Creative Process.

What the hell do those two words mean?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, in part because of my teaching job and in part because I hear people say those words a lot. Especially of recent. Sometimes it’s a question, as in: Hey dude, what’s your creative process? Other times it’s more of a statement: Dude, I’m having some trouble with my creative process, dude.

So, I was already cogitating about this concept when I happened to pick up a new book about writing called “Ron Carlson Writes A Story.” It’s another in a series of good books about the craft of writing from Graywolf Press (Check out The Art of Subtext and The Art of Time while you’re at it). In it, Carlson takes us through the writing of a single story and all the decisions he made as he created it. And he talks a lot about a “process” that works for him, one that he has come to trust. And it’s pretty expansive. It covers everything from the importance of coffee to “the outer story” and “personal inventory” (these concepts are more interesting than they sound).

Carlson takes an interesting track. He just talks about what works for him, while trusting the mystery and surprise that’s inevitably going to happen on the page. But he feels like there is a process that makes a story what it is.

This is all well and good, and I agree with it in theory. But then I couldn’t help thinking about how I actually work when I write. And how random and strange and totally un-process-like it is in every sense.

Maybe the problem is the definition. When I think of a process, I think of something orderly. A series of steps that lead to a certain end. Like the creation of a delicious beef gravy. Or training a dog to fall down when you pretend to shoot it. But my process does not lead to these things. Usually it leads to first drafts that make me want to die. It leads to really crappy literary gravy, the kind that’s clumpy and full of organ parts. Or a dog that doesn’t get back up when you pretend you’ve killed it.

And while this so-called process does involve a lot of coffee, I have a hard time pinning down what really goes on with my brain and typing fingers as it happens. But on a given morning (on a rare day when I have nothing to do but write) it might be something like this series of steps:

1) Wake up, and try to forget dream of being in invisible submarine.

2) Stumble bleary-eyed to my laptop.

3) Read words I wrote the day before.

4) Try not to weep or throw laptop through window into neighbor’s lawn.

5) Eat some Panda Puffs (best cereal ever, and the box is very informative about real Pandas)

6) Come back and look at things on the internet. Hey, wow, that one famous person did that thing with that other famous person.

7) Read words from yesterday again.

8 ) Make coffee. Contemplate shaving. (Note: why does my face need shaving exactly every 32 hours, but not before?)

9) Read words from yesterday.

10) Contemplate bathing. Drink Coffee.

11) Try a sentence. Watch it fly broken-winged across the page and crash to the cold cold ground below. Stare at it.

12) Try some more sentences, and try not to reward myself for actually having a paragraph.

13) Add punctuation.

14) And verbs.

15) Research some esoteric fact about old-fashioned elevators and their cables.

16) Get lost in the research for one hour and somehow find myself reading about Britney Spears.

17) Write another paragraph in similar fashion. Then decide to quit for the day.

18) When my wife comes home and asks me what I’ve been doing, say: “writing,” and try not to have a laughing fit that turns into a crying fit and then back into a laughing fit.

So, I guess, in the end, I have a 18 step system. Maybe I should write a book about writing. If you follow these 18 steps, you too can have a process. Or at the very least, you can feel like you have a process, so when someone asks you what your “creative process” is, you can say: I write like the very famous author Peter Bognanni does in his best-selling blog post: Peter Bognanni Writes A Blog Post. So, Process that!”

Hey blogo-maniacs. Remember me?

I used to write things on here about books, other books, and my thoughts on Personal Pan Pizzas. Then I started teaching again and now suddenly I can’t be found on the internet. All my Facebook friends have erased my face from their face collections. And other bloggers are all like: hey man, we haven’t seen you hanging around the blogo-verse lately. What gives, man? You too good for blogs or something?

The answer, my friends, is no. I’m not too good for anything. So, lay off. I’ve just been on a mini-break, preparing to teach the nation’s youth about literature and making the world a better place. Now I’m back, and will hopefully be writing about sufficiently dorked-out book-related topics again on a regular basis. Starting tonight. So take a deep breath, and let it out. Ahhhhhh. The internet is complete again.

And I want to ease back into my blog-bath with a very short and succinct topic: the sensitive art of the author bio.

You all know what an author bio is: it’s that little paragraph right underneath the black & white photo of the author in a rugged woolen sweater,  hugging his/her labrador retriever named Euripedes. Underneath that, it usually says where the author has studied, where he/she has published, what awards he/she’s won, if he/she was once a viable presidential candidate or the winner of a daytime Emmy, or is currently dead.

It’s a tiny little summation of a life in letters. Kind of like an end-of-the-book obituary, I suppose. Only sometimes the writer is still alive! So, it’s a happier version. Hurray!  Look at Peter and Euripedes, smiling away!

Anyway, I’m surprised how often I turn to this little part of the book right away when starting something new. This probably makes me shallow in some sense (I can’t bear to read something if I don’t know what the author looks like in a sweater vest, or if he lives in Oregon). But, I’m also surprised at how bored I usually am by the content. Blah blah NEA grant. Blah Blah Nobel Peace…whatever.

I used to try to do my own humble part to make these bios more interesting whenever I published a short story in an obscure literary magazine (long live obscure literary magazines!). I would say something normal first then add something about my love for diving at public pools or what particular brand of horror film I was enjoying lately. Or even what I was being paid at my current lousy job (for the record, my current job is no longer lousy). Anything to break up the monotony. But now that I have recieved a galley copy of my own book, I finally know why author bios are boring.

I know because I thought about writing a really witty or ironic bio to go underneath my black & white photo, but then I chickened out.

Here’s why: If other people are shallow like me (in only this one way of course) they’re going to turn back to my bio first and see the asinine thing I wrote back there. Something like: Peter Bognanni remembers his first Atari better than he remembers high school. Or another equally dumb few sentences. Then, that’s going to color their opinion of me and my book all the way through. At each turn, they’ll say to themselves, “I’m starting to get into this, but…this is that same jerk who wrote that thing under his jerky picture.” Then they’ll turn on my characters and my story and donate my book to their local prison.

I’m now convinced that other authors keep their bios boring for this same reason. Either that, or writers are, at heart, incredibly boring people, and all they do is sit around writing books or complaining about not writing books, and they really don’t have much else to list under their photos.

Either way, if I ever start a Twitter account it’s going to be a live and up-to-date author bio. That’s decided.

My first entry: Peter just drank some wine and ate a handful of candy corn. Why? If he knew, he would know the secret to it all.

Sometime last year, I went to see the writer Arthur Nersesian read from his new work at Magers and Quinn bookstore in Uptown, Minneapolis. He’s written a lot of well-received books over the years, but he’s most famous for writing one with a glaring f-bomb in the title. That’s right. The F*ck Up is the book most people know him by.

And, not surprisingly, this book has sold more copies than any other work of his. When I asked him about this after his reading, he was quick to tell me why. “It’s all the title,” he said. His theory was that just holding that book in public made people think they were reading something edgy, rebellious. It made them think they were doing something they weren’t supposed to, which as we all know, is always fun. I told him that I had a book coming out in the next year, and that it was called The House of Tomorrow. “Yeah,” he said, “You might want to consider changing it to The F*cking House of Tomorrow.”

I could see my Amazon ranking climbing already.

Which leads me to something I’ve been thinking about lately. Maybe crazies should start banning more books. Just stay with me here. Not because censorship is awesome. It’s decidedly not (insert your own censorship-related historical tragedy here). But they should start their banning again because, inevitably, more people end up reading banned books. When a book is forbidden, suddenly reading becomes more than just a personal activity. It becomes a statement. A cause. A celebration of truth. It becomes, for lack of a better word, badass. A nerdy booky guy in a coffee shop is transformed into the young Brando. And who doesn’t want to up their rebellious appeal, just by holding a paperback?

Though, when you look through the list of historically banned books, you have to wonder how disappointed teenagers must have been to finally get their hands on a contraband copy of Silas Marner. Or Moll Flanders. Or the Ulysses, for God’s sake (That’s a lot of hard work for very little titillation). But I bet there’s someone out there who discovered a love of literature by first trying to impress someone with their subversive taste in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Yeah babe, you might not be able to handle this one. Pretty heavy stuff, all that rafting and fishing.

These days, book-banners usually target lousy stuff (Down with Gossip Girl!) So, they really aren’t doing anyone any favors. But if they could get it together and start banning some must-reads, then I think the teens of this country might be better read by the end of high school.

But, let’s face it, we’re never going to be able to bend the censoring loonies to our will. So I offer, instead, this plan: we need to start teaching kids at an early age that reading is a subversive act. If you keep telling them it’s good for them, literacy rates and test scores are never going to climb. But if you tell them that books contain all the things that people never discuss in polite society, then you might see some ears perk up. Because the best books tell the truth in a way that would be unacceptable in day-to-day life. That’s a fact. And it took me a surprisingly long time to figure it out. Even books that seem very chaste and well-behaved on the surface, something like The Age of Innocence, can spend pages condemning accepted notions of morality. Wharton was so punk rock, kids!

So if we can’t ban books, we should at least present them for what they are: little packages of shocking truth (at least the best ones). Then maybe we can get some new literary fiction on the bestseller list.

Finally, can someone please nominate my book for banning when it comes out? It doesn’t have too many of the usual hallmarks, but there is some nudity, blasphemy, and a few obscene lyrics. And to help you out, it will also now be called The Lie-To-Your-Parents-And-Smoke-Pot House of Tomorrow! Come and get it, America.

If you’re rebel enough.

P.S. ALA Banned Books Week ‘09 is September 26th – October 3rd. So go to your library and find something shameful!

I still remember the first book trailer I saw. 

I was living in Chicago at the time and I decided to kill a tar-melting afternoon by leaving my sweatbox apartment and going to the movies. Naturally, I went to see something that was long (so I could sit in the air-conditioning for the longest amount of time possible) and something that didn’t require thinking (too hot for brain activity). I think I settled on something from the Bourne series. I.e. Matt Damon running around for two hours, dodging sniper fire. I can process that in any condition. 

Before the movie began though, something came on the screen that was not a movie trailer. Or a Coke commercial. Or one of those faux-charming “Shut-off-your-son-of-a-bitching-cell-phone-already” things. This film-like object was composed solely of stock footage noirish images and a dweeby man talking. The images: Men lurking in alleys. Guns coming out of the fog. The back of women’s heads. More alley-lurkers. The talking; “Blah blah blah…mystery. Intrique! It all looked like a B-movie trailer from 1975.

Turns out it was a book trailer. I can’t remember the title, but it was something Grishamy (Grishamesque?). 

Then! At the end of the movie (Damon dodges the missile! He lives!) some employees at the movie theater handed me a mini-book. And it was the very same book that had been advertised in the trailer. The mini-books, which sort of resembled those extra small Bibles crazies try to hand you outside the mall, were the first chapters of Gun In The Mist or Man in The Fog or Woman’s Head In The Night (Choose your title)

At first, I was kind of excited about the whole thing. Yeah, I said to myself, books should totally have trailers and sneak-peaks…and billboards and soft drink tie-ins and Happy Meal toys. 

Then I felt a little gross. Because Number 1) Books will never have enough money to make trailers the way Hollywood does (thus the pornish 70’s quality of the one I saw) 2) The great thing about books is that they usually don’t try to trick you into drinking Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper. 3) I felt like the trailer and free book I was holding were really saying “we know you don’t read, stupid, but this is kind of like a movie… with words!” 

So, here’s the personal part of this: I have to make one of these things. Or at least, I said I would. And it seems to me like an endeavor fraught with possible missteps. The idea is to make something interesting enough so that it might “go viral”

And permit me an aside here: but how did that phrase ever start meaning something positive? Can you think of any other thing in life that you’d like to have those words attached to? I’ve got this rash…and I’m really hoping it goes viral. I’m going on a date this Friday and…you get the idea.

But what if I don’t want to compromise my (remaining) dignity by acting like a total moron in order to get people interested in my words. So, what’s a boy with no-budget and an anxious publicity department to do?

I’m thinking something DIY might be the right approach. I still remember the power-point thingy Miranda July did for her collection. She made a trailer with a stove-top and dry-erase marker that was both charming and funny. I also liked the animated trailer Art Spiegelman did for his recent book with McSweeney’s. Though, I don’t know how to animate (nor do I know anyone from the Black Keys who’ll do the soundtrack. Though I did meet a guy at the YMCA once who was in a band called the HITZ with a Z!). And finally, there’s the trailer someone sent me where the author creates a mockumentery where he fakes his own death for publicity?

So I guess what I’m wondering is if it has really come to this. Do I have to pretend to fake my own death in order to get someone to look at my book? Or should I just stand outside the multiplex and hand out home-printed copies of my first chapter to people coming out of District 9?

Hello sir. Would you like part of a book?

No, it’s not the whole book, just a sneak peak.

Sure, I’ll throw away that soda for you.

Would you like to hear my live voice-over?

Yes, I have a day job…for now.

Greetings blogarians,

I want to start this post by promising that I will write about something other than books very very soon. Maybe. But before you judge, you must realize that my summers are usually full of reading and writing (in addition, of course, to grilling things on my tiny dysfunctional Weber and thwacking a tennis ball around). And, truthfully, if I don’t read and write during the summer then my wife comes home and asks me what I did all day and I have to answer truthfully: YouTube.

Today I’ve been thinking about a certain kind of book that I almost always enjoy. And for lack of a better term, I’m going to call it The-Long-Comic-Rant That-Is-Sometimes-Depressing-Novel. My favorites in this category usually take on some epistolary quality. They’re fake letters, diary entries, spoken monologues, etc. And usually they have these characteristics in common:

Number 1) The are written in a very “voicey” first person perspective. 

Number 2) They are usually written by a whiner and/or general crank. 

Number 3) They start out very funny but inevitably dip into dark moon-canyons of depression. This is mostly likely because pain can only be funny for so long before it starts to be unfunny and quite sad. 

I’m currently reading Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles, and it shares all the aforementioned qualities of the T.L.C.R.T.I.S.D.N. (what an easy acronym to remember) Our narrator, Benjamin R. Ford, is devilishly funny, has a way with words (and puns) and slowly leads us down a trail of acerbic wit to the reaches of depression-town. The book is framed as one long letter to American Airlines after a life-altering flight was cancelled. 

I think I like this book, and others of its ilk because a letter of complaint just feels like a good form for a novel to take. Especially if the narrator has a bone to pick with all of existence. Just like many of us do. Even when we (real living people) write complaint letters (or more likely these days: snarky web reviews of plumbers and pretentious bike shop owners) there is a sense of purging the affliction from the mind. It just feels good to complain, right? Of course an actual litany of complaints as novel would make for pretty tortuous reading, so these novels usually morph into something resembling a more traditional first-person telling, complete with compelling plots. But reading them can satisfy you in the same ways writing your own complaint letter does. In other words, you can play along with the home game. 

Example:

 Dear American Airlines,

My name is Benjamin R. Ford and I am writing to request a refund in the amount of $392.68. But then, no, scratch that: Request is too mincy & polite, I think, too officious & Britishy, a word that walks along the page with the ramrod straightness of someone trying to balance a walnut on his upper ass cheeks. Yet what am I saying? Words don’t have ass cheeks! Dear American Airlines, I am rather demanding a refund in the amount of $392.68. 

That’s part of  the opening of Dear American Airlines. And in addition to bristling with energy and humor, it’s kind of like a salve to that same part of me that wants to say things like that to airline folk. It’s a perfect inner complaint for all that ails the reader. 

The Cadillac of this genre (which I sort of invented) is Portnoy’s Complaint by Phillip Roth. Structurally, Portnoy’s Complaint is a long verbal pity party narrated by Alexander Portnoy, to his shrink, Dr. Spielvogel. And the monologue is usually about sex. And so here again we have another lovable whiner with a life-defining complaint. But this time there’s sexual dysfunction! And… a kind of unabashed honesty that fits this T.L.C.R.T.I.S.D.N. form perfectly. 

I.e.: 

“…and once behind the locked bathroom door, [I] slip over my head a pair of underpants that I have stolen from my sister’s dresser and carry rolled in a handkerchief in my pocket.”

Finally, I’ll just mention Homeland by Sam Lipsyte. This book is written as a false high school alumni magazine update from one of the school’s most scathing and brilliant losers. It’s addressed, constantly to “Catamounts,” the school’s mascot.

As in: “You see, fellow Catamounts, I’ve been to the edge of the abyss on more than one unsavory occasion.”

The fun here is that we’re able to take part in a giant “I was miserable in high school” purging session. The book is a clever satire of all the successful people who write into their alumni magazines to broadcast their accomplishments. It rants. It’s largely comic. And at some point it gets so so sad. 

I wish I had some kind of amazing final thesis about these books, but this is a blog not my dissertation. So, in closing, I’ll just say that I like a good comic rant, especially if it tricks me into discovering lowdown and honest things about life along the way. Sometimes you just need to hear the confessions of a man with underwear on his head to feel like someone out there knows how you feel. 

For you home game players: feel free to comment about favorites of yours in this startling new(ish) genre.

So, I read today that Random House is releasing some previously unpublished Kurt Vonnegut short stories as “single-story” e-books before the release of a posthumous collection in the fall. On may levels, I don’t have any beef with this news whatsoever. Kurt Vonnegut novels got me back into reading when I was in high school (and coming off a rare year of being too good for books for some reason I’ve never understood), so having more Vonnegut in the world is nothing I intend to whine about. 

But then I have this memory of seeing him read, and it changes things a little. The reading was in a church in downtown Saint Paul, and I was in college at the time. I waited for an hour outside the enormous front doors to get good seats in a front pew. I hadn’t been this excited to go to church since I was confirmed a Methodist and got a Star Wars cake. I held copies of books that I later learned would not be autographed (I didn’t protest when I saw how frail he looked).

When Vonnegut finally came on, he read a little from Timequake, I believe. Then he maligned republicans for awhile, and gave curt ironic answers to some lousy audience questions. At some point though he went on a brief rant about how computers were taking up all our time and keeping us from enjoying other lost pleasures.

And that’s when I remember him uttering this line, “Listen people, put down the damn fool computers!” It was the loudest he’d said anything all night. And coming from a gawky adored writer it was a little spooky. I imagined for a moment that he had traveled back from the future to bring us this message.

His outburst shouldn’t have been a surprise, I guess. Technology never really plays a good role in his work. And often times, like any good sci-fi writer, he asserts that it will be our doom. But the crowd, which seemed to contain a healthy section of nerds (myself included), was probably internet-addicted and confused by their leader’s staunch disapproval of their new passtime. So it went. 

As Vonnegut got older, I didn’t read too many of his last interviews. Maybe he changed his mind about computers. Maybe he became a World of Warcraft fan. Still, I can’t help but wonder how he would feel about all this e-book hoo-haw. Would he see evil computers or the next version of movable type? 

If he could talk right now, he’d probably say something like, “I’m dead. I don’t care about this.” 

So I won’t give it much more thought.

But man, e-vonnegut?

Here I am. Sleep-deprived and back from vacation. The Dramamine is still kicking and I’ve been reading a lot about a giant algae blob near Alaska. I’m no scientist, but when unidentifiable hairy things start floating in frigid waters, it might be time to start stockpiling non-perishables. I recommend Coconut milk. Does that perish?

But, I digress. What I really wanted to talk about was a used bookstore in Provincetown. Tim’s Used Books. That’s what it’s called. It’s off of a commercial street in the little city-center, and you have to walk over weathered planks and under some plant life to get there. The sign is yellow and faded, and the store itself is an old house with a small, but well-chosen collection. 

I started going to this bookstore when I was pretty young. All my dad’s family lived in Boston and went to the Cape in the summer. We mooched off their vacations, and now that I’m old enough, I mooch off my parents’ vacations. And each year since I was a young bookworm, I stopped in this store and grabbed something for the beach.

I’ve been trying to remember what all I found there over the years. The Tin Drum sticks out as an ambitious choice (and reading it on the beach was a grind, but I made it. The horse head full of eels helped). I know I bought my dad a copy of Revolutionary Road before Leo and Kate reunited to water it down. There might have been a Murakami in there somewhere. 

But more than any specific titles I found, I remember how nice it was to browse in that old house. Usually it was a rainy day. Wind coming through the open screens. A couple of bespectacled browsers in flip-flops. The register was and is on a card table, and the man behind it (Tim? I’ve never asked) is always reading something esoteric. 

I don’t need to go off on a save-the-bookstores rant here, but it really seems like places like this are closing everyday. Tim’s is still there, though. And this year I found a great hardback edition of The Collected Stories of Carson McCullers. It’s a tough copy to find. But it was at Tim’s. Now it’s on my desk. 

And so here’s my point: before this floating artic blob expands and takes over the oceans, and inevitably the world, you should hang out in a small bookstore and maybe even take something home.

CLICK ON THE EGOTISM —–>Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. 

Greetings, readers! 

Since I advertised this blog on my Facebook page, I can only assume there are one million people reading it now. Which is great! Welcome, one million people, to the House of Bognanni. Make yourself at home. The bathroom is down the hall on the right (yeah, you have to jiggle the handle). 

So, as my first post shamelessly mentioned, I have a novel coming out early next year ($). Right now we’re in the final stages of cover art. Because of this fact, I have been looking at more book covers than any human being should ever look at, ever. I’ve looked at books I love with terrible covers. Books I didn’t really like with awesome covers, and everything in between. But after all of this, when my retinas were seared out of my head, I had to ask the cold hard question to myself: How much does a cover really affect which book I buy?

The answer, if I look at my recent hardback purchases, is a tad embarrassing. First case: 2666 by Roberto Bolano. Admission: I never finished The Savage Detectives. But, did I purchase the thirty-some dollar, totally rockin’ three-paperback version of Bolano’s second book? Hell yes I did! I marched it right up to the counter and bought it without much thought. Why? It was really cool  (a note: now I’m reading it and loving it, but still). So, it seems I am attracted to nicely-packaged attractive things. And will even read hundreds of pages of them.

Case two: Olive Kitteridge. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. A handful of smart people recommended I read this. I like novels-in-stories. Did I buy the hardback? Nope. Why, you might ask? Too girly. That’s the truth. I have also since read this and loved it, but I read a free galley copy. It has a repeated picture of Random House’s logo on it in a maddening pattern. But it won’t girl up my bookshelf, now will it?

So, more to come on this later. But in the meantime, I ask all of you House of Bognanni guests: what book have you purchased purely for the cover? No lying or cheating!