Screaming alongside us

Eli, Eli

My God, my God,

why do I forsake you

while I hang on the cross

of my screw-you, my hell-no,

my let's-just-get-this-over-with,

my it-couldn’t-get-worse-than-this,

my lies, my leanings and inclinations

toward the better-for-me-worse-for-you?

You’re the only one who gets it.

You scream alongside me—

but I can’t hear you.

--

"Isn't it wonderful? It makes all the difference to know there's someone else screaming alongside you -- and that's the point of the incarnation. I can see that so clearly now. God came into the world and screamed alongside us." -- Drops Like Stars, p. 68

The strenuous marriage of writing

"Being a writer is a strenuous marriage between careful observation and just as carefully imagining the truths you haven't had the opportunity to see. The rest is the necessary, strict toiling with the language; for me this means writing and rewriting the sentences until they sound as spontaneous as good conversation." - John Irving, emphasis mine

I read this in my creative nonfiction class Friday as a preface to a memoir by John Irving. Immediately it reminded me of scriptwriting and the importance of writing conversationally.

The first half of Irving's quotation is referring to fiction or creative nonfiction: you tell the truth, but let your imagination play a role. (In creative nonfiction, unlike fiction, you can't use your imagination without first prefacing it. You don't lie.)

In scriptwriting, I see this "strenuous marriage" -- even only a few weeks into my scriptwriting course.

The radio spot writer wants to tell facts: WHAT is the product? WHERE can I buy it? HOW is this product special? WHY is it worth buying? etc.

But at the same time, it's done in a creative way:

PERSON 1: Man, oh, man. It's gone -- it's all gone!
PERSON 2: What is--
PERSON 1: Quick! Someone call 9-1-1!
SFX: DIAL TONE
OPERATOR: 9-1-1, what's your emergency?
PERSON 2: Jimmy, Jimmy. What's happening? What should I tell them?
PERSON 1: Someone ate all my Doritos!

For me, I favor one partner or the other in this marriage of sorts. I'm noticing that for this class, I'm favoring the Facts and ignoring Creativity. The danger of this is endless: I could write a boring spot; I could write something that's supposed to be funny; but falls flat, I could overwhelm people with facts.

The opposite is just as true: If I focus too closely on creativity, I may forget to add important facts, like WHAT the product even is.


As for the second part of the quote, about writing something as "spontaneous as good conversation," I can't help but think of scriptwriting. That means stripping writing from very "Englishy" language. That means I don't write sentences like:

Though my love for Doritos is vast, I only have fifty cents -- not enough to buy a bag.

You write the way people talk. How do people talk? Well, go back to the beginning of the quote again. You figure it out through observation. When I'm writing dialogue for short stories, there's always one character who has an overuse of the word well, because that's what I do.

An excerpt:

Then he likes you?

Not exactly.

You just said the rest was history, like it’s the end of the story. So it’s not?

Well, that was a month ago. So much has happened.

Like what?

The date.

You went on a date with him?

Sort of.

Tell me!

It was nothing. We just watched a movie at his apartment.

Alone?

Well, yeah alone. It was a date … I think.

I write wells in only because when I was writing this piece, I was saying the dialogue outloud. (I even cut out some of them, because it was a little too over the top. Good writing doesn't mean you add in speech flaws for effect. Apparently I say well too much.)


Thanks, John, for the insights.
I don't know about the rest of you, my dear Scriptwriting class, but it's a lot easier to talk about something (writing) when you have something to base it on, i.e. a quotation.

Just a thought.






(Now I'm hungry for Doritos.)


--

Scriptwriting archive:
Broken-down Poetry, and what it means

Good morning

But friends, your dead will live,
your corpses will get to their feet.
All you dead and buried,
wake up! Sing!
Your dew is morning dew
catching the first rays of sun,
The earth bursting with life,
giving birth to the dead.

Come, my people, go home
and shut yourselves in.
Go into seclusion for a while
until the punishing wrath is past,
Because God is sure to come from his place
to punish the wrong of the people on earth.
Earth itself will point out the bloodstains;
it will show where the murdered have been hidden away.
-Isaiah 26.19-21

--

Oh yes.

--

Good morning. My favorite texts in the world are "good morning" texts from Nathan. They're texts that remind me that whatever happened yesterday--whatever stress, whatever fight or struggle--is gone. Good morning. It's a new day. It's fresh. Let's wake up and sing.

I've called grace many things before. I've called it a hug. I've called it plants that grow in the wintertime. But today, today I'm going to call grace morning.

--

In Iraq, the sun rose at 4:30 a.m. The Iraqi sun is bright; it's hot; it's disturbing; it wakes you up.

I think that's grace. Okay, so I say grace is the morning and that evokes some brand of fuzzies. Aw, it's like that 1990s worship song: "Though the sorrow may last through the night, his joy comes in the morning. I'm tradin' my sorrows...." But really, it's more than that. It's hard. It's bright and blinding.

I say grace makes you do something, take action. In the very least, it makes you get out of bed. Morning is here; you can't stay in bed all day.

For me, morning is planning time. If I am not running late (as I usually am), I think about where I need to go that day, what I need to accomplish, how I am going to do it all. Morning requires something of me.

Grace, of course, is the same way. Grace says that whatever happened the night before, is over. It's done, taken care of. Any wrong I've committed against God is forgiven, and I am washed clean. But, I'm still responsible. I'm responsible for the upcoming day.

--

Isaiah is all about the coming of the Messiah. The prophet warns Israel and its neighbors of God's wrath, but he tells also of a redeemer called Immanuel, God with us.

Remembering that, I'm trying to make sense of the second stanza above, the one after the exclamation about morning! and singing! and sunshine! The one that says to lock yourselves in your house to escape God's punishment.

In context, the joyful stanza comes after Isaiah's description of his people's current condition: "Oh God, they begged you for help when they were in trouble, when your discipline was so heavy they could barely whisper a prayer."

I wonder if that final stanza is a "sobering up." Yes, God is good. God will give you a new morning, a new life, some fresh dew on the ground. But remember what you're doing right now. Remember your current situation, the sins you're immersed in, your addictions.


I think of this stanza as a mourning (yes, a nice play on words for us to enjoy). It's like: go inside your houses and shut your doors and take a while to think about what you did. Give yourself a time out. Keep yourselves from sinning. Watch out. Be careful.

--

I write this post at night, anticipating the morning, anticipating grace.

All you dead and buried, wake up! Sing!







-Ezekiel

Holy the Firm, pp. 60-62

His disciples asked Christ about a roadside beggar who had been blind from birth, "Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" And Christ, who spat on the ground, made a mud of his spittle and clay, plastered the mud over the man's eyes, and gave him sight, answered, "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be manifest in him."


Really? If we take this answer to refer to the affliction itself--and not the subsequent cure--as "God's works made manifest," then we have, along with "Not as the world gives do I give unto you," two meager, baffling, and infuriating answer to one of the few questions worth asking, to wit, What in the Sam Hill is going on here?

The works of God made manifest? Do we really need more victims to remind us that we're victims? Is this some sort of parade for which a conquering army shines up its terrible guns and rolls them up and down the streets for people to see? Do we need blind men stumbling about, and little flamefaced children, to remind us what God can--and will--do? ...

Yes, in fact, we do. We do need reminding, not of what God can do, but what he cannot do, or will not, which is to catch time in its free fall and stick a nickel's worth of sense into our days. And we need reminding of what time can do, must only do; churn out enormity at random and beat it, with God's blessing, into our heads: that we are created, created, sojourners in a land we did not make, a land with no meaning of itself and no meaning we can make for it alone. 

Who are we do demand explanations of God? (And what monsters of perfection should we be if we did not?) ...

--

I think I finally get it, Annie.

"Sinai," from George MacDonald: an Anthology, p. 4

"[God] is against sin: insofar as, and while, they and sin are one, He is against them--against their desires, their aims, their fears, and their hopes; and thus He is altogether and always for them. That thunder and lightening and tempest, that blackness torn with the sound of a trumpet, that visible horror billowed with the voice of words, was all but a faint image ... of what God thinks and feels against vileness and selfishness, of the unrest of unassuageable repulsion with which He regards such conditions."

--

Lauren's thoughts: It's odd thinking that God is both for and against us. He's against the sins we're tangled up in; he's against our innate drive for self-gratification, for hunger over restraint. But because he is against that, he's for us. He wants a Lauren - he wants a you - purged from sin.

The Phantom Tollbooth, pp. 118-119

"No one paid attention to how things looked, and as they moved faster and faster everything grew uglier and dirtier, and as everything grew uglier and dirtier they moved faster and faster, and at last a very strange thing began to happen. Because nobody cared, the city slowly began to disappear. Day by day the buildings grew fainter and fainter, and the streets faded away, until at last it was entirely invisible. There was nothing to see at all."

"What did they do?" the Humbug inquired, suddenly taking interest in things.

"Nothing at all," continued Alec. "They went right on living here just as they'd always done, in the houses they could no longer see and on the streets which had vanished, because nobody had noticed a thing. And that's the way they have lived to this very day."

"Hasn't anyone told them?" asked Milo.

"It doesn't do any good," Alec replied, "for they can never see what they're in too much of a hurry to look for."

"Why don't they live in Illusions?" suggested the Humbug. "It's much prettier."

"Many of them do," he answered, walking in the direction of the forest once again, "but it's just as bad to live in a place where what you do see isn't there as it is to live in one where what you don't see is."


"Perhaps someday you can have one city as easy to see as Illusions and as hard to forget as Reality," Milo remarked.

"Why I Write" by George Orwell

Two observations:

1. I like George Orwell's thoughts on writing more than I like his writing.
2. I may own every book on writing ever printed.

--

I've noticed that I have a really hard time blogging when there's nothing to blog about. I've spent my last few weeks in the States reading, hanging out at Starbucks, watching movies and editing magazine articles -- nothing's really "blog material." But I have to keep writing. Must ... trudge ... through. Ugh.

--

"[The writer's] subject-matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, or in some perverse mood: but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write." p. 4

I find this so, so true. Dr. Allison warns us that if we establish our voice too early in our writing career, we risk "writing ourselves in a corner." If I only write snarky-meets-prophetic blogs, will I be able to write anything else? But if I deny myself this pleasure - hey, it is my favorite kind of writing - will I want to write at all?


Ah, what a dilemma!


"I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. ... 1. Sheer egotism." p. 4

No kidding. This reminds me of Don Miller who said (paraphrase) that if he were honest with himself, he writes so that people will like him. I do the same. It's definitely not my top reason for writing, but it's always in the back of my head. Who doesn't want to be a famous writer, though, really?


"2. Aesthetic enthusiasm." p. 5

I do like words. A lot. So much so that I've been playing "Words with Friends" on my iPod for the last five hours. And let me tell you, I've been kicking butt. I'm so much better at this than I was at Scrabble for Sentence Strategies.

"3. Historical Impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity." p. 5

Meh. Whatever.


"4. Political purpose-- using the word 'political' in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society they should strive after." p. 5

Ding, ding, ding! That's it, Mr. Orwell! That's why I write! Yeah, there are a couple parts of #1 and #2, but a big chuck of it's #4. I write because I want to change the world. Is that lame? Too IWU-World-Changers for you?


It's true though.


"It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such [political]  subjects." p. 8

Ol' Orwell wrote this in the mid-forties, but I think his words are even more relevant today. Shall I list: genocide, AIDS, poverty, hunger, child soldiers, forced prostitution, sex trafficking, congenital heart disease in little Iraqi babies. 


How could we avoid writing of such subjects?


"What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art." p. 8

Thanks for putting to words exactly what I believe, Mr. Orwell. This is, essentially, why I'm a writer. Not just to write politically (to "push the world in a certain direction"), but to create art that challenges people.


Throughout the rest of the essay Orwell despises journalism which takes the art out of prose - which is true, which is why I added a double major. (I think we've learned in Practicum that journalism doesn't have to be boring - you can be creative with it - but in journalism, facts trump the creative license.)

"If poetry is not truth, and does not despise what is called license, so far it is not poetry. Poetry is the highest form of the utterance of man's thoughts. ... Prose is but broken down poetry." George MacDonald

I'm starting to think that Orwell's "Why I Write" is the same as my "Why I Write," only written more eloquently.




Thanks, Mr. O.

Eugene Peterson's Message, Isaiah 30:18f

"But God's not finished.
He's waiting around to be gracious to you.
He's gathering strength to show mercy to you.
God takes the time to do everything right—everything.
Those who wait around for him are the lucky ones.

"Oh yes, people of Zion, citizens of Jerusalem, your time of tears is over.
Cry for help and you'll find it's grace and more grace.
The moment he hears, he'll answer."

*Gulp*

In 10 days I'll be up in the air.

People keep asking me if I'm nervous. I'm not nervous; I'm scared out of my wits.

I have never left the country.
I have never flown alone.
I am never alone.
Oh God, I'm never alone.
Can I handle being alone in a foreign country?
Can I handle being a grown-up?

Back in December this sounded like a splendid idea - like a daydream. It's so real now. I will be in Iraq in 11 days. I will be where American troops fought. I'll be where Shane Claiborne traveled in 2003. I'll be in the ancient Mesopotamia, the land of Babylon, near the Garden of Eden.

Holy crap.

I'm excited. I'm not changing my mind or anything. It's just ... real. Not a lot of things I dream up become real. Like that year I really wanted to be on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno - never happened.

What's worse: I cannot be comfortable. I can't even take comfort that everything's been taken care of - because it hasn't. IWU still needs to approve my loan and CitiBank still needs to disburse it. I need a whole lot of money in just 10 days. Oh God, I'm scared. Can you make this happen?

--

God knows what he's doing - I've been signing my emails like that. I solicit your prayers, dear saints in Christ. I can't do it without God; I can't do it without all of you.

--

There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead--as if innocence had ever been--and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is not one but us. There never has been.


Here I am, LORD. Send me.




Ezekiel

The Elements of Style, p. 120

"Style takes its final shape more from attitudes of mind than from principles of composition, for, as an elderly practitioner once remarked, 'Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.' This moral observation would have no place in a rule book were it not that style is the writer, and therefore what you are, rather than what you know, will at last determine your style. If you write, you must believe--in the truth and worth of the scrawl, in the ability of the reader to receive and decode the message. No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing."

Jayber Crow, p. 54

I said, "Well," for now I was ashamed, "I had this feeling maybe I had been called."

"And you may have been right. But not to what you thought. Not to what you think. You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out--perhaps a little at a time."

"And how long is that going to take?"

"I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps."

"That could be a long time."

"I will tell you a further mystery," he said. "It may take longer."

Inspired by Buddy Glass

I'm finishing up Salinger's last novella about the Glass family, "Seymour - an Introduction," written in the point of view of Buddy Glass.

Seymour, whom Buddy writes about, is a poet; Buddy writes in prose. It's brilliant, really, how they're contrasted. Anyway, Buddy has a lot to say about prose ... and since I am a fan of prose (as broken-down poetry), I thought I'd post some of my favorite quotes.

Thanks, Buddy.

"And while I think an economically happy prose writer can do many good things on the printed page - the best things, I'm frankly hoping - it's also true, and infinitely more self-evident, I suspect, that he can't be moderate or temperate or brief; he loses very nearly all his short paragraphs. ...

Worse of all, I think, he's no longer in a position to look after the reader's most immediate want; namely, to see the author get the hell on with his story." -- "Seymour," pp. 98-99

"It is, then, as if this clerical error were to revolt against the author, out of hatred for him, were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, 'No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer.'" -- Soren Kierkegaard, epigraph to "Seymour"

Other well-written passages by Buddy Glass:

"Her voice sounded strangely levelled off, stripped of even the ghost of italics." -- "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," p. 85

"I said I didn't give a good God damn what Mrs. Fedder had to say on the subject of Seymour. Or, for that matter, what any professional dilettante or amateur bitch had to say. I said that from the time Seymour was ten years old, every summa-cum-laude Thinker and intellectual men's-room attendant in the country had been having a go at him. ...

I said that no one Goddamn person, of all the patronizing, fourth-rate critics and column writers, had ever seen him for what he really was. A poet, for God's sake. And I mean a poet." -- "Raise High," pp 59-60

with Love and Squalor,

Lauren