Expectations

Whether you are about to embark on a reading session or a writing session, your goal is the same.

You expect to be transported somewhere.  You are in effect signing on as a tourist, your senses alert for signs of local color, local passions, and the thrilling expectation of finding encounters and experiences you cannot hope to find at home.

You are more than a little open to discovering behavior with the simultaneous capacity to shock you, satisfy a submerged, secret longing, and at some future moment, to provide you with a residue of guilt.

To enter either reading or writing, without such expectations and subtext is to encourage the routine of the expected, with the final result that you’d have subjected yourself to the disappointment of the ordinary.

Even when you claim to do either reading or writing for more than exploratory purposes, you nevertheless have hopes you reading matter or your written output will surprise you with some connection that is at once audacious and provocative.

In the manner of some conspiracy theorist writers and critics you know, you read or write to discover innuendo you missed, nuance you did not grasp.  The pull of the provocative reaches under the protective clothing of your comfort zones and fantasies, where it often delivers a forbidden thrill.

Under ordinary circumstances, you’d think you’ve arrived at a stage of life where such knowledge is either quite open to you, but there you are with hopes and expectations that both activities, reading and writing, will reveal undiscovered territory within you still to be traversed, charted, and interpreted.

You take these imaginary trips of reading and writing for the thrill of being a stranger in a strange land or a recurrent tourist to a place that has continued to fascinate you to the point of prompting another visit in hopes of noticing a detail you’d neglected earlier.

At home, you are less likely to confide secrets, not from any sense of being on guard or protective but in the sense of being lulled into the routine of the ordinary.  In reading and in writing, you’re more likely to confide actual experiences and fantasies with short-term acquaintances you believe you’ll never see again, identify with unsafe and unknown attractions.

The lure of the occult, the hidden, unseen, unsuspected, is there to lure you off the path.  You find yourself sometimes in bookstores and libraries, pondering, reaching out as though your hands were the willow rods of the water diviners, seeking underground caches of story.

You find yourself sometimes halfway down a note pad or a page on your computer, reaching through the paragraphs and words, seeking buried stories and insights to bring to light.

Research: Internal and External

The way you see the matter of research, there are two basic approaches to source material.

First comes the research of external resources such as the library or such reference books as you happen to have strewn about the house, then the various Internet sites, including search engines you use on a more or less regular basis, followed by Internet searches for online sites you need at some point to assess for such matters as accuracy and bias.  There are times when you wish a particular passage from a particular book.  There is also the potential for recommendations from acquaintances and friends for source material and special collections with which they may be familiar.  In a positive sense, these are all potential research tools, whose availability and validity you pursue.

All these possibilities have the added, accidental potential you associated with browsing in the libraries of universities with which you were or are associated in some way.  You’re saving the magazines, journals, and supplements to which you subscribe.  Most all of these sources have a specific section related to books, which often provoke interest or curiosity to discover more specificity; many of these are in fact compilations of reviews of books which, by their titles and/or their authors, provoke curiosity.  Some of these have essays, informative versions of the ”what-if?” trope of story.

The “other” approach to research is much less conventional; it has to do with internal gathering of information, as in:  How do you feel about a particular person, place, thing, or condition.  There are often internal equivalents of books strewn about the house for you to consult.  When faced with the possibility of being served any of the species of squash, your early response would have been one of extreme distaste followed by a desire to avoid.  For the past twenty-five or so years, you have been quite the opposite, appreciative of any number of types of squash; well motivated to try any you’ve not yet met.

Even though the notion of not knowing how you feel seems an irony to you, a condition bordering on incomprehensible, you have to admit there are times, places, and circumstances where you have to pause, then browse hurriedly to discover how you feel because the circumstances are either foreign, complex, complicated, painful, and unsettling to the point where you not only don’t know how you feel, you’re motivated by some sense of aversion not to want to know.

This last is a tricky business.  If you don’t know how you feel about a thing, how can you hope to deal with it, perhaps learn from it, perhaps even profit from it on an emotional and/or intellectual level?

If you are to have any sense of success as a writer, an editor, or a teacher, there is an urgent sense about your need to know how as many of your known and unexplored aspects feel so that you may portray individuals as a simulacrum with a strong potential for being believed and understood.  Of course you must secure this information if you are to have any possibility of success as an individual.  

Both approaches to research, the external and internal, are curiosity based.  Each begins with a faint gnawing of wonder.  What if?  What would it be like?  Do you suppose?   Don’t you feel the irony inherent in external research often being easier, more accessible?

What can you do to provide yourself with more resources?  Funny you should ask.  You can write with a ferocity of focus on what the characters in your drama want because if you care for them at all—and you ought—you’ll catch some of the aura of their wanting.  You can resolve your stories so that your characters are buying into as little propaganda as possible.  You can want to do better, not be satisfied, alert for ways to make your negotiation with Reality have more weight, because in the end those negotiations are all you have. You become the person against the forces that most keep you from knowing how you feel.  This is often painful, frustrating knowledge, but it is your best chance to negotiate for the sense of you that will allow you to do your best work with those whom you chose as allies.

In so many ways, curiosity to know, understand, and connect is the genome that drives the species along the narrow cusp of risk between extinction and excellence.  You may not always like what you find when you do your research, but you are better equipped to live with the results.

Vocabulary

At one time in your late teens, you had the unfortunate tendency to confuse vocabulary with intelligence, which was bad enough.  You also took vocabulary to be a means by which you keep pace with and out-write those authors whose works had begun to matter to you.

This last step was a particular disaster because in large measure you were reading on two levels, the level of your own enjoyment and the level of being introduced by teachers to what has been called The Western Canon.  To render the former matter at its simplest, you thought most writers of The Western Canon placed a premium on vocabulary ahead of story.

As for the latter pathway to literary disaster, you failed to note how such worthies who meant so much to you as Mark Twain did or Willa Cather did, or F. Scott Fitzgerald did, and while you’re at it, why not throw in Stephen Crane and, okay, James M. Cain, and Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and why stop there, why not Jane Austen—why was it vocabulary was one of the last things you thought about with reference to them?

You did not think about, nor in your examinations and papers, did you write about vocabulary.  You thought and wrote about their approaches to story and their ways of relating the small, close-at-hand to the larger and more inclusive.  Of course you referred to this process as synecdoche.  Considering many of your papers and examinations were read by teaching assistants, such uses of vocabulary got you noticed rather than challenged your understanding of the real process.

At the time of which you refer, you could still get those small, throw-away gifts of paper sculpting which you’d toss into a glass of water, curious to see what form the sculpting would take when it “opened” to its intended result.  With some degree of pain at the memory, you recall describing the process as the Entelechy—“When the dried-out paper sculpting was placed in water, it opened to its entelechy.”  Thus did you discuss how Cather or Crane, writing about one person, could be interpreted as writing about a larger spectrum.

Not to forget your similar use of Fitzgerald’s observation from his longish short story, “The Rich Boy.”  He wrote:  “Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created--nothing.”  Once again, comments in the margins from ”them,” because you couldn’t let it go at that, you had to throw in the synecdoche trope.

Those years are behind you now, but the words remain burned in to your memory, words such as rebarbative and prolepsis, and pleonasm, ekphrastic, and one of your favorites, tantivy.  Thus have you given yourself yet another search-and-destroy mission to find such words and send them packing.  Sometimes one of them slips through and you will hear from an editor or a reader or both.  Sometimes, while reading a novel or a review written by John Banville, you’ll recognize the same fascination with vocabulary in addition to his—dare you say it?—grip on some form or other of synecdoche, and you’ll nod in admiration.  He can get away with it.  He does get away with it.  You admire the hell out of it, and it still tempts, but you edit the hell out of it.

You love the sets of tools you’ve needed to acquire in order to attempt the craft of writing.  Sometimes, you take great sensual pleasure in spreading some of the tools before you, wiping them down, squirting a bit of 3-in-1 Oil or perhaps WD-40 or in some cases of acute rust and stickiness, both.

Knowing what to take out is as important a part of vocabulary as the

Understanding what goes in, where, and how are no less integral parts of the larger vocabulary of story.

Balancing Act

Unlike Gregor Samsa, you slept well, had pleasant dreams but when you woke up, there was a stranger in your bed.  This was not the once-upon-a-time stranger you met in bed in the years of mating, carousing, and mischief.  This stranger was you, in large part strange to you because you’d spent so little time in his company.

He seemed to be on auto pilot, knew where the coffee things were, even got Sally outside for her morning pee, turned on the toaster, set the milk for the latte.  But there was no hint of conversation from him, no venturing of opinion about how the day looked, showed not the slightest interest in the books on the kitchen table.

Pretty much a loner, he was, not at all the you who sometimes wants to think things at slow speed for a time or get a handle on who’s in charge, which of your ensemble case of selves will be in effect steering the ship of state today.

In some ways, you owe it to him and yourself to get to know him better, much as you’ve taken the time to known and interact with the others, even those aspects of you you’d like least to spend time marooned on a desert island with.  You have no trouble with owning all of them, taking the responsibility for their actions or their significant lack of actions.

You sometimes confide to yourself how much a balancing act story is, but story is nothing of a balancing act in comparison to the self, with all its moods, quirks, and social gaucheries.  The self is in many ways like a firm of high-powered lobbyists, trying to capture your attention in the service of some goal, which may be momentary or long-range, a whim or a hidden agenda.

There are times when your component parts remind you of the frequent TV news tropes wherein questioning reporters chase legislators down the hallways of the House or Senate, trying to get that seemingly impossible thing from them, a simple yes or no answer.

Sometimes, holding office hours helps in much the same way it does at the university.  At least, some potential is there for conversation.

Even though you do not feel you’re at your best in a balancing act mode, you do your best to maintain it on the theory that you are present for anything that will throw you over into the progressive mode of your being, which draws its energy from enthusiasm.  Your form of enthusiasm comes from connecting two or more seemingly disparate things or from seeing for the first time relationships you’d not noticed in previous circumstances.  This kind of energy is clean, does not produce undue side effects of potential harm to the ecology.  The worst thing about your bursts of enthusiasm is the way it tends to make it comfortable for you to forget about tasks which may be necessary but for which you need all your wits to manufacture some performance.

On balance, you’re more often chipper and alert than not, more likely to get along with your ensemble cast of selves, who still don’t seem to have a clue about how you exploit them.

Perhaps this ongoing exploitation explains the stranger this morning.  Balance due.

Writing Utopian Fiction

Boredom is a common thread in utopian novels and utopian societies, but given human nature, boredom can produce distractions of a sexual nature.  So happens that sexual tension is a fine ingredient for the dramatic equivalent of yeast.  Once yeast begins to rise on that level, farewell boredom, welcome aboard, story.

There are any number of utopian novels, the earliest you recall being Thomas Moore’s eponymous Utopia from 1615 or so, and the more recent ones you were actually able to finish such as Aldous Huxley’s Island, which in fact he told you he “somewhat liked,” and of course you and your college-age chums were big on Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia.  At their finer moments, utopias and utopian fiction represent mankind living in harmony and democracy, equal parts of responsible citizenry and a built-in protective mechanism for the good of all.

The number of dystopian novels surpasses by trigonometric progression such Edenic visions, showing by such tropes as satire and exaggeration how utopias fall apart.  The presence of so many dystopias suggests a line drawn in the literary sand, separating those who believe a utopia run under proper conditions can sustain from those—a number that includes you—who suspect the best utopias are related to fantasy football leagues, which is to say they combine elements of theory, fantasy, and a willingness to believe the human condition is not a metaphor for the Trojan War or, for that matter, any war.

This line of thinking has led you to an answer you’d held in your pending file for some time.  There has been little doubt in you mind that you fancy the noir fiction as represented as far back as your reading takes you, even to that remarkable narrative from the first hundred fifty or so years of The Common Era, The Golden Ass or The Transformation of Lucius.

Being able to grab onto a stroke of connective tissue from two philosophers, Georg Hegel (1770—1831) and the contemporary Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek (1949--)  “Humanity is okay, but ninety-nine percent of people are boring idiots,” you are even better able to put into effect the “Law” Theodore Sturgeon, the science fiction writer, proposed to you as Sturgeon’s Law, ninety percent of everything is crap.

Farewell, then, to any linger defensiveness about your preference for noir fiction proclaiming you as inherently pessimistic when in fact it proclaims you as realistic.

To your thinking, noir fiction represents the more accurate vision of the inner battles raging within most persons, surely most memorable characters.

For the longest time, you were culturally fed on fiction where endings considered happy represented marriage and stability along with unusually high levels of familial accord and interrelatedness, with inherent striving to achieve optimal levels of satisfaction through a process of sublimation and subservience to cultural pressures.

But once you found noir, you recognized possibilities for endings that did not speak to social propaganda that did not feed the Vital Lie or the cultural myth.

Noir characters tend to lose, but they have aimed high, have taken the time to form a personal utopia where there would be understanding and love if not actual comfort and security in the process.

There is every bit as much deviousness and propaganda in the so-called happy ending as there is in noir-based betrayals of trust and promise because those are hard-wired qualities that go with the species.  So do such things as loyalty, willingness to take on a corrupt system, and a yearning for the unexplored territories of individuality.  Noir characters are on the run from oppressive cultural burdens that mean them no good.

Some utopias are held forth as available in the next life.  Like Huck Finn, willing to be damned for his ah-ha moments of clarity, the noir character is willing to risk the orderly grids of model cities and Sundays in the park for a shot at self in the present time.

Timing in Writing: Suspended Sentences

Whenever you set forth with the intention of producing a “and then what happened?” response, you are at the risk of producing one of the two worst effects a writer could wish:  “Oh,” or “That’s it?”

Long moments of silence, if deployed with care, have the ability to assume a dramatic power, creating an atmosphere of uneasiness over a conversation or a classroom or a speech being presented to a large audience.

Such moments suggest a secret, about to be revealed, a point of emphasis about to be made, a moment of truth—absolute, unblinking truth—to be shared.

These moments are often taken too far in the sense of having been described instead of evoked, provoking the response of impatience from the audience rather than the intended curiosity and empathy.

When the audience says, either in group unison or singular explosion, “Get on with it,” the exclamation point does not have to be used as a stage direction because it is already implied in the force and depth of feeling of the utterance.

The risk of the “Oh,” or the “That’s it?” is at the heart of much narrative, whether invented or the so-called memoir or personal history.  For you, the risk extends into the personal essay and, of course, the book review.

You are of a generation where your non-literary role models were both products of the stage—no, not the dramatic stage, rather the vaudeville stage.  You refer to Jack Benny and George Burns.  Much as they came to mean to you in later years, your first exposure to them was via radio, where the word “timing” was used to describe them as opposed to the more ponderous “long moments of silence” you used a few paragraphs earlier.

The effects of these two men and their deployment of statement, response, and reaction on you were as primal as the effects of your mother’s cooking.  From experiences you were to gather later in your attempts to learn how to manipulate silences, you learned of Jack Benny that the guests on his radio (and later television) shows were told they were not to deliver their lines until Mr. Benny had made eye contact with them.  At that point, the guest was free to do as she or he wished, but not until, allowing Benny to set the pace.

You also learned that Benny had to work hard to keep a straight face when in Burns’ presence.  He was in such admiration of Burns’ timing and ability to deliver even the most conversational-sounding dialogue that he had to struggle to keep his demeanor and not burst into gales of laughter.
Timing, in this dramatic sense has more to do with when a thing is said than what is actually said; it is the essence of focus and a seemingly instinctive understanding of audience and character.

For years, as you labored over the techniques and tools of the narrative trade, you more or less kept this awareness separate, apart from the things you thought you needed to know in order to tell a story.  There was almost a time when you discovered the existence of an essay by Mark Twain, “How to Tell a Story,” then tracked it down and read it, that you made the connection.

By this time, you were utterly devoted to Twain and in complete, utter awe of Benny and Burns, but you could not seem to make the freeing steps of no longer imitating them, and of striking out on your own to make necessary connections as all three of these giants had.  Besides, how bad could it be to be seen as influenced by this unholy triumvirate?  Of course you had to learn the answer to that as well.

What you have learned so far is this:  timing is synonymous with building tension, which is a necessary ingredient in story and narrative.  But there’s more yet.

Tension, which is a required presence in every scene, is more than a mere vital element.  It is yeast.

If you allow the yeast of tension to rise, you get suspense.

What comes next is suspense.  What the characters will say or do next in these present circumstances is suspense.  By the time you are into your story, the readers will have yet another kind of suspense, the fear that the characters won’t do what they ought but will do something to make matters worse.

How do the readers come to this state of suspense?

Timing.  It’s all a matter of timing.

Empathy couldn’t hurt.  But isn’t empathy part of the equation?

 

The Archaeology of Writing

      You were sitting at your desk amid a clash of cultures and technology, a telephone in your hand.  On the line is the publisher of a small, energetic publisher of niche fiction in massmarket paperback original format.  The handwriting is already on the wall.  You know that for a fact.  You are by slow degrees educating yourself to the changes in technology.  Before you is a large screen, twenty-three inches at the diagonal, a generous gift from a client.  The handwriting is on that as well as on the wall.

You have only moments before concluded a price for editing on a dollars-per-page basis, and, knowing of her concern for the timing involved, have asked the publisher when you can expect the first manuscript.

“Right away,” she tells you.

As it so happens, that twenty-three inch screen is filled with the mail program.  An additional as it so happens is the chime you hear announcing the arrival of electronic mail.  The publisher hears the chime over the phone, which, by the way is not only a landline phone, it is a non-wireless; it is connected to the outlet with a wire.

“Ah,” the publisher says.  “There.  I see you have it already.”

A few moments later, you’ve ended the conversation, then clicked on the manuscript to open it.  “Well, now,” you told yourself.  “You appear to be on the cusp of learning to edit electronically.”

Until that moment, you’d edited hundreds of paper manuscripts.  Paper is still your preference, but now even that standard is in flux.  You cannot recall the last time you edited a book-length manuscript from a paper format.  There is, in fact, one telephone connected to a wall outlet, but the same outlet has a line splitter, offering you a wireless landline.  You cannot recall the last time you used the phone connected to the wall outlet by wire; your only reason for keeping such a dinosaur is in case the electricity goes out for any reason, making your wireless useless.  But never mind; you have an iPhone model 4S, which has barely been overcome by a newer model.

You have even gone to the extreme of reading books in digital form, recognizing and accepting not merely their inevitability but rather their presence.  EBooks, electronic books, are as “here” as the Internet is “here.”  The future is here; although it won’t be for long because of the way technology evolves, step by steady step.

Somewhere among your shelves are journals and daybooks, filled with your handwritten observations before you were aware of such a word as blog, which you understand to have come from the marriage of web log.  On your desk in front of you when you were engaged in that fateful conversation with the publisher who sent you what became your first electronic manuscript book project, there was a pencil sharpener in the form of a typewriter.  You still have the device; it is on the desk behind you, a relic of its own by virtue of it being as compressed in its way as the words web and log were compressed to form a new word.

The pencil sharpener was a birthday gift from students at least thirty years ago.  You can imagine your nieces or friends, going through your things after you have moved beyond the need for them or the ability to use them.  “What’s this?”  “A pencil sharpener.”  “Why would anyone want a sharp pencil?”  O tempore, o mores; you particularly wanted a sharp pencil when a ten-year-old girl named Rena, whose last name in Italian translates to walks-while-singing, left her desk to visit the wall-mounted pencil sharpener.  Such were the emerging technologies of puberty changing your usage patterns even then.

In many ways, you are as eager to see where the digital age will take you as you’d been to see where puberty would take you, and then what?  You do not by any means begrudge the eBook or the iPad or the Kindle Fire.  Your iPhone means more to you because of the access to music than its ability to tell someone you might be a few minutes late, or even your potential for being able to get verbal driving instructions to places you should know but may not.

When the time comes, some considerable time from now. In probability, one of your nieces might say to the other, “Did you know he kept a blog?”  And in greater probability, the answer will be, “I’m not surprised.”  They may well have come upon your pre-blog handwritten observations, written with the fountain pens they will surely have discovered in a cedar-lined cigar box.  This will go some distance toward explaining the bottles of brown ink, next to the pencil sharpener.

“What do you think he blogged about?”  One of the nieces will ask this.

“Probably stuff about what he wrote.”

“Makes sense.  Do you think he had any secrets?”

“Him?”

“Well, you know.”

At which point they will be faced with the same problems and questions writers dead and alive have faced since the beginning of written language and shared by readers for the same length of time.

Were the secrets interesting enough to read through to discovery?