Journalism is Hard

I’m not a reporter, and, outside of blogging and contributing to my union’s newsletter, I don’t write a lot of nonfiction. But recently a story caught my eye on Facebook and I started to pursue it.

Did I mention I’m not a reporter or journalist of any kind?

I don’t want to go into the specifics of what is an ongoing situation, but I decided to go at my ‘scoop’ like I imagined a real journalist might. I created files on the major players, started interviewing anybody who’d talk to me, and generally began to dig into the story. I even successfully pitched the story idea to the managing editor of a small national magazine. Unfortunately, I did not bother to learn how the people I was researching might feel about my sudden interest.

Even when it started to become evident that I was, in fact, most definitely not welcome as some sort of imbedded journalist in their fight. All of the principles remained friendly. But their evasions of certain subjects turned into outright refusals. Then pretty much everybody stopped talking to me at all, instead referring me to their official leadership who politely recited the party line or had no comment.

But I was on their side, I reassured them. I promised them I was there to help The Cause. That was my top priority. My getting published in a nationally distributed magazine was secondary to my noble desire to lend them the power of my pen! Why couldn’t they see that? I even went so far as to voluntarily cede the right of final veto on the story. They could pull the plug anytime they felt I wasn’t helping. It seemed like a fair trade for unfettered access to a complex and fluid situation.

Of course, when I was proposing this quid pro quo I didn’t go so far as to baldly state what I wanted, i.e. to be on the ‘inside,’ to know everything. I smoothly let that part be implied.

Some things are best left unsaid.

You can imagine my surprise when I realized they hadn’t agreed to my little deal. Worse, my sacrifice of creative control, my obvious sympathy with the subjects of my story, even my innate charm and general likeability, had all added up to diddly-squat.

I was stuck on the surface of the story in a neat little ethical trap of my own making. If I kept digging into what I had begun to suspect was the true heart of the matter then I knew I would be in violation of the promises I had made to my story’s subjects. But I also knew if I stopped following the evidence where it led me, then the magazine I had pitched wouldn’t want the story.

It’s taken me a couple of days to figure it out, but I finally concluded that I’m just not the person to write this article.

Maybe I might have been if I hadn’t charged in thinking I had all the answers. Maybe if I had taken the time to find out what my subjects wanted. Come to think of it, maybe I shouldn’t have been thinking of these people as ‘subjects’ in the first place. And maybe, just maybe, I shouldn’t have assumed the ‘help’ I tried to jam down their throats was needed or even wanted.

This story, the one I’ve lost the right to tell, is about a group of people fighting a good fight against a powerful dirt bag. It’s about how they’re using creative and imaginative weapons to even the odds. And it’s about the help they do need and are quite clearly and specifically asking for.

But it was never about me.

Luckily I managed to figure that out before I did any harm to some folks I honestly did want to help.

Though the digging, the learning and categorizing of the various moving parts until unexpected pictures and connections emerged? That part was fun. This may not be my last bout of random journalism. Hopefully it’s just my last time screwing it up in this particular manner.

Nikki Loftin’s Nightingale’s Nest Sings

Nikki Loftin is a gifted storyteller. Her sophomore middle-grade fantasy, Nightingale’s Nest, (2014, Razor Bill) proves that.

At last month’s Austin SCBWI Working Conference I was fortunate enough to attend Sarah Ketchersid’s (Executive Editor, Candlewick Press) seminar on the importance of raising the stakes for your novel’s hero. Not surprisingly, Nikki was there too.

It got me thinking that I’d love it if she led her own class, maybe “Techniques for Torturing Your Hero in Entertaining and Compelling Ways?” Whatever she called it, I would definitely attend.

That’s because Loftin intertwines her plots so masterfully with her hero’s desires. No matter how hard Little John tries to do the right thing, his choices just keep making things worse. Nightingale’s Nest is at times heartbreaking and disturbing, but it kept me turning the page to learn if the preteen protagonist would ever catch a break.

In addition to her gripping plot, Loftin’s reinterpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale” deftly creates a setting and backstory that firmly establish Little John as sympathetic and oh so damaged – again all of the hero’s problems are tangled up in choices he did and didn’t make before the time period of the book. Then she unwinds a chain of events which genuinely and believably threaten to crush him, along with pretty much everyone he loves.

Nikki Loftin

Which brings me to the story’s other main character Gayle, the strange little orphan who escapes her abusive foster home by living in a tree and singing. Gayle has magic in the same way Loftin’s entire book has magic. It’s just part of her, it’s not explained or justified. Magic is simply something the world ofNightingale’s Nest possesses in casual abundance.

I strive to create that kind of … I don’t know, magicality in my own fiction. Sorry to make up a word, but ‘magical realism’ and ‘fantasy’ don’t really fit what Loftin creates. Her book’s world is very recognizable; the people are just regular folks with familiar, if dire, problems. The setting of Nest has everything a typical suburban/urban preteen would find familiar. Except Gayle. It’s obvious from the first sentence of the book that she’s special, a catalyst. Loftin even goes so far as to call the little girl’s music “magic” in the opening paragraph. And that’s how the author treats the supernatural throughout the rest of the book: it’s matter of fact, no big deal. Just another branch for the reader to hold onto to as he climbs.

Nikki Loftin’s skill with plot and world building are enviable and make for a tightly paced and compelling read. And her characters intrigued me and demanded my sympathy in all the right ways. In short, Nightingale’s Nest lived up to the expectation created by her debut, The Sinister Sweetness of Splendid Academy. I can’t wait to see what kind of world she crafts next.

Little Gods

I got a text Sunday night while I worked in the middle of a quickly emptying stage at the Long Center; Ballet Austin‘s most recent production had closed that afternoon. We were halfway through the load-out. I was exhausted and a little depressed because I hadn’t managed to work on my WIP in weeks. This was one of those periods where the pull of my day job was testing my commitment to maintaining a writing practice. And I was failing.

The text came from my brother in Maine:

“Hey Brad just wanted to let you know that Marylou passed away today. Love you Brian.”

Mary Lou was his mother-in-law, and her death had been imminent for months. I still considered her a friend, even if her crippling dementia had wiped any memory of me from her mind. We had gotten close one winter in the mid-nineties when I lived and worked in her home trading my then meager carpentry skills for room and board. She and her husband, a master carpenter, had hired me to help them convert their 18th century farm house into a B&B.

That text from my brother, so simple, with barely any punctuation, destroyed me in a way that I would never have predicted. I made an excuse to my crew head and fled to the upstage bathroom before I lost it. Luckily it was empty. I locked the door behind me and leaned against the gray tiles to stare down at my phone, nose dripping onto its screen. The words blurred out of focus.

Eventually my vision cleared and my breath smoothed. But I couldn’t pull my eyes off of my phone. Each time its screen went black I woke it back up to read my brother’s text another time.

A half-familiar thought was trying to penetrate my grief. Eventually I let it.

We humans are communicators like no other creatures on the planet. Sure, non-humans use language in varying degrees. I get that. But not like people. Our communication skills border on the divine. Take my brother’s text. With a few dozen keystrokes he quite literally pushed me into a new world where my friend Mary Lou no longer existed.

That is power.

And he’s not even a writer. But his message (re)taught me a lesson I’ll probably never finish learning: written expression has the power to change the very fabric of the universe. That’s at least part of why I started writing poems and stories as a kid. When I write I become a little god.

All writers do.

I’m not speaking metaphorically here. Writers of all kinds put words together in ways that transform their readers’ worlds. Whether it’s a text telling of a loved one’s death or a thousand page novel or a treatise on quantum mechanics, when it’s done well writing has the strength to shift any paradigm. Just consider the hundreds (if not thousands) of holy scriptures that humans have created, or the U.S. Constitution, or the Odyssey. I could keep going, but you get the point.

This post is not one of those of seminal documents. I know that. I just wanted to publicly thank my brother for his unintentional reminder of why I write. And say goodbye to friend Mary Lou. Both of them showed me something I needed to see at exactly the moment I needed to see it. It hurt to learn of my friend’s death, and I know her passing leaves a hole in a lot of lives, including mine. But at least one good thing came from her passing.

I went home that night and I wrote for hours. Most of it was crap, over-emotional and meandering. Stuff that will most likely never see the light of day. I didn’t care; I was writing again. It didn’t matter how I felt the next morning when the alarm slammed me into another fourteen hour workday. I had remembered my power. I had reclaimed my tiny slice of divinity. Once more I was a little god, however sleep deprived.

“Creative Limitation as a Positive Force”

Five hundred words, that’s all I needed. But a million little disasters distracted me. Compared to what a lot of people deal with, they’re not really disasters, at all. I know that. But knowledge of relative scale had ceased to provide much relief or solace after what had now been several months of low level stress and petty catastrophes. And it certainly didn’t help me focus on coming up with those five hundred words I needed for the next day’s deadline.

I sat in the shadowy glow of a blue running light upstage during Act One of Tosca at the Long Center (I work as a stagehand).

I had just given up on writing.

Seconds before, my computer had sighed a tiny almost-beep and gone blank in my lap. Its fans had stilled for the final time. The battery status indicator kept flashing once green then twice red, once green then twice red, once green then twice red. I knew its brain had fled this mortal realm. The little flashing light was merely leftover electricity with nothing else to do. My faithful machine’s last heat drained into the tops of my thighs. I pulled the power cord out of its back. The little light flashed one final time and went dark.

Surrounded as I was by my fellow stagehands, I silently swallowed against my tears and slid my laptop’s corpse into my bag. All I could think about was my WIP. It had been at least a month since I backed it up. I knew I could never exactly recreate all of the small scale tuning of my narrator’s voice that I’d been doing in that time.

I prayed to whatever god has jurisdiction over irresponsible writers and resolved to put this latest setback out of my mind until tomorrow. I pulled out my copy ofPoets & Writers’ 2014 inspiration issue. It fell open to M. Allen Cunningham’s essay called “Rethinking Restriction: Creative Limitation as a Positive Force.”

I read the first paragraph and snorted. Ha! I thought. This ought to be good. But his thesis, that it’s more useful to view “imposed limitation – in ideas or images, as well as in actual time to create” as a positive tool for a writer, intrigued me. And it certainly had specific relevance to my situation.

Some context might help. Here’s a partial list of some of what’s been eating at me since the end of last year. The first minor disaster was the partial flood of my house that required me to pull half the floor out, dry it, and reinstall it. But there have been several ongoing stressors, too. Our hot water heater has been agonal for over a year. Several plumbers have warned me it’s in its final (though hopefully still pre-dramatic-explosion) death rattle. There’s also the older, even more feeble washing machine. Getting back to discreet catastrophic events, we had a break in the main water line into our house, two tile installers who haven’t actually installed any tile in our only shower, a furnace that broke down twice, and a bunch of other annoyances. The most recent of which was the death of my computer in the dark, surrounded by Puccini’s beautiful music.

And here’s this guy telling me I just need to turn my problems into my solutions. I won’t lie; I briefly entertained some uncharitable thoughts for Mr. Cunningham. But I kept reading. I couldn’t help it. His premise that “resistance to its production [is] what makes good art good” intrigued me.

#StagehandView

The argument has a compelling logic that I just couldn’t refute. So I stared into the silhouette of the Act Three ground row I sat upstage of, and I despaired.

I had lost my last excuse, my best justification for not writing. If lack of time (or computer), if the myriad distractions occupying my conscious mind, were not the reason I had stopped writing, then what was?

Only one answer seemed plausible: I had reached the first true test of my commitment to my writing life, and I had failed it.

I was pathetic.

I finished the article anyway. What the heck? I thought. It’s not like I had anything better to do.

In the second half of his piece Cunningham delves into the role of the conscious vs. the unconscious mind in the writing (or any creative) process. He defines that moment all writers face when we must simply stare at the blank screen or page and hope something comes as “a practice of faith.” And he’s right.

So I said another aimless prayer. I put down the magazine and picked up my notebook and pen. Whatever emotional cocktail I experienced at that moment sure didn’t feel like faith. But it wasn’t despair, either. So I kept staring down at the white paper in my lap. I kept my lucky pen poised. I noted how the blue backstage lighting had rendered the lines of the page nearly invisible. Then I pressed the tip of my pen to the paper.

Eventually it moved.

Submission Guidelines Are Your Friend

I’m the critiques coordinator for next month’s Austin...

Read more