Thomas Sullivan: STAINED GLASS NOTES FROM RINGTONES IN A GOPHER HOLE or I HATE OUTLINES
10 COMMENTS follow
Planning is the death of spontaneity. Goodbye magic. Then again, spontaneity is how you end up going the wrong way on a one-way street. When it comes to writing books, I like a lot of both — planning and spontaneity.
Getting the balance right is an acquired skill. Most people get mired in one extreme or another. It’s their whatchamacallit…nature. If you are one of them, congratulations. You are normal. But if you court creativity and like to express it in words, you need a minimal map of where you are going and a maximal amount of daring in order to get there via the scenic route. Zero in on a destination, but get there by your own roads. As long as you know which horizon you’re headed for, you might even blow through a few useless traffic signs.
So which traffic signs do you keep in order to sustain a minimum plan? I like to think of effective expression as having a succinct beginning, middle and end, no matter how simple or complex. “Hello, how are you, goodbye” will work as an entry level example of the simple. You engage attention, deliver the goods, and disengage. It’s the same on the heavy end of size and comprehensiveness, just more elaborate. You have to establish a purpose for the reader’s attention in the beginning (a conflict, a problem to be solved, a set of characters to travel with, a POV), and then you run an obstacle course (the middle) with those elements on the way to a resolution that neatly disengages (the end). But when you think about it, you really only need the beginning and the end, because you can play the middle where it lies, stretching or compressing it like the bellows of an accordion. The beginning has to incorporate and foresee your needs and purpose, however, and the ending must satisfy both those needs and purpose. So those are the two traffic signs that have to be planned. To plan more is to limit the possibilities — which is sometimes desirable, sometimes not. You define yourself and the quality of your work by how open you are on the journey. That’s the savoring part. To be sure, you must pick the right beginning in order to make it work and not have to begin again. But once you have the correct anchor point, imagination and freedom will max out the potential.
As an object lesson in too much spontaneity, I’m reminded of a Sax Rohmer anecdote. This noted author was traveling by ship from London to New York, I believe, and completing the next installment of a novel serialization for a magazine en route. He had created a perfect crime scenario as a premise in the first installment and now found he could not figure a way out of it. He had written himself into a box. In a panic, he turned to a clever friend who pointed out that if he simply went back to his premise and established that a character had lied about a key fact in the beginning, he was home free. In effect, he was starting over with a new anchor for his plan. The original premise was flawed, an illusion. The clever friend’s name? Harry Houdini.
I believe most people err in the other direction, but it isn’t because they over-plan. If they do not plan out well, neither do they exercise their freedom and imagination. Instead, they follow the clichés of life. They move with the herd, doing what others have done and sticking to the map. It isn’t a big dramatic thing, it’s the little things they do and don’t do — how they look at the possibilities, how they interpret them, how energetic they are with their insight and imagination — that lock them into predictable outcomes. They simply cannot think far enough outside the box… or off the map.
And here’s where spontaneity either makes its entrance or misses the cue. For the writer, the world should be full of cues. The writer is not a passive spectator, a sedentary Kool-Aid drinker. The writer looks at what he/she saw yesterday and finds newness, because they themselves are new; they have grown in 24 hours, added to their database and therefore their insight. They have learned to see deeper and make more associations. I’m not kidding about the 24 hours, because even if there were no significant growth in that brief period of time, there is rotation of associations in your mind every day — an infinite variety of ways to engage things if you train your mind and attitudes to be open.
Australian Grant Soosalu researches this stuff and spurred me to think about what motivates life enhancement when he interviewed me recently (http://enhancingmylife.blogspot.com/2009/06/life-enhancing-with-author-thomas.html ). For sure a person’s basic nature plays into it, but a lot of the things that work against a spontaneous mind are conditioned, it seems to me. As a society we are utterly bent on things that stupefy us, mesmerize us, or otherwise discourage original thinking. I am an expert on personal failure, but I count it my one great consolation that Technicolor mice run rampant in my mind. I would have made a lousy NASCAR alcoholic or a lemming or a sedentary anything. Put me on a treadmill and I’ll flip it sideways. Not a convenient way to live, but for me a rewarding one, always interesting and full of inspirations.
Stories happen to me all day long. Friends say I make them happen by what I do. Maybe there’s some truth to that, but mostly I just see them. Hang out with me, and I’ll see the stories in your life too. Technical truth is usually a lie. People build their lives out of appearances rather than realities. They almost always have secret inner lives, and yet they feel they are being honest with the world as long as they don’t live them outwardly. That has always struck me as ludicrous and precisely backward. Why should appearances rule? Yet they do. Less so for me. I like that. True, I conform to many situations because I try not to offend or hurt anyone, but I also seek to live true to myself as many hours of the day as I can. Where and when do you live honestly? Ideally you find a soulmate with whom you can share that inner being, but failing that (as most people do) you choose either to be alone or you live a secret life beneath appearances. Inner honesty is crucial for me as a person, as a writer. I must have that. Every day. It frees me up to a whole lot of things, including making impossibilities into realities.
It might surprise you (or not) to know that stories almost always evolve from spontaneity for me rather than a plan. The plan is a coherent coming together of a pattern from those unexpected and inspiring events. Sort of like an unplanned pregnancy. Here’s one that’s perking in embryo right now:
Early this spring, when the Indian grass was 6 feet high in a place I call the Golden Meadow, I paid a visit to exquisite memories. We’re talking story quality memories and beyond already, so inspiration’s pilot light was already on. Somehow in the wandering breezes of that interlude I leaned over a cup-sized hole in the earth and my cell phone dropped dead center into it. Astonishing. Couldn’t have done it on a bet. Not so amusing, though, when I reached in only to find my hand choked off before it touched the slim phone. A little scrabbling and clawing did nothing in the hard ground, and I withdrew my fingers. The hole was too big to have been made by a snake, two small for a fox, but I imagined carnivorous incisors poised for a lucky lunch of “finger” snacks at my expense.
There were half a dozen holes in close proximity, and so I refined the picture to a burrow of gophers or other meadow munchers celebrating their lucky find while looking up the phone numbers of all their cousins in China. I glanced around for a branch to break into chopsticks, thinking I could leverage the phone out, but I probably had an equal chance of wedging it deeper, so with a nod to karma for its neat practical joke on me I went back to the car for a spade. Did I mention that there were half a dozen of these holes? I thought about that before I went to the car — thought about marking the right one — but I didn’t, of course, and when I got back, confident I’d know which black hole was eating up my cell phone minutes…I didn’t.
Oh, you just have to laugh. You laugh and laugh and laugh. And then you swear.
I didn’t want to decimate a clan of rodents by any name, or explain why I was digging up six holes to the DNR, so that’s when I got the inspiration to chug back to the park nature center and call my son, the boy, the lad, Sean a.k.a. Shane hisself. I would have him call my cell, say, 10 minutes after I hung up, by which time I would be back in position to sort out the hole with the ringtone coming out of it. One problem. Odds of getting the busy lad on the fly like that are less than picking the right hole from a choice of six. And the odds won. But the kind lady overhearing all this from behind the desk offered to make the call, and that’s how a grown man crawling on all fours around six holes in a golden field eventually reached down and plucked a singing cell phone from the earth. Just another quirky episode in my eccentric life. But it would not have happened if I didn’t live in the center of an intricate maze of meaningful cues and romantic associations.
How are all these spontaneous little acts and circumstances going to merge into a plan? Well…I don’t know. Yet. But I know they will. They already have in my life, because it is — after all — the Golden Meadow, and there I was searching in the darkness of the bleeding earth for what I could no longer see, and there were the ringtones playing “It’s only words, and words are all I have to take your heart away…” (Boyzone or Bee Gees, take your pick) and somehow, somewhere this will merge with the mirrors and echoes of my (he)art.
Spontaneous events are like pieces of stained glass, and when you collect enough of them you have a window on a new scene.
May I invite you to follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/thomassullivan )? It’s fun and unintrusive. I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for my free newsletter, which includes photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net . Past newsletters are archived at the website below. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, my new short story, “Case White,” is out in the latest issue of Cemetery Dance http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/_cd060 , and the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website. May summer’s horizons be yours.
Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/
http://twitter.com/thomassullivan
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Comments
Comment by Robert Jones on July 17, 2009 @ 12:55 pm
You need never be concerned about anyone ever mistaking you for a spectative, sedentary Kool-Aid drinker. Significant growth and especially a rotation of associations (Technicolor mice running track is a great image) are attributives that define your very being. Your latest unplug is an example. In it, you demonstrate a smooth rotation from planning and spontaneity, through initial and terminal hooks, to the ludicrousness of building lives out of external appearances rather than internal realities. (Why indeed should appearances rule?)
Your next angular displacement quickly brings readers to another illustrative tour of nature as you invite us along while you anticipate the possibility of carnivorous incisors waiting in a classic, Athenian Underworld to receive sacrificial fingers. (I shared that feeling when I used to imagine what might be salivating in dark, underwater caves in reefs as whatever it was watched me swim past.)
In regard to what starts one’s writing engine, when I was regularly writing newspaper columns, they were often an offspring of an overall, basic theme; but they were sometimes developed from an idea for only a beginning or an ending. The central, bellows portion usually seemed to expand almost effortlessly.
Comment by Thomas Sullivan on July 17, 2009 @ 2:26 pm
“…the ludicrousness of building lives out of external appearances rather than internal realities.” Amen, Amalgam. Almost everyone knows the truth within their hearts, but living that — even with one person — is the hardest thing in the world. And yet that’s where the greatest reward is. How can one achieve/acquire anything worth having without at least trying to live truth as a foundation? This is why humans just have to be the #1 sitcom/drama for the god/gods/committee that created us and gave us free will. Courage vs. fear/guilt. I don’t think I’ve passed many tests in this life, but I hope I’m passing that one. Was it Jack London said he’d rather be ashes than dust? Yeah. Ashes testify to having lived. Dust never did. Thanks for placing me on that side of risk-taking. Can’t say I’ve reached many successful outcomes by it, but it’s never about the destination, is it? Not many of us will reach a destination, and those who do are often disappointed. It’s about the journey. And if that’s just a romantic ideal, so be it. Living the ideal has made reality magical…
– Sully
Comment by Robert Jones on July 17, 2009 @ 6:17 pm
As with your previous essays, this reader has come away entertained, with more wisdom and with thoughts to carry away and ponder. For what more could one wish?
Thank you, mon ami.
In view of your history with squirrels, kindly be careful of jaywalking with a feisty one. Just yesterday, I had one chomping away at a crack in the corner of my upper deck railing. I had to chase him away repeatedly. A few minutes ago, I had to chase away a large woodpecker that was excavating the same crack. He was replaced almost immediately by a blue jay. I don’t know what’s in that crack, but it must be something tasty in animal terms.
Amalgam
Comment by Thomas Sullivan on July 17, 2009 @ 7:11 pm
Revenge of the animals! Just this week repaired a porch post that a woodpecker made into a penthouse, and last night a cat and a fox got into it in the backyard. Chipmunk ran over my foot while I was playing T-sax in the garage, and a dog fell asleep on me while I was watching a movie at my adoptive family’s house last night. Seems like everything with fur or feathers is getting bolder. New world order? Maybe you’d better finish that dog book you’re working on in order to curry favor…
Sully
Comment by Wayne Allen Sallee on July 19, 2009 @ 10:19 pm
Sully, I overthink things when I’m writing a narrative and get to deep into the character’s mindset. Sometimes the story seems to write itself, the spontaneity is like when every single thing you do during a single day is simply right and effortless. At a certain point, the story carries you. I never outline. I have a title, a first line, and a last line.
Nice comments, Robert. Wow. London Rohmer, Houdini. You name droppers. Wait a minute. Rohmer and Houdini were on a boat that had left…London. Hmnnn. The circle tightens.
Comment by Thomas Sullivan on July 19, 2009 @ 10:39 pm
First line…last line. To my mind, you probably have two-thirds of the story right there, Wayne. Doubt that those two sentences would satisfy you unless they contained at least the seeds of a set-up and a resolution. An outline by any name…
You just look at things and see the frames around them, from what I’ve seen. Even your descriptions of Chicago stuff and everyday events carry larger than life messages. Which is why you are a natural writer, say I.
As for Houdini on the high seas, didn’t happen. As I recall, the magazine that was serializing Rohmer was Collier’s, and Sax arrived in New York in a panic because he had not been able to craft a way out of his perfect crime while crossing aboard ship, as he had intended. I think at the heart of it was a sealed room with no clues. Houdini was in New York, and it was his suggestion that if one of the characters lied, the premise could be undone enough to offer a solution. It was an 11th hour salvation for Rohmer, who seized upon it in time for the deadline. Or something like that. Loren Estleman is the one who told me about it, and he later gave me a collector’s copy of a bio of SR one Christmas that I think also had he story. Not sure about that last, though. Cheers.
Sully
Comment by Alan Russell on July 21, 2009 @ 5:14 pm
Let’s face it: Sully was jealous of Alice going down a rabbit hole, prompting him to have his cell phone do a swan dive.
Now how will he make hay out of this story? Maybe his cell phone will take a picture while in the depths . . . The result might be as frightening as that Sully Scarecrow.
Comment by Thomas Sullivan on July 21, 2009 @ 6:41 pm
Ooh! Like that plot angle. How about we use the Alice shrink-pill in chapter 2? What if everyone has a scarecrow and comes face to face with it down the hole? And what do the scarecrows scare and why?
Going to dust off my scarecrow story “To Walk the Earth” and redux it… Thanks, west-coast guru.
Sully
Comment by Sam Trend on July 24, 2009 @ 7:17 pm
Hmm, usually when I try to write story, that evolves on its own, I sooner or later come to a dead-end. I really prefer to plan all out before actual work.
Comment by Thomas Sullivan on July 24, 2009 @ 7:31 pm
Nothing wrong with going with what works for you. If it was a formula, the act of creativity could be memorized. That said, for me the way to avoid a dead end is to have that initial problem/conflict that begins a story resolved in one’s mind (the ending). Planning to that extent ensures a solution or resolution. And the narrative roads between conflict (beginning) and resolution (ending) can then circle and roam endlessly. Invention is wide open in that part. Dead ends thereafter probably only happen in subplots or character entanglements that are not thought through. Bottom line, if planning it all out doesn’t make your story sounds leaden and mechanical, I say go with it. But if you can only plan out the essential parts, you may find more freedom and inventiveness as you work out the narrative. Thanks, Sam…
Sully
