The Things You Carried

A question we frequently ask of an actor's performance is What does that actor bring to a particular role? Similar questions are asked of dancers and singers; the same question may also be directed to a musician undertaking a particular work. What, for instance, did Audrey Hepburn bring to Eliza Doolittle? What did Margot Fonteyn bring to Swan Lake? What did Kiri Te Kanawa bring to the Countess in the Marriage of Figaro? What did John Coltrane bring to My Favorite Things?

There are tangible answers to all these specific questions, answered in no small part by the things other artists and performers brought to the same role or performance. Similarly, and because the thrust of this inquiry goes to writing and story, we could ask, for instance, what F. Scott Fitzgerald brought to the college novel. We could augment this question with a dependent clause, as in, what did F. Scott Fitzgerald bring to This Side of Paradise that Richard Farina did not bring to Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me?

Each of these writer questions has answers, the substances of which lead directly to the question, Why you? Or, better put, What do you bring to your story? Not, How dare you tell such a story? or what right did Jules Verne have writing about life twenty thousand leagues under the sea? but rather what elements of vision, attitude, philosophy, perspective, and emotional compass do you bring along when you confront pen and note pad or computer and screen with the ingredients for a story?

To begin, you bring a recipe for story, one you have gleaned from Aristotle or Anne Lamott or John Gardner or an amalgam of the reading you have done as you sought to inform yourself with the ingredients of story. Then you bring forth the order in which the elements are introduced. Just as I was taught that cornbread began when you poured buttermilk in the mixing bowl then added the corn meal, I also discerned the need to begin with characters who wanted things to happen or not to happen. You bring forth a history of failures, as indeed my early narratives were events, vignettes rather than fully formed stories. You bring forth successes, things that seemed to have emerged from your typewriter, your fountain pen, your computer screen as though they'd been dictated to you by the ghost of some writer on its way to eternity, things that were so completely of you that you scarcely new how to replicate them in another venture.

You bring forth attitude as in, I'll show the bastards (with a full vision of who the bastards are), or this is payoff with thanks for people who helped me grow, or this is my revision of what happened to me at a time when I was completely humiliated, or this is how I learned something, or this information about the human condition needs to be passed on, or this is my political theory, or this is what God means or does not mean to me. You know, stuff.

You bring forth a world view. Don't trust. Do trust. Beware. Be Open. The worker always gets screwed. The worker is the salt of the earth. People are basically kind and empathetic. People are mean, nasty, duplicitous.

You bring forth philosophy: In story, every character believes he is right. In story, women always have to settle for something. In story, strong men must by necessity be lonely. In story, adults are the enemy and children carry forth the real truth. In story, there is a double standard in every society which can be found if you look closely enough.

You bring forth to story your own toolkit, your individual strengths and proclivities. This toolkit may include an acute vision of the future or of the undercurrent of violence in all social relations or the gestalt of the most delicious plotting, or an eye for character or an ear for dialogue, or a reckless disregard for rule and regulation, or an imagination that is the literary equivalent of a splendidly formed woman in a bikini or an equally splendid man in a scanty Speedo, which is to say it is arresting to the point of producing the lust of envy.

You have a certain chutzpah of the sort Dustin Hoffman had when he took on Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman after Lee J. Cobb had homesteaded that part and owned it. You have the chutzpah of Jane Smiley taking on a frame tale hundreds of years after Boccaccio and Chaucer turned the format into their own Hollywoodland sign. You have the serene confidence of Margaret Yourcenar when she channelled the emperor Hadrian for her novel, Hadrian Remembers. You have the audacity to take on Merlin as Mary Stewart did in The Crystal Cave.

You dare to take on Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried with the simple and bodacious act of seating yourself to write. These are the things you carry, these are the things you are at any given moment, simultaneously fearful they will not last you through the night and confident they will replenish themselves and grow more diverse in the process.

Who are you?

Yes.

The Voice of Experience

You are seated at a small coffee shop and bakery you have come to admire much during the past few weeks, about to tuck into what promised to be an excellent late breakfast, ordered when a lecturing gig had met with disastrous results. It is by all accounts a small shop, much of the walls of its dining area a slapdash of sheet rock and plywood, the trappings of an interior and exterior remodeling. The crowdedness and closeness of customers and wait persons was bearable, even civil, adding to the sense of pleasant breakfast anticipation.

But from the midst of the assembled came a sound, something like a combination of a croak, a hawking laughter, and a middle-aged person trying to dislodge something from the mid regions of the throat. The sound revealed itself to have a vocabulary of reasonable range, not quite so extensive as a Ph.D. candidate working as a waiter but more literate than, say a crossing guard. The owner of the voice proceeded to use it for at least twenty minutes, experimentally at first, then settling into a timber and loudness the way a lady mosquito would settle on the fleshy part of a forearm. I don't know how others in the vicinity were affected, ventured on the potential rudeness of looking about to identify the voice, then check with some unscientific polling, which is to say looking for surrounding facial expressions that may have betrayed the annoyance I felt.

The whole matter of voice resides within the idiosyncrasy genome of the individual, whether that individual is a listener or a seer, a hearer or a reader. Voice is one of the two things over which writers have the least choice until they have arrived by accident or some deliberation at the other distinguishing element, which is style.

The writer's attitude, philosophy, and to a large extent the writer's present mood make major campaign contributions to the writer's voice. Choice of characters, choice of subject matter, even choices of genre and length add texture to the way the voice of a story or novel or poem sounds, even if it is not read aloud.

Style is the combination of traits, quirks, devices, use of vocabulary, sentence length, internal rhythm, sense of humor, and other items on the narrative laundry list.

Of the two qualities, voice is the most volatile, in some ways as open to the free radicals of grammar and lack of self-confidence within the writer as coffee is vulnerable to rancidity if reheated or left out in the open for too long. It may be controlled as the writing goes along, not with thought because thought is the enemy of much about first-draft narration, but rather with maintaining the guiding emotion of a particular scene or, just as well, staying within the feelings that triggered the narrative into being in the first place.

One way to approach style is by comparing two musicians, playing the same composition on the same instrument or, for another example, singing the same song or aria. Beverly Sills, singing the aria "Una Voce Poco Fa" from The Barber of Seville is a distinct experience from the Maria Callas version; Sonny Rawlins sounds distinctly apart from John Coltrane although each plays the same instrument. Style allows you to see or hear what makes the artist different from all others. If style is standardized, writers begin to sound alike, say like everyone in National Geographic or The Readers' Digest.

If you aren't pleased with your voice or your style, you can take steps to change either or both--but not when you're trying to get first draft down, and most decidedly not when you're consciously trying to imitate someone else's.

Reading an author whose voice irritates you will give you one more thing to be wary about in restaurants, but you already knew that from experiences with voices in theaters.

Reading a writer whose voice engages you makes you want to use your own, reaching with it, taking risk, always taking risk.