Storytellersunplugged

Where Words Meet

Legion

By
Richard Steinberg

“I have no stories to tell but mine own. I am, however, so many characters that I fear it will take many works to tell it,” J.M. Barrie

Do places have a soul?

Is there – within brick and mortar, iron and steel – a divine spark that grants good or evil (whatever they are) and then judges that against unreasonable standards? Would a God with the intricacies of touch to create a perfectable man, deny that same right to man’s creations? Would he/she/it be that jealous of man’s abilities to surpass his maker’s gifts that he would blindly, angrily, turn away in drunken laughter at the idea?

Or, does anything we touch – any place we dwell, live, bleed, or exalt – take away a part of us. Endow itself with a speck of our holiness . . . therefore becoming holy unto itself?

There is a place – a former place – on the Gold Coast of Spain called: Los Acantilados de Arañas.

Locals swear that you only have to touch a piece of the three thousand year old rubble to feel the presence of its former occupants. That to stand on the sheer cliff overlooking the Mediterranean at twilight as the dust of its ages blows in the never pacified winds, is to taste the life that once suffered and died there.

On the Greek Island of Naxos, there are the ruins of Heliosmaleah – a preChristian school for warriors – where the ruins of marble columns are always frigid to the touch . . . despite the often sweltering temperatures. Where photographs of the wreck of the fledgling warriors’ barracks are frequently clouded by something that seems connected to the ground and the rubble walls, but otherwise indefinable.

In the north of England – where common sense is the dominant religion – no one walks through “the Bishop’s Glade;” for fear of tracking some of the dirt home, and then dreaming the dreams (or nightmares) of the Pagan worshippers of the site – despite all evidence of their constructs having being swallowed up by nature centuries ago.

In Japan, it is the sweeping stonewalls of The Inn of the White Chrysanthemum.

In Virginia . . . the bare foundations of Avernus House.

And if they are not all proof that man – like God – endues his creations with a living soul, then they are certainly credible arguments in its favor.

As I begin this, I have lived 17,779 days; not counting the twenty-three seconds I was dead (and I have the EKG tape to prove it) on day 10,770. And in that time, I have created very little. At least very little positive.

I have no children, have built no houses, have brought to existence little amity and much enmity. My first fifteen years were spent in privilege and the sloth that such privilege can bring. My next fifteen years were spent more or less lost, in pain, in hate, in confusion, misplaced like a child’s lost innocence and grace.

The third fifteen, ah . . . there I can say with honesty and rock solid belief, I created. Nineteen novels, over a hundred short stories, one decent play and three bad ones, screenplays, columns, essays, articles, and reviews.

Now, a couple of years into the fourth fifteen, I am at an age where I begin to look back at those creations and ask a basic question, one we must all confront either now or shortly after death:

Of my creations – be they literary or otherwise – was there any worth?

When I endued them with my spirit, did that cause them to rise blessed and help make the world a little better? Did I curse them inalterably with my hate and vitriol so that all that could come of them was noise and chaos? Did they have no effect or affect so that when I do die (for considerably longer than twenty-three seconds) it will be as if I wasn’t here at all; or worse: was I just the slightest whisper in the wind that was easily and completely ignored?

Did I give, will I give, my writing . . . soul?

In the end, I’m not a very smart man. I am intelligent, well-read, fairly well educated, and certainly good at what I do. But smart?

I look across a crowded room or lobby and see a woman there; can picture my entire life with her . . . even as I will most likely not cross to meet her and explore those possibilities.

I complain about my weight, my health, my very being, all the while knowing and acknowledging that with very little effort I could remedy all those problems . . . even as I then have another scoop of ice cream, put off the workout for another day, decide I don’t really need that doctor’s visit.

I look at the children of my friends, the lives of my friends – particularly the happily married ones – and shout out deep within myself: WHY NOT ME?! . . . even as I further isolate myself with my works and my words making them more important than anything else.

Like I said: in the end, I’m not a very smart man.

But I can say, with honesty and a brutal self-assessment, that I pulled off the trick of endowing many of the pieces I’ve written with soul.

Not with an identically cloned piece of mine, but with their own, unique, free to form and evolve . . . soul, one based on my own.

Were they accidents, I wonder? Just sticking to the nineteen completed novels, I think I only did it seven or maybe eight times. Certainly less than half. Were they random events that came about out of a mystical soup composed of time, tide, who I was at the time I wrote them, and the world I lived in then?

The Ringmaster once told me that I write my best when I am enraged. The Dapper One once offered that I am at my best (as a writer) when I confront my demons. They both have told me that when I turn my sight inward instead of out there, my writing can make the hair on the back of their neck stand up.

Her Gloriousness – now gone but always with me – once said out of the blue: “the thing about your writing is how much you care about it.”

And as I examine the eight with soul and the eleven without, I can see fairly clearly that all of the above applies to the eight, and not all of them apply to the eleven.

Does this then mean that you must be enraged, painfully self-examining, confronting your demons and care a lot about each work in order for it to have its own soul?

Well, to put it bluntly, yes; but not specifically those things. Those things are symptoms of a greater disease or perhaps a greater cure.

Soul is wrought from passion.

Before I continue, let me say one brief thing about soullessness. You can write without passion, without soul; although why you would want to is a mystery to me. You can also – more’s the pity – sell to a publisher a soulless create. And, sometimes, the public will not only buy a book without soul but will elevate it to mythic status in the process. A promise to The Ringmaster and The Dapper One precludes my giving you examples.

But this essay, and this website, does not exist for those who only want to write a best-seller, get laid in Hollywood on the set of the movie based on their book, between appearances on Oprah and Leno. If that’s what writing means to you, stop reading this and go back to your creative typing (as opposed to writing) because, frankly, you won’t get this next part.

Are we alone now?

My God, how alone we are.

We sit at our computers, at our typewriters or pads, and that’s all there is. What Fitzgerald called: “the great hole into which we must voluntarily plunge or be devoured . . . even when there is no difference between the two.”

Alone.

But in that moment, that very instant in which our passion breaks off from the ectoplasm that emanates (on the good days) from our darkest, most forbidden place, we are no longer alone. Because in that moment that we endow our work with a soul of its own, we are no longer alone.

We are Legion.

I would love to give you a 1,2,3 checklist on how to do this; how to amputate a bit of your own soul, put it in a literary Petri dish, cultivate it, incubate it, then graft it to your words. But it’s not a 1,2,3 process.

There’s a theory that once the Earth and the Moon were a single planet; and that following a cataclysm, a small chunk broke off, became trapped in the larger piece’s gravitational pull, and over the eons became our evening companion. And I think this theory also is the starting point for discovering the soul of writing.

Every character of significance you create (this doesn’t apply to the mailman on page 14, or the clerk on page 283) must have within them a speck of yourself. And after investing this piece of yourself in your characters, you must completely let go of that piece and let it develop as it may.

Another way of putting this can be seen in a Cornell Study of separated identical twins. While they will often have striking similarities in their lives, their absence from each other, growing up in significantly different environments, everything different about their world will make them different. So too, must your characters develop.

Don’t ask yourself what you would do in this situation or that. Ask yourself what you would do in this situation or that if you had the background, experiences, life, and emotions of the character in question. Again, it starts with you, but evolves with them.

But a living breathing, mystical soul does not live just in your characters. Does the theme of your work have meaning and import to you? Is some part of your soul caught up in the untangling and display of your story’s purpose?

Two men step off a commuter train. One is shot down by a man in a passing car, the other is unharmed. The police investigate, and with the help of the survivor bring to justice the shooter and the plot behind the shooting.

How many times have you seen variations of this?

But take the same events, give them emotional context, tonal color, disturbing or expressive dimension and the slightest bit of soul begins to come out. Bring out the consequences of the event – however trivial – the impact those bullets had not only on the bodies but on the lives, invest the same set-up with a bit of your soul, combine that with the characters generated from bits of your soul, and now a bare pulse can be detected.

There’s one more part to this, the hardest part, I think.

You must cut off yet one more piece of your soul and slowly incubate it into meaning.

Meaning.

Soul.

The final truth of writing with soul.

You can have characters that are real, endowed with humanity, monstrousness, blood in the veins and on the lips, soulful things which captivate and entertain – and we must never forget to entertain. You can then combine them with a theme born of depth and content and real purpose drawn from the gooiest part of your darkest recesses and still not see a whole, fully formed soul in your words.

And there is nothing quite so painful to see as a deformed, partial soul.

Meaning is everything. Meaning is healing. Meaning is chilling. Meaning is what turns soulled characters and soulful settings in PSYCHO from an interesting slash and splatter story to a terrifying stay at a motel; where you are no longer the reader or the viewer, but the person in the next room wondering what those strange thudding sounds are.

Meaning comes from your own soul, as well. Meaning is not: what do you like, but what moves you? Meaning is that part of your essence that compels you to this story and not another one. Meaning comes from the meaningful. Meaning comes from what moves you.

Meaning comes from so deep inside of you that it’s hard to recognize, harder still to isolate. But once placed with any amalgam of words that have been gifted with other parts of your soul, you will hear a low hum, see a slight glow, feel a coldness or a warmth (depending on the meaning) and will know that you have something real there!

And just as a technical tip: it is often the thing missing until the second or third rewrite.

“You’ve written a wonderful story powered by consistently interesting and terrific characters,” an editor once wrote to a friend of mine. “On this rewrite pass, let’s work on giving it all some meaning.”

Work on giving it soul.

So now you know how to do it, right? Simple.

Of course not. But what I hope you do know, what I hope I’ve passed on through this is, in fact, a 1,2,3 lesson.

1: Approach your work with real passion

2: Don’t be afraid to confront your own truths

3: Channel that passion and those truths directly to the heart of your words, then wait and listen closely.

And if you hear a heartbeat similar to, but not exactly, in rhythm with your own, then smile for a moment and take a bow . . . for just a moment. Because you did it. You created something with soul.

One last point in this already too lengthy piece. The soul is self healing and regenerative. You can cut and cut and cut some more. It’s okay. It’ll grow back. They’ll be some scar tissue, some noticeable changes, but that’s a good thing. For the next time you dissect your inner being, it’ll be different than the last time.

And different is always good.

“Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you,” Oscar Wilde quotes

But they can be given.

Share your soul with your work, with the world. It may hurt for a time. It may be embarrassing or difficult. But do it, and I promise you this:

In that moment – that blessed combination of pain, of gift, of realization – your readers will understand. And thank you for the sacrifice.

Believe!

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1. Mysterious Butterflies
2. I Shall Tell You A Great Secret
3. 30 Days, 50,000 words… How, and Why?
4. The Peace Of Wild Things
5. The Gonquin Table: The Medium Is The Massage

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