Running on empty as a virtue

Although it is a strain on your composure, the results of running on empty as applied to writing fiction are worth the strain. First this disclosure: running on empty means setting forth in a writing session without a clue relating to the work at hand. Nada. No sudden moves have been set aside for a time such as this. No shaggy dog stories, jokes, or shrewdly concocted deus ex machina devices parked outside waiting, engine purring and eager to whisk you away from your dramatic doldrums, for these doldrums are a particular symptom of a particular kind of day and your response to them is to recognize them for the opportunity they afford.

You probably have some design already in mind, some sense of whose story the story at hand belongs to, what the intent of the story is and if not a complete exit strategy then at least some notion of why a reader might care about your invention. In fact, you might even have a hint of why you care about it.

Running on empty is a sometime thing, a today thing, coming forth with no warning when you are in the midst of something you have been literally dreaming about. But not today. Ah, the things you have done today rather than jump into the work, eager to see where it might take you, bringing back that remarkable sense of discovery you first made sometime back in your early twenties, when a woman you cared for with incredibly long hair one evening after you'd come to take her out, removed a few pins and combs and the entire structure of plait and braid came tumbling down over her shoulders and that was all there was to previous plans, adventure and discovery were afoot.

There is something sensual and sensuous about being rendered momentarily outside the work in progress, wanting to get back in, not knowing where or when to apply the lever much less where the fulcrum is. There is that nagging suspicion that you may have said or written or felt the wrong thing and now, you've lost it, the whole thing is suddenly removed from you, lost, irretrievable.

Part of the truth is that you hadn't taken enough risk, were now beginning to think cautiously, which means perhaps you remove a few of the most recent paragraphs, then begin removing more until the entire project seems contrived, and now, fearful that it is back to the very square one, you wonder what you ever saw in the project. At about that moment, just as the entire progress you've made seems irretrievable, some flash of awareness comes in the form of a question: Why not have... or why not let... or the even more primal What if? It suddenly seems maddeningly delicious. You had never expected the story to turn in this direction, because, truth to tell, you were playing it too cautiously and no wonder you'd begun to think at a time when you should not be thinking but rather should be listening to what they, your characters, want to do.

You have on so many occasions been in both situations, the fearful despair of running out of tricks and devices and the even greater despair of reaching for anything at hand only to find it was just the tool you needed.

For you the answer always comes in the form of a character wanting to reverse the course you have set out, having another more anarchistic approach to the story, reminding you again, yet again that you, while respecting your parents and teacher's ideas and suggestions, were more likely than not to become impatient with them, particularly if they seemed at all sensible.

Chemistry at Work...or Not

You are smugly ensconced at Peet's, which is crowded. A barista nods at you over those in line, waiting to place orders. Medium nonfat latte, she mouths. You nod and moments later, your order is set on the counter with a wink. You find a tiny space, begin to set out your things, take a tentative sip of coffee, lift up your pen and begin making some notes on a work in progress.

Some time of engrossment and coffee sipping follows before you look up to see two persons standing at the lower counter, where coffee is ground and bagged for home use and where bulk tea is bagged to go. The woman is medium height with long hair the color of a sun-burned lawn, pulled into a bun, thus emphasizing the bony planes of her face. Her posture and her poise impress you to the point where you rate her as attractive.

Standing next to her is a man, perhaps an inch taller, heavy about the middle, his hair running to gray at the temples. You wonder if their placement is the accident of many customers in the same area or if they are together, some form of couple--friends, mates, lovers. He appears to be leaning into her space and she seems aware of the closeness, making no attempt to distance herself. Simultaneously you accept their couple-ness and begin defining their dynamic, the narrative that describes their behavior each to the other, and the need for a third party--you--as the witness and ultimate narrator, for unless one or each is a dramatist, they will not write of their relationship.

Layers of dramatic potential leap forth from them, a complex aura which you read, tempered by your own attitudes, preferences, and needs. They are buying a half pound of coffee beans, ground for espresso. Because you saw her as that most damning adjective, attractive, and him as the even more damned ordinary, you have constructed a near drama. Two characters and an audience, thus of at least three participants, one of whom you hope you know and are indeed at great pains to know.

You have made choices, passed judgments, imagined scenes in which all three appear, not the least of which is the man approaching you the next time you are at Peet's, drinking coffee and writing, telling you to stop writing about his woman, and you explaining either defensively or perhaps patronizingly that she deserves to have someone write about her. But now, ah, at this moment, you look up once again from your notes about them to the reality of them and they are gone, their half pound of coffee freshly ground and ready for such adventures as may befall them in your imagination at a random breakfast or perhaps some mid-afternoon pause for coffee and conversation that leads to drama.

The degree of accuracy or congruence between this couple and the characters you construct from them is unknowable and in this context of no importance. What is important is the chemistry you experienced when you saw them during those brief moments before they went tromping off to other stories and destinies. In the years you have been going to Peet's, you have rarely had this particular chemistry with real persons to the point of taking that next step, of pushing them through the portal of your imagination and into a dynamic that may be completely unrelated to them.

The connective tissue here continues because of the chemistry you experience when you see or think of events, invest them with feelings, write about them as though they were quite real and tangible. Is the chemistry still there in subsequent days when you reread what you have set down. You have taken as many, perhaps even more, liberties as you have with the middle-aged man and woman, standing before the coffee/tea purchase counter at Peet's. You have become a witness to realities not clearly known to you or understood by you.

And you set forth once again.

Composed: a Secret History

The difference between writing and--well, composing:

Writing, which is not to be sneezed at or in any way scorned because it is, after all what you do, be it your own invention, editing someone else's invention, discussing in published commentary the writings of others, or attempting dialogue with students, is distinct from composing in the sense that writing it the act of getting things assorted, set down on the page or screen, setting the stage for composition.

You write as a kind of finger and mind exercise, working away until the mere writing begins to fade and the composing side of the persona takes over and you are no longer writing but composing. You were close to being able to articulate this some considerable time back, when your book reviews were usually limited to a 500- or 750-word limit. You would nevertheless write furiously to get all your impressions down, arriving at about 1500 words, perhaps even more, then doing what Gordon Lish did to Raymond Carver, cutting, rearranging, focusing. You had already, thanks to your weekly checks from publishers, evolved the one-idea-to-a-letter plan, in which you tried to keep your letters to authors and suppliers and such contained within one page in the belief that no one wanted to read a letter longer than that unless it was all about how wonderful the recipient was (even if the recipient were not all that wonderful). You wrote and cut and rewrote until you became aware of a voice, not your attitudinal writing voice but the one Joanne Woodard helped you articulate last night as you ate dinner in front of the Turner Classics presentation of The Three Faces of Eve, a dreadfully written (sorry to the ghost of Nunnaly Johnson, screenwriter) script about a woman with multiple personality.

You write until the composing side of you begins speaking up, perhaps a suggestion or a flash of connection here and there, perhaps with an apercu of what the entire writing is about. You listen to it, do what it says, and then you are nearly home, rereading it for its greater sense of inevitability and mounting dramatic force.

Looking back on it, you recall times in your early teens, when you ventured to tell jokes to adults even though you knew that on some level the stories you told were more tolerated than appreciated. You were eager to have these jokes appreciated by the generational gap, those adults who through no fault of their own were older than you and more experienced.

This began magically on your first away from home vacation with your peers. A friend had been left a cabin at Lake Arrowhead by his grandparents. A number of us were to spend a long weekend there, hanging out, being teen-aged boys, telling stories about girls, not realizing they were more than mere lies but rather fanciful visions of wished-for experiences we could not articulate then by using mere truth. By then your ventures into stretching the truth included having a forged identity which allowed you to be carded at the saloon in Big Bear and emerge at the other side, with your very own bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, then another, then the beery walk back to the cabin and the older ones in our group beginning the teen-aged boy ritual of telling jokes with sexual content. A man walks into a pharmacy, asks if condoms are sold there, buys a packet, asks if aspirin is available, then remarks, Fucking headache. That sort of thing.

You wanted to tell the not-necessarily sexual joke to an audience beyond your peers. You wanted to see their laughter at what you thought was funny in the first place as opposed to their polite nods, yes, yes, very nice indeed. You had not yet conflated joke with story although that conflation was on its way. But at the moment, you knew there was or was not an instance in the telling where you added an unanticipated detail or made a gesture or gave a pause because some inner voice or director told you to do so, and from that moment of awareness, you knew also that it did not matter any longer whether you got the more transitory reward of laughter. What mattered was the sense of being invested in the story, having some new detail or gesture, some vision of the events that meant it was your entire responsibility.

Writing gets you started, and you write until the composing comes forth, and you listen to it because if you ever hope to get the material feeling and sounding as you wish, you must trust that composing aspect, the one that comes only after words and words and pages and pages have flown through you and you are in your associative mood or, if you will, associative mode. Thus you write to write beyond writing, where you are indeed the dish antenna picking up signals from your past, your present, your future, from places you have been, from places you hope to visit, from places that do not exist except in the tide pools of your imagination and which you now see fit to set forth as a place as real as Omaha, Nebraska, or Hollywood, California, or Miami Beach, Florida, assuming with all due modesty (as opposed to solipsism) that these places actually exist. You have never been to Omaha, Nebraska, and if you were ever to set a scene within it, you would have to do things to convince yourself that it exists in order to write about it in a manner that suggests you do. You do not for a moment believe in the sort of underworld of which Homer wrote and in which Odysseus visited, but you have a sense of that place because Homer (if there were a Homer and not, as is possible, a group of bards who have been conflated into one Homer) did.

You are currently in the process of preparing two venues for two different works of fiction, one venue is a university where you have taught for over thirty years, the other a retirement village which is actually within walking distance of where you live. You will give your fictional university a different name, in fact, The University. From it, you will be able to see an iconic Chevrolet agency with the iconic logo of Felix, the Cat. You will also be able to see the Shrine Auditorium, where on numerous occasions, you sat in various audiences. The retirement village will require a new name from you as a part of making this imaginary place seem more real to you than the real retirement village. Thus you are waiting for the composition aspect of your craft to speak up and be heard. In order to get there, you first have to write.

The unthinkable

unthinkable come to pass, the--a condition in story in which the worst-case-scenario in the mind of a character is played out; a crucial point in a story where the writer discovers the true site of mischief and energy; the meeting point where the worst fears of the writer and one or more characters meet--and circumstances up the ante.

It is more than a drug deal gone sour (No Country for Old Men) or the sudden resignation of one of the team of bank robbers (Dog Day Afternoon) or the protagonist of Vanity Fair thinking she had married her way into a modicum of respectability. Llewellyn Moss, while out hunting, chances upon the money in No Country, where things become even more unthinkably inevitable when Anton Chigurh enters the story. The two remaining bank robbers in Dog Day become enmeshed in a stand-off with the police, which was more or less expected. The unthinkable element was the revelation of why the bank was robbed in the first place. Thinking she has achieved some measure of respectability and security in her marriage to the equivalent of a low-echelon civil servant, Becky Sharp is given the following proposal: "Come back and be my wife," Sir Pitt pleads. "Birth be hanged. You're as good a lady as ever I see....I'm an old man but a good'n. I'm good for twenty years. I'll make you happy, zee if I don't. You shall do what you like; spend what you like; and 'av it all your own way. I'll make you a zettlement. I'll do everything reg'lar.." At which point "the old man fell down on his knees and leered at her like a satyr."

For an opportunist such as Becky Sharp, how is this the unthinkable come to pass? "Rebecca started back, a picture of consternation. In the course of this history, we have never seen her lose her presence of mind; but she did now." Author Thackeray reminds us how the tears now forming in her eyes were some of the most genuine she ever wept. "'Oh, Sir Pitt!' she said. 'Oh, sir-I-I'm married already."

You would not want to be around at dinner time, when her husband came home, with a sporty kiss and a "Hey, Babycakes, what's for dinner?"

Invention begins in story after the unthinkable has come.