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

How often have you pondered on the edge of consciousness, reaching for that most Flaubertian prize, the right word, not, as Mark Twain so aptly put it, its second cousin?  You know the word is out there, orbiting about your scene or concept, wanting a landing pad in one of your sentences.  Not that you are a snob, looking for arcane tropes to prove--what?--your erudition; you are merely trying to fit another piece in the puzzle that began when you undertook your project.

There is a word; other words may nuance out to the same approximate meaning, but there is only the one word that will do it for you, convince you of its absolute resonance and necessity.  The word appears, a long lost relative returning home.  You greet it with warmth, then move on, looking for the next word that in its way produces the sense of certainty you seek in your work.

You are certain, as in positive, aware for sure, although there is certain reason, as in some, for wondering if certain is the word you are looking for.

Sometimes a certain word bothers you each time you see it in place in a manuscript you are trying to bring to a final version; something about it reaches forth to attract your attention each time you encounter it, causing you to strike it out, then insert another, surer, more emphatic word in its place, giving you, at last, the comfortable sensation of relief now that you have it for certain.

Remember, you are the filter or, if you will, prism for the reader.  Just as the great superhero character of the past, The Shadow, had the power to cloud men's minds, meaning he could render himself invisible, you have the power to convey feelings, the most precious gift we have as writers.  Aha, I sense some of you already, set to argue with me:  What about ideas?  you snort.  Aren't they precious, too?  Didn't many of our great works of art and science come from ideas?  Of course they did, but as well they must have induced some feelings within their creators as they came into focus?  Aren't some formula haunting and magnificent in their function and purpose?  There are, in fact, men and women who experience such joys from considering mathematical formula just as musicians can see in a progression of notes an inherent joy or industrious reverence that they willingly translate for us with their instruments.

So I ask you to look carefully at your choices, to pick the combinations, sentence lengths, punctuation, and general deployment as they reverberate within you and--get this because it is important--within the sensitivities of the characters you create.  It is not only the right word in the right sentence in the right place for you, it is the right word for your characters as well.  If it is to be truly from them, it must certainly be of and from them.

Doors. er, Portals

Makes perfect sense. Your process--whatever it may be--is your portal to enter an arena, a landscape, or some skein of associations.

In the arena, you may encounter enemies, predators, or even the adversarial portions of yourself, looking for at the very least a nosh. The ambiance for an arena may be a simple family meal, a classroom, or the simple-but-treacherous Plaza de Toros in Mexico, D.F.; the risks are manifest, waiting for you to find the rhythm by which you engage your adversaries at your best. The landscape may be less threatening although it can have its own potential for mischief and misstep.

The skein of associations is yet another place where you are distracted from the endless flow of quotidian event; it is the equivalent of a nuclear accelerator wherein ideas are sped up and sent into an orbit where they will eventually collide with another idea, combining at high speed to produce electronic and creative mayhem.

You have had some experience with all these portals, having passed through them to the other side, wherein you lose track of Pacific Standard or Daylight time and become adrift in your own time zone. It is so pleasant to be in any or all these places. The real world is no comparison; it is only the launching pad. You cannot be in these other places, away from reality, without being a part of the planet on which you were born, subject to and aware of many of the laws governing the behavior of matter. Thus you do not, as you once thought to do, despise reality. In it, you have met remarkable persons, read many moving things, collided with ideas you had not thought to have ever existed. But if you are to do anything in this world, you need a process to help you find ways to get temporarily out of it for those special moments when your process is your tour vehicle.

Now you look at doors with a kind of wonderment; where does the door really lead? How will you enhance your process so that you can recognize which doors are authentic doors while others are mere scenery and set decoration?

Within Reach: The Next, The New, The Promised

Your observation of the best source of inspiration persists. Work, or the involvement in a process, produces work for a composer. You first became aware of this process in operation watching Ray Bradbury feed quarters into a slot in a room at the UCLA library where one could rent a typewriter for twenty-five cents for a half-hour. On those rare occasions when Bradbury hit a snag, mindful of the clicking of the timer on the typewriter clock, he'd start working on another story. Writers' block and thinking things over were not affordable options. Later, when his finances made things slightly more affordable, Bradbury began buying used stand-up typewriters, positioning them about a table, each typewriter containing a story in the works. You're working on typewriter A and reach a point where nothing is coming forth for thirty minutes, why you simply slide the chair along to the next typewriter, then begin to work on that story. During those Christmas vacations when you had work as a temporary mailman, you saw the results of his process: every day, his mail was filled with the envelopes obviously containing galley proofs for correction. Thus you were impressed with his methodology almost at the same time you were impressed by the stories.

Except that you had not found ways to train yourself to be so disciplined. Nor had you made the simple equation that a writer at work is "in process" a magnet as it were, attracting ideas and notions. True enough, your desk and shelves and pockets and any other flat surface were strewn about with notes, opening pages, and beginnings. At one point, relatively early on in your life, you noted in one of your journals that you now had at your disposal enough stories and novels to last you for much of your life to come, giddily projecting that by the time you'd exhausted these, more would have appeared and you'd have only to return to the well, for it truly was a well, from which you could haul up a bucket load of beginnings, finish them, and send them off in time to have enough checks to bank that would pay for the past month's bills, particularly those at Phil Diamond's ARCO station at the corner of La Cienega and Olympic, one of your early tabs.

Yesterday's experience of being hit by a gift from the Muses as it were reminded you of the way things work for you, seemingly a lifelong habit you may have finally come to terms with. A rhetorical question posed by Marta in her blog http://mapelba.wordpress.com/, triggers a set of responses in which The Muse says in effect, Can you hold this idea for me? You are tempted to say, thanks, but I've learned my lesson; I'm working on a novel and I can't take the time to hold this for you now. But instead, I recall something I saw just last week, two 3 x 5 index cards paper clipped together, the reading of which transported me back to the last time I had occasion to be at Fess Parker's Doubletree Inn on the beachfront at Cabrillo Boulevard. I had an immediate memory of a well-dressed-but-sullen group of five or six individuals, mostly men, but one woman who reminded me of Danica Patrick, sitting in a conference room, following a Power Point presentation being given by a man wearing a double-breasted suit. Although the index cards did not say so, I knew the man's name was Denis. I knew that because I had given it to him. I had the impression from my memory of the woman that she felt her presence there was resented, thus my thinking she resembled Danica Patrick, further thus my reason for the index cards in the first place. Perhaps, I now recall thinking, the woman is the get-away driver. They are all bank robbers. Denis is the leader of course, and he uses Power Point presentations to outline all his capers. Another of the characters, I learn from the note, is Winston, and the notation next to his name, pastrami sandwich, makes perfect sense because Winston has at some point complained about the snacks provided by Denis, even to the point of remarking that Arthur, when he lays out a caper for his crew, provides pastrami sandwiches driven up from Langer's in L.A., and Denis, making the angry retort, You want meat sandwiches, you do capers with Arthur. You work with me, you eat healthy.

In other words, you have at least once kept sufficient notes to get you back to an idea that impressed you to the point where it was beginning to grow, while still remaining true to a priority list.

As if to prove this, thinking to safeguard the index cards in which a group of bank robbers were working out a caper in a conference room of a resort hotel, you put them in a drawer you thought would be an appropriate safekeeping place for them, whereupon you found a detailed sheet-and-a-half of lined legal tablet that took you promptly to the presence of your old pal, Marla Miller, she of Marketing the Muse cachet, who had expressed to you some concerns about how her three daughters would react to the fact of her having recently dyed her hair to a champagne blond. In real life, you know something about the daughters, one of whom was an aggressive soccer player for UC Berkeley Women's' Soccer Team, Go Bears. Thus you had the atmosphere down on paper about the whys and wherefores of a bright, energetic, attractive woman in middle age, changing her hair from its Mediterranean black to an Orange County blond.

In other words, taking the time to get sufficient triggers for the new idea down in some readable form does not mean that the work will have to disappear into the void; it can be retrieved when there is sufficient time to truly bring it back, open it up, get into it, live within it, and write it. Yesterday's entry in this vagrant succession of blog postings is the cyber equivalent of notes written on some kind of paper surface. What this means is that you do not have to leave The Secrets of Casa Jocasa stranded in limbo nor do you have to treat the more recent ideas as failed relationships that might have had a chance if only you'd paid more attention to them at the outset.

New ideas are Siren calls to Odessyeus and his crew, sent forth by Circe to tempt and. This approach you have recognized, far from perfect, nevertheless reflects your own nature and the possibilities that your future will be characterized by reaching into rather than reaching for.

Material Witnesses

material--raw dramatic data; outtakes from previous writing projects; unused research data; scraps of overheard conversation; notes and observations made in alternate states of consciousness; suggestions from friends, family, and well-meaning readers; newspaper stories (particularly tabloids) focusing on intra-family disputes and feuds; ideas generated as a result of responses of admiration or disapproval while reading the work of another writer; moral, ethical, and social problems apparent to a writer but not yet emotionally sorted through; handwritten comments over one sentence in length, written on rejection slips.

In the best-but-broadest sense, everything is material, like an untidy desk, eagerly awaiting the writer's attention for the sorting-out process to begin. More than a placebo but slightly less potent than a steroid, material is the writer's holy grail, the radiant aura surrounding a creative impulse, the assurance that this is the material--more than any other material, particularly previous material--that will transform the writer's life, craft, and career. It is the arcane book on knots, found by Annie Proulx at a yard sale, that inspired and prompted her breakout novel, The Shipping News. It is the inspiration for the poem, "Kubla Khan," that visited Samuel Taylor Coleridge's psyche and upon which he was embarked before a pair of door-to-door missionary workers knocked at Coleridge's entryway, frightening away the inspiration.

On the feeding scale, material ranks close to the bottom. It is less by far than a concept or a glimmer or a hint of story; it is deceptive and radioactive in its shimmery promise. It is all book tour and New Yorker appearance, but no story.

And yet.

It is no small thing to have material or, indeed, to have Moleskine notebooks, flash sticks, external hard drives, or three-by-five index cards on which to store such material. It is no small thing to embark on the intent of a night's sleep, mentally sorting through such material, scanning for the right trope, the right word, the key that will set the WM, The Writer Mind, off on a dizzying spiral of connecting thematic and dramatic dots. It is no small thing to note and record material, even with the foreknowledge that doing so makes one of a piece with those odd-looking men and women with the electronic scanning devices who roam the beaches and park sites just before dark, hopeful of finding something of value, often finding nothing more substantial than a beer opener or empty foil packet of peanuts.

Material is the entry ticket into the big tent of writing. The instincts to collect it, evaluate it, store it help provide the muscle memory for the technique of being a storyteller. It is inconceivable to think of a serious writer who has not amassed a trove of material, even more so inconceivable to think of a writer who has not been confronted by a well-meaning friend or family member who wonders openly what the value of such material is, how many actual stories it has produced, what revelations and new insights into the human condition it contains.

In truth, the material a writer collects is of a piece with the core samplings the earth scientist or archaeologist or polar cap specialist takes. Material is a core sampling of ideas, conversations, measurements, and observations of the world of reality and alternate universes of the imagination. Material is best interpreted by a writer.

Hidden Agendas and Old Wives' Tales

hidden agenda--a secret plan, initiative, or desire nourished by a character while professing loyalty to another cause; self-interest disguised under a veil of piety or moral superiority; a battle between the id and super ego of an individual.

By asking of a character what that character wants, doing so with the persistence of an investigative journalist, the writer may well discover a valuable commodity--the character's hidden agenda. This is not to argue that every character has a hidden agenda, nor is it to argue that most characters don't; it is to argue that characters who appear in stories are generally larger than life and have about them an explosive or impulsive tendency to act on desires. You have particularly to watch out for the repressed ones, who may all along have been fighting an increasingly losing battle of ignoring what they truly want. Similarly, the sybarites may secretly yearn for a moment or two of sincere renunciation. Go figure. But don't pass up opportunities to bring the hidden agenda forth. The censor, tollbooth guard, or other border cop should reside within the character--not the writer, which is to say the writer who wishes to be as effective as possible needs to ignore signs of personal discomfort in pursuing the motives of his or her characters.

The hidden agenda may be temporarily--but not indefinitely--concealed; it is the cat in the bag. The hidden agenda is a catalyst for the combustion inherent in the unthinkable coming to pass, because it is at this point that the story gains an irresistible momentum.


old wives' tales--an ancient source of rural and urban mythology; data purporting to be accurate information, passed along by an elderly generation of women or taken without authentication by moderns as valid; a hearty mixture of what may have once been common sense,home cures, myth, recipe, superstition. Also known as bubbie meistas.

An effective way to write off suggestions offered in a helpful spirit is to unthinkingly call them old wives' tales; some advice is shrewd and turns out to be effective if followed, making the recipient of the advice feel foolish for not following it. Old wives tales are often litanies of the consequences of someone about to do what she or he feels most like doing as opposed to listening to older sources. In many ways, and in many cultures, old wives' tales are operatic warnings direct from the communal super ego, stories of examples of dire fates that befell those who did not follow the conventional wisdom of the time and place. Amusing dramatic ironies take root when old wives' tales, contrary to conventional logic and wisdom, prove out in their accuracy.

In other ways and cultures,old wives' tales are seen as prescient and inspirational. Although they suggest what might be seen as sexist derogation, it might be wise to consider old boy's tales as yet another way of getting facts, intent, and ability all jumbled up, the consequences leading directly to story. In any case, their very mention as well as their use is a reflection of the writer's view of a particular culture and the individuals who inhabit it.

Ways of Looking at an Idea

1. It comes swooping down on you like a marauding seagull, after your last chunk of bagel and cream cheese, fully formed, backed by agenda, waiting to be taken up and dealt with. You know where this baby is going; you cannot wait to get at it; the opening sentence is already forming in your head,

2. It presents itself to you as though it were a piece of a jigsaw puzzle you found in what you thought to be an aimless walk. Now the walk has taken on the backdrop of a quest as you consider what larger picture this jigsaw piece might be, what and where the other parts are that will help you get a quick look at the goal.

3. You are in the middle of a conversation with someone when a word or phrase or clause or sentence emerges. Was it from your mouth or someone else's? Did it perhaps come from the ambient conversation around you? Time and senses have stopped now as the excitement of that word or phrase or clause or sentence is steam-driven through your channels.

4. You experience a frisson, a slip in the meshing cogs of confidence because you do not immediately see what to do with it, what format to fit it in, what closet to stash it because company is coming and you would not like to be caught with something so ungainly being out in public. As soon as you have the freedom to do so--and you force that issue quickly enough--you consult book stores, Google, blog sites, places where there are stories in seemingly impossible formats, cheering sections that energize you beyond a simple fix. If I can bring this off, you think. What a coup it will be to have brought this off.

5. I have finally cut free, arrived at a series of connected dots that is the acme of my inventive life to date. I am all alone with this. It is in many ways like the transition idea that forms just as the brain waves are switching from sleep to a waking state. Now comes the desperate lunge to grab it before it slips away.

6. You are listening to someone's idea, being given in a personable, articulate, enthusiastic way, a bright, cheery package that leaves you polar because you are pleased for the person whose idea it is and then somewhat deflated because you'd been thinking along the same directions not too long ago. If you pursue your idea at this point, you will worry about the reaction of the individual you were listening to, at which point a tinge of resentment creeps in. Now I can't pursue this idea at all because the individual who confided in me will have probable cause to suspect me of eminent domain or worse, plagiarism. Then you ask yourself the key question How can I render this as it has never been rendered? What point of view or voice or key signature or format? What theme shall I place this in counterpoint with? What new dimension shall I exploit? Then it comes, at which point you sit somewhere, laughing your thanks up at the cosmos for the challenge that has come home to roost.

7. At first you don't see it, don't even know it's there. Then, as if in confirmation, you continue not to see it. And then you are in the midst of something entirely else, or nothing, nothing at all. It finally gets through to you. At risk of slapping the butt of your palm to your forehead, you look for something to throw. Finding nothing, you settle in with a deep breath, then recognize it. What kept you so long, it asks you.