Editing Furniture: The desk stays in the studio

The clutter and enticements of your past often linger within you as a metaphor, sleeping in your memory attic, or perhaps the linen closet of nostalgia.  You step over events and the traces of their documentation (photos, printed programs, letters, framed awards, certificates, publications) without a second thought.  Your purpose is to emulate friends and associates who are more orderly, who think in advance to file things where they ought to be filed, who have a sense of where things ought to go.  These same individuals know when to discard things whose purpose or use-by date are short-lived.

Your friends have taken you on nevertheless, perhaps seeing in you adorability in the jumble and clutter you evoke at the mere hint of attempting to retrieve a specific project or item from the aggregate that is your mind, your work area, and your work ethic.  It is a rare time when you are outright unprepared; you have too much experience behind you to allow being caught without a flurry of thought and/or opinion on a matter.  You do require time, however, to make it seem that your opinions or preparations seem to have some order.

The amount of necessary time to prepare seems to you to be in direct proportion to your take on how much clarification is needed.

Moving is a form of intensified editing; you are paring down books, furniture, items you came by in the first place because they seem to you to be pure art.  No one else, looking at these, could have reason to suspect the item on your wall was art; at best they'd guess you considered it art or that you were making some form of statement by putting such a thing on the wall.

One of your oldest and dearest friends wondered today how you were coming with your edits.  You know better than to go general with this friend.  Instead, you tried for humor, explaining how you'd edited a sofa, a book case, a night stand, and an overstuffed chair.  He blinked two or three times before wondering if there were some new approach you'd discovered for making fiction sound more domestic.  "We live in a different world than the one we were born into,"  this man, who once had a computer for nearly a month before having to admit he did not know how to turn it on, said, a rueful smile dancing over his lips.

This observation, an essential truth, is already a cliche to be avoided at all costs, except when having lunch with a chum who will not pounce upon it with gotcha élan.

The subject is moving, changing residences, going through things you and others have written, received as gifts, read in some periodical, then set aside for some project that either came to grief or fruition.  Can you live without X, you ask yourself as you heft X.  You think of T.S. Eliot and his objective correlative, you think of the joyful times you had in the past, hanging out with the novelist/short story writer/editor/teacher, Robley Wilson, and the time you sent him a short story when he was editing The North American Review.  One of your characters had occasion to observe that he'd rushed to the station to catch a train that had left days earlier.  "That," Wilson told you, "is carrying the objective correlative too damned far."

Moving is carrying things too damned far.  Using the act and process of moving as a metaphor is carrying the objective correlative too damned far.  The only positive thing to come out of the exchange of venues for certain items and not for others is the certain knowledge that if you were using moving as a metaphor, you would have the good sense not to call it out in direct narrative.  It would be, as Bobbie Ann Mason did in her remarkable short story, "Shiloh," kept in the background.  How tempting it must have been to contemplate a story set in a park, commemorating one of the most intense battles of the Civil War, involving a husband and wife who get into an intense argument.  It was a mark of her maturity as a writer not to have called the parallels to the readers' attention, which means, now that you think of it, that you are severe in your dislike of the moving process and wish it were completed.

The Beginning Writer's Life: Carping Diem

 As in other creative endeavors, there are stages in the writer's recognition that maturity exists, is a worthy goal to pursue, followed immediately upon such recognition to the striving to achieve it, the arrival at the early plateau, and the subsequent exercises of discipline to keep it limber and functional. 

In similar fashion, there are stages of writerly development where the major activity is complaining.  Complaint in a writer is often a cover-up or defense, waged against the fear that other writers are progressing at a faster level, finding voices, "seeing" or understanding the dimensions in orbit about a moral or ethical situation.

Complaining writers often are drawn to one another, whence they bond in fear and recrimination rather than striving to discover steps to bring them closer to their craft.  You can close your eyes and imagine the sounds of them carping, whinging, taking offense, chanting the mantra "Carping diem."

The writer's obligation is to disturb rather than to complain.  Even when a writer's complaints are grounded in validity, they sound too much like a screed, too little like a story; their concepts are still rooted in self-advertising rather than self examination, in expressions of superiority rather than empathy.

A certain maturity is assumed when the writer recognizes the need for the antagonist to be as dimensional as the protagonist, perhaps a tad smarter than the protagonist, possibly even a bit heavier with empathy.  The protagonist must describe an arc of plausible-yet-effective change, all this in the process of devising a strategy and attitude that is of higher quality than the strategy and attitude of the antagonist.  It is fitting for the antagonist to be better looking, smarter, more disciplined in the practice of his or her talent; this gives the protagonist a worthwhile opponent, one over whom a victory is an accomplishment, not a mere dramatic convention.  In real life, it is good to succeed for the sake of participation; in drama, it is good to succeed as a winner in the cosmic poker game of story.  At least in our mythos, taking part is more important than the laurel of victory or the sting of defeat; in the mythos of the Bhagavad-Gita, Arjuna learns that participation is everything. "To the work you are entitled," Krishna tells him, "but not the fruits thereon."  How many of us work, in particular for the mere sake of doing the thing?  How many of us work for the recognition?

How many of us work for the sake of complaint?

A writer with a complaint is a traveler who has picked up the wrong novel at the airport.  A mature writer's duty is to disturb readers.  Of course the goal takes with it the sense of entertaining the  reader while providing the disturbance.

How can I ever hope to do that?  the beginning writer, the cranky writer, asks.  Find a way, comes the answer.  They didn't tell me I had to do that when I began, the cranky writer complains.  You weren't ready to hear it, the veteran says, you were too busy complaining.

Occupational Hazards

The occupation of editing as it relates to a literary publication or a publisher of books is often so fraught that the editor is forced to take the actual manuscript home to read in some relative solitude or to seek a place outside the office with its routines of meetings  and other activities that would shock the book- or journal loving reader into a state of catatonic default.  There is enough of the intuitive and creative about the process to cause the editor to yearn for reading and editing time to the same degree the writer yearns for reading and writing time.

Although you believe the editorial and writing yearnings originate in opposite, even opposing sides of the brain, you further believe the common ground is focus.  At what state of focus will the mind begin to wander toward the state where endorphins squirt forth and time appears to have taken leave?How grand it is, whether editing or writing, to lose that part of self as organizer, as universe in order, i's dotted, t's crossed, ducks in a row.  How grand to feel on an almost nonverbal level the affinity between you and story, as though, having read some of the accepted canon, you are now a member.  You are fond of your friends, still warm from the memory and interaction of the regular Friday morning coffee, and look forward to such ad lib encounters with one or more, even though your sense is of a greater likelihood you will meet more remarkable friends in the pages of books and magazines, where characters are wound about the armature of agenda and needs.

"They," which is to say your educators, employers, and perhaps some family members, say story is the linking factor in the most and least of us, that story is our opiate rather than opiate being our story or excuse or passport to interest.  Even those of us with accessible or predictable story are by degrees more refreshing than those with mere ego or inflated self-image.  We make differing stories from a singular event, translating as our languages, cultures, and agendas diverge, bonded in our absolute commitment to differing interpretations.  It is a wonder when a story or a relationship holds.  But it is not surprising.

Who's Story Now?

You are sitting in a mini-banquet room at a hotel with several ice machines, an observation desk, and an exercise room, facing fifteen writers who are hopeful of advancing their projects to the point where they can send them out into the world of publication with some notion that they will pass the first obstacle, which is the obstacle of being read all the way through.

As you listen to these fifteen writers, and interact with your co-hose in this venture, a literary agent who once ran the editorial side of two major book publishers, it comes to you that this group is a good representation of the basic components within a group.  Many of them have a number of stories, others have only one, it is the most daunting story of all for a writer to cope with.  It is their story, the autobiography of them, up to this moment.  Their story will change.  If they do not change it, life will change it for them, perhaps to the point where their story will no longer be autobiographical but rather imaginative, innovative, evocative.  They will be able to take events from the reality in which they live, twist, bend, and shape them to symbolic events rather than reported, literal events. 

This is a freedom with a price tag attached or, if you prefer, this is the string of tin cans tied to the bumper of the car of a friend, intended to surprise and provide a moment or two of startling distraction.  If you follow the price tag analogy, the price is the energy and focus needed to fall in love with the event as you let it go from what it was, while shepherding it toward what it wishes to become. If you follow the string of tin cans analogy, you risk the consequence of the friend being startled and surprised enough to respond with irritation.  Either way is a winning way.  The thought of falling in love or arousing some form of disturbance is irresistible for the writer who has moved from self to story.

This Can Only Mean One Thing (Yeah, It Means "Watch out.")

You first began to think consider the importance of interpretations during a more generous and expansive time in the world of books and publishing.  Even now, as you engage moving some of your books and effects from where you've lived to where you are living, you see that you've kept reminders, such as The Modern Library series.  You still have the copy of Dubliners, the James Joyce collected stories, printed in a uniform hardcover edition, cover price one big buck and a quarter.  You were led to consider interpretations when you discovered there were "interpretations" older works in various uniform editions, your choices often made not so much on the text as whether you knew anything about the individual writing the introduction, acute in your student days to the "interpretations" that gave you the most generous presentation of extras such as reading lists, glossaries, annotations, and the like.

Your attempts to collect one of the uniform complete works of Mark Twain went askew when the owner of the used book store at which you purchased many of the volumes for under a dollar each regretted that some of the titles were no longer available.  (But to your thinking, Twain needed no generous presentations of commentary; any collection of his works was sufficient to the task and screw the size and color of the bindings.  Any collection of Twain was, as Dryden said of Chaucer, "God's plenty.)  You mention the Twain material now because of your less-than-enthusiastic response to the recent autobiography which in aggregate editorial stampede is just the sort of mischief Twain enjoyed producing.

Interpretation gave you serious moments of thought and added contemplation when, after the established fact of the actor Lee J. Cobb "owning" the role of Willy Loman, the actor Dustin Hoffman took it on.  Your own meditations and observations were ratified by the excellence of the Dustin Hoffman portrayal or interpretation but have received yet added ratification by the recent announcement that another Hoffman, Philip Seymour, is about to take on the role.

At one point when you were seventeen and a college freshman, you had the opportunity to see the filmed version of Romeo and Juliet six times in one day, an interpretation you took on as many a seventeen-year-old would take it, with a mixture of absolute wonder and self-absorption.  Romeo was interpreted by the much-too-old English actor, Leslie Howard; Juliet was the no-spring-chicken-although-stunning American actor, Norma Shearer.  You were stunned all over again when actors of a more appropriate age were cast when the Italian film director, Zeffirelli, made the choices.  In similar fashion, you accepted the notion of interpretation in all its democratic glory when Lawrence Olivier, Kenneth Brannagh, and Mel Gibson portrayed Hamlet, and indeed spent time and effort considering the portrayals of Henry V as interpreted by Olivier and Brannagh.  Luck had you walking past the theater in which a matinee performance allowed you the joys of watching Al Pacino portraying yet another Shakespearean king, this one Richard III.

The point of all these scatter shots of example extends beyond actors and beyond the writings you have set down in which actors and characters in short story and novel form a glorious connection with professional, well-trained actors who interpret characters, each attempting to bring some detail or other to a character and this being a useful formula for a writer to examine.  (Wouldn't it be remarkable to see Jack Nicholson "interpreting" Sherlock Holmes?  Every bit as exciting, you argue, as having seen Meryl Streep portraying a rabbi in American Angels.)

Interpretation is not the sole landscape of the actor; interpretation is an integral part of the writer's reality (consider for a moment or two the need the Swiss playwright, Jean Anouilh felt to interpret a play written some thousands of years before his time, Antigone. )  Consider times when someone has interpreted something you'd published to have a meaning and intent at some angularity from your own vision.  Consider the times you have returned the compliment by seeing or hearing some trope to have an intent at odds from the creator's.

It is a sometimes wonder, other times a source of grand dramatic opportunity to revel in the potential for two or more individuals sitting down to plan something they appear to be in complete agreement about to be convinced of the complete degree of agreement and accord, then veer off to the performance which demonstrates the gap in interpretation.  (Writing about this vast Sargasso Sea of difference even among agreers, using the most generalized of terms has just this moment caused you to see the interpretation of a stalled story in a way that could give you the missing direction.  A group of individuals are meeting in an up-market hotel, using one of their conference room facilities to plan a bank heist.  You are already up several degrees of conflict when the safe man is at odds with the leader over the poor quality of refreshments and yet another member of the team is not comfortable with the notion of the driver of the get-away vehicle being a woman, even though she does in fact have NASCAR points.  Writing the previous paragraphs caused you to reflect, Suppose they set out thinking they were in sync but in fact were going to rob the wrong bank?)

Nice to See You, too

From time to time you hear nominal readers complaining about a writer such as Cormac McCarthy in the context of not wanting to subject themselves to the discomfort his stories put them through.  From time to time, such as tonight in class, you feel the wall of resistance between you and the class when you speak of the need to push the characters and readers over the margins and into the potential for discomfort.  Oh, do I have to, is the plaintive cry.  I feel so awful writing about those things.  You pounce.  Then those are the things you should most write about.

What about, someone asks with mounting tenacity, individuals who like to read for pleasure?

You want to be a novelist or short story writer, you venture, or a composer of greeting card verse?

But what about beauty?

Ah, you say.  Forget about the price it just fetched, think how much beauty there is in Van Gogh's The Irises, and think how stark and disturbing that beauty is.  Think about doing that in a story.  You want to be writers or guides at Disneyland.

Which leads to the question, Is there anything wrong with wishing to be entertained?  Of course not; entertainment is a valid part of the human experience, but so is the telling of story that linger in the memory and show a picture of the kind of starkness of The Irises.  Muriel Spark's rather persistent poke in society's ribs that is her novel, Memento Mori, is a relentless take on a condition we must all face sooner or later, the condition of age and what the condition will do to us in specificity and what it may already have done to friends, associates, family members.

There was a time when your mother was on your case to write something nice, like the old fashioned stories.  Your response was variations on the theme of you making them as nice as you can without making them too nice to be published.  Then you would delight in taking her on a tour of some of the moments in the canons of western literature  where the reader was apt to get roughed up a bit, some of the Thomas Hardy, for example, and look how angry Ahab was over a single whale.

Nice works, but only when it is portrayed in context with the sorts of things that go bump in the night and in the sensitivities of individuals who try to fend off discomfort as though they were instead trying to stave off Count Dracula and his thirsty minions.

Income, Outcome, and Real Friends

In reality as well as in fiction, you have to have enough interest in an individual to care about any outcome they might encounter.  You do not have to like them.  In some way, perhaps the same way a worker bee knows which flowers to attend and which to avoid, you have to have some recognized sense of what the individual is about in order to make that next step of caring in any degree.

In most cases, your concerns about outcomes relating to strangers comes to mind when you are in coffee shops or restaurants; to a lesser degree your attitudes may become awakened, even aroused, in waiting rooms of medical centers, lines awaiting entry to a theater, perhaps even lines of individuals awaiting flu shots.  Conversation and its tone are the first wave, the literary equivalent of pheromones.  If a particular voice appears to honk or snort, perhaps even to speak at a decibel rate you find disagreeable, you begin by wanting that individual to stop talking.  Your experience is that such individuals do many things, but not talking is not one of them; they honk or snort or drone to the point where it is time for you to ante up and you do, with irritation.  I'll see your honk and raise you one pigeon or crow, flying over your head.

As your interest in an individual increases, so does your tendency to wish bad cess to that person.  This is where story comes in.  You must resist the urge to demonstrate your disapproval, your sense of superiority, your sense of moral outrage, even against the most self-absorbed, entitlement leaning individuals.  In story, you must approximate acceptance of that individual, searching for some skill or technique to blunt your sarcasm and disapproval.  This is the only way you can prevent the runaway slide of that character into monstrous cliche and intrusive attitude.  You want not only worthy opponents, you want bright, skilled, articulate opponents in order to have your protagonist's ultimate triumph have stature.  It is nothing to defeat someone who, on face, is despicable; it is only when you are up against an Iago that your true skills of evocation and resolution are called into play.  Goodness for its own sake is dull, lackluster.  Evil for its own sake strikes you as eighteenth- or nineteenth-century, in its own way as dull and lackluster as Sir Galahad is in his representation of goodness.

You want friends who disagree with you on specifics, thus the mutuality and reciprocals of the friendship bond.  Truth to tell, aren't you a bit suspicious when someone you know agrees with you too much?  You begin to wonder what the ramifications of this agreement will become.  How nice, when you have given what you consider a decent performance in some venture, only to hear a friend say, You'll get it better next time.  First that squirt of irritation:  What do you mean?  Then the reality, what you did could have been better, but your friend is still in your corner, supportive, still your friend, yet confident of your ability.

You want opponents who are not cliche, who are bright, perhaps a bit too bright for your own comfort.  You want opponents whose opposition to you and your regard of it help you delineate yourself with greater acuity than a mere acolyte.  In life and story, an opponent of dimension and reach helps you see yourself as worthy of the best life has to offer.

Opponent:  someone for whom you reserve your best retorts.