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Tag: Lev Grossman

Perspective

Novelty

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https://bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com/2014/07/10/this-summer-take-a-seat-on-the-mrs-dalloway-bench/
http://booksabouttown.org.uk/?action=ViewBench&Id=19

Novelty is one of the main drivers that keeps me going.  One of the challenges of 2020 is that with a global pandemic afoot, folks have not been able to venture outside and follow their usual routines.  The sustained and prolonged inability to go to an office workplace, interact with colleagues, and just have a change of scenery and pace has been enormously unhealthy.  I consider human beings as generalized differential engines.  We understand everything only as a series of contrasts.  As Huxley wrote years ago in Brave New World:  “There is no black without white and no night without day.”  This is actually one reason I started this personal daily writing project back in August– it is a salubrious way of marking time.  Every day, I write on a new subject which forces my mind to stretch itself in new directions, toward new horizons.  The human brain like any other muscle in your body:  If unused for long periods of time, the brain will atrophy and devolve into grey mush.

Additionally, novelty is a motivation all its own when it comes to the creative arts.  During his session this past Saturday at Muskogee, Lev Grossman was asked, “What makes a good story?” His answer really stuck with me as he cited a scene from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925).  Woolf wrote about a high-society woman (Dalloway) on the bench and even after the woman went to sleep, Woolf just kept on writing the scene. Grossman said he’d never seen writing like that and it just absolutely blew his mind.

This idea, “Do what has not already been done before.” is another reason I write and code.  I enjoy thinking up projects that I’ve never seen before but feel should exist.  This ability to take a figment of one’s imagination and reify it into the material world is essentially magic.  For me at least, the act of creation is what it means to be alive. As long as we are continuously growing, always learning something new, and following our interests and curiosities wherever they may lead us, then there is always a reason to live. The world is too big and our puny human lives are too short to waste any more time than we already do.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
Appreciation / Reflection

Lev Grossman: A Beacon of Light and Hope for Aspiring Writers Everywhere

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Lev Grossman is one of my favorite writers.  I don’t remember exactly where I’d read it (it may have been on his blog?), but Grossman once recommended a way of writing long-form fiction that has really stuck with me:  Create two new Word documents.  In the first document, list all of the mechanical events that you want/need to happen in your story.  For example:  Alice meets Bob, Alice wins the World Cup, Bob’s dog dies, etc.  And then in the second Word document, list all of the feelings that you wish for your reader to experience when reading your story.  For example, a feeling may be “grief and loss” or “victory and triumph.”  After you have finished both Word documents, now see how many events you can pair from Document A with feelings from Document B.  Eg. “Alice wins the World Cup” could be paired with “victory and triumph” and “Bob’s dog dies” could be paired with “grief and loss.”  Also, multiple feelings can be associated with the same event.  It’s a fun and informative exercise which also then serves as a good kinda roadmap for your long-fiction writing!

Grossman also occupies a special place in my brain because he is one of the few authors I have actually ever met in person.  I have two signed books!  The first was when I met him in 2011 at the Barnes & Noble on 86th and Broadway when he was promoting The Magician King (at that signing, a fan had asked, “Mr. Grossman– did you ever think about titling TMK another name?  To which LG had replied:  “Well, I actually felt like calling it, The Magician Queen.  But that was only after seeing an advert for TMK in the Times.”)  The second was at the Brooklyn Historical Society in 2015 when he once did an event.  I still vividly remember these two encounters.  When I’d met him at B&N, I’d asked what advice he had for an aspiring writer.  And his response was:  “Read as much as you humanly can.  Always be reading.” and “Never, never, ever give up.”  He mentioned that it took him 17 years of writing other stuff before he finally wrote The Magicians at the age of 40. (And at the BHS, he signed my tattered copy of Warp!)

Oh!  One more memory:  No signed book at this one, but I also once saw the leverus in Portland at Leakycon in 2013.  I don’t remember the exact details, but for some reason, he (and several other authors) were in heated competition and his task was to extract as many red-colored balls from a source basket full of yellow-colored balls to put into a target basket in 60 seconds.  Haha, until the end of my days, I will always remember the MC (Maureen Johnson, I think?) in the background commentating, “And now here’s Mr. Grossman– demonstrating the Harvard vs Yale technique for colored-ball extraction.”  I’m probably misremembering at least part of that but in the final ten seconds, Grossman just took the source basket and dumped the entirety of its contents into the target basket.  Clever!  All that Ivy League education turned out useful after all!

My final thought on LG appreciation –aside from just the way I love how he writes and speaks (an unholy concoction of “highbrow meets lowbrow” is really the only way I know how to describe it)– is how open he’s been in print and online with his struggles against depression, especially after his divorce from his first marriage.  I just saw him at Muskogee MiniCon this afternoon (go, Thunder! ⚡✊) where he was virtua-touring The Silver Arrow and the man looked, more than anything else, content.  He’s married again now with two smaller children in his new marriage and happily living in Brooklyn.  Good for you, Mr. Grossman, and truly, thank you.  I’m so happy to see you make it to the other side.

“I don’t believe in magic, [but] books are very, very close. They’re the closest thing we have.”

Lev Grossman (August 5, 2014)
Writing

Writing Inspirations – “Product Market Fit”

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I read a lot about other writers.  Specifically, I’m fascinated with people’s different creative processes.  How do people ideate?  How do they develop their ideas?  What are the rituals or sources of inspiration that they use to get the train going?

While there are obviously many different schools of thought on the matter, the approach that seems to work best for me so far is a combination of John Scalzi’s and Lev Grossman’s.

From the Scalzi school, I’ve adopted a very commercial, capitalist approach:  First and foremost– what subject is probabilistically most likely to sell the greatest number of books?  What is the “Product Market Fit?”  Notably, when Scalzi wrote Old Man’s War, he perused the shelves at his local bookshop and identified the genre which appeared to move the most units. Military Sci-Fi was the answer.  As the story goes, Scalzi aspired to be a professional novelist (he was already an accomplished newspaper columnist by that point) and really didn’t possess an allegiance to any particular genre.  More than anything else, he was motivated by how to make the most money possible.  Additionally, then he honestly assessed his own abilities and that intersection of the Venn Diagram was thus the birth of Old Man’s War.

I really enjoy following Scalzi’s blog and writings because this guy is one fecund sob.  Truly, Scalzi’s production is genuinely legendary.  Sure, the quality might not be Lev Grossman-level.  But Grossman only puts out a book once every half-decade or so.  Magician’s Land was published in 2014, already nearly six years ago.  As Scalzi has remarked previously in multiple places, writing to him is a cold-hard vocational trade.  It’s a feature, not a bug, that he deliberately aims for being as mass-commercial-mainstream as possible.  He enjoys raking in the cash!  And possesses not an iota of romanticism about it.  And I think that’s profoundly inspiring.  I too, like Scalzi, hope I can one day make a living from writing fiction.  So I pretty much hang on his every word anytime he says something about the craft/business.

My other huge inspiration is Lev Grossman.  Man, this guy can really write.  I’ve actually had the opportunity to meet Mr. Grossman at various book-signings that he’d hosted in the past.  And what I admire most about him is just the sheer beauty of Grossman’s writing.  Sure, it doesn’t always go somewhere, plot-wise, but the absolute gorgeous prose just can’t be denied.  I once read an Amazon review somewhere that compared Grossman’s writing to “cul-de-sacs” and that analogy is entirely accurate.  Again, it doesn’t always go anywhere, but the words fit together so enchantingly that that alone is worth the admission price.

The Battle

A New Fiction Writing Project Begins!

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So things on the health-front have unfortunately deteriorated recently.  I think Bagel, having been gone for over two months, certainly contributed to that, to some extent.  But of course I don’t blame her at all; I’m glad she’s off doing what she wishes to do.  She’s currently still abroad and having just finished training, she just flew off again, to yet another country, to actually begin her real job.  I’m very excited for her.  We still talk nearly every night over video chat and that certainly helps.  But currently, more than ever, I’ve been gripped by an ever-expanding loneliness, especially when it is late at night and I am alone in the apartment.  During the day, when I’m feeling well enough, I can escape to the library or to cafes and achieve some level of human interaction.  But at night I’m left by my lonesome.  And consequently, I think the illness has unfortunately become worse recently and more debilitating.

To this end, one of my doctors suggested I take on a new hobby to try to organize my time into a more specifically-directed activity.  The thinking is that by taking on a more active hobby, it could possibly help me feel better.  Because of the illness, I’m unable to perform any kind of strenuous physical activity so exercise and sports are out of the question.  And while I’ve always reads lots of books and watched TV shows, these activities are too passive.  So as we shift into a more palliative mode of care, doc suggested I try writing; specifically, writing fiction.  Of course I’ve always journaled.  But the idea now is I would try to marshal whatever mental energies I could summon into weaving together a story.  It’s an interesting thought.  And many decades ago, when I was a child, I’d always dreamed of wanting to become a writer one day.  So hell, why not.  Maybe one day I’ll look back on all this with great amusement; let’s write a story.

To start, before I begin writing in earnest, I think it’s necessary though to establish a tone for what is to come.  A sort of “organizing principle.”  Having read a lot of fiction, I feel all authors possess an “organizing principle” when they write fiction.  JKR writes with a childish whimsy with a firm grasp on worldbuilding.  Lev Grossman writes similarly, but more adult material.  John Scalzi is a shamelessly commercial writer, hugely successful, whose prose centers mostly around quippy dialogue.  So after some thought, I’ve decided that my organizing principle, if it can be called that, will take after what I affectionately refer to as the “Michael Bay/Fast & Furious” model.  Even when there are explosions happening on screen and a $100M-worth of special effects blasting into your eyeballs, I never want the personal and intimate human story to be lost.  It’s a tightwire balancing act of never losing focus on the personal while still acknowledging the sweeping grandiosity of the world writ large.  Because, yeah.  Whenever I write, I do wish for there to be a twinge of spectacle.  Larger than life characters and plots.  Monstrous villains and gallant heroes.  I strongly feel an important component of fiction lies in its ability to give the reader a chance to escape from the mundaneness of the real world, into another more exciting, funnier, adventurous world.  That’s my aim at least.  How well I achieve that humble aim, well, I leave to you, dear reader.