As Slow and Transparent as Glass

Okay, I'll admit it: I haven't been reading The Pillars of the Earth. I've actually been trying to gear up for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) by brainstorming plots and characters. And by "brainstorming plots and characters" I really mean that I've been haunting their message board, watching to see if there would be any write-ins near me. I may have to organize one myself. It all kicks off on Monday, which I just happen to have off from work. I'm still not sure who or what I'm going to write about, so I picked up No Plot, No Problem by NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty today. It's really good; he's got a great sense of humor in his writing that makes me laugh but doesn't diminish the points he's trying to make. We'll see where I go from here but I'm already more excited now than I was last year.

One medium that intrigues me is the comic book or graphic novel. I don't have the drawing chops to pull it off by myself but I'd love to team up with an artist sometime to create a comic. While it seems like the focus is much more on the art than on the words, if the dialogue is lacking then the whole book goes down with it. I say "book," but really there are so many different formats that comics come out in now: strips, books, webcomics, graphic novels. And so many ways to access them!

It's also a really versatile medium that lends itself well to lots of different topics. Art Spiegelman created Maus to tell his parents' experience during the Holocaust. Neil Gaiman, with various artists, wrote the Sandman series about the Dream King and his siblings: Death, Destruction, Destiny, Desire, Despair, and Delirium. And Scott Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim series takes a love story and sets it to a video game soundtrack. These are all stories that could have been told completely in words but the graphic aspect of each strengthens them. Spiegelman uses the "Jews as mice" theme set up by Nazi propaganda but subverts it brilliantly. The artists of Sandman built a world that Gaiman, talented as he is, couldn't have stirred up in my imagination. As for Scott Pilgrim, an ode to video games, rock music, love, Canada, and youth is perfectly expressed to my generation through comics. We grew up on television, computers, and Nintendo (and/or Sega). We're incredibly visual.

It's a magical thing, to be swept through a story frame by frame. When an author can work with an artist (or create his or her own art) to show us instead of tell us, we as readers get a very unique experience. It's almost like a peek inside the writer's head--I know how I see this, but how do you see it?

I'm a day late in posting and approaching brain dead, so I'll wrap up with a question: What's your favorite comic?


-Bridget

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"Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting."
- The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Stories Are for Those Late Hours in the Night

My favorite scary book is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. I first read it after Mr. Gaiman was generous enough to donate an autographed copy to a benefit that I was organizing (no, I didn't read the autographed one--I bought the ebook on my Nook). It's a Newbery medal-winning retelling of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book set in a graveyard and it is incredible. When you first encounter the man Jack and his dripping blade in the beginning, you know you're in for a creepy treat. In true Gaiman style, the fear is broken up by well-timed (and clever) laughs but it's never far off. Nobody Owens is a wonderful hero and just how I imagine a cemetery Mowgli would be. For a spine-tingling Halloween, I highly recommend The Graveyard Book.

Stories are meant to transport us from our real lives. If we are willing and the story is strong enough, for a few hundred pages we are elsewhere, being somebody else, doing something more interesting than what we're stuck with day-to-day. It's truly a beautiful thing, the interaction between a book and its reader. If it weren't for stories, many of us would be leading "lives of quiet desperation" without knowing what to call them. In one of my favorite books, The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien explores the qualities of truth, war, and writing. (I also noticed, when looking for the link, that there's a CliffsNotes and a SparkNotes version of this book. I feel sick. O'Brien is a truly masterful writer and I can't imagine really understanding TTTC without his language. That's a topic for another day, though.)

I especially enjoy the concept of story-truth that O'Brien introduces in this novel. In stories, the important factor is not factual truth but the feelings of the situation. A successful storytelling makes the reader or listener feel the emotions of the characters or the situation. O'Brien's argument is that it is story-truth that is important and it is through stories that we can start to understand life and to understand ourselves. He writes, "What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at, I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again." We can achieve these things through telling a story the way it's meant to be told, with an emotional truth that the facts can't cloud over or line up into neat columns.

And to bring things full-circle, it's story-truth that makes scary stories so frightening. The villain may be a ghost or a member of a murderous secret society or a man possessed by the rage of a hotel or some one or thing equally as unlikely. And yet there's something sinister, emotionally crippled, cold, calculating, and ultimately distressingly familiar about this character that tells you: I am. Maybe not in this particular form, but I exist. You've seen me on television, in the eyes of people on the street, and you fear me. If there wasn't a familiar quality in Jack Torrance, Elspeth Noblin, or the man Jack (a little shout-out to the two of you who responded last time!), we wouldn't be afraid because we simply wouldn't be able to suspend our disbelief.


Bridget

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"Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are."

-The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

The Beating of Mighty Wings

Maybe it's because I miss English classes or maybe because I simply don't want reading to be a solitary occupation anymore, but for some reason I'm driven to blog about books. Ones I've read or ones that are begging to be written, either way. I've been reading so much lately, charging through trash novel after trash novel and I think I've been hoarding all of these happy endings to combat my stress. I suppose that's okay for a while but it's time and past I was back to real, substantial books. Ones that make me think more than just "awwww" when I'm done. It's time and past I started writing again, not just stories but about stories. A dialogue, even if it's just between my fingers and my brain, about what I've just read.

I know where I'd like to go with this blog; I have lofty goals for it. I want to organize read-alongs and writers' discussions. I want to ask my favorite authors about their favorite books and why they love them so. First, though, I have to get started. (And get some followers, that might help.)

A friend from work has loaned me Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth and I've been neglecting it in favor of easier fare. It's probably also unfortunate timing due to the five boxes of books I just had shipped to myself from my parents' house. My goal now is to have it finished by the end of the month so I can go into NaNoWriMo suitably inspired. It's intriguing so far (and I'm not very far in yet) so I'm interested in seeing where it will go from here.

Wish me luck in finishing it--I have one week! And since my deadline is Halloween, I'll ask my first followers this question:

What's your favorite scary book or story?

I'll let you know mine on Tuesday!

-Bridget

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"'Good luck,' whispered the Angel Islington. There was a rushing sound, like a wind soughing across a lost forest, or the beating of mighty wings."
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman