The week ahead.

Last week I was mostly getting back into the routine after my visit to California to see the kids. This week I'm going to be focusing on writing and other creative endeavors, and getting ready for a get-together next weekend.

The news from the Middle East is exceedingly grim, but I won't dwell on that here. I'll be exploring national and world affairs in other posts.

Torah reading for next Sabbath is Ki Tetze:
https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/2286/jewish/Ki-Teitzei-in-a-Nutshell.htm

Sunday evening.

The roommate's kids have been here for the weekend, and I got to spend some time playing with them yesterday and (for a few minutes) today. Board games, chess, and one-on-one soccer. They are delightful and adorable.

I spent two hours this morning with a deeply furrowed brow pondering my creative writing projects. I've written a few stories over the years that I consider successes, and I spent some time thinking about what made them work, and what approaches I might use in future projects. Almost nothing actually got written. But I'm still counting that as progress.

Writing journal.

From today's entry in my personal journal.

10:00. My plans for starting my writing day early in the morning early didn't materialize. I got to bed around 23:00 and found that I needed a full 8 hours of sleep, so I slept in until the unspeakably decadent hour of 7am. So I had my coffee and got cleaned up and dressed, and started my writing sesion at 8, with an intermission for morning prayers and breakfast some time around 9:15 - 9:30.

I didn't actually *produce* anything during that time, except a very minor pen-and ink correction to a paragraph I'd written (to clarify that by "hand" in that particular sentcnce I meant "handwriting"), but it was time spent in good-faith creative-writing work. Did not use computer, did not look at phone, did not read for entertainment. Instead, I re-read the few pages in the writing notebook I started recently, and the chapter on Plot (by David Harris Esenbach) in the yellow-covered Gotham book.

[https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Fiction-Workshop-Bloomsbury-Paperback/dp/B00E2RM6RM/]

Regarding the latter, one thing I noticed on the re-read is that Esenbach hedges just a little on the subject of the dramatic question. It "is *generally* a straightforward yes/no question" to be answered by the end of the story. Among the examples Esenbach cites, "the question in 'East of Eden' *seems to be* whether Cal is to be forgiven for who he's turned out to be." Also in this example, in contrast to Austin and Hemingway cited just before, the question (as Esenbach assesses it) is not a simple factual question (Do Elizabeth and Darcy marry? Does Jordan live or die?) but one that depends on a judgment supplied by the reader.

In fact, the main example in the piece is Raymond Carver's 'Cathedral'. The dramatic question, according to Esenbach, is whether the narrator "will be a person who truly *sees*." That's a very abstract question, and it's answered by an epiphany.

In my notes, I had written some experimental paragraphs - practice paragraphs, really - playing around with different ideas. I tried variations on a sentence selected randomly from Agnon, and variations (or continuations) of a couple of the handful of stories I've written that I consider successes.

I wrote 'Mohammed and the Feather' in 2014, I think, shortly after moving in at the place in Northwest Portland. Alicia is the one character I've written who is really an alter ego. The dramatic question, I suppose, is "Will Alicia resist the evil wizard's attempt to stifle (literally) her creativity?" At the end of the story, I have her picking up her notebook and beginning to write. But what would Alicia write?

I still haven't answered that question, but the new paragraph has Alicia "[staring] glumly at the forlorn, half-filled notebook page." The remainder of that page is blank. Oh, irony.

[https://asherabrams.livejournal.com/3908.html]

*

I was much much younger when I wrote 'Messages', which was inspired by the 1980 OMD song of the same title.

//It worries me this kind of thing
How you hope to live alone
And occupy your waking hours
We're taking sides again
I just wept I couldn't understand
Why you started this again
And every day you send me more
It makes it worse is this a plan of yours
To ensure I don't forget
I'd write and tell you that I've burnt them all
But you never send me your address
And I've, I've kept them anyway
So don't ask me if I think it's true
That communication can bring hope to those
Who have gone their separate ways
It hardly touched me when it should have then
But memories are uncertain friends
When recalled by messages ... //

I must have written the story shortly after the end of my hitch in the Air Force, which would have been 1988, or possibly even during it. I was heavily under the influence of Raymond Carver at the time - which is not at all a bad influence to be under (see above). The setting for my one-character story was an apartment like Stephanie's on Fell Street (along with the hibachi on the patio). I visited Stephanie there a few times while I was still in blue-suit. It would have been following DLI (1982), because I used the sea lions on the Monterey beach. The words "It makes it worse" are indistinct in the recording and I couldn't make them out at the time (and the world of internet lyric searches lay far in the future), so I settled on hearing the words as "immature verses", so that the lines read

//And every day you send me more
immature verses, it's a plan of yours
To ensure I don't forget//

which actually works really well in the song-story. In my story, the protagonist makes elaborate pretensions (to himself) of being contemptuously indifferent to the persistent attentions of the obsessive ex-girlfriend, ridiculing her poetry and using the letter as a fan to cool his microwaved dinner. I followed the sea mammal theme a little by having the character muse on whales (a preoccupation of the Greenpeace-supporting girlfriend) and then to bring in the idea of connections being gradually severed across space and time (further signaled by the snow on the TV - remember this was the broadcast era).

I'd have been in my early 20s when I wrote that, but I could probably read it today without wincing. I'm referring to it from memory because I don't have it in front of me, but I remember it pretty well.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXvlzUCB74o]

*

Living as we do in the shadow of Tolkien, I think we may be tempted to put too much emphasis on "world-building". JRRT could do it, in fact he made it look easy, and that's just the problem.

I somehow managed (I think) to avoid this pitfall in 'The Zero Ring', which is set in a vaguely futuristic kingdom (the king's throne has "suspensors", a good old-fashioned sci-fi word) in someplace called Dungard. I filled in just enough of the background of geography and culture to make the story work and supply a history for the characters. Because I used the device of a magical ring, I took pains to differentiate the Zero Ring from Tolkien's One Ring: notably, it does not exert the kind of hypnotic attraction over its bearer that Tolkien's ring does. Avishai's obsession with the Zero Ring is entirely the product of his own personality. I wanted to play around with the idea of emptiness as a generative force. The inspiration for the story itself, of course, was not Tolkien at all but Shakespeare's 'King Lear'. (In fact, JRRT himself was not particularly a Bard fan.)

(In LOTR, the action depends on saving Middle Earth from Sauron. But the dramatic question is really "Will Frodo resist the power of the One Ring?" And that goes back to the insight I learned from my middle-school English teacher, that true dramatic suspense comes not from worrying about what will *happen* to a character, but from worrying about what a character will *do*.)

I solved the 'information dump' problem by beginning the story with an introductory paragraph, set off from the main body of the narrative by italics, providing the necessary background information and setting the story in motion. I set up the whole scenario in the first sentence - as well as making the 'King Lear' reference explicit, so as not to waste the reader's time by dropping hints and being coy.

[https://asherabrams.livejournal.com/2240.html]

So, that's me spending two hours not writing and then 45 minutes writing about not writing. [10:47]