Thomas Sullivan

Oh, Lordy, here I dredge the rusty bottom of my brain for something that could pass for wisdom in last month’s column, and everyone who emails wants to know about the beautiful young thing and the owls. How embarrassing. Not because the wisdom was specious, but because – choke – I never hooked up with the fair maiden, and even the owls have abandoned me. Details about the owls later, but no film at eleven. First I need to pick up the threads I spun last time about a writer’s philosophy of language.

You may recall that I described isolating the use of three aspects of life in writing: emotions, things and events as one, and ideas. I chose those aspects for no better reason than I could see where they weighed into fiction and in what proportions. Each one is a distinct bias that tends to shape a story by genre. If you want to go back to the details, here’s a direct link to that column – http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/04/16/thomas-sullivan-spiders-and-spuds/. I also promised to relate those aspects to levels and categories of writing at the end of this series of columns, an association that I find very useful in understanding and aiming my own fiction. At the very least it can enable you to fine tune who you are as a writer and clarify to whom you are writing. So now let me make the case for the first one: the language of emotions.

This is the only language that is completely natural and so universal that it may even be pre-natal. Think about it. We spend nine months in the womb celebrating a Utopia where we don’t have to breathe, eat, drink or change our diapers. We have perfect shock absorbers, sound control, temperature control, and then suddenly – plop! – we’re born. We’re born wet and naked into a room full of strangers. The strangers are dressed. They are also wearing masks. As we turn purple and gasp for breath, one of them jerks us up by the heels and parades our privates to oohs and aahs. Sexual exploitation is soon followed by violence, as we are blindsided by a slap to a very personal place. Welcome to planet Earth. Very negative experience. Some never get over it. They become . . . literary critics. And if the slap upside the derrière is merely humiliating, the next act is downright dangerous, because another of the masked felons ties a knot in our lifeline to the mother ship and CUTS IT OFF! Ladies and gentlemen, it is time to speak. So we give it our first word: “WAAA-A!” Where did that come from? Who told us to make a vocal noise? Was there a loquacious twin in the womb? Who taught the twin? No one. Spontaneous verbal communication. Language. Pure emotion. It’s in our basic wiring.

And it never really changes. Language proceeds emotionally for a while: the feed-me cry, the TLC cry, the there’s-a-pin-in-my-fanny cry. In these more specific outcries there are the hints of a more specific language to come, but it is still our personal statement of being. Our feelings say that we exist as entities, as individuals. It is a life-long need to declare emotions per se. Oh, we will get sophisticated about it, learning to couch feelings behind all kinds of verbal rants and rationalizations that address complex and intricate circumstances, but the purpose is the same: to vent emotions. Waaa-a!

So whatever else more formal languages (English, Italian, Chinese etc.) do, they must answer the fundamental mandate of emotions. In addition to communicating facts and sophisticated thoughts, we need our languages to simply tell each other how we feel. Good writing does that, directly and indirectly. Apart from writing, one gender expresses emotions better than the other. They are called female. Not surprising then, that the most lopsided female literary audience favors writing that deals strongly and overtly with emotions. Males, schooled in the need to never flinch before the tiger, are more reticent in real life. Their emotions must often be inferred and tend to show up expressed as actions. Here’s a gross generality that has a little truth to it: women feel; men think. I hasten to add that the two approaches are not mutually exclusive. We’re talking tendencies here, gender reflex. And if you let me get away with that, here’s another, even worse: women talk; men act. Can you see why women universally shun me? Again, I hasten to point out that this is just a predilection toward one strategy for problem-solving over another. Men incline toward physical resolutions, each a kind of triumph of physical resources over resistance; women incline toward persuasion or psychological manipulation, thus causing change in the obstacle. Hoo boy, which way to the exit? Anyway, if you’ll buy into just a 51% to 49% trend along those gender lines, then grant me a similar nod in the way this gets expressed in fiction, by genre, and in reading tastes. I don’t mean simply with the gender of the characters here, but rather in the way the author exploits the characters, the handling of the conflict, and what she/he tends to emphasize. Do you start to get an idea where I’m going with this?

It is not neatly divided, however. Languages of the type I’m describing – arbitrarily dividing, really – do not exist in a vacuum. When I cover this in a speech, I can usually play off an audience for examples and direction that make the interplay abundantly clear. There are ardent devotees of language types just as there are ardent devotees of fictional categories. Think of your own stages in life and what you were consumed with at a given point and how language cued into that. Think Junior High. Think college. Think personal life. Think career. And if you are old enough, think where you ended up when all those stages finished pounding you into a conglomerate pulp. You are still being pounded. If art is a mirror of life, then maybe your fiction mirrors where you’re at. Duh. The stage is now set for the second language: the language of things and events. But that’s the next column.

And the final column in this series will try to put it all into balance in a way that lends some direction to self-analysis of the writer (and the reader, really). He said.

Okay, back to the owls. If you didn’t catch the last column, I am referring to an owls nest and a chance meeting with a comely young thing training in a nearby nature preserve (see: 04-16-06 link below). The owls went one at a time – like the von Trapp Family Singers fading out of the spotlight at a Nazi rally. First the sexually ambiguous parent disappeared. Actually, that makes sense. Abandonment was probably a subtle cue aimed at telling the owlet chilluns to get out of the nest and find a job. But then the nest disappeared. Don’t ask me how or why. The two “watermelon-size” chicks were still there, jammed more or less into the crotch of a tree, scowling down at me like juvenile judges at a felon’s trial. Hey, I’m not a house burglar, and if I was, I wouldn’t steal a house any more than a cat burglar steals a cat. Watermelon One was gone the next day. And Number Two hit the airways the day after that, I guess.

So I’ve been left to my lonesome, clop-clopping up the trails where women occasionally flash me America’s most famous digital gesture but little else. I am a pariah, destined to die unloved in the wilderness. But, hey, I’m a writer, I will make something of this. Writers suffer, right? Must suffer. So far I’m doing great. If you don’t feel life in its excruciating extremes, you can’t write about it. This is where you find the people for your books. This is where you internalize the psychology that will bring your characters to life. Take today. Out there blading when my radar pulls in a leggy blip in pink shorts on the horizon. I turn on the after-burners and in a couple of hills I’m closing in on a delightful mirage, moving like a racing blader. The pink shorts contrast a gorgeous tan, one of those I-hang-out-at-the-beach-with-buff-bronze-guys tans. I’m more the Casper the Friendly Ghost type. But hey, albinos can be buff too. Another hill, and it’s confirmed: female, exemplary specimen. Add competitive. Because now she sees me and begins to pour it on. She is no doubt one of the femmes training for the Tri who I run into every day on the trails or in the pool. I’m out here for the “Try” myself, so we’re sorta compatible already. The first curve (not counting hers) reveals the 5-wheel skates of a serious athlete. I am wearing Fischer-Price Tonka PlaySkool 4-wheel jobbies with little yellow duckies on the side. Now, the number one rule for these spontaneous races is that you must never show effort. She is showing no effort. Long, easy strokes, one hand working the turns, glide, glide, glide. I am going clip-clop, clip-clop, stagger, stumble, stutter step, pant, pant. I give up trying to breathe through my nose. If I swallow one more species of insect, I will have ingested all the entomological varieties available in the park. Mere mortals on bikes veer out of our way, as do family gaggles and terrified infants. Mile after mile (that’s two miles) we yo-yo uphill, downhill. Finally she slumps into a long glide, exhausted. I’m thrilled to see it’s hurting her, ‘cause it’s killing me. When she goes left at a juncture in the trail, I go right, happy to be able to slow down and too whipped to pursue conversation. Gorgeous tan goes one way, the Friendly Ghost the other. Back at the car I discover the carton of HeartSmart that fell out of a grocery bag yesterday. Keep Refrigerated, it says on the label. I’m out a couple of bucks. Stuff makes good suntan oil, though, and “tomorrow is another day.”

Here are some direct links to an interview and all my columns:
DBJ Sully Interview
http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2005/12/16/thomas-sullivan-whats-in-a-name/

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/01/16/thomas-sullivan-who/

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/02/16/thomas-sullivan-oh-yeah-stuff/

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/03/16/thomas-sullivan-kiss/

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

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

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

www.thomassullivanauthor.com

 

                                                                                         11  COMMENTS follow

Keep-It-Simple-Stupid is complex.  It beggars its own advice.  The slightly bitter tone of that reference to “Stupid” implies worlds of bad experience underlying the pure wisdom.  You can’t appreciate K.I.S.S. until you’ve tried to do everything with elaborations, convolutions and overkill.    

Each time I go at a new novel, I swear that this time I will organize things better.  I will research, take notes, write summaries, draw timelines, sketch characters – I will PLAN!  And I do.  I create a new monster of resource material with every new project.  Maybe you know the drill: you accumulate a wealth of material, troves of ingenious ideas, alternate endings, subtleties, nuance.  You anticipate every objection.  Ever-deepening twists open chasms of possibilities.  The characters come to life like evening rainbows in the wake of an all-day rain.  The promise of the book is staggering.  It’s all down on paper – reams of paper.  And, of course, very soon the problem stops being one for muses and starts becoming logistical.  At that point, I can no longer keep track of the densely packed details and sort through the multiple plot and scene variations.  I have kept so many options open and procrastinated so many choices that everything has potential contradictions.  I have reached a point of moratorium. 

The amateur usually begins with one sheet of paper and lets it flow sequentially: “And then and then and then…”  Some writers are good enough to make that work, and it’s still refreshing some times to read a work that isn’t too slick, that bears the authenticity of a raw storyteller letting it all out with little proportion, pace or premeditation.  But the pro, writing across galaxies of time and space out of his/her own substance, may be hard-pressed to invent a “natural” story with desirable flaws akin to cosmetic moles and passion equal to that first unschooled effort.  More often, I see writers intoxicated with the lessons they’ve learned, performing a few tricks to excess.  Mea culpa.  And yet I wouldn’t give up those stages of learning the craft.  I like to step out of sequence, let go of time and space, and use association and memory to let a character free-fall through a narrative.  I like delicious ambiguities that burst into truth long after the reader has made a false assumption.  I like to under-tell a story, leaving the possibilities as open as life itself.  Learning to use contrast and subtlety and shadows and echoes and a million hues and tints can be terrifically effective, but the capstone trick inevitably comes back to doing it all simply.  Get your universe down to a grain of sand without losing anything, and you’ve done just that, written a winner, maybe a classic.

But there is the built-in contradiction in terms.  You started out simple, and then you learned all those skills that go against simplicity.  Life is always gray, isn’t it?  That’s the folly of everything.  It’s never just . . . well, simple.  I guess the answer is always going to be a compromise of degrees.  And it won’t be a one size fits all solution.  You have to mercilessly identify your own indulgences and accept the cure.  Maybe slaughter a few sacred cows.  For me, it was a huge help to think through the stages of what I had learned and to come back to the bedrock fundamentals of communication.  And here, at risk of being – ahem – simplistic, is one of them: 

All communication has three parts. 

That’s it.  No clarion trumpet blast.  But give me a moment here, and I’ll try to connect it to a working method for a novel.  The three parts can be expressed as bluntly as “beginning, middle and end,” or slightly formalized, as in “introduction, body, conclusion” or “topic, development, summary.”  It’s all the same thing, naked or dressed up.  The important thing is to understand the logic of that.  Whether it’s two people passing on the street or a grand treatise read at a symposium, the mechanics are the same.  You have to claim someone’s attention, deliver the goods, disengage.  It may be as rudimentary as eye contact made by those people passing on the street, followed by a nod, and then the breaking of eye contact.  That says, I see you and I know that you see me, followed by a nod of recognition, followed by a conclusive looking away.  Hello, how are you, goodbye.  Take the visual out of it.  Pick up the phone, and you get hello-goodbye sandwiched around a message.  Unless you’re my father, who used to just pick up the phone and wait.  Sometimes you got the hang-up without the good-bye too.  Very disorienting for the person on the other end, because it violated the common sense of communication.

In a novel there is simply no excuse for violating the logic of communication.  More than that, you had better not slight any of the parts either.  In fact, because you have the advantage of endless premeditation, you are under obligation to deliver nothing short of the most clear, compelling and conclusive narrative possible.  You have walked onto a stage for the avowed purpose of communicating.  The problem is you have a great deal to say and you need to say it in an entertaining way.  And we aren’t talking about exposition alone here, but rather the paced meting out of information so that the reader’s emotions stay engaged, so that there is discovery and surprise and fulfillment.  Rhetoric serves another mistress, but the fundamentals still trump.  I try to break it down this way:

The BEGINNING needs to give the reader a place to stand, a seat in the theater, a POV.  Then you’ve got the reader’s attention, if not full engagement.  This probably answers, at least in part, the traditional questions of Where, Who and When.  If you’re James Michener, you’ll want to take Where and When downtown for a chapter or two, but others writers will work Who to a point of believability, particularly if there are mainstream aspects to their book.  Genre fiction is more likely to cut you a pass with Who, Where and When briefly while you work strongly on What and Why.  Which is to say, you need to define a problem, a line of tension, a conflict – something that needs resolving.  Few books can get far without doing that.  None should.  Episodic, anecdotal or stylistic raptures that approach pure poetry may be the exceptions.  I liken beginnings to rolling the dice on the green felt table and allowing the reader to read the numbers.  Therein you’ve introduced your characters and their conflict(s) in a time and setting.  You can argue lots of exceptions to this.  Faceless pulse-pounding openers will certainly command attention.  But for my purposes in organizing a work, that’s just semantics.  The BEGINNING doesn’t really end until I have a POV character on record.  

The MIDDLE next, the most important part, right?  The body, the message, the goods.  Well, yes and no.  Remember, while you may be telling a story, the real purpose is to entertain.  In terms of content, yes, the MIDDLE must stay the course and conduct the journey every step of the way between start and destination.  It answers the How.  But that’s almost a given to a competent writer.  If you make your living reflecting the things and events of life, you know you can pull that part off.  You reach into yourself – whatever insight you have into the human condition and the mortal soul – and you pull out the philosopher and the psychologist and the inventor of things and events.  You just roll along with whatever steps are necessary to get between the statement of the problem and the solution.  It’s expandable.  It’s contractible.  It’s an accordion or a bellows that you can vary in length and complexity.  You set up the hurdles and baffles.  You do the sideshows, the subplots.  Bring characters in, take them out.  In short, the MIDDLE is a stalling action between the problem around which the novel revolves and the fix.  Like a scaffold or Lego structure, it can go almost anywhere and look like almost anything.  Or like jazz, it may flow all over the place, so long as it comes back to the central theme.  To be sure, there are plenty of caveats that apply here.  Give the reader the sense that you are wasting their time, pointing at things for their own sake, or worst of all haven’t figured out where you are going yet, and you’re dead.  But the MIDDLE is a point of free play in the writing of a book, very much open-ended and limited only by your imagination. 

Not so the ENDING.  Traffic merges and everything has to come together now in a tidy confluence that will allow the reader to disengage with a sense of closure.  The essential conflict has to be resolved, or, at the very least, its insolubility must become the point of the book.  Fudge on the tacit promise you made to the reader in the BEGINNING that all would be answered and you’ve got a problem.  Often the resolution has been complicated by the MIDDLE, where other characters, subplots and conflicts have been introduced.  This can protract the ENDING and make disengagement less impactful.  Or not.  For me the guarantor against problems with endings is – back to my theme here – to simplify the fundamental parts of communication.  I do this by changing the order in which I address them.

After I write a BEGINNING, I write an ENDING before I write a MIDDLE.

Now, I know that this ENDING is just going to be a draft.  I’ll almost certainly have to change it, if only because there will be those new things in the MIDDLE that have to be concluded.  But the point is that if I can think of a dilemma worthy of solving in a novel (BEGINNING), and I can imagine a satisfying way to solve it (ENDING), then my only reason for revising the draft ENDING will be because I’ve come up with something even better to use, more comprehensive, richer in meaning and entertainment.  By writing the ENDING immediately after the BEGINNING, I also create clearer guidelines for what can be in the MIDDLE.  New elements introduced in the MIDDLE must fit the detailed scenario I’ve already laid out for a conclusion.  Overall, a much simpler method than winding up trying to straighten out a plate of spaghetti. 

All this said, it’s just a plan.  In practice I make big-time changes to an ENDING as often as not.  But again, if you have something totally workable in place to start with, something that excites and motivates you, the only time you will change it is if you come up with something even better.  Seems to work for me.  At least it dents the problem of logistics with all those notes and research sources.  The BEGINNING and the ENDING are usually the most concrete elements.  Even with variations, they tend to be clear-cut.  The MIDDLE is where complexities reign.  Surround it with packaging and it can help you control its shape as it develops.  

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

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

11 Comments:

Mari said…

Thanks for this. Lots of food for thought there.

10:10 AM  

Janet Berliner said…

A wonderful essay, Sully-Suh, on this St. Paddy’s Day. I have to confess that I find it a constant source of amazement and a permanent reason for gratitude that you are my friend and colleague. Careful out there in that cold White House. We want you around for a very long time. J.

11:08 AM  

Sully said…

Thank YOU, Mari and Janet! Happy St. Green’s Day back atcha.

Sully

11:17 AM  

Nicole said…

I’m still among the beginners, writing “and then and then and then…” Thanks for being one of those providing a map for the path I want to find.

11:35 AM  

David Niall Wilson said…

Great (lol) Now I’ll sit and ponder the ending of my next book and wonder WHY CAN’T I WRITE THE ENDING NOW?

Great essay Sully…lots of good insight, both into your own methods, and into my own interpretation of the process…

DNW

11:39 AM  

Sully said…

Nicole, writing is one of the few professions where being a beginner has some advantages. Freshness and passion are probably never going to be better for you than they are now. The other things will come with time on task. Work at it!

Sully

12:07 PM  

Sully said…

Hey, Davey, you create at the speed of light. Not sure the order of beginnings, middles and ends means much in that rarefied ether. Spontaneous creation, alpha and omega.

12:10 PM  

Jeani said…

Hi Sully,

I was reading along thinking “I knew it — I could never write a novel.” Then you said “After I write a BEGINNING, I write an ENDING before I write a MIDDLE.” That is not how I have imagined the process, but it makes sense. Even though I am, by nature (at least in part), one who plans things down to the finest details, I always rather thought any novel I might ever produce would flow out of my other nature (which I shall leave unnamed), really writing itself as I went along not knowing the ending until it “happened.” Hmmm . . .

Jeani

6:03 PM  

Sully said…

Jeani — You’ve got the novel-writing problem surrounded already. By your self-description you are an organizationopath, but you have another nature (implication: opposite). That’s what it takes, someone who can contain structures of logic and cause and effect, but at the same time can let go and follow the quantum leaps of imagination. Go for it!
– Sully

6:35 PM  

Jenni said…

Why is it, a parent and a lecturer can say things, again and again and again… not sinking in at all – and then somebody you’ve never met, says something and wham! it makes sense?

I mean, I knew the whole formula before… from writing fanfiction etc, but still, for all my assignments it seemed to go out of the window.

After reading this, I realised that the assignment I got the highest grade for, I actually wrote the end before even starting! I just knew the characters, and the last line and it was the easiest thing I’ve ever written. But before reading this, it didn’t quite sink in, as to why.

Thank you.

5:24 PM  

Sully said…

Jenni – You’re most welcome. Thank you for confirmation. Writing — creating anything, for that matter — is a lonely biz. Has to be. These blogs and postings are like cries in the wilderness and it’s great to get an answer.
–Sully

9:26 PM

                                                                                        7  COMMENTS follow

Two columns into my contributions at Storytellersunplugged.com and I’m already writing a “loose ends” piece. But, as it turns out, some interesting feedback has come in as well as a head’s up offer.

First up was this thought-provoking piece from Ed Picard, a surfer-philosopher-musician from Ventura, California, and the husband of writer Jeani Picard. He’s responding to my first column (December 16, 2005), which had to do with the default way writers are categorized by subject matter as opposed to style. Ed’s examples from other creative disciplines (creative discipline – now there’s an oxymoron) got me thinking about another distinction, which I’ll get back to after presenting his thoughts.

[quote from Ed’s email] “…what popped into my mind was that article on style and how writers really are categorized differently than any other artists. For example when I go to Grady’s Record Refuge, the records are arranged in rock, folk, country, jazz, etc. in other words style. When we were in San Jose recently, there was a modern art museum almost next to the hotel we were staying in. I made no effort to go see it, because I don’t like the style. For reading, I always go to the classics section when I’m looking for a book. In this case, I have turned over the job to a group of scholars to find books written in great style. Even though there are plenty of classics that I’ve put down because I didn’t like the style, it is the most reliable method for me to find something that I will probably like.

Anyway, I have to agree with you that subject is probably the worst of all alternatives for organizing an art form. Can’t imagine going into Grady’s Record Refuge and seeing a section called “Love Songs.” Man, that could have anything in it from Jimi to Stephen Foster! It’s a very unique predicament that writers are in, for sure. I guess the alternative that would best suit me and keep me from being overwhelmed from the staggering number of new books that come out every year would be to find a guru critic to follow. Maybe they could organize the books by critics choices. I know this would be impossible, but it is the only alternative I can see to lumping everything together or breaking them out according to subject…” [end quote from Ed’s email ]

The thing that struck me hearing from a musician like Ed is that he represents what I’ll call the “sensory arts.” He talks about records and paintings, and of course these have direct sensory impact. They don’t come to you as abstract symbols that merely stand for sensory impact, they jangle the senses THEMSELVES with sound, color, form etc. Writers, on the other hand, are confined to scribbles. Ideas represented by abstract scratchings, if you will. We skip the scenic route, trying to plant sensory effects directly in the brain rather than via the senses. Tough road, and not as much fun. We depend on readers with imaginations, associations and the willingness to think a little. Should that shape market labeling? Seems to me it makes the “style” all the more important.

An excellent Midwest writer, Frank Wydra (THE CURE), took the opposite view, emailing support for the content categories. I couldn’t get hold of Frank for permission to quote him verbatim, but essentially he argues that styles are a given and that readers sort them out. With much more eloquence than this summary can achieve (call it style), Frank pointed out the difficulties publishers would encounter trying to express the differences, and in the end he thought that “style” would simply become another label.

I never argued that subject matter didn’t, well . . . matter, only that it has increasingly become a series of catchall blind alleys that rob writers of their distinctiveness. Readers expectations are herded into those blind alleys and in the process a lot of writers get dismissed in a lump. That ubiquitous comment – “I don’t usually read books like this…” – is utterly revealing. Books like what? Books having to do with subject matter described variously as horror, western, romance, mystery, science fiction, fantasy etc? It’s a self-limiting form of marketing which has increasingly carved up (and carved out) a lot of readerships and writers. More often than not writers labeled by subject matter never get a chance to be sorted out by general readers, because they are not sampled. I’m simply in favor of moving away from content categories that literally don’t tell the whole story, and I wrote that advisedly in my December 16th column, citing the difficulties.

It occurs to me that filmmaking as a creative art offers some parallels and differences to books in its marketing. Movies share many of the same general labels – westerns, science fiction, comedy, romance, horror etc – but look how much more broadly they reach, despite the fact that many are made from books whose appeal (at least until the movie is made) is sharply limited by contrast. The movie-goer’s expectations are conditioned to much more than just subject matter. Films are marketed with all kinds of hype about the performances, the chemistry between actors, the beauty of the cinematography, the editing, the directing, the animation, the special effects, and so on. Star power is effectively a preset for characters portrayed. By the time the video is released, the movie is a known quantity as far as marketing. This comparison between film and book marketing is imperfect, to say the least, with many exceptions to what I’m saying, but I think overall it is quite fair to say that the average movie comes at a potential customer with far more emphasis on elements other than mere typecasting as a category. You could draw similar conclusions from live theater and performance art.

Most of the response I got was for the January 16, 2006, column, “Thomas Sullivan: Who?” Several emails shared lengthy descriptions of where and how writers write. Distilling that with what I know personally of other professional writers, the one common element seems to be control. My word. Have a feeling semantics would require a different word from different writers. What I’m talking about is the assurance that the atmosphere is saturated with whatever one considers non-intrusive. Amazing what a range of possibilities that includes. For some it is pristine silence, for others just the opposite, even background roar, so long as it is predictable and will not engage (distract) the writer directly. In fact, I’m still corresponding with a couple of people about this, dredging up anecdotes and searching for common ground in what would seem to be contradictory methods to produce the same result. I’ll save the details for one of the next columns. Touching on the same subject, writer Robert C. Jones from Michigan passed along some interesting research on creativity, which I will also try to include.

So glad the ski stuff resonated with others who read the column, though. Nothing more inspiring to me than to be in a magic setting where every cell of my being is required and the full sensory panel is lit up. Why wouldn’t that be the obvious place of choice to form thoughts, give free play to imagination, and solve specific problems in the development of a story? Artists are cannibals. What’s the bit – you are what you eat? Add to that: you write what you absorb. It’s metabolism. Being surrounded by an inspiring ambience has just got to press buttons if your nerve endings are still in touch with your brain. Doesn’t make sense to lock oneself up in a sterile cubicle all of the time. Garbage in, garbage out. Much better to select kinetic settings consistent with the tone of one’s work and channel the vitality as it happens.

There are ways to shortcut live influences, however. At least for me. Sometimes a movie, a photograph, a CD or even a phone conversation can fire up my muse. But more and more I favor full senses five brought to bear on whatever I want to write about. Maybe that’s a failure of imagination. Dunno. I do know that when I get out in the world, and all systems are go, fed by direct sensory stimulation, my mind just naturally gets with the pace. You have to shape the setting to the task at hand, of course. If you’re writing about a neurotic trapped between four walls and drowning in his own abstractions, then maybe a writer’s garret is the place to be. I just don’t want the venue to dictate or smoother the mood of what I write. And if you want to awaken your full spectrum of feelings, you need something transcendent to jar you. For me it’s those ski trails, my breathing cadenced to the wind as I skate up-hill toward a full moon, and tuck on the downside to soar blindly into some dark hollow where I am the alien and denizens scurry in the underbrush. That’s what phantom blue snow is all about. Tabula rasa for my imagination to write upon.

The “head’s up” I mentioned comes from Suzanne Beecher. There is no better friend to writing on the Web that I know of than this inspired entrepreneur from Sarasota, Florida. Having eschewed the usual academic routes to a career, Suzanne opened a restaurant at age 21, subsequently created and edited her own business mag, and now regularly and fearlessly beards corporate lions in their dens as part of her many outreaches to opportunity. She is disarmingly homey (homey not “homely” – this stunning blonde who has been known to get up in the middle of the night to drive her new car). She is a baker of chocolate chip cookies who writes down-to-earth columns on Dearreader.com that reach some 300,000 subscribers to her book clubs. I have been fortunate enough to have had my last three novels presented to her readers, and she tells me that they are actively looking for new books they can use in their horror and thriller categories. And as Suzanne would say, “Thanks for reading.” Your thoughts are welcome and your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

7 Comments:

David Niall Wilson said…

It’s an interesting comparison, the visual arts and sensory arts to the written word. You see every sort of musician in the world doing Christmas albums, for instance, and a lot of cross overs and collaborations that draw their audiences from various listening pools in music – and artists are allowed to go through “periods” where they switch styles completely, or create new ones…but authors?

I suppose if you are Stephen King you can get away with writing a Western, but unless you have name recognition level fame, you are going to have a hard time selling a publisher on a project well out of the range within which they already know how to market your work. I guess instead of Christmas albums, the things writers are allowed to do is cookbooks and children’s books.

As long as marketing gurus, editing gurus, publishing gurus, and readers are all seperate groups, this seems an enigma unlikely to end well for any of us (lol)

DNW

10:15 AM  

David Niall Wilson said…

Sigh…the things writers ARE allowed to do, not is…sorry.

DNW

10:16 AM  

Janet Berliner said…

I think most musicians, artists, and writers get battered for taking sideroads, just as we do, but they go ahead anyway. The Biggies do what they want, as you both said; the rest, like the Sullies, Berliners, and Niall Wilsons, are constantly torn. I know that I am. We find ourselves up that ole crick without a canoe, let alone a paddle. In the end, I think it depends upon how we define success. As someone who loves canoeing, you like those cricks, Sully. As for me, I’d rather be out on the ocean in a pea green boat than writing what I’m told to write rather than following my head and heart.

Truth is, there’s also that place in-between, which is where most sensible people end up–artists, musicians, writers. I’m just not sensible.

11:29 AM  

David Niall Wilson said…

Hah. I slice myself into thin ribbons and trickle down all the “cricks” and out over the ocean without even the pea green boat and hope that one day, before I fall apart, I’ll come back together and be on the right tributary…it’s a dream.

DNW

12:27 PM  

Janet Berliner said…

You will, Dave. I have faith. J.

12:51 PM  

Sully said…

What a crazy day. Think I am without a canoe, a paddle, or a crick so far, but I’m about to head out into the wilderness and correct one of the three. Yeah, as writers, we do seem to be bludgeoned by the limitations of the abstractions we use. It’s an argument for performance art. I say BAN published books. Let’s just read our stuff on street corners… That way we can draw or repel based on our good looks and sonorous voices. Uh-oh… Might work for you, but I’m in trouble.

– Sully

3:02 PM  

Teresa said…

Just want to toss in my own ‘Hell Ya!!’for Susan Beecher. I subscribe to the Horror and SF clubs and they are wonderful for bringing new authors to my attention. I’ve bought books by Tim Lebbon and James Moore because I read them on the ‘club’.

This week I’m reading from Gary Braunbeck’s “Keepers”.

and on a related note, I thought I’d point out this new service developed by Andrew Bert, Called iFiction http://www.aburt.com/ifiction/

What is iFiction?

“iFiction is like iTunes — pay a small amount for some great stories. You can read the first part for free, then pay an amount determined by the author to read the rest. You can pay by Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex, or PayPal.

iFiction stories are direct from the author. That means you are directly supporting authors you like, with no middleman

Any author can sign up to use this free tool.

iFiction was created and is hosted / maintained by science fiction author Andrew Burt.”

As a reader I assure you I will be taking advantage of this great idea.

5:33 PM

                                                                                              8 COMMENTS follow

Where do you write? I mean really write. Where do the answers come to the questions you agonize over in front of the computer screen? In your dreams, driving the car, watching people at a mall?

I skied at a place called Elm Creek on Christmas Eve, listening to the owls – three of them in the miles I covered – echoing their question, “Who?” as if to pass along advance warning of my approach. Who, indeed. To be a writer is to have a perpetual identity crisis. Normally you’d have a few hundred people out there at Elm Creek, dwindling down to the last diehards by ten o’clock. But it was empty. Lamps punctuated part of the trail, throwing a succession of golden spotlights for me to pass through, searching for one that fit. None of them fit. I left the last one behind me and skate-skied on under starlight, enthralled by the phantom blue snow and crystal magic. As always. This is ritual for me in winter, at least once a day. It is where I write.

CC skiing is my religion. I think it is the blankness of snow that makes it so. The world out there is simplified, made whole, its flaws covered up, with the potential for perfection renewed. Like a blank page on a computer screen.

Both the snow and the blank page invite invention, and I get a rush out of inventing from the ground up. That tabula rasa of a blank page is as exciting to me as it can be daunting. I stare at its perfection before I begin to mess it up with my humble prose, and for just that few seconds I know that I have a shot at writing the most timeless words ever written. Doesn’t matter that it’s an illusion, the potential perfection is there, the same starting point as the one for the words that actually are the greatest ever written. Dunno who wrote ‘em, or what they say – that doesn’t matter either. Potential matters. Potential is motivation.

The characters begin their transits across the blank page, and I become the inquisitor owl, asking “who, who…” And in that process, the question is always, “Who am I?” Because you cannot write things you do not know. You don’t have to know them first-hand, of course, but it requires, insight, empathy, vicarious living. So, the “Who,” it seems to me, is always a search within yourself.

Thus, as I said above, to sell one’s soul to the muse is to have a perpetual identity crisis. There are times when I think I know who I am, but then some maverick inspiration will take a potshot inside my imagination and my muses will all scatter in new directions. I don’t like limits, and I don’t like borders. Both are invitations to trespass. As soon as you define one or the other, you imply that there is something beyond, and by nature I want to see over the horizon. I want to go beyond the trail lights into the phantom blue snow.

I think most writers are like that. There are some who regard borders as security zones, and others who see limits as convenient aids to define their interests, and still others who think of limits and borders as backgrounds that in no way stunt the possibilities for setting characters against each other in a full range of human dramas. For me, the human drama interacts with the limits and the borders, and so I need to orchestrate both.

Once I actually begin to write, dissatisfaction begins. Now I have to like what I’ve dared introduce on the page. I’m damn dangerous to myself at this point and painfully aware of “sully-ing” the perfect whiteness. If it’s a novel, I’d better fall in love with it quickly. Else a pyromaniac deep within me will burn the sucker (or hit delete) in short order. The most difficult thing for me to maintain in the throes of creativity is perspective. I have lots of tricks for this, and there are a few people I trust to weigh into the process – true muses, if you will – who will read my stuff and help me regain perspective. But even so, familiarity breeds contempt, and it is just tough to read and re-read your words as you work a novel day after day and not lose a sense of what you have. “Who, who…” nags.

Sometimes the blank page stays blank. Same at Elm Creek. I become snow-blind to what’s there or it all just grays into an absence of perspective. When that happens, I will kick off the skis and trudge off-trail into the woods at night. Then I will study the darkness until I start to see what’s there. Amazing what you can see when you stare into the darkness long enough. It might be a pained tree, so gnarled and tightly balled that it looks like it dipped its fingers in acid or recoiled from a flame. Or the roseate glow of a city to the west and an ominous deep purple cloud wall across a stark valley to the south. The sky repairs itself at night and is covered with welts and abrasions of every hue. Or I might read some tracks in the snow of a drama that happened hours before, life and death stuff, played out by hungry nocturnal denizens. And the snow is always luminous at night. Did you know, there are spiders in the snow? Yeah. Microcosms and macrocosms everywhere, starting with spiders and ending with stars. The stars are just pinpricks in the unrelenting darkness of the cosmos, I told another writer recently. You just have to connect the dots.

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

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

 http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

8 Comments:

John Skipp said…

Wow. That was beautiful, and achingly apt.

Thanks for taking me out to the unbroken snow, where everything is possible.

(Even here, in the desert that is southern California.)

11:37 AM  

David Niall Wilson said…

“…it is the blankess of snow that makes it so…”

“I want to go beyond the trail lights into the phantom blue snow.”

“Amazing what you can see when you stare into the darkness long enough”

I could go back through the last twenty or so essays and not find that many lines worth remembering…there are titles in them, whole vistas of …STUFF… just waiting. Like the blank snow, I suppose…I needed this. It’s been a “life” filled weekend and I have been less-than-creative in this new year….good reminder.

We don’t have any snow, but I could always go sit on the bridge and watch the river, or stand on the bank of The Great Dismal Swamp – or drive through the 200 year old graveyard…

Thanks for “Sullying” my day (heh).

Dave

2:07 PM  

Sully said…

Thanks, guys. Snowscapes, sandscapes — same blank slate, John. Is this why we both shave our heads? … And, Davey, I’ll trade you an Elm Creek odyssey for some sagas out of the Great Dismal Swamp, which was an early soul-shaker for me.

Sully

5:18 PM  

Teresa said…

The sky repairs itself at night and is covered with welts and abrasions of every hue.

Wow… talk about an indelible image.

Welcome, Thomas.

5:28 PM  

Janet Berliner said…

Thank you, Sully-man, for yet another intelligent, beautiful, soulful essay. For me, though I will not, cannot, compete with your extraordinary prose, my muse is the sea.

For Paul Gallico, who wrote “THE SNOW GOOSE,” it must have been both.

Answer this, if you please. What do we do, you and I, if the snow and the sea are beyond our grasp? What–do we do?

–Janet

5:37 PM  

Sully said…

Ah, well, Janet, there is always more space within than without. If there is no snow and no sea, we turn to the cosmos of the soul, our imaginations. Real estate there is always available and rent free. … You know, when I was responding to Skipp’s dunes out there near L.A., I was thinking just that — the sea. And maybe that’s the eternal fascination of it, not just that water is so elemental, but that it is a vast vista, forever in flux, like an Etch-A-Sketch always washed clean by the yawing. No wonder Jack London nailed down the universe in The Sea Wolf. And “pshaw” about competing with me. That’s always a 2-way street. Hopefully none of us can do what any of the rest of us do. I sure as hell can’t balance a vast epic like you can. Don’t have the center for it. Guess that’s called insight…

TERESA — Appreciate your response. Hang in there with those short stories. Whatever they look like to you now, they are like children who grow up to support your future.

All best, Sully

7:06 PM  

Mark Rainey said…

An excellent essay, Sully — the imagery alone is enticing, the metaphors more than a little apt. I haven’t been skiing in many, many years, and never CC, but I’ve been out there enough to relate to the exhilaration you describe. Thanks for sharing all that feeling.

–Mark

9:02 PM  

Sully said…

We just skied together, Mark. Funny how often when I’m out there I wish I could share it; and it never occurred to me that by writing about it, others would connect. Thank you for the affirmation.

Sully

9:46 PM