I did it!

After months–maybe even years!–of not being able to get back into my WordPress blog (this thing here that you’re reading, if you’re reading it)–I finally found my way back in. Why was I so nimroded about finding it in the past? What made me able to surpass that state of nimrodery? If I had to guess, it could be those two parking tickets, pile of taxes that I have an extension for, and giant wad of grading in my backpack. They just knew how to conspire and set me up with something more interesting.

It’s also maybe a bit fitting, because after a big hiatus from writing (2 new jobs in 2 years, one new kid, and just a general need for a break), I had a glimmer of a way back into something I’d set aside. Could be just a glimmer; the manuscript in the proverbial drawer could very well be in its final resting-place. And it’s not that much of a surprise that on spring vacation (spring vacaaaaaaaaaytiooooooon! Like Captain Cavemaaaaan!), the abandoned dry land that is the wellspring of my creativity perks up with just a little water. But maybe this is a sign that that little glimmer (hello, mixed-metaphor, my old friend) will turn into water and yadda yadda yadda and I should go become one with my taxes before I take a certain moppet to get a haircut–

but let us not forget the great miracle that happened here, which is that I got back into the blog!

Yahoo!

Captain Caaave maaaaaaan!

As promised, Captain Caveman

I really wanted to call this blog post, “And who, day and night, must scramble for a living?” because that is one of the first  lines in “Tradition,” from Fiddler on the Roof, that I will be discussing herein, ici, la. Howevs, I’m not sure that everybody (who is not anybody) knows the particulars of this most excellent entry in America’s musical songbook, so I am going global and using the title of the song, plus a little reference to the T.S. Eliot essay I read my first year of college that I am embarrassed to admit (but admit nonetheless) that I did not understand at all. Hm, now I am Googling. What does Missouri Tom have to say about Tradition and the Individual Talent? Please hold.

Aha. It seems that, after wrestling with the idea of an artist’s tradition and innovation, Eliot determines that an artist reaches his greatest contribution when he incorporates artists of the past. Yeah, I see that — not just  in Eliot, but in the thing came here to talk about and will, eventually, Google digressions notwithstanding, talk about.

The other night, I was channel-flipping (hot night–approaching the end of the school year) and came upon a PBS fund-raiser show, “Broadway Musicals and Jewish Legacy.” (Talk about Tradition and the Individual Talent!) I pretty much love any excuse to watch musical-related things on TV, and I’m a member of the tribe to boot, so I stayed. “Maria! I once kissed a girl named Maria.” “You’ve got to be carefully taught.” “People! People who need people! Are the luckiest people…” etc etc and etc.

There was much to love, but I especially loved when the creators of “Fiddler on the Roof” talked about getting backers when their project was just a fledgling. They kept meeting with Harold Prince, the legendary producer who was helping out, and he kept asking them, “What is this show about?” They’d say, “It’s about this family,” or “It’s about this porgrom.” And he’d say, “Yeah, okay, but what’s it about?” This went on eight or nine times (probably nine, since that’s half of chai — life) — and finally one of the creators had a mini-explosion and said, “It’s about tradition! I mean, what else is it about?!”

Yes! Aha! Yes and aha! And indeed. It was about tradition. Not just about the family whose daughters stray, but about the tradition that binds them together and informs their every more. And for me, yes and aha and indeed because these guys created a musical that, next year, will have lasted for sixty; that has been loved in cities from Brazil to Japan; that many people who haven’t even seen can quote — and still, once upon a time, they didn’t know what their musical was about. To which I say, Thank God, because I don’t always initially know what my stories are about, either, and it is a relief to know that I am not doomed to being a minor chorus member because of it.  Indeed, Mr. Eliot, I am taking part in the tradition of my elders–ignorance, yes, but still a tradition–and I hope that, in trying to push beyond my ignorance, I’ll develop a little individual talent.

Who, day and night, must scramble for a living? Everyone! L’Chayim!

For those of you who haven’t read Gone Girl and or seen Side Effects, I’ve titled this post noting the Sad, Twisty women in both. If you’re still planning on checking them out, stop reading: spoilers abound. If you know the stories, or don’t plan to read them, I will now unveil the real title, which is

If You Disappoint a Woman, She’ll Hatch a Psycho Murder Plot That Frames You as the Perpetrator! Watch out!

Briefly: In Gone Girl, Nick comes home one day to find his wife, Amy, abducted. We pretty much know that he hasn’t done it (unless he’s lying to us, and we’re pretty sure he isn’t.) As the police find more and more evidence that points to him, he embarks on his own investigation and realizes that since high school, Amy has staged crimes against herself and framed her friends and lovers. The reason for insanity, we find out, is that her parents plagarized her life for their book series and then needed to take back her trust fund when they made bad investments. Nick also isn’t the husband Amy wanted him to be, either, losing his job in the recession, relocating her (without much choice) to his ailing hometown to care for his mean, dying father, and cheating on her with a student.  The author, Gillian Flynn, manages to make both Amy and Nick sympathetic, despite their many flaws–Nick for being duped and following the trail; Amy for her lame parents and her scheming brilliance. However, when I saw the movie Side Effects last night, I started to see Amy’s actions in a darker shade.

The woman bottom-right is not who she seems. She’s sad AND twisty!

In Side Effects, another women with a simple name, Emily Taylor, has her money taken away, this time when her husband is busted for insider trading at a Gatsby lawn party. In the past, her ambitions centered around graphic design. However, she sets her sights higher when she gets treated for depression by a shrink with lesbian tendencies and embarks on a plot to make back the money, kill her husband, and get away with it. (Beware the shrink with lesbian tendencies, though fear not, she will always be unmasked as the bad seed.)

Not what they seem, either.

Enter Jude Law as Dr. Banks, this movie’s Nick, as the psychiatrist who sees Emily next as part of the murder plan. Emily gets him to prescribe her anti-depressants that induce somnolent activities, like knifing your husband in the back as you’re cooking him dinner. Dr. Banks testifies that Emily did this entirely unconsciously and helps Emily get institutionalized instead of imprisoned, but his job and marriage are upended with the taint of his bad prescriptions. Desperate to gain back his reputation, he, too, goes on his own investigation, in this case to learn that Ms. Emily Taylor is not actually the sleepwalker she claims to be.

So–what is that?  Some women–both white–are so unable to accept disappointment that they go crazy, concocting elaborate deceptions that free themselves and destroy others’ lives? Okay, yes: insider trading, spousal cheating, and the sudden loss of money would throw me for a loop, too, and yes, this is genre fiction and entertainment. Still, I find it alarming that two authors in one year thought the public would find it satisfying to learn that cruel crimes and psychotic behavior were motivated by a woman’s disappointment in losing her station.

I can’t imagine this story ever being made with reverse gender roles, either because the disappointed man would go out and make something of himself or because we’d just think it was too mean for a man to frame his wife. It wouldn’t be entertaining. In contrast, we think it’s great for these bad men to be punished for their crimes against the seemingly defenseless women they wronged. “Go get ‘im, Lorena!” we cheer, until we learn–oh, noes!–that our Emily is psycho.

Except–wait! Lorena doesn’t come out on top. By the end of the story, Dr. Banks, however flawed and responsible for Emily’s circumstances, has the brains and tenacity to pursue his beliefs and seek out the she-devil and her truth. Side Effects ends with Emily, formerly only aping depression, now drugged to her pretty eyeteeth and staring out one of many indistinguishable windows of the mental institution. I felt a sense of justice, but what about Dr. Banks, who the movie makes clear was a little freehanded with the medication? Why does he get to drive off with his hot wife and cute stepkid at the end? No punishment for the man with the prescription pad?

I must give Gone Girl credit for a more savvy ending, or at least an attempt at one (of the two stories, it is by far the more finely crafted.) Amy gets pregnant with Nick’s kid, and even after all this crazy behavior, the two of them choose to stay with each other. It’s a perverse and, to me, witty take on the fact that people with families choose to be pinned down when we pick one partner and hope for the best.  To that extent, Gone Girl does take responsibility for its story by having its female protagonist get what she so desperately sought to escape: life with an imperfect man. Or is it that she gets what she wants–a husband who chooses her, warts and all, while he has to live with someone whose flaws might only kindly be referred to as imperfections?

I just don’t feel that, as a woman, I’m being given much credit for my ability to accept reality. Yes, there is something exciting about women constructing new lives after they get handed a poop sandwich, but can the lives please not involve lies and murder? Just wondering.

For another feminist take on “Side Effects,” look here: 

Brothers and sisters, guess where I was Monday night?

A showtunes sing-a-long. And if you’re going to read on in the hopes of an ironic sneer at the process, forget it! I love showtunes, and I love singing with people. It’s the closest thing in my life right now to organized religion: everybody engaged, with common knowledge and enthusiasm. Okay, we’re not seeking moral guidance, and for sure the carolers aren’t wrestling with the problematics of the song “Mame” (“The whole plantation’s hummin?” And really, people still do this show?). Still, I love singing with people, especially songs from musicals, which I’ve listened to all my life.

I did walk into Signature Theatre, who was hosting this month, with trepidation. I’d

I am no Fraulein Sally Bowles. Alas.

thought it was going to be songbook-style, but when I came in late (since I can never manage to reach any DC destination without getting lost), only one person was singing, in a very jazzy cabaret. Uh-oh. Would this be amateur piano karaoke? I like to sing, but I”m nothing to make people listen to, and I definitely wasn’t going to belt out “Maria” for a crowd of strangers. I started to wonder if I’d driven extra on Glebe Road for nothing.

However, when I reached the friend who worked there, she assured me that the event was, in fact, sing-a-long style; the lounge lizard was just doing a little publicity for an upcoming Signature show. Phew. I happily abandoned myself to the 50-page songbook and crooning crowd. Singing! Belting! With others and a piano! The piano player was totally into it, adding little flourishes that you hear on the soundtrack but have to add in on your own when you a capella in your car. I’m in my 30s and was definitely below the median age, but I was touched by the cluster of men in their 60s, letting others use the songbooks and signaling to the piano player to pause as they looked up the words to “Impossible Dream” and “Tomorrow” on their iPads. They were straight-seeming, too, which surprised and charmed me. People had come out of their demographic for the night, and I gave my gamest alto along with them.

Not without moments of self-consciousness, of course. We ventured into the late 20th century with “525,600 minutes” from “Rent,” and one young redhead in too short of a shirt-dress got WAY more into it than I thought was seemly, doing little kicky dances and flirting cutely with her friend across the circle. Or–even worse–the crowd requested “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Miserables and then proceeded to belt it out from memory, since it wasn’t in the songbook.

There was an unwritten rule to loving musical theatre, I decided. It was perfectly fine to know the words to “I’m Just a Girl Who Cain’t Say No,” or “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Those songs were just in the vernacular. Your parents sang from those shows, or you were in a production of one of them at camp. But to know the words to any song other than the major ballads of “Les Miserables” was just shameful. People shouldn’t admit to that sort of malarkey. Or maybe I didn’t want to be there when they did.

Just as I was feeling the need for a bathroom escape, though, two new, young women sauntered through in impressively tailored coats. The one with glossy curls caught my eye and intoned, “The blood of the martyrs will water the meadows of France!” I couldn’t help but laugh. There was a little irony in the night after all. Or at least, just enough.

Now, pardon me while I play a game of Spider solitaire so I can pay attention to the words to “Impossible Dream.” That’s a good song, yo!

 Do you see this face? It is one of the first GoogleImage search results for the word suspicious.

This dog? Suspicious.

This dog is so suspicious, it wouldn’t even appear. 

And why are we suspicious today? I’ll tell you.

We should actually have been suspicious a few weeks ago. We were writing a series of scenes (okay, I was writing a series of scenes) in which my protagonist was experiencing the fallout of a seriously bad decision. As I was chronicling this, I was grappling with the results of my own questionable decision to have the character merely ‘experience’ the fallout. Stuck with the chore of writing scene after scene like this, I asked my fellow MFA alums, “What can you do to break the monotony of things going godawfully bad for your character?”

The main suggestion was to add humor, to make us like the character amid her whininess. But hello, the real problem was that the character should have been wanting things and going after them! Lois Lowry was big on this when I heard her speak at the National Festival of the Book (I really should have blogged about that experience-of-a-lifetime, but instead, I’ll just show you the photo):

She was showing a character reaching for something she wanted! True story!

If I needed to ask how to make some  more interesting, it was probably a giveaway that they weren’t the right scenes. Next time, include wanting.

Have any of you had revelations like this?

Last time I wrote, I implicitly compared the act of filling out character questionnaires to finding barf in your refrigerator. By ‘character questionnaire,’ I mean questions writers ask themselves about the characters they plan to put into a novel. Most writers have a vague idea of the character’s age, appearance, occupation, and personality, but of course it’s useful to think ahead of time about the character’s background and the things that motivate her. The more you know about those, the more you know how she will respond to external forces. Response=action, and that’s plot, baby!

That said, so many writers I know cringe as they face, or even consider facing, a character questionnaire, and I’ve been one of them. So many of the questions are overly generic or, worse,  silly but without ammunition–no power. Until I found one that included questions like this:

•  How does the character handle stress and problems?

Such a good one. I have a character whom I pictured as an uber-confident, uber-cabaple, uber-connected uber-goober, but when I got to this question, I realized that in a crisis, the character blamed others as much as he possibly could.  Will that create action? You betcha!

So will this question:

What does this character notice when he walks into a room?

Does anyone get the pun here?

From the get-go, I might think that’s a refrigerator question (my new term for useless questions like, ‘What does your character keep in her refrigerator?) On second glance, though, the answer to this question will generate action as well. Does this character notice things first, or people? A character who obsessively

Doesn’t this scene end with a collapse of these bones?

notices if something’s out of place will try to fix it and maybe other people will react to that, creating action once again. A character who desperately hopes no one in the room will embarrass her will become tense if the room contains someone threatening, and maybe do something embarrassing just because.  Maybe she’ll even do something suspicious, which, in a mystery, would further fuel the plot.

A final series of questions I really liked:

• Best trait?
• Worst trait?
• What is this character’s opinion of self?
• What kind of person do others think s/he is?

Answer these back-to-back and you’ve got multiple dimensions.

Is that Lou Reed?

This does not provide an exhaustive list of the questions I found helpful, and if you find these loathsome, no worries–don’t answer them. I was just pleasantly surprised to find some useful questions that went beyond, “What do you want? What do you fear?” and I thought I’d share.

Final note: strange to say, although I thought these all came from a list I was going to share with you, apparently I’d cobbled them together with other lists,

I find this image a little chilling. Much less bad than playing H and S with Google.

and cut and pasted. Maybe Google is hiding what it once gave me so readily; maybe I forgot my search terms. In any case, here‘s the closest thing I can find to the list of questions I’ve been using, although it must be said that there are a great many herein that give me the barfs.

Happy question-and-answer!

ps If you get my picture-pun, put it in the comments.

In theory and some practice, I am pro-commitment.  Take relationships, for example.  Just the other day, I was saying that the decision to get married had actually strengthened a relationship that had already lasted for years.  Before my sweetheart and I got married, I would come away from bad disagreements thinking, “That’s it! We’re not meant to be together. We should break up.”  After we got engaged, however, I approached our disagreements differently.  “We want to be in this for the long haul,” I’d think, “so the focus is not as much on winning.  It’s on creating long-term strategies for us to avoid these issues in the future.”  Though I may have just wanted to get married for vague reasons, I see now that committing has brought its own benefits.  I think we’re a better team now than we were before.

I like commitment in theatre, too (I mean, who doesn’t?)  It brings to mind John Adams during the second-act crisis number of “1776,” when he belts out, “Commitment!”  (I am not even going to bother inserting the YouTube link here, because if you haven’t seen this late-60s show, I doubt I’m going to move you to do so.  If you have already seen it, you know it’s awesome and you know what moment I’m talking about.)  This past year, I met a Master Teaching Artist in the field of educational theatre who used to watch my students rehearse and say, “Commit,” doing the Sign-Language sign for it under her chin (I don’t remember exactly how it looked, but it looked very cool.)

So, commitment: yes!  I didn’t think I had much trouble with it in writing.  (Don’t worry, this laughable assertion will soon get debunked.)  But it was on my mind during a recent work and letter exchange with another writer, my excellent grad school roommate, Rachel Wilson (her novel, DON’T TOUCH, will be published by HarperChildren’s in the summer of 2014.  Yeah!)  She is starting a new project, like I am, and she was pushing herself to write a synopsis for me by a certain deadline, since she says that the hardest thing for her in writing is committing to one path or idea.  At the time of our exchange, I thought, “Hunh, that’s interesting.  I’ve never thought about that.  I guess that’s not a problem I have as a writer.”

Ha.  Ha.  HA.

My memory must be making me delusional.  I haven’t started a new project in a while, since the thing I just finished was a revival of something I’d let lie.  Now, though, I am starting a new project, and while I’ve been able to push myself into a certain amount of plotting by reading some plotting books, zoiks, I’m reaching a scaredy moment!

It has to do with character.  The piece I’m planning is full of action, much more plot-driven than what I usually write.  I’ll shape the characters to serve the plot, rather than the other way around.  At this juncture, I know a lot of what I basically want to happen, but zeroing in on the people who carry out those actions is scary!  What if I get it wrong?  What if the unarticulated ferment pit of my brain has all these great ideas, but in committing to getting them down, I leave out one slimy strand and the whole thing crashes to pieces?  So much better to just let it malinger in the brain, right??

Not my brain. Actually The Bog of Eternal Stench, from Labyrinth

Well.  Probably not.  For one thing, I’d just have to start something new and face the whole process all over again.  For two, I should probably give in to my suspicions that if I can’t articulate some of my thoughts for my characters, they’re probably just ghosts and feelings in the first place.  Sometimes, when I’m stuck in a scene, particularly in rewrites, I go back to my notes, hoping I’ll have included some guidance for myself.  Where I’ll hope to see some brilliant mechanism for getting Zoe and Jackie back into each others’ good graces, I’m most likely to find something like, “Then Zoe and Jackie will find something mutual to laugh at, and the ice will melt.”

‘Something mutual to laugh at’?  Wow, self, that was helpful!  So glad I took those elaborate notes.

So I suspect it’s similar ghosts and haze up here with the characters of the current piece, and that when I commit to articulating something about their hopes and fears, I won’t be killing off sad, better versions of the characters.  Rather, I’ll be killing off my own fears that I can’t bring them to life in a perfect manner and embracing the chance to move forward.  Now, if only I can get myself to believe it.  It’s painfully unshocking how the fear of committing today was so hard that I updated this blog, something I haven’t done for real in over a year.

To further inspire myself, in lieu of visiting the YouTube, I’ll post this picture of John Adams (okay, an actor playing John Adams. The real John Adams didn’t have any photos taken, and the portraits are less than stirring.)

“Commitment!”

To quote Campbell’s Soup (at least, I think it’s Campbell’s Soup), how can you argue with that face?

Oh wow, now I’m really going to get a lot of spam.

I’m back!  I’m back after a hugely long absence!  I’m not even going to calculate the number of months I’ve been away.  I have a good excuse: I’ve been busy.  Moved, bought a house, moved in, had a baby, found a job.  All good (one superlative); all stressful and time-consuming.  Throughout, I’ve been thinking, “Oh, I keep meaning to go back to that blog.  But I should also order another swaddle blanket/deal with that car insurance issue/run the wash/write a snatch of my novel/collapse.”  Tonight, something urgent brought me to the site: spam.

I don’t know how many of you have blogs, but if you do, unless you have some surefire firewall that I don’t have here on WordPress, spam will crop up in your comment feed.  You probably get all excited, thinking, ‘Someone’s hopped off Facebook and actually read and commented on my blog post!’ but no, it’s just someone trolling for cash.  I will say that at least today’s blog spammers are sort of creative.  Sure, there’s the generic.  They’ll say things like,

Thank you for your whole hard work on this blog. My mom delights in working on research and it’s obvious why. All of us learn all concerning the powerful tactic you render very useful guidelines through your website and therefore invigorate response from other people on that content so our favorite child is without question being taught a great deal. Have fun with the remaining portion of the year. Your conducting a useful job.

[Who is their favorite child, I might ask, and what is happening to their less favored child as a result?  And why do those with favorites have trouble using apostrophes?]

There’s also the lengthier:

My husband and i have been absolutely ecstatic that Albert could finish up his researching out of the precious recommendations he was given from your very own web pages. It is now and again perplexing just to always be giving out secrets that others have been making money from. We really take into account we’ve got you to appreciate for this. All the explanations you’ve made, the straightforward site menu, the relationships you can give support to promote – it is many terrific, and it’s really aiding our son in addition to the family consider that this topic is amusing, and that’s especially important. Thanks for the whole thing!

I’ve always had a fondness for that Albert.  So glad I could help him out.  Many terrific.  And I agree that it is perplexing to give our secrets that others can make money from.  It happens to me all the time, and what can I say — I’m perplexed!

The most inventive and surprising spam was deleted a few months ago, but it mentioned oatmeal!  First of all — really, oatmeal?  Secondly, how did they know I am married to a marked lover of oatmeal?

When I hopped online to delete this madness (nothing says ghost-town blog like piles of spam), I reread some previous posts, and by gum, you all are fabulous commenters.  I would definitely be motivated to blog more if I saw more of the likes of you, and I’d like my return to do a little good for the world.  Thankgiving is coming up (bye-bye, Halloween!), and some people will have a hard time coming by their turkey or tofu, so I decided, for every person who posts fake spam in the comments, I will donate $1 to a food pantry. (Now you might ask, how will I know if it’s real spam or fake spam?  I won’t.  I’ll have to guess.)

Winner gets bragging rights.  Everyone else gets the joy of sounding like a spammer.  Blunt your pencils and begin!

Oh, and since this post brought a certain video to mind, I thought I’d share:

Follow-up note: I am closing this post to comments, because, ironically, it is getting too much actual spam!  Unless my friends are excellent at creating fake spam and interested in disguising it, but that just doesn’t sound like what they have time  for these days.

Check out Jennifer Hubbard’s blog for a breakdown of how writers, bloggers, and all of you raised $1667 for libraries around the country!

I know I have been super extra MIA lately, but I’ve been focusing on Major Life Things.  Everything is great, just not very condusive (conducive? yes, the red squiggly tells me it’s ‘conducive’) to blogging.

What it is conducive to, however, is getting obsessed with a single song, which often happens in times when things are pushing down on me, pushing down on you.  And yes, I’m talking about the Queen song Under Pressure, a version of which you can watch below.  (It’s not actually that interesting to watch, but the other versions showed buildings collapsing, and I found that deeply disturbing.)

The play that I was just working on–the one that a high-school senior directed, and I mentored–went up this weekend, and one of the many amazing sound cues designed by said senior was Under Pressure.  It just stuck in my brain and all I seem to be able to do is watch and listen to Youtube versions of this song, from “Sing-Off” (which I foresee myself getting addicted to at some point in life) to the Freddie Mercury tribute by David Bowie and Annie Lennox.  I’m not going to post that last one because frankly, it’s a little weird.  You’re welcome to go looking for it, and I certainly endorse a David Bowie viewing, because I happen to find him sexy, but while I find Annie L. quite attractive as well, she’s just a bit odd here.  Oh, heck, now maybe I’ve made you curious, so I’ll include her as well, and whether you watch or ffwd to the end, tell me if you don’t think, “By gum, that is a little weird.”

More next week, I hope!

This is our last dance

This is ourselves…under pressure.