In 1997, I had the chance to read Bag of Bones by Stephen King in manuscript. This was the first time I’d ever read one of his first drafts, and the experience of plowing through that huge stack of loose pages is one that I remember fondly.

When the book was released a year later, I noticed something unusual. There was an entire subtext in the novel that hadn’t been there before. While doing research for The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, I learned that King’s wife, Tabitha, made a suggestion that led to this change.

In the opening pages of Bag of Bones, the protagonist’s wife, Jo Noonan, drops dead from a brain aneurysm outside of the local pharmacy. The rest of the book deals with Mike Noonan’s response to this unexpected loss. However, on page 14 of the first draft, the autopsy reveals that Jo Noonan was pregnant. In the margins, Tabitha King notes: “Do this differently. Pregnancy test” and “Does he find pregnancy test in purse or in prescription bag?”

In the second draft, instead of learning about Jo’s pregnancy from the autopsy, Noonan asks the assistant ME whether she was pregnant. (The two manuscript pages are reproduced side by side in The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, including Tabitha King’s annotation). Though it’s a subtle change, it plays into the book’s theme of secrets. In the first version, it was possible that Jo didn’t know she was pregnant. In the revised version, it’s clear that she suspected it was possible, but hadn’t told her husband. Why? Her actions lead Mike to suspect that she might have been having an affair. All this from one little note in the margin.

What impressed me was the way King was able to weave this new subtext of suspicion into the manuscript. It was a delicate surgical process. A sentence here, a paragraph there, a rewording or a change of tone somewhere else. It wasn’t a radical rewrite—and yet it was. It added another layer of depth to the book. Some day I’d like to do a thorough analysis of how he did this.

I was reminded of this by my work on a novel in progress. I finished the first draft a while back and gave it to my agent for his feedback. In my first draft, a character is seriously injured at the end of the first chapter and spends most of the novel in a coma that becomes a persistent vegetative state until ultimately the protagonist has to deal with turning off life support. I thought this subplot would be a way of developing his character. However, my agent observed that, since we never saw the injured character alive for more than a few pages, we didn’t get much of a sense of the lost relationship that plagues the protagonist throughout the book.

So, my idea was to keep the injured character alive and reserve the attack until later in the novel, when it might have more emotional impact. However, that means that in the second draft I have to weave in someone who previously was stuck in a hospital bed on life support for hundreds of pages. I have to give her things to do and delve more deeply into her character than I had intended. I can’t just stick her in at random the way they injected Forrest Gump into historical scenes or restaged scenes in Lost to show that Nikki and Paulo were present.

Unlike those two scenarios, my character is a perturbation. Otherwise she remains as lifeless as if she were still comatose in the hospital. A cardboard standup figure placed at convenient places throughout the book to remind people she still exists.

As you might imagine, that means a fairly radical revision in the second draft. Though the overall plot remains mostly the same, the means of executing that plot is different. The protagonist, instead of moping around because his on-again/off-again girlfriend is in limbo, must now interact with a living, breathing, animated character. She’s going to have her own agenda that will sometimes align with his, but not always. It’s a new conflict.

The process is both daunting and exciting. If done properly, I think it could dramatically expand the novel’s depth. It’s not quite the delicate surgery King performed in Bag of Bones. It’s more like taking the entire book apart and reassembling it with new parts that force me to reshape and perhaps even dispose of some of the existing parts.

I knew the story in its original form for so long that it’s difficult to adjust to the new status quo. To force myself off the beaten track and into new territory, I wrote a brand new opening chapter with a scene that doesn’t appear in the first draft. It’s a bit like writing an alternate history version of my own book. In the (real?) story, the character is severely injured on page 10 but in this new, alternate version of “reality,” she gets to live out more of her life. She might even survive the entire book. I’m not sure of that part yet. I’ll let you know when I get there.

I started a novel back at the beginning of November.  I wrote well beyond the required fifty thousand words required for Nanowrimo and the annual challenge, and sometime in January, I finished.  The book came in between 80,000 and 90,000 words.  I immediately set it aside.  I don’t know how many know or remember, but things in my personal life took a sock to the teeth at the end of November, and I was in need of time to re-boot my brain and get the creative engines firing on all cylinders again.

Still, I have this novel.  I had a good pack of readers signed in who read it in installments as I wrote it, and I got some amazing feedback.  Overall, the response was very positive.  I also got a suggestion from one of the readers – a guy who took time out of his own busy life to help me put together a “bible” for this series of novels.  He suggested that I should read some of the novels by Jim Butcher about the character Harry Dresden.

I was leery of this advice for the simple reason that I did not want someone’s style (other than my own) to leak into my work.  Still, I wasn’t ready to do the revision yet, and I had / have a lot of nagging doubts and problems with my manuscript as it stands.  I went on over to Audible.com and downloaded the first Harry Dresden novel.  I listened to it on my recent trip to Baltimore, and I have to say – I’m a fan.  It’s quick moving, it immediately provides you with  a nice comfortable stable of regular characters and settings.  I don’t believe the books are remarkable in the way that you’d remember them for years to come – but that they ARE addictive in the way Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and other shows of that type can be.  I am currently reading the second in the series and will no doubt slog my way through every one of them.

Before I give the impression this is a book review, let me shift gears.  I did learn some things from the Harry Dresden novels that will affect how I revise “Heart of a Dragon,” which is an odd duck.  It’s the second Donovan DeChance novel, but if and when I get a mass market deal on the series, it will probably be the first released.  When I wrote and sold Vintage Soul, I did so in a bit more cavalier a manner than I should have.  I have learned some things, and I intend to make use of the knowledge.

For one thing, revising this novel very carefully and noting characters and settings that will recur.  I’m also trying to provide a bit more explanation of the magic involved to lend some weight and “gravity” to the prose.  Originally I intended to write these as if I were writing one of the World of Darkness novels I penned early in my career, only without the restrictions of writing in someone else’s world.  What I neglected to do was set proper restrictions for my own.

So…this revision is a careful one.  I’ve revised Chapter One three times and have had four passes at the ending of Chapter Two.  The book will be stronger for it…but it’s going to take some time.  I believe the outcome will be worth it.

Meanwhile – any blogs / websites / book reviewers out there willing to interview, review, or take a guest blog spot to promote Vintage Soul…contact me.  I’m ready and willing.  The book has gotten very little press, and it’s been out since December.

Now, back to my revision…

-DNW

It was the wrong thing to do and the wrong time to do it on the wrong day.  The direction I took couldn’t have been more wrong, and my clothes were all wrong for the woods and the snow.  Whether because of wrong decisions I made, a bunch of other things went wrong along the way.  Even my basic quest in pursuit of confirmations was wrong because the odds of success were as wrong as slim and none. 

So, what could be more right for a story?

Quest?  Check. … Conflict?  Check. … Supporting cast (underlying characters)?  Check. … Dynamic setting?  Check. … Tension?  Check. … Obstacles and minor characters along the way?  Check. … Meaningful resolution?  Check.

To those hundreds of people who have asked over the years, this is where stories come from.  So call this column one of my Cannibal Essays.  I believe the last Cannibal Essay I did was Empty Boxes I Have Worn  http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2007/01/16/thomas-sullivan-empty-boxes-i-have-worn/, the idea being that a meaningful life shapes meaningful stories every day and that a writer must learn not just to live them but to put frames around them and communicate them.  I’ve deliberately chosen passive events here just to illustrate that it can be done without inherently dramatic material.  In fact, if a writer is to reach the professional level it is critical that these underlying techniques of story creation are able to stand convincingly on their own apart from sensational plot twists i.e., a nuclear device ticking down to doom in an orphanage in which the future Dalai Lama is mastering the secret that will save the world from ebola if only his insanely jealous hermaphrodite brother/sister will find love on death row and allow a bone marrow transplant that will supply the missing gene for spiritual enlightenment.  So I invite you to come along and see how an arbitrary circumstance morphed into a quest with conflicts and resolutions and, above all, greater meanings.

It began with defeat.  A perfect winter of adventures ended with a fall on skinny skis one night.  A rotator cuff that was already torn tore some more and surgery was deemed necessary as quickly as it could be scheduled.  Out of refusal to accept my fate I got back on skis sans poles twice before the sawbones cut a week later, but of course this was merely symbolic.  Just a tantrum I had to throw.  Anger, frustration, bitterness…done.

Are you getting this?  Negative emotions with which anyone can identify are a good beginning for a story because they map conflict.

… negative emotions, but not mourning, not denial.  Those two just aren’t me and their exclusion will be part of this story.  Not mourning, because its premise is an acceptance I can’t…accept.  Not denial, because there is very little that I don’t believe is possible, miracles inclusive.  This is because I am a romantic idealist and for me romantic idealism is the only thing worth living.  If I keep faith with myself, the romance stays alive.  Everything external is negotiable.  In the vast resources of the mind, there is a work-around for any obstacle to ideals.

Again, important because it establishes the character of the POV, and it travels well for most readers.  Okay, the romantic idealism happens to be my personal front row approach to the world.  But it’s a POV that exists in virtually everyone, even if their romantic idealism is a bunch of crushed flat hopes in the back of their closet.

And it’s funny, but when you sincerely live romantic idealism, things happen.  Where there’s a will there’s a way.  So now, standing in the ruins of a winter in the aftermath of a ski accident, I begin to pull myself together.  I won’t give up.  Instead, I go into analytical mode.  What is it about the skiing that is so essential to me?  Flight, motion, rhythm, flow…  And then the underlying reasons for those physical sensations — the fact that all of me gets used…I come alive!…I connect, I feel, I think, I sort things out, I GET IDEAS!  Idea: who needs skis for all those things?

In case you missed it, that was the catalyst…

If I can’t ski for a while, I will hike.  Nothing will steal my winter, my crystal ether, my fields of inspiration.  Blind adventure will follow.  Trust me.  I’ve done this before, and you CAN try this at home.  Or out in nature.  When you walk the walk and talk the talk day after day it all starts to link up — the symbols, the meanings, the wild cards of chance — with the adventures.  Finding a quest is easy in this my token universe of 5400 acres.  A couple of quests actually.  A white feather and a pink flamingo.  Like I said, I’ve done this before.

The white feather is from 10 months earlier.  In a place I call the Golden Meadow, next to a lone tree, I stuck it nib first into the ground, like a writer signing his name.  The place and the plume have special meaning to me, and so I took note of how the feather survived spring floods, summer storms, and autumn winds.  It got to be a thing in my life and for my readers.  There were pictures of it in my April  http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/newsletters/04162008.htm , August http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/newsletters/08162008.htm , and November http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/newsletters/11162008.htm newsletters, and I wrote about it in my October column on StorytellersUnplugged Inspiration Is A Duet http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2008/10/15/thomas-sullivan-inspiration-is-a-duet/.  The end, I thought.  With winter coming that was the epilogue.  But the amazing feather hung on, and so did I until I was sure it couldn’t be there any longer.  Ice, snow — it couldn’t survive the cycle of seasons.  I didn’t want to know.  Only now I am off the ski trails, because I didn’t survive either.  There is something here for me to accept.  So I will make one last pilgrimage to the site, just to keep faith with myself and the symbol I placed there.  Thus, knee-deep in snow, wearing only YakTrax Pros on my hiking boots, trying to protect a severely torn rotator cuff, I set off from a distant parking lot at Elm Creek’s beach to reach the Golden Meadow from the furthest approach, as if to delay by an hour or so the inevitability that this day I will confirm.

…The Quest!

So, let’s see where we are in this framing of simple events.  We have begun with a frustrated protagonist who, in desperation, sets off walking in an effort to reclaim a season of life and of nature denied him.  The symbol of his futile defiance is a white feather, now surely gone with the elements, but that he must quest for one last time as a kind of closure.  Q.E.D.  The meanings are multiple, but there are levels which will remain beyond the story –

…this is how you anchor and preserve romantic idealism, but the quest could serve any passion or tangible goal in a larger story.

The route I have chosen is very long and destined to become longer this day because I do not want to mess up the groomed trails with my boots.  I switch to snowmobile trails, but the first close call roaring up from behind gives me pause, and soon I am playing a dangerous game of Dodg’em.  It culminates when a bouncing ballistic behemoth of gleaming green metal careens off a curve head-on, driving me to my knees and nearly onto the injured shoulder.  I am in the wrong place.  My bad.  Traversing a strip of woods ends the danger and brings me to a snowshoe trail.

First challenges met.  Please note that I am not adding anything to this from my imagination.  It would be easy to intensify it with elements of almost any genre from supernatural to thriller, but the point here is that real-life has real stories every day no matter how innocuous.  The thing of it is that they never happen for you if you don’t invite them or recognize them or communicate them.

The adrenaline rush is followed by an encounter with two novice snowshoers on their maiden journey.  The exchange of stories is interesting, informative.  One of them has a brother who makes snowshoes.  Note to self: maybe I should get into snowshoeing while I’m rehabbing the shoulder.

This is a Canterbury Tales element — a character sidebar paced after an event.  Again, it could be invested with dramatic material — confrontation, rescue, emotional connection, tragedy, comedy — suitable to any category.

When the snowshoe trail veers away from my destination, I abandon it.  But cutting through fields and forests soon envelops me in waste high drifts, while marshes wrap themselves around me like wheat paste and black pools block me.  Ominous cracks appear in thin ice I must cross.  I have been skiing all winter mostly without poles in order to allow healing, but now I have an injury that must be protected against falls.  [Photos are in this month’s newsletter] I use an old trick I learned the hard way in Michigan’s state parks, i.e., that deer tracks will lead you out of dense areas.  Deer follow the path of least resistance. 

Another wave of challenges met.

I discover that deer don’t have to duck under low branches, and — just to get one more animal into this sentence — I am sweating like a stuck pig (do stuck pigs sweat or just bleed).  The next couple of hours are pure struggle against the elements.  Exhaustion and below zero cold are taking their toll.  A bass drum is beating in my chest as I surge and plunge through the snow, and I am soaked through all layers.  I cannot stop to rest, because the dampness will freeze if I stop putting out heat.  But at last I come upon the meadow, still gold though thinned and clumped by drifts, and am briefly heartened.  This is going to end my quest, I remember.  The meadow rises above me and there is the lone tree halfway up where I planted the white feather 10 months ago.  Its slender snowbound trunk informs me of what I must accept, and there is even a pulse of self-disdain in me for having come here to be defeated.  I feel foolish.  But what’s the alternative?  I climb the final hundred yards.

Do you see the possibilities for an ending?  It can be whatever you want it to be.  But this is what it was…

Cold tomb, pale shroud.  No white plume à la Cyrano de Bergerac.  The white feather could not survive an endless winter, of course, though this one nearly made it through the full cycle of seasons.  But that’s okay, I tell myself.  There is nothing safer than a memory.  The memory will always be there waiting for yet another spring.  Still, I stare grimly at the undefiled sweep of snow.  And then, like a latent flame leaping down a column of smoke to re-light a candle, I am taken by a faint hope.  I pull off my glove, and as carefully as an archaeologist at an ancient altar I caress away the white dust of winter.  At first I think it is a scraggly leaf — the skeleton of one — somehow upright, but then I see what to me is still miraculous.  [Photos in my newsletter this month -- mn333mn@earthlink.net ]

And that’s the point.  It doesn’t matter whether the reader feels they foresaw this particular outcome, because it’s not a story about things & events.  It’s an internal story about feelings, insights and revelations.  What matters is the journey, whether the reader empathizes with the POV of the story.  If it works, it works because the reader went somewhere.  And that’s the job of the writer.  To take the reader on a journey. 

Most stories that happen to most people on most days are like this one.  They do not hit you between the eyes with tangible events.  For impact they depend on your world view and the poetry in your soul or the passion with which you regard things.  But when you do this every day, potent adrenaline adventures will also happen.  You are never bored.  In any case, the fully interpreted happenings of your life are the underlayment, the launch point for the writer’s imagination.  And the writer’s imagination is the visa to cross all borders and explore all possibilities. 

Did I mention that there were two quests that day?  The second arose because something in me was confirmed by the results of the first.  I’ll use the final quest for next month’s column. 

Also thanks for all the inquiries about the shoulder.  Rotator cuff had to be Fed-exed from the scene of the ski accident, but the sawbones said I had excellent tissue and in two hours of surgery with twice the usual number of pins and sutures he got me on the road to full recovery.  Also had a ruptured bicep, same arm, which wasn’t fixed.  Other bicep has been ruptured for a long time, though, and I never fixed that one.  In the words of the inimitable orthopod, “…you probably won’t notice any difference.”  Yeah, that’s what I want to hear and why I pay my med bills promptly. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.   My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds.  I’ll be happy to add you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .    Past newsletters are being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included. 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com

Every author’s got one — a tale about a stolen tale.  They are so identical you might say we stole them from each other.  And — brace yourself — you may be abetting stolen intellectual property rights just by reading this, because even the subject has been used before in other columns.  But if I have to micromanage the marketplace trying to discover what someone else has thought of and expressed in their own way so that I can excise that idea from my imagination, my mind will end up being a very small island indeed.  No thank you, I’ll disavow any originality whatever on my part, call myself a mirror, a thief of nature, of life and — yes — inadvertently of other thieves who have thieved the thefts I thefted before I could think to thieve them.  Mea culpa.  There, I feel better now.  But if confession is good for the soul, it doesn’t change the fact that my writing is what it is and it comes out of me, my fulfillment and my destiny.  I don’t want to change it.  I want to be me.  Not being me makes me a hypocrite.  I want to spend as little time not being me as possible, even if that means I reinvent the wheel out of ignorance or otherwise overlap human endeavors unknown to me.  Was it Mortimer Adler who recommended not reading any books so that one’s thoughts remained original? 

That said, I’m not really worried about coming off derivative.  Fortunately the craft of writing demands so much of one’s soul top to bottom that the revisiting of themes, plots and elements can still be original.  It really depends on how totally and faithfully you can draw from everything inside yourself.  If you go about rendering ingenious premises or imaginative plot twists that someone else has used and do nothing distinctive with them, you are not only a bad thief, you are a bad writer.

I think plagiarism should be reckoned in degrees similar to rape or murder.  First-degree plagiarism would be the deliberate theft of words.  Probably no one would disagree with that, because actual expression goes to the heart of what every writer is — a wordsmythe.  Then again, there is the legal principle called the fair use doctrine.  Some years ago a court upheld the right of someone who “borrowed” something like seven whole pages verbatim from a book about teenage pregnancy.  I think one of the books was called Pregnant By Mistake, though don’t — um — quote me.  One suspects the sequel to the book that was borrowed from might be titled, Screwed Again. 

Second-degree plagiarism could then be the close paraphrasing of thoughts, concepts and words.  That kind of theft would probably most often occur in nonfiction. 

Third-degree plagiarism would be what — ideas?  Ah, here we get to the sticky wicket.

You can’t really protect ideas in fiction, only the expression thereof, and so there is plenty of room for grayness and paranoia and accusations and — let us not doubt — actual plagiarism of the third kind committed with intent.  I am not a lawyer (my father thought I should be, and my mother was grateful I was not), but there is some fine parsing in Hollywood and New York over what constitutes a shameless ripoff.  Shameless may be a mere decorative term.  I have no doubt whatever that a story of mine became the basis for a fairly celebrated movie some years back.  Even then I believed that it was virtually impossible to come up with anything new under the sun, so when my boy-child called upstairs, “Hey, dad, your story’s on TV!” I took only mild interest.  But a few minutes viewing of the middle of the film — already years after its theater release — had me heading for the video store to rent a copy.  The plot, the settings and even representations of aliens right down to fluttering vocal tissue were identical.  We are talking eccentric detail done at a magnification of 10.  No question.  Even the fact that the plot continued on from where my story ended and was suddenly in a different tone with a mismatched postscript all underscored what was obvious.

Whether done with full awareness by one writer or coincidently or subconsciously as part of a creative team, it happens all the time.  Hollywood really doesn’t need to scheme about this.  It’s loaded with out-of-work imaginations.  But the reality is that individuals are inspired by their own entertainment experiences, and I defy you to come up with something totally original.  If fresh work didn’t owe a debt to something, it would be as incomprehensible as amorphous shapes, raw color and cacophonous sound.  Stand-alone work, then, is always relative to something, just as individuals have parents.  Examine an idea at the genetic level and you will find the traceable DNA.  So there will never be a hard and fast definition for third-degree plagiarism.  It will rest on interpretation of extent and intent.  And sometimes the extent will be considerable while the intent will be zero.

Let me emphasize that point by telling you about my own incredible coincidence wherein I very nearly published something that would have cast me in a bad light.  The story I wrote was originally titled, Buster Beals’ Preparation H and the Intergalactic Relatives.  A spoof intended to follow up on three others I had published, the tale depended on a portal through which the main character communicated with an extraterrestrial race.  There are probably dozens of stories that could fit that parameter, but a sort of barter ensued in my tale, absurd stuff that led to a revelation and accidental cannibalism with a kicker postscript.  Additionally, I like to think that my piece was done with its own flourishes and style and perhaps attained a level of sophistication and humor that are uniquely mine.  Regardless, I read my story unpublished to a live audience and was startled when a member of one of them said he’d read it before.  I put his comment aside as a generality without much basis beyond a vague similarity to something, but a few months later I actually came across a story in a completely different tone and category of fiction that just had to be the tale to which my listener referred.  It was different in every specific element from mine, and yet there was a well (portal) through which messages were exchanged between unlike species and barter and a funny ending.  There were also major details and twists in mine not present in the other.  Still, had I read the two stories without knowing anything about the authors, I probably would have concluded that there was a link.  So I put my piece back in the file unpublished.  I may still market and publish it some day, but I will feel obliged to acknowledge similarities with the other tale, and that seems awkward.

The chill of a post-publication plagiarism accusation is something I don’t want to experience, though I got a foretaste of it once.  It happened when I was teaching ninth-grade and made a fiction assignment.  In order to launch imaginations I sometimes offered plots from my own writing, the idea being that if I gave you a premise and a resolution you still had to develop characters, narration and dialogue.  It was a steppingstone for bankrupt imaginations and virgin muses, but one particular student who was Learning Disabled either didn’t grasp that I had given her a plot or she wanted her parents to believe that she had invented her story.  In any event, the piece I wrote happened to be reprinted in The Detroit News soon thereafter, and the mother of the student called the newspaper and told them I had stolen her daughter’s assignment.  The newspaper knew me, had published me before, and after checking informed the mother that my story had originally been published years earlier.  It was blind fortune that I had chosen a published story from my inventory.  Had it been unpublished, it would have caused me major embarrassment if not a shattered career.  As it was, the woman called the school and probably mouthed her false accusation far and wide before she learned the irrefutable truth.  That same year I won a literary prize that was connected with the Detroit Auto Show, and a student in the high school division plagiarized a Roger Zelazny story that led to 25,000 programs having to be reprinted.  Sadly, I no longer feed plot cues from my inventory to writers as a learning tool.

Let’s compare the robotic derivations described in the last paragraph with some examples of inspired thinking to see how true creativity works.  In order to demonstrate that I need to bring another author into the mix, and it must be someone whose skills at invention are unassailable, an unalloyed imagination whose very reflexes are creative for the sheer joy of it.  Such a person would be able to objectively marry logic with quantum leaps and never miss a beat or blanch at old footprints in the sands of possibility.  Fortunately I have a candidate.  

The best pure idea writer I know may be David Niall Wilson.  It is impossible for the two of us to kick ideas back and forth without resonating similar permutations.  We both just seem to think through the conjugations of a theme in the same way.  Once, when he had an idea about genetic cheating in the Olympics, I mentioned that my most reprinted story — The Mickey Mouse Olympics — first appeared in Omni Magazine in 1969 on just that subject.  A lesser writer might have viewed that as a dead end, but David sees beyond pat generalizations.  For him, they are like rich topsoil that might grow any kind of vegetable underneath.  We ended up going back and forth with e-mail extensions on that satire, and while it was just fun and games for me, I was fascinated by how the process seized hold of him until his fertile mind turned a farcical premise into a wholly separate story.  This is how creativity works.  It is not a lightning stroke of unadulterated invention, it is insight into existing elements.  A chain reaction.  You throw a ping-pong ball into a room with 1000 set mousetraps and in seconds that catalyst will have triggered all of them in a crescendo of motion and sound. 

If there is nothing new under the sun, there are infinite combinations of the immutable basics.  Discovering them is a matter of stimulation, inspiration and habit.  If you can’t learn to play off the world, stand next to someone who can.  David Wilson and I are both cannibals who feast on imagination, and so communicating with each other compounds that.  I believe that that kind of conscious awareness of patterns in themes and plots is actually a doorway into creativity.  Because if you are able to grasp the connections, variations and derivations that have been done, you most certainly can exploit or develop those which have not.  This makes a David Wilson, or anyone else at that level of creativity in any field of artistry, a true original.  And remember this: while ideas may come to anyone in any particular order, the thing that distinguishes every artist is their style.

Therefore, a pastiche or homage is not considered plagiarism, rather (depending on how it is used) a parody or a tribute.  Furthermore, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then a prudent distinction made between having one’s words copied and having one’s ideas revisited might turn out to be more uplifting than threatening.  One of my earliest works, THE PHASES OF HARRY MOON (Dutton hardcover, 1988), still has a cult following and brings me frequent e-mail suggesting that other works derive from it.  It is enormously flattering to me that favorite shows of mine, such as “Arrested Development,” “Malcolm in the Middle,” “My Name Is Earl,” and “Oliver Bean,” have been compared to it for their galleries of eccentric families and irreverent vignettes delivered with understatement at lightning pace.  Those programs are executed with great originality, of course, but that any reader would see one’s work as possibly inspiring others of that quality is what a writer wants to hear.  Recognition, it turns out, is the stuff of redemption and forgiveness as well as ego feed.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.   My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds.  I’ll be happy to add you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net   Past newsletters are being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included! 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

Writers are failed children.  Lemme try that on for a thesis sentence and see where it goes.  We already know that writers are failed adults by dint of the facts that they are dreamers, seldom get paid, and work sporadically; but do the roots of their malfeasance tangle with childhood?  The answer to that might be a handy object lesson for struggling parents who have burned their Dr. Spock books: “Eat your spinach and stop picking your nose, Mikey, or you’ll become a writer!”  Or maybe it could become a litmus test for predicting a career.  If Mikey stops picking his nose but starts picking his sister Sally’s nose, we could conclude: “Imaginative…rebellious…a parser of verbal cautions…no inhibitions whatever — there are possibilities for a writer here.”

Then again, a challenging childhood might be better than growing up dead.  Which is what I mostly see, gazing out across the fruited plane — sedentary parents raising sedentary children in houses whose intellectual stimulation is limited to what can be plugged into a wall.  I don’t think there are very many things my ex and I did right as parents.  We might both have been successful single parents or terrific with other partners, but together we sort of neutralized each other.  On the other hand, it kind of let our children pick what they wanted out of the vacuum.  And they did a good job.  I’m proud of them both.  Eunice and Eunuch.  Kidding.  Kidding, just kidding, Sean — a.k.a. Shane, Lad, The Boy.  (Ha, and you thought I was going to pretend Eunice was the boy!).  For the record, their names are Colleen and Sean, and they are both outstanding and unique individuals.  They could each be writers, because they not only have the verbal skills that prevailed in their household but the thinking skills as well.  They are lifelong learners and observers of people, devastatingly keen with analysis, and if I dare say, on a good day, profoundly insightful.  Above all, they have imagination.

I claim no genetic credit for any of this, but I do feel that the vibrant creative and cerebral atmosphere of our household freed those imaginations.  Call it the writer advantage.  This really didn’t come home to me until recently when my daughter visited, and we all — Colleen, Sean, their friend Sandeep and I — sat in my living room laughing at some classic examples of their creative exploits. 

I recall how Sean as a freshman in high school managed to get four lockers assigned to him using various identities.  The only name I remember was Abubucar Jones the 4^th, whose moniker I believe he borrowed in part from a Nigerian general.  I can see now that this wasn’t a misrepresentation of who he is so much as a parsing out of his larger-than-life personality.  And isn’t that what writers do with fiction?  He has an omnivorous appetite for knowledge and just doesn’t fit in any one place.  And counterintuitively (if you’re not a writer) this causes him to be very private and usually alone, though he certainly doesn’t have to be except by choice.  He knows who he is, and he is intensely loyal to the rare few he allows into his inner sanctum.

So is Colleen.  She and her brother were both elected drum majors in high school, and Colleen in college as well, and she has always headed up organizations and causes.  Whereas Sean was a professional child actor with some 1000 performances by the time he was 15, Colleen has been orchestrating productions from both sides of the footlights since the first time she drew a crowd alongside a tennis court at age 3 with her uncanny performance of a growling Linda Blair from The Exorcist.  But her true genius came through to me there in the living room with the lake twinkling merrily behind her as we recalled some of the melodramas she and her brother perpetrated on their friends.  These were the equal of inventive short stories if not, collectively, something more sustained.

The friends must necessarily be given pseudonyms here.  There was little Randy Jones who lived next door but couldn’t go home one day because my progeny convinced him there was a tornado coming.  He could have rolled out our front door and landed in his backyard without leaving Kansas, but he had to call his mother with the weather report to explain why he wouldn’t be returning any time soon.  And then there was Billy Smith, another child actor, who was constantly overwhelmed by one ruse after another.  Somehow Colleen talked him into taking off all his clothes — I believe it was so that he could weigh himself — and then the clothes, which were draped over a half-bath enclosure in the basement, disappeared.  The last frame of this farce has Billy running home some blocks away barefoot in a bright orange blanket.

Probably Colleen’s Oscar-winning spectacle, however, was The Great Neighborhood Feud.  Involuntarily, Billy Smith starred in that one too.  We lived in a kind of compound on a dead-end road on a half-acre straddling two cities.  Beyond the dead-end barrier the dirt road resumed as a fully paved street.  The half-acre was shaped as a right triangle with four neighboring houses running along the hypotenuse and another neighbor next to the upright leg of that same triangle.  Somehow Billy was persuaded that the neighbors along the hypotenuse were feuding with the neighbor along the right leg while the innocent Sullivans were caught in the crossfire between.  This was a feud on the order of the Hatfields and McCoys, and so crossfire was literal.  With Colleen setting the course, Billy had to crawl commando-style all the way out to the barbecue pit and then back to Sean’s bedroom window.  When he got to the window he was bundled over the sill and told to keep low.  Meanwhile, another neighbor child had been conscripted to play a bit part, and she pushed a button on a tape recorder which played gunfire, then explosions, then planes dropping bombs.  This was in the bathroom next to Sean’s room.  A moment later she burst into the bedroom sobbing that people were being killed.  Alas, poor Billy Smith, trapped in a war zone, forever destined to be the audience for comedy-dramas in which he himself starred.  I do not know how Colleen drew this scintillating production to a close, but it still inspires rave reviews today.  I do happen to know that Billy Smith crawled commando-style some 256 feet just to get to the barbecue pit.  If I ever see him again, I will endeavor to peek at his butt-naked elbows, if you’ll pardon the mixed anatomy, for scars.  Too bad I won’t have Colleen to devise a way to do this.

But then, she is no longer a child, and that was my point.  Writers are like rebellious children.  At least writers who never stop inquiring, demand everything from life, and constantly bound up and down the rubber steps of their imaginations are like that.  They fail to accept the restraints and the discipline and the limits put on them, and along the way they fail to acquire adult hypocrisy, double-speak, and pretensions (at least when they are being writers they fail to acquire those last three things).  Most of all they fail to grow up.  Peter Pans all.  And Penelope Pans, or maybe Wendys.  They are forever asking Why, Who, What, When, Where and Which.  Annoying and sometimes disturbing questions that can cause otherwise normal people to actually think creatively and clash with routine.  And if you are the terminally afflicted one — the writer — you know the trade-off.  Yes, you get to keep your imagination in Technicolor, you can be energized to unbelievable megawattage, and you can soar above the clouds.  But you don’t fit.  Your galaxy collides with others and almost never mixes.  A few find soulmates, but the odds are you will be the Lone Ranger, the Anthony Adverse, and the Cyrano de Bergerac of your own comedy-drama.  The price of wisdom, truth and beauty is steep in such a lifestyle, and there are no guarantees you will find even those things.  The success of that depends on how true to your ideals you can be.  But a life of enchantment is possible along the way…entirely possible.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.   My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds.  I’ll be happy to add you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net   Past newsletters are being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included! 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

Psssst. Got an inspiration problem? You say your battery is fully charged, but your starter is dead? And all those plots and plans in your head are wilting like hothouse roses at the North Pole on account of no one around you understands what you were meant to do in life? And you’re so down that you’re starting to fantasize delusions of adequacy. You say that your children’s release The Pop-up Book of Birth Control sold only two copies and that was at a truck stop in New Jersey? Is that what’s troubling you, Bunkie?

Well, don’t just lie there growing barnacles! Drag your sorry soul into the light! Rise and shine for Revelry! Get some perspective! Resize yourself!

This is entirely within your power to do. I do it every day. I do it whenever I feel myself shrinking, retreating. Four walls related to each other by berth [sic] just kill me. I need air — more than a lung full. I need a soul full. I need prima fascia evidence that the universe still exists with all its galvanizing wonders and instructive insights waiting to be discovered. Every day. Accessing that can be a problem in a modern world of routines, obligations, and networks of unmotivating and uninspiring people. So make some new friends. One friend. Your muse. Forget the phone book; your muse is probably as close as your shadow.

Now admittedly my disconnect with inspiration is made worse by the fact that I’m easily seduced by isolation. This is bad for me, and I know I should escape being alone, even though I love it in a bittersweet way. It’s a family weakness — isolation, privacy, secrecy. If my father hadn’t somehow found the single soulmate he needed (it lasted nearly 70 years), I wouldn’t be here, of course, but even in that there was a tendency toward isolation. Pater was something of a secret agent when we lived in South America, gathering intelligence and almost assassinated at least once. I didn’t put it together until I found a commendation from the Secretary of State in his papers after he died. But the privacy went deeper than that. What I learned about him when he supervised ATF for the Treasury Department later in life I learned from his agents. My parents were secretly married for over a year before they told anyone, and my sister used to swear I was two weeks old before anyone informed her she had a brother. With me the isolation started early. I was born in the lobby of the hospital, as if to avoid checking in, and I’ve kept more or less to peripheries ever since. I love deserted islands. Thus there is a pointless propensity for being a lone wolf that is in my blood as well as learned from my father. Because of my career(s) I’ve had to learn to hide by getting in people’s faces. Make a lot of noise and you can deafen people to your silence; show some color and you can slip into the shadows while your audience blinks away the flash. So, like I say, maybe that’s not the kind of shrinking or suffocation that describes everyone in search of inspiration. If you’re a writer, or for that matter anyone who tries to generate illumination in their life, you are more apt to struggle with a different cause of stagnation. Because the thing that’s even worse than isolation is having its opposite. I.e., having your life cluttered with dead ends and decay in the form of too many comatose connections.

I think that’s the dilemma most people with light coming out of them have. They not only have omissions that need to be filled, they have to clear the playing field before they can begin. But I’m talking about really hard-core addicts of inspiration, creative people who like to think and want to understand everything. People who don’t fit the norm. People who feel like they are searching for rainbows in a black-and-white world. Writers are at the top of the list — those who write for relief as well as those who write for a living — but not just writers. Recreational users of inspiration need not apply. They just need to be temporarily distracted. I’m talking about restless people who claw for air all the time, who stare at closed doors and hear clocks ticking loudly. Quite often their story is that by the time they discovered who they were in life they had already made choices that impeded them. In order to embark on meaningful fulfillments they have to remove obstacles, undo false starts, renegotiate wrong turns, eliminate bad choices, recognize unacknowledged endings, remove excess baggage, and cast off deadweight. Like the physician’s creed says: “First do no harm.” If you are encumbered with things that kill creativity and inspiration, you are harming the essence of your nature.

But having a renaissance of the soul can be difficult and complex. Still, I like to think that being the best you is always the only choice at any time of life, because not being yourself becomes even more difficult and complex. Life isn’t a dry run, and if you try to be anything but the real and total you, you will inevitably run up against conflicts within yourself and with the world that thinks it knows you. So it’s a no-brainer for me. “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false…” Yay, verily. Sacrifices? Of course. What goal is worthy that doesn’t demand sacrifices? Sacrifice confirms, melds by fire, tempers and strengthens unique final outcomes. It creates value. So, if you’re serious about who you are, then you will get past the stage of clearing obstacles. You won’t piddle with your life. The false you will be lost — but, hey, it was false — and everything around you will ultimately be better for it. So now you are living for real, and while that’s exciting, it raises the bar and poses the problem with which I started this column: Where do you get daily inspiration?

You start by asking yourself what it is that resizes you, makes you look at new perspectives, excites you, grows you, intrigues you with questions, fills you with amazement, triggers all your emotions, makes you think and feel! Is it a place? Is it a person? You could wait for it to come to you, of course. You could wait for a million copies of The Pop-up Book of Birth Control to be sold at that truck stop in New Jersey, too, but if you want to live life while you are still above room temperature then cut through the geography and go to where your inspiration is.

You’ll know it by what it does to you. Does sensory stimulation light up your circuits and start your mind racing? Does physical activity open up your doors? Do you need serenity in order to set the table from the pantry in your own heart and mind? Do you need a catalyst person whose prism on the world gives you a gateway to things you want to see and feel? All of the above? Whatever combination turns you on starts the domino effect you need to launch the HMS You — H(eart), M(ind), S(oul). So put yourself into it, next to it, around it. Let it into your veins and merge with its aura. Follow it to its lair and once you have its address visit it every day, move in with it, put it on a leash if you can.

It’s actually better if it is slightly inaccessible — that is, if it makes you work a little to get there. We all like our comfort zone, but that’s quicksand for the soul and the mind. Make yourself take a step beyond comfort and convenience and you are halfway to inspiration just because you have gotten off the dime.

I promise you it is not far away. In fact, if you think it’s on the other side of the planet, or shimmering in the next exotic vacation, or that you have to spend a lot of money to buy it or dumb down your senses to fill the void or cram it all into desperate weekends here and there and now and then, you have gotten lost. It is closer than that. Let your eyes adjust to the dimness of hidden things, niches, borders, crevices and seams, for there you can see how life is cobbled together. And when you delve the secrets there, your eyes will have to adjust to the brilliance of insight and inspiration. Blink once, like the shutter of a camera. Click! There. You have committed it to memory and knowledge. Now you can carry it into your mood, tone, day, relationships, work. By analogy, metaphor and association you can travel poetically and musically through the rhythms of expression, and perhaps yourself become an inspiration. Or maybe you just want to live it in private and mark its passing silently, like a shadow or footprints. Either way, you’ll now have that inspiration at your beck and call.

And here’s a secret: inspiration is a duet.

It is never a solo act that performs on demand while you sit passively like a spectator. You have to partner with it. You. You’re not in the audience, you’re on the stage — or should be. It may be a private stage, but it’s your show to star in. This Is Your Life. So open your eyes to the shooting script, go on location, ask “what’s my motivation?” and then do improv with what you find at hand. More than anything, your role is to be open-minded, open to possibilities, because more than anything, inspiration is a way of looking at the world. It requires your imagination and lowering the barriers, expanding the narrowness, and removing the borders. When you stop resisting truth, it will appear all around you.

As those of you who read my newsletters and columns know, my particular stage is nature in the raw. Somewhere, somehow, I find a way to get off the beaten path every day. I can be alone in a crowd, if I have to be, but I usually go for the woods or water or snow or even the chiaroscuro world of a drive at night. Give me moving air in all those interacting dramas of the seasons and my inspirations become limitless. What nature doesn’t teach me firsthand, if confirms from what I learn elsewhere. The universe really is in a grain of sand or in the flower in the crannied wall, as some poet once penned. And it’s always new and exciting. I had to discover that. I had to quit resisting change and learn to flow with it. For me, the most inspiring thing of all is the newness every day as nature frees my imagination.

An example in kind to make the point: last spring, in a place I call the Golden Meadow, I stuck a white feather in the ground next to a tree. I did so for no other reason than to mark an anniversary. But as the months passed and it survived hailstorms and huge weather that brought down branches and flooded the area, it became an object of fascination to me, as if it had a strategy to remain upright. The strategy was to not resist. The weather passed through it, combing out its barbs, but failed to bring it down like it did the inflexible and rigid branches. The seemingly vulnerable white feather remained upright if transformed. And that’s precisely how you use the world in your work (and how, parenthetically, you survive rejection as a writer and a person). You don’t fight it, you assimilate it. You merge with it and use it. Winter will come soon, and my white feather will doubtless itself merge with the elements, but I have its inspiration forever now. Only I’m thinking as I’m writing this, what the hell, go check one last time. And practice what you preach, Sullivan. Do it now. Excuse me, please…

… hello, again. Back. And, of course, I found infinitely more than I went looking for. But then, if inspiration was predictable, it wouldn’t be inspiration. The Golden Meadow was taller than I’ve ever seen it. I made a prow of my hands and knifed through the reeds like a schooner, golden tassels bobbing in benediction, the chaff touching my face like spray. I lost sight of the tree until a skein of birds wound through the reeds and swooped up above the tassels. It is a lone tree, and I knew the birds would be heading toward it. The reeds suddenly thinned to a spot where I have sat many times on a blanket and felt a peace that can only exist at the center of the universe. And there it was. The tree and the white feather. Like a pair of prayers vying for eternity. Ah, yes, inspiration is a duet. Amazing…simply amazing.

I’ll put a photo or two of the Golden Meadow in my newsletter this month. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.  My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds.  I’ll be happy to add you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net Past newsletters are being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included!

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

If this column goes anywhere — and bear in mind that no one has ever accused me of writing from a plan — I hope it leads to this conclusion: EVERY GREAT MUSICIAN WHO CREATES THEIR OWN SONGS IS A WRITER AT HEART, AND EVERY GREAT WRITER IS A MUSICIAN. Now, I’m no kind of great writer, and I’m all the way around the world from being a great musician, but you don’t have to be either in order to read and listen to greatness. And before I launch into this, I’d better connect some dots from the last few months.

The first part of this series [ http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2008/07/16/thomas-sullivan-cross-lake-glenn-frey-breathing-the-sky/ ] appeared here two months ago after a sterling three-day weekend when Glenn & family invited me up to pristinely beautiful Crosslake, Minnesota, where he was giving a concert. The crossovers between books and music inspired a lot of things I started to share with you. The reason the second part was delayed was so that I could write about the life and death and hereafter of author Franklin T. Wydra, who died on August 2. If Flamingo Frank was larger than life — and he was — then he is certainly larger than death: [http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2008/08/16/thomas-sullivan-flamingo-frank-2/]. People are still reading that column, still responding. If you would like to see more about Frank, including photos of the pink flamingo I planted in the deep wilds of Elm Creek to honor him, here is a link to last month’s newsletter: http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/newsletters/08162008.htm

So returning now to Crosslake and the Manhattan Beach concert. How do you hide on a vibrating stage in the middle of a Glenn Frey set? Answer, you blend with the night air behind the soundboard, and that’s where I got this for the newsletter two months ago: “When a song stops, tsunamis roar over the stage.” But that’s not precisely correct. The tsunami of approval from the audience generally starts in the closing chord. It is the same tsunami that rose briefly in recognition at the start of the song. The recognition can come after even a single note, and I find that amazing. Amazing and informative when it comes to understanding what turns on readers/listeners and why.

Al Garth — one of Glenn’s versatile and key musicians — said he didn’t know about just one note when we were talking about this in the middle of the night after the show, but I beg to differ. I’m not enough of a musician to know or to sort through terms that are only vaguely comprehensible to me — pitch, timbre, etc. — I just know that there are an infinite number of nuances the human ear can pick up, and that recognizing them is what it’s all about in music. Why is that? Why aren’t songs like books where you hear/read them once and that’s basically it? Why does a song bear repetition? Why do I listen endlessly to something like The Cranberries “Dreams” or Duffy’s “Mercy” (yeah, I know, ‘cause I’m nuts)? It is ritual for me to pull up the official music videos of these on YouTube every night and let them flow through my veins like a drug. There is a huge clue in that repetition factor for writers.

The simple difference is that music is primarily a sensory experience and reading is primarily abstract. But sense and sensibility are like two outtakes of the same scene, each delivering information. In being sensory music informs the emotions, whereas reading mostly informs the rational mind. Still, good writing has to reach the emotions, of course, and the fact that music succeeds by repeating sounds makes me wonder if writers can’t achieve the same thing in their own way. True, we may never have that out-loud sensory link, but if the words evoke the images and trigger the feelings, the reader will get there. We can’t just inform, we have to arouse. Instead of notes we use silent abstractions, so we are never going to have a direct feed into the senses, but we have all day to take the reader there. We are less confined by structure. We can create more complex descriptions and a deeper analysis. And if music has it both ways — that is, it can use both its own sonorous form and our wordplay and storytelling — writers can use qualities that music has as well. Great writing has meter and rhythm and balance and repetition for emphasis. Alliteration is music. Onomatopoeia is a sensory experience. Rhetorical writing that goes for the music lover and gains that lucky niche where it can be read multiple times for enjoyment alone has a name. It’s called poetry. And maybe this is another way of saying that even prose should rise to some level of poetic form if it wants to reach full potential as communication. I’m not talking arty-farty stuff, I’m just saying that anything beyond the level of a shop manual written in Taiwan should pay attention to the silent music of words.

Like I said, Every great musician who creates their own songs is a writer at heart, and every great writer is a musician. They meet at the corner of Meter and Metaphor. It’s poetry by a lesser name. Call it music’s cousin.

Thinking and feeling, feeling and thinking. A drink and a chaser. Hmmm. Lots of substance abuse imagery here. Maybe I should issue a disclaimer that I don’t do drugs and almost never drink (what the hell’s wrong with me). Is that why I like books and music? Substitutions for wild rides through potent feelings and unbounded imagination? Anyway, regarding thinking and feeling, should one come first in presentation? Do they need each other? Instrumental music is pure sensation and doesn’t need thought, so I guess feeling can be enough. On the other hand it’s hard to imagine fiction simply delivering thoughts and being successful. The thoughts have to lead to emotional impact on the reader.

Oops! Didn’t mean to stiff the lyricist’s role in music. Great stories and hammering lines are the scaffolds of music from The Phantom of the Opera to Desperado. But it’s also true that you can get away with much less in the way of wordsmythery or even fundamental coherency and still have a great song. In fact, melodic delivery trumps sense almost any time it becomes an issue. Sing “Light my fire, light my fire, light my fire…” 63 times in succession or “Fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-fa” and nothing more need be said to explain it, “Oop poo pah do,” thank you very much. And for sure music often evokes the “soul” of character by deliberately using unsophisticated language, “Da doo ron ron.” It uses the grunts and belches of passion to be real, “Do wah diddy diddy.” To be informal is to be human. Listeners who don’t get that are usually just missing the point as well as the experience. You see the same thing with dialogue in fiction or with an informal narrator. But still, there are countless examples of clumsy lyrics in music, even in great songs. Just as the music of words tends to get shorted by fiction writers, so too the lyricist often shorts the logic of words. You want I should start an argument with an example? Yeah, here we are in the Roman Colosseum…okay, I’m game.

But let me do it by segueing back to the Crosslake concert where the context for all this began. A couple songs in at Manhattan Beach the rains came and I fled with Glenn and the band to a large secluded room in the lodge. When The Maestro is building magic and passion with the audience like Glenn does, to be cut off like that is a lot like coitus interruptus. So, with several thousand people out there waiting to see if the concert would resume, it was a little tense as well as humid and gloomy in that upstairs room. Naturally I lapped it up. Nothing attracts and inspires me more than the unexpected. So I’m soaking up the panoramic view of brambles of lightning and storm clouds scudding across the lake, and when Deacon — Glenn’s 15-year-old son who was debuting vocally that night — mentioned something about lyrics, a connection with the storm popped out of my mouth. “You don’t want to think too hard about what makes sense in a pop song,” I said. “Like Sheryl Crow’s Good Is Good. Terrific song but — hey — ‘And every time you hear the rolling thunder, turn around before the lightning strikes’? Man, by the time you hear the rolling thunder, you’re already toast. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second while sound travels about 1100 feet. Do the math. Zap…rumble, rumble. Lightning wins by a mile. Actually 185,599+ miles or the rate thereof.”

Okay, argue with me. But like I said, you don’t want to think too hard about it. And that’s the point. It’s beyond poetic license. Precise logic is simply not the focus for an emotional medium like music. Great lyrics or bad, the standard does not require either, and grammar is not an option. Do the same thing in a novel (and there are lots of examples of this), and you’ll find the stakes for “sense” less forgiving. You can hide behind an informal first-person narrator, but the grammar police are on duty just waiting for you to step across the POV, which as we all know stands for Plane Old Vernacular.

To be sure, this isn’t a group dynamic that separates all musicians from all writers. There is a mystique about it that changes with each artist. Mystique. That’s another word that came up at Crosslake. We kibitzed around about that all weekend. Despite infrequent contacts, Glenn and I feel we know each other core deep in unique ways. Musician and writer. Synonyms , sort of. Given our career fortunes, I styled us The Mystique & The Mistake, but hopefully (for me) there’s a better term — a bridge word. Or a phrase. Students of life. That’s the connection. And yet the mystique is there. Something unsolvable in the imagination and personality of the artist. Have known Glenn to be a businessman, philosopher, philanthropist, creative artist, performance artist, art collector, athlete, husband, father and teacher. The same high standards he has in other areas come across in a genius for organization. He can delegate, and that’s a secret for large-scale empires à la Walt Disney — the ability to pick good people. He has a gift for that. Comes across in every choice he makes in musicians and all other things. But he’s hands-on when it comes to interacting with the world around him. Crosslake was just one of many beautiful settings that he draws inspiration from. Yet, no matter how much you see the method and the man, you can never delve the true source of uniqueness and creativity. It’s almost spooky. Ignore that man behind the curtain.

But look for the mirror. You can learn a lot about your own creativity by looking at someone else’s. And I’ve left a lot in the mirror still, so I’ll try to come back to this at some future column. Love these searches into excellence, and I wouldn’t want to leave a horizon unexplored. The Eagles hit the Target Center in St. Paul September 30^th..  These guys are immortal. But what do you expect with anthems like Take It to the Limit? Hope that’s on the playlist.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my work, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.  And I’ll be happy to e-mail you a free newsletter every month with similar rants about life and writing, plus photos of whatever I’m writing about.  Send your e-mail address and you’re on the list.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

Flamingo Frank would hate it if I wrote his obituary, especially with black crepe hung all over it. Much too dreary. But early on the dawn of August 2, 2008 — by his own decision, you can be quite certain — Frank T. Wydra decided he’d had enough of wrestling with pancreatic cancer and told the subversive processes that were racking his body, “Okay, you want it, you got it.” He could do that because his physical presence was the least of his impact on the world around him, whereas his thoughts and his spirit will trump the grave, and so on that Saturday morning my friend and yours Flamingo Frank awoke to eternity.

Not to be outdone by John Barrymore and Errol Flynn (if you know that legendary wake story), Frank did not take his funeral home viewing lying down — strictly speaking. He was propped up a bit, the old familiar smile on his lips, with a glass of Jack in his right hand next to a bottle of same in the coffin and a silver dollar in the fingers of his left. We sang his favorite songs and hymns, as per his wishes, and spoke extemporaneously. It was the most warm and sincere wake I’ve ever seen. The assembled celebrants were eclectic, as you might imagine, ranging from enormously successful business magnates to creative types like Frank’s brother Jim, a well-known bluesman who has backed Led Zeppelin and is one of the few white men to play with Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix. But there were formal moments of great poignancy as well, such as when Frank was buried with full military honors and the flag was folded with ritual precision and delivered to his wife by a kneeling soldier “…from a grateful nation.” Flamingo Frank, be it known, was to organize the taking out of the missiles in the Cuban missile crisis, had the invasion not been aborted. His full military honors burial came about through presidential executive order and included a 21-gun salute and Taps. Incidentally, our colleague Bobby Jones of Storytellers was also part of the second wave in the Cuban missile crisis, though he and Frank did not know that about each other until recently.

Flamingo Frank never wasted a moment of his life. He spent his time making impossible things happen and was far too honest to give a single moment being anyone but his real and true self. He was also one of the happiest and most successful people I’ve ever known.

A number of mourners/celebrants have asked if there is a recording or transcript of the funeral oration I gave, and there is not so far as I know. It was given spontaneously at the wake a night early when we heard that the priests would limit my eulogy at the funeral to a couple of minutes. Ah, Rome’s rituals! But I knew pretty much what I wanted to say and the memory is vivid, reinforced by many discussions afterward, so I’ll attempt here to write down a shortened facsimile with maybe a few gaps and compressions. It should also be added about this column that it will delay by one month the second column about Glenn Frey and the Crosslake concert at Manhattan Beach. The first one in the series last month brought in more mail than ever before, and there is a paragraph about the concert in this month’s newsletter, which you can get free by request at: mn333mn@earthLink.net

Frank’s Funeral Oration

[I won’t attempt to render the opener which began with some stuff about young Jack, Frank’s grandson who had just spoken, and then talking to Flamingo, who was behind me with that bottle of Jack Daniels, the glass, and a silver dollar in the coffin. You had to be there.]

“…The good news is that Frank is entirely possible in eternity. That’s because he is consistent with the spirit of the Universe, which is to think beyond yourself, to outgrow yourself, to give yourself unstintingly to whatever you do and wherever you are. Don’t give until it hurts — that implies keeping score — give until it stops hurting. That’s who Frank was. You can’t fake what you feel and who you are over the long haul. You have to be genuine and totally honest about that. Frank was the real deal. Frank IS the real deal. He lived the kind of life that won’t go away as long as we survive him. And he’s still giving to us. He may have just stepped into the next room, but the example of attitude and problem-solving he left behind shines through the doorway like a beacon.

“‘Chin up, no regrets!’ That was his mantra. And that’s what we’re all trying to ride on, right now. We don’t want to give him up in our presence; but we can have him in our memories and in our life’s lessons. Frank was and is a sustainer. You need only look around at this assembly to see the quality of his work and his life. A wife, children, grandchildren, brothers, friends — radiant and successful human beings all, on productive journeys through this world. In some ways he was a kind of king, a hub, but a benevolent king and a resource hub. Kings collect tribute, Frank gave it. He took little for himself.

“In fact, it was hard to give to Frank. He wouldn’t suffer the spotlight to remain on himself. And he was a terrific audience for anyone with an out-of-control ego who did like the spotlight. He and I were made for each other! I’d dance, cartwheel, do push-ups, and he’d smile politely and watch. But if I said something nice about him — and I tried very hard not to do that often — he would wiggle out of it or find a way to turn it around. The only way you could give to him was if it was a joke. The miserable gifts I did give him were always jokes, and that’s what he loved about them. No one took a joke better than Flamingo Frank.

“Flamingo…that name came about because of one of those miserable gifts — a pair of cheap pink plastic lawn flamingos I brought to the housewarming in Clarkston. Wrapped in newspaper. I think Karen got as big a kick out of it as I did watching Frank grin like a Cheshire cat, oohing and aahing as he tried delicately to remove the newsprint like he was going to find a Fabergé egg. Before that there was the Sully Picasso painting I had the temerity to bring into the house of one of America’s foremost painters [Karen Wydra]. It was a stick figure on an enormous canvas. He couldn’t find a place to hang it, so he put it out at the curb for the whole world to see. Unfortunately some crazy guys in a city truck mistook it for trash and hauled it away. And after the flamingos there was the varsity jacket hanging on the clearance rack of a sport shop. Just one little flaw that made it hard to sell. The word BUFFALO was emblazoned across the back. Perfect! Flamingo…Buffalo — I could see that. And only five bucks. Twice what I wanted to spend, but what the heck… Flamingo Frank: ever the gentleman, ever the host, the benefactor. And still… all those things. That’s his legacy.

“When FRANK gave, on the other hand, it was like a stealth bomber run. He did it so under the radar that you didn’t know it was happening. [Here I told the lengthy wine story that I’ve told elsewhere.]

“I don’t know what comes next, but it must be all right. Because it happens to everyone. The last time I saw Frank, he spoke about ‘change.’ Said that that was all there was – ‘change.’ To be honest, he said it with a little dismay. But the more I thought about it, the more it struck me that all his success and happiness in life had come about because of his openness to change. I know of no one less enslaved by mindless rules or social pressure to conform one’s thinking. He examined every habit, every value, every restriction, and always found the most honest and simple solutions. I remember a particular vacation in the Bahamas where he had a list of rules and the first one was that there were no rules. I forget how he got around the fact that the list went on, but the point he was making was that this was a vacation for everyone and that we had to work cooperatively on the mundane parts of daily living so that no one was burdened with anyone else’s life. We get it, Frank. Change. No rules. Do not get so bogged down in the way things are that you can’t see the way things can be.

“I had a sister, and after I met Frank, I had a brother. I lost my sister. Yes, she died too young, but I mean I lost her. We were close in some ways, but I never went to see her. And I remember driving back from speaking at Western Writers of America’s national conference in Arkansas and coming within 200 miles of her house. I could’ve turned east… I could’ve taken that first star to the right and been parked in her drive by morning. But it was late at night, and I was in the middle of an 18 hour haul, so I kept heading home. Two weeks later my sister was dead. [Let me skip over the pathetic story of trying to record a tape she wanted of me playing the T-sax and then digging a shallow grave with a garden spade in the middle of winter to bury it in a remote place I call the White Isle.] In my mind the White Isle is where my sister is, and that’s how I keep her in my life. I’d like to make an appeal here. If Frank Wydra has had an impact on your life, consider finding a tangible way to keep him there. It could be a physical symbol or something you do or a place you go. I’m going to buy the cheapest pink plastic flamingo I can find and put it in an inaccessible place I know about at Elm Creek. It’s bounded by streams with no bridges, an isolated island I’ll call The Gonquin — after Frank’s reference to the Algonquin table of literary note, whose fame he added to with his columns on StorytellersUnplugged.com. He was always the only living character in the Algonquin Room, and in his last column he intended to cross over and join the others. So The Gonquin will be sort of his seat at the table. Maybe someday in some way we will re-visit surf from new places crashing on old shores, and stars as big as spotlights spangling the night, and pink flamingos, but until then I’ll put a plastic pink flamingo in that picturesque spot at Elm Creek where no one else goes, and in my mind and my heart that will be where I will visit my brother. And, of course, I’ll try to live his open-mindedness every day.

“Frank was a consummate collector, and now he’s collected all the days of his life. He’s analyzed them and crunched the numbers and gotten his ducks in a row. You and me — his family and friends — we’re his ducks, because he collected people too. We are one of Frank’s collections. He knows we won’t stay in line. But that’s okay. Frank likes a challenge. I’m waiting for the clouds to open up and some spot advice to come down in Frank’s elegant voice and manner. Count on me to give him a rough time. – ‘What’s that, Frank?’ He’s laughing at me. Telling me it’s time to shut up and get off the stage. ‘Okay, Frank, but feel free to re-visit anytime. In your own unique way, of course. Because as we all know after your time in our lives and our time in yours…there are no rules.’”

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/