Crisis Resolution

I went looking this week for the “traditional structure” of a novel, having been told at one point that mine didn’t have it.  I found a nifty graph and spent some time looking at it.  The effect?  Mostly a general buzzing, an expanse of emptiness in my brain.  I don't get it.  Do the crises get resolved as you go along, then?  Who brought math into it, with the X and the Y?  Can we really measure time?

Of course I know about the three act structure of a play; certainly I remember the terms crisis, denouement and resolution.  As well as I remember obtuse triangles, genetic probability and lots of other things that didn’t follow me far past high school.  When I finally got to college, I studied literature.  Lots of it.  At two schools, through two degrees.  That is not to brag, only to explain that I studied many, many, many books.  And I don’t recall ever dissecting any writing in terms of its adherence to a traditional structure.  Instead, we talked about themes and historical context, style and character.  The beauty of the language, the clarity of inspiration.  For me, novels have always been about people and ideas and I actually like when these things remain somewhat unresolved as people and ideas often are. 

It’s hard for me to write with structure in mind when I don’t read that way.

I think about a few of my favorite books, and I can’t seem to fit them into this graph, no matter how hard I try.  In fact, it makes my brain hurt.  Maybe I should have learned a bit more about triangles; maybe I shouldn’t have dropped that Statistics class after the first week.  Science was just never my thing. 

Read More

Sparkles

Woke this morning to a sparkly kitchen.  Our mischievous puppies, shown above laughing at me, had jumped onto the table during the night and chewed open a small plastic container of silver glitter.  Bright sparkles were on the table and floor, on their black snouts.  Soon and despite my early efforts at containment, human and canine feet carried the glitter into other rooms.  Within an hour, I found a glimmering piece on a couch, several pieces in my hair and a trail of silver on the porch outside.  Two hours later, the glitter has made it upstairs in random, taunting sparks.

As I cleaned in my pre-tea haze, I found myself thinking all types of deep thoughts, about human migration across the continents, about the spread of viruses, about the vitality of an original thought and how it spreads and sometimes, dilutes.  Husband entered the kitchen and noticed the remaining flashes on the tile, mostly in the lines of grout.  “That looks cool,” he said.

Read More

Aesthetic Arthritis

 From The Art of Fiction by John Gardner:

"When one begins to be persuaded that certain things must never be done in fiction and certain other things must always be done, one has entered the first stage of aesthetic arthritis, the disease that ends up in pedantic rigidity and the atrophy of intuition.  Every true work of art—and thus every attempt at art--must be judged primarily, though not exclusively, by its own laws.  If it has no laws, or if its laws are incoherent, it fails—usually—on that basis."

And this paragraph encapsulates, I think, the dilemma that keeps many writers, especially writers who are trying to get their work read or published, tossing and turning at night.  In our most fabulous imagining, someone will take our novel at face value.  They’ll understand all the thematic elements, love the pace, totally “get” everything we were trying to do.  It’s like the perfect relationship:  they’ll love everything about it, unconditionally, and they won’t try to change it.

I like thinking about that other type of writer, the one who is merely a product of writing courses, a pious student of things that “must always be done.”  It’s fun to think of him wasting away with the disease of “pedantic rigidity and the atrophy of intuition.”  But then again, he’s probably cashing his checks, too, because he has stayed true to his brand, has given his faithful readers a recognizable plot and familiar characters in each best-selling book.

It is a fine and valiant thing to have a vision for your writing and to remain faithful.  But if you’d like your book to be read (and most of us do), then the difficulty lies in finding a middle road.  Acknowledging an audience and their expectations (even those driven by ideas of what "must always be done") while remembering the cues, the ideas, the inspiration that began the project.  Staying true to your own laws but making them livable for others.  A book is like a party guest.  Make it too aloof, too unlikeable, too tedious, too conceited, etc., etc…and everyone will leave the room.  Of course, a party is a subjective thing.  Some people don't like them at all. 

Read More

Birthday Boy

"Grown don't mean nothing to a mother.  A child is a child.  They get bigger, older, but grown?  What's that suppose to mean?  In my heart it don't mean a thing. "

 ~Toni Morrison, Beloved, 1987

My eldest turns eleven today.  He’s almost five feet tall and many times, I’m startled when he enters a room, or when I reach my arm across his shoulders to find they are almost as broad as mine.  I have moments of choked panic when I think of him leaving.  His feet stretch to the bottom of his bed, where he sprawls, quite often, a lean personification of undirected purpose.  He has a short temper with me.  In the car, I turn my head suddenly to see him, reminded of when he was a baby, just he and I driving, my arm extended so he could curl his fat little hand around my index finger.  His cushioned knees and smooth skin.  His delighted, high-pitched laugh.  His angry fits.  The way he’d work a room, those many times when he was the only child there, all attention on him, our hopes like buoyant beams on his face.

My smart, gorgeous boy.  When you were very small, you’d spread your picture books around you, organizing and talking to yourself.  Everyone was awed by your concentration, your self-sufficiency.  You’re a sensitive child, with an innate sense of justice and what is right, and I admire you for that.  Keep your moral barometer; it is accurate.  Keep your confidence; it will sustain you.  Keep your sensitive soul; it will make your life rich and meaningful.

Happy birthday, wonderful boy. 

Read More

Overheard conversation

A little girl, maybe five or six years old, leaving dance class.  Calls out to her friend, similarly suited in pink and black. "Do you ever confuse yourself?"

"What?" from across the parking lot.

Being tugged along by her mother, craning her neck.  "Do you ever confuse yourself?"

A short pause.  "Yes," comes the answer.

"Me too," says the first ballerina.  "I confuse myself a lot."

Read More