Fully Fused

Part of last weekend was spent like this:

click to embiggen

Oooh, panorama feature. This time really do click to embiggen,
the size of this is just silly and the carpet looks weird. 

I was at work on the scary story. Which turned out to be like 20% fiction. Everything else was personal essay, film criticism, and Southern wives' tales. Oops?

Something amazing happened in this story that I didn't know was happening until I cut it up. I had to cut it up because the sections weren't flowing into each other smoothly and I couldn't figure out what needed to go where until I could look at all the pieces together, instead of looking at them on the computer screen in the order I'd written them. So I cut them up and then I grouped them together by...category, I guess? I put the parts about Django Unchained together, and the parts about Gone with the Wind together, and the parts about my youth together, and the adult anecdotes together, and the fiction together, and the wives' tales together. When these sections were grouped, something became visually clear: I had written three sections of each category, and there were six categories.

That's the amazing part. I didn't know that I'd done that. I didn't do it on purpose, didn't think "oh, I need one more anecdote to make three" or "oh, I need one more category to make six" - no. I wrote it in a messy, disorganized fashion and it just came out in multiples of three.

As Matt said to me once, and as my brain has been saying back to me at appropriate moments ever since, humans like threes. And I know that I tend to arrange my writing in threes, on a variety of levels. But I had no idea that I'd be capable of doing it unconsciously.

It's kind of like that time I put a ticking clock in act three of a novel I was writing without even realizing it. But there's a crucial difference: that ticking clock thing was derived from a lifetime of movie training, and this threes thing is not. It derives not from external stimuli, from other storytellers explaining to my subconscious how stories are told, but instead from me, from the writing brain that tells stories the way I see fit to tell them.

I find this exciting. I find it humbling. I want to jump up and shout in jubilation and then lie down on the floor and cry with relief. Because - in case I haven't said this in a specific enough way, and if you haven't gotten the impression from this blog, if you've been reading it for a while - I think I've learned that artistic prowess grows in cycles rather than in a straight line.

At first, you create per instinct, and unless you're some kind of preternatural talent, your instincts are good and your toolbox sucks. Then you pick up some of what's in the toolbox, and you create per a mixture of your instincts and your tools. That's even worse, because the raw power of your instincts is blunted by the tools and the tools are employed awkwardly because you are new at using them. There's this long apprenticeship where the quality of those two elements twiddles up and down, and it's awkward, for you and for the people who read your work, because this is sincerely the best you can do but it's not terribly good.

You have breakthroughs, small and large ("suddenly", conflict, recursive sentences, organicness, scenes, the truth and trial and absolution of "omit needless words"), but you don't feel like you're moving forward. You feel like you're moving in circles. Because just when you think you've learned something, it's pointed out to you that you don't know that thing at all. You think you know how to write a sentence and then you read Edna O'Brien. You think you know from postmodernism and then you read Moby-Dick. You think you know how to do a fragmented, multi-perspective narrative on a single event and then you read Mary Gaitskill and you really, really want to crawl under the floor and die.

Repeat. For years.

And then you come out the other side of something, some cave-cum-tunnel where you've learned that you do not care about the rules of writing, or the toolbox you need to write, or the way Freytag insists that short stories always are. You begin to do the thing from muscle memory, and it feels as terrible and wonderful as it always did, and it feels about the same when it's finished  (="Yeah, I guess so") as it did somewhere in the middle when you learned to stop loving every word you put on the page. But people tell you it's different. People tell you it's good. They stop kindly being quiet and they start effusing, and their ideas to make it better seem good instead of irrelevant.

At this point, instinct and toolbox are fully fused, and they're a creature of their own. They constitute muscle memory. They're the hamster on a wheel that spins the engine of your work. You do the dreaming on one end and the transcribing on the other end, and you dialogue with the draft until it's what you meant it to be. But the instinct, the power of your voice and no one else's, plus the toolbox - that dual entity is the strongman that's going to lift your work out of mediocrity.

It goes around and around, still. The strongman needs constant training to lift heavier and heavier concepts. The hamster is not actually going anywhere, even if she runs long enough and fast enough to power the world. There's no Freytag in the actual process of writing, I don't think. You just keep finding the same problems and fixing them, finding problems and fixing them; this applies to everything from editing your sentences to coming up with something to write about in the first place. Circular, not linear.

The point of that whole tangent is to say that when I found those threes in the scary story after cutting it up, I realized that my instinct and my toolbox had formed a viable life form at last. I wrote the piece somewhat artlessly, without worrying about how it would be received or whether it was Freytagian or any of that. And yet the toolbox gave the piece rhythm and quality, while instinct gave it symmetry and imbued it with my particular voice and style.

The author, in Downward-Facing Line Edit 

It was very, very hard. Not the hardest thing I've written in terms of labor, but certainly the hardest emotionally. I kept having to stop writing and shake out my trembling hands. I ate less than usual. It was like being really hung over: that feeling of wanting to die just so it'll end, and knowing you have to wait it out, but having full awareness that the current sensation could not possibly be worse.

I don't know what happens now to this piece, because I'm hearing from readers that it's extraordinary but I am not comfortable sending it out. My professor's going to read it (as well as something I've been considering writing for three years, it's the final project for a class), and maybe he can give me some direction.

It feels good to have it out - empowering, both personally and professionally - but I'm also slightly at loose ends for what comes next. As I said last week, I have a few little projects on my plate, but nothing that's as intense, or as important to me, as this was.

There are always more cycles to come. More circular, asymptotic movement toward mastery.

The Asymptote of "Good Enough"

In about a week and a half, I'm giving a reading. It's up to me what I read as long as I fill 20 minutes. So I started mentally shuffling through my work to see what would suit. Nothing I've written in 2015 was appropriate, for various reasons, so I went back to 2014. A good story to read, I thought, might be the so-called dreadful story, which I wrote last fall about two hipsters going to Medjugorje, a site in Bosnia where the Virgin Mary appears like clockwork to a small group of religious visionaries. So I opened up the file to have a look. (I also thought I might submit it to the Portland Review, which has an open call out until December 1.)

Ay. 

I could not tell you exactly what is wrong with this story. Not with a single definitive noun. I think the problem is, as ill-defined as this may be, that it's just not good enough. It's unevenly anxious about itself; sometimes the writing gains confidence for a few phrases or a sentence or two, but then it leans back into effort. And the organization feels stilted even while being conventional. And some significant amount of the dialogue tells the story instead of telling the characters. And it telegraphs its Big Ideas while trying not to.

I was not especially skilled then at writing through indirection (because I was still fighting it as a necessity), and I was determined to make my point (because the point was the reason I wrote the story, not these hateful characters), and I was barking at an experimental squirrel in the next yard (while I ignored the enormous catchable literary squirrel in my own plot of ground). I was trying to make language do something instead of letting it do something.

Does this sound vague and impossible? Good. That's how I feel about getting better at writing.

Asymptotes keep surfacing in my life over the last several months. There was this one about mastery, and there was one in Ojai which I can't remember now but which was a major point of enlightenment for some of the other women, and there was one in my theory class which I also can't remember. (It has been a difficult autumn.) This morning as I was thinking about the slush I read when I briefly ran a litmag, I realized that slush, too, is an asymptote. Submitted stories vary in quality from super-duper crappy all the way up to good enough to publish. A whole lot of them are almost there, but not quite.

My Medjugorje story has very good sentences, it's well-proofread, it's got a nice moment in the lyric register, it has good craft and a lot of work behind it. It's clear in reading it that I am a thinking person and a pretty good writer. But the story is Not Good Enough. The distance between the Medjugorje story and Good Enough is short, but takes exponentially more effort to cover than the distance between it and super-duper crappy.

In the course of workshopping and trading stories with writer-friends, I read a lot of stories like this, that are smart and thoughtful and good, but not good enough. Not worth reworking. Worth trunking as a lesson and writing something else. I wish there was a way to say this, kindly, to a writer - this is good, but it's not Good Enough, so try something else and don't waste any time trying to get this one published. I wish there was a way to say I encourage your talent and craft and perspective while still saying this one's a loser, pal. I would have wasted a whole lot less time on stories I loved throughout the past decade if someone could have done that for me.

So I'm not going to read the Medjugorje story next Friday (the 20th, at CSUN, if you want to come. I'd love to see you there). And I'm certainly not going to send it to the Portland Review. Waste of time. I might try rewriting it someday, because I still think Medjugorje is an interesting place to set a story, and the idea of a cynic being inspired by the faith of followers, rather than by some flash of light from the sky, still strikes a bell in my mind.

Ultimately I've decided to read a story that I retired from submitting after too many rejections. I reread it this morning, and I feel confident about reading it aloud. I may be too close to see what's wrong with it as clearly as I can see what's wrong with the Medjugorje story (clear as mud, that is). But it's a personal favorite and it's representative of what I like to write about. In case it bombs, I'll also read some stuff that's been editor-approved. And I think the Biff Tannen story. Because why not?