Train Wreck, Dramatic Style

Here it is, getting well on into the eleventh year of the twenty-first century, a number of disasters still raw on the face of the earth.  You think of New Orleans, still hurting and needful; Haiti, crying out in unheard agony; Pakistan immersed, soggy, miserable; the seeping wound in the Gulf of Mexico only just staunched but on this very day a new explosion of a rig.  No wonder an expression much in use is train wreck.  With ample pictures of train wrecks at our disposal we extend the metaphor to include any performance that did not go as planned, resulting in some disaster of language, performance, even intentions.  A train wreck has become short hand for Robert Burns' suggestion that "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men/Gang aft agley/An' leave us nought but grief an' pain/For promised joy..."

You have found unfortunate ways to extend the metaphor, the first of which is in things you read as a reader reading for enjoyment (might need an entire essay on what that has come to mean) or in order to provide editorial support, the other being disasters in your own work, accordion-pleated logic or detail strewn about after having collided with unnecessary description or the heavy hand of authorial intervention.

One of the great causes of literary train wreck is convenience, as in an event coming about in fortunate coincidence so that the star-crossed lovers meet or the grudging rivals meet or someone changes his or her mind in order to allow the story to arrive at some comfortable destination.  Perhaps as well a conversation between two or more characters in which vital information is FedExed to the reader, no signature required.  Hi, John, I've been meaning to talk to you about that business from last week.  You mean the one where we agreed to enter into an unlawful conspiracy against Fred?  No, although that was interesting and we might want to finalize that next week.  I mean the one where we both decided to raise prices we used to charge our clients.  Oh, that one.  Yes, that one.

Another cause is unnecessary description of any noun having the misfortune to appear in the story.  It can be the shape and/or color of the beard on the face of a homeless person the protagonist sees on his way to work every day, or a recitation of the exact number of steps a character requires to get from her desk at work to the photocopying machine in the work room, neither object, the beard or the photocopying machine having role or relevance in the story other than a demonstration of the character's acute awareness of quotidian details, thus demonstrating the sensitivity and regard for order experienced by said character.

Yet another train wreck may be an explanation, offered either by one of the characters to another, which is preferred over the explanation offered by the author, either an eighteenth-century author such as Henry Fielding (of Tom Jones fame) or the twentieth-century author Aldous Huxley, who so enjoyed explanations and descriptions that he became quite good at slipping them in between the more active paragraphs of his longer works and was no slouch at using them in short stories.

The more you think about the potential for train wrecks in the context of writing the more you become convinced that thought is a dangerous enterprise to indulge until you have completed at least an early draft of what you consider the work to be.  Even then you want more to listen to the material than think what you wish it to be.  If you listen carefully, you will learn what it wishes to be rather than the train wreck of what you think it ought to be.  Many promising dramatic ventures are spoiled by sending story and thought along the same track

Letters to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer, XVII: Your Inner Mississippi River

The accomplished writer is reminiscent of the horse "breakers" or trainers, men or women who educate rather than dominate the animal, making future ventures profitable and enjoyable for rider and horse.

Energy is a metaphor representing the necessary resources to contain and control an idea, render it rideable without breaking its spirit.

Once astride the illuminating idea, the writer wants to show appreciation to and for it, allowing it to frisk about for a time in a parade of enjoyment.  This is the first stage of awareness beyond those shimmering moments of discovery and recognition of potential.  This is literally the workhorse energy of the project. Important as this energy is, it is at best a nod of recognition; it cannot and should not be expected to power you all the way through to completion.  That has to come from somewhere else.

The energy to engage and discover is like Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, where the scope and sprawl of that vibrant river is captured in its multifarious whim within a paragraph:  "The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world--four thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. It discharges three times as much water as the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames. No other river has so vast a drainage-basin: it draws its water supply from twenty-eight States and Territories; from Delaware, on the Atlantic seaboard, and from all the country between that and Idaho on the Pacific slope--a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude. The Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water from fifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats, and from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels. The area of its drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile; the Mississippi valley, proper, is exceptionally so..."

The energy to engage and cause discovery finds its source somewhere within the writer's psyche, or should I say process?  Yes, I think I shall.  Process in a confirmed writer is a Mississippi of willfulness, with the power to carve its way through, around, and over obstacles.

Let us say your process--your inner river--is mirth, wherein you take your pleasures causing characters to collide in response to the absurdities and inconsistencies they meet in highly cultured landscapes.  Your joyful energy comes from contriving the wildest absurdities and inconsistencies your imagination can reach, a suggestion that should already have you sniggling at the implication that there is a direct ratio between the newest appearances of absurdity and inconsistency in real life and their having been forecast in the fictions of a number of writers.  Mr. Mark Twain, I believe, foresaw this aspect when he set time strictures on the publication of certain materials he had written, as though saying, Civilization will catch up to my depictions in another fifty or sixty years.

Go forth in fun; find your own interior Mississippi.  Consider using a raft.

On the other hand, let us say you take secret pleasure at the portrayal of worst-case scenarios, stopping short of having your characters say, If anything else can go wrong, it will, not because it makes a good read so much as because that is the way things are on this planet.

Fun is where you find it, or perhaps it is what sprouts after you sow the seeds of it in whatever manner you chose.  If you are an ironist, you will specialize in characters who, because of some expertise, real or imagined, are paid to predict future outcomes.  Of course the predictions are as wrong as could be, but the number of individuals who nevertheless believe them to have been accurate reflect on your own sense of mischief as a writer, encouraging you to heap more irony yet on the smoldering coals.

That's the Spirit

What was it like there, in that place you were writing about with such focus that the sense of time became like a sink running over?  That meant you were pretty well inside the narrative, had the characters placed so that you knew if they had to shout at one another or could rely on a stage whisper.  Of course, if the narrative were not fiction, you had the arguments placed in some semblance of blocking so you could tell if they had to shout at one another or could, yep, rely on a whisper.

You're getting at The Spirit of Place for a particular reason; you wish to take on in your own way from D. H. Lawrence, where he left off in his prefatory material to Classic Studies in American Literature.  You have been touched, teased, and inspired by Lawrence's work since you first read it, years back.  You loved his voice then, you listen to it even more closely now because, in this remarkable work of his, he gives you vital cues about how to listen to him; you get the sense of what sort of fellow he was, and you admire his read on America, gained so quickly from his time here and, of course, from his reading of those who came and went before him and helped define the very sense of place he was writing about.

The Spirit of Place has a special place in this nonfiction project, but in anticipation of it, you need to remind yourself that Spirit of Place is a presence in every scene in every story; it captures not only those basic sensual things as humidity or lack thereof, or height or whether the smell is from sage brush or the iodine of the ocean, it is the character of the place, blazing in on the senses of your characters, making them aware of their comfort or discomfort, their sense of vulnerability or safety, their ease or sense of being socially one or two or three down in relationship to all those standing or sprawling or, perhaps, lurking about.  If John, a character, ventures into a convenience store for a Reese's Peanut butter Cup, he must take in the Spirit of that place, register it however briefly, demonstrating among other things the power of the right word.

Spirit of Place is political, ethnic, ethical, social; it is gang turf or the simultaneous off-putting and achievement oriented strand of Rodeo Drive; it is run-down-at-the-heels tenderloin or newly gentrified downtown, it is L.A.'s Bunker Hill, it is Collins Avenue in Miami Beach.  It is all the ambiance of all the places you enjoy, say the Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles on Pico.  The need for Spirit of Place is basic and is to be sketched into stories as though through the literary equivalent of Japanese calligraphy.  The Spirit of Place for the nonfiction work you're contemplating is more attitudinal, more reflective of the Balkanization process going on amongst the political factions; it must suggest and intimate absolute quirkiness and borderline madness rampant not only in the U.S., but which is part of the human condition everywhere.  You are political, no denying that nor is there any sense denying your own quirkiness and idiosyncratic nature.  Nor, since the entire idea is triggered by a  book written by D. H. Lawrence, who has a few quirks and wrinkles of his own, should you want to ignore these.

Practice into Process

Unless you begin with a specific topic in mind, often merely an energizing word, your approach is to start with a list of random words, writing them down in a list as they come straggling in like kids at play,reluctantly heeding the call to dinner, wondering at first if there is some linking pattern between these words you have not yet divined. Depending on what sort of day this has been, sooner or later one of the words will land with a particularly loud thunk, like a baseball hitting the sweet spot on a bat. The sound of the word falling into place signals all at once the arrival of energy, intent, and purpose.

Now the momentum shifts into a higher gear, thanks to the sound of the inherent voice, at once beguiling and commanding; it is the perfect combination of force. Ideas are easily come by--until you want them, at which point you are in competition with parts of yourself dominated by judgement instead of those parts of yourself led by curiosity and playfulness. Playing with words in this manner is of a piece with a musician running scales, developing dexterity of execution and a sense of humor. You learn from practice what a sense of humor is, which is laughing at the judgmental parts of yourself.

As the scales provide a trampoline for the musician, playing with words provides the energy, intent, and purpose that provide you with paragraphs of meaning and with characters to carry those burdens forward as though they were lading the hold of a transport such as a story or an essay.

Project

When you set forth on a new project, you quickly become aware of the usual playground gang hanging around, their body language betraying their interest in being chosen for your team. "Pick me, pick me" Enthusiasm postures. "I'm good in the late innings." "Hey, what about me?" your Inner Critic says. "You never really get going until you tell me to shut up at least once. I keep you honest." "Forget them," Risk chimes in. "You need me, especially when you start feeling confident."

One of the gang stands off toward the rear, making just enough movement to alert you to his presence, his size relative to the others enough to make you doubt the wisdom of bringing him on the team. He is small. But you've chosen him before and he seems to grow into his task. He is Voice.

Another figure who pesters you to be included is Research; you know from experiences on both sides of the desk that he needs to be watched carefully. He wants you to use everything he has dug up, because after all, what's the point of research if you don't use it?

You're pleased to see Disappointment hanging around, hoping to get a foothold somewhere, because in his way he reminds you that you start with a vision which you hope to bring into Reality, and what you end up with is not going to be as brilliant or as wonderful as that first vision you had of it. But here, coming across the playground you see Different and, as though he were leading a kid brother, but the closer they get, you see it isn't a brother, it is a sister. She is Completion. You want them both on your team. You want this project to be different and you are eager to see what it will look like.

You are doing it all for Discovery, of course, that pulsing moment of awareness that comes upon you when you least suspect it, sometimes yanking you into Confrontation with the Awareness that was lurking there in the shadows all the time. Awareness is a humbling thing; no sooner is it out and running around the inner playground that is your imagination than it pauses for a moment to catch its breath and allow you to catch yours before whispering to you that this thing you now know for such certainty and in such pellucid vision is something well known by any number of others. It is fucking time you did know it, Awareness says, raising its voice just enough so that if you were, say, in a restaurant, persons at other tables would turn to see who was speaking out in that manner.

Your revenge, if you care to use that word, is the knowledge that however late it was in coming, it came from your process of writing rather than any other process you might have; you got it by synchronicity, the happy discovery that emerges when you have put forces of yourself in motion and remained with them through their permutations and resolution. All right, it isn't revenge because you aren't in truth getting even with anyone or anything, even if in fact you set out to do just that. It isn't revenge at all, it is fun. It may have taken work and doubt and those three-in-the-morning existential loneliness that arrives on schedule to keep you honest. But it is fun. Of course you are already spending the money you might possibly make from such activity, in fact spending more than you will probably make, but in addition to being fun, it is the kind of expansiveness that makes you who you are.

Suspicion

The moment suspicion elbows in front of you in the cafeteria line of reality, trust and optimism have suffered setbacks. By its very definition, suspicion evokes pictures of police line-ups, of persons of interest being displayed so that a potential miscreant in their midst might be identified. Suspicion is the fly in the ointment, the fox in the chicken coop, the awareness of and dread response to something gone wrong. It is the herald of the fall, the serpent in the garden, and hell, why not, the snake in the grass.

Things that seem too good to be true generally are in fact too good to be true; along comes suspicion with the notion that things are not as good as they seem, that there is a worse result than the one already planned for. Suspicion is the gut fear that the tab, when presented to you for payment, is going to be more than you bargained for; it is the sickening sensation that there is yet more to come when you believe you have met and gotten into bed with Rock Bottom.

Suspicion is the cynicism we offer up to the cheerful, the naive, those who seem always to have one more cheek to turn, one more smile to offer, one more rabbit to pull out of a hat; it is our protective coating to prevent over-optimistic rhetoric into our thinking and behavior. No wonder it is such a strong presence in the novel of detection, the tale of social consequence, the story of Edenic happiness known as the Utopia. Small wonder utopias are invariably boring and dystopias are so fraught; suspicion looms on the horizon like the rise and set of the sun. Suspicion exists to keep us honest, to convince us that no one, not even protagonists in novels and short stories are perfect; it recognizes our trespasses and the incursions of those who trespass against us. We are alive and suspect even in our better moments. Indeed, some of our better moments come as the direct result of our having suspected ourself of meanness of spirit or lack of motivation. We suspect we could have done more, should have done more, even to the point of seeing retrospective ways in which we could have done so. We could have been better children, better students, better lovers, and when someone praises us for something we have written, our momentary gratefulness is submerged by the suspicion that we could have done better, tapped more into the internal music and vibrant meaning of the work.

We are quick to suspect that some individuals are liars, all the while seeming to ratify our own relationship with the concept of truth, not in the slightest suspicious of our own tidal relationship with such abstractions as absolute accuracy. Parallel lines meet in infinity while truths converge readily within our conscience.

To use the words suspicion or suspect immediately denotes a negativity that haunts the rest of the thought process, the introduction of the worm of doubt into the apple of reality. There are the usual suspects of mystery and cliche fame, the unusual suspects of our imagination and doubt, gaunt, dark-eyed travelers in trench coats who loll about at street corners, waiting with abundant patience for us to pass by, whereupon they follow, just at the outer range of our awareness. We are always suspicious unless we are in those delusional states known as love, happiness, listening to music, or writing. And even then we are fearful, suspicious really, that the love, happiness, music, and writing will not last nor will the coffee that sustains them.

There is nothing worse than being suspected of entertaining some activity we may have contemplated but not yet done--unless it is the worseness of writing about a suspect or some individual's suspicion in an unconvincing way, producing the suspicion that you are not as accomplished a writer as you'd suspected.

Doors. er, Portals

Makes perfect sense. Your process--whatever it may be--is your portal to enter an arena, a landscape, or some skein of associations.

In the arena, you may encounter enemies, predators, or even the adversarial portions of yourself, looking for at the very least a nosh. The ambiance for an arena may be a simple family meal, a classroom, or the simple-but-treacherous Plaza de Toros in Mexico, D.F.; the risks are manifest, waiting for you to find the rhythm by which you engage your adversaries at your best. The landscape may be less threatening although it can have its own potential for mischief and misstep.

The skein of associations is yet another place where you are distracted from the endless flow of quotidian event; it is the equivalent of a nuclear accelerator wherein ideas are sped up and sent into an orbit where they will eventually collide with another idea, combining at high speed to produce electronic and creative mayhem.

You have had some experience with all these portals, having passed through them to the other side, wherein you lose track of Pacific Standard or Daylight time and become adrift in your own time zone. It is so pleasant to be in any or all these places. The real world is no comparison; it is only the launching pad. You cannot be in these other places, away from reality, without being a part of the planet on which you were born, subject to and aware of many of the laws governing the behavior of matter. Thus you do not, as you once thought to do, despise reality. In it, you have met remarkable persons, read many moving things, collided with ideas you had not thought to have ever existed. But if you are to do anything in this world, you need a process to help you find ways to get temporarily out of it for those special moments when your process is your tour vehicle.

Now you look at doors with a kind of wonderment; where does the door really lead? How will you enhance your process so that you can recognize which doors are authentic doors while others are mere scenery and set decoration?

Accordion 1, Ukulele 1, Shelly 0

One of the many reasons musicians practice every day, dancers exercise and dance every day, writers write every day, painters paint every day, etc is to install then instill muscle memory, that repetitive process by which we do the things that mean so much to us to the point where we are able to do them without thinking, the point where, even if we feel somewhat sore and stiff at the outset, once we have begun, we are transported into an encompassing sense of correctness.

Practice may not make us better musicians or dancers or writers or painters; we may in fact reach a point of optimal performance beyond which we will never advance. Muscle memory may or may not improve our ability to rise above the mediocre. Nevertheless. We practice so that the next time we do whatever it is we do, there will not be the pain and uncertainty, perhaps even the thoughts that come when we have spent time away from what it is we do.

At one moment in your younger years that you are just getting around to achieving closure with, you had a chum who lived across the street. Somehow, his instrument of choice was the accordion. He could not come forth to play until he practiced an hour a day, which meant you spent some time sitting outside his window, waiting for the hour to be up so that you could sally forth to play baseball or football or whatever outside activity you had planned. After about a year into your friendship, you, who played no instrument and who could not read music, observed to your friend's mother, "You know, don't you, that he's never going to get any better?" It was an incredibly insensitive and rude thing for you to have said. The mother regarded you for a moment, nodded, then said, "By the time he finds that out," she said, "it will be too late for him to quit." Those were junior high school years, and with the exception of a few things you'd learned from your parents and sister, you had rarely heard such wisdom and understanding; the incident made you consciously aware of wanting to discover more such insights.

Thinking is for after, not during. Practice help you avoid the need to think. This is especially true for you as it relates to writing. Thinking may even be helpful before, but not during. But mostly, as the thinking disappears and you become a part of the process, regardless if the process is a short story, a review, or something much longer, the material begins to speak to you and as you lean in to listen to it, on of the few things you can rely upon becomes emboldened and at the same time confident enough to alight on your shoulder for a time.

Loss

Writing about loss opens the floodgates of nuance and discovery.

You not only discover the extent to which the grief of the particular loss persists, you learn to process it through writing about it, sparing yourself, your friends and readers the equivalent of a trip to Chuck E. Cheese for a pity party.

Loss is as much a part of life as daily meals, the desire for exercise, and the equally pleasurable shower after the exercise. It comes visiting early on, most often in the form of death--a relative to whom you felt particularly close or one to whom your feelings at the time felt confusing. Sometimes the deathly visitor has come to claim a beloved pet, which could in its particular way, evoke your first argumentative dialectic with God. Sometimes the loss is quite literal, the separation of yourself from some treasured object, a loss that makes you consider the possibilities that you'd taken the object for granted or, contrary wise, had relied too heavily on it. Alas, sometimes the loss is of a friendship, either through a change of residence in one or both parties, a transfer to another school, or worse yet, some argument or betrayal.

As the years progress, loss becomes like visiting friends or relatives who just happen to be in the neighborhood, metaphorically looking to you for entertainment. Loss causes you to consider potential defensive options such as asceticism or the painful awareness that you are bush league in the world of ascetics, friend as you are to things, to books, fountain pens, gadgets you might put to profitable use were you to live in the Alaskan tundra but not in Santa Barbara.

With further progressions of loss in your life you learn the process of accommodation, recognizing there are contributions you may make with significant cheer. Self-pity, self-importance, adverbs, some adjectives, pomposity. Our truck will be in your neighborhood.

In some families, the need arises to take in a parent or aunt or uncle, much as at one time they may have had to take you in until you were back on your feet (whatever that might have meant at the time). In your case, the decision was not to take in a relative, although in one wild moment, you stood forth and offered to bring your mother to live with you and she. to her everlasting credit, even nodded and said, yes, she could see the possibility of that actually working. Now, the room you have to offer is for your old pal, Loss. If you do not make such provisions, you will always be looking out the window, sneaking in or out of the house, at pains to avoid rather than acknowledge. If you allow this process to make you cynical, you will have in a real sense begun tossing the time you have left and with it the time with the individuals, processes, and things you so value.

Crash

There are occasions when the human aspect of the writer takes a cue from the computer and/or computer operating systems.  With this cue firmly in mind, the human aspect of the writer does what the computer operating system does--it crashes.  If you had any relationship with the PC, you were aware of the ominous BSOD, the blue screen of death, which pulses with insistent menace before your eyes.  You try such time-tested mechanisms as making sure you are plugged in, which is to say, determine if you have had sufficient coffee.  When that does not appear to be the cause, you try rebooting, which is in this case turning to another scene in a work in progress, even beginning to laugh at the potential for discovering that the entire crash was the result of trying to write a scene that was not needed and wouldn't work for any of your favorite writers.  The laughter is a knowing laughter as a few sentences come forth, but then flutter and stop.

Crash, after all, means crash; the operating system is down, do you hear?  Down.

Desperate measures are needed.  Radio has its occasional Emergency Warning tests, with sounds emerging from the speakers that remind you of deep, determined snoring, followed by the reassuring, This was only a test.  Had there been an emergency, you would have been directed to the Emergency Warning System.  For computer emergency, you go to Tech Support, telephone calls to individuals with engaging Madrasi or Bengali accents that put you in mind of curry.  You will please to be turning off your computer. 

Tech support for the human condition is a combination of music, any music but Bach, which seems so compelling to you that it draws you into it for an examination of it and experience of it that demands your full interest and precludes the precious quality you have come to recognize as associative.  Music and reading.  While it is true these days that you have been on a particular Haydn and Mozart bent, finding each composer a kind of trampoline that sends your spirits soaring, they at the moment seem lackluster and so you turn to jazz, which in addition to its swinging beat captures the essence of a spontaneous pursuit of a harmonic puzzle, aspects that should help.  But don't.

This process has not consumed that much time.  You are still playing with options, one of which can be pulling forth an editorial job awaiting your attention so that you can cope with it and return it to its rightful owner, the better to send an invoice.  But you hesitate because this editing activity is something you want to be as up for in its way as the up is when you are composing.  And the editorial projects are uniformly good, so you cannot rely on your potential for irritation with the writer for missing observations or dribbling aimlessly instead of the metaphorical drive to the basket or the even more metaphorical long shot from the three-point range.

There is the equivalent of the lovely feature on your MacBook, the Force Quit, a deliberate shutting off of a program that doesn't work, allowing you to return to the flow of energy before the crash. You have sitting atop the chair that is as close to an In-box as you will have in a non-salaried position a longish letter seemingly inchoate in its details, digressions, and assertions, a work that seems to expect something of you, some sort of response, which you realize involves two separate acts, the full-out first response, then the revised edition that removes the cholers.  

Thus do you apply Force Quit, which in this case is finding something so laden with feeling, intensity, implication that you write your way back to the process that has done so well by you.

Blog Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc?

The useful purpose of a blog or journal entry is to provide the writer with a record of concern or enthusiasm, some passionate shorthand that leads upon revisit to an actual scene in an actual story or an actual idea in an actual essay or review.  Anything else--recriminations for having gone to the U2 Concert instead of writing or the mere listing of some docket of activities (Had a 9 o'clock class, missed breakfast, checked emails)--is keeping a diary or record, things foreign to you but not, it should be noted, foreign to possible characters.  Nor should it have to be defended that there is absolutely nothing wrong with attending a U2 Concert (and much to be gained), except that having written before hand would have made it an even better experience.  Ditto having a 9 o'clock class.  Missing breakfast usually results in dietary madness come lunch time, but that is a matter between you and Barry Sears and Drs. P and W.

The point here being that the lurking subtext of notes such as this is the energy of concern.  It is too easy to write things for which you have no concern and so you have attempted to find ways to keep you from doing so.  It is too easy to read things for which you have no concern and unfortunately for you are things you are paid to read.  Accordingly, you read such things with an eye for the missing concern, literary equivalents of runaway children.

True enough, one purpose of journal keeping and bloggery is to work yourself up into the necessary concern that forces you to continue writing or reading or, perhaps, to install some subtext you know will yank you back in when you revisit, looking for things that will be useful.

Fair enough, back in the days when your titanium hip did not get in the way of running, you became aware at some point that your body had begun to sweat, a delicious sign that you were "in," approaching not maximum speed nor extraordinary distance but rather congruent with your running process; you were in what the Navajo would call the beauty of your process, you were one with it.  Now, you swim to be in the beauty of that physical process, and when you are least aware of it, you enter the beauty of the writing process, not for speed or words per session or quirky metaphor but for the excitement of discovery.  Individuals you have created, often on the backs of 3 X 5 index cards, or ideas you have floated of the shores of essay inquiry take hold and offer up insights and connections the non-writing you did not realize were there.  Fueled by this discovery, you are propelled to plateaus of performance that can be seen only in retrospect because while they are being experienced there is no room or time for thoughts of assessment or evaluation.  A good argument for not thinking while you work, for breaking into that sweat of concern and energy that precludes thought, centering on muscle memory performance.

In some ways, it is like the moments when you are in a dream state and some noise or sensation or the mere rhythm of being asleep intrudes on the moment of your dream and you want to rush the dream forward to keep it in place or at least see how it turns out before you lose it to the rhythms and static of the waking state.

It was great to have been there, you realize, allowing thought processes back into your body, struggling to burn the memory of the dream into your senses.  It was a great dream or a scary dream or a dream in which you did not realize you were so attracted to a particular person, or a dream where you were joined with a dead companion such as Edward Bear or Ms. Molly, both of whom ran great sweeping distances with you in the real world.

Do you get the same sense of connection and caring when revisiting your journals or these vagrant pages of your blog? Do they remind you of the thing they should remind you of, which is to say the process of which you were a part when you created the words?  If they do not, what have you learned in the interim about making yourself care? And how do you pass it on to the you who will be back here, the archaeologist looking for potsherds and ideas and traces of lifestyle and attitude?  You may be certain that you will be back here, looking for materials on which to build story.

I Got Mine at Zappo's

process--a sequence of idiosyncratic events and stimuli that leads a writer to visualize, orchestrate, and revise a story; the notional warp and weft of threads the individual writer requires in order to tell a story; the tools, techniques, compulsions, and possible superstitions a writer uses in the act of generating material.

Writers come to their craft by accidental discovery, from genetic inheritance, from a desire for revenge, from a childhood illness that had them away from school for a prolonged period, from one or more stories that tipped them over into imitation then originality; and from the growing awareness that nothing else is quite as much fun. There are, to be sure, other processes in which real or imagined pain is an ingredient. Grown men and women confess they would rather do anything but write and then, as a part of their process, trudge dramatically to their work area, radiating martyrdom as they settle into the task at hand.

Beginning writers, most of whom are known to have no sense of humor, or who are likely to take everything seriously, begin to wonder if they have the necessary ingredients to tell stories because they do not abuse alcohol or drugs or sex, do not particularly care for driving fast cars, seldom vote in elections, and do not believe they are able to withstand or understand rejection. To them, any income under $100,000 a year derived from writing means failure, and reading the works of other writers means time wrenched away from their own creative efforts. These are all strands of the beginning writer's process, which undergoes subtle and individualizing shifts as the process of their own writing continues.

The process of some writers, a tenth of the way into the twenty-first century, involves first and second drafts written in ink before being transferred to the computer. The process of other writers is to keep a daily journal in which the goal is to evoke at least one emotion. Yet other writers believe implicitly in the process of halting a day's work in the middle of a sentence, thus to confront the next day's work with a direct link to work in progress. A considerable number of writers outline furiously and do not consider beginning text until they have a complete design before them, while an equally considerable number enjoy the high of striking out with no plot or plan to hinder their imagination.

All of these processes work for some and if anything shut others down completely. The key is to discover from yourself whence the process comes. Is it anger, politics, a desire to tell cautionary tales, an urge to revise historical outcomes, project futures based on worst-case scenarios? Are you advocating equality for women, same sex marriage, evangelism, creationism, irony, adventure? What is your natural gestalt? Are you an optimist? Is the glass already half empty? Shall we carpe the freaking diem?

The individual writer's process is a string of stimuli that may have emerged without the knots of culture, family, schooling, or writing books being added. There are those who seem to hear their process speaking to them early on, without having to unlearn things that were painfully acquired in the first place. No sentences that begin with And or But. No one-line paragraphs. A subject for every sentence. A topic sentence in every paragraph.

Ah.

These are not processes; these are rules. The consequence of disregarding rules should be considered before continuing, but if your process dictates a break, then break away.

A writer's process is much like a pair of shoes one sees in an ad, seemingly a perfect statement of personality, shape, and color. There is a disconnect between the vision of the shoe in the ad and the visit to the shoe store or the arrival of the shoes from Zappo's. No matter how good the shoe looks in the ad, it is of no value if it pinches at the sides or cramps the toes. You do not take the shoes, hoping to "break them in." The writer's process needs to fit, and the best fit is always hand-made.

The Energy of Intimacy

Consider:

1. You have been invited by someone you value to a gathering; it could be a party or a celebration or a wedding or a funeral or a christening, or a launching of some sort. It could even be a Tupperware party. With the exception of the person who invited you, you are confronted by a sea of earnest, friendly faces but not familiar faces. The person who invited you is the only person in the gathering you know. That person sees you, greets you, launches you forth into the assembled host, perhaps with a plate of nibbles, assuredly with some form of beverage. From that moment, you are on your own.

(This situation is something like picking up a new story or novel by an author whose work you favor.)

2. However opulent or restrained your lifestyle, you are surrounded by things, implements, appliances, conveniences, indulgences,tools, necessities. I'll leave it to you to affix the proper description to the individual thing. Suffice it to say, when you awaken, whenever and wherever you are, there, in your immediate sight, are items to fill these descriptions.

3. However opulent or restrained your lifestyle, you are considerably ahead of your historic and prehistoric forbears in terms of "things" within your grasp and sight, so much so that you tend to take some, perhaps even many of them for granted--at face value or less while your ancient forbear accorded surroundings, tools, implements with a broader degree of respect and even admiration. There may be a more diverse menu today of things and conditions to be coped with but life for our ancestors was no less filled with stress.

These issues are backstory to the construct that our senses of being and of place are often occluded by fast forwards to future contingency or replay of past performance, each a distraction from the present moment and the opportunity to accord enthusiasm to the persons, animals, places, things, and artistry in our midst.

Our solution to this problem is to have become writers or artists, a landscape that allows us to experience the intimacy of enthusiasm for persons, animals, places, things, artistry, and ideas in our midst. We are yanked out of our landscape by the quotidian, the seemingly ordinary, the barely countenanced or dreaded meeting or distraction, with the result that we write or create art about such things from a perspective of impatience or dread or resentment, three perspectives that have historically undercut storytellers, artists, and writers throughout history.

It has become a reflex to begrudge the things that yank us from our process landscape into our everyday landscape, to experience squirts of self-pity which become mustard or catsup stains on the shirtfront of our being. When self-pity, resentment, dread, and impatience become, as Wordsworth put it, "too much with us, late and soon," we are witness to the rug being pulled from under our process. You know the process I mean. The process of creativity.

When we are, to use the much beleaguered word, creative, we are entering an intimacy with the others who are our characters, their relationships, their ideas. We are entering an intimacy with a place to which we retire not to escape but to get some work done, to use and develop our process so that it, inanimate and nebulous as it is, will talk to us and share its gathered culture with us.

Take Your Inner Shaman to Lunch

In the manner of a dentist or dental technician asking you to open wide, your own writing self, your inner casting director, if you will, asks you to look inside for a trait or quirk, long known to you and thus long rationalized by you as being "normal," or "ordinary," or "no big deal." Said trait might actually be ordinary, such as a fondness for crossword puzzles, or stamp collecting, or perhaps even taxidermy. No big deal, you say, and largely you are correct. But take the next step. Marathon training, for instance, or dancing or musicianship, something requiring more than a occasional thought or exercise--something requiring no less than muscle memory.

Moving from the occasional to the regular means a need to revise agendas and schedules, particularly a problem if there are young children, old parents, notional dogs such as Sally, in your picture, particularly problematic if your "daytime job" relies on a working scenario where immediacy, punctuality, and promptness are the holy trinity. Your solution to such a schematic is to get up earlier or stay up later, therein to do what it is you are building into your muscle memory, your real-time and inner-time process as opposed to your working process.

If you happen to be on the job of your choice and, thus, do not consider what you do as work but rather fun or other, you can not only indulge in what you do without thought, you can in the process pretend to be a Type A personality, sparing you the need to explain to civilians what you do in your real time. In fact, if you happen to be in such a situation, you will, to return this essay back to its opening premise, in all probability consider most other civilians quirky or trait-driven, leaving you and your brothers and sisters to be the normal in the midst of Homo sapien sapien.

Because you are a writer, you know on some level that characters need to be more focused than normal persons on something, the thing you do when, to cite Hawthorne, Nature has created them thus awry.

I see Squirrel calling me to task for the mountain goat leap I am about to take, yet leap I do. Writers are by nature obsessive and compulsive and when they are neither of these, they are control freaks, meaning they are forced to lead the double life of shifting to a more normal balance with loved ones, employers, employees, U.S. Mail persons, and even the always late men and women who arrive to install appliances, remove things, deliver pizzas, read meters and the like. Thus does the artist find comfort in dealings with other artists; it is the unspoken awareness of one control freak to another, each of us trying to control an environment, whether it be a stage, a canvas, a page or computer screen. Thus does an artist understand and frequently find live with another; the rules and perceptions are taken for granted. I do not have to explain to you that I am exploring, say, my inner Ahab. One of my mentors was married to Yul Brynner when he was performing in an iconic role as the King of Siam. He awakened one morning to tell her, We want our breakfast. To which she replied, Well we can fucking have Wheaties and non-fat or make it our self. We have plenty to talk about to one another, frequently each fueling the other with variations on the theme of Process.

We after all identify our self as Process, having worked to strip all the rest away from our persona, which is to say having stripped away all traces of normal, which is further and more mountain goat like in its leap to say that we are working toward an individual who in the past and in many locales in the present day would be considered a shaman.

We do this not for politics or profit but for the power of exploiting our inner instrument, be it a writer, an actor, a singer, a dancer, a painter. We do not forswear goals and obligations of relationships with human and animal as, say, a parent or teacher or friend, rather we look for ways to siphon what we have seen in our shaman form into those times when we must appear on the other side of the door, in the world of time, space, and causation.