Cheating, on Your Way to Philandering

You began cheating on Reality at an early age, even before you cold read, then begin cheating in earnest, or writing your own material, where you in effect moved beyond mere cheating into philandering.

The cheating began when you began to listen to afternoon broadcasts called "Twilight Tales,"in which a person named Eleanor Jean, who told stories slanted toward a children's audience.  You recall they had a woo woo or fairy tale effect, but recall only her pleasant reading voice and the importance of listening to the program as a personal adventure.

Even as you learned to read and were experiencing the pull of written story, you were expanding your involvement with radio one-off stories such as the thriller types, "Suspense," "Lights Out," and "The Shadow," as well as the serials such as "I Love a Mystery," "The Green Hornet," and "Gang Busters."

Because of the way your life has gone to date, many of the things that have happened to you, a number of things that have not happened to you, and to an unknowable number of things over which you had no say, much less control, you view Reality as random, bordering on neutral.

Another person might and should have an entirely different version of reality, seeing it as harmful where you see it as benign, dangerous where you see it as neutral, judgmental where you see it as having no horse in the race.

Yet another individual may see Reality as nurturing, supportive, accommodating.  This has little to do with who is right, its focus instead on one of the major motives behind why you write and your speculations about why others who have neutral or unfavorable views of Reality turn their hands, hearts, and minds to composing stories, probing essays, memoirs, and other, idiosyncratic expressions of opinion.

You can say this with certainty:  You write to create a Reality more to your liking than the one you encounter.  This is so even though you could with little provocation fill a number of notebooks with lists, paragraphs, and observations about this Reality that bring you pleasure.  Much as you write to create enjoyable realities and denizens thereof, there are times and places and things associated with this reality that are worthy of recognition.  The problems begin when you fear for the safety of such things.

Yet more real problems begin when, for the sake of story and creation, you begin to exaggerate or focus on some of these elements with a shifted horizon or other aspect of perspective.  True enough, some of your reading made you aware of historical ventures you'd not otherwise have encountered; reading also gave you facts dressed in interesting contexts.  But most of your reasons for haunting libraries were to find stories with a different Reality than the ones you happened to have been in at various times during your earlier years.

For reasons of self-image, the reality of story made it possible for you to enter worlds where you believed you could find more of interest.  Thus reading changed the way you saw yourself, the way you behaved in such realities as New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Florida, delivering you back to what you considered to be the only real Reality, Los Angeles, but a different you than when you had left.

Puberty, teen years, college years were different Realities you tried, with some success, to conflate with the realities of the imagination and wish.  The most daunting Reality was the one in which you found yourself, somewhat like Dorothy Gale, realizing she was no longer in Kansas, when you acknowledged the reality of wanting to build your life around writing.

A good metaphor for that was your first experience at the yearly publishing spectacle called the American Booksellers Association convention, held then in the Shoreham Hotel, Washington D.C.  You entered an enormous showroom, suspiciously reminiscent of another reality in which you'd spent years, the booths, glitter, and come-on pitches of the carnival.  But this was about books.  

There was a printed badge with your name.  You saw booths manned by publishers whose books you'd been reading most of your reading life.  You saw booksellers, standing in line to get books autographed by authors you had proprietary interests in because you'd read them.  You stood in the booth operated by the publisher you worked for, talking to booksellers about all the books your publisher had published but in particular the one or two you'd acquired, edited, and seen through the process.

Parts of your reality are orbital.  You have stood behind a lectern at book stores, talking about the book you just published.  You have sat at a table, a pile of your own books at hand, while individuals asked you to autograph copies for them and their friends.

The real Reality in which you spend much of your day, preparing to enter the realities of your own creation, however neutral it may be, is agreeable, acceptable, often serving up a surprise that bowls you over with the joy of the younger you, listening to Eleanor Jean, reading stories on "Twilight Tales."

But the real work begins when you are in front of a screen or have a legal pad in front of you and a pen in hand, speaking to you of the fun that awaits.  There is even the promise of a badge, with your name on it.

Forked Tongue

The setting is the late 1940s or early 1950, when a group of characters, survivors of the Nazi atrocities, have arrived in America.  

Although the narrative has not told us, without giving the matter much thought, we assume they were speaking German or Yiddish or possibly Russian, maybe even Polish.  We don't need to be accorded the usual narrative device "He (or she) said in [fill in the language].

Now, they have arrived in America.  One of them begins to speak in another language.  The other holds up a hand.  "We should speak English from now on."  Whether they lapse into the occasional Yiddish or Polish or German is another matter.  That one line of dialogue reminds us to the point where we no longer have to think about it that they are speaking English.

Perhaps, as the story progresses, they are in a social or commerce situation, attempting to purchase something at a store or order something in a restaurant.  An American clerk says, "Sorry.  It's your accent.  What were you asking for?"

While we're on the subject of accents and dialect, the writer can step in with a description such as, "She spoke in a heavily accented whisper, somewhere between French and those secret-sounding Slavic tongues."  

This brings in description and attitude, although these come from the writer, which means the writer has felt the need to get in there with tells or descriptions that are better coming from the characters,  "Eat ease airly jet."

There is dialogue in which terminal g's are omitted.  "Ya comin'?"  or regional dialogue in which car keys turn out to be a type of trousers rather than the means to enter and start an automobile.

Such things are the handholds the author gives the reader without having to stop the story for explanations, which, when taken to extremes, are reminders to the reader that this material is set in a false reality, populated with inventions of actual people.  However we may give street names, Lexington Avenue, Hester Street, Broadway, however the characters venture into a Horn and Hardart Automat, their pockets jingling with coins, this is a simulacrum of Manhattan, not the real one.  However much the characters are based on one or more actual persons, these are inventions, not real people.

In an ironic vision, we might say of a real person named John, "John was impatient."  In a story, we say of John that "He drummed his fingers on the tabletop. "  Or we might say, "John consulted his watch."  

We may even bring another invention of a character into the scene to approach John. "Let's face it," this invented character will tell John, "you've been stood up.  Two hours you're sitting here, drinking coffee, smoking god knows how many cigarettes, she's still not here.  What is it about stood up you don't unnerstan'?"  Thus has the writer shown or demonstrated as opposed to told.

These elements all come under the heading of conveying to the reader relevant information the writer believes will contribute to the reader's deeper appreciation of the story.  In all likelihood, there will not be a uniform standard of what information to show.  Some writers and their readers are fine with being told "It was raining."  You go out of your way to avoid such use, even reaching the point where you'd be happier saying in dialogue 
"Depends." or even "All depends." instead of "It all depends."

You admire writers who are able to find ways to convey the desired information, often as much by severe indirection or subtext as by artful showing.  There are times when, if you can't find a way to get the desired information into a story, the information does not belong.

Passwords

In a sweeping acknowledgment of the convenience your various computers and their accoutrement's have brought to your life as well as the assistance in learning that have come your way, you must stop for a moment to reflect on the negative aspects as they relate to the password.

A password is in effect your insurance that you can use your computer, access your mail, even access various programs which give you access to publications, information, and financial transactions.  Passwords are keys, they are access tools, they are the equivalent of the opening line of a story or novel, the intriguing statement of thesis in an essay or review.

Sometimes, due to the fact of you hitting a wrong key on the keyboard, you'll be denied access to someplace where you wish to be.  Then you're faced with resetting the password, writing it in such a place where you will remember, then keeping that information available.

'During the years, you've had many passwords, including a few now in limbo because the effort of tracking down the correct password does not seem worth while.  In similar fashion, you have begun stories, essays, book projects, with only a few things in limbo.

Over the course of years, you've been told your password is lacking in complexity or numerals or a capital letter, denied entry in one case because the date of your father's birthday which is one of the key questions to allow you access to your bank account says October 27 is not your father's birthday, which means among other things that you have been celebrating it incorrectly all those years he was alive or that you somehow hit the wrong key when supplying his birthday in the first place.

There are a few places where, when you attempt to log in, you are told that someone else has the password and Identity you entered as yours, and they will brook no nonsense if you remind them it is not someone else who has the ID and password you entered but that it is in fact you.

Some stories and essays have said in effect similar things to you, with the implicit notion that you are not going anywhere with this story or essay until you can fix the broad issue of which these vagrant lines are the key:  your identity.

Today, not only are ideas cheap, so is information.  You cannot think of a day in recent times when you have not looked up something.  Only this morning, at coffee with your regular group of friends, you made a statement that caused a man sitting at the table next to you to wait politely for you to finish your statement, then suggest you'd erred.  "I believe,"  he said, " you have the order wrong.  Ontogeny in fact recapitulates phylogeny."  Whereupon, you both took to your phones to check out the proper order.

The gentleman was correct, and you were both aware that the concept, expressed in proper order, had been in large part discredited, which added even more texture to the argument you were making when you uttered the phrase incorrectly in the first place.  

The point is that with ideas and facts being in plentiful supply, each has to be joined to the other in a significant enough way to cause it to stand out.  This observation brings you back to your long held opinion regarding the importance of the voice in which the conflation of ideas and facts.

We are all of us in a sense representatives from an alternate universe, arrived here in this universe to take part in a Parliament of Reality.  We each have a voice and a vote.  We are representatives of our own separate Reality, which it is our duty to cobble together from facts, ideas, opinions, and proposed outcomes.

An individual who fails to cobble together a personal Reality is doomed to a life of even greater frustration than that shared by those of us who have to make a Reality from what seems to be little or no resources except our imagination.

Because of the probability you will at some future time come skimming through these notes, looking for something, it is in your best interest to remind yourself how little time you spend thinking about ontogeny or phylogeny in the first place, much less in which order they are set as The Recapitulation Theory.  You do not wish the you of the future to think you were pondering over that theory because of a conversation or concerns relating to biology.

Quite the opposite; you are instead trying to make a world within a universe, where you and your ideas have grazing rights and where unlikely forces are likely to settle in for a conversation.

William Saroyan, Family Gatherings, The Yiddish Theater, and Narrative Voice

The arrival of William Saroyan's title, My Name Is Aram in your writing life was the literary equivalent of being rescued by the AAA on a busy freeway.  

Here you were, stuck in the traffic of creativity, believing you’d be lucky to produce publishable short stories, and caught up in the hypnotic cadence of Hemingway’s narrative voice.

Compelling and engaging as Hemingway’s style emerges from his narrative, there is, as his onetime friend, Gertrude Stein, said of her own hometown, “no there there,” no voice.  

With My Name Is Aram, tucked away in your memory, Saroyan seemed to be offering you the choice between style and voice.  Every time you reread this narrative, you feel the presence of a man you actually knew in life, and remind yourself of the need for story to have a voice.

There is little doubt you could be given two unmarked pages of text, one from Hemingway, the other from Saroyan, and within moments identify each.  There is that much difference.  

True enough,Hemingway had an enormous effect on narrative and on dialogue.  His work will no doubt outlast Saroyan's, but there is an impersonal tone to Hemingway, for all his cadence and evocation.  The narrative and dialogue of Saroyan are shot through with humor, whim, and a bristling sense of absurdity so reflective of people at their best.

By the time Saroyan came into your life, you'd read most of the Hemingway short stories, were at work on his novels, and had been impressed enough with Death in the Afternoon to absorb as much as you could of the ritual of bullfighting.  Hemingway was not easy to give up or shift off to a sideline, but the more time you spent studying My Name Is Aram, the more you recognized the attractive qualities you found in his dialogue that you wished to have in your own, and in many ways were beginning to have.

Simply put, Hemingway was too detached and controlled, Saroyan's characters were hopelessly caught up in the same antic eccentricity you found so attractive. You could and did for the longest time transform works of the Western canon you were reading as an English Literature major into immigrant Armenian families and then, as you saw that working, you transferred works from the Western canon into a closer to your own culture filter.

Thus did novels from Henry James,Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, George Elliot, and Virginia Woolf begin to sound in your ears as though they'd stepped off the stage of the Yiddish theater.

My Name Is Aram sent you scavenging about in the hunt for your own voice, leading you, through some of those near absurdist exchanges of dialogue, to playwrights associated with the theater of the absurd.  You understood that view, but wanted more of the kind of impatience that comes toward the end of the main course at a family dinner, when the host is preparing the deserts and coffee, and those at the table have moved beyond politeness and familial ties into the growing conviction that their point of view is being misunderstood.

Thanks to William Saroyan, you came to see how many of your characters are responding to secret regrets they did not pursue some hidden dream.  As family gatherings, life in general, and the growing ties through marriage with other families increase, the fallout from the regrets becomes more coded but less hidden, producing epic arguments in which something as simple as the relative density of a matzoh ball becomes the rallying cry for arguments at hand which have nothing whatsoever to do with matzoh balls and everything to do with the hidden yearnings of hearts least expected to be nourishing so much spleen.

Opening Lines and Opened Zippers

During the early drafts of a story, you are often overcome by the notion of it not having begun at the proper place, which is the literary equivalent of a writer being told his zipper is opened.

Of equal truth and occasions for embarrassment, there comes the uncomfortable feeling that a story does not end in the proper place, that you've spent hours trying to fit things onto a narrative that don't fit for the simple reason that they do not belong.

As it stands now, two of your favorite short story writers are producing materials that have long entranced you with their narrative, their characters, and the quirky ways with which their characters lean into reality.  

Your absolute favorite for beginnings is the southwestern New Mexico writer, Lee K. Abbott.  Some years back, one of your trusted and esteemed readers once remarked that Abbott had nothing on you when it came to beginnings.  Your head was in the clouds for weeks, which is of course good for the ego but not so much for the technique. 

Ann Beattie is no slouch with her opening sentences, and you find yourself looking at them from time to time as a reminder of the kinds of tension and vigor these instruments must carry.  But her endings are, so far as you are concerned, even more worth study.  

Her endings have the effect of taking you up to the edge of a cliff, giving you a shove, then getting you to talk to yourself on the way down, reminiscent in so many ways of Wile E. Coyote, too focused on his quarry to see that he has overrun the edge of the mesa.

Among the things you do well as an editor and teacher, you demonstrate the knack to determine where a story begins,  This is, you believe, no mere accident.  Instead, it comes from the equivalent of an exercise you have been performing longer and with more devotion than many of the other techniques that want to be practiced on a regular basis.  

The exercise is time spent writing as many provocative opening sentences as you can.  This exercise began one afternoon when, after sitting at your typewriter for a number of hours with no satisfactory results, you decided to focus on irresistible opening sentences.

The goal of the opening sentence is to embed so much curiosity and layered implication within the reader that the reader must read the second sentence.  Even if the reader stops reading after the third sentence, having discovered she or he does not relate to the plight of your character, you have experienced a primary victory and have at the same time reinforced your belief that stories are told a sentence at a time, edited a sentence at a time, indeed read a sentence at a time.

When you find a short story you admire, say Tobias Wolff's memorable "Bullet in the Brain," you find yourself reviewing it to see how far you can get before a sentence stops you, causes you to question its appropriateness within the narrative.  Ah, the many times you've read through the Wolff story, finding no distractions.  And the many times you've read through Lee K. Abbott, Ann Beattie, Louise Erdrich, Deborah Eisenberg.  And the reaffirmation of a splendid truth:  Each writer begins with the right first sentence, ends with it.  

Now that you think about it, the short fiction of Thomas McGuane has that effect on you as well, at one point causing you to set down his story, find a pad of paper, then begin writing your own, set miles away, with a different protagonist and a different theme.

Two dear friends of yours have written books about openings, Donald Newlove about opening paragraphs, and Barnaby Conrad, taking on the opening sentence.  When you find yourself trudging through a thick slough of narrative, you turn to one or the other, sometimes even both, looking for that primary focus of the narrative line.  Once you've got that in sight, you feel the equivalent of a seismic shift, of a sheet of ice calving, of a landslide, of the surge leading to an ocean wave, building, gathering momentum.

Opening lines rarely come at the beginning; they often reveal themselves, waiting for you to see them.  After all this time, you know they are there, even when you have been lulled into thinking you have already found the proper opening line. 

Adrift in a Sea of Words

Although quite fond of the ocean, its denizens, its moods and characteristics, your knowledge of the craft that ply it, including surf boards, is well within the parameters of ignorance.  The ignorance is respectful, even tending toward awe.  

All right; you know port and starboard, you know a fathom is six feet, you know things such as stern and bow and lee and abeam and abaft.  You are also aware of a sophisticated range of instruments that can help the knowledgeable mariner to plot and maintain a course, even to determine where, in any given moment, she or he happens to be.

You present all this background because you are about to use it in a metaphor.  The metaphor relates the relative similarity between you being able to locate yourself when area, by which you mean beyond eye sight of the coast line as a source of a land mark, and when you are somewhere in what seems like the middle of a composition, a work of fiction in particular.

This amuses you, who have written two books on writing, are now involved with a third, and have already committed to producing a fourth.  The amusement comes from the fact of you knowing enough about navigating the seas of prose to have written books on the subject, each of which got some nice professional reviews and a flattering number of peer reviews.

At one point in your teaching career, and at various points in your editorial mode, you find it interesting to ask students or clients to list as many story-related concepts as they can.  You make no judgment about the number of concepts, focusing instead on the picture of an individual writer you get based on the number of terms of which he or she is aware.  

At one point, in an effort to keep boredom at bay, you tried to list as many as you could.  You became so impressed with the number that you recall saying, "Hey, I'll bet there's a book in that."  There in fact was, and it was a significant enough project to take you away from something you were having trouble with.

Your exercise is to ask the student or client to name as many aspects of story as possible, then assign a numerical ranking to each, the result being a kind of literary equivalent of a personal MRI.  You have done this to the point where, if you get lost, you don't panic.

Now, today, you have the notion that it would be of equal value to get students and clients to describe Reality.  The value here is to cause the individual to see her or his attitude and relationship to reality.  For some time, your description of Reality has begun, "A place where individuals--" at which point, according to your mood or perhaps even some recent thing you've learned, the next word, often a verb, will change.  But you know enough about the way you see things to have the foundation of a sense of what Reality means.

This is important because each of us sets his or her story in a Reality that is different from most realities or, if the writer is new at the craft, where thoughts of Reality don't seem to matter as much as thoughts of structures such as plot, where structure and intent have a priority.  

You by no means look down or in any way condescend toward such visions.  Rather, you understand in the same way a person in a cafeteria might pass up the very creamed spinach you'd heap on your plate, that we all of us have different tastes and visions.

Your number one hierarchy is voice, which is the atmosphere produced by your characters as they interact in your vision of what Reality is.  This does not mean you are gifted with the navigation devices the seasoned sailor has.  Instead, it means your approach is to writer yourself well out to sea, then flounder until some planet or constellation or landmark catches your eye, whereupon you begin rowing.

Stages

At the time, you might be so preoccupied with being in the moment that you are unaware of being in a stage.  Life is like that.  But when you begin connecting things, you may discover how much of a stage you are in and what kind of stage it is.

Stages are sometimes like those drive-through hamburger stands.  You are in a stage of wanting something approximating dinner but perhaps too tired or too hungry or too stunned to decide which restaurant you'd prefer to this drive-through stage.  You are in effect in a stage of transition, passing from one stage to another.

You've not made notes about the stages you've been in, which is to say the stages you were aware of being in.  Sometimes it is not always easy to determine if you are in a stage any more specific than an uncomfortable stage.  

But as you begin to think about some of the stages you've been in and perhaps even through, you realize there is something to be said for trying to grab on to the you of some past memory, see if you can get your attitude at that time, then see if you can decide what stage you were in.

At the moment, you're preoccupied with tracing the movement, if not progress, you've made in your transitions from one stage to another.  This preoccupation comes from trying to settle on a list of one hundred novels you've read and reread, starting at about the time you were ten, then following your progress through the subsequent decades.

There were a few books in your shelves and stacks at your present home, where you moved with about one hundred books, saved after disposing of the others.  Now, there are considerably more than one hundred books, two of which got you to the subject of stages.  

One of these books is One Hundred Years of Solitude.  Much as you love it, you will not include it in your hundred novels project, settling instead on Love in the Time of Cholera from the same author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  You have a special relationship with One Hundred Years because someone sent it to you while you were deep within a stage you longed to be out of.

You hadn't a real name for this stage, not at the time you were in it, only the awareness of being uncomfortable, looking for some equivalent, some line that would get you to the equivalent of a hamburger stand, where you would say something into a microphone, pay some modest amount of money, then in due course be handed your order.

With a bittersweet hindsight, you can now look back to the stage you were at, the envelope in which the Marquez book came, and the unsigned note that accompanied it, "Hey, man, you ought to look at this and take it to heart and start thinking of what you're going to become if you don't take steps, what you're going to become if you take any old steps, and what you might become if you take the right steps.

To this day, you believe the sender was one of the musicians you used to get stoned with, just before ROTC drill time.  You can't be certain.  The sender could have been any of a number of persons, which is why the novel and the note mean so much to you and got you reading Marquez, whom you'd not read before.

The stage you have come to understand you were in was the asshole stage.  The fact of being sent the book and the note was more than a mere wake-up call.  Even at the time, you recognized having connections with persons of some great empathy, persons who could easily have waited you out in hopes you would outgrow being an asshole.   

The other book was a title that has made your hundred list, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, which came with a note written in a different tone than the note accompanying the Marquez, but still seeming to you now, in retrospect, to be calling you out for being an asshole.  The signature was a scrawl that looked like initials.  

You are now in a stage where you can venture the belief that a worthwhile novel is one you can come back to again and again during your lifetime, learning aspects of the human condition, noting techniques of the storyteller's trade, a story making you examine yourself against the possibility you might be an asshole, then suggesting ways to move beyond.