Polarity

At a pivotal moment in your writing-publishing life, you were living in a comfortable if cheaply built condominium within easy walking distance from the ocean.  Afternoon walks there with your then dog-in-residence, Molly, invariably produced an idea for a short story.  Because of the size of the condo, you had a pretty good work space which, on the night of which you write, you occupied with a manuscript you'd brought from work, a place where you could rely on sufficient distractions to prevent the concentration needed for editing.

Within the past week, you'd just turned down a job at least two individuals, the about-to-retire editor-in-chief, and the publisher, thought you were a natural fit for, couldn't, in fact, understand why you were doing what you were doing.  You were the lead editor of a small, well-funded scholarly publisher, an aspect of publishing that you'd entered with your only experience having been reading books published by university and scholarly presses.  

In a footnote of irony, you still own what was probably the first university press book you'd ever read, Writing Magazine Fiction. There you were, a high school sophomore, thinking grand thoughts of working your way into the diverse demographic  of pulp adventure magazines, including your favorites, mysteries, but also science fiction, fantasy, sports, and Westerns. You saw each genre as a challenge you'd surely meet, insuring a life of opportunity and satisfaction.

Back to 1367-B Danielson Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93108, where you fanned out on your work area the manuscript you'd brought home, picked up your red pencil, drew a large X through two paragraphs, them wrote in the margin, "Suggest we delete these as the information included has been repeated twice earlier."

You set down the red pencil, coming to terms with something you well could have realized earlier: Whether the submissions are in scholarly publishing or trade publishing, the chances of you as an individual finding one to truly excite you are about one hundred to one. You'd already been in trade publishing situations of your company going ahead with the publication of a project for which you had little enthusiasm.  

This project on your desk was a similar one.  You'd as yet failed to make the connection that as lead editor, regardless of the type of publisher, each bad book was an excuse to move you along your way with appreciation for your service and the very best wishes for future success in publishing.

The salient reason for your refusal of the job where you were considered a natural fit was the strong likelihood of the venture moving to New York.  You'd been commuting to Los Angeles with some regularity and had been able to rationalize, given the salary and benefits offer, a pied a terre in Los Angeles, where you could coordinate your class schedule with a night or two in LA.

You do not nor did then have anything against New York so much as you had a sense of Southern California, and now the Central Coast, being your home base, the place from which your perceptions, attitudes, and tastes began.

"But you dress like an Easterner and you seem to like the food in New York well enough," your prospective boss told you.  Both were true, except that you did not set out to dress like an easterner so much as not dress like certain styles associated with Las Vegas, Beverly Hills, and Hollywood.  

Even back then, when the reputation deck was more stacked to favor New York, there was no question one could find in the sprawl and mystery of Los Angeles the perfect bowl of soba, the ideal taco, the majestic barbecue, and those places who seemed to elevate the preparation of seafood and mollusks to perfection.  (Ah, The Tasty Q on Crenshaw.)

Back once more to 1367-B, where, looking at the manuscript before you now in terms of your awareness that its success of a particular title was predicated by the author's scholarly reputation, the lack of success a metaphorical tail to be pinned on the even more metaphorical donkey who was you.  Two years, you were thinking.  Two years before you will be thanked for your years of valuable service, wished the best of fortune with your career.

Yet another point:  Painful as it sometimes gets, you understood you would rather read bad fiction submissions than bad scholarly ones.  A fuse was lit somewhere.  For the next while, you heard it sizzling and sputtering, smelled its acrid smoke.  No more manuscripts brought home.  Extended walks at the beach with Molly.

The farewell meal was at the famed El Encanto Hotel, a splendid French onion soup with a tangy crust of cheese, followed by a butterfly of salmon, its skin crackling, its flesh moist and pink,  Asparagus, of course, and no mere Trader Joe's hollandaise sauce.  Over espresso, you were thanked for your years of "innovative-but-provocative" service, handed an envelope with severance pay, and offered the advice that perhaps your true strength is in trade publishing.

"I'll keep that in mind,"  you said.

Conspiracy Theory

 Another round of classes began today, with your schedule calling for a morning one focused on nonfiction, while the evening one is flat-out, no nonsense fiction.  In your introductory remarks, you found yourself using the same figure of speech, likening you and your students to conspirators.

Most conspiracies are Class A Felonies, with all the consequences such a conviction would involve.  You were speaking of a different kind of conspiracy which, because of its tainted name, should be given a new designation.  Let's say a strategic deployment.  Let's call it what it truly is and why you happen to be in this kind of work.  Let's say strategic deployment of dramatic information.  Let's say story.  

You're in effect promising students who wish to write nonfiction and fiction an access to tools they may have not considered for years of pressing delete buttons, which send suspect computer files into oblivion.In your case, the activity was much more physical; the sense of grabbing a sheet of paper, which you then wrenched from the platen and guide bars of a typewriter, then balling up the offending sheet of paper, previous to tossing it at a nearby wastebasket.  

Quite often, the dynamic between the desire to wrench, then ball the sheet of paper, added a few extra squirts of adrenaline or frustration, or anger into the need to insert a fresh sheet in some way contributed to you missing the satisfaction of seeing the wad go into the trash.

There is a probability that any attempt to direct something, whether manuscript pages, orange peels, or late-night herbal tea bags, into the trash and missing is having the effect of making a bad situation worse, which is precisely what we want at such times. You don't wish to have to redo pages, nor do you wish the circumstances occasioning your drinking herbal tea instead of 'a demitasse of espresso, but such things do happen, and when they do, you want at least to be able to get something into the trash container.

You are offering beginning writers the opportunity to collude against the one person it makes the greatest sense to collude against--the reader.  When the shoe is on the other foot of you being the reader, you want the same dynamic to obtain.  You don't want to know how, all at once, the protagonist succeeds.  You want the characters you're reading about to go through the physicality of pulling a sheet of paper out of the platen of a typewriter.

The key  words here are "withhold" and "ambiguity."  When you read, you wish to be transported back to the early times of reading about Hansel and Gretyl, the witch, and the trail of cookies.  When you get too much information up front, you are bloated and sated with facts, only a few of which you actually want.  You want cookie crumbs which are the metaphors for curiosity, bewilderment, better yet an attitude of protectiveness to a character whom you know not to be real but, never mind, you've already got past that technicality and are now rooting for him or her to succeed.

If the work is artful enough, you are rooting for some characters to accomplish their goals without having a clear picture of what their goals are.  With all the hundreds and thousands of manuscripts you've read as an editor and at least the hundreds of drafts of your own work you've poured through as though trying to decode it from some esoteric language, you are still susceptible to the intriguing opening, that deft, mischievous offering of dramatic cookie crumbs you are likely to find in the front fiction display at your favorite bookstore.

With friends and longtime acquaintances who are writers, there is scant talk of a final book or last story, rather the expectation of being carried off by the 911 respondents who are carting you to the emergency room, certainly a bit concerned about your present condition, but simultaneously trying to make some negotiation with the Fates, the recognition that you're so far along in this latest project that you would like, oh, please, to finish before the great void.

This is the result of being so attached to story, which is not only a conspiratorial approach to offering tidbits of information, implications, innuendo, withholding vital information as long as possible, it is also the ingrained belief that you in fact have the power you do not really have--the ability to negotiate with the Fates.

When Does a Riddle Become an Opening Line?

The first thing you look for, whether reading for flat-out enjoyment, scanning your own material for possible anomaly, or serving in the capacity of editor or teacher, both of which are paid positions, is the quality of puzzlement.  You want to know some of the "what" going on here.  You want to be driven to the involuntary click that means, Where am I being taken?

You also wish to know approximately how long you will be in this destination being extended to you.  How nice, how intense if you begin to fear that this project is one from which you will not return soon.  

Nicer still to suspect you are entering some life-altering experience, in its way a cosmic accident, yet still intriguing enough to cause hackles to stand on end, suggesting you are in a far-from-relaxed mood.

Since you prefer long odds to apparent certainty, you can't help wondering, when you're breathing life at your own creations, what the experience would be like were you to stumble upon not only a stunning opening line but as well a suitable follow-up as a way of convincing the potential reader that this venture is no accident; it is a valid report from a yearning, alert you, harpoon at the ready to impair the third sentence.

You have found such books, read them through again,in the process making discoveries of so ordinary a nature that  you begin to experience a glimmer of understanding about the way things in story seem to connect without any advance notice,

At the moment, you are preoccupied with an opening line you recall rejecting out of hand, the moment you saw it for the first time..  "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aurielano Buendia was to remember that afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

You came across the line not in the novel itself, but an ambitious list of the lines gifted men and women used to begin their novels, lines that transcended Once upon a time, lines that made you care inspire of your awareness that all successful fiction and a great many unsuccessful novels are crafted to rest on false pretenses.

The first line has to be a riddle, one that sneaks up on when you least expect it.

What's a Little Repetition among Scenes?

Whether you are editing your on work or being paid to perform specific editorial services on the work of a client, you follow a routine, one major aspect of which is to deal with repetition in all its damaging, distracting variations.  

You start by looking for habit words, those often unnoticed words such as "and," or "but," or "perhaps," all of which are drum majors for habit phrases such as those beginning with "meanwhile," "later," and, in nonfiction, "as a rule," while in fiction, "Mow, what?"

This is by way of warm up for repetitions of the three-pronged trope, such as:  "She went into the living room, looked around for signs of someone having been there, then returned to her work area."  When you've run some of those to ground, you look through the entire text for repetitions of such devices as "This was error, writ large," or "This was a screw-up on steroids.

By approaching a completed draft with such targets in mind, you've sharpened your focus on the overall topic of repetition, either your own or the writer whose work you are editing.  At one point in your early twenties, you had a friend who was a gifted musician, when he was not trying to square his professional life with his drug habit.  He was in effect showing you what he listened to when he listened to other musicians improvise.

One of his early exercises was insisting you listened to a particular 78 rpm shellac disc featuring Charlie Parker, the lightning-fast improviser and gate keeper to the new cordial approaches to jazz called bebop.  You were to listen to the record one hundred times before you could talk about what you noticed.

The untutored musical student who was you observed that Parker's notes were always crisp, articulate, seeming to be a part of something larger.  This got you some nods from your friend, but when you began discussing Miles Davis' performance, lacking more musical language, you accused Davis of fluffing or missing notes, not coming close to the precise clarity of Charlie Parker. "Think about it for a minute," you friend said.  "Suppose those fluffs, as you call them, were not errors.  Suppose they were deliberate.  Suppose they were in effect two notes simultaneously, maybe even one the overtone of the other."

"That would make Davis smarter than Parker,"  you said.

"Why does it have to be a matter of smart versus dumb or a single note against two notes being played in the same space?What if his playing is a different voicing to the theme than the voicing Charlie Parker is using?  What if they're both right, each in his own way."

You scoffed.  "You can't get two simultaneous notes on a trumpet."

"Who says?"  Your friend picked up his trumpet, blew on the mouth piece, his cheeks and lower jaw seeming to expand beyond their natural ability to expand.  He played two notes simultaneously.

In any number of ways, listening to a recording of what was once a thematic outline, meant to expose its melodic possibilities, is of a piece with rereading a short story or novel to see how the author achieved a particular emotional effect.  

In one important way, your trumpet-playing friend, long dead from either too much heroin or heroin that was too bad, taught you how to read Shakespeare.  "You don't read for the words, man.  You read for the music.  You come at the text like it was a theme chart, you and the reeds and brass playing the meter.  Then it's your turn and you read it for the flight of it as it wants to take wing and reach a destination."

Whether the words are your own or those of someone else, you look for the music of the theme.  Where is it going?  What is its emotional destination?  What are you or the writer bringing to it?

You were hearing fluffs or slurs while Miles Davis was hearing something that called on the notes to do things you'd not heard notes do before.  You were more impressed with Charlie Parker's speed and dexterity than what he was making the melodic path do.  Slow down, lad.  Listen.

You do not want to repeat unless by doing so you will achieve a surprising and exciting effect you might otherwise have missed, simply because, say, someone has a vocabulary you envy.  Even then, a vocabulary can cause distraction.  What was that word?  Do I have to stop, look it up, then continue?  Can I instead guess what the word meant?  It sounded as though it belonged in the sentence.  When was the last time you looked at brick wall,then asked if a particular brick belonged there?

Editorial passes allow the writer and the editor to look at the direction the story is or is not taking, then make choices that will effect the outcome without seeming to call attention to themselves.  If you're going to repeat a word, a phrase, a theme, the repetition has to have a purpose.  So far as you've been able to see, purpose always means the evocation of a specific feeling.

On the Street Where You May or May Not Live

In the ordinary course of an evening's walk, you might find yourself one block west of the street where you live and two or three blocks northeast of here, to a place where, amidst real places and businesses, there are imaginary ones, populated by imaginary individuals, all of whom have performed imaginary acts.

Don't worry, you tell yourself; it is only fiction of which you speak, not delusion.  You might well have been drawn to walk those blocks on Victoria Street except that there were enough rain showers to make walking without your Barbour rain coat an impractical venture.  Instead, you drove past, looking for a place where you could get a quicker and smaller meal than Trattoria Victoria, on the block where your imagination has made additions, particularly a used bookstore, where a woman who is hiding from an abusive husband works.

In addition to the Trattoria Victoria on that side of the street, there is also Hotel Victoria, where the woman who works in the used bookshop lives, or at least lived, because she is now, as they say in police procedural novels and novels of intrigue, "gone into the wind."  There is every probability that the corpse on the bed of the room in Hotel Victoria where the woman who works in the used bookstore once lived is the abusive husband who has caught up with her.

There is every reason to believe the proprietor of the used bookstore is tangentially implicated in this event because, like your father, who had a number of stores or shops, all of which he could not wait to get out of, he hired the woman to work in the used bookshop in order to give him the opportunity to spend less time in it and yet keep it open, in case someone should enter the used bookstore, wishing to browse or buy a particular used book.

Even though the proprietor of the used bookstore is imaginary, you know him well, have endowed him with recognizable traits and responses from your own storehouse of responses and the wiring of other behavior you've observed,  This is how the process works for you, how imaginary individuals become real,do things they try to control but can't, try to accommodate circumstances that seem overwhelming.

In someways, you remind yourself of the short,graying,elderly woman who pushes a jerry-built cart into the neighborhood on Wednesday afternoons, no doubt to take advantage of the trash being at its fullest before collection.  Attached to her cart are several large plastic bags into which she places bottles and cans with some redemption value.  There are bags for such things as discarded appliances, clothing, and such miscellany as house plants, books, and groceries past their use-by date.  You call her Señora, she calls you Senor Patron.

Your last conversation had to do with you giving her a few items you'd intended for Good Will, and your acknowledging how you were both interested in collecting things for later use.  This has helped you see yet another way in which you are in fact sorting through the dregs of uninteresting parts of your life and the lives of others for the purpose of constructing the same sort of results Dr. Victor Frankenstein was so assiduously pursuing.

Not long ago, there appeared on your patio table, which already has a pot of succulents, a different shard of succulent, which you immediately placed in your pot, knowing it was a gift from Señora.  There are items about your dwelling that you did not chose; they were given to you by others with the thought that you might like them.  Over time, you've come to like these things for other reasons than you like the things reflecting your taste and choices, vivid reminders that you chose not to exercise too much control, lest you find yourself in a more or less comfortable bubble, where there exists a danger that you will become numbed to your surroundings.

This year was the first year in your lifetime when you had, on your kitchen table, the equivalent of a Nativity Scene, no doubt from your maid.  You do not know where it is now, but for the time it was on your table, you noticed it.  In one of your drawers, an acorn from a student.  Each tie you open the drawer, you have an opportunity to think about acorns in ways you had never thought about them before.

In such ways, you live in a tumble of events and individuals, some imagined, some actual, reminding you of the ongoing progression of events and individuals in your imagination, in your memory, and of contemporary presence, crowding, merging, conflating.  There are at least two paintings on your walls that you did not chose; they arrived as though from independent sources to take their place with pictures and art of your choice.  At least two of the rugs are not of your choice, calling your attention to them in ways beyond the ways of the rugs you did chose.

Your world here is that delightful combination of what you make of it and what it makes of you.

Lifting the Rock of Story after the Rainfall of Event

 At this stage of your discovery arc about story, you find yourself giving the most attention to point-of-view, the filter through which the dramatic materials transferred to the reader and,because you put in your hours reading, the dramatic materials accessible to you.

Much of your early ventures with reading used the omniscient presence of an author or designated-driver-type storyteller to present the material.  Once upon a time, the narrator is telling you, and yes, turning your attention back to some of those works you read when you were first starting, that still works.  

Because you've done it and enjoyed it, you can still, if necessary, do it again.  You can--and have--gone back to novels you deliberately avoided, pick them up now, and settle in.  

Perhaps it is stretching the metaphor to suggest that you can still enjoy a vinyl, 78-rpm record, scratchy though it might be.  You've even taken to downloading some of the records made before your birth year, listening to them with the pleasure of hearing them for the first few times.

All the while, you were finding yourself attracted to writers who assigned the story to one of the characters in the first-person narrative filter.  In all probability, you'd have stopped your explanation of preference with the simplistic, "First-person sounds more immediate."  

Yes, and no, because you were discovering third-person also sounded more immediate when used in the proper hands.  And then came what for the longest time was your favorite of all, multiple point-of-view, particularly as demonstrated by Wilkie Collins in The Moonstone, which was one of the first novels you began rereading early on in your career.

You began to notice the distant, authorial voice beginning to disappear in the flood of more immediate filtration of story through a designated driver character, quite often the protagonist.  This meant among other things that the narrator had to be directly involved with the pacing, progress, and outcome of the story, even if it turned out to be a somewhat distant effect such as that of Nick Caraway, in his narration of The Great Gatsby.

What this progression of focus means to you is the essence of simplicity:  You want the narrator to be affected by the story, knocked about by it, possibly even caused to undergo some painful learning.  You also want the narrator or narrators to have some tangible participation in the way the story progresses and comes to some form, however Chekhovian, of the resolution.

The seemingly remoteness of the authorial presence often precludes the kinds of progression and payoff you enjoy and think to build into your own composition.  Somerset Maugham, whom you still admire, was able to "tell" his stories while making it seem the characters were in charge; this was one of the things you most admired about him.  

You knew Maugham's on-stage presence was manufactured,and done so to create a certain suavity and acceptance that were not a part of his daily behavior.  But you completely believed the way he saw his characters and you believed the way they behaved.  

In a sense, from the Maugham short stories, you once got the image of a large rock being lifted in a garden, directly after a rain storm.  The lifted rock, the sudden light, and any number of creatures would scurry, each on its own vector, away from the sudden exposure.

Although he did not write that many short stories, the ones included in his Dubliners established James Joyce as well able to delegate the filtering of his stories to the characters, themselves, if anything adding an emotional power to the moments of epiphany he sought to convey to the reader.  You believed the characters in all the stories, including the one most foreign of all of them to you, "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," because Joyce did not once stop to tell you how they felt or what they were thinking; he plunked them right down into the middle of action.  It remained for you, the reader, to think and feel your way through what was said in context with what actions were being performed while the dialogue was being said.

You don't want anything to get in your way of trying to decipher the coded language and feelings of the characters as they scurry about after the rock has been lifted.

The Piquant Story in a Five-Ingredient Pasta

  When you were in the depths of your encounter with the flu and norovirus, not being able to think gave you a good deal to think about.  Your difficulty came in linking thoughts to action.  Get up, meant get out of bed.  One beat.  Get up, go to the bathroom, brush your teeth.  Three beats, and, for the record, pretty much the way you had to organize your movements.

There often was a considerable space between beats.  Get up.  Now organize the shifting of weight to allow for standing.  Now, lurch to the bathroom.  Once there, lean on the sink.  Reach for the electric toothbrush.  Reach for the tube of dental paste.  

As you progressed through this double-whammy of an affliction, you became able to make better connections, see yourself as you frequently do, from above or below or next to, observing the you in action, aware of the decisions and implementations linking the basic beats, doing things you in ordinary circumstances, not narovirus and flue circumstances.

Not that you needed the education to the basic concepts of movement, although in all things connected with writing, finding dramatic reinforcement is vital.  Writing, seeing story, looking for story, identifying traces of story embedded in reality, these are all learned responses.  

In the same way the musician must practice and the dancer spend time at the barre, the painter or drawer put in hours with the sketchbook, moments in real life and in story must be examined, practiced, not taken for granted.Writers often forget their own need to practice, with the result that all the characters begin sounding alike.

A favored memory from the few times you spent in company with Julia Child was one in which she observed, perhaps to you, perhaps to her niece, who is the wife of your dearest friend, perhaps to the effects of sipping away at bloody mary's:  "The true chef  achieves results not by adding ingredients but by not adding them."  Somewhere later in the afternoon, she spoke of her favorite recipe for pasta being one in which there were only five ingredients, one of those being the pasta.  

Since you tend to be a kitchen-sink type of person, this caught your interest.  You began to experiment:  1)linguini, 2) kalamata olives, 3) fruity olive oil, [California of Sicilian] 4) chopped scallions, 5) grated Romano cheese.  Depending on the contents of your fridge, 4) often became buds of garlic, and if you'd snacked away all the olives, as you tend to do, 2) could become a tin of anchovy or a tin of sardines.

While it is abundantly clear to you that you could survive on a diet of linguini with clam sauce, this five-ingredient pasta has had a notable impact on the way you behave in the kitchen, while shopping for groceries, and your attitude toward beats, those telling, dramatic moments in story where the writer reveals, willingly or not, his or her mastery of movement.

Another matter of abundant clarity is your own tendency at one time to put too many movements into a given story, your frequent marginal note to author/clients:  "Do we need this scene?" or "Do we need this altercation to go on for so many pages?" You still believe in the process of over-orchestration in order to achieve the right balance, thus your dialogue sometimes reminds you of Jose Ferrer, cast as Cyrano de Bergerac, simultaneously fencing with an opponent with sword and with words.  "And as I end the refrain--thrust home!"  Ouch, but yes.

Too many beats in a scene and you have opened the door for that most unwelcomed of all guests in story--boredom.  You recall the time when one of your clients, an emeritus professor in some aspect of a social science, was reading a scene in which his protagonist was engaged in a fight.  When he finished reading, you noticed a fine mist of perspiration on his brow.  "What I want to know,"  you said, "is who won that fight?"  And he, no stranger to last-minute epiphany, said, "I don't really know."

When unnecessary movements get in the way of you navigating from bed to bathroom sink to brush your teeth, the result is not so much direct boredom as it is the presence of another real enemy, the overthink.  It comes down to your preference for being able to see who won the fight, then get on with the action involved in the consequences.