The Complexities of the Simple Life

Simple things aren't easy.  They may be crafted to seem simple, which is to say uncluttered, perhaps even unornamented.  If they are living things, they may have evolved without the need for defensive protection or even structural sophistication.  Eric Satie's Gymnopédies may sound simple, but then the question arises, Simple in comparison to what?  Does their lack of complexity make them easier to understand?  Do they, because of their simplicity, lack the inherent ability to convey complex emotions.

An egg--say a chicken's egg--is quintessential simplicity.  And yet.  That entire egg contains a degree of biological, engineering, and nutritional complexity that represents an exquisite order of evolution.

A story--say something as simple as Poe's "A Cask of Amontillado" or Jack London's "To Build a Fire"--appear to be unvarnished narrative lines.  They engage us as a tale should, with an intriguing event.  The event is much like an unresolved musical chord, triggering our emotional need for a response.  True enough, the authors in both cases have, through judicious choices of included materials, led our expectations as readers from mere observation to anticipation, at which point the dramatic reflexes take over to produce the emotional effect we have come to associate with successful story.  But is each tale as simple as it seems?  Are there other potential readings, assumptions, questions that inhere with each.  Is, for example, "Cask" merely a recitation of events leading to the revenge visited upon Montressor's nemesis, or is it possible to conclude that Montressor has been dining out on this story for some time, refining it with each telling?  Is it possible to conclude that this particular act of revenge upon Fortunato was--and now is--the high point of Montressor's life?
And what was the protagonist of "Fire" doing in such a remote area? Had he no sense of the dangers?  A thoughtful reader could come away from a close reading with more questions than answers.

Difficult things are simple things with rampant cancer cells; some ghost in the machine has deleted the one serial comma in ten thousand that lets in confusion or double meaning.  Difficult is a recipe with too many ingredients, a beginning of a story too soon, a logistical problem of which room should get what dramatic furniture; difficult is the newlywed hostess at a first dinner party, having too many guests, becoming overwhelmed, settling on more courses, more dishes.  Difficult things are often made to seem difficult out of fear that they are in fact simplistic, reductionist, somehow not serious enough or, perhaps, too intellectual.

Things in the middle--the so-so things--are like the one-use cups you get with take-out coffee.  They're gone before you know it.  Who ever regretted a paper cup, unless it contained a fluid that spilled on a shirt?

It is easier to take on difficult things than the simple ones.  With delicious irony, we take on difficult things by breaking them down into simpler components, by which point we see the elegance and potential for evolution resident in the simple.  What, after all, are the two- and three-part inventions of J. S. Bach but the artistic placement of simple things on the same track, leading to the same discovery.  If quantum physicists are successful in determining the moment of creation and the logic behind it, they will discover these things bear an uncanny resemblance to the Inventions of Bach.

It is not so easy to take on simple things; we tend to want to complicate them, top-down and bottom-up.  We have allowed snobs and critics to put us on the defensive about simplicity in a manner similar to the Democrats allowing themselves time after time to be put on the defense by those Puritans we have by euphemism come to think of as GOPs.

Voices of Reasons

You woke one recent morning to discover a stranger in your bed.  This discovery sends your mind racing.  You have long since evolved away from out-on-the-town pickups.

There is no time for tact here.  "How," you venture to this stranger, "is it that I know you?"

"Oh, please,"  the stranger says.

Trying to cover lost ground, you ask for some hint.

"Just make the coffee, will you,"  the stranger says and that became the clue you needed to complete the circuitry.  After a brief apology, another relative is welcomed to the tribe that is, after all, you.

You would think to know all these relatives by now; you have heard many of them since your early childhood, their voices plangent in your memory.  As such things go, you are still meeting "them," hurriedly printing up name tags for them to wear so that you will be able to call them by name.

They may resemble you in the sense of looking much as you did at a particular age, but they all have different voices and attitudes.

"You call that a sentence?"

"Wait, sentence.  You call that a novel?"

"You're seriously thinking she'd go out with you?"

"XYZ."

Voices surround you, where ever you go.  Even alone in pastoral or oceanfront settings, a lifetime of crowds, groups, family dinners, and congressional clamor evoke themselves into live and alert presences.  Voices persist through meditative solitude, the tenement- neighborhood ambiance of your component selves, arguing the existential question, "What the fuck is Self, anyhow?"

Pick up any longform narrative and the litany of voices commence their beguiling susurrus, potential Sirens, luring you into a story.  You objectify things by giving them voices, thus inanimate objects essay conversations with you.

Take a neighborhood stroll of an evening and buildings, trees, bus benches begin talking to you; the world as iPod, with you listening because their conversation has the ability to interest you, to draw you into the thread of discussion.

Early this morning, as you indulged a celebratory breakfast at Renaud's Patisserie on State Street, a man paused at your table, taking you in as though running a barcode scan on you.  At length, he said, "You're not who I thought you were."

Ever fast on your rejoinders, you said, "Nor am I who I thought."

"Jesus,"  the man said, "not until I've had coffee."

"That may help you, but it won't make me any closer to who you thought I was."

"Listen," the man said, "I came up here to get away from all this--this--" his voice trailed and immediately, Willie, at his own breakfast, two tables away, said, "--existentialism."

"Exactly.  If I'd wanted existentialism, I could have stayed in L.A."

The man soon revealed himself as Peter, tired of his life of editing reality-type films, wanting something of greater substance, something with an audience base somewhat above a mean of fifteen years of age.  He was not, however, enthusiastic about the notion of giving up his current income level.

After a time, Peter took his leave of us, his iPod ear buds firmly in his ears, a muscular impatience evident in his aggressive stride.

"There goes one man,"  Willie observed, "who got no help from his coffee."

You, who more often than not do get help from your morning coffee, scanned the treetops, the surrounding rooftops, the vagrant seagulls seeking some breakfast help from a rack of nearby dumpsters.  Things were talking to you.  There were voices inside and outside you head.  What a splendid day to listen.

The Writer as Cowboy: Mon Semblance, Mon Frere

You approach sentences the way a cowboy regards a herd of cattle.  It is probable that your politics and philosophical views have wide chasms between them, nevertheless you share a vision based on your having each amassed a useful experience each according to his trade.  How ever wide the chasm of ideology between you, there is a uniting semblance of brotherhood.

You are no more surprised to see a word having broken from the pack, caught out in an awkward trope or phrase from which there is no easy return, than the cowboy, when he spots the stray, separated from the herd, anxious for a return to the comfort of safety.

Words stray for a number of reasons, all having direct connection to you.  Perhaps you had not been as alert as you might have been when a certain point of grammar was demonstrated.  Worse yet, you may not have cared when the point was demonstrated, the bored, aspiring neurosurgeon turning down an invitation to assist at a tonsillectomy. You may have wondered, What difference will predicate nominatives make in the life you hope to lead?

You may have placed the word now gone astray in a particular order with instinctive awareness that it did not, in American English usage, belong where you'd put it.  No matter; you'd felt the buzz and tingle of risk as you parachuted it down behind enemy lines, where it would send messages--exciting messages--beyond its meaning.

But now, the buzz and tingle are gone.  The excitement at the placement have departed like the audience at a boring lecture.  The message you get from the word now is:  I am lost.  Come get me.  Send money.

You may have placed the word reflexively, because you always use it in a similar context.  Or, you may have used the word to avoid using a growing roster of words you have come to dislike because they do not, in your opinion, carry their own weight of meaning, but rely instead on their neighbors.  Examples:  very, such, interesting, sad.  What do they mean?  How helpful are they?  Can they be done without?  These words--and others like them--are the lounge lizards of narrative.  They lay about, sleek, tanned, their literary equivalents of whitened teeth glinting in the sun of an otherwise vivid, meaningful sentence, waiting to be noticed.

Nice as it is to be noticed with admiration for their perfect smile, this is not the effect you wish your sentences to provide, the aggregate effect you wish to convey.  And so, when the time comes, you, like the cowboy, ride forth, looking for strays, his of the stranded calf, your target the strays of sleekness, suntan, and whitened teeth.

Who was that masked man?

In the Event

Event is as essential to story as characters and their motives are; it serves as a constant reminder to writer,character, and, of course, to reader:  Without event, story has gone off on a holiday or, if the setting is in France, story has gone on strike and is even now manning the picket lines.

A group of characters sitting about at, say, a dinner, as Julian Barnes has done with such clever effect, is often sufficient to be an event, tumbling forward into story at the merest provocation.  Hence, event is provocation, a slight edge bursting to the head of the line in dialogue, a misinterpreted gesture, an apparent weakness revealed that one character attempts to capitalize upon while, at the same time, another character attempts damage control.

Event becomes your personal seasoning of a stew you are asked to taste test; it comes to you in essence bland because all its ingredients, however organic, cancel one another, creating a negativity of democratic correctness.  Your job is to give it an undemocratic, authoritative presence, which may well be felt in the form of a surprise as a pungent, spicy invasion that prickles the tongue and causes the eyes to fill with tears.

You know you are in an event when the tide, the potential outcome, the original intent all seem to be drifting if not outright racing away from you and your compulsive desire to control.  You have, after all, put in some time toward developing technique (but, alas,not yet enough time--never enough time--taking risks), and so you think to surf the waves of technique.  Hear this:  Technique alone does not get it.  You need to dive into the event that is story, descending beyond your normal level of safety.  You need to feel the same kind of fear you feel when you were out on the town and had a few drinks with some friends.  Now you are driving home, startled by the red light behind you.  Yes, of course you are relieved when it turned out the black-and-white behind you merely wanted to get around you, but yes, of course, your heart is still thumping because although you feel in control, you wonder what the outcome might have been had you been stopped.  You want that feeling in your writing.

Even though you are only fooling around, doing the literary equivalent of sitting at a piano and playing "Chopsticks" at a party, there is somewhere within you the solemn, almost robotic presence of Sviataslav Richter, approaching the piano and playing the same, silly "Chopsticks" in such elegant grace that it brings tears to the eyes of the audience.

There are not that many templates for story, so your templates have to have events that will have taken you somewhere you had not anticipated visiting, and you will have gone to that place and returned with a gift for yourself and the reader.  Think what it did to you the first time you heard someone with chops play Ravel's "Jeux d'eau."  Think what it did to you the first time you heard Coltrane doing "Giant Steps."  Remember how you felt that night you sat at a side table in The Jazz Workshop in San Francisco, and heard Coltrane play "My Favorite Things," which you'd listened to dozens of times on LP, then think of the hundreds of times he'd played it before he played it that night.

It is too easy to use technique as a means of coasting.  Go where technique cannot save you, cannot bail you out, cannot call you home for dinner.  Go where you have potentials for failure you have not yet experienced.  Then get up and rewrite the event.

Editorial Notes on You

You see G. three or four times a month, at Peet's, the large coffee shop on upper State Street, although you first met him in his office about two miles away, when you were advised  to consult him for a second opinion.

G. has become in many ways the embodiment of the second opinion for you because he seems as concerned about it as you do, whenever you have reason to consider one.

He began his career as a teacher, but began to have second thoughts about that profession, thus his return to school, his application to medical school, his purposeful gravitation to oncology. You have had many long,satisfying conversations with him, but he has never so much as written a prescription for you.

It comes to you that you are comparing editing with oncology, further that you are making the observation that it is easier to say no to chemotherapy than it is to editorial suggestions.

Perhaps because you have been, so to speak, in the business yourself, you are relatively--say a nine on a ten-point scale--non-defensive about your own work being edited, listening to the suggestions and weighing potential result.

When it was G's time to speak to you about the potential result on you were you to indulge a course of chemotherapy, it was easy to use that lovely Latin word applied in matters of editorial suggestion: Stet--let it stand (as it is).  Instead of telling G. stet, you said, See you at Peet's.  You have looked back on that decision with comfort over the ninety-odd months since you made it.

Answers you are comfortable with are not necessarily answers free of risk, thus the awareness that you are often as comfortable as it is humanly possible to be with risk in the picture.

You have not had notably bad advice from editors or professionals associated with cancer.  Through your associations with both, you life has been changed; you were not the same person coming out as you were going in.  There have been some, shall we say, rerouting of your bodily parts as, indeed, there have been rerouting of your paragraphs, pages, entire concepts.  You have been edited on a number of levels to the point where you are comfortable with the changes that have been wrought.

No one you see on any regular basis has commented that you appear any different than before you were, shall we say, bodily edited.  They have properly concluded that the thinning of what was once a great curly mop of hair just above your forehead was the consequence of male pattern thinning.   They do not, when talking of you, say, Lowenkopf has been edited.  Although when you sometimes see A, the surgeon who did some artful rearranging, you thank him for the editing job. Nor can you think of any time at all when a reader has told you that a particular work of yours had been much improved or, contrarily, much made more opaque or leaden because of editing.

You are out on the streets, looking about, enjoying the sights, the flowers, the ladies, and ah, the music.  You are editing your own work and the work of others.  Few individuals except A and G and, on occasion, the Techs who assist you through your yearly scan, know the extent to which you have been edited.

It has become the perfect equation.

A Return Visit to an Old Neighborhood

Whether the individual in question is a client, retaining you as a freelance editor; a student often at the graduate level; a member of your writing workshop (which is quite selective about who it lets in); or an author who you have inherited through your direct connection with a literary agent or a publisher, there is every likelihood that the individual, at the editorial review, is going to behave more like a lawyer than a writer.

By this comparison, you think of the lawyer, having looked up a particular decision, a particular civil or criminal code to slap down on the table as a precedent for allowing said writer to get away with something the author knew was wrong in the first place but has, nevertheless, become defensive about in the immediate second place.

Example:

Writer, pointing at a passage in a printed book (too soon in the game for Kindles of eReaders to be brought into play.  But watch out.)  "What about this?  Right here."  Tapping the page with authority.  "Faulkner does it right here and you say I can't."

Example:

"So big deal, this is a point-of-view violation.  William Trevor does it all the time."

You want to say he doesn't violate anything at all because he freaking writes in an omniscient point of view so skillful that you think you can do it too.  But you let a nod of acknowledgment suffice because, after all, you are leading up to something, aren't you?

Example:

You only moments ago pointed out to a writer that little, if anything, in the way of action has occurred within the opening pages of a novel, whereupon the writer delivers the second most common statement made by a writer upon editorial review.  "The action is coming in the very next page."  When you point out that the next page would be a splendid place at which to consider beginning the novel, you can see the author searching rapidly through his brain, as though rummaging in a bureau drawer for a matching sock.  "Kate Atkinson didn't introduce her protagonist, Jackson Brodie, until the seventy-fifth page of Started Early, Took My Dog."

But, you are thinking as you nod your head, she had story going in the first line.

You have come to know these gambits, arguments, and comparisons, not because you have seen them in action so many times, but because you, too, began with that argumentative bent, that cocksure awareness of having read a number of books and stories with enough diligence and focus to convince you you could argue your way into acceptance.

Almost without exception, those precedent-setting examples argued before you have been executed by men and women writers of good faith, in fact such good faith that the works of theirs that have been cited to you as such egregious examples of breaking rules or conventions were examples culled from second, third, possibly even fourth novels.  All of this is to say that it generally requires a first book or story to demonstrate awareness of current conventions as an ante to get into the game.  Then it requires that remarkable stroke of fortune in which the project earns back its venture costs within a reasonable period of time after publication.

Then you can, if you still require euphemisms, experiment with form; you can mess with point of view.  Moby-Dick was not Herman Melville's first novel.  You'd have some grounds for arguing that all the "stuff" about whales and whaling contributed to the novel's relatively poor reception.  Earlier Melville work had handsome if not extravagant results.

The writer who has been given editorial notes that do not square with his or her original vision has one final line of attack, reminding you often of those Captain Horatio Hornblower novels in which one of Her Majesty's warships positions itself to deliver a series of broadsides to the enemy vessel.  "You're always stressing the need to read,"  the author says, watching to see if you realize the trap you've set for yourself.  "How is it that when I follow the technique I've read in someone else's work, I'm told it doesn't apply to me?"

Aha.  That's the very point.  We do not read in order to copy.  We read in order to observe, then do better.  Doing better, among other things, means doing something in such a way that the effect--not the technique--is noticed.  Doing better means taking us somewhere beyond the example we've used for inspiration.

As a young person, walking home from Hancock Park Elementary School, Fairfax Avenue at the southeast corner of Third Street, mid-city, Los Angeles, you and a cadre of daredevils headed homeward, south.  Between Fourth Street and Fifth were two streets, Colgate and Drexel, running perpendicular to Fairfax, extending from west to east.  At the time, they were filled with single-dwelling houses, all of which had garages in the rear.  It was your heading home practice to visit any number of these garages, finding ways to climb to their roof, then jump from it, landing in a convenient patch of lawn.  There was something particularly fulfilling in the moment your feet touched the ground and, following what you'd learned from your jumping activity, falling into a roll that seemed miraculously to have absorbed the shock of the landing.  You were not alone in the tendency to giggle as your feet touched ground and you dropped into a roll on the sweet-smelling grass.

Neither you nor your friends were leaping from garage roofs with any thought of flying or even pretending you were paratroopers.  There was the occasional risk of being caught, which simply meant being shooed away and being told not to come back here again.

But you knew you'd be back.  If not tomorrow, then the next day.



Sure enough, you became a writer.  You didn't realize it at the time, could scarcely articulate the how and why of it to yourself.  You were learning to jump off taller garages.

The Bouncer

In so many ways, the analogy grows between gaining admission to a trendy restaurant or nightclub and getting one's manuscript beyond the bouncers at the door, which is to say the low-pay or no-pay interns who filter the patently unusable mss, and into the hands of an editor who either has contract authority or knows how to build within her organization a coalition that will allow her to contract.

At some point, self-publishing may even become an option, although, thanks to the Library of Congress putting certain limitation kibosh on LC numbers and CIP data, that, too, leads us down the primrose path toward the coyotes.

Much in the manner of those unscrupulous ones who herd illegal immigrants in over the border, literary coyotes await, offering shepherding services, making you smile at the irony.  Not all that long ago, you sat across the table from a shepherd, watching said shepherd  pounding six-dollar glasses of pinot grigio because, hey, business is good.

A significant reason business is good is the sale of character profiles, sets of questions the writer should know the answers to if, indeed, the writer wishes to enhance the potential for the manuscript being seated inside the restaurant instead of being left outside.  Character profiles are lists of dumb things the writer is challenged to know about his or her characters, things such as favorite foods, favorite colors, allergies, dog or cat person, even gay or straight, GOP or Dem, as though knowing this entire of litany of things before the fact will add significant dimension to the character as said character comes off the assembly line.

What, you might well ask,is the fact before which you speak?  That fact is the fact of knowing what the character wants,possibly even why, but for certain, what that character will do to achieve the goal.

Another thing to know about characters, offered here, gratis in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods, free in some English-speaking neighborhoods, and politically independent in more conservative English-speaking neighborhoods,where the word "free" wither as noun or verb, tends to produce bat-shit crazy behavior.  Do the characters have any kind of inner life relevant to the story at hand?  A character with an inner life is more likely to turn the simplest plot into a layer cake of complexity, which, surprisingly enough, is what many readers want.

There is a cadre of men and women writing today who are producing in consistent quantity and quality works in which their characters have inner lives, agendas, and, for want of a term you'll have to coin a definition for one of these days soon, a psychological profile.  Ego armature has suddenly come to your mind because the ego is the armature about which is wrapped the strands of past history, goals, quirks, flaws, and those pesky triggers that are set off when the character least expects it, due to some buried stimulus.  Writers such as Louise Erdrich, Richard Price, Karen Russell, Dennis Lehane, Cynthia Ozick, Kate Atkinson, and by no means least of them, George Pelecanos, whose most recent novel, The Cut, is nothing less than an ensemble cast of characters with inner lives, including a few who have relatively few lines of dialogue.

Characters "acquire" inner lives by having preferences, which is one of the reason these easy-to-come-by personality tests on sale over the Internet at first seem so attractive.  They promise to do the work for the writer and the absolute fact is that the writer cannot delegate authority; the writer has to develop the traits and qualities, which must then be observed throughout the arc of the entire story.  These traits and qualities govern, direct, perhaps even control the character every moment that character has any relevance for the story.

Ah, story; glad you brought that up.  Moments before you began this essay, a student from at least three years back, emailed you to remind you of your take on an opening chapter he'd sent you about a month ago.  You went on at some length about the opening chapter NOT being a suitable place for auxiliary verbs in that such tropes as "had felt" or "had wanted" refer to past action, which should not get in the way of the opening scenes of a story because past action is of no value until the reader is down with the character.  One way around that would be to begin with Arnold seeing Sasha standing in line at Starbucks, approaching her, greeting her, and telling her "I have to ask you something," and then her reply, either, "Not again, Arnold." or "How many times do I have to tell you?"  Okay, whether Arnold is asking Sasha to marry him, go out with him, go to bed with him, or any combination of the three, we see story in action.  This time, you'd sent the former student a note in which you told him that of all the pages he'd sent you, there were some lovely descriptions, but no story nor any hint of a story.

The student's reply was classic.  You have lost track of the times you have heard his response over the years.  Oh, funny you should mention that.  It's there on the very next page.

Politely, you think, you told him, thinking another, subtext delivery all the while, Perhaps that's where you should begin.  TFS.