[FRACTAL INTERPOLATION] Ep 29 : A Viable Paradise Indeed
Episode 29
A VIABLE PARADISE INDEED
2017–10–26
TOC
Input
Arvo Part: Kanon Pokajanen - Ode I : Beautiful choral atmospheres. I listened to this a lot on The Island.
Hello
Ed. Note: This is going out both in newsletter form and also as a public post on my Patreon. Ostensibly, the Patreon is about my writing process and the newsletter is about what’s on my mind, and right now, this is both.
A Viable Paradise
The hardest stories to tell, from a technical perspective, are often those that defy a linear narrative. Where so many things happen, all of which carry so much meaning, and the overall effect is, to paraphrase Motörhead, “Everything more important than everything else.” This, in fiction, usually indicates that you need to do some serious thinking about voice and pacing. But, in a writing workshop, it probably means that you’ve just attended Viable Paradise.
One of the many talks we students participated in this week was Sherwood Smith warning us against vague and uninformative weasel words. So, when describing my week, I can’t even fall back on my usual “There was something strange and wonderful” tropes. (Also, thanks, Sherwood, for making me want to punch myself in the face every time I read “he half-smiled” in my writing). I commented more than once on the fact that the twenty-four people in my class, fine and powerful writers all, spent most of a week failing to articulate the experience we were collectively having. It should be noted that I am still failing to do that. This report represents only the barest fragments of what is zooming around my mind.
And yet, there was definitely an experience there. Twenty-four students, ten or so instructors (I swear there were occasionally more of them, there’s no way ten people could be that informative), and a gently buzzing cloud of staff members constantly ready to offer moral / logistical/ grilled cheese sandwich support. Not only were there innumerable lessons in the craft of writing and the vagaries of publishing, but the staff was also there to help navigate the sometimes difficult issues that can happen when you get a bunch of oddly-socialized nerds and put them in a pressure cooker. I certainly learned, and am still learning, a lot of things about my own ego, which somehow managed to be too large and too small simultaneously.
And a pressure cooker it was. I won’t go into details, but I did learn that I can write a short story in two days, while simultaneously working on critiques for other people and waking up at 8 am every day to attend talks that were actually interesting enough that I wanted to be awake at 8 am every day. People broke, myself included, all in our own ways. There was weeping, there was whiskey, there were moments where a half dozen people would be sitting silently in the same room, occasionally gesturing wildly at their laptops and soaking in one another’s angst. There was The Horror That Is Thursday, and so much [REDACTED]. The first time I broke was when we all went out one night, and, walking surrounded by people I could only make out by silhouette, some animal part of my brain said “You’re in the dark now. No one will see you,” and I found myself crying while listening to dear friends I had not known the week before talk about literary tropes. It was not the last time I broke. As Elizabeth Bear said, “It’s not a cult, because we give you plenty of protein!”
It was clarifying to be surrounded by a group of people who I could really consider my peers in an area that is deeply integral to who I am. Usually I feel like the smartest or the dumbest person in the room, depending on the subject at hand. It was such a relief to be in a place where making literary references to obscure sci-fi was not only not irritating, but actively welcomed. And it was immensely powerful to be having truly equal conversations with so many people whose work I have admired for so long. Long suffering friends should note that I did not fanboy, even once. But this was easy, actually, as it was made very clear that all of us students were there because we are good at what we do. “There are no sympathy cases here,” was said more than once. And this set up an environment where I could discuss social norms with Laura J. Mixon and broadway musicals with Max Gladstone, and all kinds of things with all kinds of fascinating people.
Sometimes, there is a single detail that makes the character, or the scene, the small seed from which a reader can extrapolate the entire thing. I think, for Viable Paradise 21, at least for this telling of it, the one I will pick is from my first full night there. We had been given our critique assignments, and I decided to work on mine sitting outside one of the staff rooms, from which guitar and fiddle music drifted out into the New England night. When they started singing Cohen, I couldn’t keep from stepping inside and joining in. When I hit the high note, Elizabeth Bear high-fived me, and that is how I came to be holding hands with one of my favorite authors while I belted out Hallelujah along with some of the people I admire most in literature.
Writing well isn’t just about verb choices and story lines, it’s also about lived experience. It’s about learning as much as you can about the world, processing it, adding your own dreams and desires and fears, and forging those things into a tool that will awaken ideas and feelings in the reader that are both surprising and inevitable. It’s about emotion and intellect, dancing together between the unconscious and the conscious, and weaving something greater than all of them combined. One of the things that makes Viable Paradise so difficult to describe is that it does the same thing. It operates on all levels, and rarely have I had my intellect and emotion driven so hard, and felt the same thing happening to those around me. At the end of the week, I felt that we, as a group, had been annealed into a powerful cultural force, all much more eager, and much more capable, to go out and do what needs be done.
So here’s a health to the company, and love and literature to all of my new comrades. To the Staff and Instructors: you created the experience that I would expect from a group of people all of whom understand how to craft a narrative arc, even as we, your characters, ran rampant pursuing our own goals.
And to my fellow students: We have the tools, and we have one another. Let’s get out there and build the worlds we want to see.