I was beaten to it again, today. Here is a list of prompts by another BCer.
If you read this set and "love them" or read it and go "Duh!", if this set is very different (positively or negatively) from the other sets that have been posted, ask WHY.
I think the answer is an important one.
Some sets of prompts just energise, lift, expand, inspire, tease, make the head fiunny; others are just words. Yet they are all posted by writers with serious writing ability, good brains. SO WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE?
What is qualitatively different between a good set of prompts (good for you, ie they connect to YOUR insides) and a set that someone else loves but leaves you dead from the neck up?
This takes us back to Dorothea Brande's observations about "connection" and psychological relevance.
ANYWAY, HERE THEY ARE..
Prompts
A Child Called Thursday
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk
Jewish Mother Syndrome
Moving Home
Hearts at peace, under an English heaven
The Hammers
Matilda told such Dreadful Lies
Carrying the Can
Cherry pits and peach kernels
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees
A certain shade of green
Little Selves
Ready to die, but not sick enough
What's black and hairy and goes up and down?
Young matador gored
Toto to fix buttock-scorching bidets
Calling a Spade a Spade
Thursday, 19 April 2007
Wednesday, 18 April 2007
John Dee & Jack Carmen
The tragedy in Virginia is just that, a tragedy, a terrible waste of young lives (and I include the shooter).
It has nothing to do with iraq (though many sites would like to play the death-numbers significance game), and though I may have my own opinions on the matter, I think it's inappropriate for smug Brits to talk about the American "love affair with the gun".
Many years ago, when the awful tragedy occurred at Columbine, many of the poets and writers at "Cafe-Blue" on line talked about creating "Poets Against Guns" and such like.
I began asking how many of the members owned hand-guns, how many had ever used them in their own defence, how many had been burgled or mugged despite owning a gun and how many knew of friends, neighbours, family who had been injured or killed in gun accidents.
The summary was that all these gun owners would be safer if they gave up their guns, but it would take a movement, and perhaps a leader, to make it happen. of course it didn't happen.
I wrote this story based on the idea. It was shortlisted at Fish, then appeared in The New Writer and at Archipelago
Understand I believe that if Americans want to carry guns they should.
My point is that those same guns don't make them safer.
JOHN DEE & JACK CARMEN
John Dee sleeps now, naked, in a white room. In the morning, he will rise, dress and take up his chair. They will take down the front wall of his room and he will sit so he can look out at the Capitol.
When this all took off, one of the things John Dee asked for was this view of the White House. Then, when the guns started piling up, he said, "Please, can we take down the railings?" but they said they couldn't. Instead, they said, they would build his white room higher, lift him up so he could see the growing pile, and behind it all, the pure white building. To meet John Dee now, you walk up fifty white wooden steps and the whole thing creaks.
John Dee sits in front of the White House. The Washington Post says he's a bigger target than the President, but, unlike the president, he is unprotected. Anyone can come, that's the deal, John Dee said, no exceptions; and he has made them agree, no searching, nothing, and no armed guards. If someone decides he's John Dee's killer, it's OK, he told them, really, it's OK.
As John Dee sleeps, I wait, writing in the book. I'm dressed in simple stuff; grey sweatshirt, grey pants, grey socks, just the way John will dress when he rises. John Dee knows I think I saw into his soul once but he tells me every day, "No, Jack, I am an ordinary American, that's the point. That's why we wear grey, why we do things simply."
I understand this and I know it's why we don't allow cameras on the ever-growing trestles under the chair where John spends the day. And I know why John resists the calls for him to speak on television, why he refuses to talk to the NRA or the lobbies against private guns. He says all we have to do is be examples. He says all we have to do is be prepared to die.
Before this started, John Dee lived in Binghamton, NY. He had a business there refurbing office furniture, using druggy ex-prisoners as help, jittery types, fly-triggers. So when he announced he was giving up guns, and putting a sign outside his house to say it was gun-free, the TV people came round. That was the first time John said, "It's OK, America, if you need to, come kill me." Within a week his wife had left him and gone to L.A.
I have the footage of that interview. I watch it a lot. Dee says "America, if you need to, come kill me," and this reporter guy, he tries to snigger to camera, like you might when some kook says he's Jesus Christ.
"No, really," John Dee says, and he goes inside, comes out with a chair and sits down. He smiles at the reporter. Then he says, "Maybe you could set up cameras, get yourself a scoop?"
When you look at the video you just know that John Dee is real. It's the quiet way he speaks, the utter calm in his face. Looking from here, it's as if he knew that if someone just stopped and started swimming the other way, all this was bound to happen.
The reporter eventually went away. I guess footage of a man sitting on a chair in his yard wasn't considered great television then. John Dee just sat there until it got cold, then went inside.
In the morning, when John Dee came out, a man was there with a gun. John Dee smiled and sat down in his chair. He asked the man had he seen the sign, didn't he know John Dee would have nothing to do with guns? The man said he knew that. He said Dee was one dumb mother-fucker and the NRA was already taking bets on whether he'd live a week.
"And will I?" John Dee said.
There isn't film, but I know from John Dee what happened then. This guy lifted his arm and John Dee was looking the wrong way at a piece. Maybe he was scared, but he smiled and told the man it was OK. The man was there for America, wasn't he? And John Dee had already told America that it could kill him if it needed to.
The man was skinny, jumpy. It turned out he had a history of mental stuff and shouldn't have been able to get a gun. He jerked down the path to John Dee, stuck the gun to Dee's temple and twitched, "You-You dumb. You dumb!"
This guy shook, locked, shook, the gun still pointing, but John Dee stayed perfectly still, accepting, passive, until the man stopped shaking, then like in some slow ballet, like some bird-dance unfolding at a frame a second, Dee moved his head, the man moved his, they looked at each other, and then the man gave up his gun. John Dee put it on the floor.
That was how it started, a skinny would-be killer with the shakes and John Dee who told him it was OK, really, it was OK. That afternoon an old man brought his .22 to the yard. He told John Dee that if he ever used it, he'd miss anyway, so he put it down by John Dee's chair. Then a black woman brought a gun she had stolen from her son's room. "Bless you," she said, "I hope you don't get hurt too bad," then a squad car came and John Dee was taken in. Then they let him go, and he went back to his yard.
The next morning a small pile of guns was laid at John Dee's gate and the police came again and took them away. A crowd had gathered and the reporter was back. Then the police told John Dee he was attracting the wrong types and that if he was to continue his sit-out, he should do it in a prescribed place.
That afternoon, someone drove by - some say it was kids, three black, one white, some say it was a car sent by one of the gangs - and they sprayed John Dee's yard with bullets. The camera shows John Dee flinching at the first bang but then he begins to smile. The camera shakes, wobbles, and falls away, like a Vietnam newsreel but then it comes back up. It shows broken windows, and a little of John Dee's chair which is splintered. Dee is still smiling. Then someone in the slowly recovering crowd shouts, "Hallelujah!" and tosses a small white hand-gun into the yard. There is applause.
The camera pans the crowd and then goes back to John Dee. A smidgen of blood is on the back of both his hands and from nowhere, a medic appears, but John Dee waves him away politely. The medic is all-American, tall, blond, no more than twenty-five. He looks at John Dee's face, lit by the low afternoon sun, pauses, then shakes his head and turns away. But as he leaves the yard he turns again, looks at John Dee and raises his white arm in a quiet salute. A helicopter chatters overhead.
The next day there were more guns, and the next more again, but then two policemen were left outside the yard, a squad car opposite. The guns almost stopped coming and John Dee spoke to the cameras. "Please, ask the police to leave me alone, to take away their protection. I've already said, America, it's OK, come to me."
But the police insisted. There were legal and illegal guns being dumped in a Binghamton yard, available to anyone, criminals, a passing child. If John Dee continued to sit in his yard, they would continue to be present.
The press and TV loved it, of course. An American couldn't sit in his own yard without armed guards, even when he asked not to be guarded? It was a media dream, perfect for the lawyers, and a ready-made career for kooks, crazies, copy-cat martyrs, and me.
I went outside into my yard the same day John Dee shook his head, gave up, got off his chair and went inside. I heard that day over a hundred JD-Sit-Outs began to add to the two dozen that had started earlier that week. I knew most of them were nothings, like I said, kooks, crazies, copy-cat martyrs, but I was serious. I knew it right at the start, the way a guy sometimes knows a thing way-down deep, but I didn't know why.
I guess, looking back, it was a sixth-sense or something, but when the Time-Life video came out, (this was later), it had one close up of John Dee's eyes, a zoom shot which just sailed in on his face, right at the moment he was saying, "It's OK, really. America, if you need to, come kill me." There was a light there, something so real and deep and definite in the way John Dee had decided to do what was right, that his soul shone out, straight at me.
The next day, I threw my guns in my trunk and drove towards Binghamton, but I was still half-a-day from there, four or five hours from the organised line that had grown up, the stalls and T-shirt vendors, when I heard John Dee had gone back inside.
I pulled off the road, into the dust and weeds at the side of the highway. Ahead I saw three cars do just the same, as if every one of the drivers had just heard what I'd heard and like me, they couldn't go on. I knew right then that I would sit outside, in my own yard, with my own sign, and if needs be I would out-sit the police if they came; that I would wait for the man with the gun who would come for me.
You know this is a looking-back because of who I am now, what I was brought to do, but right then, I confess my emotions were not of such a fine spirit as John Dee's. I had wanted him to win and when I saw he had lost, I set my mind to follow in his honour, to do what they wouldn't let him do. But unlike John Dee, I wanted someone to come to me who wouldn't lay down his gun; someone who would take away my despair.
My sit-out made the local news when I started, made the local-TV when I was shot, got a mention in the New York Times when I came out of hospital and set to sitting outside in my yard again. Then I was forgotten, and I guess so was John Dee, and we were locked away in the small minds of America with all the other crazy things that make us, Stealth Bombers, Oklahoma City, Charles Manson, Silence of the Lambs on Widescreen.
But then it was a year and two months since I'd first gone out in my yard and a year to the moment since I'd been shot. Maybe news was quiet or maybe some reporter really wanted to know where I was coming from, but I found myself talking to a camera, a bit jaded and out of it, my talking skills not as sharp as they were before I first heard of John Dee.
I knew that if the Lord wanted it so, here was a chance of sorts. I didn't have the light shining from my soul like John Dee, nor did I have that soft, sure drawl of his, but I knew that I had to try my hardest not to let these TV people make a fool of me, and more so, not let them make a fool of John Dee's memory. I remembered that the day I was in my car going to John Dee, so were lots of other guys, women too, driving in their pick-ups or whatever, and that every gun dropped in John Dee's yard was a statement, and every one was one less to kill with. I was trying hard to remember that saying about lighting a candle rather than just complaining about how dark it had gotten.
So I just sat there and listened to this smooth, white-teethed woman from TV, one minute sympathetic, then talking with that edgy whine a woman takes up when she wants to put you down, then speaking with authority, and not too kindly, about me and John Dee. She finished and the bright lights went out. That was when I got up from my chair.
I went to the camera. I asked was it on and right then the woman reporter swept back into view, flicking her hair back, her eyes wide, her face refixing itself. She had a microphone and was circling her hand. Technical guys were slapping open cases, spilling cups of coffee and frantically pushing plugs.
"And we are here," the woman began, sort of breathy, excited, "with Jack Carmen in his yard, one year to the day from his near-fatal shooting. And Jack still says, no guns, he will sit in his yard, the only free man in America."
"I never said that," I said, leaning down to the microphone. Then I knew it didn't matter what I said if they wanted to twist stuff around. I forgot the woman and her microphone, I just looked at the crouching guy with his camera and stared down into its ugly glass mouth.
"I'm here," I said, "only because you wouldn't let John Dee lead us out of slavery to freedom," but no sooner had this come out and I was thinking, "Oh, sweet Jesus, let me say something that's my own and from the heart."
Then I just said, looking at the lens, "I'm tired, John Dee, and I'm not so much scared as I'm lonely. I been here a year, and they've brought me three-hundred, seventeen guns. Now I'm lucky to get one a week, but I still get them, John. They haven't stopped coming."
I knew the TV wanted more, but I was learning that sometimes a man can be his own testament. I sat down, and even though the reporter woman tried, I didn't speak again. I simply smiled, not like John Dee, you understand, but the best one ordinary man can. Eventually, as I knew they would, they went away.
The next day a boy dropped me a pistol, then a woman came and crouched by me and whispered I was brave. She said if I was going to continue could she bring me something now and again, a blanket, food maybe? I don't know why, but I said, "Bring flowers." She nodded, then she touched my hand and left me.
John Dee turned up three days later. There was a short line of people bringing guns and he joined it, so grey and small I didn't see him stand there. When he came to me - after a woman who found her little girl with her pearl-handled .22 - he just stood.
I had got into some habit of not lifting my head and this person just waited, knowing I would have to look up, and when I did I was looking at John Dee. I guess I was about to get up out of my chair but John Dee stopped me and waved me to sit, then he squatted down and said would it be all right if he just shared my day?
The next person in the line was a kid maybe eighteen, with a square jaw and built like a line-back, so I called him forward, trying to look regal or profound or something. I knew people seemed to need that. He was a sweet kid, softer in the eyes than any part of his body. He just wanted to say thank-you, he said. He didn't have a gun, but now he knew he'd never need one.
I'd been taking to sitting in the evenings under the porch light waiting in case just one more person would come along, but when the line ended, John Dee said, "Jack, it's cold, let's go inside." I looked into the street and when I was sure it was empty, I said OK.
What we talked about that evening, what got me here, well, those things are a bit private, but John Dee told me about the Peace Foundation and how he had been invited by the President to set up his chair in front of the Capitol. He wanted me there with him, he said. John Dee said he had given up, but I had given him the inspiration to start again. He asked me to be his witness.
***
The surrender lines are amazing. By sun-up they stretch out of sight along Pennsylvania Avenue and a small world of commerce shadows them, selling hot-dogs and T-shirts. Once there was a service selling guns so folks would have one to give up, but that went. The people just want to meet John.
It's strange how people see us now. There are still kooks and cases, of course, there used to be many, and even now, every fiftieth guy who comes up the steps is dressed in fatigues and practising his thousand-yard stare, but even the crazies and world-enders are somehow quieted.
The old guys are interesting. Sometimes they tell John how once they used their gun. Maybe they caught a burglar or someone tried to take their car and being armed saved their day. But always, when it happens they seem relieved to be giving up their weapons. They walk away less laden. They breathe a deep breath, and sometimes John Dee will put his arm around them and together they'll look at the pistols and rifles on the White House lawn, the ones at the bottom already rusting, eager to become dirt again.
And John Dee says what he always says, "Be proud, be brave, thank-you," and these old men, many who fought for their country, they cry because they've finally discovered what courage really is, and they cry because they see the glorious, obscene pile of death trying to hide the White House. Sometimes they look like a spirit has left them and I think they may crumple, but most times it's like a new one has entered and they stand taller, more American. But all of them want to stay and look again at the mountain, and behind it, the white, white buildings.
*
Now John Dee is awake. For breakfast he has coffee, orange juice and a bowl of Cheerios. He dresses in his soft grey clothes, stretches, then comes to talk to me. He always says the same thing. "Today it's supposed to happen, Jack, and if it does, please let it. I'm just one ordinary American" Like always he sweeps a hand towards the pile, now more than ten million weapons, a few per cent of the nation's deep hurt. "All that matters is they keep coming. What matters is someone sits here."
It's gotten so sometimes we joke and we say John Dee's breakfast prayer together. Maybe I'll grin or punch John Dee's grey shoulder. He's older now, much, much older, yet we've only been here two years. It's a long haul, he says, and he knows he won't see it through, but then he grins and he reminds me of the city gun-collections, the clean schools, the gang-member from Watts who drove a truck full of guns into a lake and stayed with it as it sank, the cancer being sucked out of our country with nothing but kisses.
We start at five minutes past seven in the morning, as soon as the front wall comes down. The workmen melt away and John confirms he can see no policemen, no soldiers, that the man who will kill him today is free to do so.
We know that National Guardsmen and marines are protecting the rusting pile, but they are hidden behind boarding that is covered in peace-graffiti and flowers. We know that out of sight are patrol cars and mounted policemen, and we know far distant, in the sad ghettos of Washington they still kill each other, still stumble into gunfights on street-corners or blunder from a 7-11 into cross-fires. But that is now, John Dee says, and if we are patient...
Today, the first up the steps is a young man. He looks like the blond medic who tried to treat John Dee. He is shy, gentle, and I wonder if he's gay. Then he tells John Dee that when he was twenty-two he shot his lover in an alley, and he nods to me as if he knows I'd guessed.
But now he has forsaken the gun, he says, and he drops a pistol on to the floor. Then he waits, looks for John Dee to nod, takes out a silver derringer and drops that too. He turns and stands above the crowd and throws his ammunition into the sky. This has become a tradition and every afternoon workmen arrive to begin sweeping up from underneath the trestle. Then the young man - his name is Peter - signs the book where I sit, turns to look out over Washington, and like so many, he breathes deep as if the air is full of Thanksgiving.
We have a rule that only one person comes up the steps at a time. The tower has grown and John Dee fears its height has made it progressively weaker. A steward waits at the front of the line, and lets out the next man, just as Peter is stepping down. The two men pass, and something in the electricity between them makes me think that a killer is climbing the stairs. The knowledge is not fear-bringing; I am only frightened I may not be able to allow John Dee to die - that I will betray him.
I will discover the man is called Christos. I watch as he reaches the top of the trestle and I step forward to shake his hand. He is dark, about fifty, perhaps Turkish or Albanian, and his neck is tight. His eyes are slightly too large, faintly yellow, and I think they bulge. "I have guns," he says.
The beginning of what happens next, I have seen many, many times before. When the Washington Sit-Out began we would get a crazy a day, then maybe one every other day, two a week, then almost none. We know the world hasn't yet pulled back from wildness, so we presume that some aura now surrounds John, myself, the trestle, and the growing pile of guns.
Christos reveals his gun - it will turn out to be an illegally-owned .38 - and flourishes it with an air of superiority as if his very owning and drawing it is supposed to surprise us.
"I am America!" Christos says, with an accent so strong it takes me a second to back-track and work out what he has said. "I am America and today I take you up on your free offer. I kill you." There's spittle around his mouth and he shakes, almost as if he's stifling a giggle.
John Dee has been here before. "It's OK," he says. "If you need to, it's OK."
"See, I kill you." Christos says.
"Yes," John Dee says. "I believe you. I don't want to die. I'd like to be an old man. I would like to live in Florida, play checkers and complain about the heat. But it's OK, really it's OK."
"See, I kill you." Christos says, and I know then that this one will not be paralysed by the forgiveness in John Dee, will not look like a bemused puppy and begin to waver.
"John Dee, " I say, "this is - "
I hear John take a long deep breath. "It's OK, Jack."
"See, I kill you." Christos says.
"Would you like a juice?" John Dee asks in his gentle, curious voice. "We have water, if you would prefer it, or Jack can make you coffee. Everyone who climbs these steps is a friend."
"See, I kill you," Christos says.
John nods his head. "Yes, I understand you. I promise you, it's OK. Jack will not interfere, will you Jack? You'll be a good boy, yes?"
I stand up, to relieve tension. I tell Christos I am an observer, a recorder.
"An', I kill you, too!" Christos says.
I nod, whatever.
Christos drinks some orange juice, then he asks John Dee to stand and they walk to the front of the white room to where the steps lead down the trestle, where by looking out they can both see the rusting guns and the White House below them. Christos raises the gun and I realise that John Dee is so relaxed he has his hands behind his back, one finger of one hand clasped in the palm of the other. I'm behind them but I can only see that Vietnam War moment where a Viet Cong soldier was executed in Saigon.
"John," I say softly, "they'll think your hands are tied."
"Thank-you, Jack," John Dee says, and he lets his hands drop to his side. Below, the crowd murmur stops. Somehow they seem to know that this gunman is committed, that John Dee's day has finally come.
These minutes are so charged, so slow and I know they are final. I want to say something, to honour my friend, but then, as I am about to speak, the air about me changes and Christos crumples. There is a hole in his face from a marksman's bullet. I have heard no sound.
The pain. I know immediately this is a betrayal, that we have never been unprotected, that whoever has arranged for a hidden sniper to protect us, still doesn't understand, that the whole point is not to save John Dee.
We have been betrayed, and the crowd, the long line of Americans is betrayed. But worse, I know they will think they are betrayed by John Dee, and by me, his witness. It's over. I know it, and as if to emphasise this, I see someone break from the line, wave his gun and begin to walk away.
Then John Dee calls out, "Wait!" his voice huge and filling, and only then do I realise that the world below us is almost silent.
The man pauses, and John Dee picks up his murderer's gun and holds it high. I see the man's body change, then his focus turn to John Dee who is speaking, not to the crowd, for they are too far away, but for the record.
"I told America, come kill me if you must. This was my pact. This is why Americans are prepared to take their own small risk, to be courageous enough to forsake the weaponry which enslaves us."
He points the gun at himself. "John Dee did not betray you." he says. He puts the gun under his chin and pulls the trigger.
I don't know how long I am still, but then I go to the open space, look down, and wait. I wait because what I have to do now is painful. I wait, for though I know I can summon the small courage to take John Dee's place I don't yet know if I can do what he has made me promise to do.
I look again at the rising day. The White House gleams in fresh sunlight and before it, squalid metal settles into the earth. The crowd, Washington, America, looks up to me.
I am crying. I pick up John Dee's body. His scalp is sticky with his blood but his face is undamaged. I kiss him and hold him, but then, with the air going from me, I throw him away, off the edge of the steps, and down, onto the grass where Peter's bullets lay. I look to the crowd. I look out at America. I look at the White House.
I take a deep breath, one last look at John Dee's body, then down at the Stewards.
"Next!" I say, and take my seat.
4,715 words
It has nothing to do with iraq (though many sites would like to play the death-numbers significance game), and though I may have my own opinions on the matter, I think it's inappropriate for smug Brits to talk about the American "love affair with the gun".
Many years ago, when the awful tragedy occurred at Columbine, many of the poets and writers at "Cafe-Blue" on line talked about creating "Poets Against Guns" and such like.
I began asking how many of the members owned hand-guns, how many had ever used them in their own defence, how many had been burgled or mugged despite owning a gun and how many knew of friends, neighbours, family who had been injured or killed in gun accidents.
The summary was that all these gun owners would be safer if they gave up their guns, but it would take a movement, and perhaps a leader, to make it happen. of course it didn't happen.
I wrote this story based on the idea. It was shortlisted at Fish, then appeared in The New Writer and at Archipelago
Understand I believe that if Americans want to carry guns they should.
My point is that those same guns don't make them safer.
JOHN DEE & JACK CARMEN
John Dee sleeps now, naked, in a white room. In the morning, he will rise, dress and take up his chair. They will take down the front wall of his room and he will sit so he can look out at the Capitol.
When this all took off, one of the things John Dee asked for was this view of the White House. Then, when the guns started piling up, he said, "Please, can we take down the railings?" but they said they couldn't. Instead, they said, they would build his white room higher, lift him up so he could see the growing pile, and behind it all, the pure white building. To meet John Dee now, you walk up fifty white wooden steps and the whole thing creaks.
John Dee sits in front of the White House. The Washington Post says he's a bigger target than the President, but, unlike the president, he is unprotected. Anyone can come, that's the deal, John Dee said, no exceptions; and he has made them agree, no searching, nothing, and no armed guards. If someone decides he's John Dee's killer, it's OK, he told them, really, it's OK.
As John Dee sleeps, I wait, writing in the book. I'm dressed in simple stuff; grey sweatshirt, grey pants, grey socks, just the way John will dress when he rises. John Dee knows I think I saw into his soul once but he tells me every day, "No, Jack, I am an ordinary American, that's the point. That's why we wear grey, why we do things simply."
I understand this and I know it's why we don't allow cameras on the ever-growing trestles under the chair where John spends the day. And I know why John resists the calls for him to speak on television, why he refuses to talk to the NRA or the lobbies against private guns. He says all we have to do is be examples. He says all we have to do is be prepared to die.
Before this started, John Dee lived in Binghamton, NY. He had a business there refurbing office furniture, using druggy ex-prisoners as help, jittery types, fly-triggers. So when he announced he was giving up guns, and putting a sign outside his house to say it was gun-free, the TV people came round. That was the first time John said, "It's OK, America, if you need to, come kill me." Within a week his wife had left him and gone to L.A.
I have the footage of that interview. I watch it a lot. Dee says "America, if you need to, come kill me," and this reporter guy, he tries to snigger to camera, like you might when some kook says he's Jesus Christ.
"No, really," John Dee says, and he goes inside, comes out with a chair and sits down. He smiles at the reporter. Then he says, "Maybe you could set up cameras, get yourself a scoop?"
When you look at the video you just know that John Dee is real. It's the quiet way he speaks, the utter calm in his face. Looking from here, it's as if he knew that if someone just stopped and started swimming the other way, all this was bound to happen.
The reporter eventually went away. I guess footage of a man sitting on a chair in his yard wasn't considered great television then. John Dee just sat there until it got cold, then went inside.
In the morning, when John Dee came out, a man was there with a gun. John Dee smiled and sat down in his chair. He asked the man had he seen the sign, didn't he know John Dee would have nothing to do with guns? The man said he knew that. He said Dee was one dumb mother-fucker and the NRA was already taking bets on whether he'd live a week.
"And will I?" John Dee said.
There isn't film, but I know from John Dee what happened then. This guy lifted his arm and John Dee was looking the wrong way at a piece. Maybe he was scared, but he smiled and told the man it was OK. The man was there for America, wasn't he? And John Dee had already told America that it could kill him if it needed to.
The man was skinny, jumpy. It turned out he had a history of mental stuff and shouldn't have been able to get a gun. He jerked down the path to John Dee, stuck the gun to Dee's temple and twitched, "You-You dumb. You dumb!"
This guy shook, locked, shook, the gun still pointing, but John Dee stayed perfectly still, accepting, passive, until the man stopped shaking, then like in some slow ballet, like some bird-dance unfolding at a frame a second, Dee moved his head, the man moved his, they looked at each other, and then the man gave up his gun. John Dee put it on the floor.
That was how it started, a skinny would-be killer with the shakes and John Dee who told him it was OK, really, it was OK. That afternoon an old man brought his .22 to the yard. He told John Dee that if he ever used it, he'd miss anyway, so he put it down by John Dee's chair. Then a black woman brought a gun she had stolen from her son's room. "Bless you," she said, "I hope you don't get hurt too bad," then a squad car came and John Dee was taken in. Then they let him go, and he went back to his yard.
The next morning a small pile of guns was laid at John Dee's gate and the police came again and took them away. A crowd had gathered and the reporter was back. Then the police told John Dee he was attracting the wrong types and that if he was to continue his sit-out, he should do it in a prescribed place.
That afternoon, someone drove by - some say it was kids, three black, one white, some say it was a car sent by one of the gangs - and they sprayed John Dee's yard with bullets. The camera shows John Dee flinching at the first bang but then he begins to smile. The camera shakes, wobbles, and falls away, like a Vietnam newsreel but then it comes back up. It shows broken windows, and a little of John Dee's chair which is splintered. Dee is still smiling. Then someone in the slowly recovering crowd shouts, "Hallelujah!" and tosses a small white hand-gun into the yard. There is applause.
The camera pans the crowd and then goes back to John Dee. A smidgen of blood is on the back of both his hands and from nowhere, a medic appears, but John Dee waves him away politely. The medic is all-American, tall, blond, no more than twenty-five. He looks at John Dee's face, lit by the low afternoon sun, pauses, then shakes his head and turns away. But as he leaves the yard he turns again, looks at John Dee and raises his white arm in a quiet salute. A helicopter chatters overhead.
The next day there were more guns, and the next more again, but then two policemen were left outside the yard, a squad car opposite. The guns almost stopped coming and John Dee spoke to the cameras. "Please, ask the police to leave me alone, to take away their protection. I've already said, America, it's OK, come to me."
But the police insisted. There were legal and illegal guns being dumped in a Binghamton yard, available to anyone, criminals, a passing child. If John Dee continued to sit in his yard, they would continue to be present.
The press and TV loved it, of course. An American couldn't sit in his own yard without armed guards, even when he asked not to be guarded? It was a media dream, perfect for the lawyers, and a ready-made career for kooks, crazies, copy-cat martyrs, and me.
I went outside into my yard the same day John Dee shook his head, gave up, got off his chair and went inside. I heard that day over a hundred JD-Sit-Outs began to add to the two dozen that had started earlier that week. I knew most of them were nothings, like I said, kooks, crazies, copy-cat martyrs, but I was serious. I knew it right at the start, the way a guy sometimes knows a thing way-down deep, but I didn't know why.
I guess, looking back, it was a sixth-sense or something, but when the Time-Life video came out, (this was later), it had one close up of John Dee's eyes, a zoom shot which just sailed in on his face, right at the moment he was saying, "It's OK, really. America, if you need to, come kill me." There was a light there, something so real and deep and definite in the way John Dee had decided to do what was right, that his soul shone out, straight at me.
The next day, I threw my guns in my trunk and drove towards Binghamton, but I was still half-a-day from there, four or five hours from the organised line that had grown up, the stalls and T-shirt vendors, when I heard John Dee had gone back inside.
I pulled off the road, into the dust and weeds at the side of the highway. Ahead I saw three cars do just the same, as if every one of the drivers had just heard what I'd heard and like me, they couldn't go on. I knew right then that I would sit outside, in my own yard, with my own sign, and if needs be I would out-sit the police if they came; that I would wait for the man with the gun who would come for me.
You know this is a looking-back because of who I am now, what I was brought to do, but right then, I confess my emotions were not of such a fine spirit as John Dee's. I had wanted him to win and when I saw he had lost, I set my mind to follow in his honour, to do what they wouldn't let him do. But unlike John Dee, I wanted someone to come to me who wouldn't lay down his gun; someone who would take away my despair.
My sit-out made the local news when I started, made the local-TV when I was shot, got a mention in the New York Times when I came out of hospital and set to sitting outside in my yard again. Then I was forgotten, and I guess so was John Dee, and we were locked away in the small minds of America with all the other crazy things that make us, Stealth Bombers, Oklahoma City, Charles Manson, Silence of the Lambs on Widescreen.
But then it was a year and two months since I'd first gone out in my yard and a year to the moment since I'd been shot. Maybe news was quiet or maybe some reporter really wanted to know where I was coming from, but I found myself talking to a camera, a bit jaded and out of it, my talking skills not as sharp as they were before I first heard of John Dee.
I knew that if the Lord wanted it so, here was a chance of sorts. I didn't have the light shining from my soul like John Dee, nor did I have that soft, sure drawl of his, but I knew that I had to try my hardest not to let these TV people make a fool of me, and more so, not let them make a fool of John Dee's memory. I remembered that the day I was in my car going to John Dee, so were lots of other guys, women too, driving in their pick-ups or whatever, and that every gun dropped in John Dee's yard was a statement, and every one was one less to kill with. I was trying hard to remember that saying about lighting a candle rather than just complaining about how dark it had gotten.
So I just sat there and listened to this smooth, white-teethed woman from TV, one minute sympathetic, then talking with that edgy whine a woman takes up when she wants to put you down, then speaking with authority, and not too kindly, about me and John Dee. She finished and the bright lights went out. That was when I got up from my chair.
I went to the camera. I asked was it on and right then the woman reporter swept back into view, flicking her hair back, her eyes wide, her face refixing itself. She had a microphone and was circling her hand. Technical guys were slapping open cases, spilling cups of coffee and frantically pushing plugs.
"And we are here," the woman began, sort of breathy, excited, "with Jack Carmen in his yard, one year to the day from his near-fatal shooting. And Jack still says, no guns, he will sit in his yard, the only free man in America."
"I never said that," I said, leaning down to the microphone. Then I knew it didn't matter what I said if they wanted to twist stuff around. I forgot the woman and her microphone, I just looked at the crouching guy with his camera and stared down into its ugly glass mouth.
"I'm here," I said, "only because you wouldn't let John Dee lead us out of slavery to freedom," but no sooner had this come out and I was thinking, "Oh, sweet Jesus, let me say something that's my own and from the heart."
Then I just said, looking at the lens, "I'm tired, John Dee, and I'm not so much scared as I'm lonely. I been here a year, and they've brought me three-hundred, seventeen guns. Now I'm lucky to get one a week, but I still get them, John. They haven't stopped coming."
I knew the TV wanted more, but I was learning that sometimes a man can be his own testament. I sat down, and even though the reporter woman tried, I didn't speak again. I simply smiled, not like John Dee, you understand, but the best one ordinary man can. Eventually, as I knew they would, they went away.
The next day a boy dropped me a pistol, then a woman came and crouched by me and whispered I was brave. She said if I was going to continue could she bring me something now and again, a blanket, food maybe? I don't know why, but I said, "Bring flowers." She nodded, then she touched my hand and left me.
John Dee turned up three days later. There was a short line of people bringing guns and he joined it, so grey and small I didn't see him stand there. When he came to me - after a woman who found her little girl with her pearl-handled .22 - he just stood.
I had got into some habit of not lifting my head and this person just waited, knowing I would have to look up, and when I did I was looking at John Dee. I guess I was about to get up out of my chair but John Dee stopped me and waved me to sit, then he squatted down and said would it be all right if he just shared my day?
The next person in the line was a kid maybe eighteen, with a square jaw and built like a line-back, so I called him forward, trying to look regal or profound or something. I knew people seemed to need that. He was a sweet kid, softer in the eyes than any part of his body. He just wanted to say thank-you, he said. He didn't have a gun, but now he knew he'd never need one.
I'd been taking to sitting in the evenings under the porch light waiting in case just one more person would come along, but when the line ended, John Dee said, "Jack, it's cold, let's go inside." I looked into the street and when I was sure it was empty, I said OK.
What we talked about that evening, what got me here, well, those things are a bit private, but John Dee told me about the Peace Foundation and how he had been invited by the President to set up his chair in front of the Capitol. He wanted me there with him, he said. John Dee said he had given up, but I had given him the inspiration to start again. He asked me to be his witness.
***
The surrender lines are amazing. By sun-up they stretch out of sight along Pennsylvania Avenue and a small world of commerce shadows them, selling hot-dogs and T-shirts. Once there was a service selling guns so folks would have one to give up, but that went. The people just want to meet John.
It's strange how people see us now. There are still kooks and cases, of course, there used to be many, and even now, every fiftieth guy who comes up the steps is dressed in fatigues and practising his thousand-yard stare, but even the crazies and world-enders are somehow quieted.
The old guys are interesting. Sometimes they tell John how once they used their gun. Maybe they caught a burglar or someone tried to take their car and being armed saved their day. But always, when it happens they seem relieved to be giving up their weapons. They walk away less laden. They breathe a deep breath, and sometimes John Dee will put his arm around them and together they'll look at the pistols and rifles on the White House lawn, the ones at the bottom already rusting, eager to become dirt again.
And John Dee says what he always says, "Be proud, be brave, thank-you," and these old men, many who fought for their country, they cry because they've finally discovered what courage really is, and they cry because they see the glorious, obscene pile of death trying to hide the White House. Sometimes they look like a spirit has left them and I think they may crumple, but most times it's like a new one has entered and they stand taller, more American. But all of them want to stay and look again at the mountain, and behind it, the white, white buildings.
*
Now John Dee is awake. For breakfast he has coffee, orange juice and a bowl of Cheerios. He dresses in his soft grey clothes, stretches, then comes to talk to me. He always says the same thing. "Today it's supposed to happen, Jack, and if it does, please let it. I'm just one ordinary American" Like always he sweeps a hand towards the pile, now more than ten million weapons, a few per cent of the nation's deep hurt. "All that matters is they keep coming. What matters is someone sits here."
It's gotten so sometimes we joke and we say John Dee's breakfast prayer together. Maybe I'll grin or punch John Dee's grey shoulder. He's older now, much, much older, yet we've only been here two years. It's a long haul, he says, and he knows he won't see it through, but then he grins and he reminds me of the city gun-collections, the clean schools, the gang-member from Watts who drove a truck full of guns into a lake and stayed with it as it sank, the cancer being sucked out of our country with nothing but kisses.
We start at five minutes past seven in the morning, as soon as the front wall comes down. The workmen melt away and John confirms he can see no policemen, no soldiers, that the man who will kill him today is free to do so.
We know that National Guardsmen and marines are protecting the rusting pile, but they are hidden behind boarding that is covered in peace-graffiti and flowers. We know that out of sight are patrol cars and mounted policemen, and we know far distant, in the sad ghettos of Washington they still kill each other, still stumble into gunfights on street-corners or blunder from a 7-11 into cross-fires. But that is now, John Dee says, and if we are patient...
Today, the first up the steps is a young man. He looks like the blond medic who tried to treat John Dee. He is shy, gentle, and I wonder if he's gay. Then he tells John Dee that when he was twenty-two he shot his lover in an alley, and he nods to me as if he knows I'd guessed.
But now he has forsaken the gun, he says, and he drops a pistol on to the floor. Then he waits, looks for John Dee to nod, takes out a silver derringer and drops that too. He turns and stands above the crowd and throws his ammunition into the sky. This has become a tradition and every afternoon workmen arrive to begin sweeping up from underneath the trestle. Then the young man - his name is Peter - signs the book where I sit, turns to look out over Washington, and like so many, he breathes deep as if the air is full of Thanksgiving.
We have a rule that only one person comes up the steps at a time. The tower has grown and John Dee fears its height has made it progressively weaker. A steward waits at the front of the line, and lets out the next man, just as Peter is stepping down. The two men pass, and something in the electricity between them makes me think that a killer is climbing the stairs. The knowledge is not fear-bringing; I am only frightened I may not be able to allow John Dee to die - that I will betray him.
I will discover the man is called Christos. I watch as he reaches the top of the trestle and I step forward to shake his hand. He is dark, about fifty, perhaps Turkish or Albanian, and his neck is tight. His eyes are slightly too large, faintly yellow, and I think they bulge. "I have guns," he says.
The beginning of what happens next, I have seen many, many times before. When the Washington Sit-Out began we would get a crazy a day, then maybe one every other day, two a week, then almost none. We know the world hasn't yet pulled back from wildness, so we presume that some aura now surrounds John, myself, the trestle, and the growing pile of guns.
Christos reveals his gun - it will turn out to be an illegally-owned .38 - and flourishes it with an air of superiority as if his very owning and drawing it is supposed to surprise us.
"I am America!" Christos says, with an accent so strong it takes me a second to back-track and work out what he has said. "I am America and today I take you up on your free offer. I kill you." There's spittle around his mouth and he shakes, almost as if he's stifling a giggle.
John Dee has been here before. "It's OK," he says. "If you need to, it's OK."
"See, I kill you." Christos says.
"Yes," John Dee says. "I believe you. I don't want to die. I'd like to be an old man. I would like to live in Florida, play checkers and complain about the heat. But it's OK, really it's OK."
"See, I kill you." Christos says, and I know then that this one will not be paralysed by the forgiveness in John Dee, will not look like a bemused puppy and begin to waver.
"John Dee, " I say, "this is - "
I hear John take a long deep breath. "It's OK, Jack."
"See, I kill you." Christos says.
"Would you like a juice?" John Dee asks in his gentle, curious voice. "We have water, if you would prefer it, or Jack can make you coffee. Everyone who climbs these steps is a friend."
"See, I kill you," Christos says.
John nods his head. "Yes, I understand you. I promise you, it's OK. Jack will not interfere, will you Jack? You'll be a good boy, yes?"
I stand up, to relieve tension. I tell Christos I am an observer, a recorder.
"An', I kill you, too!" Christos says.
I nod, whatever.
Christos drinks some orange juice, then he asks John Dee to stand and they walk to the front of the white room to where the steps lead down the trestle, where by looking out they can both see the rusting guns and the White House below them. Christos raises the gun and I realise that John Dee is so relaxed he has his hands behind his back, one finger of one hand clasped in the palm of the other. I'm behind them but I can only see that Vietnam War moment where a Viet Cong soldier was executed in Saigon.
"John," I say softly, "they'll think your hands are tied."
"Thank-you, Jack," John Dee says, and he lets his hands drop to his side. Below, the crowd murmur stops. Somehow they seem to know that this gunman is committed, that John Dee's day has finally come.
These minutes are so charged, so slow and I know they are final. I want to say something, to honour my friend, but then, as I am about to speak, the air about me changes and Christos crumples. There is a hole in his face from a marksman's bullet. I have heard no sound.
The pain. I know immediately this is a betrayal, that we have never been unprotected, that whoever has arranged for a hidden sniper to protect us, still doesn't understand, that the whole point is not to save John Dee.
We have been betrayed, and the crowd, the long line of Americans is betrayed. But worse, I know they will think they are betrayed by John Dee, and by me, his witness. It's over. I know it, and as if to emphasise this, I see someone break from the line, wave his gun and begin to walk away.
Then John Dee calls out, "Wait!" his voice huge and filling, and only then do I realise that the world below us is almost silent.
The man pauses, and John Dee picks up his murderer's gun and holds it high. I see the man's body change, then his focus turn to John Dee who is speaking, not to the crowd, for they are too far away, but for the record.
"I told America, come kill me if you must. This was my pact. This is why Americans are prepared to take their own small risk, to be courageous enough to forsake the weaponry which enslaves us."
He points the gun at himself. "John Dee did not betray you." he says. He puts the gun under his chin and pulls the trigger.
I don't know how long I am still, but then I go to the open space, look down, and wait. I wait because what I have to do now is painful. I wait, for though I know I can summon the small courage to take John Dee's place I don't yet know if I can do what he has made me promise to do.
I look again at the rising day. The White House gleams in fresh sunlight and before it, squalid metal settles into the earth. The crowd, Washington, America, looks up to me.
I am crying. I pick up John Dee's body. His scalp is sticky with his blood but his face is undamaged. I kiss him and hold him, but then, with the air going from me, I throw him away, off the edge of the steps, and down, onto the grass where Peter's bullets lay. I look to the crowd. I look out at America. I look at the White House.
I take a deep breath, one last look at John Dee's body, then down at the Stewards.
"Next!" I say, and take my seat.
4,715 words
In Lieu of Preference
On a web-site recently, a respondent suggested that the typical woman's magazine story wouldn't do well in a competition judged by me, merely because of my personal preference, because, as she put it, "Judging is so subjective."
"No," I said, "It's not personal preference or subjectivity to wish to see the higher reaches of the writing craft, or even true art. Womag stories simply don't go there."
One of my stories wouldn't do well in a competition run by a womag (a typical British woman's magazine), because the judges are not solely judging "literary quality," but rather are assessing suitability for a market.
It isn't "women's fiction" that I disparage, nor is it romance. I have written romantic stories and "relationship" stories. Nor could it be said that I don't like female authors. For example, I absolutely adore the work of Alice Munro, and have written an essay analyzing her work. (See Eclectica)
If there could be such a thing as a womag story with depth and resonance, then YES, it would do well in a competition judged by me. (You could read a romantic story of mine at Espresso Fiction - Meeting Marjorie)
I told my correspondent that in my view it's an impossibility to have literary depth in the "typical" Bella story, so of course they would fail in a competition where I was the judge. "But," I argued, "that is NOT 'preference' or 'subjectivity.'"
In response to my correspondent's allegations, here are some things that ALL good stories should have, and they can all be found in Saul Bellow's "A Silver Dish."
1. An opening which immediately gives (at the minimum) a sense of quality in the language and the delivery, and/or character and the setting (or immediate situation), that says resonance is here, something that will make me ache a little or inspire me, that will not be throwaway.
Look at the opening to "Dish":
What do you do about death—in this case, the death of an old father? If you're a modern person, sixty years of age, and a man who's been around like Woody Selbst, what do you do? Take this matter of mourning, and take it against a contemporary background.
How, against a contemporary background, do you mourn an octogenarian father, nearly blind, his heart enlarged, his lungs filling with fluid, who creeps, stumbles, gives off the odours, the moldiness or gassiness, of old men. I mean! As Woody put it, be realistic. Think what times these are. The papers daily give it you—the Lufthansa pilot in Aden is described by the hostages on his knees, begging the Palestinian terrorists not to execute him, but they shoot him through the head. Later, they themselves are killed. And still others shoot others, or shoot themselves. That's what you read in the press, see on the tube, mention at dinner. We know now what goes daily through the whole of human community, like a global death peristalsis.
Listen to that incredible voice! Feel how much is pulled together here: the sad process of slow death, the loss of human vigour, what it is to be a son who sees a father fade away. All good stuff, but who but a great writer would pull in terrorism, television, and this wonderful Chicagoan Jewish voice and finish with "like a global death peristalsis." Could we doubt this is going to be a meaningful, resonant story?
2. Characters who have depth, breadth, richness, and who are both identifiable as types and yet different, somehow distinct. They must experience change or the denial of the opportunity for change (and not in a rigged or trivial way).
In Bellow's "A Silver Dish" we have a vivid character, Woody Selbst, a self-made businessman; his disreputable, passionate father, who left the mother for a lover; religious converts, a crazy or two; the prim widow Skoglund, who pays for Woody's tuition at a seminary (until he leaves after the subtle manipulations of his father); the widow's stiff as a board housekeeper—all of them, ANY of them, I'd die to have written.
But characters are "just" characters until the masters bring them together in vivid, special, unforgettable ways, and Bellow does this brilliantly for us in a story I have probably read now, ten, maybe eleven times.
3. The dialogue (and voice) should be interesting, vivid, fresh. It will develop the story. It will "ring."
In "A Silver Dish," the whole story vibrates. It reverberates with Woody's voice throughout, but when other people speak, they too are fascinating, ringing, memorable. Like when Woody's father is about to desert his wife and three children, and he needs money for gas:
"You're going to be the man of the house," said Pop. "It's OK I put you on welfare. I just got back from Wabansia Avenue, from the relief station." Hence the suit and the hat. "Then he said," You got to lend me the money to buy gasoline—the caddie money you saved."
4. The plot should have sufficient richness and complexity to make me FEEL something, to wonder, to ache, to be with, to hope, to be not-quite sure, yet sense the inevitability of the whole. There will be no cheap trick, no deliberate twist finish or deux et machina.
Bellow's plot explodes with richness, desertion, madness, manipulation, theft, disappointment, and ultimately a harrowing, yet beautiful death. But there is far more than mere machinations of cause and effect; the plot means so much, does so much, and by the end Woody sees why he was always his father's son and no Christian priest.
5. The theme should make me think, make me ache, make me dream, or it will teach me something. And if I don't want to pause a while after reading the story, if I don't want to reflect, then it will have been a failure.
"Dish" does so much. It deals with ethnicity, religion, sexuality, a primitive desire for life versus intellectual and spiritual callings; it deals with the art of living (as opposed to merely being alive), and it deals with inheritance as Emil Zola might have done, and finally, the circle of life and death and living, and dying on one's own terms.
6. The dramatic nature of the story should carry me, seduce me. It must involve me. It will work on the surface, but it will whisper that it has more than one level. It should be layered, undoable, discoverable. Each fresh visit to the story should reveal more (but the first pass should have satisfied by itself). It should consume me, take all my attention, demand my emotional and intellectual input, and the fictive dream, the language, the dialogue, everything should wrap me up and interact in a way that makes me not be reading, but rather seeing and feeling, experiencing a heightened life.
Bellow's piece is incredible. The opening has already "reached me," but on page two Woody remembers:
It was this: on a launch near Murchison Falls in Uganda, he had seen a buffalo calf seized by a crocodile from the bank of the White Nile. There were giraffes along the tropical river, and hippopotamuses, and baboons, and flamingos and other brilliant birds crossing the bright air in the heat of the morning, when the calf, stepping into the river to drink, was grabbed by the hoof and dragged down.
The narrative continues, showing the desperate calf's parents unable to figure things, looking at each other as if asking each other dumbly what had happened. This is typical of the richness, the vividness, the complete, totally overwhelming way that Bellow's works absorb attention. On almost any page he captivates, and the story has more stunning images then many a novel.
The pivotal theft, the fight between father and son, again is drama at its best, but Bellow, as only he can, finishes off the scene with the father buttoning his clothing and the uptight housekeeper entering:
As Pop was reaching below his belt, Hjordis brought in the tray. She was very sharp with him. She said, "Is this a place to adjust clothing, Mister? A men's washroom?"
"Well, which way is the toilet, then? said Pop."
7. The language should be perfect. It should not have a spare, wasted word nor a single accidental redundancy. It should have no clichés, nothing bland, no stock phrases, no fillers, and it should, via the shape and the sounds and the colours of the words, by the music, add meaning beyond mere semantics.
To quote examples of this from Bellow seems superfluous. All of Bellow is so rich, so fresh, so textured:
Then in the heat that swam suddenly up to their mufflered chins Pop and Woody felt the blizzard for what it was; their cheeks were frozen slabs. They stood beat, itching, trickling in the front hall that was a hall, with a carved newel post staircase and a big stained-glass window at the top. Picturing Jesus with the Samaritan woman. There was a kind of gentile closeness in the air.
8. The pace should be not too slow, not rushed, not patchy, not jerky, and the writer should also understand pacING, when to lean on a moment more, when to make the reader pause, where to make the reader eat.
Of course Bellow has mastered this. The story pulls, pushes, pauses where it should, precisely as it should.
9. And the ending... I should reach the ending already very happy, but a good ending should quite suddenly enhance my emotional response a whole level, into the realms of a hit in the gut, of a profound revelation, a light blasting into my head, at the very best, a life-moment.
It was like this: When he came into the hospital room and saw Pop with the sides of his bed raised like a crib, and Pop, so very feeble, and writhing and toothless, like a baby, and the dirt already cast into his face, into the wrinkles—Pop wanted to pluck out the intravenous needles and he was piping his weak death noise. The gauze patches taped over the needles were soiled with dark blood.
There follows the most immaculate writing, heart-rending, utterly beautiful passage as the son climbs into the hospital bed and stops the old man from removing his intravenous feeds. The younger man is winning the final battle:
After a time Pop's resistance ended.
But no,
Then as Woody did his best to restrain him, and thought he was succeeding Pop divided himself. And when he was separated from his warmth, he slipped into death.
That is not the story's end, but already, everything, every single word that has come before in the story is suddenly sent shimmering, ringing, vibrating, and everything, all is so much, so suddenly more, made even more organically important. An ending should be an "ah" and an "oh." This ending is both of these, plus screams, and a hymn, and the most profound, the deepest sense of rightness mere words can create. An ending should send us into a higher state and make us want to breathe deep, to wait a little while with the echo, then re-read the story, because now we realise it is four times better than good.
Now, that isn't "taste," and it isn't "preference."
That is the recognition of artistic quality, of what is great writing.
"No," I said, "It's not personal preference or subjectivity to wish to see the higher reaches of the writing craft, or even true art. Womag stories simply don't go there."
One of my stories wouldn't do well in a competition run by a womag (a typical British woman's magazine), because the judges are not solely judging "literary quality," but rather are assessing suitability for a market.
It isn't "women's fiction" that I disparage, nor is it romance. I have written romantic stories and "relationship" stories. Nor could it be said that I don't like female authors. For example, I absolutely adore the work of Alice Munro, and have written an essay analyzing her work. (See Eclectica)
If there could be such a thing as a womag story with depth and resonance, then YES, it would do well in a competition judged by me. (You could read a romantic story of mine at Espresso Fiction - Meeting Marjorie)
I told my correspondent that in my view it's an impossibility to have literary depth in the "typical" Bella story, so of course they would fail in a competition where I was the judge. "But," I argued, "that is NOT 'preference' or 'subjectivity.'"
In response to my correspondent's allegations, here are some things that ALL good stories should have, and they can all be found in Saul Bellow's "A Silver Dish."
1. An opening which immediately gives (at the minimum) a sense of quality in the language and the delivery, and/or character and the setting (or immediate situation), that says resonance is here, something that will make me ache a little or inspire me, that will not be throwaway.
Look at the opening to "Dish":
What do you do about death—in this case, the death of an old father? If you're a modern person, sixty years of age, and a man who's been around like Woody Selbst, what do you do? Take this matter of mourning, and take it against a contemporary background.
How, against a contemporary background, do you mourn an octogenarian father, nearly blind, his heart enlarged, his lungs filling with fluid, who creeps, stumbles, gives off the odours, the moldiness or gassiness, of old men. I mean! As Woody put it, be realistic. Think what times these are. The papers daily give it you—the Lufthansa pilot in Aden is described by the hostages on his knees, begging the Palestinian terrorists not to execute him, but they shoot him through the head. Later, they themselves are killed. And still others shoot others, or shoot themselves. That's what you read in the press, see on the tube, mention at dinner. We know now what goes daily through the whole of human community, like a global death peristalsis.
Listen to that incredible voice! Feel how much is pulled together here: the sad process of slow death, the loss of human vigour, what it is to be a son who sees a father fade away. All good stuff, but who but a great writer would pull in terrorism, television, and this wonderful Chicagoan Jewish voice and finish with "like a global death peristalsis." Could we doubt this is going to be a meaningful, resonant story?
2. Characters who have depth, breadth, richness, and who are both identifiable as types and yet different, somehow distinct. They must experience change or the denial of the opportunity for change (and not in a rigged or trivial way).
In Bellow's "A Silver Dish" we have a vivid character, Woody Selbst, a self-made businessman; his disreputable, passionate father, who left the mother for a lover; religious converts, a crazy or two; the prim widow Skoglund, who pays for Woody's tuition at a seminary (until he leaves after the subtle manipulations of his father); the widow's stiff as a board housekeeper—all of them, ANY of them, I'd die to have written.
But characters are "just" characters until the masters bring them together in vivid, special, unforgettable ways, and Bellow does this brilliantly for us in a story I have probably read now, ten, maybe eleven times.
3. The dialogue (and voice) should be interesting, vivid, fresh. It will develop the story. It will "ring."
In "A Silver Dish," the whole story vibrates. It reverberates with Woody's voice throughout, but when other people speak, they too are fascinating, ringing, memorable. Like when Woody's father is about to desert his wife and three children, and he needs money for gas:
"You're going to be the man of the house," said Pop. "It's OK I put you on welfare. I just got back from Wabansia Avenue, from the relief station." Hence the suit and the hat. "Then he said," You got to lend me the money to buy gasoline—the caddie money you saved."
4. The plot should have sufficient richness and complexity to make me FEEL something, to wonder, to ache, to be with, to hope, to be not-quite sure, yet sense the inevitability of the whole. There will be no cheap trick, no deliberate twist finish or deux et machina.
Bellow's plot explodes with richness, desertion, madness, manipulation, theft, disappointment, and ultimately a harrowing, yet beautiful death. But there is far more than mere machinations of cause and effect; the plot means so much, does so much, and by the end Woody sees why he was always his father's son and no Christian priest.
5. The theme should make me think, make me ache, make me dream, or it will teach me something. And if I don't want to pause a while after reading the story, if I don't want to reflect, then it will have been a failure.
"Dish" does so much. It deals with ethnicity, religion, sexuality, a primitive desire for life versus intellectual and spiritual callings; it deals with the art of living (as opposed to merely being alive), and it deals with inheritance as Emil Zola might have done, and finally, the circle of life and death and living, and dying on one's own terms.
6. The dramatic nature of the story should carry me, seduce me. It must involve me. It will work on the surface, but it will whisper that it has more than one level. It should be layered, undoable, discoverable. Each fresh visit to the story should reveal more (but the first pass should have satisfied by itself). It should consume me, take all my attention, demand my emotional and intellectual input, and the fictive dream, the language, the dialogue, everything should wrap me up and interact in a way that makes me not be reading, but rather seeing and feeling, experiencing a heightened life.
Bellow's piece is incredible. The opening has already "reached me," but on page two Woody remembers:
It was this: on a launch near Murchison Falls in Uganda, he had seen a buffalo calf seized by a crocodile from the bank of the White Nile. There were giraffes along the tropical river, and hippopotamuses, and baboons, and flamingos and other brilliant birds crossing the bright air in the heat of the morning, when the calf, stepping into the river to drink, was grabbed by the hoof and dragged down.
The narrative continues, showing the desperate calf's parents unable to figure things, looking at each other as if asking each other dumbly what had happened. This is typical of the richness, the vividness, the complete, totally overwhelming way that Bellow's works absorb attention. On almost any page he captivates, and the story has more stunning images then many a novel.
The pivotal theft, the fight between father and son, again is drama at its best, but Bellow, as only he can, finishes off the scene with the father buttoning his clothing and the uptight housekeeper entering:
As Pop was reaching below his belt, Hjordis brought in the tray. She was very sharp with him. She said, "Is this a place to adjust clothing, Mister? A men's washroom?"
"Well, which way is the toilet, then? said Pop."
7. The language should be perfect. It should not have a spare, wasted word nor a single accidental redundancy. It should have no clichés, nothing bland, no stock phrases, no fillers, and it should, via the shape and the sounds and the colours of the words, by the music, add meaning beyond mere semantics.
To quote examples of this from Bellow seems superfluous. All of Bellow is so rich, so fresh, so textured:
Then in the heat that swam suddenly up to their mufflered chins Pop and Woody felt the blizzard for what it was; their cheeks were frozen slabs. They stood beat, itching, trickling in the front hall that was a hall, with a carved newel post staircase and a big stained-glass window at the top. Picturing Jesus with the Samaritan woman. There was a kind of gentile closeness in the air.
8. The pace should be not too slow, not rushed, not patchy, not jerky, and the writer should also understand pacING, when to lean on a moment more, when to make the reader pause, where to make the reader eat.
Of course Bellow has mastered this. The story pulls, pushes, pauses where it should, precisely as it should.
9. And the ending... I should reach the ending already very happy, but a good ending should quite suddenly enhance my emotional response a whole level, into the realms of a hit in the gut, of a profound revelation, a light blasting into my head, at the very best, a life-moment.
It was like this: When he came into the hospital room and saw Pop with the sides of his bed raised like a crib, and Pop, so very feeble, and writhing and toothless, like a baby, and the dirt already cast into his face, into the wrinkles—Pop wanted to pluck out the intravenous needles and he was piping his weak death noise. The gauze patches taped over the needles were soiled with dark blood.
There follows the most immaculate writing, heart-rending, utterly beautiful passage as the son climbs into the hospital bed and stops the old man from removing his intravenous feeds. The younger man is winning the final battle:
After a time Pop's resistance ended.
But no,
Then as Woody did his best to restrain him, and thought he was succeeding Pop divided himself. And when he was separated from his warmth, he slipped into death.
That is not the story's end, but already, everything, every single word that has come before in the story is suddenly sent shimmering, ringing, vibrating, and everything, all is so much, so suddenly more, made even more organically important. An ending should be an "ah" and an "oh." This ending is both of these, plus screams, and a hymn, and the most profound, the deepest sense of rightness mere words can create. An ending should send us into a higher state and make us want to breathe deep, to wait a little while with the echo, then re-read the story, because now we realise it is four times better than good.
Now, that isn't "taste," and it isn't "preference."
That is the recognition of artistic quality, of what is great writing.
Giving Things Away?
Received an email this morning asking me why I'm "giving all these articles away for free"...
Well there's a many-faceted answer.
First, many of these articles have been published in The New Writer, The Internet Writer's Journal, The Dublin Quarterly, Cambrensis, Eclectica (see today's), Seventh Quark and so on.
Second, they reflect my attitudes to writing, reflect the ongoing ethos within BC (so act as an advert for BC). We've had three new members since this blog started!
Third, maybe at some point, some publisher with half a brain will want to collect these. Or I might decide to publish the collections via One Finger Press.
Fourth, how could I let a week go by without having a dig at womag stories?
alex
Well there's a many-faceted answer.
First, many of these articles have been published in The New Writer, The Internet Writer's Journal, The Dublin Quarterly, Cambrensis, Eclectica (see today's), Seventh Quark and so on.
Second, they reflect my attitudes to writing, reflect the ongoing ethos within BC (so act as an advert for BC). We've had three new members since this blog started!
Third, maybe at some point, some publisher with half a brain will want to collect these. Or I might decide to publish the collections via One Finger Press.
Fourth, how could I let a week go by without having a dig at womag stories?
alex
Wednesday Morning Prompts
He was captured in the valley of the women
Barrels of Chains.
it was late September. I'd just poured a glass of wine
Frogs on Parade
The groans men use, when a woman passes
A Conspiracy of Cats
Her name I may or may not have, made up
Monkeys
Let me never have her father call me
The Elephant Cinema
I'll be a wicked old woman, thin as a rail
Fleas having Fleas
I want a red dress, I want it flimsy and cheap
Sid is Vicious
There but for the clutch of luck go I
The Elders
Books on female circumsion = slit-clit-lit?
From Honour to Honour
Please can I have a man who wear corduroy
A Perplexity of Penises
I am going to leave you, he said, very politely
Cheers!
Every Day God Pats Me on the Head
I did not imagine being bald
Fying, darling, is the easy bit
When I was a goldfish you never noticed me
If I was not myself, I would be somebody else
he was no longer my father, but I was still his son
The pond was a deep pond once
Tom Cat
The small fine rain came rushing over
An Endlessness of Funereal Steps
Barrels of Chains.
it was late September. I'd just poured a glass of wine
Frogs on Parade
The groans men use, when a woman passes
A Conspiracy of Cats
Her name I may or may not have, made up
Monkeys
Let me never have her father call me
The Elephant Cinema
I'll be a wicked old woman, thin as a rail
Fleas having Fleas
I want a red dress, I want it flimsy and cheap
Sid is Vicious
There but for the clutch of luck go I
The Elders
Books on female circumsion = slit-clit-lit?
From Honour to Honour
Please can I have a man who wear corduroy
A Perplexity of Penises
I am going to leave you, he said, very politely
Cheers!
Every Day God Pats Me on the Head
I did not imagine being bald
Fying, darling, is the easy bit
When I was a goldfish you never noticed me
If I was not myself, I would be somebody else
he was no longer my father, but I was still his son
The pond was a deep pond once
Tom Cat
The small fine rain came rushing over
An Endlessness of Funereal Steps
Tuesday, 17 April 2007
Writing While Driving
IS LEGAL!
First thing I have to do the school-run, so the writing goes on hold. Leave just after eight, over to Park House, drop the kids off, drive back in heavier traffic. I'm sat down at 08:40. NOW I can write. That's forty minutes lost from my life forever.
40 minutes. 48 words. Nothing happened. My life is empty.
Let's try again.
Every morning I do the school run and it takes an average of 45 minutes. Today I'm in the mood to write and I don't want to stop, grab the kids, put them in the Mini, go up the lane, come out at the top where it's dangerous (two years ago we had a serious crash there and wrote-off the car) and head for the jams. One and a half hours every day WASTED, no other word for it. In a week I lose 7.5 Hours, effectively one full day in an office, sheesh! I drop the kids off and pass a bag of football shirts to my son's soccer coach. Off go the kids and I spin out, get 100 yards before I am in a long queue of people-movers and 4 x 4s. I get home at 08:41, flick on the kettle, throw two pieces of bread in the toaster. I am miffed, frustrated that every day I lose all this time. I feel sorry for myself. Did Shakespeare have this problem? Did Dickens?
177 words. Not much ever happens to me except driving this damn taxi.
Now let's do the school run as a writer.
Oh, I so don't want to drive the kids today, but Debbie has a real job and I am only a writer. Usually I'm up at six, but last night I went out and then write until 0200 so woke at seven or so. I'll delay until the last minute. (The kids get edgy then and think they'll be late for school. BUT THIS IS ME. I'M MAKING A STATEMENT. They are fighting again, but relatively low-level, low enough to not step in. I'm amazed how hurtful they can be. They getting to a crucial age. PJ is just growing hair, muscles, attitude (and Jeez is he strong.) Bridie is a young woman and that kind of frightens me. I hate that when I cuddle her I have to be "careful". I'm on the internet, no, not wasting time. I send out some urgent emails, post some flash prompts for my writing group, log some stories that have come in. I can smell toast (isn't it an amazing smell?
Aren't smells amazing? I can still picture the scruffy kitchen mof my childhood, toast cooking, (often burning) and porridge flupping on the stove.
Time to go, only a couple of minutes late (but the story-logging was done, YES!) The front door is locked. PJ asks can he undo it. Thirteen years old and it's a big deal to open the front door. (He's also very nervous at night and has to lock the front door if I am out, is neurotic about "being safe".
Mind you I was terrified of my house, scared shitless to be alone and sat behind the door with a poker nearby. WHY?
Exactly, why?
PJ is thrilled, by the way. Last night, while I was at Bridge (my once-a-week escape) he was promoted to County swimmer. My first reply is "Not National, then?" but he knows I'm joking and that I'm proud of him. He's so sleek in the water. He just is natural, but doesn't (yet) work that hard at it. I am going to have to sit down with him and Deb and discuss the effort required, the time in the water. When Alex tells me this I'm thrilled for him but have to think of Bridie who tries her heart out but just doesn't have his raw talent. And then again, how do I one day, tell PJ he will never be a professional footballer?
There is a pile of purple football shirts by the front door (they remind me of "Dream Team") First thing today I realised that PJ can't train with the club Saturday or play Sunday because we are away. It was our turn to wash the shirts and so I have to get them to the coach. Frantic phone-calls, problem solved, I can meet him at the back of the school (he's a dad too!) and hand over the bag.
PJ and I watch Dream Team every Sunday night at 8PM. It's our big "one-hour" and we snuggle up and watch a giant screen. I love him so much I am scared to die, scared. Not for me, but I think of him without me and it makes me want to cry. I love Bridie equally as much but it's different, a different kind of love. Later, maybe I'll think about that.
Purple shirts. Who decides to commit a team to playing in purple? The Pope? Or maybe they got a deal. The Catholic Choir Boys United team folded!
I put the shirts against the front door because I'm forgetful. Not even someone as stupid as me could step over the shirts and not pick them up. What's that called? Meta-memory, I think, where we actively learn techniques to prevent forgetting. Yeah, I did a psychology degree. I wonder where all my student buddies are now? I know where John is: John who was hit by a drunken driver with his fiancé and they both were thrown off a bridge. She died, he spent months in a coma. He was a brilliant footballer, could have been a pro but he wanted to go to university.
Oh, wow, the soccer at Uni. I was never that good, skills-wise but I was strong and very fast and could run forever (I wish I was half as fast and powerful now). John looked the spitting image of Liverpool's Steve McManaman back then and he could dribble, oh, could he dribble! Three times he "gave me" two goals in a game. Once I asked him why he never gave me a hat-trick and he said "Are you mad? You go loopy when you score. If you scored a hat-trick you'd never come back to earth!"
I remember once he banged a corner in, not an up-down looped cross, but low and flat like Steve Coppell used to hit them. I dived forward and headed in at the near post, best goal I ever scored. I went up the field like an orang-utan on cocaine (yes I'm red-haired, Welsh-Irish) with one of the other side chasing after me with my ruined spectacles.
I enjoyed Uni. I loved the work, ran the student newsletter, got involved in the debating society, was a student representative, played soccer for the department, learned photography and dark-room techniques, worked selling double-glazing in an office in a brothel, once delivered a suspect package for a VERY heavy Liverpool villain. Was loaned a Rolls-Royce for the weekend, once. Yay, times when.
Hell, better get in this car and take the kids to school.
We go out the back way. We live in a converted barn which overlooks a racecourse and just beyond, a canal and a river. Behind us there is a trout lake and a bird sanctuary (and there's the gravel-pit). I love this place. It pains me to think we might have to move because my choice of a life as a writer keeps us (relatively) poor.
Poor? Hah! What a laugh. My kids in a day get more than I had in all my childhood. This isn't a dirty council house. I'm not a smoking, gambling, heavy-drinking father. Debbie hasn't deserted her children. PJ and Bridie will never end up in children's homes. What I have now was beyond all those clichéd "wildest dreams".
Enough of poor. Yes, we'll have to move "down", but we'll still have four bedrooms, central heating, telephone, broadband, good furniture, a nice address. It's laughable what people can sometimes call "distress". If you are talking STRESS then that's a different matter.
Part of the financial recovery plan involved trading in the super-dooper company car (a BMW X5) and taking this little Mini-Cooper. Depending on mileage we could be as much as £300 a month better off. That's about a third of my monthly earnings! Talk about obscene.
I thought I would hate losing the Beemer but this little car is FUN and already I'm beginning to slag off "those 4 x 4 gas-guzzlers". Some people just don't care enough about the planet (unlike me, who drives a mini.)
I open the electric gates. Electric gates! We had to have them. We used to get deer in the garden every day and they eat anything and everything. (Except, for some reason known only to God, Lavender). Thinking about it, why didn't we just fill the garden with Lavender? That has to be cheaper than electric gates.
The gates open and we are out. The kids are NOT fighting. Note by the writing that this is a rare occurrence. I hate the way, not that they have sibling rivalry blah-blah, but the constant nature of the mutual, subtle undermining, the bitternesses, their dirty war. It makes me sad and is a major source of stress for me.
When we got the mini (days ago) I promised we wouldn't go up the back lane. I turn up the back lane. Heck using the lane saves 15 minutes a day!
We pass the other houses. An assistant Chief Constable and his teacher-wife, a self-employed business man, divorcee with new girlfriend, a guy in computers, sweet, gentle wife, two lovely daughters same age as our kids…
Fuck! The gate is chained up. Someone likes to chain the gate up. I can go 200 yards the other way and still go up the lane, BUT THEY NEVER ASKED ME.
So I get out of the car, unchain the fucking gate (one night I'm coming out here with some industrial sheers, ha-ha-fucking-ha…), get back in the car and we are off up the lane.
On the left is the gravel pit workings. The gravel pits near us were 'worked-out" years ago and we have two pretty lakes (one is the bird sanctuary) and a few reclaimed fields, heavily planted. Twenty years from now this will all be forest again. I wonder, thousands of years on will they be able to tell that someone took a few layers out from under the ground?
I read up on gravel, shale etc once upon a time. There's something raw and primaeval about the history of ice-ages, deposits, long-slow rivers, how once there were jungles, lush forest,
and the slow drip, drip, drip of time.
The workings are rust-brown, not rusty but laced with a local dust-colour that looks like rust. Debbie is always complaining that our house is the dustiest we have ever lived in.
Over on the right are loads of Canada Geese. They seem to settle in this field most nights. Did you know that Geese on the floor are a gaggle but in the air they're a skein? I mention this to the kids (again) and they say "Yes, Dad!" (again)
"OK, I say, name a part of you that exists and doesn't exist, and I don't mean 'hidden' like your tongue."
They don't know so I tell them. Your lap.
I sometimes wonder about things like "lap". How many other things are there like this?
There are two deer further up the lane but they skip, skip then dive into the bushes. I don't remember what these deer-types are, but at night we get a different type, funny little things, about the size of a large dog, and they have big arses that stick up. We get badgers, all sorts of rodents. There's a big owl, a woodpecker and a big bird of prey, I think it's a buzzard. It's nice here, very rural, yet only a mile from the railway station. (I am so deprived.)
This lane is hundreds of years old, might be thousands of years old. After The First Battle of Newbury, the Parliamentary Army marched right by here (where we wait to pull out) after the so-typed "inconclusive" battle. They went on to Brimpton and Aldermaston (where Rupert attacked their rear), then Reading, then a hero's return into London.
It boggles me to know that ten thousand men marched past here, less than four hundred years ago, bloodied, relieved to be alive.
I can SMELL them.
We are waiting to pull out. On Bridie's birthday three years ago I went to pull out (driving another small car.) I realised that a car was coming too fast. I stopped with my nose in the road, the car swerved, but clipped us, crossed the road and had a head on crash. Because the energy was dissipated over three cars, nobody was hurt, but had he been two inches more to the left we would probably have been killed or seriously injured. Had he been two inches more to the right, we would have been uninjured but then they would have had a head-on crash with no energy removed and the deaths would have been the other side of the road.
I shouldn't come this way.
The top road, when I do get out, runs past Greenham Common Air-Base, where the peace-Protest Camps were, where B-52s and Cruise Missiles were stored. Is there not something heavily spiritual to think that pike-men walked across this common, then great weapons of destruction were stored here, now people walk their dogs or go jogging?
Can't you feel the dark, dark presences of it all?
Golf Club to the right. Money. 4 x 4s, old men with red faces and funny trousers. Further on we pass new estates, Tescos, a Retail Park. This road is going to be impossible in a year or so. Why don’t planners plan?
Once we get over the roundabout and past the college (why am I not teaching creative writing there?) we pass the long line of kids walking to school. It's funny seeing the ages, shapes and sizes, and the tiny rebellions. The boys all leave their shirts hanging out and ties undone until they approach the gate where the tuck in and tidy up!
Seeing the older girls turning into women makes me so aware of Bridie growing and all the young-adult stuff we will soon be facing, all the angst and hormonal stuff.
I get to the school and meet PJ's soccer coach. Apart from my family I think he's the only person who uses my real name. Most people call me Alex.
We stop and the kids get out. The coach comes over. He's hardly recognisable in a smart suit, collar and tie. When I was a running coach I often met people I couldn't place because I'd only ever seen them in shorts and top. My favourite line when meeting the prettier female runners was, "Didn't recognise you with yer clothes on…"
Gary takes the shirts. We chat. The game on Sunday is in the afternoon against the side currently top of the league. PJ is desperate to play and I have to try (later) to negotiate an early return from our trip away. I think about Gary who LOOKS LIKE he's a strong, dominating presence but he doesn't "command" the boys and they don't listen well.
That is interesting. I should write about it some time.
I set off back. Now I'm in the traffic jams which normally I avoid, dropping the kids earlier in both time and distance.
I am FREAKED about wasting time and I discovered I could save ten minutes twice a day by doing X.
Silly? No. 10 x 2 x 5 x 40 = 4,000 minutes = 66.67 Hours gained a year. I can write 75,000 words in that time, a shorter novel!
Now decision time. Should I stop off at Tescos, buy the Independent and something for lunch (but the time, the time!) or zoom home.
Zoom home!
I pass some sheltered housing for "people with learning difficulties". It's interesting how the euphemisms change. Once we would have said "Mongols" (and some said worse) then Downs Syndrome. Will there ever come a time when someone will say, "We should not categorise them by inflicting the presumption of 'learning difficulties' "
I have to say I LOATHE "political correctness", but don't even go there. I've just remembered the six weeks I did working with handicapped children when I was a mature student doing that psychology degree. That was a tough time and there were other complexities. I remember the director of the home taking me to a hospital to show me what serious handicap was like. It was vision that I've almost blocked out but was the most uncomfortable hour of my life and I felt ashamed, inadequate.
Coming back past the Golf Club, a Range-Rover is trying to exit and the man at the wheel absolutely GLARES at me, full of hate. I'm amazed. Is he sick, unwell, mentally ill?
I turn down the lane (no vehicles it says) and pass the Nature Reserve.
Nature reserve. Oh, I'm sorry, can't rain today, it just wouldn't be right. Ask someone else.
This "Nature Reserve" is a WOOD. That's it. A WOOD. When we were kids we just went to these places. It's amazing how the countryside disappeared. Did we trespass then, or were there really hundreds of places you could simply "go"?
That's what I remember. Blue Bell wood, The Gollers, The Quarry, The Lighthouse, The Dingle, The Canal. My recall is of freedom, not fences and No Entry signs. What’s that song about a tree in a museum?
I went down into the Nature Reserve/Wood on Christmas Day with Debbie and the kids, and discovered "coppicing". They cut down trees and encourage new growths around the stump. You get thinner, more useful branches then. I found that thought-provoking at the time, then blow me if two days later on a walk in Buckinghamshire I found myself in another "coppice". I had spent God knows how many years thinking coppice = copse, ie: just another name for a wood, a small wood.
(Must look up coppicing on the internet.)
I had used the word "coppice" in a story in October, but then as a surname. I wonder why? How the mind works!
Nearly home. Over on the bird-sanctuary lake there's a flurry of activity, some big sea-birds. There are some twitchers (bird-watchers) walking up the lane. One glares at me (How DARE you drive a car down MY path). That's the second time I've been glared at with hatred or near hatred in five minutes. Both times by red-faced middle-aged "country-types" both of whom look like they haven't had sex in a while.
Hello? IT'S NOT MY FAULT!
Almost there, I slow as I pass the end house because if I buzz the electric gates through the gap in the fence, the gates start opening and I save thirty seconds when I get outside the house. Silly? A minute, four times a day, twenty minutes a week, 800 a year, That's 13.33 HOURS.
Obsessive. WHO is obsessive?
An obsessive writer would be one who switches the kettle on and then goes to switch the computer on, then goes out to put the tea-bag in and pop the toast on, then goes back to see the computer just coming on-screen. You can write a paragraph before the kettle clicks and the toast pops. A paragraph a day is seven paragraphs a week. That's 364 paragraphs a year, 100 pages a year!
I wouldn't need to obsess like this if it wasn't for wasteful things like the school-run. School-runs are an AFFLICTION. They take away the writer from what matters, the real world, where important things happen, where connections are made.
The school-run is simply "dead time", damnit!
3,314 words
First thing I have to do the school-run, so the writing goes on hold. Leave just after eight, over to Park House, drop the kids off, drive back in heavier traffic. I'm sat down at 08:40. NOW I can write. That's forty minutes lost from my life forever.
40 minutes. 48 words. Nothing happened. My life is empty.
Let's try again.
Every morning I do the school run and it takes an average of 45 minutes. Today I'm in the mood to write and I don't want to stop, grab the kids, put them in the Mini, go up the lane, come out at the top where it's dangerous (two years ago we had a serious crash there and wrote-off the car) and head for the jams. One and a half hours every day WASTED, no other word for it. In a week I lose 7.5 Hours, effectively one full day in an office, sheesh! I drop the kids off and pass a bag of football shirts to my son's soccer coach. Off go the kids and I spin out, get 100 yards before I am in a long queue of people-movers and 4 x 4s. I get home at 08:41, flick on the kettle, throw two pieces of bread in the toaster. I am miffed, frustrated that every day I lose all this time. I feel sorry for myself. Did Shakespeare have this problem? Did Dickens?
177 words. Not much ever happens to me except driving this damn taxi.
Now let's do the school run as a writer.
Oh, I so don't want to drive the kids today, but Debbie has a real job and I am only a writer. Usually I'm up at six, but last night I went out and then write until 0200 so woke at seven or so. I'll delay until the last minute. (The kids get edgy then and think they'll be late for school. BUT THIS IS ME. I'M MAKING A STATEMENT. They are fighting again, but relatively low-level, low enough to not step in. I'm amazed how hurtful they can be. They getting to a crucial age. PJ is just growing hair, muscles, attitude (and Jeez is he strong.) Bridie is a young woman and that kind of frightens me. I hate that when I cuddle her I have to be "careful". I'm on the internet, no, not wasting time. I send out some urgent emails, post some flash prompts for my writing group, log some stories that have come in. I can smell toast (isn't it an amazing smell?
Aren't smells amazing? I can still picture the scruffy kitchen mof my childhood, toast cooking, (often burning) and porridge flupping on the stove.
Time to go, only a couple of minutes late (but the story-logging was done, YES!) The front door is locked. PJ asks can he undo it. Thirteen years old and it's a big deal to open the front door. (He's also very nervous at night and has to lock the front door if I am out, is neurotic about "being safe".
Mind you I was terrified of my house, scared shitless to be alone and sat behind the door with a poker nearby. WHY?
Exactly, why?
PJ is thrilled, by the way. Last night, while I was at Bridge (my once-a-week escape) he was promoted to County swimmer. My first reply is "Not National, then?" but he knows I'm joking and that I'm proud of him. He's so sleek in the water. He just is natural, but doesn't (yet) work that hard at it. I am going to have to sit down with him and Deb and discuss the effort required, the time in the water. When Alex tells me this I'm thrilled for him but have to think of Bridie who tries her heart out but just doesn't have his raw talent. And then again, how do I one day, tell PJ he will never be a professional footballer?
There is a pile of purple football shirts by the front door (they remind me of "Dream Team") First thing today I realised that PJ can't train with the club Saturday or play Sunday because we are away. It was our turn to wash the shirts and so I have to get them to the coach. Frantic phone-calls, problem solved, I can meet him at the back of the school (he's a dad too!) and hand over the bag.
PJ and I watch Dream Team every Sunday night at 8PM. It's our big "one-hour" and we snuggle up and watch a giant screen. I love him so much I am scared to die, scared. Not for me, but I think of him without me and it makes me want to cry. I love Bridie equally as much but it's different, a different kind of love. Later, maybe I'll think about that.
Purple shirts. Who decides to commit a team to playing in purple? The Pope? Or maybe they got a deal. The Catholic Choir Boys United team folded!
I put the shirts against the front door because I'm forgetful. Not even someone as stupid as me could step over the shirts and not pick them up. What's that called? Meta-memory, I think, where we actively learn techniques to prevent forgetting. Yeah, I did a psychology degree. I wonder where all my student buddies are now? I know where John is: John who was hit by a drunken driver with his fiancé and they both were thrown off a bridge. She died, he spent months in a coma. He was a brilliant footballer, could have been a pro but he wanted to go to university.
Oh, wow, the soccer at Uni. I was never that good, skills-wise but I was strong and very fast and could run forever (I wish I was half as fast and powerful now). John looked the spitting image of Liverpool's Steve McManaman back then and he could dribble, oh, could he dribble! Three times he "gave me" two goals in a game. Once I asked him why he never gave me a hat-trick and he said "Are you mad? You go loopy when you score. If you scored a hat-trick you'd never come back to earth!"
I remember once he banged a corner in, not an up-down looped cross, but low and flat like Steve Coppell used to hit them. I dived forward and headed in at the near post, best goal I ever scored. I went up the field like an orang-utan on cocaine (yes I'm red-haired, Welsh-Irish) with one of the other side chasing after me with my ruined spectacles.
I enjoyed Uni. I loved the work, ran the student newsletter, got involved in the debating society, was a student representative, played soccer for the department, learned photography and dark-room techniques, worked selling double-glazing in an office in a brothel, once delivered a suspect package for a VERY heavy Liverpool villain. Was loaned a Rolls-Royce for the weekend, once. Yay, times when.
Hell, better get in this car and take the kids to school.
We go out the back way. We live in a converted barn which overlooks a racecourse and just beyond, a canal and a river. Behind us there is a trout lake and a bird sanctuary (and there's the gravel-pit). I love this place. It pains me to think we might have to move because my choice of a life as a writer keeps us (relatively) poor.
Poor? Hah! What a laugh. My kids in a day get more than I had in all my childhood. This isn't a dirty council house. I'm not a smoking, gambling, heavy-drinking father. Debbie hasn't deserted her children. PJ and Bridie will never end up in children's homes. What I have now was beyond all those clichéd "wildest dreams".
Enough of poor. Yes, we'll have to move "down", but we'll still have four bedrooms, central heating, telephone, broadband, good furniture, a nice address. It's laughable what people can sometimes call "distress". If you are talking STRESS then that's a different matter.
Part of the financial recovery plan involved trading in the super-dooper company car (a BMW X5) and taking this little Mini-Cooper. Depending on mileage we could be as much as £300 a month better off. That's about a third of my monthly earnings! Talk about obscene.
I thought I would hate losing the Beemer but this little car is FUN and already I'm beginning to slag off "those 4 x 4 gas-guzzlers". Some people just don't care enough about the planet (unlike me, who drives a mini.)
I open the electric gates. Electric gates! We had to have them. We used to get deer in the garden every day and they eat anything and everything. (Except, for some reason known only to God, Lavender). Thinking about it, why didn't we just fill the garden with Lavender? That has to be cheaper than electric gates.
The gates open and we are out. The kids are NOT fighting. Note by the writing that this is a rare occurrence. I hate the way, not that they have sibling rivalry blah-blah, but the constant nature of the mutual, subtle undermining, the bitternesses, their dirty war. It makes me sad and is a major source of stress for me.
When we got the mini (days ago) I promised we wouldn't go up the back lane. I turn up the back lane. Heck using the lane saves 15 minutes a day!
We pass the other houses. An assistant Chief Constable and his teacher-wife, a self-employed business man, divorcee with new girlfriend, a guy in computers, sweet, gentle wife, two lovely daughters same age as our kids…
Fuck! The gate is chained up. Someone likes to chain the gate up. I can go 200 yards the other way and still go up the lane, BUT THEY NEVER ASKED ME.
So I get out of the car, unchain the fucking gate (one night I'm coming out here with some industrial sheers, ha-ha-fucking-ha…), get back in the car and we are off up the lane.
On the left is the gravel pit workings. The gravel pits near us were 'worked-out" years ago and we have two pretty lakes (one is the bird sanctuary) and a few reclaimed fields, heavily planted. Twenty years from now this will all be forest again. I wonder, thousands of years on will they be able to tell that someone took a few layers out from under the ground?
I read up on gravel, shale etc once upon a time. There's something raw and primaeval about the history of ice-ages, deposits, long-slow rivers, how once there were jungles, lush forest,
and the slow drip, drip, drip of time.
The workings are rust-brown, not rusty but laced with a local dust-colour that looks like rust. Debbie is always complaining that our house is the dustiest we have ever lived in.
Over on the right are loads of Canada Geese. They seem to settle in this field most nights. Did you know that Geese on the floor are a gaggle but in the air they're a skein? I mention this to the kids (again) and they say "Yes, Dad!" (again)
"OK, I say, name a part of you that exists and doesn't exist, and I don't mean 'hidden' like your tongue."
They don't know so I tell them. Your lap.
I sometimes wonder about things like "lap". How many other things are there like this?
There are two deer further up the lane but they skip, skip then dive into the bushes. I don't remember what these deer-types are, but at night we get a different type, funny little things, about the size of a large dog, and they have big arses that stick up. We get badgers, all sorts of rodents. There's a big owl, a woodpecker and a big bird of prey, I think it's a buzzard. It's nice here, very rural, yet only a mile from the railway station. (I am so deprived.)
This lane is hundreds of years old, might be thousands of years old. After The First Battle of Newbury, the Parliamentary Army marched right by here (where we wait to pull out) after the so-typed "inconclusive" battle. They went on to Brimpton and Aldermaston (where Rupert attacked their rear), then Reading, then a hero's return into London.
It boggles me to know that ten thousand men marched past here, less than four hundred years ago, bloodied, relieved to be alive.
I can SMELL them.
We are waiting to pull out. On Bridie's birthday three years ago I went to pull out (driving another small car.) I realised that a car was coming too fast. I stopped with my nose in the road, the car swerved, but clipped us, crossed the road and had a head on crash. Because the energy was dissipated over three cars, nobody was hurt, but had he been two inches more to the left we would probably have been killed or seriously injured. Had he been two inches more to the right, we would have been uninjured but then they would have had a head-on crash with no energy removed and the deaths would have been the other side of the road.
I shouldn't come this way.
The top road, when I do get out, runs past Greenham Common Air-Base, where the peace-Protest Camps were, where B-52s and Cruise Missiles were stored. Is there not something heavily spiritual to think that pike-men walked across this common, then great weapons of destruction were stored here, now people walk their dogs or go jogging?
Can't you feel the dark, dark presences of it all?
Golf Club to the right. Money. 4 x 4s, old men with red faces and funny trousers. Further on we pass new estates, Tescos, a Retail Park. This road is going to be impossible in a year or so. Why don’t planners plan?
Once we get over the roundabout and past the college (why am I not teaching creative writing there?) we pass the long line of kids walking to school. It's funny seeing the ages, shapes and sizes, and the tiny rebellions. The boys all leave their shirts hanging out and ties undone until they approach the gate where the tuck in and tidy up!
Seeing the older girls turning into women makes me so aware of Bridie growing and all the young-adult stuff we will soon be facing, all the angst and hormonal stuff.
I get to the school and meet PJ's soccer coach. Apart from my family I think he's the only person who uses my real name. Most people call me Alex.
We stop and the kids get out. The coach comes over. He's hardly recognisable in a smart suit, collar and tie. When I was a running coach I often met people I couldn't place because I'd only ever seen them in shorts and top. My favourite line when meeting the prettier female runners was, "Didn't recognise you with yer clothes on…"
Gary takes the shirts. We chat. The game on Sunday is in the afternoon against the side currently top of the league. PJ is desperate to play and I have to try (later) to negotiate an early return from our trip away. I think about Gary who LOOKS LIKE he's a strong, dominating presence but he doesn't "command" the boys and they don't listen well.
That is interesting. I should write about it some time.
I set off back. Now I'm in the traffic jams which normally I avoid, dropping the kids earlier in both time and distance.
I am FREAKED about wasting time and I discovered I could save ten minutes twice a day by doing X.
Silly? No. 10 x 2 x 5 x 40 = 4,000 minutes = 66.67 Hours gained a year. I can write 75,000 words in that time, a shorter novel!
Now decision time. Should I stop off at Tescos, buy the Independent and something for lunch (but the time, the time!) or zoom home.
Zoom home!
I pass some sheltered housing for "people with learning difficulties". It's interesting how the euphemisms change. Once we would have said "Mongols" (and some said worse) then Downs Syndrome. Will there ever come a time when someone will say, "We should not categorise them by inflicting the presumption of 'learning difficulties' "
I have to say I LOATHE "political correctness", but don't even go there. I've just remembered the six weeks I did working with handicapped children when I was a mature student doing that psychology degree. That was a tough time and there were other complexities. I remember the director of the home taking me to a hospital to show me what serious handicap was like. It was vision that I've almost blocked out but was the most uncomfortable hour of my life and I felt ashamed, inadequate.
Coming back past the Golf Club, a Range-Rover is trying to exit and the man at the wheel absolutely GLARES at me, full of hate. I'm amazed. Is he sick, unwell, mentally ill?
I turn down the lane (no vehicles it says) and pass the Nature Reserve.
Nature reserve. Oh, I'm sorry, can't rain today, it just wouldn't be right. Ask someone else.
This "Nature Reserve" is a WOOD. That's it. A WOOD. When we were kids we just went to these places. It's amazing how the countryside disappeared. Did we trespass then, or were there really hundreds of places you could simply "go"?
That's what I remember. Blue Bell wood, The Gollers, The Quarry, The Lighthouse, The Dingle, The Canal. My recall is of freedom, not fences and No Entry signs. What’s that song about a tree in a museum?
I went down into the Nature Reserve/Wood on Christmas Day with Debbie and the kids, and discovered "coppicing". They cut down trees and encourage new growths around the stump. You get thinner, more useful branches then. I found that thought-provoking at the time, then blow me if two days later on a walk in Buckinghamshire I found myself in another "coppice". I had spent God knows how many years thinking coppice = copse, ie: just another name for a wood, a small wood.
(Must look up coppicing on the internet.)
I had used the word "coppice" in a story in October, but then as a surname. I wonder why? How the mind works!
Nearly home. Over on the bird-sanctuary lake there's a flurry of activity, some big sea-birds. There are some twitchers (bird-watchers) walking up the lane. One glares at me (How DARE you drive a car down MY path). That's the second time I've been glared at with hatred or near hatred in five minutes. Both times by red-faced middle-aged "country-types" both of whom look like they haven't had sex in a while.
Hello? IT'S NOT MY FAULT!
Almost there, I slow as I pass the end house because if I buzz the electric gates through the gap in the fence, the gates start opening and I save thirty seconds when I get outside the house. Silly? A minute, four times a day, twenty minutes a week, 800 a year, That's 13.33 HOURS.
Obsessive. WHO is obsessive?
An obsessive writer would be one who switches the kettle on and then goes to switch the computer on, then goes out to put the tea-bag in and pop the toast on, then goes back to see the computer just coming on-screen. You can write a paragraph before the kettle clicks and the toast pops. A paragraph a day is seven paragraphs a week. That's 364 paragraphs a year, 100 pages a year!
I wouldn't need to obsess like this if it wasn't for wasteful things like the school-run. School-runs are an AFFLICTION. They take away the writer from what matters, the real world, where important things happen, where connections are made.
The school-run is simply "dead time", damnit!
3,314 words
Poetry the Greatest Literary Art?
I've said for years that Short-Story writing is a higher-state art than novels (and I've often been frustrated by how "blind" people are to the finer points of shorts-writing.
But now I'm studyng poetry a lot more seriously, I'm coming to agree with whoever it was said that poetry is the pinnacle.
I'm finding it REALLY hard to get to grips with.
I now see (in my behaviour) the same kind of lame lack of insight (me into poetry) as I often complain about when talking of other readers looking at short-stories.
What worries me (or is it more it explains stuff?) is that out there may be people reading quality short-stories and totally "missing" them, just as I suspect i would often miss the quality poem if it was submitted to me.
I'm definitely getting better, but I think it's going to take me 12 months hard work reading poems, writing poems, reading ABOUT poems, reading "How to read a poem" books etc just to have half an idea.
But watch this space.
If I live long enough, I WILL crack it.
alx
But now I'm studyng poetry a lot more seriously, I'm coming to agree with whoever it was said that poetry is the pinnacle.
I'm finding it REALLY hard to get to grips with.
I now see (in my behaviour) the same kind of lame lack of insight (me into poetry) as I often complain about when talking of other readers looking at short-stories.
What worries me (or is it more it explains stuff?) is that out there may be people reading quality short-stories and totally "missing" them, just as I suspect i would often miss the quality poem if it was submitted to me.
I'm definitely getting better, but I think it's going to take me 12 months hard work reading poems, writing poems, reading ABOUT poems, reading "How to read a poem" books etc just to have half an idea.
But watch this space.
If I live long enough, I WILL crack it.
alx
Crit Round-Up and Stuff
Primary Session finished as follows. Interesting that the most discussed story had one less crit
8-32
9-31
9-24
9-22
9-20
9-16
We've also critiqued and discussed a story from a top author.
I couldn't write yesterday/today but have been on a submissions binge. Have now exceeded my monthly subs target by 55% and have my highest number of "out there"'s ever. Thuis is what comes from writing a lot but NT subbing and then finding you havean overflowing hard-disk.
Throw in a lost spreadsheet and I've had to search everywhere trying to work out what has been subbed where.
Argh!!
Boot Campers now up to 108 subs for the month
Three days now and there's another (minor) deadline.
In my own case, it's lucky I got ahead of schedule for word-count as two days with a rotten head cold have dragged me back into the realms of mortals.
8-32
9-31
9-24
9-22
9-20
9-16
We've also critiqued and discussed a story from a top author.
I couldn't write yesterday/today but have been on a submissions binge. Have now exceeded my monthly subs target by 55% and have my highest number of "out there"'s ever. Thuis is what comes from writing a lot but NT subbing and then finding you havean overflowing hard-disk.
Throw in a lost spreadsheet and I've had to search everywhere trying to work out what has been subbed where.
Argh!!
Boot Campers now up to 108 subs for the month
Three days now and there's another (minor) deadline.
In my own case, it's lucky I got ahead of schedule for word-count as two days with a rotten head cold have dragged me back into the realms of mortals.
Beaten to it: The prompts
I was beaten to it this morning, so try these prompts from another BCer
I love to talk, late at night
Cardboard cutout man meets silhouette woman
The red-eyed pioneers
facing the dark and making the desert green
At sundown now the windows had gone gold
Dumping him behind a fridge magnet
There were old men sitting on the bollards,
puffing smoke across the sea
She was a friendly sort of dog
The sad demise of prozac woman
Death of an Actress
Gun Control
The growing years are a cruel squadron
The Devil's Spleen
Pinball Witch
A box of truisms shaped like a coffin
The tunes that hang on pegs in the cloakrooms of the mind
I love to talk, late at night
Cardboard cutout man meets silhouette woman
The red-eyed pioneers
facing the dark and making the desert green
At sundown now the windows had gone gold
Dumping him behind a fridge magnet
There were old men sitting on the bollards,
puffing smoke across the sea
She was a friendly sort of dog
The sad demise of prozac woman
Death of an Actress
Gun Control
The growing years are a cruel squadron
The Devil's Spleen
Pinball Witch
A box of truisms shaped like a coffin
The tunes that hang on pegs in the cloakrooms of the mind
Crits Cleared Before Deadline
Stories in late Friday Night
All cleared (8/9 detailed crits) by midnight Monday.
9 crits, 32 posts
9 crits, 24 posts
9 crits, 21 posts
9 crits, 18 posts
8 crits, 21 posts
8 crits, 14 posts
0 recipes
0 people talking about their new cat
0 flames
All cleared (8/9 detailed crits) by midnight Monday.
9 crits, 32 posts
9 crits, 24 posts
9 crits, 21 posts
9 crits, 18 posts
8 crits, 21 posts
8 crits, 14 posts
0 recipes
0 people talking about their new cat
0 flames
Monday, 16 April 2007
A Little Brown Dog in the Rain
More Notes
Getting to the Heart
Beginning writers, almost all of them, exhibit the same problems. They tend to think in terms of plots, clever ideas, twists, surprises. They tend to create characters that are simple, one dimensional, stereotypical, or “stock”, or they create what they imagine are “better” characters, stereotypes with a reverse image: the hit-man who loves his Momma, or the bully who is afraid of the dark, the smiling priest who is an abuser.
If the beginning writer becomes ‘conscious’ of being like other writers he may go to great lengths to get away from the stock character in a classic situation, doing a volte face or springing a not-quite-believable extraordinary change. The result is low credibility and little or no reader satisfaction.
The singular thing I find in beginning writers is no writer.
That is, the writing, so often could be by “any beginner”. There is little or no voice, no personality, no accent, no dialect, no attitude which obviously is Jack or definitely Jill, (rather than any old Tom Dick or Harriette). The heart is missing, nothing beats, there is no ache, no sense of having been invited into another mental or spiritual world. After reading beginners’ stories we get no sense of the writer, the author, the person, the dark recesses of the mind. We have the feeling that the words on the page are false, mere cheap and easy constructions, superficialities, distractions, asides, falsenesses.
If the beginner goes to his own life for material, in some ways the problem becomes worse. Now we get apparent truthfulness, for isn’t John writing about his lost love? Isn’t Jill talking about a cheating husband? Why then do these stories too, echo with emptiness and reek of artifice?
Because, there is no heart, no soul, no nakedness, no unconsciously made connection, no risk, no blatant truth, no smell of the inner person.
It’s simply falseness, like a celebrity’s plastic smile.
How then, do we avoid these stories?
Well, my first approach as a teacher is to suggest beginners write a lot of stories in a short a span of time as possible and then to expect the clumsy twists-in-the-tail, expect the crude flip-flop characters, the obvious stories, the simple, linear, superficial plots. While the beginner learns basic rules of craft he is also “burning off” the bulk of those awful stories, those same stories all beginners seem determined to write.
This time is tough for these writers. Everything they do is blue-pencilled by their cruel taskmaster. The stories are stamped with “cliché”, “stereotype”, “stock”, “samey” and “so what?” and life, for a while seems ever uphill.
But it’s only after the beginner learns the hard way that plot-driven stories are devoid of resonance, weight and deep believability that they are prepared to alter their approach and seriously consider the power of character, the effects of theme and the extra textures that come from language.
It is now that we can really talk about the opening, the setting, the character, voice, tone, musicality. Finally they are prepared to listen (and thankfully, they are not quite so eager to write “Mrs Jones’s Funeral”).
Now we can get into an area of greater difficulty and subtlety. We can talk about “writing thing that matter”, “saying things that resonate”, “going naked” and “telling real truths”.
The writer John Ravenscroft has talked about ‘The Land of the Scary’ and I have said much the same even if I am only satisfied when travelling there. I have also talk about going naked, of outwitting the sentinels, and of accessing the depths, surprising one’s self.
Think for a moment about daily life, how superficial most things are, how we glibly lie and accept those lies, how we are trivial, duplicitous, deal in clichés, bigotry, simplifications, sound-bytes and misinformation. We do this mostly all the time. Listen to a conversation and hear repetition, “you know” and cliché after cliché upon cliché. We are all, almost, sailing alone, rarely connecting, rarely telling a deep truth or hearing one.
Most of the time we say stuff we know will be half-heard and half-absorbed by people who don’t particularly care. In writing, this kind of communication is the womag story: simple plots and trite characterisation, everything signposted, and that’s it, next story please. A little beyond this is the formulaic romance, the books you know pretty much from cover to cover before you’ve bought this month’s batch.
But step beyond here into the lower reaches of other genres, like the puzzle-style crime novel and we are still in the land where behind closed doors we ask SFW? (So F-— What?) but in politer circles we might say it’s a DIM book. Does it Matter?
I’m aware that thrillers, good mysteries, and romances may be written well artificially plotted and peopled with simplistic characters or caricatures and genuinely entertain. Fine, fine, fine, but do these stay with us? Do they make us feel? Do they change lives? Do they change the way we think? Do they alter our state, or disturb our steady state?
No they do not. They fill time and kill trees.
I’m talking, then, about writing stories with weight, with power. Stories which can move us, deeply, heavily, meaningfully; stories which when finished leave us feeling slightly different. We need to take a deep breath, rest, absorb, wait. The story has stepped inside us.
Does this mean “a literary story”?
Tricky question. If asked it, ask the questioner to define “literary”. Do they mean arty-farty? Do they mean highly-languaged? Do they mean dealing with minutiae or deep philosophical issues? Do they mean, “There aren’t any guns”? We need agreement before we continue.
For the purposes of this discussion I consider genre stories, non-literary stories as highly dependent on plot, on what happens, and when it happens. The better kind of fiction, more meaningful fiction “carries something”. As well as what happens, there is a why, perhaps a how, but what matters is not the action but its meaning. From the reader’s perspective that action may or may not be vivid, but it’s the meaning of that action we are here for.
So in the genre story, perhaps Jack returns to the bar to confront his tormentors. There’s a great fight, some gun gymnastics perhaps. End.
Maybe, feeling in a good mood, the writer might tack on some guilt, some remorse, or one cool final comment, but it’s still tacked on. The resonance is like a minor electric shock, a tickle, a flourish.
In the more serious story (and it can be as exciting as the genre story) the facts of the return may well be the same but the writer is more interested in motives, reasons, choices made, and why they are made. Why not simply walk away? Why not simply refuse to go back? If he doesn’t go back is it cowardice, apathy or a greater kind of strength? Done well, this kind of work lifts us, makes us learn about life. Both styles of writing seek to entertain, but the genre story does it superficially, on the surface, pressing well-known buttons and, however well it works, it’s still DIM. It doesn’t matter.
But the quality story still entertains. As Raymond Carver said even literary stories set out to entertain. The differences lie in what we seek. Do we seek cheap thrills or satisfying adventures?
OK, so I am talking to writers who want to entertain, but they also want to linger in the heart or the soul. They want to reach the reader in some way, to say something about life, about the human experience. After their story has been read they hope to stay with the reader, ideally forever.
Small task, eh? The next question is how? And the issues are how do we access these other kinds of stories, these deeper connections?
I’ve mentioned Dorothea Brande before. She posed the situation where two writers see an incident. Let’s say it’s a small dog struck by a car. To one of the writers, this immediately “impinges”. It feels important, and meaningful, it rattles internal connections. The writer can feel the event sticking, and for whatever reason it matters. It is the opposite of DIM.
But the second writer? Nah, dog under a car, let’s move on.
What, Brande asks, is the difference between the two writers? Why did the event affect one, connect and impinge for one, but not the other? In other situations the uncaring writer seems to care more. It’s not just “sensitivity”.
What it is, Brande says, is connection, something primitive is happening. Some element in the event connects to something in the soul, the heart, the memory of one writer. It’s a key, a viral fit. The question is what is that fit, what is the event saying to me, how can I find the answer without damaging the connection?
Later I hope to show you how to make those connections happen, how to write drunk, to flash, to work without seeing your words, to “spike your soul”. It may or not be The Land of the Scary, but it for sure is a rewarding place to visit.
Before we continue we need to talk a little psychology. Think, for a moment about all of the things you have done, things that have happened to you. Think how little you can easily recall. Your psyche chose to “lose” many things and remember others. It embellishes, distorts, changes, protects.
Now take the incident of the dog to an extreme for a moment. Imagine that at the age of ten you saw a dog just like that and it ended up dead. Maybe you killed it or maybe your drunken father was driving the car and killed it. Maybe your father had just punched you (or worse) and you looked out of the window and saw this sad little dog, walking in the rain. Back then you did not know a connection was made. You wanted to forget shame, anger, horror, humiliation, or abuse and you managed it (or rather your psyche did).
But now something is burning inside. You don’t quite know it but you feel it, feel it in a massive, swollen, slightly disturbing way.
Now you can pull on size sixteen boots and say, “Hey, brain, I wanna know. So tell me, dog, feeling, why do I feel so strongly? Why does that matter to me and not to my fellow-writer?”
Now the brain is going to roll over with its legs in the air and say, “Fair cop, Guvnor. See, I have been suppressing this stuff for forty years, but you’ve asked me so I’m gonna come clean and tell you what happened that day in that bedroom.”
Yeah, right.
No, you see unconscious thoughts are unconscious for a reason. This psyche of yours doesn’t want you to know! Freud knew of this, hypnotists know of this. If you take the memory on, head-first you will lose. The sentinels of the psyche will trick you, and give you a trivial reason for the connection.
In fact many beginning writers often reach a stage where they invent just such scenarios. The “hidden” reason is always just below the surface and always the most obvious one, the cliché, the one that makes us yawn. This is the stuff of cheap melodrama, of The Human Jungle.
First let me tell you how I access the secret memory.
I don’t.
Brande argues that something in the incident connects primitively, even primeval. Then let it!
Now if you ignore this completely, chances are the old incident will stop vibrating, and gradually, the dog-incident will fade and slowly subside. But we writers have to keep the stove burning, keep the wooden-spoon turning. We don’t let the connection go, nor do we investigate it. Instead all we do is remember the dog!
We remember the dog, the ache, the “something in the gut” by “visiting” the feeling at least once a day. Maybe we have a white board above our writing desk and on it we write, little brown dog in the rain?????
Every day we see “little brown dog in the rain?????” and remember the dog, the rain, the car, and deep in us something stirs.
Now, really, I don’t care what that connection is. But just for the sake of this essay, lets say it was a terribly embarrassing moment. Ten years old and you walked in on your father having sex with your mother. Perhaps he laughed, your mother laughed, and for one split second you hated, hated.
Now YOU don’t remember, but the dog does, the dog-connection does, and every time you deliberately remember the dog, when you keep looking, keep stirring, those deep connections are energised.
But what connections? Who knows? That’s the beauty and excitement of the process.
Deep in you, in that sewer, amino-acids surge and split, bubble and seethe. There for a split second was that memory, your sweet, innocent mother fucking like a horse, and her red face suddenly ugly. But you never catch this memory, you never quite see it. But its essence, its essence, that connects. It connects to some scene in Reservoir Dogs, to a line from The Tempest, to a picture you once saw of a little boy humiliated by some girl, and your first rejection at a dance, and...
Real things, imagined things, film, books, plays, TV, dreams, bits and pieces, combinations, new formations (Shakespeare with a .45?) occur, but all connected to that disturbance in the depths, that venting anxiety, that suppressed memory.
Now, this is the bit people fail to capture. We don’t ever, realy, truly need to unearth that original memory. The in flagrante delicto incident can be left buried, untouched. What we have to tap into is its psychological force, its power, the pressures it brought into your life, the ways it made you what you are now. Do you make love in the dark, afraid to see someone you think pretty suddenly lustful and full of heat? Are you perhaps misogynistic or lonely, afraid to enter the world of sex and love because something way back has corrupted you?
Don't answer that. It doesn’t matter! What matters is accessing the pressure!
We need to keep accessing the feelings of wrongness, our dissonances, the unresolved tensions. The more we stir the more connections we make, all barbs sticking to this particular thread of wrongness, the thread undone by seeing a little brown dog in the rain.
And understand this. If my dog in the rain connects to that bedroom, and even though I never remember the bedroom, but the hooks are there, the pressure and stickiness - when my connections start to catch, they will be, maybe, something from Reservoir Dogs, but maybe also Kathy from 4B, and she’s walking alongside John Wayne and I can hear Dylan Thomas, the slow black, sloeblack sea, and suddenly I think of my first wife, and...
All these things are what make me, me, utterly individual. When you see a film it is not my film, but each of us is a filter, a sticky ball, a builder and deconstructor all at the same time taking all of history, shuffling it up, then bringing it, some of it, out to the light.
But how? It seems if we TRY we kill it. How?
Years ago I tried in a poem to explain why I couldn’t come home, have a drink and just turn into a writer. I said something like “At work I am steel and glass, but here I need to be wood.”
In the context we are now discussing, the problem is we have be wood not steel, to keep tickling the trout, making it (or something) rise to the surface. Try to be steel, grab and it races away into the depths (or we end up with an old boot).
What has to be done is to think in the zone, to look but not look, see but not see, hear deaf. If you like it’s like lying back with a few glasses of wine and remembering the feeling of a film rather than the plot or the dialogue. Just wallow, be near, imagine, sense, but don’t try to make anything happen.
Now sort of listen for a voice, feel for a setting, sense an attitude, try to think of a line, an opening. This sounds bizarre but once you have done it you will understand. I believe that the so-called “visit of the muse” occurs when we get just such an opening voice, character, or setting because some unconscious pressure has caused a welling up and an eruption of story.
I believe we can create “favourable conditions” and “encourage” openings to appear in this way. Writing every day, thinking like a writer, being more and more sensible and sensitive increases the number of antennae we have and trains our intuitive delve-and-connect procedures. I am so old and crusty now I can almost “will openings to rise” and I do this because I am always thinking about why does that matter, when this doesn’t, why do I like this but don’t care about that?
I’m sorry if what follows seems a little esoteric. It isn’t, truly. Believe first that the connection (the little brown dog) triggers a fundamental memory (the hidden, repressed memories of that bedroom) and by keeping the dog-feeling alive we energise the old memories and create new connections.
Now believe that as the pressure increases and we approach a sense of an opening, that opening maps from the pressure (the nuclear, pulsing core of the original incident). Hold that.
Now the voice, setting, a character begins to come, and if we don’t grab at it, it becomes less nebulous. Quite often we almost have a sentence or more “close but not it” when suddenly it tunes in, like first hearing static, then garbled stations, then almost the station, and then suddenly high-fidelity.
Bang, when this hits it arrives with a tremendous force of rightness, with an inevitability. This is like when we talk as if the story was always there waiting for me to write it or others talk of the muse. But the muse is us and great stories come from us, the heart, the gut, the soul, the loins.
Now, here is the bit that might be argued as esoteric or mystical. I believe that the voice, the setting, tone, and characters chosen in the opening connect to us primitively and express us primitively. That is, I believe that if we have come to the voice with patience, by looking the other way and avoiding eye-contact with the demons, or sentinels, or trying too hard to connect to that bedroom, our psyche gives us the voice it wants.
Now if that is true, the character, voice and tone contain the essence of the story. The tone came because of the pressure and the voice came because of the pressure. That means that the voice and character, the tone, and the setting embody the uncertain feelings we are trying to articulate.
What comes now might be a story about a little brown dog. It might be a story about a boy seeing something he wishes he hadn’t. But it might be a third thing, a fourth, or a fifth - but, whatever it is, the story is the one that wanted to be written, the one that was driven by the key (dog) and the old incident (but not the incident itself, rather the human response).
I believe that the opening embodies what I need or want to say, that the characters, language, tone, attitude will ‘look after” the theme. I can trust them to write the right story.
OK, we’ve talked about when life pops up and smacks us. We see a car smash, a dog in the rain, experience pleasure or pain, but what do we do when we feel we are in a desert, nothing is coming our way?
Read. I have hundreds of books with scribbles in them. Reading a book or a story or a poem often sparks an idea, a connection. The richer the book, the more barbs.
Listen to the news. Not just the main news, but the BBC World Service, or CNN if you’re a Brit or news in other languages if you can understand them. Read news-papers, but read the smaller stories, the odd, the quirky. Read like a writer. Imagine combinations of stories. You read about a bloody murder, you read about genetic modification, but what if these were combined?
Browse junk shops for old books, scrapbooks, photographs. You can do this and look for curiosities that amuse you, but also search for those things that hit you and connect more deeply. Look at junk as a writer. Why do people throw away family photographs? What does that say about their attitude to their heritage? Who ARE these people in funny clothes? How would you like your photographs thrown away?
Read books of photographs and live in them. Read about 9-11 of course, look at the pictures, yes, but really look at some of the smaller, less well-known pictures, weep when you see the worst, be there, identify, empathise.
And when you are really struggling (remember to be a writer you should write every day) start to employ tactics to beat the blues, unlock the doors, dodge the mental guards.
Smell things, look at food, stand still and people-watch. Be a spy and follow someone, get on the wrong bus and go the wrong place. Turn round in a line of people and face the wrong way. Stop skimming, start seeing.
Try the internet. Pull up Google and type in a number and press search. I typed in 456 and discovered Aeschylus the Greek father of the tragedy. It gave me both a wonderful story and the most bizarre death ever!
Type combinations of words, random, silly, chocolate wire resulted in 510,000 hits including a management company and “our keepsake gold crazy wire heart has a hinged lid that can be used to store those precious items and comes with an assortment of five of our chocolate dipped strawberries.” A story? No, but I bet I could get a great one if I followed a few links. Learn to open your heart, mind, soul, every site is a connection, two sites may be a unique combination and a stunning new idea.
Theme
Ideas are one thing. Stories are another. What connects an idea to a story and what makes the story ultimately satisfying? My answer is usually “theme” or “premise” the story’s “why”, its point, its message. But hopefully from all that’s gone before you should have TWO why’s, why is the author writing this, and what is he trying to say? Not always the same thing.
Sometimes we have an instinct, an intuition, the nagging feeling. I can now encourage mine to form openings. What if you can’t?
Recently while I was teaching, we took a break, sat outside in an English Country Garden drinking cold white wine and talking about writing. One of my students “had an idea”. His idea was that a woman beekeeper was giving men a very hard time. My student was fascinated by some of the sexual facts about Queen Bees, and drones etc.
DIM (Does it Matter?)
I actually said SFW, So F——g What?
This is a cruel but ultimately useful test of an idea. Ideas, when articulated are rarely THE idea, they are either stage seven of a story or merely part of an idea, a symptom rather than cause.
In this case the poor student was asked, time and again DIM or SFW.
Why was the woman a bee-keeper, why not a seamstress? Why in a village? By challenging every thought, pushing, pushing, pushing, we first got, “Well she hates men, so she abuses them”. But why did she hate men? “Because she was abused in her teens?” Why? By whom? And what has this to do with bees? “Because she was fascinated by bees and was seduced by an old bee-keeper.”
Now an idea was taking shape. A young girl fascinated by bees is abused, grows up to be beautiful, a beekeeper herself and she abuses men as a kind of revenge. Suddenly all the beekeeping facts buzzed (sorry!!) as metaphors, great scenes arising like the idea that she can allow hundreds of males bees to swarm on her because she knows how to stop them hurting her. She exploits them for honey etc.
Now in this specific exercise we clinically examined the ideas, pushed until we reached a fundamental point then allowed the story and its attendant metaphors to blossom. Here we appear to be mechanical, whereas earlier we appeared to be doing something far more uncontrolled, even spiritual.
This is true, but becoming a writer is about being mechanical and factual between stories and assimilating craft, techniques, strategies then, but when we actually come to writing the stories we need to be as loose and fluid as we can, to be ‘drunk” and write drunk.
Mechanically we can often analyse half-ideas and seek their origin. Once the core is found we develop the reason. You and I may have the same start-points but produce different stories with very different messages.
“Spiritually” inspired by the little brown dog, we can coax ideas to the surface, bring out a voice. If the voice and tone comes perfectly-formed the story’s theme will be embedded in the opening. If not, perhaps we need a little of the beekeeper process.
The art comes when we can make connections and “fly them” without ever imposing, without becoming left-brained, critical, or analytical. So, for example, in the beekeeper story I would have advised only: “Imagine you are the young lady, the aspiring beekeeper. You were abused. Now you are a woman, great looking. You keep bees. Be yourself, act yourself. What do you do? The point is that the main drive has been established, namely that she is paying “men” back for her abuse. Much of the story will write itself.
When moving from beginner to better writer, many things which will eventually be right-brained, seemingly casual, ‘drunk” or serendipitous will in fact be “worked at”. Slowly but surely the writer learns to be more unfettered, to access the less logical. It takes trust, the ability to let go off the poolside and swim in deeper waters.
Now, when I write I rarely articulate my story’s theme. I simply “know” the whole story, opening, plot, point, even the sense of the language, the tone, the point of view, a general feel-sense of the ending. It’s all there, and I could lie to you and introduce my muse.
But really I write because in there, all the secret stuff, it’s very messy. It erupts often. There are pressures to be relieved. Sometimes it’s because a woman in a shop shouts, “Has anyone seen my seventy-two Wild Swans?” or maybe it’s a little brown dog, a little brown dog in the rain.
Getting to the Heart
Beginning writers, almost all of them, exhibit the same problems. They tend to think in terms of plots, clever ideas, twists, surprises. They tend to create characters that are simple, one dimensional, stereotypical, or “stock”, or they create what they imagine are “better” characters, stereotypes with a reverse image: the hit-man who loves his Momma, or the bully who is afraid of the dark, the smiling priest who is an abuser.
If the beginning writer becomes ‘conscious’ of being like other writers he may go to great lengths to get away from the stock character in a classic situation, doing a volte face or springing a not-quite-believable extraordinary change. The result is low credibility and little or no reader satisfaction.
The singular thing I find in beginning writers is no writer.
That is, the writing, so often could be by “any beginner”. There is little or no voice, no personality, no accent, no dialect, no attitude which obviously is Jack or definitely Jill, (rather than any old Tom Dick or Harriette). The heart is missing, nothing beats, there is no ache, no sense of having been invited into another mental or spiritual world. After reading beginners’ stories we get no sense of the writer, the author, the person, the dark recesses of the mind. We have the feeling that the words on the page are false, mere cheap and easy constructions, superficialities, distractions, asides, falsenesses.
If the beginner goes to his own life for material, in some ways the problem becomes worse. Now we get apparent truthfulness, for isn’t John writing about his lost love? Isn’t Jill talking about a cheating husband? Why then do these stories too, echo with emptiness and reek of artifice?
Because, there is no heart, no soul, no nakedness, no unconsciously made connection, no risk, no blatant truth, no smell of the inner person.
It’s simply falseness, like a celebrity’s plastic smile.
How then, do we avoid these stories?
Well, my first approach as a teacher is to suggest beginners write a lot of stories in a short a span of time as possible and then to expect the clumsy twists-in-the-tail, expect the crude flip-flop characters, the obvious stories, the simple, linear, superficial plots. While the beginner learns basic rules of craft he is also “burning off” the bulk of those awful stories, those same stories all beginners seem determined to write.
This time is tough for these writers. Everything they do is blue-pencilled by their cruel taskmaster. The stories are stamped with “cliché”, “stereotype”, “stock”, “samey” and “so what?” and life, for a while seems ever uphill.
But it’s only after the beginner learns the hard way that plot-driven stories are devoid of resonance, weight and deep believability that they are prepared to alter their approach and seriously consider the power of character, the effects of theme and the extra textures that come from language.
It is now that we can really talk about the opening, the setting, the character, voice, tone, musicality. Finally they are prepared to listen (and thankfully, they are not quite so eager to write “Mrs Jones’s Funeral”).
Now we can get into an area of greater difficulty and subtlety. We can talk about “writing thing that matter”, “saying things that resonate”, “going naked” and “telling real truths”.
The writer John Ravenscroft has talked about ‘The Land of the Scary’ and I have said much the same even if I am only satisfied when travelling there. I have also talk about going naked, of outwitting the sentinels, and of accessing the depths, surprising one’s self.
Think for a moment about daily life, how superficial most things are, how we glibly lie and accept those lies, how we are trivial, duplicitous, deal in clichés, bigotry, simplifications, sound-bytes and misinformation. We do this mostly all the time. Listen to a conversation and hear repetition, “you know” and cliché after cliché upon cliché. We are all, almost, sailing alone, rarely connecting, rarely telling a deep truth or hearing one.
Most of the time we say stuff we know will be half-heard and half-absorbed by people who don’t particularly care. In writing, this kind of communication is the womag story: simple plots and trite characterisation, everything signposted, and that’s it, next story please. A little beyond this is the formulaic romance, the books you know pretty much from cover to cover before you’ve bought this month’s batch.
But step beyond here into the lower reaches of other genres, like the puzzle-style crime novel and we are still in the land where behind closed doors we ask SFW? (So F-— What?) but in politer circles we might say it’s a DIM book. Does it Matter?
I’m aware that thrillers, good mysteries, and romances may be written well artificially plotted and peopled with simplistic characters or caricatures and genuinely entertain. Fine, fine, fine, but do these stay with us? Do they make us feel? Do they change lives? Do they change the way we think? Do they alter our state, or disturb our steady state?
No they do not. They fill time and kill trees.
I’m talking, then, about writing stories with weight, with power. Stories which can move us, deeply, heavily, meaningfully; stories which when finished leave us feeling slightly different. We need to take a deep breath, rest, absorb, wait. The story has stepped inside us.
Does this mean “a literary story”?
Tricky question. If asked it, ask the questioner to define “literary”. Do they mean arty-farty? Do they mean highly-languaged? Do they mean dealing with minutiae or deep philosophical issues? Do they mean, “There aren’t any guns”? We need agreement before we continue.
For the purposes of this discussion I consider genre stories, non-literary stories as highly dependent on plot, on what happens, and when it happens. The better kind of fiction, more meaningful fiction “carries something”. As well as what happens, there is a why, perhaps a how, but what matters is not the action but its meaning. From the reader’s perspective that action may or may not be vivid, but it’s the meaning of that action we are here for.
So in the genre story, perhaps Jack returns to the bar to confront his tormentors. There’s a great fight, some gun gymnastics perhaps. End.
Maybe, feeling in a good mood, the writer might tack on some guilt, some remorse, or one cool final comment, but it’s still tacked on. The resonance is like a minor electric shock, a tickle, a flourish.
In the more serious story (and it can be as exciting as the genre story) the facts of the return may well be the same but the writer is more interested in motives, reasons, choices made, and why they are made. Why not simply walk away? Why not simply refuse to go back? If he doesn’t go back is it cowardice, apathy or a greater kind of strength? Done well, this kind of work lifts us, makes us learn about life. Both styles of writing seek to entertain, but the genre story does it superficially, on the surface, pressing well-known buttons and, however well it works, it’s still DIM. It doesn’t matter.
But the quality story still entertains. As Raymond Carver said even literary stories set out to entertain. The differences lie in what we seek. Do we seek cheap thrills or satisfying adventures?
OK, so I am talking to writers who want to entertain, but they also want to linger in the heart or the soul. They want to reach the reader in some way, to say something about life, about the human experience. After their story has been read they hope to stay with the reader, ideally forever.
Small task, eh? The next question is how? And the issues are how do we access these other kinds of stories, these deeper connections?
I’ve mentioned Dorothea Brande before. She posed the situation where two writers see an incident. Let’s say it’s a small dog struck by a car. To one of the writers, this immediately “impinges”. It feels important, and meaningful, it rattles internal connections. The writer can feel the event sticking, and for whatever reason it matters. It is the opposite of DIM.
But the second writer? Nah, dog under a car, let’s move on.
What, Brande asks, is the difference between the two writers? Why did the event affect one, connect and impinge for one, but not the other? In other situations the uncaring writer seems to care more. It’s not just “sensitivity”.
What it is, Brande says, is connection, something primitive is happening. Some element in the event connects to something in the soul, the heart, the memory of one writer. It’s a key, a viral fit. The question is what is that fit, what is the event saying to me, how can I find the answer without damaging the connection?
Later I hope to show you how to make those connections happen, how to write drunk, to flash, to work without seeing your words, to “spike your soul”. It may or not be The Land of the Scary, but it for sure is a rewarding place to visit.
Before we continue we need to talk a little psychology. Think, for a moment about all of the things you have done, things that have happened to you. Think how little you can easily recall. Your psyche chose to “lose” many things and remember others. It embellishes, distorts, changes, protects.
Now take the incident of the dog to an extreme for a moment. Imagine that at the age of ten you saw a dog just like that and it ended up dead. Maybe you killed it or maybe your drunken father was driving the car and killed it. Maybe your father had just punched you (or worse) and you looked out of the window and saw this sad little dog, walking in the rain. Back then you did not know a connection was made. You wanted to forget shame, anger, horror, humiliation, or abuse and you managed it (or rather your psyche did).
But now something is burning inside. You don’t quite know it but you feel it, feel it in a massive, swollen, slightly disturbing way.
Now you can pull on size sixteen boots and say, “Hey, brain, I wanna know. So tell me, dog, feeling, why do I feel so strongly? Why does that matter to me and not to my fellow-writer?”
Now the brain is going to roll over with its legs in the air and say, “Fair cop, Guvnor. See, I have been suppressing this stuff for forty years, but you’ve asked me so I’m gonna come clean and tell you what happened that day in that bedroom.”
Yeah, right.
No, you see unconscious thoughts are unconscious for a reason. This psyche of yours doesn’t want you to know! Freud knew of this, hypnotists know of this. If you take the memory on, head-first you will lose. The sentinels of the psyche will trick you, and give you a trivial reason for the connection.
In fact many beginning writers often reach a stage where they invent just such scenarios. The “hidden” reason is always just below the surface and always the most obvious one, the cliché, the one that makes us yawn. This is the stuff of cheap melodrama, of The Human Jungle.
First let me tell you how I access the secret memory.
I don’t.
Brande argues that something in the incident connects primitively, even primeval. Then let it!
Now if you ignore this completely, chances are the old incident will stop vibrating, and gradually, the dog-incident will fade and slowly subside. But we writers have to keep the stove burning, keep the wooden-spoon turning. We don’t let the connection go, nor do we investigate it. Instead all we do is remember the dog!
We remember the dog, the ache, the “something in the gut” by “visiting” the feeling at least once a day. Maybe we have a white board above our writing desk and on it we write, little brown dog in the rain?????
Every day we see “little brown dog in the rain?????” and remember the dog, the rain, the car, and deep in us something stirs.
Now, really, I don’t care what that connection is. But just for the sake of this essay, lets say it was a terribly embarrassing moment. Ten years old and you walked in on your father having sex with your mother. Perhaps he laughed, your mother laughed, and for one split second you hated, hated.
Now YOU don’t remember, but the dog does, the dog-connection does, and every time you deliberately remember the dog, when you keep looking, keep stirring, those deep connections are energised.
But what connections? Who knows? That’s the beauty and excitement of the process.
Deep in you, in that sewer, amino-acids surge and split, bubble and seethe. There for a split second was that memory, your sweet, innocent mother fucking like a horse, and her red face suddenly ugly. But you never catch this memory, you never quite see it. But its essence, its essence, that connects. It connects to some scene in Reservoir Dogs, to a line from The Tempest, to a picture you once saw of a little boy humiliated by some girl, and your first rejection at a dance, and...
Real things, imagined things, film, books, plays, TV, dreams, bits and pieces, combinations, new formations (Shakespeare with a .45?) occur, but all connected to that disturbance in the depths, that venting anxiety, that suppressed memory.
Now, this is the bit people fail to capture. We don’t ever, realy, truly need to unearth that original memory. The in flagrante delicto incident can be left buried, untouched. What we have to tap into is its psychological force, its power, the pressures it brought into your life, the ways it made you what you are now. Do you make love in the dark, afraid to see someone you think pretty suddenly lustful and full of heat? Are you perhaps misogynistic or lonely, afraid to enter the world of sex and love because something way back has corrupted you?
Don't answer that. It doesn’t matter! What matters is accessing the pressure!
We need to keep accessing the feelings of wrongness, our dissonances, the unresolved tensions. The more we stir the more connections we make, all barbs sticking to this particular thread of wrongness, the thread undone by seeing a little brown dog in the rain.
And understand this. If my dog in the rain connects to that bedroom, and even though I never remember the bedroom, but the hooks are there, the pressure and stickiness - when my connections start to catch, they will be, maybe, something from Reservoir Dogs, but maybe also Kathy from 4B, and she’s walking alongside John Wayne and I can hear Dylan Thomas, the slow black, sloeblack sea, and suddenly I think of my first wife, and...
All these things are what make me, me, utterly individual. When you see a film it is not my film, but each of us is a filter, a sticky ball, a builder and deconstructor all at the same time taking all of history, shuffling it up, then bringing it, some of it, out to the light.
But how? It seems if we TRY we kill it. How?
Years ago I tried in a poem to explain why I couldn’t come home, have a drink and just turn into a writer. I said something like “At work I am steel and glass, but here I need to be wood.”
In the context we are now discussing, the problem is we have be wood not steel, to keep tickling the trout, making it (or something) rise to the surface. Try to be steel, grab and it races away into the depths (or we end up with an old boot).
What has to be done is to think in the zone, to look but not look, see but not see, hear deaf. If you like it’s like lying back with a few glasses of wine and remembering the feeling of a film rather than the plot or the dialogue. Just wallow, be near, imagine, sense, but don’t try to make anything happen.
Now sort of listen for a voice, feel for a setting, sense an attitude, try to think of a line, an opening. This sounds bizarre but once you have done it you will understand. I believe that the so-called “visit of the muse” occurs when we get just such an opening voice, character, or setting because some unconscious pressure has caused a welling up and an eruption of story.
I believe we can create “favourable conditions” and “encourage” openings to appear in this way. Writing every day, thinking like a writer, being more and more sensible and sensitive increases the number of antennae we have and trains our intuitive delve-and-connect procedures. I am so old and crusty now I can almost “will openings to rise” and I do this because I am always thinking about why does that matter, when this doesn’t, why do I like this but don’t care about that?
I’m sorry if what follows seems a little esoteric. It isn’t, truly. Believe first that the connection (the little brown dog) triggers a fundamental memory (the hidden, repressed memories of that bedroom) and by keeping the dog-feeling alive we energise the old memories and create new connections.
Now believe that as the pressure increases and we approach a sense of an opening, that opening maps from the pressure (the nuclear, pulsing core of the original incident). Hold that.
Now the voice, setting, a character begins to come, and if we don’t grab at it, it becomes less nebulous. Quite often we almost have a sentence or more “close but not it” when suddenly it tunes in, like first hearing static, then garbled stations, then almost the station, and then suddenly high-fidelity.
Bang, when this hits it arrives with a tremendous force of rightness, with an inevitability. This is like when we talk as if the story was always there waiting for me to write it or others talk of the muse. But the muse is us and great stories come from us, the heart, the gut, the soul, the loins.
Now, here is the bit that might be argued as esoteric or mystical. I believe that the voice, the setting, tone, and characters chosen in the opening connect to us primitively and express us primitively. That is, I believe that if we have come to the voice with patience, by looking the other way and avoiding eye-contact with the demons, or sentinels, or trying too hard to connect to that bedroom, our psyche gives us the voice it wants.
Now if that is true, the character, voice and tone contain the essence of the story. The tone came because of the pressure and the voice came because of the pressure. That means that the voice and character, the tone, and the setting embody the uncertain feelings we are trying to articulate.
What comes now might be a story about a little brown dog. It might be a story about a boy seeing something he wishes he hadn’t. But it might be a third thing, a fourth, or a fifth - but, whatever it is, the story is the one that wanted to be written, the one that was driven by the key (dog) and the old incident (but not the incident itself, rather the human response).
I believe that the opening embodies what I need or want to say, that the characters, language, tone, attitude will ‘look after” the theme. I can trust them to write the right story.
OK, we’ve talked about when life pops up and smacks us. We see a car smash, a dog in the rain, experience pleasure or pain, but what do we do when we feel we are in a desert, nothing is coming our way?
Read. I have hundreds of books with scribbles in them. Reading a book or a story or a poem often sparks an idea, a connection. The richer the book, the more barbs.
Listen to the news. Not just the main news, but the BBC World Service, or CNN if you’re a Brit or news in other languages if you can understand them. Read news-papers, but read the smaller stories, the odd, the quirky. Read like a writer. Imagine combinations of stories. You read about a bloody murder, you read about genetic modification, but what if these were combined?
Browse junk shops for old books, scrapbooks, photographs. You can do this and look for curiosities that amuse you, but also search for those things that hit you and connect more deeply. Look at junk as a writer. Why do people throw away family photographs? What does that say about their attitude to their heritage? Who ARE these people in funny clothes? How would you like your photographs thrown away?
Read books of photographs and live in them. Read about 9-11 of course, look at the pictures, yes, but really look at some of the smaller, less well-known pictures, weep when you see the worst, be there, identify, empathise.
And when you are really struggling (remember to be a writer you should write every day) start to employ tactics to beat the blues, unlock the doors, dodge the mental guards.
Smell things, look at food, stand still and people-watch. Be a spy and follow someone, get on the wrong bus and go the wrong place. Turn round in a line of people and face the wrong way. Stop skimming, start seeing.
Try the internet. Pull up Google and type in a number and press search. I typed in 456 and discovered Aeschylus the Greek father of the tragedy. It gave me both a wonderful story and the most bizarre death ever!
Type combinations of words, random, silly, chocolate wire resulted in 510,000 hits including a management company and “our keepsake gold crazy wire heart has a hinged lid that can be used to store those precious items and comes with an assortment of five of our chocolate dipped strawberries.” A story? No, but I bet I could get a great one if I followed a few links. Learn to open your heart, mind, soul, every site is a connection, two sites may be a unique combination and a stunning new idea.
Theme
Ideas are one thing. Stories are another. What connects an idea to a story and what makes the story ultimately satisfying? My answer is usually “theme” or “premise” the story’s “why”, its point, its message. But hopefully from all that’s gone before you should have TWO why’s, why is the author writing this, and what is he trying to say? Not always the same thing.
Sometimes we have an instinct, an intuition, the nagging feeling. I can now encourage mine to form openings. What if you can’t?
Recently while I was teaching, we took a break, sat outside in an English Country Garden drinking cold white wine and talking about writing. One of my students “had an idea”. His idea was that a woman beekeeper was giving men a very hard time. My student was fascinated by some of the sexual facts about Queen Bees, and drones etc.
DIM (Does it Matter?)
I actually said SFW, So F——g What?
This is a cruel but ultimately useful test of an idea. Ideas, when articulated are rarely THE idea, they are either stage seven of a story or merely part of an idea, a symptom rather than cause.
In this case the poor student was asked, time and again DIM or SFW.
Why was the woman a bee-keeper, why not a seamstress? Why in a village? By challenging every thought, pushing, pushing, pushing, we first got, “Well she hates men, so she abuses them”. But why did she hate men? “Because she was abused in her teens?” Why? By whom? And what has this to do with bees? “Because she was fascinated by bees and was seduced by an old bee-keeper.”
Now an idea was taking shape. A young girl fascinated by bees is abused, grows up to be beautiful, a beekeeper herself and she abuses men as a kind of revenge. Suddenly all the beekeeping facts buzzed (sorry!!) as metaphors, great scenes arising like the idea that she can allow hundreds of males bees to swarm on her because she knows how to stop them hurting her. She exploits them for honey etc.
Now in this specific exercise we clinically examined the ideas, pushed until we reached a fundamental point then allowed the story and its attendant metaphors to blossom. Here we appear to be mechanical, whereas earlier we appeared to be doing something far more uncontrolled, even spiritual.
This is true, but becoming a writer is about being mechanical and factual between stories and assimilating craft, techniques, strategies then, but when we actually come to writing the stories we need to be as loose and fluid as we can, to be ‘drunk” and write drunk.
Mechanically we can often analyse half-ideas and seek their origin. Once the core is found we develop the reason. You and I may have the same start-points but produce different stories with very different messages.
“Spiritually” inspired by the little brown dog, we can coax ideas to the surface, bring out a voice. If the voice and tone comes perfectly-formed the story’s theme will be embedded in the opening. If not, perhaps we need a little of the beekeeper process.
The art comes when we can make connections and “fly them” without ever imposing, without becoming left-brained, critical, or analytical. So, for example, in the beekeeper story I would have advised only: “Imagine you are the young lady, the aspiring beekeeper. You were abused. Now you are a woman, great looking. You keep bees. Be yourself, act yourself. What do you do? The point is that the main drive has been established, namely that she is paying “men” back for her abuse. Much of the story will write itself.
When moving from beginner to better writer, many things which will eventually be right-brained, seemingly casual, ‘drunk” or serendipitous will in fact be “worked at”. Slowly but surely the writer learns to be more unfettered, to access the less logical. It takes trust, the ability to let go off the poolside and swim in deeper waters.
Now, when I write I rarely articulate my story’s theme. I simply “know” the whole story, opening, plot, point, even the sense of the language, the tone, the point of view, a general feel-sense of the ending. It’s all there, and I could lie to you and introduce my muse.
But really I write because in there, all the secret stuff, it’s very messy. It erupts often. There are pressures to be relieved. Sometimes it’s because a woman in a shop shouts, “Has anyone seen my seventy-two Wild Swans?” or maybe it’s a little brown dog, a little brown dog in the rain.
Where does it come from?
Tom C.writing:
I was at work today and it was awful. I share an office with six others and it's far too small, so it's impossible to work properly - you're constantly bombarded by other people's noise. Worse than that, the office opposite us inhabited by people whose habitual tone is the BELLOW!!!!!!! We hear every word of their discussions, louder than our own. It's crazy - in terms of productivity it's simply ineffective.
But at lunchtime, using some of the Boot Camp prompts, I started writing a story. And I fell into some sort of dream state, that's the only way I can describe it. All the noise disappeared and I was alone. I wrote 1500 words during my lunch hour - okay, it might have stretched to an hour and a quarter - and those words just fell out of me. I had an opening line which I thought was strong, and everything followed from that. I found a leading character. A situation emerged. I discovered a back story. And none of it, I swear, none of it I had thought about consciously: it just appeared on the screen in front of me.
Is it good? It's one of those stories where I don't know. It could score 117 easily but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was a 98. Sometimes you're too close to a story to be able to say.
All I can say is that I have never, ever written anything like this before. I'm a bit of a tart, to be honest - I use lots of different styles and voices - but this story has appeared from somewhere completely different, fully formed, quite distinct from anything I've ever done. It's a bit creepy, really, the way this story has just emerged, almost without my intervention.
But I tell you what, this story has come from somewhere. It means something. I don't know what, yet, but I only hope I can do it justice. That character came to life for me this afternoon. I don't know where he came from, but he's alive now, as far as I'm concerned, and I feel I owe it to him to create a decent story for him.
I find it a bit scary when stories come alive like this. It's on the page now, I wrote it, but nonetheless I look at it and think 'did I really write that?'
I was at work today and it was awful. I share an office with six others and it's far too small, so it's impossible to work properly - you're constantly bombarded by other people's noise. Worse than that, the office opposite us inhabited by people whose habitual tone is the BELLOW!!!!!!! We hear every word of their discussions, louder than our own. It's crazy - in terms of productivity it's simply ineffective.
But at lunchtime, using some of the Boot Camp prompts, I started writing a story. And I fell into some sort of dream state, that's the only way I can describe it. All the noise disappeared and I was alone. I wrote 1500 words during my lunch hour - okay, it might have stretched to an hour and a quarter - and those words just fell out of me. I had an opening line which I thought was strong, and everything followed from that. I found a leading character. A situation emerged. I discovered a back story. And none of it, I swear, none of it I had thought about consciously: it just appeared on the screen in front of me.
Is it good? It's one of those stories where I don't know. It could score 117 easily but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was a 98. Sometimes you're too close to a story to be able to say.
All I can say is that I have never, ever written anything like this before. I'm a bit of a tart, to be honest - I use lots of different styles and voices - but this story has appeared from somewhere completely different, fully formed, quite distinct from anything I've ever done. It's a bit creepy, really, the way this story has just emerged, almost without my intervention.
But I tell you what, this story has come from somewhere. It means something. I don't know what, yet, but I only hope I can do it justice. That character came to life for me this afternoon. I don't know where he came from, but he's alive now, as far as I'm concerned, and I feel I owe it to him to create a decent story for him.
I find it a bit scary when stories come alive like this. It's on the page now, I wrote it, but nonetheless I look at it and think 'did I really write that?'
I Started but Suicide Beckons...
I listed all those lines then sorted them alphabetically and just started writing, incorporating them into one linear story:
=================================================
A train ride back along the longest pier in the world, that's all Bill had asked for. At the end of their separate days at the coast, one train ride, no hanky-panky. He just wanted to sit next to her and tell her something. Was it a deal? He said. Ethel said she didn't know, but name the time. If she was there, then the answer was a yes.
All day Ethel had tried to make her mind up, but she was still confused. She had a very active mind – like photos going off. All day, all the time these photos had been coming into her head – Bill and her, her and Bill, her and Bill and Toby, (even her and Toby.) But as the day went on Bill had seemed more distant, barely real. She found it hard to believe that Bill would ever dump his best mate for her. Bill and Toby weren't just friends; they were inseparable. She must have seen them half a dozen times that day already, dodging the rain in their kiss-me-quick hats, once with fish and chips.
Ethel was with Geoff. Geoff meant well and she did enjoy his company, but last week she had told him, she couldn't see their friendship ever being more. Geoff had laughed, relieved. "Don't worry," he said. He told her that a few days ago he had finally realised he was destined for the single life. He just wasn't the marrying kind, and no woman would ever put up with his ways.
Yesterday, Bill must have followed Ethel home from the bank. She was only half-way to the bus-stop when he "accidentally" bumped into her. She had given him a hard time, of course. She knew how important it was to play hard to get, but he'd persisted. When he asked her if she was going on the village trip to the seaside she said yes but then added quickly, "With Geoff Smith from Accounts Received." Bill didn't bat an eyelid. "Good for you," he said. "I'm stuck with Toby." Then he made his little proposition. She left him hanging, but her eyes were still shining with delight all the way home.
Ethel was sitting down for her hake and chips and mushy peas lunch now, with Geoff, no newspaper wrappers for him, but in her head she was elsewhere. She was hearing her interview again, how nervous she'd got, how crazy she must have sounded: "I always keep my jewellery in the bread oven. I become restless just staying in one place for so long. I need a challenge. If things stay the same I get frustrated and then angry. I can feel the temper swell up inside of me. When I came here I didn't want to be spotted by any of my friends. Life is like a recipe. You have to think what ingredients you've got and make the most of them. I have finally found a recipe I can understand which is why I want this job. Loud? Yes I am. I frighten myself sometimes, I'm so loud. But that's what passion is, isn't it? Please give me the job."
She had had no idea what he really wanted but it was something and she'd have to pay her own way to London, rip up her roots. It would be at least a year and no chance of going home. Was there perhaps a boyfriend? he asked.
She wanted to shout out, "I had no roots until you came and rescued me. Really, I can't wait to see the world. Please?"
In the end Ethel still couldn't believe how horribly easy it had been. For once in her life she had thrown all caution to the wind, and just "gone for it". She had spoken from the heart and now look, a dream job. London, New York, Paris.
Sir Henry had asked her if she would just go out of the room for a minute, to let him think. Then he had called her back in, told her she was as mad-as-a-hatter but he was past caring. He smiled wearily and waved his hand in surrender. To Ethel that hand was like a magic wand. "I'm getting on now," Sir Henry said, "but there's life in the old dog yet. Thank God for your freshness and your honesty. I'm giving you the job because you wanted it so much."
Then Sir Henry told her he was giving a talk in town tonight. He could giver her a lift if she wanted one. "Great!" she said. He laughed and chattered most of the way. "I'm not sure the young mums know what to make of me. I think, because of the long white hair and the beard they expect something serious and learned but I'm still twenty in here." He had pointed to his chest, still laughing, then glanced up at his rear-view mirror.
Ethel had seen the Austin tailing them but Sir Henry didn't seem unduly worried. She had read somewhere that in the evenings he became a different person. He had surprised her already with his laughter, and now these confessions…
"A penny for them!" a voice said. Oh heck, Geoff! "Oh dear," she said. "I'm sorry Geoff. I didn't mean to be rude. But you know me. I have this quiet face but the inside of my head is full of words, pictures, ideas and dreams. I'm quite mad, really."
She looked down at her plate, the food half eaten, gone cold. Poor old Geoff, she thought. Why was it that "nice" never seemed to be enough? He was a mummy's boy, sweet, but ruined by too much care. Oh, she knew what Marjorie Smith would say if she confronted her. It was "her duty as a mother to protect her son", etc. Perhaps, but love is also about letting go, letting your loved ones grow wings.
Geoff was smiling. Somehow his hand crept had crept across the table and into hers and now warmed her hand, there between the salt-and-vinegar and next to the Heinz ketchup. "I'll be OK," he said, really. He raised a glass of Vimto. "To the old days!" he said. Ethel raised her glass and they clinked together, but she knew the old days had gone for ever.
=====================================
That was about two-thirds of the way but it's breaking my heart. The 'thickness/density/texture of the above, is of course, far too much for a womag story, but what you should realise is that in the above passage (all the same voice, yes?) comes from EXTRACTS FROM 31 DIFFERENT STORIES
How can the style, the voice, the rhythms from THIRTY-ONE stories be so effortlessly interchangeable?
THIRTY-ONE MEANINGLESS SAUSAGES.
=================================================
A train ride back along the longest pier in the world, that's all Bill had asked for. At the end of their separate days at the coast, one train ride, no hanky-panky. He just wanted to sit next to her and tell her something. Was it a deal? He said. Ethel said she didn't know, but name the time. If she was there, then the answer was a yes.
All day Ethel had tried to make her mind up, but she was still confused. She had a very active mind – like photos going off. All day, all the time these photos had been coming into her head – Bill and her, her and Bill, her and Bill and Toby, (even her and Toby.) But as the day went on Bill had seemed more distant, barely real. She found it hard to believe that Bill would ever dump his best mate for her. Bill and Toby weren't just friends; they were inseparable. She must have seen them half a dozen times that day already, dodging the rain in their kiss-me-quick hats, once with fish and chips.
Ethel was with Geoff. Geoff meant well and she did enjoy his company, but last week she had told him, she couldn't see their friendship ever being more. Geoff had laughed, relieved. "Don't worry," he said. He told her that a few days ago he had finally realised he was destined for the single life. He just wasn't the marrying kind, and no woman would ever put up with his ways.
Yesterday, Bill must have followed Ethel home from the bank. She was only half-way to the bus-stop when he "accidentally" bumped into her. She had given him a hard time, of course. She knew how important it was to play hard to get, but he'd persisted. When he asked her if she was going on the village trip to the seaside she said yes but then added quickly, "With Geoff Smith from Accounts Received." Bill didn't bat an eyelid. "Good for you," he said. "I'm stuck with Toby." Then he made his little proposition. She left him hanging, but her eyes were still shining with delight all the way home.
Ethel was sitting down for her hake and chips and mushy peas lunch now, with Geoff, no newspaper wrappers for him, but in her head she was elsewhere. She was hearing her interview again, how nervous she'd got, how crazy she must have sounded: "I always keep my jewellery in the bread oven. I become restless just staying in one place for so long. I need a challenge. If things stay the same I get frustrated and then angry. I can feel the temper swell up inside of me. When I came here I didn't want to be spotted by any of my friends. Life is like a recipe. You have to think what ingredients you've got and make the most of them. I have finally found a recipe I can understand which is why I want this job. Loud? Yes I am. I frighten myself sometimes, I'm so loud. But that's what passion is, isn't it? Please give me the job."
She had had no idea what he really wanted but it was something and she'd have to pay her own way to London, rip up her roots. It would be at least a year and no chance of going home. Was there perhaps a boyfriend? he asked.
She wanted to shout out, "I had no roots until you came and rescued me. Really, I can't wait to see the world. Please?"
In the end Ethel still couldn't believe how horribly easy it had been. For once in her life she had thrown all caution to the wind, and just "gone for it". She had spoken from the heart and now look, a dream job. London, New York, Paris.
Sir Henry had asked her if she would just go out of the room for a minute, to let him think. Then he had called her back in, told her she was as mad-as-a-hatter but he was past caring. He smiled wearily and waved his hand in surrender. To Ethel that hand was like a magic wand. "I'm getting on now," Sir Henry said, "but there's life in the old dog yet. Thank God for your freshness and your honesty. I'm giving you the job because you wanted it so much."
Then Sir Henry told her he was giving a talk in town tonight. He could giver her a lift if she wanted one. "Great!" she said. He laughed and chattered most of the way. "I'm not sure the young mums know what to make of me. I think, because of the long white hair and the beard they expect something serious and learned but I'm still twenty in here." He had pointed to his chest, still laughing, then glanced up at his rear-view mirror.
Ethel had seen the Austin tailing them but Sir Henry didn't seem unduly worried. She had read somewhere that in the evenings he became a different person. He had surprised her already with his laughter, and now these confessions…
"A penny for them!" a voice said. Oh heck, Geoff! "Oh dear," she said. "I'm sorry Geoff. I didn't mean to be rude. But you know me. I have this quiet face but the inside of my head is full of words, pictures, ideas and dreams. I'm quite mad, really."
She looked down at her plate, the food half eaten, gone cold. Poor old Geoff, she thought. Why was it that "nice" never seemed to be enough? He was a mummy's boy, sweet, but ruined by too much care. Oh, she knew what Marjorie Smith would say if she confronted her. It was "her duty as a mother to protect her son", etc. Perhaps, but love is also about letting go, letting your loved ones grow wings.
Geoff was smiling. Somehow his hand crept had crept across the table and into hers and now warmed her hand, there between the salt-and-vinegar and next to the Heinz ketchup. "I'll be OK," he said, really. He raised a glass of Vimto. "To the old days!" he said. Ethel raised her glass and they clinked together, but she knew the old days had gone for ever.
=====================================
That was about two-thirds of the way but it's breaking my heart. The 'thickness/density/texture of the above, is of course, far too much for a womag story, but what you should realise is that in the above passage (all the same voice, yes?) comes from EXTRACTS FROM 31 DIFFERENT STORIES
How can the style, the voice, the rhythms from THIRTY-ONE stories be so effortlessly interchangeable?
THIRTY-ONE MEANINGLESS SAUSAGES.
A Very Special Set of prompts
Today, especially for you, some deep, meaningful, inspirational story prompts: any thoughts, or are you overwhelmed?
These are not ordinary prompts. These are not dumb lines cut from poems, not the words of dead letter-writers.
99% of these are specially selected (BY THE PUBLISHERS) and highlighted (BY THE PUBLISHERS) bolded, italic, in a different colour to "spice up" a story and to excite the reader into reading the story NOW.
These are selected from 31 Stories, all in the same "literary journal". To help the reader and aspiring writer all 31 stories have the same identical or near-identical voice, the same rhythm. It shouldn't be too difficult to combine ALL these prompts into one story if you felt so inclined.
Please note, despite the literary pleasure this et of prompts will bring you, I did NOT make the selection myself, did not decide to mine for diamonds. I repeat, these sentences were specially selected by the editors of this literary journal, bolded, coloured, italicised, for your delictation.
It was a hot morning in late July and the Everly Brothers' number-one hit, Bye Bye Love was blaring out over the fairground as the maintenance team inspected the rides before opening to the public.
Only a bully would pick on a young lad like that.
There was so much pain in his dark eyes.
She sighed as she looked around her perfect house. So why was she so dissatisfied?
I didn't want to be spotted by any of my friends.
Jimmy knew the old days had gone for ever
He must have followed me home from the bank
Dodging the rain in kiss-me-quick hats with fish and chips
A train ride back along the longest pier in the world
Molly put her arm round him and lay her head in his.
Bill and Toby weren't just friends; they were inseparable.
She was in shock. He'd be home from his travels in just hours - but were they truly made for each other?
All day she tried to make her mind up, but she was still confused.
All the time these photos have been coming he has seemed more distant
Silly to keep them she'd never use them again
Perhaps someone had taken a wrong turning in the dark
I always keep my jewellery in the bread oven.
He finally realised he was destined for the single life
Ken seemed oblivious to his lack of social skills
The phone call had changed everything
She recalled that 363 was shy and very young.
Why was the old bird sticking in her heels?
Jessica's hand crept into hers and warmed her hand
Her eyes were still shining with delight all the way home.
In the evenings he became a different person.
Suddenly the doors opened and out marched the chef
The story goes that one day the miller just vanished
They could feel a draught of fresh air coming from ahead of them.
She was getting her message across at last
The faint strains of Chopin wafted through the walls.
I'm getting on now, but there's life in the old dog yet
You try thinking of enough boys' names for 147 gnomes
Tom looked forlornly out the window.
I became restless just staying in one place for so long
Words that would tie me down for life came hurtling at me.
Tom was spellbound by the guitar
Geoff meant well and she did enjoy his company
Twice you could have used that triple-letter square
Think like your opponent and it's anyone's game.
Life was getting more of a struggle these days.
I was past caring - wearily I waved my magic wand.
There's only so much cleaning you can do.
I'm not sure the young mums knew what to make of me.
I had no roots until you and dad came and rescued me.
Saving up for the car had killed her social life
In her rear-view mirror she saw the Austin tailing them.
Katy hated plants, or rather they hated her. But all that was to change...
There I was, brought to my knees by houseplants
She'd lost her temper - literally! Downtrodden Denise just couldn't get angry until...
I can feel the temper swell up inside of me.
You can't imagine how it feels to be up there on stage
Suddenly, there he was, jitterbugging towards her.
It was her duty as a mother to protect her son
I frighten myself sometimes, I'm so loud.
I finally found a recipe I could understand
I had no idea what he wanted but I'd have to pay
Max had never seen anyone without teeth
I still couldn't believe how horribly easy it had been.
These are not ordinary prompts. These are not dumb lines cut from poems, not the words of dead letter-writers.
99% of these are specially selected (BY THE PUBLISHERS) and highlighted (BY THE PUBLISHERS) bolded, italic, in a different colour to "spice up" a story and to excite the reader into reading the story NOW.
These are selected from 31 Stories, all in the same "literary journal". To help the reader and aspiring writer all 31 stories have the same identical or near-identical voice, the same rhythm. It shouldn't be too difficult to combine ALL these prompts into one story if you felt so inclined.
Please note, despite the literary pleasure this et of prompts will bring you, I did NOT make the selection myself, did not decide to mine for diamonds. I repeat, these sentences were specially selected by the editors of this literary journal, bolded, coloured, italicised, for your delictation.
It was a hot morning in late July and the Everly Brothers' number-one hit, Bye Bye Love was blaring out over the fairground as the maintenance team inspected the rides before opening to the public.
Only a bully would pick on a young lad like that.
There was so much pain in his dark eyes.
She sighed as she looked around her perfect house. So why was she so dissatisfied?
I didn't want to be spotted by any of my friends.
Jimmy knew the old days had gone for ever
He must have followed me home from the bank
Dodging the rain in kiss-me-quick hats with fish and chips
A train ride back along the longest pier in the world
Molly put her arm round him and lay her head in his.
Bill and Toby weren't just friends; they were inseparable.
She was in shock. He'd be home from his travels in just hours - but were they truly made for each other?
All day she tried to make her mind up, but she was still confused.
All the time these photos have been coming he has seemed more distant
Silly to keep them she'd never use them again
Perhaps someone had taken a wrong turning in the dark
I always keep my jewellery in the bread oven.
He finally realised he was destined for the single life
Ken seemed oblivious to his lack of social skills
The phone call had changed everything
She recalled that 363 was shy and very young.
Why was the old bird sticking in her heels?
Jessica's hand crept into hers and warmed her hand
Her eyes were still shining with delight all the way home.
In the evenings he became a different person.
Suddenly the doors opened and out marched the chef
The story goes that one day the miller just vanished
They could feel a draught of fresh air coming from ahead of them.
She was getting her message across at last
The faint strains of Chopin wafted through the walls.
I'm getting on now, but there's life in the old dog yet
You try thinking of enough boys' names for 147 gnomes
Tom looked forlornly out the window.
I became restless just staying in one place for so long
Words that would tie me down for life came hurtling at me.
Tom was spellbound by the guitar
Geoff meant well and she did enjoy his company
Twice you could have used that triple-letter square
Think like your opponent and it's anyone's game.
Life was getting more of a struggle these days.
I was past caring - wearily I waved my magic wand.
There's only so much cleaning you can do.
I'm not sure the young mums knew what to make of me.
I had no roots until you and dad came and rescued me.
Saving up for the car had killed her social life
In her rear-view mirror she saw the Austin tailing them.
Katy hated plants, or rather they hated her. But all that was to change...
There I was, brought to my knees by houseplants
She'd lost her temper - literally! Downtrodden Denise just couldn't get angry until...
I can feel the temper swell up inside of me.
You can't imagine how it feels to be up there on stage
Suddenly, there he was, jitterbugging towards her.
It was her duty as a mother to protect her son
I frighten myself sometimes, I'm so loud.
I finally found a recipe I could understand
I had no idea what he wanted but I'd have to pay
Max had never seen anyone without teeth
I still couldn't believe how horribly easy it had been.
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