Month: August 2023

Nora invented a word on Saturday. It might already exist, but I don’t care. It’s perfect for our times.

As with many new words, it started from an existing one. We all know the idea of an affront, a thing that causes offense or outrage. It’s usually used as a noun. We also know the idea of affronted, which is an adjective describing the condition of having received an affront. But Nora’s word, sprung from much of our public life these days, was affrontational: the attitude toward the world that makes almost anything likely to be seen as an affront.

We all know those people. Brittle, spring-loaded, ready to be offended by any random remark. The platform of Twitter/X exists to bring us hot takes, quick responses, clever jibes. It’s a terrific tool for people ready to toss out some angry remark that generates an affrontational cycle for days or weeks, until a new tempest emerges within a new teapot.

This is the summer of WAAAAAAAAnthems like “Try That in a Small Town” and “Go Woke Go Broke” and “Rich Men North of Richmond,” affrontational songs that wail their offense at the modern world. Babies are affrontational, too, wailing their offense at anything less than their ideal.

I think physical distance makes an affrontational stance more likely. When we’re together in the same space at the same time, we’re interacting with a real person rather than reacting to cold text or secondhand video. The internet has made affrontationality (my new word, you’re welcome) the easiest condition to fall into. We used to talk about flame wars and beefs, but sometimes it seems those are more the norm than the exception.

I’ve left behind most of my religious education, but something that Pastor Fry said in seventh-grade Catechism has stuck with me for fifty years. In commentary over forgiveness, he said “it is equally a sin to give offense and to take offense.” If we think of offense or affront as a sort of perverse gift, then we can disrupt the affront by either not offering that gift and by not accepting it. Somebody has to be the circuit-breaker that interrupts the cycle of ill-will.

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Hey, it’s a mooc!

Robert Pirsig, in his one great book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, discusses what he calls “gumption,” or the willingness to continue.

Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going. If you haven’t got it there’s no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed. But if you have got it and know how to keep it there’s absolutely no way in the whole world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed. It’s bound to happen. Therefore the thing that must be monitored at all times and preserved before anything else is the gumption.

As part of this conversation, he names a few “gumption traps,” or things that make us lose enthusiasm for a project. Some of them are technical: 

• You’ve got the whole thing together and discover an internal part left aside, and you have to take it all back apart again.
• You discover that a part is missing or faulty, and you have to stop until it arrives.
• You discover that something is working most of the time, but there’s an intermittent failure that you can’t explain.

All of those drive me nuts. Guaranteed dead stop for a while. But there are other gumption traps that are more systemic, and more pernicious:

• Preset values that keep us from seeing possibilities
• Ego attachment that keeps us from learning 
• The opposite, anxiety that keeps us from imagining we can ever do it right
• Impatience, wanting it done more than wanting to do
• Incorrect categories, the either/or thinking that keeps us from reimagining the problem
• Tool traps—bad tools, bad working conditions, interruptions 

The first category, which Pirsig calls set-backs, are wholly external. They just happen, on any project. They’re unavoidable, at least once in a while. But the second category, which Pirsig calls hang-ups… those are invisible because they’re within us. And they’re as pertinent to writers as to motorcycle mechanics.

• Preset values: believing that a character should do or want something, rather than listening quietly to what they themselves do and want.
• Ego attachment: I know how to write this kind of work, and so I’m going to replicate this thing I know how to do. Every dog has its tricks, and we know how to get patted on the head. But maybe we can, even at our advanced age, learn some new ones.
• Anxiety: I’m no good, who the hell do I think I am, I can’t even spell right…. We all have our own array, but they’re always there.
• Impatience: truncating our work on one scene because we’re eager to get onto the next. 
• Incorrect categories: good guy/bad guy. Important character/background character. Show/tell. All of these labels keep us from seeing the thing as it is.
• Tool traps: Joyce Carol Oates says the thing that holds up most writers isn’t lack of talent, it’s interruptions. We can gain privacy through scheduling (before the kids get up), through physical enclosure (the door’s closed, dude), through distance (going on a retreat), and through anonymity (writing in a coffeeshop where the world ignores us). And if your pen is leaky or your computer is balky, you’re just creating a less pleasant experience for yourself.

The good news is that if we’re aware of these hang-ups, we can start to recognize when they occur, and develop strategies to interrupt the downward cycle.  More about that soon.

I was reading my daily email from The Creative Independent, a series of brief interviews with artists of all sorts about their creative practice and inspirations. Today’s was with the comedian and musician Jaboukie Young-White, who said something that struck me about his dual practice.

In stand-up, you do a bunch of intellectual labor to get a reaction out of people, whereas I’ve gone to concerts, and musicians will, in between songs, be like, “Water,” and everyone’s going crazy, dying laughing, and I’m like, “This room is so hot right now. If I could do a tight five, it would crush so hard.”

Yep. As I mentioned in the prior post, our audiences are prepared for something. And if we don’t deliver it, we lose them quickly. But some of that preparation is beyond our control.

Being an early-career standup comedian would have to be the worst job in the world, because you’d constantly be facing a cold room. On open-mic nights, the people before you wouldn’t be very good either, and it’s hard to tell a joke that enlivens a room rendered dull by boredom. They’re drinking, they’re having conversations with their friends, they’re getting an easy laugh from their buddies by mocking the people on stage. A bored room might be the best possible outcome; it could be actively hostile.

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I don’t have my copy of Cathy Park Hong’s brilliant book Minor Feelings at hand right now, so I’ll have to perform an injustice by paraphrasing. In one of her later essays, she talks about taking classes in stand-up comedy and improv as part of her self-training as a performing poet. She says poetry readings are among the deadliest social events we know of, that every poet knows it, and that we replicate all those bad performance habits anyway. She says she can’t count the number of times that a professional poet has neared the end or her or his reading by saying “Only two more.” It’s like going to the dentist, where they kindly tell us that the pain is almost over. She participated in that herself for a long time, and finally decided that there had to be a better way.

My friends in the Duke writing program who were trained in composition programs used to talk about “the rhetorical circumstance” of a piece of writing. What conversation are we entering? What kind of contribution do we intend to make? Is the mode of conversation gentle and luxurious, or quick and combative?

So let’s think about the rhetorical circumstance of reading our work. It’s theater, and specifically monologue. All eyes are on us… people are quiet and attentive… we’re facing the group, often standing while they’re sitting… and we’re on our own. That’s a mode that carries powerful performance and audience expectations.

If we’ve ever read our work aloud, we recognize that so many performers don’t recognize their responsibilities to the room. They haven’t rehearsed, they lose their place, they shuffle papers, they apologize for what they’re going to read, and they haven’t any sense at all of how long ten minutes is. I was about to write that they give us a little backstory between poems and thus break the spell, but that’s not quite right, because they never tried to cast a spell over us in the first place. We’re all polite audience members, we don’t burp loudly or start talking to our neighbors the way we might in a nightclub, but we’re waiting for the pain to end.

Let’s go back to Jaboukie Young-White’s statement, and focus on the term “tight five.” Every professional comedian has a five-minute set that they use on talk shows or talent competitions, and it’s sharpened to a razor’s gleam. It’s not tossed off, it’s not improvised. Even if the performer looks casual or awkward, that’s the role they’ve taken on; the performance of that character has been highly refined.

Here’s an example that’s easy to enter, Drew Carey’s first televised standup set, on the Tonight Show in 1991. Listen to the intro: “He’ll be appearing this weekend at The Funny Bone in Schamburg, Illinois, and then Tuesday through Sunday at The Funny Bone in Naperville, Illinois.” This is clearly not a comic who has made it yet. But after this performance, he almost immediately got a TV show. He comes on stage at :20 into the video, and he’s done by 6:55. It’s old-school comedy in the Dangerfield mode, and it’s a little dated now thirty years later, but this awkward schlubby Clevelander has perfected every scrap of his stage persona, down to the glint off his glasses in the stage lights.

When we read our work, no matter how dark or how complex or how sophisticated, we become entertainers. We have entered the rhetorical circumstance of performance, and we have to respect that. We become a very specific version of ourselves for those minutes, and we have to win the room’s trust. Even harder if that trust has been violated by prior performers.

Practice. Know your timing, and your time limits. Don’t apologize for your work. Don’t rustle pages around and lose your place. Make eye contact.

That stage is yours. Stand up there like you fucking own it, and then leave it better than you found it.

I’m leading a fiction and memoir workshop for the next ten months, and as always, I’m writing along with the group. I’ve revived a project that I’d had underway and left at the side of the road a couple of years ago. Now I know what it’s about. That helps.

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Rich Hall wrote a book in the 1980s called Sniglets, in which he invented words that didn’t exist but should. One of those words was “triorities,” which he defined as three things that all had to happen first. 

That’s what the first chapter of a book is. We have so much stuff to do! We have to introduce the characters and the setting and the time and the personalities and the narrative voice and the fundamental problem they’ll all face and the relationships between everyone and all that stuff has to come first. It’s absolutely impossible.

The good news is that we don’t really have to do all that.

My friend Nathan said something once that has really resonated with me. “The first chapter of a novel teaches you how to read the book.” And I think that’s absolutely true, what we encounter in the first few pages needs to set us up for the emotional journey that we’re about to go on. 

• If it’s a plot-focused book, like a mystery or a thriller, then we need to understand the stakes right away.
• If it’s a character-focused book, then we need to feel the complexity and the inner workings of this character right away.
• If it’s a setting-focused or circumstance-focused book, then we need to lay out the landscape right away.
• If it’s a literary book filled with ideas and delicious language, then we need to be introduced to the complexity and density of the language right away.
• If it’s a book about a relationship, we need to see that relationship early on.

Basically, the first few pages of the book establish the deal we’re making with our readers. We’re promising them a particular kind of experience, in exchange for their investment of time and attention and emotion. If, to quote Peter Ho Davies, the novel is a machine to keep us reading, one of the ways that machine can fail is by delivering an experience other than the one we promised.

One thing that implies is that we might have to go back and rewrite the introduction sometime later on, once WE know what the book is about. There’s no need to understand right off the bat what a book is about. We might discover that along the way. If we’re writing truthfully, we probably WILL learn that the story has more going on than we imagined when we started.

The term “novel” has come to mean any book-length, continuous work of fiction. Romance novel, mystery novel, historical novel, literary novel… whatever the iteration, we now understand the word to have three essential components:

1. It goes all the way from one cover to the other, unlike something that’s part of a magazine or a newspaper or a collection.
2. It concerns itself with one story, whether that story takes place on one day or over decades. It is differentiated in this way from the single-author short-story collection, which is more discontinuous in character or setting or focus.
3. It is overtly a work of imagination rather than reportage. There is no expectation of factual verisimilitude.

There are, as always, exceptions to any of these, but in lay terms, these three things are what we anticipate when we see the little words “a novel” on the book cover.

I’d like to offer an alternative. I’d like us to think of ourselves as creating extended works of ecological ambition. (“Novel” is easier to say, though, isn’t it…) “First I went here and then I went there and then I did that” is a story, sure, but it’s not a very interesting one. Why not? Because it has no system of referents within which it has meaning. And I think that’s one thing that strong memoir and strong fiction and strong personal essays have in common: they create a whole world, a cultural ecosystem in which individual actions mean more than their individual instances. In which people’s choices are constrained in particular ways, in which some possibilities might never occur to the characters even though they clearly occur to us readers. Conversely, a world in which possibilities exist for those characters that never would have been apparent to us at all. We westerners are so immersed in individualism, the idea that we have free will and an open playing field, that it’s easy for us to lose track of how much a part of a time and community and culture we all are. But every one of us work both within and against our context, and the very best longer stories have the opportunity to really play out the systems within which individual lives carry on.

A bad romance novel, for example, really doesn’t matter where and when it is. The Fifty Shades books were desperately awful in part because they didn’t take place in any knowable human landscape at all. The characters were young and attractive and rich and that’s all that mattered; it could have been in 19^th C London or 21^st C Hong Kong and told exactly the same story. Paradoxically for a work of supposed erotica, there was no friction: nothing that Christian and Anastasia had to work within or against. Contrast that against Helen Hoang’s wonderful The Kiss Quotient, in which Stella’s life with Asperger’s sets her apart from an easy mainstream of romantic life, and her work in consumer algorithms is by contrast far easier and more rewarding. It’s a body of work that’s enormously specific as to its time and place and way of life. 

The writer Charles Baxter says that one of our roles as writers is to be a cultural curator, to hold for history the details of what it was like. It’s one thing to toss in a note in our story that Lindbergh just landed in Paris; that’s enough to tell us that the story’s set in 1927. But it tells us nothing at all about what 1927 was like: how the buoyancy of his daredevil flight was spurred by the buoyancy of the Golden Age and the belief that the party could never end; that The Great Gatsby in 1925 was part of that same heedless, reckless optimism; that the first sound movie “The Jazz Singer” premiered just after the great Mississippi flood killed 700,000 destitute people; that Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in a fit of anti-immigrant fury. It tells us nothing about what it’s like to live in the first half of Prohibition and the rise of organized crime, in which poor people were blinded by homemade liquor and the wealthy had champagne and brandy without interruption. It tells us nothing about Jim Crow, nothing about sharecropping and tenant farming, nothing about the growth of mechanized agriculture.

Science fiction and fantasy writers talk about “worldbuilding,” which Wikipedia (the source of all knowledge and wisdom, and a clearly 21^st century reference) describes as “developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities.” All of us are responsible for developing an imaginary setting with coherent qualities, whether that’s a 19^th C Vermont settlement or a 21^st C Nebraska corn town or a planet in Solar System EMN298y65. And then we speculate what the lives within that would have been like, at the smallest detail of clothes and slang, at the largest forces of religion and politics. 

What our characters do is meaningless without close attention to the landscapes around them.