Gearing up for Hunter Application Round 2… FIGHT!

October 19, 2009 |

The open house for Hunter’s Creative Writing MFA program is coming up in just a couple of weeks. Not getting in last year was a disappointment, for sure, but it also motivated me to really kill it this year. When I was in high school, I only ever applied to one school—NYU—because, god damn it, that was the school I wanted to go to. When my utterly dismal high school grades didn’t get me in, I taped the rejection letter to my wall above my desk, spent a year at Foothill Community College, made a better film than the last time, and got in. Round 2 is for killing it. I’ve learned that much in my life.

And with that, Round 2 begins now.

It is time for me to look over last year’s work and evaluate it to see what did and what didn’t work. If I am going to make a better showing this time, and a better showing is what is needed, then I am going to have to be cognizant of my weaknesses as a writer so that I don’t let them get the better of me. Conversely, I must be aware of my strengths so that I can play to them, accentuate them, give them room to shine.

Last year, I submitted a piece I wrote called “Julian & Clive. But, before I get into what I think did and didn’t work in it, let’s look at the submission requirements for the program, yes?

2. Demonstrate talent
We’ll look at your grades, of course; but what we are really hungry for is talent, so we need to read what you can write.
If you’re a fiction writer, send us 20-25 pages (a short story, the start of a novel, or several short stories that total 20-25 pages). Sending more than 25 pages won’t help your cause.

All the fiction and nonfiction pages you send us must be double-spaced and in a twelve-point font. Poetry may be single-spaced or double-spaced.

4. Write a story about yourself
Tell us about yourself, why you write, and why you wish to come to Hunter. You’ve got 500 words to do this, so that does not mean 600 words. This personal statement might be the piece of writing that gets you into the program, which is not intended to make you worry excessively about it, but to remind you to make it real. A statement that feels fresh and true will be a treasure to those of us who read for admissions.

Clearly, the story I wrote was for section 2 above. Overall, it’s a decent story with some funny ideas and some well executed points. However, I think I tried to shove WAY too much into what ended up only barely fitting into 25 pages with some creative margins. This story could have easily filled many many more pages, and been served better for it. I had to throw out too much, keep things too brief, not allow the story to breathe, to try and fit it into the 20-25 pages allowed. There’s no space for nuance or subtext when I’m trying to hammer home this grandiose idea I had about a man’s inability to take responsibility for his own actions in such a short format, around 7500 words. Basically nothing! The characters come off as one dimensional since they are not given space to exist as anything but caricatures. A more skilled writer might have been able to pull it off, but I’m trying to get into writing school, not run the damn thing.

I tended to write the thing as if it were a treatment, that is, describing everything we see and focusing on the action. With a treatment, that makes sense, since what you are doing is describing what the movie will look like before it is even a screenplay. It’s not so great for a short story. It ends up feeling stilted and boring. If you can freely enter the thoughts of your narrator or characters at any time it makes sense, why wouldn’t you? If you can jump around through time and space as it’s appropriate, why wouldn’t you? If you can describe things, anything at all, however you want with images and references impossible to show on screen, why wouldn’t you?

I also think I tried to make the thing too fucking dramatic. This is a hole I’ve fallen into before. Some unconscious part of me thinks that good = dramatic, which is obviously not true. And not even really my strength. Quirk and humor are good. There doesn’t need to be fire and death and doom.

Finally there’s the ending. What the fucking fuck was I thinking? Jesse was right. I should have just ended it when he lost consciousness outside the burning ice cream truck. What’s wrong a little uncertainty at the end? Nothing, I tell you. Nothing!!!

This year I have a handful of things to keep in mind as I concept and write.

Keep it simple – DUH.
Stay away from dull action sequences – This isn’t a treatment; it’s a short story.
Embrace illusion and uncertainty – Fuck it, man. Not everything needs to be spelled out.
Let your characters breathe – I just need to make sure each character feels properly nuanced so that the piece doesn’t end up feeling like a comic book. I’m not writing Spiderman and my villain isn’t Doctor Octopus. There doesn’t even need to be a villain.
Allow lightheartedness – Good and funny is better than serious and dull.

That sounds like it might be a lot to keep in mind, but it’s not really. If Christians can remember 10 Commandments, I can remember 5 guidelines. Right? Right.

The other part of the submission process is to write 500 words about why you write, why you want to write, and why you want to go to Hunter. Here’s what I wrote last year.

I am a grocery store clerk, a salad bar operator, a construction worker, a real estate agent, a motion picture editor, an actor, a voice over artist, a musician, a production assistant, a web designer, and a great many other things. I am a son, a boyfriend, a brother, an uncle.
I believe in language and its power to create and shape the world we live in. I look for the darkest, most shameful aspects of human nature and draw humor from them. I find greatness in the mundane. I spend every step of my commute to and from work devising biting ways to start stories and introduce characters. I send my older brother particularly choice phrases of cynicism for amusement.

I write because losing my younger brother cemented in me that life is far too short, too fleeting not to embrace passionately. Despite the wisdom of Eastern sages, I’m not sure we get the chance to try again.
I write because there is nothing more human than to write. Whales sing. Monkeys scream. But only humans can commit their thoughts, feelings, fears, and dreams to words and share them with people they might never meet in an exchange that may last centuries.
And I write because, as part of that timeless exchange, I want to make people laugh and feel and think and remember.

I want to be part of Hunter’s tight-knit community of writers. When the speaker mentioned at the open house that only 6 students are accepted each academic year, a chorus of groans swelled in the room. Yet I was enticed. I have always thrived in small groups focused on intensive hands-on work. The challenge compels me. The selectivity excites me. But more than those things, the strong sense of community calls to me. It is a testament to the strength of the group that Hunter was able to get all the current students out on a weeknight to come talk to prospective students at an open house. Obviously you all have each other’s best interests at heart.
Most importantly, I want to work on my craft as a member of the Hunter community. Writing is a difficult, personal pursuit easily kept squirreled away from the potentially scornful eyes of the world. But, it is difficult, if not impossible, to grow as a writer without opening yourself and interacting with other people. For my part, I hope to serve my classmates as a reliable, insightful reader providing thoughtful criticism . From the faculty and my classmates, I hope to receive unflinching critique and analysis. I will strive to be an integral part of my fellows’ education and growth as writers since there is no better way for me improve my own craft. I don’t want to just be told my work is good—my mom can do that. I want to be challenged to make my work the best it can be, and I know Hunter can do that for me.

Am I serious? I thought this was pretty good when I wrote it, but now I can’t help but think that it’s the silliest thing I’ve ever put down on paper. Or arranged into bits on a hard drive. But you know what I mean. There’s a whole lot about this that could be better. But let’s distill it all into one, single word.

CONVERSATIONAL

What was I doing, delivering a eulogy? Speaking to the court? Apologizing to the family of the man I killed? Jesus Christ. How about I incorporate a little bit of my personal voice into this thing next time, huh? The whole thing sounds like shitty 6-grader poetry. I can do better.

To sum it all up, I’ve prepared a little visual reference of my intention.

In case you don’t understand, I’m Akuma (awesome) and the Hunter Application is Ryu, and I’ve just kicked the living shit out of him and a bunch of Jamaican people are dancing because it was so awesome. I don’t think I can make it any clearer.

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Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in real time

May 4, 2009 |

About Writing and Writing

I read Dracula during sixth grade. Every day we had a period called SSR, Sustained Silent Reading, where we’d sit wherever we wanted and read, silently, for an hour or 45 minutes or whatever. I remember quite clearly (an increasingly rare thing for me) sitting beneath a table on the windowed side of Mr. Williamson’s classroom with the green carpet reading my Penguin mass market paperback version of Dracula, enthralled by its revolutionary (to me, at least) format as a series of journals and letters. It blew my 11 year old mind. It was lush and suggestive, filled with horrors and darkness only ever hinted at indirectly. You never experienced the event as it unfurled, but were left to fill in the gaps for yourself based on what the characters had elected to describe in their writings, what they thought was important, how they felt about things. It turned what can be a very passive arrangement between author and reader into a more dynamic, exciting, interactive experience. Like 1898’s version of the best video game ever, but so much more because you got to do all the work. You were allowed to make the world your own. Indeed, to get the most out of the book, you needed to make the world your own, lest the experience become a disjointed, jumbly mess of conflicting view-points.

Let’s just say that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was important for me as a boy.

Today, Tiffany sent me a blog that is posting the entirety of Dracula as it happens in the book. The novel starts on May 3, and their first post is May 3. Such a cool idea. You can add it to your RSS feed and it will update you every day as the novel progresses.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

If you get reading it, and find you can’t wait for the next chunk, you can read the entire novel for free on Project Gutenberg.

A side note, a few years after reading Dracula, they canceled SSR which is a real shame. I’m confident that, as grueling as it was sometimes to convince a bunch of post-recess 11 year olds to sit silently and read, those mandated reading periods were instrumental in the development of my love of reading and writing and my supreme respect for the power of words. There probably would never have been The Black Laser if I hadn’t been forced to read after lunch every day. Imagine a world where you delightful people would have no place on the internet to abuse your optic nerves with my black and pink layout. Horrifying, I know.

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Vonnegut – How to Write with Style

How to write with style

By Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut, author of such novels as “Slaughterhouse-Five”, “Jailbird” and “Cat’s Cradle” tells you how to put your style and personality into everything you write.
© 1982 International Paper Co. Reprinted with permission.

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.

These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful–? And on and on.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead–or worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

Find a subject you care about.

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way–although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

Do not ramble, though.

I won’t ramble on about that.

Keep it simple.

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound.

“Should I act upon the urgings that I feel, or remain passive and thus cease to exist?”
“To be or not to be?”

“To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long.

Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

Have the guts to cut.

It may be that you, too, are capable of making necklaces for Cleopatra, so to speak. But your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

Sound like yourself.

The writing style which is most natural to you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad’s third language, and much that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens not to be standard English, and if it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.

Say what you mean to say.

I used to be exasperated by such teachers, but I am no more. I understand now that all those antique essays and stories with which I was to compare my own work were not magnificent for their datedness or foreignness, but for saying precisely what their authors meant them to say. My teachers wished me to write accurately, always selecting the most effective words, and relating the words to one another unambiguously, rigidly, like parts of a machine. The teachers did not want to turn me into an Englishman after all. They hoped that I would become understandable–and therefore understood.

And there went my dream of doing with words what Pablo Picasso did with paint or what any number of jazz idols did with music. If I broke all the rules of punctuation, had words mean whatever I wanted them to mean, and strung them together higgledy-piggledy, I would simply not be understood. So you, too, had better avoid Picasso-style or jazz-style writing, if you have something worth saying and wish to be understood.

Readers want our pages to look very much like pages they have seen before. Why? This is because they themselves have a tough job to do, and they need all the help they can get from us.

Pity the readers.

They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school–twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient teachers, ever willing to simplify and clarify–whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.

For really detailed advice

For a discussion of literary style in a narrower sense, I commend to your attention The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White (Macmillan, 1979). E.B. White is, of course, one of the most admirable literary stylists this country has so far produced.

You should realize, too, that no one would care how well or how badly Mr. White expressed himself, if he did not have perfectly enchanting things to say.

Original source is here: Kurt Vonnegut – How to Write with Style

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Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction

January 11, 2009 |

About Writing and Writing

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a highly distractable, highly unscheduled, highly undisciplined writer of things. For example, the beginning of this post has been sitting in an open tab since Friday morning. It is now very early Sunday morning and I am just writing the third sentence. You can imagine how difficult it is for me to compose anything of significant length or seriousness. As I’ve also mentioned before, I find it quite inspiring to read about how other people structure their work since it is such a struggle for me.

Friday morning I was reading an article on the Locus Magazine website by Cory Doctorow called “Writing In The Age of Distraction” that I might have found on BoingBoing. You can, no doubt, understand then that, as a fan of Cory’s, this article got me all excited up on a number of levels. It addresses something I like (Writing) in light of a problem I wrestle with (Distraction) by someone whose writing I like (Cory). In particular, one passage really stood out and screamed at me.

Short, regular work schedule
When I’m working on a story or novel, I set a modest daily goal — usually a page or two — and then I meet it every day, doing nothing else while I’m working on it. It’s not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it’s entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes. Writing a page every day gets me more than a novel per year — do the math — and there’s always 20 minutes to be found in a day, no matter what else is going on. Twenty minutes is a short enough interval that it can be claimed from a sleep or meal-break (though this shouldn’t become a habit). The secret is to do it every day, weekends included, to keep the momentum going, and to allow your thoughts to wander to your next day’s page between sessions. Try to find one or two vivid sensory details to work into the next page, or a bon mot, so that you’ve already got some material when you sit down at the keyboard.

This is a very interesting idea and something I’m going to try and keep going through The Year of 5000 Photos and 50 Short Stories, which I am already behind on. Typically, I don’t write on weeknights because my work schedule can be so crazy at times that I have difficulty coming home, regaining my focus, and sitting down to work, especially when all I really want to do is eat something, hang out with my ladyfriend, and mellow before I go to bed. Of course I am never going to fulfill my obligations to TYO5KP&50SS by giving in to my base need to be lazy and “chill out,” as the kids say. That said, it is ridiculous to expect hours worth of work from myself when I come home at 10pm from work, maybe eat something, and sit in front of the computer at midnight. But 20 or 30 minutes I can do.

Since I don’t write in a program that shows a page layout like MS Word would, I don’t have a good indication of what a “page” is or when I reach it. A Google search shows that 250 words in 12-pt Courier per page is generally considered standard for a manuscript submission. Some of my own tests using a regular US Letter piece of paper with standard margins suggest that a page is about 350 words in 12-pt Times New Roman. Either way, two pages is, what, 500-700 words? That I can do. I think. Maybe. We shall see. I am really terrible at this whole “schedule” business.

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Holy crap! This yet again proves that Japan is the future.

December 12, 2008 |

Thoughts

Scientists extract images directly from brain

Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.

The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.

Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity.

Seriously? That SHIT IS AWESOME. Computers used to read the visual data people’s eyes send to their brains? WHAT THE FUCK?!? Who told Japan that they could live inside a SF book? Do I actually need to say anything else? The answer is No.

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53 search results for “a letter”

Gearing up for Hunter Application Round 2… FIGHT!

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in real time

Vonnegut – How to Write with Style

How to write with style

Original source is here: Kurt Vonnegut – How to Write with Style

Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction

Holy crap! This yet again proves that Japan is the future.