Storytellersunplugged

By David Niall Wilson

(with a nod to Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss)

Currently, one of the greatest pleasures in my life is reading stories to my three year old daughter, Katie. One of the things that make this fun is the work of some very clever authors. My two personal favorites are Dr. Seuss, and Shel Silverstein. I’m not as familiar with Shel’s other works, but any parent who has come up against the formidable task of reading “Runny Babbit” to their child knows the evil of which I speak.

“Runny Babbit had a hurple pat,” of course, means “Bunny Rabbit had a purple hat”. That’s pretty straight forward. Then try reading the page where the waiter tells Runny Babbit all the specials of the day, and do so without pulling out any hair, asking your child if they don’t really want to read a Sesame Street book, or running screaming into the night. The other thing standing in your way, of course, is maniacal, uncontrollable laughter. The first time I read “Runny Babbit” with most of the family in the room, it killed. It does get old over time, particularly when your children start trushing their beeth with pooth taste and you have to figure out what the hell they’re talking about.

Fortunately I don’t consider this a problem; it’s a measure of what this essay is really about — the power of words. Some people have magic in their rhymes and nonsense, while others attempting the same jibber jabber manage only to frustrate or irritate readers. When my three year old daughter asked me to put pooth taste on her toothbrush, I had an epiphany. Her mind had been altered. She’d managed to take the story I read her and apply the logic to her own words, coming up with a line altered just as Mr. Silverstein would have done it, and at age three. How many books have you read in your life that gave you such a dynamic, mental shift? How many of you can recite at least a part of one book by Dr. Seuss without really giving it any thought? Apply that same question to other books you read, and other authors, and I’m willing to bet that it’s more difficult to find quotes that stuck with you as long, or as well, or that come as easily to the tongue.

Another point is the level of difficulty in reading these books aloud. I can tell you that, when I was still in the US Navy and had a bunch of sailors and bikers over to get drunk one night, I got them all to try reading passages from “Fox in Socks,” and it wasn’t pretty. I could do it, though, even after a few beers, and I still can. In fact, I can read it about twice as fast as most people I’ve met, and change voices as I go, because I’ve practiced. This has come in handy more than once when asked to read something unfamiliar or technical aloud, because I’ve trained my tongue to respond under duress. I bet Mr. Hill could explain this better than I can, but I think it’s like typing words that aren’t words as a typing exercise. You have to concentrate on exactly what is in front of you - if you try to think ahead you stumble over what you believe it should say and misinterpret what it actually does say.

“I can’t say such flibber flubber, my tongue isn’t made of rubber”

Indeed, Mr. Knox, sir, but mine apparently is.

The magic of word puzzles and rhymes is truly mystical. I don’t know what makes one attempt work so well, and another fall flat, when they seem similar in style, structure, and even content, but whatever that factor is — it exists. It makes children and adults smile. It sticks in the memory and latches on to the funny bone with sharp hooks. It gives me more pleasure to read some finely tuned children’s rhymes than any ten good novels can provide, and I can read them again and again without losing all the magic - another feat that prose seldom accomplishes for me (though on occasion I run into someone like Coleridge, or Poe, or Byron that can make me read and mumble and mutter verse over and over until people beg me to stop). I am hoping, along with enjoying the children’s rhymes we share, that the father-daughter readings will contribute to an interest in poetry and reading on Katie’s part, but if not, I’ll know she still remembers not to eat Green Eggs and Ham on a train or on a plane, in a box or with a fox, she does not like them, Sam, you see, so go away and let her be. And miracle of miracles, her BROTHER likes to read to her too - same brother who hates to read for any other reason. Maybe the magic is in Katie, and the rest of it’s all “flibber flubber.”

Another thing that has haunts me in Dr. Seuss’ universe is the messages thinly veiled in some of his books and stories. The Lorax - who will ever forget him? I actually started (and may complete at some point) a sequel to this to try and follow what our society would have done with the characters after the Onceler chased them out of town. Here is a short snippet of what I had in mind…

They clean out the sewers, the rivers and ponds,
And invest what they earn in cheap government bonds,
They clean up the garbage in big yellow boots,
In their hazmat resistable barbaloot suits

The Swanee Swans never go swimming these days,
They once found it fun, but they’re changing their ways,
They all work in factories cranking out thneeds,
From synthesized cloth that is woven from weeds

They aren’t warm, they aren’t comfy, they scratch and they smell,
But the Thneed sellers say they are doing quite well,
When the thneeds with white beads fail, they sew on black collars,
And raise up their prices a couple of dollars

The Lorax enlisted with liberal glee
In the left-wing extreme of far fiddle-de-dee
A place that is farther than most folks will go
Just to hear the poor Lorax expound on their woe
____________________________________

…. You get the idea…but that is too depressing…

In honor of this off-the-wall topic, I’m going to add in one of my own works with a more positive spin — one that evolved from my love of Seuss. I hope, one day, to figure out the oddball market of children’s books and do something with it.

This one is one of two that I wrote a few years back for my son Billy. I’ve written others for my other children, and a few that are just for me. This one is actually available in a beautiful art print suitable for framing and illustrated by the talented Mr. Keith Minnion…I have framed copies for Katie when she’s old enough to appreciate them.

The Eliphajaunt

By Wave Dilson

A Boy and an elephant both went out,
One with a football, the other a snout
As long as a boa constrictor, and grey,
To the field by the river to frolic and play

The boy threw the football quite high in the air,
And he caught it again, as it fell back from there,
While the elephant wandered a little behind,
They were out for a jaunt, it was time to unwind

And again with the football clutched tight in his hand,
The boy flicked his wrist like a taut rubber band
And the ball took off flying up up, and away,
And he reached out to catch it the very same way

That he’d caught it a hundred and ten times before,
And expected to catch it just that one time more
But his hand came up empty, the air was the same,
Something was very much wrong with his game.

For a ball that goes up as we all understand,
Cannot stay, it goes upward, and then it must land
So he spun in a circle and stared at the sky,
And he asked his friend elephant, “Do you know why?”

I have tossed up my football quite high in the air
But it did not fall down, and I’m wondering where
It could be, for you see, it is not in the sky,
And it’s not on the ground, and I’m wondering why

It is not in my hand where it landed before,
And the elephant couldn’t stand one second more
Of his secret and lifted his long, long grey snout
And he swished it around and he twirled it about

And the boy saw his football, caught snug as can be
In the trunk of the elephant, tall as a tree
And the elephant laughed, and he tossed the ball high,
So it sailed so far up it was lost in the sky

And though it flew higher than ever before,
The ball fell back to Earth, the boy caught it once more
And the boy and the elephant went on their way,
They continued their jaunt, and enjoyed the bright day.

Onward!

DNW

I saw the Phantom of the Opera tonight.

He’s given up on the old opera house, you know. Left it and its Chagall ceilings and history and heartbreak behind, packed up his kit and made his way to the Bastille. There’s a newer opera house there now, a curved edifice of grey stone and glass that’s a little more to his liking.

He’s given up on opera, too, gone looking for something that lets him find his own audience. No more Christines for him, no more training thankless ingénues and working through others and waiting for the grand production to find his voice. No, he’s got a Gibson now, and a ratty little amp. There’s a CD player that jacks into the amp so that he can crank out whatever he wants to hear sans the guitar line, and then tear into it on his own. That’s all he wants; it’s enough to get the job done.

There’s no mask these days. He’s got no use for it now, not with the way he plays. Sometimes he paces – prowls, really – up and down, his back to the world and face bowed to the guitar. Sometimes he squats down over the amp and adjusts his instrument minutely, alternating between delicate tweaks and blistering runs as the mood takes him.

You can see his fretwork. It’s out of this world. But you won’t see his face. He doesn’t turn around. Doesn’t need to, you see.

You won’t find him out in front of the opera house. At least, I didn’t. Instead, he was at the bottom of the stairs that lead down to the basement entrances and the Metro, a clean sweep of pavement thirty feet below street level. He sets up down there and lets it rip, and the hell with what’s going on inside. It was Don Giovanni, but I’m sure he didn’t care. He’s seen it. Hell, he’s lived it. And the fine and fancy folk up top gave the edge of the stairwell a wide, wide berth as they waited for the doors to open and offer them an escape inside, where they’d find a much more refined kind of fury.

He was already playing when I went out tonight, left the hotel and the laptop behind and went hunting something to remind me I was in Paris after all. My route took me past the opera house, and the sound pulled me closer. For an instant, I didn’t realize who he was, this guy with the thinning mane of silvery hair and a rough-looking down jacket. I saw him move. I saw him pace. I saw him play. And I saw the way his reflection kept skipping off the chrome of the doors that he always faced, and knew him for who he was.

I didn’t go down the steps. I didn’t dare. I just listened. There were a couple of kids down there with him, and I figured that if they were close to him, then I didn’t need to be. They were standing, watching, dressed in that combo of hip-hop and AC/DC that someone, somewhere had decreed was cool, and he ignored them. They watched and listened and swayed, and he let them, his incidental audience.

Maybe five feet separated them. Maybe ten. It was enough. As close as they might have gotten, he was alone.

I left him to them, and moved on.

They were still there when I came by again, a couple of hours later. The opera was letting out, the streaming patrons flowing out and around the cone of sound that he was still letting flood into the night. I fought the current and breasted clear into the empty space. He was playing the same song, or maybe he wasn’t. It didn’t matter. He was playing what he was playing, and more kids had drifted down to see him. A couple of dozen, maybe, all sitting there, silent, on the steps.

I didn’t go down to join them this time, either, just moved to the low stone wall that marked one side of the stairwell and leaned on it, listening. And when the song ended, I was the only one who clapped.

He looked up at me then. Just for a moment, and in a way that let none of the spectators on the steps see his face.

I saw him, though. I saw him, and nodded recognition. He nodded back, for one endless second, then started playing again. I moved on. The kids stayed. And his new song followed me off into the night.

by Janet Berliner

Thank you, Mr. Steinberg for being so gutsy and so gracious. (See “Pain.”) I proffer you a wobbly curtsy and dare here to embark upon a journey into the same territory as your last
essay.

My journey into the twin topics of pain and exercise takes a circuitus route, beginning with two of the most absolute tenets of Judaism:

1. “Do not gossip; no good can ever come of it.”
2. “Do not proseltyze,” to which I would add: especially if you’re a writer.

What does #2 mean? It means do NOT attempt to induce someone to join your own belief system.

Mostly, the law deals with religion, but it also deals with
obsessive zeal. For the purposes of this piece, it applies particularly to exercise and to aspiration as in Hope, Ambition, & Breathing.

For those of you who can and do find exercise to be an imperative for creation, bless you and may you always be
able to do it. For me, here’s my story. It begins with the words Rick showed me, written by Jim Morrison:

“People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. … Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. …Pain is meant to wake us up…You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel
your pain.”

Easy to say, Mr. Morrison, and oh, so hard to do.

When I was young–and I was young once–they called me Gypsy.
Aside from writing and reading, my passions were dancing, tennis, traveling, the ocean, and the feel of warm sand between my toes. And I loved to eat, everything from peasant food to pheasant under glass, from bananas and mangoes to figs and grapes warm off the vine. I never knew boredom or depression. I walked my own walk to my own beat and, as Piaf sang, Je regrette rien. I regret nothing.

I’d be doing all of it still, but along came myasthenia. For those not in the know, it’s an orphan neuromuscular disease–orphan because too few people have it to make research financially feasible. In short form, an enzyme that carries messages from the brain to the (mostly) small motor functions dries up and goes away. There is sometimes a helpful surgical process, but it’s mostly a question of constant replacement therapy–if you’re lucky. There is no cure. There can be remission, but even then, the more you use your muscles, the weaker they get. The heck with pecs. Think eyes, bowels, throat.

“You’ll be better tomorrow.” No.
“Get those muscles pumping. It’ll strengthen them.” No.

Myasthenia also attacks your immune system. You have to take cortisone, which can be both a miracle and the devil. There are many other side issues, more as you survive–if you do. None of them are pleasant.

I was lucky and stubborn. I already had two lovely daughters, my passion for writing, and a greedy need to live. So I had no choice, really. I had to develop the patience to withstand chronic pain and keep relearning the physical functions I needed for survival.

That was around 1980, about the time my first novel came out. For a while I was too ill to write or take risks. Whatever I did was in slow motion. Slowly my courage returned and I started taking risks again. Many of them sent me to ICU, but I kept on keeping on.

And then my immune system, what was left of it, broke down still further and I developed COPD. I am on oxygen 24/7, confined to quarters, not allowed to fly except in my mind and my memory. My immune system is so depleted that the sound of a sneeze sends me into panic. I spent most of 2004 on a vent, two years of not knowing who I was or where, a year relearning how to walk, how to write the alphabet and talk, how to find a way to hear something out of ears whose nerves died.

I’m in chronic pain. Even if I could, I’m not allowed to travel anywhere except to see physicians. I can’t visit my beloved daughters and grandchildren. Since that last stay in ICU when I once again confronted my Maker, I take 30 pills on a good day, breathing treatments three times a day, and see five physicians in luckier months. Every day I contend with up to twelve hours of nausea, headaches and dizziness.

But that’s not the worst of it. The worst thing is having to contemplate the probability of giving up my dreams.

How do I dance like a gypsy, explore islands that aren’t on any map, swim with the barracuda when I am imprisoned by my body and by the walls of my room? How do I not grow angry?

The truth is I do get angry, but I also write, and I count my blessings a lot. My memories sustain me, like the one of the woman I met in St. Croix. She was ninety-eight and went scuba diving every day to visit her pet octopus and feed him cooked chicken. Her contention was, as is mine, that since we are unique, we must claim ourselves–pleasure and pain, warts and all.

That’s what I try to do, while I search for a Pea Green Boat to take me back to the sea again.

Point of view.

The world through the eyes of a character, residing in the mind of a character.

If nothing else, point-of-view discipline is something that I have struggled successfully to maintain in my own writing. I try to contain a disciplined POV within a set-piece, most often chapter-length.

In fact, submitting to the discipline of POV can be a liberating limitation, stretching the imagination and providing a tool for plot and the running storyline.

Of course we all know the strictures of Point-of-View – that a scene be rendered through the eyes, nose, and ears of the chosen character, that the smells and sounds and feelings and knowledge of the scene be those of the character, and no one else.

POV can be a character-shaping instrument if done well and consistently. It can pull the reader in rather than distancing him or her with an omniscient view or a discombobulating bouncing of POV amongst characters. I, for one, find it disorienting and frustrating to enter and leave various characters’ minds suddenly and for seemingly no other reason than it was an easy out for the author.

As a reader, I am also flittering about the surface with such flighty POV, not entering the story and seeing and feeling as a character does . . . not wondering along with the character whose thoughts I share.

Were this column simply on Point of View, it would delve into the technical tricks used by others and seek advice and illumination on how POV can enhance tension and reveal character. But any person who has slogged through one of my essays in its entirety might note a lack of topical discipline with regard to “theme.”

And so it is with this one.

I write not about POV in a void . . . I ask a question about POV as a stalking horse for my ruminations on a particular character type. And how that character type can be rendered in fiction. Believably.

Doubtless we have all met people in real-life who would defy belief were they to be inserted into a novel. The irony is that they often come off as caricatures rather than the flesh, blood, and pathology that comprise them in the here and now. For some reason, I tend to intersect with these people more often than is comfortable, and often it is not pleasant.

When I do happen upon them, I ask myself how I could use this personality, this quirk, or that eccentricity as a foil or an appurtenance of character. I ask this, because often the person herself or himself cannot be used wholesale.

The person is too eccentric.

Damaged.

Broken.

Evil.

Yes . . . evil.

And that is the POV question I ponder.

Or perhaps the deeper question is really a matter of what constitutes evil, for to portray a concept, we first must understand it to its fullest. Or, at very least, gain a toehold to understanding.

So, how to handle evil with respect to Point-of-View? Lest you think that the answer is straightforward [and my apologies and celebratory gratitude if you tell me that the answer is straightforward, is simple, and is one that I have simply missed], let me explain a bit further.

Good and evil. Concepts that provide grist for most every story, whether overtly or implied.

Is there truly evil, or is there only mental illness?

If there is evil, then what is it? And how and why is it manifested from one person to the next? What is the motivation to hurt others?

How can it be portrayed accurately, with neither hyperbole nor excessive propriety regarding “non-judgmentalism?”

When I think of evil conceptually, the phrase that reflexively comes to mind is that of the great Hannah Arendt in her description of Adolf Eichmann and the “banality of evil.”

Eichmann’s self-deprecating image as that of clerk merely keeping the trains running is as horrific a portrayal of the inhumane as any that I can recall created in fiction. Just a minor cog in the machinery of evil, a man surely devoid of free choice in the matter. A man whose entire “defense” rested on the environment in which he found himself, conveniently forgetting that he, himself, was largely responsible for creating the abnormal environment that would later be offered up as his excuse.

And his inability to accept responsibility for his actions I have found to be typical of those imbued with evil. Evil always points the finger elsewhere, as if the ubiquitous presence of evil is, itself, an excuse for evil’s presence.

Said Eichmann: “Why me? Why not the local policemen, thousands of them? They would have been shot if they had refused to round up the Jews for the death camps. Why not hang them for not wanting to be shot? Why me?”

Why me?

The plea of the caught, tried, and convicted. Surely a phrase that never crossed his mind when Eichmann was the toast of the Reich.

Why me?

Conviction and punishment seem never condign to those who deserve it most. In some bizarre calculus known only to them, they somehow believe that they should be last in line to the gallows. Only after punishment is dealt to others whom they perceive as equally guilty should they, themselves, feel the rope about their necks.

And so it is with the fictional personality contorted by evil, twisted by God knows what.

Is there a line of philosophy or psychology that examines human behavior and motivation in light of this obeisance to a “machine” of sorts? That humans are merely cogs in a machine, whether they recognize it or not? And it is the behavior of others in the machine that is the measure of us, not our behavior according to an independent moral standard?

Or that in the measuring, all others must be measured first according to the standard, and if found wanting, then we ourselves are exonerated?

I am aware of certain self-professed “Christian” men – one, in particular – who never offer contrition or the slightest recognition that heinous behavior – betrayal, psychological abuse, physical abuse, extreme rage, the foulest language imaginable – is anything to regret or to correct.

Instead, this type of man offers the Eichmann excuse. He points the finger. “Look at these others, equally guilty.”

Perhaps it is a lunatic’s interpretation of the Biblical dictum: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Thus placing occasional pride or use of profanity on a par with, say, habitual adultery or even systematic mass murder.

Now let me make clear one thing here. When one makes comparisons of extremes to illustrate a point, there is sometimes the danger that one may trivialize the horrific rather than imbue the lesser with horrific significance. Thus, the comparison is not an equating. It is, rather, my own attempt to find the horrific in the banal, to find the common thread that links the Eichmann to the closet abuser sitting in the next church pew.

Edward S. Herman, a professor emeritus of the Wharton School, contends that “Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on ‘normalization.’ This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as ‘the way things are done.’”

The routinization of brutality. The normalization of the unspeakable.

So where does it begin?

Can we plumb the depths of an Eichmann to find answers to the quotidian evil that we are exposed to each day? Can we even enter the world of an Eichmann without soiling ourselves? Or do we hesitate to enter at all, fearing what we may find?

Hannah Arendt’s phrase the “banality of evil” gives me to shudder. Utter blandness. The horror of a scientific motivational patina slathered onto inhumanity.

Which leads me on this excursion to ponder how it is we portray evil. For, to portray it, we must believe it exists. And if we believe it exists, we must understand it to then describe it.

Is what we call “evil” merely a sickness that compels men and women to go against generally accepted social conventions? Or is it something that each of us is capable of? Something that can grip us?

I have been exposed to pure evil on occasion. At least, I think it is evil. I consider it evil. It is unsettling and inhuman.

And it is not as you might expect.

It is not the wide-eyed zealot. It is, instead, the “reasonable” and “thoughtful” person, sometimes a member of a respected profession. It is sometimes the person who acts with evil and malicious intent, and yet considers such action under the sanction of his “God.”

I tend to the notion that he is most purely evil the man who acts as if with moral purpose, focusing only on his own skewed and warped “intentions” and “motives” to the exclusion of his own despicable acts.

Who is the more evil of the two – the amoral man who subscribes to no moral code and does what others consider evil? Or he who subscribes to a moral code and manipulates that code to harm others, to serve his own selfish and bitter motives? Assuming, of course, that there is a gradient of evil that we may identify and utilize.

“She means well,” is one of those phrases that grates. Why does it grate? It grates because it places primacy on what a person feels she is doing rather than on what she does. Certainly motive is important in judgments of the severity of punishment in a court of law. But here I do not speak of acts worthy of a court of secular judgment.

I speak of daily interactions.

I speak of the banality of evil, tinged with sanctimony.

That is nuanced evil, evil with a human face, smiling to mask a black heart, consumed with the bitterness of misanthropy.

I speak of people who act against others and excuse every act, no matter how abominable, by reference to their own “good” motives, regardless from where derived. They view the world through the prism of their own sanctimony, never examining themselves or the heinous effects of their activities.

Such a person can turn against his family, mask his own paranoia and insecurities to others, externalize his problems, and go forever in search of victim status, pointing the finger of blame and fearing to look honestly into the mirror.

G.K. Chesterton penned an essay almost 100 years ago called “The Maniac.” It is as fresh and frightening as it must have appeared a century ago. Today, we might call that person disturbed, touched, or . . . evil.

This person sees the world as a tightly-cramped place, with everyone playing a role that involves him centrally or peripherally. Everyone. Everyone has a motive and no person acts randomly. The maniac sees the world through prismatic eyes that warp reality into a grotesque passion play where everyone is laughing at him, plotting against him, victimizing him.

And so he plots back. His mind is consumed by those “out to get him.” The wheels turn constantly, the flames of hate and paranoia burning bright.

To my mind, such a person is imbued with more evil than a Hannibal Lector. Or perhaps it is an evil qualitatively different. Persistent. Viral.

Such a person is worthy of fiction.

But how to write of such a person?

Can such a person have a point of view in fiction?

Here I do not refer to the stereotypical villain, who is so obviously “evil” that there is no possibility for identification with the villain. There is no ambiguity, no nuance, no gray area at all.

That character has a place in fiction, surely, but it is not particularly satisfying to write about. Nor does a man or woman of substance care to dwell too long in this land of black and white, where choices are always clear-cut and the bad guy is always recognizable.

Think of the modern-day conception of the terrorist.

This villain is unambiguous. And surely most anyone can craft an obligatory scene of bomb-building accompanied by stilted discussion lifted from a religious book, with the occasional praise to the god of the villain’s choice.

I even wonder whether those who purport to write fiction about evil in its current stereotypical form – international terrorism – even understand the potential for evil in their own hearts. The evil of which many of us are capable, the beast within every human being that strives against the leash of civilization, of morality, of religious proscription – the beast that degrades what is decent, good, pure, and true.

It is comfortable to write of obvious evil. Unambiguous evil. I have done it myself.

It is easy.

It is expected.

And while it does serve a certain market and may well be accurate in depicting surface events, it does little to speak to the human condition and to the notion that barbarism is not something of which we are incapable. Perhaps we are all closer to barbarism than we care to admit.

To wit, a measure of a man is not how he treats strangers.

It is how he treats those closest to him. Those who live with him behind the façade that he portrays to the world.

Oh, certainly men abound who treat the hard-workers of the world with barbarity and contempt . . . outright contempt, or the contempt of denial of their existence. These people may, by contrast, treat their own families with love and attention, unaware of the discrepancy.

But there are other men.

These men who treat strangers with calculated grace and courtesy, because it is part of their professional façade, which is maintained as part of their commercial success. These men then treat their loved ones as they would beasts, as appurtenances, as objects in the household, with contempt, with foul language, with discourtesy. With betrayal. With abuse. With barbarity.

They may do it blithely and with an unnerving serenity unfathomable to others. They may genuflect often and exceedingly well. With piety and with solemn visage. While spreading poison, bitterness, misery, and . . . evil.

This is the banality of evil. Bitterness with a forced smile. Retribution for imagined wrongs, savagery done in service to a warped “morality.”

It is not a single act.

It is a way of life. An unexamined life.

A life self-justified and viral.

Like a whetstone that grinds others down, anyone unfortunate enough to be admitted to the circle of hell and forced to remain either by dint of blood or of law.

That is evil, friends. It is hidden. It is relentless.

How can one create and then enter the mind of a character such as this?

It is a mind alien to me. Even as I am able to understand the behavior in an intellectual sense, I am unable to understand the thought processes that lead to such calculated behavior. Is it obsession? Contempt? Jealousy? Illness?

Several months ago, I wrote of an encounter with a man similarly alien to me, and I was fascinated from a human behavior standpoint. He came from a different world, a brutal world in which he’d killed others without remorse. But his very alienness was my only interest in this person, if “interest” is what you may call it. I could not allow myself to enter this man’s world, even in my own mind, even for a few moments, for fear of its corrosive effect.

For this was another human being, surely, but one corrupted by all manner of dysfunctional environment. This was evil, unadulterated. Not posing. Not hiding. Was there redemption possible? I do not know.

When I try to enter this kind of mind, I immediately feel soiled. And I fear that cleansing might not be immediately at hand. And so I hesitate.

But here, now, I speak of another evil.

More insidious, I think, than the evil that goes by its own moniker is the evil that dare not speak its name. Evil posing as good. Evil with nuance. Evil striving mightily to extend its little pinkie, to find a place at the table amongst the unsuspecting, who thought the door was securely barred.

Point of View.

Perspective.

How much ambiguity, how much empathy is too much?

How can a writer get one’s mind around this abomination – and then how to convey it “non-judgmentally?”

How to portray the banality of evil in a cool, horrifically sterile, accurate, yet unsympathetic way?

Is ambiguity necessarily good?

I wrestle with this. And perhaps the task is more than I am capable of.

Perhaps this type of writing requires the immersion in the muck of humanity, a strapping-on of the racist’s steel-toed boots, a smearing on of psychic slime, the impassive wielding of a machine gun on a starlit night as helpless people stream by to board a cattle car, the hand gripping a coarse leather whip to lash a defenseless person’s back . . . or the utterance of the harshly foul word and delivery of the back of the hand to a trusting child helpless in the face of abusive adult authority.

Is that what it requires?

To see the world through these leaden eyes, to smell the charred flesh, to hear the screams behind closed doors, to feel my hand upon an innocent child’s face?

Heaven help us.

By
Richard Steinberg

With more on the topic by Janet Berliner on the 26th

“If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved,” George Santayana

I remember going to the podiatrist that morning. I remember the wait in the Emergency Room later that day. I remember wondering if I was going to die and discussing the details of my death with my friend the Entrepreneurial Schoolteacher. I remember worrying about a staff meeting scheduled to be held that night for the charitable organization I had founded; and giving him instructions about that too. I remember thinking of a storyline for a novel about patients dying in an emergency room.

Then nothing.

I know a day passed; that I interacted with some family and friends, saw a couple of doctors, had some tests run. I’m told that I watched some television. But I don’t remember any of that.

I remember being in Pre-Op. The look in my mother’s eyes that I’d seen before . . . this wasn’t our first time facing emergency surgery together. We’d both been on either side of the bed before. I remember seeing the doctor – a good-looking guy who seemed full of himself – and his telling me that he didn’t know how much of my leg he could save, but he’d try.

Try.

The word stayed with me as they took me into the operating room. It rang in my ears as they hooked me to their machines and talked among themselves as if I wasn’t there.

Try.

Try to save my foot, my leg?

My life?

And I couldn’t think of a sentence that used the word “try” that ended positively.

“I’ll try to get that done for you . . . but probably won’t.”

“I’ll try to fix that for you . . . but, hey . . . shit happens.”

“I’ll try to save you . . .”

Those words are from my forthcoming book: “The Next Step,” but are as valid here as there.

There’s been a lot of talk here recently – and sporadically throughout the last year – about the role of exercise and diet and good health in a writer’s life. Much of it valid, some of it farcical, some irrelevant to any real world I know of. And the assumption that has powered these essays amounts to this: If a writer is in bad health, his process must somehow be dysfunctional.

Bullshit.

I was talking about it with fellow contributor Janet Berliner, and asked her what she thought of the idea that going to a gym and doing isometrics was what writers had to do in order to “stay in shape” to write. Her answer:

Bullshit.

And so this two part essay; today by me, later this week from Janet. Call it A Primer On Pain. Call it The Disease’s Side Of The Story. Call it The Effect Of Physical Frailty On The Artist At Work.

Call it whatever the hell you want to.

But read it and leave yourself open enough to consider the role of a less than functional body on those artists for whom getting up in the morning is a far bigger triumph than winning an essay contest. Consider the strength required to type your byline when every keystroke sends a paroxysm through your body, but you type it and beyond it anyway. Consider that for some, for many, trips to the gym, jogging or power walking just aren’t possible; that they must live their lives in fleshy cages through which they fight like hell for the main thing in their lives that has meaning.

Their art.

We’re not asking for your pity, or even your understanding. The one is offensive and the other purposeless. But if you are to call yourself “writers” in any real sense of the word, we ask you to remember that being in “good” shape and maintaining such is an idealized concept.

And I and my friends whose physical existence is less than perfect live in the real world.

I’ve spoken in this venue of my difficulty learning how to write (or think) after my strokes many years ago. At the time, doctors said I would most likely remain in a fugue state for the rest of my life. Through personal hard work, through the resolve and belief of my mother, through God’s caress and life’s quirks, I’m not terribly fuguey today.

“Wow, what an incredible story of miracles on Earth! It’s almost a Lifetime movie.”

Hardly.

No gyms, no health food and clean living brought me back from the abyss. Hard work did. Refusing to give up did. Knowing that without my ability to commit wholly and completely to my work, my art, I was doomed to silent watching instead of active participation was what drove me. But there were impediments I had to find improvisational solutions to.

From that day to this (so many years later) I have a sensitivity to light, to contrasts. My brain no longer processes visual stimuli like yours does. It seems, at times, that the monitor is a tank in which the words are suspended in a gel. That I can reach in and grab a word and move it to another place with the gentlest touch. This isn’t a hallucination, but rather a wiring problem. I melted a neuron or warped a synapse so things look different to me. Writing in the daytime is extremely hard unless I am in a dark room. It all combines to make it very easy to get distracted, lose concentration, get a blinding headache from trying to process the typing. Easier still to lose the magic as I try to translate it from my heart to the page.

So I adjust.

Sometimes I work with white lettering against a blue background or red lettering with a black background as I am at this moment. I work, on average, at 165% magnification. I tend to work in Verdana or Trebuchet fonts because they’re easier for me to see and process. But before I submit my work, I must make sure that I convert it back to black letters on a white background, at 100% magnification in Times New Roman or whatever type is necessary to the project at hand.

The byproducts of the strokes impact how I perceive, therefore how I write.

As a child, I was an enthusiastic but untalented athlete. I broke nine of my ten fingers (individually) at least once each. My left little finger seven or eight times; maybe nine, I don’t remember. These juvenile misadventures now combine with another condition to cause extreme pain and often swelling in the joints of fingers. Typing can be a physically hideous experience. Typing slowly can be an intellectually hideous experience.

Constant pain, even on low levels, can be the most debilitating experience a body can experience. Constant pain medication cannot only ruin your stomach, but it can also cause heartburn, and the aforementioned fugue state I’ve been trying so hard to avoid these last years.

So I adjust.

I call it “catch and release.” I type for a few seconds, up to a minute, and then I stop for a bit. Maybe a sentence or two, maybe a paragraph or two at a time at most. Then, when the fingers come away from the keyboard, I read what I’ve written. This amounts to performing my first rewrite during the creation of the initial draft. It may lose some spontaneity, but it gains introspection and focus.

Pain, therefore, is my constant collaborator.

Again, this isn’t about sympathy. It’s about the stark reality that in a world where writers are pressured on character gender issues, character ethnic issues, even character age issues, we need to be cognizant of the greatest discriminator of them all:

Physical conditions that impair or enhance the content and soul of what we write.

I’m tired of hearing: “You know, when I put on a couple of extra pounds I just don’t feel comfortable sitting and working.”

I don’t care.

Try opening your eyes each morning trying to figure out if you’re still alive, whether you’ll have the strength to get out of bed that day. Try sitting and typing a novel, wholly on spec, while wondering if you’ll ever live to see it published.

Hit that Stairmaster, drop those pounds. But don’t tell me that going to the gym twice a week is going to solve that block you’ve just hit. If it works for you, great. But I promise you that sitting in that chair actually working to improve your writing, solve story problems; working to get better at your craft no matter how you feel physically is a much more valid solution.

Imagine yourself sitting at your desk, working happily away, on a good roll with good material . . . and a pain drives through your leg with such force that you can’t immediately identify it as a pain. It’s more of a sensation that grows in a matter of seconds into a paralytic urgency that makes all the lights grow bright beyond imagination, your heart pound in your ears. Your chair is on wheels on a hardwood floor and you wonder if it’s stable enough for you to push on it to stand up to force the pain away. And to your amazement, you do stand and “walk it off.”

Do you then go lie down a while, play with the puppies, take the rest of the day off?

Or do you then sit back down at the computer and return to work, PRAYING that you can recapture the moment?

When you take that leisurely walk through the spring foliage to clear your mind and “regain your center,” think of me. I’d appreciate it.

Because I’ll be back at my computer.

Working.

I’m not a masochist for embracing my pain and making it a part of who I am as a writer, anymore than some are hedonists for wanting to look and feel as good as they can.

I want to look and feel as good as I can.

We all want the act of working to be as physically unencumbered, unstressful, and emotionally pleasant as possible. And if going to the gym, taking that walk, or maintaining that diet does that for you . . . FANTASTIC!

Just don’t tell me that the statuses enumerated in the above paragraph are a necessary part of the writer’s life, in order to work to the highest standards.

That’s bullshit.

I am a damaged person. The damage is such – particularly physically, but to an extent psychologically and spiritually – that I will always be a damaged person. I could go to the gym, eat right, meditate, get counseling, never get angry, never judge, melt away the rough edges and probably become a healthier person in the process. I don’t deny that.

But I do reject it.

Because the pain is mine. The discomfort, the visual affects, the visible effects, the warping of reality caused by the betrayal of my body against its soul belongs to me.

To me alone.

And if it is part of who I am it must – in and of itself – be a part of what I write.

I am a damaged person. I don’t argue that all of you out there should become damaged as well. In fact, my prayer is that none of you ever experience what I have, what Janet has. What some others of our fellow contributors here at Storytellers, and others of our acquaintance have.

But do me a favor, will you?

Stop telling me that those five extra pounds are blowing your novel. Don’t remind me of the endorphin rush you get at the gym that is going to so benefit you at this difficult juncture of your book. And, please, if nothing else, don’t force me to read or hear your story in badly constructed, uninspired prose about the time you stopped writing because you were feeling “a bit claustrophic” and just had to get out.

I have seen Janet Berliner barely able to breathe, with every reason in the world to stop and spend the rest of the day in bed, knowing she would receive nothing but validation and approval for resting that day and subsequent days.

And I have seen her work through those hours of pure Hell, because she had tapped into the magic, and wasn’t about to let it go.

I know of times when Thomas Sullivan’s hands hurt him so much he could barely hunt and peck with one finger; when no one, NO ONE would have judged him lazy or slothful for stepping away from the work and hitting the blades or the skis.

And I have known Sully – who I think should be a national literary icon – to actually go blading or skiing in that condition . . . AFTER he has allowed the magic it’s head and formation upon the page; no matter the agony.

Personally, I have quite literally bled upon the page. Been in a mind numbing agony there are just no words for. Despaired of surviving the night, the moment, to see the work come to its fruition.

And I have worked through it, nonetheless.

Because I am a damaged person. But I will not allow distractions to prevent the translation of spirit and heart into words.

Go to the gym, eat right, meditate, go through therapy. Speak to me of the benefits of such things. I don’t deny them.

But if you do any of the above instead of writing, or as a “solution” to a writing problem, or because you think it’s going to improve the writing, do us ALL a favor:

Keep it to yourself.

Because, in your way, you are more damaged than I.

“Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive,” Josephine Hart

In a few days, Janet Berliner will continue this discussion; I’ve no doubt with greater tact, and smoother skills than I have. And I know she will do so while on oxygen and in pain. I wish she would work less and rest more. Even as I know she won’t.

Even as I understand completely.

Until then . . .

Believe!

by Jeff Mariotte

Like many writers—most, probably—I’m often asked for writing advice. Because virtually everyone who speaks the language can put a pen to paper or jab at some keys and write a reasonable English sentence (although often not two in a row), many, many people think they could be writers of one kind or another, if only they knew the secret tricks. I try to dissuade some, while encouraging the more promising.

The advice I give most often, because it seems most true to me, is basically this: write, write, write. When you’re not writing, read. Then write some more.

This has felt, anecdotally, like the best advice I could come up with. Writing, I believed, is an activity that uses a particular set of “muscles,” and as with pole vaulting or hammer throwing, exercising those muscles often improves one’s performance. Writing a lot and consistently has made me a better writer, and I can’t help but think it would work for others as well. I don’t think any amount of exercise can make a bad writer good or a good writer great, but most of us fall somewhere in between those extremes, and strive diligently to improve our skills, to “master” our craft (only to find that, having gotten better at one aspect of it, other faults become glaringly obvious).

But it was all a gut feeling, without anything other than my own perception of my own experience—close-up and no doubt far from unbiased—to back it up.

Until now.

Now a writer named Sharon Begley has written a book called Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. I haven’t read the book yet, although I hope to soon. But I read an excerpt from it in TIME, and from its descriptions of studies in neuroplasticity, it convinced me that my gut instinct was on the money.

In the excerpt, Begley talks about a Harvard study in which volunteers practiced a five-finger piano exercise, then took a test while a coil of wire sent magnetic impulses into their brains. This transcranial-magnetic-simulation test showed how much of their motor cortexes were used to control the finger movements they needed for the exercise. After just a week of practice, the bit of motor cortex used had literally spread, in Begley’s words, “over surrounding areas like dandelions on a suburban lawn.”

More significantly, the researcher running the experiment had another group of volunteers merely think about doing the piano exercise, without actually doing it, holding their hands still. Like the first test group, these people experienced expansion of the region of motor cortex that controls the fingers—even without using their fingers.

As Begley writes, “the discovery showed that mental training had the power to change the physical structure of the brain.”

There is, of course, much more to the article (and doubtless, to the book) than this. But just reading this much, combined with what I already believed about how writing begets better writing, caused an almost literal spark to ignite in my mind. The brain, Begley tells us, can be literally rewired simply through thought.

Tying this back into writing, the theory goes, by sitting and writing, one is exercising whatever region of the brain controls writing. Not just the movement of the fingers across the keyboard (although that is also something that gets better with practice, and is likely the result of motor cortex expansion of a particular sort). But mentally as well. What separates writing from typing is, after all, the mental activity underlying it. The use of the imagination, combining with what we know of stylistic standards, with inspiration about characters and plot points and turns of phrase, remembering seeds planted early in a story and bringing them to fruition later on (or remembering the flowers we “saw” in our mind’s eye and making sure to plant the seeds in the right place)…these are some of the things that our minds are up to, almost without our conscious participation, while we sit at that keyboard or with that notebook and write.

Doing all of these activities at once is not easy, and it’s a testament to the power and intricacy of the human mind that we can do them at all and not fall out of our chairs or choke on our own spit. (And I am not, lest you wonder, denying having either of those experiences while writing. But I’ve survived them.)

My experiential judgment that my writing improves by the doing of it leads me to believe that writing frequently and consistently—and just as important, thinking about writing, pondering plot twists and character arcs, visualizing scenes, the daydreaming in the shower or the car or tilted back in my desk chair with my hands locked behind my head—is physically rewiring my brain. I don’t know what parts of it are giving up ground—the part that does math, I’d guess, and maybe the part that remembers who gave me what for my birthday last year. But I don’t miss those parts as much as I’m appreciative that my skills continue to grow, that I haven’t hit a plateau as a writer, that maybe it’s not possible to do so unless some other, less helpful brain wiring mechanism kicks in and overrules the rewiring.

We’ve all read writers who start out good but then get better and better as they age. We’ve probably read others who get worse—but not as many, and there are very likely reasons for that deterioration—overuse of alcohol or drugs, laziness, creeping dementia, or others. For most of us, age brings experience, practice, maybe something resembling wisdom. And our brains have been fixing themselves to operate more efficiently at whatever it is we do most.

Does practice make perfect? Of course not—there’s no such thing as a perfect work of creativity. If there were, we might stop striving toward that goal. But does practice make better? Of course. Now we know at least part of the reason why.

(so what the hell do I do now?)

Justine Musk

1

Perhaps theme gets a bad rap.

Its twin, Theme with a capital T, deserves all the potshots and ridicule and dressing-down that it gets. But if Theme is the pretentious dude decked out in Gucci and Prada who wears sunglasses at night and brags about how many thousands of dollars he dropped at his VIP table at Hyde or Les Deux the other night — which was a worknight because only wage slave losers save their partying for the weekends – I live in LA, so you’ll have to excuse these kinds of analogies – then its sibling, theme, is the cute one in jeans and t-shirt, hanging out at your local pub, inviting you over for an engaging conversation.

2

Theme’s ego has been greatly inflated by all those English teachers who inflicted all those essay assignments through high school and maybe college, in which you learned to digest various lectures and Coles notes and serve it back in some lukewarm rearranged stuff that, if cast into proper essay structure, would get you an easy B. As in: b for Bullshit, or so you chuckled to yourself, having merely scanned the book involved (you rented the movie, so who needs to read?) which looked very Boring anyway.

So when you first try to write a piece of fiction, Theme has a habit of sauntering in, smoking Gauloises and readjusting its beret in the mirror (this was before Theme realized that a fedora is a much cooler choice of headgear). And Theme talks very loudly to you and throws around a lot of big words and you think, Okay, maybe this guy really is Deep and Profound. I don’t think so, but I’m a neophyte and what do I know? It’s not like I speak with a French accent or anything, like Theme does. (Of course, Theme himself grew up somewhere in Iowa, but you haven’t figured this out yet).

Thing is, you want to write something that’s fun and compelling, sure, but also layered in a way that resonates. You have something to say, dammit, even though you’re not really sure what that is.

So you take what Theme likes to prattle on about and try to force some kind of story out of it. You take it to your writing group and your group throws around words like ‘contrived’, ‘pretentious’, ‘boring’. Or maybe you submit it to a number of places and one or two years later you collect the rejection slips. By then, you’re fed up with Theme’s endless monologuing and the way he clings to you and invades your space because he doesn’t have any real friends. You’re not his real friend either, but that’s only because he’s a longwinded self-important prig. You order him out of your life. He starts haunting artsy cafes and lecture halls looking for someone new to buy into his schtick and make him feel sufficiently admired.

3

On top of all his other personality flaws, I suspect Theme suffers from an identity crisis. He doesn’t know what he is, exactly. His name gets thrown around so much that he suffers from overexposure, and – much like other phrases (‘self-indulgent’, ‘a powerful new voice’, etc.) – the word itself has been rendered kind of meaningless.

And the poor guy is confused by his relationships with other things, the same things he likes to peer down his nose at (premise), or dismiss as far too plebian to ever bother bothering with (plot).

Thing is, theme and premise and plot are like Siamese triplets who share too many organs to ever separate successfully. Because of that, definitions get messy. But for the purposes of this essay, I’ll take a whack.

4

A premise is a general sense of the milieu of the novel. It’s kind of like the storyworld in which the story takes place. In my novel UNINVITED, the final revisions of which I just handed in to my editor at 2 am and so the story is still painfully (painfully!) fresh in my mind, I would say the premise is the loose idea I started out with.

I wanted to write something about a teenage girl in a small town that somewhat resembles my own hometown. And she has this older, golden-boy brother whom she idolizes. But something triggers him to run away and stay away from home for over a year. One day he reappears. But he brings something menacing and dangerous back home with him, and the girl herself is somehow (and unknowingly) at the heart of it (both at whatever thing triggered his leavetaking in the first place, and the consequences that unfold upon his return).

If premise is your story’s storyworld, then plot is the road that leads the reader through it. Plot is the focused sentence or two that you can toss off to someone during an elevator ride between floor two and floor six (especially if it stops at three, four and five along the way). Although I know my premise going in, it takes me a lot of thinking and brainstorming and reflecting and writing (often an entire first draft) to figure out what my plot actually is. In the case of UNINVITED, it goes something like this: A troubled young woman mourns her beloved older brother, who disappeared from home after a car accident killed two of his friends but appears to have left him unharmed. He returns unexpectedly, and the girl must help him fight off a supernatural enemy who’s come to collect him, not realizing the extent of the bargain her brother has made with the bad guy, or how it involves her.

If plot is what you carve out of premise, then theme is what emerges naturally out of plot, kind of like Venus rising naked from the water. If Theme is something you try to hammer plot and premise into, the inner logic and organic growth of the story be damned (and some writers, don’t get me wrong, can actually pull this off, and with style), then theme is something low-key and relaxed, who gives a friendly wave at the beginning of your trip and whose relationship with you, the author, deepens over time and the work of several drafts.

Back to UNINVITED. You can look at the plot statements and a couple of things jump out of you. The brother-sister relationship at the core, siblings depending on each other to fight off some kind of mysterious menace (I named that menace Archie, by the way, in direct homage to Robert Cormier’s Archie in his books THE CHOCOLATE WAR and BEYOND THE CHOCOLATE WAR. The fact that Archie implies ‘archangel’ just made it much more perfect).

That, for me, was kind of the heart of the thing that I wanted to tell. UNINVITED is meant to be a fun, hopefully compelling, supernatural story that gives you a nice case of the creeps here and there, but running underneath is a kind of storyteller’s rumination on family vs. the abyss. In the last handful of years I’ve been either writing or attending to the details of creating my own family (or watching reality TV, but we shall not speak of such things), so it’s not surprising that I’d end up writing about family. I’m not interested in anything sentimental or saccharine (or the inverse of that, the look-beneath-the-surface-of-the-sunny-suburbs-and-find-dark-crawling-maggots kind of story, although I do enjoy those).

What I’d been thinking about has a lot more to do with how cold and difficult the world is, and not just because of the basic struggle of making a meaningful living, both physically and emotionally. But also for the vast temptation of its dangerous playgrounds, how you can get sucked into things and consumed, lose your soul (it’s no coincidence that the supernatural storyline runs parallel to, and intersects with, the protagonist’s experiments with a popular drug), how much we all need someone not just to watch our backs but help shield us from the cold and the wind.

So that, to me, was the ruling theme of the story. (Someone else might take something completely different from it, which is cool. That’s what stories are for.) Something about family vs. the abyss. Something about the balance between walking your own line and finding your own freedom while remaining connected to others in that way we need, in order to nurture and safeguard our souls.

5

Where I find theme really steps up, though, is in the end revisions (unlike Theme, who wants to run the whole show, usually loudly and obnoxiously, from the get-go).

Revising is awesome. The bloody, messy, difficult work of first-drafting is done. You know your story, your characters. The end is in sight. Instead of marking off your daily wordcount – 500 words, 800 words, 1500 words, yay, now I can go have a beer – especially those days when the writing comes hard and you have to push yourself along, you can lose yourself in the depths and nuances of this complete, pre-existing thing. By this time you’ve been living with the book for a while, so certain things are becoming clear to you. And clarity, as they say, is good.

If the early draft is all about getting the stuff from head to page, revising is about choosing what stays and what goes (and what needs rearranging or fleshing-out). What you’re supposedly ‘supposed’ to do is take each scene, each element of the book, ask yourself, “Does this advance the plot?” If it does, good, if it doesn’t, out it goes. (This is why it’s so important to figure out just exactly what that plot is in the first place. An obvious statement to make, yet any agent will tell you about all the well-written, engaging manuscripts they read that they’re nonetheless forced to reject, because, in the end, for everything it does right, the book just doesn’t hang together. It has a muddled, confused center. It lacks clarity, unity.)

The danger of abiding solely by this question is that you end up with a book that is too plot-driven, too stripped of color and nuance and life.

The simple fact is, characters cannot thrive by plot – or outline — alone. They have (or should have) lives that extend beyond the page. They have relationships with other characters, and they need to have conversations within those relationships that advance the plot, yes, but still create the illusion of full-bodied psyches and personalities at work, as well as an involvement (even if it’s a lack of involvement) in the world around them. They have personal histories. They are haunted by things. They’re living in an environment that goes on around them and impacts them even as they impact it. This is the kind of stuff that grows not just from whatever kind of outline you tend to use, but the actual novel-writing itself, and which the outline itself needs to fully incorporate and keep adjusting to as the writer moves along.

So how do you build on the bones of plot, how do you layer in meaning and substance and flair, without sandbagging the plot itself? How do you respect and use your outline without becoming a slave to it? How can you step away from it without losing sight of the road altogether?

Perhaps by realizing that theme is the thing nestled inside your plot, and by drawing it out more, you create a bigger story.

Perhaps by reaching a point in the process where, instead of asking, “How does this advance my story’s plot?” you start asking yourself, “How does this build on my story’s central theme?”

6

In the case of UNINVITED, by the time I hit the final draft I could recognize some of the push-pulls going on in the novel, the dueling forces and tensions of the narrative. If the book’s themes center on family and personal responsibility (one of the reasons why it’s more or less a ‘young adult’ novel), then the opposing forces have to do with the abyss (alienation, isolation, and the temptations that pull us in that direction), and also with notions of freedom and carelessness and recklessness, and the damage and consequence that can result. And if connecting with other people, having someone who gets your back while you get his, is what steers you away from the abyss, then I somehow wanted to weave that through the material also. So when I got the notes back from my editor, I was able to make decisions accordingly.

For example, my editor pointed out that one character’s motivation for helping out the other characters needed to be further explained and developed. So I invented a backstory in which the brother had helped out this character in the past, and the character felt obligated to return the favor. I had a lot of fun with the idea of the ‘abyss’, which, since this is a supernatural novel, gets to translate into literal terms, and also helped me understand the essential nature of my bad guy and how my protagonist could end up defeating him (and what she needs to discover in order to do so). If banding together helps the characters get strong, then longstanding baggage and fissures within their relationships make them vulnerable; the bad guy knows this and exploits those points of personal conflict to get closer to the thing that he wants.

Also, certain words reoccur throughout the narrative. The characters talk about ‘fixing’ things – whether it’s fixing a meal, fixing a problem, fixing each other. They talk, or argue, about living in the moment. And my young female protagonist is forced to redefine herself not just as younger sister to a protective, and often overshadowing, older brother, but as a soon-to-be older sister to unborn twin brothers, a relationship in which she will assume the protective, wiser, mentoring role her own brother takes with her. During one important plot point in the novel, she and her romantic interest (who need things to talk about and bond over in order to advance the subplot of their relationship) discuss stuff like this. The romantic interest conveniently (for the purposes of theme) has a younger brother of his own (who at one point is also endangered). Not to mention, my protag’s older brother’s psychology – what haunts him, what motivates him to make the decisions he makes that gets them into this mess in the first place – has to do with a backstory event in which he failed to look after his younger sister, and the guilt he’s carried ever since.

The danger of laying it all out like this is that it starts to sound a lot like Theme, and not theme, was at work here. Hopefully in my book this kind of stuff isn’t too obvious (and if it is, that’s a failing). Hopefully the reader will just skate along through the story, but when she closes the cover she’ll feel moved enough to recommend my book to a friend. Theme isn’t about a grand statement so much as one creative decision after another, one creative decision building on another.

In the end, what you find, hopefully, goes beyond a simple chainlink of action plus consequence plus another action plus another consequence. You end up with a story more thickly, deeply braided. Without theme to bring together the different strands, the story itself can get flat and one-dimensional – or messy, muddled, overlong, with a lot of extraneous and seemingly pointless material.

7

If premise is the world of your story, and plot is the road that guides you through it — weaves you over the mountains and through the desert and finally to the relief of the coast — then you might say that theme is the car you’re traveling in. It makes the people you pass take admiring notice, or look away in disgust or pity, or just shrug and get on with their day.

Needless to say, the kind of car you’re traveling in is totally up to you. Choosing is part of the fun of the ride.

And when you see Theme swaggering along the side of the road, thumb cocked with a lot more confidence than he’s actually feeling, you might want to speed up.

Or take pity on the guy. Pick him up. Buy him lunch.

You can always drop him off at the corner.

by Weston Ochse

Can too much success too soon hurt your career?

What happens when a publisher comes knocking and you don’t have anything to offer?

I never thought success would be a problem, then again, I never thought I’d succeed so fast and to such a degree. Let’s go back to 2000 and the World Horror Convention and let me set the scene. Not only was it the first convention that I’d spent more than a few hours at, and not only was this the first convention I’d gone to where I knew people, but this was the first convention I’d attended that I actually had something published.

I was stunned that everyone seemed to like Scary Rednecks so much. This was just a project David Whitman and I wanted to do to get our names out there. We never thought people would actually like it. I mean we did want them to like it, but we were happy for a roomful of polite applause, or even a year’s supply of Riceroni as a parting gift. But instead the most amazingly horrific thing happened…

I forget exactly where I was when it happened. It was Saturday night when Mike Oliveri and Brian Keene came up to me at a party and they said something like, “Dude, did Don D’Auria hook up with you?”

“No.”

“Man. You better find him. He really wants to talk to you.”

After checking to see that they weren’t messing with me, I bolted, ricocheting off party guests as I maneuvered my way through early evening revelers on my way down to the main floor. It turned out that Richard Laymon and Doug Clegg had talked me up to Don D’Auria saying how wonderful they thought Scary Rednecks was and how I was coming into my own and how Don really needed to sign me to Leisure.

Don agreed and began asking people where I was.

Now let me put this in perspective that I think most of us can understand. The idea that a publisher is seeking me out was perhaps the pinnacle of my dreams and as unattainable as Sophia Loren in her prime. Never did I even believe such a thing could happen and I found myself in a hyperventilative panic, trying to figure out what I was going to say while looking for Don in the debauchery we call a writer’s enclave.

When I finally found him, he was walking out the door to attend some super secret publishers meeting where I’m sure they have all the names of all the really good writers on the wall and throw darts at them to see which will be published next. Damn but I wanted to be on that wall. And now I had my chance.

“Mr. D’Auria,” I stuttered.

He turned and looked at me. At that moment I realized I was sweating, out of breath, slightly tipsy, with a muscle shirt, jeans and combat boots. I could see the fight or flight flutter going on in his eyes. For a second I thought I terrified him, and I swore he’d run.

But he stood his ground. “Yes?”

“I’m Weston Ochse,” I said. “I heard you were looking for me.”

He stared for what seemed like an epoch and with each stretching second, I knew that my boys had tricked me good. But then he smiled. “You’re the guy who wrote Scary Rednecks.”

At last! “Yessir. That’s me. Or I wrote part of it, David Whitman wrote the other part. We co-wrote it you see.” My mouth snapped shut as I realized I’d begun to babble. “Anywaaaay, I heard you were looking for me.”

So we found a few chairs and he invited me to sit. Then he asked me about myself and I told him the five minute version of my life story. Then he asked me about Scary Rednecks and I spoke at length about it, stressing how stunned I was that people had responded so well, especially Mr. Laymon and Mr. Clegg. I tried to act humble and proud at the same time, which is so hard to do as some of you know.

Then he asked me the question.

“What else do you have?”

Sidebar 1. Have you ever been in the middle of a conversation that you thought was going so well and the other person asks you a question that makes your heart stop, sweat to bead along your brow and your jaw drop? That was this type of question.

“What do you mean?”

“I publish novels. Do you have any novels completed?” he asked. “You come highly recommended and I’d love to take a look at what you have.”

Sidebar 2. Have you ever had a dream come true only to wish it would have waited for better timing? Here I have a real live publisher asking me if I have anything he can read. How many times does this happen? I know entire writing circles who’d slit their wrists and chant I Love Donald Trump’s Toupee just to have a chance at what I had happening to me. And there I was wishing for Christ that this publisher wasn’t asking me this question.

I think I hesitated too long, because he gave me a look. I focused on his question. Do you have any novels completed. Define completed. Hmm. Maybe I had a way out.

“Weston?”

“Yes, Mr. D’Auria. I have a novel called Scarecrow Gods that you might be interested in.”

His concern vanished as he smiled. “Tell me about it.”

And I did. I told him about the main characters. I told him about the theme. And then I stopped. I smiled broadly, hoping he’d be satisfied.

“What happens next?”

I thought a hundred ways to obfuscate, but I decided to come clean. “I’ve only just started,” I said, but hurried to add, “But I finished the outline,” which was a lie.

The light of interest died in his eyes. He stood, shook my hand and turned to go, but before he left he had one last thing to say. “Let me know when you have it done. I’d like to take a look at it.” Then he was out the door and into the night.

And I sat there. And I knew that I’d been granted something that hardly anyone is ever granted and I’d blown it. I’d peeked too early and had nothing left to show. I should have felt like I’d conquered the world, but I felt defeated instead.

So, I vowed then and there that I’d never feel that way again. The only way to guarantee that promise was to write, keep writing and then write some more. That was 2000. Since then Scarecrow Gods was finally finished, published by Delirium Books in 2005 and won the Bram Stoker for First Novel. In addition to a trunk load of short stories and articles, I’ve written six other novels and four screenplays since that conversation with Don. Some are being published and some are doing the agent-publisher dance. Some are languishing on my computer, waiting for that perfect time.

Recently I had a conversation with a publisher. Roy Robbins of Bad Moon Books was going to go from being strictly a bookseller to a book publisher and he asked me if I had anything that might interest him. He wanted a novella.

That grand night of UNsuccess with Don D’Auria had taught me more than anything and gave me an almost maniacal drive to write. So when Roy asked me, I remembered a novella I’d written for myself a year before, pitched it to him, he read it, then signed me to a four figure contract.

A private part of me knew that if I hadn’t been working all this time, I never would have come through and had a novella he’d want. The public part of me cheered the success. But all of me knew that I’d missed an amazing opportunity back in 2000 when a publisher had come knocking and I had nothing to give.

Never again.

Never ever agian.

So come knocking.

I’m ready.

I’ve been writing and have some things to show you.

–Deborah LeBlanc

Last week—-or was it the week before? Hell, I’ve lost track of so many days it’s ridiculous….I handed in a manuscript that was without a doubt the biggest piece of shit I’ve ever written. No, no, I’m not defaming the book to garner sympathy or pats on the shoulder along with, “I’m sure it’s fine, Deborah. All writers think their work is inferior from time to time.”

Inferior? Okay, if you consider gangrene inferior to a paper-cut, then I suppose you could be right. But I’m sticking with the ‘piece of shit’ leitmotif.

Now you’re probably wondering why the hell I’m bashing one of my own books. Well, I’ll tell ya. As a writer, I can damn near convince myself of anything when it comes to words I’ve put on a page. Hey, this looks pretty good. Hell, this is great! Not bad. Nah, better change that. The problem is when I’m finished with a book, I don’t look at those words as a writer…I look at them as a reader, and this reader is ready and willing to state in no uncertain terms…”The book you’ve just handed in, Deborah, is unequivocally….a piece of shit. Continuity in the st