The Learning Curve

There is a tidal wave, which is often caused by some weather condition, a tsunami, which is conventionally regarded as  being the by-product of a seismic event, and the learning curve, which is occasioned when an individual is confronted with a mounting surge of awareness that understanding of a process or system is likely to be overwhelming.

For lo these many years, you have been close to the point of inundation by the learning curve of writing, sometimes being buoyed beyond the crest by the momentum of the current.  The buoyancy led you to believe that you were so to speak on peer terms with the learning curve, able to cope with it in most of its demanding clamor for undivided attention.  This is a feeling that allows you to float your way into the next project, whatever it might be, with a margin of confidence, but no sooner is the draft underway, perhaps even completed in first draft, when you become acquainted once again with that most devious and dangerous of waves, the learning curve.

All right, have it your way; you will never be so significantly beyond it that you will be able to body surf your way through the next project, never land ashore without some drag marks or without the feel of having been taken for a head-rattling, topsy-turvy tumble.  For every technique or device you learn, the next project presents you with the reality of encounter with a wave of such grand, formidable, imposing size as to cause you shivers of anticipation for the ride ahead.  There was at first a direct proportion between what techniques you were aware of and your ability to execute them with some measure of success, but you have long since reached the point where your ability to execute and your desire to include yet greater depth rely more on accident and randomness than any ability you have to measure the distance between them.  It is not constant.

So, as Nick Caraway observes in The Great Gatsby, you beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.  Your past is not Gatsby's nor anyone else's except the point from which you began and now measure yourself; it is much your own moments of beginning, what you thought and felt at the time.  The discovery that saves you, often buoys you aloft, is the recognition that it seemed magic then, that you could enter it with a mantra, an Open sesame straight from Ali Baba.  You know any number of mantras but none of them works in this context.  What you have is the magic from that time, beckoning you forth to try once again.

The Yearning Curve

When you are in the beginning stages of learning a particular discipline, there comes an idealized peek into the future, when you visualize yourself in the act of performing that particular activity, flawlessly, effortlessly, as though you had been intended from birth to arrive at that state. This peek into the future is in the way of a gift to yourself, an incentive for learning so well that you have invited the discipline into permanent remedy within your being. Some of the disciplines, such as the grammar and syntax of the English language, are basic. Others, such as sexual performance, are primal. Yet others, such as operating a vehicle, required that you be licensed.

Some things, such as sex and voting, can be engaged without much advance preparation, although in each case, advanced preparation is ultimately to your advantage.

Some stages of learning involve the awareness of tools and the understanding of their use. Before you were forced by circumstances to trade in your hip joints for those of a titanium design, you were much concerned with the nature of running shoes and a study of stride and lift and, of course, the mechanics of hydration. The night before a half- or full-marathon was a splendid opportunity to show your awareness of nutritional and metabolic processes as well as your own pleasure in preparing a meal of pasta and lobster for their carbs and glycogen. You now consider instead of running shoes the mechanics of swim fins and such stylistic devices as Total-Immersion swimming.

As the need and opportunities to become a book editor approached you, there were tools mentioned in revered tones, beginning with CMOS, The Chicago Manual of Style, which you have owned since your first purchase when it had a green color, not quite that of lime Jell-o. There was also the Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Biographical Dictionary, the Atlantic Monthly Short Lives, a Merriam-Webster Geographical Dictionary, a world atlas. You used some of these items more than others. When you had the seniority to do so, you implemented changes such as substituting The American Heritage unabridged for the MW, at which point one individual you knew and respected congratulated you on coming of age to the point of choosing the standards for your publishing venture. (Emboldened by this vote of confidence, you promptly instructed the copyeditors in your employ NOT to hyphenate Moby-Dick.)

Many of the books-as-tools you grew forward with have tumbled off the desk and into obsolescence as entire technologies have changed. Does it date you beyond measure to speak of a favored guide, Words into Type, which still has a pretty effective section on the author's responsibility to a manuscript and a project? You don't have to answer that, but you do have to know what being a professional entails.

At one time you thought to assemble a style guide for fiction writers, still not a bad idea because, splendid as it is, CMOS is more for the nonfiction writer. In your way, the work you now have out in submission, The Fiction Writer's Tool Kit, is, as the title suggests, a tool, a reference guide for the fiction writer. You are inordinately fond of the publisher who is now looking at it, but even were they after deliberation to decline, the work helped you and was at the point of this essay, your tool kit for story-telling and for the construction of non-formulaic fictions.

These thoughts have come tumbling down on you precisely because you set out this morning to restore some order to the shelves closest to your working area. Which tools can you live without? Which are you likely to use again and again? And one of the most intriguing mysteries of all: There is no question about the place Mark Twain occupies in your esteem and your dreams. You've carefully set out an entire bookcase devoted to him and such books about him as you care to keep. The mystery that arises has its origins in the second tier of the bookshelf closest at hand to you, where CMOS resides with Words into Type, The Copyeditor's Handbook, A Dictionary of American-English Usage, The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, and other such compilations, right next to a pile of Big Little Books used as a sort of decorative bookend, is Chaucer A to Z, The Viking Portable Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, John Gardner's The Life and Times of Chaucer, and yet another volume of The Canterbury Tales before drifting off to a new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? You would hardly call yourself a mediaevalist or even a Middle Ages man. Could it be that you see in Chaucer the human condition writ large as a writer's tool kit? It could be.

The Short of It

You first came to the short story because, given your youthful energy level and relative lack of a managed approach to tasks, a story was something you could do in one sitting--starting with an opening concept, such as standing in a ticket line to purchase tickets for a musical or a ballet, ending twenty-five or so pages later when the main character reached the ticket seller.  

The ending was a moment you learned about some many years later in a conversation with Bobbie Ann Mason, a writer you came to admire greatly, where endings meant a place where the energy runs out.  Thus your concept for a story was one or more persons gathered to do something, perhaps only to engage in hanging out or some other pursuit of pleasant result, taken to a natural point where they had nothing more to say or,thematically, to do.

About you were collected short stories by Jack London and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway.  Through a fortunate accident, you also had the short stories of the Irish writer, Frank O'Connor.  Through an unfortunate sort of accident, most of the writers you knew were screenwriters, who gave you scripts to read and who spoke to you of construction in ways that convinced you how lacking your education.  This drove you to used book stores and anthologies of stories that were constructed in ways that were mysterious to you.  Because the writers you knew seemed always to have enough money not to have to nurse drinks at places where music was played, even enough money to bring with then dangerous-looking women who ate minute steaks, drank red wine, and tapped their heels nervously.  One such writer was Steve Fisher, whose editor you would some day be.  But not yet.  From Fisher you gained a lifelong love of the pulp mystery story, which had a construction you could understand if not duplicate, at least nohting ways the editors of pulp magazines would appreciate.  

You were too young yet to even dream that some day, as regional president of Mystery Writers of America, you would reach a point where you had enough money to bring dangerous-looking women who ate minute steaks, drank not only red wine but red French wine, and tapped their heels nervously, nor was there the slightest hint that Ray Bradbury would call you a son of a bitch or that Irwin Zucker would teach you how to say "No more steaks" to the French waitresses at The Cafe de Paris on Sunset and Highland or at the Belgian restaurant, Frascatti, on Sunset at Crescent Heights.

All that had to come through hundreds of permutations on your basic short story recipe to the point where you were able to throw recipe away and be content to watch men and women engage situations that were more organic, more reflective of them being caught up in individual scenario and more or less looking for ways in or out of events, institutions, consequences.

While you were learning such things, you were still not making enough money that anyone would want to sue you, a fact that became an issue when the noted trial lawyer, Melvin Belli, in the heat of an editorial squabble, told you, "If you had any money, I'd sue you," to which you reflexively replied, "If I had any, I'd let you."  Although you amicably resolved your differences over a round of drinks and the book you were trying to get out of him was finished and published, the damage was done and you knew that you needed to learn more and move on.

In many ways, Fitzgerald still remains a great favorite of yours among short story writers.  So does Alice Munro because she takes the rules of construction into her own fine, Canadian hands and says, often with a little push, "This is where you get out," as though you had mistaken her frankness and honesty for an invitation to greater intimacy, a much more effective way of stopping a story than having your principal character order two orchestra seats to Lost in the Stars.

Lorrie Moore.  Tim O'Brien.  Junot Diaz.  Edna O'Brien.  John Cheever.  Louise Erdrich.  Men and women as pestered as you are, writers who have lost their own vehicles in the metaphorical large parking lot in the shopping mall--all of whom have kept the light on for you.