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.

Metaphor

Metaphor is a mischievous but useful way of connecting two or more things in a relationship they might not have had otherwise. Not only that, metaphor brings us a step or more away from language that is merely descriptive, linear, instructional; closer to the way things appear to us in reality. And how is that accomplished? Metaphor, the marriage broker or eHarmony of language, causes us to consider ideas and concepts in context with the life about it, blurring the world of Reality to the point where it becomes a constant shimmer of ambiguity, mystery, and intrigue.

No wonder we inject metaphor and digression into our stories. If they were meant to be pure reportage, metaphor and digression would be the first two things the metaphorical editor with the metaphorical green eye shade would strike out of the copy, and the third ambiguity would be the true nature of the human being which is at least a duality. No, not the duality of God and Man, rather the duality in which each of us is also its double or reverse, the one who wants for a thing to be so that he or she appears to dither but is instead measuring the potential outcome against the ideal goal.

There is an entire dimension of metaphor in the waking life of Reality and in the dream life of reality, but you have had such awareness in you made suspect by years of teachers, jobs, and instruction books that warn you off, holding forth the simple clarity of the declarative sentence, achieved without unnecessary adjective or adverb as a paradigm to be observed. While it is possible to visualize such a world and write of it, you find yourself not using all the tools in the writer's toolkit, rendering your world dependent on event that proceeds step by ponderous step in the present tense, the present moment, with little or no possibility of association or comparison. You would be apt to get the same meaning from a text each time you reread it. There could be no possibility for ambiguity or metaphor in a text that was essentially recipe instead of evocation.

The anarchists in your life were the teachers who injected poetry into your life, the middle school teacher who sent you scurrying to read the poetry of Gabriella Mistral, and the apologetic man who knew of your eagerness to get on with "real" writing allowed that you might find more to relish in Geoffrey Chaucer than in Ernest Hemingway, but asked you at least to compare and contrast the music in the styles of each. The same mild man once suggested there was more to be had in evocation than description. You were not even one and twenty at the time, no use to talk to you. It was the experience that counted, to the point where you saw yourself as wanting to be the rodeo rider of language, tossing a lariat over it, hog-tieing it, wrenching it to the ground, free of any sense of the interior of your own self or of the reader.

Now it is, of course, different to the point where you can see the process beginning to emerge before you; you are more of a kite flyer than a bull rider, the ambiguity more descriptive than the clarity, the metaphor poking its head above ground like a curious gopher, seeking a midnight snack, waiting for its opportunity.

Distraction

distraction--a character, event, or detail that will shift attention away from the main goal in a dramatic narrative; an accidental or deliberate device having the effect of arousing the reader's curiosity and possibly as well the interest of one or more characters within the story; a detail that because of its being noted by writer or character has the power to change the direction of the story in which it appears.

Distractions appear as a result of authorial laziness, authorial intervention into a narrative, or through random accident. Distractions may be deliberate calculations, sometimes no more than a word, much of a piece with a skilled magician using some device to distract the audience from seeing the mechanics of an illusion. The point to be emphasized is that distractions take the reader's attention from the procession of story elements. This may or may not be a good thing, depending on the writer's intent. A distraction or digression will raise expectations in the reader and, possibly, within other characters, triggering the reader-as-matchmaker instinct, causing the reader to make assumptions, to wait for a payoff which might not come.

Even though the writer is as conversant with the necessary elements in a story underway as a director is aware of the throughline in a written narrative, the most efficient mental state for the writer at work is the state of being "in the story," or completely immersed in the movement of events. Unanticipated details emerge from such states. It is a good policy to include them and move on until the next convenient moment for revision and possible rethinking. In other words, do not think about these distractions as they appear, waiting instead for a thinking mode--a revision mode--to decide whether they stay or go. Yes; you heard that correctly: details come rushing forth during the writing mode. Like guests wanting the maitre d' to seat them in the restaurant, they must be given appropriate scrutiny. Do they belong? Do they enhance the story? Or, like the fabled tourists with white belts and loafers, worn with green polyester trousers, are they distractions?

Distraction: On the other hand...

digression--a movement away from a story line; a detail, introduction of character, time shift, or description that calls the reader away from details vital to the understanding of and immersion in the present narrative.

Digression is either a dramatic strategy or a literary wrong turn, the former a contrived movement that will have the effect of urging the reader to continue reading, the later a case of the author becoming impressed with some detail of surrounding, of meaning, or of implication that will have the effect of causing the reader to say, "Huh? What was that about?" The gap between the two poles is, sadly, rather narrow, hence these questions: Does the digression directly add a sense of tension or suspense to the narrative? Digressions in novels are easily achieved--merely shift the point of view to another character, who is appropriately engaged in intriguing activity. This strategy causes the reader to suspend focus on the previous situation, although keeping it close at hand. A short story proposes a more difficult situation because words must be chosen with mosaic precision. Digressions in short stories may be achieved and accommodated in short stories by having one or more characters respond directly to the digression, questioning its very appropriateness (which is what the reader will be doing).

A key to understanding the related plateau of anticlimax is the awareness that digression produces distraction, which in turn yields anticlimax. Digression and distraction combine forces to undercut the dramatic momentum of story. Writers need to develop a search-and-destroy agenda for digression and distraction. This agenda begins with the close examination of the digression to see if it will effectively assist the payoff of the story or is placed where it is merely as an advertisement for the writer's ability with words. Does it lead to a relevant discovery, or is it in fact merely showing off? If it does contribute to a discovery the reader and one or more characters may achieve, stet it; if it is merely showing off--well, that will not get us very far.