Literary Fizzle Moment

Confession by this Shopaholic: I buy writerly swag. I’m really good about living within my means until

it involves books (if you’re read my blog, this is obvious), typewriters, or accessories involving things related. I bought a Sherlock Holmes cover for my iPhone. I have a bracelet handmade in England from a company (Jezebel Charms) that embosses book text onto brass cuffs. They specialize in Sherlock Holmes, Jane Austen, Alice in Wonderland, Dracula, and Moby Dick. Um, pretty much everything I like. I've actually considered blocking the web page from my browser.

So it’s a surprise to no one that I showed up to class yesterday looking like Miss Frizzle. Okay, Generation Ys and Millennials, do you remember Miss Frizzle from The Magic School Bus?

She came to class every day with a themed outfit. If the school bus was exploring the human body, her earrings were lungs and her seemingly-polka-dotted dress was really a repetition of the Ebola virus or something.

Yesterday, I wore a dress that I had made from a 1950s pattern featuring a coordination of blue and green stripes with matching blue and green typewriter keys. My earrings were typewriter keys and my necklace was a rare “Floating Shift” key that had only been featured on a few typewriters. The whole outfit was Miss Frizzle for creative writing teachers. 

I wasn’t going to say anything about Miss Frizzle, but when one of my students complimented my outfit at 1:59, I said at the 2:00 start-time, “Let’s go for a ride on the Magic School Bus!”

*crickets

To make things weirder, I said, “… in a non-drug reference way…”

*crickets

“Wow, that was inappropriate.”

*awkward giggles

That didn’t happen to Miss Frizzle. But one of the younger students gasped and said, “You ARE Miss Fizzle! OMG!” She summarily pulled out her phone and texted a friend which, of course, I told her to put away.

This is the real life of Miss Frizzle, my friends: Miss Frizzle makes you put your phone away. Four students dropped her class because she has a no late work no extra credit policy. We’re going to have fun on the Magic School Bus, but you’re not going to see anything if you don’t get on the bus. Lesson plan for the day. 

Cut the Crap

While I'm reading Bitter is the New Black and finding that "cut the crap" might be the mildest of Jen Lancaster's offenses, that's not what I mean.

After a morning of editing three essays for queries, I find that today more than ever I'm reflecting on the flabbiness of words. I'll realize this again in about three weeks when I'm grading the influx of short stories bombarding Blackboard (if they want a grade, that is), but over the summer, I've allowed myself to become blissfully unaware of how often my sentences strayed to say exactly what I meant -and with words that didn't work hard enough.

I'm thinking, right now, of Stephen King's lessons on nouns and verbs, and David Foster Wallace's aversion to "puffy" words. In fact, I had just watched a YouTube video of David Foster Wallace yesterday in which he addresses the economy of language. (http://youtu.be/E_sQrxAorDo)

And the economy of language is my focus today. It seems that no literary journal is looking for a creative nonfiction essay or book review over 1000 words (or at least none of the journals I was looking at). Three hours and three essays later, I finally removed past imperfect tense, and other flabby or careless word choices. Have you ever noticed that sometimes you don't know what to do with a sentence until you delete almost everything in it? Sometimes you need to cut to know where to cut. (My hairdresser said this, once, of my uber long hair.)

So here is my suggestion to you, dear reader: if you're stuck having to cut 1650 words down to 1000 (ouch), remind yourself that you need to cut the crap. No sentence fragment is so valuable that you need to go over it three times before finally deciding to cut it.

I mean, no one does that...

Books I’ve Finished This Year:

-East of Eden by John Steinbeck

-Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

-Silk by Alessandro Barico

-Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores

-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

-Animal Farm by George Orwell
-The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
-The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 
-Grimm's Fairytales by the Brothers Grimm
-Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut-The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost
-Old Man in the Sea by Hemingway
-On Paris by Hemingway
-The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison
-The Thin Man by Dashiel Hammett
-Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
-The Road by Carmac McCarthy
-More F in Exams/F for Effort by Richard Benson
-Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
-Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald by Scott Donaldson
-Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
-The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
-The Woman Who Wouldn't by Gene Wilder
-The Time Machine by Felix J. Palma

Currently Reading:
-Bitter is the New Black by Jen Lancaster

Books I Bought This Week:
-Bleak House by Charles Dickens
-Bizarre Books by Russell Ash and Brian Lake
-The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
-Victorian and Edwardian Ghost Stories by Richard Dalby 

5 Tips for Catching a Pterodactyl

Jeopardy Question: What do Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dickens, and my friend Holly from grad school all have in common?

Answer: They've all -in their own natural, unthreatening ways- been convicting me about writerly procrastination.

When some writers procrastinate or go way out of their way to do other things instead of write, there's usually a reason for it. As a creative writing teacher, I hear these stories and say, "Well, it sounds like there's something scary in your writing that you're avoiding" or "Maybe your idea is just so big that you're blocking yourself." The latter might be true as there are just too many ideas floating in my head and I don't know which one to write first. But recently I've also discovered that it's a seasonal thing: as a teacher, I want to pack as much into summer as it can possibly hold, which so far has included Disneyland, Portland, and, unfortunately, tonsillitis. It's also included an increase in reading and I'm proud to look back and recognize that I've read:

-The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost
-Old Man in the Sea by Hemingway
-On Paris by Hemingway
-The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison
-The Thin Man by Dashiel Hammett
-Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
-The Road by Carmac McCarthy
-More F in Exams/F for Effort by Richard Benson
-Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
-Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald by Scott Donaldson
-Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
-The Paris Wife by Paula McLain

Um, that's 12 books, guys. That's three books short of a grad school semester's load. Now all I need to do is write an annotation for all of them and I've just completed 12 credit hours. I don't slight it by any means, but no wonder I've only managed to write a short bit when my focus has been so unfalteringly upon reading -okay, reading with interrupting for grading ENG101, writing freelance articles, and day-tripping.

Someone kindly told me that freelance writing is still writing -writing that I'm getting paid for- so I shouldn't be so harsh on myself. But I am hard on myself, because what creativity comes from writing about pterodactyl sightings or "How to Properly Sit in a Kayak"? Some of these might take creativity to make them interesting, but at the end of the day, my artistic hunger isn't sated for it.

Then the reading started speaking to me. Hemingway was frustrated with Fitzgerald because Fitzgerald didn't take the time to write, and when he did, he would block himself so much that all he was good for was sweet little stories for The Saturday Evening Post instead of real, important work. Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist as a serial over the course of two years. For two years he'd committed to one story line, printing chapters weekly. No breaks. No apologies. No "Well, I just don't feel like it." I read The Paris Wife in two days, a historical fiction novel from the perspective of Hadley, Hemingway's first wife. Even through fiction Hemingway doesn't alter his course. He pisses people off because he needs time to write. He has vision. He is unapologetic. He has focus.

So in the vein of wanting to write creatively but stuck in freelance writing mode, here are five tips for catching a pterodactyl -or rather, keeping a consistent writing practice:
1. Show up. Nothing gets written if you just dream about what you're going to write about.
2. Outline if your ideas are too big.
3. Give yourself permission to only write about one facet of your big idea.
4. Set a timer and commit to the time. It doesn't have to be all day, it can be 20 minutes.
5. Give yourself permission to write all crap. The longer you wait to come back to writing, the harder it'll be, so it's best to write something -anything- now. Even if it's crap. Especially if it's crap. It can only get better from there.

Ready. Set. Go.

What Writers Say in Tragedy

By now I'm sure that you've heard about the 19 firefighters that fell in the Yarnell Hill Fire. It's made national news, and it was heartbreaking to see Andew Ashcraft's widow on the Today show yesterday.

What do writers say in tragedy?

People think that because we're "good with words" that we know what to say and how to say it, but how artificial would it feel if we as writers had practiced phrases that we whip out in these times? A writer's job is to be true to emotions and true to ourselves, and when we ourselves have been struck by tragedy, writers are no more expected to materialize words than other grievers.

My brother was on this crew a few years ago. It seems like a cliche to say that this "struck close to home." What does that mean, anyway? That we had a close call? Because we did. That we're thankful my brother is still with us? Because we are. That we are devastated for those families as if they were our own? Because it's true. My brother being on the crew drew me close to a group of men that I wouldn't otherwise have known, men that I would have merely thanked for being public servants. And while I only knew one who perished (Clayton Whitted, you're with your Lord and Savior now), by association I knew all of them.

I'm an active mourner. When stuff happens, my first instinct is to do something. It's funny that writing is only my second instinct, but if you think about it, it is still an active something. I may not be called to serve to these families directly, but through writing, I can serve them, and best of all, I can serve the firefighter's memories.

To you 19 who perished, I honor and respect your sacrifice. You went into every fire knowing that you might not come out, and for that I thank you for going into this fire honorably. Thank you for loving your community, and thank you for serving us by the greatest sacrifice. I promise to serve your families whenever I can and to keep your memory strong.

(This was the last photo taken by Andrew Ashcraft, and the last text he sent to his wife.)

See, in times of tragedy, writers don't need to say something that hasn't been said before (because I'm sure everything I've written has already been written), but it is up to a writer to speak what is true. Hemingway said that if he couldn't write anything else, he would strive to write one true thing a day. This is the truth today, and writing it down makes it as real and as immortal as the memory of these great men.

It doesn't feel like enough, but it feels like something.

Hairy Houdini and Other Reflections from Housesitting

I should write a book about this.

What is story? It's easy to get too compartmentalized with regards to story, like saying that books and movies are different from journalism and different from what happens when you come home from work and tell your spouse about your day. These are all stories, my friends, and the best and most interesting stories are ones in which unexpected things happen.

I housesit a lot, which suits me because I don't mind getting paid to read and work at someone else's house. Yes, there's more to it than that like watering plants, walking dogs, and the like, but it's just a lifestyle change for a temporary amount of time. I used to say that it was easy money. 

Past tense.

Because things happen when I housesit, and I guess looking back, weird things have always happened to me while housesitting. There was the time that the fire alarm beeped due to low battery which freaked out the little dogs resulting in one pooping all over the bed and the other running through it. Yeah, that was fun. And then there was the time when I took the trash out on a summer night and the door locked behind me so I had to traverse barefoot around the woods to get through the back door which I knew I had left unlocked. And then there was the snowy night when at 9pm someone was repeatedly ringing the doorbell. In the past, however, these have been just funny stories that I share around a campfire. 

But why do we read books? And what's the difference in reading a book around the campfire as opposed to telling stories around the campfire? 

I'm currently housesitting for Hairy Houdini. Yes, this dog waits until I'm not home to find the one place in the fence where he can somehow sneak through. On day one of my stay, the neighbor called because he'd gotten out so I had done as much fence repair as I could. Aside from pooping in the house, the rest of the stay has gone on uneventfully. Yesterday I was home all day, had a bit of a book-hangover as I'd stayed up until about 1am finishing Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, and I started The Road by Cormac McCarthy after writing a few articles and grading for my online class. I thought the most unpleasant the day got was when I stepped in one of the yard's land mines, but then the next door neighbor got home and told me about Hairy Houdini getting out. After some conversation, I discerned that he's still been getting out, but she's been putting him back in the yard. We both mended the fence after some trouble-shooting, and then I went to dinner. In the hour and a half I was gone, Houdini got out of the yard 4 times. Yeah, um, I've since placed a long two-by-four in that gap so that he doesn't keep jumping that corner of the fence. We'll see if it works. 

But this isn't nearly as interesting of a story as two weeks ago when I was housesitting for a different family and the neighbors called the cops on me. Evidently dogs don't like when the fire alarm beeps due to low battery. I've already mentioned what ensued a few years ago when it happened, but this time I awoke to find the dogs sleeping outside without even entertaining the thought of going inside for breakfast. I only had a little bit of time before church started, so I ran outside, found a latter that was, of course, covered in spiderwebs and since it's early still, the spiders were moving along nicely on those webs killing and eating moths, etc. Gross. So I found a broom, brushed them off, carried the ladder inside the house aaaaaaaand it wasn't tall enough. Of course. So I took the ladder back outside (the spiderwebs were all re-built by mid afternoon), and tried to think of another option that didn't involve calling the homeowner's brother at 7:30 in the morning. Then I remembered that there was a sliding ladder alongside the other side of the house. I evicted the spiders again, and then realized that the ladder was too long to weed through the narrow hallways of the house to get to the master bedroom. Ta-da: I removed the window screen and led it through the window. This is when the neighbors called the police, because it's not natural for a stranger in a polka-dotted dress to be leading a ladder through a window at 7:45 on Sunday morning. After a dangerous climb and replacing a battery that was so far out of my reach that I couldn't even look at it as I did it, I accomplished the goal, replaced the screen and the ladder, and rushed off to be late for church, passing the police cars on my way out of the neighborhood. It wasn't until later that I realized that 1) I could have called the fire department to change it for me, or 2) that there was a curtained screen door around the corner in the master bedroom, so I could have gone through the screen door instead of removing the window screen. Oh, well. 

Maybe I've told these stories too many times by now, but isn't that indicative of a good story? The details, now, have been gone over so many times that I won't forget them. It's told in the traditions of The Iliad or The Odyssey, verbal and with memory, not altogether different from written versions of those same stories. And here these housesitting stories are now written down, too.

Kristen Kauffman, housesitter

Average duties: walking and feeding dogs, watering plants, running out garbage barrels, checking the mail, and doing the dishes and the laundry at end of stay.

Additional duties: Washing floors and furniture that have been pooped or barfed on, picking up pieces of lamps that have been chewed, mending fences, fixing fire alarms, fixing windows, transporting animals from neighbor's house down the block back to home, calling the Humane Society, receiving calls from Animal Control and the Police Department, and escorting uninvited crazy neighbors from inside the house.

Will charge extra for: items been chewed beyond repair such as phone cords and shoes. 

Jury Duty Meets The Thin Man

Other jurors hate me -or I guess to be more accurate they love me, because by saying that I want to be selected, they don't have to be. Today, I had jury duty and there I was, the cheerful prospective member with my journal and my vending machine coffee, bright-eyed and nerding-out about the possibility to exhibit my Sherlockian skills.

Yes, I did seriously think that.

I opened my journal to even write that thought down when the gentleman next to me commented on my being left-handed. He's left-handed, too, so we talked about hating pencils, 3-ring binders, and my penchant for fountain pens as I smear ink far less than with a gel-pen or a ball-point pen. Then I caught myself confessing: "And, as you can imagine, my left hand is stronger, so when I use the typewriter, you can always tell which letters are on the left side because I press the letters harder and the ink is darker because-" I was about to explain the technique of keys and typewriter ribbons, but seeing he was older (I would learn later that was 64), I said instead, "Well, you know."

"Say," he replied, "That would be a really interesting detective clue; you know, the detective reads the finished paper and then knows that the criminal was right or left handed depending on how strong the ink is for those letters."

"Ooh, I should write that down," I replied. "I could use that." And therein led to confessing my deep, dark secret: not only am I a writer, but I actually want to be selected for this jury. So when the Jury Commissioner led us through our rights and expectations, she reached one point that said, "You may not do any personal investigation, including visiting any of the places involved in this case, using Internet maps or Google Earth, talking to any possible witnesses, or creating your own demonstrations or reenactments of the events which are the subject of this case." He chuckled and raised an eyebrow at me. 

I hereby declare that I, Kristen Marie Kauffman, will not attempt to be Sherlock Holmes, that I do not have high-functioning Aspergers, I don't have a French accent like Hercule Poirot, and I do not arrive uninvited to people's homes like Miss Marple. 

I did, however, refrain from getting the mystery novel out of my purse, and I said nothing of having recently finished reading The Thin Man or having watched the movie last night. Suffice to say, I may be like Myrna Loy, though, and may coyly be more observant and smarter than I look. 

 
Did I get selected? Yes, I'm supposed to report back next Wednesday. What case am I on? I can't tell you that part, silly. 

Film Adaptations

I'm not gonna lie: I usually hate book to film adaptations. It's not merely the obvious I-can-imagine-it-so-much-better problem, but the omission and reshuffling of plot points. The amalgams of characters. The simplification of driving questions. *sigh Really, people?


Perhaps the films I've been the most disappointed with claim to be Wuthering Heights. I don't know what book they opened, but the book I read had passion and an undying love, albeit crazy and vengeful. Cathy, though careless, was graceful. Heathcliff, though crazy, loved Cathy so much that it controlled the rest of his life (and his children's lives). This is classic Romantic Era drama: the heroes make really stupid mistakes but still manage to be noble. Nobility, however, has evaded cinema; The 1939 Laurence Olivier version ended with Cathy dying, cutting out half of the plot. The 1970 Timothy Dalton version made my fall asleep, and the 1992 Ralph Fiennes version seemed to cut only my favorite lines from the book but portrayed Heathcliff as certifiably crazy and Cathy as a manipulative wench. Come on, people.

To be fair, I haven't seen the 2011 version or the 2009 Tom Hardy version, though admittedly I'm dragging my feet on seeing them because as long as I haven't seen them, they might actually be good. (I'm secretly hoping they are.)

But I have been surprised recently.My first surprise was Life of Pi.  At first I had zero intention on

seeing it, especially when I found out it was going to be in 3D -typically a craze reserved for capes, flying webs, explosions, and robots supposed to be intelligent but reassure us that they're not via juvenile humor. Since the book didn't contain any of these, why should I see it in 
3D and thus encourage studio makers to participate in stories with no plot? Beyond that, I loved the book so much that I didn't want my memory to be replaced by a bad adaptation. 
But when someone whose opinion I respect said not only that it was good but that it was loyal to the book, Okay, I'm in. I just watched it again the day before yesterday and I was reminded with its loyalty. While Ang Lee reshuffled a few minor details, the main points are there, and he actually (dare I say) enhanced the plot by making the Author's

Note into it's own storyline. Brilliant. And through that Author's Note, the powerful and story-changing end really sings. Reluctantly I went to see it in 3D and was reminded that this is why we see movies in this novelty: it's not enough to carry the film (as superhero, action, and children's movies often depend on), but it is enough to enhance the plot and to make the images breathtaking. It was worth it. And with Ang Lee's gorgeous design style, is it possible that I like the movie even more than the book? Nah. Because even the beautiful movie omitted graceful lines such as: "That's what fiction is about, isn't it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?"Another: "If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?" Yet another and possibly my favorite: "If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."


But one movie was able to capture the narration that I felt was omitted in the previous likable 

adaptation: The Great Gatsby was a very pleasant surprise. Baz Luhrmann has given us movies like Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge, and Australia, movies that -though I love them- start with fast-paced high adrenaline and then chill out, movies with loud, pumping music, and climaxes that surprise me in spiteful contrast to their beginnings. I've also noticed that Luhrmann loves characters who run and characters who shout. I know that we as writers need the main character to want something desperately for the tension to be interesting, but there's only so much running and shouting you can observe before it's a clear pattern. That was what the trailer portrayed: running and shouting. Great. Then it came out and I brought to the theater a class of excited, fidgety high schoolers after a half

day. They dressed up in 20's dresses and feathers, I nerded out about wanting to marry the handsome Mr. DiCaprio (if you're one of my readers, sir, send me an email *wink), and though I swore I would reserve my expectations, I had high ones. The movie met them, pleasantly, and (again, dare I say) exceeded them. I think this could be the most loyal book to film adaptation that I've ever seen. (Gasp.) It was well-paced and genuine, the narration was graceful without being stilted, and while the music involves hip-hop, it's roots are Gershwin. I loved it. Does that come through? I'm being sarcastic, because I realize my review is a stellar one, but it was so much more involved than the 1974 Robert Redford version omitted almost all of Gatsby's backstory. Not only did Luhrmann include, well, everything except for a few infinitesimally minor scenes and one minor character, but he also did so much research that it couldn't help but to be inspired. In fact, Luhrmann and his wife said in the New York Times the week before the movie premiered that the research was almost more fun than shooting the movie. I think I would agree with that. One more thing: I was likewise reserved when I heard that Gatsby was going to be in 3D, and, well, again there are no tights or capes or idiotic robots in the book so I was reluctant to indulge. However, I was pleasantly surprised. While I forgot about halfway through that I was watching a 3D film, there were certain green light scenes that were awe-inspiring.

So go see these fabulous films. I've seen Gatsby in the theater thrice, now. These films are why they adapt books into film. Movies like Wuthering Heights, on the other hand...