Buffalo Bill in the Gallery of the Machines — FREE Today!

Go to Amazon!  Thank you and enjoy.

The Saga of the Tongue-Cut Ninja: A TMNT Origins Story, Part XII, “Seishu”

Err … yeah … Here ya go.

Stand tall O’ Middle Finger.  Ye be mightiest of all the digits!

You can read the words associated with each Tongue-Cut Ninja illustration, too.

A Podcast! The Ficstructor’s Alter-ego Talks, Non-Cynically, About Writing

Yes, this can happen.  Here is the proof!

Courtesy of Mike Cook, proprietor of good will and good conversation and Kindred Road.

Enjoy!

A Long List of Writing Advice from One of the Greats

Here is a list of advice I pass around every year, seems like.  Writers tend to like it.  All the advice comes from a writing instructor I had, Carol Bly, who had a profound influence on my style.  She was truly one of the greats.  I return to these quotations from time to time when I’m feeling my most cynical.  I figured what better place to put them then on the blog I created for the sole purpose of championing the darkest days of my writing life as a way to expunge my soul before I get down to the real nitty gritty of story creation.

Enjoy.

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“I’d speed up the whole story.  Especially as it hasn’t a happy ending — everyone goes on being stuck as the kind of people at the end that they were at the beginning and they go on doing the kinds of things they do — that’s all right.  It is a stupid cliche to say that characters must “grow”.  They don’t always and they needn’t.  But make it sprucier.”

“You need to practice keeping your writing stuck together properly.  You need practice in analytical thinking about other people so that you can use it to write American Literature….The exercise is in thinking, not in eleganzo writing.”

“Please do the in-class writing assignment over again…Here is why: You need to think as hard as you can about everything.  Think.  When you think you do quite well.  But sometimes you don’t really bother, Mark.  For the rest of this course would you please do slave labor and think, philosophically, psychologically, logically, as well as you can.  Do intelligent guesswork about what’s going on inside other people.  Best luck.  E-mail if you get stuck with anything.”

“Here is what we have to do in story: we move as fast as we can into actual plot because what a character does, even more than what an author says he or she feels, is what drives great fiction.”

“Can you tell yourself, ‘listen, all my life I will have to do things on-task, making sure I don’t sound very far off norm or I will be fired, etc. –but here I am, perhaps for the last time in my life, who knows, being asked to invent, invent story –to try plots and intense setting and favorite old feelings of mine.’  Keep reminding yourself.  My feeling is you can do better.”

“Life may be partly a chilled garbage can but art does not imitate life: it observes it.  Observing is much different from soaking oneself in a culture.  Seeing a puppy mistake does not mean artists must march their bare feet into it.”

“Suggestion: each time you write, ask yourself, ‘Does this help me more fully inhabit my life and the world in which I live?’  If so and I find it a drag, I might prefer to be a hack writer.  If not so, shall I loiter back into my mixed bag of a cortex, and shut one of the serpents’ doors in hopes it might free up my mind’s hallways for more cheery creatures?”

“It is extremely hard to write a good story set in USA suburbs because the disenchantment aspect of suburban life tends to make fiction dank.”

“A person would think that writing up some scenery would be easy, or some miscellaneous conversation should be easy.  But it isn’t.  It is hard.  Beginners and old hands, both, have the dickens of a time doing it.”

“Obviously throughout the ages people have tried to make such imaginative inquiries into other people’s wants, needs, repulsions, and they have made a number of bad guesses.  A great psychologist makes fewer bad guesses than a good one.  A great author makes a number of bad guesses but hopes to get more accurate as he or she goes along by practicing….On the other hand great literature is built on good inquiry, good guesswork, careful loving scrutiny done by authors.”

“It’s just a question of watching.  If someone says, ‘Yeah, right, but how do you know that that person has those values you say he or she has, if you’re so smart?’ You can answer, ‘I don’t know, but I figure it.’  ‘Yeah but what if you’re wrong?’ this clever mickey-mouse snarls.  You say, ‘I bet you I might be wrong.  That’s literature for you every time!  Some of it’s Shakespeare and some of it’s Little Orphan Annie.’”

Some shorter ones:

“Remember to lie some.  A fiction-writer’s lies are evidence of inner truth.”

“The New Yorker is dishonest because anyone with that much money around them must be dishonest.”

“I will help you use more vocabulary … Shakespeare invented 3,000 words, but he was smarter than me.”

“It’s hard to be a writer when you think things can’t be thought about.”

“The short story should be complete.  The heart should not want more at the end of a story.”

“Joan Didion’s Why I Write is rather mindless – but Orwell has 60 ideas for every one idea of Didion’s.”

“Everyone’s serf is named Perushka.”

“Neuroscientist read our stuff.  We might as well read theirs.”

“Jim Harrison is the only one to understand the rich.”

“If a writer’s group is very strong and supportive it may be time to leave.”

“A good short story has two things: 1. A bad job.  2. A surprise element.”

“That’s human beings for you – they get a beautiful place then they kill a few people or rape a mouse.”

“The more pain you can feel the better your short story will be and if you can forgive the universe for its problems then it will be even better.”

“You can always have a serious pederast be a terrific gardener.”

“First drafts are our way to clear through the sludge and get to our souls.”

“A little bit of dialect goes a long ways.  The Color Purple had too much.”

“I try to call people who do good work because there are so few of them.”

“The two best sexual metaphors are: ‘the earth moved beneath them,’ and ‘he chimed down the long vault of the cathedral;’ now it’s a joke, but the bible is too.  I haven’t seen a third good metaphor for lovemaking.  It’s still open.”

“The short story is the hardest form to write in the English language.”

“If excellence is to be had there is going to be someone there to nag at you.”

“There’s no sense to writing a rough draft…Art is slung between the back part of the brain and the front…Do a finished story even if you don’t like it.”

“I just wrote horribly stupid shallow story and I enjoyed every minute.”

“Fiction writing is partly deeper than essay writing but also shameless telling lies.  Not to mention being catty.”

[Referring to Salinger] “He’s an adolescent freak – he understood the spirit, but he couldn’t grow up.”

“Write sincerely from inside and you’ll be writing….” [She never finished her thought, but it seemed she meant to.]

“Some people are so self-centered they won’t even write an autobiography.  They’ll just research everything that historically led down to them.”

“I find it cheering that every 2,000,000 years there’s an ice age.  I think there are a lot of political figures that need to be frozen.”

“Be as deep and smart as you can first.  Then be as flippy and jokey.”

“You should think of five shallow thoughts and two deep ones in a character at any given moment.”

“It’s impossible to know what’s any good for writing.”

“Hawthorne and Socrates were the best at covering scum.”

[Referring to a priest in her short story and his comment on everyone being good]: “Well, he’s Episcopalian and they’re always a little slippery.”

[Referring to the dwindling readership in America] “It won’t always be like this.  There have been Dark Ages before.”

“We are not that stuff for which we were, but I am what I am.”

[Advice for writing a good plot] “Eat red meat when you’re stuck for a surge of energy.  Stay away from sugar.  Coffee, tea, and beef.  If this doesn’t work go write an essay.”

“Bed and breakfasts are run by women trying to escape something.”

“Have you ever been to a labor union where communists try to break it up?”

“The habituation of being around something bland makes you unable to see something grand…There’s much more fire in each one of you than you know…I bet you expected a religious lecture.”

“Very few things change in the world, but one of these things is our expectation of life.”

“Dust is always a symbol of death.”

“It’s very hard for rich people to write.  Rich people don’t know the experience of rotten equipment.  It’s terrible work to write.”

“English Departments critique things, they break it down.  They can’t build it up.  That’s what a writing program is for.”

“Stop using ‘draft.’  Draft means you didn’t put your heart into it.  Use ‘pieces.’  Some other fascist suggested ‘draft.””

“We as writers don’t imitate life.  We imitate something in our head.”

Bly’s Haiku –  “They were all doing it back then.”

Dust on the table

I remember mother

She sucked.

“Most deadly serious people are the most humorous.”

“People lie intensely to get through an English Department.”

“When you’re young, you’re dumber than you are when you’re old.”

“There’s something about Flannery O’Connor.  I just get bad tempered about her.”

“Contrast instead of parallels if you can.”

“Read your story out-loud!  So you can feel the strength.”

“When you get an MFA you don’t get anything.  You’re doomed for failure.”

[Referring to the publication of “The Life” in the New Yorker] “One of the most beautiful pieces in that smartass magazine.”

“The assumption is that you need to structure the technical stuff, but … you need to structure the technical stuff.”

“There are no rules to take care of a short story…No safety net.”

“We’ll choose what we know even if it hurts us, and we’ll stay away from what we don’t know because it’s lonely and unfamiliar.”

“The job of literature is to agree with the people you believe and support them and to escape.  Do both!”

“We need critics.  They build reading enthusiasts.”

“Writing workshops are like slavery.”

“Try to get the character to move then the rest will move too.”

“It’s out of style to teach plot, but it’s the holy will of people who collect stuff and give it out.”

“Learn to say: ‘I think I’m on the other side.’”

“Half remember a person, then lose them, and make the rest out of a piece of yourself.”

Workshopping Continues to Mislead Writers & What Happened to Zoetrope?

I’ve been non-existent for awhile, but that’s probably a good thing.  Deal is: I’ve started way too many projects than I can handle and the first thing to get shelved is this god-forsaken corner of the Internet.  I guess that means both God and me have forsaken the Ficstructor.

Sorry, dude.  You’re overwhelming at times and for the most part you sink your author into a pit of narcissistic rage and self-pity.

Related, I joined a writing workshop again because I continue to try and abuse myself through the act of story creation and laying these incomplete and sometimes incoherent pieces out for others to comment on.  I went to an old haunt of mine, Zoetrope.  What a strange place that has become.  I don’t get it.  I remember in the early days there were a lot of people on that thing and you could get, for better or worse, a healthy amount of reviews if you reviewed other people’s works.  Not all the reviews were constructive–most weren’t.  But once in awhile you ran into other people who gave a damn about writing and then you’d form relationships with these people, share stories until you both ended up just being windbags of praise and you’d move on, all the constructive elements of the workshop collapsing under empty compliments and phantom back pats once you got to know each other too well.

I mean, this was the unspoken agreement.

So I got on there again because at a certain point as a writer you become lost again.  The whole process seems to be one lonely disorienting journey where the moment you think you’re heading in the right direction is the moment just before you feel completely aimless.

I have this story that needs input.  My friends and family have largely given up on my prospects of gainful employment and my stories are as yet another form of evidence that proves their suposition, so I have to seek out strangers.  You can’t ask just anybody.  You have to ask people who claim to (or do) read words that are written on a page.  The number of people who claim to do this far outweighs the number of people who do, so it’s a total crapshoot.  Much like everything on the damn Internets.

But we’re self-hating writers.  Where the shit else are we gonna go?

My piece was weighty–not the good kind of weighty, just long as hell.  But I always write long as hell pieces because one of three words are keepers in my work.

There have been two reactions to my piece, which falls well under Zoetrope’s word count restrictions.

1. Dreaded silence–Where in the living shit did the reviewers go?  I see their names.  Not as bountiful as they used to be, but it used to be that you could just dump any old crap on that site and someone would say some ludicrous thing about it, bating you into reading their craptastic story as well.  You know.  The whole idea of reciprocation in a workshop.  I made you suffer through my bullshit, so as penance I must suffer through yours.

Silence can mean any number of things of course.  Likely it means no one gives a shit enough to even start reading your story.  Others are bolder and they hit the “opt out” option to show that your story is so irredeemable that they couldn’t even get through it.  A lot of jokers like to think themselves fairly hot editors on that site because they’ve self-published themselves on a blog–which is exactly what I do, but I’m pretty honest about how not-hot-shit I really am.

2. A reaction–one dude did respond.  Now this dude–I don’t know how great of a writer he is because I’m like everyone else on Zoetrope, which means I don’t read people’s work, rather I scan as much as I can until the 8 minute time limit runs out so I can make up some bullshit to tell you how great your story is.  Because here’s the deal: If you tell someone you like their story they will always, always assume you read it.  It’s a pretty good trick.  No one is going to “z-mail” you back and ask, “What was your favorite part?”  We’re all pretentious clowns so we tell ourselves, “That stranger on the Internet: his favorite part was, well, every goddamned word in that story!”

Admittedly, the review was constructive.  Like, the dude used all-caps for parts of it so I would better understand his point.  His point was that my story was too long.  He told me no one reads 7000 word stories and I shouldn’t expect people do so.  He went on to say I was being disrespectful of other people, taking their time and energy away from … I guess reading other people’s works, where he’d be doing the exact same thing.

It came down to a cultural difference.  I no longer understand the Zoetrope culture.  At one time I did.  At one time people did take the time to read longer works and if they couldn’t respond thoughtfully (most couldn’t), they would respond with something they hoped would be constructive toward the story.  What I got was a litany of rules that I was supposed to now abide by in a free and open workshop.  Like, there’s a protocol.  There’s a good chance this is all in that one reviewer’s head, but the silence tends to disagree.  The guy was right when he said, “If you’re not getting any responses SHORTEN YOUR DAMN STORY OR BREAK IT UP IN CHUNKS.”

Break it up in chunks?  A short story?  Really?  What happens to the entire narrative then?  Try reviewing Pulp Fiction by just watching scene one.  It makes no effing sense.  Or how about Pan’s Labyrinth, but only watch the scene with the giant monster with eyeballs in his hands.  You’d miss the point about it being a ghastly fantasy to escape Spanish civil war.  Basically, this guy is actually promoting the Zoetrope community to review in a vacuum.

I sent him a long email because it made me feel better.  I also used big words and properly formatted my paragraphs (something this dude didn’t take the time to do–maybe a stylistic choice) to prove that I was the better writer.

He responded saying I should be more open-minded.

So instead of reading short stories and reviewing works, we measured dicks.  I guess that’s why workshopping is mostly bullshit.  It becomes this thing where writers pretend they are better than they actually are.  They are so involved with their craft, their involvement makes them believe they have developed further than they have and this makes them believe they have something important to say about other people’s works.

Thing is: You don’t, man.  You’re a stupid dumbshit writer like the rest of us.  Passion for the craft doesn’t magically give you experience in it.  You have to write total fucking crap for years and years, learning the hard way, before you got anything worthwhile to add to the conversation.  If you’re into S&M, you have a unhealthy penchant for self-deprication, and you spend your weekend nights eating Cheez-Its in front of a blank TV screen … well, you’re pretty close to being a professional writer.  For the most part, we’re delusional A-holes misrepresenting ourselves to the world and fooling ourselves into believing that we’re smart as shit.

Find a trusted reader.  Use him until he starts giving you too much praise, then find someone else.  If the reader is a writer who publishes works, even better.  I used to think accolades didn’t mean shit, but accolades are proof that so-and-so at one time knew what the hell he was doing … he may not any longer, but at least you got a shred of evidence that he may help you.

All in all, This experience left me confused and angry.  A good state for me to be in.  It’s the only state I’m in when I write or revise anything.  I cut two thousand words out of that story and reconfigured large bits of it simply out of pure anger.  If the piece is going to be disregarded by a writing community I once respected, then sure as shit I’m going to do whatever I can to get that same piece in the best goddamn literary journal I can find.

Fueled by spite.  Write with a chip on your shoulder.

I think the Ficstructor has been reborn.  Hello, guy!

Eff off, douchenugget.

The old days of the Internet, folks.  I’m nostalgic for seven years ago.

The Saga of the Tongue-Cut Ninja: A TMNT Origins Story, Part XI, “Nineteen Eighty-Seven”

Seriously! We’re still doin’ it!

Adult TMNT Fans … where the shit are you?

You can read the words associated with each Tongue-Cut Ninja illustration, too.

New Story at the Ever-Generous and -Awesome Martian Lit

So Ram Henstein and the Ficstructor have alter egos.  They do stuff like this, and Martian Lit – a very very cool literary magazine and one that you should be going to twice a week — let us put it on the Interwebs: