You Are in Love

You have had enough experience falling in love with persons, places, things, even concepts to have more or less got the hang of it, to know some of the dynamics involved. (Who really knows all the dynamics, because after all, falling in love means removing existing boundaries.) There is a good deal of power involved; you award large chunks of it to the person, place, thing, or concept you have fallen in love with, perhaps even wondering if you have mortgaged some part of yourself or at least entered into a long term installment arrangement in which you make daily or weekly or monthly payments, somehow scrounging them up from resources you did not know you had.

Some of your associates and close ones have suggested you were too quick to fall in love and indeed, in your earlier years there was undoubtedly an overeagerness on your part, brought about because of your intense desire to experience connections extending beyond the ones you came by as a natural consequence of having been born into a loving family. But over time, things evened out and you began to see a greater value of and less despair in the act of falling in love.

One of the great learning experiences in that regard came from a place: you were and still are hopelessly in love with Los Angeles, the city of your origin and youth as well as the city it has become and is today, sprawling forth in every possible direction, including directions previously thought impossible. You are away from it now, going there only on rare occasion, except that you are there in one way or another in your heart and mind every day, having given considerable power over to its vista points and landmarks. You learn how to love and regard at a distance from such things, to estimate and place a value on experiences that can only be relived in memory, experience the distinct tang of grief at the realization that an old place or an old memory has been built over, changed color or shape or even existence.

Looking back at some of the persons you have loved, you are wrenched into a reality rear-ender, at first fooled or at least dazzled by the degree to which you believe you have become sophisticated. Truth to tell, you still have a crush on such persons; they are a core sampling of who you were then and who you are now and perhaps you are no longer in love with some of them but you are by no means out of love with them, and it means uncounted emotional riches to revisit loving them and the ways in which you loved. Nor are you any the less free of those whom you loved only to have your love unrequited nor, for good measure, those whose love you did not or were not able to return. It is all a dazzle of a calculus because its complexity is expanded by the fact that not all the love was romantic, meaning there were indeed other reasons for you to feel the orbital pull of others, having effect on your own wobbly path through the universe.

You are not alone in making promises to persons you love; it is a language persons of heart and purpose have, a way of communicating with another, of sharing, of hitching a ride on a traveling asteroid that carries your life along with the life of the lover, allowing you the delicious conceit that you are able to control its orbit into another galaxy of experience.

Being in love changes the way you travel; you no longer pack for one nor chose the places where you stop to pee thinking entirely of yourself. You move on a more splendid orbit, occasionally looking backward or forward to make sure the loved one is in sight, aware of the possibility that the movement you now enjoy and take for granted may place you in a different orbit, where you may still love but need to reckon with the need to love at a distance.

Falling in love with a person is experiencing light from a distant star, it is merging into your life the subtle sense that a choice you make, whether it be a word in a story or a sandwich in a Subway or Quiznos was not your entire choice but informed by hers. You may well have finished the story and eaten the sandwich but there would never be that same delicious uncertainty behind it because falling in love is, after all is said and done, a delicious uncertainty, a wrenching open of a portal through which the entire cosmos of connection from another person is invited in. Being in love is a privileged vision of the extraordinary self you are to the person who loves you, a self you had less chance of being until someone fell in love with you.

None of this so far has even considered Sam or Blue or Edward or Jed, much less Molly or Armand, Nell or that intense flare of passionate presence you call Sally. Your chum Barnaby Conrad has said that no story about animals has a happy ending; you would put it even more personally in that they all fucking leave you with memories, but ah, what memories, to inform the way you take on your awareness of your own life, and what companions they are to have influenced your own understanding of what it is you must offer up to those you would befriend. A life without an animal friend is a life not examined for the nuance of satisfaction or the understanding of how to communicate with another being without words.

As you write this, Conrad is being prepped for the biggest adventure of his life--open-heart surgery to replace at least one valve. No wonder he didn't make lunch on Monday or Thursday. No wonder you have the strong focus that life is so much about love and the persons, places, things, and, yes, animals on whom to apply that love in all the special ways that suggest themselves to you from your observation of things about you.

What's in a mnemonic?

There are times when you will go around the block sentence- or paragraph-wise to avoid using the word "that."  Having found your way back to the stream of narrative, you will again interrupt yourself when, horror of horrors, you not only use "that," you have done so twice within a paragraph.  In the bargain, you have used "and" as a connective, a habit you picked up back in the day when you were doing your best to imitate the rhythm and style of Ernest Hemingway, even though you had already had face-to-face contact with the man, consequently determining your wish to move as far away from his influences upon you as possible.  For some reason not readily available to your memory, you go to great lengths to avoid beginning a paragraph with the word "one," as in "One of the easiest ways to begin a paragraph..."  

You still wince when you find yourself using the word "accordingly" as a lever to move into some form of logical or emotional conclusion, and are only slightly less discomfited by the discovery that you have used "thus" instead of "accordingly."

Sometimes, when reviewing a page or two of narrative, it seems to you that the "that's" and "ands" and "accordingly's" and "thus's" stick out like the quills of a pissed-off porcupine, your habit words coming back to haunt you as they are not likely to haunt anyone else.  You have other plans for your prose, plans that involve it assuming the personality and intent of a particular character, plans that involve a sense of rhythm, timbre, and not to forget logic.  Your plans also include a sense of emotional layering, the wrapping of a coil about an armature, the gradual build-up of the intensity of a feeling.

True enough, you look to your favorite writers to see how they accomplish such things, but the most grating pain of all is the discovery that you have imitated rather than pushed forth on your own to try to set the desired effect(s) in motion.  Making too much of a thing about originality is in a real sense flinging the doors open to invite the voices of criticism and reproach to speak up while you're trying to compose; if you obsess about originality, you are not writing, you are thinking, you are wearing the colors of self-consciousness, flaunting them at a black-tie dinner, the effect being See how different I am as opposed to See how it is.

These are some of the reasons for keeping thought away from your intent of composition for the most part, investing your characters with a strong measure of intent, then turning them loose on the page or, if the work is nonfiction, defining a purposeful direction where your inquiry and logic are to tread before allowing your uninhibited narrative self off the leash to romp forth.  It may rankle when a reader finds a comparison between you and some other observer of the human condition, but the comparison will have a compliment rather than an instance of spotting imitation.  You can find a way to live with compliment but it is much more difficult to live with imitation.

Humor: It Only Hurts When They Laugh

omniscient point of view--a narrative technique for conveying the essential goals and sensations of story through the lenses of more than one character in the same scene; a vision of story simultaneously seen by numerous eyes. A major effect of the omniscient point of view is its suggestion of a crowd, even if there are only two characters on stage at the moment; they appear to be speaking and thinking and behaving at the same time, which in fact they are. An omniscient scene with three or four points of view evokes the sense of being at a party or gathering, with voices clamoring to be heard.

One of the resident difficulties accruing from the use of the omniscient point of view, particularly in shorter narratives of five to six thousand words or less is the problem readers will have determining whose story it is, then subsequently what that character's goal is.

Since the omniscient point of view is the least used of the spectrum, the shifts from person to person may produce a bumpy narrative ride unless closely managed. The writer who uses this approach is well advised to spend time in revision checking for a seamless switch from character to character, making sure the reader has a reasonable clue who the next narrator has become. The significant modern writer to observe for his use of this technique is the Irish writer, William Trevor, who uses it exclusively in short stories, mid-range narratives, and novels. Omniscient point of view is not an easy technique to control; reading Trevor makes it appear that it is. Caveat emptor.

An ideal theme for an omniscient point of view narrative is a family or group gathering event in which a number of front-rank characters gather to celebrate, mourn, or render a necessary decision, each bringing to the gathering a different agenda. Trevor has managed to expand on this trope by bringing romantic, filial, or sororal relationships involving two persons into the tent.


habit words--words favored (often unconsciously) by writers who use them repeatedly to the point where they become distractions for the reader. All writers have habit words; many make a point of a special seek-and-destroy mission during revision to root them out and change them. One of the many habit words shared by large numbers of writers is the innocent connective "and." The writer uses and in place of a comma, to connect independent clauses, a technique most famously used by Ernest Hemingway and now parodied at his expense some fifty years after his death. Another habit word in frequent use is a tense variation on the verb "to walk," as in he walked over to, she walked by, they walked up to, he walked into.

Accordingly, the verb "said" might seem to be a habit word thanks to its use with attribution in dialogue, but here things differ in ironic perspective. The need some writers feel to supply synonyms for said, such as averred, opined, intoned, rebutted, growled, barked, shrieked, moaned, etc help make the point that repetition of said is scarcely noticed, is largely considered a blind word, not an obvious repetition, rather than a habit word.

True enough, the reader may misinterpret, gloss over, or take text to have a meaning completely foreign to the author, but the reader is as well an amazing computer, able to detect anomalies missed by copyeditors and fact checkers, all too eager to hold these anomalies against the author. Overwhelmingly, readers are not offended by "said" as it is used in dialogue.


humor--a sudden, painful awareness of exposure or vulnerability; a force aimed at an individual, institution, or tradition with the intended goal of ridicule and possible destruction; a view of reality and a redemptive philosophy for dealing with that view; a sense of justice in which the emperor is revealed to have hand-me-down clothing but nevertheless insists it is Ralph Lauren.

First principal: there is no such thing as victimless humor.

Second principal: the target of humor always believes he has the moral high ground.

Third principal: the moral high ground is mortgaged for more than its actual value.

Fourth principal: when someone tells you "That isn't funny," it probably is.

Humor is explosive, irreverent, undemocratic, a splendid example of the unthinkable come to pass. Suspicious and anarchistic in nature, it asks the wrong questions, makes the wrong assumptions, creates a shambles of disorganization, the only thing left standing it the truth for all to see--not the truth you are told to see; the only truth you can see after the dust settles.

Humor is separate from comedy in that humor is situational and dramatic, a punctilious, super-orderly person squeezing too much toothpaste from the tube then trying to dispose of or hide the waste while comedy is more physical, trying to force the toothpaste back into the tube and, of course, bungling the operation.

How to initiate humor:

1. Select a target, which may be any institution, profession, or attitude, also an individual who thinks or feels entitled, justified, or merely right.

2. Place that institution, profession, or attitude, also said justified or entitled individual in a situation where it/he/she feels it appropriate to behave as usual, then apply pressure in the form of a question, challenge, or time constraint-type pressure. Then push the subject to defend itself.

3. Watch for the results.

4. Think dramatically, along the lines of the three-act play format of old, where act one presents the challenge, act two presents the attempt(s) to cope with it, and act three brings the venture to a combustion that blows up in the target's face.

5. Remember Wile E. Coyote. The reward is humiliation, which the target may not yet be able to see--but the audience can.


Hints:

1. A major goal of humor is humiliation.

2. Memorably successful humorists often used themselves and their foibles as targets.

3. Even though the goal is humiliation, don't kick the target unnecessarily when it is down, lest you shunt the force of humor onto yourself.

4. Ignore the warning that a particular subject is not fit for humor.

5. Remember, humor is not jokes; humor is exposure of facades and hypocrisy, reversal of positions.

Habitue

We have had this conversation before, but it is good to remind you of it because--well, because it is something likely to recur.

It is one of those process things, a systemic glitch you find in any of a number of tangential and completely unrelated disciplines. As you essay different tasks, it may even chose to appear in different ways.

I speak of that old pest, the habit word, a fact I a aware of most times I undertake a content or copyediting assignment and, indeed (whoops, there's one now!) whenever I review your own work before submitting it to its Fate.

There is no comfort in the discovery of others having some of the same habit words you do; in fact, there is often a distinct undercutting of comfort, which very thing, comfort, happens to be one of the reasons you write in the first place. Perhaps the most common of all habit words--words you use to excess in a particular text to the extent of calling attention to the overuse--is and. It is not wrong to link independent clauses with and, but it does become repetitive and, alas, sounds clunky after a time, as though you were trying to imitate Hemingway and failing.

Indeed is another habit word you use to excess, doubtless from your intention of adding emphasis, although it must be said that you do not abuse in fact. Your next overkill is with Accordingly, which is nice, once in a while, to use at the beginning of a paragraph, or when springing the tail end of a syllogism, in place of ergo, which is a tad Latinate to your taste.

Your delicacy in presenting the concept of habit words to students is admirable; after all, some words and phrases are more clear-cut than others, simpler, more honest, the literary equivalent of the natural tan Ugg boot rather then some of the more noticeable permutations.

Said, on the other hand, is an acceptable habit word, particularly when it becomes apparent that some other writer than yourself is going to some extreme in order to avoid the repetition, thus drawing attention to the very thing they are trying to avoid.

I know that you exert some considerable effort to avoid the word that, simply because you find it flat, nondescriptive, clunky. Similarly do you find very a word worth avoiding and, thus, unlikely to find its way into your text even when you are working at full, focused speed. Some words fall onto your list because they are speed bumps for you, causing you to have to stop in the middle of a sentence or paragraph, forgetting the fine-tuned vector of your intent, searching now for substitutes or wondering what on earth you might have meant by a particular phrase before arriving at the speed bump and having to think your way out.

Yes, yes you know; language is symbol, capable of being understood when read or heard if presented with clarity. Language is often a clump of ideas, concepts, formulae. Just as often, it may be a clump of complex emotion that must be decoded, which is to say rendered into an exacting pattern of words which will convey to others the complex feelings you are experiencing and (indeed) conveying understanding of those complex feelings to yourself.

Make no mistake, because some words are your habit words, they are not transmogrified into bad words, judgmentally tainted words. They must simply be regarded in the same way as, say, a sign in a mall or parking lot, prohibiting skateboarding. You have no brief for such signs or such injunctions against skating or skateboarding, but because you do have a feel for The social contract, you think, okay, I'll uphold the law. In this case, I'll try to knock the habit words out of my revisions.

You sound different, someone says. Yes, because I have interdicted my habit words.

I thought something was different.

Which brings forth an interesting question: Does the retention of habit words forge or preclude an individual style?

You know what I mean?