Dumb. Down.

Back in the day of the typewriter and such niceties as yellow second sheets or foolscap paper, on which early drafts are written before the final draft on some rag-content bond paper, you could compromise the life cycle of many trees writing about what comes first when you are possessed by the idea that ultimately becomes the story.  This is still the case even though a good deal of your work gets to the screen much earlier than it used to.  A concept ranks high as the potential egg that morphs into the chicken.  So too is the vision of a project, which in many ways is your favorite first step.

Ever since you as a teen-ager came into ownership of Margaret Nicholson's Americanized version of Fowler's Modern English Usage, you wanted to compile such a book, having written all its component parts.   You have done so.  Your first notion was to call it The Fiction Writer's Tool Kit.  Your literary agent sent it forth that way, but came to like better your alternate name for it, The Elements of Fiction.  Although you still like The Tool Kit, because it is, you believe, a tool kit, you have no problem with Elements because it is also that.

Today you have discovered that among the places to have passed on it, the one publisher you did not want to claim it has also passed on it.  You have never been a great fan or Writers' Digest nor their book division, and so when you hear from them that it does not speak to their audience, you are not only not dismayed, you are relieved.  One of the adjectives they used in describing it was professorial, which you have been.

"What's your vision of this project?" you were once asked by a producer who was considering seriously your notion of assigning you the first draft assignment to dramatize F. Scott Fitzgerald's minor masterpiece, The Cut-Glass Bowl.  When you told him you saw it period he countered with a suggestion that you try seeing it contemporary, which didn't work for you because you felt the story needed a link to the past to make it work.

You mention this event because there has been thrown into the pot the concept of dumbing down the level of Elements.  You said you'd entertain the notion and have been thinking about it off an on for a few hours, which were hours enough to lead you to the memory of a time when some of your students asked you to supply them with examples of dangling participles so they could readily identify that trope and subsequently avoid it.  You recall the great effort it cost you to be able to dangle a few stray participles.  This exercise would not have taken you so long had you been a more orthodox grammarian, but you are not.  You do not, for instance, put commas where you know them to belong as the result of knowing grammatical structure in a formal way; you place your commas and semi-colons where you wish the reader to pause, the comma being a one-beat pause, the semi-colon a beat-and-a-half.  It follows that the colon is a two-beat rest.

Therefore, as you used to say in the spelling out of a geometry proof.  Therefore, you will not fucking consider dumbing down your text, because you don't think you know how.  You can and will rewrite it, revise it as many times as sound editorial query will reveal ambiguity or anomaly.  You can't dumb it down because it will not sound like you and it will not reflect your vision.

Chaos Theory

When things go on about you in a semblance of normality. they present an exuberant chaos which you are drawn to examine.  This chaos seems unremarkable because it has no direct claim on your attention; it is something you can enjoy as you enjoy the ocean when you are not swimming in it or unceremoniously dunked in it.  

You observe with pleasure the wax and wane of tides and the clamor of waves breaking on the shore, or the mere sight of any aspect at all of the ocean as seen from a distance, as though you were nodding to an acquaintance in friendly recognition.

The ongoing chaos lays hands upon you when it trespasses the events of consequence related to your day-to-day activities and your long term visions and goals. Thus the expression "when things are going well," in response to the chaos taking on a cadence and resonance that seem to lift you slightly above the ground, informing your steps with a jaunty flair.  

Things going well impart a connective tissue with the chaos, extending a sense of family or at least community wherein all elements seem to be in sync with your moods and needs.  For delicious moments the letters and emails are acceptances of stories or go-ahead encouragement for article queries.  Some one wants you to give a speech or conduct a class, someone has found something of yours uplifting and encouraging.  

The Universe, whatever you see of it, radiates; all forces appear for a long moment to be in some agreeable alignment where even traffic noises emerge as two-part inventions composed by J.S. Bach and the rustle of trees in the grove outside your bedroom pulses with the lush evocations of Maurice Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe.

When things do not go well, the universe appears to you in discord; your professional life skitter about like squirrels on the outside palm trees, nervous, suspicious, wary.  Assignments that seemed so certain and positive dissolve before your eyes.  The envelopes now contain neither acceptances nor encouragement, shifting with sudden remoteness and impersonality to generic wishes of good luck for your career elsewhere.  

Luck?  Has it ever been a matter of luck?  Persons close to you erupt with significant health issues.  Persons younger than you speak of feeling their age and warn you that you too, someday, will feel yours.  (But what you are feeling is theirs.)  Your close animal chum shifts from the commanding presence of her earlier years to a moody participation in long afternoon naps.  You are alone only in the existential sense of such leadership as you have at all as a human, able to have some measure of focus on the chaos about you.  

You recognize it as what it is, a narrative in which your awareness is the stage master who decides which details you note and which shrink back into the shadows.  You are as alone as you allow yourself to be, as unconnected from the chaos as you have pushed away the details that so matter to you at other times.  There is a subversion going on within you of the old triteness, "The devil is in the details."  Your separateness is in the remove you have effected with the chaos.

In woe or weal, the life preserver that bobs before you in the uncertain waters of existence is the instinct to reach forth to embrace the chaos.  The devil may indeed be in the details but so is the story, so is life, and so are the sounds of life, words and music.

It's around Here, Somewhere

The "here" is where ever you happen to be at any given moment; the "It" is whatever you happen to be looking for, either at any given moment or as a holdover from a previous search that has been ongoing.

More often then you can recall in reliable detail, the "it" was finally located in a place that speaks of superior-if-not-perfect logic, which is to say a place where it ought to be.  This of itself speaks to some measure of organizational skills.  This observation is of as yet immeasurable importance because in the writing of it, you have just made the discovery that you are not the great slob you had come to believe and ruefully accept.

How can this be so?

Socks in the sock drawer, printer toner cartridges next to the reams of printing paper, reference books in a single convenient shelf, etc.  But the "here" wherein "It" is somewhere around is a different "here" altogether; it is the here of connections stretched and extended beyond socks and the sock drawer.  The things that go missing are rarely such ordinary things that go missing such as reading glasses or house /car keys; they are the artifacts of thoughts and suppositions stunning enough to you to cause you in some way to note them on paper or on the computer, or to tear them from magazines or newspapers.  Perhaps they are then stapled or paper-clipped to other elements which speak to the connection between them in spite of their seeming disparate natures.  Perhaps they are stuffed into a folder or another container.  Perhaps they linger in some attempt at a to-do file.

Amid the chaos are the traces of your attempts to seek connections or note their possibilities.  It is not that you have any special antipathy for order; you salute it when you see it, often long for more of it about you, but in the longer projections of time you recognize your contribution to the chaos carries only a small degree of slob-ness; the rest is recognition that however beautiful and stunning some portions of the universe are, however many of the pictures of interiors featured in Architectural Digest suggest an orderly approach to comfort in the midst of the furnishings of life, there is adventure and comfort dwelling the curiosity to make things known to one's self.  If there is mess and clutter from the search, if the labor does not suggest immediate classification, if the clutter is from an ongoing search, so to is life an ongoing search, so too is the need to sift through the artifacts of clutter to find tools and mechanisms to cope with life and the self.

Mickey Mouse Music

A sometimes sobering connection to the contemporary era is the fact of background music so often playing just below your awareness as you venture through malls, office buildings, department stores, even coffee houses (which you would think would know better).  The sobering continues when you are put on hold for a human voice to emerge on the line while you wait on the telephone for the likes of technical support from your cable network Internet supplier or that other technical support now euphemistically called health care.  You are not thought likely to maintain your patience waiting for the various plateaus of connection on telephone calls, and you have no hard proof to support this belief but you suspect the management of the malls you so warily approach want some measure of your compliance, thus they provide you with music.

It requires some discipline to your imagination to imagine the groups of musicians who record such music.  Regardless of its genre, it all emerges from the sound studio sounding the same, a kind of musical equivalent of the packets of non-dairy creamer served with coffee on airlines or the increasingly popular portable meal trucks.

You first became aware of the music of which you speak while riding in elevators.  The music, homogeneous in its ghastly sound, seemed geared to assure you that were you to become trapped in an elevator for any length of time, you would be safe and soothed, not at all trapped or suspended within the bowels of some building with a design suggesting you were visiting tiers of a wedding cake.

The music of which you speak was in your younger days referred to as Mickey Mouse Music, a term you heard for the first time from a dear friend, the expressive and articulate pianist, Mort Jacobs.  Speaking of another musician, he said, "He's working now in a Mickey Mouse band."  It took no imagination at all to discern what he meant.  You knew immediately that the musician referred to was producing the kind of music that no musician wants to produce for him- or herself.  You also knew then and for all this time to come that while music is of paramount importance to you, so too is the silence of the inner self and of places and venues that need no Mickey Mouse band playing ameliorating or reassuring sounds thus to spare you from the ethereal sounds of silence.

Music of the spheres has as many (if not more) genera than music.  There is to be sure country silence, river and stream silence, ocean silence, mountain silence.  During some of these silences, you hear the occasional sound of a train passing through or a hawk keening its hunting cry overhead; there is the rustle-of-wings silence at night where owls sweep the area for a midnight snack of hapless rodent, indeed the anguished cry of the rodent singing its death song.  There is the silence of frogs, of cicadas, the sudden rush of wind, the silence of heat thermals rising, the excellent silence of tall grass performing unobserved salsa in an afternoon breeze.  The sound of things growing, of ideas sprouting; the thrum of wings of the migratory birds and the flutter of ideas at night, wanting to try their wings in your imagination.

It makes some sense to you that certain insects are drawn to certain plants, that nature has a plan for individuals within a species (it's called mating) and for some inter-species attraction such as the immediate draw you felt with Sally the moment you saw her.  It makes sense that the non-Mickey Mouse Music is so evocative of nuances of emotion within the human species because it is, after all, composed by humans, men and women of what you like to think of as emotional index.  It also makes sense that there has been a history of interaction between writing and music.

As you have noted earlier, there is some connection to noise that is refreshing because it is the noise of individuals doing what they do best, interacting and sharing ideas.  There is a connection to the inner silence that should provide a sign for the individual experiencing it:  PERSONS AT WORK.  The working individual, at least that kind of working individual to which you refer, is a flurry and hive of noise and silence, words and music; the inner self is the forge on which is pounded out the great original sounds and concepts of the universe.  Humanity may not have made the mountains or the rivers; indeed, humanity often cannot control the mountains or the rivers, but there are glorious moments when they are able to control and shape the ideas and sounds that inspire us, generations after they were argued out in the solitary cell of creativity to which we all spend some of our time, listening. We need no Mickey Mouse music to reassure us.  We have our own music of the spheres of our self.

Borders (the un-bookstore kind) and Boundaries

When you begin a vision of self with a vision suggesting superiority or merely enlightened awareness at the expense of others, you are distancing yourself from forms of contact and interaction that support your basic instincts as a social animal.  This distance mechanism, if pursued, is a direct path to feelings of remoteness, where suspicions and loneliness may lurk, even be nourished into resentment, which represents an even deeper push away from contact and human discourse.

Frustrating and slow-moving as human engagement may sometimes be, it is nevertheless the wellspring from which insight, intent, and behavior emerge.  Could a person go it alone?  No question.  Could a person flourish and create alone?  Same answer; examples abound of productive men and women in quasi-hermetic conditions.  But were they happy at what they were doing?  Or did they somehow manage to convince themselves they were put upon, thus creating as they did in spite of instead of because of their remove?

Scant distance from these observations to one of your favorite and more productive working places, 3917 State Street, Santa Barbara, California, a coffee shop crowded equally in observation of free wi-fi  and superior coffee.  Whatever the motive, they often talk, chat, visit, all symptoms of their humanity.  You do not particularly need wi-fi access; there is your cell phone, if necessary.  And while you cannot match the foamy splendor of a Peet's latte, you have equipment at home to provide a good approximation of a Peet's latte.

Why then would you come here when you could just as well find the solitude you associate with you work for the lower reaches of Summerland, say, in the Greenwell Road Preserve?  You come here to be pestered and bothered, to need to focus beyond a strident voice or an engaging conversation; you come here because you are a city person who sometimes needs traces of city, if only as an avoidance mechanism.  But also, you need the sense of contact even if to create a wall about it.  You are one of many anomalies afoot on this planet, a writer who needs himself in solitude but must have people in order to write.  Perhaps if there is time, you will learn to write in solitude, where the only strident voice or engaging conversation is yours.

What are you trying to say?

Even were you one of those remarkable writers who plots out the twists, turns, and labyrinthine ways of a story, you would still not know in advance what you were trying to say when you began.  That is, you would not know consciously; your inner navigational systems would pretty well be on top of the intended outcome with the same kind of expectation as a youngster convincing his parents for a trip to Chuck E. Cheese.  "We don't even have to go inside," they'd offer, "just sort of drive by."

You pretty well know what you're trying to say in a one-on-one conversation, or the antic gatherings of your friends at various coffee houses, where there is no particular agenda.  Certainly, you know what you are trying to say when you flesh out lecture notes or when you write an editorial report for a client.  And when there is a review deadline emerging or the need for an essay overcomes you, there is some form of pole star to guide you to the destination.

A story is another matter; long or short, you require a minimum of two drafts to get used to the characters in action and the signals your emotions are sending you from the sidelines.  In some seemingly convoluted way, story telling works for you as a series of explosive discoveries.  On one hand, you are setting off to relate a series of events with some dramatic conclusion; on the other hand you are telling the story to see what you can learn from the way the characters behave.  The characters are in effect arguing with you, telling you to do as they do, not as you write.

Any logician can see where these visions go caroming off the walls, coming back to keep you off stride, particularly if you ride herd on the characters too closely, forcing them into so-called conventional wisdom which, you are increasingly learning, is not your wisdom.  For better of worse, it is not your wisdom.  Indeed, you may not have any wisdom other than the ability to listen and to wonder.

The Naive Narrator

The naive narrator steals into our fictions like a cat burglar on the alert for places where the valuables are stored, patient, calm under fire, observant, perhaps even sensitive.  This character's distinctive flaw is the ability to misunderstand behavior taken for granted by others or to be unaware of conditions conventionally thought of as compromising.

We may patronize such a character, even feel a tinge of being sorry, but we do not dislike.  More often than not, we even admire such a person.  After all, how could we not like Huck Finn or Seymour Glass or Nick Caraway?  How could we fail to feel empathy for Blanche Dubois?

A naive narrator will emerge from a story alternately fixed on a goal or in full pursuit of immature behavior, with the consequence that you as reader will be constantly vulnerable yourself to his or her actions.

Such characters are fertile; they are constant nudges in the ribs of our own naivete index, most correct in their behavior and assumptions when we have recently suspected the opposite of them.  Reminding us so vividly of undiscovered territory in our own naivete, we advance timidly forth, casting more naive shadows against the wall, hopeful our presentation and investigation will lead us to an awareness beyond mere confidence, extending toward the greater trait of acceptance.

Once we accept our characters for what they are, we have in effect allowed them to leave the house of our creation to fend for themselves, as they will rather than as we will them to do.