Tag Archives: creativity

White Writing Black Writing White

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At my writer’s group this week, we touched on the issues that arise when we try to write a character of a different race (or gender, or and so on). Coincidentally, a thoughtful essay by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda “Where Writers Go Wrong in Imagining the Lives of Others” is included in an early edition of LitHub. (If you’re interested in “the best of the literary Internet,” you may want to sign up for this e-publication, a new joint creation of Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. It looks promising.)

Rankine and Loffreda explore the difficulties inherent in any effort to imagine the lives of people who have had vastly different life experiences and social conditioning than one’s own. Most of their argument applies to white authors writing about people of color, but could apply to other fundamental differences of the sort that influence not only how people see the world but how the world sees them. (This last point is why stories about people who “pass” are so powerful. They know who they are, but no one else does, and they would be treated very differently if they did.)

Many white writers, the authors say, believe “it is against the nature of art itself to place limits on who or what I can imagine,” as if imagination “is not created by same web and matrix of history and culture” that made the writer. The result is an unconscious racial subjectivity that has the power to wound, to do damage, irrespective of whatever benign motivations the writer may have. There are risks. At the same time, they say, writers of color may pull their punches, unwilling to negotiate territory, develop characters, and explore situations outside whatever conventions the literary establishment endorses.

Nat Turner, slave

Nat Turner captured by Mr. Benjamin Phipps, a local farmer (graphic: en.wikipedia.org)

Writing authentically and deeply even about characters one presumably knows best (people “like me”) is a difficult endeavor. Writers who want to create characters of a vastly different point of view should ask themselves some basic questions, they say: why do I want to write such a character and to what purpose? Not can I and how can I? In other words, is the choice to write this character worth the risk of, essentially, getting it wrong and causing harm? What is needed, they say, is to expand the limits of imagination, even if escaping them is impossible, because “history is not an act of the imagination.” At the same time, as James Baldwin once observed, race is “our common history.”

A Slate article written in response to reviewers’ qualms about Michael Chabon’s 2012 novel Telegraph Avenue (a book I much liked, by the way), offers a somewhat different perspective. Among the book’s principal characters are the proprietors—one black and one white—of a used record store located on “the ragged fault line where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted.” Writing a black character in this setting is both appropriate and necessary, enabling an exploration of (among many other issues) the community divide and the shifting forces of gentrification, answering the “why” and “to what purpose” questions posed by Rankine and Loffreda.

The Slate piece, which is by Tanner Colby, reviews the history of this continuing debate, which crested with publication of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, told from the point of view of the eponymous former slave. For some years after the criticisms of Styron, white authors shied away from writing black characters, and Rankine and Loffreda agree that issues of “race” and “racism” frequently become entangled. Colby has a cynical view of such critiques: “If you convince white people that they’re not qualified to tackle race, if you scare them away from the issue, if you give them the slightest excuse to ignore it, they will be more than happy to ignore it. For as long as you’ll let them.”

My takeaway from this is that authors who write across racial/gender/other lines need to be hyperaware of the need to push beyond the limits of their own understanding of the world. I suspect that with practice, identifying one’s blind spots comes easier.

Fan Fic Fest

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Sherlock, Freeman, Cumberbatch

Martin Freeman (Watson) & Benedict Cumberbatch (Holmes) in Sherlock

Last night a high-powered panel of experts discussed fan fiction and its uneasy relationship with traditional media, moderated by Anne Jamison, author of Fic, and oft-quoted academic expert on this phenomenon. (She teaches the fan fic class I’m auditing at Princeton.) Fan fiction, in essence, is taking existing characters (from Elizabeth Bennett to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sometimes both at the same time) and creating new plots and storylines for them. One of its fundamentals is that people write it for love of the characters, not for money. On the panel were New Yorker tv critic Emily Nussbaum, Jamie Broadnax, creator of the website Black Girl Nerds, commentator Elizabeth Minkel of The Millions and The New Statesman, and intellectual property attorney (and fan) Heidi Tandy.

Traditional media often treat the huge and hugely diverse fan fiction universe in what the panelists observed is a mocking way, as if it were made up solely of young women who want to write about male-on-male sex. That trope is called “slash,” it is alive and well, and it really got going with Spock/Kirk fan fic. Now there’s a huge Johnlock (John Watson/Sherlock Holmes) fandom. (Find some well-written Johnlock material here.)

By contrast, the X-Files spawned a lot of het (heterosexual) fic written by people who really thought Scully and Mulder should get together. And, of course, the runaway financial success 50 Shades of Grey began as E.L. James’s fan fic based on the Twilight series.

Though sex is an important component in some fan fiction, and though a lot of it is written by young women, it’s a much more diverse field than commentators typically acknowledge. Meanwhile, there’s something unseemly, panelists agreed, about highly paid stars and showrunners snidely critiquing the writing of people who are doing it for free.

Interestingly, some tv shows are courting the fan fic community, counting on its obsessiveness to uncover Easter eggs in the story and faint clues and parallels and arcane references. Sherlock (though Benedict Cumberbatch has run afoul of the fan fic world for some of his critiques of it) uses many fan fic tropes, and the first episode of Season 3 included a group of fan fic writers as characters, creating their explanations for how Sherlock was not dead, even after the fall witnessed at the close of Season 2. Panelist Minkel has covered these developments nicely.

The Sherlock showrunners draw on many sources—not just the “canon” of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories—but all the movies, books, and other derivative works about Holmes that have been created subsequently. Fan fiction, the practice of live-tweeting shows, and other possibilities are cracking open the tv screen, and, in the future, popular programs will likely exist both within and outside their scheduled allotments.

Fan fic is a great big and raucous world, and if you’re at all curious, here are some places to start exploring or toe-dipping: Archive of Our Own (AO3), which reports it contains almost 18,000 fandoms, has more than a half-million users, and 1.6 million works; and the FanFiction Network, which used to be the most popular fan fic site, but is being outrun by AO3.

The tagline of Jamison’s book is the possibly aspirational “Why fanfiction is taking over the world.”

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Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

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Michael Keaton, Birdman

Michael Keaton in “Birdman”

Given this movie’s underlying premise, I should say up-front that I have a love-not-love relationship with it. Yes, the acting is terrific. Given a script with substance, Michael Keaton, Ed Norton (truly amazing), and Emma Stone all received Oscar nods. I’m also big fan of Amy Ryan, who plays Keaton’s wife in one of her trademark low-key performances, of the kind she perfected in The Wire. The story itself, however, of a middle-aged man’s struggle to find himself amidst the debris of his messy family affairs and dwindling career is, for me, less interesting. (Trailer here)

In telling it, Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu pays homage to magical realism of the South American kind (an armful of calla lilies appears on a monument somewhere to Gabriel García Márquez at every showing of this movie). What appears to be happening on the screen—Michael Keaton levitating in the lotus position or, yes, flying—can be accepted on either a literal or a metaphorical basis, or both, depending on the viewer’s taste and tolerance.

In the story, Keaton is a Hollywood has-been (a former superhero called Birdman) tackling Broadway for the first time, directing and starring in a production of the Raymond Carver short story, “What we talk about when we talk about love.” The play is in rehearsal, and whether it will be successful is a toss-up. It looks unlikely. Meanwhile, Birdman himself keeps appearing like a nudgy pal, alternately flattering and browbeating Keaton and trying to lure him back into the gloriously popular action movies of his youth.

The Carver story recounts an alcohol-soaked evening when two couples try to sort out what love is, a question that has baffled sober people from time immemorial. Because of his own extreme vision of love, the ex-husband of one of the characters shot himself but “bungled it,” says the play. Later, he died. This might be a clue to the movie’s unwinding or not, because the extent to which the play-in-production is supposed to illuminate the movie is deliberately ambiguous. (I didn’t understand the subtitle, either, as it seemed to me that the characters were all too knowing.)

Numerous possible explanations (waking dreams, fevered thoughts, daydreams) could explain some of the action—especially the Michael Keaton character’s flying—which if you’re not overly hung up on trying to explain it rationally is thrilling. This is a movie that you have to decide to “just go with it” or face frustration. But the acting—and the bird costume!—is worth the price of admission. Liked the drumming. Rotten tomatoes critics rating 92%; audiences 84%.

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Keep Your Edge – 33 ways

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notebook, list, diary

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

These lists of how to stay creative keep coming around, and they’re always worth a glance. Staying fresh in our own world is important, no matter what world that is. “Make lists, carry a notebook everywhere, write your ideas down”—those suggestions are all of a piece, and I do that. Of course, later the urgent items I scribbled don’t always make sense.

“Go somewhere new, listen to new music, watch foreign films”—those suggestions are different ways of saying “Break out of your routine.” I could do that by following suggestion #31—“Clean your workspace,” which, if I did would probably turn up some of those mystery notes. #29, “Stop trying to be someone else’s perfect,” reminds me of the Steve Jobs admonition pasted above my computer: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

Don’t quite know what to think of “be otherworldly.” That’s the kind of obscure directive I might write myself. For this weekend, just “Do more of what makes you happy!” (#25).

Creativity and the Brain

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brain, creativity

fMRI brain images (photo: en.wikipedia)

Lots of articles about creativity in the current issue of The Atlantic, including a fascinating long report by neuroscientist and psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen who studies the origins of creativity in the brain and its association with mental illness. She started out in the 1960’s studying people involved with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Among them was Kurt Vonnegut, who had a multigenerational family history of mental disorders and suffered from depression. (Moving interviews with Vonnegut’s son Mark were included in PBS News Hour’s coverage of Andreasen’s research.) Indeed, for many of the writers she studied, “mental illness and creativity went hand in hand.” Suicide was not uncommon. We think Hemingway, Plath, now Williams. Philip Seymour Hoffman was also far down that self-destructive path.

Andreasen began her academic career clutching a doctorate in literature, taught in the University of Iowa’s English Department, and published a book about the poet John Donne. But she chose to return to school in the sciences, hoping that study of the brain would lead her to understand why authors she admired had gone off the rails—and maybe even to help future writers.

She’s worked on two vital questions: “What differences in nature and nurture can explain why some people suffer from mental illness and some do not? And why are so many of the world’s most creative minds among the most afflicted?” As in many areas of neuroscience, the development of scanning technology, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has enabled her to watch the brains of creative people “at work,” and these scans reveal tantalizing clues to her hitherto unanswerable questions.

Earlier work has shown that high IQ is not particularly linked to creativity—“above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t have much effect on creativity,” she says. If she couldn’t predict creativity from IQ measurement (with all its flaws), she had to find other ways to find subjects for research. She looked for external recognition, which led her to the distinguished faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Interviews rather quickly revealed that mood disorders (depression, mostly) were common among the writers and often ran in families. In fact, about 80 percent of the writers she interviewed had such a mental health history, compared with about 30 percent in her control group and in the population at large.

But how to measure creativity in the brain? After years of pondering this difficulty, Andreasen finally arrived at this insight: “Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.”

She has expanded her study to include creative individuals from the sciences as well as the arts. This inclusion has brought her George Lucas, mathematician William Thurston, and six Nobel laureates from the sciences, in addition to novelist Jane Smiley and a group of young creative achievers. Despite their diverse fields, all these individuals show similar brain processes, revealed in the scans, that differ from the workings of control group members’ brains.

Wearing her psychiatrist’s hat, Andreasen talks with her subjects (creatives and controls) about their growing up, family life, relationships, and creative activities. From these interviews, she’s learned that “Creative people work much harder than the average person—and usually that’s because they love their work.” She’s studied 26 people so far—13 creative geniuses and 13 controls—and validated the link between mental illness and creativity as well as the evidence that creativity tends to run in families, though it may not confine itself to a single field.

Other traits of the creatives include a personality style that leads them to take risks, confront rejection, and persist. Of course, she says, “Persisting in the face of doubt or rejection, for artists or for scientists, can be a lonely path,” and may in itself contribute to mental illness. Many creative people are autididacts—they love to teach themselves—and polymaths, with a wide variety of diverse interests. This holds true despite out education system’s persistent separation of the arts and the sciences. “If we wish to nurture creative students,” Andreasen says, “this may be a serious error.”

She closes by referring to the case of John Nash, the Nobel prize-winning mathematician who has schizophrenia (and who lives around the corner from me), profiled in the book and movie A Beautiful Mind. “Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill. And some people, like John Nash, are both.”

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Not My Type

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comic sans, gravestone

Comic Sans used on a gravestone (photo: upload.wikimedia.org)

Perhaps you’ve missed the graphic design world’s kerfluffle over Comic Sans. I had. It’s just a simple, unembellished, jaunty little typeface, I thought, but perhaps its very unassertiveness, its cheery friendliness make it ripe for assault by the typographical bullies, confident Times New Roman and sleek (but dull) Ariel? Oh, sure, sensitive people wouldn’t use Comic Sans for an eviction notice or a letter to the IRS, but are we to abandon it entirely? Apparently so, according to this infographic from Comic Sans Criminal, which displays some of those questionable uses.

When Pope Benedict XVI retired, the Vatican published a photo album of his papacy, along with his resignation letter—all in Comic Sans. The designers behind the website “Ban Comic Sans” responded, “As all seasoned graphic designers know, this is a desecration of the cardinal rule of design – NEVER use Comic Sans.” Then they asked, “Among all the apocalyptic speculation is this simply further proof that the end is near?” And a NSFW defense.

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History is Personal

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Edwards, Wilson County

Edwards graveyard, Wilson County, Tenn. (photo: author)

A trip to the New York Public Library’s Milstein Division this week with three friends was a chance to catch up on the progress we’re making with our family genealogies. Each of us has made surprising discoveries—a grandfather who, as a baby, was left at the doorstep of a foundling hospital; Tennessee Civil War veterans who lived the agonizing struggle of “brother against brother”; the ancestor who lived next door to the real-life House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, and was a member of the Salem Grand Jury two decades before the witch trials; the family grave markers revealing sons who died within days of each other in the 1918 influenza outbreak. I even know the names and a bit of the history of the ships that brought some of my ancestors to America in 1633 and the early 1900’s (Griffin, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Amerika).

All writers can find inspiration in history, says a recent blog on the Writer magazine website by Hillary Casavant. From my own experience, looking at lives reduced to a few lines transcribed from some 180-year-old deed book, or the estate inventory that includes not only “a cowe and hoggs,” but also salt, pepper, and a coffee pot makes you think about what was valuable in a person’s life generations ago. (As a measure of changing living standards, my household has four coffee-pots and three tea-pots. No cowe or hoggs, though.)

These shards of insight prompt the thought, “I’d like to know the story behind that.” Just such an impulse set a writing colleague on a path to research one of her ancestors, born in the late 1800’s—the first woman to serve as a probation officer in the London criminal courts. Information is scattered, and she has the challenge of writing a fictionalized history. Another writer friend is compiling a set of essays on her family’s history that is closer to a conventional memoir, but viewed through a psychological lens—a thoughtful analysis of how a father’s treatment of his sons echoes through the family generations later.

Writers use history in many different ways to “make it real.” From my recent reading, additional examples are Robert Harris’s An Officer and A Spy, a novelization of the infamous Dreyfus case, in which all the players are known, and the mystery The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty, which uses the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland’s HM Prison Maze not only as a backdrop but weaves it into the actions and motivations of the fictional characters. Movies plow this ground endlessly. I really enjoyed The Monuments Men, which, although it prompted inevitable historical quibbles, stayed closer to real experience than the more highly fictionalized The Train, the 1964 Burt Lancaster/Paul Scofield movie on the same theme, which I saw again on TV last night. (Illustrating how far from real life Hollywood must sometimes stray, Wikipedia reports that Lancaster injured his knee playing golf, and to explain his limp, the movie added a scene in which he is shot while crossing a pedestrian bridge. Also, the executions of a couple of characters occurred because the actors had other “contractual obligations.”)

Casavant provides links to websites that can provide historical inspiration, including the

lists of history facts in Mental Floss, a blog of noteworthy letters, and the Library of Congress’s 14.5 million photo and graphic archive. To her suggestions, I’d add that one’s own family history, the unique combinations of external events and internal dynamics that made them who they were, can also be a rich resource. In a sense, it’s a recasting of the much-abused advice to writers to “write what you know.” Or, as George Packer has said (his ancestors lived adjacent to mine on Hurricane Creek in Wilson County, Tennessee, BTW), “History, any history, confers meaning on a life.”

Jennifer Egan’s Organic Writing

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Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Good Squad, Pulitzer Prize, writing, novel

Jennifer Egan (photo: upload.wikimedia,org – David Shankbone)

For a long time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan hadn’t consciously intended to pull together the stories that eventually formed A Visit from the Good Squad into a novel. A recent Glimmer Train interview with talks about the completely organic way of writing she employed in doing so.

The set of stories that form the book’s chapters focus on people who circle the lives of the main characters—Bennie Salazar, an aging punk rocker and recording executive, divorced, and trying to connect with his nine-year old son, and Sasha, a kleptomaniac who has worked for him. Thus, we learn about Bennie’s and Sasha’s past indirectly through these confederates.

Each of these individual stories is told in a unique, technically different way. It wasn’t a matter of just selecting a character and some different approach to telling their story, it was more the challenge of creating stories that actually required different manners of telling. As a result, for example, one is written as a slightly cheesy news story (“Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon!”), and another, in the unsettling second-person, begins, “Your friends are pretending to be all kinds of stuff, and your special job is to call them on it.”

Janet Maslin in The New York Times called the book “uncategorizable.” It wasn’t until Egan had the idea of treating the book like a concept album that its ultimate form suggested itself, she says. She had no desire to write a set of linked short stories with “a similarity of mood and tone.” (An example is Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, which won the 2009 Pulitzer for fiction.)

“I wanted them to sound like they were parts of different books,” Egan says. “Because I felt if I could do that and still have them fuse, that it would be a much more complicated, rich experience.” Sticking with the record-industry theme, she says, “You would never want to listen to an album where all the songs had the same mood and tone.” The group Chicago comes to mind.

Chapter 12, structured as a PowerPoint presentation titled “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” (you can read it here), plunges into previously uncharted literary territory. This unlikely format her interviewer calls “destabilizing,” as well as beautiful and haunting. The challenge in using it, says Egan, was that it is basically a discontinuous form being manipulated to create a continuous narrative. In another writer’s hands, such a deviation from the expected might seem gimmicky, but in Egan’s view that particular chapter demanded to be told in a fragmented way, which PowerPoint enabled. Something unlikely to happen again, she says.

While the books experimentation was praised by critics and has baffled readers, Egan believes that the only legitimate way to experiment in writing is to let the content dictate the form. And that’s where the author’s creativity has to come through. Otherwise it’s an intellectual process laid on top of a story, which from the discerning reader’s point of view, never works.

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Robot Language

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 robots, communication, Luc SteelsA meditation by Visual Thesaurus’s Orin Hargraves on how robots might develop language. He includes an enlightening TED talk with Luc Steels (Vrje Universiteit Brussels, Artificial Intelligence Lab) on experiments with robots’ learning to speak on their own through networks and the complex connections between ideas, rather than through a programmed language provided by humans. Descriptions of some of Steels’s work are embodied in this review.

When researchers allow two robots, who see the world from their own unique vantage points, to invent a way to communicate, they must come up with their own concepts and vocabulary (video). (This sounds depressingly like humans, the “unique vantage point” part and malleable vocabulary.) How will they self-organize language? Will it develop in ways we can understand, that relate to the way humans experience the world? Fascinating.

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Planner or Pantser?

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pantser, writing, author

(photo: upload.wikimedia.org)

This will make sense to the dwindling number of people who remember taking photographs with a Polaroid camera, when, as Anne Lamott says, “the film emerges from the camera with a grayish green murkiness that gradually becomes clearer and clearer.” She compares writing early drafts to watching a Polaroid develop, an inchoate beginning—often a vague mess, in fact—and an almost imperceptible sharpening, a coming into focus, with the people, the setting, everything as the writer sees it.

The question I’m most often asked about my writing is, do I plan the whole book out or do I let it develop as I go along? In writing circles, this distinction is between a “planner” and a “pantser”—a slightly snide reference to people who write “by the seat of their pants.” Most writers use one approach or the other. I use both, depending.

In the opening chapters of the mystery novel I’m finishing now (Sins of Omission), I throw in a lot of unexpected information—scars on a corpse’s wrists suggesting a serious suicide attempt, a snatch of overheard conversation—thinking it may be useful down the road. I also established the chief emotional conflicts for the main character (pride versus shame; bravery versus cowardice; and success versus fear of failing). I wrote about 20,000 words. I had a soup of messy situations, clues and maybe-clues, and a couple of dead bodies. I was at a stopping place, where the characters and plot needed to be reined in so that my eye was on the prize—the solution to the mystery—some 60,000 words ahead. And it would take that many words to get there and plausibly explain everything, consistent with the characters’ personalities and the difficult situations I’ve put them in.

At that 20,000 word mark, when I wasn’t quite sure where to go next, pantsing along, I took a big sheet of paper, wrote down each character’s name, scattered about, and listed every question I could think of relevant to that person. Mind, at that point, I could not answer these questions. But connections started to appear. Arrows. The next place the plot needed to develop was suddenly obvious. For a while, I unfolded that big sheet every morning and organized the plot around the actions needed to address the key questions. Not in 1, 2, 3 order, but in the order enabled by each new event or piece of information.  Some could be answered with a single toxicology report from the police lab, some required several chapters of set-up and resolution. Ultimately, I had 36 of these questions. Here are a few:

  1. Who was Hawk’s father?
  2. Where did Hawk get the drugs?
  3. Why did he confess to murder?
  4. What is Charleston hiding?
  5. What was Charleston’s relationship with Julia?
  6. Who killed Julia?

Even this sample reveals the extent of what I did not know as I was writing! Julia dies in Chapter 1, but we aren’t positive who killed her until Chapter 47 (of 52). Every 10,000 words or so, I reviewed the list. Is this question answered satisfactorily for the reader? If not, am I on a path to answering it? Is the Polaroid coming into focus?

Lately, I’ve started describing this process as “solving the mystery along with the reader.” That’s what it feels like and why I can get up every morning at 5 a.m. to write.

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