Lately I've been busy mourning the passing of two bad seeds: Breaking Bad's Walter White and Gone Girl's Amy Dunne.
Walter is a high school chemistry teacher who learns how to manufacture meth, and Amy is the "cool girl" every man dreams of but who actually seethes hot lava on the inside.
So why do I mourn them, you ask? Because I miss them.
I miss Walter's descent into his worst possible self and I miss Amy's attention span for revenge. Having arranged my weekends so that I could watch the AMC television series, and having read the Gillian Flynn mystery novel in one neck-cramping sitting, I can say that I no longer exist in the pre- Walter & Amy world, but must muddle along in the post.
And let me tell you, post- Walter & Amy land is a much more wide-awake kind of place.
Walter took glee in lying to everyone who cared about him, murdered a drug dealer here, a kingpin there, and even poisoned an innocent little kid for god's sake.
As for Amy, she manipulated things. And "manipulated" is probably too passive a verb; she basically manhandled any and all life forms in her path -- and some inantimate objects, too -- with her crafty brain. (I'll leave it at that in deferance to those of you who still live in the pre-Amy world.)
And yet, I rooted for these characters. I was on their team, on their side, cheering on each of Walter's blue batches of meth, fist pumping every one of Amy's verbal end-arounds. People suffered in these fictional worlds. People exploded, people begged for their lives, people messed up in their jobs, people went crazy.
And there I was, the reader and the watcher, just a howling for joy.
For a while, I couldn't shake the feeling that there must be something wrong with me. I mean, why else would I root for the bad guy? Am I bad, too? Am I, horrors, some kind of mommy sociopath next door???
I thought about my reading and television watching preferences and yup, there's lots a bad guys in there. And girls, too. A whole alphabet of them. Artemis Fowl, Batman, Holden Caulfield, the Dude, Edie Sedgewick, Fritz the Cat, Gordon Gekko, etc. Love. Every. One. Of. Them.
Truly, just the mention of their names gives me the warm fuzzies. So, that means I'm doomed, right?
But then something else occurred to me. Something that probably saved me thousands of dollars on therapy: I root for the bad guy because the bad guy feels real. Often, feels a lot more real than the good guy, who, let's be honest, can be a putz.
And real isn't bad at all, it's good.
It's great, even.
Who's your favorite anti-hero?
Here it is, almost the end of January, and I'm still thinking about beginnings. I'm pretty sure that's because I'm mulling over how to start a new project.
From a recent NPR interview with one of my heroes, Elmore Leonard, here's how the great man sits his story down:
"I have no idea where it's going to go. I don't want to know, because the idea is accumulated in the four months, five months, six months. . . of the writing process. You get better ideas while you're writing. Ideas come to you, scenes come to you that (are better) than if you were to sit down and list scenes. So I don't outline."
The "to outline or not to outline" argument is one writers have long grappled with. And not allowing rigid A, B, 1, 2 scaffolding to dictate to creativity has always been my instinct, too. I didn't outline either of my two previous books and when I finished them I was convinced that lack of early structure helped, rather than harmed, their narratives. The ideas did arrive just as Mr. Leonard said.
And, I had a pretty good idea of where the story was going when I began my latest project, a memoir now in the hands of my editor. Not because I outlined it first, but because, well, I lived it.
When you're writing from your own experience, my logic went, it's even more impossible to get off track than when you're telling someone else's story. Stick to the truth, mine your emotional highs and lows, and, as Mr. Leonard also advises, "leave out the parts that people skip."
Do all that, everything is sure to turn out just dandy, I reasoned. Outline? I don't need no stinkin' outline.
Revisions, though, have a way of picking up the glare the warm sunshine of just writing away, free and easy, without a care in the netherworld of your imagination, misses. I ended up crafting a detailed outline after I finished the first draft.
It was a good exercise, and helped me identify both the cuts and additions the book needed in a way my own "just sit down and write" process had not.
So, despite the advice of Mr. Leonard, I've reconsidered the value of outlining a long work first, before beginning to write. I'm starting to believe outlining will organize my creative impulse, not stifle it.
Writer and writing teacher Adair Lara has a great article about how to do this here. Good advice for those of us writing about our own lives, particularly if, like me, you have previously eschewed outlines.
January feels like a great time to sit down and dig in to something new, doesn't it?
After reading this, then being horrified by this, and finally this too, I feel I must offer a personal response, in the form of five women who have lived long enough to actually have something important to say.
Here, in no particular order, are five "rhymes-with-bold" biddies who kick ass.
1. Helen Mirren, assasin
2. Joan Didion, change artist
"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."
(From The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir which won The National Book Award in 2005 when she was 71.)
3. Madeleine L'Engle, explosives tech
“One day while I was happily pretending to myself that I was Madame Curie, I blew up the lab.”
(From her address to the Library of Congress on Nov. 16, 1983. At 15 she was pretending to be Madame Curie; when she addressed the Library of Congress, she was 65. And had won the Newberry Award, the USM Medallion, the Smith College Award, the Sophia Award, the Regina Medal, the ALAN Award the Kerlan Award and was President of the Author's Guild.)
4. Diane Wakoski, truth teller
"You ride a broken motorcycle, You speak a dead language, You are a bad plumber, And you write with an inkless pen."
(From her poem, "Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch," published when she was about 50. Backstory here.)
5. Dora Hain, trailrider, trailblazer, ukulele player, long-distance swimmer, sport fisherwoman, campfire chef, and my maternal grandmother.
"Cryin' about it will get you exactly nowhere, Mard. Now, do you want to swim across the lake or go pike fishing?"
This is my hero, who's yours?
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