writing with guns to head

My approach to writing is inseparable from my quest for beliefs.

Yesterday, while keying notes from Story by Robert McKee, I came across his view on what the function of art--written art--is in society (slightly compressed):

I believe we have no responsibility to cure social ills or renew faith in humanity, to uplift the spirits of society or even express our inner being. We have only one responsibility: to tell the truth. Therefore, study your Story Climax and extract from it your Controlling Idea. But before you take another step, ask yourself: Is this the truth? Do I believe in the meaning of my story? If the answer is no, toss it and start again. If yes, do everything possible to get your work into the world. In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.

To tell the truth. OK, good. What is the truth?

In the first place, from the artist's point of view, it's honesty: telling it like it is. Reporting the actuality of one's experience rather than an idealization of it, or what the community agrees it is or should be. What's it really like to get married? to get fired? There are conventional ideas around the experience of these things, but the writer should have no truck with those. What do you really think and feel? That is what the writer should be writing.

You might call that subjective truth: honesty about one's own subjective experience. But there's also objective truth: the world of facts outside oneself. The storyteller must also be honest and proficient here. That means taking the trouble to find out how things are.

If you want to write about firemen, you need to know their world. What are their job functions? How do they spend their day? How are they similar to each other? How do they differ from each other? You'll need to know these and many other things before you can write something worth reading about firemen. If all you know about firemen is that they're tall, strong, brave, and like rescuing people, then you're simply regurgitating a cliche--a conventional idea of what a fireman is. And as McKee says, what's wrong with creative writing can generally be summed up in one word: cliches.

The only way to prevent cliches is to acquire knowledge: actual, objective knowledge of what you're writing about. Each sentence should be telling the reader something he or she didn't know before--something he or she has not already heard elsewhere. Each sentence should contain some element of surprise. With each sentence you learn something new. That's what keeps a reader interested.

Yes, often that "something new" is a matter not of direct knowledge but of imaginative innovation: the various quirks of Harry Potter's world, for instance. But even there the imaginings are based in fact, and in a direct experience of the sensual world and the people in it.

And for those of us not writing fantasy, we have to dig deeper into our world for surprises.

In my case, I'm not satisfied merely to dig into the world of facts; I also dig into the world of theories: people's beliefs and the dimly-felt realities to which they refer. My "story research" is also a kind of scientific or scholarly or philosophical research. I'm not sure this is the "right" way to write, whether it will add anything or make for a better end product, but it seems to be the only way that I can do it and feel that I'm giving it my all. If I did not do this, I would not feel that I've tried everything in my quest to tell the best, the truest, story that I can.

It's a fascinating journey, an interesting way to work--but it's time-consuming. That in itself is not really a problem except for two things, in approximate order of importance: 1) death; 2) revenue. I could croak before I'm finished, and I could go broke and be derailed from my work by having to scare up the wherewithal to live.

Both of those things have worried me from time to time. But I can't let them scare me off my project, or intimidate me into changing my approach. This is a great experiment in my approach--the approach I would use if not coerced by any outside influence. With Death and Revenue holding guns to my head, I have to coolly keep my nerve--and keep working.

have a plan

Yesterday I had my weekly lunch with Mom--ham-and-cheese sandwiches at her dining-table while looking out at the milky-green water of Cove Cliff. We talk about many things: psychology, astrology, family, and of course writing (the supposed topic of the lunch symposium). Yesterday we touched on the topic of structure as an important part of creative writing.

We agree on its importance, but many people are skeptical. "Structure" sounds so dry, so...uncreative. Architects and engineers concern themselves with structure: they're making things that have to stand up in the physical world. But creative writers, channeling the Muse, spew free and original ideas on the page, going where their creative spirits take them, discovering images and writing them down...right?

Maybe for a very short piece such an approach could produce something readable. But a longer work, like a bridge or a convention center, has to stand up under its own strength. It's sustaining itself not against gravity and wind-shear, but against the wandering attention of the reader. Why should a reader stick with you?

In his Poetics, Aristotle determined that the most important element of a tragedy (the highest form of poetry, in his view) was plot, or "what happens". (More exactly, plot is "what happens" plus the arrangement or order of what happens.) It forms the structure of a story. Note that plotting has nothing directly to do with writing at all. You could devise a plot using pictures or some other symbolic system. Words are convenient for this, but not necessary.

Plotting is a selection and ordering of events. A good storyteller is someone who does this in a way that is compelling and that generates strong emotional responses in the audience. In theory it could be done entirely in one's head, without the use of words or any other symbols at all--just the arrangement of mental images, like a dream. Committing the story to words is a purely secondary task, as well as a secondary talent. As Robert McKee points out, many people have literary ability--the ability to write good prose. Few have story ability--the ability to imagine and arrange events in an interesting and meaningful way.

Speaking for myself, I find that my writing is easiest and best when I'm describing an event that has actually happened. When I write a scene that has happened in actual life (or in a dream), the characters, setting, and specific actions and dialogue are all taken care of. They've already happened, and I just need to select from among the details and choose how to describe them. There is much more in any real-life scene than could ever be described, so I have a cornucopia of choice. The choices I make put my stamp on the scene: I give it a particular meaning by choosing as I do.

In a simple real-life story, the relationship of the scenes to each other is also more or less a given. You start at the beginning and go on to the end. The structure and content of the scenes has been given you by life; now you really do just have to write it down.

But for fictional works, the writer has to come up with all the material that is supplied by life in the case of a nonfiction story. You have to think up the characters, the setting, and the specific actions and dialogue for each scene, as well as a sequence of scenes that lead to an interesting punch at the end. (In real life, this "interesting punch" already exists--and is presumably the reason you've chosen to tell the story in the first place.)

That's a lot of creative work--and it's creative work of different types.

For the past several months I've been reworking the detailed structure of my story. It's time-consuming and creatively difficult. But before my very eyes I see it leading to a better result. I'm organizing the content of a sequence of chapters, and doing this by way of bullet-points in Word. In the past I've used index cards for this purpose, but I'm experimenting with this even more convenient method (although I do miss the physicalness of the index cards, the heft of a growing deck of scenes that are gradually cohering into a story). I scan down my growing list of bullets, playing out scenes or steps in my mind, like a movie. When I hit a gap, or a step that doesn't feel like a strong, logical result of the previous step, I go back to my notes and start imagining.

"How would this character respond?" I ask myself. Well, that depends--what exactly is this character trying to achieve here? And why? The questions open up backward into the motivational world behind the story. They force me to examine the inner workings of my story-world, to confront the areas that are as yet unimagined, uncreated.

The goal is to create a fictional world that feels as close as possible to my real world: a place in which actual events in an actual world already exist, and my task as a writer is simply to find the words to describe them. In my experience this makes a story much more fun both to write and to read. I'm not fussing around trying to figure out how to describe a guy's fedora at the same time I'm trying to figure out who he is and what he wants in life. If you really figure out who he is and what he wants, you might also discover whether he really even wears a fedora.

Robert McKee says it, J. K. Rowling says it to would-be writer kids, Strunk and White say it in The Elements of Style, and now Paul Vitols says it: before you write, have a plan. Diving in and hoping for the best means harder work and a poorer result.

And who needs that?

genre science

My mother and I are having weekly meetings about storytelling. She makes lunch for us and for my aunt Jackie, now also retired, then we crack the books. She's hoping I can teach her something about the art of story--and I hope so too.

It's not a planned course. I'm feeling my way along intuitively, trying to pass on things that I think make sense. I feel much doubt, because I wouldn't necessarily wish my own methods on another person (even if my methods finally turn out to work!). And yet, those are the only methods I know at first hand.

Our text is Robert McKee's Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. Since 1990 I have tried to absorb and apply his ideas to my own writing. As he stresses in the book, he does not provide a formula for how to write stories, but rather lays out the principles for what makes a story good, along with diagnostic tools to help when one's own work is having trouble. When I read Aristotle's Poetics, I saw that McKee is mostly interpreting and adapting Aristotle's ideas to modern storytelling. Which suits me find, since not only is the Poetics a fantastic short course in how stories work, but my own mind naturally gravitates to an Aristotelian orderliness and keenness on accurately identifying first principles.

As McKee says, the first thing you need to do in telling your story is to work out what genre you're in. Are you writing a mystery? A love story? A fantasy? The word genre is related to genus, and I explained it to Mom as being like the species of animal you've got. You need to know whether your story is an ostrich, a crocodile, or a bison, before you can know what its component parts are supposed to be.

Once you know that, you can address the structure of your story--its skeleton. An ostrich skeleton and a crocodile skeleton are not the same. You need to know what it is you're creating. McKee is emphatic that writers need to do personal research into the genre of their story--to find other works in the genre and do their own cross-analysis of them, identifying their parts. What characters and situations are always present? What kinds of settings are used, and how do they affect the action? What are the basic themes or ideas of the stories? McKee says that you should study both successes and failures in your genre, to gain conscious knowledge of its workings--to gain a better knowledge of the genre than your audience subliminally has.

As McKee points out, there is not much good study material out there on genre. Plus, genres themselves keep evolving and combining. We have medieval whodunits and corporate thrillers and sci-fi erotica. As far as I know, a single book, Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding, spawned the whole genre of "chick lit" which overran the fiction sections of bookstores like mountain pine beetle. It is (or was) popular because it touched a chord in an audience. It spoke to its readers. If you seek to write chick lit, you would have to study Bridget Jones and other works to find out exactly what makes them tick--why, in other words, they appeal to readers (and presumably first of all to yourself).

Personally, I'm fascinated by the phenomenon of genre. It seems clear to me that the word is applied to different things--to settings, such as Western; to themes, such as "revenge story"; and to styles, such as satire. "Genre science" (if I can call it that) is still at that early stage in which things are still not differentiated clearly, like a big drawer in which socks are mixed in with shirts, neckties, and longjohns. It needs sorting out, and I for one would be interested in helping with that task. I'd like to become a genre scientist.

I was struck when I read Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale by his discovery that the basic structure of the fairy tale is quite invariant, if you look at it deeply enough. I suspect that all our story genres are similar in this respect, and that this invariance must express something deep about how our minds and emotions work. In short: the genres are expressions of our mythology.

Of course, it says something about my nature that whenever I look around me, I see only research projects...

patience

What does a writer who's writing about his writing write about when he's not writing?

Last week I saw, in a book my mother had bought about writing, a snippet from Lawrence Durrell, which I paraphrase as, "All blocks are at bottom a form of egotism".

For I do feel rather blocked. But at the same time I recall Robert McKee's sterling advice, that the cure for writer's block is research. According to him, writer's block is simply lack of knowledge of your subject.

I suppose that writer's block is actually a symptom, and not a disorder in its own right. It could therefore have different causes, as a fever can have different causes. Durrell's egotistical block sounds like a symptom of the writer who has donned the hat of the editor or critic, and sits perched at the desk, waiting for the creator to come up with something so he can edit/criticize it. The creator, like a gopher in a hole surrounded by vigilant dogs, knows better than to poke his nose out in that environment.

I do suffer from that type of block, but it has not been debilitating. It has not prevented me from creating--although I do think it has limited the quality of what I have written, and I have taken various steps in my life to try to improve the situation. I have tried to both throw the hounds off the scent, and also toughen up that little gopher so it can sock it to the hounds if it does find them on-site when it emerges. I've used things like writing drills, in which inhibition is smashed by forcing oneself to write nonstop for a short period, like 15 minutes. But I think this obstacle is also overcome somewhat by taking on projects that are so challenging in other respects, such as in size and complexity, that one's attention is forced to those aspects, leaving one's actual manner of expression, one's use of words, to fend for itself.

But in general I think McKee's assessment is more to the point, and more debilitating if left untreated. For the slavering hounds called Editor and Critic can be thrown off the scent by one trick or another, but if you don't know what you're talking about or what you're trying to say in the first place, you really are stuck. Then it's true that only research can save you. You have to refuel the empty tank of your head.

This is what I've been trying to do. Yes, I've been researching my world and my topic almost nonstop for five years. Yes, I read from at least one and usually two or even three relevant books on it each day, and type notes into Word files. But I need to get my hands on the right books, the right topic areas. And it takes me time to get through them. I'm steady rather than fast.

Then there's the task of synthesis. If I read more than one authority on a subject, and they disagree, which version do I go with? What do I think happened? This is decision-making in the face of uncertainty, which is inherently stressful and hard. Each decision defines the world of my story a little more, gives it its character and its meaning. For each decision is made by particular criteria, whether conscious or unconscious. If I have a choice, then I should choose that which furthers the aims of my story, which is largely still an intuitive choice.

The other danger with research, also cautioned against by McKee, is that of spending all one's time in research and never getting down to writing. This is the sign of the nervous student or amateur. In McKee's view writing should proceed as a series of steps of writing and research. You write as much as you can, until you get blocked from lack of knowledge, then you turn to research. As soon as you know enough to proceed, you do so. You learn what you need to know in the course of writing, so that by the time you finish your final draft, you know the world of your story completely--and not before that time, if you've been writing efficiently.

I've been embroiled in the world of the cults of the Roman Empire, and seeing ways to incorporate this material in my work. It's very relevant, since my work is a spiritual story at bottom. I'm still stuck at the same chapter, but I find myself making notes in other chapters for how to rewrite them in draft 2. I am learning enough to find that my current draft, draft 1, is already becoming obsolete.

And yet I must finish it. Because going back to start a new draft before you've finished the current one is suicide, I think. Don't rewrite something that isn't written yet.

Patience. That's what I really need. I think that's what I'm really trying to learn.

technical barriers

Rain has returned at last. It falls heavily in the somber twilight. The dark greenery glints in the amber light from the bright lamp on the east wall of our building--a manufactured star in a dull space.

I study my way forward. By that I mean that my progress, such as it is now, is via study. It is as though there are two urges within me: the urge to create, and the urge to know, and that these compete for processor-time in my brain.

The creative urge presses forward, a variant of the mating instinct, seeking the joy of creation: bringing the new into being, the divine prerogative and act, according to Mircea Eliade. But this runs into two (main) barriers: technique and subject (for want of better terms).

The technical barrier is about matching one's ability to the task at hand. Can I do this? A clearer example would be in music. You might be able to play some piano, but if someone drops the sheet-music for "Claire de Lune" in front of you, do you have the chops to play it? In the case of a musical instrument, the issue of one's adequacy is clear and stark. If you don't read music, for example, that settles the question right away.

In writing it's less clear. We all learn to "write" as part of our elementary education. Our very ability to read fiction seems to point to our ability to write it, since, unlike with music, literacy empowers both reading and writing at the same time.

But of course it's not so. I remember being so inspired as a young man by reading James Joyce that I felt I must be able to write as he did. My ability to experience the power of his language must mean that I had it in me to create such language myself. Only gradually did it become clear that I was nowhere near being able to write as Joyce did--that even if I could acquire Joyce's vocabulary and command of grammar and so on, I would still be only at the base of the mountain of his achievement. Even though I had direct experience of the power of his writing, I really didn't have the first idea of how he achieved his effects. It wasn't just that I didn't have access to his toolkit; I didn't even know what was in his toolkit, or where I might find a kit like it.

It's a little like what Robert McKee says about would-be screenwriters. The apparent simplicity of the final document leads them to severely underestimate the difficulty of creating one. In his words, it's like saying, "I like opera; I think I'll write one." Few opera-lovers would make that mistake, but movie-lovers--and book-lovers--make it all the time.

Writing seduces us into thinking we can do it. (Incidentally, this general delusion of universal proficiency in writing helps to depress the value of writers' work.)

I remember getting an oil-painting set when I was about 12 years old, along with a canvas. Yahoo! I loved all kinds of artistic creation, and was a fairly talented drawer. Now I could create paintings--beautiful, detailed works in color. Fantastic!

I put the canvas on the easel, squeezed some colors onto the palette in the kit, and faced my creative task. I visualized a scene--yes, a scene of trees in the full leaf of summer, with light shining through their leaves. Fantastic! I started mixing green with yellow, a dab of blue...

It soon became clear that I had no idea how to paint. How did those guys get their trees to look realistic? How did they manage to avoid creating messy blobs? How did they get any detail in there? How did they prevent all their colors from merging into excremental brown on their palette?

I abandoned my painting, realizing that I had a lot to learn before I could face a canvas with some sense of knowing what I was doing. Having a painting kit didn't really teach me anything about painting, but I did acquire a new respect for skilled painters. I learned how hard it is to do what they do.

Creative writing is not so different. Apart from the inspirational and creative aspects of the art, it's a skill. What makes it especially difficult and confusing is that there does not even seem to be universal consensus on what constitutes really good technique in writing--no equivalent of the painter's criterion of "likeness". I think this is because writing, unlike the other arts, does not work with the senses directly. Rather, the senses of sight and hearing are used to convey an abstract entity to the imagination of the audience. The real medium of writing is concepts--invisible, tucked away in each person's mind, colored with personal associations. The writer's tubes of paint are concepts, and they do their work in the secret recesses of the soul.

So much for technical barriers. I was going to get on to subject, but perhaps that will be tomorrow. Now the writer needs breakfast.

the gestating virgin

Yesterday I finally had time to take up cudgels again for writing my book. It was one of my least-favorite kinds of writing sessions: one in which I struggle to recollect the threads of what I'm working on. Eventually I realized that, after my break of several days, I just could not remember what my thoughts and intentions were with respect to my current chapter (30). Nothing for it but to go back and read the (highlighted portions of) my Word notes.

The notes document for chapter 30 now runs to 35 pages. When chapter notes get long like this, I become anxious. Admittedly, the first 13 pages of notes are mostly extracts from research texts. That still means over 20 pages of actual cogitation-and-creation notes.

Mind you, the overall quality of these notes is high (take my word for it). In my effort to understand what drives my characters, I must dig. And dig, and dig.

"Oh, pshaw!" you might say. "A character's motivation is just whatever you make it. Decide on one, and go! Don't talk in that quaint way about 'discovering' the motives of a character, as though he were a real person. You've said yourself that characters aren't real people."

Yes, true. I've been skeptical of this kind of talk from writers, which is finally a form of pathetic fallacy, I think. I remember reading a nonfiction work by the novelist John Fowles, in which he described working on The French Lieutenant's Woman. He said that when he was writing a scene for his character Charles, he had the strong feeling that Charles wanted to diverge from his path and go down to knock on the cottage door of the heroine. Fowles declared that it was a real, definite feeling of intent coming from the character--that was how he experienced it.

Yeah, right, I thought.

I was already a writer myself by then, and not had any such experience--at least, nothing so definite. Of course, I never had a very clear idea of what the hell I was doing in any case. But my suspicions about this Frankensteinian moment of the composite character suddenly rising from the laboratory bench are backed up by Robert McKee in his Story:

Research from memory, imagination, and fact is often followed by a phenomenon that authors love to describe in mystical terms: Characters suddenly spring to life and of their own free will make choices and take actions that create Turning Points that twist, build, and turn again until the writer can hardly type fast enough to keep up with the outpourings.

This "virgin birth" is a charming self-deception writers love to indulge in, but the sudden impression that the story is writing itself simply marks the moment when a writer's knowledge of the subject has reached the saturation point. The writer becomes the god of his little universe and is amazed by what seems to be spontaneous creation, but is in fact the reward for hard work.

To discover what drives a character, you need to know his world, for that is what he is responding to. It's an ecological task: to understand how the animal functions within its environment, for the two go together. The cheetah is an animal of the African savanna; it can't function in the Arctic or in the Arabian desert. It is what it is, and behaves as it behaves, because of the environment in which it exists.

Finding this level of authority for a remote historical period is, of course, difficult. But I find, as I keep at it, that insights do come. Gradually, gradually, my main characters start emerging from the fog of potentiality into the clear outline of specificness. As I learn--or decide--something definite about my world, my characters acquire something toward which they can have an attitude, and thus define themselves.

In fairness to myself, I've made a lot of progress in the last month in understanding more about my world. While the historian and the archaeologist have to refrain from making positive statements beyond what the evidence permits, and so leave their picture of the world frustratingly vague, the storyteller must commit. Nothing can be a maybe; the finished picture will be the result of countless definite choices.

My finished world will be in high-definition, and so will my characters. And look how long it took us to get high-definition TV.

bones, muscles, skin: the anatomy of story

Yesterday I was talking about the idea of using the technique of writing a "story treatment"--a document once routinely used in screenwriting--for novels. I mused about perhaps drafting a sample section of story treatment for an existing novel, and I haven't forgotten that; I'd like to try it.

I'm thinking now of the preceding stage: the "step-outline", in which you develop the bare bones of the story, perhaps on index-cards. I had already used index-cards as a way of helping myself plot stories for many years by 1990, when I first came upon a set of notes of one of Robert McKee's storytelling workshops. (A workshop student, typing furiously on a laptop, had taken excellent notes, a copy of which had been obtained by a CBC executive who had also attended the workshop. I was a struggling writer with two mortgages and couldn't afford the workshop. She took pity on me and let me have a copy of the bootlegged notes--I was after all trying to write a series for them. And Robert, if you're reading this, don't worry: I have since bought a hardcover copy of your book, and was delighted to do so!) They were a revelation. How eagerly I read through the photocopied pages of typed notes.

McKee's method changed my approach to using index-cards, and I immediately put his ideas to work in drafting a novel I had been working on called Truth of the Python, about a Vancouver hypnotherapist who inadvertently regresses a bed-wetting client to a past life--as the Greek philosopher Pythagoras. Mckee's methodology made this a much more purposeful exercise: I isolated my main plot and subplots, and gave each an act structure.

I still have those index-cards (or most of them)--I just pulled them from a file in my cabinet. I see I developed three separate stacks. One is a "master stack" of 4 x 6" cards that contain only the act turning-points of the plot and each subplot, of which I had five. The plots are labeled A through F, and each act has a number--so A1, A2, B1, B2, etc.

Then there is a stack of 3 x 5" index cards containing the individual scenes (this stack appears to be incomplete, alas), filling in the steps between the major turning-points on the 4 x 6 cards.

Finally, I have another, separate stack of 3 x 5 cards devoted to "thematic" developments in the story. These cards represent the idea-content or the significance of the story developments to my protagonist, Philip Dozier. I can't quite tell now exactly how I used these "theme" cards. Each one contains some assertions written longhand in pencil, along with a page-reference at the bottom-left corner (I think these are references to my binder of notes), and a sequential number in red pencil in the bottom-right corner. There are 37 of these cards.

For example, card 5 contains the story question for the book as a whole--the A-line question, which I phrased as "Will Philip find meaning in his life?" The card goes on to discuss the implications of the "inciting incident", or the scene that kicks off the story. (In this scene, Philip regresses his client, Greg Brodie, to a distant past life as Pythagoras, but also discovers that he, Philip, apparently had a role in that remote time as well, and the whole session is crowned with the appearance, through Greg, of an apparently all-knowing "discarnate" entity that calls itself Khepra.) Card 6 makes the comment, "Phil thinks he wants 'meaning', but in truth he seeks life: the sustenance of the heart."

Weird? Perhaps. My aim was to take my ethereal, spiritual idea, and turn it into a dramatic story, with a proper act-structure and cliff-hanging turning-points. It pretty much worked, and indeed I was able to get representation for this book at A P Watt, a prestigious London agency. The "index-card" approach had stood me in good stead.

I developed the method further with my next effort: a novel called Observer that I started writing in 1994. This was a space-age murder mystery, also set in Vancouver, that had my protagonist, a financially independent loner named Connell Smith, investigating the killing of a local software entrepreneur. In this work I prepared the drafting by writing the whole story on index-cards first, winding up with a stack of 90 4 x 6 cards, which I have in front of me now.

I recall crafting and recrafting this stack, moving between it and my notes binder. As I developed the story, I would draft cards, changing them, throwing them out, inserting new ones as I went. As the stack developed, I would periodically sit down with it and go through the stack sequentially, visualizing the story unfolding. As I turned each card, I would feel a sense of "yes!" and move on to the next card. As soon as I hit a problem, a feeling that what I was reading did not really flow, or push the action to a new level, I would get to work on identifying the problem and solving it. Rejig some cards, add one or two, and start again.

While plotting this story, because it was a mystery, I also developed another set of cards, yellow 3 x 5 ones, on which I recorded the protagonist's evolving theory of the murder. This way I, the author, who knew who did it and why, could keep track of the working theory in the mind of the protagonist and of the reader. Each new story event would cause that evolving theory to change.

Card 1 (theory 1), for example, is "sabotage/revenge by a disgruntled employee". (The victim, Rick Matthews, was found shot to death in his office in Richmond, B.C.) Card 2 is "sabotage by competitors". Card 3 is "sabotage by vencaps/investors in order to grab more of Mattrix (Rick's company) cheaply". And so on, until the climax of the story, when the full truth comes out. I found this method very helpful, for I could always, when working on any given part of the book, check to see what the current theory of the killing was. (Plus, of course, I had to come up with all these different theories of the murder--whew!)

I divided the story into chapters, and gave each chapter its own header-card, with the chapter number, as well as a word signifying its key event, and a phrase expressing the significance of the event. For example, the header-card for chapter 1 has the word "murder", and the phrase, "the trauma of loss"--the significance of the event for my hero, who was heavily invested in the victim's company. Chapter 2 is labeled "conspiracy" and "Connell decides to sleuth the crime for himself".

My story, as always, was weird--but it did flow. I do believe in and recommend the method.

Sometime over the past day, maybe in the dead of night again (although I did not spend much time awake last night), I thought of the story-development documents in terms of the parts of the body. The step-outline is the skeleton. The treatment is the organs and muscles. The actual draft is the skin and hair.

Note that in order to live, we need all of those things. And just because the skin and hair is all you see as an end-user, it doesn't mean that you can do without the other, structural elements. The skin and hair, of course, lie over them.

So, yes, maybe a story treatment for my next novel.

a story treatment for novels?

Yesterday I spent more time working at making explicit the ideas in chapter 30 of my work. As I mentioned two days ago, I see this as the basic activity of writing: turning implicit or latent knowledge and experience into explicit, named concepts: words.

In my case, this means a lot of writing before I get to my "writing"--actually drafting the chapter. My hope is that all this prewriting forms a rich compost from which the garden of the eventual prose can grow.

Robert McKee, in his screenwriting textbook Story, teaches an approach to writing in which you start with a step-outline, which is the bare outline of the plot. I used to do this on index cards; now I try to achieve it on the PC (the index cards may still be the better method). McKee's description:

If, hypothetically and optimistically, a screenplay can be written from first idea to last draft in six months, these writers typically spend the first four of those six months writing on stacks of three-by-five cards: a stack for each act--three, four, perhaps more.

There: four out of six months of writing time should be devoted to the step-outline, fully two-thirds of the storytelling effort. In my opinion, it should probably be the same in fiction-writing. One difficulty is that a novel, which is longer than a screenplay, requires a correspondingly longer period on the step-outline phase, and it is a test of the writer's commitment and nerve to see whether he or she can sit facing only a stack of index cards for a year or so. I did with this book--longer than a year, more like two--and I still think I moved on hastily, afraid of spending any more time outlining. But you pay later for any haste at this stage: first of all in a more difficult writing task, and finally in a weaker end-product--a stiff penalty for wanting to force the pace.

The next phase in McKee's method is to draft the story treatment: a prose version of the step-outline in which each scene is described. The term treatment is used in filmmaking to describe a variety of documents that range from a story synopsis to a narrative 30 or 40 pages long. As far as I know, they're not often written anymore except as a sales document to help pitch a movie idea. They're not used as writing tools by the writers themselves.

But McKee sees a story treatment as a key step in the writing process, whether or not the treatment is ever seen by anyone but the writer. At the treatment stage the writer works out logistical and motivational problems with the story. You discover things that don't work the way you'd thought. More particularly, I've found that in expanding on a terse line for a scene there are often difficult problems that I was more or less avoiding, semiconsciously.

One of the most important purposes of the treatment is to work out the subtext of each scene: what each character's true feelings and motives are. These are made explicit in the treatment. And, very importantly, the treatment contains no dialogue. It's tempting for any writer, but especially a screenwriter, to move on to the fun part of writing dialogue, but until the scene-work is complete you do not know your characters or their motives well enough to write dialogue. Only when the treatment has been fully worked out is the writer in a position to write a draft of the screenplay.

What I'm wondering is whether there's a place for story treatments in fiction-writing. I'm not sure, because a novel is not so deliberately spare and dialogue-intensive as a screenplay. And yet the imortant points still apply: knowing your characters and the subtext of each scene. A treatment for a novel would be a strange document, and long. It would be a "talking about" the story, again with no dialogue, and with some provision for filling in the sections of "telling", in which the writer talks about things instead of showing them directly with action. It would make, in effect, a particularly weird first draft.

But it may very well be worth it: a kind of technical first draft, not unlike a technical dress rehearsal for a stage production, in which the technical aspects of the show are worked out and finalized. Since any decent work of writing goes through multiple drafts anyway, it might be just the thing.

Maybe I'll try drafting a sample piece of treatment for an exising novel, to see what this would look like.

the (un)inhibited writer

I've sat here for some minutes now, trying to think of how to launch this post. Usually some idea comes to me quickly, and I start wandering into my topic, discovering it as I go. Today nothing has really recommended itself to me.

Technically this is writer's block. I can say that this block is due to the cause to which I would generally attribute writer's block--I'm not writing about the right thing. In this case, it means that I'm constrained in my blog from talking about many things--things that I feel are too private or personal to publish, or things that will reveal too much about my work in progress, spoiling the eventual result. Writer's block, in short, is striving to write about one thing when you really want to write about something else.

As a result, writer's block happens to writers on paid assignments, or in the midst of large projects to which they've committed themselves and don't want to abandon. Writer's block, as the name implies, is inhibition. What inhibits us?

I sense that these inhibitions are of two broad kinds: inhibitions due to knowledge and inhibitions due to emotions. The knowledge inhibitions come from not knowing what we're talking about. This type of block is cured by research, as Robert McKee suggests in his book Story.

Emotional inhibitions I think can be of several kinds. One kind is performance anxiety: that what one will write will be no good; fear of failure. Another kind is exposure, which is perhaps the same as other kinds of inhibition: fear of drawing unwanted attention to ourselves, or fear of provoking unpleasant reactions from people. Why won't I go skinny-dipping with the group? Afraid of what people will think about my naked body. Why not ask that woman out for a date? Afraid of rejection.

Good writing takes off its clothes and asks people for a date. At bottom it seems that inhibition is an attitude toward risk. The inhibited person--the blocked person--does not have enough confidence in the possibility of the reward that lies on the far side of a risk. "Safety first" is the motto, and it may well be one that was learned early and hard. It is therefore difficult to give up.

I remember reading a book on investing called The Zurich Axioms. In it the author, Max Gunther, makes the point that life is inseparable from risk. The caterpillar, in order to munch on the life-giving leaf, must crawl out the branch and risk being eaten by a bird. It can hide in safety for awhile, but eventually hunger will drive it out into the zone of risk, to live or die.

There's no guarantee. A risk can work out badly--maybe very badly. The caterpillar gets eaten. Or I think of sensational local news stories, such as a teenage boy who recently was killed when he crashed his motorcycle late at night on the Barnet Highway, no doubt traveling at high speed. He took a risk for the thrill of it, and snuffed out his young life.

The death of the victims heightens the thrill of the survivors: their deaths are the measure of the survivors' achievement, and provide its emotional voltage.

Speech is not often used to communicate people's true, deepest thoughts and feelings. Such communication is too risky for most of us, and we avoid it. In that sense we're all inhibited--we all have "writer's block". The writer who manages to turn into the skid, and actually, truthfully express what he or she is thinking or feeling, is showing us all the way to be genuine, courageous, and how to make a bid for the true prizes of life--the green leaves out on those sunstruck branches.

know the rules

Yesterday afternoon I finished reading Aristotle's Poetics. I found the book to be brief, bracing, even exciting. It made me recognize again how thirsty I am for instruction on how to pursue my art--so thirsty that I don't even realize how thirsty I am until I find a drink of cool water.

I have an arrogant and wayward streak with respect to my own abilities. This might possibly, partly, be necessary in order to develop and hold conviction in one's own vision and one's own execution of it. But such a person is also difficult to teach, and generally has to learn things the hard way.

In my own defence, such teaching as I received with respect to my art, creative writing, has been almost entirely informal and outside any institutional setting. By the time I had become a teenager in the 1970s, there had developed an ethos of "do your own thing" in schools, at least as regards creative expression. True, some technique would be taught in art or in writing, and of course you can't demand too much in this respect from public-school teachers; it's not their job to train "professional" artists for their careers.

And yet there was also a wider, cultural process at work. A couple of years ago I talked with an artist who, along with her husband-to-be, had studied at what was then the Vancouver School of Art. She told me that the school had been founded in 1925 by artists who had been trained in Scotland, and who believed in passing on a thorough training in the techniques of the Old Masters--techniques which the teachers were in a position to teach.

By the time that the art school changed its name in 1978 to the Emily Carr College of Art, the outlook was much changed. She said that the school had gotten away from teaching technique, and that students were encouraged to explore their creative urges in any way they saw fit. As a result, artists were emerging who had had only a piecemeal introduction to techniques, often self-taught. I recall too my late brother-in-law Freddie, who had been professor of art at the University of Victoria for many years, telling me that oil painting and other techniques could be learned fairly quickly from a book. He believed in jumping in with what you wanted to do, and gaining technique as you went, learning it or developing it yourself. Indeed, this had seemed to work for him.

There has been a pervasive sense that telling people, even raw newbies, how to do things crimps their creativity. Robert McKee, in his book Story, takes some pains to explain why this viewpoint is wrong and detrimental, which suggests that he has faced this criticism or objection many times. Telling people how to do things is not the same as telling them what to do. In the creative arts as well as in other things, the old adage applies: Know the rules before you break them.

My adolescent self would have bristled and fought against being told how to do things. I would have rebelled, refused, probably mainly simply not done them. I would have been a pain in the butt and might not have learned much. But if I had received that kind of technical instruction from someone who knew what they were doing, I would at least have perceived that there were proven methods, even if I was rejecting them. Later, I would see that I had fouled myself up to the extent that I had not paid attention.

As things stand, I don't think I missed much in the way of creative education. If I had spent thousands in tuition on a creative-writing degree, I probably would have emerged from the program knowing not much more than when I entered it how to execute an effective creative work. I would have read a lot of stories and novels, and discussed them with my classmates. In screenwriting I would have been trained in technique, and possibly also in playwriting. But fiction? The universities were already heading into the wilderness of postmodernism and Marxism, where, as far as I know, they're still lost.

Some of my best instruction was informal and outside the system. A big influence was the late Harvey Burt, who had been a writer and teacher of writing for most of his adult life. When I was a teenager he gave me my first "how to" book on creative writing: The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri, a text on how to write a stageplay, published in 1946. I was thrilled with the book, and got my first experience of drinking cool water to ease my thirst for knowledge of the craft.

I've still got the book. I just pulled it out, and flipped it open. At some point, on some rereading, probably around 1984, I highlighted a few phrases in it. Here's one that I opened it to:

What is a weak character? One who, for any reason, cannot make a decision.

Good stuff. It strikes me even now, today, as I read it again. (Does this mean Hamlet is a weak character?)

Here was a book that told you what kinds of effects you should be striving for as a dramatic writer, and how to achieve them. Fantastic! I downed it eagerly, and started making my first fumbling attempts at organizing my creative work around specific intentions, trying to give them structure.

I'm still at it. Aristotle's Poetics is another excellent "how to" text, not written as such, but maybe all the better for being the work not of an artist but of a thinker--one who identified more with the audience than with the creator. My copy is now liberally highlighted.

art imitates life

I'm reading--indeed, am close to finishing--Aristotle's Poetics. The text runs only 46 pages, plus notes. In that brief space he says a great deal.

The text, or the portion of it that has survived, is devoted mainly to tragic drama, which Aristotle regarded as the highest form of poetry yet devised. But despite the fact that his book is about poetry performed as live musical theater--which was how it was staged in ancient Greece--Aristotle's work is still highly relevant to the storyteller of today. This is because, among all the aspects of tragedy, the one he regarded as most important, and making the largest contribution to the power of a work, was the choice and arrangement of the events depicted: in other words, plotting.

As far as Aristotle was concerned, the tragic poet's number-one concern was storytelling. And while the Poetics was not intended as a handbook for writers, but rather as an analysis of an art form to help in understanding and assessing the quality of specific works, nonetheless it is of great potential benefit to crafters of story. Indeed, Aristotle's Poetics is, I see now, the main source of ideas for Robert McKee's teachings on storytelling. McKee's work is largely a matter of explaining, expanding, illustrating, and adapting Aristotle's ideas to the modern storytelling medium of filmmaking.

The ideas are excellent, and still have that quality of freshness and immediacy that all great and original thinking has, regardless of the passage of time (Aristotle died in 322 BC).

Aristotle starts off by saying that tragic poetry, like all other poetry (and indeed all other types of art), is an imitation--that is, an imitation of things in life. Malcolm chose the word imitation to translate the Greek mimesis, rather than the usual representation, because he feels that this is closer to the sense intended by Aristotle. Whereas a representation of something may not look like the thing represented--a dot on a map might represent a city, for example--an imitation is something intended to resemble the thing imitated. The aesthetic experience is the recognition of the thing imitated in the artist's imitation of it: the better the imitation or depiction, the greater the pleasure experienced by the viewer or audience.

I sense that this distinction is important. I think of how "modern" art arose in the 19th century, leading on to nonfigurative art by the turn of the 20th, when, in painting, not only imitation but also representation went out the window. With Abstract Expressionism, the notion that a painter was trying to depict some external visual object was abandoned; the aim was to "express" something within--to project outward the contents of the painter's psyche, perhaps the collective unconscious.

I believe that in fiction-writing and drama, the turn away from story was part of this same trend toward nonfigurative art. Artists and writers wanted to free themselves from the shackles of tradition and do things that were utterly new.

The art may have been unshackled and new, but how effective was it? Through study I have learned how to appreciate and enjoy some nonfigurative art. Once you've learned some of the underlying ideas, there is a certain mind-expanding pleasure in regarding the cubist works of Picasso, for instance. But I can't say that a cubist work like Picasso's "Still Life with Carafe and Candlestick" (1909) has ever struck me with the immediate, visceral sense of power and enjoyment that the painters of the animals on the cave-walls at Lascaux and Altamira were able to generate across a gulf of 30,000 years. And I feel sure that if Picasso's work survives 30,000 years, any proper enjoyment of it will require a guidebook--so we'd better hope one of those survives along with it.

Aristotle is saying that art imitates life, and that in viewing or appreciating such art, we experience the pleasure of recognition, which is at bottom the pleasure of learning. This does not mean that art is or should be didactic, but that in recognizing our world in the forms created by an artist, we necessarily learn about it. There's no need for art to preach; it's enough for it to exist.

So then: the function of art is to imitate life, and the writer's primary tool for such imitation is the sequence of the events of life: story. The difference between a good, well-told story and a feeble, poorly told one is the difference between a successful work of art and a failed one.

writing for dollars, reading for love

Except for my inner emotional tusslings, yesterday went normally. It was sunny and cloudy, and I beavered away on my copywriting work, not really affected by my previous sleeplessness. Kimmie is suffering soreness on her right side, so we did a low-powered walk through the neighborhood rather than a full-on power-walk. Both fatigued, we were in bed before 8:30 p.m., while it was still light out and a neighbor was still using a power saw. I took half a Sleep Aid and slept through till 4:11, feeling much better.

But I'm feeling a bit bad that I'm not pushing my book forward these past few days, after my recovery of enthusiasm or direction last week; it feels as though I'm kind of flunking a quiz. "Ah--you feel motivated? Let's test that motivation..."

But my research reading seems to be telling me that I'm on the right track; I'm learning new things that I believe will make a difference to my story, to the way I see its world and my own world. There is simply no denying that my discovery of the world of my story, and my discovery of its characters, is a slow, slow process. They have not sprung up fully formed. They are more like figures emerging slowly from a fog, or images appearing on photographic paper while it's being developed. Developing a photograph is a chemical process that can't be rushed. If you use developer that's too strong, in a hurry to get the image, you ruin it--you lose the subtlety and full detail of the image. Such is my memory of it, anyway, when I developed film and prints in the darkroom at high school. The image is there on the paper, latent. You need to be patient and just minister to the process.

As I do my reading, I feel my viewpoint changing, evolving, developing. Gradually I'm acquiring expertise. As I read, I witness the diversity of views among the experts, and gain a sense of the range of possibilities, and my own freedom from reliance on any one borrowed point of view. This freedom gives me the power of creative choice. Robert McKee talks about this in connection with the writer's research: knowledge of your world, that is, the world of your story, gives you choices. These choices become the possibilities of your story; the more you know about the world, the more of these you have. Depth of familiarity equals creative freedom.

All stories demand a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader; we play the game of accepting the artifice of a story, the fact that it is not reality but an imaginary construct. But, having stepped through that magic doorway and suspended my disbelief, I want to believe. Within the imaginary world of the story I want to find credibility and consistency; I want to find truth. Whatever emotional and spiritual truths a story might offer will arise only among the hard granite and oak of its setting and the firm but yielding flesh of its characters. And the more fantastic the story, the more solid and real it needs to be.

On a labor of love, no amount of work is too much, of course. Is there such a thing as too much love?

research and values

I'm doing research again. Or maybe I should express it like the old joke: "Are you drinking again?" "No--still."

I'm still researching.

So what is research? It's the more or less systematic process of discovering knowledge. As I've said many times here, without knowledge, the writer has nothing to write. Knowledge forms the stock of writable material; research builds up that stock.

In my mind I divide my research into two kinds: subject-matter research about history, technology, dress, customs, and so on; and thematic research about the meaning-content of my story. I enjoy both but my real preference is for thematic research. With subject-matter research I sometimes feel there is indeed such a thing as doing too much--learning too many things that I will never be able to, or even want to, use. Time spent doing that does indeed eat into the time one might be spending actually writing one's story.

I don't feel the same way about thematic research. Here, as far as I'm concerned, there is no such thing as too much. This is research to learn about the why of my story: why am I telling this story? why does it matter?

According to Robert McKee, in his book Story:

Day after day we seek an answer to the ageless question Aristotle posed in Ethics: How should a human being lead his life?

Ultimately each of us has only a single asset: time. Each of us has an unknown but finite and ever-dwindling allotment of days, hours, minutes, and seconds on Earth. Each moment we spend this resource. Mine grows smaller as I type this; yours grows smaller as you read it. What's the best way to spend it? What's the right way to spend it? Like shoppers in a cosmic mall, we're surrounded by come-ons and inducements to spend--to give our time here or there in the quest for love or career attainments or religious purity. Which should we choose, and why, and how?

This question, I believe, is finally about values. Just as the decision to spend money on something is made on the basis of valuing that thing, so is the decision to spend time. Indeed, money is time, inasmuch as it represents our labor, our time, in earning it. But money can come and go. Our stock of time remains fixed, and only decreases. So time is the real money, and what induces us to spend it here or there is a question of values. What we value most highly is where we spend most of our time--or at least, that's where we want to spend it. Often we spend time doing things that we would rather not be doing, such as going to an unfulfilling job each day--and yet this too expresses a value. We work in order to survive, and we avoid reaching out for something more fulfilling out of fear of failure or lack, thus expressing a preference for the value of safety or security.

Stories are about values, or, more specifically, about conflicts of values. When we weigh the values of fulfillment vs. safety in our own lives, for example, we experience a conflict of values. We make a choice and live with the result. In a story we get to see characters going through this same process, which is the process of living, of spending our sole asset of time. Different characters carry different values, including different conflicting values, and the landscape of the story is designed to put these values to the test.

We respond most to those characters whose value-problems resemble our own. An important character for me has been Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It might not be easy to express exactly what the values are, but I feel them. They have to do with finding one's own integrity as an artist and as a person, and having the courage to live in that integrity, despite pressures on all sides to abandon it and conform with one or another group, all of whom seem to have claims on one's allegiance. This unlikely hero--a weak, nearsighted little bookworm--turns out to have greater integrity and greater courage than the swaggering athletes and pious churchmen and nationalist firebrands around him. He reaches within himself, almost unaided, to find the courage to walk a solitary path to an unknown destiny. One way of expressing what Joyce was saying in this novel is that time spent in discovering and living one's own personal destiny is not wasted, even though the struggle to do so is often far from pleasant.

Values are ideas. They are represented by specific thoughts, which can be expressed. Thematic research, for me, is the investigation of the idea content, the values content, of my story. To be honest, I still don't really know what it is; that's why I'm researching. Not knowing this is anxiety-causing. There's a feeling of taking a flier here on an unknown--much like life itself.

writing as art

Robert McKee says that film is now the most powerful storytelling medium there is. I daresay he's right. A good movie, making use of two senses--sight and sound--can be a powerful, engrossing experience. But a movie makes use of more than two senses, for a movie is scripted, which means that it embodies a story, and a story makes use of the part of our mind that is not directly sensual. It is purely mental. Let's call it the imagination.

But movies have many limitations, and they're not equally effective at telling all kinds of story. In fact, there tends to be a relatively small range of stories that can be effectively told in a movie. Then there are budgetary limitations, plus the fact that filmmaking is a communal activity, which can make a production suffer if the different parts of the community aren't pulling together. Not everyone is equally talented.

And what about that script--the underlying blueprint of a movie? No movie is any better than its script. The script represents the ceiling of quality that a movie can attain, and past which it cannot go. The best filmmakers are simply those able to realize the full potential of a script.

So sound and image, for all their potential power, are boring if the story is no good. The mental dimension, the imagination, trumps the senses in terms of its power to captivate us and move us.

Film therefore may be the most powerful story medium for certain types of stories, but for many other types the printed word remains best, and I think always will.

I believe that much (or all) of the power of any work of art comes from the awakening power of experiencing the detailed presence of the artist's mind. In a painting, every point on the canvas has received the artist's attention and skill. In "The Hay Wain" by John Constable the subject is the horse-drawn wagon piled with hay, but Constable lavished just as much attention on every other element of the picture. Look at the reflections in the water; look at the summer foliage; look at the sky. Wherever we look we discover the artist's attention; we see with his eye.

Each point on the canvas has been visited by the artist's mind. And at each point the artist has used technique to reveal evidence of his passing, to turn that point into service of the whole--his vision for the picture. Looking at a well-made picture has a gentle but strong awakening effect; our minds wake up and enter a state of aesthetic enjoyment. In my experience, this state of aesthetic enjoyment is similar to the quality of wakefulness that arises in mindfulness meditation. When we see evidence of loving attention, mind recognizes itself and wakes up. Not unlike what happens when we walk into a room in which someone has taken the trouble to dust the furniture and vacuum the floor and plump the cushions: it becomes inviting and wakeful.

The art of writing works in the same way. When we read a work of artistic writing, whether fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, we know that each word is a token of the attention of the writer: the footprints of the author's thought. If this has been done carefully, skillfully, lovingly, the aesthetic effect occurs: waking up and engagement with the work.

This to me provides a concrete reason why good writing is economical and avoids cliches. Excess words are a sign either of carelessness or lack of skill on the part of the writer: both symptoms of a lowered level of mindfulness. Cliches are unoriginal ideas and expressions, the sign of a writer too lazy to take the trouble to express his own experience or thoughts in a direct, honest way. Again, sign of a lowered level of attention.

To be a true artist means to be true to the art: to work toward its highest intrinsic expression. The failures of quality in writing and in all art arise from chasing values other than those of the art-form itself: paying bills, having a "career", being popular, finishing something. The best artists suffer--but their work doesn't, and the the world, each of us, is the richer for it.

where interest comes from

James Joyce, in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, sets out an aesthetic system via the voice of his protagonist Stephen Dedalus. The artist/young man, now about 18 years old, is feeling more self-confident; like the eagle-chick, he stands at the edge of the eyrie, flapping his wings and thinking about freedom.

Even now, at age 47 (soon to be 48), I'm not sure I have what amounts to an aesthetic system--or indeed whether I need or want one. And yet I do have my likes and dislikes, which are mainly quite strong and definite, and surely there are reasons for these likes and dislikes--reasons that, if gathered together, would no doubt constitute the outlines of an aesthetic system. I suppose what my "system" lacks is a central axiom or theory from which all the other things flow. I have pieces, thoughts, but they are not unified--not yet.

As I've said many times, with regard to literature, fiction, I put storytelling uppermost in the hierarchy of values. E. M. Forster, in his Aspects of the Novel, based on a series of lectures he gave in 1927, put "story" near the bottom. (He distinguished "story" from "plot", which he rated higher.) His denigration of story is typical of a 20th-century practitioner of the art.

The whole point of a temporal art like fiction is to take the audience on a journey, not unlike a train ride, that is carefully structured to convey a particular experience. That experience and that structure is the story and how it is told. As I have also said many times, I believe that most fiction-writers are deficient in storytelling skill.

What makes a story good? Different stories appeal to different people, of course. I've been accused of applying inappropriate standards to genres that just don't appeal to me. That might be true sometimes, but on the whole I don't really mind what genre a story is in. I do have genre preferences, but I will enjoy a good story in, I think, pretty much any genre. And what work of any kind, in any medium, is so good that it could not be improved? Very few are in that category (and incidentally, I think that A Portrait of the Artist is one of them).

I'll start with the seemingly vague statement that a good story is interesting. And here's my theory of what interesting means: we find something interesting when it provokes tension within us. Tension, in turn, is what exists between a pair of opposites. The stronger the opposition, and the more closely they are placed together, the greater the tension, and the greater the interest.

I believe this dynamic holds throughout any work of art, from its top level of overarching idea to the bottom level of the execution of its details. At the dramatic level this opposition is called conflict. In storytelling, at the highest level of a work is its controlling idea: an assertion about a value and how it is realized in the world. The primary conflict in a story then is the counteridea: a contrary assertion. Robert McKee, in his Story, uses the example of the idea "crime doesn't pay". Many detective stories have this basic idea--the good guy winds up catching the bad guy. The counteridea is that "crime does pay"--the idea held by the antagonist, the idea he is seeking to realize in the world by getting away with his crime.

That's at the top level. But the same principle holds down all the levels. Another McKee concept, the "gap", is a further example. The gap is the space between expectation and reality, or expectation and result--what the character expects and what the audience expects. A character takes a certain action, expecting a certain result--and something else happens. A gap opens up: novelty, and the character must react. That gap, just like the gap in a spark plug, is a place of electric tension--it is the locus of story interest. The unexpected draws our attention and holds it; it interests us.

In Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, which I recently finished reading, one of the major gaps in the story occurs when the character Hurstwood, manager of a Chicago bar, while going through the solitary routine of closing up the place for another night, discovers that the safe has, for the first time ever, accidentally been left unlocked. It has more than $10,000 in it of his employers' money. And Hurstwood, under various pressures in his life, is at that moment in great need of money--or so he thinks.

In terms of his character, this is a cosmic gap. It opens when he, expecting all to be as usual and the safe to be locked shut, discovers that it is instead open--an Aladdin's cave of illicit possibility. It takes him by surprise--and us. What makes it storytelling is that it happens at the exact moment in Hurstwood's life when this surprise will thrust him into the greatest possible tension. On any other night he would simply have locked the safe and not given it another thought. Tonight he is ready to enter the adventure of discovering who he is; and we, the readers, are ready to discover along with him. We sense that the choice he makes, whatever it is, will express and reveal who he really is, deep down inside. And we are very interested.

Dreiser does a fantastic job of writing this scene, showing himself to be a storyteller of the first order. He doesn't skip over it lightly; he works it. In McKee's terms, he indulges the gap: he tarries in this place of high interest, keeping us in tension, feeling Hurstwood's inner tension and turmoil.

As so often happens, I feel I'm just getting warmed up. I'm sure I'll return to these themes again.

It was a quiet New Year's Eve. Mainly, anyway: we have a bus-stop right outside our front door, and two groups of loud young drunks caught buses at it during the evening just as we were heading to bed (well before midnight). I was relieved when the bus arrived to carry the first lot away, only to feel irritation with the second lot that showed up shortly afterward. I looked out from the dark of Kimmie's sewing-room at a group of about 12 young adults, male and female, 20-ish, talking loudly and shrieking at each other. One heavy-set guy strode into our flower bed to urinate against our holly-tree. The coal of his cigarette glowed in the dark.

Annoyed with that, I went downstairs, even though I was wearing only sweatpants, having just emerged from the bath, and stepped out on the front porch. The urinator quickly stepped away back to the bus stop. I carried a flashlight, which I was going to turn on him. But the next bus arrived, and, after some loud haggling among the people about whether they should take it after all or wait for someone else to arrive and pick them up, they clump aboard. All except one guy who, cell-phone to his ear, set out across the road to some other destination, trying to organize something with some other party.

The bus pulled away.

getting by

What to say. There is quiet beauty out my office window. Some little birds, I can't tell which species, but they're flapping and hovering furiously like oversized hummingbirds around the holly-tree next to the neighbor's townhouse. Maybe it has berries on it, and they're harvesting them. And the leaves of the Japanese maple by our own patio have turned a deep burnt vermilion. They glow in the faint light falling from the white overcast.

I feel both busy and unproductive. I'm doing no creative writing these days, and feel the full sense of being stuck in neutral. Even pushing ahead on a seemingly infinite project is better than actually being idled. Of course writers, like other artists, must find ways to earn their keep. James Joyce, toward the end of his career, found a patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, who was willing to support him while he worked on Finnegans Wake. Excellent woman! I doubt I'll ever be able to read more than snippets of Finnegans Wake, but I salute her gesture toward tending the flames of genius.

In his masterwork Story, Robert McKee says that the screenwriter must earn his living from his craft. Otherwise, the burden of trying to work on it while also supporting himself will eventually be too much.

I suppose he's right. But there's something to be said too for a writer's being (more or less) financially independent. True, many of the greatest works have been written while the writer was enduring terrible poverty. But I think about my own experience of earning at creative writing while working on The Odyssey. Financially I had my back to the wall while the show was in development, with two house mortgages and no other regular source of income. When people are pressuring you to change your ideas--make them worse--it's much harder to resist when you need the money. Time and again Warren and I had to beg the producer for advances on future stages of the work, just so we could survive. I didn't find it particularly humiliating, but I wasn't keen on it either. We were being toyed with by people with six-figure salaries, when, in one year, 1990 I think, The Odyssey provided us with a total pay of $8,000 each. Try paying off two mortgages with that.

I think also about an excellent documentary series Kimmie and I watched a few months ago, called The Other French Revolution, about the Impressionists. Most of them endured great financial hardship, almost starving their families as they pursued their art. Of course, as I well know, this could only be a source of family friction and pain. By the time they became old, however, they were vindicated, and mainly enjoyed good commercial success.

I'm sure there's no easy, one-size-fits-all answer. People have different needs, desires, beliefs, including artists. As artists go I'm relatively bourgeois, and like to live at a certain level of comfort. Others thrive on a bohemian lifestyle. However, I can get by on very little. But I can't quite get by on nothing. Not quite.

non-advice about historical novels

I have a meter that counts visitors to my blog. I'm quite happy with it, and it's free. (I chose to use Statcounter.) Among the things it tells me (not the identities of individual visitors--never fear!) is search terms people use to get the list of results that include my blog (and on which they clicked). A fair proportion of those are people who search with queries such as "what is a historical novel" or "how to structure a historical novel". It makes me a bit sad to think that those people will not really find what they're looking for in this blog.

If I were to try answering such questions, what would I say? For a definition of historical novel, I might look in places such as the Historical Novel Society website, and in particular to their definition page. Not to keep you in suspense, their short, one-line definition runs thus:

To be deemed historical (in our sense), a novel must have been written at least fifty years after the events described, or have been written by someone who was not alive at the time of those events (who therefore approaches them only by research).

(Their definition page has links to other, more in-depth discussions of the genre.) I'm sure their definition is as good as any; for these are people who clearly read lots of historical fiction and care about it.

Which, in some sense, is more than I can say. For I would not describe myself as a fan of historical fiction as a genre. That is, I don't go out of my way to read historical novels. I am not particularly attracted to any genre as such. I feel the same way about movies: it doesn't really matter to me whether I watch a romantic comedy or an action-adventure show. I care about only one thing: the quality of the story. If the story is good, I don't care where or when it's set, or whether it's drama, comedy, or something else. It's like the old joke: What kind of comedy do you like? The funny kind. What kind of story do I like? The good kind.

So why am I writing a historical novel? Because that's where the action that interests me happened: in history. The story is very important to me; anyway, I deduce that it must be, because it is putting me through an incredible amount of effort and mental discomfort. The story is important; it magnetized my attention; so I'm telling it.

Don't get me wrong: I do like a good historical novel. One reason, I think, is that the genre is quite wide-open thematically. The story can be about anything; it just has to be set in the past. This is unlike, say, murder mysteries, which I tend to find too formulaic. In this case, writers exert themselves to find exotic places and people to write about, but handcuff themselves (in my opinion) by writing to such a restrictive theme. But here again, an exceptionally well-done murder mystery gets my respect and my eager attention. Snow Falling on Cedars almost--almost--made it to this category for me.

As for how to structure a historical novel, I would say it is not different from any other kind of story. Most fiction-writers, in my opinion, are undereducated in storytelling, and should try to catch up with screenwriters in this regard. The best source available is Robert McKee's Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. You should learn these rules--and learn them well--before you think about breaking them.

So, you historical-novel hopefuls, I'm probably not your role model. I'm not a genre writer. I'm working on a vast, difficult, and very eccentric project.

In a word: don't try this at home.

story as training for life

"How's the iceberg?" said my chiropractor Terry Dickson as he ran his thumb, hard, up the muscle beside my spine. "No--not iceberg. What was it?"

"Glacier," I said into the leather cleft of the face-pad on his treatment table. He was asking about my writing, referring to an image I gave of myself in an earlier visit.

"Oh yeah--glacier."

"Okay," I said. "Even I have a hard time telling whether I've stopped or not."

Terry laughed.

"Maybe iceberg's better," I said. "Glaciers are disappearing."

"Not this glacier I hope!"

The weather has warmed since Sunday, melting all the snow. Maybe it has also caused this glacier to lurch back into motion, since I have returned to writing these past two days. At the end of last week I solved most of the remaining structural problems with chapter 19, and now I'm typing easily, breezing it. It's all in knowing what you're writing about.

I wanted to say a bit more about what I said in yesterday's post, that stories teach us about life and how to live it. By this I don't mean that stories should self-consciously give "life lessons" to readers; that is a ghastly approach to storytelling. Rather, I mean that stories intrinsically, by virtue of what they are, teach us about life.

Every story is about something, at the level of meaning. It is the meaning level of the story that attracts both the writer and the reader to it. Usually unconsciously, a writer wants to address some particular aspect of life through a story, some theme. Murder mysteries, for example, are almost always about justice. This is usually the value at stake in a story about murder (the term is from Robert McKee and his key work Story); will the protagonist catch the killer, or not--and how? The meaning of the work will be contained in whether the protagonist catches the killer, by what means, and at what cost. The killer will represent a different, competing value, like greed, or revenge. The story then is (among other things) a mythical contest between these values.

The issue of justice affects us all. Every single one of us relates with justice in our lives, in different ways, different arenas, at different levels of intensity. It is relevant to my life and to yours. A story in which justice is at stake therefore has meaning to us; it matters. We can learn from it. The same is true for the thematic conflicts Kate mentioned in her comment: the abuse of power, integrity vs. practicality, and so on. These affect us all; every adult has experienced them directly in his or her own life. These things don't distance me from Robert the Bruce; they identify me with him. We are one. Every life contains all the emotions. This means that every well-told story has the power to touch us, the power to show us life.

Nonetheless, some issues are more important to each of us than others. Therefore certain types of stories appeal to me more than others. I mentioned Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave yesterday as my pick for a good historical novel. I've read this three or four times all the way through, first in the mid-1970s. The last time I read it was late 2001. I was at a decision-point, even crisis-point (yes--another one!) in my life. I was working for the Insurance Corporation, feeling restless, dissatisfied, and wanting to move on with my life. I wasn't sure how. Stewart's story of the young Merlin, struggling to know of his parentage and to discover his destiny, struck a deep chord in me: it spoke to me. He followed his inner promptings, and learned to recognize signs in his world, symbols of the gods speaking to him. This led him on to his true vocation and destiny--what he had been born to do. It was not easy, and it was dangerous. But it was his own truth.

It would not be too much to say that The Crystal Cave played a role in my decision to leave the company and journey to Gampo Abbey on Cape Breton to become a monk and study the Buddhist teachings. I did those things, and am very glad I did. Mary Stewart, wherever you are: you showed me how to live, a little bit. I appreciate it.

I of course don't mean to say that stories are meant to present protagonists that we are supposed to emulate directly in our lives. I don't want to be Dirty Harry in any way. But the issue of justice vs. injustice, in particular how institutions set up to promote and enforce justice can actually create its opposite, is still of keen interest, and I want to see how these values play out dramatically.

In short: it is a "high hurdle", as Kate observed--but the hurdle is not due to my fussy tastes; it is built in to storytelling itself. This is the hurdle the writer agrees to jump in taking on the artistic task of storytelling. Let's not kid ourselves about how difficult it is to do well. And all the more praise for those who succeed: I thank you all.

search for the controlling idea

What is the status of my project, my novel? I have certainly lost compression this past month, gripped by feelings of self-criticism and worry about my life-choices, and examining these to the best of my ability, in writing. I believe it was Nietzsche who said that someone who has a why to live can put up with almost any how. I feel similarly about writing: I need to know, in some sense, why I'm doing what I'm doing in order to maintain my motivation. So I'm wondering, what do I know, anyway? What have I got to offer?

Lately I've been letting my mind run. Like deep-sea fishing: a marlin takes the hook and you have to let it run; the fish is just too big and powerful to control at first. The line pays out at ferocious speed, whizzing off the great spool. In my case, my thoughts have turned from the astrological examination of my current situation, seeing this stage as part of my life story, to investigating the theme of my life story itself: what is its controlling idea to date? The term is from Robert McKee. He defines it thus in Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting:

A controlling idea may be expressed in a single sentence describing how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end.

An important strand, maybe the main strand, of my life is itself a search for meaning in the form of clear beliefs to hold and live by. This is the same as mythology, in Joseph Campbell's view. Put simply: a search for truth. And my life has gone through distinct stages, or "acts" in story terms, in the unfoldment of this search.

But what are my beliefs right now? And what is my stance toward the material I'm writing about--the world of belief as it existed in 48 BC, and as it set the agenda for belief over the coming 2,000 years? To some extent I simply trust the material of the story, trust that my creative and technical work in devising characters and events will reveal what needs to be revealed: that the meaning of the work is already latent within it, I just need to keep writing and letting stuff happen.

On the other hand, I don't feel that's quite so. I can't simply park my conscious mind, my reasoning mind, or assign it only to the technical task of executing my story; I must reach for the stars with my rational self too. I must do my utmost to become conscious of the meaning of what I'm doing, and not simply wait for that to come to me. In short, I must work at it.

So that's what I've been doing. Or, at least, that's what I've been telling myself that's what I'm doing. As I say, I have been letting my mind free-run, and whether its course is project-related or not I can't really tell. I have been making notes, thinking, checking books.

This morning the chase took me to my copy of The Myth of the Eternal Return by Mircea Eliade, a text I bought in May 1982, just after returning from my solo trip to Europe, Israel, and Africa. I was still on the track of trying to get to the ideas underlying my novel project of the time, More Things to Come, which, as I have mentioned before, was built around the beliefs of a fictitious millenarian cult. Fascinated by apocalypse, I wanted to understand the ideas--the belief-system of one who believes in a destination for history. The subtitle of Eliade's book, Cosmos and History, suggest more of what it's about, and it seemed right up my alley.

Indeed it was--and still is, for my current work, The Age of Pisces, is really about the same thing: the conflict between the ideas of the "eternal return"--the notion that all is cyclic, and there is nothing truly new under the sun--and history: the notion that there is actual change, novelty, in the world. This topic is even deeper than it appears. I must be closer to understanding it than I was in 1982, but I don't feel that way.

In broad terms, I suspect that the conflict, the dialogue, between the "cyclic world" (which always resolves back to its timeless truths, timeless gods) and the "historical world" (which tumbles forward painfully and possibly meaninglessly) amounts to the conflict between the ossified order of the "found truth"--the freezing of society that occurs when those in power want to keep a good thing going--and the spirit of adventure: the hero questing for the means to redeem himself and his society, to heal it of its sickness.

The two depend on each other. If the world does not languish ill, the hero has no task, no function. On the other hand, if there is no hero to redeem society, then that society continues to harden into a mask of itself, an inflexible shell, like Brocq's disease, in which one's skin turns into hard, barklike plates, so that eventually one cannot move at all without shattering and bleeding.

Anyway, this morning I was keying from The Myth of the Eternal Return, rereading the book again while I typed the highlighted portions, excited by the depth and perceptiveness of Eliade's observations. Among my source authors, only Campbell himself do I rate more highly. The titles of its four chapters give an idea of the content: "Archetypes and Repetition", "The Regeneration of Time", "Misfortune and History", and "The Terror of History".

Everyone in the world bases his or her actions on beliefs about how the world is. In general, these beliefs are vague, unconscious, or mistaken. The implications of this are enormous, beyond imagining. But if one is aware of the problem, and wants to address it, what does one do? Where does one turn? Whom does one ask? According to Campbell, the hero goes forth armed with trust in himself and his own experience of value. Seek, and ye shall find.

I'm seeking. I have found a lot, but I am not at a place of rest, of insight into my own message, the controlling idea of my work. I know I can't simply down tools while hunting for the ultimate answer for everything--and yet now is a time for reflection and search, and to allow the results of this to percolate into the work. The part of me that wants results--a big part--feels pain at the slowdown.

the dead hand

Coming down a bit early today to do my post. Rain drips down from a drenched cotton-batting sky. Kimmie's office is having a barbecue at a coworker's house. I'll be heading up in due course, so I wanted to take care of this, and also get some afternoon reading in before attending the gathering.

I've been meaning to do a post based on the powerful and chilling term dead hand. Here is my faithful Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th edition:

dead hand 2: the oppressive influence of the past

The term swam up into my mind when I was writing something a few weeks ago. When I looked it up I was surprised at its strength. The oppressive influence of the past is a vast topic, and, phrased that way, also chilling.

It feels very relevant to the writer of historical fiction. One question I sometimes ask myself is, Why write (or read) historical fiction? Robert McKee's answer (in his storytelling text Story):

Many contemporary antagonisms are so distressing or loaded with controversy that it's difficult to dramatize them in a present-day setting without alienating the audience. Such dilemmas are often best viewed at a safe distance in time.

He of course is talking about screenwriting, and how to justify the tremendous added production expense of setting a story in a past period, but I believe the argument translates to fiction-writing as well.

While I'm sure there's something to that, I don't believe McKee's explanation gets to the heart of the matter. I'm thinking that historical stories have, for one thing, a quality of "once upon a time"--they evoke the mythical realm of the fairytale. Closely related to that is that they show people of remote times to be the same as we are now, merely with different fashions, social codes, language, and technology (which in turn reveals all these things to be incidental to the human condition). The problem of life, of how to live, was ever the same. The human condition has an eternal quality, which points to questions of meaning, of the spiritual.

At the same time, those very differences call attention to the corresponding aspects of life in our own time: we are thereby made aware of our own existence by seeing it through the eyes of another time, so to speak. We may notice afresh, and appreciate--or question--the social structures and things in our world that we usually take for granted.

And now: the dead hand of the past. In Ulysses Stephen Dedalus says, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." I'm sure many neurons have fired in the effort to unpack his meaning. Mircea Eliade, in his The Myth of the Eternal Return, says that for archaic man,

neither the objects of the external world nor human acts...have any autonomous intrinsic value. Objects or acts acquire a value, and in so doing become real, because they participate, after one fashion or another, in a reality that transcends them.... [H]uman acts...are repeated because they were consecrated in the beginning...by gods, ancestors, or heroes.

Later on he says:

[I]nterest in the "irreversible" and the "new" in history is a recent discovery in the life of humanity. On the contrary, archaic humanity...defended itself, to the utmost of its powers, against all the novelty and irreversibility which history entails.

For archaic man--who, after all, is us under our Calvin Klein briefs--historical acts, that is, acts that were not performed originally by a god or hero or ancestor, are necessarily imperfect and in fact sinful. It is the accumulation of these sinful, profane acts that is wiped out each year with the ancient New Year festival--a rite we still practice with our saturnalian New Year's party and list of resolutions. In the ancient world, much more than now, life started afresh after the New Year. History was erased like an Etch-a-Sketch and everyone was reborn.

What I seem to be creeping toward, here, is the idea that the dead hand is the accumulated dead weight of profane history--the irreversible events that have piled one on another since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, or since the Big Bang, depending on your view. The dead hand makes its way into spiritual thinking as the doctrine of original sin, or as karma: what was done in the past, by people we no longer identify with as ourselves, catches up with us.

The dead hand says that past and present are connected, not only in obvious ways, but in a deep mysterious way that affects each of us like a powerful current we usually don't even know we're swimming in--or drowning in.

I'm not quite sure, but I think I'm suggesting that historical fiction, historical drama, brings us closer to this reality by showing us the relativity of time. The past is now if we know how to look.