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.

hearts of darkness

Having set aside, as I mentioned, the historical novel Spartacus by the young Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon, I continue to read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Now about 20 pages in, I find I'm continuing to really enjoy it.

Let's take a look at how Conrad opens the story:

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

I found this opening interesting, but not especially exciting. Its high content of nautical jargon shows that this is a special interest of the narrator, but for me has a slightly distancing effect. And although the Wikipedia article on Conrad says that he is "recognized as a master prose stylist," I personally find his prose a little bit awkward, a little bit hard to follow. I sometimes find myself having to read his sentences a couple of times to get their meaning. Maybe this is due to the fact that English was a language that Conrad, a Pole, did not pick up until he was an adult. Still, his opener is good because he does not talk down to the reader; the narrator is treating me with respect, so I'm willing to extend him lots of credit.

Prose style is important, of course, but I think it is not by any means the main ingredient of high-quality writing. Trying to think of what actually is the main ingredient, I've come up with: "way of seeing". It's the writer's way of seeing the world--along with the ability to express this--that sets him or her apart. What details does he relate in order to convey his meaning?

Conrad opens Heart of Darkness by setting the scene: the Nellie rides at anchor at flood tide on the Thames estuary, and its officers are hanging out on deck waiting for the tide to change. The narrator names three of them by title only--Director, Lawyer, Accountant--but the fourth by name: Marlow. I found the first sketch of Marlow striking:

Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen-mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and with his arms dropped, the palms of his hands outwards, resembled an idol.

I would say that at this point, in paragraph 4 of the story, I felt myself engage with the narrative. Marlow, after this short introductory description, is already an interesting and unusual character--very specific. I found myself curious about him right away. You won't find a character description like this in an average potboiler novel. An average writer doesn't see people this way--isn't able to see them this way; that is exactly why that writer is average. It is not the flattering description of a hero (sunken cheeks, yellow complexion), but an interested and detached description by a keen observer who chooses telling details. A sailor, sitting cross-legged against the mizzen-mast, palms outward, to me is an excitingly real image. It engages my belief in what I'm reading, and bonds me to the narrator. I start to feel that I can really trust him with my attention and credulity.

I first read Heart of Darkness in, I think, 1979, probably just after seeing Apocalypse Now, when I learned that the movie was based on Conrad's book. Since Apocalypse Now was regarded as an "important" movie, and I was a budding film-maker, I wanted to get a better grounding in what it was about. (The movie itself was, for me, a disappointment.) I didn't give the novella the attention it deserved, and raced through it to "get it read." I didn't remember much about it.

The thematic path that has led me back to it is via Sven Lindqvist's "Exterminate All the Brutes", an investigation into the origins of genocide. Heart of Darkness is one of the central books he looks at. Lindqvist shows persuasively the documents and events that Conrad was exposed to just before he drafted his famous work--tells the story of how the ideas were formed and shaped.

It's part of the story of evil: where do the evils of our world come from? What drives us to commit acts of evil? These are questions that preoccupy me now.

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.

more on novel openings

Yesterday I visited my mother for our weekly lunch--two days early, since she has a doctor's appointment on Thursday. As usual, we talked about books and writing, and looked at some novel openings.

A few themes are starting to emerge from these researches. Less-than-excellent openings tend to have flaws (in my opinion) that fall into certain categories. Of course, what constitutes a flaw might vary according to who is doing the reading. I have determined that my supreme value in fiction-writing (and narrative nonfiction-writing) is story: the flow of events which the work depicts or describes. I believe that all other aspects of writing--description, tone, characterization--are subordinate to story, and should be structured so as to help the story along.

Of course this is only a general rule; there is plenty of room for exceptions.)

Yesterday Mom and I agreed that we mainly liked the opening of Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence. But the opening sentence and paragraph themselves are actually rather bland and uninteresting:

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father's house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightly-coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board which she held on her knee. They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts strayed through their minds.

As I observed to Mom yesterday, this is written almost like a screenplay: a quick bit of scene-setting, which in this case if feels like the writer wants to get out of the way so he can dive into what interests him. The setting does not suggest any special tension or interest in the scene.

Contrast the opening of Kim by Rudyard Kipling:

He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher--the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that "fire-breathing dragon," hold the Punjab; for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror's loot.

This opener is, admittedly, chewy reading: too many foreign terms for my taste, all at once. (Zam-Zammah is apparently Persian, meaning something like "conqueror of all".) The prose itself is unrhythmic and reads a bit like a police or military report; the narrator's reference to the cannon as "her" suggests his military background. But right in the first sentence there is tension, since "he" (who will turn out to be Kim) is sitting astride the gun--an unusual posture--"in defiance of municipal orders". And Kim's "holding" of the gun implies that he "holds" the entire Punjab--he has made himself a conqueror. All in the first two sentences.

By comparison, two sisters sitting "working and talking" is flaccid. But Lawrence moves quickly on to a dialogue between the sisters, about their attitudes to marriage, which shows them to have conflicting views. Gudrun can't believe that Ursula is not interested in marriage, and presses her to admit that she is, at heart. It's an interesting conflict that characterizes the two girls distinctly right away. This admittedly gentle conflict has the feeling of story: it's action under tension that feels like it's going somewhere.

Of yesterday's crop, though, I would probably award the palm to A Buyer's Market, book 2 in Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time series:

The last time I saw any examples of Mr. Deacon's work was at a sale, held obscurely in the neighbourhood of Euston Road, many years after his death. The canvases were none of them familiar, but they recalled especially, with all kind of other things, dinner at the Walpole-Wilsons', reviving with a jerk that phase of early life. They made me think of long-forgotten conflicts and compromises between the imagination and the will, reason and feeling, power and sensuality; together with many more specifically personal sensations, experienced in the past, of pleasure and of pain. Outside, the spring weather was cool and sunny: Mr. Deacon's favourite season of the year. Within doors, propped against three sides of a washstand, the oil-paintings seemed, for some reason, appropriate to those surroundings, dusty, though not displeasing; even suggesting, in their way, the kind of home Mr. Deacon favoured for himself and his belongings: the sitting-room over the shop, for example, informal, not too permanent, more than a trifle decayed. His haunts, I remembered, had bordered on these northern confines of London.

The narrator strolls into his story; no lurid shockers, no desperate attention-grabbers here. The narrator is treating us as adults, capable of mature perception and reflection, able to appreciate the subtleties of memory and association, and the way objects and sensations can awaken powerful feelings from the past. The intelligence and perceptiveness of the narrator inclines us to extend him credit, and trust that his discussion of the unknown artist Mr. Deacon is leading somewhere significant. If you have something important to say, you don't need to rush.

There's much more to be said about these things--but I have to get on with my day!

another week, another novel opening

Yesterday, another lunch at my mother's place, and another "novel opener" contest among six books chosen at semi-random from her shelves: I chose three, and she chose three.

The six novels were: Hatter's Castle by A. J. Cronin; The Black Moon by Winston Graham; A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway; The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck; Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson; and Vanity Fair by William Thackeray. I would read the opening sentence of each out loud, and we would give our reactions. Then I'd read the rest of the first paragraph or two to see how the opening progressed.

We agreed that Hatter's Castle, A Farewell to Arms, and The Winter of Our Discontent all had relatively weak openings--that is, openings that, if we were simply perusing the book in a store or library, would not encourage us to buy or borrow the book to read further. The other three were all stronger, with the best being the openings of Kidnapped and Vanity Fair. Between these it was a tough call, but we agreed that the palm should probably go to Kidnapped. Here is the opening sentence:

I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father's house.

Nice. The narrator's tone is serious, sober, and unhurried, and yet he finishes his rather leisurely sentence with a simple act that has a strong feeling of being a major turning-point in his life. Has his father died? Has he just wrapped up the estate? We don't know, but the images of a key, a door, and "my father's house" all have symbolic depth and resonance.

The paragraph finishes thus:

The sun began to shine upon the summit of the hills as I went down the road; and by the time I had come as far as the manse, the blackbirds were whistling in the garden lilacs, and the mist that hung around the valley in the time of the dawn was beginning to arise and die away.

Again, nice. This sentence is pure scene-setting description, the type of thing that opens many novels. But by placing it after the opening sentence, when our interest is already engaged with the importance of the moment, Stevenson has charged the beauty of that June morning in 1751 with a feeling of nostalgia and portent such as the narrator himself seems to have felt. He has chosen vivid details, and expressed himself in poetic language ("the sun began to shine upon the summit of the hills..."). He has set a scene that is lovely, quiet, and pregnant with adventure.

What the heck, let's look at Vanity Fair as well. My practice is to skip introductions and prologues and go straight to the top of chapter 1, to keep the playing field as level as possible. Chapter 1 of this 1848 novel is entitled "Chiswick Mall". Here is the first sentence:

While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour.

Another sunny June morning! It's a beginning that feels like a beginning: a coach is arriving at an academy for young ladies, suggesting that a novel-load of consequences will result from the transaction. Thackeray starts with people in action, which is always engaging, and his tone, like Stevenson's, is unhurried--the mark of the narrator who is confident of the importance of what he has to say. He combines an eye for detail with a comic tone ("fat horses", "fat coachman", "four miles an hour"), giving us a strong sense of the narrator's attitude. What else will this sharp and amused eye show us? Here is the rest of the paragraph:

A black servant, who reposed on the box beside the fat coachman, uncurled his bandy legs as soon as the equipage drew up opposite Miss Pinkerton's shining brass plate, and as he pulled the bell, at least a score of young heads were seen peering out of the narrow windows of the stately old brick house. Nay, the acute observer might have recognized the little red nose of good-natured Miss Jemima Pinkerton herself, rising over some geranium-pots in the window of that lady's own drawing-room.

Again, Thackeray narrates action unfolding: he's a storyteller. People are doing things, and more specifically are reacting to each other's actions, even in these first three sentences. The scene is dynamic, even though the actions are as yet subtle. His method is to pack a lot of descriptive detail around these actions, so we can visualize the scene quite definitely. The description goes down easily because it rides on the flow of action. The narrator finds the scene funny yet intriguing, and therefore so do we.

So, another week's novel-opening contest goes by, and two classics show why they are still in print 150 years later.

the goddess is dead

Another lunch at my mother's place, and five more novel openers to look at. Again, yesterday, Mom chose five books from her living-room shelves, more or less at random, and we looked at how they opened. Yesterday's crop included The Diviners by Margaret Laurence and A Passage to India by E. M. Forster. But we agreed that the strongest opening was that of The Outsider by Albert Camus:

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know. I had a telegram from the home: Mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Deepest sympathy. That doesn't mean anything. It may have been yesterday.

(That's the best translation that I have been able to find online; I don't have a copy of the book here at my house.)

The opening sentence itself is a factual statement of one of the most powerful moments in a person's life--when his or her mother dies. The immediacy of today makes the event very present, rather than something that happened in the more distant past. The narrator is writing in his journal, perhaps, or talking to us directly in the evening. Three powerful words, each one of which tells.

But if the first sentence provides a shock, the second provides a stronger one: that the narrator is not sure whether his mother died today or yesterday. It raises sharp questions: Why doesn't he know? Was her death mysterious in some way? Is he just indifferent? The cold factualness of his admission strikes a chilling tone.

The next sentence tells us that he learned of the death by telegram. It tells him, the son, there will be a funeral tomorrow. Who's arranging this funeral? Why wasn't he on hand for his mother's death? Didn't he know she was dying? Didn't he care? His pondering of the factual question of when his mother actually died, along with his seeming indifference to the event, suggest a disconnection from life that is both cognitive and emotional.

At the same time, "Mother" is not merely a person, but an archetype, the Goddess--the giver of life and of feeling. So there is a deeper chill: that somehow the Mother of us all is dead, and we the orphans live in an impoverished world, the waste land of her permanent absence. The word mother is among the most heavily loaded and significant in any language; so is the word die. Putting the two together creates a tremendous voltage. Mother is who gives us life; for her to die is a somber, almost paradoxical event.

I recall that the opening scene of James Joyce's Ulysses also deals with the death of a mother--the mother of Stephen Dedalus. In that respect these two great artists were mining a similar vein. In the 19th century Nietzsche proclaimed God to be dead. In a sense, these writers are suggesting a catastrophe that might be still greater, or anyway more jarring and traumatic: that the Goddess is dead too.

This is the condition of the Waste Land as elucidated by Joseph Campbell: no divinity without, no divinity within--just the sterility of a landscape populated by traumatized survivors thirsting for life. It's the spiritual condition of modern man, and the fact that Camus can suggest this condition in just a few words shows why he is among the greats.

"G" is for good

Last Thursday, when I visited my mother for lunch, for fun we spent part of our time looking at the opening sentences and paragraphs of a few novels. They were a semi-random selection of popular novels and serious fiction, including things like Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, and Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.

Based purely on the strength of their openers, among the small collection we looked at, I would award the palm to Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone mystery, "G" Is for Gumshoe. Here's the opening sentence:

Three things occurred on or about May 5, which is not only Cinco de Mayo in California, but Happy Birthday to me.

Nice. Many writers strive to grab your attention with an opening hook, which may be violent or often mystifying, but Grafton stimulates the reader's curiosity naturally and without excessive force by mentioning that "three things occurred." This simple statement provokes the question, "what three things?", and I as a reader am willing to extend the narrator enough credit to read on to find out. It's not an artificial attempt to mystify the reader, to provoke a huh? response, as so many openers do. It is a factual statement made by a person who has a direct, organized way of presenting information--and this in itself tells me something about the narrator, who is also clearly the first-person protagonist.

Other nice touches: Grafton's use of "on or about" tells us that the character is a cop or involved with the legal system, or is otherwise making playful use of that legalistic phrase. The date May 5 places the story precisely in time, and further strengthens the impression of the narrator's penchant for facts and precision. The mention of Cinco de Mayo in California sets the story in place, and also in attitude, since this unofficial holiday is a time of celebrating Mexican pride, hinting that the narrator may have connections with the large Hispanic community in California. Finally, the phrase "Happy Birthday to me" tells us still more about our narrator--that she's a Taurus, for one thing. Her use of "Happy Birthday" itself is ironic or playful, expressing her attitude. How well do you have to know someone to know what his or her birthday is? We know this narrator's birthday already, so are getting in fairly close and intimate--all in one 22-word sentence.

Here's the rest of the first paragraph:

Aside from the fact that I turned thirty-three (after what seemed like an interminable twelve months of being thirty-two), the following also came to pass:

1. The reconstruction of my apartment was completed and I moved back in.

2. I was hired by a Mrs. Clyde Gersh to bring her mother back from the Mojave desert.

3. I made one of the top slots on Tyrone Patty's hit list.

Very good. We learn a lot, quickly: that the narrator is 33, and that either time is hanging heavy on her hands ("an interminable twelve months of being thirty-two") or she is ironically commenting on how fast time is passing her by. Then she delivers immediately on the promise to tell us about the three things that happened. We learn that her apartment was reconstructed for some reason (was it wrecked somehow?); that she is someone whose work involves transporting people from the desert, at least sometimes; and that she has become an enemy of someone named Tyrone Patty.

Only at this last point, number 3, does Grafton use what I would call mystification--referring to someone or something that the reader does not know in a way that implies that the reader does or should know. (Note that in number 2, she refers to a Mrs. Clyde Gersh, indicating that the narrator did not know her either.) But by now we're drawn so far into the narrator's world that this teaser is legitimate. We know her well enough that she can play with us a bit. Plus, her no-nonsense style suggests that she won't leave us hanging for long. (I didn't read on to find out, by the way.)

There's no fluff here. Each sentence pulls you further into the narrator's world. She has a strong attitude and this permeates each phrase. All in all, I found it very engaging; it's hard not to keep reading.

Of course, this is just the opener. As in a horserace, just because you break fast from the gate doesn't mean you're going to win. But it does show that this writer is proficient, in control, and respects her readers. What's not to like?

More on this topic later. Aren't first paragraphs fun?

Battle of the Quartets: Scott vs. Durrell

I don't read much fiction these days, so I feel that when I do, as now, I should probably talk about it. This blog is devoted, after all, to a work of fiction. What are my thoughts about fiction? What am I looking for in a novel?

I've started reading, I think for the third time, The Jewel in the Crown, the first in Paul Scott's four-part Raj Quartet. Kimmie got a Granada mass-market paperback edition of the book in 1986, when the British miniseries based on the books was recent and popular. I'm glad, personally, since the mass-market paperback is still my favorite format of book, even though the contents of most mass-market paperbacks now I find completely unappealing. This copy has a kind of cameo image on the cover of Art Malik and Susan Wooldridge, the actors who played the characters Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners in the miniseries. It was first published in 1966, when the author was 46 (he died in 1978).

Paul Scott's style is grave and meticulous. He himself served in the British Army in India and Malaya between 1940 and 1946--the period of which he writes--and so knows the world of his story at first hand. Each page and each sentence is impregnated with his authority over his fictional world--one mark of excellence in a novel.

The book, 576 pages long, is divided into seven parts. Part One is called simply, "Miss Crane". Let's take a look at the first sentence:

Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar Gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of, standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south.

This sentence, 75 words long, is also the whole first paragraph. Its size and complexity signal that this work will make certain demands of the reader, and in fact I find the sentence somewhat involved and hard to grasp. I always have to read it two or three times to get the meaning from it, which, in my opinion, tells against Paul Scott as a stylist. There is a heaviness, a portentousness, a certain sense of the juggernaut of history trundling forward, ready to crush all in its path.

It opens with a direct address to the reader, emphasizing the literary, "told" quality of the work. I personally find the use of the word then, after Imagine, to be kind of artificial--trying to inject a sense of being in the middle of a story, rather than at the beginning. As though the narrator were retelling the story from a different viewpoint--something like that.

The sentence contains drama--"a girl running in the still deeper shadow"--but drama seen from a detached, godlike perspective. The narrator seems to be stressing not the girl running, but the "immensity" and "distance" of the landscape on which she runs, and perhaps, by extension, on which we all run.

In short, for me this sentence has problems. Nonetheless, if I were encountering it today for the first time in a bookstore, I would keep reading. It more than passes my first-sentence test. Why? I think for two reasons: 1) the content of the sentence is not trivial or frivolous, and 2) the author is addressing me as an equal, showing respect for my intelligence. That's more than enough reason for me to keep reading.

I was going to comment on a certain quality in the sentence of being overwrought, over-precious, and over-subtle, and perhaps try to blame that on Scott's seeming admiration of Lawrence Durrell and his Alexandria Quartet; but when I pulled out my copy of Justine, the first of the Alexandria Quartet novels, here is what I found as the opening paragraph:

The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind. In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of spring. A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes....

The longest sentence here is 24 words. It is not ponderous or portentous. Scott's writing has the quality of a deep, searching report, but Durrell's narrator here is first of all a poet. His choices of word and phrase are fresh, original, and striking at every turn. I remember when I first read the phrase "A sky of hot nude pearl", knowing I was reading a writer of the top class. It's as though Durrell's narrator is searching for a way to convey how intoxicated he is with the sensuous deliciousness of the world.

Paul Scott is no poet. But for all that he is, in my opinion, a better novelist than Durrell, or anyway one more able to sustain my interest and attention. I remember being excited at how vivid and sensuous this opening of Durrell's was, only to find that my attention flagged in a welter of short scenes that did not add up to a strong story. Scott clings tenaciously to his thread, sticking with it for dozens of pages on end, which tenacity communicates a sense of confidence in the importance of his story. He's never in a hurry, because what he's talking about matters.

I became tired of Durrell. His aesthetic rhapsodizing wore thin. Now, 80 pages into The Jewel in the Crown, I'm finding depth, subtlety, and continuity. Those things will keep me reading.

doubt

I've just spent time keying notes over my morning coffee, from A History of Israel, volume 1; The Golden Bough; and Cosmos, Chaos, & the World to Come. Sticking with the plan, sticking with the flow of normality (insofar as the creative life can be called normal).

This sticking with the flow is important when one's mood is not ideal. Now, when I lie awake in the dark of predawn, I find myself racked by worse doubts than usual. At such times there is no optimism; the inertia of lying in bed seems to be an expression of life in general. Then I wonder about the very concept of "success", one of the mirages we chase through life.

All around me I perceive sureness in people: certainty. People are definite in their opinions, both in the conversations around me personally, and in printed matter and among TV commentators. We all like the feeling that we know, and dislike the sense of uncertainty, ignorance, which is so paralyzing to action. If you strap explosives to your body and go detonate them in a crowded place, killing yourself in the process, you must feel very sure of what you're doing, very certain that your view of the world is correct. You're sacrificing your own life and the lives of others on the altar of your certainty.

My point, of course, is that such certainty is mistaken. It's as though the pleasurable, affirmative feeling of certainty were so important and desirable that we adopt it even though the content of our thought lacks actual certainty--the thing itself. This was essentially the problem noted by Rene Descartes in 1641 at the beginning of his famous Meditations, when he noted that he himself had for many years held many things as true which turned out to be false. Or, as he puts it in the opening of his first Meditation:

It is some time ago now since I perceived that, from my earliest years, I had accepted many false opinions as being true, and that what I had since based on such insecure principles could only be most doubtful and uncertain; so that I had to undertake seriously once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted up to then, and to begin afresh from the foundations, if I wished to establish something firm and constant in the sciences.

Here is the famous Cartesian doubt. Doubt generally prevents action. Descartes describes in the very next sentence how he came to start writing his book in spite of his doubt:

But as this undertaking seemed to me very great, I waited until I had attained an age sufficiently mature that I could not hope, at a later stage in life, to be more fit to execute my plan; and this has made me delay so long that I should henceforth consider that I was committing a fault if I were still to use in deliberation the time which remains to me for action.

Hmm. "Committing a fault if I were still to use in deliberation the time which remains to be for action."

Rene, I hear you. For me, the "action" is now merely to follow the deep groove of habit in my task, and hope for the best.

Da Vinci rewrite: postmortem

In the late 70s or early 80s the comedian and talk-show host Dick Cavett, in his autobiography, said that in his comedy career he always found it easy to write material for other comedians but hard to write material for himself. He could write a joke on any topic or theme, and put it in the style of the comedian concerned by getting into the persona of that comedian and letting the joke come out in that person's voice. Cavett gave off-the-cuff examples, "writing" jokes for Jack Benny and Bob Hope, maybe a couple of others. As a writer for Jack Parr on The Tonight Show, he could crack off his week's work in a couple of hours in one day. But when it came to writing material for himself, he agonized. What was his persona?

(I remember one of Cavett's own jokes: "When I was in college I got in some blind dates with some very unattractive girls. On this one date--you've heard of a face that could stop a clock? My date had stopped sundials.")

Well, I've had a faintly similar experience with my little rewrite job on scene 1 of The Da Vinci Code. When it's not your project it's easy to breeze through. One reason, I think, is that the decision to do the project in the first place has already been made; someone has assumed liability for the validity and value of the project. Someone has already answered the question, to his own satisfaction, "why this?" So the material is a given. The rewriter can relax and just play with what's already there.

So for me the rewrite was pure fun, not something I slaved over. I did my "thinking-through" the revision, such as it was, here in my blog, then just sat down and dashed something off yesterday.

By bedtime I had gone over it a couple of times and tweaked it a bit--the way I do with my own material, changing and deleting bits on each read-through. Can't resist. Maybe it would be useful to mention these tweaks, to give an idea of my thinking.

I remember only two (I think that's all there were). The first was down in the paragraph where I had Langdon saying "What's this about? Am I under arrest?" I deleted the first question and just had him ask the second--the one that counts.

The second tweak was in the bottom paragraph, where I had Langdon wonder about his family back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That bugged me even as I was writing it--the inclusion of "Massachusetts", a purely expository addition, to let the reader know we're talking about the U.S. and not the U.K. It seemed pretty clear that Langdon was an American in any case, although of course he could, theoretically, be teaching at Cambridge in Britain (assuming he wants a pay cut!). But soon he will be talking with a cop, and it would quickly come out that he's a Harvard prof. So I cut "Massachusetts".

Looking over it this morning, the next thing that's bothering me is the way I introduce the character's name. I have nothing against--and everything for--simply giving the name early, as Brown does himself by making Langdon's name the first two words of chapter 1. But in this case I have the concierge addressing him by name in paragraph 5 (which I believe is motivated), so strictly speaking giving his name in paragraph 1 is not necessary: we're getting it twice on the same page. If I were to work it further, I would cut his name from paragraph 1 (using good old he), let his last name come out when the concierge calls, and let his first name be revealed in the interview with the cop. This way, exposition comes in a natural way, from the flow of motivated action--always preferable, even for a seemingly small and obvious thing like getting the name of your character to the reader. Don't get me wrong: I dislike "cute" efforts to conceal the character's name and bring it out in the action; but here I feel that its occurrence is soon enough and natural enough to make it work. Also, by holding back his name, it makes Langdon's sense of disorientation more immediate--maybe he doesn't remember his name at the moment. We're not just watching him, we're experiencing along with him.

Oh--I found another tweak I did. I broke out the sentence "Five sharp raps sounded on his door" into its own paragraph. It's more shocking that way--gives it the prominence it deserves.

Found another: In paragraph 19, "Hold on!" etc., I changed the word said to added for his line "Gotta put some clothes on." This to me gave a little more quality of afterthought to this line, as well as suggesting a quieter, sotto voce quality. It also provided a bit of variety from the workhorse said (although, again, I have nothing against said and usually dislike efforts at "elegant variation" in using other verbs for this one).

Looking over the rewrite now, I see the usual wordiness of a first(ish) draft, and would prune out more if I went through it again. I'm not totally happy with the exchange between Langdon and the concierge--there are a couple of nonsequitur-ish aspects that arose as a result of deleting and rejigging while I was drafting the material. They are subtle, not noticeable to others, perhaps. But part of the goal is to make it so that events and information are happening in a motivated, connected way, so that the right information is being delivered at the right time. Each character is responding to the situation as it has just unfolded to that moment. An example: I moved around Langdon's checking of the time, finally settling on putting it after the concierge's telling him that a policeman wants to speak with him. Notice how this feels natural? "A cop wants to talk with me--what the hell time is it?" The weirdness of the hour is an index of how serious the situation is. It works for me, anyway.

There: some real inner workings of the writer's mind in the act of writing. Speaking for myself, this is fun!

Da Vinci scene 1, take 2

After my critique of the opening scene of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code over the past couple of posts, I have decided to stump up some prose of my own as an alternative. I've just sketched in a rewrite of the first part of the scene, using the principles that I've mentioned in the previous posts.

Curious?

If you want to refresh your mind as to how the real book opens, check this post first.

Here's what I came up with:

A telephone was ringing--tinny, strange. Robert Langdon, dragged from a deep sleep, felt a spike of alarm in the cavelike darkness.

Where the hell am I?

The room was hot and still; he smelled stale cigarette-smoke. Paris. Yes: Hotel Ritz. Relieved to remember where he was, but not liking the dark, he fumbled for the bedside lamp and switched it on, snatching up the telephone handset as he sank back into the massive bed.

"Hello?" he croaked.

"Mr. Langdon? I'm very sorry to disturb you." It was the concierge, the short guy with dyed hair. His English was excellent. "There is a policeman here who wants to speak with you."

"What?" said Langdon. He glanced at the bedside clock: 12:32 A.M.

"I told him to wait until tomorrow, but he says it is urgent."

"What?"

"I don't know what it's about," said the concierge. "He wouldn’t say."

As though searching for an answer, Langdon looked dumbly around the pretentious opulence of his Louis XVI room: its heavy drapes, its frescoed walls.

Five sharp raps sounded on his door.

Langdon jerked involuntarily, an instinct to run away. He remembered stories of how the Gestapo would always show up in the middle of the night. He could see why. His heart thumped, his mind was blank.

"Am I under arrest?" he said.

"Oh no Mr. Langdon," said the concierge, "I don’t think so."

You don't think so? thought Langdon.

"It's very rude of them to disturb a guest at this hour," said the concierge. "We'll be filing a complaint."

Great, thought Langdon, you can keep me posted on that in my jail cell.

There were three more raps at the door.

"Hold on!" said Langdon, now feeling anger. To no one in particular he added, "Gotta put some clothes on." Then, sarcastically, into the phone: "Thanks for calling."

He hung up and swung his legs out of bed. The four-poster, too big for the room, sagged and creaked so much that Louis XVI had probably slept in it himself. No doubt his hosts, the American University in Paris, thought they were treating him well. A surge of adrenaline was making him tremble. Wanting to stop that before he opened the door, he took his time pulling on some underpants and putting on the hotel's monogrammed jacquard bathrobe.

Breathe deeply. Think. What have I done or seen in Paris that could possibly be of interest to the police?

Then another, much worse thought came: what if this was about his family back in Cambridge? Had his son crashed that goddamn motorcycle? Langdon strode to the door, no longer caring whether he trembled or not.

I think that instead of going to a flashback of Langdon's lecture, I would let backstory emerge in his interview with the cop. That seems a natural place for us to find out Langdon's job and what he's doing in Paris, and what he was up to today. Since the reader shares some of the same curiosity as the cop, the writer can use that to answer questions in the reader's mind.

It's not perfect--but I think it's better.

scene 1, continued

A light drizzle falls outside; Kimmie's short Easter-time vacation is over, and she's soon to head back out the door to Mother Corporation. Time also for writers to pick up their tools dropped nine or ten days ago and resume work tunneling through the granite mountain of their project.

But I wanted to finish my thoughts on chapter 1, scene 1 of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. In my last post I looked at how I (not having read the whole novel) might approach the backstory to the scene. That job can be done only provisionally in one's first draft. You won't really know--or be able to know--what your story is truly about until you've finished a draft. Only then can you go into a scene with a knowledge of its real function in your story. Only then can you make sure it has the right things in it, and that the characters are loaded with the right motivations.

So with this work I'm strictly at a first-draft level; I don't yet know anything more about these characters than what I read in the first scene. My ideas and suggestions therefore rest only on that limited basis.

I'd like to look at the writing in a bit more detail. Here's the opening again:

Robert Langdon awoke slowly.

A telephone was ringing in the darkness--a tinny, unfamiliar ring. He fumbled for the bedside lamp and turned it on. Squinting at his surroundings he saw a plush Renaissance bedroom with Louis XVI furniture, hand-frescoed walls, and a colossal mahogany four-poster bed.

Where the hell am I?

The jacquard bathrobe hanging on his bedpost bore the monogram: HOTEL RITZ PARIS.

I've already commented on the opening sentence. Because of its softness, its low impact, and the fact that we don't yet know who Robert Langdon is, I might cut it. I have found that the quickest way to a stronger opening sentence is simply to delete it, and open with your second sentence. This is true not just of fiction, but of almost all works of writing. Often the first sentence is a kind of warmup; the second sentence starts getting to the point. Opening your work that way is much more vigorous. Try it.

Sentence 2: A telephone etc. It's a bit wordy, and also contains an awkward repetition of the word ring.

Sentence 3: He fumbled etc. It's okay: prosaic, purely expositional. One thought I have is that it's not self-evident that one would switch on a lamp in order to answer the phone in bed. Would I, especially if very tired and groggy, hoping to get back to sleep? I might, if I felt some disorientation and anxiety about being in an unfamiliar bed--or plain old fear of the dark.

Sentence 4: Squinting at etc. Hm. I suspect we don't need the word plush, since any "Renaissance" bedroom with a telephone in it is not likely to be a flophouse. We already know it's a bedroom, so that word is not strictly required either. I don't know what Louis XVI furniture looks like--but that's okay. To me it suggests "old, French, and expensive", which fits the bill. Again, "hand-frescoed walls" is redundant, since fresco is the art of painting on wet plaster, and as far as I know there is no machine process for this. As for the colossal mahogany bed, that's certainly expensive-sounding, but I feel a vague doubt that mahogany is Louis XVI, since mahogany is a tropical wood. It might be genuine (colonial forests), or possibly someone made a Louis XVI-style bed out of mahogany, although that seems unlikely: why make expensive period furniture out of nonperiod materials? What would they say on The Antiques Road Show? If the author has seen a Louis XVI mahogany bed, then no problem. Or if the hotel were in Las Vegas instead of Paris, then I would not expect them to care about the authenticity of the furniture. But if I were writing it, I'd play it safe with a European hardwood.

Sentence 5: Where the hell etc. This feels a bit out of sequence for a guy who has already turned on the bedside lamp and looked around. He found the lamp, which must be of different type and location from the one at home. If it were me, I would have thought this before I groped for the lamp. To have such a sustained experience of not knowing where you are is uncanny-feeling and anxiety-provoking. We should see this in the character.

Sentence 6: The jacquard bathrobe etc. It's the bathrobe that answers Langdon's question about where he is. This also feels late. The French Renaissance bedroom is a tipoff he's not in Kansas anymore. Possibly he travels so much, and stays in so many hotels, that he can't bring the name of this one to mind without help. But I suspect that the writer has used this detail as a mere expositional device, to tell the reader where Langdon is. This is bad: the writer has sacrificed character authenticity for a minor bit of exposition. In reality I think Langdon would recall exactly where he is when he switches on the lamp. If he doesn't know at that point, he's in a dissociative state. Sure, he might be a sleepyhead, a non-"morning person" who can't get it together so quickly upon being wakened, but then I think the writing should lead us to that conclusion more definitely. The narrator implies that Langdon is lucid enough to note the Renaissance style of the room, the mahogany of the bed, the jacquard of the bathrobe, while still not knowing where the hell he is. For me it just doesn't add up. I see "expositional device", and that would be enough, probably, to put me as a reader off the whole book. This writer does not see his character as a person--so why should I?

Well then, there's some more detailed criticism of scene 1. Next time, perhaps, Vitols the writer will turn his own hand to rewriting the opening of one of the best-selling novels of all time...

Da Vinci, scene 1

Let's dig deeper into chapter 1, scene 1, of Dan Brown's mighty bestseller, The Da Vinci Code (I picked up Mom's discarded copy at her house yesterday).

In my last post I looked at the first sentence:

Robert Langdon awoke slowly.

Now let's read on from there:

A telephone was ringing in the darkness--a tinny, unfamiliar ring. He fumbled for the bedside lamp and turned it on. Squinting at his surroundings he saw a plush Renaissance bedroom with Louis XVI furniture, hand-frescoed walls, and a colossal mahogany four-poster bed.

Where the hell am I?

The jacquard bathrobe hanging on his bedpost bore the monogram: HOTEL RITZ PARIS.

Slowly, the fog began to lift.

Langdon picked up the receiver. "Hello?"

"Monsieur Langdon?" a man's voice said. "I hope I have not awoken you?"

Dazed, Langdon looked at the bedside clock. It was 12:32 A.M. He had been asleep only an hour, but he felt like the dead.

"This is the concierge, monsieur. I apologize for this intrusion, but you have a visitor. He insists it is urgent."

Langdon still felt fuzzy. A visitor? His eyes focused now on a crumpled flyer on his bedside table.

THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF PARIS
proudly presents
an evening with Robert Langdon
Professor of Religious Symbology,
Harvard University

Langdon groaned. Tonight's lecture--a slide show about pagan symbolism hidden in the stones of Chartres Cathedral--had probably ruffled some conservative feathers in the audience. Most likely, some religious scholar had trailed him home to pick a fight.

"I'm sorry," Langdon said, "but I'm very tired and--"

"Mais, monsieur," the concierge pressed, lowering his voice to an urgent whisper. "Your guest is an important man."

Langdon had little doubt. His books on religious paintings and cult symbology had made him a reluctant celebrity in the art world, and last year Langdon's visibility had increased a hundredfold after his involvement in a widely publicized incident at the Vatican. Since then, the stream of self-important historians and art buffs arriving at his door had seemed never-ending.

"If you would be so kind," Langdon said, doing his best to remain polite, "could you take the man's name and number, and tell him I'll try to call him before I leave Paris on Tuesday? Thank you." He hung up before the concierge could protest.

That takes us to the end of the first scene, just before Langdon starts reminiscing about the past year and the past day. After the flashback scene, we return to Langdon's hotel room, and a pounding on his door by what turns out to be a police officer, Lieutenant Jerome Collet of the Direction Centrale Police Judiciaire.

Not having read the book, I can only assess the scene on its own content. The story function of the scene is to rouse the protagonist from his everyday life by having a new problem impinge on him. In that sense, it's exactly the right place to start: right as the story launches. The scene conflict is between the concierge, who is trying to prepare Langdon for the arrival of the cop, and Langdon, who doesn't want to be disturbed.

That conflict idea, while okay, feels a bit underpowered, considering who the players are in the scene. Since the police are here as part of what appears to be an investigation (a man linked to Langdon has apparently committed suicide), I expect they have the legal power to question Langdon if they want to--that is, they don't need his permission. In any case, scene 3 starts with the cop pounding on Langdon's door, so his effort to put off the concierge looks and is ineffectual.

The concierge's behavior and dialogue are, to me, not very plausible. His opening remark that he hopes he has not awoken Langdon seems weak and insincere. He's waking Langdon because the cops are making him wake Langdon--it's not his fault, it's theirs, and if I were the concierge I would make sure Langdon understood that up front. Instead we have a concierge who is strangely mysterious about who is visiting. He seems overawed by the policeman and refers to him cryptically, in an urgent whisper, as "an important man." Huh?

In my opinion, it appears that the backstory to this scene was not worked out. The writer did not think through the motivations, backgrounds, and actions of the characters involved. If I were writing the scene, I might start by imagining my concierge. He is probably on the same floor as Langdon, attending to the guests on that floor, he works at a posh hotel, and is very probably a snob, used to seeing famous people come and go, and helping them with various personal matters. He's probably territorial about protecting the privacy of his guests, and would resent a cop coming up and using the law to override his authority here. To him the cop is not an "important man"--his guests are important men: Bill Gates, Vladimir Putin, Justin Timberlake. This is just some cop throwing his weight around. The people tipping him--and tipping big--don't want to be bugged, least of all at 12:32 a.m. His job is to get rid of pesky, officious plebs like the cop.

Therefore, in my backstory, I imagine that the concierge has already fought the first battle with the cop--and lost. He would certainly make it plain to Langdon that any inconvenience and annoyance are 100% the fault of the cop, that he did his best to prevent this rude intrusion. He might not do this in a crude, obvious way, but that would be his attitude, and it would color his dialogue. If the concierge has no further role in the story, that will probably be enough for him: he will have enough color and attitude for a good minor character.

Langdon himself, as the protagonist, needs lots of attitude as well. He shouldn't merely be a generic professor who's peevish about some of the effects of becoming famous. He should have passions, issues, problems--things on his mind while his career carries on. If he's being woken up, why not use the opportunity to learn more about him? What if he were waking from a dream about his wife, who has recently divorced him? How about waking to the memory that he's just been diagnosed with heart disease? Something to start suggesting a person and not just a name and a job.

For the purposes of this scene, I would want to figure out how Langdon feels about being in France--does he come here a lot? Can he speak French? Does he travel well, or is it a chore--does he miss his home? If he doesn't speak French, does he notice the attitude of the local French people toward him regarding this fact? (I recall being in Paris and watching an American traveler approach an information table staffed by a young woman. The traveler simply started talking in English. The woman responded in excellent English, but she was coolly polite. When I approached I first asked, in French, permission to speak English, and got a much warmer reception.) The concierge may be subtly patronizing toward those who do not speak French. How observant is Langdon? Is he used to staying in posh hotels? How does he feel about it? I would want to know these things--and show them--if I were writing the scene.

All these questions and issues form part of the backstory of the scene--the story before the story. The writer needs to know what attitude each character has toward each of the other characters in a scene. The concierge, to the cop, might be arrogant, resentful, and minimally compliant. To Langdon he might be ingratiating, self-justifying, and subtly patronizing. The cop might be self-assured and ironic with the concierge, and to Langdon be polite, apologetic, and slightly intimidating.

You get the idea. I'll have more to say on this scene--but that's enough for today.

an opening sentence--in depth

Last Thursday, when I went to visit my mother for lunch, she had a bag of books resting in the front hall, ready to be taken off to a thrift store for charitable resale. The top book in the bag was the paperback version of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Never having read the book, I picked it up to have a look.

Of course I'm aware that The Da Vinci Code is one of the best-selling books of all time (I recall a figure of 40 million copies sold). It alone will have made its author a multi-millionaire. It didn't even appear in paperback until the release of the movie version last year, so the book will have been a particularly rich source of revenue for Dan Brown.

Good for him: I salute anyone who can do well at writing. I also think he did not deserve to be sued by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, a key source of ideas for The Da Vinci Code. Unless The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was intended as a work of fiction, they were wrong to sue him, and I'm glad he won.

I have undergone a fair amount of angst ever since I heard about The Da Vinci Code, since I am making use of many of the same ideas (I think) in my own work; I too was inspired and fascinated by The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and felt a huge uprushing of creative energy when I read it in 1994. The fact that Dan Brown "got there first" and hit such incredible pay-dirt with this material I found troubling and dispiriting. Partly for that reason, I didn't want to read or even look at The Da Vinci Code until I had finished my own book.

While Mom heated up some homemade beef soup for us to eat, I perused the opening scene of chapter 1 and we talked about the book (Mom herself could not get into it, and bailed after the first few chapters). I thought I would express some of my findings here in my blog.

First: the novel opens with a dramatic prologue--a device I generally frown on, as I have pointed out in previous posts (such as this one). Usually a dramatic (as opposed to expository) prologue is a "grabber" intended to hook the interest of the reader, who otherwise might find the story starting at chapter 1 to be too boring. Typically it contains a murder scene or other shocking or surprising element, and is intended to make the reader wonder more about the world of the story. The bad thing here is that the writer is himself sending the signal that he's afraid his story opens in a boring way. The writer thinks the story is boring--not good. Following my usual policy in assessing a novel, I skipped the prologue. I understand there is some kind of albino geek in the book who kills people, and I expect the prologue contains the first of those killings.

On to chapter 1 proper, then. I don't have the book in front of me (got to pick it up from Mom's place), so I can only quote the first sentence verbatim:

Robert Langdon awoke slowly.

I'll start with that. I'll go into some detail, because I think first sentences are important--I often use them to decide whether I want to read on.

Overall, I think it's a fairly weak first sentence. Not terrible, perhaps, but not great. It tells us four things: that there is a character called Robert Langdon; that he was asleep; that he is now waking up; and that he is waking up slowly, as opposed to quickly. In storytelling terms, let's see what this does for us.

Robert Langdon: Character names are important. This is a fairly bland, Anglo name--no crime in itself; there are no doubt many Robert Langdons in the world living worthwhile lives. But it doesn't give us as much of a sense of character as might a less colorless name. How might you feel if the book had opened with

Myron Berkowitz awoke slowly ?

or

Oliver Mbehele awoke slowly ?

or

Luz Fernandez awoke slowly ?

Differently, no? Of course, we don't know anything about these characters either, but they provoke us into imagining backgrounds for them a bit more--we have the beginnings of expectations about them, expectations that may well be defeated by the story, but that will create subtle tensions within us, tensions that are, in my view, synonymous with interest. Robert Langdon right off the bat has a harder job in getting us to imagine him as vivid and real. Is he a banker? A blue-collar worker? A drug dealer? No way of knowing as yet. He's a blank slate.

Next: awoke. That's okay--awoke is a perfectly fine verb. It tells us he was sleeping, an activity we can all relate with. We're willing to extend the narrator credit that the fact Langdon was sleeping may be important for some reason.

then: slowly. Hm. Why modify the verb awoke here? Presumably it matters that he awoke slowly as opposed to quickly or "normally". To me it suggests deep unconsciousness, or perhaps the gentleness of the stimulus that awakens him. I might be awoken slowly by a soft breeze starting to move through my Mexican beach cabana, for instance. Or I might awaken slowly after taking sleeping pills, or being knocked unconscious.

It will turn out that Langdon was indeed deeply asleep in a Paris hotel room, tired from giving a lecture earlier on. But I don't find that this opening sentence tells me much of use or interest about the scene. It is utilitarian; I get the feeling that it is simply something to communicate the name of the main character. The transition from sleep to waking is symbolically powerful, and could be heavily charged. Another (very different) novel that opens with a character waking up--or rather with the dream from which he awakes--is Gravity's Rainbow, which opens famously thus:

A screaming comes across the sky.

When I first read this I wasn't sure what it meant, but I did get a sense of uncanniness and danger--a bit of the dread of having a bomb or missile approach. It's certainly not bland, and too poetic to be a run-of-the-mill "grabber" or "shocker" opening, although it does have shock value. The unusual use of the gerund screaming signals that this writer is a poet who is willing to try things to achieve his effects. It establishes the subject-matter of the book: the development of the German V2 rockets in World War Two, as well as the important theme that these weapons, which live on in the form of the giant nuclear arsenals of today, are aimed at us all right now. Thomas Pynchon has opened his novel by launching a ballistic missile right at us. At six words, his opening sentence is 50% longer than Brown's, but two of those words are a and the--function-words that simply hold the rest of the sentence grammatically together. Four words do the main duty: screaming comes across sky (the way a Russian might say it).

You might say it's no fair to compare Dan Brown to Thomas Pynchon, and sure, it isn't. But a sentence can do a lot of duty for your story, or not, whether you're writing a smaller novel (and arguably Brown's novel is hunting even bigger thematic game, in a sense, than Pynchon's) or a major work.

Of course, to do a proper assessment of the first sentence we need to look at its context: what comes after it. But that will have to wait until I get my hands on a copy of the book again!

where do ideas come from, again?

"Where do you get your ideas?"

Sometimes I hear that question. Warren and I used to hear it occasionally while we were writing The Odyssey. I remember reading a piece by Marion Zimmer Bradley on that same question; she expressed frustration over it.

I think it's a legitimate question. That is, it deserves a serious answer (not just my occasional flip response, "Wisconsin"). I think it's worthwhile and also interesting trying to figure out where ideas come from.

I've mentioned before the theory that Warren and I developed about how story ideas begin. We saw them as having two elements, not unlike the egg and the sperm. One element was the situation or the world or the arena--the premise in general terms. In the case of The Odyssey, it was the idea of doing a show about kids turned loose from their homes and interacting only with each other, not with adults--a kind of idealization of our summer holidays when we were kids.

We found that to be an exciting proto-idea, but it wasn't enough. I would call that the "egg" portion of the idea zygote. Okay, you've got a bunch of kids running around; what's the specific story? Which kid? And what's he trying to achieve?

The next part of the idea--the part that fertilized the egg and turned it into a viable story concept--was the notion of having our guy fall out of a tree-fort and lapse into a coma, so he couldn't leave the kids' world. Now his problem is how to get out of it. A world of kid adventure is fun, until you realize it's totally unsupervised--and you can't escape it. Voila, a story is born (or conceived).

But where specifically do ideas come from? In my experience they come from facts: from real-world information of on of one kind or another. I suppose it could be of either the setting (egg) or problem (sperm) part of the story zygote; for me it has usually been about the setting first. As a kid I would read about space travel and automatically start imagining stories featuring spacecraft, astronauts, and extraterrestrial civilizations. Reading The Universe by Isaac Asimov when I was 12 made me hungry to know more about space, but much more than that it made me want to express my excitement with it in creative, story form.

I remember once participating in a creativity workshop. One of the exercises was to break into pairs and have each member of the pair seed the other with an idea for a spontaneous story. I forget what the seed idea was that I was given, but I remember the idea (it had to be one word) I gave to my partner; it just popped into my head: "vines".

My partner, a woman I didn't know, looked as though I'd tossed her a live hand grenade. She blanked out; she started getting flustered and even angry with me for giving her such a "hard" idea. For my part, I didn't see anything hard about it. The seed-word vines in my mind quickly became a vertical world of hanging woody plants, a place where whole villages could exist in a twilight among the animal and bird traffic that crept or flapped up and down its reaches... In short, a world I wanted to explore in my imagination. My partner was stumped.

I think my approach was to visualize some vines, and then look to see what was around them. Sitting here now, I thought that I could as easily have seen them as wound around someone's body, binding them while they're being carried by Polynesian cargo-cultists; or being gathered to make a mattress for a love-in among pygmy chimpanzees.

In short, what the seed-word is is irrelevant. It could be filing cabinet or cream o' wheat. It simply provides a specific for a stepping-off point. I thought a fine example of showing how imagination can be skillfully called on was in the movie Out of Africa, when Karen Blixen takes an opening sentence given her by Robert Redford's character and spins an extended story from it.

There does seem to be such a thing as imaginative talent. But like any talent, it can be exercised. There is a certain letting-go, letting images arise, trusting what will come. But it can be helped and pushed through conscious effort, too. Notice in my examples with vines, I draw on knowledge of the the world. I'm aware of things like cargo cults and pygmy chimpanzees, and so I can plug these into imaginative situations. I suspect that one of the many terrible effects of lack of learning is an impoverished imagination.

It may seem paradoxical, but I think my large diet of nonfiction books primes my imagination more than just about anything else I could do.

IQ

When keying notes from Joseph Campbell's Occidental Mythology at the end of last year, I typed the following passage (slightly compressed) from the epilogue, called "Conclusion: At the Close of an Age":

In the long view of the history of mankind, four essential functions of mythology can be discerned. The first and most distinctive--vitalizing all--is that of eliciting and supporting a sense of awe before the mystery of being. Talk and teaching cannot produce it. Nor can authority enforce it. Only the accident of experience and the sign symbols of a living myth can elicit and support it; but such signs cannot be invented. They are found. Whereupon they function of themselves. And those who find them are the sensitized, creative, living minds that once were known as seers, but now as poets and creative artists. More important, more effective for the future of a culture than its statesmen or its armies are these masters of the spiritual breath by which the clay of man wakes to life.

In my last post I was talking about my aesthetic system. But I realized that before even an aesthetic system, I need a sense of why art is valuable in the first place. Life is short. If, when pressed with the question, how to spend one's time?, one responds, "as an artist", one should know why one will spend one's time that way. At least, I need to know that.

I need look no further than Campbell's words above, and if I want one statement of validation, I would use the last sentence of that paragraph.

If I were to amend that sentence in any way, I would add the words "its business enterprises" to the list along with a culture's statesmen and armies. Nowadays I suspect that the best, or anyway the most creative, minds of our society are seduced not by politics, still less by the military, but by business. We want to make money.

Certainly for me this has been an important seduction or distraction--not that you'd know it by my circumstances or net worth. I've done all right, but my level of wealth is quite a bit below what might be expected of someone of my age and ability. I remember reading a few years ago, with a twinge, an article in Scientific American about IQ. One point made in the article was that despite all the controversy over the validity of IQ and what exactly, if anything, it might measure, it is and has always been a strong predictor of worldly success. If you want to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, your best asset is not a degree from any university or membership in any particular organization or fraternity, but a high IQ. I don't know if I remember the words exactly, but the specific quote in the article that struck me was: "If you have a high IQ, worldly success is yours to lose."

Ouch. You see, I have a high IQ. I forget the exact figure--it was only told to me years after I'd taken a test in a neighbor's backyard. (The neighbor's friend's daughter, who happened to work for the UN, was making what I think was a casual sample of kids' IQs in various countries. I don't know whether she was targeting bright kids or not. She administered the test at a picnic table in the quiet shade of Mrs. MacLellan's lawn, along with a "morality" test devised by a famous psychologist--I forget who.) Plus, confusingly, there are a couple of different IQ indexes, one of which grades "higher" than the other. But I was also pulled from my grade-2 class one day for special intelligence testing, and again in grade 3, when I was tested along with a few others for admission into a hothouse program called Major Works.

By the way, if you're not a person with a high IQ, I can't really tell you what it's like to be one. At least, in some ways. It's true that in comparison with most other people, I'm able to spot patterns and figure things out quickly. I remember one of my janitor coworkers back at Vancouver General Hospital trying to work through a bunch of math questions in preparation for some exam he was going to take. He was in a section where series of numbers were given, and you had to provide the next numbers in each series. When he asked for input, I looked over his shoulder and was able to quickly answer a few of the questions.

"How do you do that?" he said, stunned.

"Well, you look to see how fast the numbers are changing. Are they getting bigger very fast? Or only a little bit at a time? Are they going up, then down? You kind of just see how they're moving."

He shook his head.

Another janitorial coworker who admired my mind was Angela, a small Hungarian woman with a certain European mystique and sexiness even in her housekeeping uniform. Having lived in Paris a long time, she spoke with a French accent.

"What must it be like to have a brain like yours," she said one day. "I wish I had a brain like that."

So yes, I've been admired and envied for my mental abilities. But most of the time I don't have any particular sense of mental "superiority". The image that comes to mind is that of a dog chained to a stake in the yard. A dog usually will stay parked at the end of his chain, almost choking himself if need be, just to be at the limit of his freedom. A high IQ is like a long chain. You're farther away from the stake than the short-chain dog, but you're still sitting there, choking and irked by your limit.

In short, I struggle with problems I can't seem to solve, IQ or no IQ.

But by virtue of my IQ, much of the fruit of society was there for the picking for me--or so the experts claim. Over the years I have made various, relatively half-hearted, efforts to gather some of these, to "make it" in societal terms. When doing that, though, I have not really been true to myself, and the results have accordingly been mixed.

So I take my cue now from Joseph Campbell, and see my vocation as an artist lit by the words quoted above. I venture to guess that Campbell's IQ was very high indeed, and luckily for us all, he made excellent use of it.

But what will happen to me? I lie awake nights worrying about this.

why am I doing this, again?

I wanted to get back to talking about my novel--the thing that this blog is supposed to be about. What do I want to say about it? In these dark times, when I myself question what the heck I'm doing, and why, it might be good to review those questions. Why am I doing this? What is the value?

One avenue of inquiry is: What makes my project different? The log-line for The Mission--the one-sentence description of the story that appears at the top-right corner of the blog's main page--generates a certain frisson of excitement because it suggests that my story is about the (true, secret, unexpected) origin of Christianity. Which it is. But my focus is not on Christianity, particularly, as such. I am not a Christian, nor have I ever been one, and nor will I ever become one. Christianity, to me, is an important world religion, and one of the main tributaries of our modern Western culture--the culture I was raised in. But its claim on exclusive truth is no greater than that of any other off-the-shelf spiritual system.

The reason I became excited about doing this story was that Christianity, I believe, is connected closely with the symbolism of the precession of the equinoxes--the almost imperceptible shifting of the Earth's axis in time which causes the north pole to describe a wide circle in the sky every 25,920 years. It is this gradual shift that causes the zodiac--the band of stars through which the sun and planets appear to travel in their orbits--to creep backwards, so that, little by little, the sun, on the spring equinox, comes to rise in a different zodiacal constellation. The sun rises, each year on March 21, in each constellation for 25,920 ÷ 12 = 2,160 years, on average. Each of these periods of 2,160 years, when the sun rises in one zodiacal constellation, is known as an astrological age. Right now the sun rises each March 21 in the constellation of Pisces, which means that we live in the Age of Pisces.

But we're near the end of the Age of Pisces. Soon (and exactly when depends on how you draw your map of the constellations) we will enter the Age of Aquarius. So the Age of Pisces began something just over 2,000 years ago--close to the time that Christianity had its origin. Jung, in his book Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, makes a detailed case that the unfolding of Christianity over the past 2,000 years, and especially of the attitude of Western people to the figure of Christ himself, correlates closely with the movement of the vernal equinox (which is technically a geometrical point in the sky--the point of intersection of the equator and the ecliptic) through the sign of the fishes. (The fish, of course, is a key symbol of Christianity.) Jung believed that the figure of Christ evolved in tandem with his dark twin, the Antichrist or Satan, who became the repository of the evil that could not form any part of Christ's nature. Christian eschatology refers to a final confrontation between the two at the end of time.

I'm fascinated by Jung's interpretation, and it is an important inspiration for my work. Jung was a Christian, but he wasn't writing as one. He was writing as a psychologist and as a philosopher, an interpreter of the symbols that have appeared in our civilization. He defined symbol as a representation of something that cannot be completely known. It expresses something that is too vast, too vague, or too paradoxical to be presented directly to consciousness. Symbol, of course, is the language of dream and of myth.

So I'm interested in the Age of Pisces, and its key signifier in the world, Christianity. They are symbolic of things deeper and beyond themselves. This emphasis makes my work much different from most historical fiction, especially that dealing with Christ and his period. I'm thinking of things like The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson or Christ the Lord by Anne Rice, which essentially accept the biblical narrative(s) at face value and retell them, or things like Testament by Nino Ricci, which is a euhemerist retelling of the Christian myth. The first category is essentially pious. The second is an attempt to account for the mythologization of historical events by showing how extraordinary but nonetheless natural people give rise to legends about themselves.

Mine is in neither of those classes of work. I'm not a pious Christian (or any other kind), and I don't believe we have Christian mythology, and the Christian religion, because a few extraordinary people did some unusual things 2,000 years ago. No: other, deeper things are at work.

But I've written enough for today.

a reminder

I'm still on the mailing lists of Buddhist centers and organizations. One of the publications I get is the annual newsletter of the Nalanda Translation Committee, a group formed by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche to produce authoritative translations of Tibetan Buddhist texts for use by Western students. Last night while lying in bed I finished perusing this year's newsletter, a 22" x 17" sheet of bond paper folded in half to give four pages.

One of the articles is entitled "The Four Reminders", the label given to a list of four thoughts that, if brought clearly to mind, should focus the meditation practitioner on his or her desire to get on with the practice and put effort into it. Briefly, the Four Reminders are:

1. The Preciousness of a human birth

2. Impermanence and death

3. The Inescapability of karma

4. The Suffering of samsara (that is, the unenlightened state)

I spent a fair amount of time contemplating these as part of my own meditation practice over the years. They are indeed powerful once you understand them and take the effort to contemplate their significance for your own life. While reading the article I was struck by the paragraph on the second Reminder, impermanence and death. The writer of the article relates a couple of brief anecdotes about this Reminder. The first is about the Gyalwang Karmapa, head of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism (analogous to the Dalai Lama, who is the head of the Gelug school), who visited the U.S. in the 1970s. The second is about the Japanese Zen master Suzuki Roshi, author of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind:

When His Holiness the Sixteenth Gyalwang Karmapa was attending a luncheon at the United States Congress, a congressman asked him, "If Your Holiness could summarize the teachings of the Buddha in one sentence, what would that be?" Without hesitation, the Karmapa replied, "Everything changes." Similarly, when a student asked Suzuki Roshi to put the entire message of Buddhism in a nutshell, he simply answered, "Everything changes."

A familiar chill passed over my scalp and the back of my neck--what I suppose might be called the chill of dharma. These two senior, authoritative teachers chose the same two words to summarize the vast ocean of Buddhist teachings. Everything changes. Lying there in my bed, I felt the two words float quietly into me like cinders settling on the tinder of my consciousness.

The two teachers, asked for something profound, gave their questioners a simple familiar statement, a kind of truism that we all have heard before. For me, anyway, this unexpected response yanked my mind back to consider what they meant. I had no doubt that the teachers were making a simple, literal statement--and the consequences of that statement are far-reaching indeed.

Everything changes. Whatever we think of as permanent, isn't. Anything that can be said to begin also ends. My house, my friendships, my marriage, my life--all will be gone in due course. Every last thing in my experience without exception has an end-point. New things will arise; they too will end. This thought, if you sit with it, creates haunting feelings, anxiety. It is the death-knell of security.

In my mind I saw dry yellow leaves blowing along an empty street in a cold gusting wind. They made a sweeping, clattering noise on the pavement. Life coming and going like the slap of a saloon door in a ghost town.

As I laid down the newsletter I felt great appreciation, affection, and gratitude for the teachings I have received in my life. I felt humility and awe in the presence of truth--the truth which is not for us or against us; it alerts us to the present moment, so we don't miss its brief life.

search for the controlling idea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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