Seems to Fit

Paying Attention to the “Take Her Hand!” Moments

November 17, 2010 by John 14 Comments

[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.)

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Hits and Misses

August 2, 2010 by John 13 Comments

Complicated here, during the last week. Not bad, just… complicated. Thought I’d sort of summarize a couple of points of potential interest, but first, a question for regular visitors:

Have you had problems accessing RAMH recently? One of your number has reported getting repeated “the connection was reset by the server” errors. It’s prevented her from even seeing the site, apparently. (I got the information via a Facebook message.) I haven’t been able to reproduce it from any of various locations, using various browsers and operating systems. But I wanted to check before proceeding to see if anything like that has cropped up for the rest of you. (Of course — ha! — if it has, then you won’t be able to read this post.)

Okay, now onto “real” matters…

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Paying Attention to the Silence

July 18, 2010 by John 8 Comments

This Paying Attention to… series on writing fiction concentrates, for the most part, on what to do when writing. More exactly, it covers things I need to remind myself to pay attention to — particularly as I’ve been working on Seems to Fit.

In this post, I want to look at what to when not writing — particularly, while writing-blocked.

Ask me about my first novel, and I will invariably tell you about a mystery, Crossed Wires. In doing so, I’m not counting the book I started in the mid-1970s: a picaresque science-fiction extravaganza called As Luck Would Have It. It was humorous, or rather “humorous,” and (or so I imagined) intellectually wide-ranging, and full of all sorts of stylistic pyrotechnics like punning character names and a portentous prologue.* While I never finished even a single draft of the book’s manuscript, and indeed the manuscript never even made it to digital form (I’d handwritten and typed it), I always liked and remembered the book’s central conceit:

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Paying Attention to Voice

March 22, 2010 by John 5 Comments

I may never have to master anything more difficult than thinking, and thinking convincingly, like multiple characters. It’s not just a matter of the word choices and rhythms of their dialogue (although it includes that). And it’s not just a matter of the outward manifestations of their natures — gender, style of dress, and so on (although it includes that, too). It’s a matter of looking at the world in a way shared by no other characters in the same scene and/or book.

This makes sense, right? People born at different times, to different families, subject to different economic pressures, attending different schools — all that: they can’t possibly regard and respond to a given event in exactly the same way, from events small (a single question, even a single word like Why?) to enormous (the impending end of the universe).

All these considerations — not just the way someone talks but his/her psychological/emotional stance in relationship to events and other characters — constitute what I think of when I think of voice. And it’s damned hard for me to understand, let alone work with.

So when I set out on the work-in-progress now called Seems to Fit, well, naturally I’d give it a half-dozen main characters and a gaggle of lesser ones. (Ha. Joke’s on me, isn’t it?)

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Paying Attention to the Magical

February 13, 2010 by John 11 Comments

“Ambivalence” doesn’t even come close to capturing my schizoid views about magic (or magical) realism.

The term has been around since the early part of the twentieth century, and for most of its life has been associated especially with the work of certain Latin American authors. Here’s part of the definition from A Glossary of Literary Terms (6th edition, 1993), which I found here:

The term magic realism, originally applied in the 1920s to a school of painters, is used to describe the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, as well as the work of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany, and John Fowles in England. These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements… These novels violate, in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic — and sometimes highly effective — experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic.

Nicely placed editorial “sometimes” there, huh? But in the hands of, well, a true magician, magic realism just slays me: beneath the gray, mundane surfaces of everyday life writhe fantastically colored creatures of plot, setting, and character — a reality behind the reality — and I find it difficult not to be hypnotized when I discover good examples of it. (I linked to one such story in yesterday’s whiskey river-inspired Friday post.)

(Note, by the way, that “magic realism” isn’t synonymous with “fantasy.” Fantasy takes place in unreal worlds, unrecognizable worlds, while the action in works of magic realism is grounded on good old terra firma. Soil is soil. There’s only one sun in the sky, and only one moon. Country roads are paved with asphalt or gravel, not with yellow bricks.)

But wow, is the technique subject to abuse, or what? A lazy author can find it all too tempting to reach for the supernatural to explain something otherwise inexplicable; if anyone challenges a sudden rainfall of fiery goldfish in the used-car lot (or whatever), the writer can just stare, goggle-eyed, at the the ignorant questioner before replying, “It’s magic realism, you jerk!”

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Blurring Around the Edges

January 17, 2010 by John 4 Comments

[Note to regular readers: You may have noticed a change in my online tempo in the last week — I sure have: my visits to your blogs are a little more erratic, my postings here a little less… I don’t know… “focused,” maybe?

Partly, true, my spotty attendance is because the pace of my 9-to-5 workdays has gone up. But mostly, it’s because the parts of my mind shared between the online world and the fictional are starting, once again, to be given over to early-morning and (on Saturdays) all-morning writing sessions. I’ve been so distracted by other stuff since November, in short, that I haven’t worked much on the novel. That’s changing — for good, I hope, at least until this draft is done.

In the meantime, you’ll probably continue to find me fading into and out of view.]

The prospect of having a stroke has always terrified me, even more than the prospect of Alzheimer’s; at least to my way of thinking, the gradual dissolution of the self in the latter case is a kindness (surely the only one) compared to the sudden wham! of the former: the blow to some faculties while leaving others intact.

And because I’m someone who lives with words so much, not surprisingly, the most terrifying of all faculties to lose would be verbal ones. What (I wonder) would I do if I could never talk again — and knew it? What if I not only couldn’t talk, but couldn’t even within my own head any longer form a particular word when I needed it? How would I cope with losses like these? Could I cope with them?

Such questions drove the opening of the excerpt, below, from the current chapter-in-progress. This chapter takes place (if anywhere) inside the head of a main character. By this point in the story, the reader, like some of Al’s friends, has seen Al topple suddenly to his driveway on a Sunday morning, and has seen him in the hospital, alive but inert.

All the usual disclaimers about first-draft work apply. :)

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July 4th: (Momentary) Freedom from Self-Consciousness

July 4, 2009 by John 7 Comments

So there’s this new writerly-blogging trend — not really a dangerous one, but it sure feels like one to a cautious soul like Yours Truly. Which is: throw caution to the winds. Post online something you’ve written, and… ask for feedback.

I think I’m going to try that, and I’ll get to that in a moment. [Whoops — too late!] I’ve tried that, briefly, over the last couple days, and depending on how that works out I may post about the experience later.

But first I want to lay the groundwork. I want to tell you about a sort of breakthrough I had last week, in working on Seems to Fit. (That’s the WIP’s new title — coming up with a final (?) title not the breakthrough I speak of now, although it was a huge weight off my mental shoulders then, and still.)

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Breaking WIP News: We Have a Title

July 2, 2009 by John 11 Comments

A couple weeks ago, I posted on the importance of selecting a good title for your work. Here’s what I said then, in part:

I’ve struggled for years, off and on, with the title of the WIP. When I tell you I’ve been calling it Grail, I know that instantly summons up certain… certain somethings in your head. Those somethings may or may not in fact apply to my story…
…
So no, it’s not going to be Grail in the long run. I don’t know what it’s going to be.

Well, I think I’ve found what I was looking for. Below, the story behind the new (and, I think, forever) title.

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