Challenge Me

Of the many words over-used, misused and abused by public officials and celebrities, the use of the word challenge as a euphemism for less delicate, more honest words and phrases has become pervasive. That this habit has filtered down through the upper echelons of business all the way to the redneck-working-class level has me, to avoid any euphemisms, really pissed off.

Politicians no longer await imminent defeat in an election, they face “a stiff political challenge.” The governor of Illinois doesn’t face impeachment, conviction and incarceration, he faces “significant legal challenges.” The leading man of the moment, the one with the perfectly sculpted public image, doesn’t have to give half his shit to his wife in an ugly divorce when she discovers his habitual infidelity. He can enter therapy with her, where they will “try to overcome relationship challenges.” The contractor didn’t fuck up the construction of the new city library, he “struggled with a challenging design.”

Challenge is a great weasel word. It carries no connotation of blame or fault. It implies an obstacle for which the person so challenged will require valor, fortitude, perseverance and hard work to prevail. The unexpressed idea behind the word is that a challenge bestows a great mission on the challenged. No more is he a scumbag philanderer cheating on his wife, but a victim of a heretofore unrecognized psychological stumbling block that he has the candor and guts to confront. The change of a word or two transforms a run-of-the-mil political corruption trial, turning a legal scramble to stay out of jail into a higher purpose bestowed with a nobility that the defenders of the Alamo would envy.

Challenge is sufficiently fuzzy that one can avoid more accurate but inconvenient words and phrases like indictment, divorce, bankruptcy, failure, addiction, tax evasion, alcoholism or statutory rape, and give a patina of courage to an otherwise messy and embarrassing situation. A challenge is far more respectable than slanderous precision.

So, today I will not go to the barn and clear a foot of cow shit away from obstructed gates, I will face the daunting logistical challenge of significant material relocation. Why worry if I’m too old and poor to be decent dating material again when I can have relationship challenges? And an extensive rewrite of a 300 page novel manuscript? No drudge work that. I am an artist facing a creative challenge.

I have to stop here. My barn boots and material relocation challenge awaits. If I don’t slip, I can avoid the challenge of our dog trying to lick my barn coat clean before I get it off.

Same Old Story

I watched another romantic comedy tonight. By myself, as I often do. I am a connoisseur of the form. Not so much a connoisseur, I guess, as a sucker. I give just about all of them a chance. I see some good in even the worst film efforts in the genre, a form older, actually, than cinema. Boy meets girl (Or girl meets boy. Works the same), boy loses girl, boy overcomes seemingly insurmountable obstacles to find love. Despite Hollywood’s effort to find new twists on the idea, the same basic approach dominates the genre because people keep coming back for more of the same.

Given that my real life has rarely resembled a romantic comedy, that the situations and outcomes that so satisfy me in a film are never realized in real life, why do I keep coming back? Not to learn how to make my romantic life work. It has never worked in the last forty years. If I had learned any useful lessons from seeing all those films in the genre, you’d think it would have resulted in at least some success. Nada.

So why do I fall for the next romantic comedy that rolls of the Hollywood assembly line? They fill a need in me. That’s what stories do. That’s why we like them. We need something from them and when they deliver, we come back again and again. We so need them that when someone is good at giving them to us, we throw money at them we don’t have, shower fame and adoration on them they don’t deserve. What do I need from romantic comedies? I need my hope that I can find love replenished. A life long lived is fertile ground for cynicism, and cynicism chokes out hope and belief in romantic love. Romantic comedies are like Roundup to the cynical weeds in my garden. They don’t keep the weeds down for long, though. I need regular applications.

Stories like these emphasize beginnings. They usually ignore that relationships, as all things, have middles and ends as well. A romantic comedy dabbles in endings, often mixing in fights and breakups, but at last, only the loneliness ends and a couple begins, a flat-out denial of living reality. Romantic comedies defy endings, resist all endings, because their beating heart is the struggle against decay and death. Each of us comes out swinging with our first breath every morning and we throw down with those demons until we slip into the black every night. Low morale is very bad for our fighting spirit, and we need all the fighting spirit we can get with an opponent like Our Inevitable End. Romantic comedies are the propaganda films my soul needs to keep up the battle. They help me believe that someday, someone will have my back. Always.

It’s probably not true, but without romantic comedies, I’d be saying it’s definitely not true. That little hedge, that probably, keeps me waking up each morning. That probably is there in good measure because of Say Anything and When Harry Met Sally and Sweet Home Alabama and High Fidelity and Gross Point Blank and others. That probably keeps me looking for a glance, a giggle, a bit of easy, flirting banter with a woman that lets me know I might not be alone after all. There might not be an end. Only a wait for the next beginning. For boy meets girl.

Literary Rorschach Test

Every fiction writer I know has been asked some version of the following: “Am I (fill in fictional character name here)? I have to be. I am so (fill in virtue/flaw/tragic flaw here) just like (previously named fictional character).”

There is really no way to avoid the question, especially for novice writers who haven’t found a decent writers group or workshop yet. They often turn to friends or family as first readers hoping for reassurance and encouragement. They may get that, but the reader will almost certainly see some aspect of themselves in a character, no matter how outlandish the comparison. And what they see tells you more about the reader than the writer. Your suburban-soccer-mom sister corners you in the kitchen at Christmas and says, “Is that Vietnam-vet-sniper-turned-vampire me? Because, like, who would think of a vampire who hates the site of blood? And I hate the site of blood!” Or your boyfriend’s bodybuilding-narcissist-who-listens-to-Iggy Pop-on-yard-sale-eight-track-tapes roommate catches you on the way out to dinner—“I know you modeled the Moldovan-double-agent-concert-pianist-gigolo after me. It’s so obvious. We’re both gay!”

If someone who knows you reads your book or story, they will see themselves in it somewhere. Sometimes that makes them happy, sometimes not so happy . . . “That nympho-lesbo-killer-hippie-whore is me, isn’t it? Isn’t it?! You were writing that scene right after our big fight about me being friends with Jeremy. What’s wrong with me having a guy for a friend?! You are such a jerk!” Worse than that? “How could you give a character in your book a twisted dick? How did you know I had a twisted dick? Are you staring . . . you know . . . THERE in the locker room? What is your problem, Pal?” I know some writer has suffered this: “You don’t love me. I knew it. When Kristen asks Ben on the bus, on the way home from the Vegan pot luck with the mobsters, he looks out the window and doesn’t answer her. You looked out the window of the bus when we were riding home tonight.” You protest that she didn’t ask if you loved her and you told her you loved her ten times already today. “But not on the bus. You just looked out the window like that emotionally repressed idiot Ben. And you both have curly hair.”

To be fair, perhaps I’m exaggerating a bit. No I’m not. This shit happens to writers every day. And after a while, if it won’t break up a relationship or cost you any money, you just agree that, yes, I did model Sergeant Bonecrusher after you, a 93 pound female lead singer in a punk band, because you are both “tough.” It’s easier than the long-winded truth, that everything a writer has seen or heard or smelled or felt or tasted, every breakup and orgasm and stubbed toe and gunshot wound and death of a friend, each book you read or movie or play you’ve seen or hero you’ve met or lie you’ve told or theft you’ve committed or day you spent in jail or joint you smoked and sometimes things you just dreamed while you lay half asleep on a raft in a farm pond while bluegills nibbled at your leg hairs, it all goes into a mental hopper and is mixed in and tumbled for years with genetic memory and reptilian fears and nostalgic longing for your eight grade piano teacher. And one day it comes out on the page as a character made up of so many things from so many places that you have no idea where it came from. And sometimes you just need a stock character for a minor role and you don’t want to work that hard, so you use some hackneyed filler. And that’s how it happens.

Though sometimes, that self-centered boor with one breast bigger than the other who can’t smell that she wears way too much perfume because of a head injury as a child, the one who picks her nose during sex? It is you.

Thanks, Bill

Mutts that most of us are, every writer still has a pedigree. Someone put the idea in our heads that we could be writers. Someone encouraged us. Someone planted that seed and nurtured it. We were guided by teachers who had teachers. If we had the time and inclination, we might trace our lineage back centuries. I’d rather spend the time writing, but I would like to go back a couple generations, anyway.

I trace my own lineage through William Allen, former director of the Ohio State University Creative Writing Program, best selling author, and my novelist-boot-camp drill sergeant. I took the last workshop he taught at OSU. I finished a draft of the novel I began shortly after his workshop and took him up on an invitation to his house in West Texas to re-write. The three months I spent there were, for me, a graduate program in fiction writing. A veteran editor and teacher, he tore the book apart. He watched over my shoulder as I rebuilt it into something finer. I would give him pages and he’d hand them back with more pencil marks than type. Sometimes he’d just ball up a page and toss it, insisting I should try again. I learned to trust that he meant it when he told me I’d written something good, because he had no qualms at all telling me when I’d written crap. He found everything from the smallest error in grammar to the largest story or structure problem.

Sometimes we’d bump into each other in the kitchen in the middle of the night, the seventy mile per hour winds that sometimes shook his Davis Mountains home making it hard to sleep. We had some of our best conversations then, about politics, mule deer, the ignominious fate of human kind and literature. He’d talk about his mentor, William Price Fox, who taught him at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the early seventies. Bill’s tone of admiration and gratitude towards William Fox mirrored my own for him.

I’ve had other teachers. I took my first undergrad fiction class with graduate assistant Christine “Telene” Guerra at Ohio State. I don’t think she liked me much, but I don’t hold it against her. It’s not like that makes her part of a tiny group. Nor do I think she appreciated my subject matter. But she made no judgments in that regard. She gave honest criticism of my writing without criticizing me as a person. When you are a fragile new writer, it is easy to find reasons to quit. In eschewing the chance to be a roadblock, she did more for me than she realized.

My writers groups have included published poets Psyche North Torok, Diane Ferri and short story writer Amy Simonson. Diane has also published a novel. I have learned something from all of them and I hope they have learned from me.

Beyond my ambition of writing novels that people want to read, I’d like one day to be the kind of mentor I have in Bill Allen and he had in Bill Fox. I want to keep this lineage alive out of my love of fiction and my respect for people like Bill Allen and Bill Fox. They have modeled a generosity of spirit I hope to emulate.

Help! My narrative structure is smothering my leitmotif!

I would love to watch a New York Times literary critic write a novel. After years of vivisecting the novels of others, they know every possible part and piece that goes into a great book and how they should fit together. Their attempt would probably be akin to a biology student trying to reassemble a dissected cat into a purring, meowing animal. They know how to take it apart, but they have no idea how to give it life.

I know the function of writers. It is to give us the stories we need. I don’t know where to locate that need on Maslow’s hierarchy, but I know it’s there. From the first cave paintings, events were put into an order that told not just what happened, but why it mattered. I know the function of writing teachers. They help give us the writers who give us the stories. I know the function of editors. They clarify a writers vision and hold back writers who aren’t ready to articulate one.

What is the function of literary critics? To interpret complex literature for us? Like ministers placing themselves between God and his ignorant flock, they deign to tell us what a book means. Authors don’t need the help any more than God does. Is it to teach writers? I have learned from a literary critic here and there, but the reward is far too little to wade through the smug, obtuse and condescending crap that often passes for literary critique these days. Is their function to warn us away from unworthy books and guide us to those with merit? They assume that their taste, temperament, education and experience are so far superior to our own that we should substitute their critical thinking for our own.

Certainly critics such Michiko Kakutani, Motoko Rich and others at the NY Times aren’t talking to Midwest, blue collar, hard-ass me. These modern Pharisees use a lexicon of jargon to separate themselves from us Philistines. Words and phrases like leitmotif and euphony and overarching narrative keep us confused rabble at bay. Empty and abstract clichés like intricate, deeply felt, reverberate, incandescent, fecund language, and echoes tell us nothing concrete, nothing useful about a book. What mainstream literary critics do is taste the dish and try to describe the flavor to us—usually in prose not half as evocative as the authors they critique—while simultaneously telling us whether or not we should try it. Of what use is that compared to tasting for ourselves? They get an ego bolstering position as arbiter of literary worth and a platform from which to shout. And a check, of course. What do we get? Talked down to, mostly. And we are spared the effort of thinking and deciding for ourselves.

Literary critics don’t help writers, in fact have ended careers that might have borne sweet fruit some day. They do more to obstruct than to aid readers, and they are but poor imitations of editors. While I would not go so far as to line them up right behind Shakespeare’s lawyers, it might not be a bad idea to ignore them until they are forced to find more useful work.

Talent or Training?

The question is here framed in the context of writing fiction. It’s the old Nature-vs-Nurture conundrum that keeps so many biologists and psychologists busy researching and disparaging each other’s ancestry. At some point, every writer asks a form of the question, “Do I have talent?” Sometimes they muster the courage to ask in a whisper, as if to ask aloud would ensure an answer in the negative. More often, they don’t ask, their reluctance rooted in a secret certainty they do not want to have confirmed. But the question is there. Always there. Nearly everyone who becomes serious about writing fiction has doubts. And all who doubt ache for an answer that does not destroy their dreams.

For some few, the answer is immediately obvious. There are those rare people who have such a clear voice, have so much to say, or are such natural story tellers that their lack of formal education is a detail that can be filled in later. My mentor, Bill, found a girl so gifted that he arranged to get her into his graduate writing program though she hadn’t much more than half finished an undergrad degree. That she and others may not even know the difference between farther and further, your and you’re or there, they’re and their, is irrelevant. Those are things that can be easily learned once the passion for writing has been discovered.

For others the answer is equally clear. Unless they wrote a check, a treasure map, or directions to a strip joint bachelor party, no one, including their mothers, will read past the first couple sentences. Despite extensive education, they will never write palatable fiction. Included in this group are those writers who harbor an unshakeable conviction that annoying persistence is all that lies between their present anonymous poverty and the wealth and recognition of their genius that is the inevitable result of their being discovered. They are, invariably, hacks. My personal observation is that most are men of high IQ and low EQ—that is, Emotional Quotient, or the ability to effectively and genuinely interact with other humans, most especially women. These men often live in an emotionally stunted world of power fantasy, waking wet dreams and cold technology. They usually write science fiction or fantasy that reinforces their delusions and gives them a chance to show off extensive vocabularies and techie jargon that they think sets them apart in a good way. It doesn’t. Given that the best fiction illuminates the human condition in its many variations and seeks to evoke in its readers deeply felt human emotions, they are ill prepared to write it and rarely do.

At this point, you are probably thinking that I’m arguing in favor of writing talent being innate. While there are people who seem to go from freshman English to Oprah’s couch in one book, and those who struggle to write a coherent shopping list, the mass of people attracted to writing fiction lie somewhere between these extremes. They have some combination of emotional insight, life experience, education, intelligence, curiosity and facility with language necessary to become a good fiction writer. Their initial attempts at writing a story may vary in quality, but most may have what it takes to turn out good fiction. However, like all worthwhile endeavors, whatever initial ability one possesses must be enhanced by learning and—this is the tough part that most people don’t want to hear—years and years of practice.

An observation made by many and confirmed by a few actual studies is that it takes 10,000 hours of practice at nearly anything to master it. If you break that down to a little less than three hours per day, that's about 20 hours each week, or a bit more than a thousand hours every year. So baseball, music, acting, math, fly-fishing, sculpting, dance and, yes, writing all take about a decade of practice to master. Many may take up writing and succeed if they are willing to learn and put in the time. That in no way guarantees success, but for most of us, there really is no way to know if we have the talent until we’ve worked that long and that hard to find out. It is perfectly understandable that most who consider becoming a writer decide not to risk so large a chunk of their life on the chance that they’d become a pretty good writer who can earn a little money. That’s a valid choice, as valid as deciding not to try base jumping. At least in base jumping, you’d only have to deal with one failure. Becoming a fiction writer offers no such comfort.

So I guess my answer to the writing talent question is this: If you just have to know before you start or before you get too far into it, quit. You’re really too timid or too lazy to succeed as a writer even if you have talent.