The Heritage Month Project: "Hula"

For those of us who observe Heritage Months, it is still just barely May and thus Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Month. I'll remind you that the link I just used  takes you to U.S. State Department archived material on the subject. Otherwise, the State Department Heritage Month Page disappeared earlier this year. But look! It's back with one entry for Black History Month from January of this year, in which the current administration recognized February as Black History Month.

I'm not touching what's going on with that, except to say huzzah for Black History.

Now, on to the Native Hawaiian portion of my reading this month. Which was Hula by Jasmine Iolani Hakes. Of all the books I've read for heritage months this year to date, this is the one that has made me the most aware of my ignorance of other groups. I had vague knowledge that historically U.S. involvement with Hawaii was not our finest hour. But for the most part, I just thought of Hawaii as a vacation destination. I didn't even know about the 1993 Apology Resolution, in which the U.S. government recognized its part in overthrowing the Hawaiian government in 1893.  

Hawai'i is spelled Hawai'i, but because it was spelled Hawaii in the act making it a state, Hawaii has to be used in many situations. I mention that, because I have a thing about how groups lose their language after becoming part of the United States. 

My last Heritage Month book, The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsaka, used a collective narrator/first-person-plural point of view/narrator. Lo and behold, Hula does, too! At least some of the time. 

There are two things going on in this book. In part it is the story of three-generations of women in a Hawaiian family in which the question of what does it mean to be Hawaiian is very important. In part it is the story of Hawaiian culture. When the book is focusing on Hawaiian culture, the collective narrator is used. That narrator pretty much disappears when the second and third generation women take center stage.

Though not humorous, Hula reminds me of the fantastic new Netflix sitcom North of North in which a woman leaves her husband and is starting a new life. Seen it before, yeah? The big draw here is the woman is Inuit, and the story is set in her contemporary Inuit village. We're seeing someone else's world. Like North of North, Hula rises above being something we've seen before, another mother/daughter identity drama. In this case, the story is set in late twentieth century Hawaii, where we see another world, and the characters are Hawaiian. 

Or are they?

Hula can be a little demanding to read at times, because the characters use a dialect that will probably be unfamiliar to a lot of mainland readers. But it's worth the effort because of the wealth of knowledge about Americans who we rarely see unless they are the backdrop to a vacation story.

Hula, the dance, by the way, is so much more than a dance. This clip from This Morning covers the Merry Monarch Festival and the hula competition that is part of it, both of which are in Hula. In fact, I kept going on-line to check facts from the book. Everything I looked for was there.

Yikes! I Was Rejected For Not Meeting A Publication's Standards. And I Don't Think They Were Talking Writing Quality.

Remember the post I did here a couple of weeks ago on Anne Lamott's writing advice regarding shitty first drafts? Yeah? Weeellll, I revised it and submitted it to a publication on the Medium platform that focuses on writing. It was rejected because "This does not meet the publication's quality standards. Review our rules for next time."

The issue, I believe, was the word "shitty."

Now, I did read the rules before submitting, and I did see "Submissions must be family-friendly. We reserve the right to reject offensive or inappropriate articles." I took this seriously enough that I did some rewriting so I could remove as many "shitties" from the text as possible.

Original cover. I remember it.

I knew I was taking a risk. But Bird by Bird, the book in which Lamott writes about shitty first drafts, is thirty-years-old. The concept has been discussed among writers for that long. I thought it was possible that it was so well-known that the name for it would not be considered shocking in writing circles and that a publication that publishes writing about writing would be interested in this. Also, I used the book's original cover as my illustration to try to make clear that I had some support for my essay.

I was wrong. And also a little bit arrogant.

I Broke the Most Basic Rule for Submitting Writing

The most basic rule for submitting writing is:

• Read the editor's/agent's guidelines and follow them.
• You know better than the editors/agents? Sure, you do. Follow their guidelines, anyway.

We sometimes hear stories about writers who broke this rule and became wildly successful in spite of it. But you don't hear them often, do you?  That's because they are very rare.

• Read the editor's/agent's guidelines and follow them.

I Am a Little Embarrassed About This

Not because I used "shitty" in this particular context. As I said, it's been discussed in writer circles for decades. The Brevity Blog used "shitty first drafts" in a title just last month. Also, I'm not embarrassed about intentionally breaking a rule and losing a big opportunity. I was published at this particular publication once before and only made $1.76. At Medium, you're paid by the reader and by how much time those readers spend reading your work. What I ought to be embarrassed about is how few readers I attracted there last time. My point being, though hope springs eternal, I wasn't expecting a big payday that I'd lost by intentionally ignoring the editor's guideline.

No, I'm embarrassed because I tried to work around the guideline at all. Just a bit unprofessional, Gail.

Not that embarrassed, though, since I got a blog post out of the experience.

A Story Behind the Story with Food and Stanley Tucci

Jonathan Taylor on Unsplash

This is a story of writing reality. It's not a story many writers will want to hear.

I wrote a humor piece called My Dinner With Stanley Tucci back in 2022 after watching his CNN series, Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, which dealt with food and culture. Italy isn't a major interest for me, but food and culture, yes. For people who aren't into Italy or food and culture, let me tell you that this was a popular series, as CNN series go. I believe it had two seasons.  

Why did I find something amusing regarding this show? Well, as it turns out, I have a few not-very-serious chronic health issues that are greatly improved if I limit what I eat. As much as I enjoyed Tucci's show, I can't eat most of what he talked about, at least as he talked about it.

It's the incongruity theory of humor, people. Watching all those shows about food I can't eat.

A Bit of a Timeline

I wrote the humor piece and submitted it to McSweeney's back in 2022. I used to make jokes about how the McSweeney's humor editor and I were on a first-name basis, because I'd submitted there and been rejected so many times. No, you're right. It's not that funny.

Then I submitted it to a Medium humor site, which also rejected it. 

By that point, Tucci's Searching for Italy show was getting too far in the past for a humor piece to work. Without it being in the news, as it had been while it was on, only fans would recognize the reference.  So I decided to wait for a new season before making more submissions. Then I learned that CNN was canceling the show, because they were going to do less original programming. Though it later ran Eva Longoria: Searching for Mexico, which sounds like the same show to me, except for the part about Eva Longoria hosting it and it being in Mexico. Now, I like Eva Longoria, but, come on. They had Stanley Tucci who is a known food person!

Anyway, the cancelling of the show made my humor piece seem even less of a go. 

Then, Stanley got a new show! Tucci in Italy! 

With a few edits to bring the piece up to date, I was ready to submit again. Another rejection, but then it  found a home  with Muddy 'Um.

Except for the creepy child piece published at Frazzled, which was new material and has done well, I haven't been making a giant effort to write anything original for Medium publications. Readership is way down there for many people, myself included. I was never a big draw there, but over time there was a possibility that I would eventually draw more followers who would actually read what I wrote. Because of whatever has happened there, that seems unlikely, which has motivated me to write things to submit elsewhere. As a result, I've mainly been submitting revisions of blog posts to Medium pubs. (In fact, I have a revision almost ready to submit now.) 

But My Dinner With Stanley Tucci was already written and just needed to be brought up to date. Of course, I did some other tinkering, because I'm always tinkering. But I wasn't starting from scratch. Since I didn't need to put a lot of time and effort into it, and it was probably time sensitive just as the original piece had been, I believed it was worthwhile to submit to Medium. Whatever I get for readership and income will be fine, and it will fill a gap in my publication timeline. I don't like a lot of gaps.

So there you go. That's what happened here.

The Heritage Month Project: "The Buddha in the Attic"

So many heritages used to be recognized by the U.S. federal government. You can check them out at this archived website from earlier administrations. May covers a number of them. This post deals with Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Month. 

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka is a lovely and unique piece of writing. It's often described as a novel, though after reading this I feel I don't know enough about novels to be able to comment on that. 

Two Standout Features

The two memorable aspects of The Buddha in the Attic are its subject matter and its point-of-view.

Subject Matter: The book deals with Japanese picture brides, a group I'd known nothing about. (My Heritage Month Project is exposing me to a great deal I didn't know about.) Essentially picture brides were Japanese women who came to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century to marry Japanese men they didn't know, had never even met. The men were already in the U.S. and the couples exchanged pictures. As Otsuka recounts in The Buddha in the Attic, many of the men were less than truthful, using old photographs of themselves so they'd appear younger or borrowing clothes to wear for formal photographs, so they'd appear better off than they were. Many of these women learned after they got here that they were going to work with their new husbands, picking fruit or doing other kinds of field work, and live in tents or barns. "...if our husbands had told us the truth in their letters...we never would have come to America to do the work that no self-respecting American would do." 

Some women turned around and went back to Japan, but a large number of them stuck it out. They worked with these husband strangers, created families, and for their efforts ended up in internment camps during World War II.

(For what it's worth, in the seventeenth century around 700 women went to Canada at the king's expense to provide wives for settlers and soldiers. No photos, of course. Assuming they survived the trip there, les filles du roi, as they were known, would have been part of the mainstream European culture in Canada at the time. The Japanese picture brides were outsiders in the United States. It also sounds as if the French women were in more dire straits in their homeland than the Japanese women were in theirs. The Japanese women had legitimate expectations about what they would find here that often were not met.)

Point-of-view: The Buddha in the Attic uses a first-person plural point-of-view, also sometimes known as a collective narrator. It can be a bit demanding to get used to. However, I recently took a workshop on short stories in which Steve Trumpeter, the workshop leader, said that with every short story you have to teach yourself how to read that particular story. I think that's the case with many books. Once you've taught yourself to read The Buddha in the Attic, it's riveting. The collective narrator works fantastically here, because what we're reading is the shared experience of many people. Occasionally an italicized line appears that is one person's thought that illustrates what the collective had been speaking about. 

Does this book have a plot? Is a group's historical experience a plot? Do life stories have plots? I don't know. At any rate, this is a terrific book about a specific group's experience.

Do I Have A Future In Spiritual Writing?

I was looking for something in the bowels of the blog and came upon this post from 2009. I do write about...ah, churching?...from time to time. I have an entire unsold manuscript about two Edina and Patsy/Grace and Frankie types saving a church from Christian Nationalists. I have a modest interest in spiritual subjects. Very, very modest.

A case in point:

Feb., 2009 I Have Wanted To Do This So Many Times

I had to go to church today because it was my turn to greet. Another way to put this is to say I was a greeter. Or, as a young family member calls it, a Shaker because greeters are supposed to chase down unsuspecting churchgoers and shake their hands in order to make them feel either welcomed or stalked.

My point is, I spent around fifteen minutes (yeah, I was late and should have been there longer) standing by the door, staring dead on at it, so I saw everyone who came in. This explains how I came to see the teenage girl headed up to the loft with a book under her arm.

I have frequently wanted to bring a book to church. You know, just in case I had some free time before service or it took a while to get out of the building because the minister insisted on talking to everyone on the way out. I would have chosen something by Anne Lamott or maybe some kind of philosophical essay or better yet a magazine article about celebrity religious observance, since I might have a prayer of finishing that. At any rate, I would have chosen something I could have pretended was at least spiritual in case a deacon caught me with it.

But the young are fearless, and the girl I saw this morning was lugging a Stephen King novel to service with her.

The Weekend Writer: What We Talk About When We Talk About Shitty First Drafts

Over the years that I have been an active writer, sometimes interacting with

other writers and industry people, sometimes studying craft, I've seen a lot of what I guess could be called "bandwagoning." Somehow an idea gets floated out into the void, and suddenly huge numbers of people jump on the bandwagon and will...not...get...off. Something must happen between the point when the idea comes up and the point when everyone clutches it to their collective bosom, but I have no idea what it is.

A few examples: 

• YA fiction must include romance. Nothing else happens between the ages of twelve and twenty. I first heard this twenty plus years ago.
• The freaking hero's journey. Is it really the model for all writing or just the same model for the same cliched stories?
• The whole pantser vs. plotter thing. Again, cliche much? Meaningless cliche? Don't get me started.
• Give your main characters something they want, then keep it from then. Does it seem to anyone else that a lot of traditional writing advice involves teaching how to create formula work?

Which brings me to the shitty first draft.

The Point Is, Don't Expect Much of a First Draft

When Anne Lamott coined the phrase "shitty first draft" in Bird by Bird, she seems to have essentially meant that first drafts aren't good. "All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts." (I would argue that hoping for a terrific third draft is overly optimistic.) "Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something -- anything -- down on paper."

Now, it's been many years since I read Bird by Bird, but I think what Lamott was talking about here was eliminating the need to be perfect right away. The desire to create perfect prose can be paralyzing and stop work. Later in the section on shitty first drafts, she writes about her own process, involving writing a shitty first draft of an opening paragraph and going on to more shitty first draft work that she later, over time, cut and revised. 

While she describes her process, she doesn't describe the one and only process for achieving a shitty first draft. And even within the process she describes, she doesn't cover things like how writers might generate the thoughts and work necessary in order to have the material to create the shitty first draft. Her point, I think, is the end result. A shitty first draft.

What Has "Shitty First Drafts" Become?

What I see happening with the "shitty first drafts" line is a shift from "all first drafts are shitty, get over it" to "write it all out, everything, everywhere, all at once," which has become a cliche that is as paralyzing as believing you have to get it perfect on your first shot. It's also unhelpful, because it doesn't address how to write it all out all at once. 

Your most highly skilled plotters might be able to manage this, but my understanding is that most of them do quite a bit of plot planning before they begin to write. (I once read about a writer who spent three months plotting before he would start writing.) They are not getting just anything down on paper. For organic writers, who have trouble isolating plot from story and can't plan those events out first so they have to work with all story elements at once, getting just anything down is mystifying. (Organic writers. Nobody writes by the seat of their pants.)

A Shitty First Draft Is An End, Not A Process

I started thinking about this recently after reading No silos, no hidden truths, and no shitty first drafts: A Q&A with Nicole Graev Lipson by Asya Parton at The Brevity Blog. When asked about shitty first drafts and revision, Lipson said (among other things), "I've never been able to take that approach...I cannot go on to the next paragraph until the one I'm working on is doing the work it needs to do...It's like polishing a stone. When it's ready, I move on."

I've often thought of writing as like chipping away at a block of marble, trying to carve something out of it. Polishing is involved. Because I'm part of an engineering family, I also think of it in terms of a building. The beginning of a work is the foundation. If I discover a third of a way through the project that the foundation isn't right and won't bear the weight of the story, I have to go back and fix the characters or the voice or the plot. How can I possibly go on? Whatever needs to be fixed ends up generating the material for the rest of the story. What is there to write, if I haven't fixed the foundational problems? Even with this blog post, I kept going back and tinkering to change the foundational work as I was working. As Lipson said in her Brevity Blog interview, "...the writing shapes my thinking." In my case, at least, my new thinking then shapes my writing.

Of course, particularly with longer work I still end up with a shitty first draft. But that shitty first draft is a product, not a process.