Switching Gears

As far as blogging goes, or thinking, or doing...most of my action is happening at Neuro Detour. When life shifts your gears for you, I guess the blog must as well.

From Freelance to Tap Dance

The first of who knows how many installments on tap dancing into the World Wide Web of employment.

Until two weeks ago, I had been a bona fide employee once in my fifteen years of adult life. That was ten years ago, and after the first six months I brought forks to work with me to scoop my eyes out—metaphorically speaking. Luckily, I was laid off after a year and experienced the joy of unemployment checks and food stamps. Those six months of public support gave me the time to jump-start my career as a full-time artist.

So for the last ten years, I’ve either been my own boss and other people’s boss or a freelance writer, bopping around from company to company. Those short-term gigs made it easy to show my best self, avoid office politics, and still feel totally autonomous. Even my mother, who had once claimed she would NEVER want to hire me, began to say, what a great employee you are, my lovely, respectful, understanding, good listening, hard working daughter.

Her adjectives may have been right on☺, but her misappropriation of the word employee in relation to moi boosted my confidence to a high-peaked mountain where it had no business enjoying the view.

As soon as I began freelancing for my new employer, an interactive ad agency in the Philly ‘burbs, I knew I wanted to work there full-time—despite the commute. And when they made me an offer, I was so enthused, I accepted immediately without hesitation or negotiation.

I adore my new job. I get paid to play with words. I interact with creative, talented, and engaging people all day. I can wear jeans and open-toed shoes. The benefits are a profound plus. My boss is super-cool, supportive, and really good at what he does. The whir of the regional rail commute is perfectly calming for meditating or reading. It is a match made in advertising heaven.

But…

After a few days, I realized I have a lot of learning to do to be the “great employee” my mother saw in me. Making the switch from the self-autocracy of self-employment to the semi-democracy of employment is a lot harder than I expected. And although I try to leave my work at the office, I can’t help but come home thinking—I’m an official office failure. Rather than the Copy Champion, an aggrandizing title bestowed upon me from a generous co-worker, I feel more like the Copy Champignon, a classy fungus poking its dirty head in uninvited places.

The world of freelance is, well, free. Feast or famine, it’s a glorious ride. But it’s actually, for a person like me, a very safe one. I’m good at running my own world, and I like working from home. Putting myself into this new 5-day-a-week work environment is a challenge that feels like the first day of high school. You go in with all the right intentions of being a moderate superstar, whether it’s the kind with purple lop-sided hair (in my case) or prom queen (definitely not in my case), but you end up eating your PB&J in the furthest corner of the lunch room, realizing you’re still the same reject from middle school.

When I feel like I stink at something—like marriage or cooking Thai food—I buy a book or two or three to help me find my way. While other people may turn to God, I turn to words. Words are important to me, and books are my spiritual guides.

While I haven’t tried my hand at a second marriage, I have learned how to make a mean Thai curry. I knew going into my cooking adventures, I had the culinary wherewithal in me, but I needed the right knowledge and the time to practice it.

Just because we freelancers may not know how the hell to play the office game today, it doesn’t mean we can’t learn to become an integral ingredient in the jobholder stew while enjoying the tasty contributions of the other perky ingredients.

I love stew almost as much as words. And my new job’s concoction is definitely one I want to be a part of. Being a copywriter is not high art, but as far as paying professions in the US go, it's probably as close as I'll get. While I may not be making the world a better place from 9-5, it feels good to be valued with a living wage.

Having a full-time job is a major relief. Not only do I know exactly what amount and when my next paycheck is due, I've found a career that inspires me, and a new challenge that will make me a better person. All this may sound fluffy and gooey, but it’s as solid as the truth. And as long as I'm not writing ad campaigns for the next George W. Bush, I can feel proud of the work I'm doing.

But I'd like to feel confident that I'm making a contribution beyond good writing to the company that's making my life better.

So back to the books…I just ordered three from Amazon: Watercooler Wisdom: How Smart People Prosper in the Face of Conflict, Pressure, & Change; The 12 Bad Habits That Hold Good People Back; and How to Be the Employee Your Company Can't Live Without: 18 Ways to Become Indispensable. I plan on grilling my mother for superstar-employee-tips, practicing what I learn, and sharing a few stories now and again on this blog.

Scandal Scandalizing Scandal

Kafka is dead!

But today the New York Times published “A Bug’s Life. Really,” an Op-Ed spoof by novelist and screenwriter Mark Leyner, supposedly discrediting Franz Kafka’s novella “The Metamorphosis” as non-fiction.

Fiction as truth, Oh my!

The article begins, “In a scandal that’s sending shock waves through both the publishing industry and academia, the author Franz Kafka has been revealed to be a fraud.

“‘The Metamorphosis — purported to be the fictional account of a man who turns into a large cockroach — is actually non-fiction,’ according to a statement released by Mr. Kafka’s editor, who spoke only on the condition that he be identified as E.”

How literary it is to be simply called E.!

What is Leyner trying to do? Demonstrate that the New York Times is a literary nightmare? That the recent scandals regarding fictional or historical or autobiographical integrity are McCarthy-esque witch hunts against an already marginalized and misunderstand profession? Offer his name into the coveted gated world of ping-pong-name-tossing-blaming-Oprah-interviewing-NY Times-covering-book store shelf space-rescinding publicity? Place himself at the zenith of literary genius, above the entire-museum-dedicated-to-his-work-and-life Kafka, the “con man” as he’s referred to Leyner’s article? To become a neologism, That Op-Ed piece was so Leyneresque! Wow, what a Leyneresque outfit! You are thus sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for this Leyneresque crime of treason. Don’t Bogart my Leynerism!?

But the real scandal is in the positioning that fiction cannot be fact-based. Leyner has exposed what has long been recognized; most writers write from experience.

There are numerous books on writing titled just that: “Writing from Experience”, by Richard A. Condon, “Writing from Experience” by Brian Taylor, “I Felt Like I Was from Another Planet : Writing from Personal Experience” by Norine Dresser, “A time in their lives;: Writings from personal experience” by Jerry Herman, “Writing from Experience, Revised Edition: With Grammar and Language Skills for ESL/EFL Students” by Marcella Frank, “Writing from Personal Experience: How to Turn Your Life into Salable Prose” by Nancy Kelton, “Writing from Experience: A Step by Step Approach to Freelance Writing” by Amanda Wilkins, “Talking and Writing from Experience” by Judith Atkinson and John Foster, “Writing Personal Poetry: Creating Poems from Your Life Experiences” by Sheila Bender, “Write from Life: Turning Your Personal Experiences into Compelling Stories” by Meg Files, and the list goes on and on and on and on.

What is so new and disturbing about experience-based, or truth-based writing? At best, it makes for tangible, palpable, unparalleled, fully realized writing. At worst, it’s self-aware, self-indulgent, and predictable. But these categories could be extended to any kind of writing.

In Leyner’s article, he quotes P., “a professor of literature at Princeton” who laments, “To find out that [“The Metamorphosis” is] actually true is devastating.”

Devastating.

And according to "A Bug's Life. Really," Mr. Kafka (despite his current state of burial) is devastated by this sudden exposure as well. He quotes a “contrite and tearful” Kafka as professing, “I know what I did was wrong. I’m very alienated from myself, but that’s no excuse to lie.”

Lies.

So we know Kafka is dead. Even if the Times doesn’t. Or maybe they were in on it. And according to Leyner, Kafka’s still living-breathing publishers are fact-checking his fiction. Fact-checking fiction, now there’s an oxymoron.

In Leyner's article, he names the man-as-cockroach condition as “entomological dysplasia.” GoogleTM this, and one finds nothing but links back to Leyner’s article. (NOTE: When I began writing this, there was one page of results for "entomological dysplasia" in Google. A few hours later, there were two.)

It doesn’t take a literary genius or a master of sci-fi to figure out that there’s no such condition and that Leyner’s article is no more truth-based than “The Metamorphosis.”

Thanks to Leyner, the question of truth's significance in writing is yet again under consideration, but with a twist. He's taken the memoir verifiability debate to extreme. Let's just hope the literary police don't turn their radar to the gloriously unverifiable genres of fiction and poetry.

Is Empathy Necessary?

According to the very candid historian and author Inga Clendinnen, the "novelist's gift of empathetic imagination" is misleading.

In her 70-page essay, The History Question: Who Owns the Past? (published in Quarterly Essay, Issue 23, 2006) she writes, "the 'insights' of empathy are untestable...Historical novelists spend time getting the material setting right, but then, misled by their confidence in their novelist's gift of empathetic imagination, they sometimes project back into that carefully constructed material setting contemporary assumptions and current obsessions."

The question is, misleading to whom?

Is it misleading to the author herself? to the reader? to the critic? to the egotistically-infringed academic? to the babysitter, the cat in the alley, the doorman, the barrista, the v.p. of marketing, et al?

And, who cares?

As I am reading a work of fiction, regardless of its origins, do or should I care if I’m being mislead? Only if what I’m reading is shallow and predictable, but then if it were, would I be mislead?

Should the author care if she’s been mislead by her subject? Only if it results in bad writing, I presume.

Should the barrista care if he’s been mislead? Ask the barrista. If he works at Starbucks, at least he has health insurance. Who can't empathize with that BASIC HUMAN RIGHT? (Note shifting pronoun throughout for sake of equality.)

Being mislead is a personal choice, if not a preference. And those that don’t want to be mislead, should not be reading the newspaper, let alone a novel, or a memoir for that matter.

Novel - a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length and complexity, portraying characters and usually presenting a sequential organization of action and scenes*

But empathy is such a beautiful and relevant quality. We (as in myself and people I know...I dare not assume a universal we in this format) can not relate without it. Empathy is what allows us to move past judgment to compassion. And compassion is what drives us (ditto). While not all people are capable of empathy, whether due to mental or genetic disorders, it's what keeps my humanity busting out of its bones, and dare I presume, yours as well.

Last night, I fortuitously watched The Hoax, a much lauded factual movie about a washed-up author (played by Richard Gere) who receives a million dollar contract to write the autobiography of the reclusive Texan billionaire, Howard Hughes. Only everything, including the verified letter of agreement from Hughes, is a hoax.

A great premise for a movie, right? Historically based no less, right?

But the characters. Oh, the characters. I could not, for the empathetic life of me, empathize with them. They were just too unlikable for me to become engaged, to care. And in their inability to evoke empathy from me, their experiences and actions became pigeonholed as…predictable.

So, is the “novelist’s empathetic imagination” misleading?

Probably, to a certain extent, if you’re a lawyer or the editor of HIPAA policies and procedures (which I have been the latter not the former), but one of the reasons for reading Philip Roth's fiction, Anne Waldman's poetry, Inga Clendinnen's accounts of history, People Magazine, or the Sunday funnies** is to exit one reality, that world of presumed innocence/guilt/right/wrong and enter into a new one. What really should be said, is that the writer's imagination is leading.

The empathetic imagination is what leads us into the realm of the text - believable or unbelievable as it may inherently be.


*novel. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/novel (accessed: February 16, 2008).

**According to Wikipedia, the Reading Eagle boasts the "Biggest Comics Section in the Land".

A Picture of Fred Astaire

He holds a cane—not for walking; for dancing; a dancing stick. Not a stick that dances but a stick for a man who dances with a stick.

There is sound in his feet. There is sound held together, laced into rhythm by the wormy-white ties of his shoes.

This picture can move. I hear it tapping. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. What’s it they say? “From screen to stage” or something of the sort.

Read about Fred

Develop a Few Mantras

I just finished reading Searching for the Secret River and The Secret River, both by Kate Grenville. Both of which are devouringly captivating and difficult if not impossible to get in the US. You'll have more luck getting your hands on the latter, a work of historic fiction, than the former, a memoir of the writing of the novel--unless you have a trip planned to the land of Oz anytime soon.

So, if you're not as lucky as me, AND you don't know the right gypsies who have migrated from England to the US to Australia and back to England who happened to pick up a copy of said text along the way, OR if you're just the kind of person who only reads summaries and cliffs notes, OR if you're in a hurry and need a helping hand or a hint of inspiration, OR if you just want to know what I'm thinking (which for the sake of imposed-modesty as not to distance you from my moment of sarcastic pomposity, "but you probably don't want to know what I'M thinking" [NOTE: she said with a soft sigh and curl of her lower lip, her eyes folding into the circles beneath them])...

I've included the greatest lessons, at least for me, that I've gleaned from reading Ms. Grenville's story of her story.


1. Experience your characters.
“I could experience the past-as if it were happening here and now.” (p. 47)

2. Allow your research to live (by experiencing as human/sensorial).

3. Visualize.
“…what did they wear?...Did the sitters make a pet of the new baby, carrying him on their hips, arguing about swhose turn it was to push in the pram? Did they have prams?...were they the other kind of big sisters,the secretive hair-pulling and ear-pinching kind?” (p.34)

4. Take your time.

5. Be humble. And learn from your process.
“This process was teaching me to be more humble. So far I’d found nothing that was absolutely certain.” (p. 38)

6. Let the story tell its story.

7. Sometimes, but not always follow logic.
“The logical place was to start at the beginning. “ (p. 31)

8. Question your source.
“Was there so much history in Britain that it could be treated casually?” (p. 50/51)

9. Acknowledge your differences (from your story/characters).
“It [aboriginal culture] was so foreign. It took a long time to realise that that was an appropriate feeling. I was an outsider. This wasn’t knowledge you could expect to go to a beak and learn. The thing was to recognise that I didn’t know.” (p. 129)

10. See your experiences as your characters would.
“A few steps into the bush and I’d panicked…not a moral shortcoming, but an interesting thing to know. Wiseman didn’t have the track…He had a whole continent…around him, and those birds that made the place sound so very empty.” (p. 137)

11. Develop a few mantras.


Read Kate Grenville's Whispering Voices of Advice

Morning and evening...

“Morning and evening the Government chain gangs clanked and shuffled to and from the split-timber barracks where their hammocks were packed in so close together the convicts became part of each other’s dreams.”

From The Secret River by Kate Grenville.