He is gone

Shelley wrote it first: “I weep for Adonais — He is dead!”

The “I” was Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the “Adonais” was John Keats. And I’m sure Shelley lost something when John Keats died. But from what I’ve read about their acquaintanceship, it couldn’t have been anything compared to what we in the School of Humanities at St. Edward’s University have lost with the passing of Adam Pyles.

Our School of Humanities is a real family. The people in Andre Hall on our campus in Austin are a genuine community of souls and minds. When we lose something, we really lose it.

Adam was one one of the better people I’ve ever known. I knew him for almost ten years. He was one of the rare people who I could just pass on a sidewalk and feel happier for having seen him, said hello, and nothing more than that. For no good reason. That’s not to take away from the much more involved, deeper conversations we had.

We had so many talks about music, books, ideas. He was, like so many people at St. Edward’s, an intelligent soul who taught as much as he ever learned. He knew music, art, literature, style. He could wear a hat like few men could, but that was just the outer wear. The brain underneath was a fascinating thing. I’ll miss it desperately.

He was smart, creative, deeply intelligent. I thought of him as a little brother, a friend, a teacher. He gave me so many ideas that wound their ways into my classes. He helped me figure out things that made me feel incompetent.

And he was just a pleasure to be around. We’ve all had people we have to see, and gird ourselves for that experience. Adam was the exact opposite of those people. I was always so glad if I had a question or concern that involved Adam, because it made for an excuse to spend a few minutes with him.

I feel sad that I never I told him these things. I didn’t think it was necessary. But it was. As Kim Livingston, a great friend to Adam, and to me and all of us in the School of Humanities, wrote today on her facebook: “Hug the ones you love and let them know it.” That’s the way to say it. Straight out.

So yes, as Shelley once put it, weep for him, for he is gone. I’ve been doing a lot of that today, as so many of us have at our school. These are sad days on the hill.

His like will not be seen amongst us again.

Process – the cork board approach

I’ve recently gone to visual aids for my writing. As I’ve written recently, Austin Kleon turned me on to the idea of an “analog station” in the work room. Mine is up and running. It’s not perfect. Space is always an issue. There’s space for the desk, for the books, but then the trombone and the Roland keyboard want to be in there, and the writing room becomes a semi-music room, and …

This isn’t a functional model. We don’t all live in houses where we can have a designated space for every thing we do.

But writing needs to have its corner. It can be a desk, a nook, a 4×4 cell. Put a table in a closet with a light.

But back to the analog station. I’ve been enjoying posting cards and photos, thinking how characters might look, seeing how settings really do look since I’m writing something that takes place almost now, in a space that’s very vivid.

How to craft a “reluctant hero” for any genre: what to watch out for

Interesting tips on writing this kind of character. I think I have one in my novel. No, I don’t just think so, he’s right in the middle of it all.

Creative Writing with the Crimson League

The topic of today’s post is character: in particular, epic, heroic characters. We most associate such characters with genre fiction: fantasy and sci-fi, but really, I define an epic character as an inspiring character, and that can be found in any genre.

The “hero” character is a type, for sure, which means writing a hero is always tricky to do in a way that comes off as fresh and original. One way to make a character type uniquely yours is to keep in mind how these characters generally evolve in stories.

Shakespeare wrote, “Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” I look at heroes in two categories:

• Heroes ready, willing, and rearing–or at least who voluntarily choose–to get in the action and do great things (those who are born great/achieve greatness)
• Heroes who have no choice but to “(wo)man up” and get…

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Inspiration takes a hand

Today was an inspiration day, or rather tonight, this morning, I woke up with an idea I’ve been needing. I firmly believe that the ratio of inspiration to perspiration in creative work is small, very small. But little moments come when problems we’ve been wrestling with become clear, and ideas start to flow. And now and then inspiration, like destiny in the film Casablanca, takes a hand.

With me, it all starts with the Paris Métro between Porte de Bagnolet and Gambetta. Line No. 3.

It’s a five-, maybe five and a half-block ride. No one would take it. You get on at Porte de Bagnolet and go at least to Père Lachaise, down the hill of Menilmontant, if not further. You get on at Gambetta and go to the end of the line, Gallieni, or you just walk.

But in my book I had a guy going that one stop and couldn’t quite explain it to myself. Tonight, I figured it out, while sleeping, so I’m up writing it down and writing this post. I’m not going to explain it here, for obvious reasons, but I know.

The breakthrough might have come because I started pinning things to the wall. Pictures, maps, cards with plans, more cards with questions. I pinned these two guys up there. They’re both real people. The one to the right is someone on Twitter, Farid ARAB, a Parisian with Algerian roots, maybe Algerian born, mostly into tech things, as far as I can tell from his feed. The one below is an Egyptian film director, Ibrahim El Batout. I chose them for their faces. I need to visualize what one of my characters might look like, and one is pretty similar to one of these guys, or an amalgam of both. He’s involved in the Métros and the one-stop ride. There’s some running in the streets. These two actual people have nothing to do with the book. They’re just visual inspiration. I’m trying to imagine a character, the one who runs the several blocks because of something to do with his best friend, and get to how he thinks and feels by looking into his face, that’s all. But it’s a lot. And these guys have pretty interesting faces, you have to give them that.

This is all stuff that has to be worked out. It’s just nice to have it come alive in my head so now I can work it into the pages. It’ll come into the book in several places, and only become clear near the end.

And now the morning doves are cooing, so I have to get back to sleep. Paris was a few weeks ago. It’s good to remember the Gambetta Métro station has at least five entrances/exits, and that the Porte de Bagnolet one has only three. And that CCTV didn’t exist in the Paris Métro in 2011.

I’ll write this out in the morning. I’ve got a page full of notes written in purple marker (the only thing at hand), and a subway map. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s writing.

Tintern Abbey Par-tay

Me, Tintern Abbey, back when cameras used film.

Like the Romantic sublime, this post comes to you a bit delayed. Wordsworth put it either best, or just most famously:

Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear,

For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds,

We questioned him again, and yet again;

But every word that from the peasant’s lips

Came in reply, translated by our feelings,

Ended in this, — ‘that we had crossed the Alps’.

Imagination — here the Power so called

Through sad incompetence of human speech,

That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss

Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,

At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;

Halted without an effort to break through;

But to my conscious soul I now can say —

“I recognise they glory.”

I wrote about travelling to find what he was trying to find once here. But that’s not what this post’s point.

A few people came over the other night for no particular reason, but when the date was set for July 13, I couldn’t help thinking about Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” or, more correctly: “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, upon revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798.”

When I visited Tintern Abbey it was closed. I didn’t know you could close a ruin, but you can. So I went along the Wye and looked at it. That was more in the spirit of Wordsworth’s poem, so I didn’t really mind.

I tried to feel

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things.

It didn’t happen there. That took a few more years and a trip to the Alps, where Wordsworth missed the sublime in 1792. He’s the better poet of the two of us, but I’m the better sublime-finder.

Last night had nothing to do with Wordsworth, in the end. Good friends, good food, some Jackson 5, and Earth, Wind and Fire at the end.

So what I’m saying is that turned into more of a Coleridge evening than a Wordsworth one. But I think I’ll celebrate Tintern Abbey Day every year from here on.

With Freya on the same trip. I think this one’s at Dublin Castle.

 

Bonne fête nationale à tous/Happy Bastille Day

A younger Siobhán shows the way to Le Place de la Concorde

I took a walking tour of Paris a couple of years ago, and when we got to the Place de la Concorde the guide made a big point of telling us we shouldn’t call July 14 “Bastille Day.” He said the holiday came about on July 14, 1790, was originally called the Fête de la Fédération, and focused on the new nation and reconciliation, not the storming of the Bastille on the same date in 1789.

From that, we get Le Place de la Concorde. The picture at the right with a little Siobhán will show you the way there.

I was there this past week but I didn’t take any photos. I was scoping out the U.S. Embassy, Thomas Jefferson’s former house, for some scenes in my novel in progress, and didn’t think I should take pictures while looking suspiciously at the place. The gendarmes were everywhere, as were cameras. I noticed that you can’t walk by the embassy because of security, but you can drive past it. Interesting.

But back to France and “Bastille Day.”

I was in France for American Independence Day, and now I’m in the U.S. for Bastille Day. Don’t know what to make of that, but it’s made me think of my relationship to two of the three countries I visit most: France and England (the third is Ireland, my own true love). I teach British literature, but I’m no Anglophile. I like and dislike British things just about as rationally as I like and dislike American things. I’m the same way with France. I love speaking French. I love walking around Paris. But I can’t go crazy over French food, which I find bland, and have just as complex a set of relationships with French people as I do with Americans. I like some, dislike some, and don’t find generalizations easy.

The Flynn Connection to The French Connection

One of Hemingway’s six-toed cats, daring you to type.

I’m well into the first draft of a book that’s going to kill me, unless I kill it first. Masculine approach to writing, I know. I don’t go at it like that every day. Yesterday evening I worked on putting up corkboard for index cards, arranging colored markers, printing out pictures of places … Very analog, let’s get along, playful, not the angry Hemingway pounding the typewriter approach to writing.

Although – to be briefly tangential – I have a typewriter in my analog section of the writing room. But that’s another post. Back to the topic.

A geek for the kids

Just a quick note and picture to point out that I can be an absolute geek for my kids.

My daughter Siobhán has turned into a Dr. Who nut over the past year. Tardis this, Dalek that, etc. She’s also writing three novels, apparently because I keep giving her notebooks, and every notebook has to have its own story. I fear for her future.

I took a subway from Hackney to wherever. I can’t get a grip on whether a town’s a town or a borough or a whatever in London. In any case, we went from Stoke Newington, Borough of Hackney, to the Who Shop in Upton Park. Borough of I don’t exactly know where. Maybe it’s still Hackney. The taxi driver was really fun and tried to explain it all. He pointed out the Olympic stadium and said he lived near there. He was from Somalia and told me it was much better there than before, but he’d never move back because his kids were utter English kids.

And then, there’s the shop.

They say they’re the first and only Dr. Who Shop. I’ve found some others online, but never mind. The people working there were delightful, ridiculous, utterly geekish. If they say they’re the first and only, I’m with them. I deny the existence of the others. They must exist out of time and space.

When I asked one of them to take the picture here he asked: “In front of which Tardis?” He wasn’t just “one of them,” I learned, but “my husband,” according to the checkout clerk, the owner of the store. He explained a lot of Who things I didn’t really catch. But he was nice, she was nice, they loved taking visitors’ pictures, and there it is. I didn’t want to ask what the hell a Tardis was, so I pointed to the big box and they said it was an excellent choice.

Quimper to Paris

I left Brittany much the way I got there. Lugging, schlepping, cars and trains and steps, a taxi, the Métro …  It was a trip full of connections and changes.

I left Penmarc’h, and all the beautiful lighthouses, rocky beaches and ardoise-roofed stone houses behind, and drove my Europcar rental to the Quimper train station, or “gare.” I like the car. I purposely got a Fiat 500, just like I drive at home, to make it less disorienting. The sunroof didn’t open, but never mind that. It handled the Brittany roads with their narrow lanes and ubiquitous rond points (roundabouts) very easily.

Two good days in Brittany

I had two excellent days in Brittany, checking out the lighthouses and the coast. I watched fishing boats crawl into port after a day of work, and had an excellent dinner at a “gite,” or B&B, where our hosts, Hélène and Daniel, along with a bunch of Italians, sat down to eat with us for hours. Langostinas, which are like little crawfish, white wine, red wine, cheese, crêpes, Scotch. My room was very close to where we ate, fortunately.