Formula for Safety

When it is working, you scarcely notice anything but a sense of smooth inevitability that takes you into an awareness well beyond thought.  The "it" is, of course, the conveyance known as story, involving, mysterious, primal.

When it is not working, you become aware of and fret about the fact of it being a rail bed of a narrow-gauge train, the dips and upthrusts of grade numerous and sudden.  The turns are not always banked with any subtlety or with attention to comfort.  Sometimes a cow or frightened deer panics, frozen on the tracks.

Sometimes it is altogether less like riding a train and more like being a flea a big dog is trying to shake from his back.  The more you think about it, try to make repairs, add mechanics of smoothness, the more the metaphor grows to the extent of you trying to give a large dog a bath in a small tub.  Both of you get wet.  Neither of you wishes to be wet.  Neither of you, in fact, wishes to be where you are, doing what you are doing.

At such times there are few certainties, one of them being that the metaphors for what you are attempting to do and are in fact not doing become more monstrous and disorienting.  If you have been in such situations often enough, you will recognize the feelings of uneasiness and dread spreading through your awareness.  If you persist, the worst that can happen is the result of some flat, stilted pages in which you attempt to explain too much, perhaps noting as you read these pages that you are explaining to yourself.  Also, if you persist, the feelings of dread and disorientation will begin to slide away and you will have ridden through the poorly banked turns and precipitous drops, experiencing once again the awareness of being, pure writer being.  For reasons still not entirely clear to you, risk is almost always involved in the sense of disconnection; you need to see how effective taking some risk or unexpected turn is as a companion on these ungainly moves through the landscape of process.

Formula breeds certainty of result and safety and boredom.  Risk causes the forehead to erupt with the tingle of fear and entrance to the unknown.  Boredom produces more of itself, predictable, correct, safe, too polite to say how boring boredom truly is.

The Safety Net.

1. One serious reason for Jonesing in fiction is the knowledge that while we sit safely in our reading venue, the characters are sent forth to places where we do not wish to tread.

2. The readers' safety net is the knowledge that something worse will happen to the character before long; when worse things cease, so does the story.

3. As writers we know about this reader's safety net and exploit it by never taking the reader where he wants to go.

4. As readers we do what many affluent persons do in times of war--hire a surrogate to report on our behalf.

5. We are voyeurs as readers, our empathy growing in direct proportion to our concern for the safety of the characters and our growing suspicion that they will be led astray.

6. We know they will be led astray.

7. We want them to be led astray.

8. Never, never take the reader where the reader wants to go.

9. If you have ever considered travel writing, consider that the best venues to write about are the forbidden, enjoined venues, the boundaries crossed over, the trespass.

10. It is a splendid jape to establish a character with strict boundaries--then have that character step tentatively at first then boldly over the border. Now, you're cooking.

11. Characters who have intense senses of boundary--territoriality, you might say--are ripe for humor.

12. Characters who more or less annex the territory of others are interesting in the extreme and have the power to change, which is, after all, another condition of story.

13. As readers we hope to learn from the way characters respond to moral dilemmas or to feel superior to them for falling for temptations we fantasy but do not trespass into. Yet.

14. Temptation = the unthinkable come to pass. I.e. we each of us know the limits to trespass in the depiction of temptation.

15. You can never oversell temptation; it has a direct link to your vocabulary.

16. Do not write safe things.

17. Beginning writers allow the desire for publication to adumbrate risk, causing their work to seem ordinary.

18. Find out what your character wants, what your character is willing to do to achieve that goal, and where that character draws the line beyond which he will not trespass. Then have something tempt him over.

19. Writers who understand this causal equation may well be regarded as shocking or crude or brutal, but they will be read long past the time when what the wrote about seems shocking or crude or brutal.

20. You can be concerned with being nice after you've finished your day's writing quota, but not during.