One is Never Enough

I did it again.

Over the past week I have been using the Stereoport/Eastern Undercurrent sketchbooks with a lot of success. My mind is flittering with ideas and getting them down is simple and beautiful. I am thinking visually again, in snippets of atmospheric pressure and shots of color. I can carry it around with me, and I do. People stop me everywhere I am to peek through it. It’s interesting – I don’t mind. I thrive on collective interest and instant reaction. I had someone who had never seen my work read through the entire week’s worth of work and nod her head at me, telling me it was interesting.

I liked that.

So, with the spare cash I had this week I picked up a slightly larger, more brown sketchbook for Cartography, which has gotten no love lately and needs to be chipped at. It’s the third and final piece of my current Works In Progress. The one with the actual first draft and the whole history hashed out. The one that isn’t quite there, but almost.

The one I know a lot about.

So, I thought a another visual escape for it would be a good idea. Something to get me thinking about it in a different way. Yes, this one is my baby. This one is my story gem and I hope that I’ll do it justice one day. Thankfully, I’ve already tried it once and failed spectacularly, which I am proud of. In fact, there is nothing I am proud of more in my writing career than the marvelous disaster that is the first Cartography draft.

I love this sketchbook already. Old maps, brown tones. Places I’ve never been.
Yet another fake history to immerse myself in.

I admit, more often than not, I am a literary snob.

Maybe it is the hours and hours I put in to get my English BA. Maybe the other hours I spent in lectures, readings and critique groups. Could be my collection of over 400 books. Could be my obsessive interest in Junot Diaz alongside my upmost respect for William Gibson. Could be the fact that reading Haruki Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicles taught me to understand writing fiction or that Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street opened my eyes on how to do do it.

I’m unsure, it could be a lot of things. Sometimes I feel bad about it. Most times, I don’t.

The only thing it really leaves me with is a sense of duty to my words. A motivation to layer it on and create a puzzle that needs to be made sense of. I am not happy when my writing is straight forward. I am not happy when my writing goes from point a to point b and there’s barely a hint of atmosphere or thematic storytelling in between. I don’t mind it in other people’s tales, but I can’t manage it in my own. I get down easily when I’m unable to make cross-character connections and dual moving plots that are really about the same thing but different.

My literary snobbery left me with a palpable desire to just want to make something that someone else will dissect. I love books sometimes just because of what they’ve tried to achieve. Even if the characters were a bit drab and the storytelling was convoluted. Just trying something new with literary form, with getting people paying attention, with testing the boundaries and deepening fiction kind of sets my heart off.

And when things connect, the layers form a latticework of understanding, I can do nothing but smile. I’m thrilled. There’s a theme, there’s an undercurrent, there is something aside the action and the thrills.

And that’s all I want to be able to do. Really. When I complain, it is all I am trying to do.

If that’s being a snob, well, you know, I’m okay with that.

On James Bond and why I can’t give a decent review of “Inception“

Inception: Joseph Gordon Levitt wears a bunch of amazing suits and looks absolutely stellar while a bunch of fantastic storycrafting is taking place around him, but when asked, all I can say is Did you see that shot of his suspenders at his lowerback? I am officially inspired for weeks. Don’t ask me to leave the house, I have writing to do. Stories to uncover. Entire novels to write about suspenders and lower backs.

And yes, we can also talk about Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy and Lukas Haas, if you so desire. I won’t stop you. Storytelling at a wonder-level, laced with good looks and good dressing. Really, we could talk about it all you want.

I just am quite sure I wouldn’t know what to say.

I’ve been thinking lately, on the usual things. What makes a story. What makes a story I love. Action, adventure and heartbreak – usually. Dead lovers, sharpened knives, guns with silencers on them. I am often told the things I love in life, in media, aren’t reflected at all in my stories.

This, I think, is true.

I have a folder full of quiet moments between people in bed, nestled together under the sheets. They have blankets up to their nose and scabs and scars that are hidden from plain view. I am not very good at putting together reasons behind these cuts and bruises, but they are there. The moment lacks it’s proper saccharin though. How can it be so sweet, so cloying when there was no burn beforehand. And what I want and need is burn after burn after burn. Motion, action, violence. I am learning plot slowly, through character motivation (as simple as they can be. Man wants to find his cat. Man wants to go home to his kids. Man wants to make it through the end of the day.) and simple cause and effect action. It is a hard learning process. Writing action is right up there with it. I don’t really read action books, but, I’ll watch an action film. I’ll watch them two or three times, watch them four or five times and never have a problem.

How does that find itself into a book?

Sure there are thrillers. Mysteries. I’m a half-breath from Miami and Miami is a wonderland for all that sort of stuff. Every new crime show, every new crime novel is here. But, no, I’ve decided to take it even further back. Back to the year my mother was born with From Russia with Love. With that gorgeous new cover they so deceptively placed in a stand near the comic table I was going to look through at the local bookshop. I love James Bond – how can you not? I’ve never read a James Bond book though.

So I am starting now.

I am going to learn to put things together perfect. With reason and motivation and proper gunshot sequences. There will be boys in suspenders and bloody kisses under sheets. There will be everything I love in it, really. And this is how I am starting out.