Anthony Dobranski Online

Category: Selected

  • How writers read (sometimes)

    How writers read (sometimes)

    After a month focused on marketing and promotion, I am back to writing my maddening current novel, a science fiction set in a future war-ravaged Budapest.

    It’s maddening because I set myself goals that are hard to square. For one, or one pair in opposition, I want to give the book a pre-modern European patina, but I also want to keep it short and pointed — the formal elegance without the pastiche.

    I clearly needed a little inspiration. I’m intuitive when it comes to getting what I need. Like Philip K Dick’s Golden Man, I have no forethought; only an inadvertent method-acting, the way that some travelers unthinkingly restyle their hair to local norms. I really don’t know myself, at all. Existential panic notwithstanding, it’s a huge timesaver.

    Anyway. Without wanting to or planning to, I’ve lately been drawn to books and audiobooks that feel pre-modern.

    I started with Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris, a heady book with lovely imagery, but I didn’t go far in it. I love VanderMeer’s work but I wasn’t reading to read. My artistic needs were guiding me, and Ambergris‘s thickly-layered lavishness was going to bust open my style if I lingered too long.

    A conversation led me to the audiobook of Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, a novel told from the diaries of two feuding late 19th-Century British magicians.* This might seem the perfect inspiration — my book is also a diary, and its writer discovers a secret — but honestly it wasn’t planned. Despite the interesting excerpt in the bookstore, I actually bought the audiobook wondering why the hell I was doing it; I had work to do and other books in my pile. Eventually I understood.

    The end of my intuitive tour was a very fine audiobook of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which I haven’t read since adolescence, but know well in memory. By now you’ve probably caught my drift — a diary of a trip to a remote castle in Hungary! the discovery of a dark secret! the need to find hidden resolve! Just the hairstyle I needed! I won’t finish it, now that the sailing ship Demeter* has brought its vampire passenger to England. I have work to do, and honestly, Lucy Westenra is annoying.

    It’s terrible to use books this way. If VanderMeer or Priest ever read this, they’ll likely feel like Salieri meeting Mozart in Milos Forman’s Amadeus — bitter and angry at some punk saying “a funny little tune, but it yielded some good things.”

    Alas, I’m just a writer. And, you know, it is what it is. It has always been.

    Long ago in Tokyo, a colleague and friend once told me about a novel she enjoyed,*** about the friendship between a shogun and an aesthete. The scene she retold sticks with me, and I think of it often:

    The shogun gets word that the aesthete has grown a magnificent garden of gorgeous chrysanthemums. The shogun sends word that he wants to see it. When he arrives, he finds all of the flowers have been hacked down. Furious, he marches into the house — and there finds one chrysanthemum, the best chrysanthemum of the whole garden, in a vase.

    Life is cruel but it’s got nothing on art. Cruelest of all, is need.

    *Priest wrote a short book slagging Harlan Ellison for sitting on The Last Dangerous Visions for what was then twenty years (and now will be forty-five when J. Michael Straczynski finally issues it this year). Then, Priest wrote a book about a destructive feud. I wonder if he picked a fight for his own inspiration…

    **My book’s protagonist is named Dömötör, the Hungarian version of the name. This happens to me all the time. Any writer who is not a mystic makes a fetish of empiricism.

    ***Alas the novel had not been translated, I don’t know Japanese, and I have forgotten the title and author. Also forgotten, where I put my own diary of my trips to Japan.

  • Quarantine Inspiration on The Inner Loop Radio!

    The Inner Loop is a Washington DC live-reading group that hosts fiction, non-fiction and poetry writers at monthly events. I’ve been pleased and proud to read work there twice.

    They also run a terrific podcast on all aspects of writing. This week I’m part of their Qurantine Inspiration Series, with my own 12-minute creative stimulus – motivation, tips, a writing prompt, and a super-short story with my new take on a legendary being.

    For more inspiration, subscribe to their podcast at: https://www.theinnerlooplit.org/radio

  • The safe bummer of legal marijuana

    In the small clear-plastic cube on the counter were two shelves of smoking accessories. On the top shelf, clear glass pipes printed with silhouette men and women having sex; on the bottom shelf, blister packages of metal pipe and grinder combos, in Jamaican flag colors, with a Bob-Marley-ish face in the grinder. The gear was less surprising than the store selling it: a gas station in Merrifield, Virginia, where I had taken my father’s old truck for its state inspection.

    Virginia is not a state with legal marijuana. It wasn’t long ago that the few record stores and novelty stores that also sold bongs and pipes had to sticker them with notices that they were intended for tobacco use. We Americans have all grown used to these fig-leafs being lifted, and to the eventual likelihood of its pan-state (if not national) legalization.

    Still, it disappoints me. Not that I want it recriminalized. I just want it to be illicit.

    The legalization of something already widely accessible is an end to hypocrisy, a chance to research and understand its real effects, and a huge boon to the poorest and least privileged among us, too many of whom still sit in jails for an ever-more legal act. Back when I was an illegal pot smoker — as all American pot smokers older than 30 once were — I certainly would not have wanted to go to jail.

    But, it was thrilling to be illegal, for an hour here and there, and be unscathed. Thrilling, and maybe necessary.

    Criminality is a form of puzzle-solving. You are not supposed to do something, but you find a way to do it, with no great consequence and possible great benefit. It uses the same skill-sets that get salespeople good commissions, that got my father through nine months in a Nazi POW camp.

    I know, in head and heart, that no crime is victimless. Someone suffers. The Buddha reminds us we all suffer regardless.

    So I will just say it aloud for once. I miss the risk and the seediness of being a pothead, the odd skill it took to know whether it was good or not, the randomness of the available product, the curious investigations tracking it down in new places. I miss making bongs out of foil ashtrays and Pringles cans. I miss not explaining that the good wood I sought in hardware store scrap piles was for whittling pipes. I miss scoring my weed instead of shopping for it.

    Samuel R. Delany, a great writer and greatly carnal man, laments the transformation of his youth’s Times Square from dangerous and cheaply decadent to Disney-fied and casual-dining. Breaking Bad‘s murderous, enslaving white supremacists lament helmet laws. I lament legal pot.

    I am grateful that my children, should they choose to use pot when they are adults, will never have to risk prison to get it. I alas feel this safety as a loss. Sometimes I wonder if our anxious populace clamors for CBD because we’ve taken away the risk of getting THC.

    In the way of stopped clocks, do the desperate and the horrid have a valid point about the over-management of modern human life?

    It’s an irresponsible question, but not an idle one. Even the optimists behind Star Trek had to admit, through the invention of Section 31, that society needs those willing to violate the Prime Directive on more than a captain’s whim, and with a very different sense of the greater good. The Devil’s Advocate was a real job in Vatican canonization trials. He kept the unworthy out of the ranks of the saints, and performed penance when he lost. Since John Paul II diminished the office, one could argue we’ve had saint inflation. (Someone should tell The Good Place.)

    The CIA might want to leave the Ivy League to corporate recruiters. The children of today’s Dreamers may be America’s best future spies.

  • Merge and purge (writing and language)

    My first draft was 220,000 words of symbol-laden passages and over-described locales. Over years I steadily replaced sets of words with smaller stronger ones, refining the language to heighten the story and the emotional viewpoint. The never-quite-articulated goal was for the words to hold more weight relative to their size thanks to their structure.

    In four passes I got down to 120,000 words. I cut few complete scenes. Mostly I just kept redoing the language, finding slenderer shorter beams for each bit of structure, abandoning ideas that were less essential. It was like starting with an Art Deco skyscraper and renovating it into a geodesic dome, bit by bit.

    Now I hope to write less in the first place but I am not sure it is turning out that way. At least I outline more, or more frequently, nothing grand but enough to guide me. Still, once it’s prose, my process scales to it. Less is an asymptote. Even a small post like this, I write and rewrite, in layers, questioning the questioning.

    Yesterday going through the magazine pile for something to read with my soup, I stumbled upon an article discussing linguist Noam Chomsky’s controversial recent ideas about the beginning of language. Chomsky theorizes early humans created the foundations of language by developing a new ability Chomsky calls Merge, the ability to group mental objects and work with them as a unit.

    I’m no judge of linguistics theory but as an idea Merge resonates with me. Something in my process also looks to merge, or at least more densely encode, meanings – and wants a lot of meaning to encode. Just as we care about both increasing bandwidth and compressing data, maybe the drive to merge is tied in with communication in multiple ways, a circle of acquiring and optimizing we have yet to map out.

    I also confess a happy feeling about my own fiction’s truth. One of the angels to appear late in my novel is of_clumping, which I felt was a driving force in our universe, from stars to black holes. How nice to think this is an angel of meaning as well.