The Confabulator Cafe

Author: akordahl

  • The Head Bumps of Writing

    When I started writing my great non-nationalistic novel, tentatively titled “There Was No King,” I knew my characters and plot were loosely based on the biblical book of Judges. I knew the setting was the great post-nation-state Kansouri, one of the many regional confederations created after these United States were united no more. I knew the church would explode at some point. However, I did not know that Delia, one of the main characters, would be a phrenologist.

    But as I started on that rough draft, back in 2010, Delia decided on her own career. Somehow, in that future world, after all the institutions that preserve actual scientific knowledge disintegrated, my rational but passionate betraying minx became a student of head bumps, a pseudoscientist-psychologist-small business owner. I wanted her to be a border guard! Or maybe a courier for underground networks, or a low-level government worker, or a hacker like her boyfriend. Certainly not a phrenologist. But she decided, and all my attempts to coerce her into another career failed.

    Since I didn't know much about what she did, I had to investigate her job and education. And I found out a few interesting things. Phrenology wasn't really about the head bumps, but a theory that sections (organs) of the brain influenced different character traits; short of breaking open the skull, there wasn't any other way to figure out the size of those “organs” than feeling the bumps on the skull. It wasn't ever really accepted by the scientific establishment. It contributed a lot to racist pseudoscience and early criminology (“the criminal type” kinds of BS), but it also prefigured developments in neuroscience that recognized different parts of the brain did, in fact, serve different functions. There are also still adherents of phrenology out there somewhere in the world. Thank you, internet.

    Now, Delia won't have to depend on feeling the skull–she can do a quick mini-MRI of the future on her clients and offer them a detailed read-out. Of course, in the future, phrenology is more the province of prospective mothers-in-law than racist scientists. But Delia, like her predecessors in the 19th century, will practice her art with great ceremony and drama. She will offer counseling to understand the results. She will struggle with whether to practice adaptive phrenology, the altering people's brain architecture to change their personality. She will be a psuedo-scientist with the best of them, and she will think about the differences between popular science, fake science, and “real” science a lot. I look forward to learning more about this profession along with her!

  • They wasted time. You drafted a novel. I wrote a masterpiece.

    You type a word on the page, pick up the pencil, initiate the writing process. You hear the sentences in your head. You know the characters, the plot, the style, the voice will coalesce to something that resembles a novel by the end of the month. At least you hoped so.

    All NaNovelers know the difficulties of choosing a point of view and tense for a novel. One must strike the balance between straight-out memoir chronicle style and dry documentary; future tense is presumptive, but delightful at times; past tense was the novel default for years, but now perhaps present tense usurps it. And then the direction of the text depends so much on its pronouns. Shall “I” personalize the novel, perhaps too much, blur the lines between narrator and author? Can “you” participate in the novel as character and audience? Does a plural third-person narrator impose a false unity? And what of the glorious omniscient observer, the third person who knows and sees all but is no one?

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  • Time and Teaching

    Once, when I was in teacher-training school, my class had to read an article about English teachers and writing. This article expressed the belief that such teachers should not pursue their own writing projects, because any time spent on self-centered expression was time taken away from lesson planning and grading, the true purposes of life for any educator. My classmates and I condemned this concept vociferously, both from a personal sanity perspective and from an educational perspective. For how does one teach a process that s/he does not experience? How can adults model a literary life they do not have?

    Alas, now that I am a teacher, I understand the article’s perspective, even as I disagree with it. Teaching is a time-consuming job. In the current environment we are asked to do more work with less funding and less time, and the powers that be would rather we think of every moment we are not teaching or preparing to teach as a moment stolen from the kids. Several educational consultants have even suggested that if we do ever go on vacation, we must record the vacation and turn it into a lesson for the kids. Of course the kids deserve the best education I can possibly offer them. But it’s easy to start thinking of myself purely as a work machine, here to revise lessons endlessly and integrate new technologies seamlessly and innovate constantly to improve. The constant admonishments from the media and neoliberal organizations about the dangers of bad teachers ring in my ears every time I sit down with a book, every time I pull out my keyboard, every time I journal rather than grade. (more…)

  • Non-Fictions

    Various non-fictions litter my reading and writing past; I am an enthusiastic connoisseur of the art of the differently true writing. Each time I find a new enthusiasm, it leads me to heaps of fascinating, genre-crossing work. Every new group of texts makes me ask myself if I can contribute something to them.

    I sometimes wonder if every woman who has escaped the clutches of fundamentalist Christianity has written a memoir; and if so, if I have read them all yet. If I haven’t, it’s not for lack of trying–I grasp those memoirs eagerly and read them through in a day or two, all other work and reading and writing thrown aside for the great moments of identification. Every one of the dozens I’ve read have the same characteristics–the chafing, the quiet doubts, the discovery of feminist thought and practice, the realization that the Bible is not literarily true, the men telling us that we were not staying in our place by thinking, etc., etc. The extreme similarity of our experiences is probably not all that surprising, for their origins are in a movement that glorifies central authority and normalisation. (more…)

  • The Effective Intertext

    In teacher training classes, once we had to make a visual map of “A Day in the Literate Life.” The instructor intended us to examine all the literary tasks we performed each day, the better to understand the types of reading and writing we (and our students in the future) must be able to process. And I realized that I floated from one type of writing to another type of reading back to writing, constantly, throughout every day. My writing life is a natural extension of my reading life.

    On days when I feel pretentious and long for grad school, I might say that my inner voice constitutes a rich intertext, that I am the intersection between the many texts of my reading life, and in writing I bring all those input sources together. I honor the writing that has fed me by writing back at it.

    Or I might just say that I feel lucky to have read a lot of great books and want to express that gratitude back with some books of my own.

    Also, I have always been a hand raiser, one to talk in class–not because I wanted to show off, but because my larynx would burst if I did not get to talk within the next three minutes. And writing allows me to sound that barbaric yawp in quieter, better controlled ways. I write because I talk, because I am grateful, and because I want to participate in the conversations that have shaped my life and mind.

     

  • Know the Swirl and Swing

    My favorite writing advice comes from a writer whose work I don’t enjoy, oddly enough. Or at least he gets credit for it on the writing angel who graces my office wall with her charm. “I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions,” states the angel, quoting James Michener, the writer of those gigantic historical fictions that were really popular in the 70s. This reminds me constantly to ask myself, why would my audience care? How are my words entangling with human emotion today? What part of human experience can I capture, what are my characters feeling right now, where is the human element? Answering these questions enlivens fiction and ennobles nonfiction.

    However, the very common piece of advice, “Write what you know,” strikes me as the worst advice available. Here’s the problem: Writing what you know turns all writing into life writing, an exploration of the writer instead of an exploration of the world. Certainly life writing can be exciting, good work, work that exposes joys and injustices, that introduces incandescent personalities or unique experiences to a larger audience. But I am uninterested (mostly) in mining my rather dull life for stories. I use writing as a discovery process; I write what I want to know about.

    Now, writing does require all my empathy and life knowledge to pull the human emotions into the words. And no one enjoys reading the product of ignorance. By the time a writing project emerges to the world, it should be saturated in knowledge, the product of its author’s learning, research, and imagination. But writing only what you know is an unreasonable limitation, one that asks too much of youth’s ignorance and too little of human capacity to learn and grow, and forces life to be the research for writing–rather than the other way around.

  • Spicing with Subplots

    Plots are quite pleasant for novel readers and even more pleasant for novelists, providing a structure for the writing and all that jazz.  But subplots are the sugar and spice.  As a writer, I don’t enjoy the main plot so much–once I’ve constructed the gist of the book, it’s difficult to change, and that element of the creative work is done.  For me, subplots allow play and fluid creativity on the sideline of a novel.

    Subplots bear especial importance in science fiction writing.  My novels are set in the near future; their plots involve characters who live and breathe and grow through that future.  They don’t necessarily think about how their own time came to be.  But for me (and I expect for many other readers) there must be a link between our present and that future-present, and I tuck those links into subplots: an older person who watched those changes unfold, perhaps, or a holdover community that progressed in a different direction, or other minor characters whose wanderings explore a different part of the world.

    In my reading and writing both, I notice that subplots serve a very important commercial-literary purpose:  sequels!   If a book does not wrap up its main plot, I am annoyed and less likely to feel the book was a satisfactory literary experience.  But subplots can be left floating, a stem into a future full plot with its own sundry subplots and schema. My NaNoWriMo novel of 2010 ended up having a character work on the border crossing between Kansas and Missouri; her relationships there were minor details in context but contributed a lot to the sequel in the end of Novel2011.  And someday one of the subplots from the border-crossing will spout into its very own main plot, making the annual a perennial.

  • It’s Never Just Writer’s Block

    In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the classic meandering semi-fictional work from the 60s, narrator-author Robert Persig tells a student suffering from writer’s block to start writing about one brick in one building on her town’s main street.  The student comes back to him transfixed, with pages and pages of writing about that brick, and the next, and then the whole building and whole downtown and EVERYTHING, and the curse was lifted!  She was no longer blocked and could write ecstatically.

    Alas, if only writer’s block was really that easy to overcome. The question this week asks if there’s such a thing as “writer’s block,” and I suppose my answer to that is “no.”  I don’t believe there’s an actual psychological condition that hinders a previously productive writer from working.  It’s something of an excuse, something of a myth–you can always write about that first brick, right?

    Except when you can’t.  And at those times,”writer’s block” is a convenient shorthand for whatever is wrong. Depression, for one, cripples creativity and pretty much everything else too.  It certainly blocks writing for some people (and usually for me). I know many great writers managed to keep going through depression–indeed, rumor has it that Shirley Jackson, among others, actually wrote herself out of depression–and I admire this feat, but that’s not how it usually works for me.  Depression accompanies self-doubt, this suspicion that my words and ideas are worthless and don’t even deserve the data space on my computer.

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  • Netstrider (Flash Fiction)

    “And then, the Netstrider passes in the night and eats the internet.”  Laney paused to let the chills go down their backs, as they poked at screens under the covers.

    “But Mommy, they can still use their phones, right?” Dana asked. “That’s not the internet.”

    “The Netstrider doesn’t care how you are on the internet, my love. He only cares that you are on, and it draws him like honey. In those lands where the Netstrider has recently passed, oh, the chagrin, oh, the horror–for all around, the phones disconnect, the computers grunt and groan and settle down in a poof of dust.”

    The children gasped.  “Then what do we do?  What does anyone do?” asked Will.  His phone beeped three times then, three messages. (more…)

  • No Longer a Poet: A Cautionary Tale

    When I was about seven or eight, I fell in love with poetry.

    I don’t quite remember how it happened, but one day I started begging my parents for books of poetry in much the same way that other girls beg for Malibu Stacy dolls. My dad was happy to help find the poetry book he grew up on:  Best Loved Poems of the American People, a Readers’ Digest treasury.

    Anyway, shortly after reading all the way through that, I began my own first poetic efforts, typing out a rhyming line at a time on an old electric typewriter. Those early creations meditated on the seasons, and on jump roping–topics near and dear to my third grade heart.

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