Quote of the Day

"We should remember that if a situation cannot be changed, there is no point in worrying about it. If it can be changed, then there is no need to worry about it either, we should simply go about changing it." -H.H. The Dalai Lama, (via Tricycle Magazine)

Detour

Because I have actually fallen out of the groove of working on the book project since I've come to Seattle, i have decided to allow myself a bit of a writing detour. I am working on a few fiction things that I've neglected for some time, one of them a short story that I am excited about. It will be a dystopian tale set in the not-too-distant future centering on the story of a boy trapped inexorably in the mire of a military-industrial complex that makes our present-day complex look like the set of Bambi.

Poking around the net for some inspiration, I stumbled upon a short article written by one of my favorite writers, Chuck Palahniuk. Chuck is the author of, among other things, Fight Club and lives just a few hours away from Seattle, apparently. Some years ago, he wrote a helpful little piece entitled "13 Writing Tips"which contains this little nugget:

"Life is too precious to spend it writing tame, conventional stories to which you have no personal attachment."

To all of us who endeavor to write, perhaps even for a living, whether our writing be fiction or nonfiction, poetry or journalism, this is a maxim we should revere and hold as true. Our lives are indeed too precious to be finicky, nervous, and weak about our writing. Boldness is the order of the day. Let's go!

De Libertas Quirkas

Visited the neighborhood of Fremont, Seattle today, known alternately as "The People's Republic of Fremont" (for its association with various counterculture elements) and "The Center of the Universe." Their unofficial motto, De Libertas Quirkas, translates roughly to "the freedom to be peculiar," and everywhere this motto rings true. Below are several pictures of landmarks in Fremont, including the Fremont Rocket, the "Fremont Troll" (a troll under a bridge!), and a massive statue of Vladimir Lenin. Learn more about Fremont here, if you'd like.

Format?

For the sake of my own sanity and to give myself a concrete framework in which to work, several months ago I decided to approach this writing project not as one monolithic, single-voiced string of words--an entire book, if you will--but rather as a series of essays centered on a common theme. Again, at the time I made this decision, it was purely for psychological reasons, to make me more at ease as I approached the project. But the more I think about it and the deeper I get into the book, the more I am thinking that perhaps rather than just a little sleight-of-hand tool to put me at ease, this idea might be an actual format I should consider using in fact. Consider: a series of essays, each on a different event or topic, but centered around the same general subject matter, which is to say, my experience on the campaign. It may make for more readable and digestible material and would also give me concise, mini-projects to work on. I'll be pondering this as I continue my work.

Seattle

For those of you who know me personally, you will know that my family recently moved to Seattle. I am presently with them, having arrived Saturday morning at 3am local time after a nearly four-hour delay at O'Hare Airport in Chicago. I am sitting comfortably in our home in the Magnolia neighborhood. Outside our window, to the south, like some beautiful painting, Mt. Rainier towers over all below it. For some scientific reason beyond my understanding, the mountain appears to be floating, its base shrouded in the same pale blue as the sky above and around it. Magnificent.

From our rooftop, one can view the many fishing boats in the water below as well as the tops of the houses all around. This home is smaller than our previous homes; it is three stories with roughly three rooms on each floor, including a fourth floor that is an open rooftop. Below, the lights from the boats and surrounding buildings dance upon the water's dark, gently swaying surface. Here is a place of peace.

I will stay here until my appetite for the city has dissipated sufficiently for me to gin myself up to go back to Kentucky. I will occupy myself with tourism, to be sure, but my primary hope is to spend much of my time writing. Writer Julia Cameron says in her book "The Right to Wright" that when a writer possesses a concrete sense of place, it "make[s] for writing that a reader can connect to." This is my challenge.

Which is why it is so important that I left Kentucky for a time. I need to break routine and change my environment in an effort to be more productive. Here's where we see if that gamble pays off.

Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"

Shortly after the Second World War, in 1946, George Orwell published his now-famous essay "Politics and the English Language." As one writer writing to other writers, this essay is an indispensable item in my toolbox as I approach my various projects. Orwell writes:

"Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

In the essay, Orwell lays out several examples of what he considers to be poor writing and then lays out six rules that he suggests may be implemented by English writers seeking to turn the tide back in a progressive direction with regards to our language. It is striking that Orwell wrote this essay in 1946, long before things like Facebook, text messaging, E-mail, instant messaging, Twitter, and online comments sections have dragged the English language through the mud more than just about anything else in the history of the language.

Orwell's six rules are the following:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Any writer endeavoring to produce decent material would be wise to take these rules to heart. Oh that it were so easy as just applying rules....

Recommended Blog

If, like me, you are interested in the lifestyles of writers, I highly recommend the now-dead blog "Daily Routines." When the anonymous author was posting regularly, this was one of my must-read sites. It features posts on "how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days." Here's one of my favorites, about Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Philip Roth:

If turbulence remains one of Roth's dominant literary tones, "Order in living" is now his credo. "Philip lives like he's at Fort Dix," his friend Ross Miller, who teaches literature at the University of Connecticut, told me. "Everything precise and hospital corners." Roth wakes early and, seven days a week, walks fifty yards or so to a two-room studio. The front room is outfitted with a fireplace, a desk, and a computer set up on a kind of lectern where he can write standing up, the better to preserve a bad back. There are pictures here and there of his family: his father, Herman, who sold insurance for Metropolitan Life; his mother, Bess; his older brother, Sandy, who used to be in advertising and now paints. Most of Roth's books are in the big house, where they run, room after room, in alphabetical order by category.

When I came to visit, it was a late-winter morning, and the snow was piled high around the studio. Roth was wearing a blue Shetland sweater, green corduroy pants. Often there is tweed. He dresses like a graduate student of the late fifties. He led me to the back room. There was a team photograph of the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers. There were free weights, a lifting bench, and an exercise mat. He had quintuple-bypass surgery eleven years ago and is determined to keep in shape. He stays out here all day and into the evening: no telephone, no fax. Nothing gets in. In the late afternoons, he takes long walks, often trying to figure out connections and solve problems in the novel that's possessing him.

"I live alone, there's no one else to be responsible for or to, or to spend time with," Roth said. "My schedule is absolutely my own. Usually, I write all day, but if I want to go back to the studio in the evening, after dinner, I don't have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day. I don't have to sit there and be entertaining or amusing. I go back out and I work for two or three more hours. If I wake up at two in the morning--this happens rarely, but it sometimes happens--and something has dawned on me, I turn the light on and I write in the bedroom. I have these little yellow things all over the place. I read till all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can't sleep and I want to work, I go out and I go to work. So I work, I'm on a call. I'm like a doctor and it's an emergency room. And I'm the emergency."

David Remnick, Reporting: Writings From The New Yorker