A Country for Old and Young Writers

Whichever direction we turn, we seem to be presented with an ongoing scenario of dissent, making us spectators at a Balkanized, fractured landscape ruled by old passions and questionable logic.  

It is not a landscape we have entered with zeal or adventureous spirit.  Rather, it is a place where we have turned in search of refuge if not solace from the consternation about us.  It is more a place for a cynic, a politician, or a career diplomat that one who would offer the soaring freedom of the creative imagination.

Cormac McCarthy called it no country for old men; he was quoting Yeats, who was old when he wrote the lines:
That is no country for old men. The young
  In one another's arms, birds in the trees
  - Those dying generations - at their song,
  The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
  Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
  Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
  Caught in that sensual music all neglect
  Monuments of unaging intellect.

McCarthy's sheriff, Ed Tom Bell, was inspired by those lines and he,in the best artistic sense, became our man in this fractured landscape.  It is the job of the story teller to take us into such dismal and disspiriting places, asking questions, forging the moral boundaries over which we must not retreat lest we limp backward to the cynical state of the politician or career diplomat or other well-paid pragmatist.  

The landscape of the reader is a country for old men and women as well as young, teeming voices, eager to find their own aimbre and pitch. 

Apocalyptic Fiction: If Sarah Had Become VP

apocalyptic fiction--short stories and novels framed on the premise that civilization, as it has evolved until the time of writing, has been traumatized by some natural or man-made catastrophe; narratives dramatizing the consequences of severe trauma to earth and its denizens; the evolutionary unthinkable, come to pass.

Whether it is a nuclear holocaust, tidal waves, epidemic,eruption, greenhouse effect, or some politically inspired pandemic, the story of apocalypse begins with the consequences writ large, dramatizing its effects on the lives and status of the survivors. No matter if the catalyst is a metaphoric result of the sorcerer's apprentice, atomic rockets fired by insurgents, or a worldwide flare-up of mutant salmonella, the story is about what the characters do next and how they accomplish what they do. The apocalyptic novel thus begins with the literary equivalent of Mr. Dickens telling us, It was the worst of times. The English writer H. G. Wells (1866--1946), with his frequent ventures into the medium of science fiction, is often thought of in connection with the apocalyptic genre although Mary Shelley's much earlier work, particularly the 1826 novel, The Last Man, is a place to draw the historical if not the dramatic line.

Like Wells, the American writer Jack London had strong socialist beliefs and wrote about them throughout their careers. In his apocalyptic mode, London produced The Scarlet Plague in1912, depicting a San Francisco of 2027, after a global plague pandemic has killed off enormous chunks of the population. No stranger to her own political extrapolations, Margaret Atwood added another dimension to her speculation, The Handmaid's Tale with the overtly apocalyptic 2003 Oryx and Crake, which builds on extrapolations of genetic engineering and bio-technologies to produce various species who can then be exploited. Earlier, Richard Matheson's 1954 I Am Legend, posited a bacterial pandemic in which Los Angeles resident Robert Neville is the only survivor. The symptoms resemble vampirism, to which Neville, having once been bitten by a vampire bat, is immune.

Apocalyptic novels involve Earth being struck by asteroids and comets; as well there are cultural and political wars, and in John Wyndham's 1951 The Day of the Triffids, an invasion by plants of particularly aggressive behavior who are able to communicate with one another. The triffids are particularly fond of feeding on humans. Nevil Shute's 1957 novel, On the Beach, tunes in on Melbourne, Australia, dramatizing the effects of the survivors of an atomic holocaust as they await the effects of death from the radiation. Walter Miller's plangent 1960 novel, A Canticle for Liebowitz, remains one of the archetypal novels of apocalypse and reconstruction. Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel, On the Road, is yet another example of the flexibility of the apocalyptic novel; things were worse than bad--a cataclysm (probably nuclear, but not specified) has wiped out most of the population of the earth, leaving an unnamed father and son, who undertake a journey toward the sea.

There are literally hundreds of apocalyptic novels readily available for study, many of them from experienced and prolific science fiction writers, just as many others from men and women who have turned from more literary pursuits, driven by their individual senses of concern and politics, to this genre. The apocalyptic story begins with some worst-case scenario--the worse, the better--impending or having taken place. One or more characters is selected to sort through the wreckage and remains, then set forth to do something about making a contribution to the continuation of the human race.

Authors Errors

The two most frequently considered approaches to story telling are the plot-driven story, where most major events are plotted out in advance and characters, accordingly follow the plot as though it were an itinerary on a tour. An apt enough metaphor; made even more remarkable when the author appears to have distracted the reader from being aware of the plot and its distracting inevitability. The other approach is the character-driven story, in which the author plunks two or more individuals with opposite agendas within a crucible that had a built-in shrink factor. The excellent motion picture, Driving Miss Daisy, comes to mind as an example, given an elderly black man who needs a job and an elderly Jewish woman who needs a chauffeur. The two characters have a built-in potential for story, made all the more remarkable by the fact that it represents an explosion on the way to happening, but not in any predictable way.

The reason for my unconditional preference for the latter is my near inability to plot right out of the gate as so many of my friends can and so many writers I admire but do not know personally are able to do. The inevitable question comes forth: what about the middle ground, the final product being something as neatly constructed as, say, any given Harlan Coben, yet allowing the characters some room to swing? Great if you can do it. Dennis Lehane surely did it in Gone, Baby, Gone, and as well in Mystic River.
There is yet another approach to story telling and lest anyone think I'm setting it on a pedestal reserved for beginners, I'll cite two major American authors as practitioners, William Gaddis (see Carpinter's Gothic) and Cormac McCarthy (see everything).

The third approach is author-driven, a narrative in which the author fills in many of the details including the author's ow choices of adjectives and adverbs to describe characters, events, and settings. Unless you are writing novels such as Gaddis' remarkable JR, which is entirely dialog, or a similar approach by Manuel Puig, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, or most of the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, chances are you will slip in some authorial direction or herd dog activity.

Although I greatly admire McCarthy's work and even more so admire another author-driven writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, their way grows cumbersome in my hands, leaving me by a process of painful experimentation and exclusion to the character-driven story. To get there, you need first of all to let go of the characters, stop hanging the albatrosses of your adjectives and adverbs about their dramatic necks to weight them down. It is enough that you've investigated them thoroughly, more so than, say, John McCain has so recently failed to do, then allow them to demonstrate your intentions by actions, by their words--not yours.

Ways to trust your characters and in the process learn from them:

1. Why Acting Matters by Uta Hagen.
2. An Actor Prepares by Constantin Stanislavsky
3. Sanford Meisner on Acting by Sanford Meisner

All three are beginnings to a closer association and understanding of the component parts of yourself that create characters, allowing you to control them in the best way to achieve a textured, dramatic intensity and allow them the delicious luxury of giving the performances of their life.