Attention Span: We'll Cross That Bridge When We Come to It

At some point in the undifferentiated future, your attention span is going to catch up with you, wrestle you to the floor, then get you to sign some agreement equivalent of the Magna Carta.  You will then be obligated, bound by the significant ties contractual agreements have held for you for your entire working life, when your own income was related in no small way to the agreements you forged as an editor with writers and, in appropriate enough balance, to the agreements you forged with various literary agents and publishers with whom you had dealings as a writer.

How easy for you to shift into the mode of railing against such villains as MTV, shorter TV scenes to accommodate more commercials, even that splendid invention of your great pal, Digby Wolfe, the neighborhood integrator (as in there goes the neighborhood) of his, "Laugh-In."  Your screed against such noble and ignoble changers of pace grown more intense with each new example as it occurs to you.  Twitter, for example; say "it" (whatever 'it is) in one hundred forty characters--or else.  Texting.  Emoticons.  Email.

Easier still to pick fast-paced events from among slower ones, then present them as evidence of a growing trend which, thus emboldened by the distortions of your logic, you view with increasing alarm.  O, tempore, you could hear yourself saying.  O, mores.  (More likely, oh, tempura, oh, morays.) You believe you feel more comfortable, for a certainty more relaxed, when entwined in long-term attentiveness than the tug, the near-masculine attribute of the pull of a short-term infatuation.  It is not that you have anything against shorter work; you after all admire the short story (in particular those of Louise Erdrich and Deborah Eisenberg) and all but fawn over the intricate construction and powerful inner reach of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, but of late you have come to enjoy as well the sense of richness and belonging-ness to such work as Hilary Mantell's Wolf Hall.  Even now, you are slathering to get at and into the book that arrived on your doorstep earlier this afternoon, George Elliott's Daniel Deronda, which, if memory of your last venture with it holds true, will keep you with a smugness throughout the coming weeks.

Your ultimate point being that having a short attention span is a serious distraction, bringing you to the point of a duelist slapping the cheek of the adversary.  The adversary is, of course, time, but you are quick to note that it has always been time; that is the delight of being alive and tempted by books and by ideas and by the idea that you could think to construct books and ideas of your own while trying to maintain a semblance of sociability.  When you were living amongst a cadre of blue-tick hounds, you identified with their nose, which with such dispatch alerted them to the spectrum of scents out there,waiting for them.  You are blue-tick in spirit so far as ideas and stories are concerned, and thus the wonder that you ever get anything beyond a half-done state.  Oh, to have single-mindedness of focus, for just a moment--to see what it might have been like.

What's so funny now?

With some frequency, you find yourself on the downside of a conversation in which you have  been asked but just as often challenged to explain what is funny and in some extreme cases what is so funny.

To get the obvious out of the way first, you are often caught off guard by the question, which was directed at you in the first place--"What's so funny?"--because the funny thing was you.  You were laughing because you had done something counter to your resolve not to have done it.  You may well have been laughing at the way you did something, once again having done something counter to your intentions, creating in the process an image of yourself that causes you to laugh at the picture you have presented to the world about you and to you in particular, attempting to cope with some need or responsibility.

Thus you have begun to describe and demonstrate what is funny in terms of your prime target--you,  Starting with you, people are funny; they are humorous because, like you, they are hives of inconsistency, alternately confident, unsteady, unsure, thinking to have at last caused the rocks to dislodge in sufficient number to cause a landslide.  You and those like you are walking, living comedies of the absurd in the warp and weft of your daily life.

In addition to the characterization of the theater of the absurd in which you are headliner star, the universe, although stunning in its magnificence and natural beauty, is also a fit arena for absurdist drama.  In case you hadn't noticed, it is a jungle out there except when the jungle has dried out or flooded or burned or perhaps even exploded.

Funny is among other things someone--you included--thinking exulting enough thoughts to consider himself in some position of knowledge or authority or--dare you go so far--grace or familiarity with the laws humans from time to time associate with a natural and proper order of things.  Funny is thinking you have the right tool in your toolkit, the right sentence in your story, the right paragraph in your book.  Once "they" get a look at it, "they" will appreciate the distance you have come, the ground you have covered, the tremendous forces you wield over the elements.

Events, by the nature of their being the products of human ego, inventiveness, determination, and wrong-headedness, have the potential for rollicking and bumptious humor, which is to say funny moments, which may cause others to laugh but not you in the role of the beholder.

What's so funny? can be seen as a thinly veiled probe in which the questioner is wondering if you are laughing at him or her.  In such cases, it does not provide ready help to suggest you are laughing with rather than at--funny, you see, has become a threat, a heat-seeking missile of ridicule and mockery.  Some of us have already been on the real and/or perceived firing line of those attacks.

What's so funny is you, in particular when you are trying to effect the most seriousness of purpose, to solve cosmic conundrums with homily and a faith in extra-human agency.  The more we attempt to put on disguises, the more we begin the process of appearing funny to someone else.  Truth is, there are already those to whom on any ad hoc basis we already appear funny.

Dignity is a lovely possession, a kind of psychic immune system that begins with the notion that a human who has most dignity at all is the one who realizes how funny he or she at heart is, then sets about asking us all to celebrate with the ritual of a good laugh.

The Way of All Flash

Back in the day, which is to say the nineteenth and mid years of the twentieth centuries, reading a book meant going on a journey of some considerable reach, either to a place in history, momentous events, or on some near-unthinkable quest.  The individuals portrayed had some significant purpose, getting away from a place, venturing to a place, protecting a place and its inhabitants.  Nevertheless, these worthies were your guides, indicating potential interests to you, perhaps even sharing a meal or two with you.  After a few pages, you felt you were along not any longer a mere tourist but, somehow, a participant.  You felt the potential for menace in the feud, for instance, between the Grangefords and Shepperdsons; you knew the issues in the Robert Louis Stevenson adventures; you were unwittingly allied with the Saxons in Ivanhoe; you knew for whom your sympathy was meant in Anne of Green Gables.  When you experienced the depth and presence of Daniel Deronda, you wondered would you ever have the necessary reach much less the presumption to call yourself a novelist.

Reading then was a journey of discovery that emphasized for you the importance of imagination, learning, travel, and the understanding of the effects on the human experience caused by the emotions provided every human at birth.

Today, reading a book puts you more in mind of a visit to a therapist or career coach or other type individual who affects modern clothing and attitudes while behaving in secret as though a shaman from some remote civilization. The reason behind this state of mind is your awareness that many individuals who write books today are writing them for goals that have less to do with writing and more to do with venting or redressing some grievance or making money as a form of cashing in on some former relationship of some particular knowledge.  You have nothing against venters or redressers or entrepreneurs, and you even bear certain admiration for some of the many whistle blowers in our midst who are out to undercut some particular double standard undermining the social contract we either sign onto or find a way to lead the hermetic life somewhere on our own.

Your vision of many documents sold as books holds that there is little essential difference between two such outrageous conflations of strategy as the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the platform of the Republican Party.  Both appear to you as refraction, which is to say distortions of true imagery, each of which contains propositions and conclusions that lack foundation when observed in the light of logic; each of which argue for a more rigorous teaching of the applications of logic.

True enough, you are not always the most logical of thinkers or functionaries, led as you are to follow pathways not as well marked as they might be, guided not by clarity of thought as they might be.  Your one salient hope is that you will hear and be guided by the insistent urge to write something memorable and the ancillary wish not to trip over the potential pomposity resident in such hope.  There are booby traps everywhere about you, waiting to pounce each time you bring a sentence into being.

The Long and Short of It

There was a time when you worked for a particular publisher who loved such phrases as "hands-on," "micro-management," and "ROI," by which he meant return on investment.  Having come from other publishing venues before this particular one, you understood from the beginning that he would be a pain in the ass and at odds with your own style of activity.  In accordance with your understanding and your added awareness that your direct supervisor, the person who had in fact hired you was at some considerable pains to keep you and the publisher from spending much time together, you arranged for monthly "tours" of your department, in which the publisher got an up-to-the-minute report on the progress of all books in production, including those in peer review and content editing stages.  Given the disparity in height between you and the publisher, it was no surprise to you when, during these tours, you heard in stage whisper from your editorial team the expression, "The long and short of it."  Since you were about sixteen, your nickname had morphed from "Shorty" to the Yiddish translation of a term that meant long noodle.  It is not that you were by any means approaching professional basketball altitude, but your father was six feet one inch, and in this way only you were able to look down toward him.

Although your tour idea was a good one, the publisher was not satisfied, demanding as well a weekly walk that began at six thirty of a morning; not your favorite time but no problem until the publisher began to refer to them as "walkie-talkies."  So far as the ROI factor, you with some regularity based your pricing decisions for the various titles on an index that ran ten percent higher than the current money market certificate of deposit interest rate.  Thus you were able to respond to such questions at editorial meetings as "Such a high price on this title?" with the merest flicker of a shoulder shrug.  "If we had more sales support, we could, of course, adjust out price from the beginning."  This last was a deliberate taunt at the sales department which, you believed, would have had problems collecting money at a tent-show religious revival or an NRA convention.

Long and short.

You like short--except when you feel yanked in by the trickle of enthusiasm into your brain pan and autonomic nervous system.  Then you love long; swooping, baroque sentences, lacing about distractions and subplots, more intricate than a formal garden, their particular joy being a grammatical and syntactical carpentry by which means the reader never lost track with the main subject, before all those ancillary ones began crowding in line.  You admire the ease with which clauses, phrases, and entire cadences attach themselves to a sentence, thrumming their way into paragraphs in a manner reminiscent of the lines outside Apple stores the day after a new model of something is introduced.

A favored story comes from a book-length reflection of modern jazz, wherein the legendary tenor and soprano saxophonist, John Coltrane, was heard complaining to Miles Davis, his sometimes employer, that he did not always know how to end a solo because the ideas continued to arrive.  Davis' response was the essence and spirit of short.  "Have you tried taking the instrument out of your mouth, John?"

Short is when everyone who reads or hears it wants more.  Long is when everyone who reads or hears it begins shuffling feet, scratching at imaginary itches, casting furtive looks at cell phones to see if there is a life line in the form of a message.  Urgent.  Rescue me.  From this!

Short comes to you almost on the spot, before you have had a chance to think about it.  Long comes to you when you have some agenda, particularly the one of thinking you have nothing to say on the matter and, thus, intent on wanting to make clear that you indeed have not only something to say but something of immense value.

You are writing this now because your editor has asked you for more on something you believe you have already said quite enough.  Thus, sometimes long is a manipulation, a gambit for not being able to be the short of it, which takes you back to your opening, in the mischievous manner of Mozart, embarking on one of his remarkable chamber pieces.  The publisher with little or no variation knew the long way to anything, thus calling attention to himself for the ironic comparison when he visited your book department to make his rounds, the long and short of it, writ larger than necessary.

What's in a gnomon?

At first, you'd thought to call it a tool kit because you'd been working with Brian Fagan on one of his books, where he'd written about our prehistoric forbears moving about with the primitive equivalent of tools in his tool kit.  The idea fascinated you, particularly the tools made from chipping flakes from a larger stone to use as spear points or engraving devices, knives, and even blades for butchering kill.  It was like an early forerunner of the Swiss Army knife, you said, which Brian liked so much he used the term, which apparently others liked as well because soon it had a life of its own. You'd already begun thinking about the writers' tool kit in the sense of wanting to turn it into a book.  An agent who almost took the project and you on (and much to your relief did neither) insisted the concept of tool kit had been used. Even though you're from a culture where the writer is not always seen as right until the writer has sold a few hundred thousand copies, you stuck to your guns, thinking of the work as a tool kit, then, as the words began to appear, and you became more immersed in its completion,you found the agent for the project in the sense that half hour after talking to you about it, she promised you she would sell it.

Trouble was, she didn't like the concept of Toolkit because that sounded too much like a boys' book. Even you knew that there were girls out there writing books as well as reading them,  You even used those terms--boys' book and girls' book in editorial meetings when you were a salaried employee of trade publishers.  Nevertheless, you persisted, arguing that your book had all the elements a writer needed to survive.  That's it, the agent said.  The Elements of Fiction.  That will not put girls off.
You agreed.  That was so good, it didn't even sound like a compromise.

The editor who bought the book told your agent she was worried you would not like her title for the book.  What title is that, you asked.  Ah, she said.

Ah, what?

The thing is, your book project misses an entire marketing segment.

Here we go, you said.  What marketing segment?

Readers, she said.

Thus the reason why you have files on your computer for The Fiction Writers' Tool Kit, The Elements of Fiction, each with a subtitle of which the editor said, borrrring.  Accurate, perhaps,but boring.
Thus the new title:  The Fiction Lover's Companion: A definitive guide to mcguffins, red herrings, shaggy dogs & other literary jargon from the POV of a real character.

It is fun, instructive, and humbling to compare yourself to men and women whose writing you admire.  F. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, wanted to call the title so many critics believe to be his best book Gold-Hatted Gatsby, then Gold-Hatted Lover.  How could he have been so right on so many things and so wrong on so many of his titles?  One robin does not a spring make, to be sure, nor does factoring yourself into the process matter a whit.  Yet the truth is, much as writers like the notion of being solitary ego sorts, writing in the long run is as much of a collaborative effort as composing for a full orchestra or for a chamber group.  One of the great titles of the last few hundred years, Catch-22, was originally seen by its author as Catch-19, which might or might not have made its way into our hearts.  The mere coincidence of Catch-19 appearing on the same list as Leon Uris' Milan-19 became a collaborative force since who was the publisher going to ask to change, their big seller, Leon Uris, or first-novelist Joe Heller?

In summary, you have had some of the experiences some of the writers you admire have experienced; you do not think these shared experiences have made you one whit more insightful nor has your ability at empathy increased by a hundredth of a percentage point.  But on the other hand, you would no mind if they evolved to your advantage.

Where do you fit in the equation?

A question you ask your students and yourself with some regularity is:  How do you see things?  With enough footnotes and descriptions, you imply how far your question is meant to extend beyond such unprofitable tropes as Is the glass half-empty or half full?  Are people basically honest or, perhaps dishonest, or let's say cheerful or--another perhaps--even borderline pessimist?

This question is as relevant for the newcomer to writing as it is for you, who still considers himself on the learning curve, not at all complacent.  Coiled within the bowels of the answer, like an underfed tapeworm, waits all the elements of attitude and signals of response, waiting to spring forth with some patriotic message.  You say patriotic because the response is, after all, faithful to the host country, the individual and his or her aggregate responses to the worlds, both real and apparent.

Used to be, the story had some hidden device, like those incredible party poppers that appear at your dinner plate each Christmas Eve at Afghan's, whence comes the pop of a cap being detonated, a fortune or homily of some sort, and a toy, packed into a burrito-shaped roll of holiday festivity.  Now the story has an agenda of its own, reflecting and perhaps even refracting the zeitgeist of the culture in which you live and against which you rebel, for which you swear fealty, about which,depending on the tenor of the current majority party, you produce razzing or cheer sounds.  Story has moved some degrees since the days of Chekhov and Joyce, simultaneously marking time in the same place, reflecting among other things the acid-etched fears and distrust of the liberal and conservative factions for one another.  On most levels of society, life has become fraught, multifarious, textured, Balkanized, and other descriptors denoting and connoting dialectic and schism.

You not only have to know where you are, you have to know where you stand and what you stand for.  Then you have to discover ways of dramatizing--which is to say bringing to vivid life--the issues and constructs of your time and culture in ways showing at once your appreciation for it as the best that can be done at the moment and your awareness that neither we as a race nor you as a person are where each of us wants to be.  The work needs to be done with proficiency and graceful movement and yet not appearing to represent the choral voice of a MFA writing program, analogous to music composers from a certain time in Vienna tended to sound like Mozart who, in great eclat tended not to sound like anyone but himself.

Writing can be taught.  Story can be taught.  Individuality can be taught.  But unless students are willing to listen and absorb, neither writing, story, nor individuality can be learned.

The German Sneeze

Besides sounding as though it were the title of an eventful discovery of a forgotten Wagner opera, rescued from oblivion in an old library, Bildungsroman has the authenticity of sounding like a German sneeze.  It is an established literary form, so much so that you grew up on any number of them and to this day reach for them as though they were kielbasa or Hebrew National franks, piled high on a platter, passed around for second helpings.

Of course the Twain works occupy terrain near the top of the pyramid, Huck sharing with Pip (from Mr. Dickens' great Great Expectations)honors for first-person narrative resonance.  Mr. Salinger's Holden Caulfield is right up there as well because one of the two, Holden or Jerome David, found the near-perfect pitch for the metaphor and the seeming essential grain of truth, embedded within many observations about life and the details of life.

Young persons, growing up not quite formed within an adult world populated by grouchy adults and their grouchy rules, seem to you ideal torchbearers to follow.  For one thing, even though it has been established that the sixteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-year old minds are not fully developed to their potential, you rode that cusp of believing you had all the equipment you needed while believing from time to time that you were several ants short of a picnic.  Still do, particularly when listening to the likes of the seventeen-year-old daughter of a friend,who has left you with the impression that she can conversationally and concept-wise pop the equivalent of a wheelie whenever she chooses.

Such are the individuals who populate the coming-of-age story or bildungsroman.  You think of Saul Bellow's Augie Marsh and Walter Tevis' Beth Harmon from Queen's Gambit, wherein Beth learns to play chess from the janitor in a Kentucky orphanage.   You think about the enormous energy, drive, and sense of purpose.  You think, it is not too late yet, not for a freaking minute.  You think of Bobbie Ann Mason's remarkable young woman, Sam (for Samantha),who makes more sense of what we think of as The Viet Nam War that we as adults were ever able to make of it.  You think of Jane Eyre, you think of perhaps the first bildungsroman you ever read, not knowing it was the German sneeze but rather a tale of a young man with a flaw, looking for answers and purpose.

Don't even talk about David Copperfield or Sons and Lovers, although, even though it is so much a boy book, you will insist on Treasure Island and linger on Kidnapped because it takes the young person beyond mere betrayal and into history in the making.  In its own, wonderful way, Jack Schaefer's Monte Walsh fits the bildungsroman mould, and how could you possibly not mention Amory Blaine from Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise.

No, you do not think you are going after one on your own; you are still flirting with yet another iconic sort, the mystery. But you will bring dozens of influences with you when you get back to the mystery, influences of the brilliant truths uttered by individuals who believed there were no limitations in the universe.

This was in fact inspired by a bildungsroman you are scarcely into, Martha Grimes's Fadeaway Girl.  How easy it is for the adult reader to be drawn into the landscape and predicaments of the teen narrator; we recognize the need for a fresh eye, in particular when dealing with matters over which we may have stumbled ourselves.