Is it weakness of intellect, birdie, I cried, or a rather tough worm in your little inside?

In a fit of pique at you for some long forgotten specific, an individual to whom you were deeply close said, "You are not required to have an opinion about everything." The very formality of the rhetoric was also a clue to certain social standards that had been a part of an education that took for granted her having servants. You remember the exchange because it was so unlike her essential self in so many ways, but also because even then you were aware that in order to pursue some process by which you made your living from writing, you did indeed need to have an opinion about all the things you held in awareness.

There have been times--too many for comfort, actually--where even if you had an opinion, you were willing for some sake to not have one, or to sit on the one you had. This is part of what you like to think of as the interior War of the Roses, two houses or sides vying for the crown, which in this case was getting your way rather than accommodating. Not caring is of a piece with being asleep at the wheel, going through the motions of being awake and present but not caring enough to look about to see if there was some way to make some gains from doing something you did not wish to do or the even greater possibility of turning something you did not wish to do but had to do for some sake into an enormous plus. At the least, you are now in such circumstances able to see the play of subtext before you--what you do in arm wrestle with how you feel about what you do, or what you say and what you feel like saying.

As someone who is largely committed to being opinionated, you recognize the risky waters of giving offense, breaching boundaries of politeness,holding your tongue and/or in some way compromising the decisions and efforts that helped you evolve into the person you are now.

For a while you thought it was a simple matter of taste that dictated the way you felt toward writers you know personally or only through their works, but, late bloomer that you are, you see this extending across the entire field of expression where voice and opinion are required, thus your admiration of musicians, painters, sculptors, actors, photographers is also resident in your admiration for writers. Of course the reverse is true. "You do think David Sedaris is funny?" only last night. You had already seen things going wrong. "Not in the least," you said, not with intent to argue, although there was friendly willingness to do that; rather you were saying, as a writer you admire would have said, "No in thunder."

With this as prologue, there are writers whose successes thrill you and indeed they are successful with you. Even to the point of granting them an occasional off performance (Louise Erdrich's latest), you wish them well. Those whom your opinion leads you to disagree with may get the occasional, grudging awareness that something remarkable has finally come through. And there are those, particularly those you know personally, for whom your opinions will stubbornly rejoice when they step on the stage again, then trip. In this area at least you do not display meanness of spirit nor schadenfreude, merely the smugness of having chapter and verse to call them out on.

Is it weakness of intellect, Birdie, I cried...

The fact of you agreeing to be one of the two judges in a fiction contest--short stories and stand-alone segments of novels--reminds you once again of the notional climate inherent in any contest and/or submissions landscape. There is, for instance, the fact of you with a work of your own in submission for two months with a publisher whose books you have published two reviews. Speaking of which, there is the persistent campaign being waged by the author of a self-published book to have you review his project, despite your assurances that anything you might think to say about the work would hardly encourage anyone to read it, much less to buy it. There is also the incest of you living in a city with a larger-than-median percentage of writers, both published and aspiring, and, speaking of the nooks and crannies of interconnectedness, the other judge in this latest writing contest is not only a friend but someone who became a friend as a direct consequence of a published review of his last major novel.

There were also times when the writers' conference with which you are associated, in concert with the local daily newspaper, had a yearly contest, the awards being full and partial scholarships to the conference. As a judge in this contest, you frequently gave the highest marks to those submissions you thought had the least to recommend them, your theory being that they most richly needed the writers' conference.

Let us take a number, say one hundred, representing the number of times you have served as a judge in a contest. This is separate from the approximately one thousand book reviews you have written and at least ten thousand full manuscripts or manuscript proposals you have had a say on in your capacity at various editorial venues. Is there some terse, cogent philosophy you can articulate to describe the process by which you cast your lot for or against? If such terse, cogent philosophy existed, it might be this: If something aroused the adrenaline of your interest to the point where you felt invested in the outcome, you stood for it. If not, not.

What causes the adrenaline to flow in a genre you think you hate or at least have no interest in? What causes the adrenaline not to flow when the work is in a landscape you admire, written by an author whose work you admire? You would think a man with your experience would be able to give Power Point answers, the slides already on the screen of your mind, but the added fact is that you are vastly impatient with Power Point presentations, thinking them a gross sham.

The simplest answer--pace William of Occam--is that you like what you like on the basis of external chemistry. Same is so with individual persons; you like something in their manner or stature or posture or tone of voice or a combination of these and no doubt reflecting sexual, intellectual, and artistic considerations in the summary. You do not, accordingly, apply a cookie-cutter set of standards so much as you apply a chemical response which you then begin to break down into more component parts such as potential readership, artistic and intellectual challenges inherent.

Do you, in effect, say or think to another person, Thanks for letting us see you, but unfortunately...you are not right for us? No doubt you do.

How many manuscripts have you accepted without any thought of editorial suggestion?

How many friends and acquaintances have you accepted without any thought at all of wishing to tweak some large or small mischief?

Added to this calculus, how many novels or short stories, even by your own reckoning, even novels or short stories by Louise Erdrich, are perfect?

Is Conrad perfect? Wolfe? Fagan? Cook?

You know from intimate association and those tumultuous teen years when intimate association was put on hold that you least of all are in any way perfect and you are well able to live with that, just as you are able to live with the utter anarchy of unfinished business and clangorous coincidence in fiction.

Accordingly, even though you are hired, or in this recent case enlisted to judge, you do so by the one reliable standard you have encountered so far, the utter anarchy of chemistry.

Detect and Discover

Although you had been fond of reading novels of detection and, indeed, many of your friends were writing and publishing them, you had no thought to actually write them. It was enough to think about them in a kind of hazy and noncritical admiration, aware that you did not see your own way clear to plotting such narratives in ways that could lead to a satisfactory conclusion. At one point, you'd even gone so far as to plan an elaborately complex novel, something even more prolix than Hammett's The Dain Curse, that ended with the protagonist saying in so many words,"I've fit all the pieces together and now have supporting evidence to bear out my conclusion: Phil did it." THE END.

Even when circumstances drew you closer into the net of acquiring and editing mystery novels and, in time, a mystery magazine, you still considered yourself more an adjunct. Being affectionately railroaded by Dorothy B. Hughes into serving as an officer in The Mystery Writers of America only brought you into contact with more mystery writers, more respect for their abilities at plotting which you did not believe you had, and, of necessity, more mystery writers.

Somehow the lines grew more blurred. Mystery writers were serious drinkers, and two of the more prolific at the time braced you, each in his own way, with the trope that only women mystery writers with husbands who had significant daytime jobs had the luxury of being able to plot and outline. When you recall the ways they braced you, you also recall that the process involved some quantities of bourbon. Your first mystery was done while you were still in high school and although it was bulky and filled with false clues and moments of suspense, most of it remained in pen and ink rather than finding its way into typescript. The first one you were paid for was a more intimidating experience since much of the advance was in a sense enough to pay an outstanding bill at a French restaurant on Highland Avenue, where you were known to have an affinity toward cabernets sauvignon and Gewurtztraminer. Nor did you shy away from the trockenberen auschlese and madiera desert wines nor Martel's VSOP cognac. Ah, no wonder you found yourself with a deadline and a brick wall beyond which you could not penetrate. Smaller wonder yet that you repaired to the very same French restaurant with mystery writer friends who insisted that sole with a tangy Veronique sauce would be just the thing to show you the way beyond your brick wall. Home at midnight with the strong hint of a buzz and no concrete way out of your problem, you had until nine the following morning to present the final pages.

The memory of all that. No wonder you migrated away from French restaurants and novels of detection. Is it fair to say that you have moved to Italian restaurants and novels of discovery? Yes; it is fair. You are able to salute the novel of detection from a distance, take some notion of security in your ignorance of any local French restaurants, and look at such novels of discovery as Richard Price's Lush Life and Clockers, Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves and The Painted Drum, and Richard Powers' The Echo Maker and, most recently, Generosity as role models, things to look at when the world of literary cynicism is too much with you. Instead of Martel's Very Special Old Plain Cognac, there is the occasional bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and all the hidden bottles of peppermint schnapps hidden here and there in the novels and novellas of Jim Harrison.

You could also toss in Richard Russo.

Could and did.

Good night, John Boy.

Good night, everybody.

Comfort Foods, Comfort Reading

Although there are many foods you turn to for the added bite of emotional encouragement they may provide--corn bread comes to mind as does chili, the fried egg sandwich, cold spaghetti eaten from the fridge, and that great ethnic dish from your father's side of the family, egg noodles with diced cabbage sauteed in butter--there is one comfort food that towers over the other contenders:  creamed tuna on toast.  In its ideal iteration, it is a chemistry of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, a small can of Brandywine sliced mushrooms, a can of Chicken of the Sea tuna, and a can of petit pois peas, served over two toasted slices of, ugh, Wonder bread or, better still, the tangy rye bread available from the closest delicatessen.

As your sensitivities and awareness grew over the years and you did not have your mother to prepare such a dish, you experimented variously with the sauce, even dallying as far away from cream of mushroom soup to Hollandaise made from scratch, fresh mushrooms, either fresh or frozen peas, and tuna of Japanese origin.  At the very least, the bread would be sour dough, perhaps even a ficelle split lengthwise.  No question that the taste and nutrients were vastly improved, but the old comfort, the pre-puberty comfort, was off on vacation.

It came to you in later years that the dish was born in the Great Depression, its purpose to fill you, supply you with protein, and accomplish its goals with a minimum of expense in similar measure with Kraft Dinner, an ungodly mixture of macaroni and cheese, the mention of, to this day, causes within your lower regions a stir of protest.

At one point, long after you had moved out of the parental lodging and, indeed, out of Los Angeles, you habitually stopped for a visit after class.  On one such visit, you were offered your choice of delectable entrees for a late supper and when you chose creamed tuna on toast, your mother said, almost reproachfully, "I don't know why anyone would eat that."  It was then that you realized how it had been a product designed to render you safe and secure and so, no wonder it has become the quintessential comfort food.

There is comfort reading as well, to the point where you have at least three of them downloaded on iPod and on your new Droid phone.  You guessed it, Life on the Mississippi, Roughing It, and Huckleberry Finn.  They also nourish you in times of woe or weal.

In recent years, you have added Louise Erdrich, based entirely on Love Medicine, then ratified over the years by a dizzying display, most recently The Plague of Doves, but by no means to forget The Painted Drum.  And now you have cause to add yet another, whose work seems to you to combine both the food and the reading.  This is, of course, Jim Harrison, whose most recent, The Farmer's Daughter, has sent you over the top.  In the past, you have essayed some of Harrison's food suggestions, starting with the one you thought to be the most difficult of all to accommodate, the Spam and onion sandwich.  Although a bit salty to your taste, the first bite produced an awareness that there was a chemistry at work here, one that could ease considerably any thoughts of vulnerability you might have for yourself and the orb on which you live.

Places you'd not think to go except in reading

Two of your favored living writers consistently produce stories set in places you have not set high priority on visiting. Yet in each case, as you read, you are not only transported to these landscapes to the point where you can feel and understand them, you also find yourself shifting priorities, visualize yourself traveling to the reality of these places in order to experience that very real landscape from which the writers drew.

One of these writers is Jim Harrison who, like the mythic creatures is only half man. His other half could very well be peppermint schnaps or music or fishing or scenery or some form of animal or even literature both ancient and modern because Harrison surely is all these things, knows about them and their effects and the driving forces that motivate them.

The other writer is Louise Erdrich who, in many ways, reminds me of a Navaho weaver, compulsively yet comfortably seated before her loom, turning out pattern after pattern, replicating in yarn the fixed form of sand paintings, all of which have the mystical power to heal, cure, provide understanding of the things we see about us in this world.

Unlike other writers from whom you have drawn influence, these two do not cause you envy by their technique, although the technique of each is simply stunning; they cause you to envy their vision of the universe and the individuals who haunt it. In a real and remarkable way, the characters of Harrison and Erdrich are haunted by their dreams, their awareness of other individuals, and by the landscape about them. They are affected by animals and mountains and trees, by times of day and the heat of desert, the persistent cold and slush of snow. Their words appear as though spun from looms, immersing you in patterns that seem familiar until they draw you into their uniqueness. If it were possible to experience religion as you experience their stories, then you would be a religious person because then being religious would seem to you a tangible, reciprocal system instead of a mosquito swarm in which you were valued only for your blood.

At this moment, you are a third of the way through Harrison's latest effort, a collection of three novellas. The first is set largely in Montana, with a side trip to Arizona. You have spent considerable time in Arizona but most of what you have of Montana comes from Conrad's descriptions of it, and from his son, BC3, and his book, Ghost Hunting in Montana. Now you have Harrison's Montana. You met in this first novella an ensemble of characters you more or less expected and, with a little extrapolation from Annie Proulx's stories of neighboring Wyoming, you would be willing to spend time there in reality, already knowing the heartbreak of not finding the Harrison and Proulx characters but rather the persons and landscape you would encounter by chance. And there it is in a nutshell: Such writers as Harrison and Erdrich and Proulx break your heart page after page because of the way they have drawn characters forth from their real-life counterparts and presented them to you as relatives you did not know and will now enter into love-hate relationships with.

If there is such a thing as a true antagonist in the first of the three Harrison novellas, it is probably Karl, a youngish, smart-ass cowboy. Although you find no redeeming social values in him, nevertheless even he represents a social presence you recognize and, when he and they get what Booth Tarkington referred to as comeuppance, a portion of your psyche wants to cheer. This cheering is not for revenge so much as it is for a celebration of the basic Social Contract..

Your novel in the works owes its present format to Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves. There is a character coming up in the second Harrison novella that could very well bear some influence on the protagonist of your novel in progress. Other elements and influences are gifts happily received. The only certainty of which you are now aware is that both these writers provide ample gifts for the close reader.

What is so rare as a prime rib roast?

No doubt about it:  the matter is purely subjective.

Most of the writers who inhabit the panoply of your favorites (room for at least a footnote if not a separate essay) are writers whom you consider accessible on an emotional level.  Rereading Aldous Huxley at the moment for the purpose of your next Golden Oldie column, you are aware of the gap between his people and, say, Christopher Isherwood's characters.  (Well you see,"  Isherwood told you, "I love all my characters and Aldous loves the ideas for which his characters stand.")  You are thus more easily transported into the world, however strange and remote, of the characters rather than being impressed by the ideas the characters express.  Thus you can measure yourself from having read and been impressed by Huxley's Antic Hay and, to a lesser degree, Time Must Have a Stop, and now finding those somewhat lacking in comparison to Louise Erdrich and Jim Harrison and Annie Proulx.  True enough, you read all the Huxley you could get your hands on because his way of reaching into the story seemed to delightfully conversational and urbane, things you saw at the time as worthy of investigation.  Who would not like to have his work thought of as witty and urbane.  But then you read Isherwood all the way through, particularly reached by A Meeting by the River, and the movement from exterior gloss to inner reflection had been given an encouraging push forward. Reading the former is still fun, but the latter provide a kind of inspiration that leads to combustion and discovery.  Huxley is an excellent parodist and satirist, both aspects of your current work under way, The Secrets of Casa Jocosa, but it was Erdrich's The Plague of Doves that gave you the message that led you to haul the description of the precipitating event from your files, flesh it a bit more, and call it Chapter One.

While editing Conrad's latest anthology-type venture, you came across a segment from Lady Chatterly's Lover that also helped emphasize the point:  you prefer stories in which you can feel what the characters are feeling rather than merely appreciate what they are feeling.  Let's call it the difference between empathy and understanding.  Nor does it hurt that you are currently reading Frans De Waal's The Age of Empathy, in which a world-class primatologist discusses his observations about such issues as the sense of fair play in chimps, the ability of a chimp to feel embarrassment, and the ranges of jealousy that extend from our primate cousins to us.

Scenario:  Fred and Mary are seated next to one another at a dinner party.  Neither knows the other.  Fred is highly attracted to Mary.  In the course of conversation, they learn things about one another, primarily that each is available in the sense of not being in a committed relationship to another.  As the interchange continues, Fred finds himself not only attracted but interested.  What Fred does not know, and what he has not been able to piece together from his observation of Mary is that she is a vegan.  He is not.  When time for the main course arrives and the host calls from the end of the table, "Who's for rare on the roast?" Fred heartily affirms and thus is passed to him a slab of rare prime rib.  After a few moments, he notices that Mary is not being served the roast.  "'Samatter?" he asks.  "Not hungry?"  We can add some added details to, shall I say beef up the circumstances, but we would not be surprised to discover, down the line, Mary having to excuse herself and retire to the loo or at least stand for a few moments in an unobserved corner, deep breathing until her sense of revulsion at the presence of the blood rare slab of roast.  We are also not surprised when what Fred thought of as a growing chemistry between him and Mary appears to be vitiated.

There are any number of ways in which the scenario can progress.  Different writers would direct it differently, using differing techniques to freight the information and the responses to the information, not the least of which is internal monologue through either point of view, but that would not only be telling, it would be avoiding the nuanced play of feelings that exist between all characters when they appear on stage together.

There are different ways in which a scene may progress, depending on the mindset of the writer and the eye of the writer and the heart of the writer.

The Defenseiveness Rests

More pairs of opposites:

The writer who writes from the I-am-wonderful perspective vs. the writer who writes from the I-am-unworthy point of view.

The reflective, confessional self vs. the go-for-the-throat, I'll-show-them approach.

We need to get through and considerably beyond these mindsets if we wish our stories and our nonfiction to reflect variously any or all of the above, demonstrating instead the purer, non-defensive intent of the work by removing unnecessary flourish and authorial gloss either within the text or as footnotes.

Some of these thoughts were triggered by a recent rereading of Hemingway, which you would not have done if Conrad had not been working on another of his writing books and asked you to venture your opinion on the short story, "Up in Michigan."  As you would recognize the style of Haydn and/or Mozart, you recognized the music of the Hemingway prose, a sound you once strove so hard to acquire.  The music of the Hemingway story was fine but not, alas, the content.  What emerged instead was the macho, bullying image you had already come to know and take offense from when you saw the letters he wrote to his son, Greg, your classmate for a time at UCLA.  The momentum you absorbed from rereading some of Hemingway's stories was a wish to have the author's personal issues left outside the work.  

Giving one's self over to the intent of the story is no small matter, nor is the actor any less daunted when trying to find the essentials of character as opposed to imitating some intellectualized vision of the character's philosophy.  The intent has to be dug out of the story as though trying to get a walnut meat prised from its shell or the long, delicious sliver of crab meat from the leg segment.  Rather than emerge with the politics of an author after having read one of his or her stories, you prefer to be aware of the author's energy or compassion, the energy part also including the enthusiasm for sharing the emotional and moral information, the compassion part relating directly to the author's sense of understanding and acceptance of the multifarious presence that is the human being.  You frequently get such awareness when you read Louise Erdrich, Michael Chabon, and with increasing regularity, your new buddy, John Shannon.

As a teacher/editor, you have the most difficulty with writers who step forth with a subtext that translates to you as, See how wonderful I am.  Of all the writers you know, the late John Updike seems to be saying this as an overtone to his meticulously wrought investigations.  Not far behind this difficulty comes the I am unworthy trope, but at least this allows you to tell the student or client that as you continue with your efforts, you will soon discover that you have made yourself worthy, and can then get on to the business at hand, which is the most glorious pairs of opposites of all, the pure science of investigation and the artistic pleasure of discovery.

I hear voices

You might have known there would have been a few stragglers, reminiscent of days long past when kids are out playing some game that seemed remarkable to them at the time--Capture-the-flag, Stickball, Hopscotch, baseball--being extra alert against the call that would come at any moment, the call for dinner. At such moments, feats of athletic prowess were born, etched in the memory. The awareness, then, of a trope, a small addition after a book is officially finished:

narrative voice--the interior source from which an individual story is told; the sense of a story dictating itself to the writer; the genuine tone and intent driving a story forward.

The narrative voice is the writer's voice, which in turn is the writer being story, telling it first to himself or herself as completely as possible and in as unguarded as possible, the better to rule out attempts by the voice to sound like someone else. During the course of a day, the writer sees, hears, feels, and remembers things--things read, things imagined, things related by others. All of these seem attractive. Many of them actually are attractive. The writer should be free to take them in and note their attractiveness, but the writer should not try to imitate this attractiveness. What the writer sees, hears, feels, remembers informs the authentic narrative voice and is to be cultivated. Hemingway has a lovely way of linking sentences with and. Good for him. Louise Erdrich exudes a sense of vocabulary, mere words, fluttering within like a flock of birds taking off on an adventure. Way to go, Louise. James Lee Burke has an inner cadence that could make the drawings of Hieronymus Bosch and scenes of great violence seem like the lace doilies on your grandparents' easy chairs. But these things, however you value them, are not yours and do not inform your narrative voice. It is for you to find that voice in each of your stories. You find that way by listening to the story, listening to the way the senses inform you. It is as an actor of some stature, a Meryl Streep, a Mary Steinburgen, a Dustin Hoffman, a Derek Jacoby, searching for the authenticity of a character about to be portrayed. It is of them, seeking his or her entry into the landscape. It is of you, and of listening until the story tells you what it is and what it wants from you.

Character Type: The Sorcerer's Apprentice

sorcerer's apprentice,the--an overeager aspirant who sets into motion forces he or she cannot control; a beginning or medium-stage student who has reached a stage of impatience and acts to outperform the mentor, discovering too late the need for more learning; a iconic character type who believes things are easier than they appear.

Naivete, hubris, and impatience seem to be the stars by which the sorcerer's apprentice sets his or her course, a course that in one way or another encourages at first blush the belief that the master's secrets have been digested and taken in as muscle memory. Thus the sorcerer's apprentice, whomever he or she may be, sets a glorious magnet of attraction for the writer to use as a character who is bound to produce some significant story line. The inevitable result of the sorcerer's apprentice was well illustrated in the 1941 Walt Disney film, Fantasia; things got out of hand quickly when Mickey Mouse used one of his mentor's charms to enchant a broom to fetch buckets of water that he, Mickey, should have been fetching by hand. Mickey was used to illustrate the Paul Dukas musical suite which in turn was offered as a musical version of the Goethe poem, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," which had earlier incarnations from classical antiquity. Thus also a dynamic twofer: an example of quiting (see) and validation of the iconic pedigree of the character type.

The sorcerer's apprentice trope is, then, often an innocent, as in Graham Greene's The Ugly American, who causes a progression of events other than intended, producing calamitous results. It maybe a bit of a stretch but Greene appears to have done it again in Don Quixote, in which a simple parish priest achieves enhanced status through a mild deception. The moral of the sorcerer's apprentice tale revolves about the consequences of taking the short cuts of convenience, using them as a substitute for learning. One of the unintended benefits for the writer is the self-evaluation that may come from undertaking such a story and recognizing the personal potential for naivete, hubris, and impatience.

If we posit the work of any admirable storyteller, say a Louise Erdrich or a Jim Harrison, as the literary equivalent of the sorcerer, then equate the enthusiasm and inspiration from reading their work with a story of our own, it is natural and understandable to think we have achieved the spells by which we can duplicate their sorcery. Our failure is not in the attempt but in the inability to recognize how much work these sorcerers have put into learning their craft. In that sense, we are all of us apprentices every time we embark on a new project.

Visions of Sugar Plum Fairies

The "Other" Parts

inference--an assumption or conclusion reached by a character in a story or by a reader reading the story; a reaction or decision which is possibly correct, made without direct, unassailable evidence; a conclusion formed by a character or a reader based on past experience; the use of circumstantial evidence; arriving at a conclusion or decision based entirely upon a character's experience and subsequently based on the reader's experience.

As the twenty-first century shifts into gear (See pathetic fallacy), one highly visible fork in the narrative road is the inferential one, in which the reader is left with more leeway to assume such matters as agenda, intent, and volition of characters as well as what actually happened in a narrative. Did they or didn't they? Were they, or not? Such words as ambiguity and elliptical come forth, particularly in the short story.

A highly prolific and versatile writer, Elmore Leonard, speaking at publishing conventions (ABA, Book Expo, etc) and writers' conferences (notably Santa Barbara, CA) has often been quoted expressing his working approach to story, which in essence is to write only the parts that interest him, while leaving out the "other" parts, it being understood that "other" means descriptions and scenes that don't directly involve him. By extension, Leonard could be interpreted to advocate as a part of the revision process the removal of anything he considered unnecessary explanation, whether in narrative (which includes description) or dialogue.

Contemporary writers as diverse as Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Tobias Wolff, George Saunders, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Haruki Murikami may be argued to write with the inferential less-is-more approach, yet none of these is arguably a minimalist. There is among them a common thread of trust. The interesting questions to consider is the applications of the trust: Do they trust the reader? Themselves? The reader and themselves?

A storyteller in the twenty-first century is well advised to read these writers as well as writers of past eras and, indeed, new writers on their own path of self-discovery, keeping in mind choices to be made about how much the reader truly needs to know.

Hint: Some writers of nonfiction are often seduced by the need to use all their research in a particular project, resulting in their project telling the potential reader more about the subject than the reader wants to know. In similar fashion, some writers of fiction may be tempted to explain to the reader more about their characters and the motives of those characters than the reader wants to know.

Added hint: Because of its subjective base, the result of fiction is greater than the sum of its parts; the goal of storytelling is the evocation of that greater effect. Evoke rather than describe. Encourage the reader to infer. The reader would rather discover his misapprehension in the face of surprise behavior from the characters than be told he was wrong by the author.

Love Thy Characters

True enough, one robin doesn't make a spring, but one Louise Erdrich short story often makes a novel--or at least a part of one. Of all the major short story writers producing materials today, her short stories, which stand firmly on their own dramatic feet, are the ones most likely to find their way into a novel.

Tobias Wolff? Not so much; perhaps his last venture being the opening chapter of his novel, The Old School, which first appeared in a different form as a short story in The New Yorker. Alice Munro? Much as her stories have many of the features of a novel, including multiple point of view, and are to this reader satisfying in their unsettling way of revealing symptomatic behavior and attitudes, she continues to let the matter rest with the shorter form. Tom Boyle? Although I think any given short story of his has an amazing mixture of gravitas, wild humor, and a complete willingness to take no prisoners, I don't see him linking the stories together nor do I see his novels appearing to be stitched short form ventures.

All of which gets us back to this week's (November 3, 2008) issue of The New Yorker, which contains Erdrich's short story, "The Fat Man's Race," stunning enough in its stand-alone self but even more promising in its portent of being a part of another of Erdrich's ensemble-cast novels which began with Love Medicine, which is, of course, a series of chapters that have a second life as short stories. In and of itself, "The Fat Man's Race" does in its first two paragraphs what a well-wrought story should do: it introduces characters (note plural here), agendas, personalities, and agendas. The second paragraph, which is only one brief sentence, immediately brings the unthinkable to pass, and from there becomes a wild, careening ride down icy curves with no restraining rails to keep the car from breaking loose and diving off the road.

Even though I've for some years managed to convince myself that I no longer read for pleasure, but rather for the intense focus of discovery (of the author's techniques, of world visions, of assorted mementos and hidden messages I may have missed, of inspiration and understanding), Louise Erdrich is one of two or three authors for whom such lofty ends disappear and the agenda of pleasure lurches forth like a bored teen-ager getting out of school for the afternoon. Another such author is Jim Harrison, whose latest novel, The English Major, made itself known to me as a book that wanted to be brought home. But that is a matter for later.

Erdrich's characters suffer long bouts of yearning or expectation or fear or a combination of things that make them ideal candidates for being in the kinds of brief encounters that somehow will link into a larger story arc. Her short stories remind me of an enormous quilt made by sewing together any number of smaller Bayeux Tapestries, a metaphor rich in irony for the primary reason that the Bayeux Tapestry is of itself quite large. Her characters want such things as love, respect, understanding, an unfolding of some art or artifice or agenda they sense to be blooming within them. They often get what they want but do not recognize it or they do recognize it and immediately become suspicious of it. Many of her characters, while not formal scientists, seek some form of living proof that will confirm or eradicate their beliefs. Nevertheless, superstition, the supernatural, and the magical whisper dissenting votes into their ear, causing great internal disruptions which they try to mitigate by drinking large quantities of alcohol, making large quantities of live, playing subversive jokes, and drawing others along by the force of their reckless energy.

You would be hard put to find any of her characters whom you could say with certainty she did not love, which is, I believe, the clue to her effectiveness as a story teller. By loving them, she is free not to have to defend them; they may do as they wish to whomever they wish, their random acts seeming driven and perhaps even desperate, but never meanspirited. By loving her characters, Erdrich is free to grant them leave to do what they will and later to own up with the consequences. As a result, her middle-aged characters have much more cogent conversations with their children, thinking that somehow they may learn something from their children as well as passing along such information as survival entails. Her middle-aged characters want in the confines of their secret selves to be seen as sources of wisdom for earlier generations, but they have too much heart to want to be venerated and too much wisdom to allow them to accept the veneration were it to be offered.

Character: A Mirage Made in Heaven

Plot-driven stories often amaze and astound us into reading on into a series of events we know to be contrived and manipulated, their very complexity and puzzle-like intricacy being the engine that dries us. A successfully intricate plot can actually cause the reader to suspend disbelief at the behavior of the characters, investing interest instead in the construction rather than the peeling of the onion of character.

Character-driven stories amaze and astound us into reading further, thanks to a series of revelations about the individuals portrayed. Often these revelations have to do with some quirk, flaw, or radical social differentiation. My own argument about these revelations of differentiation has it that as readers we are approached with coded language that promises us insight into behavior and traits we suspect to be resident in our selves. Sanguine about my opening of this particular can of worms, I site one Humbert Humbert as an example of such a character, caught up in a character-driven story. My own particular line drawn in that particular sand has not so much to do with morality as the very opposite--self-interest. Some young ladies of Dolores Haze's age are, to be sure, attractive, but so are ladies two and three times her age as well, each group having more opportunity for contacting interests and sensible partnerships with less potential for mischief. To seal the bargain and simultaneously give the sexual side of attraction its weighty due, there are other aspects present such as social, political, artistic (including musical), historical, and of course the literary.

Author-driven stories have the potential for grabbing reader attention and holding on throughout the duration of the tale, but on reflection I often find myself growing uneasy at the author's constant reach for the attention I would more easily relinquish to the characters themselves. W. Somerset Maugham had the ability to insert himself into short and long form fiction with a seamless easy. George Bernard Shaw floundered in his attempts at fiction before he found his voice in drama for this very reason. Henry James floundered in drama with the same condition, finding his way as a deliberate author manipulator.It is probable that my experience as editor and teacher have made me more sensitive to and restive of this narrative approach, just as my long years of trying for traction in the plot-driven story have made me more sensitive to the awareness that this is not the sandbox in which I am most comfortable.

Writers such as Louise Erdrich, Ruth Rendell, Jim Harrison, Richard Powers, Richard Price yank me in by the collar and hold me by the way they reveal secrets about their people, making me feel in each case as though I were going through the process of friendship and discovery by slow, cautious degree, the intimacy forming from a recognition that somewhere within, there is a community of interest, that although we are of different times, places, and backgrounds, I share the most important thing of all with the characters these individuals and others like them create. That thing is fantasy. I recognize in theirs the edges and formations of my own. The result seems at first like pure intuitive magic, but it is no such thing. It is something more wonderful than magic it is empathy.