Novels & Short Stories: Some Assembly May Be Required

The recent arrival of a  bookshelf ordered on line brought untold resolutions to never again order anything sold with the designation:  Some assembly required.

Such items may well not be a challenge for those who score "high manual skills" on aptitude tests, but they are no friend to you.  In fact, had you been born into the Ice Age, or even the Stone or Bronze Ages, a so-called cave person, you would have been screwed, perhaps even fucked.  "Sorry,"  the leader of the hunting clan would have said, "We were hoping for someone with greater toolmaking and butchering skills.  Perhaps even the ability to throw a spear with accuracy at a considerable distance, woolly mammoths being what they are."

You were able, after some frustrations, able to assemble the bookcase to the point where it holds books without wobbling or sagging, bringing you to the awareness that the next time you see the designation "some assembly required," you will also look for a warning that some swearing may be required.

This is not mere hyperbole.  You often order stories and have recently accepted delivery on a novel.  Assembly is definitely called for in both.  So is swearing.  So it should be.  To get a short story or novel to stand without wobbling or sagging, you need skills of dramatic carpentry and design, true enough, but to get these bits of literary furniture to hold feelings, themes, zeitgeists, this requires the swearing born of anxiety, concern, faith, and a reach across some chasm that separates the known and familiar from the mysterious and transformative.

You would be properly suspicious were any short story or novel assembled by you to emerge in perfect plumb without some swearing or expression of dismay along the process, nor would the occasional kick in the shelves be amiss.  The simple truth is:  There are no instructions for this sort of thing; you must begin afresh each time, as though you faced an impenetrable learning curve, goaded by an equally inextinguishable urge to see the new project through to its wobbly, sagging emergence into the world,  whereupon you would need with some haste to create a shim which could give it greater stability in the eyes of those who would chance to lean upon it.

Letter to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer IX

Your enthusiasm for a project in the works rather than plot or outline is the hybrid vehicle you will ride through to the final destination.  The main source of power for this hybrid vehicle is your enthusiasm, but when that switches off or its warning lights begin to flicker, your next remarkable fuel is curiosity.  Thus my advice to you:  Beware of Sisyphean sentences in the course of which you push stolid predicates to the top of a rhetorical hill, give them a shove, then hope they achieve in their downward descent some--you guessed it--momentum.  Remember Sisyphus as a metaphor representing meaningless, mind-numbing work; keep him in mind as an exemplar of the kind of sentence you do not wish to write, not under any circumstances.

Sisyphus was sentenced to an eternity of meaningless work for defying the god Zeus--well, actually, for hitting on a mortal woman Zeus had planned an adventure or two with.  If your sentences bear the aura of fearful duty--"I've got to explain my characters' motivation"--or the taint of relying on the need to satisfy everyone in your writing group, including that one person who is so particularly critical of everything you write, these burdens will weigh your sentences and, indeed, your story, bringing it to a standstill, leaving you with the uncomfortable awareness of being alone, stranded as it were on a desert island much as the young chaps in Lord of the Flies were stranded.  And you know what happened to them.

How, I hear you asking, do I achieve this mind-freeing enthusiasm of which I speak?  I can give you the mechanism.  The specifics work for me; perhaps they'll show you how to draw upon them to develop your own, as indeed I drew from my role model, a musician name of Franz Josef Haydn, not only an articulate composer but a prolific one.  He began his working day by sorting through his library of musical scores, finding a piano work written by Karl Philip Emanuel Bach, then spending half an hour playing the score on his own piano, whereupon he turned to his own composing.  Although a fan of Haydn, particularly his piano sonatas, I am not so much a fan of KPE Bach, whose music doesn't send me off the way Haydn's does, but to be sure, Haydn's approach gets me looking.  Look for ten things you can read, recite, listen to, taste, or merely look at.  These are to be selected with the notion that they will provide energy and momentum to you because they have in the past.  I can pretty much get going on nearly anything by Maurice Ravel.  Yo-Yo Ma's renditions of the six unaccompanied cello suites by KPE's father, Johann Sebastian Bach, get me moving.  I find it difficult not to be energized by the playing of nearly anything by Bill Evans going it alone, or accompanied by the wise, verbal bass playing of Eddie Gomez.  Reading Louise Erdrich gets me moving; reading almost anything by Jim Harrison can get the ideas hopping.

It rarely takes me more than three or four things to get me going.  Sometimes I am drawn back again to the wonder and whimsy of the Krazy Kat comic strips that so enchanted me as a young person and made me wonder if I would ever be able to project such a magisterial vision as George Herriman's on the walls of my mind.

So okay, you pick among these ten things of yours and have at them.  If they don't help you to tuck into your day's writing session, I'm sorry to say you're fucked, which is a different kind of destination than the one I have in mind for both of us.  I have in mind a destination that is informed by The Three Princes of Serendip, a Persian folk tale which has come to us through a number of languages, leaving us with an uncanny sort of dramatic road map and the word serendipity.

You can, dear writer friends, follow the well-worn paths of tradition, plotting everything in advance, then arriving at your destination in mechanical fashion that promptly bites its thumbnail at any sense of realism.  You can, of course, follow the path of the three princes, arriving at your destination by happy chance, your destination coming as a complete and pleasing surprise for you, or perhaps not--perhaps not so pleasing as to seem mechanical, but pleasing enough to seem lifelike.  Besides, you've arrived at anticipated destinations before in your earlier works, you've been through the juggling, rearranging of plausibility as though it were cheap motel furniture.  That didn't make you feel as pleased at it might had you agreed to let the unthinkable come striding forward, inviting it in to accompany you on your way.

I leave it to you, dear friends:  We can cause our conclusions to have the heavy hands of event managers or we can follow those remarkable three princes who were actually from Sri Lanka and somehow, through the serendipity of translation and writers looking for destinations that will leave us with something of substance, found us.

Can any Writer Who Likes Publishing Be All Bad?

As you observed with what you considered cogent appropriateness in your review of John Grisham's latest publication, Ford County, those same stories, submitted by any other writer, or even under a pseudonym, would have not made their way through the editorial process into contract, scheduling, and publication.  Grisham is some distance away from being among your favorites; you mostly get his work when Barnaby Conrad passes them along to you in a set of CDs or in virtual publication (thus was it appropriate for you to give him your copy of Ford County).  He is, on the other hand, a favorite if not the favorite of many hundreds of thousands of readers.  Also, he is a writer of some narrative skills, knowing among other things how to delineate a character (although not always with great success) and having more than a speaking acquaintance with such dramatic tropes as conflict, reversal, and surprise.  You suspect--but do not know this for a fact--that he has learned how to listen to editorial suggestions.

You had a brief association with another such writer, Louis L'Amour, when you were sent to attempt him to leave his then publisher, Bantam, to join the publisher you represented, Dell.  L'Amour's writing style was, to be charitable, clunky, but he knew how to tell a story and his passion for research and history was stunning.  You learned an important technical construct from him which,in subsequent years (and at the risk of vainglory) you have incorporated into your own toolkit as one of its significant strengths--how, when, and where to begin a story.

Both Grisham and L'Amour have enjoyed sales in the millions, meaning readers seek their works, not just once but again and again.

This fact alone makes it possible for you to posit that they were ultimately published and continue now, over twenty years since L'Amour's death (1988), on the basis of their names.  Building on that foundation, an author should be published because of who he or she is, which is to say he or she has found a particular voice (Grace Paley, anyone?)with which to deal with and depict the dramatic life going on about him or her.

A literary agent phoned you just the other day to tell you that the publishing industry was going through some major revisions and overhauls, which let you know immediately he had no interest in trying to sell a particular project of yours, and indeed, you caused him no little discomfort when, after he told you of the problems within publishing, that you were sorry he didn't think he could place your project.  

You learned some years back when as an editor, someone wanted you to look at her manuscript, which Publisher A really liked and would have published if there hadn't been such a major paper shortage in effect at the time.  Since this happened in your office, you called Perkins & Squire, your primary paper supplier and asked how long it would be for them to deliver a carload of sixty-pound basis weight matte finish long-grain white bulking at 360 pages per inch (a by no means uncommon order) to your principal manufacturer, Kingsport Press.  Have that out for you in about a week, came the reply.

You do not believe you were being cruel to the writer because, in fact, you wanted the project and offered to take it on provided she accepted the bulk of your development memo.  But you have in subsequent years met writers who were led to believe that their work might have been published except for some act of God, some hitch in the publishing industry, which has always been vulnerable to change and disaster by virtue of what it was, is, and will continue to be in the future.

It is essential to learn dramatic construction just as it is important for an artist to learn human and animal anatomy, but it is also important to learn to write as yourself so that you are not mistaken for another or, for that matter, so that you are not considered so bland and formulaic that your writing becomes the literary equivalent of the art on the walls of Motel 6 suites.

You will never be published if they can find you in someone else.  Someone, I don't know why or why, is offering for sale on the Internet (www.ioffer.com/.../LITTLE-WOLF-S-INVINCIBLE-PAINT-AT-ADOBE- WALLS-GENEALOGY) an essay you wrote for a historical magazine (not by any means a journal, rather a pulp Western Historical magazine.  Heaven knows how he has packaged it, but he is selling if for $29.99, which is almost what you were paid for writing it in the first place.  Has he offered to split any of that $29.99 with you?  We won't go there; your point is that you published the work under your by-line.  Had the seller thought better of himself, he could have rewritten the material and perhaps sold even more copies on his own.

There will always be something wrong with publishing, but that is no reason to let it interfere with your enthusiasms and needs.