Substrate

I was not sure where to post this, but this blog hasn’t gotten much love lately, so I figured I would post it here.

The idea for the post came to me as I was biking home. I always take the same route from work to my apartment in Palo Alto: down the Hill on Coyote, right on Page Mill, left on Hanover, through Standford campus and then six blocks of professor-housing. It’s not the world’s most exciting journey. But even though I’ve made it about forty times so far this summer, each time has been different. While my feet and hands and eyes are locked into a cycle of near-identical stimuli, my mind wanders without limit. This time, as I raced down the Hill on Coyote, the vast emptiness of farmland and highway around me made me think of gods, wandering landscapes of bubbling chaos, ready to burst into order at their beck and call. As I pushed up towards Hanover and saw Stanford Tower, my thoughts turned to Borges and his endless libraries. As I wound through campus and raced past young men and women hurrying home, I pondered the next chapters of my novel, where a green private in the Israeli army is fighting to the death with his lieutenant - inside a virtual world, their characters ripping each other to shreds with blade and magic. 

Imagination is my escape from the bicycle ride. The ride is every single bit as important as the escape: it gives me the freedom to imagine. But without imagination, I would be seeing the same landscapes and buildings, listening to the same sounds day in and day out. I would be limited by my surroundings. Imagination helps me break these limits as though they weren’t there, and opens my mind to an infinite variety of experience. Letting your mind wander is a bit like walking through Borges’ library - there is no end to it, and you can easily get lost. But it does not mean it’s not worth doing: every trip opens new paths, and every path is like a miniature life, begging to be touched, felt, experienced. Instead of going on one ride, you go on infinitely many at once. Finally a few rides, a few errant thoughts latch on to your brain and become memories, insights. When you come home, you pick those insights up, and share them with others in your books, or your games, or your conversations. All of a sudden, your friends are taking infinitely many bike rides as well - and some of them have never even been on a bike!

This is a blog about writing, and recently we’ve all been talking (and writing) about why we write. I write to share my imagination with my audience, whether it’s as small as the other members of Substrate, or as big as the whole world. It’s been a big effort for me to bring my imagination down to earth, to tie my fantasies back to our lives, to our human joys and struggles, but in doing so I feel I get the biggest payoff for letting my imagination wander. It’s all too tempting for me to completely remove my stories from reality. I am happiest when, instead, my stories are threads that start in the real (to wit, a bicycle ride) and end in the completely fantastical (gods walking through roiling chaos), and nowhere does the transition feel forced or sudden. I haven’t been too successful at this approach yet, but I am working on it, and maybe, one of these days, I will get to the point where I can take my reader from bicycle rides to Borges in one smooth page-turner

A few years ago, Jonathan Carroll posted an excerpt from Orhan Pamuk’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature. I posted it on my personal journal with certain bits of it bolded, and invited my writer-friends to respond and bold the bits of it that applied to them.

It’s interesting to see what different people resonate with, and also interesting that, 2.5 years later, my answers have actually changed.

Here’s the excerpt:

“The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I cannot do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but as in a dream cannot quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy. ”

Your turn.

Greetings!

It’s been about a week since I ought to have posted, but, there is life, and there is my general hesitance before putting things on a page. I am just bad at the blogging thing - but I hope you keep reading, because the fact that I am writing this at all, is a testament to me trying to get better

I am Vlad. I am a scientist: computer-scientist, mathematician, sociologist, which sometimes to me feels like saying, “I’m a magician.” The title for this post, from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, is about the magic of mathematics, the incomprehensible complexity of fractal geometry and its dimensions that break the mind… and yet are visible, before us, every day - in flowers, in the branches of trees, in the movement of jam through pudding. To be completely honest, I’m not yet a scientist (a couple of years until my Ph.D.), so the whole magic thing feels scary to me sometimes, as I study at night, in my room in Ithaca, while the cold wind blows outside, in darkness…* it’s quite enough to send any sane person running back to the comfort of family, friends, warm meals by the fire. I have held out for about three years, somehow, and hopefully will hold out for the remaining one-two that it takes me to finish graduate school.

So why do I write? For two reasons: one, because writing, and Substrate in particular, is that warm fire that keeps me connected to the people I care about, and to things that I can touch, hear, taste. Two, because writing is the thing that keeps me sane. Yes, two is separate from one, significantly so, because even when I am not alone, I remain so, because it is so hard to speak of a world that tries to model ours, and yet remains so abstract, so different, that you can’t just I don’t know, tweet about it, or call up your buds and talk about attractor dynamics in CC-space. I can’t just WRITE science (okay, I can, I do it, but it’s not particularly rewarding)… but when I WRITE fiction, when I put the crazy abstract in my mind into images, and transform those images into words, and those words suggest other words, I begin to come back to reality, to an extent. I become grounded in this wonderful, familiar atmosphere of Things, things many people can relate to, and there’s little these days that makes me happier than talking to Max about his novels, or getting feedback about my fledgling effort to write my first novel, or pondering a short story idea and putting down an outline to write about later. So I joined Substrate, and have never been happier

I hope to come back next week, and so on in a regular fashion, to regale you with stories of my crazy brain, my writing efforts, perhaps tidbits from Lukomorye (the novel), and to hear what the other wonderful Substrate folk have to say!

*This is not to suggest grad school is evil. Grad school is great. Sometimes it’s just a little too great for my puny human brain

One concept that shows up constantly in the martial arts is the idea of the stance.  A stance is a posture that you assume in order to practice a technique: a student practicing his punches will assume a horse-riding stance, a student practicing front-leg kicks may assume a reverse cat stance, and so forth.

Practitioners in the mixed martial arts often criticize this kind of practice, saying it is “dead”: the stances of a martial arts class seldom translate directly to anything one does in combat.  They’re too formal, too broad, too stable to react to the ever-shifting conditions of a fight.  But more traditional martial artists who know what they’re doing know they don’t train stances for combat, really: they train to build an instinctive sense of weight distribution that they can rely upon when they don’t have the luxury of time to check or adjust their weight.  A traditional martial artist can learn a lot from a stance; however, if he tries to use these stances in combat without knowing how to make them live, he’ll only get kicked in the face.

I’ve been reading John Gardner’s excellent “On Becoming a Novelist” recently on commutes to and from the airport.  For those who don’t know Gardner, he’s an excellent novelist (the writer of Grendel, which many of you may have read in a high school class at some point, among other things), as well as — even rarer — an excellent teacher of writing.

At one point in the book, Gardner cautions against two common habits in writing description.  The first is what he calls “Pollyanna” diction: excessive use of phrases like “his broad shoulders” or “with a merry twinkle in her eye” or “friendly lopsided smile.”  These phrases, he says, smack of an easy sentimentalism, and more to the point of a borrowed sentimentalism.

The second common habit is what Gardner calls the “disPolyanna.”  This is the tendency to use language emphasizing how much life is shit.  To quote directly:

Sunny optimism, with its fondness for italics, gives way to an ill-founded cynicism, also supported by italics, and “broad shoulders” give way to “gut level things” or worse.

Beware of Spider Jersualem’s instinctive gut-rage as much as we beware the flower church sermon, in other words.

Gardner’s point, I think, is that one should beware of dead writing: writing that stems entirely from a “stance” that may have once been useful in developing an authoritative voice, rather than from the truth of the situation being described.  The difference between martial arts and writing, though, is that writers preparing work for publication are always in combat.  There’s room for stance work in exercises and sketches, but the final product must have vision beyond a rough knee-jerk instinct to optimism or cynicism if it’s to be successful.

So what does this have to do with fantastic fiction, and with my writing?  I think the fantastic genres are at extreme risk of both Pollyanna and disPollyanna style: writers glorying in the romance of the genre may fall into the first trap and writers recoiling from that trap may fall into the other.  It is, maybe, so hard to come up with a whole world for one’s characters to inhabit that we often take up simple stances as a reflex, without inhabiting the worlds of our characters enough to describe them accurately.  A risk indeed!

And for me: I write fast, and in the speed of my writing I often skirt around the frank vision necessary to avoid falling into a set stance.  Fortunately, one always has the chance to edit.  Now if only I could get myself to be excited about that as I am about finishing the next thousand words!  More on that in my next post, maybe.

My first post here, and it’s late! Thank goodness Max e-mailed me earlier today to remind me that I’d promised to do a blog post.

When Max first pitched the name Substrate, I had no idea what it meant. I did some searching and found a link to the stuff that goes on the bottom of aquariums. (And while you could get philosophical about being underwater and the nature of the Jungian unconscious, I admit, I was thinking about fish poo.) Then Websters helped me out, and I got the idea of palimpsest, and steered away from the fish.

To tell the truth, it didn’t really matter to me what we were calling the writing group, what mattered was that, for the first time, I was going to *have* one. A real, local group with people who also turned in work on a regular schedule and who would push me and critique me and make me do my best was going to meet in real life. I was going to be a part of something bigger than just myself in my writing. And I was going to have people to hold me accountable for the writing I said I’d do.

So, to carry on from Max’s Sgt. Pepper, Substrate to me is all about getting by with a little help from my friends. Writing’s a lonely profession, and it helps tremendously to get an e-mail from Vlad trying to schedule our next meeting, or a note from Max about the query letters he’s writing, or tea with Michelle discussing a serial I’m working on, or a comment from Sarah on my lj talking about some project or another. Feeling like I’m writing in a community, rather than writing all alone, drives me to be a better writer — and, I hope, a better friend!

Whenever I learn a new computer programming language, the very first step is always to get the program to output, “Hello, world!” Since this is my first time blogging ever, I figure it isn’t a bad way to start off.

Hello, world. I’m a writer, first and foremost: while other kids doodled in class in high school, I wrote poems in the back of my notebook. Through almost every class, I’d be writing short stories, or working on that novel I’m going to get published someday. The only one who ever caught me at it was my sharp-eyed Pre-Calc teacher; the others always thought I was taking notes.

I’m also a gamer, an undergraduate computer science major, an artist, and probably a wide number of other things. I enjoy inventing myself. When I was 4, I was a magical princess trying to save her fantastical kingdom in the sky. When I was 12, I was a sorceress destined to save a planet full of dragons. When I was 13, I was an assassin living on the edge, who ultimately did save the universe.  Nowadays, I’m still deciding which of my identities I want to embrace…but when I  choose, you’ll be the first to know.

I write fantasy primarily, and while I’m focusing on short stories the poems tend to spring out. I’m hoping to finish that novel someday. I write because I love writing, and though I hope to be published one of these days, I mostly want to have fun with the stories I write.  There are few things more amusing than having a full cast of characters traipsing through your head, telling you where your story ought to go. The best is when they declare that they’re going to go do -this- now, and your precious plot outline is just going to have to get over itself and get out of their way.

But enough about me. There’s plenty of other fine folks, waiting to introduce themselves to you…

One of my favorite Beatles moments is from the intro to Sgt. Pepper’s: “The singer’s going to sing a song, and he wants you all to sing along, so let me introduce to you, the one and only Billy Shears and Sgt. Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band!”

I’m hardly Paul McCartney, but I’m here to introduce the band anyway. It’s been suggested that I talk for a moment about where the name “Substrate” comes from.

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