This morning, I had an interesting conversation with my son's vocal performance instructor. I'll call him "B". B is an outstanding teacher and we have seen my son's abilities coaxed and coached to a level that he (my son) didn't think possible. We are very pleased to have B work with our son. B is very patient and he is able to break vocal performance down into discrete chunks in a way I've never seen before. I have learned a lot about singing just by being in the same room as B and my son go over practice pieces.
B also teaches music at a local private school. In fact, he attended my son's (and other of his students') high school choir concert the other night and told me about the extensive time and effort he had put into a performance by his own students. I would have thought that he would have been ecstatic, knowing what I know of his personality, but B just seemed drained. He told me that while he had taught his kids where to be, when to be there, and how to sing, some well-meaning parents inadvertently made things difficult by not trusting their own children to do as instructed, as they had done several times before in rehearsal.
Fast forward to today, when I had a conversation with B, after my son's lesson was over. I honestly don't remember how the topic came up, but B essentially let on that he was looking for other opportunities, that teaching, he is finding, isn't as rewarding as it once was. He said he had come to a realization, only recently, that what he loved to do was to perform in front of an audience, not as part of a larger choir (which he does with a church choir), but with a small group, a band.
There have been times when B has interrupted himself while teaching my son. He stops playing and singing along with my son and says "Sorry, I'm showboating. I'll stop that." Most of the time, I don't even notice that he's been showboating. I just assume he's trying to lead my son with a little more emphasis, and sometimes that's the case. But there are occasions when I can tell that B is showboating. Thankfully, he knows that instructing my son is not the same as being on stage. Yes, he can emphasize certain phrasings, even exaggerates things so that my son, in reaching for the exaggeration, hits the right tone. But when he finds himself slipping into performance mode, he catches himself and resets.
When we had our conversation, I remarked that his desire to move from instructing and participating in choirs to more focused vocal performance with a small group reminded me of my own journey as a writer. The corollaries are not exact (are they ever?), but when I look back on my writing career, it goes a bit like this:
In the beginning, I edited. My writing at that time was overly baroque and florid (some will argue that it still is, but I have some MSS hidden away from my early days that will have you puking purple in no time). I had a good grasp of grammar. I knew a good story when I read it. I knew how to organize a theme. And I had (and still have) distinctive tastes in fiction. So what better way to learn how to write than by exposing myself to a large amount of short fiction in a short time? At around that time, Jeff VanderMeer asked if I would like to help him edit the Leviathan 3 anthology. I had loved the first two Leviathans and Stepan Chapman's The Troika, all of which Jeff had edited. So I jumped in.
I learned a great deal from Jeff. We compiled the anthology, and won a World Fantasy Award for editing. I took on a few other editorial projects, while, at the same time, working on honing my short fiction skills. I found some measure of success there, but considered myself more of an editor than a writer. I'm not quite sure why: I had more stories published even at that time than many others who considered themselves "writers". Maybe it was some internal coding I had that left me feeling that my writing wasn't as good as many other people's writing or not as recognized as others' writing, but I knew that my editing had garnered some attention. Ah, that inner demon, self-esteem!
As time wore on, however, more comfortable with my abilities as a writer. As the writing credits racked up, I still felt like something was missing. That something was long-form fiction, novellas, novels, the big stuff. The important stuff. The stuff that shows "I am a writer," at least how I conceived a writer at that time.
Short fiction came quite naturally to me, with little effort. I'm told that this is all backwards, that most writers write novels first, then short stories, and that writing short stories is the most difficult of writing arts. Not for me. The long-form was my bugbear. This probably has something to do with a short attention span and my penchant for being distracted by responsibilities and other interests. So I attempted to write a novel. I had had a few different ideas brewing for some time, so I thought it was time to give it the old college try.
What a disaster . . . The novel, as a novel, never materialized. Well, it did, but it was an ugly, mutated mess. I had a few writerly friends read it and the best advice I received was to split it into two. I could see that they were right, so I did so. In the course of splitting these, I discovered that what I had was not a novel, nor a short story, but two novellas. After thorough editing, I had created two long, but not-novel-length stories that I was pleased with. I found the exercise so enjoyable that I went on and wrote several more.
One of them I sent to editor John Joseph Adams, who said, in effect, "what you've got here is a novel". He said that it had made the short list for one of the anthologies he was editing at the time, but he felt that it just needed more breathing room, so he rejected it. Best . . . rejection . . . ever. I took his advice and unraveled the "end" of my novella to open up the door to . . . more. How much more, I didn't know at the time. Well, to make a long-form story short, I ended up with the rough draft of Heraclix & Pomp.
So this transition from editor to short story writer to novelist parallels, in some ways, B's ongoing journey from instructor/conductor to performer. But what about "showboating"?
Many years ago, I was lambasted in a review for being too enamored of words. That might have been true. I love beautiful words and beautiful sentences. I found that my editors for Heraclix & Pomp were frequently chastising me for using overly-complex metaphors and odd constructions that, while they made sense to *me*, were becoming stumbling blocks for the editors and would, hence, get in the way of the common reader (and I use the term "common" with the greatest affection). My job as a writer is not to impress, but to communicate. If I can communicate effectively *and* beautifully, all the better. But clarity must come before elegance, at least in the long form novel. I'm afraid, though, that you'll have to tolerate some level of experimentation and overt playfulness of language in my short fiction. I love words, I love beautiful sentences, and sometimes, at least in the short story form, I have to wear my emotions on my sleeves. I am, after all, a romantic at heart.
Saturday, May 31, 2014
Saturday, May 17, 2014
Hand Job or Why I Write By Hand
I'm thinking that the title of this post might get a lot of hits from people that don't want to know anything about writing . . . Yes, I pulled the old "bait and switch," so sue me. Or, read on, and you might learn something about writing, or at least, why I write the way I write.
You might wonder, from my writer's hideaway post, why I have a composition book and pen resting there on my writing desk, but no computer. In fact, I have no computer down in my writing area at all. And though I will take my tablet with me to stream music, I can't really write on the tablet. Nor would I want to. Truth is, I like to write my short stories and novels by hand, then type them into the computer. In fact, I can't make myself write any other way. Why is that?
First and foremost, I am a kinesthetic and visual learner. I learn with my eyes and my hands. I leer and grope to understand and create. Good thing my writing area is in the basement, away from other humans, huh? Seriously, though, I have to manipulate things with my hands to really get into them. Not that I'm mechanically inclined - I can hardly change the oil on the car. In fact, I don't. But when it comes to understanding something thoroughly, I am at my best when I can get my sight and movement involved. Typing is too mechanical for me. I fidget when I type, and my mind does not readily flow with ideas when I'm stuck at a keyboard. The varied movement of writing with a pen, the feel of the ink flowing from the pen, and the immediacy of seeing handwriting, my handwriting, brings me more fully into the setting and my character's head. Maybe it's the electrical fields in a computer that screw with my mojo, I don't know, but I am much more "intimate," I think is the right word, with my fiction when I write by hand.
This also has something to do with pacing. I can write much faster than I type. And it's easier to move a pen across paper to fix a mistake then it is to hit the backspace key twenty times (as I just did while typing this sentence). And, if I wish, I can write more slowly while still moving. Typing slowly feels stilted and un-natural. Writing slowly feels very natural, especially when I am trying to tease the right words out of my brain on the first draft. Of course, this saves me some editorial pain down the road. Maybe handwriting appeals to my lazy side.
I should probably note here that my handwriting is absolutely terrible. You can see some representative, and reprehensible, examples right here. And, really, that's an improvement over how poorly I used to write. As a child, I was constantly given bad marks for my penmanship (or lack thereof). Obviously, I didn't care much about the chiding. But a few years ago, I decided to try to write more clearly. After looking around for good resources, I found that using the Operina script was best for me, and I've been practicing it for the last couple of years. My handwriting isn't beautiful, by any means, but at least now it's legible to others besides myself, doctors, and madmen.
I also like the portability of pen and notebook. I carry these wherever I go. Have you ever seen that guy pulled off the side of the highway taking notes in a composition book? That's me. You never know when the muse is going to strike, and I've had some of my best ideas and solved some of my stickiest character and plot problems at the weirdest of times. Rather than trust that I'll remember things, I write them down. And you can't do that quickly with an electronic device. Not as quickly as you can with pen and paper.
Finally, there's the benefit of the space of the page. That is, when you write with pen on paper, you are inevitably going to leave some white space out on the margins, at the head of the page, and, likely, at least one line at the bottom. I've found that these are marvelous places to collect ideas when my thoughts go racing ahead of me, as they often do. For example, I'm working on chapter 3 of the novel and I have a realization about a character or a situation that can't go into chapter 3. So I make notes at the top of the page, away from the main text, then circle and star the notes with a big star that gets my attention later. Then, if I've done an outline of upcoming chapters (which I usually don't do until I am at the point that I guess is about halfway done), I can add those notes to the outline. Or, if the outline doesn't exist yet, this is a prompt that maybe it's time to do that outline I've been putting off for so long.
The more I think about it, the more I see that I write by hand, not to make things more difficult on myself, but to enable my natural laziness. It's worked for me, for years. If you sat me down to a computer and said "start writing," I would likely go into a paralytic shock. The keyboard, for me, is a mere tool: utilitarian, but devoid of any soul.
My pens, though, are magic!
You might wonder, from my writer's hideaway post, why I have a composition book and pen resting there on my writing desk, but no computer. In fact, I have no computer down in my writing area at all. And though I will take my tablet with me to stream music, I can't really write on the tablet. Nor would I want to. Truth is, I like to write my short stories and novels by hand, then type them into the computer. In fact, I can't make myself write any other way. Why is that?
First and foremost, I am a kinesthetic and visual learner. I learn with my eyes and my hands. I leer and grope to understand and create. Good thing my writing area is in the basement, away from other humans, huh? Seriously, though, I have to manipulate things with my hands to really get into them. Not that I'm mechanically inclined - I can hardly change the oil on the car. In fact, I don't. But when it comes to understanding something thoroughly, I am at my best when I can get my sight and movement involved. Typing is too mechanical for me. I fidget when I type, and my mind does not readily flow with ideas when I'm stuck at a keyboard. The varied movement of writing with a pen, the feel of the ink flowing from the pen, and the immediacy of seeing handwriting, my handwriting, brings me more fully into the setting and my character's head. Maybe it's the electrical fields in a computer that screw with my mojo, I don't know, but I am much more "intimate," I think is the right word, with my fiction when I write by hand.
This also has something to do with pacing. I can write much faster than I type. And it's easier to move a pen across paper to fix a mistake then it is to hit the backspace key twenty times (as I just did while typing this sentence). And, if I wish, I can write more slowly while still moving. Typing slowly feels stilted and un-natural. Writing slowly feels very natural, especially when I am trying to tease the right words out of my brain on the first draft. Of course, this saves me some editorial pain down the road. Maybe handwriting appeals to my lazy side.
I should probably note here that my handwriting is absolutely terrible. You can see some representative, and reprehensible, examples right here. And, really, that's an improvement over how poorly I used to write. As a child, I was constantly given bad marks for my penmanship (or lack thereof). Obviously, I didn't care much about the chiding. But a few years ago, I decided to try to write more clearly. After looking around for good resources, I found that using the Operina script was best for me, and I've been practicing it for the last couple of years. My handwriting isn't beautiful, by any means, but at least now it's legible to others besides myself, doctors, and madmen.
I also like the portability of pen and notebook. I carry these wherever I go. Have you ever seen that guy pulled off the side of the highway taking notes in a composition book? That's me. You never know when the muse is going to strike, and I've had some of my best ideas and solved some of my stickiest character and plot problems at the weirdest of times. Rather than trust that I'll remember things, I write them down. And you can't do that quickly with an electronic device. Not as quickly as you can with pen and paper.
Finally, there's the benefit of the space of the page. That is, when you write with pen on paper, you are inevitably going to leave some white space out on the margins, at the head of the page, and, likely, at least one line at the bottom. I've found that these are marvelous places to collect ideas when my thoughts go racing ahead of me, as they often do. For example, I'm working on chapter 3 of the novel and I have a realization about a character or a situation that can't go into chapter 3. So I make notes at the top of the page, away from the main text, then circle and star the notes with a big star that gets my attention later. Then, if I've done an outline of upcoming chapters (which I usually don't do until I am at the point that I guess is about halfway done), I can add those notes to the outline. Or, if the outline doesn't exist yet, this is a prompt that maybe it's time to do that outline I've been putting off for so long.
The more I think about it, the more I see that I write by hand, not to make things more difficult on myself, but to enable my natural laziness. It's worked for me, for years. If you sat me down to a computer and said "start writing," I would likely go into a paralytic shock. The keyboard, for me, is a mere tool: utilitarian, but devoid of any soul.
My pens, though, are magic!
________________________
If you like my writing and want to help out, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!
Saturday, May 3, 2014
. . . And Back Again
Since some curious citizens have been asking about the jacket in my latest author photo for Heraclix & Pomp, I am posting a shot of the back of my jacket. Yes, I sewed all of the patches on myself. You couldn't tell by the shoddy stitching?
When I was a teenager, I had a denim jacket (two, actually) riven with patches. Of course, those were patches for Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Motorhead, and the like. Whereas I used to rock, now I geek.
Cthulhu and killer robot . . . what's not to like?
And to prove I'm not lying about my teenage years, that's me in the extreme upper left part of the photo, almost cut in half, senior year . . . this one had a Motorhead and Venom patch on the front, both of which you can barely make out. As you can see, I was at the top of my class . . . bwahahahaha!!! Yeah, right.
When I was a teenager, I had a denim jacket (two, actually) riven with patches. Of course, those were patches for Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Motorhead, and the like. Whereas I used to rock, now I geek.
And to prove I'm not lying about my teenage years, that's me in the extreme upper left part of the photo, almost cut in half, senior year . . . this one had a Motorhead and Venom patch on the front, both of which you can barely make out. As you can see, I was at the top of my class . . . bwahahahaha!!! Yeah, right.
Friday, May 2, 2014
The Newest Me
Just sent this new, slightly-more-entertaining-than-the-old-one bio and new, I-look-slightly-older-than-my-last-author-photo picture to my publisher and thought I'd share. Sorry, but you'll have to wait for the book to come out before you see my dedication and acknowledgements!
Bio:
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Bio:
Forrest Aguirre was born in Wiesbaden,
Germany, the son of an Air Force Sergeant. After living in five
different countries and roaming the world like a gypsy, he finally
settled in Madison, Wisconsin with his wife and four children. He
holds a bachelor's degree in Humanities from BYU and a Master's in
African History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His short
fiction has appeared in over fifty venues and his editorial work has
been recognized with a World Fantasy Award. He is best bribed with
very expensive dark chocolate, herbal tea, role playing games, books,
swords, early modern silver coins, Badgers regalia, and canoes.
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PS: Can you spot the H.P. Lovecraft in this picture?
________________________
If you like my writing and want to help my creative endeavors, ko-fi me at https://ko-fi.com/forrestaguirre. Every little bit is seen and appreciated! Thank you!