Thomas Sullivan

Several of my colleagues have written on the specifics of teaching, and I thought I’d address the soul-searching panic that can befall anyone who suddenly finds themselves called upon to give a speech, teach, or advise. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a single person asking you for advice or a trumped-up forum in which the local library has decided you should entertain the patrons at their monthly soiree, the pitfalls are the same. It can come as a shock when you realize that something you’ve done has settled a mantle of presumed wisdom on you – wisdom you don’t have. You may decide to hide, fake laryngitis, or – if you are one of those confident but lonely types – tell your life story…again. If the request comes at you enough times, however, guilt is likely to turn you inside out searching for messages and honest value in your life.

And if you’re kicking around the scene at the pro level, you will face this. The first time you are introduced with shameless adjectives to a friendly audience, you may get a little intoxicated with the attention. But you know, the reality is that YOU are not being adulated and this isn’t perfect justice arriving on Earth for you as you and your mother always knew it would. This is people who are interested in something you represent, and they are willing to give you a hearing. They want to know what you have to say. And you do have something to say. At a minimum, the route you took in your own idiosyncratic life is a path that may offer clues to others. If you have a little pizzazz or can abstract your own “This is what I did” story into abstract components, all the better. And if you can actually start to analyze your audience and customize what you say to who they are – in other words give them the attention you want – you really will come off acquitted in the eyes of God. I don’t care which religious or non-religious handle you give God, or what non de plume, for that matter, there is a survival imperative for all of us to leave the world better than we found it. That’s your own personal ledger, and it can be accomplished in quiet and anonymous ways, but hey, you’re a writer. You already went “splash.” So ride that wave ashore and try not to drown any sand castles.

It may happen spontaneously, so trust yourself to be spontaneous. Scripted works less well. I’m not saying you won’t fall into buzzwords or repeating whole tracts verbatim. If you are called upon to teach enough times, you will. The most important thing, though, is to remember that you are first of all a student. You have to keep learning and adapting to everything around you. You have to value what there is to learn from others, even if it’s simply from observing them. Everyone is a teacher because they are part of life. If you don’t remember that, you WILL become irrelevant, and your irrelevancy will be all you have to teach: dead, static moments that were true for you at one point in your existence but quite possibly no longer are.

Contrary to what you might think, I’m an extremely private person who has lived virtually alone his entire life. I grew used to showing different aspects of myself in different settings, and never my total self to anyone – incredibly, I never let my guard down until this past year when I met someone so natural to me that it just happened. So I didn’t know who to be in front of a large audience. Used to bother me that I’d see a lot of the same people showing up for my stump speeches before widely disparate (or was it desperate) groups. I knew damn well I was saying some of the same things, word for word, same zingers. But kind listeners always swore that it was different, and one time someone told me, “…you’re different.” That stuck with me. I still don’t know exactly what that means, but I’ve come to trust it a little. I think people tune into energy (or lack of same) as well as optimism, and as long as you’re you, energy and optimism will convey as much as specific words. Yeah, I have up days and down. And every day I yearn for solitude, or something shared only with a soulmate, but if you focus on the audience – SINCERELY – you will come up to the task. They will motivate you. So even if you are repeating humongous sermons word for word, those will likely resonate, if you repeat them from the heart and not the head. And if you are focused on the individuals listening, what you say will vary, because you will adapt to them.

The more speaking you do, the easier it gets. In fact, you may find it becomes almost a reflex. Not didactic exactly, but more enthusiastic, sort of cajoling, purposeful though not taking itself too seriously. It can intimidate the hell out of you, if it catches you by surprise. You are holding forth one on one somewhere in public – a ski rental room, a restaurant, waiting in a doctor’s office – and suddenly you realize others are listening, people passing through are staying, or there might be just a hint of theater-like concentration. Either they are thinking, “Who does this asshole think he is?” or they are finding what you say more interesting than the Ranger Rick magazine they are reading while waiting for the sawbones to see them. Take it in stride. Remember, it’s not about you. Not unless you get carried away with yourself. In which case, everyone will know soon enough. So do your thing. Don’t be afraid to give. If you have no value, you’ll have no audience. And if you do have an audience, keep an objective distance from it.

There is a downside to this, I should tell you. It may drain you and – curiously – leave you lonely. Hmm. I should probably stop right here and draw the curtain. Consider this the advanced footnotes the author should have thrown away. But I’ve pondered long and hard as to why I always feel alone after I climb down from a soapbox. Of course, the answer may be as simple as, “Well, dummy, you DID stand on a soapbox – how was the air up there?” But even when the reaction is effusively kind, I feel that way. Maybe it’s an individual thing, but I want to believe it’s because I’m doing it for the right reasons. If I’m pedaling myself, my ego, it never works. Lots of experience with pedaling my ego. But if I’m truly trying to give, I forget myself, and in the aftermath I feel like I wasn’t there. This is absolutely the most valuable thing that could happen to you if you want to honestl
y give – forget yourself, do not be there. But you may pay that price afterward, as I do. Maybe that’s because the ego comes rushing back, all your little fantasies of personal acceptance and fulfillment. Or maybe it’s because you’ve just parsed yourself out, played the prostitute, and now you’re faced with the hard fact that no one knows what you’re really like. That’s what you need a soulmate for. Someone interested in and capable of understanding the unique you. God help the audience if they have to play that role. We’ve all sat through captive classes run by such needy souls, have we not? An audience can give you the delusion that you have recouped the frustrations and compromises of an incomplete life. So maybe that’s the touchstone as far as knowing if you did a good job speaking, i.e., if you don’t feel just a tad lonely and isolated afterward, you were probably wallowing in the rapport instead of the needs of the audience. I’ll take that limitation. I think a lot of entertainers get lost in the interaction. The audience becomes their soulmate. But it only lasts as long as the cameras role, the disks spin, or the footlights remain on. Then they go looking for themselves and are disappointed. It’s a lonely world.

Which brings me full circle to the point I tried to make about remaining a student. I don’t want to reach a destination. Soon after we become adults, most of us seem to anchor on a plateau inside ourselves where life doesn’t expand, and there we resign our futures to the slow ravages of time. It’s as if we get tired of looking for answers and just grab up whatever is in our lives at the moment, declaring, “I’m there.” I guess that’s security for some, but not for me. My security is in not running out of momentum or directions. And I don’t need to move very far to find both. I just have to continue to explore the world wherever I am – rather thoroughly. The universe truly is in a grain of sand. An audience is part of that. It is not a reward conferred upon you, not something permanent, not as meaningful or satisfying as a soulmate. It is more like a resting point, a place to pause and reflect for perspective. So is writing, for that matter. Actual living stops when the words pour out of you. Words are a summation of what you do and know – the long shadows and bright reflections of everything you see and explore. Have you lived today? Open a window and get some air, or come outside and breathe!

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. My web site is below. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out the free sample chapter from my latest novel, THE WATER WOLF. And if you’d like to receive the monthly newsletter, ask to be added to the list at: mn333mn@earthlink.net

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

Ah. You’re back for Part 2. Please be seated. The guards are now sealing the exits.

Last month I wrote about optimism. I don’t think I ever actually used the word optimism, because I was talking mostly about pessimism and cynicism. Does that make me a pessimist? Hmmm. An optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds; a pessimist fears that’s true. Pick a color on the spectrum between the two, and color me anything but black, even though I drive a black car, like to wear black, and love Noir 86% dark chocolate bars. The thing of it is, as I tried to say in Part 1, there’s a lot of self-fulfilling prophecy in the attitudes one takes, particularly for people who want any kind of perfection or dare to risk failure, as writers must do. Hope makes you vulnerable and takes a little courage. You may deflect some disappointment or temper some shock by setting the bar of expectations low, but then why bother getting out of bed? If you’re going to do that, my advice is to postpone life and age as little as possible until you’re ready to get in the game. “A life without living, still is lost,” as the song goes. If you’re going to live at all, live large and sweat not the obstacles.

Humdrum scripted lives should be reserved for 24-hour insects: hatch, mate, find a blood meal, lay some eggs (if you’re of that persuasion), then die. Take your time dying if you want. Nothing much between laying the eggs and dying, so don’t suffer from useless things like hope. Just avoid getting swatted – pain – and veg out passively. Life sucks and then you die. Starting at 25 hours, though, we are into a whole new sunrise. Once you get that far, might as well die from a lethal dose of happiness, which means dust off the dreams you had before the world taught you to say “ouch!” Forget just minimizing unhappiness. Dare to be happy big-time and reach for whatever your perfect life is. This includes such reprehensible endeavors as becoming a writer. One needs only paper and pencil to become a writer, actually. In fact, a Taco Bell bathroom wall and a crayon will do. Be read by the next bad chimichanga customer, and you become a writer with a readership. Sell something to a publisher, and you can claim legitimacy in the marketplace. But first – as esteemed writer Richard Steinberg says – you must “Believe!” Miracles seldom happen to cynics.

I was a cynic once. Still am when it comes to humor. But down deep I’m always looking to max out the best of life. You can want to be happy, but if you don’t clear the red lights and the fear of driving, you can’t possibly reach your destination or even enjoy the journey. I dunno when it was I decided all this, or even if I ever did. Maybe it just came naturally, like a feeling. But I remember things like a coach telling me after I went what was probably my fastest 200-yard breastroke, “The watch didn’t start,” and I said, “Let’s not discount the possibility that I swam it in nothing flat.” Optimism. It starts the car and makes the lights turn green. Then all you have to do is push your foot on the accelerator. Or maybe it was gambling that taught me to hope. I think I faced a lot of fear early, and I know now what is worth losing – if it comes to that – and what isn’t. It never does come to that. But if it did, you still have everything if you have yourself and your ideals and – if you really hit the jackpot – someone to share them with. In fact, the only way to not have happiness is to live a life of compromise with yourself.

Writers especially have to face down that paper tiger of giving in to compromise, because they so often go against sterile lifestyles and stereotypical thinking. Being true to yourself is an island, and not for everybody, especially if you need a lot of social approval. Hope, fear and superstition float ashore with the tide each day, and you have to pick what stays with you and what you throw back in the ocean. That was another thing I tried to say in Part 1 [http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2007/07/16/thomas-sullivan-3-legged-stallions-hopping-toward-hope-between-the-garden-and-the-vacuum/] of this post. Your island should be self-sufficient, a reward onto itself. Make it that, and you are guaranteed happiness and satisfaction in life. As a writer, though, you are exporting notes in bottles. If and when you succeed in communicating your beauty and your wisdom, or maybe just your entertainment, society may put your island on their maps and give it a name and send tourists to worship you. But if you learned what there is to learn in the process of succeeding, you hate tourists. You even hate being worshipped. Not that I would have any personal experience with that, but it’s evident in the lives of truly fulfilled people who do.

As last month’s column tried to suggest before it reached an ungodly length and split like a cell, the reward is in being who you are, the same inside as you appear to be outside. You prove your point when you reach for perfection and are happy with the peace and honesty it brings. That’s the real success and all you need, really. For sure, fame and fortune are nothing without it. And there’s something else. Something that comes with intimate familiarity with the ups and down of fortune and coincidence. Last month I called it a game played by the gods of irony. I was not being all that metaphorical. In fact, as the person closest to me pointed out, cues and omens abounded in the wake of that article. Sometimes it’s impossible to deny that higher presences are testing you, teasing you, looking to see what you’re made of and whether or not you are worthy of your dreams. But the gods are not without compassion. They never seem to create fates where there are not choices and solutions. And it is usually demanding in the short-term. There are elements of our lives that are so important that they redefine us, change us forever, according to what we do. Emerson called it “compensation.” For me, these big swings of cosmic destiny offset the little inconsequential acts of fate and make all the difference in life. If you fail to recognize or answer one of these, you have truly lost something. I mentioned love and the saving of my son’s life as two such keystones for me. Let me end this column with a letter I wrote my lad after the latter event. Writer’s reflex, I guess. It doesn’t matter now, because years later the letter was published in The Detroit News, and subsequently picked up in a TV pilot by Tony Orlando of Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree fame, so it’s no longer just personal.

The guards have unsealed the exits, but here is the letter…

Dear son,
It may be some years before you read and understand this, but it must be written now. Since coming so close to losing you, I seem to have a need to go over and over what happened, to acknowledge how miraculous it is that you’re still here, and to draw closer to you in every way.

Even though you are only three, I think you feel a little of this, too. Especially the drawing closer part. A bump on the head, a scraped shin, small cuts send you looking for me now as much as for your mother; and there are moments – just brief moments – when I’m carrying you straddled on my hip with your arms around my neck, or holding you on my lap, that I see something much too old in your blue eyes. It may be a fixation on an undefined event in your memory, or a troubled glimpse into life’s grimmer possibilities, but it comes across your face like a trance, passing when you sigh and blink and drop your head on my shoulder. Afterward those delicate fingers of yours go to work on a button of my shirt, or a piece of fuzz from a blanket, and you are uncharacteristically quiet.

So we’re closer. Thank God we still have the opportunity.

The whole thing started when we went on vacation. Maybe it even started before that. Your mother and I took you to register for pre-sc
hool just before we left, and the secretary there said we would have to send for your birth certificate. I don’t know whether it was a premonition or what, but I didn’t want to wait. Somehow I felt you had to be registered before we went on vacation – a kind of insurance policy, I guess, that you would have to come back for pre-school in the fall. It even occurred to me fleetingly that if I lost you, I would register you anyway when I got back. But I quickly banished the whole fear from my thoughts.

Then we were on our way, and the heat and the traffic and the scenery took over. We stopped in the town I grew up in, and after that you and your sister were tired of traveling, so it was: “Sean, stop hitting your sister!” and “Colleen, quit teasing your brother!” from the front seat the rest of the afternoon.

We reached our friends house on Lake Michigan above Traverse City and there spent two wonderful days. There was the kayak, and your sister’s growing shell collection, a bonfire, a tour of a coastguard cutter, and the water slide. You chased the grown-ups through the sand waving noxious, dead “alewives” that had washed up on the beach; and the stony shallows kept you from venturing out too far.

Then it was back in the car and straight through the Upper Peninsula into Canada. The country got more wildly beautiful, more awesomely serene, but I wanted to go where no one was.

The locals directed us to a place where there was nothing on the map and as usual made a fuss over you – the blue-eyed, blond-haired wonder child, precocious, forthright, with the slightly husky voice and engaging mannerisms. Your sister, though only six, was remarkably good about all this attention, as usual, and even showed you off.

Your old man’s penuriousness was as much a factor as solemnity in our final choice of a camp. Snowshoe it was called. Five miles down a nearly impassable lane. It was under reconstruction, having deteriorated to the point of collapse. There were outhouses and primitive facilities, but we were the only guests, and the lake – the lake was a huge donut, as much as 240 feet deep, with an island maybe two miles square. And the whole thing – lake and island and woods – was devoid of humanity. We settled in.

Your mother and I reveled in watching you and your sister prance barefoot down a shaded path to a sunlit beach where you built your castles and found exotic fauna. We explored the lake, and you thrummed on the bottom of the boat scaring the fish away. When the wind whipped up waves off the head of the island your mother insisted I turn back. We had a bouncy return trip, and I could see your white faces looking very small above the orange life jackets.

But the next day you didn’t have a life jacket . . .

There was a waterfall that skimmed warm water off a higher lake, making a swimming lagoon near the camp. A jetty divided it, and I had just gone off the open channel side to cool off, while your sister played on the shore. In the meantime you were telling your mother in the cabin: “It’s about time I learned to swim, I’m going down with daddy and struggle with it!”

Whatever possessed your truculent soul to march down that path toward such a hideous misjudgment, we’ll never know, but down you came to the other side of the jetty. Nor did I know just exactly when you entered the water, nor when the steeply sloped sand gave way under your feet. What I do know is that for some reason I felt compelled to swim around the end of that jetty, and that, even after my eyes were drawn to the cat that sat on the log there, I felt compelled to turn further. And that was when the riveting tragedy finally reached me.

You were just a pair of wrists and spread fingers above the water, and the merest glance of a nearly horizontal face, eyes wide in surprise, mouth gaping and twisted. Even now, I have to stop as I write this . . .

So.

I sprinted to you, maybe twenty yards, head up, and the most I could see was your blond hair massed just below the surface. There was no doubt in my mind you were swallowing water, and I knew it only take seconds sometimes. I remember thinking I’d have to give you mouth-to-mouth, and then my last stroke went down and under you, and my palm on your bottom shot you up and above the water. That critical split second of looking at you, as if on a pedestal, supplied indelible relief, because even though you were purple, your eyes were open and you coughed and gasped.

I have never felt such an intense rush of emotion, or so mixed. You clung to me, and I reassured you, and the first thing you said when you could breathe again was a very stoic and sincere: “You’re gonna hafta teach me to swim, Dad . . .”

Quailing inside, I stood you on the shore and went back in to show-off for you, so you wouldn’t be afraid of the water.

For the next two days that scene kept repeating with increasing vividness in my mind. I marvel at the timing. Had I looked a second or so late, I might never have seen you again in that black water.

What a blessing it is to fret over a mosquito bite on your downy forearm. The moments with you and your sister and your mother seem incredibly precious to me now. As the years pass, and you children grow into your own families, we’ll forget these things. That’s why I want to write this now. So you’ll remember a time and an event and how it made us aware of each other. So you’ll know – I love you, son.
Dad
p.s. I will teach you to swim!

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. My web site is below. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out the free sample chapter from my latest novel, THE WATER WOLF. And if you’d like to receive the monthly newsletter, ask to be added to the list at: mn333mn@earthlink.net

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

Hello, pen. Hello, paper. Hello, computer screen. You are the three faces of my family. Me, myself and I. You have always been there, always will be. Thank you for that. Damn you for that. Because you are all there is.

Writing is a reflection of a solitary state. I don’t need a mirror of words to tell me that. Whatever the tangles of my soul, there is no untying them. The Gordian knot lies within. And never lies. At least there is that. Truth. At the end of the day that is faint consolation. At the end of a season it is hollow. But at the end of life? I expect it will be enough. It has to be.  

Everything I wrote above is true for me…was true for me at the time I wrote it. I thought that writing and being read was a way of escaping the solitude of one’s personality. And it is, as far as it goes. But you know, there are exquisite possibilities no matter how complex and inaccessible you may think you are. And for a writer that may mean that you can do more than just pen letters to the world to be read by strangers. It means you may interact one on one, if you run into the muse who can draw that out of you. Creating from the deepest part of you, as true artists do, is a little like sending a signal into deep space hoping it reaches intelligent life. Most artists who keep faith with themselves never expect to make full contact. The audience is a compromise of your fantasy, and you’re lucky to have any part of it in this competitive world. A muse is a preview of coming attractions and subject to the same limited possibilities as any group of respondents. Or unlimited possibilities, if you’re lucky enough to find that eclectic person who can span the same ranges you do. Then you may interact without compromise, and that is liberating to a writer’s soul, an analyst’s mind, and a poet’s heart. Call it what you will – simpatico, empathy, a meeting of ideals and tastes, sheer congruency of the rarest type – it compounds the possibilities for both inner space and outer reality.

I suspect I’m describing a lot of writers in a general way. Describing a lot of people, actually, writers or not. You don’t have to be the fly on the wall to discover that people need to express their inner cores. What are prayers, if not that? Or silent communes in the woods, or wishing on stars, or watching a fire burn down as if the sparks are the freed heat of one’s soul. People talk to dead loved ones, or to themselves, or if they feel self-conscious, then to pets furred, finned or feathered with whom they may keep up both ends of a running conversation. I spoke to my mother for a time after she died, just so you know where I’m coming from. And I catch myself now and then saying out loud, “…I miss you, man,” to Freddie Bean, a cowboy writer who rode over the horizon too soon. I wrote a while back about the beast of the Lawndale Hotel who I thought beat and berated his roommate, only to find out he didn’t have a roommate (http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2007/01/16/thomas-sullivan-empty-boxes-i-have-worn/). Expression. What doesn’t come out, dies and kills the host a little. Only, where do you let it out? People think I’m gregarious as hell, but what they see (and it will vary) are personae that hang in the closet with my other clothes when I return to my inner sanctum. I have always had solitary pursuits for my naked soul to come totally together. The T-sax, working out, transits under stars, wandering alone in the woods, driving at night. You do too. Think about it. Whoever you are – whoever you really are – like a vampire fleeing the light of exposure, you must return to your native soil every 24 hours. It’s a darkness that will allow you to restore and metamorphose and manage so that you can rise up fresh for the world and its relationships. If you’re a writer, the rising up fresh is essential, because the gateway to the world looks very much like the cover of your next book or the next page you write of a work-in-progress. So how much better if you have the possibility of restoring yourself in the presence of an actual human being: a muse?

But how do you relate to a muse? I thought I knew. I thought it was a variation on management, a control situation in which you know who you are revealing something to and therefore can gauge their reaction. You allow yourself to be managed in a “what if?” way, because for those moments of exchange you are letting them be your whole audience. It’s difficult to find muses who can give you candid reactions. They will likely feel under the gun to be more than themselves. It’s a Goldilocks need you have for something not too extreme, not too sparse, but just right with honesty, objectivity and spontaneity. Add inspirational. That’s the part I didn’t get.

I didn’t get it because it never really occurred to me that a muse could be a muse BEFORE you have written something. It’s difficult enough for most writers to show an unfinished ms, but to let someone see your thoughts being assembled with all the rough edges is a challenge. I am apt to create multiple and conflicting layers of the same scenes when I write and to gloss over weak elements I take on faith that I can make credible. No chance for perfection at that stage. Sort of like making sausage – you don’t want people to see what goes into it. That’s a lot of trust. But you know, it takes you a whole lot further down the road if you can actually express your inner thoughts to someone as opposed to have them whisper and die half-formed in your mind. The very act of articulating them in whole statements and then knowing they are shared makes them less likely to be lost or left in limbo.

Give me credit for recognizing it, at least, when it happened. It really wasn’t much different from the circumstances I wrote about in http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/09/16/thomas-sullivan-ky-jelly-the-headless-squirrel/, the first of my Cannibal Essays meant to help writers find the stories in their lives. I wrote then: “Helps if you have a mentor, companion, relationship with someone who is like that. Kills you if you have someone just the opposite who dulls you down, smothers you, and inhibits your potential…the worst thing is to miss a catalyst in your life.” I should have added “muse.” But I wasn’t thinking prescriptively about that term then. A muse was sort of post mortem to having writ. Now I’m suggesting that a muse is a dress rehearsal before you even write, someone who can actually trigger your voice and awaken you to your full range. Someone perhaps who sees you more clearly than you see yourself at times, and who – by their very presence – causes you to develop and express your thoughts. Here’s an example of the difference:

Take #1 [from my stream of consciousness]: There is a very large broken branch hung up in the towering basswood in my backyard. It has been lodged there for at least two years, and sooner or later it’s going to come down – maybe on me while I’m mowing the lawn. I should throw some stuff at the branch to try to knock it loose. I threw some stuff at it.

Take #2 [to my muse]: “…so I’ve always had this thing about this Greek general Perseus. He was sort of invincible. I mean the guy was a cat with a refillable prescription for nine lives. Nothing could take him out, until he was in some victory parade and an old lady accidentally tips this flowerpot out her window and clocks him dead as he’s marching past. So that’s how I figure I’m gonna go, you know? Something stupid. And here’s this branch hanging up there like a Sword of Damocles. So I’m on it two years ago in my head, like nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag. But I don’t really do anything about it except cut the grass funny underneath it, shouting “Timber!” as I gun the Toro push mower. The grass there looks like a bad haircut on the Jolly Green Giant. Winter arrives and storm after storm comes through. Nada for the seesawing branch. So now it’s mow time again, and the branch is looking lethal, so I borrow the neighbor kid’s basketball from her aunt. There’s a strip of trees and some underbrush between the basswood and the lake, so I figure the basketball will stay in-bounds, right? I heave the sucker 60 feet in the air, it bounces 30 feet and bumps through the underbrush like a pinball at the World Championships. Splash and bon voyage. Kid doesn’t even know her stupid neighbor has her basketball, and I’ve already pitched it in the lake. I spend the next half hour following it along the shoreline in my bare feet, scrambling over rocks wire-meshed into a levy trying to reach the basketball with a stick, but the wind is blowing in brisk circles like its got eyes and a sense of humor. I finally get a finger on the ball and bounce it water polo style to get my palm under it. So now I’m out of the NBA, and I get a sisal rope and thread it through three rusty sockets from a socket wrench. Slingblade Sully whirls and tosses. Up, up she goes, like the Hindu rope trick, only then the rope falls back slack and the last I see of the steel sockets they are disappearing over the neighbor’s lawn. This is the same neighbor whose kid’s basketball I just pitched in the lake. Can’t wait for him to mow the lawn. MAPLE GROVE MAN FOUND WITH SHRAPNEL WOUND IN CHEST. PRESUMED BOMB EXPLOSION COVERED BY SOUND OF LAWN MOWER. IDIOT NEXT DOOR SHRUGS, SAYS, “I DIDN’T HEAR NOTHIN’.” It will be the first homicide in this ‘burg in 22 years. Maybe they’ll think it’s terrorism, which it sorta is, since last time I flew on a plane I was on a terrorist watch list and now I’m bonded to every customs agent from here to Nassau. The next brainstorm for lobbing something at the branch is short and dumber even than the first two. I try an iron bar but lose sight of it as soon as it’s above my head. You don’t need the details, but hey, Perseus died, I live. But now I’m all for the proper branch snagging equipment, and I go to Walmart where I discover SpiderWire. This is fishing line. I get the 50-lb test spool and a little bag of “egg sinkers,” whatever those are. I stick a drill extender with a socket on one end through the spool, so that it will spin out freely. Back on the lake, one swing and all I know is the egg sinkers and the SpiderWire went UP. I do the womb position again, waiting for it to rain sinkers, but this time the sky does not fall. Two lead sinkers going on forever, passing space probes on the way to the edge of the Universe. Or, look on the bright side, maybe they took out the other neighbor’s hyper dog named Bear (no relation to Elizabeth). Looked all over. No line laying anywhere, no sinkers. Probably up in the tree right where I wanted it. Except now I see the end of the line is only three feet from the spool. The sucker broke. 50 lb test line! I can’t believe it. What the hell, we don’t need Star Wars Missile Defense, just put Sully out there with his egg sinkers and 50-lb test line. Back in the house for the remaining sinker. This time I tie a double bowline. In the yard, I start to swing the weighted SpiderWire and it sounds like an Australian bullroar – whooom! whooom! whooom. Cowardly people are grabbing up their children on the lake trail beyond the thin strip of trees. They act like I don’t know what I’m doing. I let go, and the bullroar rips through the air and catches the wrong branch. Also the wrong tree. I don’t know what I’m doing. I play tug o’ war with the tree for a while, then snag another branch. The squirrels are going nuts, and not for nuts. Apparently, they can’t see the SpiderWire either, and when I tug and the branches start swaying here, there and everywhere, they flip out, scurrying around trunks, dodging invisible pursuit. Man, you do not know where egg sinkers and SpiderWire are going to travel when you let go. On try number 27 I have so much line off the spool that it’s wrapped around both my legs, and the sinker shoots back like a yoyo, nearly taking off my kneecap. This is embarrassing. TERRORIST FOUND TIED UP AND STARVED TO DEATH IN BACK YARD. SUICIDE SUSPECTED (SNICKER). It’s getting dark and I can barely see the fishing line in the grass. I have my scuddy yard shoes on and the SpiderWire keeps catching on the Velcro tabs. I end up having to take the shoes off, but there is no circulation in my
left foot below where the line is still wound around my cuff. I see the solution, but I absolutely will not do it. No way. There is such a thing as dignity, you know. My foot is beginning to look a coal scuttle. I will do it. I take off my pants. Suddenly there are no more people on the trails, and I hear the disturbing laughter of children, which is almost the same as the laughter of disturbed children. In the failing light I see that the end of the metal drill extender isn’t a socket like I thought, but a drum rasp. This could explain how the 50-lb test line broke. But the 473^rd time is the charm and I catch the branch. Full moon, but what the hell, I’ll wait for daylight. I’m getting good at this. Tree 473, Sully 0.”

The second take, of course, is an approximation of how I told it to my friend, a muse for every season. So the truth finally dawned on me. The true definition of a muse is inspiration.

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. My web site is below. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out the free sample chapter from my latest novel, THE WATER WOLF.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com

Old writers never die, they just switch to invisible ink and become ghost writers. I’m not sure whether that puts them in Writers’ Heaven or Writers’ Hell. This is because I’ve already been a ghost writer, and it was a little of each. I’m only going to tell you about Writers’ Hell, though, on account of the heavenly experiences were for people whose names I can’t mention, while the Hell stuff was purely of my own design. I should get credit for time served for the Hell stuff.

If ghost-writing isn’t the most satisfying profession in the world, it has a lot in common with the oldest. You have to be able to walk whatever side of the street you find yourself on, discretion is always called for, the paying client’s wishes are your command, and it’s pay for say if not for play. I absolutely must reinforce the great divide, however. Those few times I wrote for well-known people were without exception rewarding experiences; and the anonymous things I wrote for anonymous people were the most problematic. Funny, because you might think it was just the opposite. Fame and high profile enflame ego and vanity, don’t they? Not so in my limited experience. The only explanation I can offer is that the glitter jobs came to me when I wasn’t looking to do anyone’s writing but my own. The smaller ones were a consequence of actually starting a business called Mouthpiece Phone & Letter Service. “Scared money never wins,” as a con-man mentor of mine used to say. The harder I pushed to promote myself earlier in my career, the less anyone cared. The more I resisted jobs that came at me later when I really didn’t want to write for anyone else, the better and more tempting the offers. I don’t know, maybe you can just let your work speak for itself over time; but it seems to me that people have to be told that something is meritworthy, and then – deserved or not – you get your shot. That’s always the first hurdle for any kind of an artist.

Right out of the chute Mouthpiece was ill-defined. But that was okay with me, since creativity and words were all I intended to sell. Could’ve cared less about the format. That “anything goes” attitude probably doomed me from the start, because it is all too easy to slip across the border between the abstract and the real, inserting yourself as a player in a comedy or a drama. And the first client I had was a thirtyish woman who barely spoke English and wanted me to write a love letter for her to an octogenarian millionaire with whom she was having an affair. I will call her Zeta. Tough to write with a Greek accent, but I was up to the challenge of coy passion writ simply, I thought. That was before I learned that the well-heeled geezer was on his deathbed and that Zeta didn’t want dying to interrupt their pending marriage. Small problem. I revised the letter to reflect desperate passion writ large. It wasn’t until the plea was delivered that I met the extended cast of thugs, lawyers and expectant heirs arrayed against the sobbing siren from Greece. At this point a reasonably sane professional writer would have understood that the handwriting on the wall was not his own. I am not reasonably sane. Sex and violence, I thought, I am gathering material. It wasn’t until it came home to me that I might have a whole lot to do with the violence that I returned Zeta’s fee, escaping barely wounded with my head permanently turned around backward so that I could keep looking over my shoulder. Yes, I am drawing the curtain a little short of the final lines, on account of revenge is not subject to statutes of limitation. And I shouldn’t tell you this, but I am hampered by carpal tunnel this month and inclined toward economy.

My wife (now ex) was not thrilled, but then she was less “not thrilled” than she would have been had she known the full extent of the story. I taught school during the day, and so she often answered the phone, and this gave her steadily growing reasons to dislike the new business. For starters, there were the crude calls from creatures who wanted her to say anatomically graphic things to them. Nowadays they are called “Love Connections” or “Love Line,” but back then we just called them “obscene phone calls.” And there were any number of alarming requests and desperate stories that poured in. Rending entanglements, incoherent pleas, pure psycho rants. I regret that I probably never heard the best of those calls. I did get the one from the president of a local dairy, however. He wanted me to play a gag on a friend of his. “You make it up,” he said, “but this guy will go to any lengths for a practical joke, so feel free.”

Free. My favorite word, and “freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” according to Janis Joplin.

The target was a steel executive who had this huge isolated house backed up against the woods in opulent West Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and a patch of emerald green backyard just begging to have something buried in it. I will call him Bob Thompson. Now you’re probably thinking, Sully screwed up by moving a body from a cemetery or something, right? And I admit to mulling over some far-out possibilities – like running railroad tracks stacked at a nearby trestle up to his back door or burying the Man of Steel’s dog in an airy box with a breather tube until he heard it barking. But Rover was a Rottweiller without his owner’s sense of humor, and so I bought the biggest bottle of gin you ever saw – Gilbey’s, 3-feet tall – and made a coffin for it – 3-foot coffin. The small coffin would turn out to be a luckless detail.

The comings and goings of the family were a problem, and I had to use some ruses to get them all out of the house, but when the moment came, I struck with precision. Shovel, wooden cross, gin, coffin, parking with access to the woods. Some sidebars I won’t go into, but I had to take a neighbor into my confidence when she spotted me while the Rotty went crazy inside the house, and I didn’t count on the bees. Not killer bees or a swarm, just freelancers. Stung twice, I must have looked like something all elbows from the Kama Sutra as I dug and whirled and swatted, and I am certain that I achieved the notorious “grasshopper milking a cow” position when I embraced the coffin to lower it gently into the earth. Authors shouldn’t actually dig plots, they should write them. Ideally, the hole should have been deep enough so that Bob Thompson might stumble on a few Chinese artifacts before getting to the coffin, but I was discovering that a hole barely three feet d
eep contains several cubic miles of dirt. Alas, the inscription I put on the cross has faded from memory. Let us assume it was infinitely clever. And there must have been a clue, or a challenge, or a tease, because of course Bob Thompson would know it was a joke, would resist digging; so it had to be something that would haunt him and keep him awake nights until he gave in and went to the shed for a shovel.

I do remember the fatal step in this elaborate folderol as far as I was concerned. It was a Happy Ad in the Detroit Free Press. Happy ads are subject to editorial scrutiny, but somehow I talked my way past the Classified’s editor over the phone. The single line was: “Who is buried in Bob Thompson’s backyard?” And I guess that should have been a satisfying conclusion. The dairy guy was delighted, the Man of Steel now had revenge to keep him occupied, and I got generously paid. Except that for nearly two years a serial killer had been mounting a grim tally in southeast Michigan, and I never considered that. Someone quickly drew attention to the Happy Ad, and the Oakland County child murder task force wanted to know just who was buried in a backyard in West Bloomfield Hills.

I was not there for the exhumation of the 3-foot coffin. But my ex was there for the first phone call. The school was sort of used to calling me out of class for bizarre reasons, but this was more than just flamboyant. Smiles were hard to come by for a spell, and Hell had clearly frozen over by the time I got home to Happy Valley. My ex never said a thing, and I just sort of zipped up Mouthpiece for good. No more surrogate letters for disgruntled employees, unsavory lovers, and grudge-holding victims. I’m still not officially out of the biz, though Mouthpiece has not advertised or had a customer in twenty years. Not a good repeat biz rate. But then not much that happened could be repeated.

The funeral for the gin bottle all came back to me this Halloween when the family down the street turned their lawn into a cemetery. You know, miniature iron fence, dead leaves stuck in fake spider webs like sucked-dry insects, crooked tombstones with killer rhymes (“Here lies Jeb/his life was full/until he tried to milk a bull”). Most of the trick-or-treaters this year were older teens who looked like they had taken a night off from boosting car stereos. They came to the door sans costume in the middle of the night with pillowcases, smoking cigarettes. Next year I’m giving out Marlboros – candy, of course (do they still make candy smokes). Teens should be thrilled. Well, it is TRICK or treat, and playing jokes dies hard.

Must apologize, as I had intended to write a couple more pages, heavy on the encouragement and advice for writers. Sad to say, the 3^rd and 4^th carpal surgeries don’t seem to be relieving the problem, so I have to quit early. If you absolutely lust for my deathless prose, or just can’t believe I actually get paid for it, feel free to check out the sample chapter of my new paperback release THE WATER WOLF [www.thomassullivanauthor.com]. At $7.99 it’s a great stocking stuffer! Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome and your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

www.thomassullivanauthor.com

K-Y, K-Y – not “KY,” as I wrote in September’s column, http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/09/16/thomas-sullivan-ky-jelly-the-headless-squirrel/. “KY” is what Rodan shrieks when it is lumbering out of the ocean or flapping through Tokyo popping tourists for fingersnacks. Titles aside, last month’s column introduced Cannibal Essays or How to Edit Life, my attempt to inspire writers and people in general to see the content of their lives and to put frames around it. Agent Bingo was supposed to be part of that ramble, but I ran out of space blathering about roaring down the expressway with my arm out the window until a bug flew up my cast. Cast, cast, I said a bug flew up my cast.

That essay was mostly lunacy, life in a funhouse mirror. I was going to balance it off with a switch in tones and some further comments on drawing stories out of events and relationships. That’s what I’m catching up to here.

Most of the time I like to go alone out in nature, but if I meet someone special who I think can get something out of it, I very much like to share it. And to be honest, about half the time that I go out, I wind up meeting someone and sharing it that way. You can make transcendent things happen in your life. In fact, if you’re sitting around waiting for them to happen, you are living in slow motion. As a writer, you must not only learn to recognize life, you have to go out and meet it. Here’s an example of something that had plenty of spontaneity, unknowns and wild cards, but it also arose because I knew it would happen sometime, somewhere and with someone.  

Anyone who has read even a little of my writing, knows that exquisite journeys into nature each day are prime resources for me. Whether I’m soaring along rivers of light cascading through autumn leaves in a pristine forest or gliding phantom-like through gluey green shallows in a canoe, I breathe ether outdoors. Naturally, I have special places and things to share, and they hold the potential for indelible memories. For me. And for someone I might invite to an inner sanctum.

Just such an epiphany of elements came together for a friend and me last winter. But part of the point here is that this occasion wasn’t left entirely to chance. It was different from just running into a friend or a stranger, as I seem to do every day on the trails or elsewhere. The latter are terrific but distinctly random: a gymnast rehabbing her knee, a recovering alcoholic who has discovered the runner within himself, a solitary cyclist who has grown away from her sedentary husband, the serious Olympic team contender who wants one more shot before her college career fades, a young architect who reads Ayn Rand while she walks until I show her the living cathedrals of light and motion all around her. Each of them offers me a glimpse of their life and I reciprocate, as if we share a yellow brick road and a Technicolor adventure in an Oz of our own design before returning to the black and white Kansas from which we entered these escapes. These are stolen hours, secret lives where the ordinal things of prescribed days are suspended. It’s very addictive and impossible to adequately describe. But a lot of it has to do with choice: what we talk about, knowing that it is said in a sanctuary that won’t carry over to the rest of our lives, what we see along the way, and how we interact with our surroundings and ourselves. It’s a full sensory press when you’re out in nature, when you’re using your body, mind and spirit to capacity. And there are settings that are just wrong for some, right for others. So I had this set of things I wanted to share, and it had to be with the right person.

Enter Agent Bingo, aka Katie Hilpisch, a young biomedical engineer, who has a literary side to her. We met at a hockey game, and she is one of my muses. I have a number of those, some who failure test my work, like Elizabeth Dyhouse (who always influences what I am working on), some who inspire thoughts and conversation, some who do not even know they are my muse. Agent Bingo is not my demographic of age or background. That’s a plus. She reads a ton of books. Another plus. She knows where I’m coming from. Not necessarily a plus, but inevitable if you are lucky enough to find a good muse or two that you can utilize close at hand. She is blunt and honest and has no need to prove her insights. Plus, plus, plus. If I dig for her thoughts, she provides them – thoughtfully – but is immune to any leading of the witness I may commit. I don’t remember why I call her Agent Bingo, but she calls me Snowman or Ninja or whatever names we have made up in our correspondence, which seems vaguely set in a pseudo world of espionage and missions. We keep the farce going and share occasional sojourns in the great outdoors, which we both love, or wander bookstores and chill out at coffee bars. At 29, she plays hockey, softball, blades, bikes, triathlons. Until last winter she had not skinny skied, but I guessed she would love it, and that she would feel the rhythm, get the poetry, and add to both.

So Agent Bingo was the right person to share some elements that were gathering that winter, if only she would accept my invitation, and her enthusiasm for the idea when she did accept seemed to confirm that. I knew it would be memorable and that sooner or later I would draw on it as part of my life and my work, if they are not the same thing. And they often are. I stress that this “making of memories” is anything but formal or even dramatic. On the contrary, it is subtle. One of the mistakes I think people make is believing that the high points of their lives center around some distant vacation or organized event. Not that those things aren’t highlights, just that if you need to be orchestrated full symphony like that, then you are missing a lot of duets, solos and combos in the interludes. Life happens. Be there. It is not necessarily over the horizon or glittering with planned perfection.

Planned perfection. There was some of that at the vast and varied Three Rivers nature preserve called Elm Creek the day Katie and I went out. Well, unplanned perfection anyway. It was the night before Valentine’s Day. A full moon. Air as thin as ether. Crystalline snow that makes a caressing sound as you carve through it on cc skis. Animated silhouettes slipping through the trees on wing or hoof or furry pads. Actually, Katie took off from work at noon, giving
us time for a little anticipation and spirited talk looking out my window at a frozen lake where eagles make daily visits. And Christmas visits. Because it was a holiday gift of Godiva chocolates and black cherries in brandy from Eagles’ music legend Glenn Frey and his talented wife Cindy that we stowed in my backpack. The plan was to reach a certain distant deer overlook I knew of where we could sit on a promontory, eat 78% of the world’s chocolate reserves while Willie Wonka lurked in the bushes, and gaze out at vistas of white diamonds and yellow reeds brushing a cobalt sky. But, of course, whatever you imagine, it will be different and better. A short drive and we were fitting rental skis on Agent Bingo, and then we were out on the trails.

She took to it like I knew she would, an athletic natural but heedless of a few soft falls and the breathless challenge. Check out some photos in my free newsletter (email mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll send you one every month). We didn’t push it, just enjoyed the climbs and exhilarating downsweeps, pausing on stone or wooden bridges, finding stories in the tracks in the snow, playing an espionage game when I clued her to uncover an overgrown windmill almost invisible in a thick and towering woods. We put the hemorrhaging sun to bed on one horizon and birthed the full moon on another. The latter rose like a luminous pearl over the crest of the trail. Then down phantom blue lanes into near midnight where Agent Bingo discerned a deer I missed in a copse as thick as a pile of Pick-Up-Stix. And now the moon was louvered by cloudy fingers as we reached a high meadow, climbing, climbing, until that “ghostly galleon” sailed free on top of us (shades of Pirates of the Caribbean) and we were sitting on a stone bench.

We ate Godiva chocolates and sampled the cherries in brandy, and as if cued to perform, the most eerie chorus of coyotes erupted close by. They do this sometimes. A corybantic frenzy from somewhere just around sunset or moonrise. You never see them. But their discordant howling chimes in suddenly as if their territories have converged or they have found an atavistic trigger in the galvanizing moon. Blood-chilling and beautiful.

And then we were coming off the meadow in graceful sweeps, down into the woods and along a picturesque creek lined with sentinel pines and dotted with quaint wooden bridges. I showed Agent Bingo where beavers were building a dam, and we skied through silent moonlit awescapes you just can’t describe, because that would be only visual, and these are palpable to all senses.

Agent Bingo is a trooper. I should be shot for taking her on a two-hour first journey that lasted four. But she never complained, and she was exhilarated – is still exhilarated over the memory a year later. We came back in through a series of runs, knowing we owned the world and maybe the universe. Hard to think otherwise when you are standing steaming under the cosmos looking down an escarpment at an ephemeral white lake. And orange trail lamps beyond, like ordinal spotlights, lead you home, decompressing you back into the black and white world. Except you can never really go home again, as Thomas Wolfe said. My colleagues have been bandying that notion around of late, but in this case, once you’ve been to the White Room like that, a piece of you stays out there.

So that’s another life edit for me, a series of moments savored for themselves but which accumulate simultaneously in my artist’s soul. Like I said, my life and my work are the same thing. It is cannibalism, but it isn’t exploitation. A writer must do this. Though, of course, you don’t have to be a writer to let life penetrate you that deeply. Anyone who wants to live freely, fully, should surround themselves with inspiring places to be and people with light coming out of them to be with. Your companions are as important as your solitude. Ironically, while I was writing this, an email came in from another friend, Mystic Vixen (writer and Stumblebumstudios.com reviewer Jennifer Hairfield) whose connections with nature and poetry are equally eclectic. She writes: “Winter is already coming again. It seems like yesterday…I do tend to follow the fairy path, so when the moon is full and the flesh is willing I let them take over and play. It usually leads to a very interesting evening.” She has introduced me to the charmed backwaters of Oklahoma known as “fairy groves,” and I don’t believe I would have learned that had I not presented her with a Minnesota winter. Is she a Technicolor person or b/w? Do you think she gets it? The quid pro quo of life starts with you if you’re a writer. You’ve declared yourself a chronicler, a messenger, and you cannot be that without at least becoming an observer, and you cannot know the fuller meanings and insights without becoming a participant. “…when the moon is full and the flesh is willing I let them take over and play.” This person won’t miss the poetry if she gets close enough to it, and with a chosen name like Mystic Vixen you already know she will resonate it with words to match the deeds.

Confession. I am utterly bankrupt when I’m mired in formal situations or with individuals who are terminally narrow. They just leave me uninspired. That’s the flip side of finding those special people with whom to spend special times. Maybe that’s selfish of me, and if I were a better person I would be more tolerant, but I cannot stand to waste life. People who resist everything, including ideas, passions and communication are just down time for me. Especially communication, which can even include shared silence but never apathy. Fortunately the people who really don’t open up when you get them one on one are never writers and seldom readers. And if they are readers, then they have a closet wish to escape their narrowness. I try not to give up on people, because the most recalcitrant types have the most passion when they finally yield, but more often the bottom layer is just fear and inhibition – a selfishness as bad as my own.

Is this mercenary of me as a writer? I guess. But it isn’t just mercenary. Always nice when your work and your life are the same thing. I don’t think I’d be different in my life if I stopped writing. In fact, most of my writing is one on one – emails. Definitely not mercenary.

In both writing and li
fe, you have to give in order to get, though. Non-judgmental honesty and sincerity will take you further in understanding people and your own character inventions than will clinical observations you make from behind a wall of your own insecurities. Just a fact. If you can’t disarm fears, don’t expect to get past the foyers of other people’s lives. And you won’t disarm anyone if you aren’t “for real.” Being a writer – the best writer you can be – means living to the max. You just happen to be a mirror of words along the way.

Check out my just-released new novel, THE WATER WOLF, if you will. There’s a free chapter at www.thomassullivanauthor.com. Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome and your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com

When I grow up, I’m going to be a child prodigy. That way I won’t have so much history to look back on. Can’t believe this is column #5 on the same subject. But at last we are into the chase scene, the circus maximus, the ninth inning, 4^th quarter, third period. For those of you who have been in the lineup since April when this series on language and style began, please bear with one last summary for those who have not. Despite all my jazzing around with prenatal language, Marmaduke, and the Great Divides between people, it really isn’t complicated. It boils down to this:

Frustrated author (moi) wants to get a handle on writing that avoids the usual genre labels. Maybe something that gets to the nitty-gritty of every author’s individuality. This is because genre labels tend to lump writers into a few plot elements that shape reader expectations toward caricatures (romance as mush and gush, horror as blood and gore, literary as arty farty, etc). Sooo…for my own edification and grasp of who I am and who other writers are I began to think about language and style. What I came up with is not two God-given tablets of stone, but it is concrete (groan) in an area of writing that the marketplace, editors, publishers and even writers seem to find difficult to summarize.

Author’s style.

What the hell is it? What do you say after you say it’s everyone doing their own thing with words? Do you simply list the possibilities, the endlessly differing elements, the emphasis on one thing over another – more of this, less of that? For me it comes down to the impact of the language itself on the reader. I mean, take the word “style,” for instance. It’s a fussy word. Why? What makes it difficult? And the answer is that you can’t taste it, touch it, can’t find a referent for it that evokes a picture, a sound or a smell. It’s abstract. An idea rather than a specific thing or event. Ah. Things and events. Another kind of impact. Lemons, purple elephants, wars, sex in the surf of a thundering ocean – the nouns and verbs of physical reality. Unlike ideas, things and events are not so fussy. They are real things and happenings that you can associate with your senses.

Okay. So we’ve got physical and intellectual, what’s left over? What other kind of impact is there? Ideas, things and events…emotions. We feel. And communication is sometimes used purely to express or manipulate emotions. So there was my scaffolding: emotions; things and events; ideas.

Arbitrary, yeah. Quibble-proof, no. But if you really want to organize language, pretty much everyone can fit their range of communication under ideas, feelings, and things and events.

From there I started to plug the three languages into how I looked at everything, especially writing. Especially genres. It became useful for understanding a lot of things. And then it became useful for measuring what I was writing and to whom I was writing. That’s where we are with this column today. So the bottom line for this whole series, which dates back to a one-hour speech I was giving in the 80s, is that it is a way of dividing language so that it corresponds to different parts of ourselves and, by extension, with what we choose to read and how it is written.

Four of my previous columns break this down in some detail just for fun and for understanding people. Here are the links (each of the last three addresses one of the three languages):

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/04/16/thomas-sullivan-spiders-and-spuds/ 

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/05/16/thomas-sullivan-horned-owls-other-horny-beasts/ 

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/06/16/thomas-sullivan-name-the-baby/ 

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/07/16/thomas-sullivan-marmaduke-er%e2%80%a6-goes-to-college-or-wet-naked-screaming/

Writers tend to favor one or another of these languages, I believe. They do this by human nature as I’ve described it in those prior columns, and in so doing label themselves, because the different genres line up to one degree or another with those languages. Categories in fiction really represent biases that favor one or another language. Let’s take them in their most exaggerated forms to make the point:

The language of emotions: In its purest use, this tends to be represented by what is loosely called “the romance market.” Include chick lit, some types of YA, adolescent identification, cutesy title books, even porn veiled (perversely) in romantic auras, that share the following characteristics:

1) Each action and event is followed by emotional introspection, an emotional search for emotional content.

2) Feelings and the excitement of discovering those feelings is what the genre is all about.

3) Language of things is skeletal.

4) Language of ideas is relatively unimportant.

You could, however, make a strong case for “love” as idea, because virtually every classic that endures is a story about love – love of self, love of country, boy loves dog, gender love, etc. The difference here lies between emphasis and total use of the three languages. Are we talking about sweeping epic romances like THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME and GONE WITH THE WIND or is it LUCILLE AND THE FLAMING BARBARIAN? (I actually had a woman come up to me after a speech and inform me that her name was Lucille – or whatever name I had used that night – and I could tell I was not her flaming barbarian.)

Before I get some blistering hate mail from romance writers, let me add that one reason romance gets the “trite” rap is because it is the most basic language. Whatever our deeper sensibilities as an audience, we usu
ally find a common denominator for things that turns out to be an emotion. This, the most popular category in the world, has endless levels of skill within its ranks. Was a time when it was often written by women who went to the supermarket, picked up a First Circle of Love that sat next to the broccoli and had the same shelf life, and said, “I can write better than this.” And they did. I remember reading the three amateur winners of a contest that was co-sponsored by a top women’s mag and one of the leading romance writers in the world (who had gotten in on the ground floor years before), and it was glaringly obvious that the newbies were “heart and soul” better writers than the icon. The cloyingly saccharine pro, who pandered to every frailty of femininity, was downright gratuitous; the amateurs could actually write fleshed out…er, fully developed stories. Thus, the genre has evolved into a highly competitive market, and like any market, there is good, there is bad, and there is everything in between.

The language of things and events: is represented by pretty much everything else in the popular genre categories. I won’t try to list all the sub-categories and niches for fear of missing one, but mystery, western, thriller, horror, adventure, fantasy, science fiction, suspense, detective, hard-boiled, political, legal, graphic porno all TEND to rely heavily on things and events. Action. Adrenaline. Hardware. Palpable things and events left to make their own statements. Of course, the things and events are calculated to produce select emotions (fear and excitement mostly), but the emphasis is on the showing of how the emotion comes about rather than the exploration of feelings for their own sake.

I think what I am observing here is obvious, but if you want to find exceptions in any genre, you can. Emphasis is the key word. The degree of emphasis is what makes a genre whatever it is– a bias, in effect. All genres are biases that misproportion something when compared to real life. Fiction in general, and genres in particular, edit life. Andy Warhol’s 40-hour flick of a man sleeping – that’s unedited life. So the editing, the emphasis, the bias – call it what you will – shape the category, create the pace, and focus the writer and the reader. You can define this (somewhat inadequately) by content, of course. Which is pretty much what happens in the marketplace. But that’s like saying a certain painter paints cats or sunsets or chilluns with enormous eyes. In writing, the infinite variations on the way the languages I’ve distinguished are proportioned reflect the stylistic differences among writers.

The fact that so many adrenaline genres lean heavily on the language of things and events is further evidenced by the amount of crossover between thing-and-event categories. I have often had the same story or even a novel reprinted across several categories. My novel THE MARTYRING, for example, is a metaphor for my career. Written as thriller, published as mystery, shelved as science fiction (Barnes & Noble), reviewed as Gothic horror, and a finalist for Best Novel at World Fantasy Con, they are all genres that pump adrenaline with elements of physical danger. Give me a medal for schizophrenia.

The language of ideas: This one is an orphan. Other than maybe fifty pages on whaling concepts in MOBY DICK, you don’t see sustained unadulterated ideas in fiction. Here again it comes down to degree and emphasis. Ideas, like emotions, tend to underlie all stories; but as a pure art form, ideas writing is mostly non-fiction. Ideas do, however, tend to move center stage in “serious lit” (whatever that is). Mainstream. Contemporary. Literary. Usually they show up as diatribes about politics or soliloquies on existentialism or something you were supposed to write a theme about in tenth grade but you found neatly summed up in the Cliff Notes for Shakespeare.

What, you ask, no intellectual porn? I wouldn’t presume… Should be noted, though, that enterprising publishers have scaled passion all the way from “squeaky cleans” through “bodice rippers” into something called “leather and lace” (which is sort of porno with saddles), so why shouldn’t there be a genre of exquisitely cerebral sex, a la the commissioned work of Anais Nin? Or maybe the bathroom wall at Wellesley trucked into B&N.

What about mainstream then? Here’s a cynical definition: Anything that doesn’t fit into genre is mainstream. The reason may be because it is easier to define a target audience with genre. That’s publisher (and editor) safety. I think most genre editors want to expand the parameters and welcome broadly developed material, but if you put a tumbleweed in a mainstream tale, it’s going to be marketed as a western. In case of tie, genre wins.

Mainstream does, however, mark a distinct change in style. It tends to balance all three languages. This corresponds to real life. Well…not mine, but hey, I’m generally off-planet. Mainstream uses emotions for reader identification, things and events for action and hardware, and ideas for perspective and transcendent meaning. And here’s a cardinal tenet of my personal tastes:

Good genre fiction should at least include, if not balance, emotions, things and events, and ideas.

Probably most writers will agree with that in principal, most readers even, but in practice there are mucho masses of both who don’t. We can argue tastes and whims till the last cowboy rides into the sunset awakening the first vampire, who will return the favor at dawn, but you can’t tell someone they like what they don’t like or don’t like what they do. Each of us is a fact in the marketplace. That said, it’s good to know the range of possibilities and to recognize that we grow and change, for better or for worse. This writing business isn’t moral turpitude. It’s putting funny marks on paper to evoke all kinds of responses.

Here are some corollaries to all this – truisms, at least for me:

1) Writers who write only emotions tend to be shallow – often creating heavyweight treatments of lightweight subjects.

2) Writers who write only things and events tend to have unconvincing characters.

3) Writers who write only ideas tend to be cold and complicated.

So, would you like an example of a really, really, really great piece of lit that crosses the border of all three languages (depending on how it’s told)? Here ‘tis:

THE THREE LITTLE PIGS.

Yup. One of my favs. You’re not surprised, right? Consider, though, that it could entertain preschoolers across the hall from a graduate seminar remarking on its timeless social ideology.

1) Told from an emotional viewpoint, it’s a Chicken-Little story (sorry for the miscegenation). It is a downright drumbeat of panic and terror.

2) Told from a thing-and-event viewpoint, it’s about pork and architecture.

3) Told from an idea perspective, it’s a cautionary tale of survival and the work ethic.

(I’m sure there’s a porn version somewhere.)

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome and your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

May I invite you to visit my NEW web site, just up (courtesy of California surfer/guitar webmaster Ed Picard): www.thomassullivanauthor.com

Well, it isn’t Marmaduke anymore. Last month’s name-the-baby contest brought in some choice selections. If you don’t know who Marmaduke is – was – I’ll explain in a moment, but first the re-christening.

Had some great finalists, including: Eustace, Ebeneezer, Dousenberry, Clementine (requires early sexual reassignment surgery), Billy Bob, Felix, Thor and Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern-schplenden-schlitter-crasscrenbon-
fried-digger-dingle-dangle-dongle-dungle-
burstein-von-knacker-thrasher-apple-
banger-horowitz-ticolensic-grander-
knotty-spelltinkle-grandlich-grumblemeyer
-spelterwasser-kurstlich-himbleeisen-
bahnwagen-gutenabend-bitte-ein-
nürnburger-bratwustle-gerspurten-mitz-
weimache-luber-hundsfut-gumberaber-
shönedanker-kalbsfleisch-mittler-aucher von Hautkopft of Ulm (yes, that’s the fictional composer from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, thanks to Mark). I came to favor an entry from West Virginia, however. Kelly Barker’s “Maverick” wins the honor for its tone and sexual ambiguity (an example should fit all readers, right?). This will also please Julie in Phoenix who wants to keep Baby M. And if you think these strain credibility, I once ran across a thesis titled “Pause Patterns in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama” by Ants Oras and Dingle Foot. Ants and Dingle. They had to meet.

Maverick (nee Marmaduke), then, is you, me and everyone else reading this column: the prototype human being growing up and acquiring language. The reason I had to invent a stand-in for us is because three columns ago I tackled the ambitious challenge of defining how we develop and use style in writing fiction. Non-fiction about fiction. Lots of ways to get a handle on styles, but the way that works for me is to recognize three natural divisions in language. I called them the language of emotions, the language of things and events, and the language of ideas. Here are direct links to the previous essays http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/04/16/thomas-sullivan-spiders-and-spuds/ and 

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/05/16/thomas-sullivan-horned-owls-other-horny-beasts/ and

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/06/16/thomas-sullivan-name-the-baby/ 

This is the fourth and final essay, in which I’ll give a simple definition of the language of ideas, then lay out how all three lingos feed back into the genres and writing in general.

So, back to Maverick. You’ll recall that the language of emotions is the most natural form of expression, maybe even prenatal, and that Baby M used it as we all do to vent our feelings at whatever stage of life. And then Baby M glommed onto the most universal language, the nouns and verbs of reality, and used them to interact with all the basics of daily living. That language of things and events didn’t replace the need for venting feelings as he/she grew up – you don’t have to be wet, naked and screaming to use the language of emotions (although it makes a helluva evening if you’re on a date). Emotional expression simply merges with the more codified and ordered language of things and events.

Likewise, the third language has been sneaking in there as the teen years approach. This one is a little tougher, because it is abstract. The language of ideas has to be imagined. By nature intangible, it has no physical referents. It has other distinguishing characteristics. Unlike the language of emotions, which is very personal, pure idea expressions can stand apart from you intellectually. Unlike the language of things and events, you aren’t interacting with specific sensory input. Ideas form in the vacuum of a broom closet with the door shut tight in an abandoned farmhouse in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. Ideas may knit together the worlds of your emotions and senses, but they don’t feed directly off them. You can’t see “freedom” or touch “loyalty” or taste “economy.” Okay, we can all smell “politics,” but that’s a figure of speech. So ideas have to solo in the dark of your mind. You need terms and processes for them and you have to sweat a little to carry them very far. They don’t come as easy as, “Oh, look, there’s a blue donkey playing a steam calliope.”

For that reason, some folks don’t dwell much on ideas. They’re called men, right? Not really. But there are gender preferences, it seems. Hey, I’m not steppin’ in that mine field; an idea is an idea whether it’s “love” and “sincerity” or “competition” and “heroics.” The preferences (biases) are ingrained as classical stereotypes in our society, though, often arranged according to an intellectual yardstick. I remember hearing somewhere when I was very young that small people talk about people, medium size people talk about things, and big people talk about ideas. Now I think of that as just another way to address the three languages in all of us.

None of us is a purebred of emotions, things and events, or ideas. It comes down to emphasis in our lives. Very seldom does any one of those languages get used entirely by itself. To do so is more like a caricature of a human being. But the emphasis, the proportion, the tendency to use one over the other…that’s a big-time identifier. Incorrigible idea people are cold and geeky and we give them glasses with Coke-bottle lenses and a pocket caddy. The pure beautician type is seen as arrested development all about vanity and feelings as she files her nails, chomps her gum, and gossips. Or to put both caricatures in one setting: the Queen of the Cheerleaders, despite her rah-rahs for the team, is seen as an exhibitionist all about herself and her feelings (emotions), just as the King of the Football Team is seen as all about himself and his deeds (events). Extremes in a vacuum. They don’t exist in reality, but they tend to exist as…are you ready for this, ideas.

We choose when and where to be each of those three aspects of ourselves, and we use the three languages to do it.

Phew! Am I still writing to anyone? Have you caught me in my own mirror yet? Time to get out of Dodge…or just dodge. Safer to talk about Baby M. To wit…

Maverick (sexless) may turn out to be either an abstract whiz or a dolt whose eyes glaze over when he/she hears the word “think.” At any rate, this is where li
fe makes the big cut. Do we simply work on the line 9 to 5, belly up to the bar till 7, then fade to upholstery and TV until stupor puts us down for the night, or do our lives contain a greater balance of scheming, problem-solving, bullshitting, philosophizing (redundant?), and relating to other humans in intellectual and emotional ways? No pure types here, of course, but the degrees determine who we are. Idea people tend to go to college. Idea people tend to work idea jobs. Idea people drink for different reasons than fun people who just feel or like to not feel, as in numb. Idea people can be boring if they are just idea people.

Once that divide is made between whether we are basically emotional people, thing and event people, or idea people, the social order changes, career paths change, the pool of potential relationships changes. Maverick finds his/her comfort zone and hunkers down. He/she may be a happy SOB driving a semi, or a shmoozer who can sell you a life insurance policy if you look at them twice across a crowded room, or a scowling string theorist who stares through you on the way to…damn, where was I going before I got that epiphany about 5-D braneworld black holes and gamma rays? The three languages will tend to follow and flow out of the needs of what you do. But we’re interested in books and stories here. Where do reading and writing come into it? Whichever person you are, if you read, what do you look for, what do you like and why? If you write, how do you reach the people you want to connect with? What personal resources do you draw on and deliberately shape? Who are your muses?

And you know what? My muse just kicked me in the shins and said, “Enough already.” No way I’m going to get the rest of it out in this column. So it ain’t my last essay on the subject (no hissing, please) after all. I need a fifth column (not that Fifth Column). Can’t understand how I ever covered this as part of a one-hour speech. I must’ve sounded like an auctioneer.

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome and your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

I am not – strictly speaking – writing a column. I am avoiding writing a novel. This is a switch, because for days now I have been avoiding writing a column by writing a novel. But the deadline is upon me, so it’s time to face the question that’s been mired in my thoughts like a spider in the mashed potatoes. (Hell, I don’t even eat mashed potatoes. <!–[if !supportEmptyParas]–>Spiders, though…that’s another – um . . . column). <!–[endif]–>

Enough of spiders and spuds, the question I’m really choking on is do I want to attempt a single column on a subject that used to take me an hour in front of an audience to cover. When I get talking a hundred words a minute (with gusts up to two hundred) for an hour, that’s a lot of potential column. I think you can relax – me too – because the answer is “no.” Small servings, that’s the way to do it. A dollop of mashed potatoes here, a spider there. Yum, yum. <!–[if !supportEmptyParas]–>And besides, the subject I am writing about divides itself naturally into three parts. <!–[endif]–>

I refer to a philosophy of language. Every writer should have one. I’m not talking about vocabulary here, but rather what language represents in ways we humans look at the world. The ways I chose are: emotions; things and events; ideas. I chose those because I could see where they weighed into the writing of literature, and in what proportions. The areas I’ve chosen are arbitrary, and maybe you could do better in making divisions, but these worked for me when I first saw the need to get a handle on writing many years ago. So, I’m going to do them in several columns, because this stuff travels a bit, and in order to say everything I want to say, and to relate it back to specific fiction, I need some room. Otherwise, it would come out too many spiders and too little mashed potatoes. <!–[if !supportEmptyParas]–> <!–[endif]–>

Now, there is nothing holy about my particular method, just as there is nothing holy about language. Language is a bunch of grunts and scribbles that people agree upon. That makes it a social contract. If you and I agree that the term “scudburgers” are paddies of pre-masticated dead cow, incinerated and laid to rest on biers of stale bread served at the Porcelain Rooms (White Castles), then “scudburgers” it is. No one can tell us we’re wrong. That’s an example from real life, BTW. Ex-Frogman named Harry Hauck (pronounced “Hawk”) christened them, and we lived off them in the Caribbean for a time back in another millennium. The point being that the social contract of language is whatever people say it is. It isn’t ordained by God with every falling in and out of usage and it does not come to us on tablets of stone. It changes when enough people have misused something enough times, or coined a usage long enough, for it to enter the common culture through media of every form and in every day communication. Sometimes a famous quote can make it in one scream, as with Howard Dean (though no one has yet figured out what he meant), or in the lyrics of a hit song (which also are not figured out). Meaning is shifty. And change is resisted by some, as in India where 300 dialects may be spoken in relatively small regions and bloody language riots ensue. Often language changes are a corruption, a shortcut, or something jangly and colorful, like “ripped off” or “stonewalled.” I have personally made up tons of words. So far no one else has used them. <!–[if !supportEmptyParas]–>They are called “grammatical mistakes.” <!–[endif]–>

But my philosophy of language is not meant to pioneer new directions, only to identify existing ones. Grammar books try to do that, and they are always out-of-date. English teachers die with them clutched in their cold, dead hands, but they are still out-of-date (both the Warriner’s and the English teachers), passé, dinosaurs, last week’s lunch. I wanted to create divisions that would not become dinosaurs. So I based my divisions on the purposes of languages. And I did this with an ear toward the different categories of writing. More on that in the final column of this series. So that’s where all of this is going: a way of understanding what types of writing go where in the marketplace. <!–[if !supportEmptyParas]–><!–[endif]–>Because, if you once get that, then you will be able to analyze your own writing and readership and understand what makes it what it is at the root level of wordsmythery.

Check that. Indulge me while I qualify a bit of semantics here. “Understand” is a bad word in my method. “Understand” implies that you can learn creativity as if it were a set of principles, whereas learning what can be learned that way might qualify you to be a critic (yuk) but certainly won’t give you two main assets of any creative person: insight and imagination. Insight and imagination are native abilities that allow a person to take a little information or experience all the way to the horizon. They are probably a limited resource, different in amounts for each of us, but they can be sharpened and maxed out in any person. “Learning” them, “understanding” them, is too often packaged and sold along with snake oil to hopeful writers as if the magic beans, the SECRETS (shhhh!), are available to all if you just memorize the quality of “insight” on page 269 of the text they are selling. Can’t be done. If you don’t have your own secrets, your own magic beans, and your own potentially successful voice already inside you, you need to get out and live a little until you awaken and develop those qualities. For sure no one is going to graft them onto you. You can’t lead by following; and writing is an attempt to be original, unique. So a word that comes closer than “understanding” to what I’m trying to convey here is “recognize.” <!–[if !supportEmptyParas]–><!–[endif]–>I’m hoping (betting) that you will recognize some things you already know but maybe haven’t ever consciously sorted out, if only I can get this little language perspective I’ve outlined down in a couple of columns.

In my experience, recognizing possibilities is the real secret of almost anything. Think outside the box. You can be drowning in material and inspiration and never see it. If you wait for it to put on a lampshade and dance for you, you’ll have a lot of free time. You have to make something out of whatever is at hand – the universe in a grain of sand – and if you’re a good enough artist, you will. That ringing phone that is annoying you, distracting you, keeping you from t
hinking that great thought hovering just out of reach, has an entire universe on the other end of the line. Pick the damn thing up! Use your imagination. Get interested in life. Go out to meet it with your eyes and ears open, and it will give you something every time. Especially people. On a good day I see dozens of things I missed on a bad day. Was thinking while writing this, I wonder who got to do the April 1^st column and what a plum that would’ve been. Just checked. No one did it. April Fool’s Day and we all missed it! <!–[if !supportEmptyParas]–>And – oh yeah – happy Easter. <!–[endif]–>

Hmmm. Full moon out as I write this. Gibbous anyway. And the air is the temperature of life tonight. Can’t tell you what a longing that puts in me. You know what? I’m gonna practice what I preach. Time for a little research, time to fill the well, find some impromptu inspiration. Tomorrow when I wake up, I’ll have a whole new set of associations to fire my imagination. This night will not end without an adventure. Met someone blading yesterday and showed her an owl sitting on a nest with two fuzzy “chicks” the size of watermelons. She was entranced – with the owls, drat. But maybe a little with our conversation, too, because she wanted to exchange email addresses. Said she was a compulsive person. Said she hoped we’d see each other again. Whatya think? Too quick to email? Of course. Am I not gonna email now anyway? Nay. An hour or so hence, with or without her, I’ll be canoeing on the lake behind my house past swans on black glass, looking for owls. With a little luck I/we won’t find any. But I/we will find the moon…. <!–[if !supportEmptyParas]–> <!–[endif]–>

Thanks for reading. <!–[if !supportEmptyParas]–>Your thoughts are welcome and your attention valued. <!–[endif]–>

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

www.thomassullivanauthor.com