Same and Different

In my thinking about various things, I arrive again and again at a basic conundrum of human experience: the Same and the Different.

Even in ancient times this question exercised philosophers. How do we understand the ideas of Same and Different? What makes something the Same as something else, and what makes it Different? I thought of doing a drawing or a painting with the title of "Same and Different": two identical eggs side by side. They're the same--but different.

Another way of presenting this same idea is the notion of Genus and Species. In the ancient, original sense, Genus was the category to which two individuals belonged--as, say, the Genus "egg" in my example--and the Species was the individual instance within the category--as the two individual eggs. Two Different individuals within the Same category. They're the Same--just Different.

Two other terms for Same and Different are Familiar and Strange. For something to be the Same, it must be Familiar: we must have a preexisting idea of it against which to compare it and note its Sameness. The Strange is Different from our familiar ideas. We recognize its novelty.

Every created work will be an amalgam of Familiar and Strange, Same and Different, Old and New. Familiar words in a Strange sequence, for example.

My first thought was about historical fiction: that it is a particular example of Same and Different. For, like, say, science fiction, it transports us to a world removed in time from our own: to a place none of us has been in our lifetime. In that sense it must be Strange and Different. But in that Strange and Different time, it contains people, things, situations, that are Familiar--the Same as what we recognize in our own lives now.

But it's not just historical fiction and science fiction that traffic in the Familiar and the Strange in this way--it's every work. An artist is exactly someone who assembles the Familiar and the Strange in a creative and novel way to evoke a sense of aesthetic enjoyment and meaning in a viewer or reader.

And hence, again, that excellent saying about high-quality writing: it makes the familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar. This is the ability to see (and represent) things with fresh, unprejudiced vision, with the eye of newness.

A historical project is simply one way of doing that. Right now, it's my way. Day in and day out, I journey through the Strange to find the Familiar in history--and finding the Familiar in history, recognize the Strange in today. My task is to share those insights.

zeitgeist

I still can't view the stats page for my blog, which creates a curious feeling of being cut off. Sort of like a performer who can no longer see the audience.

I continue to research my work. If I am not an "insecure talent", in McKee's phrase, who spends all his time in research without ever actually getting down to the creative work, then I am indistinguishable from one.

But you have to go by your own sense of readiness. Only you can really tell when you're ready to write. Often not even you, for in my opinion all too many writers start writing before they're ready, and mediocrity is the result.

Now I'm enmeshed mainly in research on ancient Rome. I've always known I would have to dig into this topic, but had other fish to fry first. So it's not a surprise; I knew this was coming. And I don't want my own work to suffer from the defects I feel exist in many other works that deal with ancient Rome. Too often historical fiction suffers from an over-reliance on superficial details and texture, and does not find the deep feelings and ideas underlying past cultures. These, admittedly, are not easy to find, surfacing in one's mind, I think, only at the end of a long process of research--and not at all if you're not looking for them. But you're looking for a certain feeling of zeitgeist.

I'm now sensing that coming over my own mental horizon, which means I'm getting ready to write again...

another one bites the dust

Thundershowers outside. The soft pale pink of rhododendron blossoms and bluebells glows under the gray sky.

Yesterday was Victoria Day in Canada; Kimmie and I relaxed in the prolonged weekend, and put up wall-shelves in her sewing-room to accommodate the growing crowd of Barbie-dolls clothed in her sumptuous creations. She bought about a half-dozen dolls over the weekend at Value Village in Vancouver--all brunettes this time. Lovingly she washed the dolls and shampooed and, yes, conditioned their hair. (Kimmie never had Barbie-dolls as a girl.) More models for her small-scale couture.

As for me, more reading, more notes. I left off reading Spartacus, a historical novel by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the pen name of Scottish writer James Leslie Mitchell, who died in 1935 at age 33, having, according to one source at least, apparently worked himself to death (not how I plan to go!).

Gibbon, a passionate socialist, was a talented writer, but I found that, even though I was most interested in the period and the events (I bought the book precisely because it was about the Spartacus slave revolt), the narrative did not hold me. I was influenced partly by the reviews on Amazon.com, which were ecstatic.

What went wrong? Gibbon's style is appealingly vivid and terse. He packs a lot into the opening sentence, for instance:

When Kleon heard the news from Capua he rose early one morning, being a literatus and unchained, crept to the room of his Master, stabbed him in the throat, mutilated that Master's body even as his own had been mutilated: and so fled from Rome with a stained dagger in his sleeve and a copy of The Republic of Plato hidden in his breast.

It's an eventful first sentence, to be sure. I especially liked the detail that the slave is carrying a copy of the Republic. But this purely outer view of the action proved to be Gibbon's way of narrating all the action in the book. We never get too much inside characters' heads, and thus the story has a rather cinematic quality: sights and sounds without thoughts or feelings. To me, as I think about it, this is a particular weakness in historical fiction, where there is a particular barrier, the gulf of time, to the modern reader's being able to identify with characters and feel connected to the story. Getting inside characters' heads is exactly how to make a modern reader feel at home in the ancient world.

When Robert Graves wrote his Claudius novels he narrated them in the first person, as Claudius, and thus provided an automatic entry to the inner world of his character. Yes, Claudius's ways of thinking and feeling seem strange at times--but at other times not. We recognize him as a person like ourselves, and even have the intriguing thrill of witnessing just how different an ancient person's thoughts are from our own, rather than merely seeing how strange their actions are, and puzzling over why.

Such, anyway, are a few of my thoughts. I had made it just past page 100 of Spartacus, and realized that it was a chore to keep on reading, so I pulled the bookmark and sent the book back to its slot in our bedroom shelf. I pulled out my new copy of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and started (re)reading that instead. I experienced the pleasure of embarking on a story by an experienced, self-assured writer who has something important to say.

So, yes, novel-wise, another one bites the dust.

the seeds of today

I'm in one of my work slowdowns. I suppose I'm like one lost in the woods: the advice is to stop and figure out where you are and where you're going, rather than striking out in some direction, hoping it's the right one.

Action does feel better than inaction: it seems like you're achieving something, rather than just sitting there thinking (or worrying). And yet, in order to arrive anywhere, you need to know where you're going. It's better to get that sorted out and proceed calmly.

I continue to learn about the ancient world. The research books I'm currently reading are Isis in the Ancient World by R. E. Witt, and The Cults of the Roman Empire by Robert Turcan. Kimmie and I have also taken to watching the HBO series Rome, which is set right in my period. Very impressive. (A fun challenge: try to count all the producer credits at the head of each episode. I haven't counted, but I'm going to guess it's about 14.) Each book (or show) takes me on a tour through another piece of the ancient world, and enlarges my "experience" of it. I feel that my task is to get beyond the facts to the feel of that world--the underlying feelings and motives of its people.

I've read that good writing makes the strange seem familiar, and the familiar seem strange (I thought this was Samuel Johnson, but I can't find the source). Well, writing historical fiction presents special problems of strangeness and familiarity. The strangeness is obvious, so the challenge, I think, is to find the familiarity. Other forms of--what shall I call it?--"displaced fiction", such as fantasy and science fiction, present their own challenges with regard to strangeness and familiarity.

In the case of fantasy, it's a purely invented world, which maybe poses special problems in making it seem familiar enough. (My guess is that fantasy characterizations might therefore tend to be somewhat restricted--when the world is too strange, the characters need to be somewhat standard-issue.) With science fiction, it's a matter (often) of extrapolation from the current world: perceiving the seeds of a possible future in our present, and growing these into a jungle of consequences.

Historical fiction presents a different case again. The idea is essentially to present a world that factually was, and thus give the story the authority of factuality. It's "factual", but nonetheless makes imaginative demands of the reader, just as fantasy and science fiction do. Like science fiction, it is linked causally to the present, but instead of growing the seeds of present facts into big consequences, it shows the present as the jungle of consequences which has grown from the seeds of the past. In some sense it answers the question, "how did we get here?"

It's a tall order. Can I answer it even for my own life? How did I get here?

Of course, it might not matter. If you're lost in the woods, then how you got there is less important than how you'll get out. And yet I think it's important to know the history of a situation--including one's own. Knowing the history tells you what causal factors have been at work, and may still be at work. As with the science of ballistics, to know where you've come from is to know where you're going. Or at least, where you will be going unless you make deliberate changes.

So I float over the foggy landscape of the deep past, searching for the seeds of today. I like to think that I'm not actually lost in the woods, I've simply stopped to gather seeds.

on showing off

To think that when I started this blog I was worried that I would not have enough ideas for posts! I used to keep a Word file of possible post ideas, in case I dried up. Now I positively enjoy coming to my post with a blank mind, even if I do have to sit here staring at the screen for a few minutes before finally starting to type.

My approach is just to open up my Word document (I no longer compose my posts in Blogger, since there is a problem with the way typed text shows up slowly there), clear out the previous day's post, and let my mind wander to my book. Even if I haven't really been working on it, what are my thoughts?

In truth, though, I am working on it, even if it is just in the form of research. In this area I feel I do follow Goethe's personal motto, "without haste, and without rest". There's no getting around the fact that if you're writing about a remote time and place, you've got a lot of learning to do first. Otherwise your work will be amateurish and unconvincing.

The historical novelist must necessarily face the problem of the tour de force--a literary phenomenon that I'm generally skeptical and disapproving of.

What do I mean?

Webster's defines tour de force thus:

tour de force : a feat of strength, skill, or ingenuity

My idea of a literary tour de force is a story that involves persons and places remote from the writer's experience. This would be those stories in which a man narrates a story in the voice of a woman, or vice versa, or a European sets his story in an African village. It's not that I have anything intrinsically against it--and I deplore the concept of, what's it called, can't think of the name...the criticism that for a white writer to write a black character is paternalistic...cultural appropriation? Seems I've successfully dismissed that concept from my mind.

I have nothing against that in principle, but my question is: why would you want to do it? Why does a Dane need to write about a Nigerian village? I can't help but feel that at least part of the answer is: showing off.

Showing off is a bad motivation for a writer, in my opinion. I've had a lot of that motivation in my writing life, and maybe I still do. It's not something I'm happy about.

And yet I do think that both self-esteem and ambition are necessary for a good writer. John Milton, before writing Paradise Lost, said that he wanted to create a work that people would not willingly let die. No doubt Dante and Tolstoy and Melville must have had fevers of ambition in writing their masterpieces. But I don't think this is the same as showing off. What's the difference?

Showing off has as its primary motivation the desire to impress and draw admiration and praise. The ego needs of the writer are placed ahead of the meaning of the work itself; the work is subservient to the writer's ego. Just like the showoff child, who aims to grab attention by any which means, you're making demands on people's attention without fully earning it. Instead of moving people and seeking to enrich their souls, you're tying to get them to say, "wow".

So if you're a proud, ambitious writer, the proper way to exercise your abilities is in tackling a project of suitable size and importance (Dante, Tolstoy, Melville). If you pull it off, people will indeed be impressed, but they will be impressed by the depth and scope and power of your message--not by your tricks. The Divine Comedy is 100 cantos of a verse form known as terza rima, structured in three equal parts, each devoted to one of the zones of the nonterrestrial cosmos: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. It is a poetically conceived map of the universe, structured as an epic journey by a visionary poet conscious of his unique cosmic mission. There is no lack of ambition or self-esteem in Dante's work, but the work itself demands these from its creator, and its message is worth it.

But if I, a man born and raised in Vancouver, sat down to write a story from the point of view of, say, a little girl growing up in Texas, what the hell would I be doing? Even if I could pull it off, why am I pulling it off?

To show off.

The historical novelist is taking on a burden that is not dissimilar in some ways. One excuse we have is that there are no living writers who are in a better position than oneself to write about a bygone age. There are women in Texas who are better placed than I am to write about their childhood there, but there is no one who is better placed to write about the ancient world.

But in my opinion the "research overhead" of a historical novel means that it should have something important to say. The writer who's writing a trivial story set in Elizabethan times is, I think, guilty of the tour de force syndrome: he or she is showing off. Yes, maybe you love the Elizabethan period and happen to know a lot about it, but, I don't know...there should be a reason for setting a story in a certain time and place. It shouldn't just be about local color, trying to elevate your pedestrian story with an exotic setting.

Readers of this blog know that I have plenty of anxiety about the scope and nature of my project. I don't doubt its importance, so it's not mere showing off. As for whether I can actually execute the idea, well, time will tell. I'm guessing it wasn't easy for Dante, Tolstoy, or Melville either.

the historical novelist's burden

Luckily, I like solving problems. For writing a work of this size and nature is a continuous path of problem-solving on many levels: story, theme, character, but also history--I must come up with my own solutions to historical problems, gaps, and controversies. Scholars are divided on all kinds of issues, but I can't be; I have to choose. While I enjoy this, it also feels like a heavy responsibility. I want to get it right--that is, to offer the solutions that to me make the most sense--and to do that I have to examine the evidence.

Writing fiction about historical characters is tightly constrained work; but, again luckily, constraint is exactly the spur to creativity. If I know that a character in history did x and y and z, then these things must be accounted for in my story; they must be consistent with the character I'm creating and with the other, fictional events I build around him.

If I were writing a work from scratch I would never create so many characters or saddle myself with so many seemingly disconnected events and details. I take on this challenge because I feel I must in order to address the material I want to address. After all the years I spent searching for the story that I really wanted to tell, the material that really expresses what is important to me, I must take on the creative and research overhead required to get that story written.

The result will be a kind of panorama of that time and place: the best that I can provide. I want the reader to feel that he or she is a time traveler, fallen from the sky into the world of my story, and kind of trapped there until it plays itself out. The reader is there with the textures, sights, smells, sounds of the world; with pungent characters, not different from the people around us now in any important respect, merely in the details of dress and the technology they use and some of their beliefs about the world. They, like us, are people with problems to solve, equipped much as we are to solve them. They are our ancestors, both physically and ideologically.

A time so remote that it seems shrouded in the mist of myth becomes something living and immediate. The things that seemed all-important to them we can see were mere trifles in the flow of history. And certain things that seemed to insignificant for them to notice have become the life's blood of our own age.

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.

elusive gratification

Winter truly drawn in, with wet snow falling all day (lightly), and me out a couple of times to shovel it off the sidewalk along the front of our building, also shoveling the walkways of my neighbors down to the corner. Tossed anti-ice crystals on the walks.

I was happy to receive a comment from a reader named Kate to my recent post about shopping for historical fiction, offering suggestions in response to a request I left in the comments there. She recommends The Masters of Rome series by Colleen McCullough. It does seem like a natural. I borrowed one of them from the library about a year (or two) ago when I saw it on the paperback rack--it must have been Caesar: A Novel, because it opened with Caesar in Britain. I made it about 100 pages in as I recall, then bailed. Why?

These books get glowing reviews and have high ratings by readers on Amazon.com. What's my problem? This is a symptom of my fiction anhedonia. My basic problem with what I was reading was my feeling that although stuff was happening, there was no story. I felt that McCullough was executing history, and had clearly done a ton of research, but at 100 pages in I wasn't engaged with a character who had a well-formed problem. To me there was a sense of history being taken for granted, rather than turning it into character problems whose outcome is always in doubt. Since I can't (or won't) force myself to read something I'm not enjoying, I took it back and gave up on the series. Maybe I should go back and give it another try--I probably should.

Kate also mentions the famous Robert Graves books I, Claudius and Claudius the God. Now these are indeed brilliant. Graves of course is a different order of writer, and his command of the period is as close to complete, I'm sure, as any modern could come. He is one of the best English stylists ever, but his real achievement is in conveying a sense of the strangeness of the time relative to our own: he shows how the characters of the time think differently than we do, have different assumptions built into their being. Harold Bloom, in The Western Canon, mentions that strangeness is one of the defining qualities of great literature--often obscured by the fact that great works have become canonical, and so, in a sense, are taken for granted. But when they first appear, they are strange and unprecedented in some way. Graves's books about Claudius have, I think, some of this kind of strangeness, even if they do not become canonical or great in Bloom's sense.

Kate seconds a vote by Gabriele Campbell that Dorothy Dunnett's King Hereafter is a good standalone historical read, so I think I will try that by all means. I'm game to try her other pick too, The Heaven Tree (trilogy, I see) by Edith Pargeter. Many thanks, Kate--I appreciate it, and feel free to throw more picks my way.

Now: teatime, read-time. I'm currently working on four books during reading-time: Shantaram, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis, Uriel's Machine, and Identity: Youth and Crisis. I'm enjoying them all very much. A reading hedonist, pure and simple. And I wish to gratify readers as I have been gratified.

the writer shops for a novel

The dark days of the year are here. The fog has lifted, leaving everything dark and wet and still. I turned my errand of cash-fetching at an ATM into a short jog, and ran around Victoria Park. The dark clouds were trying to rain as I walked off my run, but they are still only pregnant with rain.

Kimmie's colonoscopy went well yesterday: the doctor gave her the all-clear, and so whatever was paining her in her abdomen is of still unknown cause. The doctor feels that it's within the bounds of normal experience and is not concerned. Meanwhile, Kimmie is assured for now that there is no sign of cancer, which struck down her brother Freddie.

While Kimmie was in the tender hands of the St. Paul's GI Clinic staff, I walked along Burrard and Robson, winding up again at Indigo Books. This time I determined to search for a novel. Fiction is on the third floor, so I rode the escalators up there and started looking. My first impulse was to look in the science-fiction section. Why? Probably because what I'm looking for is to leave this world: to see how other writers handle the depiction of an imagined other place. Partly this is defeatism, though, because I expect all novels to be disappointing, and so want to have some imaginative verve as compensation for putting up with a basically unenjoyable reading experience. Isn't that a negative stance?

Pushing aside my defeatism, I strode to the "fiction/literature" shelves: the large section of general fiction. Starting at the As, I worked my way along the book-spines and covers. I held my gloved hands behind my back, only looking. No touching unless something looked at least a little bit interesting. Margaret Atwood--nope. Peter Aykroyd--nope. Jilly Cooper--nope! On...

I wanted to find historical fiction, if possible, to compare with my own work. At some point I'm going to have to compare my work to others', and I'll need to know what's out there. I find this thought tiresome. "What will your work remind me of?" "Picture the Shopaholic books, but written by Thomas Pynchon."

Shelf after shelf. Shelf after shelf. Here I am, people--I'm here to spend. Make me. C'mon...

Hmm...what's this? My first pickup: a big Penguin paperback called The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett. Say, this looks not bad. Nice cover. Hm, part of a series, I see--dangerous, but also potential (series to me suggest cranked-out, repetitive work--but I'm planning one myself so I'd better not carp!). Penguin: I still associate this imprint with quality, and indeed British writers I regard as over all better than American or Canadian. Slight problem: it's set in the 16th century, a period I don't have any particular fondness for. Flip it open, read the first paragraph, the first page.

I don't exactly remember the first paragraph (I didn't get the book), but I was a little leery of its suggestion that the main character (or the character being introduced) was a kind of swashbuckling rake, back in the country after unspecified adventures. It feels kind of standard. The writing itself, though, was good, far from the schlock that is usually dished up as historical fiction. Should I? It's a big book--but I like that (if it's good). Hmm. I flipped to a couple of passages in the middle. I settled on one: a rapid narrative of some kind of forest campaign, in which large actions were summarized in brief sentences. This put me off. Combined with the opener, which again was an overview rather than a specific action of one character (it was along the lines of, "When news of So-and-So's return started circulating through the country, people could hardly believe it..."), I felt I was getting too much summary and not enough drama. Nah, I thought--it's too risky. I put it back.

(Now that I've checked the Amazon.com listing for this series of books, I see that every one of them gets 5 stars or 4.5: the reviews are stellar. I'd better go back and read this after all!)

Listlessly I trailed among the shelves. Back, forth. Nope. Nope. Nope.

I went past another biggie: a novel called Shantaram by someone called Gregory David Roberts. It had an Asian-looking design on its gold cover. I picked this up too. The back cover contained reviews of praise, but no plot summary. Odd. The striking thing was Roberts's own story, which occupied the largest paragraph on the back, next to his photo:

Gregory David Roberts was born in Melbourne, Australia. Sentenced to nineteen years in prison for a series of armed robberies, he escaped and spent ten of his fugitive years in Bombay--where he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner, and street soldier for a branch of the Bombay mafia. Recaptured, he served out his sentence, and established a successful multimedia company upon his release. Roberts is now a full-time writer and lives in Bombay.

Well. One thing's clear: I sure have a tame bio. I assessed the physical book. Hm, big trade paperback, 936 pages including two pages of acknowledgments at the back. The book appeared to be based closely on his life--that could be good. How does a junkie/robber/Bombay street soldier write? Let's find out. First-sentence test, chapter 1:

It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.

Hm--is it good? Or a "hey notice me!" grabber? I'll read on:

I realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

Good. For one thing, this writer is not among the great majority who share the same dismal characteristic: they write as though life were a pointless waste of time. He sees life and experience as the arena of important things: values. That makes him my kind of guy up front. I was willing to read more:

In my case, it's a long story, and a crowded one. I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison.

Good. I could see why such emphasis was put on Roberts's bio; without it, these lines would raise huge credibility issues. With it, though, they command attention. I get the feeling that although I would never want to live Roberts's life, here in this book I have the opportunity to learn from it, because he has himself. I was mostly sold at this point.

But it was so big, and relatively expensive (trade paperback: $19.95), that I wanted more security. I flipped ahead to other passages. Here's the second paragraph of chapter 2, in which he's describing a Swiss girl named Karla whom he meets in Bombay:

And I did--I liked everything about her. I liked the Helvetian music of her Swiss-American English, and the way she pushed her hair back slowly with a thumb and forefinger when she was irritated by something. I liked the hard-edged cleverness of her conversation, and the easy, gentle way she touched people she liked when she walked past them or sat beside them. I liked the way she held my eyes until the precise moment when it stopped being comfortable, and then smiled, softening the assail, but never looked away.

That clinched it. Here I was reading someone who's probably better than I am at characterization; I can learn from this guy. He deserves to have his book bought, and I'm happy to do it. I chose a pristine copy and headed for the till downstairs.

When I got home I read chapter 1 and very much enjoyed it. Now: chapter 2.

knowledge and creative choices

Morning notes: A History of Technology, Alexander the Great.

Then: more chapter-prep. I can feel when I know enough to start drafting a chapter, or a scene. Sometimes it takes me by surprise: I might be expecting a couple of more days' preparation, and suddenly I'm typing in the chapter document. It's the same with endings: I might feel the end of the chapter is another day's or two days' work away, then suddenly I'm there--this page, this paragraph. I might sit awhile thinking about what to type next, and suddenly realize I don't need to. It's over. Feelings of pleasure mixed with suspicion and even guilt arise. But I file away the chapter and move on.

Today was still preparation. I treat each chapter as a story in its own right. I like each one to have its own drama, its own turning-points. The basic purpose of the chapter is already established in my outline. I have both the short version and expanded version of the outline text pasted at the top of my notes document. The challenge now is how to achieve that purpose: how to make it happen dramatically, unexpectedly, as the result of forces and pressures acting on my characters.

Creative ideas come from knowledge. I've said it before, but it bears repeating. For one thing, I need to remind myself of this as I pore through seemingly endless research material. I feel a mixture of enjoyment and fretting as I open research file after research file. What would Ostia, the port at the mouth of the Tiber, be like at that time? Hm. I have a file on Ostia--clever me. These prepared files are making the pre-chapter research flow ever more smoothly. Ah. It's still republican Rome; the big port complex was not yet built. The Romans didn't bother with engineering their way around the exposed mouth of the river, or dealing with the sandbars created by the huge volume of silt deposited there each year. Warships, with their shallow draft, simply rowed over them; heavy freighters were partly unloaded onto barges before being towed the rest of the way in.

Will I use that information? Not necessarily. I'm constructing my character's trip, my character's day. In this case the character is Menahem, the magician turned Essene monk. He's never been to Rome, so he will be barraged with new impressions--impressions that will also be the reader's. I need to find those impressions, but more importantly I need to find the factors in that environment that are going to make his day challenging. The forces pushing at your characters should always seem bigger than they are; it should always be a little in doubt that they will be equal to the demands being made of them. Fiction, like life, should offer no guarantees--only insecurity, but with great moments of success and failure, joy and distress.

I wound up reading and highlighting more material in Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome by Lesley and Roy A. Adkins (indispensable for researching this period), and keying it into various research documents, copying and pasting certain sections into my ever-growing chapter-notes document. I know more. I feel my range of creative choices growing. Soon I will have enough to create life, to show living people moving through a bewildering but completely real world.

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.