Brief Response Upon Finishing Lolita

I finished Lolita over the weekend. I alternated between reading the book and watching the accompanying scenes from Adrian Lyne’s filmic version (which is 100% true to the book, but only as far as the events go—the characterization is completely wrong, but that’s another story). The book bowled me over so hard, I think I’m still recovering.

The best way I think I can describe is that Nabokov took me on a three-tiered, or three threaded, journey through the book. The first thread was the actual story as it unfolded linearly—how the characters experience the story. The second thread was the writing style/narrative—how the author experiences the story. The third thread was the way I felt about the narrator, Humbert Humbert, and the book at large—how I experience the story. All three of these met in a synergistic yarn which caused the three elements/entities (characters, authors, reader) to be interconnected in such as way as to make the existence of each impossible without the existence of the others.

Throughout “Part One,” I was absolutely entranced and delighted by the writing and, much to my chagrin and confusion, felt just as charmed by the pedophile Humbert Humbert himself. The book takes a sharp turn at Part Two. This was an interesting and ingenious division for the book: the change from Part One to Part Two is that Lolita finds out that her mother is dead. Charlotte actually has been dead for quite some book-time. Both the reader and Humbert know the mother is and has been dead. Only Lolita didn’t know, and when she finds out, everything changes.

“Part Two” begins the slow decline of the regard in which Humbert is held by Lolita, by Nabokov, and by the reader. His charm and wit have worn thin with his self-awareness and, later, his inability to deprive himself of self gratification. Confidence has become smarm, which soon gives way to patheticalness. The writing seems to become long-winded and cloying. I don’t fault Nabokov for this, as some reviewers have. Rather, the culprit is Humbert’s increasingly desperate attempts at justification for his actions that plays out via the narrative. I began to hate him, began to hate what he had to say, began to hate his every action, and in turn began to hate the book and the writing itself—but I was so mired in the story that I could not put it down. Likewise, Lolita was mired in her own situation that she could not escape. Even when she thought she did escape, she just got into another situation that was equally unhealthy for her. She never really escaped at all until her death (which we learn about at the beginning of the book, but actually occurs after the book is over: she dies in childbirth). The reader gets to escape the misery of the story at the same time both the characters do; but only death is a strong enough reprieve from the torment they’ve been subjected to by the hand of McFate and by their own designs.

As I stated earlier, I felt immensely uncomfortable and confused at how much I was enjoying reading this book about a “nympholectic” pedophile. It made me feel dirty, decadent, and debased. But the way I felt throughout the end of the book completely reconciled my emotive response to where it “should” have been through the incredible feat of making me strongly desire to read a book I was, at points, loathing.

There’s so much to say about this incredible book, but I haven’t fully been able to wrap my brain around it all. I just wanted to write a few words about my response as a writer. What I’m taking from this is how your narrative design can affect the interconnectedness of character/author/reader—and the tremendous effect that interconnectedness can have. I’ve also learned about creating unreliable narrators, and the power of both sides of that coin: when the unreliability is only hinted at, or unknown completely, and when the unreliability is undeniable and almost excruciating to the reader. Nabokov used that tool to effectively manipulate his readers emotive responses as if he were creating the responses himself.

I love when you finish a book and you feel like you have “traveled” – through time, through space, and through that intangible journey that is experience.

Read it.

Publication News

I have recently had a creative non-fiction piece, "What It Means To Be Alone," picked up by The Eloquent Atheist. You can read the piece in its entirety here.

If you are moved, whether positively or negatively, by the piece, please leave a comment on the site. It's a very interesting, lively community, and I'm proud they wanted my writing to be a part of the site.

NaNoWriMo Reflections

Like thousands of writers across the country, I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in November. Due to a series of unfortunate events, including my car getting broken into in a Baltimore alley (one that I park in at least three times a week), I almost didn’t. I gave up before I began, having only written 149 words by Day Five. However, when on Day Five I realized I had blogged nearly the same amount of words as my required daily quota for NaNoWriMo (1667), I told myself that noveling was a far more rewarding and worthwhile past time than blogging, and set myself to the task of catching up.

I was officially behind for about the first twenty days of November, when I suddenly surged ahead. I “finished” my novel (read: 50,169 words of it . . . after un-contracting all my contractions) four days early. It was a vomitous first draft—full of such flaws as wordiness, repetition, inadvertent rhymes, typos ("soul heir"), mixed metaphors, purple prose ("never ending slumber of death"???), meandering plot, redundancy ("ghostly apparition" ??), etc.—but it was a first draft nonetheless. It is officially the second longest piece of writing I’ve ever done, and has provided great groundwork for a significantly less flawed second draft.

My NaNoWriMo experience was most likely exactly the same as every other WriMo’s experience in that it was deeply individual. I make that seemingly self-contradictory statement on purpose, because I think that is part of the human experience: to feel exactly the same things as countless other living and dead humans, but to experience them in a state of complete self-absorption and solitude. Or maybe that’s just writers.

But in any case, a lot of time NaNoing is a lot of time spent alone. Even those occasions when I partnered up with a fellow WriMo for sessions of solidarity, we were still very much inside our own heads during much of our time together. Not only is writing “butt in chair,” it is “mind in mind.” Unlike an artist painting a figure study from a model, fiction writers create almost solely from within their own heads. A lot of time spent inside one’s mind can lead to many negative things—antisocialism, narcissism, self-consciousness, low self-esteem, etc. But it can also be a transcendental and uplifting experience, as was my NaNoWriMo experience.

I learned many things during this time, that I want to just get down in words. I’m still digesting the whole experience, but this is what I have for now:

1) Writing fast encourages you to write in a fat and bloated way; you write the way you eat on Thanksgiving—and there is great pleasure in that. But there’s a reason Thanksgiving only comes once a year. It’s not healthy to do that all the time. Something can be said for turning off your inner editor, but I say put her in the next room. Don’t send her home on an extended leave of absence.

2) Outlining would have been a really good idea. I once did the Three-Day Novel Contest, and the ONLY reason I finished was that I had an extensive outline and notes beforehand. If I had used an outline, I might not be in the position I am now, and that is the position of rewriting a second draft from scratch. I have written Chapter One three times now, and it’s still not right.

3) 1667 words a day is nothing. Stephen King recommends 2000 words a day—and we all want to be Stephen King, don’t we? (Just kidding.) If you can’t find the time to put down 1667 words a day, you don’t deserve to call yourself a writer. Harsh, I know, but I’m growing tired of the “someday” people (myself included). You’re not going to someday win the lottery and be able to quit your job and suddenly have an extra nine hours a day to devote to writing. Even if you do win the lottery, you’ll probably spend those extra nine hours a day getting really familiar with daytime television—or shopping—or (like I probably would) staring at your bank statement in orgasmic disbelief.

If you want to succeed as a writer, you should be putting in a little time every day either: writing, editing, or sending out submissions. Even if you’re not working on your novel or a short story or a poem, write something. It will be good for you and will help you develop a habit.


Right now, I’m taking a break between my first draft and the “official start” of my second draft. It’s giving me a chance to catch up on my reading (the second best thing you can do to improve your writing is to read) and also to let my mind wander around the plot and the various holes I need to tidy up. Then I’ll finish and refine my outline, which has been dribbling out slowly, and finally I’ll begin earnest work on my second draft. Around that time, Writers Block will hopefully have started back up, which no doubt will prove to be very motivating to me.

Lo. Lee. Ta

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of

the tongue taking a trip of three steps

down the palate to tap, at three, on the

teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta."

--Vladimir Nabokov

I stopped at Barnes and Noble on my way home last night in search of Noah Lukeman's Dash of Style. Usually, I buy books online, using a site like Better World, which donates a portion of its proceeds to charitable causes for global literacy and uses green shipping methods. But I was really craving a look at this book.

But sadly (and not unexpectedly) they didn't have it. They had three editions of The Elements of Style, including an illustrated version (do you really need to illustrate a book about words?), but they did not have one copy of Dash of Style.

So, still craving something to feed my bibliophilia, I headed over to Fiction/Literature, where I promptly forgot the names of all the hundred or so books I want to read right now. Love in the Time of Cholera was on prominate display, because of the movie coming out, and I briefly toyed with the idea of purchasing One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I've wanted to read for some time. But the book was heavy in my hands--I wanted something lighter, shorter after having slogged through The Blind Assassin (which, I know I know, is not a long book; I just have a short attention span, which is why I mostly read short stories).

Thinking of heavy books, I remembered how fervently Chris had recommended Great Expectations (after overcoming his shock that I hadn't yet read it. I was a writing major, I told him yet again, not a literature major). So I headed to the Ds and selected one of the three editions they had available. It was strange indeed to see such a classic in mass market paperback (and about three inches thick at that size). While in the Ds, I saw Dostoyevsky, which reminded me of Nabokov and reminded me that I wanted to read Lolita. That seemed like it would be as "light and short" as I might get, considering my list of old and new classics that I hadn't gotten around to yet.

Long story short, I bought Great Expectations and Lolita (as well as Madison Bell's National Book Award Nominee All Souls Rising, which I really ought to read as well) and started Lolita last night. I don't know what I expected of this book, only knowing the plot and having seen the most recent film adaptation. In fact, I fear that the story is so ubiquitous that many have not taken the time out to actually read the novel.

I'm SO glad that I have. Even just reading the first paragraph (reprinted above) I was blown away. Nabokov plays with language in a way I am desperate to be able to do (and to have the confidence to do). The book was simultaneously creepy and laugh-out-loud funny--not a combination I ever expected. So many little lines and jokes and off-the-cuff witticisms have captured me entirely. 40 pages in, and I am in love with this book.

"...my knees were like reflections of knees in rippling water..."

If I didn't have to get up for work this morning, I could have easily spent all night drowning myself in Nabokov's intoxicating language, his scenes and images that pop more vividly than any film could ever hope to recreate. I felt naughty reading the book, like a kid with a flashlight under the covers, reading something utterly trashy and delicious. I couldn't get enough. Today, I regret not having brought my copy to pore over during my lunch hour.

"I exchanged letters with these people, satisfying them I was housebroken, and spent a fantastic night on the train, imagining in all possible detail the enigmatic nymphet I would coach in French and fondle in Humbertish. Nobody met me at the toy station where I alighted with my new expensive bag, and nobody answered the telephone; eventually, however, a distraught McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned down--possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins."

I'm not going to do any sort of detailed literary analysis of Lolita. I just wanted to share how amazing it is, so, if you haven't read it yet, you can pick up a copy and join me in savoring it like dark chocolate cheesecake.

Blog Renaissance

If you've visited my blog before, you know it has previously been dedicated to my craftwork, soft sculpture, and stuffed animals. Due to various circumstances, I am no longer working on that type of artwork (though there are still some items left in my store). Rather, I am focusing my energy on working full-time on my writing career.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with me, I am a 25-year old professional writer working in living in Baltimore, MD. I have my BA in English from Goucher College, where I was fortunate to study under the amazing Madison Smartt Bell. My passion is for short fiction, and my stories have been published in Preface and the unfortunately defunct Baltimore Writers Project. I've also been a staff writer for several periodicals. I'm currently honing my poetry skills and revising a novel I began during National Novel Writing Month, which deals with gender roles as they relate to power, wealth, and status.

I will be forthwith dedicating this site and blog to my journey as a writer and a reader. Though, due to publishing standards and copyright issues, I will not be printing any of my pieces here, I currently have one story on the web from my undergraduate days, which you can read here.

Thanks for visiting!

4 Poems in 21 Days

Well, wasn't I quite the ambitious little monkey at the beginning of September. I should have known better. Here are my excuses (the validity of which I will diminish in a minute): I was sick for like two weeks straight. I had 16 hours of community service. I've had some depression issues.

These are the dumb excuses. They are the kind of excuses that will always exist (read: "Dumb Shit That Gets in the Way of Important Shit") and therefore lose their validity as excuses due to their constancy. It's kind of like saying, "Gosh, I don't have time to do X because I have to sleep eight hours a night. It's really getting in the way of my productivity. Once I don't have to sleep anymore, I'll get it done. Really." Once my LIFE stops happening, maybe I'll have the time, energy, and inclination to write. Fuck that.

But that's not actually the point. I didn't stop writing these poems for the sole reasons of not having time, energy, or inclination. In fact, I made a conscious decision on Day Five to stop. The reasons are as follows:

1) Poems are short; they are not easy. There is a significant difference there that I did not take into account when I started. I never actually thought poetry would be "easy" but I did count on it taking less time than, say, crafting a short story or a one-act play. This was selling both myself and the form short, pardon the pun. Poems are not easier than other forms--they are different. Additionally, they are not necessarily short (though, Edgar Allen Poe recommends that a poem should take no longer than one hour to read [e.g., one sitting]; otherwise, its singular emotional impact is diluted by the sheer event of stopping, then restarting the reading).

2) Poems require as much proofing, editing, revision, and rewriting as any other form of writing, in proportion to their respective lengths. Writing a poem and assuming it is finished is juvenile and amateurish. I did not take this into consideration. Why would I want to end 30 days of poetry writing only to have 30 worthless first drafts? I'd much rather have four polished, revised, finished poems.

3) Poems take as much inspiration and planning as other forms of writing. Emo kids be damned: you cannot expect something to be profound, emotional, or impactful just because it is a poem. I thought this way in middle school. That thinking doesn't hold up now. Random line breaks do not a poem make. Rhyme (or willful lack thereof) does make words into poetry. To write a successful poem, you have to consider--even more clearly than the what the poem will literally--what feeling and thoughts you want your reader to have when exiting your poem. A poem, like other language art, is a temporal journey that has a beginning and end in time for your reader. He will begin to read it, and when he is finished reading it, time will have passed. During this time, more must have happened than him having read a poem--and the poet is the designer of this small fate.

So, in fewer words, I wasn't giving enough credit to the form, and was probably thinking myself more talented than I really was to be able to write a poem in a sitting and have it turn out as anything more than drivel. I plan to take the poems I did finish and revise and refine them until they're actually meaningful and effective--no matter how long that takes.

As an anecdote, I will share that between Days Three and Four, I lost the poem I wrote on Day Three. It was something to do with the way my computer synchs to the network at my job. I was really quite pleased with it, and really disappointed to think I wouldn't have it anymore. So, I did the only thing I could think of: I wrote it again, as best as I could remember it (I planned this poem in my head before I got it down on paper, so remembering it wasn't too difficult). The next day, when I went back into work, my computer synched properly, and the original poem returned to my My Documents folder. I was elated! I opened it to compare it to my rewritten version.

They were exactly the same.

I thought that was pretty cool. Maybe there IS a sanctity in the first draft. Who knows?

30 Poems in 30 Days

A new undertaking, inspired by the recent revival in my writing revelry, and a new and sudden passion (of unknown origin [though perhaps from listening closely too closely and too frequently to Andrew Bird's lyrics]): 30 poems in 30 days. It's kind of like National Novel Writing Month, except it's personal, not national, and it's poems (plural), not novel (singular, or even fractionally singular, being quite possibly unfinished).

I already cheated and wrote one on August 29th, and not one on September 1st, but since then, I've done one a day--that makes four so far. I plan to continue to write (at least) one a day for the remainder of the month. I may or may not post them for your reading pleasure, as some of them are more personal (and/or bad) than others. I may submit some to one or more contests, just to see if I have any idea what I'm doing (I don't). I will submit at least one to the City Paper Poetry Contest.

For inspiration and education, I have actually been reading poetry (never before a pastime or pleasure of mine), including that of Wallace Stevens (thanks to Chris), Thomas Gray, William Blake, Dylan Thomas, and more.

Simultaneously, I am working, story-by-story, through the near-2000-page The Story and Its Writer short story anthology. I am on indefinite hiatus from finishing Moby Dick, whose literary merits do not agree with me (or, vice versa, with whose literary merits I do not agree).

Also, on this note, I have finished the first short story I wrote during the Writers Block meetings. Alas, it is too long to submit to its originally intended City Paper contest (by a formidable thousand words), so I'll be writing another, pithier story, and submitting "Scheme" elsewhere.

Note: Chris and I are still in disagreement as to whether a limerick counts as a poem. Thoughts on this are invited.

The List

So much left to read...(and this, only a start: Time's 100 Best English-Language Novels post-1923). Money is (currently) my favorite novel of all time, so I was elated to see it on this list. And The Sound and the Fury is the novel (in conjunction with Toni Morrison's Jazz) that made me want to be a writer.

I've cancelled my cable, scaled back my netflix, gave my television antenna away, and now I'm focusing on reading, reading, reading. I've already started working on this list, having most recently finished the astounding Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood.

I'm currently reading Dubliners by James Joyce, while waiting to see which of the following books I get for Christmas. They're all on my list.

The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow

All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren

American Pastoral
Philip Roth

An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser

Animal Farm
George Orwell

Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume

The Assistant
Bernard Malamud

At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien

Atonement
Ian McEwan

Beloved
Toni Morrison

The Berlin Stories
Christopher Isherwood

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler

The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood

Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder

Call It Sleep
Henry Roth

Catch-22
Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger

A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess

The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron

The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen

The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon

A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell

The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West

Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather

A Death in the Family
James Agee

The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen

Deliverance
James Dickey

Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone

Falconer
John Cheever

The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles

The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing

Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin

Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell

The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck

Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers

The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene

Herzog
Saul Bellow

Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson

A House for Mr. Biswas
V.S. Naipaul

I, Claudius
Robert Graves

Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace

Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison

Light in August
William Faulkner

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis

Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov

Lord of the Flies
William Golding

The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien

Loving
Henry Green

Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis

The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead

Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie

Money
Martin Amis

The Moviegoer
Walker Percy

Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf

Naked Lunch
William Burroughs

Native Son
Richard Wright

Neuromancer
William Gibson

Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro

1984
George Orwell

On the Road
Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey

The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski

Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India
E.M. Forster

Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion

Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth

Possession
A.S. Byatt

The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark

Rabbit, Run
John Updike

Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow

The Recognitions
William Gaddis

Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett

Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles

Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson

The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth

The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner

The Sportswriter
Richard Ford

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
John le Carre

The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf

Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller

Ubik
Philip K. Dick

Under the Net
Iris Murdoch

Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry

Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

White Noise
Don DeLillo

White Teeth
Zadie Smith

Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys