Formula

A formula is a language of elements and symbols, chosen to produce a governable result.  Although there are areas of similarity between formula and recipe, including an outcome, you could say without too many accusations of reductionism that recipe, if followed, will produce corn bread.  Formula, if it is followed, will lead you to the solution of a problem.

Both terms have application to story. 

You write a story to solve an inchoate problem that wants to be articulated, addressed, then brought to some settlement. Within the context of story, each term—formula and recipe--gets something of a bad rap.  Boy plus girl plus cute meeting is a recipe for many of the early Hollywood comedy romances that were themselves ingredients used to great success by that paradigm of novelists, Jane Austen.  A story, whether filmed, dramatized, or printed, that delivers an outcome with no surprises or reversals or, as your new publisher choses to call the trope, turns, is said to be predictable or formulaic.  Predictability in fiction has become the literary equivalent of immigration among politicians, suspect and controversial due to the belief that the audience wants to have predictability to boo and hiss the way they once booed and hissed the villain in the melodrama.

Your association with formula is not so different from many aspiring writers; you studied the various genera, identifying the implicit promises each offered the reader.  In some cases, during the heyday of the massmarket paperback explosion, when there were such giants as Bantam and Dell and New American Library, Popular Library, Lion, Gold Medal, Pocket Books, and at least a dozen more, you could actually write to such a publisher for their genre guidelines.

Through your undergraduate years, you were an avid reader of science fiction to the point where you had a plausible enough feel for its formulae.  Your true love was the mystery, however, but one serious problem stood in your way before you could make your way down its mean streets. 

You were unable to have one of your characters kill another one of your characters.  This was not because of your pacifist nature, because you had no such nature.  You were unable to convince yourself a character had sufficient motive to kill another.  How many years did you need to come up with a motive you could believe?  And when you had the motive—fear of a closely guarded secret being revealed—how many novels could you do without repeating yourself?

Which brings you back to the problem you never solved to your satisfaction:  Formula meant to you a set of conditions you could use ad infinitum to produce story.  There went a few more years of frustration and crumpled sheets of early draft manuscript paper.

Whether the story is set within a genre that is fraught with obligations to the audience or is of a more contemplative, shall we say literary, approach, it has as an absolute requirement the need for characters the reader will care about.

When you make this observation before a larger group, someone in the audience is sure to ask, “How do I make readers care about my characters?”

At one point, during a presentation, one of the first questions in the Q and A was that very question.  Your reply was certain to have been grumpy.  “It starts with you.  You have to care more about them than you do about getting published.  Stop thinking about getting published and think more about creating worthwhile characters.”

 To a growing tide of foot shuffling and muttering, you went on, perhaps to save the day.  “Characters are your tools.  You don’t use a ripsaw to cut across the grain.  You don’t use a cheap knife to dice vegetables.  Get yourself a character with some background—someone who has fears and hopes and blind sides and one or two questionable moral values. Get yourself a character who has a weakness for a particular other person or a particular thing that is not healthy.  Get yourself a character or two who are tired of being losers and now see a chance to make something of themselves, provided they’re willing to cut a few corners.  Get yourself a character who’d rather tend bar in an Alaska saloon than practice law in Boston. Get yourself characters--”the glimmer of an idea was coming through. “—get yourself a set of characters who’ll do things that surprise you, and don’t ask me how to do that.  The way to do that is to stop telling them what to do and start listening to them, which means you’ve got to let them talk more, which means you’ve got to ramp and amp, and don’t ask me what that means.  That means they’ve got to be more confrontational when they talk.”

You’d begun to feel like a circuit-riding preacher on a Sunday afternoon, unsure where his next chicken dinner invitation was coming from.  You also noticed there were scattered “yes” and vigorous nods of approval in the group.

You never know how effective those outbursts are or what results they produce in your audience, although you do want them to get it, your impatience with them being a mere reflection of your own impatience with yourself and such technique as you may have.  Whatever that is, it is not enough to suit you.

Your frustration comes from the simultaneous wanting of and recognition of the impossibility of discovering the philosopher’s stone, that alchemical equivalent of the holy grail, the formula for story.

Aristotle did not compose his Poetics in vain; he dissected story to the point where he could.  The rest is up to you and your sister and brother writers who would send story rushing out into the streets like Paul Revere, warning not against the impending arrival of the Red Coats, but of boredom, of plainness, of niceness.

Formula will take you so far, then, with an enormous heave; it bucks you off its back, into the air for a brief moment or two.  There you are, no longer on your high horse, rather an immediate martyr to the laws of gravity.

Elephants Redux

Unless you carry about a collection of jazz discs in your car or connect your iPod touch to the radio system on your car, jazz input is limited, the one or two available sources reliant on scheduling hours. Not a serious problem, not when KUSC, one of the major classical outlets, is available throughout the central coast area.

The frustration is not being able to hear what you want, when you want it, which is a good analogy for the music you hear in your mind’s ear, classical or jazz, which you have absolutely no ability to reproduce, neither in writing or performance on anything more sophisticated than a kazoo.

The frustrations (plural because there are many) inherent in transforming an idea from concept into story, from skittering, so-what story to meaningful story, have haunted you like the ghost of his father haunting Hamlet, more or less since you were of that Hamlet’s age. 

Within the intervening years from you achieving Hamlet’s age, then moving well beyond it, you have contributed your share of wadded discards of attempts, on occasion achieving an intellectualized vision of what might help, at other times understanding the need to convey the necessary feelings, at yet other times a combination of both.

Your placement in the evolving scale of technology, from typewriter to electric typewriter to early generation computer, to now allows you a vision between the piles of crumpled pages and the code names you give files to remind you when they were written and, thus, what evolution in the process they might have made.

Among the elephants in the living room are the frustrations of getting your own ideas captured so that they may be studied, fed, enhanced, brought to some degree of satisfactory conclusion.

This elephant, which you will call the personal writing elephant, is joined by the teaching elephant; you are seen by some as one who knows which firefly to snatch from the sky, where to put it, and how to feed it while it is in captivity.  There comes a time when the student becomes aware that what you can do is not an alchemy which can be learned once for all time.  After you experience this realization from the student, you are faced with their added disillusion when they discover that each new project requires a new alchemy, one that works for that project alone.

A colleague confided in you this past week that he believes you have forgotten more than he knows.  You responded to the effect that you are never sure you have forgotten enough.  His reaction to that convinced you there is a splendid basis for continuing friendship.

Another elephant you sometimes forget, then stumble over on your way out of the living room is the editorial elephant, coming into play often when a fresh and viable approach to the project at hand seems to have come from nowhere, but is in reality quite experience based.  The problem with the work is not the work itself but where the work begins and sometimes where the work ends.  The sigh you hear from the one who has been edited precedes the author’s sense of being tired of the project, not wanting to do another draft.  You understand that as a kind of defensiveness; it is the equivalent of driving on the freeway and experiencing someone make a sudden lane shift directly in front of you; it is your space, your vision, being trespassed, threatened, invaded.

Music to the editor’s ears:  “I don’t have it in me to do another draft.”

You are, of course, being ironic.  You appreciate actors such as the late Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman, Glenn Close, and Meryl Streep, who think nothing of doing another take and another and another, in complete disavowal of perfection.  As there is no failure, only dreadful grasp of the idea (which may not have been all that good), there is no perfection, only the opportunity to bring something fresh to a story.

Writing in this sense has nothing to do with success or failure, only an opportunity to capture a falling star or a shard of lightning.  Such coins as there are in your pocket come from your awareness of this and your ability to share it.

This philosophy would work a good deal better if the only elephant in the living room were your own writing and your own relationship to it.  Those two bumps over there.  Teaching.  Editing.  They figure in the calculus as well to the point where, the longer you can go without being overcome by one or more of the frustrations associated with teaching and editing, the greater the likelihood you will also go a tad longer without the frustrations getting to be elephants within your own work.  Then the next draft will be from curiosity and enthusiasm rather than defensive dreariness.

Voice of Unreason

We all hear voices.

Even if we have some serious hearing impairment that reaches beyond our ability to have the voices sent in electronically, we hear voices from earlier times.  For many of us, the voices are telling us to do things, not to do other things, recriminating with us about some past action we should have done or not done.  These voices are often those of long forgotten authority figures, by which you mean teachers from junior high school and high school, although by the time you’d moved into grade ten, the voices, even the ones offering you a measure of praise, were speaking in a monotone, thus losing their power to do much more than remind you of how bored you were during the course of those intermediate years

Some of the voices we hear are our own, reminding us that we may have gone too far in pleading for something, gone too far in our refusal to do something we found abhorrent, or gone too far in losing our temper.  When you hear the voices of others, engaging in extending the boundaries, we are made uncomfortable because of the reminded that you’ve said or done something similar, and now it is free again, wandering the hallways of your personality, a miserable ghost, looking for some way to divest its essential being, now that you’ve made the connection that you sounded that way and wish no longer to do so.

Some voices you heard were so impressive that you have only just begun to realize the speaker was influencing your future beliefs because you were programmed to listen to voices of authority figures and not say such responsive things as “Bullshit,” even though you might have felt that at the time.  Listening for anomaly or error or unacceptable attitude were not traits wired in when you came tumbling from the womb.  You had to learn.  This is a recognized part of your story arc.  You still hear voices, but now you often take them in, then engage them in some form of conversation, often verging on the less polite, waspish response that carries your resentment at having accepted the weight and veracity of the voice without question.

Some of these voices, voices clearly your own, are painful reminders of your malleability.  If a voice spoke loudly enough, you believed it not so much because you accepted its weight of accuracy but because you had no counter response.  How useful it has become for you, these days, to keep this in mind when you hear your own voice rising.  Are you using your voice, either your natural speaking voice or some culturally charged voice as a weapon?  Are you using voice as a schoolyard bullying tactic?  If your voice begins to rise to that level where it is clearly aggressive, is this a sign that you are not confident in your position?  Would you be less aggressive and more tonal were you surer of yourself?

No need to answer that; it is you, reminding you of your own contribution to the chorus of voices about you, written and spoken.

How would you like your voice to sound when your words appear on printed pages or come as some portion of lecture or conversation?  Can it stand on its own, whether the reasoned you or the bombastic you, or does it require some special effect going on in the background as a distraction?

As an angry, emerging teenager, you kept most of your combativeness to the verbal.  There were a few memorable times when you took the combativeness out of its container, set it aside when you took off your glasses—what a dramatic gesture right there—and sailed forth into combat, in one case with the class bully.  He was likely as surprised as you were, finally having to remind you to stop hitting him because it was over.  Still hitting him, you asked if he was sure.  He extended his hand, dripping with blood from where you’d caught him on the nose as his answer.

After a time, he even asked you why you’d kept hitting him, when he’d acknowledged the incident, the combat, was over.  Only then did you understand.  You were frightened to a severe degree by him, made even more fearful at the thought of what he’d do to you if you stopped.

How many verbal arguments did you pursue in that spirit?

Your Ordinary Day

As habits related to writing take on increasing roles in your life, you begin to see how much is at stake if you are to feel free to call yourself committed, engaged, beyond being a dilettante.

You begin to see yourself accommodating—or not accommodating—what your friends in business orientations would call income streams.  The next thing to your own writing is the writing of others, which is to say work you are paid to edit, either by the author, the author’s agent, or the author’s publisher.

Another important factor to consider is the need to read, which of itself have become more complex because you are no longer able to read for the enjoyment you experienced when you began your journey of reading.  You read now in fear of missing things, that you will not have read closely enough for it to qualify as close reading, which means that you will not have absorbed all you might have absorbed that will be helpful to your own vagrant writing craft. 

Although you have to a degree disabused yourself of the hope that you will encounter one work that will make the process and the craft you seek plain to you, nevertheless you read as though you might have missed a clue, a detail, either in the excellence of another writer’s work or in the depressing sense of dread it sends ricocheting through your wiring.  Thus alert reading looms large as a priority.

Students are ever so much beyond the concept of income stream in the financial sense.  These splendid individuals are unique vectors of potential learning.  You owe each of them the sense of her or his own voice, the vision of what story might be on an individual basis and such random-but-important nuances as what you will call generational tools, things they know that you don’t and ought to.  Attention to students becomes as crucial as attention to reading.  It is a partial truth to say you enjoy teaching; you enjoy imparting information, sharing dramatic sensations.  It is a truth of equal partial completeness to say you do it to repay those from whom you have learned.  You teach to stay ahead of them, to learn from them, to perfect what you think you have at least polished to the point where it becomes muscle memory, enabling you to ply your skill at a notch or two of greater depth.

You’ve moved for certain over the line where you’d be able to say that writing fucks up your normal day to the point where you are now able to say that your normal day fucks up your writing.

You’ve moved to the point where you accommodate your writing against the agenda of a given day.  Never a patient person, ever eager for results, you fight the writer’s fight of Curmudgeon in this corner, and in this corner, weighing in at one hundred eighty pounds, the challenger, Consideration.

There are, you are pleased to say, individuals in your life and about your orbit who deserve consideration.  Such as you can contribute, you do—in a way of sincerity and devotion rather than duty, which smacks of obligation, and is a breeding ground for resentment.

Writing has traditionally played hob with your love life, raising issues from time to time of which you preferred more, her or it.  Depending on who the her was and the it was, you often reminded yourself of the late great comedian, Jack Benny, who often found himself in conflict with the hold-up man as portrayed by Sheldon Leonard, “Your money or your life.”  Then the agonizing silence.  Then, “Well?”  Then, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.”

Someone who was not a particular fan of you or your writing accused you of thinking your interest and focus related to writing gave you some sense of entitlement.  “Would that it were so,” you replied.  You told her that being good didn’t really factor in the equation.  In fact, you told her that if her calculus had any practicality, given your attitudes, you’d already be pretty good at what you do.

Don’t get you wrong; you’d have no problem being as good as your visions and quirkiness would appear to indicate, but you already crossed the line where good no longer matters.

Once, nearly twenty years ago, you were interviewing the writer, William Campbell Gault, for the local throwaway weekly.  He said something that has remained with you.  “I’d rather be the world’s worst writer than a good anything else.”

For your part, you are willing to fight the Curmudgeon vs. the Considerate battle, you’re willing to be quirky, impatient, have your day fucked up.  You’ve crossed the line.  You’ve not only told a number of persons to get stuffed, you have a few in mind you could with some ease add to the list.

Having days that threaten to fuck up your writing will do that to you.

Surprise Party

You find yourself colliding with an idea for a project, say a story or a book.  In that collision, you get a brief vision of what the finished project will be, perhaps even the ending.  You may even believe the project was given to you ending first instead of beginning first.

Energized by your enthusiasm for the vision, you set forth with it, working to give it the sufficient amount of presence you know it will require for you to see it through to completion.

Now comes the important part.  Because you have done this before, because you know how the process works, you are aware that the project will not be complete to any degree of your satisfaction until it undergoes some transformation, opens itself to something completely unexpected.  This “something” is resident somewhere within you, but you’re unable to identify where because you do not know.

The important part is that you see the project, then you understand something you’ve learned sometime in the past:  the project must collide with an association, a metaphor, an accidental discovery.

The important part is that you rely, as much on what you cannot see or know as the technique you believe you possess in sufficient degree to feel comfortable about it.

An additional note of importance is the awareness that you frequently use the words “fun” and “comfort” when you are writing, even when you are writing something that was nudged into being by anger or resentment.  Thus the questions:  Is comfort good for you?  Do you need to redefine comfort and confidence for yourself?  You believe you do.

Where does this leave you?

At the moment, you believe the implications are that when you write something you know with no hint of doubt or uncertainty, you are likely to be recreating and rearranging material you already know to the point where you do not question it.  In similar fashion, when you write something you are trying to use as a springboard to discovery, you are inviting conclusions and diversions you have not yet assimilated in full.

In hopes of being clear about this matter, you offer this observation:  There is more fun involved in writing for discovery.  This is an activity fraught with tension and hyperawareness bordering on excitement.  Dare you say thrill?  You dare.

Writing about something where the end result is certainty becomes an act of transcription, of copying, of rearranging the furniture for the sake of busywork. 

There is one way in which fiction is congruent with reality:  Each is focused on outcome, which is more often than not unknowable, subject to last-minute adjustments of reversals.  Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction is predicated on outcomes prized by and hoped for segments of society, but by no means all of society.  Twentieth-century and later fiction is predicated on the notion that outcomes are uncertain, ambiguous.  Further, this later fiction reflects the growing understanding that outcomes—all outcomes—are capricious, sometimes divisive, reflective of multiple points of view, each insisting on its own integrity.

Toward the end of her life, your mother began making presents of things she treasured.  Some of your souvenirs of that nature include porcelain and china teacups, silverware, a secretary, and two chests of drawers, the sight of any one of which, at any time, remind you of her.

Even in a time of great uncertainty, you scarcely feel you’ve reached any point close to that state and yet, reminded of her actions and intent, it comes to you to think of giving things away, not in any sense as passing along treasures—that will require more deliberation and reflection—rather of getting rid of possessions you’ve been carting about with you from place to place over the years.

You think sometimes with a pang of things you were moved to abandon when you had to move from Hot Springs Road and considerably more storage space than you have here on Sola Street.  You wish you’d abandoned hubris and stubbornness, a sense of knowing what you were doing.  These are not things you can set out on the street with signs reading “Free” and “Gratis.”  Nor can you invest in a provocative description of them for Craig’s List, which you would post online. 

Ridding yourself of these and other related things is going to be difficult.  The only certainty attached to this divestiture is that somewhere, a clock is ticking.

Fail

You live in a small enough town not to be surprised when you meet someone in passing around noon, who tells you where you had breakfast, who you were with, and yes, you were eating those pancakes with sliced banana and wheat germ.

The town is small enough so that, while standing in line to use the ATM for the Santa Barbara Bank and Trust in the Montecito Von’s Shopping Center, satirically referred to as Von’s of the Stars because of an infestation of what is called the Hollywood People, you are greeted by a passerby who says “Guess I’ll see you there, what, about threeish?” You are able to understand exactly what she meant by “there.”  You have only to answer, threeish.

Unlike larger cities, say Boston or Los Angeles or New York, where you may go weeks, entire months without seeing persons you know, your city presents you the opportunity to have entire months pass without seeing acquaintances but also to see the same individuals in differing contexts several times during the course of a day.

The Internet social programs have a vast, enormous demographic.  At one point, you were at an interactive website where you noticed individuals from the west coast of three different continents.  Because of your special interests in things such as writing, publishing, and editing, the Internet social programs also have the effect of a small town, where you actually see news of friends in other cities, former students, clients, in one case reminding someone from a city other than yours that you will meet for lunch on Monday in a place more or less half the distance between you.

You were also privy to an individual expressing the opinion that writing every day is, as she put it, a bullshit proposition.  She doesn’t force the muse.  The muse comes to her when the muse is ready, and bugger all with this nonsense that the only way to be a writer is to write every day.

Reading this sentiment, you guessed she was young, serious, confident of her powers, more than likely a good writer, a considerate and considerable poet.  You understood where she was coming from.  You were once young yourself.  Not that you are in any sense old now, you are beyond that.  You also recalled that when you were young you in fact did write every day.  You were much impressed with a story you’d heard about Anthony Trollope, where his workday was such that he completed one novel in the morning and began another in the evening.

You also recalled with a certain measure of discomfort that you had your time of writing on whim, thinking to engage other things if the Muse did not stop by with a steaming casserole.  You also recalled that you did not get much growing nor did you develop curiosities about how things were done. You finished manuscripts, but you did not experience that sense of momentum and independence you experience these days.  You tended to judge a day as a good writing day or a bad writing day, accordingly judging what you wrote on a particular day either good or really tuned in or struggling or awful.  Worse, there was no sense of continuity.

Continuity is a key element here; it allows you a closer rather than sporadic entry into the landscape of the story, helps you maintain that floating stage of being in and alert to the elements as opposed to waiting for flashes of insight or discovery, the literary equivalent of a buried treasure map or a note in a bottle, washed up along the shore.  Continuity takes you beyond good days and glorious days and dreadful days, transporting you beyond judgment and into the reason you got into this racket in the first place, the sense that you don’t have to wait, don’t have to fight or look for decisions as in a boxing match or scores as in tennis or football or baseball.

The outcome is not a matter of winning or losing a game nor of excelling or somehow being remiss, rather it is of a chance to visit the landscape, which is decorated with vehicles of your choice to ride about in, persons of your choice who wish to accomplish unusual activities, decisions to make, details to note down, and details to later on remove.

Projects or properties are important outcomes.  For you, they are not easily achieved any more than digging a deep hole is something you can achieve with ease and the muses and heavens know you have managed to dig yourself into some rather deep holes when it was not your intention to do so.

Writing every day gives you a better chance to fail than writing sporadically does; it also gives you the mindset to continue not out of stubborn determination but rather of a vision of the relative unimportance of failure in the long haul.  When you are failing on a daily basis, it ceases to matter as much as it would were you only writing two or three days a week, giving you failure to look forward to two or three days a week or, worse, being dogged by failure for a chunk of the week.

Such things vanish from your record books or score cards.  Not that you would ever note it down as such, but “Wrote all week and really screwed up a story,” is ever so much healthier a thing to say than, “Screwed up two days last week.  Got to get better.”

The elephant you’ve introduced here is that writing every day does not guaranteed you will not fail gloriously.  It might mean you will, if you keep up the work, fail with less panache or brio; your greatest success will be that you’ve worked a full measure at something you care about.  If, after a time, you sense it does not requite your affections, you have the delicious opportunity of using your imagination to move on to something that might.

You could start by writing a story in which the person who wrote the diatribe against writing every day agrees to at least give it a try, with no promise of results or outcome.

The story might be a failure, but it would surely be fun.  

What do we believe when we believe we believe?

 You are sitting in the workroom of your optometrist, whose intent is to use one or more devices to measure to his satisfaction the fit of a new brand of contact lenses.  Even though his partner was the reason you became a patient at this facility, because of her interest in music, this doctor has become your favorite because of his overt Buddhism approach to the world about us.

In a matter of moments you are confiding that these instruments remind you how vital point of view is to story, whereupon he reminds you of a conversation during your last visit where he’d asked you to read the top row of a chart and you, not seeing the chart, allowed that you saw nothing, propelling us immediately into Buddhist concepts.

Today you were acute to the fact that the measuring devices had a range of adjustment reflecting the entire range of human vision, a range you envy because you want only some of the characters you create to have the same vision you do.

For starters, you are farsighted, meaning you can see items at a distance with greater clarity than those closer to hand.  This factor alone has some effect on how your creations take in, process, then act out dramatic information.

You are still suffering from having pushed the wrong calibrating device on the peanut-grinding machine at Whole Foods, resulting in a pint container of creamy peanut butter, which is better than no peanut butter but nearly so good as chunky peanut butter.

Calibrations come into play at every step you take, reminding you of the diversity of potential for agreement and disagreement, for the appearance of disagreement and wide shades of taste among individuals.  Somehow, after the doctor agreeing that your lenses fit, as they ought, you found yourself in another agreement relative to learning.  There is more enigma and potential for mischief than for accord and congruence where human experience is concerned.

Buddhism arrives in full regalia again.  Do you possess experience as such or are you merely a witness to it?

A dear, longtime chum with whom you cohosted writing workshops and participated in entertainment mystery plays in which the audience guesses who the murderer is, before he moved off to Provo, Utah, has returned for the writers’ conference.  You meet for dinner, slide into the old habits of friendship, and realize you should also meet tomorrow morning for breakfast.  Your office at the university is scant yards from his wife’s former office when she chaired the drama department, an aspect of the small world of coincidence point of view.  While you are speaking of your experience with the optometrist, your chum laughs and recounts the ongoing argument he and his wife have when they discuss the events and seating arrangement when they first met.  He believes he was already seated when she entered and sat behind him.  Her vision is of her being seated and him entering, then taking a seat in the row in front of her.  Thus all the necessary equipment is in place for story.  All it needs is an occasion to bring out the disagreement, dust it off, and exacerbate it to a point where it combusts.

Combustion is an energized meeting in which an object is transformed from one state to another through the introduction of oxidant.

Two or more characters are transformed from one state to another through the introduction of an attempt at conciliation or, better still, reconciliation.

Tony Webster, the first-person narrator of Julian Barnes’s remarkable novel, The Sense of an Ending, is confronted by a rather angry woman, then told that he doesn’t get it.  The “it” in this case is the implications of a set of events everyone else in the story does seem to get, making us, the readers, wonder, speculate, challenge our puzzle-solving abilities to see if we got “it” which is the story, the backstory, and the dramatic/emotional payoff.

Although this is a mountain goat leap of logic, the modern story becomes the combustible element created in the ambiguity of interpretation between two or more characters and the reader/audience, who believe they know what happened, then fall to arguing about it when the story is over.