Stan Ridgley

RETURN TO THE STORYTELLERS HOMEPAGE

By Stan Ridgley

I’ve read with interest the most recent essays by my colleagues, particularly the powerful message sent by Rick Steinberg on being true to one’s inner voice and vision rather than seeking external “inspiration” and validation.

Another colleague cut against the conventional grain in sharing that he does not write every day. Of course, I don’t write every day either, but I believe that I should. And so I admit that I violate this dictum.

And given my overly cultivated conscience, I carry guilt upon my shoulders rather than assuage that guilt by simply penning a few lines here and there each day.

What do these two previous essays mean to me? Why do I connect them? They offer nuggets that resonate with me and remind me of verities that I learned . . . and sometimes must relearn from time-to-time.

Here is what I mean.

A decade ago, my own attempts at novels were technical masterpieces (in my own mind) and emotional wastelands. Well-researched, but barren. Think of an incredibly written technical manual posing as a novel. In self-pity, I even took on the sobriquet the Titan of Technocratic Prose, although as is the case with self-pity, only one person on this earth would indulge me by addressing me with this monstrosity.

Rick’s essay brought to mind my own odyssey of attempting to write what might sell or what might interest a particular audience next year. A forlorn exercise that results in a hollow story and unsure characters who strut stiffly rather than amble confidently.

And so I began the difficult task of investing myself in my fiction. That may sound peculiar and obvious. “Of course you invest yourself in your fiction!”

Well, no.

There is no “of course” to it. It requires a degree of honesty with ourselves that some of us achieve more readily than others. I suspect that it is a difficult task, not just for me, but for many folks.

And so I now write with far more abandon than before. Not picking and choosing words carefully, but lashing them onto the page with what I believe to be honesty and sincerity, pouring them out in anger or in love or in puzzlement or in joy or in hurt.

And then I go back – “of course” – to edit. But not to strip the heart and feeling from my sentences.

Which brings me to the second point mentioned by a colleague, namely that of the writing habit (and its first cousin, the bane of “writer’s block).

I do believe in the writing habit, although it is, sadly, a habit that I’ve had no trouble breaking. But I do not believe in “writer’s block.”

The two phenomena are connected in this way: The daily writing ritual, whether a commitment to write for time or for word count (for 1 hour or for 1,000 words), is the finest antidote to the myth of writer’s block that I’ve encountered.

You see, I used to believe in writer’s block. But that changed when I sat down for the first time to fulfill my commitment, but had nothing to say.
Nothing.

But it was either write or sit idle.

And so I began writing something.

Anything.

One sentence after another. Paragraph to strained paragraph. I used my characters’ names. I created new settings. I delighted in pulling scenarios out of–- . . . well, I pulled them from wherever scenarios reside when we scribes aren’t using them.

And I discovered – 1,000, 3,000, 5,000 words later – that I had created some of my best stuff. Sure, I had to throw out five or six hundred or even a thousand words of chaff.

But a core of great material remained. Certainly, it was great stuff by my measure, perhaps not yours. But it satisfied me, and it dispelled for me once and for all the myth of writer’s block – I understand it now as a mere psychological construct that can easily be beaten rather than succumbed to.

And so these two nuggets that I write about today are, indeed, linked: 1) Investing my work with what is uniquely me, without external stimulus contrived of attempts to outguess the market, and 2) Writing daily and doggedly.

They work for me, and, at bottom, that is what counts.

Adopting a method that yields results and then making it one’s own.

By Stan Ridgley

Indulgence is a scarce commodity in our coarse, impatient world.

Yield a bit to me, please.

I touch upon several related points, as is my wont and compulsion in these monthly essays — the conundrum of “vision,” the connection between the worlds of business and art, the difficulty of communicating a truly unique vision, the entrepreneurial writer, the dastardly nature of corporate leavening that leeches away the lifeblood of creativity, and through all of it — the problem of writing what you actually mean to say, so that the message received was the message sent.

These are all topics that weave their way into a semester’s worth of my lectures in my business strategy and global management courses. I knit together much disparate material in this way . . . but, alas, forgive me if the medium of the essay form does not provide the tractability of the classroom with its stage and its various multi-media crutches.

And if I wander, well please just wander with me and let’s see what we find, keeping our fingers crossed that it will be useful.

Vision.

George H. W. Bush might have called it “the vision thing.” He beat me to it by about 15 years, and while it might have been a phrase suitable for ridiculing an uptight politician, I think it does capture its amorphous quality.

The vision thing.

It seems that the vision thing is amorphous . . . to everyone but the visionary. To the visionary, the vision is clear, rational, bright as white phosphorus burning on a moonless night. And quite as hot.

At best, the visionary is surrounded by lesser minds whose feeble synapses cannot loop themselves about the vision. At worst, they are idiots and obstructionists.

Of course, we all have visions.

To us, our own visions are clear. They are indeed rational, bright as white phosphorus burning on a moonless night. And quite as hot.

Exciting visions, and visions that are bound to disappoint us as we make others aware of them.

For no one else understands. Because . . . communicating that vision may be as difficult as confecting it in the first place.

And for every sympathetic ear lent to you by a fellow visionary who has been put through the meatgrinder of negativity, there are 100 naysayers eager to turn the crank on your vision.

No . . . 1000 naysayers.

Not that naysaying is always bad, mind you. All visions are not created equal, and some can be downright nasty.

The man or woman with a vision could easily be an artist or architect, or could well be a developer scarfing up land to lay down asphalt for a superhighway or to lay foundations for a new Trump Tower.

Or it could be an entrepreneur — wild-eyed, committed, driven by a vision.

Or a woulde-be novelist with one good plot in him . . . or her. Or a dozen plots seething and straining at release from the prison of our poor imagination. A would-be novelist, driven to write. Or driven to distraction.

Is there so much difference between an entrepreneur and a writer? For novelists are entrepreneurs. Each time the bold writer casts a blank page upon the screen to begin a new tale, it is a fresh project, new to the world and unlike anything that has gone before. One hopes.

The endeavor requires a particular set of attributes. Determination, patience, acumen, imagination, education of a sort (not necessarily formal), experience in life, literacy. And the ability to communicate . . .

This last, of course, is the trick.

For words are the medium most of us use to convey our vision, whether a novel or an idea for a product that does not yet exist. A product that meets a need that we do not yet know we have. A story that resonates with feelings we have not yet explored.

Even the painter must use words to “explain” his art to those unable to grasp its subtlety or significance — such explanation, by its very nature, is usually a forlorn exercise.

The vision thing. Our visions can be great or small, creative or mundane.

In my classes on business strategy, I talk about the vision thing in oblique terms. I actually broach the concept of businessperson as artist. The artistically inclined in my courses (and some liberal arts folks do slip in) look askance at the idea, and most of the fact-motivated business-inclined in my courses don’t seem to care. Or, even if they were to care, simply do not understand the point.

The notion is not warmly received.

Perhaps the point is nonexistent. Or strained. Or ludicrous.

Perhaps it is a futile exercise. Perhaps it is something that I see that others do not. And even so, it is possible that this thing that I alone see does not necessarily have value.

But I do believe that there are no disciplinary bounds that contain creativity. Many of the products of advertising agencies abound with creativity – at least in their initial stages before the corporate leavening process strips away edginess and originality and anything which might prove too startling for public sensibilities.

For corporate leavening is designed to package knowledge in comprehensible, digestible segments. It is designed to link information seamlessly into the already-known world of popular culture, more to massage viewers with familiar verities and comfortable genuflections than to stimulate thought. It is the proverbial cooks spoiling broth.

And so it is with business generally. There is an art to business, but it is never described as such lest such creativity be hooted from the room. This is the realm where ideas are “run up flagpoles” and such like, where outside-the-box thinking receives the obligatory tip o’ the hat, but where genuine “outside the box thinking” is neither expected nor appreciated.

The articulation of true thinking outside the corporate box is risible, if anyone unschooled in the unwritten corporate rules dares to give voice to such heresy.

This is the conundrum. The paradox.

Now, we all engage in pop-psychology from time-to-time, and this allows us to speak of the “average person’s” attitudes, beliefs, and reactions as if we, ourselves, are free of this “average person’s” afflictions. But indulge this hubris for a few more moments.

The conundrum is that when the artist, the visionary, thinks outside the box, it leaves others feeling threatened and insulted that they, themselves, are perceived as restricted to thinking inside this box.

Likewise, the average person tends to interpret his own inability to understand a vision as the other person’s quackery . . . whether the artist is a painter, composer, writer . . . or businessman.

There is a balance to be struck here.

Those of us without calluses on our fragile psyches can be wounded by the mass rejection of our vision, such rejection leaving us questioning our sanity and ability. And those of us informed by our own arrogance and too callused may be deaf to legitimate criticism or to gentle suggestion.

Thus, the conundrum of the vision. Visions are difficult.

I said that not all visions are created equal. Not all are salutary or benign. Some are unsavory, insidious, dangerous, cold.

Others are just boring, derivative, smug, pale.

But I desire not to judge a man’s vision. Not hereabouts, anyway.

These problems of distinguishing good vision from bad are worth essays and books in their own right, essays and books that are perhaps beyond this scribe’s abilities to pen.

Rather, at this point, I call attention to the angst and anguish of the man who perceives that his vision cannot be grasped by others. His impatience with naysayers, his irascibility, his inability to compromise, his propensity to scoff rather than to explain.

And, ultimately,
his resignation that any explanation will not be enough. For if it were explicable to the average mind, then the average mind would have long ago seized upon the vision and made it corporeal.

That is yet another conundrum for the entrepreneur, the artist, the visionary. Perhaps it has always been this way, and it is not necessarily restricted to those of genius stature.

If the vision itself, indeed, is true art — an assemblage of something truly unique, then of course it will not be immediately apprehensible to the hoi-polloi. And so not to sound haughty, perhaps it could be better said: “immediately apprehensible to us of the hoi-polloi.” To those of us not privy to the vision’s intricate fabric, the obscure linkages, the high concept that informs the few.

Let me issue a caveat that complicates the issue. There are those in our lives who exhibit a raft of negative characteristics—irascibility, inability to compromise, the sneer of the wise — without the saving grace of having a vision or anything resembling it. But shrewd and clever folks are afoot, and they know the trappings of the visionary, the finery of the thinker, the vernacular of the annointed.

But he is hollow. And how to spot this poseur?

Again, I digress in the interest of clarity and refinement. Back to the point-of-the-moment, and that point is this:

Communicating the vision is incredibly difficult. It is difficult because of snags all along the communication chain. It is difficult because of flaws inherent in the visionary, in the medium, and in the those receiving the message. And given this, it is a wonder that useful communication occurs at all.

Think of the equation: An irascible, haughty, driven, and quirky entrepreneur attempts hurried and imperfect communication with an unresponsive, suspicious, and fallow audience.

For inevitably, the recipient of a fresh, new, insightful, electrifying, unique confection of art, vision, or theory will respond in predictable manner.

The recipient of this revolutionary information responds to the truly new by filtering the information through sensors that massage and mold it into images and words and reality that are already known. For it all has been heard before, seen before, considered before, and catalogued before.

Nothing is truly new . . . especially to the clever man, who for the most part has no personal stake in recognizing and processing novelty.

If perchance, an idea takes root, a theory is accepted, art recognized for its texture, nuance, and universalism . . . well, the problem of communication is instantly forgotten after the fact.

After the fact, of course, it is all different. We all recognize novelty, genius, the great idea after the fact. Long after the fact. It becomes “obvious.”

The unserious novels of Charles Dickens. The absurd notion that people might appreciate a service that provides overnight delivery, a service with the ridiculously stuffy name “Federal Express.”

In each of these dramatically different cases, an entrepreneur recognized something that others, perhaps much like us, could not or would not.

Entrepreneurs and novelists are usually driven people. I tend to believe that they are one and the same. Would-be authors are entrepreneurs. In fact, they are repeat performers, whether crafting fiction or non-fiction . . . every new book is an entrepreneurial effort.

They visualize what is not there, what others cannot see. Or can see only through a mist of reality that clogs the imagination. Imaginative and single-minded, they embrace their mission with religious zeal (and I do believe that those two words, religious and zeal, are joined at the hips, much as to “redouble one’s efforts”).

A touch of the maniacal, the obsessive, the glassy-eyed dreamer, the take-no-prisoners, uncompromising drive. The determination that compels one to rise each day to face the idea that no one understands, to embrace yet another day alone in one’s belief. An attitude that says “do not tamper with this vision.”

This is, of course, the only way for entrepreneurs to succeed. If they were any other way, they wouldn’t be entrepreneurs.

Which brings me to the final point that is not so disentangled from what has gone before to be a standalone.

I have waxed on about communication and its difficulties. The word has become almost a cliché in that everything these days can be labeled a “communication problem,” even when the problem is not lack of communication, but rather too much accurate communication.

The “communication” conundrum I refer to afflicts anyone who would write to inform others, who would convey thoughts and notions and concepts.

In fiction, and even in non-fiction, I have noted a disinclination on the part of many undergraduates and some graduate students to edit their work. As if such editing is equivalent to the “corporate leavening process” I mentioned earlier. They confuse the goal of clarity with senses-dulling censorship.

Strunk and White touched upon this, and where Strunk and White are sometimes looked upon as too basic, their insights provide a solid technical foundation that many young writers would do well to absorb. Strunk and White observed a tendency among young writers to confuse spontaneity with genius, to affect a breezy, careless, even world-weary style. I believe the modern vernacular for this is the “been there, done that” posture.

But of course, such an attitude leads to ambiguity and sloppiness in writing — whether one is conveying exactly a child’s appropriate emotion in a funereal scene, or whether one is conveying the impact of various liquidity ratios on a novel business model.

Inevitably, what is communicated on the page is not what the writer believes he or she is conveying. First drafts are always afflicted with a primitivity of communication. Yet, ironically, the first draft carries for many writers an aura of spontaneity and genius that resists change.

The solution? Editing.

If there is a single act that can improve this communication issue, it is careful and ruthless editing. Only through editing can clarity, focus, and meaning be teased from the morass of words. This is a lesson taught on Storytellers many times, but it demands repeating.

The daily difficulties of communication abound. When the subject is new or the product unique, the obstacles increase dramatically, for all the reasons I have listed in such disorganized fashion. Through the act of editing, perhaps we can at least overcome one obstacle in the difficult task of communicating our vision.

The problems lie all along the communication chain — in the personality of the visionary, in the unique nature of the vision itself, in the inadequacy of the medium with which we communicate, and in the prejudices of the recipient.

Is there a formula to address all of these issues along the communication chain? Probably not. I certainly do not have the answer. But at risk of sounding like the cookie-cutter b-school professor, let me iterate that the good news is that awareness of a problem and its proper identification is a giant step toward its resolution in our personal strategic planning process.

The more rarefied the vision, the more intractable and personal the issues we must deal with. And as a result, I suspect that each of us must define our own problems and search out our own answers to our communication issues.

For only we can grapple with them and, ultimately, deal with them.

Point of view.

The world through the eyes of a character, residing in the mind of a character.

If nothing else, point-of-view discipline is something that I have struggled successfully to maintain in my own writing. I try to contain a disciplined POV within a set-piece, most often chapter-length.

In fact, submitting to the discipline of POV can be a liberating limitation, stretching the imagination and providing a tool for plot and the running storyline.

Of course we all know the strictures of Point-of-View – that a scene be rendered through the eyes, nose, and ears of the chosen character, that the smells and sounds and feelings and knowledge of the scene be those of the character, and no one else.

POV can be a character-shaping instrument if done well and consistently. It can pull the reader in rather than distancing him or her with an omniscient view or a discombobulating bouncing of POV amongst characters. I, for one, find it disorienting and frustrating to enter and leave various characters’ minds suddenly and for seemingly no other reason than it was an easy out for the author.

As a reader, I am also flittering about the surface with such flighty POV, not entering the story and seeing and feeling as a character does . . . not wondering along with the character whose thoughts I share.

Were this column simply on Point of View, it would delve into the technical tricks used by others and seek advice and illumination on how POV can enhance tension and reveal character. But any person who has slogged through one of my essays in its entirety might note a lack of topical discipline with regard to “theme.”

And so it is with this one.

I write not about POV in a void . . . I ask a question about POV as a stalking horse for my ruminations on a particular character type. And how that character type can be rendered in fiction. Believably.

Doubtless we have all met people in real-life who would defy belief were they to be inserted into a novel. The irony is that they often come off as caricatures rather than the flesh, blood, and pathology that comprise them in the here and now. For some reason, I tend to intersect with these people more often than is comfortable, and often it is not pleasant.

When I do happen upon them, I ask myself how I could use this personality, this quirk, or that eccentricity as a foil or an appurtenance of character. I ask this, because often the person herself or himself cannot be used wholesale.

The person is too eccentric.

Damaged.

Broken.

Evil.

Yes . . . evil.

And that is the POV question I ponder.

Or perhaps the deeper question is really a matter of what constitutes evil, for to portray a concept, we first must understand it to its fullest. Or, at very least, gain a toehold to understanding.

So, how to handle evil with respect to Point-of-View? Lest you think that the answer is straightforward [and my apologies and celebratory gratitude if you tell me that the answer is straightforward, is simple, and is one that I have simply missed], let me explain a bit further.

Good and evil. Concepts that provide grist for most every story, whether overtly or implied.

Is there truly evil, or is there only mental illness?

If there is evil, then what is it? And how and why is it manifested from one person to the next? What is the motivation to hurt others?

How can it be portrayed accurately, with neither hyperbole nor excessive propriety regarding “non-judgmentalism?”

When I think of evil conceptually, the phrase that reflexively comes to mind is that of the great Hannah Arendt in her description of Adolf Eichmann and the “banality of evil.”

Eichmann’s self-deprecating image as that of clerk merely keeping the trains running is as horrific a portrayal of the inhumane as any that I can recall created in fiction. Just a minor cog in the machinery of evil, a man surely devoid of free choice in the matter. A man whose entire “defense” rested on the environment in which he found himself, conveniently forgetting that he, himself, was largely responsible for creating the abnormal environment that would later be offered up as his excuse.

And his inability to accept responsibility for his actions I have found to be typical of those imbued with evil. Evil always points the finger elsewhere, as if the ubiquitous presence of evil is, itself, an excuse for evil’s presence.

Said Eichmann: “Why me? Why not the local policemen, thousands of them? They would have been shot if they had refused to round up the Jews for the death camps. Why not hang them for not wanting to be shot? Why me?”

Why me?

The plea of the caught, tried, and convicted. Surely a phrase that never crossed his mind when Eichmann was the toast of the Reich.

Why me?

Conviction and punishment seem never condign to those who deserve it most. In some bizarre calculus known only to them, they somehow believe that they should be last in line to the gallows. Only after punishment is dealt to others whom they perceive as equally guilty should they, themselves, feel the rope about their necks.

And so it is with the fictional personality contorted by evil, twisted by God knows what.

Is there a line of philosophy or psychology that examines human behavior and motivation in light of this obeisance to a “machine” of sorts? That humans are merely cogs in a machine, whether they recognize it or not? And it is the behavior of others in the machine that is the measure of us, not our behavior according to an independent moral standard?

Or that in the measuring, all others must be measured first according to the standard, and if found wanting, then we ourselves are exonerated?

I am aware of certain self-professed “Christian” men – one, in particular – who never offer contrition or the slightest recognition that heinous behavior – betrayal, psychological abuse, physical abuse, extreme rage, the foulest language imaginable – is anything to regret or to correct.

Instead, this type of man offers the Eichmann excuse. He points the finger. “Look at these others, equally guilty.”

Perhaps it is a lunatic’s interpretation of the Biblical dictum: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Thus placing occasional pride or use of profanity on a par with, say, habitual adultery or even systematic mass murder.

Now let me make clear one thing here. When one makes comparisons of extremes to illustrate a point, there is sometimes the danger that one may trivialize the horrific rather than imbue the lesser with horrific significance. Thus, the comparison is not an equating. It is, rather, my own attempt to find the horrific in the banal, to find the common thread that links the Eichmann to the closet abuser sitting in the next church pew.

Edward S. Herman, a professor emeritus of the Wharton School, contends that “Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on ‘normalization.’ This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as ‘the way things are done.’”

The routinization of brutality. The normalization of the unspeakable.

So where does it begin?

Can we plumb the depths of an Eichmann to find answers to the quotidian evil that we are exposed to each day? Can we even enter the world of an Eichmann without soiling ourselves? Or do we hesitate to enter at all, fearing what we may find?

Hannah Arendt’s phrase the “banality of evil” gives me to shudder. Utter blandness. The horror of a scientific motivational patina slathered onto inhumanity.

Which leads me on this excursion to ponder how it is we portray evil
. For, to portray it, we must believe it exists. And if we believe it exists, we must understand it to then describe it.

Is what we call “evil” merely a sickness that compels men and women to go against generally accepted social conventions? Or is it something that each of us is capable of? Something that can grip us?

I have been exposed to pure evil on occasion. At least, I think it is evil. I consider it evil. It is unsettling and inhuman.

And it is not as you might expect.

It is not the wide-eyed zealot. It is, instead, the “reasonable” and “thoughtful” person, sometimes a member of a respected profession. It is sometimes the person who acts with evil and malicious intent, and yet considers such action under the sanction of his “God.”

I tend to the notion that he is most purely evil the man who acts as if with moral purpose, focusing only on his own skewed and warped “intentions” and “motives” to the exclusion of his own despicable acts.

Who is the more evil of the two – the amoral man who subscribes to no moral code and does what others consider evil? Or he who subscribes to a moral code and manipulates that code to harm others, to serve his own selfish and bitter motives? Assuming, of course, that there is a gradient of evil that we may identify and utilize.

“She means well,” is one of those phrases that grates. Why does it grate? It grates because it places primacy on what a person feels she is doing rather than on what she does. Certainly motive is important in judgments of the severity of punishment in a court of law. But here I do not speak of acts worthy of a court of secular judgment.

I speak of daily interactions.

I speak of the banality of evil, tinged with sanctimony.

That is nuanced evil, evil with a human face, smiling to mask a black heart, consumed with the bitterness of misanthropy.

I speak of people who act against others and excuse every act, no matter how abominable, by reference to their own “good” motives, regardless from where derived. They view the world through the prism of their own sanctimony, never examining themselves or the heinous effects of their activities.

Such a person can turn against his family, mask his own paranoia and insecurities to others, externalize his problems, and go forever in search of victim status, pointing the finger of blame and fearing to look honestly into the mirror.

G.K. Chesterton penned an essay almost 100 years ago called “The Maniac.” It is as fresh and frightening as it must have appeared a century ago. Today, we might call that person disturbed, touched, or . . . evil.

This person sees the world as a tightly-cramped place, with everyone playing a role that involves him centrally or peripherally. Everyone. Everyone has a motive and no person acts randomly. The maniac sees the world through prismatic eyes that warp reality into a grotesque passion play where everyone is laughing at him, plotting against him, victimizing him.

And so he plots back. His mind is consumed by those “out to get him.” The wheels turn constantly, the flames of hate and paranoia burning bright.

To my mind, such a person is imbued with more evil than a Hannibal Lector. Or perhaps it is an evil qualitatively different. Persistent. Viral.

Such a person is worthy of fiction.

But how to write of such a person?

Can such a person have a point of view in fiction?

Here I do not refer to the stereotypical villain, who is so obviously “evil” that there is no possibility for identification with the villain. There is no ambiguity, no nuance, no gray area at all.

That character has a place in fiction, surely, but it is not particularly satisfying to write about. Nor does a man or woman of substance care to dwell too long in this land of black and white, where choices are always clear-cut and the bad guy is always recognizable.

Think of the modern-day conception of the terrorist.

This villain is unambiguous. And surely most anyone can craft an obligatory scene of bomb-building accompanied by stilted discussion lifted from a religious book, with the occasional praise to the god of the villain’s choice.

I even wonder whether those who purport to write fiction about evil in its current stereotypical form – international terrorism – even understand the potential for evil in their own hearts. The evil of which many of us are capable, the beast within every human being that strives against the leash of civilization, of morality, of religious proscription – the beast that degrades what is decent, good, pure, and true.

It is comfortable to write of obvious evil. Unambiguous evil. I have done it myself.

It is easy.

It is expected.

And while it does serve a certain market and may well be accurate in depicting surface events, it does little to speak to the human condition and to the notion that barbarism is not something of which we are incapable. Perhaps we are all closer to barbarism than we care to admit.

To wit, a measure of a man is not how he treats strangers.

It is how he treats those closest to him. Those who live with him behind the façade that he portrays to the world.

Oh, certainly men abound who treat the hard-workers of the world with barbarity and contempt . . . outright contempt, or the contempt of denial of their existence. These people may, by contrast, treat their own families with love and attention, unaware of the discrepancy.

But there are other men.

These men who treat strangers with calculated grace and courtesy, because it is part of their professional façade, which is maintained as part of their commercial success. These men then treat their loved ones as they would beasts, as appurtenances, as objects in the household, with contempt, with foul language, with discourtesy. With betrayal. With abuse. With barbarity.

They may do it blithely and with an unnerving serenity unfathomable to others. They may genuflect often and exceedingly well. With piety and with solemn visage. While spreading poison, bitterness, misery, and . . . evil.

This is the banality of evil. Bitterness with a forced smile. Retribution for imagined wrongs, savagery done in service to a warped “morality.”

It is not a single act.

It is a way of life. An unexamined life.

A life self-justified and viral.

Like a whetstone that grinds others down, anyone unfortunate enough to be admitted to the circle of hell and forced to remain either by dint of blood or of law.

That is evil, friends. It is hidden. It is relentless.

How can one create and then enter the mind of a character such as this?

It is a mind alien to me. Even as I am able to understand the behavior in an intellectual sense, I am unable to understand the thought processes that lead to such calculated behavior. Is it obsession? Contempt? Jealousy? Illness?

Several months ago, I wrote of an encounter with a man similarly alien to me, and I was fascinated from a human behavior standpoint. He came from a different world, a brutal world in which he’d killed others without remorse. But his very alienness was my only interest in this person, if “interest” is what you may call it. I could not allow myself to enter this man’s world, even in my own mind, even for a few moments, for fear of its corrosive effect.

For this was another human being, surely, but one corrupted by all manner of dysfunctional environment. This was evil, unadulterated. Not posing. Not hiding. Was there redemption possible? I do not know.

When I try to enter this kind of mind, I immediately feel soiled. And I fear that cleansing might not be immediately at hand. And so I hesitate.

But here, now, I speak of another evil.

More ins
idious, I think, than the evil that goes by its own moniker is the evil that dare not speak its name. Evil posing as good. Evil with nuance. Evil striving mightily to extend its little pinkie, to find a place at the table amongst the unsuspecting, who thought the door was securely barred.

Point of View.

Perspective.

How much ambiguity, how much empathy is too much?

How can a writer get one’s mind around this abomination – and then how to convey it “non-judgmentally?”

How to portray the banality of evil in a cool, horrifically sterile, accurate, yet unsympathetic way?

Is ambiguity necessarily good?

I wrestle with this. And perhaps the task is more than I am capable of.

Perhaps this type of writing requires the immersion in the muck of humanity, a strapping-on of the racist’s steel-toed boots, a smearing on of psychic slime, the impassive wielding of a machine gun on a starlit night as helpless people stream by to board a cattle car, the hand gripping a coarse leather whip to lash a defenseless person’s back . . . or the utterance of the harshly foul word and delivery of the back of the hand to a trusting child helpless in the face of abusive adult authority.

Is that what it requires?

To see the world through these leaden eyes, to smell the charred flesh, to hear the screams behind closed doors, to feel my hand upon an innocent child’s face?

Heaven help us.

“The first responsibility of the writer is to be understood. After that comes entertaining, influencing, teaching. But none of that is possible without understanding coming first.” – “Vegas Rick” January 22, 2007

Theme is everything.

Ain’t it?

Nah, it ain’t.

As Mr. Richard Steinberg points out, understanding takes priority. What good is “theme” if few people get the message because the prose is so clunky, tortured, dense, labored, lofty, or bland?

I took a short-story writing course while an undergraduate down south, and we talked a bit about theme. Too much, to suit my unrefined taste.

My prof’s last name was Seay (pronounced “see”), and he had a page-boy cut and wore an eye-patch and sounded like a fusion of Bill Clinton and Shelby Foote.

As a guide of sorts in the class, we used a book called Techniques of Fiction Writing by a fellow called Leon Surmelian.

I still have that book in my library. That self-same one.

For me, something almost mystical touches me when I hold a book now that I held way back then. A book I read then that I flip through now. There is something ageless about it, but it must be the very same book.

It helps if it was a good book then. And the feeling is even more emotionally driven if I still think it’s a good book.

But I did not like Surmelian.

Then . . . or now.

Surmelian was beyond me. Or at least it seemed to be.

Perhaps my expectations were incorrect. I’m sure that the book’s emphasis on “theme” might have been helpful to some folks, but at the time, I simply wasn’t trying to become another Faulkner or O’Connor. I just wanted to learn how to write a bit of fiction.

I really wanted to, but I was so uncoachable. A tin ear deaf to the sound words made on the page and to the unique messages that certain combinations of words could convey.

This was beyond me.

And what was beyond me was “theme.” Theme.

The emphasis on the thematic just did not resonate with me. And that was my problem, I am sure. Surmelian? At that point in my young life, if it wasn’t a product authored by Anheuser-Busch, I wasn’t that interested.

I didn’t worry too much about theme.

Nowadays?

I still don’t worry about theme. And perhaps that has become too obvious on the 25th of each month in this space.

But I do worry about understanding.

And about direct communication.

And about the dearth of words that plagues me when it comes time to write. Of the hundreds of thousands of words available free-of-charge to us all, you would think that lacing a few of them together would be relatively easy.

Especially after years of practice.

Not that the mythological “writer’s block” is a problem with me, mind you. I don’t chin-scratch a lot before committing prose.

And I can crank out ground beef fairly well and consistently.

But sometimes – sometimes – I find it salutary to launch a piece with someone else’s words.

As with this essay.

Quoting a famed or otherwise brilliant writer has many advantages and few downsides. Besides lifting me off the hook for producing a catchy lead sentence, it provides enough throat-clearing leeway to yank a few times on the rope of my own pull-start lawnmower. And those quotation marks carry a thin patina of legitimacy that, one imagines, might extend the halo onto one’s own words.

And so Rick’s words came cascading down on me.

Unbidden, they came to me, and I was able to copy them word-for-word.

Scribbled them verbatim, I did.

Who says there is no muse. There is a muse, and he is Steinberg.

And he set to me the theme of this essay.

Understanding.

So in that vein, let me confess, here and now, something shameful.

I am a graduate in the liberal arts. Journalism.

At first, I was a double-major, in English as well. But that went by-the-by. It went by-the-by when word came down that I must take Milton. So I abandoned English and fled to the Radio, Television, and Motion Picture sequence.

All us journalists are, or were, a kind of writer, no?

When I say “writers,” I mean anyone who would communicate clearly and concisely, with passion and power, with style and substance. Anyone who uses the written word as a vehicle for expression.

I know that the majority of writers on this site are accomplished stylists, published artists, capable expressionists, and able philosophers. In fact, I will vouch for that.

Persons of substance with something to say and beautiful ways to say it.

Unfortunately many people gambol about out there, and they have something to say, but no facility for saying it.

And plenty of people have wonderful facility, but they are bereft of imagination or inclination to spin a yarn deep and fanciful.

And many unsupervised people are about who have nothing to say and nothing to stop them from saying it.

And then there is the middling mass of us, striving to be heard. Wondering if we will ever climb up from these depths of ignorance and doubt.

Some of us are, or were, journalists.

And every journalist worthy of the appellation “scribe” is working on a novel tucked away somewhere.

Journalism? I said shameful. Why is it “shameful?”

Because many journalists just know that it’s not “real” writing. It’s playing at writing. Deadlines, column-inches, and all that.

But I simply jest.

Perhaps I reveal a bit of that envy I have always carried for the folks who seemed to daub words upon the page in elegant strands of diamond-like prose, sentences to enrapture and stories to enchant. Envy or the folks who can sustain a narrative page-after-page, chapter-after-chapter, without exhaustion.

Yeah.

Envy.

Sour grapes.

The simple act of journalism was . . . well, writing about stuff that merely happened seemed to me to be a kind of minor league for writers. Double-A ball, at best.

But journalists do write.

They commit writing. Felonious writing.

Many write well, you probably agree. But I wasn’t one of them when I was a young journalist.

I was the worst kind of journalist . . . a pariah in at the newspaper.

Let me breathe deeply . . . and choke this out.

I was a sportswriter.

Sportswriter.

Collective gasp. The crowd shrinks back. Murmuring in the theater akin to that heard when the burgomaster announced to the shocked audience at the Vienna music festival that Captain Von Trapp would be taking his position in the German Navy as soon as the concert concluded.

As a young sportswriter, I committed every literary sin imaginable.

Let me correct that.

What I actually did so abominably and unspeakably sinful was so far from the fine work of my comrades at Storytellers, that to call these transgressions “literary” would insult legions of English professors, prize-winning novelists, and proctors of prose across the land.

Petitions would circulate.

Rallies organized.

A million-muse march on Washington.

Ah, yes . . . those sins.

Clichés.

A pitcher was never just a “pitcher.”

Sure, you were permitted to use “pitcher” one time.

But from then on, your holy obligation was to find colorful substitutes. Otherwise folks might not think you were a colorful sportswriter or working hard enough for those big bucks we earned.

Sportswriting, you see, was thought differen
t.

And so, the “pitcher” became a “moundsman.”

Or a “hurler.”

Or a “reliever.”

Or a “right-hander.”

Or a “lefty.”

Cross-country runners became “thinclads.”

And on it went . . .

I do not know what it is that grips many people when they begin to write about sports. It’s as if they believe it’s a different kind of journalism.

Now, I’m not referring to some of the wry stuff crafted by Frank Deford or Bill Lyon, or Curry Kirkpatrick when he was at his best. John Feinstein has done good work, too.

I am referring to the vast wasteland of sports pages across this great nation. Rife with clichés and freighted with opinion pieces by phalanxes of too-sharp young J-school grads who promptly chuck Strunk and White into the drawer . . . until they need it for “real” writing.

Sportswriting intoxicates. It unleashes the mediocrity in many of us, so ready to burst forth in all its blandness. It drags us into the stygian depths of formula stories, where athletes always “give 110 percent,” and a “nailbiter” is “going down to the wire,” and a “field general” is tossing one last “Hail Mary” pass. Is it really so far from Orwell’s double-plus-good Newspeak?

But much ink (so many kilobytes?) has already been spilled hashing over the two-minute half-life of sports metaphors, clichés, and assorted jargon.

What concerns me more is what their use demonstrates about the disconnect between what is on the page as a medium for communicating information about an event in an interesting and novel way. In a way that increases understanding.

It demonstrates what I have observed about many writers, particularly younger writers. Many simply do not recognize the link between words and reality, how one portrays the other, enhances the other, shapes the other.

The reciprocal effect that writing can have on the world and that the world invariably has on writing.

They do not understand why what they have written oftentimes does not communicate what they meant to say. That writing to send a message is quite apart from reading to understand the message being sent.

I didn’t understand this completely. And even now, I often forget.

I am thankful that I have forgotten most of those early efforts on the sports page of a newspaper I will not name.

Suffice to say that I was not truly clear on how words worked on the page. And I think that many would-be writers today lack a fundamental understanding of how words work.

Do I know how they work? Have I unlocked that mystery?

Suffice to say that I am aware that it is a tremendous problem that I must constantly strive to surmount. And thus I work for greater understanding of the language and how it is wielded by those I would most like to emulate.

Emulate, of course, in a way that achieves the effects that I see them achieve, but in my own way and with my own self-conscious ruffles and flourishes.

It’s a journey. A long and tortuous journey, I can say.

But a wonderful journey filled with sweat and frustration and the occasional glimmer of hope when a phrase clicks into place seamlessly and perfectly or a metaphor chimes genuinely fresh.

Rare moments of triumph.

And that is my theme, I suppose. To savor the journey and the struggle to become what one is not. And along the way, to communicate and to have one’s writing be understood.

Not so ambitious a theme, but one that is essential. And worthy, I think.

Scribe Scrooge

When asked if the university stifles writers, Flannery O’Conner stated that the university unfortunately doesn’t stifle enough of them.

I paraphrase that quote from our dear friend Rick Steinberg, who has done more to encourage young writers than anyone else I know. Encourage them in the proper way, of course, which he does with great flourish, energy, and skill.

But this isn’t about encouraging.

This is about stifling.

Repression.

My naturally autocratic tendencies, which have held me back in the literary world for years, compel me to cast a pall on the enthusiasms of my young charges.

At this time of year, such endeavor could be considered . . . Scrooge-like.

Accordingly, as a business school professor, I urge my students to dispense with their flights of fancy picked up in undisciplined liberal arts courses.

In class, my audience is 29 students, half from foreign countries. They look at me, expectantly. Yes, we’re there – in class – now:

“You remember those idyllic scenes conjured by your imagination, back when you were young and unjaded? High school seniors . . . or even freshmen? When college still had its sheen?”

I roam the floor, the space in front of the rows of desks with their internet connections. It is my stage.

“Remember those scenes of professors and students out on the lawn under a late summer sun, students sitting cross-legged, perhaps chewing on blades of grass? Your kindly bearded professor, a tam resting upon his head, gesturing grandly while reciting something beautiful? Perhaps a passage from Faukner? Perhaps a trope from Aristotelian philosophy or verse from an angry beat poet?”

One student speaks up.

“I saw a group out there today! Why can’t we do that?”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” I respond.

Nods around the room. Broad smiles.

“No, it would not be nice,” I say. “That’s not genuine. It’s not authentic. Just actors performing for touring visitors and posing for publicity shots. College isn’t like that. There is no authentic college of your dreams waiting for you to discover. Remember the lesson of Oliver Wendell Douglas.”

“Who?”

“Oliver . . . Wendell . . . Douglas.”

I’m concerned at this lack of essential preparatory knowledge of the modern college student at a major university.

“The star of Green Acres, the greatest television show of all time. Don’t you watch Nickelodeon or TVLand?”

Green Acres. I explain.

It was really an allegory, a metaphor for our time. Mr. Douglas was forever in search of the authentic. He had an idyllic conception of rural life. He abandoned his big city lawyer’s life in a quest for authentic Americana. Instead, he found a bizarre world populated by characters that could have been confected by Rod Serling and Flannery O’Conner.

Hank Kimball.

Mr. Haney.

Sam Drucker.

Eb.

Frank Ziffle.

And everyone was an actor in a drama staged for the benefit of Mr. Douglas’s dreams of the authentic rural life. The unifying theme of the show was Sam Drucker’s general store, where many of the crucial insights were revealed. Rural folk did not use oil lamps, “’cause we all got ’lectricity.” The barrel in Sam Drucker’s general store was filled with plastic pickles.

The store was a magical place for Mr. Douglas, a crossroads for many of the strange characters who annoyed him so naughtily. For the most part, they gave Mr. Douglas exactly what he wanted to see, because in the immortal words of Sam Drucker: “City folks seem to expect it.”

The idyllic outdoor-on-the-grass-communing-with-nature-scene.

Students seem to expect it.

Expectations I am determined to deflate.

“I suppose that no one in this classroom has seen Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan? And if you have, I’m betting you completely missed the theme of Jeremy Bentham’s philosophy of Utilitarianism expressed by Spock throughout the film. Never mind the obvious references to Melville’s Moby Dick.”

“Umm, Professor? Is this class Global Strategic Management?”

Yet again, those naturally autocratic tendencies assert themselves.

“This class is what I want it to be. And it is not going to be about outdoor-on-the-grass-communing-with-nature instruction. It’s going to be . . . authentic.”

I snap my fingers.

“How many people here believe in this . . . this muse?”

There is silence. No movement.

“You know. This writing trope. This muse. Anyone ever heard of this muse? Don’t hide from me. I know you were exposed to this . . . this muse over in that heinous liberal arts college.”

Hands begin to go up. Cautious hands.

More hands than I expect. More hands than are comfortable.

Time to disabuse them, time to explode their fantasies.

“There is no muse.”

A simple declarative sentence, but with the unsentimental power and imperious grandeur of a Thomas Carlyle proclamation.

Puzzled looks. A few of them distraught. Then, anger.

“But there is. There is a muse . . . there is!”

“Humbug! There is no muse! Get that Birkenstock notion out of your callow head.”

“But my English prof said—”

“Your English prof is teaching because she cannot earn a living foisting this muse-myth on folks who live and breathe and work and play in the real world. People who build bridges, crop tobacco, feed hormones to beef, fly you home over holiday break, and who serve you every day at the 7-ll. People who pay taxes and die.”

Gasp.

I smile with satisfaction. Smug satisfaction. Nothing infuriates like smug.

“You must know only one thing.”

My voice drops low, just above a whisper, and I lean forward. Pause.

“You must know only one thing.”

My students sense something profound coming. They won’t be disappointed.

“Yes, there is a muse . . . I am your muse.”

I smile a benevolent smile. I see several people actually taking notes, writing this down.

“I am on your shoulder whispering to you late at night in those moments when you lack inspiration,” I say. “I am your solution to the blank computer screen.”

My voice rises, I lean back and spread my hands wide, just as I have seen evangelicals do when working a crowd.

“I am the muse, the answer to your writer’s block and the source of your inspiration.”

Titters of laughter ripple through the room, and I scowl.

“You think I’m joking . . . that this is a joke?”

I pace like a panther, my hands clasped behind my back. I stalk the room, the entire space in front of the classroom and right in front of the giant PowerPoint projection screen.

I stop and face them, squaring my hips and flexing my jaw.

“I want you to remember that one thing when you’re up at night and time is trickling by, and you have an assignment but no ideas and no hope . . . .”

They are silent and they watch me.

“I will perch on your shoulder, and I will whisper to you just four words. I want you to remember those four words. Just four little words – just five little syllables. They are magic words! An incantation! A mantra to warm you on those cold nights bereft of imagination, as you trek that barren wasteland of words without order, without discipline, without a point.”

I have their attention now. They are
rapt.

Will I win them over this time? Can I break through? Can I help them make the leap from soaring idealism to mundane responsibility? Can I put the bridle in their mouths?

“Remember these words: Love … the … Value … Chain!”

Groans. They’ve heard this before. They sound disappointed. Cheated.

So many fail to see the beauty of disaggregating the firm into its functional components. The analytical precision it provides, the world of discovery that it opens up! So many stop short of making that final connection . . . Except this time . . .

“I love the value chain, Professor Ridgley!”

“Really?” I’m skeptical, jaded. I search for signs of sucking up. But detect nothing but enthusiasm. I feel so fatherly. “Which part of the value chain do you feel the most affinity for?”

“Since I’m chronologically oriented, Professor, I’m partial to Inbound Logistics!”

There is a general murmuring and uneasiness in the class. Inbound logistics?

I nod sagely. “That’s fine, Margarite. It’s okay to privilege one segment of the value chain over another, if it provides you the key to identifying competitive advantage!”

A hand shoots up and a voice cries out before I can acknowledge it.

“Operations! That’s the ticket for me.”

And yet another!

“After sale Service!” a voice in the back calls out. “Professor, Customer Relationship Management has a symmetry and logic about it that outstrips anything we touched on in my basic philosophy courses!”

The dam had finally burst, and the classroom was abuzz with talk of core competencies, competitive analysis, environmental scans, core products, strategy formulation process, Five Forces analysis, and comparative advantage!

The Value Chain! Inbound logistics, Operations, Outbound logistics, Sales and Marketing, and Service.

If ever there were a time for sentimentality and outright weeping, this was it!

But then . . .

But then, one of the most staid literary conventions of all time reared its ugly head.

I woke up.

I awoke from a dream.

It was nothing but a sweet dream. Students excited at the prospect of writing a paper on value chain analysis . . . on identifying a company’s core competency and developing a strategic plan to gain sustained comparative advantage based on that competency . . . students who loved the value chain . . . who could see the art and creativity demanded of the accountant and financial manager. Who could see the beauty in efficient operations management. Who would strive for efficiency because it was the right thing to do!

It was all a sweet dream.

A cruel dream.

And I awoke to a cold, winter world where idealistic students still dream and irresponsible students still party and wiseacre students still wisecrack with a tiresome world-weariness. And write with an undisciplined lackadaisical casualness that drives me to distraction.

It is the little things that do this.

For example. “need to.”

Instead of expressing an action in terms of what should or must be done to achieve success, many students I identify a perceived “need” and inevitably use the construct “need to” when describing the proposed action.

The company “needs to” adjust its bottom line.

We “need to” move forward.

Management “needs to” modify its employee rewards policy.

If there is any single action that I “need to” take, it is to advertise this barbarism ad infinitum in my classes. Because, as the Russians say, “Repetition is the Mother of Learning.”

Now, I know that “need to” probably doesn’t qualify as a “barbarism” to most folks, and it may even appear perfectly serviceable.

Innocent.

But for someone who sees this furshlugginer construct far more often than is healthy, it is akin to poking me with a sharp pencil in the rib cage. Repeatedly.

Communication is the first rule for business memos and reports. They “need to” be clear and concise. Actually, they must be clear and concise. They should be clear and concise.

The memo doesn’t need anything.

Anyone sense the venting of a pet peeve? Well, it’s not off-topic, assuming of course that the topic is fairly clear. A bad assumption.

I do my best to convince my classes that strategy and value chain analysis can be an art. I even say positive things about accounting and accountants, observing that there is a bit of art and flair and imagination necessary to produce a product desired by the employer . . . or patron. Think of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel for his patron. Accounting as art.

I close my eyes and maybe . . . perhaps I can recapture a bit of the magic. Recapture my dream.

I look up, startled to find a group of students gathered round my desk after I have dismissed class. They are heading home in the cold for their winter break.

“What’s this?”

“A gift, Dr. Ridgley.”

“Thank you.”

“Aren’t you going to open it?”

I peel the wrap away in a crinkle of coated Christmas paper. It’s a book. A copy of Peter Drucker’s Management.

It’s a first edition. I feel my eyes tearing up.

“We know how much you like Green Acres, Dr. Ridgley. And Drucker’s general store.”

Smiles abound.

Drucker?

“You do know that it wasn’t Peter Drucker’s store? It was Sam Drucker’s general store.”

“Does it really matter, Professor Ridgley?”

Does it really matter?

“In the grand scheme of things, I suppose that it does not. Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas!”

Why do I offer a hearty Merry Christmas instead of something ecumenically blasé in accord with the new appropriateness?

Well, because I can. Because I’m authentic. Because I have authoritarian tendencies. Certainly not because I “need to.”

And I heartily accept Chanukah and Kwanzaa and Season’s Greetings from anyone and everyone else who cares to send ’em my way.

Now, let me go read Sam Drucker’s book on Managing a general store in Hooterville.

I’m such an idealist.

CAVEAT: I do not ordinarily use profanity in my writing, even as I am a former soldier who well-understands that in certain coarse segments of society, the “F” word is considered the most versatile tool in the English language, capably performing the functions of almost every part of speech. Nor do I intentionally offend any group. Having said that, far below I recount parts of an actual conversation that, without its inherent offensiveness, would lose much of its meaning and impact. You are fair-warned.

Cursed to follow the inestimable galactic efforts of Richard Steinberg, I am left fumbling for words in the rough.

You know the rough.

The place where it’s unlikely to find a diamond, much less a serviceable essay.

And here I am, afflicted with acute self-awareness such that I write about that very self-awareness and its sometime creative vacuum. It’s not that I am at a loss for words . . . it’s just that I am uncertain which words might do justice this odd notion that came to me on a subject that has fascinated me for years. Would I want to waste precious words on it.

This subject is a sub-culture in many countries.

And it is uni-dimensional, at least in my opinion. It is limiting, and in its most extreme forms it is anti-intellectual and can be physically harmful. And yet it holds fascination for me because of the extreme discipline that it requires to live such a “lifestyle.”
I do not refer to the life of an ascetic monk. Is that really so debilitating? Or is that an easy way out, to isolate oneself from the tribulations most humans face in an increasingly complex and baffling modern society?

No. This sub-culture is euphemistically called “Physical Culture” by its aficionados. Years ago, I was peripherally involved in this sub-culture.

What is physical culture?

Bodybuilding.

Bodybuilding and the accompanying “lifestyle.”

Sculpting the body, straining with lead weights for hours on end each day, crafting one’s diet to weird and untried specifications (tuna, supplements, apple juice), and of course the inevitable injections of various illegal growth hormones and steroids.

And that’s about it.

That’s the entire lifestyle, as far as I can make out.

Now in this day and age of egg-walking, one criticizes at one’s risk. And this bodybuilding community, after all, is a clearly identifiable minority in our society. But having been a peripheral member of that minority, oh-so-briefly (I actually won a contest in 1983—Mr. Physique in the city of what was then West Berlin), it may give me cover to offer up a few stray opinions that someone may find interesting.

Bodybuilding and writing.

Hmm.

Actually, I am a person who believes in the nexus between body and mind, and I run 1-3 miles each day for the beneficial health effects, but also for the endorphin release it provides. It helps my writing.

I think it does. I mean, it strikes me that it could be entirely unnecessary to suffer physically, drink oneself into stupefaction, or to claim a damaged past to write well.

But what about this extreme Physical Culture thing? Are there any novel ideas lurking in the gym, hidden ’twixt the weight plates or behind the Pilates stability ball?

Think of the wealth of possibilities for an entire series of novels on this bodybuilding lifestyle.

When you come up with any, please let me know.

But let’s pause a moment and go through the exercise. Of what might a novel about bodybuilders consist? What sort of dialog might we be compelled to craft? What possible plot could one contrive?

Steroid theft?

Fixed contests?

Love in the gym?

Conflict between the “good” bodybuilders and the “bad.”

This last one is staple of film, particularly vintage martial arts films in which the conflict is between one school and another rival school (“I fight white-stomping-horse!”), one of which is invariably “bad.”

But this contrivance isn’t limited to foreign films. I am reminded of the movie Twister in which there were “good” stormchasers and “bad” stormchasers. Remember that somersault?

In Twister, it wasn’t sufficient to have man and woman aligned against a powerful force of nature, so a scriptwriter came up with the subplot of “competing Stormchasers.”

The bad stormchasers were well-funded by nameless corporations, and they drove black, nazi-like vehicles in a tight little convoy. They were motivated by money, fame, and greed. The good stormchasers were an underfunded rag-tag outfit in a little van with makeshift equipment and the usual motley collection of good souls (at least one beard) doing it for the betterment of mankind.

Never mind that both Twister groups were engaged in studying the behavior of tornadoes so to better understand them. The film required the conflict, and it gave it to us in the form of a contrived good and bad dichotomy.

But back to the gym and our bodybuilding novel:

“You look pumped, today, Jim.”

“You, too, Apollo.”

“Where you going later?”

“Home to pop a can of tuna and rest up for my next workout.”

“Cool. What’s on tap?”

“Quads and hams. Maybe some glutes.”

“I’m working on bis and tris.”

Apollo flexes his arms, admiring the vascularity and bulk in his forearms achieved through weeks of contest preparation, during which he restricted his diet to protein served in five meals per day along with handfuls of supplements and various illegal substances.

“I’m heading across the border to Tijuana, Jim. Wanna come with?”

“Juice, eh?”

“Yeah, heard about a new cocktail of Human Growth Hormone and Dianabol.”

“Man, I don’t know about those injectibles,” Jim said with a shake of his head sitting atop his overdeveloped trap muscles like an orange atop Pharaoh’s pyramid. “Oral’s good enough for me.”

“Poor results, man. No cut, no bulk, no vascularity. Just piss-poor all around.”

“But no acne or ball shrinkage.”

Writer’s block kicks in, and I’m grateful for that.

That’s all I can come up with at the moment, and given my languor on the subject, not much else is forthcoming.

I could always introduce the oppressed minority angle, since we are talking about a distinct minority of the population. Let’s think about that. Let me go to my gym for some primary research on a Saturday late afternoon.

So I do.

I go to my gym in mid-town Philadelphia for a Saturday evening workout and maybe a story idea or two.

Not much drama taking place along the row of treadmills—just a lone walker in spandex, arms pumping, sweat flying, her eyes riveted on the monitor overhead broadcasting CNN.

Nor is there much conflict on the hard rubber mats in front of regimented racks of various sizes and weights of dumbbells. One tattooed African-American giant is squatting with what looks like a railroad axle on his shoulders. Whoa, now.

He does not look conversational.

The music throbs loudly, and even as this pulsing techno beat fills the gym with false energy, I find no true spirit of the steel, no bonafide discipline of the iron.

I’m out of literary luck in this venue.

I leave. Pumped, blood flooding the muscles, endorphins raging . . . but still out of literary luck.

But then a mere 30 minutes later . . .

I stop off at Ruby Tuesday’s on the way back to my studio apartment. Just for a single libation in the early evening, mind you. Replenishing those carbs.

Am I stalling?

Why on this globally warming earth would I introduce this heino
usly boring subject now, of all times, if it seems so bereft of possibilities, so barren of point and counterpoint? And why in Vishnu’s name would I continue talking about it interminably?

Because . . .

Because, as I write this, not one hour ago I sat across a bar table from a man named “Brad” who was just released from the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg. It’s not that I wanted to be sitting there, trapped in a social situation not of my choosing. Believe me.

The bar area was crowded with transients, located as it is near the airport hotels. I had sat down alone, wearing my underarmor compression tee and carrying a book on Fundamentals of Strategic Management that I planned to skim for its section on ‘case analysis.’

A buzz-cut fellow at the bar kept eyeing me. He invited himself over. He sat down and offered his hand.

“Brad.”

Our encounter began evenly enough, even as I tried to conduct a delicate self-intervention to prevent it.

You see, Brad wore a checkered short sleeve shirt, unbuttoned to reveal an undershirt. And tattoos. Lots of tattoos.

Arms.

Chest.

Ugly ominous black tattoos. No hearts or cupids or flowers in sight.

Tattoos send a message, and in my experience it is rarely a good one.

After Brad pulled off his shirt in the bar, I saw that he had tattoos around his neck as well. Chains, skulls, knives, claws . . . dark things, dead things.

Brad’s message was definitely not one of sweetness and light.

He was chewing tobacco. The wad of Copenhagen dip tobacco caused Brad’s lower lip to bulge, and it left flecks of black about his lips.

“Where’s your spit cup, Brad?”

“I swallow it.”

“You swallow tobacco juice? Isn’t that somewhat unhealthy for you? I mean, aside from the cancer risk.”

“Yeah, it might give me stomach cancer but what the hell.”

Brad waved at the bartender.

“Drink up! Beers for my man here! On me!”

He put my Yeungling on his tab.

“Um, thanks Brad. Why the tattoos?”

He sipped his vodka tonic, obviously the latest in a long sequence of vodka tonics stretching back into the afternoon.

“I was in a gang,” Brad said. “The AB.”

“In prison, you mean?”

“Where the fuck else? I been in for 20 years. I just got out eight hours ago, mother fucker.”

“Well, I thought it might be some street gang or fraternal group.”

Brad’s eyes narrowed and he tilted his head at a funny angle.

“Whaddaya mean by that?” Brad said. “What the fuck’s a ‘fraternal group’? That a fag outfit?”

“It’s just a club,” I said, with an involuntary throat clearing.

“No . . . AB ain’t no club.”

“What’s AB?”

“Aryan Brotherhood.”

“I see.”

Stan, how in God’s name do you get yourself into this kind of fix? It reminds me of a confrontation in Ollie and Buck’s Old West Saloon 25 years ago when you, in your patent leather shoes and tight black pants and fancy schmancy silk shirt were escorted forcibly out of the Bar by Jesse and Billy, burly bearded bouncers in flannel shirts. That was your own fault, disco man.

Yes, Brad’s an ex-con.

“I just got out,” Brad said. “Did I tell you that? Eight hours ago. And I’m trying to get to the West coast but got stuck here ’til Monday. Stayin’ in that ratty motel right over there.”

Brad’s got a job lined up.

He’s going to be a rep for some kind of bodybuilding supplement company, the name of which I won’t divulge. He claims that I, too, can be a rep and receive $3,000 of free stuff each year.

Brad keeps looking at my arms and chest. Am I nervous?

“Hey, I ain’t no fag or nothin’, man, but I see you walk in and you know what’s what. It’s obvious you know what’s what, right? Dontcha?”

“Huh?”

“You know what’s what! You ain’t dumb!”

“Yeah,” I said. “You better believe I know what’s what.”

“I thought you did! I knew it!”

I grin stupidly and raise my beer, and I drink that beer as fast as I can.

“Brad, what can I say? You know what’s what, too.”

“Damn right, I do!” he said, and he smacked the table.

“What you got? Nineteen?” He nodded at my arms.

“Beg pardon?”

“Come on, man, you know what’s what! Nineteen inches?”

“Almost seventeen.” I said.

Brad nodded approvingly. He held up a hand.

“Hey, I ain’t no fag or nothin’, but I’m just sayin’ you got what’s what. Just admirin’ the truth, y’know.”

“Thank you.”

Brad keeps claiming that I’m “on the juice.” That’s bodybuilder talk for steroids. Deca, Dianabol, Equipose. That kind of thing.

“You tellin’ me the truth, Stan? You’re natural? What the fuck, man! You know what’s what!”

“All natural! I know what’s what!”

“I thought so!”

Another long sip on the vodka tonic.

“Can’t drink too much of this with this Hepatitis C. Bad for the liver.” He grabbed his side. “Tomorrow I’m gonna feel like a fuckin’ brick right there. Hey, you know I just got out of the pen.”

Long pause during which I know I better say something or this fellow might get nervous. What do they say in the movies?

“I guess that’s why you know what’s what.”

“Damn right.”

“So, what were you in for?”

Brad leaned in close.

“I was in their highest level of custody,” he said, leaning closer and showing me his bureau of prisons inmate card. A red and white plastic card with Bureau of Prisons on it, I think. That’s what it said on the card: “Inmate.” With a number.

“I used to have one of my brothers guard me when I went to the john,” he said. “A man outside the stall. A man guardin’ me when I took a shower. It’s hard in there, man. You got to be hard. Got to watch your back all the time.”

He nodded over his shoulder.

“See that guy there? If he puts his hand on my shoulder, I’ll break the fucker. I’ll snap that fucker’s arm. I’ll put this in his fucking neck.” He held up a pen he was using to write down the name of his supplement company for me. “I’ll put this in his neck right into his brain stem.”

“You just bought that guy a drink, Brad. I don’t think he wants to start something with you.”

“I don’t care man, you gotta take care of yourself.” He looked around. “See these people in here, I mean I could kill anyone in this place.”

I nod.

“I believe you could, Brad.”

I raise my glass and give a tight little grin. What else can I do while listening to a man just out of the pen, locked up for bank robbery and boasting of three murders while in lock-up? Challenge him? Set him straight?

“Well, what were you in for?”

Brad sat back.

“I was in for bank robbery. Twenty years.”

“Were you framed?” Isn’t that what you always ask these folks?

“Nah, man, I did it! I just got caught. Twenty years on the inside. Man I’m forty-four now.”

He wiped his mouth and lowered his voice.

“I did three murders, too, but that was on the inside, so they don’t count. They were inside jobs and they don’t care nothing ’bout that. Don’t give a shit ’bout that. Those murders don’t count.”

I drained my beer.

“Uh, I have to go now, Brad . . . lots of work to catch up on. Thank you for the beers.”

“Wel
l don’t let me hold you up.”

“Is that a joke? ‘Hold me up?’”

Brad points at me.

“Ha, ha—you’re a funny man.”

I offer my hand, and he takes it, his little finger jutting at an odd angle from a break doubtless suffered in a long-ago fight over stakes that didn’t matter. Save survival.

“I wish you luck, Brad. You might want to stay mellow tonight. I don’t think anyone here will jump you, so please don’t break any arms or stick that pen into anyone.”

Brad looked at me.

“You know what’s what, man! They arrest you for fighting, not loving. I’m gonna be a lover from now on.”

I pointed at him and nodded.

And, blessedly, I left.

And I do not feel good having dipped my toe into that morass that grips much of humanity and turns it inhuman. Three murders that don’t count? Aryan Brotherhood? In my apartment, I felt like I wanted to take a hot psychic shower to rid myself of certain images.

But there is dramatic grist here.

That man has a story. Brad is out of the pen, he’s hawking bodybuilding supplements between vodka and tonics and is living a lifestyle now that I cannot begin to fathom. Lord only knows how this man will spend his day tomorrow . . . and the next . . . and the one after that.

He has a story, but I just don’t know if I could stand to hear it.

Could you?

I mean . . . do you know what’s what? Because I surely do not.

Stan Ridgley

Let me wax reasonably eloquent about a group of folks I shall call “young writers.”

And woven into my thoughts on Young Writers, I’d like to make a related point concerning what I believe to be the magic inherent in books, whether fiction or non-fiction.

To many people, books are magic things.

To me, as well. I grew up thinking they were magical.

Asimov and Heinlein, MacLean and Fleming.

These were the major literary influences on me as a young man enamored of science fiction and adventure. Not Hemingway or Fitzgerald. And I have a special place in my memory reserved for Fred Reinfeld, the chess-book author, who taught me more about logic and systems analysis than any professor ever did.

The one thing all of these books had in common in their effect on me was what I perceived as a magical effect of concentrated psychic power.

Bear with me.

I accept a good novel—and even some of the bad ones—as the concentrated psychic power of a writer and his coterie of editors and proofers, whomever they may be.

Yes, concentrated psychic power, for lack of a better terminology (or terminology that may be better, but with which I am unacquainted).
Concentrated psychic power.

Think of it this way. A writer spends a year or more mining the imagination for a story, teasing it out, then painstakingly day-by-day spinning it onto the pages. Tightening it, compressing it into the pages. Compressing it until all of this psychic energy strains for release.

Enter, the reader.

The reader releases this energy.

The reader absorbs this year’s worth of concentrated psychic energy in the space of, say, two or three days of steady reading.

Think of it. That is powerful.

What a heady experience!

Soaking up a year of psychic energy in a fraction of the time it took to expend it. That is truly the magical aspect of books, this compression of imagination and its sudden release. In the case of the masters, it can be the compression of genius.

And, of course there is much more that is magic about a good story, but I think that this compression and sudden release is one aspect that plays well for me.

Still, as wonderful as it is, this magical effect is often lost on young writers. They do not understand that stories—novels—are labors of labor. They constitute art and craft. The painstaking search for the exactly right word, the careful ordering of sequential things for nothing more than contrapuntal effect, the distillation of dialogue to its crystalline essence, the hurting process of cutting prose that one once thought was grand but now comes across as little more than empty posturing.

The fattening-up and the trimming away that constitutes much of published writing. The hard decisions of editors, this give-and-take between author and editor. Much of that is alien to young writers.

“Don’t touch my prose!”

Young writers oftentimes believe that the creative process must be pure. It must be pristine, the story springing from the muse, whole and in finished form. Spontaneity is confused with genius and, at its triumphant moment, must not be tampered with by halting, doubtful second thoughts.

The novel, they suppose, is written from start to finish . . . in a kind of one great swoosh. If the would-be author feels inspiration today. If the workspace is adequate. And if enough research has been done.

Forget the novel for a moment. Think, instead, of a basic analysis paper. A memo.

The young writer usually writes the analysis paper from start to finish. There is no such thing as a first “draft.” Well, there is, but it’s quite often the only draft.

And always, always, there is the sense that the words on the page are stilted enemies of the young person who wrote them. The discomfort of the author is palpable, and one can almost feel angst oozing from every ill-chosen phrase. You sense that the author knew what he or she was trying to say, was bursting to say.

But just did not say it.

And this is a shame, because young writers bring so much enthusiasm to the table, and so little discipline. They are capable of producing much that is magical, fresh, new. But the discipline of art is not there. I speak not of all young writers, of course, but many of them.

I have waded through volumes of student writing in the past 10 years, much of it from schools around the country, including St. John’s, Yale, Pennsylvania, Duke, Claremont McKenna, Wabash College, and Dartmouth.
Enthusiasm, yes.

Exuberance, doubtless.

But the overwhelming sense I get is that many college students do not understand what words are supposed to do on the page for them. They do not understand precise meanings, nuance, or how word order can affect the sound of a sentence on the page. They show no fascination with and love of words. They simply do not know how to use the tools of the writer’s trade.

Okay, I speak in generalities. There are exceptions, and it is in the nature of generalities for there to be exceptions.

In my experience, there are grand and overarching remedies for these vague criticisms I offer.

First, “young writers” would do well to write in simple declarative sentences. No adjectives, no adverbs. No crutches. Sentences fleeced bare. This strikes me as a tutorial sufficient to return meaning to the printed page. Then, they may return anon to add the necessary, to excise the unnecessary, to polish and maybe to add a finial or two to a skeletal first draft.

Good advice, I think, but in my experience, this rarely happens.

Granted, I am talking business writing here, but the principles are the same. We are, after all, talking about clear communication, whether the subject matter is a “coming of age” story or a memo to the company president recommending a switch from low-cost to a differentiation strategy.

Never one to resist swimming against a tide, I do my best to rectify this in my own small way. The ability to reason logically and express clearly thought-out conclusions in writing is essential in the business world, and I recommend the dictates of Strunk and White quite often.

“Who’s that?”

“You’ve never heard of Strunk and White?”

Maybe three people say they’ve heard of Strunk and White.

The Elements of Style.

Hmmm, what does this portend for the future of writing in America?

Maybe it portends nothing more than that quite soon I shall be alone in recommending this Strunk and White book, which may well be out of print in due course. Replaced by…. what?

The Easy-Does-It Writers Manual?

The Grammar-Free Guide to Good Writing?

No More Tears: A Writer’s Guide?

Words? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Words?

Ah, for the students to actually open themselves up to receipt of suggestions. Not criticism, mind you, because that cuts against the notion that esteem should not be eroded. But suggestions, one here, another there.

The point of this short essay, I suppose, is that the font of magical good writing is generated somewhere in the writing of drafts, in the care taken in the writing process, in the investment of imagination.

It is conjured in the expression of passion in written form, leavened with care for the medium. Enough care to make that medium invisible to the reader and subordinate to the message, rather than part of the message itself.

It is these things that render good writing invisible and allow the story to emerge. Without care and attention to punctilio, then the writing mov
es onto center stage in its muddy boots, intrusive and clunky, rough-edged and loud.

And whether it is a story or a business memo, the words should be invisible, the message itself conveyed in as straightforward a manner as possible.

I do not know if there is a “muse” out there, but I sometimes believe that the “muse” is a contrived excuse not to write . . . because the muse just ain’t there. Not for me. I confess that this little essay was written museless.

And surely this essay is bereft of any magic, save that which might be conjured in the mind of the reader, who might say to himself or herself: “Hmm, if nothing else, there was a minor point in this that made it worth my time.”

And that would truly be a magical result.

By Stan Ridgley

It took me quite a while to understand one of the fundamentals of life.

And it’s taken me a while to overcome the natural reluctance to share a discovery with others for fear of being revealed as the last guy to the party. There is a fine line between carving out descriptions of universal experiences and simply being pedestrian.

But then, it usually takes me a while to puzzle through many things.

And I fully realize that I may be leaving myself wide open to a salvo by calling it a “fundamental of life,” but so be it.

This “fundamental of life” that relates to the human condition and is utterly essential to conveying that condition accurately on the page in all of its crystal clarity and unpredictability.

Like most fundamentals, it is so pristinely simple that it boggles the mind that one may have missed it. That one may have lived one’s life without recognizing it.

“One may have missed it?”

Let me lean in toward you, glance to either side, and lower my voice—I’m talking about me, of course. I missed it. I am culpable and take full responsibility for my hard-headedness.

Here it is:

People think differently and perceive the world differently.

That’s it.

Okay, I know that this sounds … well, it sounds dumb. Of course, people think differently and perceive the world differently. That’s obvious and everyone knows it. Right?

What I mean by this is that it is not obvious. In fact, I have learned that when I perceive something as obvious or clear-cut or “common sense,” it is a red flag that I ought to heed.

Here’s an example, not exactly on point, but closely related to it.

In my Global Strategic Management course, which focuses on doing business across international borders, I point out to my class that culture is quite often, by its nature, invisible to those immersed in it. For many of my students, two-thirds of whom are from countries other than the United States, culture means gaily dressed dancers in native garb serving ethnic dishes and smiling all around.

Native culture is what the other guy has. We don’t have a particular culture—mores, values, folkways, rituals. It’s just the way things are. We just do things naturally. My foreign students recognize this more readily than my American students.

This assumption that our own way of doing business or maintaining personal relationships is natural is embedded somewhere deep inside many people. I don’t know where, mind you, but somewhere. This isn’t a problem per se. But it can be, depending on how the person responds to others outside of the personal cultural paradigm.

This is trodden ground, I know, and Graham Greene’s Ugly American alludes to certain culturally based behaviors that can blind us to other viewpoints, other ways of simply living life day-to-day.

Of course, no one in our family at Storytellers has this ethnocentric view. Everyone here is self-aware, questioning, humble, and confident in one’s own openness to difference. I surely am. Humble? I’m the best of the lot!

I submit that the need for vigilance is probably greatest in those with the greatest self-confidence, those who believe that they are immune from the petty preconceptions and gross generalizations.

In one graduate class I taught on Globalization, I had concluded presenting an even-handed look at the current Russian political administration and the economic and business environment. Russian behavioral explanations almost always tend to the sinister if their actions do not appear superficially in accord with certain values.

My lecture included a recitation of cultural indicators that might explain certain Russian behavior outside the black-hat, white-hat paradigm that seems to infect much of the mainstream media’s treatment of the Putin administration.

One student near-angry reaction: “I’ve never encountered anyone more pro-Russian than you!”
I spread my hands and said, “I just believe in giving the Russians a fair shake.”

But her question tended toward proving my point, I thought. My lecture was simply an exercise at understanding Russian behavior through the prism of Russian eyes, as much as any American could conceivably make such a presentation. I encouraged my students to step outside the outside the liberal universalist and messianic cultural perspective that dominates the Western Democratic tradition. She interpreted this as affecting a “pro-Russian” stance.

Perhaps she was correct. Perhaps I have gone native. But I tend to think that she was simply too wedded to her own cultural perspective to admit that there might be an explanation for Russian political and economic behavior that was something other than sinister.

My own observation is that the roots of culture are much thicker and far deeper into us than many of us can imagine, and culture can leaven political and social superstructures more than we realize.

But most everyone already knows this. Or should.

Move back to my original point. That “people think differently.”

It’s a deceptively simple statement, but one freighted with implications not often thought through. For instance, I stopped talking politics with people long ago. I finally recognized that as long as liberal and conservative (to take one broad-brush dichotomy) views informed the policy prescriptions embraced by liberals and conservatives, then two people would necessarily talk past one another. Each would continue to “miss” the “real” question or issue.

Arguments over politicians and policies often come down to differences over differing worldviews. Such arguments are bound to be fruitless.

Which worldviews? I personally believe that much of this philosophical difference, in Americans at least, comes down to whether one embraces the ideals of the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment or the Continental Enlightenment. Do you embrace the ideals that inspired the American Revolution or those that inspired the French Revolution. They are quite different.

In my earlier, younger, firebrand days, I understood none of this. Not in discussions, nor was it reflected in my writing. In my personal relationships and interactions, I naively thought that people were, at bottom, all alike. With shared values and commonalities underneath the layers of sophistication, subterfuges, poses.

No tolerance for me in those days. Patience was in short supply and there was supreme confidence in my own “common sense.” Surely others could see my point of view, grounded as it was in common sense. Surely if I pounded away and used logic to demonstrate how someone was utterly wrong, he or she would appreciate that. And come away from their encounter with me invigorated and a much improved person.

Ugh.

On a personal level, it might be akin to going to a foreign country and reflexively expecting the locals to speak English to you. And for them to understand English if you pronounce it slowly enough and loudly enough. People with these kinds of expectations exist.

Well, needless to say, I have changed greatly from that simplistic and indescribably irritating and self-defeating worldview. And I am grateful.

To a more quotidian concern, I recently had an interaction with two people that, in my firebrand days, would have led to an incredibly ugly conflict. Instead, I genuinely listened to them.

I thought that their behavior with regard to me was unacceptable, intrusive, shameful, and wrong. But rather than react automatically with hackles up, I listened to what they had to say, not assuming that motives were suspect, and I tried to understand the not-so-hidden philosophical grounding for what they were trying to say.

It turns out that I still do not agr
ee with them one whit.

But I listened patiently, explained that I disagreed, and then I told them that from a sociological perspective, I was fascinated that they believed what they did about their actions with regard to me and wanted to understand more of this alternative point of view. I grant that this might sound like a patronizing, tutorial, or insulting thing to say, but in the broad context of a conversation that had potential for erupting into a firestorm, it was justified and elicited what I needed.

And I came away from the meeting more enlightened by human behavior than I was when I entered. I learned something.

Again, I apologize if this sounds more like a twilight revelation for someone who should have learned a fundamental social skill years earlier, but I do find it a handy analytical tool when I attempt to translate human behavior to the page. Primarily, the issue of motivation.

What motivates a character?

For me, it seemed as if all my characters could have only one set of motivations. And in such a world, good and evil are clear.

But in the real-world in which we live and breathe, heroes and villains are not clear-cut. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. One man’s vigilante is another man’s savior. One man’s undying love is another man’s pathological obsession.

It is one thing to believe these things abstractly. It is quite another to actually attempt to get into not just the other guy’s shoes, but his clothing as well. And, finally, into his mind.

It is difficult. It is frustrating. It can even be distasteful. I have learned, it requires a large reservoir of patience. And the reward is, frankly, uncertain.

But at very least, in my own interactions, I like to think that I have left the firebrand days behind. Not my passion, not my excitement. But rather the baggage of a fruitless and simplistic worldview.

And I am a better and more complete writer for it.

Well, that’s my point of view.

By Stan Ridgley

“You have trouble with relationships.”

That was Ruth, my first agent speaking to me.

That was back in the mid-90s, when hope ruled me and I thought everything was possible, and that the world was waiting for me and my stories, global fingers rapping bored and impatient, anxious for me to entertain it as it had never been stimulated before.

I had completed my first novel. I had finished this anvil of a masterpiece.

And I had an agent.

A New York agent, by golly. That was a decade ago and three agents back. And this agent told me that she could not stop reading my novel. It was a thriller. It was exciting, rich, robust. Muscular prose and a gripping storyline.

What was that first “men’s thriller” story?

Unpublished, is what it was.

But it was also this and it was also that. A confidante read it and dryly commented that its high concept was “Everything Stan thinks about.” At 185,000 words, it well could have been.

It was not bad, it truly was not. But it had lots of problems. Preaching was a big problem, but not its worst. Its worst flaw was what my dear agent told me directly and unbuttered and unsugared.

“You have trouble with relationships.”

Catastrophic trouble, apparently.

Wonderful characters who lost all color as soon as it was time to think, ponder, interact, emote. Interesting characters who turned to unfinished pulp not even good enough to be called cardboard.

Characters that stiffened when the action began to thin.

Characters that grew brittle when they required anything resembling sincerity, or depth of feeling, or vulnerability, or raw emotion.

Well, not all emotion. I could handle anger fine. Did it well. Hate, rage, envy. Most of us probably can.

Hate is easy.

And it isn’t difficult to find anger, is it? Or rage. We can do that to ourselves quite handily. And it requires no giving whatever. It is easy. Childlike.

Such a simple and self-indulgent emotion. In some people, I think that it serves as the emotion of first resort. At times, it probably substitutes for accepting truth. About ourselves.

Yes, anger is easy, I think.

But love?

No, not love. Not romantic love.

And certainly not romantic love played out in a scene between two people.

That is not easy at all. But I speak only for myself.

When you write that way—about romantic love, I mean—all the fears of being called schmaltzy, maudlin, cloying, or syrupy elbow their way front and center. The sense of vulnerability of putting yourself on the page becomes acute.

Aside from that, how can you write about something that you do not understand in the first place? Something that you simply know about two-dimensionally, from reading someone else’s work? Work that might well come across as schmaltzy, maudlin, cloying, or syrupy.

See? See how the cynical urge to kneejerk criticize is right there on the tongue?

Anger is easy. Pain, heartache, yearning, sorrow, love are not. Not for me, anyway, because I “have trouble with relationships.”

Love? Love is tough.

And that’s why love is avoided or ridiculed or dispensed with in some quarters, my own included. That’s my opinion, of course, which is the only opinion I have, flawed and torqued though it might be. Dispensing with love and romance in my storytelling became routine.

I recall that I would contrive anything to keep my characters from slipping into anything resembling a romantic situation, to the extent of creating an assassin—complete with backstory—to burst in and interrupt a possible tryst, introducing a thoroughly new subplot that added yet another 10,000 words of furious, yet loveless, action.

How can you write about love you do not believe in? And your disbelief has nothing to do with volition and everything to do with ignorance. You do not believe in it because you have not experienced it. And you scoff when a few persons may utter, “You will know it when you feel it.”

How obliquely bleak is that? Sounds like holy-grail doubletalk to me. Does it you?

It is so easy to not believe in love. Perhaps it is a self-reinforcing tendency that creates a hard external shell, a buffer against anything that might cause pain. Perhaps endless chin-scratching head-shaking repetition leads to a calloused heart.

As the years ease by and laugh-lines deepen to fissures and anxieties replace dreams, perhaps it is something as mundane as growing cynical.

Growing sour.

Bitter.

Hurt.

And perhaps you begrudge others the open display of what you, yourself, do not understand. Or have simply forgotten. Like a child, you ridicule it as “mushy.” Or as we grow more sophisticated, we refer to a more mature kind of “love” that is more controlled, less intense, more mellow, less fevered. Staid.

But that is not really love, is it?

That’s just coping. Settling. Letting time pass in the least hurtful and least vulnerable way possible.

When, exactly, does one stop believing in love?

That, of course, is a self-centered question, an extremely self-indulgent question, since there likely are multitudes of folks who never stop believing in love. In fact, I am certain of it now.

So I presume that I address my rhetorical query to that self-defining group of unemotional, “mature” folks who totally control their feelings, believe that being “in-love” is transient rather than transcendent, and that it may simply be an ephemeral state of mind that passes so quickly that its very unimportance is such that it need not be discussed. It remains little more than a distraction, really, from the real business of life.

And what might that business be?

Dentistry?

Lawyering?

Soldiering?

Bridge night?

Mergers and Acquisitions?

So I wonder. When did I begin again to believe in love? When did the door creak open for me?

I do not know, exactly. But I do know one thing with utter certainty.

Love hits suddenly.

Love hits like a firestorm, a raging conflagration that consumes everything before it, setting everything ablaze in a fury of white heat. Quicksilver lava with an attitude, scorching a path with sneaky speed. Devouring lifeforce at an incredible rate, like an F-111 on afterburners.

I do know that when you are in love, it compels you to share it with everyone you meet. And depending how you do it, it can be endearing or it can be insufferable.

I have noticed that someone falling in love somehow believes it is the first time that anyone has fallen in love, and that it is a feeling unlike anything anyone has ever experienced before in the history of humankind. They know intellectually that this is, of course, ridiculously untrue.

But it does not matter. So many things do not matter. It feels that way. Well, perhaps I generalize to a fault, but if I am wrong. . . . then I am simply wrong and have no apology for it.

When love strikes, it is as if the change is in the world around you and not in yourself. Yes, the world itself has changed, altered dramatically. And that is such a self-absorbed way of looking at things, but inevitable to the affliction, I think.

Or, at least that is the way it is with me, and I do not believe that I could be unique in that respect. And so it seems that the world behaves differently. The rhythms you never before noticed suddenly resonate with meaning.

The love songs once scoffed-at, if ever before noticed, suddenly seem composed especially for you and your situation. They speak to you. You understand their language.

N
ow.

Even those songs composed decades earlier.

Surely these beautiful ballads must have been composed with you in mind, inspired by a premonition that you would blossom at some point in the distant future and that you would need that song to provide you a release of feeling that you could not express otherwise, lest you burst.

And poetry! Love poems!

Poetry and plays and plots centuries old are no longer cliche, no longer ignored. No longer words on a page or actors on a stage. Love breathes life into words, and the words become reality. Lord, you begin to believe the words were written about you!

And if you did not appreciate the universality of at least some of our human experiences, then you begin to understand and celebrate that understanding. And you begin to wonder if there are not other senses, experiences, words, ideas, concepts that speak to us over the years.

Perhaps there is wisdom in tradition. Accumulated wisdom. Some wisdom, at least. That is a topic for another day. Maybe.

But does not all of this self-indulgence have the quality of an adolescent discovering the concept of “self” for the first time? Looking at one’s arms and legs with wonder, and turning inward to examine one’s thoughts, feelings, and unarticulated yearnings, and fruitlessly trying to separate the analytical mind from the very mind that is being analyzed?

That type of analysis is foredoomed by the uncertainty principle, as poor Margaret Mead discovered in her study in American Samoa. The uncertainty principle posits that the presence of the observer affects the behavior being observed—and self-analysis by a lovesick soul could be the archtype example of it. And so, too much introspection might lead us astray. Just as too much analysis of love’s siren call might destroy its magic.

Regardless, the bloom of love seems always new and fresh to the uninitiated, and yet it travels along a well-worn path that humanity has trod for centuries.

But it is just in these moments of introspection—probably too many moments—I wonder if given a choice, who I would rather be. Would I rather be a man afflicted and in love’s grip, or would I want to be a part of the multitude of head-shakers who lament such seeming addlepatedness?

Or perhaps there is still another group, quite large and in the middle, folks who suffer gladly the odd behavior of the man or woman in love, for it is something to believe in. Oh, they may not believe in it themselves, or they may have loved and lost, or they may be “beyond” that sort of thing.

But they recognize it as something beautiful and sweet. A brief, shining recrudescence of something magical and innocent.

And in a world so ugly and coarse at times, there is just not enough beauty and sweetness and innocence to go around.

Beauty and sweetness and innocence that embody an incredibly powerful force.

Love.

And how powerful and irresistible a force love must be if it frees one from healthy constraint and prudence and unleashes one to use words like “recrudescence” without apology, without qualification. And without the excuse that one is simply searching for a word to rhyme with “effervescence” or “quiescence” for use in a limerick.

No, I have learned that love is not to be trifled with. You embrace it, protect it, treasure it, enjoy it, and nurture it. If most others learned that long ago, then I plead your patience with the pleasure I get from savoring that datum.

“You have trouble with relationships.”

Perhaps I do, but at least now I know why. Or I know why I did. And maybe I still do in my writing. But even now I am subjecting myself to an appropriate remedy.

It is a remedy indeed appropriate to one who avoids romance in his stories. I am 40,000 words into my latest project. . .

. . . a romance novel.

It likely will turn one of three ways.

A stilted, wooden, caricature of every romance novel ever published and a clone of every one ever rejected — syrupy, maudlin, cloying, yet simultaneously bereft of any genuine emotion.

Or, a weird experimental project in which two sharply drawn and interesting characters, filled with leonine ferocity and lusty passion, never seem to find themselves in a . . . romantic setting. Interesting in an abstract way, but ultimately unfulfilling and jejune.

Or, a decent story.

A decent story, with a rich, multifaceted, yet conflictual romantic relationship that deepens and grows more complex by the chapter, ending with satisfying closure, two people finding each other, understanding each other, and believing in the magic and majesty of love, whose power can transform this world from a barren monochromatic landscape of cynicism, violence, and sorrow into a kaleidoscope of color and enchantment, passion and promise, desire and delight.

Wish me luck.

I need it.