Somewhere a Voice Is Calling

You want to frame the question in a way that will be daring and presumptuous enough to challenge your personal borders.  If it doesn't challenge you, how can you expect it to challenge anyone else?  That's for starters.  So how about this:  How can you tell when a particular bit of music was composed by Mozart and not by anyone else he happened to admire?

There are simple and more complex answers to that question.  You are more familiar with the former than the latter, although you are growing more comfortable with the concepts and vocabulary of the latter.  Then there is the matter of a collateral question, one that steers the conversation away from the original question and its answer:  Are you comparing yourself to Mozart?  The direct answer to that question is a simple yes, the more nuanced answer contains your growing awareness of why you make such a reach, the man's energy, his sense of humor, his inventiveness.  He is a splendid standard to set, given his stunning, varied output, nearly all 600 +/- of which is being performed over 200 years later.

You can distinguish most of his music from some of his contemporaries because it has such a distinctive voice, his harmonic sense merging with these other aspects such as energy, sense of humor, personal favorites (such as Haydn and J.S. Bach) and what the music of his time sounded like.  It is also instructive to pick a voice from another discipline as well as one from you own, thus you are able to pick out such stylists as Elmore Leonard and, of course, Ernest Hemingway in a blindfold test.  You listen for the voices of others as you listen to your own.  What do you sound like?  What are your rhythms, your cadences, your dialogue, your narrative.  Can you recognize your own voice, distinguishing it from the work of others?  And why do you personally think voice is so important that you have to make this kind of argument about it?

Voice determines the way your stories evolve, the characters you chose to perform in them.  Although somewhat of a stretch, voice would become your way of casting Jack Nicholson, of I want you to hold the chicken between your knees fame, as Lear, Al Pacino as Robin Hood, Sean Connery as Scrooge; similarly Meryl Streep as The Wife of Bath, Helen Hunt as Varya in The Cherry Orchard, Susan Sarandon as Lubya in the same play, the common theme being you would not expect these characters to come equipped with these voices.  What a splendid new dimension an unexpected voice, perhaps your own voice, can give to a work.  Voice is your take on the performance that is your story; it must come through to you before you can trust it to carry the burden you place on its shoulders.  Accordingly, you must ask questions, constantly probing to find out how you feel about the circumstances that have insinuated their way into your psyche and are not attempting to scoot free as a story.  Plot is important only after the fact of the story being told; voice will speak to the reader, assuring the reader of the tone of the story.  Listen to the voices you hear about you during the course of a day's adventure.  Make note of the ones that attract your attention as compared with those that disturb you.  Be able to acknowledge if a person's voice bears the tells, the give-away gesture or facial tic the skilled poker player looks for in the face of his opponents.  Be able to distinguish Mozart from Haydn, Beethoven from Mozart.

Be able to tell your most secret you what voice you would have reading to you, whispering to you, reading your work aloud, and of course reading her work aloud because you would never become involved, would you, with a person whose voice was a rasping nag or an off-pitch squeak; you would only become involved with someone whose every range was one you knew and understood for the emotion behind it; you would know when she was irritated, with the world, with you; you would know when she wanted you to make a decision and when she wanted to make the decision.  You would know because you listen, of course, but you would also know because there was a moment when you heard her speaking when you knew this was a voice you could become involved with.

This is exactly the way you want your voice to sound when you transfer story from your mind and heart to the page; this is why there are writers you admire and those whose voice sound to you like that off-key alto in the coffee shop who calls your attention from what you were reading or writing or whomever you were conversing with, wondering Who is that?


Got to listen for the voice.  Got to have it in your work.

Influences

You needed considerable time--years in fact--to move away from your rebellion against Annie and Jake, easing instead into a conversation, even dialogue with them. There are still times when you hear yourself talking about them or when you find yourself thinking about them, when you realize some of the outposts of rebellion are still in effect, reminding you of those stories of Japanese soldiers on remote Pacific Islands, holding out long after WW II had ended, their loyalties still out there for the emperor and what the empire stood for.

The necessary time to effect this shift was, you now see, in direct proportion to the distance you hoped to place between you and them. What could be more an issue than a young person, respectful of his parents, wishing to forge his own ways and styles, his own vocabulary, his own voice? What could be more ironic than a young person becoming aware of the vast devotion and affection his parents inspired universally, while he enjoyed no such connective tissue? What issue could be taken more ironically by this callow young man than being told his parents actually wanted him?

It took considerable hand wringing and flat-out rebellion to arrive at the same kind of conversation and dialogue with literary parents and influences, none of whom actively sought him out in the first place. In a grim coincidence, the rebellion against Annie and Jake came out at the same time you were alternately seeking freedom from and scurrying to the protective cover of:

Samuel L. Clemens,

Francis Scott Fitzgerald,

Ernest Miller Hemingway,

Ring Lardner,

James Agee,

William Saroyan,

John Fante,

Carson McCullers,

Dorothy Parker,

Edna St. Vincent Millay,

James M. Cain,

Dashiell Hammett,

Raymond Chandler,

John Steinbeck,

Jane Austen,

Geoffrey Chaucer.

At the current stage in your life, you are completely thrilled to see or hear of any trait of Annie or Jake emergent in you. Nor do you become defensive or argumentative should you see traces of "them," those others, in your work; their appearance in your work, just as a walk-on by Annie or Jake in your persona are welcomed as influences, not as individuals you are attempting to imitate.

In truth, you have tried to imitate them all, including Annie and Jake, but you discovered to your frustration at first and then your growing awareness that they cannot be imitated, they matter to you because they are so clearly recognizable; no one asks of them "What do you mean?" Persons may well ask of you, "What do you mean?" at which point you have to go to the source, yourself, ask yourself what you meant by that, then produce an answer. You also need to make sure you write that answer down so that you will remember it and be influenced by it.

You did make a prodigious attempt to do many of the things SLC did, bumming about the West, even working for his old paper, the Territorial-Enterprise, but the bite was missing until you realized it was not enough to be angry at the things he was angry at; you had to learn what you were angry at, then see where it led you. You spent considerable time wandering about Fante's Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, thinking how wonderful it would be to live in one of the building alongside the steep incline of the Angel's Flight, but you lacked his poetry, which made perfect sense because it was not your poetry and although you admired his passion and his music, you admired them because they were poetry and music, but his poetry and music, not your own. You had similar "encounters" with all the others, having a particularly difficult time of it with F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom you envied for the results of his work rather than the actual work itself.

Once you and a chum who also cherished writing ambitions grew by degrees increasingly more drunk, taking turns, as it were, giving up some of your favorites. You didn't realize at the moment how you were giving up the notion of copying them or their lifestyle, but rather you were giving up the notion of imitating them, which is to say trying to counterfeit them. You and your chum came to the same conclusion the next day when neither of you had a hangover headache, as though some great gift were visited upon you. Nor did the room spin nor the mid night supper at Ah Fong's on Sunset and Crescent Heights come up to inflict misery upon you.

Hardcover books today sell at twenty-five and twenty-six dollars, you tell students. Why would anyone pay that much to get you in imitation of someone else? Invariably, they will respond with a bleat, But how else do I get there? And the answer is that nobody knows but if you are going to get there at all, it will most likely be as you sounding like you.

Sometimes, when you are reading through your work, you will be caught off guard by a comparison or a particularly deft combination of words, producing an image that produces deep within you a mischievous laughter and you think, pure Twain, twenty-first century. Sometimes you will happen upon a particular understanding of the human condition and you think Fitzgerald might nod approval, although he might then scold you for some earlier infraction. You had the good grace to excuse yourself when someone observed you were stepping on Jane Austen, and it pleased you to think you heard her voice telling you to mind, don't let it happen again now that you know the rules.

It is so much nicer now, them knowing they no longer have to take care of you or even warn you off projects that lack merit; you knowing that they owe you nothing beyond the considerable pleasure they have afforded you and whatever wisdom and understanding you got from them came not from them hectoring you but rather you listening to them. That, of course, goes for Jake and Annie, too.

Exit pursued by a cliche

The effective translation of emotion into written language often loads more demands than mere description can bear. Writers have memorably conscripted adjectives, adverbs, and metaphor into service with uneven results. In the irony of unintentional pathos, writers have also attempted to Shanghai poetry as a means of conveying in more exquisite detail the heights and depths the human awareness can reach. Same results: some poetry soars, other gets on the Daedalus list for trying to fly, and yet other poetry sinks like a hastily defrosted chicken pot pie in a hungry tummy.

Exit description pursued by a cliche.

Enter story and its adjuncts, the daydream (from which many stories emerge) and the sleeping dream in which symbols, fears, and uncensored ambitions play dress-up adult behavior while the adults are out. Each of us has at least one dream or recurrent fear or fantasy, a genie as it were in a bottle, waiting to escape. The beginning writer has already come to expect more than one story, nurse more than one dream, learn to live with more than one fear. You could begin to argue that the measure of progress and success in an intermediate writer is not only the acceptance of the resource but an ongoing welcoming party on its behalf.

The intermediate and veteran writers are as tolerant of the presence of stories and dreams as a dog is to fleas: they come, bring itches, crawl about for a time, then they move on. Intermediates and veterans even have strategies for dealing with their arrivals, their itches, and their departures, strategies which are multifarious and pestering enough to deserve their own specific interview.

At focus here is the story itself. Simplistic to say, story is a shared human trait. The more advanced and devoted to technique the individual, the greater likelihood of a greater and more nuanced number of them in the toolkit and the greater the dramatic technique available for conveying them to others in ways that will, indeed, interest others.

If you were to chance upon the individual who was Ernest Miller Hemingway, you would probably want to place as much distance between him and you as possible. If you were to encounter even one of his more overtly male-bonding-type short stories, you'd be likely hauled in by your collar due to his use of language, nuance, ability at inference, his way of evoking feelings you may in fact disagree with but who you would nevertheless endorse as accurate, authentic renditions of emotion.

Ernest Miller Hemingway can get most of us to listen to his stories, in some cases even as we simultaneously reject the intent and posture of the story. He found a way to get us to listen by doing things with the language and with story that had not been done before. The way of his technique is yet another potential for a substantive digression of its own, "How Hemingway Got Us to Listen."

On the other side of that coin is a mythical storyteller, let's call him Ishmael. No; let's not. Mr. Melville's Ishmael is not only mythical, he is iconic. Even though he may have told us more in the long run about whales than we wanted to know. Let's instead call this fictional person Fred, imparting to him advanced middle age, perhaps even a noticeable paunch, male pattern hair loss, a retirement income adequate if not extravagant to his survival needs, a few children who have long since flown the coop and now live in other states at enough of a distance that Fred does not have the close connection he might have had if his grandchildren lived nearby. Fred is a widower; he has few friends. Much of his day is spent tidying up his condo apartment, then strolling forth variously to a coffee chop, a park, or a seniors' recreation center where his goal, although he could not convey it in so many words to you, is to get others to listen to his story.

What result does Fred want from telling you this story? Ah, he wants the magic of transforming things back to the magic of his dreams when the events were taking place for him in reality. He wants to dazzle you and work magic with his story.

Fred's story is one note in a bottle, tossed into the swirling ocean tide or perhaps the downstream rush of a massive river. He wants you to find it and read it and think, oh, fuck, what a story, what a remarkable, wonderful, memorable story. He must have been something, that Fred, that fucking remarkable Fred.

Secrets

It may well be that you have written your way into a  awareness if not outright discovery for the thing you had been searching, much as Lewis and Clark had searched for a Northwest Passage.  Ambiguity and irony have occupied your thoughts for some while; so too has the notion of constructing a biography of each character before beginning a story (particularly a longer one).  

You began one particular story, "Dog Star," with the notion that there was a character of some financial success as an actor, who had bought his way into a second home, a get-away home, in Santa Barbara, and subsequently fallen in with a group of breakfast regulars at a bakery/coffee shop where you were a breakfast regular with a group of regulars.  You did not want the character to be you; instead, you chose an actor of your acquaintance who more or less filled the basic qualifications for what you have come to think of as armature status, the bare condition about which you would wrap traits, qualities, and past history to form your own dramatic Golem, who would then go forth to deal with story.  All you needed was the extra edge to give your character enough dimension for you to be able to turn him loose, whereupon he would behave and all you'd need to do was write about the things he did, thought, and, importantly, felt.  In this case, the character, John Millain, had a dog whose very presence made the story.  Millain's breakfast regulars tolerated him because of his dog, whom they all greatly admired.  They did not dislike Millain, nor did they fail to recognize what he was in professional life, but on matter of taste, his dog was his ticket to the morning breakfast table and subsequent conversation.

You, as writer, knew something the protagonist did not know. You knew a secret.

At one time, the considerable shadow of Ernest Hemingway fell over you to the extent of you being completely caught in the need to hear the music of his prose, the better to refract that music into your own.  As a result, your own prose may have sounded interesting, but its content lacked the bite and vision you sought.  How, you wondered, could any man who so clearly saw the value of Twain, be of no value to you.  And so you went after him instead of Twain.  Water under the proverb now; the one thing from H. that remains, the one construct that allows you to venture forth to be you rather than a stylistic copyist, is his notion that you start by putting everything in, then gradually reduce it, removing more than you think safe, so that characters are talking and thinking about things in such a way that the reader is able to see them.  With this in mind, you have evolved your own approach, and think about H. only when Conrad discusses him in relationship to his abysmal knowledge of bullfighting and of those who found the bull ring the easel for their art.  Sometimes, you think of H. when you have occasion to remember his son, Gregory, your classmate for a time, and for Gregory's sharing word from him in re things you had written in parody and or admiration of him, or when Gregory showed you letters from him revealing what an egotistical, cold-hearted individual he was.

At the moment, you are in the process of inventing secrets for the characters who inhabit a novel with the word secrets in its title, wondering if by some fortunate misfortune, you began with the formula reversed.  All characters (and indeed all people) have secrets.  When we talk about making reductions in cooking, we consider reducing a sauce or gravy or juice or marinade or some combination of these to a basic liquid essence.  In writing, the reduction is the secret, what she or he holds tight to the bosom, fearful of discovery, fearful of the consequences of discovery, fearful the cover-up will be penetrated.  Secrets.  Fear.  Vulnerability.

The secret may have to do with a slight or more deliberate forging of one's resume, thus one was employed or inducted or invited or romantically involved.  The secret may also involve a hidden dream, an aspiration, an attraction for another person, an aching wish to become a particular sort of person.

We all of us live with our secrets; they are our companions with whom we conspire in the belief that the conspiracy is unnoticed by others.  Our behavior is affected by our secrets; we sometimes use them as bartering chips with loved ones, the equivalent in its way of having the name of a loved one tattooed on a portion of one's body.  What great misadventures erupt when the relationship dissolves, when the shared secret that was once a bartering chip becomes a ransom note.

The discovery/awareness has directly to do with secrets.  Even now, you are compiling a curriculum vitae for a character who is nominally an academic and is now apparently retired.  You have even compiled a list of his publications.  One of his secrets is that all his publications except one are self-published.  Aha, what does that tell you about him?  Another of his secrets is that he wishes more than anything for recognition as a poet (but has a tin ear for dialogue and music).  Yet another is that although he makes reference to his income from royalties and his university pension, the bulk of his income is from a chain of pizza restaurants throughout the Tri-Counties area.  Now you know him.  Or think you do.  What about his second wife, some twenty-five years his junior, and her secret, and her ambition to be a fine art painter?

When you think about it, you suppose your focus on the bedrock concept of secrets could be reduced to yet another concoction:  Nothing is what it seems.  For the moment, the happy, happy moment, you believe you can live with that.  And write about it.

What's That on Your Nose?

aftertaste--a feeling or vision evoked after reading a short story or novel in which the reader takes up the characters and dramatic situations, giving the characters and their circumstances life off the page; a resonant impression triggered in the reader by the events, circumstances, and personalities in a dramatic narrative.

Some novels and stories are so evocative that they seem to continue in their readers' mind long after the ending has been resolved. For instance, how many of us have considered what would happen next to Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley after Barnes has delivered his famed closing line in The Sun Also Rises, “Yes, isn't it pretty to think so?” 

 Or, still with Ernest Hemingway, this time A Farewell to Arms. Catherine Barkley has just delivered a stillborn baby, then died of a hemorrhage. Frederic Henry stays with Catherine until she dies, attempts to find ways to say farewell, realizes he cannot, then walks back to his hotel in the rain. The endings of both novels, as written, leave no doubt that the story is over, but the characters were drawn so well that they do not fade from the imagination. The result is aftertaste.

Aftertaste is the emotive awareness in the reader of the entire narrative, the literary equivalent of the aftertaste of a particular wine or ale, the lingering effect of the very process by which evocation works, the affect and effect a skilled actor produces when portraying a character.

How to achieve aftertaste? Consider the goals of each character and the actions the character takes to achieve that goal. Consider how each character responds to frustration and reversal. Consider the endings of stories as dramatic moments of theme rather than explanations of their significance. 

 Consider the way Anton Chekhov ended his stories. Consider ways by which hints are introduced to pique the reader's curiosity, for instance what further conversations or actions Fortinbras and Horatio might have had at the conclusion of Hamlet.

A story that lingers in the reader's sensitivities has a life of its own, a life that will draw the reader back to hear more from the writer.


on the nose--a theatrical term indicating an action, behavior, or description is too literal; a reminder of the need for greater evocation of a desired result in all dramatic storytelling.

In a larger sense, being told a particular interpretation or scene is too "on the nose" is being alerted to the absolute moral white or black of meaning, of the operatic nature of one's drama. Human behavior tends more to gray than white or black; it is rich with shading and shadow. The judgment of "too on the nose" is a cry for greater complexity and depth of character and, accordingly, of the motive of character.

Habitue

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?

A Team of Rivals

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.

Where Will It All End?

Among the many technical and emotional joys to be found reading and rereading Richard Price's earlier novel, Clockers, and his most recent, Lush Life, there is the tacit agreement that the good guys don't always win, the bad guys don't always lose. The surprise comes not so much from seeing justice triumphing as an abstract condition but rather to see how much justice will be done at a particular time and how much is held over for later.

Short stories used to be more perfervid in their allocation of justice. Lately they have become more advocates for a force almost as forceful as justice. I speak of ambiguity.

We have moved, I observe, from living dangerously to living ambiguously. Living ambiguously may be more dangerous than living dangerously because of the uncertainty, the tension of wondering when things will become more dangerous--all this rather than the creeping boredom of ceaseless danger.

I believe there are reasons why short stories end on more ambiguous notes than, say, A Cask of Amontillado or An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, or even To Build a Fire. We have grown as a result of those stories, grown more cynical and sophisticated. As they did with so any other things of style and technique, the short stories of Ernest Hemingway added to the ambiguity syndrome, particularly some of the Nick Adams stories, say Big Two-Hearted River, or Hills Like White Elephants. In more recent years, in this century, the ambiguity is more deliberate than ambiguity merely for the sake of not being specific it is put in place to draw the reader artfully into visualizing a conclusion. Often this conclusion is a bundle of emotion, as well-orhestrated and sensual as a bouquet of flowers.

Do not, therefore, do the reader's work for him. Show the reader the direction you have in mind, then end with a good shove. To my mind and senses, the best ending seems at first blush a bit abrupt. You mean, That's it? Then, like an Altoid aftertaste, the other shoe drops and the ambiguity coalesces--off the page.

They all lived happily ever after is more ambiguous than it sounds because it raises questions that at the present time make you
question such things as what happiness is, and because of certain liberties taken with logic and semantics by a former president of the United States, oh, you know, that one, William Jefferson Clinton, it is fair to ask how long you mean when you say ever after.

I remember still the instant wisdom I got some years back when Barry Spacks called to invite me to one of his classes at UCSB to hear a presentation by an author he knew I admired greatly. I asked Bobbie Ann Mason to talk about why she'd seen fit to end her remarkable and memorable story, Shiloh, at what seemed to be an up-in-the-air moment. It was her answer that helped me forge my vision about ambiguity. "I ended it there," she said, "because that's where all the energy ran out."

I found it impossible to let that remark fade down the hallways of my memory, and I have thought long and hard since about where to end a story, and learned from countless attempts at trying to tack endings onto stories I did not realize were already done, the defensive sound staying on too long brings to the story.

Mark Twain actually said, "Put all your eggs in one basket--and watch that basket." I'm taking liberties by suggesting Bobbie Ann Mason's contribution as being, "Put all the available energy into a story situation--and watch that energy."