Being the Author's free-associative thoughts
on process, simulation and escape velocity . . .
I think of you
and wonder who
you are and what's your line
I wonder if
there's someone else
or if it's true that I'm
the only one
in your life . . .
As enigmatic
as you can be
I'm not suspicious
naturally
There's so much that
you hide from me
The mystery:
am I the only one
in your life?
--Pet Shop Boys, "The Only One"
There was no sleep last night: I couldn't get on top of the ache in my leg, and I haven't been able to shake the cling of ill-health that managed to find me last month. Plus, I've been struggling with a critical sequence in the novel. So yes, insomnia. For me, the distressing aspect isn't the inability to sleep; it's the vague feeling of claustrophobia that invariably accompanies my extra-innings wakefulness.
So after wandering around darkened, suddenly too-small rooms, I decided to play one contributing factor against the others: Sleeplessness being a given, my problem with the book sequence could at least distract me from various aches and help productively pass the time until dawn. I sketched a schematic of the pesky impasse with Tony that resembled the hub of wheel, with spokes extending in all directions. The hub represented a specific view held by Tony; the spokes led to constituent parts of that opinion.
Laid out in this fashion, it was clear the eight components of his view could be just as easily gathered in subgroups. Indeed, it would be much easier for Tony (and therefore me, his long-suffering conduit between aether and page) to embrace a "small-plate" approach to life: Seizing partial opportunities in a pragmatic, highly effective way. But this tricky sequence occurs after Tony has his hard-won authenticity and wants what is not necessarily easy, pragmatic or conventionally effective. In fact, he's appalled by time/motion studies applied to the emotions. And further, in terms of structure, Tony's needs are meant to underscore the breathtakingly shallow Venn Diagram Philosophy Beatrice espouses. For her, one lover's 80 percent overlap with her interests is equal to another lover's different, similarly sized intersection. (It's a relativistic, any-lover-in-a-bout-of-boredom strategy that she's worked out with elegant and frightening precision: Bed-hopping justified with statistical analysis.)
The question, then, is what's problematic with this sequence? In a word, it's the How. The struggle with this section of the book--which, given enough time, I'll win--underscores what I'm exploring with this fiction. For better--or maybe worse, given your taste in literature--it's simply not about our old friends, the Five W's: In this case, I've got Who, What, Why, When and Where nailed; I've have them firmly by their respective, metaphoric balls. That's what outlined story arcs are for. At this point in the rewrite, I walk around in Tony's fictive skin for a minimum of five hours every day, including weekends. I know Who he is and What he's feeling. Also, as illustrated by my earlier comments, I know Why he feels as he does--as well as When this happens in terms of the book's aggressive atemporality. Additionally, I know Where he is as the sequence takes place.
But what I don't yet fully understand is How he feels this way--meaning the process whereby he arrives at certain conclusions and decisions (in this case, about Beatrice). Staring at my visualization of Tony's mindset in the dark heart of a sleepless night, I realized I most often write fiction--whether prose or lyrics--to explore the machinations of characters coming to terms (if only momentarily) with what confronts them. The Five W's are elevator-pitch fodder for the novel or the book flap hype--the art's found in the How.
When I'm cornered at a gathering and asked about my manuscript, I'm always at a loss. Do they want the pitch? (Middle-aged, former songwriter reassesses his life as he remixes songs from his past--lots of sex, rock-and-roll and violence; the visceral aspects of the work amp-ed up and fashioned into a Trojan Horse used to sneak-in the art.) Or are they inquiring about novel's intentions? (The ever-shifting stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and others; our fluid self-myths.)
But last night it occurred to me that, in effect, either answer only describes the parameters for what's really happening in the book--an exploration of How; the processes that drive reassessment of one's life or self-mythologization. And, in turn, this recalled the dynamics of SimCity, the only computer game that's ever interested me. There, one defines a city in terms of taxes, infrastructure, the amount of parkland, etc, and then monitors its growth, along with attendant new problems, like traffic jams. The Sim in SimCity stands for simulation--and at this point in my writerly evolution, it best describes my approach.
As a writer, I set up parameters, add momentarily constant characters, and determine I'm testing for X. And then I flip the switch on the story. After this, it's about reporting on the process--the collisions, near-misses and ricochets that occur. It's about capturing the progress of the experiment and its inevitable loss of energy, which, respectively and in prose terms, are narrative arc and climax.
So, yes: fiction-as-simulation. In as far as I can be accurately self-aware as a writer, this is my present modus conscriptio. However, what I'm testing varies with the project and my own curiosity. As noted, the novel I continue to wrestle with is an exploration of How. Being so close to the writing, what happens per se is simply not a wonderment to me. But the the psychological wheels that move the What along are of extreme interest. Given another project, however, Why or Who may be the unknown factor that demands mapping--with How all but forgotten.
And, if I have time to further evolve as a writer, might fiction-as-simulation fade away, to be replaced with another approach? Very possibly. In the future, I may write from characterization or situation or--god protect us from the beach-book crowd--plot. But right now, running fictional simulations feels both natural and comfortable
to me.
Where the SimCity analogy falls apart is in the game's highly provisional concept of winning (probably the reason I continue to be attracted to it). An exercise in endless process, "winning" in SimCity can nevertheless be defined--it's the attainment of an optimized balance, where growth of the city ultimately outpaces the inherent, entropic drag that's also created. How long this optimization is maintained varies with each player's concept of winning: Two minutes? Two hours? Two days? Two weeks? Two years? Each of us must decide. But regardless of the half-life of Optimized Balance, happy Sim citizens is the goal.
This is because a layer of game-ness has been imposed on a complex urban simulation program to make it marketable. But most simulations do not end in happy results, nor are they intended to: Think about simulations of how the wing of a 747 might fall off over the Atlantic. Think about visualizations of how a murder suspect may have made his get away. Think about the computer-modeled concentric rings rippling out from the US Capitol, representing blast and fallout patterns from a hypothetical nuclear device. In all these situations, accurately understanding the Thoroughly Bad News--utterly unoptimized and brutal realities--is the point. An accurately depicted and understood entropy becomes the new definition
of winning.
My current writing, therefore, is closer to scientific simulation than the game-y iterations on electronics store shelves. I'm stress-testing in my fiction, not determining an optimal path toward a Happy Ending. (Another concept--diagnosis--isn't being used because it most often skews to the What, and unavoidably triggers more Just-Like-Dr-House hilarity from my increasingly unfunny friends. Learn from my misfortune: Given the choices of bad leg, beard and sarcasm--only chose two, or resign yourself to relentless, no-longer-amusing comparisons with a certain television show until it runs its course.)
It pleases me to riff on my writing-as-simulation because it seemingly makes an entire aspect of my writing mechanistic, demythologizing the artistic approach. This is a good thing, I think, because it achieves the paradoxical: It's a reminder of the self-conscious craft driving art at the same time it demonstrates that art, having been pushed to escape velocity by the mechanistic, lifts off on its own trajectory, leaving the gantries, gears and cabling behind. This is a different kind of How: You need the banality of Approach and Craft to get started, and then suddenly, they are no longer required. (Given a full-throttle catastrophe, the wreckage never falls near the launch pad--unless, of course, it's never disengaged from the tangle of tower support. And though we were loathe to admit it, undefinably, there's more honor in a far-flung debris field than a launch-pad disaster . . . )
In terms of art, what's the equivalent of that second stage ignition--the thing that puts the piece in orbit? It's that which can't be taught--it's, well, talent. And this is the problem with the (Your Favorite Midwestern State Here) Writers' Workshop. The only things they can teach--maybe--are launch-pad mechanics. And since (a) it's the only quantifiable thing they can convey, and (b) telling students that undefinable, genetic and unteachable talent is the determinant of genuine success is both a business- and buzz-kill, they proceed to SuperGlue attendees to their launch pads. It's as if good writing was endless instrumentation cross-checks and cancellation due to inclement conditions (risk-aversion and the cautious avoidance of possible debris fields).
Explaining my writing-as-simulation gives the midwestern ink-slinging incubators apparent validity, even as it underscores the fact they're ultimately as dodgy as Mexican alternative medical clinics--the last chance for the truly desperate. But paradox is good; it undermines one-size-fits-all solutions by pointing out complexity . . .
The link-back to the problem that bedeviled me last night is entangled with the fact that in the novel, Beatrice is an avid proponent of/participant in (Your Favorite Midwestern State Here) Writers' Workshops--and, tragically, she's the perfect candidate for rules-based creativity that never reaches escape velocity. Further, she choses poetry--which wraps her vision in even more strictures. And, finally, she's chosen to versify Nature in all of its 600-year-old poetic predicability: It's, like, bigger than all us and somehow wiser and, from certain angles, it teaches us Deep Life Lessons otherwise unknowable . . . If this sounds unbearable in the manner of all Noble Savagery, it is.
I'm having fun with Beatrice's dalliance with writers' workshops--she and the scene are unavoidably middle-brow, NPR-esque and Terribly Sincere (as heartland sanctimony tends to be). Hopefully, it's all there: The cheap, warming chablis, the slightly dried-out Boursin on stale wheat thins; the public readings and the they'll-never-know-back-home flirtations. Artist commune as summer camp. In short, the perfect satirical mother lode.
One of the book's payoffs is after seven years of work, Beatrice lands her (Your Favorite Midwestern State Here) Writers' Workshop masterwork in--wait for it--The (Your Favorite Midwestern State Here) Literary Journal; after all, the workshops and journals co-exist to vouchsafe each other's business models. However, there's a typo that inexplicably and surreally changes the poem's meaning--but to no one's confusion. Apparently, a froggy beach gets the job done as well (albeit accidently) as a foggy beach. Sometimes you really have to love (Your Favorite Midwestern State Here) readers' imperviousness to literary dissonance. Though this is a seemingly over-the-top episode, trust me: These things do occur, and my biggest challenge as a writer is in making the reality less bizarre and shallow than it actually is. Toning it down makes it funny--straight reportage would have made even non-literary types despair.
At the same time, Beatrice's rigorously mathematical Life Logic has other, grimmer consequences. For example, love becomes a game of emotional billiards--a matter of steely, practiced geometry and calculated chain reactions. It's the same infatuation with rules, but detached from those wacky writers' workshops and recontextualized within matters of the heart, it has shattering impact.
Last night's distraction from discomfort was about exploring the how of the low-key confrontation scene because I already know why there's no big-ending melodrama between Tony and Beatrice, even if a few of the early readers seem unable to grasp it. (The "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" moment is wildly inauthentic and best left to Selznick's amped-up, CinemaScope bodice-ripper. On the other hand, the brutal (and preferable) minimalism of William Gibson's last line in Neuromancer--"He never saw Molly again"--completely begs psychology.) But foremost, working out the how will satisfy my own curiosity, because long ago Tony reached critical mass and became his own agent in my fiction-as-simulation.
It's similar to the way citizens of SimCity annoyingly have minds of their own when you raise their taxes or fail to build enough schools--sure, it's just "pretend," but that's cold comfort when the little bastards move away, turning the southwestern quadrant of your city into a ghetto. And if I've done my job, Tony is significantly more complex than a Sim citizen. Thus, at this point, I have ideas about Tony's reaction to different situations; I have theories as to how he may act. But definitive insight can only be had by running my prose simulation and waiting for him to engage. This is another factor that undermines the romance of writing: Characters don't necessarily react instantly and, when they do, their actions may not be immediately comprehensible--even to their creator. Sometimes it's a waiting game--it's not that characters react cryptically; they don't react at all. You surround them with carefully designed circumstances and they stare back at you blankly--sometimes for a very long while. And so you wait--and when that doesn't cut it, you do your best to encourage responses from your creations.
This is why I spent a sleepless night studying a meticulously mapped visualization of How Tony Desires Beatrice. The nature of his response is clear, but I needed to understand the motivations. This is the aforementioned Escape Velocity--the thing that disengages the gantry and sends the work hurtling upward--if only only on its way to becoming a debris field. Discerning Tony's motives allows the sequence to transcend its formalism as structural balance--his yin to Beatrice's yang; his harder, deeper demands juxtaposed to her shifting field of lovers justified by a Venn Diagram that looks like charted high-school cliques.
(In truth, this type of cut-and-dried contrast would play well at a writers' workshop: It has an easily grasped Masterpiece Theater gravitas that makes for the photogenically thoughtful sipping of cheap, warming chablis. But resonating with the Recently Writing SAAB Set is so not what I want to do with this book: While there may be a class difference between Oprah's Book Club and All Things Considered, they are quantifiably and operationally identical.)
How is the crucial differentiator between two characters who are more similar than either would care to admit. Psychologically damaged in almost the same ways, Tony and Beatrice have--fatally--chosen different aids for their emotional gimpiness. The question, as ever in this novel, is not what or why--it's how. In any kind of analysis, anomaly is often the key to understanding.
The quest for how also integrates the writing of the book with its subject matter: After all, it is a story about how people create and revise the personal stories we insist on calling memories. In essence, the prose fiction and the character memories it examines are both narratives, albeit with different dynamics. Where the book functions as a simulation that helps me discover the how of character behavior, Tony's morphing memories are how seamless self-myth is maintained: New discontinuities in our personal stories are smoothed over in much the same way potholes are filled in to ensure continued safe and efficient travel.
(Case in point: Beatrice explicitly and bitterly dumps her husband because he no longer makes her happy. But she calculatingly waits to do so until she has another relationship to step into. She then lies to him about the reason--Tony--to get a more favorable divorce settlement. But when Tony finally realizes the truth about her and leaves, she suddenly remembers her former husband as a good man who was lied to in order to save his feelings. Beatrice victimizing her husband (also with lovers prior to Tony) is a massive discontinuity that threatens her new self-myth of being baselessly deserted. The victimizer needs to be blameless victim and so her memories have to morph. In the book, it's left unclear whether Beatrice is aware of her revisionism--which is a nicely creepy moment, if I do say so. Sometimes self-deception has the authentic whiff of madness.
Beatrice's overhauling of memories to ensure the continuity of her personal narrative is not that different from what Tony is doing as he careens headlong through memories of their affair as he remixes the songs from The Formal Absences of Precious Things. But--again--the how makes a crucial difference: He is stripping delusion from his memories; not adding it; he is conscious of the surgery he's performing; and he feels no need to function as the hero of his narrative. In the divergent how of morphed memories, Beatrice and Tony could not be more dissimilar even as they are alike in their emotional damage.
With regard to rebooted recall, the take-away is this: It's all about the how--the who, what, and why are not the at-large issues. I'm attempting to write a different kind of suspense novel--if readers turn the pages, it's not to find out what happens next, but rather, how it happens . . . )
Which once more brings us back to my all-nighter visualizing Tony's needs: Somewhere around 4:00 AM, thinking about Beatrice's Venn Diagram theory of love, I saw the how. I remembered that throughout the manuscript, the motif for Tony's desire has been gearworks--clocks, cars, etc. Tony's love for Beatrice is about meshing, which is inherently made possible by differences, not in spite of them: One gear's teeth fit into the voids of another. However, Beatrice's highly flexible view of life is one of shifting overlays of commonality: If not this overlap, than the new and different one over there. The Venn philosophy of Beatrice explains her shocking relativism and impermanent relationships.
In this, I'm reminded of my old nemesis, Death From Above--the peregrine falcon that still haunts my property. When it's time for feeding, it exhibits a similar flexibility: If not an unsuspecting field mouse, a chipmunk or dove will do . . . And this further reminds me that--finally--this long night is over; it will be light in about 20 minutes. Just enough time to grab a coffee and take my position at the top of the yard, vigilantly defending the innocent from the falcon. The bird's constant return is primal in a creepy way. It does not make allowances for anything outside its needs. Which makes my presence, rain or shine, confusing. The falcon often circles twice, as if doing a double-take, before departing. Its gene-deep opportunism blinds it to what keeps me writing and fighting no matter the odds:
I am relentless.
A last thought: Perhaps Tony's story is also one of slowly understood and unfolding vigilance regarding a golden-haired raptor . . .
