Betrayal

A betrayal is the breaking of an allegiance, a deliberate reneging on a promise or previously professed devotion. Every time we speak ill of a friend we are at risk of betraying the covenant of friendship. Every time we speak ill of ourselves, we are making it easier to betray the image of the self as an instrument of integrity, creative reach, and consideration for the integrity, creative reach, and wonders of imagination we find in others.

Before even considering such aspects as craft and conventions, a writer needs to take some stand with regard to the health and well-being of the writing self, establishing a code of ethics and behavior, paying some form of dues to the concept of curiosity, as in What are the things I need to know, What is the Self to which I am being true, and How can I hope to judge the work of others if I cannot judge my own?

It was comparatively easy to have ideals in your own early years because much of your experience came second or third hand, from books, from classroom examples, from the teen and twenties equivalents of moot court proceedings in which you had long, argumentative conversations with peers, lubricated by massive doses of the cheapest red wines available. One of your favorite affirmations was an emphatic avowal of what you would not do: I would never compromise my ideals. I would never--ah, the bugbear of the teens and twenties, selling out, the betrayal of ideas for money and/or political gain. You, who worked in the television industry long enough to accrue points for membership in the Writers' Guild, learned how collaborative and product driven television is, gained practical examples of the things you disavowed in your earlier days, doing in practice the things you'd previously sworn you would not do. The cost was learning more extensive and useful dramatic techniques, without which there was nowhere for you to go, a fact you realized to the point where you returned to what you considered your more proper sphere.

Cutting to the chase--one of the things you needed to learn--you learned what you felt you needed to learn through a series of less traumatic betrayals, which is to say you wrote an extended series of novels and short stories, at first with no plan, then with a growing sense of plan to the point where the betrayals were reminders that what you seek is a lifelong process, that to a degree each finished project is a betrayal of what you most hope to achieve, and which you recognize you will, if you are at all to progress, need to continue betraying such things as pride, humility, hubris. It might work.

At the moment you are sitting in a lofty perch of having a project out in submission, represented by an agent who is solid behind it, requested by a number of potential publishers. You note the fact that publishers tend to hold editorial meetings in the middle of the week; most publishers you worked for had meetings on Wednesdays, one or two others you know of had those meetings on Thursdays. There is a chance you will have to betray some ideals; editors have notes and thoughts about the best form of a work. As an editor, you have had such notions about the potential for a work. It comes to you that this form of betrayal is not covert, not back stabbing; it is done to move yourself through an association of trust with individuals you respect to a point where you have learned a tad more than you did when you first finished the project and sent it forth.

Enough!

Enough is when it is time to move on to something else.

Enough is a wake-up call to satiety; when the voice in you says enough it is speaking on behalf of you're having taken all you're going to take, eaten all you feel like eating, listening to someone for as long as you can possibly take it and, perhaps, a bit more out of a sense of courtesy or family loyalty or the not-to-be-discounted act of being a friend.

Enough is the awareness that seeps through your being, telling you a story is done, ripened, matured, ready to go out and if they don;t like it, you know better, you will in fact have had enough with them.

Enough is the decision to stop thinking about a thing you have already thought through an infinitude of permutations; it is the moment switch gears, up or down, moving briskly ahead or lapsing with studied leisure into relaxation.

Enough is the time to quit a thing you thought you could never get enough of in favor of a distraction that carries you along, confident it will tell you when it is through with you so that you can return fresh to the thing you thought you could never get enough of.

Enough is a time to stop being distracted by things that lurch out at you like tour guides wanting to direct you to shops and restaurants run by their cousins, time to tell yourself you have procrastinated enough and must realize the thing you want and have some nervousness about is waiting for you and that you have been afraid enough of it so that you no longer worry about failing at it or even worrying that you will be competent in its thrall.

Enough is the time to stop researching and start writing, which is the truest way you will ever have of discovering how much research you needed in the first place. Similarly, enough is time to stop trying to add things to the story that don't want to fit, the literary equivalent of when friends or family tried to fix you up with someone who you already knew did not fit; it is the time to stop falling in love with someone who has no interest in you because after all your efforts and still no result, you will always wonder if your love was returned in a moment of weakness only to be regretted soon after. Enough is also the time when you need to distance yourself from the belief that you have nothing to offer, experiencing the significant distraction of presenting observations, deeds, and companionship to individuals you might not even know. It is quite true that some of these individuals will consider you a busybody or a snoop, possibly even some pervert or degenerate, but these same individuals will think other negative things of you if you do nothing.

Enough is using exclamation marks and underlinings and words written with all capital letters with frugality because in each case once is often more than enough.

Enough is telling the joke only once and, despite gales of laughter from the punch line, not repeating the punch line. Enough is making your thanks resonate the first time, without any need for adding adjectives or adverbs to them.

Enough is also making sure there is a sufficiency of you in a venture of any sort, rather than the mere traces of you. Enough is making enough of an appearance that your departure provokes regret.

It may be true of you that what you write is more than enough, but let it also be said that what you edit is enough to produce the optimal result.

It may be possible to love too much or care too much but let it never be said of you that you don't do either enough.

Complications

Complications are enhancements to make ordinary wristwatches more expensive, things that somehow make you feel you own a Porsche, things intended to inject excitement into timing a soft boiled egg, convince you that you really are the sort of person who cares about elapsed time in some contest, convince others that you have daily need of knowing such times.

Outside of watches, complications are man's closest companion and as a consequence, have effect on women as well.

Complications are the engines that turn the wheels of Reality; they rev up the action in story and send persons involved in relationships off into unintended orbits from which they struggle to recover.

Complications are things that were supposed not to have emerged in the Good Old Days, although those same Good Old Days were not so remarkable as a retrospective glance might make them seem. True enough, things cost less then--a nickel or a dime, because of their buying power then, were adventures waiting to happen; you could get a cup of coffee, an ice cream cone, a comic book, a soft drink--and you were undoubtedly younger, thus better able to duck, outrun, or merely stand still to endure confrontation. But things only seemed less complicated. Age and perspective cohabit in the cabal of complexity, providing perspective for it of not a full exploration. But the perspective remains the only relative thing in the calculus; complexity inhuman affairs, wherever and whenever it is found, seeks its level the way water does in an aqueduct or, more to the point, complexity, like a carp in a pond, grows to fill its enclosure. Wherever we are, at any given time, complexity has taken our measure as though a Hong Kong tailor had fitted us for a three-piece suit; it even allows for the waist to be let out should the need arise.

Our first awareness of complexity often arrives as a matter of a choice that has been presented us. You close your eyes to expedite the time travel back to a voice offering you either of two stunning prospects that you become lost in the interstices. Tentatively, you essay that exquisite choice, smug with the problem-solving approach that has come to your mind. A little of both, you venture, only to be made aware how quickly such simplistic answers depart your sphere of awareness. "No! Chose one or the other. Not both." The reason behind this, you learn, is the reason not of logic but of power. "Because I say so."

Soon, you will learn to use Because I say so, and without quite realizing it, you will have gained admittance to the Big Tent of Complexity wherein motives--yours and "theirs'--become paramount and your interpretations of them are now the determining factors in your future behavior.

Complications are as much you as they are of those about you; they are your interpretations, your reading of a script, your interpretation of what someone means or wants or means and wants when he/she tells you he/she loves you. Complications are your understanding of how it is you have nothing against chocolate but the flavor of vanilla is ever so much more subtle and representative of you, this awareness taken to a new level of complexity when you are heartbreakingly in love with one who prefers chocolate. This means there will be a thin coating of chocolate on everything in your life, your silver, your dishes, your tongue, your other body parts including your heart. You cannot get through life without one such complication, one such love, one such story; you cannot pour your heart into a story or a libretto or ballet in which you demonstrate the futility of war without encountering someone who tells you he or she enlisted as a direct consequence of having heard/seen/read that particular work.

You may think you can renounce all such complications by means of the monastic life but even there, choices are to be made, consequences of them haunt you as you are forced by conscience and heart to chose between the dualistic or non-dualistic approach. Even there you might be tempted to say, you'll have some of each, but the answer is always the complication of No! Because I or someone or something says so.

Were you to be successful in determining the source of the I who says so, thinking to work your wit and charm upon It,you would still find the complexity of It preferring chocolate to your vanilla, and you by now being heartbreakingly in love with It.

Expect

Every time you pick up a novel, whether it is from an old literary friend, a young writer whose face and voice have not been completely weathered yet, or a writer previously unknown, you also lift up a series of expectations.

One such expectation is that you will be seized by the collar, lifted, then transported to a landscape where everything in it and all things within its purview will dispense meaning, insight, and nuance as the syrup dispensers do at International House of Pancakes. Another expectation of this novel calls for your immediate care and concern for the individuals who populate it, the stratagems by which they will conduct their lives in pursuit of the solutions to the obstacles Reality has placed in their way, and the meanings they will extract from the problems that beset them.

Perhaps most demanding of all expectations, you expect from this novel transformative energy and insight of sufficient magnitude to change your life in ways that will cause you to feel, think, and behave with more focus.

If this were not significant enough a burden, you extend the power you afford these expectations to those you associate with love, looking for the signs of transportation and transformation you associate with novels to apply there as well. Thus in your relationship with friends, colleagues, students, lovers, animal friends, you seek and to a large measure find in them an entity you can identify as a transformative force, one you can carry with you in your own times of woe and weal.

The nature of expectations is to outweigh their consequences, to distract us in our step-by-step process by which we seek to excel at the things we do, certainly not for pride but rather for the enhanced satisfaction of pursuing selfhood as though it were a draft of our best novel or short story to date. Being thus engaged and focused, you reckon will not make dying any easier than it ought to be but will make life more a continuous feast to be shared with any who are in the vicinity.

It is arguable that expectations invariably lead to disappointment, just as the idea in one's forge of process can never be equaled by its execution. Some musicians you know of may have achieved this goal: Mozart comes to mind; so does Ravel. Gershwin? Yep. Bach? Of course. But writers? Well, read on, and write on.

Also arguable is the notion that removal of expectation makes us, somewhat the samurai of old, and the likes of the Buddhist monks more open to something more valuable even than expectations, which is to say opportunity. You admire the prospect of opportunity, at this stage in your life being at the point of having expectations of encountering them. Through work, which is another occasion for a definition: Work is the engagement of listening to the senses, hearing them, seeing them, tasting them, rearranging the furniture if they do not all fit comfortably in the room we have, which is the body we were born into and the edifice it has become. Work is living and loving. And writing about them.

Answers

There are matters in life--questions, really--that are all but unanswerable; some wiggle room is left for a tentative "Well..." trailing off into the abyss of the unknown, the unreckoned, the inconceivable. In story, someone has to come along with the observation "That won't do. There's got to be an answer," transforming story immediately from the quotidian to the tense, dramatic, zip file of fiction.

Today, as you sat in one of your favorite corners of your favorite coffee shop, trying to get some traction with a book review that did not want to grant traction, you overheard such an unanswerable question, rising out of conversation like pure ectoplasm in a seance. "People on the other side," a sincere-to-the-point-of-matter-of-factness said, "help us over." The same voice quickly abused you that the Other Side could mean anything other than The Spirit World. Before this individual's companion could frame the question stretching its elephantine trunk, the speaker said, "You'll have to trust me on this," thus removing from the table any hint of rationality. Those of us who are big on faith have no problem with the Other Side, with God, possibly even with the Republican party; these things are articles we believe in because of some internal rumble that could be anything on a spectrum that has its alpha at acid reflux and its omega at God. I know there is God because I have this feeling.

Story doesn't so much go after those who have faith or, indeed, believe there is a God in whom they most surely believe as it is, to borrow freely from Biblical lore, the scepticism of the Doubting Thomas, wanting proof. The demand for the tangible propels the story to some conclusion, either one that demonstrates, yes; there is a God, or the no, in thunder of the refusal to accept anything so fanciful.

I can't answer that question is an option in a political debate, a science lab, or an on-line dating program. Story will have none of it; unless there is a force powerful enough to drive someone to discover the answer, the good stuff in story would never be told. We would rather have the wrong answer in story than no answer at all. Reality is another matter. We even agree through manipulation of CW, conventional wisdom, how wise it is to admit the unanswerability of certain questions involving probability or lack of sufficient data.

That word, data, immediately conjures up the traces of sound argument and a logical pursuit to get at the bottom of things. We want data rather than information in story because data, by its very sound and the elitist way it is distinguished from stuff or information, transcends the two worlds of the made-up and the reality going on at a given moment in a given place. A city may be located a mile above sea level and we will accept that as a relative fact, but for the mile above sea level to be in some precipitous mountain range where most access is a chore, the information changes it to the point where we are gasping for air even as we read.

Because of our human wiring, which is in some major way given to curiosity and eavesdropping, we want answers, and we will continue reading until someone gives them to us.

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.

Two great WTFs of story

Ambiguity and uncertainty are the eighteen-wheel trucks of story, shaking all the other elements in their slipstream. You think not? Have a look at the outcome of your favorites in the novel or short form. You see any guarantees of certainty? Wiggle room abounds even in plot-driven stuff. And this is as it ought to be; we're all hard-wired to root for the underdog; our secret ballots are already mailed in, marked for the long shot. We want privilege and certainty to get either an outright comeuppance or at least an A-ticket on the rides of humiliation.

The former, ambiguity, says nothing is as it seems, a corollary we bring in from classes in Reality; the latter, uncertainty, says we're not always sure about how the things that are supposed to work out will in fact work out. Ambiguity. Rick is a good guy and all, but that's not a warranty that he'll be able to shrug off the latest offer of a bribe. "Don't assume I'm crooked," Samuel Spade tells us in The Maltese Falcon. How are we supposed to react when we've just learned that he's not only been messing around with his partner's wife, she mistakenly believes Spade killed Miles Archer so that he could be with her all the way. Maybe that's a bit of a stretch, a hard-edged example, but how many of us are pellucid, the light of honesty and openness radiating through us.

The latter, uncertainty, allows us to wonder who in our midst or in the ensemble of any cast of characters will break from patter, having taken all he or she could, wanting to make a statement or perhaps a break with the past. You can still read Theodore White's first volume in his Making of the President series and believe Adlai Stevenson is going to best Dwight Eisenhower. You can watch a rerun of the famed Orson Welles film, The Third Man, and think Anna Schmidt is going to walk off arm in arm with Holly Martins instead of walking right on past him. Dream on. Life is filled with enough uncertainties to make us recognize it when we see it in fiction.

We in fact love to argue about the way an event might have ended other than the way it ended, if--for instance--Al Gore had won the Bush v. Gore decision and the Florida votes would have continued to be counted. No trillion-dollar tab for Afghanistan and Iraq. No outrageous list of dead servicepersons and civilians. No neocon revisionist history memes and tropes being played out in VFW and American Legion halls all across the country. We might have been somebody, a contender instead of a punch drunk palooka.

Robert Burns nailed it:

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,

Gang aft agley,

An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,

For promis'd joy!

Things--particularly things that can't go wrong, say oil rig things--can and do go wrong, and even though they can do considerable damage in reality when they do, there is no gainsaying that things in story go the wrongest of all.