Details Details Details

For writers and readers, the devil is not in the details, the world is. For far too long I have allowed myself to believe something I heard repeatedly but never questioned; that being, too many details in writing was the mark of an amateur. They just weren’t needed. They killed the story I was told. They were boring, just a fill factor. What a surprise I had when I read Chapter Three - Details, Details in Alice LaPlante’s classic: The Making of a Story.

An unexamined belief is a guarantee of limitation. The notions we accept without investigating are invariably those that trip us up and hold us back. I accepted that details were something that should be avoided, stick to the big picture I was told and then march your characters into that and hope the reader makes that often serpentine journey with you. But now I see how where you start each story is so significant. Do you start with the big picture – the noble truths, the campaign, the issue that drives the story and move to the specifics or do you begin with the specifics and then expand? If you do the latter, details are your major tools.

So do we write:

With the beginning of World War II, Jeffrey Tomes, who had always wanted to be a soldier, was secretly celebrating that his dream was about to come true.

Or do we write:

Jeffery was curled in a half circle on his bed completely absorbed in a comic book he’d found as part of someone’s weekly garbage set out in an alley he used as a short cut to school. When he spotted a comic book on the top, he dug feverishly through the box, rationalizing his lateness for school against the prospect of finding one of his favorites. Three-quarters of the way down, there it was. A Soldier of Fortune comic. What a find. Now on his bed, he licked the  index finger on his left hand and stuck it on the page corner insuring it turned without hesitation. For once the story started to roll out, Jeffrey wanted nothing to stop it.

From the details, emerge the story. From the details, emerge the characters. The details, like an old Biblical genealogy, beget images and images deftly rendered beget familiarity and familiarity is how a reader inserts himself into the developing story and brings with him a palette of emotions that assures reality. The writer’s role is to get that process started with every ounce of creativity he or she can engender.

But the message didn’t hit with its full punch until LaPlante offered a writing exercise from John Gardner’s, The Art of Fiction. Here is that writing exercise for you to experience first-hand what stands revealed when you are forced to use only detail to create an image which in its own way tells the story of a particular moment. Give it go. Here are the instructions:

Describe a barn as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, or war or death. Do not mention the man who does the seeing. The result should be a powerful and disturbing image, a faithful description of some apparently real barn, but one from which the reader gets a sense of the father’s emotion; though exactly what that emotion is he may not be able to pin down.

If you are a writer, this exercise is definitely worth your time and effort, for if your experience is anything like mine, you will feel like you have learned something that you could never quite put your finger on before - what it is that master novelists are doing in their writing that makes it so compelling.

If you would like to read my attempt at this exercise, click here.

The Serendipity of Success

 The stories of success that most enchant us are those that we, or those involved, cannot explain. That doesn't stop us from trying to figure them out, speculating on the possible causes or dismissing them as blind luck, but they continue to haunt us as they suggest a possibility we can’t quite grasp.

Maurice Sendak was an American illustrator and author of children’s books. He based his stories on childhood influences: his immigrant origins, the Lindbergh kidnapping, the concentration camp deaths of his extended family, which he found out on the day of his bar mitzvah, and parents consumed with anger and depression. He felt many children had experienced what he had at some level, not the same events but the confusion, fear and disempowerment they represented. Sendak wanted to share with his young audience what he considered the reality of most childhoods. He vowed he’d never lie to them. Needless to say, rainbows and sunshine were not part of his illustrations.

In 1963, Sendak had an idea for a book which he entitled Where the Wild Horses Are. His editor, Ursula Nordstrom, loved the idea and was purported to say the title was poetic and evocative. She offered him a contract, and Sendak set about working on the book. Several months into it, Sendak realized he had a problem. He couldn't draw horses. He wasn't a school-trained artist. Upon informing her that this project wasn't going to work, he met the business face of Ursula Nordstrom. In an “acid-tone[d] response” she asked what could he draw.

“Things,” he said.

So his editor suggested another title, Where the Wild Things Are, perhaps with more sarcasm than was mentioned in my source.  Likely no one continued to grouse about it, however, because 19 million copies have been sold since its publication in 1963. Who’d have ever imagined? These ugly little character things, a boy who disobeyed his mother, a mother who sent her son to bed without supper (this was the 1950s, and they were no-no’s) and a “violent” story.

In a quote of Sendak’s, I found what I would call a clue to his “serendipitous” success. One I've seen before in similar tales. Here’s what he said:

"I'm totally crazy, I know that. I don't say that to be a smartass, but I know that that's the very essence of what makes my work good. And I know my work is good. Not everybody likes it, that's fine. I don't do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can't not do it."

The italics are mine. The two points are critical. The most pertinent question a creative being must be able to answer for himself is what is my art about. This doesn't mean defining a genre. It refers to what in you has to get out. Understanding that puts us in touch with the force governing point two, the “I can’t not do it,” part of an artist. That drive is not to be confused with obsession. It represents a depth of engagement that generates satisfying results and often notable art. Accepting these two realities often places a person in the path of serendipitous success.

Maurice Sendak knew what he was and who he was and didn't appear to be tempted to be anyone else. He knew also what was his to do, and he did it. This quote describes that awareness beautifully:

“Art has always been my salvation. And my gods are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart. I believe in them with all my heart. And when Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can’t explain — I don’t need to. I know that if there’s a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart. Or if I walk in the woods and I see an animal, the purpose of my life was to see that animal. I can recollect it, I can notice it. I’m here to take note of. And that is beyond my ego, beyond anything that belongs to me, an observer, an observer.”

To be successful, we must be infatuated with what we do, not infatuated with success. That cuts the job down to a size that we can engage with in the present moment.  And it also means that no matter what the outside world does, we experience ourselves as satisfied and successful. If along that way, life gives us notoriety and/or money, so be it. If it doesn't, we still have lived a life worthy of our time on this earth.

Sendak was sometimes censored and sometimes praised, but that

flux of human emotion didn't tempt him to change. It wasn't  money that made him successful, it was who he was that brought his art to a level that touched people and made the world pay attention. 

Money often rewards that accomplishment, but it is not its progenitor nor is it a true measure of success. If you’re stuck on that point, meaning money is your motivation and your measure, you may miss out on serendipity and success.

A Month of Doing Anew

I woke this morning feeling like January was slipping away before it had even started. So the Hans Brinker in me stuck my finger in that dike as I began to clear the clutter off my desk. Under one pile, I pulled out Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing to return it to the bookcase after having lain on my desk for a month or more unopened. I didn't get very far, however; because for the hundredth time, I opened it and, if you've ever read it, you know what happened next. Yes, I got caught again in Bradbury’s zest for writing, for life, since they were one and the same for him.  I began reading some of the many places I had magic markered. If there was ever a book that walked its talk, that is it.

Most all of us want something different as each year starts. We are keenly aware our life does not meet our expectations for it. But we always start in the same mood, disposition, and doubt that caused us to start listing our resolutions to begin with, the only thing new or different being the sheet of paper on which we’re writing. So let’s do something different this year. Let’s just start doing what we are waiting for. No plans, no schedules, just do – as Yoda told us.

Here’s how dear Ray Bradbury puts it with a few insertions to make it clear this works for anyone:

If you are writing (living, working, parenting) without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer (alive, a worker, a parent). It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market (bank account), or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie (what someone else thinks), that you are not being yourself. You don’t even know yourself. A writer (and everyone else) should be excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.

If you expect something different you must fight through the fog of sameness and complacency and be different right from the start. You wonder how, since this appears to be the problem? You’re telling me you don’t already know how to laugh, to dance to music, to sigh over poetry, to feel the penetrating power of beauty to lift you tall? Use them then every time you begin to head into the weeds. That’s what I’m going to do.

Then say to yourself every morning as you rise, “I will not end this month the same person I began it.” 

Change is not a future event. How else do you think we change, but by doing right now? In 25 words or less: How do you want it to be different? Get clarity on that and then, live in that way right now. If it lasts only minutes the first little while, that’s still minutes of a different way of being. Each time you pick yourself up and start again, now it is anew. This is how change happens, spontaneously but driven by the intensity of your desire. Keep your vision close to your toes, shuffle if you have to, but be a doing that is your being, the you that yearns to feel alive and fearless. Your actions inform you of who you are.

Stick with me this month, and I’ll share with you what I find along the way to know myself anew. Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing is a great place to start whether you’re a writer or not. His enthusiasm for life will infect you and what a glorious infection to have.

Writer or Pretender

Shakespeare asked this same question another way: to be or not to be. It is as fundamental a question as there ever was, from determining the reality of our existence to simply sorting out whether we are a writer or a dreamer. I mention this because a recent blog by Russell Blake put this question squarely in my face, once again.

In it, he is talking about being a writer in 2015 and what writers will face as well as what is required of them if they are to succeed. Russell isn't a speculator. He started out like most of today’s wannabees, but unlike most now makes his living from writing. The difference between him and others is he knew what he wanted and set his life up to reflect that. He also busts several myths  about writing when he states he is now associated with several writers whose names would be unfamiliar to us and yet they make an excellent income from writing even in their basic anonymity. Russell talks about why.

What Russell made clear to me is I have yet to set an intent to be a writer. By that I mean I still have two columns on my sheet: the reasons I could succeed and the reasons that might hold me back. When you set an intent, however, not only do you not have two columns, you don’t even have such sheet of paper. There is no energy pouring into resistance or validation. There is only the determination of what is yours to do next, which is determined intuitively not through rational thought, and then doing it. By intuitive, I mean “it comes to you,” not in some hocus pocus manner, but rather you just bloody know that right now you need to be doing such and such, and you do it. And when that piece comes to fruition, you see the next one and do that. Ironically, the path to true success is identical to esoteric principles or, said another way, the path of truth. Simple, honest, and doable just not necessarily easy.

I italicized the word true preceding ‘success’ for a reason. I suspect that most people who dream of being a successful writer have created what that life would be like by imagining a life without what they despise about their present situation, thus offering the antithesis. That’s how we create a life using our intellect. But any time I have truly succeeded, I always noticed that what I got never looked like what I imagined, but if I reached that place intuitively, it didn't matter. What success demanded of me I was willing to do because it was integral to me, real and compelling. But what success demanded of me from a project arrived at intellectually — my plan — never panned out. That’s where resistance arises and usually drags us to a halt.

I believe there are always two groups in the arts: those who are painters and those who want to paint a picture; those who are writers and those who want to write a book. It behooves us to be honest with ourselves and make that determination once and for all. For the life of a writer is whatever it is, the difference is that if you are a writer, you’ll do it. If you are a pretender, mostly you’ll talk about doing it. And that’s where I find myself this Sunday morning: asking am I a writer or a pretender. The answer to that question must then be reflected in my life, or said another way; if I am a writer, I must get in touch with the next step and just bloody do it.

In his most current blog, Russell Blake talks about a writer's life currently. Take a look at what he describes as inherent in a writer’s life remembering it’s the life he’s now living. The reality may not be so appealing to you. Russell is a writer not because his income results from book sales, but because he knows he’s a writer, and his life reflects that awareness at every turn. Mine doesn't yet, and that’s what stands before me. Earning my living has never before been unrelated to the career I am drawn to, and I allowed this to confuse me.

You too may now want to ask: what stands before you? Be curious. Be honest. A fulfilling life comes from one that reflects that clarity. And if it's fulfilling, it really doesn't matter what name you give to yourself in that life.