Follow-up to Creative Stimulants 3

Below is part of the outcome of my creative stimulants exercise from last time. I did not include the entire story, since it goes on for some time and I wanted to spare the blog the long chunk of text.

 After I finished my story, I read the host story, as it were, Julia Alvarez's “Trespass." That story focussed on a child, while mine focussed on an adult who was visiting the American Garcias. My Garcias are Argentinian, a more or less random choice of country. I have some Argentinian relatives, whom I met once when they visited here. The father in that family was a doctor, so I made my father of the family a doctor too. The class differences have an impact on characterization as well as on the plot, such as it is in my story. I noted with interest the sordid turns that both of the stories ended up taking. I don't know why that would be. 

I have work to do on this story still. But for what it's worth, here is an excerpt of its first draft.

True Blue

“The day the Garcías were one American year old, they had a celebration at dinner.”  Julia Alvarez, “Trespass”

     The oldest García, Jacinta García, was not an American. She was visiting from Argentina. She insisted on cooking, however. She made her version of a true-blue American meal: hot dogs and French fries for her son Diego’s two youngest children; roast beef, mashed potatoes and coleslaw for the adults and the two older children, who were teenagers; and apple pie with tiger tail ice cream for everyone.

     None of the children liked the pistachio ice cream. Pablo, the oldest grandchild, said, “Abuela, you should have asked me what kind of ice cream we like.”

     Jacinta nodded. A smile twisted her mouth even as an exasperated frown threatened below it. “You’re right, Pablo.” Jacinta was a diabetic and had not eaten ice cream in years, neither American nor Argentinian. “Here I thought ice cream on sale at Sam’s Club was ice cream most people liked.”

     “It is,” Diego’s wife Maria said. “Your grandchildren have become picky all of a sudden.”

     “You can’t know America from watching telenovelas,” teenaged Brisa said.  “You should have asked us.”

     Jacinta had waited ten years for this visit to America, and now, with a sweep of her hand, she had alienated her grandchildren from her. Since Diego, Maria and the two oldest had citizenship, she had felt safer coming over. She had heard stories about American immigration not letting their family stay in America if they let an older parent come to visit. In the past they had come to visit her for long periods, often taking advantage of the visit to sort out details of their planned application for citizenship. Once Diego had managed to convince Jacinta to come to America when they were in California but that was because Maria had just had given birth to Ana, and Diego had said that Maria needed help--the pregnancy had tired her out, and she was slow to recover. Maria’s youngest sister Nadia wouldn’t come, so Maria had no one else. Even so, Jacinta had stayed only for three weeks.

Jacinta was grateful for Diego’s courage in visiting Argentina so frequently and ensuring she could keep in touch with Pablo and Brisa. She had wept over her grandchildren the most when Diego moved to the United States. Her first two grandchildren had loved her so much. And now she had ruined this first attempt at showing that she loved them just the way they were, whether they Argentinian or American. Of course the littlest ones had been born in Spokane and so had always been American. They had never known their grandmother as anything other than someone from a foreign country. Jacinta had become like one of the itinerant parents she had been acquainted with through her childhood school friends. So many fathers of her friends lived somewhere else to work or do graduate studies and came to visit their children only once or twice a year. Her best friend Elenora’s father had been one of those men. He lived in Dubai many years. Elenora had told Jacinta that she had never viewed her father as a real father. Elenora’s mother had taken a lover, one of her many, in the meantime and considered him to be her real father.

     “What kind of ice cream do you like, then?” Jacinta asked all four children the question. The two oldest waited for the two youngest to answer. Ana, the five-year-old, looked up at her grandmother and opened her mouth. A word Jacinta didn’t understand came out.

     “Birthday cake flavour,” Diego translated.

     “Ice cream with the flavour of birthday cake? What does that taste like?”

     “You know,” Pablo said. “White cake, with sprinkles, and very sweet icing.”   Pablo smiled as though he shared Jacinta’s skepticism, but Ana seemed irritated. Nevertheless, she said nothing and neither did Brisa. Jacinta wondered if Ana knew any Spanish. Diego said she did, but she had never heard Ana speak a word of it. She had only heard Ana speak English, and only then when Jacinta was not in the room. Once Jacinta walked in the room, Ana’s eyes narrowed, and she shrunk into a small package of herself.

     The littlest one, Connor, just past one year old, didn’t speak at all, except for “Mama” and “Papa.” 

     Ana said something else, and Diego didn’t translate immediately.

     “What did she say?”

     Brisa said, “She asked you have any birthday-cake ice cream.”

     “Is there a place to get it?” Jacinta asked.

      “Oh, no, you don’t, Mama.” Maria shook her head in that exaggerated way she always shook her head, like a nervous horse tossing her head at a strange sound. “The kids don’t need birthday-cake ice cream.”

     Brisa wrinkled her nose at Ana. “You can’t even buy that in stores,” she said. “You can only get that in ice-cream shops.” She spoke in Spanish, as though she expected Ana to understand her. Ana frowned as though she had understood perfectly.

     Baby Connor picked up a piece of cut-up hot dog and pushed it cautiously into the scoop of ice cream in his plastic dish.

     “That won’t help, Connor,” Ana said in English.

     Later, while Jacinta, Maria and Diego were doing the dishes, Jacinta wanted to have a smoke. With Diego around, however, she didn’t dare bring up the subject. One thing she had liked about Diego not being home in Argentina was that she could smoke whenever she wanted to. Ever since Diego started medical school she had not been able to smoke around him. She had even quit smoking for his sake. Once he had moved to California for his residency, he had left her, yes, and taken his family with him, but he had also taken with him a barrier to one of his mother’s great pleasures. She restarted her smoking only one week after he left. Now in his permanent job in Spokane, he had not changed his ways, and he had his eye on her. “I hope you aren’t smoking again, Mama,” he said when they were driving from the airport to his home.

“Sometimes, yes.”

“Not inside the house, of course!”

“Of course.”

Creative Stimulants 3: First line

Take the first line, sentence, or paragraph of a piece of writing and create your own story from it. You should acknowledge the authorship of the inspiring piece somehow. Otherwise, write it as you wish. This exercise is most interesting if you use a first sentence from a text you haven't read yet. Read the parent text afterwards and compare.

My parent text is "Trespass," a short story by Julia Alvarez, published in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.

"The day the Garcias were one American year old, they had a celebration at dinner."

The original story is 81 paragraphs long. Likely my piece will not be as long. Stay tuned for it.

Novelty

These days, I am all about novelty. I don't mean novelty in the sense of "novelty items" or "novelty stores."  Novelty items are small and cheap toys or doodads that are entertaining or eye-catching. I love novelty items, don't get me wrong. Recently I received two novelty items as gifts: a Batman Pez dispenser and and a Wolverine action figure.

No, by novelty I mean newness. To dedicate oneself to creativity, novelty or newness is a given. Creativity requires the belief that doing something no one else has done is good. I am talking about novelty for novelty's sake. I am not speaking of pragmatism. Certainly novelty may have pragmatic applications or results: acquiring a new hobby, meeting a new friend, learning something to help a person at work or home, saving myself from starvation during a bout of poverty by eating Pez (a theoretical example).

The aim of novelty, at least in the way I define it, is simply to encourage oneself to do something new.

I have been feeling stuck, thwarted and downcast lately. A life dedicated to daily newness seemed to be a solution to these feelings of feeling stuck. If I am doing something I haven't done before, how could I be stuck?

I have become a devotee of novelty. Whom should I worship, then? Who is the patron saint of novelty?  Perhaps Claude de la Columbière or Nicholas of Myra, both patron saints of toymakers, depending on whom you ask. I don't need an anthropomorphism to bow to, however. Instead, I have made a pledge. I pledged to do something new every day for one year: 365 days of novelty.

So far I have done well. Since Oct 31,  I have recorded one novelty per day.  I keep a diary of novelty in a notebook. Newness doesn't have to be like a so-called "bucket list" that involves far-fetched, far-flung destinations. I have gone for coffee in two cafes I haven't been in before, I wrote a one-act play, I coloured my hair red, blue and green (temp colour only), I taught my dog a new trick ('phasers on stun: ZAP!'--that is, play dead), I registered two domain names (vivianzenari.ca and vivianzenari.com), and I visited a malthouse. Some of these things are creative, some are related to things I had to do anyway but for which I found a novel way of doing them, while others are whimsical. The benefit, for me, is the idea of novelty as something open to me no matter how stuck I think I am and how powerless I feel at times.

Creativite Stimulants 2: Ekphrastic writing

Ekphrastic writing is writing based on a non-writing work of art. Traditionally ekphrasis is a description of a visual work of art such as a painting or sculpture.

The resulting ekphrasis has to add to the experience of the original art work, help vivify it or express its essence through the skillful use of language. Ekphrastic writing tends to be hyperbolic and enthusiastic, rather than understated, but that is only a tradition. For some examples of ekphrastic writing, see John Mullan's compilation in The Guardian of important ekphrastic writing.

Here is a paragraph of ekphrastic writing I wrote based on a little painting I have in my room.

Her small face stares intensely out at my world and asks for my opinion. On what? On her world or the outside world? Her world is a small square of wood with infinite depth. Bluegreen fog, white flowers opening their erratic petals, pink spheres, paler pink flowers that may be birds, a red table top that may be a brick path leading to somewhere inaccessible to this world. Perhaps to hers, even. Someone has instructed her to wear a blue sundress. A sheaf of long orange hair sweeps over her shoulder and lies down the front of her chest. She is bent forwards, perhaps to get a better look out of the square window of glass that lets her see out into this world. She smiles as though she knows what I might say. I dare you, she says.

Creative Stimulants 1: Rory's Story Cubes

I have some creativity tools I want to share. They may be relevant most to narrative arts, fiction writing specifically, but I think they could be adapted for other creative processes.

1. Rory's Story Cubes have images on their six sides. Roll the dice and create a story based on those dice. I have a generic set, but thematic Story Cubes exist as well. These include Doctor Who, Batman, space, and animal cubes.

I have used them when I am completely stuck. They are also a way to start a story when I
 need one but have no ideas.

Below is an example of a paragraph of story I generated. I forced myself to use the images from all nine dice.

The images were a bridge, a falling star, a flame, a fish, one die, a cane, a rainbow, a dialogue bubble, and the Earth:

Cane hadn't known a falling star was coming that night, but there it was, sliding down the night sky in front of him and the bridge he was fishing on. Just as the falling star slipped down below the treetops beside the old Die farm, his line jerked. He leaned over the bridge's pedestrian railing and saw a flash below him in the water. The flash widened. The light was beaming down from above, a hot pink light The light made a roar. In the light he saw a fish in the water. He said out loud,  "Rainbow trout," and then the bridge shuddered beneath him The tremours threw him forward against the railing, and the rod slipped out of his hands into the creek. The earth rumbled. Ahead, flames raced up from the trees and met the roof of the night.

Case Study of Comedy Television as Art

I have been listening to Marc Maron's podcast WTF this summer. The Atlantic gives a charming account of Maron as an American Ancient Mariner. Indeed, he is someone who cannot stop talking about himself, and, in so doing, compels others to both listen to him and become a version of him.

WTF has been around long enough for people to compile best-of lists. One of the podcasts that appear on many best-of lists is the second part of his special 500th podcast with comedian Louis CK.  This episode contains CK's account of the creation of his webseries Horace and Pete. Maron gives CK free rein to describe the entire creative process behind the creation of CK's webseries.

Listening to this account gave me a view of what it is like to put together a project that has no precedents. Louis CK is not an unknown person, and as he admits, he was able to use his fame and his past success to help him fund and produce his project. To hear CK talk about the project, money (it was his money) was not an issue for him. Instead, what CK wanted to do was to allow himself to be creative and then allow himself to work towards getting his creative ideas to an audience.

CK talks about everything in the production of this podcast. For those who aren't interested in behind-the-scene details, this is not the podcast to turn to. But for those who want to hear the details of how someone gets an original project off the ground, from writing to casting to marketing, this should prove a useful case study.

Turkey Shoot

I am working on something, but I am not finished. In the meantime, here are two recent photographs of turkeys that I personally took with my own hands and with no assistance whatsoever.

Spokane street turkey, July 15, 2016

Carny turkey, July 25, 2016. He is sleepy but happy.