Communism?

After a weekend writing retreat, I'm always left feeling the effects for several days afterwards.

Not from the drinking (though yes, also from the drinking--writers love to party, okay?)--from the "living the dream" aspect of it all, a feeling that's in stark contrast to ordinary-life-upon-return.

So...why can't we live that dream all the time?

You know the one, where we all buy a massive house together somewhere stunningly remote, and live in a community of writers, and work and talk craft and get inspired all day, and unwind with loads of cocktails every night.

The view from last weekend's cabin. Picture: Julie Kingsley

Probably someone would need to learn how to chop wood, too. And someone else would want to know a few things about pickling and canning. Just to complete the whole ethos.

The Stories our Stories Tell

A few years ago, I went to my first Renaissance faire.

I was working on a novel in which one of the main characters was a ren faire obsessive. I spent some time on rennie message boards learning about what true die-hards might be doing with their off-season time (apparently some people are sewing costumes, practicing speech patterns, and singing along to era-specific songs MONTHS before ye olde turkeye legges come out in full force), and I dove down multiple internet wormholes about what different classes of people might have worn, how to swear Elizabethan style, and how to construct your own hoop skirt.

But obviously that wasn't enough: I had to GO to one of these things. And since my mother is emphatically neither a dork nor the type of woman who dressed herself up for Halloween, too, the entire experience had never really been on my radar before.

How I missed this is beyond me.

What struck me then--and struck me even more forcefully yesterday, when I headed back to the faire just for fun--was the depth of storytelling that all these individuals are engaging in.