The Little Skiier Who Could--A Tale Perseverance and Perspiration

Long ago, when mullets were still kind of cool, my friend Rachel and I went through four years of high school gym classes together. Despite having an aversion to the whole experience, I do recall at least being in shape and, for that matter, being in better shape than Rachel.

Oh, how times have changed.

Last Sunday, Rachel and I went cross-country skiing up Cypress Mountain. After getting our tickets, Rachel pushed off on her skis with the confidence and grace of speed skater, regularly stopping to wait for me as I puffed and huffed slowly up the hill behind her.

Along the way, other skiers passed me like Ferraris on the autobahn. Finally, mercifully, we reached the top of the first hill, where I swung back some desperately needed water, and caught my breath.

“Are you okay, dear?” asked a concerned septuagenarian in a jaunty snowsuit.

“I’m fine,” I said. And then to Rachel, “Do I look like I’m about to die or something?”

“Well,” she said, “you do look a bit flushed.”

Knowing this meant I looked like an overripe tomato, I pushed on, and had a great time, until we got to this particularly long and steep hill.

Rachel trekked ahead of me like a penguin returning to the birthing grounds, while I floundered like a flamingo on rollerskates. Eventually, I opted to just incrementally sidestep up the mountain.

About halfway up the hill, this line from one of Frisbee’s books popped in my head. “I think, I think I can, I think I can, I know I can, I know I can.”

And it was true. It took me forever, and I probably looked foolish doing it, but eventually (and not without help from Rachel who traded skiis with me) I got to the top, and then it was mostly downhill from there.

These last couple of weeks, I’ve been despairing about writing. Worried that I’ll never get anything done. That nothing I write will actually add up to anything more than a random collection of scenes and musings. But experiences like this remind me that, as long as I keep at it, and stop measuring myself against all the other writers I know, I will get there…eventually.

Missing—Quotation Marks, Reward if Found

Every year in the spring, coyotes come down from the nearby mountains and cats in my neighborhood begin to disappear.

Recently I’ve noticed that quotations marks in American literature are suffering a similar fate. The situation is getting so bad I’m considering putting up missing posters on telephone poles and at the library.

Miranda July doesn’t use quotation marks. Cormack McCarthy doesn’t use ’em. And Robert Coover didn’t use ’em in his story “White Bread Jesus” in last month’s Harper’s.

I fear soon nobody will use them; that quotation marks (also know as “quotes” or “double quotes”) will go the way of the trema (the two dots used above a vowel to indicate an extra syllable, as in “coöperate”) and the en-dash (once used to indicate equality among words used to form a compound adjective, as in “the Franco–Prussian war”).

I can live without tremas and en-dashes, but I can’t bear the thought of the typographic menagerie lacking quotation marks.

Sure, I get it: a page free of quotation marks is easy on the eye. Without any of those distracting, dimple-like quotes grinning out at you everywhere, the page looks and feels uncluttered.

And I can’t help but admire a writer who is so totally confident in his characters’ voices that, with help only from line breaks, periods, and the occasional speech tag, he feels his readers will be able to easily distinguish dialogue from exposition—even when the dialogue appears mid-paragraph.

But despite these things, I think the stylistic decision not to use quotations marks is risky—particularly if you’re dealing with lazy readers like me. In Coover’s piece (you can read the first paragraph here), it wasn’t until after I’d read a few paragraphs that I was able to understand what was going on in the first paragraph, at which point I had to go back and reread it to really appreciate the story.

While it could be argued that this was a deliberate decision on Coover’s part—the protagonist is having a mental and spiritual breakdown and the style reflects his confusion—it didn’t work for me.

If Coover had just sprinkled his text with a few extra little pieces of punctuation, then the characters immediately would have become more clear and the writing more enjoyable.

William Zinsser, the guru of style, has a lot of great things to say about writing. One of them is, “Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.”

Quotation marks—as easy-to-follow indicators of speech—achieve all of these things. I hate to think they might get devoured.

Your Best Character Might Be An Atheist Who Loves Sarah Palin, Hates Fidel Castro, and Smokes Cuban Cigars

Yesterday a friend and I started a dispute over the response of Westerners to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. I say started a dispute, because I know it’s not over yet. In fact, this could be one of those topics that will haunt our friendship for years to come.

Etiquette dictates that if you want to remain friends with somebody, you should never discuss religion or politics with them. Over the fifteen years Chris and I have been friends, we’ve discussed religion and politics a number of times, and have rarely agreed on anything.

It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about global warming, the existence of God, or whether Barack Obama will make an effective leader—the likelihood of us having the same feelings (he would prefer the word “thoughts”) on the matter are about 1 in 567,832,486. (Having taken statistics, he would also point out that the likelihood is actually more like 1 in 7, down from about 1 in 10).

Whatever.

The point is, the ability for us to remain friends despite disagreeing on important matters, is one of the things I value the most in our friendship.

(It also helps that he’s not a rabid ideologue who is unwilling to consider other people’s points of view. And that he’s intelligent, thoughtful, loyal, considerate, funny, and a number of other things that make him fun to be around).

What does this have to do with writing?

Everything.

In my opinion, the best fiction does what journalism so often fails to do: it presents the perspective of characters we might normally find disagreeable, even dislikeable, and makes us understand their motivations.

Some of the most iconic characters in literature—Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff, E. Annie Proulx’s Quoyle, or even Batman—are characters who in real life we likely wouldn’t choose to be friends with. And yet, even if they are murderous, psychopathic, cowardly, or wounded, we come to empathize with them.

I don’t want to read—or write—books with characters who are just like me (only way better than I could ever be) because that would get really boring, really fast. For similar reasons, I don’t want all my friends to agree with me on everything all the time, because that too would get boring after a while.

The best fiction makes us stretch: often, so do the best friendships.

New Year’s Resolution: Be Less Ambitious

In my first post I talked about how I had a list of twelve things I wanted to accomplish in 2008, and how by April it was becoming clear that most of them just weren’t going to happen, and how by September they just seemed laughable. As in, “Ha, ha, ha, I thought I’d achieve that? Ha, ha, ha…that’s rich.”

So this year, I’ve decided to be less ambitious. I have a list resolutions but I’ve decided to aim lower. So instead of the mighty 2008 goal of “Finish first draft of novel by March” (which nine months later I still haven’t done), I’m lowering the bar I set for myself. Significantly.

My writing goal for this year? Write three-sentences a day.

That’s it.

It’s actually something I’ve been doing almost every day since September. And it works really well for me, because if three-sentences is all I manage on a given day I don’t beat myself up too badly over it—the way I most certainly would if I set myself a loftier daily goal of, say, three pages a day, and then only wrote a paragraph.

When you’re trying to work and parent and still have a life, three sentences a day is manageable.

And one of the great things about sentences is that they’re cumulative. Even if you only ever wrote three sentences a day, they would still slowly add up, forming paragraphs and scenes and short stories and, before you knew it, a short-story collection or a novel.

But the best thing about the three-sentences-a-day rule is that sitting down to write three sentences tends to lead to writing more than just three sentences a day. Like this blog posting: I’ve accomplished five days of writing in fifteen minutes…and suddenly I feel like a successful overachiever.

You should try it.