Lee Martin's Blog, page 64

A Writer Writes: A Life-Long Apprenticeship

Because I’ll be gone next week, teaching at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop in Yellow Springs, Ohio, I’ve decided to post an extra entry this week. Here’s a snippet from the keynote address I’ll be making tomorrow evening in Yellow Springs.

Each year, in July, my thoughts turn to my father, and I’m swept back to 1982 and my last summer spent near him. Two weeks before I’m to leave for the MFA program at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, he has his second heart attack and dies on a hot day while mowing the yard. The last words I ever say to him, just a week prior, are “Don’t work too hard.” He won’t, he assures me, and I know he’s lying. He grew up during the Great Depression, and work was with him the rest of his life. The fierce determination to get the job done no matter what it took was his great gift to me.

At the time, the hardest thing I’ve ever done is to leave my widowed mother behind and make the 400-plus mile drive to Fayetteville. I almost don’t go. I almost back out to be near my mother during her time of grief. Maybe I should have done just that. Maybe that’s what a good son would have done, but a dream dies hard. I wanted to be a writer. I went to Fayetteville, and by so doing I began to learn that a writer is often leaving someone behind. The truth of this has deepened as the years have gone on.  How many times I’ve retreated from loved ones for the sake of time spent holed up in my writing room, paying attention to the comings and goings of characters in stories or novels, or with representations of family members in essays and memoirs.

Those two years that I spent at Arkansas taught me many lessons. One of them came down on me with a ferocity that left me reeling: after my first workshop where my story was ripped apart, I realized I’d been ill-prepared for this part of my journey; I didn’t know much of anything about how to write or what it meant to call oneself a writer. Today, I’m still learning how much I don’t know; each draft I face has something new to teach me. Writing is a life-long apprenticeship.

I guess you’d say I was at ground zero after that first workshop, admitting that I knew nothing. Not a bad place to be, as Joseph Brodsky points out when he says, “A zero is at once the perfect emptiness and the most complete sense of possibility.” I was in a place those early days at Arkansas from where I could open myself to what my instructors and my fellow writers had to teach me. Another lesson imparted: never let your ego get in your way of honing your craft. Someone always knows more than we do. No matter how long you write and no matter how many successes you have, there’s always something more that you can learn.

At Arkansas, I learned to read the way a writer must, with an eye toward how a story, or essay, or poem is made, with an eye toward the artistic choices a writer makes and the effects those choices create. I learned to listen to criticism. I learned that my first obligation was to the work itself and not to my own ego or to thoughts of publication and acclaim. I wanted those things, yes, but I most assuredly wanted them too soon. Dreams of success? Sure I had them, and more often than not, they were frustrated. I collected my rejection slips. I felt inadequate. I half-heartedly celebrated the successes of others. It would take me a while to understand that I wasted too much energy on disappointment, fear, envy—energy that would have been much more wisely spent on learning my craft. It’s hard to take ourselves and our self-interests out of the creative process, nigh-on impossible, but one thing I know is that we should stop wanting things for ourselves and instead start wanting things for the writing that we’re doing. Our obligation shouldn’t be to ourselves and what we might gain from our writing, but instead to the work itself and what it will gain from the full realization of the impulse that first brought us to the page. I gradually began to learn to tune out the voices of ego and to listen to the work itself. I learned that a good deal of a writer’s life is spent at a snail’s pace. Sitting, for example. I’m very good at sitting. Staring out windows. I’m good at that, too. Daydreaming? I’m first-rate. I learned that a writer has to be patient. I learned the joy of steady work. I learned that writing is self-perpetuating. The more you do it, the more you do it, and the more you do it, the more you do it. I learned, as Billy Crystal’s writing instructor character tells his student, Danny Divito, in the movie, Throw Momma from the Train, “A writer writes.”

I’m not sure that writing can ever flourish if approached from a hobbyist point of view. To me, writing isn’t something that someone dabbles in. You’re either all the way in, or you’re not. Does that mean you have to quite your day job, hole up in a garret and spend every waking minute writing? Of course not. We all have to face the realities of our lives. We have bills to pay, stomachs to fill with food, families to support.

When I finished my MFA program, I spent three years teaching at a technical college in southeast Ohio. I taught five sections, mostly Freshman Composition, each quarter, with 25-30 students in each section. That makes for a lot of student essays to read and respond to, a lot of student conferences, a lot of classes to prepare. Somehow, I still found time to write. I wrote between classes if I could. I wrote at night. I wrote on weekends. But what I remember to be the most exciting writing time of all took place on the fifteen-mile drives to and from campus, that time when I heard my characters engage in dialogue in my head, when I imagined what they might do next. The point is I lived inside my stories on those drives, and that was writing, too. In fact, it made it so much easier the next time when I actually put pen to paper because by then I was chomping at the bit to get down what I’d already worked through in my head. And when I read craft essays by other writers, in addition to their novels and stories and personal essays or pieces of memoir? Well that was writing time well spent, too.

How much time can you set aside during the course of your day for writing? Two hours, one hour, thirty minutes? You’ll be surprised at how many pages stack up over a year even if you only have a half an hour to devote to your writing each day. The important thing is to dedicate yourself to the life of a writer, to make that a part of the way you see yourself in the world. “A writer writes.” Exactly.

 

Living Full: Tempering Sentimentality in Memoir

I received a triumphant message from a friend this morning about a breakthrough with the memoir she’s writing. She reports “a strange and wonderful happening,” the shedding of tears as she wrote, tears that came from the clear memory of her at a previous time, a time retrieved through the careful cataloging of specific concrete details. “I’m elated,” my friend said, and anyone who’s had a similar experience while writing a memoir will understand exactly what she’s feeling, that emotional immersion into the past, an experience my friend described as “living full.”

Yes, exactly. We live full when we slip into our past lives. The tears that come tell us we’ve arrived with our whole bodies. Although it might be sad to revisit the people we were in times of trouble, it’s also a cause for celebration. So much conspires to keep us from slipping through the veil between the here and the then. When we finally break through, it indeed gives us, as my friend reported, a feeling of elation.

I remember well the moments during the writing of my first memoir, From Our House, in which the past seemed so real to me that I broke down in tears (yes, it’s all right for male memoirists to cry). One such moment came when I was writing about the summer I lived alone with my father while my mother spent the weekdays at Eastern Illinois University where she was finishing her degree. As you may or may not know, my father lost both of his hands in a farming accident when I was barely a year old and wore prosthetic hands, his “hooks,” from then on. He also became an angry man, and our relationship for much of my childhood and adolescence was a difficult one. Those weeks we spent alone on our farm that summer, then, were strange ones for us both; never before had we had so much time together without my mother to act as a buffer. “That summer, I did for him what she would do for twenty-six years without regret or complaint,” I write. “I shaved him, I bathed him, I cleaned him after he used the toilet.” It wasn’t recalling the intimacy of these actions that brought tears to my eyes; it was, instead, my father’s vulnerability as I washed him:

Never was he as timid as he was then—as bashful as I. He would look away from me         while I washed him, sorry that circumstances were such that I had to perform this       task. If  anyone were to have seen us there, the aging man and his son, they would have never suspected the ugly rancor that simmered between us. They would have seen the boy  soaking the washcloth in a basin of water and wringing it out with his small hands, and the father, standing naked in the sunlight streaming in through the open window, his legs apart so his son could touch the washcloth gently to his tender groin.  How could I not love him, then, so great was his need.

I remember how this memory overwhelmed me and how I had to find an appropriate measure of distance to be able to portray it without becoming maudlin. Which brings me to the point of this post. We writers of memoir need the sort of immersion that sometimes brings us to tears, but we also need strategies for tempering the rawness of emotion so it becomes more deeply felt by the reader. You’ll note that I relied on a shift to a third-person point of view in the passage above: “They would have seen the boy. . . .” That slight adjustment in perspective allowed me to be both the participant (the boy I was in the past) and the spectator (the adult who observes from a slight remove). As the spectator, I note the washcloth, the basin of water, the sunlight through the window, the boy’s small hands, the father’s nakedness. As the participant, I feel again the bashfulness, the love, the need. The blend of immersion and distance creates a moment on the page that not only I, but also the reader, can “live full.”

Of course, this use of the third-person is only one strategy for blending perspectives in memoir. If the mood strikes you, I’d love to hear some of your favorite methods for avoiding sentimentality in memoir while also giving full expression to the emotions you’re reliving. I’ve always found voice to be important, the voice of the calm narrator, blending with the voice of the intense moment. Anton Chekhov, in a letter to Lydia Avilova, offers this advice:

When you describe the miserable and unfortunate, and want to make the reader feel pity,  try to be somewhat colder — that seems to give a kind of background to another’s grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold. . . . . The more objective you are, the stronger will be the  impression you make.

This advice holds true for the writer of memoir. Immerse yourself in the past, yes, but never lose sight of the present. Find the strategies that will allow you to hold both open for the reader.

 

 

The Books and the Boys of Summer

Summertime and the reading is easy. It’s that time when I can read the books I never find time to get to during the school year. I can range far and wide, from Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, to a re-reading of The Great Gatsby, to Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, to Russell Banks’s Affliction, to Jane Leavy’s biography of Sandy Koufax. I read the way I did when I was a boy—indiscriminately—snatching off the library shelves whatever book happens to catch my eye.

Combining the books of summer with the boys of summer, I just finished New York Times columnist, Dan Barry’s Bottom of the 33rd: Hope, Redemption, and Baseball’s Longest Game. This is the story of a minor-league baseball game between the Pawtucket Red Sox, the Triple-A team of the Boston Red Sox, and the Rochester Red Wings, the Triple-A team of the Baltimore Orioles, that began on the Saturday before Easter in 1981, and was finally suspended early Sunday morning with the score tied 2-2 after 32 innings played. The game was continued from that point two months later, requiring only eighteen minutes for a Pawtucket victory in the bottom of the 33rd inning. Winner of the 2012 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting, this is a book about much, much more than baseball. A book about the nature of timelessness, about loyalty, passion, community, and the pursuit of a dream. I dare say there are even some lessons for writers contained therein.

Imagine the eighteen fans who stayed through all 32 innings that April night and morning in spite of cold temperatures and frigid winds, imagine the players (some of them like Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken, Jr., bound for greatness; others like Dave Koz, who come June will drive in the winning run for Pawtucket, but will be unable to make that final climb from Triple A to the big leagues) relying on their baseball instincts to prolong a game that has turned into an absurdity that begs to have an end. Players who want to get out of the cold, who want to sleep. Hitters who don’t want to be 0 for 13. Pitchers who don’t want to be the one to give up the game-winning hit. A catcher who has worked 22 innings. Men who keep doing what they’ve trained themselves to do: to pitch, to hit, to catch, to run, to throw. Imagine how time seems to disappear, how the stillness settles over the nearly empty park so the sounds of the bat against the ball, the grunt of a pitcher as he gets a little extra oomph behind his fastball, the whop of a cleat on the first-base bag, the smack of ball against the leather of a mitt, are clearly heard. Imagine that this will go on forever, baseball reduced to its purest elements, much the way it is on the sandlot when you’re a kid and you keep playing no matter the score, and sometimes after the score has been forgotten. Baseball played for the love of playing.

Imagine all of this and then think about writing. Think of all the hours spent alone in your writing room, writing poems, stories, essays, memoirs, novels, plays, screenplays, or whatever your genre of preference might be. If you’re like me, you’ve got a number of manuscripts that will never be published, things you had to write in order to write the ones that do finally appear in print. You’ve spent countless hours doing what you love to do, which is to move words about on a blank page. And, if you’re like me, there will be countless times when you’ll doubt the worth of what you’re doing. What does it matter if this piece gets written? Trust me, it matters. Ask those men who played those thirty-three innings. Even if that game didn’t amount to a hill of beans in the larger scheme of things, it meant something to those who played it, all of them with dreams of making it to the big leagues. They could have walked away as the night turned into morning. Imagine a baseball diamond with no players. But they couldn’t walk away. The game wouldn’t let them. Their passion wouldn’t let them. Their talents wouldn’t let them.

Again, if you’re like me, you’re prone to whining when the work isn’t going well. You get all out of sorts. You wail out of fear of rejection. You say, “If only. . . .” You look for targets upon which you can cast blame. You long for more time, more calm, more inspiration, more something.

I think about those men who played those thirty-three innings, and I tell myself, “Suck it up, Cupcake, and get in the game. Do what you love with thanksgiving. Celebrate the hours. There’s writing to be done.”

 

 

 

 

 

Afloat

I’m lying on my left side while the technician moves the transducer over my bare chest. Nine months after my stroke, and six months after my PFO closure, I’ve come to see whether the occluder that my cardiologist implanted over the hole in the septum between my atria is doing what it’s supposed to do, which is to keep my blood from shunting from my right atrium to my left. That’s how a clot traveled to my brain in September. That’s what we’re trying to keep from happening again. I was lucky the first time; I left the hospital after two days with no impairments. A second time, though? I might not be so lucky.

It’s chilly in the exam room, and I’m trying my best not to think about the ultrasound waves bouncing off the structures of my heart and what they might show. Soon, the nurse will inject a saline solution that contains bubbles into my IV, and the ultrasound will determine whether any of those bubbles are able to pass through the occluder, which is two titanium rings filled with mesh, one ring on either side of the PFO. We want those bubbles to stay out of my left atrium.

I’m thinking about baseball, specifically the arc of a fly ball rising, rising, rising and then the descent into the webbing of a mitt. I used to stand in the front yard of our farmhouse and throw a baseball into the air and then position myself under it with my glove. I’d throw the ball on the roof and let it roll down the slope so I could dash toward it, diving, trying to make a shoe-string catch. I’d throw the ball into the air near the wire fence around the yard, so I’d have to jump, extend my arm behind the fence and snag a ball that looked like it might be uncatchable. My favorite team was the Yankees, and I particularly enjoyed the slick-fielding third baseman, Clete Boyer. When my cousin visited, I’d ask him to hit sharp ground balls to my right and left so I’d have to dive to stab them and keep them from getting through my imagined infield. When I played Pony League ball, I was a late-inning defensive replacement. I prided myself on my glove work, able to dig low throws out of the dirt, able to leap and snare high tosses. I specialized in the spectacular save, in rescuing what seemed to be lost.

I’m thinking about all this as the bubbles enter my bloodstream and make their way to my heart. I think of Holden Caulfield and his fantasy of catching kids running through a field of rye before they go over the cliff. “That’s all I’d do all day,” he tells his sister, Phoebe. “I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”

It’s all crazy, this life. I’ve come to think that we’re all afloat, drifting here and there. I’ve come to believe that this is what living is, this random sequence of circumstances. We can convince ourselves we have all our ducks in a row, our lives mapped out just the way we want them, and then in an instant everything can change. My father knew this. In November, 1956, the shucking box on his corn picker clogged and he reached in without shutting down the power-take-off that turned the snapping rollers. The rollers took in his hands, and there he was at that point where his life divided into before and after.

Now mine does, too: the years before my stroke, and now whatever years are to follow it. But I’m trying not to think of that as the technician maps the bubbles’ journey to and from my heart. I’m thinking of soap bubbles, the kind kids blow from a wand, and dandelion fuzz, and the whirly-gig maple seeds twirling down from trees, and paper boats drifting along a stream, and those parachute men I used to toss up into the air and then watch float to the ground. I’m thinking of a baseball rising in the air and coming to settle in the mitt of a little boy, a boy with a hole in his heart, a hole no one will know about for a long, long time, a boy who years later as a man will feel a childlike glee when his doctor calls to tell him the results of the bubble test. Perfect. It was perfect. Nothing got through.

 

Into the Fire: A Writing Exercise

I just got back from teaching at The Sun magazine’s three-day writing retreat in Rowe, MA. The retreat is called “Into the Fire: The Sun Celebrates Personal writing.” In all my sessions, but particularly in the last one that I offered on Saturday night, I invited participants to walk into that fire to see what they might find. The title of this session was “Who Are You?” My objective was to make the participants aware of what they could gain in a piece of personal writing by paying attention to the multiple selves that aree in conversation on the page. By investigating our experiences from a number of vantage points and perspectives, we create more rounded characters of ourselves, and we also produce a more tonally textured piece of writing as the voices of the various parts of ourselves vibrate against one another.

I want to share the writing prompts that I gave the people who came to my session in case you might find them helpful for your own personal essays.

1.         Start by recalling someone from the past who calls up in you a moment of shame, guilt, or regret. Spend about five minutes writing from the prompt, “I can’t tell you. . . .” The objective is to get down the facts that led to the shame, guilt, or regret.

2.         Shift to something from your present-day life that memory of the past invites into the conversation. Again spend about five minutes writing from this prompt: “Instead, let me tell you about. . . .”

 3.         Spend about five minutes writing from the prompt, “When I think of the person I was then, I. . . .” The idea here is to look at your past self from the perspective that you have now.

 4.         Complete these two sentences: “Back then I thought. . . .” And, “Now I see (or understand) that. . . .”

 5.         Then complete these two sentences, applying them to either the past experience or the present-day one: “Part of me wishes. . . .” And, “But another part of me. . . .”

 6.         Spend as much time as you need with this final prompt: “If I could rewrite that moment (the one from the past), I’d. . . .” And “But I can’t. All I can do (or all I have) is. . . .”

When I write a personal essay, I usually have a story to tell, and it invites another story, one that I’d rather not tell because it makes me uncomfortable to do so. It’s that second story that makes the essay resonate. This exercise will leave you with the fragmented bones of an essay. The sections may not cohere until you flesh them out and rearrange them to create an essay in which past and present merge. The results can be startling. Many of the people who attended my session said afterwards that this exercise took them to significantly life-changing and healing moments of clarity. Isn’t that exactly what we’re after in a good personal essay?Isn’t that the reward for walking into the fire?

The Beautiful Land: an Album

From time to time, I hear someone comment on what they consider to be the ugliness of the Midwest–the flat, agricultural land that for them holds no beauty or charm. Here, in a photo essay, is my response.

In early summer, the wheat starts to change from green to gold. I remember going with my father to the field to gauge whether the crop was ready to cut. As many of you know, he’d lost his hands in a farming accident when I was barely a year old. He couldn’t snap off a seed head and roll it in his palm to free the kernels and then chew them to see if they were ready to harvest. That became my job. I placed the kernels on my father’s tongue. His lips brushed my fingers. We stood there in the twilight. A communion.

The native grass growing alongside the gravel roads holds a reddish tint as it bends in the wind. At first, I thought this was turkey-foot grass, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe one of you will tell me. Milkweed, foxtail, multi-flora rose, trumpet vine, brown-eyed Susan: all of these and more grow in the fence rows and make a trip down a country road a pleasure.

Young corn plants break the clay soil on a hillside in a geometric arrangement of arcs. Blue sky, the dark green of the oak leaves, the reddish-brown clay worked to tilth, the bright green of the corn plants. By summer’s end, they’ll be taller than anyone who walks their rows. Their yellow tassels, their russet silks. In early autumn, the stalks will yellow and dry, and the ears of corn in their husks will be ready for the harvest. All winter, the corn stubble, bent and ragged, will wait for spring and the plow, and the cycle will begin again.

The honeysuckle is in bloom at the Brian Cemetery in Lukin Township, Lawrenceville, Illinois. My great-great grandmother is buried here on this hill along a gravel road. For long stretches of time, I can be in this place without hearing a single man-made sound. Just the chatter of squirrels, the sound of the wind moving through the hickory trees, a call of a crow overhead. All that, and the intoxicating scent of the honeysuckle.

The wild blackberries  are in bloom, too. The berries will turn to red and then that purplish black, but first there’s the white blossoms, so delicate around the seeds.

A spring lamb has grown bold enough to strike a pose.

Canada geese and their goslings come to shore at Red Hills State Park.

The Wabash River at Vincennes, Indiana, at twilight.

The Old Cathedral at Vincennes.

The George Rogers Clark Memorial.My great-great grandfather and his second wife, Eliza French Phillips Martin, lived on this property across from the Ridgley Cemetery in Lukin Township, where they’re both buried.

They lived in this log house in this beautiful land.

 

 

 

The Necessity of the Beautiful Sentence

The Columbus Dispatch recently ran a feature on the area’s scholar-athletes who are about to graduate from high school. They all responded to a series of interview questions. I took particular notice of the question that asked them to name their least favorite class. More than a few said that English was their least favorite because “writing essays is hard.” This started me thinking about why well-crafted sentences can turn my head in a heartbeat and make me fall in love with the arrangement of words on the page.

Take this passage from The Great Gatsby, for example, that describes Nick Carraway’s first glimpse of his cousin Daisy and her friend Jordan Baker:

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in  white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to  the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on a wall. Then there was a  boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

There’s a good deal of action in those sentences even though most of them are describing the stationary Daisy and Jordan. The “rippling and fluttering” dresses, the “whip and snap of the curtains,” “the groan of a picture on a wall,” and, finally, the boom from Tom shutting the windows, the only concrete action in the passage and one that literally takes the air out of the room. Notice the progressive tense of “rippling and fluttering” to give a sense of an ongoing motion, the hard “p” sounds at the end of “whip and snap” to evoke the sharp sounds of the curtains being blown by a hard wind. Finally, notice the compounds in the last sentence, each “and,” slowing the sentence down as “the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.” Such a vivid portrait made possible by the intricacies of language.

Or this passage from Nick as he opens the book:

When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be  in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions  with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.

Here we have a more abstract passage meant to make plain Nick’s state of mind on the other side of the events he’s about to describe, but even here in less precisely detailed sentences, Fitzgerald uses a metaphor—the world in uniform and standing “at some sort of moral attention”—to stylize, or literally dress up Nick’s reaction to this portion of his life. “I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.” Notice the use of assonance—the repetition of the “s” sounds in “riotous,” “excursions,” “glimpses.” Also notice the alliteration of “human heart.” This stylized language gives what could have been a rather plain sentence more sizzle. Finally, notice the parallel structures in the last sentence that occur each time the name, “Gatsby,” is used and then amplified by first an appositive (“the man who give his name to this book”) and then an adjective clause (“who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn”). This parallelism, along with the repetition of the name, “Gatsby,” emphasizes Nick’s strong feelings for him. So a passage whose primary purpose is to give us information also has music at its heart.

It’s that music that we need, not just for the sake of the writing, but for our own sakes as well. So much of the world around us is chaotic and without reason. A well-crafted sentence is an antidote against this discord. A precise and beautifully constructed sentence holds the chaos of our lives at bay. It provides a structure that gives us the illusion that we can live forever even if our words are describing the moments that threaten to destroy us.

Some of those scholar-athletes didn’t like English class because they found it hard to write essays.  Sure, it’s hard to write a beautiful sentence, and I’ll admit it’s harder for some than for others. Still, there’s something about a gorgeous sentence that makes me feel all is right in the world even if it isn’t. I labor nearly every day of my life to write such sentences. I gladly take on this work because it’s the only way I know to give some sort of integrity to the world around me. It’s the only way I know—at least for the time I spend immersed in word choice, and syntax, and structure—to shape the life I’m living, to rely on the music of language. Why shouldn’t writing a good and beautiful sentence be hard? It’s our attempt at salvation.

 

 

 

 

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The Art of the Snark

Is it just me, or is it true that somewhere along the line we became a culture that values (nay, practically demands) the snark? You know what I’m talking about, that sharp-tongued voice that cuts to the quick, that often mean-spirited comment meant to belittle. We hear it on our television shows and in our movies, in our dinner-table conversations, in our classrooms, in much of the fiction that we read.

As summer settles in and I have a chance to do a good deal of reading, I’m noticing the degree of sarcasm that some novelists give their characters—usually young, hip characters who think they have something smart to say about the world around them. It’s not that I’m totally against the snark; a zinger of a line can be refreshing. What was it Dorothy Parker said? “If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” And Cole Porter? “He may have hair upon his chest but, sister, so has Lassie.” But let’s not forget Noel Coward who said, “Wit ought to be a glorious treat like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade.” Too much snark, as Coward makes plain, piles up and gets sluggish and starts to become annoying.

Which leads me to that classic snark, Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. In a scene early in the novel, Holden is trying to read a book but keeps getting interrupted by another student, Ackley. Ackley asks him if the book is any good, and Holden says, “This sentence I’m reading is terrific.” Holden then admits that he can be very sarcastic when he wants to be. And yet, this same Holden is capable of compassion, sometimes even toward those that he derides. He is, most memorably, the person who fantasizes that he’s the protector of children. He tells his sister,

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch          everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look  where they’re going. I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d    do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only    thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”

For all his sarcasm, all his cynicism, all his distrust of phony people, he’s genuinely worried about his little sister and by extension “thousands of little kids,” whom he wants to save. His compassion exists beneath the facade of his snark; the pressures of the plot make that facade crack from time to time, and the kinder, more genuine Holden is visible. The snark can’t hold, as it does in too many novels and stories these days. The sharp word, the sarcastic attitude, the cynical eye? Life has a way of breaking down the confidence it takes to put those tools to work, at least temporarily if not forever. The good fiction writer knows that. The good novelist is interested in the aspect of a character that’s hidden—the fear, perhaps, or the insecurity—that makes the construction of that snarky facade necessary and at the same time impossible to maintain.

 

 

Comedy in Fiction

When I was in the first grade, my class took a field trip to Santa Claus Land, an amusement park in southwestern Indiana. My mother gave me a quarter in case I had need of it. Maybe I’m thinking about this because it’s Mother’s Day, or maybe because this happened in May when it was hotter than it should have been, and at a time when there was no air conditioning in our school bus. The point being that on the drive home, everyone was extremely thirsty. Parched, I guess you could say.

What a blessing it was, then, to find a roadside cafe open for business with cold bottles of pop for sale. I remember sitting at the counter on a stool that swiveled and asking the waitress how much a bottle cost.

“A dime,” she said.

My heart sank. “I don’t have a dime,” I told her, and she was kind enough to bring me a free glass of ice water, which I drank while watching my friends guzzle Pepsi, Coke, orange Nehi, 7 Up.

When I got home and told my mother this story, she asked me why I hadn’t used my quarter to buy a bottle of pop.

“Because it wasn’t a dime,” I said. “I had to have a dime.”

“Son,” she said. “It’s time we had a talk about change.”

Now, when I look back on the boy I was, I find myself laughing at his ignorance. Then, in a tick, the laughter always dissolves, and I look a little closer, and I find myself wishing I could tell that kid what a quarter is. “You could have had a bottle of pop,” I want to say. “Heck, you could’ve had two bottles!”

That’s when I remember that glass of ice water. Even though I was glad for it on that hot day, I also felt how it marked me as the kid who didn’t have enough money to buy a bottle of pop. As I look back on that first-grader, drinking ice water and wanting so badly to have what his friends were having, I start to feel the yearning underneath the comedy. I start to feel the wanting and its frustration, which makes me a little sad, and that’s another important element of the comic in fiction. The funny and the sad are often contained within the same character, the same event.

I also think of my mother and how she never planned to have a child. Things happened, though, and I was born when she was forty-five. Nearly twice the age of my friends’ parents, she must have been sensitive to any imperfections in her own maternal skills. She was a grade school teacher. She taught kids about change all the time. How could it be that the lesson had never made its way to me? I also think about how my mother was such a timid woman. I inherited her shyness. I didn’t like standing out from the crowd the way I did that afternoon in the cafe. When my mother said we’d have to have a talk about change, I felt her own embarrassment.

On the surface, this is an amusing family anecdote that gets told for years and years, and everyone laughs. Beneath the surface, though, lies a more human story of a shy kid, an unused quarter, a desperate want, a deep embarrassment shared with his mother.

I’ll never forget that my mother and I were alone in our house that day. She poured Pepsi over ice in an aluminum drinking glass, and I sipped the foam the way I liked to do, and then I drank and drank while she got some coins from her purse—pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters—and started to teach me what was what. Each coin contained a certain number of the others. My quarter was made up of twenty-five pennies, five nickels, two dimes and a nickel. A whole was made up of its parts, just the way characters are in fiction.

A drowsy late afternoon in our farmhouse. My mother and I, connected somewhere deeper than anecdote because of what we shared: the wanting, the embarrassment. The context of our story—that timid kid who wanted a cold bottle of pop, my late-in-life mother who wanted to prove that she could indeed be a good mother at her age—gives the amusing story its weight and makes it something I can’t forget. Comedy in fiction should never exist for the sake of the joke alone. It should have something to show us about the human condition. It can be truly memorable if the writer doesn’t neglect the human beings at the heart of the humor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stuff I Hear Myself Say on Panels

I just got back from the Creative Nonfiction Conference in Oxford, Mississippi, where for some odd reason the weather was much cooler and much rainier than here in Columbus, Ohio. So much for my plans to enjoy some hot, sunny days. That’s all right. Sometimes it’s better for a writer to delay his or her gratification.

I was on a panel yesterday about balancing work, life, and writing, and, as always, when I’m on a panel (surely this doesn’t just happen to me?), I heard myself saying things with a voice of certainty, when really I wasn’t certain at all. This is the way it usually goes for me. My Libra scales, seeking balance, cause me to see too many sides to the same question. I’m more of a person who wonders about certain things, hoping that the uncertainty of wondering might lead to considerations otherwise not possible, but I almost always fall victim to that panel persona of the one who knows exactly what he’s talking about. People in the audience are asking questions, after all, and we panel members are the ones who are supposed to know the answers.

The truth, though, is that sometimes I say something on a panel and later start to wonder exactly what I meant. I start to question whether I had any right to say what I did. I start to question, and I think audience members should do the same. They should interrogate the answers of the panelists, trying to see if those answers have any validity, knowing, of course that any answer from a panel member might make perfect sense for one person in the audience and still be bad advice for someone else.

So yesterday in the midst of a conversation about the importance of carving out blocks of time for writing and staying obsessed with a project so you can’t help but bring it to completion, I found myself saying that sometimes life gives us opportunities to rest and for the writer that can be a good thing because time away from a project can allow it to evolve in ways that it might not if we’re forcing ourselves to keep slogging along. Leaving the project alone for a while can give the unconscious parts of our minds a chance to do some work with the material in the same way that we work on our lives through our night dreams. The result, once we return to the writing, is usually something we’re more deeply attached to, moving through it now the way the dreamer does, by instinct, rather than woodenly trying to understand something through the logical parts of our brains. Simply put, we sometimes feel the material more deeply because we give ourselves permission to forget it.

Lordy Magordy! What kind of an enabler am I, telling people it’s okay not to write? The older I get, though, the slower I become with my writing projects. It’s not that I’ve lost my passion for the craft; it’s just that I’m more at ease with being patient, letting something steep, waiting longer for completion, hoping that the rests I take might in the end result create something thicker, more textured, more resonant. By the same token, I understand the importance of rest to make my writing seem fresh to me. Words, words, words: a lifetime of words. How easy it is to start to rely on the same tricks. When I was a younger writer, I could feel like everything I wrote was something I was making anew. Now, in what I’ll call my more mature years, I sometimes crave rest and silence. They help me see my material with new eyes. A good writing day can be spent daydreaming in my chair with no words put on the page.  I feel, then, the same way I feel when I wake from a dream in the morning, like I have one foot in my real life and one still in that dream world. That’s how writing feels to me when it’s going really well, a happy blend of the conscious and the unconscious. More and more, I’m starting to see the importance of rest for keeping me in that place from which my freshest writing comes.

Do I still have books I want to write? Absolutely. To write them the way they deserve to be written, though, I’m willing to wait, to give them time to deepen. I have a novel in progress now that I’ve barely touched since my stroke last September. I’ve worked on essays instead. But now the season seems right for that novel. I find myself waking up with thoughts of it on my mind. I hear it calling to me. I hear it telling me I’m ready.