The Confabulator Cafe

Author: akordahl

  • For every work there is a deadline

    On a typical day in the writing life, I might stumble into my home office, where several motivational NaNoWriMo posters and offbeat art cheerlead my efforts from the walls. There, I set up my laptop on the cluttered desk.  I notice it’s cluttered, mutter something about fixing that at some point in the future, and attempt to carry on.  I turn on some appropriate music (something that vaguely promises a revolution now, or a pleasant female vocalist).  Then I realize that I’m thirsty and go put the tea kettle on for hot water.  I open up a new document, type an opening sentence and delete it a dozen times, then hear the tea kettle screeching at me.

    After I brew a perfect cup of tea, I change up the music.  Adjust my desk chair.  Contemplate de-cluttering.  Survey other projects that are not getting done.  Set an alarm. Realize that the fragrant tea is not engraving a brilliant novel on the computer screen–I have to do some chiseling.

    But who do I fool?  I try to set up routines, carve out space each day for writing; but it simply does not work.  Wave a deadline in front of my face, though, and the words wend their way to the page. There are some drawbacks to this reality:  the less sleep I’ve had, and the closer the deadline, the longer my sentences become, labyrinthine monuments to unfolding thoughts that gleamed with the spark of fools’ gold in the early morning light.

    For good or for ill, though, deadlines are the magic that make me write.  This is why I like NaNoWriMo so much; it is no respecter of routines, effective or otherwise.  It breaks into my life, forces me to write at gunpoint, burgles some of my time back for a novel.  I also appreciated semester’s end at school for similar reason.

    The other part of routine that I do find effective is changing locales.  My home office is great, but deciding to go out to a coffee shop to write makes it seem more like a scheduled activity.  Alas, even with specific cafes I find myself slipping into routine activities and standard beverages that help me avoid writing.   So I must be promiscuous in my routine, changing place and caffeine catalyst constantly lest the anti-muse of distraction catch me.  The anti-muse and I are old lovers; only in hiding, shape-shifting, teleporting can I hope to evade her!

    Fortunately, there are a lot of coffee shops in Lawrence, and she seems to forget them quickly.  Hopefully she won’t notice that I’m cheating with a deadline now!

  • I simply remember my favorite book…

    My favorite books all enter into the category of those that make me weep hysterically (except maybe everything Douglas Adams ever wrote, which only promote the tears after hysterical laughter.  Maybe I should say books that promote hysteria!). But for today, I’ll go with my favorite novel by a living author:  Galatea 2.2, by Richard Powers.

    My first reading of Galatea 2.2 came during my freshman year of college;  I found the book by wandering the library bookshelves and pulling something that looked interesting off, a practice that has introduced me to most of my favorite writers.  Later, I would discover that the head librarian was also a fan of the relatively unknown Richard Powers; hence, the library including all his works in their otherwise scanty recent fiction collection.  With the book’s ample treatment of the history of literature, it instantly hooked this budding English major.

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  • Over-rated Origins

    Big ideas and plotting have always been a struggle in my writing. I envision worlds and characters and interactions with ease; sentences and paragraphs come naturally from my fingertips. But climax and plot and sequence? These emerge slowly if at all.

    For years, alas, I thought that I was condemned to writing only of my own limited experiences, using my quotidian existence as source material.  But rarely are happy lives the stuff of good novels (see:  Tolstoy), and I am blessed with a happy life.

    Eventually I figured out that if source materials are good enough for Shakespeare, they’re good enough for me!  So now I mine ideas from the wealth of the texts around me.  I love newspapers, especially the tiny columns of human interest stories that run down the margins, giving two or three sentences of a story–a kernel big enough to build around, but small enough to prevent imprisoning the story in reality.  A few years ago, I read about a young man taking the bibles out of a church before burning it to the ground, as a form of protest against who knows what.  Despite numerous google searches, that story has never resurfaced, but it lives on at the core of two of my three NaNoWriMo novels.

    I also find ideas in the biblical, Old Testament book of Judges.  Now, my dad is a pastor and my origins are deeply religious, even fundamentalist.  In response to this, I strive to embrace the good parts of my heritage of piety and reverence for holy texts, and bring that into my writing.  And the book of Judges is as good as it gets for source tales–sex, lies, and videotape (metaphorical, anyway).  It portrays an anarchic society, or very nearly anarchic, a society making up the rules as it goes along. A society dependent on deeply flawed leaders with limited authority to help them discern justice from injustice.  The most interesting society possible, in other words.  I find ideas in those lives of sinning saints and saintly sinners.  Eventually, once the stories of the judges are exhausted, perhaps I’ll find another holy text to mine–but for now, I draw storied guidance from their faith and follies.