Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Life Lessons

Novel Spaces is in its 10th year! Over the coming months we'll be featuring some of the most popular posts from our archives. This one was first published July 22, 2010.  Enjoy!


By Terence Taylor


I had an experience the other day that left me filled with so many contradictory emotions that I feel the need to write about it. My writing has always been where I’ve gone when I need clarity. As I explain in print what I’m feeling, I often understand better what it is that I’m actually going through.

My adolescence and even my adult life is littered with lengthy, heartfelt, meticulously typed letters to lovers, friends and family detailing how I felt after fights -- explaining in the overly articulate detail of aftermath why I really won or why I was apologizing -- or as a way to release inner thoughts, positive or negative, that I had trouble expressing in person. There’s even a stack of old journals written to myself from the eighties that I’m almost afraid to re-read, remembering the highs and the lows of those years. Words have the power to bring back both the pleasure and the pain of the past, sometimes more vividly than is comfortable.

This particular event occurred at my local Chase bank, as I entered with my battered bike to get twenty dollars from my account to buy some vegetables at a local farmer’s market to make a salad. The day before I’d grilled some salmon I’d bought on sale, cooked enough for two meals, and realized that I could add it to a cold salad on a hot day, if I just steeled myself for one brief exposure to the heat and humidity to get the fixings.

I was in a good mood. The day was a classically hot and muggy New York summer Sunday, but the idea of eating a cold salad in front of the fan, in front of the computer, pleased me no end and made it worth venturing out.

A black man my age, maybe a little younger, but with a harder history, opened the door with the broad smile of someone who wanted something.

“Come on in, brother!” he said, and ushered me inside, adding that any help to him on my way out would be appreciated. I’m one of those people who will always buy a meal for anyone on the street who says they’re hungry and asks to be fed. I’d like to think I’d clothe the naked as well. But I stopped handing out cash in the nineties, as it got harder to earn and as more people, younger and in better shape than I, were asking me for it, with increasing belligerence, as if somehow it was my duty.

He had a plastic cooler next to him, and as I got my solitary twenty from the cash machine, all I could afford to take out that day, a white woman who‘d walked out as I entered came back to the door and sheepishly handed him a dollar for one of the tiny bottles of water he had on ice for sale, her eyes downcast in guilt. I finished my transaction, and turned to go.

As I approached the door, he began his spiel again, rapidly going from a fake cheerful, “Gonna help a brother out?” to snide derision as it became clear I had no intention of doing so. By the time I hit the door, he was accusing me of letting down the black race by not giving him money, and I felt a flush of embarrassment rise as I exited. Not content, he followed me out the door, and continued his tirade.

I got mad and started responding, yelled back that he was no great representative, and that I had done more for black people than he could imagine, and in return was told, “You don’t even sound black!” spat out as if it was the worst thing he could think of to say. And it was. I launched into a rant that I cut off only because I was heading across a street with my bike and didn’t want to be smeared across Fifth Avenue by traffic.

He stepped back inside the air-conditioned ATM to peddle his wares and his line. I biked down to the Farmer’s Market, angry and ashamed, without knowing why I was reacting so strongly. I understand now, of course, after taking time to process it and talking to several friends of assorted ethnicities about the encounter.

But as I fumed then and came up with all the things I could have said to put him in his place, I came back to one thing. He was a hustler and he’d hustled me. Guilt is the panhandler’s first line of offense, and he’d just clicked into a mode that had worked for him in the past with articulate middle class black folk who may feel some residual guilt that they’re doing better than their less successful fellows.

It wasn’t any great insight he was exercising, or even a truth he was revealing. It was an animal survival reflex. Tearing into him, showing off the high verbal skills he’d mocked, wouldn’t make me the winner, or make me feel any better, even if I made it past his emotional armor to get in a dig.

I was left confronting my real issue. Why do I feel guilty about being educated, being a professional black writer who owns his own home (though still broke at times between jobs), has travelled the world, written and produced hours of television seen across the planet, with two published novels? And why should I?

Of course the obvious answer is that I shouldn’t, but all my life I’ve had to deal with people, both black and white, who have tried, as so many did with Barack Obama, to define my blackness. In my Catholic high school, where my Harlem-raised mother sent me to get a grounded education she felt would be better than public school, I had an argument with two white friends who insisted that, in their words, “You’re not black. You talk like us, you like the things we do. You’re the same as us.”

To them, my manner and cultural tastes were enough to exempt me from blackness, and they meant it as a compliment in their own weird way. In their minds they were accepting me as one of them, despite my skin color, when I wanted to be accepted along with my skin color, not as a faux Caucasian, but as an articulate educated black man like the ones I grew up around.

On a family vacation trip to the Pegleg Bates Resort in the Catskills where there was no one my age to hang with, a group of younger black kids gathered around me one day, going on and on in thick southern accents that I “talked funny. You sound like that Get Smart guy!”

Neither confrontation was meant to be malign. Both were just expressions of astonishment that someone who looked one way should sound and act so differently from others they’d seen that looked like me.

I’ve never wanted to be white -- not that there’s anything wrong with it. If anything, I bemoaned the melting pot past that gave me thin lips and what I saw in profile as a ski jump nose, wanting to be have the full rounded features and dark unblemished sheen of my best friend David from down the street when I lived in Cincinnati. Most of my life I’d grown up on Air Force bases, surrounded by all races, but mostly white. I sounded like very other kid who did the same. We all grew up without a regional accent. “The newscaster voice,” we used to call it as kids. We sounded like the TV shows we watched no matter where we lived, a flat, neutral, slightly nasal accent, like a British actor impersonating an American.

Honey, I can “code switch” with the best of them in a room of black folks at ease, dropping the professional veneer many of us affect at work to be taken seriously. But my default is that nasal Get Smart guy, and on the phone, I’ve had more than one misunderstanding because of the way I sound -- a blessing and a curse, as they say, that has worked both to my advantage and disadvantage. I know I am not alone in any of this, and that we’re all susceptible to having that button pushed. Which brings me to my realization.

Why have we allowed ourselves to culturally support the idea that educated black people are somehow losing their heritage if they rise up the economic ladder into the middle class and above, when for generations we were told to do exactly that by the best and the brightest among us? There’s no reason I should feel guilty for living up to guidelines laid down by Frederick Douglas, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora neale Hurston, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Martin Luther King and a host of others.

My emotional reaction, the flash of shame and guilt that the panhandler’s hurled abuse raised in me isn’t his fault -- it isn’t the fault of everyone who’s ever told a black kid that doing well in school is somehow a disgrace, that speaking “proper English” well enough to get a good job is turning your back on your people.

It’s my fault for listening, for letting myself diminish the years I spent staying up and studying to get passing grades (not always by as wide a margin as I would have liked), the years I spent working when I could have been partying (not that I didn’t party at all -- oh, I did!), the time I spent becoming the person I am today, a guy I finally appreciate.

That guy is black -- not African-American. My gene pool is far too diffuse for me to claim any one branch of my family tree as my sole origin. Like most of us, I am a Black-American mutt, a wonderful genetic soup cooked up from the races, cultures and widespread geographies that combined to make me. I carry them all proudly, the good and the bad, as we all do in this gumbo called the United States, as divisive as we are.

Short of recent immigrants, no one here is pure anything. That is the chemistry that drives this nation forward -- a distillation process that reduces everything and everyone down to a common goal -- the pursuit of happiness -- without diluting the ingredients it took to make it.

I am resolved not to be embarrassed ever again by who or what I am, or how I am perceived by others. I am a proud black gay man who took decades to find his ethnic identity and self-image in a world and time that offered few choices I could embrace, forcing me to forge my own path. I know my politics, and they are left and liberal. I know my own mind and it is rich and full of ideas that no one has had before, as are all our heads.

That is what the encounter at the ATM has given me -- the right to be me, as I’m finally able to allow everyone else the right to be who they are, as they please, as long as it doesn’t harm others.

To do no harm -- the essence of the Hippocratic Oath -- the heart of any good religion worth believing in and of any good God. I don’t have to hurt the haters. In the end they only hurt themselves by hating. After a lifetime of Catholic education I’m learning again to turn the other cheek, to feel empathy for the man who basically spat on who and what I am, only because I wouldn’t give him what he wanted for doing something I didn’t want done.

In the end we are all only as good as we can be. How well we do is for someone or something greater than us to judge, if we need to be judged at all. I’m just trying to put down my own gavel, and accept the world for what it is, others for who they are, and maybe, just maybe, if anything, trying to leave things here just a little better than they were when I arrived.

If getting from shame and anger to that quiet comfortable place is where writing can take me, then I’m happy to keep doing it. More than anything, that’s why my writing is so important in my life, why I make time for it, and why I open my mind to where it takes me. It tells me who I am.

And if I see that guy in the Chase bank again, I’ll probably give him a dollar this time, without worrying about what he’ll do with it, or passing judgment conjecturing on what brought him there. As far as tuition payments go, it’s pretty reasonable, and I’ve paid far more for lessons far less valuable.

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

Resonance

Novel Spaces is in its 10th year! Over the coming months we'll be featuring some of the most popular posts from our archives. This one was first published December 11, 2010. Enjoy!


By Charles Gramlich

I did a post quite a while ago on my own blog about "resonance" in writing. It’s been one of the more popular posts I’ve made so I thought I’d revisit the concept for Novel Spaces.

Resonance represents the degree to which a name, term, or subject evokes already existing associations in someone’s mind. Consider this, you hear about two good mystery novels by writers unknown to you. The first features Linda Harmon as the private eye. The second features Sherrill Holmes, a descendant of the great Sherlock. Which book captures your attention first? Which immediately brings thoughts to your mind?

I’m betting it will be the “Holmes.” Resonance is the reason. Whether you liked the Holmes stories or not, you recognize the name. It carries weight. It already evokes thoughts of detectives where “Harmon” is a cipher. “Holmes” impacts like Harmon cannot, at least for most people.

Some names carry powerful resonance even when separated from the historical figures who wore them. Consider “Moses,” or “Jesus.” What personal and physical traits do you automatically assign to a character named Moses? Does “Moses” suggest someone who is strong willed? What about “Morris?” Resonance gives your character “Moses” power the moment his name is put on the page. Not so much for “Morris.”

Resonance can be negative, as well, though. Take “Adolph.” Think very carefully if you decide to give your character that name. Most people will automatically associate “Adolph” with mass murder, concentration camps, and war.

Even fictional names can develop resonance. “Sherlock” has it. “Conan” has it. What do you think of when you hear the name “Homer?” Homer of the Odyssey or Homer Simpson? I bet you thought of one of them. For The Simpson’s fan, the name Homer is going to evoke a certain level of dumbness.

How many thrillers have you seen with Nazis in them? Nazis have resonance. And I wonder how much resonance had to do with the phenomenal success of The Da Vinci Code? Leonardo Da Vinci himself. Jesus. Mary Magdalene. The Catholic Church. The Vatican. Opus Dei. “The Last Supper.” All of these have resonance.

For adults, everyday words already come with varying degrees of resonance. What images come to mind when you hear concrete nouns like “blood,” “snow,” “death,” “lover,” or “child?” When I hear the word “blood,” I don’t just think of the liquid; I think of life itself, and of a color, and of violence. For me, “child” brings thoughts of my son, Joshua, pitching baseball, riding his bike, laughing and playing. Resonate nouns make more powerful engines for your prose.

Some abstract nouns, like “freedom,” or “violence,” can develop powerful resonance, but they are still different from concrete nouns in the specificity of images they evoke. Other abstract words evoke little: “humanist” or “theorist.”

Consciously or unconsciously, many writers in the past have used resonance in naming their characters. Mike Hammer. Sam Spade. Or consider the wealth of fictional characters named some variation of “Cain.” Unfortunately, this has been overused and I’m not sure you want to name your characters “Stone,” or “Steele,” or “Wolfe,” or “Hawke” anymore. Here, resonance has been lost because of overuse, or has been transferred from positive to negative.

Resonance is a writer’s tool just as much as punctuation and grammar. You just need to consider what resonances you’re evoking as you write. Should your character fly the “Stars and Stripes?” Should they be from “New York?” Should they be described with terms that evoke the “tiger,” or those that evoke the “snake?” There’s no real right or wrong answer. There are only resonances: positive and negative, and sometimes both.

Wednesday, August 8, 2018

Are We Writing Unhealthy Endings?

Novel Spaces is in its 10th year! Over the coming months we'll be featuring some of the most popular posts from our archives. This one was first published July 14, 2010.  Enjoy!


By Stefanie Worth

It’s come across this blog before: the inherent perils of the “butt in chair, fingers on keyboard” action that separates authors from wannabe writers. However, in recent months, findings have been reported that connect this action – or lack thereof – to greater perils than not hitting word counts or finishing manuscripts:

DEATH!

I’m so dramatic, I know. But the reports are unsettling and maybe the supernatural storyteller in me will weave some creepy tale with the facts one day. For now though, I’ve taken their reality to heart. A news piece on National Public Radio a few months ago stated the following:
"The other consequence that we're starting to understand now is that when we're sitting for prolonged times such as, you know, in front of the television or long hours in front of the computer screen at a desk, there's an absence of muscle contractions. And there's extensive evidence that indicates that muscle contractions are so essential for many of the body's regulatory processes - for example, the breaking down and using of glucose. So when we're remaining idle for prolonged periods, we're disrupting those body's typical regulatory processes.”
That summation comes from David Dunstan of the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia. The focus of Dr. Dunstan’s report was the dangers of too much TV watching. But as you can see from the paragraph above, the body doesn’t really differentiate between being a soap opera-loving or crime show-addicted couch potato and a dedicated, page-churning writer.

Who knew these great stories we’re penning are setting us up for more than critical acclaim and personal triumph? Heart disease and – according to this report – an increased risk of death from all causes lurks behind every hour we refuse to budge from our tasks.

The part that got me is that – again, according to the study – even those who exercise regularly are at risk. UGH. So what are we to do?

Simple. Get up.

The study recommends rising from sitting every 20 minutes. How do we do this? Stand up and type? Use my blog colleague Phyllis Bourne’s egg timer technique and force ourselves to stand, stretch and walk around the desk at regular intervals?

I suppose we could also find ways to make our muses more efficient. I read blogs by writers who profess to whip out thousands of words in a single hour. I’ve yet to master that technique, but it would certainly cut my sitting time by about 75 percent.

Mind you, I also have a day job that involves a lot of sitting, so I feel like I’m in a double bind. What I’ve done there is to get out of my comfy desk chair when the phone rings and take the call standing up. I also check my email standing up, maybe rocking from one foot to the other. I’m trying to be more conscientious about drinking my 6-8 glasses of water every day, but instead of chugging from a long-lasting 32 ounce bottle, I use a glass. This forces me to get up and walk to the kitchen area to refill my glass every time it’s empty.

And, yes, I’m working on utilizing my Bally’s membership. I actually attended a spinning class a couple of weeks ago and have forced myself onto the elliptical machines several times since.

Weight gain seems to accompany every manuscript I’ve finished and that’s a cycle I know I need to break. But now, I also know I need to fit continuous motion or, at minimum, twenty minute work stoppages into my day job and the job of my heart. In a perfect world this would be my solution at both places. (Video here: http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/mornings/verizon-workstations-keep-employees-exercising-062910 )


What’s yours?



Wednesday, August 1, 2018

Anti-writing

Novel Spaces is in its 10th year! Over the coming months we'll be featuring some of the most popular posts from our archives. This one was first published September 10, 2009. Enjoy!

By Liane Spicer

The story has been burning inside of you for a long time. It's like a child waiting to be born and you feel all the excitement, the anticipation of wanting to watch it grow up and go off into the world, maybe even make its mark on the world.

Only, there's another part of you that gets in the way of all this, a part that doesn't want to see you sit down and devote a sizable chunk of your life-time to a creative pursuit like writing a novel. You might never finish it, and even if you do it might never be sold. Or it might sell and drift quietly and quickly into the oblivion that awaits the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of other novels out there.

The thing to do is to feed this other part, the part that will stop at nothing, and I mean NOTHING, to get you to NOT write. The key to keeping this non-writing part of you alive and well is distractions. Here are a few easily mastered techniques to help you NOT write the book(s) you know you were meant to write.

  • BLOGS. Own multiple blogs. Write posts everyday. Accumulate masses of blog pals and read and respond to their posts every day.
  • WIDGETS. Welcome to the amazing world of widgets, those neat little gadgets that will allow you to place cute stuff on your blog, website or CPU, from live webcam feed of beaches to colored balls that bounce all over your desktop. Weather updates, clocks, maps, slideshows, a cat that sits on your desktop and does absolutely nothing - they're all available and free, thousands of them, enough to keep you happily NOT WRITING for years to come.
  • RESEARCH. Internet research, specifically. You're a writer, right? So everything is possible grist for your mill. Those hours you spent reading every comment on the Rihanna vs. Chris Brown debacle? Research. YouTube? Research. Porn sites? Research. Gossip columns? ...You get the drift.
  • FACEBOOK. Hell, it's networking, right? Writers need to do that. How else will they connect with other writers and readers? Okay, future readers, then, if the book hasn't been written yet. Which it hasn't.
  • SHOPPING. Take Amazon to heart. Embrace it. Accumulate links to every online catalog you can find. There are millions of items for you to peruse, compare and save to wish lists, gift lists, shopping lists, and carts. Then - proceed to checkout. Amazing what you can do with a few clicks these days...
  • PROCRASTINATION. This is tried and true and it works because it allows you to lie to yourself. You're not sayin' you won't write the damned book. You're just sayin' you won't write it RIGHT NOW.
  • HOUSEWORK. This is a great one because it's legitimate - sort of. And since housework is never done you can fall back on it at any time and have sparkling proof that you were too busy doing 'real' work to write.

Writing is done in solitude so there's nothing to prevent us from distracting ourselves
ad infinitum. We're accountable only to ourselves - and accountability can be put off till tomorrow. ;) Please feel free to weigh in with your own tried and true techniques for NOT WRITING that book of yours that's dying to be born.

Liane Spicer