Doomed to Determinism

If you happen to be a writer of fiction, you are in one way or another a determinist. one who believes things do not merely happen, they take place or appear because of some previous intertia.  There is also a great leaning on your part toward creating the pathetic fallacy, which means you from time to time attribute human qualities to inanimate objects. 

You don't create the pathetic fallacy for the mischief of overstepping rules or conventions of grammar and syntax so much as following the generosity of spirit by you wish to cause others to see inanimate forces as being more vivid, more themselves, in other words, than they are in their actual taste.

Without even thinking about the matter, the actual fact of you taking pains to become a writer cause you to spend a certain amount of your working day in a determinist state even though you may move out of that state to become the left-leaning Democrat you are or possibly the hopeless romantic you are, or the growing possibility, again without giving the matter much direct thought, of spending time as a cynic.

You in fact are and/or do all these things during the course of your working day, and when your working day as a writer is put upon by your need to be a teacher or an editor,you add adjunct aspects of determinism, romanticism, and cynicism to the cavalcade of events, secure, if not comfortable, in the knowledge that you are being propelled by conditions you hereby propose to call idiosyncratic muscle memory. 

Whatever time you have left over, you are at liberty to pursue free will as a philosophical concept you have had a running argument with pretty much dating back to the days when you began having arguments with yourself in seriousness.

To explain self-inflicted arguments for the sake of these paragraphs of May 7, 2016, sufficient unto the day your experience-related belief that free will is an abstraction invented by philosophers, politicians, and religious zealots. Although you sympathize with the notion that extreme visions of determinism tend to have aspects of woo-woo and class distinctions connected to them like tin cans tied to the bumper of a newly wed' car, you also believe that there is simply too damned much going on in the universe that is your bubble for there not to be a present force of causality that ties past event to present behavior.

One of your favorite forms for the unfolding or development of a story, whether short enough for appearance in a magazine or with enough layers to provide fodder for five or six hundred book pages, or the stage, or the screen, has an interesting lead character caught up in some present-time mischief, which is exacerbated to its full dramatic momentum, then appearing to have been abandoned while the author shifts the point of view to another point in time, possibly with the same character we've only moments ago left.

Story deployed in this fashion allows the introduction of relevant events as they took place sometime back in the past, in effect becoming backstory for the events we'd just been unceremoniously whisked away from.

You will not discount out of hand stories that jump around in time, provided at least fifty-five percent of them take place in the present moment, the great bulk of the balance being dispersed through past times. We can and do take to some major characters we've just met and for whom we have no backstory, Frank Chambers of The Postman Always Rings Twice, comes to mind.

 But for the most part, we want characters who travel about like the Starship Enterprise, warping through numerous pasts, occasional presents, and one or two sideways digressions, reminding us as readers how our journey through Reality is always bumpy, filled with pot holes, detours, and dead ends, in much the same way our own life has been buffeted about.

How Long Must a Participle Dangle until

For the past several years, the first section you pull out of the Sunday edition of The New York Times is the magazine section, home of the crossword puzzle, a gesture speaking to your fondness for the puzzle and also speaking to the growing sense of lost interest in the editorial section. 

In previous times, the puzzle came second, after you'd taken on a conversation-type argument with the NYT editorial board over matters of national, global, and local issues.

For years preceding and paralleling the crossword puzzle years, you were drawn to the hardboiled mystery novels of such writers as Ross MacDonald (Ken Millar) whom you knew, Dashiell Hammett, whom you wish you'd known, and Raymond Chandler, whom you you spent a great deal of time trying to capture in your own mystery novels.

Since the age of seventeen or eighteen, when you were grappling with the awareness that plotting as such was as filled with mystery for you as algebra and geometry were, the frustration of enjoying, loving the mystery novel and not being able to plot one out to your satisfaction, hung over you, an oppressive, weighty cloud.

You'd studied with a gifted mystery writer, Dorothy B. Hughes, met and talked to her dear friend, Vera Caspary, of Laura fame, become at their nudging, active in the Mystery Writers of America, envying the mystery writer, any mystery writer, for their ability to string out related series of events. At one point, after you'd begun teaching, a number of your students were publishing mysteries, which you'd read, recognize as having the proper alignment of strategic scenes, then wonder what it would take for you to get beyond the impasse.

In fiction, the protagonist writer would work toward his goal of wishing to make his living as, indeed your friend, Day Keene, made his, writing a mystery novel a month. In fiction, the protagonist writer would work his way up to turning in two hardcover mysteries a year to a respectable enough hardcover house, then get a job moonlighting as a story editor for a TV Western anthology.  

In life, the closest you came was watching your students get contract after contract, while you became an editor of the sorts of writer you hoped to start as, then grow as Ross Macdonald grew, to the point where a writer such as Eudora Welty would say in print that the mystery novel was a literary force.

Here you were, a shelf filled with half-finished mysteries, unfinished because you'd written yourself into a place you wished to be, confident with the belief that you'd be able to work your way out, in keeping with your belief that this was the goal you were after.  But zip, nada, niente. All the while the crossword puzzles in both the Los Angeles and New York Sunday Times, until.

Until cannot be allowed to dangle like a misplaced participle. Until must be reconciled with some form of resolution.

Mystery novels were--still are--puzzles to be solved. Mystery novels were--still are--narratives where the puzzles needed some kind of solution, but the inner workings within the characters matter more than the solution to the puzzle.  In fact, the solution to the puzzle is maybe only the equivalent of the conclusion of act two; the solution oi the parallel elements to the puzzles the major story, stepping out of the shadow of the puzzle.

You are back at the pursuit that brings you the most happiness, half-articulated mysteries peeking out at you from stacks of handwritten sheets, the sight of them whispering to you, Hey, pssst, over here, friend.  Look over here.  In fiction, answers would have come to you long ago enough to have allowed you to develop necessary skills.

In life, you try not to overthink, to get your pages done, which is what you must do if the process is to make any sense to you.

A Window of Illusion

Early in your life, your father announced he was going to demonstrate to you the illusive quality of appearance, promising you first frustration, then ice cream. 

"The ice cream," he said, "is to keep in your mind forever that I am not a bad guy for showing you how deceptive reality can be."

With that announcement and your mother's growing objections, he drove to a jewelry shop on Wilshire Boulevard, parked the car, then led you to the front window, which, because of its concavity, did not seem at all like a window. You in fact seemed to be able to reach into the display of watches that lay before you, ticking away.  "Go ahead," your father said. "Help yourself."

Of course you were headed off at the pass, or surface as it were, a shiver of frustration running through you. You reached several times, thinking there was surely some way he would show you to make contact with a wrist watch for which you had absolutely no use but, nevertheless, an aching desire to possess.  

"Forgetting the moral issues involved here," your father said, "nothing anywhere is what it appears to be. Things are often better, sometimes worse, but nothing is exactly as advertised."

You were thinking things over while being driven, as promised, to a then popular ice cream store called Curry's, home of the mile-high cone. "I don't have to remind you," your father said, "that your ice cream cone is not a mile high,  Big, yes, but not a mile high."

Memory does not provide you a record of what you thought while claiming and demolishing your mile-high cone. Of course you knew mile-high was a metaphor. In probability, the cone was strawberry, a favored choice of yours at the time, but to say the incident was of a tangible force in your interest in storytelling and your decision to make it your life's work would be a mountain-goat leap of logic and, in many ways, an illusion even greater than the concave window or your experience of frustration.

And yet, the temptation is there. After all these years, you still remember the incident, and you do understand that story is about a protagonist who reaches for a goal in the belief that it is within grasp, only to be frustrated at first by the concave window or illusion or accessibility, which transforms itself into the energy required to propel the protagonist to effect an outcome whereby, even though he does not get the watch, is nevertheless taken to Curry's and a mile-high cone. 

The leap of credibility would be yet greater to mention having a friend, later on, who was tall for his age, whose name was Paul Cohen, and whom you began calling Mile-high Cohen, a nick name that seemed to have taken.

Story is all about--but not limited to--an individual who is confronted with an illusion, is transformed from neutrality toward that illusion to an obsession with it, exemplified, say, by a certain gentleman from La Mancha.  Such stories can be made effective because many of us, yourself among them, have illusory goals they strive to achieve, discovering somewhere in the process that the illusion was even greater than supposed.

Somewhere along the way, you also learned from your father that the moral aspects of possessing something you'd not earned or been given had a different kind of barrier than a mere concave window, and you were given enough collateral information to work out for yourself the awareness that your acceptance of this awareness did not mean you were going to be taken out for ice cream.

Later still, you understood that those who thought their moral superiority entitled them to ice cream or some kind of compensation, were targets to be picked off with humorous barbs and satires.

Here you are then, rejoicing in those memories of years past, when you had a father who left you with a menu of memories, and the beginnings of awareness of how the thing you wished to deal with most in your life--story--was the kind of convex window you could work at duplicating for your own use.

Speak the Speech, I Pray You, But Not Where I Have to Hear It

This is the age of electronic communication. The email and text message have supplanted the written note and certainly the telephone. This is a time when no reply to your email or text within twenty-four or so hours means a no to whatever it was you were writing about, whether it was to apply for a job, suggest a meet for coffee, submit a manuscript for publication.

In earlier times, no response meant someone at the other end hadn't got around to your letter or proposal or invitation, or application. In some cases, no response even went so far as to mean your invitation, submission, application, proposal was still undergoing active consideration. 

More often, the long response time meant your correspondent was busy, in consequence of which, you needed to be more patient. With few exceptions, your patience got you a response. The response was not always the hoped for reply, nevertheless it was a mild courtesy, a mild acknowledgment you as an individual, a person attempting to  participate in a conversation or transaction or a publication process.

The earth itself and its denizens have evolved; we are at this time, going on toward half way through a year which, given your own age, seems precarious, out there on some sort of ledge, dangling over a certainty of closure in much the same manner as the sword of Damocles dangled, an imminent and ever present weight, suspended over uncertainty.

No, thank you , is no longer sorry, or thanks but no thanks, or not this time, it is in fact not even thank you any longer, it is merely no, and acknowledges by its absolute lack of response how little concerned your correspondent is to have any further contact with you, should you have at some future time a better offer, a more judicious complaint, a more remarkable short story or novel. 

No response is no longer a negative option, it is by its very finality an assumption of a high ground, asking you how you'd dare expect so much as a thank you for your submission, or Hey, thanks for your note; it is the most generic fuck-you note of all. 

We not only have no wish to be quit of you and your recent letter-submission,invitation-suggestion, we don't know who the fuck you are, having no inkling of why you thought to contact us in the first place because we receive so many submissions-letters-requests-congratulations that we have in effect robotized and automated our response system by not responding to your correspondence.

Such aspects of cultural communication have, you suspect, always been a tricky business. Today's mail brought twenty-seven items you discarded without reading or consulting, another two or three you afforded only the most cursory glance, and one magazine saved for a future reading that will probably take place when most of the materials commented upon within its pages are past their use-by date, and yet you get at least four publications from abroad, and have access to fast-breaking local incidents from a global variety.

You are not only the target; you are the cause. In years past, you may have contributed to some charity or political venture only to discover, yet again, that the places where you sent money have spent often more than twenty-five times the monetary value of your erstwhile contribution in postage, bringing, and overhead costs calculated to shame you into yet another contribution. 

You are a part of a culture that communicated with exceedingly well designed internet pages or four-color printed fliers as well as email solicitations and hastily scrawled signs on sheets of corrugated cardboard, ripped from packing crates, announcing to anyone who will look that the bearer needs help, that God will bless, and that every little bit helps.

In your lifetime, it became clear that you could never keep up with the increasing proliferation of books, some dreadful, others mediocre, others still of preeminent cultural and ethical significance, not to suggest that cultures don't produce ethos nor that ethos's do not invigorate cultures. Rather it is that we wish to speak but somehow avoid listening or at the very least wish to avoid response.

The FedEx Delivery Person as Storyteller

 Along with your belief in which story consists of bursts and bundles of dramatic information, played out in strategic increments, you see a splendid opportunity for a metaphor. The opportunity came to you earlier today, watching a FedEx delivery person scour the neighborhood in his attempts to deliver a small package.

The delivery man worked his way with dispatch about the small, whimsical area in which you and a slew of neighbors live, going from door to door, consulting what appeared to be an iPad, then resorting to personal contact, wherein he asked you if you had any idea where an individual named Talia lived.

To add the splendid ingredient of confusion via coincidence to the stew, there had at one time been a tenant named Talia who lived in your studio, but that was at least six years ago, and here was the FedEx man with a package sent within the last few days, to an address that was close to but not actually yours.

Contemporary fiction writers--men and women who write short stories, short novels, and long novels--have three equivalents of the FedEx delivery man in terms of locating the correct recipient. The contemporary storyteller has at hand narrative, which is direct action. John stood. Mary whispered. Fred shook his head in disbelief. 

Narrative is action that may, but not necessarily, be seen by the major narrative filter in a specific scene. Let's say the point of view is John. We assume John was watching when Fred shook his head in disbelief, so we don't have to come right out and say it because the reader will understand that the reason we're getting material is because John saw it. The only no-no here is for the narrative to tell us, John did not see Fred scratch his head in disbelief. 

The only assumption to be made if the narrative tells us John did not see Fred scratch his head in disbelief is that the information is being delivered by the author.  John can only report on what he sees, guesses, or is told by some other source. Someone in this theoretical scene can even tall John, You should have seen the way Fred scratched his head in disbelief.

The second method of delivering dramatic information comes via interior monologue. Let's try John again for our example. Too bad Fred has that nervous tic,where he's forever scratching his head. This is John thinking. John can think it's time to get out of here; he can also wish he'd never come, or wonder how long it's going to be until he can make an excuse, then get the hell out of here. 

There will be times when narrative is braided or runs parallel with interior monologue. John debated about ordering another drink. That's borderline interior monologue, but still fits narrative, thanks to that verb, debated.  If this keeps up, John thought, he was going to need another drink. There; that crosses the line into thought, speculation, planning ahead. The trick is to use as many action verbs as possible in narrative and interior monologue because thought-related verbs are more apt to slow the pace.

Third and last of the FedEx dramatic deliveries is, of course, dialogue. Easy to say of course here because of your experience as an editor and teacher, dealing with the beginning writer's notion that the best dialogue sounds conversational. Simply put, that's a no. 

Dialogue is every bit as much dramatic information as narrative and interior monologue. Seen in its most expansive form, dialogue can parallel narrative by an artful use of descriptive detail. "Why is it, every time you get a new apartment, you have a big pot of red flowers?" This is both descriptive and confrontational, two qualities you would not mind having a permanent home in any dialogue you write.

Too often, the beginning and intermediate writer fail to regard dialogue as the potential FedEx delivery person, bringing on vital dramatic information. Once again, simply put, chatty conversation is a no. Story is carved out of the elements, a sentence at a time. Whether the sentence is narrative, interior monologue, a combination of the two, or braided into some kick-ass dialogue, the sentence has to earn its way by carrying enough information to push the lead characters deeper into the corner of entrapment.

Fear: The Writer's Merit Badge

  If you were looking for a one-word definition of fear for use in a dramatic argument, which is to say a story, or as a point of logic in an essay, chances are strong you'd choose dread. 

The You, in the essay, or your surrogate character in a story, would accept that definition, even though dread doesn't pack the emotional wallop.  I dread the thought. Nice enough, but lacking some of the physical effects fear can work on you or the psyche of a character.

You can dread a forthcoming event, dread the forthcoming results of some test, trial, or performance, but chances are you could fall asleep in the face of your dread while fear itself could keep you from sleep or from being absorbed in the things you are so frequently absorbed in when you are nor fearful.

Look at it this way:  Fear is a commanding presence, one that can take you away from music, reading, writing, a remarkable meal, and the proper enjoyment of friends.Once you've experienced fear in the immediate moment or the dread of the effect yet to come, you've earned your way up the ladder of appreciation at being able to become so caught up in some other emotion or state of mind. 

Thanks to fear, you understand how commanding a presence it is when you are in effect merged with your focus on your other project at hand.These merged states are the ones you've become attached to, starting with the times of childhood when you were merged with nothing so much more exciting than putting on a sock, where a parent would find you, as though in a catatonic state. Then, you were merged with the wonder of everything, Sirens calling you to the thrill of the world and your youth. 

Later, you were able to become merged with something you were writing, a symptom that grew until you found times where you were merged with the work you were trying to compose. Then you came to understand the fear of the thing you were merged into being of no greater importance than you, putting on your sock.

Fear has that distracting effect, on humans and on the characters they create. And yet, fear is one of the most useful implements in the writer's tool kit and a vital force to have for a human. This is not merely to recognize fear as an early warning system alarm, slipping the note under the door to tell us we are in some serious fucking danger, rather to remind us how fortunate we are to have any presence of it in our life.

To some degree, you're afraid of at least one thing every day, even if that fear is a reminder you might be late for an appointment, a meeting, a class, or a deadline. This last, deadline, is of splendid relevance in its direct association with performance. 

Deadline means a promised time to have a project, such as a story, ready to hand over to a publisher, or a speech or lecture close enough in hand to be presented to an audience or to a lens, which will capture enough of you for later projection to an intended audience.

Your life, and the lives of your characters, would become hollow misery if neither you nor they suffered fear at any level. The result would be an overwhelming projection of confidence, perhaps even arrogance, two qualities you recognize as symptoms leading to humor inherent in such individuals. 

For all he was well conceived and presented, the character of Sherlock Holmes provides us a splendid example of a nearly fearless individual. Holmes's nearest imagined fear is the one of boredom.

A step or two beyond your role as a person who on occasion is subject to fear, there lurks the you as a person who wishes to spend as much time as possible in a writing mode or, beyond that, in a reading mode, much less in a regular person role. 

This is because you have a higher degree of control than you have as a regular person, even though you bring fear right along with you in the sense that when you look at your work the subsequent day to having done it, you will find one major flaw or a series of small, irritating ones, in either case giving you cause to fear there is no way out of the conundrum into which you have worked yourself, nor indeed is there sufficient questioning and presence to suggest any degree of relevance or merit.

Filter

When you used to brew your coffee using the elegant Chemex device, you'd begin by pulling a large, circular leaf of filter paper from its container, fold it into quarters, then insert it in the upper cone, prior to measuring in freshly ground coffee. 

The next step became pouring a measured amount of boiling water over the grounds, then waiting for the water to work its way through the filter paper, taking with it the aromatic essences and oils, leaving the dross clinging to the filter paper.

If you'd not moved along in preference to having your coffee in its espresso form, you'd still be using the Chemex device because of its performance and its aesthetic appearance. Chemex coffee is quite companionable. 

To someone who drinks a good deal of coffee, the Chemex system has the ability to allow making enough to last for most of the day with less chance of the brew turning rancid.

Chemex is in so many ways the essence of simplicity. William of Occam would have appreciated it: Glass, filter paper, water, ground coffee. The key element here is the filter. A similar effect is to be had with computer programming, in which a given program filters out undesirable codes and random elements, allowing only a specific filtrant, not unlike Chemex coffee.

When the matter shifts to narrative and to the dramatic narrative known as story, a filter provides a specific result of its own, a sense of who is bringing the narrative or story forward, what qualities and characteristics are allowed to seep through, and which are intercepted. 

In most instances, narrative thought of as nonfiction is run through a filter whose job it is to block out unreliability. You remember your times working at the Associated Press, where the narrative without a by-line was held in the highest esteem. You were told by the editors that such a story reflected the essential nature of the Associated Press, which was the nature of trustworthy presentation of known information,

The by-line is a different kind of filter, in effect removing a layer or two of objectivity in favor of allowing more obvious opinion. This brings us directly to the by-line in fiction which, by its very nature, has prevented more objectivity from leaching through and, in fact, enabling bias or astigmatism or perhaps even color blindness.

Part of the act of revision involves coming to terms with what kind of filter to use for producing the narrative at hand. Do you wish to block the naivete of the narrator or let it come through? Do you wish to filter out reliability and, thus, let the dramatic information come through the senses of an unreliable narrator? Or perhaps you'd prefer to let one or more of your narrators have to deal with a particular bias they will have to cope with during the arc of the story.

If you educate yourself to include this concept of filtration when you reach the examination and revision stage, you'll be taking a step toward arriving at a purer view of the narrative or story at hand, wherein the colorblindness, which is a physical variant, or a bias, which is an emotional one, is the filtrant least likely to turn rancid.