Ideas in Abundance

Silence: Not a Sestina

2010-01-28T23:10:00.000-08:00

Hello my gentle readers.

I know I haven't put anything up here in over a month, and I'm sorry. It's no excuse, but I've been working on something else that has a deadline coming up very soon, and it's something potentially major vis-à-vis my writerly aspirations, so I've been pouring all my energy into that. I don't want to make too much of something that will probably, after all, come to nothing, so that's all I'll say for now. But fear not: I'm also currently sitting on a new story for this blog, and I will put it up as soon as I turn in that other thing. Most likely next Monday. (It's finished, but it needs editing). Until then, I'll leave you with this little two-part teaser:

1) office Christmas party (I wrote it right around Christmas so it's seasonal)
2) zombie apocalypse

See you soon!

Silence: a Sestina (Week 1)

2009-12-14T13:03:00.000-08:00

Original Madoc quotation: “A sestina about silence, using the key words dark, ragged, never, screaming, fire, kiss.”

Blogger’s note: I thought I’d start with this idea because I knew it would be by far the most difficult for me, and it seemed wise to get the hard bit over with first. If, as I’ve said before, my prose fiction skills are lacking, then my poetry skills are downright abysmal. While I very much admire people who can write good poetry, I have never been one of them, and I doubtless never will be. So I can already venture a guess that today’s entry will probably be the worst of them all.

For those of you who don’t know what a sestina is, Wikipedia describes it as:

a highly structured poem consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet (called its envoy or tornada), for a total of thirty-nine lines. The same set of six words ends the lines of each of the six-line stanzas, but in a different order each time; if we number the first stanza’s lines 123456, then the words ending the second stanza’s lines appear in the order 615243, then 364125, then 532614, then 451362, and finally 246531. This organization is referred to as retrogradatio cruciata (“retrograde cross”). These six words then appear in the tercet as well, with the tercet’s first line usually containing 1 and 2, its second 3 and 4, and its third 5 and 6…English sestinas are usually written in iambic pentameter or another decasyllabic meter.

In this case, Madoc has predetermined that the six end-words will be dark, ragged, never, screaming, fire, and kiss.

That sounds confusing because it is confusing. Sestinas ain’t easy, folks. The piece that follows is the best that I could compose under the double-handicap of my usual inability to write poetry and my struggle with the intricacies of this particular poetic form. As a lover of iambic pentameter, I originally wanted to write an “English sestina,” but though I tried my best to do so, I was ultimately flummoxed by the fact that three of the words with which I was required to end my lines—ragged, never, and screaming—aren’t natural iambs, so I gave up and went with free verse. You will probably also notice that I frequently “cheated” with my key words, using kisses as well as kiss, darkness as well as dark, or, worst of all, occasionally substituting ragged for dragged and bragged etc. But really, I did my best under the circumstances.

Subtext: be gentle, gentle reader.

***

Silence: A Sestina

In the darkest
corner of the library I sat with you, as you daily dragged
indifferent eyes across tedious pages. But you never
looked up, never saw me, though each day my cheeks screamed
with blushes—those imaginary fires
kindled by imagined kisses.

How often I’ve imagined those kisses
as I developed pictures of you in my darkroom,
pictures you never saw me take, some deftly capturing you face, and some misfires
in which I only caught a ragged
edge of sleeve, or the blur of pep-rally crowds, the screaming
faces of unnumbered never-minds.

We’ve shared lab tables and lecture halls for years and you’ve never
asked my name, though you’ve kissed
more than your share of screaming
cheerleaders, sorority girls, girls who wear dark
lipstick and pink miniskirts. And too often you’ve bragged
of conquests in backseats, of wine-fueled liaisons beside illegal campfires.

I am the silent one. I am no firebrand,
nor bombshell, nor shooting star. You’ve never seen me—never
wanted me—because I’ve never spoken, ragged
though my mind has run from dreaming of your kisses.
I’ve kept you in the dark,
screened every smile and silenced every scream.

But now my secret self is screaming
for release, and no longer can the blushes in my cheeks contain the fire.
Desire spreads into every dark
corner of my mind, and sets it all alight. I never
knew that idle dreams of unknown kisses
could burn a soul to rags.

You alone can mend my ragged
self, can turn my silent screaming
into gentle words. Just one kiss
will quell this fearful all-consuming fire.
Do you now wonder how long I’ve loved you? Never
mind. Just tell me you love me back. Speak it now into the dark.

She pulls him further into the darkness, tearing his wrists ragged with the knots that she has tied.
She never falters, though tomorrow they will say they could hear his muffled screams across the grounds.
She is afire with purpose. She will get her kiss tonight.

A Lengthy and Tedious but Necessary Introduction

2009-12-06T21:05:00.000-08:00

Like most people with brains and good taste, I am a huge fan of Neil Gaiman's graphic saga The Sandman. And of all the stories that make up the Sandman epic, none affect or move me more than “Calliope” (issue #17, which can be found in Dream Country, the third volume of the trade paperback collection of the complete Sandman series). In saying this, I imagine I must be in the company of most Sandman fans who also in any way consider themselves writers. “Calliope” tells the story of Richard Madoc, a novelist who imprisons and repeatedly rapes a muse in order to keep at bay a monumental case of writer’s block. When Morpheus, the protagonist of the series, intervenes and frees the muse, Madoc defends his actions by insisting, “I need her. If I didn’t have her, I wouldn’t be able to write. I wouldn’t have ideas.” An unsympathetic Morpheus replies, “You disgust me, Richard Madoc. You want ideas? You want dreams? You want stories? Then ideas you will have. IDEAS IN ABUNDANCE.” And so, as punishment, Morpheus assaults Madoc with an endless stream of ideas. For several frames afterward, Madoc can do and say nothing else, spewing out idea after idea with few other coherent words or thoughts in between. The ideas vary in substance from the simple (“A plum, sweet and tart and cold”) to the incredibly complex (“A city where the streets are paved with time”). Finally, teetering on the edge of madness, Madoc frees the muse, only to find, once Morpheus has lifted the curse, that he is again bereft of ideas, unable to write.

Although I find Madoc repulsive, as I suspect I’m meant to, I also can’t help sympathizing with him just a bit. I suffer from writer’s block all the time—when I really feel like writing a story, when I desperately need to start my end-of-term research papers, and sometimes even when I’m trying to come up with a simple entry for my personal blog. I know how daunting a blank page (or MS Word document) can be. The moral of “Calliope,” as I understand it, is that ideas are everywhere, that even the smallest and most errant of thoughts can become a good story—there’s nothing so wonderful about “a plum, sweet and tart and cold” that Madoc couldn’t have come up with it without the help of a muse or an angry deity. But somehow, this lesson is remarkably easy for me to forget when I’m faced with the blank page, and with the demand actually to create something. And though I don’t think I’d ever rape a muse for ideas, sometimes I do need to look outside of myself in order to find them.

I’m not much good at writing fiction. I’m a Ph.D student in the humanities, and my talents, if I have any, are limited to the writing of scholarly papers, not literary prose. However, I’ve always loved writing and secretly fantasized about becoming a great novelist. Every now and then my fingers itch and my imagination stirs and I feel the urge to write. This is one of those times. I’ve been thinking for a while now that I really should practice writing more often, that I should start a writing blog and put things in it so that I get myself into the habit of writing regularly, but I haven’t been able to come up with anything to practice writing about. So, appropriately, I am going to look outside of myself for inspiration, and use “Calliope” as the springboard for this writing blog project. Each week I will take one of the ideas Madoc lists in “Calliope” and turn it into a story, which I will post here. Every entry will begin with the “Calliope” excerpt that inspired it. I probably won’t write out the ideas in the order in which Madoc lists them, just because the order seems pretty arbitrary anyway. Eventually I’ll have to wean myself off of my source material, since by my count there are only about twenty ideas mentioned in “Calliope,” so once I’m through with them I’ll probably turn to a new and completely unrelated exercise. However, since the whole point of “Calliope” is that any thought can become a good story, I think whatever new ideas I write about after I’m through with Madoc’s ideas will have just as much right to belong in this blog.

In the interest of fairness, and to give credit where credit is very much due, I should mention that not only are the ideas for these stories not my ideas, but the idea to collect and compile and elaborate on these ideas is also not entirely my idea. I remember wondering idly, when I first read “Calliope,” what all these stories would look like if Madoc, or anyone really, went on to write them. However, it wasn’t until China Mieville verbalized a similar thought years later that it occurred to me that somebody could actually do that, could write all the stories corresponding to Madoc’s ideas and put those stories together.

On June 19, 2009, Mieville, appearing as a guest blogger on Omnivoracious (a blog run by the book editors over at Amazon.com), wrote an entry entitled “Leave an Idea, Take an Idea: Five Things Someone Else Should Totally Do.” Included amongst his suggestions was the following:

In the Sandman story “Calliope,” collected in Volume 3 of the collected decalogy, Dream Country, Neil Gaiman gets disquietingly under the skin of a writer, and presents a dreamlike but perfectly savage investigation of storytelling. Richard Madoc, in his verve to become a “great writer,” imprisons and rapes a muse. His ongoing creativity is predicated on tawdry and brutal violence, in the kind of literalised metaphor that the fantastic is uniquely suited to providing. When Morpheus, Dream, confronts him in disgust, and Madoc repulsively insists that his actions were necessary so he could keep having ideas, Morpheus sentences him to “ideas in abundance.” Which Madoc then begins to feverishly expound, as he breaks down.

“A city in which the streets are paved with time,” he says. “Head made of light...A were-goldfish...” And on and on. It ranges from the para-insightful—“Gryphons shouldn’t marry’—to the numinous— “An old man...who owned the universe”—via the humourous—“two old women taking a weasel on holiday”—to the (seemingly) banal—“A small piece of blue cardboard.” It’s a bravura sequence. It is terrifying and, in some bleak way, in the slopping speed with which these ideas vomit forth, a baleful antimatter version of “reassuring” to the would-be writer: see how quickly hooks can be generated? But at what cost, by what violence?

A sideways homage to Gaiman and to his incomparable Sandman, rather than stories set in the comic’s universe, would be a collection of all these tales listed but not (yet) written, generated by Madoc’s punishment. Each thrown-out line could be turned, by some suitable writer, into a story. It would be loving, respectful, hopefully intriguing and, if done right, not a little unsettling, given the grotesque nature of the crime that spawned these punitive inspirations.

This I’d love to see happen. But I’m no editor. INTG [I’m Not The Guy].

Well, frankly, I’m Not The Guy either. I, too, am no editor, and while I do know lots of aspiring writers who would probably love to get in on this with me, I wouldn’t have the first idea of how to coordinate them all. And although I’m sure that someday in my scholarly career I will work as an editor, and that therefore such skills will at some point be of great use to me, I’m not yet advanced enough in said career to be concerned about whether I’m getting along in my editing skills just at this moment. Right now, all I want to do is work on my writing. I’ve been looking for some good writing exercises lately, and this concept of turning all of Madoc’s ideas into stories just strikes me as the perfect project, an ideal sequence of personal writing drills. So I’m taking Mieville’s idea and adapting it—that is, I’m going to write a story that corresponds with each of Madoc’s ideas myself.

I hasten to add that I am also very much not “some suitable writer” for this project, and I will probably not “do it right.” As I’ve said before, my skills as a writer of fiction are but feeble, and I don’t think any of the stories I might come up with here will do the project and its source material the justice they deserve. But damnit, I’m going to try anyway.

Finally, I feel I should clarify that this is not in any way Sandman fanfiction. None of my stories will take place in or have any connection with the Sandman universe, other than that the ideas behind them are listed in “Calliope.” “A small piece of blue cardboard,” for example, doesn’t inherently have much to do with Sandman other than that it is mentioned as one of Madoc’s ideas. More importantly, I have no intention of publishing, selling, profiting from, circulating etc. any of these stories. I'm writing them for myself—for practice, for my own private enjoyment, and just to see if I can. As a fledgling academic, I take copyright infringement (and its scholarly cousin “plagarism”) very seriously. There is no excuse for stealing other people’s ideas and passing them off as your own, and it is not my intention to do so in this blog.

That’s all you need to know. Welcome, and thanks for reading.