More TK

It’s one of those words that we use as literary types, that I realized last night I wasn’t quite sure what it meant. I always imagined “the arc” as a little rainbow over stories, or some magic conduit to narration. Then lately I started to suspect that arc didn’t mean literally being like a rainbow that starts in one place, goes up, and then coming back to roughly the same place. When we talk about arc, we’re talking about change, so I tried to come up with some other shapes for it.

I learned via Wikipedia that this is terminology borrowed from television, that uses the Aristotlean idea of a tragic fall. So a character finds themselves in a compromised position without the usual structures they rely upon (loses a job, a relationship, a family member) and then finds their way without these structures. Why this is called something that has to do with the curve of a line I’m not sure, but it’s clearly catchy because I often use it without really knowing what it means.

I posted a while back about the hero’s journey, which is another shape of storytelling, where the hero takes off, encounters obstacles, meets a mentor, overcomes the obstacles, and changes in the path of the journey. This might be more a film metaphor as it comes from Joseph Campbell and his work on stories in different cultures and what they have in common.

So what about books and short stories? Those words on a page — black on white — do they have the same formulas that television and films use so well? They must in a way. There’s the fish-out-of-water formula of someone dropped in a place they don’t know and finding their way, which is another way for saying character arc. And more than all that there’s the beginning, middle, and end — as any story has. The plot is what happens. The arc is, from my understanding, how a character changes. Any corrections? Other thoughts? Let me know.

One thing that keeps coming up with my writing coach clients is how long to spend writing. How much time it takes to type out a page or two or three. (What I recommend as daily goals.) And I keep saying that you can get a lot of writing done in 45 minutes a day. In fact, you can do a lot with 20 minutes a day. That it doesn’t have to be a 2-hour block. This doesn’t have to be a daily long-distance run. It can in fact be as I described to a writer/editor friend over lunch the other day a series of sprints.

So I wanted to update the blog. And had five minutes left in my writing section that I’d portioned out for this morning. I decided to take those five minutes and write this lesson quickly. Maybe it comes from journalism, from learning to think best against a deadline, but there’s something to it for me to try and type quicker than I can think. To try and catch that stream of thought and write it down. Of course, it’s not that easy. Even writing this I find that the voice inside my head is always just a word or two ahead of my fingers on the keyboard, that may just be the way we are wired.

And the little bit each day philosophy may have it’s downside. I wonder if the reader will be able to sense the subtle shifts that took place with those increments of writing. But for now, my five minutes is up, and my writing lesson for the post is this: try and just write a little bit a time, don’t worry that you need hours to do it, we write as we read: a page at a time.

There are some unfortunate things that we say so many time we begin to think they may be true. “Those who can’t do teach.” Or “you can’t teach someone to write.”

Well, maybe I hope they’re not true since I am currently teaching journalism and also starting to do some writing coaching. For the journalism class, I had less books that I could pull out of my shelf and say, “here’s what you need.” And there were many things that we did exercises on or I made a handout of that I really thought, no one taught me this stuff. I just learned by doing it. Even though I took classes (and got a master’s). Even though I tried to find books. It was the experience that was my ultimate teacher, and so I tried to get the class doing things as much as possible.

And what a class — veterans, and moms, and people from faraway countries that I’ve never heard of — and we met every Friday for the past 15 Fridays (except the one after Thanksgiving) and something clicked with the whole group, they started to give each other feedback, and teach one another, and when we had a guest speaker last week one cut me off because he had a question. That’s a journalist.

But did I teach them to write? Probably not. I taught about journalism. I asked them to interview strangers and each other. We read critically. And once in a while I went up to the board and tried to show things like “subject + direct verb + object = active sentence.” And they dutifully took notes.

But really I do think there is a lot that can be taught about writing. Maybe not finding your own voice. Or what words to put down when you meet the page, probably by yourself. Still, there are things people have told me that I tell my clients, and somewhere in there someone is learning about writing. Maybe just when they teach themselves again when they go back to their workbench. Even that is something Louis Jones told me at Squaw Valley this last summer, something I learned.

So a few tips:

- It helps to keep a calendar and star off the days that you’ve written.

- You want to write everyday. If you make a date, the muse will follow.

- Five out of seven days starred is OK.

- The border of what you know is fertile territory. People say write what you know, but sometimes writing about what you’re trying to figure out can be powerful. So you know your family. But maybe you’re not sure about your father’s story and so you start asking some questions, or making up a fictional side world, and this mining of ambiguity can lead to good material. (Note: not sure about phrase mining ambiguity.)

Looking over my shelf of writing books, and thinking back on all the people who have in one way or another been writing teachers to me, I do think you can learn to write. Or at least learn how to teach yourself. And if you need a coach? Hit me up.

I’m working on a final photo project for this class I’m teaching at the Academy of Art and I’ve been going back to the Haight and taking photos. The concept was to take pictures of things that were the same as when I grew up there in the late 1970s and 198os, but after the first day wandering back around my old neighborhood (now called Nopa), I didn’t find all that much. I heard once that most of your cells regenerate every seven-ten years, and you’re essentially a new person. (NYT has something on it. I’m not saying it’s true. I’m saying it’s an idea.) So if I don’t have many cells that are the same as when I was there, how can I expect the place to stay the same? Of course there’s been new layers of paint and new people and different kinds of stores.

And this bothers me less than it used to. Maybe because I feel much less “of” there than I used to as well. It used to be that I’d see a store closed or a new building go up, and feel like the neighborhood was betraying itself. A fancy car in the same garage that the old African American man used to sit and tinker with his old Chevy? Blasphemy. Condos where the abandoned wear house that once had the Hells Angels bike gang living there. What’s happening? Now these changes are several layers of paint below the current changes. That’s already happened. There’s probably someone who grew up there in the  late 1980s and 1990s now going back and feeling betrayed by a whole other set of things.

Cities change.

But in a neighborhood like the Haight, where the reputation was formed so many years ago, one things stays the same and that’s the communal nostalgia, and the marketing of it. (That sentence felt kind of academic. I’m also teaching a journalism class at the Academy and have been reading more academic writing, and hope I can keep it out of my writing. We’ll see.) Anyways, what I noticed that really stayed the same were things that happened before I ever lived there. A certain shrine to these things. Janis Joplin screaming in black and white on a poster in a window, just below where the sterling silver rings are selling — that’s the same as when I was an adolescent. And this stuff caters to rebellious teens in a way. That’s another thing that doesn’t seem to change.

How the pretty, young, drugged out girl somehow adds to the mystique of the place. Standing in front of the Red Victorian Movie House, that’s just closed down and has a sign in the window thanking the city for 31 years of good times, the girl looks lost, but somehow pretty while lost, as the fading light catches her almost vagrant style — a beanie colored hat, layers of clothes — while she gives a sad look to another good looking possibly homeless guy who has long brown hair and keeps talking about how the second deal didn’t go down. This seems familiar.

And since I was there this time to take pictures (and I really hope to figure out how to post pictures on this blog), another thing that’s the same is how the light hits things. That’s got to be the most similar. The church turning different colors of orange-pink as the sun sets, the streets seeming orange from a top the hill on Frederick Street looking West where the sun is setting over the ocean. Yes, that was something I hadn’t remembered, something better than memory, how you can see the ocean from the top of that hill.

I’m not sure how many blogs I can post about starting writing (feels great!) and then pausing writing (you see I’m in transition) and then worrying about pausing writing (uhhh) and then planning to get back to it (I think I can) and then starting again. Rinse and repeat. It’s getting old. And in getting old, it’s made me think about not putting things on hold.

I’ve been thinking about this in other aspects of my life as well. There’s always an excuse for some things, such as not — OK, I just engaged in some mild level ironic behavior. I wondered if I should write about dating on this blog, thought about my audience (which I know for sure only includes one friend who likely doesn’t want to read about my dating), then looked at my nails, noticed that I had a broken nail that really needed to be cut, went to the bathroom and cut it, wondered if I should actually also take my nail polish off and then thought back to the point of this blog: not putting things on hold, and laughed a little inside my head.

What I have to remind myself at these times is that even though some voice inside me said I shouldn’t type with a broken nail, the moment that I stop something, I’m really saying whatever I am going to do is more important than what I’ve done. So the nail, which could have waited, is more important than the blog. And really I wanted a little time to think what direction the blog might go in, and so I walked away, and that can be helpful, sometimes, but the danger, the danger is that time passes without my taking the reins. That things don’t get done. (Besides my nails obviously.) That I trip myself up with these excuses, and spend too much time on hold.

So what am I going to do about it? Do! Not say. I’m going to sit down tonight as I do my “review” and go through the loose ends of my life, and I’m going to set some new writing goals. Some specific goals. I’d like to go to the Squaw Valley Writers Conference this year (I think in August), and I should have something presentable on the book by then, there’s probably a deadline to apply to put on my calendar, and some money to be budgeted away for the fee. And in this admin work, I want to see where it is I want to get this year, and break down where I want to get next month, and then make the time everyday. Yes, every day. At least I can say I started with a little writing today. That we’re rolling.

I’d hoped that the numbers I heard at a club on Friday night weren’t right, but today I saw in the Washington Post that they expect the death toll in Japan to reach more than 10,000. That the island has had hundreds of aftershocks and that supplies are running out.

There aren’t really appropriate words that I can think of for this kind of disaster, as I sit across the ocean near another fault line. Nicholas Kristof had a piece in the New York Times yesterday about “Sympathy for Japan and Admiration” that hit on something important — the idea of ganbatte. I lived in Japan at the end of the last century (1999) for six months, and heard ganbatte almost as much as I heard the phrase gaijin desu (or “there’s a foreigner”).

It means persevering, keeping on keeping on, toughing it out, and it’s central to the language and the experience of the Japanese.

It’s hard to write anything in this blog that doesn’t seem trivial in comparison to the walls of waves and nuclear plants threatening meltdown and dark days to come to that tough island. So I’ll leave you with where I’m going, the link to donate to the Red Cross effort through iTunes. And ganbatte kudasai.

I don’t have a topic for this blog. Sometimes, when I’ve been writing them each week, I’ll be thinking about something throughout the week and it will bubble up to a post. But today, this afternoon, I have more fragments of things going through my head, and this past week, I thought mostly about work, and then how to relax after finally putting out the last magazine.

So at Sunday at 12:15 p.m. in my life I have a space heater going in my apartment and my Medill/Northwestern sweatpants on and sleep in my eyes since I thought I should sleep in because of this phantom cold I keep thinking I might be getting. I woke up happy thinking about my old friend who is in town and a rambling conversation we had last night that spanned middle and high school (where we went together), her 11-year marriage, my 34-year singleness, kids, love, life, the kind of conversation you have with someone who has known you for more than twenty years.

The free form is hitting some walls in my head, maybe because I haven’t been feeling all that free form lately. I’ve been feeling like I need to add structure back to my writing life — pick a time and show up at the computer everyday at that time, get a spreadsheet going of every writing project I have, get a plan planned out for continuing with the book. (“You’ve got to get it out there,” my old friend said last night.) So I’m feeling almost more administrative than creative, although yesterday when I pulled out a short story I’ve been working on, and read it again, and started to make some notes in the margin, I felt that I visited that space again, that calm space that I imagine resides inside me, somewhere near my heart, somewhere where my head goes a little further back and finds that narrative voice (or that narrative silence) to try and divine what this story is really trying to say. It was like visiting a favorite spot. I need to come back here more often I thought.

I’ve been thinking about rejection lately. Rejection and the writer’s life. Rejection and everyone’s life. I’ve gone through different aspects of rejection in my mind looking for the personal acceptance that comes at the end. I once heard that they call salespeople “happy losers” because they deal with rejection so much and can be motivated by it. It was some sort of business article that said the thing to say to salespeople to motivate them was to announce after X amount of “nos” they made their way to a “yes.” My editor friend who pointed this out asked what this meant about writers, who also deal with rejection, and we laughed that they can be called “unhappy losers.”

So my stories got rejected by the literary journal I last sent them to, if you’re curious. And I’ve had some other unnamed events in my life that made me think of personal rejections as well.

So, as I do, I got on the Internet and started googling it. I found that men are supposed to be better at rejection than women because they’re trained in it. They approach women more. As a result, they get more heads shook at them. And they learn to keep going, to see it as the other person’s loss, to realize that everything doesn’t necessarily fit together and that speaks to both parties. So if the literary journal doesn’t want my stories, I should think back to the fact that I never found a story in the journal that particularly spoke to me. That we weren’t simpatico.

And that later, later it hopefully all makes sense. Like when I lost a job and then found a much better one. That they key is to keep going, to keep submitting, to keep smiling at strangers. To know that you hear “no” more than “yes” in some of these pursuits, and rejection is just part of dancing with the world.

So, Monday is now a Sunday since it’s a long MLK weekend, and I found myself lying in a bit, wondering what I wanted to do first thing, and missing the sleep-still-in-my-eyes, groggy, waking up and typing feeling. Missing it like a static in the background. Something I’ve tried to drown out lately, but is there all the time. (Specifically I’m thinking of the static playing from my cheap Sony travel speakers that have been not been doing that well lately, and buzz annoyingly. They want to play music. That’s what they’re there for. But kept in an in-between space, the static means that there’s no music but no silence. Or maybe it means I need new speakers.)

Either way, it’s time to get back to writing. I started a new job about two months ago, and in all the shopping for work clothes and figuring out the hours and personalities and way things work, I put down my writing projects. I told myself I didn’t want to have unrealistic demands. I didn’t want to do too much. And now I think that time is up. Now I need to start typing away for myself again.

Not sure that this blog is winding to saying much at all. Except that I wanted to wake up late-ish on Monday and write. Except that I want to pick up where I left off. I’m back.

The one thing that I thought of while on my pillow wondering about resuming blogging was the idea that a log is what a ship keeps (kept?) to show where it’s been, to mark the levels of the water and the speeds and make calculations later. So I wanted to make another mark. Time to pick up some speed.

Yes, it’s been a long time since I’ve updated this blog. The thing is that after the hacking, I wasn’t really sure about it. And truth be told, I’m still not. I mean when it goes bad with these kinds of things, suddenly you’re spamming the world with random things like sheet music and down-loadable maps, and the hosting company (addr.com = bad) won’t answer your calls and emails, and there’s this sense that your very identity has been taken on a joy ride.

So, from what I can tell, the hack happened because of wordpress. I’d been using addr.com — a bad Web hosting company — and wasn’t able (or knew how) to keep my wordpress files up to date. So there are malicious coders out there that know how to exploit old wordpress accounts, and found mine somehow, cracked the password likely using a robot-style algorithm that goes through all possible password combos, and then got into my domain name through wordpress and used it to send out weird downloads with my extra bandwidth. If you can’t tell, I’m sort of hanging on to understand a few of these concepts: namely algorithm and who the hell wants to hijack other people’s personal Web sites.

I called a friend who is a computer whiz who told me to switch Web hosting companies and suggested hostgator. I tried to cancel with addr.com, they didn’t respond, I wrote the Better Business Bureau, they responded to give me just enough info to successfully make the switch, hostgator reinstalled wordpress, I made a note to myself to update it every month, and after much hand-wringing, malaikacostello-dougherty.com seemed to be mine again. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to blog.

For a while it looked like my blog “More TK” had been completely wiped out in the hack, and I realized I never backed it up, even thought it was one thing I worked on pretty consistently over the past two years. Then it came back, but in the meantime I’d wondered if the vulnerability was worth it. Here’s where the computer world with its robots and equations and malicious coders seems to meet the flesh-and-blood world; if you put yourself out there, reveal little things each week, trust a free program and a hosting company, someone might find a way to exploit the vulnerability. Someone might take just a little bit of what you offered and threaten to not give it back.

I told this story in Minneapolis in a basement bar with a friend and his friends, and heard that there’s an app for that: that I can install something that alerts me if someone is trying to break into my new password. Maybe that will be enough changing of the locks to continue blogging about writing on Sunday mornings. I’m going to put it on my list to look up. Right after “figure out how to get addr.com to stop charging me after I’ve tried to cancel their services twice.” Ah, the tangled webs we weave.