Problems and Solutions

This morning I sat down at my desk, read for a while, and then asked myself the same questions I’ve been asking for the past 15 years: what can this writer teach me? What does s/he do especially well that I can study? How would I write this differently? What I haven’t often thought of is how I came to ask these questions as a kind of fiction writer’s daily office.

When I was a MFA student at the University of Montana, the famous editor, Rust Hills, came to talk in our program. Though retired, he was still connected to the fiction being published in Esquire and he seemed to radiate all the confidence and clarity of the romantic minimalist tradition—the pared-down prose style that writers like Hemingway, Carver, and Ford helped make the dominant paradigm in North American fiction for the latter half of the 20^th century.

Here was Rust Hills, sitting in our workshop, live and in person. Everyone was excited and I was no exception. I was very much a fan of his book, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular. At the time, it seemed definitive, the young fiction writer’s answer book. Forget Rilke. Here was someone who told you exactly how not to embarrass yourself on the page, how not to write like a fool, in a way that sounded far more elegant and far less proscriptive than John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction—the other book on writing that everyone trusted at the time.

When I met Hills at the usual dreadful faculty-grad student party for visiting dignitaries, I was also happy to discover that one of my heroes was a decent human being—something that quickly becomes an exception rather than a rule when encountering visiting celebrities in MFA programs. He was a soft-spoken thoughtful person, witty, and perfectly at ease in every situation. He was essentially a gentleman. Moreover, he spoke about writing with the sense of quiet surety that comes from being wholly immersed in a particular aesthetic. When this happens, the boundaries and characteristics of the style in question can provide an answer for everything. And though I have since rejected this as a kind of creative sickness, an over-stylization that traps imagination and limits possibilities, I was young enough back then to believe. Someone with Hills’ degree of conviction had to be right. At least, he had to be righter than someone like me who wasn’t sure about anything as far as how to write was concerned.

For the rest of that year, I rededicated myself to writing the Lished-down Carverian prose line. I read Ford’s Women with Men, Munro’s Open Secrets, Mona Simpson’s Anywhere But Here, and Janet Fitch’s White Oleander. I took “Gazebo” and “Cathedral” apart, writing imitations that tried to evoke the same invisible weight of implication between simple lines. I learned how to admire Exley’s A Fan’s Notes and I fell in love with the stories in Busch’s Absent Friends. But then I read Waltzing the Cat and everything fell apart.

Up late one night, smoking, too much coffee, I looked at the handwritten draft of my latest story and started to feel sick—that heartsick dread we get when we don’t want to admit that a particular piece of writing has already failed, failed conceptually and therefore completely. I tore it up. I looked at the last 10 or 12 story manuscripts in my cardboard “finished pieces” box: crap. In fact, they were a special kind of crap: slavish craven imitation. I had produced most of a story collection over the last year and it was garbage. And I didn’t know if I could write another word. I didn’t know if I should or if I even wanted to. It seemed that my personal heroes were guilty of some glaring lies of omission. A long night of whiskey ensued in which a fellow grad student and I jumped a train and wound up in a snow bank, which did not help.

Hung over and covered in angst the next day, I wanted to blame Pam Houston for everything awful in my life, especially for my artistic faith crisis. But how do you blame someone who wakes you up? Is it really possible to blame Lucifer if the apple makes you less gullible? In Waltzing the Cat, Houston was doing just what the minimalists did—practicing economy, implicitly characterizing through dialogue and action, showing change only within the frame of implications and assumptions established in the beginning of the story. But she was also enjoying words. A playful absurdity undercut many of her scenes where straight Hemingway-esque minimalism would grind its teeth in existential despair. Essentially, Pam Houston’s collection gave me a way to imagine other ways of writing—ways that diverged radically from what Hills easily set forth as the way it should be.

I read Cowboys Are My Weakness that week and had a similar experience. Then I started to look at how she was doing these things, how she could blend the hard-cut storytelling abilities of the minimalists with maximalist sensibilities. That line of inquiry helped me produce “Living in It”—a short story that would become the first in my book, Gravity. While working on Gravity, I discovered that there were a lot of established fiction writers diverging from the minimalist party line.

Pam Houston made it possible for me to learn from a different tradition that was largely overlooked by my writing teachers, most of whom had built careers around prose that was minimalist and therefore easily publishable and who typically defended their way as The Way to Write. But that was untrue. If I’ve learned anything by asking myself how other writers do things, it’s that there is no one way. It’s a hard realization, especially for beginning writers looking for some kind of objective clarity.

Since having that realization, I’ve taught students of my own and have suggested that by all means they should imitate the writers who interest them. It’s one of the best ways to learn. At the same time, it’s important not to become a true believer—not to get sucked into an existing aesthetic simply because it’s there and it gives you boundaries. Those boundaries will ultimately kill your work.

Instead, become a student of literature and read with a writer’s eye. Read Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular and The Art of Fiction and Story and Narrative Design. But also use your own brain. Keep a journal or a computer file in which you write about what you’re learning. Above all else, keep an open mind. Genre writers can teach you structure and dramatic tension like no one else. Poets can teach you voice and depth. Playwrights live on implicit characterization. And other hybrid forms like comic books, online interactive narratives (hypertext, etc.), songs, legends, and folk tales each have something that is particularly useful to learn. Read everything.

This is what I’ve done and what I continue to do. And I think this is what has led me to question everything I read as if its author were sitting across from me, eager to explain.

Art is Your Right

Don’t buy into the romantic assumption that being a creative artist is easy for those who are truly talented and meant to do it. This is a materialistic commercial lie. Something I believe: art is part of being human and must therefore be available to everyone. And those who do it right never find it easy; though, the publishing industry, for example, may find it easier to sell certain books if readers believe that the writers being published are like idiot savants.

Everyone has an aptitude for some kind of creative process. Finding out what it is means finding out more of what it means to be human and alive. Not investigating this firsthand means voluntarily accepting an impersonal, commercially interested assumption about one’s creative potential—some external story about you imagined and written by someone who doesn’t even know you. It’s an affront to everything unique and valuable in the individual self.

Moreover, it elevates money over art, which is fundamentally disconnected from the reasons we make art in the first place. This is essentially stupid. Therefore, we need to appreciate art. We should create it and consume it, but we should not assume that it is something mysterious, selective, elite, or random. It is better to think of artistic ability as an attainment, a product of self-cultivation that uses materials we already have. And our job is to understand it, interact with it, develop it, and teach this praxis to others. Our job is not to worship those being held up to us as a select, anointed group. Our job is to understand how commerce reacts with art and then to set all that aside so we can do our own work.

By an Inner Sky I Chart My Way

The structure of what I write is the structure of my emotional life. My fiction isn’t autobiographical in any overt way. Yet how I approach my subject matter depends on the way I see the world and myself in it. Therefore, conceptually, perceptually, structurally, I write the narrative of my life the way I write any narrative—certainly in words but, in a deeper sense, in images. Strung together in the mind, they form a constellation of emotions unique to me. The physical manuscript is a chart of these moments, an inner star map, a personal zodiac that makes it possible for others to see what I have seen and feel the way I have felt. The secret of such navigation is not in the words but in the structural relations between them, not in any given star but in the proportionality of the constellation.

This is my current understanding of creative writing: building associations between emotional states instead of focusing on monolithic things (characters, paragraphs, settings, scenes). A character is a humanlike set of particularities that exist in relation to something else. A paragraph is a movement, an emotional gesture. A setting is an environmental set of particularities, also significant insofar as it relates to something else (even to the eye of the reader, Mr. Fish). A scene is all of the above moving together and in relation to all the other scenes. And all of it exists for one purpose—to map a structure of intricate emotional movements that took place first in my mind, now in yours.

Is this difficult or complicated? Not really. But it is more honest, more elemental (-ary), than saying, “according to so-and-so, a character should do X, Y, and Z in a dramatic scene.” Focusing on X, Y, and Z misses the point. I don’t write to fulfill a preset arrangement of static constituent categories. I write to move my reader. And that is just as dynamic, relational, and variable as any emotion I might feel.

The White Space and Transitions in Short Stories

The following is taken from my response to a former student who asked: “When writing a story and you find that you need to hop around from one scene to another, but not start a new chapter, what do you do?” In other words—how I decided to construe the question—how do you break scenes and create implicit transitions between them?

When I started training myself to think in scenes, I relied heavily on the “white space” as a time lapse / separator. The visual analogue of this would be the classic “wipe” transition from TV and movies. It’s technical shorthand for “there is nothing more of significance to show in this particular time and place.” We can use this because modern writers have pretty much stopped trying to adhere to the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action.

Here is one theory about this departure. As a form, the novel is older than the short story and the stage play is older than the novel. Each form owes a lot to its predecessor. Even late British stage melodrama generally observed the Aristotelian dramatic unities. In other words, the only “jumping around” were the extremely conservative transitions between acts and scenes on stage—existing primarily so the stage hands could change the scenery and the actors could change costumes, etc. But as western culture changed, public and private space got redefined, and middle class leisure reading became important (Habermas is the man to read to understand this in conjunction with the rise of the novel). Fiction in English began to transform from highly episodic, picaresque shipwreck narratives (think: Defoe) and expositions of female morality (think: Richardson) to the highly stylized escapism of the Gothic novel. The aesthetic of Gothic romance rebelled against tightly controlled forms.

Enter: Jane Austen and Northanger Abbey, her first published novel and pretty much a parody of the Gothic style. As soon as we got this, we were ready for Victorian realism in the novel, which kept the idea of what a novel could be (a long, sometimes convoluted, graphic portrayal of a person’s life) and dropped the Gothic melodrama. This is important because Edgar Allen Poe, one of the most significant figures in the early development of the short story form, argued (roughly around the same time) that a story should be readable in one sitting (back to Aristotle). His reasons were less aesthetic and more practical: he wanted to encourage magazine fiction as a legitimate market (here is a good summary of his motivations). So the story form emerged in a time when the novel (as the dominant form of fiction) was breaking away from classical, formal assumptions about when / where / how. And the short story was defined (and marketed) as something compact that you could read out of a magazine in a single setting.

This is where the use of white spaces comes in. Early story writers either used them to tell broader more “novelistic” stories or didn’t use them and scaled everything down in order to tell a more compact tale. The idea was to produce a single emotion (incidentally, where we will get the modernist concept of epiphany). Twain used white spaces like this. Hemingway adopted them but more sparingly (we see them also in Fitzgerald and Maupassant)—still trying for that definitive emotional moment. But in the 1960s, the maximalists rebelled against this, arguing that life actually wasn’t at all the way modern realism made it out to be. Given the highly subjective, variable nature of human experience, the early maximalists (think: Elkin, Barthelme, Coover) found “minimalist realism” to be highly unrealistic! This means that in their work technical moves like white spaces could be a lot of different things (look at the Coover link).

Realists loudly criticized such maximalist departures from what they considered to be a highly defined, clearly articulated form. Needless to say, their vehemence fit right into the tradition I’ve been describing (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Pirsig is a wonderful exploration of the tension between classical and romantic aesthetics).

Can we use the white space to good effect, defining what it will be the way Coover does in his famous story or in the way of William Vollmann, David Foster Wallace, Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson–the recent postmodern maximalists? Yep. We can.

So back to the original question: “When writing a story and you find that you need to hop around from one scene to another, but not start a new chapter, what do you do?” Given everything I’ve said, here’s the answer that might not have made sense otherwise: first determine what you’re trying to make the reader feel. Because “form” should follow function instead of a set of classical assumptions about how to dramatically interpret experience through structure.

Moreover, everyone wants to write a story that will show up in the New Yorker or a novel that will make them famous with the NYC publishing machine. But the corporate model for success as a fiction writer actually cannot be taught or learned. That kind of success is as serendipitous as any other—no matter what the book industry would have young writers believe. So if I were to tell students, “Do what feels right and make your own rules,” no one would listen. Instead, I have begun with “let’s follow some of the rules.” Only later have I followed that with: forget about what people say you should do. Study literature as your guide and learn from what other writers have done. Then do your own thing.

Right now, I’m writing a story, a novella, and working on a full-length novel. In each of these, my only goal is to create the emotional movements / moments I need to create.

AIR AND LIGHT AND TIME AND SPACE – Charles Bukowski

AIR AND LIGHT AND TIME AND SPACE

”– you know, I’ve either had a family, a job,
something has always been in the
way
but now
I’ve sold my house, I’ve found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
for the first time in my life I’m going to have
a place and the time to
create.”

no baby, if you’re going to create
you’re going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you’re on
welfare,
you’re going to create with part of your mind and your body blown
away,
you’re going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,
flood and fire.

baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
and don’t create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.

– Charles Bukowski

The Rules of Attraction: a Lesson in the Use of Idiosyncratic Voice

Like most who went to college in the early 1990s, I had the misfortune of first encountering Bret Easton Ellis’ work indirectly via the movie adaptations. I rented Less Than Zero and thought it was okay in a rich-kids-get-the-blues-and-make-bad-life-decisions sort of way.

James Spader was simultaneously cool yet annoying. And that pretty much characterized my opinion of Ellis’ sensibility for a few years. The people he wrote about were outside my experience; though, I’d known a few self-entitled wealthy narcissists at my private high school in San Diego—daddy owned a boat and mommy took valium, that sort of thing. But what I didn’t realize was that I had been reacting to the oversimplified (maybe clichéd) Hollywood tropes that had been extracted from his writing—a serious case of lost in adaptation, particularly for Less Than Zero and Rules of Attraction.

During my MFA, my professors were so determined to dismiss Ellis—I thought, mostly out of jealousy—that their vitriol actually piqued my interest. I went through everything he had out at the time—Less Than Zero, Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, The Informers, Glamorama, and Lunar Park. I read them with an eye for plot structure. I paid attention to his use of short chapters and perspective shifts. But mostly I apprenticed myself to his idiosyncratic first person voice. I think that’s his strongest stylistic quality as a fiction writer.

Consider this beginning to one of Lauren’s chapters in Rules (and note the Hemingway-esque beginning in media res via “And”):

And it’s quiet now, and over. I’m standing by Sean’s window. It’s almost morning, but still dark. It’s weird and maybe it’s my imagination but I’m positive I can hear the aria from La Wally coming from somewhere, not across the lawn since the party is over, but it might be somewhere in this house perhaps. I have my toga wrapped around me and occasionally I’ll look over and watch him sleep in the glow of his blue digital alarm clock light. I’m not tired anymore. I smoke a cigarette. A silhouette moves in another window, in another house across from this one. Somewhere a bottle breaks.

And it continues this way. The entire chapter is a long paragraph—not atypical for the novel or its predecessor, Less Than Zero. The speaker’s voice—her tone, how she frames her perceptions in words—shows more about who she is than what may or may not be taking place in the physical setting. Just as each voice-driven passage sets up a rhythm using long and short sentences to evoke the personality of the speaker, the lengths and arrangement of the chapters does the same thing on a larger scale. By the end, we realize that the novel works not only because the main characters (speakers) have fully formed implicit arcs, but also because the novel itself has a vocal arc. Rules weaves each of the character arcs together to push beyond their particular experiences and make a broad statement: this is what’s happening to your children, America. Or, maybe, this is what happens when you give your child a gold card and send her off to college.

The broad message is what it is: disaffected youth with too many resources, upper-class dry rot. We can watch any movie about the idle rich and enjoy the cliché of the vacuous aristocrat. In my opinion, those things are less important than what we can learn by paying attention to Ellis’ writing style. He has been put down for having a trite, narrow message (and for his off-color comments on social networks and the media), but I think we definitely miss out on what’s great about his work if we let those things take precedence over the writing itself. When I want to solve a problem using voice and I don’t know how to do it, he is one of my teachers.

England: First Thoughts

London from the bridge... — I find this photo interesting because I did not edit it in any way. This is how the scene looked to my eyes as well.

Being in England is an education in many ways. I have lived abroad for various lengths of time and each experience provided a useful degree of contrast, but my experience in the UK thus far has been unique–cultural consonance and dissonance reapportioned in new and unforeseeable dimensions. There is something simultaneously impressive and inscrutable about this place, a puzzle in plain sight. In many ways, it seems like the mirror-opposite of the United States for better and worse. I’m still thinking about it to the extent that a full post would be premature. But I will say that this is not the England that lives in the American popular imagination, and vice versa. Two very different, yet comparable, cultures dream of each other on either side of an ocean. Each dream contains a mixture of belief, fear, and desire. Crossing the water, one finds oneself in a new place that seems deceptively familiar. And the mechanics of what one believes about Self and Other have to be confronted on a regular basis. I have only been here for three weeks. So it is too soon to characterize these things. But hopefully my ongoing notes will begin to form some developmental arc, some narrative that I can use to gain a more critical distance.