Where You're Writing from

Pick a place you have been before, some city at a distance, some locale such as an airport or train station, even a clinic, or restaurant, possibly even a theater or store. You are alone, enjoying the deliciousness of anonymity. Most likely you will not see anyone you recognize. You are perfectly aware of your own identity, the details, as it were, of your own resume or curriculum vitae. But you are a stranger to those about you. You could ask for directions, of course, except that you don't need directions. You know where things are or have a pretty good idea of where to look should your needs require something of great specificity.

Now we turn the tables, or at least rearrange some of the furniture.

You are a writer, of course; you know that about yourself, know it well enough not to have to stop some complete stranger to inform him or her that, here you are, a writer, at loose in this place you've been before, this airport or train station, or clinic, or restaurant, possibly in a theater or a store. In the first place, no body cares, that is, unless some fan recognizes you. No body cares or can recite the dates of your publications. Many of the individuals you see are not even readers. True enough, most of them can probably read, but many of them also would rather do something other than read, say attend movies or a theater or yoga lessons or a sporting event; some of them might be more interested in crafts, making stained glass windows or tossing pots, or painting in oil or gouache, or tempera.

You being a writer is of no interest to them, even though it is of great interest to you. They, whoever they are, might be more interested in problems of mathematical natures or just possibly causing progressions of tones from one or more musical instruments, or practicing law, wherein some written documents are thought of as instruments. The point is that you telling them you are a writer is not a sufficient condition to cause them to wish to read something you've written, Indeed, even if they, whoever they might be, were interested in reading such a thing as a short story or a novel, even though you are a writer is not sufficient enough condition to cause them to want to read something you've written.

Part of your job as a writer is to produce a work of enough stature that, without you even being present to urge them to read the work, they will nevertheless to some degree wish to read what you have written. Before this can happen with any predictability and regularity, there are some things you have to know that extend beyond the conventions followed in historical or contemporary story.

Anyone can memorize the ingredients which are constituent parts of, say, a cupcake. A surprising number of individuals who never baked cupcakes before could, if scrupulously following a recipe for constructing a cupcake, produce a whole bake pan of them. A surprising number of individuals with less technical knowledge and talent than you could follow a recipe for writing a short story, then produce immediately one of such nuance and emotional depth that it would find almost immediate publication. This is a condition that may not seem fair, particularly given the time you've put in on the honing of your own talent, but it has happened before and will happen again.

It would therefore be of no small assistance to your own resume or curriculum vitae if you had some idea why you'd come to this familiar place where no one knows you, some sense of the motivation for tucking into a particular work, some goal or effect residing in the part of creativity we'll call your heart and also in the part of your creativity we have called the mind or story center. Writing a story without building into it a sense of who you are, how you feel and think, how you articulate your material is like the master criminal who wipes away all traces of fingerprint and other betraying DNA.

If you do not know or are unwilling to disclose who you are, why would some complete stranger in this theoretical locale take anything you say seriously?

And yet.

And yet, weren't there times when you believed that all you had to do was demonstrate how much you loved words or had such a splendid vocabulary or a way with description was sufficient cause to make readers take an interest in your story?

And weren't there times when you were told that your narrative didn't ring true to some reader that your retort was, But it really happened that way?

And weren't there times when you seethed with envy when someone you knew to be a lesser writer than you was able to concoct things from whole cloth, then find a score of avid believers?

And weren't there times when you'd committed writing books by writers such as John Gardener and Anne Lamott and Janet Burroway and Barnaby Conrad to memory, holding forth on them like the individuals who appear on your front porch from time to time, wanting to chat with you about God?

If you tell me who you are and what your goals beyond being a writer are, the odds in favor of you being listened to go up. I want to be a writer is a sufficient condition but it is not yet a necessary one. I wanted to be a sculptor is not an effective way to get persons to look at your sculpting. I wanted to become a sculptor and so as a child, I began experimenting with the bricks in my parents' fireplace, and the cubes of butter in the refrigerator, and boulders in a nearby park, and one day, while I was playing with the side of my parent's garage, I caused the entire building to collapse.

Now that would be a sculptor whose work it would be interesting to see.

Who are you? Why should we listen to you, much less trust you? What are you trying to demonstrate about life? What can we learn from you?

Think about it: there are about a hundred words, more or less, on the opening page of a story. Successful writers are successful because they suggest answers to these and other mysteries of the cosmos within these few opening lines, letting us know who they are from the get go.

The Ultimate Put-down

Although you have heard and pursued arguments to the contrary, it is your belief that change may possibly be enhanced but never hurried; it wants and takes its own time.  And your change is not someone else's change, your change has its own inner clock.  For all practical matters, you are not aware of change on a daily basis.  You may look at notebooks and journals you began compiling at about age twenty; more convenient is a review of blog entries, as you have done recently to check out the allegations that you wrote of someone from your past as being a deadbeat.  

Risking the sounds of vainglory, you must admit your recent entries, your notes to the various components of your self, comprise a more detailed map of the known universe of you than do your earlier notebooks, a broader set of interests, preoccupations, likes and dislikes.  But no accurate index of change, only the sense that you have over the years become something other than what you were although still a direct relative of that person.

The agent provocateur of these observations came into place because this is the week to review a Golden Oldie, a book that has been published sometime significantly back in the past, for demarcation purposes, at least as far back as the penultimate review, The Canterbury Tales, but at least something published five years ago.

You don't recall the trigger that led you to William Eastlake's 1951 novel, Go In Beauty, only that upon first reading it, you were transfixed.  It had nearly everything you wanted within a book.  It had the Southwest, it had Indians, it had contemporary issues, it had mesas and buttes, it had creation myths and mysticism.  If Navajo were not your favorite native Americans, they were next door to them, some of the Hopi attitudes then bound to rub off.

How easy it was to slip over to Amazon, find a copy from a nearby vendor, and click on the Order tab.  How special to find the envelope in yesterday's mail, slip the pocket knife into the fold, and withdraw a trade paper version in reasonably fine condition.  How easy to slip over to Peet's, order a foamy latte, sit back, and send yourself back to a younger you and to the part of the country you've been itching to revisit for some time now.

In a similar mood, also relying upon Amazon, you ordered a book from the depths of your immersion in noir fiction.  Even the title worked its magic on you:  You Play the Red and the Black Comes Up, which was written by the same man who wrote Lassie, Come Home.

True enough, you have had other such flashes of nostalgia and insight, all of which amply repaid their recall; it was these two that were such abject failures.  Having read and feasted on each earlier, you could scarcely bring yourself to continue reading beyond the first forty or fifty pages as the evolved you, or is it the more cynical you or the more conservative you, or--?

Go In Beauty is the quintessential mantra of Navajo being; an entire culture and religion is built around the joys and comforts of things in harmony.  Rituals are plentiful to cure the un-beauty of people, places, and things.  These are called blessingways and still seem to you a remarkable concept for anyone to have at ready disposal.  Go In Beauty is also a novel that demonstrates to you the things you once found magical and now find tedious, unbelievable, certainly unremarkable.

Quick, find five hundred kind words to say or think or feel about the book.  No problem.  You could start with the obvious love the writer has for the countryside and for the horses and for his acceptance of the multitude of personalities that are crammed into the single individual.  You could point out that he places an abundant burden upon anyone who would say I am a writer.  Easy five hundred words out of those; possibly even many more hundreds of words.  But there are these words now to reflect how much that book meant to you at the time you first read it and how you cannot bring yourself to read farther than the third chapter, words that reflect the considerable burden it has placed on you to spend time understanding, reviewing, revisiting the two entirely differing landscapes you inhabit.

It is an equal crisis when you come upon a work you were dismissive of, aware of your sneering, your condescension, reminding you in addition to the discoveries of change within you of the dismissive, sneering, condescending person who stormed about, wearing your clothing, dining with your friends, attempting intimacy with your girlfriend, using your red Olivetti portable typewriter to weave out stories to which your name was signed.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom at least two high school teachers conspired with you to cause you to dislike back then, would have relished the idea for a story you would now dedicate to him much as Mozart dedicated those six remarkable string quartets to Josef Hayden.  A writer picks up a story, begins reading it, sneers, says "I could have done this better," then sets it down, unfinished, only to be told, "But it was you who wrote it."

Discovery, Reader Feeder, Metaphor

discovery--information arrived at by a character after deliberate research, by accident, or the intervention of another character; dramatic details that will have some visible effect on a character's behavior and/or understanding of himself; awareness achieved by a character through sudden or gradual process that specific conditions need no longer obtain or that previous constraints are no longer necessary.

When a character discovers that he is no obliged to behave in an advisory or subservient capacity, he is able to move forward with the energy inspired by that awareness. Thus a son may part company with a controlling parent, but at what cost or result. When a character discovers that a trusted and revered mentor has been passing off her work as his own, she may well require a measure of revenge before being able to move forward. When a married couple discover their shared boredom with one another, they are ready to move forth to counseling, a joint vacation, divorce, or...


In a real sense, characters are making small discoveries each time they enter a scene with other characters or, during the course of a story arc, have a conversation with other characters. When going through the effects of a recently dead relative or friend, a character may make discoveries that will change the way in which the departed is remembered. When a character discovers by accident that he is not the biological product of those he'd imagined, his responses will certainly include bewilderment, anger, perhaps even resentment.

A detective may discover a clue that exculpates a suspect in a criminal investigation, an archaeologist may discover a tool or artifact that defines previously undocumented behavior, a child may discover that assurances to the contrary, not all adults tell the truth, a character in a fantasy may discover a portal leading to a new world, an adult may achieve a long-sought goal only to discover she is far from pleased with the result.

Discovery is the dramatic equivalent of fermentation; with it personalities, situations, and opinions may evolve from one form to another. Discovery may be the awareness of one character of her romantic feelings for another, the dislike of her job, or the shattering of a long-cherished basis of unquestioned faith.

Discovery walks along the path with naivete and conviction, playing a divide-and-conquer game, imploding to change the psychological landscape for characters and readers. Discovery is forbidden knowledge, the awareness and understanding some characters are at great pains to keep from others. Discovery is the Alka-Seltzer tablet of transparency, dropped into the glass of human history.


reader feeder, the--relevant dramatic information the writer wants the reader to know, inelegantly force fed to the text; intrusive authorial introduction of subtext, backstory, or information related to relationships among characters.

As the name implies, the reader feeder has the effect of turning the reader into the goose who is force fed to cause enlargement of its liver for a result of foie gras. Dramatic information is best communicated by the characters themselves, either through action, dialogue, or a combination of the two--but the action must seem plausible, as though the dialogue could actually be said, the action a plausible extension of the ongoing story. Conversations that are manufactured or seem too pat and convenient severely undercut the sense that there is a convincing story underway. Characters stumbling upon convenient newspaper headlines or just happening to overhear information that will enhance the story become speed bumps, jostling the sense of reality a story conveys.

Exaggerated example: "Say, John, didn't that remarkably attractive redhead over there used to attend law school with you all the while working a night job and barely eking out a living as a single mom?"

"No, Fred. She wasn't the one who was at the Yale Law School with me. That person did go on to clerk for a circuit judge and later become a U.S. attorney. The one you're looking at now and obviously find yourself attracted to is, however, an attorney and she did work her way through law school while serving as a night shift checker at a neighborhood grocery."

In a real sense, story is a tactical matter of getting dramatic information on the page through the movement and awareness of the characters, the relevance of the information a pawn in the ongoing chess game of show-vs-tell. The more relevant the information to the nature and outcome of the story, the more onus on it to be demonstrated.

A workable strategy for the writer is to keep out of the narrative, allow the characters to freight the data where ever possible, and avoid information dumps that seem overly convenient. Even with the given that all the information the writer wants the reader to have is relevant, it is better to under tell than to over tell.

A valuable litmus test for the reader feeder: If the passage seems too convenient, it probably is.


metaphor--a literary device in which a comparison between two persons, places, or things (often unseen previously) is made; a sudden awareness of similarity; an emphasis on the smaller or larger emphasis of a synecdoche (See). "Sometimes," Sigmund Freud said, "a cigar is only a cigar." By that statement, we may assume he meant the shape of the cigar is not to be construed as a phallic symbol or even a wand, merely a tightly wrapped bundle of selected aromatic tobacco leaves. But no matter what he said or meant, story is different and Sigmund Freud gives way to Yogi Berra in that, as the former baseball great might have said, "Even when it is only a cigar it is not only a cigar." Not in fiction, it isn't.

Metaphor is the explosive result of man's presumptuous brain, linking things, comparing them, evaluating them. Thus does all story become metaphor for something other than what it is. Beginning writers,whose early attempts at story may be misunderstood, gradually come to realize the Zen-like need of letting go of proprietary control of what metaphor their work will convey, a letting go that leads them to embrace ambiguity, from which they take the next significant steps forth in the arc of their career as writers.

Writers at all stages of emergence are well reminded of the need to avoid cliche in their choice of comparisons; cliche inhibits the growth of metaphor in a story. You need to remember that.