Lanz and the Court of Enquiry: a writing group for anonymous authors and nonymous critics

I've mentioned this once or twice and thought I'd give it a try. It's a quarterly writing group where you may submit your works for anonymous publication, followed by feedback and criticism from all and any ilxors. It will work as follows:

• it will be primarily for creative writing, but initially I shan't be fussy
• it's for fragments, scenes, or short short stories; 500-1500 words feels about right
• email them to: ismaelklata at gmail dot com

• each will be assigned a nom de plume and published on an open thread
• criticism will follow; there will be an obligation to be constructive, but no obligation to only be nice
• you may out yourself if you wish, but need not do so

The group will commence in April; the deadline for submissions is [I]31 March[I].

As he could not inquire for the Court of Enquiry he invented a joiner called Lanz - the name came into his mind because Frau Grubach's nephew, the Captain, was called Lanz - and so he began to inquire at all the doors if a joiner called Lanz lived there, so as to get a chance to look into the rooms.

It turned out, however, that that was quite possible without further ado, for almost all the doors stood open, with children running out and in.  Most of the flats, too, consisted of one small single-windowed room in which cooking was going on.  Many of the women were holding babies in one arm and working over the stove with the arm that was left free.  Half-grown girls who seemed to be dressed in nothing but an apron kept busily rushing about.  In all the rooms the beds were still occupied, sick people were lying in them, or men who had not wakened yet, or others who were resting there in their clothes.  At the doors which were shut K. knocked and asked if a joiner called Lanz lived there.  Generally a woman opened, listened to his question, and then turned to someone in the room, who thereupon rose from the bed.

"The gentleman's asking if a joiner called Lanz lives here."

"A joiner called Lanz?" asked the man from the bed.

"Yes," said K., though it was beyond question that the Court of Enquiry did not sit here and his inquiry was therefore superfluous.

Many seemed convinced that it was highly important for K. to find the joiner Lanz, they took a long time to think it over, suggested some joiner who, however, was not called Lanz, or had a name which had some quite distant resemblance to Lanz, or inquired of their neighbours, or escorted K. to a door some considerable distance away, where they fancied such a man might be living as a lodger, or where there was someone who could give better information than they could.  In the end K. scarcely needed to ask at all, for in this way he was conducted over the whole floor.  He now regretted his plan, which at first had seemed so practical.

As he was approaching the fifth floor he decided to give up the search, said good-bye to a friendly young workman who had wanted to conduct him farther, and descended again.  But then the uselessness of the whole expedition filled him with exasperation, he went up the stairs once more and knocked at the first door he came to on the fifth storey.  The first thing he saw in the little room was a great pendulum clock which already pointed to ten.

"Does a joiner called Lanz live here?" he asked.

"Please go through," said a young woman with sparkling black eyes, who was washing children's clothes in a tub, and she pointed with her damp hand to the open door of the next room.

this is a great idea.

We have excelsior already

I hope so xp. I had a writing group for a while and the criticism was the most useful part; it feels a bit awkward, and with luck the anonymity will help with that, but getting *and making* very specific comments on what works and what doesn't is a really good exercise.

Ppl should post their best ilx posts, every day is judgey art day imo

can't wait to have my prose critiqued by someone who has read 14 wheel of time novels

Three times, son

Another cool thing about my writing group was that we passed copies round then read our own piece out loud - sometimes you'd find the subconscious was working overtime and you'd be reading subtly different from what you'd actually written, always to your advantage.

We can't really reproduce that here though.

the best thing you could do is force everyone into a schedule and then give us bad grades if we don't submit on time

if that happens I'll have The Whipper set on you

"I can't wait any longer," said the Whipper, grasping the rod with both hands and making a cut at Franz, while WIllem cowered in a corner and secretly watched without daring to turn his head.

Then the shriek rose from Franz's throat, single and irrevocable, it did not seem to come from a human being but from some martyred instrument, the whole corridor rang with it, the whole building must hear it.

"Don't," cried K.; he was beside himself, he stood staring in the direction from which the clerks must presently come running, but he gave Franz a push, not a violent one but violent enough nevertheless to make the half-senseless man fall and convulsively claw at the floor with his hands; but even then Franz did not escape his punishment, the birch-rod found him where he was lying, its point swished up and down regularly as he writhed on the floor.

And now a clerk was already visible in the distance and a few paces behind him another.  K. quickly slammed the door, stepped over to a window close by, which looked out on the courtyard, and opened it.  The shrieks had completely stopped.  To keep the clerks from approaching any nearer, K. cried: "It's me."

"Good evening, Sir," they called back.  "Has anything happened?"

"No, no," replied K.  "It was only a dog howling in the courtyard."

Out of interest, the first extract above is 500 words and the second just short of half that. You *can* do this!

Ha

my bantz might have been clearer had i mailed you at the right address IK

Hm, I never really thought about how the anonymity rule would curtail scope for banter on this thread. I'll keep it rolling with public service announcements, of which this is the first.

Has anybody written a murder mystery set at a papal conclave? If not, why not

― herr doktor (askance johnson), Wednesday, March 13, 2013 6:28 PM (1 hour ago)

He's talking to you, ILX

in 500 words? you'd only get to the vote.

Bump. Get honing, and honing, and honing.

I might rehone that one tbh i knocked it out in an hour as a lite flann o'brien exercise

So much for the anonymity idea.

heh, dont worry i had to let ward know who to gun for

if I am a writer, what do I care that there are now some Polish plumbers around? this is not interesting.

― the pinefox, Friday, March 15, 2013 1:11 PM (7 hours ago)

laying down today's challenge

darraghmac, 'kidding' aside, wld hate to think that i might discourage you, or anyone, from creative endeavour, and don't intend to be so snippy here in future.

i hope Ismael doesn't mind if i ask a more general question - do ppl have books/manuals etc, or methods, for creative writing that they find useful or productive? aside from literary criticism, think the only thing i've read on the subject is sid field's old book on screenwriting, which is obv a fairly tangential example

By all means - anything that keeps the thread active, without relying on my inanities, is grand by me.

I can only recall one such book that I've devoured - Robert McKee's Story, also on scriptwriting. It was revelatory to see plot arcs and so on mapped out like that; I'm very much an overall plan type, so it was exactly designed for me. Oh, I had William Goldman's Adventures In The Screen Trade, which was also terrific but the details escape me. I seem to recall a mixture of expositions of what-this-scene-in-Chinatown-is-for, with yarns about movie grosshunds.

Coming from the other direction, I don't recall ever reading much about the minutiae - word choice, character traits, dialogue, etc. I recall some detail things from my writing class though - if this gets off the ground I'll maybe suggest one as an optional theme for each round.

Ward, i looked like an ass, i was in ilf schtick mode for IK's benefit (backfired cos i sent my piece to the wrong address ;_;)

stephen king's 'on writing' is the only thing i've read that vaguely fits the bill, i enjoyed it.

i finally bought former ilxor g00blars phil roth book, looks good~~

― johnny crunch, Saturday, March 16, 2013 11:55 PM (Yesterday)

Take note - g00blar gets his big break on ILX, and now look at him.

'how not to write a novel' is sort of half okay

there's a book called 'the weekend novelist' which is sort of interesting -- it's all about time management!! -- i read the detective writing spinoff, it was awful actually

While I'm mentioning Roth xp, I loved the content and rhythms of this piece on his eightieth birthday bash. Inspiring stuff.

Roth walked slowly out onto the stage, smiling, waving, nodding happily, acknowledging the applause. What followed was a highly finished performance, a written performance by a writer who had declared himself out of the game. Roth has suffered from miserable back pain; standing at a lectern was not for him. Instead, he sat down at a table and opened a black binder. He began to read a prepared text, listing all the myriad Newark particulars that he would not be talking about: the city’s schools and the ball fields; the newsreels at the Roosevelt Theatre; the flags in the windows marking the dead during the Second World War; the factories and the butcher shops. Oh, no, he would not wax nostalgic about going to the fights at Laurel Garden. (“For me, it had the synagogue beat by a mile,” he said. Laurel Garden was where he and his friends could bet a nickel per bout and hear, in the screams of “You bum!” the “coarse libretto for a Newark opera buffa.”) Nor would he go on about seeing Jackie Robinson play for the Montreal Royals against the Newark Bears, at Ruppert Stadium. And since he was retired, he said, he was through describing the work of a gravedigger, the mechanics of a glove factory, the life of a butcher, the fate of parents whose daughter becomes a political terrorist. Realism was his métier, he said, but “I’m finished with that stuff, too!” After listing all the glories of Newark, all the familiar set pieces from his novels, after making sly and constant denials that he would dwell on any of it—a rhetorical move, he admitted, known as paralipsis—Roth finally settled into his real theme of the night: death. Happy birthday, indeed!

...

With that introduction, Roth read pages three hundred and sixty-three to three hundred and seventy of “Sabbath’s Theater,” one of the most stunning passages in all his work. He was not about to let us forget what eighty means. In the novel, Sabbath has gone south (“Tunnel, turnpike, parkway—the shore!”) to visit the Jewish cemetery where his grandparents, parents, and brother are all buried. I will not ruin it for you. To get the feel of the night, you must read the passage in full—or, better, read the novel entire. And imagine that this passage—with its great elegy of gravestones, with its memories of life lived, of a life cut short, and all of it in particular—imagine that this is what Philip Roth chose, very deliberately, as his birthday message, his greeting, his farewell. These were not his last words—please, not that!—but they were what he chose. Death-haunted but assertive of life. The passage ends with his hero putting stones on the graves of the dead. Stones that honor the dead. Stones that are also meant to speak to the dead, to mark the presence of life, as well, if only for a while. The passage ends simply. It ends with the line, “Here I am.”

I'm going to get this up & running next Monday. Anybody interested in contributing - you have a week to bash out a piece.

Today you come back from a run to find her on the stoop, talking to la doña. Your mother calls you. Say hello to la profesora.

I’m sweaty, you protest.

Your mother flares. Who in carajo do you think you’re talking to? Say hello, coño, to la profesora.

Hello, profesora.

Hello, student.

She laughs and turns back to your mother’s conversation.

You don’t know why you’re so furious all of a sudden.

I could curl you, you say to her, flexing your arm.

And Miss Lora looks at you with a ridiculous grin. What in the world are you talking about? I’m the one who could pick you up.

She puts her hands on your waist and pretends to make the effort.

Your mother laughs thinly. But you can feel her watching the both of you.

Junot Diaz: Miss Lora

xxp god, i love that section of sabbaths theater

on the roth topic also, the new documentary on him is also airing as a pbs american masters on friday fyi

I know you've been working hard, shaping these pieces to perfection, and you don't want to let them go. But the time has come to dot those is and cross those ts, and send 'em in. You don't get to finish a piece of writing, you only abandon it.

ismaelklata at gmail dot com by Sunday, please

I have no idea if there's anybody out there; but if there is, you have about 48 hours.

24 now

Takeup has been, ah, fairly underwhelming - so if anybody has a lazy day and an idea, do send me something and I'll put it up with the others tomorrow.