One of the difficult things about writing a novel is that there are so many details to research. The list is endless. If I were Margaret Atwood I’d have a team of researchers to help me, but alas, I am on my own. I thought I would turn to the internets for help. Does anyone know the answer to any of these questions?
1] What are the names of a couple well-known American military generals from the Vietnam War? [If not generals, then men in the top ranks.]
2] I haven’t been back to NYC in a while. Are there bars/pubs that have outdoor tables? Here that is very common, but I don’t recall seeing this in NYC. [I am particularly interested in the West Village.]
3] Does anyone know any rap songs with vile, misogynist lyrics? I need to find some of these lyrics so I can use them as inspiration for satire.
4] A couple airplane questions…Are there skydiving planes that can fit upwards of 20 people in them? Why can skydiving planes open their doors in the air and not crash, but if a jetliner did that everyone would get sucked out? Is this just because of the altitude of the plane or some other feature? I need a pilot to steal a plane that evil people can be thrown out of mid-air. I was thinking of a skydiving plane since the doors can open, but any other ideas?
5] Acid attacks against women are widespread in countries like India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. I’m wondering what legitimate uses sulphuric acid has? I’m guessing it must have some legitimate purpose, otherwise it wouldn’t be so widely available to the general public.
6] If you put $700 into a bank account every month for twelve years (from 1995 – 2007), anyone have any idea how much interest you’d earn on this sum of around $100,000?
7] If you’re applying for a handgun in NYC…where do you actually apply for the license?
8] Would 4 women of reasonable strength be able to roll over a small pick-up truck?
Not a great day, really. I couldn’t face the novel; the thought of it made me want to weep. I’m suffering from terrible sciatic pain too, which I blame for my mood. So I accomplished nothing today, though tonight I read de Maupassant’s short story Butterball. Reading this description of Butterball -
“Her face was a russet apple, a peony bud about to flower; above, two magnificent black eyes opened wide, shaded by great thick lashes that cast a shadow all around; and below, a charming mouth, with pursed lips all moist for kissing, well furnished with gleaming microscopic baby teeth.”
…was the highlight of my day, particularly the bit about the peony bud. Lovely.
You may remember that I recently disabled comments on an old Harry Potter post I wrote, one that was highly critical of the series and dared to say that it’s sexist. I disabled the comments because I grew tired of being subjected to the rantings and ravings of the semi-literate loons of the internet. Well, now these Harry Potter fans are trying to break through my defenses…by leaving comments on other posts. I just heard from “Jim,” who thinks he has out-smarted me by leaving a comment on a 3-year-old post. He writes: “Just wanted to say your [sic] retarded.” Gee thanks, Jim! “You think your [sic] deep and introspective..but really your [sic] just an attention seeking douche wanting to capitalize on a popular series to fell [sic] fulfilled by other people agreeing with your inane viewpoints.”
Jim, you are the ambassador for Harry Potter the world needs. Thanks for stopping by.
After reading Jim’s comments, I’m wondering if I should change the name of my blog from “Anglofille: An American in London” to “Anglofille: An Attention-Seeking Douche in London.” It’s catchy. Thoughts?
BTW, Jim, you might find this link to be helpful: click here.
I have a character in my novel who appears for only a couple pages, but he has a backstory that is quite complicated. Does anyone know if it would have been possible to escape from the Warsaw Ghetto during the uprising of 1943? This character’s parents and sister would have ended up being taken to Treblinka, but he somehow escapes before being deported. No idea how he could escape or if this would have even been possible.
Also, he needs to take refuge in a cinema. Would there have been cinemas still operating in Warsaw during the war?
Does anyone know of any novels that have scenes between a therapist and a patient? Preferably repeated scenes with a lot of dialogue?
In my novel, I have many scenes between my narrator and a therapist. I feel as if I’m cheating by having her pour out her secrets to this therapist (and vicariously to the reader). I want to see how other writers have done this.
When I got back from France, I slipped into a terrible “writing depression.” This is what I’ve named my writing-related depressions (creative, yes I know). Other things in my life were going fine – I like the place where I’m living now, I’ve seen friends since I’ve been back, but the writing wasn’t going well. I would sit at the computer and want to cry and scream. I’d work for 20 minutes and then get into bed and pull the covers over my head. One day I literally could not get out of bed until after noon (a bad sign), in order to avoid the computer. Another day I said screw it and went to see “Robin Hood.” It just wasn’t happening. After a while this angst began to spill over into other areas of life and put me into a dark mood. I wanted to quit my PhD, quit the novel and just flee. I can’t explain how painful and intense this is when it’s happening. It’s like drowning. You can’t just say to yourself, “Oh, everything will be okay.” It seems like nothing will ever be okay again.
[By the way, if you're in this situation, I don't recommend watching Secret Window with Johnny Depp, as I did...]
Thankfully, on Thursday things began to work again. Just like that. Friday and today I’ve been in a writing frenzy. I got my mojo back, though I have absolutely no idea why it went away and why it came back again.
One thing I’ve really thought about lately is how much writing a novel happens on a subconscious level. There’s craft to consider, there’s hard work and discipline, but there’s more. There’s something that cannot be understood or controlled (despite what your writing teacher may tell you). All the time when I’m writing well, connections are made, ideas crop up, things click into place in a way that often amazes me. You have to do the hard work to get to this place – you have to plant the seeds – but there’s part of the creative process that is mysterious and you just have to wait for it. I think some of my “writing depressions” may be a result of a problem on this level.
Or maybe I’m just a nut. That’s always possible.
I just read this interview with David Mitchell (the novelist) where he discusses his new novel. In talking about the writing process, he said he had to finish writing his novel before it finished him. I think that’s where I am. I still have so much work left to do, but I have this real sense of urgency now. This can’t drag on for much longer or I won’t make it to the end.
That picture up there is my computer monitor. I plug my MacBook into a giant flat-screen monitor, which I absolutely adore and could not live without. The photo is of Carroll Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I used to live on that street, though I don’t remember it being so colorful. I took this photo a couple years ago when I was visiting and just discovered it in my Flickr account. Funnily enough, the character in my novel also lives on Carroll Street in Brooklyn, at least for the first 200 pages. What a coincidence, eh? I put this photo as my wallpaper and since my monitor is so big, it’s like I’m looking out a window onto Carroll Street. It helps me channel the character. In certain ways, my novel uses Alice in Wonderland as an inspiration. The narrator is called Alicia, etc., but strangely enough, even though I’ve known the character lives on Carroll Street for years, it wasn’t until recently that I made the connection between Carroll Street and Lewis Carroll. These weird connections happen all the time, often unintentionally. I had it happen a few times today. It feels good when everything is working on all different levels.
In July of 2007 I wrote a blog post about how sexist the Harry Potter books/films are. This post has received a lot of attention over the years for reasons unknown to me, but lately I have been bombarded with comments. I’m guessing someone out there on a Harry Potter website has linked to my post. I’m getting sick of all this traffic from crazed Harry Potter fans, so today I finally disabled the comments and changed the content of the post. Yes, it’s a mean message. I know some of my regular readers have left comments there and my bitchiness isn’t directed at you, but rather at the people who comment that I’m a bitch, that I need psychiatric help, etc. For the record, I don’t need psychiatric help…I HAVE TASTE IN BOOKS!!! If you like Harry Potter, I don’t begrudge you that, but for god’s sake, get a life. Stop and think about why some stranger on the internet putting down your precious Potter enrages you so. After you figure this out, then try to take all that intense passion and channel it into something that actually matters in life.
I delete the vast majority of these comments, but it’s just becoming a tiresome chore, which is why I’ve deleted the post and disabled the comments. My favorite comments are from people who aren’t smart but think they are, such as this comment I received today from a lady who says that the Harry Potter books can’t be sexist because a woman wrote them. She wrote: “What kind of woman would put her own gender down?!”
…bangs head against wall…
Deranged Harry Potter commenters, here are three helpful tips that you can feel free to clip, put in your wallet and take with you on the journey of life:
1] Just because you can read a book doesn’t mean you can do literary criticism;
2] Just because you are female doesn’t mean you have the first clue about gender issues;
3] Just because you have a keyboard and an internet connection doesn’t mean you have anything interesting to say.
Well, to update my previous post, I’ve been set straight on the whole magazine issue! I’ve put the magazine back in the novel and broadened the scope a bit so that there’s an online version of the magazine and also, the editor of the magazine (who my character works for) appears on TV as well. So it’s more dynamic now, but retains the magazine that I really missed when I took it out.
I have been writing very intensely this week. I go for about three hours, then must stop because I get a headache. So I take a break and then try to write for three more hours, and so on. After tomorrow I am free from all other responsibilities until the middle of January. Hurrah! My goal is to revise the first 300 pages of the novel during my time off. I still have a few chapters left to write, but I’ve decided to go back to the beginning and do some revision. This will help me get reacquainted with my character in the early chapters and maintain continuity of voice. Also, I need to start sending proposals out to agents and if I get lucky, someone may request to see the first chapters, so I want to be prepared. I met with my supervisor this week and I really need to get an agent and try to at least get a publishing deal, otherwise I have no chance of getting a university job. I don’t necessarily want a university job anymore – I’d rather write and perhaps work as a visiting lecturer here and there – but on a practical level, I will likely need a full-time job to support myself. I’m too old not to be realistic about that.
In the opening chapters of my novel, the protagonist works for the editor of a teenage fashion magazine. She has a particular kind of job that I don’t want to mention. I based this on my own experiences in the New York magazine world. When I first wrote these opening chapters way back when, there was no Devil Wears Prada or Ugly Betty. In short, writing about magazines wasn’t a big cliche. I was writing with Plath’s The Bell Jar in mind, where she recounts her experiences working at Mademoiselle. For a feminist novelist, this is rich terrain, but sadly, it’s all been ruined by crappy ‘chick lit’ authors and Hollywood hacks. Still, I kept the magazine element in the book because it’s my novel and I wanted to be true to my vision. This is why I was quite surprised when yesterday, I suddenly realized that the magazine has to be cut from the book. Not just because it’s cliched territory, but more importantly, because print magazines don’t have a bright future. (Look at newspapers.) A couple of the magazines I used to write for, including the aforementioned Mademoiselle, no longer exist. And for the teen demographic, which is what I’m writing about in the early chapters, it’s even worse. This demographic wasn’t raised on print magazines as we were. They’ve been raised on internet porn instead.
The world has changed a lot in the ten years this novel has been part of my life. It’s changed in ways I never could have predicted. Having a magazine in the book will make it dated, so the magazine is gone. Instead of working for a magazine editor, my character will now work for the host of a television show. Television as we know it is changing as well, but I think it’s more relevant than print magazines. The job my character has can be transferred to TV pretty easily, though it won’t be the same as having the magazine in the book. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t just a wee bit brokenhearted.
Of course, if print is dead, what does that say about the future of novels?
I have an important question I’d like to pose. Skip down to the bottom if you don’t want to read my blathering about my book…
Okay. So today I met with my PhD supervisor. She hasn’t really seen any of my work since January. That’s because of me. I don’t like letting go of novel chapters unless I think they are absolutely ready to be read by another person. It’s a very personal thing to me. But given how long the process of writing this novel is dragging on, I knew my supervisor was anxious to see something. I sent her some excerpts from various chapters, much of it from those chapters dealing with pornography that I wrote while in France this summer, the chapters that nearly sent me over the edge and made me want to give up writing forever. Those chapters. I’ve been working in isolation for months and months on this very strange material, without anyone seeing my work. And as I was about to send this material off, I began to wonder: Am I nuts? I’m writing all this very strange, very politically charged material, much of it about the vileness that is pornography. These chapters involve people being tortured and killed, explicit descriptions of pornography, explicit feminist politics, etc. I started to fear that perhaps I’d lost it, that I was writing all this stuff that would make my supervisor laugh at me, or think I’m disturbed or twisted, or perhaps make her want to order a psych evaluation for me. I pictured myself being kicked out of my PhD program for writing crap that’s not good enough to pass the PhD. I suddenly realized that much of what I’m writing is a huge risk…and that this was the first time anyone else had read it. I never expected to feel such vulnerability.
Much to my relief, my supervisor loved what I’ve written. She raved about it and said that it’s the best material I’ve written, that the novel is now much more exciting and that no one else out there is writing this kind of stuff. She also said that the vulnerability I felt was a good thing- it means something is at stake, that what I’m doing is daring, that it’s not safe. She even suggested a writer who could perhaps be one of my PhD examiners, someone who has been short-listed for the Booker Prize. I never expected this kind of reaction at all, so I was surprised and relieved. She said my work reminds her of Murakami and Atwood. Yay! So after this meeting I am feeling much more confident. All the hell I put myself through this summer may have been worth it. Of course she hasn’t read the whole novel – no one has – but I feel a lot more sure of myself now. Maybe I’m not nuts after all.
I have a new deadline to finish everything up until the last chapter by the middle of January. I am aiming for this, but it’s flexible. I can only guesstimate how many more pages I have left to write – it’s impossible to know for certain.
Those of you who’ve been reading the blog for a long time might remember that I was inspired to write this novel after seeing the film Fight Club. That was ten longs years ago. Crikey. I haven’t been working on this novel for ten years. In fact, almost everything in the book now has been written in the past two years. But still, it’s been part of my life in some way for a really long time. Fight Club appeals to me because it deals with issues of gender in a kick-ass way. It’s about men, not women, but after I saw the film for the first time, I wondered if there could ever be a book or film that deals with gender issues from a female perspective with the same kind of spirit. I’d never seen anything like that for women – and I still haven’t. Women get Bridget Jones and Sex and the City – enough said.
As I’ve been writing my kick-ass book about women, however, I’ve begun to think that it’s much more complicated to be a woman than a man. It’s not easy to translate the spirit of Fight Club into a book dealing so explicitly with femaleness. Being a woman is much more complicated – at least that’s the way it seems to me as I write this book. I’m not saying it’s inherently more complicated to be a female (though biologically it probably is), but I mean that it’s more complicated because society/culture/whatever has made it that way. I’ve never been a man, so perhaps I’m biased!
I knew I’d have a meltdown during the last year of my PhD, but I didn’t expect it to come right at the beginning of the first term. This past week was not good. Once again, I have gotten in way over my head with too many responsibilities. Three jobs, for crying out loud, on top of a full-time PhD that’s in its last year. This wasn’t intentional. I have my American job and then I accepted two classes at the language school where I’ve taught for years. I’ve never taught two classes there at once, since one class alone is about 7 hours of teaching time. But since I have to pay rent now, I accepted the two classes. Only after I accepted the classes at the language school did my university offer me the teaching job that I wrote about in my last post. I obviously couldn’t turn that down, so voila – three jobs.
The two classes at the language school equal about 14 hours of teaching time, not counting marking and prep (which is, of course, unpaid). The university job is only 2 hours a week, but those two hours pay more than a seven-hour class at the other school, which is the educational equivalent of a sweatshop. British university lecturers have it made, let me tell you. I’d love to see the lecturers I know survive one week at the language school. Anyway, the language school job was just too much even on its own. I knew I had to do something about it, but I had committed to the classes. Once the term starts, it’s really crappy to back out of a class. So I felt conflicted, but my PhD and novel were on the line – if I kept the 14 hours, I could kiss my PhD and novel goodbye, because in my time away from teaching, I was just too exhausted to write. The PhD/novel requires dedicated, concentrated work and a level of mental energy that is not easy to sustain if there are too many other distractions. Last Wednesday I was in bed with stomach pains and couldn’t move. Everyday I just felt like crying. Finally I was honest with my boss at the language school – I told him I felt as if I were drowning. I thought he would be angry or fire me, but for whatever reason he was nice about it (in some way, it must benefit him). So now I just have one class there, one class at the university and my American job, which I can take time off of if I need to. It’s still too much, but this is one of the most expensive cities in the world and living here ain’t cheap. I’ll have less money, but at least now I’ll have time to write each day.
When I think about all the the sacrifices I’ve made for this novel and PhD, I feel sick. If it were just the PhD, it wouldn’t be worth it. But the novel could be something really great, so I’ll finish the damn thing, even if I’m poverty stricken and my life is in shreds by the end of it.
I finished the week with a terrible sinus cold, but even still I managed to get some writing done this weekend. I hadn’t been writing for a while. I still can’t write at home, so went out to a cafe this afternoon and wrote five pages while drinking hot chocolate (okay, and eating a brownie). I really missed my character so much. Writing and spending time with her this weekend was like being with an old friend. It’s strange to have feelings like this about someone who doesn’t actually exist in any way except in words, but the fact that I have such strong feelings about her and that I feel she is real on some level perhaps means that I am doing something right. I still have a few months of writing left to go and then the revisions, but I have this sense that I’m nearing the end of my time with her. I think the next few months are going to be about that – sending her out into the world on her own, my little girl.
So it seems as if I have my writing mojo back. I was in hell for a month or more, but now the words are flowing again. I can only write in public spaces (libraries and cafes), rather than at home. No idea why – this is certainly a new thing, but I’ll go with it. The other day I was at the British Library and I was writing in a white heat – those moments writers love – when I realized the library was closing. Ahhhhh! I ran down the street with my laptop and found a Costa and started writing again. Luckily I hadn’t lost my momentum. It was at this moment that I knew I truly had my mojo back – running down Euston Road like a maniac with a laptop is a pretty good sign.
I’ve lost my mojo and then found it again so many times. It’s exhausting. This last freak-out I had over my writing was the worst one I’ve experienced since I started my PhD. It was thoroughly horrible, but it’s over. Now I’m in the homestretch, so perhaps I won’t experience another one of these before I finish. When I’m done I’ll have tons of revision to do, but still, it’ll all be there on paper – beginning, middle and end. I really need to get to that place. Since we’re heading into autumn now, I’m hopeful that I’ll really, truly, finally reach the end of the book soon (by “soon” I mean the end of October if I’m lucky). Autumn is my most productive time of the year. I’m not going to set myself a deadline though – my self-imposed deadlines cause more harm than good.
The current chapters I’m writing aren’t so dark, which makes my life easier. It’s still sad though. For the past two days, my character has almost made me cry. When I write, I feel what she feels. It’s a weird feeling. It’s also strange to be in public when this happens, especially at the British Library, because I often see people there that I know. I think I need to spend more time in cafes so I can channel my character and not feel self-conscious. We don’t really have the Parisian kinds of cafes here – only the London kind, which is Starbucks, Costa and Nero. I’ve made my peace with these chains because they have sofas and cushy chairs. You don’t have that in Paris, so there.
As for the British Library, why does everyone working there have a Mac? Is this the status symbol of the London intelligentsia? We’re like a flock of sheep. I like to feel unique, dammit! I am a unique snowflake.
Reading
The other day my internet went out for 24 hours and, surprise surprise, I got a lot more reading done. Reading of actual books. So I realized I need to put myself on an internet diet, because I waste far too much time online. And really, 90 percent of time spent online is a waste. David Ulin’s piece from the L.A. Times does a good job of examining how the internet and all the other digital crap makes it more difficult to concentrate on reading books these days:
“…after spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page…Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down. What I’m struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it’s mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.”
I experience this constantly and my recent internet outage highlighted just how destructive this is to my reading life. I think this might be one reason I find it easier to write in public – no internet access. So anyway, an internet diet for me now. I’ve got a stack of non-fiction books to get through.
For the past month I have been searching for a novel to read. I think the problem is that I can’t read fiction while I’m writing it so intensely myself, but I crave a novel. It’s a terrible feeling to want that nourishment that only fiction can provide but not be able to find it. Two Augusts ago, I went through a Virginia Woolf spell, when her words put me on the right path and just spoke to me in a way that I needed. Last August I discovered Murakami, who helped me fix a big problem with my novel (without him, I’m not sure what would have happened with my book). This August I expected the magic to happen again, that I’d stumble upon the perfect book, but no. Nothing. It’s painful. Quite literally painful. Last week I re-read an old favorite, a short novel called ‘Pereira Declares’ by Antonio Tabucchi (read a review here). I love this book and highly recommend it, but it’s so short that I breezed right through it. And since I’d already read it, I didn’t have the sense of discovery that comes with reading something new. I’ve been tempted to buy the new Coetzee, but I dunno…it doesn’t grab me. It seems even more self-aggrandizing than his last book. You lucky American readers have the chance to buy Lorrie Moore’s new book…her first in 11 years! If you have this book, I hate you. Seriously, get out of my sight. I adore Lorrie Moore. We have to wait for everything here – books, films, technology. Not fair!
So anyway, I’m novel-less. I’ve been through the entire fiction section at the university library and countless bookstores, but I can’t find anything I want to read. I start books and abandon them. I think it’s just me and my state of mind at this time. Perhaps I only have room in my head for my own words right now. Thank heavens my words are finally there again.
Yesterday in an email exchange I told a friend of mine that my novel has become much more political than I had originally envisioned. I wrote that if I ever manage to finish this novel, I’m not sure I’ll have the courage to publish it. She wrote back with this quote from “The Golden Notebook” (Mother Sugar speaking to Anna):
“You’re afraid of writing what you think about life, because you might find yourself in an exposed position, you might expose yourself, you might be alone.”
True.
In other news, I’m leaving Paris on Monday. Just the other day I bought a Eurostar ticket for August 22nd, thinking I’d leave one week earlier than I had originally planned. That would have given me ten more days here, but then today that all changed. I was calling around trying to find short-term accommodation in London and, miracle of miracles, I landed a place I’ve been trying to get for weeks and weeks. Relief! This is a place where I’ve lived before. It’s not a student place, but it’s similar – I’ll just have an en-suite room, not a flat. There’s a shared kitchen on the floor. It’s in Southwark, which can be a bit dodgy, particularly at night, so you have to be careful. But I know that it’s a nice, clean place and for London it’s damn cheap, which is why it’s so difficult to get a room there. The room is available for Monday, which is why I’m leaving here even earlier than my other earlier departure date. They only take reservations a couple days in advance and I can’t gamble on another room becoming available. This place makes all the difference between me feeling stable and calm and me feeling terribly angsty and unhappy. It just takes a huge weight off my shoulders, y’all. I’ve been a bundle of anxiety lately. I can stay at this place for as long as I want and it’s affordable, which means I won’t have any pressure to find a flat right away.
This only gives me a couple days left in Paris, which is a bit of a shock. I’ve ended up with an extra Eurostar ticket, so I may come back to visit in October – my favorite time in Paris. For now, I just feel I need to get back to London. I’m applying for teaching jobs, need to visit the doc, need the library and want to see my friends.
A few people have asked me why I haven’t been sightseeing while I’m in Paris [I haven't even taken a photo of the Eiffel Tower!]. Well, I didn’t come here as a tourist. Remember I was supposed to go to NYC this summer for writing and research, but that plan fell apart. I was left on the verge of homelessness in London and decided to come to Paris on what was, essentially, a whim. I spent my first month here writing non-stop, then spent a little while traveling and have since spent my days having a complete meltdown over my writing. Not much time for seeing the sights of Paris, then. But now that I’m leaving toot sweet, I will get out more, look at some art, point my camera at a few pretty things and all that, just to make everyone feel better.
I’m very unhappy that Ruth Padel has stepped down as Oxford’s Professor of Poetry. I didn’t intend to write about this issue, since I don’t really have the energy for it, but this is so unbelievably sexist. The first female Professor of Poetry in Oxford history is pressured to resign just days after being elected to the post. Surprise, surprise. Apparently she “smeared” Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott (her rival for the post, who later withdrew from the running) by repeating claims that he sexually harassed female students in the past. In the 1980s, Walcott was admonished by Harvard for pressuring a freshman to have sex with him and in the 1990s he settled a lawsuit by another student for sexual harassment as well. I think this is highly relevant when considering Walcott’s suitability to become Professor of Poetry, yet these charges against him have been roundly described as “character assassination” and anyone who mentions them is vilified.
Anglofille is an American living in London, finishing up a novel and a PhD, taking photos, and blogging about expat life, books, feminism and perpetual angst.
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