Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

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  • Socerer’s apprentice

    Writing badly is easy. You just open up the mental spigot and words flow out of your fingertips and pretty soon you’ve filled a bunch of pages.

    Writing well is hard. You open up the mental spigot and words flow out of your fingertips and pretty soon you’ve filled a bunch of pages and then a couple of days later you re-read those pages and find two paragraphs worth keeping or two fine sentences worth sharing or the germ of an idea worth developing.

    And if, heaven forfend, you are trying to craft a novel, then there should have been time on the front end where all you did was ponder plot and story and character, so that when you do sit down to begin writing, the architecture can sustain and direct the sentences and paragraphs poring out of your fingers.

    When I see people promoting the idea that a novel can be written in 30 days, I think to myself, yes, of course, you can open up the spigot and the words will surely flow. But a brain dump is not a work of art.

    All of which is my way of reminding myself to be patient. I can’t push this river.

  • Waterscape as meditation

    Putting rocks in a glass box. Putting plants and water in the glass box. Shining light in the glass box. Sucking out toxins and adding in carbon dioxide. Introducing fish.

    Takashi Amano, you did this to me. Ever since I saw your stunning natural waterscapes, I have been mesmerized. I don’t know what it touches in me exactly, but I’m so delighted to be able to play with these elements.

    Here’s my first attempt at a nature aquarium on a large scale. I set it up over the weekend. It’ll be a couple of weeks before the filter system is cycled to the point where it’s safe for fish. In the meantime, I can’t figure out why staring at plants and rocks in water is more compelling than television.

    Here’s the list of gear: 40 gallon ADA rimless aquarium, Eheim classic 250 filter, Aquatic Life 30-inch T5 lights, Archaea Pro co2 regulator that can handle a variety of tanks.

    Here are the plants: hemianthus callitrichoides, glossostigma elatinoides, selaginella wildenowii, echinodorus amazonicus, anubia congensis, dracaena sanderiana, and, of course, Java ferns.

    Aquarium geek and proud.

  • The right question

    Robert McKee’s “Story” is my current best writing friend. It’s a book about how to write screenplays, but it is excellent as a guide to sorting out the architecture of a good story regardless of the format.

    I love it for being pragmatic. Here’s an example: “Here’s a simple test to apply to any story. Ask: What is at risk? What does the protagonist stand to lose if he does not get what he wants? More specifically, what’s the worst thing that will happen to the protagonist if he does not achieve his desire? If this question cannot be answered in a compelling way, the story is misconceived at its core.”

    But I also love it for recognizing why we love stories: “We not only create stories as metaphors for life, we create them as metaphors for meaningful life — and to live meaningfully is to be at perpetual risk.”

    McKee makes me want to simultaneously write well and live well. How cool is that?

    from page 149 of the 1997 hardback edition.