Man Martin's Blog, page 218

How the Rest of Us Do It

If you check this blog periodically, you'll find that once in a while I give away a million-dollar idea, completely free of charge.  Here's an idea that's going to make somebody rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Have you noticed how many men wear baseball caps all the time?  This may only be true in the southeast, but I swear there are towns in Tennessee you'd think boys were issued baseball caps at birth and forbidden by law from ever removing them.  They wear them inside and out, day and night, rain or shine.  (Surely the purpose of a baseball cap is to shade the eyes?  Why would you need one after sunset?)  So here's my idea: open a clinic that will surgically implant a visor directly into the forehead.  Great, huh?  Someone's going to make a fortune.
It won't be me, though.  I'll be working on my novel.
My current work-in-progress, tentatively titled Bread of Heaven, is about a grammarian who suffers from a mysterious neurological impairment and is also convinced his wife is unfaithful.  In my previous draft, which I've been working on well over two years now, he hired a detective who turns out not to be what he'd seemed.  Somewhere between Thursday night and Friday morning it occurred to me it wasn't the detective who wasn't what he seemed, it was the neurologist.  Did I mention I'd been working on this for two years now?  The neurologist and the detective can't both be not what they seem, that would be overdoing things.  Out goes the detective.
My previous draft (12c) weighed in at about 301 pages - much of which was scrap, and was destined to be jettisoned anyway.  After trimming out all the stuff about the detective - this is only preliminary, I know there's some other parts to take out as well, I'm at 202 pages.  So, at an estimate, I've lost a little over eight months' of work, early mornings, most of it, between 530 and 700 AM.  I won't say I didn't cuss when I figured this out, and didn't feel like crying a little.  Still, what the hell, right?  By this time I'd be this much older anyway, whether I'd fiddled away my time writing about a character who didn't make the cut, or spent it productively working on the neurologist.  Hell, if I'd started with the neurologist, I might be done by now.  *&%$##!
Mark Twain's favorite novel, his third, was Pudd'nhead Wilson.  He said he'd gotten the thing finished before he realized it was actually two novels - one a tragedy about Pudd'nhead and one a farce about co-joined twins.  He surgically removed all the parts about the twins and produced it separately as a forgettable novella - remembered only because it had once been part of Pudd'nhead Wilson.  In his foreward to Pudd'nhead, he explains all this, and says that there is a lot of information on how professionals write novels, but that maybe the reading public would like to know "how the rest of us do it."
I belong to the category of "the rest of us."  Pudd'nhead was Twain's third novel; this is my third novel.  Maybe it's a kind of a curse or something.
Anyway back to work.  *&%$##!  Back to work.
I should've gone into surgically implanting baseball caps.

Craving Attention

Different people write for different reasons.  Flannery O'Connor said she wrote because she was good at it, the kind of funny, frank, conversation-stopping comeback she specialized in.  But that can't be true, can it?  There must've been a time when she wasn't good at it, but was writing anyway, learning to be good at it.
I can't speak for other writers, but I'm pretty sure I took it up because I craved attention. 
I wasn't always interested in writing, for the longest time I wanted to be a cartoonist.  When I was in middle school, I drew comics about my friends on the debate team.  Actually, they weren't properly friends at the time.  I was the youngest person on the team, there largely on sufferance of the coach, Ted Carter, because my big sister was on the team.  Everyone else was older, sophisticated, wise-cracking and sharp.  I covetted their acceptance.
I dreamed up a story line in which the team were super heros, along the lines of the Fantastic Four.  I stayed up one night, using a playing card to square off panels on sheets of typing paper, in which I illustrated their adventures. Just wait 'til they see this!  They're going to love it, I thought, and sure enough, they were thrilled!  They passed them around and laughed and repeated the jokes I'd written and told their friends about it.  I wasn't just accepted, I was like a star.
That set a pattern for me.  Every time we went on a debate trip, I produced a fresh comic.  When I moved to Milledgeville and joined the team there, I did the same.  Staying up late, all alone, darkness outside the windows, drawing pictures and writing dialogue - wait 'til they see this!  It was the anticipation of people's reaction even more than their actual reaction that began to drive me.
Also while in Milledgeville, I joined the theater group at the behest of my teacher Lee Bowman - ah, what we owe to our teachers, can we ever thank them enough.  I loved being on stage and was pretty good at it.  I continued acting right through college.  But the attention you get performing, while intoxicating, is too strong for a steady diet as far as I'm concerned.  I love being on stage, but afterwards my hands are shaking because of the strain.  My young friend Carson is soon to debut as a Lost Child in Peter Pan, and I hope he loves it, too.  Acting is a real thrill and something no one should miss.  But in the long run, it's not for me.  Maybe the proportions are wrong - there's too much actual attention and not enough anticipation of it.  Everything's all-at-once do-or-die make-or-break.  You're on the tightrope the whole time, and while it's a blast feeling their response - and blast is the accurate word: it's like standing in front of an open furnace door - you can't enjoy the prospect of their pleasure.  Flannery OConnor, like me, had also been a cartoonist, and I believe acted on the same Georgia College (Georgia Women's College, then) stage that I did.  But she gave those things up, even though she must've been good at them, to write - which presumably, she wasn't good at yet.  Maybe there wasn't enough wait 'til they see this to savor.
I like this right now.  I'm the only one awake in the house.  It's dark outside the windows.  My second cup of coffee is at my wrist.  In a moment, I'll refill it and resume work on The Bread of Heaven, a novel I'm currently on draft 12-c of.  But OMG, OMFG, it is really something!  Wait 'til you see this!  Just wait 'til you see it!

The Great Victorian Moralists

The funny thing is, when I try to think of Victorian Moralists, I have a hard time doing so.  There's Dickens, yes, well, definitely, and then there's... well, Dickens.  There's George Eliot, very moral.  But then, do moral ladies really go around taking men's names?  And the Brontes - forget about it!  Have you read Wuthering Heights?
Who else?  There must have been scads of them, right?
There's Darwin.  He was a Victorian, and he was definitely a model of probity.  But do we really consider him a moralist if what he says so scandalizes the public?  Freud's another one - he's Viennese, I know, but still the same era.  Aren't moralists of the Victorian stripe forbidden from talking about certain topics?
When I think of my favorite Victorian writers - I'm including both sides of the pond here - they don't seem the least bit Victorian.  Oscar Wilde who said, "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."  Mark Twain (crossing the pond here) who said, "Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it."  Abrose Bierce (still across the pond) who said, "Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others."  Saki (back in England) "You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school."  Lewis Carroll, "Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."  W S Gilbert, "No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have - and I think he is a dirty little beast."
Well, you get the idea.  Obviously I have a sweet tooth for humorists, but I think the list above is maybe more typical of Victorianism than Dickens.  And all of these folks are true moralists: they expose fraudulent public morals in the name of a greater standard.  Ditto for Darwin and Freud.
As G B Shaw, that other great Victorian moralist puts it, "My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity."  Or - W S Gilbert again, "He who'd make his fellow creature wise must always gild the philosophic pill."

Orlando Home and Leisure

Nancy Pate, who is as wise as she is no doubt lovely and good, did a very nice write-up of Paradise Dogs for Orlando Home and Leisure.

14 ORLANDO HOME & LEISURE AUGUST 2011Okra Picks, Nostalgia andSummer's Bookish BountyIam loving summer'sbounty: blueberries, melons,peaches, corn, tomatoes –and okra. Not just to eat butto read. Let me explain.Every season, the SoutheastIndependent Booksellers Allianceannounces its dozen "OkraPicks: Good Southern BooksFresh Off the Vine.'' Two recentselections, both with a local flavor, drew me in.Man Martin's Press) shouts "retro'' with its cover, a neon titleriding in the sky above an aqua car, a roadsidediner and a pink(!) alligator. We're boarding theWayback Machine to Central Florida in the1960s, B.D. (Before Disney)."Interstate 4 had come through,'' Martinwrites early in the book, "but the region stillfairly trembled in anticipation of the next bigthing, the thing that would lift it from being alargely rural cracker town into something likemodern glory as had happened in Palm Springsand Miami.''His protagonist, Adam Newman, is a homelyreal estate agent/dreamer with lots of charm,great expectations and a talent for reinventinghimself at any given moment. As he gases uphis car at the "Sinclair on Eola," he pondershis plan to win back his ex-wife, Evelyn, withwhom he once ran a restaurant that served onlyhot dogs. But what of his clingyyoung fiancée, Lily?Complications ensue as Adamtries to return to the FloridianEden of yesteryear. Martin's allegoricallynamed characters getup to all sorts of mischief, andthe resulting comedy of errorsborders on high farce and tomfoolery.Martin – who grew upin Florida and now lives in Georgia – has a defthand with local color and shows true affectionfor his goofy hero. A major plot point, whichincludes mysterious land purchases, will comeas no surprise to Central Floridians familiarwith a certain omnipresent mouse.Paradise Dogs (St. Martin'sParadise Dogs call an "E-ticket,'' yet it's still an agreeable rideback to an orange-blossom-scented past not yetpaved with theme parks.may not be what old-timers

Faulkner's Unvanquished

When I was nineteen or twenty I read William Faulkner's The Unvanquished.  I did not know Faulkner from Fauntleroy in those days, and wasn't intimidated by his reputation.  I was so affected by the story, I rewrote a chapter, switching out word for word, changing it from a Civil War novel into science fiction.  Ringo became Ognir.  Granny became the Ygrann.  You get the idea.  It was really unreadable.  I called it, "The Unvanquished, novel by William Faulkner, more novel by Man Martin."
Yesterday I finished re-reading it, the novel, not my piece, which has mercifully long since been lost.
Lord, why would anyone read anything else ever?
It really is fearsome to try writing when Faulkner, Percy, and Camus are still on the shelves.  You could never top them, can you even hold your own with them?
Reading it a second time, I appreciate how perfectly constructed it is.  The first half or so of the novel is an hilarious picaresque about an upright old lady and two boys outwitting Union Soldiers during the Civil War.  But there are consequences to be paid for their chicanery, and just after the funniest chapter in the novel - the chapter I tried rewriting, by the way - they begin to pay those consequences.  Then, the protagonist has to pay consequences for paying the consequences.  By swift gradations, the novel turns from farce to high drama to tragedy.
The book ends with what is quite properly the archetypal ending of Westerns: law comes to the town and replaces the rule of the gunslinger.  It is a novel about a boy's coming of age, but also the coming of age of the South.
It is a great book.  It pleases me that thirty-odd years ago I was so taken with what a great book it was, I attempted adapting it.

Back to Woik

If this is late July, my day job is starting again soon.
I'm probably one of the few public school teachers who went into the profession for the money.  At the time my comic strip, Sibling Revelry, was folding and I needed steady income, so I went back to school and got my teaching certificate.  Teaching is hard work, and had I sales enough, I'd rather spend my time writing, and yet...
Every year, about this time, I begin dreaming of being back at work.  Not bad dreams, like the horrible dread of the final exam you were supposed to take that somehow you forgot to show up for, and not particularly good either.  Just ordinary work-a-day stuff: planning, instructing, grading.  When I have those dreams I realize I'm unconciously looking forward to going back to work.
Teachers bellyache all the time, but the truth is, teaching actually is very fulfilling work.  I've even wondered if my wish came true, and the fairy-angel of literary success waved her wand over me, would that be enough?  Wouldn't I want to keep teaching, at least part time, to meet this strange desire I have to teach?
Last night, I dreamt about setting up the creative writing class I'll teach this fall, and the way I'll use the internet to give students their outside reading.  I woke up this morning with a pleasant sensation, yes, that's just the way I'll do it.
It's time to go back to work.

Working Through It

The summer, she ain't been an easy one.
Both of our cars decided to give up the ghost.  We have bought one car, which is our sole means of transportation.
The swimming pool - I know complaining about having a swimming pool is like griping about caviar being too lumpy - continues to be an absolute drain on our bank account.
My oldest daughter is engaged, which, while in itself is thrilling news, Nancy and I looked at the price tag of the upcoming fete and quailed like unto... well... quail.
On top of this, something's been eating our tomatoes.
Life is hard.
I've been re-reading some of my favorite books and thinking how lovely it would be to have the sunshine and space to create that the great authors enjoyed.
So Albert Camus - he lived a charmed life if anyone did.  He'd written The Plague, The Fall, The Stranger and won the Nobel Prize when he was only 44.  Of course he died when he was 47.  He was born in poverty.  His father died when he was 1.  He contracted TB, he fought in the war.  OK, bad example.
Walker Percy.  Well, his grandfather shot himself.  So did his father.
David Foster Wallace.  OK, another bad example.
Laurence Sterne.  Tuberculosis.  Wife's mental illness.  Death at 54.  Miguel Cervantes.  Wounded in battle, held four years as a prisoner and slave in Algiers.
Not that hardship makes great writers, but hardship is the common bread of humanity.  There's a little something in this world for all of us, and a useless car and a drained bank account are pretty small beans compared to TB and depression.
I'll stop moaning, count my blessings, and get back to work.

Hats Off! (More on Camus' The Plague)

I'm in the midst of re-reading The Plague.  In case you're unfamiliar with the story, it's about the bubonic plague unexpectedly devastating a modern city in North Africa.  Although a possible scenario, Camus is not strictly interested in scientific realism as other stories such as Outbreak.  At one point, doctors hopefully administer an innoculation to a dying child to test its efficacy.  That doesn't quite make sense, does it?  You can't innoculate against a disease once you already have it, right?
What Camus is really interested in is how people react.  There are those who turn to religion, to love, to service of fellow man, to despair, to mad hope.  There is a criminal about to be tried to whom the plague is actually good news, who feels more at ease in a world where everyone is as haunted and hunted as himself.  All of these are people attempting to make meaning in a meaningless world.  Camus, who must have at times viewed the character as despicable, makes even the priest seem worthy and noble.
In a story like this, every reader searches the cast of characters for the one most like himself.  Who would I be?  How would I act in this situation?  The character with whom I most identify is the aspiring author, Grand.  Even before the Plague strikes, Grand finds meaning in his lonely, menial existence, crafting his great novel. (So obsessed is he with perfection, he can never get past the first sentence.)
"What I really want, Doctor," Grand tells Dr. Rieux, "is this.  On the day when the manuscript reaches the publisher, I want him to stand up - after he's read it through, of course - and say to his staff: 'Gentlemen, hats off!'"
Rieux was dumbfounded, and, to add to his amazement, he saw, or seemed to see, the man beside him making as if to take off his hat with a sweeping gesture, bringing his hand to his head, then holding his arm straight out in front of him.
"So you see," Grand added, "it's got to be flawless."
Though he knew little of the literary world, Rieux had a suspicion that things didn't happen in it quite so picturesquely - that, for instance, publishers do not keep their hats on in their offices.  But, of course, one can never tell, and Rieux preferred to hold his peace.
Elsewhere, Grand explains the extraordinary difficulty of his craft:
"I'd like you to understand, Doctor.  I grant you it's easy enough to choose between a 'but' and an 'and.'  It's a bit more difficult to decide between 'and' and 'then.'  But definitely the hardest thing may be to know whether one should put an 'and' or leave it out."
Of all the characters, Grand is the one I'd like to be.  He is laughable, naturally, and absurd, but in Camus' world we are all absurd, struggling against the greater absurdity of the world.  I love Grand's passion, though, even envy it.  It reminds me of something from Thoreau about a man driven to create the perfect walking stick - just that and no more - and in his pursuit of this simple perfection finds the clue to immortality.
How does Camus, the Nobel-winning author, feel about the writer of his creation, who sweats and labors and entire life polishing that one never-finished sentence?  Well, he does name him Grand.
Hats off!

Ramping Up

There's a temptation for beginning novelists to use the "slow build." They figure since the novel is a long form, they have ample leisure to establish setting, get their characters in place, and so forth, before getting around to anything actually happening.  This wearies the reader almost at once.  Why should I read a book where I have to wait a hundred pages for an event, when other books start rolling on page 1?  Another novelist will have a wild, super-intense opening scene, and then let the story settle into a long morass before revving it up again with any action.  This hypes the reader's interest, but makes him impatient and rightly irritated.  Often, readers who even bother to get that far discover that the best part was the first few anyway.  The opening scene is a promise, and if you break that promise, the readers will come at you with sticks.
I suspect slow-build novelists haven't spent enough time thinking beforehand where the story is going, otherwise there'd be a lot less prologue and we'd get there already.  There's nothing wrong with thinking through a story in writing first, meandering around until you find what you were seeking, but that doesn't mean the reader has to do it with you.  This is why God gave us the delete key.  Likewise, I think the common cause of having an explosive hype scene and then nothing is that the hype scene is all the writer had in the first place.  He should have mulled more carefully on the consequences of his opening scene before proceeding.
I'm re-reading The Plague, which I know is about so much more than the plague of the title, but I want to consider it today purely from the point of craftsmanship of plot.  Camus devotes two pages - tops - to describing the ugliness and banality of Oran.  Even here, he is creating suspense, a sort of "we-never-thought-it-could-happen-here" sort of mood.  Then, the rats start dying.
The death of the rats is grisly and spectacular, wierd and compelling.  They all come into public as they die, and there prove to be more of them in this ugly coastal town than anyone could have imagined.  There are rats everywhere, in streets, trashcans, hallways - still warm bodies underfoot.  Just as the rat deaths taper off, a concierge develops fever and swellings and dies in horrible agony.
Then the human deaths begin.
In a very few pages Camus siezes our attention - the ugliness of the town is a promise, and he fulfills it with the death of the rats, and the rats are likewise a promise, and he follows on their heels with human deaths.  We never loiter around with the characters backstage waiting for events to start; instead the characters are in the middle of the events with us - a doctor, a priest, a writer, a criminal - doing what they would do as first rats, then people, begin to fall.
That's how you do it.

Early Work

There's a Gahan Wilson cartoon in which a disgruntled museum patron stands before a wall of crayola drawings of smiling stick-figure people and wobbly circle-suns with spokes.  The guard behind him says, "Of course, they're very early Rembrandts."
This is an early Man Martin, in fact the earliest Man Martin extant.  It is was given to me by my sweet, sweet sister Helen who had saved it, lo these many years.  The heading is "Facing Reality" spelled with the eccentricity of a six or seven-year old.  (My mother had recently divorced my alcoholic father, so this concept had special resonance for me.  It is also interesting that it was written on Norlestrin notepaper - Norlestrin, the internet informs me is a birth control prescription???)  I will offer one minor clarification of the picture; the reason for the man's peculiar dance-like pose is that he was facing in the other direction and has just that moment wheeled around, perhaps feeling the humid breath of "Realatty" at his back.  Everything else I leave to you.
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