Storytellersunplugged

by Richard Steinberg

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t,” Mark Twain

The Duke Of Oy is not only the best writer I’ve ever read (no exaggeration) but is also great looking, charming, intelligent, funny, profound, and oft times the only friend I’ve had that always stuck around.  All women want him, all men want to be him; cute little birdies and magnificent rainbows escorted him in pacific glory along a path of ease and comfort and plenty; while flights of angels sing him to his rest.

A few years ago, he showed me something he’d recently written and asked me for my opinion.  It was poetry in prose; magnificent, evocative, stunningly transcending.  And wholly not a part of the overall project it belonged to. 

It was a jarring moment. What should I say to him?  He was a New York Times and international best-selling novelist.  He was published in 19 languages and 32 countries around the world.  A very recognizable, internationally famous actress once had sex with him because she’d liked one of his books so much! 

Maybe I was wrong; it was brilliantly executed, if wholly not germane to anything that came before or afterwards.  The prose and technique were first rate, even if there was no connection between this piece and the rest of the novel.  And everyone else who’d seen it had praised its glory to the Gods . . . even if they were uniformly hard pressed to say what it was about or how it made the overall book (which had struggled to maintain pace and pith to that point) better.  So, gritting my soul, I did that only thing I could do.

I killed him.

It wasn’t an easy thing to do.  Right up until he breathed his last, Duke proclaimed the quality of his words/work, that the world was wrong for its gradual abandonment of him and his gift.  That the literary universe which still proclaimed his greatness was jealous of him and therefore out to stop him.

As he struggled valiantly against his inevitable end – still writing the best, the finest lines in the land that fewer and fewer would ever see – I cradled his soul in my arms and drew him close.  A light kiss, a gentle brush of the clouds away from his eyes one last time, and then I choked the last of his life away.

A mercy, not a murder.

When R.C. Jones and I decided to tag-team on the subject of putting fact in your fiction, and why you must, on occasion, paint with colors of fiction your too stark facts, that killing came flooding back to me for the first time in years.  For, in his way, The Duke Of Oy is the perfect example of what we’re talking about.

A man as consumed by his talent as so many others are by their technique.

We hear the too common refrain all the time:  “If they don’t understand what I’m saying, that’s their problem, not mine!  My book, my vision, your fault!”

And the people who not only say this – loud and long – but breathe and believe it with all their heart, are absolutely right.  It’s the reader’s responsibility to understand the creative typist or amateur fictioneer.

But if that pithy quote-meister – as fellow Storyteller Stan Ridgley once referred to them in an ugly Georgetown restaurant with incredible food – has ambitions to be published as a Professional Writer (capitalized out of respect) then they are absolutely wrong.

As R.C. wrote on the 19th:  “Readers learn much from literature. It provides answers to many questions most readers might not even think to wonder about until it is brought to their attention by a story.”

It is the job of the professional writer to accurately communicate – with meaning and emotion – the message they have for their readers.  Some times, that message is simply: “have a good time while you read this.”  Sometimes it’s deeper and can be life affecting: “this is why I believe the theft of a child’s innocence and sense of personal well being is the greatest crime in the universe.”

But is the professional writer required to communicate that message only in a three dimensional universe well ordered by the rules we know so well?

No.

Two of the greatest stories I’ve ever read, go to great lengths to make this point.  The Voyage Of The Space Beagle by A. E. van Vogt and a substantially different piece:  Shall The Dust Praise Thee by Damon Knight stand as clarion calls to the professional writer.  They, as fine representatives of fantasy, horror, science fiction, and alternative reality stories, proclaim loudly and proudly:

“Let your mind run wild!  Free yourself from conventionalities!  Create worlds only you can fathom . . . then bring your readers inside and share that understanding with them.”

Rules.

Few of us like them, many of us rebel against them, but we all must concede one thing about them.  In all worlds at all times, there are rules.  While gravity might be the dominant rule of the world we live in, it might not even exist in the worlds we would create.

But unless your characters are simply floating aimlessly there must be rules, be order – even if that order makes no initial sense – so that your readers are able to put their feet down and observe/absorb your new world.

In The Voyage of the Space Beagle, van Vogt crafts a universe contained within a single ship of scientists out exploring the furthest reaches of the universe.  And every life they encounter – no matter how incomprehensible, threatening, or mystifying – has its own set of rules. 

Perhaps the creature that can easily move through walls, pass their “hand” through or into human bodies best represents this.  It is a being of pure creative fantasy, whose horror comes from our coming to understand its universe; the rules that govern its behavior and actions with the same dark dispassion that gravity does so much of ours.

It is in that created fantasy of an alternative reality within which van Vogt suspends our rules, then adheres to his new rule-set carefully and fully.

“To suspend all rules is not liberation but imprisonment.  Where there are no rules, how can one be free,” Algernon Blackwood

Which brings us to Shall the Dust Praise Thee?

Obviously, when you make God the central physical and emotional character of a story, all rules and bets are off.  There is nothing the Deity can not do (by generally accepted agreement) and therefore it would appear at first blush that you can do, say, or depict anything you want in any way you want.

But, again, this is the dividing line between the creative typist/amateur writer and the professional.  For it lies with the professional to know that their readers MUST be able to understand the actions of their lead and propelling character.  

Even when that character is a being well removed from true understanding.

Perhaps especially then.

In the story, after considering the problem for millennia, God has reached the conclusion – and who can blame him/her/it – that mankind cannot be saved.  It’s reap-the-whirlwind time boys and girls!  Apocalypse Now without the benefit of retakes.

But when God arrives on the planet to carry out this urban renewal program, he discovers a desolate, destroyed world.  God didn’t do it, but someone did.  Who?  How?  Why?

Eventually God finds these answers and is stunned.  But what stuns the Divinity even more is a sign, a figurative message in a bottle addressed directly to God.

“We were here. Where were You?”

I neither endorse nor reject Damon Knight’s vision, nor do I ask you to . . . without reading and considering it.  I present it only for the significantly less than cosmic purpose of illustrating a point.

In fiction, even God has to play by the rules.  The author’s rules.  Rules that must make sense, however nonsensically they are applied or however ridiculous they might seem.

“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman was as dystopian and fantastical as its creator, Harlan Ellison.  But the message of this remarkable novella – that I am never sure whether or not I like – is one that is crafted around a set of rules.

Even if rebellion against those rules is the point.

Which brings us back to the killing – my killing, to be honest – of The Duke of Oy.

When he was me, those qualities that made him/us a notable writer were talent and imagination.  They were also the qualities that led to his/our professional downfall.  Because talent combined with imagination is nothing more than limitless nothingness.  A thing you might sense or remember having once sensed, but can’t recall the specifics or the reason you’re even recalling it now.

But talent combined with imagination – strengthened by purpose and structure – can topple, then rebuild, universes.

As for Duke, well . . . he’s gone but with me always.  Which I suppose means that he had some structure and purpose after all.

Hmm . . .

Imagine that?

Believe!