The Mendacity of Hope

13 Thursday Jan 2011

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I was a little hesitant to post this for a while. My concept of the What I’m Reading section of this site was to give some insight into what kind of reading material inspires me as a writer, and this isn’t even close. Still, I read it, and that plus honesty in blogging counts for something to me.

A second caveat: I am, I admit, one of those Americans who really doesn’t care about politics. I want to care. I wish I cared the way certain people wished they could stand the taste of coffee. Caring about politics is one of those marks of sophistication; knowing what’s happening in the news is a decent litmus test of savviness, and a kind of adult mentality. I fail every time. I try to watch debates or Presidential speeches, and halfway through I end up shamefacedly reading webcomics, typing the url really slowly in hopes that no one will realize what I’m doing. It’s like inching through a red light in hopes that people won’t recognize that you’re moving til you’re through. Then, as if that isn’t enough, the opinions in The Mendacity of Hope aren’t even ones I necessarily agree with. I like Obama. I voted for him proudly in 2008, and since then I’ve let him be and assumed he’d do a decent job with the country.

So why in the world did I pick up this book to read, if it’s such a literary and political anomaly for me? A couple reasons. I realized an election is coming up in the not-too-distant future again, and since I refuse to vote blindly, I’ll need to put together some idea of what’s going on if I want to participate again. I miss my college Sociology classes. With my double major, I got to spend plenty of time writing creatively, but also plenty of time reading the works of great social theorists, and arguing, living in logic as well as creativity. Nowadays, I’m just in the one program, the MFA. Sure, I’ll read a few articles on spiked.com from time to time, but I missed reading something big, something I didn’t always understand, something that would force me to think hard just to keep up. Jumping into politics with a book on why Obama is disillusioning the country seemed like a great way to get a mental argument rolling. Mostly, though, expanding my horizons is incredibly important to me. I am never happy with how much I know right now, and as long as I can squeeze any amount of time from my schedule and energy from my mind, I’m determined to find a way to learn things. Now, on to The Mendacity of Hope:

The book itself is very well done, I have to say. What I appreciated was how self-aware the author strived to be of his own leanings. The introduction establishes that yes, clearly, Obama is miles better than W., no matter what complaints still exist. Hodge acknowledges that in his quest for directness, he may come off rude, which is nice, and for the most part he doesn’t. He comes off as someone who is frustrated with the American political system as a whole, and frustrated anew by the fact that a president who swore to change how that system operated is not, in fact, doing so. A large portion of the book explores political thinkers when America was a baby: Jefferson and Hamilton and so on. The question of The Mendacity of Hope is less about whether Obama lied to/misled his voting audience, and more about the patterns of power and, inevitably, money in American politics. The great lie at stake isn’t any campaign promise, but the idea that the country can operate according to the “by the people, for the people” dream it was built on at all. It’s not the most hopeful stuff, but it is really interesting. I don’t understand most of the details of what he’s saying, but the whole piece he’s putting together here has some neat questions wrapped in it.

That said, I do have a few complaints. There’s one instance where he basically comes out and says he thinks Christianity is belief in a bunch of fairy stories. I think there was no call for that. He wasn’t talking about voters’ religions influencing anything, or Obama’s, or even the founding fathers. It came off as a stab from his own personal agenda against religion, and without having a properly justified context in the book, I don’t see it having any result other than alienating readers. Religion is still overwhelmingly the norm, and even if many intelligent people are atheists, I doubt they’d stop reading a book if an author failed to make a crack at Christians. There are plenty of other analogies out there that don’t strike at the most important aspect of many people’s lives, and I’m sick of people insinuating that I’m less intelligent because of what I believe.

Besides that, which is admittedly a pet peeve, although also a sloppy moment in a mostly crisp book, I wasn’t convinced by Hodge’s arguments that Obama is to blame for what he feels is a rather toothless health care reform. I seem to remember, even from the political hole I usually live in, that for about a year, anytime Obama mentioned the topic, it would go like this:

Obama: Health care–
Opponents: You want to murder my grandparents!
Obama, No, I just wanted to say that health–
Opponents: You’ll club them to death like baby seals!!!
Obama: Hea–
Opponents (jamming fingers into their ears): BABY SEALS!!!!!

There were people who didn’t make it easy to pass things, is what I’m saying.

At any rate, this was still supposed to be more book review than political rant. Expanding horizons is all very well and good, but if you want to stay smart when you talk, probably stick with what you know! So: did I enjoy The Mendacity of Hope? Yes. Will I become involved in the political news du jour from now on? Almost certainly not. Will I pick up another political book to read sometime soon? Maybe. I’ve only seen the one side now, after all. There’s another story out there.

The year of winning

06 Thursday Jan 2011

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Bring it, 2011. For about the last three years now, I have promised myself in New Year’s Resolutions that this was the year I was going to become a Successful Writer. I’ve come at it from all kinds of angles: write a novel, edit a bunch of short stories, produce a completed new piece every week, Get Published. So far? Goose egg.

I think part of the problem is that the aspirations I’ve been choosing are either too rigid (produce a new piece every week? that’s an invitation not to attempt a novel if ever I heard one), or externally based (whether I get published is at least as much up to the editors as it is to me. heck, if it were up to me I’d be a bestselling author by now). One of the pep talks in NaNo last November pointed out that the writing is what’s on the page. Anything else, glorious as it may be in the head of the writer, is just thought.

This year, I’m tackling the leap between the brain and the page. I’m trying to create resolutions that will encourage me to stretch myself as a writer, but also allow enough flexibility that having an off day once in a while won’t make me feel like I’ve failed. Here they are:

1. Write every day. The rules are that it must be creative, blog posts don’t count, and I have to give a good effort to finishing a piece I start, rather than ending up with a thousand opening lines by the end of 2011. Beyond that, if I write a sentence one day because I’m exhausted and the story’s not coming, so be it. I’m taking even that token time to dedicate to writing. So far this year, my low is 88 and my high is 524 in one day. Not NaNo numbers by any means, but I’m hitting a pretty steady 200-300, and hoping to increase as the year continues.

2. Blog once a week, minimum. This site does wonders to make me feel like I’m taking writing seriously, so even though I might have been using the time it took to write this post to work on my actual story, I think it’s worth it to make this blog and site an active part of my life. Besides, when I make it big and people search for me, don’t you think they should see something that has relatively recent content? Yeah, me too.

3. Read at least one book a week. Normally I’d scoff at such a basic “requirement,” but I’ve been finding that my new schedule gives me less time and energy to read than I’m really happy with. This is more of a safeguard to help me remember that reading is something that recharges me and gives me pleasure, and I don’t want to let it slide in favor of my other responsibilities. Plus, if I read a book per week, I can at least update what I’m reading here, so making time to read lots of awesome books will help me fulfill resolution #2. Double points!

Incidentally, I wish I could crank out 500 words of story as easily as 500 words of blog. My new system to make sure words happen has been to pull up a blank Word document when I get to work. Anytime I think of the next sentence of my story, I stop what I’m doing for fifteen seconds to write it down. Since I’m in front of a computer for eight hours a day, I thought, why not be thinking about stories for part of that time? So far it’s working out well. One particularly slow, particularly creative day, I had over 1000 words by closing time. On busier days, I’ll squeeze in just about 100. Anything helps push the story along, though, right?  know I have all of one reader right now, but if anyone comes across this and has other tips for how to fit writing into a cramped schedule, let me know!

Milestone!

23 Thursday Dec 2010

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I just hit 5,000 words on my novel! I’m taking this story slower than a NaNoWriMo novel, but I am still getting places! It is helping right now to say that I’ll write something every day, but not set a particular word count goal. So far my best day I hit 1,000 words, and my worst was around 40, but the point is that I am back to putting something more toward this story every day. I’ve got one chapter down, and working on Chapter 2, and it makes me very happy.

A secondary milestone is that, although this will technically be my third novel, it is the first I am doing deliberately, without any organized external motivation. Basically, my first novel was with NaNo, and it was awful. My second novel I wrote on my own, but it kind of became a novel by accident. I started writing a story with the “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way” mentality, and several months later, I caught on that this was getting into novel territory. For a good portion of the time, I’d sit down to write wondering if today was the day the story ended. This is the first time that I’ve sat down with the thought, “I’m going to take these characters and the things I know about them and work on making their stories into a novel.” And here I am with a satisfying chunk of words, and I have a general idea of what might happen next. So far, things are good.

One More Theory About Happiness

19 Sunday Dec 2010

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In the spirit of honesty, I read this a few months ago, so it’s more of a “What I Read.” But it is still worth talking about, so the current books can wait a moment.

I don’t read a lot of memoir; I’m primarily a fiction girl. But I also pride myself on being open to anything that looks good, and the premise of Paul Guest’s story was dramatic, to say the least. When he was twelve, he crashed his bike, breaking his neck and irreversibly paralyzing him. The memoir follows his life from that event through college, and a little after, and the more I read, the more I liked and admired the man.

The remarkable thing about this book is that Guest manages to be both honest & serious without falling into the trap of self-pity. There’s a moment, for example, where he talks about an episode of rehab in the hospital. The paralyzed patients had to watch a series of videos explaining how their injuries would affect different systems of the body, and they had come to the inevitable question of sex. For  12-year-old boy, this would have been awkward in the best-case scenario, and there is something almost cruel in making a child watch what amounted to low-grade porn (the video featured a couple demonstrating sex acts that could potentially be an option for paraplegics). Guest acknowledges the futility of the video for most of the audience and the absurd humor of the situation, and strikes an excellent emotional balance. Later, when he wrote about the end of his first adult relationship, I was impressed to see that he didn’t even begin to pull the “she left me because I was a cripple” card. He admits frankly that he was inexperienced at relationships, and tended to say the wrong thing. The reader understands that the injury can easily explain why he may have had less relationship experience than his peers, but you’re left to draw your own conclusions, which is mature, and thoughtful. It makes the book an open communication about life as a paraplegic, rather than a sermon.

All in all, One More Theory About Happiness seeks to show Guest’s life as a whole: the injury, his discovery and pursuit of writing, the process of developing relationships, friendships, independence (yes, even that). It’s thoughtful and funny and sad and refreshing, and if he ever comes to Baltimore for a while, I hope Paul Guest would want to be friends with me.

For Real, People

13 Monday Dec 2010

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I read writing magazines sometimes, and one of the articles that comes up perenially is the “How to Quit Making Excuses and Actually Write” feature. It seems that I am not the only writer who can be pretty bad at getting down to writing. There are plenty of logical reasons. I work an overloaded week, plus grad school. Writing is not always (or even often) fun enough to entice me to the computer. I am still learning what works for me as a writer in terms of scheduling (early or late? write a set number of words/pages a day or whenever I feel inspired, regardless of word count?), and I’ve been noticing that even if I find a good rhythm, what works one day usually changes by the next week or so. Hitting a writing rhythm is more like swimming in an ocean than a pool, and it can be exhausting to locate the current, never mind work once I’m in it.

Here’s the thing, though. I always make time for my boyfriend, even during finals week. I never go a day without reading for pleasure, even if it’s just a few pages, even if I have to sacrifice half an hour of sleep to get it. If I want to make cookies for one group of friends and catch up with another friend, I’ll put her on speaker phone so I can talk and knead dough simultaneously. I insist on having time for the people and activities that are most important to me. It’s fairly clear to me that what I must do if I want to start getting this writing thing right is treat it as if I want it as badly as I want to read, or say good night to Andrew, even if that is not the case.

My plan over Christmas break is to write the lion’s portion of a novel. I’d like a minimum of 40,000 words done by the time I go back to class on January 24th. Yesterday, according to the schedule I’d drawn out for myself, I should have hit 2500 words. I’m at about 600. I’d like to hit 25,000 by the end of this year. I’m going to try and post here every week or so on how it’s going (one of my plans is to have a more active presence on my little site, too), and we’ll see if I can beat this “no time” myth. Wish me luck!

A Question of Genre

18 Thursday Nov 2010

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One of the main hesitations I had when I was applying to MFA programs in the U.S. was that without exception they insisted I pick between fiction, non-fiction and poetry as my primary concentration. I’ve never been good at tying myself down to any one thing. I’m half Dutch and half American, I grew up celebrating two religions, and none of my friends are ever surprised to hear that the reason I like autumn the best is because I get to watch everything change. One of the main reasons I am where I am now is because they do both writing and publishing classes here, and I want nothing more than to see both sides of what I want to do with my life.

Writing works much the same way for me. I’m at UB for fiction primarily now, but I rotate between seasons of fiction and poetry, with the odd month of memoir thrown in as well. I believe the genres feed each other. When I’m running out of breath on stories, or my characters feel wan and boring, I know it’s time to return to poetry. Poems are meant to be so clean, so pure, like drops of water. Everything is essential. I’ve heard people complain about overanalyzing poems, and too much analysis is bad, but I think some is necessary. I think you’re meant to look close enough to understand how much weight each word has to carry to make you feel the way it does once you’re done.

So I write poetry for a season, and batter my head against internal rhymes, and meter, and where to break a line to make it mean two things at once, and one day I wake up and the poetry is done. The images are making me think too much or not enough, and I’m putting in people and miniature scenes with line breaks, and wondering how to work dialogue into a genre that frowns on quotation marks. And then I am back to fiction, trying to see stories through poet’s eyes.

It’s always about balance, in my life, and it’s a very difficult balance to keep sometimes. My sister is tens of thousands of words into her latest NaNo, and I’ve written maybe a thousand words this month on the story I care about right now, and sometimes it feels like a catch-22 that I have to work so many hours to pay for a program that will let me write. What I am trying to keep in mind is that these seasons of writing are something I am still learning about myself. I’m still negotiating the dry spells and writing jags, and finding out what will fill me. My goal is to send at least three pieces out before Thanksgiving. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Hunger Games

04 Monday Oct 2010

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The most common, trite pieces of advice writers tend to give aspiring writers are:

1. Just write!

and

2. Read, read, read (why they must say this in triplicate I do not know. Maybe once I become a Famous, Successful Writer this power of three will become clear to me, but for now it just seems condescending).

I’m just starting out, myself, and am still experimenting with the best structure to help me achieve #1 most effectively. I’ve always been a good reader, though, and it occurred to me that in a very you-are-what-you-eat way, you may be able to get a sense of what I would like to write by seeing what kind of brain food inspires me. Thus, I present to you the first installment of:

What I’m Reading

I just finished the Hunger Games series, by Suzanne Collins, and it is amazing. This is the kind of work that stops being YA and starts being the kind of books people should talk about, and hopefully are, more and more. The series takes place in a future where the 12 Districts of Panem are governed by the Capitol. Every year, each district must send a boy and a girl, chosen by lottery, to fight to the death in a televised reality series called the Hunger Games. When Katniss Everdeen’s little sister is picked, Katniss volunteers to take her place. Years of illegal hunting to feed her family have given Katniss a certain competitive edge, and she finds herself standing a good chance of winning.  From there, the series dives into all kinds of huge questions, taking a sharp look at blame and responsibility, the cost of life, and how much anyone is able to lose.

The first thing I love about this series is Katniss. I’m going to have to raise my hand at this point and confess I did read three of the four Twilight novels, so believe me when I tell you Katniss is the Bella antidote. She’s strong to the point of being abrasive, has a tendency to insist on answers to uncomfortable questions from friends and enemies alike, and is (gasp!) not even especially pretty. She is wholeheartedly committed to protecting people she cares for, though, and takes responsibility for all that she does, and manages to be good at things without being either self-deprecating or boastful. Augh. Katniss is the only person I could see making it through this series without breaking beyond repair or becoming a monster, which shows how well Collins chooses her characters.

Collins also — I swear I am not making this up — manages to pull off a love triangle that isn’t rigidly fixed in one side’s direction, and stays interesting throughout the books. This is because she knows the romantic line is secondary to the main plot, which is another beautiful thing.

I love the pacing of the series. There’s a constant flow of suspense and release, but it feels organic. There’s nothing forced enough to break you out of the rhythm. Also, the fact that the Games are broadcast as a televised reality series in Katniss’s world lends another layer of credibility to the cliff-hanger-driven plot. Viewers want action, so the Gamemakers would shape the tributes’ surroundings to fuel that need.

Finally, Suzanne Collins is a risky writer. She doesn’t back down from any of the typical challenges: her love triangle is fair to both boys, her main character doubts her own motivations and therefore whether she is acting from a good place at all, and the deaths in her final book push the limits of what Katniss can take without crumbling. It’s a breath of fresh air to see someone treat her work so rigorously, and expect her readers to come to terms with so much ambiguity, and Collins does a tremendous job.

This book is best for: YA readers, people who love strong female leads, people who love tough questions, people who are sick of Twilight and other submissive-female stories, people who always suspected there was something even sicker about reality TV than meets the eye

Hello world!

01 Friday Oct 2010

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Welcome to my journal. This is where you’ll find any important news updates, my thoughts on the writing life, and fantastic book recommendations from yours truly. If there is anything you want to hear about, let me know and I’ll do my best to oblige.*

*unless I decide I don’t want to.