Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Hey folks, got any questions for Thaisa?  Please pipe up.  (Off-WELL
readers, please return to the inkwell home page and click on the Ask
or Comment link.)

Meanwhile, here's a passage from "The Short and Unhappy Life of HAL the 
Computer," also from _Sleeping in Velvet_.  It's really about a computer 
named Martha, mother of the computer from "2001":

 One evening Martha joined an on-line conference where people were
 discussing a sado-masochistic wedding.  The groom was dragged to the
 wedding in a body bag, and beaten into submission until he said I do.  
 A man who called himself halcyon wrote:  "I'm reading this with detached
 curious interest."--and something in his tone made Martha sure she'd 
 found her son.  "HAL?" she posted in the topic.  "Is that you?"  "For
 Godssake," someone wrote.  "Take it to e-mail.  This is topic drift."
 Martha left the conference and never wrote to halcyon.  She was
 programmed to be a woman of the Forties and it hurt her feelings to
 be accused of drift.
  

    
Not to ask a leading question or anything, but in what other ways has
the WELL in particular, and cyberspace in general, influenced your
writing?
  

    
I liked that strange HAL story when you read it aloud at Clean Well-Lighted
Place for Books some time ago.  Very different than my impressions of online
experience, but strangely familiar too. Alternate halucinations are always
of interest.

While I haven't read your book on Voice, having read your posts on the WELL
over the years has always taught me something about voice.  I remember a
third-person narrative line you threaded through first-person soap-boxy
statements one time, vividly contrasting with the dominant style of the
conversation.  To me, that was eye-opening, a reminder that different
posters imagine different audiences for their words, and perceive the shared
"place" differently.

That's not a question, I'm sort of waiting for the answer to Steve's
question.  But I guess I think whether or not cyberspace changed you,
Thaisa, you changed your corner of cyberspace.
  

    

  Gee, Gail.  I wish I remembered that post. Was it something strange in
  the writers conf?  (Of course I do that all the time in my head, that
  running third-person narrative!)

  In any case, many thank yous, Gail and Jennifer.

  HAL is part of a trilogy called Tales from Cyberspace, and the only
  reason I wrote it is that one day Howard Rheingold said, "Why don't
  you write some stories about cyberspace?" He was editing something or
  other, and I wrote them right away, but decided I didn't like them.
  Then, when I was working furiously at this deadline, I found them in
  my computer and decided to use them.
  

    

  I think that cyberspace is postmodern magical realism. Everyone is
  in their own personal space-time-scheme vehicles equipped with any
  number of masks. It is like an etheric masked ball. Your post hangs
  in a kind of timeless-present, and at some point some other time-
  traveler answers it.  And the WELL is like a mansion where hundreds
  of parties are going on and you can walk into any one of them and
  find cartoon balloon dialogue of all the conversations.

  No wonder people are less interested in getting stoned.

  So did cyberspace influence me?  I don't know.  I think it fit right
  into my sensibilities, because it has a whiff of the supernatural,
  the miraculous, the surreal.

  What I have loved about doing the writers conference is imagining
  this group of people who are completely invisible as a real group
  and listening to them.  It's like Paris in the 20s for people
  trapped in the 90s.
  

    

   It's fairly common for me to write something, decide I don't like it,
   and stash it away without showing it to anybody, only to find it
   later and see that it works. So I'm sorry I never showed those
   stories to Howard, who was, after all, the inspiration.  The great
   thing about cyberspace, is that you can't hesitate, or have second-
   thoughts.  And in this way, I'm sure it increased my sense of
   authority as a writer--but then almost everybody I've talked to on
   the WELL has said that cyberspace has helped them have a voice.
  

    

True for other writers reading this now, I wonder?
  

    

 Yes, I had wondered that, too--did writing in cyberspace, especially
 on the WELL, give you a stronger sense of your voice?
  

    
I think posting on the WELL may have increased the level of confidence
I have in using my natural voice, yes.

Speaking of cyberspace, will you tell us a little about your novel,
Thaisa?
  

    

 Very soon, Steve. I am going off to the Museum of Modern Art to
 see an exhibition of all the surrealist gurl artists. It will
 be interesting to see if any of them are actually magical realists!
  

    

And speaking of novels, can you talk about what the experience of
writing longer fiction has been like for you?
  

    <scribbled by thaisa Sun 17 Jan 99 16:25>
  

    

 Too many typos, even for me in the above!

   By the way...I have to say that the show of women surrealists at the
   MOMA disappointed me.  Surrealism at its worst is when you simply
   gape at the image, and don't  see how the image acts on its environment.
   Oddly, Lenore Carrington, one of the Latin American surealist writers,
   also painted.  Her pictures were in it, and I think they were among
   the best. One was called  Let's Meet the Minataur's Daughter.  It
   had real wit.

   About longer work. Well I hope I can answer that question quickly,
   Ron (!).  I know you're working on a novel. And I've just read
   a wonderful novel Steve has written.

  What comes to mind most readily is that I think that the novel demands
  a different treatment of time.

   I would be curious what some veteran short stories writers think about
  what I'm going to say.  But for me the short story involves an epiphanic
  sense of time, in that it captures a moment, or moments. In general, this
  is the way I experience human life in time. I know that cause-and-effect
  has its place and all that--but moments, and illuminating moments, are
  what speak to me.

  But when I wrote my novel, I found myself immersed in a very different
  sense of time. I had to think of the billiard-ball effect, so that what
  happened in chapter 1 influenced chapter 2 influenced chapter 3, etc.
  The novel itself felt like a puzzle to me.
  

    

  I also never understood writers when they said that they forget parts of
  their own novels, but I also forgot parts and would find myself
  wishing I had a cross-referencing dictionary for it.

  It would be great to hear from some other people about their sense of
  the difference between the novel and the short story.  Meanwhile,
  I'll think about exactly what to tell you about my novel. (The 'what"
  of it, instead of the "how" of it.)
  

    

I find that I do forget minor traits of some characters, so that I have
the protagonist coming home to watch TV too many times, or change the
length of a minor character's hair when he disappears for three chapters.
I usually leave these standing as I put the initial burst of energy on
paper, then revise later on, when larger chunks of the structure are done.
  

    
I forget what happens in my novels.  It's very strange.  I generally don't
read what I've written until I've finished a draft and then let it sit
for a while, and I often remember struggling to resolve some plot problem,
but I don't remember how I resolved it.  So when I read it, I often find
plot twists that surprise me.  I wrote that?  Oh.

I try to write little plot synopses of each chatper, and to update them 
as I revise, so at least I have a clue as to what happens where, and 
whether it happens at all.

I haven't written enough short stories to have a sensible opinion on
how writing novels is different, but your take sounds right, Thaisa.
  

    
Of course I forget parts of my novel, and discover them later. It's like 
having enough land that you can ride a horse over it and occasionally be 
surprised by what you see. 

I understand what you say about the sense of time being different in a 
novel - certainly most novels are that way, Thaisa. But my own novel, for 
me, feels like an inter-knit series of epiphanic moments, entwined into 
tapestries that become the larger plots. I guess the difference for me is 
that, if the novel has any juice, it does not flow from 
the larger plot so much as from the individual moments. Does that make 
sense to you.
  

    

  Yes, it's easy to forgot the minor traits of characters.
  And impressive, Steve, that you write a synopses.
  Maybe someday someone will devise a Novel Memory Program that gives
  you a hologram of your novel.

  Joe, I do know what you mean, and it sounds enviable.  It makes sense, and
  it also makes sense that you would write that kind of novel, since you
  have written poetry. (How many people know that Joe Flower was one of
  the original founders of _Poetry Flash_? Well, he was.)

  For me, the short story unravels from the inside, like one of those
  Japanese flowers you put in water.  But the novel also has an external
  sense of motion, and I found this challenging.  Your novel, Joe,
  almost sounds as though it worked like a series of stories, even though
  it may not have been a novel-in-stories.

  A bit more about my novel tomorrow.
  

    

What Joe described to me sounded very much like Dos Passos' "USA,"
full of epiphanic moments, some of which have narrative continuity
and all of which have a thematic overarching vision.
  

    
From within the writing process, I keep looking out at the =other= kind of
writer, the one who writes totally from the moment forward. For me, that
looks deadly, almost guaranteeing runaway loose-endism at every progressive
stage (or maybe that shouldn't be 'progressive stage,' but organic stage). I
was just as worried about the way I was proceeding, until I found this by
Iris Murdoch:

'I think it is important to make a detailed plan before you write the first
sentence. Some people think one should write--"George woke up and knew that
something terrible had happpened yesterday"--and then see what happens. I
plan the whole thing in detail before I begin. I have a general scheme and
lots of notes. Every chapter is planned. Every conversation is planned. This
is, of course, a primary stage, and very frightening because you've
committeed yourself at this point. I mean, a novel is a long job, andif you
get it wrong at the start you're going to be very unhappy later on. The
second stage is that one should sit quietly and let the thing invent itself.
One piece of imagination leads to another. YOu think about a certain
situation and then some quite extraordinary aspect of it suddenly appears.
The deep things that the work is about declare themselves and connect.
Somehow things fly together and generate other things, and characters invent
other characters, as if they were all doing it themselves. One should be
patient and extend this period as far as possible. Of course, actually
writing it involves a different kind of imagination and work.'

The most amazing thing to me is that she seems to be right. I had worked
hard (and long--a couple of years) on the first part. Now, as I am slowly
moving into the next part, writing the first draft, the deep things that the
work is about are indeed declaring themselves and connecting, so that I find
myself both writing a narrative and seeing ideas coalesce into expansions,
changes, nuances in parts of the outlined whole that are, in narrative
sense, hundreds of pages beyond where I am plodding along.

That, and the comfort of Hemingway ("The first draft of anything is shit.")
have been helping me make progress with only a fraction of the agony I had
before this particular ephiphany happened.
  

    
There are billions of ways to write. The correct way is the one that 
works for you. I did in fact write the first draft of mine just the way 
you described. I started with a first line, "There is a town out on the 
coast . . ." and wrote from there forward.

The first draft was a mess. I outlined it in place, took it all apart, 
re-arranged it, pulled one major character apart in two, mushed two other 
characters together to becomne one, invented plots and subplots. Then I 
wrote a very complex outline in a "matrix" format. This is why God 
invented computers, trust me.

Then I rewrote the whole thing to the matrix. And it works far better 
than it did before.
  

    
My novel has stories of a number of lengths embedded within it. There is 
an overarching plot of political intrigue taking place over a period of 
about six weeks leading up to an election. There are several other major 
stories that take up ten to fifty pages each as different characters go 
through self-discovery or whatever. The smallest stories are some of the 
original "19 Lines" stories that I wrote here on the Well. The longest 
one, the political story is, by design, the one with the least emotional 
impact. It is the playing field for the characters.
  

    
I thought Thaisa was going to tell us about *her* novel.  Also, I'm
wondering whether your approach to teaching writing has changed at all
as a result of your having gone through the process of writing a novel.
  

    

  Well...I asked Joe.  What he said reminded me that I started with a title,
  got a character, and wrote a whole first draft before I thought: "Oh!
  I forgot to put in a plot!"

  Like those T shirt that say, "I forgot to have children."

  (Fortunately I remembered that.)

  Maybe I should have used some things from 19 lines.


  It's funny--I often think I know what I am going to be doing because I am
  asked to teach it.  So I was asked to teach the novel at the University
  of San Francisco before I wrote one.  I suppose the only thing that's
  changed is that I have a developed a better vocabulary for talking about
  a novel, because I understand that in most novels the chapters have to
  imply each other like billiard balls and the plot must flow from the
  motivations of the characters.


  I also think that suspense--or what I would rather call uncertainty--
  has a much more important role in novels than in short stories. When I
  was teaching a course in the novel for UC Santa Cruz, it suddenly hit
  me that all you need to do to create suspense in a novel is to create
  something with an uncertain outcome that matters to a character--and
  the reader thinks, or hopes, it will be resolved in the novel.
  

    <scribbled by thaisa Mon 18 Jan 99 22:52>