Give Consider the Lobster Some Whatchamallit, Consideration

The Footnote King really delivers with his kickass essay collection, Consider The Lobster. He knocks John Updike on his duff (supposedly one of Wallace’s big heroes), he posits that Kafka was really a misunderstood humorist, and that tech crews are the real brains behind political campaigns. He goes out of his way to be a likable agitprop. He succeeds. And it doesn’t hurt that he is a master craftsman of the potent sentence. It’s not all about pretty prose, he loads his lines with philosophical polemics. This ain’t no beach read.

I love his essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” because it’s so frustrating to be such a huge fan only to have a crappy book written about the ex-champ. His argument is really interesting and it reminds me of how disappointed George Plimpton was when he found out that Vladimir Nabokov was a big fat dud in person. Now, Wallace is fully aware that Tracy Austin, his childhood heroine, didn’t even pen her memoir, but rather had a ghostwriter do the dirty deed. Wallace himself admits that though he is a sucker for these sports stories, he usually tries to hide them under something “highbrow” when he’s at a bookstore’s checkout counter.

We all have curiosity about the rich and famous and sometimes we couple this up with a craving for something saucy, something that we know is really, nothing more than junkfood. Boy, does David Foster Wallace know how to pull us in. His opening essay, smartly titled “Big Red Son” is about Hollywood’s evil twin the Porn Industry. The characters are really characters is an understatement, but he doesn’t treat them in a pathetic way. You never get the feeling he is there, leering at the jugs of the porn stars. You can sense how important it is for him to see their humanity. He offers an objective tone, providing a fairly detailed analysis of the key players in the industry: camera men, production companies, journalists, and fans. Because he has such keen insight into what makes the various players tick— petty gripes they’ve had with each other and interests (beyond the screen) you believe his authorial voice.

What makes this collection so appealing is that it covers such a breadth of topics that you have to scratch your head and wonder how the hell this guy does it? You know he’s a meat-eater through and through, but he seems to, convincingly, plead the case for protecting the lobster from its vicious fate of being dumped into scalding hot pot. The lobster hangs on for dear life (by the claw) when he’s tossed in a pot. The lifelong loner is the type of animal (I use this word in its broadest sense) that hates, absolutely hates to be claw-to-claw with other crustaceans and that is how he spends his last moments before you point to him and choose him for your surf and turf dinner.

The sort of book review/romp on John Updike is classic, and it clues us into what D.F Wallace is all about. Wallace takes umbrage with the GMNs. The Great Male Narcissists. He includes Updike, Roth, and Mailer as the 3 horsemen of this enterprise. Wallace admits that he’s always been a big fat fan of Updike, but knows too that there’s a wee bit of misogyny going on between the covers. He’s not against the Updike obsession with penises and desire to roam free and be one’s own man, but that this is the overwhelming theme of pretty much everything the guy has ever written. Surely, a protagonist could be better-rounded. So maybe there’s a boatload of sentences that deserve lots of oohing and aahing, in the end, you want to smack some sense into his protagonists.

Love him, loath him. David Foster Wallace can write some stretchy sentences, but he's got lots of pop, and is always engaging.

NaNo Wrimo Advice: Look to the Scene Amigo

NaNo Wrimo has crossed the halfway point. Now the uphill battles begins. There are eleven more days to make the critical threshold. It might be a good idea to call in sick from work if you are overly stressed and want to hit your number. Maybe you write better under pressure.

I’ll tell you something that often works for me and I do this with all of my fiction. I go to dialogue when I need to spur fresh writing. I want to see my characters respond in different situations. I might even find something juicy about my character and when I learn it a spate of information rushes forth. And there is your writing blitz.

If it were another month I’d spend more time exploring the underlying reasons why my character did such and such. I might even question it and see if it jived with the stuff we knew about him previously. But, that’s not going to cut the mustard, not if you are only at 20,000 words and you need to bang out 30,000 more in eleven days.

The point is you need to do whatever it takes to open up your story so that it will move forward. Let me strike that previous comment. It’s okay to move backward too. Let’s say you feel you’ve hit an impasse because you think you ended your novel. That’s fine, but with the writing frenzy you’ve been partaking in there’s no way in the world you’ve scratched the surface of a fully-realized character let alone a full cast of them.

Go back and develop fresh scenes. Use dialogue to move it along. See how each character responds to plain comments, random comments, and bizarre requests. And especially pay attention to that last one. It might just carry the seed to another chapter or even a whole new novel.

Think of these encouraging words by Philip Roth. “It takes two-hundred or so pages just to get going.” Now this seems daunting, it makes writing a herculean task and frankly it is. But, if it takes a master that long to get going you can see how manipulating your characters will be for the their best interest as well as the success of your novel.

I am also a big believer in taking short pauses to gather yourself and figure out where you want to go next. There is plenty of free-writing. But, I don’t always see the merit in pure free-writing. For the most part, I see it as fruitless typing. I think your best off if you arm yourself with a few simple questions. Have them written down so you can return to them when you are in a writing session. Nobody says you have to answer the question in any particular way. But, by making the effort to answer the question you will have keyed in some words. That’s the point.

I had a great writing teacher by the name of Craig Lesley who was a student of Raymond Carver and Craig always said when you get into trouble always go back to the scene. We talked a lot about this very subject when I was working on some short stories and he asked me, quite slyly, “How many scenes do you have?” and I remember the first time he asked me this I hadn’t a clue. Well, a lot has changed since then. For one, I think in scenes even if I am spouting off in a stream of conscious narrative. Go back to “Portnoy’s Complaint” if you don’t believe me. Roth’s narrator starts off by telling his shrink everything in his head. It’s essentially and unfiltered monologue, but low and behold there are scenes in it and it’s not because after a while you realize he’s talking to his shrink, but because he directly addresses his mother, his father, and even his alter ego. He replays scenes from childhood.

Don’t rewrite “Portnoy’s Complaint,” but if you find yourself coming to a halt then go into interrogative mode. Pit different characters who haven’t met each other yet into scenes. Some really nifty things will happen. I promise you. And don’t worry whether or not you think this is going to make it into the final draft. NaNo Wrimo is about getting it onto the page. Give your inner editor the month off.