Tidying up After Writing

What beginning and intermediate writers are thinking of when they speak about or question the condition of writers' block is little more than fear of what their own inner editor will think of them,

Such thoughts can cause an otherwise chatty and inquisitive person to shut down under a welter of questions related to usage conventions, verb tenses, and plausibility.

Writers composing from a place of engaged enthusiasm have the advantage over those whose first thoughts on having a viable concept lead them to consider technical details:  best place to start, point of view, assignment of single or multiple character filtration, over abundant focus on the use of habit words..

Enthused focus trumps stylistic or usage questions; it strives instead to get a splatter of words down and the growing sense that you as writer have found an informant, someone within the framework of the story who will leak secrets and hidden agendas.

 When you reach this stage, you are no longer describing the charged chaos and turmoil about you, you are instead evoking a sense of place, tradition, and convention the characters you've created have to overcome.

To be sure you will make repetitions, deploy habit words, abuse techniques you've taught yourself that keep the momentum going.  Sometimes this becomes so persistent that even when you are urging yourself to move on, the dreadful presence of the inner editor appears offering you raised eyebrows and reminders of things you must not do to create lucid, grammatical prose.

You, of course, have no interest at the moment in creating lucid, grammatical prose.  You are telling a story, not serving as a reporter, interviewing a source.  You are the source from every character who sets foot in your terrain.

The single, essential beauty of story is the certainty of every character you bring on stage believing he or she has the matter in hand.  Things would not be so chaotic, so fraught with tension and mystery is only the characters would pick the equivalent of a jury foreperson whom they trust to keep matters on track and lucid.

You rejoice in this beauty because you know how it is the glue holding the elements of story together in a guaranteed argument that will soon if not already get out of hand.

The goal is to see to it that your circumstances never quite stop at the boundaries you set for them.  You are at your best when working beyond limits of control in order to allow all the unseen and unspoken things of your observation to rebel.  Sometimes, when  composition seems to be going the best of all, you can almost hear the yelps and cries of your characters bellowing slogans of revolt.

They are revolting against conventions you've set for them according to your own conventions and assessments but also because of the seeming wonderful accomplishments of writers you so admire.

This will, you tell yourself, have been one hell of a party and you will have one hell of a time, cleaning up after it.  But ah, what glorious trespasses, spilled drinks, and epithets shouted in anger the material you've composed will be.

Cliches will be tossed aside, secret coalitions formed, and you will understand the galvanic currents of story passing through the walls and surroundings, into your characters.

Of course you'll tidy up.  Writers do tidy up when the time comes, but if they try to clean up too soon, they can be sure of one inevitability.  The characters will grow restless, then bored.  They will want to leave early.

Characters: Slight of Hand or Slight Hands?

  In recent years, keeping pace with your growing interest in the shape of stories and the voices in which they are told, older works have become of increased importance to you.  Much of your early work as a student attempting to understand and luxuriate in the stories of Chaucer and Shakespeare failed to grasp the vitality and nuance you now see.  Of course this causes you to wonder if there is yet more to come.

Chaucer's presentations of unique individuals, each telling stories, has come to be your favorite approach to narrating.  The idea of comparing a tale or fable, told by a unique personality type, helps define the concept of voice, and further helps you see how every narrator is to some degree unreliable.

Watching the progressive changes within some of the Shakespearean plays, you feel yourself understanding the implications of story as you never before understood.  For the longest time, characters were pursuing courses of action which you took at a shallow, face value.  

The tragedies were tragic only because the characters did what they did because they were following a plot design rather than being led down an increasingly narrow and inevitable path.  You were in effect missing the burden of consequence, the price extracted for one's yearnings.

Much as you've come to admire Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Richard III for what can be learned about the consequences of yearning, and being led over the edge of previously set boundaries, your favorite Shakespeare has for some time been Twelfth Night.  This is so because of the way the story came into its structure from an aspect of the reality dramatists of the time had to face.

Shakespeare, Marlowe, Johnson, and the lesser playwrights had to live with the reality of no women permitted on stage.  Two of Shakespeare's more conflicted in her vulnerabilities and needs characters appear in the same play, Hamlet. These were Hamlet's mother, Queen Gertrude, who is now, by virtue of her marriage to Hamlet's uncle, his aunt.  The character is portrayed by a boy.  Ophelia, for a time a romantic interest for Hamlet, is also portrayed by a boy.  

Both characters have considerable emotional conflicts to endure.  Although Ophelia is not on stage for long, her presence and her death add to the weight of momentum against Hamlet.  Gertrude is torn by the grief of loss of her husband, her concerns for her son, her conflicted interests in her new husband, her former brother-in-law.

Twelfth Night  brings an even more delicious jumble.  A boy actor portrays Viola, who is a girl, pretending to be a boy.  Viola is given the chore of testing the waters for her patron, who is in love with a woman whom he wishes Viola to be his amanuensis, which would not be too difficult except that Viola is in love with her patron, and the object of her patron's affections, believing Viola to be a young man, has fallen for her/him.  This is a delicious tangle.

Had the original writers of the motion picture Tootsie any familiarity with Twelfth Night?  From your perspective, there would be more difficulty establishing that they had not any awareness of the play and its inner workings than to demonstrate a direct influence.

None of your stories have pushed the boundary of outright impersonation.  The closest you've come to such a dynamic is a short story, "Mr. Right," in which two women in a same-sex relationship wish to have a child to add the bond of parenthood to their relationship.  You have always taken the leap of creating women characters, but beyond the occasional questions about a woman character's motivation, this was a leap you took for granted.

You have also brought individuals from other races and age groups onto the stages of your stories, trusting your powers of observations of those races and age groups to provide plausible individuals who were not mere stereotype representations.  You trusted your powers of observation in this matter to the same extent you trusted them in other ways, including dialogue, motivation, agenda, and rate of growth as that aspect relates to the closure of the story.

Thus you emerge from the process, wanting to fulfill your own notions of creating characters who are created for their inner arguments and uniqueness, larger than life and yet suggestive of the ordinary detail of ordinary experience.  You want to push them to the edges of your imagination and patience and their imagination and impatience.

You want to make them so extraordinary that they will do things that surprise them, you, and such readers who may take interest in them, forgetting as they read that these characters are anything less than real.

Slight of hand, or slight hands?

Travel Writing of the Interior Sort

Before you had the built-in directional applications on your iPhone, your list of necessities included taking your car in for a lube and oil change, checking the air pressure of the tires, and insuring the presence of at least one map detailing your route and your destination.

The road maps were unnecessary because you more or less knew where you were going, which is to say you were driving northward to the San Francisco Bay Area, or beyond that to Seattle.  Otherwise you were driving north north east to Virginia City or east along what has become I-40, leading you through Arizona and, on occasion, into New Mexico.

To be sure, there were other destinations, many of them one-time, or what you still like to think of as whim destinations, places you have no particular reason for visiting other than liking the name of the place or some real or imagined romantic aspect about it.

Now you have the GPS, which you use in tandem with Google Maps.  The ancients used the stars; you use the satellite.  Your journeys are often even greater adventures than you'd intended, subject to vagaries in accommodations and meals taken along the way.  One stop for a genuine Navajo fry bread taco produced a disastrous four or five hours of an uncomfortable tummy.  Another stop at an Arby's on Andy Devine Road in Kingman, Arizona, brought similar chaos to your GI tract.

These last situations were the luck of the road.  Most of your road experiences have been characterized by the best of fortune rather than the worst.  Even a bout of trying to get snow chains on the wheels of your VW Bug, while uncomfortable for an hour or so, led to a happy outcome.  Don't even bother much detail with journeys to San Francisco; you could make that trip in your sleep; it was never less than inspirational of something or someone.

Those journeys were of a different sort, they were combinations of a journey through the dregs of young and unsure, into the landscapes of coming-of-age and yearning.  They were necessary preambles to another kind of journey, the kind for which the travel sections of The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and Travel and Leisure have no dominion.

The journeys of which you speak now are inner ones or, in the broadest sense, trips in which individuals come to know, understand, and interact with one another.  There are some maps for such journeys, but when reduced to bare bones, these prove to be psychological or sociological generality.  You more or less leave your iPhone and its attendant GPS at home or turned off for the travel of which you speak.

Your motives for taking such trips have something to do with whim and curiosity, which become satisfying answers up to a point.  Another term or concept, self-knowledge, sneaks its way into the waiting line and, after some hurried consultation, you decide to allow the term to stay.  You do wish to know more about you, sometimes to help you decide why you did a specific thing or, with equal specificity, opted not to do another.  

Other reasons to learn more about you have to do with the resulting knowledge serving as a data base from which to create characters who will populate your completed stories, your stories in the works, your fantasies, and your daydreams.  Such self-knowledge gives you a quality related to confidence, which allows you to continue your search.

While a traveler on such trips, you are best served with no maps, no GPS, no full tank of petrol.  Rather, you are at best under these circumstances in a condition you like to think of as running on empty.  When you are thus, you are not relying on experience, only trust of your aggregate resources which, admittedly, you do not grasp.  You are going on the belief that you will soon arrive at a direction, a strategy, perhaps even that curious goal of most traditional travelers, the ETA or estimated time of arrival.

Pretty neat trick, isn't it, when you consider that you do not know where you're going.  This confidence in the face of having used all one's tricks, of having a hidden reserve tank of fuel somewhere, will, you believe, produce a new result you've never used before.  This result may not be as qood as some of your previous successes or a nuanced as some of your earlier ideas.  You'll have taken the risk of being caught out, a total naif or, worse, unsuited for the job.

Wonder of wonders, in recent years, you've come to realize this risk of being caught out, or not having the bon mot, the mot juste, or even a sly, mischievous answer, is attractive to the point where now, the joy of taking a risk carries with it the greater hope of being caught.

Imagine the mischief that might produce.

Literary Junk Yards

For as long as you can remember, you've been fascinated with parts of the world where the front and rear yards of houses had the flavor and sprawl of pawn shops and junk yards.  Neat, manicured lawns or the more imaginative rock and cactus gardens might catch your attention, even provoke a not of approval.  But you wouldn't want to live there.  

You'd be pleased for a visit to such places, admiring color, texture, overall arrangement, even theme.  You often pass such places on your evening walks, stopping to admire some imaginative use of succulents, appreciating gradations of color from one blossoming plant to another, lost to a measurable intensity on the planning, work, and imagination required to bring a sense of completeness to an area that would just as soon be open to whim.

You've seen places of this type of whimsy as well, where little or no attempts  were employed to prune back the hydrangea or thin out the alstromaria and iris, and thought yes, you could live with comfort amid such disarray, provided of course, that there was a large ensemble of plant and flower.  All of this is speak with appreciation of the garden you live within and of the effects of your weekly flower and plaint binges have throughout the square footage of your studio.

Much as you admire the presence and value of plant and flower life, you also have feelings of tenderness toward rusted out auto parts, ladders with missing rungs, old model washing machines and their newer iterations as well as microwave ovens, pinball machines that appear to have given up the ghost, the occasional gas or electric range, and if you are fortunate, a sizable chunk of what was once a truck.  In such places, you value rust and the intimacy of the complex inner wiring associated sewing machines, or the functional random beauty of old Oldsmobile or Pontiac parts.

Such treasures have the most beauty for you.  There is an unspoken sense of optimism in such places, wherein unseen men recognize the inherent value of these things.  Mindful of their womenfolk's cynicism, these men believe themselves on the cusp or restoring these hulks to useful life--every one of them, including rusted TV sets, sprung sofas, and that still radiant Maytag washer-dryer combination.

You imagine yourself at such places feeling close to the nascent energy of such front and back lawns all because you have in your filing cabinets, hard drives, and unsorted piles of handwritten materials the literary equivalents of such yards.  Not everything you write goes unfinished, and this is your point.  You have this optimistic sense where all these hulks of unfinished things will be tended to because there are useful parts and characters and themes. 

The hidden truth here is the regularity with which you keep certain projects around in the belief you'll someday get to them, but in fact they are already finished.  This is a candid admission that you more often than not don't know you've finished a particular piece.  You persist in tacking additional material to it, baffled that this added matter falls off.

The discipline of working every day to make sure the junk does not get the opportunity to rust out is a friendly, fun-loving discipline.  It allows you to think of fun days and of work, however frustrating or humbling, as a partnership between you and the project.

A number of your writer friends have neater literary lawns or at least the discipline to work with one thing until it has been brought to life, allowed to mature, then kicked out of the nest to go at life on its own.  For the longest time, you accepted the notion that your friends' discipline meant they were better able to have such cornucopias as a tangible body of work.

In recent years, you've come around to the belief that the rural junk yards you see in portions of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and their attractiveness for you, are no accident.  They remind you of your own literary junk lawns, the difference being that you can and in fact do live within them.

You understand what this makes you, a hoarder of junk, a hill-billy sort of individual with a strewn yard who is one of these days going to get around to removing yet another piece of the clutter.  This takes you back to the fact of having neat, organized parents and the possibility that your own literary yards are some sort of payback to Annie and Jake, each of whom would joke about you that they did not provide you with neatness DNA.

You do not write as you do from some hidden desire to show Annie and Jake a justification or even as a proof that you are moving more and more toward working in your own manner of   work, taking the money, yet hanging around to see if perhaps you can fix some of those forgotten parts.

This Changes Everything

Even more engaging than reading a story or watching a drama gather momentum until it achieves escape velocity, keeping track of the logistics embedded in a story is like trying to elbow your way into the lines of individuals wanting the new iPhone 6 or 6 Plus.

Story is a composite of aspects, starting with characters, then the plot or design into which those characters become involved.  Then such choice parts as dialogue, suspense, surprise, reversal, pacing, point-of-view; these are all part of the recipe for story.

A favored exercise for you to spring on students has them trying to list as many story elements as possible, which serves to inject into their comfort zones a sense of discomfort.  You do this because of your own wish to be out of your own comfort zones when composing.  

Much as you enjoy the process and consider it fun, you do not think it is the kind of fun that comes from being comfortable.  Perhaps angry or frustrated or cynical, but not comfortable.  The edge of the defining emotions pushes and nudges you toward a practiced focus, a state where you feel "in" the process of composition.  Then you are experiencing fun.

When the student(s) list as many aspects of story as possible, you ask them to arrange the aspects of story in hierarchical rank.  Number One is the element they think most important.  The last is the one they think least important.  This is a good way of keeping track of progress and grout or, if you will, individual development.  

For the longest time, you put Characters at the top of your list and Plot at the lowest extremity.  How could you have a story without characters? you asked yourself.  And because you could not, cannot, plot worth much of anything, you put plot at the bottom and in the bargain use the relations between characters to fines a semblance of plot.

All these elements, the ones you've mentioned and the one you now put at the top of your list, continue to remind you of the physicality and immediacy of story, and thus the comparison to the lines of individuals wishing to trade up to iPhone 6 or 6 Plus .  

Your own choice for the top of the list is Voice.  The Voice in which the story is told has a direct effect on the types of characters you chose and those you send packing, telling them not to come back until they have a more pronounced attitude.

The story aspect you and your students are most apt to leave out when compiling the list seems to get lost in the shuffle, yet what successful story do you know of that can get by without it?  This one, often-ignored or forgotten element, drive story in ways other elements cannot.  What other element than Change can you say that of?

Change is the elemental force within story, impatient in its desire to register effect on characters.  Good characters change their ways as, say, Michael Corleone did in The Godfather, going from good to an individual who grew into his darker side as the forces of his Reality brushed against him.  At the outset of Macbeth, our eponymous protagonist was a loyal follower of the king, but soon enough he kills the king and his own dearest friend, Banquo.

To be sure, malevolent persons can and do change, inching their way toward goodness, considerate and empathetic in their packaging.  Mid-rank characters change their loyalties and minds as moral choices are presented to them in the inexorable procession of story points.

Simplistic as it may sound, there is dramatic truth in the observation of story, Something happens and someone changes.  Protagonists and antagonists alike are led to changes in which they are on occasion freed from traditions and conventions or, for the first time in their life, brought face to face with a convention previously ignored.

The changes in you, whether from the Real Time experiences you've endured or the Story experiences you've inhaled, thus making them a part of you, have shoved you to a place in line you'd not occupied before.  The changes in you from the things you have written have flung closed doors wide open in many cases, or, where previously locked, now opened a crack, admitting light and the freshness of contact with others. 

Edens and the Returns Thereunto

Last night, your dreams took you back to a place you have driven past from time to time but have not set actual foot upon in well over fifty years.  

Four hundred nine South Fairfax Avenue, Los Angeles, is the site of Hancock Park Elementary School.  Even at the time, you knew it was a comforting place, its many challenges not so much aimed at you, rather presented as obstacles to be overcome through study, observation, and some kind of operating plan.

You attended Hancock Park Elementary School from grades one through three, where on a daily basis, you were methodically trounced at tether ball by a girl named Georgia, whom you recall at this distant retrospect as a honey blond, Dutch cut, who towered over you.  At the time, most persons you had any contact with towered over you.  On almost a daily basis, you used one stratagem or another to get a sixth grader, a playground monitor named Norman Fordis, to inspect some construction or other you'd concocted in the sand box.

Norman Fordis seemed even taller than Georgia.  Difficult at this remove to tell if your impression  of him as skeletal with deep-set eyes came from the fact of your encounter with him years later, also on Fairfax Avenue, when you strolled into a butcher shop on an errand for your mother.  

When sixth-grader and playground monitor Norman Fordis approached your sandbox construction, you felt a tinge of excitement you now realize is the kind of braided surge of curiosity and satisfaction you experience when you've completed a project and are now waiting to see what the rest of the world thinks about it, or does not deign to think of it at all.

"No foundation," Norman Fordis often said with the gravitas and certainty of a sixth grader and playground monitor.  You had some thoughts about gravitas at the time, the word and some of its implications a gift from your father.  "With your kind of mischief,"  your father said, "an occasional show of gravitas convinces people you're listening and learning.  Too much gravitas is not good for a boy, but some,"  he said, "some is useful."

"No foundation,"  Norman Fordis said.  "Things need foundations.  You can't go around, building things without foundations."

The last time you saw Norman Fordis, he was a butcher at a Kosher butcher ship, his own foundation apparent to you because of the lettering on the outer windows, Fordis and Son, Kosher Meats.  You were at least as tall as he was then, perhaps taller.  Such is the nature of sixth graders who are playground monitors, he did not recall you, but when you told him about his advice about foundations, he nodded while he handed you a wrapped package of short ribs.  "It was good advice,"  he said.

Georgia and Norman remain in portions of your memory relating to actual influences.  Yet another individual from that time and place plays a role, Ruth Angelo, the Principal, who made it clear to you that you had access to any of the books in her library, and once, when she saw you noting the presence of a title with Walt Disney characters among her books, she said that one was available for borrowing as well.  "Always be able,"  she said, "to identify the frivolous and your need for it."

You were to have reported to Mrs. Wallace's class for your introduction to the fourth grade, an exciting prospect because Mrs. Wallace's class was known to have a bee hive with two glass sides, allowing the inner activities of the hive to be seen.  But for you, this was not to be.  Fourth grade for you was to be spent in a dismal school in the dismal neighborhood of a dismal small town in New Jersey, where nothing was, nor ever would be the same.

A teacher at the John Howland Elementary School on Elmgrove Avenue in Providence, Rhode Island, was quick to note the effects of your life at Hancock Park Elementary School, and for the longest time, your comfort with schools--you were not quite ready for faith in them--returned.

Your dream about Hancock Park Elementary School seemed to have the equivalent of English subtitles because your movement from event to event came with explanations of  the significance, embedded within your awareness over all these years.

Each time you embark on a new story, whether it is only a brief exercise or a sense of connection with something yet more grand, you are influenced by Georgia, who never once asked you why you continued to accept the daily humiliation of being beaten.  You are influenced by Norman Fordis, who has you asking of yourself and your students and clients about the stability of the foundation.  And you are in continual thrall to Ruth Angelo for encouraging your investigation of frivolity, which you put in constant comparison with gravitas.

If indeed story is a replication of the expulsion from Eden, a metaphor to include the necessary ventures into the larger, outer world, Hancock Park Elementary School was a pleasant place to experience Eden.  Somehow the gravel of the play yard was less abrasive on your young knees.  The water from the drinking fountains was sweeter, the books in Miss Angelo's library more extensive, the sense of forthcoming adventure more vibrant with the harmony of imagination.

Some years back, you spent a day revisiting another such Eden, the sad time of scattering your sister's ashes at selected spots on the UCLA campus.  You'd excused yourself for a sentimental journey to the student union building, thinking to stand outside your old office, which housed the campus humor magazine.  An intriguing sign captured your attention, the student daily newspaper, The Daily Bruin.  

You followed the signs and arrows, the past rushing back to welcome you.  So did two pleasant young men, impressive combinations of gravitas, but as well up on frivolity.  They asked if they could help you.

When you said, "I used to work here," an immediate bond was formed.  They saw their future selves, returning to one of the Edens they would have made for themselves.

I'd Love to Stay, But I'm Already Late for Another Story

When was the last time you had time do do something you wished to do without thinking you were in effect performing an act of defiance?

Most of the television drama you've been watching this year is cable rather than network, most of it crime or suspense related.  The few variations are apt to be one-off dramas or a specific miniseries with a specific number of episodes.

Your avowed purpose is to watch the behavior and performance of the actors rather than the quality of story. This has to do with your book project underway, which you've more or less begun to outline or do riffs in these Blog paragraphs.  The quality of story is high at one end, with some drama such as Fargo, Longmire, and Ray Donovan, and True Detective notable for the quality of writing as well as acting.

One thing you've begun to notice in such material has you convinced you are getting unintended results.  The thrust of your book in progress is to help writers of books gain better understanding of their characters through a close examination of acting techniques.  The results you're getting work on a scene-by-scene basis.

In basic terms, two or more persons gather somewhere to pursue their individual agendas, in the process revealing textual and emotional data which the viewer will put in a more holistic process.  This is no surprise or revelation to you.  In fact, the only surprise or revelation for you comes should there be scenes where the story does not convey hidden layers of meaning and intent.

The thing you've noticed is that at least one of the characters is in a hurry to leave the scene because he or she has to be somewhere else.  A minor variation on this theme is that at least one of the characters wishes he or she were elsewhere.

Stage-trained actors know to look at a larger picture.  If their character is in a particular scene, the actor "knows" or invents where the character "was" previously, then comes to understand as well where the character is going next.  This kind of knowledge has the potential for effect on how the actor delivers lines and what body language and gestures are to be used while delivering these lines.  Developing fiction writers need to be more aware of this approach.

Even in the more laid-back genera of comedy and romance, there is still a need for a focused sense of the present moment, which conveys the awareness that these are characters involved in the midst of a story rather than hanging out in Real Time.  The background for any story is this sense of immediacy.  Within this immediacy, someone wishes to leave, is in a hurry to leave, is expected elsewhere, perhaps even to the point of having a romantic tryst somewhere else, right after this present scene is over.

Story is growing more visual as the years of this century click off.  The narrative is becoming more hyperlinked and intense, reflecting any number of contemporary pressures and conventions.  For many viewers and readers, drama and story are exquisite forms of entertainment.  They become transportation away from the world of the need to work two or more jobs.

Drama and story give us temporary respite from the sometime social pressures of social media, the sense of being tracked by telemarketing drones.  They insulate us from the awful sense of having scant time to pursue any meaningful personal activities that do not contribute in some way or another with what we consider our chores and duties as we seek to make a living and be a responsible individual.  In this sense, they serve a healthier alternative to narcotics and denial.

All the more reason why dialogue--the dramatic information characters exchange--does not have the luxury of going on for extended paragraphs, in the manner of Ayn Rand, taking on with that odd Randian duality of antipathy for the state and the evangelical zeal to float that antipathy.

Scenes can't go on for too long.  Someone is late.  Someone is being summoned out of bed to come to a crime scene or a board meeting or an appointment with a marriage counsellor.  Someone is thus becoming frustrated because he or she does not get quality time from the significant other they pursued in order to have a Life's Companion.

In an interesting and lovely irony, sometime when you have finished a class or a meeting with a client, and see a restaurant sign that intrigues you, you experience a kind of Cosmic heartburn.  There is no one waiting for you, pissed she has not heard from you all day.  The sign is a large, flamboyant neon, Noodle City.  You can already taste the slide of a well-brewed bowl of pho, running down your throat, or a bowl of noodles with sliced vegetables, swimming in a succulent lagoon of soup.

No one for you to rush to see, no one to get pissed at you for forgetting to call when you'd got caught up writing the chapter you'd been struggling to meet up with for weeks.