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 Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Words

Words sneak into your awareness and hunker down like squatters in abandoned houses. They are as devious as visiting relatives, persistent as commission sales reps in big box stores, urging you to try things you have no intention of ever owning, assuring you how useful they are, hinting that if you order now, you'll also get steak knives thrown in for free.

Words flutter about like a mob of hungry pigeons, alert for targets of opportunity. They pout, strut, dart, the brave among them taking risks that amuse and annoy us. Some words, well known for their interior music, are as buskers or street-corner performers, suggesting the activity inherent in their name. You have only to see a word such as buzz or its cousin, buzzing before a picture of a bee or a band saw or some form of attention-getting mechanism arrives. When buzz is used as an adjective, as in buzz words, even then it is fecund with exoskeleton thanks to its meaning of special vocabulary for a particularized discipline. As a verb, buzz works well, signifying some device set in action to signal an arrival or a call for attention. I'll buzz you in. The buzzer clamored for his attention.

When you see or hear the word susurrous, you are transported with immediacy to the whisper of a stream over a bed of rocks or the secretive conversation among a throng of doves; not to mention the fun of conflating the word with the imaginative name for a Japanese-made auto. The word used to describe this sound of meaning quality, onomatopoeia, conveys an Oriental sense of mystery, revealed only by the chanting of a mantra to unlock the linguistic door.

However sensual the sound of susurrous, another word from the S family, squeamish, embeds the sensors that trigger a feeling verging upon another S-word yet, stomach, in a turmoil of discomfort.

Tuna, by itself, is not particularly humorous, nor is sandwich, but the mere thought of conjoining the two to produce tuna sandwich sends a grin of near mystical mischief to appear, a love note from your secret place of meaning. Try repeating the phrase tuna sandwich a few times without cracking a smile.

Words can do that to you, transport you, change your mood, inspire you, even frighten you. Edgar Allen Poe spent some considerable time deliberating over word choice, intent on conveying a mounting atmosphere of terror, aware of the effectiveness each word bore as he erected the pyramids and sphinxes of the bizarre and enigmatic. He may not have succeeded in frightening you as, say, his later-day acolyte, Steven King, has done, but Poe has left you a legacy, the receipt of which is to make you suspicious, wary, uneasy.

Spectacular is a word you use from time to time as a way to describe certain friends, male or female; it has become a useful term because of the way the merest phrasing of the word in your mind suggests the bodacious, good-cheer presence of the individual.

Your earlier mention of the word mantra, the mystical pattern of words used in mysticism-based meditation. Mantras often contain the word from Hindu prayer, Om, or Aum, which itself is an exhortation and invocation; they also contain Sanskrit designer words called Bija words, usually a conflation of the qualities of a particular god or goddess. These Bija words are quintessential buzzwords, intended as meditational tools to help the spiritual aspirant observe then experience the very qualities inherent in the words.

There are also cooking- and food-related words such as succulent or esculent, or perhaps even savory, their very mention likely to provoke images of curries and gumbos, of posole and menudo, causing you to slather as you consider.

Words have the power to turn you inside out, to arouse, mollify, enrage, enchant, engage you. The musician is guardian of her instrument, the chef protector of his knives, the hunter of his weaponry. The writer's tool is the kit of words, the possessive vocabulary he or she might own, with newer, more modern tools as much on the wish list as the iPhone on the modern person's wish list

If wishes were horses, would beggars get rejection slips?

 For many of those who write with the notion of telling a story or discovering the essential story in the hurly burly of real life, the operant mantra is composed of those two provocative words, What if.

The writer who is as concerned with self-discovery as the telling of a tale is well aware of the glorious possibilities ready to escape, genies from their bottles, when the What if proposition is posed, but is as well aware of the yet more primal formula of I want.

Either of the two existential pronouncements carries with it a weight similar to the quantum physicist's quest for the formula that defines the creation of the universe, and while you wish each player good fortune in this game where quest is the feature race, you have the admittedly cynical belief that answers are never as satisfying as the asking of the questions that provoke them.

What if produces a nice springboard for invention, development, and some sort of resolution.  We have only to look at some of the J.S. Bach two- and three-part inventions to see how successful and enduring so many inventions are, removing us as they do from the random collisions of event and intent about us, offering the fictional possibility of a tidy or near tidy result.  In a real sense, a tidy result is a final paper from a student, marked with queries and encouraging developmental notes by you and returned to the student without having been thrown up on or urinated upon by a cat, a dog, or both, to say nothing of having the work returned without a trace of coffee spill or the embarrassing hallmark of peanut butter.  A tidy manuscript goes directly from the printer into an envelope or box, transported by hands of relative cleanliness, absent of ink, peanut butter, coffee, and not to forget catsup, thence to its destination of literary agent or editor of choice.

I want is a speculation of a prescient perfection, it is desire for a Porsche, the attainment of said Porsche, and not only the ability to pay for the servicing of said Porsche but beyond that the ability not to experience back pains from getting in and out of said Porsche.  It is a desire for a particular person plus the unspoken desire that said person will not be a pain in the ass, being instead appreciative of having been wanted  in the first place.  It is the desire to be published at a particular venue without the need for a full-on conflict with the copyeditor of said venue, replete with such queries as Who he? every time you mention Mahatma Ghandi.

Each--What if, and I want--is in its own way a condition made more wonderful by its seeming impossibility to achieve, because failure to deliver to one's satisfaction and getting what one wants actually keep one writing because of the delicious possibility of the twofer, the realization of the two simultaneously, as in, What if I get what I want?

Hanging in the Balance

A mantra is a series of words or syllables which combine the names or aspects of the godhead and are intended as an adjunct to meditation. The word has its roots in Sanskrit, which is itself intended as a language by which to convey the meaning and intensity of mystical scripts, formulas, chants, and poems. To make matters even more intriguing, the words used in Sanskrit-based mantras are encapsulations of the personalities of gods and goddesses are additionally special, meaning that even a person who has some Sanskrit is not likely to use these so-called bija or jewel words except when chanting or meditating on mantras that contain them.

This is probably more than you wanted to know about mantras and Sanskrit and bija words, just as Melville probably, now that you think about it, told you more about whales than you want to know. But the fact is that there are mantras for the writing and telling of story; they are not in Sanskrit nor do they have bija words in them. One of the more powerful mantras for story telling is: Never take the reader where the reader wants to go. Meditating on this mantra has caused many aspiring writers to understand how important it is not to tell the reader too much about whales until the reader is sufficiently invested in the story that he has to suffer the stuff on whales to find out what happens to the characters. When the reader is sufficiently caught up in the story, the writer can successfully thrown in a chapter or two about whales and although the reader may ultimately complain, the reader will, as some recent characters in American political activities have put it, stay the course.

Another mantra of significant value to the writer is the single word withhold, a word and concept not to be taken lightly. The reader reads to be made interested in characters who take on a bigger-than-life resonance, continuing to read to see what happens to the characters. At more or less the moment the reader finds out, the story is over. In answer then to the question, when does a story end, the answer becomes When the reader finds out what happens. In exaggerated theory, the ideal place for the discovery or revelation or even the backstory-as-explanation is the penultimate chapter of a novel because, cumbersome as such an arrangement might be, the reader would put up with it to find out what happens. Come to think of it, the reader would even put up with all that stuff about whales to find out what happened to Ishmael.

The product created by withholding is suspense.

Suspense is the glue that holds stories together.

Mantras may lead to insight, even mystical union. Suspense leads to dramatic discovery.

A Likely Story

Whenever we see or hear these words, A likely story, set forth as a response to a narrative, we are coming face to face with audience reaction writ large.

Stories, tales, narratives, and yes, even accounts are all very much like notes in a bottle, set lose in some river or ocean by someone hopeful of a response from someone else. By its very nature, a story is a crafted plea for a response, the worst of which is complete indifference.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a protean and often pompous literary force, set in motion a concept quite relevant to the designation, A likely story. Coleridge introduced for out consideration the willingful suspension of disbelief, which is to say a deliberate setting aside by the reader of a narrative that its characters, their motivations, and the resolution of these motivations are anything less than plausible. Willingful suspension of disbelief is often challenged in the courtroom of the reader's sensitivity. I don't believe that character would do or say such a thing, comes the indictment. To which the author replies, But it really happened that way. To which the critic replies, Doesn't matter; it wasn't rendered in a way that convinced me.

The great divide, wider than the Continental Divide--what the writer of the tale observes, either from reality or imagination or a combination of the two, and what the reader believes.

Just check some of the Internet sites relative to Urban Myth for a sampling of things readers believe, things often stranger and with more tenuous logic than events found in reality. My favorite example of urban myth comes from the so-called choking Doberman story, invented by my pal, Digby Wolfe, as an exercise in producing intriguing dramatic beginnings for some of his writing classes. In brief apercu, the choking Doberman story involves a woman rushing her dog to a vet because the dog has difficulty breathing, being told the dog must be left for an intensive examination, and ending with a police cordon and a swat team apprehending an escaped killer. What began as a classroom exercise worked its way onto urban myth sites, having been reported and regarded as real.

It comes down to this: plausibility. How plausible is it that the protagonist in Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "The Minister's Black Veil," actually wore a facial covering? Only as plausible and believable as Hawthorne made it. We believe what we are led to believe, at which point the belief becomes what we want to believe. For me, it is second nature to bring politics into this equation, both as an explanation for what other people--notice the introduction of elitism there with the concept of other people, persons other than me, to which I could also add My Kind. Me and my kind--believe or can be induced to believe. The elitism continues to include my kind of truth and other people's, a not so subtle variation on the equation that the only real truths are those such as chemical and mathematical formulae. Sorry, Jane Austen, but a truth universally acknowledged doesn't cut it; truths universally acknowledged often end up on urban myth websites.

Listening to a narrative--any narrative--then deeming it a likely story is a frontal attack on the narrative's intent of veracity. It is the equivalent of asking, Are you serious? Are you kidding? You expect me to believe that?

Saying or thinking A likely story! is taking a step toward cynical sanity, a form of questioning that may cause me a great sense of isolation and loneliness, not merely from people of my kind but from all people, but in the end it causes me to look at my own unreliability as a narrator, to avoid the pitfall of making a holy grail of the abstract concept of truth, and recognizing the kinship of brother and sister pursuers of comfort with the written and spoken word.

It can be instructive at times, when exposed to the blustery rhetoric of the Republicans in the hot tub at the Y, or the impassioned rhetoric of such teachers as me on a roll of enthusiasm, or after reading some work that strives for importance to say, internally, or externally, A likely story, then try it one more time, punctuated with an exclamation point. A likely story! Just thinking about it imparts a mischievous sense of freedom.

Some religious philosophies introduce the concept of a mantra, a series of mystically charged words to be repeated and contemplated until the individual begins to take on the very qualities embodied in the formula. Hindu mantras involve bija words, words crafted from Sanskrit that have no other purpose than to convey aspects of the ineffable. Our own secular mantra could very well be, A likely story, a lovely combination that will keep us on the writers' path of working at our craft and not taking anything, particularly ourselves, too seriously. It will also work wonders to keeping us out of the urban myth casualty lists.


My review of Matsuo Kirino's (1951-) new novel Grotesque, has just appeared and I link to it herewith.