Letters, iv

I'm writing this letter to you from the advantage point of having had more time to pursue the craft than you.  If this sounds as though more time on the job gives me some moral high ground, it intends no such thing.  On the contrary, it gives me a chance to warn you about advice from geezers in addition to talking about the subject I'd wanted to address in the first place, good guys in your stories and their adversaries.

It should be apparent to you if you've read my earlier letters--always the danger you haven't, because I do tend to go on--that the warning is more to me than to you, in the sense that I am likely to make assumptions based on my time on the job which, although indeed extensive, can be illogical, particularly when compared to the potential of you coming onto the job with more chops already than me.  This is not so much a matter of humility on my part as the awesome awareness of lost time, of my having frittered time and pool balls away in darkened parlors, of more than a casual interest in women as distractions as well as their considerable other presence, and of allowing times of indecision to have had too strong an influence on my writing practice sessions.  However wrong you may be, you always do better when writing decisively.  Indecision only creates one kind of learning situation, the could have or should have tropes.  Wrong is at least straightforward, honest, lacking in the props of adverb.

So far as the good guys and their opponents are concerned, let me put it to you this way:  Give the good lines to your antagonists.  Let the protagonists fend for themselves.  Part of being a young writer us the understandable desire to show off your talents, your energy, your bravado, your ability to make sentences and entire paragraphs sail about with the dazzle and grace of a ballerina/  I was going to use the analogy of a gun fighter in a Western film, but as I explained a bit earlier, I do become distracted by the images and actual presence of women.

Let showing off have its time on stage via the narrative in which your people observe things about life, about one another, about themselves. Protagonists who speak as though Cyrano de Bergerac were on hire as a dialogue writer tend to come off the page as pomposity writ large, as humbugs, as set-up for a takedown which, in point of argument, is the fulcrum on which humor rests until the pomposity takes that one, irresistible step forward, from what may be pathos into what is definitely bathos.  Do what Beethoven did, which was in fact writing and playing to the point where they had to build a different kind of keyboard instrument in order to keep up with him.  He literally and figuratively forced what we now think of as the piano into existence.  How many writers do you know who have pushed the craft so relentlessly where writing is concerned?

The adversaries and antagonists are the people your guys have to engage and live to tell the tale, so it cannot be just any tale.  Melville had to let Ishmael live merely to tell us what happened.  We think about him because he did manage to get through it all, but it is only later, after we have considered all the implications that we even remember, oh, yeah, that Ishmael guy who wanted us to call him, he survived.  We remember him for all those wonderful reasons of his own, down-at-the-ego personality, but imagine him trying to cadge drinks at a bar with such a fanciful story.  Then we'd see him as something entirely else, someone like Montressor, the narrator of Poe's "A Cask of Amontillado," who has been dining out on telling this story of revenge, probably the one real moment in his life.  Melville saves the good lines for the dead guys, and for Father Marple.  We don't remember Ishmael as we remember those two hulking mammals, Ahab and the Great White Whale; Melville gave them the good lines.

Remember, it is not about you, it is about your characters.  Remember that and you will be remembered.  At least, your work will.  I'll bet you never thought when you were screwing around in high school, frittering, your thoughts jumping between moments of clearing the table in a game of rotation or edging over to the body parts of girls you're programmed to notice, that you'd be given some distraction such as that short story by Hawthorne called "The Minister's Black Veil," thinking as you finished it, some day I'll be a writer and I'll do better than this.  I suppose it makes me a nut case to admit that I did in fact read that story, at the time wanting more than anything to impress the hell out of a girl named Pauline.  Mind you, there were some good reasons to want to impress her, but that took me about fifteen years and by then the balances of power and chemistry had shifted.  Now, however, I am thinking what fun it might be to take that same story and bring it up to the present, featuring one of the guys who comes to Peet's Coffee Shop on State Street, a minister in some evangelical local church who frequently meets his parishioners there to discuss such subjects as goals, service, and, yesterday, getting right with God.

The language of story

How do we recognize individuality when we see it?

What causes the zebra to stand out from the herd? Are there some standardized forms--tin cans in a supermarket display--that take on individuality only after we have removed one from a collection? Is there some trait or combination of behavior pattern that speak to us in a rhetoric of awareness that operates beyond our conventional senses? Is there, in fact, a distinct language of recognition by which we communicate through the calculus of apartness?

These inquiries underscore the need we had ab ovo to pursue the rhetoric of story, for only story reveals to us the dialectic between the individual and the multitude from which the individual emerges, trying simultaneously to become camouflaged against the background of others while trying to establish voice, ambition, expertise, and understanding.

Each front rank character in each memorable story is by default larger than life, striving to achieve expertise of a sort in a human pursuit. Ishmael, signing aboard The Pequod to escape the depression that has threatened to overcome him, seeks solace and soothing effects. Had he remained on land, he would merely have trespassed more deeply into depression and despair. In his wish to escape, he entered the region of the unthinkable, where strange men and a beast so large as to take on mystical dimensions become his quotidian. If we accept one of the arguments raged about by Ahab, Ishmael has entered a landscape of causal malevolence and brutality. Indeed, he will be spared only that he may be able to relate the details of the malevolence; he will have entered the literary equivalent of a black hole.

When you think of Melville and his whale and his Ahab and his Starbuck, you are looking at not only a story but a metaphor for all story, the living, breathing synecdoche where the whole is one of the parts and one of the parts stands for the whole. The white whale as metaphor for opposition and confrontation, Nature incarnate, a simple lash of its tail enough to send a boatload of individuals careening into eternity. Melville attracts and repels because he dares place such cosmic forces before us with the exquisite inevitability of the dramatic meeting. Ishmael has signed into the Unthinkable just as his brother being, Achilles, signed into it when he railed and raged against the pettiness of Agamemnon and, later, was drawn into battle with a force every bit as formidable as the whale, Hector. The only difference was that Hector, too, fought within the inevitability of the war into which he was drawn, the war of rival forces and the war of custom and convention for a man of his rank.

In story, a character is articulated by the battle he or she encounters, however innocently. The forces that keep the character in the story serve to remind us who read how each time has its own forces to keep the character in confrontation with contemporary Fates. The circumstances that doomed Antigone would not, today, doom a bright, vibrant young woman and so we must look at ways to engage our modern character with the whale, the war, the desire to secure a burial for her brother that confronted these historical characters. Tess, Hester, and to a significant degree Jane Eyre faced the beasts of their time and station.

You look for those social, moral, and existential conventions that define your characters so that they may try to wriggle free long enough to tell the story of how they were caught up in the first place.

Coming Clean

Whenever I arrive at a place where the waiting room has stacks of magazines, I see them as life preservers, tossed out to those of us who know without being told that we will have to wait. No matter if we are prompt or even early; we'll have to wait. My first move at this state of discovery is to search through the piles of magazines for Architectural Digest, therein to brows page after page of neat, relatively uncluttered rooms, neat desks, even neat bedrooms. It is not so much the architecture itself or the furniture. In some form or other, I have all those, however improvised they may be as opposed to the opulence of the furniture in the features. Nor is it the arrangement of the furniture, although there have been times when it came to me that all in my study was not as efficient as it should be. Almost without exception, the photos in Architectural Digest show a studied neatness, however casual, however defensive the captions for the photos are about a particular office or study being "a working office" or "a study in the midst of a project." There have even been photos of artists' studios and in one case the studio of a busy potter. My study is "a working study" and my room is a room "in the midst of several projects."

Point is, I look at the photos of rooms as a tip of the hat to alternate-universe fiction; each of these pictured rooms or scenes, however filled with books or objet d'art they are, they represent to me some Platonic ideal of neat rooms.

Returning home from such places where I have been afforded time to browse, I am confronted by the specter of my desk, cheery, familiar, as mischievously disheveled as a young boy's hair. At this moment my desk is a mild clutter, a photo of an earlier dog, Mr. Edward Bear, resting on its side, a check, an ink bottle, two pair of reading glasses, a stapler, a wireless mouse, a mouse pad from the College of Letters, Arts and Science, USC; a stapler, a nail clipper, a small box of matches, a Mountblac fountain pen, a small cache pot filled with letter openers and fountain pens, a paperweight in the form of a book, given me when I moved away from Sherbourne Press and on to Dial, Dell, Delacorte. There is some satisfaction in seeing the pigeon holes at some respectable condition of neatness and organization.

It is good to clean desks and shelves and studies, even at the frequency I employ. I do so not from any inherent call to order but at a greater metaphor that relates to cleaning out the ledges, crannies, and pigeon holes of the part of me that originates ideas and sets them to word. All right, I'll take it a step farther: the ledges, crannies, and pigeon holes of my claim to creativity. It is good to write myself out, by which I mean to use up all the accumulated ideas, jokes, tropes, similes, metaphors, syllogisms, and unresolved curiosities I'm willing to lay out on the table. It is good to feel depleted, talked out, shed of an opinion or two, dissatisfied with a comparison between two or three things that may have come to me in the midst of a shower or perhaps while shaving: to start out empty-but-confident, anticipating the clutter that will come because, in a real sense, it always has.

Not all that long ago, I came upon the discovery that things with my handwriting on them often contained a sentence or two worth looking at and thinking about, matter that did not make me cringe reflectively at what I'd said or thought or surmised at an earlier time. In some cases, these notes are like memos to myself at a later time, something I was not only interested in then but as well something that actually makes sense now and holds my interest.

Yes, writers are supposed to be able to convey fact and invention in a manner freighted by clarity and the quality of being interesting, even compelling. What writer, in fact, can you name who did not set pen to paper with the avowed intent of being interesting? Alas, I think I know a few. Even greater alas, there are those who may think that very thing of me. We do not set out to be inane or boring or uninteresting, but in spite of our best efforts, sometimes we are. When Ishmael was in such a mood, "whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off -- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." Nothing so drastic for me. Something physical such as swimming or a long stroll with Sally or the beginnings of the metaphor of cleaning, neatening the room, neatening the desk, cleaning out files on the computer, perhaps even reading, looking for something known to be wonderful or awful, listening to music, attaching the jumper cables of interest and attitude and curiosity and enthusiasm to the inner battery and jump starting the process all over again. Persons in twelve-step programs seem to agree that you need to recognize the impact that comes from hitting rock bottom in order to jump start the recovery wave. For the writer the rock bottom is much less threatening or dire; you simply dump all the momentary jokes and defenses and smartass equations, holding back nothing. Then you get yourself down to some work.