Category Archives: Commonplace Book

Last night my husband and I took a brisk walk to the Orange Line, rode down to Chinatown, and had a delightful meal at Pho Pasteur. Boston is far more accessible now than it was when we lived at the end of a commuter line. I love train rides, but thankfully the time is shorter and options greater now that we only have to use the T. We don’t have to leave the car parked in a public lot, departure deadlines are more flexible—we don’t have to take the last train out an hour before we’d like, and there’s no more sitting in North Station terminal, shooing stunningly brave pigeons from snatching at leftovers.

Neither of us can tell whose birthday present it was—I thought they were his, he insists they were mine. But seeing that we’re almost halfway between the two, it’s not really a thing that matters. What matters is that he managed to find two tickets to A Conversation with Neil Gaiman at the Colonial Theatre on Emerson College campus, right across from the Central Burying Ground on Boston Common, which I found amusing, as I love The Graveyard Book. Well, I love most of his work, anyway.

The line for his books transcended what either of us thought reasonable—primarily because we’ve just had to downsize and still aren’t where we’re likely to end up staying. Why add when you know there’s more subtraction coming? So we muddled though the crowd, out of the lush red, gold-trimmed foyer and found our seats in the balcony. Dancers and musicians looked down on us: painted faces on the ceilings and walls, golden musicians awaited the proceedings above the boxes. Like many old theatres, the balcony seats were designed for the smaller people of another age, so we crowded in—a row of six couples, all strangers with less rom than eggs in a carton, perched in potentially vertiginous space. All well and good. Neil Gaiman was going to speak. Tom Waits, Nina Simone, and Johnny Cash serenaded us over the speakers in the run-up.

Gaiman came to the podium in all black—no surprises—and opened with an unpublished poem about Batman dedicated to Neal Adams, who had passed earlier in the day. He read “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar”, “Click Clack the Rattlebag”, and closed with a poem for the Syrian refugees. He may have read one or two more pieces—I was fanboying, absorbing the moment, wherever the storyteller wanted to take me.

In between selections he answered from a stack of questions, humorously lamenting that the audience had had time to think about them, but he had not. Of particular interest to me was a question about writer’s block, which he strategically reframed as a bad writing day, which first we can own and second we can fix. The full answer was lengthy and beautiful, and I found that Hy Bender’s The Sandman Companion ends with nearly identical advice, so I’m going to close—and make my point—by sharing it here:

“I just sit down and write, regardless of how bad the stuff I’m producing is. I can do that because I know I’ll wake up the next day, look at what I’ve done, and say, ‘Yes, that is indeed not very good; But it’s mainly because this sentence here is entirely superfluous, the paragraph following it is clunky, and the scene in the middle should be moved to the top.’ In other words, when my writing facilities are on the blink for a little while, I can still rely on the editor part of my head to read what I’ve done objectively—that is, as if someone else wrote it—and fix the problems” (Bender, 262).

And now you know why I work with an editor, and why I am not suffering a block.

My editor friend and I have been talking about camera angles for some time. Several month ago, she told me to put a microphone in Nic’s (my protagonist) head and a camera on his shoulder. Sometimes it’s easy; other times, I miss the boat entirely because I get lost trying to capture the place and forget to capture the place in the context of action.

So in our conversation this weekend, we discussed the selections from my prior post (“Where Dialogue and Action Meet”), she gave me an alternate reading of the Tehanu passage by following the camera and asking “what do we see?” and “why do we see it?” Then she shared this excerpt from Chapter 35 of Dickens’s Great Expectations:

And now the range of marshes lay clear before us, with the sails of the ships on the river growing out of it; and we went into the churchyard, close to the graves of my unknown parents, Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and Also Georgiana, Wife of the Above. And there, my sister was laid quietly in the earth, while the larks sang high above it, and the light wind strewed it with beautiful shadows of clouds and trees.

It’s a stunning passage with a clear motion for the eye, presenting the procession to the graveyard exactly as it unfolds, symbolism seamlessly woven into the scene. It’s really a beautiful thing, what Dickens has done here. My colleague’s analysis/instruction as it relates to the beauty of this scene as a means of thinking about the narrative camera was brilliant, resonating in a way that makes me wish I could have sat in her classes when we were teaching years ago. The passage is here where I can come back to it, a reminder to me now that when I think of the camera on Nic’s shoulder (or the narrator’s or anyone else’s shoulder who appears in my writing ever again), I really want to be breathing toward this scene.

And I suppose when I get a few other books in the pile read, I’ll be revisiting Great Expectations for the first time since high school, I think. Not that I’m upset by this–there’s much to discover now that I simply didn’t have the motivation to see then.

My current project is a first person limited narrative in which the protagonist, Nic, reflects extensively on the past and studies family artifacts—photos, documents, and the like. Sometimes he makes things up, building fiction on the narratives he learned as a child. One of the challenges constantly presenting itself is the integration of context and action into the dialogue. There are times when my vision is so clear I forget that my reader doesn’t see what I do. Et voilà, as Poirot would say. Text that does not connect. Insert David Suchet mustache-wriggle here.

So my editor suggested I look at a few sample texts. I chose two for this activity. Because I’m reading LeGuin’s EarthSea cycle so that I can have a conversation about it with one of my staff members, I pulled my first example from the early pages of book four, Tehanu, “Chapter 12: Winter”:

She sat down at the fireside with a weary sigh, and did nothing at all for a while.

A rap at the door: Clearbrook and Ged—no, Hawk she must call him—Hawk standing on the doorstep. Old Clearbrook was full of talk and importance, Ged dark and quiet and bulky in his grimy sheepskin coat. “Come in,” she said. “Have some tea. What’s the news?”

“Tried to get away, down to Valmouth, but the men from Kahedanan, the bailies, come down and ’twas in Cherry’s outhouse they found ’em,” Clearbrook announced, waving his fist.

“He escaped?” Horror caught at her.

“The other two,” Ged said. “Not him.”

“See, they found the body up in the old shambles on Round Hill, all beat to pieces like, up in the old shambles there, by Kahedanan, so ten, twelve of ’em ’pointed theirselves bailies then and there and come after them. And there was a search all through the villages last night, and this morning before ’twas hardly light they found ’em hiding out in Cherry’s outhouse. Half-froze they was.”

“He’s dead, then?” she asked, bewildered.

Ged had shucked off the heavy coat and was now sitting on the cane-bottom chair by the door to undo his leather gaiters. “He’s alive,” he said in his quiet voice. “Ivy has him. I took him in this morning on the muck-cart. There were people out on the road before daylight, hunting for all three of them. They’d killed a woman, up in the hills.”

“What woman?” Tenar whispered.

Her eyes were on Ged’s. He nodded slightly. (Kindle edition 213-4)

Tenar—the “she” of the scene—has survived an attack by a local gang the night before, and as a consequence has lied to a child she has taken in (I won’t spoil the story by revealing more; this is enough). The sentence—placement by the fireside, a description not of doing, but of not doing—it’s the barest little sentence so packed with weight, and it sets up the way she responds and reacts in the conversation that follows. She offers tea—culturally understood as a calming beverage and an act of care. A bracing cup of tea can help you through anything, right? But look at the emotions: horror that the man might have escaped, yet bewildered at his death, and upon discovering a murder had taken place, she drops to a whisper—in part to protect the child, in part possibly to absorb the news herself.

Equally important is the way action marks time and creates emphasis points in the dialogue. Ged doesn’t sit down right away. He appears in the doorway in his bulky coat, which comes off behind the scenes, while Clearbrook describes the scenes. We come back to Ged, who is a silent, methodical type, as he he has shucked the coat and is removing the protective leggings. He’s taking off his armor. Is he weary? Probably, as Ged has been equally stressed for some time. It’s his act of removing armor that teaches the reader where he is in the scene. And this is what I need more practice at—concise action to set mood and tempo.

Also of interest to me is how we know the dialogue belongs to Clearbrook. LeGuin describes him as full of talk, but in the second long passage of narration, the language does not fit a quiet man who has settled into removing his armor. The author never has to tell us it’s Clearbrook. She has foregrounded it enough with her description and the actions of her other characters—the ones who aren’t saying much.

Switching gears for a moment, when I began writing this work years ago, I had kept Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried in mind. My work isn’t the war story O’Brien writes, but it is a war story of sorts. And the way O’Brien deals in truth, and what constitutes it, and what we reveal and when, strikes chords with me. My protagonist Nic must contend with ideas of the truth as he redefines family and self. So here’s a segment of O’Brien’s work, the lion’s share of a chapter titled “Friends.” Two grunts—Jensen and Strunk—have gone from mortal enemies to—within the framework of war—friends, having resolved one night that if either should become “totally fucked up”, the other would put him out of his misery:

There was nothing much anybody could do except wait for the dustoff. After we’d secured an LZ, Dave Jensen went over and kneeled at Strunk’s side. The stump had stopped twitching now. For a time there was some question as to whether Strunk was still alive, but then he opened his eyes and looked up at Dave Jensen. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, and moaned, and tried to slide away and said, “Jesus, man, don’t kill me.”

“Relax,” Jensen said.

Lee Strunk seemed groggy and confused. He lay still for a second and then motioned toward his leg. “Really, it’s not so bad. Not terrible. Hey, really—they can sew it back on—really.”

“Right, I’ll bet they can.”

“You think?”

“Sure I do.”

Strunk frowned at the sky. He passed out again, then woke up and said, “Don’t kill me.”

“I won’t,” Jensen said.

“I’m serious.”

“Sure.”

“But you got to promise. Swear it to me—swear you won’t kill me.”

Jensen nodded and said, “I swear,” and then a little later we carried Strunk to the dustoff chopper. Jensen reached out and touched the good leg. “Go on now,” he said. Later we heard that Strunk died somewhere over Chu Lai, which seemed to relieve Dave Jensen of an enormous weight. (Kindle edition pages 67-8).

O’Brien appealed to me when I was younger not because of the content, but because of the sparseness, the bite-sized chunks of experience that reminded me in some ways of my father’s own dinner-table narratives from his days in the Navy—which thankfully he sanitized so that his children could hear them.

As I consider this text now, I am grateful to not cling to this kind of storytelling voice the way I might have when I was younger. How much context is necessary in a person’s mortal wounding? This is Vietnam, and if it’s a jungle (we don’t know), only the language of human artifacts—weapons, aircraft, towns—distinguish it from any other jungle in which any other war was fought. If this was a jungle. We don’t know, and I’m not sure we need to. The actions are intimate. The passing out, the begging not to be killed, the touch of the leg. Staring at the stump. Death waiting on the flight out. It seems to me that O’Brien is working at once to make death mundane and to make each man’s lose intimate and numbing. Certainly it works, but I’m sure that what makes it work is exactly why it won’t work for the style of story I am currently writing.

References

LeGuin, U.K. (1990). Tehanu (Kindle Edition). New York: Atheneum.

O’Brien, T. (1990). The things they carried (Kindle Edition). New York: Houghton Mifflin.

“There is so much less reading in schools, and very little teaching of grammar. For a writer this is kind of like being thrown into a carpenter’s shop without ever having learned the names of the tools or handled them consciously. What do you do with a Phillips screwdriver? What is a Phillips screwdriver? We’re not equipping people to write; we’re just saying ‘You too can write!’ Or ‘anybody can write, just sit down and do it!’ But to make anything, you’ve got to have the tools to make it.”

The further I go down the writing path, the easier it is to rest easy with the difficulty of the craft. I’m back with Ursula LeGuin, this time in her Conversations on Writing with David Naimon. An interview—her last—that was released posthumously. At times in this text, we know she is at the end of her career. She tells us. She has nothing left to lose, if she ever did. But it’s implied so much more in moments like the passage above.

I have taught writing for years now. That’s more about my personal life and current career than I ever thought I would reveal in this space. And I was raised in the school of “You Too Can Write!” I assigned the classical and contemporary essays, subjects of rhetorical analysis, and early on depended on the knowledge that I had studied grammar in several years of junior high and a year of high school, so therefore my students must have studied it, too. Of course, the misconceptions fell away quickly, and I incorporated at least some grammar into my teaching.

But it’s never enough. We need the metalanguage of grammar specifically and language more broadly, the perpetual refreshing when we read, not just to examine ideas, but to examine the construction of ideas. Yes, they are the tools we need in the shop, or at our own writing desks. They are the tools that help us learn not only to build, but also to see. I’ll admit a certain horror when I find that a student cannot identify a noun (person, place, thing, or idea), or the verb that the noun is either doing or having done to it. Yes, you too can write, but it’s merely throwing down the words and hoping without any sense of clear meaning or construction.

In my own work in progress, I am spending a lot more time listening to my editor, who is helping me see those passages that are narrating context, or world building, or telling what I either fail to show or show later. The process of cutting and emending is not a fast one. We don’t run with scissors, in life or on the page. So slowly, word by word, line by line, I discover my own language, my choices, and add by subtraction. At the same time, adding by addition is preferable, and the best way is not just to read good words, but to know the tools the author used to write those good words. Yes, you, too can write. But first, you must read.