Dreamland

This morning my wife was relating last night’s dream. We were hiking along the Mulholland ridge and our car was on the other side of the valley and we had to find someone who would allow us to hitch a ride. I said, ‘Where did that come from?’

Dumb question. It comes from our lives, real and imagined. All our experience is dumped into a mosh pit and it mysteriously recombines in our synaptic short circuits and comes out as something else.

As writers, it is the essence of creativity. We should celebrate our mosh pits. It’s money in the bank. Personally, I was in my 70s before I felt there was enough compost from which to draw. I am in awe of the young writers, really young writers, who can bring forth meaningful emotions and plots and story flow from their meager seniority, unless, of course, they are writing about young people’s issues only.

Now, as a plot possibility emerges in my pea brain, I find that stuff shows up and piles on. It’s not exactly as I lived it but close and I stir it all up in a new recipe put it in the oven of my manuscript and, viola!, out comes something new and interesting (if I do it right). I don’t question. I give thanks.

Style Manuals Be Damned

I just reread ‘The Good War’ (1984) by Studs Terkel, a longtime Chicago newspaper columnist. Besides being essential reading for those without appreciation of the significance of WW II on America, it is an object lesson in substance over style. It is called the ‘good war’ because it was a war that we absolutely had to fight and win to avoid being enslaved…and we did. It consists entirely of interviews of people from all walks and in wildly varied roles pertaining to the World War II experience. In the process, it violates almost all the rules of grammar and style in the service of authenticity. The interviewees tell their stories and we can’t help but believe them whether they are ignorant country women working in ammunition factories, foot soldiers, Japanese-American internees or highly educated generals and economists.

Authenticity carries these gripping stories and provides our lesson for the day. Reality in phrasing and imagery generates emotional engagement and empathy. Worked for Studs Terkel and works for us in constructing our own less-than-epic stories.

Writer’s block? Pshaw!

When a writer runs dry, it is most times referred to as his/her ‘block’. Poppycock! Let’s call it a ‘stall’ instead. A block is something that must be hammered at as in your head against a stone wall. Seldom productive.

There are two kinds of stalls: one that occurs in the midst of a work and one that precludes starting at all.

First, let me say that I have no patience with those who say they can’t think of anything to write about. What nonsense! We are awash in things to write about. Engage your imagination, for God’s sake. Take a trip, even a small one. Sit in a mall and make up stories about the people who shamble through. Read something. Play ‘what if’ with your own life history. Go to Wikipedia and read up on some person, event, era in which you may have a scintilla of interest. If something doesn’t pop up within, say, twenty minutes, you must consider erasing the title ‘writer’ from your business card.

Re ‘stalling’ while in flight: If you are flying and your plane stalls, it means there is insufficient air passing over the wings to provide lift. How to resolve that? Dive and pour on the coal. How do you dive when you’re in midair with a story? You write something else. You depart from your story line and write the ending or introduce an outrageous scenario that you’ll probably dump later. You write some friends. You take a walk and enjoy exercising your eyeballs on distant objects. You take the afternoon off. What you don’t do is sit there like a ninny and stare at the screen.

The sensation of sight

Is writing about words? I contend it is about sight and, if you will, insight. The words are just the means to get there as the rails are the means to get you to Grand Central or the Interstate is the means to get you to grandma’s house. What you are after is Grand Central or grandma’s house.

With a story, the goal is to enable the reader to see and feel. If images or emotions are not produced, what’s it all about? Stringing words together is not the issue. Any instruction manual has lots of words, correctly used words, grammatically organized. But, is it a story? Not unless you gasp and get angry or weepy or it allows you to envision the product and the logistics behind it, feel the wind in your hair. If it makes you feel something, I suppose even an instruction manual could lay claim to literature. But there is certainly a difference between Jane’s inventory of naval vessels and ‘Das Boot’. One is non-fiction for information. The other is to allow you to know what it’s like to live in a crippled German submarine on the bottom of the Straits of Gibraltar with little chance to survive. Can you see that? Can you feel it? Congratulations, you’ve just been transported.