The Magic of Coffee

I don't know if this is the case for most coffee drinkers, but I can remember the exact week when coffee became a centerpiece of my life.  More importantly, it became a centerpiece for my writing life.
I was living in Ireland at the time, going to grad school for writing, and one of my classmates and I decided to take a trip to Venice for part of our spring break.  Venice, if you haven't been, is an incredible city -- everything there is old and winding and colorful and haunted.  Just put your camera up to your eye and, no matter where you are in the city, you have an instant post card photograph.  And when Kate and I went on our trip, it was also deserted.

If this doesn't make you want a hot cappuccino and a good book, I don't know what will.

Sadly for her, my friend came down with one of the worst sinus infections I've had the misfortune to see, and so I spent much of my time in Venice wandering the narrow, twisting sidewalks alone.  Which sounds bad, but really, it was kind of a magical experience.  I had plenty of time philosophize and take photos and brood.  And one of the things I did, being so inspired by the romantic nature of the lonely city, was write.
What I wrote, for the most part, was not particularly good, I'm afraid.  Some core scenes of my novel did come to fruition there, but so did a lot (I mean a lot) of really, really, really bad poetry.  But that caffeine is no joke, and when you're shaking with that first coffee euphoria, you write whatever comes into your head because you haven't learned to filter it yet.
I felt like the greatest writer that ever lived.  It was magical.

I'm a genius!

Once home, I was converted.  Coffee was a way of life for me, and the coffee shops I frequented in Dublin are among the places I miss the most.  I imbibed the juice of the enchanted bean with the fervor of a religious zealot.  And the pages and pages I filled with enthusiastic scrawl while is sat along the canals of Venice, sipping an espresso -- those felt to me like a gift from another plane.  I had met the gods, and they were highly caffeinated. All those people shaking in their pews in small, rural churches, the ones bowing down again and again and again at the Wailing Wall, the whirling dervishes spinning around and around and around in their white skirts -- I felt something like that.

The blogger in her natural habitat . . . a coffee cup.

And yes, it sounds dismissive of those people, or like a severe exaggeration of my caffeinated inspiration, but I assure you, I mean every word.  And yes, it was because I drank way too much of the stuff and it had made me high as a kite, and no, I don't generally get quitethat much out of coffee these days, but maybe you can see why I love it so much to this day, why I rarely go a day without at least a couple cups.
This very minute, if fact, I am sipping coffee from a favorite mug.
But don't take my word for it -- history is full of famous writers, whiling away the hours in tiny cafes.  Everyone from Ernest Hemingway to J.K. Rowling spent their early days bouncing from cafe to cafe, mingling with other writers or scribbling out their seminal works.  Ever walk into a coffee shop and notice that everyone there is on their computer?  Maybe they're onto something.

Good ole Ernie. The coffee may be Irish, but the cafe is Parisian.

Here's the science-y explanation:  The caffeine in coffee binds to the adenosine receptors in your brain, which are responsible for making you feel sleepy.  When the caffeine hits, BAM!  The adenosine can't get to your nerves and you feel more alert.  Caffeine also blocks reabsorption of dopamine in your brain (dopamine is a neurotransmitter that activates the pleasure centers in your brain), which is part of the reason you get that euphoric high when you drink a cup. You can find more information on the science of caffeine here.

Coffee sends your neurons to a rave!

But there's more!  Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, talks in his book about how relaxation help encourage creativity in our brains by turning down the volume on a part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.  This part of the brain is basically responsible for impulse control, which is terrible for the creative mind because it gets you second-guessing yourself and stops your brain from allowing you to follow your thoughts wherever they take you.  While I'll admit that caffeine is not physiologically a relaxing substance (it's actually a stimulant), the coffee shop is a very relaxing place.  Think about it: people gathered around to chat or read, enjoying pastries and sipping warm drinks.  It's all very calm.  The ambient noise of keys clicking and hushed voices, pages turning.  Strangers stop to chat with each other.  Your guard goes down in a place like that.  So what happens?  That damned dorsolateral prefrontal cortex takes a nap while the rest of your brain is just waking up, stretching, and getting down to business.

Eureka! We have found creative stimulation, and it is inside that mug!

One more factor, I think, contributes to the writer-in-a-cafe phenomenon, and that is the starving artist quotient.  All artists, I think, benefit from a change of scenery, and coffee shops allow us to got to a place that is not our home, where we feel comfortable, and where we can stay warm, sheltered, with adequate facilities, for hours and hours at a time without spending a ton of money.  While I would never suggest that a person stay all day in a place and only buy one cup of coffee (it's just rude, people), you can buy yourself a cup every hour or two and stay perfectly within the bounds of polite society, get your work done, mingle with other artists (because, who are we kidding, that's who else is there all day) and not break the bank.
One of the greatest things I got out of my coffee addiction while I was in Dublin was the Fellowship of the Bean.  This was a group composed of three of my classmates and I who would walk down to the local Starbuck's (don't judge--it was right on the bay, and the closest good, local-owned coffee shop was a twenty-minute bus ride away) every Sunday after our hangovers wore off and stay there until they closed the place down.  We're talking, five or six hours sometimes.  It was lovely.  Just four friends writing and talking and reading and pumping black, beautiful coffee goodness into their bodies.  If I could've taken it intravenously, I would have.  Those were some of the most productive days of my life, and spent with people who are some of my best friends to this day, despite the miles between us.

The Fellowship of the Bean.

This is what coffee has given to me.  And for that, I am ever grateful, and ever reverent (say that three times fast--if you're caffeinated).

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On Writing: Truman Capote V. Jack Kerouac

Ah, November:  when fall changes to winter and families gather to glut themselves on buttery deliciousness.  November also happens to be National Novel Writing Month.  As I have in years past, I started a NaNoWriMo project and then couldn't figure out what the hizzle to write.  Okay, so I wanted to do a collection of short stories rather than a novel, because I figured I would have to have a less grand plan for them, but of course, a plan is still necessary for a short story.  And for twelve short stories, well, one must have twelve plans.

Which begs the question, how good are these NaNoWriMo novels, anyway?  This is not sour grapes, I still have hopes that I will finish my project on time.  The question comes from my knowledge that the work I am turning out right now is far from my best.  Then again, it is work.  I know that the point of NaNoWriMo is to get people to (say it with me folks!) apply the ass to the chair, to actually write that novel they keep telling everyone they're going to write that day.  And for my own part, yes, I am actually churning out some work, and getting some great ideas while I'm at it.  But in terms of quality?  It's not quite there.  Basically, what we see on my NaNoWriMo screen is stream-of-consciousness that may or may not make sense to a reader.

Type faster, pokey!

Which brings to mind Jack Kerouac.  Before you Kerouac fans get all defensive, I am not dissing the fella, nor am I saying that his writing was bad.  What I am saying is, he famously wrote On the Road in, like, ten minutes (actually, it was three weeks -- a shorter period of time than the month of November).  As the story goes, Old Jackie sat at his typewriter, fingers bouncing all over the keys, pounding words onto a 120-ft scroll of paper as his wife wiped the profuse sweat from his face.  On publication, he added paragraph breaks and margins, took out some sections and added others, but the point is after three weeks, homeboy had himself a novel.   And it turned out to be a major novel.

Looking smug, I daresay.

While On the Road was a bestseller that some said revitalized the world of literature in the 1950's, others were considerably less pleased with the work, and wholly unimpressed with the method of writing.  I am thinking of Truman Capote here, that catty scribe, who, upon hearing about Kerouac's three-week writing binge, famously said "That isn't writing.  That's typing."  (A little disclaimer here, folks: everywhere I looked to get the exact quote, it was different.  While nobody disputes that Capote did say this -- it just sounds like the sort of thing he'd say, doesn't it? -- everybody who quotes him seems to be paraphrasing.)

Oh, you spiteful kitty, you.

What Capote seemed to be getting at with that little jibe was this: Anyone with a little time and a decent idea (and a wife who will change your shirt for you as you type) can write a book in three weeks.  That doesn't make it good.  A writer takes time and consideration when putting word to paper, puts thought and care into the words they choose.

It's hard to imagine that the NaNo people are super concerned with the quality of their participants' writing so much as they are concerned with the fact of the writing.  That is, they are trying to encourage people, all people, to think about words, to think about expressing themselves in words, to imagine a world of their own and assign it a reality on paper.  And in that sense, they are saying to the whole world the same thing that Truman Capote said to Jack Kerouac: Anyone can do it if they sit down and try.

How good it is, then, is not the point.  And that's what I tell myself this month.

The Whole Vampire Thing

Oh, no! Don't bite me! (Please bite me.)

Okay, guys.  It's confession time: I read Twilight.  Not only did I read Twilight, but I also read New Moon and Eclipse and Breaking Dawn.  I'm not proud.  My little sister was about eleven at the time, and she's about the farthest thing in my family from a reader.  So when she was giddy with the excitement of finding out what happened to Bella and Edward, I was just happy to see her reading.  I wanted to support her.  I wanted to give her someone to talk about the books with (which is something I often wish I had), so I borrowed her copies of the books as she finished with them.  And since this is confession time, I have to admit that I really enjoyed the first book.  The second one was less fun for me -- I thought Bella was waaaaaay to distraught -- and by the third book, I was rolling my eyes almost constantly.  Seriously, I was getting headaches.  My sister still bemoans the way I laughed every time the word "Renesme" appeared in the (thankfully) final book of the saga.

The thing is, I could totally understand my sister's fascination with the Twilight books.  After all, I was watching horror movies with her since before she could string together a sentence.  She loves creepy, kooky, dangerous fiction almost as much as I do.  And I had my own version of vampire love when I was a teenager: Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire.  I read it the summer I turned sixteen, while I was spending the summer at my aunt's house in Florida.  She lent her copy to me and I remember being rapt.  I was up late flipping pages, re-reading passages.  The eerie gorgeousness of the characters, the danger, the immortality -- they call to a young girl.  And while Interview With the Vampire is infinitely  less ridiculous and better-written than the Twilight saga, it spoke to me the same way Twilight spoke to my little sister.

The reason I bring it up is because last night (after watching an episode of South Park making fun of Twi-hards) I had the most fascinating dream about vampires.  I won't go into all the details, because I don't want to confuse myself, but it started out at Fright Fest at Six Flags and ended in a dusty old Victorian mansion, and somewhere in between, I found myself taking notes for a novel WHILE STILL DREAMING.  This is an important point: Most of what I have actually written and finished in my life came from a dream.  My last novel and tons of short stories were all inspired by vivid dreams from which I could not escape upon waking.  So the fact that my dream self was scribbling down notes about the dream for a novel is majorly symbolic to me.  It's like my Muse is shaking my shoulders and screaming, "This is it, you idiot!  Write this down!"

We all know I am shopping for a new novel idea.  I thought I had one worked out, but I just couldn't get into writing it.  I've been really getting into sci-fi lately.  I've found that I enjoy reading it more than almost anything else, that it yanks me into its pages and won't let me go until the story is over.  Plus, it's Halloween, my absolute favorite time of the year in almost every way.  And I'm writing a ghost story.  So it's not really surprising that this is the sort of idea I would come up with right now.  So what's the big hang up?

It's this: Vampires are just so damned trendy.

I have never, never, never been into trends.  Jumping on the bandwagon is just not my thing.  And I can make myself feel better by saying that I've always loved vampires and creepy crawlies and zombies and werewolves and whatnot, but that doesn't change the fact that the vampire thing is sooooo popular right now that it's almost hard to take anything with vampires in it seriously (True Blood aside, folks -- I will take no dissing of True Blood).

That said, I have also never been one to ignore my instincts.  I have tried at times, lord, have I tried, but every time I ignore the whisper in the back of my head the whisper becomes a giant, steel-toed boot and kicks my ass until I do what it said in the first place.  So there's a very good chance that in the next year you fine people will start seeing new excerpts based on this here dream I had last night.
If I can figure out how to make it NOT about vampires.

"Write Drunk, Edit Sober": Ernest Hemingway's Writing Philosophy

Ernest Hemingway was famous for two things: writing and drinking.  So perhaps it's no surprise that his writing philosophy combines the two great constants in his life.  It's definitely no surprise to anyone who's ever read any of his books, except maybe The Old Man and the Sea.  Maybe.

Typing with one hand, holding a drink with the other.

While I the first book of his that I ever read was that very book, the first time I read and loved him was A Farewell to Arms.  Perhaps I felt a sort of kindredness with the protagonist in the story because we were both expatriates.   I was living in France at the time, in Dijon, and there was a rumor that the great writer had studied French in the same program that I was in.  While I hadn't really enjoyed The Old Man and the Sea (I was barely out of high school the first time I read it, and I think that I was just too inexperienced to really understand the book at that point in my life), I decided to give Old Hem another shot.  He did, after all, love Paris, so he couldn't be all bad.  I bought A Farewell to Arms in the Gare de Lyon while I was waiting for a train (I sort of think I was headed toward Berlin, oddly enough, because I was on my own, but I really could have been going anywhere, I suppose).  After I put the book down, I had changed my mind about Ernie.

In the following years, my love affair with Hemingway deepened.  I've read most of his books while living in various European cities, and I think that a big part of my connection to Hemingway draws from the fact that he was writing about expatriate life at the same time as I was experiencing it.  He so perfectly captured the loneliness and the excitement and the pureness of friendships between expats.  The Sun Also Rises.  A Moveable Feast.  These books were my expat bibles.

People who have read my work are always shocked to hear that I have been influenced by Ernest Hemingway.  His tight, concise style seems in direct conflict with my own style, which tends toward the verbose, often waxing emotional and quasi-poetic.  I think that people just roll their eyes and say, "You're probably influenced by Shakespeare and Stephen King too."  And it's true, when I'm writing, I totally ignore Ernie's spare voice.  But when I'm editing?  He is the heavy bird-of-prey on my shoulder saying, "Cut it.  Throw it to me."

Which leads me nicely to my point.  Hemingway once (supposedly) said, "Write drunk.  Edit sober."  And while I have no doubt that he meant the statement (at least partly) literally, that's not how I read it.  Personally, I'm a horrible writer when I'm tipsy, and if I ever gave it a shot when I was flat out drunk, I'm pretty sure it would be a horrible, rambling mess.

But what I think that Hem was getting at was this: the time to censor yourself is not when you are writing.  When you are writing, you should let yourself go, put on the page (or the screen) whatever comes into your mind, whether it makes logical sense or not.  We're talking stream-of-consciousness, wild and crazy stuff.  As though you are the drunk dude at the bar at the end of the night, hugging everybody and telling them how nobody loves him like his mother and it's been three years since the last time he got laid and he really hates his job because his office smells terrible.  Nobody is really interested in what he has to say, but HE is interested.  It means something to him.  And when he wakes up the next afternoon, he will wonder what the hell he was talking about.  He will wish he hadn't said certain things.  He will edit.

See what I'm saying?  More importantly, see what Ernie's saying?  He's telling you to let yourself go when you put pen to paper.  Follow your imagination wherever it takes you.  Enjoy yourself.  Make stupid jokes.  Bring in characters who don't belong.  Make up indiscriminate love affairs and ill-conceived antics and senseless crimes.   Fall in love with every word you write.  Become drunk with the power of creating your own universe, being the god of that universe.  If you censor yourself from the very beginning, you'll never get anywhere.

And then, when you've written the last word, get yourself a strong cup of coffee.  You're going to need it.  Now you've got to edit this mess.

Writing is fun.

Writing is fun!

I am working on a new short story.  I started writing it (or outlining it, I guess) before I finished editing my novel, but I was distracted.  Editing is sort of the opposite of writing.  It's all about restraint and a critical eye (I am working on another blog post about this very subject, so look for that soon).  Writing is about letting yourself go, openness and appreciation for every idea that flits through your mind.

Which is why I am so excited now.  When I was editing, I was frustrated.  My creative instincts felt stifled, and I had to force myself to keep going.  But now I remember why I love this job.  It's letting my imagination go nuts, creating something totally new, something that came out of my brain, through my hand, onto the page (or the screen).  It didn't exist before, and now it does, solely because of me.  I made it, and only I could have made it.

And that is exciting.