Thomas Sullivan

If something has to be kept secret, it must be true.  Secrets are self-proving.  Lies are loud and wear red hats, e.g. Santa Claus.  Okay, I’m being a tad glib here.  I do not mean that only secrets are true or that all red hats – i.e. loud proclamations — are lies (your red hat is still true blue, Santa).  But secrets tend to be true, else they wouldn’t need hiding.  I think that most people believe this at some level.  In fact some OVER-believe it, glomming onto every “exposed” secret as innately true because life after all is run by conspiracies and manipulative forces.  Consider the power that this reflex gives to persuasion.  Want someone to believe something outlandish?  Present it as a secret.

And in this way my premise statement moves from being a truism about content to a truism about style.  Because if you pretend something is secret only to make it seem valid when you expose it, you’ve given it the style of truth but not necessarily the substance.  And that can be a literary device to disarm the reader.  An effective literary device.  In fact, take it a step further.  Let the secret be some discovery you make contrary to what the writer is saying.  No truth is more acceptable than underlying truth you think you perceive by yourself, after all.  Better yet if you have to pry it out, testifying to your astuteness.  In this model the falseness is the literal statement, parading itself as truth.  The truth is the secret you discern hiding behind the falseness, and it is its opposite.  Thus we have Mark Twain giving us his truth about all humans being of equal worth by having Huck Finn believe he is going to hell for helping the runaway slave Jim escape.  The world has it backwards, Twain is showing us.  Social morality is the real falseness and Huck Finn in the simple purity and honesty of his soul has it right though he believes he will go to hell for his choice.  Edgar Allen Poe gives us an even more direct stylistic example in the beginning of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”  “True!” his first person narrator tells us too loudly in the very first word, “nervous, very dreadfully nervous I was and am, but why will you say I am mad?”  Already you know the character is mad.  (“Methinks he doth protest too much.”)  He is in your face, asserting his “truth” so loudly that you immediately know it’s a lie.

Life is full of opposites, isn’t it?  It is tempting – particularly in an improbable life like mine – to put more faith in the counterintuitive then into the face value of things.  But that would be another grave error.  Nevertheless, it is counterintuitiveness that seems to yield the most insight into truth when it comes to understanding people and presenting characters.  We are devious, after all, you and I; yet relatively transparent as well to the observer who has developed objectivity.  So, in human behavior, it is often enlightening to look for opposites, contrasts, and apparent contradictions lurking beneath the surface.

These show up most clearly under stress, but with some people the occurrence is pathological.  I find these pathological types to be the most predictable because they always try to be unpredictable, and I often use them for catalyst characters.  They are people who have discovered a game, a posture, an attitude, or a tone that works for them.  They are usually one-trick types who continually use the single gimmick of reverse psychology.  Over time they tend to lose credibility, and so they wear their audiences down to the gullible, the susceptible, or the impaired.  You might see them holding forth where education is scarce, or playing the victim, or sounding witty under neon lights just before “last call.”  Drunk or sober, “in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”  Their conflicts are seldom internal but instead come from trying to manipulate the external world.  That’s why they make good catalyst characters.

More fascinating to me are people who are internally conflicted, because they are not neatly consistent or as predictable.  Especially if their emotions are strong.  This happens more with women than men.  And, no, I’m not saying that women are less rational than men.  But I am saying that they tend to be influenced by a more complex range of emotions than men usually are.  In evolutionary terms, anger and aggressiveness work strongest for archetypal men, while a fuller range of emotions has more survival value for archetypal women.  The former (male) tends to solve immediate tactical problems and be direct; the latter (female) may address long-term strategic goals and be indirect.  Which is probably why women get hung with the tag of being unpredictable.  In any event, if this makes sense to you, you can easily see why marketing biases favor physical action books for men (external conflicts) and emotional tension books for women (internal conflicts).  Of course, just as in reality these stereotypes of men and women exist as a mix within individuals of either sex, fully developed writing reflects a mix of simple action and character complexity no matter what the genre or gender.  The nod, though, goes toward internal conflicts with its focus on substantial characterization, if only because most readers are women.  I like that.  It takes me right back to the deliciously counterintuitive wildcard that emotions introduce.

Think of how many things can go wrong with internal conflicts as opposed to external.  In external you have things and events; in internal you have things and events plus all the interpretations and psychological/emotional consequences of external happenings.  Internal is where external crosses into human experience, the nerve center, the point of impact – if a tree falls, does it make a sound?  (Does it matter to you, if you don’t hear it – if you don’t internalize it?)  If you want to experience and communicate life fully, free your characters to be human.  Let them become contradictory, confused, emotional, unstable and changeable – then let them find their way back (or not).  And while you’re at it, free yourself from being that writer/person who has a one-trick pathology and writes/sees with one eye open in the country of the blind.  With two eyes open in life, you have twice the chance of seeing the magic.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Happy to be able to offer a job – well, half a job – to any readers who are receptive to same.  Here ‘tis.  Q&A.  You write the questions, I write the answers.  Pay is just the same for both of us.  Srsly.  I am amazed at your feedback, touched by your sharing, daunted by your killer questions, and grateful for your support.  Last month’s vignette of my Avatar moment at Elm Creek in particular brought in lots of e-mail world-wide with stories of magic, fate, and romantic destiny.  So, as promised, here is Bride of Q&A – Q&A 3.  I picked the questions this time based on one of three qualities: either they were things I’m asked repeatedly, are of general interest to writers, or are just plain fascinating and challenging to answer…

Q [Gatlinburg, TN]: When you write a novel how do you prove it’s not slander?  

A: First, understand that slander is verbal; libel is print.  In either case, the best defense is whether or not what you state is true.  Since you are writing fiction, you have another level of protection because you are not claiming it’s true.  In nonfiction your purpose in reporting facts must not be to harm someone with malicious intent, whether or not that becomes an unintended consequence of the truth.  

Q [Zhirkov, Russian Federation & others]: Why do you shave your head?   …      [Fontana, California]: Why do you shave your head in the rain?

A: To take a load off my mind.  Besides, I am in no danger of being mistaken for a Chia pet, and all-or-none is more my style, so I’d rather prune than preen.  As for the rain, you must be referring to the photo some team members took while we were building a church school in the Dominican Republic.  When you are in a part of a country where running water is infrequent, keeping an eye to the sky for purposeful plumbing makes sense.  However, I do not recommend it for flushing toilets.

Q [Roodepoort, S. Africa]: You wrote about your favorite fiction authors a few months back, do you read nonfiction and who are your favorite nonfiction authors?

A: Again, don’t want to rank order writers who include friends, so I’ll just say that I’m currently reading one fav I’ve never met – Mark Steyn, a political commentator whose savoir-faire, genteel manner, wit and intelligence are every bit in the class of Alastair Cook.  Love to read historical, social, political observations from people who come from multiple cultures on either side of the socialism/capitalism divide and can see America objectively. … And, yes, I’m a closet geek who daily combs the Internet for info, including world headlines in translation, the Drudge report for links to news that gets ignored or doesn’t fit the so-called mainstream media’s template/agenda, and especially science sources of every stripe.  I read far more nonfiction than fiction and have all my life.  And if you ask me to weigh into conversation with social commentary, history, or the oceans of science and philosophy percolating in my thin paper skull, I’ll deny everything I just wrote, unless you want to listen to me for the rest of your life or eternity, whichever comes first.  So far, no one has taken me up on the offer, though now and then I get asked why I play dumb.  Who’s playing? 

Q [Oak Grove, MN]: Is the waterfall you’ve photographed situated next to a bike path in Maple Grove?

A: Yes.  Runs parallel to Elm Creek south of Elm Creek Park.  The waterfall isn’t dangerous except for a couple of months a year, but the boulders that appear when t’s drying up can be treacherous.  I know a young man who had to be choppered out of there with a head injury.

Q [Oak Grove, MN]: What has caused you the greatest pain in your life?

A: Spectacular.  Too intriguing to ignore, too probing to answer without flinching.  Should everyone ask themselves this?  Well, it’s a question no one would ask unless they had asked it of themselves, so you deserve some kind of candor.  Okay.  What would be the most painful thing to a romantic idealist who has created multiple paths – paradoxical paths – to follow through life, always keeping the central one as perfect as ideals allow, which of course means it would be impossible in the real world?  Would it be first to discover that the central path was – astonishingly – not only possible but that it had become seemingly inevitable (ah, be careful what you wish for) . . . and then to have it founder pointlessly, tragically, in a way that stumbled over surreal perceptions?  Kind of like successfully walking barefoot the length of a high wire across the Grand Canyon in pitch black night, then tripping over imaginary shoelaces at sunrise as you stroll blissfully unsuspecting over terra firma on the other side.  …  Forgive the generalization for an answer, but I don’t think anyone could relate to the rather emotionally spartan specifics of my life anyway.  The idea of irony, however, is more likely to match the experiences of others, whether it involves something ideal, extreme commitment, blindsiding perceptions, or all of the above. 

Q [Tranca, Philippines]: Why aren’t you writing new books?   …   [Hampstad, Maryland & many others]: When is your next book coming out?

A: I’ve decided to write to the world one person at a time.    Srsly, I know I’ve parlayed carp ‘n’ tuna syndrome ops into an excuse for not working book length, and if procrastination is the thief of time, I’m guilty of grand larceny.  But what with the Sullygram newsletters, this column, blogs, blurbs & forewords for other authors, and mucho correspondence, it seems like I’m writing more than ever.  And somewhere in that procrastination of novels I decided this was also a great time to reincarnate myself yet again, back into my original literary mainstream.  All options are still on the table for me.  Like a train moving through freight yards, I just keep getting longer and longer.  That said, I’m answering this particular question in order to announce that I’ve come to terms with two different companies this month (on the same day!) to begin bringing out my work, old and new, in e-book, audio and print formats.  The first two releases will come out as e-books.  And – ta da! – here’s a flash: the first release is – wait for it, wait for it –TODAY!  Just hours ago Crossroad Press released my Best Novel Finalist from WorldFantasy Con, THE MARTYRING, in E-book form in time for Christmas.  And Tell-Tale Publishing Group will similarly be bringing out BORN BURNING, whose popularity has now pushed it to a 4^th English language edition in two decades.  At $3.99 the E-publishing debut – which can be downloaded and read in any reader, including on a computer – makes a good stocking stuffer, so count on it, I’ll be most appreciative of anyone putting one or both on their holiday list.  Here’s the link where you can get THE MARTYRING now – http://store.crossroadpress.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=101_22_28&products_id=488  – and it will also be available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords in a few days.  My webmaster will be updating our website shortly to include all info: www.thomassullivanauthor.com .

And here’s a special offer I think I can keep up with if I prepare ahead of time.  If you give THE MARTYRING to someone, let me know and I’ll send them an author’s greeting to go with the e-book on Christmas Day or on whatever holiday you may celebrate.  Just email me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and include their name and the email address where you want me to send the greeting. 

Finally, if it walks like a chicken, and talks like a chicken, at my house we call it turkey on Thanksgiving Day, but there are no substitutions for my warmest wishes to you every day of the year!  My genuine best to you all!  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326     

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  

As one control freak to another…  Uh-oh, way to go, Sully.  You’ve alienated your entire readership already.  But the essential thing about being human – about being anything with a pulse and choices – is trying to control one’s living conditions to make them beneficial to one’s self, isn’t it?  AKA survival.  Like I was saying, as one control freak to another, what might you notice about all those items in the title above?

Did you say they are all things beyond one’s personal control?   Or maybe you just thought, I hate friggin’ questions that try to force me to someone else’s answer, because that’s REALLY controlling!  Either way you reach the central point here: CONTROL IS THE SELECTIVE WAY WE ACCUMULATE PERSONAL BENEFITS AND ELIMINATE THREATS TO OUR WELL-BEING.  (Unless maybe you are an ant or a bee or a communist, in which case you derive your identity only as part of the collective.)

But what if the choices you make in establishing control end up controlling you, limiting you, ceasing to be a benefit?  We grow, after all, and as our needs change, the controls we opted for as security and fulfillment may confine us.  In fact, this is what happens to all of us to one degree or another, I believe.  If you feel like you are trapped by routine and dying inch by inch in the circumstances of your life, the point may not need emphasis.  And if you are a writer – or anyone creative – control may be that faceless enemy you call “writers block,” or maybe you call it boredom or stagnancy or something slightly more accurate that reflects your frustration like…fallow, sedentary, freedom-crushing, soul-rotting premature death.

In such a frame of mind you may regard that list in the title of this essay as the cause of your plight.  Bad joss, you sigh and knuckle under to life’s myriad social mechanisms, myths and pressures that keep you in line (now that’s CONTROLLING).  But those phantom concepts in the title are your escape route, and you should invite them into your daily life with urgent fervor.  Privately…if it must be (you are already living a secret life – shhh.)  You can call those title items anything you wish, but what they really represent is breaking with routine, abandoning the rut, making a right turn when familiar stresses demand you turn left.  Trust your gut – unless it’s filled with fear and guilt.  Fear and guilt bestow false virtue and lock one into a charade of honesty.  Trust your gut if your dreams are still nourishing you there.  Cultivate those terms I’ve used in the title as if they are your universal visa, your all-border pass to all things and all places.  Because that’s what they are.

You wanna take a test drive?  OK.  Escape with me.  Let me switch to my Cannibal Essay format, and give you an example.  How did I shake up my day today?  When did the magic get invited in?  Pick a time.  9:30 AM?…9 ½ is good.  We’re biking up the street on the way to anywhere/everywhere, specific destination unknown, and we stop in at Norby Nation – a family of seven who have sort of adopted me.  In my pocket are five Werther’s butterscotch candies, which I pass out to the kids, who are all clearing weeds from the backyard garden under their father’s (my buddy Bruce’s)direction.  I tell them that the candies are seeds and that if they plant them, a Werther’s tree will grow.  Annaliese – who from age 8 has appointed herself as my personal critic and social advisor – puts me to the test.  She plants one as a challenge to my credibility.  An uh-oh moment for me?  Nay.  This is kismet, serendipity – all those good terms in the title of this essay.  See, this is where you escape the pattern, the rut, and invite the magic in.  I mean, take note, you are hearing from one of the guardians of magic, a child!  You do not chuckle adult-like and blow it off.  Instead, you hie yourself to Walmart’s and buy a 1-foot tall tree (plastic is OK), and then you cram the branches full of Werthers and plant it in NN’s backyard.  Congratulations, you have just broken the Law of Living Tediously – jailbreak, jailbreak! – and your imagination is on the loose, because even if that plastic tree doesn’t take root, something else has.  Read the title again.  You have to nudge that stuff.  It’s there.  And when you do – when you let motivation spark imagination – you kick down the door to inspiration and things just start to HAPPEN.  Trust me, magic is looking for us.  Read on…

So, we’ve opened the door, left the beaten path of the ordinary just by doing a silly little thing, an eccentric thing, crazy and free.  And now we are taking a hike to Elm Creek, a 5600 acre park preserve, thundering along, enlivened by what just happened, keenly in tune with the open-endedness all around us, the sense of prerogative and the existential nature of nature.  The outré forces have stopped being coy with us, because we are true believers…so here it comes, here it comes…the magic!

Only, remember, this really happened and you’re borrowing my life, so you have to understand a little personal histoire first.  The exact spot where I’m standing is sacred ground to me, a place where on March 27, years ago now, I spent the most miraculous afternoon of my life.  So I’ve never stopped revisiting it or celebrating its magic.  It was very much like the romantic idealism of the forest scene in the movie Avatar where Neytiri discovers that Jake Sully (…hey, you know I didn’t write the script!) is the Chosen One because the floating seeds of the Sacred Tree suddenly waft to his arms and shoulders.  And that’s exactly what happens now. I am standing there in this galvanizing place and a half dozen diaphanous seeds floating from whatever mundane source suddenly catch a puff of something’s breath and settle gently on my arms and chest.  Have you ever had that happen with more than one dogwood or dandelion or milkweed “Santa Claus” at the same time?  I don’t know what the seeds were, but at that moment…in that place…parodying that movie right down to my name and romantic history/destiny…?  Wishful thinking, you say. OK.  But life takes place between the ears, and this essay is all about awareness.  Magic follows the path of least resistance, and like I said, when you put yourself in the way of fate, destiny, serendipity, karma, kismet and star-crossed ironies and coincidences, you allow internal realities to trump life’s external appearances.

So, yeah, I’m still a control freak (but one who knows where and when and how to be just the opposite).  I like to analyze (but not judge) and to notice patterns – especially the non-pattern pattern that refutes all other patterns.  Transcendent living begins where you drop logic, relinquish control, and embrace the intuition that arises from some nameless repository of the soul that harbors perfection, quantum leaps of imagination, insight without anchors, and – by any name you choose – magic!

Now, you take control – because even though I enjoy your company, you’re not going to be original if you’re following anyone.  I have no idea where your path goes.  I’m just suggesting that you have to DO something.  Something that refutes what you normally do.  Permit the meaningful and the imaginative to penetrate the predictable and the dull in your life.  It doesn’t have to be dramatic, but it can’t be automatic – i.e. routine.  Drive a different route, shop a different store, walk backward, whistle, splash in puddles as you hike in the rain, confront a lie, pursue a hidden truth, get out in nature away from four walls, talk to yourself when you’re alone and say all the things you don’t dare say in anyone’s presence, sleep on the floor, climb a tree, shout, laugh, revisit the best memory in your life in any way you can (and the worst), phone someone who inspires you, stay up all night, whisper your dreams to a star, whisper your FORBIDDEN dreams to a star.  OR…you can just skip all that and get through life with as little creativity and adventure as possible.  But as the saying goes, if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

The Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition hisself – Torquemada – has nothin’ on you guys!  What a bonanza of questions and comments came in from around the globe last month in response to the Q. & A. format.  Probing, intelligent, deep and even beastly stuff – and damn near Truth or Dare.  You’re having altogether too much fun with this.  Do I get to cross-examine?  O.K.  Let’s go with it a-just-a-one-more-time (who sang that?).  And keep sending your questions in, so that I can revisit the format (won’t use your name).  Send any questions, specific or broad ranging.  It only takes one star to guide a ship – if it’s the right star – and each question I get is like a new supernova charting an interesting course.

Q. [Tamil Nadu, India] Did you shoot that mosquito in the bathroom?  [Refers to last month’s column: http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2011/08/15/thomas-sullivan-panning-gold-freedom-the-great-shopping-cart-fiasco/  ] 

A. She’s still waiting me out.  No more baths in the dark for me until this is over.

Q. [Quincy, MA] I published exactly one story, and that was for free.  What should I expect to get for a short story?  What’s the least to the most you get? 

A. Well, FREE might be just a little on the lean side – I mean, how easy do you wanna look – but virtually no one makes a living from short pieces, so if you got a little exposure and a decent credential out of it, consider it a worthy entry point.  There are a lot of literary and pulp pubs struggling to survive out there, and they may pay as little as 1/8 cent a word or two free copies or a bottle of scotch.  That said, I don’t remember selling anything for less than 10 cents a word.  My best payday for a short story began way back in 1979 with Omni Magazine paying me 28 cents a word for “The Mickey Mouse Olympics”– a story that continued to sell reprints until it netted me thousands of dollars.  But that’s rare.  I suggest you recognize that short stories prime the pump, if you are trying to establish your name for novels.  If that’s the case, the money isn’t all that important.  Once you’ve achieved recognition, short stories may simply be a way to keep in contact with readers, or you may opt for putting all your time into longer works.  For me short pieces are often the afterbirth of novels – leftover creative energy – and I seldom write them now except by commission from an editor.  The exception for me would be to do a collection of just my work, which to this date I’ve never attempted.  Finally, there is always the possibility of a movie even from a short story.  Francis Ford Coppola picked up the rights to one of mine, and it has been brought to my attention that another seems to have been the basis for a successful film, though it was never credited – which is the problem, because you can’t copyright ideas, only the expression thereof, and short stories generally require expansive scripts which can get around that.

Q. [San Diego, CA] What bores you? 

A. NOTHING.  Except maybe sophomoric people who can’t stop talking about beer.  I skipped that whole college beer-worshiping thing, so drinking just seems like a giant sleepfest to me.  I guess you could say I’m bored by anything that reduces maximum awareness and feeling. 

Q. [Toronto, Canada] Do you have any rules about writing sex scenes?

A. ROTFL.  Ah, sex…glad to see it made it through customs to Canada!  Sorry, sorry.  Rules, rules about sex — well, that’s a buzz-kill for openers, eh?  Kidding.  Not entirely, though.  Rules for sex are as unique as the desires of two consenting adults.  And so the rules problem for the writer is: Who are you writing for?  Because everyone who willfully reads your sex scene is sorta your consenting adult.  You will almost certainly offend or disappoint one extreme of reading tastes or another, while maybe satisfying everyone in between to varying degrees.  Different strokes for different folks, so to speak.  What is your purpose in the sex scene; i.e., shock? gratuitous pandering to grunt graphics? plot twist? character development (seriously)? emotional tour de force? the ultimate act of romantic love? the defining discovery of two soulmates? pure (or impure) titillation?  It would be easier if you were writing to one person, as in a love letter.  So when you’ve decided who you’re writing to, maybe that’s the way to think of it.  An audience of one.  I think most writers write sex scenes to themselves.  Which is kinda narcissistic.  If you’re writing to someone else, it should be altruistic.  Think I explained it better in a comment on my Facebook wall recently.  Let me be clear, art is an imitation of nature, and if I’m interested in writing about a guy and a German Shepherd for 300 pages, I’ll write that.  But I’m not really focused on gratuitous sex.  Okay, with those as givens, let me borrow from a comment I made on someone else’s column a while back.  To wit: There are a couple of other checkpoints for me in writing a sex scene.  One is the degree of exxx-plicitness vs. implicitness.  Sort of deciding where to point the camera.  Ditto the microphone.  And do you include the diary of what’s going on in either character’s/animal’s/group’s thoughts and emotions?  If you ECU with the camera locked on a tripod with full lighting, you end up with dessert but no nutrition.  Catch the shadows and silhouettes, the breathing, glistening flashes and the hiss of fingers through the sheets and it becomes sexuality and sensuousity.  Another decision for me as a writer is whether or not the scene is really about some other words, like “love,” “passion” or “romance” — which incline (recline?) toward “sexuality” (the aura and meaning of sex) as opposed to “sex” (flailing body parts).  And finally, the framing has major importance to me.  Call it foreplay and aftermath.  The latter tends to get more internal, maybe even stream-of-consciousness.  But it tells a lot about the degree of emotion in the characters.  All of these representations in a sex scene can be just as significant by their absence as their presence, though sometimes you have to point to that a little, i.e. show it in some overt way as opposed to just leaving a void.

Q.  Is the white feather still out in that field?

A.  Yes…if you know what it looks like, lo, these several years and counting.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  (Thanks for the questions – keep ‘em comin’!)

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326     

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Help…I have locked myself in the bathroom with a loaded pistol and I don’t know how much time I have left before I pull the trigger.  I know this is where I have to be now.  It’s a desperate move, but I am desperate.  I saw the mosquito fly in here, and if I don’t get it, it will get me…sometime in the early dawn…just when I’ve entered REM sleep mode.  So I’ll wait.  Sooner or later I’ll hear the little sucker hum, and that’s when I blast away.  But what to do in the meantime?  I have my wireless, so I guess I’ll write my column now.  No notes but I have all my e-mail.  Good time to write that column I’ve been thinking about for a long time, using some of the many interesting questions I get from around the world.  Maybe I’ll make it into a format to use now and again.  Maybe you’d like to ask me something for a future column.  So, ask me something.  Anything at all.  About writing, not about writing, something personal, something general.  Just send your questions to mn333mn@earthlink.net .  I won’t use your name.  You guys are so fascinating.  You should see the questions…well, you will, you will.  I’ll try to use ones that are relative to a lot of readers, but also a zinger or two.  Here are four…

 Q. [Victoria, Australia] How do you handle rejection?

 A.  Mine it.  It’s like panning for gold.  You examine the slosh for any bright nuggets that might enhance your fortunes.  Most of the time it will be just generic sand and gravel – editor comments that simply indicate your material isn’t really a fit for their narrow window of the moment.  It doesn’t mean that YOU and your children have been rejected.  Funny marks you put on paper have been rejected.  I’ve never heard of anyone who was told, Hey, give it up.  You are worthless, and so is your crapola writing!  But now and then there may be a glint of possibility in the sand and gravel you dredge up from a market to which you have submitted – mention of a specific element that you could change to fit their needs, or a critical reason they believe you should consider, or simply enthusiasm for your work in the hope that you will write something that is a fit for them.  On the latter score, one of my earliest rejections called my work, perfect, flawless, brilliant . . . and went on to say, in essence, we don’t want it.  Business is always subjective and rarely if ever is there such a thing as objective excellence in publishing.  So you mine the rejections for future possibilities.  If you’re going to take it personally, I suggest you separate anger and frustration from proactive marketing.  Have the envelope (or computer file) and logistics all mapped out for your next submission BEFORE a ms can be bounced.  If you then receive a rejection, immediately go through the process of turning that ms around and getting it back into the marketplace prior to throwing a hissy fit that ends in a blue funk of paralyzing depression.  Giving up requires only fear and a lack of courage and leads nowhere.  Not giving up is an end in itself, granting you a journey, and is the only way to reach Oz.  That doesn’t mean you have to be stupid about which direction you set off for or stay on.  Dead ends are all too common.  But it does require that as you discover the best road for you, you take it.

 Q. [Ranchi, India] You seem so free and full of energy in your Sullygrams.  How does one achieve that?  Were you always like that or did success just give you the luxury? 

 A.  Mmmm, how to make the complex answer as simple as possible?  Lemme take on the energy part first.  Because, aside from the genetics (all my family enjoy very active longevity), I believe that energy is a direct consequence of freedom.  You can’t reach your maximum output if you aren’t enthused, and you can’t be enthused if you’re living repressed, compromised, hypocritically or under some other kind of falseness.  Writers especially need to be free.  I’m not talking about the clichéd image of a bohemian artist, but a certain amount of nonconformity is obviously a part of creativity, and that means escaping the soul-crushing falseness I just described.  And, yes, as far back as I can remember I’ve always rebelled against that kind of pressure.  As I grew up, it became more of a conscious thing, I suppose, because many people yearn for that freedom but end up trapped in very unsatisfying lives.  They try to fake their own fulfillment, taking to heart the expectations of friends, relatives, relationships, careers and society as they attempt to will themselves into roles that smother their most basic freedoms to think, feel, dream and just generally interact with the emotional, intellectual and psychological fullness of who they really are.  For me, living a life of quiet desperation out of the misguided belief that it serves a greater good is (and was for a major chunk of my life) just tragically absurd.  It never serves the greater good to let your life be wasted, and it isn’t noble.  At best, it patronizes those you are fooling and is an affront to whatever created you.  That said, I don’t condemn anyone for living under any kind of yoke if that’s how they spell S-E-C-U-R-I-T-Y.  In fact, anyone who thinks they’re not living a lie at least some of the time is living at least that much of a lie all of the time.  Do I ever find myself trapped in a situation where I don’t want to crash someone else’s expectations at the same time that I need to carve out freedom for myself?  Sure.  But I will not let myself be bullied by fear and guilt.  It’s so easy to get the guilt backwards – letting others shrink-wrap us, stunting that intellectual and emotional fullness I mentioned above.  Isn’t it strange that so many of us feel guilty when we refuse to live DISHONESTLY?  How wrong is that?  But even that kind of usurpation can’t keep you from at least visiting freedom every day.  It can be a place, a relationship, an outlet, a private communication, or – ideally – all of the above.  My parents had exactly that – all of the above – so I know freedom can be shared.  But if I had not grown up with that model, I’d probably tell you it’s impossible to be so mutually focused with someone else.  I do not have that in my life, though I know that I was bred to it.  Like a one-owner dog, my loyalties are single-minded and never-ending.  A few years ago someone made me understand that about myself – that I need a substitute for what my parents had that I do not have, i.e. the all of the above.  That, it seems to me, is the spark I must nurture daily, even if by myself or in pieces with others.  Call it romantic idealism, really.  If I lose the inspiration of something perfect and magical in my life, I lose my freedom. 

 Q. [Manchester, UK] Who are your favorite authors?

 A.  Oh, I could be in a lot of trouble with this one, so I’m just going to mention a few authors I don’t know personally.  Vladimir Nabokov qualifies, as a side effect of being dead.  Obscure, pedantic, plotless and full of self-told jokes, Nabokov nevertheless captures the afterghosts of light, shadows and echoes, and understands how to use time and memory better than any other writer I know.  John Cheever could escape sequence in much the same way on occasion.  And among the living, I love E. Annie Proulx’s work, and – my current favorite – anything by Mark Helprin.  This is the Helprin who wrote WINTER’S TALE, not the Mark Helprin of the news media.  I also wish I could read Carlos Ruiz Zafon in Spanish better than I do, though even the translations are passably good.

 Q. [Catskill, NY…from a former swimmer of mine] Can you tell me the story about the time you pushed the shopping cart off the 10 meter platform…I am recalling stories from my youth to tell my daughter, she just turned 19 last week.

 A.  Ah, the Great Shopping Cart Fiasco.  I’m so ashamed.  Don’t know what came over me.  But there it was, on the deck – a supermarket cart that kickboards were sometimes stored in.  So when I saw it that fateful morning next to the 18-foot deep diving well in the 55-yard long pool, it just struck me that it would be magnificent to watch it descend from the 10-meter platform and break that crystal surface in the well.  A 33-foot soar in the silence of the dawn and then a slow settling to the bottom like the Titanic.  Hope to tell you, it was hell hauling it up there.  Narrow, zigzag staircase ascending through all three platforms.  But, hey, I was the 97-pound version of Superman in those days, right?  (…hot damn, still am ).  Anyway, it must’ve taken 20 min. to drag it up those cocoa-matted stairs, clinging to the rungs with one hand, hanging onto the dead weight of the cart with the other while trying to thump it up one more step and another and another, all without committing sudden-death by pitching off the sprawling divers gestalt of platforms and boards (I am terrified of heights).  So, when at last the cart was up there, I went through a little ritual of running it the full length of the platform and pushing it off the end, savoring the freefall and smiling with satisfaction – though it did not waft to the bottom like the Titanic but rather sank like a stone (duh).  Then I turned to descend the stairs, and that’s when the Detroit police car pulled out of the bushes up to the iron fence next to the diving platform.  Both officers got out of the car to regard me on high, and the ensuing conversation was brief but earnest.  “Why did you do that, son?” floated up to me as in a dream.  Realizing that I had been ambushed by a bush, and that they had been parked behind it through the whole preliminary of bloody cart being dragged up three stories, I allowed as to how I had brought the thing up there for the divers towels and that it had slipped.  In retrospect, I can see that that was a tad lame…a ton lame actually.  I probably should’ve said something like I had a seizure, or better yet, that Birdman [my swimmer] made me do it.  But there it was, the treacherous absurdity “slipped.”  The nice officers just kept smiling and staring.  And then they told me to “get it out of there.”  There?  They couldn’t possibly mean out of the 18-foot deep well, right?  The well whose steep sides sloped abruptly up to the 9-foot deep level?  Yes, alas, they could mean that.  And they stayed there for the next hour or so while Seaweed Sully set world records for frustration, for holding his breath, and for futile attempts to raise the Titanic.  Each effort was the same: push the diabolical cart up the sloping sides of the well by kicking breaststroke like a banshee; and if it finally made it to the 9-foot level where it teetered on the slightly lesser slope of the 55-yard pool, hook one foot through the handle and frantically bob for air.  I was like the Coyote and the cart was like the Roadrunner.  Inevitably, air and gravity would win.  Which is to say the cart would slide back into the depths, and I would gasp and gurgle for a while in plain view of two stony-faced cops.  But then there came that one superb effort, which cost me several million brain cells (though I could not have had many more than that when I hatched the idea, could I), when I managed to get the cart not only out of the well, but a few feet further up the length of the 55-yard pool to where it was perhaps 8 feet deep.  This worked well for the oxygen, though I was now developing Charlie horses.  The idea here was that I had to get the cart out of the deep-well end of the pool and all the way to the other end, which was about 5 feet deep, so that I could somehow hoist it onto the deck.  You may recall, Birdman, that the curb edge of the pool all the way around was probably a good 2 feet high as well, since it doubled as starting blocks.  So, when I finally managed to breaststroke kick the cart the whole length of the pool as if it were a kickboard, it was another tactical feat to drag it out by hanging onto the poles of the ladder with one arm.  The kicker – so to speak – was that when Detroit’s finest left the scene, another swimmer – can’t remember if it was BN or maybe KK (you remember when I trapped him in the sewer and also got Big John to serve the phony extradition papers on him after he broke out of jail in the Bahamas?) – came blithely onto the deck.  Immediately I suggested that he haul the supermarket cart up to the 10-meter and push it off.  Which that swimmer did.  Alas, I scrutinized the bushes in vain, because no Keystone cops showed to make the pinch.  Some days are just like that.  [Photo at top is from the 10-meter, but you can only just see the start of the well at the very bottom of the pix]

Don’t forget to send me your own questions.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326     

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Hey, you want to bug out with me?  You know, ditch this horrible, awful agony of trying to create characters, plots and settings?  I’ll tell you a secret.  When your imagination goes stale, you don’t have to put it to bed until it recovers.  In fact, that may be the worst – and certainly the longest – way to refill the well.  I call that the AMNESIA METHOD.  You simply stop working until the ruts you were in fade away and your words stop echoing in your head and the plot quits running the same maze into the same dead ends.  Amnesia.  Yeah, it works about as effectively as a dried out eraser on printing with a grease pencil.  Leaves a smear that you still see when you come back to the task. 

The AMNESIA METHOD is sorta like waiting for an inflammation to die down, after which everything has atrophied.  Better you should rehab.  Better to keep using your imagination, keep the Muse employed.  I call this the DISTRACTION METHOD.  The idea is that you are not so much worn out as you are simply bored.  So what you need is an escape, a distraction, a whole new set of stimuli and the more overwhelming the better.  Those ruts you were in came from the inventory of words and ideas you had on tap at the time, so the quicker you change out that inventory, the sooner you are back in action.  No waiting for amnesia to make the stagnant words/ideas look fresh again.

So, I repeat my invitation – come along with me while I practice what I preach.  Today is Famous Dave’s Bluesfest down at Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis.  10 hours, 10 bands.  I hate crowds, but today I will co-mingle with the masses in order to shift the gears of my imagination.  As long as you keep moving, you can hide in plain sight.  More importantly, you will not be distracted while you’re busy distracting yourself.  Nothing will tie you down.  You will be able to think, observe, and move back and forth between two concert stages, multi-tiered fountains, steaming barbecue pits of succulent ribs, spontaneous dancers carving out their funky space, and the frosty vapors exuding from Ben & Jerry’s cavernous coolers.  Hang with me here; this isn’t as arbitrary as it may seem.  You are a drive-by observer, interacting with everyone and no one.  Intrude wherever you wish, like a bee in a garden, but keep it brief.  Music will insulate you, draw you, free you to move on.  Why don’t you talk to the musicians between sets, and maybe help that old black lady over there with a cane trying to cross the paving stones in the fountains?  And why is that six-year-old in the sailor hat crying?  Ask him.  Put some style into it and see if your mojo works on him. (You’re a wordsmith, after all – a poet!)

Okay.  I can see you are physically here, but you aren’t HERE yet, are you?  When you are truly here, you will disappear into whatever here is but without actually joining it.  You will empathize with all of it in a way that would seem alien to you when you have your walls up.  You will do this with insight, sincerity, and a kind of respect.  Remember the thing you are supposed to be expert on – you are a writer, a creator of worlds.  Get out of yourself, open up your senses, your mind.  You don’t have to judge what’s around you, but do feel it, analyze it, because it is utterly real!  What a mix.  Lookee, lookee – there’s an elderly couple from affluent Minnetonka with their seat cushions and umbrellas, dressed meticulously to the nines, but sitting on the same concrete step as the desperate-looking goth teen to their left and the grizzled Hispanic dude on their right who might be a night watchman in one of the buildings down here, judging by the ring of keys on his belt.  If you watch carefully, you’ll see the transitional characters too – people who come to this annual event in their every day guises and then step out of (or maybe into) character.  Like that Madison Avenue woman over there who has taken off her light jacket, revealing that she has more tattoos than a sailor.  Besides transitional characters, there are those who never change but come out year after year as if this is the only place they bloom, like annuals popping up for their moment in the sun:

There is the lady who invariably wears a bonnet and Easter fashions (all purple this year).  She seems caught up in some sort of delusion, like the Norma Desmond character from the movie Sunset Boulevard as she dances slowly to the pounding music.  And there’s the outerspace, staggering Tin Man, who cocks his head toward the sky and makes peculiar lunges, always out of sync.

This year we have a rebel wearing a Civil War hat and a black shoulder-drape duster, and a little girl in shorts and a ballet tutu, and a dapper black man with a New Orleans strut, and a scarecrow in a crimson coat.

There are always sidebars.  Over there, for instance.  Two young girls just reached out from opposing paving stones in the fountain, each thinking the other was going to help her cross, and when they crossed at the same time, they both wound up in the drink.

The music itself is therapy for writer’s block.  Especially if you have true poetry in your style – i.e. rhythm, meter, alliteration, repetition of patterns, onomatopoeia – because music does all those things just like words do, as I explored a couple years back when writing about Eagle Glenn Frey in one of my Crosslake, Minnesota, columns, I think.  Norwegian publisher Jan Fredrik-Lockert has also written about the Eagles’ poetry, and I believe from my own experience that about half the world gets it when it comes to the music/poetry of everyday communication.  Strange to say, the tone deaf half that doesn’t get it occasionally includes an editor or two.  But that’s why there are dull shop manuals from Taiwan as well as enduring reads in fiction that jangle with language.  If you write the latter, you will benefit from finding music by any name – poetry, wit, sense, sensibility and sensuousness – in every moment of your life.  If you do this, it will be like moving from a silence to a symphony, from grunting artless notes to resonating full chords, from seeing only film noir to awakening in Technicolor.  You will be stepping out of Kansas into Oz.  While it may seem obvious that this is a life quality issue for any person, it is especially crucial for a writer.  Because before you can express worlds in depth, you have to grasp words in depth, you have to be able to live them both, see them both, think them both.  WOR(L)DS.

And if you are a writer, you get another bonus.  The similarities between silent wordsmythery and audible music may be extended to the visual and performing arts.  Again, rhythm, meter, repetition, and sensory patterns are included in the links between these expressions.  And that means – get this, now, if you are suffering vapor lock of the imagination – you can CROSS-TRAIN by switching Muses.  Not just by visiting someone else’s Muse at Famous Dave’s Bluesfest, but by courting a different Muse of your own.  So add the CROSS-TRAIN METHOD to ways of resuscitating your imagination.  Any visual or performing art will do – painting, sculpture, crafts, acting, dance – whatever shapes your imagination into expression.  It works like synesthesia, where evoking one kind of sensory impression stimulates another (e.g. words take on color, as they did for the author Nabokov).  In the spring and summertime I spend a couple hours every day playing tenor sax at Elm Creek and Weaver Lake parks near my house, which somehow stirs a whole new lexicon of language out of my brain.

I just used the word resuscitating, but what if you’re in need of a séance?  What if your imagination is basically at room temperature?  Happens.  Like everyone else, writers become jaded, disillusioned, or hopelessly stagnant.  They may give up for years, even for life.  Maybe it’s the day job that saps you, or the interactions of the people in your world.  Cheer up, Pilgrim, there may still be a way.  Because the problem is you need a transfusion.  Doesn’t have to be massive, but it does need to be fairly regular.  I’ve seen marriages where a vibrant partner goes fallow in order to accommodate the other partner’s unenergized personality.  What a waste of life.  Terribly tragic.  And unnecessary.  If your lifestyle just doesn’t fit who you are or the fact that you are a writer, take a look at that toe tag you put on your circumstantial self and see if it doesn’t read “Lazarus.”  And if it does, find yourself a galvanizing guru of inspiration whose energy and optimism you can feed off of in order to rise from the dead.  Because there are natural generators out there, albeit rare, whose imaginations are contagious.  Let that generator’s originality infect you.  To some extent, inspiring yourself is an acquired skill, and if you can increase your capacity to experience life at all times in all places by rubbing up against a natural generator, you will greatly enhance the quality of your creativity.  Think of it as putting your Muse on steroids.  I call this the UPGRADE METHOD. 

So what did you just do at Famous Dave’s Bluesfest?  You got out of yourself.  I purposely picked a bombastic “happening” to make it obvious, but you need to be able to do this in small ways every day – ideally all the time.  In order to escape the tedium and façades that swallow the meek and the weak, you need to be more like that natural generator.  Thanks for coming with me to Bluesfest.  There are four videos of what you saw and heard in my Sullygram newsletter this month.  They are available for free to friends & fans if you email mn333mn@earthlink.net   

Now, go back to whatever you were creating out of yourself a few pages ago.  See?  The dull clinks and thuds of those sterile words and stagnant characters are gone.  Lots more inventory in your imagination to inspire you.  All you had to do was open the door.  Stand back or be trampled by the ideas rushing past…write on!

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326     

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Maybe I’ll write humor today, you decide.

It is 4:41 AM and your sawdust-for-brains next door neighbor has just “unleashed” Lion Lungs – the hyper barking pooch – for his pre-dawn serenade.  Your spouse slumbers next to you, and if you move to the computer downstairs, there is a good chance you’ll wake the baby.  Better to just lie here trying to make light of it by writing the funniest story ever in your head:

Q: “So, what does your dad do for a living, little boy?” 

A: “He doesn’t do anything.  He’s a writer.”

Dumb.  Even your two grade-schoolers would think that was juvenile.  Humor is tough this early.  Especially if you are awakened before First Light by First Dog.  But at 6:35 AM, when an exhausted Lion Lungs is replaced by Dementia Dog, the wind-up yapper, Second Dog is no better.  You switch genres:

Maybe I’ll write a cutesy animal story today.

So now you start to fantasize a mama eagle arcing above the houses.  This bird not only has keen eyes, she has keen ears (picture Mouseketeer ears like radar domes) that register every yap from Dementia Dog (yap, yap!  – translation: here I am, here I am!).  Suddenly mama eagle banks, swoops and picks up Dementia Dog, who continues yapping mindlessly in a cross-eyed frenzy as he is carried off to a duo of ravenous eaglets awaiting breakfast 316 miles away.  Oh, this is good!  You’ve really got it this time.  You are just getting into some seriously sociopathic stuff – donating Dementia Dog to McDonald’s pooched egg menu for eagles – when a pair of elfin bare feet hit the floor boards in the next room, followed moments later by another pair. 

A war story would be good: “The paratroops landed running, their boots hitting the ground one after another…” 

…begin REALITY, the 8-hour inconvenience to your writing career a.k.a. “gainful employment.”  This is where your long-suffering spouse mans the trenches elbow to elbow with Dr. Seuss while you rush out into the rat race of 9-to-5 stiffs in order to earn filthy lucre selling shoes at The Wild Pair.  By 10 AM you are struggling with depression. 

…maybe I’ll write an “Oh-Yeah” satire today.  (“Hey lady, you’ve tried on every shoe in the store, why don’t you just wear the shoeboxes home?”)

And when your 8 hours end, you return to Happy Valley where luckily you find a place to park in your driveway right behind the roof repair truck and several vans.  But inside the House of Chaos you discover remnants of three projects, two committees, a charity drive, and half a dozen mothers bartering their children into pools.  Everyone is late for something, and expressions of dismay over where the day has flown fill the air.  Somehow your arrival seems to settle arrangements, as all vehicles except the roofer’s truck quickly disappear from the drive.  Alas.  Of the children who yet remain, you recognize less than half the human menagerie waiting to use the bathroom. 

Note to self: write a medical drama about a writer who dies of uremic poisoning in his own living room.

On it goes, another precious hour of writing time slipping away.  But while the minutes winnow down, the children you do not recognize and may not be related to also winnow down, because now their Mazey Bird mothers begin to trickle back in their vans to pick them up.  Your muse stumbles back on stage…

Maybe I’ll write a story about a heroic father who rescues children wandering lost in the jungle/arctic/desert…

And that is when you begin to recognize subtle signs of stress in your spouse.

 Attention children: Do not look at that woman who-is-not-your-mother curled in a fetal position on the basement floor, surrounded by razor blades, rope, and a mega-size bottle of aspirins!  Bike ride, bike ride, time for a bike ride!  See Daddy do his famous killer garage door trick as you wait on your bikes in the drive. 

The kids love it when you push the inside switch to start the garage door down and take two quick strides, stopping right under it.  You wait until the descending panels are a hair’s breadth from guillotining you, then suavely rotate your neck so that your head passes just under it.  Only this time the door practically cracks your skull open, and you are left grinning idiotically.  The “roof repair” man standing by his truck is not grinning.  He is shaking his head.  Ah.  You see it now.  The lettering on the truck: Roof & GARAGE DOOR REPAIR.  Yes, a new motor on the garage door will definitely throw the ol’ timing off in your act.  “Daddy, you look like a bobble head,” your youngest informs you. 

The bobble-brained author.  How wonderfully tragic!  It’s been done successfully before.  Faulkner.  A tale told by an idiot.  Keyes.  “Flowers for Algernon.”   Attention, Muse, this will be the shortest bike ride ever.    

But the caravan turns into a demolition derby of skinned knees, jammed chains, loose handlebars and a flat tire.  Everyone is unhappy.  Everyone whines.  Everyone has to go to the bathroom.  Check that.  One unhappy camper no longer needs to go to the bathroom…  Maybe I’ll write a prisoner-of-war story, you decide, announcing in your best Nazi voice:  “Everyone WILL now have fun.  Anyone caught not having fun will go to bed at exactly 5:17 PM with asparagus up their nose.” 

Elder daughter rolls eyes.  Youngest pouts.  Even the dog, who is eating grass, looks stupefied.  A leering child you do not recognize pulls two leaves off a farkleberry bush and shoves one in each nostril.

…Definite cue for a horror story: Children of the Wild Asparagus.  Yes, you are losing it. 

Back at the house, things have improved.  Your spouse looks surreally animated, dinner is only slightly burned, and the baby’s sprue seems to have abated – or perhaps migrated to the dog, who is now throwing up as you drag him toward the door.  Losing it, losing it, losing it…

Maybe I’ll write a funny horror satire about a heroic father in a dysfunctional family who saves his baby by casting a magical trans-possession spell that transfers a fatal infection to a dangerous dog who is then carried off by an eagle…  (Going, going, gone!)

Pssst!  This is how it is.  For all of us.  A day in the life of…  Hope I’ve cheered all you struggling authors out there.  YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326     

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

You don’t have to read too many of my columns to know that I am an advocate of first-hand inspiration as opposed to letting one’s imagination do all the work.  No matter how good you are, standing pat on your knowledge and memory as you create whole worlds is a sure way to cheat your potential.  If you want your work to be supercharged, you need to keep the chain reaction going in the fission/fusion part of your brain that made you what you are.  Rest on the laurels of your experience, and you will miss the YOU that could’ve been.  Call a halt to learning and growing, and you’ll connect far fewer dots by the time you assume room temperature.  I say this knowing I’m a hypocrite, that I love to hunker down and spin everything out of myself whole cloth, and that I have to overcome inertia every day.  Occasionally life makes it easy to fight that battle.  Case in point, my recent extended travels.  So, now I invite you to the second half of the writer’s diary I began last month in Europe.  It is, perhaps, of no value other than a personal account, except to say that searching and discovery require a certain mindset.  Searching especially.  Because sometimes when you’re lost on the yellow brick road Oz will find you. 

That’s what happened to me on returning from speaking at the House of Literature in Oslo (see last month’s column:  http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2011/04/15/thomas-sullivan-channeling-jack-kerouac-or-why-writers-need-to-get-out-more/#respond ) in the middle of a two-month journey.  In both a literal and a metaphorical sense Oz came to me.  The literal truth is the fact that Aussies Grant & Fiona, otherwise known as the “Oz”-ians, flew in for a visit almost on the tail feathers of my Delta flight from Norway.  The metaphorical truth is that they brought with them the magic of their own wizardry from the fabled land down-under.

The ensuing 10 days were a hoot, a compounded inspiration, and a chain of nonstop adventures.  Our days and nights scintillated with meaningful conversation and irreverent pranks.  Grant & Fiona are a brilliant down-to-earth couple well versed in everything from quantum to psychology, and me – um…did I mention the pranks?  I could have easily missed this core friendship in my life from halfway round the globe.  Grant was simply another interviewer to me two years ago when that interview began by international phone call.  Several hours later we had bonded and were making plans to ocean kayak from atoll to atoll in Tonga.  Now the three of us have shared exquisite times and are planning yet another adventure starting with five days in China and ending on a yak Safari that follows Genghis Khan’s route through the Gobi desert in Mongolia.

But the geography is the least of it.  Life is about people.  And if you’re a writer, you can never be reminded enough of that, because the more broadly and deeply you know people, the more consummate a writer you have a chance of becoming.  Writers tend to dismiss that, perhaps because they think there’s nothing one can do to affect that process.  But you can affect it.  Moreover, making characters up from limited archetypes that you relate to from your past or from favorite movie roles is a little like trying to learn psychology by studying cadavers.  It ensures only a degree of caricature in your work.  If you trust your imagination to do this, you’ll end up cloning yourself on paper or discovering only your own fingerprints all over the world.  In order to exercise the God-power of sympathetically creating genuine and convincing characters, you must know people.  And for that you have to let go of your blueprint, your map, your schematic.  You have to open up to more than yourself and to things/people/ideas that are unlike you and your security zone.  You have to get lost.

Prayer: Dear Muse, if I can only know one person, let it be a certifiable schizophrenic or the biggest heart/mind/soul in the world. 

Alernate prayer:  Let me get lost every day on the yellow brick road to unknown destinations so that things to be discovered can find me.

Allow me to explain in some detail, please, what I mean here by the term “lost,” because as you can tell, I use the word pretty much as a synonym for escape.  Lost means you do not know in advance every hour of your day.  Lost means you aren’t able to walk your rooms with your eyes closed, perform tasks in your sleep, and use the indentation in your favorite easy chair for a mirror.  Lost means you are still learning, growing, searching.  When you know every menu, every TV show, every uninspiring conversation of your “free” time before they come to pass, you may as well replace your pillow with a tombstone, because you are not just asleep, you are as scripted as death.  Your day-to-day life is all mapped out.  Which is fine, if that’s who you really are and you just want to maintain your status unto death.  But that is fatal to creativity…to a writer.  Writers need to be lost.

So there I was between Norway and nowhere, soaking up Oz, and when my Aussie friends left I jumped in the car and headed west, headed back in time, until an adventure or two later I was in the Sawtooth Mountains cc skiing with another incredible friend who lives on a small ranch in Idaho along with two horses and a dog named Ziggy.  But then again, Bruce doesn’t live anywhere that small.  He doesn’t think small, he doesn’t do anything small.  Long ago and far away we swam thousands of meters a day in frigid 50 m pools together.  But now it is as if the water has burst out of those small venues, flowing from narrow lanes into frozen endless ski trails up and down glorious mountains, through paradise after paradise.  [Short video clip Bruce took: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itSpP3y430g  ]  I can’t tell you how haunting it is to hear his voice echoing across misty dawns on a mountain, across time really, filled with the same energy and wonder now as then and yet different now because of how he has lived.  I can tell you that the wonder is seasoned with wisdom and that his remarkable perspectives are hard-earned.  And I can tell you that knowing someone like that over time is gold to the soul and sometimes the only way to discover what is locked up inside yourself.

So now we are back on the highway – you and I – if you are still sharing this little road tour of mine with its object lessons on the benefits of getting lost.  You do not need to leave home to get lost.  I once wrote a book for someone who got lost in a tent for two days, blinded and clinging to life during a raging storm.  And in a sense, this final leg of my journey was a process of coming home even though I was still headed west, because I was going to Oregon to meet my grandson for the first time.  Only…I didn’t just meet my grandson.  I met my daughter.  Who was this woman who put her life on the line in an at-risk pregnancy to carry an at-risk baby to term?  Well, not to term.  Seamus was an 8-week preemie, born struggling and requiring almost heroic care.  My daughter and her husband triumphed in this, and Seamus is fine.  More than fine.  He has climbed a mountain.  That is, his mother climbed the mountain while he was strapped to her chest.  But he never cried, except for 100 yards at the top where the 2500 foot elevation results in a couple of deaths every year.  And the crying wasn’t for that, I don’t believe, but rather because Seamus is not on solid foods yet and the adults – Colleen, Dave and I – had a brief picnic on the narrow trail.  It was an eight mile journey over four hours through spectacular velveteen forests, reminiscent of Pandora in the flick Avatar.  I swear, neither loose slopes, nor perilously positioned logs, nor mossy stones in icy cascades that we had to cross could wipe the smile off Colleen’s face the whole way.  It was an odd displacement of time for me, a bit of closure in an unfulfilled fantasy, because it was exactly the kind of day I had envisioned but never experienced in my own parenting of Colleen and her brother Sean.  Like I said, sometimes when you’re lost on the yellow brick road Oz will find you.

There are many photos of the above in my free monthly newsletter (Sullygram), and if you’d like to see them, e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Here are some extra photos, as follows.  Lead photo above:  Sully, Colleen, Seamus on Mt. Hood.  Photos below: 1-Sully, Grant, Fiona at Crow-Hassan.  2-Bruce & Sully at Galena.  3-Velveteen forest on Mt. Hood.  4-Salmon River flowing down Mt. Hood.  Thanks for reading.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326     

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  

Sorry for leaving you in the woods last month.  February’s Cannibal Essay was half a quest, and this is part 2.  The point of the two columns is to take the most mundane circumstances possible and try to make stories out of them, because you can always invent adrenaline rushes but unless you can find and express the underlying meanings in daily living you really can’t anchor make-believe dramas to believable characters.  Meaning is like DNA.  Just as the complete genetic code of an organism is present in each of its cells, so too a complete universal truth is present in each experience.  The universe in a grain of sand, as they say.  When we make up characters we are playing God, after all, usurping the power of creation, even if we only do it with words and imagination.  Fortunately we don’t have to worry about rivaling God.  Our failures will keep us humble if our ambitions do not.

 All the more reason, then, to practice exercises like last month’s http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2009/02/15/thomas-sullivan-do-stuck-pigs-sweat-negotiating-romance-and-the-path-of-least-resistance/ .  In a nutshell, what began as defeat (when a severely torn rotator cuff sidelined me) turned into a quest for an incredible white feather that has become a symbol of survival on both the physical and romantic planes of my life, if they are not one and the same.  Yes, I chose to do those things written about in February’s column, which considerably upped the likelihood of an adventure that day, but within that there were many more choices and recognitions that needed to occur in order to develop a story.  Here’s where I left off:

…so now I am standing there steaming in the snow, staring at a minor miracle that makes the exhaustion of the prior several hours fade away.  Because I’ve just found something that should not be there in the harsh elements of winter.  What is so eternal about a white feather?  If the symbol survives, can the thing it stands for do less?  I recall another relationship that will always survive and whose symbol hides in these woods.  This one is with a friend (Frank Wydra, author and columnist here at Storytellers) six months removed but not forgotten…

Flamingo Frank is a brother to me in every real sense of the word.  He died before his time and is buried 750 miles away, but a part of his spirit is here.  I brought it here two days after his funeral, a pink plastic flamingo that was a joke between us.  It was a joke because he would brook no mourning for him — he even had his body propped up at his wake with a glass of Jack Daniels in one hand and a silver dollar in the other.  In the heat of August I carried that pink flamingo into the most impenetrable part of a 5400 acre preserve and the joke is now a covenant.  The white feather has restored my spirit, restored my faith and hope, preserved my commitment to the people I believe in…today is a good day to visit Flamingo Frank.

Conflict and quest and character were all established in last month’s column, as were time and setting.  The main thing that needs to be added here as I segue from one quest to another is the connection between them — a catalyst, in effect — which is what the white feather instilled and renewed in me.  Additionally, if this unfocused event in the course of my day is to be turned into a story, I have to develop some back-story about Flamingo Frank.  That could be fed out through memory and association as I search for the covenant symbol.

For several hours I have struggled against deeply drifted snow and underbrush in freezing temperatures to reach this spot by the most indirect route, but now I head out from the lone tree in the Golden Meadow in another trackless direction.  The chill reality of beginning a second quest soaked to the skin in this weather soon comes home to me as I fight through waste-high dunes and lariats of reeds that snare me as tightly as Chinese finger traps.  So when I cross an actual park trail that poses no such obstacles, I opt to follow it even though it will take me a little out of my way.

This is the rising and falling action of the typical story — small hurdles and lesser challenges.  It can always be enhanced with imagination, and I’m leaving a few difficulties out that could be exploited, such as the fact that a cougar and a black bear have both been reported wintering in the area.

There are fresh tracks from three snowshoers with short strides — women or children — on the trail, and through the snow that has begun to fall I sight the veiled trio in the first mile.  By coincidence they turn out to be three nurses who work in the same hospital where my torn rotator cuff is scheduled to be surgically repaired.  They are lost and I have my own urgency, having overstayed my time in the woods.  In an odd quid pro quo of our chance meeting, I give them the right directions and they give me the lowdown on all the surgeons.

Minor characters can serve a great many purposes ranging from simple human interest to actual involvement in the unfolding of a plot.  The coincidence of the shoulder surgery could be developed through these characters as part of this story just as it happened or in a totally different way.  Think in terms of intensifying the character relationships — love, hate, gratitude, revenge — along the way.  Whatever takes place between us at Elm Creek could set the stage for even more drama or a meaningful twist if one or more of them turn out to be in the operating room for the surgery.  Coincidence is one of life’s great gifts to fiction writers…

I leave the trail and come to a creek, which I know will be no problem because it has recently been 25 below zero, and it just has to be frozen.  But there, nestled down in the woods, on a day when the temperature is twenty degrees higher, there is moving water.  With my shoulder like it is I cannot take a chance, I argue with myself.  A wet foot out here and I’ll be in real trouble this far from help and out of cell phone range.  But I look up and down the banks, because there are many logs across the creek, some in tumbled tandem where you can go from one to the other.  Plowing through the brush above the black water I find something at last that I think will work on both sides.  The fallen tree is a little slippery, and with my left arm unable to move except with my elbow leveraged against my side, I have to pretty much crawl and lean at the same time.  The main log has a few extended branches still stuck on it, but they are old and some snap off like breadsticks.  Still, I go slow enough to get to the middle, and now there is just three feet of smooth snow covering what I hope is solid ice right next to burbling water.  One lucky step is all I need, and if my momentum is fast enough and my step light enough, I should be able to hit the far bank which — though damn near vertical — is loaded with dried branches.  No “one-for-the-money,” I just do it.  (“I’m comin’, Frank…”)  And though I don’t like the disturbingly hollow sound of my foot thudding off what looks like snow over the ice, I fall forward onto the bank, clutching with my right arm at all the snapping underbrush.  I am soaked with sweat but the snow down my socks feels good somehow as I work up onto the bluff. 

Crossing the creek in winter is the riskiest part of this simple story, and again it could be made more dramatic in fiction, i.e. I fall in, I get pinned or trapped, etc. The point here being that those benign happenings of your daily life usually presents some “what ifs” which provide ample drama.  You simply have to think outside the box…

I do not know precisely where I placed the pink flamingo last August.  Heavily overgrown then, the landscape now is considerably different under winter’s pall.  But if I move in back and forth sweeps, I should be able to pick up the pink flash nestled against a tree…if it is still there.  For the next half mile I trudge futilely through the tract in ragged arcs.  No neon hint of red breaks the achromatic plane of woods and snow.  As with the white feather, I feel the drag of pending disappointment.  Someone has come upon this strange marker out here in the middle of nowhere and taken it as a souvenir.  That too was inevitable.  A symbol for a reality must become the memory of a symbol for a reality.  I make another pass close to the serpentine creek and well away from where I crossed, just to be sure, and then I see it.  I’m not sure at first, because the pink looks brighter than I imagined.  But then, Frank always was a beacon… 

This seesaw of emotions is not contrived, though perhaps predictable in these circumstances.  Until the moment of discovery, success would be in doubt.  What is important in those final moments is to bring out the poignancy of the relationship and what it means.  I think a lot of writers miss this in the denouement.  You really need to make the reader feel what the issues, conflicts and questions are right before they are resolved.  It not only hones emotional impact, it delays and teases out the climax.

Call it praying, call it a séance, call it a bridge between two planes of existence, call it what you will, standing next to that garish plastic symbol I had my commune with Flamingo Frank.  Wise-cracking, of course.  Hey, Frank, thought maybe you flew south for the winter on this here flamingo I left.  (Frank always went south in February, if he could get away).  He was as real to me in those minutes as ever, and he gave me a loan against eternity — the knowledge that there is some kind of continuance from this life, because I felt his presence so strongly that he just has to exist somewhere.  And I like to think that my being there preserves the fact that he once passed this way on planet Earth.  Wherever he is, perhaps that was a mutual assurance we both needed…

It seems almost sacrilegious to write about fictionalizing any of what actually happened that day at Elm Creek, but in keeping with this column, the content of those moments in the presence of eternal mystery could provide endless threads for storylines.  The spiritual aspect could go toward drama, mystery, thriller or any other shade of human experience.  At its most basic level, I simply took a walk in the woods that day.  But being a thinking animal (and only incidentally a writer), I have fashioned a life of symbols and meanings as I interact with my environment.  I cannot imagine living without that (the writing seems irrelevant) because I cannot sense or feel less than I do.  But if you are a person who does not optimize the world around you for its myriad connections to wit and beauty and wisdom and all truths, you must learn to do so if you expect to express it meaningfully to others, as a writer does.

“Seeing” Flamingo Frank again wasn’t closure or a simple paying of respects, it was, as always, stimulation.  We were always each other’s catalyst.  So the story continues… 

Leaving the woods I am tempted to take a shortcut and try another jumble of logs to cross the creek just for the adventure.  Don’t do it, Sully, the countering voice of prudence warns me.  Don’t do it.  But that is practically a dare to my nature.  Hey, another time…heal first, says Jiminy Cricket.  And you know what.  This time I listen.  Maybe that was Frank too.  I follow my tracks back to where I crossed the first time.  Sliding down the bank is a lot quicker than going up, and I decide to just take that step on the ice with my momentum and trust again.  I brake myself, pause, then take the leap and the one-armed reach.  But there is no luck with the thin ice this time.  The thud and the cracking are simultaneous.  I roll, sweeping the leg away from the point of contact and fall with my right arm against the log.  Sanctuary! 

Thank you, Flamingo. 

Long hike back.  I pass the stations of the cross I have walked before, and in the parking lot by the pool/pond I pick up the shuttle bus to the chalet.  The young chef at the concession stand makes my special turkey club most generously as I ply him with questions about his life and joke with the cashier.  I sit down and half a dozen high schoolers slide onto stools around me.  “Hey, Sully, when are you going to snowboard with us?”  Standard question to which I give my standard answer.  “When I retire,” I tell them.  “You guys are short-term risktakers.”  “So when are you going to retire?” one of them wants to know.  When I stop questing for white feathers and pink flamingos, I think, but what they see and get is my smile…

As with part one, this is still an internal story framed by physical events.  In my writer’s mind I cannot see it ending with the fulfillment of the quest.  Yes, there was satisfaction when that happened to me and my goal was achieved.  But Flamingo Frank and I had many adventures as varied as a week on a deserted beach in the Bahamas to big-city soirees.  It seemed fitting to me then that the return crossing of the creek should have a little kicker of adrenaline in it for me — for us — and maybe I kind of made it happen that way on that day out of the memory of those times.  Author discretion.  But it’s that kind of prerogative in writing the story — in seeing the story when it is happening to you — that makes for transcendent statement.  Whether or not what happened at Elm Creek that day became a story (or a column, as it did), or a fragment of fiction used in some later work, or just an exercise, the point is that a writer needs to become someone who finds all the living in all the life that surrounds them.

Photos in my free monthly newsletter for March include the pink flamingo from the day described in this column.  I’ll be happy to put you on my mailing list if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters are archived at the website below, photos included.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website.  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com

Take off your clothes. It’s okay, this is a vocational test. Well, if you’re reading this on a laptop while sitting in Ethics class, or you are Internet surfing in the back row of a PTA meeting, you might want to postpone the disrobing (at the very least, after you are buck naked, keep the laptop in the position for which it was named). Assuming you have achieved privacy outside of the PTA or Ethics class, now take a look at yourself au natural in a mirror. Do you see:

A) Several reasons to put your clothes back on.

B) A six-pack or curves, an attitude, and the conviction that you want to share yourself with the world.

C) A burning moment of honesty and empirical curiosity in a world of façades and appearances?

If your answer was B, forget writing, though you might consider penning porn or thinly veiled chronicles of the fantasies that keep you awake at night. Because in order to qualify for really meaningful lit you need to be riddled with neuroses, paranoia, guilt, shame and fear. The writing will be your attempts to get rid of all that. Writing is therapy, right? Nothing healthier than a working writer (snicker).
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