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Remembering Titanic
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“Did you cry?”
“I cried four times. Just hearing the song makes me cry.”
Such was the conversation of thirteen-year-olds following the release of Titanic in December of 1997. The song of course, is “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion, and reactions to the film somehow became a mark of status among my classmates in our tiny landlocked Montana town. Leo was a heartthrob to wallpaper your bedroom walls with; Kate was a picture of feminine beauty for us to aspire to.
I haven’t seen Titanic in over a decade. The last time I watched the movie all the way through, we had to change the tape halfway through — which ought to clue you in on the year that happened. So this year, with the film being re-released in 3D to honor the centenary of the unsinkable ship’s sinking, I felt a driving need to see it.
It’s strange to re-live a childhood memory through an adult perspective.
It’s strange to watch something so iconic with the eyes of someone who has experienced loss.
It’s strange to allow yourself to let in the reality of what happened that night one hundred years ago, stranger still to experience it through fiction knowing that in the background, the horror of the backdrop pales in comparison to the reality.
I couldn’t start to understand my desire to re-visit Titanic until the arrival of my April issue of National Geographic. The featured articles? All about Titanic. The ship, yes, but also the film. What I didn’t know before then was that James Cameron, aside from being a multi-bazillionaire and one of the most absurdly high grossing film producer in history, is a science buff and an historian. Specifically, it was his personal draw to Titanic that led him to visit the wreck in 1995 and film it, and it was that sense that made him make the film.
In my April issue of NatGeo, James Cameron wrote a piece entitled “Ghostwalking in Titanic.” He wrote it about visiting the wreck, about his emotions and fears, revelations and awe. Some new images of Titanic showed where Hollywood had to improvise; others mirrored the re-creation with eerie accuracy, down to the gold-plated mantlepiece clock in the suite of Ida and Isidor Straus who were known for their refusal to separate and instead opting to ride the wreckage of the ship to her final resting place together. Their suite was the inspiration for Rose’s suite in the film, the clock and the rest of the decor modeled after archival photos of the ship.
Perhaps Cameron sought only money, but in his words I sensed passion. Passion for what exactly, I am unsure. Whatever fire drives him beneath the waves of the North Atlantic time and again to search out the secrets of one of the greatest mechanical tragedies in human history has uncovered just that: secrets and images of the last moments of 1,500 human beings who lost their lives in the frigid cold.
And so this morning I set an alarm and got out of bed to catch the earliest showing of Titanic, unsure of what to expect.
Adult eyes catch more than the eyes of children, even teenagers. Of that I am now even more convinced than I was before I set foot into the theater. I understood a little of Rose’s situation as an adolescent — a young woman forced into an unwanted engagement for the financial gain of her family. That much I got even then. What I missed was the nuance and the insidiousness of Rose’s fiance.
This time around, I was able to understand Molly Brown‘s impudence in asking Cal if he planned to cut Rose’s meat for her. I understood Cal’s gift of the diamond necklace for what it was: a bribe for sex, as clear and naked as that sparkling blue stone. I understood his statement, “I thought you would have come to me last night.” Translation: “I gave you the diamond. You owed it to me to sleep with me.”
And I understood Rose’s character much better for the words in voice over, “Inside, I was screaming.”
I understood for the first time her heroism in rescuing Jack, how her bravery saved his life. I could respect her decision to stay with him and recognize that as a moment that also showed his worth as a character because he didn’t question her choice to do so.
The fictional story captured me again. With an almost Romeo and Juliet sort of naivete, you cannot help but love Rose and Jack. As he takes her from the stilted steps of high society to the pounding bodhran and uillean pipes in the steerage dance, you cannot help the exultation. Their love is unfettered and bright. Even though you know it’s doomed.
Even though their story is fiction, the backdrop against which it is set is not. Watching the film in 3D — well. The sound of the iceberg’s impact thundered through the theater, and I couldn’t help imagining it ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times louder. Feeling it shake the ship, hearing the crunch of thick steel.
Over two thousand souls trusted to Titanic to bear them across an ocean. And as she foundered on the calm midnight seas, some of the most horrific moments were not nature versus human, but human versus human. Locking the lower class passengers in their quarters. The panic that made officers launch life boats half-full or less when there weren’t even enough boats for half the souls onboard. The chaos and the scrambling.
When the water began rushing in, creeping from deck to deck, I felt the panic. As it encroached upon the higher levels of the ship, I had a sense not of the ship going down, but of the sea reaching up to claim it.
Claim it as what? A sadistic tribute in response to the pride of humanity, taken hungrily by an implacable sea? A reminder of the respect we so seldom afford to the earth? A frightening testament to human nature? There are parts of this history that are sickening. How only two of the twenty lifeboats returned to collect survivors after the Atlantic claimed the ship for good. How the arrogance of the shipbuilders led to allowing aesthetics to trump safety. The cost was almost 75% of the lives on the ship.
As I watched the final moments of the Titanic’s sinking in the film, I was reminded of the National Geographic article once more. In it, they described how the ship’s stern (the rear part that broke away from the bow once the waterlogged front portion sunk beneath the waves) corkscrewed to the bottom of the ocean. It’s the part of the wreck you don’t see images of. The bow in all its aerodynamics survived in a rather picturesque state; the stern took a tumultuous and violent spiral downward, and it took hundreds of terrified people along with it.
The end of the film shows those touching moments: an elderly couple meant to be Ida and Isidor Strauss holding one another, an Irish mother telling her children of Tir na Nog. What it doesn’t show, what it cannot depict, is the scream of strained steel, the terrible crush of the in-rushing water, and the darkness when the sea snuffed out the lights leaving people inside the belly of a sinking ship.
It was that that pulled the tears from me this morning. The adult knowledge of people, stuck and helpless, being dragged downward to the bottom of the North Atlantic.
So today, nine days after Titanic’s centenary, I’m remembering not Kate and Leo as Rose and Jack, or even the unsinkable Molly Brown. I’m remembering those who died faceless for human folly, because when people in power err — whether in building a ship and naming it unsinkable or invading a country — it’s the faceless who bear the brunt of it. And that is heavy enough to sink a ship.
I’m reminded also that nature isn’t to be trifled with. Perhaps that is what Titanic should remain: a lesson in humility, and a reminder that the swiftest and most brazen among us can be brought low.
And yes, I wept.
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Life Lessons From My Husky
I’ve been observing this puppy of mine for the last couple weeks, and I’ve decided that there’s a lot to learn from her. Here are some of the lessons she’s taught me!
"Mom, I found a softball. It's so much better than my dinky tennis balls!"
No Matter How Much You Like It, It Can Be Tough To Carry Around
We went to the dog park last week, and Buffy found this softball. Oh, how she loved it. She was determined to haul it around with her — even though it’s about the size of her head. Sometimes as humans we carry around our nostalgia like Buffy’s softball. Sure, it can still look shiny and new, but really it’s just something old we keep finding over and over again.
Continuing to carry it with us is a chore, though not always one we see as such. Sometimes we never know how much weight we’ve been hauling with us until someone makes us let it go.
Satellite dishes!
Your Ears Should Be Your Biggest Asset
Even if they resemble satellite dishes more than auditory devices, your ears are important. Listening to the world and the other people around you is one of the greatest tools you can ever use. So often we surround ourselves with sound without taking the trouble to sit down and really listen — and all too often we hear words without listening to the meaning behind them.
We’re all guilty of it: people with differing viewpoints, our parents, our spouses, our friends, our bosses, our employees, our children, that homeless guy on the corner. The list goes on and on. We think we know best and wonder why things aren’t working out the way we wanted them to. Nine times out of ten, our problems can be more easily solved if we just open up our ears and hear people out.
Everybody loves an ice cube on a hot day.
Even If You Are Very Different, You Still May Have Things In Common
When Buffy and Willow first met, there was a lot of bottle brush tail, a few lunges, several hisses, and a full-clawed swipe or two. They may both have four legs, fur, and a tail, but they’re still different kinds of critters who speak a different language. It took them some trial and error and a lot of listening to the occasional yelp and mew to get it right — and they still backslide a little — but now they’re able to hang out and share something they both like: ice cubes.
I gave them both ice cubes the other day, and lo and behold, they both love them! They sat there just lick, lick, licking them until they were gone. Even if you’re different than someone, even if to you a friendly bark sounds, well, friendly and you can’t understand why it scares someone else — you might be able to find some common ground somewhere. That’s where those satellites above come in handy.
"Willow's toys look like much more fun than mine, Mom!"
Some Things Are Out Of Reach For Good Reason
I don’t think people like to hear that, even though we tell our kids and our pets over and over. “Don’t touch the stove; it’s hot!” “Just because you can get on the roof doesn’t mean you should!” “Yes, but how are you going to get down from the tree?”
Willow’s bird sure looks like fun to Buffy, but that plastic rod could splinter easily. It has small parts that could choke her. Just like Willow shouldn’t gorge herself on Buffy’s treats, Buffy shouldn’t get to play with toys that could be hazardous to her.
Think about 2008, the splintering plastic rod in the US mortgage world. For a decade, Americans bought houses that were out of reach. Just barely, maybe, but they overextended themselves. Then the rod splintered, and we all choked on it. I worked in real estate that year. It went boom, and not in a good, exploding values sort of way. More like diamonds to dirt. If something is out of reach, it doesn’t mean we should stop at nothing to get it; it sometimes means we should be content with what we have and be thankful for it.
Something tells me she won't fit.
What Works For Someone Else Might Not Work For You
This also can be a tough splinter to swallow. Willow loves her boxes. Spouse went through a whole twenty minutes of trouble to carve out holes, make little danglies, and generally create a cardboard paradise for Willow Kitty. Buffy doesn’t have anything like that, and she tries to chase Willow inside her little havens.
But she doesn’t fit. She instead knocks them over and then sits there looking bewildered.
If she did get inside, she’d likely feel trapped and panicked and try to get out, breaking the box in the process. We’re back to the people are different theme — what works for you might not work for someone else. That can go for politics, religion, waking up early, who you want to marry, and what kind of cheese you like on your sandwiches. Trying to fit into someone else’s comfy box could cause panic and claustrophobia. Find something that works for you, and be yourself.
"I love my chicken quarter, Mom. It's deeeeelicious. And tastes even better on the floor!"
Think Outside The Bowl. Erm, Box.
There are seven billion people on this planet. (Anyone else remember when it was *only* six? Yeesh.) Most of them probably disagree with you. That’s fine. But what we have to remember regardless of who disagrees is that we’re all stuck on this little round rock together. We have to breath each other’s air and drink each other’s water. Sometimes we have to help other people’s children.
This world can be a big and scary place, but it’s full of faces. Full of people who might look and think differently than we do, but people who ultimately desire the same things we do. Safety. Love. Food. Sex. Warmth. Companionship. We’re all different, but we are also all the same. We’ll never get along if we can’t think outside the box and step out of our comfort zones a little.
Besides. Sometimes you find that life just tastes a bit better when you do.
Buffy the Siberian Husky and Willow the Domestic Medium Hair Mutt Cat are already best pals — they play, drink from the same water bowl, and wreak havoc for Mom. Between the surprise pouncing matches, the war on Mom’s bamboo, and Buffy’s ability to pee twice in two minutes right after she comes inside, life’s always a trip in the Mears household. They’re only 9 weeks into this life, but they’re already showing me that they’ve got some wisdom to teach me.
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- Cookie Dough Part 1: Buffy and Angel (emmiemears.com)
- Buffy Wedding Lessons (emmiemears.com)
- In Which Emmie Uses Cute to Feel Better About Politics (emmiemears.com)
- She Saved the World A Lot (emmiemears.com)
- Monday Man: Spike (emmiemears.com)
- Emmie Becomes a Mommy! (emmiemears.com)
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Bring on the Drama: How NOT to Have a Relationship
Conflict.
As a writer, I love conflict. It’s what makes the words jump from the page and launch themselves at my throat. It’s what can make a 1,000-page behemoth of a story interesting.
But let’s face it. What makes good fiction doesn’t make a good relationship.
If you’ve got conflict on every page of your relationship, you’ve also got something called a problem.
Hilarity and mayhem? Check. Good role modeling? Not so much. Image via wikia.com
How did those four get where they are? Love. And great writers.
While we might sometimes feel that getting a bazooka out to wipe out our love interest‘s arch nemesis is a great idea, in this murky real world of ours that idea could land you in a federal prison for, you know. Ever.
One of my favorite television couples is Veronica Mars and Logan Echolls. Logan starts out as the obnoxious, somewhat cruel rich boy with a home life like something out of a social worker’s nightmare. Veronica is a fledgling private investigator who gets in a lot of trouble with style and aplomb after the dual personal tragedies of her best friend’s murder and having been roofied and raped at a party. What better combination of lovebirds?
True love begins at...the dance. 
Even with their spectacular personal issues, Logan and Veronica might stand a chance — except Logan’s aforementioned home life steps in via his criminally insane and disgusting father who installed cameras in their pool house to film his trysts with women (not, I might add, Logan’s mother). Ah. Conflict.
Veronica discovers the cameras and blames Logan. Over the seasons, they make increasingly bad decisions about one another, which keeps the tension high, but the chances of a successful relationship somewhere below ground zero.
In this the season of loooove — and I was born as a result of this season, so I can’t knock it — relationships spring to the center of attention. Who has them, who doesn’t, who wants them but doesn’t want to admit it — ah, February.
What makes fiction intriguing is that we see mirrors of ourselves. We see the shoddy communication efforts. We see the bad choices. The strange thing is that these examples often show a happy ending, when we know deep down in our gut that relationships that are that tumultuous don’t end without ending badly.
Wondering how to keep your relationship from being a conflict-driven tragedy? Here’s some tips!
1. Listen. So you had a misunderstanding that led to a fight — maybe even a breakup. Your significant other calls and leaves you a voice mail. Don’t pull a Veronica and delete it without listening to it; hear it out, then make a rational decision. That goes for arguments, too. Listen to what your partner has to say. If they’re screaming obscenities at you, the message you should hear is, “I’m very wrong for you. Go snuggle a puppy, eat some Ben and Jerry’s, and get out of this freak show.”
2. Define break. Are you on a break? Decide what that means going into it. Remember Ross and Rachel? Misunderstanding is born of a little seed called miscommunication, or that nothingness that exists where communication dies. Save yourself several seasons years of angst and be clear about your expectations. Honesty might be painful, but it cuts through a lot of er…stuff.
3. Don’t cheat. Aside from the abiding level of betrayal this entails, cheating doesn’t do much for your karmic accumulations. If your relationship is failing, talk to your partner. With your words, not with the body language of a forbidden encounter. Believe me, that is one message that gets across loud and clear, so head it off and use your words like a big kid.
4. Talk. Where’s the beef? You got a beef? Air it out. Get it off your chest, and various other cliches. As much as 4 a.m. infomercials like to pretend to the contrary, people aren’t mind readers, and they generally don’t know what you’re thinking if you don’t tell them. You can fix most things with words and judiciously applied actions.
5. Trust. The final tip here is to leave the suspicion to the soaps and sitcoms. Successful relationships are built on trust — if you go sprinting to the worst assumption your brain can concoct, you’ll do nothing but sabotage any chances you had with your significant other. Just remember, it could be a murderous and perverted father who planted those video cameras.
Okay, if you find fiber optics and tiny Bond-esque cameras, you’ve probably got a problem. Luckily, that happens more often in fiction.
Good relationships will inevitably have conflict, but unlike fiction, that conflict does not have to exist on every page to keep things moving and happy. I’m lucky to have a husband who understands those two foundation stones of communication and trust — if you’re single, this is me giving you permission to hold out for someone who doesn’t just plunk you on a horse and trot westward, but someone who’ll be there on the other side of the sunset.
What have you learned not to do from your favorite books or television shows? Have you ever thought your significant other was taking lessons from a derailed plot? Entertain us!
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All I Want For Christmas…
Okay, so I don’t celebrate Christmas in a religious sense. We already took down our tree to rearrange our living room for our brand new Kinect (thanks to Spouse’s parents for that one!), and we had Chinese for lunch. I’m also making a Harry Potter themed dinner for us from the Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook that Spouse got me for my birthday. Meat and potato pasties (I guess more of a mini-pie…), buttered Brussels sprouts, and glazed carrots with mini custard tarts for dessert.
We started opening presents last night over Skype with Spouse’s family, and then we ended up diving right into the rest of it instead of waiting. We forgot about stockings. All of that is just fine. I got some pretty spectacular gifts this year — a gift card to Massage Envy (Who’s planning a spa day? Emmie is!), the biggest book I’ve ever owned — Harry Potter Filmmaking Journey — and a book to rival that size, the guide for Skyrim. Spouse also got me a heap of books, one by the late David Eddings, and the two missing books of the Fear Street Saga I’ve been trying to replace for years. Also a Buffy omnibus and a hardcover edition of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Tales.
Did I ever mention I’m a big fat nerd?
Consider that mentioned.
I am a fortunate human.
Spouse also managed to find a steal of a deal on a gorgeous edition of Stieg Larson’s trilogy — cloth-bound hardcovers. I haven’t read them yet, but have been meaning to for some time. Suffice it to say I am quite spoiled this year. Spouse himself made out with a very expensive pair of headphones, a rather rare vinyl album, and a ukulele, which he has been talking about learning for some time now.
So we did the gift thang, in spite of a lack of the church thang, which is fine with us. We joke about SolstiChrismaKwanZukkah, and wished each other a happy solstice a few days ago. It’s been a quiet day. I have a whopping three days (the hourly equivalent of four, actually) off, and I intend to read, hop around and work up a sweat playing video games (whoever invented this is a bloody genius). And write. Of course.
Which brings me to my title.
All those things I got and bought for others this holiday season — I’d give and take it all back in a heartbeat if I could just somehow return my cousin to life, to his daughter and family who all miss him so bereftly. (I know that’s not a word, but I couldn’t find one that said what I wanted it to.) I can’t do that. That’s never been a possibility. So we slowly heal. We listen to Spouse play his ukulele. We call to hear the voices of those we love, to connect with them and remind them we’re still here. We’re still family, and even though there is a hole where Nate should be, we’re all forever bonded and changed by the memories of him that we share. We eat and hug one another. We allow ourselves to grieve when we need to. We celebrate the season as we can, regardless of which day it is.
That’s all I can do. That’s all I want for Christmas. A few precious days with my family before the dawn of a new year. The sun begins its slow return to the earth, to warm us with the hope of a coming spring.
Call someone you love today, someone you have lost touch with, someone you keep meaning to get back in touch with. Tell them you’re thinking of them, that they mean something to you. Laugh about the antics of your children or your cats. Reminisce. Reflect. Life is fragile, and winter can be dark. Remember what matters.
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Seasons
I am a writer. That is what I do. It’s what I breathe each day, what I cannot stop. So perhaps, as I go through these words with you today, you will see more clearly into the last few days and understand why it is only now I mention something that has had me in its grips since Friday.
As my husband drove me to work on Friday morning, I got a message notification on my phone from an Ohio number. When I listened, I heard my cousin’s voice telling me to call her. And that it was bad.
I expected…I don’t know what I expected. As my aunt said later, “Emmie, you can never be prepared for these things.” I already knew that. And yet in the instant the phone rang, calling my cousin back, waiting to hear her voice on the line, I tried to prepare for something.
I failed. You see, grief hits you like a missile to the chest. It hollows you out. Makes a hole deep inside you. The words she said were raw and somehow dirty. Wrong. She told me that my cousin Nate had been killed in a car accident early that morning.
I stopped. Everything stopped. The wrongness of it, the pale horror that dawned with those words sent grief’s missile into my heart and made a hole. The hole started out gaping and rough-hewn, and as I gasped a breath, it became larger still.
I won’t plague you with more details than that. But this is why I’m writing now and not sooner about this very personal tragedy. Until today, my uncle had requested that we keep everything off Facebook and social media. The torrent of thoughts and prayers from those who pray has been overwhelming as they fill his Facebook page with memories and love. Tomorrow I drive to Pennsylvania, and now in this quiet place, this silent hour of midnight, I have to write.
Some of you will understand why. This isn’t the first I’ve written or spoken of it; I’ve already filled pages with things I can’t share with the world. What I’ve prepared here will be given as a gift to my uncle and aunt, to show them how much I loved their son.
No one is ever really gone as long as those who survive still remember.
That’s why I’m sharing this with you, in the hopes that a few more people will remember Nathan Stuart Layton. He was my family. My cousin. My friend. This post is a tribute to him.
I’ll always remember him with blue hair.
It was summer at a truck stop trade off. Aunt passed me to uncle, and through a dingy diner came my cousin Nate.
As he walked toward me, I recalled Uncle Tim’s wedding in the hot Arizona air years earlier. We searched the town for birch beer with my sister and his, and when we poured it over chunks of vanilla ice cream, it ran in crimson rivulets. I remembered the sweetness and the pink smiles and cold against the summer heat.
As he walked toward me, 17 to my 14 now, I remember my nervousness. Yes, he was family, my cousin, but he was in high school, and what would he think of the awkward, metal-mouthed pubescent that had infested my body?
Big grin. Teeth slightly askew. Bright, smurf blue hair instead of red. Freckles. Cheekbones.
Nate showed me I could fit. He introduced me to his friends — another Nate and two Toms. He taught me to play pool.
He and Jess let me tag along to Warped Tour in Pittsburgh that year. 1999. Nate’s blue hair was by no means an oddity when there were giant green sea urchins masquerading as human heads. Nate and Jess tried crowdsurfing to Blink 182. I just tried to keep a handle on both of my slip-on sandals.
Eminem called in sick to his show that day, but we blasted Lit and Fuel in the car on the way back to New Castle.
Next came Pelee, that tiny blip of island in the midst of Lake Erie, just barely Ontario. The air was warm and gritty like sand. We drove the island in Uncle Jon’s van, chanting Limp Bizkit lyrics at the tops of our lungs with the windows rolled down. Impromtu swimming sessions. My first Canadian money. The Canadian family I’d always heard my mom talk about.
We sat on the porch of the house, talking about music and life, and my cousin Nate helped me bridge that precarious gap between junior high and high school by treating me like a friend. Like family.
There was my first party and midnight lake-diving, the water warm and black and deep. There was no talk of leaving me out of anything, and for that I loved him.
There are other memories, numerous in spite of the distance that separated his house and mine. Long phone conversations. Many, many emails. Through my teen years, Nate was there for me, even when he joined the Air Force and the emails straddled the seas.
I remember twenty years ago when he and Jess showed me how the milkweed pods burst and sent tiny white bits of fluff adrift like swirling magical dancers. I was allergic, but I didn’t care. I remember the birch beer and how it stained our mouths red.
But Nate — in my mind, he’ll always be my blue-haired cousin.
Forever in my memory and always in my heart. Nathan Layton, beloved son, daddy, brother, husband-to-be, grandson, and cousin.December 5, 1981 – December 16, 2011
I’m not a religious person, but this series of verses from Ecclesiastes shows more wisdom than I can create on my own.
To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under the heavens. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what has been planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.
Even though this is a season of joy for many, for me and my family, it is a time to mourn and remember someone we all will love until the end of our days.
My cousins Jess and Nate with their beautiful babies.
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I Wear My Sunglasses At Night
Time to wrap up The 25, folks! And we’re going to do it with style.
No, really. The last bit is style.
25. Style
Writers sometimes speak of style as if it were an ingredient to be added to their story or poem or memoir. Instead, style is the thing itself. E.B. White said it best, writing, “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.’” The key, then, to developing one’s style is to write, as White states, “in a way that comes naturally.”Sound easy? It’s not. In fact, finding the “way that comes naturally” can take a lifetime, and the way can change with each piece you begin. One key to beginning that journey is to think about style not so much as a matter of addition, but subtraction—casting off feelings of awkwardness and self-consciousness, affectation and pretension. Focus on presenting your piece clearly, in a way that connects with readers. For practice, imagine a single reader sitting across a table from you. Spend a half-hour relating your piece to that reader, as clearly and honestly as possible. Spend another half-hour striving to make the piece more clear, more honest, more affecting. Then spend another half-hour making the piece more clear, more …
—Heffron
I think the point Heffron makes is an insightful one. Style isn’t about imitation or any other kind of flattery to others. Because of that, I can understand why it’s one of the more difficult aspects of writing to make authentic, because it’s one of the age old bits of advice that people tend to find very difficult: Be yourself.
I remember being a child/adolescent/teen/undergrad and having people tell me that. “Just be yourself, Emmie.” As if it came second nature to them, but I suspect it doesn’t really come first nature to anyone, really. There is, of course, a lot of wisdom in those two little words, but if we’re all honest, we know that human beings spend a lot more time trying to blend in than stand out.
With a lot of things in life, I can see why we do it. It can be dangerous to stray from herd, especially when that herd is full of pubescent females who have grown massive retractable claws along with their burgeoning busts. Boys aren’t much better. We might go through a rebellious stage and put strangely colored things on our heads (or in our heads), but people have a massive drive to fit in.
Going against that grain is a painstaking uphill climb, and other famous cliches.
When you can take that advice, something changes in your life. I know we’re talking about writing here, but I’m going to give you a little of my history to illustrate how my style has grown because of those two words. I still have an evolving style (I might even call it a revolving style), but my writing now is much more interesting than it used to be. I spent most of high school just trying not to be noticed. I spent the first year of college realizing that people like what they expect, and get a wee bit upset when you do something that doesn’t jive with that. In my case, it was me beginning to realize that I didn’t believe in Christianity anymore — in my second semester at an expensive, private Christian university, no less. I lost a lot of friends over that. When it comes to religion, for all the prayer and convincing and Bibles and whatever else, there is this little fork in the road. One sign points at “You Believe,” and the other just yells, “BULLSHIT!” Three guesses which fork was me. You can’t force yourself to be something you’re not, so I quit trying. And I took off across an ocean.
In 2004, I moved to Scotland for the summer. I spent two months there by myself. Away from expectations, away from anything I was familiar with, yet I was home the second my toes touched the tarmac at the Prestwick Airport south of Glasgow. I spent those two months flitting throughout the country alone. I met people who are still in my life, namely a UT student named Marshall who is now a barrister in Leeds, and a fabulous Punjabi-Scottish man who makes chai from scratch and speaks Gaelic with equal facility called Jordan, but I just call him my best friend. He was man of honor in my wedding last month. I also met a young man named Pawel, who was the first Polish person I ever met. I heard the sounds of his language and had to learn it.
The next summer I flew to Poland with four other women, and I returned to Scotland, where Jordan introduced me to my soulmate, a beautiful, intelligent, hilarious woman named Julia, who joined him on October 2 as my maid of honor. She was just selected from a pool of hundreds of applicants to join an organization (the only organization) that does systematic research on the G20 Summit. I’m so proud of her I could burst. Six months later, I packed my bags and moved across the Atlantic. I didn’t come back for almost two years. Those people I met are still a part of me, a part of my life. None of them knew much about my life growing up. They met me in places I felt utterly at home and comfortable, and those were my first lessons about being myself.
It was then I began to write Elemental, the book I’m currently trying to finish for NaNoWriMo.
I knew I had something the moment I began it. You know the thrill, gentle viewers. The electric pulse that flits through you as the ragged curtains between worlds ripple back with an unseen wind and reveal a Story to you. I ended up realizing that that story wasn’t the beginning, and I put it aside to write Primeval, which is the first book in the trilogy. Now five years later, Primeval is getting ready for takeoff, and I’m writing the final pages of Elemental at last.
The point of all of this is that your style evolves when you put those two little words into practice. It will sprout out of what you thought was barren dirt and sneak tendrils into your skin. It will begin to take you over until who you are manifests on every page. I’m no Shakespeare, and I’m still a work in progress much like my writing, but there’s a lot more of me on the page than there ever was before.
So to wrap up The 25 (but certainly not my daily posts), style is what happens when you be yourself. Love yourself. The rewards are still untold, though I think I’ve gotten more from life than any woman deserves even now in the three people who form my personal triumvirate of true love. They’re what pushes me forward on this path. Who pushes you?
If I can do it, a girl who grew up with no pot to piss in (literally) and who kept her mouth shut for a decade — so can you.
- True love happens. Image by Jordan Jaquess Imaging.
- Three times for me. Image by Jordan Jaquess Imaging.
EDIT: I apologize for the weird formatting on this post. I tried looking at the HTML for a whole five minutes before I gave up. Not really sure what happened — never had trouble with copy/paste resetting font before. Weird.
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Make Them Beg For More
The best compliments I have ever received about my writing were all some derivative of the following: “I want more.”
That is the bit of ambrosia all of us yearn for. If we write for an audience, we spend our time willing life into the empty whiteness of a blank page and searching and sifting through life for those bits of magic to put in our jars, hoping that’ll be enough to coax our work to live.
The goal is an insatiable lust for our work, for the worlds and characters we funnel onto the page. How do we do that? Originality. Creativity. Skill. Luck. Any number of things go into it — I’m probably not alone when I say that I rather hope luck plays less a role than skill, but I don’t make the rules. And speaking of rules, here’s one from The 25 that sticks its fingers all over that “originality and creativity” thing:
17. Avoiding Clichés
Everyone “gets” clichés. That’s why they show up virtually everywhere. Clichés may be thought of as overused and predictable, but few people complain about movie car chases. For every person who doesn’t want “same old,” hundreds continue to enjoy stereotypical hard-boiled dicks helping dames in distress. Depending on your audience, a well-placed cliché can be more effective than an explanation.Nevertheless, we need folks like you to buck the trend. So here are some ways to spend a half-hour:
- Create a cliché-free protagonist: you. Choose a career you once contemplated. Change your age, gender, race. Investigate something that intrigues you. Invent a situation that boosts your heart rate. Send your character to a place you’d like to visit. Now write.
- Remove from a work unnecessary parts of speech—such as replacements for the perfectly acceptable said, and words like angrily to reveal how someone slams a door. Say no more than readers need to know; let their imaginations work.
- I’ve intentionally loaded my five contributions to this article with more than my usual share of clichés. Circle them. Do it now. The early bird gets the worm.
I think it’s perfectly acceptable to use cliches if you use them sparingly — about as sparingly as you might sprinkle salt on your ramen. What I mean by that is that if you’re going to say something verbatim like, “Her skin was as soft as silk, as white as snow. She was as pretty as a picture.” — if you’re going to say that, turn it on its head somehow. “Her frozen body would occupy a place in my memory that amnesia couldn’t touch, cocooned forever by winter and premature death.” There. It’s not the best example perhaps, but the cliches from the first bit get flipped at you with a catapult in the second bit. Yeah, her skin is soft and white. She froze to death in the middle of winter. She’s pretty as a picture? Yeah. A picture of a loved one, dead. Forever.
I think the masters of the craft manage to tease us with something familiar and then jerk us round the bend so quickly that we end up somewhere we didn’t expect to go. They disturb our expectations in words so tantalizing and succulent that we can’t help but follow. They make a cliche into something tangible and create art from contrast. If you can learn how to continually surprise and delight (or horrify, or titillate) your readers, you will spark that insatiable hunger for more.
All writing serves to forge a connection. If you’re reading this, I’ve taken my thoughts and implanted them into your brain without ever opening my mouth. (Except to breathe, because I’m a little stuffy right now.) It’s almost like telepathy — in fact, I’ve heard a writer describe writing as such. I can create an image of an elephant with one tusk wearing a fez, and you’ll see it when you read that whether you want to or not. It’s a connection, and if you feed enough magic into it, you’ll start to feel a tug on the other end. A pulling sensation that means your readers want more. More story. More characters. More of the beating thrumming heart you created from that blank page.
A well-timed cliche can create a basic connection with a reader, but it’s like communicating with two cans and a ball of yarn. It’ll only be so long before your readers search for something to keep that feeling going, and if you deliver something original and alluring, that connection changes to fiber optics.
Use your jar of magic to infuse your words with bait — bait that will hook your readers to your stories for as long as you write them.
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I Said I’d Be Back
Thus quoth Arnold the Governator on the Terminator 2 3-D experience at Universal Studios Orlando on my honeymoon. And whaddya know? Here I am, gentle viewers. I’m back.
I apologize for the pre-during-post-wedding absence, as well as the confession that I teared up during the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride at the Wizarding World in Orlando. Yet that all happened, and now I’m here again, watching the leaves selectively change on the tree outside my balcony and jealous that my now-husband has a job where he is appreciated and paid for a valued skill and I don’t.
Now where was I? Pity party aside, I spent the last couple weeks thinking a lot about my second draft in spite of the honeymoon. Part of what has prodded those thoughts along has been my re-reading of the Anita Blake series. I’ve been reading the books over very critically, turning my eye to things I do myself (that I consider failings) and watching for things that are done particularly well (that jump off the page and rip my throat out).
The first book in the series is mired in the passive tense. Mired. Caught in sludge and almost drowned. I remember not being able to get into it when I first read it and that it took several tries to get through. The rest aren’t like that — if you watch for those things, you can see Ms. Hamilton’s evolution as a writer in even the first few books of the series.
Reading is fuel. It fills up my tank and makes me want to write when I get stuck in the sludge myself. Right now, Anita Blake is hauling me back to the keyboard to start typing again. I may have limited time and a lonely sense of helplessness pouring out of my professional life, but the determination is still there.
The holidays are approaching, and I know they can be hectic, but part of what the fledgling stage of marriage has impressed upon me is the need to move forward. The need to contribute, to do something I am passionate about. And so I write. I will write. I will read. I will publish my stories and market them to the best of my ability.
I have more than one horse to climb back up on post-honeymoon. A lot fell by the wayside in the past couple weeks and months as the wedding sort of took over everything. I was warned (correctly, it seems) that the doldrums may await our return from Orlando’s sun and playtime. That, if nothing else, is a nice spur in my behind that might succeed in getting my feet back in the stirrups. There are goals to meet, agents to win over, and a bright shiny novel to polish till it blinds you.
On the subject of the novel, I have a great deal to commit to paper. The night after we flew back in, my husband (yep, still sounds weird) and I went to see Thrice play in Towson. One of the other bands that opened for them marvelously formed a backdrop for some deep pondering as I listened. Their sounds haunted me, pulled forth tendrils of the conclusion of my story. It is a trilogy, you see, so the third book is rather important. I hadn’t thought much into it before, aside from a few forays and snippets, but as O Brother played, for the first time the protagonist of the third book sunk her fangs into me. She’s a cool wind from a dark, dark cave. She is lovely and strong and somehow more important than the other two main women who lead the first two books and their narratives. She is the key to everything that unfolds. A guardian and a protector. A survivor. She sacrificed everything to be that person, and she did it without thinking twice. She is stunning and bright and one of the most interesting characters I’ve met from this world. I can’t wait to start putting her on paper, seeing what flows out.
There was a clarity that came through that music. I think I might just be forced to get their CDs on my computer so that I can listen to them when I start my first draft of book three. I have a feeling it’ll be useful to open up those gates again. Music can be a mysterious muse, but a reliable one. Sense memory is a powerful thing.
Aside from returning to my trusty constipated dinosaur of a computer, I also need to return to the workout world. I may or may not have eaten my weight in burgers over the course of the honeymoon, and let me just say that yes, the calories still count when you’re celebrating. At least to the scale. Yikes. I met a fabulous pair of gingers at the Maryland Renaissance Festival a couple weeks ago, and they fight with swords. They said I could be their medium ginger (not often that I would be called medium at five foot ten — large ginger tops six feet), and that I could come play with pointy objects with them.
That came out wrong.
Anyway, if I’m to swing claymores and other swords about, I need to get my body back to the condition it was in a couple months ago before the wedding stress dove down my throat in the form of ice cream, more ice cream, pizza, and more ice cream. But I digress.
The stories have returned to swirl about my brain, my fingers are itching to let them out, and life is supposed to return to whatever state of normal it hovers near. I’d say it’s about time I get my bum in gear, don’t you, gentle viewers? As Rafiki would say to his little fingerpainted lion on the inside of his treehouse, “It is time.”
Or perhaps he’d just run around banging me on the head with his staff and singing, “Asante sana, squash banana, wewe nugu mimi hapana…”
The honeymoon is over. Now the real work begins.
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Mad Hatters and March Hares
Attraction.
It’s an unseen force. A magnetic pull. It’s what draws people together. It’s also what dictates our tastes in food, music, books. I read once that what makes a writer an author is writing for an audience. It’s taking one’s writing beyond the simple, self-tuned writing for oneself and actively gearing work for readers. That’s my career goal — if that’s not evident by now, gentle viewers, I shall swallow my hat.
There’s a certain amount of self-pride that comes with writing for an audience. I say that not to insult writers (seeing how I’d be insulting myself at the same time), but because whenever one creates anything for an audience, it speaks of a feeling that people need or want to see what we have to say. If I’m not writing to an audience, I’m just talking to myself, and that’s a whole other issue. It’s not a negative thing, this breed of pride. Post Secret is a very successful website built on the premise that if you have something to say, it might well help someone else. There’s enough of us on this planet to safely say that we share many experiences and feelings with several million or billion others, and sharing what one creates is a venue for connecting with those people.
What makes a book sell is the force of attraction. It’s someone seeing it, getting sucked into it, and loving it enough to tell all their friends about it. Then the process repeats. That’s how books make millions and get made into movies and worm their way into the hearts of a generation. Look at the Twilight series. As much criticism as it’s gotten from literary critics and many others, it’s become a multi-million dollar franchise. That means people connect to it. It doesn’t even matter much if the writing isn’t Shakespeare, which it’s not. But something about the books connects people, attracts them. It’s not just young people, either. The blazing success of Harry Potter is another example of attraction. That’s the pull we try to create as writers.
I think all writers have to be a little bit mad in order to create good fiction. I’ve heard it a hundred times from different writers who talk about their characters as if they’re friends. Bemoaning a bad decision or considerably baffled by a turn they took. I feel it too. One of my more secondary characters had such an aggressive voice that she plowed her way into all three books and ensconced herself in my story deeply enough that she cannot be removed now. Another started being a real brat, and I had to get to know her much better before I understood why. In some ways, I feel schizophrenic — also a sentiment I’ve heard echoed from other writers.
Some days as I write, I fight the urge to search for a dormouse under teacups. The writing process can feel like I’ve set a long table for twenty people at a tea party — people no one but me can see. I don’t need opium or hallucinogens to have my characters pop up in my mind, but having them start prattling while I’m in the middle of a shift at work can be inconvenient.
In a way, that teensy madness is one of the biggest joys of creating. It’s the opposite of writer’s block; it’s birth pangs. It means the story is forcing its way out. In and of itself, it’s also a way to battle writer’s block. If I’m having trouble with a part of my story, it’s usually because I’ve forced my characters into something they wouldn’t do. If I sit still for a while and meditate on them, they usually show me where to go.
The characters are key to the attraction in a story. They have to be people readers can relate to, even if the characters are not completely likable. That’s where I am in my revision process — I’m trying to make sure these characters spark a connection in the readers who are helping me get through this stage. Seeing what their reactions are. Ultimately, the goal is to make people fall in love. Not everyone is going to want to read the stories I have to tell — no one can please everyone. The goal is to connect with the others out there who share the story already — they just don’t know it yet.
This is the transitional phase for me, going from a Mad Hatter at an empty table to a table full of others just as quirky as the dormouse sings and the March Hare conducts us all toward that mysterious attraction.
