Yes, and… | Elisa Bassett lays writing (creating!) rules down
2. Play to the top of your intelligence. I wish I could explain this one better, but I think I just like the phrase, “Play to the top of your intelligence.” (Here is what Google says: ”If your character is stupid, be smart about how you’re stupid,” which I take to mean, be stupid in a specific way).
2a. I am trying to write a book. The book begins with me as a college student, a nineteen-year-old girl. I did a lot of dumb shit at that age. As the writer/present-day narrator (no longer a college student, no longer a teenager), I have to be smart about showing that young girl doing dumb shit.
3. “Yes, and.” Tina Fey’s Bossypantsgets this right: “The Rule of Agreement reminds you to ‘respect what your partner has created’ and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where it takes you. As an improvisor, I always find it jarring when I meet someone in real life whose first answer is no … ‘No, I will not hold your hand for a dollar.’ What kind of way is that to live? … You are supposed to agree and then add something of your own … To me, YES, AND means don’t be afraid to contribute. It’s your responsibility to contribute. Always make sure you’re adding something to the discussion. Your initiations are worthwhile.” Do I agree with Tina Fey? YES, AND I want to be her sister.
3a. Once applied to writing, you’ll be saying to yourself, “Yes, I want to write this emotionally traumatic scene, and I want to write the healing scene that comes a few years later.” “Yes, I want to hear your constructive criticism, and I’m going to make this chapter stronger because of it.” “Yes, this character goes down on that character, and then they switch it up.” “Yes, this horrible thing happened to me, and I’m going to write about it and turn it into the most beautiful piece of literature.” “Yes, I’m going to write a book, and I’m going to write another.”
*or all you really needed to learn to do great, you learn in improv.
i really must learn to play with other people. but this is fantastic.
The Situation in [insert country/designation] Writing
Found these series of interviews from Maud Newton, and apart from showing my favorite answers so far—I’m interested to hear about what people in my “circle” think about these set of questions asked by Full Stop as inspired by The Partisan Review. (don’t you just love that name?)
Here’s the basic description:
In 1939, The Partisan Review sent out a questionnaire to a number of prominent writers, asking them about literature, politics and their identities. While the questionnaire hasn’t been completely forgotten, we felt that these specifically political questions were rarely being asked of our writers. Considering that 2011 was a year of global unrest, we felt that it would be particularly relevant to update The Partisan Review’s questions.
And here are my favorite answers (emphasis mine):
from Geoff Dyer:
2011 was the year of the Arab Spring. There have also been massive protests in Greece, Spain, Britain, and most recently, the United States. Does literature have a responsibility to respond to popular upheaval?
I don’t think so. Responsibility is an important civic and personal quality — obviously — but literature is free to be as irresponsible as it wants. Having said that, many of the writers I care most passionately about would argue — and have demonstrated — exactly the opposite.
And from Aimee Bender
2011 was the year of the Arab Spring. There have also been massive protests in Greece, Spain, Britain, and most recently, the United States. Does literature have a responsibility to respond to popular upheaval?
Absolutely. But there are many ways to respond. There are the writers with journalistic skills who are able to tell about the situation via fact and story; there are the people directly involved who will tell their own personal stories, and there are others impacted who will tell the stories in more metaphorical ways that are less easy to track but still deeply influenced by these upheavals. There’s a clunky writing exercise I give in a class about building scene, where the book (that holds the exercise) asks each writer to follow very specific instructions: write a sentence describing a character’s hands, write a sentence about the weather. One of the instructions is: write a sentence including a current event. It’s kind of hilarious. Usually it fails miserably—“He leaned on the bookshelf, thinking of Hurricane Katrina”. You can’t just cut and paste current events — they have to be felt and moved through to work. But, on occasion, a student will weave one in beautifully. I feel similarly about a writer’s job — yes, we are here to respond to the world, but sometimes it takes awhile to process events and let them happen naturally on the page.
(I think i just like that writing exercise, too.) Anyway, here are the questions with the option to alter them to what you feel is your context (hahahahaha!). If you feel like responding to the the questions or to just one or to even protest the questions, leave a comment here or better yet, a link to your response on your blog. 1. 2011 was the year of the Arab Spring. There have also been massive protests in Greece, Spain, Britain, and most recently, the United States. Does literature have a responsibility to respond to popular upheaval? 2. Do you think of yourself as writing for a definite audience? If so, how would you describe this audience? Would you say that the audience for serious American [ insert relevant description here] writing has grown or contracted in the last ten years? 3. Do you place much value on the criticism your work has received? For the past decade we’ve seen a series of cuts to predominant literary magazines and literary supplements, and in response, criticism has moved online. Do you think this move to the non-professional realm has made literary criticism more or less of an isolated cult? 4. Have you found it possible to make a living by writing the sort of thing you want to, without other work? Do you think there is a place in our current economic system and climate for literature as a profession? 5. Do you find in retrospect, that your writing reveals any allegiance to any group, class, organization, region, religion, or system of thought, or do you conceive of it as mainly the expression of yourself as an individual? 6. How would you describe the political tendency of Philippine [insert description here ] writing, as a whole, since 1986/2001/[insert significant year] ? How do you feel about it yourself?
7. Over the past ten years, America has been in a state of constant war with a nebulous enemy [do feel free to edit to your ideas of what the Philippines has been doing the past decade.] This war has extended to fronts throughout the world. Have you considered the question of your opinion on an unending war on terrorism[or religion, or population control, or religious supremacy, or poverty, or shallowness, etc ,etc]? What do you think the responsibilities of writers in general are, in the midst, of unending war?
Yes, I’ll be answering this too. You know how much I love answering interviews like I’m of some import.
an apology for blogging, tumbling and all other sorts of oversharing
I’ve been doing this a for a while.
I’ve only recently taken down the blog that I maintained the longest (the little tugboat sailed off into the happy seas) because I wasn’t sure how exactly I wanted to keep doing this. And now that I actually shelled out some chump change (heehee) to have a semi-permanent presence of the web, it’s making me wonder why the hell i keep doing this.
for one thing, i know that much of what i’ve been doing on the web lately that it isn’t related to work (go to Qwanz ) is really just trawling and linking, and reblogging. and honestly, i’ve gotten bored with it. it’s not that there isn’t great content out there and i probably won’t be able to stop myself from linking or reblogging (there’s a lot of shit definitely, but there’s a whole host of interesting!)—but it’s stopped being what it used to be for me.
I’ve also stopped needing the anonymous venting outlet—or really, the web has made it more and more difficult to be anonymous here. even my alternate selves (and because of work, i have many.) feel like they’re revealing some side of me. This could also just mean that i’ve stopped feeling like i have no friends. (grow up, will you?!)
so what do I do now?
being with friends from that one place where you finally felt like you grew up (professionally, sort of—Ateneo was idyllic, like a childhood or puberty even,) it made me realize that if writing is what you do (not necessarily who you are because i know am not. am a woman first) then i want to do it either for sheer beauty (hahahahaha!) or to be useful. since the sheer beauty kind is something still best done on actual paper (at least, for me)—then being useful it is.
though i’ve seen that being useful is less a series of how-to’s and more a condition of un-selfness. not that you obliterate the self (i wish i could, but i think i like talking about myself way too much to do so) but you write better because you realize that you are taking people’s time.
perhaps that I’ve had to learn to write for the web and its search engines (blech! a part of me is still fascinated by it, but still blech!) i am painfully aware of the difference. I read somewhere that much writing (especially poetry and its intimacies) is an approximation of someone else’s approximations (oooh vicious cycle that can descend either into intertextuality or anxieties of influences) and as i believe that, it makes it apparent that the reblogging, relinking, etc that i do has made me a lazy writer and worse, a lazy thinker.
it can be said that it’s the web, so why worry so much? but this is the medium i’ve chosen, why not?
so what does that really mean, then?
more of me (and the not-me), i hope. this is the one thing that i’ve forgotten that writing allows you to do—to think out loud (or softly on paper) and even if nothing really changes, something does click. i hope it doesn’t click back.
it’s funny—i realize this means i have to take things seriously, and play.
The thing is, everything I do—I have a faint glimmer that it comes from somewhere else, someone else.
