Readers as kleptomaniacs in a big box store

Curiosity is a force in fiction that causes the reader to care what happens next and to whom it happens. It is a dramatic element, curiosity is, always coming on stage breathless from the last place it attended, playing on our sympathy, our sense of personal identity, and the depth to which we are able to empathize. The sight of a character in want, danger, or serious speculation is sufficient to arouse our curiosity by flashing those warning lights of complication.

You could do well to add denial to the list; with enough denial leaking from a character, the concept of arousing interest becomes the dramatic code words for not when but how soon the thing being denied will explode its ashes all over the character. "Oh no," a character will announce to the Cosmos, "I've got too much on my plate to even think about romance." (Actually, The Cosmos is a nice metaphor for The Reader.) This is quickly followed by a chance meeting with--surprise--a romantic interest of spectacular quirkiness and energy, to bring to the mat all previous defenses to romance.

When a thing happens in Reality, there is often a mark-up in cost of the sort we are reminded of in post-holiday sales, where the discounts on list price are stark reminders of the profit margins enjoyed by so many retailers. This mark-up is usually the addition of complications that abound with all human events, reminding us how Reality has its own agenda. When a thing happens in story, the extraneous complications are discounted, filtered out, making the effect seem undiluted, intense, fraught. We are curious to see what the consequences will be, in some measure because we have been programmed through previous reading to expect that no act, even the act of inaction, goes unnoticed or unpunished in story. Drama is the quintessential tier of on-end dominoes, placed to trigger the next. No more dominoes, no more story.

To exaggerate the metaphor, readers are kleptomaniacs in a big-box store with awesome security. Readers are curious not only to see if they are correct in their suspicions, they want to project themselves into story to see if they can get away with lifting that tube of lipstick or that pair of sunglasses without being caught.

Vulnerability in one or more characters is a starting point for arousing the reader to be curious--to care. Add a touch of potential menace or failure and the reader has felt the oh, oh buttons being depressed. It is also possible to start with a character in high gear with hubris or pomposity for starters. The reader cares to the point of wanting to see that particular character crash against the guardrail of humiliation. Of course the seasoned writer will up the ante by allowing the hubris laden and pompous to win a few rounds first, enhancing the desire to see and taste the deliciousness of the ultimate crash. Those are the stakes for those of us who wish to sit in the game.

Ante up, guys.

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!

The Voice of the Coffee-House and Your Stories

Without even thinking about it, you reached a state in your evolution as a writer when you were no longer writing to everyone but to a much narrower group, still without many facial or demographic characteristics, more along the lines of mystery readers or science fiction readers or adventure readers, or readers of contemporary event. This was because you were thinking these would be interesting landscapes to be writing in and why shouldn't readers in these fields like your material? You had ample reason to find out why readers in any field might not stand in line to pick up publications in which your work appeared. Indeed, you had equally ample reason to find out why you began to get the distinct feeling that readers had expectations, one of which was that the writer make the metaphoric equivalent of eye contact with them as they tell their stories.

By the time you more or less blundered into working on the other side of the desk, the publisher side, you'd begun to learn something about reader tolerance as in how much of anyone's writing was a reader willing to take? This insight came to you as the result of 1) many, many long letters, sent to you simply because of the accident by which you were able to sign your letters as Shelly Lowenkopf, editor, and 2) by the amount of time you were spending in the writing of letters. Thanks to a remarkable secretary named Peggy, you quickly reached the plateau where ninety-five percent of your letters did not take more than one page and a good sixty percent of these did not take more than one paragraph. Even though you were dictating many of these letters to Peggy, you were also seeing some image of the recipient in your mind's eye, which gave you the added impetus to address all your writing to someone. You could easily delete the address, Dear Whomever, and the complementary close, Yours, or Cordially, or Sincerely after the first draft. It seemed appropriate to write stories and chapters of novels to or at a person, particularly someone you knew well enough to be fond of or in love with or respectful of.

This was as close as you were able to come at the time to articulating voice, which includes authorial intent and state of mind, leavened by authorial feeling in general and specificity. If I don't like you, I'm not going to be casually informative, certainly not overtly respectful, perhaps even a bit snarky or ironic. Depending on how much I like you, I'm going to be informal, confidential, up front, conspiratorial, with the occasional tease tossed in.

By now, much as you like writing to a particular person, especially for the conveyed sense of intimacy and informality, you appear to have come full circle. The circle is easy enough to explain. You are writing for yourself, to yourself, at yourself. You are also going public with it, leaving it out there so that anyone who wishes may eavesdrop. There are likely to be many who will in effect switch to other channels, to other authors, to other voices, to other genera other than those in which you write. At one time, you may have been snarky about that, but as things stand today, you are not snarky when you find a book that does not speak to you.

You get a certain reinforcement of your approach by spending some hours per week in a coffee shop, not merely enjoying the coffee but being aware of the background voices and conversations and their effect on you. A favored game is trying to settle down to writing, then seeing how long you can remain absorbed before some particularly unattractive voice arrests your attention, wrenches you from your absorption. Male or female? Low, high-pitched, squeaky, idiosyncratic with such filler words as I mean or you know? Imparting the manic sense of self-importance or perhaps even at the other end of the spectrum, self-pity?

These coffee shop voices are supplements to the voices you do not want for your front-rank characters--unless, of course, you want to start them off with the albatross of being someone who will have to undergo some change. These coffee-shop people are all perfectly delightful, reasonable sorts who bear you no ill will and may scarcely recognize you. It is not their fault that their speech mannerisms tend to irritate you or put you off. But the same thing is true of the professionally trained voice, say the radio disc jockey or the commentators on the various music stations which draw your interest. So the calculus does revolve about you in the area of pure voice. Your coffee-shop people have an age range from about early teens on through seventies and eighties, the occasional pre-teen dragged in by a parent or grandparent. Some of them have voices you'd cheerfully listen to. You can't tell from looking. The individuals at every age who seem most visually pleasing to you may check out to have voices that need WD-40 or 3-in-1 Oil. They all inform the catalogue you keep in your head of how you want your work to sound and how you do not, under any circumstances, want it to sound; how, alas, it most certainly sounded at one tie before you were aware.

Can any Writer Who Likes Publishing Be All Bad?

As you observed with what you considered cogent appropriateness in your review of John Grisham's latest publication, Ford County, those same stories, submitted by any other writer, or even under a pseudonym, would have not made their way through the editorial process into contract, scheduling, and publication.  Grisham is some distance away from being among your favorites; you mostly get his work when Barnaby Conrad passes them along to you in a set of CDs or in virtual publication (thus was it appropriate for you to give him your copy of Ford County).  He is, on the other hand, a favorite if not the favorite of many hundreds of thousands of readers.  Also, he is a writer of some narrative skills, knowing among other things how to delineate a character (although not always with great success) and having more than a speaking acquaintance with such dramatic tropes as conflict, reversal, and surprise.  You suspect--but do not know this for a fact--that he has learned how to listen to editorial suggestions.

You had a brief association with another such writer, Louis L'Amour, when you were sent to attempt him to leave his then publisher, Bantam, to join the publisher you represented, Dell.  L'Amour's writing style was, to be charitable, clunky, but he knew how to tell a story and his passion for research and history was stunning.  You learned an important technical construct from him which,in subsequent years (and at the risk of vainglory) you have incorporated into your own toolkit as one of its significant strengths--how, when, and where to begin a story.

Both Grisham and L'Amour have enjoyed sales in the millions, meaning readers seek their works, not just once but again and again.

This fact alone makes it possible for you to posit that they were ultimately published and continue now, over twenty years since L'Amour's death (1988), on the basis of their names.  Building on that foundation, an author should be published because of who he or she is, which is to say he or she has found a particular voice (Grace Paley, anyone?)with which to deal with and depict the dramatic life going on about him or her.

A literary agent phoned you just the other day to tell you that the publishing industry was going through some major revisions and overhauls, which let you know immediately he had no interest in trying to sell a particular project of yours, and indeed, you caused him no little discomfort when, after he told you of the problems within publishing, that you were sorry he didn't think he could place your project.  

You learned some years back when as an editor, someone wanted you to look at her manuscript, which Publisher A really liked and would have published if there hadn't been such a major paper shortage in effect at the time.  Since this happened in your office, you called Perkins & Squire, your primary paper supplier and asked how long it would be for them to deliver a carload of sixty-pound basis weight matte finish long-grain white bulking at 360 pages per inch (a by no means uncommon order) to your principal manufacturer, Kingsport Press.  Have that out for you in about a week, came the reply.

You do not believe you were being cruel to the writer because, in fact, you wanted the project and offered to take it on provided she accepted the bulk of your development memo.  But you have in subsequent years met writers who were led to believe that their work might have been published except for some act of God, some hitch in the publishing industry, which has always been vulnerable to change and disaster by virtue of what it was, is, and will continue to be in the future.

It is essential to learn dramatic construction just as it is important for an artist to learn human and animal anatomy, but it is also important to learn to write as yourself so that you are not mistaken for another or, for that matter, so that you are not considered so bland and formulaic that your writing becomes the literary equivalent of the art on the walls of Motel 6 suites.

You will never be published if they can find you in someone else.  Someone, I don't know why or why, is offering for sale on the Internet (www.ioffer.com/.../LITTLE-WOLF-S-INVINCIBLE-PAINT-AT-ADOBE- WALLS-GENEALOGY) an essay you wrote for a historical magazine (not by any means a journal, rather a pulp Western Historical magazine.  Heaven knows how he has packaged it, but he is selling if for $29.99, which is almost what you were paid for writing it in the first place.  Has he offered to split any of that $29.99 with you?  We won't go there; your point is that you published the work under your by-line.  Had the seller thought better of himself, he could have rewritten the material and perhaps sold even more copies on his own.

There will always be something wrong with publishing, but that is no reason to let it interfere with your enthusiasms and needs.

conventional wisdom

publishers' conventional wisdom--an idiosyncratic sense of knowing what the reading public wants and how to reach it; a series of reasons publishers give for taking on some projects and not others; reasons mainstream publishers give for removing mention of oral sex from YA novels; rationale behind enormous advances given on celebrity titles.

Publishers have their individual conventional wisdom, which is their pole star. Similarly, writers have their individual conventional wisdom. This is as it should be. Occasionally the two overlap and a partnership is formed. This is precisely as it should be. Neither should adjust his conventional wisdom to conform to the other; what happens should be of a sincere feeling of chemistry or, better yet, the remarkable symbiosis achieved when particles in a nuclear accelerator crash into one another and produce a reaction.

Hint: It is one thing for a writer to research a publisher so that the odds of colliding particles is enhanced, but it is yet another for a writer to alter or diminish his own conventional wisdom to suit a conventional wisdom of a particular publisher that is entirely supposition. One of the reasons Kenneth Millar (aka Ross Macdonald) submitted his Lew Archer private eye novels to the publisher Alfred Knopf was because, at the time, Knopf had no mystery list. The best conventional wisdom to follow is this: The more unlike others you are, the more likely you are to find a readership. It may not happen as soon as you wish; it may not happen at all, but you knew that all along and, somehow, the knowledge of it fueled your work.