Letters to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer, XXII

A hint of intrigue or mischief.

An outrageous proposal.

Logic, spread thinner than the peanut butter in a cafeteria sandwich.

An ironic comparison between two unlikely bedfellows.

A provocative question.

An introduction to an impending disaster or, to use a currently popular illustration, a train wreck.

All these elements and others like them appear with some regularity at the beginning of stories and essays.

They are components of opening velocity, the energy required to nudge stories, essays, reports, and memoir into sufficient activity and structure to keep them not only moving but interesting.  If there is neither intrigue nor challenge at the beginning, why should we expect it to suddenly spring into life somewhere in the interior?  Your work, without opening velocity, is in its own way a Heart of Darkness.

Opening paragraphs are portals into your inner world, the world that informs who you are, what you write about, and how you write it.  Think carefully about the more virtual portals you have entered in recent days or weeks--years, if you wish, recalling how those portals conveyed some positive or negative feelings to you that influenced your experience inside their boundaries.

Think about how you felt, then ask yourself if you are content with your inner world as it is.  Does the arrangement of the furniture suit you?  Are the pictures hung to your wish.the plants watered?  Is there  enough light?  Perhaps there is a tad too much dust?  Why should we enter your landscape in the first place, then there are so many scarier, pleasant, interesting, challenging others so contrived as to lure us in and serve up refreshments on the family china, brought to mouth with the family silverware.

Opening fucking velocity, your key to story that takes us somewhere.

Trick of the Eye

Even though you stress the word "relevant" in your fondness for details in a story, and in the bargain regard some of the early pulp novels as being worthy of elevation to the literature status, you recognize in yourself a certain long-windedness that persists even when, in the direct context of conversation, you can see the eyes of your companions glazing over. What you seek to do in such circumstances is what you also seek to do when you write, which is, literally, to unglaze them with narrative voice.

It may come as a surprise then when you admit to a fondness for the brief, terse, poetic-in-its concision, miniature. No, you do not mean the short-short, the flash fiction, even some of those arbitrary word length stories with the clock set at, say, fifty-five words or perhaps one hundred. Those are of little interest to you, the literary equivalent of mosquitoes or persistent flies. You mean a paragraph or perhaps two or three, such as in the frequent editorial page columns of Verlyn Klinkenborg. You mean writers who are able within a few paragraphs to make you feel as though you've known the characters all your life, writers who cause you to feel your shirt sticking to your body regardless of the temperature outside for they have created an inner temperature that causes you to reel in the humidity.

Your first thought for today's entry in the on-going saga of your blog was what you considered a clever-but-doable one: You would within one paragraph express your feelings about concise, miniature portraits wherein the elements jumped forth like the fresh fruits or recently bagged fowl or even the pot of flowers so prized by the still-life painter. You even thought to title the essay Trompe l'oeil, trick of the eye for such paintings are remarkable visuals of the synecdoche, the entire represented by a few or perhaps only one of its parts, as in the long arm of the law.

You also confess to a certain fondness for the sudden need to cut a previously commissioned work by as much as twenty-five percent. When you were reviewing books for Swindell at the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, you were given fairly generous word lengths which, on a few occasions, needed to be made less generous, which gave you the idea of experimenting with future work. You would write as long as possible then cut to some seemingly impossible word length. When you did it, you almost always learned how effective such an exercise was in getting you to focus on the most important point you wished to make as soon as possible. No wonder that your grades at UCLA began to rise meteorically right after you signed on to work the Associated Press night office; you simply wrote your examination blue books as though they were AP stories, meaning you had to stop to consider a lead before you began writing.

Life is different now in the specific sense that you have the leisure to write a first draft, perhaps even a second draft, in some cases even a third before you begin thinking about the movement of furniture, the arranging of paragraphs into optimal dramatic order. Life is also different in that this approach has meant that things will take longer, which in its turn means you will perforce be spending more time on a specific project. Yes, this, too, has a caboose to be tacked onto it; this state of events means you are spending more time each day writing something, whether it is an email to a friend agreeing where and when to meet for coffee or a cover letter for a book proposal or the opening statement of a book proposal.

Now remember, you were, as you let the bee-swarm of sleep wear away this morning, going to get all this down in one paragraph:

When you were younger, late teens to mid-twenties, even while your prolificness impressed you, you realized it was not enough because there were so many things going on about you and it was necessary to get at them all, somewhat like Nabokov,ranging about with a net for scooping up lepidoptra for further study. Now you have come to recognize that although you are interested in things you aren't even aware of being interested in, you need to consider priorities because things take time to evolve. Even a story, which you are pleased to have dropped a Nabokovian net over in order to bring it home for study, requires time to fledge, its own form and finish coming from a deliberate consideration of its special parts. Even though it is your idea and your vision, your proprietary rights begin and end with your observation and your feelings about what you see.

Hey, kid, get away from that paragraph! The shouting elders.

Back in the days when you had shed your cocoon and had begun to become aware of the increasing number of outer things to study, things such as grass and flowers and trees, which could yield such succulent surprises as sour grass to chew, snapdragons to play with, and the Ceratonia siliqua tree which produced the remarkable snack of St. John's bread, you were increasingly aware of elders whose mission in life seemed to be intoning "Hey, kid, get away from that_____" filling the blank with an appropriate noun.

This awareness of shouting elders came at a time close enough to your learning how to read that you cannot say for certain which came first, the warning or the reading. No matter, it is a certainty that until this very day, March 9, 2010, you had not conflated the two, the shouting of warning or the learning to read.

Many paragraphs in your life--entirely too many--had that built-in tone of voice that conveyed "Hey, kid, get away." In a sense, you are now traveling back to your youth, a whimsical sort of Captain Nemo, going under the surface of reality to such exposures to those two wimpy kids, Dick and Jane and their wimp dog Spot, as in "Look. Look. Look. See Dick run. See Jane run. See Spot run." In comparison to some of the paragraphs awaiting you through grammar school and what you had come to consider a death camp, junior high school, Dick and Jane and Spot were an idyll. After all, they did get you through the vocabulary and verb tenses. And yes; it is true; the "Hey, kid, get away!" voices that inhered in all those dreadful paragraphs of all those dreadful text books did move you inexorably toward the notion of constructing your own goddamned paragraphs to do with as you damned well pleased, which more often than not was to construct a story in which something of consequence would happen to someone of some consequence to you.

Equally true, there have been equivalents of elders and contemporaries telling you the equivalent of "Hey, kid, get away." to your paragraphs and stories, but these have imbued you with a stubborn determination to mostly plod forth, hopeful of shedding that youthful outer coating of rebelliousness merely for its own sake, the teen- and twenties-years surliness, and those tendencies linking admiration for other writers to a path that was more derivative than you might have wished.

Your paragraphs have a goal in life, a mission they hope to realize. Each of them that goes forth is much of a piece with an actor, who has been waiting in the wings for a cue to enter, delivering not only a series of lines and a logical vector but an attitude, a voice, a presence. Your paragraphs are, without having articulated it as such before, wanting to steal the entire freaking scene with their presence. This has nothing whatsoever to do with delivering the punch line of a joke or a "J'accuse!" indictment but rather the entire package of meaning, feeling and presence that contributes along with the other paragraphs to delivering a story that in its turn fills the reader with its presence. Your theoretical, metaphorical paragraph is synecdoche personified, the long arm of the law, the American Olympics team, the part standing forth as representative of the whole.

Go, paragraphs!

Language

There are any number of rules, edicts, and perorations relative to what is acceptable in written prose, but when you either write something egregious or read it in the work of another, you suspect there need to be even more cautions than there are.

Some of your recent favorites emerged a few weeks back at a Friday morning coffee soiree, beginning with the observation that paragraphs should neither be begun with "And" or "But." You took immediate issue to these and as well another ventured edict against one- and two-word paragraphs, causing a stirring within you that you were more fond of the paragraph than you had realized. Or perhaps it was that you felt a proprietary interest to them that began, as you eventually reckoned, back to the days when you were a student at Central Beach Elementary School, Miami Beach, Florida, where you were introduced to the concept that every paragraph had a topic sentence. You'd come to accept the notion that painful experiences were filtered from memory much in the same way one of your early favorites from comic books, The Shadow, had the ability to fog men's minds (and render himself invisible).

Not so.

You recall countless exercises in which you and your classmates were presented with paragraphs from which you were bidden to seek out the topic sentence, then defend your choice, whereupon you were presented with yet another dictum: one idea per paragraph. You, where no stranger to mere perversity by this stage of your life, argued that there was no reason why a paragraph could not have more than one idea, a view that understandably drove the teacher beyond the limits of patience when she observed with tart hauteur, "Perhaps they do in California, but rules there don't seem to count for much."

You were not about to take that rebuke in good grace. "Perhaps if Florida had been on the winning side in the Civil War--" you began, only to be interrupted with "You mean The War of Northern Aggression, don't you?" It was and remains a conflict in which a sixth grader has little hope for immediate redress and must instead nurse wounds and humiliations and boredom for that magical time when the language seems to bloom like stands of wildflowers along the outer reaches of the state highway, then assumes the even greater tenacity of volunteer flowers, springing up unexpectedly where asphalt and concrete would seem to preclude them. Language that is yours come over you like a wave of puberty, causing you unutterable and sometimes embarrassing excitement and abandon, which you simultaneously try to express and repress. Language brings such invasions to your entire being that the feelings of lust mixed with adoration and previously inexperienced admiration for the likes of Lita and Gloria and then Pauline could be shrugged off as youthful folly; language was not only your new steady, language returned your lust by revealing more secrets to you, reminding you that rules and topic sentences and sentences ending with prepositions were as child's play. You were now an adult and language was not only a remarkable tool, it was a responsibility.

Today, egregious means to you too many adverbs, too many adjectives, long defensive streams of attribution that suggest you or anyone else using this remarkable language as a tool are arguing and not terribly sure of your ground in the first place. When you read a writer such as Muriel Spark or Joan Didion or George Orwell or Michael Chabon, you no longer experience the hum of envy sparking to life in your belly as you did when friends and schoolmates got bicycles or toys that seemed so magical, you sense a membership in a guild or trade union where these journeymen and women have achieved the knowledge of our condition, the human condition, and are now showing us ways to use our condition for the optimal results.

He who pays the piper has a musician brother-in-law

What exactly is outline?  

You first became aware of the word in grade school, when a teacher announced that you were going to be spending considerable time, learning how to do it, because it would be required of you from here in, a serious mistake made by numerous teachers in your life and perpetuated to some extent by you, at least in the sense of you telling students they would be needing and using various things well into their lifespan.  Your only way out of that quagmire of guilt is the fact that you never told students they would be required to use outlines.  Let them find out for themselves, soon enough.

Outlines are based on the construct that paragraphs have topic sentences.  There was a time when you attended Central Beach Elementary School in Miami Beach, Florida, where you were positive you couldn't, as requested, find a topic sentence.  You took to guessing when called upon, invariably picking the second sentence in a paragraph, and not getting into too much trouble with authority for proceeding in that approach, realizing sometime later in life that one of the reasons text books were so awful was due to the fact of their having a topic sentence in the first place and that, indeed, most of them were second sentences in paragraphs.

Early into your working years, no employer ever mentioned topic sentences to you much less asked you to find loose or missing ones as though they were some sort of rambunctious dog who'd dug out of his yard.  Soon you were in journalism, where the topic sentence was replaced with the lede, that repository of the four w's and an h, although that became a bit too restrictive (or you lacked essential imagination) and you went into television via the carnival life.  There was no need for a topic sentence in either landscape, and thus you moved along into such pursuits as writing short stories, writing novels, writing screenplays and, for some considerable time, essays about the American West for a man named Charlie who published those wonderfully pulpy magazines whose pages contained acid and were thus guaranteed not to last for centuries as acid-free paper is guaranteed.  From what you remember, your paragraphs then had no topic sentences.  Discovering some of these articles and essays in recent years, you read with the relief of a man who was true to the code of paragraphs sans topic sentences.

On the other hand, they have drama, your paragraphs.  A paragraph without drama will soon reveal itself to you as a wimp paragraph, unwilling to carry story, subtext, or any sort of dramatic load.  Even when you'd become a published novelist and then an editor who had contract-signing authority, you were removed from grammatical niceties, even though there was an earlier time when you knew your way around parts of speech and diagramming sentences to the point where you actually contrived to be sent to the blackboard to diagram sentences.  Lurking in the back of your mind was the notion that being known for diagramming sentences would get you a girlfriend.  It did not, nevertheless you persisted in diagramming sentences (and for that matter, trying to get a girlfriend).  Surely if you knew about objective and nominative and objective cases, girls would see you as a wise choice.  There is a distance between wise choice and smart ass, which is what you were largely seen as, and by the time you had a girlfriend, she was interested in dancing, particularly the fox trot, bossa nova, and Lindyhop, interested in doing as opposed to your interest in listening to the music by which these steps were to be danced.

Always out of step.

Now, you are able to relate paragraphs and topic sentences and objective cases to stories and essays in the sense that you believe any paragraph, any story, any novel without drama is what you were when you were nineteen, with a fake ID--trying to pass.  You were trying to pass for legal age.  The paragraphs without drama are outline.  So in the long run, this is about writing and how, although you have an idea what a predicate nominative is or a relative pronoun referring to an indefinite antecedent, you'd probably have to guess at a set of examples.  You could, on the other hand, find the drama just as, after some hours of work on a scene set around a poker game in your current novel underway, you knew that although it contained the elements you wanted it to contain, it was still an outline because there was no drama in it.  How did it become dramatic instead of an outline of plot points to be included?  Simplicity, itself: you had the most objectionable character in the whole novel show up for the poker game as though he'd been invited. And indeed he had, we discover a bit later--he'd been invited by a character who wanted very much to provoke the host.  You did not need a topic sentence for that.