Dialogue as a Second Language

You're used to hearing writing described as a lonely process, although you do not agree with the assessment.  True enough, you're often alone in the physical sense, even though on occasion you leave the comfort of your work area at home for a coffee shop filled with customers engaged in chat and conversation.  You do this to fine-tune your focus on work by blocking out the very conversations you'd come to experience.

Once at work, you're far from lonely; you're in the company of characters and landscape you've created, focusing on them,  In the process of this focus, you've transported yourself into another landscape of time, space, and causation.

For the past several days, you've been living in two parallel universes.  One of these is the alternate universe of your own devising, dropped on your desk almost like a legal brief or, to apply heat to the metaphor, like an indictment.  

You'd not set out with any plan to design this alternate universe the way you'd have done had the material on your desk been a novel.  This universe was a group of your short fiction, often written in times such as these, between classes and editing assignments, or as delightful excuses to avoid working on something longer.  

The stories have all had homes in various journals, some no longer thriving.  Every one of them has passed through some form or another of editorial review.  The fact of their having been published was a contributing factor to their being about to appear under the same covers, subject to yet another editorial review, and of course your own.

The other parallel universe is, of course, the world of reality as it is, or as it presents itself to you, as the reality it is.  This other universe and your response to it and your interpretation of it, is a direct and proximate cause of this alternate universe you've brought together over some years and in various moods, all of which are recognizably you--so far as you are concerned.

Going through this potpourri of your visions, you've focused on the world of dialogue, which is the world of characters speaking in dramatic terms as opposed to the conversational tones you're used to hearing about you when you're out in the actual world.

This morning, you're at one of your favored breakfast spots, puttering with the New York Times crossword puzzle, making some inroads on a latte with an elaborate design, waiting for the rest of your meal to be delivered and for your frequent Sunday morning companion, Jim Alexander, to appear.

Other breakfasters are beginning to appear, including a gentleperson of about your age, who is seeming to address the same puzzle as you with a vigorous ease.  Sounds of conversation waft about you like the pleasant bitterness of coffee aroma from your latte.  These sounds are in their way incomplete or distracting even though the persons engaged in producing them seem comfortable and sociable.  They are speaking in conversation.  You've been intent these days on dialogue.

When Jim Alexander arrives, you're relieved because at last, with another writer present, you can switch to dialogue.

Dialogue is in most cases another language, neither American English, conversational discourse, nor the oblique approaches to communication so useful and serviceable in the world of reality.  The inner dialogue a character has when alone or when being introspective among a group of others is called interior monologue.  This inner talk is also unlike the more descriptive aspects of narrative; it is taut, tense, often incomplete or barely declarative sentences.  It is the poetry of your inner selves, the articulations of your fondest desires, your most forbidden fantasies, your darkest moods, your agendas of discovery and understanding.

You live in an area where there is a significant and diverse Latino community, thus numerous occasions for ESL or English as a Second Language Classes.  With that in mind and your sense of disconnect at having spent so much time in your own world of your own language and your own visions of trying to express ideas, feelings, understanding, and empathy, you are teaching the equivalent of ESL classes every time you give a writer's workshop.  You are trying to write and feel your way into the language of story.

If you have learned anything at all about story, you've learned that it cannot be described, it must be conveyed, through dialogue, interior monologue, and narrative.  These are not languages of English or Spanish or any other fine and descriptive language; these are the languages of the human spirit, caught up in the immediacy of coping with the world we all inhabit and try to understand.

What is not said in a story is as important as the things that are said, he said.

 You pick up a promising novel, find yourself intrigued by the narrative voice issuing from a lead character, then watch for the anticipated event that will confront the character with the need to act.  Or react.  Or take steps.  Perhaps all of these.

In almost no time at all, you've bonded with that character, his or her narrative voice, and way of responding.  You may even begin to suspect the character of some quirk or flaw or predilection.  If all the circumstances are positive, you might even have a few moments of realizing you've been transported to a place you had no interest in going, arriving at a time other than the present, where you had no particular interest.

Let's say you're four or five pages in, aware of a growing commitment to the story.  One other moment of realization comes to you:  You're in to stay.  Unless there is some egregious flaw or breach, unless the hologram of plausibility and tension is shattered in some unanticipated way, you're in for the long haul, intending to real all the way through.

Although you do read many books during the course of a year and have dealings with entire manuscripts or portions of works intended for publication, you do not arrive lightly at the states you've described here.  Nevertheless, when you do reach that state with a work you're reading, a feeling of satisfaction and warmth begins to seep through your awareness.  

Even though the narrative itself may be horrific or disturbing in its thematic implications (such as the manuscript you're reading for a friend, dealing with a front-rank character who has just suffered a debilitating stroke), the warmth of satisfaction at being "in" a narrative is tangible, appreciated, welcomed.  Of course you hope to produce such an emotional landscape with every story you write.  These feelings are the ones that seem to have appeared as you set about trying to learn the storytelling craft.

Here you are then, engrossed, engaged, pleased to be identifying and sympathizing with this narrative voice.  You come to the end of a chapter, which ends in satisfying tension or outright suspense, for a moment smiling at the degree to which your focus has been arrested by the character's depth, complexity, and momentary dilemma.

With eagerness, you turn the page, only to discover the author has pulled the rug from under you, swept the tablecloth from under the place setting with a deft flick by switching to the point of view of another character, one who is being introduced to you in the opening lines of the new chapter.

Cut to you being in your publisher's office, having just had a pleasing chat with your editor, who has excused herself to get a copy of her notes on your recent work.  You're curious to see the notes, pleased to see your editor's office is every bit a jumble as yours when you worked for publishers.  There is a knock at the door.  In comes the editor's employer, the publisher, who introduces herself, then presents you with what you can only call a high-class problem.  

The publisher wants to engage you in a three-book arrangement which will be likely to occupy as many as five of the next years of your life.  You don't have to make up your mind right here on the spot, the publisher tells you.  Take your time.  Then she hands you her card.  Maybe by the end of next week you could let me know.  She offers her hand, then leaves.

You sit there, stunned, flushed with a sense of purposeful satisfaction at reaching such a plateau.

A moment later, there is another knock on the door.  It is your editor's assistant, holding a folder with your editor's notes on the project for which you were summoned here.

You've done here in imaginary effect what the imaginary book you were reading and describing a few moments ago had on you.  You've introduced parallel narrative lines.

With your hard won understanding about the nature of parallel lines in a geometric sense (having experienced severe difficulties with geometry in high school to the point where you did not grasp the concept of alternate interior angles of the same degree), you now accept that in reality, parallel lines meet only in infinity.  In dramatic narrative, they meet in the last chapter.

Or sooner.

Two distinct characters being set in motion, confronted with intriguing obstacles or decisions, causes you to understand on some level that their stories are tied by some link, the discovery of which will add even greater satisfaction to your pursuit of this narrative.  

You read on, absorbing the status and demeanor of this new character.  While you do, a new suspicion begins to grow in your mind:  Perhaps there will be yet another character introduced, causing you to have to go through this same exquisite tension yet again.  A favored novel, Wilkie Collins' 1868 The Moonstone, was written in this multiple point-of-view fashion.  You'd probably experienced this narrative approach before reading The Moonstone, but because of the effectiveness of this form of narrative, this has become the default example for you.

When you think about story and structure, no wonder you think about parallel lines; you are setting forces in motion, causing concern for their safety or possible detours into disaster.  You are creating the suspense of wondering how the character is who is out of immediate focus.  You are creating entire lines of concern you'd not imagined when you began puttering with what the story was and how best to tell it.

Parallel construction is a different matter altogether, a negative one that in effect creates distraction and that unwelcome presence, anticlimax.  Parallel lines keep the focus where it belongs, on the characters, away from you, the writer.

Parallel lines help introduce into the story the forceful presence of implication and evocation, both of which are well above simple description.

What is not said in a story is often every bit as important as the things that are said, particularly if the reader is saying them for you.

The Dark Side of the Story

When you take a quick look at yourself, you're more apt to be blinded by the brightness of enthusiasm and an eagerness born of impatience to get things moving.  This quick look sends back reports of near normality because of the way the enthusiasm trumps so many resident quirks.

You would in fact rather be up and eager and alert rather than lugubrious, dark, cynical.  In this frame of mind and reference, you are aware of but forgiving of your quirks.  Sure, have a few quirks, but on balance, you're pretty upbeat, your politics left-leaning and your mode social.  

You're pretty much the sort who is not surprised when out in public, at, say, a coffee shop, trying to slip in some writing, one or more strangers will approach you and start a conversation.  Even at your age, you're not invisible when out in public, even though there are times when you try to make yourself invisible as a kind of actor's exercise.

Nevertheless you tend to gravitate more in your reading and writing to characters on the dark side of the line, darker than you.  You set a tentative boundary because you don't want the dark side to be so tedious in its darkness that plausibility disappears.  Let's leave it at this:  you recognize the need to push characters of your creation over the line you've set up for yourself in real life.

If you allow your characters to stop where you see yourself stopping, don't expect to experience a tingle of excitement or apprehension or tension when you reread what you've written.  Don't expect the transactions and responses and subsequent resolutions to resonate for you.  

Don't expect to push the confrontation to the point where the responses frighten you.  Under such circumstances, you're trying to get out with a show of edginess and probing while still maintaining a degree of comfort.

Yeah, well.  Comfort has to go.  Nice has to go.  If these two qualities are allowed to remain, somewhere along the way, the narrative is going to turn to mush for you, and you are not all that fond of mush except that it is oatmeal, prepared with some deliberation.

You're looking for encounters between and among individuals that reflect some plausible image of the reality you see going on in these early years of the twenty-first century, slightly beyond the bubble of comfort in which you live, bleeding into the polarity and extremes you see just beyond your line of sight and reach.

You're looking for entitlement, encounters with connectedness, desperate seeking for connections which may in the final analysis be impossible to maintain for any significant time.  You're looking for individuals who tie meaning into knots they find it impossible to untie, persons who seek meaning from things they've purchased at the literary equivalents of garage sales.  

You're looking for persons who've tried any number of conventional and unconventional things, hopeful of extracting tangible meaning, men and women who've been infused with expectations they can never seem to meet.

When you were in high school, it seemed to you many of the girls you were interested in were drawn to sullen types in leather jackets who seemed to understand motorcycles.  You were sullen in all the conventional ways but cared nothing for motorcycles and accordingly knew little about them except for the two primary brands being Indian and Harley-Davidson.

Trouble was, sullen seemed to go better with motorcycles and leather jackets.  Your brand of sullenness got you nothing but a few premature creases on your brow.

The way you see yourself now, if you're not careful, is someone whose sullenness is masked by his enthusiasm for the wild literary rides of investigation and essay, and from reading literature with an increasing focus on the noir or dark side of men and women who have begun to feel betrayed by the conventions they'd been led to believe would bring them a measure of happiness.

Dylan Thomas, the tormented and troubled Welsh poet, wrote of his craft:


In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

You're looking for the meanings in that secret, dark side of the heart, meanings that will help you and your characters find some escape velocity from the heavy orbit of convention.  

Improve through Improv

You are in the midst of the discovery that comes from revisiting a number of short stories you'd thought were finished.  The stories led you to believe they were finished in a way you at first did not understand, then came to appreciate.

Almost all the stories you'd thought were finished arrived separately, in unfinished stages, waiting upon you to apply the final touches.  No problem with that; you play and dance and think, trying your best to listen to the characters, even talking to them, telling them they're on their own now.  

Some of them believe you and tell you how they wish things to go, and you say,"aha, so that's how it is with you," and you set down their choices.  Now the stories say, "We're through, we're out of here."  You send these stories to various publications you've come to appreciate.

They send you notes saying they find your stories congenial and will offer them a home, and you are pleased for the entire process.

Other stories are not so cooperative.  This is so not because of any inherent problem with them, rather the matter focuses on you.  You work furiously at finishing them off, trying one crazy stunt after another.  You do everything you can think of with the possible exception of listening to the characters, a complicated matter that in fact has led to this essay.

The stories were, after all, quite finished.  You did not believe the stories themselves, much less the characters, not until you'd done the equivalent of trying to tack numerous last acts to these stories you'd come to think of as problem stories.  They did not think of themselves as problem stories; you were the narrative fly in the dramatic ointment.

After some time, you came to understand that the stories you worked so hard to finish were already done.  No wonder you couldn't get additional scenes to fit onto them.  They already had a caboose.

Which meant you had to spend considerable time, thought, and effort asking yourself and, in subsequent adventures, your characters if you could please come to some agreement about where the story ended.

You reached the point where you almost understood.  To put the matter in a yet better way, you reached the point where you understood as much as you wished to understand, which was the state where you had to reach some understanding with story, with characters, and with endings.  The risk, you felt, was going too far in articulating the way things should be, opening the door for a formulaic feeling where instead you wished to achieve another feeling, one of a well-articulated presence of believable certainty, which, according to you, is a blend of certainty, absolutism, chaos, and uncertainty.

These past days, you've been looking at the notes your publisher has sent on a group of your short stories from which he hopes to select twelve or fourteen, all of which in one way or another caused you some forms of exercise, conversation, frustration, and, ultimately, satisfaction.  All the stories have gone through your process, have been sent off, have been well received, discussed in some memo or other, sent through a final review, then published.

Here they are again, much like children coming home to live with the parents again because each one has notes from the latest publisher.

This is not a complaint because in looking at them again you're thinking there are some stray cat or dog hairs, a flake of dandruff, or in more direct terms, an unnecessary -ly adverb, an observation from you that would have had better effect coming from a character, a tad too much about the waist here, and traces of poor nourishment there.

Although you're quite pleased about this forthcoming publication and your publisher's obvious enthusiasm, you were for a time not sure how to proceed.  You spent a good deal of time puttering with the order of these stories and the building momentum you hoped to achieve.  Both processes were, you realized, stalling devices.  You were edgy about looking into the actual text, particularly since the Publisher said there'd be notes.

How could you think to get into the story, recapture the feeling in order to cope with the notes and your own impressions?

Then the answer.  Improv.  You have your characters improvising a scene.  Starting to feel good.  So you try another take.  Soon, the chemistry is back, and that's the dynamic to make everything work.

Henry V, Act 3, Scene 1:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more...

What Good Is a Story if It Doesn't in Some Way...

There are times when you become so engaged in a narrative that you not only suspend your disbelief, you as well fail to realize what you've read is not a story.

You do not come lightly to this failure to recognize story from non-story; your own early work reflects innocence of the dramatic genome and its applications.  Not only is that fact a given, even today, you are in frequent need of several drafts before you can begin looking at the narrative, calling it out, challenging it with such rhetoric as "Are you story yet?"  Perhaps even the more stringent, "You call this story?"

To date, you're over two thousand mini-essays on this site.  At least a quarter of those are in some specific way an investigation about one or more facets of story.  If awareness of your own hypotheses and investigations is any help at all, you are at least that much more apt not to pass a narrative you've written until it shows a passport or entry visa of story.

If your speculations have any weight, you've in some measure defined for yourself and your dramatic instincts such concepts as "slice-of-life," "vignette," and "flash fiction," the later having a range of subjective definitions, ranging from acceptance as a shorter short story to your own definition of an expanded joke or apothegm or, perhaps, maxim.

You've had to work your way into what a story is for you from the point of view of what it is not.  Because so many of the narratives you called story in the past were narratives with attitudinal (authorial) payoffs, you were able to see how easy it was for you to pick a situation that was a concept, extend it for a bit, then resolve it yourself, scarce in your awareness that it was none of your business but rather the explicit business of your characters.  

Thus you wrote concepts.  Unable to take that necessary defining step in which the characters could cause some resolution, you supplied it via theme.

Thus, your personal rule number one:  A concept is not a story.  

A writer (such as yourself) trying to write a story and not being successful with the particular story is only a concept.  True, it has a basic ingredient, conflict.  The writer is trying to do something, but is not making progress.  He is frustrated.  

You introduce another character, say a pal who is an editor.  "Hey, how you doing on that story you owe me?"  External pressure.  "Fine, fine,"  the writer says, feeling pressure.  "Coming along nicely."  Pressure exacerbated, but still no story.  How about, add another character--the writer's SO.  "Hey,"  she says, "Didn't I just hear you tell Fred, who buys all your stories, that you were well along?  And aren't you in fact desperate for a story?"  Enhanced pressure, but no story.  A writer on a deadline, unable to develop material, is not yet a story, only a concept.

Feeling uncomfortable for the fib told his editor and guilty for snapping at his SO, then sending her off to a movie with a girlfriend, he resolves to be a better person.  Even you, back in the earlier days, could see that there was still no story.

However.

The writer recalls an incident that might lend itself into that magnificent dramatic concatenation called a short story.  He sits before his computer, begins to type.  Still no story, but he is beginning to formulate who the characters are in this narrative, when, of a sudden, a female mosquito (only girl mosquitoes bite) enters the room, begins buzzing about the writer, sensing a four o'clock snack.

The writer grows irritated, waves the mosquito off.  For her part, the mosquito has begun to sense a nice afternoon cocktail.  She persists in her attempts to land on the writer.  Aware of the mosquito's intent, the writer pushes back from his desk, spots a copy of The New York Review of Books, picks it up, rolls it into a tight wand-shaped tube.  It is a weapon.  It is also the first direct step the writer in this scenario has taken to solve a problem.  

The concept has now been moved into story stage, which will be enhanced in any of a number of ways depending on the author of this story.  The writer could, for instance, take a swat at the mosquito, miss, and break a bone china coffee cup given him by his SO, swearing at the misfortune as he stops to pick up the broken shards, wondering if repair is possible.

Complication.  The SO has returned from the movie, which was so bad, she couldn't bear to sit it through.  Also, she began thinking maybe she could be more supportive of the writer, which she does by offering to make a pot of coffee, which now confronts the writer with the need to confess the misadventure with the china cup, consider the second  stretching of truth by concealing the misadventure with the cup.

Where once there was only concept, ironically buzzing about in search of a story, now, thanks to the introduction of the mosquito, story is in place, progressing as the writer attempts to deal with physical, emotional, and existential.

In order to impart more of your own fingerprint on this story or any story of your own composition, you wish to impart your personal rule number two:  You must keep reviewing, reconsidering, and improvising events and responses that provide some outcome or revelation that you'd not previously seen--a complete surprise to you.  All the better if the surprise borders on a revelation of an existential nature.  (You do write for discovery, don't you?) 

Rule Three--yes, there is a third rule here--is that the effectiveness of the story and its outcome are in direct proportion to some aspect thought to be unthinkable (to one or more of the main characters or you as the writer) has come to pass.  Another, less sententious way of stating this premise:  What good is a story if it doesn't fuck with some social or moral convention and your own sense of boundary?

Escape Velocity

  In the waning months of 1974, you moved from the city of your birth, Santa Monica, California, to relocate about ninety-five miles north, to another coastal town that in a number of ways continues to remind you of Santa Monica.

That same year, you began teaching at the University of Southern California, which is located near a neighborhood where you once lived for a brief time.  You made the commute for thirty-four years, during which USC and the neighborhood underwent the kinds of small and epic changes you've come to associate with the entire Los Angeles Basin.  Sometimes, when you'd arrived in Los Angeles, you could almost feel the changes that had begun to take place.  You'd visit the home where you lived with your maternal grandparents, noticing how it had aged, faded, begun to peel.  You saw the high school you'd feared you'd have to attend, and you saw USC, which you feared you'd have to attend.  You had no reason to think you'd teach anywhere, much less USC, thus the beginnings of many ironies when you in fact did teach there.

On most occasions when you traveled to Los Angeles, you drove through the city of your birth.  Today was no exception.  You were scant blocks from the place you lived in 1974, close to the site at Fifth and Santa Monica Boulevard where your father had a store, passed locales where, in earlier times, he and your maternal grandfather had several stores, and were within blocks of 611 Fourteenth Street, whence you were taken having been born at the then Santa Monica Hospital at Fifteenth and Wilshire.

You passed the coffee shop near Fifth and Lincoln where, at one time, you went with some regularity to have eggs Benedict.  Of course it has long since ceased being a restaurant and is not the setting for a family dentistry practice.  You in a larger sense passed ghosts of your former self, your parents, and their friends.

In that same sense, every time you are in El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, you see ghosts of yourself, friends, ambitions, experiments, and learning curves.  You see a place you were convinced you would never leave.  Even with its massive changes and architectural equivalents of face peelings, you have a sense of direction and history you've not experienced in any other larger city such as Mexico, D.F., London, or New York.

Driving north on Pacific Coast Highway to Topanga Canyon, then over that old familiar road, you saw ghosts of other Los Angeles Canyons, notably Laurel, Coldwater, and Beverly Glen.  You saw wide reaches from the heights, and small, intimate alleyways from the lower portions.  You were amazed, as you always are when driving in any portion of the sprawl that is LA how familiar everything seems, how the curves of the canyons are graded, how the houses are cantilevered on the hillsides.

At the topmost point of Topanga Canyon, a mile or two south of Mulholland Drive, at almost the exact spot where, several years earlier, you found your lost dog, Edward, waiting for you one Christmas morning, as though he'd known you'd come for him there, you realized that often in your dreams, you are driving through portions of LA in all its moods and surreal presence.

You have some kind of understanding with the Los Angeles Basin, which is an enormous landscape containing parts of heaven, hell, purgatory, gated communities and long, leisurely strips of tall palm trees, seeming to sway slightly in the wind, reminding you of lion's tales.  You drove down a shaded lane in which crepe myrtle had strewn their wondrous mauve foliage.  Then there were vestiges of jacaranda in bloom along bricked center dividers in streets that ambled like congenial drunks along late afternoon shadows and old stage coach stops.

In its way, Los Angeles is like a large, sheet cake, its design and shape a collaboration of exuberant, bright kids wanting to try something new.  Cut a slice and take it with you.  Cut another slice and take it home to someone you love, or hand it to a stranger whom you hope to love.

Driving through Los Angeles is like a double shot of espresso with that special espresso cream from being made so perfect.  You drive through places such as Woodland Hills and Calabassas to reach 101 northbound, watching people driving Porsches flipping off drivers in lesser cars, women in Lexus and Cadillacs waving rolled Yoga mats in greeting, and hip, blond teenagers shouting Namaste and making tents with their hands.  Commuters are texting, talking on cell phones, making gestures of benediction to the Deer Crossing signs.

You need a special escape velocity to get out of Los Angeles, and by the time you're over the county line into Ventura County, moving to such outposts as Thousand Oaks and Camarillo, you understand that you carry some of Los Angeles with you, fairy dust, karma dust, perhaps a touch of cardamom or coriander on your sleeve.

Stopping at the Marie Callender restaurant off Las Posas to get a large, generous cornbread round, seems a gesture of grounding yourself back in reality, but you know LA is still with you.  It doesn't go away.  

Later, you will realize how much energy being in LA has required of you.  When you sleep, you'll dream Los Angeles dreams, see Los Angeles stucco and glass and bold, fanciful graffiti that waves to you, beckons you back into the laser-like shimmer of a reality that follows you as long as there are motes of the fairy dust and karma dust and cardamom or coriander on your sleeve.

Fuck you.  Namaste.  Watch those chakras.  Fasten your seat belts and return your chairs to an upright position for landing in the rest of the world.

You'll be back.  It's there, waiting for you.

Impatient for Results

Things take time.

Impatience often becomes a dissenting voice, complaining about a particular thing taking too long.

You've lived long enough to have a sense of how long many things take, how surprises, both pleasing and unpleasant, arise, often in the form of something taking longer than it ought or a discovery that an event or goal in progress has happened before you'd expected.

In real and important senses, you've only in recent years come to terms with the impatience associated with finishing works in progress.  In your mind's eye, you sometimes visit graveyards of unfinished projects, recalling the way the idea came to you in the first place and the way the sensations of it seemed to take over your life, and how energizing and wonderful that was, until you'd hit the literary equivalent of the wall you'd sometimes hit in distance running.

That wall came for you at about mile twenty or twenty-one, at about the time when you'd burned off the glycogen reserves and felt a physical sense of devastation.  The solution to that came after some reading and study.  The solution was at once wonderful and simple:  a large helping of pasta with lobster sauce.  The lobster rather than the pasta was the major ingredient.  Eat a modest plate of pasta with lobster for dinner, then be able to run the full twenty-six miles the next day, not artificially enhanced as some professional athletes, but nutritionally equipped according to your own, three and a half hour performance time.

The solution in writing came when, one day, with no warning, you found yourself walking your dog along the beach, mind a delightful zone-out, when you were presented with the answer to a story you hadn't been able to finish and left, waiting, a few years back.  You rushed home, excited to get back to this old friend you felt you'd abandoned.

In this case, the pasta with lobster was patience and the habit of a regular rereading of incomplete works.  The lobster word here was regular, not merely at times when there seemed to be nothing coming.  You knew by then how important it was to not walk away from reading closely and writing every day, whether you felt like it--whatever that may have meant at the time--or not.

You've not had pasta with lobster for some time, the closest being a pasta dish that's become dear to you, pasta with calamari.  But that is not to fuel running adventures.  That is because you enjoy the combination.

Sometimes reading seems a chore.  Rather than spending the time trying to figure out why the task seems so onerous, you developed the habit of finding something to read--anything, until the chore aspects either vanished and you became caught in the work you were reading or the work you were reading seemed so foreign and remote that in self-defense, you developed a counter irritant, something of your own to write so that you'd later have something of interest to read.

As noted in your earlier paragraphs, things take time.  Not long ago, you visited a dermatologist because of a tiny red blotch near your cheek, noticed by your gatekeeper physician during your routine physical prior to having cataract replacement.  

The dermatologist nodded, squirted a blast of liquid nitrogen on the offending spot after diagnosing it as SK, subhorreal keratosis.  He gave you a time line.  Scab by the next day.  Three days for the scab to fall off.  A week or two for the traces of red from the new cells to return to normal flesh color.  Right on time.  Everything on schedule.

Some time frames may cause you more impatience or, in relative terms, less.  Now and then, you might do something to hurry the results, but the things you do may well be little more than diversionary tactics.

Attempting to achieve the Observing Ego condition could, if you attempted to rush that ability, occasion impatience, producing an irony of circularity in which you'd exchanged one impatience for another.

In story and in life, stasis becomes a Petri dish for impatience.