Thomas Sullivan

I remember overhearing my mother tell someone how as a boy I used to set up jigsaw puzzles in different rooms.  And it’s funny, but as an adult I never thought about myself doing this until she said that.  The thing that made it bizarre if not downright dysfunctional in a personality sense was that the loose pieces and the placed pieces of each puzzle were never in the same room.  The unplaced pieces of, say, a western scene around a cowboy campfire would be in a room where the picture from a Disney film like “Fantasia” was partly put together.  There might be four puzzles in-process like that.  With laughter in her voice my mother told this person that you always knew I was onto something when I suddenly went into one room, picked up a piece and carried it into another room.

Whatever possessed me — and I use the word possessed apprehensively — to begin doing this, the thing that strikes me now is the fact that finding answers that fit wasn’t something I did just standing over a problem.  It was something that occurred mostly over time and from a distance.  So, obviously the problem(s) were carried around in my head, and obviously the search for answers was ongoing, and perhaps less obviously whatever else I was doing at any given moment might trigger an inspiration or a revelation.  And now (at last he’s getting to the point, folks) I realize it’s the same thing with creating books and short stories.  They get solved (written) over time and from a distance.

Tell me, please, do you solve problems this way?  It seems evident that everyone does to some extent.  But to what extent?  How deliberately?  Is it a trainable resource in human creativity or just another blind alley in my idiosyncratic nature? 

I guess I’ve tried before to pin it down as a worthwhile and useful strategy for writers, i.e., that you should always define the next problem before you walk away from a creative session, because then solutions may occur to you in the interim.  In fact they almost certainly will be suggested by whatever you experience as you go about doing other things.  The suggestions will come to you as associations and metaphors.  Or maybe the terms connections and similarities work better for you.  That flow of suggestion is a big part of who you are, writer or not – creative person or not.

Well…at least the associations part is.  All people put life’s puzzles together over time by seeing the associations.  And they do it walking from room to room in their lives, noticing things that might fit insights and answers to whatever questions are nagging them.  Unless the TV is on.  (That’s only a metaphor for distraction, ‘cause in reality even the TV can suggest associations.)  What I mean is that the TV sort of appeals to the passive/lazy part of all of us.  It’s a stand-in for imagination and active thought.  If that’s your default activity whenever you chill out, pick a good channel, because that may constitute the quality of your life.  I know it’s scary to turn the TV off.  Suddenly we are in a room again and the walls rush toward us and the silence feels thick and terminal.  If we are with someone, what do we talk about?  God help us if we give our brains center stage and the spotlight fades to black!  There is always that danger.  But then, if that’s who you are – if you think that the last words to the national anthem are “…start your engines” – you can always turn the TV back on and pop a beer.  On the other hand, you might turn out to have those whatchamacallit’s…inner resources.  You might turn out to have them in spades – deep thought, wit, wisdom, imagination.  Dial the TV and other passive distractions down, and you dial the nagging problems up along with your motivation to solve them.  Do something that draws energy out of yourself, or interact with whatever or whoever inspires you, and you’ll feel your circuits come to life. 

Okay.  Sorry for the rant.  I’m just bitter about all the years I’ve wasted in the company of uninspiring things, narrowness and blocked communication.  My choice, mea culpa.  But then, I do have one helluva lot of rooms in my life.  It’s a burning regret and kind of an irony that I never found someone to share them with, and yet I think everyone has some rooms like that – maybe the innermost rooms.  I’m good at sharing innermost rooms, but I suck at crowded rooms where you have to live appearances rather than truths.  Appearances just smother me, and in general I have to believe they are antithetical to a creative life.

Anyway, I was saying that all people put life’s puzzles together with associations.  But not all people put together those metaphors to express them that I mentioned.  Writers do that.  People with poetry inside them do that.  Metaphors too are apt to dawn slowly on a person who carries the need to communicate with flair and imagination from room to room. 

It strikes me that metaphors are also more inspiration-sensitive than simple communication.  Expressing oneself in language that jangles and pulses with imagery is a whole other universe.  It can convey multiple levels of information and connect the dots between insights.  It can do this in a style that is itself colorful and entertaining, as opposed to the mundane communication of literal facts.  But this requires a willingness to go with the flow and sometimes a suspension of disbelief.  When you try to express yourself with flair to someone who clings narrowly to literal communication, you can quickly be snuffed out.  You feel you are talking to a blank wall, unable to engage them with insight, depth and emotional coloring.  Metaphorical and image-laden language is more challenging to use, but when it works, there’s nothing like it.  You want to connect with it always, to live life in the Technicolor it provides in a black-and-white world.

I’d like to believe it can be acquired.  And you can make it real.  Imagine a bed of roses.  Have you ever actually seen a bed of roses?  Why don’t you make one, like the picture at the start of this article?  Presto…done!  The metaphor is no longer just a metaphor but a fact.  You are living your imagination; you have given an ideal permanence. 

The truth is probably that some people just think metaphorically, while most do not but recognize and respond to what they perceive as witty or poetic or wise.  The problem for the inventor of metaphors — the writer, in this case — is to not overreach.  Hence, coming up with optimal expression is just like any other problem — any other jigsaw puzzle — that can benefit from being carried from room to room while life suggests possibilities and puts things into perspective.  I’m not saying that every word you write/utter should reverberate through marble halls.  On the contrary, clarity is the first mandate of communication.  But clarity is not confined to simplicity.  Unrelenting simplicity can be both boring and shallow.  Finding the right balance between artful expression that carries meaning and the straightforward conveyance of facts is just the sort of problem-solving I’m writing about.  If you’ve never spent a few days carrying around the dilemma of what to say or write, you’ve missed out on the rich array of possibilities that might have nudged you over that period of time.

Try it.

Imagine you are going to propose to someone by renting a billboard on a highway they drive.  You’ve got the first and the last parts of the message, i.e., “You make me feel like_______________________!  Marry me…”  Now carry that blank around with you.  Force yourself to think about it everywhere you go.  Turn off the radio in the car, take a walk by yourself, stare out the window and THINK until monkeys come out of your nose.  Do not settle for the first candidate to fill in the blank, even if ultimately you come back to that one as the best choice.  Let frustration and annoyance have their way for a few seconds each time you draw a blank on the blank.  Sooner than later you’ll have something that works, something satisfying, something worthy of…

Who You Are.

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s fun and unintrusive.  2 examples of my recent Tweets:  Chicago out 4 Olympics. So tell the gangbangers to stop training for the drive-by target shooting event.  And…  “Freedom ain’t worth nothin’ but it’s free.”  Is that why I always do way more than I commit to?  Here’s the link:  http://twitter.com/thomassullivan .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net.  Past newsletters/photos are archived under News & Articles at the author’s website below by my illustrious California webmaster, Cap’n Ed Picard.  Also, if you tried to find my old columns and the links no longer worked, it’s because StorytellersUnplugged recently moved to a new hosting location with David Niall Wilson now keeping it dynamic and up to date.  But my webmaster, working tirelessly, has just finished posting new links to those columns as well.  You’ll find them all on my author’s website next to the newsletters.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/  

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

                                            21  COMMENTS follow

Picture this.  It’s a 70° Saturday, and your kids are away at Death Valley survival camp, your spouse is shopping at Mall of America with a new credit card, the teen across the street who drives the Panzer with the heavy metal band locked in the trunk is in bed with the flu, phone service is out, and the neighbors’ dog has stopped barking for the first time since squirrels were invented.  You are sitting in front of your computer, fingers poised above the keyboard, staring at a blank New Document in Word.  Eager images crowd into your thoughts like actors waiting to audition at a cattle call — a Spanish galleon weighs anchor on the edge of your imagination, two lovers with eager moist lips lean across a red rose, gunfire slashes through dense jungle around a Mayan pyramid, a lone cowboy urges his horse up a dry gulch on a mountain, from the Oort region of the solar system a meteor is bumped into Earth trajectory, a broken-hearted woman with tear-stained cheeks climbs to the rail of a bridge…  Your fingers attack the keys with very little guidance from your brain and what you get is:

At last they stood on the quarterdeck, remembering how they had escaped their Mayan captors — he, a lone cowboy from the mountains of his native Spain where the rain falls mainly on the plain, and she, an English Lady so recently suicidal (had she really tried to leap off that bridge into the Thames) over her last lost love — and now, anticipating their first kiss within the heady scent of roses that somehow mysteriously perfumed the breeze, they were blissfully unaware that a meteor half the size of East Sweet Pea, Arizona, was hurtling toward them.

So goes the perfect writing circumstances of an optimal afternoon.  Those porcelain acoustics you hear in the distance are your muse retching in the toilet.

But maybe the problem is that creativity really doesn’t take place in front of the computer or hovering over a blank sheet of paper.  It takes place in all your collective experiences, your associations, your memories, and everything you know about life BEFORE you sit down in front of the computer.  The specific act of writing is pretty much a sorting out process applied to what you bring to that point.  And so, in your frustration with eliminating distractions, you may have overlooked the need to stimulate or inspire that fundamental collective of thoughts and insights that brought you to the game.

Wordsmithing is the shaping of content into expression.  The content has to be there, has to be drawn from the well, refined into gold, distilled from swamp water; and maybe you sat down in the perfect absence of distraction and expected it to be on the screen — that dead piece of glass covered with electrically excitable dots known as pixels.  If you spend a lot of your time doing that every day, you get farther and farther from the source material.  Moreover, you get saturated with your own uninterrupted words and dead-ended in the ruts of circular thoughts.  Good writing needs priming.  Properly primed it can almost flow by itself. 

And you prime by going back to the well.  It took me a long time to learn that.  I thought that the only things that stood between me and success as a writer were the demands of gainful employment and the distractions of a home life.  Curse the world that thought it didn’t owe me a living!  Where was the booklined study where the author sat ensconced in golden silence meticulously crafting deathless prose with a goose quill on parchment?  Hungry mouths at home dictated that quitting my job as a teacher was out of the question.  I became habituated to parked cars, bathrooms and restaurants in order to practice my craft, as if it were a dark perversion in the otherwise pedestrian flow of life.  And then I learned to separate — to see the natural separation, actually — between creativity and the physical act of writing.

You can create anytime, anywhere.  In fact, anytime/anywhere is the precise coordinate of time and space where your source material resides.  Why separate those sources — those rich and tangible associations from everything you know — from the act of creation?  All you need do is think while you are out and about engaged in the act of living.  The things you must think on are the questions that need to be answered about wherever you are in the creation of a book or story.  Need a new idea for a book?  A character?  A plot twist?  A scene?  Know what the question is, and as you go about your life with insightful eyes, seeing and appreciating the world around you with all the insight you can muster, I guarantee you that answers to those questions will come.  They will come as possibilities, suggestions to yourself that you can refine into workable directions for what comes next.  But you can — nay, must — ask those questions before you quit a writing session, if you want the answers to be there when you return.  Hemingway called it “leaving something in the well.”  I think that’s what he meant.  I’ll ask him next time we talk.

Despite my making light of them, the physical circumstances of writing are a factor, of course.  I’m just trying to point out that much of distraction is self-inflicted and that you can parse out a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to creativity.  It isn’t like someone shoots off a starting gun when you sit down in front of the computer.  “Ready…set…think!”  By putting my brain in gear and my muse to work, I learned to write very fast when I actually sat down.  Typically I would drive 12 miles to the school where I taught, take the steps two at a time to the library loft on the third floor, and there in the five minutes or so before first bell, knock out a couple of handwritten pages of a novel.  It happened on demand because I was ready by the time I got there.  The major work was prepped sometime after asking the right questions at the end of the previous writing session.  Knowing what I had to answer kept me engaged in the intervening time as I simply passed through life with my eyes open.  Eyes open — very important.  Won’t work for sedentary spectators.  You have to make yourself into the kind of person who thinks, notices, analyzes.  It’s sort of like being a quick-start computer that is never completely off, and when the right signal jars your circuits, you come consciously to life with a linkage or an answer.  And you never know when that will happen, because you don’t know when the right associations or inspirations will appear.  My first novel was sketched out on a scrap of paper I borrowed from a stranger working in her backyard when I was out running.  Even today I routinely leave plot notes on my voicemail.

The many ways writers acclimate themselves to a day’s work are legendary.  Nabokov wrote at a lectern, recording each sentence on a 3 x 5 card he kept in a shoebox.  Janet Berliner tells me that Harlan Ellison similarly composes at a typewriter on a podium.  Loren Estleman uses one of many antique typewriters from his collection, repairing one with parts from another.  I know a former 9-5er who simply must shower, shave, dress formally and drive to an office he has rented before he can write.  Come to think of it, a hypnotherapist once loaned me his penthouse office overlooking a quiet city to write in the middle of my nights.  John Stchurr used to spend a couple of hours setting up (usually in a library carrel) before he could work and even then he found himself easily distracted.  Other writers have an amazing ability to concentrate, perhaps born of necessity.  David Niall Wilson, the author king of multitasking, can focus on tweets, screenplays, novels, short stories, e-mail, blogs, and take the nanowrimo challenge all by turns while watching movies or TV or listening to audio sources and fielding a full family of chilluns.  Proust, by contrast, worked in a cork-lined room.  Nikolai Gogol is said to have reached a contemplative state by killing lizards with a silver-headed cane in his garden.  And was it Bach who solved the routine aspects of composing by putting his 20 – or 24?  (the number varies, and some of his children did not survive infancy) — offspring to work copying manuscripts?

I’ve tried them all.  Well…not the lizards (though somewhere there is a picture of me on a writing retreat in the Bahamas with a lizard on my shoulder).  Other places I’ve tried writing include a canoe, bathtub (which is the same thing only with the water inside), taxi, golf course, attic, moving around the house, outdoor deer watch in the dead of winter, Golden Meadow, Mall of America, small island in a pond, woods at night, alternating with playing T-sax in same woods, numerous backstages in numerous theaters, skate skiing while dictating into a cell phone recorder, ditto snowshoeing — and a zillion other venues, the point being that a muse is portable and can benefit by a change of setting.  I am writing this now using Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice activation software.  Sometimes it helps to make oneself comfortable, sometimes uncomfortable.  Curiously, I love to write in a crowd if I know that I won’t be interrupted.  In fact, I used to write in the local Wal-Mart pharmacy where my tight-lipped pharmacist would charge my battery between laptop sessions.  Some of these columns were written at a Humana display and a Subway shop in that same Wal-Mart’s.  And the photo that heads up today’s column is of the author hisself working diligently in a gazebo overlooking Lake Minnetonka at a place called Noerenberg Gardens, which is a frequent workstation for me.

I’ll focus more specifically in another column on ways to stimulate that fundamental collective of thoughts and insights mentioned earlier.  In the meantime, may I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  Here’s the link:  http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  .  It’s fun and unintrusive.  Example of my recent Tweets: “To my heirs: there’s a fortune in carwash coupons lost around the house.  Sorry, I’m taking the car with me.” And at the end of several Tweet exchanges with a friend: “4 me, romance and imagination r paramount. Irony gave me a glimpse… now have to live on knowing ‘it could’ve been.’”  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters, which includes photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net . Past newsletters are archived at the website below.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see a sample of my fiction, a new short story, “Case White,” is out in the latest issue of Cemetery Dance http://www.cemeterydance.com/page/CDP/PROD/_cd060  , and the opening chapter from THE WATER WOLF is on my website.  Live large and write on….

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Thomas Sullivan

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Comments

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Comment by David Niall Wilson on August 16, 2009 @ 8:02 am

You captured that very well, my friend, and while I strive to avoid ALL of those distractions at once, we do what we have to to get the words down…

I want to hear the story of how the cowboy happened to be there to rescue the lady from the Thames prior to their capture, but maybe (probably?) that’s just me.

Write on!

Comment by Jeani on August 16, 2009 @ 8:08 am

I don’t think I have the stomach for killing lizards, but a silver-headed cane would look good standing in the corner by our front door.

Comment by Serg on August 16, 2009 @ 9:03 am

Very interesting article. Thanks You!!!

Comment by Robert Jones on August 16, 2009 @ 9:50 am

The constituents in your colorful description of what should have been a perfect day for writing were delightfully diverse and imaginative. I was particularly amused by your mention of the across-the-street Panzer driver confined to bed with the flu. That described my years-ago Detroit neighborhood. The neighbor in question had no band in his trunk but did have recordings of bands with which he enriched the lives of his neighbors by keeping his volume control at its highest setting and keeping his trunk wide open while he and his friends bounced a basketball continuously all afternoon and late into the night.

Your advice on noting ideas on the spot is especially valid. They don’t call short-term memory by that name for no reason. I’m often left frustrated by how unexpectedly quickly my short-term memory runs its squeegee down my mental blackboard.

Descriptions of how writers position themselves for writing is always interesting. An enlarged version of yours would make an interesting and amusing article. A college English teacher once described a famous writer’s REQUIRED preparation as involving having an apple and a pen positioned just so on his desk. That smacks of conforming to a childhood image.

Your e-mailed picture of a low Sun’s reflection and the aura-like circle of hazy colors is a beauty that provides as much mood as image.

Thank you.

Amalgam

Comment by Firewolf on August 16, 2009 @ 1:12 pm

Hi,
thanks for your words! I’ll follow you on twitter once I’m home from work.

Julie
(long time lurker)

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 16, 2009 @ 7:15 pm

Ah, Davie, you could work out that little logistical probably without a hitch. You never miss a thing. Well, maybe one thing…I used your initials backwards on Twitter yesterday to create an anagram…

Sully

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 16, 2009 @ 7:18 pm

I’m with you, Jeani. That author (Gogol) was a study in isolation. His schoolmates wouldn’t even touch books he had handled. Hmmm. Sounds like a normal author to me.

Sully

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 16, 2009 @ 7:19 pm

Your welcome, Serg, and thanks for taking the trouble to comment…

Sully

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 16, 2009 @ 7:25 pm

Back atcha, Amalgam. I’m up here in the Boundary Waters using Ely’s Grand Lodge computer to answer these. Had a fantastic day and night. Canoeing in tsunamis with storms raging around, island hoping, and having stimulating conversations in the lea of one cove or another. Then swimming in a storm and a superb dinner…

Glad you liked the photo. Anyone reading this who would like to receive my free newsletter with the photos Robert Jones is talking about can email me to get on the list at mn333mn@earthlink.net.

Sully

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 16, 2009 @ 7:30 pm

Thanks very much, Julie. Just visited your blog, and I’ll look forward to keeping track of you there…

Sully

Comment by Alan Russell on August 16, 2009 @ 8:11 pm

Wonderful column, Sully.

I knew I was missing something. I need more swamp water to distill.

Alan

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 17, 2009 @ 7:36 am

Hey, Al, I’ll look for some swamp water today up here in the Boundary Waters. Though this pristine stuff looks more like the distilled variety. Wish u wuz here. What a setup. Class by night, adventure by day. Ah, the loons are calling and I must answer (snicker)…

Sully

Comment by Janet on August 17, 2009 @ 3:27 pm

Right now (as opposed to write now) it’s 106 degrees indoors because the power has gone elsewhere. Makes me nervous, given that I’m oxygen and other equipment dependent. My shaking hands don’t do much for me either. Ordered #4 version of “Speak and it shall appear.” We’ll see. Meanwhile, as always, it is a joy to read your words.

I like writing in a New York Deli, at Grand Central Station, and plugged into a Palm tree.

Much love, Janet

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 17, 2009 @ 5:37 pm

Well, I don’t know about plugged into a palm tree, Janet, but today in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters I could have used that pea green boat you sail in Granada. My Tasmanian buddy and I jammed a canoe into some boulders in the middle of a huge wind-tossed lake and road out storm winds on an island about twenty feet across. What a hoot! Am jumping from computer to computer whenever we make land, trying to keep up with newsletter/column feedback. Adventure, hoy!

106 degrees sounds like time to fill the bathtub with ice water or gin and tonic, Janet. Think of it as another sterling saga in your most interesting life. I do believe your autobio could be presented alphabetically in 30 volumes, a la encyclopedically. Take care and write on…

Sully

Comment by Larry on August 19, 2009 @ 3:33 pm

Yes nothing but natures music. Truly inspirational.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 19, 2009 @ 3:55 pm

From a man who knows about music that is much appreciated. Thanks…

Sully

Comment by copywriting seo on August 21, 2009 @ 10:22 pm

I am yet to find my inspiration for writing. Like everybody else, I put too much pressure on myself to write the good stuff. Sometimes, distractions can also be an inspiration.

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on August 22, 2009 @ 6:44 am

Distractions as inspiration — well put. Like they say, there are no negatives for writers. Everything is material. A trained artist’s mind takes everything — including so-called distractions — and mines them for associations, patterns, insights, metaphors and portable minutia that apply to whatever they are working on or might work on. Thanks for the…inspiration, CS.

Sully

Comment by Lectern Guy on September 7, 2009 @ 11:01 am

I love this blog, and I can’t wait to read more from you! I’ll definitely be following you on twitter too!!

Comment by Thomas Sullivan on September 7, 2009 @ 1:15 pm

Thanks, Lectern Guy. I kind of surf through the Tweets of my followers informally, but Twitter seems to be the way to go these days. Cheers and best…

Sully

Friday the 13^th of June was a lucky day for me.  That was the start of a three-day weekend on Cross Lake, Minnesota, as a guest of Glenn Frey.  The friendship goes back 20 years now, and though our muses have different addresses and our histories follow different maps, we are brothers in the ether.  His muse glides elegantly from one success to the next; mine lives in the woods and sweats a lot.  His maps cover the Seven Wonders of the World; mine cover one-way streets and dead ends.  Still, I like to think the differences highlight the similarities.  We’ve come to the same universal truths by different roads.  Universal truths…essential material for any artist.  Moreover from the beginning we instantly recognized each other’s style.  Styles. 

That yields up a lot of relevant insights for me, some of which I’ll try to deliver here.  Yeah, Glenn’s is in part performance art whereas writing books is abstract, but peeking over a shoulder (or wing in the case of the Eagles) at what is arguably the most successful musical phenomenon of all time has afforded me information I could never have otherwise gleaned.  Glenn started the Eagles and they have always born his stamp of independence and individualism.  To me that is almost synonymous with endurance in the arts.  It can also be alienating, particularly in an age where media hype is essential to recognition.  Fail to pay homage to the gatekeepers, and you are probably doomed to obscurity.  Do it your way, and you will very likely do it alone.  But Glenn Frey and the Eagles have certainly done it their way and they are anything but alone.  So say the fans.  What other musical legends could have made and set records starting in the early 70s, disbanded and resurrected themselves in the early 90s to set more records, left that last millennium with the #2 and #5 best-selling CDs of the 20th century (the only musical entity to have two in the top five), then come back in 2007 with their first totally new material in 37 years debuting #1 and going almost instantly Platinum seven times?  The new CD, which was not released until late October and sold only through Wal-Mart, ended up the top album of the year for a US group.  Moreover, each of the Eagles has had a successful solo career, though I believe Glenn is the only one to chart #2, which he did twice (“Heat Is On” and “You Belong to the City”).  Clearly the fans — new and old — continue to find them.  So one of the revelations I’ve taken from our friendship is that of the two tracks to success in entertainment — media hype and grassroots recognition — only the latter produces enduring acceptance.  Fans trump.

An interesting conversation in the middle of the night after the Manhattan Beach concert with Al Garth, one of Glenn’s key band members, left me flat out astonished that he didn’t seem to entirely grasp the scope of his impact as part of the Eagles.  In a very scaled-down and relative way I’ve found this blind-sidedness to be true in my own humble career and generally in the careers of other writers, but — hey — we’re talking performance art vs. abstract art here.  All those fans pulsing energy at a stage bathed in shifting rainbows has to be some kind of affirmation, I thought.  As a rule readers don’t wave glow sticks at writers, and when someone says, “Oh, you’re the author,” I’ve learned that the appropriate response is, “It’s too late to get your money back.”  This was the first time I’ve actually been on stage during a performance, and even tucked beneath an awning and behind a soundboard you get a sense of what the musicians must be feeling:

The air is charged.  The audience is like an ocean held back by magical incantations that come from strings and reeds and the dynamics of a mesmerizing voice.  What surprised me was the vibration.  The stage practically levitates you.  The next time my feet ache I want to stand on a couple dozen amps each the size of my car.  When the vibration stops, tsunamis roar over the stage.  The heat from the lights seems suddenly to leave a chill and the figures in the aura are momentarily inanimate, like batteries drawing current.  Glenn holds the plug and keys the switch.  I see a friend whose inner space I know but who is also a stranger made bigger than life by some potent spell he has cast.  The spell’s thrall includes himself, as if he is channeling whatever muses he has called forth from all the thunder and lightning of his life.  His blood has been replaced by adrenaline and he is breathing the sky.  His senses are honed and lucid in a way that only those who create and perform can recognize.  He is playing the pauses.  The audience is unified into one listener.  He can and does speak to it with a single intimate voice.  The musicians are an integral part of that voice by extension.  Key the switch…

So how is it that the Al Garths and you and I and even Glenn Frey cannot necessarily appreciate the impact of our work?  Why do brilliant writers like Wayne Allen Sallee, Janet Berliner and Richard Steinberg despair?

Maybe it’s the fact that we’re on the supply side of entertainment, or that we look in the mirror and see the person behind the curtain, or that we create in a vacuum, or that we tend to focus on what’s missing in fulfilling our goals, or maybe it’s because of the isolation that surrounds many entertainers — contrary to what most fans believe.  The very recognition that people suppose creates access is in fact a barrier.  And when that barrier is stormed, the person behind it usually has to fulfill an expectation rather than the reality of who they are.  It is a very lonely and guarded business beneath the surface, and one in which you can easily get lost. 

In the conversation with Al Garth I could empathize with the artist who is vulnerable to whatever media attention or apathy defines them, but I could also present myself as the fan who sees that his own most intense emotions and meaningful memories are evoked by happenings like a Glenn Frey concert or an Eagles song or a powerful novel.  The barriers all come down then.  For the performance artist it feeds off an audience, as Glenn illustrated that night at Manhattan Beach.  The thing I want to underscore is that entertainment can express the very soul of a fan in a way that is life altering.  You just can’t know how much impact or influence it has when you’re on the supply side.  And that — notwithstanding that the Eagles have unprecedented critical success that speaks for more than one era — is their real success.  Ultimately it’s the real success for any artist.  Connecting with emotions, especially at the core.

I guess it’s tougher to do with a book, simply because you don’t have direct sensory input.  Writers are stuck with abstract symbols.  But then again, great songs score with great lyrics that stand alone too.  I’m going to try singing my next book.  What do you think, light opera, tighten my belt and sing falsetto, slum it (Sully Winehouse — Whinehouse)?  Not pretty.  On the other hand, I want to hear Glenn sing a song in braille.  Every art form has its limitations and advantages.

And I think I’m closing in on the length limitation for this column.  It’s telling me to turn it into a two-parter.  So be it.  I’ll pull this one together with the general observation that a couple of writing elements made the Manhattan Beach concert particularly magical: settings and characters.  So… 

Settings: spent half of one night on the shores of Island Lake and Cross Lake, or as I described in one of the post responses to last month’s column: “… catching storm cells gusting in from the west with rumbles and flashes, standing in the wind on a dam whose concrete fingers billowed up silver water in the moonlight, and discovering gossamer mists and foxfire in its hollows at dawn…”  Beauty may only be in the eye of the beholder, but you get a lot of help from nature in that area of Minnesota. 

Characters: have to give that honor to those two scene-stealers Deacon and Otis Lincoln Douglas Frey, Glenn and Cindy’s two sons.  I believe they are best known for clearing out all the fish from Loon Lake while standing barely 30 feet from the house.  But thousands of fans at the concert can testify to 15-year-old Deacon blowing them away with his rockin’ guitar and vocals.  Ditto for Otis, age 6, on the tambourine.  Otis comes with his own backup, little Kaylee, also 6.  Hell, Otis comes with his own universe.  I guess that makes him an artist already.  To be continued…

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my work, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.  And I’ll be happy to e-mail you a free newsletter every month with similar rants about life and writing, plus photos of whatever I’m writing about.  Just send me your e-mail address.    

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

My mind went on a diet a while ago and already it’s lost nearly 1800 words.  It started by eliminating all those empty adjectives and adverbs that just pile bulk on the body of my work without any real nutrition.  Then it tossed out the interjections (pure comfort words – WOW! huh?).  You’re allowed substitutions on this diet, and so next went a bunch of nouns, replaced by less rich pronouns.  I feel much better now.  I have more energy and I can think non-stop without running out of imagination.  My inner, slimmer brain that was buried under layers of useless prose has been liberated!

Call it the thinking man’s diet.  Throwing away something you’ve slaved long and hard over may seem counterintuitive, but sometimes you get addition by subtraction that way.  More and more I find myself inclined to focus energy on eliminating the bad in order to clear the way for the good.  It used to feel wrong to do that.  When I threw my hard work away, I thought I had lost something.  All that time, effort, and most of all hope, seemed like too much of an investment to walk away from.  But then I realized that the reason it wasn’t going anywhere was because it was finished.  That approach had gone as far as it could, and it wasn’t going to get any better.  To keep trying to patch it into perfection was like making a joke of it and of myself.  So it wasn’t a blasphemy to move on; on the contrary, it was a blasphemy to stay mired in something fundamentally flawed.  I was agonizing over a limitation I had outgrown. 

But beyond that, I got better at understanding what perfection would look like.  Now, complete perfection isn’t going to happen to the likes of me.  Nor would I want it to, because then I’d stop growing.  There is, however, a basic threshold of potential you have to have if you’re reaching for your best.  You have to have the right idea, the right vision for moving that idea, and all the necessary elements on hand to see it through.  And sometimes you don’t discover those things until you choose the wrong things first.  By making some wrong choices, you come to recognize what isn’t a mistake.  Then what you need is simply the courage to start over.  That’s the personal part I had to learn.  Maybe it was just pride in what I had already begun that was holding me back, maybe it was part ego, part vanity, but in any case I had to recognize the dead end and shift my motivation toward a better result.  You might never fully attain the perfection you want, but you can start with those undiluted and uncompromised three things: idea, vision, and the essential elements on hand to pull it off.  

You might use different words for those labels I’ve chosen.  Some other words for idea are: inspiration, catalyst, stimulation, ideal and model.  By vision I mean the inner certainty you have gained through life that you can make the right judgments as you act on your idea (hint: if the idea is inspiring enough, the judgments will be easier).  Essential elements are the specific material you have to work with: plot, characters, setting.  The quality of what you start with has everything to do with where you end up.  Whatever terms you use, there is no greater feeling than being on a journey toward something really good.  To hold the essential clay of perfection in your hand and know you have a chance to shape it to your ideal — that’s electrifying.  Respect that above all!  It justifies who you are.  It can motivate you and balance out the flawed things that eat up the rest of your life.  

But first you have to slim down your brain.

If I hadn’t been afraid of making mistakes, I think I would have gotten on the right track a lot sooner.  I wasted vital years hanging onto efforts that were exhausted.  Something cowed me into submission.  Maybe it was fear of failure, maybe it was too much pride in what I thought I had going for me.  It just seemed like my words were too bad to keep and too good to throw away. When I started to see them as finished, I was able to clear the palate and escape what was holding me back.    

Hang on, this is about to turn into one of my Cannibal Essays.  You may remember the format from the column  http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/09/16/thomas-sullivan-ky-jelly-the-headless-squirrel/ .  The idea was to try to inspire people, writers or not, to see the stories and the lessons in their lives.  For me that often happens in nature.  The point about not being afraid to make mistakes came to me as I was hiking in a 5600-acre nature preserve named Elm Creek the other day.  After crossing a quaint old wooden bridge in a remote section, I came upon an ear-splitting chorus of croakers in a pond so weedy and turbulent it looked like boiling rhubarb.  Every frog that Kermit ever knew was having shameless sex.  Which is sort of like tag-team wrestling.  All right, it was an orgy.  Under and over the weeds they struggled in randy pursuit, ambushing each other with triumphant leaps that ended in bronco-busting tussles.  It soon became apparent that the missionary position wasn’t going to work well for frogs.  And it also became clear that the little green critters weren’t all that accurate at telling male from female.  But that didn’t stop them from trying all of the above.  Equate sex with creativity (oh, man, do I want to go there) and you’ve got it.  The creative drive can’t max out if you don’t explore the right avenue.  Whether it is procreation or just creation, you are shooting blanks when you stick with a dead end.  Nature isn’t afraid to make mistakes and then to move on.  That’s how things get better in the whole scheme of evolution and successful survival, and that’s what I’m talking about here in the growth and success of a writer.

I never did get whether all that amphibian sex was connected with another phenomenon when I was exploring Elm Creek that day, but it did give me a second metaphor for writers.  A half dozen tiny birds were going crazy nearby.  They were popping off some overhanging branches and performing whigged-out stunts like acrobats on meth.  They had to be scoffing down insects in mid-air, but I couldn’t see the blue plate special.  According to a book in my library the black-feathered phenoms with pale orange decals on their fuselages and tails are American redstarts and this time of year the no-seeums are hatching out.  Anyway, it struck me that writers aren’t a whole lot different in their mental gyrations.  We work in a vacuum.  And like those birds staring into seemingly empty air to see what only they can see and performing acrobatic leaps and loops from their vantage points to find food one insect at a time, we stare at empty screens and snatch nourishment for the soul out of thin air one word at a time.  We get to play God a little more than the average person.  Yes, all people define their lives, all people become self-fulfilling prophecies.  But more than most, writers can use their imaginations to shape their lives.  If we tend to be mavericks, it’s at least in part because of that mental power.  We do not live behind the same façades as everyone else, sanctioned and endorsed and even defined by the expectations around us.  We invent what’s right.  We might get it wrong at the start, but we work at it with will and imagination until our passion becomes reality.  And that just kicks down the door to possibilities.  Making mistakes is part of the process.  And maybe mistake isn’t the right word for what I’m trying to describe.  Maybe I mean aiming too low, or underestimating what you need, or starting with an idea, vision and elements that can’t go the distance.  But it’s a definite mistake to not recognize when you do.  And it’s a colossal mistake to hang onto the debris of the wrong choice.  Put your mind on a diet.  You deserve to like the person in the mirror.  It’s one thing to reach for your star, it’s quite another to aim for mediocrity.

There is another nature story to this piece, if you are interested.  It involved an act of courage and trust that inspired me to address this topic.  I put it in my newsletter, which comes out simultaneously with this column each month.  Some photos of the frog sex pond and bird-launching area are also included there, along with the notorious Dr. Foto’s latest blasphemy, and some photos from a spectacular weekend I just spent up at Cross Lake, Minnesota.  As I wrote in the newsletter this month, for many years I’ve enjoyed an extraordinary friendship with an extraordinary man and his extraordinary family.  Glenn Frey of the Eagles has more facets than the Hope diamond, and when he invited me up to Cross Lake, I knew it was going to be a hoot with philosophical overtones.  Adding to the warmth and meaningfulness we always share was the fact that his wife Cindy and two sons, Deacon and Otis Lincoln Douglas (you got that right — and this six-year-old has the pz-zazz to back that handle up!), and father-in-law Jerry, who can barbecue his way into Hell’s Kitchen, were all there.  Deacon stole the limelight at the outdoor concert with his rockin’ guitar and vocals on some of his old man’s hits like “Hotel California.”  Not to mention that Otis made his bid to insert “Tambourine Man” on the playlist.  Three days of beautiful vistas on the lake, exquisite people, great food, a million laughs and pranks, music to tame the masses, and scintillating conversation.  Having the privilege of looking over someone’s shoulder at the high end of another creative art form has afforded me more than a few relevant insights, and the Cross Lake happening was no exception.  I’m going to try and write about that next month.  Count on it.

Meanwhile, past newsletters are being archived at the website below (and usually go up sometime during the day that this column comes out), but I’ll be glad to send you one once a month if you e-mail me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net.  

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my work, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.     

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

I think it was the DragonBar that made me remember an early lesson in my writing career.  And that happened because the carp ‘n’ tuna syndrome that beset my wrists after too many 18-hour marathons at the keyboard eventually led me to try voice activation software.  Dragon NaturallySpeaking with its DragonBar is arguably the leader in that field.  I had tried using it in the late 90s to write a book for a celebrity, but the error rate just killed me when it came time to transcribe our interviews.  The celeb’s voice was crystal clear, while mine sounded like a cat coughing up hairballs underwater.  And guess what?  Dragon just wrote “their balls” for “hairballs,” so my enunciation is still perilous at best.  I think I learned speaking from Demosthenes, and no one ever told me to take the pebbles out of my mouth.  At any rate, the new version of Dragon is more mumble-friendly and so intuitive that you can talk in your sleep and come up with coherent confessions by morning.  The mumble-friendly is a gas, but I can do without the intuitive aspect, which is actually a bit of a pain because of the way I think and speak.  That’s because the intuition is based on normal patterns of sane people, and I’m not…um – well, let’s just say that if you think unorthodox thoughts or constantly use language in inventive ways, Dragon won’t be able to zero in on you. 

So, there is this DragonBar on my screen.  I mean doesn’t the name alone set off pinwheels and sparklers in your imagination?  DragonBar! – can’t you just picture a lizard lounge with fire-breathing serpents warming their rum toddies by blowing on ‘em?  And there’s this little yellow dialog box that plays Simon Says with your every breath and grunt (clear your throat and it’s liable to “spit out” the Gettysburg address).  The thing spangles with color cues in response to your voice — a kind of synesthesia — that make you feel that your words are refracting light like bits of broken glass in the bottom of a kaleidoscope.  And the mystical crossing between sound and visual representation is unpredictable.  You never know what zaniness will pop up next, because what’s inside the box is sometimes outside the box, if you get my meaning.  Hmmm.  Maybe I’m looking in a mirror.

But it’s also inspiring, intriguing, rich in possibilities, thought-provoking, and a catalyst for newness and change.  It unblocks me, unlocks me — lets me develop and distill those truths I need to find and express in order to be me.  I can’t do that by following rutted footprints and being the same as everyone else.  Every day (and every experience) is fresh and new if you can find the words and wisdom with which to capture it.  To put it conversely, DragonBar does not go with the herd.  It goes beyond what you would expect from passive people, places and things.  It travels to terra incognita (land of my birth!).  There be DragonBars!  It does so by unleashing little imperfections in what you feed it; and that’s what reminded me of the early lesson in my writing career.

Before I became stupid, I knew a great many things.  I had a phenomenal memory for facts and could explain any process.  Never mind that most of those explanations were wrong; when I looked at a wall it dissolved into molecules and quantum paradigms.  I have written elsewhere in this blog about converting my mind’s warehouse space for facts to storage space for patterns [http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2007/03/16/thomas-sullivan-%e2%80%9cmamas-don%e2%80%99t-let-your-babies-grow-up-to-be-writers%e2%80%a6%e2%80%9d/].  I did this because patterns are more valuable.  I can always look up facts, but patterns have to be recognized and understood.  At least, I think I did this conversion of my mind’s limited storage space.  But since that’s a fact, I may have forgotten it (I forget).  Before that, remembering facts was a kind of perfection.  And it showed in my writing. 

I wrote with an airless clarity that was logical and absolute.  I think a certain kind of beginner writer does this to a fault.  Usually they are male.  Usually they write about “things and events” or “ideas,” as opposed to incorporating “emotions.”  I’ve covered all three of those elements in a five-part series here on StorytellersUnplugged, which is central to my writing philosophy.  What the hell, here are the links: http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/04/16/thomas-sullivan-spiders-and-spuds/     

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

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

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

http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/08/16/thomas-sullivan-time-to-jump-the-shark/ 

The change in my writing did not come from a sudden epiphany anymore than the change in what I stored in my brain was instantaneous.  It was (and still is) a gradual trade-out of inventory.  I learn much more about life and people by focusing on patterns than I ever learned from facts.  And patterns are seldom pure and exact.  They tend to be a kind of consensus of observation, and they cut to the heart of an issue, and they reveal private truth like…uh, nobody’s business.  They separate the façades we all wear from the underlying and meaningful realities that govern who we really are.

Anyway, writing with perfect knowledge of facts can get in the way of showing the patterns of life.  To know everything is to be unreal.  You can even intimidate readers, or make them uncomfortable, by bombarding them with too much in-depth certainty.  Most of all, you are very likely to be rejected by mature readers as phony if all your prose is cocksure factual and exact.  On the other hand, the messy contradictions that show the humanity of characters (and even of the third person POV of the author) are more consistent with inexactness.  It wasn’t until I learned to use qualifier words and relative modifiers that I felt my characters coming to life.  Beware of characters you think you know inside and out.  You may have dressed them in caricature.  Let them go where you cannot.  Let them lead you from page to page.  Are you never going to change, be wrong or contradictory?  If the answer is no, then why create fully formed manikins whose thoughts and utterances are exact?  Sure your characters can have their unchanging bedrock, but all the more reason to show the reader their vagueness and uncertainty in the little things they think and do on the surface.  Let your characters grow and surprise you.

And here’s the key: apply some of that same inexactness to the narrator, even if it’s third person omniscient.  Because even that unobtrusive narrator is a kind of implied character POV, capable of stepping away from every other character and observing, describing, philosophizing, analyzing and so on.  You have the reader by the hand, and they must trust you.  So think of yourself as needing to come across as the real and imperfect person you are and not God.  Of course, if you are God, that’s different.  But then, shouldn’t you be writing a Bible? You are trying to be omniscient, not omnipotent.  So give the blend of your fallible humanness and omniscience a name or an anagram that will stick with you.  Think 3CPO — if I may borrow from “Stars War.”  Third Character-Person Omniscient. 

What I’m suggesting is that giving reality some elbow room is a stage of development in good fiction writing.  Pin it down too tightly and it may lose color, reverting to black and white.  The more human you are as a writer, while still observing and analyzing but never judging, the more your readers will fit under your umbrella.  Sometimes it is better to be merely omnipresent rather than omniscient as a third-person narrator.  And if you are writing first-person narratives you can really be imperfect.  First-person POVs enjoy the suspense of not knowing.  Sort of gives a whole new meaning to imperfect tense.

I do recall sitting in a writer’s group one night where I had a sort of epiphany about this.  And I have a déjà vu feeling that this anecdote is also in the SU archives of my columns (if you find it, please let me know).  Three of the people present that night stand out like an equilateral tri — no, too perfect, make it an isosceles triangle… aargh! worse… okay, you know, one of those Leaning Tower of Pisa triangles. 

So, there they were, three people coming from different angles from acutely bent to obtuse.  The first angle was a former ballet dancer who emoted with everything.  Her movements were dramatic and choreographed, even when she helped herself to the honey roasted cashews.  She would rise up on one bent leg, the other extended toward the coffee table, and with a graceful bob dip one hand swan-like into the silver dish, then curtsy back down to the divan.  Her writing was infused with emotional color but no form, rather like a finger pressed to mute lips seen in a dream for which there is no explanation.  The second angle was all sly mind games — ideas — which he perpetrated on the hostess mostly, and on those among us he felt were easily shocked (definitely not moi).  His writing was about transvestites, and in reality he was outing himself, enjoying the delicious dawning horror in the faces of the inhibited ones in the group.  But the third angle is the one I am writing about today — facts (things & events).  He was a wonderfully researched, technically informed, fact-crammed writer who should have been in charge of all shop manuals from Taiwan.  He also had a squeeze bottle of Neosynephrin (spelling — where is my pharmacist?) that he kept squirting up his nostrils.  One of the hosts had a hearing aid whose ultrasonic mosquito note came clearly into range each time he turned it up.  So it remains a very vivid memory for me, filled with eccentric mannerisms like the madcap Marx Brothers in “A Night at the Opera.”  Of course, I was the straight arrow member of the group.

If there was a single moment when the fallacy of a perfect omniscient narrator sank in for me as a writer, that was it.  But I’d like to make a distinction here between the kind of stylistic imperfection I’ve described and perfection as motivation.  I worship perfection.  It has always been my Grail.  Without it as an ideal to pursue full speed my life would be dull and empty.  The difference is in learning that communication has no rules.  DragonBar reminds me of that.

“What?” you say.  “No rules!  Absurd.  Of course it has rules!”  Well… not really.  Just the one.  Communication must communicate.  That’s the definition.  Yes, I’m using a ton of rules (or trying to) to write this essay.  But that’s my choice.  Sometimes you have to strip away all the rules in order to appreciate how much freedom you have within the rules.  You won’t find your voice on DragonBar, but you might find the breath of freedom and imagination you need to go looking for it.

Finally, last month I gave some misinformation in my newsletter which, for many people, is linked to this column.  I mentioned that the gift of a nomination at The1000BestSpecialPeople.com  expires after a year, and so I thanked a number of individuals for tributes and for boosts as the year drew to a close.  Now Australian Grant Soosalu informs me that the site has gone free and thus the nomination will stay up there.  Thank you one and all, in particular for the tributes and boosts posted since last month. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out a free sample chapter from THE WATER WOLF on my website.  My free monthly newsletter is separate from this column and the mailing list is growing by leaps and bounds.  I’ll be happy to send it to you if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net   Past newsletters are being archived at the website below, and the photos are now included!  

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

I can’t afford to look in the mirror. Not the one that looks back anyway. Like Cyrano de Bergerac, I try to hang my adornments on my soul. That way there is no visible evidence to confirm or refute that I have any adornments. I guess breaking even in life is starting to look good to me. For better or worse, it’s increasingly difficult for me to motivate myself toward the collective thinking of society. That isn’t a lack of respect, but a lack of confidence in conditioned mindsets. I don’t know whether competition was just kicked out of me or if I’m defaulting into Zen. I do know that Janet Berliner’s recent column about nasty competitiveness among writers has me thinking about the whole thing.

Competition is a bloodstained mirror.

I can tell you this, the most competitive world I’ve ever lived in was the swimming world, and relatively little of the competition took place in the water. I’ve seen adolescent suicide, coached two swimmers who two different people we’re trying to murder, and witnessed a lesbian vendetta on a major city common council over pool time. A coaching friend of mine had his eyes gouged out, was garroted, shot in the head six times, and dragged behind a car on a chain by an irate parent whose child had been chewed out on the deck by one of my friend’s assistant coaches.

Competition is a seed with many mutations.

Maybe that was why I took the name Altruists Anonymous for the last ragtag group of athletes I trained, instead of something like Crimson Fanged Screaming Ninja Walruses. But there would not have been an AA, had it not been for Bill pond. Bill was an ex-cop from small-town Middle America. Plain and unassuming, you would never notice him unless you had time for slow-motion wisdom to unfold. He showed up at my $7/week room at the Lawndale Hotel at a time when I wanted nothing to do with giving or getting from the world. You remember the Lawndale Hotel, don’t you? This link will take you there http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2007/01/16/thomas-sullivan-empty-boxes-i-have-worn/. That was when, little more than a kid myself, I was wearing paperclips for shoelaces and driving a car that sounded like an MRI clunking, thumping, and thudding through a body scan. I had just quit coaching, and Bill was the last parent I would have expected to see. Of all the ones who asked me to reconsider, he was the only one whose appeal was not based on competition. He stood there in a room so small that he blocked the light fixture and I sat on the bed so that there would be room for him to stand. He had one sad little boy, he said, who didn’t know what to do with himself. On a team that set 48 national age group records that year, his son Jimmy was never going to score in the medals, and he knew that. He also knew that it didn’t matter.

Competition within your self is self affirmation.

But Jimmy Pond turned out to be the greatest athlete I ever coached. He never won a trophy or a race, but he had the heart of a stallion and the simple honesty of a Huck Finn. Alone with him in the subterranean confines of a glowing green pool at 3:30 a.m., I have seen him cover distances nobody cares about with an effort no one would recognize at speeds no one would remark on that thrilled me more than any record with which I’ve ever been associated. I virtually adopted Jimmy Pond (no conflict there with his real father – Bill wasn’t competitive!). Or maybe he adopted me. For sure, he taught me that the potential within you is what matters, and living up to it. And for that you need to enter the race. You can’t sit-out life and fulfill anything. You have one shot. Wasting it just has to be the cardinal sin of all time. Jimmy Pond entered the race on his own terms. No one ever feared him for his speed. But he launched for the stars and left nothing in the tank and came away with a galaxy of quiet respect.

Yet Jimmy Pond threatened no one. I don’t think he ever thought about defeating others. He thought about winning for himself. He wasn’t a philosopher. He was known for his spoonerisms and misstatements. “The chlorophyll’s hurtin’ mah eyes, Sully,” when he meant chlorine, or “It was pitch white” – if there was a pitch black, there had to be a pitch white. One time, when I asked him what nationality he was, he scratched his head and came up with, “I’m All-American.” But his fearlessness in reaching for the stars was profound. There was simply no other way for him to live. He taught me to trust doing that. At a time when I used to quit writing every other week, or prostitute myself with a market that I really didn’t belong with, he taught me to trust my own fate by always reaching for perfection. In fact, not reaching for perfection is the only mistake I can make if I want to keep passion and meaning alive in my life.

Before that, I thought there were only two responses to competition: go head-to-head or never get in the game. If you don’t get in the game, you can’t lose, right? Alas. You can lose your very soul that way. Skipping life, skipping your one statement of who you are, all your aspects and dreams – not losing? There is no greater loss than that. No greater affront to any God you might believe endowed you with potential or your purpose in being on Earth. Selling yourself short is simply playing a shell game with the opinions of others, and – more importantly – your own self-esteem. It isn’t enough to say that if you are never trumped, you might be the best. Nothing will make you more insecure than knowing you won’t let yourself be tested. Better to trust your dreams and reap the benefit of your desires than to suffer the suffocating consequences of your fears. With his incredible self-honesty worn on his sleeve, and his refusal to settle for less than fulfillment, Jimmy Pond showed me how to do that.

The only competition that matters is between you and your dreams.

And that’s how I look at writing. It doesn’t seem to me like a competitive thing. It’s a beauty contest where the eye of the beholder is everything. Different strokes for different folks. I know what my dreams are, what is uniquely perfect for me. There is no substitute for that, no compromise. To remain loyal to that, even if it has to remain a dream, is what makes me what I am. There is an audience for each of us, just as there is a soulmate. There is no defeat, no failure, if you stay on the road toward that. You might get lost for years, take some hideously wrong turns, but the only way to lose is to give up. The true trail will never disappear as long as you dare to dream. In speeches, I often call myself an “expert on failure,” but I like to add that no one should take that as an endearing confession, because I’m very arrogant about failure. I’m proud of it. It’s taught me everything I know, and each failure seems to lead to a more important success. Last month I wrote: “Soon after we become adults, most of us seem to anchor on a plateau inside ourselves where life doesn’t expand, and there we resign our futures to the slow ravages of time. It’s as if we get tired of looking for fulfillment and just grab up whatever is in our lives at the moment, declaring, ‘I’m there.’” To me, that’s failure.

Okay. Maybe I’m being too harsh. I’m talking to myself, to the Jimmy Ponds, to the idealists, to the dreamers (to writers, who by definition are dreamers), to romantic idealists – who are the most needful people of all. If you are perfectly happy in the passive mold of modern life, you don’t need anything I have to say. But if there is even a single white feather left in your plumage, you can still fly with it. And never doubt the shining destination. I don’t think anyone has held out any longer than I have for idealistic dreams, and the rewards are not simply just over the horizon. They happen along the way. I’ve denied myself every tangible compromise to what I want and need, and the ironies are soul-crushing at times, but I’ve also glimpsed with utterly vital certainty that my personal Holy Grail is possible. Entirely possible. That simple confirmation may not seem like much, but it validates everything in my life.

Your uniqueness indemnifies you against competition.

I hate competition. I love competition. Both true. There is a time and a place for everything, and a season. And a goal. The goal makes all the difference. I won’t compete for personal popularity (it isn’t a single prize or a zero sum game), political correctness (sellout), or true love (it is a single prize). You can win control, lip service, or physical possession of any of those things and still only be fooled into thinking you’ve reached the goal. I will compete for fun (usually something symbolic) or for human excellence that can be measured quantitatively. The only things that can be measured quantitatively about writing are sales and advances. And admittedly, there are moments when the red rage of competition for such recognitions overwhelms me with the unfairness of life. It’s easy to see how dwelling on that can lead to the envy, cattiness, and resentment that Janet Berliner describes in her essay. May those worthless stabs by the worst parts of me be infrequent in my life. To have the testimonials of success without the true substance of what I am would be far worse. I do not want to hang in the world’s closet, valued for some superficial part of me. I want to age well. Hell, I don’t want to age at all. Jimmy Pond has given me a perspective through which to own myself and control my destiny.

Can you have it all? Of course. I’m just saying that recognition and acceptance are secondary to being true to yourself. The tail shouldn’t wag the dog. Next time you see your muse, ask, “what’s my motivation?” If the list is topped by the appearances of things rather than personal fulfillment, close your eyes and dream again. The amazing thing is that, when you are true to yourself, very often the respect and adulation you feared missing come to you. And if that doesn’t happen in quantity, it only makes the quality sweeter.

Speaking of quantity versus quality, Mark Manrique’s scurrilous doctored photos of me in the newsletter have caused some confusion and curiosity apparently about what I look like. Have put up some new photos of me on my website www.thomassullivanauthor.com au natural to answer that. Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out the free sample chapter from my latest novel, THE WATER WOLF, also on the website. And if you’d like to receive the free monthly newsletter, ask to be added to the list at: mn333mn@earthlink.net Older newsletters will now be archived on the website, but unfortunately we can only include new photos with the e-mailed version.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The empty boxes that remain after the holidays have given me one final gift: a Christmas postmortem. The relevance to writing is, again, like the other Cannibal Essays I have written, learning to see outside the box. And no, this isn’t one of the boxes referred to in the title, but it does trace some events that jarred me to consciousness. If you want to be creative in any way that expresses truth, I think you have to find and cross the two-lane bridge of insight and imagination.

They say things happen in threes, and this is a three-some column, kind of a Scrooge visitation thing, only instead of greed the vice was self-pity. Last month’s column (http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2006/12/16/thomas-sullivan-khaki-man-the-peanut-butter-players/) was itself one of three, and the flurry of e-mail from people who were touched by Khaki Man touched me as well. Thank you. If Khaki Man took my compassion to another level and made me a more complete writer, there were moments before that – moments bound in some way to a place or a period of time – that worked the same slow miracle. Such a time and place was a bitterly cold Christmas when I was living in an old men’s hotel, filled with human wrecks. It was a hotel for very old men, indeed. I was 19.

The Lawndale was $7 a week the first year I lived there (no, it wasn’t during the Civil War, though it did burn down eventually). Could’ve fled back to the ‘burbs of Detroit for the holidays, could’ve found a home-cooked meal. But I was proud, stupid, a little too martyred when I was actually in that horrid coffin of a room, which was not often. I was doing selfless things gratis for others, I thought. And I was a bit of a maverick, not succeeding where everyone said I was supposed to succeed, nor given to letting my emotions show over the failures. Never mind that I got a million dollars worth of self-pity out of it. I knew that writing was an option that was open to me, but I had the camera pointed in the wrong direction. It was pointed at me. I think a lot of writers start out like that.

When I did have to return to my room at the end of the day – four walls I could almost touch all at the same time – I tried to be numb. Do you know anything as seething with emotion as deliberate numbness? Or as blinding? I hated the Lawndale with such a passion that I was deaf and blind to the human misery and loneliness there, and more importantly for a writer, equally walled off from a lot of incredible stories. In this case, the walls were paper thin, and you could hear the moans and the groans of the dying and the drunk. There were unwritten laws, peculiar to males. If someone came in beat up and bleeding, you might hear every drop of blood dripping on the vinyl runner in the hall, but if you opened your door, the gasping and the rest of it stopped. In that mistrustful place, you didn’t dare flinch before a tiger. No quarter asked, none given. Fine with me. The people I cared for didn’t live at the Lawndale. The place made my skin crawl. And above all, I hated the man across the hall.

All the rooms were as tiny as mine, but unbelievably the man across from me had a roommate. I never saw the roommate, never wanted to, but I had a picture in my mind of a pathetically submissive creature completely enslaved by the brute I did see. The bully would come in, drunk and wheezing, and thirty seconds after his door clicked shut the vilest verbal abuse I’d ever heard would begin. Sometimes it went beyond that, and I’d cringe to hear the blows. But I never quite got the guts to go stop it. Part of the code, you know.

Thus I lived, and so a new Christmas morning came, and with it the hollow feeling that I was, in fact, truly alone. I know now that this is absurd, particularly in a world teeming with emotionally isolated people. But when you are young, there is nothing emptier than the suspicion that your self-pity is justified. I had less to my name than $10 that morning when I set out in my wreck of a car, the “Grey Ghost.” Hit the White Tower, a.k.a. the Porcelain Room, for a “scudburger” Christmas dinner. I don’t remember if there were any other customers at the counter, but I vividly remember the old lady scraping the grill. She was celebrating, you see. Celebrating. Not sitting at the counter waiting to be served, celebrating. It took me a few minutes to catch the irony of that. I had to quit staring at my reflection in the glass opposite and realize that all the photos strung along a green ribbon on one wall were probably her grandchildren. She shuffled back and forth with the gait of someone arthritic or maybe with fallen arches. And, damn it, she was singing. And she had on a silly Santa hat. And there was red and green bric-a-brac and fake snow and angel hair all over the place. A wrapped present, too, though you could see there was nothing in it – just fluffed paper. Don’t remember finishing that scudburger, though it ranks right up there with memorable cuisine. Think I was having a little trouble swallowing at that point. Out of my head, too, because suddenly I knew that if a grandma had to work on Christmas day and could be like that, then I had to stop taking and give something back, and I didn’t have anything. But the bill had knocked my $10 in half, so I left a $5 tip and got the hell out of there.

It was compulsive, and by no means charitable, but I felt better cranking the Grey Ghost to life and starting up Livernois toward Vernor Highway. Hoarfrost on the inside glass of the White Tower, and out here it was arctic, and as I’m approaching the railroad tracks, I see a man in a cardboard box. His head is cut and swollen, blood frozen in his hair, and he’s barefoot. Lawndale rules do not apply in train yards, and the poor bastard, who it turns out has just crawled out of a freight car, is going to freeze very quickly, so I stop. The old story: got drunk, rolled, left to fate. What strikes me is he is naked inside the cardboard box. I mean, they took everything, as if out of malice to let him die. You can’t imagine the blubbering gratitude of a Tennessee man up to visit his sister at Wayne State, who just about becomes a vice-icle when his binge turns bad. It took us a couple of hours to find his sister’s apartment, because he didn’t have a clue, except by scrutinizing every neighborhood as we inched up and down the narrow streets off Woodward. Merry Christmas.

So now I’m feeling pretty good, except that I have to go back to the old men’s burial ground. Revisit the self-pity. Oh, I’d been a good lad for a few hours, and learned something, I guess, but like a movie, it was over. So the Lawndale ate me up, and I climbed to the second floor, and the last room in the line – 210 – which was odd, because later in college I would be in room 210, and again, teaching at Fordson High in Dearborn, 210. Anyway, now that I was back in you know where, you know who came in on my heels and started you know what. The bully was on a tear this time. Drunk, vile and violent. I stood it as long as I could, and longer than I should have by months. Then, when I thought he was going to kill his roommate with the blows, I went out into the hall to stop the creature I loathed.

Thought I was going to have to fist his door a couple of good ones, but as it happens it was slightly ajar. He was berating his roommate with terms I cannot begin to write here, and I could hear the smack of flesh on flesh, and as I took two steps toward the wedge of light, I saw it all. The mirror. The face in the mirror. The whole room behind him in the mirror. The marks from the fists were clear on the cheek above the stubble. And I saw the last blow land. But the testosterone boiling in me suddenly went as flat as water. Because he didn’t have a roommate.

He was beating himself. Berating himself. Calling himself everyth
ing but a child of God. Nothing I had felt or thought about him all those months could approach the depths of his own self-hate. How could I have been so wrong? An epiphany moment for me? Yeah. You could say. Damn my soul if I ever underestimate any human that badly again, though, I’m sorry to admit, I’ve been over the line too many times since. My self-loathing neighbor slammed the door when he became aware of me, but he opened another to my future as a writer.

I’m not a soft touch. I believe in human excellence and transcendence, if only we can get outside of whatever boxes imprison our thinking. Low expectations cripple people, and are really a vote of no-confidence. It doesn’t matter what that man at the Lawndale lacked. What mattered was what he had, which was a mirror filled with more self-honesty than most of us could stand. He knew who he was. What he was. And at that moment I knew what he could be. I can’t tell you what truths you’ve discovered about yourself or about the human condition, but I know that they will come out in your life one way or another. You may have to look outside the box to find those truths first, of course. Writers need to engage in that search with openness and vigilance. Good writers never stop searching, or evolving. If people have happened to you today, stories have happened. The world presents us with limitless possibilities. Find the ones you can reach, according to who you are. Until you do that, you have not fulfilled your own potential as an observer, as an artist, or as a human being.

May I thank those who have taken the trouble to email me? What you have to say informs me, shapes me, and makes my life richer. My web site is below. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out the free sample chapter from my latest novel, THE WATER WOLF.

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

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

                                                                                           13 COMMENTS follow

Am I in the right place?  Most of the author photos herein (ladies excepted) sport dignified chin feathers or curried underbrush or facial fuzz of some distinction.  I am plain.  Excuse me while I glance back at the web site name to make sure it doesn’t read “Storytellers Unplucked.”  Nope.  Naked faces seem to be welcome.  So, greetings.  Nice to meet you.  And I guess an introduction is in order in this first column and, despite what I said about my being plain, a label.  My label usually reads “stylist.”  Let’s see if I can shake the tree a little with that subject. 

I suppose that if you look for a style in those first few sentences above, you’ll be justified in concluding that I am monosyllabic, platitudinous, and clichéd.  But I invoke many styles, and I do what I do consciously.  I am not a natural born storyteller, plugged or unplugged.  Style is important to me because it has the power to make the telling of any and all things worthwhile.  The most inane event can make a compelling tale if properly vested in association and meaning – the story comes about because of how that event meets the rest of life.  Conversely, a great plot badly written may dwindle into a “and then and then” summary where, like a vitamin pill, you get the nutrients but none of the flavor.  A plot is helpless without a decent delivery, but a style that soars with interesting or meaningful sidebars and wit can (at least for a while) sustain any narrative.  What is poetry if not enhanced style?  Or a song – enhanced style with sonic assists?  If you’ve ever played that party game where you confide a sentence to someone, like, for instance, the fact that you hate vegetables, and it gets whispered around the room and comes out, “Broccoli rocks!” you are illustrating the primacy of style.  This is because the sentence owes its metamorphosis to the fact that everyone applies his or her own style: editing, exaggerating, emphasizing, spinning, distorting, contrasting, under-telling, over-telling, invoking metaphor…  If there were only one style in the world, we would only need one author (apply on-line).  A unique way of telling is the distinguishing characteristic by which we parade as individual authors.  At risk of placing rhetoric ahead of exposition, I will read a laundry list if it is written by Nabokov or Proulx or Poe or Lovecraft or Goldman.  

And yet the term “stylist” is often a turnoff.  Mention it once in describing a writer, and you may get away with it; mention it more than once and the expectation is for inscrutability at best, arty-farty pomposity at worst.  We run from the term as if Shakespeare and James Joyce are coming at us, quiz in hand.  Call someone a stylist – better yet, give them an award for style – and you may as well brand them with a “P” for Plague.  The sin of style without substance is worse than the sin of substance without style, it seems.  In fact, there are readers who to one degree or another are tone deaf to words, deaf to the rhythms, repetitions and balance of sounds as they read silently.  Most of the experienced writers I know have a story about an editor or a copyeditor they would place in that category.  Sometimes that’s an excuse to explain their own rejections, but I wouldn’t call it flat out wrong.  I’ve run across a few in the literary chain who seem best-suited to publishing user manuals from Taiwan, and if you’ve ever corrected English papers for a range of students and assignments you can clearly see the evolution of style awareness as young writers mature in experience.  But insight into style is difficult.  So we tend to label authors by their plots.  Publishers love the palpable aspect of that.  It’s a handle of things and events as opposed to abstract, ethereal qualities.  I don’t know why it has to be an either-or thing.  Especially since great plots may come and go with inspiration but the ability to express a plot well tends to be a constant, enhancing all of a writer’s body of work.  As you may have gathered by this point, I use the term “style” very broadly here.  We are not talking simply about verbs cohabiting with nouns, but the whole trunk full of devices and enhancements, including elements of characterization, settings, dialogue, description, etc.  With a little luck, you’ll give me a pass on where I’m going with this, and I won’t have to get into a debate about semantics.  

Okay, it’s tough to promote writers by their styles.  But not distinguishing them by their uniqueness lumps them into mindless groupings toward which readers have formed their own biases.  A genre label based on the most general subject matter – mystery, horror, science fiction and so on – is about as definitive as saying one’s nationality or race.  Furthermore, as much as we may grow nervous at the label “stylist,” the underlying reality is that we choose our favorites because of how they write about what they write.  So what is it that is needed to give writers their due and allow them individual signatures free of one-size-fits-all plot labels?  

Well, if that were easy, we probably wouldn’t have defaulted into the simplistic marketing of authors by plot generalities in the first place.  And I’m not suggesting that plots aren’t important.  The order of Being is first something to say and THEN a way to say it.  However, the pendulum between style and content is way out of plumb.  A greater effort to promote authors as individuals would zero in on the essential distinctions between literary styles, it seems to me.  Granted, that does not solve the marketing dilemma of short reader attention spans and the need to grab attention quickly in promotion.  Horror, science fiction, romance, western, mystery et al do that as labels.  They are proud and useful shibboleths of things and events and to an extent mood.  But they are limited labels, because of what they omit.  And they mislead broad readerships into excluding possibilities – unlimited possibilities.  Recognizing that plot labels are not going to go away as marketing handles, the only reasonable way to avoid their stunting effect is to place greater emphasis on the individual authors.  Subtraction by addition.  Get rid of the bias by developing the specific product, i.e., the author whole cloth, a purveyor of words, an interpreter of the human drama by dint of how the author aims the camera and edits the film, plots notwithstanding. 

There are many outstanding and successful authors who are perfectly content to be marketed within the strictures of a category.  They have found a loyal cadre of astute readers who, much like “Indie” fans of music, want most of all just to define their territory as fans.  Both writer and readers know the rules and expectations in that instance, and they enjoy keeping to them.  It is a thoroughly compelling and respectable corner of a marketplace.  But it is more finite than writing in general.  I certainly respect that aspect of publishing and entertainment.  And I recognize that, for those writers and fans, the label is absolutely important, because it excludes and is exclusive.  A writer that does not acknowledge the validity of that area is his own kind of snob.  That said, there are legions of readers out there that are being excluded from literary treats well-hidden behind genre biases. 

Talk about simplistic.  Editors, art directors and publicists have a right to shake their heads in frustration at my sentiments.  As I said, if it were easy to market individuals free of group identities, it would have become the status quo.  It is, in fact, the status quo for The Biggies who have transcended labels.  But among that rare elite, I know a number who claim to have succeeded in part because they resisted labeling.  They kicked and screamed about it.  They cherished their individuality and held up against faithless retainers with market savvy who insisted on applying the cynical formulas full force.  In short, they indulged themselves.  Of course, the failure heap of such indulgence is towering, if by definition invisible.  Certainly there is a degree of idealism and counter-intuitive method in what I am suggesting.  It won’t work for everyone.  Put a generic plain literary cover on a book that celebrates winged dinosaurs falling in love with the daughters of dolphins from alpha centauri and you may sell a copy to the author’s mother, if she’s legally blind and gets the Braille or the audio edition, but you will not likely be found by literate strangers looking for just that exotic fare.  On the other hand, publishers too often fail to recognize their assets.  In their risk-prone business they hurl everything into the air under a genre label with minimal support, hoping to catch a fortuitous breeze.  You can’t blame them for fishing with a net instead of a lure, but to a degree the larger houses have the power to make things happen and don’t.  When the proof is there, both subjectively and objectively, that an author has “the goods” to deliver, they are often slow or remiss to promote that author into the laps of the broader diaspora of readers who may have already demonstrated that they will respond.  I could certainly write another column arguing the conservative reasons they do this, but God only knows how many mega talents have come and gone uncapitalized upon and unheralded. 

The tendency of a publisher to resist acceleration is contagious.  There is a lot of inertia and a lot of entropy out there from top to bottom, starting with authors and moving through agents, editors and publishers.  The system waits for an outside force to anoint a book before marshalling promotional resources.  As every writer knows, getting that outside attention can be extremely arbitrary.  And plot labeling further narrows the exposure window.  The successes are not necessarily the brightest talents or even the brightest prospects.  They seem to come from a broad pool of reasonably talented potential.  They may simply be trendy.  But an author who has been defined in depth as opposed to a plot label alone has a better chance of being reviewed or read in book clubs.  And that initial defining process is unquestionably the publisher’s prerogative.  I suppose the ultimate safe harbor for a publisher of fiction is to aim a formulaic novel at the heart of its appropriate genre.  But that is more like printing and distribution – modest distribution at that.  It is also patronizing to the readers of genre, who by and large will recognize and reward fully fleshed out works when given them.  More to the point, risking a little by defining authors more than plots can only help storm the barriers that isolate a genre from general readers.  There is a fundamental pressure on the publishing and promotional side of the business to not take any risks.  Understandable and not an unhealthy philosophy for the corporate whole, it nevertheless seems to have created a culture of sameness that goes hand in glove with mass labeling.  It is particularly crippling to editors who may come to feel that the only way to secure their jobs is simply not to fail.  Over time, not succeeding becomes failure.  A publisher will not succeed just by not failing – and failing rather often.  It will succeed by taking risks and winning enough of them.  

I think the penchant for slotting everything as content is just another way to try and quantify the qualitative.  But no matter how hard a book publisher tries to quantify everything, its product is still qualitative.  Building authors according to their individuality rather than their sameness may be a way to find more winners.  I guess it comes down to having good editors and then EMPOWERING them with resources, or at least opening access to resources.  That is the qualitative dilemma in-house for the decision-makers: finding discerning editors and then trusting them.  In the mania to reduce risk have we lost sight of that?  The prerogative to capitalize author resources seems reserved for the very few deans of entertainment, like Michael Korda or Steven Spielberg, whose successes, tempered in the ideals of another time, allow them to prove again that enduring miracles are a matter of taste and judgment. 

Thanks for reading this long first column.  Your thoughts are welcome, and your attention valued. 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan 

www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan 

13 Comments:

David Niall Wilson said…

Welcome aboard, Sully. What did you do, save all your words for, like, a MONTH and then spew them forth? Wait…that’s what we all do.

You know I agree on the product before artist argument. I say call it all fantasy, because it all is fantasy, in a way – or all fiction – but let the quality of the prose dictate how it is treated. I say this, but no one listens (lol)

DNW

8:58 AM  

Janet Berliner said…

“Get rid of the bias by developing the specific product, i.e., the author whole cloth, a purveyor of words, an interpreter of the human drama by dint of how the author aims the camera and edits the film….”

Welcome, Sully. Your words make much sense. Nobody in publishing will listen., but please keep saying them.

–J.

9:39 AM  

Sully said…

Hey, Davey, the day I’m as prolific as you is the day it snows butterflies. Now watch, World, I’m betting that by sunset Mr. Wilson will come up with a story about the sky snowing butterflies. And I’ll label it “grand.”

10:34 AM  

David Niall Wilson said…

I have already done butterflies (lol). You’ll see them in “On the Third Day” if it ever sells.

DNW

10:39 AM  

Sully said…

Janet, a voice heard is a tentative step toward consensus. Things do change with enough communication. Glad to join your voice on this forum.

10:41 AM  

Sully said…

Dave, come to think of it, I published a story about butterflies “snowing” years ago called “Prayerwings.” Charles Grant anthology called DOOM CITY.

10:43 AM  

Janet Berliner said…

I did a butterfly story, too, for a Lighthouse anthology. Narrative non-fiction. Hmm, Gents. Does that mean we should be doing an anthlogy of butterfly reprints…?

12:02 PM  

David Niall Wilson said…

I don’t have a great history with bug anthologies…though I proved to have pretty good TASTE in them…all we need is a publisher.

D

12:20 PM  

Janet Berliner said…

A publisher, Dave? What’s that? –J.

12:55 PM  

Mark Rainey said…

Welcome, Sully. A fine essay on style indeed. (Being one of those guys with a fuzzy face, I’ve been told on occasion I should go for a whole new style, maybe using a razor.)

–Mark

9:33 PM  

Sully said…

Thanks, Mark. With a moniker like “Damned Rodan,” facial feathers seem obligatory. And, anyway, if I could grow something as dignified as what you’re sporting, I’d donate my razor to a Chia pet. Nice to share a forum with you, Mark.

12:37 AM  

Scott Nicholson said…

Sully, thanks for the insight. However, I’m not sure it’s solely the publisher/editor’s responsibility to break a writer out of the mold. I think the writer can do that with courage, vision, and most of all persistence. I’m enjoying “Born Burning,” proof that stories go beyond genre int he hands of a skilled writer.

4:17 PM  

Sully said…

Scott – Skilled writer, indeed. Put me in a position where I have to throw away a compliment in order to defend a position. Thanks and ego wins – I’ll take the compliment! But I never meant to imply that the push for self-determination should be a solo effort of the publisher. Hell, the author defines the product. But the marketing is surely largely the province of the publisher. Your point rounds out the solution though – if there is one. ‘Specially about persistence. Man, am I persistent. Man, am I persistent. Man, am I…
–Sully