Alice Thomsen

on the wrong side of sunrise

Page 7 of 11

Readings are the worst thing ever, until you realize they aren’t.

March 29, 2013 / / 0 Comments

When I was working with a professor to finalize my portfolio for grad school applications, she suggested I apply to read one of my pieces in the university’s Undergraduate Symposium in March. It was November at the time, and with my mind ensnared as it was in the application process, concepts like reading and Symposium and March seemed like abstractions, whereas something to list on your minimalist CV was all too real. I gave brief thought to the fact that I’m not very comfortable with that sort of thing, then submitted a proposal and went back to thinking about grad school.

January rolled around, and I got an email saying my proposal had been approved, but I was still too caught up hoping for other acceptances for it to really register. Then it got to be the weekend before the Symposium, and it suddenly occurred to me, in an uncomfortably real way, that I had to give a reading soon.

I get the sense I am not unique in my performance anxiety—after all, it combines the usual stress associated with sharing work with the stress of public speaking. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a perfect storm, because there are always ways to make it worse, but it’s a pretty damn good storm. We’ll call it 8.5/10.

So what do we, as writers, do? The reading is a potentially powerful medium for sharing our work … but also potentially disastrous, if we, for instance, become so nervous that we vomit on the podium. I don’t think there’s a single formula for success, but the first step is often to stop fixating on the possible nauseous disasters. Beyond that, it breaks down to being aware of your weaknesses and then doing those things better (a strategy that applies to most areas of writing, and life in general, thanks to its vagueness).

It helps to have someone who can act as a coach, or at least a one-person audience that doesn’t mind listening to you read the same paragraph over and over. For me, this came in the form of a more performance-savvy writer friend, who pointed out some of my bad habits and gave me some advice on how to remedy them, along with words of encouragement. Accept those words—this goes along with not thinking about the disasters. Don’t try to undercut or debunk encouragement. I am guilty of this, and it hasn’t made me any better off.

On a more general level, though, perhaps it would also help to read regularly. When you finish a draft of a story or chapter or scene or sentence, read it aloud. I sometimes do this to help catch mistakes, repetition, awkward structures, etc., but the actual reading element has always been secondary. In retrospect, I think those are missed opportunities to practice performance-grade reading, rather than mumbling through the lines under my breath. Cats make a pretty good trial audience, in that they let you practice coping with that sense that you’re reading to someone who has no interest in listening to you.

I survived, by the way, as have most reading-shy writers before me. If you’re curious, I read a version of “Confidentiality” cut essentially in half to fit the time limit. I don’t envy the people at Reader’s Digest, but that’s another matter entirely.

Bottom line is, reading for an audience is hard, and anyone who says it’s not is either lying or a sociopath (or maybe both). But it’s also a good thing. During the Q&A after I finished, I got very positive feedback, signs that people had enjoyed my work. I was even able to not-too-tackily-I-hope point them to this blog. Have I suddenly developed a huge, thriving fanclub? No. But I connected with people, at least for fifteen minutes, and maybe that will give me the opportunity to connect with them again. Plus I didn’t vomit even once.

17 Ghosts (or maybe none)

March 20, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I don’t have a TV. Not because I’m one of those people who’s harnessed her productivity by rejecting television; I just haven’t plunked down the money for one yet, and at this point, when I’m angling to move in a few months, it seems better to hold off. Thanks to the internet, though, I don’t have to use that lack of TV as an opportunity to do work. You’ll see.

B. F. Skinner easily demonstrated superstitious behavior in pigeons, but we’re mistaken if we think having something bigger than a birdbrain puts us above that. We all have our superstitions—some that we acknowledge, some that we defend, some that may in fact prove accurate. Take the number seventeen. Look for it. Fill up the gas tank for $32.17? Hit. $11.72 for lunch? Hit. Finally buy a TV for $280.34 (2+8+0+3+4=17)? Hit. I live in Ypsilanti, Michigan: Y-P-S-I-L-A-N-T-I-M-I-C-H-I-G-A-N, seventeen letters. I have a class in the development of psychology called History and Systems of Psychology: H-I-S-T-O-R-Y-A-N-D-S-Y-S-T-E-M-S, seventeen. With A=1, B=2, C=3, etc., the letters of my license plate add up to 40, and the numbers add up to 23, and 40-23=17. Today is the twentieth of March, the third month: 20-3=17. I’m 5’3.5″, 4″ on my driver’s license: 5+3+5+4= … you get the idea.

This might seem silly, and it is, because I’m sitting at my desk with a cat sprawled across my arms, trying to come up with examples in a matter of minutes. I did pick the number first, though, and it would work just as well with 16 or 18 or, say, 13. Once you decide something is significant, you become biased, seeing only the confirmations. I didn’t note, for instance, that although 20-3=17, there’s no reason to subtract, except that 20+3, 20×3, 20+3+2013, etc., do not =17. For every hit, there are a multitude of misses … but the misses aren’t interesting, so we tend to ignore them.

All this is to say, I try to be skeptical, but I know I’m not immune to superstition. And when I’m not harnessing my productivity, instead watching TV shows online, I have a special weakness for shows about “real” ghosts. It isn’t that I believe in ghosts; to be honest, I don’t know what it is that appeals to me. Author Rebecca Makkai suggests that there’s something hopeful in the ghost story, which at first struck me as odd—when I recall seeing The Sixth Sense, I don’t think of it as an inspirational, uplifting movie.

But maybe she’s right. When we write about a ghost, the implication is that the human (or dog, or whatever) story doesn’t end at death. This can be good or bad, depending on how that story goes, but so much of the fear of death boils down to a fear of the unknown, and in a ghost story, what comes next becomes a little more knowable. And knowledge, as they say, is power.

I’m fleshing out the loose concept for what I can best describe as a ghost story without a ghost, and it forces me to ask what a ghost story looks like. Is ghostliness a state of being—in which case my ghostless story is by no measure a ghost story—or something more complex? And if ghostliness isn’t defined by actual status as ghost, what is it?

If personhood is the union of spirit and body, Lauren Groff suggests, ghosts are spirit without body. Given this definition, I think my story could qualify. It’s sort of the idea of being nobody—no body—and being involved in a world without being a physical entity in it.

Maybe that’s what the ghost of literature (though perhaps not Ghost Hunters International) is: the absent presence, the embodiment of the disembodied. Pick an existential oxymoron, and there you have it.

A ghostless ghost story, then, might not be such a stretch.

The Sex Talk

March 6, 2013 / / 0 Comments

A friend challenged me to write a sex scene a few days ago. After three hours’ work, it turned out to be about 1,500 words. To put this in perspective, if I’ve hit my stride, I can do that in under an hour. Suffice it to say, I did not hit my stride, only a series of sticking points.

I took the three-part psychology of sexuality course series at my university. I seek out journal articles on sexual behaviors, and A Billion Wicked Thoughts, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam’s book-length analysis of what the internet and web searches might reveal about human desire, captured my attention from the outset. None of this makes me an expert, but I can’t cite total ignorance as an excuse when it turns out that I—like most people—sometimes struggle to talk about sex.

And if talking about it is tricky, writing it is somehow harder. The selection of books with titles amounting to How to Write Sex, Even if the Prospect Makes You Whimper speaks to the fact that I’m not unique in struggling with this.

Sex is a funny thing to approach as a writer—trying to tap into the animalistic nature of lust while maintaining the higher brain state that allows you to spell words like “tongue” and “opalescent”—and maybe that disconnect is part of what makes me freeze up. Still, I think there’s more to it.

Perhaps it’s the nature of writing—the fear that people will read our stories and see us in the characters, so that when we write a sex scene, we’re seemingly recounting our own bedroom exploits. What will Aunt Betsy think when our heroine has premarital sex with a coworker? What will our coworkers think? Should we send out a mass disclaimer before the story sees the light of day?

Hey everyone,
I have a piece being published in the upcoming issue of Stories That Aren’t Autobiographical. Just an FYI, I’m not sleeping with my best friend’s brother. I don’t know anything about that position. In fact, I contracted those scenes out to someone else. I haven’t even read them.
Please don’t judge me,
Your Writer Friend

Perhaps it’s that fear of judgment, of being seen as authors of smut rather than serious fiction. Will people think we’re no better than the director who includes gratuitous 3D explosions?

With that, perhaps it’s the fear of hyperbole or tastelessness—the same thing that makes it difficult to write about violence. How can we write about such extremes of the human experience in a way that captures the power without being either comical or offensive—or both? How can we give the detail needed to portray the scene without straying into graphic overindulgence?

I suspect it’s a combination of these fears, along with what seems to be that near-universal hesitance to discuss such matters with anyone except those closest to us—if even them.

In a previous post, I talked some about the Ideal Reader, that one person you write to so that you aren’t floundering around trying to connect with everyone who might stumble upon your story. My friend’s assignment wasn’t easy, but it got easier when I returned to that idea. I didn’t have to write something I could share with my professors and relatives and the stranger at the table next to mine in Starbucks; I only had to write something I could share with my Ideal Reader.

So I did. It was just an exercise, but they say the first time is the hardest, so maybe when it comes up in a larger project, it will be a little less painful.

Growing Up

February 27, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I learned how to do my taxes last week.

Clarification: I learned how to use H&R software to file my relatively straightforward federal taxes. It’s a step, though, and one that, as a 23-year-old looking to make another move toward independence, I need to take. I am growing up.

It’s a funny idea. We use that term—grown up—as if it’s a defined threshold, when of course it’s not. I think to many people, growing up means growing out. Maybe you grow out of your childhood bedroom, your childhood home, your hometown, your high school friends, your lifestyle—whatever form it takes, that snake-like shedding of skin seems to characterize grown-up-hood. But some things we never grow out of. Or perhaps that’s not the problem—we grow out of things just fine. It’s the other stuff we have to contend with.

I wonder if we ever really outgrow our childhoods. I doubt it.

A professor of mine once said, “Knowledge is the one thing that can prevent us from becoming victims of our histories.” Growing up often means growing out. It’s true. But parts of growing up require growing—going—into ourselves, into our pasts, into our worldview and perspectives.

So where is this all headed, this treatise on growing up by a twenty-something who’s new to the game?

I have a friend who approaches any new story by way of the backstory. For every page of finished product, he has at least five of setting research, world building, character profiles, and character histories. At times, I’ve wondered whether this is partly procrastination on his part, but when I think about it in this context—what we outgrow, what we don’t—I begin to think that in writing, as in all relationships, sometimes the things that are most revealing about the present happened five, ten, twenty years ago. When we make that connection, reach that new level of insight, it’s like a dissonant chord resolving.

The difference, of course, is that the best characters are victims of their histories. Well-adjusted people leading peaceful, contented lives, whose closets are skeleton-free and whose hearts are unscarred? Boring. Give me the woman plagued by her childhood phobias and the man who doesn’t know how to connect with his peers. (Or the charming sociopath. When in doubt, give me the charming sociopath.)

Titular Troubles

February 22, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Confession: I am not good at titles. I often give projects filler “titles” so that I have something to call them, but since publication is a secondary concern for me right now, I go through most stories without having to commit to a title. I wrote a novel in the fall of 2005 that didn’t settle into anything for three years, and it wasn’t a stroke of creative genius—it was just the classic writerly strategy of keeping my ears open until I heard something worth stealing. My 2010 novel is still untitled, going by EMDASH—in part because it’s an acronym (Exsanguination Makes Death And Sadness Happen) and in part because I am, you may have noticed, rather fond of the em dash.

As I poke at the design for this site, I find myself needing to replace filler material with real material. This includes removing the photo of one of my cats lurking atop my bookshelf, settling on a color scheme, and coming up with a title.

My filler title was The Tiniest Writer (subtitle: Alice Thomsen) because although I’m in roughly the fiftieth percentile, height-wise, I was once part of a writing group where my stature inspired short jokes reaching new creative heights. (“Unlike your head!”) I gave in, embracing it little by little (“That’s how you do everything!”) because people say that once you start laughing at yourself for something, others will stop. This isn’t true, which, although disappointing, gave me an easy way to fill the blank in my site’s headline. (“It’s surprising you could even reach the top of the page without a step stool!”) But no more. I’m standing up for my five-foot-three-and-a-half-inch self and coming up with a real title.

Or, at least, that’s the plan.

You’ll notice that at the moment—depending when you’re reading this—the title is my name, with the subtitle writing with cats on the keyboard. I asked myself, What makes me unique as a writer? What sets my approach apart from that of every other twenty-something wannabe-novelist?

I have two cats. This list sums up our relationship, because my approach to cats is like my approach to short jokes: what happens will happen—just don’t fight it. What this means for my approach to writing, in turn, is that if a cat chooses to lie down across my arms while I’m typing, I’ll keep going, because hey, if I can’t reach that top row, I’ll just spell out the numbers, hold off on the em dashes, and make sure no one gets excited enough to need an exclamation mark. And if a house panther happens to take a path that goes over my keyboard, well, so be it—they say “Kill your darlings!” so it’s just as well I get comfortable using the DELETE key.

Does this give me writerly bragging rights? No. It doesn’t even give me crazy cat lady bragging rights—I think I’d need three cats to qualify for that. But it’s something, at least, and given that fiftieth percentile thing (“Maybe for hobbits!”) it’s probably more accurate.

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