Conversation: The Dollhouse (Ibsen)

June 24, 2020100 Day Project, Uncategorizedconversation, evergreen, henrikibsen, lajosegri, perspective, theartofdramaticwriting, thedollhouse, trendAaubin

When I was in tenth grade, my English teacher kept us in line by saying she previously worked for the FBI*. She came from another time, which I did not appreciate until decades later when I read Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing.

Tenth grade was a strange year. It was the year I found my voice** and started a writing club. It was the year I was less angry at things and people. It was the year I began to realize that other people were not set out of time, but that I had not lived enough to understand the conversations going on around me.

Mrs. O had a thing about Henrik Ibsen’s “The Dollhouse”. She would talk about how important it was – a piece of fiction where a woman chose – chose! – a life outside of her husband and children. That the protagonist had gone from her father to her husband’s household, and molded her personality to fit. We sophomores stared and waited, not wondering, just waiting for the punchline. In the modern age, we were children of divorce and working parents, mothers with multiple degrees who kept household and career alike.

But Mrs. O waxed on about a woman choosing herself, even if she didn’t know that self yet. As a child, I empathized more with the children who would be left with the stern personality of the father, and as an adult, my heart still aches for them. They would not see a pathway before them to strive for their own freedom, only that a fellow prisoner escaped and did not choose to take them, too.

Decades later, reading about a playwright and critic who fell in love with the then contemporary play, “The Dollhouse”, I finally understood what it was trying to say. In a time before the necessity of two parent working households, in the time before choice, this play mattered. To say there was a choice before that choice was even a thing to be imagined!

The worst part about listening to marketing your work is when people talk about trends vs. Evergreens. When they say trend, they mean you are saying something about the conversation or state of the world today. Evergreens say something about the human experience as it has been and will be. Everyone wants to write an evergreen. For one thing, they sell beyond the pop of the moment. Ibsen wrote an evergreen that was also a trend. While what he had to say was new in his time, in our lifetimes there are still people to which the thought of choosing your own path is a new concept. Maybe not when they are tenth graders in desks in high school, perhaps later in life when they have found themselves at ends. Just as I hope to write something that can be reread as new in different stages of life, I wonder what treasured stories, that I have always accepted, will tell me something new now that I am somebody else.

*One of my classmates nagged Mrs. O until she confessed that she had been a secretary for the FBI. My classmate uttered the immortal words, “Oh, that’s boring.” And we all listened to the sound of one grade falling.

**I’m pretty sure I had a voice before tenth grade, but as my brother put it, “We didn’t think you could talk.” Thanks.

Rhythm: Mem Fox

June 24, 2020100 Day Project, Uncategorizeddialogue, diction, memfox, possummagic, rhythmAaubin

Mem Fox (we love Mem Fox) is a children’s book author of some repute. She’s a titan of children’s writing, for one thing. For another, she’s the reason I know that Australia is a real place*.

On her website she has videos about how to read picture books and if you ever attend a talk she gives, she’ll tell you how to write picture books. I don’t mean the normal bit about having a writing place and writing every day. Fox pays special attention to the cadence of words, and structures both word choice and story communication for a particularly lyrical experience. Each book is like a song.

One of the stories she told, that has stuck with me, is that she argued for a long word in a picture book. Toe to toe, nose to nose, fighting for her right as an artist.

She explained it a little softer than that, making the argument that children fall in love with the sound of words. They can figure out the meaning later. Her story required a three-syllable word in exactly the right spot, and the finished book was perfect when read aloud.

When I am writing within a character’s voice, their diction is my word choice, and I can’t betray their voice by choosing a word I think is easier to understand. Or a reference that is more accessible. It must make sense for that character.

The caveat is that I am aware that the diction will say things about the character. If the reference is too old, I need a reason for that character to be older than the target audience, or if the word is obscure, that character had better have a good reason to know it.

*At a conference, I eagerly picked up Possum Magic. It’s one of those childhood books that I know so well I can read the words off the page and my heart. As I turned the pages, I noticed the word lamingtons. Now, as an adult, I know that word. It’s important to note that I grew up in the Mojave Desert and for much of my developmental years, possums were considered mythical creatures. I mean, so were cows.

I had always read Possum Magic as a fanciful story about a magical possum in a made-up land and at the ripe old age of thirty, I brutally discovered that it had taken place in Australia. I called my mother.

I asked if she remembered Possum Magic and how much I loved that story. And she said yes, how I loved that story. I asked if she remembered how I thought it took place in a magical far-off land. She said yes.

I asked at what point in my development did she plan to tell me that Australia was real? And she laughed and laughed.

There is no betrayal like parental betrayal.

Practice: Good Practice

June 24, 2020100 Day Project, Uncategorizeddialogue, math, music, practiceAaubin

Good practice is practice that moves you forward. Obviously.

Wait, come back.

When I was young, I played the flute. Mostly I played the flute because my dad had played the flute and playing an instrument was a thing you did in my hometown. I was technically terrible. I felt no music in my heart. My favorite part of practice was standing with legs spread on either side of my Labrador who insisted on laying down in front of my music stand. When I played notes that were too high for her, she stood up. It was terribly exciting.

I could play all the scales, and when looking at the music on the stand, I could make a solid effort at the marches and church music. I could listen to the metronome or play while it was also on, but neither were particularly connected. A funny thing started to happen.

Eventually, I got better.

At the same time I was struggling through basic musical expression, I was taking math courses harder than anyone thought possible for me*. When the math added concepts like variables and matrices and proofs, the lower level addition-subtraction-multiplication-division got to be quick as a thought. Which was how fast I needed to perform it when I played.

My first writing mentor** told me to listen to dialogue around me in order to develop the sense for natural speech in my writing. During this time, I kept reading books (which I still do) and someone at a seminar talked about removing all the unnecessary parts of conversation. We don’t need the uhm, the mhm, the mmm, the uh, the hi how are you. We need the important part of the conversation. Somewhere in all those books that had gone through agents and editors galore were the important parts of conversations.

In my good practice sessions, I figured out how to combine the “listening to conversation around” me, and the “necessary parts of conversation” for concise, character demonstrating, clear dialogue. I even figured out where to add the well-placed mmm and uh and the difference between hi how are you and hi you alright***.

Good practice moves me forward but it needs more techniques than the single thing that I think I’m practicing.

*When I was ten, I had a math homework worth 25 points. There were 24 questions, and you got an extra point for putting your name in the right place and spelling it correctly. I got 4%.

**In the grand tradition of small towns, Mrs. Betty L Speckles was a friend of my mom’s from quilt guild. When she found out that Betty had published some poems, my mom asked if Betty would give me some pointers. I am forever grateful that she said yes.

***Hi you alright is the British greeting and the answer is Yeah. Or Yes. Or the American ignore and move on because you honestly have no idea how to answer it. I entered the country in September and did not figure out how to answer that question until February.

Sunday Check-in 5

May 26, 2020100 Day Project, UncategorizedAaubin

How it’s going: Hahaha. Revised an old YA novel, built the revision pathway, identified major themes to flesh out. Started a new middle grade novel. Am running into the 300 sonnets issue. I can admit this like a grown up.

Count: 1,156/80,000

Check List:

Writing prep – x
Writing – in progress
Edit prep – o
Revision – o
Query – o
Pitch – o
Agent list – o

Mistake 2: Can You See Your Protagonist?

May 26, 2020100 Day Project, Uncategorizedculture, immigration, mistake, ProtagonistAaubin

I wrote eighteen drafts of my first, real, live, going to finish this sucker if it kills me, novel without ever knowing what my protagonist should look like.

Eventually, I chickened out and drafts nineteen and twenty starred a generic white dude. Except that I didn’t know any. My dad is the closest white person I know well. He’s Cajun and Irish in that grandma immigrated from Ireland as a little girl, and I was called pistach by beloved old people until my twenties*. That upbringing, as a son of a first-generation immigrant and a lower class man who built his own tree cutting business by the skin of his teeth, shaped the man I love and fought with and fought for as an angry teenager.

None of that appeared in my story, because my main character existed no further than the period at the end of the sentence on the page.

Eventually I asked myself about me.

My dad was a big contributor to my upbringing, but so was my mom. She had an immensely different upbringing than I did, as a first generation immigrant from Japan who spent the rest of her formative years in the mining country of northern California.

I didn’t know the words for myself until later in life (hapa, nissei, mixed). It wasn’t until I left the cocoon of home that I understood how alone I was in the world. I had never, at that time, seen myself in a book as a main character.

So I made my protagonist hapa.

Suddenly he gained a history, and I became fascinated by the histories of the people around him. Everyone came to the same small town for a deviously similar reason, many of them from other countries and realms. The how and why of his problem solving motive took notes from my grandmother’s Methodist faith. His parents came into focus. His mother took center stage as a reformed villain, his father turned into a foil for the secondary antagonist. They lived, they breathed. And I got closer to an actual novel.

Community: Find Your Guru

May 26, 2020100 Day Project, Uncategorizedcommunity, CSSSA, guru, peterdavid, theportablepoetryworkshop, writingforcomicsAaubin

When I was fourteen, I knew everything. And I was insufferable.

I can admit that now.

When I was fourteen, I attended a summer school for the performing arts*, creative writing unit, and accidentally lucked into the best room in the whole dorm. For six weeks, high schoolers from twelve to eighteen (I’m assuming) were trapped together with assigned strangers, to absorb as much art as our long-suffering teachers could shout at us. But like, in a quiet and artsy manner.

The roommate became a lifelong friend and we visited each other in high school, though she lived just north of LA and I lived in a tiny, tucked away desert town. One visit, I saw a how-to writing book on her bookshelf. I asked her about it. But I asked as a sixteen year old, two years into knowing everything, asks about things. I asked, What are you doing with that?

She said, it’s interesting and I like it.

Don’t we already know how to write? I asked, forgetting that we had spent six weeks learning how to write from Actual People. And how did she know she had a good book?

She said, Just pick someone you don’t disagree with.

It was still years before I picked up a how-to writing book. To find a guru, I had to put aside my pre-conceived notions of what I expected to receive. I needed to accept what I accept from any book: a new thought. I also needed to pick something that fit my mind space at the time. So the first how-to writing book I bought was Peter David’s Writing for Comics.

I was already a comic book fan, I loved Q and Star Trek, and I had no idea how to write a comic book and thought that might be fun to try. It’s a great form to study voice and dialogue, while learning to trust someone who is not you to realize the idea you believe you have put on the page. I held on to that guru for as long as I needed him. Then I got the next book.

My favorite writing book is The Portable Poetry Workshop. You’ll notice I don’t write poetry, but the exercises can be applied to prose and never fail. I’ve gained an appreciation for books on theory, personal essays, lists of rules that can be flexed and twisted and happily ignored as needed. In all these, I have developed judgment to determine what will work for me and what won’t. And to know that someday, that judgment will change, and what did not work then, will work now.

Through it all, I kept writing.

*California State Summer School for the Arts (CSSSA). Home to artists, quirks, and ants. Oh, the ants.

Structure: Proving the Premise

May 26, 2020100 Day Project, Uncategorizedlajosegri, plays, premise, structure, theartofdramaticwritingAaubin

Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing took me on a deep dive of the theory behind the parts of the play. Before this book, I had not considered that the pieces of the play could be treated philosophically. Egri discusses the protagonists and antagonists, setting the scene and establishing normal before diving into deviations from early Greek plays up to the 1920’s or so.

One of the topics he hit that was a great lightbulb moment for me was proving the premise. The premise is set in the first scene or at least in the introduction of each character. A story always begins with normal and then asks “what if?” In the first scene, we get the premise of the play to understand the normal. This should set the base of each character. Further scenes introduce the what if, the encroachment of the strange into the normal, so that the characters themselves deal or fail to deal with the new normal. Then they bounce off of each other in completely logical (for them) manners, thus creating conflict.

The climax is not the crux of the play.

Just a reminder, in a typical 5 act play, we have some phrases like introduction, action, rising action, climax, denouement, and so forth. In our modern attention spans, the climax is the crux of the conflict. It’s the boss battle that determines the ultimate winner. If you’ve read my other pieces on conversation, the climax is where you expect the winning argument to prevail.

The most important scene (according to Egri) happens just before the climax. It’s the scene where the characters, true to their character, embark on the final, most logical chain of actions that will lead them to a terrible confrontation with the other characters and thus end the play. In order to prove the premise, you must have set the premise in the beginning.

Proving the premise determines the climax with inevitability. There is no other path. In a way, proving the premise as its own scene just prior to the climax is the climax of the emotional journey. To be really fair, if a character makes a different choice in this scene, it can determine a happy ending or a sad one. Even if the path of the careening plot appeared to be going in a different direction just before the final decision.

I’m great at hedging my bets. But if I want to make a single statement in a work of art, I must stand firm from the very first sentence.

Practice: Read More

May 26, 2020100 Day Project, Uncategorizedhowardenapindell, MCA, museums, practiceAaubin

To be a good writer, you must read widely.

I don’t have to put that in quotation marks because every writing mentor, English teacher, writing friend, and writing book has told me the same thing. Substitute ‘more’ for widely, or ‘lots’. More than that. Even more. Read everything.

Read books. Read magazines. Read old letters. Read tweets and sub-tweets and screenshots sharing specific paired tweets. Read the hashtags, read the comments. Read parks. Read museum exhibits. Read cooking stores and clothing stores and high-end fashion, and don’t forget department stores. Read clever ice cream stores with branded cookbooks and a subscription service for ice cream pints.

My favorite thing to read is museum exhibits. One of the best I have seen was a show by Howardena Pindell during the 2018 spring season at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL*. It wasn’t just art that made the show memorable. The exhibit began with Pindell’s early media of choice, notably her work with paper dots and numerical patterns set in 3-D works. It moved to her exploration of themes and other media until the last room married theme and medium, so that her numerical patterns became an exploration of social justice. To one side of the dramatic works, there was an early work again, a piece consisting of an acrylic box filled with paper dots. Walking through the exhibit, we witnessed how the artist changed from a young artist experimenting with novel media to a mature artist exploring interconnecting themes. As viewers, we were changed by the exploration of the marriage of media and theme, and I walked away with a better understanding of how media can enhance thematic expression and exploration.

It was a good book.

The whole time I was reading the exhibit, I was only ever aware that Pindell had created thought-provoking art. Yet, there were times I got the sense that she had struggled, or triumphed, or regretted.

Each piece in the exhibit, in most exhibits, has a little explanatory card which can say something about the media used in creation, the title, the number sequence of the piece. A really good little explanatory card will use the available space to tell me what I need to know, but leave enough space for me to work out my own interaction with the piece.

In bad experiences, the little card has told me not what I am seeing, but what to see, what to think, how to feel about it.

The more places and things I read and read about and read to compare to other places and things I have read, the more I understand how to leave space for the reader. It’s a work in progress, but I’m getting there.

* “What Remains To Be Seen”, April-May 2018, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL

Conversation: Black Panther

May 26, 2020100 Day Project, Uncategorizedblackpanther, character, class, conversationAaubin

There’s a scene in Black Panther that made me laugh at the layers upon layers of conversation. Winston Duke, who should be in more things, plays M’Baku (this is not a spoiler. Everyone and their grandmother has seen this flick), a leader of the Jabari tribe and antagonist of the main character. He rules his people with care and sees a risk in the prince becoming king – you saw the movie. You know what happens next.

Duke creates a multi-layered character that says as much about his character’s role in the film as it does about his society – which we don’t see a lot of, actually. We get T’Challa and some little bits of the richly complex world of Wakanda, but we’re there for two hours of action and tragedy and triumph. In one scene, Martin Freeman as generic white guy, Everett Ross, keeps talking. Tale as old as time. But he stands before the leader of an entire tribe and interrupts much higher ranking women who already have leave to speak based on the societal hierarchy. That, and, he’s a guest. My man. Rude.

In an interview*, Duke said he invented the barking sound (also called a grunting sound) to make the point that Freeman’s character had no power in the throne room. He had no power in Wakanda. Had anyone else played Ross, like your basic Tom Cruise, or maybe a dozen interchangeable American white guys, it would still be a funny scene. But pick a white guy from a country with royalty and a famously complex cultural level of understanding of acceptable behavior, and it’s hilarious.

Just a shout out to world building: Pretend your character comes from a country with strict class delineations. Now pretend your character is running away with a character from a higher class. Do they speak like a peer? What rules will you have to break to make that okay?

*Empire Film Podcast #356, referenced by Webbed Media posted on March 26, 2019, “Winston Duke Improvised M’Baku Barking In Black Panther”.

Draft 24

Getting There. Eventually.