Shelly Lowenkopf's Blog

Let's Hear It for the Old Couple

2008-07-18T20:42:00.000-07:00

Thinking about Chaucer in the twenty-first century is for me more than an act of keeping alive within me a respect for a man and his works long, long dead but as well of an awareness that the reading of him revealed itself to me. I speak of the relationship between the teller and the tale, a relationship that can influence the manner in which both teller and tale are recalled long after the reading is done.

I speak admiringly of The Pardoner's Tale, which in its dark, Chaucerian way, snaps me six hundred years away, into episodes of The Wire. The Pardoner's Tale is not for everyone, indeed not for the pilgrims for whom it is intended. When the eponymous narrator begins his prologue at the urging of the host, Harry Bayley, his fellow pilgrims don't want to hear it, because of the ambiguous nature of the man:
A voice he had as small as hath a goat.
No beard had he, nor ever one should have.
As smooth it was as it were new y-shave;
I trow he were a gelding or a mare...

which is to say, his sexuality is certainly called into account and in addition because of his profession of selling religious relics of doubtful provenance and effect. The Pardoner is a fraud in many ways although to his credit, he is forthcoming to a high degree, undercutting our own tendency to regard him with the same disdain shown by his fellow travelers. At first he demonstrates for them the sales pitch he uses on prospective customers, but then, after a moment of reflection, he acknowledges that he has just given forth nothing but cynical insincerity his , further confessing "myn entente is nat but for to wynne,/ And nothynge for correccioun of synne" (My intent is merely to win [make money], and not at all for the correction of sin). Hearing his confession, offered without apology and under no duress, aren't our feelings for him more complex and positive?

Now on to that splendid Wife of Bath. Her prologue, like The Pardoner's, is a partial confession/revelation, partly a defense. Her curriculum vitae includes having had five husbands, which gives her leave to speak of the "wo that is marriage."

A good WIF was ther OF biside BATHE,
But she was somdel deef, and that was scathe.
Of clooth makyng she hadde swich an haunt,
She passed hem of Ypres and of Gaunt.
In al the parisshe wif ne was ther noon
That to the offrynge bifore hire sholde goon;
And if ther dide, certeyn so wrooth was she
That she was out of alle charitee.
Hir coverchiefs ful fyne weren of ground.
I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound
That on a Sonday weren upon hir heed.
Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed,
Ful streite yteyd, and shoes ful moyste and newe.
Boold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe.
She was a worthy womman al hir lyve.
Housbondes at chirche dore she hadde fyve,
Withouten oother compaignye in youthe--
But therof nedeth nat to speke as nowthe.

Ah, look at the game old gal, in charge and bigger than life from the very get-go. My personal preference is for the Prologue to her tale, rather than the tale she tells of the court of King Arthur which, although revelatory of a side of her character, seems less exuberant and dimensional than the Prologue. I love it when she rips the equivalent of a girlie magazine from the hands of her present husband and instructs him to admire her--and he does. Or so she says. With all that dynamism and self-assurance she displays, there is just the right touch of ambiguity about her to make us wonder and remember.

These two characters, holding fast to our imaginations over the years represent ways to build characters we can regard as timeless and timelessly human, filled with foible, self-interest, and yet guided by a moral compass where the needle rests not on magnetic north but on the place in the psyche where the truth of self-knowledge dwells.

A Year or Two at the Early Morning Casino Buffets

2008-07-17T18:46:00.000-07:00

As with Energy, Story is not continuous; each proceeds in small, discrete particles.

The elementary particles of Energy may travel as waves or particles; in Story, the discrete elementary bits travel as narrative or dialog.

Whether in Energy or Story, the movement of these particles is inherently random. Some writers, critics, literary agents, and publishers may speak of templates, which is to say outlines or formulae, and which opens the door for a full-on discussion about predictability. Okay: in quantum physics, it is pretty nearly impossible to predict the movement of the particles associated with energy. In some types of stories, it is possible to predict when and where a particular event will exhibit an anticipated behavior. Nevertheless, even in such stories, surprise is an important part of particular behavior.

It is physically impossible in quantum mechanics to know the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time, to the point where the more one such element is known the less likely the possibility of obtaining the measurement of the other. In a more idiosyncratic way in story, the more one knows about the position of a character, the less likely the possibility of that character doing something of a surprising nature. And yet.

Characters do change their state and so it becomes a kind of quantum behavior to keep them in action, while observing them, applying among other things Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle to them or, if you prefer to use your own name for the concept, applying to your changing characters your own name principle. The characters should change, undergo some kind of transmogrification.

What hubris to limit the appearance of absentmindedness merely to generic professors or to scientists. Writers may be properly distressed after having spent some time trying to chart the direction, the velocity, and the position of a character within the framework of some puzzling equation, only to find that the character already had a mind of its own, wanted no part of its creator.

As some quantum physicists seek for a Unified Theory which, they hope will explain Everything, some writers wish a theory that will minimize the randomness of life and the ongoing attempts of writers and poets to formulate a description that gets us all. It has in fact been apparent for any number of years. Someone wants something or someone. Put that in your cyclotron and turn on the motor. Then add who that person is so that a reader can decide what accommodations ar necessary before it is possible to root for that individual. Now add a certain knowledge of what that character will do to accomplish the previously depicted details.

Watch for surprises.

Plan B

2008-07-16T20:57:00.000-07:00

A contingency is an event or behavior that has potential to take place but whose outcome is not certain. Contingency is our pole star. We use the sextants of our hopes and desires to plot our courses among the bright stars of the night, but their light has left its source and has been traveling toward us since before many of us were born. Contingency is what we will do if we get what we want, if we do not get what we want, if we trip over something following an otherwise clear path toward what we want.

Contingency is Plan B, and maybe the thought of it is so abhorrent that we shift gears into denial or worse, acting-out lunacy, just one of the consequences of having achieved everything we've wanted until now, when the fear of not achieving THAT THING becomes so enormous and fearful that we come forth with Plan B, Well if that doesn't work, I can always...

It is usually after a novel or story or poem is completed when the fear emerges that a Plan B might be necessary, but in fact the completion of a novel or poem or short story or even a book review or personal essay or a blog posing represents two bodies moving away from one another at the speed of--well, of light from a distant star. There is the individual who created the work, who has learned something from having done the work. There is the work, with a life of its own. The creator looks at it in the way a parent looks after a child. The work wants to show off. The parent is embarrassed by the inherent vigor and audacity of the work.

Things do not work out the way we intend. From the moment of the idea or what if or inspiration through the execution to that triumphant there!, the work slithers and slides away from us and there is a moment of wanting to get the toothpaste back into the tube, get it out properly this time, then a moment of, ah, what the hell.

Some of the finest rewards of all come when, during other, more structured circumstances, I am looking for something, come across a pad of note paper or even the print-out of a manuscript, pick it up to see what it is, then become pulled in, wondering how many times do I have to remind students to put their names on their papers, then realize the only person I know of who does not do so is me. This that I am reading is mine, but it is as though someone had gone to considerable effort to capture the things I'd write about, then slip it in among my papers, a kind of existential joke.

Great Expectations

2008-07-15T20:52:00.000-07:00

Characters enter a scene with expectations.

Readers pick up a book with expectations.

Writers write with expectations stories that have expectations expressed and implied residing within.

Without expectation, there can be no story.

Peoples once referred to as Hunters and Gatherers, now regarded as Foragers, position themselves in strategic places, anticipating the arrival of a herd of some sort or other, or possibly one huge woolly mammoth.

Humans evolved to have expectations. The sophistication of a particular culture or society may be measured by the complexity (or naivete) of expectations.

Expectation is the dramatic equivalent of tinder, which is useful to light a fire under the crucible of story, piling on more expectation until the crucible boils over.

Another high-burning dramatic tinder is misunderstanding. Throw some misunderstanding on the fire, then step back. Characters do not like to be misunderstood they like to think they are making themselves perfectly clear. When readers begin to discern that characters, wanting to be understood--Am I making myself clear?--are in fact muddying the waters, making in fact cowboy coffee of the waters, they begin to have expectations.

The expectations are that there will be conflict.

All you have to do now is make the conflict interesting.

Readers have expectations that conflict will be interesting.

In real life, conflict, even conflict based on misunderstanding, is often boring. Think of how many persons who disagree with you seem boring.

In real life, when you were an editor on the rise, an author announced himself to the receptionist as having a manuscript you would surely want to publish. When you learned his name, you understood that this was no idle boast here was an author with some name recognition, hoping to get an out-of-print title back into print. He had reasonable expectations that you would want to publish this book, giving it new life and no doubt giving him a few months worth of trouble-free living where rent was concerned. The moment you heard the man's name, you had expectations of what the title would be. You also had every expectation that you would not want to publish this book.

Some remarkable things happened in the lobby of that publishing company, which is no longer a publishing company and may well be seeing better days as a purveyor of automobile parts. Yet another adventure was enacted in that lobby when a psychiatrist questioned your sanity because you did not want to publish a book he assured you--correctly--that his book would sell a million copies in hardcover. Your answer for each author was the same. "It is a question of taste. I don't want to publish that book."

The author of the first book was Lajos Egri; the title of his book was and still is The Art of Dramatic Writing. The author of the second book was Arthur Janov, Ph.D.. His book was and is The Primal Scream.

This leads us to one kind of ending, the kind informed by another important element in human behavior and thus in dramatic behavior. The element is consequences. The consequences of my not contracting either book are multifarious, may lead you to have any of a number of opinions of me, for instance. Henceforth, years after the fact, you may well come to think of me as the man who could have published The Art of Dramatic Writing and The Primal Scream, but didn't. The consequences also involved the direction publishing either book would have on my employer.

Expectation. Misunderstanding. Consequences. What more could a narrative ask?

Getting the Swing of It

2008-07-14T21:36:00.000-07:00

Hypotheses: Nothing is what it seems. Everything is other than it seems. Something is a surprise, waiting to perform chiropractic on a mood or condition. Something is a disaster, waiting to distribute overdrawn notices on one's reality account. Disaster protection is available at 17.5 percent interest. Events are pinatas hanging from convenient trees, daring us to swing at them with ambition or irritation or celebratory enthusiasm. The LAPD has made pinatas of many individuals who were actually celebrating but were seen by the LAPD as activists.

The study of Beckett begins to pay off richly when one entertains the subtext of nothing being what it seems. Failure for Beckett was the opportunity to try again. I don't know that he thought at all about the implications of success and so I can only hypothesize that success fin writing or him wasn't what it seemed, or perhaps worse, success in writing meant he did not have to revisit a particular place again because he couldn't

The danger of nothing being what it seems is the potential for a constant feeling of betrayal. Betrayal means one's trust is undercut (once again) which means one begins to resent being so vulnerable, which means one resolves not to trust anything, which strikes me as an invitation not to trust myself (any of them) which reminds me of earlier times when I claimed to do just that, which is to say I agreed not to trust myself. This meant a time of not knowing if I were hungry or horny or inspired or sleepy or if I understood Chaucer. There are some risks worth taking. One risk not worth taking is the conviction that I do not and cannot understand Chaucer.

That's okay because risk is not what it seems either. Risk seems so fraught with dangerous consequences that it can be interpreted as a reason to do nothing except maybe grouse and take pot shots at persons and institutions, leaving one vulnerable to all the consequences of not doing anything, a course of action that is more dangerous than it seems.

If something is what it seems, there is no surprise, not much chance of other. Does the risk of something being what it seems outweigh the risk of nothing being what it seems?

One of the few constants here is love, which is never what it seems, is filled with risks, surprises, consequences, vulnerability. Love is like Excalibur, the sword thrust deep into the stone, waiting for someone--Arthur--to pull it forth. Grab it by the hilt and yank in a quick, steady movement. That's love, not Excalibur; that was already yanked.

Look for pinatas.

Swing.

Swing again, only this time, swing better.

Diagramming Sentences

2008-07-13T20:35:00.000-07:00

Many of my generation are able to recall with varying degrees of fondness the ordeal of being called upon in class, bidden to confront the blackboard, then diagram sentences that ran from straightforward declarative to the more complex and orotund, enhanced perhaps by dependent and independent clauses.

At the time my only hesitation resided in the knowledge that my handwriting was a mass or competing styles and desires. I actually enjoyed diagramming sentences, approached the task with the same confidence I applied to being a smart ass. I knew such arcana as predicate nominative, condition contrary to fact, adverbial clause. Diagramming sentences was something I was good at; it felt good to be accomplished at something.

I am not a grammarian. I can repeat from memory the definitions of parts of speech, but this does not make me any more a grammarian than repeating a mantra makes a Buddhist or Hindu a Buddhist or Hindu; definitions are merely steps along the way. Even though I catch myself in my sentences sounding formal, I can often find a way in revision to cope with formality. Word choice. Timing. Length of sentence.

Putting sentences together is like setting up a model train, deciding where the layout goes, what degree of risk taking scratches like a cat wanting in or out, what the intent of the sentences is.

Sometimes, as a reviewer/critic, or as a teacher, I try to discover the intent of the writer--and count myself a dismal failure, thinking at times that it's best to slink off somewhere, a park, the beach, a coffee house, and read for the sheer pleasure of it in much the same manner as listening to music. Listening to music, I don't have to spend time discovering how I am led to feel. I already know. Then comes the question, as easily asked when I read through my own work as when I respond in a workshop or take an assignment from a literary agent or publisher: How does this make you feel? As with olives, cashew nuts, and grapes, you can't stop with one; so too with questions. Is what reading this text makes you feel congruent with the author's intent? (In the case of your own work, the question becomes Is this what you meant? )

The purpose of all the reading you need in order to access your own writing and to bring forth useful commentary in the class room or the editorial conference is to hone your senses to the inner music, the layout of the sentences. To return to an earlier metaphor: Is the caboose where it ought to be?

Timing. Design. Intent. Inner music.

Be There or Be Squashed

2008-07-12T20:55:00.000-07:00

Through the happy discovery of several YouTube performances of a favored pianist, Sviatasov Richter, rendering a number of works by a favored composer, Maurice Ravel, I was able to move through the thrill of the music itself, arriving at a useful, informative conclusion. Richter had an enormous repertoire, spanning a chronological gamut from Bach to such moderns as Gershwin, Berg, and Stravinsky. He was particularly fond of Debussy, performed Ravel with the insightful grace of a big man, a powerful performer, executing the lush sophisticated lyricism of Ravel.

Watching these Youtube videos impressed on me the little I knew of Richter, particularly his desire to render the work of the composer as the composer saw it, neither adding to it nor removing from it, neither embellishing nor diminishing what was there. Richter was, accordingly, like an actor, wanting to get at the essence of the text. Text meant a great deal to him to the point where, watching him, listening to him, I felt the connection between Richter and the music that the actor has with the text, that the writer has with the narrative, that the reader has with the narrative.

Into this equation comes the similarity between what the composer of music and narrative do, the play between the word and the note, the relationship each has to time. The word has verb tense, the note has duration. The actor needs to understand the consequences of time and timing, how to draw out, truncate, pause.

Particularly watching and listening to Richter perform Ravel's Alborado del Gracioso, Noble and Sentimental Waltzes, and The Waltz, all three of which are great favorites of mine, it was easy to picture him becoming the piece, the player transformed to the music, the actor losing self wile infusing energy into the text, the writer, during composition, becoming the story. So many stories don't work because there is little or no trace of the writer in them. Stories that do work seem somehow iconic or epic configurations, given reverberation through the writer's eye for physical and emotional details.

A writer's inventiveness is secondary to the voice and intent of the writer in concocting the narrative. What does the writer wish to demonstrate? What evocative details does the writer set up, almost as wind chimes are set up to be nudged into contact with one another by the breeze of the writer's invention?

Can you put yourself into this equation? It surely is an equation as opposed to a formula. The Imp of Perversity whispers into my ear that the more time the writer spends inside the story from the get go, the less time the writer will need to spend maneuvering the snow plow of revision down the pathway.

Contemporary Values

2008-07-11T14:42:00.000-07:00

1. If you give money to a homeless person, the individual will in return offer you blessings.

2. If you give money to a drug- or alcohol-dependent individual, you will be directed to have a good day.

3. If you give money to a faith-based individual or group, you will probably be offered absolution for something you did, thought you had done, or failed dismally to do.

4. If you give money to a politician, you will later be asked for more.

5. If you give money to charity, you will quickly be approached for donations from other charities.

6. If you give money to an organization specializing in animal welfare, you will receive written thanks on a card that is either signed with a paw print or by a mascot cat named Whiskers.

7. Depending on how much money you give to a college or university, they will either dedicate a tree to you, install an uncomfortable bench in your honor, or dedicate a building to you that looks like a mausoleum.

8. If you give money to the American Civil Liberties Union, you will receive a thank-you note, a warning that Bush and Cheney are still at it, and a self-addressed stamped envelope for another contribution.

9. If you donate to the Republican party, you will receive a thank-you note demanding to know what kind of American you are, waiting so long to donate.

10. If you donate to the Democratic party, you will receive a note from Terry McAuliffe, wondering why you didn't send it directly to him.

11. In many cases, you will be charged a service fee for withdrawing your own money from an ATM.

At the risk of sounding as though I were a Libertarian or a Republican, I remind you--remember, this is you, talking to yourself--that such as it is, it is nevertheless your money, to do or not do with as you please, but in today's social traffic, the perception increasingly becomes that it is their money, which you in your intransigence are withholding from them

Wisdom for Our times

2008-07-10T20:25:00.000-07:00

The late and still lamented Joseph Campbell has written voluminously about myth, archetype, and the means by which it is possible to detect the DNA of a culture in its stories. Perhaps his most lavish gift to writers is his Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he tracked the orbits of heroes from numerous times and cultures, giving us a cross-cultural and cyclic pattern called The Hero's Journey. "Down these mean streets a man must go," mystery writer Raymond Chandler wrote of the private detective hero. In his own writing, Joseph Campbell has said, "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."

Campbell was a devoted fan of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which reading may have helped Campbell formulate his articulate cycle of behavior, which appears in five stages:

A call to adventure
A road of trials
Achieving the goal or "boon"
A return to the ordinary world
Applying the boon.

The good Dr. Kubler-Ross had a five-step program of her own which, although not intended to help writers, is nevertheless of value. Hers are the five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

With these patterns in mind, it becomes easier to cast a set of characters forth on a voyage or venture that will cause many of us who read narrative tales of any sort to take them up, internalize them, make them a part of our own individual sense of diagnosing the cultural wars about us, allowing us to feel deeply about issues and conflicts at some remove from our own culture. We have, for instance, no real cultural connect with Antigone, who is all set to marry King Creon's son and be welcomed into the family, even though Creon had chosen a cultural payment of a serious sort against Antigone's brothers. Antigone's persisting in the burial of her brothers is the crux of the matter. The social and cultural forces behind Creon's wish to have the brothers remain unburied do not touch us on any but an intellectual level; Antigone's persistence in the growing threat of her own death make us care.

We of the early years of the twenty-first century live at a time, I argue, where another mythic observation holds great sway and is a ruling force in what a writer of these days writes about. To be sure, Joseph Campbell's observations are insightful, valid, exciting. To be sure, Raymond Chandler's template for the private detective, articulated in his essay, The Simple Art of Murder, is no less apt now than when written. Dr. Kubler-Ross' observations about the human acceptance of grief holds as a valid observation, dramatically satisfying in its own arc of logic.

But these are the times when and where yet another observation, a classification in its own right, holds sway, speaks to our time in plangent tones The Emperor has no clothes.

Unreliable Narrator, Unreliable Reader

2008-07-09T19:42:00.000-07:00

In keeping with recent thoughts about the writer's need to tell stories for his or her own sense of identity comes the writer's tidal need to read the works of others, hopeful of clues leading to discoveries of identity, technique, information.

As a teacher I can't help noticing the comparison between the well-read student and the well-read student's probing, original output on the positive side, the comparison between the poorly read student and the derivative, approval-seeking output on the negative side.

It is a personal help to have had since 2005 a weekly commitment to deliver a book review once a week. This has added a cyclic pattern to my reading of alternating newly published works with golden oldies, things I discover new from the new releases listed in Publishers' Weekly, and things I wish I'd had the opportunity to review when they were new (and possibly had). This pattern does not by the way ratify any sense I have of being well read, it merely provides an obligation to read, think, react, and write. Reading in general, reviewing at the pleasure and whim of various book review editors, and being paid to write about things I would ordinarily have purchased remains one of the most satisfying of pursuits. The process also reminds me of how idiosyncratic I am, authors are in general, and readers in great specificity are. Coming into the classroom filled with wannabe writers, bursting at the seams with this attitude about reading and reviewing, is only one of my agendas or, if you will, subtexts. Another is attempting to lure the student away from the desire to seek approval, leading them instead toward the temptation of becoming idiosyncratic--at least as idiosyncratic as I am, possibly even more so.

Two characters I so enjoy talking about (in my idiosyncrasy) are individuals that cause eyebrows to raise, sighs of impatience to emerge, warning flares to arc across the sky that I should give serious thought to moving over to the English Department or consider taking early retirement, those among the more charitable responses. What possible connection could connect present day narrative with two such ancient and outmoded sorts as The Pardoner and The Wife of Bath?

For one thing, each is a splendid example of an unreliable narrator, but their value does not stop with their unreliability or ambiguity. Indeed their value as what I will call vital enigmas is enhanced by the fact that each tells a large measure of what may be seen six hundred years later as no less truthful observations about human nature, each is lured into story telling by the host of a saloon, a man who is, early on in his narrative and of all the pilgrims in the journey to Canterbury, stopped from finishing his tale because "[t]hy draste rhyming is not worth a toord/" and the author himself probably had an agenda relative to a mid-fourteenth century group known as The Lollards, a reformative group reminiscent of some of our contemporary evangelicals. Thus did Chaucer bring forth an agenda against a group whose name was thought, among other things, to mean Mumblers. The Wife of Bath was--my take--a swipe at the old boys in the locker room, a woman of stature who has held up pretty well, thank you.

To move forth with a mountain goat leap, What are we to make of text we read, admire, and absorb as resonating within us? What are we to make of statements coming forth from characters who seem disorganized, corrupt, caught up in agenda, and yet redolent of the Truth as we see it? Further, what are we to make of our own narratives?

Ah, you've noticed: it is a tricky, duplicitous world out there. Individuals from half way around the world are busy trying to give us millions of dollars from the estate of wealthy Nigerians, all of whom perished in some airline disaster. Individuals closer to us are trying to convince us that John McCain has our better interests at heart, and Joe Lieberman is trying to convince us it is all Kosher, all of it.

Mountain goat alighting. None of it is Kosher nor reliable, or more than relatively truthful. We have some measure of science which has undergone peer review and vetting and is as reliable as far as we have progressed in our--dare I say it--evolution, but it is just as possible to regress, to stall, to reject inquiry and questing and questioning.

So why did BO roll on FISA? Why did the Dems roll on the Fourth Amendment? Who will come knocking on our in boxes, asking for donations tomorrow, after selling out the Glorious Fourth? And who among us will be so unreliable as to forget once again what they've done to us and how we let them?

Unreliable narrators.
Unreliable readers.

Quo vadimus?

The Way of All Flash

2008-07-08T17:19:00.000-07:00

Although there have been considerable patterns of evolution in the story from the times of pre-written language to the latest edition of some literary journal, the intent has not evolved significantly--because there has been no imperative for it to do so. Literate or not, most of us have some measure of verbal story to tell. Critics will ask us, sometimes for good reasons, for whom the story is intended. (We must not be too hard on critics. They are the literary equivalent of schoolyard bullies we must suffer. Indeed, some of us will become critics, as it were passing along the bullying tradition.)

My own take is that whatever it is we do, we do it first for ourself; it is our own candle in the darkness. We tell ourself a story to set the sensory input in place. We may proceed from there to tell it to others, as a cautionary take. Or as revisionist history. Or as an opportunity to have the final word (knowing there is no real final word), which is to say having satisfaction, however belated.

Also in the rear trunk, packed along with my own take on our needing to tell the story to ourself first, is the added baggage of my belief that much of what we do during the course of any unit of time is to process an incredible amount of sensory input, some of which we have committed to muscle memory because we have bee doing it for so long. I expect a good number of writers to agree with me on this point I'm about to make: We have become writers to teach ourself what it means to be a sensate individual, struggling for survival in a particular culture. After it becomes muscle memory, we are more or less screwed because it is not the easiest way to make a living at it. One saving grace is that any number of men and women who do it better than us are able to make some kind of living from it. (Are there such things as unsaving graces? If so, one of them is that an even greater number of men and women who do it less well than we do nevertheless seem able to make a good deal of money from doing it.)

Writing for one's self is seen by non-writers as self-absorption, possibly even solipsism. On investigation, some of these non-writers will be revealed not to give a damn about where they stand on something so basic, for example, as the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the given being that they are Americans in the first place. Some non-writers would give a great deal to have something to give a damn about beyond, say, the rivalry between the Yankees and Red Sox or the Celtics and Lakers, or is Leonard Di Caprio better looking than Daniel Day Lewis.

Tragedy for the ancient Greeks is related to hubris among the ruling classes. Tragedy for modern wannabe writers is the absorption not in self but rather in tabloid culture wars, formulae of the massmarket as opposed to risks of self-discovery. Tragedy for modern Greeks is Lean Cuisine instead of a serious roast lamb. When you reduce tragedy to cultural expediency and massmarket expectations, humor becomes tragedy sped up.

Just today, someone I've known and admired for nearly thirty years (I first met him after having reviewed his breakout novel) claimed to be growing progressively smarter, making me realize I have for some time been growing progressively dumber, a condition that has nothing whatsoever to do with Alzheimer's or attendant woes but rather from the increased awareness of how little I in fact know and how much factually deficient material is set forth as though it were fact, and, damnit, how much of the latter I have come to accept as though it were fact. From these shadows comes the need to tell myself stories, Aesop's Fables of the twenty-first century, cautionary tales, tales that impart wisdom if not fact. Fact is data verifiable by individuals of all ages, both sexes, many if not all cultures. Wisdom is a way of looking at fact, a lens or set of lenses which allow those who will take the risk of looking at fact without distortion.

Trouble is, reality may be a more serious distortion than fantasy. We'll need a shaman to test this out--a shaman called a writer.

Who Was That Masked Man?

2008-07-07T19:48:00.000-07:00

Whenever I am asked for the exercises or so-called prompts I use to get myself into a writing mode, whenever I see traces of such exercises in writing text books, and particularly when I see diagrams of dramatic formulas rendered on blackboards, my thoughts are wrenched back to my boyhood days of watching the old Frankenstein movies. In those movies, brass and copper spheres dominated the viewers' attention, static electricity sizzling between them. Rube-Goldberg-like apparatus burbled, crackled, smoked, all to show the creation of what was by all accounts a monster.

With such pellucid vision running its course in my imagination, I am able to say with relative calm, exercises and prompts are well and good for some. For most, there must of course be an inventory of tools, equipment to effect the work at hand. Scene, setting, characters, motives, agendas, dialog. There are of course others. Suspense, tension, reversal, surprise. The writer, as would any craftsperson, lays out in some proximity to the work site such things as research if needed, a time line or chronology; not to forget choices to be made such as point(s) of view and perhaps even verb tense.

So far, so good. But now comes the moment of puttering, of getting to work, of getting into the work, becoming it and having it become you. In other words, attitude. Having something to say. Taking sides. Now you begin to hear the voice speaking the narrative. The voice is of course the narrative, imparting itself to you. An apt metaphor for the beginning moments of working on a project is the seance. Your story guide comes to you from the story, then connects you with it, gives you a vision of it, allows you to hear it, smell it, sense yourself within it, remaining so until the dog wants out or the cat brushes against your legs or the battery of your laptop tells you it wants refurbishment. If you have been given a strong enough connection, you will have less trouble getting back to that trance state wherein the story dances some sort of dance within you and you now become the choreographer, directing the characters and their movements. On point? Plie? Ronde du jamb? Your call. You're into it.

Thus the elements and tools I have not mentioned: passion and risk.

There is no exercise so excellent or effective that it will not be trumped by passion. What this means is that you must care, give a damn, if you will. Incorporate these five words in a narrative of at least five hundred words? Not bloody likely. Suppose I don't care for one or more of the words in the prompt? That being the case, I'm irritated well enough, but irritated at the exercise not some organization or convention or flaw within myself. Such irritation, carried forth, will come forth only as the static and smoke from the Frankenstein movies.

Risk is what you take when you go at something. Imagine yourself a Neanderthal with a limited supply of hunting tools. A few spears but not many; perhaps even a stone hatchet or maybe you were lucky enough to have fund a fractured piece of obsidian, which has a seriously sharp edge which works well for cutting things. You and a few others contrive to jump onto a huge woolly mammoth and begin jabbing at it. Such a kill will provide your group meat for at least a week. Now that is risk, perhaps taken to hyperbole in extreme but in fact, Neanderthals were essentially meat eaters, had lousy hunting tools, and from what we can see of their available remains, many of them had multiple fractures. They took risks.

Unless you are going for the middle range of genre readers, where there are not only conventions, they are so rigidly placed that you can begin to predict when a particular thing (beat) will occur, then you must take risks with the conventions of your medium to overcome the predictable quality and in the bargain give your characters the life Dr. Frankenstein was not able to impart to his monster. Risk is what allows a writer to sail for an unanticipated time on an unanticipated thermal of enthusiasm for to take risk is to leap off the cliff of convention and expectation,

One of the risks is that we end up with our old pal, Wile E. Coyote, having blown it all on a can't miss shot at a Road Runner supper, which you just know would taste better than KFC. And now, at the bottom of the mesa with Wile E. Coyote, we dust our keester and get a hand up from, whozis? from Samuel Beckett, who nods, delivers the punch line. Next time, fail better.

Beep beep.

Taking Inventory

2008-07-06T22:10:00.001-07:00

1. A stack of Big Little Books
2. A modest collection of Haldemann-Julius Little Blue Books (including Poems of Robert Burns and Common Sense by Tom Paine)
3. The Hard Boiled Omnibus Early Stories from Black Mask
4. Eight truly old paperback mysteries Hammett, Day Keene, Parker
5. Cavafy
6. Hopkins
7. six kachina dolls
8. a pencil sharpener in the form of a Remington upright typewriter given as a birthday present by students thirty years ago
9. a mini-Rollei camera that actually works
10. a pottery medallion of a fabled bird from Acoma Pueblo
11. a cedar cigar box filled with old Esterbrook fountain pens
12. a catalog of the Modigliana exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York
13, a catalog of the El Greco exhibition, Metropolitan New York
14. three empty Altoids tins
15. a Henry Miller watercolor, frm his wall to mine
16. a serigraph from Sister Corita, Damn everything but the circus
17. a Lucky Strike green flat fifties tin
18. a belt buckle that claims to have been made from melted-down canons of the Civil War
19. A buffalo nickel
20. an Indian head penny
21. an antique bottle of Shaeffer brown ink
22. a Mark Tain model Conklin fountain pen

Double Indemnity

2008-07-05T20:08:00.000-07:00

Some days ago you wrote of the almost persistent duality arguing for possession of a character, a condition given great visual interpretation by such mimes as Jacques Tati, Marcel Marceau, and on this side of the Atlantic, the redoubtable Bill Irwin. You could hardly expect to write a scene without bringing such dramatic duality to mind. True enough about your observation that all characters believe themselves right, these mimes are instructive because of the way they bring to the stage a lurching duality, where the audience can see the tug o'war.

Comes time now to bring two or more characters on stage the better to enhance drama, the better to bring forth the rigor of counterpoint, orchestrated with Bach-like acuity. One character alone merely fights the should I this or should I that encounter, admittedly in a small arena--the arena of self--but more about that in a moment or two. Two or more similarly afflicted characters bring forth the dramatic equivalent of counterpoint, which is to say subtext. The gap between what a character says and what the character actually feels/believes,'thinks/wants. The gap between Oliver Twist saying Please, sir, may I have some more, sir? and Thanks, no more for me.

One character on stage alone for too long has two major fall-back positions, the How had it all begun? retrospective evaluation of the events bringing him to this sorry state, or the other state, the delusional state in which the audience begins to recognize it is involved in a conspiracy with the author at the expense of the single character, who does not seem aware of the delusional atmosphere. After a time, we begin to suspect that Don Quixote is deluded and Sancho Panza a pragmatist. If we read far enough into the narrative, our opinions of each become blurred. They become excellent, shifting points of reference, points on which we may construct a story. It is arguable that the master and slave characters in Aristophanes The Frogs were the spiritual and dramatic brothers of Abbott and Costello, of Martin and Lewis, of Rowan and Martin. Not to forget Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, because they have brought the pairs of opposites full circle to the point where Felix Unger can leave a note on the refrigerator he shares with Oscar Madison, signed with his initials, F.U. More to the point, it is instructive to look at the definition of each individual and the chemistry produced by the difference between their personalities. Therein lies the yeast for story, for invention, for discovery.

Thus is it a good thing to take two or more characters on a metaphoric journey to the Strait of Messina between Italy and Sicily, at which point they will be forced to steer a path between Scylla, a formidable monster, and Charybdis, a yet more formidable one. From this extraordinary gauntlet of monsters, we have the trope of being between Scylla and Charybdis, which means moving away from one menace or, if you will, one inner conflict, only to become beset by another. In The Odyssey, the goddess Circe counsels Odysseus to stick closer to Scylla as being the least dangerous of the two. By the time Aeneas came through the Straight of Messina in The Aeneid, Circe had once again changed her mind about Scylla (don't trust goddesses or Republicans) and reduced it to a precipitous outcropping, whence between Scylla and Charybdis became transmogrified to Between a rock and a hard place, which is the place for readers to see their principal characters lodged. Characters who are not in tight spots tend to lose their appeal. An illustrative comparison comes to mind: A character who is not caught between some rock and some hard place is like an individual relating to us his or her dreams in great detail. We cannot wait to escape those great details.

Start then with two or more characters, individually conflicted, coming in contact with one another in a tight situation: Emma Bovary caught between her boredom with her life and her sense that the fictional world of romances will provide excitement. Consider Huck Finn on a raft with a runaway slave. Consider Nora Helmer caught between an intransigent culture and a patronizing husband. Consider the occupants of the stagecoach in De Maupassant's Bouile de Suif. Consider Charlie and Terry Molloy in a taxicab in On the Waterfront.

See where that will get you.

Better yet, see where it will prevent you from diverting to.

Habitue

2008-07-04T21:05:00.000-07:00

We have had this conversation before, but it is good to remind you of it because--well, because it is something likely to recur.

It is one of those process things, a systemic glitch you find in any of a number of tangential and completely unrelated disciplines. As you essay different tasks, it may even chose to appear in different ways.

I speak of that old pest, the habit word, a fact I a aware of most times I undertake a content or copyediting assignment and, indeed (whoops, there's one now!) whenever I review your own work before submitting it to its Fate.

There is no comfort in the discovery of others having some of the same habit words you do; in fact, there is often a distinct undercutting of comfort, which very thing, comfort, happens to be one of the reasons you write in the first place. Perhaps the most common of all habit words--words you use to excess in a particular text to the extent of calling attention to the overuse--is and. It is not wrong to link independent clauses with and, but it does become repetitive and, alas, sounds clunky after a time, as though you were trying to imitate Hemingway and failing.

Indeed is another habit word you use to excess, doubtless from your intention of adding emphasis, although it must be said that you do not abuse in fact. Your next overkill is with Accordingly, which is nice, once in a while, to use at the beginning of a paragraph, or when springing the tail end of a syllogism, in place of ergo, which is a tad Latinate to your taste.

Your delicacy in presenting the concept of habit words to students is admirable; after all, some words and phrases are more clear-cut than others, simpler, more honest, the literary equivalent of the natural tan Ugg boot rather then some of the more noticeable permutations.

Said, on the other hand, is an acceptable habit word, particularly when it becomes apparent that some other writer than yourself is going to some extreme in order to avoid the repetition, thus drawing attention to the very thing they are trying to avoid.

I know that you exert some considerable effort to avoid the word that, simply because you find it flat, nondescriptive, clunky. Similarly do you find very a word worth avoiding and, thus, unlikely to find its way into your text even when you are working at full, focused speed. Some words fall onto your list because they are speed bumps for you, causing you to have to stop in the middle of a sentence or paragraph, forgetting the fine-tuned vector of your intent, searching now for substitutes or wondering what on earth you might have meant by a particular phrase before arriving at the speed bump and having to think your way out.

Yes, yes you know; language is symbol, capable of being understood when read or heard if presented with clarity. Language is often a clump of ideas, concepts, formulae. Just as often, it may be a clump of complex emotion that must be decoded, which is to say rendered into an exacting pattern of words which will convey to others the complex feelings you are experiencing and (indeed) conveying understanding of those complex feelings to yourself.

Make no mistake, because some words are your habit words, they are not transmogrified into bad words, judgmentally tainted words. They must simply be regarded in the same way as, say, a sign in a mall or parking lot, prohibiting skateboarding. You have no brief for such signs or such injunctions against skating or skateboarding, but because you do have a feel for The social contract, you think, okay, I'll uphold the law. In this case, I'll try to knock the habit words out of my revisions.

You sound different, someone says. Yes, because I have interdicted my habit words.

I thought something was different.

Which brings forth an interesting question: Does the retention of habit words forge or preclude an individual style?

You know what I mean?

Making a Scene

2008-07-03T21:05:00.000-07:00

The basic dramatic unit is the scene. Put enough of these units together and they take on a form and a path, developing characters and accelerating complications and insights until they form a vignette, a story, a novel, a play. Like the throw of dice in a game of liar's poker, scenes present varying dramatic options to the point where they become memorable enough to eclipse the narrative in which they appear.

In varying degree, scenes have at least the following ingredients: setting, characters, beats, pace, blocking, tension, subtext,dialog. They may also contain reversals of fortune, shifts in power, changes in attitude, shifts of allegiance, surprise, discovery, revelation.

Characters come into scenes with expectations, which may be frustrated or met. A character who achieves an expectation may experience buyers' remorse or conversely indulge exuberant celebration. Just as likely, characters may enter scenes with fears, hopes, prejudices, agendas. A character who enters a scene with no expectations is coasting, admittedly a judgmental take, nevertheless one supported by the understanding that story requires of characters a sense of being right about something.

A character who is right about something--an interpretation, an entitlement, a sense of being a victim or a protector--has earned admittance to the tent of story and must now pursue the goals that drive him, perhaps tentative at first but then with the increasing intensity of ambition. Some characters require one or more scenes in which to ratify or shore up their sense of being right, which instills within them the glorious dynamic of defensiveness, which they are perfectly free to interpret as justice must be done. Even the ghost in Hamlet has a agenda, which drives the story forth, stirring up from beyond the grave the stew of ambition, sexual jealousy, and power. That lovely, dysfunctional family, the Macbeth? They are also propelled by ambition, but can we say that Dorothy Gale is a passive observer?

The scene is a crucible to which the heat of ambition or agenda or desire is applied. If a scene does not materially advance the movement of story, it may still earn its keep within the narrative by demonstrating or revealing important information about the characters, information that will effect the reception of the characters by the readers.

If scenes are set in landscapes where some characters are more comfortable than other characters, these individuals are at an advantage, which may be exploited, undermined, or neutralized. If scenes are cast in landscapes where none of the characters are comfortable, an added atmosphere of tension seeps into the dialog, the subtext, the likelihood that the crucible will boil over. In the famed motion picture, The Third Man, directed by Sir Carol Reed, the illusive and amoral Harry Lime has a surprise meeting with his chum, Holly Martens. They meet in the Riessenrad, the large Ferris wheel in the Vienna amusement park, the Prater. Looking down upon people beneath his vantage point, Lime compares them to dots, then makes the wry, cynical observation that defines him and separates him from Martens. "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Arbitrary as it may sound, scenes should be wound around the armature of at least one salient emotion. Characters may not agree with that emotion, may be prevented from recognizing it by the sun-in-the-eyes of their own agenda, but the reader will get it.

And don't forget the scene in a small lunch room, with the character of Bobby Dupea wanting at this point in Five Easy Pieces nothing more than a conventional breakfast. "You want me to hold the chicken," the waitress asks Bobby, producing not only the crucible overflowing but a subsequent persona for the actor Jack Nicholson.

A scene then is a crucible, an arena, a place where characters go armed with the baggage of their past, their attitudes, their agendas, fortified with a toolkit of their abilities and hopes. The scene is the Swiss Army knife of story.

A Team of Rivals

2008-07-02T14:59:00.000-07:00

Quick. Which are the two loudest arguers in the Talmudic landscape of your psyche?

By this question I mean Which are the strongest two forces raging within you over what shall be your course, your work, the thing you do, the way you comport yourself.

The Talmud, of course, is a transcript of argument relating to law, ethics, customs, and by extension, arguments about history and its nature.

In a more focused sense, Talmud refers to Jewish law, ethics, custom and ritual, and by extension history, but I am here to use the Talmud more as a cultural template, allowing persons, places, and things not Jewish into the calculus. Talmud in this sense is like legal case books, with various issues, situations, arguments, and logic used as precedent-setting behavior and wisdom it is the stare decisis, the bridge of precedent that links law, behavior, expectations, and conduct.

You have also to understand that in this culture, discussion and argument are synonymous. Thus when relating a story of how, as an elementary school scholar, I would come home from school for lunch, I could easily render the exchange between my mother ad me as, "So what do you think you'd like for lunch?" she insisted. And at dinner, my father would be likely to venture, "So how was school today?" he inferred. Have a nice day translates to have a good argument.

In my culture of birth, the first big dichotomy had to do with diet, so that the primary question became milk or meat? You could not mix the two, on plate or in tummy. Separate utensils, separate approaches, a distraction to someone who likes sour cream on the baked potato he enjoys with his prime rib.

You might venture that the next dichotomy from there, the next choice to be made was medical school versus law school. Somewhat like a teen-ager feeling uncomfortable at being seen out in public with his parents, many of us in this culture war found neither medicine or the law as attractive as the arts, and so our particular bifurcation was the one of jumping off the road entirely and not opting for a back-up provided the arts did not pay the rent.

Onward to the secular Talmud, the more generalized, basic laws of self, the secular arguments we are always
engaged with, the inner Pairs of Opposites that are with us at any given moment. What do we want as opposed to what constraints or restraints do we feel? Enter subtext. Look at the subtext in Ernest Hemingway's overly praised story, The Killers. They all come here to eat the Blue Plate Special. Why does this single observation reveal the menace of these two men? Subtext.
There is always somewhere to go with characters as we pursue subtext. Somewhere surprising. Somewhere leading to a discovery.

Accordingly, assembling a character is of a piece with those cheap shelving or desk sets we buy at Office Max or Staples or Costco, where we open the box, check to see we've not been short-changed on any of the parts, then try to interpret the damned instructions. We begin with character by looking for the polar opposites in residence within him or her. They become the drama that informs this individual 24/7, alone of in company. Go ahead, pick two. Any two, so long as they are opposites. Then add a note of perceived obligation to another person. A little guilt couldn't hurt. Or perhaps a sense of having insulated oneself from the pain of obligation or guilt. We're on our way.

NB: one of the many reasons we have become what we have is to understand our particular cultural pulls so that we may interpret them--notice the weasel word there, interpret rather than understand--to the point where we can take them on, internalize them so that we feel as though we are walking in their footsteps, not judgmental, rather empathetic, for after all they are like us, driven by these polar Horsepersons of the Internal Apocalypse, seeking love, comfort, understanding.

In Search of Lost Times

2008-07-01T09:38:00.000-07:00

At first I believed it was located in a book, a book I had not yet read—one that needed to be found by diligent research.

Accordingly, I moved from libraries to used book stores, searching, browsing, reading, even to the point of taking a job as a shelver at The Beverly Hills Public Library, definitely for the money, but more for the possible target of opportunity.

Then I began to think it was in my room, somewhere in the clutter of manuscript pages, magazines, perhaps books I had not read with as full a concentration as I might have employed. Missed opportunities, you might say. Perhaps next to a series of Remington and Underwood upright typewriters, all of which came my way on the cheap as a consequence of the occasional job with my uncle, the auctioneer.

Even to the time of my shift to the glorious red Olivetti portable, I looked for it as though for misplaced car keys or reading glasses or wallet, thinking it might be near the typewriter.

The shift from the Olivetti to an electric typewriter marked an end to a kind of innocence that only a shift from manual to electric can supply, but it, the equivalent of The Grail, was not to be found and although I had published many things by then, I thought perhaps I should never find the object of my quest. I thought this mordant scenario for some years, shifting in consequence from fiction to nonfiction, imagining myself doomed to live without it. After all, weren't some people born color blind or tone deaf? Didn't some in your acquaintance have a tin ear for the likes of dialog?

By the merest of accidents, I became an editor, devoted myself to that medium, began to feel the results of practice at it, even grudgingly liked it, and began to think, ah, well, better this than so many other things because, after all, I might some day come across the object of quest, might through editing find it.

An editing colleague, actually a competitor (he worked for Bantam, I for Dell) asked me to take his classes at the university while he attended a sales meeting. Why not? It might be found at the university. I have been there for thirty-four years, doing something else I had never thought to do before, and have seen fleeting glimpses of the quested vision, indeed have come to love the university for giving me so much to write about, for having given me my own sense of regionalism of the sort others had with such tangible grasp. Faulkner had his imaginary county. Sarah Orne Jewett had her own region, Flannery O'Connor her people. An entire raft of mystery writers had their venue and their quest. Bradbury and Sturgeon had science fiction. Orwell and Huxley had politics and dystopia.

It would be fun to say that I found it with the introduction into my life of computers, but nothing is that simple. I can remember my first typewriter, a Corona portable, a splendid gift from my parents, as a sort of bottle of champagne broken on the bow of a ship. But I cannot say it came from a computer nor can I remember what my first computer was.

It came some while ago when I turned in copy for a book review and because I'd included a cover letter, apparently had forgotten to append name and address to the copy. A sub-editor was baffled by the lack of proper identification, but Swindell, the editor, took one look at the first paragraph and said, "That's Lowenkopf. You can always tell."

I had probably found it, my voice, some time before that, had even grown used to it and had it begin to matter to me as much as being honest and honestly factual meant to me. In more recent years, I discovered at a remove an editorial challenge that was carried out beyond and without my presence. One editor complained of a review of mine containing a sixty-five-word sentence. "Doesn't he know anything about newspapers?" the editor asked. And another editor answered, "Perhaps too much."

Finding your voice is in some ways like accepting the fact that because you are six feet three inches tall, you may occasionally bump your head if you hang out with trees, get sprayed on your chest if you spend any time at all in cheap motels. You get used to it, even answer it back, which I have to admit does not go too far in the way of distinguishing you from a schizoid street person, particularly if you happen to be answering yourself while swatting at a fly.

You begin by looking for it, admiring the voices of others and trying to imitate them, then feeling the dissatisfaction of knowing you are a mimic but not a voice. You recall the times around ages twelve and thirteen when your speaking voice was at odds with your appearance, or when you squeaked inappropriately, or deliberately tried to lower your voice to some basso profundo level.

Of a sudden, it emerges and you realize you have been using it for some time, with no particular ah-ha moment. It was there as surely as your six three was there, reminding you to duck around trees and not expect too much from motel showers. Nice as it is to have a vocabulary and a wit and a love of poetry, it is nicer still to recognize yourself talking in a roomful of friends or strangers, comforting to be able to edit out the dross in the voices of others, and as a teacher to emphasize the simple truth that it is your voice that makes the story resonate to the point where it is yours.

More than your keys or fountain pens or reading glasses or your goddamned checkbook always going missing, it is as much yours as your fingerprints ever will be and it is your ticket into the auditorium and your place in line and your front row at the parade and your way of telling special persons and animals you love them. If you hear it recorded, you are disturbed at first, thinking it was a trumpet but realizing it is heard as a bassoon. Not to worry. In Beethoven's Third Symphony, The Eroica, a bassoon has an entire conversation with the full orchestra and holds its own quite nicely, thank you.

Practically speaking, it is all you have. You put yourself into it and it into you, then go out to encounter.

Ranking of story elements

2008-06-30T20:14:00.000-07:00

Order of Importance in Story

1. voice
2. point of view
3. characters' agendas
4. subtext
5. humor
6. style
7. dialog
8. surprise
9. discovery
10. reversal
11.conflict
12. suspense
13.landscape/setting
14. outcome
15. opening velocity

No! in Thunder

2008-06-29T09:35:00.000-07:00

Beginning.
Middle.
End.

Those three points describe a story arc but they also describe the arc of those of us who wish to present story arcs of our very own.

The beginning writer, made aware of the pulsing magic of story and some of its basic ingredients, rushes into the stream, eager to please and delight, eager for readers, eager to demonstrate mastery of the techniques. Good plot? Hey, watch this! Splendid dialog? Nothing to it. Lapidary narrative? Check this out.

The middle writer, mindful of the 98/02 reality, which is to say the two percent of what is ultimately published as compared to the totality being written, begins to grow testy. (Not testy enough.) Begins to resent writing on spec. If they want me, let them assign me something. Surely they can see from the things I've published that, Hey, I'm here.

Edward Said, the historian/critic, has some nice thoughts on Late Style, artists (mostly musical composers) who have arrived at maturity, who have even accepted the inevitability that they are past the mid-point of their life. To hitch a caboose onto his perhaps overly embellished prose and thoughts, the end game writer walks the cusp between being pissed and not caring about them but rather about it. The Ender has a life-long habit of writing and will do it, published or not, just as some creatures will shed skins or shells, molt, hibernate, or whatever it is built into their entelechy to do. Thus does the ender have a voice, a No, in Thunder quality of which Herman Melville wrote about Nathaniel Hawthorne. "There was a grand truth about him. [Hawthorne]. He says 'No ! in thunder;' but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes."

The Ender wishes to please him/herself; the Ender has allowed passion to trump form, has exposed those passions for all who would care to see them and make of them. The Ender writes pretty much as Joan Didion has written since her early middle period, to define herself to herself. The Ender writes to define his individual belief system, to clarify it, to light a path through the darkness of the forest, to unmix the metaphors, to see the rules so that they may be successfully avoided.

Thus evolved, the Ender sees with stoic good humor the things that have been believed all along, the things cast aside, the new things purchased in some foreign port of call. The Ender sees the connection within between seriousness of purpose and the good sense to take noting too seriously. Water boils at 212 Fahrenheit degrees at sea level, does it? Yes, I suppose I do believe that, even rely on it, but not to the extent of making a god of it. For that I will chose something--a mere concept--I know does not exist except in the abstract. Kali, the Creator and Destroyer, the great and powerful shakti, as the first illusory presence of Brahmin, the formless one. Kali, created only to give some attributes, splendid and horrific, to the One whom, the moment you give an attribute of any sort, becomes no longer what the Hindus refer to as The One without a Second. I can get behind those abstract presences as well as the Shekinah, She being the Jewish Kali. They help make sense of the Universe. But so does the constant sense of writing to define these and other concepts for myself.

I once got a vivid sense of the Bhagavad Gita by writing a story that occurred to me in large measure while taking a taxi from JFK to midtown Manhattan. The cab driver was Krishna and the passenger was Arjuna, flow in from corporate headquarters to attend a stockholders' meeting and to fire some relatives from the corporation. Of course they had different names the passenger having no notion of his being Arjuna. The cabbie? Well, it is nice to think he knew he was Lord Krishna, but there we go, spiraling into Hindu theology and away from story.

What it all amounts to is this, I am beyond mid-game, cheerful in my own late style, a cranky, curmudgeonly, sceptic, laughing at the joke of being me, at the joke life sometimes becomes, at the wonder of it and the value of it, thankful to have any share at all in the ability my species has of thinking and feeling in the abstract, thankful for marshmallows and Maurice Ravel and Antonin Dvorak and Kiri Te Kanawa who belts Gershwin like you would not believe, thankful for Yeats and Hopkins and that crazy Dylan Thomas. Thankful I can hear the vibrations of the abstract in the compositions of Dame Hildegarde of Bingen, mindful in my gut of how laid back Miles Davis was as a kid. Fortunate to have two mentors, Rachel for text, Virginia for acting and stage, fortunate to have two mantras, one for mind, the other for heart.

In a real sense, my first off-road vehicle was a short story called Molly, which I wrote without any sense of rules or form or beginning or middle or ending, only a sense of someone who had been with me for some time and who wanted to get out again into the blaze of light and circumstance called life.

The Point of No Return

2008-06-28T19:34:00.000-07:00

Beginnings are neither easy nor natural, sometimes remaining unrecognized until they are well under way. Even then, beginnings are often recounted in retrospect, often sad retrospect, as in, If I had only known, or Little did I recognize then. Beginnings confound us nearly as much as endings. We often aren't sure where or when a thing begins until we decide where it ends, allowing us to scroll back to the literary equivalent of a Big Bang. Yogi Berra may well have observed that it isn't over until it's over, but had he been more observant, he'd have also recognized that we need a sign from on high that the ending really is over, allowing us to scramble back through the parking lot, looking for the lost keys of the beginning.

Being born is one beginning, promising in the sense of now being on stage, collecting coordination and memories. My own earliest memories come from a time when my family was driven by economic need from the Santa Monica, California of my birth to a distant suburb, Burbank, and a Mediterranean-style home on Providencia Street, which must have placed me in or about age three, where I remember being locked (probably by my own hand) in a bathroom with a corrugated glass pane in the door. Some time later I recall being taken by my older sister next door to see some baby alligators in the wash basin of our neighbors, the Browns. The Browns also had a dog named Silver with whom I had a relationship of sorts in that once Silver bit me and I in turn bit him.

Beginnings are not always where you expect them; in dramatic fiction, they are determined by the nature of the story and are every bit as important to get fine tuned as it is important to establish who or whom among the dramatis personae is/are relaying the story to the reader. Endings are not always where you expect them, either, meaning you either go on too long and thus risk the distraction of anticlimax or the quite different risk of stopping too soon, risking the reception of the narrative as a shaggy dog story.

Thus observed, with perils from both ends as it were, story in general is a risky business, particularly for those of us who follow the character-driven story as opposed to the compulsively orchestrated plot-driven story. And so we approach a given story with the sense that there is some safety in the middle part of the narrative arc, which in many ways is like the spare room or garage in which things are piled helter-skelter, waiting for use or, worse, waiting for guests to arrive, which occasions a need to clear our a sleeping space, which very need occasions some calamitous discovery such as the bed or sofa having an exposed spring or stain the size and shape of the former Soviet Socialist Union.

Okay, there is no place in story to go for safety, no soft spot, no lee cove or haven. Add to this menacing landscape of beginning, middle, and ending, there is the pulsing sense that a story need not be scrolled forth in chronology. If anything, a story told in strict chronology needs some added touch of suspense or characterization or moral quandary to leaven the unremarkable time frame.

I am mindful of these lurking menaces by a tart email from Digby Wolfe, reminding me it is time--another sort of time--to get on with the book we have been threatening for some time now, The DNA of Story. "I believe the middle is the minefield," he writes. "That's where the real danger lies--the matter of choice, where one may or may not safely tread, when in fact safety is the detonating word for the real menace:predictability..."

Our assignments are made. He will begin with middles and I with a dissection of the basic dramatic unit, the scene, which has beginning and middle and ending.

In the process, I am reminded of a time some years back, when The Writer was still quartered in Boston, and its remarkable editor, Sylvia Burack, approached me to do a piece on middles, which I could possibly still be grappling with to this very day had I not had the good bad fortune to watch that iconic film, The High and the Mighty, on television. The story is quintessential disaster film, wrapped in an ensemble cast, all of whom are caught on a flight between Los Angeles and Honolulu, where things go wrong. Seriously wrong. Engines catch fire. Storms approach. One of the flight crew--the pilot--has a heart attack. As one disaster after another is announced, we are delivered the dramatic equivalent of a one-two punch. The flight engineer announces that the fuel supply is in trouble, the radio man chimes in with the storm being up-graded, which will require greater fuel use. And now, the navigator with his announcement. We've reached the point of no return.

I was up immediately, reaching for my note pad, my reliable Moleskine. PONR, I printed. The middle is the point of no return; the story cannot end, the characters are committed to a course of action that will produce consequences. We cannot guess what those will be yet and indeed may change our minds as we proceed, but given the archetype, the plane cannot return to safety of the LAX airport; it must forge ahead. Not to worry, John Wayne was the copilot and he'll overcome his own issues to bring us safely under the storm and into Honolulu.

The reader needs to see the PONR to be invested fully in it. Check out Antigone, for instance, if you find this trope of mine is too modern. Check out Shakespeare and Ben Johnson, check out Middlemarch and even the short stories in this year's New Yorker.

It is instructive to see the more successful--by which I mean the more enduring--stories arriving somewhere at that Point, which throws facts and circumstances and surprise together, effecting and affecting the beginning and the middle. In F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, the PONR comes almost exactly in the middle, a stirring circumstance in which two of the principals, Dick Diver, the young psychiatrist, and Nichole Warren, his patient, are caught in a rain downpour while strolling in downtown Vienna, and in a matter of moments, to quote from Dick Diver's point of view, "he knew that from now on, her troubles were his." Were they ever!

There is a splendid PONR in Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, and an equally moving one in Huck Finn.

I shall direct Digby to these vagrant lines, curious to see if indeed we now have two chapters. On with the dialectic.

Wanted: to Have Written

2008-06-27T13:47:00.000-07:00

If you are to spend any time at all with authors, engaging in conversations that aspire to seriousness of purpose, such as, Another round? or Shall we agree to keep this between ourselves? or When are you going to finish that thing? will bring you to some new variation on the theme of a beginning writer wanting to know how one acquires the services of a literary agent. Your story is funnier, no doubt because it is so markedly more absurd than the example given you by the author you are conversing with.

A beginning writer makes his way into the men's lounge of a crowded hotel, notices all the stalls and urinals are occupied, smiles to himself because he has a large audience, then asks, "Excuse me. Anyone in here know how to get a literary agent?"

Of a piece with that ghostly apparition of writerly humor is the trope of exercises and contests for writers. I don't mean legitimate short story or poetry contests in which a completed work is submitted, I mean--well, one of the more ridiculous was the one in which the writer is forbidden to use words with the letter e in them. There are lesser evils such as each person in a group picking one word and the exercise transmogrifying into the need to use each of these words at least once in a story. There are themes, such as Man's inhumanity, or radix valorem est cupidetas or even evil to him who evil thinks.

A mere hours into recovery from a week-long and energetic writers' conference, I still bristle at the remarkably dumb contests such as The Worst Opening Sentence, or a poem, essay, or story employing the theme "sideways." You start thinking about all the costs of enrollment, travel, lodging, and the price gouging at the Fess Parker Doubletree Inn at Santa Barbara, and you're willing to spend your time trying to write a humorously bad opening sentence. I have the Midas touch; everything I put my hands on turns into a muffler.

Or you spend your time in the workshops of two first-rate screenwriters, attempting to arrive at a one-scene parody of a forty-year-old movie.

Gimme, as they say, a break.

My critics admonish me to loosen up, relax, have fun, go with the games and exercises because, after all, we've got to have some fun or we'll go stark raving mad.

Forget the fact that writers already are stark raving mad, by degrees obsessive, compulsive, and control freaks. If it were not already on some level fun, what would prompt us to do it? This argument is of a piece with telling Van Gogh to have fun, and hey there, Herr Rembrandt, have fun, and Ole, El Greco, divert thyself.

What about this for a contest? Write a first draft of a poem or short story or character sketch or essay. Write it as fast as you can without thinking. Now you have an outline. Develop this into a second draft, experimenting with order, point of view, cadence, dramatic beats. Produce a third draft, emphasizing voice. Perhaps a fourth draft for relevance and repetition. Then maybe a fifth to check out the proper beginning and ending, and yet another for the middle. Now you just might have something that produces an intensity equivalent to two cats, getting it on out on the back porch. How's that for a exercise.