Angst and darkness, but mostly angst...

I've gone back to listening to lectures at work. For awhile I'd stopped. I think it's something I do when the noise in my head gets too intense to listen to for more than an hour at a time.

Last Christmas wasn't fun. I simply couldn't get into it. I didn't want a tree or presents, I didn't bake Christmas cookies. I didn't want any summer sausage or peppermint meltaways. I ended up buying a box of dark chocolate covered cherries and crying into the box. I know they're stupid one dollar candies from Wal-mart, but out of all the candies that come around at Christmas, they're my favorite. I used to buy them three or four boxes at a time, and when we were mad at each other, my husband and I would leave boxes of them out as peace offerings. There were usually stacks of these goofy boxes all over the house and in the freezer. We didn't always get along, but we were always trying to make-up.

Jack passed away a little under two years ago, right before our 28th anniversary, and it's taken me this long to say it. I don't like this time of year and I can't stand chocolate-covered cherries. I broke out in full body hives from head to toe on the anniversary of his death and carry Benadryl around like a life preserver.

I thought I'd worked through the grief spasms, but they're back. When I started working again, I had to come clean. I'd be working or thinking, and a song would come on the radio, or someone would say something and I'd start to cry.

People have started eying me again, like I'm going crazy, and one or two brave souls have tried telling me I should be over it. Like Jack was a dog that ran away, or a shoe I lost while hiking. He wasn't the nicest person, and he had serious issues, but whenever we went out together, even if it was to the grocery store--we'd hold hands. And I miss him.

Much calmer

Thank God for friends, and driving around in my car talking to myself--although I'm not sure if I'm supposed to admit that. I ate chocolate, drank lots of soda, did a little writing and listened to a fabulous RWA lecture by Christie Craig and Faye Hughes.

I'm a lecture-geek. I know most people don't come across well, but unless you have chemistry, don't lecture with a partner. Unless you have a strong personality, don't do a panel.

Most of all--unless you believe in something with your whole heart and soul, don't try to be "inspirational". Out of hundreds of lectures, I've only heard "three" inspirational lectures. Sharon Sala's "Writing is an Addiction", which I totally fan-girled over in DC because I was fortunate enough to be her moderator.

Sharon Sala is a wonderful, gracious lady and I've been reading her books since she was writing Silhouette IMs. The fact that she totally inspires me every time I listen to her "Addiction" lecture is just icing on the cake.

Barbara Keaton's "Write with Passion", which I won't lie about--I didn't listen to until I'd worked my way to the bottom of the 2008's, because I thought it was how to add sex to your single title. Talk about jump up and witness, this woman was on fire. I almost started yelling, "Amen!" (although it would have looked funny at work. It's bad enough I kept smiling. Smiling at something no one else can hear is also bad)

And "Make it Happen", by Christie Craig and Faye Hughes.

Wow.

Just wow.

Christie Craig believes. And for the time I spent listening to her--when I wasn't snuffling madly--I believed, too. I need to put these three particular lectures together for those bad days when I lose faith.

And buy more chocolate. That Dove bag didn't last long.

I shouldn't have gone

I'm not the nicest person--and I accept it. I'm probably everything my psych profile says and more, but I like to think I'm okay. I took behavioral science this quarter because I thought it would help with developing characters, but it's more like cleaning out the inside of my head and finding out all the ways I'm odd compared to the rest of the population.

My last assignment was to pinpoint areas I thought needed improvement, and to be honest--I think I'm fine. I have issues, but I'm working through them, and I like myself. In gratitude for the scholarship I won recently, I went to the scholarship banquet. Not the smartest move on my part.

I felt like a short sighted idiot in a sea of normal people. I was the only person at my table, the next table and every table I could eavesdrop on who wasn't planning on continuing on to a four year degree. I picked my degree because it was the fastest way from point A to marketable job skills.

I'm in "re-training", not looking for a career. I just want to make enough money to live on, support my kid and have time left over to write and study craft. People ask me if I want to join study groups, come over and do homework together. Hang out after class. Seriously?

I have a life, and it involves doing homework at two am. I don't have time to go to school all day and do homework all night. I'm struggling to maintain my 3.5, and worried it'll be a total waste of time.

The woman next to me was also an accounting major and she told me how she took time off to devote herself to going to school every day, carried her textbooks around with her, how easy everything was, and how she felt she wasn't being challenged. And there I was, struggling to the point I go to flex class even though I'm not enrolled. It's like pulling fingernails with my teeth. It's freappin' hard!!

How can they make it seem so easy? Is it really that simple? I got a serious case of the unworthies from breathing the same air. I haven't felt so torn since high school. Not that this is going to rock my self-esteem, but damn--I'm blowing through this bag of Dove candy like it's a bottomless grab-bag.

The Upside Down Transformational Arc

Anyone who knows me, knows I'm not the biggest Maas fan. I admire him for the tidbit I took away from his first craft book, "Writing the Breakout Novel", and I'd been avoiding his RWA lecture, because--I dunno. It seemed like everyone was on the bandwagon, and I don't like crowds.

But I was working my way down the list and finally got to the "special" lectures. I enjoyed the first ten minutes of "The Fire Within". It was a wonderful, pumped up go-get-'em tiger of an intro that made me want to break out a pen. Then it kind of petered out. I think...because it was person-specific and would work better in a book. Not everything translates to lecture-format. Especially if you're listening to it after the fact.

But then he said the one thing that caught my attention. It might have been a "throwaway" line, but it was a nuclear flash for me.

"People usually think of the hero's transformational arc as going up, but sometimes, it goes down", and I stopped.

Wow.

He is so right. And never more so when it comes to certain types of stories. The upside down arc is the anti-hero's arc.

A good way to look at it would be to compare two movies like Good Will Hunting and The Bourne Identity. Both Matt Damon films. Put aside the fact that Jason Bourne is a killer, because that's not the part I'm talking about.

In the first movie--the Bourne Identity, Jason is a disenfranchised amnesiac killer who meets this woman named Marie (and I promised myself I wouldn't talk about the difference between the books and the movies, so I won't, lol) and over the course of the movie, he moves from considering her expendable to trusting her, to finally finding something inside himself willing to take that final step and reach out to her. It's a good example of an upward driving transformational arc.

Jason moves from point A, through positive steps--accepting Marie as a person, starting to trust her, wanting to protect her--to point B, where he's grown into the person he needs to be so they can have a life together.

In Good Will Hunting, Will starts at point A, down a long shallow slope of un-positive, really stupid and outright counter-productive behaviors. He pushes people away, destroys everyone's illusions and messes with people for the hell of it. He can't open up to the girl, and he doesn't want help to pull out of his downward spiral. Watching Will is so horrible it hurts. It's so unrelentingly bad. Down, down down, until he hits rock bottom, and only then, can he start the long crawl back. Transforming as he goes.

It's the same arc, only upside down. A reflection of all the bad things that a person can do to get to point B, instead of all the good things.

In some ways, it's like UNK's stages-of-grief downward arc, but this particular arc works for people with unreformed rakes and demons, uber-alphas with ptsd, disconnected loners and vampire/shifters. Anne Stuart does the downward arc. Probably why I have so many of her books. I love watching the hero get worse before he gets better.

Practical applications

Deanna made me pinpoint exactly what I don't like about school. The formalized structure. As I work through my courses I'm grateful community college lets me cut to the chase. A four year degree would be more profitable, but I don't see the point.

Education is a journey, a lust and a passion. I want to know why and how. The other day, one of the divas over on RD talked about her creative writing class. Her professor gave the class an assignment and the class decided to write a sex scene.

It made her uncomfortable and made me think. Why did the class decide on the assignment? Where was the teacher? How qualified was the teacher anyway, or was it a retread of the "hero's journey", a bunch of archetypes and writing prompts?

Was there an explanation--how and why writing a sex scene out of context would improve your writing?

After the dust settled, the teacher gave the woman a chance to opt out and she said it was no longer an issue because it'd been resolved, but I'd have been right there with "why?" Why are you teaching this? What practical application does it have? Why are you using "this" technique over that technique and why am I paying money so you can hand me a textbook of non-specific exercises designed by committee?

It's like crit-groups. Everyone thinks you should have one. But according to the RWA lectures, most of the big-names don't. And every time I listen to the agent lectures, at least one agent on every panel will mention the book that came out of nowhere. No crit-group, no RWA background--nothing. Just a writer learning the craft and writing.

It depends, I think. On what you want to do.

You can learn technique and craft with others, but writing is a solo act. In every group, school/university/whatever there will be people who can't see over the horizon of their mediocrity. They're the same people who used to lock writers up for hearing voices, and still classify us outside the norm.

They form committees and make writing safe for the masses, they create curricula. They create make-work that creates "stuff" without implementing the systems to create thinkers.

Who decided what is "right" thinking and "wrong" thinking? If you take a person and a stick of butter, why is making toast the right answer, and (insert something sexual here) the wrong answer?

So...give me all the information, let me think about it, marvel and wonder. And have the freedom to interpret it in my own way without being at a one-remove. Because I have things to do and places to go. The horizon is just a starting point.

It's like a very specialized school

...where I don't check in, need financial aid or have to dress up.

I recently started graduate school in my head, backwards of course. I find things I want to read and take notes on who the writer admires. Luckily some of these things are so obscure I can get them for a penny. Some things are so obscure they're no longer in print, and some things are so old they can't take my abuse.

I have a forty year-old Seymour Chatman book. I love his ideas--many of which reinforce my own theories--but it took me a solid week to read the introduction. He doesn't just use big words, he uses words so high-falutin' brow the words used to define them need definition. I spend so much time trying to figure out what he means by thinking of the words in context, I read each page three to four times. Which is cool because his kernel theory explains probability in a very elegant way. Which makes me wonder why my old English teachers didn't seem to know any of this stuff, or if it's considered so specialized, it became a side-road instead of part of the main drag. Why isn't it common knowledge in craft circles? Is it even craft? Or is there some kind of membrane between craft and theory?

Chatman is a professor emeritus of rhetoric at the University of Berkley--which thrilled me. What if he offered on-line classes? What if he did workshops on the side? Was there any way to skip the boring background stuff that doesn't interest me and go right to narrative structure? And not just any narrative structure, but "this" particular narrative structure?

The more research I do into rhetoric, the more I realize how unique he is. My favorite Chatman theory is that stories exist independently once they're told. Sort of like if you destroyed MacBeth, MacBeth would still exist. To paraphrase Chatman's example, no matter if you read Huckleberry Finn in a fancy dust jacket or a waterlogged paperback, it's still Huckleberry Finn. Just like if a freak accident ate every single Pride and Prejudice out there, including the film adaptions, in someone's head, Pride and Prejudice still exists. The same story in a different format.

Which is what stopped me halfway through the catalog.

If I take the courses I need to get to the classes I want, will I still be the same person? Will I start using the word "semiotic" instead of the "meaning of signs"? How do people lose touch?

Although I don't get a lot of feedback, I'm free to study whatever I want, whenever I want to, and form my own conclusions. There's a lot to be said for being on the outside looking in, rather than on the inside, pounding at my box.

...knowing too late is worse than never knowing

I've been in re-training for almost a year now. I picked accounting because my first thought--to be a psychologist, would have taken too long. I'm still hoping I did the right thing. I even went to the counselors and got profiled to see what I was suited for. Funny how they said, "lawyer".

Maybe because I argue.

I wanted to be a lawyer years ago, and sometimes when I think about it, I wonder why people encourage kids to go straight into college. Teenagers have all the foresight of a turtle. I wanted to be a baker, librarian or lawyer. My dad wanted me to go to the University of Hawaii, so I ended up declaring a banking major even though I couldn't stand math.

I dropped out when my English teacher kicked me out of class. I told him to get his head out of the box he was in, and he told me to get out of his class. Guess we didn't hit it off. That whole, "a sentence is five words or more", didn't work for me.

During my last workshop, I felt my brain light up. It was the weirdest feeling, like someone had poured radioactive dye into my thoughts. The more I thought about craft, how it worked and linked together, the more "up" I felt. Like caffeine, chocolate and a runner's high all at the same time.

I'd started struggling through craft books. Not that I've fallen out of love with the art of writing, just that after reading everything I could find, it was starting to get old. The books were changing, from the word-dense tomes of the Dwight Swain era (Techniques of the Selling Writer) to the almost all pictures of A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words prompt books. Then one day I stumbled over a book on literary theory and found my heart-home.

It's the study of craft, how it works, and how to use it. In the abstract, without promoting one thing over the other.

I think--I'd have liked to be an English professor. Not a high school teacher, but a full-fledged, university level professor. One of the most useless majors out there. By the time I got out of school, it'd be time to retire and I'd have more debt that I could handle. Sometimes, it's better to be ignorant.