The Author as Control Freak

How much control do you need over a story?

Ask that question at a group of writers and you'll get a neat arc of responses all the way from complete control, as in a step outline, to the other rat tail of the bell curve to freedom bordering on anarchy.  Which ever their method, the writer you most admire is she or he whose final work appears the most natural and spontaneous, a highly subjective answer, you know, nevertheless so, measured by a sense of plausibility in the performance of the characters and the added sense that while the characters' actions seemed real, they also contained an element of surprise.

One of the reasons you are so fond of Louise Erdrich's works is the emerging sense that anything could have happened, but these events did happen.  You have no close-to-hand idea of her work habits, so you can only speculate, and you do speculate that she knows a great deal about her characters, possibly in the form of biography, perhaps even in elaborately sketched time lines.  Knowing what she knows about them, she has more options, and although Leonard Tourney,your longtime friend and co-host of the Saturday Writing Workshop, the Lion's Den, disagrees with your take, you believe the characters clamor to be heard, do such surprising things as James Cagney did way back when, at the time he pushed half a grapefruit into the face of Mae Murray, or the story about Marlon Brando, told you by your mentor.  She and an unknown Brando were in an off-Broadway play, one of his first New York stage appearances.  Brando had been lackluster in rehearsals, causing ripples of worry among the cast.  He was cast as a menacing criminal.  Five minutes before his cue, Brando had disappeared, driving the stage manager wild with anxiety, only to be told, "That crazy fuck is outside, chinning himself on a fire escape."  Brando came in on cue, without missing a beat of the play's pace and action, but considerably out of breath from his exertion.  He delivered his lines breathlessly.  The effect on the cast and the audience was stunning.  In a sense, Brando was taking liberties, but he knew how he wanted that character to sound, delivering those lines the author had written.

You want the absolute control of knowing your characters well enough to know what they might do, given the chance.  This produces mischief, to be sure, but it also produces the energy of surprise that grips you when a character brings something from the depths of himself or herself to the page, stunning and triggering the other characters, sending the story scooting off on a life of its plausible own, leaving you as amazed and energized as everyone else.  You wish to give them the chance, which is why, for you, outline is tentative, provisional, subject to the explosive whim of a character being pushed to the edge, then nudged over into emotional free fall.

This may or may not be related:  For most of your life, you have been a strong admirer of the compositions of Beethoven, whose sterling quality for you is the drama produced by the cumulative outcome of each note seeming to be the only note that could possibly follow the previous.  In more recent years, and with all due admiration still obtaining, you find yourself drawn to two of Beethoven's teachers, Haydn and Mozart, each of whom seem to anticipate risk in composition, then pounce on the opportunity.  The significant difference between the teachers and the pupils is a resident humor in their work, invading even the most plaintive of adagios.  You by no means dismiss the humor in Beethoven, examples being readily available in the third movement (scherzo) of the Third and Fourth Symphonies, but the humor and good spirits dally everywhere within the music of the teachers, while the pupil appears to you to be more deliberate.  Insert joke here, as in the Third Symphony, where the entire orchestra engages a conversation with a single bassoon.

Yes, it probably is related.  Composition is, after all, composition, and the results in both written word and composed music point in the same direction, evocation of sublime emotional expression.

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.

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.