Letters, III

I'm writing today with a request that may seem a bit odd to you, perhaps even to the point of perversity, but seeing that you are yourself a writer and that I, too, am one, it would seem a bit perverse, wouldn't it, if there were no intended perversity in our correspondence?  There, I have introduced perversity into the writer's equivalent of The Social Contract, which more or less pays out the Rule of Three, doesn't it?  The Rule of Three is an old writer's trick in which things are repeated in threes, the payoff coming on the third repetition or event.  I have actually lead with the third of the triad, perversity, the first two being well known to us both, which are compulsiveness and obsession.  There, we have that out of the way:  we are all of us in addition to our perversity as writers compulsive and obsessive.

I suppose you could say that we obsess over our perversity although I know some writers who obsess over their compulsiveness, although they all tend to write escapist fiction.

You are doubtless wondering the nature of my request, which is that when you are called upon to go from one place to another, whether it is the composition of a story, the completion of a research project,or merely the carrying out of an errand, my request of you is that you go the long way.

There is something elegant about a writer taking the long way to get from point A in a task to point B, even if it means a number of digressions might arise, only to be later deleted.  Take the hard way, the long way, what seems to you to be the most difficult way, the way in which you have no easy answers, the way that forces you to reach, wobble, take some missteps, stretching every bit of your writing self to find an honest answer rather than an easy one, a fresh answer rather than one you already knew, an answer you did not even know you had.  Such answers are there, but they have to be reached for, fretted about.

If you have anything to do with schools, you will undoubtedly encounter some canned statement about the meaning of plagiarism, and a note about how intolerable such practices are.  Nothing is said about plagiarizing from yourself, but there should be, simply because doing so presents you with another incident where you do not have to grow or reach.  It would be nice to think of us all as reaching and growing, bumping into each other and ourselves as we strive for the full reach, the growth of awareness and understanding.  That is a Social Contract I hope you will join me in.

The Bucking Bronco of Character

It takes one or more characters, interacting within a scene, to provide the energy and movement of the story.

Easily enough to say; to bring it off, you need to have an attitude toward a character before you can set the individual participants into the landscape of scene with any hope that they will take the bait and accordingly move from mere conversation or observation into the swampy terrain of story. Even more difficult to contemplate is the need for these individual characters to be associated with some subtext. Under those circumstances, what appears to be mere conversation or observation is spoken or observed in relation to some other circumstantial reality.

Attitude toward characters is essential if this subtext is to take effect. Harold Pinter is a writer who often uses this approach to his scenes. Two characters appear to be going through their usual routines, talking about nothing of particular note, yet there is a hovering tension that alerts us to a dynamic between the characters, a resident relationship that combines the need most individuals have to categorize social station and group relations.

The attitude the writer brings to characters may be as seemingly neutral as curiosity or as biased as antipathy. In either case, the writer becomes a participant rather than a mere commentator who, like attendees at political rallies, carry placards announcing their feelings. The writer must ride the horse of attitude but be willing to be bucked off in the process. We must not allow our attitudes to become the equivalent of an expert rider, using riding skills to hold on. To put it more bluntly, we must not allow our original regard for the character, whether it is admiration or distaste, to become the rider struggling to remain on the horse. If we are not careful, we will remain on the horse and the character will not have an opportunity to change: The good guy will continue to do admirable things and attract attention because of his goodness, the bad guy will ride the bronco of despicable behavior right back into the corral, as bad at the end as he was in the beginning.

It is difficult bordering on impossible to be convincing in the short span of a short story when it comes to demonstrating change within a character, but we can approximate the human condition we hope to unleash within characters by allowing the good guys to screw up and the bad guys to do something remarkably empathetic. Novels afford us a bit more latitude: We can allow a few characters the luxury of change in a longer work. These observations are not engraved on any stone plates as laws or commandments, rather they reflect technical considerations. The thing we need to encourage is the capacity inherent in a character to be pulled off course in a deed, observation, or tug of curiosity. If they can break free from the preconceived notion of them, however briefly--just to the point of alarming the writer--they will be observing the potential to do the very thing that makes everyone a winner, and that very thing is to cause surprise.

Under no circumstances...

circumstances--conditions motivating or surrounding persons, places, things, and events in story; the status of behavior related to a character, that character's agenda and/or vulnerability, and the likelihood of a predictable behavior manifest in the actions or failure to act in a particular character.

Mysterious or ambiguous circumstances surrounding a character impart an atmosphere of menace and uncertainty. The suspense grows as the circumstances become volatile, leading to the growing apprehension that such a mysterious or ambiguous character will be driven to the point of combustion, whereupon he or she will reveal a true self of incredible awfulness.

Familiar, even predictable circumstances advertise a growing sense that a surprise explosion is building, some unanticipated demonstration that will ruin the stasis, nudge it unceremoniously over the edge into chaos and discomfort.

Thus the mysterious and the familiar combine to frame events and the persons who participate in them, raising suspicions wherever possible. These suspicions translate to tension which, lacking actual suspense, is an excellent glue for holding story together. Readers wonder what new circumstances will bring to the equation of characters, bent on pursuing an agenda, meeting frustration and reversal.

All a protagonist or antagonist needs in order to set a story in motion is to hear the repetition of the familiar mantra "Under no circumstances..."

Corn Bread

There is no time for such mischief as I have planned.

Student papers to be read.

Lecture to be prepared.

Yet, with all due respect, mischief comes first. Such niceties as time spent bathing, shaving, and the like, all of which are needed, will be cut back to bare essentials.

The subject of the mischief?

Cornbread.

I have been thinking about it on one level or another for some days, appending it to my
personal list of comfort foods. Then Lori sent a recipe link along with a comment to an earlier post. Soon, I came to empathy with the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart."

I know what I must do.

The oven is already set to 375 and I think I know where the cast-iron skillet is.

Dylan Thomas could well have cribbed from one of his own poems to extol cornbread: "The force that through the oven drives the cornbread/Drives my cornbread hunger..."

A blasphemy, you say? I say cornbread.