"It"

Beginning sentences and paragraphs of novels and short stories are matters of urgency and significance.  How ever slapdash or tradition bound your own beginnings may have been, you have never resorted to beginning either with the word "it."

You have in fact gone out of your way to begin novels or short stories with the word "it," and, as though this may have been the only thing you have ever taught yourself about the craft you seek to pursue with some dignity and companionable tone, you have resisted reading novels or short stories beginning with he word "it."

A number of important factors ride in on the horse of the first sentence, not the least of them the reader's sense of belief and concern, because a reader who picks up a novel or story in the first place has likely done so out of an understanding of the process in the first place and a willingness to continue in the second place.

As a direct consequence of your wish not to be thrown out of your accommodations, you have not read--nor will you--Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities,nor Paul Clifford, the novel from Edward Bulwer-Lytton.  You made exceptions for Miss Austen and Mr. Orwell, but Paul Auster's 1985 venture, City of Glass, had the word twice.  Of course you pardoned Ray Bradbury, for beginning Fahrenheit 451 with an it, because--well, because he was Ray Bradbury, and for a few years at this time of the calendar, you used to deliver his mail.

Most of the time, when a sentence begins with the word "it," you reflexively ask "what?" which fact throws you out of the story like an overbearing usher at a concert, demanding to see your ticket stubs.  The only "what" a reader should have is a "what now?" as opposed to "What was neither the best of times nor the worst of times?" or "What was a truth universally recognized?" although you have to admit Miss Austen was right in there, letting you know before the question had much of an opportunity to distract you.

You have no desire to become distracted from a story.  In fact, you hope to become absorbed in it to the point of knowing you'll be back at it from time to time, hopeful of picking up coded hints about behavior and understanding as they relate to the human condition.  Much as you relive actual events in order to catch some essence of sweetness or wisdom or understanding from the Reality about you, you understand how precious story is, how it builds through its relentless focus on event and action, causing you to reflect on what you may have missed last time through.

Even stories you read more for the choreography of action and movement are stories that do not begin with the word "it."

You want stories to begin with names of persons or with persons in the midst of some activity of some consequence.

All too true that you on occasion begin sentences with the word "it" when you are speaking, even lecturing, but your defense here is that you are attempting to commit to muscle memory ways of beginning sentences with almost any word other than freaking "it."

Regarding these previous paragraphs as a sort of running balance or account, you are aware you have revealed a longstanding feud between you and the word "it."  You have such antagonistic relationships with other, idiosyncratically chosen words,among them "that," which you will go to great lengths to avoid, and the word "as," when used to warn the reader of forthcoming parallelism, such as, "As Jim entered the room..." which takes two separate actions, runs them through the blender, and minimizes the effect of either one.

This is written with the sense of words needing to be chosen with deliberation and care; each has a job and a raft of potential implications.  You want to be sure of two things.  You want assurance you understand what's at stake.  After that, you wish to be sure your characters understand the implications of the drama in which they are appearing.  Only then can such readers as there might be have hopes of "getting" your intent.

It was raining.

What was raining?

It was cold.

What was cold?

Thus two of numerous potentials, illustrated, to show how a single word can and does throw the reader out of the narrative, much in the manner of a hitchhiker, returned to the road after making the mistake of putting the bite on the driver who picked him up.

Splash

Why the immediate necessity to put down the cooking pot lid, picked up in an exploratory mode? Why?  Because the lid has become quite hot.  Because you will burn your hand if you do not set the lid down, now.  Because, the human reflex pattern being what it is, you are programmed--wired--to drop anything you believe is too hot.  You have more than likely had this reflex reinforced by painful misadventure.

Such a reflex, and the experience with having picked up or touched something too hot for the body to accommodate with comfort, are useful reminders of the need for immediacy in story. including the sense of urgency a character feels about wanting a major wish or goal accomplished.

Immediacy, the wanting of a thing now or the need to do a thing now, and experience, the residue of an event somehow painful or memorable in its exquisite, tingling pleasure, become two acupressure points for character.  As the fictional character is squeezed or poked, or prodded, or caressed, the writer is--or should be--and in response chooses words, sensations, cadences that go flying from his fingers into the text and into the acupressure points of the reader.

You've heard numerous stories of actors who wanted a particular role in a particular drama to the point of badgering the producer, director, writer, and anyone else who would listen.  Sally Field is said to have been so eager for the role of Mary Lincoln in the current iteration of the Lincoln mystique that in spite of producer's grave doubts, she prevailed on the grounds that this part was meant for her; she was meant to portray Mary.

No matter if this is partial of total Apocrypha. The point here is that the writer should feel the same fire for the story and, as a direct consequence, the characters should experience the same burning desire to be their bigger-that-book selves; they should want, ache, rejoice, fear, and respond so that every moment they are "on" is a moment where the other characters recognize them as the dramatic equivalent of the hot cooking pot lid.

The moment a character appears, a set of consequences, like some wind-up toy, is set loose and begins its movement.

You are fond of giving as an example the pizza delivery person, whose moments in the story are limited.  But you, the writer, know this person, this young man or young woman, has not committed to a life;s career of delivering pizzas.  The tips, and such scant salary as their is, go to pay for acting lessons.  This pizza delivery person wishes to become a fully developed actor, with deeply felt skills and reach.  How is that character going to act, or perhaps react, when"on." How will that character deliver the one line:  "Someone order a pizza?"

That appearance will have some effect on one or more of the other characters present, and there is the powerful likelihood it will have an effect on you.  Thus you have the difference between reality and story.  Reality has moments between moments.  Story has beats, all of which, to extend and possibly mix the metaphor, are like playful splashing at the beach or the pool.  Everyone is going to get soaked.  That's what story is; everyone gets splashed, whether they intend it or not, and you know how you reacted the last time you got splashed.  No matter it was unintentional; the splash landed, caused reflexive response.

Story is a dropped garden hose.  Everyone gets splashed, most of all the reader.

You

The idea approaches, tentative, almost like one of the greeters at an airport, holding up a sign with your name on it.  Under those circumstances, you will be assisted to gathering your luggage, then given a hassle-free ride to your destination.  Under these more complex circumstances, the idea wants to make sure it has the correct writer.

This is not so fanciful as it may seem,  Before you and the idea get through with one another, a small laundry list must be devised.

What is the story?  You can't rush off in a clatter of action verbs. At the least, you need to see the major incident, impacting one or more of the characters.

Whose story is it?  Okay, if it's long enough,there can be several points of view.  In any case, we need concrete information.  Is it Dorothy's POV or the Wizard's?  Is it Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe, or, tee hee, Rebecca?

What is the goal?  Does Dorothy really want to get home to Kansas?  Does Sir Wilfrid want respect and stature among the Norman invaders for the Saxons?  Does Ahab want to sell cans of white whale meat?

And of course the foundation for the whole thing, Who are you?  This has to do with the notion of who the you is who is accepting delivery of this story,internalizing it, living with it until it has become something neither of you intended but at the same time has morphed into something you both regard with a sense of having accomplished something.

     The reductionist truth here is that story is a recipe, a formula for ingredients.  Do you add the corn meal first?  Do you use an egg?  Two?  Do you go so far as to use buttermilk instead of regular or skim?  You are the baker, the cook, the chef.  You bring energy and some sense of why this story has to be told in this particular way.

     You will not be able to please all readers, so give up on trying.  The more you sound like yourself, the more probable you will draw a readership.


To get to the you in Yourself, let’s look at your personal and political politics, which is the same thing as asking how involved you are with the worlds about you.

Some writers, in particular those who find contemporary social, moral, and economic events painful or tedious or downright uncomfortable, take refuge in creating make-up or fantasy worlds, where people in general seem to get along.  Their stories tend to reflect family or school or work-related dynamics. Even then, they tend to shy away from the kinds of highly personal issues and conflicts  such as those so well dramatized in stories for young readers.  You almost expect to see framed drawings of unicorns and mermaids in their work areas.

Large clusters of writers gravitate toward detecting and unraveling mysteries.  Perhaps you fit in here, wanting to know the answers to puzzles that seem unsolvable.  Still larger groups of writers lean toward stories which investigate the personal chemistry between individuals, alternately drawing them together, then driving them apart, convinced they never wish to see the other again.

You may find yourself thinking always of some time and place in the past, intrigued by the social conventions and the way they may have been affected by actual historical events.

Perhaps you burn with the inner fires that raged within such political opposites as Jack London and Ayn Rand, wishing to demonstrate the struggles of living within a society where opportunities we take for granted today are not available to any but the most privileged.  Perhaps you write from enough of a sense of mischief to have a Jack London-type meet and fall helplessly in love with an Ayn Rand-type, who feels equally helpless in her love for him.

There is ample room for you within the enormous community of writers if you enjoy speculating on the possibilities of worlds, living conditions, and scientific discoveries as yet unimagined.

Let's not forget your possible interest in works of outrageous and humorous combustion, where good sense boils over and pretentiousness and pomposity are brought to their knees.

There is no end to the potential for story category in bookstores and libraries, including the so-called crossover stories, in which two or more genres (think historical romance, or humorous speculative) have joined forces in a marriage than not only worked but flourished.

Such matters are the things you ought to be thinking about as a step toward discovering who the writing you is. Another factor to consider:  your reason for telling stories.  The reason you give brings us back to the original question of who the writing you is.  Why do you want to do it?  What does it give you.

Not through with you yet.  We need to know why you read stories and what your reading does for you.

A picture is beginning to emerge.  Let’s secure it in place.  What genres do you read?  What’s the demographic of e-books you’ve downloaded on your reading devices?  What section of the bookstore do you instinctively head for?  What stories do your bookshelves tell about your reading tastes?

If there anomalies in your answers, such as you having shelves and e-readers filled with suspense and mystery, and you burn to write a gritty, noir downer like Georges Simenon or Elmore Leonard, why haven’t you done so?  What’s keeping you?

       You need to take some time answering the questions posed in this section.  Unless you identify the Writing You and see what it wants from you, all you’re going to produce are some results that are the writing equivalent of fast food.

       This is the you who nods to the idea, where ever and however the idea comes to you.  There is nothing tentative in this recognition.  You are not here for almost or partial or somewhat.  You are here to tell a story.

Danger and Risk in Writing

Most of the writers you admire have at one time or an other said something dangerous, either about the times in which they lived, the individuals who held power then, or the organizations known to hold power and exact tribute.

You have had some experiences with this aspect of living dangerously as a writer, neither of them in circumstances as fraught, say, as Salman Rushdie, but enough nevertheless to have made you aware you were outside the boundaries of safety.

The first such episode came when you were a university student, editor of the campus humor magazine, wherein, you took on the subject of a man who was then the Vice-President of the United States, later to become the President of the United States.  To put the matter mildly, you drew the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which did indeed investigate you.

The second episode was some years later, when a novel you wrote was considered to be somewhere between impertinent and pornographic.

Both incidents had you involved with the bureaucracy.  Each fanned your late teen and early twenties cholers, but also your sense of youthful protest against establishment.

There was also an incident of a political in high school, which allowed you to maintain high cholers for at least an hour before moving along to thoughts of a girl named Pauline, with whom you were hopelessly infatuated.  Thus did romantic and sexual longings trump a betrayal from an authority figure.  You were a few years untangling the frustrations and implications of both; you can still recall the frustration of finding yourself powerless in both situations.  You were learning about risk and danger, but not nearly fast enough to suit you.

These and similar incidents were the best you could manage at the time.  They certainly fit in with your general rebellious nature at the time and, like certain more recent events in your life, can be seen as long overdue pigeons, returning home to roost.

Events forge all of us, writers hold no front-row seats.  Events and our responses to them, and the consequences of those responses forge most of us.  Again, you are no exception.  Your time for exceptional behavior came into focus at about age sixteen, when you became convinced by events that you wished to be more or less what you have become.  You need the qualifier "more or less" in there because it was not possible for you to see you entirely as you are now; there were individuals and events along the way.

 There were gestures of protest and, in one of the more spectacular ones, a non-gesture of protest, a waiting out of the action your protest would normally have taken.  Much of your professional career developed from waiting that protest out.  The adjunct danger lay in the possibility that you would not be patient.

Getting some decent writing started is of a piece with building a fire in the wilderness.  So much can impact the start of the fire.  More still can result from fires thoughtlessly placed.  There is danger in the potential for the fire growing until it is beyond control.

Writing ought to have some danger factor, even if the danger is the relatively small one of upsetting someone you don't like.  Writing ought to have consequences.  So many stories you read do not seem to have consequences, at first causing you to think you may have, in your impatience or simple thickness, not seen the implications.  When you first began reading the stories of Anton Chekhov, even though he came well recommended, you could not see the implications.  Impatient, you scurried on to others, but something about him nagged at you, persuaded you to go back for another try.

In the simplest of terms, Chekhov was dangerous for you because he both took you and left you in accustomed places.

When writing seems too safe, it becomes by definition boring.  You've had enough experience with being bored and, in keeping with the tradition, you've even tried your hand--not deliberately--at boring readers, thinking you were observing useful conventions.

You have no wish to write for persons who enjoy safe writing.  There is nothing in it for you, certainly not satisfaction.  Nor is there any joy in your older ways of rebellion for the sake of being rebellious rather than writing for the sake of conviction.

If you write to the point where you will disturb yourself, you will have approached the potential for satisfaction with a particular piece, and with yourself.

Here, Try Some of My Salad

Action and movement lead you closer to the insides of characters than thoughts do.  When the text is to be nonfiction, that is, exposition and development of ideas, action and movement still make a profound contribution because they lead you from generality to specificity and from abstractions to individuals doing or wanting things.

This awareness is not easily come by, nor is it as well retained as you’d like.  On too many occasions, as you read over a draft, you see the clouds of abstraction forming, a word or two here, a modifier there, until you see the concept slipping away from you in much the same manner the balloon on a string escapes the youngster who has not remained vigilant toward his prize.

Editing and teaching are helpful reminders for you, in particular when you reach those moments where each line is being regarded with some measure of suspicion.  The process you once held in such jealous privacy and secrecy has demonstrated to you its lack of appropriate generosity and focus.  You’d managed to stall out at the basic level of selfishness, where all decisions not your own were accepted with a grudge.  When it was your turn to point out a place for repair, for greater clarity and, yes, accuracy, you allowed the inner surge of superiority.  Small victory, Pyrrhic victory, in fact, because you were thinking ego points as opposed to the craft points of being able to see the accuracy of each movement.

Now, whether the work is your own, a student’s, or a client’s, you ask yourself:  Does it belong here?  Does it belong in the narrative in this form or in any form?  Is it coming from the characters or you?  Are you, in fact, in the way, wanting once again to demonstrate how much you know as opposed to revealing how the characters feel?

Who are they?

What do they want?

Why do they want it right now?  (If they don’t, they need to be taken for a walk around the block, made to see they are not desperate enough or eager enough or fearful enough, then returned, their agenda adjusted to a bright, blue flame.)

What are they willing to do in order to achieve their goal?  (If they are too respectful or civilized or reasonable or understanding—back out on the streets again for a heart-to-heart talk.  They need to be told that there are plenty of characters out there who are properly desperate for a story to be in, a goal to pursue, a betrayal to betray, a principal to bend.)

While you are walking them around the block or tracing the perimeters and parameters of their story, they need to be convinced that wanting something is not enough; they have to act on it; we have to see their want as demonstrated in their actions.  This reminds you of a project you really liked in your late twenties, an extension of your own at the time desperate financial straits.

Really wanted to do business with you on this one, the editor from your targeted publisher, Gold Medal Originals, told you, but there were too many tells, too many times where you told the reader your character needed the money.  We needed to see him needing it.

The memory is painful because you were close, but it is made even more painful when you see yourself lapsing into that habit of the tell rather than showing the character doing something as though he or she were an actor playing the part.

Someone you had a romantic interest in for a time had a habit you found irresistible.  Time after time in restaurants, she tugged at your salads or deserts.  On one memorable evening at your favorite restaurant, the two of you tore into a large seafood salad, your forks and fingers all but clanking.  You were caught in the heady atmosphere of the intimacy.  You can still see some of her gestures.  In actual fact, although there was a nice chemistry for a time, she was hungry.  That was her approach to eating.  She ate that way with girlfriends as well as you.  What a lovely kind of mixed message for a story.  Individuals, seen doing things as opposed to mere thinking or interpretation, are the starting points of story.  The message and the responses to these things begin at that point.

Here, have some salad.

Editing Manuscripts and Sock Drawers

Revising something you’ve written reminds you of times when you’ve sought to find a pair of socks of the same color in the sock drawer.  Your own sock drawer has compartments, which you think wisely to use as guidelines to separate one group of spectrum colors from the others.

On the surface, this seems a shrewd enough plan, reflecting your evolution from a person who wore few shades of color.  You wore the Oxford and Cambridge grays, and dark blues.  From time to time, as a streak of rebellion took hold of you, your sock drawer held brown and a crimson that ran toward a muted red.  At this stage of your development, there was no need for drawers with dividers; you merely paired the socks, rolled them into neat balls, then let them fend for themselves.

Now, in your mature acceptance of color and the ability to store your socks according to divisions of the spectrum, your sock drawers (for specificity begets more divisions) you’ve come to see how revision in your sock drawer is as much a necessity as it is with your written prose.

Do things belong?  Should a given pair go with the oranges or the yellows?  Is there a need to separate the green shades from the blue shades? And how are you ever to account for all the single socks spanning the sections of the color wheel.

This may sound as though you had compulsive drives to color code your socks, which might then lead to thoughts about the arrangements in closets and drawers of shirts and sports jackets, but such drives for that kind of specificity are rare.  No more than once or twice a year, when you are in the throes of trying to figure your way through a paragraph that will not do as you think it ought, or a line of activity that does not satisfy you.  The rest of the time, although you are fond of such stray items as socks, shirts, trousers, and jackets, they can pretty well take care of themselves and hang where you set them, without giving their placement so much as a thought.

General order becomes important only when a particular bit of work has revealed large chunks of its essence to you and you think you have begun to establish a sense of where a thing out to be, if indeed, it ought to be included at all.

There was one terrible project, a nonfiction demon that got you thinking about the order and shelving of your books.  You had a great deal more books then.  You’d also come by some Avery gummed labels, on which you printed the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress catalog numbers for each book, then affixed one label to the spine, effectively turning your books into a semblance of a library.  One or two of those books has survived your move to 409 E. Sola Street.  When you see their spines, you wince.
You have no problems with more moderate approaches to managing things.  Even in these relatively small confines, things have not appeared to have got the upper hand, either through your compulsive arrangement of them or your equally possible lack of any systematized care for them.

You try to maintain this balance with your words, paragraphs, essays, chapters, and stories—even your notes.  One of Artie Shaw’s ex-wives told you that the thing that began sending their marriage toward the divorce courts was his insistence that the pillows on their bed be arranged in pairs, with the entry ends of the pillow cases facing as opposed to all of them pointing outward.  She was also bitter about the paper towels and toilet tissue rolls being required to hang from the bottom of the roll as opposed to the top.  You can see the logic in such behavior.  Excellence does not come as a casual guest.

You can see logic in such approaches.  The act of getting a thing to sound “right,” and stand forth with clarity means a great deal to you. The closer the thing comes to achieving that sense of correctness, the more pleased you feel with it, with yourself, and with the universe about you.  Possibly, the work will have no need for any serious edits; then you will have been even more rewarded in the coin of satisfaction.  But you are human.  You in fact keep unmated socks, thinking somehow, in some phantom wash cycle, the missing one will appear.  You may be at first outraged when an editor you respect suggests you remove a sentence on the grounds that it has the same tentative effect on your paragraph that the unmatched sock has on your sock drawer,  Yet you are more for the overall wonder and joy of the process than your right to kick and scream and hold out for pillow cases with facing ends.

You even afford an occasional nod of sympathy toward more compulsive behavior than yours.  Excellence is often achieved from much compulsive behavior, but you do not find such extremes digging the metaphor of their spurs into your relatively lazy carcass.  You find solace in the potential for getting things right—whatever that might mean—in your revision process, and the socks in the drawer, particularly the unmatched ones, can look out for themselves.

The Literary Equivalent of Shouting Wolf

The ordinary goes on about you, at its own pace, comfortable, familiar, not in the least threatening.  Of course there are no surprises, but you do not venture into the ordinary with expectations of meeting surprises.  By choosing the ordinary, you have opted for the predictable.  Your focus is on comfort, perhaps even the comfort of what worked once before—or several times before.

The ordinary sometimes works on such ventures as your evening walk, where you want a slight interior focus to work out things you wish to writer or for some reason or other need to write and cannot yet bring yourself to start.  The ordinary sometimes works in these daily practice essays, which help you articulate things you wish to start growing, but can’t quite see how—yet.

Your theory that a mini-essay every day should, after a while—a year or two or three—produce some kind of muscles that overcome the comfort and familiarity and lack of threat, taking you into neighborhoods where there is known risk.

These risky neighborhoods are the ones where the shadows begin playing on your imagination, assuming shapes that trigger primal thoughts of peril.  If you are not careful, you may even find yourself crossing the street to avoid passing some of these shadows at too close a range where, for instance, your posture may give you away as a potential victim.

You have not given conscious attention to the potential you have for being a risk profiler.  There are no risks in the ordinary neighborhoods, only occasional splashes of adrenaline when a cat dashes from behind a hedge, or a dog appears before you, unattended, sniffing, yet insouciant, as though having at this moment materialized for the purpose of messing with your comfort zone.  Dogs and cats are known to pick up on pheromones, to “read” humans such as you, who go traipsing through ordinary neighborhoods.  Attributing supernatural abilities to them loses sight of the differences between what seems supernatural and what things are in actuality natural abilities with logical explanations.

Dogs and cats and apparent risks are part of the borderlines between ordinary and risk.  You accept that ordinary, while not threatening, while even comfortable and encouraging of inner exploration, produces only ordinary inner exploration, which is about as satisfying as checking through the movie ads running at this time of year to see if there is anything of vague potential as interest for you, or finding an excuse to visit Chaucer’s, the independent book store you favor, thinking to browse.

Of course much of this is metaphor.  Walking an ordinary route is a metaphor for writing that seems to reflect ordinary to you, or for not taking a chance in some relevant life venture because comfort is so easy to visualize and the risk of dodgy choices places a great deal of expectation and accommodation on the outcome.

You try to be on your guard to make sure the comfort of the ordinary is not too easy a choice.

Explaining the arrival of ideas and associations as some mystical process may sound attractive, even romantic, but as the case is with dogs and cats and other animals and their abilities to see things you are not able to see, there are often more direct, rational or, if you will empirical bases for the arrival of associations, ideas, and out-of-the-ordinary visions.

The process you’re after, depicting your own vision of the neighborhoods and their denizens about you, is not so compartmentalized as you once thought.  The process extends through everything so that even when you think you’re taking time off, away from writing or reading, or thinking about writing or reading, you are doing no such thing.  You are continuous in your articulation of everything you come in contact with.  Even sights and events that seem descriptive of setting and background appear to you with word sets and cadences of clauses and phrases, all of them reflecting your feelings at the time, your attitude, your vision, your particular sense of being alive.

No more ordinary walks for you.  No more ordinary sentences.  You have another shot at kicking them down the road into the risky neighborhoods when you set about revision, and that awareness is the kind of comfort that means more to you than the easygoing sense of comfort that comes when you’ve convinced yourself all is safe and without tension.

Readers set such text aside, perhaps far enough aside to keep track of where they put the text down.  You wish no such incidents.  In the same manner in which you write to see what happens next, you hope to lay enough crumbs along the path to keep the reader in the risky neighborhood with you, too fascinated to worry about that rumbling, wolf-like grumble off toward the shadows.