Letters, iv

I'm writing this letter to you from the advantage point of having had more time to pursue the craft than you.  If this sounds as though more time on the job gives me some moral high ground, it intends no such thing.  On the contrary, it gives me a chance to warn you about advice from geezers in addition to talking about the subject I'd wanted to address in the first place, good guys in your stories and their adversaries.

It should be apparent to you if you've read my earlier letters--always the danger you haven't, because I do tend to go on--that the warning is more to me than to you, in the sense that I am likely to make assumptions based on my time on the job which, although indeed extensive, can be illogical, particularly when compared to the potential of you coming onto the job with more chops already than me.  This is not so much a matter of humility on my part as the awesome awareness of lost time, of my having frittered time and pool balls away in darkened parlors, of more than a casual interest in women as distractions as well as their considerable other presence, and of allowing times of indecision to have had too strong an influence on my writing practice sessions.  However wrong you may be, you always do better when writing decisively.  Indecision only creates one kind of learning situation, the could have or should have tropes.  Wrong is at least straightforward, honest, lacking in the props of adverb.

So far as the good guys and their opponents are concerned, let me put it to you this way:  Give the good lines to your antagonists.  Let the protagonists fend for themselves.  Part of being a young writer us the understandable desire to show off your talents, your energy, your bravado, your ability to make sentences and entire paragraphs sail about with the dazzle and grace of a ballerina/  I was going to use the analogy of a gun fighter in a Western film, but as I explained a bit earlier, I do become distracted by the images and actual presence of women.

Let showing off have its time on stage via the narrative in which your people observe things about life, about one another, about themselves. Protagonists who speak as though Cyrano de Bergerac were on hire as a dialogue writer tend to come off the page as pomposity writ large, as humbugs, as set-up for a takedown which, in point of argument, is the fulcrum on which humor rests until the pomposity takes that one, irresistible step forward, from what may be pathos into what is definitely bathos.  Do what Beethoven did, which was in fact writing and playing to the point where they had to build a different kind of keyboard instrument in order to keep up with him.  He literally and figuratively forced what we now think of as the piano into existence.  How many writers do you know who have pushed the craft so relentlessly where writing is concerned?

The adversaries and antagonists are the people your guys have to engage and live to tell the tale, so it cannot be just any tale.  Melville had to let Ishmael live merely to tell us what happened.  We think about him because he did manage to get through it all, but it is only later, after we have considered all the implications that we even remember, oh, yeah, that Ishmael guy who wanted us to call him, he survived.  We remember him for all those wonderful reasons of his own, down-at-the-ego personality, but imagine him trying to cadge drinks at a bar with such a fanciful story.  Then we'd see him as something entirely else, someone like Montressor, the narrator of Poe's "A Cask of Amontillado," who has been dining out on telling this story of revenge, probably the one real moment in his life.  Melville saves the good lines for the dead guys, and for Father Marple.  We don't remember Ishmael as we remember those two hulking mammals, Ahab and the Great White Whale; Melville gave them the good lines.

Remember, it is not about you, it is about your characters.  Remember that and you will be remembered.  At least, your work will.  I'll bet you never thought when you were screwing around in high school, frittering, your thoughts jumping between moments of clearing the table in a game of rotation or edging over to the body parts of girls you're programmed to notice, that you'd be given some distraction such as that short story by Hawthorne called "The Minister's Black Veil," thinking as you finished it, some day I'll be a writer and I'll do better than this.  I suppose it makes me a nut case to admit that I did in fact read that story, at the time wanting more than anything to impress the hell out of a girl named Pauline.  Mind you, there were some good reasons to want to impress her, but that took me about fifteen years and by then the balances of power and chemistry had shifted.  Now, however, I am thinking what fun it might be to take that same story and bring it up to the present, featuring one of the guys who comes to Peet's Coffee Shop on State Street, a minister in some evangelical local church who frequently meets his parishioners there to discuss such subjects as goals, service, and, yesterday, getting right with God.

Letter to a Young or Middle-Aged Writer vol. 2

Dear Young Writer,
Some day in the finite future, you will be writing one or more letters to one or more young writers, carrying forth a grand tradition.  This does not have as much to do with the proliferation of writers of all ages as you might think, nor will this state of events preclude you from writing letters to middle aged writers or, indeed, writers in Seniors centers.

The fact is, you will be on the cusp of learning an important truth known to all arrived writers, which is to say writers who have found a voice if not actual publication:  Every letter you write is a letter to yourself, which makes the action of letter writing less than the unselfish gesture you hoped and supposed and more a need on your part to figure out some vital aspect of craft that has been keeping you awake nights.  The inherent wisdom here is that everything you write is a letter to yourself, a fact that should, if you have any understanding of the situation, prevent you from lecturing others how to do things your way; the best you can do is demonstrate how you do a thing.  This is not a license to assume you know the only way to do a thing or necessarily the best way, rather the best way for you...so far.  This means you are willing to see yet another way to do the thing in question even though you think you do the thing in question pretty well now.

When I was a bit younger, marching with grim determination away from youth and into middle age, the more thoughtful among those opposed to war came forth with the meme Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.  I always liked that approach to thinking about things; it has led me directly to proposing to you the potential meme Suppose you wrote a letter and nobody read it.  There is a supposition, perhaps because so many of us wish to be writers, that all we have to do is write it and it--whatever it may be--will be read.  Sitting as the editor in a number of publishing houses wherein I was paid variously every week, twice a month, every month, and when there was enough money to pay the help, I had as a part of my job description reading enough of a number of manuscript submissions that I could reasonably describe why I quit reading or why I read the manuscript all the way through, and why I might chose to recommend this manuscript be published.  From these experiences I can say that the ratio of manuscripts I read to the number I read and wished to be a publishing principle thereof was significant in its balance away from fifty-fifty.  It is not all that much an extrapolation to carry that ratio to the present, wherein I speculate that about two or three percent of all that is written is worth reading. Moving forth as is my wont, I speculate that few letters, including emails, are worth reading closely.

I have tried to put my best intention into this letter to you; have tried to consider this letter not a condescension but rather a sincere form of greeting that would not, were you to have sent it to me, be offensive or off-putting. 

Letter to a Young or Middle-Aged Writer

Dear Young or Middle-aged Writer,

My first letter from an older writer that was sent specifically to me--as opposed to the ones I read in books and magazines--came from a man who wrote a now forgotten TV masterpiece, Mr. Peepers. He didn't give me much in the way of advice, where this letter to you differs in large measure.  This letter is going to be as filled with advice as Moby-Dick is filled with whales.

Mr. Peepers was a TV show to be enjoyed then much as I enjoy The Wire and Treme now.  In that way and others, I have grown.  The Mr. Peepers writer said we would likely meet some day and have a sandwich somewhere.  He was given to statements like that, I learned.  We in fact had quite a number of sandwiches together, mostly at the home of a crazed and dangerous producer, but that is another story, isn't it?  The story here is that I was looking almost without thinking about it for mentors and teachers who actually knew something about writing as opposed to having taken upper division and graduate-level education courses and/or knowing the correct terms for such things as predicate nominative, or pluperfect subjunctive.  This drove me by default and inclination to known places where writers hung out, places that were mostly cocktail lounges with exotic and portentous names such as The Garden of Allah, The Fog Cutter, and Mr. Smith's Back Fence.  In all of these places, I learned it was best not to switch drinks during the course of a carouse, a painful lesson, really, because, as you will come to discover, writers--even those who no longer drink--have favorite things to drink.

Writers of my approximate generation were fond of sharing information with younger writers, and I was certainly younger in the sense of gaining service in some of the above named places and the likes of Barney's Beanery and Mae Burke's Lounge next door to the Fox Wilshire theater on the strength of a forged identity card which, to demonstrate the imaginative reaches available to young writers, was an application for a small aircraft pilot's license.  You see the wisdom creeping in already; get a plausible fake ID.  I rode the coattails of being younger for some years, something at the time I thought had to do with talent but which really had to do with older, shall we say more seasoned writers no longer wishing to serve in elected capacities in various organizations, transforming me to secretary and later vice-presidential, and regional presidential roles in the likes of The Mystery Writers of America.

I am no longer a young writer, a fact that does not appear to upset anyone.  Nor am I an old writer, which is a status that seems to be accorded to writers who grumble a good bit about not being able to find publishers for their last two or three books.  Although they are my seniors, neither Laird Koenig nor Barnaby Conrad is considered an old writer because they not only produce, they are published, nor do they grumble about the things old writers tend to grumble about.  I am, then, an arrived writer, neither young nor old, rather producing, and finding new ideas landing with some regularity on my shoulders much as Conrad's late African Grey parrot, Madison, would land on his shoulder for a prolonged visit.  My arrival has nothing to do with the kinds of recognition you are undoubtedly thinking about or at least hoping to achieve in the sense of it allowing you to make your living in this dangerous and mysterious way rather than taking on something which, to your complete bafflement, you have a huge talent for that many of your peers recognize.  By "arrived" I mean a delicious stage of having burned required numbers of bridges, relationships, and unhealthy expectations, a kind of comfortable cynicism, you might say, an awareness of the absolute indifference much of the world has to authors beyond such polite questions as "What the fuck have you published?" and perhaps even "What's your field?"

A number of affluent fathers have asked me to recommend suitable places for their sons and daughters to attend university, thinking these young worthies will be, as the fathers put it, "be brought up to the speed of a good income in minimal time."  My answers rarely satisfy them and any number of them have told me that they can see why I am considered funny.  "You have to know,"  I tell them, what funny truly is as opposed to what jokes are.  The concept of you telling a joke is one thing,"  you tell them in all seriousness.  "The concept of The Cosmos as a narrator is quite another."

I will be pleased to answer your questions as best I can.