Moment Of Truth

March 11th, 2010

I had one of those work sessions yesterday where I began with no idea what would happen to my poor characters. Although I rarely have things mapped out in much detail, usually, by the time I get to a new scene or a new chapter, I’ve begun to at least get some glimmers of where I am going and need only direct my narrative eye that way to see the next step.

Not so on this occasion. I had a vague idea where the characters would be in a chapter or two, but had absolutely no vision for how they would get there, which meant, given how I work, that it was not even certain the characters would be where I thought they would be in a chapter or two, which meant I really had no idea where the whole story was going.

This lent the session a Moment of Truth quality, which is an unfortunate place to begin. So after doing some laundry that suddenly needed doing, and cleaning the litter box, and washing some dishes, and checking my email once more, I faced The Moment.

Which, oddly, was no different than any other moment. Just me at my computer—where, after a bit of nothingness, it occurred to me that my characters were headed someplace cold. I tested this idea, as one does, and found that it was so. I had a sentence, and two hours later a chapter, and the sun shone a little brighter.

I was reminded of Hemmingway’s mantra: Just write one true sentence. It was the word “true” that always hung me up. I had always taken it to mean true in the philosophical sense, which is not so useful for a storyteller. However, seeking one sentence that is true to the story you are telling is useful. Once you have found that sentence you have reentered the stream of your story and you are sailing again.

Telling a story is never about a Moment of Truth. There is no moment in a river, unless you stand on a rock, in which case you are no longer in the river anymore. Telling a story, whether you are seeking your first sentence or your last, is always about remaining true to its current, which as any captain will tell you, is a continuous job, each moment as important as the next.

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Tags: Hemmingway, Truth, Writing
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What You Cannot See

March 10th, 2010

I write often in this space about the uselessness of worry, and I was reminded of this uselessness again yesterday when someone passed along a quote—attributable, we think, to the Dalai Lama—that goes: “If a problem can be solved, why worry about it? And if a problem can’t be solved, why worry about it?”

A good one all right, and it came to me when there was much worry floating around my brain. I have come to accept that I am writing stories only in part because I like to tell stories. Storytelling was what first brought me to the page many, many years ago, but somewhere in my psyche I saw in the writing of stories an opportunity to make peace with the unknown. Unfortunately, it is only now that I am finally understanding this.

Because I cannot outline, the worry comes in the form of the question, “What will happen next?” I have tried outlining to relieve this, but it is no use. So I am left to make peace with the unknown. The question, by the way, only nags me when I am not writing. When I am writing I am in the process of answering the question so there is no problem. It’s the not-writing that is the problem.

There are many techniques for shooing the worry away, but I won’t bother with those here. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. In the end, there is no formula for making peace with the unknown; in the end, there is only acceptance, which is not a fixed point but a balance to be maintained as you would your footing on a log.

I dream sometimes of a kind of unconsciousness. There are places in my life where I never worry but where other people do. Why couldn’t the writing be like that? Because if it were, I would have to worry about something else so that I could learn to not worry about it. There is no avoiding this lesson. For me, then, the peace comes quickest when I admit my worry has nothing whatsoever to do with writing or stories. I am merely perched on the edge of the moment, wringing my hands as I squint unseeing into the future, trying to determine if that place is friendly or unfriendly, when of course it is neither—it is simply not here yet.

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Tags: Dalai Lama, Worry, Writing
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End Of Argument

March 9th, 2010

I once watched Paul McCartney being interviewed by Howard Stern. Stern, as he must, wanted to know why McCartney wasn’t “nailing every girl he met,” and Sir Paul gave what I thought was the best and only response to this sort of question you can give: “Because it’s not by bag, Love. It’s just not my bag.”

End of discussion. Why? Because McCartney gave no explanation. Explanations, you see, can be argued with. McCartney offered no logic behind his choice, he didn’t try to frame it as some kind of moral decision—he simply didn’t want to bounce from bed to bed. That was the beginning and end of it.

That moment has stuck with me all these years. I think we arrive at two kinds of decisions. One is the result of deliberation. Perhaps we make lists of pros and cons, we research, we ask advice, and we think about it. I never feel secure with the choices I make in this way. No matter how much advice I seek or how many websites I consult, I always feel as though I’m trying to guess whether a coin will come up heads or tails.

The only thing I ever know for sure is what I want, or, to put it in McCartney’s 60’s vernacular, what my bag is. Everything else is guesswork. There is no truer and more continuous example of this than writing. If asked, you might say you chose this word or that scene because you were hoping for a certain affect or pacing, but even then you were choosing words and scenes to align with affects and pacing you wanted. There is no right answer.

Resting in what you want is the surest way to avoid argument, with yourself and with other people. In fact, I spend far more time arguing with myself than with other people. You see, I don’t always want to admit that the reason I’m doing something is simply because I want to. This seems too flimsy a rationale. Sometimes I will go so far as to summon some imaginary villain to question my decisions, and I will attempt to argue this lout into intellectual submission. Never works. There’s always another argument for why I could have done something else. Until, that is, I admit that I was only doing what I was doing because I wanted to, because doing otherwise would have been swimming against the current of my truest self, and that ends all argument on the spot.

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Tags: Arguments, Howard Stern, Paul McCartney, Writing
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What Follows You

March 8th, 2010

Jasper Fforde was born into a family of academics and had to overcome a belief that he couldn’t be a writer without any formal higher education. Seven books later he has concluded that the minimum requirement for writing is “being human.”

I couldn’t agree more. Writing schools (in the form of MFA programs) abound, and I imagine they serve a useful purpose. If nothing else, they get young and youngish would-be writers to write a lot under the tutelage of an experienced writer. Contacts can be made as well. Certain literary agents scour the ranks of Iowa Writers Workshop graduates for potential clients, and in her interview Zoë Ferarris described a soiree thrown by her MFA program where agents mingled with the new blood.

So all to the good. But in the end, all the writing classes in the world will never take the place of hours spent in the chair. Writing is not about a relationship between you and a writer teacher, or you and a critique group, or even you and your readership—it is a relationship between you and you. After you’ve written what you wanted to write is when the teachers and readers come in, and that is a particular relationship and experience unto itself.

The writing, however, is about you talking to you. Or, more accurately, you listening to you. Those hours in the chair are where you train your ear to hone in on your most authentic stream of thought and feeling. That stream is unique to you, and so it is ultimately impossible for anyone else to tell you where it is or what it sounds like.

Alone we are at our desks. Some of us fear this solitude, some of us are afraid to leave it. Yet there is nothing to fear, in leaving the solitude or in turning toward it. That silence and solitude is with you at all times, and if you train your ear well enough, you will hear it wherever you are—ending arguments, choosing the perfect gift, and putting you to sleep at night.

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Tags: Education, Jasper Fforde, Listening, Writing, Zoe Ferraris
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What Survives

March 5th, 2010

Daniel Pink’s book Drive brought out the missionary in me. I hadn’t gotten through the introduction and I was already quoting it to my wife. Drive is about what motivates people to do what they do, and the introduction begins with a story of an experiment conducted on monkeys years ago. The monkeys had to solve a simple puzzle, and what the test discovered, to the scientists’ confusion and amazement, was the monkeys solved the puzzle without any reward whatsoever being offered. No food, no affection—nothing. What’s more, when food was offered as a reward, the monkeys did worse.

I knew I wanted to interview Daniel as soon as I read this. Why did the monkeys solve the puzzle if doing so didn’t bring them food, shelter, or affection? Apparently because solving the puzzle pleased them. And apparently this need—this intrinsic need, as Pink describes it—is as strong if not stronger than all those survival-based needs. Pink goes on to show how humans, to the contrary of all the motivational thought of the last few centuries, are far more motivated by an intrinsic need for progress and pleasure than the rewards of money and fame or the threat of punishment.

How revolutionary. And yet it is. There is a comfort in the simplistic carrot and stick approach to motivation. If people are at base animals trying to survive, then in the end the best way to get them to do what we want them to do is to appeal to their need for safety or their fear of harm.

But if you’ve ever tried to write a book, you know the carrot and stick not only don’t apply, they don’t even exist. No one will punish you for not writing a book they haven’t asked to read, and if it’s money you’re after, writing is probably not the quickest means to that end. Yet you have to love writing to write a book, and once you have discovered something you love to do, you would just about rather crawl into a ditch and die than have that thing taken from you.

Survival is a fear-based, ersatz motivation. In fact, it is not even motivation; it is merely racing away from death. True motivation moves us toward something. Not moving toward what you love is a death all its own, though fortunately a death from which you can be resurrected with something as simple as a choice.

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Tags: Daniel Pink, love, Survival, Writing
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Teach Them Well

March 4th, 2010

I have featured a number of authors lately – Sir Ken Robinson, Daniel Pink, James Bach – and might be interviewing another (an eleven year-old writing/teaching prodigy, but we shall see) who deal in one way or another with education. Until I had children, my own thoughts about education could be boiled down to: get through it and then get on with real life because you’re going to have to teach yourself everything you really want to learn anyway.

I continue to feel that way, more or less, but the fact remains school dominates our early life, returns again once we have children, and maybe a third time with grandchildren. In my own life, my sister is a devoted public school teacher, and my father-in-law started two experimental schools in the 70s (School One and A.L.P., for you Rhode Islanders).

But why is Author interested in education? Because in the end every writer, just as every person, is a teacher and a student. What we call education or a school system is us wrangling—officially—over what it means to be human. At some point, students—and particularly child students—will ask, “Why do I have to do this?” This is an entirely legitimate question, and our answers, from, “Because I said so,” to, “Because it’s what we do,” to, “I don’t know,” reveal to us our current view of life, sometimes buried beneath useless habitual thinking.

I sometimes think of my characters as students in this way. They ask me, “Why do I have to go talk to the king?” Because I said so isn’t going to work. Those characters, just like our children, want to be themselves, and so I have to find the real reason my hero would go to the king. This search for the character’s self is the joy and challenge of writing.

The same is true of teaching. All we are ever teaching is how to be ourselves. Strange to think because every route toward the self is different, but the route is never the point. That the route exists is the point. I’ve known good teachers and I’ve known bad teachers and all the good teachers share one thing in common: a knowledge that life is interesting and meaningful. Without that understanding, you can never teach anything, you can only share your misery and hope your students reject you emphatically enough to wake you from your nightmare.

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Tags: Daniel Pink, Education, James Bach, Ken Robinson
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Pick Up Your Lantern

March 3rd, 2010

Yesterday’s Daily Minute had David Ellis talking about the trick of putting your protagonist in danger. Particularly if you are working in a series, threatening your hero or heroine’s life does ask a certain added degree of willing suspension of disbelief, as everyone in the room knows that if this person dies there will be no next book. Even if you don’t work in a series, unless you’re writing a tragedy of sorts, no matter how dire a situation, the hero is probably going to live.

There are other perils beyond loss of life—loss of love, loss of faith, loss of dignity—all of which are guns of sorts pointed at our protagonists that we ask our reader to believe might be fired. In most stories these metaphorical guns are fired and score direct hits, leaving the hero or heroine shattered and in need of repair.

And repair is almost always what our stories are all about. Why? Because everyone is born with love, faith, and dignity, but in losing any one of these and finding them again we become conscious. This is often frightening at first as we realize that we can give up any one of these pillars of our happiness with nothing more than a thought, such as, “No one loves me.” Think it, and it is true for exactly as long as you believe it.

And so stranded as we are, we must find our road back to ourselves. Fiction is filled with such journeys. Where else, really, can the hero go? Everyone’s journey, however, is unique, and try as we may to convince others that if they would only follow our footsteps they would be happy too—in truth, like knights looking for the grail, if anyone were to follow our path they would become lost.

Stories are not road maps nor were they ever intended to be. As we watch another soul, real or imagined, wend their way home from the forest, we are compelled to pick up our own lantern and continue on. Tales of happy returns spark memories within ourselves of that to which we yearn, and that spark lights a beacon in the distance toward which we might turn. Everything we seek we already know, but in finding our way home the world outside our door grows friendlier, as we come to understand that all road eventually lead to one place.

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Tags: David Ellis, Journeys, Peril, Writing
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Story Of Your Life

March 1st, 2010

Books on writing often warn beginning authors against switching perspectives. This refers to the sometimes disorienting technique of hopping the POV (Point OF View) from one character to another. Indeed, when it’s done within scenes or within paragraphs, it can be confusing, but like all “rules”, this is more of a guideline than an absolute. As always, anything can work if it truly serves the story. I was just talking to Garth Stein yesterday who wrote a bestseller from the POV of a dog. Anything is possible.

One of my favorite truisms says, “A miracle is a shift in perspective.” The author of this quote was not referring to narrative POV shifts, though in a way she could have been. We are all familiar with what I think of as a favorite sit-com device—the same event retold from each character’s perspective to comic effect. Often, this kind of story will include a version showing what “actually” happened, often identifiable by the characters not behaving like circus parodies of themselves.

Yet reality, it seems to me, exists only through the prism of perspective. As much as philosophers and scientists might yearn for an absolute, such a thing does not exist within human knowing. We are, by the purely physical limitations of eyesight alone, bound to our unique (literal) view of the world. Include thoughts, personal histories, cultures, gender and all the other vagaries that might influence perception, and life seems like a thing reflected in shattered glass, leading to existential cries of, “What’s really going on here?”

The gift of human imagination, however, is that reality isn’t fixed. What the novelist might learn in moving POV from one character to another is reality’s ultimate generosity. We are never bound to one perception by anything more than our own determination to maintain it. Just as one character might see a threat where another sees opportunity, our perception that we are not smart enough, or pretty enough, or fast enough, or rich enough, is nothing more than one of those sit-com character’s take on the current state of things. As the author of your life, you have the power to move at will from character to character, as it were, searching for the perspective that serves you best, that tells the story of your life as you actually wish to hear it.

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Tags: Garth Stein, Perspecitve, POV, Writing
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Bloodletting

February 26th, 2010

I recently interviewed Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl, whose debut YA Fantasy Beautiful Creatures has already been published in 30 countries. Not bad for two women who wrote the book on a dare and never intended to submit it for publication—but more on that next month when their interview airs.

Kami and Margaret, as you have probably guessed, are a writing team. Every chapter is passed back and forth between them and edited with such ruthless disregard for the other’s attachment to a scene or a phrase (they call it a “very bloody process”) that by the end they often don’t know who wrote what.

I can’t imagine writing a novel with anyone else, but I have to say I admire these two women. Currently, my wife is the only one to whom I show my work before it goes off to my agent, and I think she has come to dread the delivery of my latest draft. This is entirely my fault. I was not always that gracious when it came to receiving criticism, constructive or otherwise. By the time she was done telling me what she thought of what she had read I was often wondering why she had bothered marrying me.

But I have mellowed over the years, and the protectiveness I once felt for every sentence has fallen away. The beauty of Kami and Margaret’s process is that if a line or scene doesn’t serve the story, it’s gone, no questions asked. After all, that’s the only reason a line or scene was written in the first place. The trouble comes when a line isn’t written to serve the story but the writer. Not surprising in this case that a writer might snarl or crumble when someone criticizes what he or she has written.

As I have said before, our work is not us, and the editing process is where we must be most clear about that. And if you have suffered the confusion of mistaking your work for you—trust me when I tell you it is a great relief to end that perception. Not only does the work flourish, free as it is now to shed its precious but unwanted trappings, but you may rest a little easier as well knowing there isn’t some second you bouncing around New York, vulnerable to all the knives of other people’s taste.

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Tags: Editing, Kami Garcia, Margaret Stohl, Writing
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Moment Of Truth

What You Cannot See

End Of Argument

What Follows You

What Survives

Teach Them Well

Pick Up Your Lantern

Recommended Reading

Story Of Your Life

Bloodletting

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