Charcoal Drawings

I talked with my sister for about half an hour tonight, and after hanging up Mandy commented on the avalanche of vulgarity that was used.  "I've never heard you cuss that much.  Ever."  There was a metric fuck ton of impolite words used.  I explained that my sister taught me how to cuss, and could make a peg-legged pirate blush and plead for modesty.  I had to explain to my girlfriend that my sister, being nine years older than myself, used me for her entertainment when I was younger.  Being a little brother, I was always eager to fit in with the big kids.  When I was seven or eight, my sister told me that teenagers showed their mothers that they loved them by calling them bitches.  I promptly ran through the house, found my mom, yelled "Mom, you're a BITCH," with a gigantic she's-going-to-be-so-proud-of-me smile on my face, and then spent the rest of the evening in my room wondering why my mom would ever slap me and ground me for loving her.

It took me several years to discover the meaning of the word fuck, but that never persuaded me from mastering its usage.  While my sister never dared to trick me with this word, knowing full well that they would know where it came from, I did overhear it enough that I started to learn all of its delicate nuances.  My young ears were able to discern the staccato, piercing nature of the word, and realized that it was an excellent way to convey intense frustration of draw somebodies focus for important matters.  My mom first discovered that I knew this word because of Tecmo Bowl.  I didn't handle losing well as a child (or now, for that matter) and my friend Tim was just better at it than I was.  My mom came into the room to discover her eight year old angel spiking a Nintendo controller on the floor screaming "THIS IS A FUCKING JOKE!"  Her shock was only compounded when, after informing me that I was grounded for using that word, my response was "What fucking word?!?"  Several years later I discovered the meaning of the word and subsequently increased my usage.

The oddity of my family is that while my sister and I are as foul as soured milk, my dad never cusses.  The worst you'll hear him utter is the occasional "Aw, hell," or, his favorite, "How could you be so damn dumb?"  He has used this one quite a bit over the years.  My mom doesn't cuss, UNLESS she gets flustered.  Then she undergoes this change.  My mom is a tiny little woman standing maybe 5'2" with big, curly hair.  When she's had enough, her little fists clench up, her face gets red, and her first profanity busts from her lips like a balloon with too much air finally succumbing to the rules of physics.  Much like the balloon, once the structure has ruptured everything gets let out.  The usual result is my dad uttering a shock-faced, breathless "Jody" and my sister and I laughing at the hilarity of the scene.  Unless we're in public, in which case we assume the posture of the caricatures that you are used to seeing on streets and in bazaars.

New York

Upon arriving in New York I didn't know what to think.  I knew that I was either going to love it or hate it but that there would be no middle ground.  I had the same feeling in my stomach as you get on the up down up down sections of roller coasters; either vomit or a big smile is coming very soon.  Being born and raised in Nebraska did not prepare me for the old school feather pillow that hit me in the kisser.  I was expecting more memory foam.  I had always told myself that I have traveled.  I have been in bigger cities.  Delhi.  Mexico City.  Despite all of this I had never experienced anything so intensely urban.  I had always heard the term "concrete jungle" in rap songs and other pop culture mediums, but I never understood it to mean pavement and iron and brick so deep that it writhes around your ankles and makes your body feel over-sized and incapable of motion.  I wondered how so many people managed to walk down the street every day because I had the urge to look up at the stone and steel and glass monoliths that are everywhere.  As with everywhere, people become used to their surroundings and jaded to the impressiveness of it all.  I recently told a born-and-raised Californian he needed to move away from the ocean because he didn't even notice it any more.  He has lived here his entire life and hasn't been to a beach in at least three years.  Somewhere there is a New Yorker who thinks of his/her daily 60 floor elevator ride as annoying.  That person desperately needs a dose of Kansas.

Being me I noticed oddities that I'm sure others miss.  People keep their trash cans on the street because there's just no other place for them.  A fact of their life but a blemish on my daily sojourns.  Everybody reads.  The awesomeness of the subway is that it takes all of the commuting part out of commuting.  Yes, you spend 30-60 minutes each day riding this metal earthworm but you're only requirement is to step onto and off of the thing at the right time.  And then you read, or work, or sleep.  I couldn't help but think of how better read and better informed most New Yorkers are, even those you want to stereotype as non-readers.  The city seems to be ESL.  Everywhere I went there was a rich blend of tongues from ports the world over.  My ear became more nimble in my week outside of SoCal.  I noticed the quality of neighborhoods by taking note of the amount of graffiti on walls and the amount of gum on the sidewalk.

It was only day two when I realized I was in love.  There are certainly things that I would dislike about living there but I left the city with that same hungover feeling that lingers after a one night stand.  The next day your head hurts and your body aches but you wear this wry smile that won't go away because you lost yourself for just one night.  Dangling were the severed strings of responsibility, ambition, failure, consequence, doubt, reality, and sadness while the warm embrace of pleasure and enjoyment pushes you onward.  New York and I are not lasting companions, destined for love eternal, but I will keep my eye open for a possible fling or affair.

What I've Learned About Writing

I'm not a writer.  A writer is somebody who gets paid to write and makes a living out of it.  I just write.  I spill my life and thoughts out into journals or free websites but I've never made a penny.  Despite my amateur status, there are quite a few things I've learned along the way.  If I had all of the answers for writing I would have started this passage by saying "As you know, I am a writer."  Regardless, there are a few things that I've figured out that will hopefully be helpful.

1. Just start writing and keep writing.  This seems like dumb advice, but I struggled for the longest time writing stories because I didn't know how to start my story.  I would try to start at word one and progress forward only to find that after a page or two I came to a place that felt like a better starting point.  Then I'd scrap all of the things that I had written and start from my new starting point.   I spent an ungodly amount of time worrying about what was the beginning, middle, and end.  I stressed about it, sought feedback from my friends, and generally did everything I could think of to devise a way for figuring out where to start.  This one just came to me of my own accord.  One day I was sitting in this usual quandary when I realized that I could just keep writing.  The beginning, middle, and end only matter if the story is completed, so I learned to just keep writing until I came to the end of the story.  When I reached the end, I knew that I could work backwards to find where the story needed to begin.
2. Don't force a story.  My last sentence in the previous point says "needed to begin" because if the story ends a certain way, there are certain plot points that have to have happened.  The old theater adage says that if you show a gun in Act One it better go off by Act Three.  This makes sense because if the gun was never meant to be shot, it wouldn't be in the story in the first place.  If your main character falls in love, he/she has to meet their lover, and before that they'll have to be looking for another for one reason or another.  No matter how much we disagree, life happens as a logical progression.  If your story ends in a place that you don't like, change your main character's personality a bit.  Fire him from his job.  Have him be inside a bank when it gets robbed.  Do anything other than expect the reader to think "Well, sometimes people just snap, I guess," because they will never believe your story.
3. Revise your story.  Then go back, read it again, and revise it again.  I'm only now learning the value of revision and I hate it, mostly because I didn't do it before.  Revision allows you to tweak details to make the story better.  It allows you to catch stupid mistakes.  It allows you to get inside the head of your character and learn things you didn't even know before.  Stories are intricate pieces of construction like cars, and you'll never make them better unless you crash them on purpose and sift through the wreckage to figure out how.  Sometimes you'll find out nothing is wrong at all, but if you smash the story by telling it through another character's eyes it comes out even better.  You'll never know unless you experiment.
4. Write about your life and those of your friends.  I'm not advocating that fiction die off and everybody start penning essays, but use the things that you know.  The only things that are genuine are the things that come from you, so even if you're writing about an intergalactic war between octopus people and creatures that look like wire whisks, make one of those wire whisks a lot like you or a friend of yours.  Base its interactions off an anecdote from your own past.  If you want to make it fantastical you can do it by translating it into a weird world or starting at the same point and then exaggerating, but if it isn't grounded in reality your readers will never buy in.

I have more tiny nuggets of wisdom but it's two in the morning and my eyelids are pressing down on my eyelids and my will to write any longer.  Hopefully these points are useful.  Hopefully they make some manner of sense because I will certainly be skipping point three tonight.