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.

the artist as worrier

I still wake up in the middle of the night (at 3:50 this morning) and worry about my project (among other things). During the day I don't worry about it too much; I continue on with what I'm doing and let it take its course. But at night, lying passively in the dark, I worry.

What exactly do I worry about? I worry mainly that my idea is unworkable and that I'll lose inspiration with it and not finish it. Or that I will finish it but be unable to find anyone to publish it, forcing me to publish it myself. Thus the end of one Sisyphian task merges into the beginning of another.

I worry that I won't be able to solve my story problems, or to make my work cohere into something unified. That I won't be able to find what it is I'm truly trying to say, and thus won't be able to tell what belongs in my story and what doesn't.

I worry about how fast the years are going by now, and how little I seem to be able to get done each day, each year. They zip by like telephone poles on a train-ride. How many poles do I have left before the trip ends? How can I possibly be spending so much time on one project? What's wrong with me?

I sometimes feel at night the way I did as a boy in school, when I'd wake up and feel dread about some project that was coming due, and which I was procrastinating on finishing (or starting). In the day it didn't seem to bother me enough to get going on it, but at night I would have a knot of worry in my gut, knowing that the consequences of noncompletion would be unpleasant. I felt unfree.

Back then I didn't want to do their stupid assignments. I wanted to do my own projects, my own thing. But now I am doing my own project, my own thing--and still I lie awake at night, sweating it out.

Now, in the (underslept) light of day, I tell myself that this is the price of originality. If I were working on a "normal" project, that is, one that resembled other projects already out there, I would be able to plan its completion in a rational way. You're building a recognizable thing using a tested approach; you have a reasonable ETA for the whole thing. "This humorous vampire novel should take about eight months to write."

For this alien behemoth gestating in the uterus of my hard-drive, who knows.

I don't, and it worries me.

the end and how to get there

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

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

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

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

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

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

billions

It seems I'm finally coming up against what I feared when I first started this blog back in 2005: that I might run out of things to write about.

I used to keep a file of possible blog-post topics, but found that I never referred to it, preferring to shoot from the hip when I opened up the posting window. Why not just grab whatever's going through my mind, and start typing?

Sounds good. And maybe if I had more guts I could really follow through with that. But I feel constrained by the fact that, on the one hand, I don't want to talk too much about the content of my work in progress, the ostensible theme of this blog, and on the other that many of the other thoughts and feelings that dominate my life right now are things that are very private and inward.

So: here I sit.

Another week begins, and I must pray to the Muse to grant me a few more lines of my work--or at least the gumption to open up its files and face it, something I found that I couldn't do last Friday.

It helps to keep some perspective. Last night on CBC Newsworld I watched Brian Stewart interview the economist Paul Collier about his book The Bottom Billion, about the world's poorest people. These are the people--or whole families--who try to survive on less than $1 a day. Many of those people are in Africa. There were video clips of violence in Africa: unarmed people running for their lives while "soldiers" shot at them, and so on. What a mess.

I liked Paul Collier--a Brit who used to work for the World Bank. As he observed, political stability has only ever arrived anywhere at a great price in violence and upheaval, a fact we should bear in mind as we shake our heads over Africa. And, I think, even once it's achieved it's fragile, ready to be smashed when the strong give in to the temptation to gain their ends by force, and reap the whirlwind of violence.

As one of the "top billion", I have nothing to complain about. So I should get to work, then.

Rumpelstiltskin the writer

I regarded yesterday as a small victory. My output was slight--but I had an output. When I came down to my office after breakfast, it was looking bad: another day of project-avoidance.

I fiddled and footled with other things, painfully aware of my procrastination. But eventually I coaxed myself into opening up my working files. Unhappily and with distaste I made myself look at my draft in progress, the chapter I've numbered 31(b), growing slowly as a yew-tree. Where does it need to go? Has it started the right way?

The ice cracked when a specific question occurred to me. It was a question about how certain minor characters, holders of a specific job-function, would behave at a particular moment. What was their job? The smallness and specificness of this question was what enabled me to get going. I could go to my Notes document and type my thoughts, such as they were. Would they lay their hands on my character, or not?

This caused me to look at my story-world more closely, to go in and make a decision, or two or three related decisions--small ones. This is the difficulty of writing, I think: decision-making. One of the biggest obstacles to writing is vagueness: an indefiniteness about the subject. If your information is too scanty, you've got nothing to write. If you force yourself to write when you don't have enough information, you become an author of cliches.

In fiction-writing, developing the details of what to write takes effort. Those details have to be discovered, imagined, decided on. Ideally, you need enough information so that you can pick and choose: you can make creative choices.

This is partly a matter of technical research, and partly a matter of active imagination. For the writing to be good, the fictional world must become as definite and specific as the real world--the world of memories, for example. It's like constructing sets for theater or the movies: the set needs to be complete before you can film your scene there. In filmmaking there's a document called the call-sheet that specifies all the people and equipment that need to be on the set for the filming of that day's scenes: actors, hair stylists, special camera gear, automobiles, and so on. Someone has to work out all those details and figure out what's needed, and when.

Writing fiction is the mental equivalent of that. The "set" is in one's head--one's imagination. But it too needs to be furnished through a process. It requires education, research, imagination, and decision-making. I believe that the power of the finished work, the amount of interest and pleasure it can evoke in a reader, depends on how much of this type of effort has gone into it.

All that material furnishes the straw which Rumpelstiltskin the writer spins into gold.

tunneling from both ends

Still at it. That is, still working my way through the difficulties of my story.

I have spent a huge amount of time (even by my own slow standards) fiddling with this part. But experience has taught me that there's no use in pushing on with a piece of writing if you're not clear on what you're doing. That is tantamount to trying to fix a problem using the wrong tools.

From the point of view of this blog, one difficulty is in how to describe this slow, searching process--how to make it seem interesting, or at least comprehensible.

An image that springs to mind is that of building a tunnel. Often tunnels are built by digging from opposite sides of the mountain and trying to meet in the middle. This is no doubt done in order to halve the construction time by putting two full excavation crews to work at once.

In a similar way, I build story by digging from "both ends": that is, by imagining the result or end-state I want to reach, and also by imagining the motives and actions of the characters en route to that end-state. Changes to the end-state mean making changes to those motives and actions. Changes of motive and action lead to different end-states.

"End-state" means not just the ending of the story as a whole, but also the end of each segment: each chapter, each scene. In a work that has been planned, outlined, each of these will have its story purpose, and therefore the end-state that needs to be reached. But getting characters to go there can be difficult.

Why? After all, the characters just do what I tell them, don't they? Why not just send them to the destination and get the whole thing written quickly?

It's about believability. Stories in which characters move smoothly as though on rails to obviously contrived end-states smack of author convenience, the evidence of which is a feeling of bending the rules of reality every which way to get there. I've talked about these things before. These are those scenes in which the hero's fetters are done up poorly, enabling him to wriggle free; or the building has large ventilation-ducts suitable for crawling through; and so on. There's a sense of "let's just get through this part so we can get to the exciting stuff ahead".

Contrivances like these ruin my enjoyment of a story. I don't mind a few--every story needs some help at times to keep going--but as they pile up, I sense writer laziness and a work written in the belief that credibility doesn't matter, or, worse, that the audience is too dumb to notice or care.

If your hero is tied up, and you need him out of his bonds, how do you get him out? If you resort to the old "luckily, they weren't tied up very well" trick, then you're lazy in my opinion. You don't care about your story very much.

How might I handle it? If I don't have any creative way of untying those knots, I might simply have the hero struggle with them, and not succeed in untying them. In story terms, that's what's known as a barrier: the hero tries something, and it doesn't work. A rule of thumb in storytelling is: always make things tougher for the hero than he expects. (It's OK to surprise him on the upside sometimes--especially when he's expecting things to be very difficult.) Now, whatever he does next, he has to do it tied up. He'll have to get creative with a future opportunity.

Or I might try to avoid having him tied up. Why create problems for oneself? Don't use the old "tying up" formula: use something else. Maybe he escapes--and, sprinting free, triggers an old leg-hold trap in the woods, and is caught that way...

If I decided he had to be tied up after all, then I would have to examine the details of his situation: tied up how? Where? By whom? I'd have to visit the character(s) doing the tying up: how motivated are they? How knowledgeable? What materials do they have? How much time? What is their attitude to what they're doing? By looking at how the bad guy approaches the task, I'm digging my tunnel from the front: how would I do the job, if I were he?

In doing this, I might hit on an idea for how the hero will escape. Once I have this, I need to start designing my scene so as to make this work. That's digging my tunnel from the back.

I find I need to shift from front to back, back to front, again and again, working through a story problem in steps. Maybe my idea is to have the bad guy leave behind a tool that the hero will use. That too is a story convenience, of course--unless the hero makes it happen. Hero might see bad guy set down the tool for a moment, then hit on the strategy of trying to "make" him forget it. Now the escape task shifts to a new arena: how the hero tries to manipulate the bad guy's attention, even as he is being tied up. A story subproblem opens up, with its own features--another little tunnel within the tunnel.

A story is not complete until every one of those problems and subproblems has been solved to my skeptical satisfaction. I need to believe that every single character is always acting in some way that I myself might act in the same circumstances. This requires imaginative effort, and not being satisfied with easy answers--things I've seen before.

It's hard. But when you do the work, it really pays off. If you want to create a really good story, set yourself and your characters tough problems, then think hard about how to solve them. If you keep at it, the answers do come.

Just as in civil engineering, in writing this method of tunneling from both ends speeds things up tremendously--even if it doesn't feel fast.

acknowledging divine aid

I've sat here for a few minutes now, arms folded, staring at the screen, and into the pool of light cast by my old hot-pink desklamp, wondering what to write.

One thought that has moved through my mind in the last couple of days arises from reading The Epic Cosmos, a collection of essays about the epic genre in literature, edited by Larry Allums. One of the recurring features of the great epics of the past is a formal (or at least expressed in the poem) call on the Muse for help in composing the work. The poet makes clear that he need divine aid in order to achieve the task before him, and acknowledges it publicly, so to speak. In some way, too, this might also support the authority of the work: it' s created not just by human hands, but by the gods.

I've never had much patience for this literary conceit of "the Muse"; it puts me in mind of effete, unproductive, writerly types languishing in smoking-jackets and complaining about the difficulties of creative work. Invoked by anyone more recent than John Milton, the Muse seems to be an over-precious and anachronistic image used by certain people who feel a need to shore up their status as "artists".

All right, maybe that's a bit harsh. But for myself, I've never referred to the Muse in anything but a joking way.

But now I'm wondering. The Muse was invoked by epic writers of antiquity because of the superhuman scope of the task. Also, epic itself, as a genre, is specifically about ventures so great that they involve both humanity and the gods. So as humans and gods collaborate in the epic struggle, the poet asks for divine collaboration in the creation of the work.

I think about my strange, determined bonding to this oversized, unreasonable, and inconvenient work. Where does that bonding come from--that motivation? I feel stuck to it, chained to it, in a sense, like Prometheus to his rock in the Caucasus Mountains, having his liver torn out each day. Like that cornball line of the persistent suitor who just won't give up: "It's bigger than both of us, baby."

It dawns on me that this is the Muse. Which Muse? There were nine of them (Robert Graves would say that this number is an intensifier of the number 3, which belonged to the Great Goddess). Calliope was the Muse of heroic and epic poetry. Her name meant "beautiful-voiced"; she was the principal Muse, and specifically the Muse of Homer when he composed the Iliad and the Odyssey.

A daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, Calliope was--and is--immortal, and therefore must be out there (or in here) as much now as she ever was. Her planet was Mercury, guide of souls beyond the temporal sphere. Is she the one urging me on in my heroic task? The one who has made me uncompromising and irrational in my fixation on this unlikely project?

Well, why not? In James Hillman's terms, each of us has an "acorn" or a guardian angel, whose business it is to keep us on the track of our chosen life. For an artist, this guardian would be a Muse, no? Hillman says that one of the distinguishing characteristics of the guardian is uncompromisingness: the guardian angel doesn't cut deals with practicality or with the world. The angel knows that the world and its problems are fleeting, and not worth sacrificing one's cosmic mission--one's reason for being.

Yes, I need divine help, every bit as much as Dante--or, for that matter, Ebenezer Scrooge. It's wonderful to think that it's there, supporting the mission. The work cannot be achieved by either man or goddess alone.

O Muse, help me! Don't desert me now.

megaphobia

I'm an insomniac.

In truth, I'm not sure when one becomes entitled to use that label--how many wakeful nights qualify you?

Certainly this last one was wakeful. I woke around 1:30 and felt my mind drawn into the vortex of concern. By 2:30 I knew it was hopeless. I donned the sweats I'd left on the chair against this likelihood, and took myself downstairs to read. I cranked on the heat in the living-room, poured myself a scotch, opened up Asimov's Guide to the Old Testament, and got highlighting.

With my mind drawn to issues other than my own life, fatigue and befuddlement set in. But I could tell there was still a sharp edge in it. I returned to bed at around 4:00 to wait out the time till the 5:30 alarm. Then: up and at 'em!

It's not unrelated to my post yesterday about Pluto and Saturn. One of the points that caught my attention while I was typing notes from Howard Sasportas's The Gods of Change was a reference to Abraham Maslow's concept of "the Jonah complex". This was the term he gave to the fear of one's own destiny or calling--the principal obstacle to self-actualization. Sasportas continues:

Why should we fear our own greatness? One reason is a fear of responsibility. If we fully acknowledged our potential talents, we would have to shoulder the burden of doing something to develop them. Another reason for denying our full potentiality might be the fear of the power it would give us. We wouldn't be able to be "little" anymore. Would we use our power wisely, or would we mishandle it? Or maybe we are afraid that if we were truly in touch with living our greatness, other people would be envious and resentful of our achievements. Transiting Pluto, in making us more aware of what is buried in us, may ask that we confront these fears in order to grow into the self that we truly are.

Jonah (whose name means "dove"), ordered by Yahweh to prophesy to Nineveh (capital of Assyria), tries to dodge the task, catching a boat to Tarshish. A violent storm comes up, and the sailors, casting lots to discover the cause, find out that it is Jonah. Jonah confesses that this is the case, and that the sea will calm if he is thrown overboard. Jonah would rather die than face his mission. The sailors, in desperation, take his advice and chuck him over. He is swallowed by a "great fish" and remains in its belly for three days before being vomited ashore, safe and sound.

I'm not sure what I think of the Jonah complex, but I know it relates to me, because I felt a cold finger move into my core when I read about it.

One decision I came to was to read some Maslow. I ordered a book by him yesterday.

Fear of one's own greatness. Hmm...how about megaphobia? Yes: I offer that term to psychology--as well as a basket of symptoms.

panic

Yesterday, toward the end of my writing period, I experienced a flash of panic. As I struggled with the plotting aspects of my current chapter, I opened up the latest draft (not very recent) of my Detailed Outline to look at what I'd planned for later on. Cue panic.

My god, I thought, this isn't going to work.

I saw a pile of material that would all have to be changed or replaced--assuming that the thing as a whole could be made to work at all, by no means a given. As I scrolled through the paragraphs a sick bleakness settled in my core. Boring, I said to myself. Boring. How can this even be fixed?

There were other, unrelated issues on my mind that were predisposing me to a negative outlook. The toxic mix merged like the binary precursors of a nerve gas, which turn deadly when combined.

I stared at the screen for a few minutes, but it was clear I was in no shape to deal with these issues. I went upstairs. It was a crisp sunny day. I'd been planning to go for a jog, to run a rented DVD back up the hill. Now I felt too depressed.

I thought back to March 1981, when I'd had my first full-on anxiety attack. Not knowing what else to do, I'd wound up at Emergency at Vancouver General Hospital, where I actually worked at that time as a janitor. I paced and shook in a crowded waiting-room full of bruised, bleeding, and distressed people. Eventually I was seen by a doctor, an Irish resident only a few years older than I was. He was intelligent, compassionate, and very handsome. A shivering wreck in the little examination room, I felt completely inadequate.

He gave me a Valium in a paper cup. I told him I didn't want to take the drug.

"Why not?" he said.

"It's just such a...low-level approach," I said. "It doesn't get at the problem."

"Have you ever gone running?" he said.

"Yeah."

"And notice how you feel good after a run?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that's a low-level approach, isn't it?"

I nodded reluctantly, but I also appreciated that he had understood right away what I meant. And I was astonished at how the Valium produced a deep, carefree calm--inconceivable just a few minutes before.

Remembering that conversation from 26 years ago, yesterday I determined to don my sweats and go for a run. Popping the DVD into a backpack (the movie was 1989's Uncle Buck, if you're curious--still good, although I've put it on the B-list), I headed out into the cool sunshine.

I'm somewhat out of condition since I haven't been running for the past few months, but I was able to jog up Lonsdale Avenue to the Blockbuster Video on 19th Street. At a lumbering pace I wove among the people on the sidewalks, enjoying being among others on the local high street: standing at bus stops, smoking cigarettes, yakking on cell-phones, serving hot dogs from a stand. I dropped the DVD and ran back home, squinting into the brilliant, low sun in the vacant sky.

I ran up along a block of 8th Street and walked the last two blocks home, looking down the hill and across the harbor to the city. The sparkles on the water were almost too bright to look at, even through my clip-on shades. My heart rate and breathing slowed quite quickly; my condition is improving. I came back in the front door and started heating up some homemade pea soup for lunch.

I felt better. Not tip-top, but better. A run had been exactly the right thing to do--"low-level" or not.

To do what I'm doing I need nerves of steel. Unfortunately, I don't have them, so I've got to make the best of it.

page fright

Today I start with my title. The term came to me abruptly yesterday while I was going about my morning routine, preparatory to coming down to the office to write. When I looked at my mind, I saw that I have a continual, gnawing resistance to facing the task of working on my project, and when I looked more closely, I saw that that resistance was based on fear.

Fear of what, exactly? The term came to me because I recognized the fear as being much the same as stage fright, which I've had a number of times in my life. In the main it's not been debilitating, since there is a ham and applause-junkie in me always seeking a way out. The worst times have not been connected with actual acting (I used to act back in high school, and indeed took a lead role in the silent film I made with my friends in those days), but, if I recall, in business presentations. Feelings of dread and doom overtake one as the moment of facing the audience draws inexorably closer.

I take heart from the fact that even experienced professional actors get stage fright--quite badly in some cases. I remember hearing that no less veteran a performer than Peter O'Toole had terrible nerves before going on stage, would hyperventilate and flap his arms to vent his stress. The pro is (mostly) able to take that energy and use it: inject it into the performance. The schmo stands on the stage, paralyzed and squeaking, bringing on the dreaded fiasco.

I recognized my resistance to writing as being in the same genus of fear. It's performance anxiety. There comes a moment of truth, and you've either got it or you don't. Can the high-jumper clear the bar? Can the soprano hit the note? The moment comes, and we find out.

When you actually sit down to write, you've already achieved something: you've hacked your way through a thicket of excuses. That in itself is an attainment that most would-be writers never achieve. "I'm too busy"; "I can't get enough quiet time alone"; "I'm not feeling creative right now". These and their allies defeat many a proto-writer.

And why? I believe it's because the proto-writer is undermotivated, basically due to fear. The proto-writer has page fright: the fear of arriving at a moment of truth and flopping. I don't mean flopping in the sense of not getting published or produced, for those problems happen only to the writer who has actually made it through page fright and written something. I mean flopping in the sense of balling up, freezing--experiencing an emotional state much like that of the terrified actor, paralyzed and squeaking on stage.

I can't say that flopping in front of your computer screen is worse than flopping in a live performance. We've all seen those Olympic figure-skating performances that have crashed and burned, due basically to performance anxiety, and imagined the crushing disappointment of people who have spent years in relentless single-minded training, all to face those four minutes on the ice. It must be like having your soul machine-gunned.

But the private flopping of the writer has its own special poignancy, even its own special agony. There's no world audience to witness your failure, but that world audience is in some ways a boon--it gives the high-profile failure something to push back at, something to define himself against: "I'll show them!" At the very least, he can enjoy the spectacle of defeat and tragedy--we remember Hector and Troy, after all, and they have their own measure of greatness. The failure of the writer is a private affair, an unsung tragedy, like the drowning of a hermit in the wilderness. He expires quietly, anonymously, his final thoughts unknown.

My way of dealing with page fright is through structure and routine. My morning routine happens automatically, by habit. If I just let one body movement follow another, I wind up here at my PC. That gets me through the thicket of excuses.

Then I have a structured way of getting into the writing itself. I open up my Notes document to the previous day's work, click on the Word highlighter, and go through the material, looking for "keeper" ideas. It's a fairly mechanical job, and it gets me engaged with the material, recalling what I'm working on. Nowadays I'm also copying and pasting the highlighted material into another document, which I call the Workspace for the chapter: where the refined notes go, along with plotting and outlining material.

Now, having got used to the water, so to speak, I can start splashing around. I can go back to my Notes document and start typing new thoughts into it. I think, "It's only notes--you can write anything here." I talk to myself, and type what I say.

In the Workspace I feel a little more pressure, since it's a more refined level of notes. But I have the safety net of dropping back to the Notes document, to chew the cud and muse randomly, or follow tangents.

My plan is to create a third level of preparation document, a Treatment, in which I will use the material from the Workspace to write out a story treatment for the chapter. The aim here too is to take the pressure off, to alleviate page fright by providing yet more scaffolding before I attempt the actual prose.

Is this an elegant or inspired way to write? Maybe not. It feels kind of corporate. But page fright is a reality. There are plenty of author-alcoholics out there to testify to its power. If a narrow pole were stretched across the Grand Canyon, and you found yourself out somewhere in the middle of it, how worried would you be about your poise and form? Speaking for myself, I wouldn't be one of those walking with a bold, insouciant step. I'd be wrapped around it like a snake, inching my way forward, alternately praying and swearing.

Just like that pilot I talked to at Seminary: "Any landing you walk away from is a good landing." Any method that gets you hitting the keys is a good method.

the writer tries (again) to encourage himself

I slept better last night, thank you. And woke to a morning of frost. I had agreed to drive Kimmie down to the SeaBus terminal so she could attend a work seminar over at Metrotown, so we joined the cars creeping down the frosty streets in the twilight of early dawn.

Yesterday I felt too restless and distracted to get down properly to work, so I spent most of the day procuring a Dell laptop for my aunt and trying to set it up. Got to keep a watchful eye on the writer's universal tendency to seek alternative activities. "I'll just take care of this..." Yeah, right.

One contributing factor of distractibility was my feeling of disgust and boredom with my project, at least with the stage I seem to be stuck at. I'm disgusted with the fact that I can be stuck for so long at one point; I'm in a leg-hold trap and have not had the courage to chew my leg off rather than just let myself starve here. The story situation I'm working with, its features and motivations, all seem bland and colorless to me. Who cares? I think. Who cares?

You need to find what excites you. When you find that, then you jump on it--or at least start steering toward it. When that no longer excites you, you need to move on. Something else will excite you now. For we're each of us repositories of all the emotions, all the passions, and each one of these will have things that trigger it. In terms of behavioral science, these things are called releasers. The energies within us are set and primed; they just need the release of a particular stimulus. It's up to us to find the stimulus.

Ah well. I must remember Thomas Mann's observation that the quality of the finished work is independent of the mood of the writer while creating it. He found that the quality of the material he wrote while dissatisfied and depressed was almost indistinguishable from what he wrote while enthusiastic and optimistic. The finished work bears only the faintest traces of the state of mind of the writer while it was being composed.

The moral: keep at it, regardless of mood. Just as a good parent puts the welfare of the child first, so a good artist puts the "welfare" of the project first. Don't starve it, don't hate it; above all, don't abandon it.

Somehow I've got to make my way through the next scene, no matter how boring and mechanical it seems to me.

not easy--not supposed to be

Over the weekend my mother sent me a quote she found in a book she had just bought:

If I were to describe to you my situation during the past three months, you would hardly be able to believe it; it's totally impossible for things to go on this way. My wife can't take any more; I can't take any more - things have gone so far that novels and short stories mean nothing to me measured against a single tear shed by my wife: that's how things are.... Up to now, I've been unable to work freelance, nor do I earn enough to buy shoes for my children. I've simply undertaken something impossible, and I have to confess that I've reached a dead end.

Thus Heinrich Boll in 1950, 22 years before he won the Nobel Prize for literature.

I found his expression of despair heartening. It was a salutary reminder that writing is hard even for those who are the very best at it. And it's not only that the practice of writing itself is hard: being a writer is hard. It's hard on one's psyche and one's family.

I think back to one of my consultations with my meditation instructor, Geoff. I was plodding through the first leg of a practice called ngondro (Tibetan for "preliminary practices" or "foundation practices"). The first leg involves performing 100,000 full prostrations, with accompanying visualizations and repetition of certain words. One is not supposed to linger on the practice, but rather to power through it as much as one can (not in one session, of course! most people take at least months, more usually years, to complete these). I was in one of my periods of uncertainty, even dejection, about the practice. I faced Geoff alone in the small shrine-room, where we sat cross-legged on meditation cushions.

"It's not easy," I said, by way of trying to sum up the situation with an understatement.

"It's not supposed to be easy," he said.

In a way he was merely stating the obvious. But his words flipped my mind in a new direction. I was carrying the expectation that things should be easy. That if I were doing it right, I would not find the practice so hard. The unreasonable demands of the practice provoked feelings of anger and resentment, along with self-doubt, tedium, and even despair. It was supposed to do these things--and that somehow made it seem even worse: like a torturer deliberately inflicting suffering on you. But the difficulty kept on seducing my mind into dwelling on notions of success and failure, and this preoccupation was itself the source of much of my suffering. Ngondro is a kind of spiritual purgative that forces you to spew out your neuroses and emotional baggage, and then pushes your face into the revolting mess--your revolting mess.

Geoff was challenging me: Why do you expect things to be easy?

It's a good question. When things are easy, you can coast on autopilot, and success is almost assured. You can stay more blissed out, in the pleasure-zone. When things are hard, your attention is forced onto the matter at hand. You have to deal with it--think. And failure looms over your shoulder, watching your every move.

Failure. It's a painful affront to one's self-esteem. And yet even some of the world's great seeming successes have been failures when viewed from certain angles. Great works of art are often regarded as failures by their creators, who envisioned something more.

The easy way is not the heroic way. As Joseph Campbell points out, when the hero accepts his adventure (and often he tries to shirk it), his mettle will be tested to the utmost. And there are heroes--or would-be heroes--who fail. Their stories stand as cautionary tales, as warnings to those who hope to do less than their best and get away with it.

I did not finish my prostrations until 2002, when I was at Gampo Abbey, eight years after starting them. It was a long journey--and not easy.

cliff

I would like to report progress in my great work--I really would. But the very concept of progress has become hazy even to me, the one supposedly "progressing" with it.

I have arrived again at what feels like a characteristic spot for me: stuck on a cliff-face. Metaphorically, that is--although in my personal mythology, the guiding image is from a real event. When I was attempting my lifewriting project about seven years ago, one of my efforts was to write a number of vignettes of my earliest memories. These form an archipelago that has no sequential order in my mind; they remain self-contained yet interconnected, not unlike the Greek myths.

Here is the vignette that I labeled, simply, "Cliff":

Let's climb up here. Yeah. Okay. It's the cliff behind the Schmidts' house. It doesn't seem like a cliff because trees grow around it and up it and on top of it, but the dirt runs out and you have to go up the speckled rock. Greg Schmidt is first. he's twenty-four days older than I am. He's five. I'm next. Doug Schmidt is last. He's four.

Greg is fast, he finds places to grab and places to put his feet. I try some of his places and some of my own when his look too hard. At some point I stop. All the places look too hard here. I look down. Doug climbs slowly below, bristly blond head against a yellow sweater. I can't see the last place I put my foot. I look up again. There's a crack in the rock running up at an angle. The top of the cliff is rounded. Greg is just standing up to turn and look down.

A wave of fear passes through me. It is intense fear that I have never felt before.

"C'mon!" says Greg. "It's easy!"

There's a squeal of excitement in his voice. He makes a big come-up gesture with his arm, lifting one gum-boot from the rock with the energy of his movement.

I cling to the rock. I look up. I look down. The fear becomes strongest as I realize that I must either go up, go down, or fall. There is no other choice. There is no one who can help me. I must do something. I must do it by myself.

"C'mon!" says Greg. "Grab over there!"

I must choose.

"C'mon!"

But Greg is already turning to explore the trees at the top, losing interest in us.

I don't know the word panic, but I know I mustn't or I will fall. The top is closer, but I don't know how to get there. The bottom is farther but I'll have to get past Doug. I'd be chickening out. I could still fall.

I decide to go up. I reach for the crack where Greg went and cling to the rock as I make my way. I hate being forced to do this. I hate being stuck so I have no choice. I hate being terrified. But I have to. I put my feet in places and grab places with my hands. The slope gets less and I walk leaning forward over the curve at the top. I make it.

I look down and see Doug slowly climbing his way up. He doesn't seem scared. I feel some triumph but mainly relief and maybe anger that I had to be scared so badly to get up here. But I made it.

Want to know what it's like to be most of the way through writing The Mission? See above.

finding the feeling

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

May it never be!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

patience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

integrity and adequacy

I find myself engaged in a major rethinking of my project--the reason that I have had it up on blocks, so to speak, for a couple of months now.

When I say "rethink", I don't mean I intend to junk major portions or completely alter what I'm doing. Maybe the word think would be better than rethink. It's a process of learning more, of going deeper, asking why, and forging connections.

In order for a work of art to have integrity, to have unity, everything in it must relate with everything else. Everything in it needs to belong, and needs to be felt to belong. I suppose that the larger and more complex the work, the more difficult it is to meet this requirement.

It's hard to be more specific about this without going into details about the work itself, which I don't really want to do (the spoiler factor). But there is sometimes the feeling that an idea for one part of the story can be applied to others parts, thus knitting them together thematically. My current investigation into ancient credit and finance, for example: I am working with it as a means of creating tension and interest in my current chapter, but I'm also asking how this might be applied to other sections of the story. If it's meaningful and relevant here, it should be meaningful and relevant elsewhere.

Credit could thus become a thematic strand: a kind of thread running through the work, tugging the pieces into closer union with each other. It becomes part of the meaning of the work.

An exciting but scary aspect of this process is that such meanings cannot really be forced onto the work; they are discovered. There is something organic about it. I think of the image of neurons forging connections among each other in the brain: they branch out, their fibers fastening on to each other and fusing, the junctions growing stronger with each impulse that passes through them. The brain, composed of countless complex parts and subunits, becomes a functioning whole.

I continue to worry about my work in progress. When I wake at night and lie thinking, it is still one of my main concerns. Or while watching TV in the evening: something I see will trigger a thought about my work, and I will actually gasp as though an electric shock had been applied, startling my wife. It's fear that I've missed something important, or that my work is deficient in some deep but specific--and irreparable--way.

Life. A story must capture the flavor of life. There are endless ways of doing so, but it's not easy. A story represents both your understanding of life and your ability to express it. When you're offering up a story, you're saying, "I think life is like this." Even supposed escapist and fantasy works say this. As Joseph Campbell observes, stories of magic and monsters are really about the psychological world--our inner life. The story is a test and an expression of the writer's personal adequacy to the world.

In this view, the greatest works are by writers who are highly adequate. They see into life and are able to paint what they see--to express it. As with any endeavor, excellence is only for the few.

Could it be that a truly unified work can come only from a unified personality? Someone who has attained personal integrity in the deepest and widest sense?

I don't know. The question marks here express the truth of my own situation.

noise

We're being buzzed by airplanes and helicopters; I know not why. I've shut my office window against the cool gray day, but I can still hear the rumbling tremolo of turbo-prop engines surge and fade overhead. It's another tributary of the ever-swelling river of noise pollution: lawnmowers, leaf-blowers, hedge-trimmers, power-washers, the car-horns of impatient and hypocritical motorists, the roar of supercharged diesel buses pulling away from the bus stop outside our house, plus a yapping pug a couple of doors down who barks continually from early morning till long after dark. More and more these days I find it necessary to use earplugs during the day as well as at night.

Noise is a stressor. I think not enough attention is paid to this in our plans and culture. I'm sure it is part of the positive-feedback loop of aggression and incivility that characterizes our urban world.

Just saw Kimmie off to work. She says there is a fire down on the harbor; so the aircraft are probably to do with that.

Noise has always been a fact or in urban life. In ancient Rome people wrote of how hard it was to sleep at night because of the noise--especially after a law was enacted banning commercial traffic from the streets till after dark, in order to reduce congestion during the day. Then the teamsters would roll in, delivering their loads from the docks, cracking their whips and shouting. Windows had shutters but not glass. I'm sure some people must have used wax earplugs even then.

So: another week begins. I'm having a filling drilled out this morning, to be replaced by a more comprehensive onlay--part of a series of escalating dental operations to fix a tooth that hurts when I bite on it too hard.

In and around all that, I have to be creative. It's by no means as bad as working in TV, when the health or sanity of the writers was the last consideration, and we were considered mere faucets, there to deliver a certain quantity of material at a certain rate--but there are still obstacles to creating, even in the supposed quiet of one's suburban home.

write-o-phobia

Write-o-phobia. There's probably a proper Greek name for the disorder, but this makes it nice and clear: fear of writing.

How does it happen? How do I get derailed from the march of progress, and then find that I can't get back at it? I'm not sure. You get out of the flow of writing each day, and then it seems awkward, even presumptuous, to try to get back into it. It's sort of like trying to reboard a moving train or a revolving merry-go-round: you stand poised, wanting to get on, letting the opportunities zip by, but worried about goofing up and getting flung away. You want to find the right rhythm and just hop aboard.

So I remain in the swamp of chapter 30, going through my research material, collating ever more of it, and asking questions. I've been here for over a month, and start to worry whether I'll ever get out. Aren't I just being too fussy? Just sit down and write, damn it!

Ah, but that's not my way. The pump has to be primed. There's no use in writing anything until you know what you're talking about. When a writer fully does his or her homework, the writing is rich and informative. We've all read material that's mainly fluff and flab, composed of wordy generalities and familiar images. I can't stand that, and I don't want to be the author of it.

I have found that there is no substitute for simply going through my research material, looking for promising facts. These facts--events of the time of my story, or cultural practices--can trigger ideas. They can feel potentially relevant. If so, I toy with them: I try to relate them to my story. How can this fact affect my story? It's sort of like trying jigsaw-puzzle pieces. "I think that's a piece of sky..."

But it's not so well defined as a jigsaw puzzle. There's no way of knowing whether I'm moving in a fruitful or relevant direction, except by the gut feeling I have. When will the "story" feeling click in? When will I get that feeling of excitement, of wind filling my sails? My Notes document now runs to 45 pages--how much is enough?

I'm the creator. I'm supposed to be the God of this project. How did it become the boss of me?

making it believable

Plotting is fiddly. I spent my (admittedly abbreviated) writing-time yesterday continuing to tinker with the creation and arrangement of events in the chapter I'm working on. It always strikes me as strange how difficult it can be to find a sequence of events that later will seem natural and inevitable.

This is how it struck me even when plotting stories for The Odyssey. How do you decide what happens in a story? There aren't really any rules; as a writer, a storyteller, you apparently have infinite choice. How about this? How about that? How do you choose?

The story must flow to my own satisfaction. I have to believe it before I can ask anyone else to believe it; and I'm a pretty skeptical person. The more you know of the world, and the more you know of people, the less likely it is you'll be ready to swallow something that doesn't seem realistic.

I find myself easily put off by implausibilities in a drama. I very much enjoyed the first season of 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland, but found myself smiling wryly at the seamless interoperability of all the different computer systems--how the antiterrorism team could speedily link into civilian data systems and whatnot and get the information they wanted. Anyone who's ever seen a computer being used knows that this is pure fantasy; you're lucky if things that have been designed to work together actually do. I would have been much more pulled in to the show if the high-tech, expensive information systems worked only very intermittently. I would have felt more that I was watching a real story unfold, and less like I was watching actors play with make-believe props.

Then there is the matter of character decisions. When these become too contrived or foolhardy, you have "idiot plot"--a story based on decisions that no thinking adult would actually do. These are the scenes in which the lone woman agrees to meet with the villain on a dark road at night and so on. I remember watching E.T. when it came out. The scene in which the little boy, wanting to catch a glimpse of the unknown creature, parks himself out in the yard at night on a chaise longue with a flashlight, was one I could not believe. It's too flipping scary--it's not how real nine-year-olds behave.

I recall too a hole in a movie I recently watched again, and which I regard as basically good: Tin Men, a show about aluminum-siding salesmen in Baltimore in 1959, starring Danny De Vito, Richard Dreyfuss, and Barbara Hershey. This time it hit me that Richard Dreyfuss, in the course of seducing Barbara Hershey, tells her that his wife has just died (he's never been married). Later, they move in together--but we never see her learning that his "widower" line was a lie. Even if she was indeed able to swallow this, we would have to see Dreyfuss talk his way out of it.

Then there's the integrity of the setting itself. I recall my mother's criticism of Melrose Place after she's seen an episode: "That's not how people in offices behave." Indeed not. The scenes could be believed only by those who had either never had a job, or were naive enough to think that people working in "glamor" jobs such as fashion photography or publishing never concern themselves with practical things. The sets may as well have been painted backdrops against which the audience could watch attractive people betray each other (the purpose of the show, as far as I know).

Movies, TV, and even novels are full of devices that clearly are unreal--cars that start too easily, unlocked doors, ventilation ducts you can crawl though. All these things erode the credibility of a story. They mark places, in my opinion, where the writer could not be bothered to imagine things properly. The writer reached for a cliche, slothfully thinking that it would be accepted because it had already been accepted so many times before.

I can't stand that. For me, a scene must ring true in every detail--in setting and in character. Cheating with these things for the "sake of the story" does not work. All you're doing is making your story bad. There may be reasons for doing so--time constraints, the network is ordering you to, or you just can't be bothered--but don't kid yourself that it doesn't matter to the quality of the product.

on showing off

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

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

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

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

What do I mean?

Webster's defines tour de force thus:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To show off.

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

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

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