Altered States of Reality: Your Own Vision of It

Even at its best, reality is a massive, hulking from, perhaps even a troglodyte, plodding along in lumbering pace, it's very shape often defying description. All living things deal with it in one way or another, the writer, artist, actor, and musician content to focus on a small area of it at a time, all too aware how easy it is to lumber beyond the reach of definition.

The moment you attempt to deal with reality, even as a mere report or recording of events or details from a slab of it, you are in a real sense distorting it, perhaps even personalizing it, certainly betraying a bias from the very things about it you fail to note. You also stand the risk of rendering it boring or mechanistic or impersonal, depending on the agendas and tools you bring to play in your decision to convey a sense of it.

The writer, artist, musician, actor, et al bring to the task at hand of recreating a simulacrum of reality a force however unintended related to altering reality. That force is the individual vision--the way reality seems. The moment we describe is the moment we limit. Accordingly, some of us learn to exercise great care in what we describe and how we describe it, fumbling through out tool kit not so much for the adjective or the adverb or the poetic trope as for the tool of ambiguity by which we can render a thing so that a number of persons will experience it as his or her own. We are careful about modifiers in the same way we are careful with matches when near liquid or gaseous fuels; we demonstrate stories and responses in ways that allow our characters to betray or exhibit some response which, upon checking and rechecking, we believe will allow most readers to draw similar seeming results.

In order to portray reality, we have to change it, shave away some of its distractions, maintain a plausible focus on the task at hand.

For all the times you have pondered the essentials of reality, you have come to view it much as the renditions of the wooly mammoth, huge, tusked, overgrown with dread locks. In order to make this simulacrum work in a story, you believe it is necessary to present reality not as a wooly mammoth, which is among other things extinct, rather as a sleek panther or cheetah, perhaps even as a mountain goat. One of your favorite phrases to use as an editor or critic is "mountain-goat leap of logic," thus do you wish your renditions of reality to be agile on the steep escarpments of event and purpose. You have only to see a mountain goat in operation to imbed the imagery. Story and other events of emotion have great need of mountain goat ability to climb or leap because of the rarity of logic in emotion, especially emotion driving characters over the edge, to the point where they are trapped by their feelings.

Story is the wooly mammoth, dramatically honed to the body of a cheetah or leopard or the scraggly, survival-oriented frame of the coyote, particularly Wile E. Coyote, who knows a thing or two about survival in the face of the failure of his best- and worst-laid schemes.

You spent some considerable time this afternoon discussing craft with the person you suspect will become your representative. You particularly felt drawn to her because of your connections with the same publishers, with the fact that she has been and understands what the editor does and how she does it. One of her stories that got to you had to do with how she chose which manuscripts she chose to take home to read. The first line was always the decider, and you both said in unison "It was love at first sight," because that was Catch-22, even more chemistry than "Call me Ishmael." Going back even farther, your favorite of all. Hamlet. "Who's there?" That points the finger directly at reality. Who, indeed?

Logic

Stories often begin when you are off your routine of work, sorting the reality about you by moving to a new vantage point wherein to be absorbed into the background, where you are not seen, much less recognized by anyone you know. So there you are, a page or two of handwritten notes in front of you, sequestered in an out-of-the-way corner on the nine-hundred block of State Street, a medium latte set before you with a Christmas-tree design on its foamy surface, cell phone turned off, discovering that the coffee shop has excellent taste in its music: you are accordingly thrown back into another time by the riffing alto sax solo of Johnny Hodges, up front with the Duke Ellington band.

Within two minutes, you are joined by a chum who plunks down. "I thought I might find you here. If there were a place other than Peet's, this would be it."

The logic is stunning, unsettling, reminding you of a writer friend whose daytime job is private detective and who once traced a fugitive to a cheap motel in Las Vegas following the same line of logic, causing the fugitive to remark, "No matter what you do, someone's gonna think outside the box and scope your grift." Which reminded you of another writer friend to whom you in your writing and classroom lectures attributed the sage advice: "Never take the reader where the reader wants to go." Trouble is, you said that once in his presence at a writers' conference, whereupon he interrupted you. "I never said that," he said. "You said that. I happen to believe it in principal, but I never said it."

There you are, stunned, unsettled, with a better-than-reasonable latte before you and someone who knew you'd be where you had not been for at least a year, and then only by the accident of it being next door to a movie theater you were about to attend. The conversation quickly morphs into the issue of how some conversations can effect your entire mood and your entire read of the person or persons with whom you are conversing, leading to the delicate balance of conversations with persons you like and the more elaborate, more ritualized conversations with persons you have little or no attraction for. This particular person, you have begun to discover over an arc of time, is one with whom you are able to converse on that more direct, assured level. The music flows easily into Bill Evans and even you are nursing the belief that it is logical for you to be here.

Thus stunned and unsettled you are nonetheless stunned and unsettled when another person approaches. "I was hoping you'd be here. But oh, I see you're in a conversation. Okay. Maybe I'll find you next week when there's more time."

Of course you wonder about these things. In a sense, one of the reasons you left Los Angeles was in the hopes of finding the kind of comfortable solitude you'd experienced earlier when you sat in your observation post, observing, unobserved, sorting the kinds of things you thought at that age would help your development into the writer you wished to be.

Leaving Los Angeles is an entirely different vector because the moment you left it, you were offered a teaching post there, meaning you were now someone who had left however briefly, returning to observe the changes going on about you that you would not have noticed had you remained. Given the intensity of population shifting, of departures and arrivals, of relationships to and from places, you more fully see the illusory nature of living anywhere because where ever you are, you carry traces, cat hairs and dog dander of origins. You once were hopelessly lost in a sprawl of Mexico City, neither alarmed nor concerned about finding your way to your apartment. Turning a corner and seeing a small cantina where you thought to get coffee, cigarettes, and some directions, you saw, instead a man you knew from the Goldwyn Studios in Culver City, who demanded without much build-up, to know when you would be finished with the screen play he'd requested from you. Then there was the time when you were strolling past St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan.

Perhaps you are not intended to observe from comfortable anonymity. Perhaps this has been the hitch in your vision, all along.

You're invited, but don't bring your dog

The relationship between a writer's manuscript and a person's dog is not so far fetched as it may seem. Addressing either ms or dog with less than full-out appreciation is rife with explosive potential. Speaking of either with critical intent can be lethal.

"Let me see your notes," the author said. It was not an unusual request. Authors are frequently eager to see editor notes and reports on their projects, an eagerness that spans the types of book publishing you've been involved with, which is to say general trade, massmarket, literary, and scholarly.

You reached into the file, extracted the original recommendation to publish provided certain revisions were made, then placed it over the memo of suggested structural changes you'd noted from a second close reading, which included yet additional suggestions made by an outside reader from the author's own discipline. You extended this material to the author.

"So much?" he said.

Your hackles--editorial guard hairs, really--began to rise.

"I don't have to tell you, do I, that I'm considered an expert in my field?"

"Read the first line on page three," you said, knowing exactly what the line was because you'd written it.

The author fumbled pages, then began, starting with his own name, "is a recognized expert in his field, giving this title the potential for academic and public library sales as well as supplementary texts for course work at the junior college and university level. With suggested additions and revisions in place, the title could remain current for at least three years, possibly as long as five, at which point it would carry a number of its readers along to purchase a revised edition." He cast his eyes down sheepishly for a moment, hefting the memo, then bore on. "You know, I've put a good deal of work into this project."

"It needs more," you said, "and we're eager to take it on."

At length, the author said, "I'm comfortable with the manuscript as it stands. I don't see the need for these additions, as you call them, and some of the rearrangement of the chapters."

"We," that is, the publishing house you represented, "finally decided against taking the work on. The author quickly found another publisher who took it on as it stood. The published work had fewer reviews than it ought because of the author's stature, but those reviews in large measure ratified the difficulties your house had found. The work did not remain on the market or in most library shelves for long.

This scenario is intended to suggest that editorial notes have some value because of their intent to make the work as strong, articulate, and memorable a presentation of the author's intent as possible while at the same time respecting the effect the published work will have on the reader; it is most certainly not intended to suggest that there is only one editorial take on a given project or, indeed, that editors the world over are tuned in on that editorial take.

Just yesterday, a client sent you an agent's notes on his latest novel now out in submission. The novel was one you'd gone through on a page-by-page basis. There were several things about the agent's notes that baffled you, including one about some confusion he felt toward the beginning. You and the agent agree the work is intriguing, suspenseful, nuanced, artfully written and constructed, but there quickly comes a fork in the road about such matters as the beginning and interior pace. You cannot see any serious advantage to the author from following these notes primarily because in doing so, the author would be through narrative device violating one of your primary tenets in which no character should remain on stage alone for too long because the result would be having the character resort to interior monologue, including what you consider one of the most monstrous tropes of all time, How had it all begun? How had he/she allowed such things to happen?

At the denominator of the equation are two significant questions. How far will the writer go in order to please? Whom is the author most dedicated to please? There are no easy answers to either of these; they are akin to the banana peels in which characters in comics slip. You step on them at your own risk each time you begin a story.

Or a blog entry.

Lacking in Character

There are a few things you've learned about characters, the ones you've created and the ones brought to life in the novels and short stories of other writers.

You would do well to have something momentous having happened to them in the past such as, say, Ahab's encounter with you-know-who in you-know-where, simultaneously galvanizing his behavior and providing him with a purpose. You could also cite Jane of Reader, I married him fame, who grew up in an orphanage and is sent out into the world with few prospects, plus the burden of the head of the orphanage telling her she was, er, a plain girl, and so you'd better take the job with this Rochester fellow.

They should want something, perhaps someone; they should have something to prove. They often have some weakness which will come around to test them at some point. They probably should not feel too sorry for themselves over things that have happened to them in the past, although they can be seen as working on overcoming some imperfection or affliction or weakness, perhaps even failing along the way.

At all costs, they should not seem to be ordinary, even if they happen to think of themselves as ordinary; ordinary just doesn't get it in a character, even the walk-ons who more or less bring messages on stage.

The character is in many ways of construction like an onion, layered, tightly held, perhaps even a tad secretive, not wanting to reveal his or her real agenda or, conversely, so given to promoting his or her agenda as to give off the unmistakable scent of the insecure and phony. Characters do not always know what is good for them or why they do what they do.

Characters define themselves through their actions, which are often at some odds with what they say about themselves. You may describe them to the reader, provided you find a way to do so without making it seem that the observation came from you, rather another character instead. Which gets you to the major point: What a character says of another is the best possible way of description. You realize this is a bit tricky in that the first-person narrator may be seen as an adjunct of the writer, but you will take that wrestling match on by arguing that the I in a first-person narration has to be as well articulated and developed as any other character, regardless of the offered point of view.

Go ahead. Tell Me. I can take it.

How many times have you caught yourself saying to someone--"Go ahead, Tell me. Be perfectly frank."--as it relates to your work? You are reminded of this up-front-frankness syndrome by the number of clients and writers who have put this trope down on the table, because invariably those are the ones who begin to see the shifting tide as you go through your list, finally lapsing into complete, combative defensiveness. It has been some time since you've said this to another, largely because you have grown more confident with your work, even to the point of accepting that there are those who will not under any circumstances like your work.

Today, when you were least feeling like it, thanks to a raging sinus headache, a client was badgering you for the truth and you were thinking this was not a good time for you to give such answers, rather this was a time to tell the client you wanted to direct attention to some anomalies.

"This is not profitable," you said. "There is profit in addressing the need for your characters to sound considerably less like each other and more individual." At which point you were confronted with, "So, you're saying I write lousy dialogue?"

"I'm saying you can enhance your dialogue by making it reflect what the speaker wants>"

"All right, so tell me, who do you think writes powerful dialogue?"

"This is off topic," you say. "You are a client. If we were in a more formal editor writer situation, we'd be having this conversation because I had some thought that the work could do well among readers."

"You're all alike, you guys. No consideration for the writer."

"Actually, we are not alike. Editors differ in their opinions as much as readers do in theirs."

"Fucking Gordon Lish, you think you are," the client says.

"Actually, I wrote a review of one of his collections of short stories and my conclusion was that the Emperor had no clothes."

"All alike, every last one of you."

"The funny thing," you said, " is that not all writers are alike--except the ones who tell you,'Go ahead. Give me some honest feedback. I can take it."

We could conceivably remained standing there for some time, exchanging barrages of "All alike." but as you noted, your headache was something not even the coffee was helping, so you got the hell out of there.

Put that in your spell checker

When the vision for the way a project should go has seized you, made its presence felt, and nudged you over the cliff of outside awareness, into the seeming heart of the work, a frightening thing happens. Metaphor and simile begin appearing, hanging out like teenyboppers at a rock concert, wanting somehow to sneak into the show going on inside. In short, metaphor and simile are the undocumented workers, trying to get in, find jobs, show you their stuff. Make a home for themselves.

You are not entirely sure whence they came and as you check up on them, each assures you it is up to the job, will give extra layers of nuance and power to the job at hand, will match the price of any other word or trope or figure of speech.

You first became aware of them when they were pointed out to you during the study of the Tennyson poem, "The Idylls of the King," reinforced by spot quizzes that required of you to define what each was then provide specific examples.

As time progressed, you had a nodding acquaintance with them, each of you waving at the other. Hi, metaphor. Hey, Shelly. Like wow, simile. Back atcha, kid. But it was not until considerably later on, after you'd made up your mind that the writing and reading life was for you, that you happened upon Raymond Chandler, watching the evolution of his Marlowe character through a few incarnations in the old pulp mystery magazine, Black Mask. Chandler produced metaphor and simile like a teenage kid produces zits; they fall gracefully from his pages, where they remain floating about in your memory like dandelion puffs even now. Your Archimedes moment, the I-found-it insight, had arrived: to be the writer you wished, you needed a supply of metaphor and simile that were at once original, easily recognizable, and did the job of imparting a picture to the reader.

Sad but ultimately useful months were spent pressing your sensitivities for metaphor and simile which you could then tear off, insert in a story, then be on your way. The sadness was that you simply could not think of any. No, that is not quite true; you could not think of any worth keeping, much less using. A message was beginning to form somewhere, deep inside, but it was still being shouted down by the fear that in order to be a writer, you needed figures of speech--lots of them. As far back as Homer, your inner voice scolded, there were figures of speech. The wine dark sea, of which James Joyce knew enough to make fun of in Ulysses by having Stephen regard the snot-green sea. In your writing groups, where you attended as a student, not a teacher, you were amazed at the numbers of writers who could turn out metaphor with no thought of effort, without breaking a literary sweat. It wasn't so much that the stories were any good as it was that the metaphors and simile impressed the hell out of you.

Then it happened, as it must to all who attend writing groups: Someone read a story with a figure of speech so awful and contorted that you knew with the certainty and clarity of a writer who had moved on to the next plateau that the straightforward declarative sentence was your kind of sentence. You would neither look at other kinds of sentences nor cheat.

Difficult to say how long this romance lasted. You still have great affection for the active, declarative sentence and at times, when using the spell checker, the program warns you that you have used the passive voice and might, accordingly, be sent back two plateaus, you reread the scene in which the passivity took place, alert to the possibility that it caused some speed bump or inelegant locution that would stand out, break the reader's concentration, possibly even cause the reader to bail out.

Since then, some of your stronger verbs and nouns have accused you of being soft on figures of speech, pointing out that you have on occasion allowed some of them to stay, just as you have come to examine an adverb to see if it has a green card and occasionally allow one to remain. You on occasion turn your back on the passive voice when you see it because, when all is said and done, it not only fits, it belongs.

Your latest Archimedes moment was one in which you are most lenient in the early drafts, not at all adverse to a simile or two. You still go out of your way to avoid sentences with the word "that" in them, but although sometimes it can't be helped, you grudgingly admit that it can be helped with a slight hitch.

Knowing what sounds right to you and your characters makes sense, makes the subsequent drafts not only easier but somehow closer to the vision you have come to experience for the project.

Follow that cab!

The opportunity for spicing up a narrative that has fallen like a souffle right out of the oven comes bursting forth in the nature of a character suddenly being aware he is being followed, this trope a frequent participant in a mystery or novel of suspense. With careful shepherding, a character being followed can produces five or six pages. In the hands of an old pro mystery writer, it can even become a running theme, involving the tailers--those who follow--being themselves tailed.

If your character is a woman, the awareness settles in that she is being stalked, which is more true to reality than the being followed trope, but nevertheless is to be approached with extreme caution; both approaches are signal flares that the narrative is in trouble, wanting some help to bail it out of its cliche-generating circumstances.

Causing a character to be followed or stalked becomes the writer's first-stage response that something is necessary to heat up the tension to the point where it might possibly qualify as suspense. In a story you did for The Eureka Review, you had a character being set upon by a mugger who was interested in what most muggers are after, actual cash or something that can be sold/pawned for the going street price. You knew there was a soft spot in the narrative and so the response set in. The person being mugged had been forced to attend a therapy group by his department chair at the university, which gave you the next step--the mugger was in the same therapy group. But this was not quite enough. The victim had been on his way to The Wine Cask to purchase a bottle to take to a first date with a lady who very much interested him. The mugger discovers the victim's purpose, then peels off a few twenties from his wad, gives it to the victim, suggests an appropriate pinot noir, then goes on his way. All of this ties in with the theme of the story because the object of the victim's passion is also in the same therapy group, having been given the probationary option of group therapy because of a previous conviction for shop lifting. Of course on the first date, she--the object of the victim's affection--leads him into a store, where she begins asking him his opinion of certain items. It began as a story you have begun a number of times, attempting to show the more absurd sides of university faculty life, but as the stakes and individual vulnerabilities grow higher, the story invariably moves away from campus and into more personalized and vulnerable territory yet.

A device to create tension and suspense must do more than create a frail atmosphere of tension, it must put the characters a step or two over some limit they have set for themselves, a limit the reader sees ultimately, but which you see first with the racing heart of excitement and mischief.