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.

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

Another of the truths universally recognized is the fact of writers being control freaks, so it will come as no surprise to you when I bring up the subject of accommodation.  If you strive to induce the life about you to conform to your vision, you'll have had the need to ransack your tool kit for that very tool, because you'll have been brought to the unspoken need to accommodate somewhere along the way.

In the process of getting sufficient hold of an idea to bring it wriggling onto the page or screen like some enormous trout, filched from a deep pond, you watch in etched regret as it loses a modicum of its glorious color.  But you are so grateful to have landed it in the first place that you allow the process of accommodation to begin, increasing to the point where eventually you have made more concessions and adjustments than you can keep of.

It was always thus, but you were so set on landing that metaphoric trout that you could not admit that grand as the idea or vision is, you lose bits of it as the days of landing it on the page progress, and you already know of yourself how poor a loser you are; you bear down instead, trying to get it.  Such as well is your nature that as the idea begins to assume the form you can bring to it, the energy to do so continues and you properly consider yourself inspired, in the pursuit if not the thrall of the chase.

The story is truly in the details, those tiny flecks of truth inherent in your observations.  The more of these impressions you can recall, the greater the presence of reality your version of this invented reality will have.  Of course you want your characters to respond with activities that advance the story to the point of combustion while still retaining that truth or plausibility of direction; they are doing what they do not so much because you are directing them but because they represent the course of action that will define them as they relate to the story.  You pave purposely chosen characters with the belief that you could control them, seeing how difficult it is for you to control things in reality as you would wish.  But these characters you have created with expectations of being Dr. Frankenstein to their monster are anarchists; they turn on you, demand the freedom to make their own mistakes.

As time in the writing world progresses, you become more devious, providing your stories with characters you can manipulate through guilt or guile or sheer bluff and braggadocio.  But so do they.  You can do what so many elders do, you can disown them, but that is an act of futility.  The real way to get the job done, to get the most of your vision transcribed from the big-bang moment of creation to the placement of them in a scene in a story is to accommodate and the way to do that is to recognize how, even though you created them, you cannot control them.  But you can watch them and admire them and above all else, respect them.

Pages

From the advice of your late friend, Dennis Lynds, who wrote under almost as many pseudonyms as you, it became a given: No matter how broke you were, you don't take an advance from a publisher until you've completed the job. His logic was impeccable. If you take an advance on a proposal, they will come after you for pages. He was right.

On the one or two times you thought you saw the value of taking a substantial enough advance on a proposal to allow you to get the work done without having to get a job, the publishers' presence was there like a collection agency, wanting to know how you were, how it was going, where in the story you were, and when they might expect final pages. Forget that the contract gave a completion date. Forget that Donald MacCampbell, your then agent, warned you that these guys mean business and jealously enforce the due date. When you owe them pages, the calculus is disrupted to the point where what you love doing has become work. What you love doing has never been work; it has been a high order of something akin to play; it has become risk taking, experimentation, the powerful surge of being able to revise history to your own liking, perhaps even your own outcome.

No wonder you do it.

Blogspot comes after you for pages as well, reminding you each day that you have impressions to set down, possible themes for possible later investigation and variation, possibly even some expansion on a previous impression. The difference between the two sources of need are profound, the former being delivery on a promise that was made based on a concept you have formally agreed to complete. Not only that, you have formally agreed to complete it as you described it in an outline. The very word outline should have caused you concern. Even though you have walked into class rooms these past years bearing an outline of some form or other, you have no idea what you are going to say until you say it. What about the times when, having said something, you were impressed by it to the degree of stopping to write it down. The outline is a map, and as such is a friend. When you need to consult the outline to complete something you have not yet allowed to settle in, you have made of the outline a tyrant. Having to finish a novel from an outline keeps you in a place you might not wish to be; it makes you uncomfortable and you have to work to get yourself free of it.

There are those among your friends and students who swear by the outline. Your own feeling is that the outline has taken the spontenaiety from the outcome. If you already know what's going to happen, where is the fun and discovery?

Blogspot does not demand; it offers you a simple template in which to set things forth. It also has your process up and running so that when you come to a work of some meaning and interest to you, you are already buzzed not so much on your coffee as your enthusiasm for discovery.

Blogspot, the host for your notes, wants pages but is entirely non-judgmental about them, affording you a space beyond comfort and confidence, let's call it audacity, the willingness to tell an inappropriate joke in a solemn venue, the increasingly more likely chance that your ideas will collide, producing a connection between things you did not previously believe related.

Your first semester in undergraduate work at UCLA brought you to such a connection as you sat for the first of what you considered the big-time final exams. Looking at the sheet with the test questions, you had that squirt of fear associated with the student's nightmare--being halfway through the exam before realizing you are in the wrong exam venue. You reread the test questions, recognizing the instructor's name and the title of the class. You also read your feelings, which were the sinking ship feelings of being totally unprepared. You were metaphorically lolling on a deck chair of the Titanic. Someone had suggested to you that you always bring more than one blue book for an exam in case you made a false start and wished to recover on blank pages. You immediately began writing a short story, which about three paragraphs in was interrupted with the beginnings of the answer to the first question on the exam.

Ideas collide over the years, producing connections.

Blogspot is now your blue book.

Roy Rogers' Horse, Elephant in Living Room, Drunk in Parking Lot

trigger--a sensory recovering device by which sounds, smells, tastes, feelings and visions prompt the recall of previous incidents in the writer's life and then, by extension, may be transferred into the menu of response for characters; a process of recall and substitution allowing the writer to convincingly portray experiences and emotions the writer may not have actually experienced.

Many writers stumble onto this technique which is well known and used by actors, thanks to their fondness for music. The music may be used to drown out other ambient sounds--neighbors talking, telephones ringing, babies crying, dogs barking--or to provide an emotional background for the work at hand. The music triggers memories of actual events or memories of previous emotions, which influence the cadence, vocabulary, and tone of the work being written.

As the association with triggers increases (or the familiarity with acting techniques becomes more sophisticated), the writer associates memories of the feel of particular places or moods, or the smells,tastes, and sounds associated with past events to create a landscape for the work in progress. These sensual implants trigger associations within the reader, who is drawn farther into the emotions of a narrative.

Writers familiar with the technique keep lists of music they associate with particular moods or events, play that music while writing appropriate scenes. A notable example of a writer who appears to bring his lists into his published text is George Pelecanos, (The Night Gardener, The Turnaround) whose characters not only appreciate blues, popular, and rock music but argue about performers and specific solos. The genera of music and their composers are idiosyncratic and endless. Some suggestions: Howard Hansen, Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Frederic Delius, Theolonious Monk, John Coltrane, Judy Collins, George Gershwin, Antonin Dvorak, Joanie Mitchell, James Taylor, Scott Joplin.

As the process of identifying triggers progresses, the writer will begin to see the value of keeping lists of meals and their varying tastes; beverages and their adjectival and sensual associations; and such potentials as the emotions evoked within the writer by a particular species of flower. This list of emotional associations could be extended to feelings about animals and insects. (Is a particular character a cat or dog person? Perhaps neither--perhaps a bird or a goldfish. Perhaps allergic. Perhaps fearful or disturbed by spiders or roaches. Or rats. Perhaps, as Count Fosco, Wilkie Collins' great villain in The Woman in White, did--keeping a pet mouse in his vest pocket.)

Not all persons, much less writers, will have the same emotional response to a particular stimulus. Not all listeners of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue will have the cultural background to associate the slightly sour opening swirl of clarinet with klezmer music, nor is that association necessary for them to be drawn into the composition, but such a trigger will immediately have impact on those familiar with klezmer. One land mine is a potential explosion, but it is not an entire war; one trigger is a potential emotional connection, but it is not the entire story.


elephant in the living room, the--the thing or condition noticed by characters but not talked about directly by them; a significant result of subtext (which see); a triggering force for the reader; the deliberate thematic presence intended by the author, an armature about which the relevant details of story are wrapped. Although often sexual in nature, the elephant in the living room may just as easily be political, religious, ethical, or a combination of the two such as science vs. religion.

drunk in the parking lot, the--a performance-impaired individual in a story; an individual in a dramatic narrative who is emotionally or physically challenged to a noticeable degree by the reader. The key to this trope may be found in actors whose role calls for them to appear drunk or under some related influence: they are seen as exaggerating their attempts to appear sober or normal or unfazed. The drunk in the parking lot may be seen trying to remember where he parked his car, then striding purposefully to it, perhaps too purposefully. The panicked individual is trying to hold onto a shred of control before abandoning it. The key is control, which the character in question has lost or given away and is now trying to regain.

matchmaker, the--a role played by the reader; a reader's natural tendency to pair up individual characters in a story. This is one of the places where the writer-as-consummate-control-freak must suck up the frustration and move on. As youngsters in playground situations are wont to observe, "This is a free country." A reader can and will do anything possible to a novel or short story, including misunderstanding it or putting it down unfinished. Readers will consider romantic possibilities between characters that the author never intended. Let them; it is a small price to pay. Being aware of the reader's tendency, add enough ambiguity to encourage the reader. (No, this is not pandering.)