Waiter, What's This Fly Doing in My Soup? Looks Like the Backstroke, Sir.

 Your favorite waiter at your favorite Italian restaurant either knows your tastes and preferences or is a consummate actor.  After dining there for years, you have no idea which is true.  More often than not, you will go to this restaurant with a particular dish in mind, often the bronzing or sea bass, or the linguini with clams.

Before you get an opportunity to express your preferences, he will open a small bottle of San Pelegrino water, pour about half of it into a goblet with a few ice cubes and a slice of lime.  "Tonight,"  he will say, "the osso bucco will bring tears to your eyes, followed by a smile to your face."  He says this with such certainty that all thoughts of the branzini or clams vanish.  On some basic level, you understand that you have indeed come here for the osso bucco.

"A simple salad, yes?  Perhaps one fat anchovy, a splash of vinegar, a dot of the reduced balsamic vinegar.  I will bring you some bread and a glass of pinot grigio."

There are times when you wonder if he has any memory of you at all.  Being a waiter can, you imagine, have its boring aspects:  hungry people coming in, indecisive, cranky, impatient.  Perhaps you are an X-factor in some game he plays with himself in order to make his work shift interesting.  

Perhaps he has some complex contest going with the chef where each bets twenty or even fifty dollars on which dish will be most ordered on a particular shift.  Perhaps the matter of the osso bucco you will order has more to do with his winning a bet from the chef than bringing tears to your eyes and a smile to your face.

Through all the years you've been going there, alone or with friends, he has only confided in you once.  "That man, sitting over there,"  he said, indicating a middle-aged man with curly black hair, a suit with wide lapels, and wearing cowboy boots instead of shoes.  "He is not welcomed at my station.  He has been twice asked to leave the restaurant."

Of course you are curious.  "Why?"

With a sneer, your waiter tells you, "He seeks to have Pecorino Romano cheese grated on his vongole.  We have explained to him that one does not put cheese on pasta with clam sauce. We will not serve him vongole.  He knows this."

"What does he order?"

Again, the sneer.  "Lasagna.  The man has no sense."

In some way, at past meals, you were given to understand that if one were to have coffee after a meal, it would be a demitasse, the small, thick, espresso.  You were also given to understand that some behavioral code would be broken if you asked for cream.  Possibly one biscotti, but no cream.

Of course you will return to this restaurant.  Of course you will in some probability have a particular dish in mind.  Of course you will be given to understand on some sub-vocal way that you were only considering your choice, you were going instead for a full experience built on mystery, surprise, ritualized behavior, suspense, suspicion, and the chemistry of ambiance. This waiter is your favorite waiter because he is predictable, up to a point, impenetrable up to another point, perhaps as consummate a show person as an accomplished actor.

In so many ways, this waiter is like the writer you discover, then follow, knowing you are in for the experiences related to showmanship, mystery, suspense, the ritualized behavior of story, surprise, and ambiance.  When the bill comes, you gladly pay because you have this sense of having taken somewhere other than your intended destination, then made to realize how important this aspect of destination has become in your life.

The G

In hardly any time at all after opening the book, you were in' you knew it still belonged; you'd made the right choice.  By "the book," you meant Herb Gold's The Man Who Was Not With It,"a narrative of, among other things, the the illusory world of the carnival.  For a time, you were with it.  Although you have only published one thing about "It," you have never got past, over, around, or beyond the implications of being with it.

Only today, as you dawdled through toast and coffee, prompted by your reading of The Man Who Was Not With It, you were back with It, learning about the basic unit of It, wherever It is.  In this case, you were with your entry ticket to the world of It, a person you knew little about except that while you were attending Los Angeles City College and UCLA, he was attending Atascadero, which is a secure forensic hospital, and San Quentin, which is a correctional facility.  He was also an able-bodied seaman, shipping out on merchant vessels, bound for Asian and European ports.  Let's call him Stan.

Shortly after you'd completed your first job with It, which is to say with the carnival and the fraternal and sororal order of men and women unlike anything you'd seen before, you were being "broken in" at a job from which the expression "Close, but no cigar" originated, The Hammer.  Players at the time paid twenty-five cents to swing a medium-weight mallet at a padded target resembling the sprung cushion of an old sofa. The Hammer appears to be straight, Newtonian physics.  You hit the target with enough force, a marker rises up a ten-foot vertical channel, embedded between two long boards.  At the top of the vertical channel is a bell which, if hit by the marker, clangs a loud greeting.

"You're sure your friend here understands how this booth works,"  the owner, who was about to become your boss, asked Stan.  "You're sure he understands this booth pays rent and has to account for itself?"

"I showed him all about the G,"  Stan said.

"We'll have to see, won't we?"  the owner said.  "He looks kind of green to me."

"That,"  Stan said, "is his strength."

Within minutes, you were in the booth, a money apron tied about your waist, the mallet in your hand.  As a group of middle-aged men, laughing and stumbling along, passed the booth, you caught their attention by ringing the gong twice, once by holding the hammer in one hand.

"Easy as pie, boys," you called out, extending the hammer to the one who seemed drunkest.  "Here, have a swing on me."

He did.  In fact, he rang the bell even louder than you had.  "Shoot,"  you said.  "You'd a been swinging for real, that woulda got you a cigar or anything on the first shelf.  

"What about them other shelves?  Teddy bears.  Dolls.  That portable radio."

"You got to ring that gong two times to get you up on the second shelf. Course you got to pay in advance for two swings."

"Suppose I miss the first time?"

"You already saw how easy it was.  How you gonna mess up, big guy like you?"

As you recall, you worked that group of men for the better part of forty dollars, using a combination of Stan's previous instructions, and the basic unit of carnival life, the G.  Thanks to some adventurous psychological researchers, the term "The G" may have a sexual connotation.  In this case, it was short for The Gimmick.  In the case of The Hammer booth, where you indeed got a job and where, indeed, your appearing green or naive or untested, worked to your advantage, the G was a pedal with which you could control the height, or lack thereof, the counter rose toward the bell.

You were thinking this morning of Stan, of the G, and the carnival ethos which held among other things that those of us who were with It were contributing to the enjoyment of the Mark by using techniques you later began to recognize as being resident in story.  A Mark earned his stuffed animal by paying for it; it he earned it too soon,it was suspect.

You were also thinking of Stan, coming to get you in a 1940 Cadillac, he'd purchased from Freddy Fastpants,a Gypsy in Medford, Oregon.  There you were, in a garage in King City, California, the hood of the Cadillac open, billows of smoke wafting from the engine vault.  "Hey, guys, commere," the mechanic, whose name was Manny," called to his garage mates.  "You gotta see this."

Soon, four or five mechanics were huddled about the car, laughing.Your auto-related Spanish lacked the vocabulary for the insider's laugh, but when Manny asked Stan where he'd got hold of such a car, you began to get the drift.  When Manny offered to buy the Cadillac for one hundred dollars, the drift became heavier.

"I paid two thousand for that damned car,"Stan said, which provoked gales of laughter from everyone but Stan.

"All right, all right,"  Manny said.  "You got screwed is what.  I'm gonna work with you," by which he meant he was going to sell Stan a late model De Soto, the only thing wrong, and I'm telling you up front, she burns some oil.  "Throw in the Caddy, you and your buddy gonna be driving a late model De Soto outta here right now.."

Two days later, when you were in Salinas, working the Salinas Fair, and the De Soto had needed towing, you were working what turned out to be your favorite of all booths, the baseball throw.  Six lead milk bottles, stacked in a triangle.  Three balls for a quarter.  The G:  three of the milk bottles had two-pound lead weights in them.  If you happened to stack the weighted bottles toward the pyramid, a good sneeze would topple them.  If the weighted bottles were stacked at the bottom, a fast throw could easily bounce back to ricochet off the thrower.

Stan nudged you.  "What goes around comes around,"  he said, pointing down the midway.  There, stumbling along, enjoying the ever present smell of grilling onions from the cookhouse, clutching a paper cup of beer, was Manny, the mechanic from Salinas.

"My turn,"  Stan said.  "He's on my turf now."

Vision Quest

Pick a statement with an innocuous payoff, say, "Oh, how nice," or the even more simplistic, "Lovely."  Put such statements into the toolkit of a writer with a fine sense of nuance, and you might find yourself looking at a dramatic situation where a character says one or both these statements.  Chances are huge that at least fifty percent of the audience will understand the irony by which is meant the exact opposites of "Oh, how nice," or "Lovely."

Irony works that way.  A good chunk of the audience or readership understand the payoff intent, which is anything but "Oh, how nice."  The writer who understands such things is also thinking on the percentage of the audience who do not get the intended irony, who take it in its full, literal sense.  Who would say or think "Oh, how nice" under such circumstances as the author has presented?  Who would respond to a disaster or setback with what appears to be admiration?

Dramatists, short story writers, and novelists go to great lengths to wrap a coil of intrigue and pressure around the armature of a character and that character's dearest goals, causing a particular relationship between the reader and the author.  In your own reading experiences, the gone-but-not-forgotten English storyteller, W. Somerset Maugham, was one of the great twentieth century authorial presences, stepping to the stage to tell us a story, often one with an ironic bite, leaving us to rush to the library or bookstore for more of his work.  

He was our storyteller, even though he seemed to embody the suave urbanity of the upper-tier Englishman.  We trusted him.  It was Maugham, potentially world weary and cynical, wishing to regale us with tales of fascinating individuals we could only hope to meet on some social level.

But what of a writer such as Maugham's contemporary, Evelyn Waugh, who was known to take irony to  a slippery plateau on which most readers were not as comfortable as they had been with Maugham.  There seemed to be a suspicious entity lurking behind every paragraph, causing the reader to wonder if Waugh had not somehow conspired against the reader.

Evelyn Waugh was by no means the first writer to play with irony and exaggeration.  A scant generation before Waugh was the embodiment of ironic thrust, Samuel L. Clemens.  Nor was the estimable Mr. Clemens alone in his ironic manipulations; he seemed, in fact, to have been born into the midst of a generation of them, notably Artemus Ward, William Wright, and David Ross Locke, who wrote as Petroleum V. Nasby.  Even these nineteenth century ironists owed a debt reaching back some hundreds of years to Geoffrey Chaucer, who, not content with making fun of the knighthood, the clergy, and the common working man, also took himself on in The Canterbury Tales, and was shouted down because of the quality of his poetry.

The matter at hand here is that fine concoction known as satire, where the irony is exaggerated to a point where the reader joins the party, which is something you've always been willing to do as a reader, and something you hope to cause the reader to do when you are telling the story through one or more of your characters.

Have there been times when you were taken in by the exaggeration of satire?  Absolutely, to the point where, thinking to marry someone other than the person you ultimately married, you were well along to being hired by the same institution Evelyn Waugh took on in The Loved One.  Your job, had you been hired, would have had you writing secular prayers, eulogies, scholarly papers on cemetery design and importance, and leading panel discussions on full interment versus cremation.  You were also considered to be "on loan" to a pet cemetery.  The apparent deal breaker to your being hired was the fact of your having read and enjoyed The Loved One.

Over the years, as you consider satire and the forms of exaggeration that go with it, you've had frequent cause to wonder how many times you were taken it by a work that was meant as a satire.  Your gullibility has always been a source of concern for you.  How quick are you to bite?  How often do you fail to see through the cascades of well-organized exaggeration?

On a tip from a well-meaning professor, you systematically went through the works of America's first Nobel Laureate in Literature, Sinclair Lewis, watching to see how he built his narrative platforms. Your early impression was that Lewis, for all his genius, was not a satirist, rather a man with an articulated view, which meant he did not have to watch how far he pushed his exaggerations.  In fact, you could ask, were his visions exaggerations?

Years later, you learned from one of your dearest friends, who spent some memorable times as Lewis' secretary, that your vision of Lewis had merit.  From this, you learned what a gift it is for any man or woman who wishes to write to arrive at a vision and voice that has the feel and plausibility of a specific reality, whether ironic or idyllic.

 

Yard Sale

If a thing is in fact what it appears to be, and if a person/character/individual proves out to be an exact equation, with similar aspects on both sides of the equal sign, the tendency is to pass over that thing or individual without taking further notice.

Persons are drawn instead to the hint of the abnormal, the anomaly, the natural or quite deliberate camouflage which they, with their well-articulated vision, are able to detect. If individuals are living up to the levels of ability they hope and imagine themselves to have at default, they become, by default, able to see which things and individuals are ordinary, which are not, and why they are not.

You've drawn quite a binary here, in essence the ordinary and the remarkable.  You don't put in much time promoting yourself as either, preferring instead to be a witness and a reporter to the things and individuals about you.  

Nevertheless, on some level, you've not been able to give up the binary.  In support of this, you are assiduous in your search for the remarkable thing, the remarkable person, the remarkable character, thus you seek definition by and from the extraordinary.

Looking at some basic essentials, you begin by giving voice to the notion that appearances matter.  You prefer things and individuals with extraordinary rather than ordinary appearances.  You reckon most--more than fifty percent--readers prefer extraordinary characters.  In addition, you reckon that a character who first takes stage seeming ordinary will undergo a change by which she or he will elevate to a more distinctive plateau.

You are so accustomed to this metric that second or subsequent readings of a particular novel jolt you with the surprise of how far characters have evolved in their goals and quirkiness.  True enough, recent times have put greater pressures on characters, making their goals more desperate or driven, but this perspective allows the false vision of the fraught nature of the present to blot out the constant of every era having its own disasters, pressures, conflicts, and apparent shortcuts to an apocalypse.

This leaves you where you began this speculative essay, looking for remarkable things, individuals, and cultural themes, finding in some remnant shop or yard sale a length of hand-woven material, waiting for discovery.

You are delighted to find such things in the things about you, delighted when some display on a table top or window sill draws you into their vibrant presence.  Without awareness of cynicism, you sometimes imagine the yard sale value of such things, a small Zuni fetish, for instance, or one of your mother's favorite china teacups.  25 cents?  A dime?  

Wrong thinking, of course.  Things have intrinsic beauty or not, just as individuals do.  Our task is to look for both, and we know, don't we, where the search begins.

After You've Read This Book---

For a considerable number of the early years in which you pursued the quixotic, holy-grail-like search for the one book whose contents would reveal to you the secrets you sought relative to telling a meaningful, convincing story, you haunted new and used bookstores and libraries.  Your eyes scanned titles in every division of the Dewey Decimal System.  When you became aware of the Library of Congress Cataloging System, you scanned those as well.

Thrift stores were given their due as prospects, and when you became aware of Garage or Estate Sales, you correctly supposed these, too, would have somewhere in their faux cornucopia, stacks of books in which your quest might reside.

Forget about the naivete of the concept driving you; your quest had as a side effect the reading of many books you might not have read, your passing of time in the midst of books, and your eventual regard of them--all of them--as friends rather than presences of whom you were in awe. 

In addition to the hundreds of hours spent in new and used bookstores, or scanning the racks of newsstands for the latest uploading of massmarket paperbacks, you trod the underground stacks at the Powell Library at UCLA, you had a job as a page at the Beverly Hills Library, another at the public library on Mullen Street, directly across from Los Angeles High School, and you worked at two bookstores.

With all that history behind you came the revelation that you were already so idiosyncratic in your tastes, so free of structure in your interests, so biased in your biases, that the only possible book you could find that would open the doors you sought to be flung open was a book you would have to write yourself.

As if this were not enough of a revelation, you were in fact well into writing such a book--a novel, of course--before you realized these revelations you sought would only work once.  After writing the book that would teach you all you sought to understand, you'd have to start all over again, each time you'd completed a new work.

The consequences of ignoring this discovery were calamitous for you.  If you did not begin your discovery anew on each successive project, you'd in effect be duplicating yourself.  Never mind that there might be one or more unpublished works between new works.  Also, never mind that some writers seem able to use one successful title as a recipe book for subsequent works.  A serious role model for you is the late Joseph Heller who, after being questioned if he were concerned that he'd not produced another Catch-22, replied, "I've already written one Catch-22. Why would I want to write another?"

Too soon to tell if your longtime-in-the-making approach is successful; you're still alive and thus have the ideas for and drive to write more books.  You do know that the progression of events that make you the writer-editor-teacher you are feels appropriate, thus, at the absolute least, you begin each new day feeling appropriate.

This progression of personal evolution has brought you in close congruence with another standard you began applying with editorial clients and some students.  This is the "After you've read this book" approach.  It goes like this:  "After you've read this book, you'll never--"  The ending is left open because the intent is to convey the effect of reading the book on the reader.

For some years now, you've used this approach with your most prolific client.  "After you've read this book, you'll never {in one notable case] look at the donkey as a simple-minded beast of burden."  "After you've read this book, you'll never think of the ocean in the same way."

Of course the approach works for fiction.  After you've read this novel, you'll never regard families the way you once did.  After you read this novel, you'll never think the same as you once did about romantic love--or the love of friendship--or the love of family.

The beginning writer has some hard-wired belief that her or his novel will change the course of humanity.  You surely had that feeling, and are glad you did.  But that changed when you heard your mother brag to a friend that a novel of yours was published today, only to have your mother's friend reply, "That's nice," then go on to say that she has a daughter who writes.

The best part of the deal is the potential for change your next project can have on you.  If that works, you've won.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

If the first day of a New Year seems appropriate for an investigation of beginnings, the second day theme well might be the theme most probable to slip through the cracks.  One way or another, January 2 and all prior and subsequent days, no story can hold its place without the presence of fear, within its boundaries, in orbit about the writer, or, for good measure, both.

Fear is as necessary to story as a white blood cell count to the mammal condition.  No matter what a character claims to want, fear exists to challenge the outcome. No matter how confident the writer is of having pushed the characters beyond the boundary of safety, fear is the cement holding the nuances of plausibility together.

Characters tread the cusp between fear and confidence, at any given moment vulnerable to forgetting one or the other, of mistaking the one for the other.  These same characters may fear having gone too far or not far enough.  They fear failure, disapproval, or rejection, will take great risks to be noticed, but hold in the special vault reserved for hidden fears the sense of being somehow ridiculed when they are being shown approval and admiration.

Writers pace these same unpaved trails in ways only those who create can fully appreciate. Not only is a work of theirs out in public view, at risk of potential ridicule, their additional fear of not having exposed enough will persist. If, they will reason, you haven't exposed enough, that means you haven't got it in the first place.

Among the useful dramatic emotions, Fear dominates by its nature of being least susceptible to logic.  You can explain fear into a proposition, but you can't argue it out.  Any attempt to explain away what seemed like a bogeyman under the bed or in the closet can be met with the irrefutable response, "That's easy for you to say.  The bed isn't in your room."

There are cutoff ages by which one has customarily burned off most of the sort of anger that made one an interesting person in the late teens and early twenties, allowing one to move on to one of the more amusing terms you've heard of, Anger Management. 

Not that you don't lose it--meaning your composure or calmness--from time to time; such moments are cherished when they come, leaving you with the memory of erupting anger and the impulsive carrying it forth into some action, the memory of which now leaves you cackling with mirth over your own excess.

There is also a point around the early fifties where ones recognizes the presence of fear, seeming to lurk everywhere, having the effect of bringing you to terms in which you take fear as much for granted as you do oxygen.  As you know where there are places in which oxygen is at a premium, you also understand there are places more apt to provoke fear.  Your need for oxygen has not kept you from the bottoms of filled swimming pools, nor has your growing awareness of the places where fear dwells kept you from a visit.

In some ways, fear keeps you on the young side of the equation that is you, saying Why not? to risk, more thoughtful and aware of the risk that when you were younger and more contemptuous of risk and the fear risk brings.

You are more likely to laugh at your fears than ever before, which has the effect of being an agent provocateur, causing casual fears to rise up, join forces, unionize, presenting you with dire outcomes.

You are less prone to making the mistakes with anger and fear you made when you were younger and acting out of rebellion, which in its neat, twisted way is a form of fear you couldn't see then.

You are now able to jump with greater ease from the Real World into the world of characters.  At one point, you were to content merely to ask of them (and of yourself) What do these individuals want?  Now, you have another metric by which to move them closer to some ledge:  What are they (and you) afraid of?

In the Beginning Was the Rabbit Hole

There are times when discussions of beginnings are the equivalent of asking Beethoven how he knew where to begin The Fifth Symphony.  A notably impatient, bombastic, rule-bending genius, he would no doubt have responded along the lines of, "Because that's where the story started."

Beethoven would have had little time for requests to explain the origins for the meaning of those introductory notes or their symbolic implications for many intelligent adults. Depending on its length, the dramatic narrative has one significant beginning, which is the major theme, carrying us into direct action, or a sense of falling from some point of stability into a dramatic abyss.  

What better way to examplify than to speak of Alice, stumbling down the rabbit hole? A rabbit hole, by itself, is not a story. A girl, out walking, is not a story. Story starts when the girl falls into the rabbit hole Now we want to know a few details.  Who was the girl? How deep was the hole? What plans does she have for getting out?

Subsequent beginnings, such as new scenes or chapters, are also beginnings, a fact we may tend to lose sign of in our attempts to keep the requisite momentum of story.Each time we start a new scene or chapter, we expect to see some progression, some acceleration of the notion that we are in a rabbit hole, some hint that a recovery plan is necessary or there will be even more rigorous consequences.  Life and story are each a series of disasters or distractions caused by forthcoming rabbit holes.

In a sense, many of us are plagued, rather than assisted, by the beginnings so dear to our early associations with story.  "Once upon a time--"  To this day, when you hear that equivalent of Beethoven's Symphony Number Five (in C Minor) you are packed and ready for the potential trip on which you might be taken, depending on the immediate artfulness with the author has produced a character you are to follow into the depths of some menacing abyss such as the one in which you found yourself most weekdays while in the presence of a classmate whose last name translated from Italian into "sings while she walks [Passacantando]."

Ancient and anachronistic as it may sound today, another potential beginning still has the power to lure you:  "In a city named X, there lived a girl/woman, boy/man named Y, who had great dreams of A,B, or C," thus presenting you with an individual driven by the kind of goals and intents the ancient Greeks were likely thinking about when they spoke of characters who were mere pawns being driven by some god, goddess, or muse.

In a real sense, Paris, son of King Priam and Queen Hecuba, was a good-looking airhead, a near equivalent of today's antihero.  You felt sorry enough in the first place for him when you learn that he'd agreed to be the judge of a beauty contest among three goddesses, and almost found yourself saying, "I told you so" when each of the three covertly offered him a bribe.

You were already at the point of not expecting much from Paris when you realized he chose the bribe of "the most beautiful woman in the world."  Poor fucker didn't realize the bribe prize, Helen, was already married to Menelaus, had no idea that when he carted her off, he was triggering the Trojan War.

But the wise author knew that would never fly as the beginning for The Odyssey, which begins seven years down the line, with the Trojan War having been in progress for seven years, giving tempers the opportunity flare to an even greater degree, emphasizing the folly and stupidity of war, bringing in the resonant and controversial theme of vanity.  The Odyssey begins with "the wrath of Achilles," one of the big players in the war, but nowhere as big as Helen, Paris, or the true hero, Paris' brother, Hector.

Achilles is mad and has refused to fight any longer, has pulled off his cohort of troops.  Why?  Because one of his own prizes of battle, a stunning young concubine, has been taken from him and given to someone else.  Of a sudden, we realize we are inside a satire of epic proportions, perhaps not to be duplicated until Joe Heller's remarkable vision, Catch-22.

If you have anything close to a strength in assessing stories as an editor or teacher, the strength is your ability to recognize where a story begins. To reach that awareness, that Alice-falls-into-a-rabbit-hole moment, that Wrath-of-Achilles moment, you have to arrange a destabilizing potential, assemble your characters around it, then cause something to happen which will produce consequences severe enough that they cause you a personal sense of unease, the more potentially embarrassing for you, the better.

Thus a new year on the blogs, acknowledging the need to look for the place of ritual discomfort and instability before the beginning can be properly considered to have begun.