For the weekend of October 14-17, 2010, my husband, myself, and my friend Angela, went to Bouchercon, the annual convention for mystery writers and readers. It’s much less formal than an academic conference, though it has panels like an academic meeting. The people are much nicer. Many people remarked what genuinely nice people mystery writers are. It’s also much less weird than an SF convention. Nobody was running around in a bizarre alien costume.
In short, a good time was had by all.
San Francisco had hot then fabulous weather. It only rained on the very last day. Who cared if we had rain when we were leaving?
The Hammett Tour
On Thursday afternoon, Brad and I went on the Hammett tour. Dashiell Hammett lived and worked in SF for many years, and it’s the setting for possibly his most famous novel, THE MALTESE FALCON. The tour was given by Don Herron, who has published a book on his Hammett Tour. For two hours, we walked around downtown SF getting the low-down on the places in TMF, including the Geary Theater, John’s Grill, and the very spot where Miles Archer died.
It was a good tour. It gave geographical reality to the book, and now, that I’m rereading TMF, I can see the scenery much better. Good authors do the foot research, but perhaps, there should be more tours for the readers. They really do enhance the reading experience--especially if you’ve never been there before.
It also gave us a place to go for dinner--John’s Grill (www.johnsgrill.com). It’s been there since 1908. Sam Spade had dinner there that consisted of lamb chops, baked potato, and sliced tomatoes. You can still get that dinner, which I did. The lamb chops were divine, medium rare verging on rare and seasoned to perfection. According to Dan Herron, it was a working man’s chop shop in Hammett’s day. Now, it’s more upscale
Page Fright
On Saturday afternoon, I made it to one of the 30 on 30 sessions. This was a new format this year. One speaker for thirty minutes on one subject. This one was given by Dennis Palumbo on writer’s block and other perils of the writer’s life. He’s a writer and a clinical psychologist, a therapist. He had everybody’s attention for the entire thirty minutes and rightly so.
It was group therapy session that all writers should go through--if only for his three cosmic rules of writing.
1) You are enough RIGHT NOW to be the writer you want to be. This point addresses the pernicious thought--”If only . . . I were perfect.” No. EVERBODY thinks the party’s happening somewhere else.
2) Work with you’re given. This point means that we should go with our passions. Do what we love and/or fantasize about. Dennis added that all fiction is autobiographical. The more personal = the more universal.
3) Writing begets writing. Writers solve their problems by writing them out. Good writing, he said, comes from being in touch with yourself.
I’ve found one thing that’s been hugely beneficial in this department of conquering my perfectionism--if it’s not perfect, then I can’t do it; since nothing is perfect, I shouldn’t try--and that’s yoga. Yoga teaches all three of Dennis’s cosmic rules. It teaches me to live in the moment, to work with where my body is today at this moment, and to calm and train the mind. Yoga is meditation, and meditation is yoga.
Writer’s block is good news. It’s a natural step in the growth as a writer, a developmental step. The block is the tension between the plateaus. I understand his point from a spiritual perspective. I hit a plateau, and things are calm and clear. Things then get messy, and I’ve got no spiritual calm or insight whatsoever. When I get through the crisis, I’m on another plateau. Dennis’s explanation makes sense.
He went on to ask what is the source of the block? Lots of it has to do with how we see ourselves. Don’t give meaning to the blocks.
Writing is hard. Get over it. I don’t need to hassle myself about it or me. Self-acceptance is the definition of change. For me, that’s going to mean a lot more time on the mat. On the other hand, bringing issues to the mat is the way to solve them.
The fear of being discovered as a fake is universal. That statement resonated with me. When my friend James introduced me as a scholar at a lovely dinner he organized at Tarantino’s that Saturday evening, I just wanted to say, “Despite what the kind gentleman says, I’m a fraud. I’m no scholar. I’m a fraud, a fake, a poseur.” In reality, James is right, and I am wrong.
Dennis Palumbo asked, “So who’s feeling scared and thwarted in your story?” He told us to let character explain how they feel about being scared and thwarted. Thinking (and here he means analysis) = the enemy of writing.
The Earl of Armitage thinks he a fraud because he was never meant to be the earl--and doesn’t want to be, either. He always feels inadequate and merely muddling through his problems. The bodies and the family problems make him yearn for the Army. This insight came to me from the blue, but I never reject it. I leave it. Stuff from left field tends to be the best stuff, a gift from the unconscious.
Procrastination, however, is a problem, not a good thing at all. Dennis described it as primarily a protective device, a secondary game. It protects us from shameful exposure. It protects us from the fear that nothing is good enough--ever. Procrastination is trying to save my butt.
But from what? What do I fear exposing? It’s the perfectionism. It’s protecting from the fear that I shall lose what friends I’ve got by giving offense. It protects me from creating enemies I can’t afford. This belief is one of those land mines resulting from my one and only full time job in academe, a total snake pit. My brain knows that getting canned was the best that ever happened to me, but I don’t ever want to repeat that emotional pain.
Does the rest of the world work the way that place did? Probably not, but I tend to be wary. Procrastination keeps me from having to step outside of my protective comfort zone.
It also keeps me from writing.
My learning how these things work made this probably the best session of all at this year’s Bouchercon.