I've developed a system of curved arrows and numbers that help me code which scraps go where. Even hacked paragraphs can be parted out like used cars, and the best bits salvaged for another project.
I would love an essay on your longhand writing process and a pic of one of the pages of a notebook with all the arrows and numbers and your system for shuffling sentences and paragraphs around.
In a way, I agree. In most horror tableau fiction -- mostly crime fiction/thrillers -- the dead body or crime scene is the ruins that must be deciphered.
Here's the thing, I want very badly for you to have a look see at some of my work but every selection I have is a bit too long. I'm thinking that's what my problem might be; I make it too long and I don't really know how to excise the extra fat. But you've set a character limit of 1500 words or five pages and I don't want to send you something that snubs the rules. would you prefer I send you an excerpt of a chapter, or the whole chapter so you can have a look see? Even if it's just the excerpt I'm pretty sure readers will get the gist.
You gave me a review of my piece a while back, the one about the guys robbing burial mounds with CB radio antennas. The reason that subject matter is so personal to me is because I’ve hunted arrowheads all my life with my dad. In the artifact world we have met such people who have and know how to rob graves (to be clear we never do that horrible thing and only surface hunt).
On to my point... Every time my dad and I go hunt arrowheads we often come back with bags full of broken pieces or flakes of flint and chert. I have bucket fulls that I fill in my garden. Ancient deer antlers and animal bones from long forgotten camp sites. I pile all of it around my house, mixing it in garden beds and pots. I like to think that one day long in the future someone will come across it all with confusion and dismay, wondering if they discovered an ancient site. I live surrounding my house with these sacred objects that were touched by human hands tens of thousands of years ago.
Oh and we also find a lot of turn of the century bottles, whiskey jugs, perfume bottles, and broken pieces of turn of the century porcelain. My garden is a treasure trove of human trash.
Thanks a ton. That one I started in winter of last year after I relayed to you that I was feeling stuck and frustrated during the editing process for the full first draft of the first story I completed. You suggested to start something else per your dad’s dating advice of never leaving the one you’re with until you’ve got the next one. It helped me to take a step back from the ‘big one’ and become less attached to it.
I’ve since moved away from the arrowhead story to work on the original first story. It’s coming along nicely, but it’s quite a grind since it was my first attempt at a novel and my writing has improved a lot and everything else that goes into fixing and refining a complex story. I’m happy with the story though and won’t be abandoning it. It’s just going to take a lot of work to get where it needs to be.
When you mentioned recently that it often took Tom Spanbauer six to eight years to finish a piece. You have no idea how much better that made me feel. This whole time I’ve been thinking -- well fuck when Chuck started out he finished Fight Club in what like a year or two right?? (Could be wrong on that..) Point being, as a beginner it can feel an awful lot like there is some sort of countdown going on for when it must be done by. A sort of imposter syndrome, maybe. It can be easy to feel like you’re never going fast enough. As if you’re going to somehow lose the magic or whiff if you don’t finish it fast enough. Don’t know if you ever felt that way early on or still do? Thanks again.
Keep in mind that I usually tackle a book from every direction, writing "stories" I know will eventually become plot points in a novel. This allows me to write the obvious fun parts, and the books crystalizes from many different points. It's more likely to truly surprise me that way, and the final assembly -- of many finished components -- is fast and dazzling, like a car being "built" in a factory in one hour.
So when you’ve got a bunch of these short stories put together and you finally decide to connect them into one piece, does that still mean you have chapters that you have yet to write to connect parts in between? Or does it mean that you already have all chapters hand written out once you are ready to punch it all in through the keyboard?
I wish I’d tried this approach with the first one I did, but I hadn’t read Consider This until about halfway through writing it as I wasn’t yet aware you’d written a book on writing. I think it would have made things simpler for me. Maybe I still will try to write some independent stories and see if I can somehow forget my narrative. It’s just hard to make your mind forget/let go once you’ve put together a full story. But if I can somehow get myself to do it, it would probably be helpful.
I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to much Wilco, but when they recorded Yankee Hotel Foxtrot apparently they wrote all the songs in a very uniform, predictable fashion. And then they went in and turned them inside out -- chords flipped backwards, instruments inter-meshing wrong melodies, beats varying in unpredictable places, etc. Not much different than a lot of jazz characteristics I suppose, but applied to modern indie rock. Anyway, that approach with writing makes me think of what Jeff Tweedy did with that album.
The idea that books are abandoned relics, waiting to be revived, brings a whole new action plan to life for me. Like the magic of the thing must be worthwhile, it ups the expectation of writing something worth the chant and naked dance at moonlight.
There used to be an insane asylum (as they were once called) on 1st avenue near where I lived. They had columns in the courtyard which were crooked and looked half buried. Seemed like a horrifying sight for those mentally ill. They were eventually removed and I think it's a homeless shelter now.
What is the most interesting thing you have seen in a cadaver? I think mine was discovering my zealous use of a bag valve mask had blown a nerve agent test subjects lung out (pig, not a human). When we went to place the chest tube and broke the membrane around lungs. A large rush of air, much like letting go of a filled balloon, came out of the incision.
I listened to the podcast that you both did together. I enjoyed the candy striper part in addition to other things. I love hearing about other people's thought processes.
So my initial orders out of school were delayed because the government ran out of money. I graduated in June 1997 and would have been to my first duty station on Guam by July. A Korean flight crashed on the island and all my soon to be coworkers had to pick up dismembered bodies for the next week or so on a mountain side in the tropical heat. Needless to say I heard all sorts of stories about it when I got there in October.
Their stories were quite interesting err horrible. I had mostly forgotten about it till this conversation. Thanks for helping me to remember.
It's just like the government to use military people as manual labor for jobs that would be consider unsafe or mentally damaging. The descriptions of smells and sights of rotting dismember corpses still haunts some of those sailors.
Wonderful essay, Chuck. Our discussion at workshop about the horse poop in my story reminded me of an interesting fact. In Japan, before it was a developed nation, human waste was a valuable commodity. As an island country, farms did not have access to large animal waste to use as fertilizer. So an entire industry existed to collect human waste and sell it to the farmers. Landlords could make a tidy profit selling the poop of their tenants. Maybe I'll use this in my novel somewhere...
Another Japanese cultural tidbit - one of the many yokai (spirits) is the tsukumogami (spirits of man made objects). There are stories of discarded sandals, umbrellas and stoves marching in protest man's callous treatment. So watch out for that toaster oven you threw out!
Now that I think about it. I remember my grandfather's pit toilet in Tokyo. So this poo industry must have been operating back in the 1960's. Shortly before Japan became an economic giant. I wonder if they still recycle poo in Japan now?
In Europe poo collection was big business. Gunpowder makers needed it to create Saltpeter crystals. Mix the poo with clean straw, and the crystals grow.
Urine has always been a key ingredient in shampoos and conditioners. The uric acid softens the hair strands, so much so that people would rinse their hair in urine after washing it.
In the woods near my house growing up there were these two blue rusted 1950s Chevys. They had what appeared to be bullet holes all over them. As a kid I like to think some gangsters from Chicago drove all the way down to the middle of nowhere outside of Springfield, IL and executed some people.
The part where you talk about the problem being better than the solution -- I remember you once using the alien from the movie of the same name as an example. And it’s a great example. The alien getting blasted out of the airlock is absolutely no where near as impressive as the alien itself.
Like how living is synonymous to dying, decay might be my new favorite measurement of time. It reeks of metaphors. How far have we fallen off from a vision, how blurry have the details become. Entropy is what ultimately sends everything to their graves and the unavoidable destination of chaos and randomness begs us to find meaning in the briefness of order. A world has to fall apart to test a character. What he does in the face of the truth is revealing.
“On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”
This post was such a beautiful read. The ghost town metaphor is so poetic it's repulsive.
Granite and words. Writers seem to want to leave some sort of legacy through writing. Was examining this idea with a friend recently, and I believe that I value the writing because of connecting people. Everything I ever loved brings people together. Food, music, drugs, health. Totally ok with the world forgetting me a couple years after Im gone, but doing what I can to facilitate connections while Im here provides meaning.
Had the most wondrous, magical weekend. Ran into the monk that built a buddhist temple out here. The story Im working on predicates on a conversion, and Buddhism popped up from 6 different places as that day went on.
Had a visit with him and several of his friends or followers or whatever it is. I dont know ehat this relationship has to offer to the writing, but I know it has something to offer.
PS- A Buddhist temple in a sea of rednecks is a very strange thing. "It never got weird enough for me."
I've developed a system of curved arrows and numbers that help me code which scraps go where. Even hacked paragraphs can be parted out like used cars, and the best bits salvaged for another project.
Deleteaholic. Lol. That is good story matter right there. (Write it!)
I would love an essay on your longhand writing process and a pic of one of the pages of a notebook with all the arrows and numbers and your system for shuffling sentences and paragraphs around.
Post on how to make your very own Zodiac Killer cipher to code your work when?
Share! I have pain, dude!
I love abandoned things. One of my favorite places is a wildlife preserve and reservoir. After moving away from the city to a rural area I got bored one day when I was 10 or so and wandered into this 10 mile square area with abandoned houses and beautiful man made lakes that feed the next row over its water. One such house is nothing but a foundation. https://www.reddit.com/r/AbandonedPorn/comments/hrv513/another_abandoned_house_foundation_sutton_ma_usa/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Though it’s been taken over by yuppies I still go there sometimes to think, run, clear my head.
Does this same idea go along with tableaus?
(Sorry for the edits. It type too fast.)
In a way, I agree. In most horror tableau fiction -- mostly crime fiction/thrillers -- the dead body or crime scene is the ruins that must be deciphered.
Here's the thing, I want very badly for you to have a look see at some of my work but every selection I have is a bit too long. I'm thinking that's what my problem might be; I make it too long and I don't really know how to excise the extra fat. But you've set a character limit of 1500 words or five pages and I don't want to send you something that snubs the rules. would you prefer I send you an excerpt of a chapter, or the whole chapter so you can have a look see? Even if it's just the excerpt I'm pretty sure readers will get the gist.
You gave me a review of my piece a while back, the one about the guys robbing burial mounds with CB radio antennas. The reason that subject matter is so personal to me is because I’ve hunted arrowheads all my life with my dad. In the artifact world we have met such people who have and know how to rob graves (to be clear we never do that horrible thing and only surface hunt).
On to my point... Every time my dad and I go hunt arrowheads we often come back with bags full of broken pieces or flakes of flint and chert. I have bucket fulls that I fill in my garden. Ancient deer antlers and animal bones from long forgotten camp sites. I pile all of it around my house, mixing it in garden beds and pots. I like to think that one day long in the future someone will come across it all with confusion and dismay, wondering if they discovered an ancient site. I live surrounding my house with these sacred objects that were touched by human hands tens of thousands of years ago.
Oh and we also find a lot of turn of the century bottles, whiskey jugs, perfume bottles, and broken pieces of turn of the century porcelain. My garden is a treasure trove of human trash.
That piece of yours was drop-dead compelling. It ought to be a Netflix series. I'd love to see more.
Thanks a ton. That one I started in winter of last year after I relayed to you that I was feeling stuck and frustrated during the editing process for the full first draft of the first story I completed. You suggested to start something else per your dad’s dating advice of never leaving the one you’re with until you’ve got the next one. It helped me to take a step back from the ‘big one’ and become less attached to it.
I’ve since moved away from the arrowhead story to work on the original first story. It’s coming along nicely, but it’s quite a grind since it was my first attempt at a novel and my writing has improved a lot and everything else that goes into fixing and refining a complex story. I’m happy with the story though and won’t be abandoning it. It’s just going to take a lot of work to get where it needs to be.
When you mentioned recently that it often took Tom Spanbauer six to eight years to finish a piece. You have no idea how much better that made me feel. This whole time I’ve been thinking -- well fuck when Chuck started out he finished Fight Club in what like a year or two right?? (Could be wrong on that..) Point being, as a beginner it can feel an awful lot like there is some sort of countdown going on for when it must be done by. A sort of imposter syndrome, maybe. It can be easy to feel like you’re never going fast enough. As if you’re going to somehow lose the magic or whiff if you don’t finish it fast enough. Don’t know if you ever felt that way early on or still do? Thanks again.
Keep in mind that I usually tackle a book from every direction, writing "stories" I know will eventually become plot points in a novel. This allows me to write the obvious fun parts, and the books crystalizes from many different points. It's more likely to truly surprise me that way, and the final assembly -- of many finished components -- is fast and dazzling, like a car being "built" in a factory in one hour.
So when you’ve got a bunch of these short stories put together and you finally decide to connect them into one piece, does that still mean you have chapters that you have yet to write to connect parts in between? Or does it mean that you already have all chapters hand written out once you are ready to punch it all in through the keyboard?
I wish I’d tried this approach with the first one I did, but I hadn’t read Consider This until about halfway through writing it as I wasn’t yet aware you’d written a book on writing. I think it would have made things simpler for me. Maybe I still will try to write some independent stories and see if I can somehow forget my narrative. It’s just hard to make your mind forget/let go once you’ve put together a full story. But if I can somehow get myself to do it, it would probably be helpful.
I don’t know if you’ve ever listened to much Wilco, but when they recorded Yankee Hotel Foxtrot apparently they wrote all the songs in a very uniform, predictable fashion. And then they went in and turned them inside out -- chords flipped backwards, instruments inter-meshing wrong melodies, beats varying in unpredictable places, etc. Not much different than a lot of jazz characteristics I suppose, but applied to modern indie rock. Anyway, that approach with writing makes me think of what Jeff Tweedy did with that album.
The idea that books are abandoned relics, waiting to be revived, brings a whole new action plan to life for me. Like the magic of the thing must be worthwhile, it ups the expectation of writing something worth the chant and naked dance at moonlight.
Haha! And also, awww. Your altruistic ruins are both funny and sweet.
There used to be an insane asylum (as they were once called) on 1st avenue near where I lived. They had columns in the courtyard which were crooked and looked half buried. Seemed like a horrifying sight for those mentally ill. They were eventually removed and I think it's a homeless shelter now.
https://www.scoutingny.com/the-creepiest-hospital-in-manhattan-arkham-asylum-in-nyc/
So elegant!
You build ruins better than anyone I know.
You applaud cadavers better than anyone, ever.
Our lives are all about building ruins that are worth discovering.
I do love a good cadaver. Maybe this is a longer conversation.
What is the most interesting thing you have seen in a cadaver? I think mine was discovering my zealous use of a bag valve mask had blown a nerve agent test subjects lung out (pig, not a human). When we went to place the chest tube and broke the membrane around lungs. A large rush of air, much like letting go of a filled balloon, came out of the incision.
In an anatomy setting? Touching the thymus. In a morgue setting, the closet of stacked bodies.
I don’t know if Chuck has talked about this here yet. But we were both candy stripers in high school. And that’s …something.
I listened to the podcast that you both did together. I enjoyed the candy striper part in addition to other things. I love hearing about other people's thought processes.
So my initial orders out of school were delayed because the government ran out of money. I graduated in June 1997 and would have been to my first duty station on Guam by July. A Korean flight crashed on the island and all my soon to be coworkers had to pick up dismembered bodies for the next week or so on a mountain side in the tropical heat. Needless to say I heard all sorts of stories about it when I got there in October.
Korean Air Flight 801 https://g.co/kgs/QHihyL
That sounds ….awful.
Their stories were quite interesting err horrible. I had mostly forgotten about it till this conversation. Thanks for helping me to remember.
It's just like the government to use military people as manual labor for jobs that would be consider unsafe or mentally damaging. The descriptions of smells and sights of rotting dismember corpses still haunts some of those sailors.
Thank you for coming to Hindsight to listen to some of our stories. Your support is invaluable.
Wonderful essay, Chuck. Our discussion at workshop about the horse poop in my story reminded me of an interesting fact. In Japan, before it was a developed nation, human waste was a valuable commodity. As an island country, farms did not have access to large animal waste to use as fertilizer. So an entire industry existed to collect human waste and sell it to the farmers. Landlords could make a tidy profit selling the poop of their tenants. Maybe I'll use this in my novel somewhere...
Another Japanese cultural tidbit - one of the many yokai (spirits) is the tsukumogami (spirits of man made objects). There are stories of discarded sandals, umbrellas and stoves marching in protest man's callous treatment. So watch out for that toaster oven you threw out!
Now that I think about it. I remember my grandfather's pit toilet in Tokyo. So this poo industry must have been operating back in the 1960's. Shortly before Japan became an economic giant. I wonder if they still recycle poo in Japan now?
In Europe poo collection was big business. Gunpowder makers needed it to create Saltpeter crystals. Mix the poo with clean straw, and the crystals grow.
Urine has always been a key ingredient in shampoos and conditioners. The uric acid softens the hair strands, so much so that people would rinse their hair in urine after washing it.
In the woods near my house growing up there were these two blue rusted 1950s Chevys. They had what appeared to be bullet holes all over them. As a kid I like to think some gangsters from Chicago drove all the way down to the middle of nowhere outside of Springfield, IL and executed some people.
Has anybody said it yet? No? Alright:
“Fuck Martha Stewart.”
The part where you talk about the problem being better than the solution -- I remember you once using the alien from the movie of the same name as an example. And it’s a great example. The alien getting blasted out of the airlock is absolutely no where near as impressive as the alien itself.
Like how living is synonymous to dying, decay might be my new favorite measurement of time. It reeks of metaphors. How far have we fallen off from a vision, how blurry have the details become. Entropy is what ultimately sends everything to their graves and the unavoidable destination of chaos and randomness begs us to find meaning in the briefness of order. A world has to fall apart to test a character. What he does in the face of the truth is revealing.
“On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”
This post was such a beautiful read. The ghost town metaphor is so poetic it's repulsive.
Granite and words. Writers seem to want to leave some sort of legacy through writing. Was examining this idea with a friend recently, and I believe that I value the writing because of connecting people. Everything I ever loved brings people together. Food, music, drugs, health. Totally ok with the world forgetting me a couple years after Im gone, but doing what I can to facilitate connections while Im here provides meaning.
Had the most wondrous, magical weekend. Ran into the monk that built a buddhist temple out here. The story Im working on predicates on a conversion, and Buddhism popped up from 6 different places as that day went on.
Had a visit with him and several of his friends or followers or whatever it is. I dont know ehat this relationship has to offer to the writing, but I know it has something to offer.
PS- A Buddhist temple in a sea of rednecks is a very strange thing. "It never got weird enough for me."