Tell Me a Story

In the house I lived in on Lookout Mountain, GA (home of "famous" Rock City Gardens, Ruby Falls, "The World's Steepest Incline Railway", and Covenant College (from whence John Hinckley Jr. graduated)), there were two yellow and blue striped (they may have blue and yellow striped, but I think the stripes were about equal size so it's hard to say) arm chairs in which I learned to read. I remember sitting in my mom's lap while she diligently tried to explain to me the purpose of the comma. That conversation went something like this:

Mom : That's a comma. It means pause.
Me : That's stupid! Why don't they just write "pause" there?
Mom : No, it means you pause when you see it.
Me : For how long?
Mom : not very long. Try this sentence.

( sound of page turning )

Me : "We should go now,"

















he said,














"and see what is left!"

Mom : A little too long, dear. Just take a quick break and then keep going.
Me : Gaaaaawwww! How can anyone ever do this right?

I did eventually master the comma, and have been a voracious reader ever since. My early heros were the science fiction giants; names to conjure with : Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Bradbury etc. I quickly moved to Fantasy : Tolkein, Silverberg, McCaffrey, LeGuin, Lewis etc. Sometimes my papa would try to introduce me to writers outside of my comfort zone, who wrote books about actual people, or at least people who could not fly, turn invisible, roar, compute, tesseract, or anything else. I enjoyed these books readily enough, but before long my nose would be down in the next book of Susan Cooper's mighty The Dark is Rising series.

To this day, sciene fiction and fantasy books maintain their status as the vast majority of my reading choices. On my shelf right now (see Megan? two topics with one blog!) are:

1. All three of Neal Stephonson's Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, System of the World)
2. Frank Herbert's Dune (first time through, believe it or not)
3. Stephen R. Donaldson's new Thomas Covenant book, The Runes of the Earth
4. Christopher Moore's Lamb, a book recommended to me by no less than a dozen people, but which I must admit to not finding as funny as everyone else seems to have found it
   
5. Dungeon, Fire and Sword, the most fantasy-sounding title of them all but which is actually a terrific historical recounting of the fall of the Knights Templar in the crusades
   

Why is this? That's probably another blog topic entirely. The short, if misleading answer, is that I spend the large part of my day in a rigorous, extremely linear and logical world, getting computers to do things exactly as I want them to do them, which entails telling them exactly what that is and no more (and certainly no less), and so science fiction and fantasy fill a void. This is only partly true, however, because, and I say this with no false modesty, when you work with computers at the level at which I work with them, there is plenty of creative, outlandish, non-linear thinking to do in order to get anything done at all. Ask me sometime about what I did for 4 years in Indiana and you'll see what I mean.

In actuality, my guess is that the kinds of thinking one does in order to write fiction are very much like the kinds of thinking one does to write things which are rigorously true, i.e. computer code. You conceive an overall vision, and you keep as much of it in your head as you can while you focus on the many and varying details of implementation and execution. Sometimes it's so big you can't keep all of it in your head at once, and so you concentrate on chunks at a time, and when you get one chunk the way you like it you step back and figure out how what you just did affects the overall scheme of things. And there's no limit to the kinds of disciplines to which you can apply a creative technolgoical/philosophical/fantastical field of vision. It's the very best of both left and right brain exercise - it's why I got into computers in the first place (and that makes three).

Given that, then, it's amusing to note that my writing style is almost nothing like my coding style. My code is elegant, precise, minimalistic, and it always, always works. My writing, well - let's say I like to embellish, and it frequently doesn't work so well. Better to say I just outright make shit up all the time. I LOVE telling stories verbally, and when I write stories I tend to write them much like I'd speak them, with all the embellishments, side-tracking, and outright fabrications I can put in, and with WAY too many words. I overuse adjectives, adverbs, any kind of modifier I can grab a hold of I'll throw in there because I like the way it sounds when spoken. I like the rhythm, the cadence of a well constructed turn of phrase.

This is not to say this makes the best reading experience. And it's different depending on what I'm writing. If I'm telling a story about something that actually happened to me I tend to tone this kind of thing down a little bit, as I have a concrete vision in my head of the events, and so my tendancy to exaggerate can be reined in somewhat. It's when I'm writing fiction, and I'm responsible for making up everything, that the extra verbiage piles up. I've been writing the same short story for about 8 years now, and I keep bogging down because, while I have a rough idea of how I want things to go, I don't have a firm grip on the overarching structure, and no real plan of execution, and so I spend too much time being clever in dense areas of story which might be better off simply narrated so as to keep the actual story moving along. When I already know the story I'm much better at delivering.

Perhaps I should stick with memoirs.

All of this said, however, the most powerful writing experience I ever had, to this day, was in the 6th grade. My English class had a short story writing assignment; we had a week to do it, and at the end of the week we would all take an entire period to read our stories out loud to eachother. These were very short stories.

Except for mine.

At the time, I had just finished Shirley Rousseau Murphy's Children of Ynell series, starting with The Ring of Fire and culminating with the utterly stupendous The Joining of the Stone. I had fantasy and epic on the brain, and so my short story was instead a massive construction, The Quest for the Sun Sword, which came to its triumphant conclusion after a disasterous confrontation with an evil being of some type who actually wielded said Sun Sword in battle, resulting in the death of the hero's best friend, whose name, I swear to god, was Kenny. One might ask why, if the Sun Sword was such a great thing to have, did the guy wielding it in battle get his ass kicked?

But I digress.

On the day of revelation I was excited, nervous, eagerly antcipating my triumph. Our Teacher, Ginny Johnson (we all called her Ms. J., or J-Bird), went in no particular order, and so it was fate that put Georgianna George ahead of me in the queue. Now, I could go on a long time about Georgianna George. She was a country girl in a middle class elementary school, but she pretty much out-did everyone around her in pretty much everything - smart, interesting, and I was smitten with her from the start. I think she first came on the scene during 4th grade, and so I had 3 years of unrequited grade schooler passion as a backdrop to this moment.

Georgianna's story was short, simple, and had everyone gripped instantly. It involved a scientific researcher exploring a distant planet, and upon coming across an alien construction of some sort the researcher begins to try to decipher the ruins, only to be torn apart by the beast lurking within. Her description of the ruins were tinged with enough of the familiar to make you think you knew what they were, but shadowed with enough of the alien to make you wonder what you missed. As she read the final paragraph the room was dead silent. She described tendons popping and the horror of the researcher's last moments as she felt her back breaking, just before she died. And then the final blow.

"With a start, Sharon woke from her bed, crying. It was only a dream."

It was only a dream.

Inasmuch as it is possible for 6th graders to become spontaneously riotous, this is exactly what happened after a stunned, disbelieving silence. Miss George delivered her perfectly written story perfectly, with all of the timing and sensibility of a real writer. And at that moment I realized that what I had written was, in fact, crap. And no amount of, well, anything would ever change that. Of course, I was next, and when I refused to read my crap Miss J. threatened me with receiving an F for the lesson. Despairing, I waited for the bedlam to abate, and, finally, began my tale. It was too long, it wasn't very original, and the class clearly lost all interest after about 2 minutes. After Georgianna George's triumph, I felt smaller than small; worthless; a cheap bullshit artist. I ground down to my inevitable conclusion, and received the same smattering of applause that everyone else had gotten.

Everyone but Georgianna George, who as a 6th grader scared the absolute shit out of everyone in the room, including Miss J. I never felt any animosity towards miss George - far from it, in fact. What she did that day only fueled my ardor for her (an ardor which was never requited, alas - in fact, to say that I was unlucky in love as a grade schooler grossly understates the matter); it was inconceivable to me that I should think poorly of someone who wrote such a great story

But it took a long, long time after that before I ever wrote anything else. And I'm sure that, on some level, I am always feeling that feeling of knowing that I'm really not a good writer, and that my epic, convoluted story lines disguise a lack of any real talent for worsmithing. So, the answer to your question, Megan, is this:

I want to have the same effect on a room full of people that a 12 year old girl did 25 years ago.

Is that too much to ask?

I think he's got a bit of a crush...

Earlier this week I attended a taping of our author interview show, Between the Lines, at the Margaret Mitchell House as a part of their Center for Southern Literature. The author was the noted British historian, Simon Schama, and he was talking about his newest book, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution. Having left the history buff behind me years ago, I apparently missed out on the Schama phenomenon. Okay, I’m such a doof that I just found out (through the last few days of obsessive research) that he was a guest on Morning Edition just last month. Where have I been? And to what have I been listening? Clearly, nothing of historical import.

Anyway, at the taping I sat smack dab in the middle of the seats and had a rather open view to Simon. Well, this witty and brilliant Englishman began his spiel by talking about Spamalot, and I was hooked. You see, as the director of the Lit admonished all to turn off their cell phones and pagers, Simon asked the audience if anyone had seen Spamalot. Naturally I raised my hand. He then described how at the top of the show the Spamalot audience was encouraged to turn on their cell phones and make calls for the show is crap and you wouldn’t want to pay attention anyway. I laughed, indicating that I understood its humor, and I think he took notice. He probably also took notice because I was the youngest female in the audience by decades.

The interview was going well, and I was very happy for the host, the former First Lady of Atlanta. So, even though the ever-rising temperature of the room was challenging my awakedness (they had to turn off the AC for the recording), I hung on with a smile apparently planted throughout, for Simon commented on this on his way out of the venue. Simon stuck around for a book signing, and as he was leaving, he stopped right in front of me to say how much he appreciated my beautiful smile. It was a very good thing that I had no idea how big a deal he was in certain circles, for I sometimes can get quite a bit flustered and tongue-tied. Hard to believe, but so true. As I watched him leave, little did I realize that I would be quickly on his heels. I was talking to a colleague who was at the taping with a Schama groupie. He, along two other groupies, asked Simon out to dinner, and I was persuaded to go along. Okay, so not much cajoling was needed or used. I am, after all, the most going-outtest girl my Benjamin ever did know. Wait, there’s just a bit more.

When we reached the restaurant I was mortified that he would think that I was a stalker. I was not. I was just there with the Schama stalkers. However, my fears were alleviated when I introduced myself as Wanda, and he immediately made a reference to “A Fish called…” Don't know why this made me feel better. Maybe it's because it's one of my favorite movies of all time, or maybe it's simply because now he may remember me as more than a potential stalker? The table the restaurant gave us normally seated 10-12, so the six of us had about 3 feet of clearance between each of us. Since this was a stalking party, much musical chair shifting had to be done. Some long and chaotic minutes later, I was chosen to be seated (rather closely, mind you) between the two men that were at the table, hmmmmmm. Simon and I had a great ‘ole chat, and the evening ended with us exchanging emails, a hug, and a kiss. The plan is to keep in touch, and I will muster up the courage to write him soon and thank him for such a lovely meal. In the mean time, I must say that I’m the one that has got a bit of a crush now…

Kudos

My friend Lee (henceforth to be known as Leefer), with whom I went to high school, and have known longer than anyone to whom I am not related, has finally joined the ranks of blogdom with a beautiful first posting. His blog now appears on our sidebar, and as he's the one who has actually won writing awards, I highly recommend you check it out.

I, in the meantime, have been given a new assignment from our Companion Blogger, which I will tackle shortly. The topic:

"Write about writing and your vision of yourself as a writer"

She has suggested this topic to me more than once, and I've been avoiding it for reasons which will become clear when I write the post, oh, any day now that does not involved both work and concertizing (this day is scheduled for next Monday - I hope to get to it sooner than that however)...

A Random Childhood Memory

It is a well documented fact that I am, shall we say, eccentrically attached to the game of tennis. I have nearly a thousand hours of matches saved on video tape dating back to about 1986 or so (I swear that's true!), which I hope at some point to transfer to DVD so I can actually watch them, as our VCR is... ah... let's say it's actually near the home theater system. I love to play, as it's the only athletic activity for which I have shown even remedial aptitude. This isn't to say that I don't love to play other sports - I do (when we were living on the backside of Lookout Mountain (in a town called "Hinkle", if you can believe it) early in my high school career, I would bike the 5 miles to the front side of the mountain so I could attend a 2 hour swin practice and then bike the 5 miles back home (and I performed both of these tasks fairly well, if not spectacularly); this feat now would kill me somewhere during the first 8 seconds after jumping in the pool)! But my luck with other sports has been spotty.

Near the home where I grew up (on the front side of Lookout Mountain) there was a place called, simply, "The Commons". It was a regular paradise for kids during the summer; it had a huge playground, a little league baseball diamond, a larger soccer field, and 4 tennis courts in various states of disrepair. The Commons also sported a lovely hillside that looked as if it had been recently strip mined, and so, being in Georgia (but just barely - in fact, it may even be in Tennessee - I suddenly cannot recall where the state line runs on the mountain - it has been many years since I went up there, since my parents moved down to Florida), exposed an enormous bank of red clay, with other kinds of clay mixed in. A day at the Commons went like this:

1. Dropped off in the morning.
2. An activity of some sort: t-ball "practice", tag on the field, general pandemonium on the playground, etc.
3. lunch, consisting of whatever your parents bagged for you and a soda from the machine (cost like a quarter back then), which was eternally on the verge of running out of whatever you wanted, so you had to get it early in the game.
4. more activities, sometimes a t-ball "game" which consisted primarily of kids in uniform running in random-appearing patterns on a field meant for something else entirely
5. just before the parents arrived, "digging for clay". This activity was the best one of all, as it meant digging through the layers and layers of red clay for that special gleam of blue or green clay which, if you were so inclined (I never was) was about as fun to play with as other clay, which is to say, not much, but at least it wasn't red. Digging for it sure was a lot of fun, however, so we did that as much as possible.
   

The arch-activater was Coach Stamps. He coached every single t-ball team, was pretty much everywhere at once, keeping an eye on everything. There were also minions, and I can almost place faces to them, but not quite. They remain in memory as warm, indistinct but friendly prescences, and I never once felt like the Commons wasn't a safe place to be.

Until T-Ball.

For those of you who grew up in places without it, T-Ball is to baseball what training wheels are to a bicycle. You play it on a normal little league field, only instead of having the ball pitched to you, the ball rests on top of a large plastic tee, like an overgrown golf tee. The rest of the game is more or less the same, excepting for various oddities like the bat-slinging rule - if you sling the bat behind you after you swing you stand a reasonable chance of braining the kid on deck - if you did it (wether or not you actually brained the kid on deck), you were automatically out. To my knowledge this is not a rule in baseball (in fact in baseball I think you can carry the bat with you as you go, and I always wondered why no one ever did this... you could scare the bejeezus out of a first baseman this way), but The Commons was a safe haven, so no braining allowed. Also you play with an extra person out in the field, called the short-fielder. This person is supposed to roam the area behind second base in front of center field, catching the mighty pop-flies that t-ball invariably produced by the thousands as kids went through growth spurts and lost all modicum of muscle control. A short-fielder is quick and has a reliable glove.

Ours was not. Our short fielder was a kid by the name of Quentin Tugman. He was a year older but about 4 inches shorter than me. He was VERY quick, but the kid couldn't catch a cold. What would usually happen was that a ball would get lofted over Quentin's head (not hard to do - he was small for his age) and out to the center fielder. At this point the order should have been, center fielder fields ball, throws to appropriate base, or, excepting this, in the case of the center field who does not have the slightest idea where to throw the ball, throws to the short fielder, who would then relay it onward as appropriate.

In reality, standard procedure for our team was that Quentin Tugman would miss the ball over his head, but instead of turning around and putting his hands up to act as a big target for the center fielder, Quentin would charge out to center field, demand the ball from the center fielder, and when the center fielder would refuse, Quentin would then attempt to beat the living shit out of the center fielder in order to get the ball, and the times that he managed to do this he would then turn back towards the field of play and, a) find that he took so long beating the shit out of the center fielder that the kids on base were on their second or third go-around the bases, or b) see someone still running, and then heave the ball in some perfectly random direction, not always towards the field of play, in an attempt (it must be supposed) to throw someone out.

I was the center fielder.

I spent my T-Ball career getting the hell beat out of me by a smaller (but older) kid who flat out refused to lend any credence whatsoever to the idea that T-Ball was a team sport. Quentin Tugman dropped so many pop flies it's a wonder the second baseman didn't run over to where he was and pound the crap out of him on general principle. Unfortunately, honesty compells me to admit that the only time I can actually remember a ball getting hit so far out to center field that even Quentin didn't want to make a run for it, I was so amped up by the idea of getting to field the ball by myself for once that I charged back to the wall (where the ball had just bounced), grabbed the ball, turned in to the field of play, reared back to fire a mighty salvo to the plate and lost the ball out of my hand entirely, flipping it back over the center field wall for a home run. Refusing to admit defeat, I vaulted the wall (an impressive feat - it was much taller than me), ran down the hill behind the field and into the weed infested lot behind it, spent a good 3-4 minutes looking for it, found it, ran back up the hill, re-vaulted the wall, and fired the ball in to a very surprised player for the other team, who had taken the field after the merciful end of the inning.

All this is to say, it wasn't necesarily a bad idea for the ball to be taken away from me, but I was damned if I was going to give it up without a fight. What's the fucking point of being out there if all you have to look forward to is some snotty little brat beating the hell out of you to keep you from making an idiot out of yourself? I'll take the embarassment of making my own mistakes over the embarassment of letting someone else do it for me, thank you very much.

Unfortunately, my T-Ball woes were not limited to the field, as I also couldn't hit for shit. I mean it, I was hopeless at the plate. You'd think that nothing in the whole world could ever be easier than hitting a huge ball that's just sitting there, not moving, not making noise, not even trying to confuse you a little, but for some reason the way to do this successfully eluded me all but one time my whole life. Oh, I had the same waggle that the kids who could really hit had, I knew all the moves, the little rituals at the plate... but I was the only kid ever to strike out playing T-Ball. You might wonder, how is this possible, when nobody is pitching?

Well.

Imagine that at a particular point in a kid's growth, the ball is right about at his chest level, and he just can't quite get enough loft on his toes to make solid contact with the ball. Instead, he keeps making solid contact with the T, and the ball would just plop down to the ground, as gravity dictates should come to pass in this situation. Foul ball. Now image this kid doing that about 50 times in a row.

I just COULD NOT hit the damned ball. Finally, the plate umpire got the bright idea of removing the top portion of the T (the T was actually two tubes, one inside the other, so the height of the T could be adjusted for the kid - you might think that this was a solution, but the inner T was already down as far as it would go), which put the ball about 8 inches lower, so at last I could reach it. I thanked the plate unpire, wound up mightily, and swung right over the ball, missing it completely. The umpire looked at me and said, "Strike 3, kid, go sit down, will you please?" I did.

The one time, the one time I remember actually making terrific contact with the ball, I got a double. For some reason the stars aligned, the planets were in harmony, my lunch-soda-induced-sugar-high hadn't quite worn off yet, whatever, and I creamed the ball into right center field. I kept my wits about me long enough to remember that I was supposed to run, and made it all the way to second, actually driving in 2 runs, the first RBIs of my life.

But I slung the fucking bat.

They called me back to the dugout, not even a little bit sorry about the state of affairs.

"What's wrong?" I asked.
"You slung the bat. You're out."
"Oh, man, can't you give me a break just this once? I NEVER get a hit! I swear I'll never do it again"
"Siddown. You'll get 'em next time."

Needless to say, I did not.

Of the many memories I have surrounding The Commons, however, the one I remember most vividly was my first little league practice. No tees any more, just some kid throwing a ball in the general direction of the plate. We were in a sort of free-play mode as Coach Stamps was talking to a parent and hadn't yet gotten around to Organizing, and on a whim I grabbed a bat and trudged to the plate. The kid on the mound laughed at me, I took my stance, and he pitched the ball.

I knocked the shit out of it.

Hit an absolute screamer over the head of the kid at second base, but instead of watching my shot go into center field, I had to watch as the second baseman leaped up and made an absolutely spectacular catch of the ball over his head and mostly behind him.

I was so infuriated over this turn of events that a slung the bat down (I was out anyway), decided baseball wasn't for me, and ran across the parking lot to the tennis courts to see if I could pick up a game. I never played competitive baseball after that (softball does NOT count - softball is an excuse to drink beer and get dirty, in that order). All through grade school I played football, soccer, whatever the seasonal sport was... but when Summer came, I swam with the swim team instead of heading for the diamond.

I still remember the smell of the dirt in the field, red clay all over my shoes, fabulously hot afternoons on the lawn playing tether ball with Kevin Hunt, the chalky taste of the drinking fountain, the bliss of a Coke during lunch. And I will always remember the moment at which I first made that real decision : this is not for me, I am not built for it; I will try something new now. This led me to tennis. And so here I am. I love to watch basball now (although I avoided it for many years after my T-Ball days), but softball is as far as I'll go towards a reconciliation.