{"id":7917,"date":"2010-11-17T14:53:39","date_gmt":"2010-11-17T19:53:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=7917"},"modified":"2010-11-17T15:05:51","modified_gmt":"2010-11-17T20:05:51","slug":"paying-attention-to-the-take-her-hand-moments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2010\/11\/paying-attention-to-the-take-her-hand-moments\/","title":{"rendered":"Paying Attention to the &#8220;<em>Take Her Hand!<\/em>&#8221; Moments"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><object classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" width=\"500\" height=\"300.8\" codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\" \/><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\" \/><param name=\"src\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/Y5LQxrZccQE?fs=1&amp;hl=en_US&amp;rel=0\" \/><param name=\"allowfullscreen\" value=\"true\" \/><\/object><\/p>\n<p class=\"smalltext\">[Video: scene from David Lynch&#8217;s 1997 film <a title=\"Wikipedia, on 'Lost Highway' (film)\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Lost_Highway_%28film%29\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Lost Highway<\/em><\/a>. Soundtrack: Lou Reed&#8217;s interpretation of &#8220;This Magic Moment&#8221;]\n<p><span class=\"dropcap\">A<\/span>lmost every writer of stories, I bet, has had at least one &#8220;Take her hand!&#8221; moment. Here&#8217;s why I call them that:<\/p>\n<p>Over twenty years ago, I was working on a longish short story called &#8220;Sing, Sing, Sing.&#8221; (I&#8217;ve written about this story <a title=\"Posts\/Pages referencing 'Sing, Sing, Sing'\" href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?s=%22sing%2C+sing%2C+sing%22\" target=\"_blank\">numerous times<\/a> 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&#8230; without a ticket. In writing the story, I had to deal with challenges like these:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Why would eleven-year-old Matty &#8212; <em>any<\/em> eleven-year-old &#8212; be so eager to do this?<\/li>\n<li>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 &#8212; and thus, by what time would he have to leave his house?<\/li>\n<li>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?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But I hadn&#8217;t foreseen one complication.<\/p>\n<p>There came a critical moment in the story&#8217;s action, bracketed by (a) the events which brought Matty to Carnegie Hall in the first place and (b) Matty&#8217;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 &#8212; 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&#8217;t mere uniformed employees of Carnegie Hall, who might or might not be 100% on the ball: they were <em>police<\/em>, and they were <em>checking<\/em> <em>every ticket<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;m writing the scene, and I&#8217;ve got Matty navigating his way through the pushing-and-shoving crowd at the doors, and there&#8217;s all kinds of traffic noise and shouting, and Matty seems as confused by all the ruckus and foofaraw as the author himself.<\/p>\n<p>And then something curious happened, something very curious:<\/p>\n<p>Matty&#8217;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&#8230; 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&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and I <em>thought<\/em>, as loudly as I could:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><em>Take her hand, damn it! Take her hand<\/em><em>!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>And as I watched, Matty reached out and clasped the little girl&#8217;s trailing hand. The cop looked down benignly at the little motherless family, smiled, glanced at the tickets in the father&#8217;s hand, and waved them through. He even tousled Matty&#8217;s hair a bit as he passed. (The girl was a little freaked out, but it took her a few lucky moments to protest.)<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><span class=\"dropcap\">N<\/span>ow, on one level &#8212; the least interesting one &#8212; I know that I wasn&#8217;t really speaking those words to a fictional character. I was directing them to <em>myself<\/em>, something like this:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><span style=\"color: #999999;\">[Make him] <\/span><em>take her hand, damn it!<\/em> <span style=\"color: #999999;\">[Make him]<\/span> <em>take her hand!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t seeing that table, or the blank wall behind it, or the stack of paper. My hands didn&#8217;t exist. <em>I<\/em> didn&#8217;t exist. What I saw was the scene which Matty was seeing, over fifty years earlier. No authorial <span style=\"color: #999999;\">[Make him]<\/span> called the shots. I <em>was<\/em> Matty.<\/p>\n<p>(It&#8217;s hard for me to describe the emotional impact of this moment on me. Not because the right words don&#8217;t exist, but because they sound ridiculous: I sobbed.)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot lately about all the conjuration which writers must pull off if they&#8217;re to write successfully. For now, though, I&#8217;m thinking especially about the importance of leaving yourself open to the satisfactions of the unexpected.<\/p>\n<p>In working on <em>Seems to Fit<\/em>, 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, <em>systemic<\/em>. 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. <em>But he&#8217;s still part of their tale<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>From the first draft, my own &#8220;Gawaine&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s point of view, rotating in turn among the six of them. &#8220;Gawaine&#8221; seemed to have just suddenly fallen off the map. I wasn&#8217;t sure what his connection was to the others, so I pretty much ignored it.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;until a couple weeks ago. Then I had not one but two &#8220;Take her hand!&#8221; 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 &#8212; and perhaps just in my head &#8212; these three pages resolved all my worry about a break in continuity. Here&#8217;s how I described them to The Missus:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Only the second of the three pages is done. It says, &#8216;Part 2,&#8217; followed by a colon and the character&#8217;s name. The other two pages aren&#8217;t done yet, though; they just say &#8216;Part 1&#8217; and &#8216;Part 3,&#8217; with a colon after each.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Are you using characters names&#8217; to distinguish those two parts, too?&#8221; she asked.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Nope. I need just the right nouns or noun phrases to follow the colons. That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m still working on.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"dropcap\">S<\/span>tupid, right? The point is: if you keep your writerly nose to the grindstone all the time, you risk missing the &#8220;Take her hand!&#8221; moments. They don&#8217;t wait around until you notice them. (They probably get bored, and have more important things to do.) You&#8217;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 <em>keep your damned eyes open<\/em>, and don&#8217;t let the moment get away. Take its hand.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;or maybe I&#8217;m not talking there to you, my imagined reader. Maybe I&#8217;m really just reminding myself, hmm?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Video: scene from David Lynch&#8217;s 1997 film Lost Highway. Soundtrack: Lou Reed&#8217;s interpretation of &#8220;This Magic Moment&#8221;] Almost every writer of stories, I bet, has had at least one &#8220;Take her hand!&#8221; moment. Here&#8217;s why I call them that: Over twenty years ago, I was working on a longish short story called &#8220;Sing, Sing, Sing.&#8221; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[38,247,5,50,105,372,515],"tags":[106,108,1258,1306,2071,2072],"class_list":{"0":"post-7917","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-backwards","7":"category-ruminations","8":"category-06_writing","9":"category-language-writing_cat","10":"category-short-fiction","11":"category-style-and-craft","12":"category-grail","13":"tag-sing-sing-sing","14":"tag-carnegie-hall","15":"tag-david-lynch","16":"tag-seems-to-fit","17":"tag-lost-highway","18":"tag-gawaine","19":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-23H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7917"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7947,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7917\/revisions\/7947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}