Tag Archives: inspiration

Playlist For a Novel

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Flagstaff Mars HillI’m writing a novel this summer, or at least until the semester starts. Without divulging too much, it’s a crime novel, which is a return to my literary roots. I grew up reading detective fiction by Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, Colin Dexter, and others. The novel is (unsurprisingly) set in Flagstaff, Arizona, and mixes fictional and historic criminal cases.

Like most writers, I listen to music when I write. It blocks out distractions and helps put me into whatever mood I need to be in to write, which for me changes from story to story. I try to create a certain atmosphere for myself when I write, something that suits the tone, plot, characters, and setting I’m writing about. For most short stories and essays, I listen to one or two tracks on repeat, usually folk music or classical. A novel, though, is different. I need numerous moods for the story’s numerous characters. So I created a playlist catered to the overlapping atmospheres I want to write in.

The songs in this playlist work together eclectically. Some songs suit a specific character (“The Boxer” and “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings”) while others suit the plot (“No Man Knows My Destiny” and “Runaway”). For a crime novel, I want mostly minor keys and acoustic sounds, with strategically surreal lyrics (crimey music, in other words). More than anything, I want to feel immersed into the fictional world I’m working in, a sense of a world that is closed in, identifiable, and aesthetically comprehensive.

My novel playlist is as follows:

“19th Nervous Breakdown” by The Rolling Stones

“Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” by Father John Misty

“La Llorona” by Sofia Rei

“When I’m Small” by Phantogram

“Sorcerer” by Junction

“The Battle of Evermore” by Led Zeppelin

“Tam Lin” by Fairport Convention

“Bye Bye Macadam” by Rone

“The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel

“Runaway” by Nice as F*#k

“Seeds” by Moses Sumney

“No Many Knows My Destiny” by Ryan Biter

“El Mayoral” by Sofia Rei

“Far From Any Road” by The Handsome Family

“How It Went Down” by Dark Dark Dark

“Man On the Moon” by Moses Sumney

You can find most of the music I’m listening to in this playlist. What music do you listen to while writing? Let me know in the comments. I’m always open to new tunes.

-jk

 

Reflections on a First Semester in Grad School

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AcademyI’m twenty-five percent of the way finished with my Master’s Degree in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Most of what I’ve encountered is unsurprising: the workload is tough, the Midwest is flat. However, there are certain things I’ve learned, perhaps unique to my own situation, that I wish I’d known earlier this summer.

  1. Maturity is a state of mind. I’m the youngest person I’ve met in the creative writing segment of my department, and I’m often made to feel like a little kid, like I don’t quite belong, among the adults (at least among most of the writers I’ve met). Many are PhD students with an MFA or an MA. In truth, I don’t quite fit in with most of the other writers stylistically, humorously, or aesthetically. Both my writing and self are plain weird, and I’m surrounded by tradition and formality. I don’t want to sacrifice my identity to fit in, though. I’d rather be a transplanted weirdo in the Midwest than a converted Midwesterner. Growing up isn’t about leaving behind parts of myself that don’t meet others’ expectations; it’s about maintaining myself in increasingly diverse and challenging situations.
  2. Discussions of craft are not as important as craft itself. Every discussion of craft I’ve had so far consists of an extensive mythology of what other writers did to keep themselves writing, followed by the refrain, do what works for you; coffee, rum, fishing in the Missouri River, whatever will help crank out a daily three to four pages. My own method involves writing for those who inspire me, unhealthy amounts of caffeine, and hikes in nature (which I’ve yet to find near Lincoln).
  3. Nothing is more important than the writing. I came to graduate school to write, and to publish, and to understand literature and improve myself intellectually, but my primary goal is to crank out three to four pages a day, no matter what.
  4. Friendship is more important than the writing. Friends are increasingly hard to come by the higher I climb into academia. Allies are nice, but the few friends I’ve made are crucial to my survival. Without them, I’d have no support for my experimentation. Plus, writing can be lonely, and being cooped up all day is a good way to get cabin fever.
  5. Contradictions are okay (and inevitable). Graduate life, much like undergraduate life, is complex and full of numerous contradictions. Some are basic: a free ride still requires one thousand dollars of student fees per semester. Some are more complex: writing depends upon time and inspiration, but inspiration usually comes from things requiring time not spent writing (loved ones, caffeine, hiking). Fortunately, I now have the benefit of knowing exactly what I need to survive the next seventy-five percent of my degree: writing, friends, coffee, a place to hike, more confidence in my weirdness, and a few more publications would be tolerable, I suppose.

Look out, 2016, here I come.

-jk

When a Story Strikes

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Blank PagesCreativity is sneaky; it can strike at the most inopportune moments, and writers need to be prepared. Writers can find inspiration while showering, cooking biscotti, giving back rubs, performing open heart surgery, or in my case all of the above simultaneously, and creative ideas can whither if not recorded quickly enough. Many writers, myself included, carry around small notebooks to salvage sudden ideas.

Sometimes, the best preparations fall short. While flying home this week, I was enjoying the on-flight complimentary burned coffee when something in my brain clicked, and an idea for a story crystallized.

Before I could pull out my notebook and pen, the plane began to shake. The pilot announced that we should remain seated through the turbulence, “even if you do like it shaken, not stirred.” My tray table lurched as I flipped to the next blank page and scribbled down every detail of my brilliant, wonderful story idea while it was still fresh.

Several hours later, as I waited for the shuttle to my hometown, I had a few spare moments to look back at the brilliant, wonderful, award-winning story idea. Instead, I found in my notebook a slim paragraph of what looked like ancient hieroglyphics. My handwriting is bad to begin with; add a jittery writing space and a lack of patience, and clarity is doomed. I could make out the words “old man” and “saucepan” amid the scribbles, but otherwise my brilliant, wonderful, paradigm-shifting story idea was illegible.

Rest in peace, story idea. I’m sure what I would have titled “The Old Man and the Saucepan” would have been excellent. In my rush to preserve it intact, I lost it entirely. As a writer, I should slow down sometimes. More importantly, I should learn to trust myself to utilize a half-formed idea. Even the best ideas I’ve recorded legibly have evolved. Art, after all, is a process of evolution, patient and sometimes careless. The key to producing good art is the ability to improvise. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to clean biscotti dough out of my shower drain.

-jk

In the Company of Roses

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Flower Last week, a man told me a parable about a lump of clay and some roses. He cited it as a Persian parable, but I did some research and found that it actually comes from the thirteenth century Persian poet Abū-Muhammad Muslih al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, commonly known as Sa’di. He is one of the most influential poets in Islamic and Asian literature. In Iran, April 21 is celebrated as Sa’di Day.

While Europeans were busy killing each other in the medieval period, which they eventually termed the Dark Ages like a bad sequel to the Roman Empire, most of Western and Central Asia witnessed an artistic, philosophical, and scientific renaissance. Sa’di was only a part of this unique cultural era.

The poem I heard comes from the “Adoration and Preamble” section of Gulistan, or “the rose garden,” one of Sa’di’s most famous works. It reads something like this:

“I held in my bath a per­fumed piece of clay
that came to me from a beloved’s hand.
I asked it, ‘Are you musk or amber­gris?
Like fine wine, your smell intox­i­cates me.’

‘Till some­one set me down beside a rose,’
it said, ‘I was a loath­some lump of clay.
My companion’s scent seeped into me.
Oth­er­wise, I am only the earth that I am.'”

Apart from talking lumps of clay, I love this poem because it reminds me that I am defined by my proximity to others more than I realize.

Artistically, I am the product of the writers and poets I read: Billy Collins, Sylvia Plath, Douglas Adams, John Steinbeck, Dunya Mikhail, Jamaica Kincaid, and Pablo Neruda have made me the writer I am. Aesthetically, the Southwest made me an experimental, avant-garde magical realist. Socially, I am shaped by my friends, family, lovers, mentors, and the two or three enemies I keep around for good measure. Professionally, I’m a workaholic, being the son of professors who know education is a religious devotion serving the many at the expense of the few, the happy few.

I’m honored to live in the company of roses. I surround myself with those who inspire me. It took me a while to figure out how miserable one can get surrounded by those who are negative, over-critical, dishonest, manipulative, and toxic. I don’t mean I’m in the company of the perfect; all roses have their thorns. But for what it’s worth, I’m glad to let my friends rub off on me. It makes me a better person (and apparently more appealing to bathe with) to walk with roses.

-jk

A Step-By-Step Guide to Not Writing a Novel

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Coffee Flip

  1. Get an idea for a novel, something that challenges the status quo, too radical for your parents to read. Something like Cormac McCarthy’s work. Drink three cappuccinos and write two pages of exposition, then call it a day.
  2. Make concise, attainable writing goals the next day, but you should wake up late because the caffeine kept you from sleep. Create a reward system: one glass of wine for every ten pages you write. Proceed to crank out sixty pages of character description. Print it out the next day after the hangover wears off, read it over, and flush all sixty pages down the toilet because it sounds like a high school student trying to imitate Cormac McCarthy.
  3. Walk to the store for more wine and a plunger after the first draft of your radical novel clogged the toilet. Make small talk with the cashier. When she asks what kind of stories you write, look at the ceiling, shrug, and say, “Whatever comes to mind,” realizing that after the first three glasses of wine you forgot what you wanted to write about in the first place. Walk out of the store with the bottle of wine in one hand and the plunger in the other, like all writers do at some point.
  4. Rewrite your visionary, stupendous novel in a new voice. Shift the paradigms so radically that you end up with one hundred pages of a different novel entirely. Print it out, read through it, and this time flush the same sixty pages, keeping forty pages of unnecessary but extremely well-written exposition. Blame writer’s block and pour another glass of wine.
  5. Spiral into a deep depression because you can’t seem to write a novel. Spend the weekend drinking wine and reading Cormac McCarthy novels while sitting in front of your word processor. Manage to write another page of exposition, then go to a bar where writers are most likely to congregate, to ask them for help with your insurmountable writer’s block.
  6. Choose a swank hipster brew pub in a highly gentrified neighborhood. Stumble in and identify four or five writers sitting in a corner; you know they are writers because they have ordered wine in a brew pub and have brought their plungers with them. You order wine too and spend the next five hours pretending to listen to their advice but, like them, you spend much of the time updating your status about the loser Cormac McCarthy wannabes surrounding you.
  7. The next morning, email Cormac McCarthy. By now, your plot and character names should be thoroughly forgotten. You decide that you cannot write without his prophetic advice, so do not even attempt writing until you a receive a reply from Cormac McCarthy’s agent, a terse email containing the titles of several self-help books that Cormac McCarthy has written to counteract the rise of depressed writers trying to imitate him. You purchase one such book, entitled It’s Called Trying, Doofus. It features McCarthy on the cover holding a plunger.
  8. Spend the next three months perusing the Internet for cures to writer’s block and trying each one until it becomes boring. Start with the obvious (writing), then move on to the more exciting suggestions, like boxing Irish dairy farmers or having an affair with the prince of Liechtenstein. Try living on a diet of onions and peaches, or preach the gospel to alligators. All writers have their quirks, right?
  9. Try to be a writer; do everything you can to be a writer, because we all know being a writer is a lot easier than actually writing. The act of writing is difficult, often lonely work, requiring dangerous amounts of time alone with one’s thoughts resulting in alienation and poor social skills. Although the benefits of writing (completing a draft with a satisfied sigh, seeing the delight in the faces of those you share a polished draft with, seducing people, and such) are truly worth the effort in the end, the work that goes into writing is emotionally exhausting. If it were easy, there would be a lot more people writing than sitting around being writers.
  10. If writing were easy, it wouldn’t be worth it. Scars can be beneficial sometimes.

-jk

A Novel That Sounds Like Bach

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Typewriter musicStarting a new writing project can sometimes feel like latching onto an umbrella and jumping off a cliff, relying only on improvisation and plain luck to keep me from hitting the ground. The key difference is that, unlike jumping off a cliff, writing is a lot scarier.

The other day, I latched onto a good idea for a novel (lawyers, blogs, Texas). It’s since pulled me over the edge, and there’s no turning back. Fortunately, I have plenty to write about. I pull my inspiration from many sources, the authors I read, the people I talk with. One notion fueling this new novel is that I want it to read like the sonatas and partitas of J. S. Bach.

Of course prose and music are two different forms of art, but I’ve enjoyed listening to Bach for over ten years. I enjoy the deliberateness in his music. Nothing is superfluous, allowing the chord progressions to take center stage unhindered by a fixation with virtuosity, and I say this as a violinist who has personally dealt with the pretentiousness of virtuoso musicians and composers.

Instead, Bach patiently jogs along, sometimes as straight 8th notes for measure after measure. The emotions he conveys vary from movement to movement, but they always carry the same deliberate awareness, the same steady pace, putting focus on the chords rather than the structure. Similarly, I want to write prose that invites the reader to go on a run with it on an Autumn morning, that invites the reader to turn corners in an unfamiliar neighborhood but to keep running no matter what they encounter together. Ultimately, I hope to write something the reader can get along with easily, more a friend than a confusing professor. I admit that I am sometimes guilty of lecturing my readers in past stories.

I intend to listen to Bach’s sonatas and partitas while my fingers unravel this novel, but specifically I will listen to Chris Thile performing them on the mandolin. Bach wrote them for the violin, but I enjoy Thile’s rendition more. The timbre sounds more autumnal, more like raindrops or footsteps. And unless I get back to work writing, I may never see this idea to the end.

-jk