Structure and Shape

As I was working on the never-ending revision of an early novel, a particularly layered, difficult novel to be fair, I found myself asking the question: can structure alone save a story?  Now even as I type that, I know it is a ludicrous question, for no element alone can carry a story, let alone save it.  Everything in a novel works in harmony if it works at all.  It would be asking too much of any element, be it structure, plot, character to do the work a whole book must do.  But as I contemplated the intended revisions, I saw also that by giving careful, renewed attention to the shape of the story I also found entrance to other elements to partner with it, aspects of narrative and character that echoed the logic behind the desired structural revision.  To the journal I turned.  From the journal to the manuscript.  Work begets more work, but perhaps together solutions emerge.

A Word from Lethem on Invention

"Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing. "


— Jonathan Lethem

On Wild Boars, Backyard Bones, and the State of Modern Marriage: A Review

New World Monkeys: A Novel
By Nancy Mauro
Shaye Areheart Books (2009)

In a quality, wonderfully imagined and darkly comic debut novel, Nancy Mauro has certainly written one of the most memorable opening chapters of the year, a chapter that swings between the metaphoric rendering of an accident that reflects Lily and Duncan’s troubled marriage in the second paragraph:

            “What they won’t talk about is the way Lily’s arm shunted
             across his chest in an attempt to grab the wheel. To steer
             their destiny in the space before impact. He’ll later recall
             this moment as something stretched and precipitous over
             which he was suspended, eggbeater legs and arms akimbo.”

Creating a blackly humorous turn three pages later, Mauro stages the other unexpected result of this accident once they discover the object they had tried to miss was a wild boar (and a new source of tension for the couple):

             “…when he [Duncan] looks back at the tire iron, Lily
             herself brings it down with a batter’s crack against the
             base of the animal’s skull.”

This becomes one of the many things Lilly and Duncan don’t talk about. And the wild boar turns out to be the mascot for the Hudson River Valley town where Lily intends to retreat while she finishes her dissertation on architectural history (specifically the history of the pointed arch), an animal beloved by certain of the town’s strange citizenry. The boar even has a name: The Sovereign of the Deep Wood. The house in this strange town of Osterhagen is part of Lily’s birthright, a decaying old house as loaded with questionable familial history as it is with bad wiring and rotting floorboards. Some of that history includes the disappearance two generations ago of the family’s nanny. The plan is that Duncan will flee his pressure-ridden job as the de facto creative director of a Manhattan advertising agency for weekends of respite in pastoral Osterhagen with Lily. Action such as killing the town boar and finding human remains while gardening in the back yard begin to put a damper on Duncan’s enthusiasm for these weekends and add renewed strain to an already strained marriage. Just wait until Lily meets up with Lloyd, a self-declared peeping Tom and want-to-be pervert. Or perhaps it is the lynching proposed by some town elders and nightly cannon firing, both seemingly targeted at Lily and Duncan, that worsens Duncan’s fragile sanity.

Sound strange? You bet, but wonderfully so in its best moments. The book is one of those reads that makes you wonder sometimes while you are reading but dares you to put it down. Consistently surprising, always strangely funny, and excellently crafted, Mauro handles this dark comedy with deftness. Moreover, along the way she makes readers consider the nature of marriage and identity and offers such a scathing (while hilarious) indictment of the advertising industry that readers won’t be surprised to learn that Mauro worked in the industry prior to becoming a novelist. This element of the novel is so pointed that—once we stop looking at accident scenes and following local voyeurs—we recognize something elementally tragic in our image-driven, consumer-fixated culture. Maybe these are some of the themes we often fail to talk about.

This won’t be a book for every reader, but it will be a welcome read for those who love sarcasm and something just a little askew. Mauro certainly will be a writer we will hear more from as her career progresses.

Man, Underground: a new novel excerpt

While still in the early stages of revision, the first chapter of my new novel feels ready to share.  So here it is, the premier of Man, Underground, a dark, contemporary comedy.  Comments welcomed.  I hope you enjoy and want to read more:

The world of men, like the world of trees, is overwhelmingly an upright world, one of verticality such that when isolated in a horizontal landscape—when we emerge from our cover like prey within the field of vision of hunters or snipers—we are always seen. Even if moving at a distance, we are visible, just as the upright things we build are visible, like our houses and our skyscrapers. While obviously we need rest and so we must join the horizontal world at regular intervals, we typically do so in private, and thus, encountering a man in public disobeying the expectations of the upright world, we find his presence incongruous, just as we find something awry, maybe even sad, in the tree that is no longer upright, knowing as we do, that life has gone out of it.


We are so accustomed to made objects that occupy only the vertical world, like walls and doors, we find them ordinary. Yet we become so conditioned to their function we don’t know how to respond when such objects adhere to our expectations of verticality but not to our perceptions of context, no more than we know how we are supposed to behave when we pass the homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk. Such as it is for people when they encounter my front door, a door that stands alone in a field, a door without visible walls, without the context of “house” as we’ve come to expect it. If you can’t picture such a thing or you imagine only a two dimensional world with a door in a frame standing isolated in space, go back a few generations and think root cellar where the door only provides entrance to what’s below and you will have a fair equivalent of my front door. Picture the entrance to a place meant to preserve vegetables within the consistent cool womb of the earth, only this one preserves the sanity of a man. Maybe it is easier for you to accept its presence if you consider it as belonging to another age, another function, or another context. Perhaps I am easier to accept if you consider me in the same way.

Most people build houses against space. Give them a hill where the wind never stops blowing and they’ll build a house on top of it. It can be a hilltop in the middle of the prairie or in an otherwise flat valley or one rising from a suburb and still they erect a two or three story monstrosity atop it. They’ll build a private road to it if they must, install guardrails and hire a sand truck in winter and they’re at risk of sliding off the side of their beloved hill. They’ll complain at how the wind whistles through gaps in window sills and door frames and bemoan how they can’t keep water on their lawn for the steepness of its slope. All the while they’ll tell you how much they admire the view, but the only evidence you’ll see that they are home up there on that hill above you is the constant blue flicker of their TV screens at night. I know. I live below several hills. I live in a place where it hasn’t forgotten how to snow in winter even if people have forgotten how to drive or how to wear sensible shoes that accommodate the weather, a place where the wind blows and where smart farmers from another century planted wind breaks, and where, once upon a time, root cellars were common.

It is no great mystery how people are, no more than it’s a mystery that people talk about anyone who is different from them. People who live atop hills know they are the topic of conversations. And it may be simple-mindedness on my part, but I have little doubt that, consciously or not, those who live atop hills feel a kind of superiority. The house on the hill is a concept nearly as old as time. Like I said, people like to talk about those who are different from themselves. The poor talk badly about the rich and the rich about the poor and the powerful about the powerless and on and on.

I know people talk about me. I’d be a fool not to know. The crazy man in his cave. The recluse who lives down there with his spiders and snakes. Mr. Underground Man. I know they talk about more than my little underground house. Funny how people who don’t have anything to say to you always have a lot to say about you. I say let them talk.

Now I don’t really live in a cave or a hole in the ground. Let’s set that clear from the start. My home may be unconventional but it’s not primitive. Quite the opposite: complete with two large freezers and a well-stocked pantry, not to mention high-end, energy efficient washer and dryer. In designer color no less. I just take advantage of what the good earth provides. Like insulation during cold winters and hot summers.

Few people have ever crossed my threshold, so mostly they make assumptions. Like they take one look at my front door and assume that I’m more than a few bricks short of a full load. I suppose I shouldn’t blame them. I’m not so thick-headed I can’t realize how funny a door sticking up out of a field looks to most. Because my front door is little more than a gap cut into a berm, a door that opens onto a down stairwell, maybe it’s natural that people assume I live in the dark. If only they’d take a moment to consider the landscape falls away beyond my field, that there is a view the berm intentionally blocks. If they’d only consider the perspective of my home they don’t have from the road, they’d see it is purposely built into the side of a tall cut-bank, that indeed the south side of my home is visible from above and is full of windows and that in the winter, when the sun is low on the horizon, I get long hours of good light and fine solar heat. They don’t see the overhung roof that blocks the angle of mid-day sun in summer of the tile near the windows that absorbs and retains the heat. I wasn’t mindless when I built this place. But most people see my lone doorway and know I must be stone crazy.

Not that I go out of my way to correct them. And not that I didn’t build that door in the style I did for a laugh too. You’ve got to find humor where you can. Sometimes you’ve got to take pleasure in what is not said, have some confidence in the conversations that will occur regardless of your absence.

I don’t talk much to folks. I stick mostly to myself. I like talking to kids and eccentrics best when I am out and about in the world because they aren’t afraid to say what’s on their mind, or to ask questions, or act on their curiosity. The curious just might learn something. They might just stumble into a fact or an answer that opens their mind a crack. So when children approach me when I’m out at the library or the grocery store or just out for a walk for exercise in good weather—contrary to popular belief, I do leave home fairly regularly—I make it a point to talk with them if they approach me and I answer their questions. Okay, I’ll admit that sometimes I tease them, and if they ask if I live with snakes like they’ve heard, I’ll tell them I do, that the place is rampant with poisonous diamondbacks and that I cook them for my supper and decorate my Christmas tree with their rattles. I like watching their eyes grow wide and then that wrinkle of healthy skepticism furrow their brows. Mostly though I answer their questions honestly—the way I like my questions answered—and mostly kids know when a guy is teasing them. So I don’t mind when they play on my roof, because what’s it going to bother me if some little kids are running around up there in a field or they use it as a place to throw a ball back and forth. Just so long as they stay out of my garden, I’m content. What do I care? It’s not like I hear them, what with two feet of earth and a field full of native grasses and a foot of concrete between me and them. It’s not like they’re going to set fire to the place. Just so long as they don’t come bearing shovels and a jackhammer and a desire to dig a deep grave.

Of course I know there are stories about how I bury people down here or commit some other atrocious crimes or that I’ve filled the walls with sacks of money, but those stories usually have their origins with adults and the stories get screwed up and turned over and twisted, kind of like how bible stories get handed on. You might have a hard time getting to where the story began by the time it gets passed along enough and everybody gets their own agenda tagged on. They certainly bear little resemblance to the truth. But in my experience most folks wouldn’t know the truth if it bit them on their backside. Such stories are a way of explaining what you don’t understand, a way of labeling and categorizing something or someone that seems outside of you and your range of experience. It’s like people who collect insects and keep them neatly labeled, the wings all shiny and rigid with shellac and safe inside their glass cases. They just seem to forget the pins stuck through the thorax that allow for this bit of otherness to seem permanently knowable and contained.

I realize I sound bitter and I don’t mean to. I really don’t. The truth is I don’t know much about other people any more than they know about me. I don’t really understand the rest of the culture, so largely I’ve withdrawn from it. I have a history like all of us do, and my particular history helped me to decide I’d had enough of the world’s patterns—the above ground world, as I call it—and I retired to this underground world.

Now don’t misunderstand that. I fear I can make it sound as if I’m making some grand political statement, that my decision to “unplug,” as it were, has significant attachments to it. It doesn’t. I’m not Ralph Elision’s invisible man. I pay for the electricity I use same as the next guy, only perhaps I’ve learned to use a lot less. I remain disillusioned with the culture we’ve created, maybe more than disillusioned, but I can’t claim that I was used for a greater cause or that I became a spokesman for those who are alienated and abused and dehumanized or that I came close to a power that I eventually saw as corrupting. No, I’m an ordinary man. Or I was an ordinary man if choosing to live one’s life by simpler patterns makes one extraordinary. I don’t think it does. Quite the opposite. I’m so ordinary you could clone me and I’d look just like the rest of us out wandering through our lives complaining about what hand we’ve been dealt, convinced that we’ve been disrespected for one trifle or another, living by the entirely ordinary, mundane patterns of our sleeping lives, each year a bit less hair where I want it and a bit more where I don’t. I’m no different from you other than you look at me with the same disdain as you do the guy with the sign at the off-ramp looking for a handout. No, mine is no political cause, no statement, no protest. Remember back in the day when Timothy Leary said “Tune in. Turn on. Drop out,” well I dropped out. Maybe I still wore cowboy pajamas when he said it and maybe it took me almost another forty years after he said it to heed his advice, but I finally did nonetheless, I dropped out, opted out as the insurance folks like to say.

Now perhaps I’m being unintentionally misleading. As I’ve suggested, I came along a good while after Leary. I grew up between wars, came of age in that time when America had visibly failed, yet it still wanted to believe it was required to pass its values around the world whether others wanted them or not but it allowed Coke and Pepsi and Exxon and Halliburton and McDonalds to fight the wars rather than employ planes and bombs and grunts on the ground. I was a Cold War kid all the way. Tuck your head and kiss your ass goodbye while presidents and premiers called each other names. By the time I cast my first ballot, we had already forgotten most of the lessons of Vietnam and, along with a few missing brain cells, we had pretty much forgotten Leary too. We’d hired an actor to pretend to be President and got our news from animated Max Headroom, who offered another version of that President. We’d killed Lennon. We’d long since stopped selling planes to Iran and started selling them to Iraq and had watched a Sea Stallion helicopter fly into its refueling plane. Yeah, those blissful, turn your head and cough days of “peace.” Even after the wall came down, those “peaceful days” prepped us for machete murders in the millions across Africa and snipers in an Olympic city, for “wars” on drugs and “wars” on terror.

I shouldn’t complain. I’ve got no room. I chose the path of inaction. I have become Melville’s Bartleby responding to the world around me with a continuous “I would prefer not to.” Buy this product. I would prefer not to. Follow this fad. I would prefer not to. Join this campaign. No thanks, I’d rather not. Sit and watch mindless drivel manufactured in the TV studio’s writer lounges and newsroom editing floors. Perhaps not. Join an on-line “social community” while an actual community lies beyond the computer connection. Pass. Accept the lies of our beloved and bribed elected officials. Thanks, no, I’ve had my fill.

I only encountered Melville’s Bartleby within the past year. I didn’t really use to be much of a reader, which is ironic given that my degree states otherwise. But I’ll admit I’ve taken much of my solace in the world of books in the last years, and when I met a character like Bartleby I had no difficulty understanding his actions, or his inactions as the case may be. Am I, like Bartleby, too lazy to fight a corrupted culture? Damn straight. For years I tried to tune it out, but the noise is cacophonous, so loud and so constant it still tries to creep in long after I opted out.

I get Bartleby. He makes perfect sense to me. Just as I get Elision’s invisible man much more clearly in his below ground squat than I do when he was the one behind the podium. I’ve long understood his blind rage more than I do his youthful hope. I get his silence more than I get the voice over the microphone. I understand silence. I crave it. There’s just so much noise in the world, like everyone is vying for your attention so they try and shout louder than the next guy. Have you noticed? When was the last time you heard quiet? My little place snug down here inside the earth helps. It can’t block out the world, but if you get enough insulation between yourself and all the noise, it helps.

Letting Go

I have just finished writing the first draft of a new novel.  It has been nearly a year in the making.  I have but a bit more typing to catch up on and I have been, with the indulgence of my patient wife, reading the full book for the first time.  So now I reach that critical stage of revision, that process of assessing the book and seeing its needs and attempting to locate the solutions for those needs.  It is always precarious stuff, for the completion of a project of this size can cloud your vision.  It is like faling in love.  You are are so certain you are falling that you can't see clearly, yet of course love scares you, for it is an investment in another and in yourself and in blind belief, and out of that fear the logical part of you knows you must act a bit carefully, knows that you can't make real commitments without intelligence and respect while also remaining true to your core emotional self.  With a book, it is too easy to love it and just as easy to despise it.  Niether are useful places for edting and revision.  You must find the middle ground wherein you can identify what is deserving of loving and what cannot be passed over without more exertion, more discipline.  You have to find a way to walk the line between emotion and logic--the book will need both.

It is also a time of beginning the long goodbye.  You have lived this book every day of your life for nearly a year and you will continue to live with it daily for some months more.  Its people and places are as real to you, maybe more real to you than your waking life.  But if you get it right, if you finish the revison and give the book its own life, you must let it go out into the world and suffer the ravages of the world on its own.  You're trying your best to make it ready.  You want it strong and hardy and ready to succeed in the world.  You have devoted yourself to the thing and now you must let it go.  (And maybe more scary still, you must now go find its sibling and start all over again--but that is, as they say, another story.)

I have written this current book in the year where my youngest child has also left home and gone out into the world. We've tried our best to make her ready, and while we celebrate her success, we are in a kind of deep grief, for she and her sisters have been the focus of our live's most important work for the span of a generation now.  It is hard work for her too.  Like the book, the world we face upon our own is not always an immediately kind or welcoming one, or so it seems.  The hardest lesson for the parents, and for writers, maybe harder still for children (and books?) is to recognize that letting go is not saying goodbye, that the bonds remain every bit as strong, as formative even once we've had to share this being with the larger world.

Moran

Moran
Originally uploaded by wordwright

Okay, so some of us have an easier time finding inspiration (not to mention being humbled) than others. Mount Moran on a fall morning--Grand Teton National Park.

Contrast

Contrast
Originally uploaded by wordwright

Fall is beginning to show its colors here in Wyoming. Actually, that is untrue, for this picture was shot in Idaho, just a few miles from my home in Wyoming. My running joke (pardon the pun) is that most days I jog into Idaho--making myself sound impressive and all that. The picture shows off a local sub-species, the Rocky Mountain Maple peeking around the stark white of an Aspen trunk. Fall is my favorite time of year in this neck of the woods.

Ms. Freebush

Ms. Freebush
Originally uploaded by wordwright

Okay, I know, how low can I go, posting a blog entry on the dog? Let me attempt all my lame excuses at least. Let's face it, I'm a writer and as such I spend a great deal of time alone working. It's a big house. There are SO many blank sheets of paper. Ms. Gracie Lou Freebush is my primary company a good deal of the time. All three daughters have abandoned me for college. My wife, silly girl, seems to think she is required to go to work five days a week. Need I go on? You have to admit, this face is pretty irresistible.

Learning

Just a quick quotation from the late David Foster Wallace:
"...learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.  It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.  Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed."

"Organic" Writing?

Obviously I use the term "organic" a great deal throughout this blog and throughout my discussions of writing process. It is, I must admit, a favorite way of talking about writing (and about life, for that matter), which should come as no surprise as it appears in the subtitle of this blog. But what is it? For me, the application of the term organic comes as an extension of viewing the writing process as natural, of wishing to see the act of creative enterprise as a true element of interacting with the larger world, including the world of ideas, as a natural expression of human nature. It means that one takes one's cues from what the world provides. It comes from a fundamental belief that humans have a need to communicate ideas and have evolved in ways ideally suited to doing so. Much of it has to do with trusting the writing process. I believe in trusting organic forces, whether one sees those forces as harmony or karma or faith or feng shui or chi or any other expression of a belief that there are natural states of harmonic convergence and that when we tap into them we are tapping something universal within human consciousness. It is this view that helps explain the frequent occurrence that accompanies writing in a very focused manner on a project where the facts one needs seem to appear suddenly everywhere--in what you are reading at that moment, on the news, in other people's conversations. Now, lets face it, those facts were probably circulating out there anyway, but now you're paying attention. Still, it can feel as if the world placed them for you to encounter.

Okay, that's all rather mystic and abstract and perhaps sounds a little ridiculous. Let me put it into simpler terms within the confines of writing. While I'm not saying to turn a blind eye to the hard work and the revision that is inherent in producing writing worth reading, I am saying that there are times where you have to trust the process of writing itself. It its most extreme form, sometimes this means getting the editor within you out of the way of the child, for there is something about employing the imagination that we associate with childhood and the editor in you is more likely to be telling you about things you can't do or shouldn't do rather than things you might experiment with. It is about trusting that there will be time to revise later but that you must have text in the first place in order to revise. It means trusting that the act of creation is a natural desire.

Organic can mean, as an example, trusting that writing tends to form a natural structure unique to the task at hand and that part of revision is learning to see such structure and capitalize on it. Take a look at a brilliant story like Tim O'Brien's "They Things They Carried" as an example. One doesn't have to be a brilliantly insightful reader to quickly recognize that the base form of the entire story is essentially a list and that the base rhythm throughout is the cadence of a march. Given that it is a story centered on a platoon in Vietnam, a ground unit "humping" (marching with every conceivable tool and weapon they might need) from checkpoint to checkpoint, isolated in the jungle, connected to comrades outside the platoon only by radio, the cadence and the list both make sense. They are alone. They are powered only by their own legs. They carry the weight of death with them always. They are convinced they will never return to the world they knew before Vietnam. Because O'Brien is the soldier poet that he is, and because he is nearly the definition of the literary crafts person, surely he saw these elements of listing and rhythm within his drafts and openly focused upon employing them fully. But we must also allow that both elements arrive naturally from the very thing being described, from the nature of combat in Vietnam, perhaps even from the nature of the place itself. It can be simpler than that too: isn't it natural that a writer trying to transcribe a languid dream falls into elongated,, serpentine sentences mired with funky syntax? Or that the writer attempting to convey a fist fight suddenly writes staccato? Isn't that what the subjects naturally lead the writer towards?

It is in this view of writing that what I speak about bears relation to Frank Lloyd Wright's vision of organic architecture. From early on, even in his "prairie house" period, Wright studied the lines of the prairie, the rolling hills, the expanse of sky, the way the sky squeezed the light at the horizon, the ways vertical structures like tree lines altered the sense of space, the notions of line and rectangle. These studies then infused his constructions, lowering roof lines, playing with angular light, taking away walls to open living space, using simplicity and minimalism. This was the world he walked within daily, and he began to extend those naturalistic elements as he encountered other sorts of geographies. He took what the world offered. Writers do something similar, for all material has its own set of natural inclinations and its own inherent restrictions, not just from setting but from character sensibilities, actions, historical context, and naturally occurring metaphors.

It can be deeper than this too, yet for me much or my obsession with the application of organics in writing is simply trusting that eventually the story will find its way to getting told. I am a writer who rarely knows the full scope of any story I am writing during the time of the writing. The ending is almost never known to me until I've exposed enough of the story to see it, rather like the archaeologist unearthing an object; not only must much of the object come into view, it must be taken into context with the other objects around it, within the facts of history and theory and other available evidence, all this before one might know the object and conjecture its purpose with any authority. Such blindness scares many but I actually take comfort in it. I believe that I must see scenes in my mind to have any hope of writing them, but if I can only see a scene or perhaps two scenes ahead, I'm perfectly content. Or perhaps I can only see a vague image on the horizon or I have some rather inarticulate sense of where, psychologically, I hope characters might reach, yet that is sufficient, in my experience, to trust that consistent daily writing, close listening, and careful reading will get me to the whole story.

Ultimately, while writing is about ideas and universal experiences and about the conveyance of honest emotions, the vehicle of writing is always language. Words. Words are all we really have as writers. But of course words are organic creations that arise out of experience and natural sound, and vocal recreation of shape and form, out of mythology and recounted history. Together words start to bump and grind. They create rhythm and sound and music. They are as elemental to humans intent upon expressing their experiences as are the other organic elements needed for sustaining life and soul. It is in this context that I employ the roots of the term organic within writing.

Organic suggests to me that there are reasons dominant metaphors exist across languages and cultures and texts. Metaphors like the garden and the river. We don't have to share the same language to recognize the presence of natural cycles in both or to see how those cycles help us to understand the metaphysics of life and death, rebirth and time, sewing and harvesting. Nature gives us the actual and nature gives us the metaphorical too. Creative artists in any medium can recognize the presence of both as well as the applications to their forms and to their ideas that become appropriate extensions of them.

Guiding lights

Guiding lights
Originally uploaded by James Jordan

My obsession with lighthouses continues, so I've included this photo from Flickr by James Jordon. My last name actually means "lamp lighter," and although I'm reasonably confident that is a reference to lighting street lamps, perhaps I can claim my name has some birthright to this obsession. I love the form of the lighthouse as well as its symbolism. Besides, who couldn't use a little guidence to get them safely through the dark?

Parallelism

I've been thinking a great deal lately about the role of parallelism in literature, the way that in good work it can be as if we've entered a hall of mirrors, a hall of mirrors erected at angles and cantered by varying degrees such that images reflect back on themselves although never in a direct line, never a simple exact duplicate. This is how jazz works differently than pop music where you can hear the recurrent theme but it never repeats precisely, instead the theme gets reborn again and again in new variations. In pop you get simply, overt repetition of the theme--catchy, sing-worthy, but predictable on many levels. Good books work more like jazz. Sometimes they do so at the largest levels of construction and sometimes only in the most nuanced bits of metaphor and image. The best books often do both.

Perhaps I've been thinking about this so much lately because I am nearing the end of the first draft of a new novel. Frequently on a given day I am writing new material in the morning, material that is creeping up on the awareness that it is pushing near the ending, and by late morning or early afternoon I am either typing material or editing material (more often both--well always both as I type) that was originally written months ago. This constant forward backward movement allows me to look at the earliest passages of the book from the distance of some hindsight (and a new awareness of where the story actually goes) and to see in the newest material the moments when it best reflects the language, tone, images, and rhythms of its origins. Of course this allows me to see, and I hope, capitalize more fully on the echoes and parallelisms that are organically present in the text. That's how it is for me: discovering what has occurred organically at the rather subconscious phase of the original writing and then stepping away into the analytical ability to see in it what is natural what works, and then, with luck, enhance that.

The presence of such development was made material for me the other night when my wife and I were watching a commentary from the writers and directors of "The West Wing" about an episode titled "Two Cathedrals." (Okay, I am rarely a fan of TV, and the series is now years removed, but we are rapid fans of this show; one of those rare shows that is powerfully and smartly written, beautifully directed, and brilliantly acted--why aren't there more?) The writer and director spoke at length about the way they began to envision the use of the convergence of two story lines and the employment of the past and the present through the parallelism of events and of settings. Employing parallelism, symbolism, repeated image and gesture and parallelism in dialogue lines, they move the viewer seamlessly in time, going so far as to trust the viewer enough to be intelligent enough to catch more nuanced points of time transition (something TV rarely does--trust the intelligence of its audience). Beyond employing parallelism in time, they also used these patterns to allow the personal life of the President to reflect the political and executive decisions he encountered, which is one of the very things that drew viewers to the series in the first place, the humanization of a fictional equivalent of those in power from whom we are so otherwise removed and yet so dependent upon. Is that not one of the roles of literature after all, to humanize and activate ideas and experiences that otherwise seem removed and too large in scope to comprehend.

About the same time as seeing this commentary I was finishing my reading of an older Stewart O'Nam novel The Names of the Dead. Now O'Nam is consistently an enviable craftsman, someone whose work I not only enjoy but learn from. He uses parallelism in both plot and image to do something similar and move the reader within two time periods--past and present. Given that Larry Markham, his protagonist suffers PTSD from his service as a medic in Vietnam, the creation of the reader's ability to inhabit the two time periods is critical, for of course Larry does, as do all people who have survived horrific and traumatic circumstances. Memory does not leave. Indeed science shows us that without biological manipulation, the memory of absolute fear cannot leave. The reader must experience this in order to begin to formulate and understanding of Larry's present. The fluidity with which O'Nam transitions such movement in time is precisely the sort of thing writers must study if they are to learn the larger elements of craft.

Of course literature can succeed with employing identifiable applications of parallelism in part because life does. We often fail to see the images and symbols and interweaving lines of such parallelism in our lives simply because our lives are to close to see in focus. Literature allows us to examine such structures and to ask why they exist, to examine what they reveal. As always, when we encounter such applications in good books, we examine our lives and our world anew as well.

Mothers and Daughters

Last night the cell phone was thrust upon me by my crying wife as she proclaimed, "I can't do this any more." On the other end of the call was our youngest daughter, also in tears and loaded with repeated apologies, a daughter who had been crying for days as she struggled to adapt to college on the other side of the country. The tears came through the phone while more tears emitted from the other room. They were both emotionally exhausted, both drained because of their love for the other, both lost in missing one another.

Now typically, my three daughters give me endless grief for being the emotional one. My wife, excited for the opportunities they face at their respective colleges, typically puts on the braver face, is quicker to remind them of how rich and full their lives are. But this is our baby. And she is struggling with the newness and the distance, and even her stoic mother finally crumpled. Is there anything worse than hearing those you love cry while in the knowledge you are incapable of removing the source of their pain? Yet the pain is caused not by harm but by love. Perhaps that is the greatest source of pain after all. Their love will see them through, even if they find that hard to believe in the moment.

In the meanwhile, because I was needed, it was a time to swallow my own feelings of missing this youngest child, to push them aside and remind them that the love shared throughout the family will prove our solace too. Tonight, I try to find the words that might offer comfort. Tomorrow, I'll leave some space to cry.

One Hurdle into Another

So, you're writing a novel. You've been writing the novel for months. You meet the book every day, first thing in the morning. It waits for you. On good days it is friendly and talks to you. You start to feel the characters in the room. Some days the writing soars, some days it slogs along, its feet stuck in the muck at the swamp bottom. It's the typical stuff of writing a novel. Each day goes by and more pages are full of ink, and if you're lucky, with each day you begin to see a bit further ahead, begin to see scenes, however murky, images in sepia and a bit out of focus, like E.L. Doctorow says when he talks about writing being like driving at night with the headlights on; you can't always see everything around you, but if you pay close enough attention you can reach your destination. As the story begins to unfold and more scenes become visible to you, the horizon seems a little closer.

Eventually, as happened to me this week, I reached a scene that I've been writing towards for months, a scene that offers a critical turning point in the novel. It occurs more than two hundred pages into the novel. It is a scene I've seen vaguely for months, the exposure of a character's past that is pivotal to the novel. In this case, it is a scene that stands at the apex of the rising action, so I have approached it like a climber, and like a climber, I hope the way down off this summit is an easier route than the way up. I want to think it will be, for the flat lands beyond should be visible now, right?

I finished the scene after many days of work on it with elation. Like all writing worth reading, it will need work still. A great deal of work. But essentially the scene feels as if it has accomplished what I had hoped for. The drafted scene felt fulfilling. It seemed to move the characters into a space in which they were comfortable and established the past I had in mind in a way that felt organic and believable.

The elation lasted about twenty four hours. Then came the realization (as if this should have been any kind of surprise) that I had no real idea what happened next, no real ideal of how these characters will resolve their lives. If this surprises you, it holds no such surprise for me. This is the nature of how I work. The further into the text I am, the more I've learned about it and its direction, but at best the full story appears rather like a Polaroid developing out of the haze. In this instance I've reached a critical moment alongside my characters, but there is more story of course. So I go back to work. I listen for their voices. I try not to panic. I return to that strange but wonderfully satisfying place of semi-consciousness where fiction happens most often for me, so focused on the novel that it begins to mix and distort with actual life at times and writing seems a sort of perpetual dream state. I hang on to the shadows of the larger book, the blurry horizon of its potential ending, the abstractions of what the characters need to accomplish in their lives. From these abstractions I scan for the detailed scenes that will give them motion and voice and possibility, and I wait. I write more and I wait more. I watch for shape. I watch for scenes that begin to form in my subconsciousness. I read backward and I write forward and listen.

I would be lying if I failed to admit that such moments scare me a great deal. There are days when I fully believe I will never find the next word, let alone the next scene or the book's ending. It has been a week full of such days where writing a paragraph takes exhausting effort and the result still looks like it has been insulted with an autopsy. I long for the days when the writing takes control and I turn pages of new material one after another. This must be something parallel to how the bipolar patient feels all of his life. Still, the only answer I know with certainly is that it is time to go back upstairs and work some more. Find the next word and trust that it leads to one after that. If these are characters worth asking someone to share their lives with, then I must trust them to offer direction, for if they are written with real integrity, they will reveal the next events their lives hold.

New Books of Note

Murray Edwards, an editing client of mine through my business theWORDwright (http://www.thewordwright.net/), has recently published a new collection of short stories. Looking for Lucy Gilligan is a wonderfully quirky collection that is often laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes irreverent, and still manages to prove frequently touching. Don't be fooled by Edwards' dry humor, for he proves a sensitive writer, one who paints portraits of complex, concrete characters unafraid of showing the world themselves as they really are. It is a rewarding first collection. The book offers a wonderful individualized vision of contemporary Texas. Visit the website for the book at http://www.lucygilligan.com/.

Another recent book of interest that is receiving very good reviews is the true story of a Nazi concentration camp survivor. I am biased on this one, I must admit, for the author is an old college friend--Von Petersen--and I had the pleasure of reading the book while it was still in manuscript. Carl's Story: The Persistence of Hope is a moving true account of one man's unlikely survival of the Nazi horror and of the time he endured at three of the infamous Nazi camps. The book is extremely compelling and an edge-of-the-seat adventure ride of narrow escapes, happen-chance salvation, and enduring hope. It is an important book about commonplace heroism and stoicism. The author and its subject were recently interviewed on NPR, and the book has been well-received by notable authors who have written on the Holocaust. It is available at http://amazon.com/.

Revision Revisited

The word "confluence" appears all over this page I know, but it is something real, something organic, a thing I have come to believe in and and an expression I have come to use where others might use karma or sycronicity or even community. It has particular meaning for me in regards to writing and is on my mind nearly always when I am in the deep trenches of revision. Particularly when one is revising a novel, perhaps the strongest force directing revision is finding the points of confluence, finding, if you will, where the threads interect like the fibers from which the woven garment is constructed. Where does an image need to reoccur? Where does a signifier associated with a character help prepare for her future self or indicate his lingering presence? Where does one chapter echo another? More imortantly still, when one trusts the organic nature of the creative process, how can one learn to listen to the text by paying attention to where currents naturally intersect?

In his wonderful novel The Goat Bridge T.M. McNally writes: "Study the common things of this world long enough and things reveal increasingly what they have in common: namely, the language by which we describe them. This search for detecting forms of order and arrangement, always, is the work of all artists, regardless of form." Such is the work of book-length revision, detecting order, studying arrangement via shared language. Do so long enough, carefully enough and you create work that achieves intrinsic unity. Then maybe, if you have done your job well, the book helps you see how such unity is reflected in the world around you too, for it is the world that gave you the book from within the confuence of the imaginative and the real.

Rain

How appropriate that I've been writing about water all morning, for it has been raining all day. I hear it drumming over my head and rushing from the eaves. Cold mountain rain in April. Still, it melts the snow, and I've begun to see hints and glimmers of green.

Endless Revision

For years as a teacher I preached that so much of writing was really rewriting, that revision literally often meant re-seeing a text. How true that remains. Water Cycle is a book that has taken years and years to write, in large part because I had to learn how to write a book, and in large part because I chose a project (perhaps purposefully, perhaps to impose self-punishment) that is intricate, complicated, layered. I've spent the last three or four days not just revisiting a text that most would feel is complete, but working on one more short chapter that might help relieve an itch that has always existed, a need to have one of the dead characters in the book have a chance at touching the reader from beyond the grave. It is a revision that is a response both to a need I have always felt but never been able to articulate and a reaction to my interpretation of what several agents have been quietly indicating. Mostly this latest revision comes with a thank you to a quality reader who (my youngest daughter) who not only proved a close, and capable reader, but one willing to take me seriously when I asked her questions. 18 and about to leave for college, the quality of her reading reminds me again of why we must never dismiss the young just because they are young, and why we can always sustain hope for our future. Sometime a reader can offer you just the right prompt to make you ask questions of yourself and then return to instincts on how you respond to those questions. Ultimately good revision can be as fulfilling as the initial creative act, for you begin to see the deeper textures, the veins and sinew running within a text that fuel it and hold it together. In the end the focus remains on finding the way to tell all the story as it wishes and needs to be told. It's just that sometime it takes years to listen to the story.

Transcendence

Transcendence
Originally uploaded by wordwright

This is one of my favorite shots taken in the fall of 2007 from under the arch in front of the Chapel of Tranquility in Grand Teton National Park. Some days the mountains really are that crisp. I liked the framing of the bell chain and the top of the archway, as well as the way it crops the top of the chapel and links it to the Grand. When I luck into pictures like this on crisp fall days when the sky is so clear, I sometimes can't believe how beautiful this world is and how lucky I am to live in such unspoiled country.