The Writers' Psychosis Test

Where, you ask, does story begin?

Story begins at the precise moment stasis ends.  Story begins when a hand, be it the hand of God, the Author, or a character tips the fine-but-chaotic balance of seemingly ordinary clutter, tilting it toward something somebody or some system wants.

How would you account for a something (as opposed to a someone) wanting something?

In espionage-type novels, say those of Eric Ambler or John Le Carre, human characters may want something, information or money or a sense of political satisfaction, perhaps even sexual favors that might not otherwise be attainable.  Nevertheless, the system governing espionage has wants that trump what humans want.  The system wants human borders to become secondary; the system wants an apparent result that covers the real goal which is balance or stasis; the system wants always to remain one step ahead of the players.  In any kind of novel involving institutions, whether they are States, universities, retirement home facilities, or those synecdoche-type abstractions such as The Law, or Justice, or even Poetic Justice, the institution wants to demonstrate that it understands its work force--humanity--better than humanity understands itself.

How about, then, someone wanting to beat The System (whatever System it may be)?

Same thing applies; one or more characters believe they have found a way to cheat, defeat, or otherwise bring down the system.  That's the tipping point, the beginning of, say, Dog Day Afternoon.  That's the point at which things begin happening that may be interpreted to mean there are external agencies such as Kismet/Fate.

But you don't think Kismet/Karma/Fate apply, do you?

No, I don't, but that won't stop some persons from believing with the same intensity as I disbelieve that they are up and in operation.  Remember, when story is in progress, the Cosmos may appear to be taking sides.  Events are triggered that may be read just as tea leaves may be read or the entrails of fowl, or the toss of yarrow sticks.  The attribution of events in The Iliad, for example, can be seen as intervention of The Gods, or The Fates.  Those were "invented" before political science and sociology or psychology.  

You are not, then, cynical or by any stretch a nihilist?

Absolutely not.  If you need to label me, perhaps absurdist is a good place to start.  At any given moment, absurd things are happening, triggered by absurd people.  Other equally absurd individuals see these events and believe they are cataclysmic or thematic or prophetic or perhaps even representational.  At the moment, there are, for instance, members of the U.S. Congress representing Midwestern states, drawing absurd conclusions to events.  In a year or two, these individuals will largely be forgotten, but they will have had some effect on the universal tolerance for the absurd.  Yet another absurd person, once the House majority leader, is attempting to reinvent himself as an Elvis Presley-type dancer on national television, and yet another former congress person, himself a House majority leader who resigned in disgrace, trying to rebrand himself with absurdist pronouncements.  No matter that all of these happen to be Republicans; many Democrats are equally lunatic.

If you were to take an individual who had become a professional writer, then remove only the physical acts of their writing and the arrival of their work in books or journals, their behavior would seem to fit behavior commonly described by experts as lunatic or absurd or even psychotic.  There is risk, a necessary element in every story, in becoming a writer, increasing exponentially with each passing year the wannabe writer stays at the craft.  The risk involves training one's self into the psychotic landscape where voices are heard, time is warped, reality refracted, and absurdness or absurdity becoming the ruling force.

And yet you admit to being a writer?

Not sure if that question came from you or one of the voices I hear.

Al Dente

Some years ago- never mind how long precisely-(as Ishmael would put it,) I found myself at the USC dental school, hopeful of synchronizing a teaching schedule with some repair work. There was a kind of camaraderie among us, teacher to teacher as it were, and such was the nature of this connective tissue that each time I opened my mouth, one or more of those in attendance would stop his or her task and call out, "Hey, you gotta see this!" whereupon a clutch of other student dentists and their supervisors would drop their Gracey curettes and swarm in for a look.

"We really hate to see you go," one of the supervisors said toward the time when my smile was achieving some serious presence. "You have so much wrong that you've become a walking textbook for all of us."

It was about this time when the late lamented poet and good friend, Claire Rabe, told me, "You mustn't misunderstand what women want from you. They want--"

"Yes?" I said.

"--they want technique that will help them become better writers."

"Oh," I said.

And at the USC Dental School, there were at least two women who were after me for my occlusal surfaces.

But I came away with a technique that had been ingrained into their working psyche and to the degree that I can stick to it, occlusal surfaces and all, it works.

Dentists, I learned, are encouraged to divide their working day into fifteen-minute blocks called units. Somewhere in every dental school, and possibly the broom closet in some dental offices, is the dental equivalent of the Flat-Rate Book auto mechanics use to guide their billing and work ethic practices. X hours for a lube job, Y hours for a rebuilt transmission, Z hours for installing a timing chain. The hour total is multiplied by the hourly rate, to which are added such refinements as materials and hazardous material removal. The result is the grand total.

Same thing with the dentist. X hours for a crown times the hourly rate plus materials. The results for mechanics and dentists are the same. Ouch!

Okay, so I began breaking my day down into units: fifteen minutes to read email, fifteen minutes to work on a short story, fifteen minutes to read pages from a book the review of which is already several units late, a unit to pay bills, a unit of time off (see, I even factored that part of the process), a unit to read a new student paper, a unit to formulate comments...

Sounds lovely, and there are actually times when it works. I got, for instance, a unit in this morning on a short story I'm working on; I got two units in on reading the California Vehicle Code Handbook prior to my need to renew my driver's license. Feeling thus expansive, I went back to the short story, which was a big mistake because I burned about three units going over things and fine-tuning the text as far as I'd come (which is the way I like to work anyway), and now I have to deal with the consequences of the profligacy of my actions. If there were ever a more basic demonstration of karma than that, I'd like to hear about it.

What it comes down to is the sound of a man who has been spoiled rotten doing things he enjoys, and his perpetual rush to keep up with the so-so stuff that has become a cultural albatross.