Raising Your Voice

You grew up listening to, learning from, and being conditioned by voices. Not all these voices were in your head. More to your fortune, you were able to distinguish which of those voices were in your head and which weren't. The unfortunate elements of the equation appeared when you began to question those voices, internal and external.

You floundered for a time, swamped by the agenda and diversity of the internal and external voices, reaching temporary relief as you began to chose which of these to heed, which to ignore completely, and which to challenge.

One such voice you did heed spoke to the decision of what to do with your life, including suggestions for specific behavior and philosophical approaches. Like some of the ancient seafarers who in their crude craft pushed beyond the point where land was in sight, you were often out beyond your ability to navigate. In retrospect, you recognize how easy it was to listen to voices that sounded authoritative--and some of them probably were--rather than taking the time, risk, and energy to educate your own to serve as your pole star.

Raising your own voice is often a last-ditch effort, something embarked upon with a frustration undershot with anger and general helplessness, emerging long after you have considered the more basic elements of your craft such as plot, character, scene, and dialogue.

By its very nature, life presents us all with a clamor of voices, many of them from family and loved ones, many among these clamoring out of professed love and concern. Even among these, however, are voices that are best left unheeded; they are the existential equivalents of those Sirens who lured Odysseus's sailors to a distraction of doom. You often are forced to navigate through foggy terrain, relying on the sonar blips of your own voice calling out for a sounding in the existential night. Thus it pays to have a voice you recognize.

It is and will continue to be a great error in navigation were you to confuse the confidence and certainty of your own voice with the hubris of someone who believes he has nothing more to learn. I am out here at night, you seem to be saying, once again out of sight of landmark, much less landfall, calling forth "I am lost" in hopes your voice will be heard.

House Rules

1. There is always someone in any group of six or more persons whose voice will set you on an edge only such a voice could invent. You first become aware of the voice the way you become aware of a marauding mosquito or a drunk who comes home singing in the early morning hours. From the moment you hear that voice until, at last, you have heard the last of it, you funnel enormous amounts of energy into the two tasks of trying to ignore it and trying not to lose your temper.

2. If the speaker is a she, chances are good that she will--regardless of her age--be attractive to you, thus reminding you of the ironic need to compromise or set your standards to a few degrees less attractive, or to revise entirely your definition of attractive, or the even more severe need to see deeper than surface attractiveness.

3. If the annoying speaker is a he, chances are high that he will remind you of someone you either dislike now or have disliked considerably in the past but have managed to forget until this moment. You will be reminded of this person either because of his bullying nature or his unabashed excellence in his every undertaking.

4. If the annoying speaker, regardless of gender, is in any way unattractive to you, it will take less energy to ignore in spite of the fact that the irritating speaker, male or female, will appear to persistently return the conversation to some medical condition he or she is locked in combat with, or to have a simplistic solution for some pernicious social issue which he or she broadcasts with the frequent explicative, "I can't see why they don't just--"

5. If you are a writer, the annoying speaker will cause you to wonder about the extent that your own work may project a narrative voice that affects readers with the same irritation you are now experiencing as you try not to listen to the voice, as it prattles on.

6. Later in the day, when the annoying speaker has long since passed from your conscious memory, you will be involved in a conversation somewhere, realizing you have used a phrase or locution favored by your annoying speaker. One of the persons with whom you are in conversation will look closely at you. "Is there something wrong?" you will be asked.

Altered States of Reality: Your Own Vision of It

Even at its best, reality is a massive, hulking from, perhaps even a troglodyte, plodding along in lumbering pace, it's very shape often defying description. All living things deal with it in one way or another, the writer, artist, actor, and musician content to focus on a small area of it at a time, all too aware how easy it is to lumber beyond the reach of definition.

The moment you attempt to deal with reality, even as a mere report or recording of events or details from a slab of it, you are in a real sense distorting it, perhaps even personalizing it, certainly betraying a bias from the very things about it you fail to note. You also stand the risk of rendering it boring or mechanistic or impersonal, depending on the agendas and tools you bring to play in your decision to convey a sense of it.

The writer, artist, musician, actor, et al bring to the task at hand of recreating a simulacrum of reality a force however unintended related to altering reality. That force is the individual vision--the way reality seems. The moment we describe is the moment we limit. Accordingly, some of us learn to exercise great care in what we describe and how we describe it, fumbling through out tool kit not so much for the adjective or the adverb or the poetic trope as for the tool of ambiguity by which we can render a thing so that a number of persons will experience it as his or her own. We are careful about modifiers in the same way we are careful with matches when near liquid or gaseous fuels; we demonstrate stories and responses in ways that allow our characters to betray or exhibit some response which, upon checking and rechecking, we believe will allow most readers to draw similar seeming results.

In order to portray reality, we have to change it, shave away some of its distractions, maintain a plausible focus on the task at hand.

For all the times you have pondered the essentials of reality, you have come to view it much as the renditions of the wooly mammoth, huge, tusked, overgrown with dread locks. In order to make this simulacrum work in a story, you believe it is necessary to present reality not as a wooly mammoth, which is among other things extinct, rather as a sleek panther or cheetah, perhaps even as a mountain goat. One of your favorite phrases to use as an editor or critic is "mountain-goat leap of logic," thus do you wish your renditions of reality to be agile on the steep escarpments of event and purpose. You have only to see a mountain goat in operation to imbed the imagery. Story and other events of emotion have great need of mountain goat ability to climb or leap because of the rarity of logic in emotion, especially emotion driving characters over the edge, to the point where they are trapped by their feelings.

Story is the wooly mammoth, dramatically honed to the body of a cheetah or leopard or the scraggly, survival-oriented frame of the coyote, particularly Wile E. Coyote, who knows a thing or two about survival in the face of the failure of his best- and worst-laid schemes.

You spent some considerable time this afternoon discussing craft with the person you suspect will become your representative. You particularly felt drawn to her because of your connections with the same publishers, with the fact that she has been and understands what the editor does and how she does it. One of her stories that got to you had to do with how she chose which manuscripts she chose to take home to read. The first line was always the decider, and you both said in unison "It was love at first sight," because that was Catch-22, even more chemistry than "Call me Ishmael." Going back even farther, your favorite of all. Hamlet. "Who's there?" That points the finger directly at reality. Who, indeed?

Logic

Stories often begin when you are off your routine of work, sorting the reality about you by moving to a new vantage point wherein to be absorbed into the background, where you are not seen, much less recognized by anyone you know. So there you are, a page or two of handwritten notes in front of you, sequestered in an out-of-the-way corner on the nine-hundred block of State Street, a medium latte set before you with a Christmas-tree design on its foamy surface, cell phone turned off, discovering that the coffee shop has excellent taste in its music: you are accordingly thrown back into another time by the riffing alto sax solo of Johnny Hodges, up front with the Duke Ellington band.

Within two minutes, you are joined by a chum who plunks down. "I thought I might find you here. If there were a place other than Peet's, this would be it."

The logic is stunning, unsettling, reminding you of a writer friend whose daytime job is private detective and who once traced a fugitive to a cheap motel in Las Vegas following the same line of logic, causing the fugitive to remark, "No matter what you do, someone's gonna think outside the box and scope your grift." Which reminded you of another writer friend to whom you in your writing and classroom lectures attributed the sage advice: "Never take the reader where the reader wants to go." Trouble is, you said that once in his presence at a writers' conference, whereupon he interrupted you. "I never said that," he said. "You said that. I happen to believe it in principal, but I never said it."

There you are, stunned, unsettled, with a better-than-reasonable latte before you and someone who knew you'd be where you had not been for at least a year, and then only by the accident of it being next door to a movie theater you were about to attend. The conversation quickly morphs into the issue of how some conversations can effect your entire mood and your entire read of the person or persons with whom you are conversing, leading to the delicate balance of conversations with persons you like and the more elaborate, more ritualized conversations with persons you have little or no attraction for. This particular person, you have begun to discover over an arc of time, is one with whom you are able to converse on that more direct, assured level. The music flows easily into Bill Evans and even you are nursing the belief that it is logical for you to be here.

Thus stunned and unsettled you are nonetheless stunned and unsettled when another person approaches. "I was hoping you'd be here. But oh, I see you're in a conversation. Okay. Maybe I'll find you next week when there's more time."

Of course you wonder about these things. In a sense, one of the reasons you left Los Angeles was in the hopes of finding the kind of comfortable solitude you'd experienced earlier when you sat in your observation post, observing, unobserved, sorting the kinds of things you thought at that age would help your development into the writer you wished to be.

Leaving Los Angeles is an entirely different vector because the moment you left it, you were offered a teaching post there, meaning you were now someone who had left however briefly, returning to observe the changes going on about you that you would not have noticed had you remained. Given the intensity of population shifting, of departures and arrivals, of relationships to and from places, you more fully see the illusory nature of living anywhere because where ever you are, you carry traces, cat hairs and dog dander of origins. You once were hopelessly lost in a sprawl of Mexico City, neither alarmed nor concerned about finding your way to your apartment. Turning a corner and seeing a small cantina where you thought to get coffee, cigarettes, and some directions, you saw, instead a man you knew from the Goldwyn Studios in Culver City, who demanded without much build-up, to know when you would be finished with the screen play he'd requested from you. Then there was the time when you were strolling past St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan.

Perhaps you are not intended to observe from comfortable anonymity. Perhaps this has been the hitch in your vision, all along.

You're invited, but don't bring your dog

The relationship between a writer's manuscript and a person's dog is not so far fetched as it may seem. Addressing either ms or dog with less than full-out appreciation is rife with explosive potential. Speaking of either with critical intent can be lethal.

"Let me see your notes," the author said. It was not an unusual request. Authors are frequently eager to see editor notes and reports on their projects, an eagerness that spans the types of book publishing you've been involved with, which is to say general trade, massmarket, literary, and scholarly.

You reached into the file, extracted the original recommendation to publish provided certain revisions were made, then placed it over the memo of suggested structural changes you'd noted from a second close reading, which included yet additional suggestions made by an outside reader from the author's own discipline. You extended this material to the author.

"So much?" he said.

Your hackles--editorial guard hairs, really--began to rise.

"I don't have to tell you, do I, that I'm considered an expert in my field?"

"Read the first line on page three," you said, knowing exactly what the line was because you'd written it.

The author fumbled pages, then began, starting with his own name, "is a recognized expert in his field, giving this title the potential for academic and public library sales as well as supplementary texts for course work at the junior college and university level. With suggested additions and revisions in place, the title could remain current for at least three years, possibly as long as five, at which point it would carry a number of its readers along to purchase a revised edition." He cast his eyes down sheepishly for a moment, hefting the memo, then bore on. "You know, I've put a good deal of work into this project."

"It needs more," you said, "and we're eager to take it on."

At length, the author said, "I'm comfortable with the manuscript as it stands. I don't see the need for these additions, as you call them, and some of the rearrangement of the chapters."

"We," that is, the publishing house you represented, "finally decided against taking the work on. The author quickly found another publisher who took it on as it stood. The published work had fewer reviews than it ought because of the author's stature, but those reviews in large measure ratified the difficulties your house had found. The work did not remain on the market or in most library shelves for long.

This scenario is intended to suggest that editorial notes have some value because of their intent to make the work as strong, articulate, and memorable a presentation of the author's intent as possible while at the same time respecting the effect the published work will have on the reader; it is most certainly not intended to suggest that there is only one editorial take on a given project or, indeed, that editors the world over are tuned in on that editorial take.

Just yesterday, a client sent you an agent's notes on his latest novel now out in submission. The novel was one you'd gone through on a page-by-page basis. There were several things about the agent's notes that baffled you, including one about some confusion he felt toward the beginning. You and the agent agree the work is intriguing, suspenseful, nuanced, artfully written and constructed, but there quickly comes a fork in the road about such matters as the beginning and interior pace. You cannot see any serious advantage to the author from following these notes primarily because in doing so, the author would be through narrative device violating one of your primary tenets in which no character should remain on stage alone for too long because the result would be having the character resort to interior monologue, including what you consider one of the most monstrous tropes of all time, How had it all begun? How had he/she allowed such things to happen?

At the denominator of the equation are two significant questions. How far will the writer go in order to please? Whom is the author most dedicated to please? There are no easy answers to either of these; they are akin to the banana peels in which characters in comics slip. You step on them at your own risk each time you begin a story.

Or a blog entry.

Lacking in Character

There are a few things you've learned about characters, the ones you've created and the ones brought to life in the novels and short stories of other writers.

You would do well to have something momentous having happened to them in the past such as, say, Ahab's encounter with you-know-who in you-know-where, simultaneously galvanizing his behavior and providing him with a purpose. You could also cite Jane of Reader, I married him fame, who grew up in an orphanage and is sent out into the world with few prospects, plus the burden of the head of the orphanage telling her she was, er, a plain girl, and so you'd better take the job with this Rochester fellow.

They should want something, perhaps someone; they should have something to prove. They often have some weakness which will come around to test them at some point. They probably should not feel too sorry for themselves over things that have happened to them in the past, although they can be seen as working on overcoming some imperfection or affliction or weakness, perhaps even failing along the way.

At all costs, they should not seem to be ordinary, even if they happen to think of themselves as ordinary; ordinary just doesn't get it in a character, even the walk-ons who more or less bring messages on stage.

The character is in many ways of construction like an onion, layered, tightly held, perhaps even a tad secretive, not wanting to reveal his or her real agenda or, conversely, so given to promoting his or her agenda as to give off the unmistakable scent of the insecure and phony. Characters do not always know what is good for them or why they do what they do.

Characters define themselves through their actions, which are often at some odds with what they say about themselves. You may describe them to the reader, provided you find a way to do so without making it seem that the observation came from you, rather another character instead. Which gets you to the major point: What a character says of another is the best possible way of description. You realize this is a bit tricky in that the first-person narrator may be seen as an adjunct of the writer, but you will take that wrestling match on by arguing that the I in a first-person narration has to be as well articulated and developed as any other character, regardless of the offered point of view.

Go ahead. Tell Me. I can take it.

How many times have you caught yourself saying to someone--"Go ahead, Tell me. Be perfectly frank."--as it relates to your work? You are reminded of this up-front-frankness syndrome by the number of clients and writers who have put this trope down on the table, because invariably those are the ones who begin to see the shifting tide as you go through your list, finally lapsing into complete, combative defensiveness. It has been some time since you've said this to another, largely because you have grown more confident with your work, even to the point of accepting that there are those who will not under any circumstances like your work.

Today, when you were least feeling like it, thanks to a raging sinus headache, a client was badgering you for the truth and you were thinking this was not a good time for you to give such answers, rather this was a time to tell the client you wanted to direct attention to some anomalies.

"This is not profitable," you said. "There is profit in addressing the need for your characters to sound considerably less like each other and more individual." At which point you were confronted with, "So, you're saying I write lousy dialogue?"

"I'm saying you can enhance your dialogue by making it reflect what the speaker wants>"

"All right, so tell me, who do you think writes powerful dialogue?"

"This is off topic," you say. "You are a client. If we were in a more formal editor writer situation, we'd be having this conversation because I had some thought that the work could do well among readers."

"You're all alike, you guys. No consideration for the writer."

"Actually, we are not alike. Editors differ in their opinions as much as readers do in theirs."

"Fucking Gordon Lish, you think you are," the client says.

"Actually, I wrote a review of one of his collections of short stories and my conclusion was that the Emperor had no clothes."

"All alike, every last one of you."

"The funny thing," you said, " is that not all writers are alike--except the ones who tell you,'Go ahead. Give me some honest feedback. I can take it."

We could conceivably remained standing there for some time, exchanging barrages of "All alike." but as you noted, your headache was something not even the coffee was helping, so you got the hell out of there.