The Laws of the Land

Of all the experimental things you have attempted with your writing, the most outstanding failures of all came as a result of your attempting straight on to define and describe reality.  These failures took you through the literary equivalents of clover-leaf exchanges in the Los Angeles Area freeway system, with subordinate and dependent clauses appearing as if from nowhere, taking tortured and unreliable curves and ultimate sighs of despair.  These experiments came at a time when you all but detested the long, rambling sentence, set forth like a Great Dane let off its leash.  You fancied short, declarative approaches, all but too literal in their directness, giving forth the effects of a beginning driver, learning to operate a vehicle with a manual shift.  Jerky going.  Not at all sounding of a piece with what you were hearing.

Writers you admired were able to slip in the occasional long-winded sentence and with them a sense of things going on about the narrative and its denizens.  You read them and did with them what you were being taught to do in low-level science and biology classes, dissect, study, then write about your findings.  It would be comforting to say that you learned a thing or two about sentences from your biological abuses of cats, mice, frogs, and the occasional prawn, but you were able to make some sense only of the complexity of the reality in which these unfortunate creatures once lived.  Some of your classmates, in particular those who seemed least appropriate, were accomplished at dissection, their work neat, their descriptions radiating a certain tidiness and respect while your lab work and terrible penmanship produced only traces of an impatience you could not identify with ease.

Well beyond your quasi-Dr.Mengele days in the laboratory, the booming wave of your learning curve brought you to the conclusion that the individuals whose writing you most admired were men and women who evoked reality by focusing on the details of beings attempting to find their ways through the various mazes and pathways of reality.  If you narrow your focus to a person or a thing, your first true and gifted mentor explained to you, it will be easy for you to see what that person or thing is trying to do, and the moment you know that--or think you know it--you will be off to--

--publication?  You ventured.

Ah, she said.  Perhaps that.  You will be off to discovery.  But you have to realize that writers who discover things are not guaranteed publication.  Now, she urged, which would you rather have?

You have experienced many discoveries since that day so many years ago, not the least of which is a tiny sort of a mantra that may wish to be a formula, may even sound as though it were one, but which is not.  The more specific you get, the closer you come to discovering what the specific wants, which takes you to the front door of story, which must now be knocked on, often more than once, before entrance is gained.

While all this knocking on doors and discovering is taking place, you will have come as close to describing reality as you can without encountering a mare's nest of logical and syntactical mischief.  In absolute fact, you would do better in evoking the sense of reality were you to concentrate on the mischief inherent in the behavior among the characters you have created.  Thus reality may be evoked through the mischief of invented characters as they are subjected to the trials imposed by the laws of drama.

It is not only well, it is proper for a writer to study the observations made and articulated by scientists about the behavior of matter in all its various forms from a cup of water to a fist full of electronic sub-particles.  But you must come to terms not only with Ohm and Boyle and Charles and Newton and others of that kidney but as well of openings, closings, reversals, and agendas of your imaginary crews who dance about your interior hallways at bed time and during those secret hours when you are paying lip service to work but are actually composing.

Believe it. Or. Not.

 Another important word for the storyteller is "belief," which, as you understand the word, is a frame of reference or conviction about the existence and validity of a person, place, or thing.  Belief may also be a state of mind or an emphatic assumption that a proposition or some aspect of a noun has logical and emotional foundations in reality.

You believe in the reliability of a person, place, or thing; you believe in the presence of tangible things within that person, place, or thing.  In similar fashion, you believe in the unreliability or unsubstantial nature of the person, place, thing, even extending to the object being a construct such as a philosophy.  You believe, for an example to set this material in effect that "I think, therefore I am" is a construct without a stable foundation.  Thinking is not, you believe, the determining factor of your existence.  You would, you believe, exist without thinking.  All too often you have existed without thinking.  And so there we go on the adventure of defining a noun to the point where you believe it is believable, a condition you believe to be of significant importance for yourself and for all who would tell story.

Why is this so?  Even if you are inventing something, you must be able to sense enough of it to believe beyond thought about its potential to exist among the things known to you as real, without being pointed out as unreal, unconvincing.  There is no simple equation here, not according to your belief.  You may see an invention of yours, growing more sturdy with everything you write about it, to the point where you may have convinced yourself of its reality.  This does not assure you that anyone else will believe the reality of your imagined thing.  Others may, however, believe you are deluded, their belief enhanced by your insistence on the reality of your invention.

The best you can do is learn from your own practice, your own writing efforts, and your own thinking efforts to produce events involving invented individuals at invented locales in invented times, producing enough invented details to make the fiction appear real and, thus, believable.  It is your experience that many beginning storytellers use the argument "but it really happened" as a defense against the counter argument from a reader that it didn't seem real.

In real life, during the past few months, you have been involved in a contest of beliefs wherein you presented a scenario in which you were a participant, then heard another participant at the same event disagree completely with your assertions of relevant events.  Had this been a story, you would have gone for another opinion, looking for ways to make your version of the incident appear more universal in its believability, but since this was real life and you believed your version of events with such conviction, your first response was to laugh, which produced the triggering effect of causing a third party to feel you were in effect questioning his integrity.  Fact is, you were.  Added fact, challenged beliefs provoke and evoke strong feelings.

Test case:  You are at a family gathering or a gathering of friends.  Not really relevant if alcohol is being served.  Let's say the more prevalent spirit is the one of reminiscence, fueled by the punch being spiked by nostalgia.  You tell a story in which you recollect a past event, your narrative voice intending affection, amusement.  To add a detail, you even poke a bit of fun at yourself.  Now comes the fun:  another person at the gathering takes immediate umbrage to your account, questioning the propriety of you having told the story in the first place.  Aha, another point of view checking in on the same dramatic information.  You have a splendid demonstration of how multiple point of view can add questions as they relate to reliability and as they affect belief.

You are screwed if the reader does not believe you, even though you believe you've given a pretty reliable account.  Nevertheless, you revisit the material, wondering.  You believe you cannot please everyone, but do you have any real sense of the math involved? In some circumstances, you believe it possible to respond with a particular measure of schadenfreude is someone you do not particularly like has the temerity to take issue with your representation.  After all, what does he or she know?  Look at the things he or she has published.  But on the other hand,suppose that very person, the one you cannot abide, says of your story, it was believable.  Do you take credit for having moved him or her along the path toward sophistication in the slipstream of your invented landscape.

Just this afternoon, you were positing the great potentials for enmity among academics, a subject dear to your heart because you do have a concept floating about that you would like to play with at length.  One individual in your group reminded you that, large, supportive local writing community here in Santa Barbara to the contrary notwithstanding, there are rich veins of enmity among writers, two of whom you have been known to take off on in the occasional venting of spleen.  This caused you to flash on two of the more contentious writers of recent times, Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, their one-time fast friendship having come to the parting of the ways, you believe, because Wilson, not happy with some of the translations Nabokov was doing from his native Russian into English, undertook to teach himself Russian, whereupon he took Nabokov to further task.

Back to the world of accounting:  What do you do when someone does not believe you, your vision of reality, your stories set in your version of reality?



This has made you wary.  You hope your wariness has not made you too timid nor in fact at all timid; you prefer being the elephant in the living room or the salon, not above galumphing about, knocking over the furniture.  It is because you believe.

If

  A favored word of yours is small in length and enormous in its implications.  It is by all accounts a writer's word; it implies a condition or situation that has not taken place or that may not yet be so.  By these hints, the word will have given itself away.  If.

In the event.  In that case.  Ah, precious speculation.  Conditions assumed to be real, predicated, linked to some future conclusion.

If is a world of wish and whether and suppose.  Link it to another brief word, only, and the literary equivalent of a big bang is created; the universe of a particular character's psyche is on the chopping block, neck--or at least passions--bared to the potential of disappointment or, worse, some emphatic no from the cosmos.

Without if, story would be set out on the dole, without expectations of employment for some time to come.  Without if, there would be certainty or such abject conservatism rampant that we would be visited by the growing sense of minus inertia.  Things would not stand a chance of evolution, might even be seen as suicidal or at least static.

If is also on the other hand, the obverse of a speculation or plan or system, a reason to doubt or trust, a reason to take sides, take risks, take chances.

If you want to take it that way is a lovely trope meaning you have chosen to interpret someone or something in an unanticipated way, perhaps even a contentious way, which is, after all, one of the essentials of a story.  But look at if in connection with that's the way you feel about it; a clear invitation to a rift or large-scale falling out.

If things keep up the way they're headed.  If that's all that matters to you.  If worse comes to worst.  If I can count on you.  If you can keep your cool.  And what about, if you weren't so stubborn?  Or If you would only listen.  If you only knew.  If you had any idea.

If is like being in the desert or mountains, away from a large metropolitan area in the dark of night, where the myriad stars are exquisite in their visibility, their distance from earth so apparent because of the magnitude of the light they emit.  Each of these stars is an if.  If you measure the distance from it to us, you get a sense of the light as it travels, wanting to demonstrate among other things, the fact of its distance and the visual measure of its intense, colorful light.

How remarkable to have a word in our language with so many meanings inherent within its two letters.

If you had your way.  Ah, if you were able to control the universe, well, perhaps only the stories it is capable of producing, you would find ways yet unrealized to put this fine two-letter word to work in stories such as had yet to be seen, all because they were not yet written because of the things you thought it prudent to do if you intended to keep your family in some relative happiness, your employers in an equal state of relative happiness with your production, forgetting how, if you had more time, you alone of all persons who thought to tell stories, would not be so abusive of the power, if you had the power and if you had the necessary understanding to use the power, and if you had the wit to bring it all off.

If you had such things, would you be able to sleep?

The Dinosaur in the Living Room

IN her remarkable new novel, Started Early, Took My Dog, Kate Atkinson includes a scene in which one of her major players, a lady cop, is told with some rancor/bitterness by her superior how the world has changed since they both started in police work.  Being who she is, Atkinson pounces on the situation, whereby her lady cop has some ironic, even cynical things to say about the nature of such change, how "things" have evolved (some of them, by the way, quite wonderful).

At late breakfast this morning, you found yourself in what you will call a dinosaur conversation with some publishing chums, noting how the same sense of change pervaded the conversation to the point where you went so far as to observe, "We've become the dinosaurs in the living room."

You were with the former editorial director of Bantam Books and the former sales manager.  Your paths crossed on the occasion of you having been involved with hardcover properties you acquired, then tried to sell off so-called sub (for subsidiary) rights to Bantam, which was at the time the major massmarket reprint vehicle.  There were others, but you always started at Bantam, then went elsewhere if the offer was soft or non-existent.  At the gathering was also your literary agent who, at the time of the most serious details of the day's reminiscences, was promotion and publicity director at Bantam.

The notion of "The Filter" was prominent after a time, by which trope you meant how when you were all back in the game, the materials you saw had been filtered for you without your knowledge by a stream of agents and assistants.  Even the materials you saw from not-so-hot agents was a step or two above the tidal waves of material being produced and sent forth, thus your own speculation this morning that "back in the day" you could have picked almost any project from the filtered file, published it, and sat at the table with a greater than fifty-percent probability of it earning out.  A nice term writers do not wish to hear.  As all writers think well of themselves, none, you included, are comfortable with the thought that a particular project might not earn out, meaning it would have paid for itself, paid off its advance, kept you on a first-name basis with your publisher.

Yet another term or concept you bandied about was the one of taste. Never mind that if your "taste," which is to say your editorial judgement, did not reflect a preponderance of black ink, you were invited to take that long walk down that long hallway from the editorial department to the street.

When you'd said farewell to your dinosaur chums and were taking Sally to a well-deserved romp in some country terrain, you began wondering how much effect your having been an English major had on your taste as compared to how your taste was given shots of steroid by the "injections" of all the unfiltered manuscripts you'd read while on the way up.  It came to you as well that you'd been in a real sense exercising judgements gleaned from reading eighteenth- nineteenth, and early twentieth-century novels on your accept or reject decisions of the unfiltered manuscripts.  Made you wonder how you'd write about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, were you an English major now, your thoughts going back to those two archetypal English novels, Robinson Crusoe, and Pamela.


When you were starting, it was "So many books to read, so little time to read them."  You've just been awarded dinosaur points.  "So many books to write, so little time to write them."

Beyond One's Means

Child as you were of the Great Depression, the expression "living within one's means" has signified to you some respect being paid to budgetary matters, managing to put some emergency fund away, not living ahead of your income, which is in itself a euphemism for spending more than you bring in.  In fact, "living within one's means" is of itself a euphemism for pay-as-you-go, or even if you don;t have it, don't go.

You've lived all around those notions, at times so pleased to have a spare hundred or two cached away that you were even more able than you'd thought to be frugal, get by on the cheap, learning in the process that thrift is an acquired taste for saying no.  Not that any of this makes you a financial wizard or even all that thrifty or all that much the owner of the greater euphemism, the nest egg.  Barring calamity, you are on a nodding acquaintance with that kind of comfort.

The place--or perhaps it is places--you have yet to lure to the kitchen table for a bottle of ale or glass of wine is the uninvestigated side of "one's means," the emotional side.  You can point to sample demographics of various ages, in which none of them is living beyond their emotional means which also means none is taking any chances nor is apt to make some exciting discovery or gain some amazing insight.

All about you there are so-called support groups, peopled by sincere individuals, many of whom wish to help you variously accommodate to grief, depression, writers' block, adult onset diabetes, fear of death, eating problems,gambling problems, and fear of large crowds.  With the belief that you know enough about large crowds to enable you not to want to overcome such fears of them as you might have, there are no apparent reasons for you to visit any of the other support groups.  You believe you are sufficient support group for yourself.  You could perhaps use a support group to get you over the depression that sometimes attends reading manuscripts written by individuals who are quite sincere in their belief that their manuscript is a short hop, skip, and jump from publication at some reputable house, as opposed to one individual who, in order to make it seem she was a prophetess in her own country, paid exorbitant fees to be self-published in the UK.

Your emotional means still blaze out in optimism, even though you find yourself more often open to cynical rebuttal.  You do not think it a sign of failing health or hope to pass summary judgements of a cynical nature any more than you think it imprudent to embark on a project that might take you considerable time to complete.  You still recall your old pal, John Sanford, inviting you over for coffee and Sarah Lee pound cake to celebrate his three-book contract, achieved at age ninety-two (which he lived to finish).

It is your hope not to duplicate past transgressions of financial imprudence, but this is all the more reason why you are impatient to take on the profligacy of spending your feelings.  It will be as though you have won some form of emotional lottery and will be faced with the decision to take on all those glorious feelings now, or would you rather have them meted out over a ten-year period.  Freak no, being 'em on all at once.

Impatience

If ever there were an emotion ready tailored for you, its shoulders allowed for, its waist pinched in, it's right-off-the-rack fit assured, that emotion is impatience.  It is a certainty for you that things do not come soon enough, don't last long enough.  Even though it has been a good five years since you were summoned for jury duty, that call has come too soon and you can't wait to have it behind you.

Have you covered the entire spectrum, hinted at the impatience to get through with all unpleasant things, the absolute lack of respect for the way the universe is playing out its drama?  Not to your direction, it isn't, thus you do the next best thing to overrule your impatience, you write, you make things up or,if you are of a mind, down.

What after all is story but a bundle of events concocted to show a disparate group of individuals, most of whom you invented on the spot, having cast them before you got to learn their quirkiness, their own insistence on behavior even more quirky and notional than individuals you know in reality.  You borrow here and there from persons you know in reality, but these individuals you create are not content.  As Pinocchio wished to become a real boy, your characters wish to become real persons which means you either have to put up with them or send them packing.

The same obtains with your stories, wanting to--needing to seem real in order to give you the energy to continue your task of rearranging what you consider to be the dramatic furniture to be more to your liking.  The source of the energy, in fact the cause of the energy is impatience.

Well and good that you believe you are optimistic, that you talk yourself out of black moods and funks, often by reminding yourself that it was you who got yourself into these black moods and funks in the first place.  Thus you are impatient with yourself, first for the invention of the scenarios of gloom and disaster, then the counterweight of the need to invent happier turns of event, plans that will send you forth as you were sent forth to school as a younger person, secure in the knowledge that there was at least one substantial sandwich in your lunch bag and one more idiosyncratic sandwich such as peanut butter and jam or smoked salmon, or one of your more favored yet,slabs of cold meatloaf.  Even such lunch bags could not get you through the horrors of junior high school with complete insouciance.  Realities of the sort that is junior high school must sometimes be endured until they are over, increasing your inner roil of impatience.

It pleases you to be so focused on a new project that you are impatient to get to it, each day in its presence much reminding you of the early stages of romance in the works, the times where you are finding out things about the project and it is finding out things about you, which comes down to the calculus of how much of you are you going to put into it this time, how much are you going to share, and how vulnerable will this make you.

One thing you have learned that is worth keeping:  Do not take up with a project for the sake of something to do, nor however impatient you might be while waiting for the project to come along, take one from a sense of desperation.  You will know her when you you find her beginning to return your steady eye contact.  She will have the power to break your heart.  And you will be impatient to know her better, trying with all your skills to resist showing off for her.

Trying.

Things

 Small booklets, pamphlets, so-called 'zines, and similar ventures of the smallish book have always fascinated you.  Even now, within reach on your desk are three such items, one a small, two-and-a-quarter-inch by four inch note pad containing sixty-four pages on which to write things, another being two-and-a-half by three inches, a short tale by Beatrix Potter called The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit,and the most recent addition to your collection, an English publication three-and-an-eight inches by four and three-quarters inches, quite thick with over 240 pages.  This last one is called Understanding Dreams.  You found it in the trash bin at the post office, pounced upon it by no means because you were eager to discover what your dreams mean.  You already have a pretty good idea what they mean; you were aware of having lost your considerable collection of small publications--but not your collection of Haledman-Julius Little Blue Books--during the misadventure of your move from Hot Springs Road to your current home.  You wished to rebuild, driven by some quixotic dream of publishing small pocket- and purse-sized booklets, venturing so far as to have lists of titles and topics you'd publish.  Never mind how you'd market them or even let the world know they were available; that would come later.

Part of your fondness for the more conventional size of books as well as these miniatures is your romantic notion that readers want to have things explained to them; people want to know what things mean, even such abstract things as love, faith, hope, happiness, beauty.  In some ways, the format for the dream book is similar to the non-fiction project you have placed with a publisher and are awaiting.  People want to know what everything means.  They would also like some assurances that their interpretations of what things mean is not radical in departure from what other individuals think the same things mean.

And yet, you do wish to extend and express the belief and hope that there are fantastic explanations available that many individuals have yet to discover.  You in fact see yourself as some sort of Virgil, leading tourists through not Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise so much as through yesterday, today, and tomorrow, with no thought that there is a relationship between yesterday, today, and tomorrow with Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.  You in fact do not subscribe to Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.  You know that will disappoint any number of readers who were more or less preparing themselves to spend an eternity in Paradise, but in mitigation, it could easily please individuals who'd been concerned about the possibilities of Hell.  Actually, Hell would be an eternal plane trip with nothing to read but Tom Clancy, but that is another matter.

The matter here, in as succinct terms as possible, is to celebrate the fact of things having meanings.  You do not, for instance, have much use for pencils, nor have you for some time, but one of the things you keep is a small pencil sharpener in the shape of an upright typewriter, a token gift given you thirty or more years ago on your birthday by a group of students.  When you are long gone, such a token, if found by an archaeologist, will be interpreted as a totem from the pre-computer era, its inherent sentimental value to you gone with your own departure.

You are fond of saying one robin does not make a spring; you could well have said one pencil sharpener does not make a meaning.  Instead, you say this:  We give names to things, identity, description; we impart sentiment to persons, places, and things.  Even as you write this, you are moved to the cusp of tears by an email exchange with your youngest niece in which she--remarkable person that she is--did not learn the culinary secrets from her late mother (and your late sister) of the two things your sister sent you for your birthdays that invariably brought joy to you.  Thus an entire family dynamic expressed in terms of what things meant.  Your youngest niece extended the trope further by bringing her older sister into the picture, describing how yet other things your sister made for her oldest daughter affected her being, and now, of course, it spreads to you.

This is a panegyric to collecting things, not just anything but things you care about, things of quality and meaning so that looking at them, using them, caring for them in valuable ways defines you to yourself, reminds you of the complexities of being alive and the need to identify the worlds within and without, describing as you go, leaving identification marks on your landscape, noting down incidents so they may find their ways into pamphlets, booklets, books, scrolls, and, yes, electronic reading devices, catalogued with the same kinds of affection by which they were noticed and collected in the first place.