Change

Change hovers about us wherever we go, a panhandler or mugger, lurking in the shadows of a parking lot, wanting from us the personified equivalent of spare change or the entire wallet.

Never mind that our hands are already full in our ongoing relationship with gravity and its cousin, friction.  They are measurable and predictable to the point where we can determine the probability of an object standing or falling or slowing down or speeding up, depending on its center of gravity and/or weight, which are both measurable.

Although change is in some ways as inevitable as forces of gravity or friction, it is more difficult to pin down, its rate and degree of progression often in open defiance of any but idiosyncratic measure.

You have changed in ways you are not even aware as well as those ways in which you are.  Over the years, you have parted company with items you were issued at birth, the most noticeable being the thick, curly tangles of hair that once romped with freedom where now only scant sprout-like growth resides.  As your father once observed, you are presenting more forehead to the world.

You have given up some habits you wrestled with over the years, not the least of which was smoking.  As well, you’ve sent certain attitudes off packing, but here the measurement of change becomes subjective; perhaps you are in fact the only one who can tell, a fact which has the potential to cast suspicion on your overall reliability quotient.

The fiction and nonfiction you write and now have in progress are of an increased resemblance to the things you wished to write when you’d found yourself moving beyond the first gear in the metaphoric transmission of the writing process.  The change brought about with time and practice and the adjunct activities you perform such as editing and teaching is also subjective in nature, yet in reading things you’d written years ago, you can see places where the gears did shift to some useful ratio you’d not been aware of before.

In earlier times, you gave scant thought or attention to change, taking it as an inevitable, perhaps even to the point of regarding it as you’d regarded death—something you’d get to in due course, but, not unlike St. Augustine, not just now.

This is not to suggest you’d believed you could ignore change and death, with the result that they’d move on, leaving you to change and die on your own terms.  This is to suggest that both qualities are hustling you from time to time, hands out, palms extended, clever, companionable pitches coming forth from them, reminding you of the top-tier sales persons you’ve known or seen in action, in effect doing you more good than harm because of the ways you are now able to look at change and death, with a touch of insouciance.

You do not take leave from your temper to the degree you used to nor with the regularity of earlier years, but you do lose it often enough, and over trivial enough things to remind you once again of the differences between perception and reality.  Losing your temper over a triviality, you argue, should be one of the first things to be sent off to the thrift stores when their truck is in your area.  The clue word here is should.  Ought.  You give yourself lower marks for losing your temper over a triviality than over something of greater consequence.

You have only in recent days lost your temper over an incident that has led you to resign from an association of over thirty years duration.  Your loss of temper and the resignation were done in relative sang-froid.  The issues and schism were so clear that you first thought then felt the need to resign.

A week earlier, you’d lost your temper over a matter of childish insignificance, then gone storming about for several minutes, an alpha gibbon shaking his fists at the heavens, hooting, bellowing, using a favored expression at such times, “I can’t believe you did that.”  Such an expression of feeling is often thought to apply to the object of lost temper.  In a sense, it is, but not yet.  The failure to believe is in fact directed at you.  You are in actuality complaining that you did or said whatever it was that triggered toe outburst of reaction.

There is some comfort resident in the awareness of you doing such things with less frequency than you did in your early years, yet you are aware of not wanting to get by on that kind of comfort, nor that type of results.

Your attention draws you back to the subject at the center of gravity of your being, which is your relationship to story.  Through story rather than introspection, you attempt a closer, clearer understanding of the juggernaut that is you, careening through the marketplaces and universities of Reality.

Story is more hospitable to you than introspection because of the way story forces issues, does not leave your side any more than change abandons you or leaves you free of its tantrums and stratagems.   Story, too, has undergone changes, in some quaint ways impudently metaphoric of some of the more physical changes wrought upon you.

For a planned work to be called Guilt Literature, you are looking with care at works from the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Western canon.  Talk about high foreheads.  There has been a swirl of Darwinism, Jane Austen-ism, change, and gravity turned loose on story, yet it is still recognizable for what it does to us and for us, whether we read it, write it, or both.  It has changed, but you can still recognize it by its smile.

You have changed, but you are still recognizable by the laugh lines in your prose.

Fail Again, Only This Time, Fail Better

Reading Colm Toibin’s provocative and cogent review of Julian Barnes’s latest novel, The Sense of an Ending, in the current edition of The New York Review of Books, set off a falling row metaphor of dominoes in your mind, the Barnes novel causing the Henry James short story “The Man in the Middle” to topple, which in its turn tipped the James novel, The Ambassadors, which had its way with Ian McEwen’s Saturday, which fell on Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves, which triggered Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, which…

Thus, here you are, pausing as you sometimes do to consider story in which one or more characters speculates on whether his or her life had been lived well, which is to say to its fullest potential.

There have been, you note, men and women of all stripes and ranges who have distinguished themselves by expressing attitudes and activities that in turn have made life seem a grander celebration of good or evil or intelligence or industry or inventiveness than we could ever hope to make of it, rendering them, in our consideration, paragons of positive and negative achievement.

Degrees of potential seem to erupt from such stories of the extraordinary in our midst; reminding us that mediocrity lurks as a worse fate than failure.  Such is the nature of our societal history that extraordinary success is presumed, prima facie, to have arisen from the ashes of failure.  To put it another way, Failure 1 is the prerequisite course for Success 1.

You currently follow the trail leading to the belief that more individuals will see their lives as having bordered more closely to failure than to success, while the same life, viewed from differing points of view outside the self-observer, will be seen as having some footage on the success coast.

Seeing a life in retrospect is an occupation of the middle-aged, those in advanced middle age, and those who appear to be waiting out their final orders.  You are more than benevolent toward yourself in your regard of your life as a mischievous and agreeable patchwork quilt of failure.  The Peter Principle has often propelled you in areas where, in earlier stages of your life, you saw yourself as lacking the social skills, lacking the drive, or the ability to perform at the level you now found yourself, your vision of self visualizing you in some office, all right, some corner office, but nevertheless not the main office, doing in more or less solitary residence the things you do well.

Had this sense of being a living embodiment of the Peter Principle happened only once, you would have been more convinced of its accuracy, but when it comes in new surroundings, more or less yanking you out of the corner office and into larger gatherings, you begin to suspect that “they” might be right.

Throughout the years since you first read it, the splendid critic, Edward M. Said’s final work Late Style, has been one of the literary ghosts haunting you (along with the ghosts of the books and stories you have wanted to write, have written copious notes about, even paragraphs and pages on, but have not yet completed).  Said argues at kinds of stylistic traces of maturity in the works of artists at the end of their career, suggesting more than simplistic resignation or even acceptance, but rather a more balanced vision of the quality we talk at and about, when we speak of the life lived in some useful degree.

In many ways, you feel young, young enough to venture the occasional foolishness and brio not associated with late style or any sense of mellowing.  You once heard your literary agent describing you to a publisher as a person who did not suffer fools lightly, particularly himself.  You agree that you take foolishness with serious focus, and mean to infuse your later years with it on a grand scale of texture and nuance.

Some stories, particularly in the later works of Henry James, deal with individuals who come to believe they have wasted their life, and others in which characters who apparently have wasted their life are by no means aware of the fact.

The Julian Barnes novel, The Sense of an Ending, beckons to you because it so clearly makes use of Barnes’s friendship with the late poet, Philip Larkin, and because you’ve enjoyed much of Barnes’s earlier work, notably Flaubert’s Parrot.  But the interior battle over subject matter begins taking hold, and amid the clamor, you find yourself insisting you are not as interested to read about individuals wondering if their life was well spent or not as you are about individuals who have expansive, bodacious plans, doomed for the magnificent fireworks of gaudy failure.

Success is rather boring in comparison to the endless varieties of quest expended on its behalf.

Everybody's Favorite Novelist

A good part of your gravitation away from such random attractions for potential careers as airplanes, restaurants, the law, a sound effects man for radio dramas, and an announcer of minor league baseball games had to do with the fact of you being an omnivorous reader.

You enjoyed reading aloud, either to yourself or your mother, the books she got from the nearby rental library.  Your tastes ran the gamut from comic books, Sir Walter Scott, boys’ adventure books, girls’ adventure books, nonfiction about Native Americans, fiction about Native Americans, and the then remarkable humorous novels of Max Schulman, as well as, to your then mind, the casual sophistication of H. Allen Smith.

By the time you reached Mark Twain, the metaphoric penny had dropped.  To make sure, you asked a teacher if it were possible to make a reasonable living from writing such things as Mr. Twain did.

At the time, although you’d experienced living in such places as eastern New Jersey, Brooklyn, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Florida, your assumption was that somehow, whatever you did, you’d live in or near Beverly Hills.  To your credit, you soon disabused yourself of that goal, preferring instead Santa Monica, city of your birth and the place where you in fact lived before departing southern California to what is called the Central Coast.

You do not recall the exact words of the teacher when you asked her if one could make a living from writing; you are firm in your belief that what she said has been borne out.  Thinking of her response, your association travels forward some fifty years to an estate on Romero Canyon Road, where you were in the company of the playwright/novelist Max Wilk, both of you uncomfortable with your surroundings because of their evocation of, sigh, Beverly Hills.  You were discussing the writing life.  Wilk placed a cautionary hand on your forearm.  “Kid,” he said (people tended to call you kid until about five years ago, when they began to call you sir)  “it’s a tough dollar.”

He was, in fact, at the Romero Canyon home because of its association with the Hollywood culture, negotiating payment for his services as you were for yours.  To writers at all levels, the Hollywood culture had Mafia-like connotations running all the way down to things you’d seen when you ran the Los Angeles office for Dial-Dell-Delacorte, and fifty percent of your focus was on dealing with “Hollywood people.”  You were thought to be “a natural” because you, a Californian, “could speak their language.  You know, a little Los Angeles, a little Yiddish, a little literature.  Just don’t contract some Thomas Mann or Whatshisname Brecht?”

“Berthold,” you said.
“Right.  You talk literature, but all the while, you’re looking for—“

“—demographics.”

“If that means massmarket, then yes, demographics.  Lots of zeroes.  Six, seven zeroes, feshtaienze?”

“Capito,” you said.

“Funny,” they said.  “Very funny.”

You were at one point led to believe you’d been hired because you were funny and could speak California.

Heard only once from Max Wilk after that meeting.  He’d made some deal.  You never found out what it was.  You’d come away from your “conference” thinking there had to be a better way.

While such things were going on about your mise en scene, you were doing what writers tend to do, “discovering” other writers who’d found and managed to maintain a narrative voice in spite of the myriad distractions life offered such as disasters, love affairs, terrible reviews, existential doubt, telephone calls in which the caller announces this is an attempt to collect a debt, other calls wondering what advice you had for a seventeen-year-old son or daughter who wanted to be a writer.

Your primary discoveries were Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald, each in his own way as different from you as can be had.    Since then, you’ve piled on a list of others you admired, un-friended some you thought you’d admired, and careened as though drunkenly across the landscape in wild, capricious pursuit of your own narrative voice as though it were some escaped steer on the open range.

Twain and Fitzgerald still remain, but a host of others, notably Katherine Mansfield, Louise Erdrich, Deborah Eisenberg, Dennis Lehane, Kate Atkinson, and Daniel Woodrell occupy significant status.

If ever there were a writer on whom you had a crush…

You were in the Winchester Cathedral, delivering a lecture on William Golding, with particular focus on his novel The Spire.  “Mind,” a crisp English voice whispered, as you moved about, warming to your subject, “don’t step of Jane Austen.”

A few days later, you were a bit farther north, in the Devon coastal town of Lyme Regis, the birthplace of the crisp British warning voice, also a longtime friend.  You were walking along a distinctive stone jetty you recognized from having seen it in the film version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman.  As you strolled, you found yourself thinking of Anne Elliott, your favorite of all Jane Austen’s heroines, quite likely the one more like Jane Austen.  She was portrayed as strolling this very route, discussing with a distraught young naval officer the fine and basic points of the contemporary romantic poets.  Anne is the protagonist of your favorite Jane Austen novel, Persuasion, to which you are in fact devoting five weeks of discussion and investigation at the moment.

Austen’s use of point of view, her narrative skills, and her dramatic instincts make for a series of scenes and their consequences that can—and do—inspire many a twenty-first century novelist.

Many of her nineteenth-century contemporary novelists sound nineteenth-century, which is to say distant, shadowy.  Austen’s language seems to evoke the time and place; her psychology seems to rush us ever so much closer to the interior of the individuals she has brought forth as characters.

In so many ways, Jane Austen has become every serious reader’s favorite novelist, whether they know it or not, placing her a few notches above Carolyn Keene, and those remarkable Nancy Drew mysteries.

WYSIWYG

Vision can be a precarious, risky business.

You are often unsure if your vision of reality—say a relationship with an individual or a client or a student or a project you were retained to edit—is coincidental with what you will call uber-reality, that splendid abstraction of an event as it really took place.

You often enter relationships with guarded optimism, happy at the prospect of some evolutionary progress.  You might call that stage one.  Stage one is thus filtered by optimism as opposed to neutrality, indifference, or, worse case, suspicion.

Stage two is still positive.  You find yourself wondering from time to time if there is in fact the possibility for uber-reality, the abstracted and unfiltered truth of what is happening.

You were fortunate to have two persons you still consider your mentors, one a writer, the other an actor.  The actor frequently spoke of “the truth” of a character she was portraying or that character’s perception of the truth or lack thereof in other characters.  Your mentor was encouraging rather than defensive when you argued with her use of the concept of truth in these contexts.  She seemed to enjoy your progression as you came to realize, then espouse as though it were your original idea that truth is idiosyncratic.  Your truth might be another’s lie…or indifference…or ignorance…or the reverse of all these options.  She seemed even more to enjoy your accepting the fact that your vision of truth is pure idiosyncrasy, that there is yet another point of view that is more insightful and in the bargain more accurate.

So then, there you are at stage two, wondering if your vision of a person, place, thing, or dramatic idea resonates for you, and perhaps the added tail of the dog, wondering if there are things you can do to make it more so.  Can you, in effect, articulate it with greater clarity or insight?

Many of the valued persons, places, things, and projects of your life are at stage two, progressing toward long and short-term goals. Others have reached advanced stages where you began to see there were wide if not insurmountable differences in vision:  The person, place, thing, and you were woeful in your utter lack of being congruent.

Among your favorite things to read, write, and think about are such mismatched visions, come to the point of argument, with each side vocal in the expression of non-responsive arguments, you, for instance, arguing for pasta with broccoli topping, your correspondent arguing for some entire new subject matter.  In such cases, act two builds to the point where each believes he has “convinced” the other, where each goes forth thinking an agreement has been achieved.

This last is, you believe, one of the staples of irony in literature, whether that literature has comedic pretensions or not.  Any sort of agreement ends or flattens story on sight, the animal control officer approaching the stray dog with a restraining noose.  The joke is on the characters, shared by the reader.  The joke may well be on you if you do not remain alert to your own agenda, making sure you are signing the right contract, agreeing to the same thing, expecting similar or near-similar results.

In recent years, thanks to developments in computer and programming technology, the trope “what you see is what you get” has entered the language to the point where, on page 2001 of the fifth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language has WYSIWYG as an entry.  This can and does work for some things, but what you in particular see is not always what you in particular always get for the pure and simple reason that no one else is apt to see with certainty what you see.  You work to make yourself as clear as possible, increasing the potential for you emerging with less clarity.

Some individuals about you have begun to bump into physical things, resulting in their growing unwillingness to enter darkened places or to drive at night.  What they don’t see is beginning to become what they get. Some individuals have begun bumping into realities of another sort, where what they see—or have written—is not always what other persons get.

In one case, notorious to you, a first-time novelist who was given an enormous advance for his work, complained about the editorial suggestions he was asked to consider.  In later years, his career foundering, he is complaining that his publishers are too busy to offer him editorial support.

Yet another case involves a writer who cannot apply Euclidian geometry to his version of his work and the critics’ views.  What he sees is not what he gets.  That verb, to get, becomes the instrument of punning here as well.  This author is the Rodney Dangerfield among writers:  He gets no respect.

The former writer could care less what you think; he barely recognizes you to the point of having called you Fred the last two times he saw you.

The latter writer is another matter.  He knows you well enough to have asked you to review his latest novel.   What he saw was not what he wished to get.

In some existential abstraction, each time you begin a relationship, continue one, begin a project, take on a new client, or begin a new class, you are courting the disappointment of your optimism and expectations.  The man you came to Santa Barbara to work for, nearly forty years ago, and of whom, despite your political and philosophical differences, you were most fond, told you often how he always saw the bottle as half empty and had no expectations of success.  It was easier to apologize when he was wrong, he said, than to suffer disappointments.

There are things you have written and done of which you are pleased; many others were disappointments, things that did not pay off as you’d hoped while in stage one.

This does not stop you from trying, nor from loving the process of trying, nor of thinking the bottle half full.

Conversation

Whenever you come across a display of electrifying dialogue that seems to take over the story in ways that burn it into memory, you can’t help rethinking the time when you felt your own approach to dialogue was your strength.

At the time, what you considered dialogue was no such thing; it was conversation.  True enough, you had an ear for a turn of phrase, the occasional lapse into an ironic, literate commentary, the appropriate zinger.  But what you had was not what you thought or hoped.  If anything, what you had was banter or footnote to the story going on in the background—precisely where it should not be.

There have been many ah-ha moments related to your discovery of what dialogue is and is not, some examples being the most egregious misuse, even more unwieldy than your own, others hypnotic in the way each exchange caused the characters to step forth on the stage to claim his or her spotlight.

The most recent avalanche of effective, you might even say definitive dialogue comes from the television series, Justified, which comes from characters and circumstances developed by Elmore Leonard, who has evolved over the years of his vast productivity from what seemed to be the shadow lands of fiction, the Western.

How could a man with roots in Detroit write such convincing and satisfying fiction?  A simple answer is his use of dialogue, and we all know what William of Occam said about simplicity.  Universes, he said, must not be unnecessarily expanded.  To put it another way, the simplest solution is the best solution.  Persons have been saying that for years to the point where now, when you hear it spoken or think it yourself, it sounds like dialogue.

When David Simon, the executive producer of The Wire, decided to pull the plug on that remarkable series, so exquisite in its range and depth of characters and their issues, you despaired of having anything as cohesive available again on television.  You’ve come close in a few venues to being given an opportunity to teach a course on The Wire, causing you to revisit its construction and narrative flow in ways well beyond mere audience admiration.

Justified has the same sense of cohesiveness, beginning with a regionalism that implies a stratified and well-defined social culture, weaving a larger pattern of events in ways that are more organic and set in place than episodic.  Grudges die hard, relationships have ripple effects, agendas are often hidden under tarpaulin in the bed of an old pickup truck or buried in the gritty Kentucky soil.

The characters have been wound about the armatures of pure need and desire, an overlay of familial devotion and a sense of courtliness that barely misses being exaggerated.  You would not, someone asks of a character, shoot a man while he sits at a table with food in front of him, would you?  The answer, almost a parody of a Sir Walter Scott novel, is an order to stand up and move away from the table.

To be sure, Justified has two enormous attractions for you, the sure touch of Elmore Leonard’s editorial hand, embellished by the noir flavor and its resultant case of characters. There is also a third presence you hinted at a few moments ago.  This series, The Wire, and one or two others stand as literal and figurative novels because of their construction, their flawed characters, the realness and plausibility of the situations, and the sense that such thriving activity, although dramatic in its focused enhancement, happens about us.

This morning, in your Saturday writing workshop, you saw two powerful examples of how dialogue could and should replace authorial intrusiveness, bringing characters and their goals to the forefront, changing the possible outcome of story, moving the dramatic activity away from the sidelines of stage direction into actual explosions of activity from characters in which their movements demonstrated their goals and inner conflicts.

If you say it correctly, the exchange of dialogue becomes the acupuncturist’s needle on the corpus of the story, producing energy lines, tingles, reflexes.

Sometimes, when you experience an immediate, unexpected frustration, you find yourself saying, “Damn.”  In other cases, your responses are worse by a considerable margin.  Those cases are real life.  “Damn” or “Fuck” or anything you might consider in between, however much an explicative they are, are still conversation.  In drama, such moments call for dialogue or gesture or a combination of the two.

Listen for the potential irony.  Listen for the courtly exaggeration.  Listen for the desire to maintain pecking order or to bargain.

Listen.

Listen to them.

It

The first draft of a story of any length is like a first date gone well.  You know you want to see it again; there are already gestures and glances you want repeated, questions you want to have answered, shared interests you wish to revisit, disparate visions that now seem interesting for the first time.

Perhaps you said something that caused her eyes to mist and she reciprocates with something you can begin to feel moving under the short ribs or climbing along the tear ducts.

You could never presume to estimate how many revisions either would require of you.  Back then, ages ago, in the days of the shiny red Olivetti portable typewriter, when you were on a schedule of a novel a month and you allowed yourself the conceit that you might rework the occasional scene here and there, you were nevertheless surprised when you saw the growing layers of wadded-up sheets of manuscript paper.  You’d sneaked back for another run-through of a scene, your “reason” being because you liked it.

Unless there was some prearranged agreement to keep preparations casual, you thought with care about when you would shave, what you would wear.  Even so, your anticipation was for the first rush of seeing her at evening’s start.  The anticipation expanded to thoughts of what would be said, how it would be said, where it would be said.

Starting work in the morning was at the same level. You brought your coffee and toast to the desk because of your eagerness to see the last scene from yesterday, wondering did the dialogue hold up?  Was there some crackle of interest in the narrative; did the sentences swoop and barrel roll before you like stunting airplanes?

When you were well along in your interest with someone, there was the excitement of an unanticipated meeting somewhere, the market, the laundry, a coffee shop.  Once, while driving along Olympic Boulevard, westward toward Santa Monica, you were stopped at a traffic signal, where you noticed in the next lane, her window down, waving at you, pointing to a diner-type coffee shop.  Lover’s luck, you called it.  Once when you were in a producer’s office, waiting to discuss changes he wanted on a project that you hadn’t cared about all that much in the first place and was being changed once again in a maneuver you’d come to think of as the producer’s girlfriend’s dog, you found among your script material the pages from a short story you’d all but forgotten and you were transformed into several moments of the person you’d hoped to become.  The producer was not at all pleased with you or your attitude that day.

Not all producers are as removed from the understanding of what transformative experiences might mean to a writer.  This one was because, as you realized in subsequent weeks, this was the level you had attained.  You did not think sunk; you thought attained.

This particular project, although it paid you well enough in relative terms, was like a date you had high hopes for at the outset but which had turned sour around the halfway point, meaning you were faced with the prospect of being home by ten or ten thirty or stopping somewhere to listen to some music and, finding no one you cared enough to listen to, stopping off at the bar in the bowling alley, where the pounding sound of bowling balls, being lofted onto the alley and the squawk-like chatter of the pins being hit seemed to offer you kinetic relief.

Dates and stories.  Conversation, companionship, magic, some kind of chemistry, some trace of potential, but work is needed.  You have no idea how much work.  How many dates?  How many drafts?  What revisions, apologies, switches in point of view will be necessary for the step forward to the next level?

You can see it anywhere, a coffee shop, the bar at the Olio e Limone Pizzeria, the outside tables at Via Maestra, the “it” you see being a sudden reach and clasp of hands, a bump of hips, two persons sharing a pannecotta or a tiramisu, a particular jut of chin or toss of head, a single peal of laughter at the same frequency as the ring of a wine glass.

You can also see ”it” in a magazine or journal or book, perhaps even your own computer screen or a page of handwritten draft of your own work.

Whichever “it,” it is, it is intimacy.

Darlings

You first heard the expression from an individual with whom you’d already begun to have a stormy relationship.  Although the expression did have what you considered a sound premise, you did not begin to pay it the attention it deserved until your discovery that F. Scott Fitzgerald uttered the expression well before the individual from whom you first heard it.

The expression is directed to all writers.  “Kill your darlings.”  By this, Fitzgerald and, to be as fair as possible, the individual from you first heard the injunction mean to rid one’s sought-after effects, observations, figures of speech, ironic comparisons and the like that have more to do with demonstrating one’s own brilliance, rather than illustrating some key point or dramatic theme.

You could go so far as to make a general rule out of the observation that such tropes and figures have the opposite effect of enhancing the story or supplying by indirection some vital dramatic information.

Your darlings gravitate toward long, sinuous sentences.  Your practice is to allow them free rein as you pursue early drafts, going so far as to see how many semicolons you can add to the cadence as well as the vagrant clauses and those locutions bordering on redundancy, as though this were some game.

When he was still giving his daily workshop at the Santa Barbara Writers’ Conference, Barnaby Conrad enjoyed assigning an exercise in which the goal was to produce a sentence no less than five hundred words in length.  This proves to be a challenge and a worthwhile exercise, wrapped in the same package.  As you follow its phrases, clauses, and slithering through verb tense progression, you become aware of nuances beyond the mere fact of a beat elapsing, an event performed, a reaction made to a psychological vector, which actors and many writers refer to as responding to dramatic stimuli.

On any number of occasions, you’ve heard Fanny Flagg attribute Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café to her indulging the five-hundred-word sentence at the occasion of her first Conference attendance.  Working to keep a sentence alive for over five hundred words seems a good way to lose sight of darlings, which might want to creep in, uninvited.

Most of the darlings you’ve seen or dreamed up yourself belong to a kind of description glorying in its own brilliance, a self-conscious attempt to demonstrate some recondite fact or human trait.

The phrase is not meant—you believe—to discourage originality, although you do have to admit, in a manner not unlike the circuit court judge who claimed he did not know how to define pornography but surely knew it when he saw it, how easy it is for you to detect originality in your work and in the work of others.  You also believe you are supposed to recognize originality because you enjoy such exquisite taste, which tends to bring the discussion back around to darlings and their relationship to demonstrating one’s erudition, sensitivity, even compassion.

  A fun part of revising any work comes when you work up a good head of steam, then plunge through a draft as though a Cossack on a stolen horse, scimitar waving in all directions as the darlings fall in your wake.  They were not needed.  You could push your luck on this to say embellishments are distractions; a successful story does not need darlings to give it stature and resonance when, in fact, a story with a weak spine or scoliosis needs a darling or two to distract from the fact of its inherent need for some support.

Darlings call attention to the author, when in fact the author should be pointing the way to the characters, their plight, and the manner in which they address the problems besetting them.  This is the function of story, last time you looked.  A particular aid comes to you in the form of narratives read at gatherings.  When a number of individuals compliment you on your reading, then call forth a phrase or two of particular eloquence or beauty or grace—you see how easy it is to become seduced by such glorious adjectives? —then you darlings have taken up squatter’s rights in your story or essay.

Does this mean a litany of straightforward declarative sentences?  Does this mean no figurative language or hyperbole?  Does this mean no striving for rhythm or cadence or the compressed essences of poetry?  No such meaning is intended or implied.  If you stand aside, allowing the characters you’ve chosen to present the material in dramatic fashion. The characters will be all too eager to bring forth their own darlings, eager to bring them into the writing game.  Your own standard of judgment will center on whether you become jealous of your own characters for the easy fluidity of their darlings, whereas yours were so clunky and gauche.