Now that Clarion West is over I’m having trouble knowing what to make of it. I’m still processing it. Certainly it was a huge boost for my writing — I learned tons, and personally felt like the stories I produced the last three weeks were miles better than what I wrote the first two. (Week 3’s story felt weirdly transitional — it’s probably salvageable but it has deep flaws I need to work on in revision.)
Really the whole experience was a hell of a lot more intense, exhausting, and exhilarating than I expected. There were plenty of days when I felt like I was just in a constant explore-my-own-shortcomings loop, often in my writing but even more so just personally — in my character and temperament and disposition, in how I relate to people and how I apprehend them. There were some nights I just felt defeated by myself, by the messes in my head. It’s weirdly unsettling being around people you really admire.
On the other hand I feel like most of the time I provided, at least externally, a stable presence for some other folks who were going through the same peaks and troughs I was. I even sort of adopted a tattoo’d, bepierced Australian daughter, Marlee, who’s a wonderful person, a trusted friend, and a fantastic, inspired writer.
There were in fact a lot of really, really good writers there. I think if I were younger I might have found the skill level of some of them a bit disturbing, but as it was I could admire it without any sort of ill will or jealousy, and just enjoy their work as a reader.
The stories I wrote while I was there were:
- Week 1 – Periphilia (1300 words)
- Week 2 – The Iterations (4100 words)
- Week 3 – Round About the Keel With Faces Pale (4500 words)
- Week 4 – Worspect Hobbing (2100 words)
- Week 5 – Harrower (1000 words)
- Week 6 – What Would Blackshaw Do? (1200 words)
There’s a definite inverted-V shape in the wordcounts there. My week 4 story was a breeze to write, but after that I found that I just couldn’t get myself to do the work of constructing characters for a 4k-5k length piece. As I was writing a conventionally structured Week 5 story, I realized at 10pm of the night before it was due that I just couldn’t do it. I had too much head-weather aside from the effort of writing careful characterizations, evocatively described settings, etc. So I scrapped it and wrote it in the style of Beowulf over the course of three or four hours, and I was pretty happy with the results. (The title of this post is a quote from it — gotta get that alliteration into your Anglo-Saxon epic any way you can…) My fellow student Shannon (super-talented) said “When you don’t give a fuck you produce stuff like this,” which is pretty apt. I think she meant it in a positive way…
I came out of the whole experience reinvested in writing — not just in novels, which is what I’ve always been working on, but in short stories as well.
Some other stuff:
- I quit coffee while I was there. It was combining with the rich food (we had a chef making lunch and dinner for us Monday through Thursday so, uh, poor us) to murder my stomach, and not slowly either. So I whittled my intake down day by day until I eventually gave it up altogether. I feel really good now and have no plans to go back to it. I did take up rum-and-cokes while I was there, but I’m now giving those a wide berth as well.
- It was the first month I didn’t read a book cover-to-cover since at least 1987. In other words, I’ve read at least one book a month since at least seven of my classmates were born. Yikes, man.
- The instructors were uniformly great. Paul Park got replaced at the last minute by James Patrick Kelly because Paul’s eye was going to explode, and Jim did a great job jumping in and helping us through the inevitably weird first week. Kij Johnson is crazy awesome in pretty much every way, Ian MacDonald is an avuncular shaman, Hiromi Goto is a sure-eyed diagnostician and a joy to be around, Charlie Jane Anders is full of good ideas, and John Crowley is a great guy to talk books with as well as being a master teacher.
- My classmate Curtis signed with a literary agent while he was there. Congrats, Curtis!
- We played some fun games I’d never played before: Cards Against Humanity, Fiasco, Dixit, the Things, telephone pictionary. If you get a chance to play The Things with Jim Kelly, by all means do so. But don’t play with Alison — she has a lot of great qualities, including being a super-talented writer and artist, but screaming when she’s tapped to become a Thing is not one of them.
- I was luckier than a lot of folks in that I could see my family pretty regularly, since I live here in Seattle. My wife came to most of the parties, and my son even came to a few. I also spent a few nights out of the Clarion West house with them, which helped me to keep a steady heart when I really needed it. In the words of Bruce Wayne:
“Old Professor Huxtable, performing with the method of a clock his change of dress, let himself down into his chair; filled his pipe; chose his paper; crossed his feet; and extracted his glasses. The whole flesh of his face then fell into folds as if props were removed. Yet strip a whole seat of an underground railway carriage of its heads and old Huxtable’s head will hold them all. Now, as his eye goes down the print, what a procession tramps through the corridors of his brain, orderly, quick-stepping, and reinforced, as the march goes on, by fresh runnels, till the whole hall, dome, whatever one calls it, is populous with ideas. Such a muster takes place in no other brain.”
Michael Cobbett 