[Video: scene from David Lynch’s 1997 film Lost Highway. Soundtrack: Lou Reed’s interpretation of “This Magic Moment”]
Almost every writer of stories, I bet, has had at least one “Take her hand!” moment. Here’s why I call them that:
Over twenty years ago, I was working on a longish short story called “Sing, Sing, Sing.” (I’ve written about this story numerous times here.) In general, the plot revolves around the efforts of a young boy named Matty to get into a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York, in 1938… without a ticket. In writing the story, I had to deal with challenges like these:
- Why would eleven-year-old Matty — any eleven-year-old — be so eager to do this?
- Given that Matty lived a certain number of miles from New York, how would he have even gotten there in the first place? How long would it take him — and thus, by what time would he have to leave his house?
- What was the weather like in New York on that evening in January, 1938? Would Matty have to be dressed for cold temperatures? for wet? or for unseasonable weather?
But I hadn’t foreseen one complication.
There came a critical moment in the story’s action, bracketed by (a) the events which brought Matty to Carnegie Hall in the first place and (b) Matty’s experience of the concert itself: the precise moment when he moved from the street into the hall. Oh, I considered all sorts of wacky scenarios — all of which fell apart under the harsh glare of plausibility and actual facts. Especially, in the latter case, I had to accept the fact that the ticket-takers weren’t mere uniformed employees of Carnegie Hall, who might or might not be 100% on the ball: they were police, and they were checking every ticket.
So I’m writing the scene, and I’ve got Matty navigating his way through the pushing-and-shoving crowd at the doors, and there’s all kinds of traffic noise and shouting, and Matty seems as confused by all the ruckus and foofaraw as the author himself.
And then something curious happened, something very curious:
Matty’s eye was caught by a little girl and her father, approaching an elderly policeman at one of the entrance doors. Suppose he could somehow insinuate himself into the father-daughter group… But how would he do that, convincingly, without getting caught by the policeman? Meanwhile the man and his little girl were getting closer and closer to the doorway…
…and I thought, as loudly as I could:
Take her hand, damn it! Take her hand!
And as I watched, Matty reached out and clasped the little girl’s trailing hand. The cop looked down benignly at the little motherless family, smiled, glanced at the tickets in the father’s hand, and waved them through. He even tousled Matty’s hair a bit as he passed. (The girl was a little freaked out, but it took her a few lucky moments to protest.)
Now, on one level — the least interesting one — I know that I wasn’t really speaking those words to a fictional character. I was directing them to myself, something like this:
[Make him] take her hand, damn it! [Make him] take her hand!
But at another level, something subtle had happened in the moment just before I thought those words. Somehow, although I, John, was right then sitting at a table somewhere in 1989 or 1990, I wasn’t seeing that table, or the blank wall behind it, or the stack of paper. My hands didn’t exist. I didn’t exist. What I saw was the scene which Matty was seeing, over fifty years earlier. No authorial [Make him] called the shots. I was Matty.
(It’s hard for me to describe the emotional impact of this moment on me. Not because the right words don’t exist, but because they sound ridiculous: I sobbed.)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about all the conjuration which writers must pull off if they’re to write successfully. For now, though, I’m thinking especially about the importance of leaving yourself open to the satisfactions of the unexpected.
In working on Seems to Fit, I had one of those opportunities a couple of weeks ago. I was grappling with neither a plot point nor the choreography of a particular scene; the bug was deeper, structural, systemic. It sprang from the structure of some versions of the Grail story, and was exacerbated by my particular spin on it. In the original versions in question, Sir Gawaine has nothing to do with the Grail quest. He goes off on his own somewhere around the middle, has a bunch of adventures, and completely misses the transformative experiences the other knights have. But he’s still part of their tale.
From the first draft, my own “Gawaine” character had done this. He too had gone off, hundreds of miles away from the others, and gotten involved in his own story. The only connections between his story and the main one were tenuous. Much worse: his story simply stopped. Maybe another ten or twelve chapters remained in the main story, and all the other characters were too busy with their activities to think much at all about him.
Maybe five hundred or a thousand years ago, you could get away with a story like that. Such a story might even come to be revered as a classic. But modern readers expect (if not quite demand) continuity and completion in modern books. The problem especially stood out in the earlier drafts of my book, in which each chapter focused on a single character’s point of view, rotating in turn among the six of them. “Gawaine” seemed to have just suddenly fallen off the map. I wasn’t sure what his connection was to the others, so I pretty much ignored it.
…until a couple weeks ago. Then I had not one but two “Take her hand!” moments, over the course of two writing sessions: First, I suddenly realized how the stories connected, and I wrote that connection down. Second (and this bowled me over with its obviousness), I added three nearly-blank pages to the manuscript. By themselves — and perhaps just in my head — these three pages resolved all my worry about a break in continuity. Here’s how I described them to The Missus:
“Only the second of the three pages is done. It says, ‘Part 2,’ followed by a colon and the character’s name. The other two pages aren’t done yet, though; they just say ‘Part 1’ and ‘Part 3,’ with a colon after each.”
“Are you using characters names’ to distinguish those two parts, too?” she asked.
“Nope. I need just the right nouns or noun phrases to follow the colons. That’s what I’m still working on.”
Stupid, right? The point is: if you keep your writerly nose to the grindstone all the time, you risk missing the “Take her hand!” moments. They don’t wait around until you notice them. (They probably get bored, and have more important things to do.) You’ve got to relax, to figuratively stand up from your chair and shake your joints every now and then, limber up, then let yourself go almost unconscious even while remaining at your most wide-awake. And above all you must keep your damned eyes open, and don’t let the moment get away. Take its hand.
…or maybe I’m not talking there to you, my imagined reader. Maybe I’m really just reminding myself, hmm?
whaddayamean says
this is a very cute way of summing up THAT feeling. I know exactly what you mean.
At a different point in the game, I think the same energy is what’s flowing when you go back to edit a story that needs work in SO many places. And you stumble around and grasp at straws and finally figure out the PERFECT thing your character is supposed to do, and in that eureka moment, when you fix that one thing, you realize it has organically fixed two other things you were supposed to come back to.
John says
whaddayamean: No other feeling like it.
When online polls ask people why they write, most answers tend to be along the lines of fame, readers, want to make an impact, so on and so forth. (For some reason, one doesn’t hear about money so much. :)) Not me, though. I have actually thought, when I get hit with one of these eureka moments, Oh yeah — THAT’S why I’m doing this! All the rest of it is like, “Well, it would be nice later…” But this reward can be had much more immediately.
Sherri says
I LOVE that feeling! In fact, like you said, that’s why I write. The biggest one I’ve experienced was when I couldn’t figure out how to tie in the ending of my first book.
My hero needed to get to an underground grotto where the heroine was being held by the villian. Only thing was that the only entrance to the cave was heavily guarded. The hero had no help, and no time, so I was really cursing the way I’d written myself into a corner. I considered rewriting a huge portion to give him troops, or to have him sneak through, something I couldn’t see him being able to do.
Then it hit me. I’d written the solution into the story without realizing it. The castle where the hero worked was built into the side of a mountain. I’d only put it there because it seemed cool. The basement had a bathing pool, again, added because it seemed cool. I realized that the bathing pool and the villain’s lair could be connected underwater. So the hero swam in the back way, and not only did he save the day, but it also made for a great, tension-filled scene.
That was when I knew my subconscious was doing most of the work. She probably knew all along how the story would end.
Sorry so long. :)
Nance says
And I have no idea whatsoever what “that feeling” is like. I’ve never created a character…or, I mean, I don’t think I have. Have I? Damn, this stuff gets tricky.
Now, suddenly, I think I might like to try my hand at fiction. Is this how stories come about? I thought the author somehow conceived the thing as a whole, full-blown and waiting to be transcribed, just the adjectives and adverbs, colons and semi-colons to twiddle around with.
And you’re telling me that you can be missing whole critical events? Hey, I think I might possess that deficiency in spades! It’s the semi-trance state I’m not sure I can attain. Let me check with my husband; he’ll know.
Ashleigh Burroughs says
So that’s how you do it. Thanks for the creation story; it is lovely.
I love those moments when my fingers are showing me what my brain is creating. They are the posts which write themselves, which take almost no time at all to appear, and which garner the most comments and compliments.
Retire the superego – Release the Id
a/b
DarcKnyt says
I’ve had an occasional moment like that, but I can’t count on them, and because I can’t, I have to make sure I try to think things out clearly. But sometimes, having something pop into my head in the middle of a conversation or in the middle of the night can be so fun, so rewarding — yeah, not beyond tears. Not at all.
:)
John says
Sherri: Ah yes. The write-myself-into-a-corner puzzle. As I was working on this entry, I thought to myself, “NO ONE but other writers will ever understand this. EVERYONE else will wonder why I didn’t just change a detail, rather than stick with something obviously unworkable.” To me, the obvious answer to their question would be, “Because this is how the story goes.” True, an unspoken premise of pretty much all fiction (and dreams) is: These events didn’t really happen. But as storytellers know, it doesn’t matter that things didn’t “really” happen a certain way.
Oh, and somebody who writes a 1200-word post is in no position to complain about the length of comments. :)
John says
Nance: I do wonder about non-fiction writers, if they have moments like this. It seems to me that they must, especially if they’re someone like John McPhee, Susan Orlean, Tracy Kidder, Bill Bryson, Annie Dillard… When I’m reading such writers’ work, I often find myself dazzled by a connection they’ve made between two events — even if one of the two is merely fictional or metaphorical. I think those moments may be footprints of a breakthrough moment.
(If any artists or songwriters are reading this, I’d love to hear of occasions like this in the making of their works.)
I noticed a page recently at your own site which indicates you’ve built up enough writing there to notice aspects of what you’ve written which you perhaps didn’t consciously intend. This is quite possibly creeping take-her-handism at work.
John says
a/b: “Retire the superego — release the id.” If some novelists’ gift store doesn’t stock that bumper sticker, they’re missing a money-maker!
OTOH, I’ve often thought of the real-world id — mine, anyhow — as a sort of Wolfman-type creature, more likely to cause problems than to fix them. (I don’t know if you ever watched the Soupy Sales show, but my id, charmingly, talks to me in a voice like the characters White Fang and Black Tooth.)
One difference between blogging and writing-writing, which I bring up because I know you’re curious about those differences, is that blogging can be satisfying without any superego at all… satisfying to the writer, I mean. All-id blogs are pretty hard to read, though. Funny (as in funny-interesting/-strange, not funny-haha).
John says
Darc: Well, hey!
It may be just me, but it used to be that if I waited to write until it was convenient, or until I was inspired, or whatever, the frequency of “Take her hand!” moments dropped waaaay off.
A quotation in a couple of posts ago went, “As the poet Stuart Perkoff wrote in regard to abusing the gifts of the muse, ‘Be careful. It’s hers. She’ll take it back.'” One of the things she seems to guard most jealously is the daily dates I make with her. Several of these dates in a row may be somewhat routine, the equivalent of holding hands companionably while she and I are in a movie theater. But every now and then, wow. Those “wow” dates are for me the whole point of the affair, but they couldn’t happen at all without the much more frequent, plain-old Now see? Isn’t this nice? moments.
The only other time I remember sobbing as I wrote something was when I killed off a major character I’d come to love. Even though I knew it was coming, it still tore me up — I had to put the pencil down for a little while until I recovered myself.
Froog says
There are a number of ways this image can be taken.
I thought at first of reader/audience identification – where a substantial proportion of consumers of the story realise what could or should happen next, or what they want to happen next, and you can toy with that expectation: realise it immediately, make them wait a little, or confound them by doing something more surprising and challenging. This is perhaps more often thought of as the Kiss her, you fool type of moment – where almost everyone in the theatre shares the collective response of wanting this development next (or often in suspense/horror movies not wanting this to happen next).
You’ve swung it around into the writer’s perspective of taking satisfaction in those moments of sudden insight where you are able to resolve a plot development problem.
And then there’s the further aspect in your opening example of finding that inspiration in a moment where you had completely entered into the story and started identifying with the character facing the problem.
I like entering into the story like that. It’s what we expect the readers to do, but as writers we can often get cut off from it by so many other concerns. For me, though, I’ve always found it quite easy to do: I am a movie nut, and have a very visual imagination. Hence I always create a movie in my head when I’m reading or when I’m writing. And if you can get lost in the movie, there are always so many ideas, so many possibilities you hadn’t consciously been aware of yet, things you hadn’t yet written or even thought about. I love just mentally wandering around in a scene thinking “What’s in that drawer?”, “What would happen if I pick that up?”, “Who might ring me up now?” and so on.
This is also probably a reason why I’ve always felt rather unsatisfied with role-playing computer games. Sometimes they have unexpected cool stuff that happens when you pick this thing up or walk through that door or talk to this person…. but most of the time they don’t. And even when they do, it’s never quite as cool as I’d already imagined it might be.
John says
Froog: Thoughtful as ever.
Among my favorite role-playing games was the Tex Murphy series. (The Missus — the household’s REAL gamer — loved them, too.) As you say, the software always has limitations (imposed by memory, hard drive space, etc.): looking for a clue, you might want to unscrew the top of a newel post, say… but the cursor fails to change to a pointing hand (or whatever the convention is). The Tex games weren’t unlimited, but they routinely surprised me with how well the makers had thought out what people just might try. (And they had a great sense of humor, too.)
One of the difficulties of writing about setting is how to do it well enough to seem “real”… but not so well that the reader sees every detail as meaningful. It presents a sort of Chekhov’s-gun dilemma: must a pistol mounted on the wall be fired at some point? Yes? Suppose it’s a sword — must it be swung? Where’s the line between must and may?
I think you and I have had conversations before about our fascination with what takes place inside Person X’s head while experiencing stimulus Y, or while engaged in behavior Z, etc. (Even when we ourselves are Person X.) I can’t say that I, too, “create a movie in my head” as you describe. But it’s something like that — just as (for me) dreams of flying seem to induce the pit-of-the-stomach lightness of actual flight. They say that sensory impressions are automatic and not consciously controlled, but I bet the (sub)conscious mind can at least nudge the senses along.
fg says
(Question: Is this ‘take her hand’ moment always gendered, ie. always ‘take his/her hand’. Is there a similar thrill when writing a non gendered leap? The clip revels in sexuality — It’s the strength but, for me, maybe the very weakness of the scene.)
I like this post, it’s all you as you suggest the crux of the matter, the reason you write and also the reason you pursue questions in this blog. I haven’t read your blog from the beginning but one of the striking things about your blog writing is that you have a passion for collecting snippets and piecing them together. Often you create a read that is not the sum of its parts but something else. (Speaking visually, maybe like flowers in a vase — not the individual flower but the spaces between and the stems entwined and the shadows across one bloom to the next and foliage, what you can glimpse of it, and the water in the glass that ellipses invisibly.) When at its best it is not an arrangement of texts and quotations but something you present so glued together in our minds as to be another meaning. Sometimes I (we?) fall across your references, not thinking about the bridges and threads but rather about the whole.
BUT I digress a little; this is not what you are talking about exactly and you are talking about your writing not, I suspect, this blog — your workshop. But you are I think (I’m no fiction writer) concerned with other gaps (as in gaps to be leapt) that become the work. I say ‘gaps’ they need not be but I find myself thinking that there is a parallel between what is going on in your ‘workshop’ and out there at the cliff face.
This thrill, a particular point in the writing you describe, I think it is to do with working story lines together until you have written yourself tightly into a corner. And I think it’s deliberate. That’s not to say that you know the outcome. Actually, I think, maybe you shouldn’t because then you explore it as your readers will explore it, feeling their way. I say deliberately because you set yourself up, a position you seek that forces yourself to be more alive on the page.
BUT this may not be what you mean either.
The film clip is striking, as it’s meant to be. (I must say now I don’t know the film so have no idea of the context.) But in the script: said woman gets out of car, turns and gets into other car. So what is going on here? The director clearly had a bunch of agendas to cover. But does he cover them? Is this purely sexual tension or? (I doubt from the clip and the slow motion that the audience knows this woman yet. (?).) So this is her intro. Like with the flowers in the vase I mentioned before the director doesn’t want us to see her get out of the car, turn etc, he wants us to think we know her, know her type, know her face, understand her relationships to the two men in the scene. She becomes so much more than a woman as she makes her choreograph moves. She changes as the light moves on her face, as we see her cheekbones and hard bleached hair and we watch her self-possession and glances. Little has happened and yet we think we know so much. She has made this leap from a pawn in the plot to at this moment being the whole plot. She is softly in the centre of the arena, with cars and men about her and yet hard like the light on the glass in the car door she closes. I’m left wondering how ‘it’s’ happened and what is going to happen. To her, to those men? I say those, but the director only cuts to one of the men and yet we know the other presented as dominant. If ‘take her hand’ has happened to me what’s going to happen to the other characters — statement not question… ha.
Sorry. Long.
John says
fg: I’ll thank you to take back that apology, given what preceded it. :)
I don’t think the “take her hand!” moments need be gendered, as you put it. Well, aside from the fact that any characters in a story are themselves going to be of one gender or the other… so if a moment involves one or more characters, then sure, it’s “gendered.” But such a moment doesn’t have to be ABOUT the characters’ genders, which seems to be what you’re asking.
Sherri’s comment above, for instance, depicts a “take her hand!” moment in which the author’s epiphany centered more on the setting than on the character. She suddenly realized that the solution to a gnarly problem already existed in the world she’d written so far. Sherri may not have actually thought words like “Take her hand!” But the story sprang to life as she watched, it writhed on the page (and in her head), and suddenly morphed into the exact shape she needed at that moment.
(And note that it even morphed in ways she didn’t know she needed — almost as though it anticipated the need for more tension.)
A little while ago, while looking up something else, I came across this John Updike comment:
I loved that.
About the film Lost Highway…
It wasn’t one of Lynch’s most popular movies, by a long shot. One reason for this is probably that it seems to mean a lot of things, but none of them very plainly. The girl in the car, for instance, is played by Patricia Arquette… who also plays an entirely different role in the same movie. This seems to imply something about identity — not literally, not suggesting that the two women are twins or otherwise related, but figuratively. But other than the fact that Arquette plays both of them (and that both women’s lovers — played by different actors — seem to be somehow identified with each other), what it’s really saying is completely open to debate.
You’re right about the sexual spark between Arquette’s character and the mechanic. There’s a site called LynchNet, whose proprietor hasn’t really kept it up-to-date but while it was active, was pretty authoritative; he includes there a “press kit” for Lost Highway (which may or not be the official one). Among much other verbiage, this says:
That certainly describes the look (albeit color instead of black-and-white) and the superficial feel, the sense of the thing. But down deep? Uh, no. The type of film stock used isn’t the only thing no longer in black-and-white.
You’ve done an intense reading of those two minutes in the clip. I will add only that my favorite bit is that she’s still looking at the mechanic even when the car door closes, even with the tinted window between her and him. Talk about a freighted moment.