Earning Turns Revisited

It's snowing in Syracuse today. This is not news. Actually, it's pretty standard for January. I always get a little melancholic when it snows because I can't ski anymore. But I've talked about this before when I wrote "Earning Turns" a few years back. "Earn you turns" is a skiing term that means a skier has skied the "back country" by hiking up a mountain then skiing down it. I didn't know this when I wrote my first post so many years ago but I don't regret it. My kids were earning their turns in their own way and while skiing didn't grab them the way it grabbed me, I was glad that I exposed them to it. The expression "earn your turns" got me thinking though. When you think about it a little, it's a great metaphor for writing.  

When you start writing, you're in the wilderness, hiking up the mountain in hopes of finding the perfect run that no one has ever taken before. Or at the very least one that only a few people have so you can make your own mark. There's an anticipation and nervousness that comes with the unknown as a new project looms and you stumble your way through the bleakness, seeking and searching. Then you find it. That perfect run. The one that had been eluding you. A blank sheet of snow stretching out, ready for you to carve up how you see fit. It's familiar but intimidating. The first step is the hardest but once you take it, everything comes back to you in a rush. The silence of a winter's morn is replaced by the creak of a boot and the whisper of the skis on the snow. The tautness gives way to muscle memory as you guide the seventy plus inches of fiberglass through the snow. Stone and tree blur by and you feel a sense of accomplishment as you complete the run. You can't help but look back at what you've done and feel some pride that you did it. The entire process is never quite easy and if you're doing it right it should be a little difficult. It's like the quote from A League of Their Own, "It's supposed to be hard, if it wasn't hard everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great." 

I think it's a damn fine metaphor, if you ask me. So, let's go earn some turns and get some writing done. 

Properly Attired

While I was down the rabbit hole of looking at writers and their typewriters, something caught my eye in the photos. Not the typewriters or any other technology they use, but rather the way they were dressed. No, seriously. It sounds like a silly thing to notice but it made me think of the adage "dress for the job you want not the job you have." 

Almost everyone in the photos is well put together. Men at the very least in slacks and button down shirts, often with ties and sports coats. Sometimes in a smart looking sweater or cardigan. (I truly believe after my yearly viewing of the beginning of the year Twilight Zone marathon that cardigans and sweater vests need to make a comeback.) Women almost all wore skirts and blouses with pearls, usually in flats with the occasional pair of heels. The most frequent accessory besides their typewriters? Cigarettes. Lots of cigarettes. But there was more. 

Mixed in was your occasional pair of jeans (David Letterman), flip-flops (Ian Fleming of all people), and some hats (Terry Pratchett, Damon Runyon, Will Self). Mickey Spillane liked to show off his guns. Hunter S. Thompson wore shorts and often eschewed shirts. Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote in their pajamas. George RR Martin has his Greek fisherman's hat and suspenders while David Foster Wallace liked bandanas and Joan Didion had her sunglasses. 

Actually, we have a lot in common when it comes to writing attire.

It got me thinking about the way that I dress, especially when I write. I dress like a schlub. I have a schlubs's physique. I'm tall, hunchbacked with a big belly. I have relatively broad shoulders but recent years of neglect have ebbed away any muscle that I once had hiding under the soft exterior. Most of my wardrobe consists of jeans, sweatpants, athletic shorts and formless tops like sweatshirts, henleys and t-shirts. I'm not exactly ready for my candid typewriter shot. Usually, when I'm writing, it's later at night and I'm in a pair of pajama pants and a t-shirt. What job am I dressing for? 

It amazes me the things that I notice about writing when I'm not writing. Why would I focus on what writers wear when they write? Why would I think that was important? Maybe it's my quest for that writing ideal. The perfect tool. The perfect place. The perfect writing attire. The prefect writing scenario. Something that probably doesn't exist. 

My Own Space

Recently, instead of writing or grading, like I should be doing, I found myself researching sheds. It became something of an obsession and occupied my time. Now I'm not talking about the kind of sheds most of us have in our back yards, filled to the brim with lawn supplies, tools and old Christmas decorations. No, I'm talking about a comfy place sequestered from the rest of the house just for myself. A place to get away and write. It's really a romantic but completely unfeasible notion. But a boy can dream can't he?

I like that it has a porch.

This all started when I read online that Wes Anderson had replicated to the tiniest detail the writing hut of Roald Dahl for his Netflix short films. I started to wonder about writing places and, as is my wont, fell down a pretty big rabbit hole. There's a lot out there about writer's sheds. Names like George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas (who inspired Dahl in the first place), Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf and, of course, Henry David Thoreau (even though his mother did his laundry and brought him sandwiches) all had sheds, shacks or huts where they wrote. Neil Gaiman has his gazebo. Chuck Wendig has his "mystery box." Yann Martel has his back yard writing studio. Eoin Colfer and David McCullough sought refuge from busy families in their own writing sheds. Michael Pollan wrote an entire book about the entire enterprise of building a shed for his writing on his property. And it's made me want one of my own. I just feel like I need a writing space all to myself. 

I'm fascinated by the idea of writer's spaces in general. There's an entire Instagram account and hashtag about writer's spaces and I can't stop looking at it. I want a cool space to work in. I don't really have one now or maybe it's that I just don't use the space I have properly. I do most of my writing from the comfort of my couch and I wonder if that's part of the problem (though it worked for Truman Capote and Stephen Sondheim). Maybe I'm not a couch writer. Maybe I need to be at a desk or a table. I've found great success writing at my kitchen counter, though that gets uncomfortable after a while. I do well in cafes and I wrote most of this sitting at a rickety table in a cold room at the back of the school. 

I do have a great little desk/alcove in my study that's perfect for writing.  I haven't used as much as I should, for no good reason. Maybe it's time to change that. I mean there's no way my wife is going to let me plop a fourth shed in our backyard (and who could blame her?), so I'll have to make due with what I have. Plus, who wants to trudge across the backyard on a cold, snowy kind of day like today? I need to make that space my own. 

I started this process before the holidays. I bought a really nice chair  that I'm not putting together until I finish a few other around the house projects. I can't use the folding chair that's in there now because of my back. I still have to finish tidying it up and organizing a few things. I'll be sharing the space with my daughter so I won't be alone in the room but at least I won't be on the couch. It's not perfect and I'm sure there will be some bump along the way, but I think in the long run it'll work. It'll focus me on what I need to do, be that writing or grading. Speaking of which, I have some grading to do. I suppose that the kitchen counter will have to do, for now.

Corona, Futura and Stephen King's Wang

My friend Brian uses a typewriter (1938 Corona Sterling) and recently sent me a bit of correspondence using said typewriter. To be honest, it was kind of cool. It's been a long time since I'd read/seen something typewritten. I thought about how I should respond. I thought about using my own typewriter (a Royal Futura 800, gifted to me by my friend Justin) but after a long side eye from the wife, I decided to just send him an email in return. But it did get me thinking about typewriters and the tools we use to write. 

When you think about it, until relatively recently most "writing" was done on typewriters. There are still some writers that still use typewriters not unlike my Futura or Brian's Corona. And we're talking about people that don't write small books. David McCullough, Robert Caro, Cormac McCarthy and even Danielle Steel. I think about my last post. How much of Wheel of Time was written on a typewriter? I mean great googly moogly, that's a lot of paper. That's a lot of ribbon. That's a lot of time. 

There's almost a romance to it. The sounds alone: the platen makes when you roll the paper in, the click-clack tapping of the keys, the typebar hitting the paper, the ding at the end of the line and the thunk of the carriage return lever. But there's also a sense of labor in typing. A sense of satisfaction by the end of the page that you've done the work. 

A few nights ago I fell down a rabbit hole, looking at pictures of famous writers/artists/celebrities and their typewriters. It was fascinating and interesting to see. This was the way people used to work. Computers for the purpose of word processing is a pretty new thing. One, I think, that we take for granted. It's made writing a novel something anyone can do anywhere they could do it. It's said that Stephen King was an early adopter of this digital revolution, using a Wang Word Processor by the early 80s. (A $12,000 piece of equipment at the time.) I read somewhere that King may have been the first author to have a novel published that was written entirely on a computer. (A simple Google search seems to refute this, but it's still a cool piece of mythology.)

Stephen King and his Wang

Besides paper and ink, I've only ever used computers, mostly using Microsoft Word. (I'm sure in my younger days we owned a typewriter and I tried to write using that, because that's what writers did in the late 80s/early 90s.) I've used other word processors. Google Docs is incredibly useful and a back up when I need it. I tried Scrivener but found it overwhelming. Even George RR Martin, one of my literary idols, uses Word Star 4.0, a 30 year old word processing program that runs on DOS and from what I've seen it looks almost as unwieldy as Scrivener. I've never had a huge issue with Word and I've grown accustomed to it. I have other friends that swear by other things. Some even use typewriters. 

Doorstoppers and Fanfic

A few weeks back I was putzing around, watching Bob's Burgers with the TV Tropes website open as I watched the episode. I do this often, enjoying how writers use (and misuse) tropes in their work. I have strong opinions on tropes that I'll share another time. That's not what this post is about. It's about a specific trope that I came across on the website as the adventures of the Belcher family played in the background. I found myself reading the page dedicated to Doorstoppers and there went the rest of my night as I fell down this deep rabbit hole. 

According to TV Tropes, a "Doorstopper" is a book that is literally heavy enough to stop a door. A proper doorstopper is no less than 500 pages, that's about 150,000 words with a normal sized typeface though most use a smaller font to fit more words on paper likely pushing that to number closer to 250,000 words. That's the number that TV Tropes uses as the minimum to define a doorstopper. That works for me, so we'll use that number. 

3.8 million words of doorstopping goodness.

I perused the entries. the Literature one hit all the classics you know and love. Dumas, Trollope, Michener, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Tolkein, Follet and modern writers like Brandon Sanderson, Robert Jordan, Stephen King and, of course, George RR Martin. I've obviously read my share of doorstoppers. I mean A Song of Ice and Fire is hugely important to me. I've read It and The Dark Tower series. I made it about 2/3 of the way through Winter's Heart in The Wheel of Time before I made a bold decision to start the series all over and read from the beginning. (It's been 20 years since I read The Eye of the World.) But a knew a lot of the entries in the Literature section. It was another section that caught me off guard. 

I opened the tab for Fan Works and, boy, was I quickly overwhelmed. Not only by the number of entries but by some of the word counts. Great googly moogly. The tab is split into smaller tabs labeled Over 2 million words, Over 1 million words, Over 500k words and Over 250k words. I was flabbergasted by the numbers. Someone wrote 16 million words of fan fiction dedicated to the Nickelodeon show The Loud House. To put that into perspective, that's FOUR Wheel of Times. Not four books but four of the ENTIRE SERIES. There's a lot-and I mean A LOT-of My Little Pony. I did a little research. I found someone that wrote 2 million words of MASH fanfic and someone else that 1.3 million words of Dallas fanfic. (These were strictly found on Fanfiction.net. I didn't even attempt to check AAO3.)

On Fanfiction.net there are over 600 words of 800,000 words or more. That's a lot of passion for an IP. I mean 800,000 words is about 2,700 double spaced writing pages (Times New Roman, 12 point font). That's incredible. That's a lot of time and energy. That's a lot of love and devotion. the level of commitment it takes to write this much is titanic, no matter the topic. And it seems to me to be a waste. 

I have an antagonistic relationship with fan fiction. I've never been a fan of it. Technically, you are stealing the blood, sweat and tears of another author. I know that's a little melodramatic but it's kind of true. That's the way I feel about my work. I know that there are plenty of writers, especially genre writers, that got their start writing fanfic and there are others that wholly endorse fanfic of their own work. I'm not so innocent, I suppose. My earliest attempts at writing were little more than Lord of the Rings/Dragonlance fanfic with the serial numbers barely filed off. But even then, it was my own world, my own characters and ultimately my own story. It turns out I was just using the same tropes from those properties. I wasn't using Middle Earth as a setting and despite the likeness I didn't have a character named Tanis Half-Elven. If you are going to spend the amount of energy it takes to write 16 million words of fanfic, why not on something original? Or, at the very least, something that could be called an homage or pastiche of the thing you love. It seems to me to be a better use of energy. I've written about shared DNA before and find that to be far more digestible a concept than fan fiction.

But who am I? Maybe I'm just being a Grumpy Gus. I try not to be a goalie in life. As long as you aren't hurting anyone, why should I stand in your way? (There's an argument to be made that you are hurting the original author with fanfic, but I'm not here to make it.) I'm all for writing in any form, especially if you derive happiness from it. 

Peculiarity

 The other day I was thinking about my father. He died a little over a year ago and I still have plenty of thoughts about him, though they come in dribs and drabs at the weirdest times. I haven't publicly written about his death and I'm not sure why. I've written about my father before and God knows I'm not afraid of sharing in this space, but lately I haven't had much to say period, let alone about my father's passing. And I don't have to anything to say about it right now. This is more about a memory that I have of him. A very peculiar memory. 

The last few years he spent the summers at our house and at night my son and I would sit with him while he watched television. It was nice and I relished that time. Not that it was just me and my dad but that it was all three of us. It gave my son a chance to get to know him and spend some time with him. We'd sit around and shoot the shit, remembering the past and talking about a wide array of topics, as we were wont to do. 

But it was during these times that some of my father's peculiarities showed. He watched a peculiar variety of shows. We'd spend plenty of time watching American Pickers or a wide variety of those car repair/rebuilding shows. But as I've said before, my father is a paradox and on top of those shows, my father loved genre television. Cowboy shows were a staple as was scifi. He was a regular viewer of this guy called Svengoolie, where I watched FRANKENSTEIN, DRACULA and the ever classic ABBOT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN with him. I also remember watching the Americanized version of the 1954 GODZILLA movie featuring Raymond Burr. And it's Raymond Burr that got me thinking about one of my father's strangest peculiarities. 

My father also like procedurals like SHERLOCK (BBC version), LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT and, in particular, the old PERRY MASON starring Raymond Burr. The first time I sat down and watched it with him (to be fair, I was on my laptop writing or putzing around on Twitter) my father did something I found bizarre. As the show came to it's climactic end when they trial was about to be decided, he turned the station. I was taken aback. I looked up at him and thought he was just messing with me, but he didn't acknowledge my befuddlement and, being who I am, I said nothing to him in return. This became the habit. We'd watch 55 minutes of PERRY MASON and my dad would switch channels for the last five minutes. We never watched the resolution of a case. 

Now I know that Perry Mason almost always won and I always wondered if that was part of my father's reasoning. But I found it so frustrating. And the lack of explanation just made it worse. I never pressed or pushed. Maybe I didn't want an explanation. Maybe the wondering was more interesting to me. Maybe he already knew the ending. Maybe he was more interested in the investigation and didn't really care about the ending. Maybe my dad was just peculiar. 

It's weird quirks that I remember about my dad. And maybe being peculiar is what makes us memorable. 

Eureka Euphoria

I didn't want to get out of bed Friday morning. I stayed up too late and was tired. But, as I do everyday, I got up, got ready for work and trudged out the door to my truck. Then something happened that was entirely unexpected, a spark lit in my brain and I had a moment. 

I've been struggling writing for the last several months. I have one project that I've completely outlined. I've told myself the story but I can't decide which POV style to use and it's completely frozen the process. I've also been wrestling with another story idea for months. It wasn't so much an idea as a notion. It wasn't quite coalescing into something the way that I would have liked. It was elusive, just at the edges of my subconscious, and it was frustrating. I just really struggled to write. I tried forcing the idea out and it resisted. It wasn't ready yet. That was until yesterday morning, in my truck as I drove to school. The notion just clicked together like so many Legos and became a idea then an honest to goodness writing project. 

Don't get me wrong. It's still early in development. It could just shrivel up and die on the vine like so many other projects. But the bones are there, it just needs to be put together. And I think I'm up to the task. As I'm conceptualizing the idea, putting it together in my brain, something else happened. A brand new idea came strolling in through the mists of my mind. It was jolting. 

The second idea is completely different than the first and it came in fully formed. Shockingly so. It wasn't a notion or a concept, it was a fully formed idea. Sold. Tangible. And I couldn't believe it. Endorphins were released. I was overjoyed. I rushed to work to get the ideas on paper before they retreated back into the aforementioned mists of my mind. After a few bumps, I managed to get to my desk and get the ideas into my notebook. I was euphoric. 

What I think I look like getting out of my truck.

I was excited about writing again. The last few months have been a grind. I wrote, working on some things that will never see the light of day, but this felt different. All the gloom and hesitation I'd been feeling is gone. And it showed. 

My students must've noticed something. They were working on a writing assignment and were diligent and focused. For a few of the classes the only thing you could hear with the tapping of computer keys. It was exciting. Even my most challenging class (one of the most challenging I've had in the 18 years that I've been teaching) were acting different. They lined up at my desk and were asking about their grades, trying to figure out what they could do to improve. I had several constructive conversations with some of the most demanding students about what was going on in class with them and felt like I made a little bit of a connection with them. And then they went to work. No shouting across the room. No TikTok dances in the back of the room. No theatrics and antics. Just work. At the end of class they were eager to show me how much work they had done. I was beside myself. I was smiling.

I wondered, did my students sense my mood? Was I giving off vibes of some sort? Whatever it was, I was glad for it. 

Writing is a funny thing. When I got up on Friday morning, I had no idea that I was going to have a breakthrough like that. And the icing on the cake was what happened in school. Now comes the difficult part, writing the stuff. It's also the most fun.