BOOKS + INSPIRATION

Curled up with Word Play by Peter Farb, a book about language and games it plays. Now struck by explicable but odd Marx brothers movie craving.

BOOKS, READ AND HALF WRITTEN

Actually curled up with a book last night instead of hunching over the half light of my computer screen — actually, it’s 20 inches of incandescent shiny iMac glow, but half light sounds better, or at least gives a better visual. Decided to really try the Peter Drucker book, Adventures of a Bystander. It’s a collection of essays — episodes really, full of people he knew, ranging from his elementary school teachers to Freud and the upper management at GM in the 40’s. Drucker thinks and analyzes and remembers and parses life lessons with both astringency and warmth. It’s a good combination for me — bracing analysis plus a genuine enjoyment of the people Drucker has met and the situations he has experienced. His chapter on teaching and two of the women who inspired him to be curious and passionate about even dull subjects — although they never managed to improve his handwriting — reminded me how much I love reading Montaigne. The best essayists have a gift for mixing the personal with their philosophies. I’m looking forward to finishing the Drucker book; one of my favorite things about essays is you can read them in any order and even if you only have time for a few. And I’m going to see if I can find my Montaigne — I have one edition with illustrations by Salvador Dali – that’s a little mind blowing — and another with the translation that Shakespeare would have read. Bookman’s Alley in Evanston was the perfect environment for serendipity back when I rambled through it regularly.

Thanks to Sally of McGraw-Hill UK, I am working my way through “A Sense of Urgency” by John Kotter(and yes, I am susceptible to being cheered by getting a gift book in the mail), which impressed me in its FT review by Stefan Stern. The review is posted on my Opportunity Door, along with some ideas for next year’s Animation Magazine pitch party.

I am hoping the book would help with the focusing problem I seem to have about PROJECT PYE, which according to my blog on the subject, I’ve been wrestling with since August 18, 2006. It’s a great story — much of the trouble is all the other things I do, the other stories I want to tell, a lack of help, and an abundance of visuals. And I just really want to sit down and get the darn thing done. I think Calvin (one of the Lonely Ponders and my cohort in all things Gullible and Twitchy) doesn’t ever believe it will get done. I kept throwing so many possibilites at him that he just started to duck, I think.

While the Kotter book has a GREAT idea — be urgent, not hasty and avoid complacency at all costs, the style of the book doesn’t suit me; it’s very academic, I think, and I spent most of my college years in Northwestern’s gloriously tri towered library, wandering the Lakefill and writing poetry or in the few classes with professors I respected. My reading choices were Dante and Spencer and Shakespeare and Machiavelli and Lao Tsu and Hobbes and DeQuincey and Donne and Horace so modern business writing seems to stutter along without much style. I am finding “Urgency” goes a little better as I continue along but Drucker suits me so much better. People have names and problems are real and one or two words aren’t hammered at you as if there will be a quiz. And you are left to your own devices, conclusions and whatever list of bullet points or size of brain map you care to draw on your own.

Well, I guess we’ll leave the writing I found this morning while looking for a new notebook for reporting for another day…there are so many half started stories that get tangled up in other stories or left for other projects or just get lost. Even if “A Sense of Urgency” proves useful, I fear that I have already heard the only piece of advice that works and it comes from a character a person of sense might hesitate to take advice from, Lady MacBeth:

“Screw your courage to the sticking place.”

That’s what it’s really about. That’s the only thing equired: COURAGE. Nike’s “Just Do it” may be simplistic, but it is priceless advice. “Coraggio, bully monster, coraggio!” as Stephano says in the Tempest.

*Open free directing sample: The full Lady MacBeth phrase is this: We fail! But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we’ll not fail.’ Which makes me think is that the but is not the usual conjunctive but (there’s a phrase that sounds like a disease), but the adverb which acc. to wikipedia and Merriam means merely or only. And this fascination with the right phrase/meaning/inflection is why I spend many of my summers directing Shakespeare. Close free directing sample*

One of the best things about Drucker’s book for me is that he didn’t make the obvious choices or walk where expected. He followed the things that interested him and here I am, looking at his name on the cover of a book and learning from his successes. That encourages me. And as I reread this last sentence, I’m saying hmmm, look encourage — I recognize part of that, I bet it shares the same root: (and answers.com agrees: “[Middle English corage, from Old French, from Vulgar Latin *corāticum, from Latin cor, heart.]” Close word lover sample*

*open directing and word lover postscript — as I think over this, it comes to me that while courage is the essential quality required, the verb and the action — screw, do, dare –are what turns intent and whatever qualities you bring to it into success. Close directing and word lover postscript*

THE ANECDOTE

I forgot the anecdote — Altucher mentions the need for anecdotes, personal and otherwise, in his soon to be legendary how to write a book advice(see last entry Alternate Wednesdays). So which one do you want? Well, how about why did I write In The Bleak December…well, unfortunately, I could find no gay people in straight books and no straight people in gay books — and frequently, too much sex, so I decided to write a book more reflective of my life, but set before everyone was categorized and a demographic quality, as well as pay homage to the authors and westerns I loved when I was going up — Poe, early sci fi, the Lone Ranger, Bradbury, etc…so it started out as aliens visit the Old West — I believe the original title was Glowing River Gulch — there’s a winner — and I still have the parts of that I wrote somewhere…but it didn’t exactly work.

So there we were doing an excellent The Importance Of Being Earnest and I mentioned to the bundle of energy playing Lady Bracknell that I was trying to write a book about lesbian paranormal detectives and she shouted “I’m all about 19th century lesbian paranormal detectives” and insisted that one of them had to attend Bryn Mawr. So I had to change the date of the book to a time when Bryn Mawr had actually been founded and went from there, also allowing myself to be inspired by the greatness of Mike Leigh’s movie Topsy Turvy, about Gilbert and Sullivan. My theory about writing period books is to read people who were writing then rather than bury yourself in a pile of textbooks.

So I sat down and tried to write each chapter as short story to keep the pace up and to break it down into manageable chunks — I have a short attention span. And at one point Sally was a classical scholar so I tried for Homeric level repetition of epithets — yes, I took Latin and yes, I love rhetorical devices(and yes, I know Homer was Greek, but Mr. Speck made us read him anyway). And then I gave it to my friends, who loved it and then I sent it out to agents who didn’t think it was genre enough and then I read the DaVinci Code, didn’t like it, but couldn’t put it down, rewrote my first chapter to add more suspense and finally, I posted it on Scribd (a long nightmare of a story and it’s still not the prettiest copy) for anyone interested to read it — and in the hope that someday, I’d write the sequel so I’d know how the characters end up. I sense that Jane’s going to run, Sally’s not going to be that bothered, Mabel and John might try to intervene and I can’t decide if I should read Stoker’s Dracula and let it influence me. Vampires seem to be back.

I think that’s several anecdotes. I’m quite proud of the Poe parts, I do an excellent Poe voice –which could worry a person — and Jane and Sally were a hoot to try to figure out. Read it, darn it, right here. Free. Download it, pass it around, hand it to someone who isn’t happy with the assortment of characters in the books they’re reading.

And if you want a great coming out tale, read Stir Fry by Emma Donoghue. It’s amazing.

ALTERNATE WEDNESDAYS

Apparently, not only is there an alternate blog (welcome), an alternate office, but now there is alternate Wednesdays, the day when I can look forward to opening up my Tuesday Financial Times and reading James Altucher’s column.  

 Today, we have Warren Buffet, a cheerful bit about demographics and making money off funeral providers as well as the James Altucher method of writing a book. As he, unlike me, has actually been paid to write one, maybe I’ll try it…Let’s see — pick a theme I can get 100 small chapters out of — Creativity; first 25 chapters inspiration; second 25, movies and Shakespeare, third, persistence, and finally, how you can do it too. Throw in a little Machiavelli and Lao Tsu and voila. Or you can just read in In The Bleak December and encourage me to write a sequel so I can finally see where Sally and Jane end up. Meanwhile, maybe I’ll try to track down Altucher’s Buffet book. I seem to be in a business mood — next on my reading table is either Driving Change, a book about UPS or Peter Drucker’s Adventures of A Bystander — yes, while not on line yesterday, I went to the library, always a fun adventure.

P.S. Altucher’s pithy and I hope parodic how to write a book advice misses the most important point: The Catchy Title, something like Creativity, Forsooth for mine, I think.