Shelly Lowenkopf's Blog

The Mechanic

2010-01-07T09:21:00.000-08:00

On this day, remarkably, you have "solved" two critical mechanical problems related to your computer. The "solutions" came as a result of protracted persistence, a quality you are barely on speaking terms with. The quotation marks appended to the solved/solution words are there because you are not entirely sure how you effected them. In any case, you have achieved a forty-eight-hour bonding with an Internet connection without having to reboot your cable modem or the mysterious white rectangle called Airport Extreme that receives the signal from your cable modem then broadcasts it wirelessly to your computer, printer, music system, and external hard drive back-up.

You have also somehow resolved the dire warnings received each day from your computer's back-up system, advising you that it has been twenty-two days since your files were backed up. At least, you think it is your computer, sending you these warnings as opposed to the external hard drive. You have come to regard the entire process as a robotic rebellion, somewhat of a piece with the Peasant's Rebellion of the Middle Ages, wherein disparate parts go out on strike, wanting your attention.

Not long before you began typing these vagrant lines, you had another such warning about backing up files, almost reflexively responded with the same approaches you used earlier in failure, only to be informed that, ah, your computer was busily backing up files (that you neglectfully allow to go at risk) and further that you could continue what you were doing without interrupting the process.

Your earlier mechanical problem resulted in what you considered rather snippy notes alleging either that your HP Photosmart C4580 wireless printer was not communicating with your computer or that your printer was already in use (moonlighting?) somewhere else. This had caused you some concern and some asking for favors since this is the precise time you need to be printing out a book-length to submit to a publisher. As you keyboard more of these lines, the HP Photosmart C4580 is busily churning out pages with the reassuring sounds of a machine that has been your friend and is, indeed, the very model of a modern writer's friend.

Although you have accomplished these things, you are not entirely sure how you brought about these conditions, much less could you instruct anyone else to have effected them. In a way that is of itself a linking device, you are similarly unsure how you brought about the final results of the book-length manuscript now transiting through said HP Photosmart C4580 except to say that you had a vision of a reference-guide-type of work, its format suggested to you years ago when a $1.50 paperback book, A Dictionary of American-English Usage (based on Fowler's Modern English Usage) came into your possession. Over the years, particularly once you began teaching, you nourished the idea of doing the same sort of thing for what you considered the language of story telling.

You do not consider yourself the host for the tapeworm of mechanical ability or understanding; unless you were dealing with the bright red Olivetti manual portable typewriter of your late twenties and into your thirties, your persistence or its lack determined your success in dealing with gadgets, tools, implements. It was also your persistence that kept you following the spoor of the story, tracking it until you reached a point where you sensed a familiarity with its behavior and its personality.

At the moment, all is going well. The major mechanical things in your life are functioning as they were designed to do; your book-length manuscript is churning merrily forth, another work is not only in mind, you have hit several seeming dead-ends in its plotting, only to have ridden the vehicle of persistence to some solution that appeared or occurred to you or appeared and occurred at the same time. You are launched into chapter seven of the novel you call The Secrets of Casa Jocosa. True, you are also propelled by enthusiasm, but in its way the process is as uncertain as your connection with mechanical things.

At any moment, the Internet connection could become quirky, the Airport Extreme router demand time off, the HP Photosmart printer begin a maddening series of paper jams; the scene in the works at Casa Jocosa could leave you at a dead-end or cul-de-sac or in the midst of some suburban sprawl from whence you cannot emerge.

Thus this recognition that persistence is best maintained on a steed of enthusiasm.

Point-of-View: Our Inner Control Freak

2010-01-06T13:57:00.000-08:00

It would be nice to be able to say there is a rational explanation for everything, then be done with the matter, confidant that all the many things you cannot explain will continue to take place or not take place in complete innocence of or disregard for the rational explanation. A rational explanation is a sort of neural spreadsheet, plotting out the orderly progression of forces that result in a particular behavior. Water will boil if heated to two hundred twelve Fahrenheit degrees. If it does not, we may assume the water is somewhat above sea level or that the liquid may not be significantly water but rather water mixed with something else. In the open universe, water does not need to "know" this information in order to boil, it will boil at 212 because, as the taxi driver explained to Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, relative to ducks in ponds during the winter, "it's their nature."

Point of view enters the picture with the introduction of rational behavior. Thus does our control freak nature want to take command of the universe; we see the reason for the sun rising in the east and setting in the west and thus does the sun, our sun, as if by permission from us, continue to rise in the east and set in the west.

Story reassures us because there are progressions of facts that appear to explain the behavior of things--us included--on this planet. We lurch through our days, sometimes painfully aware of how much we take for granted, other times painfully aware of how much we do not know about the way things work in this universe. Sometimes, when story has too many ambiguities in it, we snarl the snarl of disapproval because we are already aware of how beyond our control things are. Other times, such as the times when you happen to be reading such eighteenth- and nineteenth century works as Ivanhoe, you are aware of the causal elements being packed in by the author and related as much by the author as by the characters. In its way, such managed reading, which is to say reading that has not evolved beyond its time, makes us impatient because it reminds us of our parents and elders and other teachers, intrusively reminding us of things they wanted us to know.

We become impatient in such cases because we have already, we think, learned these lessons and do not want to hear them repeated to us in a voice other than our own or, if we are truly curious, through the voices of characters who are, after all, creations of authors whose voices we have come subjectively to admire.

Is it fair to suggest that the truths and working descriptions we internalize best are those freighted in our own voice or in voices we have come to respect on a peer level?

You think so.

You think you know, but you're still on first draft

2010-01-05T08:38:00.000-08:00

Perhaps because of your own experiences with your own attempts to learn effective techniques, but also in some considerable measure from your experiences as an editor, you have arrived at a significant dictum: Don't think. You are able with some confidence to tell students about this approach and it is appropriate to note here that you remind yourself from time to time of the discovery. Thinking has caused many stories to lose any sense of immediacy, with as little fizz as a bottle of Wal-Mart champagne. Thinking comes later, after the early drafts have been set forth and must now be held up to the light of your vision, which more often than not comes only after all the available material has been written.

This is another such time, a time to hold up the hand, open palm perpendicular to the floor, that classic gesture of stop--nothing beyond this point. You have begun to think in relationship to the novel in progress. You have even allowed yourself to reach the point of asking yourself questions, the most notable ones relating to the number of characters in the story and of the continuing appearance of points of view away from your protagonist. Each time you begin a work session on the novel, you have the thought of your protagonist scurrying about, trying to keep up with the proliferation of additional points of view, a distraction that cuts into your work time because, having let that genie out of the bottle, you struggle to get your protagonist back on stage. You become the editor for the project before the project is finished.

You already know the answer to the question, Whose story is it? If your protagonist were not in the story at all, the texture of the story would change measurably, possibly devolving entirely to the character who has hired your protagonist to find answers to her major question. In that scenario, she would still need help and the likelihood is that she could only get it from you as intrusive author.

Because this is the week in your review schedule to be working on a Golden Oldie, you have returned to a tale from your distant past, the chivalry and knights in armor landscape of Ivanhoe and your favored representative of antagonistic forces, Sir Reginald Front-de-Boeuf, that quintessential, sneering Norman. You are also painfully aware of the way Scott stops the story with long sketches of detail and observation, addressed to the reader as though the characters were not there or could not hear the intervention. Thus are you loaded against authorial intervention.

Additional thus: You are reminded that the key to this narrative is the universality of secrets inherent in every character. You are reminded that you have, with this story, set out to break a mold, not because you thought that would be all that great an idea at the onset but because of your growing reality that the thing that will hold the story together is the picture of secrecy the story radiates. You are to be reminded that you are on a journey of dramatizing and further that this is not the time for thinking. Not now. Not yet.

Formula

2010-01-04T09:50:00.000-08:00

Before his death in 1999, you managed two or three pleasant times a year of hanging out with Bob Easton, sometimes to talk about writing in general, sometimes to talk about his writing, and other times still about his late, remarkable father-in-law, Frederick Schiller Faust, aka Max Brand.

Although Max Brand had been killed in 1945 as a war correspondent in Italy, he was prolific enough that two novels per year were published until 2001, at which point the publishers had to rely on reprints. Before moving off to "cover the war" as a reporter, Faust-Brand also had a prolific career in films, writing the scripts for his own Dr. Kildaire novels and other assigned features. His formula for story telling, you learned from Bob, was The Good become Bad and the Bad Become Good. You put this to the test any number of times, rereading the Max Brand Westerns and watching his movies.

Over the years, you have more or less strode into your own formula, if you may call it that. It first came upon you as you wrote mysteries, stumbling badly when it came to motive, as in Why would Character A kill Character B in the first place. As your writing moved you a step or two beyond pulp determinism and single-dimension texture, it came to you that a plausible motive could be to prevent someone from revealing information your character did not want made public. It took years for you to work through that calculus to the closest thing you have today, which is: Someone has something that one or more others want for themselves. Although you are still fond of mysteries, are indeed working on one at this very moment, you do not need motivation for murder because, with one or two notable exceptions, no one of interest has died in your stories, even those of a more mystery bent.

Someone has something another person wants. To get into your stories with the equivalent of an A-Pass, a character has to want something. What does she want? What does he, even the he who delivers your pizza, want.

From Iris Murdoch, you learned to string things out a bit, your last mention of the pizza delivery person Fed-Ex-ing you the image of the stringy strands of cheese that afflict pizza in the way ants afflict picnics or, indeed, that the sand from a beach afflicts egg salad sandwiches brought to the beach. Your stringing out, learned from Murdoch, is that Mike loves Mary, but although Mary is fond enough of John to have on occasion been intimate with him, Mary wants Phil, and of course Phil is not quite sure if he wants Mike or perhaps Estelle, or possibly both. Into that particular calculus, you might have Estelle wanting John, but when John starts talking about exclusivity as a parameter of their relationship, Estelle begins to think that Phil looks pretty good. Naturally all these people know one another to some degree. Let's say that John, tiring of the incestuous atmosphere within the group, breaks from the group for a time during which he becomes involved with Phyllis, with whom he more or less returns to the group, only to have all of them discover that Phyllis is either a threat, an object of intense desire, or a combination of the two. There, that ought to give you enough for a novel.

The one time you met Orson Welles in person, he sized up your early twenties swagger, and said, "A writer, eh? Well then, as a writer you should know that you can tall who a character is by the way that person walks. I studied the way old persons walk in order to present myself as a convincing Kane in his later years. You remember that."

You remember.

Finished?

2010-01-03T10:25:00.000-08:00

What does it mean in technical terms to be finished with a narrative?

In the primary sense of having read something, it means having read it as far as you can, either to the point where there is no more information from the author or, even more important, from the characters, or to the point where you simply cannot endure another word of the story. In the case of having read the work through to its physical conclusion, the next step is to blank out mind and feelings to the point of having reached a sort of Zen or meditation sense. Then you wait for the flow, the return of sensation and thought. If you are fortunate and truly enjoyed the story, some senses of satisfaction come wafting in, like the scents of a special meal, emerging from a nearby kitchen. If the first response is thought, you have the equivalent of the canary in the mine shaft having succumbed. Such first thoughts are critical as in, why would character A behave thus? of the even more personal one of I'm not buying that, not for a minute.

The next step is the one of having finished writing a narrative, a point at which you often arrive at with the same sense as having ridden past your stop on a subway. Especially in short stories, you tend to keep tacking final scenes onto a narrative, somewhat in the manner of trying to replace lost screws in drug store reading glasses. From time to time, the story may actually end where you had wanted it to end or where you thought it ought to end. Sometimes you try to fit as many as five or six different ending scenes onto a story before you are able to arrive at that aha moment that tells you none of these "endings" work because the story is already over. Almost without fail, your first response in such cases is the emotional one of bewilderment, which is your own proof that your observation was correct--the story did indeed end here. You are bewildered at not having been able to see this sooner, a feeling often followed by a glow of satisfaction because this was the only way the story could have ended for you and at least some small portion of you recognized this cosmic truth.

Finishing a longer work does not seem so fraught. Something has happened and someone--perhaps you--has changed.

Nevertheless, you hold onto the conviction that endings are removed from punch lines of jokes or anecdotes. Jokes and anecdotes are surely narrative in quality, but you feel yourself to have evolved somewhat beyond that to a degree it may be difficult to quantify but which nevertheless is confident enough to nudge you, let you know if its presence when you are winding down on a project.

The ultimate step is when you have enough stimuli in your mulling over a situation to see within it the potential for story. When you sense that there is a sufficient amount of water falling from the sky, you put on a cap. When you sense enough whirling, mischievous energy to begin investigating, out comes a sheet of paper or blank goes the computer screen in preparation for having at the early draft. Time to stop thinking. Time to start collecting the words before they become alarmed at your presence and take to the sky in a loud, fluttering rush.

Characters: Wild or Farm Raised

2010-01-02T14:25:00.000-08:00

You have to listen to them carefully because they are, in their way, just as human as you are, quite capable of missing important information, once again, just as you are quite capable of missing important clues, hints, implications. They frequently have pleasant if not noble motives, and you must not judge them because their motives are, in your opinion, more on the pleasant than the noble side.

They are your characters, some of them farm raised, others wild, plucked from the seas of your imagination and experience, sometimes even leavened with your motives. You do not, for instance, merely stumble on a story; there is some factor being fed upon that maneuvers the characters from mere shadows to individuals who are caught in some widening inevitability. You are more likely to begin suspecting the lurking presence of a story if you are at the moment bored or defensive or awaiting some event with less than enthusiasm, thus story as distraction from an ordeal or a routine, sometimes even as a distraction from a routine ordeal.

The parts of the mind that are actively engaged in presenting story to you are constantly at work, piling on the coals of enthusiasm. What a lovely conflagration we shall have, you think as these seemingly unrelated moments, these scenes that appear as if in no particular order, as toothpaste taking a vacation from being confined within the tube.

Before long, you have realized they are the equivalent of day workers, men and women looking for an honest day's work for a reasonable day's pay. You will be doing great things for the local emotional economy, keeping these workers close to hand.

It is important to remember to give them a task, which is to express their desires. They don't get the job without telling you.

A final caution: Characters being control-freak types, some of them will want to tell you what theme they bring onto the page with them. They will scurry about, auditioning theme, but they are invariably wrong. You, on the other hand, may be wrong from time to time but with the flick of a delete button, you can solve most of those problems. Theme comes after you've got at least all of the first draft done. It may not even come then, and if you find yourself looking for it as you do your reading glasses or your pocket knife or even your fountain pen, you can bloody well stop looking. If you have been honest in letting the characters have at whatever it is they truly want, you may well have everything you need. Then some reader or critic, perhaps even an editor may approach you with a sly discussion of the theme that so movingly came forth from your story

The bell tolls for you

2010-01-01T11:00:00.000-08:00

With one exception, the individuals you joined at this morning's Friday Coffee were individuals you have known for at least ten years, in two cases, for as long as thirty. The one exception so quickly acquitted herself to the communal ease, lack of defensiveness, and inherent interest in Things that within moments of being introduced to yet another newcomer to the group, she was animatedly in conversation with him on the merits of, of all things, hamburger. You notice such things just as you notice your own body language, the almost recurrent nod. By no means a nod of incipient drowsiness, it was a general, overall nod of agreement with what was being said and your own responses to what was being said.

You were just on the cusp of realizing you were in a bubble and wanting to introduce some outlier into the bubble, in the spirit of stirring things to more of a boil. In fact, you had more or less called the one newcomer to the group into the hamburger conversation with the man who runs two of the finer hamburger joints in the area, just to see what would happen. And yes, truth to tell, you did harbor at first suspicions then hopes that the newcomer was a vegan. Thus too much agreement is a vector to boredom.

When there is too much agreement, you want opinion that causes within you the passion of disagreement. You enjoyed that book? You understood her to have said what? The closest acceptable compromise would be someone dropping into the stream of conversation a trout you could not hope to catch with any of the lures in your toolkit. You want the adrenaline of curiosity or argument or the awareness of having been transported to an area where your ignorance is so tangible that nothing less than full disclosure will give you any comfort, and of course you will have to, as quickly as possible, investigate the sources of the ignorance, a lifelong battle that only becomes more pronounced as you struggle to maintain a minimal awareness of Things About You.

In similar fashion there is the temptation to write about characters and circumstances well known to us, known for perhaps much of our adult life, bringing us to the equivalent of nodding the head in agreement with sister and brother chums, risking the boredom of life within the bubble of agreement.

A significant argument about the writing life or any life dedicated to overt expression is the calculus that sends the aspirant on a vector of loneliness that is directly proportional to the individual acquisition of skills, technique, knowledge. Thus the occasional distraction of meeting for drinks, for friendships of a sort, for romances, for immersion in study, all in the spirit of fulfilling what we think of as basic human needs.

The counter to that argument is that all life is formatted in ways that send the aspirant off on some vector of loneliness, making it possible in one extreme for an individual to be in a room filled with acquaintances and yet still feel the loneliness, and further, filled with scenarios to "do something about it."

On this artificially symbolic day of the first of a new year, your resolution gleaned from these vagrant lines is to strive for disagreement with yourselves, persisting in the development of a howling dissent, a love of argument, and an ongoing alert for opportunities for mischief. It could be said that these sentiments are close on the heels of having read another Jim Harrison and, thus, a reach of an identification with some of his unlikely characters. On the other hand, some of the most unlikely characters you know share the same inner landscape you do. They may be trying to get your attention, draw you into a situation where a few polite nods will get you in the game, but where disagreement and mischief hold the upper hand.

Formula for disaster

2009-12-31T10:00:00.000-08:00

He was your first creative writing teacher, who had not only admitted you to his class when you were a mere tenth grader, he habitually wore double-breasted suits. He took you across the street to the drug store lunch counter, expansively ordered a round of cherry Coke, and proclaimed with an emphasis that vibrates to this very day, "Formula. If you learn the formulas, you will have no trouble." He gave you his tattered copy of Stanley Vestal's Professional Writing, which, he assured you, would help you learn the formulas. For starters, he initiated you with the mantra, Shoot the sheriff in the first paragraph.

Sometime later, you'd heard of a remarkable writing teacher at Los Angeles City College. With the first of a series of forged documents that would thrust you through your late teens, you sneaked enrollment at City College, therein to forge your craft. If there is a gun mounted on the wall in Act One, the gun should go off at some time during the play, you were told. You were also told that Ibsen and Chekhov knew story.

A few years later, when you were at City College under your own steam, the same instructor wanted to know if he'd met you somewhere before. He was particularly insistent that you understand rising action and denouement. At the time, you were not the best speller. Learning denouement meant learning how to spell it.

At about the same time, with equally forged documents, you frequented the lounge of The Garden of Allah, a Sunset Strip version of a residential hotel, famous for F. Scott Fitzgerald shenanigans and an abundance of screen writers. With the typical assumed sang froid of a teen-ager attempting to pass, you ordered such potables as vodka collins, Pimm's Cup # 3, and at one point, B & B over ice, that is, until a man named Frank Fowler braced you with the incontrovertible fact that ordering such drinks was a fatal tell that you were under age. From that point and for some time to come, you developed a taste for Jameson's and for either Old Rarity or Chivas Regal. "Never," he warned, "let me catch you drinking Seagram's Seven or Johnny Walker." Frank Fowler was operating on the forged documents of a pseudonym, having decided to call himself Borden (after the milk of Elsie fame) Chase (after the bank of bailout fame). He actually took the time to read a few of your things, giving you such helpful advice as reframing classic stories as he had reframed his most durable work, Red River. "Where the fuck," he asked, "do you think I got the idea for this story?" You waited a beat too long, hopeful for an impressive answer, which meant in those days a show-off answer. "It's fucking Mutiny on the Bounty," he said with triumph, "set on horseback." You will not do well in Hollywood, he said, until you learn how to copy and disguise the traces. In later years, you came to realize, having read much of his work, that he did considerably more than copy and disguise, but then, as you'd taken to vodka collinses and Pimm's Cups, you were sure that the future was paved with formula. Even though you could recite many of them, such as the formula for confessions (sin, suffer, and repent), of the formula for general fiction (a likable character struggles against great odds to achieve a worthwhile goal), you had the same problems with them that you had with geometry, back in high school. It was only when you had a tangible, practical use for geometry, such as designing books, that it made sense, an extrapolation you eventually took to heart in the way you came at story.

Formula for story is a kind of shorthand in which the observations of Aristotle's Poetics, which are copied and disguised. They are recipes, leading one in the right direction, toward a desired result, but after a life invaded by Chuck E. Cheese, McDonald's, Agatha Christie, and Motel6, you want to add your own ingredients.

"Not know the Confucian Odes?" Ezra Pound once suggested. "Then you cannot know poetry." When you showed this to a musician, he knew what you meant immediately. If you knew blues, you were launched into jazz.

From time to time, in a gathering, you meet up with Formula, and you wave but do not offer to shake hands.

To this day, the best formula for you is the one that goes, In a story, every character believes he is right.

Quirks, Quarks, Quacks

2009-12-30T09:11:00.000-08:00

A quirk is an individual, notional variation of behavior from an anticipated norm. We classify a person, place, or thing, indeed even a story as quirky if it scoots along the boundaries of convention for a last-minute lunge at whim. It is perhaps more useful and convenient to measure quirkiness in terms of what it does not have, such as gravitas. You would never consider a quirky person to have gravitas; integrity, yes; gravitas, no. Just as the white Russian drinks in The Big Lebowski are divided into floaters and mixers, there are two kinds of stories, the quirky and the mixers, the former leading us along in picaresque misadventure, the latter taking a trait or two with which the protagonist is afflicted, then mixing them with conventional denouement.

Quick quirk quiz: Pick five quirky titles from the current bestseller list.

Ah, you thought so; can't be done, and yet who, for example, would have thought at the time that Lonesome Dove would have reached such memorable heights with such quirky lead characters as McRae and Call. And yet. Year after year, we watch McMurtry, trying his dangdest to get back into that saddle, going after quirk the way the class nerd goes after the high school homecoming queen.

A quark is a basic constituent of matter, so basic in fact that it can't seem to get by on its own, needs one or more others with whom to hook up in order to get by in this roiling universe of quarks, quirky writers, and--well, we'll get to that in a bit. The great resident irony that comes from comparing quirks and quarks in the same essay or paragraph is that the more we become absorbed by our craft to the point of recognizing the importance of individuality, the more we are likely to establish some soft of attraction/repulsion relationship (on the order of the polarity of magnetism) with others of quirky nature or, having considered ourselves burned in previous relations, with persons of a more conventional nature. There is, of course, no simple answer, relationships being what they are, but it relates to quirks as it does to quarks that either connection, two quirks or a quirk and a conventional, will provoke story where story is least expected.

Were you to look beyond the simplistic definition of a quark being a basic element of matter, out on a quantum search for a hook-up, you would quickly discover that there are six known types of quarks with such glorious names as up, down, top, bottom, strange, and colors, each with a particular quality and affinity, making you aware that misadventures of attraction are not only possible in the world of quantum physics, they are likely.

You look about you then, aware that the conventional is only a rendition of some statistical average or mean. If you wait patiently, look with discernment, you will find the quirky story to write, the conventional story to render as quirky, the cosmic equivalent of Shakespeare having written The Big Lebowski. Similarly, if you watch with a discerning eye, you will find yourself, as you have noted for some time, drawn to the person most likely to lead you toward unconventional behavior in the throes of which you will produce behavioral quarks and enhance as muscle memory such quirks as you have gathered along your way.

Quacks also have a duality. The most common association with the word is the individual who is an impostor, a phony, an egregious conflation of self-ascribed gravitas, authenticity, and posturing. You know relatively few of these, one in particular you have come to admire in a grudging sort of way, his relentless quackery serving as a role model for the benefits of persistence. There are times when you are in his presence that you want to do what one of your favored characters in Thorne Smith's Rain in the Doorway did, which is to quack loudly as though in imitation of a duck, a lovely, near-romantic distraction for you because of friendships you cherished in your late teens and early twenties where you and your chums co-opted the very service organization Smith had created, The Kiarians, using the trope of a duck loose in the room as a glorious way to distract yourselves from convention and boredom. At one point, you and your compatriots would seat yourselves in different locales in a movie theater. When the performance reached a dull or overly predictable stasis, one of you would call out, "Is there a duck in the room?" To which from the other side of the theater would come the discovery, "I heard a duck over here." From that point, teen-aged humor hit high gear, a gear you are still ambivalent about having outgrown--a constituent perhaps of your own quirkiness.

When you first discovered Holden Caulfield and his own response to phoniness, you had some faint hope that there would be more, that he would show an understanding or approach that would keep him memorable as a guardian against the tsunami of duality that emerges with the progression of experience. But he was headed toward the kind of breakdown you hoped to avoid. In a sense, quacks have taught you to be wary, first of the quack within you, then the quackery about you.

It may seem to you when you look this essay over for potsherds and artifacts that you considered yourself at this point to have achieved some sort of detachment and/or understanding of The Way Things Work, but this paragraph is intended to remind you that your understanding is still waiting for an explanation. In your took kit, along with the awareness of Quirks, Quarks, and Quacks are the tools of wariness and mischief, which may not quite yet have gotten you into as much trouble as a writer can experience.

Comfort Foods, Comfort Reading

2009-12-29T08:38:00.000-08:00

Although there are many foods you turn to for the added bite of emotional encouragement they may provide--corn bread comes to mind as does chili, the fried egg sandwich, cold spaghetti eaten from the fridge, and that great ethnic dish from your father's side of the family, egg noodles with diced cabbage sauteed in butter--there is one comfort food that towers over the other contenders: creamed tuna on toast. In its ideal iteration, it is a chemistry of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, a small can of Brandywine sliced mushrooms, a can of Chicken of the Sea tuna, and a can of petit pois peas, served over two toasted slices of, ugh, Wonder bread or, better still, the tangy rye bread available from the closest delicatessen.

As your sensitivities and awareness grew over the years and you did not have your mother to prepare such a dish, you experimented variously with the sauce, even dallying as far away from cream of mushroom soup to Hollandaise made from scratch, fresh mushrooms, either fresh or frozen peas, and tuna of Japanese origin. At the very least, the bread would be sour dough, perhaps even a ficelle split lengthwise. No question that the taste and nutrients were vastly improved, but the old comfort, the pre-puberty comfort, was off on vacation.

It came to you in later years that the dish was born in the Great Depression, its purpose to fill you, supply you with protein, and accomplish its goals with a minimum of expense in similar measure with Kraft Dinner, an ungodly mixture of macaroni and cheese, the mention of, to this day, causes within your lower regions a stir of protest.

At one point, long after you had moved out of the parental lodging and, indeed, out of Los Angeles, you habitually stopped for a visit after class. On one such visit, you were offered your choice of delectable entrees for a late supper and when you chose creamed tuna on toast, your mother said, almost reproachfully, "I don't know why anyone would eat that." It was then that you realized how it had been a product designed to render you safe and secure and so, no wonder it has become the quintessential comfort food.

There is comfort reading as well, to the point where you have at least three of them downloaded on iPod and on your new Droid phone. You guessed it, Life on the Mississippi, Roughing It, and Huckleberry Finn. They also nourish you in times of woe or weal.

In recent years, you have added Louise Erdrich, based entirely on Love Medicine, then ratified over the years by a dizzying display, most recently The Plague of Doves, but by no means to forget The Painted Drum. And now you have cause to add yet another, whose work seems to you to combine both the food and the reading. This is, of course, Jim Harrison, whose most recent, The Farmer's Daughter, has sent you over the top. In the past, you have essayed some of Harrison's food suggestions, starting with the one you thought to be the most difficult of all to accommodate, the Spam and onion sandwich. Although a bit salty to your taste, the first bite produced an awareness that there was a chemistry at work here, one that could ease considerably any thoughts of vulnerability you might have for yourself and the orb on which you live.

Dream, when you're feeling blue...or pink...or maybe even green

2009-12-28T08:36:00.000-08:00

Just past two-thirty this morning, you were tugged gently from a dreaming sleep by the sound of a muffled bark, which by your reckoning had its source at about the ten o'clock position, meaning Sally had shifted from her seven o'clock position on your left. Added to your computations was the absolute certainty that the muffled bark was occasioned by a dream Sally was experiencing. Simply put, she does not muffle barks in a waking state. Her waking-state barks are Wagnerian in their ceremonial outrage. You lay there for a time, wondering about the possibilities of her dreams. She soon muffled yet another bark, then sighed heavily, a sign that she, too, was now awake. Another heavy sigh, then the light clink of her medallions clinking, then a series of scratches, paw against cloth, as she moved from the new bed at ten o'clock to the old bed at seven o'clock, sighed once more, then slid back into sleep.

Are dog's dreams sight oriented or do they dream in smell? The easy way out is to say the answer is a combination of both. Although you have had some dreams in which smell played a role, it is more likely that you will feature sight and sound. In fact, some time later, you "heard" Sviataslov Richter "playing" Ravel's Jewels in the Water. Perhaps Sally "hears" me, for instance, calling her or merely talking to her. Perhaps.

The mystery of another being's dreams is an intrigue for you, a narrow cusp that may quickly give way under your weight, bringing too many recitations of dreams and even more interpretations of what these dreams mean. Nor are you overly interested in such meanings or symbols that may inhere in your own dream life unless, of course, they directly relate to that dreamy state in which you, to some degree asleep, are still working on the story or essay of your waking hours, applying the trial and error of rehearsal or running options, hopeful of finding and remembering one for use in the light of day (or the bulb-lit light of night).

Dreams seem to be surreal, things seeming funny or sad or frightening that do not translate to their waking humorousness or sadness or fear, as though some resident emotion were providing the mixed-metaphor of a musical sound track.

Your favorite literary dream is the opening line of Kafka's Metamorphosis, set forth only as "After a night of uneasy dreams..." We can more readily relate to a night of uneasy dreams than we can to the entire scenario of them, thus the great clue emerges from Kafka's use of the word "uneasy." The very lack of specificity allows you a closer grip on what Gregor Samsa must have been undergoing as he transformed from a sensate human to something quite other.

Sometimes, in the midst of a particular dream, you have the authorial knowledge that the event taking place in your senses is the most glorious of wish-fulfillment, at once tinctured with pleasure and the naughty knowledge of possible taboo--yet you allow the dream to scroll forth, wanting to carry the flaunting of the taboo to its conclusion.

Dreams in that context are the secret taboo-breakers we carry about with us, fanny packs for our daily hours that contain ever so much more than cell phones or bottled water or Balance Bars. With these secrets in attendance, we can stand tall against the gravity of the day's events. Daydreams are a close second, bolstering us against the wolves and coyotes of loss, disappointment, and grief that track us with those splendid noses and ears of theirs. Daydreams allow us to stand tall; the moment we break and run, we send these wolves and coyotes a signal that we are vulnerable. In simple truth, they are faster than us; we are taller than they.

Places you'd not think to go except in reading

2009-12-27T08:40:00.000-08:00

Two of your favored living writers consistently produce stories set in places you have not set high priority on visiting. Yet in each case, as you read, you are not only transported to these landscapes to the point where you can feel and understand them, you also find yourself shifting priorities, visualize yourself traveling to the reality of these places in order to experience that very real landscape from which the writers drew.

One of these writers is Jim Harrison who, like the mythic creatures is only half man. His other half could very well be peppermint schnaps or music or fishing or scenery or some form of animal or even literature both ancient and modern because Harrison surely is all these things, knows about them and their effects and the driving forces that motivate them.

The other writer is Louise Erdrich who, in many ways, reminds me of a Navaho weaver, compulsively yet comfortably seated before her loom, turning out pattern after pattern, replicating in yarn the fixed form of sand paintings, all of which have the mystical power to heal, cure, provide understanding of the things we see about us in this world.

Unlike other writers from whom you have drawn influence, these two do not cause you envy by their technique, although the technique of each is simply stunning; they cause you to envy their vision of the universe and the individuals who haunt it. In a real and remarkable way, the characters of Harrison and Erdrich are haunted by their dreams, their awareness of other individuals, and by the landscape about them. They are affected by animals and mountains and trees, by times of day and the heat of desert, the persistent cold and slush of snow. Their words appear as though spun from looms, immersing you in patterns that seem familiar until they draw you into their uniqueness. If it were possible to experience religion as you experience their stories, then you would be a religious person because then being religious would seem to you a tangible, reciprocal system instead of a mosquito swarm in which you were valued only for your blood.

At this moment, you are a third of the way through Harrison's latest effort, a collection of three novellas. The first is set largely in Montana, with a side trip to Arizona. You have spent considerable time in Arizona but most of what you have of Montana comes from Conrad's descriptions of it, and from his son, BC3, and his book, Ghost Hunting in Montana. Now you have Harrison's Montana. You met in this first novella an ensemble of characters you more or less expected and, with a little extrapolation from Annie Proulx's stories of neighboring Wyoming, you would be willing to spend time there in reality, already knowing the heartbreak of not finding the Harrison and Proulx characters but rather the persons and landscape you would encounter by chance. And there it is in a nutshell: Such writers as Harrison and Erdrich and Proulx break your heart page after page because of the way they have drawn characters forth from their real-life counterparts and presented them to you as relatives you did not know and will now enter into love-hate relationships with.

If there is such a thing as a true antagonist in the first of the three Harrison novellas, it is probably Karl, a youngish, smart-ass cowboy. Although you find no redeeming social values in him, nevertheless even he represents a social presence you recognize and, when he and they get what Booth Tarkington referred to as comeuppance, a portion of your psyche wants to cheer. This cheering is not for revenge so much as it is for a celebration of the basic Social Contract..

Your novel in the works owes its present format to Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves. There is a character coming up in the second Harrison novella that could very well bear some influence on the protagonist of your novel in progress. Other elements and influences are gifts happily received. The only certainty of which you are now aware is that both these writers provide ample gifts for the close reader.

Thanks for the Memory

2009-12-26T08:49:00.000-08:00

You, it appears, have a quirky memory. In yesterday's New York Times op-ed section, the economist Paul Krugman got off a nice rejoinder about lunatic Republicans, using the trope There's no sanity clause. This took you back immediately to a moment at least sixty years in the past, from an old Marx Brothers movie, A Night at the Opera, in which Chico and Groucho were in the midst of a riff on contracts. During the course of the riff, Chico uttered the line, "Everybody knows there's no sanity clause." Krugman's deft, Christmas-day use of the pun was effective; many of the news and opinion bloggers you follow caught it, remarking on its originality. You even Twittered one of them with the citation.

Twice during a prolonged afternoon lunch conversation with Barnaby Conrad and Sandy Vanocer, you were transported back to events you'd witnessed or had read about in order to supply a slight correction to the record, an unintentional role you played as historian. True to form, Conrad commented on this trick memory of yours. Even though Sandy's reminiscences of his past as a newsman were interesting and vivid, you were drawn into the on-going debate within you about the nature of memory, particularly the awareness that your memory of an event is tinged with the colors you impart and may well differ from the memory of another who experienced the same event. Sometimes the difference of the memory resides within the nuance of a particular word. You, for instance, always thought of David Brinkley's voice as wry and amused. Sandy, who knew Brinkley personally and worked with him considered his voice dry and bordering on incredulous. Other times, although the memory comes to you wrapped in more than one sense, say visual and aural, or visual and smell, you wonder if the memory took place or that you are remembering your invention of it, life, as it were, lived as though you had wished rather than as it actually happened. And then there is the not inconsiderable use of that word "actually." Actually means really, or existing as a matter of fact. Compare actual with fictional. Did it happen or did you invent it? Much of your writing life has been focused on invention, in some measure because you felt that not enough of note was happening to you in real life, thus your need to invent it. Possibly because you were not satisfied with the outcome of things in your real life, you sought to rearrange the furniture of events to better suit your sense of self. Possibly.

Can you trust your memory? With some exceptions, the answer is yes, particularly if the memory is of a formula, a mantra, a fact that can be easily checked against two or more sources. Can memory in general be trusted? Well, that depends, and thus does a boundary line emerge between fact and fiction, between participation in an event and self-interest. That wasn't your idea, someone tells you, that was my idea, in a grand sense taking possession of the memory. You experience a squeeze of irritation, knowing it was in fact your idea, in effect wrenching the memory back from an individual who has been suddenly transported from the ranks of family, friend, lover to opponent in the Monopoly game of memory. Then an interior voice speaks to you, Screw it. Let him/her have the memory. You know the truth. Thus in one mighty concession, you have become bigger, more humane in your own eyes, a tower of empathy. You know with rigid certainty that you would never give a woman a gardenia. More likely you would have given roses or camellias but never gardenias. Of all the flowers you know and admire, the gardenia is so far down on the list that you would not even think of it much less give it. If she wants to remember gardenias, be my guest. Thus you are delivered to the nobility of allowing her memory of an event to vibrate reality for her. But you know better; you know the truth and of course, storyteller that you are, you live in the memory of truth.

So then, all the stories you tell of yourself are true? Well, you have a point there. Although he had no say in the mentorship, you have taken the memories of being mentored by Mark Twain, and he has indirectly whispered in your ear that making yourself the butt of a story can work wonders with an audience, even more so than making yourself the hero. In fact, making yourself even slightly heroic tends to heat up the room with the boredom factor. The eyes begin to roll upward, the yawns, at first stifled, tend to break through, and there, you've done it again, you've committed the act of boring an audience.

What emerges in any discussion of memory is the literary equivalent and mixed metaphor of the political football, moved up and down the grid at will and whim, one major truth being that we cling to memories as the dear and defining gifts that they are, incredulous that anyone would think to take them away from us or supplant them with their own.

Share, share the fame

2009-12-25T09:05:00.000-08:00

On those days where you have early classes or meetings with clients, or some household transaction of necessity, you may easily find yourself arriving at ten-thirty or eleven o'clock as though on automatic pilot. True enough, you are likely to be coping with your own moods and the moods of others, making eye contact, ingesting information (and coffee), processing relevant information; you are in your behavior anything but an automaton. And yet, there is a part of you missing.

The missing element makes itself known in a manner similar to a cat wanting to come in, then go out, or a cat wanting to go out, then come in. The missing element is the more gradual awakening to such gradual steps as Sally requiring a shot at the back yard, putting on water and milk for coffee, discovering where it was you last had contact with your trousers, considering your list of priorities for the day ahead, even toying with vagrant ideas that may be related to work you have undertaken or are in fact contemplating.

You read somewhere--Natural History, perhaps,or The New York Times, or Scientific America, or even The London Times Literary Supplement--that the individual is coping with hundreds of millions of sensations and bits of information per hour, minute observations related to the senses and to memory and anticipation, the aggregate of which has a strong influence on the mood and behavior of the individual at any given moment, even such seemingly automatic moments where the individual is preparing emotionally and physically for a morning class, meeting with a client, or need to greet the technician from the cable TV/Internet service provider.

It is your own sense of things that the individual is quite literally sorting out the universe, coping with it, explaining it to himself, much as the quantum physicist is, on a grander scale, trying to explain and articulate for him- or herself the structure and origin of the universe. It is also your sense that you have ventured upon writing as your own personal means for understanding and explaining the behavior of the universe to yourself, setting up trial balances and problems that will help you. One such enigma that presented itself this morning was wondering if post traumatic stress disorder translated with equal, superior, or inferior intensity to those individuals the United States once considered enemy combatants. We will not investigate here the trail of thought that led you to wondering thusly; it is amusing in its own way and may perhaps provide a platform for another essay. You did extend the wonderment to the point of empathy, bringing to your imagination a sous chef in the Viet Nam restaurant on State and Victoria Streets here in Santa Barbara, formerly a Viet Cong, now living and working in apparent comfort in his adopted country but haunted by the wartime memories of things he did to American soldiers in combat and to innocent Viet Nam citizens.

Although you appeared to be turning over elements of a story in the lathe of your mind, you were primarily trying to explain aspects of human behavior to yourself. A number of prompts throughout the years have reminded you of this intent, but the intent seems at times to suffer the same fate as the loose change and pen knives you carry in your pockets, slipping into the cushions of the chair or sofa where you often perch to read or sift through a meal, investigating it as though it had some other hidden information it could reveal to you. There is nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with reading for pleasure or eating for pleasure or listening to music for companionship rather than the potential spectrum of emotion and understanding it may offer. You do, on occasion, read, eat, listen for pleasure, nevertheless gaining more than mere physical nourishment. But you have also trained yourself, for good or ill, to read, eat, listen for understanding.

Writing, particularly in fiction, is a way of dramatizing the conditions for understanding in the kind of dialectic that brings sense to you, a quality of having considered varied, often opposing, forces to the table. The times you most regret are the times when you struck off into the unknown with only one map or guide, meaning in effect that you had no other awareness available to you. When you made choices, even blundering choices, you were more likely to have stored comfortable memories in your toolkit, memories that were not mere clutter but, indeed, tools to help you in future transactions.

For some time, you shied away from processing materials such as this in the defensive position of not wanting to appear to yourself as being selfish in your desire to publish your discoveries. You were haunted in some ways by individuals you admired, whose strengths you aspired to, but in whose lives you saw flaws or missteps you were hesitant to duplicate. As matters now stand with you, publication is neither issue nor problem; you particularly wish to publish the nonfiction work that is now ready to go out into the world, this as a gesture of sharing. There is enormous ego in it, just as there is enormous ego in you, but the enormity is leavened by the awareness that the information, the candied fruits and nuts in that confection, may well be ignored or yawned at. You have the satisfaction before hand of having written and revised in ways that allowed you to enjoy each morsel.

Here you are, then, explaining the universe to yourself, doing so by writing it in one form--nonfiction--or another--fiction--then moving on to the next explanation. In many ways, through a great series of accidents, you have become the teacher you wished to have had for yourself. In this role, you incorporate the positive characteristics of your dreams but you also embody the things in other teachers that enraged, outraged, and bored you. You are all of these as well as all the positive. You do try to edit out the negative, but you are by the very nature of things embarked on a course that leads to disappointment.

From which you arise, dust yourself literally and figuratively, then set forth with a new work, paraphrasing Sam Beckett's "Fail again, only next time fail better," with "Explain again, only this time, explain better."

Mad about You

2009-12-24T09:15:00.000-08:00

Over the years, you have had frequent opportunity to socialize with writers, either in one-on-one editing sessions, impromptu lunches with a group of friends, speaking engagements at writers' organizations, the unflaggingly raucous dinner meetings at the Cafe de Paris, when you were regional president of the Mystery Writers of America, and back in the day when the LA Times was a newspaper, at the yearly celebration for their Books-of-the-Year Awards. In more recent times, here in that exotic bubble known as Santa Barbara, you have the options of the Tuesday afternoon Wet Words gathering, the Wednesday Round Table, the First Thursday Lunch, and of course the Writers' Conference, interspersed with your regular Monday and Thursday lunches with Barnaby Conrad, and the Friday Morning Coffee at Peet's. At earlier times in Santa Barbara, you were invited to Ross Macdonald's (Ken Millar's) Wednesday lunch group, as well as its splinter group that broke the gender barrier by inviting women. In many of these gatherings, fermented beverages were/are available if not an outright staple. There were also invitations from the Santa Barbara Screen Writers' Association, where for a time, and on the basis of having once financed a Volkswagen Bug through the Writers' Guild Credit Union, you were an object of envy.

With such sterling credentials, you believe you understand the permutations inherent in the writer persona, even to the point of seeing aspects of it in your own comportment. It is a particular kind of madness, a landscape inhabited by literary agents, publishers, Quixotic dreams, stunning disappointments and depressions,confrontations, accusations, celebrations, and moments of stunning revelation and insight. Even such unseemly behavior as you are likely to note in a writer whom you hold a particular disregard will cause you in final analysis to conclude, But he (or she) is our writer.

This has long since caused you to suspect that each discipline, say music or acting or dance or photography or fine art, has its own landscape of madness, inhabited by and familiar to its denizens, and in that sense we are as patients in a mental institution, each in his particular ward, sometimes escaping into another ward, say the film studies ward, therein to try the cafeteria and perhaps mis en scene of that landscape as a vacation from our own.

From time to time we are nudged back into the ward of the normal, the un-mad, those men and women who have had to take jobs of some other sort to meet their living expenses or to cope with growing children or aging parents.

By dint of furious work and focus, we have bent the rays of perception and reality to the point where we see a different reality although not by necessity a better one. It is difficult to imagine, for instance, that Franz Kafka could have enjoyed his landscape. Although he may have appreciated it, recognized it, accepted it, yet it becomes difficult to envision him thinking this landscape of conspiracy and uncertainty was any sort of cosmic promotion. Yet still he accepted his landscape and wrote about it, leaving us a legacy we may have, each in our own way, passed through, recognized, and took steps to keep on riding away from it until it was little more than a glow in the rear view mirror.

From time to time, events and persons in the real world will try to talk us out of our landscape of madness, asking questions, needing our help, wanting the comfort of our presence as friends rather than as writers. We accept these calls, secretly aware of their potential for use in our work, but no less ready to be a friend.

Many of us are not recognizably kidnapped by our madness, yet as we spend time with one another or even on a first-time meeting, it is possible to tell. One former student of yours, a remarkably empathetic and generous woman, recognized at some point in her life that her sexual orientation wasn't what she had led herself to believe and thus, like a politician changing party affiliations, publicly switched orientations. She spoke to you of a gaydar, a resident awareness one gay person had for distinguishing not only men from boys and women from girls but gays from straights and bi-sexuals. Writers, you believe, have a similar detector by which one can assess the degree a professed writer has progressed into his or her necessary madness. She's off-the-deep-end-nuts you think of a particular writer, by which you mean she has progressed well along the path she has chosen and is recognizably haunted by her visions, this assessment in opposition to one that indicates she still has some serious hiking to do in order to catch up with her madness.

Fortunately for you, both your mentors were flat-out mad, each shrewdly able to appear in public with the patina of normality, which, you recognize fondly, was not normal at all but rather an uncommonly deep kindness and empathy. Rachel and Virginia have pulled you along into madness in their slipstreams.

In recent weeks, you've been writing letters and filling out forms from various universities for students wanting to enter yet another form of madness, the madness of graduate schools, the on-going madness of the great asylum we know of as the university. In each case, you have found yourself tempted to use a shorthand you know exists and thus in your recommendation numerically relate him or her to the density of nuts in a fruitcake; he or she is in the upper two percentile of nut case students I have known over my career. You forebear to do so; you resort to the quotidian vocabulary, reminding yourself as you do of a mere mortal who has perhaps had a mystical experience, trying to explain it to an audience that desperately wants to have a mystical experience.

If wishes were horses, would beggars get rejection slips?

2009-12-23T12:42:00.000-08:00

For many of those who write with the notion of telling a story or discovering the essential story in the hurly burly of real life, the operant mantra is composed of those two provocative words, What if.

The writer who is as concerned with self-discovery as the telling of a tale is well aware of the glorious possibilities ready to escape, genies from their bottles, when the What if proposition is posed, but is as well aware of the yet more primal formula of I want.

Either of the two existential pronouncements carries with it a weight similar to the quantum physicist's quest for the formula that defines the creation of the universe, and while you wish each player good fortune in this game where quest is the feature race, you have the admittedly cynical belief that answers are never as satisfying as the asking of the questions that provoke them.

What if produces a nice springboard for invention, development, and some sort of resolution. We have only to look at some of the J.S. Bach two- and three-part inventions to see how successful and enduring so many inventions are, removing us as they do from the random collisions of event and intent about us, offering the fictional possibility of a tidy or near tidy result. In a real sense, a tidy result is a final paper from a student, marked with queries and encouraging developmental notes by you and returned to the student without having been thrown up on or urinated upon by a cat, a dog, or both, to say nothing of having the work returned without a trace of coffee spill or the embarrassing hallmark of peanut butter. A tidy manuscript goes directly from the printer into an envelope or box, transported by hands of relative cleanliness, absent of ink, peanut butter, coffee, and not to forget catsup, thence to its destination of literary agent or editor of choice.

I want is a speculation of a prescient perfection, it is desire for a Porsche, the attainment of said Porsche, and not only the ability to pay for the servicing of said Porsche but beyond that the ability not to experience back pains from getting in and out of said Porsche. It is a desire for a particular person plus the unspoken desire that said person will not be a pain in the ass, being instead appreciative of having been wanted in the first place. It is the desire to be published at a particular venue without the need for a full-on conflict with the copyeditor of said venue, replete with such queries as Who he? every time you mention Mahatma Ghandi.

Each--What if, and I want--is in its own way a condition made more wonderful by its seeming impossibility to achieve, because failure to deliver to one's satisfaction and getting what one wants actually keep one writing because of the delicious possibility of the twofer, the realization of the two simultaneously, as in, What if I get what I want?

What have you done for me lately?

2009-12-22T11:09:00.000-08:00

It is no exaggeration or hyperbole to say that you have listened to music for thousands of hours; this statement is true in consideration of a work-week being forty hours, a day being twenty-four, a year being eight thousand seven hundred sixty hours. So exaggeration is off the table.

The hours spent listening to such genera as classical, ballet, jazz, chamber, folk, blues, and film scores renders you only slightly educated. You can often separate Mozart from Haydn or Beethoven; you can surely tell such distinctive tenor saxophone voices as Coltrane, Webster, Hawkins,and Rollins or Getz from one another, and you would have no trouble with various other virtuosi. To a satisfying-but-not-extensive degree, you can even distinguish the particular sounds of seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century music.

If your abilities with music amount to a six on a scale of ten, you could extrapolate your awareness of writing and story at a high seven or eight, looking enviously and with determination toward nine, which is what leads you to the connection between the musician and writer you wish to consider today. Musicians and writers do not, to overstate the obvious, grow up in a vacuum. The memorable composers in either art have grown up hearing a particular sound or set of sounds, recognizing themes, cadences, use of detail and form. These memorable ones have each contributed one or more things to the evolution of a particular zeitgeist, have broken one or more traditional boundaries to arrive at a new, recognizable plateau so that, for instance, hearing the third movement of any of the nine Beethoven symphonies, you could identify him as the composer of that particular symphony, or if you already knew the symphony to have been written after Beethoven's time, you would be aware that this particular segment was influenced by Beethoven.

You grew up in a zeitgeist dominated by Hemingway, although you gravitated toward Fitzgerald and Cheever and Shaw, becoming increasingly aware of Hawthorne and Twain, lurching bumpily over a road crowded with the two O'Hara's John and Frank before you began to discover the nuance and freedom of women writers, major among them Louise Erdrich and Annie Proulx, but not to forget Alice Munro and Bobbie Ann Mason, who in person gave you a shove into what ending a story meant that you had not got from anyone else.

So the question for you to ask yourself and, when the occasion warrants, your students and even into your clients, is this: What thing or things do you do to help your zeitgeist evolve? You could follow up with questions about form and vision. You could even play a sort of devil's advocate role with yourself and with such critics who come along from time to time with pronouncements that the novel is dead, that short stories are too structured or not structured enough, that flash fiction is the future because no one has the patience to read any more than a few hundred words without needing to do something else.

Ah, Mozart, you were thinking yesterday morning while driving to a meeting and listening to Classical KUSC, undoubtedly a piano sonata, if your memory held, likely it was the piano sonata in C, and if your ear was on, the performance was by that wonderful Mitsuko Uchida. Well, you were wrong about her; although the announcer said that most performers except her and the current player tended to render it in the same manner.

Sometimes a story seems to want to fit itself snugly into the zeitgeist you have immediate access to, the one in which you learned to read, the one in which seemingly wherever you turned, there were stories fitting a particular pattern so that you could almost anticipate the outcome before you were halfway there. And so you tell yourself, why not see what you can do to your stories to help them out of the increasingly crowded shopping mall and into a landscape of its own.

Help, Help, I'm Being Held Prisoner in an Uninteresting Story

2009-12-21T16:09:00.000-08:00

Of all the many cautionary taboos brought to the table as warnings to the beginning writer of fiction, the one most offensive to you is the adjuration against writing what one does not know. You have railed against this injunction in classroom, workshop, coffee house, beer parlor, and the hoary redoubts of your own mind. The sheer folly of such a dogma would have deprived the Common Era of its most notable works of imagination, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Tarzan on Mars, and The Bridge of San Luis Rey exemplifying the possibilities, and by a simple extension such works as Romeo and Juliet and Huckleberry Finn. These latter two make the list because in each case the author, a male, does not know from first-hand experience what it is to be a woman, and can only guess, extrapolate, or invent, hopeful of not offending too many women readers who know a thing or two by which to criticize any attempt at a portrait of their gender that has the temerity to come from the male writer.

The better taboo is the one against writing anything for which you have little or no interest, a taboo that in its more general reach can be made to include characters as well as subject matters and locales. This particular taboo is actually useful because it precludes setting forth on journeys where the writer has no stake, no emotional baggage bouncing along, no real concern for outcome or effect. Your own support of this measure is based on the belief that the more interest the writer has in a person, place, or thing--any noun for that matter--the greater the likelihood that some vital and transforming association will want to tag along for the ride. You believe such associations provide greater emphasis and plausibility to the nouns in the story, making them in turn more interesting to the reader. Such an example is in the story, "The Talent" you published some years back in which the protagonist, applying for a job at a university, was sent to have her photo taken as a step in the process. The photographer was reading The Heart of Darkness, a detail you argued with through several drafts of the story, first putting it in, then removing it. What possible effect on the outcome of the story could there be in the title of a book being read by a photographer? The exact number of insertions and deletions of that one detail are lost in your memory's darkest corners, but with the final decision to leave that detail in the story came the answer and thus the conclusion to the story. The title of that book the photographer was reading became the metaphor for the entire story; you were saying then and continue to believe even now that someone entering a university is in effect entering a heart of darkness.

How then, progresses the rhetorical question, does one inject a character, a story, a setting, an unspecified noun, with that quality known as interest? Why, of course, by investing the noun with one or more details of interest to you, or by asking the direct question, What would it take at this moment to interest me in this noun? Then you shut up and listen to the answer that comes, seemingly from the bottom of a well into which your interest has fallen, shouting Help, get me out of here.

Ars longa, vita brevis

2009-12-20T10:26:00.000-08:00

With abundant thanks to the world of the blog and Internet search engines as well as friends who are writers and former students who check in, you have a wide swath of sources--a considerable demographic, in fact-- from which to chose when you want to see how things are progressing for other writers. The demographic is so vast that at times you begin to construct a list of priorities to be discovered in their musings. Some of the favored topics are in no particular order save the order of whim: coffee, agents, editors, persistence, revision, brick walls, self-reliance, self-doubt, coffee, agents, rejection slips, shadenfreude, conformity, copyediting, debts, day jobs, understanding mates, not understanding mates, being published, not being published, fear of being misunderstood, fear of revealing family secrets.

You have had lead roles in productions staring most of these concerns, having worked your way through most of them to the point where you began this form of note-taking, the blog, as a reference point by which you can return to see what you've worked out and which things are still clamoring for your attention, the common denominator being the old truism of ars longa, vita brevis. Your notebooks and blog entries are in a real sense a measure of your evolution, a metaphoric wall or door jamb on which are penciled the heights of your growth along with approximate dates.

It is your view that those writers whose major goal it is to achieve publication are in a bubble just as writers who have been severally published inhabit yet another. Just as you were helped in making the transfer from one to the other, you've had a hand in assisting others, a nice, almost deus ex machina tidiness, but nevertheless a way of paying back favors, a way, to quote from one of your students, of paying it forward.

At focus here is the notion that writing, reading, and talking are functions most of us perform every day, many of us with no thought of improving our abilities either of performance or understanding. For some years, your shibboleth was wanting to be the best writer you could be, then going beyond that, which is about as unspecific as one can get while still preserving the sense of righteous conviction. A drunk in a parking lot brawl has as much if not more conviction. Thus your journals and notes to define what it is you seek and how you intend taking one of the things most civilized persons can do--write, read, and talk--and making a career of it.

One of the things you admire most about your Internet acquaintances is their persistence; not only do their writings radiate the desire to write, their output and the subsequent despair when there is no output serve as tangible evidence of their intent. One writer you know, a former student, has persisted her way into publication, her persistence overcoming what you consider a notable lack of native ability. Another writer you know, slippery and elusive with talent, has avoided publication by a persistent lack of persistence in sending her works forth.

Back to the bubbles: It is your view that those who have not yet articulated such things as what they want to write, what their purpose in writing is, and what distinguishes their results from the results of other writers is doomed to the--watch for badly mixed metaphor here--bubble equivalent of the kiddies' sandbox.

Most of the experienced writers you know, regardless of their age, are remarkable in their idiosyncratic ability to put forth their ideas in speech and writing and to glean from the works of others they read an inspirational level of understanding. Case in point is the English writer Jonathan Raban, who moved to Seattle some years ago and is for all practical purposes bi-citizen, American and Brit. You first came upon him years back, pitched a review of an early book of his paired with the first work of William Least-Heat Moon. Just recently, in the London Times Literary Supplement, you came upon a retrospective view of his take on an early work by one of his university teachers, the noted teacher and critic, William Empson. Within ten minutes of reading that essay by Rabin, you were over at Amazon, ordering The Seven Types of Ambiguity, Empson's major work. You ordered it because the concept of ambiguity has been on your mind for some time, but more to the point, you ordered it because you admire the writing of Jonathan Raban. The book arrived and you fell on it. So far, it is a major disappointment, which means you still have the potential of adventure and discovery in your attempts to read it.

Ambiguity is a fact of life. So are reading, writing, and speaking. So, too, is persistence. To do whatever it is we hope to do, with any hope at all of that great intangible, happiness, we must persist in coming to terms with ambiguity, sitting across the table with it, dining with it, eating with it, reading with it, understanding what writing means. For you, the writing you are most focused on is writing that involves story. This appropriately adds the need to seat story at the table even if the subject at hand to be written about is a book review. There is some story inherent in the review or, as you judge such things, what you have produced is an outline, a summary, a precis, an apercu. The subtext to all of this is to get as much of yourself into what is produced as possible, to the point where it reflects you and, even though it may be ambiguous to some, does not equivocate.

Arse Poetica

2009-12-19T12:44:00.000-08:00

You've gone on at some length and tangent where the joys of discovery are experienced directly through the act of composition.

Do not, you admonish yourself these days, consider the merest blog post, personal essay, or book review complete without you having discovered some fact or behavior previously unknown to you. It goes without saying that you would persist in such focus if the work in progress is a short story or novel. Thus have you covered the bases.

What you had not considered is the increasing equation in which association has a direct relationship with discovery. From about the time of your late thirties, you'd written enough to be aware of a causal relationship between the two but it took you this added time from then until now to put it in so many words as a cause-and-effect recipe. As matters stand now, when associations begin to appear for you, there is no longer any question that you are "in" the material you are composing, immersed sufficiently to push aside awareness of the present moment, focusing instead on the separate life of what is being written, experienced, anticipated.

When you first became aware of this association connection, you assumed it was the product of maturity, bringing you the gift of association, leaving it on your doorstep to fend for itself, like an abandoned puppy. In its way, it made sense to equate age with experience and, thus, more medium in which associations could spawn. On considered thought, age isn't the focal point at all; muscle memory is the driving force. No matter the age. When you begin using the association connection, it begins developing muscles which in a literal as well as figurative sense lift story from one-dimensional to the sort of simulacrum of your choice.

Associations that trigger unexpected connections are those you prize most, the warmth and energy conveying to you a personalized landscape instead of the random ones where you sometimes find yourself, eager for some point however remote on which to orient yourself.

Aha moment: you write to find your way out of the random, the unknown, and the unfriendly neighborhoods in which you find yourself. These neighborhoods may be internal or external; the feelings in each are amazingly similar. By entering a random, mysterious, or openly hostile turf, you are reminding yourself of the great duality between the you who is a runner and the you who is a problem solver.

A Hall Pass

2009-12-18T16:31:00.000-08:00

Not all that long ago,you were thinking about a landscape in which everything was at rest, or to put it another, more dramatic way, in a waiting state of stasis, that is, in a state where things are happening that may not yet be evident. A huge boulder, say, is in the process of becoming a driveway path of small pebbles. The boulder does not know this yet. For one thing, boulders don't even know about the pathetic fallacy; they remain what and where they are, benign, inanimate, awaiting such fates as the elements will provide.

Bring a person into that landscape, with a boulder or two awaiting their fate, perhaps a few trees expressing volition to become newspapers, even a stream, on its way to overflowing its banks, working up a little erosion damage. The character who wanders into such a setting may want nothing more complex than a good rest or a night's sleep, perhaps even a drink of water. The moment a character enters a scene, we have a pretty good sense in general of what's going to happen. Something will actually go wrong or appear wrong enough to cause the character concern. That is, of course, if we're talking story.

A character goes to a landscape to meditate or walk the dog or go fishing or watch the aurora borealis. Not a story. Event. Even intent. But no story. Story doesn't arrive in the scene until at least one other event occurs. Someone is already there. A huge bear appears, looking for food. An unanticipated event that produces an emotional response such as suspicion, disappointment, fear, frustration. Sure, the responses may be more positive in nature, but sooner or later, something has to go wrong in the sense that the things seeming so positive now have huge red tags of consequence tied to their big toe.

So you look at the landscape, wondering what it is about it that will give you the slight hitch necessary to move you from the real world, which has its own set of troubles, to the place of story, which has more sophisticated troubles that date back to the times when we barely had a language, traveled in small groups, and hoped to hell we were following herds of animals who knew a thing or two about how to locate food. The writer likes to think of himself/herself as a tour guide under such circumstances, but it often works out that the writer is the last to know, reinforcing your own belief that you have to listen to the characters and how they read the instructions emitted by the landscape.

Least of all does the writer know, which is the advantage of being a writer in the first place. If you knew, you'd not be all that much of a storyteller. Or to put it another way, whatever you are now as a storyteller, you'd be less than that if you went into a new story knowing what the answers were and what the best route to follow is. You want to be misled, to make wrong turns, to have your preconceived notions stood up on end.

In the long run, it is even better for you if your characters don't all think you have such great people skills, instead telling you egregious lies or saying things to one another behind your back. Your characters remind you of yourself when you were a kid, eager to move away from parental oversight so that you could go forth to screw up big time, then come back to write about it.

Watch yourself, kid; it's a story out there.

Shall I compare me to a summer's day? Go ahead, compare me

2009-12-17T10:46:00.000-08:00

In a remarkably vibrant film, Venus, in which Peter O'Toole portrays Maurice, an aging disaster of an actor, there is a scene that touched you even more so than the others. It is s cold, rainy afternoon in contemporary London, surely late fall, possibly even into the winter months. Maurice is out prowling the streets, at the tail end of an impossible romantic tangle in which he has allowed a young girl with whom he is hopelessly infatuated to use his apartment wherein to have sex with her boyfriend. On his walk, O'Toole (Maurice) ambles into a deserted outdoor theater where, we are led to imply, he has performed in earlier days of his career. Today, Maurice, on the mend from prostate cancer surgery, steps out onto the stage of the empty theater, its seats covered with fallen leaves and crumpled papers, all of which have been tumbled about by the caprices of weather.

After a moment, Maurice begins to recite Shakespeare's Sonnet Number 18:

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:

But thy eternal Summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

For a moment, he is thinking of and addressing this impossibly unattainable object of his desires, but then, you can see his axe, his instrument, his talent clicking into place and the remaining lines are spoken to them. This is who he truly is. This is him now, showing us in the reading of a mere fourteen lines what qualities of voice, timing, love, understanding, and craft mean and, literally give life to him.

On any number of occasions since you saw the film, you have paused in places alone or with an audience composed only of Sally, who is busy sniffing and scouting. You have at times indulged the conceit of attempting to imitate O'Toole, but even at those times he shines through and reminds you that there is nothing in it for you to imitate him, rather think what there is to simply utter those lines as coming from you, which is in essence what you have in your toolkit. This is a direct riposte to the concept of rejection at any level. You quite naturally are open for an audience but the sine qua non is that you have a toolkit, a you as opposed to an imitation.

There are many who would not otherwise give a whit for Shakespeare, let alone his Sonnet Number 18. You might for a moment or two change that. Or not. Your vision is of O'Toole being this elderly shell of the man Maurice has become, reciting fourteen lines during the course of which his entire being is alert, supple, in tune, which is what you hope for each time you set out, find the stage, step forth, expel that first word. We're talking eternal summer here, the eternal summer of story.

Key Signatures

2009-12-16T08:17:00.000-08:00

Thinking as you do from time to time about the places where music, acting, and writing overlap, your latest awareness came in response to the approach the musical composer takes to choosing the key in which a work is cast. The actor uses a similar type of approach in selecting a vision of the character to be portrayed. The writer gets to chose point of view.

Your own favorite for the short work is third person, the he or she, although you are not adverse to first person. You can't sort the reasons for this preference (which would accordingly make for a focused investigation) although you do know that from time to time, you do find yourself using first person without having questioned the decision (you are quite fond of any decision seemingly reached without conscious thought).

When it comes to a longer form, a novella, novelette, or novel, you gravitate toward the multiple point of view, a medium you have favored since the approximate time when you were moving away from the influence of other writers and settling into the practice of heeding your own inner voices. From time to time, as you read something rendered in multiple point of view, you find yourself nodding in agreement with the author's choice. It was likely your reading of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone that set you off on this track. The current work in progress, is in multiple; you did not for a moment even pause to consider other choices even though the throughline is a character you've known for lo these many years.

This seems a natural progression from your earlier use of an authorial omniscient, which allowed you to comment, as it were, on any character who interested you. Now, of course, they all interest you and you find you would be trying to upstage them if you did not back off and let them have the opportunity to develop on their own. Following this path, you use revision to--among other things--remove as much of your own commentary from the story at hand.

Two writers you admire, each for a particularly different facet, seem to intrude more into the story than you. William Trevor seems to own the omniscient point of view, his deftness and control admirable to the point where you find yourself occasionally rereading a passage or a scene to make sure you didn't miss any relevant nuance. A.S. Byatt is all over the place with authorial observation and control, doing things--such as describing works of art or music--you admire but would not think to do (perhaps because you can't?), leaving you to run the risk of letting your characters do the description for you (and thus running the risk of reader feeder, imparting information you want the reader to have).

Multiple POV seems also to sit nicely astride your vision of the ambiguity and complexity of event and the interpretation of event. Multiple also allows you a range of naivete to be shared among your characters with sometimes the most blustering, self-assured, desk-pounding sort being the most naive of all.

The way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea; the memory of all that....

2009-12-15T08:06:00.000-08:00

Story begins with the implicit and explicit assumption that something has happened or will happen to impinge upon stasis. The life in a story was static before the altering event, thus does the altering event step forth with some innate theme, just as an actor steps forward into a new scene aware of goal and agenda to achieve the goal.

You might say then, In the beginning was stasis. Everything in the landscape of the story was going on about its business as usual, evolving slowly, moving toward some final destination, a boulder, say, on its journey to becoming smashed into particulate we think of as gravel. Even then you could, if you wished, make use of the gravel as a pathway or a playground, each to be trod upon by generations to come. The important thing to consider is the passage of time, ticking away, beats from a metronome, measuring the passing flow of event as ordinary. A human arrives with no agenda, is caught up in the natural passing of time. No story yet. You see? Stasis. But a character appears looking for someone, and the stage setting undergoes a slight tilt toward story. Why is this character looking for someone? Romance? Revenge? Returning a past loan or favor?

There is history in all setting and all character. Bobbie Ann Mason set her break-out short story, "Shiloh," in a park that was named for a battle in what many Americans think of as The Civil War, others still think of as The War between the States, and others yet think of to this very day as The War of Northern Aggression. (Already a nice arrangement from which a story can come: an event seen in three differing ways. Mason's story is set on a landscape that was once the scene of one of the most bloody and costly battles of a contentious war. It is only natural--or is it?--that she bring forth a family to set foot on this landscape. A family. A union. Now imagine the family having what families sometimes have, which is a squabble. Stasis doesn't stand a chance in such a setting.

Each time you select a setting, you are in a sense choosing a place where things have happened, ticking away in their evolutionary time or sped up or slowed down because of something else that took place in this particular setting. A massacre? A murder? Love making?

Is story a setting? Can it be that some past event in a place characterizes the setting? Heraclitus said we could not bathe in the same river twice; once embarked in story, can our characters feel stasis in the same place twice?

Lots of questions. Some may be relevant. If, as you have long supposed, all stories are mysteries and now, as you have come to suspect in recent months, all stories are also alternating universe fantasies, can it also be that all stories are also ghost stories?

For certain, stories are landscapes where stasis has a difficult time making its presence felt.

I felt like it, you felt like it, he, she, it, or they felt like it

2009-12-14T08:44:00.000-08:00

Doing something or, conversely, not doing something because we felt like it is a valid excuse in that it has an emotional base, but it is not enough, not for a story, not for any kind of dramatic narrative. "Feeling like it" is a convenience for not digging a bit deeper to find out why you felt like it. In other words, you can be lazy in real moments, but if you are lazy within a story, your laziness will come back to haunt you.

Even though story in general has moved incrementally toward the slice-of-life or vignette or mere episode construction, story is still precedent-based, the dramatic equivalent of stare decisis in American jurisprudence. It is deterministic. This doesn't mean that the history must be shown as though coming from authorial POV or from the POV of one or more characters, but nevertheless, the history must be known.

The catalyst for this arrived mid-morning this past Saturday as you sat in your workshop, listening to S., reading a segment from an excellently convincing work in progress. Her protagonist, a young woman who was adopted nearly at birth by a WASPish family from Central Coast California. The protagonist is a Native Alaskan who has gone from the sunny clime of Santa Ynez Valley to the Arctic realities of Fairbanks, in search of her biological heritage. After a series of failures of research, the protagonist has given up in her search, believing her biological family must be dead. Hearing this resignation over a phone conversation, protag's grandmother catches the next flight for Alaska to say, Don't you dare give up. A lovely move, but not quite enough. Welling up within you was the very thing that anchored Granny into the story as a vibrant presence: She, too, was adopted, and she gave up looking for her real parents until it was too late. Now there is a tangible bond between the protagonist and her adopted grandmother, and the grandmother has a more convincing reason for coming to visit her granddaughter in Fairbanks.

This sense of interconnectedness nicely dovetails with your ever growing awareness of story as being a meeting point, even a clash between individuals driven by some agenda, even the simplistic-sounding one of hormones. In this sense, story is everywhere, waiting to be triggered, by which you mean given that more basic emotion that will cause it to react to things everywhere. Story is a landscape that has been beset with land mines, through which characters must tread, aware to some degree of the dangers, but not quite able to articulate all of them, at once suspicious, naive, cautious, casting safety to the winds.

When you find yourself doing something or not simply because you felt like doing it or not doing it, take that extra moment to ask why you felt that way--why you really felt that way. Doing so is not likely to make you a better person. Besides, it has become too easy to look about at the better persons and wonder aloud why they are so bent on bettering themselves. And there it is again, come around to confront you full-on. Taking that extra moment to examine feelings will add to the necessary tool kit of being a better storyteller.