Itching to Write

Story come from the itch of curiosity located midway between the shoulder blades, the far-flung spot an inch or two beyond reach.  As you do with all such itches, you reach to scratch, a natural enough response, although there are times when you think to test your ability to use the mind's focal powers to take you away from the itch.

After all is said, done, and thought, what is an itch but a demanding tingle, a sensation of nerve endings, skin surface and sub-surface, possibly even a response to some form of life moving over a particular point, the point itself more often in an inconvenient locale?

Looking at itch for a time, you reflect on the responses to itch, then compare the responses to story.  An effective itch and an effective story have much in common, perhaps not the sort of congruency you were taught in geometry, but yet an awareness of the effect an itch has on you and of the effect the elements of story have on you.  Cautious against the possibility of following a potential comparison down an illogical pathway, you try to think your way into an itch this time as opposed to thinking yourself away from an actual itch.  Soon your lower back and mid spinal area are alive with itching, wanting your attention.

Shouldn't the opening to a story provoke some similar response in a reader?  Only if it has produced a similar response in you, the equivalent of a real itch you have tried to employ the use your mind and array of emotional responses to create a distraction.  When, at last, you give it, reach for the source of the itch, perhaps having to contort a limb or two, perhaps even a twist of the torso, then scratch.  You are reminded of times when the itch became so cranky and demanding, much like the demanding child in a grocery or department store, its caterwauling securing the impatient response of parent.  Your body recalls the contortions, sends ratification to some remote, unreachable part of your torso, causing you in your wish to scratch the pesky itch to appear as an enormous puppet, maneuvered by a hidden manipulator.  You imagine being seen in your attempts to get at the source of the itch, self-consciousness now sending you even more emphatic messages.  Read me.  Read me.  Scratch me.  Immediate response requested.

Such responses should be, you decide, the symptoms and provocations of story, those you write as well as those you wish to read.  Stories that do not provoke itches in you are not memorable for you.  How can you bear now to read any story that does not produce such a response?  Now you have a sense of direction you did not have before.

The conflation of itching and the relief of scratching lead you to the understanding of the dramatic process and intent of telling a story; the itch must be significant enough that a mere pass at a scratch will not suffice.  It mixes the metaphor to suggest that a story, in order to provide significant, notable itches, must provide a kind of combustion where the frustration of trying to deal with the itch drives the reader beyond mere frustration, into those entire areas of emotion and physiology where the grid systems of electricity, empathy, and frustrated attempts at scratching run amok.

One such story by an author other than yourself is Louise Erdrich's "The Red Convertible," which set you in a tingling state while and after you read it.

For a time after making the connection between itch and story, you were quite pleased, visited as you were by a succession of itches here and there, feeling the smugness of a miser counting his cache of wealth.  But then the itches persisted and you realized you had no cache of story at all, merely the receptors to attract reminders of the drama about you.  To get them down in any form, you must first experience them, feel the urge to scratch them, then grapple with the distortions necessary to get at them.

The simple solution employed by individuals who itch is the insect spray or the tube of hydrocortisone or some other balm-like compound, say aloe vera, but you have chosen the path of the writer; your insurance does not cover such remedies.

When Your Characters Plot Against You

It is as close to the Big Literary Cliche as you will ever find:  a character sets out in search of some tangible goal such as a person, an item, or an explanation/meaning.  For some years now, it has ceased to matter to you that you do not know how to plot because you know this bit of universal vision.  It is as though you found after years of trying the thing you are talking about, which is the understanding that the play of story begins after a search followed by some unanticipated realization or discovery.

You had been reading books of all sorts, fiction and nonfiction, tearing novels apart, scribbling in the margins of nonfiction books as though you were one of the commentators in the Talmud, thinking somehow that the next book--fiction or nonfiction--would be the one that would impart the answer.  At that wondrous point, you'd be able to tell stories without having to go through the labyrinth of learning how to plot.

Your discovery was the essence of simplicity:  you didn't have to know how to plot so long as you brought in characters who thought they were right on a particular point, then made that contested point the crux of the narrative.

What you hadn't expected was the added realization that there is at least a beat, maybe even more, after the discovery.  What you also discovered was that there are no simple discoveries.  You'd have to find a way to bring that extra beat or two in, not kicking and screaming and obvious, but in a plausible way.  You also discovered that however well that extra beat or two of recognition or realization or action might work, it would not work the same way in the next story; you'd have to reinvent the wheel every time.  It cannot be, you tell yourself, a formulaic situation  because it will then produce stale, flat-dimensional travesties of story.

You also learned what a glorious process it is, under any circumstances.

But you already knew that much.

The Gloves Come off,

You find yourself nodding agreement at the ongoing celebration of the Internet, reaching its affect into our daily lives like the gloved hand of a food handler or sanitation worker.  You are aware of the Internet's presence, to some degree antiseptic, reaching for greater connectivity while preserving our security from invasion from sources of mischievous intent.

Beyond metaphor for the sake of illustration, the plastics technology that enables more gloves to be made even more recyclable and prevalent than they are now spreads into our awareness and very being like the hands of the various specialists who examine our reproductive and digestive processes.

Gloves are more prevalent than cell phones, ubiquitous, creeping upon us as the forest advanced in Macbeth's tortured visions.  Even our language uses gloves called euphemisms, lest the language offend, but in some particular cases because the language has not by implication offended or caused enough fear and confusion.

One language glove you wish to point out goes by its formal name, the adverb, under which passport it travels forth among sentences and paragraphs seeking to modify, by your understanding, any other part of speech except a noun.  Many adverbs call themselves to our attention by their -ly endings; other adverbs are more sly, for instance who would suspect so of adverbial intent?  When you think about it, what else could so be?  I am so not going to use that locution.  I am so over it.  And, as Kurt Vonnegut was wont to say, so it goes.

Your particular focus this time is on the adverb brought in off the street like a day laborer, thinking to prop up a lazy verb by offering a sign post of intent when the user doesn't trust the real culprit in the first place.  A more descriptive verb could be brought in as a last-minute substitute.  If the work at hand is fiction or perhaps traipses over into history or memoir, verbs with more visual credentials help inject a sense of immediacy and drama into the narrative, reminding us of the power of the ungloved word to evoke a presence, perhaps even an era or landscape, mayhap even an ethnicity.

Adverbs clutter sentences with the detritus of unresolved meanings.  While it is quite proper to evoke and imply in most types of text material, it is a truth often recognized that such tropes as sadly, menacingly, disinterestedly and the like are more like a relic often found in a super market shopping cart, a shopping list which isn't your own.

Getting "In"

How do you get into a narrative or story to the extent of causing the reader to feel the connection?

You begin by remembering the importance of every scene in the narrative; each must make a contribution of feeling relevant to one or more of the characters or to the theme.  Even better if you can hit a twofer.  Then you remember the need for the entire piece whether short form, novel, essay, or memoir, to arrive at an aggregate emotional payoff.  It is not an ending until it has an emotional impact.  It is not emotional if the reader either feels nothing or finds him/herself being argued into feeling something.

Suppose my story is epistolary, such as Gilead by Marilynn Robinson? Or maybe even Ring Lardner's You Know Me, Al?

Nevertheless.

Look at the effects Cynthia Ozick achieves with the letters written between brother and sister in Foreign Bodies.  Every one of them not only conveys emotion, they show background, attitude and character development.

Let us see characters believing in the hopelessness of their desires yet still holding onto them.

Let us see characters doing something against a background of some debilitating emotional or moral tugging at their coat sleeves, or, perhaps try the man-who or woman who approach, as in the man who wore out twenty pair of hiking shoes in his trek across America, or the woman who'd been married three times before she reached age twenty.

If it is to be done using dialogue, do not be literal, as in "I see in you a man of great purpose and unwavering determination."  Even though other characters can be more reliable sources of information about your front-rank players than you can, dialogue works best when the lines are delivered against an ironic counterpoint, Sisyphus, for instance, saying, "Gotta run now,  My rock is due for its fifty-thousand-mile check up."

The Editor as Chiropractor

Last night in class, you took a survey.  "How many of you," you asked, "Have seen the film, The King's Speech?"  A significant number of the assembled students raised hands.  There is an apt analogy, you said.  The analogy is between the king, as portrayed in that film,  and you.

You saw a flutter of bewilderment works its way through the rows, you pausing all the while to let the potential for understanding burrow its way in.

You all have the literary equivalent, you proclaimed, of a speech impediment.  A ripple of ahhhs; the connection was beginning to be made.

The editor is the equivalent of the speech therapist, portrayed in such nimble fashion by Geoffrey Rush.

To your ear, the manuscript you have completed sounds quite on the mark, quite effective in the way it addresses points you wished to make, then stretches beyond expectation, even your expectation, to make points you did.  

The therapist--editor--would hear the repetitions you do not hear, the locutions that might take the reader out of the moment and off along another path of awareness.  This person would hear the vocal interstices, the ers and ums, the moments where you explained what was already apparent and needn't have been explained all that much in the first place.

This is not limited to beginners or intermediate writers, nor--holding up an edited page of your own preface--your instructor.

Gasps and laughter of explosive relief emerged as your message sinks in--for the moment.

One brave individual is yet to be convinced.  How about, she asks, those books on sale at airports?

Paperbacks?  you ask.  Massmarket paperbacks?

A defiant nod.

You speak of your own experiences as editor at a paperback house and as writer of paperback fiction.  The quota system.  Well-prepared manuscripts transmit to the editor with a quota the semblance of professionalism, making that editor more prone to saying yes.  If the opening pages are dramatic, neither filled with weather reports nor clogged with sclerotic descriptions, bring on the contract.

Good story and good writing are essential.  But they can always get us a step closer to the true insides of the drama and the individuals to whom the drama appears.

Once more unto the iPhone, dear friends

 Story resides like an illegal squatter in the interstices between opposing views.  It flourishes when the debate is waged within you, each side raising its voice and rhetorical stratagems, rowdy, seedy politicians wanting your vote, your loyalty, your campaign contributions.

How many times have you been torn between poles in some argument that seemed so important, so vital to your well being and moral choice?  You have lost count.  These doctrinal arguments waging within you are more often forgotten than resolved.  Sometimes your memories carry you back to moments, times in the past where such arguments flared, leaving you with the picture of you impaled, helpless, ridiculous to yourself.  One such time reminds you of the ridiculousness.  You were still living in Los Angeles, for some reason walking almost due south along Crescent Heights Boulevard, about to cross Pico Boulevard, your destination some six or eight blocks south south east toward the apartment of a then girlfriend.  You were carrying a full-length mirror which you'd intended to give said girlfriend although you had not consulted her about her desire for such a mirror.  For every two blocks you walked south, you retreated at least one, your frustration progressing as you perceived silliness of vector rather than appreciation of purpose.  You'd long since forgotten the mechanics of the circumstances of your decision to take that particular mirror to that particular person.

How many times have you had such inner arguments, acting them out in some such Laurel and Hardy demonstration?  How is it that you still have such inner debates over matters of no lasting consequence or direction? It all devolves to your multiple personality vision of yourself and, of course, of others, extending well into your vision of your characters.

Today, thanks to contemporary telephonic and electronic devices, it is possible to see otherwise sane-appearing individuals having such arguments with other persons on a cell telephone, unless they happen to be truer to the multiple personality diagnosis.  You do not always know.  Yesterday, you were drinking afternoon coffee at a coffee shop, watching what you were certain was an example of a non-telephonic argument or at least conversation being waged by an individual in the outside parking lot.  He appeared to you to be growing more agitated as he marched about, waving his arms.  The more you watched, the more your certainty of his beyond conventional behavior increased to the point where you recalled his at one point being asked to leave the shop because he was disturbing customers.    He entered the coffee shop, ordered another coffee, then gratuitously attempted to engage other customers in conversation, convincing you of the severity if not accuracy of your diagnosis.  But then, his cell phone rang, whereupon he began directing his agitation to the telephone and the person at the other end of the connection, proving, you guess, that today it is possible for disturbed individuals to have cell phones, extending the potential for arguing and ranting with and at yet other dimensions.

It is surreal to argue with yourself, but the equation is advanced at least exponentially by the cell phone, which has become in its way an aspect of you with aps or applications from the application store but also units of argumentation and suspicion from the source of story--you.

Work Is Not Enough; It Requires Revision

In the beginning was the voice,whether you knew it or not.  Listening wasn't your strength or even proclivity in those days; it may in fact still elude you.  What you did here then  was filtered through the hoopla of youthful urgency and the sensory overload of reading and writing in all-night marathons.  Much of what you listened to was live performance jazz, in places where music of any sort was a temporary attraction, and where the effect was like the chorus of frogs or cicadas, singing to the night as though the night could offer them some comfort.

You also listened to your own, over-exuberant self-assurance, telling you you could be successful at what you wished to be accomplished in, all this without having to in any way suffer for doing so.  All you had to do was practice; the rest would take care of itself for you.

The rest did not take care of itself, not until you began to understand from your friends who were musicians that even those like you who practiced did not find things taking care of themselves, but nevertheless they all had in common the thing you lacked.  Even you, with limited schooling in music, recognized the players by their voices.  You heard a recording and, without being told, could identify the player.  A chum who played a rousing alto saxophone hugged his instrument to his bosom while exclaiming that it was his university, his place where he discovered what he meant.  In a way that was not unkind, he noted how you were in a university where you discovered what others meant.  You needed to learn to listen to yourself, he counseled, listen until you could hear yourself.

Busted.  When you listened, you heard all those writers you admired but you heard nothing of yourself except for that insistent mantra of wanting success.  How could you approximate success without knowing what success meant to you?

Going out in search of your own voice is a bit like the ads you see on Internet sites for online dating services.  Dates are not difficult to come by, chemistry is difficult to come by.  Voice is not difficult to come by, your voice is difficult to contain because of the early potential for it sounding whining or demanding or entitled.  You'd published your million words, oughtn't that count for something?

Not without a voice.

Many of your students already understand the need to wave their arms with ferocity or interrupt or do something to catch your attention in order to get a question or a word or an observation on the table; you are the genie free from the bottle, swooping, flapping like a hummingbird, darting about as though you had been pent up longer than it seems you have been pent up, broadcasting your voice about you with a reckless abandon that can only be brought to earth during the process of revision.