TFS: Tell the Freaking Story

For some time, your approach to a novel, whether reading one, talking about it in a class room or a review, or indeed writing one of your own, has been:  Something happens and someone changes.  Simplicity encapsulated, it is true, but given the explosive variety in genre and mainstream fiction, you'd do well to quit while ahead.

In similar fashion, there is short story (as opposed to the more generic concept of drama as story), where the operant meme is:  Someone assumes a task, writer speak for a character wants something to happen or not to happen, then undertakes to bring it into play or pull the rug from under it.

For an even longer time than you have been setting forth on the precarious sea of describing in construction terms what a novel entails, you have been pushing students to quickly list the elements they believe inhere in a novel, then assign a hierarchical listing of those elements, the sight of which, you argue, will present the student with a genome of her novel (as distinguished from the novel as visualized by other writers).  There is good sense in this exercise.  For one thing, it helps extend the notion that there is a one-size-fits-all approach to the novel.  For yet another thing, the exercise helps the writer see her personal approach to the novel.

For someone who has put in some years asking students in the class room, clients in the coffee shop, readers in reviews, and himself in his own stories and novels to please indicate where the story is because you for you part can't seem to locate it, you nevertheless rank many of the dramatic building blocks above story.

In the recent past, you'd argue character as the most vital of the tools needed to construct a story, shifting over to voice with the argument that the voice of the story had a direct effect on the choice of characters.

The time may have arrived for a change, with voice moving down the ladder to the second quality on your list, supplanted by story.  This is the result of you having spent some time working out the difference between story and plot, a definition that seems to have more or less spilled into your lap.

Story is the presence of every instance of activity portrayed in a narrative, whether the instance is taking place before our eyes right now or has happened in the remote or recent past.  The future is covered in the present time activity of one or more of the characters asking, as Bertha Young asks the Cosmos in Katherine Mansfield's short story "Bliss," the existential question of all time, "What will we do now?"

You've been uneasy about your relationship with story in your own work, in large measure because you had not come to terms with plot, which you now see as the arrangement of the instants in a story.  This points the finger in your own work at getting in with some housecleaning to determine which elements belong and which can go.  You are comfortable in your relationship with details and, although once hubristic about your approach to dialogue to the point of being hubristic about it, you now feel comfortable there, as well.

Could you have taught yourself something with all the years you have put in as editor of the work of other writers?  Beginning to appear that you have.  

Icons

When you first grew serious about reading beyond your ability to realize how serious you were or what it meant, the mountain man and cowboy were there for you as icons, ideals you had to force-fit yourself into accepting as persons with whom you could identify.  For one thing, you were somewhat shorter than your current six three; you wore thick glasses, and the closest you'd come to a horse was a visit initiated by your material grandfather to a small oval on La Cienega near Beverly in west-central Los Angeles, where two moody Shetland ponies lumbered about, more as though they were doing you a favor than bridging any sort of gap between man and animal.

In time you came into possession of a matched set of faux-pearl handled Gene Autry cap guns, but still the notion persisted that the Shetland pony had it in for you, that your own squinty-eyed visage and lack of height made thoughts of identification with the West a quixotic dream.  Frequent visits to the Hitching Post Theaters, one on Hollywood Boulevard, near the famed Pantages Theater, the other in Santa Monica, intrigued you with the issues portrayed, but left you struggling to see where you fit in.

Your early attempts at writing Western fiction revealed this sense you had of being an outsider in a place you longed to find some wriggle room.  The results were odd bits of whim and history in collision.  It was not until your late twenties and thirties that you arrived at any sense of Western identity, but by then you were immersed in Western stories intended for television, and some producers warned you off your more or less constant portrayal of class consciousness and the inherent bigotry and racism in such plentiful supply.

You abandoned the West with mixed emotions, simultaneous in your love of it as a place and a concept, not yet able to decode it to the degree necessary to write about it as the men and women you admired were able to do.  Even so, you came away aware of the figure of the cowboy as an American myth, even as you turned to another myth created with studious deliberation, the Indian.

Which leaves you, as though kicking and screaming, into the one you are even more able to identify with,the loner,investigating injustices because it feels right, because he or she is driven to do so, having already been hurt by discoveries of what people can do to one another. This individual may at one time have been military or sworn peace officer but is now right out there on the margin, wanting some sort of romantic justice in the land of the noir.  He or she may well be of a less-than-glamorous size or shape, perhaps as afflicted as Jonathan Lethem's Lionel Estorg, perhaps needing thick-lensed glasses, perhaps as Tony Hillerman's Jim Chee, wanting to become as well as an investigator a shaman.

Perhaps is the watchword for such individuals.  Perhaps they will achieve a moment or measure of a result.  But there is no doubt they will try.

Where now?

You did not think Viktor Shklovsky mattered to you all that much before you wandered into Chaucer's Books, but when you saw a still unshelved book, Bowstring:  On the Dissimilarity of the Similar, you knew he did matter and that you had to have the book.

It has been that way with books of late, a sort of hunger that in reality cannot be sated.  When the circumstances arose to launch your move from Hot Springs Road to here, you gulped a few times, then set a limit of one hundred books you would bring with you.  At just about six months residency here on East Sola Street, you have at least a hundred books in the kitchen, not to mention those in the large studio room nor indeed the art books stacked atop the cabinet that houses the heating unit.

From the get-go, you are not a fan of literary theory; it is far from your favorite course to teach even though you do enjoy the effect on students when you move from Marxist theory over to feminism.  To that effect, one of the more recent of books to have appeared at Sola Street is the new Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right, which you plan on converting into an essay for a booklength project about the nature of character in American fiction.

It is probably not as accidental as you'd like to believe that you are drawn to to noted Russian literary critics, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Viktor Shkolovsky being uppermost because of the way they view text, the intent of text, and their visions of theme and hidden agenda within text.  Had you become an academic, you would have spent considerable time digesting their work and the intent of their work.  As it is, you are, mercifully, not an academic and you have spent considerable time with the American critic, Leslie A. Fiedler.

The Shkolovsky work you brought home deals with the contrarist, the person who is out of place, does not belong where he is (almost reminds you of some Hawthorne, right?) and now he must search for meaning.

In books, there are arguments, occasional conversations, and conundrums that lead you by the nose of curiosity.  You read to embark on conversations with authors and their creations, ideas and characters (who are after all nothing more than ideas in costumes, eager to cover up a tragic flaw).

The Joys of Not Being Well Read

Shortly after you'd left high school to move into the upper echelons of education, it was your aim and goal to be well read.  Not that you had so much as a clue what being well read meant or, indeed, that you could give a plausible difference between close reading and spending several hours with a book or poem or story; not at all.  Nor could you have ventured only the most slipshod definition of what the Western Canon included--and did not include.

Truth to tell, being well read at that time was a mark of extreme snobbery and potential hubris on your part if an eighteen-year-old is capable of hubristic behavior at all.  You had a rival for the affections of a girl.  He was a sort of male cheerleader type, ukulele-strumming, hail fellow sort,  You were nothing if not a brooding,Byronic sort, vacuuming in the angst and anomie of the Fitzgeralds, the Hemingways, and all those who found it more appropriate and less costly to live abroad.

He--the rival--became, you believe, a high school gym teacher.  You became the writer of these vagrant paragraphs.  She became the wife of a dentist.  All of it for the good.  You sought ways to impress her beyond your recognition that nothing would.  Nothing.  The benefit of your then attitude was the enormous amount of residue from your reading.

Revisiting some of that material, you recognize that large portions of it--even though it stuck to your memory--did not deliver as much of its inherent nuance and layering as you'd thought, in many cases delivering to you impressions and information in direct contrast to the impressions and information you've gleaned in more recent years.

By now, "well read" has come to mean knowing a few books with a certain degree of intimacy, let's say to the point where you now reread them for their inner beauty, which is to say their language and their construction and their characters, but also for their flaws.  And so you do--you reread them and once again, they pull the rug out from under you by surprising you, which is often something a new book cannot do at all.

The summer stretches before you.  Already on the table in your small, shaded patio is that book given you when you were a boy; the big, thick volume containing the two long works about a river you had barely crossed in your young life, set down by a man whose background and culture bore no resemblance to your own and yet you have followed him as he followed that river.  The thing that makes the connection between you and in the bargain leaves you feeling well read is that he was happiest when--one way or another--he was on that river and you at your reading happiest when you are along with him.

Check your censors at the door

 In former times, running on empty was a potential trauma waiting to turn into a full disaster, complete with self doubt and a lecture from the censor.  You have been weighed in the balance, the censor tells you, and have been found wanting.  You have been caught out with neither story nor opinion.  Added implication: how can you consider yourself what you'd like to consider yourself?

Some time ago, perhaps two or three years back, you began to realize that of the many writers you admired who were able to turn their running on empty into a piece of some sort, perhaps even a short story, was William Saroyan, a man you met in person only once, with disastrous results.  You were second banana to him at a writers' conference, a fact that seemed safe enough for you to provide a home for several glasses of wine more than prudent.  You did not have any way of knowing Saroyan was an aggressive drinker, growing more truculent with each infusion.

You soon found out when it became clear that he had not only taken more than a pit stop from an arranged dinner at the El Paseo Restaurant in downtown Santa Barbara, he had also clambered out the bathroom window, found the Elk's Club bar some blocks away, and was tossing back doubles while wishing any number of individuals he knew would go become fruitful and multiply themselves.

You were neither drunk nor truculent, but you were by no means sober when informed that you had just become the keynote speaker.  After several quick cups of coffee, you were out on the stage,in front of an enormous lectern, possessed of the notion that it would be good to advance to the edge of the stage and sit down, whereupon you might continue with your speech.

Saroyan had always left an impression on you with his work, which seemed so spontaneous.  You never get a chance to ask him, although you on several occasions were able to discuss the matter with his son, Aram.  It was and still is your belief that William Saroyan could actually get a publishable piece out of being on empty, then writing about it.  Given such problems as his lousy ability to be any kind of husband and the matter of his drinking problems and temper problems, running on empty was well down on his priority list.  He might have even preferred it to, say, needing another drink or perhaps needing the money to buy another drink.

No idea?  No problem; just sit down and write about the glorious freedom of having nothing to write about, how it freed up the soul with a sense of grand potential.

You believe you can more or less do the same thing, although you do not think to attempt to publish such material or even think about publishing it; instead you try to file it in some accessible manner for use should you ever be at a similar loss.

There is a kind of tingling presence of adventure after a time, the sense that you might be onto something in the way of insight.  Not every piece of writing produces insight; sometimes pieces produce trouble of the sort associated with expressing what you think, when you have thought something unflattering or critical about someone it would have been healthier to have not expressed your opinions.

But there you are again; an opinion is something, plucked straight from your heart.  An opinion, by its very nature, is running on something, not on empty.

A Horse! A Horse!

The time has arrived, is actually here now, weighing upon you, much in the manner of a jockey estimating the responsiveness of his mount.

Wait, how mixed can a metaphor be; how can time be the jockey riding the horse that is you?

Ah, you say.

The time that has arrived is the Summer, more in abstraction than realness of the solstice.  Many of your obligations are on hold until September.  True enough, there is the launching of your book into the world.  There are a few editing jobs awaiting you, but for all practical purposes, the Summer is yours, at least the relative freedom of it is available to you.  In fairness, you have no notion of what if any surprises Reality has in store for you.  The implications and reality are clear enough:  You have time to work.  You also have time to squander, to procrastinate, to indulge.  The former two are less preferable than the latter.

It is your awareness that time can be issued its walking papers, that the new jockey is the work; you are the horse.

1.  The prequel to the novel you were at work on.
2.  The actual novel you were at work on.
3.  One of six projects you offered your publisher as something you could have ready for edits by December of this year.
4.  A short story, "Uncle Charlie," about one half done.

Four jockeys to sit astride you, guiding you into the romp that is a workout, steering and nudging and goading you beyond squander, procrastinate, and indulge.

How ever dumb it is--and you have been presented with some things original in their dumbness this past week at the writers' conference--it is not squander nor procrastinate nor indulge.

Four jockeys, already forming the word giddyup.

The Shadow of Your Style

 Not too long ago, one of your students, in a surprise move, asked you to give an example of a dangling modifier.  "Sure,"  you said.  Then you paused, trying to conjure one forth.  "Er," you said.  And then you paused some more.  "Well, let's see," you said, now an official entry into the Big Zone of Uncertainty.  A splendid contrapuntal theme began to play against your desperate search for a dangling modifier; it was the theme of relief that you had so insulated yourself against the use of this solecism that you had to struggle to call it forth in example.  You ultimately found one; it came in a sentence you constructed that began with a gerund, thus separating yourself in your mind from the United States Supreme Court Associate Justice who could not define pornography but knew it nevertheless when he saw it.

This is preamble to your Three-Words Issue. So far as you are able to determine, there are three words you will go out of your way not to use when beginning an essay or, for that matter, a blog post.

1.  Issue word number one:  one, as in "One thing you will never do is begin a lead paragraph with the word 'one.'"

2.  Issue word number two:  it, as in (sorry, Jane) "It is a truth universally acknowledged..."  Beginning an essay, a paragraph, and most sentences with "it" depersonalizes the sentence by moving it off at arm's length from the reader, allowing you to slither into the remote present rather than the immediate moment of a character being on stage.  If it was so late that the character had to look at her watch in order to place the time, then register impatience, that character is placed under a handicap of not being the kind of person you'd want in a story in the first place and, in the second place, is the kind of character you'd expect to be stood up.  Beginning with "it" when you encounter such tropes causes you to reflexively ask "What?"  It was late?  What was late?  Thus you've been pulled out of the story or narrative.

3.  Issue word number three is "that."  You have for some time had a revulsion toward "that."  You find yourself cringing when you say something along the lines of "That's what I mean."  As opposed to "One" or "It," your specificity of why "that" is so grating to you is more rooted in idiosyncrasy.  There is a clunky, extra syllable feel to it.  "That is the book I was telling you about" sounds accusatory rather than attribution.  Even such elegance of finality as "That tears it." or even "That's it." are tropes you go out of your way to avoid to the point where, in revision, you have to bite the bullet, remove the substitution, then put that back where that belongs in that sentence.

There is some grim satisfaction in knowing this about your self and your preferences; these three matters contribute even in their not being used to the quirky literary DNA now resident in your style, and should anyone wish to do so, they could identify you with greater certainty by tracing your style.