Risky business

Risk is a major element in your writing and when the writing energy loses its fizz, the probable culprit is lack of the presence of risk.  Work that plays to safety is likely to be read then forgotten, read for the smoothness, forgotten for that very quality.  Work that plays to risk plays to the edges of breakthrough or abject failure, accordingly memorable for at least two possible reasons beyond mere technique.

You first encounter risk by taking on conflicts that teeter along the cusp of cliche, both in the creation of characters and the goals they act upon.  The risk accelerates when you take sides, pushing the characters you tend to like into mistakes of judgement or the moral  wrong turn.  In similar fashion, you stir the pot of risk by injecting characters you've brought out of a base of distrust or outright dislike, modeling them in the first place after individuals whose behavior has in some way offended you (not always for appropriate reasons; in fact some of your taking of offense comes from your envy), then taking them down appropriate paths of combustion with the characters you like, then causing these individuals to have what Joyce called agenbite of inwit, the remorse of conscience or some form of moral awakening.

In life as in story, you seem eager to buy tickets for the lottery of risk although you hold no such affection for the lottery tickets you could purchase from machines or vendors, hopeful of some astronomical payoff.  When you lived in Mexico City, the lottery ticket sellers hounded you for just one small purchase, thinking to make enough for a meal from the transaction.  "Contra me fe," you'd say, with just the right amount of moral high ground.  Crazy gringo.  Against his faith to purchase a lottery ticket.  What kind of life is that?

Well, it is now the life of having taken another risk.  Big New York house or brand new publishing venture?  In many ways, the risks with the big New York house are greater, especially now, with what is best described as a front list mentality (the book must earn back production costs, overhead, and the repayment of the advance within the first year of publication) or forget all about back list support and promotion.  Forget about having anyone know who you are when you phone in, asking to speak to someone in promotion.

The new guy comes along with an editor who has been pointed in her wish for your book, thus you not only have a friend in court, she is bringing your work with her to the new court as an indication of how good her taste is.  You phone in and they know who you are, but more important, they know what your project is and their vision for it already exceeds yours.

Okay, new guys.

In which you revert to type of being a crazy writer

In your time, you have been directly allied with forces that caused authors to take to the road, promoting their works on radio, television, and newspaper venues, stopping off at key bookstores--more independent than chain--to talk about their work and autograph copies.  You have seen and thrilled to good reviews in such places as The Kirkus Service, Book Week, The New York Times, Publishers' Weekly, and other sources of that stripe.  You have even done the gritty work of extracting a positive review from a lukewarm or hostile source, sometimes resorting to that great mischief the ... between words and entire phrases, and on one occasion in particular memory, taking one word from a review that frankly hated the work, explaining why, and proclaiming for advertising purposes "first-rate" when the review said, in fact, "way off the mark from first-rate quality."

These moments are necessary elements in the activity behind publishing a work; they are often at odds or at least tangential to the necessary elements in the activity of writing a work which is then thought highly enough of to send it forth in hopes it will find a home.  The times and vectors of publishing are, as Bob Dylan put it, 'a changing.  You know one author who writes superb short stories, at least piercing and dimensional enough to be read all the way through at the major journals.  She will not send them forth.  At least two writers you know have paid huge sums to so-called mailing services "research" potential markets for their stories, then send them specially printed envelopes and mailing labels to submit individual works, little realizing that when such manuscripts arrive, they stand out as having come from the literary equivalent of Coyotes in the illegal entry business.

Thus there are necessary elements beyond writing if one wishes to write with the notion of publication; by extension, these elements take the writer out of the process of writing.  Yet other horrors come when the emerging writer seeks agency representation, hopeful of being taken on by an agent who has connections and enthusiasm.  The moment of truth comes when the agent requests a precis or pitch or synopsis or concept memo.  You can hear the groans or read them on Facebook and Twitter.

You are aware of your own groans both as writer and editor:  Non-editing and non-writing activities are necessary if one is to move beyond talented amateur.  How many times have you heard well-intentioned individuals envy you any position as editor because they love to read, have a basic knowledge of literature, are good at grammar.  When you tell them that most editing is done at home, on your own time because it is impossible to edit in an office, they are stunned.  Appalled.  Then you tell them about meetings and the need to forge alliances within the organization in order to secure the support necessary to bring a work to contract and production.  Sometimes you become so caught up in your passion that you come close to exploding, Don't tell me you don't have time to send your work out.  Look at the crap I have to go through in order to get the chance to give you editorial notes that could help your project grow incrementally better than it is now.

The rewards of authorship and of editing are not spotlight events, they are personal moments in which a scene is brought in and landed and you see it for the remarkable thing it is, a drama you felt was there and are now relieved to see has even more heart and soul and transcendence than you'd first imagined.  The rewards of editing come when you go through a scene, perhaps indicating a word or phrase that needs attention or perhaps even deletion, perhaps moving the scene to another place or starting later or leaving sooner, or perhaps saying casually to the writer, have you considered having another character be the point of view here?

There are enough of these private moments to repay the public moments of authorship and editorial support.

You are reminded of all these emotions because you are at heart the kind of writer you are, never realizing when you began that this was what you had in mind.  You are reminded of these emotions because you have not long ago received an email from the entity that intends to become your publisher, greeting you with the information that--well, here it is, verbatim: Everyone at WWP is very excited to be working with Shelly and publishing The Fiction Lover's Companion.


You note the contract attached as a PDF file, which you open, reeling at the language.  Understand, it was not the terms, which had already been relayed to you.  It was the language, the fucking language.  You have written publisher contracts, have read others, signed others still.  Your primary reaction came from the fact that you wish to sign something that reads more like a publishing contract than a first-year law school exercise.


There is a satisfying P.S. to this; your literary agent, who has put in heavy-duty time running the editorial depts.of two major houses, agrees with your take.

P is for pleonasm

Pleonasm is an ideal word for a writer to form a friendship with; it sits at the traffic kiosk before the sentence and paragraph, checking the credentials of unauthorized and unnecessary words, phrases, or concepts that in too many words rather than in so many words, repeat what has already been said--adding neither nuance nor dimension to the conversation.

When you happen upon a pleonasm while reviewing your own work, your teeth grit, your shoulders give an involuntary scrunch, your self-esteem reacts as it jostled in a crowd.  You become obsessed with the need for simplicity for its own sake in your quest for sentences and paragraphs without redundancy, supererogation, or solecism.

As with so many excesses of use, pleonasms are lingering guests from your conversational use of the language, grown a bit tipsy on the house wine, not willing to depart with the other guests, even venturing toward the querulous.  Solecisms arise from the forge of enthusiasm, metaphoric ham actors who gift-wrap their lines to serve as constant reminders that they are gifts rather than mere dramatic information being passed along in a particular context.  You have opportunities to review written words for excess as well as for matters in closer relationship to context.

Readers, even you as a reader, tend to note anomaly.  When a character with steely blue eyes winks on page 14, then later, on page 80 or so, cocks her hazel eyes, we wonder if the writer has forgotten to let us know the character is using colored contact lenses.  When an alert reader catches us in such anomalous circumstance, we sigh collectively, the weight of the fickle, reader's world on our shoulders.  Readers are prepared to take us at face value if we give them a chance, but we, in our obsessive-compulsive way, wish to make sure, and so we pile it on.  Nice strategy for early drafts, but these extra details, sometimes taking on the weight of sermons, invectives, even tirades, undermine the story, the credibility of the characters, and the standing of the writer.

In a burst of cynicism, you once made the distinction between author and writer to a person who has published works and who considers himself an author.  An author, you said, is an habitual user of pleonasm.  A writer is a person who gets the job of story done without chapter notes.

Navigating the inner and outer waterways

You enjoy the prospect of bringing a writing project "outside," which is to say executed at least in part away from your usual place of preference, where there is relative quiet.  Such inner noises to be heard are those you make for yourself, perhaps in vocal argument with your committee of personnel, or perhaps a mutter of approval, even of satisfaction.  Just as likely, the ambient sounds are some music of your choice to supply the energy of a particular passion.

When you are here, "inside," distractions are apt to be met with the same squirt of irritation you experience when you are wrested from an intense dream, the key being the measure of intensity rather than the pleasure or displeasure of a dream you have landscaped for yourself.  Either way, the sounds are you and of your making; they reflect a comfortable, connected-with-the-universe aggregate you.

There is an edge to you that seeks coffee shop or library as a place to dig into the essence of a project; it is a combined edge of loneliness, relaxed focus, remoteness from the driving intent, a distance from forces of personal gravity that attracts bodies to you and you to them.  When you are in this state, you are more apt to welcome distraction, the social you in charge now, working the room, emitting hints of good conversation to come.

These are both aspects of you in purposeful action, the representative duality that is you.  It is a duality that is tidal, each having its resident harbor pilot, the expert at navigating the reefs and shoals of the particular moment.

Sometimes these aspects meet in the equivalent of the hallway, the gregarious you throwing a salute to the edgy, irascible, inside you, the curmudgeon making eye contact and nodding, each somehow convinced the projects and goals that define your waking agendas would be better managed if he were in more complete command, delegating a short tour of duty to the other out of some attempt at unity, yet each aware of the absolute necessity of the other to have a say in the routes taken, the quality of the destination, and the greater sense of the importance of the journey rather than the demonstrable technique of the navigation.

But you already knew that

Persons you know and persons you scarcely know at all often offer you tidbits of information.  After all, humans evolved to communicate.  Even those who have settled into catatonic fits are offering information of a sort (that they do not wish to be disturbed; they are already disturbed enough, thank you).  In similar fashion, individuals you know or complete strangers will offer you tidbits of information, attaching to it the disclosure that you probably already know the information.

There you are, with another duality:  things you know and things you don't know.

Most of what you have learned has come to you from an assortment of individuals you know and those you scarcely know at all, a fact that has impressed itself on you over the years to the point where you take more time than you had to give ear to strangers.  In the process, you have come to the equivalent of researching the information you get from friends and acquaintances, surely to verify it but also to make sure you have gotten the full impact of it.  There is something dangerously comfortable about getting information from friends; you may quit acquiring before the full import sinks in or your fine-tuning of cynicism kicks in with qualifying questions, so eager are you to trust and enjoy your friends.

You are less lenient with strangers, more apt to take the What-do-they-know approach, possibly robbing yourself of useful information. (You do often get good ideas for story from the behavior of strangers (although to tell the absolute truth, you find you have to reinvent these strangers as friends).

The more existential questions come when you ask yourself how many times do you have to hear something you already know before you accept it as a viable working hypothesis?  Is it better to hear the truth from a stranger or from a friend?  Are you more likely to take kindly the praise or honest criticism of a stranger than you are from a friend?

You probably already know the answers to these questions; you will probably wonder whatever could you have been thinking when, at some time in the future, you readdress these questions.

In similar fashion, one of your tropes given to friends as casually as check stand coupons at a supermarket are given to you--You saved six dollars, Mr.--er, Lowenkopf, and I present you with this coupon for a discount on your next purchase of Pampers.--is, "But you already knew that."  Playing the irony card.

We are a species ideally suited for duality.  It is impossible for us to remember AND act upon all the things we already know.  It is just as likely that we will smack the butt of a hand against the forehead some time soon in the newly hatched year, a theatrical gesture to demonstrate the ultimate self critique, I should have known that.

But you already knew that.

(Thanks, Storm Dweller.)

Notes from the underground

Sometimes you find yourself fretting about the fact of not obsessing enough about your work.  This worry comes into particular play when an editor has been through your latest effort, thought well enough of it to offer publication, then presented you with some document of suggested improvements, eighty or ninety percent of which do in fact add clarity and nuance.

These flurries of concern on your part do not have the baggage of perfection stashed in the overhead luggage compartment.  Perfection, in such cases, is of a piece with your concerns that you do not obsess enough about your work, both perfection and enough being abstractions, arguable degrees of arguable qualities.

Nor is it a matter of applying the sophistry that were you to be more obsessive, your work would as a result move on up the food chain to more prestigious publishing venue, or even the more egregious sophistry that you must learn to accept the limits of your vision.  The matter is about the respect you need to even carry the craft to the water much less to paddle it and navigate with it once it is afloat.

The matter goes on to be about the state of caring in general, which is enough to keep you up some nights with the kinds of worry that are not occasioned by phone calls from collection agencies or the news that one or other of your proposals has been less than successful with its intended audience.

To begin, the manuscript:  You are a notoriously idiosyncratic speller, using any occasion to launch into a Lewis and Clark expedition of spelling variation on a conventional word.  Although you quite enjoyed diagramming sentences on the blackboards of various middle and high school classrooms, your sense of parts of speech and other grammatical adornments is the equivalent of having to count numbers on your fingers in maths problems, your awareness of such arcana that, for instance, the word so can be used as an adverb may account for the larger body of your knowledge of syntax, grammar, and the awareness of what a solecism is.

The manuscript is the writer's calling card; even in these days of electronic submission, the manuscript tells the editor your level of plateau in the writing society just as one's voice is often a cultural give-away, or one's school tie an index of claimed status.  As an editor, you can often "tell" on the first page if a particular manuscript has "it."  As a writer, you wish your manuscript submissions to carry the subtext to the reader, Be alert, you are reading the work of a professional.

Then there is the all-important introductory sentence, called the lede by newspaper folk.  Is it of "Call me Ishmael" intrigue?  Does it coax the reader along to the point where the reader is no longer aware of reading sentences but is rather transported to the venue of which you have written?  Does it eschew stage direction and backstory and authorial self-consciousness, moving instead with bold step into drama, where the reader is aware only of characters at accelerated risk rather than a writer of burgeoning self-importance?  Do you write to tell a story or impress yourself?  (The second response can be and has been fatal to the writer's intent.)

Is there some inherent need pushing at you to tell this particular story?  Will not telling it cause you some form of psychical harm (such as guilt, remorse, a growing sense of refusal to take on the problems a creative person must confront)?  Are you reinforcing your fear of taking risk?

Have you let fear of failure inhibit the audacity you have nourished in order to hone a writer's craft?

Have you, for fear of being misunderstood, left out the audacity in this story?

Have you moved beyond the point of fearing you will be misunderstood (for however pellucid and engaging your prose and the concepts it enlivens, individuals--some good, some despicable--will misunderstand you.  And there is nothing you can do about it except to understand yourself with the same pellucid and engaging awareness a writer needs to a higher degree than the need to identify predicates nominative or relative pronouns or indefinite antecedents.

Funny You Should Ask

 The concept of funny implies a circumstance of absurdity and potential discomfort directed to some source.  Played out in dramatic terms, the circumstance produces laughter.  The concept of funny brings us into that no-person's land between humor, which is more apt to be existential and dramatic in nature, and comedy, which is physical, but not far enough removed from the existential to preclude a well-placed pie in the face.

You are motivated to these observations and examinations because a friend, who chooses to use the blog pseudonym of The Querulous Squirrel, but whose real name is known to you, considered earlier commentary of yours as funny, to which you replied that Life is funny.

Life is just that, physical and bumptious at times, painful in excess at other times, yet the cure for either or both, to the extent cures are available for events in Life, is a point of view that sees event and circumstance as funny.  One proof you offer in support of this observation is the presence in almost any culture you can think of where there is occasion for someone scrabbling to attain the moral high ground to announce of a particular behavior, remark, or attitude:  "That's not funny."

Such utterers are drawing lines in the sand, representing themselves as arbiters of what produces laughter and, indeed, where laughter is inappropriate.  For openers, laughter appears to have been wired into most of our glorious species, but has become subject to cultural attack by those who have chosen to disconnect a major form of coping with circumstance.  There is also the possibility that those who remind us a particular vision or attitude or conclusion is not funny are in actuality saying, Don't laugh at me.  Do not make fun of me.  Can't you see I am serious?  (As though seriousness is some beau ideal, radiant in its transcendental flourish.)

Funny is odd or ironic, both primary causes of laughter.  A thing unlike conventional things is funny.  Ironic is opposition borne home; it is a tickle on the ribs of Fate, it is that magnificent cliche of the barn door being locked after it should have been; it is also an awareness that when one's ducks are all in a row, one bullet can have a fatal effect on any number of them.

Funny is Whose ox is being gored?  Funny if it is not your ox.

How many times have you been admonished, told, ordered to be serious?  Is there a correlation between those times and the behavior that evoked such admonitions.

Most humorous things may be reduced to such serious matters as survival, ethics, empathy, respect for the feelings of others, respect for the feelings of animals, regarding all individuals as deserving respect even when they, by their own actions, appear to want to be regarded as pariah.  Most things of humor have to do with attitudes taken on by ourselves and others in ways that at their core take on an absolute sense of being right about interpretation and behavior.

Funny things are, indeed persons slipping on banana peels or being hit in the face by a well-timed thrust of coconut cream pie; they are also occasions of individuals, yourself included, thinking to know answers in the absolute when, in fact, behavior so often depends on context, the understanding of context, and the awareness that context is often as vague as our most recent intention.

Sisyphus is portrayed as a man doomed to eternal repetition of a meaningless act, about as dreary and unhealthy a circumstance as a human could endure.  But along came Albert Camus to observe that Sisyphus was probably a happy man.  Your own reasoning on this score has to do with Sisyphus and many others similarly dedicated to meaninglessness had to "invent" funny to allow them something stronger than ale, something less apt to cause a hangover.

Life is funny and we would be a good deal closer to a significant seriousness if we were able to recognize and embrace this.  To put matters another way, if life were not funny, a significant number of individuals would come forth to invent funny; many if not all of them would be writers.

You have no quarrel with those whose views on such matters as faith and prayer and supernatural manifestations are tangential to your own.  You have no quarrel with men, women, and children who end their days with some form of prayer before they lapse off into sleep.  Your quarrel is with the men, women, and children who allow days to elapse before indulging the prayer of laughter.