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I’m not sure why I’ve always been obsessed with novels about depressed famous people. 

Maybe it has something to do with growing up in Washington, DC, a city devoid of glamor. Or maybe it was that DC fancied itself powerful, which felt like a big sham. Maybe it had to do with being raised as a woman in a patriarchy, seeing fame as a grand metaphor for the ever-present male gaze. Maybe I’m drawn to these narratives because fame is elusive. I’m probably drawn to fame because it’s attention without the icky strings of intimacy. 

But of course, adoration without intimacy is a magic potion for emptiness. 

Growing up, books didn’t really interest me. They always seemed to star boy-crazy, frumpy girls with poor emotional regulation. They took place in New England or Old England or the past. Books were earnest and lacked humor and had nothing to do with me. I much preferred Saved By the Bell. 

Then I came across Bret Easton Ellis. Ok, fine, first I read Gossip Girl. The series didn’t blow my mind but I enjoyed it—something I didn’t think possible from a book. Then in college came BEE. His sentences were exciting but not gushy. His characters didn’t cry; they numbed out with drugs. He wrote about beautiful people and dark subject matter. I wanted to do what he did. 

My debut novel, Vagablonde, is about a young woman in Los Angeles who prefers dissociation to emotional expression. She’s a lawyer by trade, but she wants to be a rapper. She meets a producer and they make a track that goes viral. She gets everything she thought she wanted, but she’s miserable. That’s because she’s self-medicating to an unsustainable degree. Also, fame is fragile. 

Obviously, all art comes from other art. (Queue: The Life of Pablo.) I didn’t write my book out of thin air. I wrote it based on the thoughts in my head, partially, but also on reality TV and movies and conversations with friends and books I’ve read. And now, at 33, I read quite often! Some could call me a book nerd. In Southern California, where I live, I certainly qualify as a nerd. Anyway, here are 8 excellent books about the dark side of fame. 

The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis

The Informers is not Ellis’s most famous book by any means. In fact, it was pretty universally panned, mostly as an uninspired repeat of his previous books. But it was the first BEE I ever read, so it was fresh to me. I borrowed it from my college friend—a genetically blessed blond gay who looked like he had been plucked straight from Ellis’s universe. I enjoyed reading about characters who felt numb at glamorous Hollywood parties and in their psychiatrists’ offices. This reading started a long journey of me trying to copy him. (I have several repeat characters in my first few novels as an ode to BEE.) While a recent reread of Rules of Attraction failed to charm me as it did in my late teens, I will always respect BEE for opening my eyes to what literature can be. 

Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

Play It As It Lays is an utterly perfect novel—sparse and haunting and darkly funny. It follows Maria Wyeth, 36-year-old actress in the midst of a mental breakdown, and my absolute hero of fiction. Maria renders glamorous so many traits of which I’m personally ashamed. She lives in her head, casually degrades her body, and can’t keep up her end of the dialogue with hairdressers. All her friends are gay men or people with whom she is sleeping. She tends towards dysthymia, her body crackles with sensitivity, and she really just wants to spend her time wandering around and looking at the way the light hits random objects.

Most feel compelled to play the game—that is participate in our uber-competitive, capitalist society—but Maria knows the game is ultimately meaningless. She instead finds solace in beautiful images, soothing her mind through sleep, wandering, and driving. Her vision may seem depressing on its face, but there is actually something Zen about it. Maria doesn’t overthink things. Most people ask why Iago is evil. Maria doesn’t ask.

Surveys by Natasha Stagg

While Didion and Ellis focus on Hollywood fame, Stagg’s debut novel deals with a more contemporary form of celebrity: Internet notoriety. While 23-year-old Colleen is mostly anonymous at her job at Arizona mall, she’s an online personality with tons of followers. Her fame increases when she begins a public online romance with another online celebrity. Colleen reflects on fame dryly:

“One day, I was not famous, the next day, I was almost famous and the temptation to go wide with that and reject my past was too great. When I was legit famous, it was hard to tell when the change occurred. It was traceable, sort of, because of the Internet, but it was very quick.”

The LA Review of Books wrote that Stagg’s “prose vaguely recalls the affectless monotone of the drug-addled rich kids who populated Bret Easton Ellis’s late-’80s novels.” Colleen begins to unravel when a girl named Lucinda arrives online and plays the game a bit better. She’s also wise. “In the future, no one will want to be famous,” Lucinda writes in an online essay. “We will aspire to be less and less known as we grow up.” Reading this again, I hope she’s right. 

Look by Zan Romanoff

Like Surveys, Romanoff’s third novel also deals with an internet influencer. Lulu Shapiro has 10,000 followers on the fictional app Flash (which I read as Snapchat meets Tik Tok). Throughout the novel, Lulu grapples with what it means to be looked at while also navigating her first lesbian relationship. I’ll admit I was nervous to read a lesbian romance written by a straight writer, but I was impressed with how it rang true to my own queer experiences. Particularly, the ways in which the male gaze both idealizes and cheapens lesbian relationships. And, yes, I cried!!! 

Taipei by Tao Lin

I firmly believe you CAN judge a book by its cover. And that’s exactly how I found this book, which is now one of my favorites. Taipei addresses a more niche type of fame than the others on this list: lit world fame. While Tao isn’t a household name, anyone who spends time in indie bookstores or on literary Tumblr knows him as the founder of the “alt lit” movement.

Taipei is semi-autobiographical. It’s about a famous writer on a book tour, self-medicating with drugs throughout. It’s also a love story. Upon its release, Brett Easton Ellis said Taipei rendered Tao Lin “the most interesting prose stylist of his generation.” He also called Taipei “boring.” Maybe he was jealous, I don’t know. I’ll admit it took me a minute to get into Taipei. But once I did, I was captivated. I was moved. I laughed, and I cried. And I’m still trying to copy his endearingly peculiar voice. What else do you want from a novel? 

How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell

How to Murder Your Life was the type of book I had to read slowly because I didn’t want it to end. The memoir chronicles the writer’s life from childhood (in DC, where I grew up!) to boarding school to Conde Nast to becoming a famous Internet writer, the unifying thread being her addiction—first to stimulants, and eventually to essentially every other drug imaginable. In the final third of the book, Cat’s addiction hits its peak and her fame skyrockets. An essay she writes about Whitney Houston’s death while high on a potpourri of substances goes viral, and at that point the Internet begins to glorify her twisted brain (Jezebel wrote, “Cat Marnell is Both Fucked Up And Fabulous,” and Vice gave her a column called Amphetamine Logic).

Marnell wants to stop using—she’s exhausted and feels ill all the time—but she’s also being praised for her addiction, and making money off it. Sad for Cat but a killer conflict to keep the reader hooked. I also fell in love with Cat’s writing style. She writes such energy, using exclamation points with abandon (might be the speed!!!) and frequently addressing the reader. Her subject matter is dark but the narrative remains light. It’s not easy to make reading fun, and Cat is the Queen. 

The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato

Confession: the author of this novel is my ex-girlfriend. I read it before we started dating, and before I even met her. And I’ll admit I read it with a lot of envy. Catie was my age, 28, and her thoughtful novel about a pop star who goes missing landed a glowing review in The New York Times. I hated her a little. But I loved the novel, a structurally inventive and intricately-plotted ride filled with trenchant social commentary. My favorite were its asides on Situationist philosophy (the fictional pop star Molly Metropolis is obsessed with Situationist leader Guy Debord). Getting critical theory fed through a queer pop culture narrative is heaven to moi. 

The Love Song of Jonny Valentine by Teddy Wayne

Teddy Wayne tells this charming story from the perspective of an 11-year-old, Bieber-esque pop star named Johnny Valentine. Given that I don’t care about boys or anything boyish, I didn’t expect to enjoy this novel. But I fell in love with Jonny’s funny, sympathetic, and ultimately very sad voice. I didn’t even mind reading about Jonny’s masturbatory frustrations. After Jonny can’t make himself come, he imagines a groupie accusing him of getting her pregnant and then having to issue a public statement saying that would be impossible because he couldn’t even come on his own. “[A] policeman would have to watch me in private to see if it was true, and they’d give me an adult glossy to help, and we’d also have to bring in [my bodyguard] to make sure the policeman wasn’t a child predator.” It’s these sorts of darkly funny interior monologues that sucked me into the narrative. In the end, the book nails home how just lonely it is to be a super-star. 

The post 8 Killer Books About the Dark Side of Celebrity appeared first on Electric Literature.

You know you want to write for a living, but you don’t quite feel qualified to go out on your own and try it yet. Or, perhaps, you have an unfinished manuscript that could really benefit from peer input. Or you may want to explore several different genres to see what type of writing sticks the most. 

Enter the MFA. A master’s degree in creative writing can offer you all of these things and more. 

Let’s explore all aspects of this specialized degree, starting with the question that may be on your mind: “What is an MFA?”

What is an MFA?

A Master of Fine Arts degree provides an opportunity to study your art, and this art can be writing. 

It’s a graduate-level program, so you need a bachelor’s degree before you can get an MFA, but a fine arts degree doesn’t require you to take the GRE like many graduate programs. Not having to take the GRE can come as a relief for those of us (ahem, me) who aren’t good at standardized tests.

When you study writing in an MFA program, you have several choices, depending on the program: nonfiction, fiction, journalism, poetry, pop fiction, playwriting, screenwriting and more. 

Often, you can take a workshop or two in a genre other than your focus if you want to explore other areas of creative writing. Obtaining an MFA gives you the credentials to teach at universities and colleges if you want to go that route. A program can last between one and four years, but two years is typical. Costs vary widely depending on the program, but you should expect to invest a pretty penny into your degree. 

The 3 types of MFAs

Whether you’re working full time and want to get your degree on the side, like I did, or you prefer to dedicate your life completely to your writing, you have options.

There are three types of MFA programs:

1. Online residency

For an online degree, you complete it without having to travel or move anywhere. You can do all the work from the comfort of your home. 

This type of program could be excellent for working folks, parents or people who don’t want to spend the extra money on taking trips to residencies. 

2. Low residency

You also work mostly online with an assigned mentor in a low residency program, but it requires you to travel twice a year to residencies. 

Each residency lasts around 10 days and gives you a chance to mingle with other writers in your program. This type could be the perfect choice if you want to hold a part-time or full-time job but need writer-to-writer interaction. You might be surprised how quickly you can become best friends with people even if you see them only twice a year.

3. Full residency

A full-residency program is like a standard degree — you move near campus and commute into class to learn among your fellow students. 

This type of program could be a great choice for writers who want a normal college experience. You can work directly with your classmates, call on them for editing help and attend your professors’ office hours easily. Whether or not you can hold a job on the side is up to you. 

Should you get an MFA? Let’s weigh the pros and cons 

Deciding whether or not to go back to school can be a tough process. There are many positives and negatives that you need to weigh before making a decision. 

Here’s a breakdown of factors that I looked into that helped me make my choice.

Pros of getting an MFA

• You’ll form a tight-knit writing community. No matter the type of program you choose, when you share your art with each other, you will bond. Knowing other writers is invaluable — for everything from advice to emotional support to writing a blurb for the back on your book.
• A degree will probably save you time in the long run. Two intensive years of cramming everything writing-related into your skull will almost invariably lower the learning curve for you. Instead of teaching yourself how to write better over the span of 10 years on the job, a degree should expedite the process.
• You’ll dedicate time to honing your craft. Like me, you could consider a writing program a gift to yourself. You’re honoring your art by making space in your life to advance your skill.
• You’ll sharpen your grammar skills and become a better writer, editor, reader, and critic. There’s no doubt about it: No matter what form of writing you study, writing a lot makes you better at all of it.

Cons of getting an MFA

• It will cost you. The average cost of a full residency program is $20,180, and the average low residency program is $31,184. One thing to consider: Does your employer cover any tuition costs? Keeping a full-time job allowed me to pull from the tuition reimbursement that my company offered, which helped immensely.
• You may not gain the hard skills you’re looking for. The number one complaint in my program is a lack of focus on the tougher side of writing: how to market yourself, build your portfolio, deal with agents or publish a book. Instead, these degrees tend to focus on the craft and leave the hard skills for you to figure out.
• You’ll use up time and energy. Instead of spending two years getting a writing degree, you could be out there writing. Even though you would be starting with more of a blank slate, there’s absolutely no requirement to get a degree first to be a writer. You could instead put that energy into getting published or freelancing. 
• You may not need it. If you’re thinking of a career as a marketer, social media manager, publisher, or some other specific job, an MFA might not help you get there. It will teach you some things about the writing industry as a whole, but nothing you couldn’t learn from attending conferences and workshops outside of a degree program.

Is an MFA worth it?

So is an MFA worth it? The answer to this question is deeply personal, so I can only tell you my opinion. And my answer is yes. For me, an MFA was worth the time and money I spent. 

Two key things made the experience valuable for me: the writers I met and the confidence I gained. 

When I made the choice to enter the program, I knew I wanted to write for a living, but I didn’t know in what capacity. Sure, I wish I had a better baseline understanding of my goals when I started, but that doesn’t mean it was a waste of time. Some of my friends had no idea what to write when they started but ended up with a manuscript that turned into a published book a few years out. I gained a writing community that will be with me for life. These are friends who understand the struggles of the writer’s life.

Plus, I felt like the degree propelled me into “Real Writer” status. It doesn’t take a degree to become a writer, and I had already become one the day I started writing. However, I didn’t know that yet. I needed a confidence boost. I appreciated the backing of a degree before I went out to make a living at it. 

Alternatives to getting an MFA

If your gut is telling you not to go the MFA route, trust your instincts. 

There are so many other options out there. You could try freelancing for a while. Even if it doesn’t work out, there’s nothing stopping you from applying to a degree program later. Also, there are plenty aspects of an MFA program you could replicate on your own. You could read grammar and writing books on your own. Additionally, you could write a book in your spare time, take individual writing classes, or attend workshops and residencies. 

There’s even an entire course we’ve reviewed here at The Write Life designed to help you DIY your MFA.

There’s no one right answer. You can do several of these things at once. Take a class at your local writing center and become a member of a local critique group. The most important step in becoming the writer you want to be is to try something.

Photo via Areipa.lt / Shutterstock 

The post What is an MFA, and More Importantly, Should You Get One? appeared first on The Write Life.

From our September 1959 issue, here are 36 clichéd plots that will kill your chance at publication.

By Donald Westlake

This morning I received a story in the mail, a story that contained some of the most vivid, incisive, and clever writing I have read in a long, long time. But the story was the oldie about the man who murders his wife, drags her body into the darkened living room, the lights go on and a million relatives stand around shouting, “Surprise! Happy Birthday!” The writing was wonderful, but the story wasn’t bought.

As Executive Editor of Mystery Digest and former Assistant Editor at a literary agency, I have spent too many hours a day reading and rejecting well-written stories because they are afflicted with Plot Formula, the “Tired blood” that kills an otherwise competent writer.

Definitions, please. A plot is a planned series of connected events, building through conflict to a crisis and ending in a satisfactory conclusion. A formula is a particular plot which has become stale through over-use.

My 5C Plot Plan

My own working definition of plot is what I call “5C.” First, a character. Anybody at all, from Hemingway’s old man to Salinger’s teenager. Second, conflict. Something for that character to get upset about, and for the reader to get upset about through the character. Third, complications. If the story runs too smoothly, without any trouble for the character, the reader isn’t going to get awfully interested in what’s going on. Fourth, climax. The opposing forces in conflict are brought together. Like the fissionable material in an H-bomb and there’s an explosion. Fifth, conclusion. The result of the explosion is known, the conflict is over, the character has either won or lost, and there are no questions left unanswered.

5C: Character. Conflict. Complications. Climax. Conclusion.

No matter what the definition, the essential ingredients are always the same, and the result is always plot, not formula. It wasn’t formula when Homer used it in The Odyssey, and it still wasn’t formula when Pasternak used it in Doctor Zhivago.

How to Tell the Trite From the New

A lot of writers, when told they are writing stale, cliché-filled, trite formula, cry, “How can I tell the new from the old” How am I supposed to read every copy of every magazine that was ever published?”

Something like that, yes. The writer should certainly read everything he can possibly find in his own field. It has always been my belief that no writer should expect to write a story for a particular magazine until he knows that magazine just as well as the editor does. And constant reading in your field will soon give you a pretty clear idea of what has already been done.

But here’s a head start: a list of story ideas to stay away from, and its purpose is to help you decide for yourself whether your rejection slips have been the result of poor writing or poor plotting. Included are twelve stale formula ideas from each of three fields, mystery, science fiction, and slick.

The Mystery Field

1. John Smith is sitting in his living room, reading the paper or watching television, and one, two, three, or four hoodlums, who are being hunted by the police, break into the house intending to lie low there until the neighborhood quiets down.

2. John Smith is sitting by the windows, and he watches Joe Doakes murder Jane Plain. The phone is out of order. John is bedridden, confined to a wheel chair, 10 years old, or too drunk to move. The murderer is coming to get rid of the witness.

3. John Smith comes home from his job at the gas station, is greeted by his pregnant wife, and sits down to read the paper or watch television. The doorbell rings, and it’s John Doakes, who used to be John’s cell-mate at the state pen. He wants John to come in with him on a big job, or else he will either expose John as a parole jumper or will murder John’s wife.

4. John Smith is sitting in his office and a man from Why-Do-It-Yourself, Inc., comes in and offers to murder his nagging wife for him.

5. John Smith, private eye, walked into his best friend’s apartment to find the friend dead and Lieutenant Joe Doakes from Homicide standing there with a notebook in his hand. “If I get the killer first,” says John, “there won’t be much left for the law.”

6. John Smith, private eye, is sitting in his office when a total stranger staggers in, says, “The green jade – cough, cough,” and drops dead with a kris in his back.

7. John Smith wakes up with a hangover in his head and a smoking gun in his hand. Joe Doakes is lying on the floor, shot to death.

8. John Smith is sitting in the park, feeding the other squirrels, when a beautiful girl runs up, kisses him, and whispers, “Pretend you know me.”

9. John Smith, private eye, is sitting at his desk, when Marshall Bigelow, thimble tycoon, trundles in waving thousand-dollar bills and shouting, “My daughter has disappeared!”

10. John Smith, hen-pecked husband, fortyish, short and stout, meet and mild, has decided to murder his battle-axe, demanding, shrewish, and nagging wife, and he has this plan, see, which is foolproof. Only it isn’t.

11. Johnnie Smith, 16, decides to break with the neighborhood gang, the Golden Dragons, because Becky Thatcher, 15, was to be proud of him.

12. Fourteen people, one of them named Fitz-Warren, are all weekend guests at the mansion of cranky old John Smith. Suddenly, a scream pierces the plot, and the whole entourage runs into the study, to find cranky old John Smith dead at his desk, a kris in his back.

The Science Fiction Field

1. At the end of the story, we learn that the hero and heroine are Adam and Eve.

2. At the end of the story, we learn that the solar system is really just an atom in a much larger Universe, with the planets being electrons revolving around the nucleus of the sun.

3. Johnnie Smith, age 10, is lonely, because he’s different from the other kids. He can lift things with his mind.

4. John Smith stumbles into town with a wild story about Martians who are taking over the bodies of human beings. At the end of the story, it turns out that everybody in town is a Martian.

5. Eight million miles from Earth, a crewman discovers a beautiful girl stowaway on the spaceship. Captain John Smith, old and gruffy, says, “Eight men and one woman, on a six-month voyage to Sirius. There’ll be trouble.”

6. A Frank Buck type from Alpha Centauri comes to Earth to get a male and female of every type of Earth animal, for the big zoo on Alpha Centauri. At the end of the story, he takes the hero and heroine along for the zoo, too, and it’s a good place for them.

7. It is the year 3000 A.D., and the Time Tourists are receiving their final instructions in the lounge of Time Travel, inc. “Remember,” says the guide, “do not try to bring back any souvenirs with you.”

8. It is a Navy outpost at the South Pole. John Smith, one of the eight scientists at the outpost, rushes in from the outer cold and shouts, “Something is happening to him. He’s growing younger!”

9. John Smith, having invented a time machine, decides to go back in time and kill his grandfather, just to see what will happen.

10. In the world of 2500 A.D., crime is impossible, because the police are telepathic.

11. John Smith and the green-tentacled Alien stood facing one another, both alone, both unarmed. The fate of the Galaxy was dependent upon the outcome of the struggle between these two individuals.

The Slick Field

1. Jane Smith hears from a gossipy friend that her husband, John, was seen lunching with that new French secretary. During a so-called “business” trip, John and the secretary were seen together at the Stork Club. There is lipstick on John’s handkerchief, and it isn’t Jane’s lipstick. Of course, at the end of the story it turns our to have been an innocent mistake.

2. Jane Smith is a steno at the Lumbago Corporation. She wears horn-rim glasses and tweed suits, and she has her hair in a bun at the back of her head. Gwendolyn Gloria, another steno, is blonde, voluptuous, and a man-chaser. Jane falls in love with the new vice-president, but Gwendolyn says, “That new VP, Doakes, looks like my kind of guy.”

2A. Jane Smith is a student nurse, a mousy type, and she falls in love with Joe Doakes, a handsome intern. But Gwendolyn Gloria, another student nurse, a voluptuous, blonde man-chaser, says, “That new intern, Doakes, looks like my kind of guy.”

2B. Jane Smith falls in love with the new minister, Reverend Doakes, who really wants to be a missionary in Pago-Pago. But Jane’s voluptuous, blonde, man-chasing sister, Gwendolyn, plans on marrying Reverend Doakes and going with him to the Riverhurst Church, where the country club sets hang out on Sunday mornings.

3. Joe Doakes, who works nights, is kept awake during the day by someone in the next apartment playing long-hair music on the piano. Joe stomps over and hammers on the door, shouting, “Quit that racket!” The door opens, and it’s a beautiful girl with red hair and a terrible temper. She tells him off, and at the end of the story, for no known reason, they get married.

4. Joe Doakes is driving along, minding his own business, when some clown drives right into him. He gets out of his car, stomps over and shouts, “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” The driver turns out to be a beautiful girl who is just as feminine and helpless and cuddly as can be, and at the end of the story they get married.

5. Jane Smith is married to a career man in the Army. She hates the rank-pulling and back-biting of the other wives on the base. She is lonely and irritable and doesn’t fit in with military life, and it is affecting her marriage.

6. Any story told in an exchange of letters.

7. Jane Smith is married to a rising young executive. She doesn’t get along with the other executives’ wives, and in particular she hates the boss’s wife. Her attitude is ruining her marriage, and her husband’s chances for success.

8. John Smith devotes all of his attention and energy to business. He plans to get ahead, to be a big success, and he claims that he is doing it all for his family. But the family (one wife, two children) rarely see him, and in a scene full of pathos and saccharine, John Smith realizes that what his family needs is not so much a new car as a real husband and father.

9. It is Jane Smith’s 35th birthday, and she suddenly feels old. But her husband, John, convinces her that in his eyes she is young and lovely as ever. And besides, they have two children who look, talk and think exactly like the tykes on television, and who could ask for anything more?

10. Johnnie Smith is twelve years old today, and he’s been hinting for weeks that what he wants for his birthday is a brand new bicycle. But nobody even says, “Happy Birthday,” to him and he is sure that everybody just forgot it was his birthday. He mopes around all day, miserable and unhappy, but at eventide out come the relations, the birthday cake, and the bicycle. (A real-life child would have killed himself by noon, but that’s neither here nor there.)

11. Jane Smith is fifteen, plain, and wears braces on her teeth. Her older sister, Gwendolyn, always has millions of dates, and Jane is jealous. She pulls a bit of trickery, and winds up almost forcing one of Gwendolyn’s boyfriends into taking her out instead of Gwendolyn. At the end of the story, she learns that she must be patient. Some day the braces will come off, and she, too, will be popular.

12. Joe Doakes, a traveling salesman for a paper clip company, gets involved in some pretty unbelievable adventures in a small town in the Midwest. The other participants are a local belle and a salesman for a rival paper clip company.

Why Are These Taboo?

This is by no means a complete list, but it should give you the general idea. I have tried, in this listing, to give a cross-section of the stale ideas which are still being rejected every working day of every week in editorial offices throughout the country. If what you really want out of writing is enough rejection slips to paper the den, included above are 36 stories guaranteed to bring you rejects enough to paper the whole house. But if what you want out of writing is to see your stories in print, and see them there regularly, the preceding list is a good reminder of the kind of thing to stay away from.

The Old Switcheroo

One last word. No matter what any editor says, no cliché is ever really dead, and no doubt practically all of the ideas I mentioned above will find their way into print again sometime in the future. But not in the way I have described them.

This brings us to that last standby of the writer desperate for story ideas, the variation, the old switcheroo. If you can take one of the 36 clichés listed above, and give it a brand new twist, so it doesn’t look like the same story any more, you may have a sale on your hands. If you search hard enough in the magazines on the stands today, you’ll find one or more of these variations currently in print.

Actually, it’s much the same as the old two-men-on-a-desert-island cartoon. Every cartoon editor in the business will tell you he’s sick of those two men on that desert island, but there are still variations on the gag being bought and published every day in the week. But for the new cartoonist, a desert island is a good place to stay away from.

Every Wednesday, Robert Lee Brewer shares a prompt and an example poem to get things started on the Poetic Asides blog. This week, write an action title poem.

Well, the commenting hasn’t been enabled yet, but I know that somebody is actively working on it (so fingers crossed it happens today). In the meantime, go to Disqus to create a free new account, and hopefully we’ll have more details to share very, very soon.

For today’s prompt, think of something you can do, make that the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. Possible titles might include: “100 Crunches Before Breakfast,” “Writing at Midnight,” “Walking Through the Neighborhood,” “Smiling on the Inside,” and/or “Sleeping Past Noon.” Hopefully, we’ll soon be able to write our own versions of “Commenting on the Website.” 

*****

Play with poetic forms!

Poetic forms are fun poetic games, and this digital guide collects more than 100 poetic forms, including more established poetic forms (like sestinas and sonnets) and newer invented forms (like golden shovels and fibs).

Click to continue.

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Here’s my attempt at an Action Title Poem:

“Making It As I Go”

May flowers give me hope
that sandal season’s near,
but then cold waves say, “Nope,”
to warming of the year.

If this poem seems lame,
like it’s lacking a flow,
I’m the one you can blame
making it as I go.

Create a scene or short story that is told entirely in one sentence. It could be a one-sentence story, or a sentence that goes on for pages.

Create a scene or short story that is told entirely in one sentence. It could be a one-sentence story, or a sentence that goes on for pages.

For inspiration, see Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann.

It wasn’t, it just couldn’t be. Isadora had a boyfriend, didn’t she? He was probably at that very moment sitting on the bleachers, waiting for her to come onto the field.

I’d always suspected the twins, Greice and Kelli, two stocky blondes with thighs wider than the entire breadth of my body. I don’t know. Maybe it had something to do with how they walked, with how thick their legs were, but Isadora wasn’t like that at all. Isadora came to practice with manicured nails. She had a Malhação notebook with Cláudio Heinrich on the cover, the height of heteronormativity. We were fourteen, fifteen years old and we all believed blindly in horoscope magazines. We were girls who did supposedly girl things. Was soccer a sign? I don’t think so, nearly all the girls had boyfriends, except for Greice and Kelli, and I didn’t have one because I was a puta, as they used to say, I hooked up with everybody.

The truth is I didn’t even like soccer. I liked handball – or ãndebóu where I’m from – but stopped playing because some asshole kept calling me a lesbian, claiming I rubbed up against her during matches. On my mother’s life, I was not a lesbian, and I wasn’t attracted to her, either; she was way too ugly for my nonlesbian tastes. But Ariela, now she was really something. She used to fly into the zone, ball in hand. I’d watch her movements in slow, near-ethereal motion: Ariela with her long legs, bending as if in a classical ballet sauté, muscles tightening before expanding, flying, breaching the zone, her arm rising, veins popping in her fists as she bit her lower lip, then released the grip in her hand. A cannonball. Ariela was left handed, which confused people. On account of the ogre who was always calling me a lezzo, I became a goalkeeper to ward off any awkwardness. I was a great goalkeeper, a brilliant one. Except every time Ariela rushed toward me, everything disappeared, and I froze in her gaze. Marco, our after-school coach, always got really ticked off. He always put me up against Ariela because I was the best goalkeeper and she was the best wingman. I lost count of the balls I took to the face, the belly, I lost count of the broken fingers – but it was all worth it. At the end of practice, she’d hug me and tell me good match, fair game. Then she’d run her hand through my hair, plant a crackling kiss on my cheek, and bump me with a really lame punch. It became a sort of ritual for me, and if this didn’t happen at the end of a match, it was neither good nor fair.

Oh, what I would’ve done to have arms like Ariela’s! But mine have always been smooth, unblemished, and hairless, with no veins. Ariela’s arms, meanwhile, were tan and dotted with freckles, her veins popped, and her knuckles were chunky from cracking them so often. My fingers are weird and all bent up these days from being broken so many times.

After the match, we’d sit on the bleachers with the boys. I was hooking up with Diogo at the time, a gangly German kid with a bowl cut. Ariela was hooking up with Felipe, a senior. We’d eat ice cream and then walk up to the park to watch the boys play basketball. My teenage years were chock full of sports and activities I wouldn’t even dream of doing today. I don’t know if the school encouraged us or if all the teens there just happened to like sports, but the fact is we always came out on top at the intramural tournament. We were hooked on games. I remember once cutting class with everyone to watch Grêmio and Ajax play the 1995 Intercontinental Cup. The gremistas suffered through the entire game, while the colorados spent the match rooting against every ball that entered the box. We lost in penalties. Four to three. The ogre who was always calling me a lezzie ratted on us to the guidance counselor, all because she hadn’t been invited. The next day, everyone was in the principal’s office, explaining themselves. Parents apologized to the principal and teachers and vowed it would never happen again.

The day after the event, Marco asked me if I wanted to play soccer. I said I’d rather watch soccer on TV, at home during class. He tried to feign annoyance, to act like he didn’t agree with what we’d done, but instead he laughed at my joke. I said yeah, I’d like to play soccer, so he sent me to tryouts at a soccer club in the city starting a women’s team. I showed up at the scheduled time and took the physical as well as an unbelievable written test on general and sports knowledge. The following day, he asked if I’d been selected as goalkeeper, and I said no. He pulled a saddish face, in solidarity, I think, and said maybe next time. Then I told him I’d gotten picked for offense. Jersey number nine. He looked at me, intrigued, and cracked a satisfied smile.

Isadora was number ten, Tui eight, and Rose eleven; Greice was five and Kelli was two, Simone was four and Jana was goalkeeper. I don’t remember the rest of them. That was my soccer team. We traveled together and struck up friendships with girls on other regional teams. We had games almost every weekend. We were awful, but it didn’t matter. It was cool to travel to a different city every Saturday and celebrate goals with pileups, hugs, or jumping around. There, I wasn’t ‘a gross lesbian who rubs up against people’ – there, I could touch people without fear of a stupid nickname.

A little while later, I bumped into some of the girls from the Parobé team at a gay party. Daphne Teco-Teco was shocked to see me. This was a long time after I’d stopped playing, about three or four years after, I think. She asked me what I was doing there and if I knew it was a gay party, and I said I knew, that was why I was there, so we laughed and she slapped me on the shoulder like she wanted an explanation. I just smiled and asked her to be patient, I didn’t really feel like telling my story then. She pulled me up onto a small stage and said she wanted to introduce me to someone, her girlfriend. She looked over at the dance floor, then toward the room’s darker corners, and pointed out a tall blonde leaning against the bar, her back to us. We jumped offstage holding hands. She dashed off, tugging me along, and introduced me to Sandra. I looked at Sandra, who nearly choked on her drink. She greeted me and said my name as she coughed with surprise. Sandra, the ogre who’d called me a lesbian at school. I laughed and said she should’ve paid closer attention to the hints she’d dropped me, and I swore I’d never, ever rubbed up against her in handball class. I wasn’t even aware back then of my feelings for Ariela. Another day, I found Ariela on social media. She was a lawyer, married, with kids. No way, I thought. I thought of a bunch of things that day, the paths our lives had taken, then looked up the other girls on our team whose full names I still remembered. Apparently, I’d changed the least out of all of them. Might just be my impression, though.

I went to Isadora’s profile and saw a bunch of photos of her and Kelli. They were married. So my eyes hadn’t been playing tricks on me back then. Their passion for each other had always been there. I thought of the day I’d gone back for my shin guard. The whole team was warming up on the field, kicking a ball around. Except for Kelli and Isadora. Walking into the locker room, I heard the shower running. There were slats at the bottom of the stall door, and through them I glimpsed four legs in a tangle, a pair with rounded ankles that surely led to Kelli’s thick thighs, and another pair with Isadora’s manicured toes.

 

‘Thick Legs’ is included in Natalia Borges Polesso’s collection Amora, translated by Julia Sanches and published by Amazon Crossing.

Image © Rene de Paula Jr

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