The Force Beyond You

The closest I have come to believing in divine insight, inspiration, or intervention—or maybe magic—is after I have written something that surprises me. I have created characters who are smarter (or nastier) than I am or ever will be. I have typed dialogue for these beings that shocks or humbles me because I know I don’t have the ability to be so kind, wise, or even so cruel. (A word to non-writers: if you want to write crime fiction, you want to access the darkness. It’s a good thing.)

When someone asks how a particular idea came to me, I always make a joke. Because I have no freaking idea. Sure, I can point to a string of plot points that I scrawled in a notebook before I started—proof of my complicity—but the finished story never quite adheres to them. And yes, I can often recall how or when I first learned certain factoids that I worked into a story, but when they pop up in my prose they are often employed in a manner I had never previously considered.

What I’m saying is that I have come to accept that Creativity is ultimately a mystery. I must leave it at that. I have no choice. The process is too ephemeral to explain any other way. In fact, I’m worried as I write this that words will fail me. We have all heard certain writers claim that the story just wrote itself, or that their characters took on a life of their own. Those sorts of pronouncements are often parodied because they sound fatuous. (Please enjoy the scene below from the film Wonder Boys that marvelously skewers that type of writer.) That’s why I have today brought into the lecture hall the words of other creatives that I have collected. These folks are far more eloquent than I am about this mystery, so I’m going turn it over to them.

The writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch, recently discussing a novelette for which she won a Reader’s Award from Asimov’s, wrote:

“‘The Nameless Dead’ has an opening that I actually heard in my sleep and managed to wake up and write it all down. I really don’t know where these stories come from, but I’m so pleased that readers like them.”

Ever since my wife and I bought two paintings by the fine artist G.C. Myers some years back, I have enjoyed reading his daily blog. He’s an eclectic reader, and often the words that a writer, poet, or philosopher wrote somehow inspires his work, or suggests a title that he contemplates as he creates his canvases. Here is what he says about the process of bringing a painting to life:

“I have often written of sometimes feeling surprised when I finish a piece, as though the end result, the sum of my painting, is often far more than what I have to personally offer in terms of talent or knowledge. Like there is a force beyond me that is arranging these simple elements of this work into something that transcends the ordinariness of the subject or materials or the creator.

“This feeling has remained a mystery to me for almost twenty years, driving me to write here in hopes of stumbling across words that would adequately describe this transformation of simple paint and paper or canvas into something that I sometimes barely recognize as being my own creation, so marked is the difference between the truth of the resulting work and my own truth.”

Someone, possibly Myers, referenced a Rolling Stone interview with songwriter Jeff Tweedy, lead vocalist of Wilco. I went digging, and found a couple of interviews the magazine did with him. Here’s just one that spoke to me:

“I’m not sure I can demystify something I feel wholly inadequate to explain. For me, the moments that make my scalp tingle a little bit are when I hear myself sing a lyric out loud for the first time. On occasion I make myself cry. Not because I’m marveling at my songwriting genius or I’m overcome with my poetic gifts. It’s a moment that feels more like I’m witnessing something better than me, or better than what I imagined I could make, being born. Certain things I’ve written that, at first, didn’t strike me as being remotely worthy of being sung have, when sung for the first time, startled me by uncovering truths about myself I had no intention of revealing.”

By the way, in the same interview he talks about having to write 50 songs or “almost-songs” to get to one, or to reach a point where he is “supernaturally in touch” with his abilities. I liked that turn of phrase immensely. It beats saying what I have always told people: “It came from my subconscious—where the eff else?”

Tweedy’s phrasing reminded me of an essay on writing that I first read in my twenties, and which I have reread over the years. I’ve recommended it to readers here in the past as well. In a 1993 piece in LA Weekly, the writer Michael Ventura said he thought there was a difference between writing and other kinds of creative arts. I think he’s touching on Jung’s idea of archetypes, but you tell me:

“The psyche is dangerous. Because working with words is not like working with color or sound or stone or movement. Color and sound and stone and movement are all around us, they are natural elements, they’ve always been in the universe, and those who work with them are servants of these timeless materials. But words are pure creations of the human psyche. Every single word is full of secrets, full of associations. Every word leads to another and another and another, down and down, through passages of dark and light. Every single word leads, in this way, to the same destination: your soul. Which is, in part, the soul of everyone. Every word has the capacity to start that journey. And once you’re on it, there is no knowing what will happen.”

If Ventura is a little too heavy, then let’s get back to belittling the very question of where art comes from. In a book called The Daily Pressfield, writer Steven Pressfield asks:

“Have you seen archival footage of the young John Lennon or Bob Dylan, when some reporter tries to ask them about their personal selves? The boys deflect these queries with withering sarcasm. Why? Because Lennon and Dylan know that the part of them that writes the songs is not ‘them,’ not the personal self that is of such surpassing fascination to their boneheaded interrogators. Lennon and Dylan also know that the part of themselves that does the writing is too sacred, too precious, too fragile to be dumbed down into sound bites for the titillation of would-be idolaters (who are themselves caught up in their own Resistance). So they put them on and blow them off.”

Pressfield, whom I’ve also discussed before, thinks that creativity springs from a Muse, defined as a part of ourselves that is hidden from us but ever present and powerful. He says:

“People ask me sometimes, ‘Don’t you get lonely being in a room by yourself all day?’ No. I’m not lonely because I’m with this other ‘me,’ who is me and not-me at the same time and whom I have spent my entire life trying to find, to prove myself worthy of, and to labor in collaboration with.”

In his most famous book, The War of Art, Pressfield admits that before he starts work each morning, he prays to this Muse. His practice is to recite a few lines from the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey, believing that all any of us can do is show up for work, signaling to the universe that we intend to labor in good faith.

If you’re in the chair, determined to write, good things can’t help but show up. Or so the theory goes. The opposite corollary, of course, is that if you procrastinate, you cannot be surprised that that Muse has passed you by.

Pressfield’s “show up for work” concept reminded me of another story drawn from the world of music. The songwriter Tom Waits, who doesn’t do too many interviews, once shared this experience with the writer Elizabeth Gilbert. He was driving down the freeway when, out of the blue, a great idea for a song popped into his head. In that situation, flying down the road at sixty-plus miles per hour, Waits couldn’t exactly hit the brakes and jot down the idea. Gilbert, who has told this story a bajillion times in various interviews and her famous TED Talk, describes Waits railing at God or his Muse through his windshield:

“Excuse me, can you not see that I’m driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.”

Ok, so let’s say you know all that. You accept that you either have a Muse, or a genius mini-you-who-is-not-you within you, or you accept that you are jacked into the divine source of creation. Would it really be so bad if you ignored that call?

Well, no. Not if you want to get through this life. In an interview with Ken Burns, the late Kris Kristofferson talked about how his family disowned him when he gave up a promising career as a pilot to take a job as a janitor so he could write music on the side. In the middle of this interview, Kristofferson, who studied the Romantic poets, begins quoting from a famous letter by William Blake, which Kristofferson summarized thusly: “He’s telling you that you’ll be miserable if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do.”

He’s referring to an 1803 letter by Blake to Thomas Butts. Here’s a bit of it. You’ll forgive, I think, Blake’s punctuation and mode of expression:

“If you who are organized by Divine Providence for Spiritual communion. Refuse & bury your Talent in the Earth even tho you Should want Natural Bread. Sorrow & Desperation pursues you Thro life! after death Shame confusion of face to eternity —”

See? I started by saying that I don’t know what I’m talking about. And I think I have proved it. But I am grateful that so many people I admire have had exactly the same feeling. Bottom line: Those of us who create really don’t know know where our art comes from. We only know that it comes when we apply ourselves joyfully to the task. That is at once beautiful and relieving.

It seemed appropriate to wait until the turn of another calendar to share these quotes with you. I do so with a prayer that you will get out of your own way in the coming months and let this indescribable mystery lead you into a wonderful, productive new year.

The Fatuous Writer. A scene from the film Wonder Boys.

---

Happy New Year. See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Shelf Inspirations

I'm not superstitious. Much. For example, if I stopped keeping mementos on certain shelves that may or may not increasingly qualify as shrines, no writing gods will descend to strip my creative powers. Maybe. Proof would require my not keeping those mementos, and that sounds rash.

Over my desk are two glass shelves, each with a mishmash of smile-bringers. Who is up there? Bigfoot. Got his sticker in Oregon one year. Isn’t a Bigfoot sticker on your shelf? 

There’s Bigfoot, Zoltar, a screaming goat. There's Hamish, a Highland bull we met near Loch Lochy. You gave Hamish a carrot, and he was your man. Once, driving through the Painted Desert, no other human in theory for miles, here comes the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile bound west for glory. Or at least Winslow. A mini Weinermobile abides on my shelf. I have Twain’s “The Million Pound Note,” Westlake, and pets who shared this space. 

And there are, I should mention, other shelves.

Behind me are twin bookcases with favorite authors and reference books. In a tight spot, and I get in those, it helps to re-read how a master handled a particular situation. Shakespeare is back there, as annotated. He splits a shelf with Colin Dexter and a Poirot smattering. There are past travel reminders, a Bond / Steve Zissou mash-up, and my Mysterious Shelf. It's vaguely foreboding after sundown. 

Look, both Peter Pan and hard science would back me on my shelves. Psychologists have shown that centering rituals improve related task performance—if you believe it enough. 

The Mysterious Shelf

Consider: Baseball hitters go through a whole scratch, sniff and soft shoe routine before they step into the box. Keith Richards--that Keith, of the eternal high-energy run--reportedly threatens not to take the stage unless he’s had the first slice of a fresh shepherd’s pie. Picasso wouldn't throw out his trimmed fingernails. He swore the clipping yet held his essence. Artists, pilots, sailors, religious ceremonies, yoga, if people have doing it long enough, people have rituals to get themselves feeling empowered and connected to the job. 

Why would creative writing be any different? 

Writing can be editing drudgery or unruly ideas or heartbreak when a manuscript doesn’t sell. Any list of now-revered authors also says who navigated a snootful of frustration while producing that revered fiction. The troughs are unavoidable. I need reminding the high points are worth the lows.

Rituals can be discarded when their purpose is served. I've done it, but I've kept three and recommend them however they might work for you. First, pre-session exercise, whatever you can do. Holding and fashioning ideas requires brain sharpness and surprising endurance. I need treadmill time or a brisk walk before writing, along with whatever music I associate with the work. This gets both my circulation and intentionality firing before I hit the chair. Even stretches can do pre-session me a solid. 

Hamish

Second, a success celebration. After any first draft is hauled forth, I go about adopting it into the files, introducing it around, giving it a row on my Excel tracker. I sip on a nice wine that night. Writing a complete story, any story, is a big deal. If that story ever sells, a huge deal. I descend into a flurry of refiling and list-checking and much rejoicing that another one got over the line. 

Which brings me back to my third keeper ritual: the arguable shelf-shrines. Wins need celebrating for a long time, not just on rare days. My shelves have writing milestones and covers from AHMMs that ran a piece of mine. Past sales tell me, “Look, you’ve done it before.” Past sales tell me, “Listen, man. Don’t let us down.” The shelves know if I'm phoning it in. They totally know. Quality control is also why Stadler and Waldorf are up there stage left. Grade A heckling like theirs ensures my head only balloons so much. 

There it is. I have a shelf ritual. It helps me care about the process, about seeking my best mindset. To smile when the going is hard. When the trick works, I’m a better and more dedicated writer. 

Is there risk in putting this much writing faith in Bigfoot and a fainting goat? Hey, it’s my ritual, and I'm sticking with it. 

Not that I’m superstitious or anything.

Patterson-Gimlin, via the CBC

I Was Just Wondering

by Louis Willis

I’ve been wondering about character creation. Not so much how you fictionists, or is it fictioneers (I’m not sure of the difference but that is a subject for another post), create characters, but I was just wondering how you manage to stay sane while doing so. Specifically, how you give each character a personality that distinguishes him or her from other characters, even minor ones.

Actors take what the playwright or screen writer has written and make the character their own, becoming the character. You fictionists, on the other hand, have to create several characters in one story, sometimes in paragraph or even one sentence. I was just wondering if you become each character in order to create him or her, to give them personalities, including the various emotions each must have to be believable. 

I began thinking about how fictionists create characters while reading A Free Man of Color by Barbara Hambly in which she, a white writer, created the black male amateur detective Benjamin January. I decided to write a post about creating characters after reading the short story “Pansy Place” by Dan Warthman (AHMM January-February 2012) that Rob mentions in his January 16 post. The protagonist, Jones, is white and Akin, the young man who goes along with him to confront the bad guys, is black. He reminds Jones of himself when he was young--a tough, no nonsense kind of guy. In addition, Warthman created a believable damsel in distress, L’Vonte, Jones’s cleaning lady, and Konnie Kondrasin who was Jones’s agent when he was taking on dangerous jobs. In all, including the three bad guys and L’Vonte’s boyfriend, there are eight characters he has to give different personalities with different emotions, though he gives the bad guys a collective personality.

In these two examples, the characters are of different races. Even when you create characters of the same race but different gender, you may have to be a woman and a man in the same story, and that has to do something to your mind. In the delightful story “Acting on A Tip” (EQMM July 2012), which Rob also mentions, the female author, Barbara Arno Modrack, creates Marty, a very believable male protagonist. He is an ex-alcoholic, ex-journalist who has moved with his long suffering wife Jenny and their youngest son to a small town where he helps catch a serial killer. Modrack has to first think like a man (assuming men and women think differently), switch bodies and be his wife, switch again, and be the teenage son, and finally switch and be the killer. She doesn’t give us the interior thinking of each character. We see the action from Marty’s perspective, but certainly, Modrack had to give each character a little personality to make them, even the minor characters, convincing.

In creating characters, you base some on relatives, some on friends, and even some on strangers, but mostly they come from your imagination. No matter, you still must give them different personalities with the accompanying emotions, and creating those various emotions, my friends, must take a toll on your minds, doesn’t it?

I was just wondering how you do it and still maintain your sanity.

To all of you a big

Home Alone

by John M. Floyd

A few weeks ago our family--my wife and I, our three children, and their spouses and children--spent a week in the mountains of east Tennessee.  Thirteen of us, five of whom are under the age of seven, lived together for six days in a four-story, six-bedroom cabin, and somehow managed to do it without any major arguments or threats to life and limb.  I can't say we were roughing it, because the place included a pool table, hot tub, Wi-Fi, and seven TV sets--but, to our credit, none of the TVs even got switched on, except for the night our oldest son plugged his camera into one of them to show us a movie he'd made of a kindergarten music-program featuring one of his kids.

Anyhow, we had a great time; the weather was cool and clear and totally unsummerlike for the whole trip.  Every day after breakfast, the Floyd clan hiked up and down mountains until two of us (guess who) were wheezing and had our tongues hanging out.  Lunch was always a picnic somewhere along the trail, and by five o'clock or so we were usually back at the cabin, where we had a group supper and got all the kiddos calmed down and in bed.  The eight grownups then sat around on the deck and snacked and propped up our sore feet and visited until the wee hours.

You guys go ahead--don't worry about me . . .

But my column today, believe it or not, isn't about road trips or backpacking or family reunions.  It's about writing.  Because on the first of those six days in the wild, I was recovering but still suffering from a head cold and chose to stay behind while the rest of the family packed up and trudged off into the black forest.  From eight o'clock until around four-thirty that day, I sat around by myself, taking it easy and occasionally taking in the view.  And writing.

I wrote for most of the day, and while I wish I could tell you I was writing a SleuthSayer column, I wasn't.  I was writing a short story--what used to be called a mini-mystery and is now called a "solve-it-yourself" mystery--for a magazine called Woman's World.

I was surprised at how smoothly it went.  Part of it was the quiet and the solitude, I guess, and the knowledge that there really wasn't anything else to do while the rest of my crew were off someplace having a good time.  Whatever the reason, the ideas and the words seemed to appear in my stuffy head without much effort at all.  It did, however, take some effort to make them appear in tangible form, since I was using an ink pen and a yellow legal pad I had thrown into my briefcase for the trip.  (My iPad worked well for e-mail and websurfing but I had not yet--and still have not--installed a word-processing program on it.)  I do actually remember how to write words by hand, though, and within half an hour I had jotted down a rough draft on the first four sheets of my lined pad.

The cutting-room floor

The rewriting was the only thing that was hard.  I do a lot of rewriting, and always have, but I'm a bit spoiled; after all, editing my own work on a computer screen is easy.  On paper it's not.  I did a few markouts and additions and other corrections on the sheets I'd already written, but most of my revisions were accomplished by starting over and writing a complete second draft, and then a third.  And since these WW submissions must have a short and very specific wordcount, I even wound up (don't laugh) counting the words each time, right down to every "a" and "the."  Which can be a tiresome job, and a reminder of how things "used to be."

When I was done I had filled a dozen pages, the first eight of which, of course, were now worthless.  The last four pages contained the almost-final draft of my handwritten story.

By then it was past lunchtime, so I gobbled down whatever food I could find in our Ponderosa-sized kitchen, caught a nap, and then took my better-(I hoped)-but-not-yet-completed story out onto the third-floor deck to read it over. I have always--even during my college and Air Force days--been able to do some of my best thinking when my feet are elevated to at least the level of my head, and one of the adjustable lounge chairs was just right for this phase of my creative process.  By the time my weary and sweaty kinfolks had returned from their day's adventures, I had made all my final edits and had a story in hand that now was . . . well, I won't say perfect--but was as perfect as I thought that particular story could be.  I had a product that was ready to be taken home, typed, and submitted to the WW fiction editor.

Post-production notes

Every day after that, I hiked through hill and dale with the rest of the family; my cold was better and my story was finished and safely packed away.  When we wrapped up the week and had driven the five hundred miles back to our house in Mississippi I did indeed send that story off into the world to try to make something of itself.  I haven't yet heard anything back about it, so I don't know if it'll prove to be a winner or a loser, but at least I'm satisfied with it.

I've completed several more stories since then, but all of those have been written right here in this chair in my home office, using my trusty iMac.  My future plans include installing the Apple version of MS Word on my iPad, but until then, on any trip I take, I plan to again pack plenty of paper and a few Foray rollerball pens.  Just in case I find myself grounded for a while.

Call it a wilderness survival kit.