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Hi, Everyone -- Here's a little vid/blog on how I became (shudder) a more serious reader. I've never fully recovered from it, but maybe this will be fun anyway.
Best to all, and thank you for the many kind comments I've been receiving. It heartens me more than you can imagine, Steve
Hi, Everyone -- Yes, it's me with another story about my time as a crew member of a barge on the French canals. In this one I tell you how I learned my favorite French word. It's all in promotion of my upcoming novel, "To Live and Die In the Floating World." I hope you enjoy the video. Best to all, Steve
Hi, Everyone: Here's a little video, in which I do my favorite thing -- tell a story. This one is about how I landed my job working on the small tourist barge on the canals of Burgundy. This is the boat that serves as the setting for my latest book, a suspense/thriller entitled "To Live and Die In the Floating World." (Due out October 5th.) My biggest challenge my first day of work? I had no idea where the boat was. This is how I found it. I hope you enjoy it. -- Steve Holgate
Hi, Everyone – It’s been a busy week. I’ve been working hard on my canal boat story, To Live and Die In the Floating World, going over my publisher’s edits and recommendations, as well as those of a couple of friends, trying to make things sharper, clearer. The tough thing is that, once it’s in print, I’ll see errors and inelegances that I should have noticed before, but now it’s too late.
In the meantime, and more importantly, baseball season is underway and I can’t help going back into the archives once more, after my old article on Beverly Cleary, and will share another piece I wrote many years ago for The Oregonian on baseball, silent conversation and the passage of time.
I hope you enjoy it.
Best to all, Steve
The Long Conversation
After winter’s uncounted hours, baseball season began this week and time can start again. Fans—at least those who live in cities with a ball team—will rediscover the quiet pleasures of keeping an eye on the field on a warm summer day while shelling peanuts from a sack and talking with an old friend.
Yet the best baseball conversations consist of the unspoken communion of the game itself. For more than twenty-five years, since he could first lurch at a gently tossed nerf ball, my older son and I have carried on a long, wordless conversation with ball and glove, conducted in the yard or a vacant grade school field.
Over the years we have progressed from foam rubber to tennis balls to real baseballs. Whatever the ball, each toss has been a question, every catch an answer, a relaxed seminar of challenge and response, memory and anticipation.
We start at close range with easy tosses, conversation starters, easing us into the familiar whoosh of the throw and the whap of the ball hitting the glove. Sometimes, when thrown hard and well and caught just right, the ball makes a resounding pop and we raise our eyebrows and smile at a thing done well.
As confidence grows and arms get warm we back up a few steps, then a few more, the discussion growing more earnest. We’re ready now to air out more ambitious propositions. We waggle our gloves, fingers up to request the long parabola of a pop-up, or fingers down for a ground ball, snagged nicely and returned with a low, serious throw – the smooth tag applied, catching one more of the thousands of phantom runners who have challenged our arms over the years. We both make the occasional bad throw or let a grounder trickle under our gloves. We turn and run after the errant ball without complaint; these things happen, take it easy.
For years, I was the teacher, my son the pupil. He learned to make the back-handed stab and the cross-body toss, to settle under the fly ball and catch it over the throwing shoulder, ready to make a clean transfer to the bare hand for a quick accurate throw. With time he has become a better fielder than I ever was, intuitive and graceful. But he is modest about it, knowing that any conversation darkens when you brag.
Now the challenges run the other way. He still sees the ground ball clearly and adjusts quick as a dragon fly to the bad bounce, lopes easily for the running catch. But I sometimes misjudge the grounder or chase the long fly ball with the gracelessness of a three-legged dog.
Years ago, when we were both younger, he simply threw, with the child’s confidence that I, a grown-up, his dad, would catch it. Now he thinks first, adjusting a little to my diminishing speed and uncertain glove work. These things happen too.
My son is grown up now, long ago moved away, and the discussion is interrupted often, sometimes for a year or more. But it’s only in recess, there to be taken up once more when baseball season has come, and time – and our conversation – can begin again.
(A final note: My son and I played catch a couple of weeks ago for the first time in years. It was as if we’d never stopped.)
My novels Tangier, Madagascar, and Sri Lanka are available through your local bookstore or the usual online sources. You can now also order them directly on my website here. There's no charge for handling or shipping, so this represents a substantial savings over other online sites. I'll be happy to sign copies if you'll let me know who it's going to.
Some perhaps misguided friends have suggested I should write about my writing space. So, here it is. This is similar to a picture I posted a couple of months ago, but now with all the lurid detail.
The table itself was made for me when we lived in Sri Lanka. For several years I used it in my play on Abraham Lincoln. Now it’s my nesting place when I write.
And what have we got lying around on it? Some favorite books in a little bookshelf my mom bought for me before I went off to college. They’re all ones I’ve read before, but their presence is comforting, like being with old friends. My tea pot sits on a warmer, crucial for writing in the morning – though if I make the tea too strong, by the time I get to the bottom of the pot, my handwriting starts looking pretty sketchy, like snail tracks or the EKG of a guy having a heart attack.
There’s my writing box, which brings things up a few inches and puts it at a good angle to keep me from slouching too much. I write in pen on yellow pads. (Pilot pens’ Dr. Grip Gel is my weapon of choice.) I used to think this was s-o-o 20th century of me, but I’ve discovered that a lot of writers younger than me do the same thing. I think your brain works differently, more freely, when you’re not on a computer. When it comes time to type up my scrawl – which I have to do fairly quickly or I can’t read my own handwriting – I’ll set my laptop on top of the box and bang away.
What else? A couple family pictures, the handle from an ancient Roman pot. (You can ask me how I got it.) Tea cup. The view through the window is very pleasant. It lets me look around the neighborhood in fall and winter, and it’s a curtain of green leaves in summer. When words are coming slowly I can watch the squirrels running around on the tree just a few feet away. They taught me where we get the word “squirrely.”
I love the lamp. It gives of a strong light, but warm and a little indirect. Various mementos sit on top of the lamp or hang from it.
When I’m in a funk, I look at the pictures on the mullion between the windows. From bottom to top: a Christmas card featuring a Japanese painting that I put in a small frame; Babe Ruth; Hemingway writing at a camp table in Africa; a postcard from la Closerie des Lilas, an old writers’ hangout in Paris; and, yeah, a picture of Winston Churchill with a machine gun.
I’ve been told I should write a couple more entries on the rest of the room, its maps and photos and paintings and souvenirs. Let me know if you’re interested.
Lots of writers talk about the pain of writing. One memorable quote -- which I can't be bothered to actually look up -- says that there's nothing hard about writing; just open a vein and get to work. So, I wonder if I'm not trying hard enough, not going deep enough, when I say that the time spent up in my study with a pot of tea and a pad of yellow lined paper generally goes by pleasantly.
Different writers go about their business in different ways. Some aim for a certain number of words each day. Graham Greene would write five hundred words a day -- exactly. Apparently, he had a preternatural ability to know when he had hit five hundred and would get up from his desk and walk away, even if the five-hundredth word came in mid-sentence.
Some write each day until they're too tired to go on. Me? I set aside two hours every morning at the desk I pictured in a previous post. Though it comes more easily some days than others, I've never got up at the end of that time without getting something down.
So, as I say, it goes agreeably enough. And then there's editing.
Perhaps the most painful part of the process for everyone concerned is the task of making final edits. This is were the publisher finally gets to see what I've been up to for the past year or two and weigh in on what works and what doesn't.
Back in December I received my publisher's edits to "Sri Lanka," which is scheduled for publication this spring. I would guess there were well over a thousand suggested changes, from added (or subtracted) commas to disagreements on structure and character. As with my previous two novels, it's a tedious, painstaking process, and the necessary exception to the enjoyable parts of the process. I can't imagine it's much fun for the editor, either.
It took me several weeks to go over all of them, accepting most, rejecting others, discussing an alternative approach to still others. At the same time, I'm going over the text on my own, making scores of additional changes.
Does ego get involved? Oh, yeah. The challenges suggested by the edits can be painful, or downright maddening, especially on those days
when I fear the editor may be right about virtually everything. This gives rise to a self-protecting reaction, imagining that the editor is wrong about everything. I end up whipsawed between thinking I'm a misunderstood genius or a self-deluding mediocrity.
I sent my edits of the edits back to the publisher last week. She will then consider my reaction and, as I have done, accept some, reject others. She will then send it back to me for what should be the final go-round.
So, the ball is in their court for the moment and, for a couple of weeks, I can get back to work on my story set on the French canals. Then it will be one more round and finally done, and I can look forward to seeing "Sri Lanka" in print in the next couple of months.
In my last post a couple of weeks ago I had to confess that, when it comes to writing, I don't know what I'm doing. It gets worse. I'm also not a writer.
There's a school of thought that a real writer should draft without pausing for cross-outs, corrections or other bits of what the school's adherents call self-censorship. A writer should simply keep going and not stop.
I'm sorry, but I couldn't write like that to save my life.
I draft in longhand on yellow pads. The pages quickly become a nightmare swirl of squiggles, blots, blotches and meandering lines looping across the page, leading to added sentences, notes to myself, overwrites and overwrites of overwrites, most of it done on the fly. Whole paragraphs are scribbled out, restored and scribbled out again. It's a mess, made worse by handwriting that my younger son tells me looks like an NSA cryptograph. He's not far off; by the time I've gone over it several times, as I virtually always do, there are whole sections even I can't read.
Only then, when the whole thing borders on the hopelessly illegible, do I turn to my computer and start to type. Then I print it up, grab a pen and start all over. I seriously wonder if I've ever written a sentence I didn't end up rewriting, often as soon as I've drafted it—or even before I've finished writing it out the first time.
I take my solace from the old saying that there is no such thing as writing, there is only rewriting. According to that stop-for-nothing school, I'm not a proper writer at all. But, as a rigorous rewriter, there may be hope for me yet.
I don't know what I'm talking about.
As my friends will tell you, perhaps with a roll of the eyes, I love to tell stories. I think stories give form and meaning to our lives.
But what meaning does a given story carry? The more complex the story, the harder it is to answer the question, “What am I really talking about?”
When I sit down to write a novel I know how it starts and generally have a pretty good idea how it ends. It's all the stuff in between that causes the problems. Usually, I deal with the problem by sketching out a pretty good outline, which I freely change as new ideas occur to me.
As the writing and rewriting play out—and many say there is no such thing as writing, there is only rewriting—I gradually begin to understand what my own story is telling me. It's likely been talking to me all along, but only now do I understand what it's saying, what I might have intuitively known.
This head-clearing moment when the story reveals itself can come shockingly late. When it comes, though, I can go back to the beginning and read everything with a new sense of what it's all about. More often than not, the changes I need to make are relatively small—a few cuts here, a few new lines there, a few incidents told in a different order. After all, the truth of the story was there all along, but I just didn't see it. The relief I feel, and the relative ease I have in making the changes, brings new enthusiasm to a project which had begun to bewilder and discourage me.
A writer friend once asked me if I thought every story needed a theme. I said yes, adding something to the effect that this is the only way of knowing what belongs and what doesn't. (Dirty little secret: however different my stories, I find the themes are almost always the same.) Finally understanding the theme to my story is a liberating moment. And what is liberty but knowing what you have to do?
From the moment I find that meaning, I finally know what I'm talking about.
I work hard to create good characters and interesting plots. Increasingly I realize, though, that all these years I may have been writing, more than anything else, about place. A look at my titles should have clued me in: “Tangier,” “Madagascar”and, looking to a November release, “Sri Lanka.” I also have a work-in-progress, “King's Valley.” Yet, all these aspects – character, plot, setting – tie together. Some places so shape who we are and what we do that they become their own character. The things that happen there would not have played out in the same way anywhere else.
My Foreign Service career changed my life, leading me to experiences I could not have anticipated in places I never imagined I would see. And I have felt an urge, really an obligation, to share what I have learned about the people of other cultures and the things that can happen in them. It's no coincidence that each story revolves around a character new to these places, as I was in each of them. A stranger in a strange land. I also served in Paris and in Mexico, but plenty of Americans have written fine books about those places and, as for now, I don't think I have anything to add.