Two Small Prepositions

The difference between two prepositions, “at” and “to,” becomes the fulcrum for successful storytelling in the twenty-first century.

What you mean by “successful;” is itself idiosyncratic.  What was successful in storytelling terms in the remote past of the twentieth century has already lost some of its patina.  We do know—and you do believe—that success in those particular terms in the twentieth century was at a remove from what it is now, scarcely an eighth of the way into the newer century.

You will, of course, get to those distinctions, using as your wedge those two propositions, at and to.

Nineteenth- and twentieth century readers were accustomed to having stories directed “at” them, directed more or less as descriptions and, as a result, possible to skip over, skim, ignore, or, worse even yet, believe you’d grasped.  Directed stories land in the vicinity of the reader; they may capture complete reader attention or only a portion of reader focus.

With some remarkable exceptions in mind—Jane Austen, for instance, or George Elliot, or Virginia Woolf, and perhaps you’ll allow William Faulkner in there as well==the preposition “to” did not apply with great specificity to readers; writers were still in the habit of including the literary equivalents of footnotes, stage directions, and explanations to readers.

Conventions for telling story undergo change while story remains more or less what it has always been—the techniques for conveying it have evolved, moved closer to the dramatic material itself and the audience on the receiving end.

How does this shift appear before us?

At one point in the early history of the medium, the author, knowingly or not, took on the role of a narrator, a chorus, or some filter, in effect reciting the story in ways similar to the ancient poets, those proto-Homers who recited The Iliad or The Odyssey, describing, using language and delivery to convey a sense of presence.

These ancients spoke at the audience; they told us what to believe.  If the story were interesting and the delivery was presented at the proper degree of plausible sincerity, the audience had cultural incentives to take these elements in as an appropriate approximation or actuality; the audience found no problem believing the emotions hinted at and evoked.

Now, the audience is accustomed to having the story envelope them, take them in with its immediacy.  The audience wishes to experience for themselves what the characters are feeling, without having the narrative points thrust on them as though they protective garments pressed upon children on rainy days.  The audience thus wishes to have the story happen to them, to experience both the sensual and philosophical darts being thrown at them as they are thrown in everyday life.

Having the benefit of past convention and dramatic traditions, the contemporary audience may sense something wrong without being able to articulate the resulting mismatch of hearing a modern story being rendered in nineteenth- or early twentieth-century conventions.

You are by cultural preference and by self-directed study more comfortable with reading late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century narrative.  To the extent you have favored some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, you have less difficulty accommodating to the narrative conventions of those styles.  To the extent that their grasp of dramatic technique seems remote to you, there is less chance you will be able to read such writers to any degree of intimacy that could be argued as close.  The devil maybe in the details but the division comes with the arrival of the narration.

You are willing to have it described to you because, as you were coming up, you read much earlier works than such classics as the Sinclair Lewis novels or the Steinbeck.  For all he was a stylistic entrepreneur, Ernest Hemingway was seldom mired in the engines of his style to the point where readers were left neither knowing nor caring what the characters wished or what they were willing to do to achieve their wishes.

How good you would have felt, knowing these salient facts when you were confronting ways to tell the stories you wished at the time to tell.  Because you were, in fact, still listening to the conventions of your earlier times, you would have paid only scant heed to anything as small and apparently notional as a few prepositions.  You would not have recognized these prepositions as the plastic card contemporary equivalent of the earlier key to the hotel room.

You’d have not been able to gain entrance and without clue of how to proceed.

   

A Beginning, a Muddle, and an End

The fabled New Yorker magazine perches at a tip of the literary triangle much envied by such competitors as The Paris Review, Granta, and Tin House.  Even readers who hold no brief for New Yorker—flat out do not like it or anything it represents—are aware of its presence.  The magazine is thus a presence to be scorned, admired, envied, entry to its pages sought by a larger percentage of working writers than could be accommodated.

Within these iconic pages, and in addition to the weekly “game” of seeing how many of the cartoons one “gets,” is yet another edgy template of sophistication, the weekly short story.

A significant presence in the first-generation New Yorker staff cadre, Wolcott Gibbs, eternally famous for his trenchant essays and his robust taking to the mat of the narrative style of Time Magazine, ventured one of the better descriptions of the New Yorker short story you have ever heard, related to you by Gibbs’s son, Tony, who also put some time in on staff.  “Take a typical short story by the likes of O. Henry.  Remove the first two pages, delete the last two pages, then send us what remains and we will, by God, publish it.”

The observation, although fanciful, had the right amount of seriousness and plausibility, its tone anticipating the ring of authenticity resonant in the narrative voice of the accomplished contemporary humorist, Stephen Colbert.

New Yorker short stories are uniformly provocative, as steadfast in their pursuit of uniqueness as possible.  You have seen a wide variety of voices and styles appearing in those pages of finicky, almost fussy determination that New Yorker fiction shall be as difficult to pin down as, say, Mitt Romney is difficult to define.  Opaque is an adjective seemingly designed for their fiction.

Endings seem to want to be as far away from the comedic endings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction as can be had, nevertheless leaving some residue of sensory awareness not unlike the after burn of a freshly ground horseradish.  Beginnings, although more in line with the conventional tug of a destabilizing event or attitude, identify some individual in enough hot water to make many readers concerned enough to continue reading through the next tier of complications.

You, for some time, have called middles muddles, perhaps even reaching that state of pun truth from the hundreds of stories you’ve read in that remarkable publication.

The ending is supposed to leave the reader with some emotion relevant to the theme of the story but also reflective of the accurate nature of reality as opposed to the   literary housecleaning associated with idealized endings.
The ideal of early and mid-twentieth-century fiction was to reflect a certain happy-if-strained state in which the values many conservative politicians praise in lofty abstractions allow contentment and fulfillment to trickle down.

Not any more.

Almost as though it were some adjunct of street photography, the contemporary short story is dramatizing the uncertainties, the loose ends, the missed connections, the agreements that are not agreements because the individuals are agreeing to different things.

In many ways, the modern short story begins where earlier stories end, at some basis of resolution or plateau, followed by erosion, destabilization, or entropy.

In yet other ways, life has become the art of The New Yorker short story, tart, edgy, not demonstrating any clear path to resolution, leaving you to wonder if you are still the bottle is half full person you were in your youth or whether you have had to negotiate your endings to those where the best chance of satisfaction is the knowledge that you have done the best you can.

You are living in a particular time of stress and turmoil, with its own particular symptoms, but you cannot imagine day-to-day activity was any better two hundred years ago when Jane Austen poured the final measures of her remarkable talent into Persuasion, which is your favorite of all her works.  There were notable similarities between those days and the mise en scene of which you write these lines today.

Curiosity

  What makes a story work?
What causes people to look up from a conversation or a drink or meal when a particular individual enters a room?
What draws a bee or hummingbird to one flower in a bed of similar flowers?
What makes us care about one person, place, or thing and not care about other persons, places, or things in equal measure?
What makes us care about a character who may “live” in a remote culture and/or another historical era?
Where is the boundary between curiosity on the one hand and attention to the immediate task on the other hand?
Why are we as a species so often engaged in internal and external civil wars?
What would it be like not to care about any or all of the previous questions?
Why is curiosity thought to be the metaphorical instrument that killed the metaphorical cat?
Have you ever seen a non-curious cat?

Curiosity is the itch within the brain; it pesters us to find out why, how, when, where, possibly even whom.  Curiosity is the human equivalent of a dog, attempting to scratch a rug, carpet, sofa, even a wooden floor into submission.  Most of us who care about dogs have figured the connection with the dog pawing and circling before it settles down.  Some of us have reached the point of assuming a constant level of wonderment, of what it, of, go ahead, say it, of curiosity about the self, about others, about the cosmos.

Curiosity is the thing that forestalls sleep at night; sometimes sneaking into the dream state to inject glimpses of forbidden solutions which, upon waking, we are somewhat shaken to realize we’d entertained on some level.  Yes, that includes sex, argumentativeness, sorrow, certainly fear and its BFF, dread.

Without curiosity, there would be no story, no invention, no shortcut or alternate route; there would be no regret, recrimination, enormous satisfaction or graveyards of bad ideas, inventions that perhaps did what they were designed to do, but in the process made their intended purpose seem silly.

Without curiosity, there would be no accidents, some of which prove to be disasters while others yet prove to benefit humanity in remarkable ways.

A character who ventures into a story without curiosity will be seen to be timid, conservative, lacking the qualities to carry a narrative on his or her shoulders, perhaps from the fear of “things” getting out of hand or an unwillingness to challenge the mighty, often impenetrable weight of logical progression.

Curiosity will be seen as having no brief for precedent, wishing instead to strike out on its own, distractions be damned, discovery for its own sake.  In fact, in some scholastic incidents, curiosity maybe seen as the enemy of an on-task discipline, where a task—any task—represents the ends, disciplined application the means, and curiosity the distraction, because who knows where the distraction will lead.

Curiosity may become a partner to impatience if we are momentarily involved with an individual who is led off on her own vector of curiosity, while we are left waiting their pleasure.  If we are the distracted, digressive one, we run the risk of explosive reaction to someone who is impatient, waiting for us to finish our inquiry.

The image of the “pure” scientist persists, she or he who follows a line of inquiry regardless of its final destination.  To a similar extent, the musical player who embarks on a course of improvisation is following a similar course.  So, too, the writer who is not bound by the metaphorical albatross of an outline, in which the outcome is set and now the resolution is adjusted to make as plausible-seeming a result as possible.

In so many ways, you set forth on journeys of wondering how a thing would be, aware by now, as you more or less have since your late twenties, that a resolution is never as you anticipated; the resolution is much better or much worse than you projected.  Indeed, sometimes it is better than your dire worse prediction or worse than your best anticipation.

To put curiosity into a workable platform, you must begin by caring.  The next step is the awareness that caring may mean dread as well as excited anticipation.  You must dread an event or outcome or you must have high hopes for it.  Not caring doesn’t work here.

You must launch forth.  As Walt Whitman put it, “Now voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find.

You wonder if that works.  

Change

Change begins with the discovery that you have been doing something the same way over a span of time, say the amount of time it takes you to fill the shopping-bag type conveyance your laundry gives you to transport your shirts to them.  

In this case, you have uncontestable proof you’ve been wearing shirts with blue patterns, shades, and overtones.  Nothing wrong with blue patterns, shades, and overtones, except for the observation that you have shirts whose characteristic hues tend toward brown, orange, green—even a few of yellow and peach propensity.

Change, in that case, is a signal to review different kinds of books, eat a different restaurants, try other coffee shops, take Victoria Street home instead of Micheltorena Street, take your evening walk west instead of south, switch to eggs for breakfast for a time, buy green grapes instead of read, switch from Anjou pears to Bosc, try rappini as your principal pasta ingredient as opposed to the habit you’d get into with broccolini, listen to Ravel instead of Mozart, big band instead of trios and quartets.

Change means giving other factors within yourself a voice, even to the point of replacing some of the favorite words in your vocabulary—perfervid, say, or oleaginous, or prolepsis, even slowing down a bit on vast, disingenuous, bullshit, calamitous, and gerund-as-adjectival iterations of fuck—in favor of other worthwhile candidates to express the existential joys, sorrows, doubts, and abstractions with which you form relationships.
Vocabulary is no small thing to change any more than things or individuals with whom you fall in love are less than significant.

Truth is, although experience often dictates to the contrary, there are any number of splendid words out there, music to be absorbed, books to be read, poems to be memorized, remarkable things to put on pasta (Greek olives, for instance, crumbles of goat cheese, and the fruity arbosana olive oil you discovered only yesterday, not to mention the red and yellow peppers you bought at the farmer’s market because you were so taken by their color) persons to fall in love with, and stories to write.

 Additional truth is that there have been times in your lifespan where you have recognized and in emotional if not legal ceremony adopted certain preferences, traits, even qualities from which you mean never to part.  

These acquisitions, these acquired traits, define you as well as the things you see yourself hard wired into.  They have effect on the changes and recasting of priorities you make from time to time, but they in no way make you unrecognizable to those who knew you before you decided to rearrange the furniture.

All about you, there is change.  Your most favorite use of the concept is musical, as chord progressions in the jazz genre of be-bop are called changes.  Instead of a musician asking if he knows the chord patterns of a particular melodic line, he will ask, “Do you know the changes on How High the Moon?”  

Years ago, many, many years, you were in a crowded lecture hall at UCLA, where Andre Previn, still young in his emerging genius, was lecturing about the chord progressions in be-bop.  He played several bars of a Charlie Parker song you’d heard hundreds of times, Donna Lee.  “This melodic line represents the changes on a familiar old song,” Previn said.  “Anyone recognize it?”  In a flash, you came closer to understanding be-bop than ever before, because, within that flash, you’d been led to see.  Before you had time to think about it, you called out, Back Home Again in Indiana. Every bit as surprised as you were delighted when Previn nodded, you felt the joy of seeing differences beyond your ability to describe them.  “Exactly,” he said.  “Let’s listen again so you can see how the changes work.”  He cued up Donna Lee, set the stylus down, and you began to hear Charlie Parker’s inventive understanding of changes and their remarkable effects.

Change reflects not only your own growth but as well the growth of things and individuals about you.  Change reflects the general ability to understand, the drift toward greater understanding, and the abandonment of things we no longer need to understand. These are all, essentially, separate journeys of growth and change, but in that odd, wonderful way of synecdoche, where the whole becomes a symbol of the part or the part reflects the totality, much of it is there for you to observe and experience.  You may be drawn to other things, places, individuals; they may be attracted to you.  Always there remains the potential for repulsion as well.

You step forward with undying gratitude toward the things you have changed from and those you change toward.  So long as there is change, things will grow.  So long as you change, even if it is as minor as switching to the green shirts for a time, you stand a chance.

Disclosure

From time to time when reviewing a book for your weekly column or some one-off assigned review, you feel the duty to add a note of disclosure.  The author is a personal friend; you are a member of the same faculty, you have had a previous association of rancor, ideological difference, or some elephant in some living room you wish the reader of the review to be aware of.  By use of the disclosure, you are alerting the reader to some bias favoring the author or the author’s reputation, or perhaps favoring you and, if not your reputation then your sense of pride in your powers of critical analysis.

No such disclosures are necessary in fiction, which of itself is a major reason for your preference for fiction.  At the same time, you are ratifying the belief that the writer not only must present some form of bias, the writer can scarcely avoid doing so.

Nevertheless, many writers at all levels of technical achievement persist in the attempt to maintain a rigorous objectivity, a condition of equal misguided footing to the emerging writers who render characters in extremes of good or evil, with no tolerance for that all-too-human state in between wherein the truly despicable are truly kind and altruistic and the likes of Mother Teresa and Desmond Tutu kick cats.

In recent months, because of a combination of editing your own work, editing the fiction of clients, or attempting to teach fiction writing at intermediate and advanced levels, your focus has been on how point of view has evolved from nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction to the present day narrative which, in increasing numbers, has brought the story and the narrator seemingly closer together than ever before, at the least to the point where there no longer seems to be an authorial aura hanging over the story, by which means the author is able to filter emotions, explanations, and reasons.

This information, you maintain, is vital to story in general.  You also argue that the information must come filtered through the characters, evoked as opposed to being described by character and/or narrator.

“It was hot that August night.  Mary felt the drops of perspiration starting at her forehead.”  Wrong, you say.  Whenever a sentence begins with it—sorry, Bulwer-Lytton, sorry, Dickens—the author or the author’s appointed second is stepping on stage to address the reader.  “Mary did not like these hot, sweaty August nights,” allows us the narrative conceit of funneling the information through Mary so that we may believe we are privy to Mary’s feelings rather than being told what they are.

While this narrative shift is evolving about us, another is appearing, yet is not remarked upon to any noticeable degree:  Conclusions and endings are less conclusive and seemingly less emphatic in their finality.  Some short fiction, particularly short fiction appearing in magazines, may in addition to their opaque resolution, may arrive at the end of their text at the exact bottom of a page, whereupon the next page is often a large advertisement or the headline and author by-line for another narrative, at which point the reader knits a brow, then complains, “That’s it?  That’s where the story stops?”

With increasing frequency, the answer is in fact, “Yes; that’s where the story stops.”  Of equal frequency is the narrative, editorial, and, of course, authorial intention that the reader will internally add to the narrative.  We all of us seem to be saying that although there are senses of finality in quotidian activity, some of them are baffling, inconclusive, uncertain.  Some are frustrating, others yet are provoking.  Welcome to the simulacrum.  Welcome to life meets story.  Welcome to story meets life.

Many of the interesting individuals you know in what passes for Real Life, the outer narrative, the day-to-day drama, are fond of the use in their own oral narrative of the phrase, “But that’s another story.”  Even they can see the tidal chart equivalent of story, the wax and wane.

Has the species trivialized story by snipping of a chunk of its tail, thereby in metaphor trivializing life, the narrative on which story is based?

A portion of you grapples with such matters each time you stride out beyond a sentence or two,

In case you’d forgotten, a disclosure is called for at this point:  When writing short stories, you have frequently written past the point where the story ultimately ends, attempting to tack last scene upon last scene onto the scene-ending line, sometimes writing five or six botched or inappropriate final scenes before the awareness forced itself upon you:  You’d already finished the story.

Trying to add explanations or meanings beyond the point of necessity is a distraction.  Upper among definitions for the term "Anticlimax" is "an unnecessary distraction."  False clues, red herrings, and hidden agendas are mischievous distractions.  The former muddy story; the latter give it a sense of plausibility.

Take your choice.

The Bronx Cheer Reflex

When you pause to consider the many components necessary to produce the briefest story, a natural leap of conjecture for you is the even greater enormity of elements present in you or any of the species from which you come.

How easy, in that context, to look upon the men and women you admire, wondering by how many vital components they outnumber you; which qualities do they have and to what degree, and is this a fair index by which to judge?

You grew up amid the “screw loose” trope, where an individual of demonstrable eccentricity was judged to have a connecting piece that was not as tightened in place as it might be.  In recent years, the metaphor of “two bricks shy of a load,” intended to mean a more exquisite metaphor of personal lack, has become the trampoline for an imaginative run of description.  Your own favorite in this context is “two ants short of a picnic,” but you have nodded approval at any number of others.

The important recognition inherent in such metaphor is the innumerable components required to produce a functioning, creative human being.  You could extend the metaphor:  an individual is a vast, complex mosaic, wherein the individual pieces have appeal and beauty because of their separateness, then combine or maybe seen to combine as some larger, yet more remarkable beauty.  The human being and the single mosaic tile now join metaphoric hands; the drop of water recognizes the ocean.

Both mosaic tile and human component need some kind of glue to keep them in proper, which is to say useful, format.  Proper glue in the mosaic is some form of cement.  Some psychologists have called the human equivalent ego supplement.

When the cement in a mosaic tires or becomes compromised, one or more of the tiles may disengage.  When the ego supplement in an individual loses its grip—remember the expression, “Get a grip on yourself?”—some of the components lose contact with the motherboard, resulting in a different flavor to the performance.  Such symptoms as “Not firing on all cylinders” come to mind.  Whether the mosaic or the individual or both are under diagnosis, the patient is now seen as missing some quality or attribute.

Same thing applies to a smaller, lesser mosaic or, to use the current descriptor for humans brought to term without all the standard equipment, a challenged person.

This entire line of self-diagnosis was brought about by a response you found yourself giving when, after accepting an invitation to a gathering, being informed of the attendance of an individual you find annoying, your remark to yourself was the equivalent of a Bronx cheer.  After a moment, you queried yourself, wondering at what approximate emotional age you were when producing that response.

Six, you told yourself.  Best case, seven.

Being that there are emotional age six times that still feel good, you in quick order devised this mosaic theory, wondering how many of the multitudinous mosaic tiles that comprise you were currently residing at an age under puberty, an age where whoopee cushions, jokes about bodily functions, and a general rebelliousness rule the emotional roost.

For some considerable time, no one has suggested you act your age (and even were they to do so, you’d have a difficult time deciding how your age should act).  This does not always mean you are in fact behaving according to the standard perception of how your age should act.  You like to think you are not.  This has little relationship to actual numbers and more to do with an operating philosophy.  While it is true that the years you spent in junior high school were dreadful, particularly in comparison to years spent in the fifth and sixth grades, you also observe how any age carries with it a potential for being “a bad time,” leaving you at the mercy of some circumstances and your own ingenuity.  There was, in fact, a difficult spell in your later twenties, one in your early fifties.  In each case, you were aware of having evolved to a say in the matter.

Not more than a few weeks ago, a dear, longtime friend of about your years asked you one of those “When did you stop beating your wife?” questions.  “What,” he asked, “do you do to deal with your night terrors?”

You paused for a long, difficult think.  By its very length, your silence conveyed an impression polar from the one you’d decided upon.  Thinking had dug a hole for you.  No sense trying to convince him you had no night terrors other than the occasional regret at having too much dessert.

Your mosaic is doing well, thank you.  Your world is filled with enough activity to keep you more than engaged.  You are about to become overwhelmed with books once again.  You have near crushes on too many ladies.  There are writing projects acting out in armed rebellion, seven classes a week, a schedule filled with speaking engagements, a refreshing number of individuals whose company you admire, and now that you think of it, a refreshing number of individuals close at hand and on a more global level whom the merest thought of produces within your psyche the Bronx cheer reflex.

Some things within the mosaic have no use-by date.

Making Things More Difficult for Your Characters

Because you were self-taught as a writer for so long, taking bits and pieces of technique from stories you’d read rather than from books instructing you how to write stories, you gave little overview to process other than the act of getting the material down with as much speed and deliberation as possible.  The first emphatic awareness of technique came as you began to understand that there were times when narrative would grow—characters would do things that might well surprise you.

Because you developed an early fondness for F. Scott Fitzgerald (without understanding his social goals and dynamic), you “borrowed” his narrative habit of making observations about the human condition.  Many of his early observations remain with you to this day because of their acuity.  He was born in the nineteenth century, a few years before your father.

Fitzgerald was a generation before you in his grip on narrative convention, light years beyond you in observation, discipline, and use of his ability.  You were in some ways the embodiment of one of his more note worthy narrators, Nick Caraway, so far as naiveté was concerned.  You saw him tell in many cases where younger writers dramatized; because he did so with what you considered remarkable skill, you tried to narrate the same way.  Right for him, even in his less-than-successful attempts such as Tender Is the Night, wrong for you.  Wrong.

Nevertheless.

You were recruited at the university hire with the notion that at least one of your courses would deal with the need to recognize one’s narrative voice, how to identify, then expand on that expression of dramatic information.

Thus no surprise when, first quarter, the catalogue reads:

LITERATURE CS 102, Section 3

Instructor(s): Shelly Lowenkopf
Time(s): Tuesday and Thursday, 6:00 pm - 7:20 pm
Place(s): Bldg. 494, Rm. 143
CLICK HERE FOR COURSE REQUIREMENTS
AND DESCRIPTION
EC # 27086 DEVELOPING A WRITING VOICE AND PRESENCE
You were led to believe the students, though in their early twenties, would be well read and confident in their information rather than arrogant with what passes for useful information, perhaps even defensive in the presentation of the information.

Your students’ abilities were not misrepresented.  Their alert, unsuspicious brightness was evident as you led them into a discussion of the nature of characters and how those characters are best brought to life.  For many of them, creation of character meant basing characters on some part of themselves.  A few admitted to branching out, reaching to borrowing a trait from some real life individual, another trait from someone else.  One or two even confessed (the word used advisedly because the admission was made with some sense of having perhaps overstepped a boundary.

How relieved they seemed when you, with some fustian, attempted to disabuse them.

You were in a large sense re-disabusing yourself, reminding yourself of what you’d had to come by through the trial and error of creating too many flat, inconsequential characters who scarcely had enough inner depth and turmoil to fill a single dimension.

The trust and relief you saw in the students’ eyes quickly shifted to nervousness and uncertainty as you spoke of the need to get in there and beat their characters up a bit, treat them as though the Fates or Reality had agendas against these individual characters.

This produced nervous laughter.

Wait, you thought.  Wait until they read the first two chapters of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.    Wait until, some time over the weekend, they’ll have read Bartleby the Scrivener.  Wait.

As it is, each of them quickly confessed to some personal moment of defining inner conflict where story took off, began flapping its wings, then achieved lift-off into personal drama that informs such writer tools as sense of humor, sense of irony, and some form of some sense that they have already to a degree been forged in a crucible.

They gathered their things in a thoughtful manner at the end of class, hanging around, not nearly so eager to take off into the night as they were last week.

No surprise to you how they reminded you of you at that age. No surprise to you how valuable a gift to be present as they discover the things you need to know every bit as much as they need to know these things.

“I get that you’re saying,” one of them ventured, “that they are more important than the story.  I need to see how that works.”

You, too.

You’re in this together.