Coming-of-Age Without Any Change: A Movie Review of The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)

I have a longstanding fascination with adaptations.

When I was younger, instead of allowing myself to watch the utterly forbidden R-rated movies I longed to see, like Never Let Me Go, High Fidelity, and Girl, Interrupted, I would buy the novel and enjoy the R-rated material in private, because thankfully books come without ratings, and my parents, unless they dropped everything and read along with me, had no idea what sort of smut I was shoveling into my brain.

Hypocritical, yes, but one does what one must under oppressive regimes to answer burning questions about the world.

Something happens though, when I finally get around to watching the movie adaptations of some of my most beloved books. I often end up disappointed with the results. And I’m not sure if it has anything having to do with the quality of any of it or is due simply to the order in which they were consumed. Are these books actually so much better than their movie adaptations, or do I love them more because I happened to experience them first, like an imprinting, attaching my sentiments to products of my imagination rather than of casting directors and set designers?

(Then of course sometimes the movie is better–like in the case of Forrest Gump, The Princess Bride, and The Shawshank Redemption–but these are movies I saw first, so I don’t know if I just imprinted on the first format I experienced or if the written versions really are sub-par. It probably matters that these three movies are all critically acclaimed and add major elements that were missing from the original written versions. I’ve probably just answered my question.)

But the question of which is better, movies or books is an old one. It probably doesn’t have an answer, but I feel I’m pretty close when I say neither, they’re different media. When I wonder about this, I’m not wondering so much about quality, but rather my age-old obsession with reader/viewer experience, and what circumstances must be in place and what criteria met in order to create a perfect bond between a work of art and its consumer.

Bearing all this in mind, let’s tackle my recent viewing of Desiree Akhavan’s and Cecilia Frugiuele’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post, starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Sasha Lane, and Forrest Goodluck.

First off, four things that get in the way of me liking this movie:

• I finished the book on Friday and watched the movie the following Monday
• No 90-minute movie could ever convey the same depth as 143k words of prose
• The Montana setting, a major part of what I love about the book, is completely absent from the movie
• I was raised in a homophobic Christian cult, albeit without conversion therapy camps, giving me a more nuanced perspective on the subject than this movie presents. (For a quick look at what gay Jehovah’s Witnesses are taught about their sexuality, check out this excerpt from the book given to every teenager: https://www.jw.org/en/bible-teachings/teenagers/ask/pressure-to-be-gay/ )

(Spoilers? Definitely spoilers.)

This movie starts off great. In the silence stretching behind the beginning title cards, I tried to envision the first sounds I would hear: the slosh of water of Cameron’s breaststroke across Lake Scanlan, the pop of firecrackers in the summer, an early-nineties alternative track, maybe even Cameron herself in voice-over, typical of book adaptations. I was pleased to find us jumping right into the meat of the problem: the reassuring voice of a pastor conducting a teen bible study group, complete with awkward close-ups of bibles and captive faces. We’re presented with the concept that teenagers are at an age where they’re especially vulnerable to evil. At hearing this, Cameron sighs anxiously and looks away. “What feels like fun is actually the enemy, and that enemy is closing the noose around your neck,” her pastor says over shots of her and an unnamed girl riding bikes to her house, checking to make sure they’re alone, and making out in her room. Next the girls get ready for prom, revealing Cameron’s discomfort in being dolled-up with lipstick and blush, posing with her boyfriend for photos, being told she’s beautiful. The girls find themselves in the back of a car, smoking pot and making out again, hands in each other’s panties. Cameron’s boyfriend catches them, and next thing we know, she’s off to God’s Promise Camp.

It’s an effective beginning. Trouble is, I don’t know who Cameron is beyond a girl who likes girls. I don’t know how she feels about her bible education, her relationship with the aunt who sent her away, with her girlfriend or her boyfriend, or anything really. I hoped I’d get a better sense of her personality as the movie progressed, but mostly all she does is react. She arrives fully-formed in her convictions that she did nothing wrong, and at end leaves no different. And even though I agree wholeheartedly that she did nothing wrong, that doesn’t mean I want to watch an entire movie about that non-revelation.

Other characters are better drawn. We get a real sense of their personality, their fears and conflicts. Cameron’s conflict is that she’s stuck in this backwards camp and wants to leave, so she does, with little apparent difficulty. She has nothing about herself that needs examining, which is fine except that this is all set up as a coming of age story. Maybe it isn’t, and I was just expecting that from the source material. I get the feeling, though, that the filmmakers saw the conversion camp as the most compelling element of the story and cut out everything that didn’t support that throughline.

That includes important characterization for the main character. The book provides a strong source of conflict for Cameron. The same day that she first kisses a girl, her parents die in a freak accident, and her first thought upon learning this is “Thank God they won’t have to find out about me.” The rest of the book shows her journey of acceptance, not just of herself but of her parents’ deaths. When she finally leaves God’s Promise, it’s to visit the location of their accident and let them go, looking forward to a future where she doesn’t have to feel the weight of her own guilt upon her. It’s a testament to Cameron’s strength that she goes to conversion therapy camp and there learns acceptance, despite the harmful rhetoric of sin and self-destruction she’s taught.

From what I can tell, movie Cameron enters the camp already in possession of herself. And on the one hand, I like that. It’s an interesting angle to explore, but the trouble is the rest of the story doesn’t support it. I think there’s a story out there about the girl who stays strong despite a system designed to tear her down, and I want to read it, but Cameron Post is not structured that way. Without the arc of change for the main character, there’s not enough to propel the plot further. In lack of any other source of propulsion, it becomes dull, leaving me unfulfilled at the end instead of enlightened.

The Atlantic review acknowledges this quality but spins it into praise:

Even though its running time is short, at 90 minutes, The Miseducation of Cameron Post does drag simply because it’s so much about inertia. The camp is trying to change Cameron, but the assuredness of Moretz’s performance suggests there’s no possibility of that. Akhavan’s script (co-written with Cecilia Frugiuele) commendably avoids melodramatic twists or explosive, expository arguments, though it does mean that the film drifts to an ending more than anything else. Akhavan’s confident move, in the end, is that she can tell a story of a person finding their identity without depicting a transformation. This is a film about Cameron’s core personhood, and how it stands up to concentrated efforts to transform it, and it’s told with quiet steeliness and grace.

David Sims, The Atlantic, AUG 1, 2018

One person’s quiet steeliness is another person’s tedious frustration, I guess.

All in all, I found the movie watchable. There were long shots I wasn’t sure conveyed anything other than the awkward atmosphere of the camp, but it’s generally well-edited and clings tightly to its central premise, that conversion camps suck and aren’t worth anyone’s time.

To which I say, well duh.

I guess I was just looking for a little bit more.

Do you know of any books that don’t hold a candle to their movie adaptations, or vice versa? Let me know in the comments!

A Momentous Weekend: In Which I Take Myself Seriously (And Get Disowned)

AND it’s double-sided!

I printed my manuscript this weekend. It took an hour to get all the Google Drive files together and get it properly formatted, and by the time the printer finally stopped whirring and enjoyed a well-earned rest, I had a block of paper so thick it surprised even me, and I’m the one who spent the past six years writing it.

With the house to myself for a couple days, I’m trying to get the whole thing read out loud. I spent six hours yesterday entertaining the mice in the crawl space with my teenage melodrama, and it’s surprising what I missed, considering how many times I’ve gone over this damn thing. I’m definitely not a vomit drafter. I can’t stand typos and often consult a dictionary before committing words to the narrative, so I didn’t think I’d have so many doubles and missing articles. I’m happy to say that for the most part, everything reads as smoothly out loud as it did in my head. I like to think of myself as someone who writes mainly by rhythm. I have to hear the music before I consider it right, and that apparently takes for-freaking-ever.

Hearing my story out loud in my own thin voice has helped me understand exactly what it is I’ve accomplished. When I went to Office Max to find a manuscript box–which apparently they don’t make anymore–I felt like a fraud trying to explain to the helpful sales associate what I wanted, that sometimes you print out your novel manuscript and need a convenient way to store almost an entire ream of paper. Because obviously that implies I printed out a novel manuscript, and what business would I have doing that?

But I’m enjoying the process. There are parts I’ll probably never be able to sand out, but there are also parts that legitimately make my heart race. I love the suspense and the way the characters keep getting themselves into deeper shit. I love how much they want what’s right in front of them, if only they could get over themselves and take it. And even though I know how it all works out, I still want everything to be perfect for my fragile little babies, and I’m happy to see I didn’t let that happen. Part of the delay in getting this thing done was going from a happy ending in the first draft to one that’s bittersweet. Because I don’t know how you can write about false imprisonment and emotional neglect and expect everything to be fine. Even when you actually do get justice, things are rarely ever fine.

#

My parents officially disowned me on Friday. That was a great start to my weekend. They’ve spent years toying with the idea, going back and forth on whether or not my very presence is detrimental to their spiritual health, so in some ways it’s good they finally made a decision. I haven’t seen them in eight months, so it’s not like anything has actually changed. It’s just final now. Before, the ball was sitting in their court. I told them that if they wanted a daughter, they need to act like it and actually talk to me. Friday they told me that won’t happen until I leave my husband and start believing in God again. (Over text message, no less.) So, there you go.

It’s been quite the weekend.

I decided against canceling Friday’s dinner plans and had my friend over anyway. We had a lovely time. She brought a vegan cheesecake and we drank wine and debated politics and watched a movie about a teenage girl who gets possessed. To my parents, this makes me evil. To me, it means I’m undeniably alive.

My dad was actually one of the first people to read the first draft. It’s funny to me that I wrote it over the summer/fall I lost my faith. You can witness the transition on this blog, which is one of the reasons I’ve kept it up. There’s a post where I’m clearly going through issues. (I cry over watching a squirrel’s nest fall out of a tree during a rainstorm, described as “bad stuff raining down from the heavens, indiscriminately dropping on unsuspecting targets.”) This was written during the worst year of my life, when I thought my husband was being misled by Satan because he didn’t believe anymore, and I was struggling with the possibility that maybe he was right and we’re all here by chance. You can see it in how I tried to tie the experience back to writing, which is basically an exercise in finding meaning in chaos:

I have no idea what the next step is. Maybe there is no next step. Maybe another nice squirrel family will take them in. All I know is, somehow, Squirrel Metaphor will be a reoccurring one. It will climb back into my head from reality and then out onto the page, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing, it’s that sometimes, things happen for a reason. And no one else can tell you what that reason is: you have to make it yourself. You have to make it worthwhile, because otherwise, it’s just a bunch of baby squirrel death.

Then a couple weeks later I recount a near-death experience on the Ocoee River in Tennessee and fight back against that thought, that self-ascribed reason to exist. It’s hard to see it because again, I’m comparing it to writing fiction, but when I wrote these words, I had in mind my husband’s objections to my reasoning that God has to exist because if he doesn’t, then what’s the fucking point of anything?

Some people say it’s merely human nature to look for patterns, to find meaning in the chaos. Maybe. But chaos isn’t a very nice place to be, and I would much rather spend my time looking for answers than accepting that we are all just corks, bobbing aimlessly down a river. I refuse to accept that.

At this point I had yet to open a single science book. It took a long time to learn everything my religious upbringing denied me, because if there’s one antidote to magical thinking, it’s critical thinking. The first image in the first draft of my manuscript is the main character finding a box that contains the answer she spends the next 50k words searching for, but she’s too afraid to open it. I was 100% in cult-mode when I wrote that, which is funny because that’s how cults work. They make you afraid to consider any dissenting evidence. They make you afraid to open the box of truth by filling you with lies.

Just two days ago, my mother told me to come back before it’s too late. Meaning, before I die in Armageddon, which is what they believe will happen to everyone who’s not a Jehovah’s Witness. I hate that she lives with that fear. But at this point there’s nothing I can do.

What would my father think if he read my manuscript now? Hopefully, someday he can walk into a bookstore and do just that, though I doubt he ever will. But if he did, I hope he would see it’s not about a girl bucking authority and doing what she wants because it’s more fun than following the rules. I hope he sees a girl whose life was ruined by lies, who spends a great deal of effort searching for the truth, and even though the truth hurts sometimes, it’s one of the most precious things you can find.

Messages In YA Literature

I’m reading several books at the moment, and, as astute blog readers may be able to surmise, one of them is message-driven.

Well, maybe not message-driven. Maybe message-personified is a better description. As in, that’s the entire purpose of the book. A message personified by characters representing the polarized sides of an argument. And from the very beginning of the story, we’re clear on which side we’re supposed to be on. One side is loving and tolerant, while the other is hateful and irrational, immune to reason. Granted, I’m only halfway through the book (a side effect of reading too many at once!) but it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see where this thing is going.

I hesitate to elaborate on the details, because I respect the author and what he’s accomplished in his particular area, and many of his points hold some serious water. The sad thing, though, is that the real world isn’t so clear-cut.

One of the beauties of children’s lit is its ability to help young people grow beyond the concrete, black-and-white morality of childhood. The development of moral reasoning, as put forth by psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, starts with rule-based justification, which deals heavily with obedience and punishment. Most young children adhere to this thought process (and no small number of adults). Adolescents and adults develop more nuanced shades of reasoning involving social pressures and expectations, until finally, the last level (which some people never reach) acknowledges that rules are useful but not absolutes, and that any rule violating universal human rights should be discarded.

This developmental theory explains not what is right and wrong (leave that up to the philosophers and theologians if you feel you can’t trust your own conscience) but how people justify what they believe is right or wrong. According to Kohlberg, moral development is an ongoing process, and it’s my opinion that literature and stories play a big part in that development–not by shoving messages down kids’ throats, but by giving them the tools to figure out their stance for themselves.

The stories we tell young children usually have definite morals because that’s what children understand. By showing them how to put themselves into other people’s shoes (called perspective taking), stories help kids develop their moral reasoning skills. Not everyone is the same as you. People feel different things. People think different things. We have to live with them anyway.

Beyond early childhood, though, kids are able to handle more complex thoughts. As they advance through school, (hopefully) learning critical thinking skills, their stories need to keep up with their expanding views of the world, and they need to better reflect how that world actually works. Kids are going to form some definite opinions about things (have you ever met a teenager?) but their experiences can’t simply be summed up the way their picture books used to it, with the good side clearly presented in opposition to the bad and the obvious consequences played out. The bully gets what’s coming to him, and the hero, who sticks up for the underdog, gets the girl, saves the school, and wins the respect of everyone. (As Oscar Wilde satirized in the words of his silly Miss Prism, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”)

Besides, any self-respecting teenager can spot a message a mile away, and there’s no quicker way to turn them off than by telling them what to think.

Now, as a thinking human being, I have some definite opinions on things. I tend to think about them a lot, and, as a writer, they tend to pop up in my stories. My recently completed manuscript, Walls, deals with some heavy issues, not the least of which is capital punishment. I have definite opinions on capital punishment. You can probably guess what they are by reading my story, but I tried very very hard not to turn my work of fiction into a polemic against the inequities of the American justice system. That’s no fun to read. Besides, it’s pointless. That would appeal to very few people–in fact, probably only to me. And while I write for myself first and foremost, I want to share my stories with other people, teenagers in particular. I know they think about things, and they come to every story with a preconceived set of notions concerning those things, and no matter how much I beat them over the head with my views, they’re going to think whatever they’re going to think. I’ll have better luck if I present the facts and let them form their own conclusions.

My aim as a storyteller isn’t to get people on my side of any particular issue. My aim is to illuminate that issue within the very specific context of these characters and how it relates to them. I don’t presume to know what’s right and wrong–I’m not even convinced those things can be defined by absolutes. Reading fiction isn’t about absolutes, it’s about people and what they do when confronted by those issues. How a character reacts to finding out her father is on Death Row (for instance) should not be presented as a Worst Case Scenario Handbook, what to do should you find yourself in such a situation. Literature with that purpose is very ineffective and, honestly, embarrassing. It puts me off as a reader, even if I happen to agree with what the author’s saying. 

Now, the passions of an author can be a fine engine for getting a story written. You’re supposed to attack what terrifies you, after all, face the white-hot center of your fear, and find the universal truths buried within. However, once the story lands in the hands of a reader, it’s not about the author anymore. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that, especially when you really care about what you’re writing.

What’s helped me to avoid the tendency to send messages can be boiled down to that old writing adage: everyone’s the hero of their own story. In the words of Tom Ripley, “You never meet anyone that thinks they’re a bad person.”

That bully, or critical parent, or judgmental teacher–whoever is represented by your antagonistic force–has just as much moral justification going on in their heads as your protagonists. Avoid turning your story into a polemic by searching for those antagonists’ redeeming qualities. What makes them worthwhile people? Very few humans are incapable of being identified with (even the most morally reprehensible had mothers at one point), and a story that presents people that way will come off flat and one-sided.

Even if your goal is to present an argument–go ahead, I’m not stopping you–please, make your characters real. Present your argument through the eyes of the characters, fully realized, possessing qualities both good and bad. Make your readers work to find the answers, don’t just hand them to them in black and white. The world just doesn’t work that way. We want kids to learn to think, not nod and agree with every well-formed argument.

Just some thoughts. Back to writing!

So This Is What It Feels Like

Alright, I’m coming clean. It’s been almost two weeks since I finished my manuscript.

The moment I finally typed “The End” at the bottom of chapter 23, rounding out 105k words of my first ever completed novel, I sat back and tried to analyze what I was feeling.

Truth is, though, I didn’t feel a whole lot of anything. What I’d done was certainly an accomplishment–not very many people finish a novel, let alone one that’s been plaguing them since 2007, each passing year stacking the odds against ever seeing anything come of it. But it didn’t feel like an accomplishment. Like so many of life’s milestones, things don’t instantly change the moment you achieve something you want. No magical switch was flipped, clowns didn’t appear out of nowhere with explosions of fanfare and confetti. I simply sat at my desk and watched the cursor blink at the end of line.

That’s what it was, I realized: the end of the line. And like any journey, it ended right as another one began. Except this time, as I set about revising the thing and trying to get it published, I have way more going for me. I have a newly-born self-confidence–not just from actually finishing something, but from slowly coming around to a radically different worldview.

Up until a few months ago, everything I did, everything I wanted and every decision I made was tinged with negativity. It’s amazing what a little perspective can do to your sanity. I have been happier these past few months than I’ve ever been. Things are no longer scary. Things have promise, they have hope, and I know now that I can do it because I have done it: I have made something good. The momentum I’ve built over the past few months is carrying me into a future I very much want to be a part of.

Now my manuscript must age, like all good wine, whiskey, and Angus beef. A good friend has already read the thing, assured me I’m not crazy, and shown me ways to make it better (proving again I’m crap at critiquing, because oh my goodness the way she puts things puts all my attempts at self-analysis to shame). I’m making notes and biding my time, and while I’m waiting for the right moment to dive back in, I’ve already started on the next one. My shiny new WIP gurgles and coos at a mere 4000 words, having existed in my head for less than a month–which is terrifying to me, considering all my other ideas existed for years or more before coming to (semi-) fruition.

My new idea takes several things I’ve experienced first-hand, adds something I’ve never experienced and never will, and synthesizes them into two brand new characters I’ve already fallen in love with. Someday, I hope you’ll love them too.

If my new WIP was a music video, this would be it, complete with hand-clapping:

Happy New Year, everyone.

Shiver Me Timbers!

So this is what writing looks like. It looks like me, sitting at my desk, not working on this blog. Listening to the same songs over and over again, watching music videos on youtube (over and over again), racking up my wordcount and drinking massive amounts of good black tea. By the time I’m done with this novel (10k more? 15k?) I will have no more followers and pirate teeth.

This post has no picture because who wants to look at an unwashed, glassy-eyed, pirate-mouthed muppet?

(Okay I lied. Everyone wants to look at that.)

So sorry it appeared as if I had died. I assure you, I’m merely afflicted with the midnight disease and will soon return to the land of the free and the home of the sane. Hopefully with a finished novel.

Oh happy day.

That Part of the Book

I reached an important and stomach-churning milestone over the weekend, what Neil Gaiman’s agent affectionately refers to as “that part of the book.” Since August 4th I have written 50k words–a little over halfway by my estimates, although, if you take the word of the lovely folks at NaNoWriMo, enough to qualify as an entire book!

Even if all you NaNoWriMo participants haven’t reached this milestone yet, you probably know what I mean about stomach-churning. Every couple thousand words feels like I’m hitting “that part of the book.” Usually it’s after a big event, a major revelation, or anything else I’ve been building up to for a long time. I put a lot of effort into making these tentpoles just right, hit all the major points, end the chapter with a killer line, and. . . .

Fall flat on my face.

Truth is, after all the energy I put into these exciting parts, parts that come after, where characters react, can feel sort of anticlimactic. They tend to sit around thinking, feeling, and well. . . reacting. Pretty boring. If I don’t handle it right, it will be boring, and that means bye-bye readers.

Even more frightening, it’s these passages of reaction that put your skills as a writer and your understanding of the interior world of your character to the test. How characters react to big, life-changing events reveals them at their most vulnerable, before they’ve focused themselves and moved on to the next round of action. What they think and feel now supports what they do later. And if you, the writer, get this wrong, events further on down the line are going to feel flat.

I think that’s why a little over halfway through the book can be so crippling. Everything’s been set up. By now, we’re very aware of what the story problem is, and we should be actively involved in trying to fix it. Not all the pieces may be in place yet, but characters should be gathering strength, preparing themselves for the final push, the final crises, the final desperate acts. Things said and done now justify all those coming things, and messing up now puts them in jeopardy. Those moments are why you’re writing the book, after all. They are the great character-defining events that demonstrate change, the soul of any story. Storytelling is just a form of artistic chemistry, after all, and any deficiency on either side of the equation can result in disaster.

That’s a lot of pressure. And for me, that results in a lot of blockages.

Thankfully, we get do-overs. An infinite amount, or however many we need to get it right.

Go back and click on the link at the beginning of this post to read Neil Gaiman’s wonderful pep talk from a previous year of NaNo. I read it whenever I feel like giving up. Every writer feels like giving up, at one point or another. It happens to me every other chapter. The only solution is, as Neil says, to keep on keeping on. Put one word in front of another. It’s the only way to get it done.

Good luck all you NaNoWriMo participants and writers everywhere! Get something done.

(This song is good for whatever your challenge is, be it finishing a novel or finding your place in the universe.)

“The Reservation of My Mind”

One of my favorite series on writing is The Atlantic’s By Heart series, where writers talk about passages that have influenced them in some way, usually related to writing. It’s comforting to see people who have found some measure of success doing what I’m doing talk about their journey and process in terms I can understand. It makes me feel not so alone, which is good. Writing, a very solitary activity, can sometimes make me feel like the sole survivor of the apocalypse.

(Already I’ve mentioned this series and had the pleasant and shocking privilege to thank the author myself, Craig Nova, who somehow found my little scribble and commented on it. Sometimes I love this Internet thing.)

Today I read about Sherman Alexie, whose selected quote single-handedly changed the course of his life. (Talk about power.) When Alexie was growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, Indians weren’t writers, so he didn’t even consider the possibility of becoming one. He was going to be a high school English teacher who coached basketball, end of story. However, one brush with an anthology of Native poetry, specifically a line by Adrian C. Louis, opened his eyes to the potential he could have if only he let himself realize it: “Oh, Uncle Adrian, I’m in the reservation of my mind.”

A major theme of this blog has been overcoming a great deal of fear that’s been standing in the way of achieving my dream of publishing a novel. As I chip away at this block, pouring words on it every day for the past year, I’ve started to understand what’s driving me. Maybe I shouldn’t be so shocked to realize that it’s the same thing that’s been standing in my way.

Alexie understands this better than I do, so I’ll let him explain:

The line also it calls to mind the way we tend to revisit our prisons. And we always go back. This is not only true for reservation Indians, of course. I have white friends who grew up very comfortably, but who hate their families, and yet they go back everything thanksgiving and Christmas. Every year, they’re ruined until February. I’m always telling them, “You know, you don’t have to go. You can come to my house.” Why are they addicted to being demeaned and devalued by the people who are supposed to love them? So you can see the broader applicability: I’m in the suburb of my mind. I’m in the farm town of my mind. I’m in the childhood bedroom of my mind.

I think every writer stands in the doorway of their prison. Half in, half out. The very act of storytelling is a return to the prison of what torments us and keeps us captive, and writers are repeat offenders. You go through this whole journey with your prison, revisiting it in your mind. Hopefully, you get to a point when you realize there was beauty in your prison, too. Maybe, when you get to that point, “I’m on the reservation of my mind” can also be a beautiful thing. It’s on the res, after all, where I learned to tell stories.

You know, for many years, I felt very insecure about being a writer—it wasn’t Indian enough. And then, one day, I was on stage and it occurred to me: Wait. I travel the world telling stories. How Indian is that? I’m doing the traditional thing—I’m doing the oldest thing known to humans! Before fire and the wheel, we had stories. Why did I ever let Indians who managed casinos make me feel bad about storytelling?

So there is power in this. I get to pick and choose what the prison means to me, float in between the prison bars, return in my mind when and how I want to. We’re all cursed to haunt and revisit the people and places that confine us. But when you can pick and choose the terms of that confinement, you, and not your prison, hold the power.

What is my prison? The fear that I’m not good enough. Not smart enough, not funny enough, not pretty enough, not nice enough and not happy enough. Nothing I ever do is enough. And through spilling my guts on paper, I start to see shadows of why. Maybe I’ll never figure it out completely (or maybe I will and that will be the signal that my time here is up), but it’s satisfying to get hints of it, in what I read and what I write. It’s satisfying to realize I’m not all that unusual, that my dreams and hopes and fears are shared by millions of others who aren’t as different from me as I thought.

Because that’s the thing about prisons. They make you feel alone. Kind of like writing. . . . (How Sisyphean is that?)

As a final note, if you want a more elegant description of the craziness that is the inside-out writing process (that I tried to describe here and at least some of you liked), then read author Andre Dubus III’s lovely explanation of what it means to dream a novel, also from the By Heart series.

Pink Houses, Yellow Wallpaper, and Green Lights: Your Guess Is as Good as Mine

(I apologize to any and all English teachers in advance. I really do love you.)

Last night we had dinner with a lovely group of people I haven’t seen in ages. Our conversation bounced from funny work stories and weddings to physics and Breaking Bad, took a strange detour into dirty Shakespeare jokes before coming back around to the terrible things teachers do to their students (several of us are teachers). After relaying a couple stories about eating in front of kids and not giving a crap, somehow, we ended up back at Shakespeare.

“I can tell you with absolute certainty that Shakespeare meant for the ghost of Hamlet’s father to be real,” said the one English teacher in attendance. I wanted to bring out that the uncertainty of Hamlet’s sanity (arguably one of the major themes of the play) puts even the existence of the ghost into doubt, since the ghost is what triggers his host of erratic behavior. However, I felt it unwise to argue with an English teacher.

My husband though is not so skittish. He recalled his experience in high school reading Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees as one long argument with his teacher. One major point of contention: the color of the famous pink house. She posed the question to the class, “Why did the author choose to make the house pink?” My husband, revealing himself as maybe not a literary scholar but certainly a budding skeptic, replied, “Because she wanted to add some descriptive detail and pink is very descriptive.”

BZZZZ! WRONG ANSWER! While many things in literature are up for interpretation, according to your garden variety English teacher, symbols are DEFINITELY NOT ONE OF THEM. Disagree with this sentiment and prepare yourself to do battle.

Following the relaying of this anecdote, my physics teacher friend piped up with three little words: “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Everyone groaned. 

“I don’t see why it had to mean anything more than her going crazy!” she said. “Because she was definitely going crazy.”

“Well it has to mean something. It’s called ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ for Pete’s sake!”

It definitely means something. I’ve just come to the conclusion, after years of reading and years of writing, that authors (and especially English teachers), have no business telling us what that something is.

Let me make one point clear: I’m a big fan of symbols. What I’m not a fan of is being dogmatic about them.

Oh sure, there has to be limits. I’m not calling for Anarchy in the UK Lit:

“The green light represents the color of dollar bills, therefore symbolizing Gatsby placing money above his aspirations of true love!”

“M. Night used the color red to symbolize life because red is the color of blood which is the essence of life!”

“Dorothy’s Kansas was black and white because Oz was real and Kansas was the dream world! It’s the Matrix with Munchkins, baby!”

(Okay all these are American examples sorry I failed at extending my comic metaphor.)

Maybe the author intends a certain interpretation. Maybe the entire work is constructed around that interpretation. But I’m going to be so bold as to say that’s her interpretation, and she has no business imposing that upon her readers, beyond the words she’s written in the book. Sure, it’s her book, I’ll grant her that, but that doesn’t give her the right to be dogmatic. If that was her goal, she would have become an English teacher, or included a decoder ring and handy glossary of literary definitions telling us exactly what her crap’s about. Instead, she spent 100k words getting us to think about what her crap’s about. If she could have said it in any less, she wouldn’t have written a novel. She would have written a term paper.

It’s like any work of art. I can stand in front of the wall that is Guernica in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and know the history behind the painting, know what Guernica is and what Picasso had painted about, but what I bring to my viewing is entirely my own. Maybe I can’t look at it and say it’s about any old thing (like making breakfast or slaying giants), but no one can tell me my reaction to it is wrong if I view it in complete honesty (and I stood in front of that thing for half an hour with tears dripping down my cheeks).

The best part is, you don’t have to know a thing about the Spanish Civil War to have an honest reaction. Some things are universal while some things are intensely personal. Often, the two overlap.

I say all this not because I’ve had battles with many an English teacher, but because I’ve noticed symbols cropping up in my own writing, completely without my bidding. I understand how fragile they are. Once I seize on one, try to pin it down, nurture it and extend it throughout the rest of the work, more often than not it disappears.

Symbols aren’t deliberate. They’re fungus, sprouting from the very makeup of the work, from the fertile ground of the subconscious. As the writer I can have a hunch about what it means, but anything more tends to kill the mystery and smacks of mental and emotional shoehorning. I try not to tell my reader how to feel or what to think. I trust her to be able to do that herself.

That being said (and here is where I add another disclaimer), we all owe a great deal to English teachers. Good ones show you how to approach literary criticism on your own terms, show you how to have a dialogue with the text, and open up new worlds of critical thinking and reflection. Without English teachers, I’d probably still be reading Illustrated Classics.

Possibly easier to read than the original.

(I promise I’m getting to that post about taking “Show, don’t tell” too seriously. The ideas are mostly there but need a good stitching together with a healthy dose of narrative logic. I swear, if tell myself I’m going to produce something my brain rebels and goes on hiatus. I’m reminded of the famous Douglas Adams quote: “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” I’d never make it as a freelancer. Even traditionally published novelist is looking unlikely.)

Trust Your Readers, They Know What’s Up

“Reading Corner” by Greg Williams. This is where I grew up.

Recently I started reading a book (which I will not name, however I can tell you it’s a debut YA published this year). It had a very intriguing premise and wonderful opening but somehow felt. . . wrong. Tension was high, pacing snappy, it was peopled with interesting and sympathetic characters, but my reading experience felt distant, separate. I was more aware of the physical act of reading the book than I was of the story. It made me feel self-conscious, like I was reading my own work. Was I being too critical? Was I actively on the lookout for poor writing, and therefore vindicated when I found it?

So I put the book away and started another, from an author whose debut came out in the late 80s. Same ingredients: interesting premise, wonderful opening, great pace and characters. Except this time, I was immediately immersed in the story and lost several pleasant hours before I even stopped to take a breath.

What happened? Why was this book different from the first? I tried to chalk it up to personal preference, perhaps even my state of mind at the time, but the more I thought about it, the more concrete my thoughts became. It wasn’t until writing yesterday’s post that I realized exactly what the problem was.

The first author hadn’t trusted me enough to figure things out for myself.

Reading is an experience. What the reader experiences is completely separate from what the writer experiences–and not just because the writer has a backstage pass. Readers bring a lot of baggage into a story: preconceived notions, different upbringing, prejudices and preferences. For example: they can be told over and over that a beautiful woman has blond hair, but if they personally find blond hair displeasing, they’re going to cast her as a brunette. That’s part of the magic of reading. We’re not restricted to the vision of anyone, not even the writer.

However. That magic can be impeded. And when it is, it’s usually the writer’s fault.

It can be very tempting to spell everything out for a reader. After all, they don’t know, do they? They only have what you tell them, and hey–you’re the artist here, not them. How can you trust them to get it right? So you hold their hand, explaining everything they need to know to fully experience your world, your ideas, your. . . unmitigated genius.

Because of this tendency, a common piece of advice given to inexperienced writers is this: “Show, don’t tell.” Let the reader figure things out from well-placed evidence and concrete details instead of blatant explanations.

This is great advice. It allows readers to be more engaged in the magic of the story and avoids insulting their intelligence. Ultimately, I think that’s why I couldn’t get into that first author’s book. He didn’t trust me, didn’t leave me any room to figure things out for myself. He connected all the dots, covered every point, even told me how to feel about what was happening to his characters.

I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all. And neither does anyone else.

Reading something like this pushes readers out of the story, effectively telling them, “You don’t know any better.” Most of the time it’s not overt; most readers won’t be able to pinpoint what’s wrong with the story. But the cumulative effect is strong enough to alienate them, and, worst-case scenario, kick them out of your story.

How do you know what to show and what to tell? Another piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: “Do not confuse what the writer needs to know with what the reader needs to know. They are not the same thing.” And this is where things start to get complicated. Because, as an inexperienced writer (heck, any writer), it’s hard to know the difference.

Next time, I’ll share some thoughts about what happens when writers take “Show, don’t tell” too far, swinging toward the opposite end of the spectrum and not telling readers anything. It’s an easy trap to fall into, and one I’m just now starting to climb out of.

The Novelist’s Wife Speaks Out

To wrap up my series on writers and their secret worlds, I’d like to share with you the thoughts of Amanda Palmer, a musician who happens to be married to a writer whose secret world is as big as they come: Neil Gaiman.

I’ve always had a deep and abiding respect for Neil Gaiman. His work brings to mind Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory: seven-eighths of the meaning is hidden beneath the surface. Reading him is like dipping your toe into what you think is a puddle but turns out to be an entire freaking ocean. That is the most important quality a writer can have, in my opinion. The power of subtext, the ability to say things by not saying them.

Amanda Palmer isn’t like that. As an artist she admits she’s often very literal, not well-versed in metaphor, The Queen of Feelings. The experiences of her life go into a blender on low speed and come out only slightly pureed. She’s not afraid to repurpose her life for the sake of her art.

When Neil Gaiman was writing his latest book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, he read it aloud to his wife each night before bed. To her it was terrifying and beautiful but ultimately, just a story. When the galleys came in, and she could read it for herself, she started to see the meaning behind the words, but it wasn’t until her husband patiently explained the significance of the story that it finally hit her. This was a glimpse into the secret world of the man she loved.

I just started The Ocean at the End of the Lane last night, so I only know what the few glowing reviews I’ve read reveal, but I do know this: it’s personal. Amanda traces it back to a moment the two of them shared–or more accurately, failed to share. Neil wanted to tell her something, something personal, but she had a new song budding in her head so she asked him to wait until she could get it out on piano. Later on, when she was ready, the moment had passed. The window into her husband’s secret world had shut with them trapped on opposite sides.

Neil writes on the dedication page:

For Amanda, who wanted to know.

And Amanda writes, in the blog post:

one thing i have learned, being an artist married to another artist:
you cannot separate the self from the relationship and you cannot separate the relationship from the work.
call it poison, or call it the muse.

I’m very conscious of what I choose to share about my marriage here on my blog, but in my writing, my fiction? Anything’s game. I’ve been writing about crap that’s happened to me even before I knew it was happening.

Marriage? It’s traumatic. It knocks you upside the head, knocks you flat, even when you think you’re ready for it. It’s two completely separate lives trying to merge. Things are going to break. People don’t tell you about that. Going into it, you think you’re immune to those kinds of problems.

So I know my marriage is going to come through in my writing, because everything does. I can’t help it. I write about relationships, and marriage is the ultimate relationship. When I write about someone’s feelings getting hurt, I will pull from my memory of stored emotions. Ditto falling in love, feeling misunderstood, feeling drawn to someone you shouldn’t like, resenting someone you should. And if these feelings are produced by my marriage, so be it. I’m thankful that I’m able to feel and express the wide range of human emotion, able to make sense of it, able to relate to others and make connections.

But I’m not going to write about it on my blog. Not in any deep and meaningful way, not without permission from my husband. He’s not an artist. He’s not interested in baring his soul before the world. I’m not going to betray his wishes for something as silly as a blog. Even Amanda Palmer, The Queen of Feelings, has come to the same conclusion:

…but our *actual* relationship…the feelings and fevers and discussions and layers of attachment and complication underneath…that’s….for us. our close friends follow the intimacies of this strange journey we’re on with each other. but it’s not for the blog, it’s not really for the public.

Go read her post, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane (A Book & Marriage Review).” Very rarely do I come across something that resonates with me so deeply. (And she’s not even a Neil Gaiman fan. How incomprehensible.)