The Creature and His Tale

It’s so much fun to see this creation of mine take shape and form, even sometimes taking on a life of its own. That’s the most fun – when I’m writing along to a plan, and then suddenly I feel my fingers typing or writing more furiously as though off the radar screen or out past sight of land. No one’s watching, my fingers seem to say. That’s when a bit of life quickens in me and I sense that creation is a spark, not a plan.

A book is really just a protracted speech. We’ve got a tale to tell – and it’s lengthy – and we write it because we’re afraid no listener will sit long enough to hear it without boredom or disapproval. By writing, we get to say all that we want to say, but you, the listener, don’t have to be burdened by the story. And you won’t interrupt us.

I think that’s why I’ve always preferred writing to the medium of talking. I grew up in a family in which no one listened to the half-sentence I might have squeaked out before I was cut off or plowed over with others’ more important speech. That’s how and why I started writing as soon as I could hold the pencil and sound out the words, match letters to those sounds . . . as a way to finish a sentence.

Of course it’s ideal to be heard as well – the flip side of talking. If communication were a coin, then I’d say talking is the heads side. The substance and feeling of what you say is the alloy of the coin. Being heard, the tails side, is what gives the coin its recognized value, its rate of exchange – but it’s not necessary if you’re only taking a snapshot of a coin or tossing it around in your pocket forever.

As a very young child, I would get ready for sleep at night by placing the heads of my 7 or 8 stuffed animals in a crown-like or starburst-like position around my own head so that each one of their heads was touching mine. In that way, as I imagined and created my story for the night (often continued from the previous night – a saga not to be missed), so could each of those animals “hear” the story my brain was relating. It was a way of having listeners before the time of my own literacy.

That’s how important it is for humans to be heard – any way they can. A child will often act up, not because they are bad creatures, but because even bad attention is better than none at all. I also consider that when people become hermits, or get banished to distant islands, or get held in confinement, they often write – or go crazy!

I think of when Dr. Frankenstein first comes face to face with the monster he created after it ran away from him two years previously. The good doctor is repulsed by that monster, hates it, and rejects it. The monster implores him over three paragraphs in the text merely to listen to him before doing away with him. This highly distilled version of the three-paragraph monster’s speech is from chapter 2 of part 2:

“Listen to my tale . . . But hear me . . . Listen to me, Frankenstein . . . Yet I ask you not spare me: listen to me . . . Still thou canst listen to me, and grant me thy compassion . . . Hear my tale; it is long and strange . . . you will have heard my story, and can decide.”

Finally, Dr. Frankenstein, after much protestation, agrees to listen to his creation. “I determined at least to listen to his tale . . . For the first time, also, I felt what duties of a creator towards his creature were . . . the fiend with an air of exultation, I with a heavy heart and depressed spirits . . . But I consented to listen . . . he thus began his tale.”

Stopping Cold

Thursday, October 22, 2009:  I’m always amazed at my ambition – 10 books to read and all 21 of the journals to review and organize for the writing of  "The ---------------," this book I’m writing. That’s what I brought with me to Gethsemani, my quiet weeklong retreat – these foods for thought – as though gluttony were the goal of spiritual silence.

Fortunately my work ethic is less powerful than whatever force in me said NO to all that. This is my last full day here and I’m not even sure what I’ve done this week to fill the days -- but I feel brimful nevertheless.  Was it that sunrise that took an hour to bare itself yesterday? Was it the sunset that seemed so reluctant to leave on the previous night? How long did it take to watch that flock of geese traverse the sky from one end of this world to the other? – Certainly long enough to witness three volunteers from its hindquarters rise up to relieve those with the hardest job in the front. And what about that bird that’s been following me around all week to keep me from reading even the first of those 10 books? . . .

That bird is a real mystery to me. I’ve never heard a bird’s song with more notes – or even as many – as this one had in her repertoire. It was a melody – not the repetitive four- or five-tweet pattern which I hear from the birds at home. No, this bird had melody, cadence, and even rhyme, I'd say. But I never saw her . . .

I had positioned my chair at my favorite reading spot between a large tree and the gravesite of my first favorite writer from my teenage and early bread baking years, Thomas Merton. Last year I re-read most of his early classic, “The Seven Storey Mountain,” while sitting at this spot. This year I tried to start the introduction to a book by Robert Hopcke, “There are No Accidents.” The bird began singing as soon as I sat down. I stopped my reading attempts, looked up, tried to read again, sat up and craned my neck, stopped, gazed out to the mountains, thought a while, got up from the chair, craned my neck while standing this time, sat back down, got up to circle the tree while looking upward – no bird. I even said, Who are you that sings? – thinking I might scare her out of her hiding place so I could see her – desperate measures – then I rapped on the trunk of the tree – that was ridiculous and painful too – thinking the same thing, that she might expose herself to me.

I wasn’t annoyed in the least bit – more dumbfounded – even considering whether the monks might “plant” these bird song devices in the trees and turn them on from a switch inside a nearby window. Maybe two or three monks are looking out the window at me now, I thought, snickering at the way I rapped on the tree trunk as though to say who’s there? That would be ridiculous. But I wanted to make sense of the talented bird, or at least see her, and people can be pushed to think odd ways in times of great no-sense. Nevertheless –

She (and I) must have gone on like that for 30 minutes. Then, thinking I was cold anyway, thinking I couldn’t read here anyway, I got up to walk back to my room – and the bird stopped cold. Why stop now? I’m sure I said that. I ventured back to the chair, thinking the device might somehow be linked to the chair – hoping no one saw me – walking to and fro the chair, even sitting once and circling the tree once. But she never resumed.

Then last night I heard it again – in another tree – by the parking lot – I looked up as others walked by for their after-dinner stroll, or got in their cars to leave, or just ambled aimlessly.  I wanted to scream through their silence, The bird! She’s doing it again! But – I can’t see her . . .

I looked, craned, whispered . . . but she just sang.

Gone to Gethsemani

In Search of Bones

Writers always talk about “finding their voice.” I know what that means, or what it must feel like, to find one’s voice – but I don’t think I’ve done it. I think “my voice” is much younger than the one I’m writing from. Maybe it’s really young. Maybe I should be writing children’s stories. Maybe my voice isn’t even human – maybe it’s a bird’s voice – or a dog’s.

I often think of the made-up “Fetch stories” that I told my youngest daughter before bedtime for many years. Fetch was a golden retriever beanie baby who loved lamb bones. I don’t remember how he came to love lamb bones, but it was crucial to his persona – and to the stories. Fetch eventually infiltrated the daytime hours as well, especially during dinner time, and most especially if roasting lamb wafted upstairs.

If someone had been recording the spontaneous Fetch stories all those years – if only – if only I’d had someone to follow me around the way I followed everyone else around to clean and pick up after them – if someone had followed me around that same way to write down the simple dilemmas of a dog whose sole ambition in life was to procure and enjoy lamb bones. . .

Let’s see if I can retrieve some of those characters -- Lucy Goosey, the brassy Christmas goose who wanted to marry Fetch (she cooked up some lovely lamb bone soup) – but Fetch didn’t want to marry her. Then there was Knuckles, the self-righteous pig who marched around carrying a sign that read, No Lamb Bones! His protests disturbed Fetch and made him feel bad about who he was. The Baba Yaga was a cackling witch who threatened to put Fetch in the washing machine. "But my beans will swell!," Fetch yelled. Fetch’s dad came around for occasional advice and protection, but mostly he was a device by which Fetch was read the nightly stories which he savored: “The Case of the Missing Lamb Bone,” “The Mystery of the Lost Lamb Bone,” “The Hidden Lamb Bone,” and “In Search of Lamb Bone Treasure.” I’m sure there were more – and similarly named. There was no mom to speak of – I guess she was cleaning.

. . . If only I’d had the foresight to spend 10 minutes a day writing down those stories, the many tales spun from the primary plot of a gentle, golden dog who loved lamb bones. Could one even publish a book like that today? The vegans would protest just like the pig that carried the foreboding sign, No Lamb Bones!

Frank McCourt said in an interview that he “found his voice” one afternoon when he was babysitting his 4-year-old granddaughter. As he watched her play contentedly on the floor, he “heard” what was to be the first paragraph of "Angela’s Ashes." He went home and began to write from the voice of a 4-year-old boy. He invested 30 years of “writing starts” before finding that moment.

Willa Cather said she found her voice after her failed first novel about a man who loved two women. She dejectedly took a train ride back to her family’s farm in Nebraska. She “heard” the 9-year-old child peeking out from the cracks of a covered wagon. That’s who wrote O Pioneers! and My Antonia – a nine year old.

A.A. Milne’s wife brought home a small stuffed bear from a London department store to give to their son, Christopher Robin. It was this voice, “a bear of very little brain,” who spoke up for A.A. Milne. This example comes to mind because I hear that a sequel to the Pooh books came out last week. It’s called “Return to the Hundred Acre Wood” – and the author is not Milne or his relative. It makes me want to buy a nice hardback (with dj) edition of the original Pooh books.

It would be nice if finding one’s voice were as magical as stumbling over lamb bone treasure. But I have to remind myself that Fetch never stumbled – he spent his entire life in search of the missing lamb bone!

Whose Voice?

I’m thinking about my audience too much. I recall my school-age writing classes – always the advice, Think of your audience. Who is reading this? I gave the same advice during my own brief career as a high school English teacher. I suppose it’s good advice to give narcissistic young people when they've been assigned to write an essay for parents about how to operate an iPod.  Know your audience. The audience dictates how you write.  But I longed to throw out the old advice, including the five-paragraph formula: tell what you’re going to say, say it in three paragraphs, and then tell us what you just said. I spent that year remembering that I wanted to write, not pass on “lame” advice to disinterested students. I no longer believed the advice. That’s one reason I’m not an English teacher any more.

In my original career as a journalist, I was instructed to write for an audience of adults with the average intelligence of a 13-year-old. That was a long time ago, so maybe the advice has changed by now. I was to write on that level -- so, for example, if I were to mention Hemingway, I would write, "Twentieth-century American author, Ernest Hemingway . . . "

Later, I spent a few years at the CDC editing articles for medical journals.  The doctors who wrote these laborious tomes told me their readers would already know what they were talking about. There was no need to define laparoscopic salpingectomy, I learned.

Public relations writing is the hardest work of all -- feigning urgent excitement in order to peddle treetop resort homes to an audience of bored retirees, convincing them that the fountain of youth is at Big Canoe!

I’m discovering that, for the first time in my life, it's time to stop thinking about the audience. First of all, I don’t know who my audience is. Some days it occurs to me that my audience might be my own children many years from now – that is, if they don’t throw away the manuscript along with my worn slippers and unfinished knitting projects. Maybe I’ll have a curious, like-minded grandchild who actually longs to know who his or her grandmother was – maybe he or she will publish my book!

Some people will get it; some won’t. That’s why I like the picture I’ve included at the left. The young girl in the center with the blue skirt and pinkish sweater – that’s the one I fear most of all. She’s humiliated for me, worried, shrinking inside herself on my account. Maybe the writer in me is about her age, and she can't believe the things I'm saying about us.  The two girls next to her are dumbfounded and bored. I saw those faces every day when I was teaching. The guys don’t matter. Who are those women in the front? 

I think I have to write this for myself right now. That's what real writers who give advice about writing would say.  They say, write what you know.  Be yourself.  Write the thing that comes out of you.  Find your voice!  Find your voice! Later . . . if that doesn't work . . . I'll figure it out when we get there, Little Girl.  

Pretend Writing

There is a bit-o-thing that I’ve been trying to write for two weeks, and although I’ve skipped around and done other writing, it is the one thing that I knew I had to break through before I could continue . . . but for some reason I just couldn't do it.  Then finally the other day I started writing about what I couldn’t do and about the things I wanted to say but couldn’t figure out how to say . . .

. . . and this is where I have to interrupt and say that it’s a trick I use when I can’t write something – I write about the thing I want to write. I have to assure myself that I’m not really writing it. I'm just pretending. Why? I don’t know. But for me, it feels as though a trusted person has just come in the back door and has taken a seat and had a cup of tea with me and said, OK, tell me about it – and all the while I'm talking, they are taking notes and listening – and then they leave me the notes, and I take a walk and feel much better for having talked about it.

This is another essential part of the trick: I have to let those notes set and congeal for a day or two, as though they were written in invisible ink and they needed a few days of solitude for the ink to appear. I do other things during that time – vacuum, clean out drawers, wash windows – and then I go back and read those magical notes about the thing I couldn’t write.  And with a sort of smile on my face I begin typing the notes as though they could be the real thing – and then after I’m fully tricked, I say, Wa-la,  the real thing!

It’s a trick that has worked for me since I was in college or maybe even earlier. There may have been a paper due for an English class, something I wanted to say but didn’t know how to express it or how to begin – and so I just started writing about the thing I couldn’t do. Then I looked back and saw most of what I needed – as though someone had gotten me started, and all I had to do was copy and edit.

Through all the many years I’ve been using this trick, it hasn’t failed me. But part of me can’t know it’s a trick. I honestly have to say to myself, This isn’t a trick. I just want to know what you'd like to say.  You can throw away the notes when we're finished. Let's just play.  It's important to know I can throw away the notes when finished.  And so I start answering (on paper). For me, some things just have to be written that way – from outside a window, looking in; or maybe from the back door, walking in; or from a mountaintop, looking down.

From what my notes tell me, that bit-o-thing is turning out to be a much more important thing than I thought -- so  maybe that’s what we were trying to say these past two weeks.

Slow Riser

I read in today’s newspaper about Sarah Palin’s first book which is coming out “much sooner than expected,” and has already scored as Amazon’s best-selling book before its release date in six weeks. Her 400-page book was originally slated for release in Spring 2010, but SuperWoman was able to finish it in just four months after the book deal was announced. Her publisher assures us that Palin has been “hands on” at every phase.

I sit at my kitchen table, in my atelier, and let out a big hrumph . . . like a bowl of maximally risen bread dough imploding with a swift punch to the belly. 

Many years ago I learned of a woman willing to share her recipe for a whole wheat bread that went from grain bin to table in less than two hours. “You can prepare the rest of your dinner while the bread is baking,” she assured me. I never met this woman in person, but I spoke to her many times on the phone regarding troubleshooting the technique. She had a mucous-y voice -- as though something were gurgling deep inside her lungs.

Very simply, her technique is to grind the wheat berries into flour; to add three times as much yeast as a normal recipe would call for; to decrease the salt somewhat (because salt slows yeast); to eliminate the first rise in the bowl and rather put the shaped loaves directly into bread pans where they will have their one and only 20-minute rise in a cold oven before you turn it on with the pans still inside and let the preheating act as a booster to the yeast cells that have yet to figure out what’s happening. The bread seems to explode with height in the oven – a fun spectacle to watch if you keep the oven light on. Thirty or 40 minutes later you have bread on the cutting board in the middle of the kitchen table.

I made the bread many times, always pleased with the rise, but somewhat suspicious of the doughy, moist and dark crumbs left on the cutting board – and the sensation of heaviness in the belly. It was no good at all the next day. Now, 20 years later, I think of her technique as similar to giving great amounts of fertilizer to plants, or to feeding corn and hormones to a young cow bound for slaughter in the year it was born.

Then I discovered the three-day bread – a technique using the natural yeasts of grape skins and kitchen air. A dough kneaded on Tuesday will gladly repay you on Thursday, I like to say. First you give the ingredients a slow kneading with plenty of 20-minute resting periods; then a 4- to 6-hour rest in a large, beautiful and old bread bowl; then a gentle deflation, removal from the bowl, and another hour-long rest while laying naked on the countertop (the dough); then you separate and form the dough into round loaves and let them rest some more, this time covered with linen towels from a beach gift shop you once visited; then you place the swelling loaves into bread baskets and let those rest for maybe 2 hours in that position; then you place the bread baskets in the refrigerator and let them rest 24 hours or so; it's Thursday now and you set the well-rested, dough-in-baskets onto the kitchen counter and let them rest and warm up for a few or several hours. You've got to preheat the oven for at least an hour to thoroughly heat that inch-thick baking stone -- now remove the loaves from their cozy baskets, let them rest naked again; carefully slit a smiley face across each top, rest again; then thank each one before sliding them onto the baking stone in the oven where they will gladly rise for you. Forty minutes later you will gingerly place each one on a cooling rack where they will rest for about 2 hours, all the while whistling and whispering and cackling to all those passersby who care to listen . . .

I know I’m a slow writer. It might take me four months of observing my birds at the feeder to come up with a metaphor for . . . something. It’s taken me 20 years to recall the dangerous technique of a fast riser I’ve never met.

Without Beginning

. . . without beginning.  I like that.  From Ueland's book, If You Want to Write.  She passes over the term very quickly, and in mid-sentence.  She describes a friend of hers who will start telling a story without beginning:  " . . . never leading up to it with apologetic explanations, proofs and qualifying phrases."  The necessary information comes later, when she's caught her breath.  It has a Biblical ringtone to it -- without beginning, amen.

I think of another term, a Latin one -- in medias res -- in the middle of things.  To begin right in the middle of a story, in the thick of it, from where you are floundering or maybe even drowning -- do that first, then once you've survived, tell how you got there.  It's a technique employed by most oral traditions  -- The Odyssey, The Iliad, Nibelungenlied, The Kalevala, on and on.  These have been given the status of high literature, but really they're just good children's stories meant to grasp and keep the attention of rowdy men in the mead hall.  I think a Bruce Willis movie might employ the same technique. 

"Nor does he begin the Trojan War from the double egg,
but always he hurries to the action, and snatches the listener into the middle of things."
--(Horace, "The Art of Poetry," lines 147-148)

Maybe that's why I'm having a hard time going linear with this thing I'm pretending to write.  I instinctively want to start in the middle, plunge into it even if it feels like drowning, then fill in the rest later -- like a survivor shaking herself off.  Now . . . let me tell you how I got here . . .   

I think I'll go with my instincts for writing the middle portions first.  The order will find it's own way to correctness later -- like birds flocking to a spot on the wire.