The Dark Side of the Moon

When Constantin Stanislavski (1863-1938) said, "Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art." he was primarily addressing actors and in some major the actor he wished to become. We can take his admonition to our writing heart as well because of the way each discipline--the written and the acting--are wrapped about the armature of the creative self, the person who wishes to convey stories, attitudes, behavior, agendas, ambitions through the creation of plausible characters.

In order to engage either craft, you need some basic tools, primary among which is the point of view you have of the world. This is not as simple or simplistic as first blush may suggest. Suppose for instance that your choice of story to tell is the fantasy or the alternate universe. To make your fantasy or alternate universe emerge from the shadows of your imagination into the articulated stage of your story, you must have some sense of the laws of gravity, chemistry, morality, attitude, and spirituality of the landscape, and you must understand the effects such traits have on its denizens.

Supposing you are an unrelenting optimist and create a world (this one, an alternate one, or a fantasy one) in which all are equally optimistic. Trouble arises immediately because there is no story when all are of a similar mind. Thus you must, for all your optimism, be able to create a plausible pessimist, a creation you'd expect to find lurking somewhere within the darker side of the moon that is you, a creation you don't often bring out in public. Not only must you do so, you must invest this person with qualities that will make him or her attractive enough to be a threat to the optimists in your story and perhaps to your readers. If you merely go scouting about in the market where you shop or the school where you teach or the office where you work, you will find second- or third-rate pessimist, a copied pessimist. You will be reminded of all the times when you watched reputedly hard-nosed investigative reporters on television letting some bigot or politician or publicist go without asking probing questions. You felt somehow cheated, which is what your readers will feel with a second-rate pessimist. By creating a first-rate pessimist, you will have brought an entire range of potential to your story, rendering it at once more tense, exciting, thrilling, and threatening.

You will have created a character whom your protagonist optimist will eventually defeat in some degree, allowing your reader to feel that your protagonist was in a serious, threatening contest instead of the sort of warm-up game many sports teams engage at the early days of a season.

It is not enough to merely say I want to tell stories; you need to be more specific than that, focusing on the types of stories that touch you on some basic emotional level which will be transported into the stories you write. Even if you are the sort who watches the market and picks stories based on your judgment of which kinds of story sells the most copies, you will still need to give something of your hidden or darker side of not something of your special technique with which you feel confident. If all you have to bring into your story is a statistical ability to replicate all the other commercially successful stories about you, there is still not enough in your toolkit to cause an editor to encourage you, a publisher to take you on, a readership to embrace you. The editor, publisher, and readership already have available the things you would imitate; what they want from you are the things you originate; they want from you your take on the real world or the fantasy world or the alternate world or the romantic world.

Ball's in your court.

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.