Lessons Writers Can Adapt from Popular Culture

I have to begin with a “writer’s confession” of my own: I’d love to plagiarize Sam’s post from yesterday. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve known I have this blog entry to write, and I shuffled through ideas for it but repeatedly found myself face up against a wall. I still haven’t figured out a way around, over, or through that wall. I wanted to write about that wall — an admission that I’d run into it — and then Sam wrote about her version of it first. I imagine my wall as a tall and long row of brick cinder blocks; I’m flush up against it, it’s scraping my skin raw, and neither of us appears to be moving anywhere. But I’m responsible for a blog post, so we’re stuck with whatever is about to come out extemporaneously.

My friend Lisa, who did not sign up for the Writer’s March this go-round, happily reported to me this evening that she’d managed to do a march’s worth of successful writing anyway. I confessed that I haven’t. I’ve written a good bit more than usual, yes, but not what I had in mind or as much. I told her I was having trouble coming up with an idea for tonight’s post. She’s been working on a retelling of the fairy tale “The Beauty and the Beast.” She said, “Why don’t you write about the Beauty and the Beast of writing?”

“Then I’d be stealing your idea,” I said.

“You have my permission.”

So, yeah, I could write about the beautifully romantic notions of what it means to be a writer — for instance, the glorification of the “starving” artist — and the beastly agony that is the real work, but no, no thanks, not tonight.

I watched Dancing with the Stars tonight. I have learned to love this show. It’s happy candy. This is the only second week of the new season, and the dancing is already notably better than in past seasons. But some of the “stars” are nervous, stiff; their limbs fly every which way, they miss the beat (sometimes most of the beats), they lose their place, and their performance smiles are often coupled with a deer-in-headlights look in their eyes. I like this show because of those dancers, because I get to see celebrities I may or may not recognize doing something different, something out of their comfort zone. And I often get to see them progress in their abilities.

I was talking with a student today (Ava, who is also doing the Writer’s March) and mentioned the cut-and-paste process of revision. You don’t do this on the computer. You take your manuscript and a pair of scissors, and you cut after every scene or, if you’re feeling especially bold, into the heart of the scene. Then you lay out these physical pieces of paper in a new arrangement. You shuffle them again and again until you’re forced to consider new ways to develop existing scenes and obviously new ways to structure the overall piece. Ava shuddered at the thought of doing that to her manuscript, and I admitted I’d rejected the idea outright when my own teacher recommended it to me. It sounded like so much work. But my real problem with it, I know now, was that I was doing something outside my comfort zone. I wanted then and still want to be able to write a manuscript successfully from beginning to end. Dear readers, I inform you that that has never actually happened. Only once did a fairly solid draft of a five-paged essay come out in a mostly usable form. As it turns out, every time I’ve dared make the mess of cutting up a printed-out manuscript and laying out the pieces on a table or on the floor, it’s worked to my advantage — or rather, to the advantage of the manuscript needing scrupulous revision.

I don’t know that I’ve succeeded in making the connection to Dancing with the Stars clear for you. Something about pushing yourself beyond what you’re comfortable with to discover other talents or at least other possibilities, that’s the connection I’m aiming for. Try something you haven’t done before when you’re revising. Rewrite a critical section by hand without referring to the original draft. See if anything new and useful results.

More than anything, I’m thinking about Wednesday, the day after you’ll read this post. Wednesday is Lady Gaga’s birthday. If I haven’t told you lately or ever, I’m a huge fan. No, you’re not thinking huge enough. Huger than that. Now think huger. Okay, you’re almost there. Anyway, for the past couple of years, as each semester draws to a close, I’ve brought up Lady Gaga’s musical and performance abilities in relation to writing. Believe me, it matters not one whit whether you like, appreciate, or loathe and scorn Lady Gaga as an artist. My analogy goes beyond that. It’s this: I admire her because she has a far-reaching grasp of the musical and performance traditions that precede her, yet her work also pushes past existing boundaries and shows promise of great advances. Some view her as a Madonna wannabe, but I hear Prince and David Bowie, Queen and Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen and Elton John, KISS and Liza Minelli, and others too. Some may hear party songs, dance-pop, and see an overmade-up bewigged crazily dressed gimmick of a pop star. I see someone in command of the construction of her persona(e). I could go on. Ask, and I will.

But what I want to emphasize is her knowledge of tradition and her ability to transcend it. I believe that the latter is entirely contingent on the former. Novice writers — all writers — should read, read, read. Read deeply and read widely. Read what gives you pleasure, read what you’re assigned, read what your friends and teachers and other writers recommend, read for pleasure, yes, but also read critically. Study the tradition you’re working in. “Read beyond the syllabus,” one of my professors once told me, which seems the most obvious sort of advice. As you discover kinship with writers whose work you enjoy and/or admire, try to find out which writers influenced them, and add to your reading list accordingly, ad infinitum.

Spend some time this week enjoying and studying the writers who have influenced your work or whom you want to influence your work. Steep yourself in the tradition. Consider why you admire their writing. What themes or techniques inspire you? Which characters live for you beyond the page? Where is a writer’s language most lyrical, most precise? Think about it. Then write.

Me, I’m going to call it a night!

 

“Something Amazing”: On a Prose Writer’s Appreciation of Poetry

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Brueghel, @1558

I began my writing life as a poet. I had just turned eight. A decade passed, more, and I churned out hundreds of poems, possibly close to a thousand. But I was one of those self-proclaimed poets who never read poetry for pleasure or edification; I read only what I was assigned and only for symbolic and literary analysis. That’s as much preamble as I will give at this point. What is important is that in my early twenties, after a few rough critiques by actual poets and people who “knew” poetry, I pretty much put an end to our relationship–or at least the pretense of a relationship I had with poetry. Another decade passed, and I found myself working on a Ph.D. in fiction writing. Ours was not a multi-genre program, so the one and only poetry course I had to take was not a workshop (O, thank you, lucky stars!) but rather a class that went by the daunting title of Form and Theory of Poetry.

The class was made all the more daunting by its professor, a fussy fellow with a fussy mustache who made no secret of his disdain for the fiction writers in the program. His reputation preceded him, and those of us in fiction held off on taking the class until we could hold off no more. He was demanding, that man. He expected us to memorize things about poetry: dozens upon dozens of terms, scansion (not only the metrics but particularly the theoretical aspects), the centuries-long history of the sonnet and all its transformations, metrical and rhyme schemes for dozens of types of poems (yes, there was a time I knew the sestina’s intricacies without having to look them up). He gave us tests. He made us write explications of poems, 20-paged papers detailing every choice the poet had made, and no, we could not use outside sources. Had the poet used internal rhyme, slant rhyme, eye rhyme, and to what effect? If the poet wrote in blank verse, in which lines did the poem depart from iambic pentameter, what was the metrical departure, and what impact did it have on the reading? How was enjambment used? Why, aside from the obvious grammatical usage, were certain caesurae employed? What sort of stanzas had the poet chosen, and what impact did the breaks have? What about line length? Did lines end on masculine or feminine syllables, and why? And don’t forget, under any circumstances, about alliteration and assonance!

I am telling you it was frightening. He was frightening!

Part of what was frightening, as you may suspect, was that I’d abandoned my relationship with poetry altogether. I could toss off a few quasi-intelligent remarks about Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” or Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” but beyond that, I knew very little. I dreaded that class.

Then that dreaded professor read Robert Frost’s “Birches” aloud. He’d assigned it to us for one of our first class meetings, and I’d read it diligently, several times, something about a boy swinging through trees or something. All I could think was how ill-prepared I was for this class; I felt my own ignorance. But when my professor read the poem, I understood it perfectly. I followed along as he with his sonorous, reverent voice made music—no, poetry—of Frost’s words. I even got the joke.

Poetry—it’s from the oral tradition, right, so wouldn’t it make sense to read it aloud?

One of the two poems I was given to explicate was W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.” I confess that I was dumbfounded by it at first, as with most of the poems we read. I was supposed to scan the poem and write a 20-paged explication with no outside sources. I felt like an impostor. I have no idea how many times I had to read the poem—and read it aloud, hearing its music and rhythm—before I started to grasp it. I could pick out its symbols, sure; I’d done that sort of thing bunches of times in high school and college. But what did it mean that Auden had chosen to begin his poem with a line in which the word “they” had no antecedent? What did it mean that he had provided that so-called antecedent in the second line? How did his 21-line poem’s structure echo sonnet structure, and for what reason? You get the drift.

It was a dreadfully difficult class, and much as I came to love the sound of my professor’s voice as he read aloud the poems he had assigned, he remained a dreadfully difficult professor. But damn it, I worked harder than I’d worked in any other class, ever, and I earned A’s on every assignment (this from a professor who didn’t generally give them), and my fiction professor/dissertation director told me he’d gone and praised me behind my back.

This memory came up today after a conversation I had at work with two MFA students in poetry who are set to graduate next spring. I let them know I’d be glad to be on their dissertation committees if they needed another reader. Then I mumbled a disclaimer about how, despite being a prose writer, I’d still be able to give their poetry a fair read even though I wasn’t as familiar blah blah blah. Why, I wondered later, had I taken myself down a notch or two or twenty, diminishing my potential value as a reader of their work? Even though writing poetry doesn’t come naturally to me, the fact is that I know how to read and appreciate it. I know how to plumb its depths. What I learned in Form and Theory of Poetry stays with me to this day, moreso than most of what I learned in my Ph.D. fiction classes.

Today I’d like to share Auden’s beautiful poem with you, one I can almost quote from memory because I long ago had to write that arduous/worthwhile explication. Read the poem aloud, slowly, feeling the music and the meaning of the words. Pause in your reading when you reach a caesura, not when you reach the end of a line. Then have a look at the painting by Brueghel and read the poem all over again.

Once again, I see I’m writing for an audience of prose writers. Poets won’t need the instructions I gave above! But it’s my wish today to have those of us who identify one way or another, poet or prose writer, seek appreciation from a genre we may shy away from. Now click HERE to read Auden’s poem “Musee des Beax Arts”

 

On Loving Your Characters, Especially the Ones You Don’t Like

Disclaimer: I could speak or write at length about successfully creating round characters and earning reader sympathy, but for some reason when I drafted this post Sunday night, this is the angle I took. Upon rereading it, I understand implicitly what I hope I’ve said but remain uncertain about whether or what it might communicate to readers. Ah well, it’s my turn to blog, and this is what came out. –Marisa

This past weekend, I watched the HBO movie Game Change, which covers the months between John McCain’s announcement of his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate in the 2008 Presidential election and his concession speech the night of Barack Obama’s victory. In order to do any justice to what I’m about to write, I have to out myself as a Democrat who pays increasingly close attention to politics as I age. Even though I felt certain that Obama would win the election, I feared for our country every time Sarah Palin made a public appearance. I don’t think there’s any way I can put this delicately: I don’t like her. I don’t agree with her ideologies, I don’t find her well-spoken or savvy, and I don’t appreciate the use of false folksiness to win votes.

It was clear that Game Change was made by people who shared my views. The movie was a compilation of Palin’s Greatest Hits – Greatest Flubs, that is – all drawn from interviews, speeches, and the debate. It claimed to offer a “balanced” characterization of Palin. It claimed veracity in the depiction of events. During her recent appearance on Anderson Cooper’s talk show, Julianne Moore (who played Palin) insisted that she would not have taken the role if every aspect of it hadn’t been “sourced.” In short, the filmmakers wanted the audience to accept the movie as fact, as the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Its reliance on Palin’s public appearances for source material gave credence to much of the film, but many scenes required artistic license: What were those behind-the-scenes meetings with Palin really like? When she stumbled through interviews with responses that were, at best, convoluted, and became fodder for Tina Fey and numerous Saturday Night Live skits, how did she react? The movie imagines those moments for us.

I suppose Game Change does offer something of a “balanced” characterization of Sarah Palin. It shows her toughness and her vulnerability, her ballsy self-confidence even when the pressure was at its most extreme. It shows her in loving interactions with her family and addresses her support of special needs children. But it also shows her in a semi-fetal pose after the debacle that was her interview with Katie Couric; Moore as Palin lies on the floor with a bevy of notecards scattered about her, the very notecards she’s been studying so that she doesn’t confuse the Queen of England with the Prime Minister or the war in Iraq with the war in Afghanistan. Excellent as Julianne Moore’s acting was (and she should start working on her Emmy acceptance speech now), I was thrown out of the movie: How was this scene “sourced”? Who was present to witness Palin slump back against her sofa as she watched herself caricatured by Tina Fey? Who decided to make Palin appear nearly catatonic for days upon days following the Katie Couric interview?

As a teacher and writer of creative nonfiction, I understand the agency of the author’s imagination as he or she reconstructs or invents scenes, dialogue, and so forth to convey the “greater truth” of a story. That is precisely the “creative” aspect of the craft. But as a viewer of this movie, I scoffed at the filmmakers’ claims of factuality in what was depicted. When I saw these obviously invented scenes of Palin’s private moments, I sympathized for Sarah Palin in ways the filmmakers didn’t intend to provoke. Perhaps theirs was a round characterization—they called it “humanizing” Palin!—but it reeked of fiction. And because I teach and write nonfiction, I was appalled at the filmmakers’ audacity in calling this portrayal “truth” or “fact.”

“Based on a true story”? Sure. Accurate? Who knows? I have a feeling there’s no reliable source for many of the movie’s events.

So I wanted to say something about the necessity of loving one’s characters, of constructing them with care – no matter whether they are the stuff of your fiction or your nonfiction. When you judge your characters, it diminishes the integrity of the writing and may throw the reader out of the story. You also run the risk of revealing more about yourself (and usually not in the best light) than about your other characters. Ideally, you want the reader to sympathize with your characters, all of them, because of the care you’ve taken in presenting them, and not because of your conspicuous disdain for them! There is, of course, a kind of writing intended to serve as a mouthpiece for your viewpoints and philosophies – you’re reading that kind of writing now, natch! – but in character-driven pieces, seek to be as objective and multi-dimensional as possible. “The artist must be only an impartial witness of his characters and what they said, not their judge…,” Anton Chekhov wrote in a letter to A.S. Suvorin on 30 May 1888. “Let the jurors, that is to say, the readers, evaluate it.” Today’s challenge is to write about a character you don’t like (can be someone real or fictional, though the former may offer the bigger challenge) and explore what there is to like and appreciate about that person, without qualifications or judgments and without being patronizing.

***

If you’re still reading, I’ll share a little of my review of Game Change:

Possibly the most striking moment … occurs when Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin slumps back against her sofa, the picture of defeat, and watches Tina Fey satirize Sarah Palin in an instantly iconic performance on Saturday Night Live…. The impersonation is brilliant, truly funny. The scene from Game Change is more subtly brilliant. It shows a depiction of Palin that the viewer is supposed to accept as true. In other words, that’s not Julianne Moore dressed and made up to look like Sarah Palin; that’s Palin herself, the real woman, the way she really reacted when she saw the Tina Fey skit. The viewer of Game Change is expected to believe in this Sarah Palin, while the viewer of Saturday Night Live always understands that that’s Tina Fey up there hoping to tickle our funny bones. But both are performances; both are representations of Palin; both capture something of the spirit of the woman this country saw catapulted onto the national stage during the 2008 presidential election; both capitalize on her mistakes and unpreparedness to take on the role of Vice-President of the United States. But Game Change wants its viewer, perhaps, to take its “Sarah Palin” as the real Sarah Palin rather than a constructed character pieced together from interviews, speeches, and witness accounts.

… It was Game Change‘s too-serious desire to be taken as the truth that ruined the movie for me, ultimately.… Every movie “based on a true story” has fictions beyond its disguising and meshing-together of real-life people, its dialogue and scenes recreated for dramatic effect, etc. But despite Julianne Moore’s superlative performance, this uber-serious portrait of Palin is no less contrived than Tina Fey’s and Adam Samberg’s….

 

Let the Object Tell the Story

Good morning from Marisa! I hope the first week of your march is going well!

Ever since I first read the essay “The Aging María,” I’ve been astonished by Judith Ortiz Cofer’s ability to convey in only one paragraph a narrative of three generations of women by focusing on the work of time and the elements on a yard statue of the Virgin Mary. At the same time, the piece reveals something of the deterioration of spiritual faith, and even more about its steadfastness. The essay is a descriptive tour de force, a marvel of concision, clearly situated in place and character. Though only 327 words, its scope is immense. Because of copyright laws, I cannot copy it here, but you can find the story online HERE.

*  *  *

Today, if you are in need of a writing prompt, think about an object you possess that can tell its own story or stories. It might be something quite ordinary that has been around a long time. Perhaps it has symbolic or talismanic importance to you; perhaps it holds sentimental value. Maybe no one else knows its significance—so your job is to recount it. Describe it in lush sensory detail. Reveal its history. Place it in the spotlight, show it in a scene or two, and see whether your focus on it reveals something about your own character. Let yourself write freely and fully; if you get something you can use, you can always go back later to revise for precision and concision.

Though this exercise is geared toward nonfiction writing, fiction writers can also work with it. Think of characters who are defined by the objects they value or are always seen with (Linus and his blanket, Silas Marner and his gold, any one of Tim O’Brien’s soldiers in “The Things They Carried”). In what ways can your characters’ objects help to tell their stories?

Poets, by the way, I do not mean to neglect you. This exercise seems like one you might practice often, in that it asks strong images to carry narrative impact.

Happy writing, everyone!

 

Leap Day Gives Us One More Day to Rest before We March

Hello out there from Marisa! Yesterday I wrote a Facebook post about my resolution to march again this year, if only by myself, and sparked the interest of numerous writers. As it turned out, Writer’s March inventor Sam T. already had plans in the works to get the blog up and going again. I haven’t told her about my decision to take the initiative and add a blog entry today, but here goes.

Sometimes I like to try out my students’ ideas. Someone suggested (using the anonymity of end-of-semester evaluatory forms) that I should continue to give my students new creative assignments once our workshopping was underway and all they were required to write was letters to one another. Okay, so my position is I’m not stopping anyone from going forward with creative endeavors. I just can’t do all that additional grading when my focus is so entirely placed on evaluating workshop essays. Nevertheless, this semester I’m asking my creative writing students to keep an “image journal” — short, tight descriptions of people, places, and objects. One of my teachers back in the day asked her fiction workshop students to do keep such a journal, and by the end of that quarter, I was “seeing” in ways I hadn’t seen before. Ordinary features of my daily life popped and scintillated, pushing forward their extraordinary qualities and demanding to be described!

Later this week, I’ll be writing the assignment for my classes. I may also notify them about this site and ask whether they’d like to participate. Oh, and I’ll try to encourage them not to feel thwarted in their creative pursuits just because we’ve come round to the culmination of our class: the full-fledged ESSAYS!

 

SURPRISE! A writing prompt from Marisa

Hi, everyone, I didn’t ask permission to make a guest appearance, but here I am anyway. Earlier this semester, I assigned the essay “Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn”* by Jonathan Lethem for my intermediate-level creative nonfiction classes to discuss. Their reactions to the essay were mixed, so if you want to read it, I’ll start there. It’s about a subway station in Brooklyn. No, it’s about Lethem’s memories of the subway station. No, it’s about crime. No, it’s about change. No, it’s about the history of the subway system in New York City. No, it’s about…. It’s about all of those things. I rather enjoyed the piece, though it’s exposition-heavy.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I’ll get to the prompt. When I read the first sentence of Lethem’s essay, I stopped and let the memories rise. Then I resumed reading his essay. So here’s the first sentence. If you’re looking for something to write about, maybe this’ll stir something for you:

“When you’re a child, everything local is famous.”

I hope everyone got something of benefit from Writer’s March. I know I did. And I’d like to thank Sam and Randi and the guest contributors for their work on the blog and, more than that, the inspiration to get busy. Wishing you all the best–Marisa.

*My student Matt who’s from NY said it’s pronounced Hoyt-Skermerhorn, if you care about such things (as I do).

 

When Conflict Is a Killjoy

by guest blogger Marisa P.

Conflict is the first encountered and the fundamental element of fiction…. In life, “conflict” often carries negative connotations, yet in fiction, be it comic or tragic, dramatic conflict is fundamental because in literature only trouble is interesting.

Only trouble is interesting. This is not so in life. Life offers periods of comfortable communication, peaceful pleasure, and productive work, all of which are extremely interesting to those involved. But passages about such times by themselves make for dull reading…. They cannot be used as a whole plot.

        –Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

Screw you, Burroway.

         –me, lately

So I’ve run into a conflict with my writing.

I’ve been working on the same novel for years – or not working on it, depending. I scribbled my first notes for it in 1993, began drafting it in earnest in October 1998, and put it through twelve drafts by the summer of 2003. It’s a good novel, good enough. An earlier draft was a finalist in a pretty big contest judged by Pat Conroy some years ago. Joyce Carol Oates read it, sent me some pointers on how to improve it, and invited me to resend it to Ontario Press. Her suggestions inspired my twelfth draft and stalled the thirteenth. Late last spring an essay of mine caught the attention of an agent who’s been in the business nearly 40 years and handles at least one Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. He wrote asking if I had a novel. That got me plugging away on the thirteenth draft, except in mid-July I stopped about 10 to 15 pages before finishing the overhaul of the last chapter. I have to get back to it – I put it in my goals for Writer’s March: “look at the behemoth.”

Notice how I said “look at,” not “finish” or “continue revising it.”

The novel has two narrative arcs, one action-oriented, one psychological. In the first, a twelve-year-old girl has killed her thirteen-year-old neighbor (add a softball bat and white German shepherd to the equation), and months pass before her part in the crime/accident is discovered. She’s a sullen little thing, this girl, and never talks, ever, about what happened. In the second narrative, the overarching narrative, her mother has spent more than five years trying obsessively to reconstruct the events of that fateful fatal day and the events leading up to it. She’s an unreliable narrator who didn’t witness many of the events she’s piecing together, though she more or less has the story right, and her real goal is to justify her daughter’s actions, to find the “rightness” in it. By novel’s end she succeeds in her endeavor, at the expense of all the other characters. This woman, this mother, the first-person narrator of my novel, is a judgmental bitch.

Years ago, years and years ago, I grew tired of living in her head, of seeing my flawed fictional people through her cold, cruel eyes. So last summer when I couldn’t decide what happened on one small-seeming plot point in the last chapter, I put the whole thing aside again.

Then I pitied myself my self-sabotage. That’s what I did instead of writing.

Dear readers, some advice: Don’t be like me. It’s not necessary to stop writing altogether.

Suddenly it wasn’t summer any more, and I was working again, and late one Friday afternoon in October, I found myself sitting outside with some graduate students who were speaking excitedly about their research assignment in Dana Levin’s zeitgeist class. They were so happy generating ideas for it. I couldn’t help wondering what I would write about if I were in the class: “No doubt it would have something to do with Lady Gaga,“ I said.

Within the month, I had 8600 words of a half-draft of my Lady Gaga paper (think meat dress and metaphor and DADT, lots of online research and primary sources). I had a blast working on the thing. Energy! Freedom! But when I realized how very much I had to say on the subject(s)—I imagine its finished form running 15000 – 20000 words – I worried: Where would I send this essay? Who would want to publish something so long?

Such questions can be killjoys.

I’ve grown tired of allowing killjoys to stop my writing. The Gaga paper need never be published. It gives me pleasure to work on it. DADT has been repealed (!!!), and the meat dress has long since rotted, so part of my point might well be obsolete, but so what?!?—I’m happy investing my writing time in this project.

Last month I started a blog about my three birds, who bring happiness and peace to my life. I’ve grown tired of not writing about them just because there’s no major “conflict” to propel a narrative.

Earlier this week, I got out the two novels I wrote when I was a teenager. More than a thousand pages of words in my tiny, controlled handwriting—there’s plenty of “conflict” in these novels, but I didn’t suffer any conflict in writing them. I experienced only the pleasure of the practice of my imagination.

And so to my point, in my usual peripatetic way: Today allow yourself some conflict-free writing. HAVE FUN! Write about whatever makes you happy. Enjoy the gift of your imagination. Write because you love to write.

And if it works for you, try it again tomorrow.

BIO: I am a teacher of creative writing and thus by definition a teacher of dramatic conflict. I am sometimes a writer. I am an owner of three birds and one dog and a bevy of good friends. I like pretty sunsets, full moons, travel, good food, summertime, and idling on my front porch. I like hearing my first name pronounced properly (MaREEsa) and seeing it spelled correctly (one “s”). I prefer as much conflict-free living as possible.