write unto others

Yesterday I had my weekly lunch at my mother's house--a lovely quiet place in Cove Cliff. As usual, we talked about writing afterwards. Since she's working on a memoir, we looked at the opening sentences, paragraphs, and pages of a number of memoirs that she has. How successful have these writers been in launching their stories?

We agreed that the best opener was from A Place to Stand by Jimmy Santiago Baca:

When I was a boy, my father always wore a pained expression and kept his head down, as if he couldn't shake what was bothering him.

The author opens up with a telling and well-observed fact that is important to his story. He expresses it simply and clearly, without resorting to tricks or come-ons. He has something significant to say, and is not embarrassed or coy about getting to the point. In this he treats his reader with respect, as an equal, as someone whose time and attention he does not want to waste. In this case I've also read the rest of the book, and Baca delivers the goods: a chilling tale of poverty, crime, and punishment that is all the more gripping because it's his own life-story.

One interesting problem, which I noticed for the first time yesterday, is that memoir-writers, in addition to falling prey to the usual flaws of gimmicky openers and window-dressing prologues, tend to overdo description. As I thought about it, I realized the cause.

The memoir-writer in some ways has the opposite difficulty of the fiction-writer: while the fiction-writer is often in the situation of trying to pump from a dry well--coming up with enough details to make a scene vivid--the memoir-writer has a superabundance of material to choose from. If you have a good memory, any scene from your life is full of details: the specific, life-giving touches that make an image real. It's hard to resist putting lots of these in. But too many details clutter and clog a story, just as too few make it seem dry and lifeless. In the case of memoir, the writer needs to show restraint, and choose only the most telling details for inclusion.

I suspect that one reason that this is hard to do is because there is a feeling that if a good image is not used, it is being wasted: left in one's memory as a private thing, and not shared with the world. Your precious memory will sink to oblivion, unredeemed.

Another possible cause is a feeling of insecurity about one's story. If the story is not strong and clear, it might be tempting to dally with description.

Probably a good discipline to adopt would be that suggested by Stephen King: to come up with three telling images of, say, your setting, and to use those and only those.

This is one area in which screenwriters may have an advantage. In a screenplay, the description has to be kept to a bare minimum. It is held in check by the rule that each page of script must correspond to one minute of finished film. Each eighth of a page is about 7 or 8 seconds of story-time. If you've spent that much space describing the subject of a shot, you're implying an 8-second shot--an eternity of film-time. So in a screenplay, the long, loving description has to be chopped down to a few punchy, suggestive words. I recall this example from a script, in which the hero, a hard-bitten cop I think, is introduced:

His face is a roadmap of places you don' t want to go.

In a script, the words have to evoke an image in the reader's mind, and also provide a handle for an actor to start building a performance on. In prose, of course, you have more leeway. But it might be good discipline to pretend you don't.

The duty of the writer is to offer the reader only the best, the choicest things. It's the Golden Rule: write unto others as thou wouldst be written unto.

making it good

What makes a piece of writing good? We always know how much we're enjoying something that we're reading, but it's hard to define what makes a written work enjoyable.

Establishing the criteria of quality in writing has been the business of literary critics ever since that job function has existed. But according to Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism, it is actually impossible to formulate "rules" of literary quality. If I read him correctly, he's saying that although we have a direct experience of the superior quality of one work over another, we can never finally say exactly why it is better. (Indeed, it was partly for this reason that he wanted to get away from the whole project of comparing the merits of various literary works, and see rather whether he could outline a "science" of literary criticism based on the purely objective aspects of literature--things that can be known.)

That may be OK for a literary critic, but a practicing writer does need practical guidance in how to tell good from bad, and how to steer more toward the former than the latter.

Speaking for myself, I would say that I'm guided, as a reader and therefore as a writer, by the desire to experience certain kinds of feelings while reading. Without going into the how of it, I'm seeking a kind of engaged interest--something that holds my attention and, in a certain way, compels my assent. I think that in order for this to happen, the writer's understanding of the world, people, and events must be similar to my own. I'm disengaged or put off if, while reading, I think, "That's not how the world works; that's not how people are; that's not how things happen."

I've mentioned before that the best writers make the familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar. This perhaps is the heart of the matter for literature. The task is to create a work in which strangeness and familiarity are laminated together in endless tight layers, like the layers of hard and supple steel in a samurai sword. The more strange a work is in some respects--the fanciful world of Harry Potter, say--the more it needs to be homey and familiar in others, such as in the everyday interactions of its characters. The more quotidian the setting and its people, the more strange and mysterious the underlying universe of the story--and here I think of James Joyce and his Dubliners.

Different readers like different things. We have different issues, different interests, different life experience. Certain writers "speak" to me more than other ones do--and the same will be true of you.

As I've said many times before, I have a hard time now finding fiction that I can enjoy. For whatever reason, writers are not speaking to me. So I'm setting out to write the book I can enjoy reading. Will others enjoy it? Who knows. There are a lot of hurdles to get over before I can find that out.

quiet life

It's hard to describe the writing process as I'm now practicing it. There is a feeling of tunneling in, digging into the ideas and characters that I've got, searching for a nucleus, for the linkages.

Research is continuous. In some ways I feel that a work of fiction or drama is as much a matter of research as any work of nonfiction, or even of science. And, in many ways, the more fanciful your story, the more its underlying network of consistent relationships, of rules, needs to be solid and worked out. Somewhere in the mysterious chemistry of fact and fancy emerges the special cocktail of familiarity and strangeness that is a story. A good story, anyway.

Summer heat is upon us. Right now (7:26 a.m.) the green central area between our building and the buildings next door is still in shade. The sun strikes the lane beyond the low canyon between our buildings, and the sky is clear blue over the gray expanse of the long roof across the lane. It is quiet except for the whir of two fans in my computer.

I wanted a quiet life in which to think and write, and, outwardly, I've got it.

surprise!

In my last post I raised the topic of what the experience of literature, the experience of reading, actually is. To the extent that we read for pleasure or at least on our own initiative, we must feel we're having a positive experience from it, maybe several positive experiences. Can these be identified?

At some basic level I sense the interplay here of the Familiar and the Strange. Words, in order to communicate, must be familiar--we have to know them. But in order for them to tell us something new, something we didn't know before, they must, in their combination, present us with something strange: a new idea. There is something mysterious about this ability to combine familiar things in new ways to present us with things that are not only strange and new but also relevant and illuminating. The source of the power of literature lies somewhere here.

I think about something I read in Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, something that he mentions in passing: that in Shakespeare we find, for the first time, the phenomenon of the character discovering new things about himself in the course of a monologue. We watch a character following a train of thought and coming to novel insights about himself and his world. As I recall, Bloom was saying that the character discovers or forms himself through this process. It's like the old saying, "tell me something I don't know", but applied to ourselves: I tell myself something I didn't know.

Thus the basic experience of literature, the fundamental emotion, if you like, associated with reading, is surprise. My Webster's gives this as sense 3 of the verb surprise:

to strike with wonder and amazement esp. because unexpected

All right, so surprise itself is not the emotion, but rather the trigger for the emotions of wonder and amazement.

Here I'm using wonder and amazement as general terms that have degrees of intensity. I'm referring to our reaction to novelty of all kinds. Novelty attracts our attention and sparks our interest; it engages us. I think about Paul Holinger's assertion in his book What Babies Say Before They Can Talk: that we are born with nine forms of emotional expression hardwired in us. Three of these he calls "signals of fun": interest, enjoyment, and surprise. (The other six he calls "signals for help": distress, anger, fear, shame, disgust, and "dissmell".) I'm saying that a properly functioning literary experience evokes surprise in us, leading on to interest and enjoyment. We may not gasp and gurgle and raise our eyebrows as we did when we were newborns, having learned to internalize our feelings and not let on so transparently. But nonetheless the impulses to do those things are still there, and, I say, can and should be triggered by reading.

Friends, there you have it. The experience of literature is (potentially) the gateway to the full suite of all our positive feelings. What more could one ask?

Back to creating mine...

I'd like to do that

After three years of blogging, I'm finding it hard to come up with ideas for posts these days. Does this mean that my blog has played itself out--that I've covered all the topics that naturally relate to it? Or does it mean that more of my life and work has become "unbloggable"--not of a nature that I can or want to share in this public space? Or perhaps that my creativity is drying up?

This morning, for example, I was going to launch on a post based on John Fowles's critique of his own novel The Magus--that he was trying to create an experience "beyond the literary". But I recalled then that I've already written about that. Dang! I don't want to be that person who's always repeated the same joke or the same anecdote.

Well, it still raises an important idea: the experience of literature. What kind of an experience does the literary creator seek to create in his readers--and why?

In my case, anyway, there seems to be a certain kind of "imitative inspiration". I read or see something that I really enjoy, and want to create something that has that kind of effect on others. I remember feeling that way when I first saw the movie The Big Chill in 1983. Watching the movie alone in the theater, as I often did in those days, I was moved by it, and as I walked home in the dark across the Granville Street Bridge I thought, "I'd like to make a movie like that!"

Why did I think that?

It seems there are a number of factors. We often think that when we see great athletes or pop stars or dancers: I wish I could do that. Yes, it's partly perhaps envy: "I wish I had other people looking at me and being impressed". But I think that is a relatively small part. Larger is the desire for the sense of joy and presence that mastery suggests. An athlete at the peak of performance is in the moment: absorbed in the synchronization of mind and body with the challenge at hand. This is almost the definition of fun--don't you think? So: "That looks like so much fun! I want to do it too!"

Another aspect is giving back. Just as the athlete or artist has given you an experience that you value, and for which you feel grateful, you want to be able to share that with others--to be the vector of such experiences. You want to be a joy-bringer, a fun-bringer. You want to enrich the culture, enrich people's lives.

One more factor. These thoughts remain mere daydreams or wishful thinking unless there is some native talent or aptitude within one. Where the desire to imitate is strong, I suspect it is one's own talent calling to one: "Yes, that's right--this way. Come on!"

The achievements of others send us the message that this is possible. We know that the achievement is difficult, but that is where the excitement lies: it's difficult, but if you try hard enough, it's possible. It's presenting the possibility of the thrill of achievement, like reaching the peak of a mountain: hard but exhilarating, and worth it.

All these things are ingredients in the cocktail called "I'd like to do that".

I've written before about how these feelings were triggered in me by, among other things, reading Crime and Punishment when I was 13. To produce such an excellent work of art is a noble goal, a worthwhile aim for one's life. It's very easy to be seduced by lesser or counterfeit or consolation aims, such as making lots of money or becoming envied for some other reason. But these are lesser, and at some level we know it.

Back at it then. The mountain-peak still towers far above me...

the end and how to get there

The finger? Much better, thanks. Its last segment is still a bit hard from inflammation, but it does not hurt, and I can use it at will. I used it to play some guitar last night, and this morning I'm typing with both hands.

Kimmie and I have been watching the 1977 Masterpiece Theatre production of Love for Lydia, based on the novel by H. E. Bates. Set in England of the 1920s and 30s, the story has a moody young man, Edward Richardson, aspiring to be a novelist. While the core of the story is shaped around his love for a beautiful young socialite, Lydia, who also appears to be somewhat mentally ill, I'm interested by how the approach to novel-writing is portrayed. Young Richardson simply rolls a sheet of paper into a typewriter, types "Chapter One", and launches on his book.

While I'm sure that many, no doubt most, novels are written that way, I'm equally sure that very few published ones are. But since it was presumably written this way by Bates, it seems plausible that this was how Bates himself worked. That seems the more likely, since he wrote and published hundreds of works in his lifetime (he died in 1974). (It's also possible though that the material was written in order to conform with the audience's preconceptions in order not to distract from the more important relational parts of the story.)

To me, it's as hard to imagine writing a book without a careful plan as it is to imagine building a house by just starting to dig in the ground and making it up as you go along. And writing a large book is more like building a skyscraper. It's inconceivable that it could work out without detailed planning.

On the other hand, who really knows? All the various methods and techniques for creative writing are probably so much whistling in the dark. In reality, it's probably, as I've mentioned before, as that pilot told me back at Seminary: "Any landing you walk away from is a good landing." Any method that gets you to the end is a good method.

Well then. I suppose I should get on with it.

pointing-out instructions

In Vajrayana Buddhism there is a particular class of teachings called "pointing-out instructions". These are essentially tips given by a realized teacher to his student so that the student may recognize aspects of his experience for what they are. The student may already be having the experience, but doesn't know he's having it. So the teacher points it out to him. The teacher can't give you the experience, he can only point to it in the hope that you'll recognize it.

In a more mundane sense, I think this is basically what writing does, or is supposed to do.

For why, I wondered, in a world with so much sensual richness and variety, do I spend so much of my time scanning my eyes along a track of ink-marks on paper? As sensory inputs go, this is thin gruel. Imagine how quickly you would grow tired of scanning your eyes along the pages of a book written in a language you don't know. It would get very boring, very quickly. You would become acutely conscious of how little stimulation you're receiving, and seek to increase it, most likely by tossing that book aside and doing something else.

But reading in English is something I can do, happily, for hours each day. Indeed, I feel I'm missing out if I don't read in a day.

It's not purely a matter of entertainment. Activities that are "purely" entertainment--such as, say, video games--are things I usually tire of quickly.

No, for me reading is about learning. But it's not simply learning for its own sake. For to sustain a positive interest in learning something, you have to feel that it's relevant to your experience, your life. You need to feel that the new knowledge is, in the widest sense, practical. The knowledge will enrich your experience of life.

When I read nonfiction, like, say, A History of Technology, I'm learning in a straightforward, traditional way. The knowledge is practical for me because I'm writing historical fiction and need to know those things; and also because it enriches my appreciation of the world around me. Instead of looking at, say, a ship in the harbor and simply taking it for granted, my view of it is enriched by having learned a little about the history of ships--about how they evolved ultimately from the dugout canoe, and how for a long time they bore traces of that origin in their design and construction. Instead of merely sweeping my eyes over the ship, en route to looking at something else, I might actually see it, notice it. It becomes a more vibrant detail of my experience. In a certain sense, it has been pointed out to me.

Fiction makes this process (potentially anyway) more intimate and intense. A stream of artistic prose carries your mind along a track of pure noticing. Just as, in a painting, every square millimeter of the canvas had to be worked by the artist, had to be seen and depicted, to create a vibrant work that is purely and everywhere the expression of the artist's vision, so in a work of writing every word is a contribution to a total, unflagging act of attention by the writer, communicated to the reader. Word by word, the writer draws your attention to things: sensations, thoughts, feelings. One by one, point by point, in a meaningful, purposeful structure. The writer is pointing out aspects of your experience to you.

This is what makes a resort to cliches such a sin in writing: it is a failure of attention, shoving something fake into an intimate experience of genuineness.

Yes, I like having valuable things pointed out to me. So I'll keep on with my reading.

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.

finding out what works

I find that I'm rebelling against my blog, now three years old. These days I'm not sure what to say, or why exactly I'm doing this. There's a balancing act between talking about the process of creating this work, and the danger of revealing too much about it. It's a little bit like watching a "making of" documentary about a movie before seeing the movie--putting the cart before the horse.

In another sense, though, the creation of any work of art is beyond the worldly and quotidian circumstances of its physical creation, and indeed a work of art is beyond what its creator can say or indeed know about it. Northrop Frye makes this point in his Anatomy of Criticism, which I'm currently reading. What a poet may have to say about his own work, Frye says, may have special interest, but not special authority. For in talking about his own work, the poet becomes a critic, and he may be a good or bad one, but there's no such thing as a definitive critic--one who has the last word on any given work of art.

I bought Anatomy of Criticism when I learned that in it Frye talks about, at least in passing, the epic genre. I'm thirsty and hungry for anything I can find out about this. What does epic mean? What does genre mean? Are these real, actual things, or merely terms bandied about vaguely by students of literature, with no real consensus as to what they actually refer to?

Frye's landmark book, first published in 1957, addressed what he saw as the central and long-neglected question about literary criticism: is there such a thing as knowledge about literary art, or is everything, in the end, simply and merely a matter of taste? Is there or could there be such a thing as a science of literary criticism--a field of knowledge that progresses and grows in the same way that other fields of scientific knowledge progress and grow? Could the study of literary criticism be like the study of physics or geography?

Northrop Frye emphatically believed that such a science is possible, and Anatomy of Criticism is his effort to sketch out its scope, methods, and agenda. It's a brilliant work in its own right, dense with bold, deep ideas. He essentially picks up the ball of a scientific poetics where Aristotle left it 2,300 years ago, and runs it further up the field.

I'm on page 125, and have not yet reached his detailed discussion of genre, but he has already given me plenty to think about. Indeed, any given page of this book could serve as the basis of a separate thesis, so rich is it with ideas.

Why exactly am I so keen on studying genre, and especially the epic genre? Don't most writers just wing it and write what they want without worrying too much about their "category"?

It's not so much that I want to conform to a pattern, but I do want to know what I'm building. Why reinvent the wheel? If you're setting out to build a bridge, wouldn't it make sense to find out how others have done it, what the techniques and hazards are? What if you built a house, but out of ignorance neglected to include bedrooms? Wouldn't that be silly?

A genre by definition is a structurally stable form. Like a genus or species of animal or plant, it exists because it works. The raccoons that patrol our yard at night are a viable form of life; they can make it in this novel environment; as an organism, they work.

I want to create something that works: a pragmatic goal.

(not very) sick days as opportunities for freedom

A quick post, just to keep my hand in.

I have some kind of mild gastrointestinal infection that had me fasting for five days (I stopped fasting yesterday). It's also had me living a less structured life, as I typically do when having "sick days". In fact I'm not sick in any meaningful sense--I feel good--but the break in routine of eating and so on makes the day different.

So I continue to follow my research instincts. I'm making discoveries, which creates a feeling of excitement and confirmation. I try to stay open to my intuition, letting instinct guide me from one book to another, one idea to another.

Is this any way to write a work of fiction? I don't know. I don't know if it's properly known what fiction even means. (I think of my old classmate Don's mnemonic device for remembering how to distinguish fiction from nonfiction: "bull" vs. "non-bull".) Northrop Frye also had trouble with this strangely vague but persistent way of categorizing literature.

So I'll press forward, and let it be what it is.

Onward.

new bookcase, new book

Yesterday was sunny but still unusually cold. I spent most of the afternoon assembling the Billy bookcase Kimmie and I bought at Ikea last weekend and then rearranging my bookshelves. The task was bigger than I'd expected, and I wound up losing patience and just stuffing books in wherever I could. But my office is clear again of tottering stacks of books on chairs, desk, and floor. I love it.

At reading-time I felt vaguely dissatisfied with the stack of books I've got on the go--a feeling that comes over me from time to time. I take it as a sign of the shifting wind of my interests. I read a passage of the Iliad, then a few pages of House of War by James Carroll. But I didn't really feel like reading anything else that I had on the coffee-table.

I let my mind wander over subjects: what's missing in my reading diet? Science? What kind of science? Psychology?

Very quickly my mind zoomed in on the book Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye, a lavender-colored paperback I got in February. Could that be it?

Trusting my hunch, I came down to the new bookcase (located in the empty windowless room where we keep our freezer) and collected the book. I started reading, and found myself immediately absorbed. Yes: this was just the thing.

Many years ago I was given a book by Northrop Frye, The Great Code, as a gift from our friends the Burts. I still haven't read it. Anatomy of Criticism is, I think, his most famous work, one in which he sketches an outline for a "science" of literary criticism. I decided to buy it when I found it referred to in a work on the epic genre. Apparently Frye said that epics are created by authors at times of greatest stress in their lives. I wanted to find out what else he may have to say about them.

Right from the start I felt myself in sympathy with Frye and enjoying the way his mind works. His "Polemical Introduction" to the book starts thus:

This book consists of "essays," in the word's original sense of a trial or incomplete attempt, on the possibility of a synoptic view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism.

Whew, a bold agenda, right in the first sentence. But what really hooked me was this sentence, toward the end of his long opening paragraph:

My approach is based on Matthew Arnold's precept of letting the mind play freely around a subject in which there has been much endeavor and little attempt at perspective.

Fantastic! I found this sentence provocative and stimulating. What is it about it that I find so appealing?

It's the conjunction of "much endeavor" and "free play". This, I'm sure, is how valuable discoveries are made. You work hard at something, but unsystematically, because it doesn't yet have a system. One things follows on another, and you just attend to those things. Then, after a time, you gain an unconscious familiarity with the subject. Your conscious effort impregnates your unconscious, and you feel its stirrings in hunches and creative ideas. In that condition, that tension, the imagination can burst forth with new things.

This is another variant of the relationship of research to creative writing, I think. You learn and learn, maybe without much system, and then ideas start coming. You have the materials with which to create.

As I read I found myself laughing out loud at some of Frye's dry witticisms--rare for me while reading.

Yes, it was just the thing.

no gum-chewing

The spoken word has power. The written word has, perhaps, even more. In many ways I find this to be an unfathomable mystery.

It's as though humanity reached as eagerly for writing as a child does for speech. I recently saw a wonderful documentary about how infants learn. Of all the sounds that the developing baby hears in the womb--and it hears plenty--the most audible to it is its mother's voice. At birth we're already very familiar with our mother's voice: its pitch, rhythms, and other qualities.

Experiments show too that at birth the brain is a general-language machine, in the sense that a newborn infant can distinguish between sounds in just about any language. A one-month-old baby of English-speaking parents can clearly distinguish between two different sounds in, say, Hindi, that its parents cannot tell apart. Among adults, only Hindi-speakers can hear the difference in sound. The baby, immersed in the language of its household, loses this universal sound-distinguishing ability soon, by about six months, as I recall. Now habituated to its mother tongue, it too can no longer tell the foreign sounds apart.

Babies work ceaselessly to speak, as they do to walk. As extremely social animals we thirst to communicate. The baby's survival depends in part on its ability to communicate its needs, and babies get very frustrated at the barrier they experience in getting their message across. The acquisition of language has the strongest possible motivation behind it.

Language, as a skill, comes under the heading of technology, and it may be our oldest one. The technology called writing is much more recent, dating to maybe 4000 BC or so. But that too was reached for eagerly by cultures who felt the need for it. And now it would surely be the worst sign of disaster for a culture to slide from literacy to illiteracy: the social equivalent of Alzheimer's disease.

In this culture we're inundated with words and we take writing for granted. There seems to be too much of it: marketing "messages", political campaigning, the disposable chatter of text-messaging. If television is, as Steve Allen put it, "chewing-gum for the eyes", then almost all writing today is chewing-gum for the mind.

Almost all. For man does not live by chewing-gum alone, and it was not as chewing-gum that writing was originally created and valued. In the first place, someone must have had something important enough to say that he wanted to record it, so it would not be forgotten--or altered.

Writing reflects the cast of thought behind it. It is an expression of the values and intentions of its creator. All writing is intended to influence others--this blog is so intended. The question is always, influence people how? in what direction? to do what?

Lying next to my keyboard is the latest statement from my phone-service provider, Rogers. Across the top are emblazoned the words, "Welcome to Rogers"--a typical example of automated and meaningless commercial "friendliness". A more honest headline would be: "We rely on your money for our profits, but in most ways you are a nuisance to us, especially if any of our employees has to pay any individual attention to you. Then you become a cost center. Please don't do that." (Indeed, if they put that message on there, I would gain respect for them--something I have very little of right now.)

Those of us who make an art of writing have a special duty not to be false. The deluge of chewing-gum writing is characterized by its manipulativeness, hypocrisy, and frivolity. Writing as art should be none of these things. But most of all it should be truthful: telling it like it is (or was!).

I don't even like real chewing-gum.

style? forget it

A couple of days ago I was talking with my mother about writing. She was saying that one of the things she frets about while writing is how to say something--the issue of style.

I used to concern myself quite a lot with style, but I don't anymore. Or: not much, anyway. Now I believe that if, as a writer, you're focusing on style, you're directing attention at the wrong thing. It's a waste of time for at least two reasons:

1) the most important effects of creative writing are unrelated to style;

2) any style that is self-consciously "used" comes across as affected, which places an obstacle between the reader and the content of the work.

Now I associate "chosen" styles with commercial writing. I think back to writing for hire that I've done, such as a couple of small pieces for Vancouver magazine back in the 1980s. I wrote them in the snappy, breezy style that was the tone of that section of the magazine--and collected my (small) checks. It was perfectly good work, and I myself enjoyed reading that part of the magazine. But if I set out to write a novel in that style, it would be self-conscious and phony exercise (and possibly a work of "chick lit").

I'm no more happy when "serious" writers fool around with their writing style. To me, the work of, say, Ernest Hemingway comes across as affected. Maybe it wasn't; maybe that was his natural and spontaneous way of writing. But I don't think so. It reads, to me, like the work of someone trying to write a "special way" for effect--to impress, in some way.

I'm afraid I can't even exempt my literary idol, James Joyce. Much of Ulysses is a stylistic tour de force. But to the extent that it is such, I'm afraid it is not very powerful--not to me. Such tricks rely on the reader's education in understanding some abstract point or joke being made by the writer. There is then, presumably, a burst of detached, ironic amusement, or some such. Compared to what literature is capable of, this is an empty and arid experience.

I hold much more with E. B. White, who said that style is not something that a writer can really contrive; it is a natural expression of the totality of the writer's being. Your style arises from the sum of your personality, experience, and education. At the moment of writing, you can't change those things; they are what they are, as distinctive as your fingerprint. It's almost impossible to change--and why would you want to?

An excessive concern with style shows that the writer is either ignoring or taking for granted his subject-matter. But this is a bad idea. The first duty of the writer is to have something worthwhile to say. And the more important your subject, the less important the issue of style is. If you've witnessed a genocide and want to write about it, it would be foolish and narcissistic to fuss over your literary style, aiming for precious effects. You've got bigger fish to fry.

Aristotle, in his Poetics, devotes maybe 3 or 4 pages to "diction"--roughly the equivalent of style as I'm using the term here. The rest of the 40-odd pages he devotes to content: your story. That accords with the balance I would propose: spend 90% of your effort on story, or what you're writing, and 10% on style, or how you write it. No: make that 95% and 5%.

The tip I offered Mom was to write the way she might write down a vivid and important dream when pressed for time. If you've only got 10 minutes to write down your dream, how do you attack it? You're not sweating over the fine points of style; you've got something to say, and you've got to get it down--now. That way, you'll rely on your natural style, whatever it is. For better or for worse, it will be you.

I might boil it down thus: don't be clever; be honest and accurate.

genre for fun

It's 2008, and we return to our work routine. Kimmie, off for the past 10 days or so, prepares upstairs to return to the office. I too will return to a more "normal" schedule.

Over the holiday I continued to work on my notes, but not directly toward The Mission. Instead I became absorbed in two topics: genre and theology.

Why these? In the case of genre, it's my evolving sense that this elastic concept, which according to some (including Aristotle) is key to being able to execute an artistic work properly, is not well understood. Robert McKee in his text Story emphasizes the importance to the writer of an understanding of genre, especially the genre in which he is trying to write. He provides a list of movie genres, but it is an omnium gatherum of story types ("education plot"; "revenge plot"), settings ("Western"; "historical drama"), and moods ("comedy"; "horror"). To me this is mixing apples and oranges, with a few mangoes and persimmons also thrown in.

Stories, like most things, can be categorized in a number of ways. Which are the ones that matter most to the creative writer?

I'm starting to see it this way: no work is of simply one genre. Rather, each work comprises several. I'm thinking that genre, which comes from the same root as the word gene, functions much like a gene: it is a definite unit of heredity that makes itself manifest by expression. In the body, a gene is responsible for the production of one or more proteins, which are themselves like chemical machines or robots that perform functions. Just as a person's genome is the total suite of his or her genes, what we call genre in a story is actually a genome as well: the total suite of its genre components.

Suppose you're writing a Western romantic comedy. Is your story a Western, a love story, or a comedy? Answer: all of the above. "Western", "love story", and "comedy" are all genres in the genome of that story. It has "inherited" story traits from all those genres.

The mixing and combination of genres in storytelling is much like the mixing of genes in reproduction. The vast possibilities of combination make sure that each individual is a unique expression of traits--and that is true of both organisms and stories.

What are the implications for the writer? One still needs to study genre--but one needs to understand all the genres in the genome of one's story. In this example, you'll need to know something about Westerns, about romances, and about comedies. Of course, each of those is a category with many subcategories--and you will need to know your subcategories.

One interesting task would be to take a story and analyze its genre affinities by comparing it to other stories that have similar traits. When I was explaining this idea to Kimmie over the holiday we had just watched the Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life. "Christmas story" is itself a genre, which includes things such as A Christmas Carol and Miracle on 34th Street and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. It's also (for want of another term) a supernatural fable. Again, here it resembles A Christmas Carol, but also other works such as Here Comes Mr. Jordan (remade as Heaven Can Wait) and Splash. Its actual plot structure follows one of the types of what Robert McKee calls "ironic ascension", one in which the character is

pushed further and further from his goal...only to discover that in fact he's been led right to it.

In this the story resembles Ruthless People. It also falls in the category of story called "education plot", which, in McKee's words, "arcs on a deep change within the protagonist's view of life, people, or self from the negative (naive, distrustful, fatalistic, self-hating) to the positive (wise, trusting, optimistic, self-possessed)", and in this way resembles stories such as Tender Mercies and My Best Friend's Wedding. It's also a domestic drama, and its mood is mainly comedic.

All of these are contributing factors--all are genres in the genome of It's a Wonderful Life.

Over the holiday I was reading and typing notes from works such as Aristotle's Poetics, Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, McKee's Story, and even a bit of Genetics for Dummies in order to dig into my genome metaphor.

That's one way to have holiday fun--and it was fun.

Now: back to work.

species of writers

I thought I would check in with a quick post, to let you know that all is well. Kimmie has this week off from work, and so the routine is different. Snow fell in the night sometime, so now there is a powdery cold blanket of white outside. Traffic, much less than usual, is muted. In fact, right now I can hear none. Love it!

Christmas passed very pleasantly here, and Santa was most generous. Among other things, I received a pair of waterproof Helly Hansen walking-boots made in Vietnam. Maybe I'll break them in today. I have a stack of DVDs that I must return to the library. Shall I take a walk up to Lynn Valley?

As for writing, my god, what can I tell you. Among the stocking-stuffers I received was the Holiday Issue of The New York Review of Books. I rarely read book reviews (except readers' reviews on Amazon.com when I'm considering buying a book). This is partly because my reading program is governed by my research and interests, and therefore not by what people are touting as a good book. It is partly too because I like to find my own reading experiences, and not simply consume products that have been vetted and assessed by others; I like to form my own opinions.

Then there are the specific qualities of "reviewer culture" that I don' t like. There's something depressing and undignified in the attack/counterattack of book reviews. Criticisms are rebutted by authors, then reviewers might get a chance to counter-rebut. These exchanges are often tinged with bitterness, which, while understandable, is not edifying.

I'm not very attuned to literary culture in general, although I read quite a lot and love books. Too often I find reviewers and critics gushing over works that seem very uninteresting to me. I get the feeling that the whole system is governed much more by fashion than anyone realizes or acknowledges.

On top of all that are feelings of intimidation. This issue has an essay on Joyce Carol Oates (including a lovely black-and-white photo of her from 1975: a delicate-looking creature with enormous dark eyes). Oates is a serious, high-quality writer. I've read one or two of her short stories, and thought they were very good. But what she really is, is prolific. She's published dozens of novels, short-story collections, essays, and plays. She seems to spend much of each day writing--many daytime hours and a few nighttime ones.

Egad. If a writer is someone who writes (and I think you can make a good case for that definition), then Joyce Carol Oates is a writer. The real deal. I note that she's a Gemini (born 16 June 1938), the sign of writing and thinking and talking.

It makes me wonder: why aren't I churning out books and stories and scripts by the dozen? What's wrong with me? Why does my "work" in progress consist mostly of hundreds, nay, thousands of pages of notes? I write to myself, for god's sake! What am I doing?

Clearly, I'm some different kind of animal. A slow-spawning one.

Writers' methods must differ not only because our temperaments are different, but because our aims are different. What kind of experience are you looking for from a book? I remember reading a rueful comment by John Fowles, who was always embarrassed that his most popular book was The Magus, his second novel, published in 1965. He said (as I recall) that in it he had tried to create an experience "beyond the literary"--and meant this as a criticism.

I thought I knew what he meant--sort of. I remember my excitement and enjoyment when I first read The Magus, probably about 1977 or so. It was a fast-moving, thrilleresque story, but written with a mystical aim. It seemed to be an example of the "spiritual adventure-story" that I myself became interested in writing. (Last time I tried reading The Magus, about 10 years ago, I couldn't get into it.) But was it a bad thing to want to create an experience "beyond the literary"? And what is a "literary" experience, anyway?

Maybe I'm not sure what kind of experience I'm aiming to create. But whatever it is, it's not something I can come up with quickly. I'm seeing a book like a tree, or a tooth: something with roots. The roots are its hidden connection with reality. A work of fiction is a fantasy, but its power, its effect, comes from its connection with reality. I say this knowing how slippery and unsure a word reality is. But let it stand. Reality is that which we care about. A work of art affects us to the extent that it arises from or has implications for that which we care about.

My reality-detector is a fussy, finnicky gadget. As I work through my great epic, I think, "not real enough..." and am sent off on another errand, in search of more reality, like finding potting soil with which to surround the deep, vast root-system of the oak I'm planting.

I guess it's like the sloth watching the cheetah (assuming they could find a continent to share). The cheetah is dynamic, fast-moving. The sloth, for whatever reason, conserves its energy. (The sloth was named after the sin, by the way--not the other way round.) Its habits are so sedentary that lichen grows in its fur, tinging it green as though it were a rock or a stump. But sloths have their place.

At least, I hope we do.

epic as world-view

Back at my post--blogwise, anyway.

Two days ago a big box arrived in the mail: an order of books from Amazon.com. It contained three picture-books on Victorian fashions for Kimmie, and two books for me: the Penguin Classics edition of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (translated by Robin Buss), and The Epic Cosmos, edited by Larry Allums, a text on the epic genre. The first I got as part of an investigation of "escape" stories, since this is what Mom and I think her memoir-in-progress might be (and also because of the unanimous acclaim of reader-reviewers on Amazon). The second I discovered while looking on Amazon for another book on Greek epics, under the heading "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought". The readers' reviews for this one were also glowing.

As far as I can tell, genre is not a well-studied aspect of literature. After Aristotle's original categorization of poems into four kinds--comedy, tragedy, epic, and "dithyrambic" or what we would call lyric--it seems that much of what is known about genre is a matter of received assumptions and checklists of structural features. My Webster's gives this definition:

epic n (1706) 1 : a long narrative poem in elevated style recounting the deeds of a legendary or historical hero

There: an epic is long, a poem, in "elevated style", and recounts the deeds of a legendary/historical hero.

The view taken by the authors of The Epic Cosmos (it is a collection of essays) is different. Their thinking is based on the ideas of Louise Cowan, who in fact was the teacher of all the authors at something called the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, connected with the University of Dallas. Cowan herself provides the introductory essay, "Epic as Cosmopoesis". My compressed notes from paragraph 1 of the introduction are as follows:

Epic is both more frequent and more diverse than the recognized canon tends to indicate. Characteristics intrinsic to its nature include its sense of totality and its consciousness of mission.

Yes! I thought. Fantastic! A sense of totality and consciousness of mission!

Cowan goes on to state that the epic genre is characterized by four main features:

• penetration of the veil separating material and immaterial existence, allowing an intimate relation between gods and men


• an eschatological expansion of time


• restoration of equilibrium between masculine and feminine forces


• a sense of motion, linking human action to a divine destiny, toward which epic senses history moves

Any work, however humble, that has these aims as part of its agenda, qualifies as epic from this point of view. Any one of those four features would be a major undertaking, and alone would make for a work of serious purpose. Taking them all on at once, of course, is a gigantic and ambitious task--one so large that all true epic authors have invoked divine help for their work, either explicitly in the text (calling on the muse for aid) or "offline". The epic author requires help to gain access to the realm of the gods and channel divine energy. There is an element of theurgy here--or maybe sorcery.

The introduction, which I've not yet finished reading, has already given me a huge amount to think about, and a great boost of inspiration. Looking through Ms. Cowan's magic mirror into the dark inner world of the epic, I have felt an elevation and renewed appreciation for my chosen task. And my various life problems, my worries and kvetches about career, money, relationships, and so on, seem puny and pusillanimous in the presence of such concerns.

Ms. Cowan, and her students and coauthors, are saying that epic is, first of all, a point of view. It is a way of seeing and artistically representing the world as a whole. As I dip into this book, I feel strongly that this is my own point of view, and that I'm reading--and doing--the right thing.

calibrating my frivolometer

I sit here staring at the blank window of the blog-creation screen. All kinds of thoughts tumble through my head. What to say? What to write? Where am I going? What do I report?

One thought leads to another in a vast network of tinker-toy connections (I loved my tinker-toy set when I was five or six). For an investigator, like me, the search seems endless. Search for what, you ask? For stable beliefs.

Books are again accumulating in my reading-stack like planes over a crowded airport. Two more arrived yesterday: one from Amazon.com and one from a used-book dealer in Eugene, Oregon. One was a text on website development; the other a hard-to-get monograph on religion in the ancient Near East. I didn't start either one; I've got too much on the go. A feeling of limitation starts to encroach: the sense that I can read only so many books in my life; I need to choose carefully.

One of the thoughts that came up in the bouquet or fountain of possibilities when I was trying to think of how to start this was about frivolity. I think it was a couple of years ago that this word finally came to me as the label for what troubles me about most contemporary fiction and other cultural products. It's frivolous, generating a "who cares?" response in me.

As I tried to figure out what exactly is the difference between a frivolous and a nonfrivolous work, I eventually recalled these words from Thomas Pynchon's introduction to his collection of short stories, Slow Learner:

When we speak of "seriousness" in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death--how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate.

I thought this hit the nail on the head. Now I would calibrate my frivolometer by measuring how completely a book or an artist is ignoring the fact of death. When you're dying, life matters. When you're not, you might think you can afford to pretend that it doesn't. It's mere delusion and denial--nothing more. But it is pervasive.

Being cognizant of death doesn't mean being depressing or humorless. It means being honest about your values. I believe it means looking at life from the perspective of a dying person--from the perspective of your deathbed. In fact, I think you could do worse as a writer than to imagine you're on your deathbed right now, and look to see what matters to you. That's what you should be writing about.

Coming to grips with death--with one's own death--is the task of middle life and beyond. The problem of how to swallow our own impending death is the core of the midlife crisis. If successfully met, it has a strongly maturing effect. I think this maturing effect can be visible in the work of writers and other artists, as it is in people's lives generally. The talented youngster becomes a mature artist, or, in Pynchon's terms, the apprentice writer becomes a journeyman.

Some authorities believe there's no hurrying this maturing process. I recall reading an opinion given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn on a debate about whether Sholokhov's novel And Quiet Flows the Don was written when Sholokhov was only in his early 20s, as was alleged. Solzhenitsyn dismissed this idea, since he regarded it as impossible for any writer, no matter how talented, to write anything of real maturity and worth until he or she gets into the 40s.

But I'm not so sure. There may be such a thing as "old souls", those who are mature beyond their years--in fact that seems obvious, in my experience. The opposite is certainly true: there are those who are immature for their years. And it may be possible, if you're serious and have the imaginative talent, to journey to a place of maturity, to visit it intensely enough to be able to write. My mother and I have been working our way through James Joyce's Dubliners, which he wrote in his 20s, and these works are anything but frivolous. His insight and expressive power already exceeded anything that almost any other writer could ever come up with, no matter how old they get.

Ach, I'm trying to console myself here a bit. As the world seems to whiz by, I bend over my scholarly books, reading, searching, puzzling...

finding the feeling

Over the last couple of days I have read over some of my blog-posts of the past few months, and thought I detected a rather depressed tone. It seems that a couple of years ago, when I started this blog, I was more lighthearted and capable of humor in my posts. It looks a little like one of the possible effects of aging, in which the joie de vivre of youth is squeezed out by painful experience.

May it never be!

I don't think too much about the "tone" of my writing, since I generally regard this as hard to control, and anyway the effort to control it would be a contrivance, an affectation--something I want to avoid. But every once in a while it is pushed into my attention. I recall, for instance, the very first feedback I got from a literary agent. It was in response to my submission of a youthful adventure novel called The Black Orchid, which the agent (forget who) tore to shreds. One of her withering comments was something like, "...and the dry, stilted tone, which I suppose is an effort to make it sound 19th-century...." Apart from the general unwelcomeness of this "negative praise" (a term I learned from my father), I was struck by the criticism, because I hadn't been aware of trying to affect any particular tone, or to make it seem "period". My prose style, according to this agent, was therefore just boring and stilted, full stop.

Ouch. It's a jungle out there, I thought.

It smarted, but I didn't take it too seriously. I knew my writing stood up favorably in comparison with the great majority of published material. But it did give me some pause. My outlook did and does tend toward the detached and scientific, and my writing style inevitably reflects this. Am I too much of a "scientist" to write fiction and drama? Why do I want to write fiction and drama anyway?

Well, I just do. There is a creative spring within me that keeps burbling forth, and I want to channel that, give expression to it. But there's no denying that that spring percolates through the rational, analytical rock of my mind. A hardheaded Mercury in Capricorn is just not the gushing type, or given to effusiveness.

Of course, it's not a question of a dichotomy between "dry and factual" and "gushing and effusive". And it's not as though I want to read stuff that is merely dry and factual--although I tend to find such stuff much more persuasive than purely emotional outpourings. Rather, I like a balanced, detached, well-researched text powered by an underlying passion. I like adult discourse, not baby-talk. Passion drives the prose forward, motivates it, makes it matter. Clear, authoritative facts, enlisted in the cause of passion, make for powerful reading, I think.

Another way of cutting dryness is humor. This again should not be contrived--for that is painful to read. But if one has a natural humor, then this enlivens one's prose, creates warmth around detachment. Maybe when I'm feeling depressed this becomes muted, and conspicuous by its absence.

And yet another way of boosting the vitality of a naturally even and dry tone is to turn one's detached mind directly onto the emotions themselves--to take an interest in feelings and reporting their effects, rather than simply ignoring them, which is what a true dryasdust does. When a detached mind pays attention to the feeling side of life, the effect is especially powerful, I think. James Joyce was a master of this. A cool, detached, satirical Aquarian, he nonetheless saw into the living heart of people's feelings, and was able to evoke their manifestations in his writing. His dramatization of the painful fight at the Dedalus Christmas dinner in A Portrait of the Artist is one of many examples of his mastery: a cool detached eye seeing how a family suffers, and reporting it vividly, blow by blow.

In the end, you can't really camouflage who you are. As Popeye said, "I yam what I yam." But I do need to watch out. For I think I do unconsciously steer away from "emotional" writing, just because I dislike naked appeals to feeling as a way of making one's case. My desire for objectivity and evenhandedness has me purging my prose of words or expressions that might seem "loaded" or tending to bias the viewpoint. The result can be too much like report-writing (something I'm very good at).

I don't believe in trying to goose scenes in order to wring more "feeling" out of them. In season 2 of The Odyssey, when a new story editor was shoved in by the network to run the writing of the show, he threw around the words emotion and feeling as though merely saying them were the same as evoking them. I had contempt for both the intent and the method. If there's anything I like less than dry, insipid writing it's ungenuine and painted-on emotionality. Real feeling comes out of real situations, and to make them real, you need to be connected with truth--you have to tell it like it is.

When I (mainly accidentally) switch on a contemporary TV drama, the strained efforts at laughs and emotions simply embarrass me, if they don't provoke active feelings of horror, like witnessing someone losing their grip and defecating in public.

No, give me a good, well-written report.

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 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.