Amadeus

Some of the best writers I know have never published a word, nor have they tried. They don’t think of themselves as writers, and I only know of their brilliance because they write me letters (these days emails).

Concordantly, there are many professed and professional writers I’m aware of who are, to put it charitably, not very good.

I think this random sorting of talent is true with any of the arts. I like to refer to the guy who’s never joined a band sitting on his bed ripping off guitar solos like Eddie Van Halen. And clunky wanna-bees who keep starting bands and disappointing people like me when they attempt a lead. We all know both these types.

One theory for why my talented correspondents are so good is they feel no pressure. They’re just writing to a friend, and having fun with it.

They’re under no deadline (journalist, novelist, copywriter, attorney, academic) so the stakes are zero. They also have an audience of one, or just a few, and aside from the pleasure of entertaining each other, no other purpose.

I worked with a guy, a Brit, whose charm was apparent and irresistible. Occasionally dazzling. But put a camera in front of him, and he’d suddenly turn to stone.

The words wouldn’t come, and the lively grace demonstrated in casual conversation would dissolve away. I guess this is called performance anxiety. The same malady often affects talented musicians, actors, circus acts, and writers.

I can understand this when the artistic expression needs to happen in front of a live audience. If your show goes off the rails, you know it immediately, even if the people out there don’t start throwing tomatoes, storm out, or just sit in stony silence with confused looks on their faces.

With writing, chances are good the critical reader is in another room, long after you’ve written the piece, and far, far away.

There’s another more important distinction. While no one is expected to sing on key, everyone is presumed able to write at least a little, and virtually everyone does so at one time or another, even if it’s a note to the postman to stop sticking your neighbor’s catalogs in your mailbox.

So we all get a lot of latitude. The difficulty comes when you decide that you want to write well, and tell people of that intent.

Then the fear of rejection begins to creep into your heart. And by extension, once you’ve declared yourself, you assume tolerance for your failings will turn into ruthless judgment. So now you feel compelled to demonstrate your facility at every opportunity, or that’ll be the end of such foolish ambitions.

For most writers, this feeling never goes away. I remember how long it took to get the boss’s birthday card out of the copy department.

You can imagine the paranoia, the competitiveness, the relentless revisions, the magic marker-sized well wishes, the collapse of self-esteem when one of us would really hit one over the fence.

Back to my clever, officially non-writer correspondents, they are very, very good. And it is such a delight to read their work. Aside from their misspent school years (one never made it to college, though his father was a certified genius, which counts for something), no one told them how to do this.

It just happened through some natural bent toward eloquence and wit. I know these people about as well as you can know anyone, and none of them ever aspired to write professionally, because they simply didn’t want to. They had other fish to fry. I’m sure they’d sell their God-given talent to the highest bidder if such a market was available.

I once chatted with one of my father's close colleagues. They were executives in a huge, international corporation involved in engineering and technology. I knew my father was a consummate gearhead, but this guy told me, with a hint of reverence, something no one ever said to me, before or since.

“Your dad was the the best writer in the company.

His memos were legendary. They would piss off a lot of people, but only because there was no getting around how well he made the case.”

I never knew. He was long gone by then.

---

Dear Friend:

            I know you haven’t heard from me for a while.  I’ve been busy, what with geo-political upheavals and the local zoning board hearings, the copy editor’s final notes on the review copy of my book, to say nothing of feeding the needy cats and attending my cousin’s son’s bar mitzvah (I was there for the bris, not actually there, but in spirit) taking so much of my time, I can hardly drag myself into the email ecosphere. 

I do have a topic in mind, and that’s the importance of maintaining a regular correspondence, even though you’re so much better at this than me.  I have two points:  1.  Connections established and preserved over time through the written word are precious and indispensable.  2.  Writing letters is the best practice any writer can ever have.  By that I mean any person who writes for a living/wants to write for a living/loves writing/is occasionally stalled in a big writing project and needs to limber up before going back at it again.  For writers, writing letters is like training for the New York Marathon.  Without the dehydration and sprained ankles. 

You might not believe this, but I’m always very excited to see your emails pop up in my gmail account.   You could tell me anything you want, and I’d be enthralled, because I can hear your voice in your words, see your face, and imagine your life going through various triumphs and travails.  I find myself really wanting to know all about Spotty’s gastrointestinal difficulties, the struggle to pay all those vet bills, your benighted spouse denting the new Subaru, little Evelyn’s soccer goal, and the short-listing for the National Book Award. 

My life is so much less interesting than yours, since most of it is consumed by hours at this keyboard in a tiny apartment on the Upper West Side with two cats and a neighbor whose snoring is loud enough to be entered in the Guinness Book of World Records.  Though by now, it’s become sort of soothing.  I might miss it when I start my book tour, sending me to places where the walls are thicker and the loudest noises are the Harleys fleeing from law enforcement. 

You might realize that we’ve been writing to each other for about thirty years, ever since we started passing notes in Mrs. Braverman’s social studies class, including that one Mrs. Braverman intercepted where I noted she had a little piece of tissue stuck to her chin and nobody had the courage to tell her.   She got very red, but did thank me, sotto voce, after class, to her credit.  Since then, all this back and forth with you has never stopped, even when you were in Beirut and I had that little time away in rehab. 

The thing about letter writing is it’s very different from face-to-face conversation, or talking on the phone, which has it’s own peculiar qualities, positive and negative.  There’s something honest and pure about a letter.  Maybe because it isn’t a two-way communication until you hear back from your correspondent.  You’re writing it all alone in the quiet, dispensing a monologue that you control without interruption, unless a cat decides to jump on the keyboard.  Yet the whole time I’m writing to you, I’m thinking of you.  You’re there in my heart and in my mind.  I know who I’m addressing, and what you might want to hear about.  What amuses you, what stirs you to fire off a rejoinder.  It’s tailored exactly to your sensibilities and the tempo of our relationship.  And thus maybe the most personal of all types of communication. 

I’m sure you’ll answer this with a very funny satire on writers entering the formative stages of sentimental middle age, but I know you know what I mean.  I know because you’ve always sent me two letters, or emails, to every one I write back to you, so I know you understand why this is important.  And so much fun. 

Just because it isn’t a love letter, doesn’t mean you can’t send a letter to someone you love. 

Sincerely,

Your Friend

 

Reverse Bucket List

Things I will never do (in some cases, again):

Jump out of an airplane, with or without a parachute.

Eat an insect, even if cockroaches are more closely related to lobsters than spiders.

Drive 100 miles an hour, even on the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Climb Mt. Everest.

Climb a ladder to change a light bulb more than eight feet off the ground.

Sing Karaoke.

Descend in a submarine of any type.

Pose naked in a figure drawing class.

Ever spend another minute in:

• Hampton, New Hampshire
• Camden, New Jersey
• Boise, Idaho
• Altoona, Pennsylvania
• A 6^th grade talent show

Compete in a talent show.

Celebrate New Years Day in Times Square.

Buy a lottery ticket.

Check into an ashram to find enlightenment.

Ride a Greyhound from New York to California.

Bungie jump.

Go to Disney Land. Disney World. Birthplace of Walt Disney.

Run a marathon.

Run for political office of any kind.

Run with the bulls.

Proofread.

Dive off a ten-meter platform.

Learn Mandarin Chinese.

Complete my own federal tax return.

Program a universal remote control.

Rebuild an automatic transmission.

Hike the Appalachian Trail.

Reason with a teenaged girl.

Saw off a body part to free myself from a boulder (easier than the above item.)

Roof the house.

Paint the house.

Paint my nails.

Paint still lifes.

Perform origami. Or auto harp.

Attend a concert in a sports stadium.

Ride a unicycle.

Ride a roller coaster. Luge.

Descend into a coal mine.

Change genders.

Take up gourmet cooking.

Publish a cookbook.

Hang glide.

Drive a motorcycle.

Drive an 18-wheeler.

Ride a mechanical bull.

Drink a glass of tap water in Tijuana, Mexico.

Spend more than one hundred dollars in a casino.

Try to play a violin.

Be rude to a checkout clerk/waitress/flight attendant/bouncer.

Cut down a tree with a diameter greater than 12 inches.

Change my own oil.

Surf.

Remove my own appendix (maybe in a pinch).

Dye my hair.

Tap dance.

Juggle.

Buy bitcoin.

Spelunk.

Go to a sporting event with my face painted in my team’s colors.

Understand quantum mechanics, though I keep trying.

Sail to Bermuda.

Or across the Atlantic Ocean. Or the Pacific Ocean. Or any other large body of water without a helicopter on the foredeck ready to fly me to dry land.

Stop opposing racism, sexism, fatism, ageism, culturalism or any other ism that threatens or demeans any distinct group of people.

Stop opposing political correctness or any other curtailment of free speech.

Have cosmetic surgery.

Swallow a sword.

Eat a glass.

Watch daytime television (even worse).

Join a fraternal organization.

Affiliate with a political party.

Attend a fundraiser for a political candidate.

Assert the merits of a political position with a stranger.

Mountain climb.

Dress up in drag.

Troll.

Get a tattoo.

Travel to Moldova.

Open a retail outlet.

Teach kindergarten, or any course south of post graduate.

Compete in a hot dog eating contest.

Hunt.

Slaughter a pig, or any other animal.

It might be hypocritical, since I eat meat, but I couldn’t do the deed myself. I can’t even catch a fish or step on a bug.

Plagiarize.

Write a negative book review (if you can't write anything nice, don't write anything at all).

A taste of honey. Or vinegar. Pick your poison.

There’s no accounting for taste, thank God.

The discrepancies provide an incredible richness of opportunity, a cornucopia of variety, bottomless choice. That doesn’t mean I’m not constantly bewildered by people’s preferences in books, art, love and lighting fixtures.

I’ve long since abandoned the notion that someone’s devotion to something I find utterly without merit denotes a lack of character. I hope others allow me the same tolerance. If you believe ABBA represents the pinnacle of musical achievement, I respect that. Even if you fail to appreciate the profound importance of Grand Funk Railroad to the triumph of 20^th century American Popular Music.

Granted, I tend to associate with people who share many of my tastes and predilections, as every person does. We’re a self-organizing social species. It’s natural and expected. That’s why it can be unsettling when one of my close cohort professes a love for Jonathan Livingston Seagull or the Cowsills.

Speaking of lighting fixtures, go into the biggest lighting store you can find and look at the stuff hanging from the ceiling, then imagine any of it lurking above your dining room table. Or better yet, leaf through one of those gargantuan books of wallpaper samples. Be aware they only sell this stuff because people buy it. Oh, the humanity. Some people are utterly devoted to avant-garde music. I try to imagine setting up a romantic evening of good wine, fine food, comfy couches and an hour or two of a John Cage composition featuring a bucket of bolts thrown on the piano strings. I admire people who admire this stuff, but I don’t understand them at all.

Much poetry escapes me, though I don’t read enough, I admit. When I stumble on a nice poem, I’m smitten, even if I don’t know why. I feel the same way about opera; while much of it sort of grates, the right aria can make me weep. If I’m in the right mood.

I’ve never met a mystery short story I didn’t like. Yet I’m confounded by many of the general short stories in publications like The New Yorker. I think, what’s the point? Is there a point? What am I missing?

As to literary fiction (a definition I’d argue with), I feel if you don’t have much of a plot, the writing better be fantastic. I love words, perfectly constructed sentences and clever metaphors and similes. When those are present, I really don’t care what happens. Though give me a stem-winding thriller with a few clunky turns of phrase and I’m all in. When the writing and the story are well rendered, I’m in heaven.

Clothes have nothing to do with writing, but I’ve worn basically the same style my entire life. The Harris Tweed sport coat I wore for my fifth-grade class picture, and my high school senior portrait, is still hanging in my closet, having suffered a few alterations. It’s disintegrating, so maybe it’ll have to go to the dump, though not without a small ceremony.

I agonized mightily in the early seventies, when everything sartorial turned to shit. I used to cut down the heels of platform shoes with a hot wire, and had tailors reduce lapels and pocket flaps. I had a decent stockpile of thinner ties from my father’s business career that kept that segment alive. If you see me in a leisure suit, I’m a corpse. Everyone thought I was just being contrary, but I held firm until things shifted back toward the sane in the 1980s.

Back to good writing, it’s always been there, you just have to seek it out. And more has been written in the past few thousand years than I’ll ever be able to read, so the well never runs dry. Political speech has rarely been worse, so that category has suffered serious degradation. On the other hand, there are a lot of very talented political journalists who revere the language and demonstrate it with every column. Again, you just have to hunt around for the gems.

As a cabinetmaker and house designer, I keep up with trends, and lately interiors have all been white or grey. Light grey, with no natural wood to be found (my houses are loaded with cherry and mahogany, oak floors and the occasional chestnut beam). Fashionable exteriors tend to board and batten siding and black window frames. The most recent house I designed used those elements, because that’s what the client wanted. It looks fine, though I had to go well outside the contemporary mood to convey any distinctive style.

Which tells you all you need to know about taste. It’s the tyranny of the popular, and the poverty of individual imagination.

Dear Mr. Knopf:

I’m pleased to inform you that we would like to represent you in selling your script, My Dinner With Andre II: Desert. 

JUST KIDDING!!!  Since you write such funny lines, I knew you’d have a sense of humor about this (I absolutely read at least two full pages of your script that I found on my boss’s floor).  You also asked that “whether you accept my script or not, I would appreciate your opinion”.  That presumes that anyone in this insane office has the time to write to people like you.  However, I, in fact, have a little time this afternoon having spent the whole morning

throwing away bankers boxes full of scripts that just came in yesterday.  As the Executive Administrative Assistant to Head Agent Ryan Gossling (he was born Dirk Bogarde, but changed his name for business purposes), this is one of my principle responsibilities.  For some reason, being a recent graduate from Smith College qualifies me for heavy lifting, not that the tray of coffee mugs I transport when I’m not lugging boxes (the cocktails are in the afternoon, and they’re a lot lighter) disproves this theory. 

I looked you up on Facebook, BTW, and it looks like you graduated from college a year after my grandfather.  Doesn’t this give you a teensy-weensy little suspicion that maybe this agency might be looking for writers a little less, “seasoned”?  However, your IMBD page has a lot of scripts listed!  Some are even uncredited, which has to piss a person off.  Why else would you go to all that trouble?  I even saw some of those movies, I think, when our babysitter brought over DVDs (who has a DVD player anymore?  I do!  I work in film, after all).  The ones she let us watch, as opposed to others strictly reserved for her jerk boyfriend with the nose ring. Ick.

Google says you’ve also written books.  Aren’t books awfully long?  I mean to actually write?  You have to get so incredibly bored just tapping at the keyboard all day.  Unless you write at night.  I hear old people don’t sleep that much.  My parents have a whole bookshelf arranged by color.  It’s gorgeous.  Designed by eduardo.svengali.com, of course.  Whose isn’t?

Not that scripts are all that short.  I should know, since I have to lift them up and into the dumpster.  At least they have a formula you have to follow.  I have it on no uncertain terms the exact length of each act, the number of stage directions (like almost none, so why bother?), the size and type of the font, the width of the margins (down to, like, the millimeter) and the make and model of the binder (you can tell if it’s counterfeit by measuring the little holes.)  I know this because I’m told to throw out anything that doesn’t conform to these important standards, I mean EXACTLY.

So good news for you, sir.  You nailed it!  I mean Sherlock Holmes couldn‘t find anything wrong with your script format, and I’ve seen Robert Downey, Jr. play Mr. Holmes, so I know.  Amazing. 

This is why I’m writing to you, because I think you are the perfect person to help me write scripts.  Since no one wants to make your movies anymore, you probably have a lot of extra time.  I averaged a B+ in two courses of Creative Writing at Smith so I have credentials.  (My parents wanted me to lobby for the A, but I have my principles.) My sister’s ex-husband has published articles in magazines all over his town in Northwestern Connecticut, and though he hasn’t read anything of mine, he said I have potential based entirely on my personality. 

According to Google, your third divorce just concluded.  Congratulations!  So I know you still have the house in Beverly Hills, though I’m sure you’ll miss the ranch in Arizona.  I love horses, though they make me sneeze.  And I can’t help thinking about Christopher Reeve, who fell off a horse and became totally paralyzed.  As my Latina friends like to say, this is no bueno.  Superman?  I’m mean really. 

I’m guessing pool time is now a big part of your day.  I could come over to discuss.  I mean fully dressed.  THIS IS NOT one of those types of student/mentor situations. 

The thing about scripts I most want to learn is how do you write something people have to say.  I mean, isn’t writing you hear in your head different from speaking out loud?  I want to do this because my parents are hinting that maybe my rent in LA is a little too much to keep paying and since Mr. Gossling and his partners have nicer cars than even them, I could maybe have a big “so there!”

Thanks so much for reading all this, and I’m sorry they don’t want your script, but you know how great you are, and by gosh, you never give up!  (Keep telling yourself this.  It’s life-affirming.)

Sincerely,

Wrenlee

 

 

Punctuated equilibrium. Also capitalized.

I love France, and many of the French, though they can be annoying like anyone else.  I find their language confounding, even as I love the way it sounds.  One of my good friends is fluent, as is my niece, and I’ll always marvel at their achievements.  The problem with French, to me, is there are far too many vowels, which to my ear all sound the same.  Though while I understand virtually nothing French people say, I respect their determination to preserve their native tongue, to maintain it exactly as it is for all eternity.

I also think they are completely, foolishly and historically wrong in this, though you have to admire their grit. 

The term Lingua Franca means universal language, which it used to be, but not anymore.  This is because they refused to let the language evolve, and thus the world passed it by, in favor of my language, English, which almost everyone on Earth knows “a leetle.”

I learned this traveling around Europe and other continents, and working with people from all over everywhere.  I’d ask if they spoke English, and they’d all say “a leetle”, and then display a mastery of the form far surpassing most of the knuckleheads I grew up with in Philadelphia, Pa.  USA. 

The secret of this success, aside from being spoken by the predominant global military/economic powers of the last two centuries, is unlike French, we could care less about preserving linguistic purity.  If French has the moral rectitude of Mother Superior, English would embarrass the Marquis de Sade.  Anything but pure. 

So this is a good thing, overall, though the process of change can be irksome, and exhausting.  New English words are created, often pilfered from others, in such profusion you feel like you’re in a swarm of breeding may flies.  Usage is entirely fungible, and no army of authoritarian schoolmarms could ever staunch our various and sundry populations’ creative misuse, mispronunciation, garbled grammar and syntactical sin.

Though change is inevitable, you don’t have to always like it.  A favorite pastime around this household is gritching about popular degradations of proper speech.  That is, proper by our likes, but in the future these preferences will be considered archaic.  Using the noun “impact” as a verb has achieved such widespread acceptance it’s a fait accompli.  That written, to me the only correct use of impacted relates to wisdom teeth, or when Carl Sagan described a giant asteroid slamming into the side of Jupiter.

But I console myself from such fretting by thinking of language as perfectly mirroring natural history.  Both evolve relentlessly, in the same fashion.  Species arise, dominate, splinter into sub-species, some wither away, others become entirely distinct.  It’s fair to bemoan the loss of a particular dialect, or even an entire language, but realize that thousands have arisen and died off over the eons, and any field left fallow will soon be bursting with new life.  Most of New England was once farmland.  Now you can barely see the forests for all the trees.

The natural historian Stephen Jay Gould defined a phenomenon he called “punctuated equilibrium”.  This describes how a portion of a certain population becomes isolated from the main herd (which could have been in a stable state for thousands of years), and then very quickly, evolves into something notably different.  Language does exactly the same thing. 

Everyone thinks American English is a corrupted, devolved version of the genteel speech we hear on Downton Abbey.  In fact, during the Revolutionary War the British sounded pretty much like Americans do today.  We’re the ones who’ve stayed the locutionary course while the Brits have moved on.  No one had a Southern accent as defined today until sometime after the Civil War.  The South was, and still is, bursting with distinctive dialects and styles of expression, but only the flattening of mass media could bestow upon us a fully regional inflection.

There used to be an American accent called Mid-Atlantic, sort of a hybrid British/American contraption.  The most useful exemplars were FDR and William F. Buckley, though it was so common in old movies – think Katherine Hepburn or Errol Flynn (an Australian, for Pete’s sake) – that few realized Cary Grant was actually an Englishman.  Since this manner of speaking signaled a kind of aristocratic superiority, we’re well rid of it.  Meanwhile, millions of Americans were quite eager to put Bernie Sanders in the White House, and while the majority rejected his politics, no one thought his Brooklyn accent was a disqualifier. 

Disparaging how other people speak is snobbish at best, 

and at worst, bigoted, since there is no rational or scientific justification for ascribing character flaws to styles of speech.  As with any social construct, accent discrimination is used by those with the upper hand to bludgeon others they’d prefer remain in their disfavored social class. Luckily, our language itself has a way of slipping out from under these predations, dissolving advantages and disadvantages alike. 

And churning out new words like Twinkies at a Hostess factory.

Merriam-Webster added 690 new words to the dictionary last year.  And that doesn’t include thousands more candidates.  James Joyce made up seventeen words, though only “quark” survives to this day, and only because Murray Gell-Mann used it to name a subatomic particle.  Shakespeare, on the other hand, invented over 1,700 English words, most of which are still in use. 

I’m pretty sure I invented the word “rictify”, which I used to describe what happens to some people whose attitudes and beliefs become rigid and fixed in place as they age, suggesting some sort of combination of “petrify” and “rigor mortis”.  A psychologist friend of mine liked it so much, he started using it in his practice.  Haven’t seen it in the dictionary yet, but keeping an eye out. 

Your turn.   

Do not go gentle into that good night. Bring a flashlight.

I’m in my seventies, which makes me officially an old person.  In our euphemism-afflicted age, the preferable term is Senior, though I still think that label is better suited to someone in the twelfth grade of high school.

Another sop to this PC frenzy is to call someone like me older.  Okay, older than whom?  My brother is older than me, and always will be.  He was when I was ten and he was fourteen.

They say you’re only as old as you feel.  I feel like I’m in my seventies, at least with regard to aching joints and memory lapses.  The rest of the brain appears to still be functioning, surprisingly, given how I’d mistreated it as a younger person.  It’s a known fact that when one part of the body declines, or is abruptly taken offline, the other parts compensate, growing stronger.  This is a pleasant thought, which suggests I might be getting even smarter as I stagger out of bed in the morning and lose my car keys.   

I’m not sure what effect this all has on ones writing.  I’ve had the displeasure of reading some of my juvenilia, and it’s predictably callow and risible, though I can hear my voice buried in there, yearning to be free.  There’s no certainty that being on the other end of the age spectrum means your writing will improve, or decay.  But there are plenty of examples of the former, and precious little of the latter, barring critics’ mercurial tastes, not known for their discernment at any age. 

Thorton Wilder wrote my favorite Wilder work, the novel Theophilus North, when he was seventy-six, back when that age meant something.  And nothing good. 

I published my first book when I was fifty-three.  When checking Google on this subject, I noticed that people over fifty were categorized as “starting late.”  I didn’t know that at the time.  I did write about three books in the decades before, none publishable, but it was good exercise.  And I got to enjoy a blizzard of rejections, which strengthens the spine. 

Arthritis aside, the only physical demand of a starting-late writer is typing.  And staring at the computer screen through bifocals.  What we do have, as compensation, is a lifetime of accumulated knowledge and experience.  This is a quality that’s revered in Eastern cultures.  In America, it mostly qualifies you to be ignored by the middle aged and ridiculed by your children (the grandchildren instinctively know better, though they’re too young to copy edit or help you find an agent.)  However, if you’re lucky enough to not reprise your old mistakes, writing becomes a much more efficient process.  The key here is knowing more quickly when the work sucks, and much more willing to swipe it into the trash icon with little or no regret.  When you’re young, you don’t know that it’s possible to compose thousands, if not millions, of sentences.  That you’re capable of drastically revising a hundred-thousand-word manuscript.  So every line on the page is more precious, more deserving of life in perpetuity, even though they might, in a word, suck.

At writers conferences and panel events, when I look out at the audience, most of the heads are white or grey, or would be if not for hair dye.  So writing and reading are largely pursuits of the not-so-young.  We have more time, and fewer pressing responsibilities, and if fortunate, greater resources to sustain the habit.  And unlike Olympic-level gymnastics, something you can do until you face-plant into the keyboard. 

I just had a birthday, an occasion once celebrated, now more regrettable, since it marks less potential for repeat performances.  Some say it’s just a number, though these people can still count the numbers off on their hands and feet without losing track. 

As I’ve noted in prior posts, short term memory does not improve with age.  If I need to carry an item from Room A to Room B, I immediately put it in my pocket.  Then it will find its way to the destination, even though I might not remember why it should have gone there in the first place.  Long term memories, on the other hand, become seasoned over time.  Leavened by recurring recollection, burnished through sharing with old friends and family.  These may not be quite accurate – actually, they probably aren’t – but if you’re a storyteller, all the better. 

Ones life becomes a kind of artform of its own, where the rough outlines of events are curated and shaped into reflections both material and inventive, true by Hemingway’s definition, faithful and well aimed.  

A chip off the old block.

    When I went to sailing school, our instructor noted that it’s not a matter of if you get seasick, but when.

    That was about 25 years ago, and it still hasn’t happened. This after a few times in six-foot plus confused seas (this is an actual term, which roughly equates to being in the agitator cycle of a giant washing machine).

    Now that I’ve made this boast public, it’ll likely happen the next time I get in a kayak,  but I’m taking my chances.

    By that logic, I’ll take another flyer. I admit I’ve never had writer’s block. This thought was occasioned by a novice writer who asked me how I handle such things, including what he called “hitting the wall”, which I assume means confronting an impassable edifice suddenly erected in front of your work in progress and not the side of a building on Dead Man’s Curve. I had trouble answering because it’s never happened.

    My heart goes out to anyone who has dealt with this.

    As I once felt crossing the English Channel in a storm, watching most of the passengers lined up along the rail sharing the contents of their insides with the salt water and torrential rain. The rest were in the loo.

    A significant percentage of the mystery writers I know are journalists.

    I bet few are beset by writers block, which is probably true of former copywriters like me. From what I understand, editors share the same general attitude as creative directors. If you aren’t able to write what you were supposed to write that day, they fire you. Usually the next day.

    Aside from generating colossal amounts of stress, which by correlation supported a lively bar trade in the neighborhoods surrounding newsrooms and ad agencies, this also focused the mind, and instilled the kind of discipline notable in air traffic controllers and members of the bomb squad.

    Pressed by my novice friend, I did have a few suggestions when ones productivity seems to be flagging, or when you’re not sure what should happen next in the novel.

    Getting up to go to the bathroom is the first tactic. I wrote a lot of headlines standing at a urinal. If you have a more luxurious schedule, a nice walk around the block usually does the trick. If you have both the time and means, perhaps a quick trip to Italy. Countries where you don’t know what people are saying are excellent places to write in public, say at a trattoria or outdoor café a la Ernest Hemingway (though go light on the Pernod).

    Reading other people’s writing doesn’t do much for me in this context, except for a few extraordinary stylists, like Bill Bryson, Gillian Flynn, or Amor Towels, whom I find inspirational, despite setting insurmountably high standards.

    But above all, whenever I feel the writing at hand is stalling out, I simply switch over to another project, any project.

    I usually have about three books going at once, at various stages of completion, and there are always emails to old friends and short stories waiting to be written.

    The best palliative for being stuck is to just start writing. The act itself, for me, usually limbers things up and then I'm back in business. The greatest impediment to writing is not writing. Don't worry how it's going to come out. Just start typing.

    Another trick with books is to write down in advance what I call "things that could happen." These are scenes or plot features, and often twists, or something unexpected. I can refer back to that to see if there's anything there to latch on to.

    I don't fear the blank page. In fact, I like it. It means anything goes. Dive in! Most editors will tell you the beginnings of books and short stories are often the weakest parts, and they're good at noting where you should have actually started the thing. That's fine. It just means you hadn't yet warmed up the engine.

    Writing for SleuthSayers, I have a long list of possible topics, and several opening paragraphs. These are handy diversions, and usually result in something I can use. Today, I thought, geez, none of this is helping.

    Then it occurred to me, why not write about not knowing what to write?

Your attention is most kindly requested.

            I often read in the newspaper that there’s been a general erosion in common civility.  That may be true, since why argue with sociological studies and the finely tuned antennas of our media watch dogs, ever alert for any diminishment in our quality of life.  

            But I just don’t see it.  That is, I rarely suffer this during my day-to-day undertakings.  In fact, I think people are mostly more congenial and sociable than they used to be.  It could be that since I now have white hair they take pity on me and my declining faculties, and express greater kindness than I experienced as a young man.  Maybe I’m now more convivial myself, and get rewarded by a response in kind.  I’m willing to accept these variables as suggesting I’m all wrong.

            Though still not be convinced. 

            It might be that social media interactions are larded with terribly disrespectful and aggressive behaviors, and that has warped our perception of the overall state of public comportment.  Since I participate in social media only glancingly, and then only with friendly people I know, I never confront such conduct.  If I did I’d tell the offenders, in the nicest way possible, to stick it in their ears and never communicate with them again.

              It helps to have a dog.  Only the hardest heart can resist our terrier’s charms.  He elicits good feelings from every version of human being, irrespective of socio-economic standing, race, creed, orientation or nationality.  We once had a motorcycle gang cooing over our pups, comparing notes on healthy diets and grooming strategies.  I think foreigners first learn our language by saying “Hello.”, “How much?”, “Where’s the bathroom?” and “Cute dog!”  We’re the fortunate beneficiaries of this canine charisma, since much of it seems to rub off. 

           

            I’ve been to Ireland and Australia, countries that have set the English-speaking gold standard for full-throated cheerfulness and good will toward any and all.  By contrast, I live in New York and New England, who many contend occupy the other end of the spectrum.  But this isn’t really fair.  New Yorkers are actually quite friendly and garrulous, it just feels like they’re shouting at you.  You have to tune your ears to the right pitch.  

            New Englanders are taciturn and reserved, it’s true, though get them started on a favorite subject, like the Patriots’ defensive line or the best route from Cambridge to Logan Airport, and they’ll talk your head off.   You do have to make more of an effort to engage a New Englander, unlike a person from almost anywhere else in the country.  If all you say at the check out line is “thank you” as they bag the groceries, don’t expect much.  If they ask, “How are you today?” give them a broadside of jolly commentary on your current state of being.  Even include a complaint or two, delivered with the sort of rueful irony that invites commiseration.

          

            “Could be sunnier.”

          

            “Yeah, but we need the rain.  My Roma tomatoes just lap that stuff up.  And the zucchinis?” 

“Don’t I know it.”

            

             I used to drive the Massachusetts Turnpike all the time, and before they did away with the toll gates, there was one guy so irredeemably buoyant and busting with bon homme that a line would form at his booth. 

            

            “There’s your change, sir.  One dollar and thirty-five cents.  Buy yourself something fun!”

    

              

            Mindful of our brief here at Sleuth Sayers, I do have a way to link this happy state of affairs to writing fiction.  If you only follow the observations of our gloomy journalists and academics, you’ll not only feel enduringly depressed, you’ll deviate from your lived experience.  You’ll break the law of authenticity.  The world isn’t a disagreeable place, most of the time.  Genuine assholes are notable simply because they’re so rare. 

                Writing hardboiled crime novels is no excuse.  Even Humphrey Bogart (channeling Marlowe) said, "I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners.  I don't like ‘em myself.”

 

Solitary confinement.

            Novels, short stories and poetry may be the last bastions of solitary writerly pursuits.  With the exception of the rare co-author team, most fiction writers labor in isolation, islands unto themselves.  In other creative fields employing writers, notably film and TV, and advertising, creativity is a team sport.  Playwrights usually start out on their own, but in the course of production, others are likely to stick their hands in the cookie jar. The playwright still gets all the credit, but she knows that others had their say.

            I’ve written alone and as part of a team and each has its charms.  This may be self-evident.  When working alone, all you have is yourself, and you can write what you want.  No one is over your shoulder, no one is scowling at one of your ideas (except your editor, who usually comes in at the end of the game).  It’s you alone, all by yourself, the god of your world, immune from interruption or censure.  It’s what I also love about fine woodworking and single-handed sailing. 

            But few places on earth are more fun and exhilarating than a writers room.  In advertising, we usually worked in teams of two – a copywriter and an art director, where our specialization would dissolve at the conceptual stage and each would throw in ideas for art or copy without restriction.  I might have a half-baked notion that my partner would slice into a fine part and add something interesting.  I’d take this fledgling thought and add something else, and it would go from there.  Before we knew it, something workable would emerge, and when the creative director came into the room, we’d have something to show for the time spent.           

            When writing alone, all the talk is inside your head.  In a writers room, the talk is usually about anything other than the thing you’re supposed to be working on.  If this was recorded, most strict administrators would fire us for wasting precious business time on nonsense.   But we knew we were actually circling the idea, finding context, getting to the destination via a circuitous route.  That’s because we were always thinking about the task at hand, and any nutrition from the conversation went directly into the conceptual efforts.  Ideas beget ideas.  Talk gives birth to lines of thinking that spew out concepts.  This is how it works. 

            Advertising might not be the noblest of pursuits, but it’s not that easy to do well, and when it all comes together, the adrenalin flows just as strongly as when you compose a satisfying piece of fiction (though some would argue advertising and fiction are not that different from one another).

            In his book The Innovators, Walter Isaacson maintains that the most important common element of all history-making digital advances was collaboration.  He makes his case vividly and convincingly.  Though he also cites iterations as key components.  One idea building on another.  You could apply this to fiction.  Where would the modern detective novel be without Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade?  What constitutes inspiration versus simply cribbing from an earlier work?  

             Discerning readers know the difference.  They can spot a derivation, which can be rewarding, and just as easily condemn a book as derivative.  I once wrote a book that was heavily influenced by the first chapters of James Joyce's Ulysses, which my editor mentioned to a Joyce scholar he knew.  The scholar was offended, telling the editor that my work had nothing to do with Joyce.  Okay, but I knew how I felt when I was working on that book, the same way I felt reading about Stephen Dedalus.  In the quiet of my private mind, I told the Joycean snob to stick it where the self-importance doesn't shine.  

            I think it’s fair to say that an iteration, at its most benign, is a form of collaboration.  Musicians will tell you at least half of popular music is based on the traditional 12-bar blues - tonic, sub-dominant, dominant - format (Steve Liskow, please weigh in).  That doesn’t mean so many priceless songs are illegitimate.  

Often when confronted with two equally appealing alternatives, I vote for both.  Working alone is the best, except when working in a team.  I wouldn’t have it any other way.