Newsletter - May 2009

On Being Specific

“Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose -– as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.”

• Joseph Conrad

“Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics: it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.”

• John Gardener

At one time or another we have all had our ‘story’. The one about how we were wronged.  It’s a pretty good story; some of us have perfected it over the years, (I know I have) made it bulletproof, unassailable.  Heck, sometimes it is even true!  This is fine and good, however, as storytellers we must remember that every story has an ending.

An ending is simply the natural resolution to the ‘universal problem’.  We may go round and round with our ‘story’ in our personal life, but in literature, revisiting the same beat gets old real quick.  We are interested in what the hero comes to understand as a result of his journey.

Because we are always writing our ‘story’ to one degree or another, being curious about the ending is an invitation to transformation.  This is why writing can be so thrilling (and also terrifying), because we suddenly realize that time is of the essence, the clock is ticking and we are hurtling toward the end, which may mean the death of our old identity, the death of our attachment to the victim/hero of the first act.

In story, to stay in the same place is to die.  The story is always moving forward.  As John Gardener says in On Moral Fiction ‘everything that happens in fiction leads to a deeper and deeper understanding’.  Part of the process of the rewrite is to understand why we wrote what we wrote.  There can sometimes be a tendency for the writer to want to escape the drama of his story.  This might sound strange, since logic would suggest that conflict is our goal, but here is why I think this sometimes happens.  Once we have clarity about our hero transformed, we begin to understand the hero’s victimhood in the first act, and sometimes for the writer, this can feel embarrassing.  We can personalize it, and we may feel exposed.  We might think, ‘yuck, I don’t want to show that aspect of my nature, it is so ugly, and far too revealing.  This can be a terrible disservice to our story, and may sound the death knell to all of the great unconscious work that we have done in our first draft.  There can be a desire to toss it all out and start again, with more noble ambitions for our hero.

Don’t do it.

We don’t want to neuter the liveliness of our hero for some idea of a better man. We love our hero, not because he is good, but perhaps because he wants to be better than he is.

There is an invisible line I approach in my rewrite where the work starts to get really specific and I begin to squirm as I glimpse my limitations. This is where I can withdraw into my old beliefs or I can be brave and inquire into the ‘nature’ of my limitations.

What I’m saying is that it can be helpful for us to develop a healthy relationship to our embarrassment.  It is natural for us, the moment we feel ashamed, to shut down or tune out, but as writers we cannot afford to do this in relationship to our story.  If we can, over time, develop an objective detachment to our stories, we will likely be able to write with clarity and specificity our characters’ experiences.

As we begin writing, we may have an ‘idea’ of what this entails, but our story asks everything of us for a reason – if it didn’t, we would never surrender that idea.  Let’s be curious about the nature of our hero’s struggle, his pettiness, jealousies, judgments, fears and desires.  When we are specific, when we tell the truth in all of its jolie-laide, our work will vibrate with life.