#99
November 1, 2006
From: anon

Are you and Nicola separating?

What the fuck? (And Nicola says, Huh?)

I am gobsmacked that anyone could read even a sliver of either Virual Pint or Ask Nicola and come up with this. Are you just trying to wind me up?

But — on the remote chance that this is a serious question, here you go. Nicola and I will never separate. We will be together until one of us is dead.

What are they putting in the water these days? (shakes head)

#98
October 16, 2006
From: J. E. Knowles

I am a latecomer to Virtual Pint and just read question 79 (the election and hope). Wow. That is about the best thing I have read in a long time. I wish I'd had those words these long years of exile from my country (I'm an American living abroad because my partner is British, not because of Bush). Thanks for such inspiring words.

And thank you right back, because I read the post again in order to talk to you now, and it turns out that I need to be reminded right now about hope. Not so much in terms of the government – I'm afraid that I have, at least for now, lost my energy to engage with the soul-numbing horror and stupidity that churns out of the Bush administration on a daily basis – but on a more personal level.

Hope is a concept that occasionally turns my head inside out. It's a huge, huge part of who I am. And (or But) sometimes it's challenged pretty radically. There's a book I read a while back that I go back to fairly often because it smacks down a lot of my ideas about hope, but (or and) I think it's at least partly right. It's called The Last Word On Power, by Tracy Goss, and it's ostensibly a business book, except that's not why I keep reading it. What I come back to again and again is that Goss urges the reader

…to accept – as if accepting a gift – these statements:

Life does not turn out the way it "should."
Nor does life turn out the way it "shouldn't."
Life turns out the way it does.

When I say "life," I mean your life: the life of the person reading this book. And by "the way it should," I mean the way you most deeply hope life will turn out, the way you have always expected it ought to turn out in order to be meaningful.

And then she goes on to suggest that going through 'the eye of the needle of hopelessness' is a necessary step – and that we can meet this hopelessness with acceptance or resignation. And that acceptance leads to the freedom to take any stand, any action, to attempt whatever you think is good and fail spectacularly regardless of the consequences, if that's what happens. She says, "Acceptance gives you the opportunity, instead of giving up, to play with full engagement, free from the fear about how things will turn out."

The first time I read this book, this made me so mad that I actually threw the book across the room. But after many re-readings, I understand what she means, and I don't disagree. I'm just not sure I am brave enough to believe that I can accept 'hopelessness' without feeling hopeless. Because feeling hopeless and bitter and twisted (the resignation she talks about) is not the point. The point is to feel free of fear, and to therefore be bold, to take chances, to make outrageous choices, to be as much of oneself as one wishes to be.

In other words, to be what I've always hoped I could be. Except without the hope.

This makes my head hurt, and scares the bejesus out of me because I think she might be right, and where does that leave all my hope stuff? And yet, of course, on some level Solitaire is about this journey through the eye of hopelessness, even though I had not read the Goss book before I wrote the novel.

I certainly haven't been able to let go of either hope or fear in my life. And the question I wrestle with is, are hope and fear two sides of the same coin? Is it necessary to lose hope in order to conquer fear? This one's more than a pint, it's a pitcher. I'd be interested to hear what folks have to say.

And finally, I'm not sure how all this is related, but here is a quote I currently love. It's the epigraph to The Teachings Of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda.

Para mi solo recorrer los caminos que tienen corazon, cualquier camino que tenga corazon. Por ahi yo recorro, y la unica prueba que vale es atravesar todo su largo. Y por ahi yo recorro mirando, mirando, sin aliento.

(For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel looking, looking, breathlessly.)

#97
October 16, 2006
From: Sly

Re: Q 94, Kelley said: "Other points of view are more flexible. One of the things I love about Stephen King's work is his facility in wandering in and out of everyone's heads, primary and secondary characters, and combining their real-time thoughts with memory, behavior, observation and feeling to paint a complex picture in a few simple strokes. He's fantastic at creating character."

Sticking my thoughts into this: I think also what King does so well is motivation. I guess that's really covered in "creating character" but it's a distinction that I like to make because so many writers don't nail what makes people or any other thing such as a dog or a car do what they do as well as he does.

Sly

I totally agree. People hardly ever do things in a psychological vacuum. But often, the reasons are so…. small. So everyday. An accumulation of little wants, small frustrations, bad choices that seem unimportant at the time. Or just the desire to stand for a minute longer with one's face in the sun, or stop for ice cream. King has a gift for making those things interesting and recognizable, and for picking the ones that matter most in the character's overall behavior in the story. What his people do, and why, almost always matters later on in the story.

King has such a generosity toward his characters, even the ones we aren't really meant to like. He's always willing to inhabit them, to see them from the inside out. I think that's what makes it possible for the reader to see them too.