"trials"
written with a beta song and a thought blasting by jake kilroy.
when our bodies collapsed and the roof caught its breath,
we gulped the fresh sunlight that hurt our torn-apart mouths,
hearing the sounds of words, laying in wait to pounce on our tongue,
caravanning up through our throats, leaving all the red wine behind,
strangling our stomachs, so that every inch of us felt out of place.
we listened to our hearts pound like our chests were snares;
punched, knocked, blasted, and destroyed with warmth.
a punk band of ditch diggers using welfare checks as picks,
with everything going toward romance, we were well spent,
down to the last dime; but this time, we were spry and loud,
now maniac skins fleeing the spirit core to each other, finally.
godspeed us to ourselves, we chanted over and over,
peeling clothes off like fruit skins, casual and healthy,
deliriously in love with nearly everything in the room.
but your music wasn't enough, and this light wasn't either.
nothing would cure the starvation, probably ever.
but we tried. with every magic trick and lie we had,
we put everything we knew into a second chance.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Jake Kilroy's Ten Rules for Writing
Jake Kilroy's Ten Rules for Writing
by Jake Kilroy
1. Read everything from western novellas to cereal boxes.
2. Let people know you write in your free time, so you appear deep and attractive, but don't boast enough to where they ask to read your stuff.
3. Don't date a writer that's better than you.
4. Briefly hate the entire activity of writing from time to time.
5. Have one moment in your life that you can definitely cite writing as something that saved you.
6. Impress someone you're attracted to with the written word every so often.
7. Write in different places and settings.
8. Be practically turned on by the sheer thought of publication.
9. Acknowledge that you're better than your peers, but not as good as the greats.
10. Steal.
by Jake Kilroy
1. Read everything from western novellas to cereal boxes.
2. Let people know you write in your free time, so you appear deep and attractive, but don't boast enough to where they ask to read your stuff.
3. Don't date a writer that's better than you.
4. Briefly hate the entire activity of writing from time to time.
5. Have one moment in your life that you can definitely cite writing as something that saved you.
6. Impress someone you're attracted to with the written word every so often.
7. Write in different places and settings.
8. Be practically turned on by the sheer thought of publication.
9. Acknowledge that you're better than your peers, but not as good as the greats.
10. Steal.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
R.I.P. Elmore Leonard: Dutch's Lesson
Elmore Leonard, once called "the Dickens of Detroit," passed away today. He was 87 years old and indefinitely rad as hell. Born in New Orleans and raised in Detroit, Leonard aimed to be like Hemingway if he had a sense of humor. He penned some of my favorite crime novels (Get Shorty, Out Of Sight, The Hot Kid) and my favorite pulpy western stories (3:10 To Yuma, Saint With A Six-Gun, Man With The Iron Arm), and they all contained honest, jivey lowlife dialogue. It was pitch-perfect realistic, but it was silly and violent at the same time. It was so spot on that prisoners used to write him fan letters.
He was one of the first real writers I started reading as a kid, and his take on wild characters intertwining in some big crazy deal influenced me and what I wanted to do when it came to telling stories.
Anyway, out of respect to "Dutch," here's Elmore Leonard's essay about his 10 rules of writing...
"WRITERS ON WRITING; Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle"
3. Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ''she asseverated,'' and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ''said"....
...he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ''full of rape and adverbs.''
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6. Never use the words ''suddenly'' or ''all hell broke loose.''
This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ''suddenly'' tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories ''Close Range.''
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's ''Hills Like White Elephants'' what do the ''American and the girl with him'' look like? ''She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.'' That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
Unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
And finally:
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.
He was one of the first real writers I started reading as a kid, and his take on wild characters intertwining in some big crazy deal influenced me and what I wanted to do when it came to telling stories.
Anyway, out of respect to "Dutch," here's Elmore Leonard's essay about his 10 rules of writing...
"WRITERS ON WRITING; Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle"
by Elmore Leonard
Published: July 16, 2001, New York Times
These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.
1. Never open a book with weather.
If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2. Avoid prologues.
They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's ''Sweet Thursday,'' but it's O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: ''I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy's thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.''
If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2. Avoid prologues.
They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's ''Sweet Thursday,'' but it's O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: ''I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy's thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.''
3. Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ''she asseverated,'' and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ''said"....
...he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ''full of rape and adverbs.''
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6. Never use the words ''suddenly'' or ''all hell broke loose.''
This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ''suddenly'' tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories ''Close Range.''
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's ''Hills Like White Elephants'' what do the ''American and the girl with him'' look like? ''She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.'' That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
Unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
And finally:
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)
If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character -- the one whose view best brings the scene to life -- I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight.
What Steinbeck did in ''Sweet Thursday'' was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. ''Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts'' is one, ''Lousy Wednesday'' another. The third chapter is titled ''Hooptedoodle 1'' and the 38th chapter ''Hooptedoodle 2'' as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: ''Here's where you'll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won't get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.''
''Sweet Thursday'' came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I've never forgotten that prologue.
Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.
If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character -- the one whose view best brings the scene to life -- I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight.
What Steinbeck did in ''Sweet Thursday'' was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. ''Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts'' is one, ''Lousy Wednesday'' another. The third chapter is titled ''Hooptedoodle 1'' and the 38th chapter ''Hooptedoodle 2'' as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: ''Here's where you'll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won't get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.''
''Sweet Thursday'' came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I've never forgotten that prologue.
Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
"doughnut shop"
"doughnut shop"
written after a raspberry chocolate doughnut by jake kilroy.
i was in line at a doughnut shop this morning
when i smelled your perfume and lost my four other senses,
even though you were states away and years behind me.
it was the aroma on the purple shirt you left the first night,
and maybe that's why i thought of irises, pansies, and asters,
there, memorizing my own breaths,
empty-eyed on the day's special,
counting the seconds until i had to speak.
the years blew through me then, stormy and determined,
as moment after moment crowded into the tavern of my head,
waiting for the band to play, waiting to hear our song now.
the past, scattered about in a crowd setting, cheered drunkenly,
with some rapping their knuckles on the glass of my eyes,
making sure i was paying attention to the brawl to come.
the cold night in Dublin, the near death in Morocco,
the weeks in Spain, the home in Austin, Texas;
they were mapped out in the back, near my neck,
coaxing gibberish out of their stale gums,
to paint a new picture, one that's been touched up
and revitalized as a museum piece out of a barroom.
hope is a matter of personal welfare,
and we sign checks we can't always cash,
wondering what happened to our heart
in the time it's taken to drain the vault a hundred times
and refill it a hundred times more, day in and day out.
where was i for years?
and where was i after that?
everything was wasted, and everything was lost.
everything was reclaimed, and everything was given back.
so nothing was wasted, and nothing was lost.
love is bathtub gin, stirred and stored in the very depths of us,
homemade by hand with directions we write down as they come.
some have barrels, some have pints, but all of us have something.
we must never forget that there are always new recipes upon us,
forever with new lunatics to cook up the wild and the beautiful.
written after a raspberry chocolate doughnut by jake kilroy.
i was in line at a doughnut shop this morning
when i smelled your perfume and lost my four other senses,
even though you were states away and years behind me.
it was the aroma on the purple shirt you left the first night,
and maybe that's why i thought of irises, pansies, and asters,
there, memorizing my own breaths,
empty-eyed on the day's special,
counting the seconds until i had to speak.
the years blew through me then, stormy and determined,
as moment after moment crowded into the tavern of my head,
waiting for the band to play, waiting to hear our song now.
the past, scattered about in a crowd setting, cheered drunkenly,
with some rapping their knuckles on the glass of my eyes,
making sure i was paying attention to the brawl to come.
the cold night in Dublin, the near death in Morocco,
the weeks in Spain, the home in Austin, Texas;
they were mapped out in the back, near my neck,
coaxing gibberish out of their stale gums,
to paint a new picture, one that's been touched up
and revitalized as a museum piece out of a barroom.
hope is a matter of personal welfare,
and we sign checks we can't always cash,
wondering what happened to our heart
in the time it's taken to drain the vault a hundred times
and refill it a hundred times more, day in and day out.
where was i for years?
and where was i after that?
everything was wasted, and everything was lost.
everything was reclaimed, and everything was given back.
so nothing was wasted, and nothing was lost.
love is bathtub gin, stirred and stored in the very depths of us,
homemade by hand with directions we write down as they come.
some have barrels, some have pints, but all of us have something.
we must never forget that there are always new recipes upon us,
forever with new lunatics to cook up the wild and the beautiful.
Sunday, August 11, 2013
"outerworld"
"outerworld"
written after too long by jake kilroy.
in the crack of the evening, i slipped into the unreality,
a daydream that bends and bounces and thrashes and laughs.
i heard horns and clashes but felt every kind of breeze and wind,
while all colors cackled, struck, broke, and washed over me.
there, in the right pitch of the outerworld, i felt you like a church,
a home made of light, a place without gravity.
i was weightless and sublime with the heaviest heart around,
swilling post-rock anthems in my bloodstream until sickness came,
when i finally let go of my eyes and saw like i had been asleep for years.
you were this, you were that, you were there.
what more could i want but a few more words?
what does any spirit really hope for?
i floated into the breaths of the earth,
the deep, sinking gasps for air,
and they glowed a new color, yes,
all while i dragged my limbs behind me
and went free into the unknown,
spinning.
after what felt like eons, my head returned,
emptied of hate, full of everything else,
and i was what you had always made.
this was me, and i was yours,
and it was complete.
written after too long by jake kilroy.
in the crack of the evening, i slipped into the unreality,
a daydream that bends and bounces and thrashes and laughs.
i heard horns and clashes but felt every kind of breeze and wind,
while all colors cackled, struck, broke, and washed over me.
there, in the right pitch of the outerworld, i felt you like a church,
a home made of light, a place without gravity.
i was weightless and sublime with the heaviest heart around,
swilling post-rock anthems in my bloodstream until sickness came,
when i finally let go of my eyes and saw like i had been asleep for years.
you were this, you were that, you were there.
what more could i want but a few more words?
what does any spirit really hope for?
i floated into the breaths of the earth,
the deep, sinking gasps for air,
and they glowed a new color, yes,
all while i dragged my limbs behind me
and went free into the unknown,
spinning.
after what felt like eons, my head returned,
emptied of hate, full of everything else,
and i was what you had always made.
this was me, and i was yours,
and it was complete.
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