Hard Work

I was thinking about a review that I read for Ruthie Knox’s latest novella, Making It Last — which in the interest of full disclosure, I haven’t read yet — specifically of a line in which the reviewer called it and other ‘marriage in trouble’ romances Important.

I can’t find the exact review now; I don’t mean to establish a strawman. I doubt the reviewer capitalized Important, and yet I sensed the emphasis, the sort of 18th century abstract, personified ideal attached to the pronouncement.

Certainly it is accurate to say happily ever afters do not simply happen. They must be cultivated and protected. Relationships are, as your aunt explained to you at your bridal shower, hard work.

More seriously, not every moment of a long-term relationship is sunshine and flowers and champagne. The trust that you build up in the difficult moments (and years) bears fruit in the balance. You love each other more for the wee small hours when you’re caring together for a sick child, or for the unconditional support he offers you during a professional crisis, etc. I’ve been in my relationship for 14 years (married for 9 of those); this is not simply something I believe, but something I live.

To the extent that romance doesn’t represent past the happy ever after and that ‘marriage in trouble’ romances are corrective, I am behind this designation. And yet…

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A Fine Romance Friday: Paperman

Today just hasn’t gone the way I thought it was going to, hence the tardiness and brevity of this post. While I go get a tasty adult beverage and attempt to recover, I leave you with today’s fine romance, Paperman, a Disney short film that won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 2012.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xx5d23_paperman-full-animated-short-film-vo-hd_shortfilms

I feel better already.

Pavlovian Triggers

When I want to work, when I really need to get things done and words on the page, I put on the soundtrack to the Charlie Brown Christmas special. At the sound of the big fat opening chords of “Christmastime is Here,” the words flow out of my fingers like water from a sponge.

It’s Pavlovian; akin to carefully cultivated muscle memory in an athlete. Now, my faith that it will work plays more than a little into its success. Like Dumbo with his feather, I clutch my Vince Guaraldi trusting that he’ll get me through when nothing else is.

If this seems illogical to you, well, you’d be right. It’s the result of too many years of writing papers like a maniac in late November and early December with Christmas music in the background. It’s also evidence of my feast or famine writing style, where for months at a time the work won’t come, until the flood gates open and a first draft appears.

I’m writing these days. A lot. Fiction and academic essays. So this week’s blog will be short, but a few more of the songs that get me working when everything else fails are below the fold.

Continue reading “Pavlovian Triggers” →

A Fine Romance Friday: Keeping the Faith

Do you have movies (or books or songs or whatnot) which, for whatever weird reason, you’ve seen a numerous times? Not out of a belief that they are superlative, though they might be, not because you’ve sought them out for repeated viewings, but through happenstance?

During my first year of college, I watched the 2000 romantic comedy Keeping the Faith — directed by and starring Edward Norton and featuring Ben Stiller and Jenna Elfman — about twenty-five times. It’s one of those cultural artifacts that immediately evokes a time and place for me. It ceased to be a film; it was instead a wormhole.

Recently, I caught a few minutes of it on television and in a new context, it was defamiliarized. I realized that Keeping the Faith was actually a very charming and successful rom-com, and thus it’s this week’s selection.

Norton and Stiller are childhood best friends who, stop me if you’ve heard this one, grow up to become a priest and a rabbi. They’re leading their congregations and dealing with structural conservatism against the changes they want to implement. In Stiller’s case, he’s also weathering pressure to get married. Enter Elfman — the third member of their trio — who’s grown up, become a high-powered business woman, and turned beautiful. A love triangle ensues.

What makes the film better than the average rom-com of the period is, first, it’s warmth and gentleness and, second, the extent to which it represents its characters inner lives. Elfman’s non-Jewishness is a big deal for Stiller; Norton undergoes a crisis of faith based on his attraction: this is not the stuff of the average Hollywood movie. While I wouldn’t say it’s serious by any stretch of the imagination, the characters are far more three-dimensional than is generally the case.

Now some of the humor comes from cultural and religious stereotypes, which occasionally grate, but any time the film is dealing with the genuine friendship and affection between the trio, it’s on solid ground. While I knew that Norton could be a great actor, the film also proved to me that Stiller and Elfman can give good performances with the right material. I am particularly annoyed on Elfman’s behalf that she never managed much of anything post-Dharma & Greg. (Oh, 90s pop culture.)

For me, it’s New York-style pizza and Keeping the Faith tonight.

Kern der Sache

What’s the beating heart of romance? What drives the genre? What propels the books off the shelves?

We could say, banally but accurately, that the answer is as varied as the number of romance readers and leave it there. But let’s not, if only because then this post would be so short. (Yes, this tautology fuels much of my life.)

In the anthology Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, a collection of essays about the genre by popular romance writers, we get a number of responses. Penelope Williamson writes that in romance, “The fantasies are uniquely feminine and the story is primarily the heroine’s” (126, emphasis in original). Laura Kinsale disagrees, arguing, “It is the hero who carries the book” (32) and that romance reading “is the experience of ‘what a courtship feels like’” (39). Jayne Ann Krentz says that romance is the un-politically correct fantasies of women readers, including to challenge (and perhaps be dominated by) the alpha hero who is also the villain (107-9).

So the draw of romance is that it puts a woman at the center of the narrative, subverting the Western canon, wherein she must solve (conquer?) the man who is hero and antagonist at once. Got it.

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A Fine Romance Friday: The Philadelphia Story

Shakespeare is in the air this week. Everything I’ve read lately seems to allude to the Bard. Plus, it’s the height the Shakespeare summer stock season, that moment when for some reason everyone is willing to watch Renaissance drama and comedy. (If this disturbs you, don’t worry, it ends by Labor Day.)

I considered going with a straight Shakespeare adaptation, but my favorite “this is Shakespeare, isn’t it?” romance is The Philadelphia Story, which is this week’s selection. Yes, you read that right: George Cukor’s 1940 romantic comedy starring Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and Jimmy Stewart is really Shakespeare. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to be precise.

Hear me out.

The basic premise of the film is that tabloid reporter Stewart crashes Hepburn’s fancy Philadelphia society wedding with the help of Grant. Grant is Hepburn’s ex and he’s trying to help her (sort of); mainly, he’s trying to win her back.

Hepburn and Grant are Titania and Oberon — the estranged fairy king and queen — but also one of the sets of lovers; Stewart and Ruth Hussey (who plays the Girl Friday photographer) are the other set of lovers; Hepburn’s kooky family are the fools; and alcohol is the magic. If you don’t believe me, check out the fourth chapter of Stanley Cavell’s classic Pursuits of Happiness for a fuller examination of the connections between the play and the film.

Even without the link to Shakespeare, there’s so much here that’s good. The Philadelphia Story has an astonishingly literate, intelligent screenplay, the central trio of actors are magic together, and the costumes are divine. It’s a film for grown ups and they just don’t make those all that often anymore.

I particularly love the difference between how Grant and the up-and-coming capitalist Hepburn is supposed to marry respond to her sexuality. The two performances of the line, “A wife should behave herself naturally” communicate volumes about the relationship between men and women. It’s an anti-slut shaming film and a surprisingly progressive one given when it was written and filmed. Smart and delightful, if you haven’t seen it before you should watch The Philadelphia Story immediately.

I’ve got it cued up in the DVD player and some champagne on ice. Naturally.

From the Round File: Brave in Heart

It is a truth universally acknowledged that I always start writing books in the wrong place. I have yet to pen a manuscript and retain the first chapter through revision. I always add something or, more often, throw something out. Often, thousands of things. The delete keys speaks poniards, and every word stabs. (Quick, name that play!)

I’m currently writing the second entry in a series about DC staffers and, only about 20,000 words in, I’ve trashed the first half of the first chapter. I really liked what I cut. As an introduction to the heroine and her voice, it worked. There wasn’t a backstory dump, it wasn’t slow or boring: it introduced the dynamic for the book, but it did so in such a way as to undercut the relationship between the hero and the heroine. If there’s a sin in romance writing, that’s it. So into the round file (aka the trash) that opening scene went.

Since I can’t show that scene to you because I haven’t even shown it to my editor yet, I’m going to show you the unrevised, original first chapter of Brave in Heart instead. Needless to say, this isn’t how the finished product reads.

In this case, the cut occurred because nothing happens in this eight page-opening. In this earlier draft of the book, Margaret and Theo’s separation was much longer (brought on about a fight about the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, rather than John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry of 1859). The prologue didn’t exist yet. There was just…this.

Now I like the image of Margaret on the top of the hill. And while much of this writing made it into the book (albeit in other forms), some of her backstory didn’t. As a writer, I needed to know these things about her and writing this was the only way to learn them.

What I’m trying to say is writing something you don’t ultimately use in a book isn’t falling down the rabbit hole, it’s process. It’s inevitable and futile and a little bit beautiful. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

Continue reading “From the Round File: Brave in Heart” →

A Fine Romance Friday: Once

We’ve had a string of older films — which is great — but today, I think we need something contemporary. With that in mind, Friday’s fine romance selection is Once, the 2006  indie about Dublin musicians directed by John Carney and starring Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll warn you from the start that I simply can’t evaluate this film rationally. I love Ireland. I’ve been twice and would happily move there if it were an option. (Note to self: find job in Ireland.) I love Irish literature, I love Irish music, I love the way the rain in County Kerry tastes different from rain anywhere else on earth. I’ll even take Irish food if I get to eat it in Ireland. See: not rational.

I also went into Once a fan of Hansard’s music with The Frames, though I hadn’t heard any of his work with Irglova, a collaboration they call The Swell Season. (Hansard is really polarizing. My friends who are into Irish music much more so than me use him as a litmus test to figure out people’s taste.)

The story is easy enough: Hansard is a busker on Dublin’s streets. His dreams of making it big have been forestalled by helping with his aging father’s vacuum  repair business and by a woman who broke his heart and left him for London and another man. Irglova is a Czech immigrant who starts chatting and then playing music with him.

While the title (with it’s promise of “once upon a time”) might sound like it’s setting up something pretentious and grandiose, it’s difficult for me to think of a more direct, less fussy romance. It’s an organic thing — complicated by the fact that Hansard and Irglova are not actors and did in fact have an affair around the time the movie was shot.

But getting into what’s real and what’s not distracts from what’s amazing about Once: the music. There’s a reason it’s since been adapted for the Broadway stage. Irglova pacing through a Dublin night singing “If You Want Me” is a great tense moment that communicates so much about character and place, a successful fusion of music, lyrics, performance, and cinematic-ness. I write with The Swell Season playing in the background all the time. It’s smart, emotional, beautiful music.

See, I’m absolutely not rational. But that’s precisely why Once works, because it’s so damn evocative. Tonight, I commend Once to you, with or without the soda bread and Guinness.

And Now for Something Completely Different

I’ve been writing fiction for nearly three years now and if I had to characterize myself as a writer, the adjective I would use is capricious. Or whimsical, if we’re being kind; fickle if we’re not.

I often have several works in progress, generally set 150 years apart. (Though oddly, I’m writing two books right now set in DC.) On a given day, I might write several hundred words on one, do some academic writing, and then pick up the other. I might read a few chapters from a small contemporary romance and then a biography of a woman born in 1862. There’s simply no through line that ties together my reading and my writing. I’m all over the place.

These fissures show up in the product, if not within a single work than certainly between them. When I read Brave in Heart and then one of my contemporary projects, the voice sounds so different to me; two different people could have written them. I feel almost like the romance writer equivalent of Monty Python. “And now for something completely different…”

I can imagine that I could spin this for you in a positive way: “I am large, I contain multitudes,” there is no contradiction here. But at a time of expectation in terms of author branding and consistency, I’m not sure how I work is a strength. The one is not like the other. If you liked Brave in Heart, you might not like The Easy Part. If you like The Easy Part, I’m not sure you’ll like Brave in Heart. Both come out of the mess that is me, but they represent different moods, impulses, and sensibilities. I don’t know which I should pursue moving forward, but doing both may not be possible.

What expectations do you have for authors in terms of brand or consistency? Do your favorite authors work in different genres or sub-genres? How do you feel about that?

A Fine Romance Friday: Romancing the Stone

It’s just another soggy Friday where I’m at, which requires something warm, tropical, and hilarious as a remedy. So today’s choice for a fine romance is Robert Zemeckis’ 1984 action-adventure-comedy-romance Romancing the Stone, starring Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas.

Turner is a mousy, repressed, boring romance novelist, writing about things that’s she’s never experienced. (As we romance novelists do.) She receives word that her sister was kidnapped in South America and rushes to rescue her, only to end up lost in the Columbian jungle, where she meets Douglas. For a price, he agrees to help. What ensues is a grab-bag of action and romance cliches, somehow made fresh because everyone seems to be having so much fun.

I think it’s the fun that missing from contemporary romances. I guess because there’s so much capital tied up in making a movie today everyone is so serious. Romancing the Stone is winking at you — sometimes literally in the guise of Douglas’ joyous performance — and laughing with you.

If the rain keeps up, I’ll be able to reenact the mud slide scene in my backyard, hopefully with something rummy, and suggest you do the same. (Only perhaps minus the mud.)