Use Words People Understand

Craft is a pleasing word, a lovely word, especially when taken in context with vehicle, each suggesting a medium of transportation, for moving you from one place to the next.  A horse is a conveyance; you would appreciate most horses where ever you met them, but you would not think of either as a craft or a vehicle.  Somehow both words became embedded in your sensitivity from a line of dialogue when you first saw the motion picture The Philadelphia Story.  Speaking of a craft, a yacht, really, the Tracy character, portrayed by Katherine Hepburn, said of it with a fond sigh, "She was yare."  You could not wait to consult the word in a dictionary, mentally fondling it, loving the sound of it, eager to have occasion to use it.  When you finally did, an editor had circled it and written in the margin "Use words people can understand."  This did nothing to diminish your fondness for the word and the sense it conveyed of a craft making graceful progress, exuding a sensual joy in movement.  "People should not be resistant to new words,"  you told the editor.  As you recall, you did not work long for him.

It is possible to think of craft in yet another way, as a verb and a noun, to craft a sentence or a story or an essay, as a word to connote the making of those splendid things and for the same reasons of which Dylan Thomas wrote:


In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

What a comfort then to aspire to having a craft, a vehicle, as it were, for conveying words and ideas and pictures, moving them along by evocation as opposed to the kinds of descriptions that seem to fit more in instruction manuals than in stories and essays.  As you tap the gunwales of your craft before launching it or, often times having already set it afloat only to notice leaks, seepage, over lading, you are in a comfortable stream with the men and women whose works you have come to admire over the years and who have each in some special way added a sense of the yare-ness of their craft to the destination you intend when you set forth.  You have also learned from many of them the literary equivalent of an awareness you came by on your own.  An event or destination is never exactly as you anticipate; it is either far more pleasing than you'd supposed or far more dreadful than you'd suspected.  The point of arrival frequently changes when you use your vehicle.  This is because you may have made wrong turns or discovered a short cut or received information directing you to an unanticipated destination.

When you notice a dent or scratch in your vehicle, you take it to a body shop to have repairs made.  Even as you write this, you are aware of a dent on your Yaris, the scar of a falling branch in a wind storm.  There is also a slight scratch on a fender, the result of you miscalculating your closeness to a large boulder adjacent a neighborhood park where you walk and picnic with Sally.  Neither of these repairs will cause the vehicle to run any better.  You know that, but there is an innate sense of wanting to care for all vehicles you may have in your possession.  A vehicle is, after all, a tool, a cohort in getting you started, then delivered.  You would be in desperate straits if your record of departures and arrivals in your Yaris were of a kind with your departures into stories and essays, some of which have been years in the making.  The positive side of that is the way you have been dealing with these tools, these vehicles, these craft for years and are at a plateau right now where in the midst of one journey, you unexpectedly see the way to use portions or all of a journey on which you'd embarked in the past.

Tony Judt, a British historian, university professor, intellectual and cultural critic, just recently dead this past month from the Lou Gehrig disease, wanted his stone to read, "He wrote words."  His use of words was so precise and elegant that you felt a connection with his process, his craft.  Your hope for your craft is found in that old German word, yare:  quick, active, lively, graceful.

Letters to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer, XVIII

You know how it is.  You suddenly become aware something is missing, perhaps your reading glasses or your pocket knife.  You pause for a reflective moment in which you seek and are given the location of the place you last sat when reading, or where the knife might have slipped from your pocket and into its bosomy folds.  Of course, the living room sofa.

Energized by this awareness, you pounce on the sofa cushions, confident they are the source wherein you will recover the lost item.  Sure enough, your memory, in tandem with a sharply honed instinct for such recovery, has served you well.  The glasses or the pocket knife reveal themselves.  But also you discover a trove, a true discovery:  coins, a forgotten pen, paperclips, and, if you are at all like me, shards of dog snacks.

You in fact discovered more than you anticipated--which is exactly the path you have come to expect each time you read or write a story.  In the metaphoric tumble of cushions, paperclips, and interstices within the story, there is the mystery guest discovery along with the sought after target.

In the legal sense, discovery is relevant evidential information which, our legal code dictates, must be available for prosecution and defense.  In story convention--and you will, of course, have noticed the shift from code to convention in my comparison--discovery is more subjective because some readers (and some characters) are quicker on the up-take.  Note also how important vital information, relevant information, has become in both disciplines, a significant difference residing in the underlying principal of fairness. In the law, information must be as balanced between the two parties as possible.  In other words, no surprises, even though fairness as a quality is often little more than an abstraction.  In a story, however, all information is subject to manipulation, not the least of which is point of view.  Information in story is released to create suspicion, wariness, and mistrust, among the characters themselves and between character and reader.  How delightful it is to have deduced from information supplied about a particular character that the individual is devious and uncaring, only to arrive at the discovery that the character is indeed empathetic, concerned, and admirable.  It may come as a disappointing discovery if a character we have assumed to be altruistic and companionable turns out to be self-centered.

We read for discovery in all its nuances.  These discoveries make us more alert to the ways of interpreting our own daily life as well as helping inform us of ways of behavior in which we can become better discoveries to those we care about.

Think of it this way as you go about your daytime job, then return home for a writing session:  you represent enough loose change between the cushions of a sofa to amount to a latte or cappuccino at a first-rate coffee house; you are there, waiting to be discovered.

Project

When you set forth on a new project, you quickly become aware of the usual playground gang hanging around, their body language betraying their interest in being chosen for your team. "Pick me, pick me" Enthusiasm postures. "I'm good in the late innings." "Hey, what about me?" your Inner Critic says. "You never really get going until you tell me to shut up at least once. I keep you honest." "Forget them," Risk chimes in. "You need me, especially when you start feeling confident."

One of the gang stands off toward the rear, making just enough movement to alert you to his presence, his size relative to the others enough to make you doubt the wisdom of bringing him on the team. He is small. But you've chosen him before and he seems to grow into his task. He is Voice.

Another figure who pesters you to be included is Research; you know from experiences on both sides of the desk that he needs to be watched carefully. He wants you to use everything he has dug up, because after all, what's the point of research if you don't use it?

You're pleased to see Disappointment hanging around, hoping to get a foothold somewhere, because in his way he reminds you that you start with a vision which you hope to bring into Reality, and what you end up with is not going to be as brilliant or as wonderful as that first vision you had of it. But here, coming across the playground you see Different and, as though he were leading a kid brother, but the closer they get, you see it isn't a brother, it is a sister. She is Completion. You want them both on your team. You want this project to be different and you are eager to see what it will look like.

You are doing it all for Discovery, of course, that pulsing moment of awareness that comes upon you when you least suspect it, sometimes yanking you into Confrontation with the Awareness that was lurking there in the shadows all the time. Awareness is a humbling thing; no sooner is it out and running around the inner playground that is your imagination than it pauses for a moment to catch its breath and allow you to catch yours before whispering to you that this thing you now know for such certainty and in such pellucid vision is something well known by any number of others. It is fucking time you did know it, Awareness says, raising its voice just enough so that if you were, say, in a restaurant, persons at other tables would turn to see who was speaking out in that manner.

Your revenge, if you care to use that word, is the knowledge that however late it was in coming, it came from your process of writing rather than any other process you might have; you got it by synchronicity, the happy discovery that emerges when you have put forces of yourself in motion and remained with them through their permutations and resolution. All right, it isn't revenge because you aren't in truth getting even with anyone or anything, even if in fact you set out to do just that. It isn't revenge at all, it is fun. It may have taken work and doubt and those three-in-the-morning existential loneliness that arrives on schedule to keep you honest. But it is fun. Of course you are already spending the money you might possibly make from such activity, in fact spending more than you will probably make, but in addition to being fun, it is the kind of expansiveness that makes you who you are.