The Confetti of Enthusiasm.

In your role as teacher, you've had diverse and significant opportunities to play out the ensemble of persona who are at all times roistering, complaining, and arguing with one another, noisy neighbors keeping you awake, on occasion doing the diplomatic thing of inviting you to party with them.

You've gravitated to roles where you are incarnations of The Trickster, hopeful of imparting to those you contact of the joys and needs for creating situations where ordinariness in all its forms is questioned, put through the grinder of impatience.

Often in your role of teacher, you'll hear a person read a work she or he had written that causes a special resonance for you, perhaps explaining the mystery of why the quality of voice in narrative matters so much to you.  

The Trickster takes over, after the reader has finished reading from the work.  You turn to the audience"  "Of course," you remark, "that piece was so effective because of X's reading voice."

You know what happens next.  The audience becomes vigorous in assuring you the story was there before the voice--the story had resonance because of the things the characters were doing and feeling, not from the way the reader read the material.

This is when you lay your cards down on them.  The listeners may have a full house showing, but you have four of a kind.  "The voice," you say, "informs the choice of characters, how they speak, think, and act.  The focused writer makes use of these elements to draw you into the picture.  There is little matter in a thing resonating if it does not resonate for you."

In your experience, the resonant voice often appears where and when you least expect it.  When you hear it or read it, you know it is something you look for, await with nervous apprehension, because it has the ability to transform the ordinary into the memorable, by which you mean you are transported to the landscape of which the writer writes, in effect brushing away hanging spider webs, untrimmed branches, and lawn chairs still moist from the morning dew.

With the given that nothing is perfect, that all novels and short stories have the analogy of the deliberate error woven into them as they are in Navajo rugs, you speak to the class of what they've just heard, trying to conflate voice and story, action, with purpose and deliberation, detail with the need for careful choice rather than random volume.  

You do this knowing you have in effect opened a floodgate of detail and impression the writer has held back because it is not supportive of story as much as it is an impulse for the writer to dance about the work area, showering it and the work in progress with the confetti of enthusiasm.

A narrative voice cannot be faked; it is as close to perfection as a writer can come within the framework of composition, presenting a dazzle of details, thoughts, actions, agendas, missed connections, and that great literary device beginning writers are at great pains to see, ambiguity. The part you like about being stuck, either as teacher or editor between this rock of a resonant voice and a writer who comes at you professing a love for words, is the choices you have to make among the useful and less useful words in your vocabulary.

Sometimes explaining how voice works and why things work in one way and not in another is like trying to find a matched pair of socks in a wildly scattered desk drawer.  Being placed in the position where you have to define the way a process works for yourself is a vital tool when the time comes to review, revise, or completely reconsider your own work.  

When you were only a writer, you took to techniques because of the way they felt--"It feels right."--or as an accepted technique--Because it just is.--without giving it additional thought.  Even then, you reached the place where your work was edited, most of the time to the point where you could see the reason behind the edits.

At this stage of your advancement on the fields and shoals of craft, you have to know as much about what to leave out and how to leave it out as you have to know about what goes where and why.  It took you all this time to understand that.  Without teaching and editing, you might still be searching, and as it is, you still throw out a good deal of material.  There is some  grim joy in knowing,from teaching and editing, that you are not alone.

Story: Caught between an Iceberg and the Titanic

   A seagull, someone answering a knock at the door in Spanish, an iceberg, and a county sheriff of Irish extraction, talking to a Japanese-American coroner who is in the act of conducting an autopsy came clanging together this morning after a week or so of independent orbit.

The seagull was wheeling in effortless circles over the Santa Barbara waterfront.  At least, the seagull was wheeling with no effort until you challenged the author,an articulate enough fellow, with a question that stopped him cold.  "How do you know the seagulls flight was effortless?  How do you know it wasn't costing him because he has arthritis in his wings?"

The author paused to sputter.  "I just assumed," he said. "Seagulls make it look effortless."

"But you aren't telling the story, remember?  The story is being told by one of your characters, a guy name of Jim, who has no access to the inner state of mind of the seagull."

With your prodding, the author saw the reason for settling on the notion of the seagull wheeling or coasting on an afternoon thermal.  The Spanish response to a knock at the door involved the same dynamic.  The point-of-view character, inside the door on which the knock came, was of Latina heritage, her birth language Spanish.  Further, she had every reason to believe the person knocking at the door would be another Spanish language speaker.

Here's you, acting the bad cop by asking the writer, "What are the probabilities someone whose first language is Spanish, who lives in a small, Central California farm area populated by an overwhelming Spanish-speaking population, would respond, "Come in," she said in Spanish? as opposed to "Entre."

"The reader might not know what 'Entre' means."

"Here we are, in a small town, in the field worker housing,"  you said.  "We know the point-of-view character's first language is Spanish.  Someone knocks at the door.  This character says, 'Entre.'  What are the odds more than ninety-eight percent of your readers will not have to be told 'Entre" in Spanish means 'Come in?"

"Okay," the writer said.  "I get it.  'She said in Spanish' throws you out of the narrative."

The iceberg was brought to your attention by your literary agent, who sent you an essay on Ernest Hemingway and his bare bones prose, with special reference to his short stories.  You responded to the agent's email with the observation that the essay caused you to recall a Hemingway short story, "Hills Like White Elephants," that was a perfect demonstration of the points about minimalism and restraint articulated in the article.

The county sheriff was--still is--a character in the novel-in-the-works of a student who tells a bang-up, intriguing story, which she douses in details, often to the disadvantage of the story.  The sheriff and the coroner, of diverse ethnic backgrounds and not a likely pair to become friends, are in fact close friends, thus the dialogue between them about how the coroner is able to get on with the autopsy within an hour after his own breakfast seems, when you read lines of it, more an information dump for the reader rather than a demonstration of the friendship shared and enjoyed by the two men.

The entire setting and focus of the novel begs for recognition of the theme of racial animosities in this small, Ventura county, California town, right after World War II settled down into Post-War Recovery.  In this case, the coroner, performing the autopsy without a facial mask or a lit or unlit cigar or some glob of mentholated plopped right under his nose would cause the sheriff to some kind of BFF ribbing, bordering perhaps on but not into racial traits.

All these themes have the common thread of relevant detail and ways in which even one inappropriate word throws the reader out of the narrative.  The culprit in most of these cases relates to the point of view of the character in charge during a particular scene, but a close accomplice is details the writer wishes the reader to know.

The Hemingway aspects brought forth here have to do with that author's often described method of putting everything in during the early drafts, then removing as much as possible on the theory that what is left remains not because it was described so much as because of the way it was evoked.  If, Hemingway seems to be saying, you put in everything you can think of, then start cutting back, what you get is an evocation,  The reader in effect fills in the void from his or her extrapolations of the things the author puts in and the things the author leaves out.

Story becomes most effective when it becomes both iceberg and The Titanic.

The Trickster as Character; the Character as Trickster

Modern story often begins with a fuse being lit,  The reader or, if the story is a stage or screen drama, the viewer, gets a simultaneous view of the length of the fuse, then is left waiting for the inevitable ignition.  

A popular variation on that theme is the presence of a character, hesitating before a fuse, match in hand, trying to overcome some ethical barrier. Then the character strikes the match, applies it to the fuse.  In recent years, books and film begin with the actual explosion.  Readers and viewers come in on the clearing smoke of the disaster.

We've advanced as a reading and viewing public from the "Once upon a time--" beginning, while taking enormous strides away from the "--and they all lived happily ever after" ending, to the point where you don't feel you're exaggerating your point that evolving story has made readers into conspiracy theorists.

With one or two exceptions--those wishing sermons or some form of propaganda--turn to reading in expectation of impending disaster, actual disaster, and increasing attempts to deal with the disaster, followed by some sort of negotiated settlement with either the Cosmos, the prevalent conventions, or some raging contemporary issue.

Should our interests and curiosity take us a significant span of time into the past, we may find ourselves rooting for characters who are facing issues that seem, to use figurative language, tempests in teapots or paper tigers, both of these elderly, tottering phrases coined some time ago to signify issues overcome by historical events.  

Yesterday's social scandal is today's commonplace.  Last year's elephant in the living room is today's ho-hum.  Some works from the past continue to hold our interest because of the imaginative ways the protagonists addressed the problems rather than because of the problems.  And some authors, Charles Dickens comes to mind here, construct a greater atmosphere of sentimentality than they do a maze of plot complications.

In today's Reality, those of us who put any trust in mainstream media and who do not seek the solace of fiction nevertheless find our suspicions of impending disaster fueled by invented or propagandized reports purporting to be news.  Those of us who place value on fiction often arrive at the ironic state of knowing a work is by definition an entire fabrication, yet inspired by something of current social, moral, or spiritual issue.

The nature and agenda of character has evolved to the point where we often find ourselves rooting for someone we do not entirely admire, but offer support in hopes he or she will deal a crippling blow to an institution we do not at all admire, possibly even mistrust.

Your own tastes run toward the picaresque character, the noir novel, and those semi-satiric novels in which at least one character appears in the form of the Trickster.  By this term, you mean the man, woman, or child who embody the archetype found in most cultures,  The Trickster makes fun of authority, often by ridicule, other times by strategies involving the deliberate passing of erroneous data, of giving opposing forces yet more virulent ways to distrust one another, and contriving to have the working and craftsperson classes outwit the ruling classes.

The Trickster has for some time been a driving force in story, providing such a wide and diverse palette opportunities as Til Eulenspiegel, Uncle Remus' Br'er Rabbit, Hary Janos, Bugs Bunny, and the rollicking Anansi or Aunt Nancy stories involving a mischievous spider.  You'd be pleased to add Gregor Samsa into the cohort, thanks to the potential for seeing that Kafka character as one who exacts a satisfying revenge on a patriarch he has no use for.

Persons with theatrical background speak of a character taking stage, projecting the full force of that character's presence and intent onto the assembled cast members.  When you become aware of a character in a novel or short story projecting Trickster as that character takes stage, your interest in the story and its outcome increases by exponent.  Should you have the good fortune of seeing traces of the Trickster in your own work, you experience the tingle of endorphin squirting its way into your bloodstream, as it did when, before your titanium hips, you were able to run great distances.

The Vision Quest

Early in your experiences with story, narratives began with the near magic meme "Once upon a time." You were scarcely able to understand why those words threw you into the slipstream of a momentous story passing by, somewhat in later years the way the VW Bugs you drove were caught in the slipstream of passing eighteen-wheel trucks.

All you needed to know was that you were being taken somewhere.  Often, quite often, you were following a young man who was walking along some road or through some forest, whereupon he met an older person who asked of him his destination.  More magic in the young man 's reply, "I am going forth to seek my fortune."

If, at the time, someone had uttered in your presence the word bildungsroman, smarts that you were even then, you'd have said "Gezundheit."  With time, things changed.  You knew what  bildungsroman meant.  You also had a pretty good idea why so many characters who were off to seek their fortunes were boys or young men.  

Girls had a clearer idea.  The likes of Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and the Dana Girls were detectives.  At least, they were solving mysteries as quickly as teams of writers could churn them out to an audience hungry for solutions to enigmas, puzzles, and misplaced identities.

Along about this time, your reading and curiosity took you to the concept of the vision quest, particularly as that venture related to numerous tribes among the First Americans.  However deplorable your anthropology is now, it was then by incremental measure less focused and disciplined.  You were familiar with the notion of boys of a certain age, being sent off into the wilderness by themselves, to walk about, forage, and look for signs, presences of various animals who would become their spirit guides or totems.

After enough of this sort of reading, you began to see the commonality of cultures in which the young searched for connective tissues to the cosmos, and thus the way to their destiny.  At some point, say age twenty or so, you were able to equate the vision quest with the bildungsroman, and indeed, you were seeking yours.  You'd already worked at a number of the sorts of jobs young persons work at, with varying degrees of satisfaction, one of the more pleasing ones being the manager of a parking lot at the northwest corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Cochran Avenue in that section of Los Angeles known as The Miracle Mile.

You had a reasonable salary, a congenial boss, occasional tips, frequent free hamburgers or hotcakes at a restaurant across the street named after the hamburger-loving friend of Popeye, J. Wellington Wimpy.  This job was the closest thing yet to being paid to read books, because you just that, read on the job.

Time has had its way on and with you. bringing you considerably worse and occasionally better jobs than managing the parking lot which is by now sure to have had a tall building erected on top of it.  You've seen yourself in a number of ways, had a number of visions about your relative place in the world and your relative self.

However crabby or grumpy your vision of yourself may make you sound, you do not feel grumpy most of the time, if at all, nor do you feel grouchy, that first cousin relative of grumpy.  You do understand however why many individuals of your approximate age are in fact grumpy and grouchy, some of their reasons coming from the fact of their no longer being listened to or, in fact, they were ever listened to.

Grumpy and grouchy men of your age may have lost contact with the vision quests they took as  younger men, may not recognize their totemic animals any longer, may no longer be able to enjoy the solace of dreams in which they are ageless, to a major degree unaffected by laws of gravity or friction.  They may have come to a point in life many young persons experience before setting forth to seek their fortune, that point being the elderly equivalent of hating all their toys.  Golf, lawn bowling, pinochle, and other such activities have few memorable take-away moments.  Those are probable causes for grouchy and grumpy behavior.

Your grumpiness is from an entirely different direction, which causes you great ease in recognizing true grumps and grouches or grumps and grouches like yourself.  On your way to seek your fortune, you've arrived at your own visions of the things you care about and the things you do not.  You've found traces of your vision of the world about you and your voice and vocabulary for expressing them, whether anyone else notices or not.  You've arrived at an intriguing balance of comfort and distrust of comfort in your three chosen areas of performance, writing, editing, and teaching.

The sincere and likable grumps you know have found similar positions within the areas of their choice.  You often do not agree with them nor they you, yet there are moments of profound mutual respect.  You can appear to be arguing.  You in fact are arguing, but it is the argument in which each party is bolstering his or her own voice and vision.

You've in effect worked all your life to get here, where you are eager to get at your next project and fearful you've this time bit off more than you can chew.  Being here is not as lonely as you'd imagined; you're anomalous in your finding of comfort in the risk you are undertaking.

No wonder you are grouchy.  You are grouchy about reality, so grouchy in fact that you have accepted your own as the place you write about and dream in as vacation spas from that other reality, the one with the grouchy lawn bowlers and golfers and fisherpersons who are not finding satisfaction where they are. 

A Writer's Responsibility to His Characters and Friends

Every year at about this time and since 1979, you encounter a special group of friends, individuals from other parts of the world who converge on Santa Barbara to participate in a writer's conference.  Some of them, so the joke goes, come from as far away as Los Angeles.  Others arrive from more easterly parts.

Some of these individuals began as students at the conference, worked their ways into the publication and/or production of their stories, poems, essays, films, plays.  All have evolved into the kind of entity you think about when you hear the word "collegiality" brought forth, even though that particular word and others like it have implications for causing you suspicion.

With the exception of an approximately two-year period during the thirty-four years you spent at the University of Southern California, "collegiality" had only the most abstract, neo-Platonic meaning for you, then along came Den Kamei, under whose vision and approach caused the faculty to demonstrate collegiality, which meant family, inter-faculty interest, and with one or two exceptions which were blunted by egotism, a sense of an entire faculty taking concern for an entire student cohort.

In the same way you learn as a writer that there is no way you will please all who read you, you learn how some students will not relate to you nor you to them.  At this same conference, there were two former students of yours from the University of Southern California, one who embraced you the moment she saw you, the other who expressed surprise at seeing you here.  

Was your response bled over into sarcasm from irony when you said, "No more than I, you." ?  Among the conference faculty, one from the days at USC, whom you greeted with the recitation of something he already knew, his name.  And his reply to you, "How's it going?"

In the midst of this collegiality one or two with whom you exchanged sincere expressions of love.  And one other, a colleague in a number of ventures from about 1985 until his recent--2008 or 09 move from Santa Barbara to Provo, Utah, where what had been at least a once-a-week meeting and at least a once-a-month journey to co-host a Bay Area writers' workshop.  

Your contact now is mostly by email, punctuated by this yearly visit of him to here.  The importance is the continued informality in your conversations, the notable lack of awkward silences significant of each trying to produce a thread of conversation.  Rather the opposite, the business-as-usual dynamic of friends sharing enthusiasms.

This week's activities have brought you a generous spectrum of possible relationships with former students, current students, former editorial clients, current editorial clients, colleagues, and friends. From your interactions, you found yourself led to an understanding of how you have a similar relationship with all the characters you have ever created, those you will create in the future, and those you have brought for repeat performances, moving them from one story to the next.

You cannot have nor would wish to have the same relationship with all your characters any more than you would wish one uniform approach to friends and acquaintances.  Indeed, as in the nature of friendships, some acquaintances became friends.  Some characters grew on you to the point where they became indispensable details in other stories.

A writer's responsibilities to his characters is on a level with his responsibilities to his friends:  to listen, to be a presence rather than a presumptive appearance, to be in the moment rather than phoning in friendship, to care, to fucking care.

Probably the Last Reflections on Author for a Time

So far as you are concerned, this much is true:  With some frequency, we chose our books to read and the short fiction in magazines because of our experience with the author.  This much is further true:  In places where we don't know the author's work and are impressed by a first meeting, we will, when we see that author's name, seek it out.

You are not quite finished with expressions of truth here, for instance, the things that draw you to a particular author and away from others is the characters and narrative voices presented by the authors you like and your near complete lack of sympathy or concern for the characters of authors to whom you don't relate.

Still more truth:  In either case, authors you like or do not relate to--which is different from not liking--story has little to do with the matter.  This is true because there are not all that many different stories.  Now, we can move on to certainties, as in, this is certain, so far as you are concerned:  Even a dumb story, told by an author you admire causes resonance within you.

When you come upon a character in a story forced to make a decision or take a stand, depending on the placement of the need for choice or stand, you pretty well assume the consequences will not be good for the character involved.  

We understand this because such things are the nature of story.  Narratives of characters who make right choices tend to bore you.  You want to see the outcome of the bad choices, not so much because you have made so many bad choices in your life as because of your understanding that choice is to story as consequence is to life.

The choices you've made that have no significant consequence are the same choices that bore you, a statement that goes a long way to describing your personality and the tastes you either acquired or had hard wired.

Your focus during most of this year has been on how the author participates in the process of things happening to characters in ways where the author does not stop the story to offer opinions or suggestions, but rather allows the characters to react to the situations that will cause them trouble, allow us to see the characters working on solutions, then allow the consequences to arrive, almost with the force of presence of other characters.


Many writers have, in your experience, come to see life in story and reality in much the same way as you, hence the beginnings of your respect for their work.  They also chose characters you either like on sight or have to make some accommodations to get used to.  In either case, you feel some connection.  These authors also pick characters who speak in voices that do not set your nerves on edge, the equivalent of a piece of chalk squeaking against a blackboard or the immediate surge of irritation at a squawky voice in a room.

Through all of this, you are not aware of the author, only of the author's creations of character, of flawed, quirky persons, frequently caught up in something dumb or inconsequential or something they could not resist doing.  

Does this mean you cannot read such authors as, say, Henry Fielding from the eighteenth century, or Aldous Huxley two hundred years later, because each steps forth to interject, assure, reason with, argue, point out, or compare?  By no means.  You've been prepared by the sum total of all your reading to recognize in their narrative voices the promise and delivery of quandaries that could derail you if you were to experience them in real life, and to make you somehow wish to be derailed in hopes you would learn even more from each author. 

The Writer as Sorcerer's Apprentice

The writer in you, moved by early, significant encounters with reading, has rewarded you with an image of yourself as Mickey Mouse, during the illustration of The Sorcerer's Apprentice in the motion picture Fantasia.  

You could not have felt that connection when you first saw the film, nor later, on rewatching, nor later still when you watched it yet another time, when your wish to experience the things being a writer meant to you were in place.

And what a fine metaphor for storytelling The Sorcerer's Apprentice, whether from the Goethe poem or the Disneyfied version of it, becomes after you visit its many implications now, all these years after seeing the movie for the first time.  You are still, in many ways, the apprentice, itching for the opportunity to address your chores, once the true sorcerer--those books of other splendid writers--is away.

You in effect set some of the equivalents of brooms to the tasks the sorcerer has left for you, chores such as providing characters whose speech, goals, thought, and motives resonate with heart-tingling plausibility.  This, of itself, is a kind of magic because of the unalterable fact of most readers coming to a story with the certainty of the characters being imaginary.  

How to make imaginary beings appear a significant step beyond the relationship between the boy, Calvin, and his imaginary playmate, Hobbes, the tiger, both of whom are themselves unreal?  How to make some, many, most readers drop the rational Post-it Note advising us These people are imaginary, the place where they live is imaginary, and the times in which they purport to behave are no less unsubstantial.

Yet this activity has been repeated numerous times for hundreds of years.  Of course there were pilgrimages to places considered holy in the 1400s; there are still such pilgrimages today.  Of course there were likely groups of pilgrims traveling from London to Canterbury, but were there actually those of whom Chaucer wrote in so vivid and convincing a manner?  And how is it these individuals, now six hundred years old, seem so vital and real?

Other of the Sorcerer's charms came to you from books, some from self-proclaimed Sorcerers, much of which you took for a certainty, as though you'd seen it at first hand.  What you in fact saw was the result of the Sorcerer's work, not the skills behind the various charms such as point of view and dialogue and narrative, nor indeed of interior monologue or that mysterious spell called free independent discourse, which is a mystical combination of interior monologue.

In the Goethe poem and the Disneyfied versions, the apprentice, inadequately prepared, loses control of the spell he has cast on the brooms, causing them to bring bucket after bucket of water, turning the sorcerer's study into a lake. 

In your apprenticeship days, you lost power over such things as narrative, point of view, dialogue, plot points, scenes, and characters, along with that most vital of all presences, the one of plausibility.  Your efforts were not only awash with descriptions and asides, they betrayed a complete unawareness of things that were supposed to be present as well as things that were by no means meant to be seen.

Could your eagerness to become the Sorcerer led you past any attempts at understanding the skills necessary to control the forces put into effect by the Sorcerer?

The Author, among other things, is setting forth in the workshop or laboratory, setting characters, themes, and problems into motion, watching them closely to see how and where they are going.  The Sorcerer does not merely deploy characters at whim, such as the Creator and Satan did in the Book of Job.  The Sorcerer is curious to see how the characters will react so that he might learn from them, thus bringing his observations from under the surface to the surface of surprise.

Because this is your narrative, the Author is not a contestant in arguments of deconstruction or post-modernism.  The Author takes responsibility for the creation of an alternate reality unlike any other, imparting to that reality a sincerity of intent and a commitment to nudging and bustling his characters to stress points from which they must somehow find ways to cope.