Category: essays

Intermission

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I am barely in the US Monday as I type. By the time this post goes up, it will be your Tuesday. I meant to write something 24 hours ago, but everything became too complicated, and I needed to breathe. I took medicine and I breathed, then I went to sleep.

This morning, my body told me to go back to sleep. It does this from time to time. I’m chronically ill, and there are times when bedrest prevents a whole host of problems. I listened and I slept. Since then, I’ve been catching up with everything and finally, finally in the early evening of my Tuesday and the cusp of Monday and Tuesday in the US, I can write my post. In that intervening time, I have left the questions my readers asked in such a safe place that I can’t find them… and I don’t want to talk about which bits of my body hurt and why, or the fact that this summer is never-ending.

Summer is always never-ending in February in my part of Australia. Then autumn hits with storms and leaves and arbitrary weather and it is as if summer never was. Only some parts of Canberra have the leaves, and there is a moment when pretty colours seem very exotic and Canberrans go driving around admiring these foreign trees and watch them shed their leaves. Last year I took some spectacular photographs from a local park. It’s too early this year for spectacular photographs. We’re still at the period of spectacular fatigue.

That we actively have to look for leaves in certain suburbs is why so many Australians subdue a chuckle when someone from the US talks about Fall. Not only is our autumn at a different time of year, but you need to be in very particular parts of Australia for there to be autumn leaves at all.

This moment of perpetual summer is when school has gone back after the long break, it’s when the heat is more likely to bite, and when university begins. Everything starts up, and so many of us just want to sleep until the more comfortable weather comes. It’s one of those times when all kinds of work deadlines present and many demands are made and those of us who are sensitive to the heat suddenly dream of the northern hemisphere.

Why do I call it an intermission? I’ve been writing about Todorov and that moment he describes as a hesitation, when you don’t know what the world of the novel will bring you. Anything’s possible. There could be horses, or unicorns, or fast cars, or slow bicycles. I often stop at that point in a novel and dream my own story, the plunge in and see where the real story will take me. That’s what life feels like now. As if it could go in a thousand different directions. Only I haven’t stopped to dream my own story (it’s tempting) because it’s too darn hot.

A Reading Practice

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

I’ve been working on adding some new practices to my daily schedule. A key thing I added in December – even before the Solstice, much less the official New Year – was to spend about 15 or 20 minutes reading every morning.

The original purpose was to give myself a reason to sit quietly for a few minutes before checking my blood pressure – which I’m keeping a close eye on – but it quickly evolved into something I really wanted to do. And that was probably because of the book I started with: Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time.

I stumbled on that book in a used bookstore in Sebastopol (the one in California, not Crimea) last summer and bought it on impulse. When I started doing the reading back in December, I pulled it out with a couple of other books on much the same impulse, and quickly fell into it.

Rovelli is a physicist, and the book is about the understanding of time by physicists, and yet that doesn’t begin to completely describe it, not to mention that it doesn’t tell anyone what a joy it is to read.

Rovelli is a lyrical writer and a gentle one. He can make statements that might be controversial without issuing a challenge. While I’m reading the English translation of this book (it was translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell), I am quite sure the beautiful and gentle writing is all Rovelli and was there in the Italian original. Rovelli does speak English (and likely several other languages, given the different scientists with whom he has worked), so I imagine he has some idea of what his words should look like when translated.

In doing this reading, I began to keep something of a commonplace book in which I wrote down quotations from the book or, occasionally, my own reaction.

Here are some of quotes that struck me:

Nothing is valid always and everywhere.

[T]he world is nothing but change.

The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.

We are part of a network that goes far beyond the few days of our lives and the few square meters that we tread.

We are more complex than our mental faculties are capable of grasping.

I could go on, but perhaps that is enough to entice others to read this book. Continue reading “A Reading Practice”…

Raised in a Barn: The Tango

personby Madeleine Robins
schedulePosted on

As I was making the bed this morning I found myself humming “Tango Jalousie.” It’s a melody* that has been used for ads and other things, and is familiar in that in-the-background-of-western-culture sort of way. But it’s also familiar to me because when I was… 9? My parents decided that my brother and I should learn to tango.

Insert glyph of “huh?” here.

This was in the 60s, mind, when the Bossa Nova was in. The Twist. The Frug. The Mashed Potato. Not the tango. But my father liked to tango, and felt that somehow this would be a civilizing influence on his hell-spawn young.

The tango was initially considered a scandalous dance, one which dismayed the proper citizens of Buenos Aires (where it first emerged) in the 1880s.  The partners stand so close together! (Bear in mind that seventy years the tango emerged, the waltz was considered vulgar and outré for the same reason.) The tango’s origins were a mix of African and European influences, and it was a dance of the poor people. Like jazz, the tango came from the margins and–like jazz–it took over. By the early 1900s the tango had become a European dance craze. It had its rises and falls, and by the time I learned it it was…quaint. Where some of my classmates might have been forced into dance classes where they learned the two-step or foxtrot, no one I knew was tangoing. Except me and my brother.

It’s not a difficult dance; the pattern is simple: 1-2   1-2-3. The steps can be taken in a straight line (a la Gomez and Morticia Addams) or, as we did, in a box. Step forward on my left, then right; step back on my left, step a little further out on the right, then bring the left in to join the right. The second three steps are a little faster than the first two. Once I could do that without falling over, Dad introduced other steps (my favorite was a sort of zig-zagging step where he held on to my elbows and turned me right and left, back and forth, for a count of five to the tempo of the music). And there were dips–Dad did not drop me backward as in the illustration here. Mine was just a slight bending backward, supported by his hand (nor did I wrap my leg around him. We didn’t have that kind of relationship). I assume my mother was teaching my brother roughly the same things: I wasn’t watching him, I was watching my feet.

Years later, when I was a theatre major in college, my ability to tango reliably (and to follow–or occasionally lead a dance partner who didn’t know how to lead) won me a certain amount of performance cred. “How did you learn that?” a director asked me. “My father taught me.” Silly me, I thought everyone learned the tango at home.

________
*familiar enough that Mad Magazine set lyrics to it, which I recall as “Jealousy, how could you do this to me? Because my eyeball just fell into your highball…” Which is hilarious if you’re eight years old… or my mother.

 

Summer and Eggs

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

My little bit of Australia has a heat wave. This is not unexpected, given it’s summer. It does, however, mean my brain is fried. It didn’t reach 100 degrees (using US temperatures) today, so, in the measurements of my childhood, it was hot enough to fry an egg on a car bonnet, but not hot enough for the pavement to melt. In my childhood, I would have said that this is a day when I can’t go running, but I can still play and read. Alas, I am no longer a child. Also, alas, this week is full of work that has unchangeable deadlines. If I had the energy, I would sing you (badly), “Too darn hot.” I do not. Also I have 3,000 words of deathless academic prose to write before I can sleep tonight.

I had better start writing.

Maybe next week will be cooler. Maybe the week after. We’re in our last month of summer. Schools have gone back, and universities will begin again soon and life will pick up pace. Maybe then I’ll have the inner-oomph to write those answers to the serious and interesting questions my readers sent me. I hope so. Then I can complain about storms and blowsy autumn leaves. I’ll have more energy for complaint and far less interest in dreaming of frying eggs on car bonnets.

One last note to leave you with: if it were ten degrees hotter, then I could fry an egg on the pavement. I tested this when I was a child. My parents did not let me eat the egg, alas, which is why the car bonnet is now my theoretical place of choice. It’s still only theoretical because none of my friends are willing to let me destroy their car enamel. Which is just as well, because my US friends have egg problems and if I had wasted eggs in testing the heat outdoors it would be rather rude.

Elements, Man

personby Madeleine Robins
schedulePosted on

Last week my husband and I drove from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Excitingly, when we were not quite half way there several friends who knew that we were driving down pinged us to let us know that a new wildfire had broken out near I-5 on our route. During the minutes when Danny and I were discussing whether this would impact our drive the fire grew so fast that we decided to head west at Paso Robles and take the coastal route the rest of the way. Thus our tidy six hour drive became a squalid 9 hour drive. But we got there and I moved in to the apartment upstairs where I stay when I visit, while Danny continued onward to Anaheim and the trade show he was going to.

By 11pm I was in my jammies and on the edge of sleep when Danny called. I thought this was just a “g’night, I love you” sort of call. Instead he said “you know about the fire, right?”

Um. Did he mean the Hughes fire which had caused our detour through Paso Robles and San Luis Obispo etc.? Or the Palisades fire which was (at that point) still not entirely under control. As it turns out, he meant neither. A brush fire had broken out a couple of miles north of my aunt’s house. Um.

I got hold of my daughter (in another apartment in the building) and my aunt’s caregiver’s daughter (a PhD candidate who also lives in the building) and we were discussing what, if anything, to do, when an alert siren went off on our phones: the area we were in (Bel Air, right next to the San Diego Freeway) was now on Level 2 alert, meaning “get ready to get the hell out.” 

I was, by now, fully dressed. I threw the things I’d taken out of my bag back in, and my daughter and I packed her car with various stuff. Then we went to my aunt’s house. There, things were in motion to move my aunt to her caregiver’s house in Central LA. Since other than standing around making un-useful suggestions (my aunt’s caregivers raise Awesome to a new dimension, and have their act down) and entertaining my aunt (who has lived in this neighborhood for over 50 years and, even with dementia, has a sense of humor about all this shit) there wasn’t much we could do to help, we took off to the valley and my daughter’s beau’s family house, where we spent the night. This meant actually driving past the fire that had rousted us out of our beds. It was, as these things go, small–I don’t think it got bigger than 45 acres (the Palisades fire, in contrast reached 23,448 acres; while it’s still active, it’s 94% contained, thank God). But driving past it, seeing the tongues of flame going from one dark patch to another, and seeing the firetrucks and a helicopter (I think it was a helicopter) dropping water on the area, was terrifying and impressive.

Years ago I was in London, walking up Baker Street toward Marylebone Street, and realized that there was a serious fire two blocks ahead of me on. I stood and watched, riveted, as the London firefighters took after this elemental force, fighting it with water and foam and all the tools they had. Gradually the tide turned; they kept the fire limited to the one six-story building it had started in, then began to quell it, one section of the building at a time. I was left kind of breathless: there are people who go out and face down this force with nothing more than water and the tools that science and experience has given them.

As I’ve said before: fire doesn’t care. Neither does water (if you have ever been caught in an undertow, you know this). Based on my experience with fire and water, I’d go so far as to guess that earth–in the form of earthquakes and mudslides– and air don’t care either. And yes, I realize that calling water, fire, earth and air “elements” harks back to ancient times and isn’t scientific. But these forces are powerful, and they do not yield to persuasion. Given my choice of facing down a guy with a gun or a wall of fire, I’d go for the guy with a gun. Who knows? I might be able to figure a way out, or talk the guy down or something. But Fire Doesn’t Care. Period.

In the end the fire fighters got the Sepulveda fire sufficiently contained that the “get set to go” alert was cancelled, and my aunt got to stay in her own bed. The next morning my daughter and I returned from Tarzana (a 20 minute drive that took almost two hours; thank you, LA traffic) and the rest of the visit went on as planned.

On Sunday Danny and I drove back to San Francisco. We’d had some rain on Saturday evening, and the rain on I-5 turned to snow on the grapevine (a twisty high-elevation bit of the highway above Santa Clarita), and then alternated with torrents and blue skies most of the way north. So we got more of the elements, which was occasionally exciting in the pejorative sense. We Modern Folk tend to discount the elements–it’s only rain. Or snow. It’s only fire. Or an earthquake. Or Santa Ana winds that draw every last iota of moisture out of the air so that a Los Angeles hillside is an easy target for a spark–any spark. 

All I’m saying is that the forces of nature don’t care, so we have to.

Shakespeare had a thing or two to say about tyrants

personby Deborah J. Ross
schedulePosted on

What Shakespeare revealed about the chaotic reign of Richard III – and why the play still resonates in the age of Donald Trump

In this circa 1754 illustration, two women scold Richard III in Shakespeare’s play.
Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

by David Sterling Brown, Trinity College

Written around 1592, William Shakespeare’s play “Richard III” follows the reign of England’s infamous monarch and charts the path of a charismatic, cunning figure.

As Shakespeare depicts the king’s reign from June 1483 to August 1485, Richard III’s kingdom was wrought with chaos, confusion and corruption that fueled civil conflict in England.

As a scholar of Shakespeare, I first thought about Richard III and his similarities with Donald Trump after the latter’s debate with President Joe Biden in June 2024. Those similarities – and Shakespeare’s depictions – became even clearer after Trump’s election in November 2024.

Shakespeare’s play highlights the flawed character of a man who wanted to be, in modern terms, a dictator, someone who could do whatever he pleased without any consequences.

In his 1964 essay, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” writer James Baldwin concluded that Shakespeare found poetry “in the lives of people” by knowing “that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.”

“It is said that Shakespeare’s time was easier than ours, but I doubt it,” Baldwin wrote. “No time can be easy if one is living through it.”

A black and white drawing of Richard III.
An undated portrait of Richard III.
Universal History Archive/Getty Images

A villain?

In Act 2, Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s play, a common citizen says Richard is “full of danger.”

“Woe to the land that’s govern’d by a child,” the citizen further warned.

Beyond hiring murderers to kill his own brother, Shakespeare’s Richard was keen on belittling and distancing himself from people whom he viewed as being not loyal or being in his way – including his wife, Anne.

To clear the way for him to marry his brother’s daughter – his niece Elizabeth – Richard spread what now would be called fake news. In the play, he tells his loyalists “to rumor it abroad that Anne, my wife, is very grievously sick” and “likely to die.”

Richard then poetically reveals her death: “Anne my wife hath bid this world goodnight.”

Yet, before her death, Anne has a sad realization: “Never yet one hour in Richard’s bed / Did I enjoy the golden dew of sleep.”

That sentiment is echoed by Richard’s mother, the Duchess of York, who regrets not strangling “damned” Richard while he was in her “accursed womb.”

As Shakespeare depicts him, Richard III was a self-centered political figure who first appears alone on stage, determined to prove himself a villain.

In Richard’s opening speech, he even says that in order to become king, he will manipulate his own brothers George, the Duke of Clarence, and King Edward IV, “in deadly hate, the one against the other.”

But as his villainous crimes mount up, Richard shares a rare moment of self-awareness: “But I am in / So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.”

Shakespeare’s Richard III and Trump

While the details of Trump’s and Richard’s lives differ in many ways, there are some similarities.

Much like Trump during his first term, Shakespeare’s Richard did not lead with morals, ethics or integrity.

Richard lied compulsively to everyone, as his soliloquys that contain his innermost thoughts make clear.

A black and white illustration of William Shakespeare.
An illustration of English writer William Shakespeare (circa 1600).
Rischgitz/Getty Images

Like Trump, Richard used empty rhetoric to persuade people with “sugared words” – he was not interested in speaking or promoting truth.

Moreover, Shakespeare’s Richard was a sexist and misogynist who verbally and physically disrespected women, including his wife and mother.

In the play, for example, Richard calls Queen Margaret, widow of King Henry VI, a “foul wrinkled witch” and a “hateful withered hag,” thus disparaging her older age.

He refers to Queen Elizabeth, wife of Edward IV, as a “damned strumpet” or prostitute, which she wasn’t.

Additionally, in order to cast doubts on his nephews’ legitimate claims to the throne, Richard spread false rumors about his mother, claiming that she was unfaithful.

A white man and a Black woman shake hands.
Kamala Harris shakes hands with Donald Trump before their debate.
AP Photo/Alex Brandon

For his part, Trump has no shortage of disparaging remarks about women. He once called his Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton “the devil” and characterized former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “crazy.”

Trump repeatedly peppered Vice President Kamala Harris during the presidential campaign with sexist and racists attacks.

He initially refused to pronounce her name correctly and openly mocked her racial identity as a Black woman, even questioning her “Blackness.”

A new day?

Like Trump, Richard III used religion to manipulate and confuse public perception of his amoral image.

In the play, Richard stages the equivalent of a modern-day photo op, standing between two “churchmen” with a “prayer-book” in his hands.

Much like Richard, Trump has courted evangelicals and used organized religion to his political advantage, most publicly by selling a “God Bless the USA Bible.”

Trump’s 2020 photo op in front of St. John’s Church in Washington is another example. It occurred during protests over the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed by a white police officer. Police in riot gear used tear gas to force protesters away from the White House; then Trump was escorted to the nearby church along with several administration officials.

As a political leader, Richard III left a legacy in English history as one of England’s worst monarchs.

That legacy includes his decisive defeat in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 that led to his death and to a new era for England under King Henry VII.

After winning the throne, the new king offered a message of hope that suggested England would one day emerge from its time of civil discord:

Let them not live to taste this land’s increase
That would with treason wound this fair land’s peace!
Now civil wounds are stopped, peace lives again.
That she may long live here, God say amen.The Conversation

David Sterling Brown, Associate Professor of English, Trinity College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “Shakespeare had a thing or two to say about tyrants”…

The Pretty Past

personby Madeleine Robins
schedulePosted on

I am working on spiffing up and making small revisions to my first three Sarah Tolerance mysteries, preparatory to reissuing them before I bring out #4 (title still in discussion watch the skies, etc.) One of the things I want to do is add a brief essay to each book about some aspect of the setting (and how, since these are books set in an alternate version of the English Regency, I might have changed it). This had led me to a whole lot of distracting but fun rumination, as well as an examination of why I wanted to write these books in the first place.

One of my favorite bits in the 1995 film of Sense and Sensibility is a throwaway line: as the Misses Dashwood and their hostess, Mrs. Jenkins, leave a carriage to attend an evening party in London, Mrs. Jenkins says “Mind your slippers, ladies! The horses have been here.”

Why do I love this? The line doesn’t appear in Austen; it’s there to remind the modern audience that this is a different world. It’s not just that social mores have changed. The day-to-day process of life has changed. We don’t get around using horses and carriages, so you don’t have to worry about horseshit soiling your nice dancing slippers. I love it because it’s a very mild antidote to the sorts of romances I grew up reading, which zipped right over the physical difficulties of life in the Olden Days. When I was writing Regency romances I would occasionally be asked (breathlessly) “don’t you wish you lived then?” To which my answer was always “Hell, no.” No painless dentistry, no antibiotics, no central heating, no reliable refrigeration, heating with wood or coal fire… Add to that my certainty that I would not have been the daughter of a wealthy peer, but more likely a maid or factory girl, dying early from a disfiguring disease (although in fact, dying early, particularly in childbirth, could happen to any woman up or down the social scale). The sanitized past of the Regency romances I gobbled by the ton began to annoy me.

One thing I knew when I started writing Point of Honour, the first of the Sarah Tolerance books, was that I wanted it to be largely set in London, and I wanted to at least nod to the physical rigors of life in the Olden Days. T0 the smells, particularly of the Thames, which was breathtakingly polluted, and particularly in the summer had a stench that penetrated to the city, even in the nice neighborhoods. To the waste and the necessity for crossing sweeps (hordes of little boys who haunted street corners and would swee the mud, dust, fecal matter and urine out of the path of a pedestrian willing to pay). To the darkness: gas lamps were installed in Pall Mall in 1807, and there was an ordinance that every house must have a lamp or torch outside the front door, to dispel a little of the darkness. In poorer neighborhoods this law was largely ignored, and the streets could be pitch dark.

Regency romances don’t mention the outhouses, but I wanted to. I wanted to get dentistry (and its lack) and medicine (and its well intentioned and often wrong-headed notions) and to at least reflect the difficulty of daily life for the people who are not in the top tier of society. See, I knew, given the premise of the book, that I would be playing with the social conventions of Regency London. If I–or my Fallen Woman protagonist–was going to spit in the eye of social norms, the least I could do was give her a milieu that was equally brave. And un-sanitized.

And I admit that I have a small frisson of delight in detailing the dental shortcomings and smallpox scars of my characters, and in writing a scene where a “gold finder” (a slang term for the guy who cleaned out your privy when such was needful) disrupts the orderly working of a household. It’s not that the past wasn’t pretty: it’s just that that’s not all it was.

 

 

 

 

 

From Little England to New York, not forgetting the Wild West

personby Gillian Polack
schedulePosted on

I once wondered what would happen if each time a place was central to a novel what would happen to the place if the mentions carrying charges. If the charges were of fairystuff, then new York and London, more than anywhere else in the English-speaking world, would turn into fairy wonderlands. Japanese anime answered this question for me by making the charges the stuff of detonation and world-changing tragedy. Tokyo has died more times than anywhere else in the Japanese-speaking world.

When I’d explored this notion decades ago, I kept it in mind, and nearly made a map containing all the places that were the heartland of a novel, just to find out more. At that point I entered the public service (this was a long time ago) and there was no time to make maps.

I turned my thoughts to notions that did not need mapping. How much do we centre our narratives around the US and around England? What does this do to our sense of what makes home? How does it affect how we see ourselves? Often it means we see ourselves poorly, because the London and New York publishing industries tend to reinforce the bias from the stories they select for publication. It’s far, far harder for outsiders to get published and have careers without moving to those places and creating networks and being seen. The further one is from a central place, the more difficult it is. In Australia, Sydney, Melbourne (and recently Brisbane) are those central points. People who can travel a lot and create modern networks are less disadvantaged. We know what this does to careers. I’m not sure we have looked deeply enough into what this does for the stories we tell.

Today, I’m thinking about this quite specifically in relation to the US’s story dream of a Wild West and in Australia’s equivalent. In novel terms, my favourite Australian story based in our Wild-West equivalent is Voss. It’s the opposite of anything written by Zane Grey. White won a Nobel Prize and Grey sold more novels than I can count. They are not, to be fair, good comparisons, because they were not simply written at far ends of the world, but they are also at far ends of the literary spectrum. Yet White and Grey are the two writers who always come to mind when I start to think about popular stories that share history. I read them both when I was fifteen and sixteen. I fiercely wanted to understand them. I didn’t want the literary understanding I was being offered at school. I wanted to understand how they tell us who we are and what would happen if we put them in historical perspective.

Both writers demonstrate some of the core stories we associate with European settlement when we’re telling stories that focus on that settlement. Those core stories give me hints on how we shape our own histories to make them distinctive. The publishing tendency to centralise rubs away differences. Publishing tends to limit the range of stories we’re offered and to focus on areas that publishers think will sell. This reinforces a small concept of the past and the reinforces it again and again and again until we think it’s legendary. Those of us who are not in the right region or culture find the legendary passes us by.

When I was twenty-six I accepted that job in Canberra and suddenly the stories of a gunslinging past were staring at me from the roads I walked. Local farmers were descended from famous bushrangers (Australian outlaws). Canberra is on the road from the goldfields to the big smoke. And yet… we didn’t have a big set of Wild West stories. We have some bushranger songs and tales, but they’re not encapsulated in a whole world the way the Wild West stories are. Australia’s writing legacy was through the UK rather than through the US and do, instead of dime novels, we had penny-dreadfuls and their ilk and heirs. We had writers such as Mary Fortune and Fergus Hume and, later, Arthur Upfield. They’re quite different in nature and story style. In many cases, the lives of the writers themselves held elements of that penny-dreadfulness and the books were often set in Melbourne. For Fortune and Hume, the best place to start with with the work of Lucy Sussex. She is also from Melbourne. Melbourne is, these days, a City of Literature, but it still relies on people living there and does not reach out so much to the rest of Australia. Likewise, the earlier Australian popular literature mentions of places do not seem to carry the same charges as novels set in New York or in the Wild West.

For readers, this is a good thing. Each novel can be read by itself and for itself. But from a cultural standpoint, it’s not so good. The pressure remains to write novels set in New York or to tell yet another Wild West science fiction story.

What are we missing with this? I was going to explore this in another post, next week, but I’ve been thinking about it. Would anyone reading this (including Treehouse friends!) like to talk about our histories? We could compare the dates we’re taught as important. We could discuss why the US has the Wild West while Australia has Marvellous Melbourne. We could compare goldrushes and outlaw stories. It could be a great deal of fun. Would anyone like to share a discussion? (Not for next week, for a mutually convenient future time.)

On Gentleness

personby Nancy Jane Moore
schedulePosted on

It strikes me once again how much I need gentleness in these fraught times.

The last time the grifter was allowed to occupy the White House, I ended up writing a gentle adventure novel — gentle despite the fact that it was rooted in The Three Musketeers. It’s called For the Good of the Realm and the adventures are had by swordswomen and witches. You can buy a copy here if you’re in need of gentle adventures.

The sequel I’m working on turns out to have more violence and complexity in it, which might be why I’m having some trouble with the messy middle right now. I need gentleness, though not at the expense of trying to force a story to be something it isn’t. I didn’t realize I was writing a gentle adventure with Realm until it was finished, and the current book is opening some doors I never knew existed when I wrote the first one.

That said, it may be tricky for me to write something that’s a little harsher right now because – like I said at the beginning – the times cry out for gentleness as an antidote to what we’re facing.

Now in a world with numerous wars and cruel treatment of refugees and, for that matter, of anyone without enough money — people make homes in tents and old RVs in my neighborhood — gentleness is a privilege.

Probably it has always been a privilege, though when reading about “gently bred” ladies of the English Regency period, I am inclined to think those women were more imprisoned than protected by the concept. Gentleness needs to be freely given and available.

I do not want to ignore the evils of the world. We cannot stop them unless we acknowledge that they exist and act on that.

But at the same time, looking at the horrors and knowing you can’t stop them is hard. Not as hard as living through them, but still hard.

I was brought to this realization by two recent posts on social media. In one, a friend was planning to re-read Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, but going to skip Chapter 1 because they can’t face reading it again.

It’s a very hard chapter to read. You must read it when you read the book the first time, but it will likely be so seared in your memory after that that you can skip it and get to the part of the story that shows a better path forward on any re-reads.

Someone else I follow was watching Furiosa, the prequel to Fury Road, and while they love the movie, had to stop because they found it too hard to rewatch knowing what was coming.

I think that’s why I need gentle right now: because looking at what we’ve been through the last few years, I know some of what’s coming. Continue reading “On Gentleness”…

The Right Way to Be a Writer

personby Madeleine Robins
schedulePosted on

TLDR: There isn’t one.

I once auditioned to teach a writing course on the community level for a place that offered a bewildering array of classes in everything from becoming a real estate tycoon to becoming a high-end chef. It was pretty clear to me that they syllabus the program wanted was based on the 5- or 7-beat plot (which are essentially the same thing, but the 7-beat-plot breaks the stages down a bit more). So I put together a class outline and taught a sample class and lost the gig. Why? As near as I can tell, it’s because at the end of the class I said something like “Of course, this is only one way to write a novel, and it might not be the one for you.”

Apparently that was heresy. True, in my opinion, but heretical in that situation. Oh well.

I think many satisfying books have a glancing relation to the 5- or 7-beat story (there are many different terms for each beat–one man’s “introduction” might be another man’s “exposition,” etc. But the writer may get there without once thinking in those terms.

These days a lot of the writing advice I see is not about writing at all, but about the business of being a writer. And a lot of that advice is such that I, for one, would never have put pen to paper if I had seen it as a young and tender human. If you are the sort of person who likes to write, but writes slowly, or sweats over crafting a sentence, or thinks in a quirky, non-linear fashion, some of the rules could stop you dead. If you’re the kind of introvert for whom having a Social Media presence gives you shudders the rules could stop you dead. And rules really shouldn’t stop you dead, honest.

I was confidently told last month by someone who I assume is living up to her own dicta, that if I couldn’t publish a book a month–more would be better, but a girl’s got to sleep–then I would never make it as a writer.

Um.

It may be fortunate that I don’t make my living by writing, because I flunk many of the Right Way To Be A Writer tests. The fastest I have ever written a book was a little under three months–from turning in the outline to the editor  (I never outline, but it was a media tie-in book and such was required) to dropping the manuscript on said editor’s desk. Approval of the outline, by the way, came in a week after I delivered the book (the book was needed urgently, as the writer whose work had previously been scheduled for that slot had had to drop out–publishing schedules are sometimes inexorable). So: I am not going to be putting out a book a month, under any circumstances. I don’t, as noted, outline (actually, sometimes I outline when I’m about 2/3 of the way through a book to make sure I know where I”m going). The 5 or 7 steps in my plot are observed only when the book is done and I can say “hey, look! Rising action! I did that!” All in all, in terms of the Right Way shibboleths, I’m a pretty bad writer.

And yet I’ve written more than a dozen books, published 11 of them (I’m polishing #12 as we speak). So somehow, despite the rules, I appear to be a writer.

All this is to say: you are a writer if you write. You may not be an author (I tend to think of authors as persons who have written, and perhaps published. Authordom involves past tense). You may structure your work rigorously according to one metric or another, or wander, as I do, over the landscape of your plot until you find yourself at a satisfying destination. The rules are really just there to help you, not to grade you.

Okay: maybe there is one rule I would say is inviolable: Be yourself and have fun. If you’re having fun, even if it’s the stare-off-into-the-middle-distance-and-swear-under-your-breath sort of fun, then you’re doing it right. If you’re having fun, it’s far more likely that someone else–like the audience–will as well (all things being equal, and the book being written in sentences and stuff).

You can tie your own hands by following the rules; that may make you feel safer. But remember that art is by its nature a risky business.